dem algore1 10 97a al_gore thank you very much thank you thank you very much mr president i appreciate the kind words and ladies and gentlemen thank you for your warm welcome of me back to this podium here and actually the president s kind of put me on the spot because he s emphasized the fact that i am not a scientist i am a lay person speaking to a group made up mostly of scientists and so i want to convey my own keen awareness of that fact here at the outset and ask for your indulgence as i attempt to describe why i believe this issue is so important in a lay person s terminology many of you have heard the old story probably a bigger percentage of this group than most because it s fundamentally about a weather story anybody have johnstown pennsylvania in his or her coverage area right well the fellow who talked about the survivor of the johnstown flood who talked about it on every occasion i m sure you ve heard this and people used to walk the other way when they saw him coming because all he would talk about is the johnstown flood when he died he went to heaven and saint peter said well you take it easy today and tomorrow you ll have five minutes to just introduce yourself to the assembled gathering and he said well that s great i m going to tell them about the johnstown flood and saint peter said well now you know are you sure you want to do that and he said yeah it was the most exciting thing that happened to me on earth and saint peter said well that s okay but just remember that noah is going to be in the audience and so i m keenly aware that noah is in the audience here my own way of thinking about this is as a symptom of a larger underlying issue you know we ve heard about the destruction of the rain forests and the hole in the ozone layer and the disappearance of living species and i read an article the other day about the depletion of all the ocean fisheries and the fact that all these fish that people eat are dwindling in numbers and there are all of these issues that kids talk about in schools and global warming i think they re all related in the following sense in our lifetimes we have been seeing some profound changes in the relationship between humankind and the earth s environment and that s the first obstacle in my opinion to really coming to grips with this issue of global warming because right away most of us think well now wait a minute the earth is so big you know we can t possibly have an impact on the global environment that used to be true i think that that has changed in our lifetimes and i think it s changed for three reasons that have all come together in the last century or so the first big change is population if you think about it you know we re now adding the equivalent of one china s worth of people ever 10 years now if you put that in the perspective of the history of the human race well that s something that s very very new if you go back to the beginning of the human species and i don t want to try to put a date on that because i m from tennessee and we had a trial there about that and i m a little sensitive but if for purposes of argument you assumed that the scientists are correct and that the human species emerged probably about 140 160 000 years ago and there were two people we know that much and then for the first you know tens of thousands of years for the first 130 000 years there wasn t very much change at all until the first cities and i m pretending to draw a graph here and then when the last ice age ended and agriculture began and the first cities emerged 9 10 000 years ago it started to go up a little bit by the time of julius caesar there were 250 million people on earth and by the time christopher columbus sailed there were 500 million people on earth and by the time of the american revolution there were 1 billion people on earth and by the end of world war ii there were 2 billion people on earth that s when i was born and when some of you were born and just to recap you go 10 000 generations before you get to 2 billion people but in my 49 years we ve gone from 2 billion to 5 1 2 billion and in the next 50 years we re going to 8 or 9 billion right up to the ceiling and so if it takes 10 000 human lifetimes to get to 2 billion and then in one human lifetime you go from 2 billion to 8 or 9 billion that is a huge change in the relationship between people and the earth it s happening right now in our lifetimes now the second factor is the scientific and technological revolution which magnifies the amount of power that we have for good or ill and most of it s been for the good raising our standard of living and a lot of the solution to this undoubtedly will be more new technology and better technology but the fact is some of the new power that we have we haven t always used them wisely we haven t always really been able to anticipate some of the consequences that would come from it take nuclear weapons for example warfare has been with us for as long as histories have been written but once nuclear weapons were invented the power transformed the consequences of warfare so we had to change our way of thinking about it in the same way the way we get food and shelter and exploit the earth for sustenance has been with us for a long time but now some of these new abilities have consequences that we haven t always anticipated one quick example on that chlorofluorocarbons the culprits in the ozone hole which you all know about very very well they were first invented in this century and they weren t produced in large quantities until after world war ii and yet just in that short period of time in our lifetimes most of us they have transformed the concentration of chlorine in the atmosphere the air we re breathing in this room has six times as many chlorine atoms in each lungful than it did when this room was built or when we were born and that doesn t hurt human health but indirectly it is the reason for that cause in the stratospheric ozone layer but my point is if we are able just in a few decades to change by a factor of six the concentration of a basic chemical in the atmosphere of the earth that s evidence that some of these new technologies can have a huge impact and we don t anticipate them that s really the third cause of this underlying change our grandparents would pay more attention to canning and recycling and reusing things and we kind of sometimes act as if we don t have to take consequences for the take responsibility for the consequences of what we do but in any event when i was in the sixth grade we had a geography class with a map of the world in front of the room that the teacher would pull down when it was time for class and one of my classmates this is a true story was fascinated with the fact that south america and africa had kind of the same outline south america and the west coast of africa and he raised his he got up his courage one day and finally asked the teacher did they ever fit together and the teacher said that s the most ridiculous thing i ve ever heard that s and he went on to become a drug addict and a ne er do well but the his creativity was stifled but you know in the middle and late 1950s most people thought that continental drift was just a lunatic kind of idea because they had an assumption that continents are so big they obviously can t move yogi berra once said what gets us into trouble is not what we don t know it s what we know for sure that just ain t so and one of the things that we know for sure that ain t so now is that we can t have a big effect on the earth s climate system that used to be true but now because of the growing numbers and the more powerful technology and our attitude toward it we can have a big effect and the most vulnerable part of the earth s environment is the atmosphere because it s the smallest part it s so thin my friend carl sagan used to say that if you had a big globe of the earth that had a coat of varnish on it the thickness of the atmosphere would be less than that coat of varnish relatively speaking of course y all this is one of the many things y all know much better than i do but the fact is if you go from pennsylvania avenue straight up to the top of the sky it s not as far as it from here out to national airport where most of you flew in up to the top of the troposphere it s very very thin and that s the reason why we re able to change the composition of chlorine in the atmosphere and it is the reason why we are now able to change the composition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and of course co2 is the main one now here is where i got involved in this and the whole reason i became interested in this i had a teacher and back in the 1950s 1957 and 1958 there was an event worldwide called the international geophysical year many of you probably remember that a lot better than i do some of y all took played prominent roles in it well this man s name was roger revel and he played a unique role in it he was the first and only person to say let s measure co2 in the atmosphere and up until that time there had never been such measurements and some years after that in the middle 1960s when i went to college he was a teacher and he presented the results of what they were finding and that s the whole reason why i got interested in this now if you ll forgive me i can t draw as well as y all can either by a long shot either but this is what he showed and that s most of you know this very very well that s what s happening to co2 in the atmosphere and the reason why it goes up and down once a year is of course that most of the land mass on the earth is north of the equator and you know you got all of the eurasian land mass and all of north america and mexico just a little bit of south america and a little bit of africa and australia below it so three quarters of the land mass of the earth is north of the equator so three quarters of the vegetation is north of the equator so when it s spring time in our part of the world and the leaves come out and the deciduous vegetation in the northern hemisphere then the whole earth so to speak takes a big breath in of carbon dioxide and so the concentrations go down worldwide and then in the fall obviously the reverse happens and the leaves fall and all that carbon dioxide that s been locked up in the vegetation is exhaled back into the atmosphere and the concentrations go back up again but obviously from as it s easy to see from this the peaks each year keep going up he presented six or seven the first six or seven years and i followed that after that time because it really was striking to me and later on in the house and then in the senate tried to see what had happened to it and of course as you know it has kept on going up rather dramatically and obviously the basic dynamic is very very well known that when you have that thicker blanket of co2 and other greenhouse gases the infrared radiation from the sun is trapped in larger quantities and the temperature of the earth begins to go up but the chart that the president was talking about and i hope you ll forgive me for showing this but this is the one he was talking about here this is can y all see that this is from antarctica and there there s two miles of ice and each year a little bit more falls it s technically classified as a desert because the precipitation is so low i couldn t get over that when i went down there because it sure doesn t look like a desert but because each annual layer is so thin thousands of layers can stack up without the weight of the column crushing them completely and so they can dig down through those layers of ice and measure the bubbles of air trapped when the snow fell each year in exactly the same way that foresters can bore a hole into a tree trunk or cut the tree down and read the tree rings they can measure each year s atmosphere when the snow fell in antarctica and it s kind of a time machine enabling them to read what the co2 content was and also to read what the temperature was and that s a little more complicated and out of my depth but the way it s explained to me is that there are different isotopes of oxygen oxygen 16 and oxygen 18 i believe and the ratio in which they appear turns out to be a highly accurate thermometer that enables them to measure exactly the temperature in the air when the snow fell well anyway that s what this chart is all about and it looks more complicated than it is it only has two lines this is the temperature level here in yellow and this is the co2 level in blue this is the present day here on the right hand side of the graph and it goes backwards in time 160 000 years to the time when the scientists say people first appeared on earth in our modern form and this is the last ice age here this is present day temperature this is the last ice age this is the next to last ice age and this is the period of great warming in between the last two ice ages now in new york city for purposes of comparison this is the difference between a nice day like today and having one mile of ice over your head that much difference on the cold side is the difference between glaciers covering that much or north america and not so it s a huge difference now on the co2 end of this it has fluctuated between well here s the last ice age here s the next to last ice age and here s the period of warming in between the two ice ages and it has fluctuated between 190 to 200 parts per million to around almost 300 parts per million now there are two points that this graph makes to me the first one is these two lines appear to me to go together if my sixth grade classmate who asked whether south america and africa fit together could see this graph he would say looks to me like they fit together and in fact they do the exact relationship is complex there s mutual causality but the fundamental reality is that higher levels of carbon dioxide warm the atmosphere and temperatures go up now the second point of this graph is the one that i think is the most significant point this is the current level of co2 we are now in the process with our growing numbers and new technologies putting so much co2 in the atmosphere now it s unbelievable and we are pushing the level of co2 in the atmosphere up so that in the lifetimes of some of our children we will see co2 levels up at it goes up one more there you go can you get that okay up to that level now if for as far back as we can measure co2 and temperature have gone up and down in lockstep and if we are now in the process with this new relationship we have to the earth s climate pushing the level of co2 up there then shouldn t we take responsibility for changing that shouldn t we accept responsibility for the consequences of what we re doing i think this is an ethical issue because folks that say this is no problem we shouldn t worry about it it s not anything to occupy our time what they re really saying is that it s probably perfectly all right to push the co2 concentrations in the earth s atmosphere up to that level i think it s probably crazy and i think that if our grandchildren and great grandchildren living through the expected and predicted consequences of this could reach back in time and say to us did you know you were doing this did you know it was going to have this effect on us and we said well we knew basically the facts but we thought it was perfectly all right we didn t think we had to worry about it i don t think that s an ethical answer i think we have a responsibility to them to do what we can to do something about this and change this thank you you can here we can just put this down like this what about that thank you very much i appreciate that okay now let me finish up real fast here there are people who say the evidence isn t in we had a meeting earlier this earlier today about tobacco and we had the joint leadership of the congress down and other the committee chairs and so forth to talk about the tobacco issue you know the surgeon general s report came out in 1964 33 years ago and we have been we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated a little bit by a group of people that have said on behalf of tobacco companies for all this time with a straight face there is no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer and i come from a tobacco state and you know i ve heard this all my life but long after the scientists and the doctors said the evidence is in there were some people casting doubt upon it long after the mainstream group said look you know the argument s over this is a very serious threat more people die of this each year than americans died in world war ii when can we start doing something about it if you asked the scientists today exactly how does smoking cigarettes cause lung cancer they will say we really don t know how to cross all the ts and dot all the is we really don t know but if you look at the number of people who smoke cigarettes and get lung cancer and the number of people who don t and the much smaller percentage that get lung cancer you can tell that there is a close relationship and of course they dig much more deeply into the science and they home in on it to the point where virtually all reasonable people say yes smoking causes lung cancer let s do something about it this is comparable but there are in this case also people who will say we do not have the evidence now of course there are ways to see the effects of this the hot years we ve been having the increases in temperature i went to glacier national park last month or earlier this month and if you ve been there you know what a beautiful place it is in 30 years there will be no glaciers in glacier national park it ll be the park formerly known as glacier with all apologies to the artist formerly known as prince but i went to a place called the grinell glacier and they had marked off where it was previously and where it is now and it s really clear it s really obvious on the ground you may remember a few years ago when they discovered that 5 000 year old man in the alps in italy i believe it is you remember that guy and you know how come they never discovered that guy before you know these hikers walking along hey there s a 5 000 year old man looks like they would have noticed him before well of course the answer is the ice hadn t melted there before and in 5 000 years so the and every mountain glacier in the world with the exception of a very unusual couple of glaciers in norway every glacier in the world in mountains is receding rapidly sea levels going up and so forth and you know look at the in chicago i know several of y all are here from chicago was it two summers ago where the 400 people died in the heat wave there are some people here from detroit a few years ago somebody got malaria in detroit a tropical subtropical disease in the month he got malaria the average temperature was six full degrees warmer than the 30 year average for that month again you know you can t say that s cause and effect but the odds are shifting toward the kinds of consequences that are associated with rising temperatures now before i close i just want to make one other point and this again is something that you all can describe a lot better than i can but what the scientists tell me is that weather is partly an engine for redistributing heat and again please forgive me for talking about something that y all know much better than i do but again the way it s been explained to me is that the temperature at the equator being so much warmer than the temperature at the poles that the redistribution of heat from the equator to the poles through wind currents and ocean currents and cloud systems defines the overall long term pattern and if that ratio between this temperature and that temperature changes then the pattern can change and one of the things i m sure they talked about this morning is that warming takes place not just gradually worldwide but much more rapidly at the poles because when the when you have ice on a surface 95 percent of the sun is bounced bounces right off it but when the ice melts and it s open ocean 95 percent is absorbed same thing in the tundra so that at the edge of the ice when it s melting it picks up more heat and it s a feedback loop and it eats away at the edge of it so that at the poles both the north and the south pole the ice melting and other factors cause it to warm much more rapidly if it s a five degree warming that s maybe one degree at the equator and maybe eight or nine degrees at the pole so if the pattern of weather worldwide is established in a pretty stable pattern since the end of the ice age for redistributing heat and you ve had a stable relationship between this temperature and this temperature for all that time and then all of a sudden this goes up only one degree and this goes up eight or nine degrees all of a sudden those patterns of ocean currents and wind currents and cloud systems are vulnerable to change one scientist tried to explain it to me by this doesn t really work well but he said that if you take your watch band and form a pattern you can go up and down and it still has the same pattern but if you change a basic characteristic like the angle of one of the edges and you change it enough at one point at some point it adopts a different pattern look at el nino look at what s happening to el nino right now it used to be and y all correct me if i get these numbers wrong but it used to be one out of seven years on average now it s three years out of five or this the one before this was almost continuous for several years one of the news magazines this week has a graph showing what s been happening since the late 80s you know before and after it used to be once every seven years now it s just very very common and of course the consequences are easy for everybody to see but there are a lot of other sub global systems that are affected by changes in water temperature and changes in these larger overall patterns look at what s happening in indonesia and malaysia right now planes crashing boats colliding together schools being closed all because the pattern that they re used to has been disrupted and the forest fires are out of control because they don t have the monsoon rains that they usually have at this time and the consequences are very very profound if we sit back and do nothing and allow this to happen without change then what the mainstream scientists from every country in the world are telling us is that it s going to have profound changes in the pattern of climate and in the effects on people well let me just close by adding my thanks to those the president has already expressed each and every one of you for what you do every single day for saving lives for helping people plan their lives for serving your communities in such a profoundly important way and also thank you very very much for responding to the call of the president to come and spend a little time immersing yourself in aspects of this that noaa and the other agencies involved here have spent so much time on and on a personal basis thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak to you i appreciate it very much dem algore1 10 97b al_gore thank you very much ladies and gentlemen on behalf of the president and the first lady it s my honor to welcome you to the white house and before i present the president to you i want to briefly acknowledge our deputy secretary of commerce robert mallet our deputy secretary of agriculture rich romenture the director of noaa dr jim baker i think james lee witt left but was here dr jack gibbons the president s science adviser katie mcginty the chair of the council on environmental quality todd stern who is assistant to the president s staff secretary heading up the president s climate team dan tarullo assistant to the president for international economic policy and i want to especially acknowledge as a group all of the scientists who spoke at noaa this morning i understand that they did a very thorough job and i want to thank them on behalf of the president and we are so delighted to welcome all of you to the white house and not only because of the opportunity it provides to have an exchange about this important issue but also because in the words of one of you who came through the line finally this is his phrase finally you guys get to meet a group that get more flak than you do and i imagine it s not very easy being a weathercaster and i m sure you can all tell some great stories about incidents that you ve run into but in any event we are just delighted that you are here i m going to have a chance to talk with you at a little bit more length in a few moments it is my pleasure to present the president to you not only as the president of our country but as a personal friend i ve been privileged to work with close at hand for almost five years now and i just want to say on a personal note that when an issue like this one comes up that s extremely complex extremely difficult excruciatingly difficult it really is a great thing for a country to have as president somebody who really rolls up his sleeves and asks every time what is the right thing to do what are the real best interests of the people of the united states of america it s really a privilege and a pleasure to work with him and it s an honor for me now to present to you the president of the united states bill clinton dem algore1 11 00 excerpt al_gore so often too many people think of social security as a budget program or a program that s only for seniors when actually social security is so much more than that it embodies our values as a people it links each american generation to the next with commitments of love and caring social security is how we care for our mothers and fathers it s how we give younger workers a bedrock of retirement savings that they can build on no matter what it is a compact it is a sacred trust and it truly is a compact that makes all our families stronger and undergirds the financial security of each generation in every family my opponent talks about a commitment to today s retirees but let s be clear on this soothing words don t pay the rent much less buy prescription medicine and even the sharpest campaign sound bite cannot bring into focus fuzzy conclusions that flow from fuzzy math i m going to tell it like it is he governor bush is promising to take a trillion dollars out of social security and he s promising it to younger workers for investments in private accounts and to many that sounds pretty good but the problem is that s the same money that he s promising to seniors to pay their current benefits the wall street journal looked at his plan and concluded that he couldn t possibly keep both promises so which promise is he going to break who gets left out or left behind the american academy of actuaries looked at his plan and concluded that it would lead to catastrophic results in these financial matters he said that he i heard him last night he said he rejects their premise well which premise addition or subtraction eight nobel prizewinning economists looked at his plan and said the numbers just do not add up when he was asked to clarify how he could possibly make his numbers add up governor bush refused and said that he would provide additional details after the election that s fine we re going to win florida and it won t matter with your help we are going to win florida you know you might say that on tuesday six days from now social security itself is on the ballot you will vote and you will choose and i ask you to save social security when you vote on tuesday it is very much on the ballot governor bush often says you should support him because he d get along with people in washington and that s all well and good we need less partisanship in washington but the real question is who is it that he wants to get along with the special interests the special interests who don t need social security and are perfectly happy to see it drained away the hmo s the insurance industry the oil companies the drug companies sometimes a president has to stand up and say no so that our families can have a better life dem algore1 11 97 al_gore thank you thank you very much well i sure didn t expect to stand up here and listen to that and i sure do appreciate it very much you weren t supposed to i mean the whole point of why they asked you to flip the order was so that you wouldn t speak to save your voice and you went ahead and spoke and thank you very much mr president i m touched by the kind words and of course ladies and gentlemen you can probably get a clear sense of how meaningful this friendship is to the two of us and i know that many of you have had the great blessing of having a really close friend with whom you work on a regular basis and when you take on challenges that are just really tough and you have somebody to talk with who understands and who is right there without any question just as a teammate and partner that s the kind of friendship that we have had of course the burdens and duties that this president has on his shoulders are just unimaginable and that s true of any president of course but it s been such a privilege for me to watch at close hand and see how he conducts the business of this country and to see how he handles these challenges and it s really a great privilege you know the two of us feel so much gratitude to those of you here for making it possible for this president and his team to take on these challenges and i want to thank roy romer our general chairman of the dnc and his wife bea romer roy thank you for the speech today thank you for your leadership of the party and thank you for all the hard work and effort that you re putting into this likewise steve grossman thank you as our national chair you are right there every day making the tough decisions moving us forward we re very grateful to you as well and to all of the talented team at the dnc our national victory fund chairman dan dutko our dnc treasurer carol pensky who was just here on stage and her husband david to cynthia freedman our women s leadership forum chair to tom hendrickson the democratic business council chair who is here with his wife jill alan solomont our national finance chair and to all of the other members of the team and especially this weekend to our dnc retreat chair walter shorenstein thank you very much walter for making this weekend an extraordinary and unforgettable experience we re very grateful to you and i m looking forward to art garfunkel and billy porter we re going to have some great entertainment after dinner let me just say a few words first on behalf of the president both about politics and about the future of our country we are witnessing a great contest between two sets of ideas and we have the privilege of having had a test of both sets of ideas and we can assess how well the ideas have served our nation but we also have a political struggle and the outcome of this struggle will depend in many ways on you but in looking at where we have come under the leadership of president clinton we often talk about the economic recovery and all the success in our nation but look at what has happened politically you know for a quarter century the republican party raised doubts about the ability of democrats to handle fiscal policy to handle the budget to bring crime rates down to keep our military strong to reduce the welfare rolls they drove a wedge between democrats and the middle class well that was never the party that we knew but in the last five years we have proved that those charges and allegations were just nonsense because in political terms what president bill clinton has done is nothing short of revolutionary the entire political landscape has been transformed the american people know that democrats are responsible for reducing the budget deficit from 300 billion down to 22 billion this year on the way to a balanced budget that democrats have been responsible for bringing all the crime rates down in every single category for five years in a row putting all those new community police officers on the street emphasizing prevention programs building the strength of the communities the american people understand that democrats have managed the government well reduced its size to the lowest level in 30 years and improved its efficiency in the process democrats have reduced the welfare rolls and put people back to work democrats have handled our nation s business so well that we have had the longest sustained economic recovery in more than a generation it is a success that democrats deserve credit for now the point in political terms is that we have won back the trust and confidence of the middle class in this country and that is a remarkable achievement look by contrast at what s going on in the republican party they talk constantly among themselves about how they do not have an agenda they have the same kind of bickering that they used to point do in the democratic party a quarter century ago over on the right while they re so disorganized the right hand doesn t know what the far right hand is doing and they re fighting among themselves their vision for the future is right out of jurassic park they would turn the clock back incidentally last sunday we all felt saturday night like republicans for just one brief dark moment as we turned the clocks back with the end of daylight savings time but the country doesn t want to turn the clock back 50 years and that s what the republican agenda would do they re at each other s throats because they are competing with one another for the affections of the far right wing fringe and their agenda is being driven by those elements in the party that hold them hostage and it s scary to think here the day after halloween it s scary to think what they would really propose if they were to once again be in control of the white house we cannot let that happen we ve seen what they tried to do when they acquired control of the congress and whenever they could not convince the country to accept their proposals through the normal constitutional processes the right wing has ginned them up to take hostages and so they shut the government down twice president bill clinton of course as is now legendary backed them down and forced them to retreat but they didn t learn their lesson when north dakota had that devastating 500 year flood and was in desperate need of relief they shut down the relief to north dakota in order to try to blackmail the country into accepting yet another part of their agenda now they re shutting down the confirmation process for judges on the courts of appeal because again one of their right wing groups wants to prevent the filling of these judgeships around the country with anybody that does not agree with their right wing approach so it s a very high stakes battle and they know they do not have the american people on their side so they re trying to win by hook and by crook with political sleight of hand and massive infusions of money into the process like on staten island for example where i guess roy talked a little bit earlier today by contrast as i said we ve won back the confidence of the middle class and in the famous saying on the front of the archives the past is prologue and the american people understand that the performance under president bill clinton during these past five years is what the country can expect by continuing these policies in a congress that is once again democratic never forget that the economic recovery and the transformation of america s economic and financial fortunes came about because of the adoption of president clinton s plan without a single republican vote not one in the house not one in the senate and what has happened as a result is truly remarkable you know the president referred to these new figures yesterday just let it sink in a minute growth went up again while inflation went down again that s kind of what you want that s a combination that we just convinced ourselves was impossible during the long dark years of republican rule where almost every day there was more distressing economic news about the deficit going through the roof and businesses had no confidence in the future because every time they thought they felt a little strength in the economy and tried to borrow money to expand or hire new people they ran headlong into that government demand for credit and drove interest rates up and the economic recovery shorted out before it even got started the bible has a passage they built an ambush for themselves well under republican economic policies they built an ambush for every potential economic recovery we attempted it shorted out because of its internal contradictions and the policy contradictions that the republicans inflicted on this nation mirrored the internal political contradictions inside the republican party it s not coherent and so they tried to put in place policies to satisfy the various groups even though they are internally contradictory and the result for the country is confusion and dissidence and poor performance now of all the things that have been written about the success of president clinton s policies the one thing i think has received too little emphasis is the extent to which this president beginning even before he was president assembled the best thinkers in our party to put together a coherent set of policies that would be good for america across the board it s not an accident that all this good news is happening all at the same time because the policies fit together when the crime rates go down in our cities that works hand in glove with our community empowerment strategy and our brownfields approach to bring new investment into the cities when we have a sound economic policy that drives interest rates down and stimulates new investment that works hand in glove with the increased investment we have made with public funds in research and development and science and technology and the information superhighway and the new technologies that are making us more productive that in turn works hand in glove with the president s efforts to open new markets around the world to have this huge increase in exports from this nation to the rest of the world with high paying jobs increasing rapidly as we go out to sell goods and services to the 96 percent of the world s consumers that are outside the united states of america it is a coherent agenda that is working extremely well for the united states of america now if it were ideas alone that determined the outcome of political contests then it would be all over they would have to call the fight they d have to say this is no contest but that s not the way it works and thank goodness you all understand that because a clearly superior agenda may not be selected and chosen if those who believe in it are not willing to fight for it if there is not a requisite level of intensity being put behind those policies what is so interesting about the current political landscape is that even though the republicans are incoherent even though they are presenting an agenda to the country that does not make sense and failed the nation in the past they nevertheless have a lot of people who feel very intensely that they want to win and they re fighting very hard so a lot of times they will pull out a victory in a political race purely on the basis of extra resources and more fight so that s why we re here this weekend to talk about the ideas and i look forward to participating in the panel discussions tomorrow incidentally and i ve heard wonderful reports about all of the ideas exchanged here already and i m really eager to participate in these sessions tomorrow but in addition we re talking with one another about how we can match the intensity on the other side with an even greater intensity of effort on the part of those of us who believe deeply that politics is about more than just winning and losing it really is about the future of this country so your willingness to come here and to identify yourselves as leaders for the future to be willing to be a part of this winning team is something that we really appreciate more than we can tell you it is great to have a friend as i began by saying and both the president and i feel the same way about your friendship to the democratic party and to the people of the united states of america we re grateful to you and we look forward to fighting alongside you and winning in the future thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for being here dem algore10 10 96a al_gore thank you thank you very much thank you ladies and gentlemen you don t know how that warms my heart it s great to be home it s great to receive that kind of rousing welcome and i m just so grateful to all of you for being here and being apart of it last night jack kemp and i debated last night jack kemp and i debated the future this morning bill clinton and i are building the future i am so proud and grateful to the president for coming here to knoxville to the university of tennessee especially so soon before the arkansas game he said for me to let you in on our conversation in the car on the way over here i was bragging on how arkansas did in the first half against florida and i allowed as how really the point spread between us ought to be fairly close to even on this game he s not buying it he s telling me about all the freshman on the team and what scrappers they are we ll see we ll work that out later but i m so proud and excited that the president would come here to the university of tennessee to make this exciting announcement that he is going to make today this is really one of the most important steps that any president has ever taken to build a bridge to the 21st century you are going to hear about an initiative that may sound a little technical may sound like it is in the future but believe me as someone who started talking about the information superhighway 20 years ago who passed the legislation to finance the development of the internet as it exists today someone who has had a chance to work with this president over the last four years on his pledge to connect every classroom and library in america to that information superhighway i m telling you the step he is taking today will be looked back on in the next century as a true milestone on this road to the future but more about that in just a moment let me thank lil clinard for her kind words and also dr eugene parker for his moving invocation and mildred buffler for the pledge and i want to acknowledge two people here at the top one of whom i will ask to come up here and speak in just a moment and then when he concludes i will return to the podium say a couple more words in introducing the president these two individuals are playing a key role in the president s announcement today and he will spell that out but i want to acknowledge them now because they have really decided to give so much of themselves to this effort the ceo of viacom sumner redstone and the ceo of netwave incorporated lynn forester and i d like both of them to stand up please sumner is here and where is lynn is lynn out in the audience there i d like to acknowledge both of them not now okay these others i want to thank profusely i would like to suggest since there are several of them that you hold your applause until i complete the list al trivelpiece who is doing a fantastic job as director of the oak ridge national laboratories and oak ridge is going to play a key role in the future of this country and in the development of this new initiative representative joe armstrong representative wayne ritchie representative harry tindell thomas chumpert knox county executive district attorney randy nichols knox county court clerk mike padgett and most especially tennessee s house of representatives majority leader state representative bill purcell let s give all of these individuals a hand four candidates that i would like to acknowledge and i d like to begin with the candidate of the democratic party here in the second congressional district steve smith a candidate in the third congressional district of the democratic party chuck jolly democratic candidate in the first congressional district kay smith and candidate for state senate mae owenby i want to thank the students behind me from jefferson middle school and halls high school we appreciate them being here this announcement really is all about them i m also mighty proud that my daughter karenna is with me here today and i wanted to acknowledge her too twenty years ago when i first had the opportunity to serve in the united states house of representatives i dreamed of a time when a young school girl in carthage tennessee my home town 2000 people could come home after school and plug into the library congress and navigate through a whole universe of knowledge at her own pace directed by her own curiosity i dreamed of a time when the nation s children would be able to communicate daily with students in countries all over the world to learn about other cultures share experiences broaden their horizons i dreamed of a time when a doctor would have instant access to a patient s medical records instantly if an injury occurred and that patient s doctor needed to know the best course of treatment well today that dream is fast becoming a reality two years ago president clinton and i challenged america to connect every classroom inner city rural suburban to the information superhighway by the year 2000 we challenged the nation to ensure that all of our teachers and students have access to modern computers and engaging educational software we challenged the nation to provide all teachers with the training and support they need in order to help students make the most of these wonderful new technologies we challenged the nation to make sure that our children will never be separated by a digital divide and america has responded to that challenge last march the president and i rolled up our sleeves and worked alongside 20 000 other volunteers in california to hook up one fifth of california s schools to the information superhighway in a single day so far 10 other states have held similar electronic barn raisings with similar success stories in fact i m awfully proud that our home state of tennessee will soon hold its own net day and i encourage all of you to sign up to help and be a part of it pull that cable and make the connections and it s amazing what community spirit comes out during a net day well none of this nation s technology initiatives would be possible without the tremendous support of volunteers as well as hundreds of private businesses that have chosen to become involved and today some of the angels of industry are going to ramp up their commitment to empowering every child in this whole country with our latest and best technologies a select group of leaders from the information industries have stepped up to the president s challenge i mentioned sumner redstone of viacom and lynn forester of firstmark holdings and netwave they will be joined in this group by gerry levin of time warner bob allen of at amp t ray smith of bell atlantic larry ellison of oracle brian roberts of comcast and steven case of america online this is a dream team of the information industry ceos in america and they are stepping up to the plate on behalf of america s children we appreciate what they re doing one key individual who has helped to make this possible is one of the finest men i ve ever had a chance to work with and i want you to give a special acknowledgement to the secretary of education dick riley we appreciate your leadership mr riley we re proud that mr redstone the chairman of this group and lynn forester the vice chair are with us today in bringing mr redstone to the podium let me tell you that he s demonstrated a lifelong passion for education when he was a student at harvard he was so passionate he completed his undergraduate degree in just two and a half years more recently despite his incredibly busy schedule he has devoted a great deal of time to teaching courses at boston university law school harvard law school and brandeis how he does it i don t know but i do know that during world war ii he was one of the key members of the team that broke the high level military and diplomatic codes of wartime japan sumner redstone knows what information technology can mean to a nation he knows what information technology means for individual schoolchildren and that s exactly why he is with us here today so please help me welcome a great businessman and a great friend of american education sumner redstone thank you please i didn t know that i was going to be reintroduced but i m very grateful for the honor thank you very much and thank you for your kind words mr redstone i appreciate it very much more than that i want to thank sumner redstone for heading up this historic effort once again he is doing a great service to this nation and now ladies and gentlemen i want to express my personal thanks to president bill clinton not only for his role in bringing these dramatic innovations to america s schoolchildren but for all of his efforts to maintain this nation s proud position as the world leader in science and technology here in east tennessee so close to the oak ridge national laboratory we know the importance of science and technology to the future of the united states of america president clinton knows that one of the most important bridges to the future will be built on discoveries in science and advancements in technology this president is unequalled in his devotion to promoting science and technology as the engine of our economy and as a means to improving our quality of life now the president s opponent has taken a different approach the cuts in science and technology funding that were proposed and almost implemented by the leaders of this last congress would have amounted to unilateral disarmament in the face of growing world competition in research development science and technology they wanted to cut america s science and technology budget by one third this would have crippled both our basic research and the critical applied research needed to protect our health and to protect our global environment president clinton in stark contrast has increased this nation s investments in world class basic research within a balanced budget plan he has increased support for medical research at the national institutes of health helping them to find new cures for diseases he has stepped up our commitment to developing innovative environmental technologies for the growing world marketplace to clean up our environment he has opened up trade markets around the world for our high technology exports and the president has helped to reorganize and revitalize our nation s research agencies and laboratories for the 21st century government laboratories such as the oak ridge national laboratory have played a vital role in catalyzing this nation s technological development now we have heard from the president s opponent that he wishes to completely eliminate the department of energy when asked for a clarification of what that would mean he said well we will keep the military part of the budget but the civilian part of the budget is really on the chopping block well oak ridge gets three quarters of all of its budget from the civilian part of the department of energy when asked for further clarification he said the laboratories in new mexico are off the table that s nice i think that s a wise decision but what about oak ridge national laboratory don t give us the mumbo jumbo about this will all magically work out somehow we want a commitment to oak ridge national laboratory so to those on the other side who have proposed measures that would clearly shut down the oak ridge national laboratory i have a message on behalf of the president and myself in words that you ve heard before we won t let them oak ridge is engaging in missions that are absolutely central to our current economic environmental health and national security future closing the doors of oak ridge national laboratory would be a sad step backward for the united states of america president clinton and i will not let that happen and ladies and gentlemen that is only one of the reasons that it is now my great pleasure and personal privilege to present to you a leader who has made unprecedented commitments to this nation s science and technology a leader who is making sure that every student and every family in america will have the opportunity to participate in our limitless technological future my friend our president president bill clinton dem algore10 10 96b al_gore thank you please i didn t know that i was going to be reintroduced but i m very grateful for the honor thank you very much and thank you for your kind words mr redstone i appreciate it very much more than that i want to thank sumner redstone for heading up this historic effort once again he is doing a great service to this nation and now ladies and gentlemen i want to express my personal thanks to president bill clinton not only for his role in bringing these dramatic innovations to america s schoolchildren but for all of his efforts to maintain this nation s proud position as the world leader in science and technology here in east tennessee so close to the oak ridge national laboratory we know the importance of science and technology to the future of the united states of america president clinton knows that one of the most important bridges to the future will be built on discoveries in science and advancements in technology this president is unequalled in his devotion to promoting science and technology as the engine of our economy and as a means to improving our quality of life now the president s opponent has taken a different approach the cuts in science and technology funding that were proposed and almost implemented by the leaders of this last congress would have amounted to unilateral disarmament in the face of growing world competition in research development science and technology they wanted to cut america s science and technology budget by one third this would have crippled both our basic research and the critical applied research needed to protect our health and to protect our global environment president clinton in stark contrast has increased this nation s investments in world class basic research within a balanced budget plan he has increased support for medical research at the national institutes of health helping them to find new cures for diseases he has stepped up our commitment to developing innovative environmental technologies for the growing world marketplace to clean up our environment he has opened up trade markets around the world for our high technology exports and the president has helped to reorganize and revitalize our nation s research agencies and laboratories for the 21st century government laboratories such as the oak ridge national laboratory have played a vital role in catalyzing this nation s technological development now we have heard from the president s opponent that he wishes to completely eliminate the department of energy when asked for a clarification of what that would mean he said well we will keep the military part of the budget but the civilian part of the budget is really on the chopping block well oak ridge gets three quarters of all of its budget from the civilian part of the department of energy when asked for further clarification he said the laboratories in new mexico are off the table that s nice i think that s a wise decision but what about oak ridge national laboratory don t give us the mumbo jumbo about this will all magically work out somehow we want a commitment to oak ridge national laboratory so to those on the other side who have proposed measures that would clearly shut down the oak ridge national laboratory i have a message on behalf of the president and myself in words that you ve heard before we won t let them oak ridge is engaging in missions that are absolutely central to our current economic environmental health and national security future closing the doors of oak ridge national laboratory would be a sad step backward for the united states of america president clinton and i will not let that happen and ladies and gentlemen that is only one of the reasons that it is now my great pleasure and personal privilege to present to you a leader who has made unprecedented commitments to this nation s science and technology a leader who is making sure that every student and every family in america will have the opportunity to participate in our limitless technological future my friend our president president bill clinton dem algore10 5 00 al_gore well good morning please be seated i m sorry you had to stand up so long but that s the fastest one group of politicians ever walked through another group i m delighted to see you all here i want to thank senator daschle and senator gephardt and their colleagues secretary shalala the older women s league those who represent the aging disability consumer and other health advocates who are here i want to thank betty dizik who will talk in a moment to explain what this is really all about we are here together today to announce the support of the democratic caucus in the senate and the house for legislation to provide affordable prescription drug coverage for every older american for our seniors prescription drugs are not a luxury they can mean the difference between life and death between years of anguish and years of fulfillment at this time of historic prosperity and strength there is absolutely no reason that we should force seniors to make a choice between their health and their food or their daily existence i am profoundly grateful to congressman gephardt and senator daschle and their colleagues for developing an approach that the democrats can rally behind in a few moments i will ask them to share the details of the efforts we will make together but we all know we can t achieve our efforts without bipartisan support in the congress that s why just as we are trying to do with the patients bill of rights we want to reach across the aisle to encourage republican support as well this can and should be a truly bipartisan effort but i want to make it clear first why america s seniors and people with disabilities cannot afford to wait any longer for prescription drug coverage today more than three in five older americans lack affordable and dependable prescription drug coverage the burden is getting worse according to families usa the price of prescription drugs most often used by seniors has risen at double the rate of inflation for six years in a row now two groups in particular bear a tremendous burden rural americans and women as senator daschle knows so well people in rural areas are much less likely to secure prescription drug coverage according to a study released today by the older women s league almost eight out of 10 women on medicare use prescription drugs regularly and most of them pay for these medications out of pocket in total women spend 13 percent more than men do for prescription drugs in spite of the fact that on average their incomes are 40 percent lower america s seniors men and women deserve better no one should be forced to take a bus trip to canada to get medicines made in the u s at a lower price we desperately need a comprehensive plan to provide a prescription drug benefit that is optional affordable accessible to all based on competition not price controls to boost seniors bargaining power to get the best possible price and one that addresses the devastating burden of catastrophic coverage we will have in our budget especially with the improved economy the funds to deal with catastrophic coverage as well and we absolutely should do that the budget i have presented to congress will continue our efforts to pay down the debt and pay it off by 2013 will be able to provide protection against catastrophic costs and will provide voluntary prescription drug coverage to all americans adding the voluntary prescription drug coverage to medicare is the smart and the right thing to do i will say this one more time we would never think of creating medicare today without it and it is high time we fixed it now let me say without getting into a fight over the legislation that s been proposed i don t think it s enough to stop at 15 000 income limit to give help on prescription drugs half the people who need the help fall within the income limits of 15 000 to 50 000 i don t think we should write a plan that basically is designed to please the people who are selling the drugs instead of the people who are buying the drugs and as long as we are trying to make the price competition system work and give bargaining power to seniors we ought to do this right and cover the people who need it this is not about winning a political fight it s about giving people a chance to fight for a good long life and i want to introduce now betty dizik someone who know firsthand the enormous burdens of prescription drugs she s had to make some very hard choices in order to afford the drugs that she desperately needs and she is exhibit a for why we are all here today betty come on up here and tell us your story give her a hand thank you thanks to congressman gephardt s consideration none of you will have to spend your hard earned money to buy prescription drugs to treat your cold that you got from being flooded out here but let me thank you betty thank you secretary shalala and thank all the members of congress look at our legislation we need some republican support this is a good bill it will make a big difference thank you and bless you all get in here before you get wet dem algore11 8 00 excerpt al_gore former governor jim blanchard my longtime friend and advocate for working men and women a personal friend of mine who is here on stage and i m so proud that he is here many of you do not know him but i want to say a special word of greetings to former ambassador david hermlan who is a great friend and doreen hermlan god bless you my friend thank you for being here i want to thank steve yokich and rubin birks and the members of the board and all the hardworking men and women of the uaw a lot of you know how long and how hard i have worked to gain your confidence and your support and your endorsement i am grateful to you more than i can say in words my heart is full this means the world to me i know what it means in michigan and ohio and illinois and pennsylvania and i know what it means in the united states of america and i know what it means in the history of our country because the uaw as many have noted is not only an active force for a better way of life for working men and women when it comes to bargaining sessions when it comes to organizing when it comes to wages it has also historically been at the forefront of the progressive movement to have better health care and environmental protection and education and rights for women and minorities and social justice and a better country i m going to be back here in michigan on tuesday in monroe county but when steve told me that the vote had taken place as it had i wanted to come here indeed i had to come here to carry this special message to you first i m running for president because i want to fight for you and your family and your communities and your future i want to stand by you i want to fight for the people and not the powerful i want to fight for working men and women and a better way of life the second thing i came here to say is that i now know joe lieberman and i now know that with the uaw on our side we re going to win this election in november and we re going to win for working men and women this november and we re going to elect debbie stabenow to the united states senate this november nothing can stop us now and by building the best cars and trucks in the world you re driving our economy as nurses and educators and public servants you are strengthening our communities by standing up for workers rights and the right to organize you re making sure that we have an economy of fairness and fundamental decency i respect you i appreciate what you have done and i thank you for your help the choice in this election is very simple it comes down to this we re for working families not the powerful and well connected we re for the people not the special interests we are for the working families not those at the very top and when the people we work for are well taken care of and have people who are willing to fight for them then our country is better off we ve got a we ve got a situation right now in america where the other side is trying to give the message that an approach that concentrates on a giant tax giveaway primarily aimed at the wealthy is the best thing for the economy i think they really believe that and i don t question the patriotism or the character of either of their candidates they re good men as far as i m concerned but i think they ve got ideas that would not be good for working families and i don t think they have an accurate view of what this country is like and what it needs i ll give you an example they said that the last eight years have been a time when we ve just been coasting and taking the path of least resistance well i wish there had been less resistance because i remember joining with you in breaking the tie to pass our economic program to help lift up working families against their resistance i wish there had been less resistance when they shut the government down not once but twice and we forced them to reopen it and we forced them to keep going the distance to keep building the economy and as for the effects of that plan that we passed together well the way i remember it it s a little different from the way they described it at their convention the way i remember it they left us with high unemployment after a decade of recessions and slow economic growth they left us with the biggest deficits in history they left us with a national debt that had been quadrupled in a short period of time rising crimes families under more pressure and after eight years of the program that we put in place the clinton gore program we turned the biggest deficits into the biggest surpluses instead of a triple dip recession we ve had a tripling of the stock market instead of high unemployment we ve now got the lowest african american unemployment ever in this country the lowest hispanic unemployment ever in america we ve got 22 million new jobs and officially the strongest economy in the entire 224 year history of the united states of america dem algore13 2 97 al_gore ladies and gentlemen what a pleasure it is for all of us to be here this is a happy very happy occasion and on behalf of the president and the richardson family i want to welcome all of you as guests especially the family members in addition to barbara who will hold the bible shortly bill s mother maria louisa zubiran his sister vesta richardson and her children george and rubin and we re very honored to have both of the senators from new mexico here senator pete domenici and senator jeff bingaman thank you both for your presence we re honored to have the assistant democratic leader the whip and the house of representatives congressman david bonior who is here mack mclarty and the president s cabinet and kitty higgins and maria echaveste and other distinguished guests who are present forgive me if i ve overlooked anyone it s unintentional i m going to make a few remarks and then we ll come to the highlight of the event which is the swearing in and then we ll come to the even which may surpass it the remarks from our new ambassador but i d like to begin by saying how proud i am to be here because bill richardson has been a very good friend for a long time and those of us who have had a chance to work with him feel the great joy that so many have felt in his promotion and elevation to this important position for which he is so well suited so well qualified and so well prepared i m not the only one who feels that way because he was confirmed by a unanimous vote of 100 to nothing you had a pretty good team rounding up votes for you but you know david i don t remember us getting anything like that in the house when bill had something up there you know we ve had two perfect fits at the united nations first madeleine albright and now bill richardson and i m just wondering whether or not that 100 to nothing vote the senators here would be able to tell us i m wondering if it had anything to do with the fact that on the very day he was nominated for or presented to the committee by sheer coincidence his close friends in the house who think so highly of him presented a letter in which 75 members of congress nominated him for the nobel peace prize i thought that was really brilliant on their part i have watched over the years as the president has with great admiration as bill has performed these delicate sensitive difficult diplomatic missions to almost every corner of the world and almost every time as he came back people said to themselves how does he do that because he has had such great success crisscrossing the globe as a champion of human rights and justice well he will use and need those experiences at his new post because now is the time when the united states must continue to show leadership we are as many have used this phrase the indispensable nation and it is a crucial time in our relationship to the united nations a time when reform is essential and as we achieve reform a time when we must become current in meeting our obligations at the united nations so for those and other reasons it s a time when it s particularly important to have someone like bill richardson as our new ambassador someone with an eloquent voice who is both a thinker and a doer we re going to miss you here in washington bill but we re comforted that you re not far away and we have absolutely no doubt that you will succeed magnificently so on behalf of the president to you and your wonderful family godspeed and congratulations now let me invite you to come and take the oath congratulations dem algore13 3 97b al_gore thank you very much president pro temp bill lockyer i appreciate your invitation and your friendship and your very kind words speaker cruz bustamante thank you very much for your outstanding leadership of the assembly and to all of the members of the leadership lt governor gray davis president of the senate my longtime friend also to the other constitutional officers attorney general dan lundgren also a longtime friend we ve played basketball together in the house of representatives years ago cathleen connell comptroller doing an outstanding job along with elaine easton superintendent of public instruction and john chung board of equalization member i want to also acknowledge the other members of the leadership including speaker pro temp sheila james kuehle and the bipartisan members of the escort committee i m very grateful to you for your courtesy today and allow me to also acknowledge governor wilson s chief of staff george dunn and all other members of the administration and members of the leadership including committee chairs and ranking members i m very grateful for the special honor of this invitation i know how infrequent such invitations are how infrequently such invitations are issued and i want to say from my heart i m extremely grateful to all of you for the courtesy of issuing the invitation and for the chance to speak to you here and senator lockyer thank you for bringing up the gore administration that was a very special five minutes for me for my family and if i may be so bold for america believe it or not there are some people who have overlooked my five minutes in the sun but i like to think that americans in general and californians in particular will look back fondly on the gore administration and when historians write of this period they will record that while it may not have been morning in america it was pretty close at 12 01 p m and during the gore administration our nation was at peace at home and abroad we had economic prosperity low inflation the economy boomed we created 3 1 new jobs during the gore administration 1 2 of them here in california historians will also record and i say this without fear of contradiction that there were fewer crimes committed on my watch than during the presidency of any other president republican or democratic but what s important to me is that partisan bickering gave way to bipartisan harmony that lasted the entirety of the administration indeed patriotic hymns burst forth from the steps of the capitol and members of the house and senate here will be pleased to recall that during the entire administration i did not allow the passage of one single unfunded mandate for the state of california thank you very much i think it was partly for that reason that by the end of my term a chant has swept the nation five more minutes five more minutes seriously it is wonderful to be back in california and i m so grateful for the opportunity actually after the week i ve just had it s great to be anywhere away from washington i have been to california many times as vice president and i have been impressed anew on every single visit by the capacity of californians to come together in a crisis after the northridge earthquake or when floods washed across the central valley earlier this year impressed by the scientists that i met at the jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena who were designing the x 33 rocket that we will build to power america s next space shuttle impressed as well by the tens of thousands of californians who joined president clinton and me last april for your state s netday to connect more than 3 000 schools to the information superhighway and incidentally you re going to connect even more classrooms on your next netday april 19 proving yet again why this is such an amazing state california also holds a special place in my heart for reasons that are purely personal when tipper and i were first married we drove out to the high sierras and hiked and camped several times we have hiked and camped in yosemite which incidentally i m proud to say will reopen tomorrow i ve had the opportunity and pleasure to fish on many occasions in the pacific off of your beautiful coast i love it here and besides silicon valley is the place that made it chic to be a geek i know for much of our history as a nation americans have dreamed of coming here many of you have parents or grandparents who traveled here from arkansas missouri oklahoma even from my home state of tennessee they came to seek their piece of california s promise i m proud that california s first governor peter burnett came from tennessee and so did one of your state s first two united states senators all of these people had to struggle and overcome adversity to get out west and when they arrived they had to invent a future for themselves they got so good at inventing the future that somewhere along the way californians decided that while you were at it you might as well invent the whole country s future and so it has been ever since in california s early days native americans and then russian trappers were joined by a wave spanish settlers coming north from mexico seeking a golden land then by prospectors seeking golden nuggets in calaveras county in the next century new immigrants and entrepreneurs invented hollywood and created an entertainment industry in los angeles that still captivates the imagination of the entire world by mid century california s aerospace and defense workers were stocking the arsenal that won world war ii and then the cold war twenty years ago in a garage in cupertino steve jobs and steve wozniak the founders of apple created a new machine that helped to change the world again and today in laboratories in movie studios and in high tech firms california is inventing the future again a future fashioned from aluminum and steel from genetic research from slivers of silicon and microchips that are powering personal computers that now zap bits of data instantly from one end of our planet to the other no other state can claim such ingenuity and grit and through it all your great grandparents and grandparents and your mothers and fathers too always knew that the key to opportunity in california was public education right now because we believe it is the key to america s future president clinton and i and our wives and members of president clinton s cabinet are traveling the country on a national crusade to improve american education earlier today the president addressed the state legislature of north carolina and described his vision for america s schools there really is no place in america more appropriate to address a subject so central to our future than california because education more than hollywood or even agriculture has defined what it has meant to be a californian since 1850 when settlers established california s first public grammar school in san francisco parents here have known that california s schools offer their children a ladder to a better life and for many years now california s institutions of higher education its community colleges cal state and the uc system have been the envy of the nation indeed of the entire world this commitment to excellence in education was supported by a bipartisan consensus that lasted for several decades and really laid the foundation for the burst of prosperity here in california and yet today let us acknowledge that in california and in the rest of our nation our schools are simply not what they should be funding has shrunk across america test scores have dropped standards have eroded red tape has accumulated and as a direct result children have suffered too often politics has triumphed over progress the truth in california and the rest of the nation is that educating our children works best when it operates above partisan ideological politics as president clinton has said in the cold war when our nation needed a bipartisan foreign policy politics stopped at the water s edge in the knowledge economy of the coming century politics must stop at the schoolhouse door we must all do our part this is the dawn of a new era in which the ability to learn quickly is the key to america s future and the very first thing all of us have to learn is how together we can build throughout our entire country the kind of historic bipartisan public and private consensus in favor of educational excellence for which california used to be known worldwide and i predict will be again because california as is its custom has begun to show the way again both parties in this legislature have worked together with governor wilson delaine eastin and others to begin to restore california s educational promise a new commitment to smaller class sized has been an important new innovation a 10th uc campus built in merced and the california reading initiative launched in schools that include the davidson elementary school in san bernardino where i will visit tomorrow you ve made a great start and president clinton and i want to be your partners in continuing this journey in restoring luster to america s schools in rebuilding that commitment to excellence the president laid out much of this agenda in his state of the union address this is the goal an america in which every 8 year old can read in which every 12 year old can connect to the internet in which every 18 year old has the chance to go to college and every adult can continue to learn throughout his or her lifetime here are some of the ways that we will reach those goals first national education standards teach our children the fundamentals and then test them to make sure they know the fundamentals we hope that california following delaine eastin s leadership will commit to being one of the first states to adopt these national education standards we believe they re in the best interests of california and every state second a citizen army of reading tutors one million strong to make sure that all of our children can read by the third grade i m proud that 28 california universities colleges and community colleges have already answered the president s call and enlisted work study students as reading tutors third public school choice and charter schools let s bring charter schools and the magic of competition and innovation summoned here in california to enrich the quality of our nation s public schools next leveraging 20 billion to rebuild our classrooms and schoolhouses here in california as in many other states community have had to convert trailers and community centers into makeshift classrooms because schools are either overfilled or falling down we know that our children deserve better all across america next we want to connect every classroom and every library to the information superhighway by the year 2000 and of course this technological power so much of it conceived and built here in this great state has not yet reached enough americans that computer that was invented in the california garage i referred to 20 years ago it has to make its way to the california classroom and every other classroom in every state next college opportunity for everyone hope scholarships to make community college essentially free for all americans and a 10 000 tax deduction we want to make the 13th and 14th years of education as commonplace and routine and accepted as graduation from high school is today and for those who want to go further the 10 000 tax deduction would be available so that with very few exceptions no longer would any american be taxed on money spent to finance college tuition that s an important investment in america s future and then a g i bill for america s workers so that men and women can get the job training that they need to learn and earn throughout their working lives cut the red tape cut the overlap combine the multiple bureaucracies into a single reinvented approach that focuses on the man or woman who wants the job training do it in a cost effective way that is our federal agenda for education but we don t believe it is enough we must also effect a change in the way we organize our schools and run our classrooms and so today here in california i m announcing on behalf of the president a new element of our education crusade a national blueprint to reinvent the way we spend money on public education and reorganize our schools in harmony with the principles of the information age and the networked economy this initiative will begin not in washington but in communities across california and across the nation its goal is to enlist everyone who is concerned about the education of children from parents to teachers to school administrators to students themselves and ask them to begin posing some fundamental questions about their public schools systems and in particular about how school dollars are spent we sometimes hear a shorthand expression that the problem with education is that there is not enough money well it s true that many school districts are woefully underfunded and that must change but it is equally true according to voluminous research in every part of our country that student performance bears very little relationship to the absolute amount of money spent but student performance bears a close relationship to the way the money is spent we have to look at what the money is spent on we should be spending public funds on teachers and children not on excessive overhead and bloated bureaucracy and unnecessary layers of middle management so it is time for parents and others to start asking pointed questions how much of the money in the school where your children attend classes is going to teachers and for books and for other things that are actually in your child s classroom how much instead is going to bureaucracy that is unnecessary to overhead costs that have grown completely out of control to redundant layers of unnecessary layers of administration and how exactly does all of that spending contribute to the education of your child i have been involved in the project we call reinventing government in washington we call it rego for short that s gore spelled sideways i ve worked hard on that program this initiative today is really the application of the reinventing government principles to the effort to improve our schools we ve heard so many compelling if depressing stories about what has gone wrong for example the washington post reported that the district of columbia school system spent 7 380 per student among the very highest levels of spending per student in the entire nation and still did not have enough books or crayons or toilet paper in the restrooms or even enough teachers for the students why if you re spending huge amounts of money per pupil and you don t have enough books or teachers of crayons something is going wrong that is beyond the absolute level of spending what s going on is rampant mismanagement sometimes verging on corruption funds that should have been spent on textbooks field trips and athletics instead were shifted to pay the salaries of administration personnel in this case some 50 million more than had been authorized separate sets of books in texas auditors found 640 million in inefficiencies in the state s public school systems in one texas county there were 12 different school systems with 12 different school boards and 12 different superintendents of education all for a county with 5 000 students that s ridiculous even here in california teachers are sometimes having to spend money out of their own pockets to equip their classrooms with basic supplies like chalk crayons and construction paper the same thing is true certainly in my home state of tennessee and we could go around the country and find thousands of similar examples at the same time we should also find out how teachers are forced to spend their time because what we re facing is not only the waste and misallocation of money but the waste and misallocation of time as well one study showed that the typical teachers spends only 30 percent of his or her time each school day actually teaching children that s what they re supposed to do but the rest of the time they re required to discharge administrative duties and fill out paperwork and wrestle with red tape that does not sound like the right balance to me and we need to start changing that misallocation of time and effort many of our schools of course do an extraordinary job often against long odds some of the most talented and committed americans i have ever met are teachers principals and school board members and administrators these men and women are working very hard to do right by our children all of us need to do more to make their jobs easier by working together reaching across party lines to reinvent america s public schools and to make them worthy of america s children i ll present a more detailed summary of this new initiative that i m announcing here today in a paper that will be distributed publicly after this speech but it is an example of an overall approach that we must take as we near this new century to solve the new problems we face new solutions for problems like these are more important now than they have been at any other point in america s history we face the challenge in our generation of redeeming the promise of self government of proving to the next generation that the same system of representative democracy that allowed a previous generation of californians to create an educational system that was the envy of the entire world can be renewed in time to allow this generation of leaders to address the new challenges of the new century we need reforms and reinvention we need reform in the way we campaign we need reform in the way we govern those of us in public service today whether serving in this legislature or in president clinton s administration or in some other capacity all of us serve at a time when everyone must be painfully aware of the need to do more with less to live within our means to be as creative in solving the nation s problems as california has been in reinventing the nation s future we have seen a wave of reinvention and change sweep first through the private sector with companies that are pioneers and take the lead many of them here in california eliminating the old obsolete ways of doing business and instead empowering their employees eliminating unnecessary layers of management and red tape focusing on results instead of process measuring the outcomes listening to their customers and focusing on excellent results we must adopt the same approach in government at all levels that is one of the reasons why president clinton and i have insisted upon a balanced budget that protects priorities like education and protecting the environment priorities like delivering high quality services to disaster victims of flooding in california s sacramento and san joaquin valleys priorities like protecting our seniors and fighting effectively against crime and drugs assuring a bright future for our farmers and providing health care for those who need it we have learned how to have fiscal responsibility and reduce our nation s budget deficit while focusing on these priorities through this work that we call reinventing government president clinton asked me to launch this initiative four years ago and we have begun to build a federal government that works better and costs less and serves citizens more directly we have taken that approach and tried to apply it now to this principal challenge of reinventing the way we finance education in america one of tools that we have used in reinventing government has been information technology of course california is the center of the information revolution for the entire world and is of course home to so many of the institutions that shaped the 20th century and are shaping the next century right now we have now got to do everything we can to help a new set of californians prepare the way for the century that will begin just a few years from now that is why we have insisted on cutting spending reducing the deficit and focusing on these priorities that is why where information technology is concerned so important to california s future economy the president and i have called for the next generation of the internet to allow laboratories and universities to communicate 1 000 times faster than today that s why the president s budget increases federal investments in research and development for the fifth year in a row increases funding for basic research that s also why it strengthens university based research so that stand out research institutions like u c san francisco and u c san diego and stanford berkeley and cal tech can continue to push back the frontiers of science and knowledge the california technological firepower of which i have spoken will help to propel your state s extraordinarily economic recovery and that of our nation we have seen with declining budget deficits the removal of pressure in the financial markets to push interest rates up as the deficits have come down interest rates have come down twelve million new jobs have been created social problems are yielding to solutions we are seeing progress with crime rates come down because focusing on priorities while the economy is steadily gaining strength is much easier here in california from the depths of a painful recession not so may years ago california now tops the nation last year your state created almost 900 new jobs every single day and once again california is achieving this success in innovative ways the rest of the country is going to seek to imitate what california has done as the rest of the country has done so often your recovery has been powered by the firms of tomorrow small nimble companies working in industries that a few years ago did not even exist california companies consistently make up a whopping share of companies on the inc 500 list the yearly list of the nation s fastest growing companies and many of these and other companies are backed by venture capital another category where california leads the nation jobs in the motion picture industry are exploding in number and half of the people who work in america s biotechnology industry work on jobs here in california this is the work of the future the kinds of jobs for which the public schools must be preparing california s students and make no mistake these students of today and workers of tomorrow will be selling their wares to the entire world california is america s largest exporter by far the united states gateway to asia and latin america i know there are some in both political parties who view this increasing convergence with the rest of the world s economy as a cause for fear as an excuse for retreat but not california that s not california s way you do not fear the future you say bring it on we re ready and if the future is one where the nations of the world exchange goods and ideas at an unprecedented clip california will take the lead leaving the timid in their wake one reason you will lead the way is that this state is the most diverse in our entire land by the turn of the next century just a few years away those referred to as minorities in california and elsewhere will comprise the majority together in california some cynics decry that change even use it to divert attention from the real problems that we face and sometimes inadvertently or not turn good people in here in california and throughout america our diversity is one of our greatest strengths especially in an economy that depends evermore on international trade this is true now and will be even more true in the future diversity also has advantages not simply for the health of our economy but for the vitality of our democracy this chamber is proof the most diverse legislative body in the entire nation and you are properly proud that your own diversity and your state s diversity includes absolute respect for all regardless of race religion ethnicity sexual orientation or national origin this is a commitment to bring america together for a common future that starts here in california and must spread throughout america incidentally last year when congress passed legislation to reform america s welfare system they included one provision that did not respect diversity and had absolutely nothing to do with moving americans from welfare to work the bill i refer to singled out legal immigrants legal immigrants for the harsh and unfair treatment spelled out in that provision let me state it plainly it is wrong to tell four million people in california who work here pay taxes here maybe even serve in the military here in many cases that if somebody mugs you in a dark alley or if your child suddenly falls seriously ill or you or your spouse are injured at work that you re not going to receive the helping hand that everyone else who is legally living here is entitled to that is wrong it must change if i can use a sometimes explosive term in my opinion it is un american these provisions are unworthy of a nation of immigrants we must change them and i ask for your help in changing them these provisions will cause pain and rip away at california s budget so we re going to do our very best to change these provisions and i appreciate the support you ve indicated for this effort and i hope you ll also be our partners in the historic effort here and nationwide to create the jobs that we need both in the private sector and in the public sector for californians who leave the welfare rolls finally there is another area where california has always been in the forefront and that is in protecting the environment in many ways the environmental movement was born in this state and california has a rich tradition of one generation protecting the state s air and water and land for the next generation the president s and our environmental agenda is inspired by that legacy here in california our administration will work to clean up the nation s toxic waste sites making sure that the polluters responsible for the pollution and not neighborhoods pay the cost of the cleanup we will continue strengthening the laws that protect the food our children consume the water they drink and the air that they breathe and we will help you protect your beautiful coast in a balanced and flexible and sensitive way for our entire nation owes an enormous debt to california we acknowledge that debt with gratitude incidentally your state librarian someone i met as a college student almost 30 years ago and saw again this morning captured this fundamental idea well he wrote the american people have assigned california a special role to seek out the american future to test it to try its options rejecting what doesn t work and building upon what does well today california s special role endures and i have no doubt whatsoever that you will continue to seek out the future with gritty entrepreneurs natural wonders cutting edge technologies and of course a public education system that is second to none it is time to build our common future let it begin here in california thank you god bless you god bless california and america thank you dem algore13 3 97c al_gore thank you very much president pro temp bill lockyer i appreciate your invitation and your friendship and your very kind words speaker cruz bustamante thank you very much for your outstanding leadership of the assembly and to all of the members of the leadership lt governor gray davis president of the senate my longtime friend also to the other constitutional officers attorney general dan lundgren also a longtime friend we ve played basketball together in the house of representatives years ago cathleen connell comptroller doing an outstanding job along with elaine easton superintendent of public instruction and john chung board of equalization member i want to also acknowledge the other members of the leadership including speaker pro temp sheila james kuehle and the bipartisan members of the escort committee i m very grateful to you for your courtesy today and allow me to also acknowledge governor wilson s chief of staff george dunn and all other members of the administration and members of the leadership including committee chairs and ranking members i m very grateful for the special honor of this invitation i know how infrequent such invitations are how infrequently such invitations are issued and i want to say from my heart i m extremely grateful to all of you for the courtesy of issuing the invitation and for the chance to speak to you here and senator lockyer thank you for bringing up the gore administration that was a very special five minutes for me for my family and if i may be so bold for america believe it or not there are some people who have overlooked my five minutes in the sun but i like to think that americans in general and californians in particular will look back fondly on the gore administration and when historians write of this period they will record that while it may not have been morning in america it was pretty close at 12 01 p m and during the gore administration our nation was at peace at home and abroad we had economic prosperity low inflation the economy boomed we created 3 1 new jobs during the gore administration 1 2 of them here in california historians will also record and i say this without fear of contradiction that there were fewer crimes committed on my watch than during the presidency of any other president republican or democratic but what s important to me is that partisan bickering gave way to bipartisan harmony that lasted the entirety of the administration indeed patriotic hymns burst forth from the steps of the capitol and members of the house and senate here will be pleased to recall that during the entire administration i did not allow the passage of one single unfunded mandate for the state of california thank you very much i think it was partly for that reason that by the end of my term a chant has swept the nation five more minutes five more minutes seriously it is wonderful to be back in california and i m so grateful for the opportunity actually after the week i ve just had it s great to be anywhere away from washington i have been to california many times as vice president and i have been impressed anew on every single visit by the capacity of californians to come together in a crisis after the northridge earthquake or when floods washed across the central valley earlier this year impressed by the scientists that i met at the jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena who were designing the x 33 rocket that we will build to power america s next space shuttle impressed as well by the tens of thousands of californians who joined president clinton and me last april for your state s netday to connect more than 3 000 schools to the information superhighway and incidentally you re going to connect even more classrooms on your next netday april 19 proving yet again why this is such an amazing state california also holds a special place in my heart for reasons that are purely personal when tipper and i were first married we drove out to the high sierras and hiked and camped several times we have hiked and camped in yosemite which incidentally i m proud to say will reopen tomorrow i ve had the opportunity and pleasure to fish on many occasions in the pacific off of your beautiful coast i love it here and besides silicon valley is the place that made it chic to be a geek i know for much of our history as a nation americans have dreamed of coming here many of you have parents or grandparents who traveled here from arkansas missouri oklahoma even from my home state of tennessee they came to seek their piece of california s promise i m proud that california s first governor peter burnett came from tennessee and so did one of your state s first two united states senators all of these people had to struggle and overcome adversity to get out west and when they arrived they had to invent a future for themselves they got so good at inventing the future that somewhere along the way californians decided that while you were at it you might as well invent the whole country s future and so it has been ever since in california s early days native americans and then russian trappers were joined by a wave spanish settlers coming north from mexico seeking a golden land then by prospectors seeking golden nuggets in calaveras county in the next century new immigrants and entrepreneurs invented hollywood and created an entertainment industry in los angeles that still captivates the imagination of the entire world by mid century california s aerospace and defense workers were stocking the arsenal that won world war ii and then the cold war twenty years ago in a garage in cupertino steve jobs and steve wozniak the founders of apple created a new machine that helped to change the world again and today in laboratories in movie studios and in high tech firms california is inventing the future again a future fashioned from aluminum and steel from genetic research from slivers of silicon and microchips that are powering personal computers that now zap bits of data instantly from one end of our planet to the other no other state can claim such ingenuity and grit and through it all your great grandparents and grandparents and your mothers and fathers too always knew that the key to opportunity in california was public education right now because we believe it is the key to america s future president clinton and i and our wives and members of president clinton s cabinet are traveling the country on a national crusade to improve american education earlier today the president addressed the state legislature of north carolina and described his vision for america s schools there really is no place in america more appropriate to address a subject so central to our future than california because education more than hollywood or even agriculture has defined what it has meant to be a californian since 1850 when settlers established california s first public grammar school in san francisco parents here have known that california s schools offer their children a ladder to a better life and for many years now california s institutions of higher education its community colleges cal state and the uc system have been the envy of the nation indeed of the entire world this commitment to excellence in education was supported by a bipartisan consensus that lasted for several decades and really laid the foundation for the burst of prosperity here in california and yet today let us acknowledge that in california and in the rest of our nation our schools are simply not what they should be funding has shrunk across america test scores have dropped standards have eroded red tape has accumulated and as a direct result children have suffered too often politics has triumphed over progress the truth in california and the rest of the nation is that educating our children works best when it operates above partisan ideological politics as president clinton has said in the cold war when our nation needed a bipartisan foreign policy politics stopped at the water s edge in the knowledge economy of the coming century politics must stop at the schoolhouse door we must all do our part this is the dawn of a new era in which the ability to learn quickly is the key to america s future and the very first thing all of us have to learn is how together we can build throughout our entire country the kind of historic bipartisan public and private consensus in favor of educational excellence for which california used to be known worldwide and i predict will be again because california as is its custom has begun to show the way again both parties in this legislature have worked together with governor wilson delaine eastin and others to begin to restore california s educational promise a new commitment to smaller class sized has been an important new innovation a 10th uc campus built in merced and the california reading initiative launched in schools that include the davidson elementary school in san bernardino where i will visit tomorrow you ve made a great start and president clinton and i want to be your partners in continuing this journey in restoring luster to america s schools in rebuilding that commitment to excellence the president laid out much of this agenda in his state of the union address this is the goal an america in which every 8 year old can read in which every 12 year old can connect to the internet in which every 18 year old has the chance to go to college and every adult can continue to learn throughout his or her lifetime here are some of the ways that we will reach those goals first national education standards teach our children the fundamentals and then test them to make sure they know the fundamentals we hope that california following delaine eastin s leadership will commit to being one of the first states to adopt these national education standards we believe they re in the best interests of california and every state second a citizen army of reading tutors one million strong to make sure that all of our children can read by the third grade i m proud that 28 california universities colleges and community colleges have already answered the president s call and enlisted work study students as reading tutors third public school choice and charter schools let s bring charter schools and the magic of competition and innovation summoned here in california to enrich the quality of our nation s public schools next leveraging 20 billion to rebuild our classrooms and schoolhouses here in california as in many other states community have had to convert trailers and community centers into makeshift classrooms because schools are either overfilled or falling down we know that our children deserve better all across america next we want to connect every classroom and every library to the information superhighway by the year 2000 and of course this technological power so much of it conceived and built here in this great state has not yet reached enough americans that computer that was invented in the california garage i referred to 20 years ago it has to make its way to the california classroom and every other classroom in every state next college opportunity for everyone hope scholarships to make community college essentially free for all americans and a 10 000 tax deduction we want to make the 13th and 14th years of education as commonplace and routine and accepted as graduation from high school is today and for those who want to go further the 10 000 tax deduction would be available so that with very few exceptions no longer would any american be taxed on money spent to finance college tuition that s an important investment in america s future and then a g i bill for america s workers so that men and women can get the job training that they need to learn and earn throughout their working lives cut the red tape cut the overlap combine the multiple bureaucracies into a single reinvented approach that focuses on the man or woman who wants the job training do it in a cost effective way that is our federal agenda for education but we don t believe it is enough we must also effect a change in the way we organize our schools and run our classrooms and so today here in california i m announcing on behalf of the president a new element of our education crusade a national blueprint to reinvent the way we spend money on public education and reorganize our schools in harmony with the principles of the information age and the networked economy this initiative will begin not in washington but in communities across california and across the nation its goal is to enlist everyone who is concerned about the education of children from parents to teachers to school administrators to students themselves and ask them to begin posing some fundamental questions about their public schools systems and in particular about how school dollars are spent we sometimes hear a shorthand expression that the problem with education is that there is not enough money well it s true that many school districts are woefully underfunded and that must change but it is equally true according to voluminous research in every part of our country that student performance bears very little relationship to the absolute amount of money spent but student performance bears a close relationship to the way the money is spent we have to look at what the money is spent on we should be spending public funds on teachers and children not on excessive overhead and bloated bureaucracy and unnecessary layers of middle management so it is time for parents and others to start asking pointed questions how much of the money in the school where your children attend classes is going to teachers and for books and for other things that are actually in your child s classroom how much instead is going to bureaucracy that is unnecessary to overhead costs that have grown completely out of control to redundant layers of unnecessary layers of administration and how exactly does all of that spending contribute to the education of your child i have been involved in the project we call reinventing government in washington we call it rego for short that s gore spelled sideways i ve worked hard on that program this initiative today is really the application of the reinventing government principles to the effort to improve our schools we ve heard so many compelling if depressing stories about what has gone wrong for example the washington post reported that the district of columbia school system spent 7 380 per student among the very highest levels of spending per student in the entire nation and still did not have enough books or crayons or toilet paper in the restrooms or even enough teachers for the students why if you re spending huge amounts of money per pupil and you don t have enough books or teachers of crayons something is going wrong that is beyond the absolute level of spending what s going on is rampant mismanagement sometimes verging on corruption funds that should have been spent on textbooks field trips and athletics instead were shifted to pay the salaries of administration personnel in this case some 50 million more than had been authorized separate sets of books in texas auditors found 640 million in inefficiencies in the state s public school systems in one texas county there were 12 different school systems with 12 different school boards and 12 different superintendents of education all for a county with 5 000 students that s ridiculous even here in california teachers are sometimes having to spend money out of their own pockets to equip their classrooms with basic supplies like chalk crayons and construction paper the same thing is true certainly in my home state of tennessee and we could go around the country and find thousands of similar examples at the same time we should also find out how teachers are forced to spend their time because what we re facing is not only the waste and misallocation of money but the waste and misallocation of time as well one study showed that the typical teachers spends only 30 percent of his or her time each school day actually teaching children that s what they re supposed to do but the rest of the time they re required to discharge administrative duties and fill out paperwork and wrestle with red tape that does not sound like the right balance to me and we need to start changing that misallocation of time and effort many of our schools of course do an extraordinary job often against long odds some of the most talented and committed americans i have ever met are teachers principals and school board members and administrators these men and women are working very hard to do right by our children all of us need to do more to make their jobs easier by working together reaching across party lines to reinvent america s public schools and to make them worthy of america s children i ll present a more detailed summary of this new initiative that i m announcing here today in a paper that will be distributed publicly after this speech but it is an example of an overall approach that we must take as we near this new century to solve the new problems we face new solutions for problems like these are more important now than they have been at any other point in america s history we face the challenge in our generation of redeeming the promise of self government of proving to the next generation that the same system of representative democracy that allowed a previous generation of californians to create an educational system that was the envy of the entire world can be renewed in time to allow this generation of leaders to address the new challenges of the new century we need reforms and reinvention we need reform in the way we campaign we need reform in the way we govern those of us in public service today whether serving in this legislature or in president clinton s administration or in some other capacity all of us serve at a time when everyone must be painfully aware of the need to do more with less to live within our means to be as creative in solving the nation s problems as california has been in reinventing the nation s future we have seen a wave of reinvention and change sweep first through the private sector with companies that are pioneers and take the lead many of them here in california eliminating the old obsolete ways of doing business and instead empowering their employees eliminating unnecessary layers of management and red tape focusing on results instead of process measuring the outcomes listening to their customers and focusing on excellent results we must adopt the same approach in government at all levels that is one of the reasons why president clinton and i have insisted upon a balanced budget that protects priorities like education and protecting the environment priorities like delivering high quality services to disaster victims of flooding in california s sacramento and san joaquin valleys priorities like protecting our seniors and fighting effectively against crime and drugs assuring a bright future for our farmers and providing health care for those who need it we have learned how to have fiscal responsibility and reduce our nation s budget deficit while focusing on these priorities through this work that we call reinventing government president clinton asked me to launch this initiative four years ago and we have begun to build a federal government that works better and costs less and serves citizens more directly we have taken that approach and tried to apply it now to this principal challenge of reinventing the way we finance education in america one of tools that we have used in reinventing government has been information technology of course california is the center of the information revolution for the entire world and is of course home to so many of the institutions that shaped the 20th century and are shaping the next century right now we have now got to do everything we can to help a new set of californians prepare the way for the century that will begin just a few years from now that is why we have insisted on cutting spending reducing the deficit and focusing on these priorities that is why where information technology is concerned so important to california s future economy the president and i have called for the next generation of the internet to allow laboratories and universities to communicate 1 000 times faster than today that s why the president s budget increases federal investments in research and development for the fifth year in a row increases funding for basic research that s also why it strengthens university based research so that stand out research institutions like u c san francisco and u c san diego and stanford berkeley and cal tech can continue to push back the frontiers of science and knowledge the california technological firepower of which i have spoken will help to propel your state s extraordinarily economic recovery and that of our nation we have seen with declining budget deficits the removal of pressure in the financial markets to push interest rates up as the deficits have come down interest rates have come down twelve million new jobs have been created social problems are yielding to solutions we are seeing progress with crime rates come down because focusing on priorities while the economy is steadily gaining strength is much easier here in california from the depths of a painful recession not so may years ago california now tops the nation last year your state created almost 900 new jobs every single day and once again california is achieving this success in innovative ways the rest of the country is going to seek to imitate what california has done as the rest of the country has done so often your recovery has been powered by the firms of tomorrow small nimble companies working in industries that a few years ago did not even exist california companies consistently make up a whopping share of companies on the inc 500 list the yearly list of the nation s fastest growing companies and many of these and other companies are backed by venture capital another category where california leads the nation jobs in the motion picture industry are exploding in number and half of the people who work in america s biotechnology industry work on jobs here in california this is the work of the future the kinds of jobs for which the public schools must be preparing california s students and make no mistake these students of today and workers of tomorrow will be selling their wares to the entire world california is america s largest exporter by far the united states gateway to asia and latin america i know there are some in both political parties who view this increasing convergence with the rest of the world s economy as a cause for fear as an excuse for retreat but not california that s not california s way you do not fear the future you say bring it on we re ready and if the future is one where the nations of the world exchange goods and ideas at an unprecedented clip california will take the lead leaving the timid in their wake one reason you will lead the way is that this state is the most diverse in our entire land by the turn of the next century just a few years away those referred to as minorities in california and elsewhere will comprise the majority together in california some cynics decry that change even use it to divert attention from the real problems that we face and sometimes inadvertently or not turn good people in here in california and throughout america our diversity is one of our greatest strengths especially in an economy that depends evermore on international trade this is true now and will be even more true in the future diversity also has advantages not simply for the health of our economy but for the vitality of our democracy this chamber is proof the most diverse legislative body in the entire nation and you are properly proud that your own diversity and your state s diversity includes absolute respect for all regardless of race religion ethnicity sexual orientation or national origin this is a commitment to bring america together for a common future that starts here in california and must spread throughout america incidentally last year when congress passed legislation to reform america s welfare system they included one provision that did not respect diversity and had absolutely nothing to do with moving americans from welfare to work the bill i refer to singled out legal immigrants legal immigrants for the harsh and unfair treatment spelled out in that provision let me state it plainly it is wrong to tell four million people in california who work here pay taxes here maybe even serve in the military here in many cases that if somebody mugs you in a dark alley or if your child suddenly falls seriously ill or you or your spouse are injured at work that you re not going to receive the helping hand that everyone else who is legally living here is entitled to that is wrong it must change if i can use a sometimes explosive term in my opinion it is un american these provisions are unworthy of a nation of immigrants we must change them and i ask for your help in changing them these provisions will cause pain and rip away at california s budget so we re going to do our very best to change these provisions and i appreciate the support you ve indicated for this effort and i hope you ll also be our partners in the historic effort here and nationwide to create the jobs that we need both in the private sector and in the public sector for californians who leave the welfare rolls finally there is another area where california has always been in the forefront and that is in protecting the environment in many ways the environmental movement was born in this state and california has a rich tradition of one generation protecting the state s air and water and land for the next generation the president s and our environmental agenda is inspired by that legacy here in california our administration will work to clean up the nation s toxic waste sites making sure that the polluters responsible for the pollution and not neighborhoods pay the cost of the cleanup we will continue strengthening the laws that protect the food our children consume the water they drink and the air that they breathe and we will help you protect your beautiful coast in a balanced and flexible and sensitive way for our entire nation owes an enormous debt to california we acknowledge that debt with gratitude incidentally your state librarian someone i met as a college student almost 30 years ago and saw again this morning captured this fundamental idea well he wrote the american people have assigned california a special role to seek out the american future to test it to try its options rejecting what doesn t work and building upon what does well today california s special role endures and i have no doubt whatsoever that you will continue to seek out the future with gritty entrepreneurs natural wonders cutting edge technologies and of course a public education system that is second to none it is time to build our common future let it begin here in california thank you god bless you god bless california and america thank you dem algore14 6 95 al_gore thank you so much for your warm welcome and phil lader thank you for your very very generous words and the opportunity i ve had to work with you and your outstanding leadership for small business in america heading up sba phil and i worked in the white house when he was deputy chief of staff and what he didn t say is he was my key partner in the work of reinventing government and he brought his experience in small business to bear very effectively as we were launching that exercise and we appreciate you very much phil and allan patrickoff who s done an outstanding job as chairman of this conference keeping everything moving in the right direction fantastic job thank you very much and to the distinguished guests who are here i understand that congresswoman jan myers of kansas is here also jan is a long time friend i can t see for these spotlights so if i m looking in the wrong direction that s the reason and arthur levitt chairman of the sec who s really been working hard for business in america and peggy richardson with the irs who spoke with you and milt stewart who is an expert on small business innovative research and we appreciate your work i was the author of the sbir program back when i was in the house of representatives and that s been a success i appreciate the fact that you feel that way i want to thank the commissioners who have done such an outstanding job also the staff of the white house conference they ve shown a lot of ingenuity and hard work something like this doesn t just happen as you know you made it happen but one of the reasons it has gone so well and so smoothly is the work of the staff and i want to thank a long time friend of mine nick friendly for coming up with the idea for those pennies at the last minute that was a pretty smart pretty smart move to have a back up and ladies and gentlemen i m going to be relatively brief for two reasons number one i realize that i am now the last remaining obstacle between you and dinner number two i m keenly aware of and appreciative of the fact that this is my second opportunity to speak to you thank you for that i appreciate it i m reminded of the story about winston churchill and the famous playwright george bernard shaw george bernard shaw sent a telegram to winston churchill inviting him to come to the opening night of his new play in london and he said dear winston here are two tickets to the opening of my new play bring a friend if you have one well churchill who had probably the quickest wit of anybody any of us know of immediately sent a telegram back dear mr shaw i m sorry that i cannot attend the opening night of your new play i will come on the second night if there is one i appreciate this second night performance very much i guarantee you and i was talking with some of my friends who are among your commissioners clark jones from my home state and peggy zoan fisher and merrill chambers and some of the others and i was reminded by clark jones that the last time he and i were together talking about small business was a few months ago and i was on crutches and i m so glad to get off those crutches and being as tonight is the is one of the basketball games i thought it reminded me it reminded me now was that a crowd from houston or orlando all right well anyway i tore my achilles tendon playing basketball and for those of you who follow the game so closely you ll know this terminology others ask them i hurt myself doing one of those helicopter dunks and i caught my elbow on the rim coming down and i finally i got out of the cast although the doctors tell me that i ll have to wear the old full body cast for several more years you know i got used to stories like that when i went out around the country it s no secret i ran for president in 1988 although it seemed like one at the time that was a character building experience i learned a lot of new jokes actually how can you tell al gore from a room full of secret service agents he s the stiff one if you if you use a strobe light it looks like al gore is moving al gore is so boring his secret service code name is al gore well you know it s all right i ve heard most of them by now but every time i hear a new one i always have the same reaction very funny tipper it was in order to escape that demeaning ridicule and reclaim my dignity that i decided to run for vice president of the united states well let me say a few words because this group has really made history and brought about changes and anybody who thinks there s anything small about small business in america should have learned differently in the last three days because the one word the one word that i would use to decide you best is big big dreams or you wouldn t have started your own business in the first place big measures of courage and tenacity or you wouldn t still be in business big frustrations with a government that should be in your corner and not in your face and big clout with the clinton gore administration i guarantee you i hope that you know by now that president clinton and i and all the cabinet members and agency heads who ve been here at this conference are paying close attention to you and i hope you know by now that we mean business and we mean to bring you results that s what this conference is really aimed at i already told you about results like epa s new common sense approach and you heard it from carol browner too the new approach that small business owner stu mcmichael says let s him get advice from epa without worrying about getting cited for a violation and fined at the same time and i told you about the new simpler rules on drugs and medical devices and about the new osha you saw some more results with your own eyes on monday morning when the president brought that 16 000 stack of dead regulations and thousands more pages that are being injected with big doses of common sense and you saw some more results i hope with your own eyes if you heard the common sense last night about balancing this budget in america and doing it in the right way bipartisanship and you saw some more results right here at the conference and in the business section of this morning s usa today which had an article about our new on line computer service that we call the u s business advisor did anybody see that in the newspaper this morning good many of you have tested it already we worked very hard on that the sba under phil later and our national performance review with the reinventing government task force with elaine kaymark who s my chief of staff on that effort and the outstanding team that s worked hard on that let me give you a little news they told me not to announce this because it is so new but just on the basis of this one article in usa today this morning on this on line u s business advisor all day long we have had an average of 50 000 hits per hour from one article and one of our national laboratories lawrence livermore is helping us with this with their super computer capacity they ve had to move a new super computer on to help out and we re going to we ll we ve got more contacts that we really thought and so but we re going to accommodate them here s what s behind this small business advisor sixty different agencies either regulate or provide service to business even the biggest companies have a hard time finding what they need in that thicket and the task is virtually impossible for a start up company so the goal of the business advisory is to give you one stop internet access to every service and every bit of information that government provides to business you can already get regulatory information you can get some advice you can download tax forms you can even get the names and telephone numbers of the federal workers who write regulations we re not quite ready to give you their home addresses but they do want to work in partnership with business one of your conference members paul condit who runs a john deere dealership in west texas came to town last week to witness some other results he helped president clinton and me unveil a new proposal paving the way for businesses to send in a single report on wages and taxes eliminating the need for costly multiple reports to irs and labor and social security and a list of state and local agencies one report and then we do the rest and here s something brand new within a month the first u s general store for small business will open its doors in houston texas we re test marketing a whole new concept of retail government it s not just a place to find out what regulations apply to your business the people there will tell you how to deal with the rules how to solve tax problems how to get a loan and all kinds of services and it doesn t matter whether the rules or the assistance comes from sba or irs or osha or pa or whomever you will not have to go door to door you will not get the runaround the people at the general store will know how to help you whatever the relationship you re trying to deal with concerning government is you just call or stop by if this u s general store for small business is a success and our measure of success is if its customers become raving fans if that happens we will make it a national chain and substitute it for some of the approaches that do not work about so help us out with this about the same time that that first general store opens its doors every regulatory agency in washington will hit a deadline and publish its detailed report on how it is complying with president clinton s orders some of which he talked about when he was here every one of them is right now cutting regulations focusing on results instead of red tape and on partnership instead of punishment every one of them is cutting back on the number of reports that you have to file we ve given them that mandate every one of them will let small business use their money to fix problems instead of paying fines and president clinton wants all of the government s top regulators to get out of washington again and discuss the reforms with you and with the state and local delegates who did not have the opportunity to come here to this conference and with all the other americans who are now the government s partners in this new philosophy and this new approach well as i mentioned last night while you were here in washington for this historic conference president clinton announced his plan for one of the very best things of all for american business a new approach that has the realistic prospect of moving beyond partisanship and bringing democrats and republicans and independents together on an approach that will create a balanced federal budget we believe that is extremely important for the future of this country president clinton s balanced budget plan also has special features designed specifically to help small businesses it was only a five minute address last night but all of the documentation that was released to flesh it out today makes it clear we will make it easier for you to get lower cost health insurance and it will let you deduct more of that cost from your taxes and we which is needed by small business that has that expense and we will invest more money to help the nation s 380 000 small manufacturers develop more high tech products and adopt modern manufacturing technologies to become more competitive and get a better market share so you can see that we ve been working a pretty full agenda on behalf of your small businesses and getting results even before you all came to town in fact we ve already implemented because we were listening as i said the other day we were listening to the regional and state conferences we have already implemented more of your recommendations than previous administrations democrat and republican implemented after their small business conferences we re proud of that record and we re going to try to improve on it believe me all the time and money and effort that you have spent to come here and to be a part of this conference is going to have a big pay off for our country and for small business the list of recommendations that you voted on is going to keep us on track and all the energy and passion for reform that you brought to washington is spurring us on to change the government even faster these white house small business conferences have an impressive track record and working with you president clinton and i pledged to do our dead level best to make this conference the most influential of all the ones that have taken place now where do we go from here we re going to concentrate on results as i said and i want to tell you ahead of time that we re going to follow up and keep in touch and we d like to ask you to do the same we will send you a report card so that you know how we re doing on your recommendations in washington every one of you and we would like to know from you what improvements you re seeing back in your home towns now specifically before you close the conference i d like to make a deal with you the government agency that ranks number one on the small business hit list i said hit list is osha voices yes and our side of the bargain our side of the bargain is this we will change osha where you live this year i have talked this over with joe deere i ve talked this over with joe deere we see eye to eye on it no more osha gotcha no more osha in your face instead osha will join in a partnership with you a partnership that will help your business grow more profitable by keeping your workers safe and healthy and osha s already proven to themselves what you already knew namely that partnership gets an awful lot better results than punishment and gotcha they proved it in maine and you heard a little bit about that and they re taking it nationwide and so that s what we propose to do we ll change osha where you live this year now here s what i would like from you in your part of this deal when you see that osha has changed when you see that they re doing the right thing if and when you see with your own eyes that osha has changed and you feel the difference i would like you to tell people about it i would like you that s all i ask just that s all i ask just refrain from telling your favorite old stories about the old outrageous osha and start telling people if you see it with your own eyes that osha has changed and start telling them that you have seen one example of government doing the right thing now there s a reason why i d like to make that deal with you it s because i believe deeply that we as americans as a free self governing people have an obligation to restore america s faith in our ability to solve problems even where they must be solved by working together through the institutions of self government that faith in ourselves and in this republic that we have has dangerously eroded and i m not talking about the bizarre and evil example that saddened us all and stunned us all recently in oklahoma city i m talking about something that s happened over the last thirty years thirty years ago when americans were asked this question do you trust the government to do the right thing most of the time thirty years ago 70 percent of americans said yes now when that same question is asked less than 20 percent say yes and the drop off has been among democrats and republicans conservatives and liberals men women whatever the background race religion or whatever now if we as americans don t believe that we can work effectively through self government then how will we solve serious problems that can only be addressed by working together through self government and we ve got some crime is an example racism what about the people who really and truly cannot do for themselves and really and truly need help and there are some no matter what impression is sometimes created if we don t believe that we can work effectively through government then how can we tackle some of these problems like providing a world class education in the public school system how can we gain the upper hand in some of these parts of the world competitive marketplace where other countries are pitching in and giving their businesses a leg up and in order to really compete effectively we ve got to give it an extra effort there are all kinds of examples that you could cite also even as we limit the role of government and reduce the role of government and cut back and pare down and make government smaller so it will work better and cost less even as we do all that we know all of us deep down that we also face challenges that we ve got to be able to have confidence in ourselves that we can face together and so i believe we ve got to pay attention to restoring america s faith in the power of self government if we content ourselves just to attack and criticize we may not feel an obligation to get in there and really try to fix it but those of us who really believe what i was saying a minute ago that we have got to have an ability to address things have the extra obligation to get in there and try to solve the problems and fix it and make it work the way it s supposed to work the way it wants to work the way we know it can work and the only way to restore america s faith in self government is the way you build faith in your business one customer at a time that s what reinventing government is all about restoring faith one citizen at a time so we ve got a deal right we ll change osha you ll tell people if you see it with your own eyes all right one thing in closing one thing in closing let s make it more than just a deal let s make it a partnership let s work together to reunite the american people with their government their self government restore our faith in the institutions of representative democracy and show the whole rest of the world what we have never really seriously doubted in america namely that there is no better way than the american way and small business can lead the way thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for all you ve done thank you dem algore14 9 02 al_gore the last time i was here i spoke as a candidate and this time it s a little bit different a lot of things have been different for me over the last year and a half after eight years of flying on airforce two now i have to take off my shoes to get on an airplane after getting used to all those motorcades and armor plated cadillac limousines now they let other cars on the road with me when i drive just to give you one quick example of what my experience has been like not too long ago my wife tipper and i were driving from nashville tennessee to carthage tennessee fifty miles away and there weren t any men running along side the car there weren t fifteen suvs trailing behind and no sirens no motorcade as a matter of fact it was a rented ford taurus and we were driving ourselves and we drove past lebanon tennessee around dinner time and started looking for a place to eat and we pulled off the interstate and we found a shoney s restaurant it s an excellent low cost family chain there was a denny s but i didn t want to they re doing better anyway we walked into this shoney s and we sat down at the booth and the waitress came over and made a big commotion over tipper and then she went to the couple sitting in the booth directly behind us and she lowered her voice so much we had to really strain to hear what she was saying and she said to this couple yes that s former vice president al gore and his wife tipper and the man said he s come down a long way hasn t he yes a lot s changed since i was here last time that s a true story and another true story the very next day i got on a gulf stream four and flew to africa to nigeria to make a speech in the city of lagos and since that had happened the day before i began my speech by telling that story and i told it pretty much the same way i just told it to you we were driving ourselves and went to shoney s low cost family restaurant chain all the rest and they laughed at the story and then i went on to make my speech and went back out to the airport and flew back to the u s but we had to stop at the azores islands for refueling and when the door to that plane opened up here came a man running across the tarmac holding a piece of paper waving it saying call washington call washington and i thought what in the world could be wrong in washington then i remembered it could be a bunch of things what it turned out to be was that one of the national news organizations had already printed the following story and sent it all over the united states it said yesterday in nigeria former vice president al gore announced quote my wife tipper and i have opened a low cost family restaurant called shoney s and we are running it ourselves kind of makes you want to sigh you know before i could get back to u s soil the late night comics david letterman jay leno had already started in on me they had me and tipper in white chef s hats flipping burgers not that there would be anything wrong with that but three days later i got a nice long handwritten letter from my friend and partner bill clinton congratulations on the new restaurant al we like to celebrate each other s successes in life dem algore14 9 94 al_gore thank you very much ladies and gentlemen thank you for joining us on this occasion i appreciate all the solicitude on my crutches and my cast it s not true that i did this dancing with tipper here in the front row the doctor said i ll have this cast for another five months and i ll have to wear the old full body cast for another two years i told somebody the other day that since i was under anesthesia for almost 90 minutes i formally transferred the powers of my office as vice president to the speaker of the house and when i regained consciousness speaker foley was restored to full power i want to welcome all of the heroes of reinvention who are here all of our distinguished guests members of the cabinet members of the administration members heads of agencies and departments who have been implementing these recommendations federal employees who have made all the difference in making all of this possible in giving us the ideas and then in helping us implement the ideas and i want to say first of all that one year ago here on the south lawn i presented the report of the national performance review to president clinton the report said that if we followed a few simple principles such as putting customers first empowering employees and cutting red tape we could create a government that works better and costs less we symbolically cut some red tape on the way in here but we ve been cutting the real thing over the past year at a remarkable rate there is still a lot to go just as there s still a lot of the symbolic red tape in these laundry baskets there but we re making a lot of progress and this is a status report at the one year mark in the first year since we published the report federal civil servants members of president clinton s administration and the president himself have been cutting red tape and have been working extremely hard to turn the national performance review into reality as you can see there is a lot left to do and we re talking about that too today we re releasing a formal status report on the first year of the national performance review here s the report in cd rom version it s also available on the internet and and for some of us there is also a book i commend it to your reading just as i commended to your reading the original report a year ago and those who took me up on it got back and said they felt well rewarded by the experience of reading it this is just as readable as the one a year ago and it gives us the facts and figures of which we re very proud that show how much progress we have been making but as we present the one year status report on reinventing government to the american people today i would like to emphasize that it is only the first in what we promise will be many installments toward the goal of a government that works better and costs less there are two ways to summarize the work that we have done in the past year one way the traditional way is through statistics some of which you see over here right to the right i said from the beginning this would be a seven to eight year project most of the figures have in the tradition of the budget document been calculated in five year terms but just in the first year as you can see we have already seen action taken on more than 90 percent of the recommendations in last year s report money saved personnel cuts accomplished bills passed by congress this is a record of great success and while i m talking about the actions taken by congress i want to single out the individuals in congress who have been so remarkably supportive of this and have made it all possible first of all the two committee chairs of the committees with jurisdiction over most of the recommendations in reinventing government senator john glenn and congressman john conyers would the two of you stand please i ll tell you these guys have been wonderful to work with they and their colleagues have been extremely supportive and i m very very grateful to them i want to thank a friend of mine who has been more than a majority leader in helping to put this stuff across he s been a friend and ally in helping to remove obstacles the majority leader in the house of representatives congressman dick gephardt who is here we appreciate your work dick thank you i want to acknowledge two other members of congress who have been extremely helpful on these matters and who are present congressman bill richardson and congresswoman jane harmon if the two of them could stand we appreciate your work very much i m leaving out a bunch of people i hope i haven t overlooked someone who is also here forgive me it s an oversight if i have i d like to acknowledge the agency heads who are here and who have done such an outstanding job alice rivlin the director of omb who has been a real hero of this and she s also been heading up the president s management council and every week we work very hard on this one of my strongest allies roger johnson head of the gsa roger thank you for your help and support i want to acknowledge several others from fema james lee witt from sba erskine bowles from the social security administration shirley chater the acting customs director sam banks jim king at opm who s been a real hero and in the vanguard on this material peggy richardson with irs whose been just outstanding ann brown with the consumer product safety commission ann thank you and the members of the president s management council in addition to alice tom collier at the interior department mort downey at transportation dave barram at commerce hershel gober at the veterans administration madeleine kunin at education richard moose at the state department and tom glynn at the labor department we appreciate your work ladies and gentlemen i also want to acknowledge some folks who have been key allies and when they signed on to really help make this work some people who didn t really understand what federal employees are all about were surprised i wasn t surprised after spending a year talking with federal employees in every agency and department because i already knew that most of these ideas in here are ones that federal employees at the grass roots level where the rubber meets the road have for years been saying why don t they do this why don t they do it the right way don t they understand what makes sense and so when the representatives of public employees in the public employee unions spoke up and to the surprise of some say yes we endorse this we think this is greatly needed i was not surprised but i m very grateful to them i m going to ask three of them to stand who are present john sturdivant with the american federation of government employees bob tobias with the national treasury employees union and john leyden secretary treasurer for public employment in the afl cio would the three of you gentlemen stand thank you thank you you talk about one big change in the prospects for all of this stuff it came when the employees and their representatives spoke up loudly and clearly so mr president we can talk about the people who made it possible we can talk about the facts and figures which are summarized over here but before we talk about the facts and figures that are usually in this kind of report i d like to shift gears and go about this in a different way i d like to introduce to you some people who have had firsthand experience on the receiving end with a reinvented government now i know that this phrase i m about to use sounds like a contradiction in terms or an oxymoron to use the fancy word but i m going to introduce you to three satisfied citizens that may sound like a contradiction in terms but i want to introduce all three of them and then ask the three of them to come and talk to you first to the microphone will be emilio mendoza from san antonio texas and dr mendoza is the chief executive of a small business called galactic technologies a defense contractor in san antonio texas last january the company ran into cashflow problems and began to think about the cash flow problems and began to think about the sba and he s going to come up here in a minute and tell us his experience as a high tech small business ceo our next speaker will be from big business small businesses like dr mendoza s are not the only ones that are now having the chance to become satisfied customers of the government big businesses have been noticing the change too so the next person i d like you to hear from is mr art torno managing director of american airlines from miami florida and he ll be up here in a moment and our third speaker is from california disasters like last january s northridge earthquake in southern california can be the time when americans need their government the most in the past the government has not always been there when it was needed not because there weren t good intentions or hardworking employees but because the systems were failing them and there were some things that were not enabling them to give the quality service they wanted to give but the federal emergency management agency has been reinvented so third to speak will be mrs alameda holstein and her granddaughter crystal and we ll ask them to come up here mrs holstein came from sylmar california to tell us about her experience after last january s major earthquake and then i ll come back to present the report the status report to the president and to present the president to this gathering would the three speakers come up here now and give us your presentation please mr president there are thousands of stories across our country just like these three stories and in every case federal employees who want to do an outstanding job and deliver the highest quality service but have been trying in vain to unleash those energies in the face of systems that don t work red tape that ties them in knots burdens that they have to carry that don t make any sense now are able to do what they want to do anyway for example the low doc form sba was able to do that because the leadership and the employees at sba took a form that looked like that and put it down to one two sided piece of paper fema they were able to provide this quality service because they weren t having to spend hours upon hours filling out needless forms because the innovators at fema have now given them small hand carried notebook computers where they can put the information in instantly and send it electronically overnight and cut the turn around time to practically nothing the same in customs even though the conversations between the regulators and the regulated the government agencies and the effective business community have been going on for years now with better systems with a commitment from management with a new reinvented government approach they re able to implement the good ideas that have been there in the private sector and in the minds and hearts of federal employees for quite some time this is working we have a long way to go but we have made an outstanding start in the first year and we are going to get this job done and there s one simple reason why when you get past all the rest of it last year at this time president clinton took the initial report and held it up and said to the country everywhere it says the president should this president will president clinton has kept his word he has delivered the full resources of his administration to the accomplishment of this goal and incidentally partly because of this we were able to have the success announced yesterday with the crime bill this week has illustrated president clinton s leadership on many issues national service which was just kicked off the crime bill which was just signed yesterday and now the one year status report on reinventing government it s been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life to be able to work with the federal employees who have made this report possible it is my pleasure to present this report to you mr president and ladies and gentlemen it s my great honor to present to you the president of the united states dem algore15 1 04 al_gore thank you carol and thank you joan and thank you peter and i want to thank all of you for coming here today on the coldest day of the year to talk about global warming what better time to talk about global warming i do want to say that it was an honor to work with carol browner on environmental policies in the last administration and i m very grateful for her outstanding leadership of environment 2004 i want to thank peter for his great work as executive director of moveon org and i appreciate all of those who have worked in the trenches with both of these great organizations that are co sponsoring today s speech and allow me to please say a special word about joan blades who traveled as peter did from california for this event and joan along with her husband wes boyd is the co founder of moveon org and she has been from the beginning a moving force behind the emergence of this dynamic new grassroots movement in american democracy it s a great great development i want to introduce my wife tipper who is here and my daughter karenna and my son in law drew schiff and lisa schiff all right now i have made a series of speeches about the policies of the bush cheney administration toward the major challenges that confront america national security economic policies civil liberties and today the environment now for me this issue is in a special category because i believe so much is at stake i don t want to proselytize but my own religious faith has been a has played a role in my strong feelings about this issue but i think all of us from whatever point of view we begin thinking about the environment put it in a special category and i m particularly concerned about this issue because the vast majority of the most respected environmental scientists from all over the world have sounded a clear and urgent alarm the international community including the united states began a massive effort several years ago to assemble the most accurate scientific assessment of the growing evidence that the earth s environment is now sustaining severe and potentially irreparable damage from the unprecedented accumulation of pollution in the global atmosphere in essence these scientists are telling the people of every nation that global warming caused by human activities is becoming a serious threat to our common future i m also troubled that the bush cheney administration does not seem to hear the warnings of the scientific community in the same way that most of us do now i don t say that in a humorous way they are they look at it and hear it differently than the majority of americans and so i want to show a few pictures today this first just to start with a grounding in what we re really talking about here this picture of the first image that any of us ever saw of the earth it was taken on christmas eve in 1968 by a young astronaut named bill anders on the mission of apollo 8 when frank borman was the pilot they didn t land on the moon but it was the first one to go around the moon and this picture is called earthrise and it was given a lot of the credit for beginning the modern environmental movement when this picture was first seen it caused a dramatic change in the way people thought about our planet on the following day in the new york times the poet archibald macleish wrote to see the earth as it truly is small and blue and beautiful and the eternal silence where it floats is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together this next picture was taken on the last of the apollo missions apollo 17 on december 11th 1972 part way between the earth and the moon with the sun directly behind the spacecraft and this is the most published photograph in all of history ninety nine times out of 100 when you see a picture of the earth in a newspaper or an advertisement it is this exact picture and because it s northern hemisphere winter antarctica is tilted toward the sun africa and the sinai are prominent in this picture now the next one i m going to show you is hardly ever seen it s a film it s the only home movie we have of the earth when the galileo spacecraft was leaving the earth to go out and explore the universe it turned its cameras back on our planet and captured 22 hours of the earth rotating it speeded up into just 20 some odd seconds but it s beautiful the next few pictures are unique in a different way they are made up of 3 000 separate satellite photographs taken over a three year period carefully selected to give a cloud free view of every square inch of the earth both hemispheres are in summer simultaneously and north america is the last of these and even though the earth is of such a vast size it s important to remember that the most vulnerable part of the global environment is the atmosphere because it is surprisingly thin as my friend the late carl sagan used to say like a coat of varnish on a globe from here to the top of the sky is not as far as it is out to laguardia airport and as a consequence it is possible for our civilization to fill up that relatively small space with greenhouse gases now don t spend any time on this one because this is the way the technical explanation is given of the greenhouse effect with the sun s rays coming in and they radiate back out and some of them are trapped and that s a good thing but when the greenhouse gases thicken it they re trapped more and that heats it up and that s bad this is a much better explanation our daughter kristin worked with matt groening out in hollywood or did rather and they allowed me to use that i think it s a pretty good explanation of global warming to tell you the truth but the point is this i really don t think there is any longer a credible basis for doubting that the earth s atmosphere is heating up because of global warming and i d like to show just a few pictures that are different from today in new york city you remember last summer in europe when the heat wave was quite dramatic and the temperature increases particularly in france were extremely large and ten degrees centigrade higher than that in fahrenheit of course and a lot of people lost their lives as a result and now they re calculating the estimates on a global basis of people that are casualties every year now because of global warming and this is the temperature record since the civil war the last 140 years and yes decade to decade it may go up or down and there s variations but the overall trend is pretty clear and here are some pictures that i think are really pertinent to this discussion mount kilimanjaro 30 years ago looked like this and a couple years ago it looks like this a friend of mine named lonny thompson at ohio state is the leading expert on mountain glaciers in the world and he goes there every so often it s melting rapidly this is a glacier in latin america and 100 years ago it looked like this and today it is gone this is a glacier in china which has gone through the same transition in a much shorter period of time in glacier national park 90 years ago the grinnell glacier looked like this with one of my daughters i hiked to the top of it in 98 it looks like this now twenty seven of the 38 glaciers in the park have now melted this was a popular one earlier in the century and now it s completely gone and within 15 years this could be called the park formerly known as glacier in fact glaciers are melting everywhere in the world with the with a few exceptions in scandinavia in alaska the columbia glacier used to have a vast extent and has now retreated dramatically this glacier in peru used to look like this it now looks like this this illustrates the well known saying that denial ain t just a river in egypt lonny thompson flies to the glaciers and travels in various ways not just to watch em melt but to have core drillings and they dig down into the ice and pull it back up and they study the little bubbles of atmosphere trapped in the ice and they can measure the carbon dioxide and measure the temperature by looking at the different isotopes of oxygen and they can read every year of the ice the way a forester reads tree rings and lonnie gave me this picture to illustrate why that s possible every single year there s a different layer and he has dug down a thousand years back in time and constructed a thousand year record of global temperature as reflected in the glaciers and a thousand years ago is at the bottom and the present day temperature is at the top now i m showing this to make a couple of points number one the blue is cold and the red is warm and some of the so called skeptics have made a big point of saying well this is just a normal kind of fluctuation and actually there was a medieval warming period that was warmer than now well no that s not right there it is and another one but compared to what it is today it s completely different now the other point is it s really interesting glaciers do not care about politics they don t respond to ideology or spin they just melt or freeze and so this record is really reliable few years back these hikers were going across the alps in italy and they said wow there s a 5 000 year old man never noticed that guy before because the ice had never melted there before now shifting gears this is where most of the ice in the world is ninety five percent of all the freshwater on earth is locked in the ice in antarctica and instead of going back a thousand years they can dig down through ten thousand feet of ice and go back 400 000 years and recently they completed the record of carbon dioxide and temperature going back all that way this is what carbon dioxide looks like from the present time all the way back through the last ice age through the next to last ice age the period of great warming in between and two more ice ages back to the down to the bottom of the antarctic continent and at no time in that whole 400 000 year period has it gotten above 300 parts per million or even 280 parts per million and this is what the temperature record looks like and there are two points to make on that first of all it sure does look like those lines go together and the second point is this is the difference and current temperatures in new york city and having a mile of ice over your head because that s what was above manhattan at this point in time now the current carbon dioxide concentrations are up here way way above anything that has been seen in 400 000 years and midway through this century unless we take prompt action it will be here now ask yourself this question if this much difference on the cold side is a mile of ice over your head how much what does this represent on the warm side and is that all right with everybody is that is that a perfectly sensible risk for us to take well i say that s my answer also according to the present administration it s perfectly all right no big deal shouldn t be worried about it i think it s reckless in the extreme and i think that it absolutely has to be addressed we ve all heard about these icebergs the size of rhode island breaking off of antarctica there ve actually been a bunch of em in the last seven or eight years located in green i m gonna show you a six week period in this in the antarctic peninsula just real fast in six weeks this is what happened two years ago and that now happens on a regular basis and at times in the very very distant past when large chunks of antarctica plopped into the ocean the sea level went up 23 feet all of a sudden that s not in prospect for at least 150 200 years maybe more however when land based ice melts sea level does go up and in the second largest place where land based ice is found in greenland science magazine published this picture just recently that s rushing water melting in greenland now and they the scientists are trying to come to grips with exactly what the pattern is there but there s growing evidence of very dramatic melting and change in greenland when the ice melts on land the sea level goes up and in areas that are affected by it they re beginning to take steps this is london in 1983 they built these barriers on the thames river to protect london against rising sea levels in the form of tidal surges up the thames river and since 1983 this is what has happened in the number of closures every single year the pattern is really clear the change is underway right now everywhere you look on on earth the sea level increase is projected to displace ten million environmental refugees in bangladesh alone it is also predicted to have a significant impact on florida and there are other hey hey hey hey hey hey hey no no no no no no you be careful i believe i carried florida now this is the arctic which is floating ice when ice floating on the ocean melts of course the sea level doesn t go up like an ice cube in a glass of water it melts the water level doesn t change but there are dramatic changes there as well i went up to the arctic a couple of times and these submarines the navy has specially designed for the arctic the those bow wings rotate so that they ll push up like a knife cutting through the ice there and the navy agreed over a period of time to release their secret formerly secret data showing the ice thickness in the arctic it has decreased 40 percent in the last half century it is decreasing 9 percent per decade now and the reason it happened so rapidly this is a nasa illustration when the edge of the ice melts the water heats up and it reinforces and gives a positive feedback and accelerates the melting at the edge of the ice and that phenomena means that there is a much faster process of warming in the arctic than anywhere else alaskan temperatures have already gone up 8 degrees and the 40 percent decline in the thickness of the artic ice pack unfortunately is continuing and the projection by some scientists now is that midway through this century this loss of one and a half million square kilometers of sea ice will continue and unless action is taken boldly and soon then partway through this century we may well see according to the predictions the complete disappearance in summertime of the arctic ice cap now here s the reason why that s a big deal when it s there it s like a big mirror and 95 percent of the sun s energy bounces off it and when it s gone 90 percent of the sun s energy is absorbed so that means a 1 degree increase at the equator is projected to be as much as a 12 degree increase at the top of the world and since the global climate system is an engine for redistributing heat from the equator to the poles and since that pattern of ocean currents and jet streams and storm systems is defined in part by the difference between these two temperature extremes you replace that mirror with a big heat sink then it threatens massive disruption of the entire pattern of global climate in any case that puts more energy into the climate system that s why the scientists say that storms get 50 percent stronger and hurricanes get bigger and precipitation increases because there s more evaporation off of the oceans both in the form of rain and snow in this century alone in north america there has been a huge increase in precipitation but the same phenomena that causes the extra evaporation off of the oceans also causes evaporation of soil moisture and the projection now is that we could lose in north america 25 to 30 percent of the soil moisture in the most the most valuable agricultural growing areas of this country and now the scientists are backing up and they re saying hey wait a minute we ve been saying co2 may double in the atmosphere if the current policies prevail and nothing is done we ll just go barreling right through a doubling and head toward a quadrupling which according to the scientific community would lead to a catastrophic 60 percent loss of soil moisture throughout vast areas of north america you talk about a scorched earth policy that is exactly and literally what that is this is also the moisture also comes according to the scientists much more now in the big one time storm events so it doesn t recharge the aquifers and the springs it just rushes off so that s why so many areas are getting more flooding and more droughts simultaneously not a good thing this also has captured the attention of the insurance industry because of real hard dollars and cents not all of this is due to the great weather and flood catastrophes it s because there are more people living in flood plains and in vulnerable areas but a great deal of it is due to it and that s why you have companies like swiss re and munich re just almost apoplectic about this issue attempting to convince others in the business community that it s time to say hey wait a minute you talk about the cost of dealing with the transition to new technologies time to also take into account the cost of not doing anything about this which would be just unthinkable so the point is this the evidence is overwhelming and undeniable global warming is real it is happening now the consequences that are presently anticipated are totally unacceptable now it is important to understand in my opinion that this crisis actually is just as symptom of a deeper underlying cause global warming just like the destruction of the rainforests and the other global environmental issues is actually a symptom of this fact that we are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the earth and there are three factors that are responsible for it and the first one is population we re seeing some success in slowing the momentum of population growth but it is still growing rapidly all around the world and if you look at a graph of population from the beginning of the human race until now if you go back now i don t want to get into a debate about when we had a trial in tennessee about this and and we lost and i m very sensitive about it and but for purposes of argument if you accept the scientific view that we emerged in our current form 160 000 years ago it took more than 10 000 generations before we reached a population of 2 billion people when my baby boom generation was born and in my 55 years it s gone from 2 billion to 6 3 billion and it s projected to continue going on up maybe it ll level off at 8 9 billion there has been some success but the point is this do you notice anything different about this part of the trend line here what s going on now in our lifetimes is completely and totally different from anything that has ever happened in all of human history and this pattern is also responsible for driving some other patterns such as the loss of living species the rate of extinction now is a thousand times greater than the background rate of extinction some of you saw the study that came out last week printed in nature magazine peer reviewed that now they expect a quarter of all living species to disappear in the next fifty years unless action is taken and up to 37 percent nothing like that s happened since 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out and this time it s not a collision with an asteroid it s a collision with us so the population is of course mostly increasing in the developing nations and that drives increasing demand for food and for water and for energy and also is responsible for some of the destruction of the forestland where it s cut and is burned on just a constant basis they say about a football field s worth every second is lost drying out the land and it is a political decision this is the border between haiti and the dominican republic haiti has one policy dominican republic has another policy we have political decisions to make also because this is where the greenhouse gases are coming from in our country we re responsible for more than south america and africa and the middle east and china all put together and the average greenhouse gas emission per person in the world is down there and this is where we stack up compared to the rest of the world so it is a challenge for us well here s a thousand years of carbon emissions and co2 and temperature this is not rocket science these correlations are pretty darn obvious now here s a second factor that s changing completely the relationship between humankind and the earth and that s the scientific and technological revolution which of course has brought great benefits in healthcare and communications and quality of life and all the rest but and here is the point new technologies magnify our ability to have an impact on the earth around us and old habits combined with new technologies have different consequences one old habit is war my religious faith includes the saying there will always be wars and rumors of wars but wars with spears and bows and arrows and muskets has one set of consequences but when war became more advanced there was another set of consequences and when atomic weapons were invented the consequences of the old habit of war were utterly transformed and so we came up with the idea of a cold war and now india and pakistan are negotiating and hopefully they ll resolve that deal but the point is this new technologies can so change the consequences of old habits that we are mandated to change the way we think about them our oldest habit now if you think about that as an analogy we have from the beginning of humankind got food and resources from the earth and technologies have advances and from horses and donkeys to tractors but now we see simple things like irrigation done on such a massive scale that the consequences are different the former soviet union irrigated a lot of land for cotton in central asia and inadvertently turned the fourth largest inland sea in the world into a desert this is the aral sea and this is the canal that the fishing industry desperately built dug to try to chase the receding shoreline and it ran away from them it s a pitiful sight now the changes that we are now setting in motion in many parts of the world could result in vain projects to chase the way of life that we re used to but see it just moved right out from underneath us the technologies that we have available to us now can transform the surface of the earth in dramatic ways technology can seem to just get out of hand for the lifestyle that is conducive to a happy family we are able to get into areas of the earth that were never accessible before and the new chemicals and other things that we re doing like burning energy you can see the totality of the impact by looking at the earth at night this is the western hemisphere computer enhanced images that show the white are the lights of the cities and the red are the burning forests it s worse this year than it was when that picture was made it s like that every year this is the eastern hemisphere the yellow are the gas flares and actually they are capturing more of that now but the third factor that s changing the relationship between our civilization and the earth is our way of thinking and you know there s a well i ll tell this personal story when i was in the sixth grade i had a classmate in geography who pointed to the outline of south america and the outline of africa and he asked the teacher did they ever fit together and the teacher said of course not that s the most ridiculous thing i ve ever heard that child went on to become a drug addict and a ne er do well the teacher became science advisor in the current administration that was a cheap shot he s a that science advisor s better than that but we know that they did fit together but the teacher thought they didn t because he had an assumption in his mind that went unchallenged continents are so big obviously they don t move and that s a common problem to quote a famous philosopher what gets us into trouble is not what we don t know it s what we know for sure that just ain t so and what we know for sure what many people know for sure now that just ain t so is that the earth is so big we can t possibly have any impact on it now many of you know the clich story about the frog s nervous system when change appears to be gradual it s sometimes hard to get exercised or alarmed about it and it is a fact as the medical students will tell you that if a frog jumps in a pot of boiling water it ll jump right out again because it can tell it s trouble but if a frog is placed in a pot of tepid water and the water is just slowly brought to a boil that frog ll just sit there until it s rescued i ve learned the importance of rescuing that frog because some people never remember anything except that and so it really is important to treat the frog well now in spite of the clear evidence available all around us there are many who still do not believe that global warming is a problem at all and it s no wonder because they are the targets of a massive and well organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters who are determined to prevent any action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming out of a fear that their profits might be affected if they had to stop dumping so much pollution into the atmosphere and wealthy right wing ideologues have joined with the most cynical and irresponsible companies within the oil and coal and mining industries to contribute large sums of money to finance pseudoscientific front groups that specialize in sowing confusion in the public s mind about global warming they issue one misleading report after another pretending that there is significant disagreement in the legitimate scientific community in areas where there s actually a broad based accepted consensus now focus on these pseudoscientific groups that take money from the coal companies and mining and oil companies the techniques that they use were pioneered years earlier by the tobacco industry in its long campaign to manufacture uncertainty in the public s mind about the health risks caused by tobacco smoke you know that s an industry that kills one out of every five of its customers not a good business plan unless they can find a way to recruit massive numbers of what they call replacement smokers alright and so and it s interesting if you look at the names of the people who took money from the tobacco companies laundered through law firms often some of the same scientific camp followers who took money from the tobacco industry as part of that that effort are right now taking money from the coal and oil companies in return for their willingness to say with a straight face that global warming is not real it is a fact now here is a good example of what they did before and you know at one time that didn t cause any laughter at all because it was just part of their strategy and it continued for quite a long time this was a document recently gained in a discovery process on something called project white coat and look at the goals to reverse the misconception that tobacco smoke is harmful to restore the acceptability of smoking now in a candid memo about political strategy for republican leaders pollster frank luntz expressed concern that voters might punish candidates who supported more greenhouse gas pollution and more pollution generally and then he offered advice to republican leaders on what he believes is the key tactic for defusing the issue first of all he said that the environment is probably the single issue on which republicans in general and president bush in particular are most vulnerable then he went on to say this you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue by going out and recruiting these types who ll say up is down and black is white and so forth now this let me go back one on this the bush administration has gone far beyond the recommendations of mr luntz and has explored new frontiers in cynicism by time and time again actually appointing the principal lobbyists and lawyers for the biggest polluters to be in charge of administering the laws that their former clients are charged with violating some of these appointees have continued to this day work very closely with the outside pseudo scientific front groups even though they are now on the public payroll two of the state attorneys general in our nation have now publicly accused officials in the bush white house council on environmental quality of conspiring with one of the outside groups to encourage the filing of a lawsuit against themselves against the administration as part of a shared strategy to undermine the possibility of government action on global warming vice president cheney s infamous energy task force advised lobbyists for polluters early on in the new administration that there would be no action by the bush white house on global warming and then he asked for their help in designing a totally meaningless voluntary program interestingly one of the industry lobbyists who heard that pitch from the administration s taskforce went back to talk with some of his fellow lobbyist and he made an unguarded speech it s still up on the website of his organization right now i don t think they re aware of it and he said the following about what he had heard and i m going to quote it for you he said let me put it to you in political terms the president needs a fig leaf he went on to say the president is dismantling kyoto but he s out there on a limb and he said the industry needs to be understanding and help him well the white house has indeed routinely gone out on a limb to involve large contributors representing companies charged with violating environmental laws and regulations in the drafting of new laws and regulations designed to let their clients off the hook the story s the same when it comes to protecting the american people from pollution the bush administration chooses special interests over the public interest ignoring the scientific evidence in favor of policies that its campaign contributors demand consider mercury an extremely toxic pollutant causing severe developmental and neurological defects in developing fetuses and in children and in adults we know that its principal unregulated source is coal fired power plants but the bush administration has gutted the protections of the clean air act revoking an earlier determination by the epa that mercury emissions from power plants should be treated as a hazardous air pollutant now even though the bush administration s own fda issued a warning about mercury in tuna they try to reclassify it now is everybody okay with that with the president saying that mercury shouldn t be treated as a hazardous air pollutant i mean i can t imagine that consider also toxic wastes the superfund has now gone from a surplus of almost 4 billion to a deficit of 175 million because they want to get rid of the principle that the polluter should pay to clean up his own pollution the result is fewer cleanups slower cleanups and a toxic mess left for our children and grandchildren to deal with and that s of course because the bush administration has let its friends in the industry off the hook and the tax that the polluters used to pay to finance the superfund cleanup has been eliminated so that taxpayers you and i are left holding the bill and paying for cleaning up the pollution that the polluters used to be responsible for now i can t believe that the people of this dem algore15 7 00 al_gore thank you all very much thank you thank you very much if you re from the north you can sit down now if you re from the south you can sit down now thank you very much i told i told wellington i ve never seen that done before i appreciate that very much i ll have to remember that one you know i see wellington webb everywhere that s why you know you ve heard of the worldwide webb he is really getting around i m telling you and i also want to compliment mayor webb on his great leadership of denver he s really doing a terrific job and i want to thank my friend al from i ll say some more about al a little bit later but what you have done al is just extraordinary and to those of you in this room i look around i was standing up here waiting for this to start and i was recognizing all the faces of good friends and compatriots that i fought many battles alongside and we ve done some good for this country and i m really proud of what you all have done in hanging in there and working so hard i bring you greetings from tipper incidentally she s campaigning today in california and it s been a big year for us we just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary just not seven weeks ago and last night while my daughter karenna was out making speeches on my behalf i was babysitting our grandson and he just turned one on july 4th he had excellent timing last year now let me just tell you a quick story you know that grandparents are prone to brag on their grandchildren any other grandparents here alright anybody have as many as five grandchildren ten ten really well give me some advice afterwards i m just a rookie what i ve learned so far is that evidently the preferred technique is just to give that grandchildren whatever he wants and then if that causes any problems give him back to his parents and that s what we did after his birthday party on july 4th but now i started to tell you that grandparents are prone to brag am i right you probably got pictures with you don t you okay well now i have been bragging on my grandson about how bright he is and i just have some evidence and you judge for yourself this is a true story the other day it was the day of the it was the day after the nba championship game and i was watching the game my daughter called me the night before the next morning early i was eating breakfast and the phone rang and i picked it up and said hello and i heard a baby s voice and the more i listened i recognized my grandson s voice and i said hello hello and apparently my voice came through the speaker phone because karenna came from the other room and picked it up and said dad and i said karenna and she said oh my gosh wyatt has called you on the telephone and she said i didn t even know we had a redial button on this phone well does that make the point you know you might argue that he was just playing around with that toy and happened to press that button i don t think that for a minute i think he wanted to talk to me in any case it really is great to be here and i want to thank mayor martin o malley for being such a great host to all of us this is my second visit this week to baltimore he is really coming on like gangbusters it s great did you all like that city stat program wasn t that good don t you want one well the national performance review has by coincidence been working on that same system a mayor out in redlands california is working on something similar and i don t think anybody has done as good a job with it as mayor o malley but i really recommend that those of you who are local elected officials take that idea back and make it work and we have a federal government task force that has been working for two years now to come up with a kind of a franchise cookie cutter pattern that you can use to put that into effect in your cities if you want to i want to thank my friend congressman jim moran and i don t know all of the other elected officials here but i know there are a bunch of you and i just wanted to tell you what s on my mind here today because less than four months from today americans will go to the polls to choose a new president now some would have us believe that this election is about little more than personalities and photo opportunities but you and i know that nothing could be further from the truth for fifteen years now the dlc has been dedicated to the idea that the people s best interests have to come before any special interests that the party of the people has to constantly search for new ways to put its enduring values into action for rapidly changing times that people deserve a government that is on their side i believe that fundament cause is very much at stake in this election in fact i believe that everything the dlc and the democratic party stands for is at stake in this election you remember what it was like more than 15 years ago when we started the dlc i remember it vividly some of you have heard al from tell the story it was a cold winter for the democratic party america was in the midst of a supply side spending spree our country was mired in deficits racked with not only debt but also doubt it was unable or unwilling to meet the cares and concerns of hardworking families because of the leadership in control meanwhile in a small room on capitol hill two guys named al sat scribbling out a press release that announced the formation of the dlc you remember that day don t you there s the other al right over there now this is a movement that has been given a lot of names over the years since that day but at its heart it was simple common sense we were just sick and tired of a government that was frozen in the ice of old assumptions while people worked longer for less and the american dream seemed further and further out of reach we had had enough of a government that lavished new loop holes on every powerful interest you can name but somehow couldn t make the most basic investments in its own people to give them a chance to make their own lives better well needless to say things got worse before they got better in fact by the time president clinton and i took office all that ice of old assumptions had hardened into a frozen tundra covered by the highest deficits in history a quadrupled national debt the deepest recession since the 1930s crime and welfare both rising out of control now that s the true legacy from the bush quayle years and let s don t forget that when the other party meets in philadelphia in a few weeks their basic problem was the way that they ve handled or rather didn t handle all the pressure from the special interests who made demands that they couldn t reconcile with one another and even when their new tax loop holes and new pork barrel spending proposals pushed the deficits into completely uncharted territory they still couldn t find a way to declare their independence from the special interests but by 1992 americans were ready to ring the liberty bell with help and intellectual firepower from many in this room we brought a change to this nation and as a result today we celebrate the single longest economic expansion in all of american history 22 million new jobs unemployment down inflation down welfare rolls cut in half crime down in every category we re moving in the right direction and the federal government is the smallest that is has been since john kennedy sat in the oval office because we ve been reinventing it we got a long way to go but we re making progress by applying that same common sense at the core of the dlc to the process of self governance now what s the reaction to the of the other side to all of this well instead of rejoicing in our nation s unprecedented economic success our opponents seem actually to be to feel a little put out by this record have you noticed that they try to minimize it they scan the horizon for any dark cloud that they can find and when they find it s impossible to minimize this success then they labor to explain it all away somehow they say that the credit for all of our success goes to the hard work of the american people yes of course it does absolutely but let s remind out opponents that when they were in power the american people were working just as hard then too but their hard work was undone by a government that didn t work a government that got it wrong and kept getting in the way that s what was changed to unleash the potential of the new economy we succeeded because we put government on the side of hard working americans again and i think we all know the basic ingredients of today s prosperity and progress fiscal discipline as the foundation but also smart targeted investments in the best enterprise of all americans themselves without the right fiscal policies we could never have freed ourselves from the bad choices of the past and without the right investments in education in training in research and technology we could never have given people the tools to thrive on their own initiative well i m running for president because i love this country and i am not going to see us dragged back to the tired old thinking that nearly destroyed the american dream in the past i m running for president because i want to serve the people all the people and not the narrow needs of the special interests i m running for president because i want to empower americans each and every american and i want to give them the tools to build their own futures make their own choices and make our economy and our country even better i believe very deeply in the power of the american people and that is why empowerment is the heart of my approach we need a president who is willing to stand up and take on the special interests but we also have to give every family the tools and skills to stand up and fight for themselves so let s consider the basic choice in this election and how we can put that philosophy into action we have to start with fiscal discipline and let me just pledge to you with your help as president i will never ever be profligate with the people s money i ll balance the budget every year and put america on the path to eliminating our national debt completely by the year 2012 in this year of unprecedented productivity gains we ve got far better uses for capital than tying it up in sterile government paper if we use our surpluses wisely we can afford a series of targeted tax cuts the kind that let families live out their own values and take more control over their own lives tax cuts to buy health care to pay for child care to save for college and life long learning you know we re in a knowledge economy that s why we need to invest much more and i would a whole lot rather have targeted tax cuts to help working families than a massive tax cut that primarily benefits the wealthy that kind of policy would drive us right back into a deficit and fiscal nightmare and then you and i would have to start all over again and we re not going to do that we re going to do it the right way i can just see it now al and i would have to sit down again and write out a brand new press release but what i m proposing instead is that we use this prosperity as a foundation to move on farther and higher i think we need to move to the next stage of fiscal discipline which means not just living within our means but lifting the burdens left by those who came before then we need the next generation of investments to further empower our people for the 21st century and empowerment means that every child in every school district suburban or urban rich or poor will be able to count on a high quality public education we need greater investment and greater accountability and more public school choice and competition we need to start treating teachers like the professionals that they are and give them smaller class sizes and new resources along with the new accountability and reform in the new economy we know that opportunity is another word for education but too many of our people now never get the skills that they need i meet business leaders all across this country some of them are probably here today who cannot even fill the good new jobs that are opening up right now jobs that pay 100 000 a year or more and they put the want ads in the newspaper and they describe some new software or some skill that you can t get unless you get training training you can t take unless you have education sixty percent of the businesses in america are in that situation today no wonder so many of them are pushing every year to bring in more skilled workers from abroad to fill those jobs that folks here can t compete for now we re a nation of immigrants and we proudly welcome new americans in each generation don t get me wrong but i think it s time to make sure that americans who are born and raised and educated here have a chance to compete for the best jobs right here right now let s vow to make our schools the very best in the world there s no excuse for not doing it empowerment also means that critical health decisions must be made on the basis of the best medicine for you and your family not the cheapest or quickest procedure right now too many life or death decisions are being made by young bureaucrats working for hmos and insurance companies who don t have a license to practice medicine and who don t have a right to play god and that has to change i think it s time to take the medical decisions away from the hmos the accountants and the insurance companies and give them back to the doctors and the nurses and the health care professionals that shouldn t be a controversial or complicated matter empowerment also means that our seniors are not left powerless in their old age forced to choose between food and prescription medicine we need to tell the drug companies that it s time to do the right thing we need a real prescription drug benefit for all of our seniors under medicare not a pretend plan that even the insurance industry has said publicly will not work we need to fix that problem and there are many reasons why now how do we fix things like this well empowerment means using the power of free markets not big bureaucracies or onerous regulations to free ourselves forever from influences that take away our right of self determination you could say the same thing about the problems with energy and the dominance of foreign oil sixty percent of our imports big oil companies i propose a new energy security and environment trust which will speak the development of cleaner more fuel efficient cars and products modernize aging power systems and bring people more choice and more competition from clean cars that get 80 miles to the gallon to targeted tax cuts that help people afford more energy efficient homes and appliances the dlc has been in the forefront of spreading the good news that we can create a cleaner environment and a stronger economy at the same time the export market in a world that features many cities choking on pollution levels far above what we have here in the united states that market is ravenous for the new generation of technologies that we ought to be making and selling right here creating good new jobs at the same time we reduce pollution level now also empowerment means that people have the choice to save and invest for their own retirements and to do so on top of the unshakable foundation of social security i have proposed a new retirement savings plan that matches families contributions the same way large employers do in their pension programs it lets even struggling families build bigger nest eggs for the future this plan which has been very favorably received from all points on the ideological spectrum there was an author from the heritage foundation the other day that wrote an op ed column saying this is the first proposal that would actually address the low savings rate by getting an opportunity for working families to start saving and investment this plan will help put an end to the days when savings are a scramble if not an unthinkable luxury for too many families we will make savings one of the easiest things a family can ever do and i commend this plan to all of you for your scrutiny and attention here s how it ll work for a married couple making 30 000 a year we ll match every dollar they save with three dollars deposited right into their account if a you ng couple saves just 20 a week they could reasonably expect to have by the time they retire many years later as much as 400 000 extra now this will insure that millions more families can open the door to their dreams think of this as social security plus not social security minus it is the best of both worlds not the worst of both you get all the advantages of increased private investment but no matter how the market performs your social security will always be there for you that s what was intended from the beginning to have a safety net in case the market goes badly in case other things go badly and in this day and time with the increasing number of seniors and the fast growing retirement population we need to save and strengthen social security and i m committed to doing so but i do not believe we should privatize social security that would take the trust right out of the trust fund draining away a trillion dollars that is needed to pay social security for today s retirees now i believe there needs to be a social security and medicare lockbox with a sign on it that says hands off politicians that ought to be the law because otherwise they ll always be tempted to use those programs as a piggybank as president i will veto the use of any money from social security and medicare for anything other than social security and medicare incidentally for those of you might not have had a chance to look at the social security privatization plan that my opponent has put forward the way it s described by his aides it would divert about 16 of the money that flows into the trust fund into the stock market two percentage points out of the 12 4 points 16 now social security has always been a transfer from the generation now working to the generation retired so if you divert 16 of the money you ve got to cut every social security check by 16 unless you come up with some way to replace all that money that s been diverted now that amounts to a trillion dollars over 10 years where is it coming from bigger budget deficits if it came from the trust fund then the trust fund would go bankrupt in short order if it comes from the rest of the budget then the whole economy goes into deficit and the prosperity and progress come to a screeching halt the other problem is that for those younger workers who are the intended beneficiaries of the diversion you ve got so much that s being invested by so many people you ve got a lot of transaction costs but beyond that there re going to be some winners there would be some winners and some losers what happens to the losers well i ll tell you what would happen there would be an immediate build up of political pressure to bail them out the way it s been done with the so called freedom to farm law which has been such a catastrophe supposedly market based it has led to the largest taxpayer subsidies in the history of agricultural policy well if you think freedom to farm was expensive to bail out wait till you see freedom to lose your social security congress would be falling all over itself to make up those losses because they would come from the basic foundation that s supposed to be the safety net taking away all of the so called savings that are promised there so i think it s a serious mistake now for my part i have been very clear since the day i began this campaign about what i am proposing an economic policy that s tried and tested and built on our values fiscal discipline is a foundation a new generation of investments the empowerment of our people and the unleashing of their potential no runaway spending no paybacks for the powerful interests no budget busting tax proposals and this is the approach that the dlc has championed ever since its founding hard nosed budgets smart big hearted investments but no bottleneck bureaucracies that s the balance that works now if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then governor bush must be trying to flatter the dlc every time he steps out on the campaign trail he now tries to invoke the vocabulary of the mainstream but he proposes a tax plan that would consume the entire budget surplus and then some despite his repeated reassurances not to worry it ll all add up in the end well we don t need his rhetoric we have his record as america begins this new century with the biggest surpluses in the history of our nation texas s budget surpluses are rolling away like tumbleweed one year ago with our national economy roaring along texas had its biggest surplus ever but today with our national economy still roaring along texas faces a serious budget shortfall with huge deficits in its health care and criminal justice systems the state surplus is as good as gone well you might ask how did this happen well i just happen to have the answer for you last year governor bush pushed through a 1 7 billion tax cut that served the powerful interests instead of the people now you might think that a governor whose state ranks dead last in the entire nation for families with health coverage who then gets a surplus courtesy of the national economic boom might turn his attention to moving from number 50 to say 45 or maybe even better but no i m going to tell it like it is instead of taking up legislation to help families that desperately need health care many of them going across the border to mexico to try to find health care instead of taking up proposing legislation to help them governor bush made a big tax break for the oil industry the very first bill that he signs that year now i don t really know how many oil executives in texas lack health insurance but i can tell you this a lot of children in texas do listen to these statistics texas is 50th for women without health insurance 49th for children without health insurance and more than half of the children who are not covered are latino texas is the worst in the nation for industrial pollution one of the primary causes for respiratory diseases because he put the polluters in charge of enforcing the environmental laws now who here thinks that he has the right priorities now this week as governor bush was traveling from photo op to photo op trying to put the compassion into his conservatism we learned that he failed to use tens of millions of dollars budgeted to feed poor and hungry children during the summer months less than one in ten children who receive school lunches during the school year are receiving them this summer now just because school is out doesn t mean that hunger takes a summer vacation or that leadership can go on leave this goes to our values hungry children need food not photo ops but it s also about leadership when he was asked why texas was suddenly facing such a big shortfall governor bush told the dallas morning news and i quote i hope i m not here to have to deal with it that was my reaction when i heard that now seriously with all due respect to governor bush america can t afford to deal with it either let me tell you he may try to mimic some of the rhetoric of the dlc but he has missed the core point opportunity and responsibility go together you can duck responsibility and expect a new opportunity governor bush gave some nice sounding speeches this week but we really can t go back to the days of deficits and debt and economic decline we cannot simply ignore the hard won lessons of the past eight years i believe that it is long past time for us to take the basic formula that we know works very well and build on the foundation of the unprecedented prosperity and progress that america is enjoying today and then take it on much farther and make this the beginning of a new era so if you want to keep our prosperity going and fight for fiscal policies that work then i ask you to join with me if you believe in an america that closes out not just its material debts but its moral debts as well where families get the best quality health care where our kids can breathe free of pollution and smog where our parents and grandparents can live out their lives in peace and plenty where we close the racial divide and create opportunity for all then i ask you to join with me our nation has done well these past eight years we owe a great deal of our progress to the people in this room but i m here to tell you today you ain t seen nothin yet we re moving on i ask for your help for your votes for your enthusiasm and i ask you to let yourselves believe that we can do the right thing and be the better for it i ask you to come with me and we will finish the journey we started 15 years ago and bring america to the mountaintop of our ideals let s do it together god bless you thank you let s win this struggle thank you dem algore15 8 00 al_gore thank you thank you monroe thank you mr president when i look out at this wonderful crowd and feel the enthusiasm from all of you and look into the far reaches of these blocks and see as many people as can possibly fit into this area i know we re going to win with your help in november i want to thank the mayor and all of those who have helped to make this possible here in monroe i want to thank steve yogich for driving all the way over here and for being my friend i want to thank president clinton for his generous words today and didn t he give a great speech last night in los angeles more importantly i want to thank you president clinton for giving me a chance to serve my country for the last eight years by working to help strengthen your hand thank you i m so happy to be here with our terrific first lady the next great senator from the state of new york hillary clinton and didn t she give a great speech last night now are you going to elect debbie stabenow to join her in the united states senate you bet you are and are you going to return john dingell again to the united states congress and let s make him a chairman of course i m happy to be here with the woman i love the mother of our four children the grandmother of our grandson tipper and i just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary i m glad she s here with me today on the way to los angeles she s going to speak on thursday night at the convention mr president when i think of the successes of the past eight years i don t think so much of the programs and legislation as i think of the people and the communities that have been changed and helped by what you have done monroe was the most recent example brought to our attention by the mayor s address and incidentally i want all of you to know that throughout the months and miles of this campaign and then beyond because of what you re doing here today i will never forget monroe michigan it is so great to be here what a great community thank you i think of people and families all over this country i think about david skromme a man i met in san mateo california who was one of the millions who lost a good job back during the 1980s when we had all those recessions and all that high unemployment and he and his wife started losing hope and they decided to try to see if they could go into business and they started a little sign making company and when the clinton program came into effect and the economic situation began to turn around their business boomed and now they re a powerhouse out in silicon valley and this year they re going to reach 1 million in sales their future is brighter than ever before and on behalf of david and linda skromme and all of the other new business owners and new employees i say thank you president clinton and i say we re just getting started we re not going to turn back i think of a woman in philadelphia where the other party had their convention a couple of weeks ago a woman who was actually on a film last night nancy santana when i met her she had just come off of welfare because of our welfare reform which made welfare a second chance and not a way of life and she decided to get some training and then when the empowerment zone lifted up her community she got a start up loan for a new business and now she employees 25 people who also didn t have jobs in the past and now she s making a success of her life and on her behalf and on behalf of the 22 million americans who now have jobs who didn t have them before i say to you thank you president clinton for a job well done now i say to all of you as americans and as democrats we ve always looked to the future and that s exactly what we re going to do in los angeles at the convention i do think it makes sense to pause for just a moment to acknowledge the strong foundation that we ve built over the last eight years along with the american people and the great possibilities that it brings to us the question in this election is whether we are going to erode that foundation or instead build upon it whether we are going to turn back toward the old ways of the old guard or move forward with purpose and pride america s done well but i tell you you ain t seen nothing yet we re going forward to even better times because of all we ve achieved we have a chance that is rare in our history to see to it that our prosperity enriches not just a few but all working families why on earth should we squander these historic surpluses on giant tax give aways to the wealthy at the expense of middle class families in the way that would wreck our economy instead let s invest in health care and education a secure retirement and middle class tax cuts that help working families are you with me well you and i know that it won t come without a fight when we fought together to put the clinton program into effect it passed by a one vote margin both in the house and the senate then the other side shut down the government twice in order to turn back that program they fought against us with everything they had that s why i thought it was a little bit unusual when at the convention the other side said they accused us of taking the path of least resistance i wish there had been less resistance we would have gotten to the strong economy even sooner but now we face resistance and opposition again you know from your own lives that there are obstacles and powerful interests that stand in the way from big oil to big tobacco from the hmos and insurance companies to the big polluters well i want all of you to know that throughout my 24 years of public service i have never been afraid or hesitant to take on the special interests to take on the powerful to fight for the middle class families who need a champion and who need help at a time when most americans will live to know not only their grandchildren but even their great grandchildren let s save and secure social security and medicare for generations to come i will protect social security and medicare by putting them in an ironclad lockbox with a sign that says in effect politicians hands off we re not going to allow that money to be spent for other things i ll veto anything that spends social security money or medicare money on anything else and then i will fight for a new tax free way to help you save and build for a bigger nest egg for your retirement something extra that you can save and invest for yourselves something that will supplement social security and not be subtracted from it social security plus not social security minus and i will not go along with any proposal to privatize social security by taking one out of six dollars out of it at a time of almost unimaginable health and medical breakthroughs it s time to fight for affordable health insurance for all americans step by step so patients and ordinary people are not left powerless and broke if you entrust me with the presidency i ll move toward universal coverage step by step starting with coverage for every single child in america within the next four years and isn t it time against the resistance and opposition to say that we must take the medical decisions away from the young bureaucrats at the hmos and insurance companies and give those decisions back to the doctors and the nurses and the health care professionals we ll pass a patients bill of rights with the leadership of john dingell and i believe it s time on behalf of all the seniors who take their pill bottles out and count pills and count pennies and then cut expenses and eliminate some of the prescriptions because they can t afford them it s time not to give money to the insurance companies as the other side has proposed but to give our seniors a real and meaningful prescription drug benefit under the medicare program are you with me at a time when the amount of human knowledge is doubling every five years and good businesses are looking for people who have the training that they need i ll fight for higher standards and more accountability to put a fully qualified teacher in every classroom test all new teachers and start treating and rewarding teachers like the professionals that they are joining us here today are two teachers that i spent the night in the homes of which i spent the night in michigan claudia amboyer and her husband donald from macomb michigan and margo strong and her husband jay strong from lansing michigan the teachers in this state are working hard we need higher standards new ideas smaller classes better accountability but we can t do the job without new resources and i will fight against any plan that drains money away from the public schools toward private school vouchers because we need to support our public schools at a time of unprecedented economic abundance we ought to have targeted tax cuts for middle class working families to help you save for college to send your kids to college if they want to go to pay for health insurance to pay for child care and after school care but let me say it plainly i will not go along with a huge tax cut for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and at the expense of our strong economy i ll fight for tax cuts that go to the right people the hardworking families who pay the taxes and who have the hardest time paying them we have to build on the economic strategy that s working for the american people balancing the budget paying down the debt and investing in the best enterprise of all the american people you know bill clinton worked hard to get this economy right and i m pledging to you here today i am not going to let the other side wreck it and take it away from us we re going to keep the prosperity going i know we ve got a hard fought race ahead of us i know the powerful interests are going to fight against us with everything they ve got but i also know one thing about the job of president it is the one position in the constitution that is filled by an individual who s given the responsibility to fight not just for one district or one state not just for the wealthy and well connected and powerful a president has to fight for all of the people especially those who most need a champion especially those who need lifting up so they won t be left behind i want to be a president to fight for you and for your family and for your future right here in monroe michigan with your help we will win this fight and keep our prosperity going and make this country what we know it can be i ask for your help for your support to win this election and make america in the 21st century the best america let s win it i ll fight for you god bless you dem algore16 1 06 al_gore thank you very much i d like to thank michael ostrolenk for that on the spot introduction and i d like to thank michael and the other leaders of the liberty coalition for the wonderful work that they are doing to try to help americans bridge many gaps that have sometimes unnecessarily divided us i want to thank them for co sponsoring this event i want to thank lisa brown for her friendship to me and for her outstanding leadership of the american constitution society tipper and i have long admired her work and it s a pleasure to work with her to all of the distinguished guests who are here senator dianne feinstein others who are present and i want to commiserate with congressman bob barr who was connected live when we walked out on the stage but having had similar occurrences with live video feeds before i know what can happen and what he must be feeling right now and i want to thank all of you for coming i d like to start by saying that congressman bob barr and i have disagreed many times over the years but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens democrats and republicans alike to express our shared concern that america s constitution is in grave danger in spite of our differences over ideology and politics we are in strong agreement that the american values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power as we begin this new year the executive branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of american citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by congress precisely to prevent such abuses it is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored in our country and that is why many of us have come here to constitution hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences insofar as it is possible to do so and join with us in demanding that our constitution be defended and preserved it is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of dr martin luther king jr who challenged america to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all of our people and on this particular martin luther king day it is especially important to recall for that for the last several years of his life dr king was illegally wiretapped one of hundreds of thousands of americans whose private communications were intercepted by the u s government during that period the fbi privately labeled king the and i quote the most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country and vowed to again i quote take him off his pedestal the government even attempted to destroy his marriage and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide this campaign continued until dr king s murder the discovery that the fbi conducted this long running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the southern christian leadership conference and to learn the most intimate details of dr king s life was instrumental in helping to convince congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping and one result was the foreign intelligence and surveillance act often called fisa which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there was indeed a sufficient cause for the surveillance it included ample flexibility and an ability for the executive to move with as much speed as desired i voted for that law during my first term in congress and for almost 30 years the system has proven a valuable and workable means of affording a level of protection for american citizens while permitting foreign surveillance to continue whenever it is necessary and yet just one month ago americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law the executive branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on and i quote the report large volumes of telephone calls e mail messages and other internet traffic inside the united states the new york times reported that the president decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program without search warrants or any new laws that would permit domestic intelligence collection during the period when this eavesdropping was still secret the president seemed to go out of his way to reassure the american people on more than one occasion that of course judicial permission is required for any government spying on american citizens and that of course these constitutional safeguards were still in place but surprisingly the president s soothing statements turned out to be false moreover as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press the president confirmed the story was true but in the next breath declared that he has no intention of stopping or bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end at present we still have much to learn about the nsa s domestic surveillance what we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the united states has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently a president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government our founding fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our constitution our system of checks and balances was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law as john adams said the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers or either of them to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men an executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the founders sought to nullify in the constitution an all powerful executive too reminiscent of the king from whom they had broken free in the words of james madison the accumulation of all powers legislative executive and judiciary in the same hands whether of one a few or many and whether hereditary self appointed or elected may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny thomas paine whose pamphlet on common sense ignited the american revolution succinctly described america s alternative here he said we intended to make certain that in his phrase the law is king vigilant adherence to the rule of law actually strengthens our democracy of course and strengthens america it ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation it means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint under the rule of law and make no mistake the rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested studied reviewed and examined through the normal processes of government that are designed to improve policy and avoid error and the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents overreaching and checks the accretion to power a commitment to openness truthfulness and accountability helps our country avoid many serious mistakes that we would otherwise make recently for example we learned from just declassified documents after almost 40 years that the gulf of tonkin resolution which authorized the tragic vietnam war was actually based on false information and we now know that the decision by congress to authorize the iraq war 38 years later was also based on false information now the point is that america would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history and that is the reason why following the rule of law makes us safer not more vulnerable the president and i agree on one thing the threat from terrorism is all too real there is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attacks on september 11th and we must be ever vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm where we disagree is on the proposition that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government in order to protect americans from terrorism when in fact doing so would make us weaker and more vulnerable and remember that once violated the rule of law is itself in danger unless stopped lawlessness grows the greater the power of the executive grows the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles as the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its mistakes and reveal errors it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police its activities and once that ability is lost democracy itself is threatened and we do become a government of men and not laws the president s men have minced words about america s laws the attorney general for example openly conceded that the kind of surveillance in his phrase that we know they have been conducting does require a court order unless authorized by statue the foreign intelligence surveillance act self evidently does not authorize what the nsa has been doing and no one inside or outside the administration claims that it does incredibly the administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on september 11 but this argument simply does not hold any water without getting into the legal intricacies it faces a number of embarrassing facts first another admission by the attorney general he concedes that the administration knew that the nsa project was prohibited by existing law and that that is why they consulted with some members of congress about the possibility of changing the statute attorney general gonzales says that they were told by the members of congress consulted that this would probably not be possible and so they decided not to make the request so how can they now argue that the authorization for the use of military force somehow implicitly authorized it all along indeed when the authorization was being debated the administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically and the congress refused to agree senator ted stevens and representative jim mcgovern among others made clear statements during the debate on the floor of the house and senate respectively clearly stating that that authorization did not operate domestically and there is no assertion to the contrary when president bush failed to convince congress to give him the power he wanted when this measure was passed he secretly assumed that power anyway as if congressional authorization was a useless bother but as justice frankfurter once wrote to find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of congress it is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between the president and the congress this is precisely the disrespect for the law that the supreme court struck down in the steel seizure case during the korean war it is this same disrespect for america s constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the constitution and the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of americans in both political parties for example as you know the president has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any american citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation and that notwithstanding his american citizenship that person in prison has no right to talk with a lawyer even if he wants to argue that the president or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person the president claims that he can imprison that american citizen any american citizen he chooses indefinitely for the rest of his life without even an arrest warrant without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned no such right exists in the america that you and i know and love it is foreign to our constitution it must be rejected at the same time the executive branch has also claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture and have plainly constituted torture in a widespread pattern that has been extensively documented in u s facilities located in several countries around the world over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by executive branch interrogators many more have been broken and humiliated and in the notorious abu ghraib prison investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were completely innocent of any criminal charges whatsoever this is a shameful exercise of power that overturns a set of principles that you re nation has observed since general george washington first enunciated them during our revolutionary war they have been observed by every president since then until now they violate the geneva conventions the international convention against torture and our own laws against torture the president has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals on the streets of foreign cities and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes and nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture some of our traditional allies have been deeply shocked by these new and uncharacteristic patterns on the part of america for example the british ambassador to uzbekistan one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons registered a complaint to his home office about the cruelty and senselessness of the new u s practice that he witnessed this material we re getting is useless he wrote and then he continued with this we are selling our souls for dross it is in fact positively harmful can it be true that any president really has such powers under our constitution if the answer is yes then under the theory by which these acts are committed are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited if the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on american citizens without a warrant imprison american citizens on his own declaration kidnap and torture then what can t he do the dean of yale law school harold koh said after analyzing the executive branch s extravagant claims of these previously unrecognized powers and i quote dean koh if the president has commander in chief power to commit torture he has the power to commit genocide to sanction slavery to promote apartheid to license summary execution the fact that our normal american safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is itself deeply troubling this failure is due in part to the fact that the executive branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating delaying withholding information appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore a healthy constitutional balance for example after appearing to support legislation sponsored by senator john mccain to stop the continuation of torture the president declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it similarly the executive branch claimed this it could unilaterally imprison american citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal and when the supreme court disagreed the president then engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the court from providing any meaningful content to the rights of the citizens affected a conservative jurist on the 4th circuit court of appeals wrote that the executive branch s handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle and i quote him at substantial cost to the government s credibility before the courts as a result of this unprecedented claim of new unilateral power the executive branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk the stakes for america s democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized these claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power must restored to our republic otherwise the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation for more than two centuries america s freedoms have been preserved in large part by our founders wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co equal branches each of which as you know serves to check and balance the power of the other two on more than a few occasions in our history the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled constitutional crises these crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our republic but in each such case so far we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live together under the rule of law the principal alternative to democracy throughout history has of course been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strong man or small group who exercised that power without the informed consent of the governed it was in revolt against just such a regime after all that america was founded when lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the civil war was in his memorable phrase whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure he was not only saving our union he was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history and when they fall as did athens and the roman republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily what emerges in their place is another strong man regime there have of course been other periods in american history when the executive branch claimed new powers later seen as excessive and mistaken our second president john adams passed the infamous alien and sedition acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents and when his successor president thomas jefferson eliminated the abuses in his first inaugural he said the essential principles of our government form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm let us hasten to retrace our steps and regain that road which alone leads to peace liberty and safety president lincoln of course suspended habeas corpus during the civil war and some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by president wilson during and after world war i with the notorious red scare and palmer raids the internment of japanese americans during world war ii marked a shameful low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive and of course during the vietnam war the notorious cointel program was part and parcel of those abuses experienced by dr king and so many thousands of others but in each of these cases throughout american history when the conflict and turmoil subsided our nation recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret but there are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing so that this cycle may not repeat itself for one thing we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power in a globe where there are nuclear weapons and cold war tensions congress and the american people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counterintelligence activities and allocate our military forces on the global stage when military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership but as justice frankfurter wrote in that famous steel seizure case the accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day it does come however slowly from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority a second reason to believe that we may be experiencing something new outside that historical cycle is that we are after all told by this administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to last in their phrase for the rest of our lives and so we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other presidents to justify arrogations of power will in this case persist in near perpetuity third we need to be keenly aware of the startling advances in the sophistication of eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to easily sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and then mine it for intelligence and this adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies grows those technologies do have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways that are both subtle and profound don t misunderstand me the threat of additional terror strikes is real and the concerted efforts by terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction does indeed create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the executive branch with swiftness and agility moreover there is an in fact an inherent power conferred by the constitution to any president to take unilateral action when necessary to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat and it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not but the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for many years and producing a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government and there is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle this administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential power is exactly what our constitution intended this legal theory which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which ought to be more accurately described as the unilateral executive threatens to expand the president s powers until the contours of the constitution that the framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition under this theory the president s authority when acting as commander in chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary cannot be checked by congress and president bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as commander in chief invoking it as frequently as he can conflating it with his other roles both domestic and foreign and when added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine this effort to rework america s carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful executive branch with a subservient congress and subservient judiciary is ironically accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework america s foreign policy from one that is based primarily on u s moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self defeating effort to establish a form of dominance in the world and the common denominator the common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control the same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the executive branch to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals and to demand conformity from all executive branch employees for example cia analysts who strongly disagreed with the white house assertion that osama bin laden was linked to saddam hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases ironically that is exactly what happened to the fbi officials in the 1960s who disagreed with j edgar hoover s assertion that martin luther king was closely connected to communists the head of the fbi s domestic intelligence division testified that his effort to tell the truth about dr king s innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated within the fbi and pressured and i quote it was evident he said that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street the men and i he continued discussed how to get out of trouble to be in trouble with mr hoover was a serious matter these men he continued were trying to buy homes mortgages on homes they had children in school they lived in fear of getting transferred losing money on their homes as they usually did so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in the constitution s framers who studied human nature so closely understood this dilemma quite well as alexander hamilton put it a power over a man s support is a power over his will in any case quite soon there was no more difference of opinion about dr king within the fbi and the false accusation became the unanimous view and in exactly the same way george tenet s cia eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al qaida and the government of iraq in the words of george orwell we are all capable he said of believing things which we know to be untrue and then when we are finally proved wrong impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right intellectually it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality usually on a battlefield two thousand two hundred american soldiers have lost their lives as this false belief bumped into a solid reality and indeed whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to gross mistakes and abuses that is part of human nature in the absence of rigorous accountability incompetence flourishes dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded it is human nature whether for republicans or democrats or people of any set of views last week for example vice president cheney attempted to defend the administration s eavesdropping on american citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9 11 they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers tragically he apparently still does not know that the administration did in fact have the names of at least two of the hijackers well before 9 11 and had available to them information that could have led to the identification of most of the others one of them was in the phone book and yet because of incompetence unaccountable incompetence in the handling of the information it was never used to protect the american people it is often the case again regardless of which party might be in power that an executive branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power often the request itself is used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has moreover if the pattern of practice begun by this administration is not challenged it may well become a permanent part of the american system that is why many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this president means that the next will have unchecked power as well and the next may be someone whose values and beliefs you do not trust and that is why republicans as well as democrats should be concerned with what this president has done if his attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned then our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost and the next president or some future president will be able in the name of national security to restrict our liberties in a way the framers would never have imagined possible this same instinct to expand power and establish dominance has characterized the relationship between this administration and the courts and the congress in a properly functioning system the judicial branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observe their proper spheres of authority observed civil liberties adhere to the rule of law unfortunately the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch the president s decision for example to ignore the fisa law was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court congress established the fisa court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap and yet to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power the president simply did not take matters to it and did not even let the court know that it was being bypassed the president s judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure the courts will not will not serve as an effective check on executive power as we have all learned judge alito is a long time supporter of a powerful executive a supporter of that so called unitary executive whether you support his confirmation or not and i respect the fact that some of the co sponsors of this event do i do not but whatever your view we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power likewise chief justice roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking and the administration has also supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in congress that assault includes a threat by the majority in the senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the president s nominees the assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of the courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance in short the administration has demonstrated a contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at ever dem algore17 3 95 al_gore thank you very much for your warm welcome and president steve trachtenberg thank you for your kind introduction and your friendship and your leadership of this great university i want to also acknowledge walter boortz vice president for administration and information services and my longtime friend and partner in the efforts to deal with this issue under secretary of state for global affairs and former senator tim wirth who is doing an outstanding job in addressing these issues i also want to acknowledge another partner who works with me the head of the national oceanic and atmospheric administration jim baker who is here from the administration doing a great job and there are many others i probably ought to acknowledge and i hope you will forgive me for not doing so i m afraid i d miss somebody i want to give a special word of thanks to the americorps students from g w who are volunteering to help with today s event and i want to thank them also for their excellent community service work in the district s shaw neighborhood and also i want to recognize this university for its many achievements in the sciences some of which inform the debate of which this speech is a part today it is great to be back at g w again and one reason is this is the nation s first green university the commitment you have made in a unique partnership with the environmental protection agency has made you the first university in america to develop a truly comprehensive plan of environmental awareness in all of the university s activities and i want to congratulate you for that i mentioned the americorps students earlier 15 of them are part of the green university initiative doing a great job working to draft a model environmental audit plan that will establish practices that are both environmentally sound and cost saving and by the way happy st patrick s day this is one day out of the year you can t be accused of being too green there couldn t be a better day to address the issue that i believe is the single most serious manifestation of the environmental crisis which now characterizes the radical change in the relationship between human civilization and the earth s environment two weeks from now this issue of global climate change will be discussed by more than 120 different countries in berlin as they begin the first conference of the parties for a framework convention on climate change since it s st patrick s day i thought i would begin a discussion of this issue by quoting an old irish politician sir boyle roche who once asked in the last century sarcastically why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity for what has posterity ever done for us that way of thinking would go over real well in this session of congress posterity is particularly relevant when talking about global climate change because our actions today will have far reaching implications for the environment that we leave to future generations a commitment to posterity requires that we accept and understand this profound change in the nature of the relationship between human civilization and the ecological system of the earth i mentioned a moment ago that in my view global climate change is a manifestation of that radical change in the fundamental relationship between civilization and the earth there are other manifestations the rapid destruction of forests especially tropical rain forests the unprecedented loss of living species at a rate that has not taken place on this planet since the disappearance of the dinosaurs so many tens of millions of years ago the poisoning of air and water in many places on the earth and the degradation of important ecosystems from the aral sea in central asia to the coral reef networks in shallow areas of the world s oceans all of these including global climate change are manifestations of this change in the relationship between human beings and the environment this radical change has come about in the lifetimes of people gathered here in this auditorium because of a confluence of three factors the first is the unprecedented explosion in the numbers of human beings around the world we re adding the equivalent of one china s worth of people every 10 years still we have begun to address a sensible plan of action to assist nations that wish to stabilize population growth but the momentum built into the numbers themselves ensure ensures that the rapid growth will continue for quite sometime to come the second of these three factors is the acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution which has vastly magnified the ability of the average human being to have an impact on the environment around him or her to use an analogy warfare is an ancient habit of human civilization but the invention of nuclear weapons so completely transformed the consequences of all out warfare as to require us to go back and think anew about that age old habit the cold war was in part a result of that sobering reexamination of what all out warfare would mean with these incredibly powerful new weapons but all of them taken together have transformed the consequences of all out exploitation of the earth just as surely as nuclear weaponry transformed the consequences of all out warfare and so we must think anew about the way in which we go about exploiting the land and the sea and the air or the sustenance that we need to survive the third factor leading to this radical change is in some ways the most important it is a philosophical shift in our way of thinking about the consequences of what we do to the environment a change which has led too many people to assume that we need not take into account the future effects of our present actions all three of these factors together have created a change that we are attempting to come to grips with in sessions like the one in cairo on population and sustainable development sessions like the many which led to the montreal protocol to limit the introduction of ozone depleting substances into the stratosphere and conferences like the one in berlin two weeks from now which will address global climate change in order to deal with this issue we have to begin with the facts and any discussion of the facts must take into account categories upon which there is agreement and categories that are featured by disagreement i would like to concentrate on the former rather than the latter because there is widespread agreement about the central facts which characterize this problem the revisionist view not withstanding there is a firm domestic and international consensus on the most salient issues number one we know that greenhouse gases are building up rapidly in the atmosphere concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased about 25 percent since the industrial revolution nitric oxide has gone up by 15 percent methane has gone up by more than 100 percent number two scientists also agree that continuing this buildup of greenhouse gases will cause the climate to change the operative word in that sentence is not may it is will a continued buildup of this kind will cause the climate to change about that there is no serious disagreement the scientific community cannot tell us the pace of these changes or the precise pattern they will take but they are telling us that change is coming there is an international consensus that global surface temperatures could increase from an average of 2 degrees fahrenheit to 8 degrees fahrenheit over the next century that is the rate unseen on this planet for at least the last 10 000 years that is unseen during the entire history of human civilization since the first cities appeared on the earth no such change has been seen the united states and other areas in high latitudes are projected to warm even more with increases of up to 10 degrees fahrenheit in just the last century the earth s temperature has risen by about one degree fahrenheit the nine warmest years in this century have all occurred since 1980 even though the eruption of mt pinatubo as predicted at the time held down temperatures for about three years until the heavy particulates blocking out a tiny fraction of the sun s radiation fell back out of the atmosphere to earth already there is ominous evidence of significant change underway alpine glaciers in every part of the world are retreating rapidly you may have seen the pictures not long ago of the prehistoric traveler whose body was found in a mountain pass in the alps in italy they were walking along and there he was why had no one noticed him there for the last 5 000 years because the ice covering him has not melted in 5 000 years it is now it has now melted in other areas that have not seen the ice retreat in human experience it is now retreating there is a decrease in northern hemisphere snow cover evidence of a decrease in arctic sea ice average precipitation in the lower 48 states has increased in the last century by about five percent torrential rains have increased in the summer during agricultural growing seasons these are troubling complex and challenging issues to confront but we should not image that they occur according to a pattern of slow and gradual change we know that natural systems are replete with thresholds beyond which change can occur suddenly and dramatically a warmer earth alters precipitation soil moisture and sea level that can lead to changes in the ideal ranges for crops forests and wetlands changes in precipitation patterns cause draught in some areas and more rainfall in others it causes a change in the distribution of microbial populations and vulnerabilities to viruses and bacteria a change in the distribution of pests a change in the distribution of plant and animal life combinations of changes can have dramatic effects increased rainfall can lead to more floods which together with higher sea levels can threaten the existence of some low lying coastal communities threaten the existence even of some small island nations and low lying coastal nations we have seen concern expressed by scientists in several parts of the world about the increased frequency of drastic weather events in our own country we have seen the effects of a shift in the pattern that we call el nino from a pattern that occurs every two to five years to a relatively new pattern during the last decade and a half in which it has a tendency to become almost constant some members of the business community whose lines of work make them especially sensitive to these kinds of changes are also beginning to express concern recently i met with a large number of representatives from the insurance industry and the reinsurance industry frank nutter president of the reinsurance association of america has warned about a serious risk of bankruptcy within the insurance industry that can come from in his words significant and perhaps permanent changes in our climate in this country and in the world it s easy to see why insurance companies are concerned in 1993 the mississippi flooding caused an estimated 10 billion to 20 billion worth of damage hurricane hugo cost the federal government alone about 1 6 billion hurricane andrew topped 2 billion in federal disaster payments and cost property insurers at least 16 billion the floods and mud slides in california have caused over 2 billion in damage already this year does it make sense for us to assume that we need not take action to diminish the chance that an altered climate pattern will lead to an increase in the frequency of severe events of this sort we ignore these changes at our peril i mentioned that climate change can cause a shift in the distribution of microbial populations the range of infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever can change significantly how should we respond to this kind of threat the clinton administration believes that we must guard against potentiallydevastating effects even as we deepen our scientific understanding of these issues through an aggressive research program this approach is in fact analogous to an insurance policy and is not just an abstract notion three years ago we joined the international community in signing the historic framework convention on climate change it was the beginning of a process to design a kind of insurance policy it was a treaty that called on all nations to work together in an unprecedented effort to protect the global environment specifically the industrialized countries were urged to take the lead by stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 soon after taking office president clinton went beyond the vague non binding language of the treaty declaring that the united states would meet the goal set out in the treaty the president s commitment was made to complement his economic objectives he promised to turn our economy around and he has delivered inflation is down growth is up unemployment is down jobs are up all told we are demonstrating that economic and environmental progress can go hand in hand no doubt the powerful economic course set by president clinton challenges several of the assumptions of the plan rather than shirking away from this good news we embrace it today i want to reaffirm the president s pledge the united states is committed to reaching 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2000 we ve developed an ambitious plan aimed at fulfilling the president s commitment forty out of forty seven of these initiatives have received funding are now underway most of these initiatives share at least one common feature they will mean new clean american jobs for our future for example we have signed voluntary agreements with the bulk of our utility industry to keep greenhouse gas emissions down similar partnerships have been forged with u s industry on energy efficient computers buildings and lighting systems we have pledged 430 million to the global environmental facility for its second phase the largest contribution of any nation in the world we have created a new environmental technology initiative totaling more than 1 billion to develop and disseminate environmentally superior technology and the u s has launched the world s first pilot program to assess the feasibility of joint investment projects with other countries aimed at reducing or sequestering emissions of greenhouse gases and promoting sustainable development in addition we have launched a partnership for a new generation of vehicles also know by some as the clean car initiative it is a real partnership all three of the big three automakers are participating along with the national laboratories all of the relevant federal agencies and many suppliers of parts materials and equipment also engineering faculties and students across the country together we re tackling a technological challenge in some ways as tough as putting a man on the moon we re going to develop a car with three times the efficiency of today s automobiles with no sacrifice in cost comfort or safety in the process we hope to discover the best ways to apply new technologies which may in fact lead to even greater improvements in efficiency all in 10 years time success will mean less dependence on foreign oil and lower emissions of greenhouse gases and of course in addition to the benefits for the american consumer the project also holds the promise of an extremely attractive and competitive automobile for world markets at the turn of the century and the thriving u s auto industry to produce them in our building and construction initiative our goal is to improve the competitive performance of this 800 billion industry by developing much better construction technologies that lead to less emissions with the full cooperation of the industry we re determined to ensure that our buildings like our industry are the most productive efficient safe and durable in the entire world that means cutting delivery time in half with a 50 percent reduction in cost we want to see a 50 percent reduction in construction work injuries and illnesses also while there s a 30 percent improvement in productivity and comfort and we re developing detailed plans with the industry to reach these objectives we want to see 50 percent less waste and pollution and 50 percent more durability and flexibility we recognize that our plan is ambitious and we recognize that it requires support from leaders on capitol hill some of our previous requests were not fully funded and congress is now considering taking previously approved funding back just as this treaty requires international consensus our domestic response to it requires a national consensus we are committed to working with the congress in a true partnership on behalf of our nation the world and all of its people but it is incumbent upon the new leadership on capitol hill to step up to the plate and recognize both the challenges and the opportunities presented by climate change and recognize too the need for u s leadership fulfilling this responsibility in the future requires acknowledging that our plans and those of our industrialized partners are only the first step in two weeks in berlin nations will meet to determine what more the international community can do in response to the dramatic scientific evidence that now exists once again this administration will be at the forefront of this global effort we have said for almost a year that we do not believe that the current agreement is adequate it only contains an aim or goal for the year 2000 and this aim only applies to a limited number of countries we are now in a situation in which the maximum response that is politically feasible throughout the world still falls short of what is really needed to address the problem all the nations of the world will need to work together to develop guidance on what steps to take beyond the year 2000 so we must negotiate a new aim for the future in view of these limitations and mindful of our responsibility to the future we are working with other nations to develop a mandate that can be agreed upon in berlin and can set the course for next steps under the treaty this will require us all to carefully examine what we each can do to contribute to further reductions in greenhouse gas emissions our goal in other words in berlin is to build a foundation and begin momentum just as there are thresholds in the natural climate system there are also thresholds in the political system when evidence accumulates to the point where enough people are no longer willing to listen to skeptics that have arguments that are not grounded in the facts then beyond that threshold the possibilities for significant action improve dramatically that is why it is important to develop quality research we ve already begun that process here in the united states and that will be a part of the process we will follow in the future but now is the time to re launch negotiations and walk more concretely toward the treaty s objective now is the time to establish a new negotiating mandate that will allow us to fulfill our responsibilities to future generations a mandate that ensures we move forward from the important first steps outlined for the pre 2000 period we strongly believe that all nations must participate in this effort certainly industrialized countries who have contributed most of the problem can and should take the lead and we shall but we simply cannot ignore the fact that emissions are rising fastest in developing countries which together now account for almost 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the world we know that industrialized countries have special responsibilities and we fully support the convention s call for common but differentiated responsibilities but we very much want the developing nations to join us at the negotiating table so that together we can define these common but differentiated responsibilities in the post 2000 era not so that alone we can do less but so that together we can do more through trade technology cooperation and a host of strategies that offer benefits for all nations we also must do a better job of ensuring that nations are matching rhetoric with reality that we are accountable for what we say we will do to date only a handful of nations have put forward clear substantive proposals that move them toward the emission reductions they have enunciated we must be clear good intentions and high flying rhetoric will not come close to helping us meet the very significant challenges inherent in reducing emissions what is needed and expected under the treaty is concrete action in the negotiations that will follow the berlin meeting it is imperative that we establish a menu of measures from which to choose strategies for reaching any new aim set for the post 2000 period only an analytic phase as part of the negotiating process can provide us with realizable measures and the realistic understanding of what our expectations and goals should be for the future but the measures selected must truly achieve emissions reductions and nations must be prepared to show actions and results finally we believe that the mandate for negotiations should be concluded as rapidly as possible we believe that an aggressive ambitious approach looking at short term and long term goals that is for the years 2010 and 2020 can be concluded by 1997 when the third conference of the parties will be held we think this date is a fair one one that reflects our view of the importance and urgency of the climate change problem and also gives us the lead time to develop and begin to take advantage of new technologies on the one hand we have nations that will be trying to appease strong constituencies in their countries by outbidding the rest of the national community in their pledges to reduce emissions by future actions but what future generations need is aggressive measurable and ambitious actions and not political promises of future actions on the other hand we have political extremists some of them in our own country who would have the united states evade and ignore tough issues like global climate change ozone depletion or any number of threats to human and environmental health far outside the mainstream of scientific consensus they would deny the existence of the problem and seek to prevent the united states from even acknowledging its concern even though the actions that we envision are good both for the environment and for the economy this is an intellectually politically and morally bankrupt position which must be resisted it is similar to the position that was taken for so long by the tobacco industry in the face of mounting medical and scientific evidence about the connection between smoking and lung cancer to this day the precise causal relationship and all the details about exactly how smoking causes lung cancer cannot be established with precision but the relationship is accepted it is a medical fact yet for so long those some of those with an economic interest in delaying the recognition of that connection argued implausibly that the scientific evidence was questionable ought to be ignored was insufficient upon which to base any conclusions they were wrong and those who are now seeking to delay the time at which we recognize the connection between the accumulation of greenhouse gases and global climate change are also wrong if you think back to the dramatic fires in kuwait when the oil fields were set ablaze in 1991 all of that carbon pollution put together amounted to less than one percent of what we put into the earth s environment every year and that amount continues to increase every year we cannot forget that we are now witnessing the most extreme and concerted assault on the environment in history the core of the socalled contract with america is a borehole through the heart of the nation s environmental laws and commitments buried in arcane rhetoric about regulatory reform is a deliberate attack widely acknowledged in the popular press that effectively revokes many of this nation s most important environmental laws from the clean air act and the clean water act to the endangered species act the president and i don t support this and will not accept it the health of our children the safety of our workers and the integrity of our environment cannot be so recklessly jeopardized rather than attack environmental initiatives we hope the congress will work with us to craft policies that are as environmentally sound as they are economically beneficial let me close by drawing an analogy to the response by the international community to another problem that was similar in some ways to global climate change that is the problem of ozone depletion ten years ago at about the same stage in the development of scientific knowledge the nations of the world came together in montreal to take prudent steps toward protecting the earth s stratospheric ozone layer these initial efforts were expanded in the aftermath of a stunning scientific discovery a hole in the ozone layer above antarctica which was the size of the north american continent after that discovery was confirmed the world s political system crossed a threshold beyond which it became much easier to secure agreement on the need to act that led to the london amendments in 1990 where the world agreed to phase out the most damaging ozone depleting chemicals and the subsequent copenhagen agreement which accelerated the process by five years every american can be proud that the united states helped to lead these efforts politically and scientifically as with the ozone issue nations have agreed on the nature of the climate change threat and we have taken the first tentative initial steps to thwart that threat but this is just a beginning i think we can answer the question that i quoted from sir roche at the beginning of my speech about posterity and answer it with another irish sentiment written by the great poet william butler yeats he wrote i have spread my dreams under your feet tread softly because you tread on my dreams unless we tread softly our dreams for the future will be nothing but dreams let us make sure that our next steps are the right ones thank you very much dem algore17 8 00 al_gore i speak tonight of gratitude achievement and high hopes for our country tonight i think first of those who helped me get here starting with the people of tennessee and then those who braved the first snows of iowa and new hampshire and all of you here from all over this country who have come with me into the warm sunlight of this great city while i can t thank each of you individually in words i do so in my heart and i know you won t mind if i single out someone who has just spoken so eloquently someone i ve loved with my whole heart since the night of my high school senior prom my wife tipper we ve been lucky enough to find each other all over again at each new stage of our lives and we just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary i want to acknowledge with great pride our four children kristin sarah and albert our oldest daughter karenna and her husband drew and the youngest member of our family who a little over a year ago was born on the fourth of july our grandson wyatt and my brother in law frank hunger i am honored tonight by the support of a leader of high ideals and fundamental decency who will be an important part of our country s future senator bill bradley thank you bill thank you bill for your focus on campaign finance reform and civil rights and ending child poverty there s someone else who will shape that future a leader of character and courage a defender of the environment and working families the next vice president of the united states of america joe lieberman and hadassah and their wonderful family i picked joe for one simple reason he s the best person for the job for almost eight years now i ve been the partner of a leader who moved us out of the valley of recession and into the longest period of prosperity in american history i say to you tonight millions of americans will live better lives for a long time to come because of the job that s been done by president bill clinton instead of the biggest deficits in history we now have the biggest surpluses the highest home ownership ever the lowest inflation in a generation and instead of losing jobs we now have 22 million good new jobs higher family incomes above all our success comes from you the people who have worked hard for your families but let s not forget that a few years ago you were also working hard but your hard work then was undone by a government that didn t work didn t put people first and wasn t on your side together we changed things to help unleash your potential and unleash innovation and investment in the private sector the engine that drives our economic growth and our progress on the economy is a good chapter in our history but now we turn the page and write a new chapter and that s what i want to speak about tonight this election is not an award for past performance i m not asking you to vote for me on the basis of the economy we have tonight i ask for your support on the basis of the better fairer more prosperous america we can build together together let s make sure that our prosperity enriches not just the few but all working families let s invest in health care education a secure retirement and middle class tax cuts i m happy that the stock market has boomed and so many businesses and new enterprises have done well this country is richer and stronger but my focus is on working families people trying to make house payments and car payments working overtime to save for college and do right by their kids whether you re in a suburb or an inner city whether you raise crops or drive hogs and cattle on a farm drive a big rig on the interstate or drive e commerce on the internet whether you re starting out to raise your own family or getting ready to retire after a lifetime of hard work so often powerful forces and powerful interests stand in your way and the odds seem stacked against you even as you do what s right for you and your family how and what we do for all of you the people who pay the taxes bear the burdens and live the american dream that is the standard by which we should be judged and for all of our good times i am not satisfied to all the families in america to all the families in america who have to struggle to afford the right education and the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs i want you to know this i ve taken on the powerful forces and as president i ll stand up to them and i ll stand up for you to all the families to all the families who are struggling with things that money can t measure like trying to find a little more time to spend with your children or protecting your children from entertainment that you think glorifies violence and indecency i want you to know i believe we must challenge a culture with too much meanness and not enough meaning and as president i will stand with you for a goal we all share to give more power back to the parents to choose what your own children are exposed to so you can pass on your family s basic lessons of responsibility and decency the power should be in your hands the future should belong to everyone in this land everyone all families we could squander this moment but our country would be the poorer for it instead let s lift our eyes and see how wide the american horizon has become we re entering a new time we re electing a new president and i stand here tonight as my own man and i want you to know me for who i truly am i grew up in a wonderful family i have a lot to be thankful for and the greatest gift my parents gave me was love when i was a child it never once occurred to me that the foundation upon which my security depended would ever shake and of all the lessons my parents taught me the most powerful one was unspoken the way they loved one another my father respected my mother as an equal if not more she was his best friend and in many ways his conscience and i learned from them the value of a true loving partnership that lasts for life they simply couldn t imagine being without each other and for 61 years they were by each others side my parents taught me that the real values in life aren t material but spiritual they include faith and family duty and honor and trying to make the world a better place i finished college at a time when all that seemed to be in doubt and our nation s spirit was being depleted we saw the assassination of our best leaders appeals to racial backlash and the first warning signs of watergate i remember the conversations i had with tipper back them and the doubts we had about the vietnam war but i enlisted in the army because i knew if i didn t go someone else in the small town of carthage tennessee would have to go in my place i was an army reporter in vietnam when i was there i didn t do the most or run the gravest danger but i was proud to wear my country s uniform let me tell you when i came home running for office was the very last thing i ever thought i would do i studied religion at vanderbilt and worked nights as a police reporter at the nashville tennessean and i saw more of what could go wrong in america not only on the police beat but as an investigative reporter covering local government i also saw so much of what could go right citizens lifting up local communities family by family block by block neighborhood by neighborhood in churches and charities on school boards and city councils and then tipper and i started our own family and when our first daughter karenna was born i began to see the future through a fresh set of eyes i know a lot of you have had that feeling too and i decided i couldn t turn away from service at home any more than i could have turned away from service in vietnam that s why i ran for congress in my first term a family in hardeman county tennessee wrote a letter and told how worried they were that toxic waste a lot of it had been dumped near their home i held some of the first hearings on the issue and ever since i ve been there in the fight against the big polluters our children should not have to draw the breath of life in cities awash in pollution when they come in from playing on a hot summer afternoon every child in america anywhere in america ought to be able to turn on the faucet and get a glass of safe clean drinking water on the issue of the environment i ve never given up i ve never backed down and i never will and i say it again tonight we must reverse the silent rising tide of global warming and we can in the senate and as the vice president i fought for welfare reform over and over again i talked to folks who told me how they were trapped in the old welfare system i saw what it did to families so i fought to end welfare as we then knew it to help those in trouble but to insist on work and responsibility others talked about welfare reform we actually reformed welfare and set time limits instead of handouts we gave people training to go from welfare to work and we have cut the welfare rolls in half and moved millions into good jobs and it s helped lift them up for almost 25 years now i ve been fighting for people and for all that time i ve been listening to people holding open meetings in the places where they live and work and do you know what i ve learned a lot and if i m you re president i m going to keep on having open meetings all over this country i m going to go out to you the people because i want to stay in touch with your hopes with the quiet everyday heroism of working families and because i ve learned that the issues before us the problems and the policies all have names and i don t mean the big fancy names that we put on programs and legislation i m talking about family names like nystul johnson gutierrez and malone people and families i ve met in the last year all across this country and here s what they told me i met mildred nystul in waterloo iowa because of our welfare reform she has left welfare and found a good job training electricians and she s become a proud member of ibew local 288 now now she dreams of sending her daughter irene to college mildred nystul is here with us tonight and i say to her i will fight for a targeted affordable tax cut to help working families save and pay for college they need help and we ll give it to them it s the key to our future i met jacqueline johnson in st louis missouri she worked for 35 years as a medical assistant caring for others now she s 72 years old and needs prescription medicines to care for herself she spends over half of her social security check her only source of income on her pills so she either skips meals or shops for bargains at a wholesale food store and buys macaroni and cheese dinners in bulk and then has them at every meal i invited her here tonight and mrs johnson i promise you once again i will fight for a prescription drug benefit for all seniors under medicare it s just wrong for seniors to have to choose between food and medicine while the big drug companies run up record profits that is wrong i met george and juanita gutierrez in san antonio texas their daughter katarina has just started the fourth grade at davy crockett elementary school the school building is crumbling and overcrowded with cracked walls and peeling plaster trailers cover the playground where the kids used to spend recess the gutierrez family is here tonight and i tell them again i will fight to rebuild and modernize crumbling schools and reduce class size we need to put safety discipline and character first in every classroom you know are you with me education education may be a local responsibility but i believe it also has to be our number one national priority we can t stop until every school in america is a good place to get a good education and i will never forget a little boy named ian malone who suffered from a medical mistake during childbirth and needs full time nursing care for several years i met him and his parents in seattle near everett washington their home and their hmo had told the malones that it would no longer pay for the nurse they needed and then actually told them they should consider giving ian up for adoption that s when his mom and dad got really mad they told their story in public and the hmo was embarrassed because they fought for their baby today ian has the care he needs to stay alive but no family in america should have to go on national television to save their child s life you know dylan and christine malone are here with us tonight ian s here too and i say to them and to all the families of america i will fight for a real enforceable patients bill of rights it s just wrong to have life and death medical decisions made by bean counters at hmos who don t have a license to practice medicine and don t have a right to play god it s time to take the medical decisions away from the hmos and insurance companies and give them back to the doctors and the nurses and the health care professionals let s make that a bipartisan issue so this is not just an election between my opponent and me it s about our people our families and our future and whether forces standing in your way will keep you from living a better life to me this election is about mildred nystul jacqueline johnson katarina gutierrez ian malone it s about millions of americans whose names we may never know but whose needs and dreams must always be our calling and so here tonight in the name of all the working families who are the strength and soul of america i accept your nomination for president of the united states of america i m here to talk seriously about the issues i believe people deserve to know specifically what a candidate proposes to do i intend to tell you tonight you ought to be able to know and then judge for yourself if you entrust me with the presidency i will put our democracy back in your hands and get all the special interest money all of it out of our democracy by enacting campaign finance reform i feel so strongly about this i promise you that campaign finance reform will be the very first bill that joe lieberman and i send to the united states congress it s time let others try to restore the old guard we come to this convention as the change we wish to see in america and what are those changes at a time when most americans will live to know even their great grandchildren we will save and strengthen social security and medicare not only for this generation but for generations to come at a time of almost unimaginable medical breakthroughs we will fight for affordable health care for all so patients end ordinary people are not left powerless and broke we will move toward universal health coverage step by step starting with all children let s get all children covered by 2004 and and let s move to the day when we at long last end the stigma of mental illness and treat it like every other illness everywhere in this nation and i thank you tipper for leading the way within the next few years scientists will identify the genes that cause every type of cancer we need a national commitment equal to the promise of this unequaled moment so we will double the federal investment in medical research we will find new medicines and new cures not just for cancer but for everything from diabetes to hiv aids at a time when there is more computer power in a palm pilot than in the spaceship that took neil armstrong to the moon we will offer all our people lifelong learning and new skills for the higher paying jobs of the future at a time when the amount of human knowledge is doubling every five years and science and technology are advancing so rapidly we will do bold things to make our schools the best in the world i will fight for the greatest single commitment to education since the g i bill for revolutionary improvements in our schools for higher standards and more accountability to put fully qualified teachers in every classroom test all new teachers and give teachers the training and professional development they deserve it s time to treat and reward teachers like the professionals they are it s not just about more money it s about higher standards accountability new ideas but we can t do it without new resources and that s why i will invest far more in our schools in the long run a second class education always costs more than a first class education and i will not go along with any plan that would drain taxpayer money away from our public schools and give it to private schools in the form of vouchers this nation was a pioneer of universal public education now let s set a specific new goal for the first decade of the 21st century high quality universal pre school available to every child in every family all across this nation and let s give middle class families help in paying for college with tax free college savings and by making most college tuition tax deductible open the doors of learning to all and all of this all of this all of this is the change we wish to see in america not so long ago a balanced budget seemed impossible now our budget surpluses make it possible to give a full range of targeted tax cuts to working families not just to help you save for college but to pay for health insurance and child care to reform the estate tax so people can pass on a small business or a family farm and to end the marriage penalty the right way the fair way because we should not force couples to pay more in income taxes just because they re married but let me say it plainly i will not go along with a huge tax cut for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else and wreck our good economy in the process let me tell you under the tax plan the other side has proposed for every 10 that goes to the wealthiest 1 percent middle class families would get one dime and lower income families would get one penny in fact in fact if you add it up the average family would get about enough money to buy one extra diet coke a week about it s not nothing about 62 cents in change but let me tell you that s not the kind of change i m working for i ll fight for tax cuts that go to the right people to the working families who have the toughest time paying taxes and saving for the future i ll fight for a new tax free way to help you save and build a bigger nest egg for your retirement i m talking about something extra that you can save and invest for yourself something that will supplement social security not be subtracted from it but i will not go along with any proposal to strip 1 out of every 6 dollars from the social security trust fund and privatize the social security that you re counting on that s social security minus our plan is social security plus we will balance the budget every year and dedicate the budget surplus first to saving social security in the next four years we will pay off all the national debt this nation accumulated in our first 200 years this will put us on the path to completely eliminating the debt by 2012 keeping america prosperous far into the future but there s there s something else at stake in this election that s even more important than economic progress simply put it s our values it s our responsibility to our loved ones to our families and to me family values means honoring our fathers and mothers teaching our children well caring for the sick respecting one another giving people the power to achieve what they want for their families putting both social security and medicare in an iron clad lockbox where the politicians can t touch them to me that kind of common sense is a family value hands off medicare and social security trust fund money i ll veto anything that spends it for anything other than social security and medicare getting cigarettes out of the hands of kids before they get hooked is a family value i will crack down on the marketing of tobacco to our children no matter how hard the tobacco companies lobby and no matter how much they spend a new prescription drug benefit under medicare for all our seniors that s a family value and let me tell you i ll fight for it and the other side will not they give in to the big drug companies their plan tells seniors to beg the hmos and insurance companies for prescription drug coverage and that s the difference in this election they re for the powerful we re for the people judge for yourself look at the agendas look at the facts big tobacco big oil the big polluters the pharmaceutical companies the hmos sometimes you have to be willing to stand up and say no so families can have a better life i know one thing about the job of the president it is the only job in the constitution that is charged with the responsibility of fighting for all the people not just the people of one state or one district not just the wealthy or the powerful all the people especially those who need a voice those who need a champion those who need to be lifted up so they are never left behind i say to you tonight if you entrust me with the presidency i will fight for you i mean that with all my heart there s one other word that we ve heard a lot of in this campaign and that word is honor to me honor is not just a word but an obligation and you have my word we will honor hard work by raising the minimum wage so that work always pays more than welfare we will honor families by expanding child care and after school care and family and medical leave so working families have the help they need to care for their children because one of the most important jobs of all is raising our children and we ll support the right of parents to decide that one of them will stay home longer with their babies if that s what they believe is best for their families we will honor the ideal of equality by standing up for civil rights and defending affirmative action we will honor we will honor equal rights and we will fight for an equal day s pay for an equal day s work and let there be no doubt i will protect and defend a woman s right to choose the last thing this country needs is a supreme court that overturns roe v wade we will remove all the old barriers so that those who are called disabled can develop all their abilities and we will also widen the circle of opportunity for all americans and we will vigorously enforce all our civil rights laws with the budgets and personnel that are necessary and hear me well we will pass the employment non discrimination act and we will honor the memory of matthew shepard and joseph ileto and james byrd whose families all joined us this week by passing a law against hate crimes they are different we need to embody our values in that new law it s time we will honor the hard work of raising a family by doing all we can to help parents protect their children parents deserve the simple security of knowing that their children are safe whether they re walking down the street surfing the world wide web or sitting behind a desk in school to make families safer we passed the toughest crime bill in history and we re putting 100 000 new community police on our streets crime has fallen in every major category for seven years in a row but there s still too much danger and there s still too much fear so tonight i want to set another new specific goal to cut the crime rate every year year after year all the way to the end of this decade every single year that s why i ll fight to add another 50 000 new police community police prevention community police who help prevent crime by establishing real relationships between law enforcement and neighborhood residents which incidentally is the opposite of racial profiling which must be brought to an end throughout the criminal justice system and community policing and prevention is one of the keys i will fight for a crime victims bill of rights including a constitutional amendment to make sure that victims and not just criminals are guaranteed rights in our justice system i ll fight to toughen penalties on those who misuse the internet to prey on our children and violate our privacy and i ll fight to make every school in this nation drug free and gun free i believe in the right of sportsmen and hunters and law abiding citizens to own firearms but i want mandatory background checks to keep guns away from criminals and mandatory child safety locks to protect our children tipper and i went out to columbine high school after the tragedy there and we embraced the families of the children who were lost and i will never forget the words of the father who whispered into my ear promise me that these children will not have died in vain all of us must join together to make that promise come true laws and programs by themselves will never be enough all of us especially all parents need to take more responsibility we need to change our hearts and make a commitment to our children and to one another we need to lift up the meaning in their lives you know i am excited about america s prospects and full of hope for america s future our country has come a long way and i ve come a long way since that long ago time when i went to vietnam and i ve never forgotten what i saw there and the bravery of so many young americans the price of freedom is sometimes high but i ve never believed that america should turn inward as a senator i broke with many in our party and voted to support the gulf war when saddam hussein invaded kuwait because i believed america s vital interest were at stake early in my public service i took up the issue of nuclear arms control and nuclear weapons because nothing is more fundamental than protecting our national security now i want to lead america because i love america i will keep america s defenses strong i will make sure our armed forces continue to be the best equipped best trained and best led in the entire world they are now and they will be in the last century this nation more than any other freed the world from fascism and communism but a newly freed world still has dangers and challenges both old and new we must always have the will to defend our enduring interests from europe to the middle east to japan and korea we must strengthen our partnerships with africa latin america and the rest of the developing world we must confront the new challenges of terrorism new kinds of weapons of mass destruction global environmental problems and new diseases that know no national boundaries and can threaten national security we must welcome and promote truly free trade but i say to you it must be fair trade we must get standards we must set standards to end child labor to prevent the exploitation of workers and the poisoning of the environment free trade can and must be and if i m president will be a way to lift everyone up not bring anyone down to the lowest common denominator so those are the issues and that s where i stand but i also want to tell you just a little more about two of my greatest heroes my father and my mother they did give me a good life but like so many in america they started out with almost nothing my father grew up in a small community named possum hollow in middle tennessee when he was just 18 he went to work as a teacher in a one room school then the great depression came along and taught him a lesson that couldn t be found in any classroom he told me and my sister often how he watched grown men with wives and children they could neither feed nor clothe on farms they could no longer pay for my father didn t know whether he could help those families but he believed he had to try and never in the years to come in congress and in the united states senate did he lose sight of the reason he entered public service to fight for the people not the powerful my mother grew up in a poor farming community in northwest tennessee her family ran a small country store in cold corner a store that went bust during the great depression she worked her way through college then she got a room in nashville at the ywca and waited tables at an all night coffee shop for 25 cent tips she then went on to become one of the first women in history to graduate from vanderbilt law school as tipper told you we lost my dad a year and a half ago but we re so lucky that my mother pauline continues to be part of our lives every single day she is here tonight sometimes in this campaign when i visit a school and see a hard working teacher trying to change the world one child at a time i see the face of my father and i know that teaching our children well is not just a teacher s job it s everyone s job and it has to be our national mission i ve shaken hands in diners and coffee shops all across this country and sometimes when i see a waitress working hard and thanking someone for a tip i see the face of my mother and i know for that waitress carrying trays or a construction worker in the winter cold i will never agree to raise the retirement age to 70 or threaten the promise of social security it s just not fair to them and i won t do it i say to you tonight we ve got to win this election because every hard working american family deserves to open the door to their dream in our democracy the future is not something that just happens to us it s something that we make for ourselves together so to the young people watching tonight i say this is your time to make new the life of our world we need your help to rekindle the spirit of america believe in our country we believe in you and i ask all of you my fellow citizens from this city that marked both the end of america s journey westward and the beginning of the new frontier let us set out on a new journey to the best america a new journey on which we advance not by the turning of wheels but by the turning of our minds the reach of our vision the daring grace of the human spirit yes we have our problems but the united states of america is the best country ever created and still as ever the hope of humankind yes we re all imperfect but as americans we share in the privilege and challenge of building a more perfect union i know my own imperfections for example i know that sometimes people say i m too serious that i talk too much substance and policy maybe i ve done that tonight but the presidency but the presidency is more than a popularity contest it s a day by day fight for people sometimes you have to choose to do what s difficult or unpopular sometimes you have to be willing to spend your popularity in order to pick the hard right over the easy wrong there are big choices ahead and our whole future is at stake and i do have strong beliefs about it if you entrust me with the presidency i know i won t always be the most exciting politician but i pledge to you tonight i will work for you every day and i will never let you down if we allow ourselves to believe without reservation that we can do what s right and be the better for it then the best america will be our america in this city of angels we can summon the better angels of our nature do not rest where we are or retreat do all we can to make america all it can become thank you god bless you god bless america dem algore18 10 04 al_gore during this series of speeches i have tried hard to understand what it is that gives so many americans an uneasy feeling that something very basic has gone wrong in our democracy there are many people in both political parties who worry that there is something deeply troubling about president bush s relationship to reason about his disdain for facts his incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country one group mistakenly maligns the president as not being smart enough to have a normal active curiosity about separating fact from myth a second group seems to be convinced that his personal religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis but i disagree with both of those groups and reject both of those cartoon images i know president bush is plenty smart and while i have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine and it s an important motivation for many things that he does in life as it is for me and for most of you i m convinced that most of the president s frequent departures from fact based analysis have much more to do with right wing political and economic ideology than with the bible and it is crucially important to be precise in describing exactly what it is he believes in so strongly and then insulates from any logical challenge or even debate it is ideology and not his religious faith that is the source of this troubling inflexibility most of the problems president bush has caused for this country stemmed not from his belief in god but his belief in the infallibility of the right wing republican ideology that exalts the interest of the wealthy and of large corporations over and above the interests of the american people it is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency the surprising current dominance of american politics by right wing politicians whose core beliefs are usually wildly at odds with the opinions of the majority of americans is a dominance that has resulted from the careful building of a coalition of interest groups that have little in common with each other besides a desire for power that can be devoted to the achievement of a narrow agenda the two most important blocks in this coalition are first what i would call the economic royalists those corporate leaders and high net worth families with vast fortunes at their disposal who are primarily interested in an economic agenda that will eliminate as much of their own taxation as possible and an agenda that removes regulatory obstacles and any competition they might face from smaller newer firms in the marketplace they provide the bulk of the resources that have financed the now extensive network of foundations think tanks political action committees media companies and front groups capable of simulating grassroots activism the second of the two pillars of this coalition are social conservatives many of whom want to roll back most of the progressive social changes of the 20th century including many women s rights social integration the social safety net the government social programs of the progressive era the new deal the great society and their coalition includes a number of powerful interest groups like the national rifle association the anti abortion coalition and other groups that have agreed to support each other s agendas in order to obtain their own you could call it the 300 musketeers one for all and all for one and indeed those who raise more than 100 000 are called not musketeers but pioneers now bush s seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the strength of his conviction when in fact it is this very inflexibility based on a willful refusal to even consider alternative opinions or conflicting evidence that poses the most serious danger to our country by the same token the simplicity of many of his pronouncements which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue are in fact exactly the opposite because they usually mark his refusal to even consider complexity and that s a particularly difficult problem in a world where the challenges america faces are often quite complex and require rigorous sustained disciplined analysis the essential cruelty of bush s game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority thus misleading many americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world and in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities truly president bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in american history to take what rightfully belongs to the american people and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged and these wealthy and privileged look at his agenda and they say as dick cheney said to former secretary of the treasury paul o neill this is our due the central elements of president bush s political as opposed to religious belief system are actually plain to see first the public interest is a dangerous myth according to bush s ideology a fiction created by those hated liberals who use the notion of public interest as an excuse to take away from the wealthy and powerful what they do believe is their due therefore government in this system of beliefs government of by and for the people is bad except when government can help members of his coalition laws and regulations are also therefore bad again except when they can be used to help members of his coalition therefore also whenever laws must be enforced and regulations administered it is important in their view to assign those responsibilities to individuals who can be depended upon not to fall prey to this dangerous illusion that there is such a thing as the public interest those who will instead reliably serve the narrow and specific interests of industries and interest groups this is the reason for example that president bush put the former chairman of enron ken lay in charge of vetting all of the bush appointees to the federal energy regulatory commission enron had already helped the bush team with such favors as ferrying their rent a mob to florida in 2000 to permanently halt the counting of legally cast ballots they flew on the enron plane and then after members of the federal energy regulatory commission were appointed with mr lay s personal review and approval enron went on to bilk the electric rate payers of california and other states without the inconvenience of federal regulators protecting citizens against their criminal behavior or to take another example this explains why all virtually all of the important epa positions have been carefully filled with lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in their respective industries in order to make sure that those polluters are not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the law against excessive pollution in bush s ideology there is an interweaving of the agendas of large corporations that support them and his own ostensibly public agenda for the government that he leads their preferences become his policies and his politics become their business any new taxes in this ideology are of course bad especially if they add anything at all to the already unbearable burden placed on the wealthy and powerful there are exceptions tot his rule of course for new taxes that are paid by lower income americans which have the redeeming virtue of simultaneously lifting the burden of paying for government from the wealthy and then also potentially recruiting those presently considered to pay to pay taxes into the anti tax bandwagon in the international arena treaties and international agreements are also considered bad because they can interfere with the exercise of power the same way domestic laws can the geneva convention for example and the u s law prohibiting torture were both described by president bush s white house counsel as quaint and then effectively discarded as a constraint so that bush and rumsfeld could institute policies that resulted in the widespread torture of detainees in iraq afghanistan guantanamo and numerous secret locations elsewhere and even though new information has now confirmed that donald rumsfeld was personally involved in reviewing the specific extreme measures authorized to be used by interrogators he has still not been held accountable for the most shameful and humiliating violation of american principles in recent memory because this president never told anyone in his accountable no matter what they do most dangerous of all this bush ideology promotes the making of policy in secret based on information that is not available to the public and in a process that is insulated from any meaningful participation by congress or the american people when congress s approval is required under our current constitution it is to be given without meaningful debate as bush said to one republican senator in a meeting described in time magazine and i quote from the magazine s account look i want your vote i m not going to debate it with you at the urging of the bush white house republican leaders in congress have even taken the unprecedented step of routinely barring democrats from serving on many important conference committees and then allowing lobbyists for special interests to actually draft brand new legislative language introduced in conference committees language that has not been considered or voted upon in either the house or the senate it has also become common for president bush to rely on special interests for his basic information about the policies important to them and he trusts what they tell him over any contrary view that might emerge from public debate he has in effect outsourced the truth most disturbing of all his contempt for the rule of reason and his early successes in persuading the nation that his ideologically based views accurately describe the world have now tempted him to the hubristic an genuinely dangerous illusion that reality is itself a commodity that can be created with clever public relations and propaganda skills and where specific controversies are concerned simply purchased as a turnkey operation from the industries most affected george orwell said and i quote the point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue and then when we are finally proved wrong impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right intellectually it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality usually on a battlefield in one of the speeches that i have a year ago last august i proposed that one reason why the normal processes of our democracy have seemed dysfunctional is that our nation acquired a large number of false impressions about the choices before us including for example that the false impression that saddam hussein was the person primarily responsible for attacking us on september 11th 2001 according to time magazine again 70 percent thought that in november of 2002 or to take another example an impression that there was a tight linkage and close partnership and cooperation between osama bin laden and saddam hussein between the terrorist group al qaeda which did attack us and iraq which did not and the impression that saddam had a massive supply of weapons of mass destruction and that he was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons and that he was about to give nuclear weapons to the al qaeda terrorist group which would then use them against american cities also the impression was widely shared that iraq would welcome our invading army with garlands of flowers and even though the rest of the world opposed the war when it began they would quickly fall in line after we won and then they d contribute lots of money and soldiers so there wouldn t be a risk that our taxpayers would foot the whole bill and in any case there would be more than enough money from iraqi oil supplies which would flow in abundance quickly after the invasion we could use that money to offset expenses and the net cost to america would be zero the impression also was widespread was that the size of the force required would be relatively small and would not put a strain on our military or our reserves and would not jeopardize other commitments we have around the world now of course every single one of these impressions was wrong and unfortunately the consequences have been catastrophic for our country and the plague of false impressions seem to settle on other policy debates as well for example in considering president bush s gigantic tax cut many somehow got the impression that first the majority of that tax cut would not go disproportionately to the wealthy but would go to the middle class second that it would not lead to large deficits because it would stimulate the economy so much it would pay for itself and third not only would there be no job losses but we would have big increases in employment as a result and of course as everyone knows here to every one of these impressions was completely wrong now last year i did not accuse the president of intentionally deceiving the american people but rather noted the remarkable coincidence that all of his arguments turned out to be based on falsehoods but since that time we have learned from information that has become public in a variety of ways that in virtually every case the president chose to ignore and indeed often to suppress studies reports information facts that were directly contrary to the false impressions he was in the process of giving to the american people in most every case he chose to reject information that was prepared for him by objective analysts and to rely instead on information that was prepared by sources of questionable reliability who had a private interest in the policy choice that the president was recommending a choice that was conflicted with the public interest for example when the president and his team were confidently asserting that saddam hussein had aluminum tubes that had been acquired in order to enrich uranium for atomic bombs numerous experts at the department of energy and elsewhere in the intelligence community were certain that the information being presented to our country by the president was completely wrong the true experts on uranium enrichment are at oak ridge where most enrichment has taken place in the u s in my home state of tennessee they told me early on that in their opinion there was virtually zero possibility that the tubes in question were for the purpose of enrichment and yet they received a directive at oak ridge forbidding them from making any public statement that disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by president bush in another example we now know that two months before the iraq war began president bush received detailed and comprehensive secret reports warning him that the likely result of an american led invasion of iraq would be increased support for islamic fundamentalism deep divisions in iraqi society high levels of violent internal conflict and guerrilla warfare aimed at u s forces and yet in spite of those analyses president bush chose to suppress those warnings conceal that information and instead went right on conveying to the american people the absurdly pollyanna ish view of highly questionable and obviously biased sources like ahmad chalabi the convicted felon and known swindler who the bush administration put on its payroll and gave a seat adjacent to first lady laura bush at the state of the union address who they then flew into baghdad on a military jet with a private security force but then the following year decided was actually a spy for iran who had been hoodwinking the president all along with phony facts and false predictions there is a growing tension between president bush s portrait of the situation in which we find ourselves and the real facts on the ground in fact his entire agenda is collapsing around his ankles iraq is in flames with a growing u s casualty rate and a growing prospect of a civil war with the attendant chaos and risk of an islamic fundamentalist state america s moral authority in the world has been severely damaged and our ability to persuade others to follow our lead has virtually disappeared the latest to announce they are beginning to withdraw from the coalition are poland and italy our troops because they are already bearing more than 90 percent of the burden borne by non iraqis are stretched thin under supplied and placed in intolerable situations without adequate equipment or training in the latest u s sponsored public opinion survey of iraqis only 2 percent say they view our troops as liberators more than 90 percent of arab iraqis have a hostile view of what they describe as an occupation our friends in the middle east including most prominently israel have been placed in greater danger because of the policy blunders and sheer incompetence with which the civilian pentagon officials have conducted this war this war in iraq has become a recruiting bonanza for terrorists who use it as their most damning indictment of the united states and of u s policy the massive casualties suffered by civilians in iraq and the horrible tv footage of women and children being pulled dead or injured from the rubble of their homes shown routinely and constantly on the arab television stations throughout the middle east this has been a propaganda victory for osama bin laden beyond his wildest dreams and it is tragic and it was avoidable moreover america s honor and reputation have been severely damaged by president bush s decision to authorize policies and legal hair splitting that resulted in the widespread torture by u s soldiers and contractors of iraqi citizens and others in facilities from guantanamo to afghanistan and elsewhere astonishingly and shamefully investigators also found that more than 90 percent of those tortured and abused were completely innocent of any crime or wrongdoing whatsoever the prestigious jaffe think tank in israel released a devastating indictment just last week of how this misadventure in iraq has been a deadly distraction from the crucial war on terror we now know from paul bremer the person chosen by president bush to be in charge of u s policy in iraq immediately following the invasion that he was repeatedly telling the white house that there were insufficient troops on the ground to make the policy a success and yet at the time bremer was telling the white house his views president bush was simultaneously repeating repeatedly asserting to the american people that he was relying on those americans in iraq for his opinion confident opinion of course that we had more than enough troops and no more were needed we now know from the central intelligence agency that a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the likely consequences of the invasion accurately predicted the chaos popular resentment and growing likelihood of civil war and that this analysis was presented to the president and that other similar analyses were stacked in front of the president s team on the desk in the cabinet room in the white house even as the president continued to confidently assure america that the aftermath of our invasion would be the speedy establishment of representative democracy and market capitalism by grateful iraqis now most americans have tended naturally to give the bush cheney administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their failure to take any action in advance of 9 11 to prepare our nation against an attack after all we all know that hindsight always casts a harsh light on mistakes that could not be nearly as visible at the time those mistakes were made and we all know that s true but with the benefit of all of the new studies and investigations that have been made public over the last year it is now no longer clear that the administration deserves this act of political grace from the american people for example we now know from the 9 11 commission that the chief law enforcement officer appointed by president bush to be in charge of counterterrorism john ashcroft was repeatedly asked by the fbi official in charge of protecting us against terrorism repeatedly asked to pay attention to the many warning signs that were being picked up by the fbi throughout the summer of 2001 former fbi acting director thomas j pickard the man in charge of presenting these warnings to general ashcroft testified under oath that ashcroft angrily told him he did not want to hear this information anymore and shut down the discussion now that is an affirmative action by the administration that s very different from simple negligence that is an extremely serious error in judgment that constitutes a reckless disregard for the safety of the american people it is worth remembering that among the reports the fbi was receiving that ashcroft had ordered them not to show him anymore was an expression of alarm in one field office that the nation ought to immediately check on the possibility that osama bin laden was having people trained in commercial flight schools around the u s and another from a field office warning that a potential terrorist was learning how to fly commercial airliners and yet had made it clear he had no interest in learning how to land and it was in this period of recklessly willful ignorance on the part of the attorney general that the cia was also picking up unprecedented warnings that an attack on the united states by al qaeda was imminent in his famous phrase george tenet wrote that the system was blinking red it was in this context that the president himself was presented with a cia report that carried a headline more alarming and more pointed than any i saw in eight years of six days a week cia briefings the headline said as many of you know bin laden determined to strike in the u s the only warnings of this nature that remotely resembled the one given to george bush that i recall was about the so called millennium threats predicted for the end of the year 1999 and somewhat less specific warnings about the dangers that might face the olympics in atlanta in 1996 and in both cases these warnings in the president s daily briefing were followed immediately on the same day by the beginning of urgent daily meetings in the white house of all the agencies and offices involved in preparing our nation to prevent the threatened attack by contrast when president bush received his fateful and historic warning of 9 11 he did not convene the national security council did not bring together the fbi and cia and other agencies with responsibility to protect the nation and apparently did not even ask follow up questions later about the warning the bipartisan 9 11 commission summarized in its unanimous report what happened and i quote we have found no indication of any further discussion before september 11th between the president and his advisors about the possibility of a threat of al qaeda attack in the united states end quote the commissioners went on to report that in spite of all the warnings to different parts of the administration the nation s again i quote domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat they did not have direction and did not have a plan to institute the borders were not hardened transportation systems were not fortified electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat state and local law authorities were not marshaled to augment the fbi s efforts the public was not warned end quote after the attack of 9 11 we know from the commission s report that within hours secretary rumsfeld was busy attempting to find a way to link saddam hussein with 9 11 we know the sworn testimony of the president s white house head of counterterrorism richard clarke that on the day after the attack september 12th and i quote from clarke s account the president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people shut the door and said i want you to find whether iraq did this i said mr president there s no connection he came back at me and said iraq saddam find out if there s a connection we got together all the fbi experts all the cia experts they all cleared the report and we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the national security advisor or deputy it got bounced and was sent back saying wrong answer do it again and i don t think he i m continuing the quote from richard clarke i don t think he the president sees memos that he wouldn t like the answer end quote this was the day after the attack and the president did not ask about osama bin laden he did not ask mr clarke in any case about al qaeda he did not ask about saudi arabia or any other country other than iraq when clark responded to that first question by saying that iraq was not responsible for the attack and that al qaeda was the president persisted in focusing on iraq and again as clarke spent his time on this day after the worst attack in the history of the united states on our soil to spend his time as the man in charge of counterterrorism in the white house to spend his time trying to find a linkage between the attack and someone who had absolutely nothing to do with it again this is not hindsight this is the way the president was thinking at the time he was planning america s response to the attack this was not an unfortunate misreading of the available evidence causing a mistaken linkage between al qaeda and iraq no this was something else a willful choice to make a specific linkage whether evidence existed to support it or not think about that think about that because whoever is elected on november 2nd will face other questions and we ll face other challenges and we ll have to make other difficult judgments about how to protect this nation earlier this month we had an independent report of what information was presented on the alleged the impression of a linkage secretary rumsfeld who saw all of the intelligence available to president bush that might bear on the alleged connection between al qaeda and saddam hussein finally admitted under tough repeated questioning from reporters and i quote to my knowledge i have not seen any strong hard evidence that links the two end quote this is not negligence when the administration is told specifically and repeatedly that there is no linkage and simultaneously makes bold assertions in a confident manner to the american people that leave the impression with 70 percent of the country that saddam hussein was primarily responsible for the attack this is deception this is deception it is clear that president bush has absolute faith in a rigid right wing ideology and does not feel the same desire that many of us would in gathering facts relevant to the question at hand he ignores the warning of his experts he forbids any dissent never tests his assumptions against the best available evidence in fact he is arrogantly out of touch with reality he refuses to ever admit mistakes which means that so long as he is our president we are doomed to repeat his mistakes it is beyond incompetence it is recklessness that risks the safety and security of the american people we were told also that our allies would join in a massive coalition so that we would not bear the burden alone and it s known by one and all now we are in fact bearing that burden more than 90 percent of those who are not iraqis and as i mentioned the second and third largest contingents in the non american group have announced just this week that they will begin withdrawing soon after the u s election we were told by the president that war was his last choice but it now clear from the newly available evidence that it was always his first preference his former secretary of the treasury paul o neill confirmed that iraq was topic a at the very first meeting of the bush national security council just 10 days after the inauguration and i quote it was about finding a way to do it that was the tone of the president saying go find me a way to do this his encounter was similar to richard clarke s we the american people were told that the president would give the international system every opportunity to function but we now know that he allowed that system to operate only briefly as a sop to his secretary of state and for cosmetic reasons bush promised that if he took us to war it would be on the basis of the most carefully worked out plans instead we now know in sharp contrast to what he told us at the time that he went to war virtually without thought and certainly without preparation for the aftermath an aftermath that tragically has now claimed more than a thousand american lives and many multiples of that among the iraqis he now claims he went to war for humanitarian reasons but the record shows he used that argument only after his first public rationale that saddam was building weapons of mass destruction completely collapsed he claimed that he was going to war in order to deal with an imminent threat to the united states but again the evidence shows clearly that there was no such imminent threat and that bush knew that at the time or at least had been told that by those in the best position to know he claims that gaining dominance of iraqi oil fields for american producers was never part of his calculation but we now know from a document uncovered by the new yorker magazine and dated just two weeks to the day after bush s inauguration that his national security council was ordered to meld its review of operational policies toward rogue states with the secretive cheney energy task force s quote actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields end quote we also know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against that cheney task force by the odd combination of judicial watch and the sierra club that one of the documents that was receiving scrutiny by the task force during that same time period was a highly detailed map of iraq showing none of the cities none of the places where people lived but showing in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country with dotted lines demarking blocks for promising exploration a map which in the words of a canadian journalists resembled a butcher s drawing of a steer with the prime cuts delineated by dotted lines we know that cheney himself while heading halliburton did more business with iraq than any other nation even though it was under u n sanctions at the time and we know that cheney stated in a public speech to the london petroleum institute in 1999 that over the coming decade the world will need in his words 50 million barrels a day of extra oil and he asked quote where is it going to come from and answering his own question he said the middle east with two thirds of the world s oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies in the spring of 2001 when vice president cheney issued the administration s national energy plan the one that had been devised in secret by corporations and lobbyists that he still refuses to name the report included a declaration and i quote the persian gulf will be a primary focus of u s internatio dem algore18 3 98 al_gore thank you very much thank you very much thank you thank you very much ladies and gentlemen and marilyn thank you that was such a a great you know mr rissotti of maryland is the typical member of this task force i want to get to know this whole task force and in fact i already do i ve had a chance to work with you especially at the beginning of your labors here and i want to compliment all of you we ll get to that in just a moment i want to thank marilyn for the enthusiasm that she embodies as a representative of those of you who ve been on this task force and i also want to thank her as a representative of all the employees at the irs your dedication and your constant desire to fix the problems that have been around for a long time after all and that the a lot of people don t understand that the employees want to fix these problems more than anybody else a taxpayer encounters these problems at tax time the employees are on the other side of those encounters constantly and so they really they really want to see the improvements come and i am so grateful to secretary bob rubin for his leadership at the treasury department in putting together a team and a structure that after so long finally is generating the movement in the right direction to really solve these problems without secretary rubin s leadership none of this would have happened and i want to thank his deputy secretary larry summers also this is in my opinion this is the best team that the united states of america has ever had at the treasury department and of course they do a lot of things in addition to trying to get irs fixed they also are managing this incredibly complicated international financial situation and all over the world the finance ministries and leaders of other countries and markets in other countries they all say thank goodness we have the kind of leadership at the treasury department in the u s that we have from secretary rubin and deputy secretary summers so thank you both for what you re doing we appreciate it very much and commissioner rossotti charles rossotti came on board as a reinventor somebody with practical real world experience and thank you for agreeing to take on the challenge you re making a tremendous difference and none of this would have happened without you also so i really do appreciate it and assistant secretary nancy killefer in the management side and bob tobias i ll say more about bob in just a moment and bob winsell who is the co chair of the commission and head of the taxpayer treatment and service improvement program thank you very very much this group has helped the irs rediscover its last name service and as a group that s made up more of front line employees than anyone else it can draw on practical experience in fact we made sure that more than half of the members of this task force were front line irs employees because that s where the ideas are and also if the front line employees don t support the changes then you would see them go the way of a lot of task force recommendations they would be ignored or sabotaged or just you know not ever really make a huge difference it is much likelier they will support changes that are constructive and good and positive if they ve had a chance to help craft them in a way that meets the common sense test and let me thank bob tobias for his role in this as president of the treasury employees union he urged all of the union members to support this effort he helped us find some of the best irs reinventors to name to this task force and then he spent countless hours helping the task force review recommendations from literally thousands and thousands of front line employees we need more of this kind of labor management cooperation and i would say it is the single greatest reason for our success thus far now as we all know this is the very height of the tax preparing and tax filing season and when americans sit down at their kitchen tables to fill out those tax forms they have a right to know that their government is working for them and not against them with the president s taxpayers bill of rights and with secretary rubin s hard work over the past two years we have made an important start today we take the next critical step because today i m pleased to present the final report of our irs customer service task force which is called reinventing service at the irs we re really proud of the work that this task force has done it s practical it s effective it s going to make a big difference it includes 200 recommendations that will reinvent the way the irs serves our taxpayers we believe that it will make the tax season easier and faster and in some cases cheaper for average american families many of these recommendations are already under way and they re already working this year we have seen an increase of almost 25 percent in the returns filed by computer we ve seen an increase of more than 25 percent in the number of returns filed by push button telephone irs worldwide web site hits have nearly tripled to 167 million this year and people are downloading material from the irs web site at five times the rate of last year this is a revolution in progress and it s picking up speed clearly the public appreciates the alternative approaches that have been created for dealing with the irs so today i want to highlight from our report out of the 200 recommendations i just want to highlight five specific steps that we are taking to make a dramatic difference in the quality of customer service at the irs of course i commend for you the other 195 recommendations also these folks have worked very hard on all of them but just to take five of them number one starting two weekends ago more than 150 irs public offices are opening their doors on saturdays and the irs will continue to offer this saturday service throughout the tax season nancy ike an irs front line employee who is here today from the montana office suggested that particular improvement and nancy i d like you to stand and we d like to thank you thank you very much number two the irs will make it possible for more than three million small businesses to file their quarterly form 941 payroll returns over the telephone beginning in this first quarter of 1998 this new service is free it s paperless and it automatically calculates the tax and any balanced owed number three the irs has established a prototype small business laboratory in seattle this lab will be used to test new approaches designed to limit the burdens of tax filing on small businesses and this innovation was the idea of clyde thurston an irs employee who is here today from the irs office in st paul minnesota clyde thank you for making this suggestion stand up and we d like to recognize you also thank you very much number four the irs will intensify its efforts to make deserving americans aware of the earned income tax credit president clinton and i have worked very hard to expand these important tax cuts for working families and we want everyone who qualifies to get the full benefits it can make it makes a huge difference for those families that are qualified and they re the families that need the most and actually the suggestion on how to make this work came from martha curry an irs employee who is here today from cincinnati martha stand and let s thank you for this recommendation thank you very much number five a brand new advisory committee will help the irs improve paperless filing to make it the most convenient and eventually sooner than a lot of people think the most common method of filing tax returns you know we re in the midst of an information age an information revolution and the same techniques that private businesses are using to greatly improve their productivity while cutting their costs and handling information much more efficiently and swiftly those same techniques are now being used in the irs and we ve got a lot of work ahead of us but we ve now got this team in place that is helping us make progress and one of the first principles of reinvention and morely winnegrad the head of our reinventing government group here will echo this one of the first principles is go to where the ideas are and the ideas are in the minds of front line employees who live with these situations every single day and if they re given a chance to participate in solving the problems they re going to come up with great ideas like these five like these 200 so again i want to thank all of them and i d like to summarize this way the steps that i m announcing today will help save time paper and postage for millions of americans they will help us ensure that we have an irs that is not just taken off people s backs but put on their side most importantly today s report packed with more than 200 recommendations will help us create a brand new culture of customer service at the irs and make a tremendous difference to average american taxpayers now finally of course we must do more to help the american taxpayer and for this we need the help of congress for months now president clinton and i have been urging passage of an irs reform bill last october we succeeded in getting it passed in the house of representatives by an overwhelming bipartisan margin the senate has been studying it for the last five months it s time for the senate to pass it so the president can sign it and make it the law of the land and help give the american people an irs that is more fair more efficient and more responsive for this tax season and for all seasons thanks to the members of this task force we re now moving in the right direction i want to thank everybody who s been a part of this report and i d just like to close by urging the united states senate to pass president clinton s irs reform bill now thank you very much for coming dem algore18 9 00 excerpt al_gore just seven weeks from tomorrow americans go to polls to choose a new future seven short weeks from tomorrow we face a choice not of politics or personality but of priorities what are we going to do with our nation s prosperity what are we going to do with those budget surpluses that have been built up what are we going to say is most important when we talk to our kids and follow up our words with our actions will we squander this chance on a huge tax cut for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class that hurts our prosperity and progress or will we fight for middle class families and men and women who are paying the bills making mortgage payments and house payments and car payments i mean and doing right by their kids i ll tell you it makes a huge difference whether or not you have somebody who will fight for you and i want to fight for you that s why i am running that s what this race is all about together let s make sure that our prosperity enriches not just the few but all of our families let s support parents and strengthen families let s invest in education middle class tax cuts health care and a secure retirement this election this election isn t about me or my opponent it s about you it s about your future it s about our country and what kind of nation we are and what kind of nation we wish to become and so setting priorities in this election makes the stakes much higher than they ve been at many times in the past we need to make it a priority to cut taxes for working families and the middle class not just to pay for college and job training but for health insurance and child care and long term care that s very different from what the other side is proposing the other side has proposed a giant tax cut mainly for the wealthy 41 of all of their tax cut would go to the wealthiest 1 for every 10 that goes to the top 1 middle class families would get one dime and low income families would get one penny let me say i ll never go along with a big tax cut like that for the wealthy that hurts the middle class and stops our prosperity and progress are you with me i know one thing about the job of president the presidency is the only position in the constitution that s filled by someone who is given responsibility to fight not just for one state or one district or for the wealthy and powerful but for all of the people especially those who have the hardest time fighting back against special interests who have the advantage over them so having a president in the white house who will care about you and who will fight for you can make all the difference in balancing things out and giving you a chance to realize your dreams and do right by your family because i will fight any interest that gets in your way and has an unfair approach to holding you back dem algore19 1 98 al_gore thank you mrs coretta scott king god bless you and thank you for all that you represent and thank you for your friendship to me and to tipper reverend bernice king thank you very much for your friendship and leadership in this church christine king farris and to all of the other members of the king family to reverend joseph roberts jr pastor of this church and to all members of the ebenezer church family thank you for your hospitality today to malakh and malikha shabazz thank you for joining your family with this commemoration today to my distinguished colleagues in government first of all secretary rodney slater i really enjoyed your remarks secretary slater thank you very much for your comments to governor hope scholarship miller i thought it was zell but i have learned that it is zell hope scholarship miller i am going to resist doing that with all of these to mayor bill amazing grace campbell my close friend to senator paul coverdell and senator max cleland to representative cynthia unruly mckinney and i know sun coy is here and to congressman unbelievably courageous john lewis and his wife lillian and who the other elected officials who are present attorney general herbert baker and other elected officials to my colleagues on the white house staff and thank you for giving them this place of honor i am grateful on their behalf and to the senior members of this group bob nash and thurgood marshall jr and to other members of the administration who are present david satcher and dr john hope franklin is chair of the advisory commission and to all of the other distinguished guests who are present i am deeply honored this morning of course to speak from the pulpit made famous around the world by the courage and accomplishments and oratorical brilliance of dr martin luther king jr i m delighted that people of so many different faiths are gathered here to honor dr king i understand there are more than a few preachers in this audience including including of course dr robert m franklin the preacher teacher scholar and leader who has recently been named president of the interdenominational theological center that makes my collar feel a little tighter and a lot smaller than some i see because dr franklin is not only considered one of the greatest preachers in america but he is now also responsible for educating some of the greatest preachers in america i feel very lucky that i am not following him to the pulpit bad enough to follow dr roberts and i m glad that instead he is following me as your keynote speaker that gives me some confidence that most of you will stay till the end of my remarks if if only to gain the privilege of hearing his incidentally when i was in divinity school i heard a story of two ministers one from the ame church and one from the baptist church they did their preaching across the street from one another for decades and they never got along they bickered constantly and attempted to convert each other s followers and competed for parking spaces on sunday morning and then one day overcome with the holy spirit one minister crossed the street to his neighbor s church and said brother pastor we really need to get along after all we worship the same god and the other minister replied yes you in your way and i in his today today we honor the memory of martin luther king jr and we rededicate ourselves to his work thirty years ago the first eulogies to dr king recalled what was said in genesis by the brothers of joseph behold this dreamer cometh come now therefore and let us slay him and cast him into some pit and we shall see what will become of his dreams thirty years later that is still the question what will become of dr king s dream it is ironic that some of the modern apostles of apathy now misappropriate dr king s own words to support their assertion that the struggle for justice in which he led us nearly over that the time has come for our policies to be in their phrase color blind so let s start at the beginning what is racism is it merely a mistake in reasoning an erroneous conclusion based on faulty logic which once corrected can be banished from human society or is it something much deeper and more powerful more threatening and more persistent dr king taught us that as human beings we are vulnerable to the sin of racism as a young man he studied the teaches of the theologian reinhold neibuhr who had written that it is foolish to regard racism in his words as a mere vestige of barbarism when it is in fact a perpetual source of conflict in human life neibuhr criticized those who wrongly drew the conclusion that racial prejudice is a form of ignorance which could be progressively dispelled by enlightenment racial prejudice he said is indeed a form of irrationality but it is not as capricious as modern universalists assume what is it about human nature that creates this persistent vulnerability to the sin of racism first and foremost the bible teaches us in the words of the apostle john if we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us the bible also teaches that we have the capacity to overcome evil with good we are called upon to choose in the words of the famous hymn once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide in the strife for truth and falsehood for the good or evil side there is a tendency rooted in human nature to group up with those who look like ourselves in the apocrypha which is part of catholic scripture it is written flesh consorteth according to kind and a man will cleave to his like so even though we understand that diversity is an enriching and ennobling strength in creating an integrated society it is foolish and naive to imagine that our differences will disappear and relinquish their claim upon us indeed our challenge is to appreciate and celebrate our differences as a necessary prelude to transcending them in order to join together in celebrating what we all have in common as children of god that does not mean that we ignore difference indeed we ignore it at our peril dr john hope franklin has taught that the single most important lesson of his long life of scholarship is that race is always present pretending it is not is naive but if properly acknowledged and responsibly and sensitively dealt with race can be transcended it is far from easy to acknowledge and celebrate differences while simultaneously transcending them because differences among people automatically carry the potential for unleashing the human impulse to compare to magnify whatever feelings of insecurity or abandonment or loss each individual feels in his or her soul why did cain slay abel he felt disrespected because god regarded his offerings differently from those of abel it came to pass that cain rose up against abel his brother and slew him why was joseph resplendent in his coat of many colors thrown into that pit and left for dead by his brothers they felt disrespected because their father regarded them differently from joseph why do so many young men on the streets with empty lives and loaded guns slay their brothers they tell us time and again that their brothers disrespected them and often what they re really feeling is that their fathers disrespected them by abandoning their mothers and them those those who are quick to feel disrespected often have a spiritual vacuum in their lives because they feel disconnected to the love of their father in heaven false gods force their way into the hole in their hearts they search for meaning and respect in trivial forms of group identification rival gangs adopt rival colors the slight difference between a blue bandanna and a red bandanna has led to the senseless loss of many lives what is the difference between the hutus and the tutsis outsiders who visit rwanda have difficulty telling them apart but their slight differences have served as a trigger for an horrific genocide look at bosnia there too outsiders can t tell the different groups apart look at northern ireland the middle east chechnya nagorno karabakh and a hundred other places that dot the broken landscape of our hurting world in all these places slight differences have served as an excuse to unleash the evil that lies coiled in the human soul sometimes it seems that the smaller the difference the more explosive the violence at the beginning of this century our greatest scientist albert einstein taught us that the most powerful and destructive force on earth is found in the smallest container so small we can t even see it with the naked eye the atom controlling our vulnerability to racism is every bit as crucial to the future of humankind as controlling the power of the atom our nation was founded on the basis of a highly sophisticated understanding of human nature which took our vulnerability to sin into account that s why we have checks and balances in a constitution that has been emulated by freedom loving people all over this earth one of our founders james madison wrote these words so strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities that the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts the latent causes are sown in the nature of man and cannot be removed relief is only to be sought in controlling its effects the majority must be rendered unable to carry into effect schemes of oppression as we have struggled throughout our history to perfect our union slavery and other manifestations of virulent racism have stained our national conscious when the cherokees were forced on their fateful trail of tears when mexican americans were forcefully removed from their farms and ranches when irish immigrants escaping famine encountered signs in boston saying no dogs or irish allowed when innocent and loyal japanese americans were imprisoned at the outset of world war ii and when hispanic heroes of world war ii who helped all our soldiers end the holocaust against millions of european jews and the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of chinese when these heroes came home they were denied burial in military cemeteries but in the aftermath of that war a war in which americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds joined together to defeat the racist rulers of nazi german and imperial japan minority groups were emboldened to insist that america live up to our values thurgood marshall led the charge in our courts and the mass movement led by dr martin luther king jr gave us a chance to redeem our nation s soul and much progress has been made yet now we hear voices in america arguing that dr king s struggle is over that we ve reached the promised land maybe they re just carried away by the arrival of the millennium maybe they are deluding themselves that when the calendar turns over to the year 2000 man will be perfected they d better check their computers these people who now call for the end of policies to promote equal opportunity say there has been so much progress that no more such efforts are justified but they fail to recognize that the tap root is almost 400 years long when i was 8 years old in the little town of carthage tennessee my family and i lived in a little house on fisher avenue halfway up the hill at the top of the hill was a big old mansion one day as the property was changing hands the neighbors were invited to an open house my father said come son i want to show you something and we walked up the hill and into the front door but instead of dwelling in the parlor or the ornate dining room or on the grand staircase my father took me down to the basement and pointed to the dark dank stone walls and the cold metal rings in a row slave rings we have left egypt but don t tell me we have arrived in canaan don t tell me that our persistent vulnerability to racism has suddenly disappeared and that we now live in a color blind society what would dr king see if he were here with us and walked out of this church taking us on a tour of america in 1998 i believe dr king would be proud that in the past 30 years we have cut in half the gap between black earnings and white earnings but i believe he would not let us forget that the wealth of black and hispanic households still averages less than one tenth that of white households i believe he would be proud that african american employment is at its highest level in history and african american poverty is at its lowest level in history thanks to president clinton all americans are rising with the tide of a stronger economy but i believe dr king would not let us forget that african americans still earn roughly 62 cents on each dollar that white americans earn he would not let us forget that black unemployment is still twice as high as unemployment for whites i believe dr king would be proud that the gap in high school graduation between blacks and whites has now been virtually eliminated and that more african americans are going to college than ever before in american history but i believe he would not let us forget that the dropout rate among hispanic americans is still eight points higher with barely half finishing high school and far fewer going on to college if he were here today i believe he would be proud that this administration has appointed more black more hispanic more asian americans more native americans to cabinet positions and judgeships and other high posts than ever before in american history but i also believe that he would not let us forget that in so many places and professions the glass ceiling still has not been shattered i believe he would be proud to see how much we have done to banish discrimination from our laws but i believe he would tell us that we still have much to do from banishing in banishing discrimination from our hearts and he would tell us we still have much to do to enforce the laws that are on our books that is why i am pleased to announce here today that president clinton and i are proposing as part of his initiative on race the largest single increase in the enforcement of our civil rights laws in nearly two decades through new reforms through new reforms and through heightened commitment to enforcement we will seek to prevent discrimination before it occurs and punish those who do discriminate in employment education housing health care and in access for those with disabilities this is a priority that is why it received such an enormous increase when almost everything else in the budget is being decreased i believe dr king would be proud of how diverse our culture has become with people of all races and ethnicities listening to each other s music reading each other s books living and working together but i believe he would be disappointed by how destructive and dangerous some of our culture has become with guns drugs and violence against women too often taking the place of family faith and community i think he would find unacceptable the number of broken homes and the failure of so many fathers to accept responsibility for their children i think he would heartbroken to see the devastation in too many inner city communities with boards still covering the windows and doors of some places burned in anger and grief three decades ago in the movie grand canyon the character played by danny glover surveys a desolate portion of south central los angeles and says it s not supposed to be this way two thousand years ago the apostle paul explained why it is this way all have turned aside together they have gone wrong so it is appropriate on this day to focus on the work that remains to be done and i believe dr king would urge us to get busy and he would be proud that for people of all races creeds and colors his birthday is a day of national reconciliation and service but i believe he would be genuinely surprised that as mayor campbell said some who actively oppose his agenda roll his words and phrases off their tongues even as they try to roll back equal opportunity the phrase the content of our character takes on a different meaning when it is used by those who pretend that that is all we need to establish a color blind society they use their color blind the way duck hunters use their duck blind they hide behind the phrase and hope that we like the ducks won t be able to see through it they re in favor they re in favor of affirmative action if you can dunk the basketball or sink a three point shot but they re not in favor of it if you merely have the potential to be a leader of your community and bring people together to teach people who are hungry for knowledge to heal families who need medical care so i say we see through your color blind amazing grace also saved me was was color blind but now i see the gospel of luke tells us of jesus s reaction to people who willfully refused to see the evidence before their eyes when ye see a cloud rise out of the west straightway ye say there cometh a shower and so it is and when ye see the south wind blow ye say there will be heat and it cometh to pass ye hypocrites ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth how is it that you do not discern this time man sees on the outside god sees on the inside i believe i believe i believe that god has a plan for the united states of america and has since our founding our mission has always been to advance the cause of liberty and to prove that religious political and economic freedom are the natural birthrights of all men and women and that freedom unlocks a higher fraction of the human potential than any other way of organizing human society i believe in my heart that our nation also has another closely related mission one that we did not fully understand when we counted each slave as three fifths of a person a mission we began to glimpse through a glass darkly as the terrible civil war approached i believe that god has given the people of our nation not only a chance but a mission to prove to men and women throughout this world that people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds of all faiths and creeds cannot only work and live together but can enrich and ennoble both themselves and our common purpose we learned in school about the lowest common denominator america is about the highest common denominator that is why dr king loved this country he often spoke about the glory of america with all its faults even as he was persecuted even as he was jailed even as he was hunted he spoke of the glory of america with all its faults during the bus boycott he said we are not wrong if we are wrong the constitution of the united states is wrong if we are wrong god almighty is wrong when the supreme court then struck down segregated transportation he quickly defined the victory not as a victory for colored folks oh no don t make the victory that small that was a victory for justice and goodwill and from the steps of the lincoln memorial he told us of his dream that america would live out the true meaning of its creed he was a patriot and always believed as we do today that america is indeed the last best hope of humankind so just as we reproach the apostles of apathy who tell us our work is done let us condemn those who spread hatred of america those disciples of division who preach a separatist philosophy and call people of a different race devils to them i commend the words of dr king when he said let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred the alternatives to bitterness and hatred are understanding and empathy and we must rise to this challenge with our hearts as well as our minds we must use in niebuhr s phrase every stratagem of education and every resource of religion to promote understanding and mutual respect and in our hearts we must nurture empathy in 1957 dr king quoted gandhi in saying that the appeal of reason is more to the head but the penetration of the heart comes from suffering it opens up the inner understanding in man he said of his approach to the white majority the negro all over the south must come to the point that he can say to his white brother we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering we will meet your physical force with soul force we will not hate you but we will not obey your evil laws many ridiculed his reliance on what he called the weapon of nonviolent protest but the white majority i promise you came to understand his humanity and the justice of his cause through his reliance on soul force in my tradition we believe the world has been transformed by the willingness of jesus christ to suffer on the cross suffering binds us together and enables us to see what we have in common and what we are called upon to do it can be summed up simply as it was in the gospel of matthew thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind this is the first and greatest commandment and the second is like unto it thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself so let us not weary in well doing as we address the unfinished agenda let us make dr king s dream our agenda for action and remember in the words of a hymn he loved in christ there is no east or west in him no south or north but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth join hands disciples of the faith whatever your race may be who serves my father as a child is surely kin to me dem algore2 10 03 al_gore thank you very much thank you all very much i really appreciate the nice introduction and all the big turnout here this morning i see a lot of good friends please forgive me for not trying to acknowledge all the dignitaries who are present but i just want to get right into this i do want to thank everybody at brookings and bob thank you give my best to strobe it s great to be here i appreciate your comments on the election there are all kind of stories that come out i was in florida two weeks ago after their most recent election there and i didn t make this comment i m about to report to you it was actually jay leno who made this comment but after governor jeb bush said two years ago he was going to make the florida voting system the envy of the world you know that you haven t necessarily reached that goal when the tonight show investigative team comes to find out what s gone wrong and he reported that the basic problem was that all the voting machines were still clogged with al gore ballots from two years earlier now i didn t say that that was jay leno i just repeated it for you this is a serious topic here this morning and it s a good place to talk about it i m going from here to the airport to head back to tennessee this is an election season we ve got a lot of important races there and all over the country but it s a time when it s good to talk about the basic choices that we re facing last week i spoke about the relationship between the proposed war against iraq and the ongoing war against terrorism when i spoke in san francisco i outlined my disagreements with some of the ways that president bush is pursuing a war against iraq but whether you agree or disagree with the approach of president bush there i think all americans should acknowledge and do acknowledge that when president bush feels strongly about an issue he can be focused and determined and relentless in pursuing his objective today i want to urge the president to focus on our stalled economy that way just as he has focused on foreign policy i say this because i am deeply worried that america s economy is in big trouble and i m worried that our current approach really is failing us president bush believes it is urgent that the congress act on the issue of war against saddam hussein prior to the election of november 5th for my part i think it s even more urgent that both the president and the congress take action prior to the election to strengthen our economy and get it back on track how can it be essential that we go to war prior to the election but it s absolutely fine to wait until after the election before we take any action to deal with the economy millions of americans are right now being seriously harmed by the rapid deterioration of our economy and i believe it s urgent that we have presidential leadership to completely reassess and change our current economic policy if we turn a blind eye to our weak economy it will eventually undermine everything else that we re trying to accomplish whether it s winning the war against terrorism or giving all families the economic opportunities that they deserve so this morning i am here to say to every american regardless of your political party regardless of your views on whether or not we should start a war with iraq with or without allies we all have an enormous stake in fostering the widest possible discussion about how to fix our economy and we ll all pay a price for any further delay think about it if the president does not propose action to fix our economy before the election we ll have to wait until next year when the new congress convenes and more likely we ll have to wait until next spring when congress has organized itself and finally gets down to serious business now conditions in our economy and in the global economy are so serious right now that a delay of that long could be extremely dangerous because in the interim a global recession or words could have already taken hold right now on every continent the economic trends are dangerous and worsening rapidly as bad as our markets have been hit particularly during the last three months the markets in europe and asia have been hit even worse in latin america free market reforms once reinforced democratic capitalism but today both free markets and democracy itself are threatened in many latin american companies by economic crisis and throughout the world all hopes are focused on the possibility that america s economy will recover we of course share that hope all of us do but looking at our economy today it is clear to say the least that we have a lot of work to do business investment has been declining and has declined during every single quarter of the bush administration in fact over these past two years it has dropped more sharply than at any time during the past half century not since the great depression has our stock market declined so dramatically in less than two years we have lost more than 4 5 trillion of stock market wealth more than a quarter of the total if we have another quarter like the one we have just come through ending yesterday our national losses will take us into truly uncharted realms we can t wait another quarter we can t go through another quarter like the one we have just concluded america can t afford it the world can t afford it just this week millions of americans whose retirement savings are invested in 401k plans are receiving statement with the shocking news that much of their hardearned wealth has simply disappeared one gentleman told me a couple of weeks ago he said you know my 401k plan it s just become a 201k plan it was obvious it was no laughing matter everybody here knows people who have taken a huge hit because of the sharp decline in the stock market and the worsening economy these losses that are being reported in the 401k plan this week come on top of last year when 401k and similar plans lost over 200 billion while iras lost 230 billion thank goodness that president bush did no succeed in persuading congress to put the entire social security trust fund in the stock market just before it collapsed you know people who are retired are far from the only victims the unemployment rate has shot up ward adding more than americans to the unemployment lines since last january long term unemployment has more than doubled in fact this administration now has the distinction of becoming the only administration in more than 50 years to preside over a net loss of private sector jobs and even those americans that still have jobs are finding that their purchasing power has dropped sharply those earning minimum wage for example have lost more than two percent of their real income for them and for everybody living costs have at the same time risen sharply led perhaps by healthcare costs health premiums for individual have jumped 27 percent affordable housing and quality childcare are increasingly out of reach for average families consumer confidence has plummeted by almost 20 percent home mortgage foreclosures have reached a 30 year high and personal debt is now approaching its highest level ever even at a time when interest rates are at a low level what all of this means to families is that they are working longer hours for less money the american people are now the hardest working people on the face of this earth the average american is now working three weeks per year longer than the average japanese nobody else comes even close to the amount of time that americans have to take away from their families working multiple jobs in many cases and still not being able to make ends meet they re more worried about the future they re less able to provide for their loved ones and families and millions are now postponing their retirement or interrupting their retirement and going back to work for many more years than they had planned everybody here knows men and women who are in that situation right now moreover the quality of life in most communities is also suffering because state budgets and local budgets have taken an enormous hit they ve been devastated by this historic economic decline forty five of our 50 states are now in debt tipper and i will be in tennessee later today we just bought a house in nashville the government there had to shut down for several days they re not out of the woods yet there are a lot of other states that are in almost as bad a shape and states are now planning sharp cuts in spending for education and job training and income support some of the problems of this economic decline are still in the pipeline still about to hit people perhaps worst of all due in substantial part to this failed economic policy the surpluses of over 5 trillion that had been projected for the next ten years has virtually evaporated when the new numbers come in it s probably gone completely i noticed where the president s budget director had told a group of reporters that revenue projections are just collapsing on them and they really don t know what to do about it that has also eliminated our best chance to pay down the national debt and of course under president bush s stewardship social security has not escaped the damage the budget of president bush calls for draining more than 2 trillion out of social security surpluses apparently as part of an effort to camouflage the full extent of the budget catastrophe according to president bush and his economic team none of this was supposed to happen even though much of it was in fact predicted by opponents of the president s economic plan some of them here all of it has apparently come as a shocking surprise to the president and to his economic team partly for that reason there is diminishing confidence here and around the world that the president s economic predictions for the future are any more reliable than the ones that he made in the past in fact the hard truth is there is a crisis of confidence in u s economic leadership throughout the world and this lack of confidence has become in itself an obstacle to global economic recovery people are simply not willing to place bets on the accuracy and reliability of what this economic team is saying will happen in the future yet rather than take responsibility for the failure of these policies president bush and his political team labored mightily to create the impression that our economic problems are primarily due to the terrorist attacks of september 11th 2001 the problem with that is there s not a single serious and objective economist that agrees with the president s assertion the economic damage from the attacks of september 11th was considerable but unrelated factors principally including bad economic policy were clearly responsible for most of the economic damage that we have suffered when taking office president bush said that he would begin a new era of responsibility and that a so called responsibility era would begin with the bush cheney administration yet today maybe i m missing something but he will not take any responsibility for the damage that economists say his policies have been creating now in order to lead our nation the president needs to accept responsibility for the fact that his own fiscal policies are indeed the largest factor responsible for the 5 trillion evaporation of our surplus the president needs to take responsibility for the failure of his economic team to respond in a swift and coordinated fashion to our domestic and international economic crisis and he needs to take responsibility for the fact that these policy failures have contributed to the crisis in confidence in u s economic leadership in some ways what s worse than the administration s refusal to accept any responsibility for what s gone wrong is that anyone who offers ideas to this administration about fixing our economy is not met with interest but with insult for example when majority leader tom daschle questioned these policies two weeks ago what was the response the president s budget director described senator daschle s speech as a tantrum and the president s chief congressional ally in the house of representatives even attacked senator daschle s motivation saying that his speech was and i quote driven by political greed not the public good well apparently the president s efforts to change the tone in washington have not yet born fruit when the subject is economic policy but democrats should not make the same mistake we owe the nation more than saying we told you so we need an alternative plan to get back on the right track we need to stimulate a genuine debate about what the alternatives are how can we fix this thing at this moment in our nation s history america is laboring under a weak economy experiencing a crisis in our financial markets and moving closer to war if we are to be responsible stewards we simply must take steps to match our nation s economic course to our current reality i know that we can get back on track we have done it before so today in the spirit of helping our country start a much overdue discussion i want to put a few ideas on the table first and foremost the president and the congress should undertake a complete reassessment of our current economic blueprint because what we re doing today is simply not working we need to reassess it and take a different approach the president needs to come to the table with leaders in congress to survey the current economic landscape and chart a new course now i m not asking the president to abandon his ideology if i thought it would do any good i would but i m not asking him to abandon his ideology i am suggesting that he make a sincere effort to reconcile his ideology with the realities being faced by the american people today i m asking really that he do no more than what his ideological hero ronald reagan did at the same point in his presidency before the mid term elections of 1982 and engage the bipartisan congressional leaders in a complete reassessment of our nation s economic policy to examine with clear eyes what is working and what is not working now i didn t agree with president reagan s ideology and as a member of congress i voted against his economic plan neither did i agree with all the sweeping changes that came out of president reagan s reassessment in 1982 but i respected president reagan s willingness to recognize reality and i respected his openness to an honest dialogue with those who held different views he didn t just put his head own and bull forward ignoring the evidence of economic catastrophe he brought in democrats as well as republicans from the congress and said okay i thought this would work but obviously we need to make some changes now let s work together and see what kind of changes we can make that s what we ought to have right now i m convinced that unless we immediately make some serious mid course corrections the bush economic plan will continue to drag us down and undermine our future clearly it is time for the president to engage the bipartisan leadership in both houses of congress in a reexamination of how america can get our economy and our decisionmaking process moving again and yet like a lost driver who won t stop to ask for directions the women are laughing before the men here now i resemble that remark as groucho marx once said like a lost driver who won t stop to ask directions the president clutches his old plan and continues racing in the wrong direction farther and farther into the economic wilderness with the fate of nearly 300 million americans in tow it s time for a reality check it s time to stop and ask for directions if the president would take an honest look at our economic reality we could then begin the process of moving forward in the right direction i believe it s time for the president to recognize the severity of the problem and come to the table president bush needs to sit down with the democratic leadership and with the leadership of his own party and honestly reassess where we are here are some of the pressing questions that have to be answered how does the president plan to pay for war homeland security social security and medicare all at the same time how can we refocus our resources to help our military win overseas and to help our families stop losing ground at home we need to start asking these questions and we need the president to be a part of the discussion responsible leaders have the courage to seek out what s needed when circumstances change at halftime any football coach worth his salt will look at what s working and what s not he ll make course corrections and then tailor his game plan to the reality he has encountered on the field some coaches wish they d done a better job of that last week sports teams do that regularly workers do that regularly but for some reason this administration seems unwilling to do the responsible thing we re at halftime in this term the game plan s not working the economy s in serious trouble hey let s figure out what s going wrong but let s have the coach come into the locker room and say we re going to make some changes we re not just going to ignore the fact that it s not working we re not asking the president to do something extraordinary we re just asking him to do what millions of american families have been forced to do when their economic realities have been changed so dramatically in the last couple of years they have been reassessing their plans in light of a failing economy you better believe that american families have been making a lot of changes out there they ve been reassessing what they re capable of doing what they can afford and they ve been having to change their plans i think it s time that the president changed his economic plan to keep up with the economic realities that americans are facing just think about all the people who have lost their jobs in the last 18 months or the americans who have seen their retirement savings shrink so much they are reassessing they are figuring out what they can afford today and they are setting new priorities the american people are doing the responsible thing unfortunately as yet their white house is not their solution is to tell people don t worry things will fix themselves well it takes more than words to restore confidence in our economy it takes action cheerleading will not restore confidence a responsible economic plan can secondly in addition to placing the current economic plan on the table we need to identify a group of first priorities that we can take off the table because they re priorities that we all agree on given our current conditions and that we agree have to come before other priorities in my opinion those first priorities are three fold resources for homeland security a fund to cover the estimated cost of a potential war in iraq and a short term stimulus including extended unemployment benefits and help for small businesses to jolt the u s economy out of stagnation and start creating jobs again and start getting our economy moving again third in order to restore confidence in america s economy we need to be honest with ourselves about our true situation unfortunately the president s budget and economic plan are based on what you might call for lack of a better phrase enron accounting and specifically what i mean by that and i mean this in all deadly seriousness they are projecting revenues that will never appear and they are hiding expenditures that will appear one of the most important factors in the success of the clinton gore economic policy was a rigorous insistence by every member of our economic team on using the most conservative assumptions concerning expenditures revenues deficits and economic performance in order to restore confidence we simply must have a speedy return to honest numbers in order to create the basis for an economic policy that works as intended now we also need to recognize and this is hard to say but we need to recognize that some members of president bush s economic team simply do not inspire confidence in the markets nor carry weight on his behalf during discussions in congress the federal reserve the business community and with economic policymakers from other countries and they need to be replaced we need to have a personnel change lastly the president should recognize the importance of investing in sustainable growth and energy independence investing in renewable energy efficient technology will not only create new jobs and open new markets it will give us new options as we confront the other problems that we re now facing for example it will decrease america s dangerous dependence on foreign oil coming from a part of the world that s in turmoil and could be in even more turmoil the president should also challenge the telecommunications and computing industries to go the last mile in finally connecting americans in their homes and workplaces to the new data services that require high bandwidth both of these priorities are really at the heart of how america manages the big transition that the american economy is going through right now we ve come to a dead end in our over dependence on fossil fuel it s economically unwise it s creating an environmental catastrophe it s continuing to generate geopolitical crises and yet there are all kinds of exciting new technologies that can create millions of new good jobs put the u s back in a position of leadership in the world economy and solve lots of problems at the same time but in order to get over the hurdle and break our dependence on old outdated approaches of the past we have to have leadership the second of those areas you know the economic vitality of what used to be called the new economy is still a potential source of dynamism for our economy today we re seeing continued revolutionary advances in computing power the so called moore s law that cuts in half the cost of computing the same amount of information every 18 months that can once again be a source of strength and growth in our economy but what stopped it what stopped it is the inability to get over that so called last mile to people in their homes and in their workplaces but again in order to break our dependence on the old dominance of monopoly structures and outdated technologies that prevent the full participation of the american people in this ongoing revolution we ve got to have leadership to break with the past and say let s go the last mile let s fix this problem and once again unleash the dynamism of america s economists let me close with this thought no one in america should ever give up hope that we can control our own economic destiny we can after all president clinton and i also inherited an economy deep in trouble and yet after a few years of sound economic policy albeit a policy enacted by the margin of a single vote thank you very much after a few years of a new and sound economic policy all those problems that we began the 90s with began to disappear an we replaced deficits with surplus we turned joblessness into 20 million new jobs the american people transformed a weak economy into the strongest economy america has ever known this was accomplished by the american people with boundless energy and ingenuity in the context of policies that made it possible for them to unleash all that creativity and energy an i have no doubt whatsoever that with a bipartisan reassessment of what works and what s not working and the right kinds of changes the american people can focus on the future and bring economic strength to america again we need to insist though that president bush open a full discussion of economic policy during the five weeks that remain between now and the november 5th election no more standing on the sidelines and pretending that everything s going great in the economy it s not we can t pass the buck we ve got to accept responsibility all of us for engaging in this discussion and making the needed changes i m optimistic that by working together we can make the right choices and start moving back again in the right direction we ve gotten our economy back on track before and we can do it again thank you very much i appreciate you being here dem algore2 2 02 al_gore thank you my friends thank you thank you thank you very much thank you so much for being here i can t tell you how much this means to me and tipper before you leave i just wanted to say this that i ve been asked would i do anything over again if i had the election of 2000 to do over again and the answer is yes if i had it to do over again i would have kissed tipper longer at the convention out in los angeles but she was struggling so in addition to tipper i want to acknowledge the fact that my mother pauline lafon gore is here this evening and our son al and you know thelma harper i wish that you could introduce me everywhere wasn t she great and i certainly enjoyed the great speeches by bart gordon and bob clement i want to acknowledge them and mayor bill purcell and cotton ivy and everybody who s worked so hard to make this a great event you know it s great to be back home in tennessee to be spending so much time here again and this is a time of transition for me now when i make speeches around the country sometimes i say you know they let other cars on the road with me when i drive and given that i haven t driven in eight years i m not sure that s a good idea but i want to tell you a true story about my about tipper and me driving from nashville to carthage it was after our family re union in nashville and not too long not too many weeks ago and we were driving out to carthage around dinner time and we started looking for a place to eat so we pulled of the lebanon exit there at highway 231 and started looking for a place to eat and we pulled into the shoney s restaurant there and we walked in no motorcade now a rented ford taurus and we walked in and sat in a booth and a waitress came over to take our order and she made a big fuss over tipper and then she went and talked to the couple that was in the booth directly behind us and she lowered her voice so we had to strain to hear this is a true story she said she said to the couple there yes that s former vice president al gore and his wife tipper and the man said he s come down a long way hasn t he i tell you what it s been that kind of year and the sequel to that story is that a couple days after that i had the opportunity to fly to africa i flew to nigeria and i made a speech in lagos nigeria and because that incident had just happened and i thought it was so funny i told them that story and i had to add a few things because they don t know what shoney s is so i said it s a low cost family restaurant chain and i told them we were driving ourselves and they laughed and then i went on with the speech and then i got on the airplane and flew back to the united states and we stopped to refuel in the azores islands and somebody came running out of the cinder block building there call washington call washington well now what in the world could be the matter well we called he s after your job cotton so we called washington and here was what the here was what the problem was one of the news wire services had already sent the following story all across the united states former vice president al gore announced in nigeria yesterday quote my wife tipper and i have opened a low cost family restaurant named shoney s and we are running it ourselves before i could get back to u s soil jay leno had already hit me with some rabbit punches you know he s a newscaster now along with david letterman my partner bill clinton sent me a real nice handwritten letter congratulating me on my new restaurant and i still thinking about putting that one on ebay no i wouldn t do that but but i still get people coming up to me and say what kind of restaurant is it we catered this food here tonight i hope you all enjoyed it no whoever did did a good job my friends on december the thirteenth of 2000 when i offered my concession in the presidential race i said that i was going to spend some time in tennessee and mend fences literally and figuratively and over the last year i ve gotten a pretty good start i ve been teaching as thelma said at fisk here and at middle tennessee state in murfreesboro tipper and i completed the i m glad there s some mtsu raiders here and some fisk students here and tipper and i completed our tenth annual family re union process and i ve also been driving around to different counties i haven t made all 95 yet but i ve made a pretty good start and i ll get to all 95 and to those of you who helped to put together meetings thank you very much i appreciate that and i m going to be coming to the rest of your counties i ve been reconnecting with friends old friends making new friends i ve driven from bristol to memphis and hit a lot of the counties in between and i ll tell you i love what i have seen and felt in our state there is a growing determination to become involved in helping to make a brighter future for tennessee and i want you to know that i love this state with all of my heart and soul i love you and i appreciate what you have meant to me i know that there is a i know that i ve got a lot more work to do here but i am committed heart and soul to the people of this great state you know that old story cotton about the difference between committed and involved is the difference between a breakfast of bacon and eggs the chicken was involved but the hog was committed i am committed you know with very few exceptions i have refrained from speaking out publicly on the issues for a year little over a year since the inauguration of president bush among the only times i ve spoken out were two times last fall when i wanted to join with all of you in expressing our collective support for the president s leadership of our country in response to the terrible horrific attacks of september eleventh and this is a time of course when this whole war is continuing and we all continue to stand together in the war against terrorism and with the president and we salute president bush s resolve in the fight against terrorism and in the immediate aftermath of that tragedy as the towers came crashing down on september eleventh we could all feel the american spirit rising up we are as strong and as united and as together as i have ever seen this country and that s a good thing and i know that i speak for everyone in this room when i thank our democratic party s leadership for uniting so strongly behind the president i am proud of the response of the democrats in putting country before party at a time like this that s what we re supposed to do never and the history books will confirm this in the future i ll bet anything on it never has an opposition party been so unified and committed in support of a president in the conduct of a war and i just want to say that senator daschle and congressman gephardt have done a great job we want to lift them up we want to help them lift them up senator joe lieberman my running mate bart gordon and bob clement and harold ford jr and john tanner all of the democrats virtually every democrat in congress and in the country has been doing the right thing in unifying during this time because patriotism really demands that at a time like this we all come together now while we are united on the war effort we all know there are other choices where there are very sharp differences between the parties real differences once again it is now time for the american people to look at the condition of our country and make decisions about which course we will take now is a time when the public debate should joined so that those decisions will be the right ones now i mentioned that i have refrained from public speeches on the issues some disagreed with my choice to withdraw from the policy debates for a time but it was right for me and i would do it again i thought it was appropriate given the nature of the election however we face now another opportunity in this great democracy in this election year of 2002 for people to express their views and vote for candidates who will best represent them for everything there is a season and tonight as this new election season opens i intend to rejoin the national debate and i want you with me you need to join it whether i will do so whether or not i will do so as a candidate in 2004 i don t know yet i don t know that yet but as i said in that concession speech december thirteenth a year ago no matter where my future lies i will fight for the principles that are important to our country s future and i will never stop that fight and i want you to get involved and stay involved and never stop our democracy depends on it so let s talk about a few issues first of all first of all it is now clear that our nation s present economic policy is simply not working especially not for the people who depend on it most i m concerned about the economy i was the first one laid off last november it s not funny you know an awful lot more have been laid off since then and that s certainly not funny and the policies as i said are not working now most of you know very well how i felt about last year s tax cut and i don t need to rehash that debate here but i will say this if anyone here is in the market for a never been used lockbox see me after the event listen after all of the hard work that went into eliminating our nation s deficit and building up the strongest american economy in our history the truth is america s economic house is no longer in order the policies are heading in the wrong direction not so long ago our economy was very strong because we made the right decisions it took a lot of hard work some democrats sacrificed their seats in congress to make the right decisions decisions that reflected our values i ll say this whatever anybody wants to say i believe bill clinton and i did a good job on the u s economy and our policies reflected your values but now our economy is back in recession an unbelievable four trillion dollars in projected surpluses have disappeared in a single year public investments in priorities like job training and school construction and health care are once again being slashed i believe we need a government that lives within its means invests in the american people and supports tax cuts for the people who need tax cuts tax cuts that are fair what we don t need is a government whose budget is based on inaccurate assumptions and whose priorities provide special favors for the few over the many if we continue going down that path we won t be able to honor the promises we ve made to our nation s seniors or invest in the future of our nation s children we must keep those promises we must invest in our children so we have to change the economic policy so it s up to you to make sure in this election year that we have some checks and balances and elect democrats to the house and the senate and the governor s offices i am especially concerned about what is now being done that harms our environment in the communities where we live in the world in which we live they re rolling back standards protections against pollution are being weakened for example to allow more smog even as the very latest studies tighten the linkage between air pollution and the huge prevalence of asthma among america s children they re trying to open up some of the most beautiful and pristine wilderness areas of alaska in anwr for oil drilling six month s supply twenty years down the road you re seeing some drilling under the great lakes and folks in that area are very concerned about that and our beloved country the u s once the world s leader in rallying the world to fight against the impending catastrophe of global warming has now served notice that this present government will no longer be a part of the world s effort to try to solve this problem and they re doing that in our name but the majority of the american people do not agree with that policy i need your help to make those points loudly and clearly too much is at stake and after all when you talk about the environment and global warming you re really talking about energy also and the vast majority of americans have long known that one of the best ways to secure our nation s future is by coming up with alternatives to continuing the burning of all this middle eastern oil in obsolete engines and boilers and technologies that ought to be on the dust bin of history we need substitutes and alternatives and conservation and we need leadership to provide it these kids are going to face a future that is shaped by those decisions but whether the issue is economic policy or environmental policy or health care or education or civil rights or equal rights whatever the policy in order for us to make sure that our country goes in the right direction we have to take on a threshold challenge first it is time that we have at long last meaningful and real campaign finance reform that s the key to passing good legislation and changing policies you know i said back during the campaign of 2000 that if i won the very first bill that i signed into law would be the mccain feingold campaign finance reform bill and recent events have made it clear that it s needed now more than ever before i ll say again tonight we need campaign finance reform to stop the ever growing alarming examples of too much influence by big money in washington d c the american people want campaign finance reform and the special interests don t want campaign finance reform i ll tell you also to our members of congress in the democratic delegation in tennessee and we should i ll say this we should be thankful to all of the 218 members of the house of representatives democrats and republicans who had the guts to sign the so called discharge petition guaranteeing that there will be a vote on campaign finance reform let s hold the congress feet to the fire on this if you care about these issues if you care about the economy if you believe as i do that campaign finance reform is crucial if you care about the environment then i ask you to join me in making sure that we elect the right democratic candidates in this election year of 2002 don t get ahead of yourselves the focus should be on 2002 too much is at stake the constitution says that one of the principle guarantees of our liberties is the system of checks and balances that our founders put into place that means that if you are concerned that the present administration might go too far i think they already have but if you re concerned that they might go too far then the single best thing you can do is not wait and think about 2004 elect democrats in 2002 to hold them in check and balance that is why today i am forming leadership 02 to help elect democrats and to train young activists in the skills of democracy we had a training session last summer we re going to do more and more still now my friends let me just give you one example of why this is so important i ve talked about our economic problems at the national level last time i checked we had some pretty serious economic problems right here in our home state of tennessee we need to elect a democratic governor in tennessee in november of this year we need to elect a democrat to the fourth congressional district i need your help to fight for the right causes and candidates let s win this november god bless you and thank you president al gore february 2 2002 dem algore20 1 99a al_gore hello buffalo ladies and gentlemen if this is the overflow crowd i can t imagine what s waiting in the other room thank you for being here we re going to deliver remarks in the other part of the auditorium and i know they ve set it up so that you can see it here but we wanted to come here first and say hello to you personally did you all see the president s state of the union address last night well we re going to be talking about some of the themes and issues that he talked about in that speech but before presenting it to you i just want to say on behalf of the president the first lady and tipper and myself we love you and we appreciate your warmth and support it is so great to be here and now ladies and gentlemen please welcome the president of the united states bill clinton dem algore20 1 99b al_gore thank you hello montgomery county thank you very much for your warm welcome and it is a warm welcome i want to thank the first lady for her kind comments and you know there is no doubt pennsylvania loves hillary rodham clinton tipper and i are so proud to be with all of you here today and we have been so privileged to serve with this president and this first lady over the last six years and seven and a half hours because we had the six year anniversary of this administration at high noon today and tipper and i were reflecting on the way up here about what a wonderful privilege it has been to work hard for ideas that really matter to the american people and for progress that s greatly needed for the american people and we heard a lot more last night about how we can make still more progress as we prepare our nation for the 21st century did you all hear the president s state of the union address last night was that some great speech do you agree with that agenda are you willing to fight for it let s pass it thank you you know you ve got some great members of congress here who are fighting hard to pass this agenda and to bring about the further positive changes that we need and i do want to compliment congressman joe hoeffel and his wife francesca they were in our home recently and you all have chosen so wisely and well their children mary and jake are here it s a wonderful family and joe hoeffel is off to a great start on your behalf i know that you have very high expectations and they re well placed i want to also acknowledge two other members of congress who are here both of whom do a fantastic job on behalf of the people of this state and the people of this country congressman chaka fattah and congressman bob brady would both of you all stand up please and congressman brady s wife debbie is here and congressman fattah s son chip is here and i wanted to acknowledge them i did want to say this i think that we should also recognize the vice president of the student council christopher blake it s so easy to overlook that position and actually it s an extremely significant position you and me you know coming to the norristown area i m reminded of two more of your favorite sons tommy lasorda and mike piazza as many of you know here tommy was a great player at norristown area high before he got drafted mike was a pretty good player too although he didn t play for the eagles but when tommy lasorda knew mike piazza s family he was mike s godfather and he urged the dodgers to draft mike as a favor to piazza s father so they did in the 62nd round but he never gave up mike piazza worked harder than everyone else on the field and that is exactly the spirit that i see and hear right here in this group here today and it s the kind of dedication we need to move this country forward now ladies and gentlemen last night president bill clinton stood before this nation and reported that the state of our union is strong and it is but that s really kind of an understatement because many of the economic experts are now adding up the figures and consulting the history books and looking back over the decades indeed centuries and many of them are now beginning to write but actually our economy right now may be the strongest economy we ve ever had in the entire history of the united states of america but we ve got more work to do still it is now the longest and strongest economic expansion in peacetime in the history of our nation as i say the overall figures are adding up in a very impressive way but we re also making tremendous progress in solving other problems we have the lowest crime rate in a quarter century the smallest welfare rolls in 30 years the cleanest environment in many decades and you know six years ago it s worth remembering that when the clinton gore administration started on january 20th six years ago we had in our nation at that moment by far the biggest highest budget deficit in the history of the united states and you know what we ve not only eliminated it we now have by far the biggest budget surplus in the history of the united states that s a turnaround for progress now we have cut taxes for middle income families we have brought the crime rate down we ve invested more in key priority areas that will build our country s strength for the 21st century balanced the budget the president will talk about his plans for the future and the use of that surplus we re seeing progress across the board all these new jobs lower unemployment rate all of the rest greater opportunities for all these young people this did not happen by accident it happened because we ve had leadership i listened also to the invocation and that famous line from scripture where there is no vision that people shall perish well i ll tell you what the flip side of that phrase is where there is a clear strong wise vision on the part of a president of the united states of america our country prospers thank you president bill clinton for your vision and for your leadership and for your presidency we re doing well in america we re doing well and the president knows that this is no time to rest on our laurels because this wonderful economy is one that not everybody is participating in you know in times past we ve had some good economic periods and a lot of communities and individuals and families have been left behind and from the very beginning bill clinton has said we ve got to try our best to create the kind of progress that everybody can share in and so we re redoubling our efforts to do just that and because we are in his phrase at the end of his speech last night at the mountaintop of this american century able to see into the future it is obvious that we need to use our strength and our economic prosperity in order to do even better and to solve the problems that remain unsolved and so he is charting for our nation a bold course and offering a bold new agenda to prepare us for the 21st century in presenting the president to you i just want to mention briefly three areas in which we re going to concentrate attention first of all joe hoeffel talked about this issue that some call livability or smart growth and i m well aware that montgomery county pennsylvania has been a leader in this field thanks in significant measure to what you ve done over the years joe we appreciate that you ve been a great leader in this area others have joined with you and in the county that boasts the home of john audobon himself you started one of the largest initiatives ever to preserve open spaces to maintain parks and greenways and trails and precious farmlands and we re learning from communities like this one we don t have to have a future in which the traffic jams get longer and bigger and more unwieldy where parents are explaining to their children on cell telephones why they can t get home to read them a bedtime story where road rage is on the evening news every night people are out there bumper to bumper and so the president is proposing the single largest investment in smart growth in the history of the united states of america to help communities all over our nation save open space ease that traffic congestion improve the quality of life and have a cleaner environment let s build an america that s not just better off but also better and brighter for the children and grandchildren that deserve a bright future that s what this issue is all about now secondly you know the environment is very important and we have been doing more to clean up the environment than any other administration ever has and at the same time building this strong economy so those goals go together and the second issue i would like to talk about from the president s agenda is the need to strengthen families we live our life primarily in the venue of our families and families can contribute to the healing that we all need or they can make situations worse and so the president from the very beginning has talked about and worked for this goal and the first lady has been tireless and very eloquent in pursuing this agenda as well i just want to single out one issue that is right at the heart of this agenda for families and that is the health care patients bill of rights what it s all about is this if there is a crucial medical decision that affects you or a member of your family that decision ought to be made by a doctor and not by some accountant for a company that s trying to cut corners at the expense of your health it s just that simple you know a lot of times doctors are put in a situation where they are not allowed to do what they think is the right thing for their patient and instead the decision is made by some young bureaucrat on the other end of a telephone line that does not have a license to practice medicine and does not have the right to play god and we need to change that situation as a matter of fact it reminds me a little bit of a joke that i heard the other day about three neighbors who died and went to heaven and ran into st peter and st peter interviewed all of them in succession and asked the first one what did you do on earth and she said well i was a doctor i cured the sick all my life and he said well come on in to heaven and he asked the second one well what did you do and he said i was a teacher i taught children all my life st peter said well come on in to heaven and he asked the third one and the third one is a little sheepish and he said well i ran an hmo and st peter said well come on in but you can only stay three days that s what they ve been doing to us and we need to change it a doctor a few months ago a doctor told me a true story about a patient of his who came into the emergency room and went into full cardiac arrest his heart stopped he died right on the table and the doctor used all of his skills and one of those instruments they call a defibrillator and they eventually brought this person back to life restarted his heart he sent the bill to the hmo the hmo refused to pay true story because they said it was not an emergency well now some of those fighting against this president s agenda may feel that the absence of a heart is not an emergency but to us it is and we need a health care patient s bill of rights to put the power and the decision making authority in the hands of doctors and medical professionals for the good of families now finally the third issue i want to mention from this agenda that we re fighting so hard for is education if we want to build a stronger nation for the 21st century we have to understand a couple of facts number one we are in the early stages of an information revolution without any precedent in the whole history of humankind we re seeing a dramatic change in the nature of work all professions all jobs are being changed some older jobs are disappearing a lot of new ones are appearing a lot of traditional jobs are changing the way people do them and so the strategic resource for the 21st century is knowledge and that means the strategic skill is learning and that means that just as in the earlier days of the beginning of the industrial revolution we got together and pooled our resources and worked together to build ports and railroads and to make sure that factories had the resources they needed and to make sure that we could make the industrial economy work for us instead of against us now it s obvious in the information age we need to get together and make sure that we have the best school system in the entire world right here in the united states of america because that s how we ll compete in the 21st century and so we ve been working to get more teachers into the classroom and bring the classroom size down so teachers have more time to spend with individual students we want to lift up teachers we honor teachers we don t want to tear down public schools we appreciate what teachers do and for these young people under this president s leadership we ve tried to open up the access to higher education and he ll talk about that it s an important accomplishment but there s one other thing that was on the agenda last year that the president said look we didn t do it last year he pleaded with the congress do it this time i want you to listen to this and i m pretty sure you ll agree but i want to ask you we have a lot of schools in america that are crumbling there are holes in the ceiling and cracks in the wall and portable classrooms you ve got a lot of investment going on right here but just 20 minutes away in the north penn school district there are a lot of portable classrooms and okay you all will meet on the athletic field later in the year i m sure but here s my point nobody should be in inadequate facilities you know when we talk about controlling crime we listen to the police officers tell us that if a neighborhood s run down and there are broken windows and there s litter all over and graffiti then the message to would be criminals is if you want to commit a crime this might be just the place there is an unwritten but powerful message in the nature and appearance of the community well the same thing happens in the schoolroom and a school building if our country allows a school building to be so run down that it s hard for the children to concentrate i was in a school where they had to move the desks away from where the ceiling tiles regularly fell down i was in another school that was so overcrowded they had to feed the children lunch in shifts and the first shift elementary school started at 9 30 a m in the morning and they just kept on going until the early afternoon well the message unwritten but powerful is if you re looking for a place to goof off this might be just your place because we obviously don t care enough to fix up your school and connect it to the information superhighway and make sure that it s prepared for the 21st century and so this president has said we ve got to take on that challenge after all we re all baby boomers when we first went into the elementary schools in the early 1950s there were portable classrooms then quonset huts left over from world war ii but the world war ii veterans got busy and did something about it and they built a lot of new schools and they passed the g i bill and they hired new teachers and gave them the training that they need and they stocked the school libraries with the most up to date books and they made the biggest investment in education that up until that time had ever been made and our nation benefitted from those investments in education well ladies and gentlemen there was a study that came out last summer that didn t get too much attention from the news media but to me was very significant it showed that these young people who are under the age of 18 have now just passed by the baby boom generation and now they are the biggest generation in the history of the united states of america now the question is this are those of us in a position to act today ready willing and able to take responsibility for facing this challenge the way the world war ii veterans did when the baby boomers were coming along into the schools our future is in these children and their future is in their classrooms with their teachers in what they learn and in their capacity to learn and so our president has said it is time to pass national legislation to make it possible for local school districts to build new schools and modernize the classrooms and create facilities that are worthy of these children where they can learn and be prepared for the 21st century now finally we re doing well and we ve got the agenda we need for the future this president s outlined a vision and he has the leadership skills to take us on the right road toward that bright future but there is one question that we have to answer the people of the united states of america because there is a lot of resistance to this president s agenda you ve seen it and you ve heard it we ve been able to prevail on many things but there are a lot of battles that lie ahead we need some bipartisan help but you know the response of the people of the united states to this president and his agenda will determine whether or not we will continue moving in the right direction and pass this agenda so as i present the president to you i want to ask all of you including those in the overflow room there are almost as many people in the overflow room listening to us on the television screen there as there are here and we re going to go by afterward and say hello to them personally i want to ask all of you to demonstrate to the people of the united states of america that right here in montgomery county pennsylvania you agree with president bill clinton s agenda for the future of the united states of america you support this president you want to see him lead our country in the right direction you want to pass these measures ladies and gentlemen i present to you president bill clinton dem algore20 6 00 excerpt al_gore and it s great to be with your great chair nickie patent and please give my best to the governor and your first lady and to all the other distinguished guests here it s great to be back in lexington you know my parents lived here for 10 years and it s always a pleasure to come back for the past week i ve been traveling across this country talking about the big choices that we have to make to secure prosperity and progress for a new american century now you can see right here in lexington what prosperity has done for our people new jobs have fueled new hope and a new sense of possibility right here and all across our land so today i want to talk about how we can build prosperity and progress not just for the present not just for the next four years but far far into the future i have good news to share with the american people in fact the news is better than good if we do things right we can make it far easier for families to save and invest for the future with even greater confidence and security private savings and investment are about something more than an ira or a bank balance they re about the future of this little baby over here they form the threshold of hope for the american dream you cross that threshold and the future belongs to you and your family your savings account can open the door to your first house it s the way a young couple can make that first tough down payment on a first home together your savings account can swing open for your child wrought iron gates that may have been closed to you and your parents and grandparents your savings can help you dream as they grow week by week about sending your child to college even if your father or mother never went to college even if you yourself never had that chance savings accounts can let your parents build a haven on the bedrock of social security so they can not only make ends meet but also live an old age of peace and plenty every hard working american family deserves to open the door to their dream when i was a kid i had lots of really good friends in two very different places the ones i went to school with in washington d c came mostly from well to do families with enough money to send them to college and stake them to a good start and most of them have done well in life the ones i spent my summers with in carthage tennessee were at least as smart but their families weren t nearly as well off and i saw the opportunity gap open and widen and there were times when it broke my heart they deserved more than they got and i ll be damned if i m going to let that injustice continue we need to have a bright future for all families in this country you know who i m talking about everyone in this room knows how hard it can be to save as a matter of fact it s hard enough to save even if you re well off expenses have a way of catching up with even high earning families but so many families who live month to month know how desperately hard it can be to protect that bank account for the dream they know how easily one car repair one doctor s bill one accident one unexpected sweep of bad luck can wipe it all out so you have to start all over again when that happens sometimes the dream can feel like it s fading like you ll never catch up with it sometimes for too many families it slips away and then they stop looking up to imagine anymore they try to accept that their bright child just won t go to college that that new home with enough room for the baby just won t get bought well i m here to tell you that is just not right never again should a hard working family see the door slowly closing on their dream on behalf of those people not just the ones who think comfortably about their savings over scotch in the club looking out at the golf links but also the ones who carefully try to make it all add up to the dream over a pressured half hour lunch break on the factory floor on behalf of those families we will take the white house in november of this year that s what it s all about on behalf of those people not just the ones whose families have taken for granted for generations that college awaits their children but the ones whose parents were just as bright whose kids were just as beautiful and just as filled with promise who fear that they ll never have the financial strength to pull open those ivied gates for the ones they love for those families we will take the white house in november of this year and i m here today to give those families fresh hope and concrete help today for them today because of their grit and dignity and trying hard to save and be faithful to the dream i m announcing one of the largest programs of tax free private savings ever proposed together let s put an end to the days when savings are a scramble if not an unthinkable luxury for too many families together we will make saving one of the easiest things a family can ever do hear me well my dream is an america in which your family s dream can come true and it can and here s how i propose today here in lexington that we create new retirement savings plus accounts tax free voluntary accounts that let you save invest and build on top of the guaranteed foundation of social security here s how retirement savings plus will work we will give people tax credits to match their own savings the hardest pressed working families will get even bigger tax credits and here is what this will mean to you and your loved ones for a married couple making 30 000 a year say a bus driver and a homemaker we ll match every dollar you save with 3 deposited right into your account and you can do it on your tax return and have it done automatically if you choose if a young couple saves just 20 a week together with our tax credits and the returns on their savings they could reasonably expect to save as much as 400 000 extra by the time they retire 35 years later you talk about opening up those wrought iron gates we re going to do it this new way to build wealth will mean a bigger nestegg for retirement it will also help with three of the biggest hurdles that any family faces buying that first home sending your kids to college and paying for major medical expenses and we ll make saving for the future as easy as checking a box on your tax return you will be able to deposit your full tax refund along with a matching tax credit directly into your own personal account this new initiative will ensure that millions more families can open the door to their dreams now i want to be clear on another point as well my plan for private savings and investment is very different from what others have proposed in this election it does not come at the expense of social security it comes in addition to social security we will protect social security i have always supported private savings and investment and i ve always supported additional incentives for middle income and low middle income families to save and invest more after all high income families already have generous tax incentives they get by far the lion s share of the tax credits and incentives that are on the books now but i have never supported plans that would steer the money that you pay into social security into the stock market that would undermine america s trust in the trust fund that would take the security out of social security i will not let that happen i will protect social security and together we will save social security i will oppose i will oppose the effort to privatize social security which could drain a trillion dollars out of the trust fund i will oppose the effort to privatize it it could not only drain all that money out of the trust fund it could drive our entire budget back into deficit again and you know what that means that could threaten our prosperity and apart from that harm to our nation s prosperity formula it would harm individual elderly folks people have the common sense to know that in the stock market there are good years and there are bad years there are winners and there are losers we will not on my watch become a nation that penalizes the elderly people who happen to retire in a bad year a nation penalizing the elderly people who happen to be on the losing end of the roll of the dice we will not become a nation that tells a 65 year old waitress a 65 year old janitor or factory worker too bad if you ve worked hard for a lifetime you need to keep going somehow for two or three or even more years my plan is social security plus not social security minus it s the best of both worlds not the worst of both worlds there s a clear difference a very clear difference you get the freedom and the incentive to save more and invest more but it will not come out of your social security your social security benefits will be guaranteed and the trust fund will be protected no matter how those investments perform under my plan social security will be just the beginning of a family s retirement savings and let me give you some examples i met a woman from seattle who works all day carrying for the elderly and for people with disabilities she loves her job but it does not offer her a pension so she s counting on her social security to be a major part of her retirement and she s worried that it may not provide all that she will need with retirement savings plus she will not only get the guarantee of her social security she ll be able to save tens of thousands more for her retirement another example i meet young people all the time dem algore20 9 93 al_gore thank you very much distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to thank the first lady for her introduction and leadership in this whole initiative this is the week that was as they say and it s wonderful to see so many physicians who are here and who are so strongly supportive of the president s efforts to reform our health care system i might say that it s a special honor to be with dr koop i look forward to his comments later he and i had a chance to work together on a number of projects in the last several years and it is always refreshing to hear his views it s very interesting to take stock of how much things have changed in so short a period of time the debate on health care is now dominating our national debate about where we go as a country no one any longer doubts that we are going to reform our nation s health care system now the debate is about exactly how and what kinds of changes it s very refreshing i heard kind of a throwback in the last couple of days from someone who is resisting change who made a point that i haven t heard in quite a while he said we have the finest health care system in the world and in many ways of course we do but he said we have to resist tinkering with it because it s just it s great well when i heard that i thought about an event last week when the president and i went over to children s hospital the first lady was out at mayo clinic and leading a number of events in minnesota that day tipper was talking with mental health care groups the president and i went over to children s hospital and talked with doctors and nurses there about the current system and what it means to them just in terms of the sheer paperwork and bureaucracy and red tape as is often the case when a big change comes people suddenly realize they have not allowed themselves to feel the weight of how bad things were until they can see the hope for change well that s the message that we heard over there as these doctors and nurses were saying since we sat down and really measured this we didn t realize what we were doing one patient comes in here under medicare and we have to fill out 26 different forms for that one patient we went to the file room the stack of paperwork is growing six and a half feet per day just in one hospital and one doctor said that in adding up the amount of time that he spent on paperwork he could have seen an extra 500 patients per week i believe it was per week per year i m sorry i don t want to get carried away with this no i don t think it was per year i think it was more than one per day in any event it was a lot the main point is the paperwork and the red tape and the bureaucracy is so overwhelming when people now finally let themselves look at it and realize what they ve been doing now i believe i ve got this statistic right a pediatrician said that she was spending 25 hours believe it or not 25 hours per week just filling out forms for her patients is that right okay the heads are nodding yes on that one well that s crazy and we have been in the midst of this effort to reinvent government and we ve been spotlighting the ways in which the system is very inefficient across the board and there are so many similarities between what needs to be done government wide and what needs to be done in the health care system this new approach is going to be simple one form per patient it is going to be effective it is going to extend health care coverage and it s going to eliminate the waste and inefficiency and we are all very excited about it and very pleased that you are here to help start this important week thank you dem algore21 6 96 al_gore thank you very much billy and thanks to all of the citizens of atlanta and georgia and all americans who have made it possible for our nation to host these games no matter where it travels in the world the olympic torch is a powerful symbol of unity hard work and the burning desire for excellence this year its final destination is atlanta and it has been making a remarkable journey to the centennial olympic games it was carried on a cable car through the hills of san francisco and in a jazz parade across the streets of new orleans it climbed the rocky mountains drifted down the mississippi river and circled ellis island in the shadow of the statue of liberty it has traveled in railroad cars and with the pony express it visited memphis in may for the sunset symphony by the time it reaches atlanta it will have passed within two hours of the residences of 90 percent of our nation s population as chair of president clinton s white house task force on the olympic and paralympic games i m intensely proud of all this torch symbolizes as i am of all the hard work that this task force has done to ensure that these games are the best games ever i want to thank my partner mack mclarty and all those who have worked under the president s direction to help our nation ensure that these games are a spectacular success for america and for the world the olympic torch has been shooting out rays of hope and shining a light on everything that makes our country great today the torch continues its journey now up this south lawn a community hero from our nation s capital lang brown along with 12 of the young people whose lives he has touched will light the torch dem algore23 9 02 al_gore i certainly appreciate the warmth of your welcome and i want to thank gloria duffy for that generous and i hasten to add overly generous introduction but tipper and i both enjoyed listening to that and to george dobbins the program director and connie shapiro our moderator today also i want to thank mayor willie brown for his help in helping to establish this on relatively short notice i appreciate his friendship thanks for your kind words about my service as vice president i really felt it was a tremendous honor i enjoyed the job i have to tell you that i did some research about the vice presidency and found that quite a number of my predecessors did not really fully appreciate the job and some of them resigned just to give one example before i get into my speech here john c calhoun actually resigned the vice presidency in 1825 to become a senator from south carolina and as many of you know he subsequently lost that seat to strom thurmond who s still there i want to talk about the relationship between america s war against terrorism and america s proposed war against iraq like most americans i ve been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend itself from the kind of focused intense and evil attack that we suffered a year ago september 11th we ought to assume that the forces that are responsible for that attack are even now attempting to plan another attack against us i m speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country which i sincerely believe would be better for our country than the policy that is now being pursued by president bush specifically i am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century to begin with to put first things first i believe that we ought to be focusing our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on september 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it the vast majority of those who sponsored planned and implemented the cold blooded murder of more than 3 000 americans are still at large still neither located nor apprehended much less punished and neutralized i do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than was predicted great nations persevere and then prevail they do not jump from one unfinished task to another we should remain focused on the war against terrorism and i believe that we are perfectly capable of staying the course in our war against osama bin laden and his terrorist network while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international coalition to join us in taking on saddam hussein in a timely fashion if you re going after jesse james you ought to organize the posse first especially if you re in the middle of a gunfight with somebody who s out after you i don t think we should allow anything to diminish our focus on the necessity for avenging the 3 000 americans who were murdered and dismantling that network of terrorists that we know were responsible for it the fact that we don t know where they are should not cause us to focus instead on some other enemy whose location may be easier to identify we have other enemies we have other enemies but we should focus first and foremost as our top priority on winning the war against terrorism nevertheless president bush is telling us that america s most urgent requirement of the moment right now is not to redouble our efforts against al qaida not to stabilize the nation of afghanistan after driving his host government from power even as al qaida members slip back across the border to set up in afghanistan again rather he is telling us that our most urgent task right now is to shift our focus and concentrate on immediately launching a new war against saddam hussein and the president is proclaiming a new uniquely american right to preemptively attack whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future threat moreover president bush is demanding in this high political season that congress speedily affirm that he has the necessary authority to proceed immediately against iraq and for that matter under the language of his resolution against any other nation in the region regardless of subsequent developments or emerging circumstances now the timing of this sudden burst of urgency to immediately take up this new cause as america s new top priority displacing our former top priority the war against osama bin laden was explained by innocently i believe by the white house chief of staff in his now well known statement and i quote from an advertising point of view you don t launch a new product line until after labor day end quote nevertheless all americans should acknowledge that iraq does indeed pose a serious threat to the stability of the persian gulf region and we should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction iraq s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as saddam is in power now let s be clear there s no international law that can prevent the united states from taking action to protect our vital interests when it is manifestly clear that there s a choice to be made between law and our survival indeed international law itself recognizes that such choices stay within the purview of all nations i believe however that such a choice is not presented in the case of iraq indeed should we decide to proceed our action can be justified within the framework of international law rather than requiring us to go outside the framework of international law in fact even though a new united nations resolution might be helpful in the effort to forge an international consensus i think it s abundantly clear that the existing u n resolutions passed 11 years ago are completely sufficient from a legal standpoint so long as it is clear that saddam hussein is in breach of the agreements made at the conclusion of the persian gulf war now one of the simple points i want to make here today is that we have an obligation to look at the relationship between our war against terrorism and this proposed war against iraq we have a goal of regime change in iraq we have had for a number of years we also have a clear goal of victory in the war against terror in the case of iraq it would be difficult to go it alone but it s theoretically possible to achieve our goals in iraq unilaterally nevertheless by contrast the war against terrorism manifestly requires a multilateral approach it is impossible to succeed against terrorism unless we have secured the continuing sustained cooperation of many nations now our ability and here s one of my central points our ability to secure that kind of multilateral cooperation in the war against terrorism can be severely damaged in the way we go about undertaking unilateral action against iraq now if the administration has reason to believe otherwise it ought to share those reasons with the congress since it is asking congress to endorse action that might well impair a much more urgent task that is continuing to disrupt and destroy the international terror network now back in 1991 i was one of a handful of democrats in the united states senate to vote in favor of the resolution endorsing the persian gulf war and i felt betrayed by the first bush administration s hasty departure from the battlefield even as saddam began to renew his persecution of the kurds in the north and the shiites in the south groups that we had after all encouraged to rise up against saddam but look at the differences between the resolution that was voted on in 1991 and the one this administration is proposing that the congress vote on in 2002 the circumstances are really completely different just to review a few of them briefly in 1991 iraq had crossed an international border invaded a neighboring sovereign nation and annexed its territory now by contrast in 2002 there has been no such invasion we are proposing to cross an international border and however justified it may be we have to recognize that this profound difference in the circumstances now compared to what existed in 1991 has profound implications for the way the rest of the world views what we are doing and that in turn will have implications for our ability to succeed in our war against terrorism what makes saddam dangerous is his effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction what makes terrorists so much more dangerous than they have ever been is the prospect that they may get access to weapons of mass destruction there isn t just one country that is attempting to get access nor is there just one terrorist group we have to recognize that this is a whole new era and the advances in the technology of destruction require us to think anew as abraham lincoln famously said as our case is new we must think anew and then we will save our country another difference in 1991 there was a resolution that had been passed by the united nations this time although i don t think we need one if he s in breach as he is we nevertheless went to the united nations to ask for one and thus far we have not been successful in getting it next in 1991 the first president bush patiently and skillfully put together a broad international coalition now his task was easier than the one that confronts this president bush in part because saddam had invaded another country but for whatever reason back then every arab nation except jordan of course jordan was in iraq s shadow next door but every other arab nation supported our military effort was a part of the international coalition and some of them supplied troops our allies in europe and asia supported the coalition without exception this year by contrast many of our allies in europe and asia are thus far openly opposed to what president bush is doing and the few who do support us have conditioned their support most of them on the passage of a new u n resolution fourth the coalition that was assembled back in 1991 picked up all of the significant costs of the war while this time the american taxpayers will be asked to shoulder hundreds of billions of dollars in costs on our own fifth back in 1991 president george h w bush purposely waited until after the mid term elections of 1990 in order to push for a vote at the beginning of the new congress in january of 1991 president george w bush by contrast is pushing for a vote in this congress immediately before the election now that in itself is not inherently wrong but i believe that puts a burden on the shoulders of president bush to dispel the doubts many have expressed about the role that politics might be playing in the calculations of some in the administration i have not raised those doubts but many have and because they have been raised this has become a problem for our country s effort to build a national consensus and an international coalition already just to cite one example the german american relationship has faced a dire crisis because of the reprehensible comments of a minister in that government about president bush s alleged motivations as she saw it now they ve apologized and perhaps we can move on past that but look at the entire german election campaign it revealed a profound and troubling change in the attitude of the german electorate toward the united states we see our most loyal ally tony blair who i think s a fantastic leader getting into what they describe as serious trouble with the british electorate because of similar doubts that have been raised now rather than making efforts to dispel these concerns at home and abroad about the role of politics in the timing of policy the president is on the campaign trail two or three days a week often publicly taunting democrats with the political consequences of a no vote the republican national committee is running pre packaged advertising based on the same theme all of this apparently in keeping with a political strategy clearly described in a white house aide s misplaced computer disk which advised republican operatives that their principal game plan for success in the election a few weeks away was to quote focus on the war vice president cheney meanwhile has indignantly described suggestions of any such thing as reprehensible and then the following week took his discussion of the war to the rush limbaugh show i believe that this proposed foreshortening of deliberation in the congress robs the country of the time it needs for careful analysis of exactly what may lie before us such consideration is all the more important because the administration has failed thus far to lay out an assessment of how it thinks the course of a war will run even as it has given free run to persons both within and close to the administration to suggest at every opportunity that this will a pretty easy matter and it may well be but the administration has not said much of anything to clarify its idea of what would follow regime change or the degree of engagement that it is prepared to accept for the united states in iraq in the months and years after a regime change has taken place now i believe that this is unfortunate because in the immediate aftermath of september 11th more than a year ago we had an enormous reservoir of good will and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world that has been squandered in a year s time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do but about what we re going to do now my point is not that they re right to feel that way but that they do feel that way and that has consequences for us squandering all that good will and replacing it with anxiety in a year s time is similar to what was done by turning a 100 billion surplus into a 200 billion deficit in a year s time now we have seen the assertion of a brand new doctrine called preemption based on the idea that in the era of proliferating weapons of mass destruction and against the background of a sophisticated terrorist threat the united states cannot wait for proof of a fully established mortal threat but should rather act at any point to cut that short now the problem with preemption is that in the first instance it is not needed in order to give the united states the means to act in our own defense either against terrorism in general or against iraq in particular but that s a relatively minor issue compared to the longer term consequences that i think can be foreseen for this doctrine to begin with the doctrine is presented in open ended terms which means that if iraq is the first point of application it is not necessarily the last in fact the very logic of the concept suggests a string of military engagements against a succession of sovereign states syria libya north korea iran none of them very popular in the united states of course but the implication is that wherever the combination exists of an interest in weapons of mass destruction together with an ongoing role as host to or participant in terrorist operations the doctrine will apply it also means that if the congress approves the iraq resolution just proposed by the administration it would be simultaneously creating the precedent for preemptive action anywhere any time this or any future president as a single individual albeit head of state decides that it is time vice president cheney said after the war against terrorism began quote this war may last for the rest of our lives well i kind of think i know what he meant by that but the apprehensions in the rest of the world that i spoke of earlier are not calmed down any by this doctrine of preemption that they are now asserting by now the bush administration may be beginning to realize the national and international cohesion are indeed strategic assets but it s a lesson long delayed and clearly not uniformly and consistently accepted by senior members of the cabinet from the outset the administration has operated in a manner calculated to please the portion of its base that occupies the far right at the expense of solidarity among all of us as americans and solidarity between our country and our allies on the domestic front the administration having delayed for many months before conceding the need to pass joe lieberman s bill and create an institution outside the white house to manage homeland defense has actually been willing to see this legislation held up for the sake of an effort to coerce the congress into stripping civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal employees now which is more important passing the homeland security department act or satisfying a relatively small yet internally powerful member of the right wing coalition that has as its number one priority dismantling labor unions now if that s the most important priority in that legislation that explains why they re refusing to let the bipartisan consensus in favor of it go forward now far more damaging is the administration s attack on fundamental constitutional rights that we ought to have and do have as american citizens the very idea that an american citizen can be imprisoned without recourse to judicial process or remedy and that this can be done on the sole say so of the president of the united states or those acting in his name is beyond the pail and un american and it ought to be stopped now regarding other countries the administration s disdain for the views of others is well documented and need not be reviewed here it is more important to note the consequences of an emerging national strategy that not only celebrates american strength but actually appears to glorify the notion of dominance the word itself has been used in the counsels of the administration if what america represents to the world is leadership in a commonwealth of equals then our friends are legions if what we represent to the world is an empire then it is our enemies who will be legion at this fateful juncture in our history it is vital that we see clearly who are our enemies and that we intend to deal with them it is also important however that in the process we preserve not only ourselves as individuals but our nature as a people dedicated to the rule of law now here s another of the main points i want to make if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as president bush has quickly abandoned almost all of afghanistan after defeating a fifth rate military power there then the resulting chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the united states than we presently face from saddam here s why i say that we know that he has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country as yet we have no evidence however that he has shared any of these weapons with terrorist groups if the administration has evidence that he has please present it because that would change the way we all look at this thing but if iraq came to resemble afghanistan in its current depleted state with no central authority well they have a central authority but their central authority because of the administration s insistence that the international community not be allowed to assemble a peacekeeping force large enough to pacify the countryside that new government in afghanistan controls a few precincts in one city and the warlords or drug lords control the whole rest of the countryside what if in the aftermath of a war against iraq we faced a situation like that because we ve washed our hands of it what would then happen to all of those stored reserves of biological weapons all around the country what if the al qaida members infiltrated across the borders of iraq the way they are in afghanistan then the question wouldn t be is saddam hussein going to share these weapons with a terrorist group the terrorist groups would have an enhanced ability to just walk in there and get them now i just think that if we end the war in iraq the way we ended the war in afghanistan we could very well be much worse off than we are today and when you ask the administration about this what s their intention in the aftermath of a war secretary rumsfeld was asked recently about what our responsibility would be for restabilizing iraq in the aftermath of an invasion and his answer was and i quote that s for the iraqis to come together and decide now on the surface you can understand the logic behind that and this not an afterthought this is based on administration policy i vividly remember that during one of the campaign debates in 2002 jim lehrer asked then governor bush whether or not america after being involved in military action should engage in any form of nation building and the answer was and i quote i don t think so i think what we need to do is to convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations maybe i m missing something here we re going to have a kind of nation building corps in america absolutely not now my point is this is a bush doctrine this is administration policy given that it is administration policy we have to take that into account as a nation in looking at the likely consequences of an overwhelming american military victory against the government of iraq if we go in there and dismantle them and they deserve to be dismantled but then we wash our hands of it and walk away and leave it in a situation of chaos and say oh that s for you all to decide how to put things back together now that hurts us now here we are in the city where the united nations was established even before the u n was established you look back over the last 85 to 100 years there is lots and lots of evidence about why it s almost as important to win the peace following a war as it to win the war itself couple of examples the absence of any enlightened nation building after world war i led directly to the conditions which made germany vulnerable to fascism and the rise of hitler and made all of europe vulnerable to his evil design by contrast when the world s leaders met here in san francisco after world war ii there was an enlightened vision embodied in the marshall plan the u n nato and all of the other nation building efforts after world war ii and that in turn led directly to the conditions that fostered prosperity and american leadership throughout the world another example two decades ago the soviet union claimed the right to launch a preemptive war in afghanistan and we properly encouraged and then supported the resistance movement which a decade later succeeded in defeating the soviet army s effort unfortunately however when the russians left we abandoned the afghans and the lack of any coherent nation building program led directly to the conditions which allowed the taliban to take control and to bring in al qaida and give them a home and a base for their worldwide terrorist operation that s where they planned the attack on us a year ago september 11th now incredibly in spite of that vivid lesson after defeating the taliban rather easily and despite pledges from president bush that we would never again abandon afghanistan we have done precisely that and now the taliban and al qaida are quickly moving back in now a mere two years later after we abandoned afghanistan that first time saddam hussein launched his invasion of kuwait and our decision following a brilliant military campaign to abandon the effort prematurely to destroy saddam s military allowed him to remain in power now this needs to be debated and discussed by the congress you know what this tells me is that the congress should require as part of any resolution that it considers some explicit guarantees on whether or not we re proposing to simply abandon the iraqi people in the aftermath of a military victory there or whether or not we re going to demand as a nation that this doctrine of wash your hands and walk away be changed so that we can engage in some nation building again and build the kind of peace for the future that our people have a right to expect i think specifically the congress should establish why the president believes that unilateral action would not severely damage the fight against terrorist networks i believe that the resolution that the president has asked congress to pass is much too broad in the authorities it grants and needs to be narrowed severely the president should be authorized to take action to deal with saddam hussein as being in material breach of the terms of the truce and therefore a continuing threat to the security of the region to this should be added that his continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially a threat to the vital interests of the united states but congress should also urge the president to make every effort to obtain a fresh demand from the security council for prompt unconditional compliance by iraq within a definite period of time if the council will not provide such language then other choices remain open but in any event the president should be urged to take the time to assemble the broadest possible international support for his course of action anticipating that the president will probably still move toward unilateral action dem algore24 6 04 al_gore thank you thank you very much thank you thank you very much my friends thank you eric holder for that wonderful introduction and for your friendship and the privilege i had working with you and lisa brown thank you for all the work that we ve had a chance to do together and for your wonderful leadership of the american constitution society tipper and i are honored to be here today and we re grateful as i know we all are to georgetown law center for the hospitality in this magnificent facility i feel very strongly about the subject of the remarks i m making here today and i appreciate each one of you being a part of this group when we americans first begun our biggest danger was clearly in view we knew from the bitter experience with king george iii that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an executive whether he be a king or a president our ingrained american distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power it is the power itself that must be constrained checked dispersed and carefully balanced in order to ensure the survival of freedom in addition our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety security and freedom from fear it truly is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self governance and free communication but if george washington could see the current state of his generation s handiwork and assess the quality of our generation s stewardship now at the beginning of this 21st century what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison american citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime all that is necessary according to our president is that he the president label any citizen an unlawful enemy combatant and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen s liberty without due process even for the rest of his life if the president so chooses there s no appeal what would thomas jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our current justice department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture or prisoners and that any law or treaty which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war would itself be a violation of the constitution our founders put together what would benjamin franklin think of president bush s assertion that he has the inherent power even without a declaration of war by the congress to launch an invasion of any nation on earth at any time he chooses for any reason he wishes even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the united states how long would it take james madison to dispose of our current president s recent claim in department of justice legal opinions that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as commander in chief i think that it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in american democracy and that they would feel that we here now are facing a clear and present danger with the potential to threaten the future of the american experiment shouldn t we be equally concerned and shouldn t we ask ourselves how it is that we have come to this point even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks a potential that is all too real our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the america we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self governance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature again specifically the biggest threat to america is that we americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person having painstakingly created the intricate design of america our founders knew intimately both its strengths and its weaknesses and during their debate they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long term threat which they considered to be the most serious one but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent that is when war transformed america s president into our commander in chief they worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundary and upset the delicate checks and balances which they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty that is precisely why they took extra care to parse the war powers in the constitution assigning the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president but retaining for the congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not and when our nation might decide to go to war indeed that limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen as crucially important james madison wrote in a letter to thomas jefferson these words the constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it it has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature end quote now of course in more recent decades the emergence of new modern weapons that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to war or the declaration to war and the actual waging of war have naturally led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive s war making power but the practicalities of modern warfare which do necessarily increase the war powers of the president at the expense of congress do not thereby render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the making of war by the president when added to his other powers carries with it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our constitution and in the process actually threatening our liberties they our founders were greatly influenced far more than we can imagine by a careful reading of the history and human drama surrounding the democracies of ancient greece and the roman republic they knew for example that democracy disappeared in rome when caesar crossed the rubicon in violation of the roman senate s long prohibition against a returning general entering the city while still in command of military forces though the senate lingered in form and was humored for decades when caesar impolitically combined his military commander role with his chief of state role the roman senate and with it the roman republic and the dream of democracy withered away and for all intents and purposes democracy disappeared from the face of the earth for 17 centuries until its rebirth in our land symbolically president bush has been attempting to conflate his commander in chief role and his head of government role as a means of maximizing the power that people are naturally eager to give those who promise to defend them against active threats but as he does so we are now witnessing some serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a healthy democracy in america in justice jackson s famous concurring opinion in the youngstown steel case back in the 1950s the single most important supreme court case ever on the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time of war justice jackson wrote the example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercise by george iii and the description of its evils in the declaration of independence leads me to doubt that they created their new executive in their image and if we seek instruction from our own times he again writing in the 1950s continued we can match it only from the executive governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian i am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism as serious a threat as that is but how we react to terrorism and not war but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom i am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive legislative and judicial branches of government our current president has gone to war and has crossed back into the city and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the constitution in ways that increase his personal power as president at the expense of congress the courts and every individual citizen we must surrender some of our traditional american freedoms he tells us so that he may have sufficient power to protect us against those who would do us harm public fear remains at an unusually high level almost three years after we were viciously attacked on september 11th 2001 in response to those devastating attacks the president properly and skillfully assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps were harbored and planned their assault but then just as the tide of battle was shifting decisively in our favor the commander in chief made a controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade another country a country that according to the best evidence now compiled in a new exhaustive bipartisan study posed no imminent threat to us and had nothing to do with the attack against us as the main body of our troops were deployed for the new invasion those who had organized the attack against us escaped and many of them are still at large indeed their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice and then the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the united states in those lands and according to several studies has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked us and still wishes us harm a little over a year ago when we launched this war against the second country iraq president bush repeatedly gave our people the clear impression that iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that attacked us al qaeda and that iraq not only provided a geographic base for them but was also close to providing them with weapons of mass destruction including even nuclear bombs but now the extensive independent investigation by this bipartisan commission formed to study the 9 11 attack has just reported that there was no meaningful relationship between iraq and al qaeda of any kind and of course over the past year we had previously found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in iraq so now the president and the vice president are arguing with this commission and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are right and that there actually was a working cooperative relationship between iraq and al qaeda now the problem for president bush is that he does not have any credible evidence to support this claim and yet in spite of that he persists in making that claim repeatedly and vigorously and so i would like to pause here for a moment today to address the curious question of why president bush continues to make this claim that most people who have investigated it know is wrong and i think it s a particularly important question because it is closely connected to the questions of constitutional power with which i began this speech and the way we answer it will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among our three branches of government to begin with our founders would not be the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us about why it s so important politically for president bush to keep the american people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage between iraq and al qaeda just isn t true among those americans who still believe that there is a linkage there remains very strong support for the president s decision to invade iraq but among those who accept the commission s new detailed finding that there is no connection support for the war in iraq and the decision to launch it dries up pretty quickly and that s understandable because if iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that launched the attack against us then that means the president took us to war when he didn t have to a war in which almost 900 of our soldiers have been killed and almost 5 000 have been wounded and many thousands of iraqis have been killed and wounded thus for all of these reasons president bush and vice president cheney have evidently decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there is and was a meaningful connection between iraq and al qaeda they think that if they lose that argument and people see the truth then they will not only lose support for that controversial decision to go to war against iraq but also lose some of the new power they have picked up from the congress and the courts and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the american people as a result president bush is now intentionally misleading the american people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al qaeda and saddam hussein if he actually believed in the linkage that he asserts that would by itself in light of the available evidence make him genuinely unfit to lead our nation s struggle against al qaeda if they believe these flimsy scraps then who would want them in charge of anything are they too dishonest or too gullible take your pick but the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the president s determined dissembling listen for example to the words of this editorial this week from the financial times and i quote there was nothing intrinsically absurd about the wmd fear the weapons of mass destruction fear nothing ignoble about the opposition to saddam s tyranny however late washington developed this but the purported link between baghdad and al qaeda by contrast was never believed by anyone who knows iraq and the region it was and is nonsense end quote now of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy iraq s weapons of mass destruction which turned out not to exist then the rationale was to liberate iraqis and the middle east from tyranny and it has been a positive good to remove saddam hussein from power but our troops were not greeted with the promised garlands of flowers and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92 percent of iraqis while only 2 percent see them as liberators according to a careful poll by the coalition provisional authority but alongside those two rationales right from the start beginning very soon after the attacks of 9 11 president bush made a decision to start mentioning osama bin laden and saddam hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public s mind he repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a false impression in the minds of the american people that saddam hussein was responsible for 9 11 usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording indeed president bush s consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie visibly circumnavigating the truth over and over again as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering the truth but as i will document in a few moments he and vice president cheney also sometimes slipped away from their usual tricky wording and in careless moments resorted to statements that were clearly outright falsehoods on their face in any case by the time he was done public opinion polls showed that fully 70 people of the people had gotten the message that he wanted them to get and had been convinced that saddam hussein was responsible for the 9 11 attacks the myth that iraq and al qaeda were working together was no accident the president and vice president deliberately ignored warnings before the war from international intelligence services from the cia and from their own pentagon that the claim was false europe s top terrorism investigators said in 2002 and i quote we have found no evidence of any links between iraq and al qaeda if there were such links we would have found them but we have found no serious connections whatsoever end quote a classified october 2002 cia report given to the white house directly undercut the iraq al qaeda claim top officials in the pentagon told newspaper reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by president bush and vice president cheney was an exaggeration in their words and at least some honest voices within the president s own party admitted the same thing senator chuck hagel a decorated war hero who sits on the foreign relations committee said point blank and i quote saddam is not in league with al qaeda i have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect saddam hussein with al qaeda period end quote but these voices and others did not stop the deliberate campaign to mislead america over the course of a year the president and vice president used their carefully crafted language to scare americans into believing there was an imminent threat from al qaeda that was going to be armed by iraq in the fall of 2002 president bush actually told the country and i quote you cannot distinguish between al qaeda and saddam end quote he also said and i quote the true threat facing our country is an al qaeda type network trained and armed by saddam end quote at the same time vice president cheney was repeating his claim that and i quote there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al qaeda and the iraqi government end quote by the spring secretary of state powell was in front of the united nations in an appearance he now says he regrets claiming a and i quote sinister nexus between iraq and the al qaeda terrorist network end quote but after the invasion no ties were found no evidence emerged in june of 2003 the united nations security council s al qaeda monitoring agency told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the iraqi regime to al qaeda by august 3 former bush administration national security and intelligence officials admitted that the evidence that had been used to make this iraq al qaeda claim was in their words tenuous exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies end quote and earlier this year knight ridder newspapers reported and again i quote senior u s officials now say there never was any evidence of a connection so when the bipartisan 9 11 commission issued its report last week finding no credible evidence of an iraqi al qaeda connection it should not have caught the white house off guard yet instead of the candor that americans need and deserve from their leaders there have been more denials and more insistence without evidence vice president cheney for example said even this week and i quote there clearly was a relationship and there was overwhelming evidence even more shockingly cheney put forward this question quote was iraq involved with al qaeda in the attack on 9 11 we don t know and then he claimed that he probably had more information than the commission had but has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more insults the president was even more brazen he dismissed all questions about his statements by saying and i quote the reason i keep insisting that there was a relationship between iraq and saddam and al qaeda was because there was a relationship between iraq and al qaeda and he provided no evidence whatsoever friends of the administration have tried mightily to rehabilitate their cherished by now shattered linkage john lehman one of the republicans on the 9 11 commission offered up what sounded at first like new evidence that a saddam henchman had attended an al qaeda meeting but within hours the commission s files yielded definitive evidence that no that was another man with a similar name ironically capturing the near miss quality of bush s entire symbolic argument they have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in the minds of the american people that hussein was in partnership with bin laden that they dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless totally discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever but the damage they have done to our country is not limited to the misallocation of military and economic and political resources not limited even to the loss of blood and treasure because whenever a chief executive whenever a president spends prodigious amounts of energy in an effort to convince the american people of a falsehood he damages the fabric of democracy and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self government and that creates a need for that they feel for control over the flood of bad news and bad policies and bad decisions and that also explains their striking attempts to influence and control news coverage to take the most recent example vice president cheney was clearly eager and ready to do battle with the news media when he went out on cnbc earlier this week to attack news coverage of the 9 11 commission s conclusion that iraq did not have a relationship with al qaeda he lashed out at the new york times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9 11 commission finds no qaeda iraq tie a clear statement of the obvious and he then said that there is no quote fundamental split here and now between what the president said and what the commission said end quote he tried to deny that he had ever personally been responsible for helping to create the false impression that there was linkage between al qaeda and iraq ironically his interview ended up being fodder for the daily show with jon stewart and stewart played cheney s outright denial that he had ever said that representatives of al qaeda and iraqi intelligence met in prague and then stewart froze cheney s image and played the exact video clip when cheney had indeed said exactly that in exactly the words he had denied catching him on videotape in a lie and at that point stewart said addressing himself to cheney s frozen image on the television screen it s my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire it s not unusual in the news gathering environment of the kind that exists in our country today for comedians to be able to say things that others feel like they can t dan rather for example said that the post 9 11 patriotism stifled journalism has stifled journalists from asking government officials quote the toughest of the tough questions rather went so far as to reach for a metaphor and compare administration efforts to intimidate the press to necklacing in apartheid south africa while acknowledging it as a in his phrase an obscene comparison here s the point he made and i use his words the fear is that you will be necklaced you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck rather explained it was his network cbs remember that withheld the abu ghraib photographs from the american people for two weeks at the request of the bush administration i have a close friend whose young son was staying with a family in barcelona spain for the spring quarter and he called his father in anguish during that two week period and said the spanish family with whom he was living was telling him in the spanish he had not yet perfected that america had been found to be torturing iraqi prisoners stripping their clothes off and making them do all the things we saw in the pictures and dad it s not true is it and his father said no son it s not true of course it s not true you tell them that i don t know what they have on their television there but this is not true this is not america his son relayed the response from his spanish host family who said tell your father that they don t show you these pictures in the united states now but we see them three days later this father called his son back embarrassed and chagrined and said it was us i can t believe it and that s kind of the reaction most all of us had but the fact that others around the world saw these pictures before we did is itself an issue that runs to the core of important concerns about the course of our democracy secretary of defense donald rumsfeld has said that current criticisms of the administration s policy in iraq and i quote makes it complicated and more difficult to fight the war cnn s christiane amanpour said on another network last september and i quote i think the press was muzzled and i think the press self muzzled i m sorry to say but certainly television and perhaps to a certain extent my station was intimidated by the administration end quote the administration works closely with a network of rapid responders a group of digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors and publishers and advertisers and are quick to accuse them of undermining support for our troops paul krugman the new york times columnist was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the president s consistent distortion of the facts krugman writes and i quote let s not overlook the role of intimidation after 9 11 if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president you had to expect right wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation bush and cheney are spreading purposeful confusion while attempting to punish in any way they can any reporters who stand in the way of the confusion it is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions to resist that kind of pressure which in the case of individual journalists can threaten their livelihoods and in the case of the broadcasters can lead to other forms of economic retribution but resist they must because without a press able to report without fear or favor our democracy will disappear recently the media has engaged in some healthy self criticism of the way it allowed the white house to mislead the public into war under false pretenses we are dependent on the media especially the broadcast media which is so dominant in america to never let this happen again we must help them resist this pressure for everyone s sake or else we risk other wrongheaded decisions being based upon false and misleading impressions so now we are left with an ongoing unprecedented high intensity conflict every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this administration s policies have been based and the reality of the world in which the american people live their lives when you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the bush iraq policy it s actually fairly simple he adopted an ideologically driven view of iraq that was tragically at odds with reality everything that has gone wrong is in one way or another the result of this spectacular and violent clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all too painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have encountered of course there have been several other collisions between president bush s ideology and america s reality to take the most prominent example the transformation of a 5 trillion surplus into a 4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation as the iraq war but there has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this president s policies have taken america than the two profound shocks to our nation s conscience over the last month first came those extremely disturbing pictures that document the strange forms of physical and sexual abuse and even torture and even murder by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in iraq an estimated 90 percent of them innocent of any charge and then the second shock to our conscience came just this past week with the strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal rationale for the sadistic activities conducted in the name of the american people activities which according to any reasonable person would be recognized as war crimes in making their analysis the administration lawyers concluded that the president whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief is above and immune from the rule of law at least we don t have to guess what our founders would have to say about that bizarre and un american theory and by the middle of this week the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out and it was in their words irrelevant and over broad but no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong and in fact a department of justice spokesman today confirmed that they stand by the tortured definition of torture in addition the broad analysis regarding the commander in chief powers that they had asserted has explicitly not been disavowed and the view of the memo that it was within the commander in chief s power to order any interrogation techniques necessary to extract information most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the iraqis at abu ghraib we also know that president bush rewarded the principal author of this legal monstrosity with a seat on the u s court of appeals and the president himself meanwhile continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the bush gulag and led to america s strategic catastrophe in iraq i call today on this administration to disclose all of its interrogation policies including those used by the military in iraq and afghanistan and those employed by the cia at any detention centers operated outside the u s as well as all of the analyses related to the adoption of those policies we deserve to know what and why it s being done in our name policies matter the bush administration s objective of establishing u s domination over any potential adversary was what led to the hubristic tragic miscalculation of the iraq war a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another but the people who paid the price have been the u s soldiers trapped over there and the iraqis in prison and out the top heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the u s role in the world is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to be completely dominant within our constitutional system our foun dem algore26 7 04 al_gore my friends fellow democrats fellow americans i m going to be candid with you i had hoped to be back here this week under different circumstances running for re election but you know the old saying you win some you lose some and then there s that little known third category but i didn t come here tonight to talk about the past after all i don t want you to think that i lie awake at night counting and recounting sheep i prefer to focus on the future because i know from my own experience that america is a land of opportunity where every little boy and girl has a chance to grow up and win the popular vote in all seriousness i am deeply deeply grateful for the opportunity you have given me to serve my country i want to thank you as democrats for the honor of being your nominee for president four years ago and for all you did for me and for our country and i want to thank the american people for the privilege of serving as vice president of the united states most of all i want to thank my family with all my heart my children and grandchildren and especially my beloved partner in life tipper i love this country deeply wasn t bebe winans great i believe that s the best national anthem i ve ever heard sung i love this country deeply and even though i always look to the future with optimism and hope i do think it is worth pausing for just a moment as we begin this year s convention to take note of two very important lessons from four years ago the first lesson is this take it from me every vote counts in our democracy every vote has power and never forget that power is yours don t let anyone take it away or talk you into throwing it away and let s make sure that this time every vote is counted let s make sure that the supreme court does not pick the next president and that this president is not the one who picks the next supreme court the second lesson from 2000 is this what happens in a presidential election matters a lot the outcome profoundly affects the lives of all 293 million americans and people in the rest of the world too the choice of who is president affects your life and your family s future and never has this been more true than in 2004 because let s face it our country faces deep challenges these challenges we now confront are not democratic or republican challenges they are american challenges that we all must overcome together as one people as one nation it is in that spirit that i sincerely ask those watching at home tonight who supported president bush four years ago did you really get what you expected from the candidate you voted for is our country more united today or more divided has the promise of compassionate conservatism been fulfilled or do those words now ring hollow for that matter are the economic policies really conservative at all for example did you expect the largest deficits in history year after year one right after another and the loss of more than a million jobs by the way i know about the bad economy i was the first one laid off and while it s true that new jobs are being created they re just not as good as the jobs people have lost and incidentally that s been true for me too unfortunately this is no joke for millions of americans and the real solutions require us to transcend partisanship so that s one reason why even though we meet here as democrats we believe this is a time to reach beyond our party lines to republicans as well and i also ask tonight for the consideration and the help of those who have supported a third party candidate in 2000 i urge you to ask yourselves this question do you still believe that there was no difference between the candidates are you troubled by the erosion of america s most basic civil liberties are you worried that our environmental laws are being weakened and dismantled to allow vast increases in pollution that are contributing to a global climate crisis no matter how you voted in the last election these are profound problems that all voters must take into account this november 2nd and of course no challenge is more critical than the situation we confront in iraq regardless of your opinion at the beginning of this war isn t it now abundantly obvious that the way this war has been managed by the administration has gotten us into very serious trouble wouldn t we be better off with a new president who hasn t burned his bridges to our allies and who can rebuild respect for america in the world isn t cooperation with other nations crucial to solving our dilemma in iraq isn t it also critical to defeating the terrorists we have to be crystal clear about the threat we face from terrorism it is deadly it is real it is imminent but in order to protect our people shouldn t we focus on the real source of this threat the group that attacked us and is trying to attack us again al qaida headed by osama bin laden wouldn t we be safer with a president who didn t insist on confusing al qaida with iraq doesn t that divert too much of our attention away from the principal danger i want to say to all americans this evening that whether it s the threat to the global environment or the erosion of america s leadership in the world whether it is the challenge to our economy from new competitors or the challenge to our security from new enemies i believe that we need new leadership that is both strong and wise and we can have new leadership because one of our greatest strengths as a democracy is that when we are headed in the wrong direction we can correct our course when policies are clearly not working we the people can change them if our leaders make mistakes we can hold them accountable even if they never admit their mistakes i firmly believe america needs new leadership that will make us stronger at home and respected in the world and we re here this week to present to the nation the man who should be and will be our new president john kerry john and i were elected to the u s senate on the same day 20 years ago and i have worked closely with him for all that time so i want to say a personal word about john kerry the man he is a friend who will stand by you his word is his bond he has a deep patriotism that goes far beyond words he has devoted his life to making america a better place for all of us he showed uncommon heroism on the battlefield in vietnam i watched him show that same courage on the senate floor for example he had the best record of protecting the environment against polluters of any of my colleagues bar none he never shied away from a fight no matter how powerful the foe he was never afraid to take on difficult and thankless issues that few others wanted to touch like exposing the threat of narcoterrorism and tracing the sources of terrorist financing he was one of the very first in our party to take on the issue of drastic deficit reduction and he has developed a tough and thoughtful plan to restore our economic strength and fiscal discipline to put it simply those of us who have worked with john know that he has the courage integrity and leadership to be a truly great president of the united states of america and he showed wisdom in his very first decision as the leader of our party when he picked as his running mate an inspiring fighter for middle class families and families struggling to reach the middle class john edwards of north carolina john kerry and john edwards are fighting for us and for all americans so after we nominate them here in boston and return back to our home states across this land we have to fight for them talk to your friends and neighbors go to johnkerry com raise money register voters get them to the polls volunteer your time and above all make your vote count to those of you who felt disappointed or angry with the outcome in 2000 i want you to remember all of those feelings but then i want you to do with them what i have done focus them fully and completely on putting john kerry and john edwards in the white house so we can have a new direction in america a new president a new vice president new policies a new day a brighter future what this country and what our people deserve fellow democrats when i look out and see so many friends who have meant so much to me in my own public service my heart is full tonight i thank you for all the love you ve shown to tipper and me you will forever be in our hearts and there s someone else i d like to thank and that s the man who asked me to join him on the ticket at our convention 12 years ago my friend and my partner for eight years president bill clinton i will never forget that convention or that campaign the way we barnstormed the country carrying a message of hope and change believing with our whole hearts that america could be made new again and so it was and with your help and with the leadership of john kerry and john edwards so it shall be again thank you god bless you and may god bless the united states dem algore27 6 95 al_gore thank you very much what a crowd thank you for being a part of it it goes way back way up there and thank you very much for coming and congresswoman elizabeth furse what can i say i love you too and that is the first time you will not you may not have any trouble believing this at all that is the first time in my life that i have been introduced to an audience as someone who is funny never in my life has anyone included that in my introduction this is a first and i hope that somebody made note of that anyway thank you thank you too for your courage and leadership and vision and your life long commitment to justice and to creating a better life for all of us we really appreciate you very much thank you and to president judith ramaley thank you for the wonderful way in which portland state hosted this conference today we can t thank you and your colleagues here enough it s a great institution and we appreciate you for being a leader in science education in the urban university movement thank you very much we appreciate everything you do i want to on behalf of the president i also want to thank secretary of education dick riley secretary of commerce ron brown secretary of transportation frederico pena who spoke here and the other representatives from the administration small business administrator phil lader and i don t have my glasses on so i m going to miss some people that i can t identify over there lots of deputy secretaries and people who are key assistants to the president everybody who worked so hard to make this such a success today and to mayor vera katz and governor john kitzhaber they re not here but i want to say to both of them how much we all appreciate their leadership and their help in making this possible today and thank you all for being here we appreciate you we thought it was hot inside at the beginning of the day a little bit hot outside today maybe when we re done we can grab some refreshment at the cheerful tortoise or mcmenamins we took our coats off inside and governor kitzhaber of course has established a new tradition that we want to take back to washington if we can figure out a way to get away with it to go to work in blue jeans and without a tie i think can we figure out a way to do that we d call it maybe if we called the oregon initiative it would work now if you see anybody dressed up in those very hip white suits they re not drivers from this past weekend s indy race they re the royal rosarians still hanging around from the rose festival a couple of weeks ago and we ve heard all about that since we ve been here i heard that it was the most exciting thing since the portland state football coach tim walsh bungee jumped off civic stadium i wish i d been here to see that i thought dealing with congress was dangerous we ve had a wonderful day and as congresswoman furse said we have listened and we have learned we have heard firsthand about the economy of the pacific rim region of america we ve had a chance to talk about the administration of president bill clinton and his vision for the future and we ve tried to outline what we think it can mean to the people of oregon washington california alaska and hawaii and we ve heard an awful lot in return about what we can do to move even faster toward the kind of future that we want in our country we wanted to have that conversation about where america is going and what needs to be done and one thing we heard over and over again was the need for partnership the kind of partnership that portland has formed with the federal government because of the oregon initiative a part of our reinventing government program on the federal side of that partnership and a part of the ongoing spirit of innovation in portland and in oregon on your side of it that partnership is also reflected in the americorps volunteers who are here today the envirocorps is here so is the police activities league there you go self enhancement incorporated campfire these and other groups are doing a terrific job of helping out at risk youths and the boy scouts and girl scouts and boys and girls clubs of america the ymca and the ywca they re here too and of course all of the students and faculty from portland state we appreciate you including the mensa students working hard for good grades and portland state takes a lot of pride in being an urban university and i think the motto is very appropriate let knowledge serve the city because this city and this school are linked and it s refreshing and inspiring to see them develop in a way that serves the needs of both now in closing before presenting the president let me mention just one other group a group that encompasses all of you citizens of our country the idea of self government has been under attack from some quarters in america but not here because the citizens of oregon and washington and california and all of the pacific rim states and our country are proud of what the united states of america stands for and those who live here in portland are perhaps especially proud when this city was founded 150 years ago there was a big debate i understand about what to name it one person who bought his share of the land was from maine and preferred portland asa lovejoy was from massachusetts and preferred boston so they flipped a copper coin to determine the outcome but the challenges that we dealt with all day long today cannot be determined by flipping a coin they require partnership and hard work and commitment and citizenship and ladies and gentlemen they require one other indispensable element the element that has brought us together that has helped us create in the last two and a half years 6 7 million new jobs the lowest inflation rate in 30 years a 20 percent decline in the unemployment rate budget deficit cuts for three years in a row for the first time since harry truman was president a downsizing of the government by more than ever in history and a booming economy ladies and gentlemen that element is leadership from the president of the united states of america bill clinton dem algore28 1 98a al_gore thank you very much it is great to be here thank you for all that enthusiasm i really do appreciate it very much i want to thank carol moseley braun for her kind words and her friendship and i want to thank her for doing a great job for the people of illinois and the people of our country thank you carol and i want to thank senator dick durbin for also doing a spectacular job for this nation and for the people of this state i want to thank congressman tom ewing for coming here with us and being a very gracious host thank you congressman congressman ron kind from wisconsin is here with the president today and i want to thank chancellor michael aiken and president james stukel and ladies and gentlemen i want to ask you to join me in expressing thanks to a man who i think without question has been the best secretary of education our country has ever had dick riley would you stand up secretary riley we appreciate it i want to thank mayor dan mccullom of champaign and mayor todd satterthwaite of urbana and all the other distinguished guests who are here and on behalf of the president i want to thank the groups that provided music the members of the black chorus the girls next door and the other guys the university of illinois pep band and tony clement thank you tony i was listening as dick durbin did that experiment with the sound system of the ill see i m not from here so i didn t know if that i m libel to say something like you know osciwawa what does that mean again anyway thank you very much i m really excited to be back here on this campus as dick said i ve been here many times i ve got a lot of friends on this campus and back when i was in the house of representatives and then in the united states senate i worked for 20 years to create what we now call the information superhighway and i m telling you this is really the central cloverleaf for the information superhighway right here on this campus i don t think we ll have time to go to the beckman institute and play their computer and air hockey today but i did get a chance to see larry smarr and some other friends who do such a great job on this campus and there are people from other parts of the nation here who don t really realize necessarily because they might not have been here before that anybody who surfs the net and goes to a home page on the world wide web owes a debt of gratitude to this university and this campus for the creation of mosaic that made the world wide web accessible all around the country when we took office five years ago it s hard to believe this but there were only 50 sites 50 web pages on the world wide web only 50 and now there are of course tens of millions hundreds of millions it is absolutely incredible this university made that possible and that s in the tradition of champaign you all don t mind me saying that do you the first transistor was created here and incidentally a half century ago and this year more than a half a billion transistors are created every second in the world so from the world wide web to the transistor to so many other things this campus has helped to create the future and you know as much as any group of people in the world that our future depends on our willingness to invest in education less than a year ago i was here on this campus again and i was introduced by laura apenzeller your student body president and i conducted a townhall meeting on education and the new proposals that president clinton has put before the congress at that time to expand access to education and we helped to build the case right here on this campus and with the help of these three federal legislators who are with us we were able to expand the pell grants and create the hope scholarships and set standards and have a whole new revolution in education how many people here have personally benefitted from expanded pell grants and student loans and interest deductions for student loans well that is what we must depend upon for the future and ladies and gentlemen the agenda that has made this investment in the future possible has been put before our country by president clinton and last night he stood before the american people and told us what we all know to be true the state of our union is strong and he laid out a plan to make it stronger still we re going to stand by him and support him and help him to enact that agenda for the good of our country the 21st century can be the most prosperous and productive time in all of human history if we share president clinton s vision and follow his leadership and help to put this agenda into action but in mapping out the plans for enacting these proposals that he presented to the country last night let s don t forget for one minute what it was like more than five years ago when we came to this state and talked about the need for change the future back then didn t look so rosy don t ever forget the fact that when we took office there was a budget deficit of 300 billion the highest in history it was projected that year to be 357 billion higher still it was projected in the following years to go out higher than 500 billion a year and people were beginning to lose hope unemployment was up and job creation was down crime and welfare were both up and investment in education and opportunity were both down the hunger for change was up but hope for the future was down i used to say back then everything that should be up was down and everything that should have been down was up and we needed change in america and thanks to you we have had a chance over these last five years to put this agenda for change before the people and i m telling you president clinton has brought change for the better for america he has improved the prospects for the people of our country despite all of the problems and challenges that he inherited he did not look for scapegoats he looked for solutions he moved us beyond the false choices and toward the future he said let s stop arguing about the left and the right and move toward a better day for our country he said we can eliminate the deficit and at the same time invest in our people in our country and that s what we ve done under president clinton s leadership he said that we need to move passed the old argument as he said last night about whether the government is the problem or the solution because there is a new way his way which is to cut down the size of the government but invest more in education and environment and health care and job training and technology and the future of this country and that s what we ve been doing and now we have got the first balanced budget presented to the congress in more than 30 years and at the same time he has presented the largest new investments in education in more than a generation and we ve seen the creation of almost 15 million new jobs in america good jobs with higher wages more americans own their own private homes now than ever before in the entire history of the united states of america we re seeing the income gap close up african american poverty for example is at the lowest level in the history of the united states of america that s progress our cities are coming back our environment is cleaner our communities and families are stronger we ve got welfare down by almost 4 million people the biggest drop in welfare in the history of the united states of america i m telling you we re moving in the right direction our air is cleaner our water is cleaner we re cleaning up the toxic waste sites so today let s remember the contrast between what we have seen happening for the good in our nation these last five years compared to what was going on before we got here because the country was then moving in the wrong direction they had driven the economy into the ditch the problems were not being solved so the agenda that this president has been pursuing and presented again last night is good for this nation and today just 700 days before the dawn of the 21st century we are ready to seize this moment in american history to make your generation the best educated best prepared generation ever in the history of the united states of america we ve got to do that we ve seen almost 100 000 new police put on our streets we ve got to finish that job and we ve seen how it s working because crime in every category is on the way down now he has proposed in his speech last night to put 100 000 new teachers in our schools in this country to bring the classroom sizes down and improve the quality of elementary and secondary education he s already cut taxes for families and let parents take time off from work to care for a sick child or newborn now he is asking our country to focus on improved access to high quality child care and after school care and we can do it i m proud that he is leading our nation and the world to address the problem of global warming and clean up our world s environment for you and for our children i m proud that he announced the largest increase ever in history in the national institutes of health and the sciences and research and development to benefit the work in this university and elsewhere so ladies and gentlemen we have a choice before us in this nation to continue this agenda and the investments and fiscal responsibility involved and to continue building this bright future that the president of the united states has not only sketched out for us but that he is helping us to reach a future where you can rise as high and travel as far as your god given gifts can carry you so let us move together into that future let us dedicate ourselves to working with president clinton to fighting alongside him for the 21st century that we all deserve i am now pleased to introduce a man who has brought us this far and will help us finish our journey to the 21st century he is the president of the country he is also my friend and i want to ask you now every single one of you to join me in supporting him and standing by his side i give to you the president of the united states of america william jefferson clinton dem algore28 1 98b al_gore thank you very much are you fired up i ll tell you what i haven t heard a cheer like that since illinois beat michigan you would have thought kevin turner and were introduced up here did you hear the speech at the warm up event we wanted to get up a little speed and momentum for this one the main event thank you for being here i can t tell you what it means to us to have this enormous turnout and the wonderful enthusiasm that you re expressing in your cheers in your clapping in your welcome in your support of the ideas and the agenda of president bill clinton thank you for being here we are in a battle for the future of this country and we need your help we want to invest more in education and the environment and health care and people for the future and your future in the 21st century this president is putting before our nation a set of proposals that will make it possible for you to be the best prepared and best educated generation in american history but we have to convince the congress and the whole country to support the ideas that president clinton presented in his state of the union speech last night well ladies and gentlemen we came here because you know in your hearts that these ideas and proposals are good for this country and we wanted to hear directly from you the kind of expressions that you re giving us here today and with that let me just say that i am proud to be here with you in standing by and supporting the person who is leading us to the 21st century and i present him to you now president william jefferson clinton dem algore28 9 00 excerpt al_gore the choice we make in the next 40 days could well shape our future for the next 40 years you ought to be able to know what the candidates are proposing to do with our prosperity so you can judge for yourselves if we do things right we n have it within our grasp to completely eliminate the national debt by the year 2012 saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments if we make the right choices we can make social security financially sound for more than 50 years and make medicare financially sound for another 30 years if we make the right choices we can reach the day in the next few years when seven in ten americans live in their own homes and family incomes rise by one third so let me tell you where i stand when it comes to the economy i believe in fiscal discipline and paying down the debt this year next year and every year i believe in smart investments in the future not massive tax cuts for the few that could bring us back into deficit and above all i believe prosperity has to work for the working and middle class families who built this economy the families who are the hope and soul of this country that s who i m fighting for i m talking about people making house payments and car payments parents struggling to find more time to spend with their kid and pass on the right values families that need help affording college tuition healthcare for their kids or job training to earn more and lift themselves to a better life and i will not accept a massive tax cut that gives almost half the benefits to the wealthiest 1 which would hurt middle class families and make today s balanced budget tomorrow s distant memory under the gore leberman economic plan for very new dollar that we put into tax cuts or new investments we ll set aside 2 to pay down the debt and for every dollar we put into new spending we ll also put a dollar into tax cuts for working and middle class families so here s the bottom line our plan gives 500 billion in targeted middle class tax cuts it makes the right investments in education health care a clean environment and a secure retirement it provides an additional 100 billion for our national defense and it balances the budget and pays down the national debt this isn t just about numbers it s about the standard of life for america s families and it s about what s good for america s businesses if we pay down the debt and keep interest rates low then the private sector doesn t have to compete with the federal government for investment capital productivity rises jobs are created and the economy prospers now is the time to pursue economic policies that are good for our families and good for business this is not the time to invite new deficits and high interest rates that could stifle both our growth and our hopes that is why this issue is so important that is why 40 days from now prosperity itself will be on the ballot you deserve a president who will honor your hard work by making the hard choices on economic policy if you entrust me with the presidency as i ve said before i know i won t always be the most exciting politician but i will work every day to keep the economy strong and i will never let you down thank you god bless you and let s win this fight thank you very much dem algore28 9 95 al_gore ladies and gentlemen thank you on behalf of the president and first lady and their guests here this evening i would like to welcome all of you to this historic occasion to his majesty king hussein and her majesty queen noor to president mubarak and mrs mubarak to prime minister rabin and mrs rabin to chairman arafat and mrs arafat to secretary christopher to foreign minister peres to prime minister sharif zeid bin shaker to foreign minister moussa to mr mahmoud abbas of the palestinian delegation we welcome you to the members of congress who are present to the assembled ministers and members of the diplomatic corps to the assembled friends of peace today as we begin a new month in the islamic calendar and the new year for the house of israel we have witnessed the dawning of a new day of peace for the ancient lands of the levant tonight we gather to celebrate this great triumph of courage and hope these truly are days of awe the primitive sound of the shofar the plaintiff echoes of the muezin have resonated in the collective yearnings of our peoples for peace they have awakened all of us to a new season of reason and renewal and redemption they have called us all to compassion humility and understanding they have asked us to turn away from past selves to better selves to take stock and to be reminded of our humanity and our relationship with the one god we all worship it is fitting that we join together tonight as palestinians israelis egyptians jordanians russians and other europeans americans and all friends of peace to celebrate the progress we ve made on our path to peace the historic act over which president clinton presided today and which we were all privileged to witness this afternoon at the white house culminates months of intensive difficult negotiations and opens a new chapter in our collective efforts to create a comprehensive lasting peace in the middle east i would like to welcome each of you here tonight and to say that we are especially honored by the presence this evening of five leaders whose vision and tenacity and resolve have led all of our citizens to a grand new moment of opportunity and security for peace as the philosopher spinoza said is not mere absence of war but is a virtue that springs from force of character i am privileged to welcome you to washington and am especially honored to introduce to you as our first speaker this evening under these auspicious circumstances chairman arafat ladies and gentlemen chairman arafat dem algore29 9 01 al_gore thank you thank you very much thank you thank you very much thank you so much thank you thank you so much my friends it s wonderful to be back in iowa and that warm welcome that you gave to tipper and me is something that means the world to me you know when i first accepted your kind invitation to come to this dinner i did so for one simple reason i wanted to come and say thank you and so i say thank you thank you iowa thank you iowa democrats and others who i got to know and tipper and i got to know so well i m really very grateful to you some of you know that i came here to des moines by myself driving a rental car across the state and it was an interesting experience i want to tell you a little bit about it first of all i ve joked in the past about how this is a time of transition for me and for example they let other cars on the road with me now when i go out but after not driving for eight years it occurred to me that there might be another reason why they shouldn t let other cars on the road with me tom mentioned that this is like a family and it is like a family why when tipper and i came into the different receptions before this dinner it was a flood of memories that greeted us with almost every face and so many stories we laughed a lot and as i mentioned to one group some of the things we laughed at weren t all that funny at the time they happened but they are now and it s been great to meet with people in their homes and in coffee shops and the last two days have really been quite interesting i just had a cell telephone just driving around and a map and i got lost quite a few times but when i d get close to a town i d call some old friends and we d get together and we d have some coffee we didn t talk about the election very much i think one person at ames at lunch today asked if i had it to do it over again would i do anything different and i said yes if i had it to do over again i would have kissed tipper longer at the convention but she was struggling and i thought that a couple people have asked what i m doing now tom mentioned i m teaching tipper and i are writing a book former president and mrs carter jimmy and rosalyn both advised us not to write a book together but it s going pretty well we re writing a book on family part of it s about marriage there s a lot more but part of it s about marriage and some of the experts say that a typical marriage has three stages romantic infatuation power struggles where each tries to remake the other and then mutual acceptance the reason we re getting along so well writing this book is that i ve entered the fourth stage abject surrender and anyway also i m teaching at two schools i m a visiting professor or v p for short people have asked how what this experience since the election has been like and i say well you know it s been a period of growth for me you learn more from setbacks than you do from smooth sailing you really do people have asked about our family you know i m so proud and tipper s got the pictures we ve got a brand new granddaughter five weeks old yesterday and we ve been having fun playing with our grandson also he s fine with the arrival of his sister as long as his mother doesn t hold her but you know it s kind of hard to it s kind of hard to even joke up here this is such an amazing period in our history it s almost like we all have a feeling that a gate has been opened and things that we knew before have been left behind and a new world is out there that s got new challenges and new dangers new opportunities you heard some great comments earlier this evening all i can tell you is that my reaction to what happened was just so i don t know how to describe it tumultuous i was overcome with the terrible loss of life and the images they kept playing over and over again and i understand why they did maybe that was better to have it sink in you know the clich that so many people reached out for just in trying to describe their own feelings was it was like a movie wish it had been but then of course the anger came hard on the heels of the terrible sense of loss and then all the feelings and thoughts about where do we go from here i mean it s really an extremely challenging time for us we ve talked about this i ve talked about this more than anything else over the last two days driving across iowa and i want to start here by telling you about a conversation i had this morning i got up early this morning in cedar rapids and drove southwest on highway 151 and went down to the amanas and went to middle amana to be specific and you ve heard about middle america well middle amana is about as middle america as you ll find i had heard in some of my conversations in the coffee shops yesterday that the machinists had gone out on strike last week and i wanted to go by and express solidarity and i stopped at the handy mart at the four way stop and i picked up i picked up a bunch of doughnuts at the handy mart and i went to all three gates and spent some time talking with the men and women who are out there walking the picket lines and one at the third gate one man looked at me he was a democrat hard core democrat long time member of organized labor and we started talking about the attack september 11th and he looked at me just real intently and he said hey you tell president bush that there s a whole lot of iowans that ll go if he wants em to i ll go he said i m a veteran i ll go back if you need help you let me know that s what i ve been hearing in iowa we are united behind our president george w bush behind our country behind the effort to seek justice not revenge to make sure this can never ever happen again and to make sure that we have the strongest unity in america that we have ever had that s what i m hearing in iowa i see it and hear it and feel it in every community that i have visited regardless of party regardless of ideology regardless of religion or race or ethnicity there are no divisions in this country where our response to the war on terrorism is concerned we are united george w bush is my commander in chief this country is more united that at any time i can remember in my whole lifetime and i m proud of the way that your elected officials here in iowa have led the way i ve heard from so many people since i ve been here about how there were gas lines at first and a kind of a you know a feeling of great uneasiness and some of it sort of turned toward a kind of a panicked feeling momentarily and then your governor immediately got on the airwaves was a voice of calm and reassurance and calmed things down and the gas lines went away and people got a sense of perspective that s leadership and everybody appreciates it tom and christie and i was really moved when tom harkin you know i ve spoken how many times tom at your steak fry at least twice and my father spoke once and of course this is an annual event and about as partisan as it gets well this year there were no signs and no political just like here there are no signs no political signs or slogans here but at tom harkin s steak fry some people turned on their tvs and kind of rubbed their eyes a little bit because there was tom harkin and chuck grassley and the republican office holders and the democratic officeholders all standing united now that s leadership to put partisanship in the backseat and bring iowa together and bring our country together i was proud of leonard boswell when the capital was evacuated and of course you know in those early hours nobody knew what might happen but the capital building was evacuated but leonard boswell of course vietnam veteran you ve heard often about his bravery he sent his whole staff home but he personally stayed there to answer the telephone himself so that iowans in his district would be reassured and could get information and would know that he was on the job that s leadership and that s courage so we come together tonight not as partisans but as patriots we come together yes within the framework of the two party system to celebrate our democracy and the discussions and debates that keep us free but we come together not only first and foremost but really solely as americans at a time when our country has been attacked in december of last year when i spoke to the nation the last public speech i made before this one i pledged my support to president bush and like all of you i never could have imagined the kind of circumstances that have brought our nation to this point but i reaffirm again that as americans all of us stand behind our president our principles and send a message to the world that we will win this war against terrorism it ll be difficult and it was difficult from the first minute because we had to deal with the grieving and the terrible emotions at the same time we watched our country begin to organize a response i too offer my condolences to the kincaid and havelin families represented here in this room both of whom lost family members in that event herman melville wrote a poem about the mixture of grief and organizing a response immediately after the assassination of president lincoln i read one article that compared the emotional turmoil that the country had experienced after the attack to the turmoil that america felt so long ago when president lincoln was assassinated here s what melville wrote there is sobbing of the strong and a pall upon the land but the people in their weeping bear the iron hand beware the people weeping when they bear the iron hand we do not seek revenge we do in all justification and righteousness seek justice and in navigating the difficult and tricky terrain that lies ahead it s all new we look out for some guide you know our president will make will have to make some decisions that we ll question in the days ahead and this burst of bipartisanship that we re feeling right now can t be temporary can t be temporary because i ll tell you having been there in the white house close to the difficult decision making process when the stakes are high i can tell you that in the best of times and the best of circumstances they re tough judgment calls and when some of them are made that maybe you disagree with yeah debate discuss but hold firm because we ve got a long road ahead of us this is a new world there are new means of communication that make it possible for a relatively small group of willful people to cross international borders personally with information and with weapons it s not a nation that attacked us but a group that s in fifty to sixty different countries it will be hard for president bush to find the right path whoever was there would find it hard to respond to this so as democrats let s keep this bipartisanship alive for as long as our country faces this threat i think it s very very important i look for i said you look for guides i thought about this speech and what i turn to in a time like this and it s my faith my country s history and the examples set by the people who were immediately affected by the attack september 11th first of all i want to talk about what my faith tells me about this event i mentioned the difference between justice and revenge many have remarked upon that distinction my bible tells me that there will come a time when justice will roll down like mighty waters i went yesterday during my drive across the state well actually i was at a perkins restaurant in cedar rapids meeting with pat marshall and several other people including mayor lee clancy the republican mayor and incidentally i hope all of y all will support her for re election she is a great mayor that s bipartisan isn t it we got to talking about the september 11th attack right away of course and then the discussion turned to all different aspects of it and eventually the reaction that people have had including the instances around the country of some intolerance even some people were killed and lee and pat and some of the others reminded me that the largest islamic or the oldest islamic center in north america is in cedar rapids and pat is pat here tonight i bet you she is i don t yeah pat pat recommended to me she said you know you ought to go over there and we called to see if anybody was there and they said no they weren t but they would be there in thirty minutes so pat showed me the way and i drove over and we sat down and we had a long conversation about the experience that muslims have had in the aftermath of this attack first of all in cedar rapids there have been very very few events of any kind but some and around the country there have been some one of the older men there and you know a lot of the members of that congregation were born and raised in cedar rapids and have gone there all their life one of the older men said you know the problem is more serious for the women for the women because they wear the headscarves that distinguish them and they get comments at the grocery store whatever and one of the women spoke up and she said well yes but let me tell you a story that a friend of mine told me there had been some incidents and she had a friend in one of the christian congregations who heard about it and said you know that s not right and she as a christian started wearing a headscarf and it spread to other members of the congregation and then to another congregation and pretty soon in the town where this took place nobody could tell which were the muslim women and which were the christian women because it was all in solidarity that s the american way we stand for one another for freedom of religion for tolerance and for diversity then i drove to davenport i called up a friend of mine gary ramirez a mexican american he said why don t you meet me at this restaurant the family restaurant it s run by a real good friend of mine so i went there he was a greek american we had greek salad now no big deal but i thought afterwards we were having this discussion about diversity in america and i thought okay here s a mexican american his best friend in the restaurant business is a greek american nobody says anything about that we take that for granted in america and it didn t even gary messer was there we didn t even talk about that the whole time it was just a part of the fabric of this country that we really have to appreciate and lift up we have to be true to our traditions and actually some of the problems that we re facing in the world today including the ability of these members of al qaeda this terrorist group to draw recruits that hate us some of it is due to the fact that they have never had a tradition of transcending differences in religion or ethnicity or race of course they re far from the only ones there are people in all parts of the earth that use the slightest difference as an excuse to unleash violence and hatred hutus and tutsis appear to be the same to outsiders but that small difference was enough to unleash a horrible genocide in northern ireland the same people the same religion different denominations enough of a difference to have kept that going for so long bosnians and croats and serbs there are so many examples around the world part of our historic mission in the world is not only to demonstrate that freedom unlocks a potential that doesn t get unlocked in any other system but the other mission that we have is to show that people who came from different lands generations ago or as immigrants can in this land of the free and home of the brave not only get along but enrich one another with diversity i think it s a two step process though we don t just embrace because members of some groups that have been persecuted or has a history that has left a lot of pain can t hear the genuineness of the embrace if it s not preceded by an understanding and recognition that the difference has some meaning there has to be first of all the establishment of mutual respect for difference an appreciation for whatever suffering has existed by virtue of that difference a celebration of whatever gifts or contributions that have come out of that difference and then once the respect is established and it s genuine then the second step can take place and we can transcend that difference it s not good enough to go right to the second step without really working on the first step they had an open house last week at that islamic center i was in chattanooga last week in tennessee and several of my friends there had said the mosque there had had the first open house that they have ever had we talked about a verse from my bible and they have a slightly different verse you know many of the verses are the same but there s a verse that comes from the story of joseph who was thrown into a pit by his brothers you ll remember he had a coat of many colors and his brothers were jealous and he was the youngest and they just threw him in this pit and left him for dead and of course he survived and transcended his begins and but there s a verse in the bible right at that point that says man intended it for evil but god intended it for good many have remarked on the fact that in the wake of this attack and all of the turmoil we ve felt there have been some amazing things people reaching out in a new effort to understand one another a new civility a new sense of volunteerism and involvement that s good can we keep that going i think we can if we work at it but we have to remember that spirit of america our country s history offers a guide also and others have mentioned the need to take care with the steps that are now being considered and i know that the administration as well as the congress are attempting to do just that but i recall the words of franklin roosevelt in his famous four freedoms speech he said the mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for the third guide is the example of those who died in the inferno they showed courage they reached out to one another and demonstrated altruism and they showed wisdom tom mentioned the fire and police and rescue rushing toward danger one of the faith leaders from a different faith in one of the many ceremonies i think it was the one in yankee stadium last sunday where there were all kinds of different religions represented a hindu priest made this point that really struck me he said you know we saw two different kinds of people on september 11th one a group of people who were willing to lose their lives in order to kill and inflict suffering and try to cause terror and then we saw a second group who were willing to lose their lives in order to save those who were in danger in order to rescue their fellow man that s an example that is one that will hold us in good stead in some of the difficult challenges that will lie ahead they showed wisdom think of the passengers on the plane that crashed in pennsylvania you know from the cell phone conversations as i do that the men two or three of the men had called their loved ones one of them said that they voted another one said we re going to do something about it they knew they were going to die and they voted they voted that s an american response you know when lewis and clark got near to the end of their journey of discovery at the banks of the columbia river facing a long winter and a difficult choice not knowing how to survive they voted first reported instance of african americans voting of native americans voting they were invited into the circle to vote on that plane as it was headed toward certain death they voted and out of that vote they adopted a wise course of action and they took that plane down in order to spare the lives of those who would otherwise have been killed we ve got to show courage altruism reach out to one another and we ve got to use common sense and we ve got to use our democratic processes to debate and discuss and to vote and to make sure all that of the best ideas in america are brought to bear in the struggle to come victory will be hard to achieve and difficult to define this is going to be real hard but we have to stay with it when stirred to action we demonstrate america s impressive strength and unprecedented cohesion to the entire world our greatest power is found in our devotion to one another our unstoppable weapon is our adherence to the rule of law and to the values enshrined in our constitution we will prevail the pentagon will be made stronger our skies will be made safer our people more steadfast and we will prevail i m reminded of what franklin roosevelt quoted to winston churchill during the darkest days of the london blitz in the 1940s sail on oh ship of state sail on oh union strong and great humanity with all its fears with all the hopes of future years is hanging breathless on thy fate i ve told a story in the past and i ll close with this story and a postscript about a constituent of mine when i was in the united states senate a tennessean who had been born in czechoslovakia and had escaped across the border risking his life with those guards that had machine guns he made his way to the united states as a very young man and started a family a small business made a great success of himself and years later when the berlin wall was about to fall down and his homeland was about to become free he thought and hoped he said i ve got to go over there and help out a couple years after that the president of czechoslovakia spoke to a joint session of congress and this man came to see if he could get into the congress he drove all night to see if he could get in and listen to vaclav havel s speech and he told me this story of how he had escaped and how he wanted to go back when he saw the change about to take place and how he did go back he went back to his home town where he was born and he became a part of the struggle to get the soviet union out and to reestablish freedom and he was there on the day when the tanks pulled out of the town and he said that as an american he was overwhelmed with pride when the townspeople took as one of their first actions an effort to rebuild a monument to the american g i s who had liberated that town and that part of what s now the czech republic in 1945 and then a short time later he thought maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him because everywhere he looked he saw some little american flags and echoing that phrase that we ve heard in a different context he said it was like a movie and he wondered how in the world could this happen and he looked a little more closely and he realized that each of those flags had forty eight stars because they had been hidden under beds and in cellars for a half century until the curtain of fear was lifted now i tell you that story because on my journey across iowa the day i drove from middle amana toward colo and i believe the mckinneys are here i went to their home tipper and i are good friends with them we caught up on what s happening with farming but in between middle amana and cohlo on a very small curvy road is a place call blairstown seven hundred people as i drove through blairstown i had to stop because it was an amazing sight there were thirty forty i didn t count them all but it seemed like thirty or forty big american flags lining both sides of main street little bitty town big flags lots of em and i thought of that story i just told you so i stopped and i pulled in to the blairstown caf turned out to be another greek restaurant nikolas and aliki mokas run it there they had a newspaper in pure greek not an english word in it i thought only in america as yogi bera once said had a cup of coffee and talked with the people around the tables there and they said the veterans in that town had gone out to get those flags and had put them up on both sides of the road after the attack on our country september 11th and they were democrats and republicans they were liberals and conservatives and of different religions and all different walks of life one of them was a greek american and the reason they did that was exactly the same reason that those people in czechoslovakia put those flags out there because ultimately what we are fighting for in this war on terrorism what we are fighting for within the hallowed traditions of our democracy is a set of values that is so much bigger and stronger than any of us god bless america god bless the values that hold us together thank you iowa for holding up those values and thank you for inviting tipper and me to come back here to this dinner god bless you dem algore30 10 00 excerpt al_gore from the special interests who are trying to turn the policies to their own advantage you don t mind if i take my coat off do you it s chilly but i m hot and i m telling you this election is hot this race is close have you noticed have you noticed that wisconsin is ground zero for this election have you noticed that the fox valley is ground zero for wisconsin as goes wisconsin so goes the nation in this race this state is one of a handful that holds the destiny of america in the balance you have the ability to make the difference and wisconsin may go exactly the way the fox valley goes the fox valley may depend upon you personally and how strongly you feel about the outcome of this race i need your help i want you to get involved passionately look we face a big choice just eight days from now it ll be a long eight days eight days a week as the beatles sang this is the time and we re seeing beatles fans i m telling you that what you decide will determine what these kids encounter for the rest of their lives there is so much at stake let s start with the economy we are at a fork in the road yogi berra once said when you come to the fork in the road take it we have to decide which direction to take here s what i want to see i want to see us take the road toward more prosperity more jobs higher income include everyone bring everybody into the american dream unlock the potential of this country i believe that the surplus should be used to balance the budget and pay down the debt so it s not a burden on the backs of these children when we do that we keep interest rates low we keep on creating more jobs joe lieberman talked about incidentally do i have a great running mate in joe lieberman or what and do you love hadassah lieberman joe and hadassah are great friends and joe was talking earlier about the successes of the last few years and it s true we ve made progress but you know it s not good enough i m not satisfied my pledge to you is you ain t seen nothing yet we re going to be much better still but in order to do much better we ve got to balance the budget and keep fiscal responsibility and then set the priorities in a way that put you first let me give you an example i believe that we are now in the kind of rapidly changing information age where you deserve an opportunity to be able to get new skills if you ve got your eye on a higher paying job but you know that you need some more skills in order to get that job and earn the higher wages you ought to an opportunity to go back to school get some training get the skills that you need and then realize your dreams i believe that it is time to treat teachers like the professionals they are and reduce class size and make education the number one priority in america i think we need universal high quality preschool for every child in every family all across america we ve got to reduce the size of each class by recruiting good new highly qualified teachers who are tested to make sure they know what they re doing teachers all teachers should have education and professional development opportunities we ought to modernize the schools and build new schools a lot of schools now the kids go and there s no playground the playground s covered up with trailers or portable classrooms we need to do right by these kids they re counting on us this is the largest generation in history we owe it to them and we owe it to ourselves because if we do the right thing we ll recognize that knowledge is the key and teachers are the locksmiths who can put that key into the hands of every child and every person of whatever age in the united states of america now here s the other thing i want to do for education you elect me president and i will make college tuition tax deductible for middle class families up to 10 000 a year you ought to be able to send your kids to college regardless of family income are you with me all right now let s talk for a little bit about health care i believe it s an outrage that there are 44 million americans who have no health insurance i believe we need to move step by step toward universal health care starting with a commitment to give high quality affordable health care to every single child in america within the next four years we can do that and we must do that and then i think we need to address the two issues that have been on the agenda throughout this election year and i want to use these two issues as an example of the difference in the approach that i have and the approach that governor bush has i want to use these same two issues as examples of why russ feingold s campaign finance reform bill is so important the first one is prescription drug coverage for our senior citizens look in the last 35 years since medicare was enacted prescription drugs have become a much more important part of health care and thank goodness a lot of wonderful medicines have been innovated but they re expensive and seniors are charged a higher price than anyone else because they ve got nobody standing up for them if you re in a group health plan they ll go in and negotiate and bargain for a lower price but medicare is not allowed to get into prescription drugs and so nobody stands up for the seniors they go and get their prescription drugs and the big drug companies charge them often twice as much as other customers that is wrong the drug companies have the highest profits of any industry in america and we want them to make profits but they re using those profits now not primarily for research and development that s being done by the new biotech companies they re using it for advertising and promotion and lobbying and campaign contributions and efforts to bend the laws to protect their profits often at the expense of seniors who are choosing between skipping pills and skipping meals now why hasn t that been fixed herb kohl russ feingold joe lieberman and i we ve been fighting for a prescription drug benefit under medicare to cover all seniors but the drug companies have been able to use their political power and their massive wealth to get a majority in the congress through lobbying and campaign contributions and persuasion to block a prescription drug benefit that is wrong i believe that the will of the people ought to control these kinds of policies what you need and what you want and what is right ought to decide the outcome the big drug companies dem algore30 11 93 al_gore ladies and gentlemen thank you for joining us on this happy occasion our apologies for the slight delay in the program seven central american presidents were here and the room had to be rearranged in addition to acknowledging the president and the first lady and my wife tipper i want to acknowledge the members of congress who are present senator george mitchell the majority leader senator joe biden the chairman of the judiciary committee senator howard metzenbaum the longtime sponsor of the bill in the senate right here from the house of representatives the longtime sponsor of the bill in the house representative charles schumer representative don edwards the chairman of the judiciary committee representative james sensenbrenner representative rom mazzoli representative bill hughes representative john conyers representative craig washington representative david mann representative pat schroeder representative eleanor holmes norton former congressman beryl anthony and from the administration i will introduce attorney general janet reno in a moment secretary lloyd bentsen and director lee brown and enforcement officials who are present if i may ron noble assistant secretary for enforcement in the treasury department guy caputo director of the secret service john magaw director of the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms and george weise director of customs ladies and gentlemen this is a great moment an incident which started as a tragedy for jim brady galvanized americans so we could accomplish something new in american history it has been a long hard battle so many here have been an important part of this struggle it is my honor to introduce someone who helped to fight this battle as a local law enforcement official working with the bradys before she joined the administration and someone who has worked as a vigorous advocate for law enforcement in this administration attorney general janet reno dem algore30 3 98 al_gore president and mrs weizman prime minister and mrs netanyahu mayor and mrs olmert am israel ani mevakesh slichah ani lo medaber ivrit but even though i speak in the language of my birth my heart and the hearts of all americans beat with yours this evening as we hallow the 50th year of israel s birth we were like those who dreamed the psalmist sang and so we still are those who not only dreamed but struggled in their dream those who struggled not only with the human but with the divine since the angel of god first wrestled with jacob and gave him your name israel your dream and your struggle have nurtured the children of israel through all the bitter centuries of your wandering and dispersion your persecution and despair the dream which you called zion was on your lips daily you remembered zion at every expulsion at every oppression at every devastation since the cruel and envious brothers of joseph the dreamer cast him into the pit your tormentors have marked and reviled your deepest hopes with the taunting question what now will become of the dream but the dream and the struggle in the dream have endured 100 years and nine months ago theodore herzl awoke to the realization that the dream and the struggle are one if you will it he said it is not a dream soon after a young david ben gurion spoke for all of the ingathering exiles when he said they arrived here with the dew of dreams still moist in our hearts a half century ago at one minute after midnight your mothers and fathers proclaimed your freedom in the morning they sent their children to prepare for war the dream and the struggle were still one and so they still are one but what a difference there is at this jubilee celebration i m reminded that joseph s brothers who had left him for dead did not recognize him when they saw him again long after his escape from his perils and his triumphant ascendence to power and glory if those who persecuted you despised you and murdered you could see this glorious celebration tonight would they even recognize you look at what has become of your dream you are one of the most vibrant democracies in history an economic and military power a wellspring of productivity and prosperity of wisdom and humanity a place of poetry and theater and learning and life as i lift up my eyes tonight and see the whole house of israel i recognize you and i remember the prophecy of ezekiel that god would raise you up that bone would join to bone sinew to sinew and that he would breathe life into your flesh and restore you to your land i recognize you and president clinton and i are proud as are all americans that the united states was the first nation to recognize the state of israel eleven minutes after you proclaimed your independence on the 5th of iyar 50 years ago the americans feel our ties with israel are eternal our founders like yours also made an errand into the wilderness in search of a new zion our struggle like yours has been with the divine as well as the human our prophets and yours have told us they had a dream and have summoned us with their dream to this struggle for justice and peace our work like yours is not yet complete it is an honor for my wife tipper and me to be counted as your friends and it is an honor to have you count upon our friendship and the friendship of the nation i am here to represent may a friend join you then in a blessing at this intoxicating and sobering moment blessed art thou our god ruler of the universe shehekhianu v kiemanu v higianu la zman hazeh he has kept us alive and sustained us and brought us to this time may the eternal bring us together in peace and in justice in security and prosperity to the time that still awaits us and our children and our grandchildren so that the visions born in this hallowing and harrowing place may become realities for all those who were created in the image of a good and demanding god may god bless those who struggle in their dream and may god bless medinat israel dem algore30 4 98 al_gore president and mrs weizman prime minister and mrs netanyahu mayor and mrs olmert am israel ani mevakesh slichah ani lo medaber ivrit but even though i speak in the language of my birth my heart and the hearts of all americans beat with yours this evening as we hallow the 50th year of israel s birth we were like those who dreamed the psalmist sang and so we still are those who not only dreamed but struggled in their dream those who struggled not only with the human but with the divine since the angel of god first wrestled with jacob and gave him your name israel your dream and your struggle have nurtured the children of israel through all the bitter centuries of your wandering and dispersion your persecution and despair the dream which you called zion was on your lips daily you remembered zion at every expulsion at every oppression at every devastation since the cruel and envious brothers of joseph the dreamer cast him into the pit your tormentors have marked and reviled your deepest hopes with the taunting question what now will become of the dream but the dream and the struggle in the dream have endured 100 years and nine months ago theodore herzl awoke to the realization that the dream and the struggle are one if you will it he said it is not a dream soon after a young david ben gurion spoke for all of the ingathering exiles when he said they arrived here with the dew of dreams still moist in our hearts a half century ago at one minute after midnight your mothers and fathers proclaimed your freedom in the morning they sent their children to prepare for war the dream and the struggle were still one and so they still are one but what a difference there is at this jubilee celebration i m reminded that joseph s brothers who had left him for dead did not recognize him when they saw him again long after his escape from his perils and his triumphant ascendence to power and glory if those who persecuted you despised you and murdered you could see this glorious celebration tonight would they even recognize you look at what has become of your dream you are one of the most vibrant democracies in history an economic and military power a wellspring of productivity and prosperity of wisdom and humanity a place of poetry and theater and learning and life as i lift up my eyes tonight and see the whole house of israel i recognize you and i remember the prophecy of ezekiel that god would raise you up that bone would join to bone sinew to sinew and that he would breathe life into your flesh and restore you to your land i recognize you and president clinton and i are proud as are all americans that the united states was the first nation to recognize the state of israel eleven minutes after you proclaimed your independence on the 5th of iyar 50 years ago the americans feel our ties with israel are eternal our founders like yours also made an errand into the wilderness in search of a new zion our struggle like yours has been with the divine as well as the human our prophets and yours have told us they had a dream and have summoned us with their dream to this struggle for justice and peace our work like yours is not yet complete it is an honor for my wife tipper and me to be counted as your friends and it is an honor to have you count upon our friendship and the friendship of the nation i am here to represent may a friend join you then in a blessing at this intoxicating and sobering moment blessed art thou our god ruler of the universe shehekhianu v kiemanu v higianu la zman hazeh he has kept us alive and sustained us and brought us to this time may the eternal bring us together in peace and in justice in security and prosperity to the time that still awaits us and our children and our grandchildren so that the visions born in this hallowing and harrowing place may become realities for all those who were created in the image of a good and demanding god may god bless those who struggle in their dream and may god bless medinat israel dem algore4 5 95 al_gore thank you very much doc thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you very much i really do appreciate that warm welcome and doc doc cook thank you for your warm words of introduction and also for your leadership in helping our country recognize public service we appreciate the mighty hard work that you put into this each year and the mighty hard work that you give to our country and our people every other day of the year i want to also acknowledge jerry shaw chairman of the public employees roundtable and may i say a special word of recognition to some of my colleagues in the administration who are up here margaret richardson peggy richardson commissioner of the irs administrator roger johnson of gsa director of opm jim king john koskinen deputy director of omb who works with the president s management council will be here shortly mary ellen withrow u s treasurer and other distinguished guests elaine kamarck with the reinventing government effort and also i want to acknowledge even though doc mentioned they will be greeting a returning comrade i want to mention the local rescue workers from montgomery county and virginia beach and fema we deeply admire and appreciate what you all did in oklahoma city under difficult circumstances thank you everybody behind you was giving you a standing ovation there and also i want to thank the old guard fife and drum corps as often as we have foreign dignitaries coming to the white house and getting the formal greeting we almost never have an opportunity to say to all the folks who participate in that thank you very much but today s the time when we can thank everybody who does the work for the public we thank you too also i want to thank all of the federal state and local government employees all across our country who have taken time from their day to watch us you all should know that even though you re participating by means of the satellite hookup i feel as though you are with us right here on the mall in washington you are as much a part of this celebration as if you were sitting here in front of the podium right here and in fact you are seeing us on our very first interagency television satellite hookup we re making this program available to over 1 000 locations these are at federal and local government offices all across american from bangor maine to san diego from seattle to sarasota to san juan and all points in between you know it was a long time ago that i received the invitation to come here and decided that i definitely wanted to join you in opening public service recognition week and when i first received the invitation i planned to speak once again to americans in public service as i have had the opportunity and privilege of doing often in the past about the central role that all of you have played and continue to play in president clinton s efforts and my efforts to reinvent government to create a government that works better and costs less and empowers employees and listens to their ideas and puts those ideas into effect we have made great progress together i m proud of it and we ve got a long way to go but we have gained a great deal of momentum in ordinary times i would spend today talking about some of the thousands of workers who day in and day out are transforming the face of government and accomplishing the same kinds of changes that the best managed private companies are accomplishing by listening to their employees somebody said to me when i began the reinventing government effort that the definition of a consultant in private industry is somebody who walks around the factory floor and listens to what the employees are saying and then charges the boss to tell him what they re saying and we did adopt that philosophy in the federal government to listen directly to federal employees who have been thinking for years and years about what s wrong and how it can be fixed and if they are trusted and given the ability to really share their ideas without having the fear they re going to get their heads chopped off if they stick their necks out then the ideas really flow out and they re great ideas and i would have spent most of my time talking about a lot of those ideas we would have laughed together as we have in the past about some of the sillier things that you have pointed out to us we would talk about the difficulty of change the enormity of the job the time required to really do it well and the importance of serving the citizens of this great country but these are not ordinary times because a lot of things changed two weeks ago when that bomb ripped through the federal building in oklahoma city those who were targeted targeted and those who were killed were public servants like you people who have dedicated their lives to public service thus in the wake of this great tragedy i believe it is right and fitting that we use this week to remember that contrary to the heated rhetoric of hate mongers actually in a great democracy there is no difference between the people and the government our government is our people we are a self government the federal workers in oklahoma city were planning to celebrate public service recognition week also they already had their plans well under way they have postponed that event they are amazingly enough already getting back to work pitching in helping one another receiving in gratitude the cooperation and help they ve received from fellow federal employees all across america agencies in other buildings around that city have opened their hearts and their doors to give the survivors a place to work and most of the survivors are already back at work they re grieving but they re back at work their work and your work is government work a term that is all too often disparaged but in a free society where the people rule another term for government work is america s work it s the way we as americans can work together through the institution of self government and so in the midst of this tragedy let us createa victory from the shattered lives and heroic acts of our public servants and let our victory be this that we are a nation of the people by the people and for the people and we will remain so people people like richard allen at the social security office who was helping elderly americans to the dignity earned by a lifetime of hard work people like susan ferrell a young attorney with hud who was helping less fortunate americans keep a roof over their heads people like army sergeant william titsworth who had committed his life to defending our homeland whenever and wherever he was called he his wife chrissy and their three year old daughter kayla were all there in the murrah building reporting in for their new assignment in oklahoma they were americans every one just like americans everywhere americans in public service are the government of our country the great strength of this nation has been and always will be that we do not need violence fueled by hate to change the policies and the practices and the laws of government when change is needed as it often is we change with our ideas we bring change with our voices and with our votes no one understands this and respects this better than those of you who have dedicated your lives to public service when your fellow americans told you the government was getting too big and it wasn t as responsive as it should be you said we ve known that for years you joined president clinton and me in the most far reaching reform effort that the modern government has ever undertaken many of you have put your own jobs at risk as you ve lived up to our challenge to think about the very best way to deliver a government that works better and costs less the working men and women in the federal government and their colleagues in state and local government all across this nation are not enemies of the people as some on the fringe would have us believe they are the people you are the people who make up this great nation too many have forgotten that too many have come to think of the american government as some faceless power aligned against americans too many have talked that way and too many have listened well i don t know how you feel but i ve had it with that kind of talk the people of this country are the government of this country the people who make those claims are wrong and let us remember today that government workers americans in public service were the people who rushed into the wreckage to rescue men women and children even at the risk of their own injury or death they were willing to run the risk of laying down their lives to help us to help our country government workers remained on the scene for endless heartbreaking days helping families bring closure to a terrible tragedy so that healing could god willing begin some of those same public servants as i mentioned earlier are with us today and in saluting you for your heroism and your difficult labors we salute all of those who participated in the rescue operation government workers americans in public service are also the men and women who are hunting down the villains of this catastrophe to bring them to justice their tremendous work under way right now assures us that this evil will be punished and the final irony of what happened in oklahoma city is that those who have been aptly described by president clinton as the evil cowards who planted the bomb and committed mass murder and then tried to run and hide were attempting to strike a blow at our self government and in so doing somehow loosened the bonds among americans that hold us together as the great nation we are and yet even though that was their intent what they actually accomplished was very different they accomplished two things first they accomplished an act of unspeakable evil that has outraged americans throughout our land and secondly instead of loosening the bonds that hold us together as americans they created a tremendous outpouring of patriotism and pride in country and rededication to the principles of this nation that bind us together more strongly than ever before and we have that as our answer to them americans in public service will do whatever can be done to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again we will heighten our vigilance strengthen our laws and marshal our resources to keep our citizens safe at the same time we will continue the successful effort that we began almost two years ago to make government more responsive to the people we serve so i want to thank all americans in public service today on behalf of president clinton and on behalf of the people of the united states of america you are us we are you we love this country and we thank you for serving this country and making america what it is thank you very much dem algore6 9 00 excerpt al_gore i m here today in america s heartland to talk specifically concretely about an issue that lies at the heart of america s progress in the years ahead a growing economy that enriches all our families and i m releasing this new economic plan here in cleveland today and i m doing it because i don t want you to have to read the tea leaves or read between the lines of a press release or position paper to know exactly what a gore lieberman administration would mean for families today i am setting out in black and white ten goals for the future of america s economy and the specific steps that we will take to achieve these goals first of all let s make social security financially sound into the second half of this new century and make medicare financially sound for at least another 30 years second second let s double the number of families with family savings over 50 000 we can do it third let s also take specific steps that will raise real family incomes by one third so families can not only save more but also earn more and let s lift millions out of poverty so that within the next four years here is the specific goal within the next four years fewer than one in ten americans will live in poverty isn t that a worthy goal let s reach the lowest level of poverty in recorded history during the next four years fifth let s cut the wage gap between men and women in fact let s cut it in half and then let s keep going until we achieve the ideal of an equal day s pay for an equal day s work sixth let s enable seven out of ten americans to own their own homes a new record high let s raise employment levels by adding ten million new high tech high skilled jobs across every sector of our economy while making the new investments that also protect our environment eight let s fight for and win targeted tax cuts for middle class families so that within two years a typical family within two years will have the lowest tax burden in half a century let s open the doors to college wider than ever before with a specific goal that three quarters of all high school graduates will be attending college and half will go on to graduate from college now and as we do these things let s reduce the national debt year after year every single year until it is completely eliminated by the year 2012 in fact i am proposing to go even further than a balanced budget that pays down our national debt each year the other side believes it s okay to spend more than the entire surplus and then hope the economy does far better than anyone expects so the numbers will somehow add up well joe lieberman and i have a different approach today i am announcing that we will under spend the surplus rather than over promise our way into an economic hole our approach is simple common sense our national government should do what so many families have done for years namely set aside some money for a rainy day to be absolutely certain that we never spend money that we don t have again let me be specific i propose to take one out of every six dollars of the budget surplus and put it aside so that it will not be used for new spending it will not be used for new tax cuts it will not be spent on promises or proposals of any kind so if today s economic forecasts fall short this new reserve fund will guarantee that even if they do fall short we will not have to cut education or health care and unlike the promises made on the other side we will not be running deficits or endangering america s prosperity my plan wasn t built on the cross your fingers economics that says we can give more to the people who already have the most and then just hope that the benefits trickle down to the middle class the gore lieberman economic plan has one guiding purpose to help the middle class families who have always been america s purpose and pride the people who pay the taxes bear the burdens and live the american dream the people who create the jobs drive our economy and just need a little more opportunity to achieve what they want for their families that s who i m fighting for in this election and that s who i ll work for each and every day if you elect me president of the united states of america dem algore7 1 01 al_gore thank you very much thank you chuck thank you my friends thank you new york one point seven million times thank you you are the greatest thank you very much mr president senator clinton chelsea tipper and i are so honored to be here senator schumer congressman rangel chairperson judith hope distinguished leaders and guests in the audience i m very grateful that senator clinton invited tipper and me to be with them and you here today and i m grateful for the opportunity i ll have after the president s remarks to give the oath of office in the ceremony at center stage it s a very meaningful event a reenactment but it s in many ways the real one because this is the audience that made it happen and we appreciate what you did she is a cherished friend an admired leader a great first lady and i predict one of the best senators this state and this country will ever know and i d just like to take a moment to congratulate you senator clinton not only on winning not only on all the votes you received but on getting your votes counted and finishing the race on time and actually winning it you did a great job you know some people overlook that part i enjoyed the entertainment more than i can tell you didn t that fill our hearts wasn t that fantastic unbelievable and i enjoyed the prayers i have never heard so many applause lines in prayers and i m a baptist we had a great time on the floor of the senate not long ago we were a little late getting started senator lott was outside looking for storm clouds there weren t any the truth is in extraordinary circumstances and in ordinary ones when human rights are at stake around the world or when the adoption of one child is at stake in new york when millions of children lack the health care they need or when a single family in buffalo lack the opportunity it needs hillary clinton s passion to serve and her basic commitment to people have enabled her to help those who need help and to open doors for those who have found them closed for 13 more days i ll have the privilege of serving as the president of the senate and i don t know as much about the senate as senator robert byrd but i took the occasion to look at the history of new york s delegation and the history of the senate seat that hillary clinton moved into it was from this seat that robert kennedy challenged the conscience of the nation and pat moynihan challenged us to strengthen and protect the american family much earlier this seat was held by martin van buren thank you it s always an applause line you know that he was the first president to be born under the american flag and aaron burr that never gets applause he was the first and hopefully the last vice president to fire a gun at a member of the president s cabinet and also in those early days this seat was held for a brief time by a man named governor morris now the history students here know very well that s actually his first name you ve seen that name signed on the constitution he fought for american independence sat in the continental congress he lost his seat because of his failure to support a governor named clinton it s a true story about 200 years ago new york s governor clinton believed that vermont should belong to new york well most new yorkers agreed most new yorkers agreed governor morris didn t and so new yorkers kicked him out i m not trying to give you any ideas senator i know you ve already introduced your first bill and pat leahy would really be opposed to that but my point is really a simple one you can look at the scope of new york s history and the unbelievable quality of leadership for this nation that has been provided by new york from the vision and compassion of franklin roosevelt to the soaring idealism of robert kennedy to the piercing wisdom of mario cuomo the all around excellence and dedication of chuck schumer leaders like bella abzug who broke down barriers and upheld justice charlie rangel with his tireless advocacy for those who need better schools and equal opportunity and who in two years will be chairman of the ways and means committee in the united states congress i mean let s face it new york s leaders haven t exactly been slouches and that is why the people of new york chose so wisely when they elected this new senator you can see her leadership in the fights that she has taken on for america s children and families from affordable health care to sound economic policy to the expansion of head start immunization early childhood education and so many other causes internationally as well so today s swearing in is especially meaningful for tipper and me it s one of the last events that the four of us will be doing together and one of the last opportunities that i ll have to say on a stage like this what a great thrill it has been to be able to serve the people of this country under the leadership of president bill clinton who turned the economy of this nation around who put this nation s economy on the right track to reduce the crime rate who brought inner cities back to life for all we ve achieved together though my strongest memories are the times that we ve spent on the bus together and that bus started it s eight year journey right here outside this very building and so in a very real sense that journey has come around full circle right back here we believed during that journey that this country could be made new again and you know what it has been that mission is still underway and of course there is much work to be done and this much i know and i know it without reservation senator hillary clinton is going to make this state very very proud she will be a strong and graceful voice for all those whose uniquely american dream have yet to be fulfilled and of no small consequence to tipper and me she will have as one of her youngest constituents our grandson so we really have a big stake in this now my friends i ll return to give the oath of office but i am pleased and honored for one of the last times that i ll have the opportunity to do so as vice president to introduce a great leader and a great friend someone who gave me the opportunity to serve as his ally in that remarkable eight year journey to a better america and i say without any fear of contradiction that he will be the most prominent and most instantly recognizable member of the senate spouse club president bill clinton dem algore7 9 93 al_gore thank you very much ladies and gentlemen mr president to the distinguished members of the cabinet and virtually the entire cabinet is here and my thanks to every member of the cabinet to all of the agency heads who are here and the majority of them are here my thanks to my wife tipper and other members of my family here if i may my father and my brother in law mr president if you want to know why government doesn t work look behind you the answer is at least partly on those forklifts those forklifts hold copies of budget rules procurement rules and the personnel code the personnel code alone weighs in at over 1 000 pounds that code and the regulations stacked up there no longer help government work they hurt it they hurt it badly and we recommend getting rid of it and that s one reason i m so pleased today to give you the report of our national performance review the report contains hundreds of suggestions just like that one totally 108 billion in savings over the next five years if these recommendations are enacted it is inspired by your vision of a government that works for people cleared of useless bureaucracy and freed of red tape and senseless rules this report tell us how to cut waste cut red tape streamline the bureaucracy change procurement rules change the personnel rules and create a government that works better and costs less let me tell you a little bit about what we found first some bad news we found that government really does not work very well in ways that will take a long time to fix we ve accomplished a lot in the last six months but we still have a government that writes 10 pages of regulations on how to make an ashtray we have a government that for the last 12 years has managed to spend 4 for every 3 that it takes in that personnel code on those truck lift pallets behind us we hire 40 000 people just to enforce that personnel code and let s not forget much of what is wrong with government doesn t lend itself to amusing anecdotes it s the kind of unnecessary red tape that means somebody who calls the irs with a question gets put on hold forever or a small business owner has to spend hours and hours filling out a completely useless form or a division head buys equipment he doesn t need because it s the end of the budget year it s old fashioned outdated government it s government using a quill pen in the age of wordperfect is this the way it has to be well the good news is that it doesn t have to be this way we know that because in our review we looked at organizations that worked well whether the saturn plant in my home state of tennessee or the air combat command in the federal government these groups succeed because they stick to four basic principles number one cut red tape shift from a system based on accountability for following rules to a system where you re accountable for achieving results number two put the customer first listen to them change operations to meet their needs use market dynamics such as competition to create incentives for success number three empower employees to get results you know we don t have bad workers in the federal government we have excellent hard working imaginative workers trapped in bad systems we need to help them get free of those systems we need to decentralize authority empowering those on the front lines to make more of their own decisions but holding them strictly accountable for results number four cut back to basics abandon the obsolete eliminate duplication end special privileges anyone who reads this report will see that it is backed up by a solid grounding in the theory management it s fleshed out by hundreds of suggestions that go straight to the heart of what s wrong in government and how does it put things right well mr president let me mention five areas that if we can make these changes will be dramatically changed by this report first of all it tells us how to cut wasteful spending we can get rid of those outdated subsidies not just for mohair sweaters but in every area we ll consolidate departments we ll get rid of duplicate departments we ll allow competition to bring about better service at lower costs second it tells us how to streamline the bureaucracy and we can cut it dramatically we can downsize government by 12 percent reducing the bureaucracy by 252 000 positions we can also change the structure of government by getting rid of the layer upon layer of management that prevents us from getting things done for the american people third it tells us how to improve customer service we can set customer service standards equal to the best in business we can require agencies to survey customer satisfaction and measure performance based on customer satisfaction fourth it tells us how to overhaul federal procurement we can simplify it give managers buying authority streamline the process so they can buy more like businesses buy and save money in the process and finally it tells us how to overhaul the personnel system we recommend scrapping that 10 000 page personnel code by next september replacing it with guiding principles we want managers to be able to hire and to fire to promote to reassign and to reward excellence can we do all this right away no it s going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of cooperation from congress mr president this report is just the beginning but i m confident we can do the job if we make these changes we can create a government that works better and costs less we can treat taxpayers like customers we can provide a quality product we can hold government employees accountable and reward excellence the national performance review is about change it will get us moving from red tape to results it will result in a new customer service contract with the american people one that demonstrates to taxpayers that their tax dollars will be treated with respect for the hard work that earned them for too long government has been an obstacle to change but if government is powerful enough to block change then it is powerful enough to bring change mr president virtually all of the recommendations in this report have come from federal employees themselves just as private sector organizations that have gone about this task of reinventing themselves have discovered that the best ideas come from the men and women at the bottom rungs on the ladder working where the rubber meets the road we have found exactly the same thing federal employees want to help bring about change and want to help bring about a government that works better and costs less i want to thank in your presence mr president our senior staffer on this elaine kamarck who has done an outstanding job bob stone or project director our deputy project directors billy hamilton from texas and john sharp who is a senior advisor who is here today and helped us bring this about john kamensky bob knisely carolyn lukensmeyer they ve all done an outstanding job david osborne a consultant and senior advisor who has been of invaluable assistance to us in this effort my partner phil lader the m in omb who has done such an outstanding job from the very beginning on this along with my longtime friend your director of the office of management and budget leon panetta who has been of invaluable assistance throughout this effort along with alice rivlin roger johnson at gsa and chuck bowsher at the general accounting office who along with his staff has been of invaluable help jim king at opm and many many others mr president not least among them indeed first among them the members of your cabinet who have taken to this task with real enthusiasm and dedication and in the days and weeks ahead more detailed announcements involving each of them and the tremendous changes they are bringing about on a pioneering basis in their departments will be made there s a lot of hard work ahead of us but as we take the first steps mr president i m confident that we are well served by this report one as solid well constructed strong and able to help us carry the load as those lift trucks behind us there so mr president it is my great pleasure to submit this report to you dem algore8 5 97 al_gore thank you very much thank you very much ladies and gentlemen and bill thank you for your very kind words of introduction i remember that letterman show i didn t know you were going to bring that up i gave a top 10 list on that show of the most enjoyable things about being vice president and i remember number five on the list it has to do with the great seal of the vice president if you look at that seal and close your left eye and turn your head just right it says president of the united states of america anyway and incidentally of course this is a sobering time for me living with the awareness that i m only one kneecap away from the presidency some of you may not have seen the legal times article about the inauguration january 20th in the constitution the president s term expires precisely at noon on january 20th and by custom i was sworn in at 11 58 and then the opera singer jesse norman sang and sang too long she was great don t get me wrong but the president did not take his oath to begin his second term until 12 05 you ve anticipated me it was an important five minutes for me for my family and if i may be so bold for america it wasn t exactly a morning in america but it was pretty close at 12 01 p m and historians will record that during the gore administration our country was at peace at home and abroad our economy was booming with low inflation we created 3 1 jobs 1 2 of them here in seattle history will also record with all due respect to president clinton that in my administration we had fewer crimes committed than in any other presidency democratic or republican in history and it s because we put two new community police officers on the beat eddie and duane but what s most important to me is that partisan bickering so frequently the bane of washington gave way to bipartisan harmony the entirety of my administration with patriotic hymns bursting forth from the steps of the capitol i think it s for that reason the chant began there on the steps and swept westward all the way to the pacific five more minutes five more minutes anyway it s really great to be here and i want to acknowledge the other distinguished guests who were here i want to thank steve forbes for being a co host of this remarkable event and i want to thank you again bill gates for conceiving it and bringing it off so well i wish that i had been able to be here personally for every session but i ve gotten some reports from some of the other presentations and they sounded really fascinating i want to acknowledge my friend and a tremendous leader of this state of washington the governor gary locke who is off to such a fantastic start and one of my allies in the move to reinvent government we call it rego that s gore spelled sideways so i ve worked hard on that and it s great to be here with a person who i am a little biased because he s a personal friend of 30 some odd years but our chairman of the fcc reed hundt who i personally believe is by far the best chairman of the fcc we ve ever had and i really appreciate the hard work that you re doing reed and to the other government leaders who are my colleagues the postmaster general marvin runyon and the head of the national security agency general kenneth minihan and general edmonds and richard danzig and the others and the distinguished guests and the ceos and others who ought to be singled out this afternoon i would like to talk to you about the new economy and the limited but critical role that i think government has to play in the 21st century so here goes gore on the new economy version 1 0 you ll be notified about upgrades you have been discussing here the future of the corporation in this era of technologically driven change in joining in your conversation i would like to discuss also how the very same sources are influencing government forcing the transformation of government and reshaping the relationship between government and corporations there are actually two changes that frame our conversation the first you have described explicitly as the technology revolution which is of course only the latest manifestation of the larger scientific revolution that began reshaping the economy and society more than three and a half centuries ago and of course now in our lifetime in many fields the life sciences the earth sciences brain research materials development to cite but a few examples knowledge is increasing at an unbelievably rapid pace but the one field in which it is having the biggest impact is really the revolution in information technology it s important also to recognize that the information revolution is peppered with a second change implicit in the framing of today s conversation the globalization of the marketplace this change has also been in the making for quite some time as a matter of fact as soon as communication became electrified it was inevitable that the marketplace would become global in 1851 inspired by the telegraph invented 16 years earlier nathaniel hawthorne wrote these words by means of electricity the world of matter has become a great nerve vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time the round globe is a vast brain instinct with intelligence much as jules verne foresaw submarines and moon landings hawthorne sort of saw the digital nervous system that bill gates discussed this morning these two changes globalization and the revolution in information technology have combined to create a new age with an entirely new business reality and entirely new challenges and opportunities the place to begin talking about it is by asking about the impacts not on business or government but on people what is the human impact of these changes well for starters most of us feel we have a lot more information than we can possibly deal with how many times have you heard that metaphorical question how can you drink out of a fire hose a friend of mine in the computer industry once made this point by saying that if you tried to describe our human brains in computer terms you d say we have a low bit rate but high resolution and what he meant by that was that when we try to absorb information bit by bit it takes a long time and we re not really very good at it for example years ago the telephone industry conducted research and found that seven digits were the most we could retain in our memories and then they went and added four more digits but we do have very high resolution meaning we can quickly absorb the meaning of patterns containing huge quantities of data at a single gulp and then infer the meaning of each bit by reference to its context for example there are 200 billion stars in the milky way we recognize that pattern instantly bill and melinda s daughter jennifer recognized their faces within two weeks of her birth a task that no computer can yet replicate with speed or accuracy this capacity for high resolution has served us very well but the problem is this most of the voluminous new information now becoming available to humankind about the world around us comes to us not arrayed in recognizable patterns but in huge sand dunes of data for example our satellites take a complete photograph of the earth s surface every 18 days but 99 percent of the information collected never fires a single neuron in a single human brain the clementine division of nasa to explore the surface of the moon contains 20 terra bytes of data that no human eyes have ever seen high performing computers help us to master this challenge but there was a mismatch between the incredible speeds with which processing power expands and the snail s pace with which new advances in transmission capacity have been made available i once used the old cliche with a college audience that if a you ve probably many of you have probably used this too if a car had made the same exponential advances as a computer a cadillac would get 100 000 miles to the gallon and cost only 50 cents and one of the students in the front row raised his hand and said yes mr vice president but it would only be about this big the challenge we face was similar to the challenge we confronted after world war ii when every family bought a car and the two lane roads could no longer handle the traffic indeed just as in earlier eras nations gained competitive advantage by improving the infrastructure of transportation deep water ports railroads and super highways comparative advantage now can be enhanced by a superior national information infrastructure built by sensible deregulation and competition policy but the point remains what is the human impact and how do we adapt our organizations both in business and in government to deal with these sweeping changes many of you in this room have been pioneers in the transformation of business to adapt to these new realities your presence here confirms our shared view that this is a work in progress and the underlying change which requires adaptation is not only continuing but accelerating in its pace and intensity businesses in the industrial age organize themselves according to the model of the factory and so did government most employees were valued primarily for their physical ability to perform repetitive tasks according to instructions from management that infrequently change indeed any communication from the ceo to the people actually producing goods and services had to travel through multiple layers of middle management existing primarily for the purpose of passing information from one level to the next as public education empowered a larger fraction of the american population a few pioneering managers recognized that the most valuable asset in the corporation was the unused brainpower of the men and women performing repetitive physical tasks a new theory of corporate management emerged and the publication of books describing it became a major new cottage industry theory z participative management in search of excellence quality circles a hundred different labels were fastened to the same basic insights employees can think they re smart if you can convince them to pay attention to what they re doing in context and share with them the larger objectives of the organization of which they re a part then respectfully harvest their ideas about how to improve and fine tune the collective endeavor and then invite them to help implement the innovations they ve come up with companies can boost the bottom line they can creatively encounter change at the company s edge where change is first experienced and not wait for news of that change to wind its way through multiple redundant obsolete layers up to a ceo who is insulated and isolated at the top of the proverbial pyramid this morning i met with the team at boeing producing the new 777 aircraft listen to the way this world leader describes his work the people i met with are part of an integrated design build team system grouped into small teams of eight to ten people they have been assigned to refine and mesh all aspects of the aircraft from top to bottom the idea is to have each team consider the aircraft as a whole and empower each team to act quickly on their own on ideas free from chain of command second guessing the new information technologies make it easier for more companies to take this approach to empower their employees and eliminate the barriers between employees ideas and resulting corporate innovation this wave of change has already had an enormous impact many of you here have led this change all of you have adapted to it and now several of you along with other pioneers are creating yet another new wave of change in corporate management moving from an appreciation of physicality and intellect to an appreciation of emotions creativity or if you will heart perhaps the greatest challenge facing you is attracting and retaining talented people ceos who have found ways to honor and respect their employees loyalties to their spouses and families and communities have reduced turnover and reduced absenteeism and increased creativity and productivity family friendly work places family and medical leave flex time and other measures to bolster employees emotional satisfaction are proving to be extremely valuable to earnings revenues and profits companies like the first tennessee national bank have reconfigured their corporate missions to take emotion into account and this soft headed approach is showing hardheaded results another way to describe this phenomenon might be to say they re getting more from their employees by focusing more on their core capacity and with the help of their employees understanding better their customers needs and desires in the business world there is a new appreciation for the value of focusing on core capacities the so called virtual corporation uses new information technology to combine the core capacities of different companies for a mutually beneficial endeavor the phrase that you re using here rich and free capitalism describes a very similar overlapping phenomenon but what is our core capacity as human beings in 1872 the steam hammer defeated john henry at the conclusion of this century at the end of four games in a six game series big blue is tied with gary kasparov physical health and fitness continues to matter a great deal a well educated mind is our key strategic asset but in the 21st century as the information revolution continues to accelerate i m convinced that it will become ever more apparent that our core capacity is spirit creativity heart for example how did the electronic communications revolution begin samuel morris was a portrait painter in fact his painting of james monroe hangs in the white house today while morris was working on a portrait of general lafayette in washington his wife who lived about 300 miles away grew ill and died but it took seven days for the news to reach him in his grief and remorse he began to wonder whether it might be possible to erase barriers of time and space so no one would be unable to reach a loved one in time of need pursuing this thought he came to discovery how to use electricity to convey messages at the speed of light and invented the telegraph emotion led to innovation over the past 50 years technological innovation has been responsible in the view of many for more than half of the nation s growth in productivity our approach to the new economy must include a new appreciation for the key role of innovation and for those factors which tend to promote it in the old economy growth depended largely on capital and labor the task of policy makers was to keep those factors of production in sync when the phasing was poor we got a down turn in growth or an upturn in inflation which continued until capital and labor were restored to their proper balance these factors are still crucial but the new economy is different as the economist paul romer has argued the true engines of growth may be ideas and the technologies created from those ideas the only way to produce more economic value and thereby boost economic growth rates is to find ever more valuable ways to use the objects available to us we first used sand in an hourglass to measure time now of course we use it to form the silicon chips that power the personal computers same object more creative use paul romer and others are teaching us that innovation is not something that happens outside the economy as traditional economic theory had held innovation occurs inside the economy and it is essential if economies are to grow innovation is reshaping the very way we think about the economy and the vocabulary we use to describe it to discuss the economy we once resorted to the metaphor of a machine policy makers slowed things down or sped them up stepped on the gas or hit the brakes or shifted gears but the new economy is more like an ecosystem which depends for its health on diversity nutrients and its ability to change and evolve and learn and grow in the old economy the key to growth was an individual sector in the new economy the key to growth may be an economic web and the diversity of those webs both require and create invent the personal computer and you inevitably spawn a web of products and services that move outward from that event mouse pads computer repair shops windows 95 and so it goes the economic web is itself the generator of the next novel growth opportunity innovation sparks innovations and establishing the proper conditions for innovations to flourish is one of the policy maker s highest obligations but the larger move from hard to soft is affecting every one of your companies in the old economy the value of a company was mostly in its hard assets its buildings machines and physical equipment in the new economy the value of a company derives more from its intangibles its human capital intellectual property brain power and heart in a market economy it s no surprise that markets themselves have begun to recognize the potent power of these intangibles it s one reason that net asset values of companies are so often well below their market capitalization baruch lev an accounting professor at the nyu business school says that nearly 40 percent of the market valuation of the average company is missing from the balance sheet for high tech firms the percentage is more than 50 percent and recent research by ernst young s center for business innovation suggests that securities analysts are basing about 35 percent of their portfolio decisions on intangibles and that the more an analyst relies on these factors the more accurate his or her predictions seem to be the importance of intangibles underscores the importance of the questions that i return to again what about people what kinds of policies should we follow to promote out success in the new economy in ways that enhance the quality of our lives well just as the process of corporate transformation has moved from a focus on muscle power to brain power and is now beginning to move to a focus on innovation creativity and heart our approach to national policy is doing the same but not without controversy we have an ongoing national debate that sometimes features arguments that sound like they originated in the land of oz you remember the famous frank baum story and the judy garland movie about dorothy and her companions who went off to see the wizard incidentally speaking of magic kingdoms i m looking forward to boarding the emerald star and going to see this magnificent house a little bit later on bill in any event there are many in this period of technological change and globalization who feel like dorothy suddenly placed in an unfamiliar landscape unable to go back home and they are tempted to listen to advisors whose economic philosophies mirror the personal attributes of dorothy s companions for instance there is a group that makes up what we might call the scarecrows they have hearts and a sweet disposition but don t always make good use of their brain the scarecrows are frightened of imports fearful of more open trade scared of competition and the challenge it represents they are resentful of immigrants and want to punish them and they are extremely apprehensive about new technologies but they fail to analyze the true nature of our condition scarecrows believe that the forces of the new economy are fundamentally destructive and that government s job is to throw up walls and slow down the pace of change they also call for protecting corporate welfare and similarly for propping up companies that cannot compete now in some ways the scarecrows sometimes have a point on any trade agreement the terms must be fair and the united states cannot harmonize downward on important issues like labor and the environment but fundamentally our commitment to open trade is crucial to our economic future or take immigration it s certainly true that illegal immigration has to be stopped and we need an orderly process for admitting legal immigrants and middle income families must have the opportunities to acquire the tools and the education to make the most of all these changes but immigration is good for the united states and always has been ultimately the scarecrows good intentions lead them to unwise conclusions on trade they ignore the fact that america s tariffs are relatively small compared to those of other nations and that most trade agreements therefore increase our entry into other markets not the reverse and jobs depending on exports pay well better than the average besides history teaches us that isolation holing up behind impenetrable barriers is not the way economies grow we ve tried this approach it has been a dismal failure and if you don t believe me i have two words for you smoot hawley the scarecrows are also dangerously pessimistic their philosophy assumes that american workers and american companies can t compete and aren t as good as the rest of the world and that is just plain manifestly wrong holding back change may reduce anxieties in the short term but it stifles progress in the long term we know that prosperity in the new economy depends on innovations the scarecrows offer only a prescription for stagnation you have to have a heart but you also have to use your head now if you don t like that straw man here s another one remember the tin man the tin men have a cold calculating bead on the facts and figures and theories that measure the rise and fall of markets and the latest currency exchange rates they are intimately familiar with the metal and plastic and silicon from which our new technologies are made like oscar wilde cynics they know the price of everything but the value of nothing these tin men do appear to have a well developed intellect but they re ideas are squeaky and rusty metallic standards provide the answer to every social problem they have brains but like the tin man of the tale they lack a heart their philosophy holds that the way to get the most out of the new economy is simply to slash taxes and get the government entirely out of the way cut taxes in half no cut taxes by a factor of four some say and just sit back and watch the results wash in the central belief here is that america would enjoy unimaginable prosperity if government merely packed up and went home this approach is flawed deeply for at least two reasons first we tried it and it didn t work and much of president clinton s economic policies have been directed at repairing the damage that this approach unleashed in particular the massive quadrupled budget deficit second and more important for our purposes this philosophy ignores what s new about the new economy bill gates did not start microsoft because congress cut the capital gains tax he did it because he had an idea and he innovated and he worked very hard the tin men offer no prescription for upgrading the skills of workers or for sparking innovation they preserve the status quo by draining funds from public investments and widening the gap between rich and poor that approach threatens to worsen the prospect of working people through a resistance to worker protections and hostility toward collective bargaining some people may benefit from the heartless policies of the tin men but many would not some would suffer that result is morally unacceptable but also economically unwise a rising tide that lifts only some boats will eventually capsize all boats some of you i know are drawn to the tin men s approach and i know who you are but every time you feel lured by their siren call no more government no more government take a walk around your company look at the people who are writing code or developing pharmaceuticals or figuring out a way to improve just in time delivery and ask yourselves how many of these talented people went to college on a government student loan and then ask yourself where your company would be if these people didn t have a college education the tin men do certainly have brains but their brains could use a little oil to get rid of yesterday s squeak they ignore what is new and offer an old prescription that has been tried and has failed you ve got to use your head but you ve also got to have a heart there is a more sensible approach accept change and its many benefits but recognize the disruptions this change brings forth and give people the tools to thrive and prosper but the question has been raised is there yet another group in this land of oz the lions who know what to do but lack the courage to move forward this past week not in oz but in america we got the answer yes we have the courage to move forward we completed a bipartisan budget deal that eliminates eliminates the federal budget deficit by the year 2002 it is the first balanced budget since 1969 and it will help keep alive the best economy in at least a generation unemployment at a 24 year low historically low inflation a booming stock market that has doubled in the last four years more new small businesses created in each of the last four years than in any other year in the history of the united states of america growth in the last quarter of a whopping 5 6 percent a reinvented government downsized by 300 000 positions smaller than it has been since president kennedy s administration more flexible government with rapid approval by fda of new drugs to fight scourges like aids rapid approval by agencies like the faa of products like the triple seven getting rid of the deficit is only the first piece of our new policy for the new economy we also need open markets not protectionism but the free and fair flow of goods ideas and information is critical we need flexible regulation and an open competition policy that respects the new realities of the new economy we also must invest in the physical infrastructure of the information age connect every classroom and every library to the information superhighway just yesterday under chairman hunt s leadership we took a big step in that direction with a discounted rate for schools and libraries an e rate which will pump more than 2 2 billion per year in our information infrastructure for the future now we must create the next generation of the internet with 1 000 times the capacity of the current internet and then magnify it another 1 000 fold and ensure that the internet is a duty free zone in an economy powered by innovation we must also invest heavily and in the right way in education and our budget agreement makes the largest increase in education investment in a long long time head start educational standards charter schools hope scholarships pell grants a tax credit for college tuition the ideas of bill clinton we call him the education president and may i say here in seattle the ideas of patty murray the education senator we also need a fully reinvented government aligned with the principles of the information age a transformation of government to one that does work better and cost less we must of course maintain a military adequate to meet america s unique global leadership role and we have to protect our environment and make the investments necessary to keep our air and water clean and safe in the new economy protecting the environment is not a sacrifice we make by slowing the economy it is a precondition for a growing economy and finally we must reject those who take the low road of bashing immigrants and trafficking in intolerance in the new economy we must provide open opportunity for every american because in the new economy a global economy america s racial and ethnic diversity is a powerful economic strength an asset that we have that is unmatched by any other nation in the world we have to listen to america s heart strengthen our families nurture and respect our values encourage and facilitate corporate responsibility with family friendly policies health care coverage for working men and women and their families and we need to protect our values against attacks from those forces that undermine them like crime drugs broken homes teen pregnancy and the b arriers of intolerance and discrimination economic growth depends on a foundation of values one of the untold stories of america s extraordinary post war economic growth was that at every layer of society people shared a preexisting set of values people were ready for work on day one with a certain constellation of shared beliefs that is equally important in the new economy indeed it may be the most crucial intangible upon which our prosperity depends smart people are not enough we need people with good brains and open hearts measures like character education and community policing are not only the right thing to do they re the smart thing to do to ensure that the new economy develops well this truly is an exhilarating time government must transform in order to aid the transformation of the new economy it must understand the potency of the information revolution and comprehend the globalization of just about everything we do it must also resist the temptation to either throw up walls or throw its hands and to declare either that we can t compete or that we shouldn t care in the new economy we need brains we need heart and we need each other thank you very much dem algore9 12 03 al_gore thank you thank you very much thank you very much i m really proud and happy to be here with you it s great to be back in harlem we shot basketball together one of the last times i was here howard dean and i are traveling from here to iowa and i m going to make a more extensive speech at cedar rapids a little bit later today but i said when i announced last year that i was not going to be a candidate for president myself that i would endorse one of the candidates who is running and i had no idea at that time which candidate that would be but i have watched this campaign and i have listened to all of the candidates i think it s a great field there are a lot of great democratic candidates out there but what i m about to say doesn t come as a secret or as a surprise to anybody within the sound of my voice and that is that howard dean really is the only candidate who has been able to inspire at the grassroots level all over this country the kind of passion and enthusiasm for democracy and change and transformation of america that we need in this country we need to remake the democratic party we need to remake america we need to take it back on behalf of the people of this country so i m very proud and honored to endorse howard dean to be the next president of the united states of america democracy is a team sport and i want to do everything i can to convince anybody that is interested in my judgment about who among these candidates has the best chance to win and the best chance to lead our country in the right direction i want do everything i can to convince you to get behind howard dean and let s make this a successful campaign as a group it is about all of us and all of us need to get behind the strongest candidate now i respect the prerogative of the voters and caucuses and in the primaries and i m just one person but i m offering my judgment and i m also going to say one other thing here years ago former president ronald reagan said in the republican party that there ought to be an 11th commandment speak no ill of another republican well now we re democrats and we may well not find that kind of commandment as accessible but to the extent that we can recognize the stakes in america today i would urge all of the other candidates and campaigns to keep their eyes on the prize here we are in harlem we need to keep our eyes on the prize this nation cannot afford to have four more years of a bush cheney administration we can t afford to be divided among ourselves to the point that we lose sight of how important it is for america what is going on in this bush white house today is bad for our country and it s slowly beginning to sink in to more and more people out there and we don t have the luxury of fighting among ourselves to the point where we seriously damage our ability to win on behalf of the american people this time around now one other thing i ve spent a long time thinking about national security and national defense and i ve heard a lot of folks who in my opinion made a judgment about the iraq war that was just plain wrong saying that howard dean s decision to oppose the iraq war calls his judgment on foreign policy into question well excuse me he was the only major candidate who made the correct judgment about the iraq war and he had the insight and the courage to say and do the right thing and that s important because those judgments that basic common sense is what you want in a president our country has been weakened in our ability to fight the war against terror because of the catastrophic mistake that the bush administration made in taking us into war in iraq it was osama bin laden that attacked us not saddam hussein saddam hussein is a bad guy and he s better off not in power we re all better off but it was a mistake to get us into a quagmire over there so don t tell me that because howard dean was the only major candidate who was right about that war that that somehow calls his judgment into question on foreign policy so whether it is inspiring enthusiasm at the grassroots and promising to remake the democratic party as a force for justice and progress and good in america whether it is a domestic agenda that gets our nation back on track or whether it is protecting us against terrorists and strengthening our nation in the world i have come to the conclusion that in a field of great candidates one candidate clearly now stands out and so i m asking all of you to join in this grassroots movement to elect howard dean president of the united states thank you dem algore9 5 00 al_gore thank you very much thank you my friends thank you howard thank you very much that was really nice and i thank you howard for the warm introduction and also for the tireless work that you do on behalf of the adl and to let me also be quick to add that i know that i speak for all of us here today when i say that my hearts are with abe foxman and his wife golda i wish abe now i don t know if i m pronouncing this right you help me refua shalama is that right a full and speedy recovery it s great to hear these inspiring stories and indeed we have been allies and partners one of the ways you can find that out is by cataloguing the mutual enemies that we have some of the same groups and people have condemned the adl and me in the same breath and the same sentence which is one of the greatest honors i can possibly thank god and i am really grateful for it and as some of you know when i came home from vietnam almost 30 years ago tipper and i started our family in nashville actually next week we will celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary i m very excited about that and we have four children and as of last summer our oldest daughter and her husband made us grandparents for the first time which is also very exciting as many of you know we had our grandson for the weekend and it was a great experience i learned even more fully the meaning of the advice that i have been given on grandparenting and that is that the best technique evidently is just to give that grandchild whatever he wants and then if that causes any problems give him back to his parents we gave him back to his parents on sunday evening actually monday morning but we started our family in nashville and as many of you know nashville is the world capital of country music and the capital of songwriting of all kinds and it s not just the music of the south it is the music of america and to prove it to you let me just share with you the latest hit list from one of the many proliferating subgenres in country music the latest top songs on the jewish country and western song title list number four this week is i was one of the chosen people until she chose somebody else number three this week is the second time she said shalom i knew she meant goodbye and number two on the list this week is i ve got my foot on the glass now where are you and number one this week mamas don t let your ungrateful sons grow up to be cowboys when they could very easily just have taken over the family business that my own grandfather broke his back to start and my father slaved over for years which apparently doesn t mean anything now that you re turning your back on such a gift i really am happy to be back with the adl i feel right at home here since your founding in 1913 you have been an angel on america s shoulder summing us to our highest ideas from your work to unmask klansmen in the 1940s to your fight against mccarthyism in the 1950s and incidentally when my father went to the united states senate he had one request do not assign me to any committee that has joe mccarthy on it to your efforts to monitor hate on the internet today in all these activities and over all these years you have kept a watchful eye on extremism in every form my close friend ken jerrin who was a regional head i guess in the philadelphia area has we ve talked many times about the goals of the organization and i know also that you have never stopped working for a real and lasting peace in the middle east a purpose to work with you and you have made great strides and for which we hold great hopes for nearly nine decades now the adl has therefore worked to build new bridges of understanding and trust today i want to talk about how we can rededicate ourselves to that fundamental purpose here at home and around the world together we have an obligation heavier now than at any time in the past to create a future where liberty is genuinely indivisible where we stand against every form of bigotry and hate where we acknowledge and respect our differences so that we can finally transcend them i believe that we have the capacity for both good and evil i believe that we have the god given capacity to overcome evil with good but i believe that one of the temptations that human flesh is err to is the temptation to act out of the fear of difference i believe that prejudice and bigotry are in the analysis of reinhold neiber years ago not just logical mistakes correctable by enlightenment it s not just an error in thinking that can be dispelled by appeals to rationality i think it is i think that bigotry is a mistake of logic i think it is an error in thinking but i think it is more than that i believe that our inherit capacity to be vulnerable to the temptation to do violence out of the fear of difference is one that we have to constantly be aware of and affirmatively deal with because what erupts in these episodes that take our breath away is so frequently out of all proportion to the seeming trigger for the eruption of hatred and violence a clue that it is coming from another more existential cause and that the bigotry is really a trigger a release valve that brings forth a very basic source of violence and evil and if that is the case then the appeals to logic are necessary but insufficient the kind of diligence that you bring to this task is essential i ve spoken out of my own faith tradition in these last few thoughts and in the part of that tradition that i share with many of you i understand that last weeks torah portion was from the book of leviticus chapters that fall right in the center of the five books of moses and i know that the ideas they express are found not just at the physical center of the torah but also at the heart of its meaning in that portion we are taught to do no injustice in judgment and further to love your neighbor as yourself these teachings form the foundation of our shared tradition they are at its heart a responsibility to look out for one another a commitment to equality and justice an obligation to uphold tolerance and respect in all our endeavors these are the values that are lifted up in our common definition of what it means to be an american together we have achieved great things in america in the past seven and a half years and i speak not just of the clinton gore administration but of course primarily the american people we are prosperous and at peace america is safer than it has been in more than a generation we are closing the gap between the rich and poor for the first time in two decades but you and i know we have to work much harder to close the gaps in the american spirit it was just weeks ago right before yom hashowa that the bethel congregation had its windows shattered by gunfire and the community of mt lebanon pennsylvania had its heart shattered by the murders of a jewish woman an african american man an indian man and two asian men in illinois last july we saw a man claiming to be an agent of god take lives in the name of white supremacy in california just a few weeks later we saw a gunman target a jewish day school and kill a filipino postman joseph ileto in texas we saw james byrd dragged to his death from behind a pickup truck simply because of the color of his skin in wyoming we saw matthew shepard crucified on a split rail fence because of his sexual orientation statistically speaking a crime of hate will take place somewhere in america within the time that we are together in this room a hate crime scars this country every hour and 10 minutes of every day 365 days a year they target homes and houses of worship they exempt no race religion or region some argue that hate crimes are no different from other crimes yet all of the evidence is to the contrary hate crimes are much more likely to involve assault they are much more likely to be perpetrated against a complete stranger because their very purpose is to marginalize dehumanize and intimidate a whole group of people yet with each one of these brutal acts of bigotry we hurt the heart of america of the faith that we are one people with common values and a higher vision hate crimes are acts of violence not just against the person not just against individuals but against our ideals it is long past time for a national law to punish hate crimes and prevent them once and for all i call for the passage of national hate crimes legislation in this session of congress it is time there is still time for congress to take action this year and the lobbying that you do on this issue can make the critical difference we have to send an unmistakable message if you commit a hate crime we will find you we will punish you that punishment will be swift certain and severe so let us stand together and work together and tell congress to make the hate crimes prevention act the law of our land we have a great national responsibility to demand tolerance and nondiscrimination in our laws but we also share a more personal responsibility to nurture respect and tolerance in our own lives and in our own souls i believe in the words of abe foxman when he said we have learned to walk on the moon but we have not yet learned to walk together in harmony on the earth we have eradicated small pox but we have not eradicated the more persistent pervasive pernicious virus of bigotry we have enacted laws prohibiting all forms of prejudice and discrimination but we cannot seem to implement their spirit he added and this has an ironically prophetic tone today we have succeeded in healing the human heart by unblocking it by bypassing it even transplanting it but we have failed to erase hate from it we have to teach our children why ugly words and awful violence why desecrated synagogues and bombed buildings wound us all something that i know that your world of difference campaign is doing for millions already and we have to understand why this issue speaks not just to our values here at home but also to our ideals around the world i believe in my heart that america has a destiny in world history i believe that we have two sacred missions one of which is often held up the other of which is sometimes overlooked the first well known to all americans is that our country strives to embody the principle that freedom religious economic political freedom unlocks the highest fraction of the human potential it is the way we are intended to live our lives it is our natural condition and anything that interferes with it is our natural enemy but i think that there is a second sacred mission that we sometimes don t describe in the same way because of the pain in our own history with slavery and the civil war with the legacy of discrimination against native americans against hispanics against immigrants against jews against catholics and that is that we have a mission to prove in fact to be proof of the principle that men and women of different ethnic religious racial backgrounds and other distinctions cannot only get along together but can genuinely ennoble one another and enrich our common purpose by establishing absolute mutual respect for difference appreciation for difference understanding of difference understanding of the unique suffering that has come about because of difference understanding of the unique contributions that have come about because of difference and then on the basis of that broadly established mutual respect for difference we transcend that difference to embrace the highest common denominator of the human respect all around the world there are people in places known and unknown places like chechnya and northern ireland and negorno keravack and places whose names have yet to enter our common lexicon where differences that are sometimes seemingly slight as the difference between hutus and tutsis or bosniacs and serbs and croatians freud once spoke about the narcissism of slight difference just as einstein taught that the most destructive power known on earth is within the smallest space we know the inside of the atom the smallest differences sometimes unleash the most horrific violence and where that happens throughout our world quietly and sometimes openly they dare to dream that they could establish in their lands what they believe we have here in ours and just as we hold the standard of liberty high we must also hold the standard of tolerance and diversity and respect for difference e pluribus unum as high as we possibly can so that peoples who need hope for the human future can see that banner and in their hearts march toward it from the middle east to northern ireland from the worn torn balkans to east timor people across the world see in our country a reflection of their own great potential some dare not dream because it aches their hearts but even they know or at least can dimly sense the potential that they have and they always will as long as we give all our citizens whatever their background an opportunity to achieve their own greatness first and fundamentally america must honor and uphold our values here at home when the confederate flag flies over a state capitol it should concern us all this is not complicated speak out about it it is wrong to remain silent about it we also have to uphold our values around the world the adl has always understood why domestic issues like hate crimes legislation and global causes such as middle east peace are fundamentally linked how can we lead the nations of the earth toward peace and freedom and tolerance if we are not true to ourselves and if we do not defend those principles in our own land and in our own lives then how can we make our own ideas real if we do not work for them around the world we all applaud the verdict of the court in britain against a falsifier of history who claimed that the gas chambers of auschwitz were fakes built as a tourist attraction and then tried to put history itself on trial and give comfort to those who cloak themselves in hatred and denial thank god for the wisdom and the law on the side of the court which struck down that obscene set of claims by that awful falsifier we are strongly committed to the future of israel because that promised land is deeply connected to the american promise of freedom and self determination even as we meet the people of israel begin their independence day celebrations we join with them on this special day and we will always stand with them i am for an unshakeable bond to strengthen the u s israel friendship and i always will be i think it is important for what we stand for and we must be concerned when iranian jews are detained in shiraz without a fair trial the iranian authorities assured the international community that due process would be served but by denying access to international observers and the press the government of iran has cast grave doubts on the legitimacy of the proceedings and on the recent statements of the accused the united states will judge iran by its actions not by its assurances i want to make it clear that we will watch this case as a gauge for the pace and extent of iran s reintegration into the international community any system of justice afraid of public scrutiny is an engine of injustice the adl knows the challenges are unceasing because you have fought in the forefront of these causes for almost a century now your forceful advocacy is as critical today as it has ever been we need it because we need tougher laws against hate crimes here at home and because we need principle engagement abroad we also need to heed the words of mahatma ghandi when he said we must become the change we wish to see in the world elie wiesel tells the story of the man who said look i know how to bring about a change that will benefit the whole world but the whole world is a huge place so i will begin with my country i don t know my whole country though so i ll begin with my town my town has so many streets i ll begin on my own street there are so many houses on my street i ll begin in mine there are so many people in my house i ll begin with myself and so says wiesel you begin with yourself the united states of america is grateful that the adl has been a torch bearer of liberty and tolerance across all these years we are grateful for your witness and your work on so many of the most fundamental issues in the words of abe foxman let s not throw up our hands let s roll up our sleeves and you tell him that if he misses other meetings we ll quote him even more and together i know that we can change hearts we can change minds and we can build that more perfect union that our founders envisioned to be a model for all human kind thank you and god bless you thank you very much dem algore9 9 05 al_gore i know that you are deeply concerned as i am about the direction in which our country has been moving about the erosion of social capital about the lack of respect for a very basic principle and that is that we as americans have to put ourselves and our ability to seek out the truth because we know it will make us free and then on the basis of truth as we share it to the best of our abilities with one another we act to try to form a more perfect union and provide for the general welfare and make this country worthy of the principles upon which it was founded my heart is heavy for another reason today and many have mentioned this but i want to tell you personally that my heart is heavy because of the suffering that the people of the gulf coast have been enduring the losses that they ve suffered in louisiana mississippi alabama new orleans in particular but other cities as well and rural areas we are here thinking of them thinking as well of the many brave men and women who have exceeded the limits of exhaustion as they do their duty in responding to this crisis to the families of those responders and the families of the victims when i received the invitation that you generously extended for me to come and speak to you i did not at first accept because i was trying to resolve a scheduling conflict the fifty state insurance commissioners were meeting in new orleans and asked me to speak about global warming and hurricanes i was supposed to be there today and tomorrow morning and of course as we all watch this tragedy unfold we had a lot of different thoughts and feelings but then all those feelings were mixed in with puzzlement at why there was no immediate response why there was not an adequate plan in place we are now told that this is not a time to point fingers even as some of those saying don t point fingers are themselves pointing fingers at the victims of the tragedy who did not many of whom could not evacuate the city of new orleans because they didn t have automobiles and they did not have adequate public transportation we re told this is not a time to hold our national government accountable because there are more important matters that confront us this is not an either or choice they are linked together as our nation belatedly finds effective ways to help those who have been so hard hit by hurricane katrina it is important that we learn the right lessons of what has happened lest we are spoon fed the wrong lessons from what happened if we do not absorb the right lessons we are in the historian s phrase doomed to repeat the mistakes that have already been made all of us know that our nation all of us the united states of america failed the people of new orleans and the gulf coast when this hurricane was approaching them and when it struck when the corpses of american citizens are floating in toxic floodwaters five days after a hurricane strikes it is time not only to respond directly to the victims of the catastrophe but to hold the processes of our nation accountable and the leaders of our nation accountable for the failures that have taken place the bible in which i believe in my own faith tradition says where there is no vision the people perish four years ago in august of 2001 president bush received a dire warning al qaeda determined to attack inside the us no meetings were called no alarms were sounded no one was brought together to say what else do we know about this imminent threat what can we do to prepare our nation for what we have been warned is about to take place if there had been preparations they would have found a lot of information collected by the fbi and cia and nsa including the names of most of the terrorists who flew those planes into the wtc and the pentagon and the field in pennsylvania the warnings of fbi field offices that there were suspicious characters getting flight training without expressing any curiosity about the part of the training that has to do with landing they would have found directors of fbi field offices in a state of agitation about the fact that there was no plan in place and no effective response instead it was vacation time not a time for preparation or protecting the american people four years later there were dire warnings three days before hurricane katrina hit nola that if it followed the path it was then on the levees would break and the city of new orleans would drown and thousands of people would be at risk it was once again vacation time and the preparations were not made the plans were not laid the response then was not forthcoming in the early days of the unfolding catastrophe the president compared our ongoing efforts in iraq to world war two and victory over japan let me cite one difference between those two historical events when imperial japan attacked us at pearl harbor franklin roosevelt did not invade indonesia i personally believe that the very fact that there has been no accountability for the horrendous misjudgments and outright falsehoods that laid the basis for this horrible tragedy that we have ongoing in iraq the fact that there was no accountability for those mistakes misjudgments and dissembling is one of the principal reasons why there was no fear of being held accountable for a cavalier lackluster mistaken inadequate response to the onrushing tragedy that was clearly visible for those who were watching television for those who were reading the news what happened was not only knowable it was known in advance in great and painstaking detail they did tabletop planning exercises they identified exactly what the scientific evidence showed would take place where there is no vision the people perish it s not only that there is no vision it s that there has been a misguided vision one of the principle philosophical guides for this administration has been the man who said famously that he wants to render the government of the united states so weak and helpless that you can drown it in a bathtub there were warnings three years ago from the last director in the clinton gore administration of fema that fema was being rendered weak and helpless unable to respond in the event of a catastrophe the budget was cut the resources sent elsewhere carl said he was embarrassed the word is a tricky word what did you feel after the invasion of iraq when you saw american soldiers holding dog leashes attached to helpless prisoners 99 of whom by the way were innocent of any connection to violence against our troops much less terrorism innocent prisoners who were being tortured in our name what did you feel i don t know the words i don t know the words but i want you to draw a line connecting the feelings you had when you saw the visual images providing evidence that our soldiers acting in our name with our authority were torturing helpless people and that it was a matter of policy now they pointed fingers at the privates and corporals that were in charge but i want you to draw a line between the emotions that you felt when you absorbed that news and the emotions that you felt over the last ten days when you saw those corpses in the water when you saw people without food water medicine our fellow citizens left helpless and of course in both cases the story is complex and many factors are involved but i want you draw a line connecting the feelings that you had then and now and i want you to draw another line connecting those responsible for both of those unbelievable tragedies that embarrassed our nation in the eyes of the world there are scientific warnings now of another onrushing catastrophe we were warned of an imminent attack by al qaeda we didn t respond we were warned the levees would break in new orleans we didn t respond now the scientific community is warning us that the average hurricane will continue to get stronger because of global warming a scientist at mit has published a study well before this tragedy showing that since the 1970s hurricanes in both the atlantic and the pacific have increased in duration and in intensity by about 50 the newscasters told us after hurricane katrina went over the southern tip of florida that there was a particular danger for the gulf coast of the hurricanes becoming much stronger because it was passing over unusually warm waters in the gulf the waters in the gulf have been unusually warm the oceans generally have been getting warmer and the pattern is exactly consistent with what scientists have predicted for twenty years two thousand scientists in a hundred countries engaged in the most elaborate well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind have produced long since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming it is important to learn the lessons of what happens when scientific evidence and clear authoritative warnings are ignored in order to induce our leaders not to do it again and not to ignore the scientists again and not to leave us unprotected in the face of those threats that are facing us right now the president says that he is not sure that global warming is a real threat he says that he is not ready to do anything meaningful to prepare us for a threat that he s not certain is real he tells us that he believes the science of global warming is in dispute this is the same president who said last week nobody could have predicted that the levees would break it s important to establish accountability in order to make our democracy work and the uncertainty and lack of resolution the willful misunderstanding of what the scientific community is saying the preference for what a few supporters in the coal and oil industry far from all but a few want him to do ignore the science that is a serious problem the president talked about the analogies to world war ii let me give another analogy to world war ii winston churchill when the storm was gathering on continental europe provided warnings of what was at stake and he said this about the government then in power in england which wasn t sure that the threat was real he said they go on in strange paradox decided only to be undecided resolved to be irresolute adamant for drift solid for fluidity all powerful to be impotent he continued the era of procrastination of half measures of soothing and baffling expedience of delays is coming to a close in its place we are entering a period of consequences ladies and gentlemen the warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time we are facing a global climate crisis it is deepening we are entering a period of consequences churchill also said this and he directed it at the people of his country who were looking for any way to avoid having to really confront the threat that he was warning of and asking them to prepare for he said that he understood why there was a natural desire to deny the reality of the situation and to search for vain hope that it wasn t really as serious as some claimed it was he said they should know the truth and after the appeasement by neville chamberlain he sad this is only the beginning of the reckoning this only the first sip the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor we rise again and take our stand for freedom it is time now for us to recover our moral health in america and stand again to rise for freedom demand accountability for poor decisions missed judgments lack of planning lack of preparation and willful denial of the obvious truth about serious and imminent threats that are facing the american people abraham lincoln said the occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion as our case is new we must think anew and act anew we must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country we must disenthrall ourselves with the sound and light show that has diverted the attentions of our great democracy from the important issues and challenges of our day we must disenthrall ourselves from the michael jackson trial and the aruba search and the latest sequential obsession with celebrity trials or whatever relative triviality dominates the conversation of democracy instead of making room for us as free american citizens to talk with one another about our true situation and then save our country we must resist those wrong lessons some are now saying including in the current administration that the pitiful response by government proves that we cannot ever rely on the government they have in the past proposed more unilateral power for themselves as the solution for a catastrophe of their own creation and we should not acquiesce in allowing them to investigate themselves and giving them more power to abuse and misuse the way they have so recently done the fact that an administration can t manage its own way out of a horse show doesn t mean that all government programs should be abolished fema worked extremely well during the previous administration a hundred years ago upton sinclair wrote it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding here s what i think we here understand about hurricane katrina and global warming yes it is true that no single hurricane can be blamed on global warming hurricanes have come for a long time and will continue to come in the future yes it is true that the science does not definitively tell us that global warming increases the frequency of hurricanes because yes it is true there is a multi decadal cycle twenty to forty years that profoundly affects the number of hurricanes that come in any single hurricane season but it is also true that the science is extremely clear now that warmer oceans make the average hurricane stronger not only makes the winds stronger but dramatically increases the moisture from the oceans evaporating into the storm thus magnifying its destructive power makes the duration as well as the intensity of the hurricane stronger last year we had a lot of hurricanes last year japan set an all time record for typhoons ten the previous record was seven last year the science textbooks had to be re written they said it s impossible to have a hurricane in the south atlantic we had the first one last year in brazil we had an all time record last year for tornadoes in the united states 1 717 largely because hurricanes spawned tornadoes last year we had record temperatures in many cities this year 200 cities in the western united states broke all time records reno 39 days consecutively above 100 degrees the scientists are telling us that what the science tells them is that this unless we act quickly and dramatically that tucson tied its all time record for consecutive days above 100 degrees this in churchill s phrase is only the first sip of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year until there is a supreme recover of moral health we have to rise with this occasion we have to connect the dots when the superfund sites aren t cleaned up we get a toxic gumbo in a flood when there is not adequate public transportation for the poor it is difficult to evacuate a city when there is no ability to give medical care to poor people its difficult to get hospital to take refugees in the middle of a crisis when the wetlands are turned over to the developers then the storm surges from the ocean threaten the coastal cities more when there is no effort to restrain the global warming pollution gasses then global warming gets worse with all of the consequences that the scientific community has warned us about my friends the truth is that our circumstances are not only new they are completely different than they have ever been in all of human history the relationship between humankind and the earth had been utterly transformed in the last hundred years we have quadrupled the population of our planet the population in many ways is a success story the demographic transition has been occurring more quickly than was hoped for but the reality of our new relationship with the planet brings with it a moral responsibility to accept our new circumstances and to deal with the consequences of the relationship we have with this planet and it s not just population by any means the power of the technologies now at our disposal vastly magnifies the average impact that individuals can have on the natural world multiply that by six and a half billion people and then stir into that toxic mixture a mindset and an attitude that says its okay to ignore scientific evidence that we don t have to take responsibility for the future consequences of present actions and you get a collision between our civilization and the earth the refugees that we have seen i don t like that word when applied to american citizens in our own country but the refugees that we have seen could well be the first sip of that bitter cup because sea level rise in countries around the world will mobilize millions of environmental refugees the other problems are known to you but here is what i want to close with this is a moral moment this is not ultimately about any scientific debate or political dialogue ultimately it is about who we are as human beings it is about our capacity to transcend our own limitations to rise to this new occasion to see with our hearts as well as our heads the unprecedented response that is now called for to disenthrall ourselves to shed the illusions that have been our accomplices in ignoring the warnings that were clearly given and hearing the ones that are clearly given now where there is no vision the people perish and lincoln said at another moment of supreme challenge that the question facing the people of the united states of america ultimately was whether or not this government conceived in liberty dedicated to freedom of the people by the people and for the people or any government so conceived would perish from this earth there is another side to this moral challenge where there is vision the people prosper and flourish and the natural world recovers and our communities recover the good news is we know what to do the good news is we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming we have all the technologies we need more are being developed and as they become available and become more affordable when produced in scale they will make it easier to respond but we should not wait we cannot wait we must not wait we have every thing we need save perhaps political will and in our democracy political will is a renewable resource i know that you are debating as an organization and talking among yourselves about your own priorities i would urge you to make global warming your priority i would urge you to focus on a unified theme i would urge you to work with other groups in ways that have not been done in the past even though there have been herculean efforts on your part and the part of others i would urge you to make this a moral moment to make this a moral cause there are those who would say that the problem is too big and we can t solve it there are many people who go from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually solving the problem to those who say it s too big for us i say that we have accepted and successfully met such challenges in the past we declared our liberty and then won it we designed a country that respected and safeguarded the freedom of individuals we freed the slaves we gave women the right to vote we took on jim crow and segregation we cured great diseases we have landed on the moon we have won two wars in the pacific and the atlantic simultaneously we brought down communism we brought down apartheid we have even solved a global environmental crisis before the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer because we had leadership and because we had vision and because people who exercise moral authority in their local communities empowered our nation s government of the people by the people and for the people to take ethical actions even thought they were difficult this is another such time this is your moment this is the time for those who see and understand and care and are willing to work to say this time the warnings will not be ignored this time we will prepare this time we will rise to the occasion and we will prevail thank you good luck to you god bless you dem algore92 al_gore thank you thank you thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you very much i have to tell you i ve been dreaming of this moment since i was a kid growing up in tennessee that one day i d have the chance to come here to madison square garden and be the warm up act for elvis my friends i thank you for your confidence expressed in the vote this evening i pledge to pour my heart and soul into this crusade on behalf of the american people and i accept your nomination for the vice presidency of the united states of america i did not seek this nomination nor did i expect it but i am here to join this team because i love my country and because i believe in my heart that together bill clinton and i offer the american people the best chance we have as a nation to move forward in the right direction again i m here because the country i love has a government that is failing our people failing the forgotten majority in your hometown and mine those who scrimp and save and work hard all their lives to build a better life for their children i m here to renew a journey our founders began more than 200 years ago in my lifetime i have seen america s ideals and dreams change the world and i believe that now is the time to bring those ideals and dreams home here to change america our country is in trouble people in other nations inspired by the eternal promise of america have torn down the berlin wall brought communism to its knees and forced a racist government in south africa to turn away from apartheid throughout the world obstacles to liberty that many thought might stand forever turned out to simply be no match for men and women who decided in their hearts that their future could be much greater than their past would let them dream their faith in the power of conscience and their confidence in the force of truth required a leap of the human spirit can we say truthfully that their chance for change was better than ours and yet we face our own crisis of the spirit here and now in america we re told we can no longer change we ve seen our better days they even say we re history the cynics are having a field day because across this country millions of american families have been betrayed by a government out of touch with our values and beholden to the privileged few millions of people are loosing faith in the very idea of democracy and are even in danger of loosing heart because they fear their lives may no longer have any deeper meaning or purpose but you can t kill hope that easily not in america not here where a cynic is just a disappointed idealist in disguise a dreamer yearning to dream again in every american no matter how badly betrayed or how poorly led there is always hope even now if you listen you can hear the pulse of america s true spirit no the american spirit isn t gone but we vow here tonight that in november george bush and dan quayle will be history they have demeaned our democracy with the politics of distraction denial and despair what time is it what time is it what time is it the american people the american people are disgusted with excuses and tired of blame they know that throughout american history each generation has passed on leadership to the next that time has come again the time for a new generation of leadership for the united states of america to take over from george bush and dan quayle and you know what that means for them ladies and gentlemen in 1992 our challenge is not to elect the last president of the 20th century but to elect the first president of the 21st century president bill clinton bill clinton has a plan that offers real answers for the real problems of real people a bold new economic strategy to rebuild this country and put our people back to work and if you want to know what bill clinton can do take a look at what he has already done for more than a decade he has been fighting against incredible odds to bring good jobs better skills and genuine hope to one of the poorest states in our country a decade ago when his state needed dramatic reform to shake up one of the poorest school systems in america bill clinton took on the established interests and made arkansas the first state to require teacher testing he has cut classroom size raised test scores above the national average and earned the support of both teachers and parents who now know bill clinton will be the real education president for this country for most of the last decade while the republicans have been trying to use welfare to divide us bill clinton has lead the fight to reform the welfare system to move people off welfare and into the workforce and he did all this while balancing eleven budgets in a row let me say that again while balancing eleven budgets in a row and giving the people of arkansas one of the lowest tax burdens in this country no wonder arkansas under bill clinton has been creating manufacturing jobs at ten times the national rate and no wonder that when all the nation s governors republicans and democrats alike were asked to vote on who was the most effective governor in all the land by an overwhelming margin they chose bill clinton what we need in america in 1992 is a president who will unleash the best in us by putting faith in the decency and good judgment of our people a president who will challenge us to be true to our values and examine the ways in which our own attitudes are sometimes barriers to the progress we seek i m convinced that america is ready to be inspired and lifted again by leaders committed to seeking out the best in our society developing it and strengthening it i ve spent much of my career working to protect the environment not only because it is vital to the future of my state of tennessee our country and our earth but because i believe there is a fundamental link between our current relationship to the earth and the attitudes that stand in the way of human progress for generations we have believed that we could abuse the earth because we were somehow not really connected to it but now we must face the truth the task of saving the earth s environment must and will become the central organizing principle of the post cold war world and just as the false assumption that we are not connected to the earth has lead to the ecological crisis so the equally false assumption that we are not connected to each other has lead to our social crisis even worse the evil and mistaken assumption that we have no connection to those generations preceding us or those who will follow us has lead to the crisis of values we face today those are the connections that are missing from our politics today those are the bridges we must rebuild if we are to rebuild our country and those are the values we must honor if we are to recapture the faith in the future that has always been the heart of the american dream we have another challenge as well in the wake of the cold war with the reemergence of ancient ethnic and racial hatreds throughout the world the united states must once again prove that there is a better way just as we accept it as a people on behalf of all human kind the historic mission of proving that political freedom is the best form of government and that economic freedom is the best engine of prosperity we must now accept the obligation of proving that freedom from prejudice is the heart and soul of community that yes we can get along yes people of all backgrounds can not only live together peacefully but enrich one another celebrate diversity and come together as one yes we will be one people and live the dream that will make this world free in the end this election isn t about politics it isn t even about winning though that s what we re gonna do this election is about the responsibilities that we owe one another the responsibilities we owe our children the calling we hear to serve our country and to be a part of a community larger than ourselves you ve heard a lot in the past week about how much bill clinton and i have in common indeed we both share the values we learned in our hometowns individual responsibility faith family and the belief that hard work should be rewarded we re both fathers with young children children who are part of a generation whose very future is very much at stake in this election and we re both proud of our wives hillary clinton and tipper gore two women who have done more for the children of this country in the last twelve years than the last two men who have sat in the oval office have done in their entire lifetimes my father was a teacher in a one room school who worked his way to the united states senate i was eight years old when my father s name was place in nomination for the vice presidency before the democratic convention in 1956 and growing up i watched him stand courageously for civil rights economic opportunity and a government that worked for ordinary people three years ago my son albert was struck by a car crossing the street after watching a baseball game in baltimore tipper and i watched as he was thrown thirty feet through the air and scraped another twenty feet on the pavement after he hit the ground i ran to his side and held him and called his name but he was limp and still without breath or pulse his eyes were open with the empty stare of death and we prayed the two of us there in the gutter with only my voice his injuries inside and out were massive and for terrible days he lingered between life and death tipper and i spent the next thirty days and nights there at his bedside our family was lifted and healed in no small measure by an incredible outpouring of love and compassion and prayers from thousands and thousands of people most of whom we never even knew albert is plenty brave and strong and with the support of three wonderful sisters karenna kristin and sarah and two loving parents who helped him with his exercises every morning and prayed for him every night he pulled through and now thank god he has fully recovered and runs and plays and torments his older sisters like any little boy but ladies and gentlemen i want to tell you this straight from my heart that experience changed me forever when you ve seen your six year old son fighting for his life you realize that some things matter a lot more than winning you loose patience with the lazy assumption of so many in politics that we can always just muddle through when you ve seen your reflection in the empty stare of a boy waiting for his second breath of life you realize that we were not put here on earth to look out for our needs alone we are part of something much larger than ourselves all of us are part of something much greater than we are capable of imagining and my friends if you look up for a moment from the rush of your daily lives you will hear the quiet voices of your country crying out for help you will see your reflection in the weary eyes of those who are losing hope in america and you will see that our democracy is lying there in the gutter waiting for us to give it a second breath of life i don t care what party you re in whether you re an independent whether you have been tempted to just give up completely on the whole political process we want you to join this common effort to unite our country behind a higher calling if you have been supporting ross perot i want to make a special plea to you this evening stay involved you have already changed politics in this country for the better keep on fighting for change the time has come for all americans to be a part of the healing in the words of the bible do not loose heart this nation will be renewed in order to renew our nation we must renew ourselves just as america has always transcended the hopes and dreams of every other nation on earth so must we transcend ourselves and in gandhi s words become the change we wish to see in the world let those of us alive today resolve with one another that we will so conduct ourselves in this campaign and in our lives that two hundred years from now americans will say of our labors that this nation and this earth were healed by people that they never even knew i m told that hope arkansas is indeed a lot like my home town of carthage tennessee a place where people do know about it when you re born and care about it when you die that s the america bill clinton and i grew up in that s the kind of nation we want our children to grow up in just as hope is a community so is america when we bring the community of america together we will rekindle the american spirit and renew this nation for generations to come and the way to begin is to elect bill clinton president of the united states of america thank you very much dem bobama1 12 09 barack_obama good evening to the united states corps of cadets to the men and women of our armed services and to my fellow americans i want to speak to you tonight about our effort in afghanistan the nature of our commitment there the scope of our interests and the strategy that my administration will pursue to bring this war to a successful conclusion it s an extraordinary honor for me to do so here at west point where so many men and women have prepared to stand up for our security and to represent what is finest about our country to address these important issues it s important to recall why america and our allies were compelled to fight a war in afghanistan in the first place we did not ask for this fight on september 11 2001 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3 000 people they struck at our military and economic nerve centers they took the lives of innocent men women and children without regard to their faith or race or station were it not for the heroic actions of passengers onboard one of those flights they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in washington and killed many more as we know these men belonged to al qaeda a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled islam one of the world s great religions to justify the slaughter of innocents al qaeda s base of operations was in afghanistan where they were harbored by the taliban a ruthless repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of soviet occupation and civil war and after the attention of america and our friends had turned elsewhere just days after 9 11 congress authorized the use of force against al qaeda and those who harbored them an authorization that continues to this day the vote in the senate was 98 to nothing the vote in the house was 420 to 1 for the first time in its history the north atlantic treaty organization invoked article 5 the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all and the united nations security council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9 11 attacks america our allies and the world were acting as one to destroy al qaeda s terrorist network and to protect our common security under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy and only after the taliban refused to turn over osama bin laden we sent our troops into afghanistan within a matter of months al qaeda was scattered and many of its operatives were killed the taliban was driven from power and pushed back on its heels a place that had known decades of fear now had reason to hope at a conference convened by the u n a provisional government was established under president hamid karzai and an international security assistance force was established to help bring a lasting peace to a war torn country then in early 2003 the decision was made to wage a second war in iraq the wrenching debate over the iraq war is well known and need not be repeated here it s enough to say that for the next six years the iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops our resources our diplomacy and our national attention and that the decision to go into iraq caused substantial rifts between america and much of the world today after extraordinary costs we are bringing the iraq war to a responsible end we will remove our combat brigades from iraq by the end of next summer and all of our troops by the end of 2011 that we are doing so is a testament to the character of the men and women in uniform thanks to their courage grit and perseverance we have given iraqis a chance to shape their future and we are successfully leaving iraq to its people but while we ve achieved hard earned milestones in iraq the situation in afghanistan has deteriorated after escaping across the border into pakistan in 2001 and 2002 al qaeda s leadership established a safe haven there although a legitimate government was elected by the afghan people it s been hampered by corruption the drug trade an under developed economy and insufficient security forces over the last several years the taliban has maintained common cause with al qaeda as they both seek an overthrow of the afghan government gradually the taliban has begun to control additional swaths of territory in afghanistan while engaging in increasingly brazen and devastating attacks of terrorism against the pakistani people now throughout this period our troop levels in afghanistan remained a fraction of what they were in iraq when i took office we had just over 32 000 americans serving in afghanistan compared to 160 000 in iraq at the peak of the war commanders in afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the taliban but these reinforcements did not arrive and that s why shortly after taking office i approved a longstanding request for more troops after consultations with our allies i then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in afghanistan and the extremist safe havens in pakistan i set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting dismantling and defeating al qaeda and its extremist allies and pledged to better coordinate our military and civilian efforts since then we ve made progress on some important objectives high ranking al qaeda and taliban leaders have been killed and we ve stepped up the pressure on al qaeda worldwide in pakistan that nation s army has gone on its largest offensive in years in afghanistan we and our allies prevented the taliban from stopping a presidential election and although it was marred by fraud that election produced a government that is consistent with afghanistan s laws and constitution yet huge challenges remain afghanistan is not lost but for several years it has moved backwards there s no imminent threat of the government being overthrown but the taliban has gained momentum al qaeda has not reemerged in afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9 11 but they retain their safe havens along the border and our forces lack the full support they need to effectively train and partner with afghan security forces and better secure the population our new commander in afghanistan general mcchrystal has reported that the security situation is more serious than he anticipated in short the status quo is not sustainable as cadets you volunteered for service during this time of danger some of you fought in afghanistan some of you will deploy there as your commander in chief i owe you a mission that is clearly defined and worthy of your service and that s why after the afghan voting was completed i insisted on a thorough review of our strategy now let me be clear there has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010 so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war during this review period instead the review has allowed me to ask the hard questions and to explore all the different options along with my national security team our military and civilian leadership in afghanistan and our key partners and given the stakes involved i owed the american people and our troops no less this review is now complete and as commander in chief i have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30 000 u s troops to afghanistan after 18 months our troops will begin to come home these are the resources that we need to seize the initiative while building the afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of afghanistan i do not make this decision lightly i opposed the war in iraq precisely because i believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force and always consider the long term consequences of our actions we have been at war now for eight years at enormous cost in lives and resources years of debate over iraq and terrorism have left our unity on national security issues in tatters and created a highly polarized and partisan backdrop for this effort and having just experienced the worst economic crisis since the great depression the american people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home most of all i know that this decision asks even more of you a military that along with your families has already borne the heaviest of all burdens as president i have signed a letter of condolence to the family of each american who gives their life in these wars i have read the letters from the parents and spouses of those who deployed i visited our courageous wounded warriors at walter reed i ve traveled to dover to meet the flag draped caskets of 18 americans returning home to their final resting place i see firsthand the terrible wages of war if i did not think that the security of the united states and the safety of the american people were at stake in afghanistan i would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow so no i do not make this decision lightly i make this decision because i am convinced that our security is at stake in afghanistan and pakistan this is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al qaeda it is from here that we were attacked on 9 11 and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as i speak this is no idle danger no hypothetical threat in the last few months alone we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of afghanistan and pakistan to commit new acts of terror and this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and al qaeda can operate with impunity we must keep the pressure on al qaeda and to do that we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region of course this burden is not ours alone to bear this is not just america s war since 9 11 al qaeda s safe havens have been the source of attacks against london and amman and bali the people and governments of both afghanistan and pakistan are endangered and the stakes are even higher within a nuclear armed pakistan because we know that al qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons and we have every reason to believe that they would use them these facts compel us to act along with our friends and allies our overarching goal remains the same to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda in afghanistan and pakistan and to prevent its capacity to threaten america and our allies in the future to meet that goal we will pursue the following objectives within afghanistan we must deny al qaeda a safe haven we must reverse the taliban s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government and we must strengthen the capacity of afghanistan s security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for afghanistan s future we will meet these objectives in three ways first we will pursue a military strategy that will break the taliban s momentum and increase afghanistan s capacity over the next 18 months the 30 000 additional troops that i m announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 the fastest possible pace so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers they ll increase our ability to train competent afghan security forces and to partner with them so that more afghans can get into the fight and they will help create the conditions for the united states to transfer responsibility to the afghans because this is an international effort i ve asked that our commitment be joined by contributions from our allies some have already provided additional troops and we re confident that there will be further contributions in the days and weeks ahead our friends have fought and bled and died alongside us in afghanistan and now we must come together to end this war successfully for what s at stake is not simply a test of nato s credibility what s at stake is the security of our allies and the common security of the world but taken together these additional american and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to afghan forces and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of afghanistan in july of 2011 just as we have done in iraq we will execute this transition responsibly taking into account conditions on the ground we ll continue to advise and assist afghanistan s security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul but it will be clear to the afghan government and more importantly to the afghan people that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country second we will work with our partners the united nations and the afghan people to pursue a more effective civilian strategy so that the government can take advantage of improved security this effort must be based on performance the days of providing a blank check are over president karzai s inauguration speech sent the right message about moving in a new direction and going forward we will be clear about what we expect from those who receive our assistance we ll support afghan ministries governors and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people we expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable and we will also focus our assistance in areas such as agriculture that can make an immediate impact in the lives of the afghan people the people of afghanistan have endured violence for decades they ve been confronted with occupation by the soviet union and then by foreign al qaeda fighters who used afghan land for their own purposes so tonight i want the afghan people to understand america seeks an end to this era of war and suffering we have no interest in occupying your country we will support efforts by the afghan government to open the door to those taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens and we will seek a partnership with afghanistan grounded in mutual respect to isolate those who destroy to strengthen those who build to hasten the day when our troops will leave and to forge a lasting friendship in which america is your partner and never your patron third we will act with the full recognition that our success in afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with pakistan we re in afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country but this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of pakistan that s why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border in the past there have been those in pakistan who ve argued that the struggle against extremism is not their fight and that pakistan is better off doing little or seeking accommodation with those who use violence but in recent years as innocents have been killed from karachi to islamabad it has become clear that it is the pakistani people who are the most endangered by extremism public opinion has turned the pakistani army has waged an offensive in swat and south waziristan and there is no doubt that the united states and pakistan share a common enemy in the past we too often defined our relationship with pakistan narrowly those days are over moving forward we are committed to a partnership with pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interest mutual respect and mutual trust we will strengthen pakistan s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear america is also providing substantial resources to support pakistan s democracy and development we are the largest international supporter for those pakistanis displaced by the fighting and going forward the pakistan people must know america will remain a strong supporter of pakistan s security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent so that the great potential of its people can be unleashed these are the three core elements of our strategy a military effort to create the conditions for a transition a civilian surge that reinforces positive action and an effective partnership with pakistan i recognize there are a range of concerns about our approach so let me briefly address a few of the more prominent arguments that i ve heard and which i take very seriously first there are those who suggest that afghanistan is another vietnam they argue that it cannot be stabilized and we re better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing i believe this argument depends on a false reading of history unlike vietnam we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action unlike vietnam we are not facing a broad based popular insurgency and most importantly unlike vietnam the american people were viciously attacked from afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border to abandon this area now and to rely only on efforts against al qaeda from a distance would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies second there are those who acknowledge that we can t leave afghanistan in its current state but suggest that we go forward with the troops that we already have but this would simply maintain a status quo in which we muddle through and permit a slow deterioration of conditions there it would ultimately prove more costly and prolong our stay in afghanistan because we would never be able to generate the conditions needed to train afghan security forces and give them the space to take over finally there are those who oppose identifying a time frame for our transition to afghan responsibility indeed some call for a more dramatic and open ended escalation of our war effort one that would commit us to a nation building project of up to a decade i reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests furthermore the absence of a time frame for transition would deny us any sense of urgency in working with the afghan government it must be clear that afghans will have to take responsibility for their security and that america has no interest in fighting an endless war in afghanistan as president i refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility our means or our interests and i must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces i don t have the luxury of committing to just one indeed i m mindful of the words of president eisenhower who in discussing our national security said each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration the need to maintain balance in and among national programs over the past several years we have lost that balance we ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy in the wake of an economic crisis too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills too many americans are worried about the future facing our children meanwhile competition within the global economy has grown more fierce so we can t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars all told by the time i took office the cost of the wars in iraq and afghanistan approached a trillion dollars going forward i am committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly our new approach in afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly 30 billion for the military this year and i ll work closely with congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit but as we end the war in iraq and transition to afghan responsibility we must rebuild our strength here at home our prosperity provides a foundation for our power it pays for our military it underwrites our diplomacy it taps the potential of our people and allows investment in new industry and it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last that s why our troop commitment in afghanistan cannot be open ended because the nation that i m most interested in building is our own now let me be clear none of this will be easy the struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly and it extends well beyond afghanistan and pakistan it will be an enduring test of our free society and our leadership in the world and unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the 20th century our effort will involve disorderly regions failed states diffuse enemies so as a result america will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars and prevent conflict not just how we wage wars we ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power where al qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold whether in somalia or yemen or elsewhere they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships and we can t count on military might alone we have to invest in our homeland security because we can t capture or kill every violent extremist abroad we have to improve and better coordinate our intelligence so that we stay one step ahead of shadowy networks we will have to take away the tools of mass destruction and that s why i ve made it a central pillar of my foreign policy to secure loose nuclear materials from terrorists to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to pursue the goal of a world without them because every nation must understand that true security will never come from an endless race for ever more destructive weapons true security will come for those who reject them we ll have to use diplomacy because no one nation can meet the challenges of an interconnected world acting alone i ve spent this year renewing our alliances and forging new partnerships and we have forged a new beginning between america and the muslim world one that recognizes our mutual interest in breaking a cycle of conflict and that promises a future in which those who kill innocents are isolated by those who stand up for peace and prosperity and human dignity and finally we must draw on the strength of our values for the challenges that we face may have changed but the things that we believe in must not that s why we must promote our values by living them at home which is why i have prohibited torture and will close the prison at guantanamo bay and we must make it clear to every man woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that america will speak out on behalf of their human rights and tend to the light of freedom and justice and opportunity and respect for the dignity of all peoples that is who we are that is the source the moral source of america s authority since the days of franklin roosevelt and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great grandparents our country has borne a special burden in global affairs we have spilled american blood in many countries on multiple continents we have spent our revenue to help others rebuild from rubble and develop their own economies we have joined with others to develop an architecture of institutions from the united nations to nato to the world bank that provide for the common security and prosperity of human beings we have not always been thanked for these efforts and we have at times made mistakes but more than any other nation the united states of america has underwritten global security for over six decades a time that for all its problems has seen walls come down and markets open and billions lifted from poverty unparalleled scientific progress and advancing frontiers of human liberty for unlike the great powers of old we have not sought world domination our union was founded in resistance to oppression we do not seek to occupy other nations we will not claim another nation s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours what we have fought for what we continue to fight for is a better future for our children and grandchildren and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity as a country we re not as young and perhaps not as innocent as we were when roosevelt was president yet we are still heirs to a noble struggle for freedom and now we must summon all of our might and moral suasion to meet the challenges of a new age in the end our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms it derives from our people from the workers and businesses who will rebuild our economy from the entrepreneurs and researchers who will pioneer new industries from the teachers that will educate our children and the service of those who work in our communities at home from the diplomats and peace corps volunteers who spread hope abroad and from the men and women in uniform who are part of an unbroken line of sacrifice that has made government of the people by the people and for the people a reality on this earth this vast and diverse citizenry will not always agree on every issue nor should we but i also know that we as a country cannot sustain our leadership nor navigate the momentous challenges of our time if we allow ourselves to be split asunder by the same rancor and cynicism and partisanship that has in recent times poisoned our national discourse it s easy to forget that when this war began we were united bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear i refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again i believe with every fiber of my being that we as americans can still come together behind a common purpose for our values are not simply words written into parchment they are a creed that calls us together and that has carried us through the darkest of storms as one nation as one people america we are passing through a time of great trial and the message that we send in the midst of these storms must be clear that our cause is just our resolve unwavering we will go forward with the confidence that right makes might and with the commitment to forge an america that is safer a world that is more secure and a future that represents not the deepest of fears but the highest of hopes thank you god bless you may god bless the united states of america thank you very much thank you dem bobama1 3 10 barack_obama thank you thank you so much thank you very much thank you everybody please have a seat let me begin by acknowledging some of the extraordinary people who are working on this extraordinary project first of all i want everybody to know in case you haven t already met him somebody who is working tirelessly on behalf of the young people of america my secretary of education arne duncan i want to acknowledge marguerite kondracke the ceo of america s promise who is going to be implementing so much of the terrific work that s been discussed today marguerite there she is right there i want to thank tom donohue for your hospitality in this extraordinary venue thank you very much and thanks for the chamber s support for this terrific effort i want to acknowledge margaret spellings arne s predecessor who helped to lead a lot of the improvement that s been taking place and we re building on and obviously i want to thank the powells and i will start with the more important powell alma i want to say a word about the remarkable woman who introduced me a champion of children a dedicated public servant and the recipient of numerous awards and alma has poured herself into america s promise alliance helping make it the largest partnership of its kind to improve education and help children in this country and perhaps that s not surprising because being an educator seems to run in the family as i understand even though one of her mother s parents was born into slavery and the other just after abolition both went to college became teachers four of their children followed them into the education profession so her family has educated and enriched generations of americans and our nation is better off because for it and so we are very grateful to you for your extraordinary leadership thank you there s not much we can say about the man that alma succeeds as chair of the alliance that most people don t already know anyway i will say that i m grateful for his friendship for his counsel and like so many americans i continue to be inspired by his leadership and by his life s story it s a story of a son of jamaican garment workers a student from the south bronx like me wasn t always at his best in high school but who went to city college of new york thanks to the support of his family and his friends and his community it s a story of a rotc cadet who went on to distinguish himself first in vietnam then in the pentagon in the white house and in the state department and who after spending a lifetime fighting of behalf of america has now taken up the fight for america s children so the leadership of colin and alma are that they are showing by spearheading the grad nation campaign to end america s dropout crisis is just the latest chapter in their service to this nation and so i want to publicly commend them and thank them for their extraordinary service thank you very much one last person i want to make mention of because i think it bears on the extraordinary public private partnership that s taking place here we have the ceo of the corporation for national community service patrick corvington who is here where s patrick there he is back there and so we are hoping to we re hoping to make sure we get a whole bunch of volunteers engaged in this effort now it s fitting that we re talking about education here at the chamber of commerce after all for america to compete and to win in the 21st century we know that we will need a highly educated workforce that is second to none and we know that the success of every american will be tied more closely than ever before to the level of education that they achieve the jobs will go to the people with the knowledge and the skills to do them it s that simple in this kind of knowledge economy giving up on your education and dropping out of school means not only giving up on your future but it s also giving up on your family s future and giving up on your country s future and yet that s what too many of america s children are doing today over 1 million students don t finish high school each year nearly one in three over half are african american and latino the graduation gap in some places between white students and classmates of color is 40 or 50 percent and in cities like detroit and indianapolis and baltimore graduation rates hover around 30 40 percent roughly half the national average now it s true that not long ago you could drop out of high school and reasonably expect to find a blue collar job that would pay the bills and help support your family that s just not the case anymore in recent years a high school dropout has made on average about 10 000 less per year than a high school graduate in fact during this recession a high school dropout has been more than three times as likely to be out of work as someone with at least a college degree graduating from high school is an economic imperative that might be the best reason to get a diploma but it s not the only reason to get a high school diploma as alma mentioned high school dropouts are more likely to be teen parents more likely to commit crime more likely to rely on public assistance more likely to lead shattered lives what s more they cost our economy hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of a lifetime in lower wages and higher public expenses so this is a problem we cannot afford to accept and we cannot afford to ignore the stakes are too high for our children for our economy and for our country it s time for all of us to come together parents students principals and teachers business leaders and elected officials from across the political spectrum to end america s dropout crisis this is a problem that i ve actually been fighting for years way back when when i was a community organizer in chicago i saw what happened to a family or to a school or to a community when a student dropped out so i helped work with local churches in the region to and public school officials to get state funding for dropout prevention programs and brought together african american and latino leaders to help set up after school programs because when we help keep kids off the street when we give them a productive way to spend their time then graduation rates go up so that s a commitment that i ve carried with me to the oval office and today i want to announce steps my administration will take to help end the dropout crisis in the african american community in the latino community and in the larger american community because we know that about 12 percent of america s schools produce 50 percent of america s dropouts we re going to focus on helping states and school districts turn around their 5 000 lowest performing schools in the next five years and arne will be amplifying and providing details on how we can do this we ll not only challenge states to identify high schools with graduation rates below 60 percent we re going to invest another 900 million in strategies to get those graduation rates up strategies like transforming schools from top to bottom by bringing in a new principal and training teachers to use more effective techniques in the classroom strategies like closing a school for a time and reopening it under new management or even shutting it down entirely and sending its students to a better school and strategies like replacing a school s principal and at least half of its staff now replacing school staff should only be done as a last resort the public servants who work in america s schools whether they re principals or teachers or counselors or coaches work long and hard on behalf of our children and they deserve our gratitude keep in mind i ve got a sister who s a teacher my mother spent time teaching one of the most important jobs that we have in this country we ve got an obligation as a country to give them the support they need because when principals and teachers succeed then our children succeed so if a school is struggling we have to work with the principal and the teachers to find a solution we ve got to give them a chance to make meaningful improvements but if a school continues to fail its students year after year after year if it doesn t show signs of improvement then there s got to be a sense of accountability and that s what happened in rhode island last week at a chronically troubled school when just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests 7 percent when a school board wasn t able to deliver change by other means they voted to lay off the faculty and the staff as my education secretary arne duncan says our kids get only one chance at an education and we need to get it right of course getting it right requires more than just transforming our lowest performing schools it requires giving students who are behind in school a chance to catch up and a path to a diploma it requires focusing on students from middle school through high school who face factors at home in the neighborhood or in school that put them at risk of dropping out and it requires replicating innovative ideas that make class feel engaging and relevant because most high school dropouts in a recent study said the reason they dropped out was that they weren t interested in class and they weren t motivated to do their work so that s why we ll build on the efforts of places like communities in schools that make sure kids who are at risk of dropping out have one on one support that s why we ll follow the example of places like the met center in rhode island that give students that individual attention while also preparing them through real world hands on training the possibility of succeeding in a career and that s why we ll invest in accelerated instruction in reading and math to help students who ve fallen behind make up credits and ultimately graduate on time it s also why we ll foster better alternative high schools and transfer schools where students who have dropped out and who are at risk of dropping out can return to the classroom and earn their diploma that s how we can curb dropout rates and boost graduating rates i have to point out in the 21st century high schools shouldn t just make sure students graduate they should make sure students graduate ready for college ready for a career and ready for life and that s why we ll foster what are called early college high schools that allow students to earn a high school diploma and an associate s degree or college credit at the same time we want to learn from successful charter schools where students can take advanced and college level courses so government has a responsibility government can help educate students to succeed in college and a career government can help provide the resources to engage dropouts and those at risk of dropping out and when necessary government has to be critically involved in turning around lowest performing schools and nobody has been more passionate about this than arne duncan but as i ve said before education is not and cannot be the task of government alone it s going to take nonprofits and businesses doing their part through alliances like america s promise it will take parents getting involved in their children s education consistently going to parent teacher conferences helping their children with their homework i have to point out i just went to my daughter s parent teachers conference last week she s doing very well by the way it will take students as well showing up to school on time and paying attention to classes and staying out of trouble they re not let off the hook education isn t a passive activity it s an active one so educating america s sons and daughters is a task for all americans and that s what this alliance that s what this effort is all about making sure that none of us think that it s somebody else s job but rather we all accept our role to play in making sure that we have the best educated citizenry in the world that s what has made the 20th century the american century that s what will make the 21st century the american century now there s an old story that colin has told about a man named george ellis who lived about a hundred years ago and george ellis was a janitor his job was to clean up after the artist daniel chester french some of you may have heard of french he s the one who carved the figure of abraham lincoln for the lincoln memorial so day after day week after week month after month ellis went about his job barely uttering a word to mr french other than say the occasional hello or goodbye and then one day just when french had nearly completed his masterpiece ellis spoke up he said mr french i have a question for you so the artist said what is it well what i want to ask is how you knew all along that mr lincoln was sitting inside that block of marble and as colin pointed out that wasn t a silly question because sometimes in this country and in our lives we see blocks of marble and some people can see what s inside and some people can t it was a question profound it was a profound question about how we recognize the potential within each of us and chisel away at what s keeping it locked inside i m absolutely confident that because of the work of colin and alma powell because of the work that grad nation campaign is going to be doing and america s promise alliance is going to be doing because of the work that we re doing across this nation to give our children the best education the world has to offer from cradle to classroom from college through career that we are chiseling away at the obstacles that lie in our path that block our children s potential we want to unlock that potential carve it out so that our economy succeeds so that this country succeeds and so that our children and grandchildren succeed so thank you very much for the extraordinary work you re doing thank you all for your participation may god bless you and may god bless the united states of america dem bobama1 4 10a barack_obama hello everybody have a seat have a seat thank you thank you please everybody be seated let me just begin by acknowledging some great friends first of all somebody who i consider one of the finest governors in the country and somebody who i know you guys are going to reelect governor deval patrick is in the house to the massachusetts congressional delegation i see ed markey here but i want to i know i saw congressman delahunt and capuano earlier they have shown such courage and have stuck to it in some very difficult circumstances and are consistently showing the kind of leadership we need we now got barney frank who is about to make sure that we ve got financial regulatory reform which is going to be so critical so to your congressional delegation please give them a big round of applause and ed markey in particular to my dear friend who has been a constant source of inspiration vicki kennedy is here and i want everybody to give her a big round of applause and to all of you who co chaired this elegant event i assure you i will not break out into song i want to thank tim kaine for not only the generous introduction not only for being an extraordinary governor of the commonwealth of virginia but also now being one of the best leaders of our party that we ve ever had some of you may know tim kaine was the first person the first elected official outside of illinois to endorse me when i announced my presidential race on the steps of the old capitol of the confederacy in richmond in february of 2007 where most people couldn t pronounce my name and there was no political gain for him in doing it he just stepped out because he thought it was the right thing to do and that s the kind of person that tim kaine has always been he is decent he is smart he is principled and to have somebody like that leading our party makes me feel better and it should make you feel a lot better too so thank you very quickly i want to say obviously that our hearts go out to all the families who ve been affected by the recent flooding throughout new england i was at the emergency center where deval walked me through the steps that are being taken coordinating state local and federal resources we hope that the worst is behind us but it s at moments like this where leadership is tested and as usual deval has passed with flying colors it s also at moments like this i spoke to a larger group before i came here that we are reminded of the value of government there is this notion afoot that somehow it s cool to be cynical about government and then you go into this emergency center and you see these extraordinarily dedicated people working 24 hours a day seven days a week just to help others and they re not making a lot of money doing it but they re dedicated they care and it s a reminder that we are not just individuals out there pursuing our own self interest we re also a community we re also neighbors we re also friends and those values that we care so deeply about they need to express themselves through our government as well and so it s something that is worth remembering and i want to thank all the local and state officials who ve been working so diligently as well as our federal officials for doing what s so important most of you are dear friends i have known you through good times and tough times the event right before we came here was held deval what s the name of that place the state room this room holds a special place in my heart because this is the room where i appeared before a whole bunch of supporters here in boston the day after i lost the new hampshire primary you remember that a bunch of you guys remember that marianne was there a whole bunch of folks were there most of the folks who were our supporters in boston had gone up to new hampshire to trudge around and knock on doors and help to organize for the primary and everybody had been on this euphoria coming out of iowa remember jane everybody thought oh my goodness this is you know everybody was talking about mccain already and measuring the drapes and although everybody worked hard nobody took it for granted i do think that there was just sort of a giddiness that was unhealthy in new hampshire which was punctured very quickly and so one minute everybody was full of glee and the next moment everybody was looking down and new hampshire was where i made the speech talking about yes we can that ended up winning a grammy for will i am i didn t get a share of this but i remember going to that room and saying to folks you know i know this sounds like revisionist history i know it sounds like i m just trying to put some spin on something i won t lie to you i would have preferred to have won but i said i actually think in the long run this will be a good thing and the reason i said that was because running for president is such an incredible honor and the task you are setting for yourself in being president is so profound that it shouldn t be easy you shouldn t glide into that job the american people expect rightly that their president will have been tested and the reason is is because they re tested all the time they re tested when they lose their job they re tested when they re trying to scramble to put together enough savings to send their kids to college they re tested when somebody in the family gets sick and it turns out that the insurance doesn t cover everything that they re doing they re tested in all sorts of ways that aren t always easy to anticipate and so the least they can expect is that somebody who has the audacity and the megalomania to run for president is going to is going to be put through the paces and folks want to see well we re not going to just hand this to you we want to see that you can bounce back we want to see that you have the resilience and the determination to help guide this country through what folks at that time knew was going to be a very difficult period for our country and so it was fascinating to me to be back in that room with many of the same supporters because it was a reminder of what this past year and a half has been about a lot of people have asked why is it you seem so calm and what i ve tried to say often and a lot of times this gets discounted in the press is that the experience of having traveled throughout this country having learned the stories of ordinary folks who are doing extraordinary things in their communities in their neighborhoods having met all the people who put so much energy and effort into our campaign having seen the ups and downs and having seen how washington was always the last to get what was going on always the last to get the news what that told me was that if we were willing to not do what was expedient and not do what was convenient and not try to govern based on the polls today or tomorrow or the next day but rather based on a vision for how we can rebuild this country in a way that works for everybody if we are focused on making sure that there are ladders of opportunity for people to continue to strive and achieve the american dream and that that s accessible to all not just some if we kept our eye on what sort of future do we want for our kids and our grandkids so that 20 years from now and 30 years from now people look back on this generation the way we look back on the greatest generation and say to ourselves boy they made some tough decisions they got through some tough times but look we now have a clean energy economy look our schools are revitalized look our health care system works for every single american imagine how tough that was and how much resistance they met from the special interests but they were still willing to do it if that was how we governed then i figure that the politics would take care of itself and if it didn t then we could still stand tall and still look at ourselves in the mirror and say you know what this was worth it this is why we worked so hard to get here that s what this last year has been about and i want you to know now that s what this next year will be about and that s what the year after that will be about because we ve got a lot of work to do when we signed up and i say we because all of you guys were early investors many of you didn t just write a check but you bled this stuff and many of you over the last year have had to answer aggravated e mails from people or political advice i m sure you get those e mails please tell the president that if he just right i know i get them too we should expect that it s going to continue to be hard these november elections as tim said will be hard partly because this country is still divided and after 2006 and 2008 we hit a very high watermark in terms of democratic representation in congress and governorships and we re in the midst of what is still a very difficult time and we ve got more work to do we are not finished we have to have an energy policy that works for the future we don t have an option we can pretend like we ve got an option and we can resort to simplification and say well you know what if we just open up drilling everywhere and have no regulatory oversight whatsoever that somehow it s all going to work itself out or we can simplify it by saying that by denying the fact that it s going to take some time for us to get up to full capacity on clean energy and we need some breakout technologies in order to make that full transition so we can play politics with this and take comfort in our own certainties but the truth of the matter is this is a big complicated task and it s going to require us to work really hard and there is going to be a lot of resistance from a whole range of special interests and there are going to be legitimate geographical differences that exist when it comes to energy policy and so we re going to have to work that through and when it comes to education my secretary of education arne duncan i think is doing an extraordinary job and one of the things that has not gotten much attention is the way that we have started to bridge some of the traditional differences between the left and the right and said yes we want standards and we want reform and yes we need more resources as well and yes everybody is going to have to change parents and teachers and students and principals and elected officials and communities but slowly we are making progress in that direction and one of the unsung aspects of last week was me or this week in fact was me being able to sign legislation that really puts higher education into the hands of every single young person that is committed to excelling in this country in a way that hasn t been done in years but it s still going to be hard we re not going to change the schools overnight we have fallen behind on too many measures and it s going to require us to keep moving and we re going to have to continue to work on health care i know people may not want to hear that but what we ve done is we ve enshrined a principle that every single person in this country should not be bankrupt when they get sick that every child who s got a preexisting condition they can get health care that small businesses who want to do the right thing by their employees that they re going to have the capacity to provide health insurance at reasonable rates so we ve set up a structure and it is a good structure and a sensible structure and we are going down the path of reducing costs but there are a lot of decision makers in a 2 trillion health care system there are doctors and hospitals and nurses and physician assistants and there are those of us as consumers and that process of making the system work smarter and better so that we re all leading healthier lives and that the states and federal governments aren t bankrupted that s going to take a lot of work it s going to be an ongoing project and that s all just on the domestic side and we ve got challenges in terms of bringing about peace in the middle east and we ve got challenges in dealing with nuclear proliferation and we ve got challenges in making sure that we complete getting our troops out of iraq and that we complete our mission in afghanistan and the extraordinary sacrifices that young men and women are making there as we speak that they know they are supported not only by the resources they need but also by a smart strategy in diplomacy and all the elements of american power that go into keeping america safe and secure all these things are going to require a steadfast attitude and they re going to require that all of us occasionally stand up to the immediate winds that are blowing out there but i m so confident that we can achieve it i m so confident we can get it done and part of the reason i m confident is because we ve traveled this path before and we ve got it done before not because of me but because all of you have been willing to stick with this process and i think that over time i just have so much faith and confidence in the american people and their ability even when they re anxious even when they re scared even when they re uncertain to ultimately have an instinct about what is right not just right for them individually not just right for them in the here and now but what s right for them over the long term what s right for the country over the long term what s right for the next generation and not just for the next election and that s a hard sense to maintain in this political environment some of you saw the speech i gave up in portland i started joking about imagine if the washington press corps were on a farm and you till the soil and they would say look the soil is all broken up something is wrong and then you d put the seeds in and cover it up and the next day they d have the cameras there and nothing is growing it s there are no crops we re going to starve that s just the nature of the environment that we re in right now but we ve got to keep the long view that s our task that s what this project has always been about when you helped me get elected president that wasn t the end that was the beginning that wasn t the hard part that was the easy part this is the hard part but this is also the worthy part a lot of people win elections but i ll tell you the day that we passed health care in the house you know i had been in the roosevelt room watching it with my team and i invited everybody up to the residence to celebrate that evening and we were out on the truman balcony looking at the washington monument and beyond that the jefferson monument and i looked around and i saw these incredible people most of them a lot younger than me who had just poured their heart and soul into this effort and you could see the sense on their part that somehow some way working together they had put their shoulders against the wheel of history and moved it in a more just and a more fair direction what incredible satisfaction that was because not only did i know that it was going to be helping all those people who write me letters and talk about all the things that they re burdened with in their lives it also told me that all those people all those young people on my balcony they re going to believe once again that you can change the country for the better that s the great gift that all of you have given in this process that s what your support means that s what i m going to ask you to continue in the weeks and months and years to come as fellow travelers in this effort for us to perfect our union thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama1 4 10b barack_obama hello boston hello boston it s good to be back good to be back in beantown i love you back i can t help it there are a couple people i want to make sure i acknowledge our lieutenant governor tim murray is in the house i believe a sizable portion of the massachusetts congressional delegation is here please wave where are they i see who do i got markey capuano who else we got here delahunt is over here love these guys one of the finest mayors in the country tom menino is in the house senator paul kirk is here my dear friend vicki kennedy is here somebody else who s inspired me some of you know that the democrats when we came in we decided we d try to advance this novel concept and that is that women should get the same pay as men for doing the same work the bill that we signed the bill that we signed was called the lilly ledbetter bill because lilly ledbetter through her court case inspired an entire nation to say that the supreme court wasn t right and we needed to do something about it and lilly ledbetter is here i want everybody to give her a big round of applause now it s a hard thing being a governor it s a hard thing being a governor and the chairman of the democratic national committee and over the last year this guy has done it with the grace and the stick to it iveness that has marked his entire career he s one of my dearest friends the first person to endorse me outside of illinois standing in the seat of the old confederacy in february of 2007 my dear friend tim kaine i should point out that he was term limited he only had one term to serve so he was willing to do something crazy like endorse me that quick and then let me thank deval for the extraordinary introduction and before i begin i want to say a few words about the record flooding that s been sweeping across a large portion of new england i stopped by the massachusetts emergency management agency with deval earlier today to be briefed on relief and recovery efforts and i want everybody to know that we are working closely minute by minute with authorities in both states to provide the necessary assistance and i want to thank personally local and state first responders who ve been working tirelessly and under difficult circumstances to save lives and property i want to thank our team at fema that is fully engaged and committed to working with affected communities not only in terms of response efforts but also in terms of rebuilding efforts and tomorrow secretary of homeland security janet napolitano and fema director fema deputy administrator rich serino who is a boston native by the way will be visiting rhode island to tour some of the hardest hit areas and make sure that we are doing everything we can you are welcome but thank them and all of our thoughts and prayers are with the families who ve been dislocated and are wrestling with this enormous tragedy it is worth reminding people at a time when folks who work in government don t get enough credit that when times are tough when trouble arises there are all kinds of civil servants out there who are working 24 7 in order to help folks and i think it s worth remembering that when you hear some of the rhetoric out there now it s good to be back in a town that s been so good to me people forget i once spent three years cooped up in a library across the river i still managed to make some good memories though a few years ago i gave this speech down at the convention speech that went pretty good most of you didn t know my name before that but one man who did is a man who wakes up every single day determined to fight the good fight for massachusetts families and massachusetts future and that s your governor and my dear friend deval patrick deval stood up for me when i was running for the united states senate that year then right after i took office he came to me i had just set up my office at the hart building deval is saying this is a true story this is a true story he says barack congratulations we re so proud of you i ve got this idea i ve got this feeling that the people of massachusetts might be looking for something a little bit different and so i ve got this hunger to serve i want to run for governor and i thought to myself well this guy is crazy he s not going to win he s never run for anything at the time there were these candidates who had been planning the race for years but then i thought to myself well yes but he supported me when i was doing this stupid thing running for the united states senate so and i like him so what the heck he had already put himself out there for one hopeless cause i figured the least i could do was to return the favor but the reason that i did it happily was because i knew there was a core decency and integrity about deval i knew that this was a man who does the right thing who has a vision for the future somebody who was going to be tenacious in his pursuit of that vision and even though he didn t have any money or big name support as soon as he started getting organized i said to myself he s going to win and i watched him travel across this commonwealth listening to you and building his campaign house by house block by block neighborhood by neighborhood and that confidence spread to others and folks began to say you know this guy patrick he s not irish but we like him anyway i mean it was a good trick initially people would come and then when it was too late to they listened to him and i did the same thing i put an apostrophe after the o and it worked out pretty good but the reason it worked was because deval knew that the campaign wasn t about him it was about you his core vision was that everyone in this commonwealth had a part to play in building its future and so many of you built a movement for change that could not be denied so i want you to realize that you ve got a tremendous leader in deval patrick in what is an extraordinarily tough time to be a governor he has moved forward not on the easy issues but on the tough issues pushing historic ethics reform making education a top priority keeping massachusetts at the forefront of clean technology and biotechnology and all the innovations that are ultimately going to determine how well america is able to compete around the world in the 21st century he s the governor that s going to keep leading massachusetts into the future and here s what else i want you to remember boston the campaign deval patrick built is the same campaign for change that you and i built across this country same way house by house block by block neighborhood by neighborhood because we shared a simple belief change does not come from the top down change comes from the bottom up it comes from americans like you that s what this movement has been about you believed that government of the people and by the people could still work for the people you believed that we could still stand up to the special interests by standing up for middle class interests you believed that we should finally solve the problems that had been holding back our families and our businesses year after year after year you believed that it was still possible to change the united states of america for the better and boston i ve come to tell you tonight that we have kept faith with those beliefs we have begun to solve those problems the change you fought for is beginning to take hold now we knew from the beginning that it wouldn t be easy change never is president kennedy once said when we got into office the thing that surprised me most was that things were as bad as we d been saying they were right deval so when we took office we faced a financial crisis unseen since the 1930s economy bleeding 750 000 jobs a month a 1 3 trillion deficit and two wars that were costly in every sense of the word so priority number one was responding to this incredible economic crisis and by the way some of the short term steps required to do that weren t popular and they weren t easy the pundits in washington kept on saying what s he doing shoring up the banks and the auto industry and passing a recovery act doesn t he know it s unpopular doesn t he know it will make him vulnerable well yes it turns out i ve got pollsters too we usually know what s going to be unpopular before the newspapers do but i also knew that if you govern by pundits and polls then you lose sight of why you got into public service in the first place you lose sight of why all of you fought so hard to put me there in the first place and i refuse to govern that way that s not why we fought so hard to win office my job is to solve problems for the people who elected me to solve them and for the people who didn t my job wasn t to husband my popularity make sure that i m not making waves that s how a lot of folks who get into office govern it s easy but that s part of the reason why we ve seen so little progress on the things that matter so much to ordinary people so i resolved to do not necessarily what was popular but what i thought was right and a year later the financial system has stabilized i love you know in the midst of the crisis you guys may remember last march when the stock market was bottoming out this is obama s stock market wall street journal said that oh look look at his policies and i notice it s not my market anymore i don t know what happened you notice that we recovered most of the money it took to stabilize the financial markets and i proposed a fee on the biggest banks to recover every last dime that s still out there so we are going to make sure that taxpayers get all their money back a year later gm is hiring again on the verge of reopening hundreds of dealerships a year later the recovery act has put americans back to work across the country rebuilding our infrastructure provided nearly 300 billion in tax cuts designed to help small businesses and 95 percent of working americans and that s a major reason why the economy that was shrinking a year ago is growing today taking those steps was the right thing to do now think back to just two months ago everybody thought our chances at progress were suddenly doomed a republican had won ted kennedy s seat massachusetts you caused quite a bit of excitement around the country the sky was falling you remember that i m sure none of you felt that way but we did what our friend teddy would have done we kept up the fight because it was the right thing to do and because we did and because of the members of congress who are here today last week we proved that america is a better nation than one that allows illness or accident to endanger the dreams of its people people who ve worked a lifetime to build those dreams we finally passed comprehensive health insurance reform in america after a hundred years we passed health insurance reform and enshrined the idea that everybody should have some security when it comes to their health care nobody should be bankrupt when they get sick no child should languish because of lack of care after a hundred years as joe biden said who has a way with words this is what he said it s a big deal this reform will begin to end the worst practices of the insurance industry they re going to rein in our exploding deficits and over time finally offer millions of families and small business owners quality affordable care and the security and peace of mind that comes with it some of those folks for the very first time in their lives and what it doesn t do is it doesn t hand more control to the government or to health insurance companies it gives it back to you the american people and then this week we built on that progress i signed into law a bill that will finally reform the student loan system so that it works for students and families instead of bankers we took 68 billion 68 billion that would have been going to financial middlemen to pad their profits even though they weren t taking any risks because these were all federally guaranteed loans and we said why don t we use that to make college more affordable and to strengthen our community colleges which are a pathway for so many working families to success because that s how we ll achieve the goal that i set by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world and so we re able to say to college students today that we have doubled pell grants and we are going to make sure that you never have to pay more than 10 percent of your income for your college debt because we don t want you being hampered as you get started in life and if you go into a job like teaching we will forgive your loans after 10 years that s an agenda for moving america forward and then next week i ll travel to prague where the united states of america and russia will sign the most comprehensive arms control agreement in nearly 20 years part of our effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and seek a world without them so these are some of the recent successes that you made possible but some of our other successes happened so quick everybody s forgotten about them and people don t realize we made the largest investment in clean energy in history folks don t realize that we made this huge investment in information technologies for the health care system so that you don t have to fill out as many forms when you go to the doctor and we can all start saving some money and saving some time folks don t realize that we put the law behind the principle of equal pay for an equal day s work we passed laws to protect consumers from getting ripped off by credit card companies and homeowners from being taken advantage of by predatory lenders and our children being targeted from big tobacco and we appointed sonia sotomayor to the supreme court and we made the white house the people s house again and we passed a service bill named for senator ted kennedy that s giving young and old a chance to serve their country and give back to their communities i m telling you you sound like the reporters i was up in maine and i was joking about only slightly joking about the fact that the day after we signed it everybody started writing these stories about how the country is still divided on health care it hasn t suddenly become universally popular what s going on it s been a week folks so i said can you imagine if you know the pundits and the cable guys were covering a farm and you know you sort of till the soil and look the soil is all messed up and then you put the seeds in and the next day they d write a story nothing is growing we re going to starve there are no crops it s polling really badly here s the point i m starting to have fun which i should not do in ways large and small boston we ve begun to deliver on the change you believed in we have done what we said we would do that s the other thing that surprises folks in washington they said well you know why did you keep on doing health care well because that s what i said i was going to do what our recent debates have lain bare is that even though we ve had some success overcoming political gridlock we haven t had as much success in changing political gridlock we have to admit that and i wanted to change the tone in washington it hasn t changed not yet but i still believe that if we re going to deal with the great challenges of our time and secure a better future as past generations of americans have done as they did for us then we re going to have to change our politics because for all our efforts change can t come fast enough for so many americans every time i visit workers in a factory or families in a diner every night when i sit down and i read letters from everyday americans i get the same questions people ask how am i going to find a job i m 50 years old i ve known only one skill my entire life and now i ve been laid off where do i turn or how am i going to retire when i keep spending the savings all my savings just to get by just to pay skyrocketing health care bills or how am i going to make it when i m stretched to the limit on my mortgage and my bills and i m trying to save for my kids college education you know they re not asking me barack which party is scoring more political points who s ahead at the polls who won the news cycle today they look to washington and they see a city that s just obsessed with red versus blue and who s up and who s down and every day is election day every day is election day there are stories out right now we ve polled obama in 2012 i m not joking i mean people write entire columns well you know matched up against hypothetical republicans here s what happening less concerned about what s going on in the life of folks in america and it s no wonder there s so much frustration out there and yes some of it is going to be directed at us because you know what one of the things you sign up for when you become a governor or you become a president is that you re a lightning rod for all these frustrations that build up legitimate frustrations now there are always going to be some issues where democrats and republicans just don t see eye to eye that s how our democracy works it s supposed to be messy it was designed that way but it s one thing to disagree out of principle it s another way to stand it s another thing to stand in the way just because it s politically expedient and i don t know how else to describe one of the republican senators saying that health care was going to be obama s waterloo you remember that that s the kind of politics that says when you lose i win regardless of what it means for the country and that s an unfortunate approach especially when this new law has a lot of republicans in it or a lot of republican ideas in it you know you ve got a former governor of massachusetts who s running around saying what s this health reform bill and i keep on scratching my head and i say boy this massachusetts thing who designed that and i have to say already you re starting to see some republicans that are actually claiming credit for some of the ideas in the bill even though they fought against the bill and part of this was a early calculated decision made by republican leaders in congress not to work with us on the most important issues facing the american people and they made this decision even before i was sworn into office the general strategy was if they could block progress on any big issue then they could say that the democrats had failed and they could run on that in november that s not just short term politics that s short term thinking and it s especially disappointing in a time of crisis when there s so much work to be done well it turns out health reform wasn t my waterloo and it turns out that the day after i signed the bill it wasn t armageddon no asteroids fell the earth didn t crack open nobody has lost their doctor nobody has been manacled and dragged into a government plan we re going to be okay we re going to be better than okay because in the end it was a long overdue victory for the american people and it s a step like everything that we ve done over the past year to help restore some certainty and security to middle class families that have felt that security slipping away and we re going to keep on fighting on those other challenges that we face so my friend back there whoever it was asked me what was next let me tell you folks can keep on calling me nave if they want i ve been called that before i m going to keep on reaching out to republicans for their help it may be heresy to say so at an event like this i know but i believe that those of us in public life have to care less about what s right for a party and more about what s right for the country so i m going to keep incorporating their ideas even if they refuse to consider mine maybe we can even get your newest senator on board with some of our efforts because there s a lot we should be able to agree on we should all agree that we have to rebuild this economy so that hard work is once again rewarded and families feel like they ve got a shot at the american dream again this isn t just an economic challenge for our country it s a crisis that tears at our society s soul because a job is more than just a paycheck it s about feeling that sense of self worth from a job well done the fulfillment in meeting one s responsibilities no american should be deprived of that dignity and so we ve going to have to think creatively and collaboratively if we re going to put americans back to work we should all agree we have to pursue a comprehensive strategy for energy security that moves us from fossil fuels and foreign oil to homegrown fuels and clean energy because the nation that leads in the clean energy sector will lead the economy in the 21st century we should all agree that we ve got to pass common sense rules for wall street to prevent the kind of nonsense that took place and helped to lead to this crisis where a few reckless financial institutions can bring down an entire economy and burst the dreams of millions of american families we should all agree that we ve got to bring down our mounting deficits which is why i signed into law paygo rules very simple concept you pay as you go that helped produce the budget surpluses of the 1990s and that s why i ordered a freeze on discretionary spending and have created a bipartisan independent commission to help solve our fiscal crisis because we face some tough choices ahead and we need to make them together and they re not going to be made by slogans they re going to be made by us coming together and deciding to do right by the next generation i know we can do this i know we can overcome the politics of cynicism and come together in common purpose to solve our greatest challenges and i know this because of you i was remarking to deval the first time i was in this room was after the new hampshire primary some of you were here you remember that and as is true once you re president folks had gotten carried away on the upswing all right so after iowa everybody had just gone crazy and it s over and this and that and the other and then we lost new hampshire and suddenly everybody was ohhh everybody was sad well not everybody i mean the folks who were supporting me were sad and i remember coming to this room and i don t know if some of you remember me saying this i said you know i actually think this is a good thing because i said the race for the presidency should not be easy it should be hard you should be tested you should be poked and prodded and the american people should be able to lift the hood and take candidates out for a test drive and see whether they meet the test and the process of running for president is so humbling in part because what you come to realize is the american people are so good and they re so decent and they deserve the best possible leadership and so i remember speaking to all of you and said cheer up stand up we re in the midst of this remarkable democratic experiment and i didn t get involved in this because i was a sure thing i got involved in this because i felt it was the right thing to do and that maybe my voice combined with your voice and voices of people all across the country could somehow make a meaningful difference and my faith is renewed every day by americans that i meet all across this great country who refuse to settle for the status quo my resolve is strengthened every time i see an american who rejects the idea that americans can no longer do big things i am fired up by every american who still believes that people who love their country can change it and boston we have seen what happens when we don t back down we have seen what s happens when we don t quit i don t quit you don t quit and i am absolutely confident with your help we will rise to our challenges we will finish what we ve started we ll reelect deval patrick we will keep the american dream alive for this generation and for the next generation you can bank on that thank you everybody god bless you dem bobama1 4 10c barack_obama hello portland thank you thank you thank you portland thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you so much thank you thank you everybody well what a wonderful i guess when the sun comes out around here everybody gets pretty excited i love you back now i have to say the last time i was in maine was before the caucuses it was a little cooler here as i recall but it is wonderful to be back there are some people i want to say a few nice things about first of all we could not have a better small business administrator than your own neighbor karen mills and so please give her a huge round of applause she s doing a great job i think she has more than a few folks from maine on her staff she s kind of stocked them all over the place and everybody is doing a great job over at the sba i want to thank thank you i want to thank one of the finest governors in the country john baldacci who is here thank you john where is he there he is right there thank you your outstanding mayor nick mavodones is here and we ve got two great champions from maine whose tireless efforts have helped working families all across this state and all across this country congresswoman chellie pingree and congressman mike michaud all right it is good to be back in maine and i want everybody to remember when i came here during the campaign i made a promise and it wasn t a promise about any particular issue it was a promise that our government would once again be responsive to the needs and aspirations of working families of america s middle class it was a promise that washington would concern itself not just with the next election but with the next generation of americans now keeping that promise is even more critical now at a time when so many families and so many small business owners are still struggling here in maine and all across the country every time i visit with workers in a factory or families in a diner every time i sit down and read letters from americans across the country i see and hear the same questions folks are asking how am i going to find a job when i ve only known one skill my entire lifetime and i just got laid off and i m in my fifties how am i going to retire when i keep spending my savings just to get by or trying to make sure that my kid can go to college and tuition keeps on going up how am i going to make it when i m stretched to the limits on my mortgage and on my bills those are the questions that i hear and i want you to know we are working every single day to spur job creation and to turn this economy around that s why we worked so hard over the last year to lift one of the biggest burdens facing middle class families and small business owners and that is the crushing cost of health care right here in america and mainers i want you to know that last week after a year of debate and a century of trying health insurance reform became the law of the land last week last week yes we did because of folks like chellie and mike it happened because of people like you it happened it happened because people had the courage to stand up at town hall meetings and talk about how insurance companies were denying their families coverage because of a preexisting condition it happened because folks wrote letters about how premiums have gone up 50 or 70 or 100 percent in some cases and it was forcing them to give up their insurance it happened because countless small business owners and families and doctors shared stories about a health care system that was working better for the insurance industry than it did for american people and when the special interests sent an army of lobbyists to congress and blanketed the airwaves with millions of dollars in negative ads all of you mobilized and organized and you refused to give up and when the pundits were obsessed over what the polls were saying and who was up and who was down and what would this mean for democrats or republicans you never lost sight of what was right and what was wrong you knew it wasn t about the fortunes of one party it was about the future of our country and today portland because of what you did the future looks stronger and more hopeful than it has in some time now over the last year there s been a lot of misinformation spread about health reform there s been a lot of fear mongering a lot of overheated rhetoric you turned on the news you d see that those same folks who were hollering about it before it passed they re still hollering about how the world will end because we passed this bill this is not an exaggeration john boehner called the passage of this bill no need to we don t need to boo i just want to give the facts called this passage of this bill armageddon you had others who said this is the end of freedom as we know it so after i signed the bill i looked around i looked up at the sky to see if asteroids were coming i looked at the ground to see if cracks had opened up in the earth you know what it turned out it was a pretty nice day birds were still chirping folks were strolling down the street nobody had lost their doctor nobody had pulled the plug on granny nobody was being dragged away to be forced into some government run health care plan but the thing is though you have to love some of the pundits in washington every single day since i signed the reform law there s been another poll or headline that said nation still divided on health care reform polls haven t changed yet well yeah it just happened last week it s only been a week can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm you planted some seeds and they came out the next day and they looked and nothing s happened there s no crop we re going to starve oh no it s a disaster it s been a week folks so before we find out if people like health care reform we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place just a thought now look this reform is not going to solve every problem with our health care system it is a huge complicated piece of business a couple of trillion dollars thousands of people affected thousands of people working in the industry it s not going to bring down the cost of health care overnight we re going to have to make some adjustments along the way but it represents enormous progress it enshrines the principle that every american should have the security of decent care and that nobody should go bankrupt because they ve got a kid who s sick with a preexisting condition that small businesses shouldn t be burdened because they want to do the right thing by their employee so now that this bill is finally law and all the folks who have been playing politics will finally have to confront the reality of what this reform is they re also going to have to confront the reality of what it isn t they ll have to finally acknowledge that this isn t a government takeover of our health care system they ll see that if americans like their doctor they will keep their doctor and if you like your insurance plan you will keep it no one will be able to take that away from you it hasn t happened yet it won t happen in the future what this reform represents is basically a middle of the road solution to a very serious problem it s not single payer some people wanted that i understood that but that is not see but so it s not that but it s also not what the republicans were advocating for which is essentially that you completely deregulate the insurance industry you let them run wild and that somehow you are going to benefit that was their theory it was called the foxes guarding the chicken coop health care plan so it s not the plan that some on the left supported in the past it s not what some on the right supported but it is a commonsense plan this reform incorporates ideas from both democrats and republicans including by the way a number of ideas from your senator and somebody i consider a friend olympia snowe who spent many hours meeting with me on this bill and what this reform does is it builds on the system of private health insurance that we ve already got so that if you have insurance this reform will make it more secure and more affordable if you can t afford insurance or if you ve been denied coverage you re finally going to be able to get it and over time costs will come down for families businesses and the federal government reducing our deficit by more than 1 trillion over the next two decades that s what this reform will do now portland it will take about four years to implement this entire plan because we ve got to do it responsibly we need to get it right but there s also a set of reforms that will take effect this year so i just want to i want everybody to understand what s going to happen this year starting this year millions of small business owners are going to be eligible for a tax credit that will help them cover the cost of insurance for their employees and let me talk about let me talk about what this means for a small business owner like bill milliken bill stand up that s bill right there now i want to give a little plug to bill here bill owns market house coffee and the maine beer and beverage corporation both here right here in portland in exchange for this publicity i hope that i m going to get some samples of the beer okay he nodded in the affirmative now he wants to give his part time employees health insurance and he wants to give them more hours but he can t do both he can t afford to do both so this tax credit will make it easier for an employer like bill who wants to do the right thing by his workers starting now small business owners like bill will have the security of knowing that they can qualify for a tax credit that covers up to 35 percent over a third of what they pay for their employees health insurance and starting now starting now small business owners that provide health care for their workers can sit down at the end of the week they can look at their expenses and they can begin calculating how much money they re going to save and for small business owners who don t currently provide health insurance they re going to be able to factor in this new benefit when they re deciding to do so now it won t solve all our problems but it means that employees that work for bill have a better chance of keeping their health care or getting health care and if they re already getting health care it means bill has got some extra money that means he might hire that extra worker right so this health care tax credit is pro jobs it s pro business and it starts this year this month we re going to be this month we re going to be sending out details on how to apply for this credit to millions of small businesses across the county but if you want to learn about it today we re going to put all the facts on our web site www whitehouse gov all right so that happens this year here s what else happens this year tens of thousands of uninsured americans with preexisting conditions and parents whose children have a preexisting condition will finally be able to purchase the coverage that they need that happens this year so last week i met a man named david gallagher whose daughter lauren had written me a letter last year when lauren s mom lost her job their entire family lost their health insurance when they tried to get new insurance david was denied coverage because he once had a complication free hernia surgery but the insurance companies wanted to weed him out they figured well the guy has been sick before we don t want to have to cover him we don t want to bear that risk so lauren has been worried sick about what would happen if her father became ill or injured now because of this reform david gallagher can finally have access to health insurance again that begins this year that starts this year so that s just one of the insurance reforms that starts this year here s what else happens insurance companies won t be able to drop people s coverage when they get sick or place lifetime limits or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care they can receive now this isn t some abstract concept there was a story in a local paper this week about a woman named theresa d andrea and theresa s husband d andrea excuse me thank you where is she are you up there stand up stand up theresa now theresa s husband passed away recently from cancer and before he died he hit the lifetime cap on his insurance as a result theresa has not only had to cope with the loss of her husband but with 60 000 in medical bills and this is after she s already spent all of their retirement savings on medical care now because of this reform a situation like theresa s won t happen again in the united states of america and that s going to start this year and we re inspired by stories like yours starting this year all new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care and starting this year this may interest some of you here if you are a young person who doesn t have insurance or doesn t have a job that offers insurance you re going to be able to stay on your parents insurance policy until you re 26 years old starting this year starting this year so now you re welcome thank chellie and mike they voted for it thank them this year seniors who fall into the coverage gap known as the doughnut hole some seniors probably know about that they re going to receive 250 to help pay for prescriptions and that s just the first step because what we re going to be doing is over the next several years closing that gap completely and i want seniors to know i want seniors to know despite some of the stuff that s been said out there these reforms don t cut into your guaranteed benefits what they do is eliminate co payments and deductibles for preventive care like check ups and mammograms you will be getting those for free now this is why aarp supported this bill because it s good for seniors it s the right thing to do it s good for young people it s the right thing to do it s good for people who ve hit these lifetime limits it s good for people with preexisting conditions all that all that happens this year and then by 2014 each state will set up what we re calling a health insurance exchange but it s basically just a competitive marketplace where uninsured people and small businesses who right now are out there on their own trying to negotiate with insurance companies they can now be part of a big pool millions of people coming together leveraging their purchasing power which is going to lower their rates they ll get a better deal walmart the reason they are able to give you low prices is because they buy and they tell their suppliers we re the biggest we re a 800 pound gorilla when it comes to whatever product you re talking about so you ve got to give better prices well the same thing is true when it comes to the insurance markets so everybody who can be part of this pool is going to get a better deal than they would otherwise get and by the way members of congress are going to be part of this pool so you know it s going to be good because they re going to have to use it themselves for their own families so that ll happen in the next few years and when this exchange is up and running millions of people are also going to get tax breaks to help them afford coverage so even though this pool will give you lower rates you ll get a better deal some folks still can t afford it so we re going to give you tax credits to help you afford it and that adds up to the largest middle class tax cut in health care in history that s what this bill is about so think about it so think about it that s what this is about we re setting up a pool using the private market to give people a better deal we re giving tax breaks to working people some of them working two three jobs who still can t get insurance we re going to give them some help we re going to give small businesses help so that they can help their workers and improve their bottom line and we ve got a whole bunch of insurance reforms so people like theresa aren t going to be disadvantaged and taken advantage of when they need it most that s what this bill is and it s paid for and it saves on our deficits now this is what everybody has been hollering about as the end of freedom and now that it s passed they re already promising we re going to repeal it they re going to run on a platform of repeal in november and my attitude is go for it you try to repeal it i want these members of congress to come out of washington come here to maine and tell mr milliken there you know what we re going to take away your tax credits essentially raise your taxes if you want to if they want to do that be my guest if they want to look at lauren gallagher in the eye and tell her they plan to take away her father s ability to get health insurance that s their right if they want to go tell theresa that once again you could face a lifetime of debt if you lose a family member they can run on that platform if they want to have a fight i welcome that fight because i don t believe the american people are going to put the insurance industry back in the driver s seat i m happy to have that argument i m happy to have that argument now in fairness and i want to be scrupulously fair some of them have now said well we want to repeal and replace this bill with our brand of insurance reform but when you poke and prod and you ask them well what is it exactly you re going to replace it with it turns out they want to deregulate the insurance market we ve already been there we know what that s like we re not going back we re not going backwards this country is ready to move forwards portland maine is ready to move forward and while we re talking about moving forward i just want to mention one thing kind of lost in the shuffle of all this health care debate is the fact that part of the bill that we signed that i signed this week is going to provide an additional 68 billion that used to go to banks and financial services companies and that s now going to go to the student loan program to expand pell grants and to make sure that college is affordable for every young person in america and i want to know do they want to repeal that as well because i m happy to have that discussion now 68 billion 68 billion was going to banks and financial institutions we ve just taken that money from the banks from the financial institutions doubling pell grants making sure that making sure that young people if you ve got debt when you go out of college and i know i did so you probably do too that you will never have to pay more than 10 percent of your income in repayments so that you re not going broke because you decide to get a college education that makes our economy stronger that makes america stronger if they want to repeal that too we can have that discussion the road to this victory has been long it has been it has been difficult and it s absolutely true that because health care is such a complicated issue a lot of people got worried a lot of people got scared and the misinformation seeped in and then the process was ugly and everybody was arguing and there was all kinds of stuff going on in the senate and the house and everybody just said ah this looks like a mess i understand that that s part of our democracy this is a democracy is a messy business it is the worst form of government except for all the other ones that have been tried that s what winston churchill said that s what winston churchill said he s absolutely right it can be frustrating sometimes but ultimately that s what makes our country so great is because everybody is able to voice their opinions everybody is able to get out there and organize and you re free to call your president an idiot no that s a wonderful thing as i was driving by people were waving everybody was clapping and then one guy s like eh he saw me through the window too going eh i thought that s a great thing about the country look but i want everybody to learn the lesson from this debate in reaching this milestone it doesn t represent the end of all our problems we still have jobs to create and deficits to reduce we still have children to educate we still face enormous challenges in this country jobs haven t been returning fast enough despite everything that we re doing the economy is growing again but people still haven t been hired back as fast as they need to small businesses are still having trouble getting credit out there so there are all kinds of issues we re going to have to work on but what this fight has taught us about ourselves and about this country it s bigger than any one issue it reminds us that change is never easy but it s always possible it reminds us that in the united states of america we still have the power to shape our own destiny and it reminds us that we as a people don t shrink from a challenge we don t shirk our responsibilities we embrace challenges we don t fear the future we shape the future that s what we do that s who we are that s what you re about that s why you re here that s why i ran for president of the united states of america that s what makes us the united states of america thank you portland god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama1 5 09a barack_obama thank you thank you so much this is a lot of fun this makes so much of the hard work we do worth it to see this ceremony here today it is my honor and my personal pleasure to be the first to address you as my fellow americans and welcome to your white house now i know this day carries a lot of meaning not only for you but for your family members and your fellow service members who join you today each of you has a unique story to tell about the journey that led you here you hail from every corner of the earth from southeast asia to central europe from west africa to south america some of you came to this country as young children because your parents wanted to give you a better life in the land of opportunity others traveled here as adults enduring hardship and sacrifice to provide for your own families but all of you have one thing in common you re here because you have not merely chosen to live in this country you ve chosen to serve this country you re here for the same reason that jeonathan zapata is here jeonathan recently returned from serving as part of our efforts in afghanistan he actually helped man the 400 000th aircraft landing aboard the uss kitty hawk and jeonathan wanted to serve the country he considers his own even though he was not yet a citizen because america had been so good to him from the time he came here from nicaragua as a child by serving in the military jeonathan says i can also give back to the u s so jeonathan i d like you to stand you re here for the same reason you can sit down now jeonathan you re here for the same reason that chryshann pierre is here chryshann where are you there you are chryshann is an army specialist returning from service in iraq late last year originally she joined the military because she wanted to provide stability for her three children but then she discovered something she did not expect she loves being in the army in fact she even said that she loved basic training chryshann you ve got to be pretty tough to love basic training you all have your own stories you can sit down chryshann you all have your own stories of how you came to this country and you all have your own personal reasons for why you joined the military but in the service that you render in the sacrifices that each of you have made and will continue to make in the commitment you ve shown to your adopted nation you re part of a larger story america s story for more than two centuries this nation has been a beacon of hope and opportunity a place that has drawn enterprising men and women from around the world who have sought to build a life as good as their talents and their hard work would allow and generation after generation of immigrants have come to these shores because they believe that in america all things are possible so you are not only living examples of that promise you re also serving to defend that promise for future generations and your service reminds all of us that much of the strength of this country is drawn from those who have chosen to call it home it s not lost on me or anybody here today that at a time when we face an economic crisis born in many ways of irresponsibility there are those who are actively pursuing greater responsibility and one person here today who fits that description well enough is jeanne ebongue tapo right here she grew up in a poor family in gabon africa the daughter of a single mother raising five children by herself and jeanne immigrated to the united states to provide for her family and to pursue her dream of becoming a dentist and that s why she joined the navy and she hoped she d have the opportunity to work and see the world and also earn her education and that s exactly what she has been able to do she has started college she s had the chance to travel and even though she s had to make sacrifices to be apart from her loved ones the people she s met in the navy have become like a family away from home and she s had the chance to be a part of what it feels like what feels like a small community and at the same time to be part of something much larger than herself so jeanne thank you despite all the all that she s faced despite all the obstacles that she s overcome jeanne has made it her mission to serve others at the end of the day she said the only thing that matters is that i helped as our newest americans all of you remind us just how precious our citizenship is of how much it s worth and why it s worth protecting you all remind us that citizenship is not just a collection of rights it s also a set of responsibilities that america s success is not a gift it is hard won it depends on each of us doing our part so thank you all for your service i am extraordinarily proud of you and your nation is grateful to you so now it is also my privilege to present a distinguished american with an award in recognition of the many contributions of naturalized citizens like all of you it s called the outstanding american by choice award it s given to it s given by u s citizenship and immigration services and it is my honor to award it to peter lemon and let me tell you a little bit about peter peter was just 19 years old and a citizen for just seven years when he and his platoon came under fire in the tay ninh province of vietnam wounded by shrapnel from a mortar that exploded near his foxhole specialist lemon kept fighting to protect his position against wave after wave of attack the battle raged for hours he was wounded a second time and then a third but he refused to give up even leaving his foxhole and exposed himself to enemy fire in order to continue to defend his fellow rangers in fact once the fight was over specialist lemon refused to be evacuated until others had been taken to a field hospital and pete would spend a month in the hospital himself to recover from his injuries soon after he returned home he would be presented with the medal of honor by president nixon today peter lemon is a proud father and a proud veteran as well as an author and a filmmaker and he has devoted his time and energies to talking about what his own experiences have meant to him and what he has learned to encourage each and every one of us that the way to make the most of our talents is to make a difference in the lives of others his experience is a testament to the men and women who have come to this country to build a better life for themselves and their families and who have by their commitment and contribution made america a much better place as well so it is my honor to present this outstanding american by choice award to peter lemon peter will you please come here one of you might win this someday you re already well on the way dem bobama1 5 09b barack_obama hello everybody please everybody have a seat this is a big family here a bit like a wedding you know we re here this afternoon to formally fill out my cabinet with my new secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius and my secretary of commerce gary locke secretary sebelius and secretary locke were actually sworn in before today but around here we like to make sure we get it right i had to do it twice and so now we make everybody do it twice when i announced kathleen as my choice for hhs secretary i said that one of her responsibilities would be to make certain our nation is prepared for a pandemic what i didn t expect was that a serious h1n1 flu outbreak would be her first assignment but it is and that s why on tuesday only hours after being confirmed by the senate she was sworn in by my side in the oval office and then went straight to the situation room to get to work dealing with this emergency but managing crises is nothing new for kathleen she has plenty of experience doing just that as governor of kansas and that expertise has enabled her to hit the ground running she s been closely monitoring and carefully managing the situation along with her acting director at the cdc dr richard besser and secretary janet napolitano they re making sure all federal agencies are coordinating their efforts and they ll keep the american people updated over the days ahead experts tell us this is a unique virus with the potential to have a great impact and as long as it remains a potentially grave threat we re going to take it very seriously and obviously we hope the precautions we re taking prove unnecessary but better safe than sorry we will take every appropriate action to make sure that the american people are safe and if the flu outbreak isn t enough secretary sebelius has a lot of other challenges on her plate from guaranteeing the safety of our nation s food and drug supply to keeping america at the forefront of medical research to helping to lead our effort to ensure that every american has access to quality affordable health care as a former state insurance commissioner and governor kathleen has been on the front lines of our health care crisis and she shares my belief that if we re going to cut costs for families and businesses maintain quality and improve the long term economic health of our nation we must realize that fixing what s wrong with our health care system is no longer just a moral imperative it s an economic and fiscal imperative if we want to make companies more competitive and reduce our budget deficits in the future we need to tackle health care reform right now the reform we re talking about won t focus on democratic ideas or republican ideas but on ideas that work and that s precisely the kind of commitment to bipartisan accomplishment that kathleen embodies she is after all the daughter of a democratic governor and the daughter in law of a republican congressman her father who is here former ohio governor john gilligan i just want to acknowledge him where did he go there he is right in front give him a big round of applause he and kathleen make up the first father daughter pair of governors in the united states but kathleen has a forged a reputation for bipartisan problem solving in her own right time and again she bridged the partisan divide and worked with a republican legislature to get things done for the people of kansas kathleen possesses the patience and understanding honed by nearly 35 years of marriage to her husband gary sebelius the former first dude of kansas the grace and good humor required to raise sons like ned and john and the kind of pragmatic wisdom you tend to find in a kansan she s already a tremendous asset to my cabinet she has hit the ground running i look forward to working with her in the years to come now when i chose gary locke for my commerce secretary i mentioned his own remarkable story more than 100 years ago gary s grandfather left china on a steamship bound for america and found work as a domestic servant in washington state he raised a son gary s father jimmy who would go on to fight in world war ii return home and open a grocery store and later raise a family of his own gary worked his way through yale with the help of scholarships and student loans earned his law degree and returned to washington state to devote his life to public service and when he took the oath of office as governor of washington he did so in the state capitol building not one mile from the home where his grandfather worked as a servant all those years ago and that s how i know gary shares my deep abiding belief in the american dream because he s lived it too he s since proceeded to honor the family s legacy with years of distinguished service as one of the nation s most able and forward thinking governors he worked to promote economic development and attract businesses to washington that would create the jobs of the 21st century jobs in science and technology agriculture and clean energy and i m proud of what he and his team at the department of commerce are doing to help create conditions in which our workers can prosper our businesses can compete and thrive and our economy can grow i want to thank his lovely wife mona their adorable children emily dylan and madeline for being here thank you guys and for the sacrifices they ve made to send gary from one washington to another especially emily because i know it s harder when you re older and i m grateful to gary for his service because i know how hard it is to be away from your family my cabinet is now full of energetic innovators like kathleen and gary a team of leaders who push the envelope every day because they know that whether the wind is in our face or at our backs america does not settle we always march forward i am thrilled to have them by my side as we continue the work of turning our economy around and laying a new foundation for growth that delivers on the change the american people asked for and the promise of a new and better day ahead so with that i m going to turn it over to another extraordinary member of my team my vice president joe biden to administer the oaths joe thank you everybody have a great weekend dem bobama1 5 10 barack_obama thank you thank you very much thank you everybody please be seated i love you back it is great to be here in the big house and so may i say go blue i thought i d go for the cheap applause line to start things off good afternoon president coleman the board of trustees to faculty parents family and friends of the class of 2010 congratulations on your graduation and thank you for allowing me the honor of being a part of it let me acknowledge your wonderful governor jennifer granholm your mayor john hieftje and all the members of congress who are here today it is a privilege to be with you on this happy occasion and you know it s nice to spend a little time outside of washington now don t get me wrong washington is a beautiful city it s very nice living above the store you can t beat the commute it s just sometimes all you hear in washington is the clamor of politics and all that noise can drown out the voices of the people who sent you there so when i took office i decided that each night i would read 10 letters out of the tens of thousands that are sent to us by ordinary americans every day this is my modest effort to remind myself of why i ran in the first place some of these letters tell stories of heartache and struggle some express gratitude some express anger i d say a good solid third call me an idiot which is how i know that i m getting a good representative sample some of the letters make you think like the one that i received last month from a kindergarten class in virginia now the teacher of this class instructed the students to ask me any question they wanted so one asked how do you do your job another asked do you work a lot somebody wanted to know if i wear a black jacket or if i have a beard so clearly they were getting me mixed up with the other tall guy from illinois and one of my favorites was from a kid who wanted to know if i lived next to a volcano i m still trying to piece the thought process on this one loved this letter but it was the last question from the last student in the letter that gave me pause the student asked are people being nice are people being nice well if you turn on the news today or yesterday or a week ago or a month ago particularly one of the cable channels you can see why even a kindergartener would ask this question we ve got politicians calling each other all sorts of unflattering names pundits and talking heads shout at each other the media tends to play up every hint of conflict because it makes for a sexier story which means anyone interested in getting coverage feels compelled to make their arguments as outrageous and as incendiary as possible now some of this contentiousness can be attributed to the incredibly difficult moment in which we find ourselves as a nation the fact is when you leave here today you will search for work in an economy that is still emerging from the worst crisis since the great depression you live in a century where the speed with which jobs and industries move across the globe is forcing america to compete like never before you will raise your children at a time when threats like terrorism and climate change aren t confined within the borders of any one country and as our world grows smaller and more connected you will live and work with more people who don t look like you or think like you or come from where you do i really enjoyed alex s remarks because that s a lot of change and all these changes all these challenges inevitably cause some tension in the body politic they make people worry about the future and sometimes they get people riled up but i think it s important that we maintain some historic perspective since the days of our founding american politics has never been a particularly nice business it s always been a little less gentile during times of great change a newspaper of the opposing party once editorialized that if thomas jefferson were elected murder robbery rape adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced not subtle opponents of andrew jackson often referred to his mother as a common prostitute which seems a little over the top presidents from teddy roosevelt to lyndon johnson have been accused of promoting socialism or worse and we ve had arguments between politicians that have been settled with actual duels there was even a caning once on the floor of the united states senate which i m happy to say didn t happen while i was there it was a few years before the point is politics has never been for the thin skinned or the faint of heart and if you enter the arena you should expect to get roughed up moreover democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult it s always been noisy and messy contentious complicated we ve been fighting about the proper size and role of government since the day the framers gathered in philadelphia we ve battled over the meaning of individual freedom and equality since the bill of rights was drafted as our economy has shifted emphasis from agriculture to industry to information to technology we have argued and struggled at each and every juncture over the best way to ensure that all of our citizens have a shot at opportunity so before we get too depressed about the current state of our politics let s remember our history the great debates of the past all stirred great passions they all made somebody angry and at least once led to a terrible war what is amazing is that despite all the conflict despite all its flaws and its frustrations our experiment in democracy has worked better than any form of government on earth on the last day of the constitutional convention benjamin franklin was famously asked well doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy and franklin gave an answer that s been quoted for ages he said a republic if you can keep it if you can keep it well for more than 200 years we have kept it through revolution and civil war our democracy has survived through depression and world war it has prevailed through periods of great social and economic unrest from civil rights to women s rights it has allowed us slowly sometimes painfully to move towards a more perfect union and so now class of 2010 the question for your generation is this how will you keep our democracy going at a moment when our challenges seem so big and our politics seem so small how will you keep our democracy alive and vibrant how will you keep it well in this century i m not here to offer some grand theory or detailed policy prescription but let me offer a few brief reflections based on my own experiences and the experiences of our country over the last two centuries first of all american democracy has thrived because we have recognized the need for a government that while limited can still help us adapt to a changing world on the fourth panel of the jefferson memorial is a quote i remember reading to my daughters during our first visit there it says i am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions but with the change of circumstances institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times the democracy designed by jefferson and the other founders was never intended to solve every problem with a new law or a new program having thrown off the tyranny of the british empire the first americans were understandably skeptical of government and ever since we ve held fast to the belief that government doesn t have all the answers and we have cherished and fiercely defended our individual freedom that s a strand of our nation s dna but the other strand is the belief that there are some things we can only do together as one nation and that our government must keep pace with the times when america expanded from a few colonies to an entire continent and we needed a way to reach the pacific our government helped build the railroads when we transitioned from an economy based on farms to one based on factories and workers needed new skills and training our nation set up a system of public high schools when the markets crashed during the depression and people lost their life savings our government put in place a set of rules and safeguards to make sure that such a crisis never happened again and then put a safety net in place to make sure that our elders would never be impoverished the way they had been and because our markets and financial systems have evolved since then we re now putting in place new rules and safeguards to protect the american people now this notion this notion class hasn t always been partisan it was the first republican president abraham lincoln who said the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves and he d go on to begin that first intercontinental railroad and set up the first land grant colleges it was another republican teddy roosevelt who said the object of government is the welfare of the people and he s remembered for using the power of government to break up monopolies and establish our national park system democrat lyndon johnson announced the great society during a commencement here at michigan but it was the republican president before him dwight eisenhower who launched the massive government undertaking known as the interstate highway system of course there have always been those who ve opposed such efforts they argue government intervention is usually inefficient that it restricts individual freedom and dampens individual initiative and in certain instances that s been true for many years we had a welfare system that too often discouraged people from taking responsibility for their own upward mobility at times we ve neglected the role of parents rather than government in cultivating a child s education and sometimes regulation fails and sometimes their benefits don t justify their costs but what troubles me is when i hear people say that all of government is inherently bad one of my favorite signs during the health care debate was somebody who said keep your government hands out of my medicare which is essentially saying keep government out of my government run health care plan when our government is spoken of as some menacing threatening foreign entity it ignores the fact that in our democracy government is us we the people we the people hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders and change our laws and shape our own destiny government is the police officers who are protecting our communities and the servicemen and women who are defending us abroad government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that kept you safe government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them government is this extraordinary public university a place that s doing lifesaving research and catalyzing economic growth and graduating students who will change the world around them in ways big and small the truth is the debate we ve had for decades now between more government and less government it doesn t really fit the times in which we live we know that too much government can stifle competition and deprive us of choice and burden us with debt but we ve also clearly seen the dangers of too little government like when a lack of accountability on wall street nearly leads to the collapse of our entire economy so class of 2010 what we should be asking is not whether we need big government or a small government but how we can create a smarter and better government because in an era of ipods and tivo where we have more choices than ever before even though i can t really work a lot of these things but i have 23 year olds who do it for me government shouldn t try to dictate your lives but it should give you the tools you need to succeed government shouldn t try to guarantee results but it should guarantee a shot at opportunity for every american who s willing to work hard so yes we can and should debate the role of government in our lives but remember as you are asked to meet the challenges of our time remember that the ability for us to adapt our government to the needs of the age has helped make our democracy work since its inception now the second way to keep our democracy healthy is to maintain a basic level of civility in our public debate these arguments we re having over government and health care and war and taxes these are serious arguments they should arouse people s passions and it s important for everybody to join in the debate with all the vigor that the maintenance of a free people requires but we can t expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down you can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it you can question somebody s views and their judgment without questioning their motives or their patriotism throwing around phrases like socialists and soviet style takeover and fascist and right wing nut that may grab headlines but it also has the effect of comparing our government our political opponents to authoritarian even murderous regimes now we ve seen this kind of politics in the past it s been practiced by both fringes of the ideological spectrum by the left and the right since our nation s birth but it s starting to creep into the center of our discourse and the problem with it is not the hurt feelings or the bruised egos of the public officials who are criticized remember they signed up for it michelle always reminds me of that the problem is that this kind of vilification and over the top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise it undermines democratic deliberation it prevents learning since after all why should we listen to a fascist or a socialist or a right wing nut or a left wing nut it makes it nearly impossible for people who have legitimate but bridgeable differences to sit down at the same table and hash things out it robs us of a rational and serious debate the one we need to have about the very real and very big challenges facing this nation it coarsens our culture and at its worst it can send signals to the most extreme elements of our society that perhaps violence is a justifiable response so what do we do as i found out after a year in the white house changing this type of politics is not easy and part of what civility requires is that we recall the simple lesson most of us learned from our parents treat others as you would like to be treated with courtesy and respect but civility in this age also requires something more than just asking if we can t just all get along today s 24 7 echo chamber amplifies the most inflammatory soundbites louder and faster than ever before and it s also however given us unprecedented choice whereas most americans used to get their news from the same three networks over dinner or a few influential papers on sunday morning we now have the option to get our information from any number of blogs or websites or cable news shows and this can have both a good and bad development for democracy for if we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own studies suggest that we become more polarized more set in our ways that will only reinforce and even deepen the political divides in this country but if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and our beliefs perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from now this requires us to agree on a certain set of facts to debate from that s why we need a vibrant and thriving news business that is separate from opinion makers and talking heads that s why we need an educated citizenry that values hard evidence and not just assertion as senator daniel patrick moynihan famously once said everybody is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts still if you re somebody who only reads the editorial page of the new york times try glancing at the page of the wall street journal once in a while if you re a fan of glenn beck or rush limbaugh try reading a few columns on the huffington post website it may make your blood boil your mind may not be changed but the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship it is essential for our democracy and so too is the practice of engaging in different experiences with different kinds of people i look out at this class and i realize for four years at michigan you have been exposed to diverse thinkers and scholars professors and students don t narrow that broad intellectual exposure just because you re leaving here instead seek to expand it if you grew up in a big city spend some time with somebody who grew up in a rural town if you find yourself only hanging around with people of your own race or ethnicity or religion include people in your circle who have different backgrounds and life experiences you ll learn what it s like to walk in somebody else s shoes and in the process you will help to make this democracy work which brings me to the last ingredient in a functioning democracy one that s perhaps most basic and it s already been mentioned and that is participation class of 2010 i understand that one effect of today s poisonous political climate is to push people away from participation in public life if all you see when you turn on the tv is name calling if all you hear about is how special interest lobbying and partisanship prevented washington from getting something done you might think to yourself what s the point of getting involved here s the point when we don t pay close attention to the decisions made by our leaders when we fail to educate ourselves about the major issues of the day when we choose not to make our voices and opinions heard that s when democracy breaks down that s when power is abused that s when the most extreme voices in our society fill the void that we leave that s when powerful interests and their lobbyists are most able to buy access and influence in the corridors of power because none of us are there to speak up and stop them participation in public life doesn t mean that you all have to run for public office though we could certainly use some fresh faces in washington but it does mean that you should pay attention and contribute in any way that you can stay informed write letters or make phone calls on behalf of an issue you care about if electoral politics isn t your thing continue the tradition so many of you started here at michigan and find a way to serve your community and your country an act that will help you stay connected to your fellow citizens and improve the lives of those around you it was 50 years ago that a young candidate for president came here to michigan and delivered a speech that inspired one of the most successful service projects in american history and as john f kennedy described the ideals behind what would become the peace corps he issued a challenge to the students who had assembled in ann arbor on that october night on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country he said will depend the answer whether a free society can compete i think it can he said this democracy we have is a precious thing for all the arguments and all the doubts and all the cynicism that s out there today we should never forget that as americans we enjoy more freedoms and opportunities than citizens in any other nation on earth we are free to speak our mind and worship as we please we are free to choose our leaders and criticize them if they let us down we have the chance to get an education and work hard and give our children a better life none of this came easy none of this was preordained the men and women who sat in your chairs 10 years ago and 50 years ago and 100 years ago they made america possible through their toil and their endurance and their imagination and their faith their success and america s success was never a given and there is no guarantee that the graduates who will sit in these same seats 10 years from now or 50 years from now or 100 years from now will enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that you do you too will have to strive you too will have to push the boundaries of what seems possible for the truth is our nation s destiny has never been certain what is certain what has always been certain is the ability to shape that destiny that is what makes us different that is what sets us apart that is what makes us americans our ability at the end of the day to look past all of our differences and all of our disagreements and still forge a common future that task is now in your hands as is the answer to the question posed at this university half a century ago about whether a free society can still compete if you are willing as past generations were willing to contribute part of your life to the life of this country then i like president kennedy believe we can because i believe in you congratulations on your graduation 2010 may god bless you and may god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama1 7 10a barack_obama thank you very much thank you thank you everyone please have a seat thank you very much let me thank pastor hybels from near my hometown in chicago who took time off his vacation to be here today we are blessed to have him i want to thank president neil kerwin and our hosts here at american university acknowledge my outstanding secretary of labor hilda solis and members of my administration all the members of congress hilda deserves applause to all the members of congress the elected officials faith and law enforcement labor business leaders and immigration advocates who are here today thank you for your presence i want to thank american university for welcoming me to the campus once again some may recall that the last time i was here i was joined by a dear friend and a giant of american politics senator edward kennedy teddy s not here right now but his legacy of civil rights and health care and worker protections is still with us i was a candidate for president that day and some may recall i argued that our country had reached a tipping point that after years in which we had deferred our most pressing problems and too often yielded to the politics of the moment we now faced a choice we could squarely confront our challenges with honesty and determination or we could consign ourselves and our children to a future less prosperous and less secure i believed that then and i believe it now and that s why even as we ve tackled the most severe economic crisis since the great depression even as we ve wound down the war in iraq and refocused our efforts in afghanistan my administration has refused to ignore some of the fundamental challenges facing this generation we launched the most aggressive education reforms in decades so that our children can gain the knowledge and skills they need to compete in a 21st century global economy we have finally delivered on the promise of health reform reform that will bring greater security to every american and that will rein in the skyrocketing costs that threaten families businesses and the prosperity of our nation we re on the verge of reforming an outdated and ineffective set of rules governing wall street to give greater power to consumers and prevent the reckless financial speculation that led to this severe recession and we re accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy by significantly raising the fuel efficiency standards of cars and trucks and by doubling our use of renewable energies like wind and solar power steps that have the potential to create whole new industries and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in america so despite the forces of the status quo despite the polarization and the frequent pettiness of our politics we are confronting the great challenges of our times and while this work isn t easy and the changes we seek won t always happen overnight what we ve made clear is that this administration will not just kick the can down the road immigration reform is no exception in recent days the issue of immigration has become once more a source of fresh contention in our country with the passage of a controversial law in arizona and the heated reactions we ve seen across america some have rallied behind this new policy others have protested and launched boycotts of the state and everywhere people have expressed frustration with a system that seems fundamentally broken of course the tensions around immigration are not new on the one hand we ve always defined ourselves as a nation of immigrants a nation that welcomes those willing to embrace america s precepts indeed it is this constant flow of immigrants that helped to make america what it is the scientific breakthroughs of albert einstein the inventions of nikola tesla the great ventures of andrew carnegie s u s steel and sergey brin s google inc all this was possible because of immigrants and then there are the countless names and the quiet acts that never made the history books but were no less consequential in building this country the generations who braved hardship and great risk to reach our shores in search of a better life for themselves and their families the millions of people ancestors to most of us who believed that there was a place where they could be at long last free to work and worship and live their lives in peace so this steady stream of hardworking and talented people has made america the engine of the global economy and a beacon of hope around the world and it s allowed us to adapt and thrive in the face of technological and societal change to this day america reaps incredible economic rewards because we remain a magnet for the best and brightest from across the globe folks travel here in the hopes of being a part of a culture of entrepreneurship and ingenuity and by doing so they strengthen and enrich that culture immigration also means we have a younger workforce and a faster growing economy than many of our competitors and in an increasingly interconnected world the diversity of our country is a powerful advantage in global competition just a few weeks ago we had an event of small business owners at the white house and one business owner was a woman named prachee devadas who came to this country became a citizen and opened up a successful technology services company when she started she had just one employee today she employs more than a hundred people this past april we held a naturalization ceremony at the white house for members of our armed forces even though they were not yet citizens they had enlisted one of them was a woman named perla ramos born and raised in mexico came to the united states shortly after 9 11 and she eventually joined the navy and she said i take pride in our flag and the history that forged this great nation and the history we write day by day these women and men and women across this country like them remind us that immigrants have always helped to build and defend this country and that being an american is not a matter of blood or birth it s a matter of faith it s a matter of fidelity to the shared values that we all hold so dear that s what makes us unique that s what makes us strong anybody can help us write the next great chapter in our history now we can t forget that this process of immigration and eventual inclusion has often been painful each new wave of immigrants has generated fear and resentments towards newcomers particularly in times of economic upheaval our founding was rooted in the notion that america was unique as a place of refuge and freedom for in thomas jefferson s words oppressed humanity but the ink on our constitution was barely dry when amidst conflict congress passed the alien and sedition acts which placed harsh restrictions of those suspected of having foreign allegiances a century ago immigrants from ireland italy poland other european countries were routinely subjected to rank discrimination and ugly stereotypes chinese immigrants were held in detention and deported from angel island in the san francisco bay they didn t even get to come in so the politics of who is and who is not allowed to enter this country and on what terms has always been contentious and that remains true today and it s made worse by a failure of those of us in washington to fix a broken immigration system to begin with our borders have been porous for decades obviously the problem is greatest along our southern border but it s not restricted to that part of the country in fact because we don t do a very good job of tracking who comes in and out of the country as visitors large numbers avoid immigration laws simply by overstaying their visas the result is an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the united states the overwhelming majority of these men and women are simply seeking a better life for themselves and their children many settle in low wage sectors of the economy they work hard they save they stay out of trouble but because they live in the shadows they re vulnerable to unscrupulous businesses who pay them less than the minimum wage or violate worker safety rules thereby putting companies who follow those rules and americans who rightly demand the minimum wage or overtime at an unfair disadvantage crimes go unreported as victims and witnesses fear coming forward and this makes it harder for the police to catch violent criminals and keep neighborhoods safe and billions in tax revenue are lost each year because many undocumented workers are paid under the table more fundamentally the presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are going through the process of immigrating legally indeed after years of patchwork fixes and ill conceived revisions the legal immigration system is as broken as the borders backlogs and bureaucracy means the process can take years while an applicant waits for approval he or she is often forbidden from visiting the united states which means even husbands and wives may be forced to spend many years apart high fees and the need for lawyers may exclude worthy applicants and while we provide students from around the world visas to get engineering and computer science degrees at our top universities our laws discourage them from using those skills to start a business or power a new industry right here in the united states instead of training entrepreneurs to create jobs on our shores we train our competition in sum the system is broken and everybody knows it unfortunately reform has been held hostage to political posturing and special interest wrangling and to the pervasive sentiment in washington that tackling such a thorny and emotional issue is inherently bad politics just a few years ago when i was a senator we forged a bipartisan coalition in favor of comprehensive reform under the leadership of senator kennedy who had been a longtime champion of immigration reform and senator john mccain we worked across the aisle to help pass a bipartisan bill through the senate but that effort eventually came apart and now under the pressures of partisanship and election year politics many of the 11 republican senators who voted for reform in the past have now backed away from their previous support into this breach states like arizona have decided to take matters into their own hands given the levels of frustration across the country this is understandable but it is also ill conceived and it s not just that the law arizona passed is divisive although it has fanned the flames of an already contentious debate laws like arizona s put huge pressures on local law enforcement to enforce rules that ultimately are unenforceable it puts pressure on already hard strapped state and local budgets it makes it difficult for people here illegally to report crimes driving a wedge between communities and law enforcement making our streets more dangerous and the jobs of our police officers more difficult and you don t have to take my word for this you can speak to the police chiefs and others from law enforcement here today who will tell you the same thing these laws also have the potential of violating the rights of innocent american citizens and legal residents making them subject to possible stops or questioning because of what they look like or how they sound and as other states and localities go their own ways we face the prospect that different rules for immigration will apply in different parts of the country a patchwork of local immigration rules where we all know one clear national standard is needed our task then is to make our national laws actually work to shape a system that reflects our values as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants and that means being honest about the problem and getting past the false debates that divide the country rather than bring it together for example there are those in the immigrants rights community who have argued passionately that we should simply provide those who are here illegally with legal status or at least ignore the laws on the books and put an end to deportation until we have better laws and often this argument is framed in moral terms why should we punish people who are just trying to earn a living i recognize the sense of compassion that drives this argument but i believe such an indiscriminate approach would be both unwise and unfair it would suggest to those thinking about coming here illegally that there will be no repercussions for such a decision and this could lead to a surge in more illegal immigration and it would also ignore the millions of people around the world who are waiting in line to come here legally ultimately our nation like all nations has the right and obligation to control its borders and set laws for residency and citizenship and no matter how decent they are no matter their reasons the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable now if the majority of americans are skeptical of a blanket amnesty they are also skeptical that it is possible to round up and deport 11 million people they know it s not possible such an effort would be logistically impossible and wildly expensive moreover it would tear at the very fabric of this nation because immigrants who are here illegally are now intricately woven into that fabric many have children who are american citizens some are children themselves brought here by their parents at a very young age growing up as american kids only to discover their illegal status when they apply for college or a job migrant workers mostly here illegally have been the labor force of our farmers and agricultural producers for generations so even if it was possible a program of mass deportations would disrupt our economy and communities in ways that most americans would find intolerable now once we get past the two poles of this debate it becomes possible to shape a practical common sense approach that reflects our heritage and our values such an approach demands accountability from everybody from government from businesses and from individuals government has a threshold responsibility to secure our borders that s why i directed my secretary of homeland security janet napolitano a former border governor to improve our enforcement policy without having to wait for a new law today we have more boots on the ground near the southwest border than at any time in our history let me repeat that we have more boots on the ground on the southwest border than at any time in our history we doubled the personnel assigned to border enforcement security task forces we tripled the number of intelligence analysts along the border for the first time we ve begun screening 100 percent of southbound rail shipments and as a result we re seizing more illegal guns cash and drugs than in years past contrary to some of the reports that you see crime along the border is down and statistics collected by customs and border protection reflect a significant reduction in the number of people trying to cross the border illegally so the bottom line is this the southern border is more secure today than at any time in the past 20 years that doesn t mean we don t have more work to do we have to do that work but it s important that we acknowledge the facts even as we are committed to doing what s necessary to secure our borders even without passage of the new law there are those who argue that we should not move forward with any other elements of reform until we have fully sealed our borders but our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols it won t work our borders will not be secure as long as our limited resources are devoted to not only stopping gangs and potential terrorists but also the hundreds of thousands who attempt to cross each year simply to find work that s why businesses must be held accountable if they break the law by deliberately hiring and exploiting undocumented workers we ve already begun to step up enforcement against the worst workplace offenders and we re implementing and improving a system to give employers a reliable way to verify that their employees are here legally but we need to do more we cannot continue just to look the other way as a significant portion of our economy operates outside the law it breeds abuse and bad practices it punishes employers who act responsibly and undercuts american workers and ultimately if the demand for undocumented workers falls the incentive for people to come here illegally will decline as well finally we have to demand responsibility from people living here illegally they must be required to admit that they broke the law they should be required to register pay their taxes pay a fine and learn english they must get right with the law before they can get in line and earn their citizenship not just because it is fair not just because it will make clear to those who might wish to come to america they must do so inside the bounds of the law but because this is how we demonstrate that being what being an american means being a citizen of this country comes not only with rights but also with certain fundamental responsibilities we can create a pathway for legal status that is fair reflective of our values and works now stopping illegal immigration must go hand in hand with reforming our creaky system of legal immigration we ve begun to do that by eliminating a backlog in background checks that at one point stretched back almost a year that s just for the background check people can now track the status of their immigration applications by email or text message we ve improved accountability and safety in the detention system and we ve stemmed the increases in naturalization fees but here too we need to do more we should make it easier for the best and the brightest to come to start businesses and develop products and create jobs our laws should respect families following the rules instead of splitting them apart we need to provide farms a legal way to hire the workers they rely on and a path for those workers to earn legal status and we should stop punishing innocent young people for the actions of their parents by denying them the chance to stay here and earn an education and contribute their talents to build the country where they ve grown up the dream act would do this and that s why i supported this bill as a state legislator and as a u s senator and why i continue to support it as president so these are the essential elements of comprehensive immigration reform the question now is whether we will have the courage and the political will to pass a bill through congress to finally get it done last summer i held a meeting with leaders of both parties including many of the republicans who had supported reform in the past and some who hadn t i was pleased to see a bipartisan framework proposed in the senate by senators lindsey graham and chuck schumer with whom i met to discuss this issue i ve spoken with the congressional hispanic caucus to plot the way forward and meet and then i met with them earlier this week and i ve spoken with representatives from a growing coalition of labor unions and business groups immigrant advocates and community organizations law enforcement local government all who recognize the importance of immigration reform and i ve met with leaders from america s religious communities like pastor hybels people of different faiths and beliefs some liberal some conservative who nonetheless share a sense of urgency who understand that fixing our broken immigration system is not only a political issue not just an economic issue but a moral imperative as well so we ve made progress i m ready to move forward the majority of democrats are ready to move forward and i believe the majority of americans are ready to move forward but the fact is without bipartisan support as we had just a few years ago we cannot solve this problem reform that brings accountability to our immigration system cannot pass without republican votes that is the political and mathematical reality the only way to reduce the risk that this effort will again falter because of politics is if members of both parties are willing to take responsibility for solving this problem once and for all and yes this is an emotional question and one that lends itself to demagoguery time and again this issue has been used to divide and inflame and to demonize people and so the understandable the natural impulse among those who run for office is to turn away and defer this question for another day or another year or another administration despite the courageous leadership in the past shown by many democrats and some republicans including by the way my predecessor president bush this has been the custom that is why a broken and dangerous system that offends our most basic american values is still in place but i believe we can put politics aside and finally have an immigration system that s accountable i believe we can appeal not to people s fears but to their hopes to their highest ideals because that s who we are as americans it s been inscribed on our nation s seal since we declared our independence e pluribus unum out of many one that is what has drawn the persecuted and impoverished to our shores that s what led the innovators and risk takers from around the world to take a chance here in the land of opportunity that s what has led people to endure untold hardships to reach this place called america one of the largest waves of immigration in our history took place little more than a century ago at the time jewish people were being driven out of eastern europe often escaping to the sounds of gunfire and the light from their villages burning to the ground the journey could take months as families crossed rivers in the dead of night traveled miles by foot endured a rough and dangerous passage over the north atlantic once here many made their homes in a teeming and bustling lower manhattan it was at this time that a young woman named emma lazarus whose own family fled persecution from europe generations earlier took up the cause of these new immigrants although she was a poet she spent much of her time advocating for better health care and housing for the newcomers and inspired by what she saw and heard she wrote down her thoughts and donated a piece of work to help pay for the construction of a new statue the statue of liberty which actually was funded in part by small donations from people across america years before the statue was built years before it would be seen by throngs of immigrants craning their necks skyward at the end of long and brutal voyage years before it would come to symbolize everything that we cherish she imagined what it could mean she imagined the sight of a giant statue at the entry point of a great nation but unlike the great monuments of the past this would not signal an empire instead it would signal one s arrival to a place of opportunity and refuge and freedom here at our sea washed sunset gates shall stand she wrote a mighty woman with a torch from her beacon hand glows world wide welcome keep ancient lands your storied pomp give me your tired and your poor your huddled masses yearning to be free send these the homeless tempest tossed to me i lift my lamp beside the golden door let us remember these words for it falls on each generation to ensure that that lamp that beacon continues to shine as a source of hope around the world and a source of our prosperity here at home thank you god bless you and may god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama1 7 10b barack_obama hello everybody what s going on guys thank you thank you everybody everybody have a seat well hello welcome to the white house congratulations to sky blue on winning your first women s professional soccer championship congratulations give them a big round of applause i want to recognize the mayor of piscataway brian wahler who is with us here today where s brian hey he s got the video camera going on i want to thank the six players who took part in the wps all star game yesterday and rearranged their travel plans so they could be in washington here today we re glad you could make it thank you this is a pretty exciting time for soccer in america we ve all been glued to our tvs over the last couple of weeks as the men s team made their run at the world cup i know my staff by the way was watching when the u s beat algeria because i could hear them whooping it up as i was having important meetings in the oval office malia s team did very well this summer which i think is also important to know and today it s an honor to welcome the first ever champions of the women s professional soccer league to the white house now i know there were some bumps in the road for this team last season they dealt with multiple coaching changes they squeaked into the playoffs at the last minute and then they had to play three games on the road in eight days to win it all but this team came together when it counted no matter what obstacles they faced no matter what disappointments and distractions they had to deal with they had each other s backs and they stayed focused on their ultimate goal that s what teams do they work hard this team loves being an underdog and in the end that made all the difference i know she s probably sick of hearing that story but i have to single out your captain christie rampone where s christie this is very impressive this impresses me after sky blue won the championship last season christie s teammates tried to get her to take a celebratory drink with them in the locker room and she had to turn it down because she was almost three months pregnant that s really impressive christie didn t want it to be a distraction and so she had been waiting until the season was over to tell her teammates after all she said we can t have the trophy taken away for having 11 1 2 women on the field is it going to be a girl do we know okay well there you go today christie is the mother of two beautiful daughters including so reece already came she showed up where is she where is she hey oh she s precious yes she looks a little hungry though so reece is going to be four months old next week and in the meantime christie is already back in the lineup helping her teammates chase another title now even though christie s story is unique her dedication is not the women on this team aren t playing for fame or fortune they are spending countless hours in the gym and on the practice field because they recognize a rare opportunity to do the thing that they love they believe in using their god given talent to inspire the next generation to reach a little higher and work a little harder and that sense of responsibility also extends off the pitch i m pleased that the wps is creating a program called get active that will sponsor 3 on 3 soccer tournaments and help young people learn about the importance of living healthy active lives obviously this is an issue that the first lady michelle is talking about all across the country and so i want to thank this league for joining the cause today nearly 14 million children in america play soccer 40 percent of them are girls and as the father of one of them i want to say a special thanks to this group and to all the women who came before them for serving as such outstanding role models together you ve changed the way our young women look at themselves you ve expanded the realm of what they believe is possible and for that we all owe you a great debt of gratitude so congratulations on your championship and best of luck this season all right i think they re going to pull this out and then we re going to take some pictures okay oh but i ve got my jersey yes okay i ve got to have my jersey and it is sky blue by the way that s very nice i might have to get in the weight room a little bit before i wear this thank you very come on and i ll hold it while we re taking our picture dem bobama1 7 10c barack_obama thank you please have a seat everybody good evening everybody as president one of my highest national security priorities is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons that s why my administration has aggressively pursued a comprehensive agenda of non proliferation and nuclear security leading by example we agreed with russia to reduce our nuclear arsenals through the new start treaty and i ve urged the senate to move forward with ratification this year and with allies and partners we ve strengthened the global non proliferation regime including the cornerstone of our efforts the nuclear non proliferation treaty now in the entire world there is only one signatory to the npt only one that has been unable to convince the international atomic energy agency that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes one nation and that nation is iran for years the iranian government has violated its commitments defied united nations security council resolutions and forged ahead with its nuclear program all while supporting terrorist groups and suppressing the aspirations of the iranian people since taking office i ve made it clear that the united states was prepared to begin a new chapter of engagement with the islamic republic of iran we offered the iranian government a clear choice it could fulfill its international obligations and realize greater security deeper economic and political integration with the world and a better future for all iranians or it could continue to flout its responsibilities and face even more pressure and isolation to date iran has chosen the path of defiance that s why we have steadily built a broader and deeper coalition of nations to pressure the iranian government last month we joined with our partners at the u n security council to pass the toughest and most comprehensive multilateral sanctions that the iranian government has ever faced and i want to specifically single out our tireless and i mean tireless ambassador to the united nations susan rice for her terrific as i said last month we are going to make sure that these sanctions are vigorously enforced at the same time we ll work with our allies and friends to refine and enforce our own sanctions on iran and that s exactly what we ve been doing here in the united states thanks to the efforts of my treasury secretary tim geithner and under secretary stuart levey they have been terrific on this effort stuart has been just outstanding we have imposed sanctions against more institutions more individuals involved with iran s nuclear and missile programs other nations are now acting alongside us nations like australia which announced new sanctions including those against a major iranian bank and iran s shipping company the european union is moving ahead with additional strong measures against iran s financial banking insurance transportation and energy sectors as well as iran s revolutionary guard other countries like canada have indicated they will also be taking action in other words we are ratcheting up the pressure on the iranian government for its failure to meet its obligations and today we re taking another step a step that demonstrates the broad and bipartisan support for holding iran accountable i m pleased to sign into law the toughest sanctions against iran ever passed by the united states congress the comprehensive iran sanctions accountability and divestment act i want to thank all the members of congress who worked on behalf of this legislation including another tireless person but who never seems to break a sweat the speaker of the house nancy pelosi i want to thank representatives steny hoyer and eric cantor for doing outstanding work although they weren t able to join us i want to acknowledge senators harry reid jon kyl and richard shelby and i want to thank those who led the effort to forge a final bill that received overwhelming bipartisan support senator chris dodd and representative howard berman thank you for your good work consistent with the security council mandate this legislation strengthens existing sanctions authorizes new ones and supports our multilateral diplomatic strategy to address iran s nuclear program it makes it harder for the iranian government to purchase refined petroleum and the goods services and materials to modernize iran s oil and natural gas sector it makes it harder for the revolutionary guards and banks that support iran s nuclear programs and terrorism to engage in international finance it says to companies seeking procurement contracts with the united states government if you want to do business with us you first have to certify that you re not doing prohibited business with iran in short with these sanctions along with others we are striking at the heart of the iranian government s ability to fund and develop its nuclear program we re showing the iranian government that its actions have consequences and if it persists the pressure will continue to mount and its isolation will continue to deepen there should be no doubt the united states and the international community are determined to prevent iran from acquiring nuclear weapons finally even as we increase pressure on the iranian government we re sending an unmistakable message that the united states stands with the iranian people as they seek to exercise their universal rights this legislation imposes sanctions on individuals who commit serious human rights abuses and it exempts from our trade embargo technologies that allow the iranian people to access information and communicate freely in iran and around the world the united states of america will continue to stand with those who seek justice and progress and the human rights and dignity of all people so again this is not a day that we sought but it is an outcome that was chosen by the iranian government when it repeatedly failed to meet its responsibilities and the government of iran still has a choice the door to diplomacy remains open iran can prove that its intentions are peaceful it can meet its obligations under the npt and achieve the security and prosperity worthy of a great nation it can have confidence in the iranian people and allow their rights to flourish for iranians are heirs to a remarkable history they are renowned for their talents and their contributions to humanity here in the united states iranian americans have thrived and within iran there s great potential for the iranian people to forge greater prosperity through deeper integration with the international community including with the united states that s the future we do seek one where iran s leaders do not hold their own people back by failing to live up to iran s international obligations and where iran can reclaim its place in the community of nations and find greater peace and prosperity that is the iranian government s choice and it remains our hope that they choose this path even as we are clear eyed and vigilant about the difficult challenges ahead so with that i will sign this legislation into law dem bobama1 9 09 barack_obama please everybody have a seat thank you well it is my great pleasure to host all of you here at the white house to mark this special occasion ramadan kareem i want to say that i m deeply honored to welcome so many members of the diplomatic corps as well as several members of my administration and distinguished members of congress including the first two muslims to serve in congress keith ellison and andre carson where are they just a few other acknowledgements i want to make we have senator richard lugar here who s our ranking member of the foreign affairs committee where is dick lugar there he is representative john conyers chairman of the judiciary committee representative rush holt is here thank you rush have we found you a seat rush i got you we also have here secretary of defense gates is here secretary gates our attorney general eric holder and secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius is here and most of all i want to welcome all the american muslims from many walks of life who are here this is just one part of our effort to celebrate ramadan and continues a long tradition of hosting iftars here at the white house for well over a billion muslims ramadan is a time of intense devotion and reflection it s a time of service and support for those in need and it is also a time for family and friends to come together in a celebration of their faith their communities and the common humanity that all of us share it is in that spirit that i welcome each and every one of you to the white house tonight s iftar is a ritual that is also being carried out this ramadan at kitchen tables and mosques in all 50 states islam as we know is part of america and like the broader american citizenry the american muslim community is one of extraordinary dynamism and diversity with families that stretch back generations and more recent immigrants with muslims of countless races and ethnicities and with roots in every corner of the world indeed the contribution of muslims to the united states are too long to catalog because muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country american muslims are successful in business and entertainment in the arts and athletics in science and in medicine above all they are successful parents good neighbors and active citizens so on this occasion we celebrate the holy month of ramadan and we also celebrate how much muslims have enriched america and its culture in ways both large and small and with us here tonight we see just a small sample of those contributions let me share a few stories with you briefly elsheba khan s son kareem made the ultimate sacrifice for his country when he lost his life in iraq kareem joined the military as soon as he finished high school he would go on to win the purple heart and bronze star along with the admiration of his fellow soldiers in describing her son elsheba said he always wanted to help any way that he could tonight he s buried alongside thousands of heroes in arlington national cemetery a crescent is carved into his grave just as others bear the christian cross or the jewish star these brave americans are joined in death as they were in life by a common commitment to their country and the values that we hold dear one of those values is the freedom to practice your religion a right that is enshrined in the first amendment of the constitution nashala hearn who joins us from muskogee oklahoma took a stand for that right at an early age when her school district told her that she couldn t wear the hijab she protested that it was a part of her religion the department of justice stood behind her and she won her right to practice her faith she even traveled to washington to testify before congress her words spoke to a tolerance that is far greater than mistrust when she first wore her headscarf to school she said i received compliments from the other kids another young woman who has thrived in her school is bilqis abdul qaadir she s not even 5 5 where s bilqis right here stand up bilqis just so that we i want everybody to know she s got heels on she s 5 5 bilqis broke rebecca lobo s record for the most points scored by any high school basketball player in massachusetts history she recently told a reporter i d like to really inspire a lot of young muslim girls if they want to play basketball anything is possible they can do it too as an honor student as an athlete on her way to memphis bilqis is an inspiration not simply to muslim girls she s an inspiration to all of us of course we know that when it comes to athletes who have inspired america any list would include the man known simply as the greatest and while muhammad ali could not join us tonight it is worth reflecting upon his remarkable contributions as he s grown from an unmatched fighter in the ring to a man of quiet dignity and grace who continues to fight for what he believes and that includes the notion that people of all faiths holds things in common i love this quote a few years ago he explained this view and this is part of why he s the greatest saying rivers ponds lakes and streams they all have different names but they all contain water just as religions do they all contain truths they all contain truths among those truths are the pursuit of peace and the dignity of all human beings that must always form the basis upon which we find common ground and that is why i am so pleased that we are joined tonight not only by so many outstanding muslim americans and representatives of the diplomatic corps but people of many faiths christians jews and hindus along with so many prominent muslims together we have a responsibility to foster engagement grounded in mutual interest and mutual respect and that s one of my fundamental commitments as president both at home and abroad that is central to the new beginning that i ve sought between the united states and muslims around the world and that is a commitment that we can renew once again during this holy season so tonight we celebrate a great religion and its commitment to justice and progress we honor the contributions of america s muslims and the positive example that so many of them set through their own lives and we rededicate ourselves to the work of building a better and more hopeful world so thanks to all of you for taking the time to be here this evening i wish you all a very blessed ramadan and with that i think we can start a feast i don t know what s on the menu but i m sure it will be good thank you very much everybody dem bobama10 12 09a barack_obama your majesties your royal highnesses distinguished members of the norwegian nobel committee citizens of america and citizens of the world i receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility it is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world we are not mere prisoners of fate our actions matter and can bend history in the direction of justice and yet i would be remiss if i did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated in part this is because i am at the beginning and not the end of my labors on the world stage compared to some of the giants of history who ve received this prize schweitzer and king marshall and mandela my accomplishments are slight and then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics i cannot argue with those who find these men and women some known some obscure to all but those they help to be far more deserving of this honor than i but perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that i am the commander in chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars one of these wars is winding down the other is a conflict that america did not seek one in which we are joined by 42 other countries including norway in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks still we are at war and i m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young americans to battle in a distant land some will kill and some will be killed and so i come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace and our effort to replace one with the other now these questions are not new war in one form or another appeared with the first man at the dawn of history its morality was not questioned it was simply a fact like drought or disease the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences and over time as codes of law sought to control violence within groups so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war the concept of a just war emerged suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met if it is waged as a last resort or in self defense if the force used is proportional and if whenever possible civilians are spared from violence of course we know that for most of history this concept of just war was rarely observed the capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different god wars between armies gave way to wars between nations total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred in the span of 30 years such carnage would twice engulf this continent and while it s hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the third reich and the axis powers world war ii was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished in the wake of such destruction and with the advent of the nuclear age it became clear to victor and vanquished alike that the world needed institutions to prevent another world war and so a quarter century after the united states senate rejected the league of nations an idea for which woodrow wilson received this prize america led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace a marshall plan and a united nations mechanisms to govern the waging of war treaties to protect human rights prevent genocide restrict the most dangerous weapons in many ways these efforts succeeded yes terrible wars have been fought and atrocities committed but there has been no third world war the cold war ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall commerce has stitched much of the world together billions have been lifted from poverty the ideals of liberty and self determination equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced we are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud and yet a decade into a new century this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats the world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe terrorism has long been a tactic but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale moreover wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations the resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts the growth of secessionist movements insurgencies and failed states all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos in today s wars many more civilians are killed than soldiers the seeds of future conflict are sown economies are wrecked civil societies torn asunder refugees amassed children scarred i do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war what i do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision hard work and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago and it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace we must begin by acknowledging the hard truth we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes there will be times when nations acting individually or in concert will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified i make this statement mindful of what martin luther king jr said in this same ceremony years ago violence never brings permanent peace it solves no social problem it merely creates new and more complicated ones as someone who stands here as a direct consequence of dr king s life work i am living testimony to the moral force of non violence i know there s nothing weak nothing passive nothing nave in the creed and lives of gandhi and king but as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation i cannot be guided by their examples alone i face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the american people for make no mistake evil does exist in the world a non violent movement could not have halted hitler s armies negotiations cannot convince al qaeda s leaders to lay down their arms to say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism it is a recognition of history the imperfections of man and the limits of reason i raise this point i begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today no matter what the cause and at times this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of america the world s sole military superpower but the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions not just treaties and declarations that brought stability to a post world war ii world whatever mistakes we have made the plain fact is this the united states of america has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from germany to korea and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the balkans we have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will we have done so out of enlightened self interest because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren and we believe that their lives will be better if others children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity so yes the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace and yet this truth must coexist with another that no matter how justified war promises human tragedy the soldier s courage and sacrifice is full of glory expressing devotion to country to cause to comrades in arms but war itself is never glorious and we must never trumpet it as such so part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly inreconcilable truths that war is sometimes necessary and war at some level is an expression of human folly concretely we must direct our effort to the task that president kennedy called for long ago let us focus he said on a more practical more attainable peace based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions a gradual evolution of human institutions what might this evolution look like what might these practical steps be to begin with i believe that all nations strong and weak alike must adhere to standards that govern the use of force i like any head of state reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation nevertheless i am convinced that adhering to standards international standards strengthens those who do and isolates and weakens those who don t the world rallied around america after the 9 11 attacks and continues to support our efforts in afghanistan because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self defense likewise the world recognized the need to confront saddam hussein when he invaded kuwait a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression furthermore america in fact no nation can insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves for when we don t our actions appear arbitrary and undercut the legitimacy of future interventions no matter how justified and this becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor more and more we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region i believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds as it was in the balkans or in other places that have been scarred by war inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later that s why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace america s commitment to global security will never waver but in a world in which threats are more diffuse and missions more complex america cannot act alone america alone cannot secure the peace this is true in afghanistan this is true in failed states like somalia where terrorism and piracy is joined by famine and human suffering and sadly it will continue to be true in unstable regions for years to come the leaders and soldiers of nato countries and other friends and allies demonstrate this truth through the capacity and courage they ve shown in afghanistan but in many countries there is a disconnect between the efforts of those who serve and the ambivalence of the broader public i understand why war is not popular but i also know this the belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it peace requires responsibility peace entails sacrifice that s why nato continues to be indispensable that s why we must strengthen u n and regional peacekeeping and not leave the task to a few countries that s why we honor those who return home from peacekeeping and training abroad to oslo and rome to ottawa and sydney to dhaka and kigali we honor them not as makers of war but of wagers but as wagers of peace let me make one final point about the use of force even as we make difficult decisions about going to war we must also think clearly about how we fight it the nobel committee recognized this truth in awarding its first prize for peace to henry dunant the founder of the red cross and a driving force behind the geneva conventions where force is necessary we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct and even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules i believe the united states of america must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war that is what makes us different from those whom we fight that is a source of our strength that is why i prohibited torture that is why i ordered the prison at guantanamo bay closed and that is why i have reaffirmed america s commitment to abide by the geneva conventions we lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend and we honor we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it s easy but when it is hard i have spoken at some length to the question that must weigh on our minds and our hearts as we choose to wage war but let me now turn to our effort to avoid such tragic choices and speak of three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace first in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws i believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior for if we want a lasting peace then the words of the international community must mean something those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable sanctions must exact a real price intransigence must be met with increased pressure and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one one urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to seek a world without them in the middle of the last century nations agreed to be bound by a treaty whose bargain is clear all will have access to peaceful nuclear power those without nuclear weapons will forsake them and those with nuclear weapons will work towards disarmament i am committed to upholding this treaty it is a centerpiece of my foreign policy and i m working with president medvedev to reduce america and russia s nuclear stockpiles but it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like iran and north korea do not game the system those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the middle east or east asia those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war the same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people when there is genocide in darfur systematic rape in congo repression in burma there must be consequences yes there will be engagement yes there will be diplomacy but there must be consequences when those things fail and the closer we stand together the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression this brings me to a second point the nature of the peace that we seek for peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting it was this insight that drove drafters of the universal declaration of human rights after the second world war in the wake of devastation they recognized that if human rights are not protected peace is a hollow promise and yet too often these words are ignored for some countries the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are somehow western principles foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation s development and within america there has long been a tension between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world i reject these choices i believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please choose their own leaders or assemble without fear pent up grievances fester and the suppression of tribal and religious identity can lead to violence we also know that the opposite is true only when europe became free did it finally find peace america has never fought a war against a democracy and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens no matter how callously defined neither america s interests nor the world s are served by the denial of human aspirations so even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries america will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal we will bear witness to the quiet dignity of reformers like aung sang suu kyi to the bravery of zimbabweans who cast their ballots in the face of beatings to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of iran it is telling that the leaders of these governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation and it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear that these movements these movements of hope and history they have us on their side let me also say this the promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone at times it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy i know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation but i also know that sanctions without outreach condemnation without discussion can carry forward only a crippling status quo no repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door in light of the cultural revolution s horrors nixon s meeting with mao appeared inexcusable and yet it surely helped set china on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies pope john paul s engagement with poland created space not just for the catholic church but for labor leaders like lech walesa ronald reagan s efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the soviet union but empowered dissidents throughout eastern europe there s no simple formula here but we must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement pressure and incentives so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time third a just peace includes not only civil and political rights it must encompass economic security and opportunity for true peace is not just freedom from fear but freedom from want it is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food or clean water or the medicine and shelter they need to survive it does not exist where children can t aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family the absence of hope can rot a society from within and that s why helping farmers feed their own people or nations educate their children and care for the sick is not mere charity it s also why the world must come together to confront climate change there is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing we will face more drought more famine more mass displacement all of which will fuel more conflict for decades for this reason it is not merely scientists and environmental activists who call for swift and forceful action it s military leaders in my own country and others who understand our common security hangs in the balance agreements among nations strong institutions support for human rights investments in development all these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that president kennedy spoke about and yet i do not believe that we will have the will the determination the staying power to complete this work without something more and that s the continued expansion of our moral imagination an insistence that there s something irreducible that we all share as the world grows smaller you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are to understand that we re all basically seeking the same things that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families and yet somehow given the dizzying pace of globalization the cultural leveling of modernity it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities their race their tribe and perhaps most powerfully their religion in some places this fear has led to conflict at times it even feels like we re moving backwards we see it in the middle east as the conflict between arabs and jews seems to harden we see it in nations that are torn asunder by tribal lines and most dangerously we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of islam and who attacked my country from afghanistan these extremists are not the first to kill in the name of god the cruelties of the crusades are amply recorded but they remind us that no holy war can ever be a just war for if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will then there is no need for restraint no need to spare the pregnant mother or the medic or the red cross worker or even a person of one s own faith such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace but i believe it s incompatible with the very purpose of faith for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature for we are fallible we make mistakes and fall victim to the temptations of pride and power and sometimes evil even those of us with the best of intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us but we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected we do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place the non violence practiced by men like gandhi and king may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance but the love that they preached their fundamental faith in human progress that must always be the north star that guides us on our journey for if we lose that faith if we dismiss it as silly or nave if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace then we lose what s best about humanity we lose our sense of possibility we lose our moral compass like generations have before us we must reject that future as dr king said at this occasion so many years ago i refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history i refuse to accept the idea that the isness of man s present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal oughtness that forever confronts him let us reach for the world that ought to be that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls somewhere today in the here and now in the world as it is a soldier sees he s outgunned but stands firm to keep the peace somewhere today in this world a young protestor awaits the brutality of her government but has the courage to march on somewhere today a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child scrapes together what few coins she has to send that child to school because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child s dreams let us live by their example we can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us and still strive for justice we can admit the intractability of depravation and still strive for dignity clear eyed we can understand that there will be war and still strive for peace we can do that for that is the story of human progress that s the hope of all the world and at this moment of challenge that must be our work here on earth thank you very much dem bobama10 12 09b barack_obama thank you very much your majesties your excellencies your royal highnesses to all my friends my family this is obviously an extraordinary evening and i must say i was telling the committee members that having entirely exhausted myself with the speech this afternoon i have i spoke for a very long time i have only a very few words to say first of all i would like to thank the committee once again for the extraordinary confidence that they placed in me and this great honor that i have received tonight as i indicated before no one was more surprised than me and i have to say that when the chairman spoke introducing me i told him afterwards that i thought it was an excellent speech and that i was almost convinced that i deserved it i also wanted to pick up on a theme in both our speeches and that is the extraordinary power that this prize has in lifting up those who otherwise would be forgotten in magnifying the cause of justice when it s confronting great resistance in 1964 when dr king received this prize the course of the civil rights movement was still uncertain how that would play itself out was not yet entirely known and for a baptist preacher from the south to be lifted up on the international stage to highlight the fact that this was not simply a parochial struggle but was rather a struggle for the ages a struggle for the hearts and minds not just of the american people but of the world and how we thought about each other and how we thought about minorities in countries everywhere what extraordinary power that had and as a consequence i think it s fair to say that it helped to put the wind behind the sails of a movement that is largely responsible for both michelle and my presence here tonight you know it s obviously one of life s great ironies that alfred nobel the man responsible for inventing dynamite helped to establish this extraordinary moral force in the world he bequeathed his largest share of fortune to the nobel prizes and the roster of nobel laureates has grown to include not only the finest minds in science and literature and economics but i think what captivates people most is the giants of peace that it has acknowledged when alfred nobel signed his last will and testament on november 27 1895 it s not entirely clear that he could have foreseen the impact that his prizes would have but he did know this truth that our destinies are what we make of them and that each of us in our own lives can do our part in order to make a more just and lasting peace and forge the kind of world that we want to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren that has been the mission of the committee it has carried out over these 108 years this charge with extraordinary diligence creativity and as i indicated today at lunch great moral imagination and so for that i am grateful not only to the current committee but past committee members who i know are here the world thanks you for the work that you do and as a consequence what i d like to do is to propose a toast once i get some wine i d like to propose actually if you will bear with me in washington in the senate or the house this is called a point of personal privilege i don t want to make her cry but i do want to say my sister is here tonight and it was in one of the earlier toasts discussed a passage in my book that talks about my mother and the values that she instilled in me and i do think that it s worth noting that to the extent i am deserving of this esteemed prize either now or in the future it will be largely because of her and the largeness of her heart so to alfred nobel skl cheers thank you thank you very much dem bobama10 2 07 barack_obama oh look at all of you look at all of you goodness oh thank you so much thank you so much giving all praise and honor to god for bringing us together here today thank you so much i am so grateful to see all of you you guys are still chillin back there let me let me begin by saying thanks to all of you who have traveled from far and wide to brave the cold today i know it s a little chilly but i m fired up we all made this journey for a reason it s humbling to see a crowd like this but in my heart i know you didn t just come here for me you no you came here because you believe in what this country can be in the face of war you believe there can be peace in the face of despair you believe there can be hope in the face of a politics that shut you out has told you to settle that s divided us for too long you believe that we can be one people reaching out for what s possible building that more perfect union that s the journey we re on today but let me tell you how i came to be here as most of you know i m not a native of this great state i moved to illinois over two decades ago i was a young man then just a year out of college i knew no one in chicago when i arrived was without money or family connections but a group of churches had offered me a job as a community organizer for grand sum of 13 000 a year and i accepted the job sight unseen motivated then by a single simple powerful idea that i might play a small part in building a better america my work took me to some of chicago s poorest neighborhoods i joined with pastors and lay people to deal with communities that had been ravaged by plant closings i saw that the problems people faced weren t simply local in nature that the decisions to close a steel mill was made by distant executives that the lack of textbooks and computers in the school could be traced to skewed priorities of politicians a thousand miles away and that when a child turns to violence i came to realize that there s a hole in that boy s heart that no government alone can fill it was in these neighborhoods that i received the best education that i ever had and where i learned the meaning of my christian faith after three years of this work i went to law school because i wanted to understand how the law should work for those in need i became a civil rights lawyer and taught constitutional law and after a time i came to understand that our cherished rights of liberty and equality depend on the active participation of an awakened electorate it was with these ideas in mind i arrived in this capital city as a state senator it was here in springfield where i saw all that is america converge farmers and teachers business men and laborers all of them with a story to tell all of them seeking a seat at the table all of them clamoring to be heard i made lasting friendships here friends that i see in the audience here today it was here where we learned to disagree without being disagreeable that it s possible to compromise so long as you know those principles that can never be compromised and that so long as we re willing to listen to each other we can assume the best in people instead of the worst it s why we re able to reform a death penalty system that was broken that s why we were able to give health insurance to children in need that s why we made the tax system right here in springfield more fair and just for working families and that s why we passed ethics reform that the cynics said could never ever be passed it was here in springfield where north south east and west come together that i was reminded of the essential decency of the american people where i came to believe that through this decency we could build a more hopeful america and that is why in the shadow of the old state capitol where lincoln once called on a house divided to stand together where common hopes and common dreams still live i stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the united states of america now listen i i thank you thank you thank you thank you look i i recognize that there is a certain presumptuousness in this a certain audacity to this announcement i know that i haven t spent a lot of time learning the ways of washington but i ve been there long enough to know that the ways of washington must change the genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed and we should take heart because we ve changed this country before in the face of tyranny a band of patriots brought an empire to its knees in the face of secession we unified a nation and set the captives free in the face of depression we put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty we welcomed immigrants to our shores we opened railroads to the west we landed a man on the moon and we heard a king s call to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream we ve done this before each and every time a new generation has risen up and done what s needed to be done today we are called once more and it is time for our generation to answer that call for that is our unyielding faith that in the face of impossible odds people who love their country can change it that s what abraham lincoln understood he had his doubts he had his defeats he had his skeptics he had his setbacks but through his will and his words he moved a nation and helped free a people it s because of the millions who rallied to his cause that we re no longer divided north and south slave and free it s because men and women of every race from every walk of life continue to march for freedom long after lincoln was laid to rest that today we have the chance to face the challenges of this millennium together as one people as americans all of us know what those challenges are today a war with no end a dependence on oil that threatens our future schools where too many children aren t learning and families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can we know the challenges we ve heard them we ve talked about them for years what stopped us from meeting these challenges is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans what stopped us is the failure of leadership the smallness the smallness of our politics the ease with which we re distracted by the petty and trivial our chronic avoidance of tough decisions our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle the big problems of america for the past six years we ve been told that our mounting debts don t matter we ve been told that the anxiety americans feel about rising health care costs and stagnant wages are an illusion we ve been told that climate change is a hoax we ve been told that tough talk and an ill conceived war can replace diplomacy and strategy and foresight and when all else fails when katrina happens or the death toll in iraq mounts we ve been told that our crises are somebody else s fault we re distracted from our real failures and told the blame the other party or gay people or immigrants and as people have looked away in disillusionment and frustration we know what s filled the void the cynics the lobbyists the special interests who have turned our government into a game only they can afford to play they write the checks and you get stuck with the bill they get the access while you get to write a letter they think they own this government but we re here today to take it back the time for that kind of politics is over it is through it s time to turn the page right here and right now now look thank you thank you thank you look look we have made some process already i was proud to help lead the fight in congress that led to the most sweeping ethics reforms since watergate but washington has a long way to go and it won t be easy that s why we ll have to set priorities we ll have to make hard choices and although government will play a crucial role in bringing about the changes that we need more money and programs alone will not get us to where we need to go each of us in our own lives will have to accept responsibility for instilling an ethic of achievement in our children for adapting to a more competitive economy for strengthening our communities and sharing some measure of sacrifice so let us begin let us begin this hard work together let us transform this nation let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age let s set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed let s recruit a new army of teachers and give them better pay and more support in exchange for more accountability let s make college more affordable and let s invest in scientific research and let s lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across america we can do that and as our economy changes let s be the nation that ensures our nation s workers are sharing in our prosperity let s protect the hard earned benefits their companies have promised let s make it possible for hard working americans to save for retirement let s allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country s middle class again we can do that let s be the generation that ends poverty in america every single person willing to work should be able to get job training that leads to a job and earn a living wage that can pay the bills and afford childcare so their kids can have a safe place to go when they work we can do this and let s be the generation that finally after all these years tackles our health care crisis we can control costs by focusing on prevention by providing better treatment to the chronically ill and using technology to cut the bureaucracy let s be the generation that says right here right now we will have universal health care in america by the end of the next president s first term we can do that let s be the generation that finally frees america from the tyranny of war we can harness homegrown alternative fuels like ethanol and spur the production of more fuel efficient cars we can set up a system for capping green house gases we can turn this crisis of global warming into a moment of opportunity for innovation and job creation and an incentive for business that will serve as a model for the world let s be the generation that makes future generations proud of what we did here most of all let s be the generation that never forgets what happened on that september day and confront the terrorists with everything we ve got politics doesn t have to divide us on this anymore we can work together to keep our country safe i ve worked with the republican senator dick lugar to pass a law that will secure and destroy some of the world s deadliest weapons we can work together to track down terrorists with a stronger military we can tighten the net around their finances we can improve our intelligence capabilities and finally get homeland security right but let s also understand that ultimate victory against our enemies will only come by rebuilding our alliances and exporting those ideals that bring hope and opportunity to millions of people around the globe we can do those things but all of this cannot come to pass until we bring an end to this war in iraq most of you know most of you know that i opposed this war from the start i thought it was a tragic mistake today we grieve for the families who have lost loved ones the hearts that have been broken and the young lives that could have been america it is time to start bringing our troops home it s time it s time to admit that no amount of american lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else s civil war that s why i have a plan that will bring your combat troops home by march of 2008 let the iraqis know letting the iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last best hope to pressure the sunni and shia to come to the table and find peace and there s one other thing that it s not too late to get right about this war and that is the homecoming of the men and women our veterans who have sacrificed the most let us honor their courage by providing the care they need and rebuilding the military they love let us be the generation that begins that work i know there are those who don t believe we can do all these things i understand the skepticism after all every four years candidates from both parties make similar promises i expect this year will be no different all of us running for president will travel around the country offering 10 point plans and making grand speeches all of us will trumpet those qualities we believe make us uniquely qualified to lead this country but too many times after the election is over and the confetti is swept away all those promises fade from memory and the lobbyists and special interests move in and people turn away disappointed as before left to struggle on their own that s why this campaign can t only be about me it must be about us it must be about what we can do together this campaign must be the occasion the vehicle of your hopes of your dreams it will take your time your energy and your advice to push us forward when we re doing right and let us know when we re not this campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship restoring our sense of common purpose and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change by ourselves this change will not happen divided we are bound to fail but the life of a tall gangly self made springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible he tells us that there is power in words he tells us that there s power in conviction that beneath all the differences of race and region faith and station we are one people he tells us that there is power in hope as lincoln organized the forces arrayed against slavery he was heard to say this of strange discordant and even hostile elements we gathered from the four winds and formed and fought to battle through that is our purpose here today that is why i m in this race not just to hold an office but to gather with you to transform a nation i want to win that next battle for justice and opportunity i want to win that next battle for better schools and better jobs and better health care for all i want us to take up the unfinished business of perfecting our union and building a better america and if you will join with me in this improbable quest if you feel destiny calling and see as i see the future of endless possibility stretching out before us if you sense as i sense that the time is now to shake off our slumber and slough off our fears and make good on the debt we owe past and future generations then i am ready to take up the cause and march with you and work with you today together we can finish the work that needs to be done and usher in a new birth of freedom on this earth thank you very much everybody let s get to work i love you thank you dem bobama10 3 09 barack_obama thank you si se puede thank you thank you so much please everybody have a seat thank you for the wonderful introduction david and thank you for the great work that you are doing each and every day and i appreciate such a warm welcome some of you i ve gotten a chance to know many of you i m meeting for the first time but the spirit of the u s hispanic chamber of commerce the desire to create jobs and provide opportunity to people who sometimes have been left out that s exactly what this administration is about that s the essence of the american dream and so i m very proud to have a chance to speak with all of you you know every so often throughout our history a generation of americans bears the responsibility of seeing this country through difficult times and protecting the dream of its founding for posterity this is a responsibility that s fallen to our generation meeting it will require steering our nation s economy through a crisis unlike anything that we have seen in our time in the short term that means jump starting job creation and restarting lending and restoring confidence in our markets and our financial system but it also means taking steps that not only advance our recovery but lay the foundation for lasting shared prosperity i know there s some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time and they forget that lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad and passed the homestead act and created the national academy of sciences in the midst of civil war likewise president roosevelt didn t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war he had to do both president kennedy didn t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon and we don t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term america will not remain true to its highest ideals and america s place as a global economic leader will be put at risk unless we not only bring down the crushing cost of health care and transform the way we use energy but also if we do if we don t do a far better job than we ve been doing of educating our sons and daughters unless we give them the knowledge and skills they need in this new and changing world for we know that economic progress and educational achievement have always gone hand in hand in america the land grant colleges and public high schools transformed the economy of an industrializing nation the gi bill generated a middle class that made america s economy unrivaled in the 20th century investments in math and science under president eisenhower gave new opportunities to young scientists and engineers all across the country it made possible somebody like a sergei brin to attend graduate school and found an upstart company called google that would forever change our world the source of america s prosperity has never been merely how ably we accumulate wealth but how well we educate our people this has never been more true than it is today in a 21st century world where jobs can be shipped wherever there s an internet connection where a child born in dallas is now competing with a child in new delhi where your best job qualification is not what you do but what you know education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success it s a prerequisite for success that s why workers without a four year degree have borne the brunt of recent layoffs latinos most of all that s why of the 30 fastest growing occupations in america half require a bachelor s degree or more by 2016 four out of every 10 new jobs will require at least some advanced education or training so let there be no doubt the future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens and my fellow americans we have everything we need to be that nation we have the best universities the most renowned scholars we have innovative principals and passionate teachers and gifted students and we have parents whose only priority is their child s education we have a legacy of excellence and an unwavering belief that our children should climb higher than we did and yet despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world we ve let our grades slip our schools crumble our teacher quality fall short and other nations outpace us let me give you a few statistics in 8th grade math we ve fallen to 9th place singapore s middle schoolers outperform ours three to one just a third of our 13 and 14 year olds can read as well as they should and year after year a stubborn gap persists between how well white students are doing compared to their african american and latino classmates the relative decline of american education is untenable for our economy it s unsustainable for our democracy it s unacceptable for our children and we can t afford to let it continue what s at stake is nothing less than the american dream it s what drew my father and so many of your fathers and mothers to our shores in pursuit of an education it s what led linda brown and gonzalo and felicitas mendez to bear the standard of all who were attending separate and unequal schools it s what has led generations of americans to take on that extra job to sacrifice the small pleasures to scrimp and save wherever they can in hopes of putting away enough just enough to give their child the education that they never had it s that most american of ideas that with the right education a child of any race any faith any station can overcome whatever barriers stand in their way and fulfill their god given potential of course we ve heard all this year after year after year after year and far too little has changed certainly it hasn t changed in too many overcrowded latino schools it hasn t changed in too many inner city schools that are seeing dropout rates of over 50 percent it s not changing not because we re lacking sound ideas or sensible plans in pockets of excellence across this country we re seeing what children from all walks of life can and will achieve when we set high standards have high expectations when we do a good job of preparing them instead it s because politics and ideology have too often trumped our progress that we re in the situation that we re in for decades washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom too many in the republican party have opposed new investments in early education despite compelling evidence of its importance so what we get here in washington is the same old debate about it s more money versus more reform vouchers versus the status quo there s been partisanship and petty bickering but little recognition that we need to move beyond the worn fights of the 20th century if we re going to succeed in the 21st century i think you d all agree that the time for finger pointing is over the time for holding us holding ourselves accountable is here what s required is not simply new investments but new reforms it s time to expect more from our students it s time to start rewarding good teachers stop making excuses for bad ones it s time to demand results from government at every level it s time to prepare every child everywhere in america to out compete any worker anywhere in the world it s time to give all americans a complete and competitive education from the cradle up through a career we ve accepted failure for far too long enough is enough america s entire education system must once more be the envy of the world and that s exactly what we intend to do that s exactly what the budget i m submitting to congress has begun to achieve now at a time when we ve inherited a trillion dollar deficit we will start by doing a little housekeeping going through our books cutting wasteful education programs my outstanding secretary of education arne duncan who s here today stand up arne so everybody can see you i m assuming you also saw my secretary of labor hilda solis but secretary duncan will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars it s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative but whether it works and this will help free up resources for the first pillar of reforming our schools investing in early childhood initiatives this isn t just about keeping an eye on our children it s about educating them studies show that children in early childhood education programs are more likely to score higher in reading and math more likely to graduate from high school and attend college more likely to hold a job and more likely to earn more in that job for every dollar we invest in these programs we get nearly 10 back in reduced welfare rolls fewer health care costs and less crime that s why the american recovery and reinvestment act that i signed into law invests 5 billion in growing early head start and head start expanding access to quality child care for 150 000 more children from working families and doing more for children with special needs and that s why we are going to offer 55 000 first time parents regular visits from trained nurses to help make sure their children are healthy and prepare them for school and for life even as we invest in early childhood education let s raise the bar for early learning programs that are falling short now today some children are enrolled in excellent programs some children are enrolled in mediocre programs and some are wasting away their most formative years in bad programs that includes the one fourth of all children who are hispanic and who will drive america s workforce of tomorrow but who are less likely to have been enrolled in an early childhood education program than anyone else that s why i m issuing a challenge to our states develop a cutting edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs show us how you ll work to ensure that children are better prepared for success by the time they enter kindergarten if you do we will support you with an early learning challenge grant that i call on congress to enact that s how we will reward quality and incentivize excellence and make a down payment on the success of the next generation so that s the first pillar of our education reform agenda the second we will end what has become a race to the bottom in our schools and instead spur a race to the top by encouraging better standards and assessments now this is an area where we are being outpaced by other nations it s not that their kids are any smarter than ours it s that they are being smarter about how to educate their children they re spending less time teaching things that don t matter and more time teaching things that do they re preparing their students not only for high school or college but for a career we are not our curriculum for 8th graders is two full years behind top performing countries that s a prescription for economic decline and i refuse to accept that america s children cannot rise to this challenge they can and they must and they will meet higher standards in our time so let s challenge our states let s challenge our states to adopt world class standards that will bring our curriculums to the 21st century today s system of 50 different sets of benchmarks for academic success means 4th grade readers in mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than students in wyoming and they re getting the same grade eight of our states are setting their standards so low that their students may end up on par with roughly the bottom 40 percent of the world that s inexcusable that s why i m calling on states that are setting their standards far below where they ought to be to stop low balling expectations for our kids the solution to low test scores is not lowering standards it s tougher clearer standards standards like those in massachusetts where 8th graders are we have a massachusetts contingent here in massachusetts 8th graders are now tying for first first in the whole world in science other forward thinking states are moving in the same direction by coming together as part of a consortium and more states need to do the same and i m calling on our nation s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity that is what we ll help them do later this year that what we re going to help them do later this year when we finally make no child left behind live up to its name by ensuring not only that teachers and principals get the funding that they need but that the money is tied to results and arne duncan will also back up this commitment to higher standards with a fund to invest in innovation in our school districts of course raising standards alone will not make much of a difference unless we provide teachers and principals with the information they need to make sure students are prepared to meet those standards and far too few states have data systems like the one in florida that keep track of a student s education from childhood through college and far too few districts are emulating the example of houston and long beach and using data to track how much progress a student is making and where that student is struggling that s a resource that can help us improve student achievement and tell us which students had which teachers so we can assess what s working and what s not that s why we re making a major investment in this area that we will cultivate a new culture of accountability in america s schools now to complete our race to the top requires the third pillar of reform recruiting preparing and rewarding outstanding teachers from the moment students enter a school the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents it s the person standing at the front of the classroom that s why our recovery act will ensure that hundreds of thousands of teachers and school personnel are not laid off because those americans are not only doing jobs they can t afford to lose they re rendering a service our nation cannot afford to lose either america s future depends on its teachers and so today i m calling on a new generation of americans to step forward and serve our country in our classrooms if you want to make a difference in the life of our nation if you want to make the most of your talents and dedication if you want to make your mark with a legacy that will endure then join the teaching profession america needs you we need you in our suburbs we need you in our small towns we especially need you in our inner cities we need you in classrooms all across our country and if you do your part then we ll do ours that s why we re taking steps to prepare teachers for their difficult responsibilities and encourage them to stay in the profession that s why we re creating new pathways to teaching and new incentives to bring teachers to schools where they re needed most that s why we support offering extra pay to americans who teach math and science to end a teacher shortage in those subjects it s why we re building on the promising work being done in places like south carolina s teachers advancement program and making an unprecedented commitment to ensure that anyone entrusted with educating our children is doing the job as well as it can be done now here s what that commitment means it means treating teachers like the professionals they are while also holding them more accountable in up to 150 more school districts new teachers will be mentored by experienced ones good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools teachers throughout a school will benefit from guidance and support to help them improve and just as we ve given our teachers all the support they need to be successful we need to make sure our students have the teacher they need to be successful and that means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom but let me be clear let me be clear the overwhelming number of teachers are doing an outstanding job under difficult circumstances my sister is a teacher so i know how tough teaching can be but let me be clear if a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances but still does not improve there s no excuse for that person to continue teaching i reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences the stakes are too high we can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children s teachers and the schools where they teach now that leads me to the fourth part of america s education strategy promoting innovation and excellence in america s schools one of the places where much of that innovation occurs is in our most effective charter schools and these are public schools founded by parents teachers and civic or community organizations with broad leeway to innovate schools i supported as a state legislator and a united states senator but right now there are many caps on how many charter schools are allowed in some states no matter how well they re preparing our students that isn t good for our children our economy or our country of course any expansion of charter schools must not result in the spread of mediocrity but in the advancement of excellence and that will require states adopting both a rigorous selection and review process to ensure that a charter school s autonomy is coupled with greater accountability as well as a strategy like the one in chicago to close charter schools that are not working provided this greater accountability i call on states to reform their charter rules and lift caps on the number of allowable charter schools wherever such caps are in place now even as we foster innovation in where our children are learning let s also foster innovation in when our children are learning we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when america was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day that calendar may have once made sense but today it puts us at a competitive disadvantage our children listen to this our children spend over a month less in school than children in south korea every year that s no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy that s why i m calling for us not only to expand effective after school programs but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time whether during the summer or through expanded day programs for children who need it now i know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas not with malia and sasha not in my family and probably not in yours but the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom if they can do that in south korea we can do it right here in the united states of america of course no matter how innovative our schools or how effective our teachers america cannot succeed unless our students take responsibility for their own education that means showing up for school on time paying attention in class seeking out extra tutoring if it s needed staying out of trouble to any student who s watching i say this don t even think about dropping out of school don t even think about it as i said a couple of weeks ago dropping out is quitting on yourself it s quitting on your country and it s not an option not anymore not when our high school dropout rate has tripled in the past 30 years not when high school dropouts earn about half as much as college graduates not when latino students are dropping out faster than just about anyone else it s time for all of us no matter what our backgrounds to come together and solve this epidemic stemming the tide of dropouts will require turning around our low performing schools just 2 000 high schools in cities like detroit and los angeles and philadelphia produce over 50 percent of america s dropouts and yet there are too few proven strategies to transform these schools and there are too few partners to get the job done so today i m issuing a challenge to educators and lawmakers parents and teachers alike let us all make turning around our schools our collective responsibility as americans and that will require new investments in innovative ideas that s why my budget invests in developing new strategies to make sure at risk students don t give up on their education new efforts to give dropouts who want to return to school the help they need to graduate and new ways to put those young men and women who have left school back on a pathway to graduation now the fifth part of america s education strategy is providing every american with a quality higher education whether it s college or technical training never has a college degree been more important never has it been more expensive and at a time when so many of our families are bearing enormous economic burdens the rising cost of tuition threatens to shatter dreams and that s why we will simplify federal college assistance forms so it doesn t take a ph d to apply for financial aid that s why we re already taking steps to make college or technical training affordable for the first time ever pell grants will not be subject to the politics of the moment or the whim of the market they will be a commitment that congress is required to uphold each and every year not only that because rising costs mean pell grants cover less than half as much tuition as they did 30 years ago we re raising the maximum pell grant to 5 550 a year and indexing it above inflation we re also providing a 2 500 a year tuition tax credit for students from working families and we re modernizing and expanding the perkins loan program to make sure schools like unlv don t get a tenth as many perkins loans as schools like harvard to help pay for all of this we re putting students ahead of lenders by eliminating wasteful student loan subsidies that cost taxpayers billions each year all in all we are making college affordable for 7 million more students with a sweeping investment in our children s futures and america s success and i call on congress to join me and the american people by making these investments possible this is how we will help meet our responsibility as a nation to open the doors of college to every american but it will also be the responsibility of colleges and universities to control spiraling costs we can t just keep on putting more money in and universities and colleges not doing their part to hold down tuitions and it s the responsibility of our students to walk through the doors of opportunity in just a single generation america has fallen from 2nd place to 11th place in the portion of students completing college that is unfortunate but it s by no means irreversible with resolve and the right investments we can retake the lead once more and that s why in my address to the nation the other week i called on americans to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training with the goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the year 2020 and to meet that goal we are investing 2 5 billion to identify and support innovative initiatives across the country that achieve results in helping students persist and graduate so let s not stop at education with college let s recognize a 21st century reality learning doesn t end in our early 20s adults of all ages need opportunities to earn new degrees and new skills especially in the current economic environment that means working with all our universities and schools including community colleges a great and undervalued asset to prepare workers for good jobs in high growth industries and to improve access to job training not only for young people who are just starting their careers but for older workers who need new skills to change careers and that s going to be one of the key tasks that secretary solis is involved with is making sure that lifelong learning is a reality and a possibility for more americans it s through initiatives like these that we ll see more americans earn a college degree or receive advanced training and pursue a successful career and that s why i m calling on congress to work with me to enact these essential reforms and to reauthorize the workforce reinvestment act that s how we will round out a complete and competitive education in the united states of america so here s the bottom line yes we need more money yes we need more reform yes we need to hold ourselves more accountable for every dollar we spend but there s one more ingredient i want to talk about no government policy will make any difference unless we also hold ourselves more accountable as parents because government no matter how wise or efficient cannot turn off the tv or put away the video games teachers no matter how dedicated or effective cannot make sure your child leaves for school on time and does their homework when they get back at night these are things only a parent can do these are things that our parents must do i say this not only as a father but also as a son when i was a child my mother and i lived overseas and she didn t have the money to send me to the fancy international school where all the american kids went to school so what she did was she supplemented my schooling with lessons from a correspondence course and i can still picture her waking me up at 4 30 a m five days a week to go over some lessons before i went to school and whenever i d complain and grumble and find some excuse and say awww i m sleepy she d patiently repeat to me her most powerful defense she d say this is no picnic for me either buster and when you re a kid you don t think about the sacrifices they re making she had to work i just had to go to school but she d still wake up every day to make sure i was getting what i needed for my education and it s because she did this day after day week after week because of all the other opportunities and breaks that i got along the way all the sacrifices that my grandmother and my grandfather made along the way that i can stand here today as president of the united states it s because of the sacrifices see i want every child in this country to have the same chance that my mother gave me that my teachers gave me that my college professors gave me that america gave me you know these stories you ve lived them as well all of you have a similar story to tell you know it s i want children like yvonne bojorquez to have that chance yvonne is a student at village academy high school in california now village academy is a 21st century school where cutting edge technologies are used in the classroom where college prep and career training are offered to all who seek it and where the motto is respect responsibility and results now a couple of months ago yvonne and her class made a video talking about the impact that our struggling economy was having on their lives and some of them spoke about their parents being laid off or their homes facing foreclosure or their inability to focus on school with everything that was happening at home and when it was her turn to speak yvonne said we ve all been affected by this economic crisis we are all college bound students we re all businessmen and doctors and lawyers and all this great stuff and we have all this potential but the way things are going we re not going to be able to fulfill it it was heartbreaking that a girl so full of promise was so full of worry that she and her class titled their video is anybody listening so today there s something i want to say to yvonne and her class at village academy i am listening we are listening america is listening and we will not rest until your parents can keep your jobs we will not rest until your parents can keep their jobs and your families can keep their homes and you can focus on what you should be focusing on your own education until you can become the businessmen doctors and lawyers of tomorrow until you can reach out and grasp your dreams for the future for in the end yvonne s dream is a dream shared by all americans it s the founding promise of our nation that we can make of our lives what we will that all things are possible for all people and that here in america our best days lie ahead i believe that i truly believe if i do my part and you the american people do yours then we will emerge from this crisis a stronger nation and pass the dream of our founding on to posterity ever safer than before thank you very much god bless you god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama10 3 10a barack_obama thank you thank you thank you everybody thank you everybody have a seat have a seat thank you so much all right we ve got some everybody is a special guest but we got some big names around here first of all please give a huge round of applause once again to one of the finest governors in this country jay nixon give it up for him your outstanding attorney general chris koster your fabulous state treasurer clint zweifel my great friend and supporter state auditor susan montee one of my favorite folks in missouri jean carnahan and all the mccaskills out there i know you take up about half the tables golly by the way your younger sister made a point of saying i m the younger sister i just wanted you to know that all right it is great to be back in the show me state it s nice to get out of washington for a little bit now there are a lot of nice things in washington don t get me wrong i love the monuments but let s face it it s a town where most of the time folks are more worried about what s good politics than what s right where folks are just hooked up to the daily polls like they re on some kind of ekg and this isn t a new phenomenon in fact i remember i m reminded of somebody from missouri named harry truman who once said in an interview he gave a long time ago washington is a very easy city to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place but i want everybody here to understand that there is one person who s never forgotten where she comes from or why she is there and that s claire mccaskill claire is there to serve she s there to serve you she s there to serve missouri she s there to serve the united states of america and i don t have to tell you that because you ve known claire you knew her as a prosecutor you knew her as a state auditor you now know her as one of the finest senators that missouri has ever produced in fact she s a lot like a modern day harry truman except she s a she but she s a standout in washington for speaking truth to power for bringing common sense to every issue and for having the courage of her convictions claire is tough not just to score cheap political points but because she understands what her constituents are going through and in a town marked by just withering partisanship she s focused on what needs to be done to make sure that ordinary families here in missouri and all across the country are getting a fair shake and she ll work with anybody no matter what party to get it done and she ll criticize anybody no matter what party in order to get things done and so in a town marked by gridlock she s not afraid to challenge old assumptions or worn out ideas and so she s a good role model for all of us including the president of the united states just as the truman committee went after waste and abuse in our military during world war ii saving taxpayers billions of dollars claire has been a relentless force for bringing more efficiency and more transparency more accountability to our government she understands what everyone in washington should understand but don t the money we spend doesn t belong to us it belongs to the american people and we ve got to invest it responsibly in fact earlier today down in st charles i announced a plan that claire proposed and pushed through congress that s about to come online it s a database where americans can track spending on contracts to see who s getting the job done on time and who s not to see which companies keep costs low and which come in over budget time and again because the way that claire sees it is the same way that harry truman saw it you don t govern by polls you govern by principles you don t put your finger up to the wind you put your shoulder to the wheel and when this country is challenged you do what you think is right and you figure that the politics will work itself out no one in his or her right mind would have plotted at the beginning of my administration to do what we did shore up the financial system shore up the auto industry pass the recovery act if the goal was just to drive up our poll numbers i ve got a really good pollster we knew that what we had to do wasn t popular we knew it wasn t popular to make sure that we didn t have a financial meltdown we knew that a lot of folks felt like well the auto companies got themselves into trouble so we knew it wouldn t poll well but we had a different mission we had a greater responsibility and that is to save our country from an even greater economic catastrophe than the one that we ve seen and that s a responsibility that we met and today our financial system is stabilizing and general motors is expanding and hiring again and millions of people are working in america who would not have been working had it not been for the recovery act and all across missouri all across the nation roads are being repaved and bridges are being repaired and waterways are being rebuilt not only putting americans to work today but laying a foundation for a better tomorrow but we didn t know how the politics would work out we knew it was the right thing to do the same way claire understands in each of her legislative initiatives i m not sure how this will poll but i know it s the right thing to do now as we meet tonight there are still millions of americans and too many right here in this state who are out of work millions who are stretched to the limits on their mortgage or their credit cards their student loans we are on the road to recovery but we haven t gotten there yet not until our economy is adding jobs again not until people feel secure again and claire and i together every day are fighting for an economy in which americans can compete and win we re fighting for an economy in which hard work and entrepreneurship is rewarded again where small businesses as well as large are thriving again and the great middle class that is the backbone of our country and where claire and i come out of is thriving again is strong again that s not easy because there s been a lot of work that s been undone for the last two decades three decades seven decades we ve got a lot of built up challenges that we re going to have to work hard to solve but even as we fight these fights i want you to understand we are taking on some of the other problems facing folks in this state and across the country and we re going to win these fights we passed a tough new tobacco law that helps stop cigarette companies from targeting kids and force them to disclose what they put in their products we passed a credit card bill of rights that protects consumers from surprise charges like over the limit fees and hidden costs for paying a bill by phone we passed an equal pay law to help a promise to america s women that if you do the same job as a man you should make the same wage as a man we expanded health insurance coverage for 4 million more children so the bottom line is this i want everybody to understand despite all the gridlock despite all the shenanigans we ve gotten a lot done the reason i m here tonight and the reason claire is here tonight is because we ve got a lot more work to do some of our biggest challenges lie ahead because the future belongs to a nation that educates its children best we ve got to reform our education system so that all our kids are ready for college all our kids are ready for a career all our kids are ready to succeed in the 21st century because the nation that leads in clean energy today will lead the global economy tomorrow we need to invest in a clean energy industry that frees us from foreign oil and cleans up our air and generates millions of jobs in the process and yes and yes because the current health care system is broken and unsustainable we have to have health insurance reform this year right now we ve been talking about health care for nearly a century one of the presidents who tried to do something about it harry truman sixty years ago he pushed back against opponents of reform by saying the american people will not be frightened off from health insurance because some people have misnamed it socialized medicine he then repeated what i am recommending is not socialized medicine who says history doesn t repeat itself but you know what else harry truman said you know the famous saying about give em hell harry what harry said was i m going to tell the truth they ll think it s hell and so let me tell the truth about this health care debate i know there are strong views about this i know there are democrats who would like to scrap our system of private insurance and replace it with a government run health care system that works in some countries i know there are some on the other side who believe that the answer is to loosen regulations on insurance companies where there s consumer protections or basic standards of what kind of insurance can be sold this is what we call the fox guarding the henhouse approach to health care reform but i don t believe we should give the government or insurance companies more control over health care in america i believe it s time to give you the american people more control over your health insurance and that s why my proposal my proposal builds on the current system where most americans get their health insurance from their employer if you like your plan you can keep your plan if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor i m the father of two young girls i don t want anybody interfering between my family and their doctor but essentially the proposal that we after all the talk after the years of debate let s be clear on what we re doing here three things we re going to change about the current health care system number one we re going to end the worst practices of the insurance companies within a year of signing health care reform thousands of uninsured americans with preexisting conditions will be able to purchase health insurance for the first time since they were diagnosed this year this year insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions this year they will be banned from dropping coverage when you get sick they ll no longer be able to arbitrarily raise premiums those practices will end when this reform passes into law all new insurance plans will offer free preventive care to their customers free checkups so that we can start catching preventable illnesses on the front end starting this year if you buy a plan there won t be lifetime restrictions or annual limits on the amount of care that you can receive from your insurance companies and if you re an uninsured adult you ll be able to stay on your parents policy until you re 26 years old so that s the first thing we do second thing we change for the first time we would start allowing people who are currently trying to get health insurance on the individual market small businesses and just can t do it to have the same kind of choices of private health insurance that members of congress get for themselves which i don t think is a bad idea and neither does claire mccaskill now i want everybody members of congress will be getting their insurance from this same marketplace because if it s good enough for the american people then it s good enough for congress my proposal also says that if you still can t afford the insurance in this new marketplace we will offer you tax credits to do so tax credits that add up to the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history understand the wealthiest among us can already buy insurance the best insurance there is the least well off they re covered under medicaid it s the middle class that s getting squeezed and that s who we have to help small businesses self employed individuals who are out there struggling and this will cost some money it s going to cost about 100 billion per year but most of this comes from the nearly 2 5 trillion a year that we re already spending on health care we re just not spending it very wisely right now we are wasting it we re spending it badly and with some basic reforms eliminating waste and abuse we can make sure to provide coverage that s affordable make it more affordable and more secure we re going to eliminate wasteful taxpayer subsidies currently going to insurance and pharmaceutical companies we ll set up a new fee on insurance companies that stand to gain as 30 million new customers come onboard but the point everybody needs to understand is it s paid for i said at the beginning of this thing we would not do anything that adds to our deficit this plan does not do anything to add to this deficit and that s how we should be operating we can t say the same for the prescription drug plan that was passed by the previous congress finally this proposal would bring down the cost of health care for families and businesses and the federal government americans buying comparable coverage to what they have today in the individual market they d see their premiums drop 14 percent to 20 percent americans who get their insurance through the marketplace premiums could fall by as much as 3 000 per person and by now we ve incorporated every single serious idea across the political spectrum about how to contain rising costs in health care ideas that go after waste and abuse in our system especially in programs like medicare but we do this while protecting medicare benefits extending stability of the program and filling this doughnut hole that is such a burden on a lot of seniors who really need their prescription drugs so our cost cutting measures would reduce most people s premiums bring down the deficit by a trillion dollars over the next two decades those are not my numbers those are savings determined by the congressional budget office the nonpartisan independent referee of congress so just in case anybody is out there asking you about health care reform that s our proposal and it is a proposal whose time has come we are coming to a final vote in congress and that s when folks in congress they get nervous the washington echo chamber is deafening and it tells members of congress to think about politics instead of what s right it tells congress that comprehensive reform that s failed before it really hurt clinton it may just be too hard yes this is hard there s no doubt about it let me tell you what else is hard there s a woman i just met leslie banks in pennsylvania single mother she was hit with a 100 percent rate increase just a letter sent by her insurance company 100 percent increase in her premiums that s hard there s a woman named natoma canfield she s got cancer in ohio had to drop her insurance even though it may cost her her house the other day she suddenly fell ill she s in the hospital right now we re all praying for her but lying in a hospital bed worrying about how you re going to pay for your bills that s hard i know my mother went through that there s a woman named laura klitzka in wisconsin green bay young mother battling cancer she and her husband had insurance but their medical bills still landed them in debt so she s in the middle of this unbelievable battle got little kids she loves dearly she s spending most of her time worrying about debt when all she wants to do is spend time with her children that s hard millions of families small businesses what they re going through because we don t have a health insurance system that works for them that s really hard those of us in public office were not sent to washington to do what was easy we were sent there to do what was hard we were sent there to do what s right when i think about the campaign i ran for president and i think about the campaign claire mccaskill ran for senate all the work we put in we were joking backstage about boy you worked really hard for this job the reason we did it wasn t to get a title the reason you so many of you were so passionate about this campaign wasn t just so you could have a picture with me that wasn t what this was about this was about recognizing that america at its best doesn t shrink from a challenge we overcome challenges we don t shrink from responsibilities we embrace our responsibilities we don t fear the future we seize the future that s what we did in the campaign at a time when everybody was out there saying we couldn t do it that s what people were warning claire about when she took on this race for senate saying i don t know claire you ve already gone through a couple of losses this may be tough why take the risk because it needed to be done because somewhere down the road there were a whole bunch of people in our pasts our parents our grandparents our great grandparents who decided we re not taking the easy path we re taking the right path we re going to fight to make sure our kids and our grandkids and our great grandkids have a better life than we do that s what our campaigns were about that s what your involvement has been about that s what this health care debate is about that is what my presidency is about and that is what america is about and that is why i m absolutely convinced if we stay on course that we are going to win this thing not the short term battle not the november election we re going to win out in terms of creating the kind of society for our kids and our grandkids that we can be proud of thank you everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama10 3 10b barack_obama what s going on st louis thank you it is good to be back in missouri thank you guys thank you i got the same reception when i went to the republican caucus they were chanting and cheering you don t remember that give it up for governor jay nixon one of the finest governors in the country give it up for mayor francis slay who s in the house he s around here somewhere there he is over there and give it up for my dear dear friend claire mccaskill i love claire mccaskill love love claire mccaskill now claire and i both agree it s nice to get out of washington once in a while now don t i m going to don t get me wrong there are a lot of nice things about washington i like the monuments house is okay it s got a bowling alley what my bowling has not gotten any better but here s the thing about washington i love you back i love you back but here s the thing about washington look it s a town where everybody is spending all their time worrying about staying reelected what s good for their poll numbers instead of thinking about what s right i mean they are just you walk into you walk in somebody s office and they got like five tvs cnn msnbc fox news i m just saying yes they ve got all the tabloids the little gossip you know papers in washington so it s like a hall of mirrors but folks don t spend enough time thinking about what s right and what s going on outside of washington now this is not a new phenomenon harry truman said something to the same effect he had an interview he said washington is a very easy city to forget where you come from and why you got there in the first place let me tell you something claire mccaskill doesn t forget where she came from and she doesn t forget why she got to washington she got to washington to serve you to fight for you to fight for families all across america that s why you re here tonight because you know claire mccaskill is on your side you ve known that ever since she was a prosecutor you ve seen her as a state auditor just pinching pennies just looking through making sure folks aren t wasting your money she s turned into one of the finest senators missouri has ever had she s following in harry truman s footsteps she s a standout because she speaks truth to power she s not afraid of anybody speaks her mind sometimes she tells me things and i m the president but that s that s what you need is somebody who s got the courage of their convictions they re not a weathervane putting their fingers out to the wind seeing well is that thing popular is that going to win is that good for me she s thinking about is it good for you she s focused on solving problems no matter what party she ll work with anybody if she thinks it s going to solve a problem she s willing to challenge old assumptions and worn out ideas and she s a great role model for that i ll just give you an example some of you remember the harry truman made his name with the truman committee that went after waste and abuse during world war ii saving taxpayer dollars and lives well claire is doing the same thing fighting for transparency and accountability in government she understands that the money we spend doesn t belong to us it belongs to you it belongs to the american people so it s got to be spent responsibly so just today just today i announced a plan that claire proposed pushed through congress that s going to be coming online it s a database where americans can track spending on contracts who s getting it are they doing it on time are they doing it on budget if companies aren t doing it on budget then they stop getting contracts but that s an example of the kind of work she s been doing since she got there the same way harry truman saw it you don t govern by the polls you govern by principles you don t put your finger to the wind you put your shoulder to the wheel because claire assumes that if she s doing what s right the politics will sort itself out see i ve got the same philosophy i have so much faith in the american people that i have so much faith in the american people that i figure you know what if i do the right thing then the politics will work itself out now that s puzzling to washington so they ve been writing over the last couple months oh my goodness look at obama his poll numbers have dropped oh the sky is falling no i mean you see articles you know can you imagine what s happened what a catastrophe i m looking around and i feel okay i feel pretty good and the reason i feel pretty good is because i wake up every day trying to figure out what s going to help what s going to help american families have some control over their lives what s going to help them be able to save a little more for their retirement what s going to help them be able to find a job what s going to help them deal with a health care crisis in their lives what are we going to do to make sure young people can afford to go to college now sometimes the decisions we make in the short term are not going to be popular and the folks in washington don t understand that i know they re not going to be popular they can t believe i m doing them see they just think i m an idiot because i m doing something that s not immediately popular but i ve got pollsters i ve got very good pollsters they send me the polls they say you know what shoring up the financial system not popular helping out the auto industry not popular passing the recovery act not popular that s okay because my job is not being popular my job is solving problems for the american people i ve got a greater responsibility i ve got a deeper mission i m looking at 10 years from now will you look back and say that what he did made sense for the american people not whether tomorrow people are going to be looking and saying that made him popular so today listen you remember you remember a year ago everybody was saying we had only been there for two months they said oh his financial plan is a disaster stock market had dropped remember that everybody is like his presidency is over he s been in three months now suddenly you look up financial system is stabilized people said oh you know what why is he getting involved in this auto thing big mistake now suddenly general motors is hiring again they said well i don t know about this recovery act except all over missouri and all across the nation roads are being repaved and bridges are being repaired and waterways are being rebuilt and we re putting americans back to work we re laying the foundation for tomorrow and instead of the economy contracting 6 percent it s now growing 6 percent so i think about what s right and then figure out whether the politics will work out or not i m confident in the american people now look here s the bottom line claire and i know this as much progress as we ve made there are still millions of americans and too many all across missouri who are out of work too many people who are still stretched to the limits on their mortgages their credit cards their student loans so we re on the road to recovery but we re not there we will not be there until folks who want to find a job can get a job not until people feel some sense of security again we are fighting every day claire and i for an america where every single person can compete and win if they re willing to work hard if they re willing to apply themselves then they ve got a shot at the american dream we re fighting for an economy where entrepreneurship and hard work and some sweat can result in success and that we can rebuild this middle class that has been the backbone not just of our economy but also our democracy so we re going to have some more fights we ve won some fights people don t people tend to forget we won them so fast those first six months everybody s forgotten about it we banned tobacco advertising to kids we passed credit card legislation to make sure that the worst abuses no longer happen we passed housing fraud laws that will crack down on predatory lending we passed equal pay laws so that women are getting paid the same for doing the same work as men we expanded health care to 4 million children we passed national service legislation we are bringing our troops home from iraq we have delivered on our promises but we ve got work left to do the country that educates its children the best will compete the best in the 21st century and that s why we re going to keep on pushing to reform our education system make sure that college is affordable because the nation that leads in clean energy will also lead in the 21st century economy we re going to keep on pushing for solar and wind and biodiesel and create millions of jobs in the process and yes because we know that this economy cannot work if we ve got a broken health care system we are going to get health care reform done this year right now everybody remembers that person yelling to harry give em hell harry but folks don t remember harry s response which was i m going to tell the truth and they ll think it s hell so let me tell you the truth about health care reform the system is broken out in california one of the biggest insurers there just raised rates up to 39 percent on millions of people right across the river in illinois 60 percent hikes in some of the individual markets it s not sustainable and everybody knows it so what have we done there s nothing radical about what we ve proposed we have said look some countries have a government run system that s not going to work for here in the united states some people most of my republican colleagues in washington seem to think that the best health care plan is just to let er rip when it comes to the insurance companies deregulate further and that that s somehow going to give you more of a break this is the foxes guarding the chicken coop theory of health care reform what i ve said is look we don t need government or insurance bureaucrats controlling your health care we re going to put you in control and we re going to do that in three simple ways number one we re going to have the toughest insurance reforms in history a patient s bill of right on steroids so they can t deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition so that they ve got to cover young people up to the age of 26 so they don t have fine print that will prevent you from getting the care that you need or allow them to drop you when you get sick insurance reform number two what we re saying is you know what members of congress have a pretty good deal on health care you know why because they re members of a big pool of federal employees they ve got millions of people in their pool so like any big company they can negotiate for the best rates what about you what about you why shouldn t you be able to do the same thing that members of congress can do so we re going to create a pool for you that will drive down your premiums so that you ve got leverage so that you can get a better deal whoa all right who was was that mitch mcconnell back there trying to yes see they don t like when we start telling the truth so that s number two number three we re going to drive down costs we are going to drive down costs now let me tell you some of you may have heard of the congressional budget office this is the office that basically decides it s the referee on how many how much things cost according to the congressional budget office our plan passes and folks right now who have to buy insurance in the individual market or small markets because they don t have a big employer that s looking out for them they will save 14 to 20 percent on a comparable plan to what they re purchasing right now that s money out of your pocket that s money that right now is going out of your pocket that would go back in if this health care reform passed employers according to the business roundtable would save up to 3 000 per employee in reduced premium costs if health reform passed that s their numbers according to the business roundtable not my numbers the deficit over the next two decades will be reduced by a trillion dollars if health care reform passes and that s why it can t be if it s got to be when we are going to get this done and we re going to get it done soon and it s time for an up or down vote in washington on health care reform tired of talking about it let s get it done see i want every member of congress to hear this chant we got to start this chant up in congress because what ends up happening in washington is that right about now when it s time to actually just go ahead and get this done this is when folks get the most nervous oh there s just so much noise out there just the echo chamber it s getting people all stressed out stay the course is what i tell them and you know we were meeting with some supporters back here and a couple of them said the same thing they said don t let them wear you down and i tried to explain i don t get worn down i wear them down i don t get worn down you know why i don t get worn down because of the woman i met in pennsylvania this past week who found out that her health insurance premium has just gone up a hundred percent or the mother up in green bay who i met last year who s got two small kids breast cancer has metastasized and instead of just worrying about how she can get well she s having to fight off the incredible debt that s coming because of these limits that are placed on her insurance coverage she s got insurance and is still worrying about her family going broke now if she s not tired if she s still fighting then i m fighting if they re not getting worn down then i m not going to be worn down and if i ve got somebody like claire mccaskill next to me if i ve got claire mccaskill in the foxhole with me if i ve got somebody like claire mccaskill in the senate bucking people up and telling them we don t give up we don t get worn down then i guarantee you we re not just going to pass health care we are going to do what is required to make sure that the middle class here in america once again has the ability to control its own destiny we don t shirk from a challenge we don t shrink from responsibilities we embrace them for our children and the next generation we don t worry about the next election we worry about a longer term and that s why you re here that s why you supported me in this campaign that s why you supported claire mccaskill don t give up on me now we re just getting started thank you st louis god bless you dem bobama10 3 10c barack_obama hello missouri it is good to see you i know you guys have been a little bit here it s a little bit warm in here you re all fanning yourself off whoo it is good to see everybody here today how s everybody doing i ve got a couple of acknowledgments i want to make first of all mayor of st charles patti york where s patti thank you madam mayor thanks for the great weather we also have the st charles school district superintendent randy charles is here where s randy i just saw him there he is back there it is great to be here great to be back in the show me state great to be back in st charles some of you may remember that it was from this town that lewis and clark began their journey into a harsh and unforgiving landscape i can relate because the first time i came here i was trying to get to washington d c a harsh and unforgiving landscape a big part of our campaign was about changing the way washington works it was about transforming a politics that s driven by cynicism and a 24 hour news cycle and the cable chatter and always focused on the next election instead of the next generation our campaign was about meeting the looming challenges in education and in energy in our health care system in our financial system that helped bring about the worst economic crisis since the great depression and it still threatens our prosperity it was about making our government actually work for you the people a government that lives up to its responsibilities including the responsibility to live within its means now there s been a lot of discussion about government over the last several months and let s face it people have lost faith in government they had lost faith in government before i ran and it s been getting worse you know president lincoln said that the legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done but which they can not do at all or do so well by themselves that pretty much sums up my attitude you let people do for themselves what they can do for themselves and then if there are some things that we do better together we should do them together and i believe that in everything government does we ve got a special responsibility to be wise stewards about how americans hard earned tax dollars are spent and i know you agree with that too doesn t matter whether you re a democrat or a republican you don t like seeing your money wasted or an independent don t like seeing your money wasted that s a responsibility my administration is seeking to fulfill every single day over the last year we ve gone through the budget line by line looking for places to trim the fat out of government and we ve found a lot of fat to trim i got to admit last year we pushed congress to cut nearly 20 billion by streamlining or eliminating more than 120 government programs this year we put another 20 billion in cuts on the table targeting dozens of additional programs that were wasteful or duplicative or in some cases just plain ridiculous for example we decided not to fund an office maintained by the department of education in paris france now i m sure that was nice work if you could get it but i didn t think that was a real good use of our money we eliminated a decades old radio navigation system which cost 35 million a year and some people might say well why did you do that we need that navigation system well the thing is we got this thing call gps now and satellites so the whole radio navigation thing wasn t working so well so we ve been pushing for cuts on things that we don t need that government doesn t do so well and we re also reforming the way government contracts are awarded think about this between 2002 and 2008 the amount spent annually on government contracts more than doubled to half a trillion dollars those are contracts with private contractors and the amount spent on no bid contracts jumped by 129 percent no bid contracts that s an inexcusable waste of your money so last march i ordered federal departments to come up with plans to save as much as 40 billion a year in contracting now this brings me to the person standing right over here the lady in pink you know before claire was your senator she was your state auditor she just pinches pennies i mean she s just you think i m i don t like waste but claire she just every dime she s so thanks to claire we re going to have a new tool to help us meet this goal of eliminating some of these wasteful contracts and no bid contracts in the coming weeks we re going to be rolling out a new online database which claire mccaskill proposed and helped pass into law and we ll be able to see before any new contract is awarded whether a company plays by the rules how well they ve performed in the past did they finish the job on time did the company provide good value did the company blow their budget it s your money so you deserve to know how it s spent and who these contracts are going to and that s an example of the kind of service that claire mccaskill is providing not just to the people of missouri but people all across the country and in every way but one claire mccaskill is the new harry truman in the united states senate the one difference is she s a she but just as the truman commission prevented billions of dollars of wasteful spending during the war and saved lives in the process through tough and fair minded oversight of contracting during world war ii claire has been a relentless force for rooting out scams and making government more efficient harry truman also said in the commission s final report that in completing the mission where necessary heads must be knocked together and let me tell you claire loves knocking some heads together she s never been afraid to do that as we were driving in i was saying boy it s just good to be back in the midwest this is about as close as i ve been to home in a while and part of the reason it s just good to be back is because washington is a place where tax dollars are often treated like monopoly money they re bartered and traded and they re divvied up among lobbyists and special interests and where waste even billions of dollars of waste is accepted as the price of doing business when we proposed by the way those 20 billion in cuts last year we were ridiculed by the press said ah that s just a spit in the bucket now i don t know about here in st charles 20 billion that s real money isn t it that s real money but claire doesn t accept business as usual i don t accept business as usual you don t accept business as usual the american people don t accept business as usual especially when we re facing these enormous long term deficits that threaten to leave our children a mountain of debt now this brings me to the primary topic i want to talk about today nowhere is reform more needed than when it comes to our health care system nowhere nowhere the health care system has billions of dollars that should go to patient care and they re lost each and every year to fraud to abuse to massive subsidies that line the pockets of the insurance industry let me just give you one example this is a long recognized but long tolerated problem called improper payments that s what they call them washington always has a name for these things improper payments and as is often the case in washington the more innocuous the name the more worried you should be so these are payments mostly made through medicare and medicaid that are sent to the wrong person sent for the wrong reason sent in the wrong amount sometimes they re innocent errors sometimes they re because nobody is bothering to check to see where the money is going and they re abused by scam artists and fly by night operations look health care this health care debate has been hard on my health i got to tell you it s estimated that improper payments cost taxpayers almost 100 billion last year alone think about that that by the way just that abuse in improper payments is more than we spend on the department of education and the small business administration combined if we created a department of improper payments it would be one of the largest agencies in our government now for the past few years there has actually been a pilot program that uses a system of tough audits to recover some of this lost money and even though these audits they were just operating mainly in three states they already found a billion dollars in improper payments so these results were both disturbing and encouraging they re disturbing because it shows you how much waste there is out there in the health care system but it s encouraging because we can do something about it so earlier today with claire looking over my shoulder one of our auditors in chief i signed an order calling on all federal agencies to launch these kinds of audits all across the country all across the country so agencies would hire auditors to scour the books go through things line by line auditors are paid based on how many abuses or errors they uncover so it s a win win the auditor if they do a good job they get a small percentage as a reward and the taxpayer wins by getting huge sums of money that would otherwise be lost that we can then spend to provide care to people who really need it or we can use to reduce the deficit now through this effort we expect to more than double the amounts we would ve otherwise recovered a couple of billion dollars over the next few years and i m announcing my support for the improper payments elimination and recovery act that s a mouthful but this is a bipartisan bill is a bipartisan bill to expand our ability to do these audits so we can prevent even more fraud and abuse and waste now the reason i m bringing all this stuff up is because there s been a lot of talk about health care lately and look i ll be honest a lot of people they re confused they re saying well how can you help people get insurance who don t have it without it adding to our deficit it s a legitimate question well the reason is is because so much of the money currently in our health care system is being misspent look if you ve got if you ve got a house and the roof is leaking and the windows are all letting through a bunch of draft and you get that cold winter and all the heat seeping out and if you decide to spend on some new windows and fix your roof that s going to spend a little money but you d save money in the long run because you don t have heating expenses and those leaks aren t ruining your furniture the same thing is true with our health care system we ve got leaks everywhere that you pay for directly or indirectly and if we can have a smarter health care system then yes we can provide help to middle class folks who need it and at the same time actually reduce the burden on taxpayers now i know that during the health care debate opponents have tried to scare people especially our seniors into thinking that we are going after seniors medicare benefits that s how obama is going to pay for his plan when you look at the facts that s just plain wrong in fact by saving billions of dollars of the sort we just talked about waste and abuse in medicare reining in waste and inefficiencies we re going to be able to help ensure medicare s solvency for an additional decade this is just one example that speaks to how we re going to stop wasting money through the health care system on things that don t make people healthy in fact often take away from the care we receive and take that money and make it work for the american people so medicare will work better provide better care because of these reforms senior citizens who are dealing with the doughnut hole in the prescription drug plan that plan will be filled in part because we re not wasting money on stuff that doesn t work that s common sense you know i get a lot of letters from constituents i get about 40 000 every day and i don t read all 40 000 somebody does but what i ve done is i ve asked my staff to collect a sampling of 10 letters that i read every night and i will tell you that my staff is very evenhanded because about half of these letters call me an idiot and at least half of them talk about health care and when the health care reform debate was really heating up one of the things that i heard from a lot of seniors was keep your government hands out of my medicare i heard this from a bunch of seniors they say i don t want your government run health care plan and don t touch my medicare and so i d have to write back and i d say ma am or sir medicare is a government program but we re not going go weaken it we re going to make it stronger but i think those letters tell you something about what sometimes happened in this health care debate because people have been hit with a lot of bad information and health care is really important and so people get worried and they get nervous but when you get past the divisive and the deceptive rhetoric it turns out that most americans are happy that two generations ago we made the decision that seniors and the poor should not be saddled with unaffordable health care costs or forced to go without needed care that was a decision that we made decades ago and it was the right decision to make and by the way when we made those decisions folks were saying the exact same thing about medicare that s socialized medicine this is government run care and blah blah blah now today we face a different choice but it s a similar choice to the one that previous generations faced and that is whether we should help middle class families and business owners that are being pummeled by the rising costs of health care see back when the medicare debate was taking place seniors were having problems because they were no longer working and people were getting their health care through their jobs and so it made sense to help them it made sense to help the poor who might not be employed but back then middle class folks they were pretty secure if you were working you had health care that was affordable but you know what s happened over the last several decades what s happened is is that more and more businesses are saying we can t afford to provide health care to our workers because the costs are skyrocketing so they just drop health care altogether a lot of small businesses they don t provide health care to their employees anymore and large businesses what are they doing they re saying to you we re going to jack up your premiums we got to increase your deductibles if you re self employed you are completely out of luck if you ve got a preexisting condition you are completely out of luck and by the way those of us who are lucky enough to have health care today we don t know if we re the ones who are going to lose our job tomorrow or suddenly it turns out that our child has a preexisting condition and we ll be stuck in the exact same situation even if we ve got good health insurance now everything i just said if you talk to my opponents they ll agree they ll say you re right the health care system is broken for too many people it s getting worse they will acknowledge that the status quo is unsustainable but you know what they tell me we had that big health care summit i know you guys watched all seven hours of it yes absolutely it was scintillating but you heard what they said they said well we agree with you that the current system is unsustainable but this is just not the right time to do it they said let s start over that s what they said we just got to start from scratch well let me tell you something the insurance industry is not starting over they just announced a 39 percent rate increase in california and a rate increase of up to 60 percent right across the border in my home state of illinois 60 percent in one year that s the future that s the future if we fail to act and by the way i don t recall any of these republicans trying to do anything about insurance companies abuses during all the years they were in charge do you claire i don t remember i don t remember them doing anything about folks who needed some help when the government was running surpluses so i get a sense with some of these folks it s just never going to be the right time but the truth is we have debated health care in washington not just this past year we ve been debating it for 70 years you know who was pushing health care reform harry truman harry truman was pushing health care reform and by the way you know what they said they said he s pushing socialized medicine harry truman and over this past year we ve been talking about it every proposal has been put on the table every argument has been made and everybody has made it and i know that people view this as a partisan issue but the truth is is that if you set aside the politics of it and what was good for election day it turns out that parties have plenty of areas where they agree and the plan that i ve put forward is a proposal that s basically somewhere in the middle one that incorporates the best ideas of democrats and republicans even though the republicans have a hard time acknowledging it now there are some folks who wanted to scrap the system of private insurance and replace it with a government run health care program like they have in some other countries we ve got a couple some applause here and look it works well for those countries but i ll just be honest with you it was not practical or realistic to do here to completely uproot and change a system where the vast majority of people still get their health care from employer based plans and on the other side of the spectrum there are those who believe that the answer is to simply unleash the insurance industry and provide less oversight and fewer rules and that somehow that s going to drive down prices for everybody this is called the putting the foxes in charge of the hen house approach to health care reform so whatever state regulations were in place we d get rid of those and so insurance companies could basically find a state that had the worst regulations and then from there sell insurance everywhere and that somehow that was going to be helpful to you all this would do would give insurance companies more leeway to raise premiums and deny care so i don t believe we should give either the government or the insurance companies more control over health care in america i want to give you more control over health care in america so my proposal builds on the current system where most americans get their health care from their employers if you like your plan you can keep your plan if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor but my proposal would change three important things about the current health care system now i want everybody to pay attention i know it s a little warm in here but i want you to pay attention so that when you are talking to your friends and your neighbors and folks at work and they re wondering what s going on i want you to be able to just say here are the three things obama is trying to do first it would end the worst practices of insurance companies and it would begin to do so this year this year thousands of uninsured americans with preexisting conditions will be able to purchase health insurance for the very first time in their lives or since they got sick this year insurance companies would be banned from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions this year insurance companies would be banned from dropping your coverage when you get sick insurance companies would no longer be able to arbitrarily and massively raise premiums they would be subject to review those practices will end as a consequence of health care reform all new insurance plans would be required to offer free preventive care to their customers and if you buy a new plan there will be no more lifetime limits on the amount of care you receive from your insurance company all that fine print that ends up getting folks into trouble if you re a uninsured young adult you ll be able to stay on your parents insurance policy until you re 26 years old so a lot of folks as they re transitioning into the workplace will have insurance all right so that s part one of the plan insurance reform part two for the first time uninsured individuals and small businesses will have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of congress get if it s good enough for members of congress it s good enough for the people who pay their salaries this should not be a controversial idea the reason that federal employees usually have pretty good insurance is because they re part of a pool of millions of people so what happens is they can negotiate for really good rates because the insurance companies really want those millions of customers so what we re talking about is setting up a pool for people who don t work for the federal government you individuals small businesses they can be part of this pool and this is an idea that a lot of republicans embraced in the past until i said it was a good idea so all this would drive down rates for those individuals and small businesses who aren t part of a big company that get good rates and my proposal says if you still can t afford it even though now the premiums are lower than you can buy on your own then we ll offer you some tax credits to make it affordable and those tax credits would add up to the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history so it s estimated that this would drive down the costs for folks who don t work for big companies so they don t get as good of a deal by 14 20 percent this is before the subsidies before the tax credits now it s true that this will cost some money it s going to cost about a hundred billion dollars per year that s real money that s a lot of money but most of that money comes from the nearly 2 5 trillion a year that america already spends on health care that we re not spending well that we re spending badly right now so we pay for this proposal by getting at the abuse that we just talked about we eliminate wasteful taxpayer subsidies that go to the insurance companies do you know that through the medicare program we are giving insurance companies close to 20 billion a year about 18 billion every year of taxpayer money through the medicare system and we re saying well why do we do that they re making a profit on their own and while some of what we save goes to helping the uninsured most of it goes back to small businesses and the middle class who right now just aren t getting a good deal it doesn t make sense to me that people who are really poor are able to get medicaid but people who are working really hard and just not quite as poor they don t get a decent deal that doesn t make sense to me all right that s the second part first part insurance reform second part creating this marketplace where small businesses and individuals can get a good deal third part bringing down the cost of health care for families and businesses and for the federal government cost control now when you listen to the other side they ll tell you we want to do more about cost we want to do more about cost well let me tell you we ve incorporated almost every serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain rising health care costs there s not an idea out there that we have not worked on that we have not included in this proposal and according to the congressional budget office this is the office that is supposed to be the independent referee for how things cost it s not supposed to be democrat or republican according to the congressional budget office people buying health plans in the individual market right now they d see their premiums go down 14 to 20 percent i already mentioned that now here s another thing a recent study by the business roundtable that s made up of all these big companies out there they don t they re nonpartisan but it s not like they re just dyed in the wool liberal democrats let s put it that way these are company ceos they commissioned a study and said the reforms could reduce premiums by as much as 3 000 per employee that s their study not mine then the congressional budget office said that the government would save a trillion dollars reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars so think about it you re saving money employers are saving money the federal government is saving money not according to me but according to these studies that were done by independent analysts so here s the bottom line st charles there s no government takeover unless you consider reining in insurance companies a government takeover and i think that s the right thing to do there s no cutting of medicare benefits there s just cutting out fraud and waste in medicare to make it stronger what we re proposing is a common sense approach to protecting you from insurance company abuses and saving you money that s the proposal and it is paid for and i believe that congress owes the american people a final up or down vote on health care reform the time for talk is over it s time to vote it s time to vote tired of talking about it now of course folks in washington they like to talk and so washington is doing right now what washington does they re speculating breathlessly day or night every columnist every pundit every talking head is this proposal going to help the republicans or is this proposal going to help the democrats what s going to happen to the president s poll numbers if the vote doesn t go forward if it does go forward what will it mean for november what will it mean for 2012 how s the politics going to play i heard the republican leader of the senate the other day he s warning democrats you better be careful about voting for this it could hurt you i don t know how sincere the republican leader is about the best interests of democrats he s been very generous with advice you know what here s the bottom line st charles i don t know how the politics play i don t know this is a hard issue it s a complicated issue there is a lot of information floating around out there a lot of it is inaccurate the opponents have spent millions of dollars fighting it and people during recessionary times they re anxious and sort of thinking gosh can we really afford to change things right now maybe we should just kind of stick with the status quo even though we know it s not working for us so i don t know how the politics plays but here s what i do know the american people will be more secure with this reform our country will be stronger because of this reform i don t know about the politics but i know it is the right thing to do and that s why i m fighting so hard to get it done we ve seen years decades where washington just puts off dealing with our toughest challenges because it s too hard because we don t know how the politics works and the will and the capacity to act to do serious things in this country starts just getting sucked away just gets sacked by partisanship and political gamesmanship and debates about who s up and who s down and how does this play politically instead of asking what s right and what s wrong and we ve seen terrible consequences not just these last two years of turmoil but a decade of struggle for middle class families we can t accept the status quo we can t accept the same old same old i won t accept it claire mccaskill won t accept it not when it comes to how we manage taxpayer dollars not when it comes to how our health care system works not when it comes to meeting the difficult challenges that we face and that s why claire and i are fighting to stop waste and abuse in our government that s why claire and i are fighting to pass these health insurance reforms now is the time now is the moment now is the time for us to leave for the next generation and generations to come a stronger and more prosperous country we are not backing down we are not quitting st charles and we are going to get this done thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama10 3 10d barack_obama please be seated good afternoon everybody and on behalf of the american people i want to welcome president prval the first lady and their delegation to the united states the president and i have just concluded a very productive meeting in the oval office on the urgent and overriding challenges before us helping the people of haiti as they recover and rebuild after one of the most devastating natural disasters ever to strike our hemisphere mr president as i did when i spoke to you in those first days after the earthquake i again want to express to you and to the haitian people the deepest condolences of the american people your grief is shared by our strong and vibrant haitian american community some of whom join us here today and who continue to mourn the loss of their loved ones back in haiti to you and to our fellow americans please know that you remain in our thoughts and in our prayers the united states joins in mourning the loss of american citizens as more than 100 americans died in this earthquake and our hearts also go out to their loved ones we also remember that this natural disaster was an international tragedy taking the lives of dominicans and canadians french brazilians and people from dozens of nations around the world president prval and his delegation offered an update on the status of relief recovery and reconstruction efforts the progress so far and the daunting challenges ahead in a disaster that even now defies comprehension to offer just some perspective on the awful scale of haitian loss it s as if the united states in a terrible instant lost nearly 8 million people or it s as if one third of our country 100 million americans suddenly had no home no food or water that gives you a sense of relative to the populations what has happened in haiti no nation could respond to such a catastrophe alone it would require a global response and that s exactly what we have seen these past two months mr president even as you and other haitian leaders have endured your personal tragedies losing your own homes your loved ones you have carried on with great courage and determination you ve persevered leading an international effort with critical support from the united nations many partner nations and countless nongovernmental organizations representatives of some of the ngos are here today and for the extraordinary work that you ve done to uplift lives every day in haiti and around the world often at great risk to your own lives we salute you as well in this international response the united states has been proud to play a leading role mr president we are joined today by men and women representing all the americans who answered haiti s call in its hours of need including members of congress and many state and local officials who we thank for their support and leaders from across my administration the department of state usaid homeland security fema health and human services transportation and the department of defense including our great folks at southern command today i want to thank all of them for leading a swift and coordinated response during one of the most complex humanitarian efforts ever attempted we re joined by ambassador ken merten and some of our heroic embassy staff who worked around the clock we re joined by our disaster response teams who were on the scene within 24 hours our military personnel who quickly reopened the airport and the port making way for a massive humanitarian effort our search and rescue teams who crawled into the rubble to pull survivors out to safety haitian and american the volunteer physicians and nurses and paramedics who treated tens of thousands of patients with life threatening injuries and all our men and women in uniform who have helped to distribute desperately needed food and water and medicine to millions of people our remarkable soldiers sailors airmen marines and coast guardsmen i just want to personally say how extraordinarily proud i am of each and every one of you because i think you represent what s best in america and i could not be prouder of the response that all of you were engaged in during this humanitarian crisis now no relief effort of this magnitude is without its difficulties but there should be absolutely no doubt in anybody s mind along with their haitian and international partners these men and women made a difference they saved lives countless lives of men and women and children so mr president if you will permit us this moment to briefly express once again our admiration for all those who stepped forward who volunteered who represent the true character of our country and who projected to the world the best face of america a face of compassion and generosity each and every one of you can take enormous pride at your service and every single american thanks you for making us so proud i also want to acknowledge the enormous generosity of so many individual americans who gave what they could to support haiti even in difficult economic times that help makes possible an extraordinary response from the courageous and capable nongovernmental organizations that have been at the scene and that support all kinds of efforts that the government is engaged in and i know that the support of the american people will continue to be essential as haiti tries to recover and rebuild as president prval and i discussed the situation on the ground remains dire and people should be under no illusions that the crisis is over many haitians are still in need desperate need in some cases of shelter and food and medicine and with the spring rains approaching those needs will only grow the challenge now is to prevent a second disaster and that s why at this very moment thousands of americans both civilian and military remain on the scene at the invitation of the haitian government and that s why even as the u s military responsibly hands off relief functions to our haitian and international partners america s commitment to haiti s recovery and reconstruction must endure and will endure this pledge is one that i made at the beginning of this crisis and i intend for america to keep our pledge america will be your partner in the recovery and reconstruction effort toward that end the international donors conference at the united nations later this month will be an opportunity an important opportunity for all parties haiti can lead the way and will lead the way with a strong vision for its future the international community can pledge the resources that will be necessary for a coordinated and sustained effort and working together we can ensure that assistance not simply delivers relief for the short term but builds up haiti s capacity to deliver basic services and provide for the haitian people over the long term so mr president in the face of devastation that shocked the world the people of haiti responded with resolve and faith that inspired the world in song and in prayer and in the determination to carry on as you declared during last month s national day of mourning it is time to wipe away the tears it is time for haiti to rebuild and to you and to the haitian people i say today as you embark on the heavy work ahead you will continue to have a steady and reliable partner in the united states of america so with that let me turn this over to president prval dem bobama10 5 09 barack_obama thank you thank you everybody good evening you know i had an entire speech prepared for this wonderful occasion but now that i m here i think i m going to try something a little different tonight i want to speak from the heart i m going to speak off the cuff good evening pause for laughter wait a minute this may not be working as well as i let me try that again good evening everybody i would like to welcome you all to the 10 day anniversary of my first 100 days i am barack obama most of you covered me all of you voted for me apologies to the fox table they re where are they i have to confess i really did not want to be here tonight but i knew i had to come just one more problem that i ve inherited from george w bush but now that i m here it s great to be here it s great to see all of you michelle obama is here the first lady of the united states hasn t she been an outstanding first lady she s even begun to bridge the differences that have divided us for so long because no matter which party you belong to we can all agree that michelle has the right to bare arms now sasha and malia aren t here tonight because they re grounded you can t just take air force one on a joy ride to manhattan i don t care whose kids you are we ve been setting some ground rules here they re starting to get a little carried away now speaking when i think about children obviously i think about michelle and it reminds me that tomorrow is mother s day happy mother s day to all the mothers in the audience i do have to say though that this is a tough holiday for rahm emanuel because he s not used to saying the word day after mother that s true david axelrod is here you know david and i have been together for a long time i can still remember i got to sort of i tear up a little bit when i think back to that day that i called ax so many years ago and said you and i can do wonderful things together and he said to me the same thing that partners all across america are saying to one another right now let s go to iowa and make it official michael steele is in the house tonight or as he would say in the heezy what s up where is michael michael for the last time the republican party does not qualify for a bailout rush limbaugh does not count as a troubled asset i m sorry dick cheney was supposed to be here but he is very busy working on his memoirs tentatively titled how to shoot friends and interrogate people you know it s been a whirlwind of activity these first hundred days we ve enacted a major economic recovery package we passed a budget we forged a new path in iraq and no president in history has ever named three commerce secretaries this quickly which reminds me if judd gregg is here your business cards are ready now on top of that i ve also reversed the ban on stem cell research signed an expansion signed an expansion of the children s health insurance just last week car and driver named me auto executive of the year something i m very proud of we ve also begun to change the culture in washington we ve even made the white house a place where people can learn and can grow just recently larry summers asked if he could chair the white house council on women and girls and i do appreciate that larry is here tonight because it is seven hours past his bedtime gibbs liked that one in the last hundred days we ve also grown the democratic party by infusing it with new energy and bringing in fresh young faces like arlen specter now joe biden rightly deserves a lot of credit for convincing arlen to make the switch but secretary clinton actually had a lot to do with it too one day she just pulled him aside and she said arlen you know what i always say if you can t beat them join them which brings me to another thing that s changed in this new warmer fuzzier white house and that s my relationship with hillary you know we had been rivals during the campaign but these days we could not be closer in fact the second she got back from mexico she pulled into a hug and gave me a big kiss told me i d better get down there myself which i really appreciated i mean it was it was nice and of course we ve also begun to change america s image in the world we talked about this during this campaign and we re starting to execute we ve renewed alliances with important partners and friends if you look on the screen there there i am with japanese prime minister taro aso there i am with gordon brown but as i said during the campaign we can t just talk to our friends as hard as it is we also have to talk to our enemies and i ve begun to do exactly that take a look at the monitor there now let me be clear just because he handed me a copy of peter pan does not mean that i m going to read it but it s good diplomatic practice to just accept these gifts all this change hasn t been easy change never is so i ve cut the tension by bringing a new friend to the white house he s warm he s cuddly loyal enthusiastic you just have to keep him on a tight leash every once in a while he goes charging off in the wrong direction and gets himself into trouble but enough about joe biden all in all we re proud of the change we ve brought to washington in these first hundred days but we ve got a lot of work left to do as all of you know so i d like to talk a little bit about what my administration plans to achieve in the next hundred days during the second hundred days we will design build and open a library dedicated to my first hundred days it s going to be big folks in the next hundred days i will learn to go off the prompter and joe biden will learn to stay on the prompter in the next hundred days our bipartisan outreach will be so successful that even john boehner will consider becoming a democrat after all we have a lot in common he is a person of color although not a color that appears in the natural world what s up john in the next hundred days i will meet with a leader who rules over millions with an iron fist who owns the airwaves and uses his power to crush all who would challenge his authority at the ballot box it s good to see you mayor bloomberg in the next hundred days we will housetrain our dog bo because the last thing tim geithner needs is someone else treating him like a fire hydrant in the next hundred days i will strongly consider losing my cool finally i believe that my next hundred days will be so successful i will be able to complete them in 72 days and on the 73rd day i will rest i just i want to end by saying a few words about the men and women in this room whose job it is to inform the public and pursue the truth you know we meet tonight at a moment of extraordinary challenge for this nation and for the world but it s also a time of real hardship for the field of journalism and like so many other businesses in this global age you ve seen sweeping changes and technology and communications that lead to a sense of uncertainty and anxiety about what the future will hold across the country there are extraordinary hardworking journalists who have lost their jobs in recent days recent weeks recent months and i know that each newspaper and media outlet is wrestling with how to respond to these changes and some are struggling simply to stay open and it won t be easy not every ending will be a happy one but it s also true that your ultimate success as an industry is essential to the success of our democracy it s what makes this thing work you know thomas jefferson once said that if he had the choice between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government he would not hesitate to choose the latter clearly thomas jefferson never had cable news to contend with but his central point remains a government without newspapers a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts is not an option for the united states of america so i may not i may not agree with everything you write or report i may even complain or more likely gibbs will complain from time to time about how you do your jobs but i do so with the knowledge that when you are at your best then you help me be at my best you help all of us who serve at the pleasure of the american people do our jobs better by holding us accountable by demanding honesty by preventing us from taking shortcuts and falling into easy political games that people are so desperately weary of and that kind of reporting is worth preserving not just for your sake but for the public s we count on you to help us make sense of a complex world and tell the stories of our lives the way they happen and we look for you for truth even if it s always an approximation even if this is a season of renewal and reinvention that is what government must learn to do that s what businesses must learn to do and that s what journalism is in the process of doing and when i look out at this room and think about the dedicated men and women whose questions i ve answered over the last few years i know that for all the challenges this industry faces it s not short on talent or creativity or passion or commitment it s not short of young people who are eager to break news or the not so young who still manage to ask the tough ones time and time again these qualities alone will not solve all your problems but they certainly prove that the problems are worth solving and that is a good place as any to begin so i offer you my thanks i offer you my support and i look forward to working with you and answering to you and the american people as we seek a more perfect union in the months and years ahead thank you very much everybody thank you dem bobama10 5 10 barack_obama hello hello hello thank you thank you very much everybody please have a seat good morning everybody of the many responsibilities accorded to a president by our constitution few are more weighty or consequential than that of appointing a supreme court justice particularly one to succeed a giant in the law like justice john paul stevens for nearly 35 years justice stevens has stood as an impartial guardian of the law faithfully applying the core values of our founding to the cases and controversies of our time he has done so with restraint and respect for precedent understanding that a judge s job is to interpret not make law but also with fidelity to the constitutional ideal of equal justice for all he s brought to each case not just mastery of the letter of the law but a keen understanding of its impact on people s lives and he has emerged as a consistent voice of reason helping his colleagues find common ground on some of the most controversial and contentious issues the court has ever faced while we can t presume to replace justice stevens wisdom or experience i have selected a nominee who i believe embodies that same excellence independence integrity and passion for the law and who can ultimately provide that same kind of leadership on the court our solicitor general and my friend elena kagan elena is widely regarded as one of the nation s foremost legal minds she s an acclaimed legal scholar with a rich understanding of constitutional law she is a former white house aide with a lifelong commitment to public service and a firm grasp of the nexus and boundaries between our three branches of government she is a trailblazing leader the first woman to serve as dean of harvard law school and one of the most successful and beloved deans in its history and she is a superb solicitor general our nation s chief lawyer representing the american people s interests before the supreme court the first woman in that position as well and she has won accolades from observers across the ideological spectrum for her well reasoned arguments and commanding presence but elena is respected and admired not just for her intellect and record of achievement but also for her temperament her openness to a broad array of viewpoints her habit to borrow a phrase from justice stevens of understanding before disagreeing her fair mindedness and skill as a consensus builder these traits were particularly evident during her tenure as dean at a time when many believed that the harvard faculty had gotten a little one sided in its viewpoint she sought to recruit prominent conservative scholars and spur a healthy debate on campus and she encouraged students from all backgrounds to respectfully exchange ideas and seek common ground because she believes as i do that exposure to a broad array of perspectives is the foundation not just for a sound legal education but of a successful life in the law this appreciation for diverse views may also come in handy as a die hard mets fan serving alongside her new colleague to be yankees fan justice sotomayor who i believe has ordered a pinstriped robe for the occasion but while elena had a brilliant career in academia her passion for the law is anything but academic she has often referred to supreme court justice thurgood marshall for whom she clerked as her hero i understand that he reciprocated by calling her shorty nonetheless she credits him with reminding her that as she put it behind law there are stories stories of people s lives as shaped by the law stories of people s lives as might be changed by the law that understanding of law not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page but as it affects the lives of ordinary people has animated every step of elena s career including her service as solicitor general today during her time in this office she s repeatedly defended the rights of shareholders and ordinary citizens against unscrupulous corporations last year in the citizens united case she defended bipartisan campaign finance reform against special interests seeking to spend unlimited money to influence our elections despite long odds of success with most legal analysts believing the government was unlikely to prevail in this case elena still chose it as her very first case to argue before the court i think that says a great deal not just about elena s tenacity but about her commitment to serving the american people i think it says a great deal about her commitment to protect our fundamental rights because in a democracy powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens and i think it says a great deal about the path that elena has chosen someone as gifted as elena could easily have settled into a comfortable life in a corporate law practice instead she chose a life of service service to her students service to her country service to the law and to all those whose lives it shapes and given elena s upbringing it s a choice that probably came naturally elena is the granddaughter of immigrants whose mother was for 20 years a beloved public schoolteacher as are her two brothers who are here today her father was a housing lawyer devoted to the rights of tenants both were the first in their families to attend college and from an early age they instilled in elena not just the value of a good education but the importance of using it to serve others as she recalled during her solicitor general confirmation hearings both my parents wanted me to succeed in my chosen profession but more than that both drilled into me the importance of service character and integrity elena has also spoken movingly about how her mother had grown up at a time when women had few opportunities to pursue their ambitions and took great joy in watching her daughter do so neither she nor elena s father lived to see this day but i think her mother would relish this moment i think she would relish as i do the prospect of three women taking their seat on the nation s highest court for the first time in history a court that would be more inclusive more representative more reflective of us as a people than ever before and i think they would both be tremendously proud of their daughter a great lawyer a great teacher and a devoted public servant who i am confident will make an outstanding supreme court justice so i hope that the senate will act in a bipartisan fashion as they did in confirming elena to be our solicitor general last year and that they will do so as swiftly as possible so she can get busy and take her seat in time to fully participate in the work of the court this fall with that i would like to invite the person who i believe will be the next supreme court justice of the united states elena kagan to say a few words dem bobama10 8 10 barack_obama well thank you very much everybody it is wonderful to be with you and i just first of all want to thank russell and dori for the wonderful hospitality in a gorgeous home so thank you very much give them a big round of applause and i want to also say thank you for doing such a great job training my ambassador ron kirk he has been doing yeoman s work internationally and i know it s because he has such good friends in dallas who along with matrice keep him straight so we are pleased to have him in the administration he is just a great friend as well as a great national leader and thanks to all of you who ve done so much not only to help support my campaign in 2008 but to help democrats here in texas here in dallas county and all across the united states of america i was down in austin before we came here and i mentioned that austin was really the first big rally we had after i had just announced that i was running for president of the united states back in february of 2007 we had more than 20 000 people show up and so i have a lot of friends in texas a lot of friends in dallas a lot of friends in austin and i was reminded of a story abraham lincoln used to tell about a guy who came to see him looking for patronage work he had really tried to get in to see the president and back then security was a little more lax than it is now and eventually he got an audience with the president and he looked at lincoln and he said you know i am responsible for you being in office if it wasn t for me you would not be here and lincoln said is that true he said yes he said well i forgive you there are times given all the grey hairs that i ve been accumulating here over the last two years that i understand lincoln s joke but obviously being president is the most extraordinary privilege that anyone could have and with it comes such sober responsibilities that s particularly at a time of great national challenge all of you remember the wonderful spirit that existed in washington on that very cold january day when i was sworn in but i think we also have to remind ourselves that in the previous six months we had already lost three million jobs that the financial system had all but locked up and was on the verge of meltdown the month that i was sworn in we lost 750 000 jobs subsequently we lost 600 000 jobs in each month after that the stock market plunged the country had lost trillions of dollars worth of wealth and people were talking about us possibly tipping into a great depression and so we knew we had to act quickly and we did and as a consequence of the actions we took not all of which were popular at the time we were able to stabilize the financial system and get finance circulating again we were able to stabilize the economy stop just the complete bloodletting of jobs throughout the economy and whereas we were losing 750 000 jobs every single month we re now we have now seen private sector job growth for seven consecutive months where we were contracting at a rate of 6 percent per quarter we re now growing once again and so there is a sense that we are now moving in the right direction but understanding that we ve got to move a little faster we ve got to keep on going because there are a lot of people here in dallas there are a lot of people all across america who are struggling i see it every single time i pick up a letter from a constituent who s working hard has sent out resume after resume and yet just haven t gotten hired yet or the person who was laid off just on the verge of retirement and they re trying to figure out how can i ever possibly afford to retire what are we going to do because our we had saved for our child s college education but now we re on the verge of losing our house and we re having to make that horrible choice between our child s future and the needs of the present so we ve got some big challenges out there and the question we re going to have in this election is whether we re going to continue down a path of creating greater opportunity making that opportunity available to all people are we going to become more competitive in this 21st century economy or are we are going to go backwards to the exact same policies that got us into this mess in the first place and if you don t think that s what the choice is you haven t been paying attention to what the other side is offering for november i mean this is not a situation where the republicans having run the economy into the ground having taken record surpluses when bill clinton left office and turned them into record deficits this is not a situation where they ve done a bunch of reflection here they didn t go off into the desert and say to themselves boy we really screwed up you know i don t know exactly what we did wrong here but gosh things did not work out the way we expected let s come up with some new ideas for moving the country forward in how we re going to educate our kids and provide health care to all americans and make sure that we ve got the highest college graduation rates once again that research and development and innovation here in this country is on the move that s not what s happened they are not offering a single idea that is new all they are offering is retreads of what they ve offered before and so what they re counting on in this election is amnesia they re counting on you not remembering the disastrous consequences of economic policies that by the way had caused problems for working class families for middle class families before the recession hit before the crisis hit we had had almost a decade of sluggish growth sluggish job growth and incomes and wages that had flat lined even as the cost of health care the cost of college tuition the cost of energy had all skyrocketed and so they are not offering a single new idea they are counting on you forgetting that it was a consequence of these policies that got us into this mess in the first place you know i ve been using the analogy of the folks who drove the car into the ditch and so we decided you know what we re going to do the responsible thing we put on our boots we got into the mud we got into the ditch we pushed we shoved we re sweating they re standing on the sidelines sipping a slurpee sort of watching us saying well you re not pushing hard enough or your shoulder is not positioned the right way giving us a whole bunch of advice on how to push not lifting a finger to help and finally we get this car up back on the road again and finally we re ready to move forward again and these guys turn around and say give us the keys well no you can t have the keys back you don t know how to drive you don t know how to drive they don t know how to drive and i also want to point out by the way when you want to go forward in a car what do you do you put it in d when you want to go backwards you put it in r we cannot go backwards we ve got to move forwards that s what we re fighting for in this election moving forwards think about what we ve done over the last 20 months to move the country forward not only did we prevent another great depression not only did we stabilize the financial system but we have finally enshrined the idea that every american should be able to get health care that s affordable and nobody should be bankrupt when they get sick we ve done so by the way combining those reform efforts with the strongest patient bill of rights than we ve ever seen so that insurance companies can t drop your coverage can t deny you coverage because you ve got a preexisting condition making sure that young people are able to stay on their parents health insurance until they re 26 years old eliminating lifetime limits that were causing people great hardship and reducing costs so that the medicare trustees just last week said that as a consequence of health reform we have extended the life of medicare for another 12 years meaning this was one of the most important deficit reduction steps that we could have taken we have instituted a financial regulatory reform package that makes sure that we re not going to have taxpayers bailouts again at the same time making sure that you as consumers are not being taken advantage of so that credit card companies can t just raise your rates arbitrarily on existing balances or mortgage companies can t have hidden fees or mortgage brokers can t steer you into more expensive interest rates on your mortgage we have instituted housing reform we have instituted credit card reform we have made sure that tobacco companies can t market to our kids we have raised national mileage standards on cars and trucks the first time in 30 years so that we have the opportunity now to make sure that the clean energy cars of the future are made right here in the united states of america we have created wind turbine plants and solar plants all across america and are creating an advanced battery manufacturing industry in this country where we used to have 2 percent of that market we re going to have 40 percent of that market by 2015 in five years oh and by the way we ve also appointed two supreme court justices so that s what we ve got to offer and we re just getting started because we ve got more work to do the problem we ve got right now is we ve got folks on the other side of the aisle who have spent 20 months politicking while we ve spent those 20 months governing they ve been thinking about the next election instead of the next generation i mean think about it when the leader of the republicans on the house side was asked what s your idea for job creation he said repeal health care reform i don t know what jobs that would create except maybe for the guys who are paid to deny you claims when they asked them about wall street reform they said no we think actually the status quo is okay now think about this you have the worst financial crisis since the 1930s and they said no to reforming the system when we had a crisis down in the gulf unprecedented oil spill and i went down there and i met with fishermen and small business owners who were being devastated economically and were seeing their way of life potentially threatened and we made sure that bp was going to be accountable to those folks and put together a 20 billion fund to make sure they were getting paid off what happened the guy who would be in line to chair the energy committee on behalf of the republicans apologized to bp said we are sorry about the president shaking you down that s how he characterized our efforts to make sure that people were treated fairly after a big oil company wrecked their livelihood so across the board what you see is a governing philosophy on their part that basically comes down to we re going to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest among us folks who don t need those tax cuts and weren t even asking for them which would cost 700 billion these are the folks who say they re concerned about the deficit but are willing to spent 700 to those who are luckiest and least in need in our society their agenda is we re going to eliminate rules and regulations that rein in special interests and then we re going to cut the middle class loose say you re on your own you can t afford health care tough luck you re on your own you can t afford to send your kids to college tough luck you re on your own you can t afford to retire too bad you re on your own that is the philosophy that held sway in washington for eight years before i came in and that is what they want to go back to so i just want everybody here to understand very clearly this is a sharp and clear choice if you are interested in a clean energy future in which we continue to build our solar industry and wind power and biodiesel and natural gas and we are shaping a strategy to wean ourselves off our dependence on foreign oil then you better go out there and support those democratic members of congress because the other side is just going to say no to that if you are interested in ending tax cuts for companies that ship jobs overseas and instead want tax cuts to go to small businesses like the bill that we ve got right now in the senate that would eliminate capital gains for small businesses would be additional tax cuts on top of the eight tax cuts we ve already given to small businesses so far then you d better go out there and help some democratic candidates because the other side is not interested in helping folks who are starting things up they re interested in the special interests who can afford to hire lobbyist in washington if you re interested in things like equal pay for equal work because i ve got two daughters and i want to make sure they re treated just like any boys as they re coming up then you better make sure that you re working on behalf of these democratic candidates out here because we ve got a big job ahead of us i was just down in austin talking about education we have gone in a single generation from ranking number one in college graduates to ranking number 12 in this country we cannot compete if we lose our edge when it comes to having the best colleges and the best universities in the country but also the best trained workers which is why one of the things that we did didn t get a lot of notice over the last 20 months but one of the most important thing we did was we eliminated the middleman on the federal student loan program and obtained an additional 60 billion to provide student loans to millions of more young people all across america by the way the other side said no to that the other side wouldn t have anything to do with it they thought it was a bad idea so we re going to have choice after choice on every single issue that you care deeply about if you care about education if you care about health care if you care about civil rights and equal pay for equal work if you care about consumer protections if you care about jobs and growth in this economy if you care about building a new foundation so that we re not just going back to the same tired worn out theories that didn t work for the last decade but are instead instituting something that s going to work for the 21st century then we re going to need you to really step up and work hard in this election now that s hard to do at a time when people are feeling like boy this is a polarized electorate and it makes people dispirited all the yelling and the shouting and the cable chatter and the punditry and i ll be honest with you sometimes democrats we re our own worst enemies because we can do great stuff and somehow still feel depressed you know there s sometimes we do a little too much handwringing say well you know i don t know i wish we had gotten that public option well that s great but we got 31 million people health insurance and we re reducing costs for people and we are consumer protections when it comes to the health insurance industry we have had an extraordinary record of accomplishment over the last 20 months and we can continue those efforts but we re going to need you in this election season we ve got to have you talking to your friends we ve got to have you talking to your neighbors your coworkers we re going to need you to contribute to congressional candidates who are going to have very tough races out there and part of what s happened in this landscape is the supreme court those of you who don t think the supreme court matters their ruling in citizens united which said that corporations including potentially foreign corporations can go ahead and spend unlimited amounts without disclosing who they are during election season means that you re going to have a whole bunch of organizations like americans for prosperity spending millions of dollars trying to roll back reforms that we ve initiated and you won t even know who they are because right now the law says they don t have to disclose who they are now we re going to try to change that we ve got legislation in the senate and the house that says you know what the least we can do is on behalf of our democracy is to make sure that if somebody is spending millions of dollars to try to influence an election they ve got to disclose who they are that s the least we can do so the american people know who s out there making these arguments but the other side won t have any of that because they want help and support from those special interests and they don t want to face up to the consequences if the american people knew who was paying for these ads so we ve got some tough work ahead of us we ve got some headwinds because we re still working our way out of this hole we re going to have a lot of money on the other side they think that the american people have forgotten how badly they mismanaged this economy and the only way we are going to win is if all of you are engaged and informed and are out there engaging and informing other people but in the end i m confident you can do that remember when i started this fascinating journey not a lot of people knew who i was in fact nobody could pronounce my name but there were people all across america who had this basic sense that we had put off for too long some things that were holding this country back and who believed that there s nothing we can t accomplish when a group of citizens decide it s time to go out and about and bring about change that sense of fundamental optimism that sense that this country still has its best days ahead of it that belief that if we make sure that our young people get the educational opportunities they deserve if we are spurring innovation if we are making sure that we have a free market that works because it s got rules of the road that work for everybody and not just those who are well connected in washington that belief that america works best when it s inclusive and everybody has a shot at the american dream that s what propelled me into office that s what moved so many of you to get involved that s what we re going to have to rekindle over the next several months i m confident we can do it and when we do if you guys are working hard if you re making those phone calls and sending out those emails and doing what needs to be done i feel very optimistic not just about the next election but more importantly i feel optimistic about the next generation thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama10 9 09a barack_obama all righty hey guys thank you thank you thank you thank you so much it is good to be with all of you please sit down everybody it is just great to be with nurses again it is great to be with becky i want to acknowledge i want to make sure i get them in order nat this is linda and that is sonia right i got it right and i want to thank all of them for appearing with us today and i want to also acknowledge dr mary wakefield our health resources and services administrator our highest ranking nurse in the administration thank you becky for your leadership on behalf of nurses and i want to just thank you for leading an extraordinary organization the american nurses association i was mentioning to becky the first time we met that when i was in the state legislature i was the chairman of the health and human services committee and one of my strongest allies in springfield illinois in the state capital there was the nurses association and we did a lot of work together to make sure that nurses were getting treated properly were getting paid properly getting the overtime they needed getting time off that they needed getting the ratios that they needed and so i ve got a wonderful history working side by side with all of you to make sure that we ve got the best health care system in the world and as a consequence i want to say thank you for all the support you re providing for health insurance reform for the american people i am so pleased to be joined by all of you and i ve said it before and i will say it again i just love nurses i don t know what it is i love nurses michelle knows about it it s okay i ll never forget how compassionate how professional and how dedicated nurses have been to michelle and i when we needed them most and when our daughters were born one of our best friends was is an obgyn and she presided over the deliveries but the truth of the matter is we only saw her for 10 minutes that was it this was one of our best friends the rest of the time we spent with nurses who not only eased the nerves of an anxious father but made sure michelle was doing all right cared for our newborn babies when our youngest daughter sasha was diagnosed with meningitis when she was just three months old it was one of the scariest moments of my life and we had to have a spinal tap administered and she ended up being in the hospital for three or four days and it was touch and go we didn t know whether she d be permanently affected by it it was the nurses who walked us through what was happening and made sure that sasha was okay so that continues in joy of birth but also obviously in tougher times when my mother passed away from cancer when my grandmother passed away each time nurses were there to provide extraordinary care but also extraordinary support and so i m thankful for that and as a father and as a son and a grandson i will forever be in debt to the women and men of your profession and i know that millions of other families feel the same way you re the bedrock of our medical profession you re on the frontlines you re on the frontlines of health care in small clinics and in large hospitals in rural towns and big cities all across this country so few people understand as well as you why today s health care system so badly needs reform now one part of the problem is the uninsured and this morning the census bureau released new data showing not only that the poverty rate increased last year at the highest rate since the early 1990s but also that the number of uninsured rose in 2008 and we know from more up to date surveys that since the recession intensified last september the situation has grown worse over the last 12 months it s estimated that the ranks of the uninsured have swelled by nearly 6 million people that s 17 000 men and women every single day and we know that during this period of time the number of adults who get their coverage at the workplace has dropped by 8 million people but i don t have to tell you about all the problems plaguing the health care system and the fact that they don t just affect the uninsured most americans do have insurance and have never had less security and stability than they do right now because they re subject to the whims of health insurance companies many people fear that they ll lose their health insurance if they move or if they lose their job they change jobs or that insurance just won t cover them when they need it the most because insurance companies can deny coverage if a person has a preexisting condition many people fear they won t be covered when they get sick because there s no cap on how much a person can pay in out of pocket expenses each year many others fear that a single illness will lead them into financial ruin even if they have insurance and i every day i get letters from people i just got a letter two days ago from a woman who had been changing jobs had just gone to sign up for her new blue cross blue shield policy but in january before she had taken her new job she had felt a lump and had been referred to do a mammogram and found out unfortunately she had breast cancer well the new insurance policy just said this is a preexisting condition won t cover it she now owes 250 000 this happens all the time all across the country you see it every day it is heartbreaking it is wrong and as i said last night nobody should be treated that way in the united states of america nobody so the reason i need nurses so badly is because now is the time to act and i will not permit reform to be postponed or imperiled by the usual ideological diversions or we don t need more partisan distractions if there are real concerns about any aspect of my plan let s address them if there are real differences let s resolve them but we have talked this issue to death year after year decade after decade and the time for talk is winding down the time for bickering has passed we re not the first generation to take up this cause but we can and have to be the last so just in case folks weren t tuned in last night if they were watching so you think you can dance a show michelle likes by the way let me explain just explain more briefly than i did last night what health insurance reform will mean for ordinary americans simply put it will mean that as folks go about their everyday lives one thing they won t have to worry about as much is their health care it will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance it will provide insurance to those who don t and slow the growth of health care costs for our families our businesses and our government now for the hundreds of millions of americans who have health insurance nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have nothing will change for you if you have insurance nothing in the plan will require any changes what this plan will do is make the insurance you have work better for you will put in place strong consumer protections that will make it illegal for insurance companies to deny a person coverage on the basis of a preexisting condition we will make sure we will make sure that we place a limit on how much folks have to pay for out of pocket expenses for the tens of millions of americans who are uninsured we ll create a new insurance exchange a marketplace where uninsured americans and small businesses can choose health insurance at competitive prices from a different a number of different options and by pooling the uninsured and small businesses together as one big group we give insurance companies an incentive to participate and give consumers leverage to bargain for better prices and quality coverage and as i ve said from the outset and repeated last night one way to give people a real choice when it comes to their health care and keep insurance companies honest is by making one of the options available in such a marketplace a non for profit public option but let me just repeat because this is the source of the rumor that we re plotting some government takeover of health care it would just be one option among many no one would be forced to choose it and everybody believes that the vast majority of people will still be getting their insurance through private insurance add it all up and the plan i m proposing will cost around 900 billion over 10 years 90 billion a year that s real money but it s far less than we ve spent on the iraq and afghanistan wars and it s less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few americans that congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration the cost of this plan will not add to our deficit the middle class will be rewarded with greater security not higher taxes and if we re able to slow the growth of health care costs by just a fraction of 1 percent each year we will actually reduce the deficit by 4 trillion over the long term and by the way when we stop spending money on things that don t improve quality then we can start spending money on things that do improve quality which means for example that we can start paying our nursing professors more money to train more nurses so that we can actually have the kind of quality care that we need just one example a random example that i chose now amid all the chatter and the noise on radio and tv with all the falsehoods that are promoted by not just talk show hosts but sometimes prominent politicians sometimes it can be easy to lose sight of what the debate over reform is all about it s about stories like the one told by an oncology nurse named theresa brown a few weeks ago theresa wrote a blog post about a patient of hers he was in his 60s a recent grandfather a steelers fan spent the last three months of his life worrying about mounting medical bills and she wrote my patient thought he had planned well for his health care needs he just never thought he would wake up one day with a diagnosis of leukemia but which of us does she asked and then she wrote that s why we need health care reform nurses that s why we need health care reform i am absolutely confident that if you continue to do your part nurses you guys have a lot of credibility you touch a lot of people s lives people trust you if you re out there saying it s time for us to act we need to go ahead and make a change if all of us do our parts not just here in washington but all across the country then we will bid farewell to the days when our health care system was a source of worry to families and a drag on our economy and america will finally join the ranks of every other advanced nation by providing quality affordable health insurance to all of its citizens that s our goal we are going to meet it this year with your help thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama10 9 09b barack_obama thank you thank you please everybody have a seat first of all i m sorry to keep you guys waiting i have all these things i ve got to do as president this is by far the most fun thing that i m doing today so welcome to the white house we are extraordinarily pleased to have the world champion pittsburgh penguins with their third stanley cup just a couple of acknowledgements in the house pittsburgh mayor luke ravenstahl where s luke where s the mayor i thought he was around here well he should be senator bob casey is he around come on bob casey senator arlen specter in the house representative mike doyle i know he s a fan representative jason altmire representative chris carney representative tim murphy and representative glenn thompson and even though he s from iowa this guy grew up in pittsburgh is still a fanatic and that is secretary tom vilsack agricultural secretary i have to say all of you look pretty good without your playoff beards they re pretty good looking guys without all that i want to congratulate all the fans back home who made mellon arena such a tough place for visiting teams this year with the steelers and the penguins i guess it s a good time to be a sports fan in pittsburgh i was complaining about this it s been a while since chicago won anything coach and i m not happy about that but as many of you know i have a special place in my heart for pittsburgh and so if it can t be the blackhawks then the penguins aren t a bad choice the last time this team was here was during the playoffs against the washington capitals it was a hard fought series but it showed everybody how enthusiastic our hockey fans are also here in the nation s capital i want to thank coach dan for being here not only did dan win the stanley cup in his first season as head coach that does not happen very often but he also brought a new sense of purpose and excitement to the team and made sure his players had a little fun along the way having mario lemieux here is a pretty big deal he won a couple of these trophies as a player but this is his first as an owner and he s still got a big smile on his face so i guess it feels pretty good this way too i want to thank willie o ree for joining us willie is a hockey pioneer in his own right who has worked tirelessly to make sure kids from every background can learn the lessons that hockey has to offer so we are grateful to you sir please give him a big round of applause and this team would not be here without two of its youngest members so first of all i want to congratulate sidney crosby on becoming the youngest captain in history to win the stanley cup and evgeni malkin for being the third youngest player ever to be named playoff mvp you know we ve had a lot of championship teams visit the white house i ve seen a lot of trophies there is something special about the stanley cup other than it just being really big winning this trophy takes a whole new level of sacrifice it takes a group of players who can persevere through injuries and pain and setbacks and seven game series above all it takes a team that is willing to stick together because nobody wins the stanley cup on their own and that s why after the last buzzer sounded back in june these players took the cup on the road to say thank you to all the people who helped get them here they took it on fishing trips and stopped by neighborhood barbeques they visited elementary schools and brightened the days of children recovering in the hospital i think this cup has even held a baby or two so this is a team that understands that being a champion doesn t end when you step off the ice service is a way of life for these players back in pittsburgh earlier today willie and the guys put on a clinic for kids here at fort dupont as part of our united we serve summer of service and besides teaching the kids a few moves they stressed the importance of staying in school and leading active and healthy lifestyles i understand we ve got some of those young players from washington d c and pittsburgh here with us go ahead and wave guys there you go that s what the stanley cup is all about not just having your names engraved alongside the best players in history but also giving back to others along the way and this spirit of service helps to strengthen our communities it strengthens our country and i know this team gets a lot in return for it as well so i want to again just say congratulations for your outstanding season for not just your athleticism but also your sportsmanship coach we ve very proud of you thank you very much this is what i m talking about can i just make one more point sidney must be really fast because there are some big hockey players and he s not one of them but you know he s got some speed and some skill thank you everybody we are thrilled can we get a picture with the cup in the background here dem bobama11 10 09 barack_obama thank you everybody please you re making me blush i love you back to joe solmonese who s doing an outstanding job on behalf of hrc to my great friend and supporter terry bean co founder of hrc representative patrick kennedy david huebner the ambassador designee to new zealand and samoa john berry our director of opm who s doing a great job nancy sutley chairman of council on environmental quality fred hochberg chairman of export import bank and my dear friend tipper gore who s in the house thank you so much all of you it is a privilege to be here tonight to open for lady gaga i ve made it i want to thank the human rights campaign for inviting me to speak and for the work you do every day in pursuit of equality on behalf of the millions of people in this country who work hard in their jobs and care deeply about their families and who are gay lesbian bisexual or transgender for nearly 30 years you ve advocated on behalf of those without a voice that s not easy for despite the real gains that we ve made there s still laws to change and there s still hearts to open there are still fellow citizens perhaps neighbors even loved ones good and decent people who hold fast to outworn arguments and old attitudes who fail to see your families like their families who would deny you the rights most americans take for granted and that s painful and it s heartbreaking and yet you continue leading by the force of the arguments you make and by the power of the example that you set in your own lives as parents and friends as pta members and church members as advocates and leaders in your communities and you re making a difference that s the story of the movement for fairness and equality and not just for those who are gay but for all those in our history who ve been denied the rights and responsibilities of citizenship for all who ve been told that the full blessings and opportunities of this country were closed to them it s the story of progress sought by those with little influence or power by men and women who brought about change through quiet personal acts of compassion and defiance wherever and whenever they could it s the story of the stonewall protests when a group of citizens when a group of citizens with few options and fewer supporters stood up against discrimination and helped to inspire a movement it s the story of an epidemic that decimated a community and the gay men and women who came to support one another and save one another who continue to fight this scourge and who have demonstrated before the world that different kinds of families can show the same compassion in a time of need and it s the story of the human rights campaign and the fights you ve fought for nearly 30 years helping to elect candidates who share your values standing against those who would enshrine discrimination into our constitution advocating on behalf of those living with hiv aids and fighting for progress in our capital and across america this story this fight continue now and i m here with a simple message i m here with you in that fight for even as we face extraordinary challenges as a nation we cannot and we will not put aside issues of basic equality i greatly appreciate the support i ve received from many in this room i also appreciate that many of you don t believe progress has come fast enough i want to be honest about that because it s important to be honest among friends now i ve said this before i ll repeat it again it s not for me to tell you to be patient any more than it was for others to counsel patience to african americans petitioning for equal rights half a century ago but i will say this we have made progress and we will make more and i think it s important to remember that there is not a single issue that my administration deals with on a daily basis that does not touch on the lives of the lgbt community we all have a stake in reviving this economy we all have a stake in putting people back to work we all have a stake in improving our schools and achieving quality affordable health care we all have a stake in meeting the difficult challenges we face in iraq and afghanistan for while some may wish to define you solely by your sexual orientation or gender identity alone you know and i know that none of us wants to be defined by just one part of what makes us whole you re also parents worried about your children s futures you re spouses who fear that you or the person you love will lose a job you re workers worried about the rising cost of health insurance you re soldiers you are neighbors you are friends and most importantly you are americans who care deeply about this country and its future so i know you want me working on jobs and the economy and all the other issues that we re dealing with but my commitment to you is unwavering even as we wrestle with these enormous problems and while progress may be taking longer than you d like as a result of all that we face and that s the truth do not doubt the direction we are heading and the destination we will reach my expectation is that when you look back on these years you will see a time in which we put a stop to discrimination against gays and lesbians whether in the office or on the battlefield you will see a time in which we as a nation finally recognize relationships between two men or two women as just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman you will see a nation that s valuing and cherishing these families as we build a more perfect union a union in which gay americans are an important part i am committed to these goals and my administration will continue fighting to achieve them and there s no more poignant or painful reminder of how important it is that we do so than the loss experienced by dennis and judy shepard whose son matthew was stolen in a terrible act of violence 11 years ago in may i met with judy who s here tonight with her husband i met her in the oval office and i promised her that we were going to pass an inclusive hate crimes bill a bill named for her son this struggle has been long time and again we faced opposition time and again the measure was defeated or delayed but the shepards never gave up they turned tragedy into an unshakeable commitment countless activists and organizers never gave up you held vigils you spoke out year after year congress after congress the house passed the bill again this week and i can announce that after more than a decade this bill is set to pass and i will sign it into law it s a testament to the decade long struggle of judy and dennis who tonight will receive a tribute named for somebody who inspired so many of us named for senator ted kennedy who fought tirelessly for this legislation and it s a testament to the human rights campaign and those who organized and advocated and it s a testament to matthew and to others who ve been the victims of attacks not just meant to break bones but to break spirits not meant just to inflict harm but to instill fear together we will have moved closer to that day when no one has to be afraid to be gay in america when no one has to fear walking down the street holding the hand of the person they love but we know there s far more work to do we re pushing hard to pass an inclusive employee non discrimination bill for the first time ever an administration official testified in congress in favor of this law nobody in america should be fired because they re gay despite doing a great job and meeting their responsibilities it s not fair it s not right we re going to put a stop to it and it s for this reason that if any of my nominees are attacked not for what they believe but for who they are i will not waver in my support because i will not waver in my commitment to ending discrimination in all its forms we are reinvigorating our response to hiv aids here at home and around the world we re working closely with the congress to renew the ryan white program and i look forward to signing it into law in the very near future we are rescinding the discriminatory ban on entry to the united states based on hiv status the regulatory process to enact this important change is already underway and we also know that hiv aids continues to be a public health threat in many communities including right here in the district of columbia jeffrey crowley the director of the office of national aids policy recently held a forum in washington d c and is holding forums across the country to seek input as we craft a national strategy to address this crisis we are moving ahead on don t ask don t tell we should not be punishing patriotic americans who have stepped forward to serve this country we should be celebrating their willingness to show such courage and selflessness on behalf of their fellow citizens especially when we re fighting two wars we cannot afford to cut from our ranks people with the critical skills we need to fight any more than we can afford for our military s integrity to force those willing to do so into careers encumbered and compromised by having to live a lie so i m working with the pentagon its leadership and the members of the house and senate on ending this policy legislation has been introduced in the house to make this happen i will end don t ask don t tell that s my commitment to you it is no secret that issues of great concern to gays and lesbians are ones that raise a great deal of emotion in this country and it s no secret that progress has been incredibly difficult we can see that with the time and dedication it took to pass hate crimes legislation but these issues also go to the heart of who we are as a people are we a nation that can transcend old attitudes and worn divides can we embrace our differences and look to the hopes and dreams that we share will we uphold the ideals on which this nation was founded that all of us are equal that all of us deserve the same opportunity to live our lives freely and pursue our chance at happiness i believe we can i believe we will and that is why that s why i support ensuring that committed gay couples have the same rights and responsibilities afforded to any married couple in this country i believe strongly in stopping laws designed to take rights away and passing laws that extend equal rights to gay couples i ve required all agencies in the federal government to extend as many federal benefits as possible to lgbt families as the current law allows and i ve called on congress to repeal the so called defense of marriage act and to pass the domestic partners benefits and obligations act and we must all stand together against divisive and deceptive efforts to feed people s lingering fears for political and ideological gain for the struggle waged by the human rights campaign is about more than any policy we can enshrine into law it s about our capacity to love and commit to one another it s about whether or not we value as a society that love and commitment it s about our common humanity and our willingness to walk in someone else s shoes to imagine losing a job not because of your performance at work but because of your relationship at home to imagine worrying about a spouse in the hospital with the added fear that you ll have to produce a legal document just to comfort the person you love to imagine the pain of losing a partner of decades and then discovering that the law treats you like a stranger if we are honest with ourselves we ll admit that there are too many who do not yet know in their lives or feel in their hearts the urgency of this struggle that s why i continue to speak about the importance of equality for lgbt families and not just in front of gay audiences that s why michelle and i have invited lgbt families to the white house to participate in events like the easter egg roll because we want to send a message and that s why it s so important that you continue to speak out that you continue to set an example that you continue to pressure leaders including me and to make the case all across america so tonight i m hopeful because of the activism i see in this room because of the compassion i ve seen all across america and because of the progress we have made throughout our history including the history of the movement for lgbt equality soon after the protests at stonewall 40 years ago the phone rang in the home of a soft spoken elementary school teacher named jeanne manford it was 1 00 in the morning and it was the police now her son morty had been at the stonewall the night of the raids ever since he had felt within him a new sense of purpose so when the officer told jeanne that her son had been arrested which was happening often to gay protesters she was not entirely caught off guard and then the officer added one more thing and you know he s homosexual well that police officer sure was surprised when jeanne responded yes i know why are you bothering him and not long after jeanne would be marching side by side with her son through the streets of new york she carried a sign that stated her support people cheered young men and women ran up to her kissed her and asked her to talk to their parents and this gave jeanne and morty an idea and so after that march on the anniversary of the stonewall protests amidst the violence and the vitriol of a difficult time for our nation jeanne and her husband jules two parents who loved their son deeply formed a group to support other parents and in turn to support their children as well at the first meeting jeanne held in 1973 about 20 people showed up but slowly interest grew morty s life tragically was cut short by aids but the cause endured today the organization they founded for parents families and friends of lesbians and gays has more than 200 000 members and supporters and has made a difference for countless families across america and jeanne would later say i considered myself such a traditional person i didn t even cross the street against the light but i wasn t going to let anybody walk over morty that s the story of america of ordinary citizens organizing agitating and advocating for change of hope stronger than hate of love more powerful than any insult or injury of americans fighting to build for themselves and their families a nation in which no one is a second class citizen in which no one is denied their basic rights in which all of us are free to live and love as we see fit tonight somewhere in america a young person let s say a young man will struggle to fall to sleep wrestling alone with a secret he s held as long as he can remember soon perhaps he will decide it s time to let that secret out what happens next depends on him his family as well as his friends and his teachers and his community but it also depends on us on the kind of society we engender the kind of future we build i believe the future is bright for that young person for while there will be setbacks and bumps along the road the truth is that our common ideals are a force far stronger than any division that some might sow these ideals when voiced by generations of citizens are what made it possible for me to stand here today these ideals are what made it possible for the people in this room to live freely and openly when for most of history that would have been inconceivable that s the promise of america hrc that s the promise we re called to fulfill day by day law by law changing mind by mind that is the promise we are fulfilling thank you for the work you re doing god bless you god bless america dem bobama11 2 09 barack_obama thank you so much thank you please everybody have a seat i will be brief though i promise what a spectacular evening michelle and i are so pleased to be here to rededicate this hallowed space we know that ford s theatre will remain a place where lincoln s legacy thrives where his love of the humanities and belief in the power of education have a home and where his generosity of spirit are reflected in all the work that takes place this has been an extraordinarily fitting tribute to abraham lincoln that we ve seen and heard from some of our most celebrated icons of stage and of screen because lincoln himself was a great admirer of the arts it s said he could even quote portions of hamlet and macbeth by heart as we ve seen here this evening and so i somehow think this event captured an essential part of the man whose life we celebrate tonight as commemorations take place across this country on the bicentennial of our 16th president s birth there will be reflections on all he was and all he did for this nation that he served but while there are any number of moments that reveal the exceptional nature of this singular figure there is one in particular that i want to share with you not far from here stands our nation s capitol a landmark familiar to us all but one that looked very different in lincoln s time for it remained unfinished until the end of the war the laborers who built the dome came to work wondering whether each day would be their last whether the metal they were using for its frame would be requisitioned for the war and melted down into bullets but each day went by without any orders to halt construction so they kept on working and they kept on building when president lincoln was finally told of all the metal being used at the capitol his response was short and clear that is as it should be the american people needed to be reminded he believed that even in a time of war the work would go on that even when the nation itself was in doubt the future was being secured and that on that distant day when the guns fell silent a national capitol would stand with a statue of freedom at its peak as a symbol of unity in the land still mending its divisions it is this sense of unity that is so much a part of lincoln s legacy for despite all that divided us north and south black and white he had an unyielding belief that we were at heart one nation and one people and because of abraham lincoln and all who ve carried on his work in the generations since that is what we remain today and it is for that reason that we are able to gather here this evening thank you all of you for a spectacular evening thank you for those who helped to rededicate this theatre thank you for those who are serving this nation i m very grateful to all of you good night dem bobama11 3 09 barack_obama thank you so much well today as we continue our celebration of international women s history month i m proud to sign this executive order establishing the women s the white house council on women and girls it s a council with a mission that dates back to our founding to fulfill the promise of our democracy for all our people i sign this order not just as a president but as a son a grandson a husband and a father because growing up i saw my mother put herself through school and follow her passion for helping others but i also saw how she struggled to raise me and my sister on her own worrying about how she d pay the bills and educate herself and provide for us i saw my grandmother work her way up to become one of the first women bank vice presidents in the state of hawaii but i also saw how she hit a glass ceiling how men no more qualified than she was kept moving up the corporate ladder ahead of her i ve seen michelle the rock of the obama family juggling work and parenting with more skill and grace than anybody that i know but i also saw how it tore at her at times how sometimes when she was with the girls she was worrying about work and when she was at work she was worrying about the girls it s a feeling that i share every day in so many ways the stories of the women in my life reflect the broader story of women in this country a story of both unyielding progress and also untapped potential today women make up a growing share of our workforce and the majority of students in our colleges and our law schools women are breaking barriers in every field from science and business to athletics and the armed forces women are serving at the highest levels of my administration and we have madam speaker presiding over our house of representatives i had the privilege of participating in a historic campaign with a historic candidate who we now have the privilege of calling madam secretary but at the same time when women still earn just 78 cents for every dollar men make when one in four women still experiences domestic violence in their lifetimes when women are more than half of our population but just 17 percent of our congress when women are 49 percent of the workforce but only 3 percent of our fortune 500 ceos when these inequalities stubbornly persist in this country in this century then i think we need to ask ourselves some hard questions i think we need to take a hard look at where we re falling short and who we re leaving out and what that means for the prosperity and the vitality of our nation and i want to be very clear these issues are not just women s issues when women make less than men for the same work it hurts families who find themselves with less income and have to work harder just to get by when a job doesn t offer family leave that also hurts men who want to help care for a new baby or an ailing parent when there s no affordable child care that hurts children who wind up in second rate care or spending afternoons alone in front of the television set and when any of our citizens cannot fulfill their potential because of factors that have nothing to do with their talent their character their work ethic that says something about the state of our democracy it says something about whether we re honoring those words put on paper more than two centuries ago whether we re doing our part like generations before us to breathe new life into them in our time that above all is the true purpose of our government not to guarantee our success but to ensure that in america all things are still possible for all people not to solve all our problems but to ensure that we all have the chance to pursue our own version of happiness to give our daughters the chance to achieve as greatly as the women who join us today that s the impact our government can have it s the impact of a health and human services department that funds research by women like dr nina fedoroff a biotechnology and life science pioneer who won the national medal of science in 2006 it s the impact of a defense department that works to recruit and promote women women so that women like sergeant major michele jones who was the army s highest ranking enlisted woman before she retired can strengthen our military with their leadership it s the impact of a department of education that enforces title ix so athletes like so athletes like olympic gold medalist dominique dawes and lisa leslie have a level playing field to compete and to win it s the impact of a white house and a congress that fight for legislation like the lilly ledbetter fair pay restoration act so that all women can get paid what they deserve i m very proud this was the very first bill that i signed into law and that s why i m establishing this council not just to continue efforts like these but to enhance them the council will be composed of the heads of every cabinet and cabinet level agency and will meet on a regular basis we have many of those cabinet members here some of the men showed up we put them in the second row but they re going to be fighting they re going to be part of this council and it s going to meet on a regular basis its purpose is very simple to ensure that each of the agencies in which they re charged takes into account the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft the programs they create the legislation they support it s not enough to only have individual women s offices at individual agencies or only have one office in the white house rather as former secretary of state madeleine albright once said in our government responsibility for the advancement of women is not the job of any one agency it s the job of all of them and she should know she helped lead an interagency women s initiative during the clinton administration at the same time given the critical importance of its work this council must have strong leadership from the white house and direct accountability to me and that s why i m appointing valerie jarrett one of my closest advisors and most senior members of my administration to lead it tina tchen another senior member of my white house staff will serve as the council s executive director in the end while many of the challenges women and girls face are new the work of this council is not it s been with us for generations frances perkins who was president franklin roosevelt s secretary of labor and the first woman to serve in the cabinet a great hero of the new deal described it well when she said i had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered and so establish the rights of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats to sit in the high seats that is why i m standing here today because of what my mother and grandmother did for me because of their hard work and sacrifice and unflagging love that s what michelle is doing right now thinking every day about making sure that malia and sasha have the same opportunities as anybody s sons do that s why so many of us are here today because of the women who came before us who were determined to see us sit in the high seats women who reached for the ballot and raised families and traveled long lonely roads to be the first in the boardroom or in the courtroom or on the battlefield and in the factory floor women who cracked and shattered those glass ceilings so that my daughters and all of our sons and daughters could dream a little bigger and reach a little higher so now it s up to us to carry that work forward to ensure that our daughters and granddaughters have no limits on their dreams no obstacles to their achievements and that they have opportunities their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers never dreamed of that s the purpose of this council those are the priorities of my presidency and i look forward to working with all of you to fulfill them in the months and years to come all right so i m going to go sign this thing thank you very much dem bobama11 3 10 barack_obama thank you everybody and thank you john for that generous introduction congratulations to you and fabienne and luis for the recognition your companies so richly deserve and thank you to the chairman of the export import bank fred hochberg for having me here today and for all the important work the ex im bank is doing to help american businesses sell their ideas to the world i also want to recognize the secretary general of the oecd angel gurra for his leadership at that institution let me also acknowledge some members of my economic team who are here today my commerce secretary gary locke who s just returned from a trip to brazil where are you gary there he is right here our u s trade representative ambassador ron kirk who s been putting in a lot of miles they are both doing a great job in the work of moving this country forward in tough times now it has been our most pressing priority over the first year of my administration to deal with an unprecedented economic crisis one that has been as serious as anything since the great depression to do that required difficult and sometimes unpopular steps to rescue our financial system and to jumpstart an economic recovery but we took those steps and because we did we can stand here just over a year later and say that we prevented another depression we broke the back of the recession and the economy that was shrinking a year ago is growing today what s also clear is that we ve got a long way to go more than 8 million americans have lost their jobs since the start of the recession millions more remain underemployed including those doing part time work or odd jobs and the middle class across this country has felt their economic security eroding for longer than they care to remember that s why we continue to do everything we can to foster private sector job creation and to restore some sense of security but the fact is if we want to once again approach full employment if we want to create broad shared and lasting wealth for our workers and our families if we want an america that is ready to compete on the global playing field in the 21st century then we can t slide back into an economy where we borrow too much and put off tough challenges we can t return to an economy where too much of our prosperity is based on fleeting bubbles and rampant speculation we have to rebuild our economy on a new stronger more balanced foundation for the future a foundation that will advance the american people s prosperity at home and support american leadership in the world and that s precisely what we ve begun to do we re catalyzing a new clean energy industry that has the potential to employ millions of workers in good jobs we re investing in the skills and education of our workers and reforming our education system with a goal to once again lead the world in the proportion of college graduates by the end of this decade we re building a better health care system that works for our people our businesses and our government alike we re establishing clear common sense rules of the road for wall street that encourage innovation and creativity instead of recklessness and irresponsibility rules that prevent firms from taking risks that threaten to bring down the entire economy and we are rebuilding an economy where we generate more american jobs in more american industries by producing and exporting more goods and services to other nations now in my state of the union address i set a goal of doubling america s exports over the next five years an increase that will support 2 million american jobs and i ve come to the export import bank conference today to discuss the initial steps that we re taking to achieve that goal i know the issue of exports and imports the issue of trade and globalization have long evoked the passions of a lot of people in this country i know there are differences of opinion between democrats and republicans between business and labor about the right approach but i also know we are at a moment where it is absolutely necessary for us to get beyond those old debates those who would once support every free trade agreement now see that other countries have to play fair and the agreements have to be enforced otherwise we re putting america at a profound disadvantage those who once would once oppose any trade agreement now understand that there are new markets and new sectors out there that we need to break into if we want our workers to get ahead and meanwhile if you ask the average american what trade has offered them they won t say that their televisions are cheaper or productivity is higher they d say they ve seen the plant across town shut down jobs dry up communities deteriorate and you can t blame them for feeling that way the fact is other countries haven t always played by the same set of rules america hasn t always enforced our trade rights or made sure that the benefits of trade are broadly shared and we haven t always done enough to help our workers adapt to a changing world now there s no question that as we compete in the global marketplace we ve got to look out for our workers but to look out for our workers we ve got to be able to compete in the global marketplace it s never been as important an opportunity for america as it is right now in a time when millions of americans are out of work boosting our exports is a short term imperative our exports support millions of american jobs you know this well in 2008 we exported more than 1 trillion of manufactured goods supporting more than one in five manufacturing jobs and those jobs by the way pay about 15 percent more than average we led the world in service exports which support 2 8 million jobs we exported nearly 100 billion in agricultural goods and every 1 billion increase in exports supports more than 6 000 additional jobs so it s critical in the short term but it s also critical for our long term prosperity ninety five percent of the world s customers and the world s fastest growing markets are outside our borders we need to compete for those customers because other nations are competing for them they re investing in the skills and education of their people they re investing in the high demand industries of the future they ve benefited from american consumers they ve made themselves into export based economies and positioned themselves for the jobs of the future they re pursuing trade agreements with growing markets and those agreements would give their companies access to those markets and put our workers and businesses at a disadvantage so if we stand on the sidelines while they go after those customers we ll lose out on the chance to create the good jobs our workers need right here at home that s why standing on the sidelines is not what we intend to do we need to remind ourselves we still have the most innovative economy in the world we still have the most productive workers in the world we have the finest universities in the world we have the most dynamic and competitive markets in the world we remain the number one exporter of goods and services in the world so we ve got a terrific foundation to build on but we can t be satisfied with being number one right now we shouldn t assume that our leadership is guaranteed when other markets are growing and other nations are competing we ve got to get even better we need to secure our companies a level playing field we need to guarantee american workers a fair shake in other words we need to up our game and that s why for the first time the united states of america is launching a single comprehensive strategy to promote american exports it s called the national export initiative and it s an ambitious effort to marshal the full resources of the united states government behind american businesses that sell their goods and services abroad this morning i signed an executive order instructing the federal government to use every available federal resource in support of that mission that order has created an export promotion cabinet made up of the secretaries of state treasury agriculture commerce and labor along with our ustr our small business administrator the export import bank president and other senior u s officials whose work impacts exports that cabinet will convene its first meeting next month i ve also re launched the president s export council the principal national advisory committee on international trade and i named jim mcnerney the president and ceo of boeing as its chair with ursula burns the ceo of xerox as vice chair and i look forward to their recommendations let me talk a little bit about what the national export initiative will do first we will substantially increase access to trade financing for businesses that want to export their goods but just need a boost especially small businesses and medium sized businesses some of the biggest factors limiting a firm s decisions to export are the high upfront costs of establishing a foothold in a new market and the ability of the customers in that market to finance the purchase of their products so during the financial crisis as trade finance dried up the export import bank lived up to its mission and stepped up to fill the void in fiscal year 2009 as part of a broader effort of g20 nations to mobilize trade financing worldwide this institution authorized 21 billion in loans in support of american exports that s an increase of nearly 50 percent over the previous year so i applaud fred s efforts to increase that pace with the authorization of about 10 billion more in the first quarter of this year alone and under the national export initiative we ll continue to increase the amount of trade financing ex im offers including a new 2 billion per year effort to increase support for our small and medium sized businesses but another obstacle that our exporters face is that the federal government frankly just hasn t done a good enough job advocating for them abroad at least compared to the advocacy that other countries are engaging in and that s why as the second part of the national export initiative the united states of america will go to bat for our businesses and our workers as an example last week i signed the travel promotion act a law that will establish active promotion and marketing efforts to encourage foreign citizens to come visit the most dynamic cities the most entertaining destinations and the most beautiful natural resources in the world well that same principle applies for all of our businesses we ve got some of the most innovative companies in the world and we should be advocating on their behalf to boost local economies and create jobs here this is an effort i will personally lead as president next week i ll take my second trip to the asia pacific a region that will be fundamental to america s ability to create jobs and to thrive in the 21st century we can t be on the sidelines we have to lead and our engagement has to extend to governments and businesses and peoples across the pacific so while i m there i ll visit indonesia and australia two vibrant economies and democracies that will be critical partners for the united states and in both countries i ll highlight the role that american businesses play there and underscore how strong economic partnerships can create jobs on both sides of the pacific while advancing both regional and global prosperity going forward i will be a strong and steady advocate for our workers and our companies abroad and this effort will extend throughout my administration secretary locke is issuing guidance to all senior government officials who have foreign counterparts on how they can best promote our exports secretary clinton is mobilizing a commercial diplomacy strategy directing every one of our embassies to create a senior visitors business liaison who will manage our export advocacy efforts locally and when our ambassadors return stateside we ll ask them to travel the united states to discuss export opportunities in their countries of assignment we re also announcing more than 40 trade and reverse trade missions that are scheduled for this year the department of commerce for example has sent a trade mission to india this week secretary vilsack is off to japan on april 15th so advocacy is going to be critical third we ll unleash a battery of comprehensive and coordinated efforts to promote new markets and new opportunities for american exporters many businesses want to export their products but just don t have the resources required to identify new markets or set up shop overseas and that s where we can help we ll bring together the ex im bank the sba the departments of commerce and agriculture and the trade development agency to set up one stop shops across the country and in our 250 embassies and consulates abroad to help american businesses gain a foothold in the fastest growing markets with the most demand and we ll provide a comprehensive toolkit of services from financing to counseling to promotion to help potential exporters grow and expand we ll create public private partnerships to help firms break into new markets with the help of those who have been there shipping and supply chain companies for example and we ll increase funding for existing promotion efforts we ll increase funding for the international trade administration at the department of commerce and strengthen the usda s ability to connect farmers with new overseas markets so we re going to increase financing advocacy and assistance for american businesses to locate set up shop and win new markets those are the first three aims of the national export initiative the fourth focuses on making sure american companies have free and fair access to those markets and that begins by enforcing trade agreements we already have on the books when i ran for president i promised that when the united states of america puts its name to an agreement that agreement will be as good for workers as it is for businesses including strong labor and environmental protections that we ll enforce my administration is living up to that promise ambassador kirk has been doing an extraordinary job as our united states trade representative and he s been working to knock down barriers that unfairly keep american companies from markets we belong in hold our trade partners to their labor and environmental obligations and crack down on practices that blatantly harm our companies but keep in mind the united states offers some of the world s lowest barriers to trade that s why we can often get more out of a trade deal because our borders are largely already open and when we give other countries the privilege of that free and fair access we can expect it in return that s the spirit in which we ll move forward so we re going to continue to work towards an ambitious and a balanced doha agreement not just for the sake of any agreement but for one that enhances market access for american agriculture and goods and services we re going to strengthen relations with key partners specifically south korea panama colombia with the goal of moving forward with existing agreements in a way that upholds our values and we will pursue negotiations in the trans pacific partnership that we launched last year with some of the most dynamic economies in asia negotiations that i believe will result in a new standard for 21st century trade agreements that aren t just good for workers businesses and farmers but also consistent with our most cherished values what s more we re going to aggressively protect our intellectual property our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the american people it is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century but it s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor there s nothing wrong with other people using our technologies we welcome it we just want to make sure that it s licensed and that american businesses are getting paid appropriately that s why ustr is using the full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses and that includes negotiating proper protections and enforcing our existing agreements and moving forward on new agreements including the proposed anti counterfeiting trade agreement we ll also work within the g20 to continue global recovery and growth last year when the g20 met to coordinate the international response to our global economic crisis we agreed that in order for that growth to continue we needed to rebalance our economies for too long america served as the consumer engine for the entire world but we re rebalancing we are now saving more and that means that everybody has got to rebalance countries with external deficits need to save and export more countries with external surpluses need to boost consumption and domestic demand and as i ve said before china moving to a more market oriented exchange rate will make an essential contribution to that global rebalancing effort i want to commend secretary tim geithner for his extraordinary work and his tremendous leadership throughout this past year within the g20 and i know he ll keep encouraging other nations to rebalance global demand and those are efforts that will be good for our exports good for our job growth good for the world economy as a whole finally we re working to reform our export control system for our strategic high tech industries which will strengthen our national security what we want to do is concentrate our efforts on enforcing controls on the export of our most critical technologies making america safer while enhancing the competitiveness of key american industries we ve conducted a broad review of the export control system and secretary gates will outline our reform proposal within the next couple of weeks but today i d like to announce two steps that we re prepared to take first we re going to streamline the process certain companies need to go through to get their products to market products with encryption capabilities like cell phone and network storage devices right now they endure a technical review that can take between 30 and 60 days and that puts that company at a distinct disadvantage to foreign competitors who don t face those same delays so a new one time online process will shorten that review time from 30 days to 30 minutes and that makes it quicker and easier for our businesses to compete while meeting our national security requirements and second we re going to eliminate unnecessary obstacles for exporting products to companies with dual national and third country national employees currently our exporters and foreign consumers of these goods have to comply with two different conflicting set of standards they re running on two tracks when they could be running just on one so we re moving towards harmonizing those standards and making it easier for american and foreign companies to comply with our requirements without diminishing our security and i look forward to consulting with congress on these reforms as well as broader export control reform efforts so that s how we re going to double our exports open up new markets and level the playing field for american businesses and american workers i have every confidence that we can success in this effort i have every confidence that we will succeed in this effort this is a difficult time for our country and in times like these questions have always arisen about whether or not america s best days are behind us that s standard fare it happens every so often there have always been naysayers and skeptics there were always those who ve waxed fatalistic fearing that we lacked the capacity to adapt to succeed at times even to survive in a changing world but what makes america great what continues to make america the envy of our competitors what makes this a place where people come not just to invest but to start lives and businesses and families is something that has been inexorable and enduring especially in times of great challenge and great change it s that spirit of adventurousness and entrepreneurship that has for generations turned wild eyed tinkerers into world changing entrepreneurs that led us westward and skyward that led to roads and railways cutting through wilderness and ships and planes and fiber optic lines carrying american goods and services around the world it s the spirit that has advanced america s leadership in the world and held aloft the american dream for generations and it is ultimately that spirit that s given us the tools and the toughness to overcome every obstacle and adapt to every circumstance and today is no different it hasn t always been easy our success is by no means guaranteed but if we summon a sense of national purpose equal to the seriousness of these times if we combine our creativity our innovation and our eternal optimism if we come together in common cause as we have so many times before we will succeed we will define our destiny once again and we will make this century another american century with your help thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama11 5 09 barack_obama hello well thank you everybody please have a seat we re not in the dean dome here you don t need to stay standing the whole time i want to first of all just acknowledge that we ve got a few special guests in the audience we ve got the outstanding new senator from north carolina kay hagan we ve got some outstanding members of the house of representatives g k butterfield g k brad miller mike mcintyre with his tar heels cap on and we ve also got mr roy cooper north carolina attorney general and a tar heel alum where is roy he s over there as well as kevin foy the mayor of chapel hill there he is right over there well welcome to the white house everybody and congratulations on bringing carolina its fifth national championship and more importantly thanks for salvaging my bracket and vindicating me before the entire nation that first round was rough on me but andy katz knows that i came through in the end because of you guys and i want to congratulate everybody who makes this program run from the assistants to the trainers the students to the ticket takers and tar heel fans everywhere you should all be very proud and by the way i have a few tar heel fans on my staff i see a couple of them standing right here i want to offer special congratulations to the seven seniors who graduated yesterday mike copeland bobby frasor danny green tyler hansbrough patrick moody j b tanner and jack wooten i am proud of all of you give them a big round of applause i have to tell you everybody on my staff was really excited about the team coming except my assistant reggie love reggie did win his own national championship ring while playing at duke and at some point he wants to scrimmage with you guys so we ll arrange for that but i want to thank coach roy williams and his wife wanda who is extraordinarily gracious and i just had a wonderful time visiting with them what makes coach williams one of the great coaches isn t just his extraordinary record but his dedication to his players he s just as serious about making these guys into men and into leaders as he is into making them champions now i did have a chance to play ball with this crew just over a year ago when i visited chapel hill and i m not sure whose luck rubbed off on who i think there was just a good vibe going on there because they re now national champions and i m now president and i remember congratulating tyler on choosing to forego the nba draft and coming back to get that ring and after winning the 2008 national player of the year and getting a championship ring i think it worked out pretty well for him so congratulations to you again tyler we re proud of you now when we played everybody went out of their way to pass me the ball set screens for me let me take a shot tyler chose not to block my shot of course i was so intimidated by him being near me that i missed it there was one exception though jack wooten he stole the ball from me he blocked my shot he fouled me once coach williams had to remind him that there were a bunch of guys with guns around but just to show that there are no hard feelings jack i want to congratulate you he made phi beta kappa this year that s worth applauding to achieve academic excellence as part of a national championship team is extraordinary and i know that jack is interested in public service and we need more young people like him to be willing to serve our country so jack anytime you re ready come on board i know coach williams instills the importance of academics into all these guys which is why they didn t just plow through the tournament field they also had the highest graduation rate of anybody in the final four and what they understood is that being a champion doesn t stop when you step off the court in fact they spend a remarkable amount of their time off the court in service to others they hold a special olympics clinic every year in which they scrimmage with special olympians and teach them basketball skills coach williams has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for north carolina charities every christmas these guys compete with one another to see who can get the most creative christmas gifts for underprivileged children who need a little bit of hope all of this makes the chapel hill community stronger it makes the state of north carolina stronger it makes our country stronger and i know this team gets a lot of a lot out of it as well so it s all a reflection on the great character of the program but also the great character of the coach just one of my favorite people and one of the most gracious individuals you d ever care to meet i want to congratulate you coach williams i want to congratulate all you guys for an outstanding season and i got to say also of ty lawson you had an unbelievable series so congratulations playing a little gimpy and still just tearing it up so we re very proud of you so thank you everybody give these guys a big round of applause and good luck next season that s what i m talking about let s step out here we don t want to block it from the cameras all right thank you so much participate that s a nice way of putting it well thank you so much i appreciate that look at that barely broke a sweat that s a beautiful picture thank you so much guys now if somebody could just present me a jump shot i need one of those thank you coach thank you everybody have a wonderful rest of your visit here at the white house appreciate it dem bobama11 7 09a barack_obama hello ghana thank you thank you i want to thank the people of ghana for this extraordinary visit michelle and i have been greatly honored to be joined by president mills and his lovely wife they have been gracious hosts you know your president and i have a lot in common we re both lawyers we re both former law professors we re both new presidents we both like to think of ourselves as athletes the difference is president mills played hockey on the national team of ghana and i played basketball mostly in my backyard but we both love sports we re both proud of serving our country and today i want to honor president mills for his strong and thoughtful leadership his devotion to democracy and his commitment for the future of his nation i also want to thank the magnificent welcoming committee including the drummers and the dancers michelle and i and our daughters enjoyed it very much i want to recognize our peace corps volunteers who are here you know ghana was the very first nation to host young people from the peace corps and for decades our two nations have formed vital partnerships and lasting friendships because of this program so all of you in the peace corps you are doing an outstanding job and we re proud of you as somebody whose father comes from africa obviously this visit has been particularly meaningful for me i ve had a chance to discuss the future of ghana but also the future of africa with president mills i ve spoken to the parliament here in ghana about america s commitment to supporting democracy and development michelle and i visited la general hospital where we met with beautiful women and their children who are getting the care that they need for a healthy start and finally we toured cape coast castle a place for centuries where men women and children of this nation and surrounding areas were sold into slavery i ll never forget the image of my two young daughters the descendants of africans and african americans walking through those doors of no return but then walking back those doors of return it was a remarkable reminder that while the future is unknowable the winds always blow in the direction of human progress at each point of our visit here i was reminded of the enduring bond between our nations men and women taken from this nation helped to build my own today many of our leading citizens trace their roots to these shores your first president attended a university in the united states as did your current one great civil rights leaders of america like dr martin luther king looked to the independence movement here in ghana and asked themselves if africans can live freely in africa why can t african americans live freely in america and immigrants from ghana and from all across africa have thrived all across america today both our nations are diverse and vibrant democracies here in ghana many different ethnic groups speak many languages but have found a way to live and work together in peace people here can speak freely and worship freely you have a robust civil society fair elections and a free press a growing market economy and a sense of energy and optimism and every day with its success ghana sends a simple message to the world that democracy can thrive in africa so we in america are proud of our partnership with ghana together we ve worked to advance education and fight poverty we ve made real and measurable strides in fighting diseases from malaria to tuberculosis to polio and neglected tropical diseases this is a partnership we intend to continue it s a partnership based not just on shared interests but on shared ideals ideals forged in struggles for independence that have made our countries who they are we believe that democracy is not simply a gift from previous generations but a responsibility for each generation to preserve and to pass on we believe that no one whether it s through the influence of politics the power of money or the fear of force is above the law and we believe that we re all equal all endowed with basic human dignity all entitled to basic human rights it is up to each of us every one of us to uphold those ideals this is true not just in ghana but for all of africa america wants to partner with the people and nations of africa but we all know that the future of africa is in the hands of africa so i especially want to again speak to the young people of africa in places like ghana you make up more than half the population and here is what you must know that the world is what you make of it you have the power to hold your leaders accountable and to build institutions that serve the people you can serve in communities like these peace corps workers and harness your energy and education to renew and build connections between the world you can conquer disease and end conflict and make change from the bottom up you can do all that and i promise you this if you seize this opportunity if you take responsibility for your future america will be with you every step of the way as a partner and as a friend freedom is your inheritance hard won 52 years ago by men and women determined to cast off the title of subjects for the title of citizens and claim for themselves and their children the liberties that are all of our birthrights dr king came here to ghana to witness the culmination of that struggle he watched as the union jack was lowered and the ghanaian flag was raised at the parliament he marveled at the site of the duchess of kent dancing with the new ghanaian president at the state ball and in a sermon he gave upon returning home to america he said of this new nation there is a great day ahead the future is on its side those words ring just as true today as they did more than half a century ago great days lie ahead for this nation the future is on ghana s side i promise that america will be with you and together we will create a better world thank you ghana god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama11 7 09b barack_obama i like this thank you thank you i think congress needs one of those horns that sounds pretty good sounds like louis armstrong back there good afternoon everybody it is a great honor for me to be in accra and to speak to the representatives of the people of ghana i am deeply grateful for the welcome that i ve received as are michelle and malia and sasha obama ghana s history is rich the ties between our two countries are strong and i am proud that this is my first visit to sub saharan africa as president of the united states of america i want to thank madam speaker and all the members of the house of representatives for hosting us today i want to thank president mills for his outstanding leadership to the former presidents jerry rawlings former president kufuor vice president chief justice thanks to all of you for your extraordinary hospitality and the wonderful institutions that you ve built here in ghana i m speaking to you at the end of a long trip i began in russia for a summit between two great powers i traveled to italy for a meeting of the world s leading economies and i ve come here to ghana for a simple reason the 21st century will be shaped by what happens not just in rome or moscow or washington but by what happens in accra as well this is the simple truth of a time when the boundaries between people are overwhelmed by our connections your prosperity can expand america s prosperity your health and security can contribute to the world s health and security and the strength of your democracy can help advance human rights for people everywhere so i do not see the countries and peoples of africa as a world apart i see africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world as partners with america on behalf of the future we want for all of our children that partnership must be grounded in mutual responsibility and mutual respect and that is what i want to speak with you about today we must start from the simple premise that africa s future is up to africans i say this knowing full well the tragic past that has sometimes haunted this part of the world after all i have the blood of africa within me and my family s my family s own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger african story some you know my grandfather was a cook for the british in kenya and though he was a respected elder in his village his employers called him boy for much of his life he was on the periphery of kenya s liberation struggles but he was still imprisoned briefly during repressive times in his life colonialism wasn t simply the creation of unnatural borders or unfair terms of trade it was something experienced personally day after day year after year my father grew up herding goats in a tiny village an impossible distance away from the american universities where he would come to get an education he came of age at a moment of extraordinary promise for africa the struggles of his own father s generation were giving birth to new nations beginning right here in ghana africans were educating and asserting themselves in new ways and history was on the move but despite the progress that has been made and there has been considerable progress in many parts of africa we also know that much of that promise has yet to be fulfilled countries like kenya had a per capita economy larger than south korea s when i was born they have badly been outpaced disease and conflict have ravaged parts of the african continent in many places the hope of my father s generation gave way to cynicism even despair now it s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others yes a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict the west has often approached africa as a patron or a source of resources rather than a partner but the west is not responsible for the destruction of the zimbabwean economy over the last decade or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants in my father s life it was partly tribalism and patronage and nepotism in an independent kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career and we know that this kind of corruption is still a daily fact of life for far too many now we know that s also not the whole story here in ghana you show us a face of africa that is too often overlooked by a world that sees only tragedy or a need for charity the people of ghana have worked hard to put democracy on a firmer footing with repeated peaceful transfers of power even in the wake of closely contested elections and by the way can i say that for that the minority deserves as much credit as the majority and with improved governance and an emerging civil society ghana s economy has shown impressive rates of growth this progress may lack the drama of 20th century liberation struggles but make no mistake it will ultimately be more significant for just as it is important to emerge from the control of other nations it is even more important to build one s own nation so i believe that this moment is just as promising for ghana and for africa as the moment when my father came of age and new nations were being born this is a new moment of great promise only this time we ve learned that it will not be giants like nkrumah and kenyatta who will determine africa s future instead it will be you the men and women in ghana s parliament the people you represent it will be the young people brimming with talent and energy and hope who can claim the future that so many in previous generations never realized now to realize that promise we must first recognize the fundamental truth that you have given life to in ghana development depends on good governance that is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places for far too long that s the change that can unlock africa s potential and that is a responsibility that can only be met by africans as for america and the west our commitment must be measured by more than just the dollars we spend i ve pledged substantial increases in our foreign assistance which is in africa s interests and america s interests but the true sign of success is not whether we are a source of perpetual aid that helps people scrape by it s whether we are partners in building the capacity for transformational change this mutual responsibility must be the foundation of our partnership and today i ll focus on four areas that are critical to the future of africa and the entire developing world democracy opportunity health and the peaceful resolution of conflict first we must support strong and sustainable democratic governments as i said in cairo each nation gives life to democracy in its own way and in line with its own traditions but history offers a clear verdict governments that respect the will of their own people that govern by consent and not coercion are more prosperous they are more stable and more successful than governments that do not this is about more than just holding elections it s also about what happens between elections repression can take many forms and too many nations even those that have elections are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty no country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves or if police if police can be bought off by drug traffickers no business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top or the head of the port authority is corrupt no person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery that is not democracy that is tyranny even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there and now is the time for that style of governance to end in the 21st century capable reliable and transparent institutions are the key to success strong parliaments honest police forces independent judges an independent press a vibrant private sector a civil society those are the things that give life to democracy because that is what matters in people s everyday lives now time and again ghanaians have chosen constitutional rule over autocracy and shown a democratic spirit that allows the energy of your people to break through we see that in leaders who accept defeat graciously the fact that president mills opponents were standing beside him last night to greet me when i came off the plane spoke volumes about ghana victors who resist calls to wield power against the opposition in unfair ways we see that spirit in courageous journalists like anas aremeyaw anas who risked his life to report the truth we see it in police like patience quaye who helped prosecute the first human trafficker in ghana we see it in the young people who are speaking up against patronage and participating in the political process across africa we ve seen countless examples of people taking control of their destiny and making change from the bottom up we saw it in kenya where civil society and business came together to help stop post election violence we saw it in south africa where over three quarters of the country voted in the recent election the fourth since the end of apartheid we saw it in zimbabwe where the election support network braved brutal repression to stand up for the principle that a person s vote is their sacred right now make no mistake history is on the side of these brave africans not with those who use coups or change constitutions to stay in power africa doesn t need strongmen it needs strong institutions now america will not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation the essential truth of democracy is that each nation determines its own destiny but what america will do is increase assistance for responsible individuals and responsible institutions with a focus on supporting good governance on parliaments which check abuses of power and ensure that opposition voices are heard on the rule of law which ensures the equal administration of justice on civic participation so that young people get involved and on concrete solutions to corruption like forensic accounting and automating services strengthening hotlines protecting whistle blowers to advance transparency and accountability and we provide this support i have directed my administration to give greater attention to corruption in our human rights reports people everywhere should have the right to start a business or get an education without paying a bribe we have a responsibility to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don t and that is exactly what america will do now this leads directly to our second area of partnership supporting development that provides opportunity for more people with better governance i have no doubt that africa holds the promise of a broader base of prosperity witness the extraordinary success of africans in my country america they re doing very well so they ve got the talent they ve got the entrepreneurial spirit the question is how do we make sure that they re succeeding here in their home countries the continent is rich in natural resources and from cell phone entrepreneurs to small farmers africans have shown the capacity and commitment to create their own opportunities but old habits must also be broken dependence on commodities or a single export has a tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few and leaves people too vulnerable to downturns so in ghana for instance oil brings great opportunities and you have been very responsible in preparing for new revenue but as so many ghanaians know oil cannot simply become the new cocoa from south korea to singapore history shows that countries thrive when they invest in their people and in their infrastructure when they promote multiple export industries develop a skilled workforce and create space for small and medium sized businesses that create jobs as africans reach for this promise america will be more responsible in extending our hand by cutting costs that go to western consultants and administration we want to put more resources in the hands of those who need it while training people to do more for themselves that s why our 3 5 billion food security initiative is focused on new methods and technologies for farmers not simply sending american producers or goods to africa aid is not an end in itself the purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it s no longer needed i want to see ghanaians not only self sufficient in food i want to see you exporting food to other countries and earning money you can do that now america can also do more to promote trade and investment wealthy nations must open our doors to goods and services from africa in a meaningful way that will be a commitment of my administration and where there is good governance we can broaden prosperity through public private partnerships that invest in better roads and electricity capacity building that trains people to grow a business financial services that reach not just the cities but also the poor and rural areas this is also in our own interests for if people are lifted out of poverty and wealth is created in africa guess what new markets will open up for our own goods so it s good for both one area that holds out both undeniable peril and extraordinary promise is energy africa gives off less greenhouse gas than any other part of the world but it is the most threatened by climate change a warming planet will spread disease shrink water resources and deplete crops creating conditions that produce more famine and more conflict all of us particularly the developed world have a responsibility to slow these trends through mitigation and by changing the way that we use energy but we can also work with africans to turn this crisis into opportunity together we can partner on behalf of our planet and prosperity and help countries increase access to power while skipping leapfrogging the dirtier phase of development think about it across africa there is bountiful wind and solar power geothermal energy and biofuels from the rift valley to the north african deserts from the western coasts to south africa s crops africa s boundless natural gifts can generate its own power while exporting profitable clean energy abroad these steps are about more than growth numbers on a balance sheet they re about whether a young person with an education can get a job that supports a family a farmer can transfer their goods to market an entrepreneur with a good idea can start a business it s about the dignity of work it s about the opportunity that must exist for africans in the 21st century just as governance is vital to opportunity it s also critical to the third area i want to talk about strengthening public health in recent years enormous progress has been made in parts of africa far more people are living productively with hiv aids and getting the drugs they need i just saw a wonderful clinic and hospital that is focused particularly on maternal health but too many still die from diseases that shouldn t kill them when children are being killed because of a mosquito bite and mothers are dying in childbirth then we know that more progress must be made yet because of incentives often provided by donor nations many african doctors and nurses go overseas or work for programs that focus on a single disease and this creates gaps in primary care and basic prevention meanwhile individual africans also have to make responsible choices that prevent the spread of disease while promoting public health in their communities and countries so across africa we see examples of people tackling these problems in nigeria an interfaith effort of christians and muslims has set an example of cooperation to confront malaria here in ghana and across africa we see innovative ideas for filling gaps in care for instance through e health initiatives that allow doctors in big cities to support those in small towns america will support these efforts through a comprehensive global health strategy because in the 21st century we are called to act by our conscience but also by our common interest because when a child dies of a preventable disease in accra that diminishes us everywhere and when disease goes unchecked in any corner of the world we know that it can spread across oceans and continents and that s why my administration has committed 63 billion to meet these challenges 63 billion building on the strong efforts of president bush we will carry forward the fight against hiv aids we will pursue the goal of ending deaths from malaria and tuberculosis and we will work to eradicate polio we will fight we will fight neglected tropical disease and we won t confront illnesses in isolation we will invest in public health systems that promote wellness and focus on the health of mothers and children now as we partner on behalf of a healthier future we must also stop the destruction that comes not from illness but from human beings and so the final area that i will address is conflict let me be clear africa is not the crude caricature of a continent at perpetual war but if we are honest for far too many africans conflict is a part of life as constant as the sun there are wars over land and wars over resources and it is still far too easy for those without conscience to manipulate whole communities into fighting among faiths and tribes these conflicts are a millstone around africa s neck now we all have many identities of tribe and ethnicity of religion and nationality but defining oneself in opposition to someone who belongs to a different tribe or who worships a different prophet has no place in the 21st century africa s diversity should be a source of strength not a cause for division we are all god s children we all share common aspirations to live in peace and security to access education and opportunity to love our families and our communities and our faith that is our common humanity that is why we must stand up to inhumanity in our midst it is never justified never justifiable to target innocents in the name of ideology it is the death sentence of a society to force children to kill in wars it is the ultimate mark of criminality and cowardice to condemn women to relentless and systemic rape we must bear witness to the value of every child in darfur and the dignity of every woman in the congo no faith or culture should condone the outrages against them and all of us must strive for the peace and security necessary for progress africans are standing up for this future here too in ghana we are seeing you help point the way forward ghanaians should take pride in your contributions to peacekeeping from congo to liberia to lebanon and your efforts to resist the scourge of the drug trade we welcome the steps that are being taken by organizations like the african union and ecowas to better resolve conflicts to keep the peace and support those in need and we encourage the vision of a strong regional security architecture that can bring effective transnational forces to bear when needed america has a responsibility to work with you as a partner to advance this vision not just with words but with support that strengthens african capacity when there s a genocide in darfur or terrorists in somalia these are not simply african problems they are global security challenges and they demand a global response and that s why we stand ready to partner through diplomacy and technical assistance and logistical support and we will stand behind efforts to hold war criminals accountable and let me be clear our africa command is focused not on establishing a foothold in the continent but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of america africa and the world in moscow i spoke of the need for an international system where the universal rights of human beings are respected and violations of those rights are opposed and that must include a commitment to support those who resolve conflicts peacefully to sanction and stop those who don t and to help those who have suffered but ultimately it will be vibrant democracies like botswana and ghana which roll back the causes of conflict and advance the frontiers of peace and prosperity as i said earlier africa s future is up to africans the people of africa are ready to claim that future and in my country african americans including so many recent immigrants have thrived in every sector of society we ve done so despite a difficult past and we ve drawn strength from our african heritage with strong institutions and a strong will i know that africans can live their dreams in nairobi and lagos kigali kinshasa harare and right here in accra you know 52 years ago the eyes of the world were on ghana and a young preacher named martin luther king traveled here to accra to watch the union jack come down and the ghanaian flag go up this was before the march on washington or the success of the civil rights movement in my country dr king was asked how he felt while watching the birth of a nation and he said it renews my conviction in the ultimate triumph of justice now that triumph must be won once more and it must be won by you and i am particularly speaking to the young people all across africa and right here in ghana in places like ghana young people make up over half of the population and here is what you must know the world will be what you make of it you have the power to hold your leaders accountable and to build institutions that serve the people you can serve in your communities and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world you can conquer disease and end conflicts and make change from the bottom up you can do that yes you can because in this moment history is on the move but these things can only be done if all of you take responsibility for your future and it won t be easy it will take time and effort there will be suffering and setbacks but i can promise you this america will be with you every step of the way as a partner as a friend opportunity won t come from any other place though it must come from the decisions that all of you make the things that you do the hope that you hold in your heart ghana freedom is your inheritance now it is your responsibility to build upon freedom s foundation and if you do we will look back years from now to places like accra and say this was the time when the promise was realized this was the moment when prosperity was forged when pain was overcome and a new era of progress began this can be the time when we witness the triumph of justice once more yes we can thank you very much god bless you thank you dem bobama11 8 10 barack_obama thank you thank you very much everybody please have a seat good afternoon everybody welcome to the white house from the day i took office my administration s highest priority has been to rescue our economy from crisis rebuild it on a new foundation for lasting growth and do everything we can every single day to help the american people whose lives have been upended by a brutal recession now we knew from the beginning that reversing the damage done by the worst financial crisis and the deepest recession in generations would take some time more time than anyone would like and we knew that it would require an ongoing effort across all fronts now the challenges we face have been confirmed not just by the economic data that we ve seen since last spring when events in europe roiled the markets and created headwinds for our economic recovery they re also confirmed every day in the conversations that i have with folks around the country and in the letters that i read at night stories of americans who are still looking for work and the men and women who are still struggling to grow their businesses and hire in these challenging times so while we have fought back from the worst of this recession we ve still got a lot of work to do we ve still got a long way to go and i m more determined than ever to do every single thing we can to hasten our economic recovery and get our people back to work so that s why i m pleased today to sign into law a bill that will strengthen american manufacturing and american jobs and as i do i m joined by two members of my economic team secretary of commerce gary locke who s been a tireless advocate for america s manufacturers and ambassador ron kirk who s been doing a great job and putting in a lot of miles as our u s trade representative few areas of our economy have been as hard hit as manufacturing not just in recent years but in recent decades throughout the 20th century manufacturing was the ticket to a better life for generations of american workers it was the furnace that forged our middle class but over time the jobs dried up companies learned to do more with less and outsourced whatever they could other nations didn t always live up to trade agreements and we didn t always enforce them and over the last decade the manufacturing workforce shrank by 33 percent leaving millions of skilled hardworking americans sitting as idle as the plants that they once worked in this was before the recent recession left them and millions more struggling in ways they never imagined now some suggest this decline is inevitable that the only way for america to get ahead is to leave manufacturing communities and their workers behind i do not see it that way the answer isn t to stop building things to stop making things the answer is to build things better make things better right here in the united states we will rebuild this economy stronger than before and at its heart will be three powerful words made in america for too long we ve been buying too much from the rest of the world when we should be selling more to the rest of the world that s why in my state of the union address i set an ambitious goal for this country over the next five years we are going to double our exports of goods and services an increase that will grow our economy and support millions of american jobs we ve got a lot of work to do to reach this goal our economy has fallen into the habit of buying from overseas and not selling the way it needs to but it is vitally important that we reverse that trend after all 95 percent of the world s customers and the world s fastest growing markets are beyond our borders and when the playing field is even american workers can compete with anybody and we re going to compete aggressively for every job for every industry and every market out there that s why we fought for and passed tax breaks for companies that are investing here in the united states rather than companies that are keeping profits offshore that s why we closed loopholes that encourage corporations to ship american jobs overseas that s why we re enforcing our trade laws in some cases for the very first time that s why we told america s automakers that if they made the tough decisions required to compete in the future that america would stand by them and that s why we re investing in a clean energy industry and the jobs that come with it jobs that pay well and carry america to a cleaner more secure and more energy independent future now already we re beginning to see some of these investments pay off i ve seen it myself in factories where american workers are now manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels components for the advanced batteries of tomorrow i ve seen it in retooled auto plants where american workers are building high quality fuel efficient cars and trucks that can go toe to toe with any in the world in fact for the first time in more than five years the big three are operating at a profit and the auto industry has added 76 000 jobs since last june that s the strongest period of job growth in more than 10 years so overall the manufacturing sector has actually added 183 000 jobs so far this year that s the strongest seven months of manufacturing job growth in more than a decade instead of plants leaving america to set up shop overseas we ve actually begun to see the opposite a growing number of firms setting up shop and hiring here at home so we re not yet where we need to be but there are some good trends out there and we can t let up we ve got to keep moving forward that s why today i m signing a bill into law that will make it cheaper and easier for american manufacturers and american workers to do what they do best build great products and sell them around the world the manufacturing enhancement act of 2010 will create jobs help american companies compete and strengthen manufacturing as a key driver of our economic recovery and here s how it works to make their products manufacturers some of whom are represented here today often have to import certain materials from other countries and pay tariffs on those materials this legislation will reduce or eliminate some of those tariffs which will significantly lower costs for american companies across the manufacturing landscape from cars to chemicals medical devices to sporting goods and that will boost output support good jobs here at home and lower prices for american consumers this bill passed both houses of congress on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis and i want to thank democrats and republicans for coming together on behalf of america s businesses and workers and before i sign it into law i want to take this opportunity to encourage that same kind of bipartisan spirit on another step that will create jobs and move america forward the extraordinary growth we ve seen in the clean energy sector is due first and foremost to the entrepreneurial drive of our businesses and our workers but it s also due to the fact that we invested in them one of these investments came in the form of clean energy manufacturing tax credits what we said to clean energy firms was if you re willing to put up 70 percent of the capital for a worthy endeavor we ll put up the other 30 percent that means that for every dollar we invest we leverage more than two private sector dollars the only problem we have is these credits worked so well there weren t enough to go around more than 180 clean energy projects in over 40 states received 2 3 billion in tax credits but the program was such a success that we received 500 qualified applications for 8 billion in tax credits i believe that if an american company wants to innovate grow and create jobs right here in the united states we should give them the support they need to do it that s why i m urging congress once again to invest 5 billion in these clean energy manufacturing tax credits it s an investment that will generate 12 billion or more in private sector investment and tens of thousands of new jobs and as i ve said before the nation that wins the race for the clean energy economy will lead the 21st century economy other nations know this they ve been investing heavily in that future they want those jobs but the united states of america doesn t play for second place we compete to win and we will win this if we move forward free of politics focused on just what it takes to get the job done this is an idea that already has bipartisan support but it s been delayed for months so my simple message is don t let politics get in the way of doing what s right for our economy and for our future and don t bet against the american worker or lose faith in american industry this is a nation that has always been proud of what it builds and it is that spirit that s going to lead our recovery forward we ve been through tough times before and it is precisely in those times that we rebuilt we retooled we recaptured the ingenuity and resilience that makes this nation so great that s how our predecessors built the first american century that s how we ll build the next and it s in that spirit that i will now sign this bill into law thank you very much everybody dem bobama12 11 09 barack_obama hello elmendorf thank you thank you everybody thank you please thank you so much anybody who has a seat go ahead and take a seat i want to thank general troy for the introduction and for his extraordinary service to colonel mark camerer and your outstanding local leaders for welcoming me here today and i want to give a shout out to the united states air force band of the pacific i realize that your commander general atkins couldn t be here i m told that he got called down to hawaii shaka brah what s up i grew up there so i hope that he s getting as warm a welcome as i m getting here i want to thank your senior enlisted leaders command chief master sergeant robert moore chief master sergeant tom baker and command sergeant major david turnbull give them a big round of applause and please give some applause to all the airmen and soldiers up here they look terrific it is wonderful to be here at one of america s great air bases i have to tell you i m also really excited because i had up until today visited 49 states so this is officially my 50th state i love you back but we also have a lot of folks from fort richardson we ve got folks from all across alaskan command air force army navy coast guard united states marines active guard and reserve we have our allies and friends from the canadian armed forces i see i see many spouses here today and i want you to know you are the backbone of our military families and we honor your service and i m thrilled to see the kids who are here today hey guys thank you i know you re proud of your mom and dad but we re all proud of you too you know we re here in america s last frontier and most of you are far from home and i know your service is made a little easier by your unbelievable neighbors so we want to thank your local and state leaders lieutenant governor craig campbell all the people of anchorage and alaska for their incredible support and we re also joined today by a leader who is fighting for alaska in washington and for you and all our men and women in uniform as a member of the armed services committee and the veterans affairs committee mark begich is here senator mark begich is in the house stand up mark so everybody can see you today i m on my way to asia my first visit there as president the crews are out there refueling air force one but i didn t want to just pass through because this is also as i said my first visit to alaska and my first visit to elmendorf and i couldn t come here without taking this opportunity to deliver a simple message a message of thanks to you and your families now these have been days of tribute two days ago we gathered at fort hood and we honored 13 americans taken from us soldiers and caregivers mothers and fathers husbands and wives sons and daughters brothers and sisters we grieved with families who have endured unimaginable loss and we found inspiration in the wounded their spirits unbowed and in those who braved the bullets so that others might live yesterday we gathered at arlington national cemetery to salute proud veterans who served on foreign fields long ago and wounded warriors from today and as citizens of a grateful nation we are humbled by such service today we gather here at elmendorf and we see the same spirit it s the spirit that i saw in the outstanding airmen and soldiers i met with a few moments ago it s the spirit that i see in all of you it s your sense of service answering your country s call volunteering in a time of war knowing that you could be sent into harm s way that s a sense of responsibility on your part the belief that the blessings we cherish as americans are not gifts that we take for granted they are freedoms that are earned and it s your sense of unity coming from every corner of the country from every color and every creed and every faith and every station to take care of each other and to serve together and to succeed together as americans so i m here to say to all of you all of you who serve all the families who are here of all the privileges i have as president i have no greater honor than serving as your commander in chief we have the finest fighting force the world has ever known and it s because of you because we ve got the finest personnel in the world that s our most precious resource by being here all of you are joining a long line of service at elmendorf from the liberation of pacific islands during world war ii through a long cold war you embody that creed faithful to a proud heritage a tradition of honor and a legacy of valor and you uphold that legacy every day twenty four hours a day 365 days a year you keep america s skies safe so we salute the 3rd wing and the 11th air force you project power across the pacific returning just recently from guam the 90th fighter squadron the dicemen and the 525th fighter squadron the bulldogs and all the maintenance troops who support them welcome home and when disaster strikes whether a typhoon in the philippines or an earthquake in samoa you re there delivering the relief that saves lives so thank you firebirds today we also send our thoughts and prayers to all those who at this very moment are serving on the front lines there are airmen from elmendorf in every corner of the world they re soldiers from fort richardson military police in iraq the 4th brigade combat team in afghanistan fort rich paratroopers are no strangers to tough assignments a few years back you all spent 14 months in iraq now they re working to bring stability and security to eastern afghanistan building roads and medical clinics renovating schools protecting the afghan people and giving them a chance at a better future they are doing a terrific job and we salute them but with services comes sacrifice all of you know this you ve made the most profound commitment a person can make you ve pledged to dedicate your life to your country and perhaps give your life for it here at elmendorf and fort richardson some have they re airmen like staff sergeant timothy bowles who when a comrade fell sick volunteered to take his place on the patrol in afghanistan that would end up taking his life they re soldiers from the 4th brigade combat team like the husband and father who gave his life in afghanistan last week specialist julian berisford and citizens of this state like alaska native corporal gregory fleury raised in anchorage he joined the marines and served two tours in iraq he loved the corps he loved alaska so much so that he carried the state flag with him everywhere it was with him last month when he was killed in those helicopter crashes in afghanistan a little while ago i had the honor of meeting greg s family donna and christopher and his grandfather albert and i expressed the gratitude of our nation and we thank them for being with us here today donna albert please stand there are no words that are strong enough and no tribute worthy enough to match the magnitude of such service but to you and all who serve i say this the american people thank you we honor you and just as you have fulfilled your responsibilities to your nation your nation will fulfill its responsibilities to you so as your commander in chief here s the commitment i make to you we ll make sure you can meet the missions we ask of you that s why we re increasing the defense budget including spending on the air force and the army we ll make sure we have the right force structure so we ve halted reductions in the air force increased the size of the army ahead of schedule and also approved a temporary increase in the army we ll spend our defense dollars wisely so we re cutting tens of billions of dollars in waste and projects that even the pentagon says it doesn t need money that s better spent on taking care of you and your families and building the 21st century military that we do need i want you guys to understand i will never hesitate to use force to protect the american people or our vital interests but i also make you this promise i will not risk your lives unless it is necessary to america s vital interest and if it is necessary the united states of america will have your back we will give you the strategy and the clear mission you deserve we will give you the equipment and support that you need to get the job done and that includes public support back home that is a promise that i make to you and as you meet your missions around the world we will take care of your families here at home that s why the first lady michelle has been visiting bases across the country go michelle your family is a priority for our family so we re increasing pay we re increasing child care we re increasing support to help spouses and families deal with the stress and separation of war and finally we pledge to be there when you come home we re improving care for our wounded warriors especially those with ptsd and traumatic brain injuries i want to salute the outstanding work you do at the hospital here on base including your new tbi clinic thank you for giving our wounded warriors the world class care they deserve we re funding the post 9 11 gi bill because we want to give we want to give your families the chance to pursue your dreams and we re making the biggest commitment to our veterans the largest percentage increase in the va budget in more than 30 years so these are the commitments i m making to you because you ve always taken care of america and america must has to take care of you back america s obligation to our military as we saw this week is a sacred trust that we are honor bound to uphold it s the sacred trust that brought a nation together this week around 13 battlefield crosses it s the sacred trust that leads us to pause on that november day to give thanks for all those who have served before us it s the sacred trust that brings me here to say thank you for serving today thank you to you and your families for all you do to protect this country we love god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you everybody thank you dem bobama12 2 09a barack_obama thank you very much well it is wonderful to be back in springfield and i see so many familiar faces to mr hart to marilyn to my secretary of transportation ray lahood to two of the finest governors that we ve had in the past jim thompson and jim edgar to laura lynn ryan and to our new governor who s going to be doing outstanding work for us in the future pat quinn to reverend mccants and to my dear friend loretta durbin i do feel guilty because dick was the one who brought this event to my attention i m here and he s there but part of the reason that dick durbin has been such a great friend not just to me but to the people of illinois is because his work always comes first and he has been unbelievable in providing leadership in the senate through thick and through thin i m very very grateful to him he is one of my greatest friends and i would not be standing here if it were not for dick durbin so please give dick durbin a big round of applause so it is wonderful to be back in springfield the city where i got my start in elective office where i served for nearly a decade i see some of my colleagues your attorney general lisa madigan in the house you ve got some constitutional officers there i think that s alexi your treasurer who s going to be playing basketball with me at some point dan hynes comptroller and just an incredible supporter during this past race and your new senate president john cullerton one of the sharpest legislators that we ve ever had is the speaker around he s over there mr speaker it s good to see you thank you so i ve got a lot of friends here i ve got to stop there otherwise i m going to be using up all my time i served here for nearly a decade and as has already been mentioned this is where i launched my candidacy for president two years ago this week on the steps on the steps of the old state capitol where abraham lincoln served and prepared for the presidency it was here nearly 150 years ago that the man whose life we are celebrating today who you ve been celebrating all week bid farewell to this city that he had come to call his own and as has already been mentioned on a platform at a train station not far from where we re gathered lincoln turned to the crowd that had come to see him off and said to this place and the kindness of these people i owe everything and being here tonight surrounded by all of you i share his sentiment but looking out at this room full of so many who did so much for me i m also reminded of what lincoln once said to a favor seeker who claimed it was his efforts that made the difference in the election lincoln asked him so you think you made me president yes the man replied under providence i think i did well said lincoln it s a pretty mess you ve got me into but i forgive you so whoever of you think you are responsible for this we re taking names it s a humbling task marking the bicentennial of our 16th president s birth humbling for me in particular because it s fair to say that the presidency of this singular figure who we celebrate in so many ways made my own story possible here in springfield it s easier though to reflect on lincoln the man rather than the marble giant before gettysburg before antietam before fredericksburg and bull run before emancipation was proclaimed and the captives were set free in 1854 lincoln was simply a springfield lawyer who d served just a single term in congress possibly in his law office his feet on a cluttered desk his sons playing around him his clothes a bit too small to fit his uncommon frame maybe wondering if somebody might call him up and ask him to be commerce secretary he put some thoughts on paper and for what purpose we do not know the legitimate object of government he wrote is to do for the people what needs to be done but which they cannot by individual effort do at all or do so well by themselves to do for the people what needs to be done but which they cannot do on their own it s a simple statement but it answers a central question of abraham lincoln s life why did he land on the side of union what was it that made him so unrelenting in pursuit of victory that he was willing to test the constitution he ultimately preserved what was it that led this man to give his last full measure of devotion so that our nation might endure these are not easy questions to answer and i cannot know if i m right but i suspect that his devotion to the idea of union came not from a belief that government always had the answer it came not from a failure to understand our individual rights and responsibilities this rugged rail splitter born in a log cabin of pioneer stock who cleared a path through the woods as a boy who lost a mother and a sister to the rigors of frontier life who taught himself all that he knew and everything that he had was because of his hard work this man our first republican president knew better than anybody what it meant to pull yourself up by your bootstraps he understood that strain of personal liberty and self reliance that fierce independence at the heart of the american experience but he also understood something else he recognized that while each of us must do our part work as hard as we can be as responsible as we can although we are responsible for our own fates in the end there are certain things we cannot do on our own there are certain things we can only do together there are certain things only a union can do only a union could harness the courage of our pioneers to settle the american west which is why lincoln passed a homestead act giving a tract of land to anyone seeking a stake in our growing economy only a union could foster the ingenuity of our framers the ingenuity of our farmers which is why he set up land grant colleges that taught them how to make the most of their land while giving their children an education that let them dream the american dream only a union could speed our expansion and connect our coasts with a transcontinental railroad and so even in the midst of civil war lincoln built one he fueled new enterprises with a national currency spurred innovation and ignited america s imagination with a national academy of sciences believing we must as he put it add the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery of new and useful things and on this day that is also the bicentennial of charles darwin s birth it s worth a moment to pause and renew that commitment to science and innovation and discovery that lincoln understood so well only a union could serve the hopes of every citizen to knock down the barriers to opportunity and give each and every person the chance to pursue the american dream lincoln understood what washington understood when he led farmers and craftsmen and shopkeepers to rise up against an empire what roosevelt understood when he lifted us from depression built an arsenal of democracy created the largest middle class in history with the gi bill it s what kennedy understood when he sent us to the moon all these presidents recognized that america is and always has been more than a band of 13 colonies or 50 states more than a bunch of yankees and confederates more than a collection of red states and blue states but we are the united states there isn t any dream beyond our reach there is no dream beyond our reach any obstacle that can stand in our way when we recognize that our individual liberty is served not negated by a recognition of the common good that is the spirit we are called to show once more the challenges we face are very different now two wars an economic crisis unlike any we ve seen in our lifetime jobs have been lost pensions are gone families dreams have been endangered health care costs are exploding schools are falling short we have an energy crisis that s hampering our economy and threatening our planet and enriching our adversaries and yet while our challenges may be new they did not come about overnight ultimately they result from a failure to meet the test that lincoln set i understand there have been times in our history when our government has misjudged what we can do by individual effort alone and what we can only do together when we didn t draw the line as effectively as we should have when government has done things that people can and should do for themselves our welfare system before reform too often dampened individual initiative discouraging people from taking responsibility for their own upward mobility in education sometimes we ve lost sight of the role of parents rather than government in cultivating a thirst for knowledge and instilling those qualities of good character hard work and discipline and integrity that are so important to educational achievement and professional success but in recent years we ve seen the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction what s dominated is a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way that if government were just dismantled and divvied up into tax breaks that it would somehow benefit us all such knee jerk disdain for government this constant rejection of any common endeavor cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges it can t refurbish our schools or modernize our health care system it can t lead to the next medical discovery or yield the research and technology that will spark a clean energy economy only a nation can do those things only by coming together all of us in union and expressing that sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility for ourselves yes but also for one another can we do the work that must be done in this country that is that is part of the definition of being american it s only by rebuilding our economy and fostering the conditions of growth that willing workers can find a job and companies can find capital and the entrepreneurial spirit that is the key to our competitiveness can flourish it s only by unleashing the potential of alternative fuels that will lower our energy bills and raise our industries sights make our nation safer and our planet cleaner it s only by remaking our schools for the 21st century that our children will get those good jobs so they can make of their lives what they will it s only by coming together to do what people need done that we will in lincoln s words lift artificial weights from all shoulders and give an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life that s all people are looking for fair chance in the race of life that s what s required of us now and in the years ahead we will be remembered for what we choose to make of this moment and when posterity looks back on our time as we are looking back on lincoln s i don t want it said that we saw an economic crisis but did not stem it that we saw our schools decline and our bridges crumble but we did not rebuild them that the world changed in the 21st century but america did not lead it that we were consumed with small things petty things when we were called to do great things instead let them say that this generation our generation of americans rose to the moment and gave america a new birth of freedom and opportunity in our time these are trying days and they will grow tougher in the months to come and there will be moments when our doubts rise and our hopes recede but let s always remember that we as a people have been here before there were times when our revolution itself seemed altogether improbable when the union was all but lost when fascism seemed set to prevail around the world and yet what earlier generations discovered and what we must rediscover right now is that it is precisely when we are in the deepest valley when the climb is steepest that americans relearn how to take the mountaintop together as one nation as one people as one nation as one people that s how we will beat back our present dangers that is how we will surpass what trials may come that s how we will do what lincoln called on us all to do and nobly save the last best hope on earth that s what this is the last best hope on earth lincoln has passed that legacy onto us it is now our responsibility to pass it on to the next generation thank you god bless you and may god bless the united states of america dem bobama12 2 09c barack_obama thank you everybody it s good to be back home thank you thank you so much thank you please everybody have a seat have a seat well first of all let me thank dan armstrong for his wonderful introduction and participation in this event and we are going to be thinking about you and your family each and every day in the coming months i want to thank peoria s own ray lahood who is doing outstanding work as my transportation secretary ray comes from a long line of republicans i love starting with bob michel and you know they re just i think there s a common sense midwestern can do bipartisan attitude that ray represents and i am so pleased that he s in my cabinet now his successor congressman schock where is he he s back here he s right here stand up aaron this is a aaron s still trying to make up his mind about our recovery package so he has the chance to be in the mold of bob michel and ray lahood and so we know that all of you are going to talk to him after our event because he s a very talented young man i ve got great confidence in him to do the right thing for the people of peoria i also want to thank jim owens who i ve gotten to know and is one of the top ceos that we have in the country you know jim is obviously confronted with some tough choices like every ceo is right now but what i m absolutely confident in is he s thinking about the company s long term growth and he cares about his workers he cares about the long term and not just the short term and i appreciate him agreeing to serve as one of our economic advisors during this process and i think this company is going to be in good hands with him at the helm so thank you very much jim for being a part of this event today well you noticed i ve been traveling a little bit i had to come to peoria you have to see how things are playing in peoria we come together today as jim said at a difficult moment for our country you know what i know i m already in my speech but there s one other thing i forgot to do there s a guy here who i served with in the state senate he s just a good buddy of mine i love him to death give george shadid a big round of applause i just thought of him stand up george i like his wife more but george is okay we come together today at a difficult moment for our country and for this great american company in recent weeks there s been a lot of talk in washington about how to address our economic crisis with a lot of back and forth about dollars and numbers but here s the thing when we say we ve lost 3 6 million jobs since this recession began nearly 600 000 last month alone when we talk about the 22 000 layoffs announced here at caterpillar a company that has sustained this community for more than 80 years and that had one of its banner years just last year you know this isn t about figures on a balance sheet it s about families that many of you probably know it s about folks like dan all across this state and all across this country folks who are losing their jobs and their health care and their homes that were their footholds on the american dream and it s about the ripple effects across this community from restaurants with fewer customers because folks can t afford to eat out anymore to shops that can t sell their goods because people can t afford to buy them to the companies that do business with caterpillar but now find themselves cutting back because caterpillar is cutting back so what s happening at this company tells us a larger story about what s happening with our nation s economy because in many ways you can measure america s bottom line by looking at caterpillar s bottom line caterpillar builds the equipment that moves the earth your machines plow the farms that feed our families build the towers that shape our skylines lay the roads that connect our communities power the trucks that deliver our goods and more so those 22 000 layoffs aren t just a crisis for those families or for the communities like peoria and decatur and aurora they are an urgent warning sign for america because when a company as good and successful and efficient and lean and mean as caterpillar is cutting back production and shedding jobs that means we re not building up this country it means we re not building new homes and offices or rebuilding crumbling schools and failing infrastructure in short it means we re standing still and in this new global economy standing still is the surest way to end up falling behind standing still is not an option it s not who we are it s not who we have to be right now we have a once in a generation chance to act boldly to turn adversity into opportunity and use this crisis as a chance to transform our economy for the 21st century that is the driving purpose of the recovery and reinvestment plan that i ve put before congress it s a plan that will save or create more than 3 5 million jobs over the next two years that will ignite spending by businesses and consumers and make the investments necessary for lasting economic growth and prosperity now these past few weeks we ve had a spirited debate in washington about this plan and not everybody shares the same view about how we should move forward at times our discussions have been contentious but that s a good thing diverse viewpoints are the lifeblood of our democracy debating them is how we learn from each other s perspective we temper each other s excesses we make better decisions but the debate is now coming to an end the bill has passed the house and it s passed the senate it s been reconciled and now it s going back to those two chambers so it can get on my desk it is time for congress to act and i hope they act in a bipartisan fashion but no matter how they act when they do when they finally pass our plan i believe it will be a major step forward on our path to economic recovery and i m not the only one who thinks so yesterday jim the head of caterpillar said that if congress passes our plan this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off and that s a story i m confident will be repeated at companies across the country companies that are currently struggling to borrow money selling their products struggling to make payroll but could find themselves in a different position when we start implementing the plan rather than downsizing they may be able to start growing again rather than cutting jobs they may be able to create them again that s the goal at the heart of this plan to create jobs and not just any jobs not just make work jobs but putting people to work doing the work that america needs done repairing our infrastructure modernizing our schools and our hospitals promoting the clean alternative energy sources that will finally help us declare independence from foreign oil so once congress passes this plan and i sign it into law a new wave of innovation activity and construction will be unleashed all across america we ll put people to work building wind turbines and solar panels and fuel efficient cars we ll upgrade our schools creating 21st century classrooms and libraries and labs for millions of children across america we ll computerize our health care system to save billions of dollars and countless lives lay down broadband internet lines to connect rural schools and small businesses so they can compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges repairing our dangerous dams and levees so we don t face another katrina think about all the work out there to be done and caterpillar will be selling the equipment that does the work and in addition to saving and creating jobs we ll also ensure that folks in places like peoria who ve lost their jobs through no fault of their own can receive greater unemployment benefits and continue their health care coverage here in illinois that will mean an additional 100 per month to more than 820 000 workers who ve lost their jobs it means extended unemployment benefits for another 145 000 folks who ve been laid off are out there busy looking for work but haven t found a job yet it s not just our moral responsibility to help them it also makes good economic sense if you don t have money you can t spend it and if people aren t spending our economy will continue to decline and for that same reason the plan will provide badly needed middle class tax relief putting money back into the pockets of just about everybody here nearly 4 9 million workers and their families here in illinois so you can pay your bills and meet your families needs during a downturn in the end that s what the recovery plan is about it s about giving people a way to make a living support their families and live out their dreams americans aren t looking for a handout they just want to work they re meeting their responsibilities you re meeting your responsibilities but when you start seeing an economic crisis of this magnitude everybody s got to chip in everybody s got to pull together politics has to stop and we ve got to get the job done passing this plan is an important step but it s just one step it s only the beginning of what we re going to have to do to turn around our economy so to truly address this crisis we re also going to need to address the home mortgage crisis we re going to have to get credit flowing again we need to reform our financial markets both to restore trust and ensure that a crisis like this can never happen again and whether it s rebuilding our schools or reforming our health care system or investing in clean energy much work remains to lay the foundation for long term economic growth and fiscal responsibility we ve got to spend some money now to pull us out of this recession but as soon as we re out of this recession we ve got to get serious about starting to live within our means instead of leaving debt for our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren that s not the responsible way that s not how folks here in peoria operate in their own lives and they should expect the government is equally responsible so the road ahead is not an easy one some of our plans might not always work out exactly the way we d like our recovery will likely be measured in terms of years and not months but to anyone who might feel doubtful or discouraged i urge you to think about the history of this company as some of you know about 60 years ago shortly after the end of world war ii caterpillar decided to build its new offices somewhere other than east peoria but the people of this city had other ideas they were hard at work rebuilding and modernizing and they were determined to make east peoria an ideal home for companies like caterpillar but caterpillar s leaders were impressed and ultimately they changed their minds they decided to go ahead and build offices right here in east peoria to be as a former chairman of the company put it no less willing to get in step with the march of progress throughout the 20th century this company has helped lead that march from working far beyond capacity during world war ii even with 6 000 workers on military leave to surviving the recession in the 1980s and emerging stronger and more competitive to seizing the promise of today s green economy by leading the way with clean diesel engines caterpillar has shaped the american landscape shown the world what a great american company looks like i know the past few months have been hard for this company but they i also know that they ve been among the worst in a generation but here s what else i know here in america even in our darkest moments we ve held fast to a vision of a better future and we ve been willing to work for it and struggle for it and sacrifice for it that s how it s going to be again i have the fullest confidence that if we think boldly and we act quickly and fully devote ourselves to the work at hand then out of this ordeal will come a better day and a brighter future for our children and our grandchildren that s the history of this company that s the history of this city that s the history of this state and that s the history that we re going to make you and me together thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama12 3 09a barack_obama thank you general wilson for the wonderful introduction and your hospitality thank you to secretary gates and admiral mullen for the extraordinary service that they render to this country i want to acknowledge the other members of the joint chiefs of staff who are doing outstanding work and have been a great support to me and ambassador ross to each of you who are here for your service to our country and your commitment to our security i want to say thank you on behalf of the american people you know i think so highly of ndu that i picked one of your alumni general jim jones to be my national security advisor i know many of you have served in harm s way and for that you have the respect of a grateful nation and before i go any further i want to acknowledge all of our troops now serving overseas they have shouldered an awesome they have shouldered an awesome responsibility they have performed brilliantly and they have the full support of the american people today it is my privilege to join you in dedicating this building to the memory of president abraham lincoln we know of course that there are many monuments to lincoln s memory across this country his words are written into stately walls and his image is printed on our currency his story is taught in our schools and his name is synonymous with freedom you and i live in the union that he saved and we inherited the progress that he made possible yet despite this far reaching legacy it is still to quote the man himself altogether fitting and proper that we should set aside this ground and dedicate this hall in his memory because lincoln s presidency was characterized by war even as his ambition was a just and lasting peace here in this indispensable institution we find a living legacy to that ambition here at national defense university men and women come together to think to learn and to seek new strategies to defend our union while pursuing the goal of a just and lasting peace the grounds that make up this campus tell us an interesting story about how america can pursue this goal fort mcnair was built over two centuries ago to protect a young capital against invasion its defenses were traditional training for soldiers stockpiles of arms fortifications to hold advancing armies at bay it was overrun by a british attack in the war of 1812 and treated the wounded warriors of the civil war in lincoln s day and then just over a century ago president theodore roosevelt came here to lay the cornerstone of the army war college in dedicating the school roosevelt spoke words that resonate to this day he said more and more it has become evident in modern warfare that the efficiency of the unit of the individual officer and the individual enlisted man is going to be the prime factor in deciding the fate of fought fields more than 100 years later roosevelt s insight remained the essential mission of this institution the belief that even as our weapons have grown more powerful individuals still determine the strength of our national security the belief that individual americans remain as roosevelt said the prime factor in deciding the fate of fought fields the battlefields that we now face would be unfamiliar to lincoln and roosevelt the days when president lincoln would wander down to the war department s telegraph office to get reports from the front are long past but the threats to our nation are real and they are direct from this fort which was founded to defend the city of washington against invasion you could stand on september 11 2001 and watch the smoke from the pentagon billowing up across the potomac the attacks of 9 11 signaled the new dangers of the 21st century and today our people are still threatened by violent extremists and we re still at war with terrorists in afghanistan and pakistan who are plotting to do us harm yet terrorism and extremism make up just one part of the many challenges that confront our nation in iraq we will surely face difficult days ahead as we responsibly end a war by transitioning to iraqi control of their country a historic economic downturn has put at stake the prosperity that underpins our strength while putting at risk the stability of governments and the survival of people around the world we re threatened by the spread of the world s deadliest weapons by emerging cyber threats and by a dependence on foreign oil that endangers our security and our planet poverty disease the persistence of conflict and genocide in the 21st century challenge our international alliances partnerships and institutions and must call on all of us to reexamine our assumptions these are the battlefields of the 21st century these are the threats that we now face and in these struggles the united states of america must succeed and we will succeed we also know that the old approaches won t meet the challenges of our time threats now move freely across borders and the ability to do great harm lies in the hands of individuals as well as nations no technology no matter how smart can stop the spread of nuclear weapons no army no matter how strong can eliminate every adversary no weapon no matter how powerful can erase the hatred that lies in someone s heart so it falls to institutions like this and to individuals like you to help us understand the world as it is to develop the capacities that we need to confront emerging danger and to act with purpose and pragmatism to turn this moment of peril into one of promise that s how we will find new pathways to peace and security that is the work that we must do now make no mistake this nation will maintain our military dominance we will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world and we will do whatever it takes to sustain our technological advantage and to invest in the capabilities that we need to protect our interests and to defeat and deter any conventional enemy but we also need to look beyond this conventional advantage as we develop the new approaches and new capabilities of the 21st century and in that effort this university must play a critical role our troops are faced with complex missions increasingly they re called upon to defeat nimble enemies while keeping local populations on their side and that s why my administration is committed to growing the size of our ground forces and to investing in the skills that can help our troops succeed in the unconventional mission that they now face we must understand different languages and different cultures we must study determined adversaries and developing tactics that s the education that takes place within the walls of this university and that is the work that must be done to keep our nation safe america must also balance and integrate all elements of our national power we cannot continue to push the burden on to our military alone nor leave dormant any aspect of the full arsenal of american capability and that s why my administration is committed to renewing diplomacy as a tool of american power and to developing our civilian national security capabilities this effort takes place within the walls of this university where civilians sit alongside soldiers in the classroom and it must continue out in the field where american civilians can advance opportunity enhance governance and the rule of law and attack the causes of war around the world we have to enlist our civilians in the same way that we enlist those members of the armed services in understanding this broad mission that we have finally we know that the united states cannot defeat global threats alone there is no permanent american solution to the security challenges that we face within any foreign nation nor can the world meet the tests of our time without strong american leadership and that s why my administration is committed to comprehensive engagement with the world including strengthened partnerships with the foreign militaries and security forces that can combat our common enemies those partnerships are advanced here within the walls of this university where we welcome men and women from around the world to study alongside americans to understand our values to forge partnerships and hopefully friendships that contribute to a safer world the lesson of history is that peace and security do not come easily each person who passes through this university will play a different role some of you will serve in uniform abroad or help train troops here at home some will be diplomats intelligence officers or congressional staffers others will work in the private sector some will rise to be senior officers and top strategists and some of you might even decide to run for public office although i d warn you about that your story is your own and the education that you re receiving will help you advance it but you re here because you ve also accepted the responsibility of having your story as part of the larger american story your story is serving your fellow citizens in the wider world and my message to you today is simple your individual service makes all of the difference you will make the decisions large and small that will help shape our future so as we dedicate this building where you and future generations will be prepared to make those choices remember that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth it comes from the power of our ideals democracy liberty equality justice and unyielding hope those ideals are embedded in our national character because generations of americans have chosen to live them in their own lives to advance them through their service and through their sacrifice this is the truth that lincoln understood that pragmatism must serve a common purpose a higher purpose that s the legacy that we inherit and that in the end is how government of the people and by the people and for the people will endure in our time so thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama12 3 09c barack_obama thank you thank you so much please everybody have a seat i want to get to some q a as quickly as possible so let me dive right in first of all thank you it s a pleasure to be here this afternoon i see a lot of friends in the room it s especially important i think for us to be meeting today with the business roundtable because the companies that you lead account for nearly 10 million jobs and generate trillions of dollars in revenue each year your companies have fueled the prosperity of communities across the country and the success stories of countless individuals they ve enriched our nation they ve served as a tribute to the enduring spirit of american capitalism but for over three decades the business roundtable is also taking a broader view of your responsibilities as chief executives you ve looked beyond the bottom line and the next quarter to the long term health of your company you ve not only served as accomplished leaders but as engaged citizens citizens who understand that it is in the interest of both your companies and your country to have a workforce that s highly educated healthy and prosperous to have a market that is free but also fair and to live in a nation that s willing to invest in its own future you understand the public responsibility of private enterprise it s fitting then that we meet at this moment because over the last few weeks a spirited debate has emerged in washington a debate over what it will take to ultimately break the back of this recession and strengthen our economy for the long run it s a debate that centers on one key question does the greatest economic crisis in our lifetime warrant extraordinary action to deal with the array of challenges we face or should we limit our efforts and try to deal with them incrementally or one at a time now let me say that it was not my preference believe it or not to launch my administration by passing the largest economic recovery plan in the nation s history or to face crises in the financial market and the automobile industry it was not ideal to take office in the midst of the worst job and growth numbers in decades particularly since we re still in the midst of two wars but that s the duty i signed on for and although my administration did not create these problems it s now not only my responsibility but my extraordinary privilege to help solve them it s my job to address every challenge that may threaten the strength and vitality of our families our businesses and our entire nation now and in the future we must move quickly and aggressively on the most immediate threats to our economy and financial stability jobs housing and credit there s no debate about that that s why we ve already passed a recovery plan that will save and create 3 5 million jobs over the next two years more than 90 percent of which will be located in the private sector a plan that will also give 95 percent of working families a tax cut that begins by april 1st that s why we ve launched a housing plan that will help responsible families lower their monthly payments a plan that s already helping responsible homeowners save money by refinancing their loans and that s why we ve forcefully attacked the credit lockdown that the housing crisis helped create as all of you know credit is the lifeblood of a healthy economy the inability of even creditworthy businesses and consumers to get loans today is a major roadblock to our recovery to help get credit flowing again we ve created an unprecedented lending fund in partnership with the federal reserve that will help support up to a trillion dollars in auto loans college loans and loans for the consumer the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running we ll soon be announcing more efforts to provide even more lending to small businesses which are being devastated by this credit crisis these are all important steps but the only way we can truly unlock credit and heal our financial system for good is to address the state of our banking system and i know that this crisis is at the top of your list of immediate concerns and i promise you it is at the top of mine as well we all know how we got here a wave of complex and risky transactions around mortgages and other loans produced huge profits for financial institutions and those who run them until the housing bubble burst and now some of the nation s largest banks are holding so called toxic assets problematic debt that are dragging down the balance sheets of these institutions with no real market in which to sell them and this has caused a slowdown in lending and since finance today is global the virus has spread worldwide now it s important to note that there are thousands of banks large and small that have made sound decisions and are on solid footing and all americans need to know that their deposits are secure but the weakened condition of some of our largest banks has implications for the entire system and those weaknesses must be addressed and critical to that solution is an honest and forthright assessment of the true status of bank balance sheets something that we ve not yet had and that s why the treasury has asked bank regulators to conduct intensive examinations or stress tests of each bank when that process is complete next month we will act decisively to ensure that our major banks have enough money on hand to lend to people even in more difficult times and if we learn that such a bank has more serious problems we will hold accountable those responsible force the necessary adjustments provide the support to clean up their balance sheets and assure the continuity of a strong viable institution that can serve our people and our economy i intend to hold these banks fully accountable for any assistance they ll receive and this time they ll have to clearly demonstrate how taxpayer dollars result in more lending for the american taxpayer i also intend to enact tough common sense regulatory reforms equal to the challenges of a 21st century financial system so that a crisis like this never happens again and when i meet with the leaders of the other g20 nations next month i ll ask them to join us in these actions because in an age when financial transactions often cross borders global coordination is essential to safeguard against future crises but the truth is that these problems in the financial market as acute and urgent as they are are only part of what threatens our economy and we must not use the need to confront them as an excuse to keep ignoring the long term threats to our prosperity the cost of our health care and our oil addiction our education deficit and our fiscal deficit now i m not choosing to address these additional challenges just because i feel like it or because i m a glutton for punishment i m doing so because they re fundamental to our economic growth and ensuring that we don t have more crises like this in the future you see we cannot go back to endless cycles of bubble and bust we can t continue to base our economy on reckless speculation and spending beyond our means on bad credit and inflated home prices and over leveraged banks this crisis teaches us that such activity is not the creation of lasting wealth it s the illusion of prosperity and it hurts us all in the end instead we must build this recovery on a foundation that lasts on a 21st century infrastructure and a green economy with lower health care costs that create millions of new jobs and new industries on schools that prepare our children to compete and thrive on businesses that are free to invest in the next big idea or breakthrough discovery we cannot wait to build this foundation putting off these investments for another four years or eight years or 12 years or 20 years would be to continue the same irresponsibility that led us to this point it would be exactly what washington has done for decades and it will make our recovery more fragile and our future less secure and that s a future i don t accept not for my children and not for yours i did not come here to pass our problems on to the next president or the next generation i m here to solve them i m here to start building an economy and a prosperity that lasts now would i prefer to tackle these challenges without having inherited a trillion dollar deficit or a financial crisis absolutely but that s a choice that we don t have i don t like the idea of spending more government money nor am i interested in expanding government s role i ve always been a strong believer in the power of the free market it has been and will remain the very engine of america s progress the source of a prosperity that has gone unmatched in human history i believe that jobs are best created not by government but by businesses and entrepreneurs like you who are willing to take risks on a good idea and i believe that our role as lawmakers is not to disparage wealth but to expand its reach not to stifle the market but to strengthen its ability to unleash the creativity and innovation that still makes this nation the envy of the world but i also know this throughout our history there have been times when the market has fallen out of balance there have been moments of economic transformation and upheaval when prosperity and even basic financial security have escaped far too many of our citizens and at these moments government has stepped in not to supplant private enterprise but to catalyze it to create the conditions for thousands of entrepreneurs and new businesses to adapt and ultimately to thrive that s why we laid down railroads and highways to spur commerce and industry to stitch this nation together that s why even in the midst of civil war lincoln launched a transcontinental railroad and land grant colleges and the national academy of sciences that s why we initiated universal public high schools and passed a gi bill to nurture the skills and talents of all our workers that s why eisenhower built an interstate highway system and kennedy pointed us to the moon knowing that the exploration would lead to unimagined innovations here on earth that s what we ve done in the past and that s why i ve chosen to address education health care energy and this budget because we can t wait to make the investments today that will lead to tomorrow s prosperity as members of the business roundtable you know how important this is when it comes to each one of these challenges on education i know that you just heard from arne duncan you ve all long understood that the success of your business ultimately depends on its ability to hire workers who have the skills and knowledge to compete with other workers and other companies all over the world you also know that america is increasingly falling behind in that competition that s why it will be the goal of this administration to ensure that every child has access to a complete and competitive education from the day they are born to the day they begin their career we ve already dramatically expanded early childhood education and we will continue to improve the quality of these programs for as this organization knows children who receive a quality early childhood education are more likely to attend college more likely to hold a job and more likely to earn more in that job this budget also creates new rewards tied to teacher performance and pathways for advancement and rewards for success for those teachers and we re going to invest in innovative programs that are already helping schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps we ve urged states to lift the cap on the number of charter schools they build and i ve asked every american to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training with the goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the year 2020 and to meet that goal we re investing 2 5 million to identify and support initiatives across the country that achieve results in helping students graduate and we ll also make sure that a higher education is affordable for every american who wants to go this budget also recognizes a reality that you understand as business leaders in this economy adults of all ages need opportunities to earn new degrees and skills so we will work with our universities and community colleges to prepare workers for good jobs in high growth industries and to improve access to job training not only for young people who are just starting their careers but also for older workers who need new skills to change careers that s how we ll create a workforce that will help our businesses compete and win in the 21st century and that s how we ll create a workforce that is adaptable to a dynamic global capitalist system even as we invest in our workers we ll also need to create the jobs for them to fill and that s why the second major investment that our budget makes is in the jobs and industries of the future the recovery plan we passed will ultimately leverage at least 175 billion in private sector investment investment in areas like clean energy and small business development and school construction this budget builds on that foundation by making historic investments in science and technology and infrastructure by making permanent the research and experimentation credit by eliminating capital gains taxes for investments in small business and start ups and by providing the resources necessary to finally spark a clean energy revolution we all know that the country that harnesses the power of renewable energy will lead the 21st century and yet it s china that s launched the largest effort in history to make their economy energy efficient we invented solar technology but we ve fallen behind countries like germany and japan in producing it new plug in hybrids will roll off our assembly lines but they re running on battery cells made in korea i do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders and i know you don t either it s time for america to lead and to do this you and i both know that we need ultimately to make clean renewable energy the profitable kind of energy we know that the best way to do that is through market based caps on carbon pollution that drives the production of more renewable energy in america i understand that this will be a difficult transition for many businesses to make and that s why this budget does not account for such a cap until 2012 a time when this economy should be on the road to recovery and to support this transition we ll invest 15 billion a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power advanced biofuels clean coal and more fuel efficient cars and trucks built right here in america the last major challenge we address in this budget is a threat not only to the well being of our families and the prosperity of our businesses but to the very foundation of our economy and that s the exploding cost of health care in america and i know you had a session with peter orszag about this for those who believe that this issue is somehow unrelated to our economic crisis consider the fact that up to 1 5 million americans could lose their homes this year just because of medical crises and as everybody in this room is painfully aware the same soaring costs that are straining our families budgets are also sinking some of our best businesses or putting enormous strain on your bottom line today too many small businesses can t even think about insuring their employees and major american corporations like yours are struggling to compete with foreign counterparts companies of all sizes are being forced to ship jobs overseas or shut their doors for good medicare costs are consuming our federal budget medicaid is overwhelming our state budgets at the fiscal summit we held in the white house a few weeks ago the one thing on which everyone agreed was that the greatest threat to america s fiscal health is not the investments we ve made to rescue our economy it s the skyrocketing cost of our health care system you understand this for years the business roundtable has worked tirelessly to promote investments in electronic medical records with strict privacy standards that will help save money and lives investments that we have now made in the recovery plan you participated in last week s white house forum on health reform proving that this time we find business and labor medical professionals and patient advocates all on the side same side of the issue urging meaningful reform and you were one of the many organizations that urged us to include health care in this budget which is why we ve made a historic commitment to reform based on the principle that we must bring down crushing costs and provide quality affordable health care to every american it s a commitment that s paid for in part by efficiencies in the system that are long overdue and we will need your help to ensure that it is included in the final budget let me just give you one example medicare for years we ve been paying medicare advantage plans 14 percent more than it would cost for the traditional medicare plan in this budget we have a simple idea instead of government setting prices for our seniors why not have private plans bid for medicare s business this competitive bidding is good for businesses it s good for our seniors and it s good for taxpayers because it saves us 177 billion over 10 years we ve undertaken an unprecedented effort to find savings just like this in every corner of this budget because with the deficit we inherited the cost of the recession we face and the long term challenges we have to meet it s never been more important to ensure that as our economy recovers we do what it takes to cut this deficit in half by the end of my first term in office now i know that some have questioned this commitment and i want you to know that i understand the skepticism because we ve heard promises like this before and it s true that this crisis has compelled us to add to our deficit in the short term but i ask all of you to look at this budget already we ve identified 2 trillion in deficit reductions over the next decade we ve announced procurement reform that will save the government 40 billion by greatly reducing no bid contracts we re going to end education programs that don t work we will eliminate direct payments to agribusiness that don t need them we ll root out even more waste fraud and abuse in our medicare program so altogether this budget cuts spending by 1 trillion over the next decade 1 trillion from where it would be if we just kept on going on our current path and that will reduce discretionary spending for domestic programs as a share of the economy by more than 10 percent over the next decade it will be at the lowest level in nearly half a century lowest level in nearly half a century now if we wanted to we could have painted a sunnier fiscal picture in this budget we could have relied on some of the same gimmicks that our government has used for the last eight years gimmicks that would hide spending on things like iraq and afghanistan gimmicks like assuming that there s never a natural disaster anywhere in the country over the course of a year our deficit would appear 2 7 trillion better had we used those gimmicks over the next decade but i told my team we re not going to do that we re not just suffering from a deficit of dollars in this government we re suffering from a deficit of trust and i believe that restoring that trust begins by restoring a sense of honesty and accountability to our budget now while we re being honest let s also talk about taxes always a favorite subject i said in my address to congress that this is the one issue that always falls victim to the same political scare tactics we ve seen for decades so let me be very clear if this budget is passed not one american will see their taxes raised a single dime between now and the end of 2010 all right so for the next two years your taxes aren t going up nobody at that point at the end of 2010 97 percent of all taxpayers and 97 percent of all small businesses will still not see a tax increase 97 percent in fact 95 percent of all working families will receive a tax cut so they can buy some of the wonderful products that you make for the top 3 percent of all taxpayers and i m just going to take a shot in the dark and guess that that includes some of the people in this room the top tax rate across the board will still be lower than they were during the prosperity of the 1990s it will still be lower than they were during the clinton era you will pay a tax rate on capital gains and dividends that is also lower than it was during most of the 1990s and the revenue that results from these changes will reduce the deficit by 750 billion over the next 10 years now there s no doubt that we ve had to make some tough choices in this budget and we re likely to have to make more in the days and months ahead and you and i won t always agree on every decision or every issue but i do believe that we know what needs to be done to build an economy that s not just revived from a crisis but rebuilt for the future to secure a prosperity that no longer rests on a bubble but on a firm foundation that will make this country strong and competitive in the 21st century that kind of economy an economy with workers who are highly skilled and highly educated with a health care system that is efficient and affordable with energy that is clean and renewable with entrepreneurs who are free to invest in the next big idea that s an economy that s built to last that s a future that s good for business and this is a country that will lead and prosper for generations to come and i look forward to your continued cooperation in building that country because i have absolute faith that we can get there together so thank you very much i asked i asked my team for some extra time to make sure that i was able to answer as many questions as possible mr chairman of the roundtable do you want to start us off absolutely that s exactly the kind of partnership that we seek as i said there are actually a lot of people in this room who our team has consulted with on a regular basis and we hope to do more of that in the future and i know that you know john has attended a number of the summits that we ve been putting in place i think you will find that this is actually an administration that also wants you to succeed in the same way that you want us to succeed as i said before i am a strong believer in the ability of the free market to generate wealth and prosperity that s shared across the board i think there are times where sometimes our economy gets out of balance this is obviously one of those times and so government has to intervene in a crisis but the goals should always be to right the ship and let private enterprise do its magic there are going to be a series of fairly complex issues around regulation in the financial markets which we believe is necessary i think we ve got to and i assume that many of the people here agree that we ve got to update the regulatory framework that was created in the 30s for global markets where trillions of dollars are spinning around the globe with the press of a button but we are also very mindful that we ve got to do those regulatory reforms in a way that doesn t strangle innovation and creativity and entrepreneurship but deals with the systemic risks that obviously we were unprepared to deal with when this latest crisis occurred with respect to a tax policy again we want to consult with you because our belief is that we ve got to have a stable system that closes the structural deficit that right now is built into the federal government and it s an unsustainable deficit if we keep on going down this path at some point folks who ve been financing our ways are going to say enough we don t want to buy anymore t bills and then we ve got some problems so we re going to work with you on that we want to do it in a way that encourages work encourages investment encourages savings and make sure that we re financing what we need out of government but no more than what we need so on a whole host of these issues we are going to be actively soliciting your advice and your input and our expectation is that we can use this moment to create a stronger free market system one that s more stable one that s more profitable over the long term but i think as everybody here recognizes because you re all thinking about it with respect to your own businesses this is going to take some time i mean we were engaging in a unsustainable model for a very long time and the bill is now due for a lot of bad habits and bad practices that were built up over the course of many years it is complicated and it is international and so our focus right now is to stabilize the financial system get credit flowing again to project a budget that allows in future years for us to start tackling these very big problems but we ve got to get started now if we re actually going to get there on health care on energy and education and that s what we re trying to accomplish let s see sam thank you dem bobama12 5 09 barack_obama well thank you joe for the wonderful introduction welcome all of you to the white house and for joining us on this beautiful spring day it is an extraordinary privilege to celebrate these top cops who have traveled here to be recognized for incredible acts of courage and quick thinking which prevented harm and saved lives before i speak more about these outstanding officers there are just a few wonderful members of congress that i want to introduce representative john conyers one of the deans of the house of representatives republican emanuel cleaver from kansas city and representative lucille roybal allard great to see you thank you so much please give them a big round of applause now i don t know if you guys are aware that we have a nickname for joe biden around here in the white house joe has been overseeing the way funds are being used under the american recovery and reinvestment act to ensure tax dollars are going toward the intended purpose of creating jobs and aren t being wasted so we ve taken to calling him the sheriff because nobody messes with joe and i want you to know that he is making sure that money is getting on the ground helping local communities including making sure that money is going to allow local communities to hire more police officers and make sure that they ve got the equipment and the training they need to succeed i also want to thank attorney general eric holder for being here and for his leadership at the department of justice which oversees much of the funding in the recovery plan and the budget that will be providing local law enforcement the resources they need and finally i want to give a particular welcome to the leaders of the national association of police organizations including their outstanding president tom nee thank you so much for being here this is an event that we are glad as joe mentioned to bring back to the white house after a period of absence in honor of these fine officers and the folks across the country they represent the men and women who walk the beat who answer the call and do the difficult work of keeping our neighborhoods safe and it s no surprise that many police officers including many of you have served in our military or are serving still as members of the reserve of course it s not a difficult thing for a president or a vice president or anyone one of us to praise you you deserve it you ve rescued hostages held at gunpoint you ve ended violent standoffs you ve taken on gunmen in the face of grave danger refusing to give up or back down even after suffering serious injuries you ve reacted quickly in crisis to protect the innocent you ve reacted with compassion for those that were in need and you ve literally walked through the fire to help your neighbors escape disaster that s what police officers do you step into harm s way to form officer by officer block by block neighborhood by neighborhood the line between safety and violence calm and chaos hope and despair and for that it s not difficult to offer our praise but you deserve more than just praise for it s far more important that we actually support you that we match these words which come so easily with the work that can and must follow right now for example at this moment of economic challenge one of the greatest concerns is that we ll see state and local governments forced to lay off police officers even though we know that crime has a tendency to go up when the economy is in dire straits we ve seen that in my own hometown of chicago and many other cities so we can t back down because the job of every american depends on the job you do and the resources that enable you to do that job well police officers know better than anyone a neighborhood that isn t safe is a neighborhood that isn t growing that won t see old businesses hiring new workers or new businesses opening their doors you know how devastating crime can be how it can shatter lives and undermine whole communities and that s why the american recovery and reinvestment act includes 1 billion to save or create about 5 500 jobs through the cops program and there s another 2 billion in grants which will help keep police officers on the beat and in the job in fact in march i went to columbus ohio to speak at their police academy s graduation ceremony and these new officers are now protecting the streets of columbus because of those grants and there are similar stories being told in precincts all over america the budget we passed builds on the recovery plan providing additional funding for the cops program as well as for justice assistance grants also known as the byrne jag program taken together we re making a significant down payment towards my administration s goal of adding 50 000 police officers across this country and that s only part of what we re doing to provide law enforcement with the tools and resources necessary to keep people safe as you know this is a difficult moment for our nation but at a time when we face economic crisis born partially from irresponsibility on wall street and in washington i m heartened by the folks who are standing behind me today who ve demonstrated with acts of selflessness and bravery what it means to be responsible what it means to be a problem solver a mediator an investigator and protector all wrapped into one what it means to wave goodbye to your families and start another shift unsure of how it will end and what it means to put your life on the line for a partner or a stranger in order in other words what it means to serve so i want to thank all of you for this extraordinary service i am honored to welcome you to the white house i m proud to offer my congratulations my appreciation and most importantly my administration s unwavering support god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you all for joining us here today thank you dem bobama12 8 09a barack_obama good morning everybody and welcome to the white house i am glad all of you could be with us today as we honor the newest member of our highest court who i m proud to address for the very first time as justice sonia sotomayor we are also honored to be joined by justice sotomayor s new colleagues we have justice ginsburg who is here as well as justice stevens so i just want to thank both justice stevens and justice ginsburg not only for being here today but for your extraordinary service on the court and i know you ll be giving justice sotomayor some good tips i also want to thank everyone who s worked so hard to bring us to this day i want to thank especially our judiciary committee chairman senator patrick leahy as well as our senate majority leader senator reid for their outstanding work to complete this process before the august recess i want to thank senator schumer and senator gillibrand both of whom are justice sotomayor s home state senators for their extraordinary work on her behalf i want to thank all the members of congress who ve taken the time to join us here at the white house event and i want to acknowledge all the advocates and groups who organized and mobilized and supported these efforts from the very beginning your work was absolutely critical to our success and i appreciate all that you ve done so pat yourselves on the back congratulations two members of congress that i just especially want to acknowledge senator bob menendez who worked so hard on the senate side and congresswoman nydia velazquez who is our chair of the congressional hispanic caucus and i think we all want to take a moment to recognize the woman who in so many ways truly made this day possible justice sotomayor s mother celina sotomayor mrs sotomayor is here with her husband omar and justice sotomayor s brother juan and other members of their family and we re thrilled that they could join us here today and by the way i don t normally do this but let me also just thank my extraordinary white house staff who helped to usher this stuff through we re very proud of them thank you very much of course we re here not just to celebrate our extraordinary new supreme court justice and all those who ve been a part of her journey to this day we re here as well to celebrate an extraordinary moment for our nation we celebrate the impact justice sotomayor has already had on people across america who have been inspired by her exceptional life story we celebrate the greatness of a country in which such a story is possible and we celebrate how with their overwhelming vote to confirm justice sotomayor the united states senate republicans and democrats tore down yet one more barrier and affirmed our belief that in america the doors of opportunity must be open to all with that vote the senate looked beyond the old divisions and they embraced excellence they recognized justice sotomayor s intellect her integrity and her independence of mind her respect for the proper role of each branch of government her fidelity to the law in each case that she hears and her devotion to protecting our core constitutional rights and liberties justice william brennan once said that in order for government to ensure those rights for all its citizens government officials must be attentive to the concrete human realities at stake in the decisions they make they must understand as justice brennan put it the pulse of life beneath the official version of events the pulse of life beneath the official version of events justice sotomayor understands those realities because she s witnessed them firsthand as a prosecutor a litigator and a judge working to uphold our laws keep our communities safe and give people the chance to live out their dreams work that she has done with devotion with distinction and with an unyielding commitment to give back to this country that has given her so much and she understands these things because she s lived these things because her life is one of those only in america stories raised by a single mom in the south bronx determined to give her every opportunity to succeed propelled by the talent and hard work that would earn her scholarships and honors at the best schools in the country driven always by the belief that it doesn t matter where you come from or what you look like or what challenges life throws your way no dream is beyond reach in the united states of america and with her extraordinary breadth and depth of experience justice sotomayor brings to the court both a mastery of the letter of the law and an understanding of how the law actually unfolds in our daily lives its impact on how we work and worship and raise our families on whether we have the opportunities we need to live the lives we imagine that understanding is vital for the work of a supreme court justice as justice stevens and justice ginsburg will testify the work of applying principles set forth at our founding to the cases and controversies of our time for as visionary as our founders were they did not presume to know exactly how the times would change what new questions fate and history would set before us instead they sought to articulate ideals that would be timeless ideals that would accommodate the ever changing circumstances of our lives and preserve for each new generation our most sacred rights and freedoms when justice sotomayor put her hand on that bible and took that oath we took yet another step towards realizing those ideals we came yet another step closer to the more perfect union that we all seek because while this is justice sotomayor s achievement the result of her ability and determination this moment is not just about her it s about every child who will grow up thinking to him or herself if sonia sotomayor can make it then maybe i can too it s about every mother or father who looks at the sacrifices justice sotomayor s mother made and the successes she and her brother have had and thinks i may not have much in my own life but if i work hard enough maybe my kids can have more it s about everyone in this nation facing challenges and struggles in their lives who hear justice sotomayor s story and thinks to themselves if she could overcome so much and go so far then why can t i nearly 80 years ago as the cornerstone was laid for the building that became our supreme court chief justice charles evans hughes declared the republic endures and this is the symbol of its faith justice sotomayor s rise from humble beginnings to the height of achievement is yet another symbol of that faith faith that the american dream still endures faith that equal justice under the law is not just an inscription in marble but an animating ideal of our democracy faith that in this great nation all things are still possible for all people this is a great day for america and i know that all of us here are proud and honored to have been a part of it and so with that i would like to introduce the newest member of the united states supreme court justice sonia sotomayor dem bobama12 8 09b barack_obama there are many honors and privileges bestowed on the occupant of this house but few mean as much to me as the chance to award america s highest civilian medal to the recipients that are here today this is a chance for me and for the united states of america to say thank you to some of the finest citizens of this country and of all countries the men and women we honor today have led very different lives and pursued very different careers they re pioneers in science and medicine they re gifted artists and indomitable athletes they have made their mark in the courtroom in the community and in congress and what unites them is a belief that most forgive me to those of you who are not americans but what we consider to be that most american of beliefs that our lives are what we make of them that no barriers of race gender or physical infirmity can restrain the human spirit and that the truest test of a person s life is what we do for one another the recipients of the medal of freedom did not set out to win this or any other award they did not set out in pursuit of glory or fame or riches rather they set out guided by passion committed to hard work aided by persistence often with few advantages but the gifts grace and good name god gave them so let them stand as an example here in the united states and around the world of what we can achieve in our own lives let them stand as an example of the difference we can make in the lives of others let each of their stories stand as an example of a life well lived one of the last things suzy komen did before she passed away was ask her sister nancy to make her a promise nancy promised her she would prevent other families battling breast cancer from hurting the way theirs had what began with 200 and a list of friends has become a global race for the cure a campaign that has eased the pain and saved the lives of millions around the world in the months after her sister s death nancy lay awake at night thinking about the promise she had made and wondering whether one person could really make a difference nancy s life is the answer while an intern at miami s jackson memorial dr pedro jos greer came across a patient in a coma without a known name or address a homeless man found by firefighters suffering from tuberculosis in the days that followed the physician little havana knows as dr joe searched for clues about the patient s life in the squalor under miami s highways deciding that miami s homeless deserved better dr greer founded camillus health concern a clinic that now offers care to over 4 000 poor and homeless patients it s a life that might be distilled into a question dr greer asks all of us if we don t fight injustice who will professor stephen hawking was a brilliant man and a mediocre student when he lost his balance and tumbled down a flight of stairs diagnosed with a rare disease and told he had just a few years to live he chose to live with new purpose and happily in the four decades since he has become one of the world s leading scientists his work in theoretical physics which i will not attempt to explain further here has advanced our understanding of the universe his popular books have advanced the cause of science itself from his wheelchair he s led us on a journey to the farthest and strangest reaches of the cosmos in so doing he has stirred our imagination and shown us the power of the human spirit here on earth told he was too small to play college football jack kemp became a pro quarterback cut by four teams he led the buffalo bills to two championships football he once said gave him a good sense of perspective about politics he d already been booed cheered cut sold and traded makes me feel better a conservative thinker a republican leader and a defender of civil rights he was that rare patriot who put country over party never forgetting what he learned on the gridiron that it takes each of us doing our part and all of us working together to achieve a common goal it s a life from which we can all draw lessons democrat and republican alike after purchasing an 8 racket with money earned from chores 11 year old billie jean declared a goal to be the number one tennis player in the world yet what we honor are not simply her 12 grand slam titles 101 doubles titles and 67 singles titles pretty good billie jean we honor what she calls all the off the court stuff what she did to broaden the reach of the game to change how women athletes and women everywhere view themselves and to give everyone regardless of gender or sexual orientation including my two daughters a chance to compete both on the court and in life as billie jean once said we should never ever underestimate the human spirit nor should we underestimate billie jean king s spirit born and raised in jim crow alabama preaching in his blood the reverend joseph lowery is a giant of the moses generation of civil rights leaders it was just king lowery and a few others huddled in montgomery who laid the groundwork for the bus boycott and the movement that was to follow a founder of the southern christian leadership conference lowery was later asked to serve as president he agreed to serve for one year but wound up serving as he puts it for 20 one year terms throughout his life some have called him crazy but one of my favorite sermons that i heard dr lowery once deliver he said there s good crazy and there s bad crazy and sometimes you need a little bit of that good crazy to make the world a better place born just a generation past the battle of the little big horn a grandson of a scout for general custer himself dr joseph medicine crow was the first member of his tribe to attend college and earn a master s before completing his phd he left to serve in world war ii wearing war paint beneath his uniform and a sacred feather beneath his helmet joseph medicine crow completed the four battlefield deeds that made him the last crow war chief historian educator and patriot a good man a bacheitche in crow dr medicine crow s life reflects not only the warrior spirit of the crow people but america s highest ideals his name was harvey milk and he was here to recruit us all of us to join a movement and change a nation for much of his early life he had silenced himself in the prime of his life he was silenced by the act of another but in the brief time in which he spoke and ran and led his voice stirred the aspirations of millions of people he would become after several attempts one of the first openly gay americans elected to public office and his message of hope hope unashamed hope unafraid could not ever be silenced it was harvey who said it best you gotta give em hope when a young sandra day graduated from stanford law school near the top of her class in two years instead of the usual three she was offered just one job in the private sector her prospective employer asked her how well she typed and told her there might be work for her as a legal secretary now i cannot know how she would have fared as a legal secretary but she made a mighty fine justice of the united states supreme court a judge and arizona legislator cancer survivor child of the texas plains sandra day o connor is like the pilgrim in the poem she sometime quotes who has forged a new trail and built a bridge behind her for all young women to follow it s been said that sidney poitier does not make movies he makes milestones milestones of artistic excellence milestones of america s progress on screen and behind the camera in films such as the defiant ones guess who s coming to dinner uptown saturday night lilies of the field for which he became the first african american to win an academy award for best actor poitier not only entertained but enlightened shifting attitudes broadening hearts revealing the power of the silver screen to bring us closer together the child of bahamian tomato farmers poitier once called his driving purpose to make himself a better person he did and he made us all a little bit better along the way dolores conchita figueroa del rivero knows the adversity that comes with a difficult name i can relate known to the world by the name that has lit up broadway marquees chita rivera s career had an improbable start accompanying a nervous classmate on an audition she decided to audition herself and impressed the choreographer jerome robbins who would make her famous as anita in west side story sassy electric that rare performer who can sing dance and act chita rivera revealed that still rarer ability to overcome when she recovered from a car accident that shattered her leg she ended up retaking the stage won a tony for kiss of the spider woman and like her unforgettable anita chita rivera has shown that life can indeed be bright in america the only girl in a family of four brothers mary robinson learned early on what it takes to make sure all voices are heard as a crusader for women and those without a voice in ireland mary robinson was the first woman elected president of ireland before being appointed u n high commissioner for human rights when she traveled abroad as president she would place a light in her window that would draw people of irish descent to pass by below today as an advocate for the hungry and the hunted the forgotten and the ignored mary robinson has not only shone a light on human suffering but illuminated a better future for our world after graduating from the university of chicago school of medicine in 1948 janet rowley got married and gave birth to four sons making medicine a hobby and making family her priority it was not until she was almost 40 that she took up serious medical research and not until almost a decade later that she discovered hunched over her dining room table examining small photos of chromosomes that leukemia cells are notable for changes in their genetics a discovery that showed cancer is genetic and transformed how we fight the disease all of us have been touched in some way by cancer including my family and so we can all be thankful that what began as a hobby became a life s work for janet the glint in the eye and the lilt in the voice are familiar to us all but the signature quality of archbishop desmond tutu says nelson mandela is a readiness to take unpopular stands without fear perhaps that explains what led the arch as he s known to preach amid tear gas and police dogs rallying a people against apartheid and later when a free south africa needed a heart big enough to forgive its sins archbishop desmond tutu was called to serve once more as chairman of the truth and reconciliation commission tribune of the downtrodden voice of the oppressed cantor of our conscience desmond tutu possesses that sense of generosity that spirit of unity that essence of humanity that south africans know simply as ubuntu thirty five years ago a young economics professor at a university in bangladesh was struck by the disconnect between the theories he was teaching in class and the reality of the famine outside so determined to help mohammed yunus left the classroom for a village and discovered that just 27 would free dozens of artisans vendors and rickshaw pullers from debt offering himself as a guarantor he withdrew a loan paid off their debts and founded grameen bank a bank that has disbursed over 8 billion lifting millions of people from poverty with microloans mohammed yunus was just trying to help a village but he somehow managed to change the world there s a story ted kennedy sometimes tells it s about a boy who sees an old man tossing starfish stranded by a receding tide back into the sea there are so many asks the boy what difference can your efforts possibly make the old man studies the starfish in his hand and tosses it to safety saying it makes a difference to that one for nearly half a century ted kennedy has been walking that beach making a difference for that soldier fighting for freedom that refugee looking for a way home that senior searching for dignity that worker striving for opportunity that student aspiring to college that family reaching for the american dream the life of senator edward m kennedy has made a difference for us all these are the 2009 recipients of the medal of freedom at a moment when cynicism and doubt too often prevail when our obligations to one another are too often forgotten when the road ahead can seem too long or hard to tread these extraordinary men and women these agents of change remind us that excellence is not beyond our abilities that hope lies around the corner and that justice can still be won in the forgotten corners of this world they remind us that we each have it within our powers to fulfill dreams to advance the dreams of others and to remake the world for our children and it is now my distinct and extraordinary honor to ask each of them to come forward to receive their award as a military aide reads their citation before we break up why don t we all give an extraordinary round of applause to these remarkable men and women thank you very much for joining us everyone thank you very much dem bobama12 9 09 barack_obama hello minnesota hello minneapolis thank you thank you everybody are you fired up thank you thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you everybody all right all right thank you everybody everybody take a seat take a seat great to see you it is good to see you all it s good to be back in minnesota now before i do anything else i want to get to some very important news i hear the gophers have their home opener in their brand new stadium a little later today i want to make sure you know i wish the gophers luck but they are playing air force and i have to fly back home on one of their planes in a few hours so i got to be careful about what i say we ve got some wonderful people who are here today with me and i just want to make some special acknowledgments first of all your two outstanding senators senator amy klobuchar and senator al franken are in the house my great friend who was part of the obama for president movement before i decided to run for president r t rybak mayor of minneapolis is in the house the mayor of the great city of st paul chris coleman is in the house your attorney general lori swanson is in the house your state auditor rebecca otto is here and one of the finest public servants in the country my secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius is here also the biggest obama fan in the country is in the house love this guy michelle has a picture where she looks like sasha thanks to this guy he s a great supporter and it s great to see you again you know i don t know if any of you caught it on television you may have been watching so you think you can dance but michelle loves that show by the way but the other night i gave a speech to congress about health care and i have to say i can already see that this crowd is a lot more fun but listen i didn t go to congress just to speak to senators or representatives i went to speak on behalf of the american people because you see i ran for this office because i believed it was time for a government that once again made possible the dreams of middle class americans that we re looking out for ordinary people a government that understands the quiet struggles that you wrestle with at the kitchen table when you re going through all the bills or when you re lying awake at night at the end of a long day and trying to figure out what you re going to do about health care for your children or what you re going to do about the situation with your mortgage worrying about how stable your job is and what s happening with the economy seniors who are worrying about their retirement security you know and i know that health care is one of those fundamental struggles because if you re one of the tens of millions of americans who have no health insurance you live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy and contrary to some of the myths out there these aren t primarily people who are deep in poverty a lot of those folks are on medicaid these are people who are working every day these are middle class americans maybe your employer doesn t offer coverage maybe you re self employed and you can t afford it because it costs you three times more in the marketplace than it does for big companies maybe you re one of the millions of americans who s denied coverage because of a previous illness or condition no fault of your own but the insurance companies decide it s too risky or too expensive for you to cover in the last 12 months alone 6 million more americans lost their health insurance 6 million more today we received more disturbing news a new report from the treasury department found that nearly half of all americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next 10 years think about that more than one third will go without coverage for longer than one year we ve got to do something we ve got to do something because it can happen to anyone there but for the grace of god go i it could happen to anyone but i don t need to tell you that our health care problems don t stop with the uninsured how many of you who have insurance have ever worried that you might lose it if you lost your jobs or you changed jobs or you had to move how many stories have you heard about folks whose insurance company decided to drop their coverage or water it down when they get sick and need it the most how many of you know somebody who paid their premiums every month only to find out that their insurance company wouldn t cover the full cost of their care like they thought they would get we ve all heard these stories there s the father i met in colorado whose child was diagnosed with severe hemophilia the day after he was born now they had insurance but there was a cap on their coverage so once the child s medical bills began to pile up the father was left to frantically search for another option or face tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills another woman from texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because they said she forgot to declare a case of acne true story by the time she had her insurance reinstated her breast cancer had more than doubled in size small business people i got a letter just this week from a small businessman he said i don t know what to do i ve always provided health insurance for my families but here the attached bill shows that the premiums have gone up 48 percent in the last year and i think that i m probably going to have to stop providing health insurance for my employees i don t want to but i don t have a choice these stories are wrong they are heartbreaking nobody should be treated that way in the united states of america and that s why we re going to bring about change this year it has now been nearly a century since teddy roosevelt first called for health reform it s been attempted by nearly every president and congress since and our failure to get it done year after year decade after decade it has placed a burden on families on businesses and on taxpayers and we can t stand it any longer we cannot sustain it any longer if we do nothing your premiums will continue to rise faster than your wages if we do nothing more businesses will close down fewer will face fewer will be able to open in the first place if we do nothing we will eventually spend more on medicare and medicaid than every other government program combined that s not an option for the united states of america so minnesota i may not be the first president to take up the cause of health care reform but i am determined to be the last we are going to get it done this year we are going to get it done this year the good news here s the good news we are closer now to reform than we ve ever been we ve debated this issue for better than a year now and there s actually some solid agreement on about 80 percent of what needs to be done that s never happened before we ve got our overall efforts have been supported by an unprecedented coalition of doctors and nurses and hospitals and seniors groups even drug companies many of whom were opposed to reform in the past this time they recognize you know what this is not going to be stopped we ve got to get on board now what we ve also seen in these last few months is the same partisan spectacle that has left so many of you disappointed in washington for so long we ve heard scare tactics instead of honest debate too many have used this opportunity to score short term political points instead of working together to solve long term challenges i don t know if you agree with me but i think the time for bickering is over the time for games has passed now is the time for action now is the time to deliver on health care for every american now because even after the speech there s been a lot of misinformation out there i want you to know about this plan that i announced on wednesday so that when you go talk to your neighbors and your friends and you re at the water cooler or buying starbucks or whatever it is that you re doing i want you to be able to say to people here s what s going on the plan i announced will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance it will provide insurance to those who don t and it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families our businesses and our government let me give you some details first of all if you re among the hundreds of millions of americans who already have health insurance through your job or you ve got health insurance through medicare or medicaid or the va nothing nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change your coverage or your doc all right i want you to be clear about that let me repeat nothing in this plan requires you to change what you have if you re happy with it what this plan will do is to make your insurance work better for you so under this plan under this plan it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition when i sign this bill it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most they will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out of pocket expenses because in the united states of america nobody should go broke because they got sick and insurance companies insurance companies will be required to cover at no extra charge routine checkups and preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies because there s no reason we shouldn t be catching diseases like breast cancer or colon cancer before they get worse that makes sense it saves money it saves lives now if you re one of the 10 million tens of millions of americans who don t currently have health insurance the second part of this plan is going to finally offer you affordable choices so if you lose your job or change jobs or want to start a business you ll be able to get coverage you will have confidence that affordable coverage is out there for you and we will do this not contrary to what folks say by some government takeover of health care we will do this by setting up a new insurance exchange a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for an affordable health insurance plan that works for them and because there will be one big group because there will be one big group these uninsured americans will have the leverage to drive down costs and get a much better deal than they get right now that s how large companies do it that s how government employees get their health insurance that s how members of congress get good deals on their insurance you should get the same deal that members of congress get now if you still can t afford the lower priced insurance available in the exchange we re going to provide you or a small business owner tax credits so that they can do it and in the first few years that it takes up to the it takes to set up the exchange because it will take a few years to get this all set up even after it passes but in the meantime we want to make sure people get some immediate help so we re going to immediately offer americans with preexisting conditions who can t get coverage right now we want to give them some low cost coverage that will provide them protection from financial ruin if they become seriously ill now i ve also said that one of the options in the insurance exchange one of the options most of the folks who are going to be offering insurance through the exchange are going to be private insurers blue cross blue shield aetna all these well i think one of the options should be a public insurance option now let me be clear let me be clear let me be clear it would only be an option nobody would be forced to choose it no one with insurance would be affected by it but what it would do is it would provide more choice and more competition it would keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable to treat their customers better i mean think about it it s the same way that public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students that doesn t inhibit private colleges and universities from thriving out there the same should be true on the health care front now minnesota i have said that i m open to different ideas on how to set this up but i m not going to back down from the basic principle that if americans can t find affordable coverage we re going to provide you a choice and i will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the coverage that you need that s a promise i will make now now a lot of you might think this plan sounds pretty good or when you re talking to your friends or neighbors they might say yes that sounds all right but let me ask you this how are you going to pay for it and that s a legitimate concern we ve got we inherited some big deficits and some big debt and we ve had a big economic crisis that has required us to take some extraordinary steps so we re going to have to get control of our federal budget we have to do it so it s a legitimate question but here s what you need to know first of all i will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future no ifs ands or buts part of the reason i faced these trillion dollar deficits when i walked into the door of the white house is because there were a lot of initiatives over the last decade that weren t paid for from the iraq war to tax breaks for the wealthy i will not make the same mistake when it comes to health care second of all we ve estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system money that s already being spent but spent badly wasted and abused right now too much of your taxpayer dollars and too much of your savings frankly are spent on health care that doesn t make us healthier that s not my judgment that is the judgment of medical experts and doctors and nurses health care professionals all across the country we love nurses i love them as i said on wednesday night this is also true when it comes to medicare and medicaid and medicare is one of these issues that has been really distorted in the debate so i want i spoke directly to seniors on wednesday i want to repeat what i said we have stood up for four decades for the principle that after a lifetime of hard work our seniors should not be left to struggle with medical bills they can t pay that s the essence of medicare that s how medicare was born it remains a sacred trust it needs to be passed on from one generation to the next that s why not a dollar of the medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan not one dollar we will not be lowering benefits for senior citizens the only thing that we will be doing is eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud as well as subsidies that are going to insurance company hmos subsidies that pad their profits but don t improve care the other thing we want to do is we want to create an independent commission of doctors and medical experts charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead and that s going to ensure that americans seniors get the benefits that they ve been promised we ll ensure that medicare is there for future generations and we can use some of the savings we get to actually fill the gap of costs on prescription drugs that so many seniors are struggling with we can save them thousands of dollars on prescription drug costs that s what the plan will do for senior citizens so don t pay attention to these scary stories about how your benefits will be cut that will not happen on my watch in fact the folks who are making the accusations they re the ones who have been talking about cutting medicare in the past i will protect medicare and here s the best thing and this is important especially for minnesota because medicare is such a big part of the health care system making that program more efficient can help usher in changes in the way that we deliver health care that reduces costs for everybody we have long known that some places including minnesota offer high quality care at costs below average look at what the mayo clinic is able to do it s got the best quality and the lowest cost of just about any system in the country so what we want to do is we want to help the whole country learn from what mayo is doing we want to help the whole country learn some of the good things that are going on in minnesota that will save everybody money the commission can help encourage the adoption of common sense best practices everything from reducing infection rates for hospitals to helping teach doctors how to work together so when you go to the doctor s office you don t have to take a test each time you see a doctor you take one test and they e mail it to every doctor common sense stuff like that now this is the plan i m proposing it incorporates ideas from democrats and republicans and i m going to keep on seeking common ground in the weeks ahead and i ve said to everybody in congress if you come to me with a set of serious proposals i m going to be there to listen and my door is going to be open but i also said some of you heard me on wednesday night i will not waste time with people who think that it s just good politics to kill health care i m not going to i m not going to allow the special interests to use the same old tactics to keep things the way they are i m not going to let people misrepresent what s in my plan i will not accept the status quo not this time not now minnesota we are closer to reform than we ve ever been before but this is the hard part this is when the special interests and the insurance companies and the folks who think you know this is a good way to bring obama down this is when they re going to fight with everything they ve got this is when they ll spread all kinds of wild rumors designed to scare and intimidate people that s why i need your help you know there have been there have been some of the pundits in washington who have been saying well maybe you ve been trying to do too much maybe you ve been pushing too far too fast and i try to remind them i said listen i never said change would be easy change is hard it s always been hard when fdr when fdr decided that social security was something that seniors needed when fdr decided when fdr introduced social security you know what happened they called it socialism but senior citizens decided that you know what if i ve got some protection in my golden years that s something that s worth fighting for when medicare when medicare was introduced as an idea they said this is going to be a government takeover of medicare but imagine what seniors would be dealing with right now if they didn t have medicare every time we ve made progress it s because ordinary people banded together and they stood up and they said we ve got to make progress and we re going to push and we re going to prod until washington finally reacts finally responds i ve always believed because i ve always believed that change doesn t come from the top down it comes from the bottom up it doesn t start in washington d c it begins in places like minneapolis it begins in places like st paul it begins with you sharing your stories fighting for something better that s how change happens that s what s happening right now you know i asked you i asked you at the beginning of the rally whether you were fired up some of you may have heard where that story comes from but for those of you who don t know i want to just tell this story real quick my staff loves this story so they always tell me tell that story but it bears on what s happening with health care today this is back at the beginning when i was running for president nobody thought i could win nobody could pronounce my name nobody except r t that was the only person who believed so i went down to it was right at the beginning of the campaign i went down to south carolina to a legislative conference where i was supposed to be one of the speakers and i was sitting next to a state representative there nobody was that excited to see me you know i was but i really needed some support and endorsements because south carolina was an early state so i said to this state representative will you endorse my campaign and she looked at me and she said i will endorse your campaign if you come to my hometown of greenwood south carolina so i had had some wine and i was feeling kind of desperate i said yes i ll come to greenwood be happy to do it only to find out that greenwood is like an hour and a half from everyplace else you can t fly into greenwood about a month later i ve been campaigning in iowa for weeks haven t seen my family got some iowa folks in the house i m exhausted i get into greenville south carolina about midnight i get to my hotel about 1 00 a m i m dragging to the hotel i m carrying my bags ready to hit the pillow and suddenly my staff says sir i said what they said sir you have to be in the car at 6 30 a m tomorrow in the morning i said why is that they said because you ve got to go to greenwood like you promised next morning i wake up and i feel awful i feel terrible i m exhausted and i stagger over to the window to pull open the blinds and it s pouring down rain outside terrible day i go out and i get some coffee and open up the newspaper bad story about me in the new york times i pack up i go downstairs as i m walking to the car my umbrella blows open and i get drenched so by the time i m in the car i m wet and i m sleepy and i m mad and i drive and we drive and we drive and we drive hour and a half we just keep on driving finally we get to greenwood although you don t know that you re in greenwood right away it s not like minneapolis so there s a little field house in a park and we go into the field house i walk in i get a little more wet i walk in lo and behold 20 people there twenty people and i m already thinking about the fact i ve got another hour and a half i ve got to drive back and they re all kind of damp and they don t look like they re that happy to be there the state rep had dragged them to the meeting but that s okay i have a job to do i m running for president i shake their hand i say how do you do what do you do nice to meet you suddenly i hear this voice should out behind me fired up and i almost jumped out of my shoes but everybody else acts like this is normal and they all say fired up and then i hear this voice ready to go and the people around me they just say ready to go i don t know what s going on so i look behind me and there s this little woman there she s about 5 2 5 3 she s maybe 50 60 years old and she looks like she s dressed for church she s got a big church hat and she s just grinning at me just smiling and she points at me and she says fired up wait wait the story gets better here it turns out that she is a city councilwoman from greenwood named edith childs that s her name and she s also known as the chant lady because she does this chant wherever she goes she goes fired up fired up ready to go ready to go and she does this at every event she goes to she s also by the way we discovered later she also moonlights as a private detective but that s a true story true story but she s well known for her chant so for the next five minutes she starts chanting she says fired up and everybody says fired up ready to go ready to go and this just keeps on going and i realize i m being upstaged by this woman and i m she s getting all the attention and i m standing there looking at my staff and they re shrugging their shoulders but here s the thing minneapolis after about a minute maybe two i m feeling kind of fired up i m feeling i m feeling like i m ready to go and so so for the rest of the day every time i saw my staff i d say are you fired up they d say i m fired up are you ready to go they d say i m ready to go and it goes to show you how one voice can change a room and if it changes a room it can change a city and if it can change a city it can change a state and if it can change a state it can change a nation if it changes the nation it can change the world it can bring health care to every american it can lower our costs it can make your insurance more secure i want to know minnesota are you fired up ready to go fired up ready to go fired up ready to go they can t stop us let s go get this done thank you everybody god bless you dem bobama13 4 09 barack_obama thank you everybody i hope everybody had a wonderful easter i just came from the easter egg roll and it was a spectacular spectacular outing all the kids were out there having fun and it reminds us of why we do the work we do before i discuss the purpose of my visit to the department of transportation today i want to take a moment to say how pleased i am about the rescue of captain phillips and his safe return to the uss boxer this weekend his safety has been our principal concern and i know this came as a welcome relief to his family and his crew i had a chance to talk to his wife yesterday and as she put it she couldn t imagine a better easter than seeing his safe return and i am very proud of the efforts of the u s military and many other departments and agencies that worked tirelessly to resolve this situation i share our nation s admiration for captain phillips courage and leadership and selfless concern for his crew and i want to be very clear that we are resolved to halt the rise of privacy in that region and to achieve that goal we re going to have to continue to work with our partners to prevent future attacks we have to continue to be prepared to confront them when they arise and we have to ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes now as we work to ensure america s safety out on the seas i want to discuss what we re doing to restore economic security here at home to revitalize our nation s infrastructure and create good jobs across america it has been nearly three months since i first took office and i think it s fair to say that we ve been busy faced with an extraordinary economic crisis we ve responded with extraordinary action action that s both unprecedented in scale and unprecedented in its speed we developed plans to stabilize our housing market to unfreeze our credit markets and to ensure the survival of our auto industry in this new century we passed a budget that cuts our deficit in half while making investments to spur long term growth and lasting prosperity and because we know that people are hurting right now and we need to create jobs and get money into people s pockets right now we passed the american recovery and reinvestment act the most sweeping economic recovery plan in history a plan to save or create 3 5 million jobs putting americans back to work doing the work america needs done and to give a tax cut to 95 percent of working americans today i think it s safe to say that this plan is beginning to work we see it in the clean energy companies rehiring workers in police departments cancelling planned layoffs in health care clinics planning to expand to care for more folks in need we see it in the 120 million families who are already taking home larger paychecks because of our making work pay tax cut and we see it particularly in the work of this department in the plans underway to rebuild crumbling roads and bridges modernize our airports and shipyards develop high speed rail networks and restore aging public transit systems all told we are making the largest new investment in america s infrastructure since president eisenhower built the interstate highway system back in the 1950s but what is most remarkable about this effort and what i m here to talk about today isn t just the size of our investment or the number of projects we re investing in it s how quickly efficiently and responsibly those investments have been made today because these projects are getting approved more quickly than we thought thanks to in large part the outstanding work of the tiger team and folks here at the department of transportation and because these projects are costing less than we thought we can utter a sentence rarely heard in recent years this government effort is coming in ahead of schedule and under budget now think about it we passed the recovery plan less than two months ago two weeks later i came here to dot to announce that we would be investing 28 billion to rebuild and repair our highways roads and bridges work on the very first project resurfacing route 650 in silver springs maryland began that very same day people who d been out of a job found themselves being called back to work and some of the crews are here today and we want to thank them and we re proud of them because they re making the roads safer and some of your commutes a little bit better and at the same time they re doing what they ve always done working really hard to support their families and living out the american dream so we appreciate them thank you about a week later we had approved 500 more projects two weeks after that we had approved another 1 000 projects and today i m proud to announce that we have approved the 2000th project a project to widen an interstate and rebuild an overpass in portage michigan improving safety reducing congestion and boosting local businesses this project will start this summer creating an estimated 900 jobs right away and it will go into 2011 creating nearly twice that many jobs altogether before it s finished so i want to acknowledge governor granholm both for her leadership on this project and for her tireless work to strengthen michigan s economy and i m pleased that joe biden who s overseeing our recovery efforts will be attending the groundbreaking for this project in june now some may have thought it would take months to get to this point but in part because of the hard work and commitment of the people in this department we approved these 2 000 projects in just 41 days so taken together these projects will reduce the congestion that costs us nearly 80 billion a year it will save some of the 14 000 people who lose their lives each year because of bad roads and driving conditions it will create good jobs that pay well and can t be shipped overseas by the end of next year our investments in highway projects alone will create or save 150 000 jobs i want to repeat that 150 000 jobs most of them in the private sector i m pleased that work on some of these projects has already started and that many more will be underway by this summer but i want to be very clear that while we re doing this with speed we re also doing it with care we ve acted quickly because our economy losing hundreds of thousands of jobs each month means we don t have a minute to waste and we ve acted with care because we don t have a single taxpayer dollar to waste either and that s why i appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general to root out waste and fraud that s why we created a website called recovery gov so you can see exactly where your tax dollars are going and soon you ll be able to click on the transportation section and track the progress of every project underway and that s why i m pleased to hear that in state after state across america competition for these projects is so fierce and contractors are doing such a good job cutting costs that projects are consistently coming in under budget the final bid for one road project in connecticut was 8 4 million less than the state budgeted for another one in louisiana was 4 7 million less a project at bwi airport will be completed for 8 million less than expected bids for projects in north carolina have been 19 percent under budget colorado is reporting bids up to 30 percent less than they expected and the officials in california have seen bids that are close to half as much as they had projected and because these projects are proceeding so efficiently we now have more recovery dollars to go around and that means we can fund more projects revitalize more of our infrastructure put more people back to work and ensure that taxpayers get more value for their dollars now i have no illusion about how much work lies ahead and how hard it will be the road to recovery is long we will undoubtedly make some mistakes we ll face some setbacks along the way there will be some projects that don t work the way we want them to but it is now clear that we re heading in the right direction it s now clear that day by day project by project we are making progress we re doing what we ve always done in this country as president johnson said more than 40 years ago when he signed the legislation creating this department the department of transportation america s history is a history of her transportation of railroads that pushed frontiers and waterways and highways that opened up markets airplanes that connected us to one another and to the world throughout our history there have been times when a generation of americans seized the chance to remake the face of this nation and this is one of those times and that s what we re doing today building a 21st century infrastructure that will create jobs spur growth and sustain an economy that creates shared and lasting prosperity so thank you to the folks here at dot you re doing an outstanding job thanks to ray lahood for being a terrific leader of the department and thank you to joe biden for helping to drive this thing home and thanks to all the workers who are standing behind us we don t want to keep them too long they ve already got their hard hats they are going to go straight into their cars and they re going to go back to work so thank you everybody dem bobama13 5 09 barack_obama hello everybody hello hello hello thank you thank you so much please everybody be seated it is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to the white house for an evening of music and poetry and spoken word from some of our nation s most gifted performers both distinguished veterans and up and coming young talents we re here tonight not just to enjoy the works of these artists but also to highlight the importance of the arts in our life and in our nation in our nation s history we re here to celebrate the power of words and music to help us appreciate beauty but also to understand pain to inspire us to action and to spur us on when we start to lose hope to lift us up out of our daily existence even if it s just for a few moments and return us with hearts that are a little bit bigger and fuller than they were before the great jazz musician louis armstrong once said simply what we play is life what we play is life and that is what these artists do they express the joys and hardships of life and remind us how much all of us have in common it s a great gift and a great responsibility and we re honored to host them here at the white house tonight i now have the privilege of introducing the star of the show somebody who brings a lot of poetry to my own life the first lady michelle obama dem bobama13 5 10 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you so much everybody please have a seat it is good to be back in new york city love new york city i want to thank first of all congressman chris van hollen who has one of the tougher jobs around let s face it whenever you are the chairman of the dccc the demands on your time in addition to being a member of congress all your committee assignments and then you also have to go out there and help campaign for everybody it is a tough job and chris is handling it with unbelievable class and we are so grateful to him thank you chris congressman steve israel thank you for the outstanding work that you ve done as chair of recruiting to all of the distinguished members of congress including the dean of the new york delegation charlie rangel and everybody else who is here thank you for not only helping to organize the event tonight but also for your incredible dedication and courage during the course of the past year and a half it is good to be back in new york city and it is good to be following nancy pelosi new york is a tough town but nancy pelosi that s one tough lady that is one tough lady and she s so elegant even as she s ripping your heart out if you mess with her you need to be tough to put up with all the criticism and griping that she deals with on a daily basis and that s from the democrats but her toughness her extraordinary leadership is why she s not just going to go down in history as the first woman speaker she is going to go down as one of the greatest speakers of all time she has been unbelievable in her leadership i m proud of her now i also want to thank all of you not just for your financial contributions but for your time your energy your faith that america can move forward in the right direction your support has made an incredible difference because 16 months ago when we took office we knew this wouldn t be easy at least i hope you knew because i told you if you didn t know you weren t paying attention at my inauguration remember that washington couple million people really cold we came in here with a whole host of challenges in our inbox challenges the likes of which we hadn t seen in this country for decades abroad we were confronting a war in iraq that needed to come to a responsible end and a war in afghanistan that demanded greater attention and focus and a host of new threats and new dangers and new opportunities in a new world and here at home we were facing a financial crisis that had the potential to plunge us into another great depression we had a deficit crisis saddling our children with a mountain of debt an economic crisis that was pounding families and small businesses all across the country a lot of families who had already endured an awful lot during the previous decade and even though we didn t cause these crises we took the responsibility to end them that s why we asked the american people for the chance to lead in the first place that s why nancy pelosi and all the members of congress here the reason they ran wasn t to put off problems but to solve problems that was the reason i ran for president and that meant we had to make some tough decisions trust me when i walked into the door of the oval office and found a 1 3 trillion deficit after the previous administration had inherited a surplus the last thing i wanted to do was spend money on a recovery package or become involved in the auto industry or prevent the collapse of wall street banks particularly those whose irresponsibility had helped to cause this crisis that wasn t on my campaign to do list you don t remember me campaigning on those items and they certainly weren t popular we knew that you know sometimes these folks i listen to these pundits and they re saying aw the president has made this decision and these are unpopular decisions i ve got pollsters i know when what we re about to do is politically unpopular but what i also knew was that if we wanted to break the back of our recession and get our economy moving again then the steps we took were absolutely necessary and while we still have a long road ahead of us we re beginning to see signs of progress all across america all across america the economy that was shrinking a year ago it s growing today the economy that was bleeding jobs at a historic pace a year ago 750 000 jobs a month when i came in now we re creating jobs again our economic heartbeat keeps growing stronger these are good things even if our friends on the other side of the aisle fall all over themselves to argue otherwise but here s the thing the steady progress we re seeing it didn t happen by accident we re starting to see in public opinion surveys that people start thinking that the economy is getting better but there seems to be a disconnect as to why it s getting better the reason the economy is getting better is because nancy pelosi and every democrat here embraced the responsibility to lead it happened because they embraced the responsibility to stand up to special interests stand up even against the prevailing political winds stand up for the american people s interests it happened because we embraced the responsibility to finally take on problems that washington had talked about for years sometimes decades and put off over and over and over again that s what this congress has been doing and it hasn t been easy these guys have taken more tough votes in the last 16 months than congress had taken in the previous 16 years and that s the truth think about it for years washington had talked about how credit card companies were ripping off american families well this was the congress that passed the credit card bill of rights for years for years washington talked about protecting our kids from tobacco companies this was the congress that stepped up and delivered and put a stop to those practices for years washington had talked about making sure our veterans got the care and benefits that was promised them this was the congress that increased funding for our veterans by more than we had done in a generation and guaranteed that it would arrive on time every year for years washington talked about fixing the student loan system that favored financial interests over students and families this was the congress that finally made it happen over 60 billion of funding that is now going to students to help them go to school happened because of the courageous votes that were taken by these members of congress for years washington talked about the need to transition to a clean and independent energy future this was the congress that made the biggest investment in clean energy in our history and that investment is already reopening factories and rehiring workers to build wind turbines and solar panels and effectively create an advanced battery industry right here in america and for nearly half for nearly a century we had been talking about the need for health insurance reform in america and this was the congress that delivered it for the american people so i want everyone in this room to be clear i m glad i got pictures with you it was nice to smooze with you a little bit but the bottom line is is that i could not have gotten done any of the things we got done had it not been for this team right here and they did it despite all the gridlock despite all the partisanship this has been one of the most productive legislative sessions in history in the midst of crisis if we just stopped now in fact if we had stopped last year it would have already been one of the most productive legislative sessions in history and that s tempting stopping everybody is kind of pooped but particularly because it would have been nice to get a little help from the other side of the aisle just once in a while you would have thought at a time of historic crisis that republican leaders would have been more willing to help us find a way out of this mess particularly since they created the mess we all have a stake in cleaning it up we re not democrats or republicans first we re americans first i tell the story about you know sometimes you got a feeling nancy and i are charlie and steve everybody jerry we re we got our mops and our brooms out we re cleaning stuff out and they re sitting there saying hold the broom better that s not how you mop don t tell me how to mop pick up a mop do some work on behalf of the american people to solve some of these problems but that wasn t their strategy it was not their strategy from day one and i m not making this up this is public record they ve said in interviews we made a political decision we stood nothing to gain from cooperating we knew things were going to be bad and we figured if we didn t do anything and if it didn t work out so well maybe the other side would take the blame they ve done their best to gum up the works to make things look broken to say no to every single thing that was the attitude they had when it came to pulling our economy out of a crisis that was the attitude they had when it came to making sure that families and businesses finally got the security of health care in this country that s been the attitude on any number of challenges that we faced their basic attitude has been if the democrats lose we win so after they drove the car into the ditch made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back now they want the keys back no you can t drive we don t want to have to go back into the ditch we just got the car out we just got the car out look i just came from buffalo i spent some time with workers and families they re still facing very tough economic times a couple weeks ago i spent time with folks in the midwest i ve been trying to make it a habit of getting out of washington as often as the job allows and when i do you know what s fascinating none of the people you meet and i m not just seeing folks who have signed up to see me we re stopping in diners and we re talking to folks on the streets and on the farm they don t care which party puts points on the board they re not talking about who s positioned better for november they re not keeping track of what s going on with the red team and the blue team they re not watching cable network news they just want to know that somebody is looking out for them in washington that somebody is working hard they want to see progress they expect us to respond to our challenges with the same sense of urgency that they feel in their own lives that s all they re looking for they want to know that we re trying hard and that we ve got their interests in mind and what i believe is when we win we win when the american people win that good policy is good politics people wonder sometimes why it is that i stay calm i stay calm because if i feel like i m making the best decision possible that s good for the american people then ultimately the american people are going to figure that out and nancy pelosi and this caucus has the same attitude because if they didn t we would have made a whole bunch of different decisions and the american people are going to have a clear choice when they head to the polls in november they re going to have a choice about whether they want somebody who has the courage to stand up in a time of need or would prefer somebody who sits on the sidelines and tries to cast blame they re going to have a choice about whether you re going to make decisions that strengthen our country for the long term or that just serve your short term political purposes the american people will have a choice about whether or not we re going to keep rebuilding america that is stronger and more prosperous and more competitive than before and that means making some tough choices now for our children and our grandchildren or going back to the policies that got us into this mess in the first place and i am proud that for the past year and a half under the leadership of the folks sitting in this room the democratic party has taken the right path it s cut taxes for 95 percent of america s working families cut taxes for small businesses for making college more affordable for families buying their first home not just to reward those at the top but instead to give a little bit of lift to folks on the bottom at a time when they were really in trouble that s what democrats were for and the other side was against it we took on the special interests and fixed the broken student loan system that gave tens of billions of dollars to financial systems unnecessary middlemen and we put that money to work helping students all across america go to college and get the skills they need to win the race in this 21st century economy that s what democrats are for you know what the other side it was against it we thought it was unfair to deny health insurance to americans with preexisting conditions we thought it was wrong to let hardworking families go bankrupt because somebody in their family gets sick and so we did something about it that no congress had done in american history that s what we were for and the other side was against it we fought for the principle that all of us ought to have a sense of security when it comes to our health care and i truly believe that and so does everybody in this room and now they are talking about repealing it if they take over in november they d actually tell uninsured americans with preexisting conditions you know what it s a mistake to ensure that you get coverage they d tell seniors you know what give back that help that you re getting when it comes to paying for your prescription drugs they d tell millions of small business owners who today qualify for new tax credits to help them cover their workers and the millions of young americans who can now stay on their parents plan until they turn 26 years old you know what tough luck you re on your own i m not going to let that happen nancy is not going to let that happen and i m confident as long as we re able to get our message out with your help the american people aren t going to let that happen i m not saying democrats and republicans ought to agree on everything there are going to be some things we don t see eye to eye on and a good serious debate is good for our democracy that s what this is all about but the fact is the problems that we face are too great for us to be playing politics all the time and all of us democrats and republicans need to come together to solve problems and that is what nancy pelosi and the democratic caucus has done they have not played politics and now and frankly that is not always politically convenient we re engaged in a debate right now about common sense wall street reform i was in wall street just a few weeks ago and i said i believe in the power of the free market i believe in a strong financial system when it s working right our financial institutions are an enormous source of strength and dynamism in our economy it helps families buy homes and businesses grow and ideas to take flight there are a lot of good people who work in the financial industry who do things the right way it s in our best interest to make sure those firms are strong and healthy but when these institutions operate irresponsibly they don t just threaten themselves as we ve seen they threaten the entire economy along with the dreams of millions of americans who worked so hard to make a life for themselves so we need reform that would ensure they operate in a honest fair open way and we ll see who can stand up to the lobbyists and special interests who are trying to weaken this reform even as we speak we ll see who wants to get it done because all of us democrats and republicans have a responsibility to make sure the american people don t have to endure a crisis like this ever again all of us are going to have to tackle our exploding deficits and i got to say washington has got a short term memory so people don t remember that it wasn t that long ago under a democratic president that america enjoyed the hard won budget surpluses and yet it only took a few years of republican congresses these same budget hawks being in charge to turn that surplus into a massive deficit passing a tax cut for the richest americans creating an expensive new entitlement program and authorizing two wars without paying for a single dime of it and now suddenly we re in charge and they say hey where did this deficit come from well we will help clean up that mess too that s why i ve gone through our budget line by line to cut what we don t need so we can pay for what we do need that s why i set up a bipartisan fiscal commission to look at our structural deficit our long term deficit set a clear goal to cut our deficit in half over the next three years because i don t want to kick our problems down the road i don t want our children to have to deal with it and that s what all this comes down to that s what democrats have been about over the course of this last year and a half what kind of future are we going to build and leave for the next generation i know this is a party fundraiser this may be blasphemy to say so but all of us has to ask ourselves one question what is more important doing what is easy to get through the next election or doing what s right for the next generation and the democratic party this year has answered that question we chose to lead we chose to make tough decisions we chose not to spend all our time looking at the polls i remember the conversation nancy and i had about health care at the beginning of the debate and i told her i said i want to get this done even if it meant that i was going to be a one term president i think it s that important and nancy when everybody got all nervous after massachusetts she said you know what we re still going to get it done and we did what was necessary to rescue our economy we ve done what s necessary to resuscitate our economy and to rebuild it on a new foundation of growth and to turn this country around and point it in the right direction and yes we re going to take some lumps but we can now see the contours of what s a more prosperous more secure future for america where new jobs and new industries in areas like clean energy and clean tech come back to within our borders and you ve got a highly trained highly educated workforce that can compete for those jobs with any other workers in the world and where more families and businesses are free to chase their dreams backed up by the security of health care and where the future of the american dream is once again within the reach of every american and we ve got a government that works and is competent and has restored science to its rightful place and believes in civil liberties and we have some folks on the supreme court who believe in the constitution that is the future that is within our sight we ve gone through a stormy time and i know sometimes it s made you guys a little seasick but right now the waters are calm right there at the horizon we can see our destination so now is not the time to lose heart now is not the time to get complacent now is the time to remind ourselves of what america is all about and make sure we are working as hard as we can to return democrats to the house of representatives thank you very much everybody god bless you thank you dem bobama13 7 09a joe_biden hello everybody please have a seat well welcome to the white house and congratulations to the columbus crew on winning your first mls cup give them a big round of applause there are a couple people who are big fans and so they also happen to be members of congress i want to acknowledge them senator sherrod brown of ohio representative steve driehaus and representative mary jo kilroy please give them a big round of applause and the olives soccer team is here is that this crew right here i suspected as much they ve been working with the crew they re all from the columbus area so welcome to the rose garden and congratulations to all of the rowdy fans who were with you guys every step of the way i hear that the crew stadium was one of the toughest places to play for visiting teams although i think you saw playing the chicago fire that we ve got a little you know we ve got some pretty good fans in chicago as well i want to thank clark hunt and all the members of the hunt family for being here today the hunt family s legacy and dedication to american professional sports and to soccer in particular has been critical to the success of this team but also to the success of the league i want to congratulate coach warzychi warzycha and you know it s like barack obama you know you screw it up occasionally and i also want to congratulate coach schmid under your leadership this team made an incredible turnaround from a losing season in 2007 to the best record in mls in 2008 and congratulations sigi on being chosen mls coach of the year now i should admit up front that i don t get a chance to see a lot of professional sports teams these days most of the soccer i ve seen recently has been at my daughters games and i ve learned that there are two important rules at that age i m sure some of you may remember this the first is no matter what position you play just run straight to the ball and congregate around it and the second rule is don t forget the snacks at half time but i see that my daughters love playing this game of soccer and we know that this is an exciting time for soccer in america we just watched team usa shock the world at the confederation cup and we re in the middle of another impressive run in the gold cup as some of you may know i just got back from the g8 meeting in italy and one of the leaders there was president lula da silva of brazil he gave me a hard time about team usa dropping a 2 0 lead in the confederations cup final but i reminded him that we held our own against the best teams in the world we shocked a lot of people and we might just see that team in the world cup next year so it s clear that soccer in america is on the rise and mls is a big part of that i want to congratulate chad marshall on being named defender of the year guillermo barros schelotto for winning the mvp award and assisting in all three goals in the championship game and finally i want to salute these guys for donating so much time and energy to the columbus community and we thank them for participating in our united we serve summer of service just last week the crew spent time with young people in columbus cleaning up some of the low income neighborhoods near crew stadium which strengthens their community and reaches out to folks who need it most that kind of spirit of service is what this white house wants to encourage in all citizens but seeing it from professional athletes is especially gratifying and so we appreciate also the clinic that the crew is going to put on for young people here in d c today which teaches them not just skills but also how to live healthy and active lives and thanks to that example an example set by the crew and by players across mls and women s professional soccer as well i m confident that american soccer will remain something to be excited about for years to come so congratulations again for the incredible championship season and good luck next year and i have to say that that s a big trophy so give them a big round of applause everybody thank you dem bobama13 7 09b barack_obama good morning everybody before i introduce america s next surgeon general i d like to say a few words about our ongoing efforts to reform the health care system that she will help oversee we are now closer to the goal of health care reform than we have ever been over the last several weeks key committees in the house and the senate have made important and unprecedented progress on a plan that will lower costs provide better care for patients and curb the worst practices of the insurance companies it s a plan that will not add to our deficit over the next decade let me repeat that it is a plan that will not add to our deficit over the next decade and eventually will help lower our deficit by slowing the skyrocketing cost of medicare and medicaid even though we are close i ve got no illusions that it s going to be easy to get over the finish line there are going to be more debates and more disagreements before all is said and done but health care reform must be done i know there are those who believe we should wait to solve this problem or take a more incremental approach or simply do nothing but this is the kind of criticism we heard when the country tried to pass medicare a program that is now providing quality care to generations of american seniors it s the kind of criticism we heard when we tried to pass the children s health insurance program which has provided quality care and coverage to millions of kids it s the same washington thinking that has ignored big challenges and put off tough decisions for decades and it is precisely that kind of small thinking that has led us into the current predicament so make no mistake the status quo on health care is no longer an option for the united states of america if we step back from this challenge right now we will leave our children a legacy of debt a future of crushing costs that bankrupt our families our businesses and because we will have done nothing to bring down the cost of medicare and medicaid will crush our government premiums will continue to skyrocket placing what amounts to another tax on american families struggling to pay bills the insurance companies and special interests that have killed reform in the past will only continue to benefit even more and they ll continue to deny coverage to americans with pre existing medical conditions people will continue to lose health insurance just because they lose their job or they change jobs this is a future that we cannot afford this country can t afford to have health care premiums rise three times faster than people s wages as they did over the last decade we can t afford 14 000 americans losing their health care every single day we can t afford a future where our government will eventually spend more on medicare and medicaid than what we spend on everything else and during the campaign i promised health care reform that would control costs expand coverage and ensure choice and i promised that americans making 250 000 a year or less would not pay more in taxes these are promises that we re keeping as reform moves forward this is no longer a problem we can wait to fix this is about who we are as a country health care reform is about every family s health but it s also about the health of the economy so i just want to put everybody on notice because there was a lot of chatter during the week that i was gone we are going to get this done inaction is not an option and for those nay sayers and cynics who think that this is not going to happen don t bet against us we are going to make this thing happen because the american people desperately need it and even those who are satisfied with their health care right now they understand that if premiums keep on doubling and if employers keep on shedding health insurance because it s unsustainable and if you look at the trajectory of where medicare and medicaid are going then inaction will create the biggest crisis of all and so i understand people are a little nervous and a little scared about making change the muscles in this town to bring about big changes are a little atrophied but we re whipping folks back into shape we are going to get this done and if there s anyone who understands the urgency of meeting this challenge in a personal and powerful way it s the woman who will become our nation s next surgeon general dr regina benjamin the list of qualifications that make dr benjamin an outstanding candidate to be america s leading spokesperson on issues of public health are long indeed she was in the second class at morehouse school of medicine and went on to earn an md from the university of alabama at birmingham and an mba from tulane she served as associate dean for rural health at the university of south alabama college of medicine and in 1995 she became the first physician under 40 and the first african american woman to be named to the american medical association s board of trustees in 2002 she became president of alabama s state medical association and she has received numerous awards and recognitions including the macarthur genius award it s very impressive but of all these achievements and experience none has been more pertinent to today s challenges or closer to regina s heart than the rural health clinic that she has built and rebuilt in bayou la batre did i say that right well tell me how to say it bayou la batre that s in alabama people bayou la batre is a rural town of about 2 500 people it s a shrimping town where a lot of folks work for themselves scrape by and can t usually afford health insurance and by the way dr benjamin while we were talking in the oval office described for me the demographics of this town are actually very interesting because you ve got whites blacks and asians in this community there are a lot of laotians and cambodians who have moved there and are part of this shrimping town so it s a diverse but very poor rural community and like so many other rural communities doctors and hospitals are hard to come by and that s why even though she could have left the state to make more money as a specialist or as a doctor in a wealthier community regina benjamin returned to alabama and opened a small clinic in bayou la batre when people couldn t pay she didn t charge them when the clinic wasn t making money she didn t take a salary for herself when hurricane george destroyed the clinic in 1998 she made house calls to all her patients while it was rebuilt when hurricane katrina destroyed it again and left most of her town homeless she mortgaged her house and maxed out her credit cards to rebuild that clinic for a second time she tended to those who had been wounded in the storm and when folks needed medicine she asked the pharmacist to send the bill her way and when regina s clinic was about to open for the third time and a fire burned it to the ground before it could serve the first patient well you can guess what dr benjamin did with help from her community she is rebuilding it again one disabled patient brought her an envelope with 20 inside another elderly man said simply maybe i can help i got a hammer for nearly two decades dr regina benjamin has seen in a very personal way what is broken about our health care system she s seen an increasing number of patients who ve had health insurance their entire lives suddenly lose it because they lost their jobs or because it s simply become too expensive she s been a relentless promoter of prevention and wellness programs having treated too many costly and diseases and complications that didn t have to happen and she s witnessed the shortage of primary care physicians in the rural and underserved areas where she works but for all that she s seen and all the tremendous obstacles that she has overcome regina benjamin also represents what s best about health care in america doctors and nurses who give and care and sacrifice for the sake of their patients those americans who would do anything to heal a fellow citizen through floods and fires and severe want regina benjamin has refused to give up her patients have refused to give up and when we were talking in the oval office she said the one thing i want to do is make sure that this surgeon general s office gives voice to patients that patients have a seat at the table somebody is advocating for them and speaking for them and now we in washington and across america have to refuse to give up on the goal of health care that is affordable and accessible for every last one of us we don t have to deal with hurricanes and we don t have to deal with floods and we don t have to deal with fires all we have to do is pass a bill to make sure that the american people have a decent shot at getting the kind of choice and high quality health care that s affordable and i know that dr benjamin is going to help us get there as the next surgeon general and i am truly honored to nominate her for that post and secretary sebelius is equally excited even though she s just standing here with that let me introduce the next surgeon general of the united states dr regina benjamin dem bobama13 7 10 barack_obama hello everybody hello hello hello hello hello hello well good evening everybody this is a pretty feisty group here love you back thank you thank you well it is a privilege to speak with all of you welcome to the white house let me begin by welcoming the cabinet secretaries who are here i know i saw at least one of them kathleen sebelius our outstanding secretary of health and human services i want to thank all the members of congress who are present and all the distinguished guests that are here that includes all of you in particular i want to recognize ambassador eric goosby our global aids coordinator eric s leadership of the president s emergency plan for aids relief is doing so much to save so many lives around the world he will be leading our delegation to the international aids conference in vienna next week and so i m grateful for his outstanding service and i want to also thank the presidential advisory council on hiv aids thank you and the federal hiv interagency working group for all the work that they are doing so thank you very much now it s been nearly 30 years since a cdc publication called morbidity and mortality weekly report first documented five cases of an illness that would come to be known as hiv aids in the beginning of course it was known as the gay disease a disease surrounded by fear and misunderstanding a disease we were too slow to confront and too slow to turn back in the decades since as epidemics have emerged in countries throughout africa and around the globe we ve grown better equipped as individuals and as nations to fight this disease from activists researchers community leaders who ve waged a battle against aids for so long including many of you here in this room we have learned what we can do to stop the spread of the disease we ve learned what we can do to extend the lives of people living with it and we ve been reminded of our obligations to one another obligations that like the virus itself transcend barriers of race or station or sexual orientation or faith or nationality so the question is not whether we know what to do but whether we will do it whether we will fulfill those obligations whether we will marshal our resources and the political will to confront a tragedy that is preventable all of us are here because we are committed to that cause we re here because we believe that while hiv transmission rates in this country are not as high as they once were every new case is one case too many we re here because we believe in an america where those living with hiv aids are not viewed with suspicion but treated with respect where they re provided the medications and health care they need where they can live out their lives as fully as their health allows and we re here because of the extraordinary men and women whose stories compel us to stop this scourge i m going to call out a few people here people like benjamin banks who right now is completing a master s degree in public health planning a family with his wife and deciding whether to run another half marathon ben has also been hiv positive for 29 years a virus he contracted during cancer surgery as a child so inspiring others to fight the disease has become his mission we re here because of people like craig washington who after seeing what was happening in his community friends passing away life stories sanitized as he put it at funerals homophobia all the discrimination that surrounded the disease craig got tested disclosed his status with the support of his partner and his family and took up the movement for prevention and awareness in which he is a leader today we re here because of people like linda scruggs linda learned she was hiv positive about two decades ago when she went in for prenatal care then and there she decided to turn her life around and she left a life of substance abuse behind she became an advocate for women she empowered them to break free from what she calls the bondage of secrecy she inspired her son who was born healthy to become an aids activist himself we re here because of linda and craig and ben and because of over 1 million americans living with hiv aids and the nearly 600 000 americans who ve lost their lives to the disease it s on their behalf and on the behalf of all americans that we began a national dialogue about combating aids at the beginning of this administration in recent months we ve held 14 community discussions we ve spoken with over 4 200 people we ve received over 1 000 recommendations on the white house website devising an approach not from the top down but from the bottom up and today we re releasing our national hiv aids strategy which is the product which is the product of these conversations and conversations with hiv positive americans and health care providers with business leaders with faith leaders and the best policy and scientific minds in our country now i know that this strategy comes at a difficult time for americans living with hiv aids because we ve got cash strapped states who are being forced to cut back on essentials including assistance for aids drugs i know the need is great and that s why we ve increased federal assistance each year that i ve been in office providing an emergency supplement this year to help people get the drugs they need even as we pursue a national strategy that focuses on three central goals first goal prevention we can t afford to rely on any single prevention method alone so our strategy promotes a comprehensive approach to reducing the number of new hiv infections from expanded testing so people can learn their status to education so people can curb risky behaviors to drugs that can prevent a mother from transmitting a virus to her child to support our new direction we re investing 30 million in new money and i ve committed to working with congress to make sure these investments continue in the future the second let s hold on you can talk to me after we ll be able to talk after i speak that s why i invited you here right so you don t have to yell right thank you second is treatment to extend lives and stem transmission we need to make sure every hiv positive american gets the medical care that they need and by stopping health insurers from denying coverage because of a preexisting condition and by creating a marketplace where people with hiv aids can buy affordable care the health insurance reforms i signed into law this year are an important step forward and we ll build on those reforms while also understanding that when people have trouble putting food on the table or finding a place to live it s virtually impossible to keep them on lifesaving therapies now the third goal is reducing health disparities by combating the disease in communities where the need is greatest we all know the statistics gay and bisexual men make up a small percentage of the population but over 50 percent of new infections for african americans it s 13 percent of the population nearly 50 percent of the people living with hiv aids hiv infection rates among black women are almost 20 times what they are for white women so such health disparities call on us to make a greater effort as a nation to offer testing and treatment to the people who need it the most so reducing new hiv infections improving care for people living with hiv aids narrowing health disparities these are the central goals of our national strategy they must be pursued hand in hand with our global public health strategy to roll back the pandemic beyond our borders and they must be pursued by a government that is acting as one so we need to make sure all our efforts are coordinated within the federal government and across federal state and local governments because that s how we ll achieve results that let americans live longer and healthier lives so yes government has to do its part but our ability to combat hiv aids doesn t rest on government alone it requires companies to contribute funding and expertise to the fight it requires us to use every source of information from tv to film to the internet to promote aids awareness it requires community leaders to embrace all and not just some who are affected by the disease it requires each of us to act responsibly in our own lives and it requires all of us to look inward to ask not only how we can end this scourge but also how we can root out the inequities and the attitudes on which this scourge thrives when a person living with hiv aids is treated as if she s done something wrong when she s viewed as being somehow morally compromised how can we expect her to get tested and disclose her diagnosis to others when we fail to offer a child a proper education when we fail to provide him with accurate medical information and instill within him a sense of responsibility then how can we expect him to take the precautions necessary to protect himself and others when we continue as a community of nations to tolerate poverty and inequality and injustice in our midst we don t stand up for how women are treated in certain countries how can we expect to end the disease a pandemic that feeds on such conditions so fighting hiv aids in america and around the world will require more than just fighting the virus it will require a broader effort to make life more just and equitable for the people who inhabit this earth and that s a cause to which i ll be firmly committed so long as i have the privilege of serving as president so to all of you who have been out there in the field working on this issues day in day out i know sometimes it s thankless work but the truth is you are representing what s best in all of us our regard for one another our willingness to care for one another i thank you for that i m grateful for you you re going to have a partner in me god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama13 8 10 barack_obama good evening everybody welcome please have a seat well welcome to the white house to you to muslim americans across our country and to more than one billion muslims around the world i extend my best wishes on this holy month ramadan kareem i want to welcome members of the diplomatic corps members of my administration and members of congress including rush holt john conyers and andre carson who is one of two muslim american members of congress along with keith ellison so welcome all of you here at the white house we have a tradition of hosting iftars that goes back several years just as we host christmas parties and seders and diwali celebrations and these events celebrate the role of faith in the lives of the american people they remind us of the basic truth that we are all children of god and we all draw strength and a sense of purpose from our beliefs these events are also an affirmation of who we are as americans our founders understood that the best way to honor the place of faith in the lives of our people was to protect their freedom to practice religion in the virginia act of establishing religion freedom thomas jefferson wrote that all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion the first amendment of our constitution established the freedom of religion as the law of the land and that right has been upheld ever since indeed over the course of our history religion has flourished within our borders precisely because americans have had the right to worship as they choose including the right to believe in no religion at all and it is a testament to the wisdom of our founders that america remains deeply religious a nation where the ability of peoples of different faiths to coexist peacefully and with mutual respect for one another stands in stark contrast to the religious conflict that persists elsewhere around the globe now that s not to say that religion is without controversy recently attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities particularly new york now we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of lower manhattan the 9 11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country and the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost loved ones is just unimaginable so i understand the emotions that this issue engenders and ground zero is indeed hallowed ground but let me be clear as a citizen and as president i believe that muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country and that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower manhattan in accordance with local laws and ordinances this is america and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable the principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are the writ of the founders must endure we must never forget those who we lost so tragically on 9 11 and we must always honor those who led the response to that attack from the firefighters who charged up smoke filled staircases to our troops who are serving in afghanistan today and let us also remember who we re fighting against and what we re fighting for our enemies respect no religious freedom al qaeda s cause is not islam it s a gross distortion of islam these are not religious leaders they re terrorists who murder innocent men and women and children in fact al qaeda has killed more muslims than people of any other religion and that list of victims includes innocent muslims who were killed on 9 11 so that s who we re fighting against and the reason that we will win this fight is not simply the strength of our arms it is the strength of our values the democracy that we uphold the freedoms that we cherish the laws that we apply without regard to race or religion or wealth or status our capacity to show not merely tolerance but respect towards those who are different from us and that way of life that quintessentially american creed stands in stark contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on that september morning and who continue to plot against us today in my inaugural address i said that our patchwork heritage is a strength not a weakness we are a nation of christians and muslims jews and hindus and non believers we are shaped by every language and every culture drawn from every end of this earth and that diversity can bring difficult debates this is not unique to our time past eras have seen controversies about the construction of synagogues or catholic churches but time and again the american people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues and stay true to our core values and emerge stronger for it so it must be and will be today and tonight we are reminded that ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and ramadan is a reminder that islam has always been a part of america the first muslim ambassador to the united states from tunisia was hosted by president jefferson who arranged a sunset dinner for his guest because it was ramadan making it the first known iftar at the white house more than 200 years ago like so many other immigrants generations of muslims came to forge their future here they became farmers and merchants worked in mills and factories they helped lay the railroads they helped to build america they founded the first islamic center in new york city in the 1890s they built america s first mosque on the prairie of north dakota and perhaps the oldest surviving mosque in america still in use today is in cedar rapids iowa today our nation is strengthened by millions of muslim americans they excel in every walk of life muslim american communities including mosques in all 50 states also serve their neighbors muslim americans protect our communities as police officers and firefighters and first responders muslim american clerics have spoken out against terror and extremism reaffirming that islam teaches that one must save human life not take it and muslim americans serve with honor in our military at next week s iftar at the pentagon tribute will be paid to three soldiers who gave their lives in iraq and now rest among the heroes of arlington national cemetery these muslim americans died for the security that we depend on and the freedoms that we cherish they are part of an unbroken line of americans that stretches back to our founding americans of all faiths who have served and sacrificed to extend the promise of america to new generations and to ensure that what is exceptional about america is protected our commitment to stay true to our core values and our ability slowly but surely to perfect our union for in the end we remain one nation under god indivisible and we can only achieve liberty and justice for all if we live by that one rule at the heart of every great religion including islam that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us so thank you all for being here i wish you a blessed ramadan and with that let us eat dem bobama13 9 10a barack_obama hello everybody welcome welcome to the white house it is good to see some old friends and familiar faces and i want to especially welcome three of our newest board members of the president s board of advisors on historically black colleges and universities i am so grateful that they ve agreed to join and i m looking forward to working with all of you now last february i saw some of you here when i signed the executive order to strengthen the white house initiative on hbcus and this is allowing the government to collaborate with educational associations with philanthropic organizations and with the private sector to increase your capacity to offer a college degree to as many students as possible we ve also declared this week to be national hbcu week and we do this for two reasons first of all to remember our history we remember all the men and women who took great risks and made extraordinary sacrifices to ensure that these institutions that you lead could exist we remember that at a critical time in our nation s history hbcus waged war against illiteracy and ignorance and won you ve made it possible for millions of people to achieve their dreams and gave so many young people a chance they never thought they d have a chance that nobody else would give them and that s something to celebrate and that s something to be very very proud of but we also use this week as an opportunity to look forward towards the future and to take stock of the work that we ve got left to do as many of you know i set a goal that by 2020 the united states would once again lead in the number of college graduates have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world i set that goal because our success in a 21st century economy is going to depend almost entirely on having a skilled workforce how well trained our young people are we cannot reach that goal without hbcus we can t get there we can t get there unless all of you are improving your graduation rates we can t get there unless all of you are continuing to make the dream of a college education a reality for more students we want to help you do that in every way that we can already we ve eliminated billions of dollars of unnecessary subsidies to banks and financial institutions so that that money could go directly to your students and that is incredibly important and as a consequence of that we re making it possible for millions of more students to attend colleges and universities and community colleges all across the country we also want to keep strengthening hbcus which is why we re investing 850 million in these institutions over the next 10 years and as i said in february strengthening your institutions isn t just a task for our advisory board or for the department of education it s a job for the entire federal government and i expect all agencies to support this mission now none of this is going to be easy i know i m sure you know that as leaders of these institutions you are up against enormous challenges especially during an economic crisis like the one that we are going through but we all have to try we have to try we have to remain determined we have to persevere that s what the first founders of hbcus did they knew that even if they succeeded that inequality would persist for a very very long time they knew that the barriers in our laws the barriers in our hearts would not vanish overnight but they also recognized a larger and distinctly american truth and that is that the right education might one day allow us to overcome barriers to let every child fulfill their god given potential they recognized as frederick douglass once put it that education means emancipation and they recognized that education is how america and its people might fulfill our promise that s what helped them get through some very difficult times it s what kept them fighting and trying and reaching for that better day even though they might not be able to live to see that better day that s the kind of commitment that we re going to need today from everybody here at the white house from all of you at your respective institutions we are extraordinarily proud of what you ve done but we ve got a lot more work to do and i just want everybody here to understand that you ve got a partner in me and you ve got a partner in the department of education and you ve got a department with everybody here at the white house who s absolutely committed to making sure that you can succeed in your mission so thank you very much everybody god bless you thank you dem bobama13 9 10b barack_obama hello everybody well it s good to see boy this is a healthy looking group here it is wonderful to see you welcome to the white house i want to thank all the teams that have traveled from all over the country to be here and congratulations on being ncaa champions we ve got over 650 athletes and almost 150 coaches and staff here today this is the most athletic talent we ve ever had on the south lawn we ve got the sharpshooters from tcu rifle squad where are they there they are down there i think they might be able to give secret service a run for their money we ve got the fairleigh dickinson bowling team here i need some tips guys you might be able to tell me how to get my score up i want to recognize ambassador ron kirk who s a big texas longhorns fan he s our ambassador for trade we ve got a lot of members of congress who are here local officials who are with us and i know they are incredibly proud of the trophies that all of you brought home i want to thank the ncaa interim president jim isch for everything he s doing to support so many outstanding student athletes give jim a big round of applause now that term student athlete is the thing that makes me so proud to stand before you here today because when each of you won the titles that you won whether it was in lacrosse or gymnastics or wheelchair basketball you didn t do it as professionals you didn t have multimillion dollar contracts or huge endorsement deals you woke up early you put in countless hours of practice for the love of the game and for the pride of your school you rode those buses and you carried those bags because you knew what it was going to take to be the best and because every one of you has a competitive streak that s about a mile wide and most impressive of all you did this while shouldering a full load of classes sometimes grabbing a few minutes to study in airports or locker rooms because you understand that student athlete emphasizes student and not just athlete so this is a group that knows what it means to be a champion you also understand that being a champion means giving back to the folks who gave so much to you the fans and the students who braved the heat and the rain and the snow to see you play the communities that adopted you as one of their own that s why i m so proud to hear about all the ways that you ve found to improve the lives of those around you i know that one team cooks dinner for the families of children suffering from serious illnesses another holds a track meet every year for more than 300 students with physical and mental disabilities together you guys have organized blood drives built houses cleaned up beaches and reached out to senior citizens one young man even donated bone marrow to a little girl he had never met and as he said saving someone s life is a lot more important than a football game it s the kind of selfless attitude that s going to stay with you for the rest of your lives and that s incredibly important because for the vast majority of you the day will come and it will probably sooner than you like when you won t be known primarily as a hockey player or a tennis player or a baseball player anymore instead you re going to be known as a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or a nurse a businessperson a mom or a dad and i m confident that you re going to excel at that just as you ve excelled at everything that you do no matter what you do no matter where you end up you will always know in your heart what it means to be the best there is at what you do you ll always know what it s like to set a goal and then reach it what it feels like to hit your limit and then go beyond it to get to the top and turn around and give others a hand in other words you re always going to know what it means to compete and what it means to be a champion that s something that nobody will ever be able to take away from you and that is something that you should be extraordinarily proud of so i m thrilled to have a chance to meet all of you you guys don t just make your communities proud but you make america proud god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you very much everybody thank you dem bobama13 9 10c barack_obama good morning everybody governor granholm this is your friend barack obama well look i wish i could be there in person to celebrate with you today but i am calling to congratulate a123 systems on this tremendous milestone as you said thanks to the recovery act you guys are the first american factory to start high volume production of advanced vehicle batteries i met with david and some of the a123 team here at the white house back in april and it s incredibly exciting to see how far you guys have come since we announced these grants just over a year ago and this is important not just because of what you guys are doing at your plant but all across america because this is about the birth of an entire new industry in america an industry that s going to be central to the next generation of cars and it s going to allow us to start exporting those cars making them comfortable convenient and affordable it helps our manufacturing industry to thrive and with it that means our communities and our states and our country are going to thrive for a long time our economic policies have shortchanged cutting edge projects like this one and it put us behind the innovation race and i don t have to tell folks in michigan that fewer parts of the economy have been harder hit by this recession than manufacturing but what i said when you guys were in the white house was i do not see a decline in manufacturing as inevitable for the united states and i know you don t either and so we re starting to reverse that slide and anybody who doubts that has to go and see what you guys are achieving and i want everybody to understand just a few years ago american businesses could only make 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries for hybrids and electric vehicles just 2 percent but because of your extraordinary work thanks to the recovery act we re going to get up to 40 percent of the world s capacity and that means when folks lift up their hoods on the cars of the future i want them to see engines and batteries that are stamped made in america and that s what you guys are helping to make happen so i want to thank your great governor jennifer granholm for her vision in jumpstarting a homegrown clean energy industry i want to thank your congressional delegation senator levin and stabenow and chairman dingdell and chairman levin for their leadership and their support of the recovery act i also want to thank my secretary of energy steven chu for his extraordinary work to get the money out the door quickly and wisely but most of all i want to congratulate and thank all the men and women of a123 systems you guys are making us proud the work you re doing will help power the american economy for years to come and so everybody there should just feel very very good about what you guys are doing and i am looking forward to continuing to see the great work that you guys do in the years to come so thank you very much everybody and good luck dem bobama14 1 10a barack_obama thank you thank you house of representatives thank you thank you very much thank you thank you please everybody have a seat have a seat thank you madam speaker to xavier thank you jim clyburn outstanding work by chris van hollen and of course steny hoyer to all the leadership to all the members thank you for inviting me here today thank you the house of representatives has been an incredible partner throughout this year but i hope you don t mind me singling out one of the best partners any president could ever have and that is your unbelievable speaker of the house nancy pelosi i was out in california doing i think it was a dnc event and nancy introduced me and i said you know nancy she s smart she s articulate she knows her issues but what people don t understand is nancy is tough she is tough and she is tough for her members for this caucus and she s tough for the american people and so her extraordinary leadership is one of the reasons why the house of representatives has consistently set the bar on a whole host of issues that and legislative accomplishments that we ve seen this year this past year and that we re going to see this year coming up now before i begin i want to give all of you a quick update on our urgent efforts to save lives and support the recovery in haiti our obviously thoughts and prayers go out to all the people of haiti haitian americans who have family members one of my top advisors patrick gaspard is haitian american he s got cousins and aunts and uncles who are still missing his family priest who he s known since he was a baby who baptized him is suspected dead those stories ripple throughout the haitian american community but obviously they ripple throughout all humanity when we see the kind of tragedy that we re seeing i want everybody here to understand that i ve directed my administration to take swift and coordinated and aggressive action i ve made it clear to my national security team that this has to be a top priority across agencies department of defense department of state usaid all the agencies involved homeland security our fema director they are all intimately involved in making sure that we can get in there as quickly as possible to engage in search and rescue and to provide immediate medical attention and then long term help with the recovery now our highest priority is the safety of american citizens and we are currently airlifting injured americans out of haiti i know many of you have constituents desperate for news of their loved ones and you should direct them to the state department web site for a phone number and e mail address and let them know that we will not rest until we have accounted for every single of our fellow americans that are in harm s way the first wave of our rescue and relief workers arrived on the ground yesterday search and rescue teams are now working around the clock to save lives more waves of major assets are going to be arriving this morning i announced an immediate investment of 100 million to support our relief efforts in the early days of this crisis most of this is for the basics life saving equipment food water medicine this investment will grow over the year as we help our neighbors embark on what is going to be a long term recovery and so i just want everybody in the house of representatives to understand this is a moment for american leadership this is a time when the world looks to us and they say given our capacity given our unique capacity to project power around the world that we have to project that not just for our own interests but for the interests of the world as a whole and my national security team understands that i will not put up with any excuses for us not doing the very best in this time of tragedy now it is good to be here with all of you i want to make a guarantee that 2010 will not be a boring year let me also say this 2010 will mark a year of remarkable progress for the american people and much of the reason for that is because of actions that were taken by the house of representatives i just want everybody to go back because sometimes in this town memories are short when this congress convened a year ago after eight years of failed policies and decades of broken politics we faced down the worst economic crisis since the great depression so we knew that we were going to confront an unprecedented battery of challenges not to mention long simmering problems that had been put off for decades we knew the solutions would not be quick and they would not be easy and they would not always be popular but we made a decision that we were going to govern there were easier paths to take because we knew that when i was sworn in for example we had already lost 650 000 jobs we were going to lose another 700 000 jobs the month i was sworn in the next month 650 000 jobs we knew that the recovery coming out of this extraordinary recession was going to be long and hard and the easiest thing to do would have been to not take tough decisions and simply to point fingers there is a long and hallowed tradition in washington of doing that but that s not what you did and think about what s happened as a consequence in one of america s darkest hours you answered the call time and again you stood up and you led and thanks to what you did we can say now what we couldn t say a year ago that america is moving forward again the economy is growing job losses have slowed to a trickle job losses over the last quarter of 2009 were still unacceptable but they were one tenth of what we endured in the first quarter so you have a lot to be proud of but let s be honest with each other i mean this is still a tough environment for a huge number of americans this is a tough time for this country i know that what you ve seen in your districts the same thing that i ve seen in towns across this country the same thing i read about in letters each and every day pain and anxiety and sometimes anger felt by our friends and our constituents and our fellow americans there are 7 million americans out there who have lost their jobs over the past two years and they still need our help what they can expect from this administration and i know what they can expect from you is that we are going to have a sustained and relentless focus over the next several months on accelerating the pace of job creation because that s priority number one last month i outlined the next steps that i believe we have to take to spur job creation and the house has already acted on many of these first tax breaks and loans to help accelerate small business hiring second additional investment in putting people to work modernizing our national infrastructure third incentives for consumers to make their homes more energy efficient which doesn t just create jobs but also saves consumers money and puts us on the path of energy independence and i want to thank all of you for stepping up to pass a jobs bill along these lines now if these were ordinary times the legislative victories of this congress the ones we ve already accomplished would be historic by any measure think about the enormous challenges we faced that explains why some of the things we already did haven t gotten as much attention as they deserve what s so amazing though is out of the major initiatives we were talking about before we took office you ve either completed or set the stage for almost all of them because of what you did we cut taxes for small businesses and 95 percent of working americans just as we said we would because of what you did women now are getting equal pay for equal work because of what you did 4 million children now have health insurance that didn t have it before our veterans know that they re going to be taken care of in a way that had been neglected for too long before because of what you did there will finally be new rules preventing credit card companies from ripping off americans and tobacco companies from targeting our children and there are new laws in place to protect consumers from mortgage fraud and predatory lending because of what you did young people and old people alike have new pathways to serve this country through our national service legislation because of what you did we ve strengthened protections against hate crimes based solely on who you are or what you look like or who you love we made historic investments i know eric schmidt is here today an extraordinary leader in our corporate community and in our technology communities he knows what we ve done in science and technology and a clean energy economy historic investments the largest that have ever been made we made historic investments in education so that we re fully prepared to win the race for the 21st century we reformed our defense spending to cut out waste and save taxpayers billions of dollars while keeping us safe i don t know if you saw today the washington times not known for a big promoter of the obama agenda pointed out that we had succeeded where previous administrations had failed because of the work that was done here in this congress to finally get serious on some of these spending cuts that had been talked about for years and this house this house passed common sense financial regulatory reform to help prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again so each achievement represents promises kept and we re not stopping today we are on the doorstep of accomplishing something that washington has been talking about since teddy roosevelt was president and that is reforming health care and health insurance here in america now believe me i know how big a lift this has been i see the polls i get 40 000 letters every day and i read a stack of them each night i catch the occasional blog post or cable clip that breathlessly declares what something means for a political party without really talking much about what it means for a country i know that the virtues of this legislation for americans with insurance and americans without it have been entirely obscured by fear and distraction but i also know what happens once we get this done once we saw this law sign this bill into law the american people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like and doesn t do things that people have been trying to say it does their worst fears will prove groundless and the american people s hope for a fair shake from their insurance companies for quality affordable health care they need will finally be realized this year alone this reform will ban some of the worst practices of the insurance industry forever they ll no longer be allowed to refuse coverage for preexisting conditions for children or drop coverage when folks get sick and need it the most they ll no longer be allowed to impose restrictive annual limits on the amount of coverage that you receive lifetime limits on the amounts of benefits received they ll be required to offer free preventive care like checkups and routine tests and mammograms at no cost patients will have rights they will get what they pay for and that s just the beginning all told it s reform that finally offers americans the security of knowing that they ll have quality affordable health care whether they lose their job or change their job or they get sick and by the way it s reform that begins to bring down costs for families and businesses and governments and for those of you who are concerned about the deficit when you ve got the congressional budget office that says in the second 10 years this brings down the deficit by a trillion dollars in the first 10 years it brings it down by over 100 billion you have nothing to apologize for when it comes to talking about deficit reduction the irresponsible thing would have been to do nothing and that s not what you ve decided to do this represents the biggest step towards deficit reduction in years so i know everybody in the media is all in a tizzy oh what s this going to mean politically well let me tell you something if republicans want to campaign against what we ve done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over american families and businesses that is a fight i want to have if their best idea is to return to the bad policies and the bad ideas of yesterday they are going to lose that argument what are they going to say well you know the old system really worked well let s go back to the way it was that s not going to appeal to seniors who are now seeing the possibility of that doughnut hole finally closing and so they can finally get discounts on their prescriptions that s not going to appeal to the small businesses who find out all the tax credits that they re going to get for doing right by their employees something that they have been wanting to do but may not have been able to afford it s not going to be very appealing to americans who for the first time are going to find out that they can provide coverage to their children their dependents all the way up to the age of 26 or 27 and that s why i ll be out there waging a great campaign from one end of the country to the other telling americans with insurance or without what they stand to gain about the arsenal of consumer protections about the long awaited stability that they re going to begin to experience and i m going to tell them that i am proud we are putting the future of america before the politics of the moment the next generation before the next election and that after all is what we were sent up here to do standing up for the american people against the special interests solve problems that we ve been talking about for decades make their lives a little bit better make tough choices sometimes when they re unpopular and that s something that every one of you who support this bill can be proud to campaign on in november now i know that some of the fights we ve been going through have been tough i know that some of you have gotten beaten up at home some of the fights that we re going to go through this year are going to be tough as well but just remember why each of us got into public service in the first place we found something that was worth fighting for there was something we thought was important enough that we were willing to stand up in the public square risk loss risk embarrassment because we knew in our hearts that something wasn t right that we weren t in some measure living up to the american ideal and that we thought that if we got involved and engaged in the democratic process somehow we could make it a little bit better we ve asked the american people for the chance to lead at this defining moment and they have entrusted that extraordinary privilege to us and if we live up to that responsibility if we re fighting for the american people with the same sense of urgency that they feel in their own lives then i am absolutely confident we re going to be able to look back at the end of this year and say that things are getting better that we ve reignited confidence in our economy in america and in each other that we ve restored a sense of responsibility here in washington and that above all we ve begun to renew the american dream and keep it alive not just for this time but for all time that s what you did last year that s what i want you to join me in doing this year and all the years to come thank you very much everybody thank you dem bobama14 1 10b barack_obama thank you please have a seat everybody thank you so much well good afternoon everyone and thanks for all of you for being here today i d like to recognize the deputy cabinet secretaries who are with us for their leadership at our agencies and it s exciting to see the leaders of some of the most innovative cutting edge tech savvy companies in the world gathered in the city where i had to fight tooth and nail just to get a blackberry there may be a little bit of a cultural clash here but that s exactly why we want you here i really appreciate the time all of you have taken to be in washington for this forum i know how busy all of you are we stand in the midst of challenging times for our economy i don t think that s any secret and i know that many of you have felt these challenges in your industries and in your businesses some of you have felt them quite acutely but i also know how you ve managed to meet them and managed through them experimenting and innovating and finding new ways to increase productivity and better serve your customers we re here today because i believe your government should be doing exactly the same thing when i first started campaigning for this office i said i wanted to change the way that washington works and when i said that i meant how it works for the american people i meant making government more responsive to their needs i meant getting rid of the waste and the inefficiencies that bloat our deficits and squander their hard earned savings i meant finally revamping the outdated technologies and information systems that undermine our efficiency and threaten our security and fail to serve their interests and i asked all of you to this forum on government modernization today because i believe that this last objective bringing our government into the 21st century is critical to achieving all those other objectives now i can say without any hesitation that our government employees are some of the hardest working most dedicated most competent people i know government workers get a bad rap they are dedicated they put in a lot of hours and they care deeply about what they do and they desperately want to provide the very best service for the american people but all too often their best efforts are thwarted because the technological revolution that has transformed our society over the past two decades has yet to reach many parts of our government many of these folks will tell you that their kids have better technology in their backpacks and in their bedrooms than they have at the desks at their work to this day there are still places in the federal government where reams of yellow files in manila envelopes are walked from desk to desk or boxes of documents are shipped back and forth between offices because files aren t yet online believe it or not in our patent office now this is embarrassing this is an institution responsible for protecting and promoting innovation our patent office receives more than 80 percent of patent applications electronically then manually prints them out scans them and enters them into an outdated case management system this is one of the reasons why the average processing time for a patent is roughly three years imminently solvable hasn t been solved yet even worse too often when we ve attempted to update or replace outdated technology we end up spending exorbitant sums of money on technologies that don t meet our needs or that took so long to implement that they were obsolete before we even started using them i just met with department of veterans affairs eric shinseki who a veteran himself cares so deeply about making sure that veterans get their claims processed efficiently we ve been talking for 10 years about putting electronic systems in place for veterans affairs to reduce the backlog and so far it has not yet happened not because people don t want it to happen but partly because previous purchasing decisions have mismatched what va has with what the department of defense has they don t speak to each other they don t merge none of this is acceptable particularly at a time when we re experiencing such economic difficulty and so many people are struggling we ve got to get the best bang for every single dollar that the government has in its possession and when washington lags a generation behind in how we do business that has real and serious impact on people s lives when we waste billions of dollars in part because our technology is out of date that s billions of dollars we re not investing in better schools for our children in tax relief for our small businesses in creating jobs and funding research to spur the scientific breakthroughs and economic growth of this new century and we know that the tools the technology the solutions are out there you know because you put them in place every day it s time we started putting them to work for the american people if you can book dinner on open table or a flight on southwest or united online then why shouldn t you be able to make an appointment at your local social security office the same way if you can track your ups package with your iphone then why not be able to check the status of your citizenship application on a website rather than having to write a letter and wait for a letter back now these are simple cost effective steps ones which we ve already taken or at least are in the process of taking but these are just the beginning going forward i want to see solutions like this in every agency i want to ask ourselves every day how are we using technology to make a real difference in people s lives how are we making it easier for small business owners to get loans so they can open their doors and expand their operations and create new jobs how are we helping young people get student loans so they can get the education they need to pursue their dreams how are we ensuring that the brave men and women who ve served this country get their benefits as quickly and as easily as possible how are we cutting costs and reducing our deficit so that our children and our grandchildren aren t saddled with debt improving the technology our government uses isn t about having the fanciest bells and whistles on our website it s about how we use the american people s hard earned tax dollars to make government work better for them and this is something i m very serious about now this is why i appointed the very first ever federal government cio and cto and vivek kundra and aneesh chopra are both coordinating our efforts and ensuring that we re embracing the best most effective technologies possible it s also why we introduced our it dashboard at usaspending gov here s a website which i ve personally reviewed where the american people can monitor every it project in the federal government if a project is over budget or behind schedule this site tells you that and by how much and it provides the name the email and the phone number of the person responsible to date the site has gotten 78 million hits we ve already terminated a number of projects that weren t performing and going forward we won t hesitate to cut more and then take that money and reinvest it in someplace that s actually going to make a difference but here is the reason all of you are here we can t do this alone many of you are pioneers harnessing new technologies to build thriving businesses some of you have revolutionized industries you ve changed the ways that we look at the world and if i had any doubt about how much government has to learn from all of you then the homework assignment you all completed would have certainly convinced me otherwise i think the depth and the thoughtfulness of your responses indicates that all of you spent real time on preparing for today and i deeply thank you for it i hope all of you will continue those efforts at the forum today i want the very best of what you ve got i want you to tell us not just what we can do to better serve the american people but how we can do it how we can do it without spending a whole lot of taxpayer dollars is especially what i want to hear from you and i also want to emphasize i don t want to just hear your input today we re going to need it in the months and years ahead as well a lot of this stuff takes time to implement even when it s implemented well that s why i ve charged our federal chief performance officer jeff zients who you already heard from to work with vivek and aneesh and all of you to make sure the changes we make have a lasting impact we ll need each of you to keep stepping up and sharing your insights and your ideas and your expertise we re going to need you to help us build the kind of government that the american people expect and the kind of government that they deserve and that s one that spends their money wisely serves their interests well and is fully worthy of their trust and their respect so that s the purpose of today s forum that s the ongoing mission of this administration and i very much look forward to hearing what you have to offer us thank you very much for being here everybody dem bobama14 10 09 barack_obama well good afternoon everybody please be seated welcome to the white house i m glad you could join us today as i proudly sign this executive order reestablishing the president s advisory commission and white house initiative on asian american and pacific islanders now when we talk about america s aapi communities we re talking about the industry and entrepreneurship of people who ve helped build this nation for centuries from the early days as laborers on our railroads and farmers tilling our land to today as leaders in every sector of american life from business to science to academia law and more we re talking about the creative energies of musicians like the singers penn masala we appreciate them who performed today and we re talking about the competitive spirit of athletes like wat misaka who played for the new york knicks back in 1947 the first non white player in the nba and who served in the u s army during world war ii mr misaka is here as well today and where s mr misaka there he is thank you so much we re talking about the public service of leaders like secretaries gary locke and steven chu and eric shinseki and the folks on stage with me today and we re talking about the courage and the patriotism and sacrifice of heroes like the members of the 442nd regimental combat team who served in world war ii including terry shima please give him a big round of applause mr shima is the executive director of the japanese american veterans association and we are grateful that he took the time to be here today some of their families had been interned some had been interned themselves but they still insisted on fighting for america and went on to become the most highly decorated unit of their size in history and one member of the regiment private jake kirihara whose parents were held in a camp here in america while he fought overseas later said even though this wrong was done to us there was never any question whether america was my country if america needed me to help i ll do it so this proud tradition of service continues today in iraq and afghanistan and around the world carried on by folks like tammy duckworth my dear friend who s here today tammy is a decorated member of our national guard a passionate advocate for our wounded warriors who is now serving as our assistant secretary of public and intergovernmental affairs at the veterans affairs department i m proud to have her on board and pleased that she could join us today and on a personal note when i talk about america s aapi communities i m talking about my own family my sister maya my brother in law konrad my beautiful nieces suhaila and savita and the folks i grew up with in indonesia and in honolulu as part of the hawai ian ohana or family our aapi communities have roots that span the globe but they embody a rich diversity and a story of striving and success that are uniquely american but focusing on all of these achievements doesn t tell the whole story and that s part of why we re here it s tempting given the strengths of the asian american and pacific islander communities for us to buy into the myth of the model minority and to overlook the very real challenges that certain asian american and pacific islander communities are facing from health disparities like higher rates of diabetes and hepatitis b to educational disparities that still exist in some communities high dropout rates low college enrollment rates to economic disparities higher rates of poverty in some communities and barriers to employment and workplace advancement in others some asian american and pacific islanders particularly new americans and refugees still face language barriers others have been victims of unthinkable hate crimes particularly in the months after september 11th crimes driven by ignorance and prejudice that are an affront to everything that this nation stands for and then there are the disparities that we don t even know about because our data collection methods still aren t up to par too often asian american and pacific islanders are all lumped into one category so we don t have accurate numbers reflecting the challenges of each individual community smaller communities in particular can get lost their needs and concerns buried in a spreadsheet and that s why i m signing this executive order today reestablishing the advisory commission and white house initiative created by president clinton 10 years ago because when any of our citizens when any of our citizens are unable to fulfill their potential due to factors that have nothing to do with their talent character or work ethic then i believe there s a role for our government to play not to guarantee anybody s success or to solve everybody s problems but to ensure that we re living up to our nation s ideals to ensure that we can each pursue our own version of happiness and that we continue to be a nation where all things are still possible for all people that s the impact that our government can have it s the impact of a small business administration that offers loans to asian american and pacific islander entrepreneurs whose small businesses sustain so many communities around the country it s the impact of a department of health and human services that funds research on the diseases that disproportionately affect asian american and pacific islander families it s the impact of a justice department that upholds the voting rights act and its promise of language assistance and equal access to the polls and it s the impact of evidence based research and data collection and analysis on aapi communities so that no one is invisible to their government all of that is the mission of this initiative and commission to work with 23 agencies and departments across our government to improve the health education and economic status of aapi communities the initiative and commission will be housed in the department of education and they ll be co chaired by secretaries arne duncan and secretary gary locke both of whom have devoted their lives to promoting opportunity for all our citizens and i think it s fitting that we begin this work in the week leading up to the holiday of diwali the festival of lights when members of some of the world s greatest faiths celebrate the triumph of good over evil this coming saturday hindus jains sikhs and some buddhists here in america and around the world will celebrate this holiday by lighting diyas or lamps which symbolize the victory of light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance and while this is a time of rejoicing it s also a time for reflection when we remember those who are less fortunate and renew our commitment to reach out to those in need while the significance of the holiday for each faith varies all of them mark it by gathering with family members to pray and decorate the house and enjoy delicious food and sweet treats and in that spirit of celebration and contemplation i am happy to light the white house diya and wish you all a happy diwali and a saal mubarak now i m going to sign this bill sign this order all right there we go dem bobama14 11 09 barack_obama thank you so much arigatou thank you very much good morning it is a great honor to be in tokyo the first stop on my first visit to asia as president of the united states thank you it is good to be among so many of you japanese and i see a few americans here who work every day to strengthen the bonds between our two countries including my longtime friend and our new ambassador to japan john roos it is wonderful to be back in japan some of you may be aware that when i was a young boy my mother brought me to kamakura where i looked up at that centuries old symbol of peace and tranquility the great bronze amida buddha and as a child i was more focused on the matcha ice cream and i want to thank prime minister hatoyama for sharing some of those memories with more ice cream last night at dinner thank you very much but i have never forgotten the warmth and the hospitality that the japanese people showed a young american far from home and i feel that same spirit on this visit in the gracious welcome of prime minister hatoyama in the extraordinary honor of the meeting with their imperial majesties the emperor and empress on the 20th anniversary of his ascension to the chrysanthemum throne in the hospitality shown by the japanese people and of course i could not come here without sending my greetings and gratitude to the citizens of obama japan now i am beginning my journey here for a simple reason since taking office i have worked to renew american leadership and pursue a new era of engagement with the world based on mutual interests and mutual respect and our efforts in the asia pacific will be rooted in no small measure through an enduring and revitalized alliance between the united states and japan from my very first days in office we have worked to strengthen the ties that bind our nations the first foreign leader that i welcomed to the white house was the prime minister of japan and for the first time in nearly 50 years the first foreign trip by an american secretary of state hillary clinton was to asia starting in japan in two months our alliance will mark its 50th anniversary a day when president dwight eisenhower stood next to japan s prime minister and said that our two nations were creating an indestructible partnership based on equality and mutual understanding in the half century since that alliance has endured as a foundation for our security and prosperity it has helped us become the world s two largest economies with japan emerging as america s second largest trading partner outside of north america it has evolved as japan has played a larger role on the world stage and made important contributions to stability around the world from reconstruction in iraq to combating piracy off the horn of africa to assistance for the people of afghanistan and pakistan most recently through its remarkable leadership in providing additional commitments to international development efforts there above all our alliance has endured because it reflects our common values a belief in the democratic right of free people to choose their own leaders and realize their own dreams a belief that made possible the election of both prime minister hatoyama and myself on the promise of change and together we are committed to providing a new generation of leadership for our people and our alliance that is why at this critical moment in history the two of us have not only reaffirmed our alliance we ve agreed to deepen it we ve agreed to move expeditiously through a joint working group to implement the agreement that our two governments reached on restructuring u s forces in okinawa and as our alliance evolves and adapts for the future we will always strive to uphold the spirit that president eisenhower described long ago a partnership of equality and mutual respect but while our commitment to this region begins in japan it doesn t end here the united states of america may have started as a series of ports and cities along the atlantic ocean but for generations we have also been a nation of the pacific asia and the united states are not separated by this great ocean we are bound by it we are bound by our past by the asian immigrants who helped build america and the generations of americans in uniform who served and sacrificed to keep this region secure and free we are bound by our shared prosperity by the trade and commerce upon which millions of jobs and families depend and we are bound by our people by the asian americans who enrich every segment of american life and all the people whose lives like our countries are interwoven my own life is a part of that story i am an american president who was born in hawaii and lived in indonesia as a boy my sister maya was born in jakarta and later married a chinese canadian my mother spent nearly a decade working in the villages of southeast asia helping women buy a sewing machine or an education that might give them a foothold in the world economy so the pacific rim has helped shape my view of the world and since that time perhaps no region has changed as swiftly or dramatically controlled economies have given way to open markets dictatorships have become democracies living standards have risen while poverty has plummeted and through all these changes the fortunes of america and the asia pacific have become more closely linked than ever before so i want everyone to know and i want everybody in america to know that we have a stake in the future of this region because what happens here has a direct effect on our lives at home this is where we engage in much of our commerce and buy many of our goods and this is where we can export more of our own products and create jobs back home in the process this is a place where the risk of a nuclear arms race threatens the security of the wider world and where extremists who defile a great religion plan attacks on both our continents and there can be no solution to our energy security and our climate challenge without the rising powers and developing nations of the asia pacific to meet these common challenges the united states looks to strengthen old alliances and build new partnerships with the nations of this region to do this we look to america s treaty alliances with japan south korea australia thailand and the philippines alliances that are not historical documents from a bygone era but abiding commitments to each other that are fundamental to our shared security these alliances continue to provide the bedrock of security and stability that has allowed the nations and peoples of this region to pursue opportunity and prosperity that was unimaginable at the time of my first childhood visit to japan and even as american troops are engaged in two wars around the world our commitment to japan s security and to asia s security is unshakeable and it can be seen in our deployments throughout the region above all through our young men and women in uniform of whom i am so proud now we look to emerging nations that are poised as well to play a larger role both in the asia pacific region and the wider world places like indonesia and malaysia that have adopted democracy developed their economies and tapped the great potential of their own people we look to rising powers with the view that in the 21st century the national security and economic growth of one country need not come at the expense of another i know there are many who question how the united states perceives china s emergence but as i have said in an interconnected world power does not need to be a zero sum game and nations need not fear the success of another cultivating spheres of cooperation not competing spheres of influence will lead to progress in the asia pacific now as with any nation america will approach china with a focus on our interests and it s precisely for this reason that it is important to pursue pragmatic cooperation with china on issues of mutual concern because no one nation can meet the challenges of the 21st century alone and the united states and china will both be better off when we are able to meet them together that s why we welcome china s effort to play a greater role on the world stage a role in which their growing economy is joined by growing responsibility china s partnership has proved critical in our effort to jumpstart economic recovery china has promoted security and stability in afghanistan and pakistan and it is now committed to the global nonproliferation regime and supporting the pursuit of denuclearization of the korean peninsula so the united states does not seek to contain china nor does a deeper relationship with china mean a weakening of our bilateral alliances on the contrary the rise of a strong prosperous china can be a source of strength for the community of nations and so in beijing and beyond we will work to deepen our strategic and economic dialogue and improve communication between our militaries of course we will not agree on every issue and the united states will never waver in speaking up for the fundamental values that we hold dear and that includes respect for the religion and cultures of all people because support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in america but we can move these discussions forward in a spirit of partnership rather than rancor in addition to our bilateral relations we also believe that the growth of multilateral organizations can advance the security and prosperity of this region i know that the united states has been disengaged from many of these organizations in recent years so let me be clear those days have passed as a asia pacific nation the united states expects to be involved in the discussions that shape the future of this region and to participate fully in appropriate organizations as they are established and evolve that is the work that i will begin on this trip the asia pacific economic cooperation forum will continue to promote regional commerce and prosperity and i look forward to participating in that forum this evening asean will remain a catalyst for southeast asian dialogue cooperation and security and i look forward to becoming the first american president to meet with all 10 asean leaders and the united states looks forward to engaging with the east asia summit more formally as it plays a role in addressing the challenges of our time we seek this deeper and broader engagement because we know our collective future depends on it and i d like to speak for a bit about what that future might look like and what we must do to advance our prosperity our security and our universal values and aspirations first we must strengthen our economic recovery and pursue growth that is both balanced and sustained the quick unprecedented and coordinated action taken by asia pacific nations and others has averted economic catastrophe and helped us to begin to emerge from the worst recession in generations and we have taken the historic step of reforming our international economic architecture so that the g20 is now the premier forum for international economic cooperation now this shift to the g20 along with the greater voice that is being given to asian nations in international financial institutions clearly demonstrates the broader more inclusive engagement that america seeks in the 21st century and as a key member of the g8 japan has and will continue to play a leading and vital role in shaping the future of the international financial architecture now that we are on the brink of economic recovery we must also ensure that it can be sustained we simply cannot return to the same cycles of boom and bust that led to a global recession we can t follow the same policies that led to such imbalanced growth one of the important lessons this recession has taught us is the limits of depending primarily on american consumers and asian exports to drive growth because when americans found themselves too heavily in debt or lost their jobs and were out of work demand for asian goods plummeted when demand fell sharply exports from this region fell sharply since the economies of this region are so dependent on exports they stopped growing and the global recession only deepened so we have now reached one of those rare inflection points in history where we have the opportunity to take a different path and that must begin with the g20 pledge that we made in pittsburgh to pursue a new strategy for balanced economic growth i ll be saying more about this in singapore but in the united states this new strategy will mean that we save more and spend less reform our financial systems reduce our long term deficit and borrowing it will also mean a greater emphasis on exports that we can build produce and sell all over the world for america this is a jobs strategy right now our exports support millions upon millions of well paying american jobs increasing those exports by just a small amount has the potential to create millions more these are jobs making everything from wind turbines and solar panels to the technology that you use every day for asia striking this better balance will provide an opportunity for workers and consumers to enjoy higher standards of living that their remarkable increases in productivity have made possible it will allow for greater investments in housing and infrastructure and the service sector and a more balanced global economy will lead to prosperity that reaches further and deeper for decades the united states has had one of the most open markets in the world and that openness has helped to fuel the success of so many countries in this region and others over the last century in this new era opening other markets around the globe will be critical not just to america s prosperity but to the world s as well an integral part of this new strategy is working towards an ambitious and balanced doha agreement not any agreement but an agreement that will open up markets and increase exports around the world we are ready to work with our asian partners to see if we can achieve that objective in a timely fashion and we invite our regional trading partners to join us at the table we also believe that continued integration of the economies of this region will benefit workers consumers and businesses in all our nations together with our south korean friends we will work through the issues necessary to move forward on a trade agreement with them the united states will also be engaging with the trans pacific partnership countries with the goal of shaping a regional agreement that will have broad based membership and the high standards worthy of a 21st century trade agreement working in partnership this is how we can sustain this recovery and advance our common prosperity but it s not enough to pursue growth that is balanced we also need growth that is sustainable for our planet and the future generations that will live here already the united states has taken more steps to combat climate change in 10 months than we have in our recent history by embracing the latest science by investing in new energy by raising efficiency standards forging new partnerships and engaging in international climate negotiations in short america knows there is more work to do but we are meeting our responsibility and will continue to do so and that includes striving for success in copenhagen i have no illusions that this will be easy but the contours of a way forward are clear all nations must accept their responsibility those nations like my own who have been the leading emitters must have clear reduction targets developing countries will need to take substantial actions to curb their emissions aided by finance and technology and there must be transparency and accountability for domestic actions each of us must do what we can to grow our economies without endangering our planet and we must do it together but the good news is that if we put the right rules and incentives in place it will unleash the creative power of our best scientists engineers and entrepreneurs it will lead to new jobs new businesses and entire new industries and japan has been at the forefront on this issue we are looking forward to being a important partner with you as we achieve this critical global goal yet even as we confront this challenge of the 21st century we must also redouble our efforts to meet a threat to our security that is the legacy of the 20th century the danger posed by nuclear weapons in prague i affirmed america s commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons and laid out a comprehensive agenda to pursue this goal i am pleased that japan has joined us in this effort for no two nations on earth know better what these weapons can do and together we must seek a future without them this is fundamental to our common security and this is a great test of our common humanity our very future hangs in the balance now let me be clear so long as these weapons exist the united states will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent that guarantees the defense of our allies including south korea and japan but we must recognize that an escalating nuclear arms race in this region would undermine decades of growth and prosperity so we are called upon to uphold the basic bargain of the nuclear non proliferation treaty that all nations have a right to peaceful nuclear energy that nations with nuclear weapons have a responsibility to move toward nuclear disarmament and those without nuclear weapons have a responsibility to forsake them indeed japan serves as an example to the world that true peace and power can be achieved by taking this path for decades japan has enjoyed the benefits of peaceful nuclear energy while rejecting nuclear arms development and by any measure this has increased japan s security and enhanced its position to meet our responsibilities and to move forward with the agenda i laid out in prague we have passed with the help of japan a unanimous u n security council resolution embracing this international effort we are pursuing a new agreement with russia to reduce our nuclear stockpiles we will work to ratify and bring into force the test ban treaty and next year at our nuclear security summit we will advance our goal of securing all the world s vulnerable nuclear materials within four years now as i ve said before strengthening the global nonproliferation regime is not about singling out any individual nations it s about all nations living up to their responsibilities that includes the islamic republic of iran and it includes north korea for decades north korea has chosen a path of confrontation and provocation including the pursuit of nuclear weapons it should be clear where this path leads we have tightened sanctions on pyongyang we have passed the most sweeping u n security council resolution to date to restrict their weapons of mass destruction activities we will not be cowed by threats and we will continue to send a clear message through our actions and not just our words north korea s refusal to meet its international obligations will lead only to less security not more yet there is another path that can be taken working in tandem with our partners supported by direct diplomacy the united states is prepared to offer north korea a different future instead of an isolation that has compounded the horrific repression of its own people north korea could have a future of international integration instead of gripping poverty it could have a future of economic opportunity where trade and investment and tourism can offer the north korean people the chance at a better life and instead of increasing insecurity it could have a future of greater security and respect this respect cannot be earned through belligerence it must be reached by a nation that takes its place in the international community by fully living up to its international obligations so the path for north korea to realize this future is clear a return to the six party talks upholding previous commitments including a return to the nuclear non proliferation treaty and the full and verifiable denuclearization of the korean peninsula and full normalization with its neighbors can also only come if japanese families receive a full accounting of those who have been abducted these are all steps that can be taken by the north korean government if they are interested in improving the lives of their people and joining the community of nations and as we are vigilant in confronting this challenge we will stand with all of our asian partners in combating the transnational threats of the 21st century by rooting out the extremists who slaughter the innocent and stopping the piracy that threatens our sea lanes by enhancing our efforts to stop infectious disease and working to end extreme poverty in our time and by shutting down the traffickers who exploit women children and migrants and putting a stop to this scourge of modern day slavery once and for all indeed the final area in which we must work together is in upholding the fundamental rights and dignity of all human beings the asia pacific region is rich with many cultures it is marked by extraordinary traditions and strong national histories and time and again we have seen the remarkable talent and drive of the peoples of this region in advancing human progress yet this much is also clear indigenous cultures and economic growth have not been stymied by respect for human rights they have been strengthened by it supporting human rights provides lasting security that cannot be purchased in any other way that is the story that can be seen in japan s democracy just as it can be seen in america s democracy the longing for liberty and dignity is a part of the story of all peoples for there are certain aspirations that human beings hold in common the freedom to speak your mind and choose your leaders the ability to access information and worship how you please confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice these are not impediments to stability they are the cornerstones of stability and we will always stand on the side of those who seek these rights that truth for example guides our new approach to burma despite years of good intentions neither sanctions by the united states nor engagement by others succeeded in improving the lives of the burmese people so we are now communicating directly with the leadership to make it clear that existing sanctions will remain until there are concrete steps toward democratic reform we support a burma that is unified peaceful prosperous and democratic and as burma moves in that direction a better relationship with the united states is possible there are clear steps that must be taken the unconditional release of all political prisoners including aung san suu kyi an end to conflicts with minority groups and a genuine dialogue between the government the democratic opposition and minority groups on a shared vision for the future that is how a government in burma will be able to respond to the needs of its people that is the path that will bring burma true security and prosperity these are steps that the united states will take to improve prosperity security and human dignity in the asia pacific we will do so through our close friendship with japan which will always be a centerpiece of our efforts in the region we will do so as a partner through the broader engagement that i ve discussed today we will do so as a pacific nation with a president who was shaped in part by this piece of the globe and we will do so with the same sense of purpose that has guided our ties with the japanese people for nearly 50 years the story of how these ties were forged dates back to the middle of the last century sometime after the guns of war had quieted in the pacific it was then that america s commitment to the security and stability of japan along with the japanese peoples spirit of resilience and industriousness led to what s been called the japanese miracle a period of economic growth that was faster and more robust than anything the world had seen for some time in the coming years and decades this miracle would spread throughout the region and in a single generation the lives and fortunes of millions were forever changed for the better it is progress that has been supported by a hard earned peace and strengthened by new bridges of mutual understanding that have bound together the nations of this vast and sprawling space but we know that there s still work to be done so that new breakthroughs in science and technology can lead to jobs on both sides of the pacific and security from a warming planet so that we can reverse the spread of deadly weapons and on a divided peninsula the people of south can be freed from fear and those in the north can live free from want so that a young girl can be valued not for her body but for her mind and so that young people everywhere can go as far as their talent and their drive and their choices will take them none of this will come easy nor without setback or struggle but at this moment of renewal in this land of miracles history tells us it is possible this is the america s agenda this is the purpose of our partnership with japan and with the nations and peoples of this region and there must be no doubt as america s first pacific president i promise you that this pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world thank you very much dem bobama14 12 09 barack_obama good evening and merry christmas thank you george lopez thank you to all the incredible performers for sharing your wonderful holiday spirit with us this evening mary j blige neil diamond sugarland rob thomas usher and justin bieber bieber he was just discovered the american family choir and the washington youth choir and the united states army herald trumpets and to the producers and crew behind the scenes thank you for bringing us together at this historic and beautiful national building museum and for bringing this celebration to our fellow americans for many of your families this is a holiday tradition the 28th christmas in washington celebration for our family this is our first christmas in the white house michelle and i are honored to be with you and i know that malia sasha and my mother in law marian robinson want to wish you all a wonderful holiday and i m sure they re watching here at home this evening this season we celebrate that sacred moment the birth of a child and the message of love he would preach to the world that we are our brother s keeper our sister s keeper that pure in heart we do unto others as we would have them do unto us that we devote ourselves to good works that we are summoned to be peacemakers more than 2 000 years later that spirit still inspires us it s why this celebration tonight benefits the children s national medical center and all the children whose lives they touch and they save and it s why as so many of our fellow citizens struggle through tough times we are called upon to help neighbors in need and it s why with our men and women in uniform serving far from home in harm s way our fervent wish remains this season and all seasons let there be peace on earth to all americans from our family to yours merry christmas and god bless you dem bobama14 4 09 barack_obama thank you so much it s good to be back thank you so much please everybody be seated well to president degioia thank you so much for the gracious introduction and thanks for bringing your family including jt appreciate you we re going to invite him over hang out with the girls he s a pretty good looking young man to mayor adrian fenty who s doing such a great job in this city thank you so much for your attendance to representative donna edwards who is here and represents maryland s 4th district thank you to georgetown university students it is great to be here well it is good to be back i appeared in this room during the campaign and had a wonderful reception then and it s wonderful to be back and be with all of you we re going to talk about the economy today and i was telling president degioia this may be a slightly longer speech than i usually give but it s a slightly bigger topic and that is how we are going to deal with so many of our economic challenges you know it s been 12 weeks now since my administration began and i think that even our critics would agree that at the very least we ve been busy in just under three months we ve responded to an extraordinary set of economic challenges with extraordinary action action that s been unprecedented both in terms of its scale and its speed and i know that some have accused us of taking on too much at once others believe we haven t done enough and many americans are simply wondering how all of our different programs and policies fit together in a single overarching strategy that will move this economy from recession to recovery and ultimately to prosperity so today i want to step back for a moment and explain our strategy as clearly as i can this is going to be prose and not poetry i want to talk about what we ve done why we ve done it and what we have left to do i want to update you on the progress we ve made but i also want to be honest about the pitfalls that may still lie ahead most of all i want every american to know that each action we take and each policy we pursue is driven by a larger vision of america s future a future where sustained economic growth creates good jobs and rising incomes a future where prosperity is fueled not by excessive debt or reckless speculation or fleeting profits but is instead built by skilled productive workers by sound investments that will spread opportunity at home and allow this nation to lead the world in the technologies and the innovation and discoveries that will shape the 21st century that s the america i see that s the america that georgetown is preparing so many of you for that is the future that i know that we can have now to understand how we get there we first need to understand how we got here recessions are not uncommon markets and economies naturally ebb and flow as we ve seen many times in our history but this recession is different this recession was not caused by a normal downturn in the business cycle it was caused by a perfect storm of irresponsibility and poor decision making that stretched from wall street to washington to main street as has been widely reported it started in the housing market during the course of the decade the formula for buying a house changed instead of saving their pennies to buy their dream house many americans found that suddenly they could take out loans that by traditional standards their incomes just could not support others were tricked into signing these subprime loans by lenders who were trying to make a quick profit the reason these loans were so readily available was that wall street saw big profits to be made investment banks would buy and package together these questionable mortgages into securities arguing that by pooling the mortgages the risks had somehow been reduced and credit agencies that are supposed to help investors determine the soundness of various investments stamped the securities with their safest rating when they should have been labeled buyer beware no one really knew what the actual value of these securities were no one fully understood what the risks were but since the housing market was booming and prices were rising banks and investors just kept buying and selling them always passing off the risk to someone else for a greater profit without having to take any of the ultimate responsibility banks took on more debt than they could handle the government chartered companies fannie mae and freddie mac whose traditional mandate was to help support traditional mortgages decided to get in on the action by buying and holding billions of dollars of these securities aig the biggest insurer in the world that had a very traditional insurance business that was very profitable decided to make profits suddenly by selling billions of dollars of complicated financial instruments that supposedly insured these securities everybody was making record profits except the wealth created was real only on paper and as the bubble grew there was almost no accountability or oversight from anyone in washington then the housing bubble burst home prices fell people began to default on their subprime mortgages and the value of all those loans and securities plummeted banks and investors couldn t find anyone to buy them greed gave way to fear investors pulled their money out of the market large financial institutions that didn t have enough money on hand to pay off all their obligations collapsed other banks held on tight to their money and simply stopped lending now this is when the crisis spread from wall street to main street after all the ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to as you all know very well a college education it s how stores stock their shelves and farms buy equipment and businesses make payroll so when banks stopped lending money businesses started laying off workers when laid off workers had less money to spend businesses were forced to lay off even more workers when people couldn t get a car loan a bad situation at the auto companies became even worse when people couldn t get home loans the crisis in the housing market only deepened because the infected securities were being traded worldwide and other nations also had weak regulations this recession soon became global and when other nations can t afford to buy our goods it slows our economy even further so this is the situation the downward spiral that we confronted on the day that we took office so our most urgent task has been to clear away the wreckage repair the immediate damage to the economy and do everything we can to prevent a larger collapse and since the problems we face are all working off each other to feed a vicious economic downturn we ve had no choice but to attack all fronts of our economic crisis simultaneously the first step was to fight a severe shortage of demand in the economy so the federal reserve did this by dramatically lowering interest rates last year in order to boost investment my administration and congress boosted demand by passing the largest recovery plan in our nation s history it s a plan that s already in the process of saving or creating 3 5 million jobs over the next two years it s putting money directly into people s pockets with a tax cut for 95 percent of working families that s now showing up in paychecks across america and to cushion the blow of this recession we also provided extended unemployment benefits and continued health care coverage to americans who ve lost their jobs through no fault of their own now you will recall that some argued this recovery plan is a case of irresponsible government spending that it s somehow to blame for our long term deficit projections and that the federal government should be cutting instead of increasing spending right now so i want to tackle this argument head on to begin with economists on both the left and the right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending you see when this recession began many families sat around the kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back and so have many businesses and this is a completely reasonable and understandable reaction but if everybody if everybody if every family in america if every business in america cuts back all at once then no one is spending any money which means there are no customers which means there are more layoffs which means the economy gets even worse that s why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand that s exactly what we re doing right now second i absolutely agree that our long term deficit is a major problem that we have to fix but the fact is that this recovery plan represents only a tiny fraction of that long term deficit as i ll discuss in a moment the key to dealing with our long term deficit and our national debt is to get a handle on out of control health care costs not to stand idly by as the economy goes into free fall so the recovery plan has been the first step in confronting this economic crisis the second step has been to heal our financial system so that credit is once again flowing to the businesses and families who rely on it the heart of this financial crisis is that too many banks and other financial institutions simply stopped lending money in a climate of fear banks were unable to replace their losses from some of those bad mortgages by raising new capital on their own and they were unwilling to lend the money they did have because they were afraid that no one would pay it back it s for this reason that the last administration used what they called the troubled asset relief program or tarp to provide these banks with temporary financial assistance in order to get them lending again now i understand that tarp is not popular and i have to say that i don t agree with some of the ways the tarp program was managed but i do agree with the broader rationale that we must provide banks with the capital and the confidence necessary to start lending again that s the purpose of the stress tests that will soon tell us how much additional capital will be needed to support lending at our largest banks ideally these needs will be met by private investors who are willing to put in money to these banks but where that s not possible and banks require substantial additional resources from the government then we will hold accountable those who are responsible we ll force the necessary adjustments we ll provide the support to clean up those bank balance sheets and we will assure the continuity of a strong and viable institution that can serve our people and our economy of course there are some who differ with our approach on the one hand there are some who argue that the government should stand back and simply let these banks fail especially since in many cases it was their bad decisions that helped create the crisis in the first place but whether we like it or not history has shown repeatedly that when nations do not take early and aggressive action to get credit flowing again they have crises that last years and years instead of months and months years of low growth years of low job creation years of low investment all of which cost these nations far more than a course of bold upfront action and although there are a lot of americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of to banks one of my most frequent questions in the letters that i get from constituents is where s my bailout and i understand the sentiment it makes sense intuitively and morally it makes sense but the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in 8 or 10 of loans to families and businesses so that s a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth that s why we have to fix the banks now on the other hand there have been some who don t dispute that we need to shore up the banking system but they suggest that we ve been too timid in how we go about it this is essentially the nationalization argument that some of you may have heard and the argument says that the federal government should have already preemptively stepped in and taken over major financial institutions the way that the fdic currently intervenes in smaller banks and that our failure my administration s failure to do so is yet another example of washington coddling wall street why aren t you tougher on the banks so let me be clear the reason we have not taken this step has nothing to do with any ideological or political judgment we ve made about government involvement in banks it s certainly not because of any concern we have for the management and shareholders whose actions helped to cause this mess rather it s because we believe that preemptive government takeovers are likely to end up costing taxpayers even more in the end and because it s more likely to undermine than create confidence governments should practice the same principle as doctors first do no harm so rest assured we will do whatever is necessary to get credit flowing again but we will do so in ways that minimize risks to taxpayers and to the broader economy to that end in addition to the program to provide capital to the banks we ve launched a plan that will pair government resources with private investment in order to clear away the old loans and securities the so called toxic assets that are also preventing our banks from lending money now what we ve also learned during this crisis is that our banks aren t the only institutions affected by these toxic assets that are clogging the financial system aig for example is not a bank it s an insurance company as i mentioned and yet because it chose to insure billions of dollars worth of risky assets essentially creating a hedge fund on top of an insurance company its failure could threaten the entire financial system and freeze lending even more and that s why as frustrating as it is and i promise you nobody is more frustrated than me with aig i promise we had to provide support for aig because the entire system as fragile as it is could be profoundly endangered if aig went into a liquidation bankruptcy it s also why we need new legal authority so that we have the power to intervene in such financial institutions the same way that bankruptcy courts currently do with businesses that hit hard times but don t pose systemic risks and that way we can restructure these businesses in an orderly way that doesn t induce panic in the financial system and by the way will allow us to restructure inappropriate bonus contracts without creating a perception the government can just change compensation rules on a whim this is also why we re moving aggressively to unfreeze markets and jumpstart lending outside the banking system where more than half of all lending in america actually takes place to do this we ve started a program that will increase guarantees for small business loans and unlock the market for auto loans and student loans and to stabilize the housing market we ve launched a plan that will save up to four million responsible homeowners from foreclosure and help many millions more to refinance their homes in a few weeks we will also reassess the state of chrysler and general motors two companies with an important place in our history and a large footprint in our economy but two companies that have also fallen on hard times late last year the companies were given transitional loans by the previous administration to tide them over as they worked to develop viable business plans unfortunately the plans they developed fell short so we ve given them some additional time to work these complex issues through and by the way we owed that not to the executives whose bad bets contributed to the weakening of their companies but to the hundreds of thousands of workers whose livelihoods hang in the balance entire towns entire communities entire states are profoundly impacted by what happens in the auto industry now it is our fervent hope that in the coming weeks chrysler will find a viable partner and gm will develop a business plan that will put it on a path to profitability without endless support from american taxpayer in the meantime we re taking steps to spur demand for american cars and provide relief for autoworkers and their communities and we will continue to reaffirm this nation s commitment to a 21st century american auto industry that creates new jobs and builds the fuel efficient cars and trucks that will carry us toward a clean energy future finally to coordinate a global response to this global recession i went to the meeting of the g20 nations in london the other week each nation has undertaken significant stimulus to spur demand all agreed to pursue tougher regulatory reforms we also agreed to triple the lending capacity of the international monetary fund which as many of you know is an international financial institution supported by all the major economies so that they can provide direct assistance to developing nations and vulnerable populations that s not just charity because america s success depends on whether other nations have the ability to buy what we sell it s important that we pay attention to these emerging markets we pledged to avoid the trade barriers and protectionism that hurts us all in the end and we decided to meet again in the fall to gauge our progress and take additional steps if necessary so that s where we ve been that s what we ve done in the last three months all of these actions the recovery act the bank capitalization program the housing plan the strengthening of the non bank credit market the auto plan and our work at the g20 all have been necessary pieces of the recovery puzzle they ve been designed to increase aggregate demand to get credit flowing again to families and businesses and to help families and businesses ride out the storm and taken together these actions are starting to generate signs of economic progress because of our recovery plan schools and police departments have cancelled planned layoffs clean energy companies and construction companies are re hiring workers to build everything from energy efficient windows to new roads and highways our housing plan has helped lead to a spike in the number of homeowners who are taking advantage of historically low mortgage rates by refinancing which is like putting a 2 000 tax cut in your pocket our program to support the market for auto loans and student loans has started to unfreeze this market and securitize more of this lending in the last few weeks and small businesses are seeing a jump in loan activity for the first time in months now this is all welcome and encouraging news it does not mean the hard times are over 2009 will continue to be a difficult year for america s economy and obviously most difficult for those who ve lost their jobs the severity of this recession will cause more job loss more foreclosures and more pain before it ends the market will continue to rise and fall credit is still not flowing nearly as easily as it should the process for restructuring aig and the auto companies will involve difficult and sometimes unpopular choices we are not finished yet on that front and all of this means that there s much more work to be done but all of this also means that you can continue to expect an unrelenting unyielding day by day effort from this administration to fight for economic recovery on all fronts but even as we continue to clear away the wreckage and address the immediate crisis it is my firm belief that our next task beginning now is to make sure such a crisis never happens again even as we clean up balance sheets and get credit flowing again even as people start spending and businesses start hiring all that s going to happen we have to realize that we cannot go back to the bubble and bust economy that led us to this point it is simply not sustainable to have a 21st century financial system that is governed by 20th century rules and regulations that allowed the recklessness of a few to threaten the entire economy it is not sustainable to have an economy where in one year 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices maxed out credit cards over leveraged banks and overvalued assets it s not sustainable to have an economy where the incomes of the top 1 percent has skyrocketed while the typical working household has seen their incomes decline by nearly 2 000 that s just not a sustainable model for long term prosperity for even as too many were out there chasing ever bigger bonuses and short term profits over the last decade we continued to neglect the long term threats to our prosperity the crushing burden that the rising cost of health care is placing on families and businesses the failure of our education system to prepare our workers for a new age the progress that other nations are making on clean energy industries and technologies while we we remain addicted to foreign oil the growing debt that we re passing on to our children even after we emerge from the current recession these challenges will still represent major obstacles that stand in the way of our success in the 21st century so we ve got a lot of work to do now there s a parable at the end of the sermon on the mount that tells the story of two men the first built his house on a pile of sand and it was soon destroyed when a storm hit but the second is known as the wise man for when the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house it fell not for it was founded upon a rock it was founded upon a rock we cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand we must build our house upon a rock we must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad it s a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another american century number one new rules for wall street that will reward drive and innovation not reckless risk taking number two new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive number three new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and new industries number four new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses and number five new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations that s the new foundation we must build that s our house built upon a rock that must be our future and my administration s policies are designed to achieve that future let me talk about each of these steps in turn the first step we will take to build this foundation is to reform the outdated rules and regulations that allowed this crisis to happen in the first place it is time to lay down tough new rules of the road for wall street to ensure that we never find ourselves here again just as after the great depression new rules were designed for banks to avoid the kind of reckless speculation that helped to create the depression so we ve got to make adaptations to our current set of rules create rules that punish shortcuts and abuse rules that tie someone s pay to their actual job performance a novel concept rules that protect typical american families when they buy a home get a credit card or invest in a 401 k so we ve already begun to work with congress to shape this comprehensive new regulatory framework and i expect a bill to arrive on my desk for my signature before the year is out the second pillar of this new foundation is an education system that finally prepares our workers for a 21st century economy you know in the 20th century the g i bill helped send a generation to college for decades we led the world in educational attainment and as a consequence we led the world in economic growth but in this new economy we ve come to trail the world s leaders in graduation rates in educational achievement in the production of scientists and engineers that s why we have set a goal that will greatly enhance our ability to compete for the high wage high tech jobs of the 21st century by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world that is the goal that we have set and we intend to do to meet that goal we have to start early so we ve already dramatically expanded early childhood education we are investing in innovative programs that have proven to help schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps we re creating new rewards that tie teachers performance and new pathways for advancement and i ve asked every american to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training and we have provided tax credits to make a college education more affordable for every american even those who attend georgetown and by the way one of the changes that i would like to see and i m going to be talking about this in weeks to come is once again seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things engineers scientists innovators for so long we have placed at the top of our pinnacle folks who can manipulate numbers and engage in complex financial calculations and that s good we need some of that but you know what we can really use is some more scientists and some more engineers who are building and making things that we can export to other countries now the third pillar of this new foundation is to harness the renewable energy that can create millions of new jobs and new industries we all know that the country that harnesses this new energy source will lead the 21st century yet we ve allowed other countries to outpace us on this race to the future i don t know about you but i do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders i think it s time for america to lead again so the investments we made in the recovery act will double this nation s supply of renewable energy in the next three years and we are putting americans to work making our homes and buildings more efficient so that we can save billions on our energy bills and grow our economy at the same time now the only though that we can truly spark the transformation that s need is through a gradual market based cap on carbon pollution so that clean energy is the profitable kind of energy there are those who ve argued that we shouldn t attempt we shouldn t even be thinking we shouldn t even be talking about such a transition until the economy recovers and they are right that we have to take into account the costs of transition transitioning to a clean energy economy will not be easy but we can no longer delay putting a framework for a clean energy economy in place that needs to be done now if businesses and entrepreneurs know today that we are closing this carbon pollution loophole they ll start investing in clean energy now and pretty soon we ll see more companies constructing solar panels and workers building wind turbines and car companies manufacturing fuel efficient cars investors will put some money into a new energy technology and a small business will open to start selling it that s how we can grow this economy enhance our security and protect our planet at the same time now the fourth pillar of our new foundation is a 21st century health care system where families businesses and government budgets aren t dragged down by skyrocketing insurance premiums one and a half million americans could lose their homes this year just because of a medical crisis major american corporations are struggling to compete with their foreign counterparts small businesses are closing their doors we can t allow the cost of health care to continue strangling our economy and that s why our recovery act will invest in electronic health records with strict privacy standards that can save money and lives and reduce medical error that s why we ve made the largest investment ever in preventive care because that s one of the best ways to keep costs under control and included in the budgets that just passed congress is an historic commitment to reform that will finally make quality health care affordable for every american so i m looking forward in the next few months to working with both parties in congress to make this reform a reality we can get this done and we have to get it done now fixing our health care system will will require resources it s not going to be free but in my budget we ve made a commitment to fully pay for reform without increasing the deficit and we ve identified specific savings that will make the health care system more efficient and reduce costs for us all in fact we ve undertaken an unprecedented effort to find this kind of savings in every corner of the budget because the final pillar in building our new foundation is restoring fiscal discipline once this economy recovers already we ve identified 2 trillion dollars in deficit reductions over the next decade we need to do more but we ve already done that we ve announced procurement reform that will greatly reduce no bid contracts and save the government 40 billion we need to do more but that s an important start secretary gates recently announced a courageous set of reforms that go right at the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and cost overruns that have bloated our defense budget without making america safer we need to do more but that proposal by secretary gates is right on target we will end education programs that don t work we will root out waste and fraud and abuse in our medicare program altogether this budget will reduce discretionary spending for domestic programs as a share of the economy by more than 10 percent over the next decade to the lowest level we ve seen since we began keeping records nearly half a century ago and as we continue to go through the federal budget line by line we will be announcing additional savings secured by eliminating and consolidating programs that we don t need so we can make room for the things that we do need that s what we re doing now of course i realize that for some this isn t enough i know there s a criticism out there that my administration has been spending with reckless abandon pushing a liberal social agenda while mortgaging our children s future you ve heard the argument well let me make three points first as i said earlier the worst thing that we could do in a recession this severe is to try to cut government spending at the same time as families and businesses around the world are cutting back on their spending so as serious as our deficit and debt problems are and they are very serious major efforts to deal with them have to focus on the medium and long term budget picture not on the short term and that s exactly what we ve done second in tackling the deficit issue we simply cannot sacrifice the long term investments that we so desperately need to generate long term prosperity that s the argument that some critics have made well you re proposing health care reform you shouldn t be doing that you re proposing education investments you shouldn t be doing that that adds to the deficit look just as a cash strapp dem bobama14 5 09a barack_obama thank you thank you thank you asu thank you very much thank you very much thank you so much thank you please well thank you president crow for that extremely generous introduction for your inspired leadership as well here at asu and i want to thank the entire asu community for the honor of attaching my name to a scholarship program that will help open the doors of higher education to students from every background what a wonderful gift thank you that notion of opening doors of opportunity to everybody that is the core mission of this school it s a core mission of my presidency and i hope this program will serve as a model for universities across this country so thank you so much i want to obviously congratulate the class of 2009you re your unbelievable achievement i want to thank the parents the uncles the grandpas the grandmas cousins calabash cousins everybody who was involved in helping these extraordinary young people arrive at this moment i also want to apologize to the entire state of arizona for stealing away your wonderful former governor janet napolitano but you ve got a fine governor here and i also know that janet is applying her extraordinary talents to serve our entire country as the secretary of homeland security keeping america safe and she s doing a great job now before i begin i d just like to clear the air about that little controversy everybody was talking about a few weeks back i have to tell you i really thought this was much ado about nothing but i do think we all learned an important lesson i learned never again to pick another team over the sun devils in my ncaa bracket it won t happen again president crow and the board of regents will soon learn all about being audited by the irs now in all seriousness i come here not to dispute the suggestion that i haven t yet achieved enough in my life first of all michelle concurs with that assessment she has a long list of things that i have not yet done waiting for me when i get home but more than that i come to embrace the notion that i haven t done enough in my life i heartily concur i come to affirm that one s title even a title like president of the united states says very little about how well one s life has been led that no matter how much you ve done or how successful you ve been there s always more to do always more to learn and always more to achieve and i want to say to you today graduates class of 2009 that despite having achieved a remarkable milestone in your life despite the fact that you and your families are so rightfully proud you too cannot rest on your laurels not even some of those remarkable young people who were introduced earlier not even that young lady who s got four degrees yet today you can t rest your own body of work is also yet to come now some graduating classes have marched into this stadium in easy times times of peace and stability when we call on our graduates simply to keep things going and don t screw it up other classes have received their diplomas in times of trial and upheaval when the very foundations of our lives the old order has been shaken the old ideas and institutions have crumbled and a new generation is called upon to remake the world it should be clear to you by now the category into which all of you fall for we gather here tonight in times of extraordinary difficulty for the nation and for the world the economy remains in the midst of a historic recession the worst we ve seen since the great depression the result in part of greed and irresponsibility that rippled out from wall street and washington as we spent beyond our means and failed to make hard choices we re engaged in two wars and a struggle against terrorism the threats of climate change nuclear proliferation and pandemic defy national boundaries and easy solutions for many of you these challenges are also felt in more personal terms perhaps you re still looking for a job or struggling to figure out what career path makes sense in this disrupted economy maybe you ve got student loans no you definitely have student loans or credit card debts and you re wondering how you ll ever pay them off maybe you ve got a family to raise and you re wondering how you ll ensure that your children have the same opportunities you ve had to get an education and pursue their dreams now in the face of these challenges it may be tempting to fall back on the formulas for success that have been pedaled so frequently in recent years it goes something like this you re taught to chase after all the usual brass rings you try to be on this who s who list or that top 100 list you chase after the big money and you figure out how big your corner office is you worry about whether you have a fancy enough title or a fancy enough car that s the message that s sent each and every day or has been in our culture for far too long that through material possessions through a ruthless competition pursued only on your own behalf that s how you will measure success now you can take that road and it may work for some but at this critical juncture in our nation s history at this difficult time let me suggest that such an approach won t get you where you want to go it displays a poverty of ambition that in fact the elevation of appearance over substance of celebrity over character of short term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end now asu i want to highlight i want to highlight two main problems with that old tired me first approach first it distracts you from what s truly important and may lead you to compromise your values and your principles and commitments think about it it s in chasing titles and status in worrying about the next election rather than the national interest and the interests of those who you re supposed to represent that politicians so often lose their ways in washington they spend time thinking about polls but not about principle it was in pursuit of gaudy short term profits and the bonuses that came with them that so many folks lost their way on wall street engaging in extraordinary risks with other people s money in contrast the leaders we revere the businesses and institutions that last they are not generally the result of a narrow pursuit of popularity or personal advancement but of devotion to some bigger purpose the preservation of the union or the determination to lift a country out of a depression the creation of a quality product a commitment to your customers your workers your shareholders and your community a commitment to make sure that an institution like asu is inclusive and diverse and giving opportunity to all that s a hallmark of real success that other stuff that other stuff the trappings of success may be a byproduct of this larger mission but it can t be the central thing just ask bernie madoff that s the first problem with the old attitude but the second problem with the old approach to success is that a relentless focus on the outward markers of success can lead to complacency it can make you lazy we too often let the external the material things serve as indicators that we re doing well even though something inside us tells us that we re not doing our best that we re avoiding that which is hard but also necessary that we re shrinking from rather than rising to the challenges of the age and the thing is in this new hyper competitive age none of us none of us can afford to be complacent that s true in whatever profession you choose professors might earn the distinction of tenure but that doesn t guarantee that they ll keep putting in the long hours and late nights and have the passion and the drive to be great educators the same principle is true in your personal life being a parent is not just a matter of paying the bills doing the bare minimum it s not bringing a child into the world that matters but the acts of love and sacrifice it takes to raise and educate that child and give them opportunity it can happen to presidents as well if you think about it abraham lincoln and millard fillmore had the very same title they were both presidents of the united states but their tenure in office and their legacy could not be more different and that s not just true for individuals it s also true for this nation in recent years in many ways we ve become enamored with our own past success lulled into complacency by the glitter of our own achievements we ve become accustomed to the title of military super power forgetting the qualities that got us there not just the power of our weapons but the discipline and valor and the code of conduct of our men and women in uniform the marshall plan and the peace corps and all those initiatives that show our commitment to working with other nations to pursue the ideals of opportunity and equality and freedom that have made us who we are that s what made us a super power we ve become accustomed to our economic dominance in the world forgetting that it wasn t reckless deals and get rich quick schemes that got us where we are but hard work and smart ideas quality products and wise investments we started taking shortcuts we started living on credit instead of building up savings we saw businesses focus more on rebranding and repackaging than innovating and developing new ideas that improve our lives all the while the rest of the world has grown hungrier more restless in constant motion to build and to discover not content with where they are right now determined to strive for more they re coming so graduates it s now abundantly clear that we need to start doing things a little bit different in your own lives you ll need to continuously adapt to a continuously changing economy you ll end up having more than one job and more than one career over the course of your life to keep gaining new skills possibly even new degrees and you ll have to keep on taking risks as new opportunities arise and as a nation we ll need a fundamental change of perspective and attitude it s clear that we need to build a new foundation a stronger foundation for our economy and our prosperity rethinking how we grow our economy how we use energy how we educate our children how we care for our sick how we treat our environment many of our current challenges are unprecedented there are no standard remedies no go to fixes this time around and class of 2009 that s why we re going to need your help we need young people like you to step up we need your daring we need your enthusiasm and your energy we need your imagination and let me be clear when i say young i m not just referring to the date of your birth certificate i m talking about an approach to life a quality of mind and quality of heart a willingness to follow your passions regardless of whether they lead to fortune and fame a willingness to question conventional wisdom and rethink old dogmas a lack of regard for all the traditional markers of status and prestige and a commitment instead to doing what s meaningful to you what helps others what makes a difference in this world that s the spirit that led a band of patriots not much older than most of you to take on an empire to start this experiment in democracy we call america it s what drove young pioneers west to arizona and beyond it s what drove young women to reach for the ballot what inspired a 30 year old escaped slave to run an underground railroad to freedom what inspired a young man named cesar to go out and help farm workers what inspired a 26 year old preacher to lead a bus boycott for justice it s what led firefighters and police officers in the prime of their lives up the stairs of those burning towers and young people across this country to drop what they were doing and come to the aid of a flooded new orleans it s what led two guys in a garage named hewlett and packard to form a company that would change the way we live and work what led scientists in laboratories and novelists in coffee shops to labor in obscurity until they finally succeeded in changing the way we see the world that s the great american story young people just like you following their passions determined to meet the times on their own terms they weren t doing it for the money their titles weren t fancy ex slave minister student citizen a whole bunch of them didn t get honorary degrees but they changed the course of history and so can you asu so can you class of 2009 so can you with a degree from this outstanding institution you have everything you need to get started you ve got no excuses you have no excuses not to change the world did you study business go start a company or why not help our struggling non profits find better more effective ways to serve folks in need did you study nursing understaffed clinics and hospitals across this country are desperate for your help did you study education teach in a high need school where the kids really need you give a chance to kids who can t who can t get everything they need maybe in their neighborhood maybe not even in their home we can t afford to give up on prepare them to compete for any job anywhere in the world did you study engineering help us lead a green revolution developing new sources of clean energy that will power our economy and preserve our planet but you can also make your mark in smaller more individual ways that s what so many of you have already done during your time here at asu tutoring children registering voters doing your own small part to fight hunger and homelessness aids and cancer one student said it best when she spoke about her senior engineering project building medical devices for people with disabilities in a village in africa her professor showed a video of the folks they d been helping and she said when we saw the people on the videos we began to feel a connection to them it made us want to be successful for them think about that it made us want to be successful for them that s a great motto for all of us find somebody to be successful for raise their hopes rise to their needs as you think about life after graduation as you look into the mirror tonight after the partying is done that shouldn t get such a big cheer you may look in the mirror tonight and you may see somebody who s not really sure what to do with their lives that s what you may see but a troubled child might look at you and see a mentor a homebound senior citizen might see a lifeline the folks at your local homeless shelter might see a friend none of them care how much money is in your bank account or whether you re important at work or whether you re famous around town they just know that you re somebody who cares somebody who makes a difference in their lives so class of 2009 that s what building a body of work is all about it s about the daily labor the many individual acts the choices large and small that add up over time over a lifetime to a lasting legacy that s what you want on your tombstone it s about not being satisfied with the latest achievement the latest gold star because the one thing i know about a body of work is that it s never finished it s cumulative it deepens and expands with each day that you give your best each day that you give back and contribute to the life of your community and your nation you may have setbacks and you may have failures but you re not done you re not even getting started not by a long shot and if you ever forget that just look to history thomas paine was a failed corset maker a failed teacher and a failed tax collector before he made his mark on history with a little book called common sense that helped ignite a revolution julia child didn t publish her first cookbook until she was almost 50 colonel sanders didn t open up his first kentucky fried chicken until he was in his 60s winston churchill was dismissed as little more than a has been who enjoyed scotch a little bit too much before he took over as prime minister and saw great britain through its finest hour no one thought a former football player stocking shelves at the local supermarket would return to the game he loved become a super bowl mvp and then come here to arizona and lead your cardinals to their first super bowl your body of work is never done each of them at one point in their life didn t have any title or much status to speak of but they had passion a commitment to following that passion wherever it would lead and to working hard every step along the way and that s not just how you ll ensure that your own life is well lived it s how you ll make a difference in the life of our nation i talked earlier about the selfishness and irresponsibility on wall street and washington that rippled out and led to so many of the problems that we face today i talked about the focus on outward markers of success that can help lead us astray but here s the thing class of 2009 it works the other way around too acts of sacrifice and decency without regard to what s in it for you that also creates ripple effects ones that lift up families and communities that spread opportunity and boost our economy that reach folks in the forgotten corners of the world who in committed young people like you see the true face of america our strength our goodness our diversity our enduring power our ideals i know starting your careers in troubled times is a challenge but it is also a privilege because it s moments like these that force us to try harder to dig deeper and to discover gifts we never knew we had to find the greatness that lies within each of us so don t ever shy away from that endeavor don t stop adding to your body of work i can promise that you will be the better for that continued effort as will this nation that we all love congratulations class of 2009 on your graduation god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama14 5 09b barack_obama thank you so much what a wonderful welcome it s good to be back in new mexico it s always nice to get out of washington for a while and come to places like rio rancho the climate is nice the conversation is nice people are nice it is just wonderful to be here we ve got a few special guests that i want to acknowledge here first of all a great friend one of the finest governors in the country please give it up for bill richardson lieutenant governor diane denish secretary of state mary herrera state treasurer james lewis state auditor hector balderas we ve also got joe garcia president of the national congress of american indians got rio rancho mayor tom swisstack we ve got some members of congress who couldn t be here today but i just want to acknowledge them because they re doing a great job senator tom udall senator jeff bingaman and representative ben lujn and i want to thank chris for the wonderful introduction and for her wonderful family who are here please give her a big round of applause now the last time i came here was 10 days before the election we were over at the university of new mexico tens of thousands of you showed up it was a gorgeous night stars were out and i told you then that if we wanted to steer ourselves out of our economic crisis if we wanted to bring about the change we needed then i needed your help i needed you to show up one more time and new mexico you delivered i love you back you delivered because you believed that after an era of selfishness and greed we could reclaim a sense of responsibility from wall street to washington to main street you believed that in a time of great inequality we could restore a sense of fairness to our economy you believed that rather than go back to the pursuit of short term profits and a bubble and bust economy that led us to this point we could build an economy based on sound ideas and solid investments hard work in order to secure a long term prosperity so new mexico i ve come back today to tell you that s exactly what we ve begun to do since the very first day that i took office we have acted boldly and swiftly across all fronts to clear away the wreckage of this painful recession and to start laying a new foundation for prosperity we passed the most ambitious economic recovery plan in our nation s history to jumpstart job creation and get our economy moving again a plan that has kept teachers in the classroom and class sizes from increasing a plan that will save or create 22 000 jobs just in new mexico mostly in the private sector a plan that made good on the middle class tax cut that we promised a tax cut that s already begun to appear in paychecks for 700 000 working families across new mexico we made historic investments in the kind of clean energy that s led to an influx of cutting edge companies creating new jobs and new opportunities right here in this state we ve made productive strides towards fixing the health care crisis that i know has hit especially hard here strides towards reform that brings down costs that give americans the freedom to keep their doctor or plan that they already have and choose a new doctor and a new plan if they want to that finally gives every american access to quality affordable health care and already we ve got millions of children across the country that have health care right now under the children s health care bill that we signed since i ve taken office so i believe we re moving in the right direction step by step we re making progress now we ve got a long way to go before we can put this recession behind us and new mexico is doing better than many states but it s tough out there but we do know that the gears of our economy the economic engine are slowly beginning to turn in the meantime though i know that there are so many americans who are hurting right now you got hundreds of thousands who ve lost their jobs just last month millions are working jobs that don t pay enough to cover the bills millions more see increasing portions of their income going towards paying down debt they re americans struggling to cope with the rising cost of putting things like their mortgage their tuition their medical bills even their food and gas bills on their credit cards because they feel like they re going underwater but they re quickly finding out that they can t dig their way out of debt because of unfair practices and that s what i want to talk about today briefly we re talking about folks like chris lardner she and her husband work hard they re doing well they have a wonderful small business but she wrote to me last week and you just heard her story her husband s business is in albuquerque two of their children are in college when one tuition payment that was mistakenly charged to a credit card put her over the limit her credit card company more than tripled her rate to nearly 30 percent and she made a simple point in the letter that she wrote to me she said if we conducted business this way we d have no business she wrote and if this is happening to us i can only imagine what s going on in homes less fortunate than ours you all know what chris is talking about i know i remember it hasn t been that long since i had my credit card sometimes working that a little bit we re lured in by ads and mailings that hook us with the promise of low rates while keeping the right to raise those rates at any time for any reason even on old purchases even when you make a late payment on a different card right now credit card companies charge more than 15 billion a year in penalty fees one in five americans carry a balance that has been charged interest rates above 20 percent sometimes they even raise rates on outstanding balances even when you ve paid your bills on time now i understand that many americans are defaulting on their debt and that s why these companies claim the need to raise rates one of the causes of this economic crisis was that too many people were living beyond their means with mortgages they couldn t afford buying things they couldn t pay for maxing out on credit cards that they couldn t pay down and in the last decade americans credit card debt has increased by 25 percent nearly half of all americans carry a balance on their cards and those who do have an average balance over 7 000 so we have been complicit in these problems we ve contributed to our own problems we ve got to change how we operate but these practices they ve only grown worse in the midst of this recession when hardworking americans can afford them least now fees silently appear payment deadlines suddenly move millions of cardholders have seen their interest rates jump in the past six months you should not have to worry that when you sign up for a credit card you re signing away all your rights you shouldn t need a magnifying glass or a law degree to read the fine print that sometimes don t even appear to be written in english or spanish and frankly when you re trying to navigate your way through this economy you shouldn t feel like you re getting ripped off by any time any reason rate hikes and payment deadlines that seem to move around every month that happen to anybody you think you re supposed to pay it this day and suddenly and it s never on the end of the month where you re paying all the rest of your bills right it s like on the 19th all kinds of harsh penalties and fees that you never knew about enough is enough it s time for strong reliable protections for our consumers it s time for reform it s time for reform that s built on transparency and accountability and mutual responsibility values fundamental to the new foundation we seek to build for our economy now this is not an issue i just discovered recently for years i ve been a proponent of strengthening consumer protections when it came to credit cards as a senator i fought predatory lending and credit card abuse and i called for what i called a credit card bill of rights last month i met with the leaders of the major credit card companies to discuss these and other reforms that i believe will better protect the nearly 80 percent of american households that use credit cards and we didn t agree on anything everything as you might expect that was a slip of the tongue here we didn t agree on everything but we did agree that any reforms we can shouldn t diminish consumers access to credit i also think there s no doubt that people need to accept as i said before responsibility that comes with holding a credit card this is not free money it s debt and you shouldn t take on more than you can handle we expect consumers to make sound choices and live within their means and pay what they owe in a timely manner banks are a business too and so they have a right to insist that timely payments are made but what we also expect is that our institutions act with the same sense of responsibility that the american people aspire to in their own lives we expect that when we enter into an agreement that agreement is reasonable and transparent we expect to pay what s fair not just what fattens growing profits for some credit card company this is america and we don t begrudge a company s success when that success is based on honest dealings with consumers but some of these dealings are not honest that s why we need reform we need reform that restores some sense of balance we need a new equilibrium where credit is flowing where lenders can succeed where consumers don t find themselves in a bad situation that they didn t anticipate this kind of reform is especially needed during this economic crisis and as i ve said all along it should adhere to four basic principles first there has to be strong reliable protections for consumers protections that ban unfair rate increases and forbid abusive fees and penalties the days of any time any reason anything goes rate hikes and late fees that must end that must end second all forms and statements that credit card companies send out have to be in plain language in plain sight no more fine print no more confusing terms no more hiding the truth we re going to require clarity and transparency from now on third we have to give people the tools to shop for a credit card that meets their needs without being afraid of being taken advantage of so we re going to require firms to make all their contract terms easily accessible and we re going to give consumers the information they need to do some comparison shopping and we ll require firms to offer at least one simple straightforward card that offers the strongest protections along with the plainest terms and prices and finally finally we need more accountability instead of abuse that goes unpunished we need to strengthen monitoring and enforcement and penalties for those who engage in deceptive practices that take advantage of families and consumers and we also need to clean up practices at universities to protect students from getting stuck in debt before they even get started in life that s important now the federal reserve has already issued some new rules that would change some of these practices and i m grateful to them for doing so but i m also pleased that congress has begun to act two weeks ago the house passed credit card reform legislation that follows these principles by a wide bipartisan majority and i thank them for that and new mexico you should be proud that you ve elected people as i said before ben ray lujn martin heinrich harry teague who stood up for you by voting for that bill even as we speak the senate is debating its version of the bill and i know your senators jeff bingaman and tom udall stand on your side too so i m calling on congress to take final action to pass a credit card reform bill that protects american consumers and send it to my desk so that i can sign it into law by memorial day there s no time for delay it s time to get it done there s no time for delay we need durable and successful flows of credit in our economy but we can t tolerate profits that depend on misleading working families those days are over because more than anything this economic crisis has reminded us we re all in this together we can t prosper by putting off hard choices or by protecting the profits of the few at the expense of the middle class we re making steady progress moving from recession to recovery but we want lasting prosperity and that means that we have to ensure that the legacy of this moment is an american economy that rewards work and innovation that s guided by fairness and responsibility and that grows steadily into the future so new mexico i know there will be setbacks i know that this is going to take some time some of you are going to continue to struggle for a while we re doing everything we can but here s what i also know if you re willing to do your part if our companies are willing to do their part if those of us in washington are willing to do our part if we all work together then i promise you this years from now you will be able to look back at this moment as the time when the american people once again came together to reclaim their future and bring about a new and brighter day thank you everybody thank you so i didn t come here i didn t come here just to make a speech whenever we visit a community we want to do a little bit of a town hall give people a chance to ask questions obviously we ve got a lot of people and i won t get through every question but i m going to try to get through as many as possible and we re going to go boy girl boy girl or girl boy girl boy and i m going to go around the room if you can raise your hands when you have the question and there are people with microphones in the audience so wait until you get the microphone everybody can hear your question that way and introduce yourself so we know who you are and i ll start with this young lady over here yes well as you know i campaigned vigorously on health care reform and i think that we have a better chance of getting it done this year than we ve had in decades i am optimistic about us getting health care reform done now health care is one sixth of our economy so it is a complicated difficult task and congress is going to have to work hard and everybody is going to have to come at this with a practical perspective as opposed to trying to be ideologically pure in getting it done here are my principles in terms of health care number one we ve got to control costs across the system because if we simply insured everybody under the current system we couldn t afford it we d go broke the fact of the matter is is that families are seeing their premiums go up skyrocket each and every year businesses are getting crushed by the rising costs of their employees health care and the federal government medicare and medicaid is going broke that s the single biggest driver by the way of our deficits i want everybody to be clear about this because driving in i saw some folks who were saying what are you going to do about debt et cetera listen by far the biggest contributor to our national debt and our annual deficit is the costs of medicare and medicaid as well as the other entitlement social security defense and interest on the national debt that s the lion s share of the federal budget the things you read about in the newspapers and you see on tv about earmarks i want to get rid of earmarks but the truth of the matter they re only 1 percent of the entire budget most of what s driving us into debt is health care and so we ve got to drive down costs now here is some good news there are ways that we can drive down costs because we just have an inefficient system if we emphasize prevention and wellness programs if we help if we so that we re reimbursing doctors and providers not just for treating people after they get sick but for helping people stay well if we use medical technology to reduce error rates and ensure electronic medical billing so when you go to the hospital you don t have 15 20 forms that you have to fill out over and over and over again there are simple things that we can do that will save us money so we need to focus on cost that s number one number two i think that it is very important that we provide coverage for all people because if everybody s got coverage then they re not going to the emergency room for treatment and right now if you ve got health insurance the average family is paying about 900 a year in additional hidden costs because you re subsidizing the folks who are going to the emergency room and so you d be better off with a system that might cost the federal government overall a little bit more and we do have to pay for that but that would lower your premiums so that you don t have these hidden costs because it s cheaper to treat a child for asthma with an inhaler than it is to have them go to the emergency room and take up a hospital bed so that s the second principle now this brings to the last principle and so this touches on your point and that is why not do a single payer system got the little single payer advocates up here all right for those of you who don t know a single payer system is like medicare is sort of a single payer system but it s only for people over 65 and the way it works is the idea is that you don t have insurance companies as middlemen the government goes directly and pays doctors or nurses if i were starting a system from scratch then i think that the idea of moving towards a single payer system could very well make sense that s the kind of system that you have in most industrialized countries around the world the only problem is that we re not starting from scratch we have historically a tradition of employer based health care and although there are a lot of people who are not satisfied with their health care the truth is is that the vast majority of people currently get health care from their employers and you ve got this system that s already in place we don t want a huge disruption as we go into health care reform where suddenly we re trying to completely reinvent one sixth of the economy so what i ve said is let s set up a system where if you already have health care through your employer and you re happy with it you don t have to change doctors you don t have to change plans nothing changes if you don t have health care or you re highly unsatisfied with your health care then let s give you choices let s give you options including a public plan that you could enroll in and sign up for that s been my proposal now obviously as president i ve got to work with congress to get this done and there are folks in congress who are doing terrific work they re working hard they ve been having a series of hearings i m confident that both the house and the senate are going to produce a bill before the august recess and it may not have everything i want in there or everything you want in there but it will be a vast improvement over what we currently have we ll then have to reconcile the two bills but i m confident that we are going to get health care reform this year and start putting us on a path that s sustainable over the long term that s a commitment i made during the campaign i intend to keep it all right we ve got it s a man s turn this guy right here this guy right here big guy yes right here okay let me talk about the employee free choice act one of the things that i believe in and if you look at our history i think it bears this out even if you re not a member of a union you owe something to unions because because a lot of the things that you take for granted as an employee of a company the idea of overtime and minimum wage and benefits a whole host of things that you even if you re not a member of a union now take for granted that happened because unions fought and helped to make employers more accountable the problem that we ve seen is that union membership has declined significantly over the last 30 years and so the question is why is that now part of it the economy has changed and the culture has changed and there hasn t been a very friendly politics in washington when it comes to union membership but part of it just has to do with the fact that the scales have been tilted to make it really hard to form a union so a lot of companies because they want maximum flexibility they would rather spend a lot of money on consultants and lawyers to prevent a union from forming than they would just going ahead and having the union and then trying to work with and collectively allow workers to collectively bargain so there s a bill called the employee free choice act that would try to even out the playing field and what it would essentially say is is that if a majority of workers at a company want a union then they can get a union without delay and some of the monkey business that s done right now to prevent them from having a union now i want to give the other side of the argument businesses object to some of the provisions in the employee free choice act because one of the things that s in there is something called card check where rather than have a secret ballot and organize a big election you could simply have enough employees a majority of employees check a card and that would then form the union and the employers argue we need to have a secret ballot i think that there may be areas of compromise to get this bill done i m supportive of it but there aren t enough votes right now in the senate to get it passed and what i think we have to do is to find ways in which the core idea of the employee free choice act is preserved which is how do we make it easier for people who want to form a union to at least get a vote and have a even playing field how do we do that but at the same time get enough votes to pass the bill that s what we re working on right now i think it s going to have a chance of passage but there s still more work to be done all right it s a young lady s turn this young lady right there you yes i m sorry can you repeat i missed just part of it no not the whole thing you re a small business owner you were saying that you ve seen something happen to your revenues but i couldn t hear you a decrease well look this is part of why we passed the recovery act we passed a package of 787 billion over two years this is the largest economic recovery package ever been passed and it includes tax cuts so everybody should be seeing a slight increase in your paycheck it s not in a lump sum it s spread out each paycheck you re getting a little bit money back that you weren t getting before so that s putting money in people s pockets we are rebuilding our infrastructure all across the country so governor richardson i know he s put in a whole bunch of proposals to rebuild roads and bridges and infrastructure the mayor of albuquerque is here i know that he s working on it the nice thing about infrastructure projects it s a two fer not only does it put to work people to work right now especially a lot of folks who have been laid off from the construction industry which has been weakened but what it s also done is it creates the framework for long term economic growth because if we ve got better mass transit if we ve got high speed rail if we are rebuilding our electricity grid to get clean energy from the places that produce it to the places that need it all that will generate economic growth above and beyond the short term so that s another element of it part of what we ve done in the recovery act is just make sure that the economic damage is not worse so we ve provided states additional resources to retain teachers and retain police officers and to make sure that if you do lose your job you can keep your health care through cobra which prior to this bill was really hard for most folks to afford because you had to pay the full cost of your health care without employer subsidy but now the government has picked up the subsidy and that allows a lot more people to keep health care so we ve been doing a lot of things through the recovery act the other thing we re trying to do is to stabilize the housing market and so we have programs now in place that have helped boost refinancings making millions of people who weren t eligible to get their homes refinanced refinanced at lower rates that s like a tax cut that s like money in people s pockets because your monthly rate will be lower and if you have not recently refinanced you should take a look at what banks are now offering because interest rates have gone down significantly and the programs that we ve put in place have helped to spur on some of those refinancings we re also trying to stop the rate of foreclosure now this is hard to do because housing prices have gone down so far that some people they re just unfortunately not going to be able to stay in their home they bought too much home given their incomes but people who are at the margins what we ve done is we ve said to the banks negotiate the banks will be better off and the consumer will be better off if you avoid foreclosure and everybody takes a haircut the bank has to lose a little bit of money on what they were expecting on principal and interest on the other hand the homeowner if they make this agreement with the bank they ve got to agree that when prices start going up again they give up a little bit of equity to repay the bank but either way everybody is better off including the community if people stay in their homes so there are a whole bunch of steps that we ve been taking and we re starting to see improvements in the housing market we re starting to see slight improvements in some of these other areas but i have to tell you this was a big big big economic problem that we had this is like nothing that we ve seen since the great depression and as i said new mexico has been fortunate partly because of some good administration from the new mexican government but also because new mexico wasn t overbuilt at the same pace it did not have some of the same problems as some other states but for the country as a whole we took a big hit wall street just was gambling with a lot of people s money and they were taking risks they should have never taken so we ve seen trillions of dollars of wealth removed and it s going to take some time to catch up and a lot of people are still paying off their credit cards and a lot of people are trying to get out from under the debts that they had accumulated when times were better and so we re going to have to set what i m calling a new foundation for growth where people are less reliant on debt they re living more within their means businesses are engaging in more sensible business practices they re investing in the future and the long term and not short term profits we are focusing on clean energy we re reforming our health care system we are boosting our education system to produce more engineers and more scientists and retraining our workers so that we ve got the most productive workers in the world that s the strategy that we re going to be pursuing in the months and years to come all right it must be it s a guy s turn it s a guy s turn let me go up here because i don t want to feel i don t want folks up here feeling neglected that gentleman way up there right in the corner way up there look at that guy he s all standing right in front of him well first of all first of all i think it s very important to understand that since i came into office i have said to my republican friends in congress i want to work with you i ve had them over to the white house more than they were over in the white house during the bush administration that s true we have consulted with them extensively now there have been on two big issues some very fundamental disagreements with the republican party and i don t doubt their sincerity they just have a different view one is on the stimulus package on the recovery act there were people who said we should not have government spend that much especially when we re inheriting a 1 3 trillion deficit from the previous administration and we ve already spent money on the tarp program and shoring up the banks et cetera we shouldn t do this there are some people who made that argument now i will tell you that every serious democratic and republican conservative and liberal economist that i spoke to believe very strongly that we needed a recovery package because what was happening was consumers they had pulled back people weren t shopping as much because they were worried about the state of the economy and their debts had gotten too high businesses were pulling back and so what you had was a crisis in demand where if everybody pulls back at the same time nobody is going shopping if nobody is going shopping then this young lady with her store she doesn t have money she may have to lay off a worker which means that worker is now spending less which means they re not buying groceries and now somebody else s store shuts down you start getting into a vicious cycle where everybody is pulling back all at the same time in that circumstance the only person or the only entity that can fill the gap is the government and so that s why we passed the recovery act it s not because we re not worried about deficits it s because if we didn t do anything this economy could have really gone into a tailspin but i make that point only to say there s some republicans who just philosophically were opposed to the idea of this recovery package i have to say they weren t as worried when the previous administration was running up and doubling our national debt but but having said that having said that it s entirely legitimate for that s part of what our democracy is about to disagree with us on this they also disagreed on our budget because they don t believe that we should for example reform our health care system in a way that includes more people they think that the free market can solve the problem now i m a strong believer in the free market but i think that when it comes to health care the free market only takes you so far if your child is sick and you don t have health insurance in a country this wealthy we should be able to make sure that your child is cared for and i actually think i actually think that long term we ll spend less money when we do that because other countries like france and japan and a whole host of other countries they spend less a percentage of their gdp on health care than we do we spend more per capita than any nation on earth but we still have 45 million uninsured and in some cases we ve got worse outcomes we ve got higher infant mortality rates we ve got higher rates of some deadly diseases that doesn t make sense but again there s a philosophical difference having said all that this credit card bill when it passed in the house we actually got 100 republican votes on our children s health insurance bill we got some republican votes so the media likes to focus on where we disagree they don t dem bobama14 5 10 barack_obama good morning everybody please have a seat well it is wonderful to see all of you to tom to attorney general holder and to the outstanding officers standing behind me as well as their families welcome to the rose garden it is my privilege to welcome the top cops back to the white house men and women who stand as shining examples of the bravery persistence and good judgment that so many members of our law enforcement community display each and every day i think that eric holder has done an outstanding job at justice department but part of the reason he s here is because one of his key jobs is supporting local law enforcement and he truly appreciates the extraordinary service that local law enforcement does each and every day we also have a couple members of congress here who i want to recognize representative tim ryan and senator max baucus who have been extremely supportive of local law enforcement efforts to tommy nee and the other officers and board members from the national association of police organizations thank you for coming and thanks for the great work that you do every day and finally i want to congratulate this year s top cops and their families i think it s fair to say that the folks behind me never imagined they would be here today if you asked them these officers would say they were just professionals doing their jobs as best they could and they ll tell you that there are thousands of law enforcement officers in every corner of this nation who are just as brave just as dedicated and just as capable as they are and who would do the same thing if given the opportunity and that s all true but that s exactly what makes these officers and all of our men and women in uniform real heroes it s the ability to put on a badge and go to work knowing that danger could be waiting right around the corner it s the understanding that the next call could be the one that changes everything and it s the knowledge that at any moment they could be called upon to stop a robbery to participate in a high speed chase or to save a life some people haven t faced their moment yet but whether it s by chance or by the hand of fate these officers were tested and when the moment came they did what they were trained to do the men and women here today have jumped into cars to rescue victims held at knifepoint they ve pulled trapped children from a burning car seconds before it was engulfed in flames they ve leapt in front of hijacked buses faced armed suspects led six hour manhunts through the dark and saved countless lives by risking their own and in the moments when these officers were under fire or choking on smoke they weren t thinking about themselves they weren t thinking about the medals or commendations i m pretty sure they weren t thinking about being honored at the white house instead they were focused on their partners on the face of the child who was in harm s way on the victim and the innocent bystander who desperately needed their help and that s why we honor them because while these officers may think of themselves as ordinary as just another sheriff or trooper or patrolman doing their job their actions were extraordinary and for that we owe them our undying gratitude but honoring top cops means doing more than just saying thank you it means supporting our entire law enforcement community so that no matter what the challenges we face in the months and years ahead our men and women in uniform will be prepared to answer the call and that s why from the very beginning my administration has been dedicated to giving state and local law enforcement the resources they need to get the job done so far 3 5 billion of the recovery act has gone to support local law enforcement 1 billion for the cops program alone that money has helped to create or preserve almost 4 700 law enforcement jobs for three years and made progress towards our goal of putting 50 000 new police officers on the street next year s budget would more than double the previous request for the cops program and at a time when our nation is emerging from the worst economic recession in generations we ll maintain strong funding for justice assistance grants known as the byrne jag grants and bulletproof vests to keep our communities and our men and women in uniform safe we ll make sure you continue to have the resources and support that you need because we ve seen the results of that work in the first half of 2009 crime fell to the lowest level since the 1960s homicides dropped by 10 percent car thefts were down nearly 20 percent and property crimes declined by over 6 percent much of this is due to the men and women and their counterparts all across the country that are doing outstanding work but it s also a reflection of the role that ordinary americans are playing taking back their neighborhoods from violent gangs and open air drug markets educating their children being vigilant of course the most recent example and most visible example of this partnership between citizens and police happened two weeks ago in times square alerted by two street vendors that smoke was coming out of a suspicious vehicle nypd officer wayne rhatigan immediately realized the potential danger and along with other officers on the scene helped clear the area quickly and safely the nypd s elite bomb squad unit then spent over five hours defusing the device and just two days after the attempted terrorist attack thanks to the outstanding work of local state and federal officials a suspect was in custody and yesterday i had the privilege of visiting the nypd real time crime center and meeting officer rhatigan and other officers whose quick thinking and cooperation may have saved hundreds of lives like the folks behind me they succeeded because they were well trained they were vigilant and they were ready being a hero isn t always easy as officer ryan jacobsen who is being honored here today said of his own experience it s one of those things in your life you can never prepare for fully and that you hope never happens again so we are incredibly proud of the courage that all of you have shown in the conditions that we can only imagine it s a distinction that none of you asked for but all of you accepted and i promise that we will stand by you and everyone who wears the badge as you continue to keep us safe so thank you all tom thanks for the outstanding work dem bobama14 6 06 barack_obama thank you thank you thank you ah thank you so much thank you all right thank you guys appreciate you thank you thank you so much thank you thank you i think we re taking back america here thank you so much bob for that generous introduction i want him to send that to my wife so that she knows these things she would dispute a few of the facts that were offered roger hickey congratulations for the great work that you ve done we all appreciate you and thank you for all the attendees you know bob was back there he was bragging about all of you he was saying we ve got young people it s a diverse crowd it s a sophisticated crowd it s a hardworking crowd it s ready to go and i can just i m amazed that all of you all have stuck around after listening to that many politicians over the last several days so i m grateful to all of you for not just the work that you ve been doing here at this conference but the work that each and every one of you do back home on a day today basis because it s easy to attend conferences and it s easy to listen to speeches it s even easy to give speeches it s not so easy sometimes to do the hard work in the fields making sure that people have the kind of opportunities that they deserve and making sure that everybody in america has got a decent shot in life we meet at a time where we find ourselves at a crossroads in american history it s a time where you can go into any town hall or veterans hall or coffee shop or street corner and you ll hear people express the same anxiety about the future you ll hear them convey the same uncertainty about the direction that we re headed as a country whether it s the war or katrina or health care or outsourcing you ll hear people say that now surely we ve come to a moment where things have to change and there are americans who still believe in an america where anything s possible they re just not sure that their leaders still do they still believe in dreaming big dreams but they suspect maybe that their leaders have forgotten how i remember when i first ran for the state senate this was my very first race back in chicago and all right chicago and i m not one of these folks who had been thinking all my life about running for office but after working as a community organizer and as a civil rights attorney and as a law professor the seat for the state senate where i lived opened up and some people asked me if i would be interested in potentially running for office and i did what every wise man does in such circumstances i prayed on it and i asked my wife and after consulting those two higher powers i went you know my wife huh she s cheering so then i did what ever first time candidate does which is basically talk to anybody who will listen to you and i went to barbershops and beauty shops and pta meetings and bake sales and if there were two guys standing on a corner i d start handing them out literature and everywhere i went i would get the same two questions first question where did you get this funny name barack obama although no one would pronounce it right so they would call me alabama or your mama and i would have to explain no it s obama my father is from kenya and my mother was from kansas the second question though bears on today because people would say you seem like a nice young man they would look over my literature they would say you have a fancy law degree you teach at a fine law school you ve done fine work you ve got a beautiful family why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics why would you want to go into politics and the question is understandable and it bears on today because even those of us who are involved even those of us who are active in the political process and in civic life there are times where all of us feel discouraged sometimes where we get cynical about the prospects for politics because it seems as if sometimes that politics is treated as a business and not a mission and that power is always trumping principle and that we have leaders that are sometimes long on rhetoric but short on substance and so we get discouraged and every two years or fours years maybe we do our bit and we knock on doors or pass our literature or we go into the polling place and hold our noses and vote for the lesser of two evils but we don t feel in our gut sometimes that politics and government is going to improve our lives at most we hope it does us no harm and i am not immune to those feelings but you know when i get in that funk i think about a person i met the day before i was elected to the united states senate so fast forward i am now the democratic nominee for the united states senate it s the day before the election we have a big rally on the southside of chicago about 2 000 people and we re feeling in a pretty good mood because i m running against alan keyes and so we re feeling confident at this point and i m standing off stage like i was earlier and my staff comes up to me and says senator before you go up there s this woman who wants to meet you and she s driven a long way and she s a big supporter and she just wants to take a picture with you and shake your hand and i say well that s not a problem and so i go offstage to a back room and i meet this woman she explains that she has supported me since i announced for my race she shakes my hand we take a picture she tells me that s she s proud of me and she had already cast her ballot at that point absentee and she was really appreciative of the work that i was doing and wished me godspeed and none of this would have been exceptional except for the fact that this woman named marguerite lewis had been born in louisiana in 1899 and was 105 years old and so ever since i met this frail 105 year old african american woman who found the strength to leave her house and come to a rally because she believed that her voice mattered i ve thought about all that she s seen in her life i thought about the fact that she was born at a time when there were no cars on the road and there were no airplanes in the sky born in the wake of slavery in the shadow of jim crow a time when it was far more frequent for african americans to be lynched than to vote i thought about how she lived through a world war and a great depression and another world war and then she saw her brothers her uncles her cousins coming back from that second war and still have to sit at the back of the bus and i thought about how she finally saw women win the right to vote and how she watched fdr lift millions out of fear and send millions to college on the gi bill and bring folks out of poverty and how she saw unions rise up and give them a foothold into the middle class and she saw millions of immigrants travel from distant shores in search of this idea that we call america and she believed in this idea of america despite the cards that she had been dealt she believed in this notion of a more perfect union and when she saw in the distance breaking out the civil rights movement over the horizon she thought well maybe it s my turn now and she saw women who were willing to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing someone else s laundry or looking after somebody else s children because they were walking for their freedom and she saw people of every race and creed young people get on buses and travel down to mississippi and alabama to register voters and she saw four little girls die needlessly in sunday school and saw how it catalyzed a nation and at last she saw the passage of the civil rights act and the voting rights act and she saw people lining up to vote for the first time and she got in that line and she never forgot it and she kept on voting in each and every election because she believed she had seen enough over the span of three centuries to know that there s no challenge that is too great or no injustice too crippling or no destiny that is too far out of reach for america when it puts its mind to it she believed that we don t have to settle for equality for some or opportunity for the lucky or freedom for the few and she knew that during these moments in history there have always been people who have been willing to settle for less but they ve been counteracted by people who ve said no we re going to keep on dreaming and we re going to keep on building and we re going to keep on marching and we re going to keep on working because that s who we are because we ve always fought to bring more and more people under the blanket of the american dream and i think we face one of those moments today in a century that is just six years old our faith has been shaken by war and terror and disaster and despair and threats to the middle class dream and scandal and corruption in our government the sweeping changes brought by revolutions and technology have torn down the walls between business and government and people and places all over the globe and with this new world comes new risks and new dangers the days are over where we can assume that a high school education is enough to compete with for a job that could just as easily go to a college educated student in beijing or bangalore no more can we count on employers to provide health care and pensions and job training when their bottom lines know no borders we can t expect oceans that surround america to keep us safe from attacks from our own soil but while the world has changed around us unfortunately it seems like our government has stood still our faith has been shaken but the people running washington haven t been willing to make us believe again now it s the timidity it s the smallness of our politics that s holding us back right now the idea that there are some problems that are just too big to handle and if you just ignore them that sooner or later they ll go away so that if you talk about the statistics on the stock market being up or orders for durable goods being on the rise that nobody s going to notice the single mom who s working two jobs and still doesn t have enough money at the end of the month to pay the bills that if you say plan for victory often enough and have it pasted and the words behind you when you make a speech that nobody s going to notice the bombings in baghdad or the 2 500 flag draped coffins that have arrived at dover air force base the fact is we notice we care and we re not going to settle for less anymore you probably never thought that you probably never thought i would say this at a take back america conference but i m going to quote newt gingrich newt was talking the other day about what an awful job his own party had done governing this county and he said that with all the mistakes and misjudgments the republicans have made over the last six years democrats should just have a two word slogan going into the next election had enough and i don t know about you but i think old newt is on to something there because i think we ve all had enough enough of broken promises enough of the failed leadership enough of the can t do won t do won t even try style of government four years after 9 11 i ve had enough of being told that the best we can do on economic policy is to provide paris hilton another tax break at time when we can t protect our borders and we can t protect our railroads or our chemical plants or our ports i ve had enough of closed door deals that give billions to hmos when we re told we can t do anything about 46 million people who are uninsured and all the folks who are paying for the medial bills i ve had enough of that i have had enough of being told we can t buy body armor for our troops we can t afford health care for our veterans we can t deal with those who have been wounded and maimed in this country i ve had enough of that i have had enough of giving billions away to oil companies when we re told we can t invest in renewable energy that will create jobs and lower gas prices and finally free us from dependence of foreign oil i ve had enough of that i ve had enough of children attending schools where rats outnumber computers i ve had enough of that i ve had enough i have had enough of katrina survivors who are still living out of their cars and begging fema for trailers i ve had enough i ve had enough of being told that all we can do about this is sit and wait and hope that some good fortune trickles down on everybody else in this country we all remember george bush back in 2000 he said he didn t believe in national building we didn t know he meant this nation didn t know that now let me say this i don t think that i think george bush loves this country i really do i don t think his administration is full of stupid people the problem is not that the philosophy of this administration is not working the way it s supposed to work the problem is that it is working the way it s supposed to work they don t believe they don t believe that government has a role in solving national problems because they think government is the problem they think that we re better off if we just dismantle government if in the form of tax breaks we make sure that everybody s responsible for buying your own health care and your own retirement security and your own child care and your own schools your own private security forces your own roads your own levees it is called the ownership society in washington but you know historically there has been another term for it it s called social darwinism the notion that every man or woman is out for him or her self which allows us to say that if we meet a guy who has worked in a steel plant for 30 40 years and suddenly has the rug pulled out from under him and can t afford health care or can t afford a pension you know life isn t fair it allows us to say to a child who doesn t have the wisdom to choose his or her own parents and so lives in a poor neighborhood pick yourself up by your own bootstraps it allows us to say to somebody who is seeing their child sick and is going bankrupt paying the bills tough luck it s a bracing idea this idea that you re on your own it s the simplest thing in the world easy to put on a bumper sticker but there s just one problem it doesn t work it ignores our history now yes our greatness as a nation has depended on self reliance and individual initiative and a belief in the free market but it s also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other our sense that we have a stake in each other s success that everybody should have a shot at opportunity americans understand this they know the government can t solve all their problems but they expect the government can help because they know it s an expression of what they re learning in sunday school what they learn in their church in their synagogue in their mosque a basic moral precept that says that i have to look out for you and i have responsibility for you and you have responsibility for me that i am your keeper and you are mine that s what america is and so i am eager to have this argument with the republican party about the core philosophy of america about what our story is we shouldn t shy away from that debate the time for our identity crisis as progressives is over don t let anybody tell you that we don t know what we stand for don t doubt yourselves we know who we are and in the end we know that it s not enough just to say that we ve had enough we ve got a story to tell that isn t just against something but is for something we know that we re the party of opportunity we know that in a global economy that s more connective and more competitive that we re the party that will guarantee every american an affordable world class life long top notch education from early childhood to high school from college to on the job training we know that that s what we re about we know we re the party we know that as progressives we believe in affordable health care for all americans and that we re going to make sure that americans don t have to choose between a health care plan that bankrupts the government and one that bankrupts families the party that won t just throw a few tax breaks at families who can t afford their insurance but will modernize our health care system and give every family a chance to buy insurance at a price they can afford progressives are the folks who believe in energy independence for america that we re not bought and paid for by the oil companies in this country we believe that we can harness homegrown alternative fuels and spur the production of fuel efficient hybrid cars and break our dependence on the world s most dangerous regions we understand that we get a three for we can save our economy our environment and stop funding both sides of the war on terror if we actually get serious about doing something about energy we understand that we understand as progressives that we need a tough foreign policy but we know the other side has a monopoly on the tough and dumb strategy we re looking for the tough and smart strategy one that battles the forces of terrorism and fundamentalism but understands that it s not just a matter of military might alone that we ve got to match it with the power of our diplomacy and the strength of our alliances and the power of our ideals and that when we do go to war we should be honest with the american people about why we re there and how we expect to win we understand as progressives that we believe in open and honest government that doesn t peddle the agenda of whichever lobbyist or special interest can write the biggest check and if we believe in all these things and if we act on it then i guarantee you america is looking for us to lead and if we do it it s not going to be a democratic agenda or a liberal agenda or a progressive agenda it s going to be an american agenda because in the end we may be proud progressives but we re prouder americans we re tired of being divided we are tired of running into ideological walls and partisan roadblocks we re tired of appeals to our worst instincts and our greatest fears so i say this to you guys that america is desperate for leadership i absolutely feel it everywhere i go they are longing for direction and they want to believe again you know a while back i was reading through jonathan kozol s new book shame of a nation it s a great book and he tells about his travels to underprivileged schools all across america and one of the schools he visits is in los angeles it s called freemont high school and he meets a girl there who tells him that she has taken hairdressing twice because there are actually two different levels of hairdressing at this school there is hair styling and there is hair braiding and as this young girl is talking one of her friends is standing next to her a young woman named mariah and she starts crying and kozol turns to her and says what s the matter and she says this i m quoting she says i don t want to take hairdressing i don t need sewing either i knew how to sew my mother is a seamstress in a factory i m trying to go to college i don t need to sew to go to college my mother sews i hoped for something else i hoped for something else you know i think about mariah sometimes and that simple dream and all the other young people all across this country who have those same dreams of something else and i have wondered if mariah is lucky enough to live as long as marguerite lewis 105 years old if she someday has a chance to look back on the 21st century what will she see will she see a country that is freer and kinder and more tolerant and more just than the one that she grew up in is she going to see greater opportunities for every citizen in this country will all her childhood hopes be fulfilled you know we re here because we believe that in this country we have the power to answer yes to that question to forge our own destiny to begin the world anew and so take back america this is our time our time to make our mark on history our time to write a new chapter in the american story our time to lead a nation that is more prosperous and more free and more just than the one that we grew up in so that someday when our kids look back they can say that this time at the dawn of the 21st century was when america renewed it s purpose they can say that this was a time when america found its way they can say that this is a time when america learned to dream again that s what this conference is about that s what all of you are about let s all you can go out there and get busy thank you very much everybody appreciate it dem bobama14 7 09 barack_obama hello michigan thank you thank you so much first of all give joe a big round of applause for the wonderful introduction we ve got some special guests here now if everybody has chairs go ahead and use them feel free we ve got some special guests here today that i just want to acknowledge all of you are special but these folks i want to make sure that you have a chance to see them first of all one of the best governors in the country please give jennifer granholm a big round of applause lieutenant governor john cherry give john a big round of applause one of my favorite people a former colleague of mine still just a fighter on behalf of working families each and every day senator debbie stabenow we ve got speaker of the house andy dillon in the house we ve got a lot of other local elected officials and i just want to thank them a couple of people who are missing carl levin who is doing great work he s in the senate right now fighting on behalf of a bill to make sure that we re not loading up a bunch of necessary defense spending with unnecessary defense spending so he s the point person on it the only reason he s not here is because he is working alongside the administration to get this bill done please give him a big round of applause congressman sandy levin also working hard on your behalf each and every day but is not here today i want to go ahead and acknowledge the new mayor since he s the new mayor mayor dave bing great ball player my game is a little like dave bing s except i don t have the jump shot or the speed or the ball handling skills or the endurance also don t have the afro don t think i forgot that dave i remember i remember that i also want to acknowledge that we ve got the executive director of the white house council on auto communities and workers who s working hard has a direct line to me each and every day he s traveling constantly back here ed montgomery please give ed a big round of applause and the chairman of the grand traverse band of ottawa and chippewa indian tribe derek bailey is here please give derek a big round of applause and finally the president of the college where we are here jim jacobs give jim jacobs a big round of applause and those of you who i ve missed you know how grateful i am that you re here and thank you all it is wonderful to be back at macomb it was terrific visiting this campus as a candidate but i have to admit it s even better visiting as a president now this is a place where anyone anyone with a desire to learn and to grow to take their career to a new level or start a new career altogether has the opportunity to pursue their dream right here in macomb this is a place where people of all ages and all backgrounds even in the face of obstacles even in the face of very difficult personal challenges can take a chance on a brighter future for themselves and their families there are folks like joe who just told us his story when joe lost his job he decided to take advantage of assistance for displaced workers he earned his associate degree here at macomb and with a pretty impressive gpa i might add and with the help of that degree joe found a new job working for the new henry ford west bloomfield hospital as a maintenance mechanic using the skills he learned here and the talents that he brought to make a fresh start there are workers like kellie kulman who is here today where s kellie raise your hand kellie where are you there you are there s kellie right there kellie is a uaw worker at a ford plant in sterling heights michigan she used to drive a fork lift right but then she decided to train here at macomb for a job that required new skills and now she s an apprentice pipe fitter it s a telling example even as this painful restructuring takes place in our auto industry workers are seeking out training for new auto jobs and joe and kellie s story make clear what all of you know community colleges are an essential part of our recovery in the present and our prosperity in the future this place can make the future better not just for these individuals but for america now since this recession began 20 months ago 6 5 million americans have lost their jobs and i don t have to tell you michigan in particular has been hard hit now i the statistics are daunting the whole country now the unemployment rate is approaching 10 percent here in michigan it s about five points higher and new jobs of course are going to be coming out and we re going to see continuing job loss even as the economy is beginning to stabilize now that s not just abstractions those just aren t numbers on a page those are extraordinary hardships tough times for families and individuals who ve worked hard all their lives and have done the right things all their lives if you haven t lost a job chances are you know somebody who has a family member a neighbor a friend a coworker and you know that as difficult as the financial struggle can be the sense of loss is about more than just a paycheck because most of us define ourselves by the work we do that s part of what it means to be an american we take pride in work that sense that you re contributing supporting your family meeting your responsibilities people need work not just for income but because it makes you part of that fabric of a community that s so important and so when you lose your job and when entire communities are losing thousands of jobs that s a heavy burden that s a heavy weight now my administration has a job to do as well and that job is to get this economy back on its feet that s my job and it s a job i gladly accept i love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say well this is obama s economy that s fine give it to me my job is to solve problems not to stand on the sidelines and harp and gripe so i welcome the job i want the responsibility and i know that let s just take an example many questioned our efforts to help save gm and chrysler from collapse earlier this year their feeling was these companies were driven to the brink by poor management decisions over a long period of time and like any business they should be held accountable for those decisions i agree that they should be held accountable but i also recognize the historic significance and economic prominence of these companies in communities all across michigan and all across the country i thought about the hundreds of thousands of americans whose livelihoods are still connected to the american auto industry and the impact on an already struggling economy especially right here in michigan so i said that if chrysler and gm were willing to fundamentally restructure their businesses and make the hard choices necessary to become competitive now and in the future it was a process worth supporting now today after a painful period of soul searching and sacrifice both gm and chrysler have emerged from bankruptcy remember folks said there was no way they could do it they ve gotten it done already in record time far faster than anybody thought possible they ve got a leaner structure they ve got new management and a viable vision of how to compete and win in the 21st century those sacrifices were shared among all the stakeholders workers and management creditors and shareholders retirees and communities and together they ve made the rebirth of chrysler and gm possible it was the right thing to do but even with this positive news the hard truth is is that some of the jobs that have been lost in the auto industry and elsewhere won t be coming back they re the casualties of a changing economy in some cases just increased productivity in the plants themselves means that some jobs aren t going to return and that only underscores the importance of generating new businesses and new industries to replace the ones that we ve lost and of preparing our workers to fill the jobs they create for even before this recession hit we were faced with an economy that was simply not creating or sustaining enough new well paying jobs so now is the time to change all that what we face is far more than a passing crisis this is a transformative moment and in this moment we must do what other generations have done it s not the time to shrink from the challenges we face or put off tough decisions that s what washington has done for decades and it s exactly why i ran for president to change that mindset now is the time to build a firmer stronger foundation for growth that will not only withstand future economic storms but that will help us thrive and compete in a global economy to build that foundation we have to slow the growth of health care costs that are driving us into debt we re going to have to do that and there s going to be a major debate over the next three weeks and don t be fooled by folks trying to scare you saying we can t change the health care system we have no choice but to change the health care system because right now it s broken for too many americans we re going to have to make tough choices necessary to bring down deficits but don t let folks fool you the best way to start bringing down deficits is to get control of our health care costs which is why we need reform now is the time to create the jobs of the future by growing industries including a new clean energy economy and jennifer granholm has been all on top of this as the governor of michigan she is bring cleaning energy jobs right here to michigan and we ve got to support her in that effort i want michigan to build windmills and wind turbines and solar panels and biofuel plants and energy efficient light bulbs and weatherize all our because michigan you know bad weather so you can be all on top of weatherizing you need to weatherize i know about that in chicago too but we also have to ensure that we re educating and preparing our people for the new jobs of the 21st century we ve got to prepare our people with the skills they need to compete in this global economy time and again when we placed our bet for the future on education we have prospered as a result by tapping the incredible innovative and generative potential of a skilled american workforce that s what happened when president lincoln signed into law legislation creating the land grant colleges which not only transformed higher education but also our entire economy that s what took place when president roosevelt signed the gi bill which helped educate a generation and ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity that was the foundation for the american middle class and that s why at the start of my administration i set a goal for america by 2020 this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world we used to have that we re going to have it again and we ve begun to take historic steps to achieve this goal already we ve increased pell grants by 500 we ve created a 2 500 tax credit for four years of college tuition we ve simplified student aid applications and ensured that aid is not based on the income of a job that you just lost a new gi bill of rights for the 21st century is beginning to help soldiers coming home from iraq and afghanistan to begin a new life in a new economy and the recovery plan has helped close state budget shortfalls which put enormous pressure on public universities and community colleges at the same time making historic investments in school libraries and classrooms and facilities all across america so we ve already taken some steps that are building the foundation for a 21st century education system here in america one that will allow us to compete with china and india and everybody else all around the world but today i m announcing the most significant down payment yet on reaching the goal of having the highest college graduation rate of any nation in the world we re going to achieve this in the next 10 years and it s called the american graduation initiative it will reform and strengthen community colleges like this one from coast to coast so they get the resources that students and schools need and the results workers and businesses demand through this plan we seek to help an additional 5 million americans earn degrees and certificates in the next decade 5 million not since the passage of the original gi bill and the work of president truman s commission on higher education which helped to double the number of community colleges and increase by seven fold enrollment in those colleges have we taken such a historic step on behalf of community colleges in america and let me be clear we pay for this plan this isn t adding to the deficit we re paying for this plan by ending the wasteful subsidies we currently provide to banks and private lenders for student loans that will save tens of billions of dollars over the next 10 years instead of lining the pockets of special interests it s time this money went towards the interests of higher education in america that s what my administration is committed to doing now i know that for a long time there have been politicians who have spoken of training as a silver bullet and college as a cure all it s not and we know that i can t tell you how many workers who ve been laid off you talk to them about training and they say training for what so i understand the frustrations that a lot of people have especially if the training is not well designed for the specific jobs that are being created out there but we know that in the coming years jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience we will not fill those jobs or even keep those jobs here in america without the training offered by community colleges that s why i want to applaud governor granholm for the no worker left behind program it s providing up to two years worth of free tuition at community colleges and universities across the state the rest of the country should learn from the effort this is training to become a medical technician or a health it worker or a lab specialist or a nurse in fact 59 percent of all new nurses come from community colleges this is training to install solar panels and build those wind turbines we were talking about and develop a smarter electricity grid and this is the kind of education that more and more americans are using to improve their skills and broaden their horizons many young people are saving money by spending two years at community college before heading to a four year college and more workers who have lost their jobs or fear losing a job are seeking an edge at schools like this one at the same time community colleges are under increasing pressure to cap enrollments and scrap courses and cut costs as states and municipalities face budget shortfalls and this is in addition to the challenges you face in the best of times as these schools receive far less funding per student than typical four year colleges and universities so community colleges are an undervalued asset in our country not only is that not right it s not smart that s why i ve asked dr jill biden who happens to be a relation of the vice president joe biden but who is also a community college educator for more than 16 years to promote community colleges and help us make community colleges stronger and that s why we re putting in place this american graduation initiative let me describe for you the specifics of what we re going to do number one we will offer competitive grants challenging community colleges to pursue innovative results oriented strategies in exchange for federal funding we ll fund programs that connect students looking for jobs with businesses that are looking to hire we ll challenge these schools to find new and better ways to help students catch up on the basics like math and science that are essential to our competitiveness we ll put colleges and employers together to create programs that match curricula in the classroom with the needs of the boardroom these are all kinds of there are all kinds of examples of what s possible we ve seen cisco for example working with community colleges to prepare students and workers for jobs ranging from work in broadband to health it we know that the most successful community colleges are those that partner with the private sector so we want to encourage more companies to work with schools to build these type of relationships that way when somebody goes through a training program they know that there s a job at the end of that training we ll also create a new research center with a simple mission to measure what works and what doesn t all too often we don t know what happens when somebody walks out of a classroom and onto the factory floor or into the library or the laboratory or the office and that means businesses often can t be sure what a degree is really worth and schools themselves don t have the facts to make informed choices about which programs receive achieve results and which programs don t and this is important not just for businesses and colleges but for students and workers as well if a parent is going to spend time in the classroom and away from his or her family especially after a long day at work that degree really has to mean something they have to know that when they get that degree this is going to help advance their goals if a worker is going to spend two years training to enter into a whole new profession that certificate has to mean that he or she is ready and that businesses are ready to hire in addition we want to propose new funding for innovative strategies that promote not just enrollment in a community college program but completion of that program see more than half more than half of all students who enter community college to earn an associate degree or transfer to a four year school to earn a bachelor s degree unfortunately fail to reach their goal that s not just a waste of a valuable resource that s a tragedy for these students oftentimes they ve taken out debt and they don t get the degree but they still have to pay back the debt and it s a disaster for our economy so we ll fund programs that track student progress inside and outside the classroom let s figure out what s keeping students from crossing that finish line and then put in place reforms that will remove those barriers maybe it becomes too difficult for a parent to be away from home or too expensive for a waiter or a nurse to miss a shift maybe a young student just isn t sure if her education will lead to employment the point is we need to figure out solutions for these kinds of challenges because facing these impediments shouldn t prevent you from reaching your potential all right so that s a big chunk of this first part of this initiative the second part we re going to back 10 billion in loans to renovate and rebuild college classrooms and buildings all across the country all too often community colleges are treated like the stepchild of the higher education system they re an afterthought if they re thought of at all and that means schools are often years behind in the facilities they provide which means in a 21st century economy they re years behind in the education they can offer that s a mistake and it s one that we ll help to correct through this fund schools will have the chance to borrow at a more affordable rate to modernize facilities and they ll be building on the funds in the recovery plan that are already helping to renovate schools including community colleges all across the country and by the way not only does this improve the schools and the training that they re providing guess what you also have to hire some workers and some tradesmen and women to do the work on those schools so it means it s putting people to work in michigan right here right now number three even as we repair bricks and mortar we have an opportunity to build a new virtual infrastructure to complement the education and training community colleges can offer so we re going to support the creation of a new online open source clearinghouse of courses so that community colleges across the country can offer more classes without building more classrooms and this will make a big difference especially for rural campuses that a lot of times have struggled attract have to struggle to attract students and faculty and this will make it possible for a professor to complement his lecture with an online exercise or for a student who can t be away from her family to still keep up with her coursework we don t know where this kind of experiment will lead but that s exactly why we ought to try it because i think there s a possibility that online education can provide especially for people who are already in the workforce and want to retrain the chance to upgrade their skills without having to quit their job so let me say this more the road to recovery the road to prosperity is going to be hard it was never going to be easy when i was sworn in we were seeing 700 thousand jobs lost that month then we had the same amount lost for two more consecutive months now we ve got an average of about 400 000 jobs lost but we re still losing too many jobs we will get to the point where we re not losing jobs but then we ve got to start getting to the point where we re actually creating jobs and it s going to take time there are going to be false starts and there are going to be setbacks but i am confident that we can meet the challenges we face because that s what we ve always done that s what america does we hit some challenges we fuss and argue about it and then we go ahead and go about the business of solving our problems that s what we see on display right here at macomb community college that s what i ve seen at colleges and universities all across this country at every juncture in our history when we ve been challenged we have summoned the resilience and the industriousness that can do american spirit that has allowed us to succeed in the face of even the toughest odds that s what we can and must do now not just to overcome this crisis but to leave something better behind to lay a foundation on which our children and our grandchildren can prosper and take responsibility for their future just as the students at this school at this difficult moment are taking responsibility for theirs i am absolutely confident that if i ve got your help that we can make it happen and we are going to see a stronger more prosperous michigan in the years to come thank you very much warren god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama14 9 09 barack_obama thank you very much it is wonderful to be back in new york after having just been here last week it is a beautiful day and we have some extraordinary guests here in the hall today i just want to mention a few first of all from my economic team somebody who i think has done extraordinary work on behalf of all americans and has helped to strengthen our financial system immeasurably secretary tim geithner please give him a big round of applause somebody who is continually guiding me and keeping me straight on the numbers the chair of the council of economic advisers christina romer is here we have an extraordinary economic recovery board and as chairman somebody who knows more about the financial markets and the economy generally than just about anybody in this country paul volcker thank you paul the outstanding mayor of the city of new york mr michael bloomberg we have assembly speaker sheldon silver is here as well thank you we have a host of members of congress but there s one that i have to single out because he is going to be helping to shape the agenda going forward to make sure that we have one of the strongest most dynamic and most innovative financial markets in the world for many years to come and that s my good friend barney frank i also want to thank our hosts from the national park service here at federal hall and all the other outstanding public officials who are here thanks for being here thank you for your warm welcome it s a privilege to be in historic federal hall it was here more than two centuries ago that our first congress served and our first president was inaugurated and i just had a chance to glance at the bible upon which george washington took his oath it was here in the early days of the republic that hamilton and jefferson debated how best to administer a young economy and ensure that our nation rewarded the talents and drive of its people and two centuries later we still grapple with these questions questions made more acute in moments of crisis it was one year ago today that we experienced just such a crisis as investors and pension holders watched with dread and dismay and after a series of emergency meetings often conducted in the dead of the night several of the world s largest and oldest financial institutions had fallen either bankrupt bought or bailed out lehman brothers merrill lynch aig washington mutual wachovia a week before this began fannie mae and freddie mac had been taken over by the government other large firms teetered on the brink of insolvency credit markets froze as banks refused to lend not only to families and businesses but to one another five trillion dollars of americans household wealth evaporated in the span of just three months that was just one year ago congress and the previous administration took difficult but necessary action in the days and months that followed nonetheless when this administration walked through the door in january the situation remained urgent the markets had fallen sharply credit was not flowing it was feared that the largest banks those that remained standing had too little capital and far too much exposure to risky loans and the consequences had spread far beyond the streets of lower manhattan this was no longer just a financial crisis it had become a full blown economic crisis with home prices sinking and businesses struggling to access affordable credit and the economy shedding an average of 700 000 jobs every single month we could not separate what was happening in the corridors of our financial institutions from what was happening on the factory floors and around the kitchen tables home foreclosures linked those who took out home loans and those who repackaged those loans as securities a lack of access to affordable credit threatened the health of large firms and small businesses as well as all those whose jobs depended on them and a weakened financial system weakened the broader economy which in turn further weakened the financial system so the only way to address successfully any of these challenges was to address them together and this administration under the outstanding leadership of tim geithner and christy romer and larry summers and others moved quickly on all fronts initializing a financial a financial stability plan to rescue the system from the crisis and restart lending for all those affected by the crisis by opening and examining the books of large financial firms we helped restore the availability of two things that had been in short supply capital and confidence by taking aggressive and innovative steps in credit markets we spurred lending not just to banks but to folks looking to buy homes or cars take out student loans or finance small businesses our home ownership plan has helped responsible homeowners refinance to stem the tide of lost homes and lost home values and the recovery plan is providing help to the unemployed and tax relief for working families all the while spurring consumer spending it s prevented layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers and police officers and other essential public servants and thousands of recovery projects are underway all across america including right here in new york city putting people to work building wind turbines and solar panels renovating schools and hospitals repairing our nation s roads and bridges eight months later the work of recovery continues and though i will never be satisfied while people are out of work and our financial system is weakened we can be confident that the storms of the past two years are beginning to break in fact while there continues to be a need for government involvement to stabilize the financial system that necessity is waning after months in which public dollars were flowing into our financial system we re finally beginning to see money flowing back to taxpayers this doesn t mean taxpayers will escape the worst financial crisis in decades entirely unscathed but banks have repaid more than 70 billion and in those cases where the government s stakes have been sold completely taxpayers have actually earned a 17 percent return on their investment just a few months ago many experts from across the ideological spectrum feared that ensuring financial stability would require even more tax dollars instead we ve been able to eliminate a 250 billion reserve included in our budget because that fear has not been realized while full recovery of the financial system will take a great deal more time and work the growing stability resulting from these interventions means we re beginning to return to normalcy but here s what i want to emphasize today normalcy cannot lead to complacency unfortunately there are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment instead of learning the lessons of lehman and the crisis from which we re still recovering they re choosing to ignore those lessons i m convinced they do so not just at their own peril but at our nation s so i want everybody here to hear my words we will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses those on wall street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences and expect that next time american taxpayers will be there to break their fall and that s why we need strong rules of the road to guard against the kind of systemic risks that we ve seen and we have a responsibility to write and enforce these rules to protect consumers of financial products to protect taxpayers and to protect our economy as a whole yes there must these rules must be developed in a way that doesn t stifle innovation and enterprise and i want to say very clearly here today we want to work with the financial industry to achieve that end but the old ways that led to this crisis cannot stand and to the extent that some have so readily returned to them underscores the need for change and change now history cannot be allowed to repeat itself so what we re calling for is for the financial industry to join us in a constructive effort to update the rules and regulatory structure to meet the challenges of this new century that is what my administration seeks to do we ve sought ideas and input from industry leaders and policy experts academics consumer advocates and the broader public and we ve worked closely with leaders in the senate and the house including not only barney but also senators chris dodd and richard shelby and barney is already working with his counterpart sheldon bachus and we intend to pass regulatory reform through congress and taken together we re proposing the most ambitious overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the great depression but i want to emphasize that these reforms are rooted in a simple principle we ought to set clear rules of the road that promote transparency and accountability that s how we ll make certain that markets foster responsibility not recklessness that s how we ll make certain that markets reward those who compete honestly and vigorously within the system instead of those who are trying to game the system so let me outline specifically what we re talking about first we re proposing new rules to protect consumers and a new consumer financial protection agency to enforce those rules this crisis was not just the result of decisions made by the mightiest of financial firms it was also the result of decisions made by ordinary americans to open credit cards and take on mortgages and while there were many who took out loans they knew they couldn t afford there were also millions of americans who signed contracts they didn t fully understand offered by lenders who didn t always tell the truth this is in part because there is no single agency charged with making sure that doesn t happen that s what we intend to change the consumer financial protection agency will have the power to make certain that consumers get information that is clear and concise and to prevent the worst kinds of abuses consumers shouldn t have to worry about loan contracts designed to be unintelligible hidden fees attached to their mortgage and financial penalties whether through a credit card or a debit card that appear without warning on their statements and responsible lenders including community banks doing the right thing shouldn t have to worry about ruinous competition from unregulated competitors now there are those who are suggesting that somehow this will restrict the choices available to consumers nothing could be further from the truth the lack of clear rules in the past meant we had the wrong kind of innovation the firm that could make its products look the best by doing the best job of hiding the real costs ended up getting the business for example we had teaser rates on credit cards and mortgages that lured people in and then surprised them with big rate increases by setting ground rules we ll increase the kind of competition that actually provides people better and greater choices as companies compete to offer the best products not the ones that are most complex or the most confusing second we ve got to close the loopholes that were at the heart of the crisis where there were gaps in the rules regulators lacked the authority to take action where there were overlaps regulators often lacked accountability for inaction these weaknesses in oversight engendered systematic and systemic abuse under existing rules some companies can actually shop for the regulator of their choice and others like hedge funds can operate outside of the regulatory system altogether we ve seen the development of financial instruments like derivatives and credit default swaps without anyone examining the risks or regulating all of the players and we ve seen lenders profit by providing loans to borrowers who they knew would never repay because the lender offloaded the loan and the consequences to somebody else those who refused to game the system are at a disadvantage now one of the main reasons this crisis could take place is that many agencies and regulators were responsible for oversight of individual financial firms and their subsidiaries but no one was responsible for protecting the system as the whole as a whole in other words regulators were charged with seeing the trees but not the forest and even then some firms that posed a systemic risk were not regulated as strongly as others exploiting loopholes in the system to take on greater risk with less scrutiny as a result the failure of one firm threatened the viability of many others we were facing one of the largest financial crises in history and those responsible for oversight were caught off guard and without the authority to act and that s why we ll create clear accountability and responsibility for regulating large financial firms that pose a systemic risk while holding the federal reserve fully accountable for regulation of the largest most interconnected firms we ll create an oversight council to bring together regulators from across markets to share information to identify gaps in regulation and to tackle issues that don t fit neatly into an organizational chart we ll also require these financial firms to meet stronger capital and liquidity requirements and observe greater constraints on their risky behavior that s one of the lessons of the past year the only way to avoid a crisis of this magnitude is to ensure that large firms can t take risks that threaten our entire financial system and to make sure that they have the resources to weather even the worst of economic storms even as we ve proposed safeguards to make the failure of large and interconnected firms less likely we ve also created proposed creating what s called resolution authority in the event that such a failure happens and poses a threat to the stability of the financial system this is intended to put an end to the idea that some firms are too big to fail for a market to function those who invest and lend in that market must believe that their money is actually at risk and the system as a whole isn t safe until it is safe from the failure of any individual institution if a bank approaches insolvency we have a process through the fdic that protects depositors and maintains confidence in the banking system this process was created during the great depression when the failure of one bank led to runs on other banks which in turn threatened the banking system as a whole that system works but we don t have any kind of process in place to contain the failure of a lehman brothers or aig or any of the largest and most interconnected financial firms in our country and that s why when this crisis began crucial decisions about what would happen to some of the world s biggest companies companies employing tens of thousands of people and holding trillions of dollars of assets took place in hurried discussions in the middle of the night that s why we ve had to rely on taxpayer dollars the only resolution authority we currently have that would prevent a financial meltdown involved tapping the federal reserve or the federal treasury with so much at stake we should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fail into a rapid and chaotic dissolution that threatens the economy and innocent people or alternatively forcing taxpayers to foot the bill so our plan would put the cost of a firm s failures on those who own its stock and loaned it money and if taxpayers ever have to step in again to prevent a second great depression the financial industry will have to pay the taxpayer back every cent finally we need to close the gaps that exist not just within this country but among countries the united states is leading a coordinated response to promote recovery and to restore prosperity among both the world s largest economies and the world s fastest growing economies at a summit in london in april leaders agreed to work together in an unprecedented way to spur global demand but also to address the underlying problems that caused such a deep and lasting global recession and this work will continue next week in pittsburgh when i convene the g20 which has proven to be an effective forum for coordinating policies among key developed and emerging economies and one that i see taking on an important role in the future essential to this effort is reforming what s broken in the global financial system a system that links economies and spreads both rewards and risks for we know that abuses in financial markets anywhere can have an impact everywhere and just as gaps in domestic regulation lead to a race to the bottom so do gaps in regulation around the world what we need instead is a global race to the top including stronger capital standards as i ve called for today as the united states is aggressively reforming our regulatory system we re going to be working to ensure that the rest of the world does the same and this is something that secretary geithner has already been actively meeting with finance ministers around the world to discuss a healthy economy in the 21st century also depends on our ability to buy and sell goods in markets across the globe and make no mistake this administration is committed to pursuing expanded trade and new trade agreements it is absolutely essential to our economic future and each time that we have met at the g20 and the g8 we have reaffirmed the need to fight against protectionism but no trading system will work if we fail to enforce our trade agreements those that have already been signed so when as happened this weekend we invoke provisions of existing agreements we do so not to be provocative or to promote self defeating protectionism we do so because enforcing trade agreements is part and parcel of maintaining an open and free trading system and just as we have to live up to our responsibilities on trade we have to live up to our responsibilities on financial reform as well i have urged leaders in congress to pass regulatory reform this year and both congressman frank and senator dodd who are leading this effort have made it clear that that s what they intend to do now there will be those who defend the status quo there always are there will be those who argue we should do less or nothing at all there will be those who engage in revisionist history or have selective memories and don t seem to recall what we just went through last year but to them i d say only this do you really believe that the absence of sound regulation one year ago was good for the financial system do you believe the resulting decline in markets and wealth and unemployment the wrenching hardship that families are going through all across the country was somehow good for our economy was that good for the american people i have always been a strong believer in the power of the free market i believe that jobs are best created not by government but by businesses and entrepreneurs willing to take a risk on a good idea i believe that the role of the government is not to disparage wealth but to expand its reach not to stifle markets but to provide the ground rules and level playing field that helps to make those markets more vibrant and that will allow us to better tap the creative and innovative potential of our people for we know that it is the dynamism of our people that has been the source of america s progress and prosperity so i promise you i did not run for president to bail out banks or intervene in capital markets but it is important to note that the very absence of common sense regulations able to keep up with a fast paced financial sector is what created the need for that extraordinary intervention not just with our administration but the previous administration the lack of sensible rules of the road so often opposed by those who claim to speak for the free market ironically led to a rescue far more intrusive than anything any of us democratic or republican progressive or conservative would have ever proposed or predicted at the same time we have to recognize that what s needed now goes beyond just the reforms that i ve mentioned for what took place one year ago was not merely a failure of regulation or legislation it wasn t just a failure of oversight or foresight it was also a failure of responsibility it was fundamentally a failure of responsibility that allowed washington to become a place where problems including structural problems in our financial system were ignored rather than solved it was a failure of responsibility that led homebuyers and derivative traders alike to take reckless risks that they couldn t afford to take it was a collective failure of responsibility in washington on wall street and across america that led to the near collapse of our financial system one year ago so restoring a willingness to take responsibility even when it s hard to do is at the heart of what we must do here on wall street you have a responsibility the reforms i ve laid out will pass and these changes will become law but one of the most important ways to rebuild the system stronger than it was before is to rebuild trust stronger than before and you don t have to wait for a new law to do that you don t have to wait to use plain language in your dealings with consumers you don t have to wait for legislation to put the 2009 bonuses of your senior executives up for a shareholder vote you don t have to wait for a law to overhaul your pay system so that folks are rewarded for long term performance instead of short term gains the fact is many of the firms that are now returning to prosperity owe a debt to the american people they were not the cause of this crisis and yet american taxpayers through their government had to take extraordinary action to stabilize the financial industry they shouldered the burden of the bailout and they are still bearing the burden of the fallout in lost jobs and lost homes and lost opportunities it is neither right nor responsible after you ve recovered with the help of your government to shirk your obligation to the goal of wider recovery a more stable system and a more broadly shared prosperity so i want to urge you to demonstrate that you take this obligation to heart to put greater effort into helping families who need their mortgages modified under my administration s homeownership plan to help small business owners who desperately need loans and who are bearing the brunt of the decline in available credit to help communities that would benefit from the financing you could provide or the community development institutions you could support to come up with creative approaches to improve financial education and to bring banking to those who live and work entirely outside of the banking system and of course to embrace serious financial reform not resist it just as we are asking the private sector to think about the long term i recognize that washington has to do so as well when my administration came through the door we not only faced a financial crisis and costly recession we also found waiting a trillion dollar deficit so yes we have to take extraordinary action in the wake of an extraordinary economic crisis but i am absolutely committed to putting this nation on a sound and secure fiscal footing that s why we re pushing to restore pay as you go rules in congress because i will not go along with the old washington ways which said it was okay to pass spending bills and tax cuts without a plan to pay for it that s why we re cutting programs that don t work or are out of date that s why i ve insisted that health insurance reform as important as it is not add a dime to the deficit now or in the future there are those who would suggest that we must choose between markets unfettered by even the most modest of regulations and markets weighed down by onerous regulations that suppress the spirit of enterprise and innovation if there is one lesson we can learn from last year it is that this is a false choice common sense rules of the road don t hinder the market they make the market stronger indeed they are essential to ensuring that our markets function fairly and freely one year ago we saw in stark relief how markets can spin out of control how a lack of common sense rules can lead to excess and abuse how close we can come to the brink one year later it is incumbent upon us to put in place those reforms that will prevent this kind of crisis from ever happening again reflecting painful but important lessons that we ve learned and that will help us move from a period of reckless irresponsibility a period of crisis to one of responsibility and prosperity that s what we must do and i m confident that s what we will do thank you very much everybody dem bobama14 9 10 barack_obama thank you hello thank you thank you well hello philadelphia and hello masterman it is wonderful to see all of you what a terrific introduction by kelly give kelly a big round of applause i was saying backstage that when i was in high school i could not have done that i would have muffed it up somehow so we are so proud of you and everything that you ve done and to all the students here i m thrilled to be here we ve got a couple introductions i want to make first of all you ve got the outstanding governor of pennsylvania ed rendell in the house the mayor of philadelphia michael nutter is here congressman chaka fattah is here congresswoman allyson schwartz is here your own principal marge neff is here the school superintendent arlene ackerman is here and doing a great job and the secretary of education arne duncan is here and i am here and i am thrilled to be here i am just so excited i ve heard such great things about what all of you are doing both the students and the teachers and the staff here today is about welcoming all of you and all of america s students back to school even though i know you ve been in school for a little bit now and i can t think of a better place to do it than at masterman because you are one of the best schools in philadelphia you are a leader in helping students succeed in the classroom just last week you were recognized by a national blue ribbon as a national blue ribbon school because of your record of achievement and that is a testament to everybody here to the students to the parents to the teachers to the school leaders it s an example of excellence that i hope communities across america can embrace over the past few weeks michelle and i have been getting sasha and malia ready for school and they re excited about it i ll bet they had the same feelings that you do you re a little sad to see the summer go but you re also excited about the possibilities of a new year the possibilities of building new friendships and strengthening old ones of joining a school club or trying out for a team the possibilities of growing into a better student and a better person and making not just your family proud but making yourself proud but i know some of you may also be a little nervous about starting a new school year maybe you re making the jump from elementary to middle school or from middle school to high school and you re worried about what that s going to be like maybe you re starting a new school you re not sure how you ll like it trying to figure out how you re going to fit in or maybe you re a senior and you re anxious about the whole college process about where to apply and whether you can afford to go to college and beyond all those concerns i know a lot of you are also feeling the strain of some difficult times you know what s going on in the news and you also know what s going on in some of your own families you ve read about the war in afghanistan you hear about the recession that we ve been through and sometimes maybe you re seeing the worries in your parents faces or sense it in their voice so a lot of you as a consequence because we re going through a tough time a country are having to act a lot older than you are you got to be strong for your family while your brother or sister is serving overseas or you ve got to look after younger siblings while your mom is working that second shift or maybe some of you who are little bit older you re taking on a part time job while your dad s out of work and that s a lot to handle it s more than you should have to handle and it may make you wonder at times what your own future will look like whether you re going to be able to succeed in school whether you should maybe set your sights a little lower scale back your dreams but i came to masterman to tell all of you what i think you re hearing from your principal and your superintendent and from your parents and your teachers nobody gets to write your destiny but you your future is in your hands your life is what you make of it and nothing absolutely nothing is beyond your reach so long as you re willing to dream big so long as you re willing to work hard so long as you re willing to stay focused on your education there is not a single thing that any of you cannot accomplish not a single thing i believe that and that last part is absolutely essential that part about really working hard in school because an education has never been more important than it is today i m sure there are going to be times in the months ahead when you re staying up late doing your homework or cramming for a test or you re dragging yourself out of bed on a rainy morning and you re thinking oh boy i wish maybe it was a snow day but let me tell you what you re doing is worth it there is nothing more important than what you re doing right now nothing is going to have as great an impact on your success in life as your education how you re doing in school more and more the kinds of opportunities that are open to you are going to be determined by how far you go in school the farther you go in school the farther you re going to go in life and at a time when other countries are competing with us like never before when students around the world in beijing china or bangalore india are working harder than ever and doing better than ever your success in school is not just going to determine your success it s going to determine america s success in the 21st century so you ve got an obligation to yourselves and america has an obligation to you to make sure you re getting the best education possible and making sure you get that kind of education is going to take all of us working hard and all of us working hand in hand it takes all of us in government from the governor to the mayor to the superintendent to the president all of us doing our part to prepare our students all of them for success in the classroom and in college and in a career it s going to take an outstanding principal like principal neff and outstanding teachers like the ones you have here at masterman teachers who are going above and beyond the call of duty for their students and it s going to take parents who are committed to your education now that s what we have to do for you that s our responsibility that s our job but you ve got a job too you ve got to show up to school on time you ve got to pay attention in your class you ve got to do your homework you ve got to study for exams you ve got to stay out of trouble you ve got to instill a sense of excellence in everything that you do that kind of discipline that kind of drive that kind of hard work is absolutely essential for success and i can speak from experience here because unlike kelly i can t say i always had this discipline see i can tell she was always disciplined i wasn t always disciplined i wasn t always the best student when i was younger i made my share of mistakes i still remember a conversation i had with my mother in high school i was kind of a goof off and i was about the age of some of the folks here and my grades were slipping i hadn t started my college applications i was acting as my mother put it sort of casual about my future i was doing good enough i was smart enough that i could kind of get by but i wasn t really applying myself and so i suspect this is a conversation that will sound familiar to some students and some parents here today she decided to sit me down and said i had to change my attitude my attitude was what i imagine every teenager s attitude is when your parents have a conversation with you like that i was like you know i don t need to hear all this i m doing okay i m not flunking out so i started to say that and she just cut me right off she said you can t just sit around waiting for luck to see you through she said you can get into any school you want in the country if you just put in a little bit of effort she gave me a hard look and she said you remember what that s like effort some of you have had that conversation and it was pretty jolting hearing my mother say that but eventually her words had the intended effect because i got serious about my studies and i started to make an effort in everything that i did and i began to see my grades and my prospects improve and i know that if hard work could make the difference for me then it can make a difference for all of you and i know that there may be some people who are skeptical about that sometimes you may wonder if some people just aren t better at certain things you know well i m not good at math or i m just not really interested in my science classes and it is true that we each have our own gifts we each have our own talents that we have to discover and nurture not everybody is going to catch on in certain subjects as easily as others but just because you re not the best at something today doesn t mean you can t be tomorrow even if you don t think of yourself as a math person or a science person you can still excel in those subjects if you re willing to make the effort and you may find out you have talents you never dreamed of because one of the things i ve discovered is excelling whether it s in school or in life isn t mainly about being smarter than everybody else that s not really the secret to success it s about working harder than everybody else so don t avoid new challenges seek them out step out of your comfort zone don t be afraid to ask for help your teachers and family are there to guide you they want to know if you re not catching on to something because they know that if you keep on working at it you re going to catch on don t feel discouraged don t give up if you don t succeed at something the first time try again and learn from your mistakes don t feel threatened if your friends are doing well be proud of them and see what lessons you can draw from what they re doing right now i m sort of preaching to the choir here because i know that s the kind of culture of excellence that you promote at masterman but i m not just speaking to all of you i m speaking to kids all across the country and i want them to all here that same message that s the kind of excellence we ve got to promote in all of america s schools that s one of the reasons why i m announcing our second commencement challenge some of you may have heard of this if your school is the winner if you show us how teachers and students and parents are all working together to prepare your kids and your school for college and a career if you show us how you re giving back to your community and your country then i will congratulate you in person by speaking at your commencement last year i was in michigan at kalamazoo and had just a wonderful time although i got to admit their graduating class was about 700 kids and my hands were really sore at the end of it because i was shaking all of them but the truth is an education is about more than getting into a good college it s about more than getting a good job when you graduate it s about giving each and every one of us the chance to fulfill our promise and to be the best version of ourselves we can be and part of that means treating others the way we want to be treated with kindness and respect so that s something else that i want to communicate to students not just here at masterman but all across the country sometimes kids can be mean to other kids let s face it we don t always treat each other with respect and kindness that s true for adults as well by the way and sometimes that s especially true in middle school or high school because being a teenager isn t easy it s a time when you re wrestling with a lot of things when i was in my teens i was wrestling with all sorts of questions about who i was i had a white mother and a black father and my father wasn t around he had left when i was two and so there were all kinds of issues that i was dealing with some of you may be working through your own questions right now and coming to terms with what makes you different and i know that figuring out all of that can be even more difficult when you ve got bullies in a class who try to use those differences to pick on you or poke fun at you to make you feel bad about yourself and in some places the problem is even more serious there are neighborhoods in my hometown of chicago and there are neighborhoods right here in philadelphia where kids are doing each other serious harm so what i want to say to every kid every young person what i want all of you if you take away one thing from my speech i want you to take away the notion that life is precious and part of what makes it so wonderful is its diversity that all of us are different and we shouldn t be embarrassed by the things that make us different we should be proud of them because it s the thing that makes us different that makes us who we are that makes us unique and the strength and character of this country has always come from our ability to recognize no matter who we are no matter where we come from no matter what we look like no matter what abilities we have to recognize ourselves in each other i was reminded of that idea the other day when i read a letter from tamerria robinson she s a 12 year old girl in georgia and she told me about how hard she works and about all the community service she does with her brother and she wrote i try to achieve my dreams and help others do the same that she said is how the world should work that s a pretty good motto i work hard to achieve my goals and then i try to help others to achieve their goals and i agree with tamerria that s how the world should work but it s only going to work that way if all of you get in good habits while you re in school so yes each of us need to work hard we all have to take responsibilities for our own education we need to take responsibility for our own lives but what makes us who we are is that here in this country in the united states of america we don t just reach for our own dreams we try to help others do the same this is a country that gives all its daughters and all of its sons a fair chance a chance to make the most of their lives and fulfill their god given potential and i m absolutely confident that if all of our students here at masterman and across this country keep doing their part if you guys work hard and you re focused on your education you keep fighting for your dreams and then you help each other reach each other s dreams then you re not only going to succeed this year you re going to succeed for the rest of your lives and that means america will succeed in the 21st century so my main message to all of you here today i couldn t be prouder of you keep it up all of you i know are going to do great things in the future and maybe some time in the 21st century it s going to be one of you that s standing up here speaking to a group of kids as president of the united states thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama15 10 09 barack_obama thank you thank you please everybody have a seat now i am not going to spoil a good dinner with a long speech but there are some big thank yous that i ve got to say first of all i ve got to say something about my introducer we are doing some tough stuff in washington and mark is absolutely right that everybody has a story about nancy s kindness and her thoughtfulness her intelligence her passion i just want to say a little bit about her toughness washington unfortunately i think over the last several years has been engulfed with a climate that isn t just partisan because we don t want to romanticize the past things have always been partisan that s the nature of democracy but rather a sense that partisanship overrides the national interest there s always been politics but there s been a sense lately that goes beyond just the run of the mill politics a sense that we are going to slash and burn and go after folks just because we want to win as opposed to because we re trying to get something done and as a consequence being speaker of the house is challenging job you are constantly the target of attacks and then there s the other party and yet having now known nancy first as a senator and now as president i can tell you that day in day out she faces down some of the toughest problems not just policy problems but political problems that you can imagine and she doesn t break a sweat and she is willing to stare folks down and tell them how things are going to be and that steel that nancy pelosi has is part of the reason why this has been such an incredibly productive congress and why i m so confident that we re going to end up getting health care done and so i just want everybody to give nancy pelosi a big round of applause i love nancy pelosi love her now speaking of strong women dianne feinstein and barbara boxer aren t around but dick and stu are here to accept their accolades i love them as well and they have been showing extraordinary leadership on a whole host of issues to the people who helped to set this up this evening mark gorenberg along with wendy have just been diehard supporters from the very beginning of this unlikely journey i m grateful to them azita raji doug hickey denise bauer steve westly wade randlett and jeff bleich we are so grateful to you for your willingness to step up and to support democrats not just right before an election but during these sort of trials these periods where everybody is impatient and trying to figure out why we haven t transformed the world overnight and all of you understand that when i ran for office and we talked about change i think all of you understood that change wasn t going to be easy change is hard in a country of 300 million people change is hard and then in a world with several billion arriving at a time when we were on the brink of the worst we were on the brink of a great depression the worst financial crisis since the great depression at a time when our relationships with other countries all around the world were strained to say the least at a time of two wars and great danger and a sense that on a whole host of big challenges from health care to energy to the way our schools work to how our courts work to how we engage with one another that we had been stuck in a place that wasn t working for the future of the country we had to understand that change was not going to be easy and what was so exciting about the campaign not just mine but the whole movement behind democratic victories more than a year ago was the recognition not just that people wanted change but that i think the american people were hungry to take responsibility again for trying big things for stretching out of our ruts and our comfort zones and our habits and saying well let s see what it is that we can do to make this country work even better we know we live in the greatest country on earth but gosh we also knew that there was this big gap between what was possible and where we were and so we came in and we got busy we went to work and working with nancy pelosi and harry reid we decided that we were not going to shy away from the tough stuff we decided we weren t going to read the polls and see how we could calibrate and make sure that we didn t offend anybody what we said was there are some big challenges that nobody has taken on for a long time and we re going to take them on and some of those challenges were not of our making and we decided we were going to take them on anyway so we passed a recovery act that has now brought us back from the brink of recession and also ended up being the largest investment in clean energy and the largest investment in infrastructure and the largest investment in educational reform that we ve ever seen and then we we as nancy already mentioned we ended up saying you know it s time to put science back on the front burner and we ended up making sure that stem cell research was possible so that it could save lives and cure debilitating diseases and then we said you know it makes sense for us to make sure that women are paid the same for the same work and we signed the lilly ledbetter act and we gave insurance to 11 million children who had been left out of the children s health insurance program and we moved forward and we said we are going to bring the war in iraq to a responsible close and we re going to close guantanamo and we are going to ban torture and we are going to once again achieve the kind of moral primacy that america had previously been known for and that was the easy stuff if we stopped today this legislative session would have been one of the most productive in a generation if we just stopped but we didn t want to stop and so we decided you know what we re tired of going to town hall meetings and hearing stories about parents who were worried about their children s health care coverage we re tired of hearing stories about families going bankrupt because somebody got sick and we said yes we know the insurance companies aren t going to like it and the drug companies are going to be uncertain about it and there s going to be a whole bunch of contention out there but after decades of watching health care costs soar and coverage decline we decided we are going to take on health care and we are now closer than we have ever been and i am telling you this people we are going to get this done in the next couple of months because nancy pelosi is committed to it harry reid is committed to it and i m committed to it we are going to get this done for the american people we passed a historic energy bill out of the house and we are now making sure that the senate moves forward because it s good for our economy it is good for jobs and by the way it s good for the planet and when i hear babies you know yelping back there they re asking are you going to make sure that this planet is at an appropriate temperature that s what they re crying about they don t know english yet they don t know english yet but that s what they re saying and so we re going to get that done and we re going to reform our financial regulatory system because we can t afford to have wild risk taking on wall street end up resulting in massive layoffs and people losing their homes all across main street so and by the way we re just slipping in probably the most aggressive education reform agenda that we have seen in a very long time but that s just we re not highlighting that now just in people ask well what s been going on in washington i want to make sure that you guys are well informed but i also don t want us to be complacent i don t want us to be satisfied we have to understand that folks are hurting out there and they are scared and many of them are angry and although in some cases that anger may be misdirected there s reason for people to be scared and to be angry we ve got the highest unemployment rate that we ve seen in over 20 years people are losing their homes they re worried about the future they re angry about the fact that even before this recession hit their wages and incomes had flat lined and let s face it everybody in this room is very fortunate there are a whole bunch of folks out there who just day in day out it is a struggle and they are working just as hard as you are and love their families just as much and things are tough and so when i wake up every single day i m thinking about how do i help those families how do i make sure i m putting them back to work and it s not going to be easy because we got into a big hole as a consequence of this financial crisis and then we ve got real dangers all around the world iraq was hard afghanistan is harder iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons that s hard the middle east peace process that s hard these are not problems that are going to be solved overnight they re not going to be solved in nine months they re not going to be solved in 18 months and they may not be solved all of them in 36 months but the main message i have for you is that that spirit that we carried into the campaign that spirit doesn t die that conviction that we can do better and that sense that the effort we put in our determination our persistence our willingness to stand up to all kinds of nonsense and just keep at it day in day out that animating spirit is what is going to make sure that when my presidency is done whenever that is and nancy s speakership is done whenever that is that we re going to be able to look back and we re going to say you know this country is better that we have made a difference in the lives not just of people today but hopefully people tomorrow so i hope that so i hope that all of you guys understand we re just getting started see some of our opponents they seem to think that they could wear us down and i just want everybody to be clear i m not tired i m refreshed i am fired up i am ready to go we are not going to stop until we get health care done until we ve got an energy bill that we re proud of until we are fixing schools all across america we are not going to stop they re going to get tired we re not going to get tired we re going to keep on going thank you everybody god bless you love you dem bobama15 11 09 barack_obama hello everybody i just wanted to make a brief statement about the wonderful relationship that i ve been able to develop with president yudhoyono as many of you know i have some historic ties to indonesia but i am also extraordinarily impressed with the progress that indonesia has made in developing its democracy i want to congratulate the president for his recent re election and he now has his government in place indonesia is not only regionally important but as a member of the g20 as one of the world s largest democracies as one of the world s largest islamic nations it has enormous influence and really is i think a potential model for the kind of development strategies democracy strategies as well as interfaith strategies that are going to be so important moving forward we had a strong discussion about a range of issues and how we can create even better bilateral relations than we already have a comprehensive agreement comprehensive partnership agreement that we re developing that will cover things like education working on clean energy issues expanding the peace corps presence in indonesia counterterrorism issues these are all areas in which we intend to focus in the months and years to come we discussed some of the broader challenges of getting a meaningful copenhagen agreement and continuing to stabilize the world economy and promoting growth both through trade and investment and also through what has been discussed throughout the asean summit the idea of inclusive development and growth where it s not just at the top but is spread out among the population so i am very excited about our prospects for deepening relations in the future and i want to make sure that everybody knows that i intend to be visiting indonesia next year the invitation that s been extended to by president yudhoyono is one that i want to take up and i m hoping to be able to take michelle and the girls as well so that they can take a look at some of my old haunting grounds and again i want to thank you mr president for your leadership and your commitment to improving ties between the united states and indonesia thank you very much dem bobama15 12 09 barack_obama hello everybody hello hello thank you guys thank you everybody please have a seat we ve got a couple of special guests here today first of all the outstanding senator from the great commonwealth of virginia senator mark warner is here where s mark right there we ve got a couple of champions for job creation here in northern virginia gerry connolly and jim moran can i just ask how come they got the home depot thing and you guys don t have it what the senators are too cool to put it on what s going on here working to jumpstart our retrofit efforts around the country senator jeff merkley and congressman peter welch are here as well we ve got alexandria mayor william euille where s william there he is good to see you bill and we ve got frank blake and his team here at home depot where s frank there he is so seeing how christmas is just around the corner and we re at home depot i thought i might knock out some of my holiday shopping i figure my energy secretary wants a few million energy efficient light bulbs my press secretary wants something that will prevent leaks come on guys it took a while there for but i ve also come here to spend some time with workers and contractors and manufacturers and small business owners who ve been especially hard hit by our economic downturn a few of us just spent some time at a roundtable talking about the role they want to play in job creation and in our economic recovery and how government can best help to give them a boost i don t need to remind them or any of you about the situation we found ourselves in at the beginning of this year the economy was in a freefall as a result of our financial crisis folks couldn t access affordable credit to run their businesses or take out an auto loan or a student loan or in some cases pay their mortgages home values were plummeting and we were hemorrhaging about 700 000 jobs per month today the economy is growing for the first time in more than a year and november s job report was the best that we ve had in nearly two years but the fact is even though we ve stopped the rapid job losses that we were seeing just a few months ago more than seven million americans have lost their jobs in the two years since this recession began unemployment still stands at 10 percent so we re not finished with our task far from it we ve got a lot of work to do and i promise you in the white house we re hard at work every single day until every single person who wants a job can find a job that s why last week i announced some additional targeted steps to spur private sector hiring and give an added boost to small businesses by building on the tax cuts in the recovery act and increasing access to the loans desperately needed for small businesses to grow we ll rebuild and modernize even more of our transportation and communication networks across the country and i called for the extension of emergency relief like unemployment insurance and health benefits to help those who ve lost their jobs while boosting consumer spending and promoting job growth we also want to take some strategic surgical steps in areas that are going to generate the greatest number of jobs while generating the greatest value for our economy from the moment we took office even as we took immediate steps to deal with the financial crisis we began investing in newer stronger foundations for lasting growth one that would free us from the cycle of boom and bust that has been so painful one that can create good jobs and opportunities for a growing middle class that s at the heart of our efforts and clean energy can be a powerful engine for creating that kind of growth that s why the recovery act included the single biggest investment in job creating clean energy in our history in renewable sources of energy in advanced manufacturing in clean vehicle technology in a bigger better smarter electric grid that can carry clean homegrown energy from the places that harness it to the places that need it and after these investments have been given the better part of a year to take root a picture of their impact is starting to emerge i just received a report from vice president biden that confirms that as a result of the steps that we ve taken a major transformation of our economy is well underway we are on track to double renewable energy production and double our capacity to manufacture clean energy components like wind turbines and solar panels right here in the united states by the year 2012 doubling it but there s a lot more that we can do and that s what i ve come to home depot to talk about in our nation s buildings our homes and our office consume almost 40 percent of the energy we use and contribute almost 40 percent of the carbon pollution that we produce and everybody is talking about right now in copenhagen homes built in the first half of the last century can use about 50 percent more energy than homes that are built today and because most of our homes and office aren t energy efficient much of that energy just goes to waste while costing our families and businesses money they can t afford to throw away the simple act of retrofitting these buildings to make them more energy efficient insulation new windows and doors insulation roofing sealing leaks modernizing heating and cooling equipment is one of the fastest easiest and cheapest things we can do to put americans back to work while saving families money and reducing harmful emissions as a result of a variety of investments made under the recovery act including state and local energy grants we re on pace to upgrade the homes of half a million americans by this time next year half a million americans boosting the economy saving money and energy creating clean energy jobs that can t be outsourced but this is an area that has huge potential to grow that s why i m calling on congress to provide new temporary incentives for americans to make energy efficiency retrofit investments in their homes and we want them to do it soon i know the idea may not be very glamorous although i get really excited about it we were at the roundtable and somebody said installation is not sexy i disagree frank don t you think installation is sexy stuff here s what s sexy about it saving money think about it this way if you haven t upgraded your home yet it s not just heat or cool air that s escaping it s energy and money that you are wasting if you saw 20 bills just sort of floating through the window up into the atmosphere you d try to figure out how you were going to keep that but that s exactly what s happening because of the lack of efficiency in our buildings so what we want to do is create incentives that stimulate consumer spending because folks buy materials from home improvement stores like this one which then buys them from manufacturers it spurs hiring because local contractors and construction workers do the installation it saves consumers money perhaps hundreds of dollars off their utility bills each year and it reduces our energy consumption in the process in other words most of this stuff is going to pay for itself you put in the insulation you weatherize your home now you will make up that money in a year or two years or three years and then everything after that is just gravy but the challenge for a lot of people is getting that money up front they know that this is a smart thing to do but times are tight right now and it s hard to afford making that capital investment and that s where the government can come in to provide the incentive to help people make that initial investment so that they can recover that money over the long term these incentives will build on the work that my administration is doing to eliminate existing barriers to retrofitting millions of homes across the country my middle class task force and the council on environmental quality recently released a report titled recovery through retrofit that explains some of these hurdles and how we can overcome them providing homeowners with straightforward and reliable information on retrofitting their homes reducing their costs to do it and ensuring that we ve got a well trained workforce ready to make it happen so i think this is an extraordinary idea all the ideas that we ve discussed were talked about at the jobs forum we held at the white house a couple of weeks ago and in fact frank blake was there and mentioned that 30 percent of home depot s business is made up of small contractors of five or fewer employees who often do this kind of work and they and the folks that i met with earlier know just how important a program like this could be the economic downturn hit both small contractors and our broader construction industry especially hard construction unemployment reached 21 percent in the beginning of this year the investments we made under the recovery act has helped but obviously there s a lot more work to do to put construction workers and millions of other americans who are ready and eager to help rebuild america and move our recovery forward back on the job again and we re not going to rest until we do it so it s fitting that we re here today at home depot with folks who play a vital role in helping america s families build strong homes and strengthen the ones that they ve got because that s exactly what we re trying to do rebuild our rebuild america s house on a stronger foundation of growth and prosperity it s not going to be easy but we ve got the concrete poured and one thing is clear we re moving in the right direction so i promise you we are going to get this job done together we can leave something for future generations that makes america that much stronger and i just want to emphasize one last point there s a lot a lot of times there s an argument about economic growth versus the environment and in the debate that s going on about climate change right now a lot of people say we can t afford to deal with these emissions to the environment but the fact of the matter is energy efficiency is a perfect example of how this can be a win win manufacturers like owens corning whose ceo is here today they win because they produce this stuff and those are american jobs and right now i just heard from the ceo because australia put an incentive to do exactly what we re talking about they ve seen a huge increase in their volume of experts exports to australia well why can t we do the same thing here when it comes to contractors contractors all around the country know that this is work they can do they can do effectively they can do well and it s a reliable business it s not going to be subject to as many of the vacillations as home sales are in the current environment where you ve got a soft housing market so this can help fill the void in a major industry that s taken a big hit and the workers we have somebody who just got trained and is already on the job crawling through attics and putting all this stuff together over the course of six months or a year somebody can get trained effectively and liuna is doing terrific work with this its apprenticeship program and what this means is that people who are unemployed right now they can get a marketable skill that they can take anywhere so this is a smart thing to do and we ve got to get beyond this point where we think that somehow being smart on energy is a job destroyer it is a job creator but it s going to require some imagination and some foresight and it requires us to all work together that s what this white house is committed to doing i know that s what all of you are committed to doing we are going to generate so much business for you frank we are going to generate so much work for you guys from liuna we re going to create so much business so many business opportunities for contractors here that over the course of the next several years people are going to see this i think as an extraordinary opportunity and it s going to help america turn the corner when it comes to energy use i m excited about it i hope you are too see i told insulation is sexy thank you very much everybody dem bobama15 3 10 barack_obama hello ohio it is good to be here in the buckeye state congratulations on winning the big ten championship i m filling out my brackets now and it s even better to be out of washington for a little while yes that kid turner looks pretty good you guys are doing all right it is wonderful to be here i love you back i do couple of people i just want to make sure i give special mention to first of all you already saw him governor ted strickland in the house ted is fighting every day to bring jobs and economic development to ohio so is your terrific united states senator sherrod brown love sherrod brown your own congressman who is tireless on behalf of working people dennis kucinich did you hear that dennis go ahead say that again a couple members of congress are here u s representative betty sutton u s representative marcia fudge u s representative tim ryan u s representative charlie wilson i want to thank mayor tom perciak here in strongsville please mr mayor you re on that s a good bunch of folks we got here in ohio working hard which is why i m glad to be back and let s face it it s nice to be out of washington once in a while i want to thank connie i want to thank connie who introduced me i want to thank her and her family for being here on behalf of her sister natoma i don t know if everybody understood that natoma is in the hospital right now so connie was filling in it s not easy to share such a personal story when your sister who you love so much is sick and so i appreciate connie being willing to do so here today and and i want everybody to understand that connie and her sister are the reason that i m here today see connie felt it was important that her sister s story be told but i want to just repeat what happened here last month i got a letter from connie s sister natoma she s self employed she s trying to make ends meet and for years she s done the responsible thing just like most of you have she bought insurance she didn t have a big employer who provided her insurance so she bought her health insurance through the individual market and it was important for her to have insurance because 16 years ago she was diagnosed with a treatable form of cancer and even though she had been cancer free for more than a decade the insurance companies kept on jacking up her rates year after year so she increased her out of pocket expenses she raised her deductible she did everything she could to maintain her health insurance that would be there just in case she got sick because she figured i didn t want to be she didn t want to be in a position where if she did get sick somebody else would have to pick up the tab that she d have to go to the emergency room that the cost would be shifted onto folks through their higher insurance premiums or hospitals charging higher rates so she tried to do the right thing and she upped her deductible last year to the minimum the highest possible deductible but despite that natoma s insurance company raised her premiums by more than 25 percent and over the past year she paid more than 6 000 in monthly premiums she paid more than 4 000 in out of pocket medical costs for co pays and medical care and prescriptions so all together this woman paid 10 000 one year but because she never hit her deductible her insurance company only spent 900 on her care so the insurance company is making getting 10 000 paying out 900 now what comes in the mail at the end of last year it s a letter telling natoma that her premiums would go up again by more than 40 percent so here s what happens she just couldn t afford it she didn t have the money she realized that if she paid those health insurance premiums that had been jacked up by 40 percent she couldn t make her mortgage and despite her desire to keep her coverage despite her fears that she would get sick and lose the home that her parents built she finally surrendered she finally gave up her health insurance she stopped paying it she couldn t make ends meet so january was her last month of being insured like so many responsible americans folks who work hard every day who try to do the right thing she was forced to hang her fortunes on chance to take a chance that s all she could do she hoped against hope that she would stay healthy she feared terribly that she might not stay healthy that was the letter that i read to the insurance companies including the person responsible for raising her rates now i understand natoma was pretty surprised when she found out that i had read it to these ceos but i thought it was important for them to understand the human dimensions of this problem her rates have been hiked more than 40 percent and this was less than two weeks ago unfortunately natoma s worst fears were realized and just last week she was working on a nearby farm walking outside apparently chasing after a cow when she collapsed and she was rushed to the hospital she was very sick she needed two blood transfusions doctors performed a battery of tests and on saturday natoma was diagnosed with leukemia now the reason natoma is not here today is that she s lying on a hospital bed suddenly faced with this emergency suddenly faced with the fight of her life she expects to face more than a month of aggressive chemotherapy she is racked with worry not only about her illness but about the costs of the tests and the treatment that she s surely going to need to beat it so you want to know why i m here ohio i m here because of natoma i m here because of the countless others who have been forced to face the most terrifying challenges in their lives with the added burden of medical bills they can t pay i don t think that s right neither do you that s why we need health insurance right now health insurance reform right now i m here because of my own mother s story she died of cancer and in the last six months of her life she was on the phone in her hospital room arguing with insurance companies instead of focusing on getting well and spending time with her family i m here because of the millions who are denied coverage because of preexisting conditions or dropped from coverage when they get sick i m here because of the small businesses who are forced to choose between health care and hiring i m here because of the seniors unable to afford the prescriptions that they need i m here because of the folks seeing their premiums go up 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 percent in a year ohio i am here because that is not the america i believe in and that s not the america that you believe in so when you hear people say start over i want you to think about natoma when you hear people saying that this isn t the right time you think about what she s going through when you hear people talk about well what does this mean for the democrats what does this mean for the republicans i don t know how the polls are doing when you hear people more worried about the politics of it than what s right and what s wrong i want you to think about natoma and the millions of people all across this country who are looking for some help and looking for some relief that s why we need health insurance reform right now part of what makes this issue difficult is most of us do have health insurance we still do and so and so we kind of feel like well i don t know it s kind of working for me i m not worrying too much but what we have to understand is that what s happened to natoma there but for the grace of god go any one of us anybody here if you lost your job right now and after the cobra ran out it looks like we ve got somebody who might ve fainted down there so if we ve got a medic no no no hold on i m talking about there s somebody who might ve fainted right down here so if we can get a medic just back here they re probably okay just give her or him some space so let s just think about think about if you lost your job right now how many people here might have had a preexisting condition that would mean it d be very hard to get health insurance on the individual market think about if you wanted to change jobs think about if you wanted to start your own business but you suddenly had to give up your health insurance on your job think about what happens if a child of yours heaven forbid got diagnosed with something that made it hard for them to insure for so many people it may not be a problem right now but it s going to be a problem later at any point and even if you ve got good health insurance what s happening to your premiums what s happening to your co payments what s happening to your deductible they re all going up that s money straight out of your pocket so the bottom line is this the status quo on health care is simply unsustainable we can t have we can t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the american people and we know what will happen if we fail to act we know that our government will be plunged deeper into debt we know that millions more people will lose their coverage we know that rising costs will saddle millions more families with unaffordable expenses and a lot of small businesses are just going to drop their coverage altogether that s already what s been happening a study came out just yesterday this is a nonpartisan study it s found that without reform premiums could more than double for individuals and families over the next decade family policies could go to an average of 25 000 or more can you afford that you think your employer can afford that your employer can t sustain that so what s going to happen is they re basically more and more of them are just going to say you know what you re on your own on this we have debated this issue now for more than a year every proposal has been put on the table every argument has been made i know a lot of people view this as a partisan issue but look the fact is both parties have a lot of areas where we agree it s just politics are getting in the way of actually getting it done somebody asked what s our plan let me describe exactly what we re doing because we ve ended up with a proposal that incorporates the best ideas from democrats and republicans even though republicans don t give us any credit that s all right you know if you think about the debate around health care reform there were some who wanted to scrap the system of private insurance and replace it with government run care and look that works in a number of places but i did not see that being practical to help right away for people who really need it and on the other end of the spectrum and this is what a lot of the republicans are saying right now there are those who simply believe that the answer is to unleash the insurance industry to deregulate them further provide them less oversight and fewer rules this is called the fox guarding the henhouse approach to health insurance reform so what it would do is it would give insurance companies more leeway to raise premiums more leeway to deny care it would segment the market further it would be good if you were rich and healthy you d save money but if you re an ordinary person if you get older if you get a little sicker you d be paying more now i don t believe we should give the government or insurance companies more control over health care in america i believe it s time to give you the american people more control over your own health insurance and that s what our proposal does our proposal builds on the current system where most americans get their health insurance from their employer so if you like your plan you can keep your plan if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor i don t want to interfere with people s relationships between them and their doctors essentially here s what my proposal would change three things about the current health care system but three important things number one it would end the worst practices of the insurance companies all right this is like a patient s bill of rights on steroids within the first year of signing health care reform thousands of uninsured americans with preexisting conditions will be able to purchase health insurance for the first time in their lives or the first time since they got sick this year insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions so parents can have a little bit of security this year under this legislation insurance companies will be banned from dropping your coverage when you get sick those practices would end with this reform package all new insurance plans would be required to offer free preventive care to their customers starting this year so free check ups to catch preventable diseases on the front end that s a smart thing to do starting this year if you buy a new plan there won t be lifetime or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care you receive from your insurance companies so you won t be surprised by the fine print that says suddenly they ve stopped paying and you now suddenly are 50 000 or 100 000 or 200 000 out of pocket that won t that will not happen if this becomes law this year i see i see some young people in the audience if you re an uninsured young adult you will be able to stay on your parents policy until you re 26 years old under this law so number one number one is insurance reform the second thing that this plan would change about the current system is this for the first time uninsured individuals small businesses they d have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of congress get for themselves understand if this reform becomes law members of congress they ll be getting their insurance from the same place that the uninsured get theirs because if it s good enough for the american people it s good enough for the people who send us to washington so basically what would happen is we d set up a pool of people millions of people across the country would all buy into these pools that give them more negotiating power if you work for a big company you ve got a better insurance deal because you ve got more bargaining power as a whole we want you to have all the bargaining power that the federal employees have that big companies have so you ll be able to buy in or a small business will be able to buy into this pool and that will lower rates it s estimated by up to 14 to 20 percent over what you re currently getting that s money out of pocket and what my proposal says is if you still can t afford the insurance in this new marketplace then we re going to offer you tax credits to do so and that will add up to the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history that s what we re going to do now when i was talking about this at that health care summit some of you saw it i sat there for about seven hours i know you guys watched the whole thing but some of these folks said well we just that s a nice idea but we just can t afford to do that look i want everybody to understand the wealthiest among us can already buy the best insurance there is the least well among us the poorest among us they get their health care through medicaid so it s the middle class it s working people that are getting squeezed and that s who we have to help and we can afford to do it now it is true that providing these tax credits to middle class families and small businesses that s going to cost some money it s going to cost about 100 billion per year but most of this comes from the nearly 2 5 trillion a year that americans already spend on health care it s just right now a lot of that money is being spent badly so with this plan we re going to make sure the dollars we make the dollars that we spend on health care are going to make insurance more affordable and more secure and we re going to eliminate wasteful taxpayer subsidies that currently go to insurance company insurance companies are making billions of dollars on subsidies from you the taxpayer and if we take those subsidies away we can use them to help folks like natoma get health insurance so she doesn t lose her house and yes we will set a new fee on insurance companies because they stand to gain millions more customers who are buying insurance there s nothing wrong with them giving something back but here s the bottom line our proposal is paid for which by the way is more than can be said for our colleagues on the other side of the aisle when they passed that big prescription drug plan that cost about as much as my health care plan and they didn t pay for any of it and it went straight to the deficit and now they re up there on their high horse talking about well we don t want to expand the deficit this plan doesn t expand the deficit their plan expanded the deficit that s why we pay for what we do that s the responsible thing to do now so let me talk about the third thing which is my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for families for businesses and for the federal government so americans buying comparable coverage to what they have today i already said this would see premiums fall by 14 to 20 percent that s not my numbers that s what the nonpartisan congressional budget office says for americans who get their insurance through the workplace how many people are getting insurance through their jobs right now raise your hands all right well a lot of those folks your employer it s estimated would see premiums fall by as much as 3 000 percent which means they could give you a raise we have incorporated most of the serious ideas from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising costs of health care we go after waste and abuse in the system especially in medicare our cost cutting measures would reduce most people s premiums and bring down our deficit by up to a trillion dollars over the next two decades those aren t my numbers those are the numbers determined by the congressional budget office they re the referee that s what they say not what i say now the opponents of reform they ve tried to make a lot of different arguments to stop these changes you remember first they said well there s a government takeover of health care well that wasn t true well that wasn t true then they said well what about death panels well that turned out that didn t turn out to be true you know the most insidious argument they re making is the idea that somehow this would hurt medicare i know we ve got some seniors here with us today i couldn t tell you guys look great i wouldn t have guessed but want to tell you directly this proposal adds almost a decade of solvency to medicare this proposal would close the gap in prescription drug coverage called the doughnut hole you know something about that that sticks seniors with thousands of dollars in drug costs this proposal will over time help to reduce the costs of medicare that you pay every month this proposal would make preventive care free so you don t have to pay out of pocket for tests to keep you healthy so yes we re going after the waste the fraud the abuse in medicare we are eliminating some of the insurance subsidies that should be going to your care that s because these dollars should be spent on care for seniors not on the care and feeding of the insurance companies through sweetheart deals and every senior should know there is no cutting of your guaranteed medicare benefits period no ifs ands or buts this proposal makes medicare stronger it makes the coverage better and it makes the finances more secure and anybody who says otherwise is either misinformed or they re trying to misinform you don t let them hoodwink you they re trying to hoodwink you so look ohio that s the proposal and i believe congress owes the american people a final up or down vote we need an up or down vote it s time to vote and now as we get closer to the vote there is a lot of hand wringing going on we hear a lot of people in washington talking about politics talking about what this means in november talking about the poll numbers for democrats and republicans we need courage did you hear what somebody just said that s what we need that s why i came here today we need courage we need courage you know in the end this debate is about far more than politics it comes down to what kind of country do we want to be it s about the millions of lives that would be touched and in some cases saved by making health insurance more secure and more affordable it s about a woman who s lying in a hospital bed who just wants to be able to pay for the care she needs and the truth is what s at stake in this debate it s not just our ability to solve this problem it s about our ability to solve any problem i was talking to dennis kucinich on the way over here about this i said you know what it s been such a long time since we made government on the side of ordinary working folks where we did something for them that relieved some of their struggles that made folks who work hard every day and are doing the right thing and who are looking out for the families and contributing to their communities that just gave them a little bit of a better chance to live out their american dream the american people want to know if it s still possible for washington to look out for these interests for their future so what they re looking for is some courage they re waiting for us to act they re waiting for us to lead they don t want us putting our finger out to the wind they don t want us reading polls they want us to look and see what is the best thing for america and then do what s right and as long as i hold this office i intend to provide that leadership and i know these members of congress are going to provide that leadership i don t know about the politics but i know what s the right thing to do and so i m calling on congress to pass these reforms and i m going to sign them into law i want some courage i want us to do the right thing ohio and with your help we re going to make it happen god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama15 4 10 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you so much thank you everybody please have a seat thank you i want to thank senator bill nelson and nasa administrator charlie bolden for their extraordinary leadership i want to recognize dr buzz aldrin as well who s in the house four decades ago buzz became a legend but in the four decades since he s also been one of america s leading visionaries and authorities on human space flight few people present company excluded can claim the expertise of buzz and bill and charlie when it comes to space exploration i have to say that few people are as singularly unimpressed by air force one as those three sure it s comfortable but it can t even reach low earth orbit and that obviously is in striking contrast to the falcon 9 rocket we just saw on the launch pad which will be tested for the very first time in the coming weeks a couple of other acknowledgments i want to make we ve got congresswoman sheila jackson lee from texas visiting us a big supporter of the space program my director office of science and technology policy in other words my chief science advisor john holdren is here and most of all i want to acknowledge your congresswoman suzanne kosmas because every time i meet with her including the flight down here she reminds me of how important our nasa programs are and how important this facility is and she is fighting for every single one of you and for her district and for the jobs in her district and you should know that you ve got a great champion in congresswoman kosmas please give her a big round of applause i also want to thank everybody for participating in today s conference and gathered here are scientists engineers business leaders public servants and a few more astronauts as well last but not least i want to thank the men and women of nasa for welcoming me to the kennedy space center and for your contributions not only to america but to the world here at the kennedy space center we are surrounded by monuments and milestones of those contributions it was from here that nasa launched the missions of mercury and gemini and apollo it was from here that space shuttle discovery piloted by charlie bolden carried the hubble telescope into orbit allowing us to plumb the deepest recesses of our galaxy and i should point out by the way that in my private office just off the oval i ve got the picture of jupiter from the hubble so thank you charlie for helping to decorate my office it was from here that men and women propelled by sheer nerve and talent set about pushing the boundaries of humanity s reach that s the story of nasa and it s a story that started a little more than half a century ago far from the space coast in a remote and desolate region of what is now called kazakhstan because it was from there that the soviet union launched sputnik the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth which was little more than a few pieces of metal with a transmitter and a battery strapped to the top of a missile but the world was stunned americans were dumbfounded the soviets it was perceived had taken the lead in a race for which we were not yet fully prepared but we caught up very quick president eisenhower signed legislation to create nasa and to invest in science and math education from grade school to graduate school in 1961 president kennedy boldly declared before a joint session of congress that the united states would send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth within the decade and as a nation we set about meeting that goal reaping rewards that have in the decades since touched every facet of our lives nasa was at the forefront many gave their careers to the effort and some have given far more in the years that have followed the space race inspired a generation of scientists and innovators including i m sure many of you it s contributed to immeasurable technological advances that have improved our health and well being from satellite navigation to water purification from aerospace manufacturing to medical imaging although i have to say during a meeting right before i came out on stage somebody said you know it s more than just tang and i had to point out i actually really like tang i thought that was very cool and leading the world to space helped america achieve new heights of prosperity here on earth while demonstrating the power of a free and open society to harness the ingenuity of its people and on a personal note i have been part of that generation so inspired by the space program 1961 was the year of my birth the year that kennedy made his announcement and one of my earliest memories is sitting on my grandfather s shoulders waving a flag as astronauts arrived in hawaii for me the space program has always captured an essential part of what it means to be an american reaching for new heights stretching beyond what previously did not seem possible and so as president i believe that space exploration is not a luxury it s not an afterthought in america s quest for a brighter future it is an essential part of that quest so today i d like to talk about the next chapter in this story the challenges facing our space program are different and our imperatives for this program are different than in decades past we re no longer racing against an adversary we re no longer competing to achieve a singular goal like reaching the moon in fact what was once a global competition has long since become a global collaboration but while the measure of our achievements has changed a great deal over the past 50 years what we do or fail to do in seeking new frontiers is no less consequential for our future in space and here on earth so let me start by being extremely clear i am 100 percent committed to the mission of nasa and its future because broadening our capabilities in space will continue to serve our society in ways that we can scarcely imagine because exploration will once more inspire wonder in a new generation sparking passions and launching careers and because ultimately if we fail to press forward in the pursuit of discovery we are ceding our future and we are ceding that essential element of the american character i know there have been a number of questions raised about my administration s plan for space exploration especially in this part of florida where so many rely on nasa as a source of income as well as a source of pride and community and these questions come at a time of transition as the space shuttle nears its scheduled retirement after almost 30 years of service and understandably this adds to the worries of folks concerned not only about their own futures but about the future of the space program to which they ve devoted their lives but i also know that underlying these concerns is a deeper worry one that precedes not only this plan but this administration it stems from the sense that people in washington driven sometimes less by vision than by politics have for years neglected nasa s mission and undermined the work of the professionals who fulfill it we ve seen that in the nasa budget which has risen and fallen with the political winds but we can also see it in other ways in the reluctance of those who hold office to set clear achievable objectives to provide the resources to meet those objectives and to justify not just these plans but the larger purpose of space exploration in the 21st century all that has to change and with the strategy i m outlining today it will we start by increasing nasa s budget by 6 billion over the next five years even i want people to understand the context of this this is happening even as we have instituted a freeze on discretionary spending and sought to make cuts elsewhere in the budget so nasa from the start several months ago when i issued my budget was one of the areas where we didn t just maintain a freeze but we actually increased funding by 6 billion by doing that we will ramp up robotic exploration of the solar system including a probe of the sun s atmosphere new scouting missions to mars and other destinations and an advanced telescope to follow hubble allowing us to peer deeper into the universe than ever before we will increase earth based observation to improve our understanding of our climate and our world science that will garner tangible benefits helping us to protect our environment for future generations and we will extend the life of the international space station likely by more than five years while actually using it for its intended purpose conducting advanced research that can help improve the daily lives of people here on earth as well as testing and improving upon our capabilities in space this includes technologies like more efficient life support systems that will help reduce the cost of future missions and in order to reach the space station we will work with a growing array of private companies competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable now i recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way i disagree the truth is nasa has always relied on private industry to help design and build the vehicles that carry astronauts to space from the mercury capsule that carried john glenn into orbit nearly 50 years ago to the space shuttle discovery currently orbiting overhead by buying the services of space transportation rather than the vehicles themselves we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met but we will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies from young startups to established leaders compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere in addition as part of this effort we will build on the good work already done on the orion crew capsule i ve directed charlie bolden to immediately begin developing a rescue vehicle using this technology so we are not forced to rely on foreign providers if it becomes necessary to quickly bring our people home from the international space station and this orion effort will be part of the technological foundation for advanced spacecraft to be used in future deep space missions in fact orion will be readied for flight right here in this room next we will invest more than 3 billion to conduct research on an advanced heavy lift rocket a vehicle to efficiently send into orbit the crew capsules propulsion systems and large quantities of supplies needed to reach deep space in developing this new vehicle we will not only look at revising or modifying older models we want to look at new designs new materials new technologies that will transform not just where we can go but what we can do when we get there and we will finalize a rocket design no later than 2015 and then begin to build it and i want everybody to understand that s at least two years earlier than previously planned and that s conservative given that the previous program was behind schedule and over budget at the same time after decades of neglect we will increase investment right away in other groundbreaking technologies that will allow astronauts to reach space sooner and more often to travel farther and faster for less cost and to live and work in space for longer periods of time more safely that means tackling major scientific and technological challenges how do we shield astronauts from radiation on longer missions how do we harness resources on distant worlds how do we supply spacecraft with energy needed for these far reaching journeys these are questions that we can answer and will answer and these are the questions whose answers no doubt will reap untold benefits right here on earth so the point is what we re looking for is not just to continue on the same path we want to leap into the future we want major breakthroughs a transformative agenda for nasa now yes pursuing this new strategy will require that we revise the old strategy in part this is because the old strategy including the constellation program was not fulfilling its promise in many ways that s not just my assessment that s also the assessment of a panel of respected non partisan experts charged with looking at these issues closely now despite this some have had harsh words for the decisions we ve made including some individuals who i ve got enormous respect and admiration for but what i hope is is that everybody will take a look at what we are planning consider the details of what we ve laid out and see the merits as i ve described them the bottom line is nobody is more committed to manned space flight to human exploration of space than i am but we ve got to do it in a smart way and we can t just keep on doing the same old things that we ve been doing and thinking that somehow is going to get us to where we want to go some have said for instance that this plan gives up our leadership in space by failing to produce plans within nasa to reach low earth orbit instead of relying on companies and other countries but we will actually reach space faster and more often under this new plan in ways that will help us improve our technological capacity and lower our costs which are both essential for the long term sustainability of space flight in fact through our plan we ll be sending many more astronauts to space over the next decade there are also those who criticized our decision to end parts of constellation as one that will hinder space exploration below low earth orbit but it s precisely by investing in groundbreaking research and innovative companies that we will have the potential to rapidly transform our capabilities even as we build on the important work already completed through projects like orion for future missions and unlike the previous program we are setting a course with specific and achievable milestones early in the next decade a set of crewed flights will test and prove the systems required for exploration beyond low earth orbit and by 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space so we ll start we ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history by the mid 2030s i believe we can send humans to orbit mars and return them safely to earth and a landing on mars will follow and i expect to be around to see it but i want to repeat i want to repeat this critical to deep space exploration will be the development of breakthrough propulsion systems and other advanced technologies so i m challenging nasa to break through these barriers and we ll give you the resources to break through these barriers and i know you will with ingenuity and intensity because that s what you ve always done now i understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the moon first as previously planned but i just have to say pretty bluntly here we ve been there before buzz has been there there s a lot more of space to explore and a lot more to learn when we do so i believe it s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach and operate at a series of increasingly demanding targets while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward and that s what this strategy does and that s how we will ensure that our leadership in space is even stronger in this new century than it was in the last finally i want to say a few words about jobs suzanne pointed out to me that the last time i was here i made a very clear promise that i would help in the transition into a new program to make sure that people who are already going through a tough time here in this region were helped and despite some reports to the contrary my plan will add more than 2 500 jobs along the space coast in the next two years compared to the plan under the previous administration so i want to make that point we re going to modernize the kennedy space center creating jobs as we upgrade launch facilities and there s potential for even more jobs as companies in florida and across america compete to be part of a new space transportation industry and some of those industry leaders are here today this holds the promise of generating more than 10 000 jobs nationwide over the next few years and many of these jobs will be created right here in florida because this is an area primed to lead in this competition now it s true there are floridians who will see their work on the shuttle end as the program winds down this is based on a decision that was made six years ago not six months ago but that doesn t make it any less painful for families and communities affected as this decision becomes reality so i m proposing in part because of strong lobbying by bill and by suzanne as well as charlie i m proposing a 40 million initiative led by a high level team from the white house nasa and other agencies to develop a plan for regional economic growth and job creation and i expect this plan to reach my desk by august 15th it s an effort that will help prepare this already skilled workforce for new opportunities in the space industry and beyond so this is the next chapter that we can write together here at nasa we will partner with industry we will invest in cutting edge research and technology we will set far reaching milestones and provide the resources to reach those milestones and step by step we will push the boundaries not only of where we can go but what we can do fifty years after the creation of nasa our goal is no longer just a destination to reach our goal is the capacity for people to work and learn and operate and live safely beyond the earth for extended periods of time ultimately in ways that are more sustainable and even indefinite and in fulfilling this task we will not only extend humanity s reach in space we will strengthen america s leadership here on earth now i ll close by saying this i know that some americans have asked a question that s particularly apt on tax day why spend money on nasa at all why spend money solving problems in space when we don t lack for problems to solve here on the ground and obviously our country is still reeling from the worst economic turmoil we ve known in generations we have massive structural deficits that have to be closed in the coming years but you and i know this is a false choice we have to fix our economy we need to close our deficits but for pennies on the dollar the space program has fueled jobs and entire industries for pennies on the dollar the space program has improved our lives advanced our society strengthened our economy and inspired generations of americans and i have no doubt that nasa can continue to fulfill this role but that is why but i want to say clearly to those of you who work for nasa but to the entire community that has been so supportive of the space program in this area that is exactly why it s so essential that we pursue a new course and that we revitalize nasa and its mission not just with dollars but with clear aims and a larger purpose now little more than 40 years ago astronauts descended the nine rung ladder of the lunar module called eagle and allowed their feet to touch the dusty surface of the earth s only moon this was the culmination of a daring and perilous gambit of an endeavor that pushed the boundaries of our knowledge of our technological prowess of our very capacity as human beings to solve problems it wasn t just the greatest achievement in nasa s history it was one of the greatest achievements in human history and the question for us now is whether that was the beginning of something or the end of something i choose to believe it was only the beginning so thank you god bless you and may god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama15 5 09 barack_obama hello everybody please have a seat please have a seat thank you welcome to the white house and congratulations to the world champion philadelphia phillies we originally planned to do this last month but postponed it after the loss of the legendary voice so familiar to any sports fan the hall of fame announcer the great harry kalas and harry left us as he lived in the ballpark preparing to call another game for his beloved phillies and i know a season without the warm comfort of his voice is difficult but i also know this that harry is here with us in spirit today and he is proud of all of you he waited 28 years to call another world series championship run and what an unbelievable run it was full of come from behind wins by an underdog team that loved to prove the prognosticators wrong and so we share something in common there because nobody thought i was going to win either this is a team that never gave up you weren t supposed to win your division you weren t supposed to win postseason series against the dodgers or the rays and even though the stretch between the top and the bottom of the sixth inning in game 5 took two full days of rain you came out before the toughest fans in sports to win philadelphia s first major championship since 1983 and so this was truly a victory for both young folks but also the young at heart those who waited nearly three decades and a new generation of fans that had been waiting their entire lives it also as i mentioned to the team back here was not just a victory for the people of philadelphia but for some longtime fans like joe biden and my campaign manager david plouffe who i m not sure whether he cared more about my victory or the phillies victory but it was a close call as well as folks from the entire delaware valley this is a team made up of guys who don t quit cole hamels the unbelievable playoff ace chase utley a throwback who plays hurt and plays hard and never complains brad lidge who came to the philly organization looking for a fresh start and who went a perfect 48 for 48 in save opportunities all season long and who wiped away 28 years of near misses and heartbreak with that final strikeout and guys like our manager here charlie manual who lost his mother during the playoffs and i know how tough that is i lost my grandmother in the middle of my election and charlie i admired your perseverance during those trying times i know how hard that must have been on you also guys like shane victorino shane we don t get that many baseball players from hawaii in the majors where did shane go he was around here somewhere he was pointing out the hawaiian flag on the carpet in there saying shaka local boy but that means that there are a lot of folks looking out for you and then jimmy rollins who i have to say made some telephone calls on behalf of our campaign before the election and i couldn t be more grateful to him for that you know i remember giving a campaign speech in chester just outside of philadelphia one week before the election and it was the day after rain had suspended the series game and it was still raining and i told my staff if they can suspend the world series in the middle of a game then the least you could do is find an indoor location for my speech that was the coldest i may have ever been do you remember that plouffe i mean it was cold but true to form thousands of philadelphians showed up to brave the rain and my speech just like they had shown up to watch their beloved phillies play and so like this team i tried to give them my best i also know how it felt for the phillies to get this weight off their back because my beloved white sox finally did it three years ago after nearly 90 years of waiting so cubs fans out there take heart anything is possible i also want to point out the example that each and every one of these guys their wives and the entire organization set with their time and efforts off the field chase works on behalf of pediatric hospitals brad supports our wounded warriors cole helps those suffering with hiv aids in africa ryan howard is a national face for the boys and girls clubs participates in the make a wish foundation and takes an active role in mentoring inner city students and on and on and just as the number of african american kids taking up baseball is in severe decline the impact of having role models like ryan and jimmy to look up to just can t be measured you know jimmy likes to say that nothing comes easy in philly and that s why i think that so many americans found themselves rooting for this extraordinary team as americans we know a little something about being underdogs we know a little something about coming together when times are tough and like this team we remember a simple truth which is that we rise and fall together and no one individual is bigger than the team so phillies congratulations not only for a great season but doing it the right way and manager great job thank you dem bobama15 6 09 barack_obama thank you so much good to see you thank you so much please everybody be seated thank you very much you re very kind let me begin by thanking nancy for the wonderful introduction i want to thank dr joseph heyman the chair of the board of trustees as well as dr jeremy lazarus speaker of house of delegates thanks to all of you for bringing me home even if it s just for a day from the moment i took office as president the central challenge we ve confronted as a nation has been the need to lift ourselves out of the worst recession since world war ii in recent months we ve taken a series of extraordinary steps not just to repair the immediate damage to our economy but to build a new foundation for lasting and sustained growth we re here to create new jobs to unfreeze our credit markets we re stemming the loss of homes and the decline of home values all this is important but even as we ve made progress we know that the road to prosperity remains long and it remains difficult and we also know that one essential step on our journey is to control the spiraling cost of health care in america and in order to do that we re going to need the help of the ama today we are spending over 2 trillion a year on health care almost 50 percent more per person than the next most costly nation and yet as i think many of you are aware for all of this spending more of our citizens are uninsured the quality of our care is often lower and we aren t any healthier in fact citizens in some countries that spend substantially less than we do are actually living longer than we do make no mistake the cost of our health care is a threat to our economy it s an escalating burden on our families and businesses it s a ticking time bomb for the federal budget and it is unsustainable for the united states of america it s unsustainable for americans like laura klitzka a young mother that i met in wisconsin just last week who s learned that the breast cancer she thought she d beaten had spread to her bones but who s now being forced to spend time worrying about how to cover the 50 000 in medical debts she s already accumulated worried about future debts that she s going to accumulate when all she wants to do is spend time with her two children and focus on getting well these are not the worries that a woman like laura should have to face in a nation as wealthy as ours stories like laura s are being told by women and men all across this country by families who ve seen out of pocket costs soar and premiums double over the last decade at a rate three times faster than wages this is forcing americans of all ages to go without the checkups or the prescriptions they need that you know they need it s creating a situation where a single illness can wipe out a lifetime of savings our costly health care system is unsustainable for doctors like michael kahn in new hampshire who as he puts it spends 20 percent of each day supervising a staff explaining insurance problems to patients completing authorization forms writing appeal letters a routine that he calls disruptive and distracting giving him less time to do what he became a doctor to do and actually care for his patients small business owners like chris and becky link in nashville are also struggling they ve always wanted to do right by the workers at their family run marketing firm but they ve recently had to do the unthinkable and lay off a number of employees layoffs that could have been deferred they say if health care costs weren t so high across the country over one third of small businesses have reduced benefits in recent years and one third have dropped their workers coverage altogether since the early 90s our largest companies are suffering as well a big part of what led general motors and chrysler into trouble in recent decades were the huge costs they racked up providing health care for their workers costs that made them less profitable and less competitive with automakers around the world if we do not fix our health care system america may go the way of gm paying more getting less and going broke when it comes to the cost of our health care then the status quo is unsustainable so reform is not a luxury it is a necessity when i hear people say well why are you taking this on right now you ve got all these other problems i keep on reminding people i d love to be able to defer these issues but we can t i know there s been much discussion about what reform would cost and rightly so this is a test of whether we democrats and republicans alike are serious about holding the line on new spending and restoring fiscal discipline but let there be no doubt the cost of inaction is greater if we fail to act if we fail to act and you know this because you see it in your own individual practices if we fail to act premiums will climb higher benefits will erode further the rolls of the uninsured will swell to include millions more americans all of which will affect your practice if we fail to act one out of every five dollars we earn will be spent on health care within a decade and in 30 years it will be about one out of every three a trend that will mean lost jobs lower take home pay shuttered businesses and a lower standard of living for all americans and if we fail to act federal spending on medicaid and medicare will grow over the coming decades by an amount almost equal to the amount our government currently spends on our nation s defense it will in fact eventually grow larger than what our government spends on anything else today it s a scenario that will swamp our federal and state budgets and impose a vicious choice of either unprecedented tax hikes or overwhelming deficits or drastic cuts in our federal and state budgets so to say it as plainly as i can health care is the single most important thing we can do for america s long term fiscal health that is a fact that s a fact it s a fact and the truth is most people know that it s a fact and yet as clear as it is that our system badly needs reform reform is not inevitable there s a sense out there among some and perhaps some members who are gathered here today of the ama that as bad as our current system may be and it s pretty bad the devil we know is better than the devil we don t there s a fear of change a worry that we may lose what works about our health care system while trying to fix what doesn t i m here to tell you i understand that fear and i understand the cynicism they re scars left over from past efforts at reform after all presidents have called for health care reform for nearly a century teddy roosevelt called for it harry truman called for it richard nixon called for it jimmy carter called for it bill clinton called for it but while significant individual reforms have been made such as medicare medicaid and the children s health insurance program efforts at comprehensive reform that covers everyone and brings down costs have largely failed part of the reason is because the different groups involved doctors insurance companies businesses workers and others simply couldn t agree on the need for reform or what shape it would take and if we re honest another part of the reason has been the fierce opposition fueled by some interest groups and lobbyists opposition that has used fear tactics to paint any effort to achieve reform as an attempt to yes socialize medicine and despite this long history of failure i m standing here because i think we re in a different time one sign that things are different is that just this past week the senate passed a bill that will protect children from the dangers of smoking a reform the ama has long championed this organization long championed it went nowhere when it was proposed a decade ago i m going to sign this into law now what makes this moment different is that this time for the first time key stakeholders are aligning not against but in favor of reform they re coming out they re coming together out of a recognition that while reform will take everyone in our health care community to do their part everybody is going to have to pitch in ultimately everybody will benefit and i want to commend the ama in particular for offering to do your part to curb costs and achieve reform just a week ago you joined together with hospitals labor unions insurers medical device manufacturers and drug companies to do something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago you promised to work together to cut national health care spending by 2 trillion over the next decade relative to what it would have otherwise been and that will bring down costs that will bring down premiums that s exactly the kind of cooperation we need and we appreciate that very much thank you now the question is how do we finish the job how do we permanently bring down costs and make quality affordable health care available to every single american that s what i ve come to talk about today we know the moment is right for health care reform we know this is a historic opportunity we ve never seen before and may not see again but we also know that there are those who will try and scuttle this opportunity no matter what who will use the same scare tactics and fear mongering that s worked in the past who will give warnings about socialized medicine and government takeovers long lines and rationed care decisions made by bureaucrats and not doctors we have heard this all before and because these fear tactics have worked things have kept getting worse so let me begin by saying this to you and to the american people i know that there are millions of americans who are content with their health care coverage they like their plan and most importantly they value their relationship with their doctor they trust you and that means that no matter how we reform health care we will keep this promise to the american people if you like your doctor you will be able to keep your doctor period if you like your health care plan you ll be able to keep your health care plan period no one will take it away no matter what my view is that health care reform should be guided by a simple principle fix what s broken and build on what works and that s what we intend to do if we do that we can build a health care system that allows you to be physicians instead of administrators and accountants a system that gives americans a system that gives americans the best care at the lowest cost a system that eases up the pressure on businesses and unleashes the promise of our economy creating hundreds of thousands of jobs making take home wages thousands of dollars higher and growing our economy by tens of billions of dollars more every year that s how we ll stop spending tax dollars to prop up an unsustainable system and start investing those dollars in innovations and advances that will make our health care system and our economy stronger that s what we can do with this opportunity and that s what we must do with this moment now the good news is that in some instances there s already widespread agreement on the steps necessary to make our health care system work better first we need to upgrade our medical records by switching from a paper to an electronic system of record keeping and we ve already begun to do this with an investment we made as part of our recovery act it simply doesn t make sense that patients in the 21st century are still filling out forms with pens on papers that have to be stored away somewhere as newt gingrich has rightly pointed out and i don t quote newt gingrich that often we do a better job tracking a fedex package in this country than we do tracking patients health records you shouldn t have to tell every new doctor you see about your medical history or what prescriptions you re taking you shouldn t have to repeat costly tests all that information should be stored securely in a private medical record so that your information can be tracked from one doctor to another even if you change jobs even if you move even if you have to see a number of different specialists that s just common sense and that will not only mean less paper pushing and lower administrative costs saving taxpayers billions of dollars it will also mean all of you physicians will have an easier time doing your jobs it will tell you the doctors what drugs a patient is taking so you can avoid prescribing a medication that could cause a harmful interaction it will prevent the wrong dosages from going to a patient it will reduce medical errors it s estimated that lead to 100 000 lives lost unnecessarily in our hospitals every year so there shouldn t be an argument there and we want to make sure that we re helping providers computerize so that we can get this system up and running the second step that we can all agree on is to invest more in preventive care so we can avoid illness and disease in the first place that starts with each of us taking more responsibility for our health and for the health of our children it means quitting smoking it means going in for that mammogram or colon cancer screening it means going for a run or hitting the gym and raising our children to step away from the video games and spend more time playing outside it also means cutting down on all the junk food that s fueling an epidemic of obesity which puts far too many americans young and old at greater risk of costly chronic conditions that s a lesson michelle and i have tried to instill in our daughters as some of you know we started a white house vegetable garden i say we generously because michelle has done most of the work that s a lesson that we should work with local school districts to incorporate into their school lunch programs building a health care system that promotes prevention rather than just managing diseases will require all of us to do our parts it will take doctors telling us what risk factors we should avoid and what preventive measures we should pursue it will take employers following the example of places like safeway that is rewarding workers for taking better care of their health while reducing health care costs in the process if you re one of three quarters of safeway workers enrolled in their healthy measures program you can get screened for problems like high cholesterol or high blood pressure and if you score well you can pay lower premiums you get more money in your paycheck it s a program that has helped safeway cut health care spending by 13 percent and workers save over 20 percent on their premiums and we re open to doing more to help employers adopt and expand programs like this one our federal government also has to step up its efforts to advance the cause of healthy living five of the costliest illnesses and conditions cancer cardiovascular disease diabetes lung disease and strokes can be prevented and yet only a fraction of every health care dollar goes to prevention or public health and that s starting to change with an investment we re making in prevention and wellness programs that can help us avoid disease that harm our health and the health of our economy but as important as they are investments in electronic records and preventive care all the things that i ve just mentioned they re just preliminary steps they will only make a dent in the epidemic of rising costs in this country despite what some have suggested the reason we have these spiraling costs is not simply because we ve got an aging population demographics do account for part of rising costs because older sicker societies pay more on health care than younger healthier ones and there s nothing intrinsically wrong in us taking better care of ourselves but what accounts for the bulk of our costs is the nature of our health care delivery system itself a system where we spend vast amounts of money on things that aren t necessarily making our people any healthier a system that automatically equates more expensive care with better care now a recent article in the new yorker for example showed how mcallen texas is spending twice as much as el paso county twice as much not because people in mcallen texas are sicker than they are in el paso not because they re getting better care or getting better outcomes it s simply because they re using more treatments treatments that in some cases they don t really need treatments that in some cases can actually do people harm by raising the risk of infection or medical error and the problem is this pattern is repeating itself across america one dartmouth study shows that you re less likely you re no less likely to die from a heart attack and other ailments in a higher spending area than in a lower spending one there are two main reasons for this the first is a system of incentives where the more tests and services are provided the more money we pay and a lot of people in this room know what i m talking about it s a model that rewards the quantity of care rather than the quality of care that pushes you the doctor to see more and more patients even if you can t spend much time with each and gives you every incentive to order that extra mri or ekg even if it s not necessary it s a model that has taken the pursuit of medicine from a profession a calling to a business that s not why you became doctors that s not why you put in all those hours in the anatomy suite or the o r that s not what brings you back to a patient s bedside to check in or makes you call a loved one of a patient to say it will be fine you didn t enter this profession to be bean counters and paper pushers you entered this profession to be healers and that s what our health care system should let you be that s what this health care system should let you be now that starts with reforming the way we compensate our providers doctors and hospitals we need to bundle payments so you aren t paid for every single treatment you offer a patient with a chronic condition like diabetes but instead paid well for how you treat the overall disease we need to create incentives for physicians to team up because we know that when that happens it results in a healthier patient we need to give doctors bonuses for good health outcomes so we re not promoting just more treatment but better care and we need to rethink the cost of a medical education and do more to reward medical students who choose a career as a primary care physician who choose to work in underserved areas instead of the more lucrative paths that s why we re making a substantial investment in the national health service corps that will make medical training more affordable for primary care doctors and nurse practitioners so they aren t drowning in debt when they enter the workforce somebody back there is drowning in debt the second structural reform we need to make is to improve the quality of medical information making its way to doctors and patients we have the best medical schools the most sophisticated labs the most advanced training of any nation on the globe yet we re not doing a very good job harnessing our collective knowledge and experience on behalf of better medicine less than 1 percent of our health care spending goes to examining what treatments are most effective less than 1 percent and even when that information finds its way into journals it can take up to 17 years to find its way to an exam room or operating table as a result too many doctors and patients are making decisions without the benefit of the latest research a recent study for example found that only half of all cardiac guidelines are based on scientific evidence half that means doctors may be doing a bypass operation when placing a stent is equally effective or placing a stent when adjusting a patient s drug and medical management is equally effective all of which drives up costs without improving a patient s health so one thing we need to do is to figure out what works and encourage rapid implementation of what works into your practices that s why we re making a major investment in research to identify the best treatments for a variety of ailments and conditions now let me be clear i just want to clear something up here identifying what works is not about dictating what kind of care should be provided it s about providing patients and doctors with the information they need to make the best medical decisions see i have the assumption that if you have good information about what makes your patients well that s what you re going to do i have confidence in that we re not going to need to force you to do it we just need to make sure you ve got the best information available still even when we do know what works we are often not making the most of it and that s why we need to build on the examples of outstanding medicine at places like the cincinnati children s hospital where the quality of care for cystic fibrosis patients shot up after the hospital began incorporating suggestions from parents and places like tallahassee memorial health care where deaths were dramatically reduced with rapid response teams that monitored patients conditions and multidisciplinary rounds with everyone from physicians to pharmacists and places like geisinger health system in rural pennsylvania and intermountain health in salt lake city where high quality care is being provided at a cost well below the national average these are all islands of excellence that we need to make the standard in our health care system so replicating best practices incentivizing excellence closing cost disparities any legislation sent to my desk that does not these does not achieve these goals in my mind does not earn the title of reform but my signature on a bill is not enough i need your help doctors because to most americans you are the health care system the fact is americans and i include myself and michelle and our kids in this we just do what you tell us to do that s what we do we listen to you we trust you and that s why i will listen to you and work with you to pursue reform that works for you together if we take all these steps i am convinced we can bring spending down bring quality up we can save hundreds of billions of dollars on health care costs while making our health care system work better for patients and doctors alike and when we align the interests of patients and doctors then we re going to be in a good place now i recognize that it will be hard to make some of these changes if doctors feel like they re constantly looking over their shoulders for fear of lawsuits i recognize that don t get too excited yet now i understand some doctors may feel the need to order more tests and treatments to avoid being legally vulnerable that s a real issue now just hold on to your horses here guys i want to be honest with you i m not advocating caps on malpractice awards which i personally believe can be unfair to people who ve been wrongfully harmed but i do think we need to explore a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first how to let doctors focus on practicing medicine how to encourage broader use of evidence based guidelines i want to work with the ama so we can scale back the excessive defensive medicine that reinforces our current system and shift to a system where we are providing better care simply rather than simply more treatment so this is going to be a priority for me and i know based on your responses it s a priority for you and i look forward to working with you and it s going to be difficult but all this stuff is going to be difficult all of it s going to be important now i know this has been a long speech but we got more to do the changes that i have already spoken about all that is going to need to go hand in hand with other reforms because our health care system is so complex and medicine is always evolving we need a way to continually evaluate how we can eliminate waste reduce costs and improve quality that s why i m open to expanding the role of a commission created by a republican congress called the medicare payment advisory commission which happens to include a number of physicians on the commission in recent years this commission proposed roughly 200 billion in savings that never made it into law these recommendations have now been incorporated into our broader reform agenda but we need to fast track their proposals the commission s proposals in the future so that we don t miss another opportunity to save billions of dollars as we gain more information about what works and what doesn t work in our health care system and as we seek to contain the cost of health care we also have to ensure that every american can get coverage they can afford we must do so in part because it s in all of our economic interests each time an uninsured american steps foot into an emergency room with no way to reimburse the hospital for care the cost is handed over to every american family as a bill of about 1 000 that s reflected in higher taxes higher premiums and higher health care costs it s a hidden tax a hidden bill that will be cut as we insure all americans and as we insure every young and healthy american it will spread out risk for insurance companies further reducing costs for everyone but alongside these economic arguments there s another more powerful one and it is simply this we are not a nation that accepts nearly 46 million uninsured men women and children we are not a nation that lets hardworking families go without coverage or turns its back on those in need we re a nation that cares for its citizens we look out for one another that s what makes us the united states of america we need to get this done so we need to do a few things to provide affordable health insurance to every single american the first thing we need to do is to protect what s working in our health care system so just in case you didn t catch it the first time let me repeat if you like your health care system and your doctor the only thing reform will mean to you is your health care will cost less if anyone says otherwise they are either trying to mislead you or don t have their facts straight now if you don t like your health care coverage or you don t have any insurance at all you ll have a chance under what we ve proposed to take part in what we re calling a health insurance exchange this exchange will allow you to one stop shop for a health care plan compare benefits and prices and choose a plan that s best for you and your family the same way by the way that federal employees can do from a postal worker to a member of congress you will have your choice of a number of plans that offer a few different packages but every plan would offer an affordable basic package again this is for people who aren t happy with their current plan if you like what you re getting keep it nobody is forcing you to shift but if you re not this gives you some new options and i believe one of these options needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market so that force so that we can force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest now i know that there s some concern about a public option even within this organization there s healthy debate about it in particular i understand that you re concerned that today s medicare rates which many of you already feel are too low will be applied broadly in a way that means our cost savings are coming off your backs and these are legitimate concerns but they re ones i believe that can be overcome as i stated earlier the reforms we propose to reimbursement are to reward best practices focus on patient care not on the current piecework reimbursements what we seek is more stability and a health care system that s on a sounder financial footing and the fact is these reforms need to take place regardless of whether there s a public option or not with reform we will ensure that you are being reimbursed in a thoughtful way that s tied to patient outcomes instead of relying on yearly negotiations about the sustainable growth rate formula that s based on politics and the immediate state of the federal budget in any given year and i just want to point out the alternative to such reform is a world where health care costs grow at an unsustainable rate and if you don t think that s going to threaten your reimbursements and the stability of our health care system you haven t been paying attention so the public option is not your enemy it is your friend i believe let me also say that let me also address a illegitimate concern that s being put forward by those who are claiming that a public option is somehow a trojan horse for a single payer system i ll be honest there are countries where a single payer system works pretty well but i believe and i ve taken some flak from members of my own party for this belief that it s important for our reform efforts to build on our traditions here in the united states so when you hear the naysayers claim that i m trying to bring about government run health care know this they re not telling the truth what i am trying to do and what a public option will help do is put affordable health care within reach for millions of americans and to help ensure that everyone can afford the cost of a health care option in our exchange we need to provide assistance to families who need it that way there will be no reason at all for anyone to remain uninsured indeed it s because i m confident in our ability to give people the ability to get insurance at an affordable rate that i m open to a system where every american bears responsibility for owning health insurance so long as we provide a hardship waiver for those who still can t afford it as we move towards this system the same is true for employers while i believe every business has a responsibility to provide health insurance for its workers small businesses that can t afford it should receive an exemption and small business workers and their families will be able to seek coverage in the exchange if their employer is not able to provide it now here s some good news insurance companies have expressed support for the idea of covering the uninsured and they certainly are in favor of a mandate i welcome their willingness to engage constructively in the reform debate i m glad they re at the table but what i refuse to do is simply create a system where insurance companies suddenly have a whole bunch of more customers on uncle sam s dime but still fail to meet their responsibilities we re not going to do that let me give you an example of what i m talking about we need to end the practice of denying coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions the days of cherry picking who to cover and who to deny those days are over i know you see it in your practices and how incredibly painful and frustrating it is you want to give somebody care and you find out that the insurance companies are wiggling out of paying this is personal for me also i ve told this story before i ll never forget watching my own mother as she fought cancer in her final days spending time worrying about whether her insurer would claim her illness was a preexisting condition so it could dem bobama15 6 10 barack_obama well hello pensacola it is great to be here i want everybody first of all to give a big round of applause to chief elison talabong for leading us in the pledge and singing our national anthem to lieutenant commander randy ekstrom for the wonderful invocation i want to thank your outstanding local leaders for welcoming me here today including captains chris plummer mike price and brad martin give them a big round of applause and your great senior enlisted leaders including master chief mike dollen give them a big round of applause i want to thank all the spouses and families who are joining us here today you hold our military families together so we honor your service as well it is great to be here in pensacola america s oldest naval air station the cradle of naval aviation we ve got navy all the students of the naval air technical training center we ve got training wing six maybe a few blue angels we ve got the united states marines in the house maybe a few air force and army too now i don t know how many could be here because they re out there on the water right now responding to the spill but i want to thank all the folks at coast guard station pensacola for their outstanding work and i know somebody who is especially proud of them and that s the former commandant of the coast guard who postponed his retirement to answer his country s call once more and coordinate the federal response effort to the spill and that s admiral thad allen please give him a big round of applause now i was just down at the pensacola beach gulf pier at the fish sandwich snack bar now i don t know if any of you ever checked it out it s a nice spot we were there with some of florida s state and local leaders to discuss the situation here i want to acknowledge the hard work that s being done by the governor of florida charlie crist florida s chief financial officer alex sink senators bill nelson george lemieux representatives who are here today we got jeff miller and corrine brown and ted deutch please give them a big round of applause we ve got escambia county commissioner grover robinson and pensacola mayor mike wiggins thank you very much for your outstanding efforts i know all of you join me in thanking these leaders and their communities because they re your neighbors for the incredible support that they give all the men and women and your families here in pensacola so we re grateful to you but this is my fourth visit to the gulf coast since the start of this spill yesterday i was over in gulfport mississippi theodore alabama and now pensacola assessing the situation reviewing the response seeing what needs to be done better and faster and talking with folks whether fishermen or small business people and their families who are seeing their lives turned upside down by this disaster here in pensacola the beautiful beaches are still open the sand is white and the water is blue so folks who are looking for a good vacation they can still come down to pensacola people need to know that pensacola is still open for business but that doesn t mean that people aren t angry that doesn t mean that people aren t scared that doesn t mean that people have concerns about the future we all have those concerns and people have every right to be angry those plumes of oil are off the coast the fishing waters are closed tar balls have been coming ashore and everybody is bracing for more so i ll say today what i ve been saying up and down the coast over the last couple of days and over the last month yes this is an unprecedented environmental disaster it s the worst in our nation s history but we re going to continue to meet it with an unprecedented federal response and recovery effort the largest in our nation s history this is an assault on our shores and we re going to fight back with everything we ve got and that includes mobilizing the resources of the greatest military in the world here at naval air station pensacola you ve been one of the major staging areas you ve helped to support the response effort and i thank you for that and i know the people of pensacola thank you for that and all along the gulf coast our men and women in uniform active guard and reserve from across the country are stepping up and helping out they re soldiers on the beaches putting out sandbags and building barriers and cleaning up the oil and helping people process their claims for compensation from bp they re sailors and marines offering their ships and their skimmers and their helicopters and miles of boom they re airmen overhead flying in equipment and spraying dispersant and of course there are coast guardsmen and women on the cutters in the air working around the clock and when i say this is the largest response of its kind in american history i mean it we ve got more than 5 000 vessels on site skimmers tugs barges dozens of aircraft more than 27 000 personnel are on the scene fighting this every day putting out millions of feet of boom and cleaning the shores all told we ve authorized the deployment of 17 500 national guardsmen to respond to this crisis so far only about 1 600 have been activated that leaves a lot of guardsmen ready to help and if our governors call on them i know they ll be ready because they re always ready so i want the people of this region to know that my administration is going to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to deal with this disaster that includes the additional actions i announced yesterday to make sure that seafood from the gulf is safe to eat it includes steps we ve taken to protect the safety of workers involved in the cleanup it includes the new command structure i announced this morning to make sure states and local communities like pensacola have the autonomy and the resources that they need to go forward and that includes something else making sure bp pays for the damages that it has caused because this isn t just an environmental disaster for many families and communities it s an economic disaster here in pensacola and the panhandle tourism is everything and when the tourists stay home it ripples out and hits folks across these communities the charter boats the hotels the restaurants the roadside stores the shops the suppliers the dive shops and if your inland waters are contaminated if the bays and bayous are contaminated it could be devastating changing the way of life down here for years to come i m going to speak to the nation tonight about this but let me say to the people of pensacola and the gulf coast i am with you my administration is with you for the long haul to make sure bp pays for the damage that it has done and to make sure that you are getting the help you need to protect this beautiful coast and to rehabilitate the damaged areas to revitalize this region and to make sure that nothing like this happens ever again that is a commitment i am making to the people of florida and people all across this gulf now that spirit that spirit of resolve and determination and resilience that s the same spirit we see in all of you the men and women in uniform the spirit we ll need to meet other challenges of our time obviously the news has been dominated lately by the oil spill but our nation is at war and all of you have stepped forward you volunteered you took an oath you stood tall and you said i will serve and here at pensacola you re carrying on the proud tradition of naval aviation that spans a century here at the barrancas national cemetery our heroes from yesterday s wars are still inspiring us and like generations before you you re no strangers to sacrifice our prayers are with the families and friends of the crews that you lost in that training exercise two months ago today we send out our thoughts and prayers to all the folks from pensacola on the frontlines at this very moment including iraq and afghanistan they are making us incredibly proud and so are you as naval aviators and naval flight officers you ll soon earn your wings of gold many of you will prove yourselves as indispensable air crews the mechanics the engineers the electricians the maintenance crews people s lives depending on what you do each and every day i know you re looking ahead to your first operational tours to join the fleet and your squadrons and within weeks some of you may find yourselves serving on a carrier deck in the arabian sea or working a busy flight line in afghanistan and as you begin your careers as you look ahead to a life of service i want you to know on behalf of the american people that your nation thanks you your nation appreciates you your nation will stand with you every step of the way and as your commander in chief i want you to know something i will not hesitate to use force to protect the american people or our vital interests but i will also never risk your lives unless it s absolutely necessary and if it is necessary we are going to back you up to the hilt with the strategy and the clear mission and the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done right that s my promise to every one of you every man and woman who wears america s uniform that includes the right strategy in iraq where we re partnering with the iraqi people for their long term security and prosperity and thanks to the honor and the heroism of our troops we are poised to end our combat mission in iraq this summer on schedule as we end the war in iraq we re pressing forward in afghanistan we re working to break the momentum of the taliban insurgency and train afghan security forces strengthen the capacity of the afghan government and protect the afghan people we will disrupt and dismantle and ultimately defeat al qaeda and its terrorist affiliates and we will support the aspirations of people around the world as they seek progress and opportunity and prosperity because that s what we do as americans as you meet the missions we ask of you we re going to make sure you re trained and equipped to succeed that s why we halted reductions in the navy that s why we increased the size of the marine corps that s why we re investing in the capabilities and technologies of tomorrow and as we come up on the 100th anniversary of naval aviation next year we re committed to the next generation of aircraft we re going to keep you the best trained best led best equipped military that the world has ever known some of that is about technology but the most important thing in our military is our people it s all of you and as you advance through the ranks and start families of your own we want to be there for your loved ones too this is one of the defining missions of the first lady michelle obama on sunday she visited the navy marine corps team and their families at camp pendleton and they had a tough week because five outstanding marines from pendleton gave their lives last week in afghanistan during her visit michelle had a message for their families and for all military families america is going to keep faith with you too when a loved one goes to war that family goes to war that s why we re working to improve family readiness and increase pay and benefits working to give you more time between deployments increasing support to help spouses and families deal with the stresses and the separation of war but this can t be the work of government alone as michelle has been saying 1 percent of americans may be fighting our wars but 100 percent of americans need to be supporting our men and women and their families in uniform you guys shouldn t be carrying the entire burden that s why michelle is challenging every sector of american society to support our military families not just now with our nation at war but at every stage of your lives so we re improving care for our wounded warriors especially those with post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury we re funding the post 9 11 gi bill to give you and your families the chance to pursue your dreams we ve made a historic commitment to our veterans with one of the largest percentage increases to the va budget in the past 30 years those are concrete actions we ve taken to meet the commitment i have to you and that the american people have to you because you ve always taken care of america america needs to take care of you and that s my main message here today we re all in this together in our country there isn t a military world and a civilian world we re all americans there s not democrats and republicans when you take the long view we re all americans we all rise and fall together and we all need to do our part to get through the challenges we face as a people so yes we re emerging from the worst economic crisis since the great depression too many folks are still out of work here in florida and around the country yes we re a nation at war with adversaries who will stop at nothing to strike our homeland and would kill innocent people women and children with no compunction yes we re now battling the worst economic environmental disaster in american history any one of these challenges alone would test our country confronting them all at once might overwhelm a lesser nation but look around you look at the person standing next to you you look around and you see the strength and resilience that will carry us through you look at this installation and the forts that have stood watch over this bay and its people for centuries through the rise and fall of empires through a terrible civil war and as a nation healed itself we became a beacon to the world we ve endured all of these men and women in uniform all of you represent the same spirit of service and sacrifice as those who ve gone before who defeated fascism defeated tyranny prevailed in a long cold war over communism and now in our time you ve toppled regimes based on terror and dictatorship and you ve given new hope to millions of people you ve earned your place among the greatest of generations and look at the people of this city and this region fishermen who ve made their lives on the water families who ve lived here for generations hardworking folks who ve had to endure more than their share tough economic times and hurricanes and storms that forced so many families and communities to start over from scratch but they never gave up they started over and they rebuilt stronger than before as americans we don t quit we keep coming none of these challenges we re facing are going to be easy none of them are going to be quick but make no mistake the united states of america has gone through tough times before and we always come out stronger and we will do so again and this city and this region will recover it will thrive again and america s military will prevail in the mission to keep our country safe and our nation will endure from these trials stronger than before that is the history of the united states of america that is the legacy of our armed forces and i promise you that we will not falter past generations have passed on this precious gift to us and future generations are depending on us and as i look out on each and every one of your faces i m absolutely confident that you will meet that challenge god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama15 7 10 barack_obama hello everybody thank you so much thank you everybody please have a seat have a seat before i get started first of all let me thank your fine young mayor mr mayor it is wonderful to see you and i am partial to daughters as i know you are and i hope at some point i get a chance to meet yours but thank you for the great work that you ve done somebody who i think is one of the best governors in the country jennifer granholm please give her another round of applause jennifer has been relentless about bringing manufacturing 21st century manufacturing here to michigan and this is just an example of the kinds of projects she s been working on for so long i m very grateful for the presence of the chairman of lg chem bon moo koo thank you very much for your presence here today as well as the ceo and vice chairman peter bahn suk kim thank you very much please give them a big round of applause and i want to acknowledge your congressman pete hoekstra is here in the audience please give him a round of applause now it is wonderful to be here in holland and i am especially to be here as compact power breaks ground on this site this is about more than just building a new factory it s about building a better future for this city for this state and for this country now i want to say what everyone here in holland and everybody here in michigan knows too well which is that these have been some pretty tough times a brutal recession came on top of what was already a lost decade for the middle class especially for manufacturing towns here in the midwest even before this recession cost so many jobs incomes had been flat jobs were moving overseas while the price of everything from health care to college tuitions were skyrocketing it was a decade in which it seemed like the values that built this country were turned upside down folks who were working hard and honestly every day to meet their responsibilities were running in place or falling behind while high flying financial speculators who were cutting corners were rewarded with lavish bonuses and benefits it got even worse when the financial crisis sent our economy into a freefall and cost 8 million americans their jobs michigan was hit harder than anywhere else an on top of this recession you were also rocked by the near collapse of the domestic auto industry it was in the middle of this crisis that my administration walked through the door and we had a number of difficult decisions that we had to make and make quickly some including shoring up u s automakers weren t real popular as you will recall but with millions of jobs at stake with the future of so many families and businesses on the line we acted to prevent the country from slipping into an even deeper crisis and that s why when my administration began we cut taxes for small business owners and for 95 percent of working families here in michigan and across the country we extended unemployment insurance to help folks get through these storms and through small business loans a focus on research and development and investments in high tech fast growing sectors like clean energy we ve aimed to grow our economy by harnessing the innovative spirit of the american people because we did shovels will soon be moving earth and trucks will soon be pouring concrete where we are standing because of a grant to this company a grant that s leveraging more than 150 million private dollars as many as 300 people will be put to work doing construction and another 300 will eventually be hired to operate this plant when it s fully up and running and this is going to lead to growth at local businesses like parts suppliers and restaurants it will be a boost to the economy of the entire region now this is the ninth advanced battery plant to begin construction because of our economic plan these plants will put thousands of people to work this includes folks who were working at a couple of facilities being built in michigan by another battery technology company called a123 and in every case we ve been guided by a simple idea government can t generate the jobs or growth we need by itself but what government can do is lay the foundation for small businesses to expand and to hire for entrepreneurs to open up shop and test new products for workers to get the training they need for the jobs of the 21st century and for families to achieve some semblance of economic security so our goal has never been to create a government program but rather to unleash private sector growth and we are seeing results there are 4 5 million unemployed workers already hired whose employers are eligible for a payroll tax exemption a tax break that i signed into law earlier this year just yesterday the council of economic advisers put out a detailed report and it showed that for things like tax credits that go to advanced energy manufacturing or loan guarantees for small businesses or financing for infrastructure projects we re leveraging nearly three private dollars for every public dollar that s spent that s an incredible bang for our buck by making critical seed money available we ve attracted more than 280 billion in investment from private companies and others which will mean new jobs and brighter futures for families in holland and in communities across the country and by the way these aren t just any jobs these are jobs in the industries of the future just a few years ago american businesses manufactured only 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles 2 percent but because of what s happening in places like this in just five years we ll have up to 40 percent of the world s capacity 40 percent so for years you ve been hearing about manufacturing jobs disappearing overseas you are leading the way in showing how manufacturing jobs are coming right back here to the united states of america for example the workers at this plant already slated to produce batteries for the new chevy volt learned the other day that they re also going to be supplying batteries for the new electric ford focus as soon as this operation gears up that means that by 2012 the batteries will be manufactured here in holland michigan so when you buy one of these vehicles the battery could be stamped made in america just like the car and here s another benefit because of advances in the manufacture of these batteries their costs are expected to come down by nearly 70 percent in the next few years that s going to make electric and hybrid cars and trucks more affordable for more americans and that not only means more jobs but it also means we re going to be less dependent on foreign oil so taken together these are the efforts that are going to create jobs and help build a stronger economy in the long run and i want to express my appreciation to the michigan leaders not only here but in congress who supported the economic plan that made this possible as a result of the steps that we took an economy that was shrinking is now growing we were bleeding jobs at a rate of 750 000 per month the january that i was sworn in now the economy is adding private sector jobs and has been for six straight months now this doesn t mean that we re out of the woods not by a long shot but it does mean that there are small business owners who ve been able to get the loans they need to hire a few more people it means there are salespeople with a few more dollars in their pockets because customers are buying again it means there are innovators and entrepreneurs finally able to take a chance on a new idea and it means there are construction workers heading to the jobsite each day just like some of the folks who are here today because our country is slowly coming back from this vicious recession the progress we ve made so far is not nearly enough to undo the enormous damage that this recession caused and i ve said since the first day i took office it s going to take time to reverse the toll of the deepest downturn in a generation i won t be satisfied as long as even one person who needs a job and wants to work can t find one but what i m absolutely clear about and what this plant will prove is that we are headed in the right direction and that the surest way out of the storms we ve been in is to keep moving forward and not go backwards there are some folks who want to go back who think that we should return to the policies that helped to lead to this recession some of them made the political calculation that it s better to obstruct than to lend a hand they said no to tax cuts they said no to small business loans they said no to clean energy projects now it doesn t stop them from being at ribbon cuttings but that s okay i just want to make sure that everybody understands that this country would not be better off if this plant hadn t gotten built and if the clean energy package that made it possible wasn t in place and when you head out to any of the two dozen battery technology plants coming online that are going to be able to be stamped made in america on their products i want folks who have been pushing against these economic policies to explain to these workers why it would be better for these things to be manufactured in other countries or why the solar plants and wind turbines and biodiesel refineries that are being built shouldn t have happened most workers and most entrepreneurs understand we re not in the clear yet but they understand we re headed in the right direction there s something about america that no matter what the trials are what the tribulations are we stay optimistic and we keep going forward and we know if we work hard enough and we re determined enough if we try as hard as we can and if we re willing to experiment and if things don t work we put them aside but we keep on going that sooner or later we re going to see a brighter day and we re going to pass on a better america to our children and our grandchildren that s been our history that s the legacy that we inherit so to everybody in holland i want you to understand these have been a tough few years but we have been through tough times before and at our best we ve risen to the challenges we face by tapping the drive and the talent and the ingenuity that has always been at the heart of america s success and that s what s happening all across america as we speak that s not only how we re going to emerge from this period of turmoil that s how we re going to actually come out stronger than we were before so to all of you who have been part of this project thank you this is a symbol of where michigan is going this is a symbol of where holland is going this is a symbol of where america is going god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama15 9 09a barack_obama thank you thank you lordstown thank you guys it is good to be back in ohio and it s good to be at one of gm s flagship plants with all of you i ve got a list of some wonderful people that i want to make sure that i acknowledge real quick first of all a former colleague of mine somebody who is now collaborating with me to make sure that working people are getting a fair shake please give it up for your united states senator sherrod brown where s sherrod there he is your congressman doing an outstanding job great young man tim ryan from the neighboring congressional district somebody who is responsible for cash for clunkers betty sutton and an outstanding congressman from ohio as well charlie wilson give charlie a big round of applause we ve got a great trio of mayors here mayor michael o brien of warren michael chaffee of lordstown and mayor jay williams of youngstown give them all a big round of applause we ve got state senator and minority leader capri cafaro is here how are you she s a fireplug i remember her the ceo of general motors fritz henderson is in the house plant manager john donahue is in the house uaw servicing agent john mohan is in the house president of the uaw local 1112 jim graham is in the house president of local 1714 david green is in the house chairperson of 1112 ben strickland and chairperson of local 1714 will adams well listen i just finished having a productive discussion with some of your coworkers about the challenges you re facing both here and in your communities and how we can meet them we talked about the economic troubles that you ve been weathering here in trumbull county since long before our current crisis yes if you ve got chairs feel free to sit down you don t have to stand this whole time but let s face it we ve been going through some crises since since before this economic crisis this financial crisis hit over the years you ve seen factories close you ve seen friends and neighbors and relatives laid off your daughters and sons have had to move away in search of jobs and opportunity i know it was painful around here earlier this year when three shifts at this plant were cut down to one today the local unemployment rate is unacceptably high in this region second highest in ohio so i know at times it seems like this community has been on the brink over and over and over again there are some who see this pain and suggest that somehow it s inevitable that the only way for america to get ahead is for communities like yours to be left behind but i know better we know better we know that our success as a nation depends on the success of communities just like this one we know that the battle for america s future is not just going to be won in the big cities not just on the coasts but in towns like elkhart indiana and pittsburgh pennsylvania and warren and youngstown that s what we re fighting for that s why i m proud to be here with all of you you work hard you meet your responsibilities you deserve better you deserve better than the attitude that s prevailed in washington and wall street and sometimes in detroit for far too long an attitude that valued wealth over work and selfishness over sacrifice and greed over responsibility that s why i want you to know that every day that i step into the oval office i am thinking about you and your families i am fighting for you and your families and i m going to keep on doing it as long as i m president of the united states now sometimes that involves making tough decisions that have been put off for too long that s my job making tough decisions if it s an easy decision it doesn t get to my desk as i ve said before i didn t run for president to manage auto companies it wasn t something on my to do list it wasn t even something on my want to do list i like driving cars sometimes you know i can change a spark plug or change a tire but i don t know so much about cars that i wanted to be deeply involved in the car industry but here s what i knew i wasn t going to put any more tax dollars on the line if it meant perpetuating bad business decisions that got us to a point where the u s auto industry was in crisis but in the midst of a deep recession and financial crisis for me to have just let the auto industry collapse to vanish would have caused unbelievable damage to our economy not just here in lordstown but all across the country so we intervened for one simple and compelling reason your survival and the success of our economy depended on making sure that we got the u s auto industry back on its feet there were some people who said you can t do it but our belief was that if gm retooled and reinvented itself for the 21st century it would be good for american workers it would be good for american manufacturing it would be good for america s economy and i m pleased to report that that is exactly what has begun to happen at plants like this and others across the country so i know that some of those decisions may not have been popular but i will tell you what i will double down on the american people and the american worker and all of you any day of the week one of the other efforts we undertook was the cash for clunkers program folks said that wouldn t work either that program was good for automakers it was good for consumers and by the way it was good for our environment and you know what the chevy cobalt that you build here was one of gm s most sought after cars under that program dealers across the country started running out you need to build more and one other thing for too long our auto industries faced uncertain and conflicting fuel economy standards and that made it difficult for you to plan down the road and that s why today we are launching for the first time in history a new national standard aimed at both increasing gas mileage and decreasing greenhouse gas pollution for all cars and trucks sold in america it creates an even playing field it s an action that is long overdue it will give our auto companies clarity and stability and predictability in the past an agreement like this would have been impossible but this time it was different because automakers the uaw environmental advocates democrats republicans states all across the country all of them came together pledging to set aside the quarrels of the past for the sake of the future because of the steps we ve taken this plant is about to shift into high gear a hundred and fifty of your coworkers came back to work yesterday more than 1 000 will be coming back to work in less than three weeks as production of the cobalt ramps up that s worth standing for and next year this plant will begin production of the chevy cruze a new car that will get more than 40 miles per gallon i just sat in the car i asked for the keys they wouldn t give me the keys i was going i was going to take it for a little spin but it was nice sitting in there it was a roomy car 40 miles per gallon so if you picked up a copy of the youngstown vindicator back in january you would have seen a headline that read worries mount in wake of layoffs a couple weeks ago you would have read a different story good news at lordstown is good news for all and today you made by the way some more good news i understand that the one millionth cobalt rolled off the assembly line late last night so i don t want to just congratulate you i want to thank you you re doing your part to move us forward and make sure that the high quality well engineered safe and fuel efficient cars of the future will be built where they ve always have been built right here in ohio right across the midwest right here in the united states of america now even though you re proving that american automakers are getting back in the game i think everybody understands our economic troubles are far from over i don t want to overpromise here we ve still got a lot of work to do we got in a deep hole over a course of years it s going to take some years to get back out of this hole we have a lot of work to do not just to get this community moving again and this economy moving again but we ve got to build a stronger foundation for economic growth into the future there s some people in washington they ve already forgotten just what it was that we walked into eight months ago so let just go through let me go through the facts here real quick in case you all have forgotten a financial system near collapse 700 000 workers losing their jobs every single month a sudden decline in credit that made it difficult to take out a mortgage or a student loan or a small business loan or an auto loan you couldn t get an auto loan it was so bad that experts of all political persuasions feared a second coming of the great depression so we took bold swift action to make sure that didn t happen we moved to keep responsible homeowners in their homes we moved to jumpstart lending we passed a sweeping recovery act without the usual washington earmarks or pork barrel spending but putting people back to work and that plan is now working i want you to know what s happened here one third of our recovery act went to tax relief we cut your taxes ninety five percent of america s working families 4 5 million families right here in ohio we cut your taxes and we cut taxes for small businesses on investments that they make that was a third of our recovery act and that gave everybody a little more money in their pockets to spend which helped boost the economy then what we did was we put another third into emergency relief all those americans who were laid off we extended unemployment benefits and that s made a difference for 12 million americans including 570 000 right here in ohio and for all those people who had lost their jobs they were worried about losing their health care they were going to have to try to get on cobra but you know how much cobra costs having to pick up your whole health care premium so what we did was we made health insurance through cobra 65 percent cheaper for families while they were looking for work we saved the jobs of tens of thousands of state and local workers including 336 police officers right here in ohio that was part of our recovery act now the last third is investing in your towns and your future over in canfield we awarded a competitive contract to a local company to repair a bridge on route 11 that allowed them to avoid layoffs they were otherwise going to make that allowed local folks to keep coming to work doing the work america needs done we ve got projects like that all across ohio and all across the country rebuilding our roads and our bridges laying broadband lines making sure that we re building the wind turbines and solar panels that are going to drive our energy future that s what the recovery act has been all about now we ve still got a long way to go but there is little debate that the decisions we ve made and the steps we ve taken helped stop our economic freefall in some places they ve helped us turn the corner home sales are up business investment is starting to stabilize for the first time in 18 months we re actually seeing growth in american manufacturing instead of decline i know that s small consolation when so many people you know are still out of work it s going to take some time to achieve a complete recovery but i want you all to know i will not rest until anybody who s looking for a job can find one and i m not talking about just any job but good jobs that give every american decent wages and decent benefits and a fair shot at the american dream that s what i m fighting for every single day we re fighting for an america where your children will be armed with the skills they need to compete with any worker anywhere in the world we re making a historic commitment to strengthening and improving education from cradle to a career and i ve set a goal by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world there s no reason why we can t have that number one ranking once again we re fighting for an america where clean energy generates green jobs that can t be outsourced that help us free ourselves from our grip of foreign oil jobs that make sure the cars of the future and the technologies like the new batteries that power them are made right here in the united states of america and yes just in case you were wondering we are fighting for an america where no american should have to worry about going without health insurance or feel that one illness could cost them everything they have we re going to reform the system to provide more security and stability to those of you who have health insurance we re going to offer quality affordable choices to those who currently don t have health insurance and we re going to bring health care costs for our families and our businesses and our government under control think about it if you re a member of the union right now you re spending all your time negotiating about health care you need to be spending some time negotiating about wages but you can t do it but i want to make sure that you understand you ve got to understand fritz s position here he s trying to build this company back up and if health care costs are going up 30 percent or 20 percent every year it s very tough for him so we all have an interest in reforming the health care system so that the cost for employers don t go up that means the cost for you don t go up and that means you can actually start bringing home a little more take home pay that s what this is all about if you ve already got health insurance so that s what we re fighting for to bring lordstown and youngstown and warren back to make sure that our towns and our middle class a middle class forged just like in plants that you re seeing here i want them not just to survive today but to thrive tomorrow i want you to deliver a message to the gm team members who are manning the line and couldn t join us today as long as you ve still got an ounce of fight left in you i ve got a ton of fight left in me i ve said it before i m skinny but i m tough and as long as i have the privilege of being your president i m going to keep fighting for a future that is brighter for this community and brighter for ohio and brighter for the united states of america i need your help so give it to me guys because we re going to rebuild right here right now we re going to make ohio work again thank you everybody god bless you dem bobama15 9 09b barack_obama thank you thank you afl cio thank you thank you very much thank you so much please everybody have a seat thank you thank you guys thank you very much everybody all right you guys are making me blush thank you thank you so much everybody you know i tell you what the white house is pretty nice but there s nothing like being back in the house of labor let me begin by recognizing a man who came to washington to fight for the working men and women of pennsylvania and who has a distinguished record of doing just that arlen specter i want to give my thanks and the thanks of our nation to one of the great labor leaders of our time a man whose entire life has been devoted to working people who brought new life to a movement who worked tirelessly on behalf of organized workers and who will be stepping down tomorrow your president john sweeney john i know that maureen is looking forward to seeing a little more of you and your granddaughter kennedy is about to get a whole lot more spoiled by her grandpa but we are so proud of the work that you ve done and grateful for your lifetime of service i know it s bad luck to congratulate somebody before they are officially elected but i m going to go ahead and take my chances and congratulate the man who will pick up john s mantle the son and grandson of pennsylvania coal miners a man who worked his way through college to lead the united mine workers my friend a fiery advocate for america s ideals rich trumka i also want to congratulate the officers coming in with rich arlene who will be continuing her service and liz who will be making history as the first woman elected secretary treasurer i am looking forward to working with every single one of you now being here with all of you is a reminder of what we re trying to do in washington and why i m there in the first place because one of the fundamental reasons i ran for president was to stand up for hardworking families to ease the struggles to lift the hopes and make possible the dreams of middle class americans your stories are what drive me each and every day in the white house stories i read about in letters or i hear about in town hall meetings or somebody grabs me in a rope line and starts telling me something stories i remember from the campaign trail stories like one told by steve skvara a proud member of the united steelworkers in indiana steve spent 34 years at ltv steel until a car accident left him with a disability and forced him to retire when the company went broke a couple years later steve lost his pension and his family lost their health care so rising to ask a question at the cfl the afl cio debate during the campaign steve said and i m quoting him now every day of my life i sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family and i can t afford to pay for her health care and as he said it he got choked up and his voice started to crack brothers and sisters this isn t just about steve this is about all of us because when hardworking americans like steve succeed that s when organized labor succeeds and when organized labor succeeds that s when our middle class succeeds and when our middle class succeeds that s when the united states of america succeeds that s what we re fighting for for over half a century the success of america has been built on the success of our middle class it was the creation of the middle class that lifted this nation up in the wake of a great depression it was the expansion of the middle class that opened the doors of opportunity to millions more it was a strong middle class that powered american industries and propelled america s economy and made the 20th century the american century and the fundamental test of this century of our time is whether we will heed this lesson whether we will let america become a nation of the very rich and the very poor of the haves and the have nots or whether we will remain true to the promise of this country and build a future where the success of all of us is built on the success of each of us that s the future i want to build that s the future the afl cio wants to build that s the future the american people want to build that s the future that i ve been working to build from the moment i took office now we ve been hearing a lot of stuff from folks who aren t that friendly to me or the union movement so let s just take a stroll down memory lane see so let s just remember where we were when i took the oath of office a little over eight months ago at the time folks were fearing the complete collapse of our entire financial system our economy was shedding about 700 000 jobs a month our credit markets were frozen folks couldn t get a home loan they couldn t get a car loan they couldn t get a student loan if they needed it what was a deep recession threatened to become a great depression you remember that right okay that s why we acted boldly and swiftly to pass an unprecedented economic recovery act a plan that didn t include any of the usual washington earmarks or pork barrel spending but what it did include was a guarantee to uphold davis bacon and pay prevailing wages because of the recovery act we re keeping a promise i made to give all of you 95 percent of working americans a tax cut a tax cut that will benefit nearly 5 million families in pennsylvania we increased and extended unemployment insurance to 12 million americans including hundreds of thousands of pennsylvanians we made sure that they could get health insurance if they were looking for a job because cobra was too expensive reduced the cost of it by 65 percent so a lot of families out there were able to hang onto their health care even during the downturn we re putting americans to work across this country rebuilding crumbling roads and bridges and waterways with the largest investment in our infrastructure since eisenhower created the interstate highway system in the 1950s all in all many middle class families will see their incomes go up by about 3 000 because of the recovery act helping them get back much of what they ve lost due to this recession so i know times are still tough for working people i know too many people are still looking for work or worried they ll be the next ones let go but the recovery act is making a difference we ve stopped our economic freefall that s something everybody can agree on but here s the problem even before this last financial crisis the economy had problems just last week a census report came out showing that in 2008 before the downturn family income fell to its lowest point in over a decade and more families slid into poverty folks at the top 1 percent did pretty good everybody else saw their wages and income flat that s unacceptable and i refuse to let america go back to the culture of irresponsibility and greed that made it possible back to an economy with soaring ceo salaries and shrinking middle class incomes back to the days when banks made reckless decisions that hurt wall street and main street alike we re not going to go back to those days it would be bad for unions bad for the middle class and bad for the united states of america we re not turning back we re moving forward we re not turning back we re moving forward and that s why we need to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity by creating the jobs of the future by reforming our health care system by laying down tough rules of the road to protect consumers from abuse let the markets function fairly and freely and ensure that we never experience another crisis like this again that s how we ll build an economy that works for working americans that s how we ll help our children climb higher than we did that s how we ll grow our great american middle class i love you too sister although it sounds like you ve been hollering too much your throat was all we re going to grow our middle class with policies that benefit you the american worker and as john sweeney noted i ve set up a middle class task force to do just that run by my outstanding vice president that scrappy kid from scranton pennsylvania joe biden we ll grow our middle class by building a stronger labor movement that s why i named hilda solis daughter of a union member as our new labor secretary hilda and i know that whether we re in economic good economic times or bad economic times labor is not the problem labor is part of the solution that s why we ve begun reversing and replacing old anti labor executive orders policies with ones that protect your benefits and protect your safety and protect your rights to organize and collectively bargain that s why the very first bill i signed into law was the lilly ledbetter act to uphold the basic principle of equal pay for equal work and that s why i stand behind the employee free choice act because if a majority of workers want a union they should get a union we ll grow we ll grow our middle class by creating jobs for americans who want one not just any jobs but jobs with good wages and good benefits jobs that give a person the satisfaction of knowing they ll meet their responsibilities to their families jobs that aren t just a source of income but a source of pride and self respect every american deserves that much earlier today i visited a gm plant in youngstown ohio that is youngstown here in the house this plant is rehiring about a thousand workers to make the cars of tomorrow that s a sign of life in our auto industry and i m pleased to see it but you know what i don t want to just see jobs returning to our auto industry i want to see them being created across this country in every industry that s why we re investing in a clean energy economy that will free america from the grip of foreign oil and create millions of new green jobs that can t be outsourced that s why i ve named a new point person to jumpstart american manufacturing so that we can make made in america not just a slogan we want to make it a reality we ll grow our middle class by doing a better job educating our sons and daughters it was the gi bill that helped strengthen the middle class in the 20th century and our generation deserves the same kind of commitment and that s why we ve begun improving standards holding ourselves more accountable making college and advanced training more affordable and offering students a complete and competitive education from the cradle to the classroom from college through a career that s how we ll prepare every child in america not just some children but every child in america to out compete any worker in the world and yes we ll grow our middle class by finally providing quality affordable health insurance in this country health care can t wait it can t wait few have fought few have fought for this cause harder few have championed it longer than you our brothers and sisters in organized labor you re making phone calls knocking on doors showing up at rallies because you know why this is so important you know this isn t just about the millions of americans who don t have health insurance it s about the hundreds of millions more who do americans who worry that they ll lose their insurance if they lose their job who fear their coverage will be denied because of a preexisting condition who know that one accident or illness could mean financial ruin in fact a new report from the kaiser family foundation was released today showing that family premiums rose more than 130 percent over the last 10 years three times faster than wages they now average over 13 000 a year the highest amount on record which is why when you go in to negotiate you can t even think about negotiating for a salary a wage increase because the whole negotiation is about trying to keep the benefits you already have that s not just the fault of the employer it s the fault of a broken health care system that s sucking up all the money when are we going to stop it when are we going to say enough is enough how many more workers have to lose their coverage how many more families have to go into the red for a sick loved one how much longer are we going to have to wait it can t wait we can t wait my friends we have talked we have talked this issue to death year after year decade after decade that s why i said last week before a joint session of congress i said the time for bickering is over the time for games has passed now is the time for action now is the time to deliver on health insurance reform the plan i announced will offer more security and more stability to americans who have insurance it will offer insurance to americans who don t and it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families our businesses and our government if you already have health insurance through your job and because many of you are members of unions you do nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change your coverage or your doctor let me repeat nothing in this plan will require you to change your coverage or your doctor what this plan will do is make your insurance work better for you it ll be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most they won t be able to place some arbitrary cap on how much coverage you can receive in a given year or a given lifetime we ll place a limit on how much you can be charged for out of pocket expenses because in the united states of america nobody should go broke just because they got sick insurance companies will be required to cover at no extra charge routine checkups and preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies because there s no reason we shouldn t be catching diseases like breast cancer or colon cancer before they get worse it makes sense it saves money and it will save lives so that s what we re offering to people who already have health insurance more stability and security for the tens of millions of americans who don t have health insurance the second part of this plan will finally offer them offer you affordable choice we ll do this with a new insurance exchange a marketplace where individuals and small businesses they can shop for affordable health insurance plans that works for them and because there will be one big group these uninsured americans they have leverage and they can drive down the cost of care and get a better deal than they re getting right now that s how large companies and government employees get affordable insurance it s how everybody in congress including those who are always critical of government get their insurance it s time to give every opportunity to americans that members of congress give to themselves i ve also said that one of the options in this exchange should be a public option now let me be clear let me be clear because there s been a lot of misinformation out here about this this would just be an option nobody would be forced to choose it no one with insurance would be affected but what it would do is offer americans more choices and promote real competition and put pressure on private insurers to make their policies affordable and treat their customers better now when you re talking with some of your friends and neighbors they might say well that all sounds pretty good but how are you going to pay for it and that s a legitimate question because i inherited the 1 3 trillion deficit when i came into office that s the other thing people have been a little selective about they don t seem to remember how we got into this mess but it s a legitimate question how are we going to dig ourselves out of this big financial hole we re in so let me try and answer it the plan i m proposing is going to cost 900 billion over 10 years that s real money although that s less than we ve spent on iraq and afghanistan wars it s less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few americans that congress passed during the previous administration wars and tax cuts that were not paid for and ballooned our deficits to record levels and didn t help america s working families we won t make that mistake again we will not pay for health insurance reform by adding to our deficits i will not sign a bill that adds a dime to our deficits either now or in the future what we will do is pay for it by eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and waste and abuse including billions of dollars in subsidies for insurance companies that pad their profits but aren t improving care we ll also set up a commission of doctors and medical experts to encourage the adoption of common sense best practices that can further reduce costs and raise quality in the years ahead that s how we ll pay for most of this plan by using money that s already being spent in the health care system but spent badly so don t pay attention to those scary stories about how medicare benefits will be cut that will never happen on my watch we will protect medicare so it s a safety net for our seniors that they can count on today tomorrow forever not a dollar from the medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan not a single dollar these are the reforms i m proposing these are the reforms labor has been championing these are the reforms the american people need these are reforms i intend to sign into law quality affordable health insurance a world class education good jobs that pay well and can t be outsourced a strong labor movement that s how we ll lift up hardworking families that s how we ll grow our middle class that s how we ll put opportunity within reach in the united states of america the battle for opportunity has always been fought in places like pittsburgh places like pennsylvania it was here that pittsburgh railroad workers rose up in a great strike it was here that homestead steelworkers took on pinkerton guards at carnegie mills it was here that something happened in a town called aliquippa it was a tough place for workers in the 1930s a benevolent dictatorship said the local steel boss labor had no rights the foreman s whim ruled the day and the company hired workers from different lands and different races the better to keep them divided it was thought at the time but despite threats and harassment despite seeing organizers fired and driven out of town these steelworkers came together serb and croat italian and pole and irish and greek and kin of alabama slaves and sons of pennsylvania coal miners and they took their case all the way to the supreme court securing the right to organize up and down the ohio river valley and all across america and i know that if america can come together like aliquippa and rise above barriers of faith and race and region and party then we will not only make life better for steelworkers like steve in indiana not only make life better for members of the afl cio but will make possible the dreams of middle class families and make real the promise of the united states of america for everybody that s what we re fighting for that s what this white house is committed to that s what the afl cio is committed to and arm in arm we are going to get this done i got a question for you are you fired up are you ready to go are you fired up are you ready to go let s go get this done thank you everybody god bless you dem bobama15 9 09c barack_obama thank you so much everybody please have a seat thank you it was first of all wonderful to meet all of you as we were taking pictures and i want to say that i am so pleased to be here not only because of arlen s outstanding track record but because like me he married up in life we are both lawyers we both appreciate the constitution we re both fighters and sometimes people count us out so although we come from different parts of the country we have this bond this thread and as arlen i think has mentioned one of the most important bonds is we re basically a couple of kansas kids who somehow got displaced him in philadelphia and me in honolulu i want to make sure that i give a word of thanks to bob casey who is one of the finest people i know has just been a great friend to me and his entire family obviously is just legendary here in pennsylvania so please give bob casey a big round of applause and i want to thank david cohen for being such a great supporter of mine a great supporter of arlen s and i suspect that david is in the middle of just about every civic activity that takes place in philadelphia and he does it with just a lot of class and always a smile on his face so thank you david for all your help you know if you d think back to where we were eight months ago it s hard to imagine when i was sworn into office we were in the midst of the worst recession since the great depression and a lot of economists both left and right thought that we might be plunging into a great depression we were shedding 700 000 jobs a month credit was almost entirely frozen not only could you not get a bank loan or a student loan or a home loan but banks weren t lending money to each other and at that point i think there was a sense that in the absence of effective government action we could end up being in a real disaster so we determined that we had to move boldly and swiftly to turn this around and we put together after consulting with the best economists in the country from all walks of life and all parties we decided that we needed to put together a recovery package that would have a variety of elements it would provide tax cuts to businesses and individuals it would provide support for states that were seeing their budgets plummet it would provide help to individuals who were being laid off and it would start building the kind of infrastructure that would move america into the 21st century and there s been a little bit of a selective memory about a little historical revisionism about the situation that we were in but even then even as scared as people were there were some in washington who decided that this is a political opportunity this is ideological that we should fight this and perpetuate the kind of gridlock that has caused us so many problems in the past i m pleased that i had a partner in arlen specter in getting that recovery package done because it displayed all the traits that i think makes him such an exceptional senator obviously the first independence he is somebody who has always fought for the people who sent him to washington and not just party a terrific intellect being able to follow all the arguments about how to structure a plan that had the best chance of being effective toughness being able to put up with an awful lot of grief in the midst of what was a eventually pretty acrimonious debate and integrity willingness to stand for what he believed in because of arlen we were able to get that recovery package passed we are now seeing that this economy has pulled itself back from the brink the financial markets are working again the stock market has recovered a lot of its value which means people s 401 k s have recovered a lot of their value banks aren t lending as much as we d like but at least things are functioning we saw this month for the first time in three years manufacturing actually ticking up consumer confidence is up we are not out of the woods but we ve pulled back from the abyss now the challenge for us is figuring out how do we create an economy that doesn t go through these wild boom and bust cycles how can we create sustained growth how can we make sure that we ve laid the foundations for a competitive america in the 21st century just like the foundation was laid for the american century the 20th century and in that process there are going to be some critical decisions that we re going to have to make are we willing to invest in the education of our young people so that we can develop the science and engineering and technology and mathematical skills that keep us at the cutting edge we re not going to get that free it s not just going to be a matter of money it s also going to be a matter of reform but we ve got to have a sense of urgency about how we pick up the pace in our schools we re going to have to have an entirely new approach to energy not just because of climate change and the environment not just because of our addiction to foreign oil that ends up having us send billions of dollars overseas but also because it is putting us at a huge competitive disadvantage we re going to have to fix our health care system we re in the midst of a major debate about health care and if you are a liberal then you re concerned about making sure that 30 million american citizens get coverage if you re a moderate and not all that interested in politics you should still be concerned about the fact that your health care is less secure and less stable than it has ever been and if you re a conservative then you should know that the only thing that is going to allow us to close the structural deficit that we have that is piling on debt for our children and our grandchildren is if we are able to bend the cost curve and reduce the cost of health care inflation over the next 20 30 years if we don t do that there s no way for us to balance our budget there s so much at stake in fixing our health care system now this is before we start getting into foreign policy and the decisions we re going to have to make in terms of how we project our power effectively how do we balance diplomacy and our military might in an intelligent way so that we re serving the national security interests of the american people how do we make sure that we preserve our civil liberties even in the midst of going aggressively after those who would try to do us harm how do we affirm our constitutional values at a time when the country is becoming more diverse that can lead to incredible dynamism that s always been a source of strength for america but it can also lead to contentiousness and conflict and strife on each and every one of these questions the presidency can only take you so far i ve got a clear sense of where we need to go and i m absolutely convinced that if we make the right decisions right now and we battle through some difficult choices and we re willing to make some sacrifices that we are going to be able to lay that foundation for the next generation but the president can t do it alone every single issue that i just mentioned i ve got to have effective tough partners with integrity and vision who feel accountable not to special interests in washington but feel accountable to the folks who sent him there that s the kind of senator you ve got in bob casey that s the kind of senator that you have had for many years and you need to continue to have in arlen specter and that s why i m here today i m here today because i m going to need all of you to redouble your efforts in the months to come to fight for arlen because he s fighting for you and he s fighting for what s right and it s not going to be easy it s not easy because we live in a polarized environment and politics has become sport and it s hard to sustain complex arguments about why we have to make choices that don t always seem real attractive on the surface and so that creates political vulnerabilities for all of us and all of you who know better who know why it s so important for us to make these tough decisions you ve got to make sure that you support somebody who s got the savvy and intelligence and the tenacity to actually get things done that s who arlen specter is i m proud to call him a friend i am glad that he is in the senate and i m going to keep on needing him in the senate in the years to come so i hope that all of you work as hard as you can if you do then i m absolutely confident that we re going to get through these tough times and brighter days are going to be ahead not just for pennsylvania but for the united states of america so thank you so much for being here everybody god bless you thank you dem bobama15 9 10 barack_obama thank you very much thank you to senator menendez and to the chairwoman of the congressional hispanic caucus congresswoman velzquez for those extraordinary introductions but more importantly for the outstanding work that you do each and every day please give them a huge round of applause thank you to the congressional hispanic caucus institute for inviting us this evening michelle and i are thrilled to be here with so many friends to kick off hispanic heritage month i want to acknowledge a few people before i begin my remarks first somebody who i believe is going to go down in history as one of the greatest speakers of the house of all time nancy pelosi is here two of our outstanding cabinet secretaries are in the house secretary of the interior ken salazar and our wonderful secretary of labor hilda solis i want to thank our mistress of ceremonies soledad o brien i want to congratulate eva longoria parker and arturo sandoval and lin manuel miranda on your well deserved awards this evening i love you back and i want to thank all the members of congress the local elected officials the chci alumni and all who work day in and day out to advance the hispanic community and america as a whole i also want to acknowledge and thank all of the outstanding latino leaders serving across my administration because i am proud that the number of latinos i ve nominated to senate confirmed positions at this point far exceeds any administration in history and i m especially proud that a whole bunch of them are latinas and as i ve said before one of my proudest moments of my presidency was the day justice sonia sotomayor swore an oath and ascended to our nation s highest court and sparked new dreams for countless young girls all across america now some of you may remember i first joined you here two years ago as a candidate for this office and we spoke then about how after years of failed policies here in washington after decades of putting off the toughest challenges we had finally reached a tipping point a point where the fundamental promise of america was at risk we talked about how these challenges impacted the latino community but also about how they re bigger than any one community i said then that if a young child is stuck in an overcrowded and underperforming school it doesn t matter if she is black or white or latino she is our child and we have a responsibility to her that if millions of latinos end up in the emergency room because they don t have health care it s not just a problem for one community it s a problem for all of america when millions of immigrants toil in the shadows of our society that s not just a latino problem that is a american problem we ve got to solve it as dr king told cesar chavez all those years ago our separate struggles are really one and that truth became painfully clear when less than a week after i had appeared before the chc some of the biggest wall street firms collapsed and the bottom fell out of our economy millions of families across america were plunged into the deepest recession of our lifetimes and a latino community that had been hard hit before the recession was hit even harder so when i took office i insisted that we could only rebuild our economy if we started growing the economy for all of our people not just some of our people if we provided economic security for all of our working families all across america we had to renew the fundamental idea that everybody in america everybody in america has a chance to make it if they try no matter who they are no matter what they look like no matter where they come from or where they were born that s the idea that drives us the chance to make of our lives what we will and i know that many of you are thinking tonight about a task that is central to that idea and that s our fight to pass comprehensive immigration reform now i know that many of you campaigned hard for me and understandably you re frustrated that we have not been able to move this over the finish line yet i am too but let me be clear i will not walk away from this fight my commitment is getting this done as soon as we can we can t keep kicking this challenge down the road there s no doubt the debate over how to fix all this has been a fractured and sometimes painful one in this country and let s face it there are some who seek political advantage in distorting the facts and in dividing our people we ve seen it before some take advantage of the economic anxiety that people are feeling to stoke fear of those who look or think or worship differently to inflame passions between us and them i have news for those people it won t work there is no us and them in this country there is only us there is no latino america or black america or white america or asian america there is only the united states of america all of us all of us joined together indivisible if we appeal to the american people s hopes over their fears we ll get this done we already know what this reform looks like just a few years ago when i was a senator we built a bipartisan coalition around a basic framework under the leadership of senator kennedy and senator mccain and president bush we rallied with leaders from the business community and the labor communities and the religious communities many of you were there and the bill we forged wasn t perfect it wasn t what any one person might think was optimal but because folks were willing to compromise we came up with a commonsense comprehensive reform that was so far from the false debates the notion that somehow on the one hand there s mass amnesty or on the other hand there s some unworkable mass deportation that wasn t what we were talking about and the american people i think were ready to embrace a commonsense solution and we passed that bill through the united states senate but since that effort fall apart fell apart we have seen how broken and bitter and divisive our politics has become today the folks who yell the loudest about the federal government s long failure to fix this problem are some of the same folks standing in the way of good faith efforts to fix it and under the pressures of partisanship and election year politics most of the 11 republican senators who voted for that reform just four years ago have backed far away from that vote today that s why states like arizona have taken matters into their own hands and my administration has challenged that state s law not just because it risks the harassment of citizens and legal immigrants but it is the wrong way to deal with this issue it interferes with federal immigration enforcement it makes it more difficult for law local law enforcement to do its job it strains state and local budgets and if other states follow suit we ll have an unproductive and unworkable patchwork of laws across the country we need an immigration policy that works a policy that meets the needs of families and businesses while honoring our tradition as a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws we need it for the sake of our economy we need it for our security and we need it for our future and i understand it may not be the easy thing to do politically it s easier to grandstand but i didn t run for president to do what s easy i ran to do what s hard i ran to do what s right and when i think something is the right thing to do even my critics have to admit i m pretty persistent i won t let it go they can call me a lot of things but they know i don t give up now the senate is going to have a chance to do the right thing over the next few weeks when senator reid brings the dream act to the floor keep in mind in the past this was a bill that was supported by a majority of democrats and republicans there s no reason why it shouldn t receive that same kind of bipartisan support today i ve been a supporter since i was in the senate and i will do whatever it takes to support the congressional hispanic caucus efforts to pass this bill so that i can sign it into law on behalf of students seeking a college education and those who wish to serve in our country s uniform it s the right thing to do we should get it done now i want to be straight with you to make real progress on these or any issues we ve got to break the republican leadership s blockade let s be clear about this without the kind of bipartisan effort we had just a few short years ago we can t get these reforms across the finish line their leadership has made reaching 60 votes the norm for nearly everything the senate has to do the american people s business is on hold because simply put the other party s platform has been no for example consider the public servants i ve nominated to carry out the people s business most of them had been supported widely and approved unanimously by senate committees but they ve been held up for months by the republican leadership we can t even get an up or down vote on their confirmation i nominated a man that you all know well well i did nominate salazar i got him confirmed raul yzaguirre to be our ambassador to the dominican republic raul is right here now raul has been waiting for 10 months to be the ambassador to the dominican republic right now there are 21 judges who ve been held up for months while their courts have sat empty three of them are outstanding latinos like judge albert diaz who i nominated to the fourth circuit court he s been waiting for 10 months this is a widely respected state court judge military judge and marine corps attorney he was approved unanimously by the judiciary committee but just last month the senate republican leader objected to a vote on his confirmation yet again and when he was asked why he basically admitted it was simply partisan payback partisan payback we can t afford that kind of game playing right now we need serious leaders for serious times that s the kind of leadership this moment demands that is what we need right now because when i get out of this town and i m meeting with people talking to folks nobody is asking me hey barack which party is scoring more points nobody is saying oh don t worry about us i just want you to do what s best for november what they re interested in is how they re going to find a job when they ve only known one trade their whole life how are they going to put their kids through school how are they going to pay the bills if they get sick how are they going to retire when their savings have plunged after this financial crisis they re the folks we re here for they re the folks we re fighting for that s why we passed wall street reform for every hard working family who s tired of taken getting taken advantage of every time they opened their credit card bill or mortgage payment or tried to send a remittance send a payment to help their parents or families abroad that s why we re reforming america s schools so that all our children have a chance to learn the skills they need for today s economy we eliminated tens of billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies to big banks that provide student loans and we re taking that money to make college affordable for millions of students including more than a hundred thousand latino students that s what the chc did that s what this administration did that s why we passed health insurance reform for americans who are sick of being gouged by insurance companies that jack up rates and deny coverage because you ve got a preexisting condition now millions of americans with insurance can get free preventive care now 9 million latinos and tens of millions of americans will be able to afford quality health care for the first time that s why we cut taxes for small business owners and 95 percent of working americans thank you instead of giving tax breaks to corporations to create jobs overseas we re cutting taxes for companies that put our people to work here at home instead of tax breaks for the wealthiest americans who don t need them and weren t even asking for them we re fighting to cut taxes for you middle class folks all across the country that s what we re about that s what we re fighting for and when it comes to just about everything we ve tried to do almost every republican in congress has folded their arms and said no even where we usually agree they say no they re thinking about the next election instead of the next generation trying to score political points instead of solving problems they said no to help for small businesses no to middle class tax cuts no to making college affordable no to comprehensive immigration reform their platform apparently is no se puede is that a bumper sticker you want on your car in fact the chairman of their campaign committee said that if they take over they d go back to the exact same agenda that s a quote the exact same agenda they had when they were in power they re saying they ll repeal wall street reform they ll try to repeal health insurance reform they ll give the special interests a pen and let them write the rules again and right now because of that republican blockade those special interests even foreign corporations can spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign ads without even having to disclose who they are you ve seen some of these ads you know they call themselves americans for apple pie or moms for motherhood and then they use their voice to drown out yours to let wall street write rules that take advantage of main street to let insurance companies write rules that let them cover or drop folks whenever and however they please to go back to that exact same agenda well tell me you something that agenda didn t work out so well for the latino community it didn t work out for anybody here in america it is not going to solve the challenges we face we can t go backwards we ve got to go forwards so let me say this not just to the folks who are in this room but to the latino community across this country you have every right to keep the heat on me and keep the heat on the democrats and i hope you do that s how our political process works but don t forget who is standing with you and who is standing against you don t ever believe that this election coming up doesn t matter don t forget who secured health care for 4 million children including the children of legal immigrants don t forget who won new pell grants for more than 100 000 latino students don t forget who fought for credit card reform a new agency to protect consumers from predatory lending and protections for folks who send remittances back home don t forget who cut taxes for working families don t forget who your friends are no se olviden don t forget we can t go back now not when there is so much work to be done we ve got to move forward we ve got to move forward on jobs and on the economy and on immigration reform and all the unfinished business of our time these are serious times they require serious leaders and serious citizens and your voice matters your voice can make the difference so let me close by saying this long before america was even an idea this land of plenty was home to many peoples to british and french to dutch and spanish to mexican to countless indian tribes we all shared the same land we didn t always get along but over the centuries what eventually bound us together what made us all americans was not a matter of blood it wasn t a matter of birth it was faith and fidelity to the shared values that we all hold so dear we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal endowed with certain inalienable rights life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness that s what makes us unique that s what makes us strong the ability to recognize our common humanity to remember that in this country equality and opportunity are not just words on a piece of paper they re not just words in the mouths of politicians they are promises to be kept and that is our calling now to keep those promises for the next generation no matter which way the political winds shift i will stand with you for that better future and if you stand with me and if we remember that fundamental truth that divided we fall but united we are strong and out of many we are one then you and i will finish what we have started we will make sure that america forever remains an idea and a place that s big enough and bold enough and brave enough to accommodate the dreams of all our children and all our people for years to come si se puede thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama16 10 09 barack_obama thank you thank you so much thank you so howdy aggies it is an honor to be here with all of you today at this outstanding university now i was told that if the winds had been different today president bush would have parachuted in to kick things off here that s the story but that s okay i am still thrilled to be introduced by this man whose vision of service we celebrate today and whose life of service is an inspiration to all of us and much to his likely embarrassment i m going to talk a little more about the singular nature and impact of that service in a minute but before i do i d like to recognize several other people joining us today starting with president bush s extraordinary wife mrs barbara bush where did she go madam first lady there she is over there as we all know mrs bush has an impressive record of service herself particularly her tremendous work to promote family literacy across this country so we are very very grateful for everything that she s done on behalf of our nation we have our secretary of defense here secretary bob gates who i think you know a little bit about he has served for four decades under eight presidents with integrity with candor with an undying commitment to keep this nation safe and i know how much he loved his time as president here at a m which is why he was relieved to hear that this week s game is out at kansas state i didn t want him to be sneaking away to relive his glory days leading yell practice never returning to washington but i can tell you and i want everybody to understand this although it is an enormous sacrifice for him to have left this institution he could not be doing a better job on our behalf and i want you all to know that i m very proud to have him as our secretary of defense i want to acknowledge former secretary of state jim baker who s served this country for decades as a trusted advisor to presidents and more importantly as a statesman i also want to thank another texan ambassador ron kirk for his terrific work as our united states trade representative former senator sam nunn for his lifetime of service i want to mention particularly senator nunn s visionary work on nuclear nonproliferation and we have two outstanding members of congress who are here with us today chet edwards and sheila jackson lee where s chet chet is over there i want to recognize melody barnes director of the white house domestic policy council for her outstanding work on service and many other issues stand up melody i want to thank michelle nunn the ceo of points of light as well as neil bush chairman of the board for their wise leadership i want to congratulate mallory myers today s daily point of light award winner and commend her for her tireless work to pulling together the big event which i know is no easy task and i understand that this event is just one of the countless ways that students at this university are giving back to this community from tutoring children and building homes to raising money to fight cancer and aids to continuing a m s proud tradition of military service so i can see why president bush chose to locate his library at this school what you all are doing right here is precisely what he was talking about when he called for those thousand points of light and became the first president to create a white house office devoted solely to promoting volunteerism it s a vision that s changed lives across this country including that of a young woman who went to work for an organization called public allies to prepare young people for public service careers an organization initially funded by the bush administration and her experience there inspired her to devote her own life to serving others and that young woman happens to be my wife michelle obama and i ve been instructed to convey her gratitude today as well but here s the thing george bush isn t just a president who promoted the ethic of service long before it was fashionable he s a citizen whose life has embodied that ethic from his daring service as a navy pilot during world war ii enlisting the day he turned 18 to his time in congress at the cia and as u n ambassador vice president and president he easily could have chosen a life of comfort and privilege and instead time and again when offered a chance to serve he seized it it was second nature to him the continuation of a proud family tradition that he and mrs bush clearly passed on to their children and grandchildren and one which he s carried on throughout his quote unquote retirement how s that working out mrs bush spends it working tirelessly to help others without fanfare or any expectation or desire for recognition though i do recall one endeavor of his that actually drew quite a bit of attention that was back in 2005 and some of you may remember this he and president clinton had agreed to come together to raise money for the nations devastated by the tsunami that killed nearly 230 000 people in asia and that partnership between these two presidents would continue in the wake of hurricane katrina as first longtime friends and aides to both of them were suspicious let s tell the truth now they were convinced that the other guy was using their guy to burnish his own reputation that s how staffers are but then when one operative expressed his concern to president clinton the president sharply rebuked him replying this is much more important than politics this is much more important than politics that s the conviction that drew these two outstanding leaders once fierce adversaries to join forces the belief that there s some things that are beyond politics that there s no place for partisanship when a great american city is underwater that the r or d next to your name is irrelevant when nations in crisis need the world s help that certain moments call on us to stop the back and forth and the bickering to forget the old rivalries and embrace a common purpose that is bigger than our differences and while while you might not always know it from watching the cable news shows or listening to folks on the radio i think it s clear that we stand at one of those moments we re seeing turmoil in our economy that s left many people wondering whether their kids will have the same opportunities that they had to pursue their dreams we face threats to our health our climate and of course our security that have left many of our young people wondering what kind of future they ll be leaving for their own kids and if anyone here thinks that our government has all the solutions president bush and i will be the first to tell you that you ll be sorely disappointed government can build the best schools with the best teachers but we can t run the pta or chaperone those field trips or mentor those kids after school or have them sit down and do their homework at night we can pass the most comprehensive health reform bill but congress can t be on the ground in our communities caring for the sick and helping people lead healthier lives government can give our troops the equipment they need and the pay and benefits that they have earned and nobody is working harder at doing that than secretary gates but it can t be there to offer a home cooked meal to a military family stretched thin or to make sure our veterans get the respect and appreciation they deserve in their communities when they come home in the end when it comes to the challenges we face the need for action always exceeds the limits of government while there s plenty that government can do and must do to keep our families safe and our planet clean and our markets free and fair there s a lot that government can t and shouldn t do and that s where active engaged citizens come in that s the purpose of service in this nation and that s the point i want to emphasize today that service isn t separate from our national priorities or secondary to our national priorities it s integral to achieving our national priorities it s how we will meet the challenges of our time to this day despite all the evidence to the contrary there s still folks with this notion out there that well service is nice but it s not really essential it s something you do once in a while to fulfill a requirement or to fulfill yourself or for a year or two after college to put off getting a real job i m talking to you the notion that the real work of changing this country is done by people with fancy titles and big offices out of washington d c but history tells a very different story it s the story of patriots who set forth the ideals that animate our democracy and all those who fought and died for those ideals it s the story of women who reached for the ballot and people who stood up and sat in and marched for justice it s the story of firefighters and police officers who rushed to those burning towers and ordinary people who rushed to the aid of a flooded american city that s always been the story of this nation the story of those who stepped forward in our darkest hours to serve it those who rose to answer the defining questions of their time colony or country free or half free separate but equal or truly equal those folks weren t in it for the money those folks were volunteers their service wasn t extra it was the work that changed this country the courage the patriotism the compassion that drove them to act are the same qualities we need today as we seek to answer the questions of our own time will we continue to be a land of opportunity where all things are still possible for all people or a place where those born without advantages of wealth health and good luck have the deck stacked against them will we engage with the world to confront our shared threats or hope against hope to defer them to the next administration the next generation the answer to these questions lie in large part with all of you the young people especially who are here today and that s why i feel so optimistic about our future because you all are the most engaged service minded generation since the 1930s and 40s serving your communities in record numbers last year applications to city year tripled and the peace corps had three applicants for every position americorps applications were up 400 percent in just the first four months of this year alone having come of age in serious times you all don t have a lot of patience for pettiness and bickering and the worn divisions of the past rather than arguing about whether or how we should do something you d rather just go out there and get it done as president it s my mission to put that passion and commitment to work to build on the efforts of presidents bush clinton george w bush and others to engage not just young people but people of all ages and walks of life to serve their communities that s why i was proud to sign the edward m kennedy serve america act expanding americorps and senior corps other programs that give people the chance to give back that s why we ve created a new community innovation fund to seek out the most creative effective nonprofit organizations in america ones that could be the next harlem children s zone or teach for america and replicate their efforts all across this country that s why this summer we launched united we serve a nationwide effort calling on all americans to make service part of their daily lives and we partnered with more than 400 organizations made more than 250 000 service opportunities available on serve gov and watched as nonprofits and foundations and corporations and individuals spent hundreds of thousands of hours serving their communities so we ve been doing everything we can to get people involved and i m pleased to have with us today my nominee to lead the charge on those efforts as ceo of the corporation of national and community service patrick corvington patrick stand up and wave so we can all recognize you but i also want to be honest with you while we ll do our best to make it easy to get involved the service itself won t always be easy people won t always appreciate what you re trying to do for them you won t always make the difference you had hoped for and let s be honest some problems are so big so stubborn that even your best efforts will only help just a little bit they might just help one person they might just help one corner of a neighborhood but those are the efforts that matter the most it s through that struggle the fact that it s hard that the difference is made not just for others but for yourself that s how you young people in particular will discover your strengths and weaknesses and the depths of your compassion and courage it s how you will grow and how you grow closer to the people you serve and once you ve formed those connections you ll find that it s a little harder to numb yourself to other people s suffering it s a little harder to convince yourself that their struggles aren t your problem it s a little harder to just stand by as a bystander once you ve tutored young people in a struggling neighborhood it s hard not to care about that ballot measure to fund their school once you ve volunteered at a food bank it s hard not to care about poverty and unemployment over time the needs of the people you serve become your stake in the challenges of our time in the end service binds us to each other and to our communities and our country in a way that nothing else can that s how we become more fully american that s what it means to be american it s always been the case in this country that notion that we invest ourselves our time our energy our vision our purpose into the very fabric of this nation that s the essence of our liberty that we give back freely you don t have to devote your entire career to service though i hope that many of the students here will but i m asking you to have a public service mindset i m asking that no matter where you live or what job you do or what obstacles you face you re always looking for ways to make service part of your life whether through it s it s through your workplace your house of worship or your local school whether it s in your own neighborhood or another where the need is greater whether you offer some special skill or just an extra set of hands and a sympathetic ear i know you re busy i know that sometimes even if you don t like to admit it service can feel a bit like a chore but if mallory myers can repeat last year s success and get more than 12 000 students to perform more than 20 a hundred let me try that again 1 200 it s so much that it boggles the mind mallory 12 000 students and 1 200 service activities in this community if mallory can do that then surely you can round up a few friends to volunteer in your community too that s right i got an amen back here if president bush could fly 58 combat missions when he was younger than many of you here today and keep on fighting even after he was shot down and nearly captured by the enemy then surely you can keep going when your service project gets a little tough don t you think if 11 year old erin buenger whose all too short life touched so many in this community could travel to washington and lobby members of congress for cancer funding while going through chemotherapy if she could raise money by making lanyards and writing her own cookbook all while making the honor role then surely you can find the strength to serve even when you face challenges in your own life and that ultimately is the idea at the heart of president bush s vision that each of us has a role to play and all of us have something to contribute he didn t call for one blinding light shining from washington he didn t just call for a few bright lights from the biggest nonprofits but he called for a vast galaxy of people and institutions working together to solve problems in their own backyard and today 20 years later think for a minute about the impact that he s had think of the thousands of people and organizations who ve been named points of light and the countless others he inspired to do their part think of all the people they touched and the lives they changed and all of those who were helped who went on to help others that s the extraordinary ripple effect that one life lived humbly with love for one s country and in service to one s fellow citizens can have may we each strive to make that kind of difference with our own lives thank you president bush thank you texas a m god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama16 2 10 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you please have a seat have a seat good morning everybody before i begin let me just acknowledge some of the people who are standing behind me here first of all two people who have been working really hard to make this day happen secretary steven chu my energy secretary steven chu and my white house advisor on everything having to do with energy carol browner i want to acknowledge the outstanding governor of maryland martin o malley as well as his lieutenant governor anthony brown we ve got mark ayers from the building trades and billy hite from the ua plumbers and pipefitters give them a big round of applause gregory jaczko who s with the nuclear energy commission is here where is he ed hill president of ibew international and i want to thank chuck graham and everybody here at local 26 for their great hospitality thank you for the warm welcome thanks for showing me around i was just mentioning that i got a chance to pull the first fire alarm since i was in junior high and i didn t get in trouble for it this is an extraordinarily impressive facility where workers are instructed on everything from the installation of sophisticated energy hardware and software to the basics of current and resistance we need to look no further than the workers and apprentices who are standing behind me to see the future that s possible when it comes to clean energy it s a future in which skilled laborers are helping us lead in burgeoning industries it s a future in which renewable electricity is fueling plug in hybrid cars and energy efficient homes and businesses it s a future in which we re exporting homegrown energy technology instead of importing foreign oil and it s a future in which our economy is powered not by what we borrow and spend but what we invent and what we build that s the bright future that lies ahead for america and it s one of it s a future that my administration is striving to achieve each and every day we ve already made the largest investment in clean energy in history as part of the recovery act an investment that is expected to create more than 700 000 jobs across america manufacturing advanced batteries for more fuel efficient vehicles upgrading the power grid so that it s smarter and it s stronger doubling our nation s capacity to generate renewable energy and after decades in which we have done little to increase the efficiency of cars and trucks we ve raised fuel economy standards to reduce our dependence on foreign oil while helping folks save money at the pump but in order to truly harness our potential in clean energy we re going to have to do more and that s why we re here in the near term as we transition to cleaner energy sources we re going to have to make some tough decisions about opening up new offshore areas for oil and gas development we ll need to make continued investments in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies even as we build greater capacity in renewables like wind and solar and we re going to have to build a new generation of safe clean nuclear power plants in america that s what brings us here through the department of energy under the leadership of nobel prize winning physicist steven chu although just a quick side note when he was talking to some of the instructors here and they were talking about currents and this and that and the other i indicated to him that he could have saved a lot of money instead of getting a ph d he could have come here and learned some of the same stuff you know the instructors here were just keeping up they were right there with him but through the department of energy and secretary chu s leadership we are announcing roughly 8 billion in loan guarantees to break ground on the first new nuclear plant in our country in three decades the first new nuclear power plant in nearly three decades it s a plant that will create thousands of construction jobs in the next few years and some 800 permanent jobs well paying permanent jobs in the years to come and this is only the beginning my budget proposes tripling the loan guarantees we provide to help finance safe clean nuclear facilities and we ll continue to provide financing for clean energy projects here in maryland and across america now there will be those that welcome this announcement those who think it s been long overdue but there are also going to be those who strongly disagree with this announcement the same has been true in other areas of our energy debate from offshore drilling to putting a price on carbon pollution but what i want to emphasize is this even when we have differences we cannot allow those differences to prevent us from making progress on an issue that affects our economy our security and the future of our planet we can t keep on being mired in the same old stale debates between the left and the right between environmentalists and entrepreneurs see our competitors are racing to create jobs and command growing energy industries and nuclear energy is no exception japan and france have long invested heavily in this industry meanwhile there are 56 nuclear reactors under construction around the world 21 in china alone six in south korea five in india and the commitment of these countries is not just generating the jobs in those plants it s generating demand for expertise and new technologies so make no mistake whether it s nuclear energy or solar or wind energy if we fail to invest in the technologies of tomorrow then we re going to be importing those technologies instead of exporting them we will fall behind jobs will be produced overseas instead of here in the united states of america and that s not a future that i accept now i know it s been long assumed that those who champion the environment are opposed to nuclear power but the fact is even though we ve not broken ground on a new power plant new nuclear plant in 30 years nuclear energy remains our largest source of fuel that produces no carbon emissions to meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change we ll need to increase our supply of nuclear power it s that simple this one plant for example will cut carbon pollution by 16 million tons each year when compared to a similar coal plant that s like taking 3 5 million cars off the road on the other side there are those who have long advocated for nuclear power including many republicans who have to recognize that we re not going to achieve a big boost in nuclear capacity unless we also create a system of incentives to make clean energy profitable that s not just my personal conclusion it s the conclusion of many in the energy industry itself including ceos of the nation s largest utility companies energy leaders and experts recognize that as long as producing carbon pollution carries no cost traditional plants that use fossil fuels will be more cost effective than plants that use nuclear fuel that s why we need comprehensive energy and climate legislation and why this legislation has drawn support from across the ideological spectrum i raised this just last week with congressional republican leaders i believe there s real common ground here and my administration will be working to build on areas of agreement so that we can pass a bipartisan energy and climate bill through the senate now none of this is to say that there aren t some serious drawbacks with respect to nuclear energy that have to be addressed as the ceos standing behind me will tell you nuclear power generates waste and we need to accelerate our efforts to find ways of storing this waste safely and disposing of it that s why we ve asked a bipartisan group of leaders and nuclear experts to examine this challenge and these plants also have to be held to the highest and strictest safety standards to answer the legitimate concerns of americans who live near and far from these facilities that s going to be an imperative but investing in nuclear energy remains a necessary step what i hope is that with this announcement we re underscoring both our seriousness in meeting the energy challenge and our willingness to look at this challenge not as a partisan issue but as a matter that s far more important than politics because the choices we make will affect not just the next generation but many generations to come the fact is changing the ways we produce and use energy requires us to think anew it requires us to act anew and it demands of us a willingness to extend our hand across some of the old divides to act in good faith and to move beyond the broken politics of the past that s what we must do that s what we will do thank you very much everybody appreciate it dem bobama16 3 09a barack_obama thank you very much first of all marco thank you for the wonderful introduction i don t know if people heard properly here but this is a all natural health food restaurant in philly so i asked him what was the equivalent at his shop for a cheese steak and he described for me what was it a chicken right so i wanted to know if there was whiz on that and he said no marco is an example of what small business is all about and i think cynthia is an example of what community banks are doing all across the country partnering with small businesses in order to create jobs and opportunity and entrepreneurship that s been the driving force in our economy for so very long so i thank all of you particularly the small businesses and community bankers who are here today and i thank the two of you as well as some of the other entrepreneurs that we met and bankers that we met before this public event thank you for sharing your stories i also want to thank the chair and ranking member of the senate committee on small business and entrepreneurship senators mary landrieu and olympia snowe please give them a big round of applause as well as the chair and ranking member of the house committee on small business congresswoman nydia velazquez and congressman sam graves who are here as well i want to thank them publicly for being here but also so much of the good work that our proposals today are building on has to do with the vigilance that they ve shown on their committees so we very much appreciate that now before i talk about the new steps we re taking to get credit flowing to small businesses across our country i do want to comment on the news about executive bonuses at aig i think some of you have heard a little bit about this over the last few days this is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed under these circumstances it s hard to understand how derivative traders at aig warranted any bonuses much less 165 million in extra pay i mean how do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat in the last six months aig has received substantial sums from the u s treasury and i ve asked secretary geithner to use that leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the american taxpayers whole i want everybody to be clear that secretary geithner has been on the case he s working to resolve this matter with the new ceo edward liddy who by the way everybody needs to understand came on board after the contracts that led to these bonuses were agreed to last year but i think mr liddy and certainly everybody involved needs to understand this is not just a matter of dollars and cents it s about our fundamental values all across the country there are people who are working hard and meeting their responsibilities every day without the benefit of government bailouts or multi million dollar bonuses you ve got a bunch of small business people here who are struggling just to keep their credit line open that they are foregoing pay as one of our entrepreneurs talked about they are in some cases mortgaging their homes and doing a whole host of things just in order to keep things afloat all they ask is that everyone from main street to wall street to washington play by the same rules and that is an ethic that we have to demand and what this situation also underscores is the need for overall financial regulatory reform so we don t find ourselves in this position again and for some form of resolution mechanism in dealing with troubled financial institutions so that we ve got greater authority to protect american taxpayers and our financial system in cases such as this now we already have resolution authority excuse me i m choked up with anger here we always already have some of that resolution authority when it comes to a traditional bank but when you start getting into aigs and some of these other operations that have a whole bunch of different financial instruments then we don t have all the regulatory power that we need and this is something that i expect to work with congress to deal with in the weeks and months to come well we re here today to talk about how my administration can help the millions of small businesses bearing the brunt of this credit crisis and secretary geithner and i just met with not only marco and cynthia but a number of other small business owners and community lenders who shared with us experiences that are familiar to so many small businesses are the heart of the american economy they re responsible for half of all private sector jobs and they create roughly 70 percent of all new jobs in the past decade so small businesses are not only job generators they re also at the heart of the american dream after all these are businesses born in family meetings around kitchen tables they re born when a worker takes a chance on her desire to be her own boss they re born when a part time inventor becomes a full time entrepreneur or when somebody sees a product that could be better or a service that could be smarter and they think well why not me let me try it let me take my shot that s marco s story which he just shared with us that s brian conrad s story when brian s company eliminated his department brian is sitting right there so i don t want to embarrass him here but it s a great story he lost his job but he found his calling and started you know doing all kinds of work on a restaurant called the blue monkey which now employs some 40 people in pennsylvania s lehigh valley that s carmen jones s story carmen is over there carmen was disabled in an accident a few years ago and in facing personal trials she discovered a reservoir of strength and an untapped market so today she helps companies advertise and sell their services to people living with disabilities this is america s story a place where we believe all things are possible where we are limited only by our willingness to take a chance and work hard to achieve our dreams but today too many entrepreneurs can t access the capital to start operate or grow their business too many dreams are being deferred or denied by a form letter cancelling a line of credit and this is a consequence of the credit crisis which began when some banks bundled and sold mortgages in complex ways to hide risk and avoid responsibility the collapse of these mortgage backed securities and other complex financial instruments froze the credit markets including the markets that help small businesses access loans to cover payroll to purchase supplies or to expand in ways that create new jobs and i think it s important just to take a moment to understand here s how these markets work a community bank like the one run by cynthia offers an entrepreneur like marco a loan to open up a restaurant before this crisis cynthia had two options her bank could hold the loan and receive regular payments from marco as he pays back the amount that he borrowed plus interest but another option was the bank could also sell part of the loan as an asset to a larger bank or to an investor and that means that her bank could then use these new funds for more business loans and auto loans and home loans and student loans that s why this secondary market cynthia s ability to resell loans is so important it means banks can offer small businesses and families more credit because the bank has more money on hand if cynthia could get that 11 million of sba loans that she currently holds in her portfolio if she can get that into the secondary market that s now 11 million that she can make work back in her community today unfortunately there aren t nearly as many secondary buyers for these kinds of loans even when they re guaranteed by the small business administration so community banks cannot bring in the funds necessary to provide as many loans and as a result we ve seen a precipitous drop in lending to small business the sba typically guarantees 20 billion in loans annually but this year lending may fall below 10 billion even businesses with impeccable credit can t access loans so entrepreneurs and their employees pay an enormous price but the whole country pays a price as well because less lending leads to fewer jobs and lower spending which leads to less lending a vicious cycle that delays our recovery and small businesses don t just provide jobs they provide the innovations that help us lead in the global economy smaller companies produce 13 times more patents per employee than large companies now think about it hewlett packard began in a garage it was a small business google began as a research project small business the first apple computers were built by hand one at a time small business mcdonald s started with one restaurant marco i know you ve got ideas small business our recovery in the present and our prosperity in the future depend upon the success of america s small businesses and entrepreneurs and that s why my administration has already taken aggressive action on their behalf my recovery plan as already been noted raises the guarantees on sba loans to 90 percent and eliminates costly fees for borrowers and lenders that can be too costly in a recession and these changes are being implemented now fulfilling a campaign promise that i made the recovery plan also includes a series of tax cuts for small businesses and tax incentives to encourage investments in small businesses and the treasury department has launched the consumer and business lending initiative to help unfreeze the credit markets i ve also proposed as part of my budget that we reduce to zero the capital gains tax for investments in small or startup businesses expanding and making permanent one of the tax cuts in the recovery plan and my budget as part of our health care reform efforts calls for tax credits and other assistance to help small businesses offer coverage to their workers so we ve already done a lot but we ve got to do more and none of these steps will be effective unless we unlock the credit markets that are denying small businesses the loans they need to grow therefore as part of my financial stability plan the treasury department will begin purchasing up to 15 billion of sba loans through the troubled asset relief program or tarp we will immediately unfreeze the secondary market for sba loans and increase the liquidity of community banks cynthia s bank is going to be able to sell those 11 million loans so that she s got more money to lend so with this action any lender that provides sba small business loans will have a buyer for those loans and in turn community banks will no longer have to choose between providing loans to creditworthy small businesses and maintaining the required capital and liquidity now this plan is the latest step but by no means the last step in our ongoing efforts to stabilize the financial markets on behalf of businesses and consumers we ll be outlining further steps on behalf of small businesses in the weeks and months ahead and we will continue to do whatever is necessary to lead this economy out of recession and lay the foundation for long term prosperity that s what the small business owners in this room expect us to do they re folks like john wilson the president and part owner of a small business in raleigh north carolina he wrote to me a few weeks ago and participated in the meeting we just held and john s business nc design group sells cabinets and interior design services and not surprisingly it s been a tough year sales have fallen by half and keep in mind john had previously doubled what had started off as a very small business to the point where he s providing a living for it was up to 40 48 people and john did all that he could to save loans the owners including john have taken no compensation but they had to reduce the size of their company from 48 employees to 34 and john just told the group of us that he personally took the time to speak to each and every person that he had to lay off and i don t think he minds me sharing that he cried each time he did it because it s a hard thing when somebody is working hard and committed to helping you build your business you having to lay them off and now even though they ve never been late on a payment to the bank they re having trouble keeping a credit line it s putting his small business and the 34 jobs left in jeopardy now john is not looking for a handout he s looking for the opportunity to succeed and he said it best himself in his letter and i m quoting from the letter here small business people are incredibly resilient and resourceful given half a chance he said but we need the chance well i want to say to john and to every american running a small business or hoping to run a small business one day you deserve a chance america needs you to have that chance and as president i will continue to do everything in my power to ensure that you have the opportunity to contribute to your community to our economy and to the future of the united states of america thank you everybody thank you dem bobama16 3 09b barack_obama thank you very much to jim benson for helping to organize this for mahdee for your service to our country a pledge of allegiance that you ve shown in your own commitment to protecting this country and obviously to secretary shinseki it is an honor to join you and the hardworking public servants here at the department of veterans affairs as we mark a milestone in the distinguished history of this department you know 20 years ago on the day the veterans administration was officially elevated to a cabinet level agency and renamed the department of veterans affairs a ceremony was held to swear in the administrator of the old entity as secretary of the new one and in his remarks that day president george h w bush declared that the mission of this agency is so vital that there s only one place for the veterans of america in the cabinet room at the table with the president of the united states of america i could not agree more i could not be more pleased that eric shinseki has taken a seat at that table throughout his long and distinguished career in the army secretary shinseki won the respect and admiration of our men and women in uniform because they ve always been his highest priority and he has clearly brought that same sense of duty and commitment to the work of serving our veterans as he knows it s no small task this department has more than a quarter of a million employees across america and its services range from providing education and training benefits health care and home loans to tending those quiet places that remind us of the great debt we owe and remind me of the heavy responsibility that i bear it s a commitment that lasts from the day our veterans retire that uniform to the day that they are put to rest and that continues on for their families without this commitment i might not be here today after all my grandfather enlisted after pearl harbor and went on to march in patton s army my grandmother worked on a bomber assembly line while he was gone my mother was born at fort leavenworth while he was away when my grandfather returned he went to college on the gi bill bought his first home with a loan from the fha moved his family west all the way to hawaii where he and my grandmother helped to raise me and i think about my grandfather whenever i have the privilege of meeting the young men and women who serve in our military today they are our best and brightest and they re our bravest enlisting in a time of war enduring tour after tour of duty serving with honor under the most difficult circumstances and making sacrifices that many of us cannot begin to imagine the same can be said of their families as my wife michelle has seen firsthand during visits to military bases across this country we don t just deploy our troops in a time of war we deploy their families too so while the mission of this department is always vital it is even more so during long and difficult conflicts like those that we re engaged in today because when the guns finally fall silent and the cameras are turned off and our troops return home they deserve the same commitment from their government as my grandparents received last month i announced my strategy for ending the war in iraq and i made it very clear that this strategy would not end with military plans and diplomatic agendas but would endure through my commitment to upholding our sacred trust with every man and woman who has served this country and the same holds true for our troops serving in afghanistan the homecoming we face over the next year and a half will be the true test of this commitment whether we will stand with our veterans as they face new challenges physical psychological and economic here at home i intend to start that work by making good on my pledge to transform the department of veterans affairs for the 21st century that s an effort that under secretary shinseki s leadership all of you have already begun conducting a thorough review of your operations all across this agency and i intend to support this effort not just with words of encouragement but with resources that s why the budget i sent to congress increases funding for this department by 25 billion over the next five years with this budget we don t just fully fund our va health care program we expand it to serve an additional 500 000 veterans by 2013 to provide better health care in more places and to dramatically improve services related to mental health and injuries like post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury we also invest in the technology to cut red tape and ease the transition from active duty and we provide new help for homeless veterans because those heroes have a home it s the country they served the united states of america and until we reach a day when not a single veteran sleeps on our nation s streets our work remains unfinished finally in this new century it s time to heed the lesson of history that our returning veterans can form the backbone of our middle class by implementing a gi bill for the 21st century i know you re working hard under a tough deadline but i am confident that we will be ready for august 1st and that s how we ll show our servicemen and women that when you come home to america america will be here for you that s how we will ensure that those who have borne the battle and their families will have every chance to live out their dreams i ve had the privilege of meeting so many of these heroes some of the most inspiring are those that i ve met in places like walter reed young men and women who ve lost a limb or even their ability to take care of themselves but who never lose the pride they feel for their country and that is after all what led them to wear the uniform in the first place their unwavering belief in the idea of america that no matter where you come from what you look like who your parents are this is a place where anything is possible where anyone can make it where we take care of each other and look out for each other especially for those who ve sacrificed so much for this country these are the ideals that generations of americans have fought for and bled for and died for these are the ideals at the core of your mission a mission that dates back before our founding one taken up by our first president years before he took office back when he served as commander in chief of the continental army then general washington fought tirelessly to support the veterans of america s revolutionary war such support he argued should never be considered as a pension or gratuity rather it was the price of their blood and of our independence it is therefore he said more than a common debt it is a debt of honor a debt of honor washington understood that caring for our veterans was more than just a way of thanking them for their service he recognized the obligation is deeper than that that when our fellow citizens commit themselves to shed blood for us that binds our fates with theirs in a way that nothing else can and in the end caring for those who have given their fullest measure of devotion to us and for their families is a matter of honor as a nation and as a people that s a responsibility you hold that s the work that you do repaying that debt of honor a debt we can never fully discharge and i know it s not always easy i know there s much work ahead to transform this agency for the 21st century but i have the fullest confidence that with secretary shinseki s leadership and with the hard work of the men and women of this department we will fulfill our sacred trust and serve our returning heroes as well as they ve served us thank you god bless you and may god bless the united states of america thank you everybody dem bobama16 4 09a barack_obama well thank you very much this is an extraordinary honor and an extraordinary pleasure to be here in mexico with all of you today i want to thank president caldern and his wonderful first lady and the delegation for their hospitality and facilitating this trip and i want to thank the people of mexico for the warmth with which i ve been received especially the young people who are here today thank you very much there is a reason why the first visit that i had with a foreign leader after my election was with president caldern it was a reminder as john f kennedy said that the bonds between our two countries cannot be broken we are joined by a border but our bonds are so much more than that in my hometown of chicago the population is at least one third made up of people of mexican heritage all across america all across the united states we have benefitted from the culture the language the food the insights the literature the energy the ambitions of people who have migrated from our southern neighbor and my hope is is that the united states has had something to offer to mexico as well so our relationship our friendship is strong but as president caldern said we can make it stronger at a time where all of us are dealing with an extraordinary global recession where unemployment is on the rise where credit has begun to shrink where businesses are struggling it is more important than ever that we work together not only to restore economic growth in mexico and the united states but also to make sure that growth is sustainable and to make sure that growth is from the bottom up so that each and every person every young person here in mexico as well as every young person in the united states has an opportunity to live out their dreams at a time when the mexican government has so courageously taken on the drug cartels that have plagued both sides of the borders it is absolutely critical that the united states joins as a full partner in dealing with this issue both through initiatives like the merida initiative but also on our side of the border in dealing with the flow of guns and cash south and at a time when mexico is not just a regional leader but now a global leader as shown by its outstanding participation in the g20 summit and other multilateral organizations it s critical that we join together around issues that can t be solved by any one nation issues like climate change issues like poverty issues like terrorism these are issues in which the united states and mexico will have to stand side by side in order to promote common security and common prosperity and so it is wonderfully fitting to see the children of mexico as well as i suspect a few children of the united states here together waving flags of both countries because we are reminded because we are reminded that ultimately the reason that we serve in government ultimately the reason that bilateral relationships like this are so important is because it allows us to promote a better future for our children that s what we re fighting for for their dreams for their opportunities for their futures and i m very much looking forward to developing the kind of relationship between mexico and the united states that will allow all the children here and all the children in both countries to thrive for years to come so thank you very much mr president madam first lady and to all of you for welcoming me in such a gracious way thank you dem bobama16 4 09b barack_obama good evening thank you very much let me begin by expressing my deepest thanks to president caldern and mrs zavala for their gracious welcome and thank you for the spectacular setting i can t imagine a more magnificent evening this is my first trip as president to mexico and it s one that i will always remember fondly for the hospitality and the warmth that has been provided to me during my brief visit now earlier today we conducted a series of productive meetings on a whole host of challenges and opportunities that we face jointly we spoke about our deep economic ties reflecting the 1 billion of trade that crosses our borders every day and we discussed steps that we can take together both bilaterally and in a global setting to advance opportunity and prosperity in our two countries and across the americas we spoke about the deep ties between our peoples and what steps can be made to meet our immigration challenge that involves passing comprehensive immigration reform in the united states which i am committed to doing and it involves making certain that we are promoting increased opportunity here in mexico we spoke about our obligation to take steps to build clean energy together that can power our economies and beat back climate change in future centuries and of course we spoke about the grave dangers that the drug cartels are presenting to both our nations that are threatening innocent men and women and children on both sides of our borders and our shared determination to put an end to these drug wars these are some of the critical challenges that we face as a result of a border we share but what makes us good neighbors is not that our interests are always aligned that we will agree on everything in our long and interwoven history we haven t always been on the same side of every issue and there is no doubt that in the future there will be differences once again what makes us good neighbors is a simple truth that our people share so much more than common challenges and common interests we also share values and ideals we are both a people who know the meaning of hard work a people who know what it means to struggle and to sacrifice on behalf of our children and our grandchildren people who know that strength comes from faith and from family people who have known hardship and trial and persevered in the face of great odds that s the story of the separate struggles for independence that have made our nations who we are struggles that are forged on this continent two adjoining nations founded on a set of shared values that our democracy is not simply a gift from a previous generation but a responsibility for each generation to protect and to pass on to the next we both understand that no one whether through influence of politics the power of money or the fear of force is above the law and that we are every one of us equal endowed with the basic human rights that spring not from our laws but from our maker each of our nations was formed out of this sense that a state has no greater responsibility than to uphold the essential dignity of its citizens that was the promise of my country s struggle for independence that was the promise of mexico s struggle for independence that was the promise of american independence it s a promise advanced by hildago as well as washington by lincoln but also by juarez and a promise that now falls on all of us to advance in our own time more than 60 years ago at a moment when our world was consumed with war one of my predecessors came here to mexico to reaffirm the relationship between our two nations in a speech to the people of mexico franklin delano roosevelt said our peoples are finding that they have common aspirations they can work together for a common objective let us never lose hold of that truth that was president roosevelt s message then that is my message now and i m confident that if we continue to draw strength from our common aspirations and purpose from our common objectives if we continue to act as we have during this visit in a spirit of mutual responsibility mutual respect and mutual interest then that is a truth that we will uphold together in the months and years to come and i am so pleased that i have such an outstanding partner as president caldern somebody who has shown his courage and his bravery and somebody who s shown that he combines a sense of principle with a sense of practicality somebody who i know wants to be a partner with me as we strengthen our partnership and we make certain that the children of mexico and the children of the united states are both seeing a future that s more prosperous and more hopeful than the ones that have come before so thank you very much everybody and let me please make a toast to my host dem bobama16 4 09c barack_obama thank you very much that is a wonderful reception and i want to in addition to ray lahood and joe biden rahm emanuel all of who have worked on this extensively i also want to acknowledge jim oberstar and rob andrews two of our finest members of congress both people who understand that investing in our infrastructure investing in our transportation system pays enormous dividends over the long term so i m grateful to them you know i ve been speaking a lot lately about what we re doing to break free of our economic crisis so to put people back to work and move this nation from recession to recovery and one area in which we can make investments with impact both immediate and lasting is in america s infrastructure and that s why the recovery and reinvestment plan we passed not two months ago included the most sweeping investment in our infrastructure since president eisenhower built the interstate highway system in the 1950s and these efforts will save money by untangling gridlock and saving lives by improving our roads and save or create 150 000 jobs mostly in the private sector by the end of next year already it s put americans back to work and so far we re ahead of schedule we re under budget and adhering to the highest standards of transparency and accountability but if we want to move from recovery to prosperity then we have to do a little bit more we also have to build a new foundation for our future growth today our aging system of highways and byways air routes and rail lines is hindering that growth our highways are clogged with traffic costing us 80 billion a year in lost productivity and wasted fuel our airports are choked with increased loads some of you flew down here and you know what that was about we re at the mercy of fluctuating gas prices all too often we pump too many greenhouse gases into the air what we need then is a smart transportation system equal to the needs of the 21st century a system that reduces travel times and increases mobility a system that reduces congestion and boosts productivity a system that reduces destructive emissions and creates jobs what we re talking about is a vision for high speed rail in america imagine boarding a train in the center of a city no racing to an airport and across a terminal no delays no sitting on the tarmac no lost luggage no taking off your shoes imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour walking only a few steps to public transportation and ending up just blocks from your destination imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild america now all of you know this is not some fanciful pie in the sky vision of the future it is now it is happening right now it s been happening for decades the problem is it s been happening elsewhere not here in france high speed rail has pulled regions from isolation ignited growth remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations in spain a high speed line between madrid and seville is so successful that more people travel between those cities by rail than by car and airplane combined china where service began just two years ago may have more miles of high speed rail service than any other country just five years from now and japan the nation that unveiled the first high speed rail system is already at work building the next a line that will connect tokyo with osaka at speeds of over 300 miles per hour so it s being done it s just not being done here there s no reason why we can t do this this is america there s no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders building a new system of high speed rail in america will be faster cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system and everybody stands to benefit and that s why today with the help of secretary lahood and vice president biden america s number one rail fan i ve been told i m announcing my administration s efforts to transform travel in america with an historic investment in high speed rail and our strategy has two parts improving our existing rail lines to make current train service faster so rob can you know shave a few hours over the course of a week but also identifying potential corridors for the creation of world class high speed rail to make this happen we ve already dedicated 8 billion of recovery and reinvestment act funds to this initiative and i ve requested another 5 billion over the next five years the department of transportation expects to begin awarding funds to ready projects before the end of this summer well ahead of schedule and like all funding decisions under the recovery act money will be distributed based on merit not on politics not as favors not for any other consideration purely on merit now this plan is realistic and the first round of funding will focus on projects that can create jobs and benefits in the near term we re not talking about starting from scratch we re talking about using existing infrastructure to increase speeds on some routes from 70 miles an hour to over 100 miles per hour so you re taking existing rail lines you re upgrading them and many corridors merit even faster service but this is the first step that is quickly achievable and it will create jobs improving tracks crossings signal systems the next step is investing in high speed rail that unleashes the economic potential of all our regions by shrinking distances within our regions there are at least 10 major corridors in the united states of 100 to 600 miles in length with the potential for successful high speed rail systems and these areas have explored its potential impact on their long term growth and competitiveness and they ve already presented sound plans i want to be clear no decision about where to allocate funds has yet been made and any region can step up present a plan and be considered the high speed rail corridors we ve identified so far would connect areas like the cities of the pacific northwest southern and central florida the gulf coast to the southeast to our nation s capital the breadth of pennsylvania and new york to the cities of new england and something close to my heart a central hub network that draws the cities of our industrial heartland closer to chicago and one another or california where voters have already chosen to move forward with their own high speed rail system a system of new stations and 220 mile per hour trains that links big cities to inland towns that alleviates crippling congestion on highways and at airports and that makes travel from san francisco to los angeles possible in two and a half hours and by making investments across the country we ll lay a new foundation for our economic competitiveness and contribute to smart urban and rural growth we ll create highly skilled construction and operating jobs that can t be outsourced and generate demand for technology that gives a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs the opportunity to step up and lead the way in the 21st century we ll move to cleaner energy and a cleaner environment we ll reduce our need for foreign oil by millions of barrels a year and eliminate more than 6 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually equal to removing 1 million cars from our roads now i know that this vision has its critics there are those who say high speed rail is a fantasy but its success around the world says otherwise i know americans love their cars and nobody is talking about replacing the automobile and our highways as critical parts of our transportation system we are upgrading those in the recovery package as well but this is something that can be done has been done and can provide us enormous benefits now there are those who argue that if an investment doesn t directly benefit the people of their district then it shouldn t be made jim you know some of those arguments but if we followed that rationale we d have no infrastructure at all there are those who say well this investment is too small but this is just a first step we know that this is going to be a long term project but us getting started now us moving the process forward and getting people to imagine what s possible and putting resources behind it so that people can start seeing examples of this around the country that s going to spur all kinds of activity now finally there are those who say at a time of crisis we shouldn t be pursuing such a strategy we ve got too many other things to do but our history teaches us a different lesson as secretary lahood just mentioned president lincoln was committed to a nation connected from east to west even at the same time he was trying to hold north and south together he was in the middle of a civil war while fighting raged on one side of the continent tens of thousands of americans from all walks of life came together on the other dreamers and risk takers willing to invest in america college educated engineers and supervisors who learned leadership in war american workers and immigrants from all over the world confederates and yankees joined on the same side and eventually those two sets of tracks met and with one final blow of a hammer backed by years of hard work and decades of dreams the way was laid for a nationwide economy a telegraph operator sent out a simple message to a waiting nation it just said done a newspaper proclaimed we are the youngest of peoples but we are teaching the world to march forward in retrospect america s march forward seems inevitable but time and again it s only made possible by generations that are willing to work and sacrifice and invest in plans to make tomorrow better than today that s the vision we can t afford to lose sight of that s the challenge that s fallen to this generation and with this strategy for america s transportation future and our efforts across all fronts to lay a new foundation for our lasting prosperity that is the challenge we will meet make no little plans that s what daniel burnham said in chicago i believe that about america make no little plans so let s get to work thank you everybody dem bobama16 4 10a barack_obama thank you everybody thank you so much thank you please everybody have a seat thank you it is a great privilege to join you for this conference on america s great outdoors there are a number of people that obviously i want to acknowledge here who have worked tirelessly to move this agenda forward at the top of our list our secretary of the interior who i believe is going to be one of the best secretaries of interior in american history ken salazar who has just fully embraced this issue we re thrilled with the work he s done thank you thank you ken secretary tom vilsack administrator lisa jackson nancy sutley all have been part of what we call our green team and are consistently providing creative ideas to make sure that we understand that conservation is not contrary to economic growth it is an integral part of economic growth and they have just done a fabulous job on that so please give them a big round of applause we have my outstanding noaa administrator dr jane lubchenco we have assistant secretary of the army for civil works jo ellen darcy deputy under secretary of defense for installations and the environment dr dorothy robyn and in the audience if i m not mistaken we ve got some luminaries is governor bill richardson in the house there he is from new mexico a great conservationist former secretary of the interior secretary bruce babbitt is here one of the finest young mayors in the country mayor cory booker and to all the outstanding members of congress who have been so diligent in promoting a conservation agenda now i am mindful that the first such conference was held over one century ago by one of my favorite presidents one of our greatest presidents and certainly our greatest conservation president upon taking office theodore roosevelt avid birdwatcher bear hunter set out on a tour of the american west that would change his life and the life of a nation forever he stood in awe of the geysers at yellowstone he camped in a snow blizzard at yosemite he stood on the lip of the grand canyon the ages have been at work on it he declared man can only mar it and from that sense of commitment sprang five national parks 18 national monuments 51 federal bird reservations and 150 national forests from that commitment sprang an effort to save the great redwoods of california and the petrified forest of arizona the great bird rocks of the aleutian islands and the tongass of alaska from that commitment sprang a breathtaking legacy of conservation that still enhances our lives now that legacy is an extraordinary achievement and no matter how long i have the privilege of serving as president i know i can never match it and i will probably never shoot a bear that s a fair bet there fair guess but i do intend to enrich that legacy and i feel an abiding bond with the land that is the united states of america i do for the same reasons that all of you do for the same reason families go outside for a picnic or campers spend a night in a national park and sportsmen track game through the woods or wade deep into a river it s a recognition passed down from one generation to the next that few pursuits are more satisfying to the spirit than discovering the greatness of america s outdoors and when we see america s land we understand what an incredible bounty that we have been given and it s our obligation to make sure that the next generation enjoys that same bounty that recognition has been a touchstone of this presidency thanks to the outstanding leadership of ken salazar and secretary vilsack and lisa jackson and nancy sutley they have done extraordinary work last year i signed into law a public lands bill the most significant in decades that designated 2 million acres of wilderness over 1 000 miles of wild and scenic rivers and three national parks we better protected cherished places like oregon s mount hood we re taking a new approach to our national forests to make sure they re not just providing timber for lumber companies but water and jobs for rural communities we are restoring our rivers and coasts from the chesapeake bay to the gulf coast from the great lakes to the everglades so yes we are working faithfully to carry on the legacy of teddy roosevelt in the 21st century but we also know that we must adapt our strategies to meet the new challenges of our time over the last century our population grew from about 90 million to 300 million people and as it did we lost more and more of our natural landscape to development meanwhile a host of other factors from a changing climate to new sources of pollution have put a growing strain on our wildlife and our waters and our lands so rising to meet these challenges is a task and an obligation but it s one that government cannot and should not meet alone there are roughly 1 600 privately run land trusts in this country that have protected over 10 million acres through voluntary efforts and by working with farmers and ranchers and landowners the department of agriculture s conservation reserve program has protected over 30 million acres and its natural resource conservation service a service that is 75 years old this year has protected almost 3 million more so together we are conserving our working lands in a way that preserves the environment and protects local communities and that s the kind of collaborative spirit at the heart of the america s great outdoors initiative that we re launching today in the months ahead members of this administration will host regional listening sessions across america we ll meet with everybody from tribal leaders to farmers from young people to businesspeople from elected officials to recreation and conservation groups and their ideas will help us form a 21st century strategy for america s great outdoors to better protect our natural landscape and our history for generations to come understand we re not talking about a big federal agenda being driven out of washington we re talking about how we can collect best ideas on conservation how we can pursue good ideas that local communities embrace and how we can be more responsible stewards of tax dollars to promote conservation first we re going to build on successful conservation efforts being spearheaded outside of washington by local and state governments by tribes and by private groups so we can write a new chapter in the protection of rivers wildlife habitats historic sites and the great landscapes of our country secondly we re going to help farmers ranchers property owners who want to protect their lands for their children and their grandchildren third we ll help families spend more time outdoors building on what the first lady has done through the let s move initiative to encourage young people to hike and bike and get outside more often and fourth we want to foster a new generation of community and urban parks so that children across america have the chance to experience places like millennium park in my own chicago we re launching this strategy because it s the right thing to do because as tr said we must not mar the work of the ages but we re also doing it because it s the right thing to do for our economy it s how we re going to spur job creation in the tourism industry and the recreation industry it s how we ll create jobs preserving and maintaining our forests our rivers our great outdoors in a time of great difficulty when we are recovering from the worst recession in generations and waging two wars abroad some may ask whether now is the time to reaffirm our commitment to our national heritage but i want everybody to recall it was in the midst of civil war that abraham lincoln set aside lands that are now yosemite it was in midst of a great depression that fdr formed the civilian conservation corps that built the trails and campgrounds and parks we enjoy today even in times of crisis we re called to take the long view to preserve our national heritage because in doing so we fulfill one of the responsibilities that falls to all of us as americans and as inhabitants of this same small planet and that is the responsibility that we are rising to meet today so thank you all for the outstanding work that you re doing individually i look forward to the work that you re going to be doing collectively and advising this administration thank you god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama16 4 10b barack_obama thank you everybody everybody have a seat everybody have a seat settle down here for a second oh it is good to be back in miami it s good to be back in the sunshine state i came to florida today to visit nasa lay out a bold new vision for america s future in space and i figured hey while i m here let s beam down and visit some old friends in miami thank you tim kaine not only for the generous introduction but for the great job he is doing an unbelievable job as dnc chair just like he did an unbelievable job as the governor of the great commonwealth of virginia thank you to your vice chair your own debbie wasserman schultz we love debbie we have in the house florida s next governor alex sink we ve got florida s next cfo and one of the first people in florida to stand up and endorse my campaign lorann ausley is here as well somewhere around here is the next senator from the great state of florida kendrick meek he s here somewhere there he is kendrick s doing a great job i also want to point out a great friend of mine a former member of my administration who just yesterday announced he is running for congress in florida s 25th joe garcia is in the house joe garcia so is florida s next agricultural commissioner scott maddox and a wonderful member of congress from further up north i don t know if she came out but she s doing unbelievable work so keep her in mind suzanne kosmas there s suzanne there she is she came out and thank you to the talented esperanza spalding isn t she terrific i love listening to esperanza she is wonderful i also want to thank all the leaders of the haitian american community who are with us tonight i think some of you know my political director patrick gaspard is from haiti and so through him we understood how much you ve lost and how much you ve given and some of you know i think michelle just took her first solo trip abroad as first lady her first stop was to haiti the devastation moved her deeply and she also saw though the resiliency and the resolve of the people and that filled her with hope and so i asked her to give the people of haiti a message from me which is the united states of america will continue to stand with the people of haiti as they recover and they rebuild that is something that we are committed to so it s good to be among friends in florida i spent a lot of time here during our campaign many of you were on the frontlines devoting your time your energy knocking on doors making phone calls arguing with people most of all affirming that unyielding faith in the promise of america and so i want to thank you for being part of this journey in a time of incredible economic uncertainty you believed that we could still make the american dream accessible for everybody who was willing to work for it and at a time of cynicism you believed that we could still solve problems that had held us back for years decades at a time of great challenge especially when we were challenged you believed that change was still possible in the united states of america so miami i ve come back here to tell you tonight that we have kept the faith with those beliefs we ve begun to fix the problems that we identified during the campaign the change you fought for is beginning to take hold in washington and all across the country now change is never easy i don t know if you ve noticed this people tend to be comfortable with the status quo even when the status quo isn t working for them and the fact is that with all the turbulence that s been taking place this year for many americans change still can t come fast enough but i wanted people to understand what we were looking at when we first came into office a financial crisis unlike any we had seen in generations an economy that was bleeding 750 000 jobs a month challenges that ranged from the specter of terrorism to the impacts of globalization to two wars that were costly in every sense of the word before we could start healing we had to stop the bleeding we needed to make sure that an economic disaster did not become a full blown depression and some of those short term steps designed to stabilize the economy they weren t popular the recovery act even though we gave tax cuts to everybody somehow got confused with the bank bailout and then there was the auto thing and everybody said gosh what s obama doing he s not listening to the polls this is unpopular but it turns out that there are some things that shockingly enough are more important than polls more important that elections the country was in trouble we had to respond we had to respond to the problems that were facing the american people with the same sense of urgency that they felt in their own lives that was just over a year ago now we ve still got a long way to travel there s still a lot of people hurting out there you see them in your communities you see them in your own family maybe you see them in your own lives but one year later we can say that the financial system has stabilized people have recouped a lot of what they had lost in their 401 k s we ve seen that an economy that was contracting is now growing again we were losing jobs now we re gaining jobs as far as the bank system goes we recovered most of the money that it cost to stabilize it and i proposed a fee on the nation s biggest banks so that we recover every dime the taxpayers put into them so one year later we ve made progress the economy is growing again the markets are rising again america s businesses are creating jobs again one year later more than 2 million americans more than 100 000 floridians are at work today who otherwise would not be there because of the recovery act because of what debbie wasserman schultz did and suzanne kosmas did and kendrick meeks did and since today happens to be tax day i should just point out that one third of the recovery act went to tax cuts tax cuts that strengthened the cornerstone of the american dream working for a living earning an education owning a home raising a family we cut taxes for 95 percent of working americans just like i promised we would on the campaign that made a difference for 7 million families in florida alone we cut taxes on small businesses we cut taxes for students and parents paying for college we cut taxes for first time homebuyers more than 128 000 here in florida in all we passed 25 different tax cuts last year and one thing we haven t done is raise income taxes on families making less than 250 000 a year another promise that we kept so i ve been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes you would think they would be saying thank you that s what you d think so we re headed in the right direction on our road to recovery but the true measure of our progress is the progress that the american people feel in their lives and there s still a lot of hurt out here too many folks still out of work that s why we re doing everything we can in the short term to accelerate private sector job creation but here s the thing miami if we want our economy to fuel job creation in the long term if we want to grow in the way that brings the middle class along for the ride then we need to rebuild it on a new and a stronger foundation for growth and that s what we ve been doing we re working to give every american the world class education they need to compete and win in the global economy every child in america we launched a national competition to improve our schools we took on the special interests and with the help of debbie and suzanne and kendrick we reformed the school loan system 68 billion that was going to banks is now going to students and families to help pay for their education so we re making college education more affordable and more accessible we ve made the largest investment in clean and renewable energy in our nation s history because there are factories to reopen and assembly lines to restart and workers ready to build wind turbines and solar panels and advanced batteries for the new electric cars right here in america the nation that leads the clean energy economy will lead the 21st century economy and i believe that america has to be that nation and that s what we re going to fight for and miami for the sake of our families and businesses and with your help we finally passed comprehensive health reform right here in the united states of america we did it thanks to debbie thanks to suzanne and thanks to kendrick and thanks to you as my vice president said this is a big deal joe s got a way with words and he was right it s a big deal i mean think about what we accomplished here this reform is the strongest most sweeping insurance reform in history it will begin to end the worst practices of the insurance industry it cuts the deficit by over 1 trillion puts in place all sorts of reforms that are going to make sure that we are getting better quality health care for less money and it s going to finally offer millions of families and small business owners quality affordable care and the security and peace of mind that comes with it a lot of people for the very first time in their lives so for all the sound and fury and all the scare tactics here s what you need about health care reform the law doesn t hand more control to the government it doesn t hand more control to health insurance companies it gives it back to you the american people this law doesn t weaken medicare it strengthens it and extends its life almost by a decade this law doesn t increase our deficits it s going to reduce them more than 100 billion over the next decade over 1 trillion the decade after that and there s an array of consumer protection and benefits that take effect this year i just want to list some of these off just in case you re having a conversation with your coworker or friend i know you ve had some of those conversations this year seniors who fall into the doughnut hole coverage gap will receive 250 to help them pay for their prescriptions and that begins a pathway where we are closing that doughnut hole completely so that seniors have the coverage they need and the security they need for their prescription drug coverage this year millions of small business owners will be eligible for tax credits to cover the cost of ensuring their employees this year this year 10 000 tens of thousands of uninsured americans with a preexisting condition and parents with children with preexisting conditions will finally be able to purchase the coverage they need this year insurance companies can t drop you when you get sick this year insurance companies can t apply lifetime limits on your coverage these are big deals for families all across america now this reform is not perfect there are going to be adjustments that we re going to have to make this is going to take a few years to fully implement because we ve got the responsibility to get it right but when you turn on the television you ve got pundits saying that the country is still divided on health care it s not universally popular yet folks i want to repeat what i said in maine it s only been a couple weeks you know sometimes the way they cover stuff in washington i was talking about how the way they cover a farm you know you d be up there tilling the soil and the press would look and look the dirt s all messed up and then you d put the seeds in and pack it down and next morning they d come up there are no crops it s not working we re going to starve let me tell you and then you ve got then you have some of my republican friends who were warning that after health care this was going to be armageddon wanted to repeal health reform before the signature was even dry so i went to nasa today and i asked some of the guys i said are asteroids coming are you sending bruce willis and ben affleck out to they told me america is going to be okay and for those republicans and folks who are on the repeal platform my attitude is go for it i ll have that fight we ll have that argument we ll take that argument across the country if they want to let kids if they want to let kids be barred from getting insurance because of preexisting conditions we can have that discussion they want to take back tax cuts from small businesses who want to do the right thing by their employees i m happy to have that argument they want to allow insurance companies to take away your insurance right when you get sick and need it most i m happy to have that debate are they really willing to look that senior in the eye and say we re not going to help you afford that medicine well they may but i tell you what if they do it i don t think they re going to get a very good response i don t think they re going to look a small business owner in the eye and take away their tax credits or say that your son can t have health care after all too bad tough luck you re on your own look what happened the other day just north of here ted deutch won the first congressional election since health reform passed now look i mean let s not get too excited it s a democratic district but to listen to the republicans they were warning over and over again this would be a referendum on health care this is a referendum on the recovery act this is a referendum on obama well maybe it was i m just listening to them here s what i think miami here s what i think i think if we stay true to our principles if we do what s right for the american people then elections will take care of themselves you know i noticed this was one of the great things about running for president especially for two years is it gives you a little perspective because you realize that these things go in cycles the mood of the media and how things get portrayed and so you re like a genius for about a month and then you re an idiot for about six months then you know you re smart again for you re not as smart as you were but you re a little smarter than they thought you were then you re an idiot again but what it shows you is that you can t hyperventilate about the day to day politics and the gamesmanship and the polls what you ve got to focus on is that true north that lodestar which is are the things we re doing over the long term going to help not just this generation but the next generation is this going to make america stronger is it going to help the economy grow is it going to help equip our children to compete in a new economy there are always going to be issues that democrats and republicans don t see eye to eye on that s how our democracy works i have to say though it s one thing to disagree out of principle it s another to stand in the way simply because of politics and too often that s been what s going on and we had we had republican leaders who made a decision even before i took office now this is their quote so i m not making this up who just said you know we re not going to work with the obama administration on the most important issues facing the american people a few weeks into my presidency i went to the capitol to meet with some of my republican friends on the house to talk about what were we going to do about this economy plunging into disaster it turned out there was a press release issued before i got to the meeting saying they had already decided to vote against it they didn t know what it was but they were going to oppose it early in the health care debate a republican senator said if we are able to stop obama on this it will be his waterloo it will break him when it comes to fiscal responsibility these are the folks who inherited this massive surplus from bill clinton and the democrats right so they conveniently forget when they re in charge that they turned this massive surplus into massive deficits voting for two tax cuts for the wealthy that weren t paid for two wars a new entitlement program paid for none of it suddenly we re in and they ve got the green visors out and they re sharpening the pencils and they re deficit hawks again blamed me for all of it i walked in with a 1 3 trillion deficit suddenly it s mine it s a sight to see so i said okay i m president i m going to take responsibility for it i embrace a republican idea we re going to create a bipartisan fiscal commission to help us close the deficit what happened some of the same folks who had proposed the idea they were sponsors of the bill suddenly they re against it so i m sensing a pattern so somebody has got to tell them you talk and you share ideas first then you can say no you don t say no first so not surprisingly people are frustrated with washington but if folks spent less time trying to score points and more time thinking about the needs and the hopes of the american people imagine all that we could accomplish together i know this may be heresy to say in front of a crowd like this at an event like this but there are more important things than political party so i m going to keep on reaching out to republicans i m going to keep on incorporating good ideas when they have them even if they refuse to consider my good ideas because there is a lot that we should be able to agree on we should be able to agree on rebuilding our economy so that hard work is rewarded and families feel like they ve got a shot at achieving the american dream again this is more than just an economic challenge because jobs are more than about a paycheck it s about feeling a job well done the sense of self worth and dignity the fulfillment of meeting one s responsibilities we ve got to think creatively and collaboratively if we want to put america back to work in well paying jobs we should all agree we ve got to close our mounting deficits i take this very seriously even as we ve had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term helping people with unemployment insurance and their health insurance needs and helping states so they re not having to lay off teaches and cops and firefighters we ve still been making hard choices necessary to put our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run but we re going to face more tough choices ahead and we ve got to work on them together we should all agree that we ve got to pass common sense wall street reform that prevents the kind of situation that led us into this crisis in the first place and damaged the dreams of millions of americans now it s no surprise that the financial institutions that profit from the status quo have sent hordes of lobbyists to kill reform it s like throwing a piece of meat into a piranha tank they re going to race to see how fast they can tear it apart but we can t allow them to succeed every member of congress is soon going to have to make a decision they re going to have to make a choice and the choice is going to be very simple between special interests and the american people if you want the status quo where banks are able to take wild risks to pump up their bonuses and leave you footing the bill when things go south that s one option i don t think it s the right one and there s going to be a very clear choice to make i believe that all of us democrat and republican can find some common ground here so the bottom line is we ve come a long way to go we ve come a long way this past year but we ve got a long way to go we ve got a lot of work left to do times are still tough for too many of our fellow americans but here s what i want you to remember america has endured tough times before tougher times than these even and we always come out of them stronger we always come out of them smarter we always come out more united and miami i m convinced that if we keep at it if we see this through if we shun the cynics if we heed the better angels of our nature if we look beyond the next election do what s right for the next generation then we re going to meet our common challenges and we are going to finish what we ve started we are going to keep the promise and hope of america alive for this generation and for the next generation and every generation after that and we re only going to do it because of you guys and the incredible work that you re doing each and every day thank you i love you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama16 6 10 barack_obama hello everybody all right everybody have a seat i got a lot to say here first of all i want to just thank becky patton for the extraordinary work that she has done on behalf of nurses on behalf of patients on behalf of the country thank you so much we are proud of everything that she s done and her mom is in the house so thanks mom good job good job with becky i want to thank marla weston the ceo of the american nurses association and i also want to acknowledge the presence here of dr mary wakefield who is our for those of you who are not familiar she is the administrator of hrsa and our highest ranking nurse in the administration and does absolutely great work now i want to tell you it is an honor to speak to the ana representing more than 3 million registered nurses across the country part of the reason i m here is because i promised i was going to come and i told to becky that i don t break promises to nurses because you never know when i m going to need a shot and i don t want them working that needle all kind of i can t find a vein so i m keeping my promises but it s not just out of fear it s also because i love nurses i love nurses now i m not just saying that because i m talking to a roomful of nurses there are representatives from illinois here in the house and they will testify i loved nurses before i got to washington and i don t think i m alone in that because virtually all of us at one time or another in our lives have known the care and the skill that you offer in hours of need in moments where people are most vulnerable most worried nurses are there doing difficult and lifesaving work and you don t just provide clean bandages or an intravenous line a nurse will hold your hand sometime or offer a voice of calm or that knowing glance that says things are going to be okay and when malia was born i remember vividly the nurses who took care of michelle and our new baby the doctor who delivered is actually one of our best friends but she was there about 10 minutes and the nurse was there the whole time tending to this new family of ours that was a happy day now there was another day when our youngest daughter sasha she was three months old was diagnosed with meningitis and it was nurses who walked us through what was happening and who along with the doctors helped make sure that sasha was all right and that her father did not have a breakdown so as a father as a husband i will forever be in debt to the women and men of your profession and i know that millions of others feel the same way america s nurses are the beating heart of our medical system you re on the front lines you are on the front lines of health care in small clinics and in large hospitals in rural towns and in big cities all across america and it s because you know our health care system so well that you ve been such a fierce advocate for its reform because after all you care for patients who end up in the emergency room or in surgery because they couldn t afford the preventive care that would have made more invasive and costly treatment unnecessary you are asked not only to take care of patients you ve got to navigate a tangle of rules and forms and paperwork that drive up costs and prevent you from doing the best job possible you re the ones who see the terror in a parent s eyes when an insurance company bureaucrat has denied coverage for a child s treatment and you re the ones who have to comfort people who are wracked with worry not only about getting better but also about paying for health care because they ve hit a cap on benefits or their insurance doesn t cover a preexisting condition so nurses have seen the consequences of our decades old failure to reform our health care system the rising costs the increased uninsured the mixed up incentives the overburdened providers and a complex system that has been working a lot better for insurance companies than it s working for the american people or for providers and that s why almost a year ago nurses from across the country came to the white house to help make the case for reform for making coverage more affordable and extending coverage to millions without it for giving doctors and nurses more freedom to help their patients for providing families and small businesses with more control over their health insurance and for ending the worst and most abusive practices of the insurance industry and after a long and tough fight we succeeded yes we did in passing health care reform thanks to you and that reform will make a positive difference in the lives of the american people now this fight wasn t new for the ana i understand you were one of the only major health care organizations that supported the creation of medicare from the start and i want to recognize one of your leaders jo eleanor elliott of colorado who is here today and was your president back then for the courage and leadership she showed where is she there you are right there give her a big round of applause so you ve been there before and you were here this time and i want to thank the ana for advocating for health care reform for ensuring that the voices of nurses and of patients were heard now already we re seeing the start of a profound shift as reforms begin to take effect we re giving ordinary consumers and small businesses more power and protection in the health care system and we re knocking down barriers that stand between you and the people who you care for a few weeks ago 4 million small business owners and organizations got a postcard in their mailbox from the irs now usually that s not good news but this time it was because it told them that they could be eligible for a health care tax cut this year a tax cut worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars for those small businesses a tax cut that will help millions to provide coverage to their employees that s happening now in many cases young adults without health insurance are now able to stay on their parents plan until they re 26 years old even though insurance companies had until september to comply with this rule we asked them to do so immediately to avoid coverage gaps for young adults and most have agreed starting this month relief is also available to businesses for providing coverage to retirees who are not yet eligible for medicare and as of last week senior citizens who fall into the doughnut hole have started receiving a 250 rebate to help them afford their medication and we re going to keep on going until we close that doughnut hole completely in the meantime we re strengthening medicare by going after the billions of dollars in waste and fraud and abuse in the system and states like maine and connecticut are beginning to predict budget savings as pieces of reform come online so we ve begun making coverage more affordable in addition the new health care law has also started to end the worst insurance industry practices you know them for too long we ve been held hostage to an industry that jacks up premiums and drops coverage whenever they please those days are coming to an end so after my administration demanded that a large insurance company justify a massive premium increase on californians the company backed off its plan my secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius has urged states to investigate other rate hikes we ve set up a new office of consumer information and insurance oversight and we ll provide grants to states running the best oversight programs to root out bad practices when it comes to premiums now as of september the new health care law prohibits insurance companies from dropping people s coverage when they get sick which is critical to giving people some peace of mind but when news reports indicated that an insurance company was dropping the coverage of women diagnosed with breast cancer my administration called on them to end the practice immediately don t wait till september and soon after the entire industry announced that it would comply with the new law early and stop this perverse practice of dropping people s insurance when they fall ill and when they need coverage the most some were also questioning whether insurance companies could find a loophole in the new law and continue to discriminate against children with preexisting conditions so we called on insurance companies to step up provide coverage to our most vulnerable americans and the insurance industry has agreed in just two weeks americans denied coverage because of preexisting conditions will be able to enroll in a new national insurance pool and for states that opt to run their own pools using funds from the new law we re urging them to begin enrolling people as soon as possible and these pools are going to provide some short term relief but they re temporary they re going to ensure that folks who have been shut out of the market because they ve been sick can access more affordable insurance starting right away but what we want is these health insurance exchanges up and running in a few years so that at that point this kind of discrimination will finally be banned forever and that s when those that s when the millions without coverage including people with preexisting conditions will have the access to the same types of insurance plans that members of congress get and you know those must be pretty good we re also going to be putting in place a patient s bill of rights that will tell insurance companies that they can t put a restrictive limit on the amount of coverage you get in your lifetime or in a given year it will prevent insurance companies from rescinding your coverage when you get sick because of an administrative error it will provide simple and clear information to consumers about their choices and their rights and beyond making insurance more affordable and more secure reform also will mean changes that make it easier for you the backbone of the health care system to do your jobs already over the past year we ve made one of the largest investments in the nursing and health workforce in recent history we passed landmark reforms to make college more affordable which can help more people gain a nursing degree even as we provide grants and aid for more than 15 000 nurses seeking graduate degrees and other training and we ve begun the transition to private and secure computerized health records because this will not only reduce errors and costs i know you can t read those doctors handwriting it will mean you can spend more time with patients and less time with paperwork and that s why you got into the profession now there is more work to do and that s why today my administration is announcing a number of investments to expand the primary care workforce this includes funding to allow students training part time to become nurse practitioners to start training full time we want to speed up the process where folks go from the classroom into the exam room and we re going to provide resources for clinics run by registered nurses and nurse practitioners without these nurses many people in cities and rural areas would have no access to care at all now all of these steps are part of a larger effort to make our system work better for nurses and for doctors and to improve the quality of care for patients and by focusing on primary medicine we will finally recognize the role of all talented and skilled health care providers including nurses i don t have to tell you that nurses all too often have been given short shrift even amidst a nursing shortage when there are cutbacks you feel the squeeze in salaries or the reduction in shifts despite being overworked and underpaid and as you know this disregard goes beyond numbers on a ledger there have been a bunch of times i m sure when the service you rendered is thought to be less consequential or valuable than that of other professions that s what has to change it s important that we not only ensure that you have the support to do your jobs we re seeking to elevate and value the work that you do because throughout our history nurses have done more than provide care and comfort to those in need often with little power or sway on their own nurses mostly women historically have been a force of will and a sense of common decency and paved the way towards better care and a more compassionate society from clara barton s treatment of wounded soldiers at antietam to the advocacy of dorothea dix on behalf of people with mental disabilities to the countless nurses whose names we ll never know one of america s greatest poets walt whitman also served as a nurse during the civil war and the experience changed him forever later he would reflect on that time on both the heartbreak and the fulfillment he found during those years and he wrote i thread my way through the hospitals the hurt and wounded i pacify with soothing hand i sit by the restless all the dark night some are so young some suffer so much i recall the experience sweet and sad sweet and sad your jobs are tough your days can be stressful and exhausting and sometimes thankless but through long shifts and late nights in the hectic scrum of the emergency room or in those quiet acts of humanity you are saving lives you are offering solace you re helping to make us a better nation and my task as president our task as a people is to ensure that our health care system is worthy of your efforts our mission must be to live up to the values you uphold each and every day so thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you everybody thank you dem bobama16 7 09 barack_obama thank you it is good to see you hello new jersey all right everybody have a seat everybody have a seat i want to begin by just making a few acknowledgements first of all i m going to have a lot to say about this guy but i just want everybody to know that one of my earliest supporters somebody who had faith and confidence in me before i was a united states senator was the man standing next to me right here jon corzine and so it is a special honor to be with him i ve got a couple other friends i want to quickly acknowledge larry cohen is around here somewhere cwa right here we appreciate you larry president of the communication workers we ve got a couple of outstanding mayors the pride of newark cory booker is here there s cory in the back and we ve also got the pride of jersey city jeremiah healy i want to just say a little something at the top as many of you may have heard five officers were shot in the line of duty in jersey city jeremiah i just saw him we just discussed it he may already be on his way back obviously we are watching this closely our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of all the officers who have been hurt and we are confident they are going to end up coming back strong as ever but it s a reminder for all of us of the incredible sacrifice that our law enforcement officials engage in and their families are part of each and every day so i hope everybody keeps them in their thoughts and prayers in the days to come it is great to be back in new jersey i m proud to stand with a man who wakes up every single day thinking about your future and the future of this state and that s your governor jon corzine like many of us in public life today jon is a leader who s been called to govern at some extraordinary times he s been tested by the worst recession in half a century a recession that was caused by years of recklessness and irresponsibility and obviously had a disproportionate impact here in new jersey given the closeness of the financial sector to the state part of the crisis was caused by the same small thinking that s plagued our politics for decades the kind of thinking that says we can afford to tinker around with big problems put off tough decisions defer the big challenges tell people only what they want to hear that s not the kind of leader jon corzine is he didn t run for this office on the promise that change would be easy and he certainly has not avoided what is hard this isn t somebody who s here because of some special interest or political machine he s here because he cares about what happens to the people of new jersey this is a man who has provided more property tax relief than any other governor in new jersey s history this is the first governor in 60 years who has reduced the size of government at the same time this is also a leader who has stood up against those who wanted to cut what matters like education jon corzine has not only protected funding for new jersey s schools he s reformed them with higher standards and now students in this state rank at the top of the country in reading and math that s a testimony to jon corzine s leadership since jon corzine became governor the children s health insurance program has been expanded to reach 80 000 more children 80 000 who got health insurance who did not have it before new jersey has become a leader in clean energy and jon corzine wasn t just the first governor to pass an economic recovery plan for his state he was an ally in helping the federal government my administration develop the national recovery plan and because of these recovery plans jobs have been saved and created throughout the state of new jersey jobs of cops and teachers jobs in small businesses and clean energy companies unemployment insurance and health insurance has been extended to those who have felt the brunt of this recession who lost their jobs tax relief has been delivered to families and small businesses ninety five percent of working families have already received tax relief as a consequence of our recovery plan and i can promise you that more help is on the way in the weeks and months to come now i realize this is little comfort to those who have lost a job in this recession some of you know people who ve lost jobs or maybe you re worried about losing their home or can t afford their health insurance anymore i realize that some of the progress that s been made doesn t help some folks who need to pay their bills and have fallen deeply behind and i ll be honest with you even though jobs have always been one of the last things that come back in a recession some of the jobs that have been lost may not come back the fact is even before this crisis hit we had an economy that was creating a good deal of wealth for the folks at the very top but not a lot of good paying jobs for the rest of america it s an economy that wasn t built to compete in the 21st century it was one where we spend more on health care than any other nation but aren t any healthier where we ve been slow to invest in clean energy technologies that have created new jobs and new industries in other countries because we ve been slow to take up the call of clean energy we had an economy where we ve watched our graduation rates lag behind too much of the world we used to be at the very top number one in college graduation rates we aren t anymore we re in the middle of the pack but that was the america of yesterday that doesn t have to be the america of tomorrow that must not be the america our children inherit you see what we re facing right now is more than a passing crisis it s a transformative moment that s led this nation to an unmistakable crossroads we ve got some choices and decisions we ve got to make right here in washington in washington and right here in trenton now there are some in new jersey some in washington some all across the country who want us to go down the path we ve already traveled for most of the last decade the path where we just throw up our hands and say we can t do anything about health care it s too tough we can t do anything about energy too hard where we do nothing but hand out more tax breaks to the wealthiest few that make the rich richer and the deficit even larger and leave ordinary people in the lurch that s one path it s a path where our health care costs keep rising and our oil dependency keeps on growing where our financial markets remain an unregulated crapshoot and our workers lose out on the jobs of tomorrow but that s not the future i accept for the united states of america that s not the future that jon corzine accepts for the united states of america that s not the future you accept for the united states of america we are going to set a new course for this nation and it s going to start right here in new jersey we did not come as far as a country as we have because we ve spent all our time looking backwards or because we stood still in the face of great challenges and said no we can t we didn t get here by lowering our sights or diminishing our dreams we are a forward looking people a people who have always faced the future not with fear but with determination not with doubt but with hope we ve always taken great chances and reached for new horizons and remade the world around us and that s what we must do again i am absolutely confident that we will weather this economic storm but once we clear away the wreckage the real question is what are we going to build in its place even as we rescue this economy from this crisis i believe we have to rebuild an even better economy than we had before we re going to have to lay a new foundation that will allow this country to thrive and compete in the global economy and that means investing in the clean energy jobs of the future that means educating and training our workers for those jobs that means finally controlling the health care costs that are driving this nation into debt when it comes to these issues the naysayers seem to think that we can somehow just keep on doing what we ve been doing and expect a different outcome we can t and everywhere we go i meet americans who know that we can t they know change isn t easy they know there will be setbacks and false starts and i love some of our opponents who stand up and say look it s been six months and you haven t solved the economy yet the american people know better than that here is what they also know we re at a rare moment where we ve been given the opportunity to remake our world a chance to seize our future and as difficult as it sometimes is what is inherent about the american spirit is the fact that we don t cling to the past in this country we always move forward and that movement doesn t begin in washington it begins with you it happens because the american people decide it s time to move forward because you decide it s time for change because you re willing to face the future without fear and if you do that now then we will not only reelect jon corzine so he can keep on fighting for families here in new jersey but we will do what earlier generations have done and build something better to leave to our children and secure our future in the 21st century we are counting on you and i m absolutely confident that the american people are going to meet the test thank you everybody god bless you dem bobama16 8 10 barack_obama thank you very much everybody please have a seat thank you very much it is wonderful to be at zbb energy and thanks for your hospitality and thanks for helping to build a future i ve got a couple of people i want to acknowledge first of all your wonderful governor and first lady jim and jessica doyle are here please give them a big round of applause we ve got somebody who is fighting on behalf of wisconsin families each and every day russ feingold your wonderful u s senator a great friend and somebody who has been really doing great work over her first couple of years in congress congresswoman gwen moore please give her a big round of applause and thank you eric for the wonderful tour that you provided to us please give eric apfelbach a big round of applause ceo of zbb it is great to be here i just had a chance to see some of the batteries that you re manufacturing and talk to a few of the men and women who are building them and the reason i m here today is because at this plant you re doing more than just making high tech batteries you re pointing the country towards a brighter economic future now that s not easy we ve been through a terrible recession the worst that we ve seen since the great depression and this recession was the culmination of a decade that fell like a sledgehammer on middle class families for the better part of 10 years people were seeing stagnant incomes and sluggish growth and skyrocketing health care costs and skyrocketing tuition bills and people were feeling less secure economically and few parts of the economy were hit harder than manufacturing over the last 10 years the number of people working in manufacturing shrank by a third and that left millions of skilled hardworking americans sitting idle just like the plants were sitting idle that was before the recession hit obviously once the recession took hold millions more were struggling in ways that they never imagined and there s nobody here who hasn t been touched in some way by this recession and certainly a state like wisconsin or my home state of illinois can tell a lot of stories about how badly hit manufacturing was particularly in the midwest now there s some who suggest this decline is inevitable but i don t see it that way and i know neither do you yes times are tough but we ve been through tough times before and we ve made it through because we are resilient americans are resilient we don t give in to pessimism we don t give in to cynicism we fight for our future we work to shape our own destiny as a country and that s what we ve been trying to do since i took office we ve been fighting on all fronts inch by inch foot by foot mile by mile to get this country moving forward again and going after every single job we can create right here in the united states of america so we re investing in 21st century infrastructure roads and bridges faster internet access high speed railroads projects that will lead to hundreds of thousands of private sector jobs but will also lay the groundwork so that our kids and our grandkids can keep prospering we ve cut taxes for small businesses that hire unemployed workers in fact i ve signed seven other small business tax cuts so that entrepreneurs can help expand and buy new equipment and add more employees we ve taken emergency steps to prevent layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and firefighters and police officers and other critical public servants in our communities and i think that governor doyle will testify that we have made progress in part because everybody has pulled together there was a great danger of even greater layoffs all across this state for vital services that would affect our kids and our families these folks would have otherwise lost their jobs because of state and local budget cuts and at the same time what we ve been trying to do and that s why i m here at zbb is to jumpstart a homegrown clean energy industry building on the good work of your governor and others in this state that s why i m here today because of the steps we ve taken to strengthen the economy zbb received a loan that s helping to fund an expansion of your operations already it s allowed zbb to retain nearly a dozen workers and over time the company expects to hire about 80 new workers this is leading to new business for your suppliers including mgs plastics and other manufacturer here in wisconsin and zbb is also planning to take advantage of a special tax credit to build another factory in southeastern wisconsin so we can create even more jobs and more opportunity and eric is confident that you can expand because you re seeing rising demand for advanced batteries and all this is part of steps we ve taken in clean energy steps that have led to jobs manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels building hybrid and electric vehicles modernizing our electric grid so that we have more sources of renewable energy but we can also use it more effectively we expect our commitment to clean energy to lead to more than 800 000 jobs by 2012 and that s not just creating work in the short term that s going to help lay the foundation for lasting economic growth i just want everybody to understand just a few years ago american businesses could only make 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles 2 percent in just a few years we ll have up to 40 percent of the world s capacity here at zbb you re building batteries to store electricity from solar cells and wind turbines and you ve been able to export batteries around the globe and that s helping lead this new industry for years we ve heard about manufacturing jobs disappearing overseas well companies like this are showing us how manufacturing can come back right here in the united states of america right back here to wisconsin now obviously we ve got a lot more work to do the damage that was done by this recession was enormous eight million people lost their job 750 000 lost jobs the month i was sworn into office 3 million had lost their jobs by the time we took office and several more million in those first few months of 2009 so too many of our family members and our friends and our neighbors are still having a tough time finding work and some of them have been out of work a long time and i ve said before and i ll say it again my administration will not rest till every american who is willing to work can find a job and a job that pays decent wages and decent benefits to support a family but what s clear is that we re headed in the right direction a year and a half ago this economy was shrinking rapidly the economy is now growing a year and a half ago we were losing jobs every month in the private sector we ve now added private sector jobs for seven months in a row and that means the worst mistake we could make is to go back to doing what we were doing that got us into the mess that we were in we can t turn back we ve got to keep going forward we ve got to keep going forward now i ll be honest with you there s going to be a big debate about where we go there are folks in washington right now who think we should abandon our efforts to support clean energy they ve made the political calculation that it s better to stand on the sidelines than work as a team to help american businesses and american workers so they said no to the small business tax cuts i talked about they said no to rebuilding infrastructure and they said no to clean energy projects they even voted against getting rid of tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas so we could give those tax breaks to companies that are investing right here in wisconsin and my answer to people who have playing politics the past year and a half is they should come to this plant they should go to any of the dozen new battery factories or the new electrical vehicle manufacturers or the new wind turbine makers or the solar plants that are popping up all over this country and they should have to explain why they think these clean energy jobs are better off being made in germany or china or spain instead of right here in the united states see when folks lift up the hoods on the cars of the future i want them to see engines stamped made in america when new batteries to store solar power come off the line i want to see printed on the side made in america when new technologies are developed and new industries are formed i want them made right here in america that s what we re fighting for that s what this is about so zbb you re part of that process you guys are at the cutting edge you re how we re going to strengthen this economy these have been a couple of very hard years for america and we re not completely out of the woods yet there are going to be some more tough days ahead it would be a mistake to pretend otherwise but we are headed in the right direction you re pointing us in the right direction and i am confident about our future because of what i have seen at this plant and what i see when i talk to workers like all of you what i have seen all across this country when the chips are down it s always a mistake to bet against the american worker it s a mistake to bet against american businesses it s a mistake to bet against the american people this is the home to the most skilled hardworking people on earth there s nothing we cannot achieve when we set our minds to it all we ve got to do is harness the potential that s always been central to our success that s not just how we re going to come through the storms we ve been in recently that s how we re going to emerge even stronger than before so i want to say thank you to eric i want to thank zbb for hosting us more importantly i want to thank all of you for setting a model for how we re going to create the kind of lasting economy that s going to be good not just for this generation but for the next generation thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless america thank you dem bobama16 9 09 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you it is true that i always wanted to fence and i thought that would be cool so i might get a couple tips from you guys now you see one of the reasons that i love chicago so much it s the city where i met the woman i love sixteen days away we re just 16 days away from the deciding vote on which world city will host the 2016 olympic and paralympic games so let s get right down to business here the united states is eager to welcome the world to our shores this nation would be honored to host the 2016 olympic and paralympic games and to serve as host to thousands of athletes and millions of visitors from around the world and within this great country of ours there is no better city than that than chicago illinois now i may live in washington these days i love washington d c and our house here is a little bigger than the one we got in chicago but i ve called chicago home for nearly 25 years it s a city of broad shoulders and big hearts and bold dreams a city of legendary sports figures legendary sports venues and legendary sports fans a city like america itself where the world the world s races and religions and nationalities come together and reach for the dream that brought them here in chicago old and new exist in harmony it s a city rooted in an industrial past that laid this nation s railroads forged this nation s steel rebuilt itself after a great fire and reversed the course of a mighty river and it s also a city of bustle and gleaming promise that mayor daley has pledged to make the greenest in america and that s why i think that one of the most exciting parts of the olympic and paralympic games is that all of the plans being made in chicago exist within minutes of the city center easily accessible to commerce and culture parkland and water because we don t want these venues to be far flung all over the place we want to host these games where we live and work and play we want them in the heart of our proud city the city that opened the way westward in the 19th century that showed the way skyward in the 20th century and that is leading the way forward in the 21st century so chicago is ready the american people are ready we want these games we want them the olympic and paralympic games they hold a special place in our psyche they lift us up they bind us together they re the sources of fleeting moments instants really that have become permanently seared in our collective memories the humble victory of jesse owens the perfection of nadia and mary lou michael johnson s astonishment at his own feat derek redmond and kerri strug bravely making it through with a little help jean driscoll racing her wheelchair to gold after gold be it over 100 meters or 26 2 miles moments of euphoria after years of hard work and moments when the human spirit triumphed over injury that should have been impossible to overcome moments of a team s shared glory and moments of lonely disappointment despite one s best efforts countless moments we live and relive again and again silently and subconsciously nodding yes we do believe in miracles we find ourselves riveted by the games because even as we cheer even as we live and die for each point or each tenth of a second what we see reflected in the olympic and paralympic games are simple truths of our common humanity and that no matter who you are where you re from or what you look like with hard work and dedication and discipline you can achieve your dreams you can make it if you try what we see is that although we may come from vastly different stories and very different walks of life we are one people who possess common values and common ideals who celebrate individual excellence but also share a recognition that together we can accomplish great and wonderful things we can t accomplish alone it s the stuff from which our young nation was forged and it is a set of timeless values that serves as the underpinnings of the olympic spirit and so the united states of america does more than just stand behind the olympic and paralympic games we stand behind their ideals ands that s why we ve created the first ever office of olympic paralympic and youth sport right here in the white house now this office does the work of coordinating with federal agencies to support and promote olympic and paralympic games but it also works to support and promote the olympic spirit we ve been working hand in hand with chicago 2016 the united states olympic committee olympians and paralympians some of whom have joined us here today to get our young americans active and involved in sports because we want to do more than just bring the olympic games to america we want them to create a lasting legacy here in america i want to thank the members of the international olympic committee for their dedication to the olympic and paralympic movement and the values it represents i am confident that they ll find no greater partners than the city of chicago and the american people to fuel this movement to ignite it in new generations and to inspire the world in 2016 with magnificent games that bring this world together in noble competition and shared celebration of our common humanity the energy excitement and enthusiasm on display at the white house here today these aren t new the folks gathered here this afternoon have had the olympic spirit blazing within them for years working tirelessly to bring these games to the city and the country we love and i promise you we are fired up about this i would make the case in copenhagen personally if i weren t so firmly committed to making making real the promise of quality affordable health care for every american but the good news is i m sending a more compelling superstar to represent the city and country we love and that is our first lady michelle obama she s going because she and i share the conviction that bringing the games to the united states isn t just important for the city but for the american people and i m confident she and my senior advisor and director of the white house office of olympic paralympic and youth sport valerie jarrett will represent the american people well our nation from the local to the national level is committed to the success of these games the chicago city council unanimously supports this bid both houses of the united states congress support this bid i support this bid and on behalf of the nearly 20 000 volunteers the more than 1 million who ve already signed up in support and all who ve already taken up this cause and made it their own first as the cause of the city and now the cause of a nation the united states supports this bid americans like chicagoans we don t like to make small plans we want to dream big and reach high we hope deeply we want these games and if you choose chicago i promise you this chicago will make america proud and america will make the world proud so as i said when we first were announcing this bid in chicago let the games begin right here in the united states of america thank you dem bobama16 9 10a barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you so much thank you thank you everybody please have a seat thank you very much thank you to ursula and all the board members here we are so excited about this initiative and i want everybody to also know that i ve got one of the finest secretaries of education i think in the history of this country in arne duncan and he is excited about it as well so i hope you don t mind before i begin i just want to comment on a vote that just took place a little while ago in congress i want to thank the senate for finally passing the small business jobs bill that had been held up for months by partisan delay it s going to make a difference in millions of small business owners across the country who are going to benefit from tax breaks and additional lending so companies have the capital to grow and hire and this is really welcome news now these tax breaks and loans are going to help create jobs in the short term but the reason all of us are here companies large and small is to talk about an issue with far reaching consequences for our economy in the long run and that s the education of our children it s an incredibly impressive gathering that we have here we ve got dozens of leaders from the business community who are part of today s announcement we re joined by talented and enterprising students where are the students raise your hands we re very proud of you guys we have some passionate and dedicated teachers teachers raise your hands proud of you i want to recognize all the members of congress who are with us as well as the top scientists from my administration including my science advisor john holdren who is here where s john there he is right there as well as and in addition we ve got and this is obviously the coolest thing we ve got two trailblazing astronauts in sally ride and mae jemison who are here so we are just honored to have all of you here at the white house we re here for a simple reason everybody in this room understands that our nation s success depends on strengthening america s role as the world s engine of discovery and innovation and all the ceos who are here today understand that their company s future depends on their ability to harness the creativity and dynamism and insight of a new generation and that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today especially in science technology engineering and math we know how important this is for our health it s important for our security it s important for our environment and we know how important it is for our economy as i discussed this morning with my export council our prosperity in a 21st century global marketplace depends on our ability to compete with nations around the world and we are never going to win that competition by paying the lowest wages or simply by trying to offer the cheapest products we re going to win by offering the most innovative products we re going to win by doing what we do best which is harnessing the talents and ingenuity of our people to lead the world in new industries that s how we can create millions of new jobs exporting more of our goods around the world now as any one of the scientists ceos and teachers here will tell you this kind of innovation isn t born in the boardroom or on the factory floor it doesn t begin in a basement workshop or a research laboratory that s where the payoff happens but it starts long before it starts in a classroom it starts when a child learns that every star in the night sky is another sun when a young girl swells with accomplishment after solving a tough math problem when a boy builds a model rocket and watches it soar when an eager student peers through a microscope and discovers a whole new world it s in these moments that a young person may discover a talent or a passion that might lead to a career it s in these moments every day that our nation our promise as a nation is realized and it is in these moments that we see why a quality science and math education matters why it is absolutely critical to us now despite the importance of education in these subjects in recent years we have been outpaced by our competitors there is no disputing that one assessment shows american 15 year olds ranked 21st in science and 25th in math when compared to their peers around the world yet for years we ve failed to address this challenge there s been some talk about it there have been some white papers and some reports about it but we haven t solved it and instead we ve oftentimes gotten into tired arguments traded across old divides and parents and students and teachers have been basically left to accept that mediocrity was the best that america could do and we ve got some islands of excellence but we assume that we can t substantially turn this around the cost of this inaction is immeasurable the inventions that are never built the businesses never started the cures never discovered the sparks of imagination never lit the brimming potential squandered because we failed to come together for the sake not just of our children but for the sake of our future now i ran for president because i believe we cannot accept this failure of responsibility i believe as all of you do and that s why you re here today that america doesn t play for second place and we certainly don t play for 25th that s why soon after i took office i set this goal for our nation we will move from the middle to the top of the pack in math and science education over the next decade and we are on the way to meeting this goal under the leadership of arne duncan a man who has devoted his life to the idea that every single child deserves a world class education we launched an initiative called race to the top under race to the top states are actively competing to produce innovative math and science programs raising standards turning around struggling schools recruiting and retaining more good teachers at a difficult time for our nation when budget cuts across america have threatened the jobs of countless teachers we ve also fought some tough opposition to save hundreds of thousands of educator and school worker jobs these are folks in the classroom right now because we refused to accept a lesser education for our children even at a time of economic hardship today my science advisory board which is represented here by eric lander and jim gates released a set of recommendations to recruit and train more great teachers over the next decade and to promote breakthrough innovation in math and science education and it was a terrific report i sat with eric this morning and got a full briefing on it and there are so many promising ideas out there proven ideas that can work if we apply the will to it and i m asking arne duncan and dr cora marrett acting director of the national science foundation to take a look at all these recommendations closely and then start figuring out how can we implement them what i ve also said for a long time is that our success will not be attained by government alone it depends on teachers and parents and students and the broader community it depends on us restoring an insistence on excellence in our classrooms and from our children and that s why last year i challenged scientists and business leaders to think of creative ways to engage young people in math and science and now they are answering the call all across this country companies and nonprofits are coming together to replicate successful science programs new public private partnerships are working to offer additional training to more than 100 000 teachers and to prepare more than 10 000 new teachers in the next five years media companies are creating content to inspire young people in math and science and businesses are working with nonprofits to launch robotics competitions and other ways for kids to make things and learn with their hands so now we re building on this effort the business leaders gathered in this room with this board at the helm are launching a new organization called change the equation to help our country reach the goal of moving to the top in math and science education it brings together a coalition of more than a hundred ceos from the nation s largest companies who are committed to bring innovative math and science programs to at least a hundred high need communities over the next year and by the way they re doing this not only out of a sense of duty to the country not only because it s the right thing to do but they ve got a self interest in it xerox is going to do really well if we ve got a whole bunch of engineers and scientists and math majors who are clamoring to work for some of america s most innovative businesses we re also announcing other commitments from companies and foundations and nonprofits that will create fun and educational programs for students in science museums build hands on learning centers and 21st century libraries make sure that the students of military families have access to ap courses and improve professional development for math and science teachers and i think the teachers here will acknowledge that one of the challenges is making sure that those folks who are teaching these subjects in the classroom that they re up to date up to speed in getting the best professional training possible and this coalition is also going to extend opportunities to all of our young people and that includes efforts to open doors for women and minorities who all too often have been underrepresented in scientific fields but who are no less capable of success in scientific careers so i want to thank all the leaders who are here today for their outstanding commitment to this cause for lending their resources their expertise and their enthusiasm to the task of strengthening america s leadership in the 21st century by improving education and i want to encourage others to be part of this growing movement to harness the incredible potential for our young people for while this may be a difficult time for our nation and we face some tough challenges it s that potential that ought to give us hope we need no better example than the students who are here today from west philadelphia high school these students under the direction of some terrific teachers entered a global competition against serious corporate and college challengers to build a production ready car that runs on very little fuel so as part of an after school program they worked to get their vehicles ready they tweaked the hybrid engine they figured out how to make their cars run more efficiently at first the adults didn t really think their team had a chance admit it but then something strange happened where older and more seasoned teams failed they succeeded even making it through an elimination round now they didn t win the competition they re kids come on but they did build a car that got more than 65 miles per gallon they went toe to toe with car companies and big name universities they went against big name universities well funded rivals they held their own they didn t have a lot of money they didn t have the best equipment they certainly didn t have every advantage in life what they had was a program that challenged them to solve problems and to work together to learn and build and create and that s the kind of spirit and ingenuity that we have to foster that s the potential that we can harness all across america that s what will help our young people to fulfill their promise to realize their dreams and to help this nation succeed in the years to come and i just have to editorialize this is the kind of thing that just isn t going to get a lot of attention initially this will not lead the nightly news you won t see this on the cover of roll call or politico it s not doesn t have conflict and controversy behind it but these are actually the kinds of things that 10 years from now 20 years from now we re going to look back and say this is something that made a difference these are the kinds of things i m really proud of it doesn t get a lot of fanfare but from the bottom up it s making a huge difference in our country and so i just want to thank all of you who are here for your participation and i wasn t sure by the way whether all the folks on the stage here were introduced so i just want to make sure that everybody gets introduced in addition to ursula burns from xerox i want to thank rex tillerson of exxon mobil craig barrett who s the former intel ceo antonio perez of kodak glenn britt from time warner and somebody who s not on the stage but is going to be the ceo of change the equation linda rosen and obviously one of my heroes sally ride we are just so grateful to them we re grateful to you let s go get this thing done thank you very much everybody dem bobama16 9 10b barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you so much thank you everybody please have a seat have a seat well hello stamford it is good to be back in connecticut and it is an honor to stand here with your attorney general and the next united states senator from connecticut dick blumenthal i also want to acknowledge your candidate for governor dan malloy who is here or he may have slipped out right before there he is not sure when you re campaigning you can t be in one place too long and i also want to just say thank you to cynthia and the kids for lending dick to connecticut and to the country i know it is hard to be the spouse of a candidate and the spouse of an attorney general and it s going to be tough being the spouse of a united states senator i promised that i would not let michelle talk to cynthia before the election it s hard work but we are extraordinarily grateful and the fact that david and matthew and claire and mike are doing so well is a testament i know dick agrees with mom so please give her a big round of applause now connecticut let s face it this decision in this election should be a no brainer right i mean it should be should be a no brainer here you ve got a man who s been fighting for the people of connecticut since the day he walked into the attorney general s office he s got the record to prove it he s taken on the tobacco industry and helped stop those companies from targeting our kids he s taken on utility companies to try to beat back electricity rate increases and skyrocketing costs of heating oil he s taken on the auto industry to help keep family dealerships open that have been around for almost a century there is no there s no fight too big or too small for dick blumenthal to take on he was there to help a mother get her insurance company to pay for her baby s special formula he was there to help a family rebuild after their home was destroyed by fire he s there at county fairs and rotary club meetings and pta meetings talking with people of this state listening to your concerns this is the kind of leader you want representing you somebody you know somebody who shares your values somebody who doesn t just show up and try to get a victory by writing a big check and flooding the airwaves with negative ads now i have to say dick said his opponent may have more money dick she has more money than you i mean it s just in case there s any confusion and i understand she has promised a smackdown that is what she said and look there s no doubt i can see how somebody who s been in professional wrestling would think that they re right at home in the united states senate if the were watching some of the behavior that s been going on but the truth is and dick understands this public service is not a game at this moment we are facing challenges we haven t seen since the great depression and facing serious challenges requires serious leaders leaders who are willing to take on the status quo leaders who are willing to take on special interests leaders who are willing to fight for our people and our future and dick blumenthal is that leader and that s why i need all of you to make him your next united states senator that s the choice in this election i want to give you a sense of the context of this election what s at stake see for the last decade there was a very specific philosophy that reigned in washington you cut taxes especially for millionaires and billionaires you cut regulations for special interests you cut back on investments in education and clean energy and research and technology the idea was that if we put blind faith in the market if we let corporations play by their own rules if we left everybody else to fend for themselves somehow america would automatically grow and would prosper and over the last 10 years that philosophy has not worked out well it didn t work for middle class families who saw their incomes go down while their costs of everything from school tuition to health care go up it didn t work for an economy that experienced the slowest job growth since world war ii this was before the financial crisis it didn t work when a record surplus turned into a record deficit it didn t work when the recklessness of some on wall street led to the worst economic crisis since the great depression so i ran for president because i had a different idea about how this country was built and it was an idea rooted in my own family s story my parents my grandparents they never had much they worked tirelessly so that i might have a better life they believed in the american values of self reliance and individual responsibility and they instilled those values in their children but they also believed in a country that rewards hard work a country that rewards responsibility a country where we look after one another they believed in the america that gave my grandfather the chance to go to college because of the gi bill an america that gave my grandparents a chance to buy a home because of the federal housing authority an america where a rising tide really does lift all boats from the ceo to the newest guy on the assembly line that s the america i believe in that s the america dick blumenthal believes in we don t think that government has all the answers to our problems we don t think government s main role is to create jobs or prosperity we believe government should be lean and it should be efficient but in the words of the first republican president abraham lincoln we also believe that government should do for the people what they can t do as well for themselves and that means that means it should invest in our common future it means the powerful special interests corporations that they need to live up to their responsibilities it means government should help make the middle class more secure and give ladders for people to climb into that middle class that s what we believe that s the future that we see we see a future where we encourage american innovation and american ingenuity and that s why we want to end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that are investing in research and development and hiring right here in the united states of america that s why we re investing in research and technology and a homegrown clean energy industry because i don t want to see new solar panels or electric cars or wind turbines advanced batteries manufactured in europe or asia i want to see them made right here in america with american workers we see an america where every citizen has the skills and training to compete with any worker in the world today i had down in washington a meeting with a hundred ceos who are now partnering with our department of education and our national science foundation to improve math and science training in schools because we need more engineers and more scientists that s how we re going to keep our cutting edge and that s why we ve set a goal to once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 we used to be number one we re now around number 12 we re going to get back to number one by the end of this next decade and that s why we re revitalizing our community colleges and reforming our education system based on what works not what perpetuates the status quo that s why we re fighting to make permanent our new college tax credit this is a tax credit that will mean 10 000 in tuition relief for each child going to four years of college so we see an america where a growing middle class is the beating heart of a growing economy that s why i kept my promise and gave a middle class tax cut to 95 percent of working americans that s why we passed health insurance reform that stops insurance companies from jacking up your premiums or dropping coverage because you re sick or have a preexisting condition that s why we passed financial reform to end taxpayer funded bailouts reform that will stop credit card companies and mortgage lenders and wall street banks from taking advantage of the american people we want them to compete we want a thriving financial services area we want to compete on service on good products and good prices that s why we re trying to make it easier for workers to save for retirement and fighting the efforts of some in the other party to privatize social security because as long as i m president nobody is going to take the retirement savings of a generation of americans and bet it on the market that s the america that we see that s the american we believe in that s the choice in this election now obviously we ve been through an incredibly difficult time as a nation i never imagined that when i walked into the white house preventing a second depression would be at the top of my to do list and even though we ve done that even though the economy is growing again and we re adding private sector jobs again there is no doubt that because the hole was so deep progress has been painfully slow millions of americans remain unemployed millions more can barely pay the bills hundreds of thousands of families have lost their homes and behind each of these numbers is a story of heartache and struggle and i read about that heartache and struggle in letters that i receive every single night and whenever i m traveling around the country so i know that people are frustrated and they re angry and they re anxious about the future and i also know that in a political campaign the easiest thing for the other side to do is to try to ride that anger and fear all the way to election day especially when you got millions of dollars that you can burn on negative ads that s what happening right now look let s face it it would be one thing if dick s opponent and other republican candidates had looked back on the last decade and said you know what our policies really didn t work very well did they they kind of screwed up and they go they went away they meditated they contemplated and then they finally said everything we did ended up in this terrible recession let s try something new and they came back and they said we re going to propose something different this time we think we ve got the answer but that s not what they re doing they re not offering any new ideas i would challenge anybody here to name a single new idea that they re putting forward they don t have one they re not offering new policies the chair of the republican campaign committee said that if they take over congress they will pursue the exact same agenda as they did before i took office now keep in mind we lost 4 million jobs in the six months before i took office and they d pursue what they say are the exact same policies so here s what it comes down to these folks spent a decade driving our economy into a ditch and as soon as we took office we put on our boots we climbed down into the ditch it was muddy down there it was dusty bugs and we re pushing on the car and we re trying to get it out and slipping and sliding and the whole time the republicans are standing there sipping on a slurpee just watching us saying you re not pushing hard enough you re not pushing the right way and we tell them come on down here and help we could use a hand no that s okay and so finally finally after two years of toil we get this car back on the road and we can see the way forward and we get a tap on our shoulder and we turn around and it s the republicans and they say can we have the keys back no you can t have the keys back you don t know how to drive you don t know how to drive you can t have the keys you don t know how to drive all those it s not just them either all those special interests they re all lining up yeah we re going to ride shotgun we can t give them the keys back have you ever noticed by the way that if you want to go forward in a car you put your car in d and if you want to go backwards you put in r we d end up right back in the ditch it s true you think that s a coincidence it s not if we gave them the keys back they ve told exactly what they plan to do they want to go back to the days when credit card companies can jack up your rates without reason and insurance companies can deny you coverage just because you got sick they want to stand by and do nothing while states are forced to lay off teachers and firefighters and cops because in the words of the republican leader of the house those are just government jobs apparently not worth saving they want to give more tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas instead of giving them to companies that are investing here in the united states they want to borrow 700 billion to give a tax break worth an average of 100 000 to every millionaire and billionaire in america now these are the people who lecture us on fiscal responsibility the same people who refused to pay for two wars two tax cuts for the some of the wealthiest americans and left me a as a welcoming present a 1 3 trillion deficit when i took office and now they want to spend another 700 billion that 98 percent of americans will never see that s their agenda that s the sum total of their agenda that s what they re offering the american people a future that looks just like the past one where special interests get free reign to play by their own rules and where middle class families are left to fend for themselves now that s not a future i accept for the united states of america that is not a future that dick blumenthal accepts for the united states of america this is a tough election season people are hurting and they are understandably frustrated and a lot of them are scared and a lot of them are anxious and that means that even when people don t have ideas if they ve got enough money behind them they may be able to convince some folks that you know what just cast a protest vote throw the bums out that s a mentality that has an appeal and you can t blame folks for feeling that way sometime but that s not a future for our country a country that s more divided that s more unequal that s less dynamic where we re falling behind in everything from investment in infrastructure to investment in r d that s not a vision for the future and if that s not a future you accept for this nation if that s not the future you want for your kids and for your grandkids then we are asking you for help in this election because if you don t think the stakes are large and i want you to consider this right now all across the country special interests are planning and running millions of dollars of attack ads against democratic candidates because last year there was a supreme court decision called citizens united they re allowed to spend as much as they want without ever revealing who s paying for the ads that s exactly what they re doing millions of dollars and the groups are benign sounding americans for prosperity who s against that or committee for truth in politics or americans for apple pie moms for motherhood i made those last two up none of them will disclose who s paying for these ads you don t know if it s a wall street bank you don t know if it s a big oil company you don t know if it s an insurance company you don t even know if it s a foreign controlled entity in some races they are spending more money than the candidates not here because here the candidate is spending a lot of money they re spending more money than the parties they want to take congress back and return to the days where lobbyists wrote the laws it is the most insidious power grab since the monopolies of the gilded age that s happening right now so there s a lot of talk about populist anger and grassroots but that s not what s driving a lot of these elections we tried to fix this but the leaders of the other party wouldn t even allow it to come up for a vote they want to keep the public in the dark they want to serve the special interests that served them so well over the last 19 months we will not let them we are not about to allow a corporate takeover of our democracy we re not about to go back to the days when special interests took advantage of main street families we re not going to go back to the days when insurance companies wrote the rules that let you languish without health care because you had a preexisting condition we re not going to go back to the exact same agenda we had before i took office a lot has changed since that last election but what hasn t changed is the choice facing this country it is still fear versus hope it is still the past versus the future it is still a choice between sliding backwards and moving forward that is what this election is about that s the choice you will face in november so i need you to knock on some doors for dick blumenthal i need you to talk to your neighbors about dick blumenthal i need you to make phone calls for dick blumenthal we need you to write some more checks for dick blumenthal we need you to do this for candidates all across the country because the only way we ll match their millions of dollars is if we ve got millions of people making their voices heard and none of this will be easy it s going to be hard but you didn t elect me to do what was easy and you re not going to elect dick to do what was easy you elect us to do what is right so help me get dick elected and let s keep on moving forward connecticut thank you very much god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama16 9 10c barack_obama everybody please have a seat have a seat well good morning everybody and i want to thank all of you for being here today this is a terrific kickoff on the president s export council and i want to thank the cabinet secretaries the senior officials in my administration who are here and have helped to pull this together the members of my export council i appreciate all of you being here to discuss next steps in growing america s exports and our economy and i want to thank jim mcnerney and ursula burns who are serving as chair and vice chair of this council for their outstanding work from the day that i took office my administration s highest priority has been to pull our economy out of the deepest recession of our lifetimes to put people back to work and to position our economy on a path of long term and sustainable growth in the immediate term we ve had to act across many fronts to get folks back on their feet and get our economy moving again and one of the things that we ve been trying to do is to help create the conditions necessary for our small businesses to grow and to hire and a few hours from now after months of delay the senate will finally have an up or down vote on a package of tax cuts and lending initiatives to help small businesses some of which will be exporters reinvigorating our economy in the short run and rebuilding it over the long term is not a one step process there are going to be many steps we have to take in the months and years ahead but this is a critically important one and i am grateful to those senators on the republican side of the aisle willing to take this vote on behalf of america s small business owners but even as we re working to get our economy moving today we are also laying a new foundation for growth tomorrow and that s where you come in we ve been working to increase america s competitiveness in a global economy after all one of the reasons we got into the mess we ve been in over the last couple of years is because let s face it we grew complacent we allowed too much of our prosperity to be based on fleeting bubbles of consumption and risk and artificial gain we spent too much we saved too little we allowed our economy to become bloated with debt both in the private sector and public sectors we failed to fully harness the talents and skills and creativity of the american people and we put off investments in technology and innovation that are critical to helping our businesses compete in the 21st century that s not a path we could afford to continue down and that s why we ve been working so hard to try to reverse those trends we re upgrading our national infrastructure for tomorrow we re investing in science and technology research and development and clean energy projects that will strengthen our global leadership we re reforming our schools making college more affordable and investing in the skills and education of our people in fact later today i ll be meeting with ceos of a hundred of america s biggest companies who ve joined together in common cause to make sure we re preparing all our students today with the science technology engineering and math skills that they ll need for the high tech jobs of today s high tech industries and by the way ursula is participating in that and she is almost as overexposed as me today because the best way we know to compete and win in the global marketplace is by doing what we do best harnessing the talents and ingenuity of our people to lead the world in new industries and we re building an economy where america s businesses and american workers once again do what they do best which is build great products and sell them around the world we were just talking before we came in and one of the things that i think is so critical is to realign the interests of business and workers here in america so that everybody is fighting on the same side everybody is out there with a united front competing to make sure that america succeeds in this year s state of the union address i set a goal for america we will double our exports of goods and services over the next five years because the more american companies export the more they produce and the more they produce the more people they hire and that means more jobs good jobs that often pay as much as 15 percent more than average the world wants to buy goods and services made in the united states and our workers are ready to produce them that s why six months ago we launched the national export initiative the first ever government wide export promotion strategy with focused attention at the presidential and cabinet level america is going to bat as a stronger partner and a better advocate for our businesses abroad we re increasing trade missions we re removing barriers to help businesses gain a foothold in new markets we re increasing export financing for small and medium sized businesses we hope to move forward on new trade agreements with some of our key partners in a way that doesn t just advance the interests of our businesses workers and farmers but also upholds our most cherished values and finally we continue to coordinate with other nations around the world to promote strong balanced and sustainable growth so we re six months into what s going to be a five year long process and despite some strong economic headwinds this year we ve already seen some progress obviously working off a low baseline given the crisis last year exports are expected to be up but we re very pleased to see that they re up 18 percent to where they were a year ago and manufacturing exports are up 20 percent and that s helping put a lot of our people back to work and there s more we can do to keep that growth going yesterday my export cabinet submitted a report detailing the progress that s been made and additional steps that our agencies intend to take to deliver on our goals and i look forward to seeing these steps implemented it s also why two months ago i announced the formation of this council to seek the expertise of private sector business and labor leaders who know what it takes to succeed earlier this morning in a meeting with vice president biden as well as jim and ursula about some of the recommendations you ve devised we were encouraged that we think we can move forward rapidly on some of these fronts and we re pleased to see the fresh and innovative strategies that we can pursue to help small and medium sized companies sell their goods and services abroad with companies like yours in mind we ve been looking at our export control system and working to streamline the process in a manner that helps our high tech companies stay competitive we re also working to resolve outstanding issues with our free trade agreements with our key partners like korea and to seek congressional approval as soon as possible and as our troops come home from iraq and afghanistan and re enter the workforce i think it s terrific that we are going to look at a veterans retraining initiative that would help them translate their remarkable leadership skills but also their technology skills skills they ve honed in the military into careers in the high demand science and technology fields that will keep america economically strong and globally competitive well into the future so these are some of the steps we ll pursue to double america s exports over the next five years when i made this initial announcement some were skeptical but the truth of the matter is is that if we are increasing our exports by 14 15 percent per year something that is achievable then we can meet our goal and that s one of the ways that we re going to make this economy in the 21st century what it was in the 20th century an unparalleled force for opportunity and prosperity for all our people so i look forward to seeing your recommendations and our continued work together to make that happen i am very grateful because this is a group of very busy people that you re willing to invest the time and energy that you already have and will continue to invest in the future to make sure that this council is productive as possible this is one of my top priorities i m going to be paying close attention to it my cabinet and my economic team are going to be working diligently on this so i am very confident this is going to be a worthwhile endeavor that may indirectly help your companies but is certainly going to help the country and the american people thanks very much everybody dem bobama17 1 10a barack_obama fired up fired up first of all i m going to let michelle know you all sang her happy birthday she ll be pleased to know i love you back let me begin by thanking liz bonacci for the wonderful introduction where did liz go there she is give her a big round of applause nice job i told liz on the way out here i said oh you re going to be great she says yeah i m going to rock the house she did i want to thank northeastern president aoun and his lovely wife thank you so much for the hospitality i want to thank boston mayor tom menino governor deval patrick the great senior senator from this i know where we are massachusetts the great commonwealth of massachusetts john kerry i want to thank vicki kennedy and the entire kennedy family they have been great friends for so long to all the outstanding members of congress who are in the house today thank you and we are so thankful to pastor laguerre for reminding us once again of the incredible obligations that we have to help the people of haiti in this time of extraordinary need so it s good to be back in boston i love this town i spent three years here stuck in a library trying to graduate but i still had a little fun i had a good time in worcester too i came back here a few years ago and gave a little speech that turned out pretty well something about boston folks have just always been good to me even though i ve got to say that i was going to wear my white sox jacket today come on now you want a guy who s loyal to his home town team but i love boston and today i ve come to talk about one thing i ve come to talk about tuesday on tuesday you have the unique and special responsibility to fill the senate seat that you sent ted kennedy to fill for nearly 47 years and i am here to tell you that the person for that job is your attorney general martha coakley now there s been a lot said in this race about how it s not the kennedy s seat it s the people s seat and let me tell you the first person who would agree with that was ted kennedy see the only thing he loved more than the people of this commonwealth was serving the people of this commonwealth he waged a personal battle on behalf of every single one of you even if you don t know it for seniors who are living on fixed incomes for families struggling to get health coverage for their children for students who dream of a college education he fought for the working men and women whether they were teachers in pittsfield or longshoremen in new bedford ted kennedy was always on your side in so many of the battles that led this commonwealth and this nation forward martha knows the struggles massachusetts working families face because she s lived those struggles their stories are her story you heard her she was raised in north adams one of five kids her dad owned a small business her mother was a homemaker she worked her way up nothing was handed to her and she became a lawyer not to cash in but to give hardworking people a fair shake she became a lawyer to fight for families like the one she grew up in families who are the backbone of this commonwealth and the backbone of this nation and that s what she s done look at her record as a prosecutor she took on cases most of us don t even want to think about putting murderers and child abusers away as attorney general she took on wall street and recovered millions for massachusetts taxpayers took on predatory lenders that were taking advantage of massachusetts families she went after big insurance companies that misled people into buying coverage only to deny it when they got sick she went after big polluters who put the health of your family at risk time and again martha has taken on those who game the system at expense of hardworking middle class families that s the kind of leader the people of massachusetts need now more than ever you need somebody that s all right that s all right we re doing okay we re okay we re okay we re doing fine now listen now where were we all right let s go everybody now listen that s all right hold up everybody hold up now more than ever you don t need just another politician who talks the talk and you don t need just people yelling at each other right now what we need is somebody who s got a proven track record a leader who has walked the walk somebody who has fought for the people of massachusetts every single day because i don t need to tell you we re in tough times right now we re still dealing with an economic crisis unlike any that we ve seen since the great depression it s done a lot of damage to so many people and even before that storm hit with its full fury middle class families were weathering tough economic times throughout this past decade working harder and harder just to keep up so people are frustrated and they re angry and they have every right to be i understand because progress is slow and no matter how much progress we make it can t come fast enough for the people who need help right now today but here s the thing you know how politics is at times like this there are always some who are eager to exploit that pain and anger to score a few political points there are always folks who think that the best way to solve these problems are to demonize others and unfortunately we re seeing some of that politics in massachusetts today now i ve heard about some of the ads that martha s opponent is running he s driving his truck around the commonwealth and he says that he gets you that he fights for you that he ll be an independent voice and i don t know him he may be a perfectly nice guy i don t know his record but i don t know whether he s been fighting for you up until now but but here s what i do know i do want somebody who s independent i want a senator who s always going to put the interests of working folks all across massachusetts first ahead of party ahead of special interests and here s what i know is that martha has done so she s got a track record of doing so i know there are things on which she and i disagree i respect her for that she doesn t just call herself independent she has the character to be independent so i hear her opponent is calling himself an independent well you ve got to look under the hood because what you learn makes you wonder now as a legislator he voted with the republicans 96 percent of the time 96 percent of the time it s hard to suggest that he s going to be significantly independent from the republican agenda when you listen closely to what he s been saying it s very clear that he s going to do exactly the same thing in washington so look forget the ads everybody can run slick ads forget the truck everybody can buy a truck here s the question you need to ask yourselves before you go to vote on tuesday massachusetts when the chips are down when the tough votes come on all the fights that matter to middle class families across this commonwealth who is going to be on your side that s what this race on tuesday is all about because it s easy to say you re independent and you re going to bring people together and all that stuff until you actually have to do it and when the vote comes on energy and there s a choice between standing with big oil or fighting for the clean energy jobs of the future whose side are you going to be on martha is going to be on your side when the vote comes on taxes and there s a choice between giving more tax breaks to the wealthiest few and corporations that ship american jobs overseas or giving them to the middle class and businesses that create jobs here who s going to be on your side let me just say by the way because you ll hear a lot of stuff about taxes you always do every election last year i kept a campaign promise to cut taxes for 95 percent of working americans cut taxes and these members of congress right here voted to cut taxes here in the commonwealth not just for individuals but also for small businesses we cut taxes for middle class families that was part of the recovery act now you better check under the hood because from everything i see martha s opponent would have voted against those taxes he would have voted against those tax cuts would have voted against those tax cuts when it comes to taking on the worst practices of an insurance industry that routinely denies the american people the care they need and leaves too many families one serious illness away from bankruptcy who s going to be on your side you know she will because she always has when the vote comes on financial regulatory reform and the choice is between standing with wall street or standing up for common sense reforms that will protect consumers and protect our economy from future crises who s going to be on your side now we learned the answer to that one this week now keep in mind democrats in congress voted for tax cuts for middle class families and businesses now what we re proposing is to make sure that taxpayers get their money back from the rescue that we had engaged in at the beginning of this year thanks to the bad regulatory policies of the previous administration and so we asked martha s opponent what s he going to do and he decided to park his truck on wall street it was your tax dollars that saved wall street banks from their own recklessness keeping them from collapsing and dragging our entire economy down with them but today those same banks are once again making billions in profits and on track to hand out more money in bonuses than ever before while the american people are still in a world of hurt now we ve recovered most of your money already but i don t think most of your money is good enough we want all our money back we re going to collect every dime that s why i proposed a new fee on the largest financial firms to pay the american people back for saving their skin but instead of taking the side of working families in massachusetts martha s opponent is already walking in lockstep with washington republicans opposing that fee defending the same fat cats who are getting rewarded for their failure now there s a big difference here it gives you a sense of who the respective candidates are going to be fighting for despite the rhetoric despite the television ads despite the truck martha is going to make sure you get your money back she s got your back her opponent has got wall street s back let me be clear bankers don t need another vote in the united states senate they ve got plenty where s yours that s the question and it wouldn t just be any vote we know that on many of the major questions of our day a lot of these votes are going to a lot of these measures are going to rest on one vote in the united states senate that s why the opponents of change and progress have been pouring money and resources into the commonwealth in hopes of promoting gridlock and failure they want to keep things just as they are so i d think long and hard about getting in that truck with martha s opponent it might not take you where you want to go and where we don t want to go right now is backwards to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place when we just started to progress now massachusetts we have had one year to make up for eight it hasn t been quick it hasn t been easy but we ve begun to deliver on the change you voted for i mean think about it what some of these members that i just talked about have done what we ve done just over the last several months we ve started to see the economy grow again we ve given tax cuts to small businesses we re forcing the banks finally to start lending again on main street and not just worried about profits we ve made sure that police officers and teachers and critical workers across this commonwealth haven t been laid off but we ve got so much more work to do so many families are out there hurting i get 10 letters out of the 40 000 that i receive every single day i select 10 out to read every night and they re heartbreaking people talking about losing their jobs losing their homes sometimes it s young children who are writing mr president can you help my dad has lost his job mr president can you help my brother is sick and we don t have health insurance we ve got so much work left to do and as much progress as we ve made i can t do it alone i need leaders like martha by my side so we can kick it into high gear so we can finish what we ve started you know we always knew that change was going to be hard and what we also understood i understood this the minute i was sworn into office was that there were going to be some who stood on the sidelines who were protectors of the big banks and protectors of the big insurance companies protectors of the big drug companies who would say you know what we can take advantage of this crisis because it s going to be so bad even though we helped initiate these policies there s going to be a sleight of hand here because we re going to let democrats take responsibility we re going to let them make the tough choices we re going to let them rescue the economy and then we can tap into that anger and that frustration it s the oldest play in the book but everybody here knows that the choices that have to be made in order to get this economy moving to make sure that people are actually working in jobs that pay a living wage that we have a green energy economy that is freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil that young people can actually afford to go to college and can look forward to graduating to careers that are building this country that those things aren t going to happen overnight and they re not going to be easy but we sure aren t going to get there if we look backwards and try to reinstitute the same failed policies that we ve had over the past decade that s not going to work we ve been there we ve done that what martha s opponent is preaching we ve already tried and it didn t work so understand what s at stake here massachusetts it s whether we re going forward or going backwards it s whether we re going to have a future where everybody gets a shot in this society or just the privileged few if you were fired up in the last election i need you more fired up in this election i need you out there working just as hard right now in those final days i need you knocking on doors i need you making phone calls i need you talking to your friends and your neighbors and telling them what s at stake on tuesday that every vote matters that every voice matters and if you do that if you do that if you are willing not only to cast your vote for martha coakley but if you re willing to get out the vote for martha coakley then you won t just win this election you will carry on the best progressive forward looking values of this proud commonwealth and send a leader to washington who is going to work tirelessly every single day to turn this economy around to move this country forward and to keep the american dream alive in our time and for all time that s what martha coakley is about and we need you we need you on tuesday thank you very much thank you massachusetts dem bobama17 1 10b barack_obama good morning praise be to god let me begin by thanking the entire vermont avenue baptist church family for welcoming our family here today it feels like a family thank you for making us feel that way to pastor wheeler first lady wheeler thank you so much for welcoming us here today congratulations on jordan denice aka cornelia michelle and i have been blessed with a new nephew this year as well austin lucas robinson so maybe at the appropriate time we can make introductions now if jordan s father is like me then that will be in about 30 years that is a great blessing michelle and malia and sasha and i are thrilled to be here today and i know that sometimes you have to go through a little fuss to have me as a guest speaker so let me apologize in advance for all the fuss we gather here on a sabbath during a time of profound difficulty for our nation and for our world in such a time it soothes the soul to seek out the divine in a spirit of prayer to seek solace among a community of believers but we are not here just to ask the lord for his blessing we aren t here just to interpret his scripture we re also here to call on the memory of one of his noble servants the reverend dr martin luther king jr now it s fitting that we do so here within the four walls of vermont avenue baptist church here in a church that rose like the phoenix from the ashes of the civil war here in a church formed by freed slaves whose founding pastor had worn the union blue here in a church from whose pews congregants set out for marches and from whom choir anthems of freedom were heard from whose sanctuary king himself would sermonize from time to time one of those times was thursday december 6 1956 pastor you said you were a little older than me so were you around at that point you were three years old okay i wasn t born yet on thursday december 6 1956 and before dr king had pointed us to the mountaintop before he told us about his dream in front of the lincoln memorial king came here as a 27 year old preacher to speak on what he called the challenge of a new age the challenge of a new age it was a period of triumph but also uncertainty for dr king and his followers because just weeks earlier the supreme court had ordered the desegregation of montgomery s buses a hard wrought hard fought victory that would put an end to the 381 day historic boycott down in montgomery alabama and yet as dr king rose to take that pulpit the future still seemed daunting it wasn t clear what would come next for the movement that dr king led it wasn t clear how we were going to reach the promised land because segregation was still rife lynchings still a fact yes the supreme court had ruled not only on the montgomery buses but also on brown v board of education and yet that ruling was defied throughout the south by schools and by states they ignored it with impunity and here in the nation s capital the federal government had yet to fully align itself with the laws on its books and the ideals of its founding so it s not hard for us then to imagine that moment we can imagine folks coming to this church happy about the boycott being over we can also imagine them though coming here concerned about their future sometimes second guessing strategy maybe fighting off some creeping doubts perhaps despairing about whether the movement in which they had placed so many of their hopes a movement in which they believed so deeply could actually deliver on its promise so here we are more than half a century later once again facing the challenges of a new age here we are once more marching toward an unknown future what i call the joshua generation to their moses generation the great inheritors of progress paid for with sweat and blood and sometimes life itself we ve inherited the progress of unjust laws that are now overturned we take for granted the progress of a ballot being available to anybody who wants to take the time to actually vote we enjoy the fruits of prejudice and bigotry being lifted slowly sometimes in fits and starts but irrevocably from human hearts it s that progress that made it possible for me to be here today for the good people of this country to elect an african american the 44th president of the united states of america reverend wheeler mentioned the inauguration last year s election you know on the heels of that victory over a year ago there were some who suggested that somehow we had entered into a post racial america all those problems would be solved there were those who argued that because i had spoke of a need for unity in this country that our nation was somehow entering into a period of post partisanship that didn t work out so well there was a hope shared by many that life would be better from the moment that i swore that oath of course as we meet here today one year later we know the promise of that moment has not yet been fully fulfilled because of an era of greed and irresponsibility that sowed the seeds of its own demise because of persistent economic troubles unaddressed through the generations because of a banking crisis that brought the financial system to the brink of catastrophe we are being tested in our own lives and as a nation as few have been tested before unemployment is at its highest level in more than a quarter of a century nowhere is it higher than the african american community poverty is on the rise home ownership is slipping beyond our shores our sons and daughters are fighting two wars closer to home our haitian brothers and sisters are in desperate need bruised battered many people are legitimately feeling doubt even despair about the future like those who came to this church on that thursday in 1956 folks are wondering where do we go from here i understand those feelings i understand the frustration and sometimes anger that so many folks feel as they struggle to stay afloat i get letters from folks around the country every day i read 10 a night out of the 40 000 that we receive and there are stories of hardship and desperation in some cases pleading for help i need a job i m about to lose my home i don t have health care it s about to cause my family to be bankrupt sometimes you get letters from children my mama or my daddy have lost their jobs is there something you can do to help ten letters like that a day we read so yes we re passing through a hard winter it s the hardest in some time but let s always remember that as a people the american people we ve weathered some hard winters before this country was founded during some harsh winters the fishermen the laborers the craftsmen who made camp at valley forge they weathered a hard winter the slaves and the freedmen who rode an underground railroad seeking the light of justice under the cover of night they weathered a hard winter the seamstress whose feet were tired the pastor whose voice echoes through the ages they weathered some hard winters it was for them as it is for us difficult in the dead of winter to sometimes see spring coming they too sometimes felt their hopes deflate and yet each season the frost melts the cold recedes the sun reappears so it was for earlier generations and so it will be for us what we need to do is to just ask what lessons we can learn from those earlier generations about how they sustained themselves during those hard winters how they persevered and prevailed let us in this joshua generation learn how that moses generation overcame let me offer a few thoughts on this first and foremost they did so by remaining firm in their resolve despite being threatened by sniper fire or planted bombs by shoving and punching and spitting and angry stares they adhered to that sweet spirit of resistance the principles of nonviolence that had accounted for their success second they understood that as much as our government and our political parties had betrayed them in the past as much as our nation itself had betrayed its own ideals government if aligned with the interests of its people can be and must be a force for good so they stayed on the justice department they went into the courts they pressured congress they pressured their president they didn t give up on this country they didn t give up on government they didn t somehow say government was the problem they said we re going to change government we re going to make it better imperfect as it was they continued to believe in the promise of democracy in america s constant ability to remake itself to perfect this union third our predecessors were never so consumed with theoretical debates that they couldn t see progress when it came sometimes i get a little frustrated when folks just don t want to see that even if we don t get everything we re getting something king understood that the desegregation of the armed forces didn t end the civil rights movement because black and white soldiers still couldn t sit together at the same lunch counter when they came home but he still insisted on the rightness of desegregating the armed forces that was a good first step even as he called for more he didn t suggest that somehow by the signing of the civil rights that somehow all discrimination would end but he also didn t think that we shouldn t sign the civil rights act because it hasn t solved every problem let s take a victory he said and then keep on marching forward steps large and small were recognized for what they were which was progress fourth at the core of king s success was an appeal to conscience that touched hearts and opened minds a commitment to universal ideals of freedom of justice of equality that spoke to all people not just some people for king understood that without broad support any movement for civil rights could not be sustained that s why he marched with the white auto worker in detroit that s why he linked arm with the mexican farm worker in california and united people of all colors in the noble quest for freedom of course king overcame in other ways as well he remained strategically focused on gaining ground his eyes on the prize constantly understanding that change would not be easy understand that change wouldn t come overnight understanding that there would be setbacks and false starts along the way but understanding as he said in 1956 that we can walk and never get weary because we know there is a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice and it s because the moses generation overcame that the trials we face today are very different from the ones that tested us in previous generations even after the worst recession in generations life in america is not even close to being as brutal as it was back then for so many that s the legacy of dr king and his movement that s our inheritance having said that let there be no doubt the challenges of our new age are serious in their own right and we must face them as squarely as they faced the challenges they saw i know it s been a hard road we ve traveled this year to rescue the economy but the economy is growing again the job losses have finally slowed and around the country there s signs that businesses and families are beginning to rebound we are making progress i know it s been a hard road that we ve traveled to reach this point on health reform i promise you i know but under the legislation i will sign into law insurance companies won t be able to drop you when you get sick and more than 30 million people our fellow americans will finally have insurance more than 30 million men and women and children mothers and fathers won t be worried about what might happen to them if they get sick this will be a victory not for democrats this will be a victory for dignity and decency for our common humanity this will be a victory for the united states of america let s work to change the political system as imperfect as it is i know people can feel down about the way things are going sometimes here in washington i know it s tempting to give up on the political process but we ve put in place tougher rules on lobbying and ethics and transparency tougher rules than any administration in history it s not enough but it s progress progress is possible don t give up on voting don t give up on advocacy don t give up on activism there are too many needs to be met too much work to be done like dr king said we must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope let us broaden our coalition building a confederation not of liberals or conservatives not of red states or blue states but of all americans who are hurting today and searching for a better tomorrow the urgency of the hour demands that we make common cause with all of america s workers white black brown all of whom are being hammered by this recession all of whom are yearning for that spring to come it demands that we reach out to those who ve been left out in the cold even when the economy is good even when we re not in recession the youth in the inner cities the youth here in washington d c people in rural communities who haven t seen prosperity reach them for a very long time it demands that we fight discrimination whatever form it may come that means we fight discrimination against gays and lesbians and we make common cause to reform our immigration system and finally we have to recognize as dr king did that progress can t just come from without it also has to come from within and over the past year for example we ve made meaningful improvements in the field of education i ve got a terrific secretary of education arne duncan he s been working hard with states and working hard with the d c school district and we ve insisted on reform and we ve insisted on accountability we we re putting in more money and we ve provided more pell grants and more tuition tax credits and simpler financial aid forms we ve done all that but parents still need to parent kids still need to own up to their responsibilities we still have to set high expectations for our young people folks can t simply look to government for all the answers without also looking inside themselves inside their own homes for some of the answers progress will only come if we re willing to promote that ethic of hard work a sense of responsibility in our own lives i m not talking by the way just to the african american community sometimes when i say these things people assme well he s just talking to black people about working hard no no no no i m talking to the american community because somewhere along the way we as a nation began to lose touch with some of our core values you know what i m talking about we became enraptured with the false prophets who prophesized an easy path to success paved with credit cards and home equity loans and get rich quick schemes and the most important thing was to be a celebrity it doesn t matter what you do as long as you get on tv that s everybody we forgot what made the bus boycott a success what made the civil rights movement a success what made the united states of america a success that in this country there s no substitute for hard work no substitute for a job well done no substitute for being responsible stewards of god s blessings what we re called to do then is rebuild america from its foundation on up to reinvest in the essentials that we ve neglected for too long like health care like education like a better energy policy like basic infrastructure like scientific research our generation is called to buckle down and get back to basics we must do so not only for ourselves but also for our children and their children for jordan and for austin that s a sacrifice that falls on us to make it s a much smaller sacrifice than the moses generation had to make but it s still a sacrifice yes it s hard to transition to a clean energy economy sometimes it may be inconvenient but it s a sacrifice that we have to make it s hard to be fiscally responsible when we have all these human needs and we re inheriting enormous deficits and debt but that s a sacrifice that we re going to have to make you know it s easy after a hard day s work to just put your kid in front of the tv set you re tired don t want to fuss with them instead of reading to them but that s a sacrifice we must joyfully accept sometimes it s hard to be a good father and good mother sometimes it s hard to be a good neighbor or a good citizen to give up time in service of others to give something of ourselves to a cause that s greater than ourselves as michelle and i are urging folks to do tomorrow to honor and celebrate dr king but these are sacrifices that we are called to make these are sacrifices that our faith calls us to make our faith in the future our faith in america our faith in god and on his sermon all those years ago dr king quoted a poet s verse truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne and behind the dim unknown stands god within the shadows keeping watch above his own even as dr king stood in this church a victory in the past and uncertainty in the future he trusted god he trusted that god would make a way a way for prayers to be answered a way for our union to be perfected a way for the arc of the moral universe no matter how long to slowly bend towards truth and bend towards freedom to bend towards justice he had faith that god would make a way out of no way you know folks ask me sometimes why i look so calm they say all this stuff coming at you how come you just seem calm and i have a confession to make here there are times where i m not so calm reggie love knows my wife knows there are times when progress seems too slow there are times when the words that are spoken about me hurt there are times when the barbs sting there are times when it feels like all these efforts are for naught and change is so painfully slow in coming and i have to confront my own doubts but let me tell you during those times it s faith that keeps me calm it s faith that gives me peace the same faith that leads a single mother to work two jobs to put a roof over her head when she has doubts the same faith that keeps an unemployed father to keep on submitting job applications even after he s been rejected a hundred times the same faith that says to a teacher even if the first nine children she s teaching she can t reach that that 10th one she s going to be able to reach the same faith that breaks the silence of an earthquake s wake with the sound of prayers and hymns sung by a haitian community a faith in things not seen in better days ahead in him who holds the future in the hollow of his hand a faith that lets us mount up on wings like eagles lets us run and not be weary lets us walk and not faint so let us hold fast to that faith as joshua held fast to the faith of his fathers and together we shall overcome the challenges of a new age together we shall seize the promise of this moment together we shall make a way through winter and we re going to welcome the spring through god all things are possible may the memory of dr martin luther king continue to inspire us and ennoble our world and all who inhabit it and may god bless the united states of america thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama17 2 09 barack_obama thank you everybody please have a seat you guys can sit down too let me begin by saying thank you to a few people first of all your outstanding governor bill ritter please give bill a big round of applause lieutenant governor barbara o brien secretary of state bernie buescher your outstanding mayor john hickenlooper your new senator michael bennett your old senator now my secretary of the interior ken salazar mark udall is not here but give him a round of applause anyway one of the outstanding leaders who helped shepherd this process through in record time please give max baucus of montana a big round of applause thank you max to secretary federico pena one of my national co chairs i would not be here if it were not for federico thank you to representative diana degette who is a we are in her district so thank you so much representative betsy markey representative jared polis representative ed perlmutter to all the other elected officials and outstanding leaders who are here and to the whole namaste family and mr jones for outstanding work congratulations give them a big round of applause and to the best vice president that we ve had in a long time joe biden it is great to be back in denver i was here last summer we had a good time to accept the nomination of my party and to make a promise to people of all parties that i would do all that i could to give every american the chance to make of their lives what they will to see their children climb higher than they did and i m back today to say that we have begun the difficult work of keeping that promise we have begun the essential work of keeping the american dream alive in our time and that s why we re here today now i don t want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems nor does it constitute all of what we re going to have to do to turn our economy around but today does mark the beginning of the end the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs the beginning of what we need to do to provide relief for families worried they won t be able to pay next month s bills the beginning of the first steps to set our economy on a firmer foundation paving the way to long term growth and prosperity the american recovery and reinvestment act that i will sign today a plan that meets the principles i laid out in january is the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history it s the product of broad consultation and the recipient of broad support from business leaders unions public interest groups from the chamber of commerce and the national association of manufacturers as well as the afl cio from democrats and republicans mayors as well as governors it s a rare thing in washington for people with such diverse and different viewpoints to come together and support the same bill and on behalf of our nation i want to thank all of them for it including your two outstanding senators michael bennett and mark udall as well as all the members of your congressional delegation they did an outstanding job and they deserve a big round of applause i also want to thank joe biden for working behind the scenes from the very start to make this recovery act possible i want to thank speaker pelosi and harry reid for acting so quickly and for proving that congress could step up to this challenge i have special thanks to max baucus who s the chairman of the finance committee without max none of this would have happened he had to work overtime and push his committee to work overtime and i want to thank all the committee chairs and members of congress for coming up with a plan that is both bold and balanced enough to meet the demands of this moment the american people were looking to them for leadership and that s what they provided now what makes this recovery plan so important is not just that it will create or save 3 5 million jobs over the next two years including 60 000 plus here in colorado it s that we re putting americans to work doing the work that america needs done in critical areas that have been neglected for too long work that will bring real and lasting change for generations to come because we know we can t build our economic future on the transportation and information networks of the past we are remaking the american landscape with the largest new investment in our nation s infrastructure since eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s because of this investment nearly 400 000 men and women will go to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges repairing our faulty dams and levees bringing critical broadband connections to businesses and homes in nearly every community in america upgrading mass transit building high speed rail lines that will improve travel and commerce throughout our nation because we know america can t out compete the world tomorrow if our children are being out educated today we re making the largest investment in education in our nation s history it s an investment that will create jobs building 21st century classrooms and libraries and labs for millions of children across america it will provide funds to train a new generation of math and science teachers while giving aid to states and school districts to stop teachers from being laid off and education programs from being cut in a place like new york city 14 000 teachers who were set to be let go may now be able to continue pursuing their critical mission it s an investment that will create a new 2 500 annual tax credit to put the dream of a college degree within reach for middle class families and make college affordable for 7 million students helping more of our sons and daughters aim higher reach further fulfill their god given potential because we know that spiraling health care costs are crushing families and businesses alike we re taking the most meaningful steps in years towards modernizing our health care system it s an investment that will take the long overdue step of computerizing america s medical records to reduce the duplication and waste that costs billions of health care dollars and medical errors that cost thousands of lives each year further thanks to the actions we ve taken 7 million americans who lost their health care along the way will continue to get the coverage they need and roughly 20 million more americans can breathe a little easier knowing that their health care won t be cut due to a state budget shortfall and a historic commitment to wellness initiatives will keep millions of americans from setting foot in the doctor s office in the first place because these are preventable diseases and we re going to invest in prevention so taken together with the enactment earlier this month of a long delayed law to extend health care to millions more children of working families we have done more in 30 days to advance the cause of health care reform than this country has done in an entire decade and that s something we should be proud of because we know we can t power america s future on energy that s controlled by foreign dictators we are taking big steps down the road to energy independence laying the groundwork for new green energy economies that can create countless well paying jobs it s an investment that will double the amount of renewable energy produced over the next three years think about that double the amount of renewable energy in three years provide tax credits and loan guarantees to companies like namaste a company that will be expanding instead of laying people off as a result of the plan that i m about to sign and in the process we will transform the way we use energy today the electricity we use is carried along a grid of lines and wires that date back to thomas edison a grid that can t support the demands of this economy this means we re using 19th and 20th century technologies to battle 21st century problems like climate change and energy security it also means that places like north dakota can that can produce a lot of wind energy can t deliver it to communities that want it leading to a gap between how much clean energy we are using and how much we could be using the investment we re making today will create a newer smarter electric grid that will allow for broader use of alternative energy we will build on the work that s being done in places like boulder a community that s on its that s on pace to be the world s first smart grid city this investment will place smart meters in homes to make our energy bills lower make outages less likely and make it easier to use clean energy it s an investment that will save taxpayers over 1 billion by slashing energy costs in our federal buildings by 25 percent save working families hundreds of dollars a year on their energy bills by weatherizing over 1 million homes and it s an investment that takes the important first step towards a national transmission superhighway that will connect our cities to the windy plains of the dakotas and the sunny deserts of the southwest even beyond energy from the national institutes of health to the national science foundation this recovery act represents the biggest increase in basic research funding in the long history of america s noble endeavor to better understand our world and just as president kennedy sparked an explosion of innovation when he set america s sights on the moon i hope this investment will ignite our imagination once more spurring new discoveries and breakthroughs in science in medicine in energy to make our economy stronger and our nation more secure and our planet safer for our children now while this package is composed mostly of critical investments it also includes aid to state and local governments to prevent layoffs of firefighters or police recruits in recruits like the ones in columbus ohio who were told that instead of being sworn in as officers they were about to be let go it includes help for those hardest hit by our economic crisis like the nearly 18 million americans who will get larger unemployment checks in the mail about a third of this package comes in the forms of tax cuts by the way the most progressive in our history not only spurring job creation but putting money in the pockets of 95 percent of hardworking families in america so unlike the tax cuts that we ve seen in recent years the vast majority of these tax benefits will go not to the wealthiest americans but to the middle class with those workers who make the least benefiting the most and it s a plan that rewards responsibility lifting two million americans from poverty by ensuring that anyone who works hard does not have to raise a child below the poverty line so as a whole this plan will help poor and working americans pull themselves into the middle class in a way we haven t seen in nearly 50 years what i m signing then is a balanced plan with a mix of tax cuts and investments it s a plan that s been put together without earmarks or the usual pork barrel spending it s a plan that will be implemented with an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability with a recovery package of this size comes a responsibility to assure every taxpayer that we are being careful with the money they work so hard to earn and that s why i m assigning a team of managers to ensure that the precious dollars we ve invested are being spent wisely and well we will governor ritter mayor hickenlooper we re going to hold governors and local officials who receive the money to the same high standard and we expect you the american people to hold us accountable for the results and that s why we ve created recovery gov a web site so that every american can go online and see how this money is being spent and what kind of job is being created where those jobs are being created we want transparency and accountability throughout this process now as important as the step we take today is this legislation represents only the first part of the broad strategy we need to address our economic crisis in the coming days and weeks i ll be launching other aspects of the plan we will need to stabilize repair and reform our banking system and get credit flowing again to families and businesses we will need to end the culture where we ignore problems until they become full blown crises instead of recognizing that the only way to build a thriving economy is to set and enforce firm rules of the road we must stem the spread of foreclosures and falling home values for all americans and do everything we can to help responsible homeowners stay in their homes something i ll talk more about tomorrow and we will need to do everything in the short term to get our economy moving again while at the same time recognizing that we have inherited a trillion dollar deficit and we need to begin restoring fiscal discipline and taming our exploding deficits over the long term none of this will be easy the road to recovery will not be straight we will make progress and there may be some slippage along the way it will demand courage and discipline it will demand a new sense of responsibility that s been missing from wall street all the way to washington there will be hazards and reverses but i have every confidence that if we are willing to continue doing the critical work that must be done by each of us by all of us then we will leave this struggling economy behind us and come out on the other side more prosperous as a people for our american story is not and has never been about things coming easy it s about rising to the moment when the moment is hard and converting crisis into opportunity and seeing to it that we emerge from whatever trials we face stronger than we were before it s about rejecting the notion that our fate is somehow written for us and instead laying claim to a destiny of our own making that s what earlier generations of americans have done that s what we owe our children that s what we are doing today thank you colorado let s get to work thank you dem bobama17 2 10 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you please have a seat thank you very much thank you to blake and chuck and thank you to my outstanding vice president and his extraordinary team that have done just a great job managing this program i want to begin by recalling where we were one year ago millions of jobs had already been lost to the recession before i was sworn into office another 800 000 would be lost in the month of january we d later learn that our economy had shrunk by an astounding 6 4 percent in the first quarter of 2009 and economists from across the political spectrum warned that if dramatic action was not taken to break the back of the recession the united states could spiral into another depression that was the backdrop against which i signed the american recovery and reinvestment act in denver with blake alongside it certainly wasn t a politically easy decision to make for me or for the members of congress who supported it because let s face it no large expenditure is ever that popular particularly at a time when we re also facing a massive deficit but we acted because failure to do so would have led to catastrophe we acted because we had a larger responsibility than simply winning the next election we had a responsibility to do what was right for the u s economy and for the american people one year later it is largely thanks to the recovery act that a second depression is no longer a possibility it s one of the main reasons the economy has gone from shrinking by 6 percent to growing at about 6 percent and this morning we learned that manufacturing production posted a strong gain so far the recovery act is responsible for the jobs of about 2 million americans who would otherwise be unemployed these aren t just our numbers these are the estimates of independent nonpartisan economists across the spectrum now despite all this the bill still generates some controversy and part of that is because there are those let s face it across the aisle who have tried to score political points by attacking what we did even as many of them show up at ribbon cutting ceremonies for projects in their districts but if we re honest part of the controversy also is is that despite the extraordinary work that has been done through the recovery act millions of americans are still without jobs millions more are struggling to make ends meet so it doesn t yet feel like much of a recovery and i understand that it s why we re going to continue to do everything in our power to turn this economy around now the truth is the recovery act was never intended to save every job or restore our economy to full strength no bill or government program can do that businesses are the true engines of growth businesses are the engines of job creation in this country they always will be but during a recession when businesses pull back and people stop spending what government can do is provide a temporary boost that puts money in people s pockets and keeps workers on the job cuts taxes for small businesses generates more demand gives confidence to entrepreneurs that maybe they don t have to cut back right now maybe they can hold steady in their plans and in their dreams that s exactly what we ve been able to do with the recovery act and i just want to point this out there has never been a program of this scale moved at this speed that has been enacted as effectively and as transparently as the recovery act i m grateful that congress agreed to my request that the bill include no earmarks that all projects receive funding based solely on their merits and despite that i was still concerned joe and i were just talking in the back when this thing passed we said 787 billion somewhere there s going to be some story of some money that ended up being misspent 787 billion spent out over 18 months that s a lot that s a lot of money and it is a testimony to vice president biden and his team that as joe puts it the dog so far at least hasn t barked this team has done an outstanding job overseeing the recovery act it doesn t mean that everything has been perfect but when you think about the scope the magnitude of this thing this program has run cleanly smoothly transparently we brought in one of the toughest inspector generals in washington as well as professionals from private industry to help run the implementation and every american can see how and where this money has been spent just by going on www recovery gov now just to review one third of the money in this bill one third was made up of tax cuts i talked about this at the state of the union tax cuts for 95 percent of working americans i just want to say to the american people because we see some polling where about twice as many people think we ve raised taxes as lowered taxes 95 percent of you got a tax cut tax cuts for 95 percent of working americans tax cuts for small businesses tax cuts for first time homebuyers tax cuts for parents trying to trying to care for their kids tax cuts for 8 million americans paying for college so far we ve provided 120 billion in tax relief to families and small businesses now up until this point i ve never met a republican who didn t like a good tax cut but you remember when i mentioned this at the state of the union joe they were all kind of squirming in their seats they weren t sure whether to clap or or not because most of them had voted against all these tax cuts which i thought was it was interesting to watch the second third of this bill was made up of relief for those who have been most affected by this recession we ve extended or increased unemployment benefits for more than 19 million americans we made health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families who lost their jobs and had to get temporary coverage through cobra and we gave relief to states that were struggling to balance their budgets relief that has allowed 300 000 teachers and education workers to keep their jobs as well as tens of thousands of cops and firefighters and first responders and correctional officers and joe biden will tell you that not one of the 50 governors we ve spoken to democrat or republican has failed to show appreciation for this relief and i also have to tell you that i am concerned because state budgets have not yet recovered and you re now seeing a whole bunch of state and local governments who were able to put off layoffs last year as the recovery money is running out having to make some very tough decisions and we could potentially see layoffs taking place this year because we haven t re upped in terms of providing some help to those states and local governments that s something that we re watching and we re concerned about now the last third of the recovery act is what i want to talk a little bit about more today it s the reason blake and doug are here that third is about rebuilding our economy on a new and stronger foundation for growth over the long term see we knew when we came into office that it wasn t enough simply to solve the immediate crisis before us we knew that even before the crisis hit we had come through what some people are calling the lost decade a period where there was barely any job growth and where the income of the average american household declined this is before the recession over the course of the decade the average american household they saw their incomes decline even as the cost of health care and college tuition were skyrocketing had reached record highs the prosperity was built on little more than a housing bubble and on financial speculation people maxing out on their credit cards taking out home equity loans we can t go back to that kind of economy that s not where the jobs are the jobs of the 21st century are in areas like clean energy and technology advanced manufacturing new infrastructure that kind of economy requires us to consume less and produce more to import less and export more instead of sending jobs overseas we need to send more products overseas that are made by american workers and american business and we need to train our workers for those jobs with new skills and a world class education other countries already realize this they re putting more emphasis on math and science they re building high speed railroads and expanding broadband they re making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs and america cannot stand still in the face of this challenge we can t afford to put our future on hold so that s why a big part of the recovery act has been about investing in that future yes it created jobs now yes it created business opportunities now but more importantly it s laying the foundation for where we need to go so instead of just pouring more money into america s schools regardless of their performance we launched a national competition between states that only rewards success and reform reform that raises student achievement and inspires students to excel in math and science and turns around failing schools failing schools that steal the future of too many young americans we re also making sure that our nation has an infrastructure that s built to compete in the 21st century so we now have projects in 31 states that are laying the ground for the first high speed rail network in the united states of america i mean for years japan and europe have had high speed rail china has got about 40 times as many projects that have been going on on this front we re playing catch up we shouldn t be the recovery act has made possible over 12 500 transportation construction projects from rebuilding highways to improving our airports and today we announced funding for over 50 innovative transportation projects across america everything from railroads in appalachia to a new passenger terminal in new orleans these projects will put hundreds of thousands of americans to work and in many cases they already have that s part of the reason that chuck is here today he s the president of a construction company in pennsylvania and the recovery act will fund about a third of the work his paving company will do this year that s allowed him to hire two engineers and about a hundred employees so in case people are wondering whether or not the recovery act has created jobs and opportunity for businesses talk to chuck the new equipment he s ordered to help pave these roads will save an additional 40 jobs on an assembly line out in california these are well paying long lasting private sector jobs that wouldn t be possible without the recovery act they ll be doing the work that america needs done to stay competitive in a global economy in no area is this more important than in energy because of the recovery act we have finally jumpstarted the clean energy industry in america and made possible 200 000 jobs in the clean energy and construction sectors just take one example consider the investment that we ve made in the kind of batteries used in hybrid and electric cars you ve heard about these right before the recovery act was signed 98 percent of the world s advanced battery production was done in asian countries the united states did less than 2 percent of this advanced battery manufacturing that s going to be the key to these high mileage low emission cars then we invested in new research and battery technologies and supported the construction of 20 battery factories that will employ tens of thousands of americans batteries that can make enough factories that can make enough batteries each year to power half a million plug in hybrid vehicles so as a result next year next year two years after the recovery act the united states will have the capacity to produce nearly 20 percent of the world s advanced batteries from less than 2 percent to 20 percent and we ll be able to make 40 percent of these advanced batteries by 2015 an entire new industry because of the recovery act this kind of progress is happening throughout our clean energy sector yesterday i announced loan guarantees to break ground on america s first new nuclear power plant in nearly three decades a plant that will create thousands of construction jobs and 800 permanent jobs in years to come there s the manufacturer in philadelphia who makes energy efficient windows he used to be skeptical about the recovery act until he had to add two more shifts just to keep up with the new business it s created and blake at namaste solar it s based in boulder colorado one year ago blake gave us a tour of one of his company s solar installations on top of a museum in denver right before i signed the recovery act into law and at the time blake was pretty sure that the recession would force him to lay off about half of his staff one year later because of the clean energy investments in the recovery act he has instead added about a dozen new workers and expects to hire about a dozen more by year s end his company continues to install solar panels all over colorado from the governor s mansion to the denver museum of natural nature and science so that s our future that s what s possible in america you can argue rightly that we haven t made as much progress as we need to make when it comes to spurring job creation that s part of the reason why the recovery act is on track to save or create another 1 5 million jobs in 2010 that s part of the reason why i expect congress to pass additional measures as quickly as possible that will help our small business owners create new jobs give them more of an incentive to hire but for those skeptics who refuse to believe the recovery act has done any good who continue to insist that the bill didn t work i d ask you to take that argument up with blake and his employees take that argument up with chuck and his construction workers take it up with the americans who are working in those battery plants or building those new highways or teaching our children new skills all because the recovery act made it possible so our work is far from over but we have rescued this economy from the worst of this crisis and slowly in new factories and research facilities and small businesses the american people are rebuilding a better future and we will continue to support their efforts we will leave our children an economy that is stronger and more prosperous than it was before thank you very much everybody dem bobama17 3 09a barack_obama thank you thank you thank you so much good evening everybody welcome to st patrick s day at the white house and it seems particularly fitting that we gather tonight in a house that was after all designed and built by an irish architect i want to thank joe biden and jill biden for being such great friends to michelle and myself and joe is an outstanding vice president jill instructs him on how to be an outstanding vice president and joe s mother is just a sweetheart and so her you know we re all thinking of her as she gets back on the mend we have had a wonderful day that began by meeting with a strong friend of the united states taoiseach brian cowen who presented us with gifts of shamrocks from the people of ireland a symbol of the enduring ties between our nations and a reminder of the everlasting promise of spring and he also brought his wonderful wife mary and she has just been extraordinarily gracious we are grateful to them i was mentioning in the other room it turns out that the taoiseach and i have something in common both he and my great great great grandfather on my mother s side hail from county offaly my great great great grandfather was a boot maker there apparently and i have been adopted there i understand that i have been invited to a pub there to enjoy a pint there and so we re going to take them up on that offer at some point i also you can tell these are my friends because they cheered about the pint hey just a side note you know guinness tastes very different in ireland it is much better you guys are keeping the good stuff for yourself it could start a trade dispute i also had the pleasure of meeting first minister peter robinson and deputy first minister martin mcguinness of northern ireland two men who have stood together to chart a historic path towards peace and they are with us here tonight and deserve an extraordinary round of applause i ve also met with sir hugh orde the chief constable of northern ireland s police services who is leading the efforts to bring those responsible for the recent violence to justice we ve all watched this week as the people of northern ireland and their leaders have responded nothing short of heroically to those who would challenge a hard earned peace and the thoughts and prayers of americans go out to the families of the fallen and i want everyone who is listening to know this that the united states of america will always stand with those who work towards peace and after seeing former adversaries mourning and praying and working together i have never been more confident that this peace will prevail today serves as well as a solid reminder of just how deeply intertwined how deeply woven the ties between our nations are irish signatures are on our founding documents irish blood has been spilled on our battlefields irish sweat went into building our greatest cities tens of millions of americans now trace their roots back to that little island that has made such a large impact on america and i include myself in that category for generations the irish along with so many other immigrant and ethnic groups came to america equipped often with nothing more than faith and an unbending belief that success was possible for all who were willing to work hard for it and that after all may be the reason americans identify so strongly with the story of st patrick the story of believing in the unseen and of making that belief a reality and that s what the irish did in this country they struggled to create a place for themselves in a distant land and with a commitment to faith and family and hard work they transformed that land in the process and even after all the generations of becoming and being americans their descendants have never lost the enduring spirit that insists on proclaiming themselves irish still that same pride was embodied by a man who once occupied this very house and whose portrait is right outside this door a man who was only three generations removed from ireland in the third year of his presidency john f kennedy decided to make a trip to his ancestral home and one of his aides advised against it the aide said you ve already got all the irish votes you want in this country if you go to ireland people will say it s just a pleasure trip and kennedy responded that s exactly what i want a pleasure trip to ireland that s what i want too but i m not going to get one right now we ve got a little more work to do but while he was there president kennedy visited the port from which his great grandfather embarked for america and he addressed the irish parliament and he reflected as we all have from time to time on the role chance plays over the generations in determining who we become and he said if this nation had achieved its present political and economic stature a century ago my great grandfather might never have left new ross and i might if fortunate be sitting down there with you kennedy said of course if your own president had never left brooklyn he might be standing up here instead of me of course it bears saying that if patrick kennedy hadn t left county wexford or if thomas fitzgerald hadn t left county limerick the american people would have been deprived of the presidency of john f kennedy but also would have been denied one of the finest public servants of this or any age and a great friend of mine and many of yours sir edward m kennedy teddy wishes he could be here tonight but i guarantee you this much the very thought of all of you gathered here would put a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face he as much as anyone reminds us of what it means to be irish that no matter what hardships may come there s always joy to be found in this life that through hard work tomorrow can be better than today that comfort is found amidst faith and family love and laughter poetry and song and tonight in this room with all of you i am reminded of the words of that great irish poet yeats there are no strangers here only friends you haven t met yet happy st patrick s day everybody i d like now to bring to the podium the taoiseach brian cowen dem bobama17 3 09b barack_obama please everyone have a seat have a seat have another one of those cookies that s being passed around speaker pelosi distinguished members of the house and senate honored guests the taoiseach and his entire delegation all the extraordinary leaders from ireland northern ireland who are here thank you so much for joining us in this wonderful st patrick s day tradition as speaker pelosi mentioned this lunch was begun under tip o neill and ronald reagan two men of irish stock who loved a good scrap but who also knew how to work together to find common ground and to put the differences of the day aside in favor of laughter and good cheer at the end of the day in fact looking at all of you i m reminded of a greeting president reagan once offered the guests at this gathering on st patrick s day he said you should spend time with saints and scholars so i have two more stops to make but it is it is wonderful to see so many wonderful irish americans as well as so many who wish they were people help you discover a lot about yourself when you re running for president as has been mentioned it was brought to my attention last year that my great great great grandfather on my mother s side hailed from a small village in county offaly now when i was a relatively unknown candidate for office i didn t know about this part of heritage which would have been very helpful in chicago so i thought i was bluffing when i put the apostrophe after the o i tried to explain that barack was an ancient celtic name taoiseach i hope our efforts today put me on the path of earning that apostrophe and of course this st patrick s day seems different than most because there s one person missing as it s already been mentioned one person who has touched all of us fortunate enough to walk these halls with his mentorship and his friendship the hardest working irish american we know friend to all father to some teddy kennedy he sends his best along with if i may speak seriously for a moment earlier this morning i mentioned briefly the recent attacks in northern ireland by those who would seek to challenge a hard earned peace and i told the taoiseach not all americans are irish but all americans support those who stand on the side of peace and this peace will prevail this peace will prevail because the response of the people of northern ireland and their leaders to these cowardly attacks has been nothing short of heroic true profiles in courage they ve condemned this violence refrained from the old partisan impulses made it absolutely clear that the future is too important to cede to those who are mired in the past the sight of former adversaries mourning and praying and working together this week should inspire us all and strengthen our resolve to see that this peace does not falter and today we also reflect on the fact that the past and the future of our nations are forever intertwined the irish came to america with the dream of a better life but they didn t just wait for somebody to hand it to them they helped forge the very promise of america that success is possible if you re willing to work hard for it irish hands have signed our founding documents and fought in our wars they ve helped build our greatest cities through tragedy and triumph despite bigotry and hostility and against all odds the irish created a place for themselves in the american story we are a nation blessed with so many immigrant and ethnic groups that have contributed to that story and in doing so they helped fashion a better life for all of us now our challenge tomorrow and in the months and years ahead is to try and remember some of that spirit of this day to work together with a renewed commitment to overcome the obstacles that stand in our way and toil just as passionately as our forebears to bring about a better life for all americans and so to paraphrase some wise irishman or woman may we govern may we who govern have the hindsight to know where we ve been the insight to know where are and the foresight to know where we are headed taoiseach thank you so much for being here and your lovely wife and the entire delegation happy st patrick s day to all of you thank you dem bobama17 3 09c barack_obama well happy st patrick s day to everybody i want to welcome taoiseach brian cowen and his lovely wife on their first visit to the white house for this wonderful st patrick s day tradition this is the first for both of us and with a little bit of luck of the irish i m sure we ll get it right we are pleased to be joined by a statesman who worked as hard as anybody to usher in an age of peace in northern ireland and that is my now middle east envoy because he s a glutton for punishment senator george mitchell i am also proud today to announce that i am naming a great friend dan rooney co founder of the ireland fund unwavering supporter of irish peace and culture and education not to mention the owner of the super bowl champion pittsburgh steelers as the united states ambassador to ireland he will be an outstanding representative just a private note here dan is a great friend he and his family are as gracious and thoughtful a group of people as i know and so i know that he is just going to do an outstanding job and the people of ireland i think will benefit greatly from him representing the united states there now before i turn it over to the taoiseach it turns out that we have something in common he hails from county offaly and it was brought to my attention on the campaign that my great great great grandfather on my mother s side came to america from a small village in county offaly as well we are still speculating on whether we are related i do share though a deep appreciation for the remarkable ties between our nations i am grateful to him for his leadership of ireland the bond between our countries could not be stronger as somebody who comes from chicago i know a little bit about ireland and the warmth the good humor and the fierce passion and intelligence of the irish people is something that has informed our own culture as well and so that s why this day and this celebration is so important so with that what i d like to do is let taoiseach say a few words and then i believe he s got something to give me dem bobama17 3 10 barack_obama thank you please everybody be seated to speaker pelosi distinguished members of the house and senate republican leader boehner majority leader steny hoyer my outstanding vice president and his newest chief of staff to prime minister cowen and the entire irish delegation as well as the extraordinary leaders from ireland and northern ireland it is my privilege to welcome all of you for this wonderful st patrick s day tradition and governor o malley thank you for that outstanding rendition of our two national anthems i had asked if martin was going to do a rock and roll version some of you know he s got a rock band and is in much demand this tradition as most of you know was begun by tip o neill and ronald reagan two men who agreed on their love of all things irish including a good scrum but they also knew how to set aside time just to enjoy one another s company president reagan himself said that the two men could be friends after six o clock and i imagine they also made a midday exception for this luncheon every year today is a day we speak with pride of being irish american whether we actually are or not i am pleased to say that i can actually get away with it and i ve got the taoiseach here to vouch for me prime minister cowen was born in county offaly and i can trace my ancestry on my mother s side there as well i believe it was my great great great great great grandfather this is true he was a boot maker if i m not mistaken someone actually discovered my irish lineage when i was running for president and my first thought was why didn t anyone discover this when i was running for office in chicago i would have gotten here sooner i used to put the apostrophe after the o but that did not work so it is nice to have a little irish blood today it is after all a day to celebrate and give thanks for the profound and enduring relationship between ireland and america and it s also a day to thank the irish people for all that they ve done for america few nations so small have had such an enormous impact on another they came to our shores in waves by choice as well as by necessity building new lives even as they were building a new nation enriching our heritage enriching our culture in their own way and in so doing alongside so many others who sought a better life in america they forged a better future for all of us but the truth is they weren t always welcomed there were times where the irish were caricatured and stereotyped and cursed at and blamed for society s ills so naturally it was a good fit for them to go into politics made sense when the fictional mayor skeffington of edwin o connor s the last hurrah spoke of his life as an irish american he said when i began it was long ago and the situation around here was a bit different i had no education to speak of a good many roads were closed to our people and politics seemed the easiest way out today of course we all feel the heavy absence of one of our greatest irish americans a man who loved this day so much a man who i believe is still watching this body closely particularly this week and that is our beloved ted kennedy and i m so grateful that vicki and patrick are here thank you for your presence i confess that one of my fondest memories of teddy has been on my mind lately it s one that i shared before just a few years ago on st patrick s day so it would probably be maybe five years ago when i had just gotten to the senate teddy cornered me on the senate floor for my support on a piece of legislation and i told him you ve got my vote teddy but i got to tell you this is not looking good i do not think this thing is going to fly but it did with votes to spare and so i grabbed teddy pulled him aside i said how did you pull that off and he just patted me on the back and he said luck of the irish and it s nice when the luck of the irish can bring to the senate and to congress such an extraordinary leader as ted kennedy i think it s a little providence as well as a little luck it s also nice when the luck of the irish can bring us all together republicans and democrats that was one of teddy s talents even as he waged epic and unyielding battles in this building he too was a believer that we were all friends after six o clock and more importantly he was a believer in building consensus in forging compromise in the idea that the only way that we can accomplish the work of the american people is to work together and one of the greatest testaments to his life and his work i think was that so many of his colleagues past and present republican and democrats came forward to honor him in similar terms that work the work of setting aside old differences and softening hardened positions taking the tough steps to do what s right in the long run over what s easy in the moment has also paid dividends in terms of the remarkable progress that we ve seen in northern ireland particularly in recent months and so i want to salute first minister peter robinson and deputy first minister martin mcguinness for their outstanding leadership their continuing example we are grateful for that thank you it is such leadership that keeps me convinced that our best days for this legislative body for this nation for ireland and for northern ireland and for the friendship between our peoples those best days are still ahead so taoiseach i thank you and your lovely wife for coming to you and to the people of ireland america is grateful for our shared past hopeful for our common future and i assure you we will be a faithful partner in the work of progress and prosperity and a just a lasting peace happy st patrick s day to all of you and with that please welcome the prime minister of ireland brian cowen dem bobama17 4 09 barack_obama good evening i am honored to join you here today and i want to thank prime minister manning the people of trinidad and tobago for their generosity in hosting the fifth summit of the americas and i want to extend my greetings to all the heads of state many of who i am meeting for the first time all of us are extraordinarily excited to have this opportunity to visit this wonderful country and as somebody who grew up on an island i can tell you i feel right at home it s appropriate and important that we hold this summit in the caribbean the energy the dynamism the diversity of the caribbean people inspires us all and are such an important part of what we share in common as a hemisphere i think everybody recognizes that we come together at a critical moment for the people of the americas our well being has been set back by a historic economic crisis our safety is endangered by a broad range of threats but this peril can be eclipsed by the promise of a new prosperity and personal security and the protection of liberty and justice for all the people of our hemisphere that s the future that we can build together but only if we move forward with a new sense of partnership all of us must now renew the common stake that we have in one another i know that promises of partnership have gone unfulfilled in the past and that trust has to be earned over time while the united states has done much to promote peace and prosperity in the hemisphere we have at times been disengaged and at times we sought to dictate our terms but i pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership there is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations there is simply engagement based on mutual respect and common interests and shared values so i m here to launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration to move forward we cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements i am very grateful that president ortega i m grateful that president ortega did not blame me for things that happened when i was three months old too often an opportunity to build a fresh partnership of the americas has been undermined by stale debates and we ve heard all these arguments before these debates that would have us make a false choice between rigid state run economies or unbridled and unregulated capitalism between blame for right wing paramilitaries or left wing insurgents between sticking to inflexible policies with regard to cuba or denying the full human rights that are owed to the cuban people i didn t come here to debate the past i came here to deal with the future i believe as some of our previous speakers have stated that we must learn from history but we can t be trapped by it as neighbors we have a responsibility to each other and to our citizens and by working together we can take important steps forward to advance prosperity and security and liberty that is the 21st century agenda that we come together to enact that s the new direction that we can pursue before we move forward for our shared discussions over this weekend i d like to put forward several areas where the united states is committed already to strengthening collective action on behalf of our shared goals first we must come together on behalf of our common prosperity that s what we ve already begun to do our unprecedented actions to stimulate growth and restart the flow of credit will help create jobs and prosperity within our borders and within yours we joined with our g20 partners to set aside over a trillion dollars for countries going through difficult times recognizing that we have to provide assistance to those countries that are most vulnerable we will work with you to ensure that the inter american development bank can take the necessary steps to increase its current levels of lending and to carefully study the needs for recapitalization in the future and we recognize that we have a special responsibility as one of the world s financial centers to work with partners around the globe to reform a failed regulatory system so that we can prevent the kinds of financial abuses that led to this current crisis from ever happening again and achieve an economic expansion not just in the united states but all across the hemisphere that is built not on bubbles but on sustainable economic growth we re also committed to combating inequality and creating prosperity from the bottom up this is something that i ve spoken about in the united states and it s something that i believe applies across the region i ve asked congress for 448 million in immediate assistance for those who have been hit hardest by the crisis beyond our borders and today i m pleased to announce a new microfinance growth fund for the hemisphere that can restart the lending that can power businesses and entrepreneurs in each and every country that s represented here this is not charity let me be clear this is not charity together we can create a broader foundation of prosperity that builds new markets and powers new growth for all peoples in the hemisphere because our economies are intertwined next we can strengthen the foundation of our prosperity and our security and our environment through a new partnership on energy our hemisphere is blessed with bountiful resources and we are all endangered by climate change now we must come together to find new ways to produce and use energy so that we can create jobs and protect our planet so today i m proposing the creation of a new energy and climate partnership of the americas that can forge progress to a more secure and sustainable future it s a partnership that will harness the vision and determination of countries like mexico and brazil that have already done outstanding work in this area to promote renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions each country will bring its own unique resources and needs so we will ensure that each country can maximize its strengths as we promote efficiency and improve our infrastructure share technologies support investments in renewable sources of energy and in doing so we can create the jobs of the future lower greenhouse gas emissions and make this hemisphere a model for cooperation the dangers of climate change are part of a broad range of threats to our citizens so the third area where we must work together is to advance our common security today too many people in the americas live in fear we must not tolerate violence and insecurity no matter where it comes from children must be safe to play in the street and families should never face the pain of a kidnapping policemen must be more powerful than kingpins and judges must advance the rule of law illegal guns must not flow freely into criminal hands and illegal drugs must not destroy lives and distort our economy yesterday president caldern of mexico and i renewed our commitment to combat the dangers posed by drug cartels today i want to announce a new initiative to invest 30 million to strengthen cooperation on security in the caribbean and i have directed key members of my cabinet to build and sustain relations with their counterparts in the hemisphere to constantly adjust our tactics to build upon best practices and develop new modes of cooperation because the united states is a friend of every nation and person who seeks a future of security and dignity and let me add that i recognize that the problem will not simply be solved by law enforcement if we re not also dealing with our responsibilities in the united states and that s why we will take aggressive action to reduce our demand for drugs and to stop the flow of guns and bulk cash south across our borders and that s why i m making it a priority to ratify the illicit trafficking in firearms convention as another tool that we can use to prevent this from happening and i also am mindful of the statement that s been made earlier that unless we provide opportunity for an education and for jobs and a career for the young people in the region then too many will end up being attracted to the drug trade and so we cannot separate out dealing with the drug issue on the interdiction side and the law enforcement side from the need for critical development in our communities finally we know that true security only comes with liberty and justice those are bedrock values of the inter american charter generations of our people have worked and fought and sacrificed for them and it is our responsibility to advance them in our time so together we have to stand up against any force that separates any of our people from that story of liberty whether it s crushing poverty or corrosive corruption social exclusion or persistent racism or discrimination here in this room and on this dais we see the diversity of the americas every one of our nations has a right to follow its own path but we all have a responsibility to see that the people of the americans have the ability to pursue their own dreams in democratic societies there s been several remarks directed at the issue of the relationship between the united states and cuba so let me address this the united states seeks a new beginning with cuba i know that there is a longer i know there s a longer journey that must be traveled to overcome decades of mistrust but there are critical steps we can take toward a new day i ve already changed a cuba policy that i believe has failed to advance liberty or opportunity for the cuban people we will now allow cuban americans to visit the islands whenever they choose and provide resources to their families the same way that so many people in my country send money back to their families in your countries to pay for everyday needs over the past two years i ve indicated and i repeat today that i m prepared to have my administration engage with the cuban government on a wide range of issues from drugs migration and economic issues to human rights free speech and democratic reform now let me be clear i m not interested in talking just for the sake of talking but i do believe that we can move u s cuban relations in a new direction as has already been noted and i think my presence here indicates the united states has changed over time it has not always been easy but it has changed and so i think it s important to remind my fellow leaders that it s not just the united states that has to change all of us have responsibilities to look towards the future i think it s important to recognize given historic suspicions that the united states policy should not be interference in other countries but that also means that we can t blame the united states for every problem that arises in the hemisphere that s part of the bargain that s part of the change that has to take place that s the old way and we need a new way the united states will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made we will be partners in helping to alleviate poverty but the american people have to get some positive reinforcement if they are to be engaged in the efforts to lift other countries out of the poverty that they re experiencing every nation has been on its own journey here in trinidad and tobago we must respect those differences while celebrating those things that we share in common our nations were all colonized by empires and achieved our own liberation our people reflect the extraordinary diversity of human beings and our shared values reflect a common humanity the universal desire to leave our children a world that is more prosperous and peaceful than the one that we inherited so as we gather here let us remember that our success must be measured by the ability of people to live their dreams that s a goal that cannot be encompassed with any one policy or communiqu it s not a matter of abstractions or ideological debates it s a question of whether or not we are in a concrete way making the lives of our citizens better it s reflected in the hopes of our children in the strength of our democratic institutions and our faith in the future it will take time nothing is going to happen overnight but i pledge to you that the united states will be there as a friend and a partner because our futures are inextricably bound to the future of the people of the entire hemisphere and we are committed to shaping that future through engagement that is strong and sustained that is meaningful that is successful and that is based on mutual respect and equality thank you very much dem bobama17 5 09a barack_obama hello indiana it s good to see you guys it s good to see you hello hello hello it is good to be here and it s a pleasure to be with your outstanding representatives in congress andre carson joe donnelly brad ellsworth baron hill give it up for these outstanding members of congress we re here to make sure they can stay right where they belong in the united states congress representing your hopes representing your dreams carrying your voices to washington dc it s good to be back in indiana we spent a little time in indiana it reminds me of why i like getting out of washington so much people are friendly it brings back a lot of memories from all those days out here on the campaign trail so i want to start out tonight by saying thank you thank you to all of you here in indiana i know that i m here tonight because of you and folks like you across this country who made the phone calls and knocked on the doors and registered voters and dug deep and gave whatever you could because you were hungry for new ideas and new leadership and a new kind of politics and that s what we are trying to deliver right now in washington you believed that after an era of selfishness and greed we could reclaim a sense of responsibility from main street to wall street to washington you believed that instead of huge inequalities and bubbles that bust we could restore a sense of fairness and stability to our economy and build a new foundation for lasting growth and prosperity you believed that at a time of war and turmoil we could stand strong against our enemies stand strong for our ideals and show a new face of american leadership around the world that s the change you believed in that s the trust you placed in me that s something that i will never forget but we know that winning that election was just the beginning of our work it wasn t the end it was just the start it was the end of the beginning that victory alone was not the change that we sought it was just the opportunity to make the change and i don t know about you but i think it s fair to say that over these past four months we have seized this opportunity to jumpstart job creation and get our economy moving again we passed the most ambitious economic recovery package in our nation s history we gave tax cuts to 95 percent of working americans and put back people to work modernizing our health care system and rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges and transit systems and investing in renewable energy that could help boost our economy and preserve our planet we launched plans to stabilize our housing market and unfreeze our credit markets and to ensure the survival of our auto industry in this new century we passed a budget that will cut our deficit in half while making investments to spur long term growth we lifted the ban on federal funding for stem cell research we expanded the children s health insurance program to cover 11 million children in need we passed a national service bill to create hundreds of thousands of opportunities to serve we passed the lilly ledbetter fair pay act the first bill i signed into law because we believe in equal pay for equal work so we re making progress and i m pleased with how far we ve come but i m not satisfied i m confident in the future but i am not content not when there s still workers who are out of a job and families who can t pay the bills not when too many americans can t afford health care and so many of our kids are being left behind not when our nation has failed to lead the world in developing 21st century energy we ve come a long way we can see some light on the horizon but we ve got a much longer journey ahead that s why all of you are here tonight that s why you re digging deep again even when times are a little tight why i know you re going to make those calls and knock on those doors and get to the polls again next november because we ve got to make sure these four leaders continue their devoted service to indiana and to america and that s why i m here tonight that s why i m here because i can t bring the change i promised all by myself i can t rebuild our economy and reform our health care system and our education system and preserve our environment and keep our nation safe if i m all alone in the oval office that s not how our democracy works i need partners in congress people who are going to work hard every day to move this country forward that s why i m supporting these gentlemen that s why i believe in andre carson and joe donnelly and brad ellsworth and baron hill they serve their constituents and this nation with dedication and intelligence and compassion and pride they re determined to make a difference for the people they represent more than ever before we need their help america needs their help we need their help to build schools that meet high standards and close achievement gaps and prepare our children for the 21st century challenges that they ll confront where we reward teachers for performance and give them new pathways for advancement and we need their help to reach the goal that i ve set for higher education in this country that by the year 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world we used to have that distinction we don t anymore we are going to get it back with the help of these four gentlemen right here we need their help to pass a comprehensive energy plan and climate bill that will finally reduce our dependence on foreign oil cap carbon pollution that threatens our health and our climate a plan that will create millions of new jobs producing wind turbines and solar panels and the alternative fuels that will power the future because we know that the nation that leads on energy on clean energy in the 21st century that s the nation that will lead economically and america can and must be that nation i need these gentlemen s help to create a 21st century health care system that s cutting costs for families and businesses i ve already met with representatives from the insurance and drug companies from doctors and hospitals and labor unions these groups some of them used to be fierce critics of health care reform back in 1993 but today they ve pledged to do their part to reduce the annual health care spending growth rate by 1 5 percent and coupled with comprehensive reform that could save us up to 2 trillion 2 500 per family every year and working with these congressmen we re going to do everything we can to achieve comprehensive health care reform by the end of this year are we going to get it done gentlemen this is the year to get it done and we need these gentlemen to help give working people in this country a fair shake again to make sure our workers can be paid fairly and treated fairly for the work that they do i ve got to say a few words about where we re gathered tonight it s a fine establishment but there are workers here from indianapolis hotels who are seeking to unionize including some right here at the westin and i want to recognize these workers and offer my support for their efforts where are they raise your hands guys right here we appreciate you in these difficult times our country will be stronger if management and workers come together to resolve disputes and work together to provide quality service and workers should never be punished for demanding the right to collectively bargain that s not right we won t stand for it and finally we need these four leaders to help us restore fiscal discipline in washington so we don t leave our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt these are some of the leaders in trying to get washington to take those responsibilities seriously already my administration has identified more than 100 government programs that we can reduce or eliminate save 17 billion next year alone we re going line by line through the budget page by page looking for even more cuts i ve personally asked the leadership in congress to reinstate the pay as you go rule that we followed during the 1990s a rule that will help start a rule that helped us start this new century with a 236 billion surplus you remember that the idea is very simple you don t spend what you don t have if you want to spend you need to find someplace else to cut that s the rule that families across this country follow every single day and there s no reason why their government shouldn t do the same so look indiana we re living through some extraordinary times we didn t ask for the challenges we face but we re determined to answer the call to meet them to cast aside the old arguments overcome the stubborn divisions to move forward as one people it won t be easy and there s going to be setbacks it s going to take time this is going to be a hard year and next year is not going to be so easy either but i promise you that we will get through this i ll always tell you the truth about the challenges we face and the steps that we re taking and i ll continue to measure my progress by the progress the american people are seeing in their own everyday lives and if you stand with me if you stand with andre carson and joe donnelly and brad ellsworth and baron hill then i know we will look back on this moment at the time that we came together to reclaim america s future to write the next great chapter in the american story thank you everybody god bless you god bless america dem bobama17 5 09b barack_obama well first of all congratulations class of 2009 congratulations to all the parents the cousins the aunts the uncles all the people who helped to bring you to the point that you are here today thank you so much to father jenkins for that extraordinary introduction even though you said what i want to say much more elegantly you are doing an extraordinary job as president of this extraordinary institution your continued and courageous and contagious commitment to honest thoughtful dialogue is an inspiration to us all good afternoon to father hesburgh to notre dame trustees to faculty to family i am honored to be here today and i am grateful to all of you for allowing me to be a part of your graduation and i also want to thank you for the honorary degree that i received i know it has not been without controversy i don t know if you re aware of this but these honorary degrees are apparently pretty hard to come by so far i m only 1 for 2 as president father hesburgh is 150 for 150 i guess that s better so father ted after the ceremony maybe you can give me some pointers to boost my average i also want to congratulate the class of 2009 for all your accomplishments and since this is notre dame that s all right and since we re fine everybody we re following brennan s adage that we don t do things easily we re not going to shy away from things that are uncomfortable sometimes now since this is notre dame i think we should talk not only about your accomplishments in the classroom but also in the competitive arena no don t worry i m not going to talk about that we all know about this university s proud and storied football team but i also hear that notre dame holds the largest outdoor 5 on 5 basketball tournament in the world bookstore basketball now this excites me i want to congratulate the winners of this year s tournament a team by the name of hallelujah holla back congratulations well done though i have to say i am personally disappointed that the barack o ballers did not pull it out this year so next year if you need a 6 2 forward with a decent jumper you know where i live every one of you should be proud of what you have achieved at this institution one hundred and sixty three classes of notre dame graduates have sat where you sit today some were here during years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare periods of relative peace and prosperity that required little by way of sacrifice or struggle you however are not getting off that easy you have a different deal your class has come of age at a moment of great consequence for our nation and for the world a rare inflection point in history where the size and scope of the challenges before us require that we remake our world to renew its promise that we align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age it s a privilege and a responsibility afforded to few generations and a task that you re now called to fulfill this generation your generation is the one that must find a path back to prosperity and decide how we respond to a global economy that left millions behind even before the most recent crisis hit an economy where greed and short term thinking were too often rewarded at the expense of fairness and diligence and an honest day s work your generation must decide how to save god s creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it your generation must seek peace at a time when there are those who will stop at nothing to do us harm and when weapons in the hands of a few can destroy the many and we must find a way to reconcile our ever shrinking world with its ever growing diversity diversity of thought diversity of culture and diversity of belief in short we must find a way to live together as one human family and it s this last challenge that i d like to talk about today despite the fact that father john stole all my best lines for the major threats we face in the 21st century whether it s global recession or violent extremism the spread of nuclear weapons or pandemic disease these things do not discriminate they do not recognize borders they do not see color they do not target specific ethnic groups moreover no one person or religion or nation can meet these challenges alone our very survival has never required greater cooperation and greater understanding among all people from all places than at this moment in history unfortunately finding that common ground recognizing that our fates are tied up as dr king said in a single garment of destiny is not easy and part of the problem of course lies in the imperfections of man our selfishness our pride our stubbornness our acquisitiveness our insecurities our egos all the cruelties large and small that those of us in the christian tradition understand to be rooted in original sin we too often seek advantage over others we cling to outworn prejudice and fear those who are unfamiliar too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self interest and crass materialism in which the world is necessarily a zero sum game the strong too often dominate the weak and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice and so for all our technology and scientific advances we see here in this country and around the globe violence and want and strife that would seem sadly familiar to those in ancient times we know these things and hopefully one of the benefits of the wonderful education that you ve received here at notre dame is that you ve had time to consider these wrongs in the world perhaps recognized impulses in yourself that you want to leave behind you ve grown determined each in your own way to right them and yet one of the vexing things for those of us interested in promoting greater understanding and cooperation among people is the discovery that even bringing together persons of good will bringing together men and women of principle and purpose even accomplishing that can be difficult the soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm the gay activist and the evangelical pastor may both deplore the ravages of hiv aids but find themselves unable to bridge the cultural divide that might unite their efforts those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in an admirable conviction about the sacredness of life but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son s or daughter s hardships can be relieved the question then the question then is how do we work through these conflicts is it possible for us to join hands in common effort as citizens of a vibrant and varied democracy how do we engage in vigorous debate how does each of us remain firm in our principles and fight for what we consider right without as father john said demonetizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side and of course nowhere do these questions come up more powerfully than on the issue of abortion as i considered the controversy surrounding my visit here i was reminded of an encounter i had during my senate campaign one that i describe in a book i wrote called the audacity of hope a few days after i won the democratic nomination i received an e mail from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the illinois primary he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election he described himself as a christian who was strongly pro life but that was not what was preventing him potentially from voting for me what bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website an entry that said i would fight right wing ideologues who want to take away a woman s right to choose the doctor said he had assumed i was a reasonable person he supported my policy initiatives to help the poor and to lift up our educational system but that if i truly believed that every pro life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women then i was not very reasonable he wrote i do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion only that you speak about this issue in fair minded words fair minded words after i read the doctor s letter i wrote back to him and i thanked him and i didn t change my underlying position but i did tell my staff to change the words on my website and i said a prayer that night that i might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me because when we do that when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe that s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground that s when we begin to say maybe we won t agree on abortion but we can still agree that this heart wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually it has both moral and spiritual dimensions so let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions let s reduce unintended pregnancies let s make adoption more available let s provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term let s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion and draft a sensible conscience clause and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science but also in clear ethics as well as respect for the equality of women those are things we can do now understand understand class of 2009 i do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away because no matter how much we may want to fudge it indeed while we know that the views of most americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory the fact is that at some level the views of the two camps are irreconcilable each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction but surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature open hearts open minds fair minded words it s a way of life that has always been the notre dame tradition father hesburgh has long spoken of this institution as both a lighthouse and a crossroads a lighthouse that stands apart shining with the wisdom of the catholic tradition while the crossroads is where differences of culture and religion and conviction can co exist with friendship civility hospitality and especially love and i want to join him and father john in saying how inspired i am by the maturity and responsibility with which this class has approached the debate surrounding today s ceremony you are an example of what notre dame is about this tradition of cooperation and understanding is one that i learned in my own life many years ago also with the help of the catholic church you see i was not raised in a particularly religious household but my mother instilled in me a sense of service and empathy that eventually led me to become a community organizer after i graduated college and a group of catholic churches in chicago helped fund an organization known as the developing communities project and we worked to lift up south side neighborhoods that had been devastated when the local steel plant closed and it was quite an eclectic crew catholic and protestant churches jewish and african american organizers working class black white and hispanic residents all of us with different experiences all of us with different beliefs but all of us learned to work side by side because all of us saw in these neighborhoods other human beings who needed our help to find jobs and improve schools we were bound together in the service of others and something else happened during the time i spent in these neighborhoods perhaps because the church folks i worked with were so welcoming and understanding perhaps because they invited me to their services and sang with me from their hymnals perhaps because i was really broke and they fed me perhaps because i witnessed all of the good works their faith inspired them to perform i found myself drawn not just to the work with the church i was drawn to be in the church it was through this service that i was brought to christ and at the time cardinal joseph bernardin was the archbishop of chicago for those of you too young to have known him or known of him he was a kind and good and wise man a saintly man i can still remember him speaking at one of the first organizing meetings i attended on the south side he stood as both a lighthouse and a crossroads unafraid to speak his mind on moral issues ranging from poverty and aids and abortion to the death penalty and nuclear war and yet he was congenial and gentle in his persuasion always trying to bring people together always trying to find common ground just before he died a reporter asked cardinal bernardin about this approach to his ministry and he said you can t really get on with preaching the gospel until you ve touched hearts and minds my heart and mind were touched by him they were touched by the words and deeds of the men and women i worked alongside in parishes across chicago and i d like to think that we touched the hearts and minds of the neighborhood families whose lives we helped change for this i believe is our highest calling now you class of 2009 are about to enter the next phase of your life at a time of great uncertainty you ll be called to help restore a free market that s also fair to all who are willing to work you ll be called to seek new sources of energy that can save our planet to give future generations the same chance that you had to receive an extraordinary education and whether as a person drawn to public service or simply someone who insists on being an active citizen you will be exposed to more opinions and ideas broadcast through more means of communication than ever existed before you ll hear talking heads scream on cable and you ll read blogs that claim definitive knowledge and you will watch politicians pretend they know what they re talking about occasionally you may have the great fortune of actually seeing important issues debated by people who do know what they re talking about by well intentioned people with brilliant minds and mastery of the facts in fact i suspect that some of you will be among those brightest stars and in this world of competing claims about what is right and what is true have confidence in the values with which you ve been raised and educated be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake hold firm to your faith and allow it to guide you on your journey in other words stand as a lighthouse but remember too that you can be a crossroads remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt it s the belief in things not seen it s beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what god has planned for us or what he asks of us and those of us who believe must trust that his wisdom is greater than our own and this doubt should not push us away our faith but it should humble us it should temper our passions cause us to be wary of too much self righteousness it should compel us to remain open and curious and eager to continue the spiritual and moral debate that began for so many of you within the walls of notre dame and within our vast democracy this doubt should remind us even as we cling to our faith to persuade through reason through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles and most of all through an abiding example of good works and charity and kindness and service that moves hearts and minds for if there is one law that we can be most certain of it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together it s no coincidence that it exists in christianity and judaism in islam and hinduism in buddhism and humanism it is of course the golden rule the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated the call to love the call to serve to do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this earth so many of you at notre dame by the last count upwards of 80 percent have lived this law of love through the service you ve performed at schools and hospitals international relief agencies and local charities brennan is just one example of what your class has accomplished that s incredibly impressive a powerful testament to this institution now you must carry the tradition forward make it a way of life because when you serve it doesn t just improve your community it makes you a part of your community it breaks down walls it fosters cooperation and when that happens when people set aside their differences even for a moment to work in common effort toward a common goal when they struggle together and sacrifice together and learn from one another then all things are possible after all i stand here today as president and as an african american on the 55th anniversary of the day that the supreme court handed down the decision in brown v board of education now brown was of course the first major step in dismantling the separate but equal doctrine but it would take a number of years and a nationwide movement to fully realize the dream of civil rights for all of god s children there were freedom rides and lunch counters and billy clubs and there was also a civil rights commission appointed by president eisenhower it was the 12 resolutions recommended by this commission that would ultimately become law in the civil rights act of 1964 there were six members of this commission it included five whites and one african american democrats and republicans two southern governors the dean of a southern law school a midwestern university president and your own father ted hesburgh president of notre dame so they worked for two years and at times president eisenhower had to intervene personally since no hotel or restaurant in the south would serve the black and white members of the commission together and finally when they reached an impasse in louisiana father ted flew them all to notre dame s retreat in land o lakes wisconsin where they eventually overcame their differences and hammered out a final deal and years later president eisenhower asked father ted how on earth he was able to broker an agreement between men of such different backgrounds and beliefs and father ted simply said that during their first dinner in wisconsin they discovered they were all fishermen and so he quickly readied a boat for a twilight trip out on the lake they fished and they talked and they changed the course of history i will not pretend that the challenges we face will be easy or that the answers will come quickly or that all our differences and divisions will fade happily away because life is not that simple it never has been but as you leave here today remember the lessons of cardinal bernardin of father hesburgh of movements for change both large and small remember that each of us endowed with the dignity possessed by all children of god has the grace to recognize ourselves in one another to understand that we all seek the same love of family the same fulfillment of a life well lived remember that in the end in some way we are all fishermen if nothing else that knowledge should give us faith that through our collective labor and god s providence and our willingness to shoulder each other s burdens america will continue on its precious journey towards that more perfect union congratulations class of 2009 may god bless you and may god bless the united states of america dem bobama17 5 10 barack_obama hello everybody please have a seat have a seat well welcome to the white house everybody congratulations to the uconn huskies on your second straight undefeated season and your second straight ncaa championship i want to point out this team has not lost a game since i was elected president i m just saying i want to acknowledge a few uconn fans who made the trek from the other side of pennsylvania avenue we ve got senators chris dodd and joe lieberman in the house and congressmen john larson and joe courtney are here as well now when this team came to the white house last year i was just pointing out to maya we went out back i ve got a little court we shot a little bit i m not going to say who won but i noticed then there were people who were saying you know these huskies they ve got a little too much swagger because they said that they d be back in 2010 they said that at the time i m not sure anybody believed them i believed them listening to them and that confidence was well deserved this team has had an unbelievable run i think most of you know the statistics seven of the last 16 ncaa titles six undefeated regular seasons four undefeated championship seasons and last year coach auriemma promised you guys would go 40 0 this year it s not your fault that he can t do math very well there were only 39 games so coach you can t win 40 if there are only 39 games but 39 0 is pretty good these women beat their own ncaa record to become the first women s basketball team in history to win 78 games in a row over the past two years which is just a staggering achievement and i was telling them michelle and i work out in the morning we ve got a little gym here in the white house and we d just watch sports center i know you ll be surprised that we don t watch the news shows but this is really true during the entire season i just kept on repeating and i truly believed this was the best team in all of sports any sport any gender by far and that s just something that made us all very proud i want to point out that coach geno s teams have had a 100 percent graduation rate over the past 25 years and that s true again this year because these players work as hard in the classroom as they do on the court i want to congratulate the seniors that graduated last week if i m not mistaken number one wnba draft pick tina charles is going to be graduating jacquie fernandes meghan gardler kalana greene and kaili mclaren give them all a big round of applause congratulations to tina for winning the naismith trophy as player of the year for graduating as uconn s all time scoring leader i do have to say though maya has her sights set on that record she s coming after it and maya congratulations on being named the final four s most valuable most outstanding player when you consider that maya says she approaches her academics as she does her basketball it s no surprise that she was named first team academic all american for the third year in a row that is worth an applause so obviously this team was under enormous pressure this season everyone was watching and waiting for them to stumble figuring out figuring there was no way for them to go undefeated again when your toughest test came in this year s national championship game you trailed the longest that you had all year you came out swinging in the second half and brought that championship home yet again to the storrs community that loves and believes in you so deeply and when you re at home in storrs you apply that same winning attitude off the court you read with elementary children spend time with cancer patients today you brought that sense of service to washington visiting wounded warriors in walter reed and i know they were thrilled to see you whether it s winning a national championship balancing practice with schoolwork or serving others these young women made it all look easy despite the fact that we all know they put in enormous amounts of work it s that perseverance and dedication and that will to succeed that makes them so special and that s why every single one of these young women sets a terrific example for girls and women today as athletes as scholars and as leaders and i think coach you have just been an extraordinary leader and i think all of us are extremely proud of the example that you ve set so as your president i commend you for setting that example as the father of two tall girls who are also very cute and also do great work in the classroom i m just so glad that they ve got all of you to look up to and i thank you for it i will say i will be very impressed if you make it here a third time in a row congratulations to all of you give them a big round of applause dem bobama17 6 09a barack_obama well today i m proud to issue a presidential memorandum that paves the way for long overdue progress in our nation s pursuit of equality many of our government s hard working dedicated and patriotic public servants have long been denied basic rights that their colleagues enjoy for one simple reason the people that they love are of the same sex currently for example lgbt federal employees can t always use sick leave to care for their domestic partners or their partners children their partners aren t covered under long term care insurance partners of american foreign service officers abroad aren t treated the same way when it comes to the use of medical facilities or visitation rights in case of an emergency these are just some of the wrongs that we intend to right today in consultation with secretary of state clinton as well as opm director john berry my administration has completed a long and thorough review to identify a number of areas where we can extend federal benefits to the same sex partners of foreign service and executive branch government employees i m requesting that secretary clinton and director berry do so where possible under existing law and that the heads of all executive departments and agencies conduct reviews to determine where they may do the same hundreds of fortune 500 companies already offer such benefits not only because it s the right thing to do but because they recognize that it helps them compete for and retain the best possible talent and we need top talent serving their country right now more than ever now under current law we cannot provide same sex couples with the full range of benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples that s why i m proud to announce my support for the domestic partners benefits and obligations act crucial legislation that will guarantee these rights for all federal employees i want to thank representative tammy baldwin who is behind me somewhere there she is right there for her tireless leadership on this bill and in the broader struggle for equality i want to thank senator joe lieberman joe is here as well as susan collins for championing this bill in the senate and representative barney frank for his leadership on this and so many other issues in fact this is his second trip to the white house today it s a day that marks a historic step towards the changes we seek but i think we all have to acknowledge this is only one step among the steps we have not yet taken is to repeal the defense of marriage act i believe it s discriminatory i think it interferes with states rights and we will work with congress to overturn it we ve got more work to do to ensure that government treats all its citizens equally to fight injustice and intolerance in all its forms and to bring about that more perfect union i m committed to these efforts and i pledge to work tirelessly on behalf of these issues in the months and years to come thank you very much everybody and with that i am going to sign this executive order dem bobama17 8 09 barack_obama thank you please be seated thank you so much commander gardner thank you for your introduction and for your lifetime of service i was proud to welcome glen and your executive director bob wallace to the oval office just before the 4th of july and i look forwarding to working with your next commander tommy tradewell i want to also acknowledge jean gardner and sharon tradewell as well as dixie hild and jan title and all the spouses and family of the ladies auxiliary america honors your service as well also governor jan brewer is here of arizona and mayor phil gordon our host here in phoenix i want to acknowledge president dr joe shirley jr president of the navajo nation and this wasn t on my original card but this is just an extraordinary story and you may have already heard from her but i just want to publicly acknowledge and thank ms helen denton the secretary to dwight eisenhower who typed up the orders for the normandy invasion and is here today and what an extraordinary story that is members of the veterans of foreign wars i am honored and humbled to stand before you as commander in chief of the finest military the world has ever known and we re joined by some of those who make it the finest force in world from luke air force base members of the 56th fighter wing whether you wear the uniform today or wore it decades ago you remind us of a fundamental truth it s not the powerful weapons that make our military the strongest in the world it s not the sophisticated systems that make us the most advanced the true strength of our military lies in the spirit and skill of our men and women in uniform and you know this you know this because it s the story of your lives when fascism seemed unstoppable and our harbor was bombed you battled across rocky pacific islands and stormed the beaches of europe marching across a continent my own grandfather and uncle among your ranks liberating millions and turning enemies into allies when communism cast its shadow across so much of the globe you stood vigilant in a long cold war from an airlift in berlin to the mountains of korea to the jungles of vietnam when that cold war ended and old hatreds emerged anew you turned back aggression from kuwait to kosovo and long after you took off the uniform you ve continued to serve supporting our troops and their families when they go to war and welcoming them when they come home working to give our veterans the care they deserve and when america s heroes are laid to rest giving every one of them that final fitting tribute of a grateful nation we can never say it enough for your service in war and in peace thank you vfw thank you today the story of your service is carried on by a new generation dedicated courageous men and women who i have the privilege to lead and meet every day they re the young sailors the midshipmen at the naval academy who raised their right hand at graduation and committed themselves to a life of service they re the soldiers i met in baghdad who have done their duty year after year on a second third or fourth tour they re the marines of camp lejeune preparing to deploy and now serving in afghanistan to protect americans here at home they re the airmen like those here today who provide the close air support that saves the lives of our troops on the ground they re the wounded warriors at landstuhl and walter reed and bethesda and across america for whom the battle is not to fight but simply to speak to stand to walk once more they re the families that my wife michelle has met at bases across the country the spouses back home doing the parenting of two the children who wonder when mom and dad may be coming home the parents who watch their sons and daughters go off to war and the families who lay a loved one to rest and the pain that lasts a lifetime to all those who have served america our forces your families our veterans you have done your duty you have fulfilled your responsibilities and now a grateful nation must fulfill ours and that is what i want to talk about today first we have a solemn responsibility to always lead our men and women in uniform wisely and that starts with a vision of american leadership that recognizes that military power alone cannot be the first or only answer to the threats facing our nation in recent years our troops have succeeded in every mission america has given them from toppling the taliban to deposing a dictator in iraq to battling brutal insurgencies at the same time forces trained for war have been called upon to perform a whole host of missions like mayors they ve run local governments and delivered water and electricity like aid workers they ve mentored farmers and built new schools like diplomats they ve negotiated agreements with tribal sheikhs and local leaders but let us never forget we are a country of more than 300 million americans less than 1 percent wears the uniform and that 1 percent our soldiers sailors airmen marines and coast guardsmen have borne the overwhelming burden of our security in fact perhaps never in american history have so few protected so many so the responsibility for our security must not be theirs alone that is why i have made it a priority to enlist all elements of our national power in defense of our national security our diplomacy and development our economic might and our moral example because one of the best ways to lead our troops wisely is to prevent the conflicts that cost american blood and treasure tomorrow as president my greatest responsibility is the security and safety of the american people as i ve said before that is the first thing i think about when i wake up in the morning it s the last thing that i think about when i go to sleep at night and i will not hesitate to use force to protect the american people or our vital interests but as we protect america our men and women in uniform must always be treated as what they are america s most precious resource as commander in chief i have a solemn responsibility for their safety and there is nothing more sobering than signing a letter of condolence to the family of servicemen or women who have given their lives for our country and that s why i have made this pledge to our armed forces i will only send you into harm s way when it is absolutely necessary and when i do it will be based on good intelligence and guided by a sound strategy i will give you a clear mission defined goals and the equipment and support you need to get the job done that s my commitment to you which brings me to our second responsibility to our armed forces giving them the resources and equipment and strategies to meet their missions we need to keep our military the best trained the best led the best equipped fighting force in the world and that s why even with our current economic challenges my budget increases defense spending we will ensure that we have the force structure to meet today s missions and that s why we ve increased the size of the army and the marine corps two years ahead of schedule and have approved another temporary increase in the army and we ve halted personnel reductions in the navy and air force and this will give our troops more time home between deployments which means less stress on families and more training for the next mission and it will help us put an end once and for all to stop loss for those who ve done their duty we will equip our forces with the assets and technologies they need to fight and win so my budget funds more of the army helicopters crews and pilots urgently needed in afghanistan the intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance that gives our troops the advantage the special operations forces that can deploy on a moment s notice and for all those serving in afghanistan and iraq including our national guard and reserve more of the protective gear and armored vehicles that save lives as we fight in two wars we will plan responsibly budget honestly and speak candidly about the costs and consequences of our actions and that s why i ve made sure my budget includes the cost of the wars in iraq and afghanistan in iraq after more than six years we took an important step forward in june we transferred control of all cities and towns to iraq s security forces the transition to full iraqi responsibility for their own security is now underway this progress is a testament to all those who have served in iraq both uniformed and civilian and our nation owes these americans and all who have given their lives a profound debt of gratitude now as iraqis take control of their destiny they will be tested and targeted those who seek to sow sectarian division will attempt more senseless bombings and more killing of innocents this we know but as we move forward the iraqi people must know that the united states will keep its commitments and the american people must know that we will move forward with our strategy we will begin removing our combat brigades from iraq later this year we will remove all our combat brigades by the end of next august and we will remove all our troops from iraq by the end of 2011 and for america the iraq war will end by moving forward in iraq we re able to refocus on the war against al qaeda and its extremist allies in afghanistan and pakistan that s why i announced a new comprehensive strategy in march a strategy that recognizes that al qaeda and its allies had moved their base from the remote tribal areas to the remote tribal areas of pakistan this strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war that we also need diplomacy and development and good governance and our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda and its extremist allies in the months since we have begun to put this comprehensive strategy into action and in recent weeks we ve seen our troops do their part they ve gone into new areas taking the fight to the taliban in villages and towns where residents have been terrorized for years they re adapting new tactics knowing that it s not enough to kill extremists and terrorists we also need to protect the afghan people and improve their daily lives and today our troops are helping to secure polling places for this week s election so that afghans can choose the future that they want now these new efforts have not been without a price the fighting has been fierce more americans have given their lives and as always the thoughts and prayers of every american are with those who make the ultimate sacrifice in our defense as i said when i announced this strategy there will be more difficult days ahead the insurgency in afghanistan didn t just happen overnight and we won t defeat it overnight this will not be quick nor easy but we must never forget this is not a war of choice this is a war of necessity those who attacked america on 9 11 are plotting to do so again if left unchecked the taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al qaeda would plot to kill more americans so this is not only a war worth fighting this is a this is fundamental to the defense of our people and going forward we will constantly adapt to new tactics to stay ahead of the enemy and give our troops the tools and equipment they need to succeed and at every step of the way we will assess our efforts to defeat al qaeda and its extremist allies and to help the afghan and pakistani people build the future that they seek now even as we lead and equip our troops for the missions of today we have a third responsibility to fulfill we must prepare our forces for the missions of tomorrow our soldiers sailors airmen marines and coast guardsmen adapt to new challenges every day but as we know much of our defense establishment has yet to fully adapt to the post cold war world with doctrine and weapons better suited to fight the soviets on the plains of europe than insurgents in the rugged terrain of afghanistan twenty years after the cold war ended this is simply not unacceptable it s irresponsible our troops and our taxpayers deserve better and that s why that s why our defense review is taking a top to bottom look at our priorities and posture questioning conventional wisdom rethinking old dogmas and challenging the status quo we re asking hard questions about the forces we need and the weapons we buy and when we re finished we ll have a new blueprint for the 21st century military that we need and in fact we re already on our way we re adopting new concepts because the full spectrum of challenges demands a full range of military capabilities both the conventional and the unconventional the ability to defeat both an armored division and the lone suicide bomber the intercontinental ballistic missile and the improvised explosive device 18th century style piracy and 21st century cyber threats no matter the mission we must maintain america s military dominance so even as we modernize our conventional forces we re investing in the capabilities that will reorient our force to the future an army that is more mobile and expeditionary and missile defenses that protect our troops in the field a navy that not only projects power across the oceans but operates nimbly in shallow coastal waters an air force that dominates the airspace with next generation aircraft both manned and unmanned a marine corps that can move ashore more rapidly in more places and across the force we re investing in new skills and specialties because in the 21st century military strength will be measured not only by the weapons our troops carry but by the languages they speak and the cultures that they understand but here s the simple truth we cannot build the 21st century military we need and maintain the fiscal responsibility that america demands unless we fundamentally reform the way our defense establishment does business it s a simple fact every dollar wasted in our defense budget is a dollar we can t spend to care for our troops or protect america or prepare for the future you ve heard the stories the indefensible no bid contracts that cost taxpayers billions and make contractors rich the special interests and their exotic projects that are years behind schedule and billions over budget the entrenched lobbyists pushing weapons that even our military says it doesn t want the impulse in washington to protect jobs back home building things we don t need has a cost that we can t afford this waste would be unacceptable at any time but at a time when we re fighting two wars and facing a serious deficit it s inexcusable it s an affront to the american people and to our troops and it s time for it to stop and this is not a democratic issue or a republican issue this is not a democratic issue or a republican issue it s about giving our troops the support that they need and that s something that all americans should be able to agree to so i m glad i have as a partner in this effort a great veteran a great arizonan and a great american who has shown the courage to stand and fight this waste senator john mccain and i m also proud to have secretary of defense robert gates who has served under eight presidents of both parties leading this fight at the pentagon so already i ve put an end to unnecessary no bid contracts i ve signed bipartisan legislation to reform defense procurement so weapons systems don t spin out of control and even as we increase spending on the equipment and weapons our troops do need we ve proposed cutting tens of billions of dollars in waste we don t need think about it hundreds of millions of dollars for an alternate second engine for the joint strike fighter when one reliable engine will do just fine nearly 2 billion to buy more f 22 fighter jets when we can move ahead with a fleet of newer more affordable aircraft tens of billions of dollars to put an anti missile laser on a fleet of vulnerable 747s and billions of dollars for a new presidential helicopter now maybe you ve heard about this among its other capabilities it would let me cook a meal while under nuclear attack now let me tell you something if the united states of america is under nuclear attack the last thing on my mind will be whipping up a snack so this is pretty straightforward cut the waste save taxpayer dollars support the troops that s what we should be doing the special interests contractors and entrenched lobbyists they re invested in the status quo and they re putting up a fight but make no mistake so are we if a project doesn t support our troops if it does not make america safer we will not fund it if a system doesn t perform we will terminate it and if congress sends me a defense bill loaded with a bunch of pork i will veto it we will do right by our troops and taxpayers and we will build the 21st century military that we need finally we will fulfill our responsibility to those who serve by keeping our promises to our people we will fulfill our responsibility to our forces and our families that s why we re increasing military pay that s why we re building better family housing and funding more childcare and counseling to help families cope with the stresses of war and we ve changed the rules so military spouses can better compete for federal jobs and pursue their careers we will fulfill our responsibility to our wounded warriors for those still in uniform we re investing billions of dollars for more treatment centers more case managers and better medical care so our troops can recover and return where they want to be with their units but as the vfw well knows for so many veterans the war rages on the flashbacks that won t go away the loved ones who now seem like strangers the heavy darkness of depression that has led to too many of our troops taking their own lives post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury are the defining injuries of today s wars so caring for those affected by them is a defining purpose of my budget billions of dollars more for treatment and mental health screenings to reach our troops on the frontier on the frontlines and more mobile and rural clinics to reach veterans back home we are not going to abandon these american heroes we are going to do right by them we will fulfill our responsibility to our veterans as they return to civilian life i was proud to co sponsor the post 9 11 gi bill as a senator and thanks to vfw members across the country and leaders like arizona s harry mitchell in congress it is now the law of the land and as president i m committed to seeing that it is successfully implemented for so many of you like my grandfather the original gi bill changed your life helping you to realize your dreams but it also transformed america helping to build the largest middle class in history we re saying the same thing to today s post 9 11 veterans you pick the school we ll help pick up the bill and as these veterans show start showing up on campuses i m proud that we re making this opportunity available to all those who have sacrificed including reservists and national guard members and spouses and children including kids who ve lost their mom or dad in an era when so many people and institutions have acted irresponsibly we choose to reward the responsibility and service of our forces and their families whether you ve left the service in 2009 or 1949 we will fulfill our responsibility to deliver the benefits and care that you earned and that s why i ve pledged to build nothing less than a 21st century va and i picked a lifelong soldier and wounded warrior from vietnam to lead this fight general ric shinseki we re dramatically increasing funding for veterans health care this includes hundreds of millions of dollars to serve veterans in rural areas as well as the unique needs of our growing number of women veterans we re restoring access to va health care for a half million veterans who lost their eligibility in recent years our priority 8 veterans and since there s been so much misinformation out there about health insurance reform let me say this one thing that reform won t change is veterans health care no one is going to take away your benefits that is the plain and simple truth we re expanding access to your health care not reducing it we re also keeping our promise on concurrent receipt my budget ensures that our severely disabled veterans will receive both their military retired pay and their va disability benefits and i look forward to signing legislation on advanced appropriations for the va so the medical care you need is never held up by budget delays i ve also directed secretary shinseki to focus on a top priority reducing homelessness among veterans after serving their country no veteran should be sleeping on the streets no veteran we should have zero tolerance for that and we re keeping our promise to fulfill another top priority at the va cutting the red tape and inefficiencies that cause backlogs and delays in the claims process this spring i directed the department of defense and veterans affairs to create one unified lifetime electronic health record for the members of the armed forces a single electronic record with privacy guaranteed that will stay with them forever because after fighting for america you should not have to fight over paperwork to receive the benefits that you ve earned today i can announce that we re taking another step i ve directed my chief performance officer my chief technology officer and my chief information officer to join with secretary shinseki in a new reform effort we re launching a new competition to capture the very best ideas of our va employees who work with you every day we re going to challenge each of our 57 regional va offices to come up with the best ways of doing business of harnessing the best information technologies of cutting red tape and breaking through the bureaucracy and then we re going to fund the best ideas and put them into action all with a simple mission cut those backlogs slash those wait times deliver your benefits sooner i know you ve heard this for years but the leadership and resources we re providing this time means that we re going to be able to do it that is our mission and we are going to make it happen now taken together these investments represent a historic increase in our commitment to america s veterans a 15 percent increase over last year s funding levels and the largest increase in the va budget in more than 30 years and over the next five years we ll invest another 25 billion to make sure that our veterans are getting what they need these are major investments and these are difficult times fiscal discipline demands that we make hard decisions sacrificing certain things we can t afford but let me be clear america s commitment to its veterans are not just lines on a budget they are bonds that are sacred a sacred trust we re honor bound to uphold these are commitments that we make to the patriots who serve from the day they enlist to the day that they are laid to rest patriots like you patriots like a man named jim norene his story is his own but in it we see the larger story of all who serve he s a child of the depression who grew up to join that greatest generation a paratrooper in the 502nd parachute infantry regiment of the 101st airborne jumping in a daring daylight raid into holland to liberate captive people rushing to bastogne at the battle of the bulge where his commanding general surrounded by the germans and asked to surrender declared famously nuts for his bravery jim was awarded the bronze star but like so many others he rarely spoke of what he did or what he saw reminding us that true love of country is not boisterous or loud but rather the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime jim returned home and built a life he went to school on the gi bill he got married he raised a family in his small oregon farming town and every veterans day year after year he visited schoolchildren to speak about the meaning of service and he did it all as a proud member of the veterans of foreign wars then this spring jim made a decision he would return to europe once more eighty five years old frail and gravely ill he knew he might not make it back home but like the paratrooper he always was he was determined so near bastogne he returned to the places he knew so well at a dutch town liberated by our gis schoolchildren lined the sidewalks and sang the star spangled banner and in the quiet clearing of an american cemetery he walked among those perfect lines of white crosses of fellow soldiers who had fallen long ago their names forever etched in stone and then back where he had served 65 years before jim norene passed away at night in his sleep quietly peacefully the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime the next day i was privileged to join the commemoration at normandy to mark the day when the beaches were stormed and a continent was freed there were presidents and prime ministers and veterans from the far corners of the earth but long after the bands stopped playing and the crowds stopped cheering it was the story of a departed vfw member that echoed in our hearts veterans of foreign wars you have done your duty to your fallen comrades to your communities to your country you have always fulfilled your responsibilities to america and so long as i am president of the united states america will always fulfill its responsibilities to you god bless you god bless all our veterans and god bless the united states of america thank you very much dem bobama17 8 10a barack_obama hello everybody what a spectacular evening let s just hang out we don t need to make speeches well it is wonderful to see all of you there are a lot of friends here there are a couple of people i ve got to make special mention of first of all obviously thanks to john and marilyn for their incredible hospitality thank you very much please give them a big round of applause to the best speaker of the house that i can imagine working with she has just been a fighter day in and day out i couldn t have a better partner in washington than nancy pelosi please give her a big round of applause my secretary of labor is here california s own hilda solis democratic congressional committee chairman a thankless job and he is handling it with grace chris van hollen all of the members of california s congressional delegation who are here i want to just say thank you for your outstanding work i m going to make mention of one person who is not yet member of the congressional delegation but is going to be soon the former speaker of the house who is soon going to be the congresswoman from this district karen bass is here give karen a big round of applause the mayor of los angeles antonio villaraigosa is here we re not going to let him on a bike any time soon city council president eric garcetti is here please give him a round of applause and there are at least just at least two members of congress who are here that i just want to make special mention of barbara lee because she is the chairwoman of the congressional black caucus and is doing outstanding work and howard berman who is helping to guide us through so many difficult foreign policy challenges and i m so grateful to him for his leadership please give howard a big round of applause so it is wonderful to be back in los angeles and i look out on this crowd and i see so many friends who helped me to get to the white house i am reminded of lincoln s story he used to tell a story about a guy who showed up at the white house security was a little more lax at that time he insists on seeing the president during his office hours says i am the guy who got lincoln elected and he kept on badgering whoever was at the door and finally lincoln lets him in and lincoln says so sir i understand you are responsible for me having this job he says that s right and lincoln says i forgive you it is obviously an extraordinary honor to be the president and an extraordinary privilege to be the president at this moment in history a lot of people have said to me i just can t imagine all the things that you re juggling right now we ve got two wars coming out of this extraordinary recession that we ve gone through and i say this is exactly when you want to be president this is why i ran because we have the opportunity to shape history for the better to create an america that will serve our children our grandchildren our great great grandchildren well for if we are taking the right steps if we recognize this is an inflection point and that means it s difficult that means it s contentious and that means there s going to be passions that are stirred up that a quieter more stable time might not but it s also exactly when i d want to be in washington because i think we have the opportunity to make such a difference for so many people who need that help right now and i know nancy feels the same way about being speaker of the house now i want to make special mention of what congress has done and the house of representatives have done when you re president you ve got the bully pulpit and when you re president you ve got four years and as a consequence i think there are a lot of things i m very proud of that we ve done over the last two years but the pressures on me are different than the pressures on some of these congressional members nancy has experienced the same thing that harry reid has experienced on the senate side which is just constant nonstop opposition on everything there hasn t been an item that has come up in which there has not been just uniform insistence on the other side that it was a bad idea that it was going to wreck the country and that we shouldn t be doing it and so for people like nancy and chris and all the members here to have stood up again and again and again under just fierce withering criticism and opposition and to do so with a smile on nancy s face and with the grace with which she s done it and for the members who have taken tough vote after tough vote over the course of the last two years because they knew it was the right thing to do even when it wasn t the popular thing to do that s why we re here tonight that s my focus over the next several months because when i ran for the presidency my firm belief was if you did the right thing then eventually that was going to be good politics it might not be good politics in the short term but it was going to be good politics in the long term i believe that now just like i believed it then but we ve got to make sure that all those members in the house of representatives who believed it and took a lot of big political risks over the last two years are rewarded for it so i hope you understand why we re here tonight it s not to take a picture with the president you know i m a lot grayer now but we re here because we want to make sure that those folks who have taken the tough votes are supported i want to just remind everybody because sometimes we ve got short memories of where we ve been the journey we ve traveled over the last 20 months when i was sworn in a few of you were there it was very cold that day in january of 2009 do you remember it was cold yes that same month we lost 750 000 jobs in the six months leading up to my inauguration we had lost 3 million jobs in subsequent months we were losing 600 000 500 000 before any of the steps we could take were put into place we had already seen 8 million jobs lost the worst financial crisis since the great depression the entire financial system on the verge of meltdown and i think it s a good thing that we tend not to remember how worried everybody was but people were worried in march when the stock market was dropping 300 400 points people were not sure whether or not we were going to be dipping into a great depression and so we had to take action and we had to take action quickly and not everything we did was popular but we knew that if we didn t act if we were thinking about the next election instead of the next generation then we were putting the country at risk so immediately we took steps to shore up the economy to lift up demand to make sure that people who were vulnerable got support to make sure that states like california were getting enough help that they didn t have to lay off teachers and firefighters and police officers across the board and it worked we were able to stabilize the economy but that still left all the damage that had already occurred eight million jobs had still been lost and more than that it still left undone the task that i had been running on as president which was to create the kind of foundation for economic growth that had been missing for 10 years part of what has made this recession so tough is middle class families were struggling before the crisis hit they were hurting before the storm struck they had seen a decade of sluggish growth they had seen a decade of sluggish job growth incomes and wages had gone down for most families when you factored in inflation at the same time that health care and tuition were all skyrocketing so people felt less secure than they d ever felt and they kept on seeing jobs moving overseas and they had a sense that nobody was thinking about them and you know what they were right they were right the previous administration and the republican congress that had been in charge they had a simple philosophy they put a fancy name on it they called it the ownership society but when it came down to it the philosophy was simple we are going to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires folks who don t need it and weren t even asking for it we re going to cut regulations and rules that provide some check on special interests and then we re going to cut loose ordinary folks and tell them you re on your own you don t have health care tough luck you re on your own you re a young person and you didn t choose your parents properly and so you re poor maybe can t afford college too bad you re on your own you got laid off just short of retirement you don t know what to do too bad you re on your own that was the reigning philosophy before this recession hit and that s why i went to washington to change that so our job wasn t just to make sure that we didn t go into a depression our job was to figure out how are we going to put this economy back on track so it works for everybody not just some but for everybody so every kid here in california is able to say to themselves if i work hard if i m studying i m going to be able to afford to go to college and if i go to college then i m going to be able to get a job that pays me a decent wage and if i ve got a job i m going to be able to get health care and protect my family and if i do those right things during the course of my life i m going to be able to retire with some dignity and some respect that s why we went to washington that s why so many of you worked so hard to send me there and so we had a tough task we had to rescue the economy but we also had to remind ourselves that we ve got to put this country on a different trajectory than we ve been on and we went about the business of doing that with the help of nancy with the help of chris with the help of every member of congress here but with no help from the other side and as a consequence we have been able to deliver the most progressive legislative agenda one that helps working families in not just one generation maybe two maybe three so we were able to deliver on health care reform so that we enshrine the principle in this country the wealthiest on earth that nobody should be bankrupt when they get sick and we were able to make sure that we ve got a financial system in which everybody follows the basic rules of the road and you don t make money by cheating people you make money by offering them decent services and then we said you know what we re going to make sure that college is accessible to every young person in america and so we transformed how our student loan program works so that millions more kids are able to get health able to get help on their student loans and their tuition item after item after item when you look at what nancy and the house have done in combination with harry reid in the senate what we ve delivered is a package of changes that are going to help bolster security for middle class families and then we looked at the long term and we said look what are we going to do about energy and as a consequence invested made the biggest investments in clean energy in our history building solar panels and wind turbines and advanced battery manufacturing plants and biodiesel all across the country and we said we re going to make the biggest investment in research and development in our history and we did that all designed to make sure that we are competitive in a 21st century economy and we did all this without any help from the other side now here s the challenge that we ve got we ve got a long way to go people are still hurting all across america i meet folks or i read letters that are sent to me every night single moms who are sending out application after application and getting no response from potential employers people who have been laid off their jobs and have been out of work for a year year and a half and now they ve depleted all their savings and don t know where to turn and so in that environment you can talk about saving the economy from a potential depression and you can talk about the long term vision that makes me so optimistic about america but right here right now we ve still got a lot of work to do and that s what makes this election so challenging but having said that i am absolutely confident that we will do well in this election as long as we understand what this election is about and that is we have a choice between the policies that got us into this mess and the policies that are getting us out of this mess it s a very simple choice it s pretty straightforward i ve used this analogy before you had a group of folks who drove the economy drove the country drove our car into the ditch and so nancy and chris and barbara and howard and me we put on our boots and walked down into the ditch it s muddy and hot and dusty and bugs everywhere we re pushing and got our shoulders up and we re slipping and sliding and sweating and the other side the republicans they re standing there with their slurpees watching us you re not pushing fast enough that s not how you do it do it this way and so every once in a while we d offer why don t you guys come down here help us push no no no finally we get this car to level ground finally we re ready to move forward go down that road once again of american prosperity and what happens they want the keys back and what this election is about is saying to them you cannot have the keys back you do not know how to drive you don t know how to drive we re not going to let you take us in the ditch again i would make this observation when you are driving and you want to go forward what do you do you put your car in d you want to go backwards you put your car in r we can t afford to reverse back into the ditch we ve got to go forward that s what this election is about that s what this election is about now the republicans don t have an affirmative agenda they re counting on two things they re counting on fear and they re counting on amnesia they understand the very legitimate fears that people have about the future and so rather than offer solutions practical solutions about how we are going to rework our energy policies so that we can deal not only with our national security challenges not only with our economic challenges but also create jobs right here in the united states of america and by the way maybe save the planet in the process they don t have an answer for that just more of the same same policies drill more that s i think basically all we ve heard from them when it comes to education we haven t heard new ideas out of them when it comes to how we re going to spur on innovation in research and development they re not talking about that that s not what they are talking about when it comes to supposedly their signature issue if they want to do something about the big spending democrats we re going to do something about the deficit and you keep on asking them okay well what are you going to do well we re going to cut waste fraud and abuse okay what exactly waste fraud and abuse are you going to cut well we ll get to that later they re offering fear and they re offering amnesia they are counting on the notion that you won t remember what happened when they were in charge i think the american people do remember i think they understand exactly what happened when republicans were in charge and they ve also been watching over the last several months over the last two years my campaign you ll recall our slogan was yes we can their slogan is no we can t on every item on health care how many times nancy did we reach out to them and say you know what we are willing to work with you to come up with some sort of cooperative way to make sure that people aren t prohibited from getting health care because of preexisting conditions and to take seriously how we re going to cut costs in our health care system and strengthen medicare and make sure that people aren t having unnecessary tests when their results could just be emailed to doctors because of electronic medical records all kinds of ideas that we kept on offering up and no we can t on energy we re willing to compromise on a whole host of different issues but we ve got to have a strategy that starts reducing carbon because we want those clean energy jobs built here in the united states not in china not in germany what did they say no no we can t when the auto crisis struck and we said we can t afford to lose a million jobs in the midwest in the midst of this huge downturn and rather than just write checks to the auto companies which is what had been happening before our administration took over what we said was we re going to force the auto companies to restructure and hold them accountable and make sure management is producing the kinds of cars and trucks that speak to the future and not just the past and we raised fuel efficiency standards on cars and trucks for the first time in 30 years and we said to the republicans this represents something iconic about america the fact that we make things right here in the united states of america help us no we can t on issue after issue they ve just said no mitch mcconnell was quoted i think last week maybe it was this week he said if we could have obstructed even more we would have is that even possible how could you obstruct more and so that s what the choice in this election is going to be all about tax policy is going to be a major issue next year the democrats nancy chris we want to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that are creating jobs right here in the united states of america that s common sense and we ve got a track record right now we ve got a bill pending to provide tax breaks including the elimination of capital gains for small start up businesses we ve been debating this thing how long now six months a year and these guys still aren t going for it the chamber of commerce is for it you know now they usually don t side with me on a lot of things although they sided with me on the recovery act and they ve conveniently forgot about that so on issue after issue the choice is going to be are we moving forward or are we moving backwards now i think that the american people want to move forward i m positive of it and one of the things i ve been saying as i travel around the country is as tough as these times have been we ve been through tougher times our grandparents our great grandparents the parents before them they ve gone through revolutionary war civil wars slavery and segregation world war ii great depressions this country has been through some tough stuff there have been times where the naysayers and the cynics and the pessimists said our better days are behind us there have been times where the main currency of politics was making people afraid trying to divide them not offering up a way forward and a way to bring people together but rather trying to point out who is to blame we ve seen that before but time after time decade after decade somehow we ve always found it in ourselves to reach for what s best in us we ve always been able to set our sights on the future and as tough and sometimes depressing as our politics can get in opposition to this notion that we can t somebody said we can that s the choice in this election and if all of you who two years ago or four years ago or six years ago if all of you remember why we worked so hard and what s at stake and understand that our task is not yet done but also recognize the enormous progress that we ve made because of the leadership of these members of congress right here then we re going to do just fine and this country is going to be just fine while i was taking photos a woman came up to me she said thank you for health care because my child has type 1 diabetes couldn t get health insurance once he graduated and now i know that he s going to be covered today i was in an advanced battery plant outside of milwaukee where they are adding manufacturing jobs stamping green technology made in america across the country we re seeing states suddenly reforming their education systems to make sure that we re lifting up those who are underperforming because we know that we ve got to have the best possible workforce to compete in the 21st century we are making progress we are moving forward and so even as the other side wants to offer fear we re going to offer hope and i want to make sure everybody here understands don t bet against the american worker don t bet against american businesses don t bet against nancy pelosi we are going to move this country forward with your help we re going to move this country forward with your help but we are going to need your help we re going to need your phone calls we are going to need your knocking on doors we need your enthusiasm we need your spirit we need your confidence that we can continue to make this country even better than it already is all right and if everybody here is able to marshal that spirit once again i m absolutely positive we re not just going to do well in this election we re going to do right by the next generation thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama17 8 10b barack_obama thank you everybody thank you this is a pretty good view it s not bad i want to just say that rob and cori they have been such great friends for so long when we first met and they agreed to help on my senate campaign people could not pronounce my name they were calling me alabama and yo mama and yet they took a risk in supporting me and i m extraordinarily grateful i will also add they did not have this huge brood that they now have all these young ones running around and so thank you guys for all the support and congratulations on the beautiful family that you guys have to all of you who are here i see some old friends and some new friends people who were probably at that first fundraiser and people who have subsequently helped me in so many ways i am reminded of the story that president lincoln told apparently at a time when security around the white house wasn t quite as strict so a guy shows up at the door and he says i want to see the president i worked for him i am responsible for him being in the white house he was looking for a job of some sort and finally lincoln says all right let the guy in he comes in and he says mr president i am responsible for you being here is that right lincoln says he says well i forgive you i don t need to forgive you obviously it s an unbelievable privilege to be president in fact this is the time when you want to be president because we are at one of these inflection points in our history where after for decades putting off tough challenges for decades not addressing problems that were structural in our economy in how we are training our young people for the 21st century economy we now have the necessity to step up and do right not just for the next election but for the next generation we also have at a time when our leadership had been waning internationally we ve got an opportunity to step up and say that just as the 20th century was the american century the 21st century will be the american century but that our power is not just going to come from the might of our military it s also going to come from the strength of our values and our ability to project core beliefs about democracy and equality and freedom around the world and so we ve done a big job over the last 18 months and i have to tell you when i think about that month when we were first sworn in some of you may have been at the inauguration it was cold that day it was cold but there was an incredibly warm spirit and there was a sense of hopefulness but what we have to remind ourselves is that same month that i was sworn in we lost 800 000 jobs we had lost 3 million jobs in the previous six months and we would lose another several million jobs in the next three months before any of our economic policies had a chance to actually take root so altogether we lost 8 million jobs the financial system was on the verge of meltdown and most economists thought that there were decent odds we might tip into the next great depression because of the swift action that we took we were able to stabilize the economy and stabilize the financial system but that was not just because we drafted a whole bunch of clever plans on paper we had to move all that stuff through congress and that brings me to your senior senator patty murray if i did not have a partner like patty we would not have been able to invest in clean energy like never before in our history if i didn t have patty murray we would not have been able to get small business loans out at a time when most banks had completely contracted and a lot of folks were on the verge of going under if it hadn t been for patty states like washington would have had to lay off tens of thousands of teachers and firefighters and police officers because of patty we were able to get help that states and local governments needed so when i think about patty i think about one of the generals who helped to stave off what could have been a much worse crisis than we had and partly because i served with her i know how effective she is not just in coming home and listening to people but how effective she is in fighting for them when she gets back into washington i m also always sympathetic to patty because she was always trying to catch the plane back home and when the votes went late she d be looking at her watch and thinking well that one just left and there s one more and i ve got 10 minutes and jim demint is talking and i know it s tough but here s the thing though our job was not just to rescue the economy our job as i said was to deal with a decade of putting off tough decisions i m not just interested in saving the economy in the short term i m interested in rebuilding the economy for the long term for the next generation for rob and cori s kids and for my kids and for your kids and for your grandkids and that means taking on some tough stuff and stuff that s not always popular if we did not deal with our health care system now we were looking at the possibility that health care alone medicare and medicaid would consume all of our discretionary spending at the federal level all of it because of the direction that health care cost was going if we didn t tackle the education system now then not only have we slipped already from first to 12th in college graduation rates we might have slipped even further if we did not tackle energy now then we don t know what this view will look like 50 years from now or 70 years from now or maybe even 20 years from now because of the impact it has on the environment but we also don t know what kind of impact the next crisis in terms of oil supplies might have on our economy or our national security so we had to take on these tough problems now and they weren t always popular they didn t always poll well and people in washington would always get surprised they d say well why is the president doing this it doesn t poll well and i would have to explain to people you know i actually have pollsters so i know when things aren t popular i know when they don t poll well but i was not sent to washington just to do what was popular i was sent to do what was right that s why so many of you supported me in the election and i know patty feels the same way so as a consequence if you take a look at what we ve accomplished over the last 18 months in addition to staving off a great depression we can just tick it off we finally have enshrined the basic core principle that everybody in america should have decent affordable health care that people should not be bankrupt just because they get sick and that we should be able to get good bang for our health care dollars and thereby slow the costs and the burdens on families and on businesses we revamped our student loan system so that instead of sending tens of billions of dollars to the banks as middlemen for guaranteed loans where they were taking no risk we were able to cut out the middleman and now millions more young people here in washington state and all across the country are going to be able to get assistance to go to college which means they re going to be able to go to work for microsoft or all these other wonderful companies that are up here and we ll be able to maintain our cutting edge which reminds me we also made the largest investment in research and development in our history because the essence of america is innovation and entrepreneurship and technological leadership we decided that it was time for us to make sure that even as we re sending young men and women to fight in iraq and afghanistan that we ve got to make sure that we re doing right by our veterans and nobody has been a fiercer advocate on behalf of veterans than patty murray and with her help we saw the largest increase in funding for veterans in at least 30 years and we helped to pass a post 9 11 gi bill my grandfather who actually lived here in puget sound when my mom was going to mercer island high school well he was a beneficiary of the original gi bill and it was because of that gi bill that we built an entire middle class educating folks investing in people well with patty s help we re doing the same thing with this next generation of veterans who are coming back home and they re going to have opportunity on issue after issue from making sure that tobacco companies can t market to kids to making sure that credit card companies can t arbitrarily raise your rates or impose hidden fees to making sure that we re expanding national service for our young people to making sure that housing programs and mortgages aren t taking advantage of people to making sure that women are paid equally for doing the same work as men to getting a couple of pretty smart women on the supreme court on issue after issue we ve been able to make progress and you know what what s remarkable is we ve done it without a single bit of help from the other side you remember i campaigned on yes we can their philosophy has been we can t they said no to clean energy investment they said no to health care they want to go in fact they want to repeal it so that we can have a situation where people with preexisting conditions can t get health insurance they said no to wall street reform now think about this we had a complete utter meltdown of our financial system and you would think that they would say well maybe we should at least cooperate on this one they said no didn t get any help on issue after issue their only response has been let s go back to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place it s not like they after presiding over eight years of failed economic policies they said you know what we better reflect a little bit and see what we re doing wrong here and they went off into the wilderness and meditated and then they finally came back and said well we realize the error of our ways but now we ve got a whole new set of proposals to try that s not what they re doing they re coming back and basically peddling the same old snake oil they were peddling before they want to give tax breaks to folks who don t need them and weren t even asking for them they want to keep on giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas they want to deregulate so that oil companies for example could drill with minimum oversight and they re basically saying to most middle class families you re on your own and the excuse they give for these policies is well we can t afford any of these initiatives and yet this is the same group of folks who took a record surplus from bill clinton and turned it into record deficits so that i had a 1 3 trillion deficit wrapped in a big bow when i arrived in the white house so i was just talking to a group over at the westin and i used the analogy imagine that our economy is a car these guys drove it into a ditch and so patty and i have been down there in the ditch we ve been pushing and shoving we ve put our boots on and we re trying to get that car out of the ditch and these republicans have been standing watching drinking a slurpee and giving us advice you re not pushing hard enough push this way and we finally get that car on level ground and we re about to move forward and they say we want the keys back and we say no you can t have the keys back you can t drive now is not the time to reverse course and go back to the things that got us into this mess in the first place we ve got to move forward and that s why your support is so important now we ve still got a lot of work to do the economy is stabilized but it s stabilized at a very weak level so patty and i just had some lunch with some wonderful small businesspeople who were talking about how it s still difficult for small businesses to access credit which is why we ve got initiatives in the senate right now to make sure that small community banks are able to provide lending to small businesses we want to cut taxes smartly so for example eliminating capital gains taxes on investments in start up businesses we want to make sure that we are still pursuing a vision for clean energy because i believe that whoever wins that race for clean energy in the 21st century they are going to own the 21st century economy and so i want solar panels and wind turbines and biodiesel and hydroelectric power i want that here in the united states of america and i want a smart grid that can transmit it all across the country and i want the cars of the future built here in the united states which is why we made an investment in detroit a lot of people thought that was a bad idea but we said look instead of giving bailouts year after year without asking anything in return which is what the previous administration had been doing we said here s some help but you re going to have to restructure so you can compete and we were able to mobilize the car companies auto workers all the stakeholders involved to actually negotiate the first increase in fuel efficiency standards in 30 years on both cars and trucks and now we ve got every u s automaker posting a profit the best job growth in that industry in a decade and they re building the cars of tomorrow cars that people will want to drive that get 40 miles a gallon or 50 miles a gallon or ultimately don t take any gallons in order to move so those are the kinds of things that we re going to have to work on we ve still got infrastructure that we ve got to build we re falling behind other countries not just in roads and bridges and ports and airports all of which of important but in broadband access and coverage or in high speed rail and in order for me to succeed over the next couple of years i m going to need patty murray and there are a whole bunch of folks in congress who are in tough races this year who stood up and did the right thing without a lot of fanfare knowing that they were going to be making themselves politically vulnerable but they remembered why they went to washington they remembered they didn t go to washington to have a fancy office or to have a fancy title they didn t go to washington to take polls and put their finger out to the wind and figure out what s going to be the right thing to do at this particular moment because the cable chatter is moving in this direction or that direction they went to washington because they believed that what makes this country special is our ability to provide every single person an opportunity to pursue their dreams if they re willing to work hard enough and apply themselves if they ve got a big enough imagination and some pluck and some drive whether it s starting a high tech company or being a rock and roll star that what makes this place special is that you can go as far as your dreams carry you and we ve got to make sure that america is there not just for this generation but for the next generation and the generation after that and that means we ve got to think not about the next election but about the next generation that s what patty murray does that s what a whole bunch of folks who have helped us over the last 18 months do and that s why i m so pleased that you are here to support them if you stay with us if you re willing to see this thing through i m confident that we re going to be able to look back despite all the ups and all the downs we re going to be able to look back and say that what we did mattered that this was a moment that counted and that you were standing there to be counted at that critical moment in this country s history thanks so much everybody god bless you thank you dem bobama17 8 10c barack_obama hello milwaukee thank you thank you so much thank you very much everybody everybody please have a seat have a seat it is good to be back in milwaukee good to be back in the midwest good to be out of washington once in a while good to be in the great state of wisconsin and looking out at this crowd i know that so many of you did so much on behalf of my campaign you were with us when we were up you were with us when we were down so if it weren t for so many of you i would not be standing here as president today and i am grateful to all of you so thank you very much we ve got a few special guests that i want to acknowledge your outstanding governor and wonderful first lady jim and jessica doyle are in the house one of the finest senators we have and a pretty good owner although he talks a lot of smack about the bucks versus the bulls we re going to see this year senator herb kohl and a wonderful member of congress congresswoman gwen moore is here now as your president it is my honor to stand here where i understand al mcguire won the championship with marquette a while back see just the smattering of applause shows that i m getting older because i vividly remember that championship and about half of you don t but it s also a great honor to be here with wisconsin s next governor milwaukee s own tom barrett tom is the kind of leader this state needs right now he s the kind of leader this country needs right now this is a man of character he hasn t forgotten where he came from grew up right here in wisconsin started off after college working on the assembly line at harley davidson and ever since then he has been fighting to bring jobs and opportunity and hope to the people of this state and as this city s mayor he s had success he helped turn around the industrial wasteland into a thriving commercial center that supports nearly 3 000 jobs he helped start a regional economic development group that helped bring another 2 000 jobs to wisconsin in the past 10 months a time when those jobs were desperately needed no other candidate has this kind of record on jobs no other candidate has put forth the kind of detailed plan that tom had has been able to put forward to make sure that this state s economy is moving forward under his watch this city has held the line on property taxes it s expanded opportunity it s put more cops on the street and reduced crime as a result but the most impressive thing about tom goes beyond his accomplishments as an elected official it goes to who he is as a human being it goes to his character you know i ve heard stories about mayors who personally respond to calls about potholes and parking tickets and snowed in driveways but i never heard about a mayor who risked his life to respond to an actual cry for help that is some serious customer service from this mayor right here tom gets embarrassed when folks bring this up but what he did for a local woman and her baby granddaughter when they were threatened by domestic violence that s the kind of act you don t hear about every day he stepped in he tried to help sustained serious injuries as a result that s what counts in a leader when the cameras aren t rolling when nobody is watching that s the mark of real character that means this is a person who is going to fight for you each and every day and that s why i know tom barrett is going to win this race and lead wisconsin to a better day that s the kind of leader we need it s the kind of leader we need for an incredibly challenging time for america eighteen months ago i took office after nearly a decade of economic policies that gave us sluggish job growth and falling incomes and falling wages and a record deficit policies that culminated in the worst recession in our lifetimes in the last six months of 2008 3 million american jobs were lost 3 million the month i swore i was sworn in we lost nearly 800 000 jobs that month january 2009 600 000 the next month 600 000 the month after that and behind each of these stories is a story of heartache and frustration a factory worker who was just a few years shy of retiring suddenly loses his job at the local plant or a single mom who keeps sending out job applications everywhere she can and still waiting for the phone to ring day after day after day a college graduate who thought her degree would land her a good job with a decent paycheck instead just has a mountain of debt or somebody who was bound for college suddenly found out that they couldn t afford it had to defer their dreams i hear these stories every day every night i read letters from folks around the country good decent people who are having a tough time middle class families who never thought they would see the kind of hardship that they re seeing right now and those struggles and hopes are why i ran for office in the first place that s why so many of you supported me and that s why i intend to keep fighting as hard as i can for as long as it takes until we turn this economy around that is why i m here that is our goal that s why tom barrett is running for governor to get this economy moving so every single person in wisconsin who wants to work can find a job that s what we re fighting for we re not there yet we know that it s going to take a few years to repair the damage that was caused by this recession but i am confident as confident as i ve been about anything that we are headed in the right direction this nation is moving in the right direction we are moving forward and the most important thing we can do right now is to keep moving forward we need to keep our economy growing we need to keep adding private sector jobs we need to keep making progress on all these fronts and we ve got to do it faster what we don t need the worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place that s the worst thing we could do and in november you re going to have that choice the american people are going to walk into that voting booth and the question is going to be are we going to move forward or are we going to move backwards we didn t get to this point by accident we got here after nearly 10 years of an economic agenda in washington that was pretty easy to sum up you cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires you cut rules for special interests you cut working folks loose to fend for themselves if you re out of a job tough luck you re on your own don t have enough money for college tough luck you re on your own you don t have health insurance too bad you re on your own that was the philosophy of the last decade you are on your own and now that we ve actually begun to make progress what we re seeing from the other side is just offering more of the same i mean think about it this is not a situation where the republicans after having presided over these disastrous policies said you know what we should go reflect for a while we should go off in the desert and kind of think through boy we really messed up maybe we should come up with some new ideas to see if we can plot a new direction for the party that s not what they re offering they are offering the exact same policies that you rejected in 2006 that you rejected in 2008 because you knew they weren t working think about it i mean they ve said as much people have asked them well what are you going to do different this time nothing we want to go back to what we were doing if you re a wall street banker or an insurance company or an oil company like bp you get to play by your own rules if you have special interests in washington that don t like oversight we re going to give you some breaks maybe we ll give you some more tax cuts all at the expense of middle class families and at the expense of the country as a whole that s why we ve got a record deficit and the weakest economy since the great depression and i bring this up not because i want to re litigate the past i just don t want us to relive the past i don t want us to relive the past and what the other side is basically counting on right now is amnesia that s basically what they re counting on it s as if they drove a car into the ditch and then we had to put on our boots and go down there in the mud and we ve been pushing and shoving and they ve been standing aside and watching us and saying you re not pushing right you re not pushing fast enough you know they re drinking on a slurpee or something and no no so we re huffing and puffing and we finally get this car out of the ditch finally have it on level ground we re moving forward and they turn to us and say we want the keys well you can t have the keys back you don t know how to drive you got us into the ditch you can get in the backseat if you want if you want to make your car go forward what do you do you do it in d if you want it going backwards what do you do you put it in r that s not an accident they can t have the keys back we don t mind them hitching a ride but we re not going to keep on doing the same things that got us into this mess that s the choice in this election do we go back to the policies of the past or do we keep moving forward the policies that are getting us out of this mess and the america we believe in it always moves forward the america we believe in is a country that rewards hard work instead of greed an america that rewards responsibility instead of recklessness we did not become the most prosperous nation on earth by letting special interests run wild we did it by investing in people who ve always built this country from the ground up workers and middle class families and small business owners and responsible entrepreneurs we did it by out working and out educating and out competing the rest of the world that s what we did and that s what we need to do again other countries out there they re competing they re fighting for the jobs of the future china india germany south korea and let me tell you milwaukee the united states of america does not play for second place we play for first place we are going to rebuild this economy and we re going to rebuild it better and stronger than it was before and at that heart of that strategy will be three powerful words made in america we are going to make things right here in the united states of america and sell them all around the world our choice in this election is between policies that encourage job creation in america and policies that encourage job creation someplace else so instead of giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas we want to cut taxes for small business owners who create jobs right here in the united states of america we want to jumpstart a homegrown clean energy industry i don t want to see new solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars manufactured someplace else i want to see them stamped with made in america by american workers we re investing in a 21st century infrastructure not just new roads and bridges but faster internet access and high speed railroads projects that can lead to hundreds of thousands of new private sector jobs and these ideas shouldn t be democratic or republican ideas they are common sense ideas and yet most of the republicans in congress voted no on just about every one of these policies do you remember when i was running we had a little slogan yes we can these guys slogan is no we can t no on closing loopholes for companies that ship jobs overseas no on the tax cuts for small businesses no on the clean energy jobs no on the railroad and highway projects just this weekend the republican leader in the senate said this is a quote from the republican leader in the senate i wish we had been able to obstruct more obstruct more is that even possible so apparently that s their plan for the future no we can t clean energy no we can t health care no we can t wall street reform no we can t think about this we had the worst financial crisis since the great depression almost resulted in a complete meltdown 8 million jobs lost and when we try to repair the system to maintain innovation in the financial system but to make sure that people have some idea what kind of mortgage they re buying or what kind of credit card interest is being charged or making sure that if one bank goes down taxpayers don t have to bail it out in order to ensure that the whole system goes down they said no that kind of politicking they might think serves them for the next election but that s not why tom is running that s not why i m president that s not why you re here we re not here for the next election we are here for the next generation that is our priority to think about the future and that s the difference in this election that s the choice in this election on issue after issue the republicans in congress have sided with corporate special interests over middle class families a few weeks ago the republican leader of the house was asked what his jobs plan was if he took control of congress next year you know what he said my number one priority is repealing health care reform that s his jobs plan not his health care plan his jobs plan now this is reform that finally prevents insurers from denying or dropping coverage because of an illness reform that cuts taxes for small business owners who cover their employees so they re now getting a 35 percent of the premiums they re paying for their employees they re now getting a tax break for it allows young adults to stay on their parents coverage until they re 26 it lowers the price of prescription drugs for our seniors it s going to lower the cost of health care for every american the actuaries just reported two weeks ago that this is going to extend the life of medicare making it more secure for the next generation now i m not sure how reform will create jobs except for insurance executives who deny your claims but i do know this i got a letter a few weeks ago from a man in new hampshire in march his wife was diagnosed with a serious form of cancer they had no health insurance because her cancer was classified as a preexisting condition denied coverage by every insurance company they tried they couldn t afford coverage on the individual market but she desperately needed treatment they had no idea what to do and because reform finally passed she now has health insurance because reform passed she is now getting treatment for the first time in history a preexisting illness will not prevent you from getting covered that s the law you want to repeal they re siding with the insurance companies who want to go back to the days when they could drop that woman from coverage or deny that woman coverage but we can t afford to go backward we need to move this country forward same thing with the financial system we can t go back to a status quo that almost brought this country to its knees we ve got to move forward so that in fact you now know what credit card companies are charging you for interest and mortgage companies can t steer you to the more expensive interest rate on your mortgage and there will not be taxpayer bailouts they say they want to repeal this that can t be a strategy for the future that s not what we re fighting for that will not help middle class families across america that s not going to help put people back to work that should be something that we should get the parties to agree to the same thing is true on clean energy and the same thing is true on equal pay for equal work and the same thing is true for not having tobacco companies market to children these are common sense ideas democrats and republicans across the country should be able to support it but we ve got folks in washington who are more concerned with the next election than they are with the next generation so i know that tom is going to have a tough race everybody is going to have a tough race across this country because we re going through tough times but i just want everybody here when you re talking to your friends your neighbors your coworkers constantly ask the question who do you think is fighting for you who is on your side when we had this disaster in the gulf thankfully now we ve capped the well but a lot of people have been harmed i just came back from there you got folks who may have lost 50 percent of their revenues if they re a small business fishermen who put everything they had into the fishing season and suddenly they were without any customers and we saw that happening and we said you know what we re going to talk to bp and we are going to make sure the bp meets their obligations and their claims and we structured a 20 billion fund so that we could assure that all those fishermen and small business people and people who had lost their jobs that they would be taken care of and the leading republican on the energy committee who would be in charge of energy if the republicans took congress he apologized to bp apologized to bp he said you know what this 20 billion fund is a shakedown i think he called it a chicago style shakedown this is somebody who could be running our energy policy if the other party takes over he wasn t apologizing to all those folks who had been affected because bp had caused this accident he was apologizing to them that can t be the kind of leadership that we need going into the 21st century we can t go backwards we have to move forward that s what s at stake in this election if we give them the keys to this economy they are going to drive it right back into the ditch and riding shotgun will be the big banks and the insurance companies and the oil companies and every special interest under the sun and i want to be very clear here i want businesses in this country to succeed and the vast majority of folks out here who are running a business they are doing what s right by their communities and their workers and i want to do everything we can to help you grow and to prosper and hire more employees we just came back from a company that s building advanced batteries right here in this region hiring more employees and we are giving them all the help we can but i don t think it s anti business to say we should make sure an oil rig is safe before we start drilling i don t think it s anti business to say that wall street banks should play the same play by the same rules as everybody else i don t think it s anti business to say that insurance companies shouldn t prevent that woman in new hampshire from getting the care she needs because she s got cancer we can t go back to an attitude that says what s good for me is good enough we ve got to start asking what s good for america what s best for all of our businesses what s best for all of our people that s what we do in this country we move forward as one people and as one nation not just a few of us but all of us a few weeks ago i had the opportunity to visit a chrysler plant in detroit now this is a place that s been hit harder by recession than almost anywhere else in the country the auto industry alone lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the year before i took office obviously some of those jobs were lost here in wisconsin we had to make a very difficult decision when i was president about whether to walk away from u s automakers or help them get back on their feet and we decided we could not walk away from up to a million jobs and an iconic industry that symbolizes the rise of american manufacturing and so we told the automakers we ll give you some temporary assistance but you ve got to restructure your plants so they can finally compete in the 21st century now most of the no we can t crowd in washington didn t agree with that decision and let s face it it wasn t that popular in the polls but today all three american automakers are operating a profit for the first time in over five years they ve had the strongest job growth in more than 10 years all across the midwest folks are heading back to factories and building better cars more energy efficient cars and at the plant i visited 14 of these workers at this chrysler plant had just won the lottery now you d think that most of them would just kick back and retire after that they could have cashed out they could have walked away it turns out most of them they re going to work every day the man who bought the winning ticket is a guy named william shanteau he decided to take the money and buy his wife one of the jeep grand cherokees that he had helped to build and then he went out and bought a bunch of american flags for his hometown because he loves his country and he keeps on showing up to work every day because he loves the company he works for and he loves his coworkers and i when i heard that story i just wanted to say to all the naysayers in washington don t bet against the american worker don t lose faith in the american people because the american people never lose faith in america we do not give up we do not quite we do not fear the future we shape the future that s part of what this election is about the other side wants you to be afraid of the future but in times of trial and hardship we don t give into fear we don t give into division we move forward we recapture the ingenuity and optimism of the most dynamic country on earth that s how we made the 20th century the american century that s how we re going to make the 21st century the american century and as long as i have the privilege of being your president i m going to keep fighting alongside you to reach that better day and if you give tom barrett a chance he s going to make you proud as governor fighting for you to reach that better day but we re going to need you out there each and every day don t give in to fear let s reach for hope don t believe no we can t i believe yes we can thank you milwaukee god bless you dem bobama17 8 10d barack_obama thank you it is good to be in washington it is good to be in washington it is good to be in seattle seattle just looks terrific i just want to go take a stroll but secret service said no i am just thrilled to be here i want to acknowledge some of the folks who are here who are so important to the life of this state but also to what s taking place throughout the country first of all your wonderful governor chris gregoire please give her a big round of applause your outstanding congressional delegation jim mcdermott is in the house norm dicks is here jay inslee is here rick larsen is here brian baird is here to the mayor of seattle mike mcginn thank you so much the king county executive dow constantine is here and to somebody who i just adore who i just think is terrific your senior senator from the great state of washington patty murray as i look out on the crowd i see a lot of people who helped so much during the course of the campaign you were with us when we were up and you were with us when we were down but you always were there understanding that we were at a critical point in our history and we needed to make some fundamental changes in order to deliver that promise to the next generation and so to everybody here who supported me during my campaign and helped me become the president thank you so much for your outstanding efforts i am here to say thank you not only for my own election but for having the wisdom to send patty murray to washington and when this state sent patty to the senate she wasn t one of these lifelong politicians who wanted the job or the position for a fancy title or a nice office she was a self described mom in tennis shoes who was just looking to help a few people solve a few problems and all these years later patty is that same person except she s helped a whole lot of people solve a whole lot of big problems when i was in the senate i sat next to patty on the veterans affairs committee and i can tell you there is no fiercer advocate for our veterans than patty murray nobody whether it was keeping three va hospitals open here in washington or helping a world war ii veteran break through the bureaucracy so he could receive his purple heart no problem is too big no problem is too small for patty to fight for you and the same is true when it comes to fighting for jobs and opportunity for the people of this state you ve seen her go to bat to keep boeing jobs and aerospace jobs right here in washington you ve seen her fight for clean energy jobs and new infrastructure jobs right here in washington she s a senator who still flies across the country every weekend to come home to listen to listen to you the cares and concerns of her constituents so this is this is the kind of person you want representing you especially in a time like this this is the kind of leader you need the country needs patty so i want everybody to understand i m asking you to cast a primary vote today i know she is unopposed but it doesn t hurt to practice and then we need a whole bunch of votes in november because we have to have a leader like patty continuing to do battle on behalf of middle class families working families all across this country she is rooted here in washington but her concerns her vision her passion for people that s important for the country as a whole and i am proud to call her a friend and i can tell you we would not have been able to get some of the critical things we got done this year had it not been for her leadership so make sure you send her back to washington please now look this is obviously an incredibly challenging time for america eighteen months ago i took office after nearly a decade of economic policies that had given us sluggish growth sluggish job growth falling incomes falling wages and a record deficit and all those policies culminated in the worst recession in our lifetimes and i think it s fair to say the worst crisis that we ve had economically since the great depression in the last six months of 2008 while i was still campaigning for the presidency 3 million american jobs were lost the month i was sworn in 800 000 jobs were lost subsequent months 600 000 600 000 eight million jobs were lost all told and behind each of these numbers is a story of heartache and a story of frustration the factory worker who gets laid off just a couple of years before retirement the single mom who has sent out job application after job application and doesn t hear the phone ring day after day a college graduate who thought that a degree would land her a good job with a decent paycheck and instead has just gotten her a mountain of debt or somebody who aspires to college and then discovered that they just wouldn t be able to afford it because their family has fallen on tough times i hear these stories every day i read them in letters each night the struggles and the hopes of the american people are why i ran for this office in the first place it s the reason that patty ran for the senate in the first place and that s why we intend to keep fighting as hard as we can for as long as it takes to turn this economy around that s why i m here that s why patty is here and we are going to succeed now we re not there yet we ve got a lot more work to do we know that the truth is it s going to take a few years to fully dig ourselves out of this recession it s going to take time to bring back 8 million jobs anybody who tells you otherwise is just looking for your vote but here s what i can tell you after 18 months i have never been more confident that our nation is headed in the right direction we are doing what is needed to move forward and we re doing what s necessary not just to rebuild the economy for the short term we want to rebuild it for the long term for our children for our grandchildren we did not become the most prosperous nation on earth by rewarding greed and recklessness of the sort that helped cause this financial crisis we didn t come this far by just allowing a handful of banks and insurance companies and special interests to run wild we did it by rewarding the values of hard work and responsibility we did it by investing in the people who have built this country from the ground up workers and families and small business owners and responsible entrepreneurs we did it because we out worked and we out educated and out competed other nations that s who we are that s who we need to be because right now countries like china and india and south korea and germany they are fighting as hard as they can for the jobs of the future they re trying to out compete us when it comes to clean energy they re trying to out compete us when it comes to producing engineers and scientists and frankly in some cases they ve been catching up and even propelling forward ahead of us and i said this at the state of the union a while back and i will repeat it the united states does not play for second place we play for first we are going to rebuild this economy stronger than it was before and at the heart of this rebuilding effort are three simple words made in america made in america instead of giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas we want to cut taxes for companies that create jobs right here in the united states of america we want to give tax cuts to small business owners we want to give tax breaks to clean energy companies we also want to make sure that we keep taxes low for middle class families and that s why we cut taxes for 95 percent of workers right at the beginning of my term because they had been going through a tough time and they needed to have a chance to deal with this economic crisis instead of prolonging an addiction to oil that endangers everything from our security to our coastlines we are jumpstarting a homegrown energy industry in this country i don t want to see solar panels and wind turbines and advanced batteries and electric cars manufactured in europe or asia i want to see them made right here in the united states of america by american workers we need 21st century infrastructure not just roads and bridges but faster internet access and high speed rail projects that can lead to hundreds of thousands of new private sector jobs and we re helping the u s auto industry get back on its feet and retool for the 21st century this was an industry that lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the year before i took office and were getting bailouts but never asked to restructure to figure out how they could compete so we had to make some tough decisions about whether to help them out or walk away from possibly a million jobs and i decided we couldn t walk away and by the way this was not very popular it s interesting in washington people keep asking me gosh why are you doing these things that don t poll well and i have to keep on explaining i have pollsters i know when things don t poll well but i wasn t sent to washington you did not send me to the oval office to just do what was popular you sent me there to do what was right that s why you sent me that s why you sent me to washington to stand up for things that were right so it turns out lo and behold all three u s automakers are now operating at a profit for the first time in years they ve got the strongest job growth in more than a decade and when i visited i went to a chrysler plant in detroit this had been shut it was on the verge of being shut down and i had a chance to meet 14 workers who had just won the lottery now you would think they might want to retire but most of them had stayed on because they love their job and they re proud of what they do in fact one guy had used some of his winnings to buy a car a jeep grand cherokee from the plant where he worked he had helped build that car he bought it for his wife then bought a whole bunch of american flags for his hometown because he loves his country he loves his company and he loves his co workers and it captured the essence of who we are coming out of tough times do not bet against the american worker do not bet against american businesses don t bet against american ingenuity that s the message that he was sending and that s the message i want to send to you we can compete but we re going to have to take some steps to deal with longstanding problems not ignore them not pretend that they don t exist to confront them we ve got to make sure that our workers can compete on with any other workers on earth and that s why we re also reforming our education system based on what works for our children not on what works for the status quo we ve eliminated billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to the big banks that provide college loans so that all those billions of dollars can go to make a college education more affordable for millions of students patty was one of the people who took the lead in that critical change to lower costs for families and for businesses we passed health insurance reform that will finally make coverage affordable and stop insurance companies from jacking up your premiums or refusing to cover you just because you re sick you just saw marcelas owens come up here what a wonderful young man with a powerful story and when he was standing next to me as we were signing that piece of legislation i thought about his mom and i thought about my mom a single mom who didn t always have the kind of job that provide health insurance to ensure that a financial crisis like the one we just had doesn t happen again we passed wall street reform that demands new accountability and tough oversight reform that will stop credit card companies from charging you hidden fees and unfair rate hikes and that ends the era of wall street bailouts once and for all patty was in the lead on all these measures and all these reforms make america more competitive in the 21st century they move us forward and on each of these reforms we reached out to democrats and republicans for ideas and support but in just about every instance i m sure there s an exception that s escaping my mind in almost every instance republicans in congress said no no on help for small businesses no on middle class tax cuts no on clean energy jobs no on making college more affordable no on wall street reform you remember our slogan during the campaign yes we can their slogan is no we can t no we can t that s really inspiring this vision they have for the future gives you a little pep in your step when you hear it don t you no we can t let s unpack why they re doing this i mean part of it is they refuse to give up on the economic philosophy that they ve been peddling for much of the last decade and their agenda was pretty straightforward you remember it you voted against it that s why i m president their basic philosophy goes something like this we re going to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires folks who don t need it weren t even asking for it and we re going to cut rules for special interests gut regulations that protect clean air and clean water and things that most of us value and then you re going to cut working folks loose to fend for themselves so if you can t find a job or you can t afford college or don t have health insurance tough luck you are on your own now if you re a wall street bank or an insurance company or an oil company like bp come on in help us write the regulations now i think you may have noticed that their philosophy didn t work out too well it s not like we didn t test it right no we the american people tried it out they said all right we ll go with that for eight years and it didn t work it gave us record deficits and ultimately led to the worst economic crisis since the great depression remember that it gave us record deficits remember when they came in with this theory we had record surpluses you remember that right yes and at the end wrapped up in a big bow for me when i arrived was a 1 3 trillion deficit so when these guys are going out talking about spending and deficits and debt i m thinking well what are you talking about now i bring all this stuff up not because i want to re litigate the past i just don t want to relive the past i don t want to go through that again i mean it would be one thing if the republicans had gone through a period of soul searching right if they had said boy we really messed up and had kind of gone off into the wilderness and thought long and hard about their economic approach and then came back and said you know what we didn t know what we were doing but now we ve got some new ideas we ve got some new policies we ve learned from our mistakes we re going to do something different this time that would be a plausible argument but that s not what they re doing one of their leaders in congress was asked what his party would do if they took over congress he actually said they d pursue the exact same agenda as before i took office that s a quote the exact same agenda that didn t work so basically what this campaign is coming down to is that between now and november they re betting that you will all come down with a case of amnesia they re basically they re counting on the fact that you don t remember that you re going to forget what happened when they were in charge for the last for eight years they spent almost a decade driving the economy into a ditch i mean think about it if this if the economy was a car and they drove it into the ditch and so me and patty and a bunch of others we go down there and we put on our boots and we re pushing and shoving and it s muddy and there are bugs and we re sweating and shoving pushing hard and they re all standing there sipping slurpees and watching and you re not pushing hard enough that s not the right way to push so finally finally patty and i and everybody we finally get the car up on level ground we re about to go forward and these guys come and tap us on the shoulder and they say we want the keys back you can t have the keys back you don t know how to drive you don t know how to drive you can t have them back can t have them back you can t have them back we are trying to go forward we do not want to go backwards into the ditch again you notice when you want to move forward in your car what do you do you put your car in d when you want to go backwards you put it in r back into the ditch keep that in mind in november that s not a coincidence so that s the choice in this election do we go back to the policies that got us into this mess or do we keep moving forward i believe we move forward america always moves forward do you want to know what will happen if the other party takes control of congress in november all you have to do is look what they ve done over the last 18 months i mean they one thing i will give them credit for they have not been bashful right on issue after issue they have sided with special interests over middle class families name me an issue they voted to keep giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas they voted to give insurance companies the power to keep denying coverage to people who are sick the top republican on the energy committee actually apologized to bp for us making sure the 20 billion was secured to help fishermen and small businesspeople in the gulf whose livelihoods were almost decimated this guy called it a shakedown i think he said chicago shakedown just to kind of underscore it apologized to bp they voted en masse against wall street reform and now patty murray s opponent has earned the distinction of being the first candidate in the country to call for repeal of wall street reform think about this he wants to go back to the old rules and the lack of oversight that caused the worst crisis since the great depression that is don t you think that s strange i mean i could see him saying well here are certain provisions i might modify but to just say we didn t need it when we almost had a complete financial meltdown he s counting on amnesia so this is what s at stake in this election if we give them the keys back they will drive us right back into the ditch and riding shotgun will be every other special interest group under the sun and i want to be clear because i just patty and i just had a wonderful meeting with three small business people local folks right here over at grand central bakery it was very good they had this turkey sandwich very tasty so i want businesses in this country to succeed if you are a responsible business owner i will do everything i can to help you grow and prosper and hire more employees and patty doing the same thing helping to open up credit help to keep your taxes low but i don t it s not anti business to say that we should make sure an oil rig is safe before we start drilling it s not anti business to say that wall street banks should play by the same rules as everybody else it s not anti business to say insurance companies shouldn t be able to deny care to people just because they get sick we can t go back to an attitude of what s good enough for me is just good enough we ve got to be asking what s good for america what s good for the people of washington what s good for marcelas what s good for the next generation what s good for america that s what we do in this country that s how we ve always moved forward as one people and as one nation so washington i want everybody to know look i know times are tough and when times are tough it can be easy to give in to cynicism and to fear to set our sights lower to settle for the status quo to try to make us afraid of each other drive wedges that s we ve all seen that movie before and that s what the other side is counting on in this election they re not offering new plans they re not offering new ideas they re offering cynicism and they re offering fear that s not who we are that s not the country i know we are americans we don t give in to fear we do not give up we do not quit we don t shy away from the future we don t look backwards we shape the future we seize our own destiny so i need you to join me and i need you to join patty in building a future where our small businesses flourish on the power of their ideas and ingenuity a future where clean energy powers not just america but powers the world produced in the fields and factories of the united states a future where our children get the education and training they need to compete with anyone and anywhere i want to build a future where we recapture a sense of optimism and confidence hope that s made america a beacon to the world that s how we built the last american century that is how we are going to build the next american century the american people don t believe in no we can t in times of great challenge we push forward with the unyielding faith that we can thank you everybody god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama17 9 09a barack_obama hello maryland thank you thank you college park thank you so much it is good to be back at the university of maryland i want to start by wishing the fridge and the terps good luck on the game this weekend maybe i ll even rub testudo s nose before i leave we ve got a number of extraordinary elected officials who are here i just want to introduce them real quick your governor martin o malley is in the house the two outstanding senators from maryland barbara mikulski and ben cardin are in the house one of the finest leaders that we have in congress steny hoyer is in the house lt governor anthony brown is here prince george s county executive jack johnson is here mayor stephen brayman is here state senate majority leader tom miller is in the house congresswoman donna edwards is here congressman elijah cummings congressman chris van hollen congressman sarbanes is here congressman dutch ruppersberger is here and to your president dan mote president of the university of maryland thank you so much you know who you know the last time i was here it was in the heat of a very long and very tough campaign and in that campaign i promised to be a president who you guys can sit down by the way in that campaign i promised to be a president who didn t just clean up yesterday s crises i didn t want to be a president who was just content with standing still i promised to be a president who would build a better future who would move this nation forward who would ensure that this generation your generation had the same chances and the same opportunities that our parents gave us that s what i m here to do that s why i ran for president of the united states of america i ran for president because of people like rachel did she not do an outstanding job in the introduction part of that promise is an economy that leads the world in science and technology and innovation part of that promise is a clean energy revolution that protects our planet protects our security creates jobs of the future right here in the united states of america part of it is giving every citizen the skills and the education they need to compete with any worker in the world just like you re getting right here at the university of maryland and today we are on the cusp of taking another big step forward towards fulfilling that promise a few miles from here the house of representatives will soon be voting on a plan that would finally make the student loan process simpler and more affordable for millions of young americans this plan would end the billions upon billions of dollars in unwarranted subsidies that we hand out to banks and financial institutions money that doesn t do anything to make your loans any cheaper instead we re going to use that money to guarantee access to low cost loans no matter what the economy looks like we ll use it to strengthen pell grants and perkins loans to make college more affordable we ll shore up our system of community colleges and we will simplify the complicated convoluted financial aid forms so it s easier for you to apply for help and get the finances that you need these are reforms that have been talked about for years but they re always blocked by special interests and their lobbyists well because you voted for change in november we re going to bring change in the house of representatives today and then we will take this battle for america s students and america s working families to the senate and then i intend to sign this bill into law because that s the change you worked for that s the change you voted for that s the change we re going to deliver but terps we can t stop there there are still those in washington who are resistant to change who are more willing to defend the status quo then address the real concerns of the american people what can i tell you they re still out there we re facing the same kind of resistance on another defining struggle of this generation and that s the issue of health insurance reform now let me say when you re young i know this isn t always an issue that you have at the top of your mind you think you re invulnerable that s how i thought i love you back i m sure that some of you wondered why this college required that all new students have health insurance this semester well here s why here s why every day the one in three adults one in three young adults who don t have health insurance live one accident or one illness away from bankruptcy think about what would have happened with rachel if she hadn t had health insurance nearly half of these young people have trouble paying their medical bills nearly 40 percent are in debt because of them i mean think about adding the debt you already have for college on top of that another 10 000 or 20 000 or 30 000 or 50 000 worth of debt because you get sick some of these americans don t get insurance because they feel young and healthy but some work part time or for small businesses where you aren t offered health insurance and it s just too expensive to buy coverage on your own even if you have coverage insurance companies today they can drop it or water it down when you re sick and you need it the most or they can decide that they won t pay the full cost of your care and make you pay the rest of it out of pocket even if it s thousands upon thousands of dollars that s why more than one third of all young adults including those with insurance have had trouble paying their medical bills that s why one fourth of all young adults are paying off medical debt and we ve heard some horror stories during the course of this debate there s the young father i met in colorado his child was diagnosed with severe hemophilia the day after he was born and they had insurance but because there was a cap on their coverage as one child s medical bills piled up this father was left frantically to search for another option or face tens of thousands of dollars of debt another woman from texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne by the time she had her insurance reinstated her breast cancer what s going on guys we re doing okay relax everybody is all right we re doing fine i want everybody to understand this you had a young woman who was diagnosed with cancer but because she had a case of acne that the insurance company said hadn t been declared they decided they wouldn t cover her by the time her insurance was reinstated her breast cancer had more than doubled in size the now these stories are heartbreaking they are wrong nobody in america should be treated that way and we are going to bring about change this year now at its core listen up at its core that s what this issue is about health care is about more than the details of a policy it s about what kind of country you want to be young people it s about what kind of country you want to be we are the only nation on earth that leaves millions of people without health insurance we spend more than any country on earth and we re not any healthier for it so this is about what kind of country you want your children to grow up in a lot of you here today and a lot of young people across the country gave your time and your effort to this campaign because you believed that america can still do great things you believed that in this country we don t fear the future we shape the future we don t feed on division and anger we feed on hope and possibility that s what america is about that s what we re called to affirm right now it has now been nearly a century since teddy roosevelt first called for health care reform it s been attempted by nearly every president and every congress since and our failure to get it done year after year and decade after decade has placed a burden on families and on businesses and on taxpayers that we can no longer sustain so i may not be the first president to take up the cause of health care reform i am determined to be the last with your help the good news is we are now closer to reform than we ve ever been after debating this issue for the better part of a year there s now agreement in congress on about 80 percent of what needs to be done four out of five committees in congress have completed their work yesterday the finance committee under the leadership of max baucus put out its own bill each bill has its strengths and there are a lot of similarities between them and our overall efforts have been supported by an unprecedented coalition of hospitals and seniors groups businesses drug companies even most importantly drugs doctors and nurses are supporting this effort we ve got doctors medical students right here in the house see i just want to point out i think it s telling some of the people who are most enthusiastic about health care reform are the very medical professionals who have firsthand knowledge about how badly the system needs to change so don t stop paying attention to the folks who are spreading false charges crazy rumors about our plan pay attention to the health care experts the doctors and the nurses who know our system best now i think it s fine that we ve been hearing constructive criticism about these issues over the last several months because this is a big deal that s how our democracy works no one has all the right answers we ve all got a stake in getting this right that s why i ve said i will embrace good ideas wherever they come from we already have but too often during this important debate we ve also seen the same partisan spectacle that has left so many people disappointed about washington too many engage in scare tactics instead of honest debates too many use this as an opportunity to score short term political points instead of working together to solve a long term challenge i ve heard a lot of republicans say they want to kill obamacare some may even raise money off it but when you ask these folks what exactly my plan does they ve got it all wrong when you ask them what their solution is it amounts to the same old same old the same status quo that s given us higher costs and more uninsured and less security than you ve ever had it s more of the same well look i will not accept the status quo as a solution not this time not now the time for bickering is over the time for games has passed now is the season for action now is the time to deliver on health care reform for the american people so just to make sure you re clear here s what you need to know about our plan for those who have health insurance you ll have more security and stability it will provide insurance to those who don t have insurance it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families and our businesses and our government let me say if you already have health insurance nothing in this plan will require you to change what you have what this plan will do is make the insurance you have work better for you because under this plan listen up young people under my plan if your parents have health insurance and you re currently on their policy you will automatically be able to keep your coverage until you re 26 years old that means you will know that you ve got health insurance if your parents don t have access to health insurance one of the ideas on the table is to give folks under 25 the chance to buy low cost insurance that will protect you from financial ruin if you get seriously ill now under this plan it will also be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition you just heard rachel s story she s okay right now she s thriving but when she goes into the workforce and their insurance companies start asking well have you been sick before right now she d have trouble getting insurance under the bill that we sign she will still be able to get coverage when i sign this bill it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick water it down when you need it the most they ll no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given lifetime or a given year we ll place a limit on how much you can be charged for out of pocket expenses in the united states nobody should go broke because they get sick and insurance companies will be required to cover with no extra charge routine checkups and preventive care because there s no reason we shouldn t be catching treatable illnesses treatable diseases before they get worse that makes sense that saves money and it saves lives now if you don t have health insurance the second part of this plan will finally afford offer you quality affordable choices so if you lose your job or you change jobs you ll be able to get coverage if you decide you want to start your own business you ll still be able to get coverage we ll do this by creating a new insurance exchange a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for an affordable health insurance plan that works for them that s how large companies and government employees get affordable insurance that s how i and everyone in congress get affordable insurance you should have the same thing that congress has now i ve also said that one of the options in the insurance exchange should be a public insurance option let me be clear let me be clear it would only be an option no one would be forced to choose it no one with insurance would be affected by it but what it would do is provide more choice and more competition and put pressure on private insurers to make their policies affordable and treat their customers better now think about it there s some folks who ve said well this is a government takeover of health care we ve got public universities and private universities nobody says that we re taking over private colleges what we re doing is giving students a choice you should have a choice the same way in your health care of course the only way this plan works is if everybody fulfills their responsibility not just government not just insurance companies but employees and individuals this school should be proud that every student is required to have health insurance since our plan will make sure that insurance is affordable for everybody we re going to also say everybody needs to get insurance because if there are affordable options and people don t sign up then the rest of us pay for somebody else s expensive emergency room care and that s not fair improving our health care system only works if everybody does their part and i think americans are willing and ready to take on that responsibility now a lot of you may be asking you know this plan sounds pretty good but how are you going to pay for it how do we make sure this doesn t add to the deficit that the next generation is going to have to be paying so here is what you need to know first i won t sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficit either now or in the future period part of the reason i faced a trillion dollar plus deficit when i walked into the door of the white house is because too many initiatives over the last decade were not paid for from the iraq war to tax breaks for the wealthy i won t make that same mistake when it comes to health care second we ve estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system there s all kinds of waste and abuse the doctors and nurses know this right now too much of the hard earned savings and tax dollars we spend on health care doesn t make you healthier that s especially true when it comes to medicare and medicaid so without taking any money from the medicare trust fund that gives benefits to your grandparents they depend on it for their health care we re going to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud and subsidies to insurance companies that pad their profits but don t do anything to make seniors healthier now some of my republican colleagues have also supported reforming our medical malpractice laws as a way to cut down health care costs i don t think this is a silver bullet but i want to explore the idea so today i directed my secretary of health and human services to move forward with programs that will help us put patient safety first while allowing doctors to focus on practicing medicine instead of defending against lawsuits so maryland this is the plan i m proposing it s a plan that incorporates ideas from democrats and republicans and i m going to seek common ground in the weeks ahead if you come to me with a set of serious proposals i will be there to listen my door is always open but know this i will not waste time with those who ve made the calculation that it s better to kill health reform than to improve our health care system i won t stand by while special interests do the same old tricks to keep things exactly the way they are and i said last week at the speech to the joint session if you misrepresent what s in the plan we ll call you out we will call you out now i said we re closer to reform than we ve ever been but this is the hard part this is when the special interests gear up this is when the folks who want to kill reform fight back with everything they ve got this is when they spread all kinds of rumors to scare and intimidate americans this is what they always do that s why i need your help when i was running for president i never said change would be easy change is hard it s always been hard civil rights was hard getting women the right to vote that was hard making sure that social security was there for our seniors that was hard getting medicare in place that was hard i know there are doubts that creep into people s minds i know there s a tendency during tough times for folks to turn on each other and get mad and get angry but our history tells us that each and every time we faced a choice between the easy road that leads to slow decline or the hard road that leads to something better something higher we take the higher road that s how americans are we refuse to stand still we always want to move forward and that journey doesn t take that doesn t start in washington d c it begins right here in college park it begins on campuses like this one it always has just like the change that began in our campaign it starts with people especially young people who are determined to take this nation s destiny into their own hands you know some of you remember during the campaign we had a slogan fired up ready to go not everybody here knows how this story came about so i m going to tell it again because it bears on health care reform this is early in the campaign when none of you knew how to pronounce my name i had just announced and i was looking for support i had to go down to south carolina it was an early primary state i went down to greenville for a legislative dinner and i was sitting next to a state representative there and i wanted her support i needed some endorsements nobody supported me at the time so i said madam representative i need your endorsement she said i will give you my endorsement if you come to my home town greenwood south carolina and i said i d had a glass of wine i said fine i promise come to find out that greenwood is an hour and a half from everyplace else it s in the middle of nowhere so about a month later i fly back into greenville and i m tired i m sleepy and i ve been campaigning for two weeks straight i m dragging my bags to my hotel room and suddenly i get a tap on my shoulder my staffers i said what they said we ve got to be in the car at 6 30 tomorrow morning i said why six thirty why because we ve got to go to greenwood like you promised so the next morning i wake up and i feel terrible dragging out of bed feel like a college student feel like i m back in college and don t want to wake up feel like i ve been staying up late doing who knows what i know i remember how you all are so i just feel i m exhausted i go over to the curtains to try to get some sunlight wake myself up it s pouring down rain outside miserable day i go to get some coffee i open up the newspaper there s a bad story about me in the new york times i go downstairs and my umbrella busts open and i get poured on so by the time i m in the car i m wet and i m sleepy and i m tired and i m mad and we start driving and we re driving and we re driving and it s an hour and a half and i realized i m going to have to drive an hour and a half back and finally we get to greenwood although you don t know you re in greenwood right away but there s a little park district building we go into this park fieldhouse i get a little more wet get inside and after this long drive waking up at 6 30 a m there are only about 20 people in the room twenty people and they re all kind of damp and they don t look that excited to see me they don t really know how to pronounce my name either but you know i m running for president so i m shaking hands how do you do nice to meet you suddenly i hear this voice behind me shout out fired up and i m startled but everybody around me they just think this is normal they say fired up and suddenly i hear this voice ready to go and everybody goes ready to go i say what s going on i look behind me there s this small woman she s about 5 5 2 she s about 50 60 years old and she s dressed like she just came from church she s got a big church hat and she s looking at me she s smiling and she says fired up come to find out that this is a city council member from greenwood she also by the way moonlights as a private detective true story true true story but she s mainly known for her chant she does this everywhere she goes everywhere at any event football game at a city council meeting she says fired up and everybody says fired up and ready to go everybody says ready to go so for the next five minutes she keeps on doing this she says fired up fired up ready to go ready to go and i realize i m being upstaged by this woman so i m looking at my staff asking what s going on here when is this going to stop and they re shrugging their shoulders they don t know but here s the thing maryland after about a minute a couple minutes of this suddenly i realize i m feeling kind of fired up i m feeling like i m ready to go so i start joining in the chant and for the rest of the day wherever we went whenever i saw my staff i said are you fired up they d say i m fired up boss are you ready to go they d say i m ready to go so it goes to show you and this is so important for young people it goes to show you one voice can change a room and if a voice can change a room it can change a city and if it can change a city it can change a state if it can change a state it can change a nation if it can change a nation it can change the world we will change the world with your voice we need the voices of young people to transform this nation to meet up to the meaning of its dream i need your voice so i want to know are you fired up ready to go fired up ready to go fired up ready to go let s go change the world thank you everybody dem bobama17 9 09b barack_obama thank you thank you so much everyone thank you thank you so much what an extraordinary honor to be here tonight thank you thank you so much let me let me begin by thanking all of you for supporting this wonderful organization i want to say how much i appreciate my former colleague and great friend senator bob menendez and all the members of the hispanic caucus for their outstanding work i want to thank the chairwoman of the congressional hispanic caucus nydia velazquez for her extraordinary dedication and leadership our great speaker who has been a partner in every single tough fight that we have had so far and none of them have been easy but she is helping to move this country forward nancy pelosi to all the house leadership i m grateful to you to a couple of people who i stole from the congressional hispanic caucus they were just too good to leave alone my great secretary of labor hilda solis and my outstanding secretary of the interior ken salazar i want to acknowledge the presence of her royal highness infanta cristina of spain who is here and our own royalty somebody who we have become so extraordinarily proud of somebody who i ve just come to adore and who is going to make us proud for many many years to come because she is not term limited the newest justice of the supreme court sonia sotomayor thank you well michelle and i are so pleased to be here among such good friends i want to congratulate marc anthony not only because it s his birthday but also because he s being honored tonight as an artist who has shared not only his music but his heritage with all of us i m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that nydia has a crush on you that you were provided this award she s not along i m telling you j lo watch out i m also pleased to have the opportunity to be here as you mark the start of hispanic heritage month i want you to know that my administration is marking this occasion as well later this week secretary salazar will lead the first meeting of a commission to look at the creation of a national museum to honor the historic contributions of latinos and latinas to our country everybody here understands how important those contributions have been and will be for more than 30 years the congressional hispanic caucus institute has through scholarships and fellowships and internships sought to lift up the next generation of latino leaders i came here one year ago as a candidate and said this was a goal i shared today i am here as a president to say that this is a goal my administration is helping to meet you don t have to take my word for it you can ask ken or hilda or any of the many young latinos and latinas including four from chci fellows who work tirelessly in the white house and throughout my administration every single day i don t mean to brag but the number of latinos and latinas i ve nominated to senior positions at this point exceeds that of any administration in history and we are not finished yet nearly half of those appointments by the way are latinas and every single one of them wasn t just the best latino for the job but the best person for the job and obviously one of my proudest moments as president in fact probably the proudest moment as president that i ve had was the day that justice sotomayor formally ascended to our nation s highest court we stood where generations of justices had served in that ornate chamber and as she lifted her right hand to take the oath our nation took one step closer to fully realizing the founding ideals that the court itself was established to defend and across america millions of children s sights are now set higher their dreams are a little bigger that benefits all of us now we face enormous challenges as a nation many of those challenges are felt far more acutely by latinos but our ability to solve any of the problems we face from health care to education from economic recovery to immigration reform depends on our willingness to recognize that our destiny is shared we ve seen this starkly throughout this economic crisis as fortunes linked the small business owner on main street and the bond trader on wall street the young family looking to refinance a mortgage to the large bank whose profits depend on their staying out of foreclosure but this has always been true in good times and bad our success has long depended on our willingness to see our challenges as ones we have to face together our willingness to live up to a simple ideal todos somos americanos we are all americans because when there s a young latina stuck in a crumbling school who starts to actually believe she s worth less because she doesn t have more that isn t just a problem for that child that isn t just a problem for the hispanic community that s a problem for a nation that s why i ve challenged states to raise the bar across their early education programs so that more of our children enter kindergarten ready to learn that s why i ve called for a new race to the top to reform america s schools and provide students with the knowledge and skills they ll need for the 21st century that s why we will address the dropout crisis that plagues far too many communities and commit to increasing access to college and success at college so that america can once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world that depends in part on making sure that latinos and latinas have access to higher education and that s a commitment of our administration we ll provide a complete and competitive education for every student because our prosperity as a nation requires that we harness the talents of all our people not just some todos somos americanos when the unemployment rate for latinos and latinas is higher than 10 percent it isn t just a problem for families worried about paying the bills or keeping their home this is not just a problem for the hispanic community it s a problem for a nation and that s why the recovery act is providing a tax cut for working families and extended unemployment and health insurance for folks who have lost their jobs that s why we are not only seeking to revive this economy but to rebuild it stronger than before by investing in the clean energy jobs of tomorrow by preparing our children to outcompete workers around the world and by giving every american the security and stability of quality affordable health insurance todos somos americanos you know how important it is to pass health insurance reform you know that hispanics are more likely to be uninsured and hispanic small business owners like all small business owners are struggling with higher health care costs than large companies costs that are rising all the time so i m grateful to so many of you for the support you ve shown from the beginning of this effort but the problems in our health care system aren t just a hispanic american problem they re an american problem that s why we ll offer a tax credit to individuals to help them afford coverage and to small business owners to help them provide coverage for their workers that s why we ll provide greater security and stability to those who already have insurance because no one in america should have to worry that their coverage will be dropped the moment they need it most no one in america should be denied health insurance because of a preexisting condition no one in america should go broke because they got sick that s a basic principle that we seek to uphold now as you know there s been a little controversy about who exactly will be covered under reform i want to be clear if someone is here illegally they won t be covered under this plan that s a commitment i ve made but i also want to make this clear even though i do not believe we can extend coverage to those who are here illegally i also don t simply believe we can simply ignore the fact that our immigration system is broken that s why i strongly support making sure folks who are here legally have access to affordable quality health insurance under this plan just like everybody else and we certainly should not let this debate on health care one so essential to hispanic americans and all americans get sidetracked by those looking to exploit divisions and kill reform at any cost that s what they always try to do if anything this debate underscores the necessity of passing comprehensive immigration reform and resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all that s what i ve said from the start that s what i say tonight i ve asked secretary janet napolitano to lead the conversation with stakeholders both on and off capitol hill and i know that she s met with many of you this is a tough issue we all know that which is why it is so important that we develop the strategy and the policy that s going to get us over the finish line my commitment is real and so is my desire to get this done in fact the changes we ve made administratively are already making a difference the american people did not send us to washington to ignore problems just because they re tough they sent us here to solve them and that s what we can and must do on immigration reform on all on all these issues you understand what s at stake because you see it you experience it in your communities every single day whether it s health insurance reform or immigration reform fixing our schools or reviving our economy it is essential that we put aside the petty and the partisan that we don t fall prey to arguments that would divide us that would suggest that progress in america is a zero sum game we know the opposite is the truth we know that here in america we can only prosper as one nation as one people we know that here in america we rise or fall together todos somos americanos we are called to rise above the politics of the moment to meet the challenges of our time that s why i m here that s why the congressional hispanic caucus is here that s why all of you are here because i know and you know that this new generation of hispanic leaders the focus of this gathering and this organization all of you know you haven t worked so hard and come so far just to watch history you came here to make history together that s what we can do together that s what we must do that s what we re already beginning to do i am absolutely confident that if all of us work together if all of us support the extraordinary efforts of the members of the congressional hispanic caucus if you support the efforts of this administration to finally fix our immigration system and put our kids into college and make sure that folks can stay in their homes and that job opportunities exist for everybody and not just some if we can lift the tone of the debate so that we re not scoring political points just by turning on each other but we re instead scoring points for all of america by solving problems if that s our attitude nothing can stop us think about how far we have come but we have so much more to do we have so much more such a longer road to travel it s going to be up to all of you and i am grateful for the opportunity to be your partner in this extraordinary journey thank you very much everybody god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama17 9 09c barack_obama please be seated good afternoon and welcome to the white house of all the privileges serving as president there s no greater honor than serving as commander in chief of the finest military that the world has ever known and of all the military decorations that a president and a nation can bestow there is none higher than the medal of honor it has been nearly 150 years since our nation first presented this medal for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty and in those nearly 150 years through civil war and two world wars korea and vietnam desert storm and somalia afghanistan and iraq and countless battles in between tens of millions of americans have worn the uniform but fewer than 3 500 have been recognized with the medal of honor and in our time these remarkable americans are literally one in a million and today we recognize another sergeant first class jared c monti the medal of honor reflects the admiration and gratitude of the nation so we are joined by members of congress including from sergeant monti s home state of massachusetts senator john kerry and congressman barney frank we re joined by our secretary of defense robert gates chairman of the joint chiefs of staff admiral mike mullen and leaders from across the armed forces we are joined by the leaders of the army to which sergeant monti dedicated his life secretary pete geren our incoming secretary confirmed by the senate last night john mchugh chief of staff general george casey sergeant major of the army ken preston and jared s fellow soldiers and commanders from the legendary 10th mountain division and we are joined by those who now welcome sergeant monti into their storied ranks members of the medal of honor society but today is not about high officials and those with stars on their shoulders it s a celebration of a young soldier and those who loved him who made him into the man he was and who join us today his mother janet his father paul his brother tim and his sister niccole and from his grandmother marjorie to his six year old niece carys and cousins and aunts and uncles from across america more than 120 proud family and friends duty honor country service sacrifice heroism these are words of weight but as people as a people and as a culture we often invoke them lightly we toss them around freely but do we really grasp the meaning of these values do we truly understand the nature of these virtues to serve and to sacrifice jared monti knew the monti family knows and they know that the actions we honor today were not a passing moment of courage they were the culmination of a life of character and commitment there was jared s compassion he was the kid at school who upon seeing a student eating lunch alone would walk over and befriend him he was the teenager who cut down a spruce tree in his yard so a single mom in town would have a christmas tree for her children he even bought the ornaments and the presents he was the soldier in afghanistan who received care packages including fresh clothes and gave them away to afghan children who needed them more there was jared s perseverance cut from the high school basketball team he came back the next year and the next year and the next year three times finally making varsity and outscoring some of the top players told he was too young for the military he joined the national guard s delayed entry program as a junior in high school and that summer while other kids were at the beach jared was doing drills there was jared s strength and skill the championship wrestler and triathlete who went off to basic training just 18 years old and then served with distinction as a forward observer with the heavy responsibility of calling in air strikes he returned from his first tour in afghanistan highly decorated including a bronze star and army commendation medal for valor and there was jared s deep and abiding love for his fellow soldiers maybe it came from his mom who was a nurse maybe it came from his dad a teacher guided by the lessons he learned at home jared became the consummate nco the noncommissioned officer caring for his soldiers and teaching his troops he called them his boys and although obviously he was still young himself some of them called him grandpa compassion perseverance strength a love for his fellow soldiers those are the values that defined jared monti s life and the values he displayed in the actions that we recognize here today it was june 21st 2006 in the remotest northeast of afghanistan near the border with pakistan sergeant monti was a team leader on a 16 man patrol they d been on the move for three days down dirt roads sloshing through rivers hiking up steep mountain trails their heavy gear on their backs moving at night and in the early morning to avoid the scorching 100 degree heat their mission to keep watch on the valley down below in advance of an operation to clear the area of militants those who were there remember that evening on the mountain a rocky ridge not much bigger than this room some were standing guard knowing they had been spotted by a man in the valley some were passing out mres and water there was talk of home and plans for leave jared was overheard remembering his time serving in korea then just before dark there was a shuffle of feet in the woods and that s when the treeline exploded in a wall of fire one member of the patrol said it was like thousands of rifles crackling bullets and heavy machine gunfire ricocheting across the rocks rocket propelled grenades raining down fire so intense that weapons were shot right out of their hands within minutes one soldier was killed another was wounded everyone dove for cover behind a tree a rock a stone wall this patrol of 16 men was facing a force of some 50 fighters outnumbered the risk was real they might be overrun they might not make it out alive that s when jared monti did what he was trained to do with the enemy advancing so close they could hear their voices he got on his radio and started calling in artillery when the enemy tried to flank them he grabbed a gun and drove them back and when they came back again he tossed a grenade and drove them back again and when these american soldiers saw one of their own wounded lying in the open some 20 yards away exposed to the approaching enemy jared monti did something no amount of training can instill his patrol leader said he d go but jared said no he is my soldier i m going to get him it was written long ago that the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them glory and danger alike and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it jared monti saw the danger before him and he went out to meet it he handed off his radio he tightened his chin strap and with his men providing cover jared rose and started to run into all those incoming bullets into all those rockets upon seeing jared the enemy in the woods unleashed a firestorm he moved low and fast yard after yard then dove behind a stone wall a moment later he rose again and again they fired everything they had at him forcing him back faced with overwhelming enemy fire jared could have stayed where he was behind that wall but that was not the kind of soldier jared monti was he embodied that creed all soldiers strive to meet i will always place the mission first i will never accept defeat i will never quit i will never leave a fallen comrade and so for a third time he rose for a third time he ran toward his fallen comrade said his patrol leader it was the bravest thing i had ever seen a soldier do they say it was a rocket propelled grenade that jared made it within a few yards of his wounded soldier they say that his final words there on that ridge far from home were of his faith and his family i ve made peace with god tell my family that i love them and then as the artillery that jared had called in came down the enemy fire slowed then stopped the patrol had defeated the attack they had held on but not without a price by the end of the night jared and three others including the soldier he died trying to save had given their lives i m told that jared was a very humble guy that he would have been uncomfortable with all this attention that he d say he was just doing his job and that he d want to share this moment with others who were there that day and so as jared would have wanted we also pay tribute to those who fell alongside him staff sergeant patrick lybert private first class brian bradbury staff sergeant heathe craig and we honor all the soldiers he loved and who loved him back among them noncommissioned officers who remind us why the army has designated this the year of the nco in honor of all those sergeants who are the backbone of america s army they are jared s friends and fellow soldiers watching this ceremony today in afghanistan they are the soldiers who this morning held their own ceremony on an afghan mountain at the post that now bears his name combat outpost monti and they are his boys surviving members of jared s patrol from the 10th mountain division who are here with us today and i would ask them all to please stand like jared these soldiers know the meaning of duty and of honor of country like jared they remind us all that the price of freedom is great and by their deeds they challenge every american to ask this question what we can do to be better citizens what can we do to be worthy of such service and such sacrifice sergeant first class jared c monti in his proud hometown of raynham his name graces streets and scholarships across a grateful nation it graces parks and military posts from this day forward it will grace the memorials to our medal of honor heroes and this week when jared monti would have celebrated his 34th birthday we know that his name and legacy will live forever and shine brightest in the hearts of his family and friends who will love him always may god bless jared monti and may he comfort the entire monti family and may god bless the united states of america janet paul would you please join me at the podium for the reading of the citation dem bobama18 12 09 barack_obama good morning it is an honor for me to join this distinguished group of leaders from nations around the world we come here in copenhagen because climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people all of you would not be here unless you like me were convinced that this danger is real this is not fiction it is science unchecked climate change will pose unacceptable risks to our security our economies and our planet this much we know the question then before us is no longer the nature of the challenge the question is our capacity to meet it for while the reality of climate change is not in doubt i have to be honest as the world watches us today i think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now and it hangs in the balance i believe we can act boldly and decisively in the face of a common threat that s why i come here today not to talk but to act now as the world s largest economy and as the world s second largest emitter america bears our responsibility to address climate change and we intend to meet that responsibility that s why we ve renewed our leadership within international climate change negotiations that s why we ve worked with other nations to phase out fossil fuel subsidies that s why we ve taken bold action at home by making historic investments in renewable energy by putting our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy these mitigation actions are ambitious and we are taking them not simply to meet global responsibilities we are convinced as some of you may be convinced that changing the way we produce and use energy is essential to america s economic future that it will create millions of new jobs power new industries keep us competitive and spark new innovation we re convinced for our own self interest that the way we use energy changing it to a more efficient fashion is essential to our national security because it helps to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and helps us deal with some of the dangers posed by climate change so i want this plenary session to understand america is going to continue on this course of action to mitigate our emissions and to move towards a clean energy economy no matter what happens here in copenhagen we think it is good for us as well as good for the world but we also believe that we will all be stronger all be safer all be more secure if we act together that s why it is in our mutual interest to achieve a global accord in which we agree to certain steps and to hold each other accountable to certain commitments after months of talk after two weeks of negotiations after innumerable side meetings bilateral meetings endless hours of discussion among negotiators i believe that the pieces of that accord should now be clear first all major economies must put forward decisive national actions that will reduce their emissions and begin to turn the corner on climate change i m pleased that many of us have already done so almost all the major economies have put forward legitimate targets significant targets ambitious targets and i m confident that america will fulfill the commitments that we have made cutting our emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020 and by more than 80 percent by 2050 in line with final legislation second we must have a mechanism to review whether we are keeping our commitments and exchange this information in a transparent manner these measures need not be intrusive or infringe upon sovereignty they must however ensure that an accord is credible and that we re living up to our obligations without such accountability any agreement would be empty words on a page i don t know how you have an international agreement where we all are not sharing information and ensuring that we are meeting our commitments that doesn t make sense it would be a hollow victory number three we must have financing that helps developing countries adapt particularly the least developed and most vulnerable countries to climate change america will be a part of fast start funding that will ramp up to 10 billion by 2012 and yesterday secretary hillary clinton my secretary of state made it clear that we will engage in a global effort to mobilize 100 billion in financing by 2020 if and only if it is part of a broader accord that i have just described mitigation transparency financing it s a clear formula one that embraces the principle of common but differentiated responses and respective capabilities and it adds up to a significant accord one that takes us farther than we have ever gone before as an international community i just want to say to this plenary session that we are running short on time and at this point the question is whether we will move forward together or split apart whether we prefer posturing to action i m sure that many consider this an imperfect framework that i just described no country will get everything that it wants there are those developing countries that want aid with no strings attached and no obligations with respect to transparency they think that the most advanced nations should pay a higher price i understand that there are those advanced nations who think that developing countries either cannot absorb this assistance or that will not be held accountable effectively and that the world s fastest growing emitters should bear a greater share of the burden we know the fault lines because we ve been imprisoned by them for years these international discussions have essentially taken place now for almost two decades and we have very little to show for it other than an increased acceleration of the climate change phenomenon the time for talk is over this is the bottom line we can embrace this accord take a substantial step forward continue to refine it and build upon its foundation we can do that and everyone who is in this room will be part of a historic endeavor one that makes life better for our children and our grandchildren or we can choose delay falling back into the same divisions that have stood in the way of action for years and we will be back having the same stale arguments month after month year after year perhaps decade after decade all while the danger of climate change grows until it is irreversible ladies and gentlemen there is no time to waste america has made our choice we have charted our course we have made our commitments we will do what we say now i believe it s the time for the nations and the people of the world to come together behind a common purpose we are ready to get this done today but there has to be movement on all sides to recognize that it is better for us to act than to talk it s better for us to choose action over inaction the future over the past and with courage and faith i believe that we can meet our responsibility to our people and the future of our planet thank you very much dem bobama18 2 09 barack_obama thank you very much please everybody have a seat thank you well it is good to be back in arizona thank you are you excited thank you thank you and thank you for arranging for such a beautiful day i want to stick around but i got to go back to work but it is wonderful to be here and to all of you i know that attending these kinds of events oftentimes you have to wait in line and there s all kinds of stuff going on but i appreciate you being here very much and to all the officials here at the school the principal and the student body everybody who helped make this possible thank you so much to all of you i m here today to talk about a crisis unlike we ve ever known but one that you know very well here in mesa and throughout the valley in phoenix and its surrounding suburbs the american dream is being tested by a home mortgage crisis that not only threatens the stability of our economy but also the stability of families and neighborhoods it s a crisis that strikes at the heart of the middle class the homes in which we invest our savings and build our lives raise our families and plant roots in our communities so many americans have shared with me their personal experiences of this crisis many have written letters or emails or shared their stories with me at rallies and along rope lines their hardship and heartbreak are a reminder that while this crisis is vast it begins just one house and one family at a time it begins with a young family maybe in mesa or glendale or tempe or just as likely in a suburban area of las vegas or cleveland or miami they save up they search they choose a home that feels like the perfect place to start a life they secure a fixed rate mortgage at a reasonable rate and they make a down payment and they make their mortgage payments each month they are as responsible as anyone could ask them to be but then they learn that acting responsibly often isn t enough to escape this crisis perhaps somebody loses a job in the latest round of layoffs one of more than 3 5 million jobs lost since this recession began or maybe a child gets sick or a spouse has his or her hours cut in the past if you found yourself in a situation like this you could have sold your home and bought a smaller one with more affordable payments or you could have refinanced your home at a lower rate but today home values have fallen so sharply that even if you make a large down payment the current value of your mortgage may still be higher than the current value of your house so no bank will return your calls and no sale will return your investment you can t afford to leave you can t afford to stay so you start cutting back on luxuries then you start cutting back on necessities you spend down your savings to keep up with your payments then you open the retirement fund then you use the credit cards and when you ve gone through everything you have and done everything you can you have no choice but to default on your loan and so your home joins the nearly 6 million others in foreclosure or at risk of foreclosure across the country including roughly 150 000 right here in arizona but the foreclosures which are uprooting families and upending lives across america are only part of the housing crisis for while there are millions of families who face foreclosure there are millions more who are in no danger of losing their homes but who have still seen their dreams endangered they re the families who see the for sale signs lining the streets who see neighbors leave and homes standing vacant and lawns slowly turning brown they see their own homes their single largest asset plummeting in value one study in chicago found that a foreclosed home reduces the price of nearby homes by as much as 9 percent home prices in cities across the country have fallen by more than 25 percent since 2006 and in phoenix they ve fallen by 43 percent even if your neighborhood hasn t been hit by foreclosures you re likely feeling the effects of this crisis in other ways companies in your community that depend on the housing market construction companies and home furnishing stores and painters and landscapers they re all cutting back and laying people off the number of residential construction jobs has fallen by more than a quarter million since mid 2006 as businesses lose revenue and people lose income the tax base shrinks which means less money for schools and police and fire departments and on top of this the costs to local government associated with a single foreclosure can be as high as 20 000 so the effects of this crisis have also reverberated across the financial markets when the housing market collapsed so did the availability of credit on which our economy depends and as that credit has dried up it s been harder for families to find affordable loans to purchase a car or pay tuition and harder for businesses to secure the capital they need to expand and create jobs in the end all of us are paying a price for this home mortgage crisis and all of us will pay an even steeper price if we allow this crisis to continue to deepen a crisis which is unraveling home ownership the middle class and the american dream itself but if we act boldly and swiftly to arrest this downward spiral then every american will benefit and that s what i want to talk about today the plan i m announcing focuses on rescuing families who ve played by the rules and acted responsibly by refinancing loans for millions of families in traditional mortgages who are underwater or close to it by modifying loans for families stuck in sub prime mortgages they can t afford as a result of skyrocketing interest rates or personal misfortune and by taking broader steps to keep mortgage rates low so that families can secure loans with affordable monthly payments at the same time this plan must be viewed in a larger context a lost home often begins with a lost job many businesses have laid off workers for a lack of revenue and available capital credit has become scarce as markets have been overwhelmed by the collapse of security backed securities backed by failing mortgages in the end the home mortgage crisis the financial crisis and this broader economic crisis are all interconnected and we can t successfully address any one of them without addressing them all so yesterday in denver i signed into law the american recovery and reinvestment act which will create or save the act will create or save 3 5 million jobs over the next two years including 70 000 right here in arizona right here doing the work america needs done and we re also going to work to stabilize repair and reform our financial system to get credit flowing again to families and businesses and we will pursue the housing plan i m outlining today and through this plan we will help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages so they can afford avoid foreclosure and we re not just helping homeowners at risk of falling over the edge we re preventing their neighbors from being pulled over that edge too as defaults and foreclosures contribute to sinking home values and failing local businesses and lost jobs but i want to be very clear about what this plan will not do it will not rescue the unscrupulous or irresponsible by throwing good taxpayer money after bad loans it will not help speculators it will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell it will not help dishonest lenders who acted irresponsibly distorting the facts distorting the facts and dismissing the fine print at the expense of buyers who didn t know better and it will not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford so i just want to make this clear this plan will not save every home but it will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild it will prevent the worst consequences of this crisis from wreaking even greater havoc on the economy and by bringing down the foreclosure rate it will help to shore up housing prices for everybody according to estimates by the treasury department this plan could stop the slide in home prices due to neighboring foreclosures by up to 6 000 per home so here s how my plan works first we will make it possible for an estimated 4 to 5 million currently ineligible homeowners who receive their mortgages through fannie mae or freddie mac to refinance their mortgages at a lower rate today as a result of declining home values millions of families are what s called underwater which simply means that they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are currently worth these families are unable to sell their homes but they re also unable to refinance them so in the event of a job loss or another emergency their options are limited also right now fannie mae and freddie mac the institutions that guarantee home loans for millions of middle class families are generally not permitted to guarantee refinancing for mortgages valued at more than 80 percent of the home s worth so families who are underwater or close to being underwater can t turn to these lending institutions for help my plan changes that by removing this restriction on fannie and freddie so that they can refinance mortgages they already own or guarantee and what this will do is it will allow millions of families stuck with loans at a higher rate to refinance and the estimated cost to taxpayers would be roughly zero while fannie and freddie would receive less money in payments this would be balanced out by a reduction in defaults and foreclosures i also want to point out that millions of other households could benefit from historically low interest rates if they refinance though many don t know that this opportunity is available to them meaning some of you an opportunity that could save your families hundreds of dollars each month and the efforts we are taking to stabilize mortgage markets will help you borrowers secure more affordable terms too a second thing we re going to do under this plan is we will create new incentives so that lenders work with borrowers to modify the terms of sub prime loans at risk of default and foreclosure sub prime loans loans with high rates and complex terms that often conceal their costs make up only 12 percent of all mortgages but account for roughly half of all foreclosures right now when families with these mortgages seek to modify a loan to avoid this fate they often find themselves navigating a maze of rules and regulations but they re rarely finding answers some sub prime lenders are willing to renegotiate but many aren t and your ability to restructure your loan depends on where you live the company that owns or manages your loan or even the agent who happens to answer the phone on the day that you call so here s what my plan does establishes clear guidelines for the entire mortgage industry that will encourage lenders to modify mortgages on primary residences any institution that wishes to receive financial assistance from the government from taxpayers and to modify home mortgages will have to do so according to these guidelines which will be in place two weeks from today here s what this means if lenders and home buyers work together and the lender agrees to offer rates that the borrower can afford then we ll make up part of the gap between what the old payments were and what the new payments will be under this plan lenders who participate will be required to reduce those payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower s income and this will enable as many as 3 to 4 million homeowners to modify the terms of their mortgages to avoid foreclosure so this part of the plan will require both buyers and lenders to step up and do their part to take on some responsibility lenders will need to lower interest rates and share in the costs of reducing monthly payments in order to prevent another wave of foreclosures borrowers will be required to make payments on time in return for this opportunity to reduce those payments and i also want to be clear that there will be a cost associated with this plan but by making these investments in foreclosure prevention today we will save ourselves the costs of foreclosure tomorrow costs that are borne not just by families with troubled loans but by their neighbors and communities and by our economy as a whole given the magnitude of these crises it is a price well worth paying there s a third part of the plan we will take major steps to keep mortgage rates low for millions of middle class families looking to secure new mortgages today most new home loans are backed by fannie mae and freddie mac which guarantee loans and set standards to keep mortgage rates low and to keep mortgage financing available and predictable for middle class families now this function is profoundly important especially now as we grapple with a crisis that would only worsen if we were to allow further disruptions in our mortgage markets therefore using the funds already approved by congress for this purpose the treasury department and the federal reserve will continue to purchase fannie mae and freddie mac mortgage backed securities so that there is stability and liquidity in the marketplace through its existing authority treasury will provide up to 200 billion in capital to ensure that fannie mae and freddie mac can continue to stabilize markets and hold mortgage rates down and we re also going to work with fannie and freddie on other strategies to bolster the mortgage markets like working with state housing finance agencies to increase their liquidity and as we seek to ensure that these institutions continue to perform what is a vital function on behalf of middle class families we also need to maintain transparency and strong oversight so that they do so in responsible and effective ways fourth we will pursue a wide range of reforms designed to help families stay in their homes and avoid foreclosures and my administration will continue to support reforming our bankruptcy rules so that we allow judges to reduce home mortgages on primary residences to their fair market value as long as borrowers pay their debts under court ordered plans i just want everybody to understand that s the rule for investors who own two three and four homes so it should be the rule for folks who just own one home as an alternative to foreclosure in addition as part of the recovery plan i signed into law yesterday we are going to award 2 billion in competitive grants to communities that are bringing together stakeholders and testing new and innovative ways to limit the effects of foreclosures communities have shown a lot of initiative taking responsibility for this crisis when many others have not and supporting these neighborhood efforts is exactly what we should be doing so taken together the provisions of this plan will help us end this crisis and preserve for millions of families their stake in the american dream but we also have to acknowledge the limits of this plan our housing crisis was born of eroding home values but it was also an erosion of our common values and in some case common sense it was brought about by big banks that traded in risky mortgages in return for profits that were literally too good to be true by lenders who knowingly took advantage of homebuyers by homebuyers who knowingly borrowed too much from lenders by speculators who gambled on ever rising prices and by leaders in our nation s capital who failed to act amidst a deepening crisis so solving this crisis will require more than resources it will require all of us to step back and take responsibility government has to take responsibility for setting rules of the road that are fair and fairly enforced banks and lenders must be held accountable for ending the practices that got us into this crisis in the first place and each of us as individuals have to take responsibility for their own actions that means all of us have to learn to live within our means again and not assume that and not assume that housing prices are going to go up 20 30 40 percent every year those core values of common sense and responsibility those are the values that have defined this nation those are the values that have given substance to our faith in the american dream those are the values we have to restore now at this defining moment it will not be easy but if we move forward with purpose and resolve with a deepened appreciation of how fundamental the american dream is and how fragile it can be when we fail to live up to our collective responsibilities if we go back to our roots our core values i am absolutely confident we will overcome this crisis and once again secure that dream not just for ourselves but for generations to come thank you god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama18 2 10a barack_obama hello denver well it is good to be back in denver good to be in colorado and good to be campaigning for one of the finest young senators we have in the united states senate michael bennet i have to confess the reason i was delayed i was grabbing one of those little canaps quite tasty he had one too you re welcome well look it is wonderful to be here we just came from the fillmore auditorium where we had what did we have a couple thousand people twenty four hundred people not that he s counting because they understand that at this defining moment in our history we ve got to have people who are willing to fight on behalf of families all across america and they know that michael got into this business because he believes in that fight now before i go on i think there are a couple people who are still around i m not sure if they re out here but the senior senator from colorado brother udall is right here give him a big round of applause and a great friend and a terrific governor of california is here where s governor ritter where did he go colorado sorry what did i say california listen east coast time it s past my dinner that s why i give bill ritter a big round of applause all right now back to what i was saying you know obviously we know that the country is going through a tough time but when i was here a year ago at mile high and some of you were probably here some of you were there with me i made a promise to you not that i was going to tell you what you wanted to hear not that i was always going to do what was popular but i promised you that i would wake up each and every day thinking about how we can make sure that the american dream is working for everybody and more importantly how we can make sure that it s working for the next generation and one of the things throughout my campaign for the presidency was reminding america that this isn t about a candidate this is about the people that change comes from the bottom up not from the top down and that the kind of transformation that we needed was not going to happen because you elected me as president because but rather because all of us together were willing to join and all of us were willing to take responsibility now one of the things the great things that you did was to send two outstanding united states senators with me on this difficult journey and we ve got to make sure that michael continues on that journey with me because the same things that we fought for in 2008 the same things that i campaigned on that same spirit that s what driven michael all his life he knows what it s like to come from humble beginnings he knows what it s like to make sure that everybody is going to have a chance in life and that s why even though he was successful in business and the private sector he decided that he could make his biggest contribution by going into public service and i m sure taking a really big pay cut so working with the outstanding mayor and soon to be governor john hickenlooper he helped to balance budgets he helped to make sure that this city was running as well as it s ever run a model for cities across the nation and then he decided well that s not a big enough challenge let me try to fix the school system and he took that on and he did it with the same energy and the same determination and the same capacity to bring discordant voices together and get them to work and think in new ways and as a consequence you saw the performance of this school district go up as fast as any school district anywhere in the country so he s been a business executive he s somebody who s run a school system and made it work for children and then he decided well let me try this u s senate thing now i m not sure he knew entirely what he was bargaining for udall might have warned him a little bit because udall had been in congress for a while but the truth is michael is a pretty bright guy and he understood this was not going to be an easy year or two to get started in electoral politics i mean think about where we were last year michael took his spot about two days after i was inaugurated and at that point we already understood that we had the worst recession since the great depression we re losing 800 000 jobs per month we knew that the financial system was on the verge of meltdown we knew that we were involved in two wars that we were inheriting a 1 3 trillion deficit we knew that this was going to be a tough time so nobody would have blamed michael if he had said you know maybe i ll make my maiden race four years from now when things are looking a little bit better but that s not what he did he stepped up and not only did he step up but since he has been in washington there has not been a better champion on behalf of middle class folks and on behalf of the dreams and aspirations that each of you carry for your children and your grandchildren than michael bennet there has not been anybody who s been fighting harder for you and taking the tough votes he was with me when we signed the recovery act that has provided a tax cut for 95 percent of working families created an entire new sector of clean energy did you know that when we started last year the recovery act we had about 2 percent of the advanced battery production here in the united states almost all of it was coming from asia we now have 20 percent capacity and we re going to go up to 40 percent capacity that s because of the kind of work that michael bennet working with his partner senator udall did we provided the biggest boost in education from the federal government in our history and not just any kind of money but rewarding success rewarding reform investing in research and development and math and science education because we understand that whatever country out educates us today is going to out compete us tomorrow and we will not tolerate america being number two or number three in the number of scientists and mathematicians we made investments not just in roads and bridges as important those are but we made investments in smart grid and high speed rail and broadband the infrastructure of the 21st century that s going to make sure that we can compete all these things were because michael pushed and michael supported an agenda that was not only going to deal with the immediate crisis but looking beyond trying to figure out what our future was going to be and that s just one of the fights he s fought alongside me and the rest of the democrats in the senate we ve been able to make sure that credit cards were no longer the source of abuse for ordinary consumers we passed housing fraud legislation to make sure that people weren t taken advantage with predatory loans we passed the largest expansion of national service that our young people can get involved at an early age in giving back to america we provided children 4 million children in this country without passing health care comprehensive health care yet we ve already provided 4 million children with health care that didn t have it before michael joined the united states senate so this guy s been fighting for you now you need to fight for him because the fact of the matter is is that this is a tough political environment i m not telling anything anybody anything they don t know as successful as the recovery act and our other steps have been in breaking the back of the recession there are still millions of people out there who are struggling who are trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage they re seeing their homes underwater they re worried about whether they can find a job if they ve already lost the one that they had and so understandably people are scared and sometimes when people are scared politics can get rough that s not unique to this period of time that s been true throughout our history and it doesn t help when you ve got an opposition that is more interested in tearing the other party down than they are in building america up but what michael understands is that as many barriers as there may be in front of us we ve got to keep on going because just walking away is not an option look he hasn t been in politics long enough to understand that the easiest way to get reelected is just to wave and smile and don t say anything offensive keep your head down don t do anything that s the best way to keep your poll numbers high but he understands that we can t afford that we can t afford to walk away from a clean energy future we can t afford to walk away from making sure that our education system is producing the kinds of scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs that are going to build our economy in the future we can t afford to walk away from a health care system that is broken for everybody for small businesses and large businesses for families who are seeing their premiums go up 25 percent 30 percent 35 percent for the millions who don t have health insurance at all and for future generations who are going to have to carry the bill if we don t get control of health care costs like medicare and medicaid he understands we cannot walk away from it and we will not walk away from it if i ve got michael bennet s help we are going to get health care reform passed in this country so yes it s tough but we re tougher we ve been through tougher times our parents our grandparents many of you in your own lives you know what it s like when you hit a barrier there are times where you feel doubtful there are times where you get weary but what has defined america throughout our history is that in fits and starts we just keep on going forward and we re driven not just by self interest we re driven not just by greed or not just by inquisitiveness we re driven by a sense of responsibility and obligation to others to this country to our community to our children to the next generation that s what drove michael into public service that s what is keeping him going even when he s away from that gorgeous family of his and that s why he needs you look there will continue to be special interests and lobbyists and those in washington who are going to try to go after a guy like this who plays it straight they re going to try to take him out they ve got all their pollsters and their and we got to this is a rookie here the guy has never cut a tv ad he doesn t know how to speak in seven minute seven second sound bites so they ve got a target on him and this becomes a test of what kind of government do we want do we want the kind of government where an outstanding individual who s in it for all the right reasons and has a track record of success in making systems work for ordinary people are we going to make sure that this guy has a long and outstanding career in washington and are we going to channel that anger and that frustration we feel sometimes understanding that michael is not part of the problem he s part of the solution and that he s somebody who is going to change washington if you send him back there and give him the kind of mandate that he deserves so my bottom line is this my bottom line is this as hard as you worked in 2008 you ve got to work harder in 2010 if you raised money for me i want you to raise more money for michael bennet if you made more if you made phone calls for me i want you to make more phones calls and i want you to twitter too for michael bennet if you knocked on doors on your block i want you to go in your whole neighborhood for michael bennet i want you to work hard because if you do then i am absolutely confident that not only is michael bennet going to continue to be the united states senator from colorado i am confident that this is going to be one of the most outstanding senators that we ve ever had and a great leader for all of america thank you very much denver let s get to work let s get busy god bless you dem bobama18 2 10b barack_obama hello denver i m fired up what a great crowd yes we can thank you thank you everybody listen let me first of all say i am thrilled to be back in denver i ve got some good friends here who i want to make sure i acknowledge in addition to the guy standing beside me here first of all your outstanding governor is in the house bill ritter where is bill there he is lieutenant governor barbara o brien is here a great partner for this guy senator mark udall is in the house congressman jared polis is here and an outstanding mayor who i think actually might make a pretty good governor john hickenlooper in the house it is great to be back in colorado i love you back i know this state is the training ground for a few winter olympians who are doing us so proud i know shaun white s secret training facility up on silverton mountain paid off i don t know how those guys do that though how do you start doing that but how do you get up the guts the first time to start practicing doing that gold medal for snowboarding colorado is the home of several olympians including lindsey vonn who brought home the gold yesterday johnny spillane who won the silver medal in nordic combined first american medal in that event so i just want all of our olympians to know that the united states of america is proud of you we are cheering for you every day i am checking my blackberry every half hour to see how things turned out i ve got some good memories of denver including one just down the road at mile high stadium some of you may have been there you know that night i talked about the promise of america and i want you to know that not a single day goes by that i don t think about the obligation that i have to keep that promise alive for every single american and every single coloradoan you re welcome thank you for giving me the privilege of every single day thinking about how can we make that american dream live for everybody not just for some and i m thrilled to be here in support of a leader who shares our commitment to that priority senator michael bennet now some of you may support him just because he s got an adorable family they are adorable but for those of you who need additional reasons let me testify about this guy he s been an agent of change in these parts for a very long time as a businessman he turned struggling companies around and got them to work better he knows how to make the private sector work then he put his talents to use making denver work better and mayor john hickenlooper one of america s finest mayors soon to be one of america s best governors knows how valuable michael can be michael closed a budget deficit and balanced two budgets in a row by finding innovative ways to get the job of city government done then he took over the public school system where progress was stalled and budgets were shrinking and he turned that around too he invested in your schools and your classrooms he expanded early childhood education for your kids finished with graduation rates up and student achievement climbing faster than in any other district in the state in just a few short years michael proved himself to be one of america s great education reformers that s right i got an amen over here so when i heard that he d be joining your other extraordinary senator mark udall i was thrilled because i knew that michael is a different kind of leader one who s unafraid to bring a fresh approach to tough challenges because he knows the old ways of doing business just won t do not anymore and colorado that is precisely the kind of leader that he has been in washington that s precisely the kind of leader he s going to continue to be when you reelect him as senator from the great state of colorado now keep in mind michael answered the call to service at an extraordinarily challenging time for colorado and for america he took office just over a year ago two days after i did and thinking about what we were facing then a financial crisis unlike any that we had seen in generations an economy that was bleeding 700 000 jobs a month a 1 3 trillion deficit two wars challenges that ranged from the specter of terrorism to the impacts of globalization and on top of that one of the toughest decades america s middle class has ever faced with stagnant job growth declining income and rising costs so when he was asked to serve he could have said i don t think so let me put this off for a while and especially when you think about the sacrifice he has to make with respect to a young family nobody would have blamed michael if he had declined the challenge he could have blinked in the face of these difficulties and shied away from an economy in turmoil he could have scanned the political landscape and seen the pain and anger that americans were feelings and said you know what let me just point fingers at somebody else and wait till things got better but that s not what michael did because that s not his style he has always thrived in taking on the tough job and he knew it would be a tough time to serve but he knew that s when you can make the greatest difference he knew that he might take a few licks as a politician but he also knew it would be nothing compared to the licks that working families all across this state and all across this country have been taking every day and so he stepped up and he has been a tremendous ally for middle class families not just here in this state but all across the country he was here by my side in denver a year ago when we signed the recovery act into law it wasn t a politically easy decision to make for any of us because we knew that we were already facing big deficits that had been run up over the last decade but we had a responsibility to do what was right for the american people and break the back of this recession that was slipping into a depression one year later thanks largely to the recovery act we can stand here again and say that a second depression is no longer a possibility an economy that was shrinking by 6 percent a year ago is now growing by nearly 6 percent according to independent nonpartisan economists there are about 2 million americans who are at work today who would otherwise be unemployed we cut taxes for 95 percent of working americans for small businesses for first time homebuyers for parents trying to care for their kids for 8 million americans paying for college we made it less expensive we extended and increased unemployment insurance for more than 19 million americans we made cobra 65 percent cheaper for families who have suffered a job lost we gave relief to states to help them through these tough times and every governor republican and democrat will acknowledge that if it hadn t been for that recovery act we would have seen police officers and firefighters and teachers laid off and we began building the infrastructure investing not just in roads and bridges in airports and railways but in the infrastructure of the future something that john hickenlooper knows a lot about making sure that we ve got high speed in this country making sure that we ve got broadband lines in this country making sure that we re investing in science and technology and education and clean energy in america that is going to assure long term growth and prosperity now you wouldn t know any of this if you just listened to those who are trying to score political points by attacking me or attacking michael or what we did despite the fact that a lot of these guys when it comes to the ribbon cuttings for the projects they show up they were holding up those big checks look what i did for you you know i m not going to give them hell i m going to tell the truth and they ll think it s hell that s what harry truman said but that s politics as usual we ve become accustomed to it we ve become numb to it we re just accustomed to falsehoods and exaggerations and slash and burn politics but michael and i we don t have time for that nonsense we re going to keep doing everything in our power to turn this economy around we won t rest as long as millions are still without work or millions are still working harder and harder for less until they begin to feel recovery in their own lives we re going to keep on working because for years americans just doing their best to live up to their responsibilities have seen their leaders fail to live up to their responsibilities we ve got a washington here every day is election day on wall street they ve seen failure rewarded in the hallways of both cities you see lobbyists and special interests using money and connections to stack the deck and pundits who all they re interested in is the political game is the red team winning is the blue team winning instead of are the american people winning and so people are fed up because it s not a game it s not a game and when i get out and i talk with workers in factories and families in diners nobody is asking who s up who s down what s the latest poll number look like no one is asking me hey you know who won the media cycle today they re interested in how are we going to help them find a job when they ve only known one trade in their whole life how are they going to send their kids to college how are they going to pay the bills if they get sick how are they going to retire when their savings are so beat up and who if anybody is going to confront the real problems that touch their lives that s why i ran for president that s why i was in mile high stadium that s why michael bennet signed up to be your senator that s why we are not going to quit we do not quit because we believe if we re going to secure a better future for the people of this state and the american people as michael so eloquently spoke about we re going to have to change the ways of washington we re going to have to solve problems that keep holding us back and we ve got no time to waste now look this is a problem that transcends party what s happening in washington right now a couple weeks ago i went to the capitol to speak with democratic senators and michael stood up and he s new so he s still kind of puzzled as to why is nothing getting done so michael stood up he challenged everybody in the room including me he said this place looks broken to the american people what can we do differently what do we need do differently democrats and republicans so that democracy can meet the test that we re facing right now that s what michael asked me that s what the american people are asking now the first thing i ll say is you ve got to have more leaders like michael bennet because he s determined to break through partisan gridlock to get the tough stuff done he s fearless when it comes to challenging the old assumptions and the tired debates and the entrenched special interests that have stymied progress for too long he told me about a woman he met from glenwood springs she asked him where could she get her lobbyist in washington i don t know what he told her but i if she were here i would tell her you don t need a lobbyist because you ve got michael bennet as senator and you ve got mark udall as senator and they are going to be looking out for your interests the only agenda michael has is yours he understands that there s something more important than pursuing power or clinging on to your seat or scoring points and that s breaking free from the politics of the past and moving america forward at this defining moment in our history look we can keep on being consumed by the politics of energy but we know that there are factories to reopen and assembly lines to restart and workers ready to build wind turbines and solar panels and advanced batteries right here in the united states of america we know that whoever leads the clean energy revolution is going to lead the 21st century economy the people of colorado understand that michael bennet understands that and we can t wait we can t wait because china is not waiting india is not waiting germany is not waiting we can t afford to wait exactly we can t continue to spin our wheels in the old education debates the stale debates they pit teachers against reformers meanwhile kids are trailing their counterparts all around the world so we need to do what michael did here in denver which is to bring people together get them talking build consensus around reform because we know that the country that out educates us today is going to out compete us tomorrow and we don t want that future for our young people we re not going to sentence them to a lifetime of lower wages and unfulfilled dreams we can continue to ignore the growing burden of runaway health care costs and we all know what will happen if we do it s already happening just the other week one of california s largest insurers sent a letter to a million customers saying your premiums are going to go up by as much as 39 percent it s not just happening there it s happening in kansas it s happening in missouri it s happening in maine you name it across the country it s happening it s going to be happening here already happened now after folks found out about this rate hike they caused a ruckus and the insurance company said well we ll put it off for couple months i m sure they re going to work on their pr a little more the reform before congress that people like michael and myself have been working on would help prevent such hikes from happening and if we walk away from it we know that premiums and out of pocket expenses will keep rising this decade just as they did in the last decade more small businesses are going to be priced out of the insurance market more business more big businesses are going to be unable to compete internationally more of you will see health care taking a bigger and bigger bite out of your paychecks millions will lose their coverage our deficits will keep on growing because health care costs by far is the biggest driver of deficits and that s why we re not going to walk away from it that s why i ve asked leaders of both parties to come meet with me next week i want to see what their ideas are because we know we ve got ideas that will work for america and we can t afford to wait we can keep on playing games with the deficit but michael bennet refuses to he was a strong supporter of the paygo law that says surprisingly enough to congress you have to pay as you go a novel concept that helped produce the budget surpluses of the 1990s if you want to spend on something new you ve got to cut back somewhere else michael was part of a majority in the senate that supported the creation of an independent bipartisan fiscal commission to help us find long term solutions to some of the problems that we re facing there you go now unfortunately partisanship blocked that step some of you read about this how there were seven people who were co sponsors of this bill that would create this fiscal commission who when i decided i was for it suddenly were against it they were sponsors of the bill so we said okay that s all right i ll establish one on my own national commission on fiscal responsibility we signed it today alan simpson a republican erskine bowles a democrat to find real solutions michael held an event out here recently where he was talking about fiscal discipline and his 10 year old daughter caroline came to watch there she is wave yes there she is when she was born america had a surplus but after two tax cuts two wars a prescription drug program none of which were paid for we faced a deficit of over 1 trillion and projected deficits of 8 trillion over the next decade that s all before my administration spent a single dollar then you had the recession that s another 3 billion and then we did have to make sure that we were stimulating the economy and that cost about a trillion dollars a fraction of the overall debt so that s we inherited and as michael and his daughter walked out of the event she was listening to all this i don t know if you were adding all this up in your head caroline but she said dad just so you know i m not paying for all that that s a smart kid her message was crystal clear the american people did not send us to washington to argue they didn t send us to washington to obstruct they sent us there to do what it takes not to win the next election but to help the next generation you sent us there to work together to do what s right to solve our problems once and for all now you ve got a senator right now who goes to work every single day with that mission in mind and even though michael bennet has been serving you for years believe it or not this is his first election he s a heck of a public servant but he s new to politics do he hasn t learned the best way to keep your poll numbers up is just to smile and wave and pretend like you re doing something and not really doing anything that might offend anybody he hasn t perfected the seven second sound bite he s never even made a tv ad heaven forbid and he s facing reelection in a tough political climate look something you got to understand for those who don t believe in government those who don t believe that we have obligations to each other it s a lot easier task if you can gum up the works if you make things broken if the senate doesn t get anything done well that s consistent with their philosophy it s a whole lot easier to say no to everything it s a whole lot easier to blame somebody else that politics that feeds on peoples insecurities especially during tough political times that s the easiest kind of politics there s a long storied history of that kind of politics and so michael is running in a very tough environment but he s got one very powerful advantage he s got you he s been fighting for each and every one of you in washington he needs you to fight for him now and if you do that if you re willing to organize and make phone calls and talk to your friends and your neighbors and explain to them what s at stake if you come out and caucus for michael on march 16th and then fight for him all the way to november if you help him finish what we ve started we re not just going to move colorado forward we re going to move america forward and we re going to guarantee that this century is the american century just like the last one is let s get to work colorado god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama18 3 10a barack_obama good morning everybody please have a seat well on this beautiful morning we are here to mark the passage of a welcome piece of legislation for our fellow americans who are seeking work in this difficult economy but first let me say a few words about the latest development in the debate over health insurance reform i don t know if you guys have been hearing but there s been a big debate going on here this morning a new analysis from the congressional budget office concludes that the reform we seek would bring 1 3 trillion in deficit reduction over the next two decades that makes this legislation the most significant effort to reduce deficits since the balanced budget act in the 1990s and this is this is but one virtue of a reform that will bring new accountability to the insurance industry and greater economic security to all americans so i urge every member of congress to consider this as they prepare for their important vote this weekend and i want to welcome all the members of congress who are here those who are on stage madam speaker majority leader reid as well as some of my cabinet members who are here in a few moments i ll sign what s called the hire act a jobs bill that will encourage businesses to hire and help put americans back to work and i d like to say a few words about what this jobs bill will mean for workers for businesses and for america s economic recovery there are a number of ways to look at an economic recovery through the eyes of an economist you look at the different stages of recovery you look at whether an economy has begun to grow at whether businesses have begun to hire temporary workers or increase the hours of existing workers you look at whether businesses small and large have begun to hire full time employees again that s how economists measure a recovery and by those measures we are beginning to move in the right direction but through the eyes of most americans recovery is about something more fundamental do i have a decent job can i provide for my family do i feel a sense of financial security the great recession that we ve just gone through took a terrible toll on the middle class and on our economy as a whole for every one of the over 8 million people who lost their jobs in recent years there s a story of struggle of a family that s forced to choose between paying their electricity bill or the car insurance or the daughter s college tuition of weddings and vacations and retirements that have been postponed so here s the good news a consensus is forming that partly because of the necessary and often unpopular measures we took over the past year our economy is now growing again and we may soon be adding jobs instead of losing them the jobs bill i m signing today is intended to help accelerate that process i m signing it mindful that as i ve said before the solution to our economic problems will not come from government alone government can t create all the jobs we need or can it repair all the damage that s been done by this recession but what we can do is promote a strong dynamic private sector the true engine of job creation in our economy we can help to provide an impetus for america s businesses to start hiring again we can nurture the conditions that allow companies to succeed and to grow and that s exactly what this jobs bill will help us do now make no mistake while this jobs bill is absolutely necessary it s by no means enough there s a lot more that we re going to need to do to spur hiring in the private sector and bring about full economic recovery from helping creditworthy small businesses to get loans that they need to expand to offering incentives to make homes and businesses more energy efficient to investing in infrastructure so we can put americans to work doing the work that america needs done nevertheless this jobs bill will make a difference in several important ways first we will forgive payroll taxes for businesses that hire someone who s been out of work at least two months that s a tax benefit that will apply to unemployed workers hired between last month and the end of this year so this tax cut says to employers if you hire a worker who s unemployed you won t have to pay payroll taxes on that worker for the rest of the year and businesses that move quickly to hire today will get a bigger tax credit than businesses that wait until later this year this tax cut will be particularly helpful to small business owners many of them are on the fence right now about whether to bring in that extra worker or two or whether they should hire anyone at all and this jobs bill should help make their decision that much easier and by the way i d like to note that part of what health insurance reform would do is to provide tax credits for over 4 million small businesses so they don t have to choose between hiring workers and offering coverage the second thing this bill does is to encourage small businesses to grow and to hire by permitting them to write off investments they make in equipment this year these kinds of expenses typically take years to depreciate but under this law businesses will be able to invest up to 250 000 let s say in a piece of factory equipment and write it off right away put simply we ll give businesses an incentive to invest in their own future and to do it today third we ll reform municipal bonds to encourage job creation by expanding investment in schools and clean energy projects say a town wants to put people to work rebuilding a crumbling elementary school or putting up wind turbines with this law we ll make it easier for them to raise the money they need to do what they want to do by using a model that we ve called build america bonds one of the most successful programs in the recovery act we ll give americans a better chance to invest in the future of their communities and of the country and finally this jobs bill will maintain crucial investments in our roads and our bridges as we head into the spring and summer months when construction jobs are picking up i want to commend all the members of congress and their leadership is what made this bill possible many of them are here today i m also gratified that over a dozen republicans agreed that the need for this jobs bill was urgent and that they were willing to break out of the partisan morass to help us take this forward step for the american people i hope this is a prelude to further cooperation in the days and months to come as we continue to work on digging our way out of the recession and rebuilding our economy in a way that works for all americans and not just some americans after all the jobs bill i m signing today and our broader efforts to achieve a recovery aren t about politics they re not about democrat versus republican this isn t a game that we re playing here they re about the people in this country who are out of work and looking for a job they re about all the americans of every race and region and age who ve shared their stories with me over the last year the single mother who s told me she s filled out hundreds of job applications and been on dozens of interviews but still hasn t found a job the father whose son told me he started working when he was a teenager and recently found himself out of a job for the very first time in his life the children who write to me they re worried about their moms and their dads worried about what the future holds for their families that s who i m thinking about every morning when i enter into the oval office that s who i m signing this bill for and that s who i m going to continue to fight for so long as i am president of the united states so with that let me sign this bill and let s get to work dem bobama18 3 10b barack_obama good evening everybody welcome to st patrick s day at the white house on a day when springtime is in the air and this is even though the taoiseach hasn t even shared his shamrocks yet but we can feel spring coming before i say anything else let me just say that i could not have a better partner in a difficult job than the vice president of the united states joe biden he does a great job each and every day and i couldn t have a better partner in life than the first lady of the united states michelle obama welcome back mr prime minister first lady we are thrilled to have you the irish and irish americans are out in force tonight i believe if i m not mistaken that supreme court justice anthony kennedy is here a couple of my cabinet secretaries are here as well secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius and secretary of homeland security janet napolitano i would love to acknowledge all the members of congress who are here tonight but there are a few dozen of you including three or four murphys there s one right there you re everywhere governor martin o malley who s been known to be the lead in an irish rock band governor bob mcdonnell is here of the great commonwealth of virginia and mayor tom menino shipped down from boston my dear friend the united states ambassador to ireland and the person who is singly responsible for converting the entire country to become steelers fans dan rooney and his counterpart the irish ambassador to the united states michael collins so welcome everybody this has been a wonderful day filled with good reminders of just how deeply woven the ties between our two countries are we welcomed back a friend the taoiseach he and i remarked once again of our shared ties to county offaly he was born there and when i was running for president it was brought to my attention that i want to make sure i get this straight it was my great great great great grandfather on my mother s side who hailed from moneygall i wish i knew about this when i was running in chicago i also had the pleasure of welcoming back first minister peter robinson and deputy first minister martin mcguinness of northern ireland two men who have stood together with conviction to chart a historic path towards peace they are here tonight we were thinking about sending them up to congress tomorrow to see if they can share some of their secrets i also just met with andrew sens and brigadier general i want to make sure i get this right tauno niemenen who because of their successful leadership are winding down the work of the independent commission on decommissioning after 12 years and matt baggott the chief constable of the police service of northern ireland whose fairness and impartiality is keeping the peace across all of northern ireland s communities so thank you twelve years ago america was inspired by the brave men and women who found the courage to see past the scars of a troubled past so that their children would know a better future and we are watching you and continue to be inspired by your extraordinary work it s wonderful to have everybody here at the white house here tonight during his last visit the taoiseach mentioned that the irish diaspora is some 70 million strong which is obviously impressive for a small island and it s even more impressive that they all find their way to america for st patrick s day i can make that joke as somebody of irish heritage i should mention by the way that we were discussing this with my mayor from chicago mayor daley and i told him that i had this irish heritage and he said that he had actually kenyan blood in him also it just goes to show that in recent decades it has become cool to be irish it s the phenomenon the irish poet and joe biden s favorite poet seamus heaney once described in stunned fashion as the manifestation of sheer bloody genius ireland is chic and obviously we know though that that wasn t always the case after centuries of oppression the irish began coming to america even before america had been won many came with no family no friends no money nothing to sustain their voyage but faith faith in the almighty faith in a better life over the horizon and faith that in america you can make it if you try and in the wake of a great hunger that migration intensified and the irish carved out a place for themselves in our nation s story america and ireland our brawn and our blood side by side in the making and remaking of this nation pulling it westward pushing it skyward moving it forward even if it was a nation that was not always as welcoming as it could be but with hard work and toughness and loyalty and faith the irish persevered and in the process they secured the future for generations of irish americans free to live their lives as they will and today free to argue openly and proudly about who is more irish than whom so it can be easy to forget that there was a time when no irish need apply particularly when it was half a century ago this year that john f kennedy walked through the doors of this house as the first irish catholic president of the united states one person who never forgot this history someone who frequently recalled his grandfather s vivid stories of those days who through his office window could see the boston harbor steps where his eight irish grandparents first set foot in america was the president s youngest brother and our dear friend ted kennedy he knew as we do that our nation is infinitely richer for not only the contributions of the irish throughout history but the contributions of people from around the world that s why i m pleased that there s bipartisan progress being made in an area that i know was close to his big heart and that s fixing our broken immigration system and that s why my own commitment to comprehensive immigration reform remains unwavering in this and every other battle for progress ted was a tireless warrior and i know that we could use him this week i am so glad that we re joined tonight by his wife vicki his daughter kara his son congressman patrick kennedy and his sister in law ethel kennedy as well as a whole bunch of nieces and nephews please give them a big round of applause both of our nations are down one friend a champion and peacemaker but it wouldn t be irish mourning without some undercurrent of joy so while teddy s laughter may not shake the walls of this house tonight as it did so many times over the past half century ours will not be diminished while his singing may not fill these rooms i suspect that won t stop some of you from trying you don t have to try though that s why we brought in the entertainment this is rightly a day for celebration and good cheer between america and one of her oldest friends and it s a partnership that extends to our earliest days as a republic so before i turn it over to the taoiseach let me leave you with all the words from those early days that speak to why this has been such an incredible relationship between our two countries these are words spoken by the father of our country george washington when our friendless standards were first unfurled who were the strangers who first mustered around our staff and when it reeled in the light who more brilliantly sustained it than erin s generous sons ireland thou friend of my country in my country s most friendless days much injured much enduring land accept this poor tribute from one who esteems thy worth and mourns thy desolation may the god of heaven in his justice and mercy grant thee more prosperous fortunes and in his own time cause the sun of freedom to shed its benign radiance on the emerald isle to all of you from near and far and over all the years and tests ahead may america and ireland forever brilliantly sustain one another s sons and daughters and with that to our guest the taoiseach of ireland on behalf of the american people we want to thank you for your presence here we are proud to call you a friend this day and every day and we are looking forward to planting this little piece of ireland in the garden here in the white house happy st patrick s day everybody the taoiseach the prime minister of ireland brian cowen dem bobama18 5 10 barack_obama hello hello hello hey it s good to see you thank you thank you everybody everybody please have a seat let me first of all just say thank you to some people who are doing outstanding work beginning with somebody who i think is one of the best governors we ve got in this country and just a great guy give it up for ted strickland your governor you ve got an outstanding young mayor mayor jay williams the mayor of girard jim melfi is here as well secretary of state jennifer brunner and three terrific members of congress tim ryan charlie wilson john boccieri give them all a big round of applause it is good to be back in ohio and it is good to be back in mahoning valley i appreciate the chance to tour this unbelievable facility you know sometimes when you re president you get kind of jaded you know you ve seen a lot of stuff you go through these factories this one when you walk through is just unbelievable it s like off of a movie set and so it was exciting to see but what was especially exciting was to see all the people who are working here and to see the work that you re doing here so i saw the 85 ton electric arc furnace i didn t see any evidence but i know that you re building iron man s suits somewhere in here i appreciate the time that i ve had to spend with all of you partly because it s just nice to get out of washington washington is a wonderful place beautiful nice monuments i have this nice home office live right above the store so i don t have a commute but sometimes in washington everybody is spending all their time arguing about politics and you lose track of the folks who sent you there in the first place and so it s important for me to meet you directly and hear your concerns and your hopes and your dreams and i ve been trying to make a habit out of doing this about once a week i try to take a trip like this just to talk to folks who are working in various parts of our economy and to find out what s going on in communities and obviously the issue that s front and center on everybody s minds is the state of our economy in the two years i was running for president i wasn t any stranger to this state these guys know i came here an awful lot and i saw firsthand what years of failed policies have done to working families and i saw how hard these guys were working to put ohio back to work and the mahoning valley is a place that doesn t need an economist to tell you when a recession begins or when a recession ends because plenty of folks here have known their own private recessions for 10 20 30 years now they may not have seen one like the one we just had with an unemployment rate here that s at 14 percent and families having a tougher time than they d ever imagined and a lot of people let s just be blunt aren t always real impressed when a governor or a president comes swooping in and talking about the economy because the only headline they want to see is the headline that says you re hired but i do want to talk about a piece of encouraging news for a change something concrete not just a lot of talk because for a lot of the last two years you didn t always get a lot of good news a year ago we took significant action to jumpstart economic growth and job creation that action included making investments in sectors with the greatest potential for private sector job growth areas like clean energy and infrastructure and one of those investments is going towards revitalizing the site right next door preparing it for new construction and building a rail spur that connects to the norfolk southern line that runs through town so as a result of this investment v m star s parent company decided to invest 650 million of its own money its own money to build a new one million square foot mill right here in youngstown the largest industrial plant built in the valley since gm built its plant over in lordstown in the 1960s think about that biggest investment since the 1960s 50 years so right here in the heart of the old steel corridor where some never thought we d see an investment like this again they re placing a bet on american manufacturing and on this community and that bet is going to pay off for 400 construction jobs once they break ground this summer 350 new manufacturing jobs once the mill comes online which doubles the current workforce and as everybody here knows every time a new factory or plant opens or expands in america it doesn t just employ the people who are working at the plant everybody here suddenly they ve got a little more money to go buy lunch somewhere or buy a computer for their kids or do something else and so it becomes an economic lifeline for the whole community capable of supporting hundreds or even thousands of jobs indirectly and so that s a success story that all of you are part of now i don t want to suggest this one plant and the jobs it ll create are going to make the difference for the entire community it took us decades to get to where we are it s going to take some time to get to the point where we need to be but just think about where we were a year ago our economy was collapsing our businesses were losing 750 000 jobs every month economists across the spectrum were warning very seriously of the possibility of another great depression and all of this was on top of one of the toughest decades for america s middle class that we ve ever seen so that was the situation just a year ago everybody has got kind of a selective memory here but nobody was sure whether the economy was going to hold up so we had to make a choice we could sit back do nothing make a bunch of excuses play politics and watch america s decline or we could stand up and fight for our future and i ran for president youngstown because i believe that we re at a defining moment in our history and if we re going to keep the american dream alive not just for us but for the next generation then we couldn t just sit back and put off solving these big problems we had to tackle them head on job one was rescuing our economy and that required some steps that were frankly unpopular steps like stabilizing a financial system that was on the brink of collapse and intervening in an auto industry that was on the brink of extinction i knew those steps would be unpopular even in ohio even in michigan even in auto making states if you polled people said don t do anything about the auto companies and i knew politics being what it is that some people would try to score political points off our decisions but i think it s fair to say any fair minded person would say that if we hadn t acted more people in the valley more people in ohio more people across america would be out of work today i mean i can just give you a very concrete example the gm plant over in lordstown would not be there because gm would have liquidated instead gm is paying back its debts turned a profit for the first time in three years and a third shift is about to come back to work in lordstown putting that plant at maximum capacity right next door and by the way it was in part because of the decisions that these three guys made in congress that s not easy they ve been knocked they ve got bumps all over the backs of their heads some on top but it was the right thing to do today my administration is announcing a landmark agreement to help dozens of communities like youngstown revitalize and redevelop old shuttered gm facilities preparing them for new industries new jobs and new opportunity these steps were the right thing to do and it was the right thing to do to give tax relief to small businesses and working families right in the middle of this enormous recession 4 5 million working families in ohio alone got tax breaks most of you guys didn t know it didn t notice it in your paycheck we didn t go around advertising it but each paycheck was a little bit bigger because of the steps that we took and that meant that you could recirculate that money into the economy and keep demand up which helped avert a depression that was the right thing to do it was the right thing to do to give loans to small businesses to keep their doors open more than 2 400 right here in ohio got small business loans because of the recovery act because of the work that these guys did it was the right thing to do to extend unemployment benefits and make cobra cheaper for people caught up in the recession until they could get back on their feet there s probably not a single person here who doesn t know somebody who either got unemployment benefits or used cobra to make sure they could keep health insurance for their families when they lost their job that was the right thing to do it was the right thing to do to help governors like ted avoid massive cuts to medicaid and layoffs to teachers and police officers and it was the right thing to do to invest in this town s infrastructure we put all of that stuff in the recovery package because it was the right thing to do now we ve got a long way to go before this recovery is felt in the lives of our neighbors and in all the communities that have lost so much ground in this recession and in years before but despite that sobering reality despite all the naysayers in washington who are always looking for the cloud in every silver lining the fact is our economy is growing again last month we gained 290 000 jobs so think about this we gained more jobs last month than any time in four years and it was the fourth month in a row that we ve added jobs and almost all those jobs are in the private sector everybody talks about government was doing this government was doing that now what we did was we encouraged the private sector gave them the funding the financing the support the infrastructure support in order to invest and get the economy moving again and last month also brought the largest increase in manufacturing employment since 1998 1998 because i believe in manufacturing and i believe in manufacturing right here in the united states of america we can compete against anybody youngstown can compete against anybody you got the best workers there s no reason why we can t compete with anybody if you guys have the support that you need and you know what i think those critics who have been trying to badmouth these efforts they know it s working these folks who opposed this every step of the way predicting nothing but failure they know it s working because this always puts a smile on my face even as they ve tried to score political points attacking these members of congress a lot of them go home and then they claim credit for the very things they voted against they ll show up at the to cut the ribbons they ll put out a press release they ll send the mailings touting the very projects that they were opposing in washington they re trying to have it both ways i know that s hard to imagine in politics that a politician might try to have it both ways but here s the fact if the just say no crowd had won out if we had done things the way they wanted to go we d be in a deeper world of hurt than we are right now families wouldn t have seen those tax cuts small businesses wouldn t have gotten those loans or those health care tax credits that they re now eligible for insurance companies would still be deciding who they want to cover and when they want to cover them and dropping your health care coverage whenever they felt like it the steady progress we re beginning to see across america would not exist and neither would the plant that you re about to build so i invite anybody who thinks we shouldn t have taken those actions that we took last year or made those investments to come to youngstown and explain to us why that plant shouldn t be built come talk to ted strickland and the mayor come tell us why companies like this in towns like youngstown shouldn t be given every chance to expand and add new jobs tell us why small businesses shouldn t receive tax credits so they can help purchase health insurance for their employees explain why seniors shouldn t get help paying for their medications when they hit that gap called the doughnut hole explain why we should tell families that children with preexisting conditions aren t going to be able to get health insurance because we decided that insurance companies should be able to do whatever they want they need to explain why they would be nothing to make doing nothing to solve some of these problems that have been plaguing america for years now decades so i m here to say that s not how we deal with crises that s not what america is about we did not become the greatest economic power that the world has ever known by avoiding problems the united states of america does not play for second place we step up we face our challenges we compete and we win and that s something we should all agree on but everybody should be able to agree on that for all the things we ve gotten done despite the unified determined opposition of one party imagine how much further we could have gotten if i d gotten a little help if people decided to step up it doesn t mean they have to agree with me on everything but step up take responsibility don t just play political games you re welcome i truly it is not too late to work together not when there s so much progress to make so many more success stories like this one to write because we re not democrats first or republicans first we are americans first that s what we re about so i know it s still tough i know a lot of times the future still feels uncertain and i m not going to stand here and pretend that things are back to normal or even close to where they need to be i read too many letters each night from people who are hurting who are still out of work so i know things are still tough out there but i will tell you one thing it s people like you people in towns like youngstown all across america that i m thinking about every single day when i go to the oval office i ran for office to make sure not just you but your kids and your grandkids have a shot at the american dream because i wouldn t be in office if somebody hadn t worked hard to give me a shot at the american dream i didn t come from money i didn t come from a powerful family i got a name nobody could pronounce but somebody gave me a shot somebody made an investment in me that s why i ran for president that s why i wake up every morning insisting to everybody who works for me that we re not going to rest until the future brightens for middle class americans all across this country hardworking people and i m absolutely convinced that the steps that we re taking are going to help us bring about a better future for america i believe that seeking new markets for our exports is the right thing to do and that enforcing the rules of free and fair trade is the right thing to do for our workers and for our companies i believe that investing in a clean energy economy to create good jobs of the future building pipe for natural gas but also building windmills and steel and turbines and advanced batteries for the new generation of electric cars that s the right thing to do for our economy and for our environment i believe that raising standards in our schools and making college more affordable and upgrading our community colleges is the right thing to do so that every child has a chance to live out their dreams i believe that reforming our health care system to crack down on the worst practices of the insurance companies and giving everybody a decent shot at getting health insurance is the right thing to do and trying to control costs on premiums is the right thing to do it s the right thing to do for families and it s the right thing to do for businesses so we re going to keep up every effort to rebuild our economy and restore some security for the middle class a middle class forged in plants just like this one so that places like youngstown don t just survive year after year but they are thriving year after year and as long as i have the privilege of being your president i m going to keep fighting for a future that is brighter for this community and for ohio and for the united states of america the country that we love god bless you god bless all the work here god bless the united states of america appreciate you dem bobama18 6 10 barack_obama good afternoon everybody well it is great to be back in ohio strickland said i ve been in ohio so much he might start charging me for it it is wonderful to be back in ohio and it is wonderful to be back in the beautiful city of columbus i just want to say thank you right off the top to mayor coleman for his outstanding leadership of this city you ve got one of the best mayors in the country you also got one of the best governors in the country in ted strickland and i also want to just acknowledge that you re going to have one of the best you already have one of the best senators in sherrod brown and you re going to have another one in lee fisher so we appreciate the great work that they re doing i m going to mention some of the congressional delegations here because they ve got a lot to do with what s going on at this site my last visit here was a little over a year ago when i came to take part in a graduation ceremony for 114 the 114th class of the columbus police recruits some of you may remember that i know the mayor does i don t have to tell anybody here that these have been difficult times for ohio and difficult times for the country and when i was here last america was losing 700 000 jobs per month our economy was shrinking plants and businesses right here in ohio were closing and we knew that if we failed to act then things were only going to get much worse that s why with the support of sherrod brown but also members of the house of representatives mary jo kilroy steve driehaus and charlie wilson who are all here wave guys that s why these folks worked so hard to pass the recovery act which cut taxes for middle class families that way boosting demand cutting taxes for small businesses so that they could make payroll and keep their doors open extending unemployment insurance and cobra to help folks make it through some really tough times to rebuild our infrastructure and make investments that would spur additional investments from the private sector and strengthen our country in the long run that s what the recovery act was all about and since then here in ohio nearly 2 400 small businesses have gotten loans to keep their doors open and their workers on payroll 4 5 million families have gotten tax cuts to help pay their bills and put food on the table some 450 transportation projects are underway or have been completed and more than 100 000 ohioans are at work today as a result of these steps and today i return to columbus to mark a milestone on the road to recovery the 10 000th project launched under the recovery act that s worth a big round of applause and i want to thank secretary ray lahood who has been instrumental in so many of the projects that have taken place he has done an outstanding job as have our other agencies in administering these programs now these projects haven t just improved communities they ve put thousands of construction crews just like this one to work they ve spurred countless small businesses to hire because these are some big guys here so they got to eat which means that you got to get some food brought in or the local restaurants here benefit from the crews being here at work it means that instead of worrying about where their next paycheck is going to come from americans across the country are helping to build our future and their own futures now as my friend joe biden who has done a great job overseeing the recovery act would say this is a big deal and i think it s fitting that we ve reached this milestone here in this community because what you re doing here is a perfect example of the kind of innovation and coordination and renewal that the recovery act is driving all across this country a lot of people came together to make this day possible business and government grassroots organizations ordinary citizens who are committed to this city s future and what you re starting here is more than just a project to repair a road it s a partnership to transform a community mayor coleman was describing for me how all these pieces fit together on the way over here so the city is using recovery dollars to rebuild the infrastructure and because of that in part the hospital is expanding its operations to take even better care of more people more children here in columbus and throughout ohio which means they re hiring more people so together you re creating more than 2 300 new jobs and sending a powerful message that this neighborhood will soon be a place where more families can thrive more businesses can prosper economic development that s being sparked today is going to continue into the future and my understanding is because the hospital is now growing that means they re putting money back into the neighborhood for housing and other facilities so that the entire community starts rebuilding ultimately that s the purpose of the recovery act not just to jumpstart the economy and get us out of the hole that we re in right now but to make the investments that will spur growth and spread prosperity and pay dividends to our communities for generations to come since i was here last year we ve begun to see progress all across the country businesses are beginning to hire again our economy which was shrinking by 6 percent when i was sworn in is now growing at a good clip and we ve added jobs for six out of the past seven months in this country we were losing 700 000 jobs a month for the last six out of the last seven months we ve increased jobs here in the united states of america in part because of the policies that these members of congress were willing to step up and implement now i m under no illusion that we re where we need to be yet i know that a lot of families and communities have yet to feel the effects of the recovery in their own lives there are still too many people here in ohio and across the country who can t find work many more can t make ends meet and for these folks the only jobs we create that matter are the ones that provide for their families so while the recovery may start with projects like this it can t end here the truth is if we want to keep on adding jobs if we want to keep on raising incomes if we want to keep growing both our economy and our middle class if we want to ensure that americans can compete with any nation in the world we re going to have to get serious about our long term vision for this country and we re going to have to get serious about our infrastructure and i want to say a few words about infrastructure generally along with investments in health care education clean energy and a 21st century financial system that protects consumers and our economy rebuilding our infrastructure is one of the keys to our future prosperity if we re going to rebuild america s economy then we ve got to rebuild america period from the ports and the airways that ship our goods to the roads and the transit systems that move our workers and connect cities and businesses now some of this work involves fixing infrastructure that s already in place patching up roads repairing bridges replacing old sewer lines and the recovery act has made important investments in all these things i mean we ve got a huge backlog of work just with the infrastructure that we ve got that could put hundreds of thousands of people to work all across the country just repairing roads that we already have and fixing sewer lines that are badly in need of repair but here s the thing columbus repairing our existing infrastructure is not enough we can t build an economy that sustains our kids and our grandkids just by relying on the infrastructure that we inherited from our parents and our grandparents we can t let other countries get the jump on us when it comes to broadband access there s no reason why europe or china should have the fastest trains instead of the united states there s no reason that germany or other countries in europe should have the newest factories that manufacture clean energy products instead of us right here in the united states that s why the recovery act has been making unprecedented investments in clean energy spurring america s businesses to build some of the world s largest wind and solar projects right here in the united states of america i said this once at a state of the union address america does not settle for second place and we re going to make the investments to make sure we are first in the future not just in the past that s got to be our priority that s why we re bringing high speed internet to ten thousands of homes tens of thousands of homes and businesses and hospitals and schools it s why ray lahood is helping to lead a surge in new investment in high speed rail that s why we re investing in electronic medical records a year ago american businesses had just 2 percent of the market in the production of electric car batteries that power the vehicles of the future all these hybrid cars that have electric batteries those batteries were made someplace else we only had 2 percent of them we made investments in the recovery act and by 2015 u s companies are going to have 40 percent of the global market we have created an advanced battery manufacturing facility facilities right here in the united states that are going to allow us to maintain that cutting edge from the very first railroads to the interstate highway system our nation has always been built to compete and you know the history of ohio is a testament to that nearly two centuries ago our nation s first federally funded highway the national road was extended across ohio bringing a generation of settlers west to this new frontier and paving the way for the automobile that would transform our landscape and for our economy to thrive in this new century we ve got to act with that same sense of purpose and that same spirit of innovation that s why the recovery is just beginning just the beginning of the investments we re going to have to make for years on our infrastructure it s just the beginning of the work of increasing our mobility and our productivity reducing congestion reducing pollution creating good jobs that can t be shipped overseas because we know what we can achieve when we act boldly and invest wisely we re seeing it right here in this community we see it in this hospital and the depths of its commitment to this city we see it in the city leaders who saw a need and an opportunity in this neighborhood and decided to act we see it in the folks right here who are ready to get to work building this road and providing for their families and i m confident that we ll soon see it in new families and businesses that are calling this area home it is with that vision of a brighter future for this city and for the country that we begin this project and i am looking forward to seeing all that you achieve in the years and months to come so thank you congratulations for the great work you guys are doing god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama18 8 10a barack_obama hello miami it is good to be back it is good to be back in miami i was just in florida and it is true that sasha outscored me on the first hole i took her i think on the third it was tight the whole way though but it is wonderful to see all of you looking out at this crowd i know how many of you worked so hard on my campaign worked hard on behalf of democrats for years here in florida and are going to be working hard on behalf of the great ticket that we re going to be having this year there are a number of people that i want to acknowledge obviously first of all you have got a wonderful senior senator right here in florida who s working hard every day give bill nelson a big round of applause an outstanding congressional delegation ron kline is here alan grayson is here ted deutch is here debbie wasserman schultz is here soon to be member of congress joe garcia running in florida s 25th running for florida attorney general dan gelber is here state senator also running for florida attorney general dave aronberg also state senator is here we ve got scott maddox who s running for agricultural commissioner for the state and we ve got matti bower mayor of miami beach in the house so as i said it s just great to be with friends and you were with me when we were up you were with me when we were down if it weren t for you i would not be standing here as president of the united states and as your president it is my honor it is my honor to stand in support of the next governor of the great state of florida alex sink at a difficult time like this you need somebody in tallahassee like alex she combines the sensibility of a successful businesswoman with the tenacity of a consumer watchdog which is what she s been for the last four years as florida s cfo she s cut waste she s eliminated unnecessary contracts she s saved the state tens of millions of dollars she s protected countless seniors and homeowners from being taken advantage of by predatory lenders she s put this state s entire checkbook online so that you know exactly how your tax dollars are being spent and now she s running to be the economic ambassador for this state with a plan to attract new companies and new jobs and new opportunities to the sunshine state so alex knows what it takes to change business as usual in tallahassee she s not afraid to take on the status quo she s done it before she s going to do it again so i want all of you to do me a favor i know everybody here i m preaching to the choir but i need you to talk to your friends i need you to talk to your neighbors i need you to send out email blasts i need you to raise money i need you to walk and knock on doors whatever it takes to make sure that alex sink is the next governor of florida we need to move forward in this state let me also say something about the next senator from the state of florida kendrick meek kendrick has been a champion of middle class families and somebody who has not been afraid to stand up to the status quo and special interests so we need that kind of fighter in the united states senate i need you to help him get there we need leaders like alex and kendrick in this country because we are facing an incredibly challenging time eighteen months ago i took office after nearly a decade of economic policies that produced sluggish growth and falling incomes and falling wages and took a record surplus to a record deficit and these policies culminated in the worst recession of our lifetimes in the last six months of 2008 three million americans lost their jobs the month i was sworn in 800 000 more americans lost their jobs the month after that 600 000 the month after that 600 000 before we could even get our economic policies in place we had already seen devastation across this country and behind these numbers behind these statistics there s a story of heartache and frustration a factory worker who was just a few years shy of retirement suddenly seeing his plant closed and not knowing where to turn or a single mom who sends out application after application but doesn t get a call back and wonders how she s going to pay the bills or a college graduate who worked hard got a degree and all they ve got to show for it is a mountain of debt and then some kids planning to go to college decided they couldn t afford it because their family needed their help i hear these stories every day i read them in letters every night the struggles and the hopes of these americans are why i ran for office in the first place that s why i am going to work as hard as i can for as long as it takes to turn this economy around that s why i ran for office that s why alex sink is here that s our goal now florida we re not there yet we are not there yet we know that it took us close to a decade to dig ourselves into this hole it s going to take some time to dig ourselves it takes time to bring back eight million jobs that s the hard truth somebody tells you different they re probably running for office but here s what i can tell you after 18 months i have never been more confident that we are headed in the right direction we are doing what s needed to move forward we are rebuilding this economy not just for the short term we had to rescue the economy short term but we re also building the economy for the the long run for our children and our grandchildren we did not become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness of the sort that helped cause this financial crisis we did not come this far by letting special interests run wild in washington writing their own rules we did not get here by just looking after ourselves and not looking after our neighbors we got here by rewarding the values of hard work and responsibility and by investing in our people and making sure that economic growth happened from the bottom up middle class families and small business owners we did it by out working and out educating and out competing every nation on earth that s who we are that s who we need to be this is a serious time right now countries like china and india and south korea germany they are fighting as hard as they can for the jobs of the future they re trying to out compete us on things like clean energy they re trying to out compete us on education and how many engineers they produce and frankly in some cases we ve been slipping we used to be number one in the number of college graduates we now rank number 12 now let me tell you florida the united states of america we do not play for second place we play for first place we ve got to rebuild this economy stronger than it was before and at the center of that agenda are three powerful words made in america we ve got to start making things here in the united states instead of giving tax breaks to companies that ship our jobs overseas we ve got to cut taxes for companies that create jobs right here in the united states of america we ve got to give tax cuts to small business owners and tax cuts to clean energy companies and tax cuts to middle class families which is what we did ninety five percent of american workers got a tax cut under my administration that was the right thing to do and we ve got to have an energy strategy in this country instead of prolonging an addiction to oil that endangers everything from our security to our coastlines we re jumpstarting a homegrown clean energy industry in this country i don t want to see solar panels and wind turbines and advanced batteries that go into electric cars i don t want them manufactured elsewhere i want them manufactured right here in the united states of america by american workers we ve got to invest in 21st century infrastructure that means new bridges and new roads but it also means faster internet high speed railroad projects that will lay the foundation for long term economic growth but also produce hundreds of thousands of new private sector jobs and we are helping old industries like the american auto industry get back on its feet and retool for the 21st century now you will remember a while back this was an industry the auto industry that had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the year before i took office and we had to make a tough decision about whether to help them out or walk away which might have cost another million jobs and a lot of folks said we should walk away we decided no we re going to take a different approach instead of continuing to give bailouts to the auto companies and asking nothing in return we said we are going to make sure you restructure so you can compete over the long haul and we got all the stakeholders together and worked hard helped gm through bankruptcy helped chrysler through bankruptcy and today all three automakers are operating at a profit for the first time in years they ve had the strongest job growth in more than 10 years gm just announced it s going public again i visited a chrysler plant in detroit a few weeks back and this was a plant that would have shut down had we not moved forward and now they re producing these outstanding cars and 14 workers had just won the lottery at this plant now instead of cashing out quitting their jobs most of them stayed because they love their work they re proud of what they do the guy who bought the winning ticket he bought one of the cars that he helps assemble for his wife and then he bought flags for his hometown because he loves his country and he loves his workers and he loves the company he works for and that symbolizes something it sends a message that sometimes the naysayers in washington don t understand do not bet against the american worker do not bet against american businesses do not bet against the american people don t bet against american ingenuity we are coming back and we re coming back strong but to come back strong to rebuild for the long run we ve got work we ve got to ensure that our workers can compete with any workers on earth and that s why we re reforming our education system based on what works for kids not what works for the status quo we eliminated billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to the big banks that were acting as middlemen on the college loan program and as a consequence of this we saved tens of billions of dollars that are now making college educations more affordable for millions of more students to lower the costs to families and businesses we passed health insurance reform that will finally make coverage affordable and stop insurance companies from jacking up your premiums or refusing to cover you before you re sick because you re sick to make sure that everybody is participating in our economy i signed into law legislation that makes sure we ve got equal pay for equal work because we want our women getting paid just like men are getting paid on the workforce to keep faith with the brave men and women who risk their lives for ours and to help build the middle class like the greatest generation built itself up we are increasing access to health care and benefits and education for our veterans and their families and we re keeping the promise i made when i began campaigning for the presidency by the end of this month we ll have removed 100 000 troops from iraq and our combat mission will be over to ensure that a financial crisis like the one doesn t happen again we passed financial reform that provides new accountability and tough oversight of wall street it s going to stop credit card companies from charging hidden fees or unfair rate hikes it s going to end the era of wall street bailouts once and for all and these reforms all these reforms taken together are going to make america more competitive in the 21st century they move us forward and on each of these reforms we reached out to democrats and republicans for ideas and for support but i have to tell you in just about every instance almost every republican in congress said no no on help for small businesses no on middle class tax cuts no on clean energy jobs no on making college more affordable no on wall street reform remember our campaign slogan yes we can this year their campaign slogan is no we can t it s pretty inspiring huh you know you wake up in the morning and you hear no that just puts a little pep in your step why do they keep on saying no well part of it is is that they just can t give up on the bankrupt economic policies that they have been peddling for much of the last decade i mean this agenda is pretty straightforward and i give them credit you know they keep on coming back with it you cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires you cut rules for special interests you cut working folks loose to fend for themselves so if you don t have a job or you can t afford college or you don t have health insurance or you can t get health insurance for your kid tough luck you re on your own now the advantage of this economic philosophy is it s simple the disadvantage of this philosophy is it doesn t work out real well i mean think about we tried this for eight years and here s what it gave us it gave us the worst economic crisis since the great depression and it took us from record surpluses to record deficits these guys now they re all running on well democrats are the spending party think about this we had record surpluses when i arrived in the white house i had a 1 3 trillion deficit wrapped in a bow waiting for me so yes we had to spend money to get us out of what could have been a depression so we spent money on high speed rail and we spent money on clean energy and we spent money making sure teachers and cops and firefighters weren t laid off what did they have to show for the 1 3 trillion deficit that they delivered to us we got a lot of options here but it s not a real attractive list so when these guys get on their high horse about spending it s like hold on a second now i m bringing this up not to re litigate the past i just don t want to relive the past it was hard enough it s been hard enough trying to rescue this economy the first time i don t want to have to do it a second time i mean it would be one thing if republicans they all said to themselves gosh you know what we did really didn t work out so let s go off and let s meditate a little bit and see where we went wrong come up with some new ideas come up with a new philosophy acknowledge the mistakes that we made promise to do things differently if that was their message that would be plausible and i would embrace it i would say great you got new ideas come on let s work together let s figure out how we can move the country forward but that s not what they re saying one of their leaders was asked what would he do if they took over congress again and he said i m quoting here we re going to pursue the exact same agenda as before obama took office the exact same agenda so basically what they re really betting on i mean their whole campaign strategy is that all of you have come down with a case of amnesia they are banking on the fact that you ll forget what their agenda did to this country over eight years imagine the economy is a car and they re driving along and i don t know what they re doing they re not paying much attention to the road maybe they re on their blackberry i don t know they re talking on the phone something but they drive the economy into the ditch and so now me and bill nelson and the congressional delegation here and all of us we got to put on our boots and we climb down into the ditch and it s muddy down there and hot bugs we re pushing we re shoving trying to get this car out of the ditch republicans they re standing there watching us sipping on a slurpee or something they re like we say you guys want to come down and help push no no that s okay push harder though you re not pushing right if we were pushing we d be doing it differently finally finally after all this work we get the car back up on level ground we re ready to move forward some of these guys tap us on the shoulder we turn around they say we want the keys back you can t have the keys back you don t know how to drive we don t want to go back into the ditch i don t know if any of you have thought of this but when you want your car going forward what do you do you put it into d when you want to go reverse what do you do put it into r we don t want to go backwards we want to go forwards that s why we re going to vote for alex sink we need to go forward that s what this election is about moving forward america always moves forward if you want to know what will happen if the other party takes over congress all you ve got to do is take a look at what they ve done the last 18 months on issue after issue they ve sided with special interests over the middle class families they voted to give tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas they voted to give insurance companies the power to deny you coverage if you ve had a preexisting condition the top republican on the energy committee the guy who would be in charge of energy policy in this country if they take over after the oil spill happened he apologized not to the people of florida he apologized to bp said he was so sorry that the president forced them to put a 20 billion trust fund together so that fishermen and small business owners and hotel owners would be compensated called it a shakedown called it a chicago shakedown are you serious on wall street reform i mean think about this the worst financial crisis since the great depression and they want to go back to doing the same the same things how can that be how can that be the economy was almost brought to its knees and we put together a very sensible mainstream approach for making sure we wouldn t have taxpayer bailouts making sure that consumers were protected we kept on reaching out to them work with us wouldn t do it because the special interests in washington didn t want them to do it that s what s at stake in this election if we give them the keys back they will drive this economy right back into the ditch and riding shotgun will be every special interest under the sun and let me be clear about how we re going to move our economy forward the key to moving this economy forward is going to be the private sector government is not going to be the primary driver of job creation in this country we want businesses to succeed the free market is the greatest instrument of wealth production in our history but so if you re a responsible business owner i want to do everything i can to help you grow and prosper and hire more employees but i don t think it s anti business to say we should make sure an oil rig is safe before you start drilling i don t think it s anti business to say wall street banks should play by the same rules as everybody else i don t think it s anti business to say that insurance companies should deny people care just because they get sick to make sure that we say to insurance companies you got to treat people fairly that s not being anti business that s just being common sense we can t go back to an attitude where whatever is good for me is good enough we got to start asking what s good for america what s best for all our businesses what s best for all our people what s best for the next generation not just the next election how do we move this country forward as one people and as one nation so florida i know times are tough when times are tough it can be easy to give in to cynicism it can be easy to give in to fear sometimes we set our sights lower we settle for the status quo that s what the other side is counting on in this election they re not offering new plans they re not offering new ideas they re offering cynicism and they re offering fear they re offering distractions and wedge issues you know during the course of the last 18 months there have been times where i ve taken positions that surprise people in washington all the pundits they say boy you know what he s doing it doesn t poll well i know it doesn t poll well i ve got pollsters but you didn t send me to washington to do what was popular you sent me to do what was right that s who we are as a country we are americans we do not give up we do not quit we do not fear the future we shape the future and if you ll join alex sink and if you ll join kendrick meek and you join me to build a future where all our kids are getting educated and small businesses are flourishing because of their ideas and their ingenuity and we re creating clean energy jobs all across america if you ll join me in building a future that thinks about more than just politics thinks about how are we going to meet this solemn obligation we have to those who ae coming after us i m absolutely positive that the 21st century is going to be the american century just like the 20th thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama18 8 10b barack_obama thank you everybody thank you ohio please have a seat have a seat thank you so much it is great to be here there are a couple of people i want to make sure to acknowledge they may have already been acknowledged but not by me so i m going to acknowledge them because they are doing outstanding work first of all the mayor of the great city of columbus michael coleman a champion of working families not just in ohio but all across the country senator sherrod brown a wonderful member of congress who s fighting day in day out mary jo kilroy is here and although he is not on the list he s down a little south from here but he s here i saw him so i want to acknowledge him because he is just an outstanding outstanding young member of congress steve driehaus is in the house there he is lieutenant governor and soon to be senator lee fisher is here attorney general rich cordray is here treasurer kevin boyce is in the house and candidate for lieutenant governor yvette mcgee brown is here it is good to be back in ohio and it is good to be among such good friends because as i look out over the audience i know so many of you worked so hard on behalf of our campaign you were there when we were up you were there when we were down i might not be standing here if it weren t for the incredible efforts that all of you put in here in this state and around the country so thank you so much for everything that you ve done it truly means a lot i have to say by the way that earlier today we had a wonderful little mini town hall in the backyard of some folks the weithmans and you will be pleased to know that for using their backyard the price they charged was they made me be the o in o h i o this is true this is on videotape which i m worried about when i go to michigan but i did their commencement so hopefully things kind of will balance out the main reason i m here is to stand with somebody who i genuinely believe is one of the best public servants in the country your governor ted strickland ted took office during an enormously difficult time in ohio s history and this state had been hit harder than almost anyplace else by the loss of manufacturing and when the recession hit in 2008 times got even tougher but from the day he stepped in as governor ted strickland has not wasted a single solitary minute fighting to turn this economy around not a minute has gone by that he hasn t thought about how do build an economy not just for the present but for future generations and under ted s watch ohio has invested in high growth industries he has invested in new infrastructure he s provided new skills and job training to more than 150 000 workers there are over 65 000 more students in college than when ted took office he s cut red tape he s kept taxes low so this state can be a better place to do business and he hasn t just been concerned about the next election he s been concerned about the next generation of ohio families and his work is not yet done so i know i m preaching to the choir in this room but i want everybody who s going to be hearing me through the television i want you guys to know ted strickland has done an outstanding job for ohio and he needs another term to finish what he has started here you ve got to turn out for ted strickland now we need leaders like ted in this country and like sherrod and mary jo and steve we need them because we face an incredibly challenging time for america eighteen months ago when i took office after nearly a decade of economic policies that had given us sluggish growth and falling incomes and falling wages and a record deficit we knew that it was going to be tough to rebuild this economy but when i was sworn in nobody fully i think appreciated at that point how bad this recession had become it turned out this was the worst financial crisis and the worst recession since the great depression in the last six months of 2008 while i was still campaigning 3 million americans lost their jobs in the month that i was sworn in nearly 800 000 people lost their jobs 600 000 a month after that 600 000 a month after that before we had any opportunity to put in our economic policies we had already seen millions of jobs lost ultimately 8 million jobs and these aren t just statistics behind each of these stories behind these statistics is a story of heartache it s a story of frustration you got workers midlife who are suddenly laid off and don t know what they re going to do next single moms sending out job application after job application waiting for the phone to ring trying to figure out how they re going to pay the bills college graduates who thought having worked hard in school that a degree would land a good job and a decent paycheck and instead just have a mountain of debt to show for it and some young people have made the decision to forego college because their families couldn t afford it i hear these stories every single day i read them in the letters that i get each night the struggles and the hopes of these americans are the reason i ran for office in the first place they re the reason that ted ran for office in the first place that s why i intend to keep fighting as hard as i can as long as it takes to make sure that this economy is working for every single american anybody who wants a job got to be able to go out there and get one and we re not going to be done until we get that result now we re not there yet we know that it will take a few years to fully dig ourselves out of this recession it will take time to bring back 8 million jobs that have been lost that s the hard truth anybody who s telling you otherwise they re just running for office but here s what i can tell you after 18 months i have never been more confident that our nation is headed in the right direction we are doing what is needed to move the country forward we re rebuilding this economy not just in the short term but for the long term for our children for our grandchildren for our great grandchildren you see we did not become the most prosperous country on earth by rewarding greed and recklessness of the sort that helped cause this financial crisis we didn t come this far by letting a handful of irresponsible folks on wall street or insurance companies or special interests run wild we did it by rewarding the values of hard work and responsibility by investing in people who ve built this country from the ground up middle class families and small business owners we did it by out working and out educating and out competing every nation on earth that s what we are going to do again but we ve got to but we re going to have to buckle down we re going to have to buckle down because the competition is fierce out there right now countries like china and india and south korea and germany they are fighting as hard as they can for the jobs of the future they are trying to out compete us when it comes to clean energy they re trying to out compete us when it comes to how many engineers they re producing and how many entrepreneurs they re producing and frankly in some cases they ve pulled ahead we used to be ranked number one in the number of college graduates we have slipped to number 12 in a single generation that s unacceptable the united states of america does not play for second place we play for first place we are going to rebuild this economy stronger than it was before we re going to rebuild this economy stronger than it was before and at its heart are going to be three powerful words made in america made in america we got to make stuff here and ship it over there not the other way around and that means instead of giving tax breaks to corporations that are shipping our jobs overseas we need to cut taxes for companies that create jobs right here in the united states of america it means giving smart tax breaks to small business owners tax cuts to clean energy companies and yes it means tax cuts but for middle class families the 95 percent of our workers that i pledged i would provide a tax cut to and we delivered on that pledge and instead of prolonging an addiction to oil that endangers everything from our security to our coastlines we re now jumpstarting a homegrown clean energy industry in this country i don t want to see solar panels or wind turbines and electric cars manufactured in europe or in asia i want to see them made right here in the united states of america by american workers and that s starting to happen all across the midwest because of the clean energy investments we ve made you re seeing solar plants and wind turbine plants popping up advanced battery manufacturing right here in the midwest but we ve also got to not only spur on clean energy we ve got to build a 21st century infrastructure yes new roads new bridges but also faster internet access high speed railroads projects that will lead to hundreds of thousands of new private sector jobs and we re helping to get the american auto industry back on its feet and retool for the 21st century now this is an industry that had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the year before i took office we had to make a tough decision about whether to help them out or walk away from what could have potentially been another million jobs and i decided we couldn t walk away and you ll recall that was not necessarily a popular decision folks in washington are always puzzled by me doing things that don t poll well but let s take the case of the automakers they said couldn t be done it was better to just walk away instead of providing them bailouts with no obligations in return like had happened in the previous administration we said we ll help you out but you got to restructure because we want you to be able to compete in the 21st century and today all three u s automakers are operating at a profit for the first time in years they ve had the strongest job growth in more than 10 years folks are working across the midwest because of the decision that we made i visited a chrysler plant in detroit a few weeks back turns out 14 workers had won the lottery now you would have thought that might have decided to retire but instead of quitting most of them had stayed on their jobs because they love their work they re proud of what they do in fact the guy who had bought the winning lottery ticket not only is he staying on his job but he used the money to buy a new grand cherokee that he had built for his wife so my message to the naysayers in washington is this don t bet against the american worker don t bet against the american people don t bet against american businesses don t bet against american ingenuity we are coming back and we are coming back strong we re moving forward and ohio is moving forward to ensure that our workers can compete with any workers on earth we are reforming our education system based on what works for our children not on what works for the status quo we ve eliminated billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to the big banks that were providing college loans to take that money the savings and use it to make college more affordable for millions of students to lower the costs for families and businesses we passed health insurance reform that is finally going to make coverage affordable and stopped insurance companies from jacking up your premiums or refusing to cover you just because you re sick to ensure that an equal day of work means an equal day of pay i signed a law that will help end pay discrimination in the workforce to keep faith with the brave men and women who risk their lives for ours we are increasing access to health care and benefits and education for our veterans and their families and we are keeping the promise i made when i began my campaign for the presidency by the end of this month we will have removed 100 000 troops from iraq and our combat mission will be over in iraq to ensure that a financial crisis like the one we just went through doesn t happen again we passed financial reform that provides new accountability and tough oversight of wall street reform that will stop credit card companies from charging you hidden fees or unfair rate hikes and that will end wall street bailouts once and for all all these reforms will make america more competitive in the 21st century all these reforms are helping to move us forward and on each of these reforms we reached out to democrats and republicans for ideas and support but in just about every instance almost every republican in congress said no they said no to help for small businesses they re still saying no they said no on middle class tax cuts this is supposed to be the party of tax cuts said no when it came to tax cuts for folks who needed them no on clean energy jobs right here in ohio and across the country no on making college more affordable no on wall street reform you remember our slogan during the campaign yes we can this year their slogan is no we can t it s catchy it s really inspiring it puts a little pep in your step no we can t that s their philosophy and the reason they re saying no is because they won t give up on the economic policies the philosophy that they ve been peddling for most of this decade and their agenda is pretty straightforward you cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires you cut rules for special interests and then you cut working folks loose to fend for themselves if you can t find a job or you can t afford college or you don t have health insurance or your child doesn t have health insurance tough luck you are on your own the thing is we tried this philosophy remember for eight years and it didn t work out real well all it gave us was record deficits and the worst economic crisis since the great depression now i bring this up not to re litigate the past i bring it up because i don t want to relive the past it would be it would be one thing if republicans after y all voted them out had said you know what maybe our philosophy doesn t work they had gone off into the desert and kind of meditated and came back we ve learned from our mistakes we promise to do things differently this time we ve got some new ideas we want you to try i would have gladly said all right come on let s work together but that s not what they re doing one of the leaders in congress was asked what his party would do if he took over congress he said we will pursue the exact same agenda as before president obama took office the exact same agenda now think about that basically they re betting on between now and november they re betting on you coming down with a case of amnesia that s their strategy they figure you re going to forget what their agenda did to this country over the last eight years i was using an analogy i was talking out in california imagine our economy is a car and these guys i don t know what they were doing i don t know whether they were on their blackberry while they were driving or they were doing something else irresponsible they drive it into the ditch and so me and sherrod and mary jo and steve and ted and a whole bunch of folks we re all putting our boots on and we go down into the ditch and it s muddy down there and it s hot and there are bugs swirling around and we re pushing on the car trying to get it out of the ditch putting our shoulder shoving it pushing it and the republicans are up there looking at us sipping on their slurpees you re not pushing hard enough you re not pushing the right way push harder and we invite them to come down and help us out they just sort of said no we don t want to no we can t and then finally we get this car up on level ground and it s ready to finally move forward and we feel this tap on our shoulders and we turn around and it s those republicans and they re saying we want the keys back well no you cannot have the keys to the car back you drove it into the ditch you don t know how to drive we worked hard to get it out of the ditch we now want to move forward we don t want to move backwards we don t want to move backwards we don t want to move backwards if you want you can sit in the back we re happy to have you along for the ride but we re moving forward and i just want to point out when you want your car to go forward what do you do you put into d when you want it going backwards what do you do you put into r we don t want to go into reverse we don t want to go back into the ditch that s not a coincidence that s not a coincidence that s not a coincidence let me tell you what will happen if the other party takes over congress in november if you want to know what will happen if the other party takes over congress all you ve got to do is look what they ve done over the last 18 months on issue after issue they ve sided with special interests over the middle class families voted to keep giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas despite folks like sherrod brown who fought hard on this issue voted to give insurance companies the power to keep denying coverage to people who are sick the top republican on the energy committee you may recall this is the guy who would be in charge of the energy committee in the house of representatives apologized after the oil spill to bp remember this he apologized because i had said to bp you need to set aside 20 billion to make sure that we re making fishermen and small business owners whole as a consequence of your mistakes this guy he apologized to bp he said oh the president shook you down a chicago style shakedown that s what he called it that s what he called it he had to throw in the chicago thing in there imagine that that s what s at stake in this election if we give them the keys back they will drive right back into the ditch and riding shotgun with them will be every other special interest under the sun and by the way let me make this point i want business in this country to succeed the free market the free market is the greatest wealth producer in our history we were built on entrepreneurship and private enterprise and if you are a responsible business owner i will do everything i can to help you grow and prosper and hire more employees and ted strickland will do the same but i don t think it s anti business to say we should make sure an oil rig is safe before we start drilling i don t think it s anti business to say that wall street banks should play by the same rules as everybody else i don t think it s anti business to say that insurance companies shouldn t deny people care just because they get sick we can t have an attitude that what s good enough for me is good enough we ve got to have an attitude that says what s good for america what s good for everybody what s best for all of our businesses what s best for all of our people that s what we do in this country that s how we move forward as one people as one nation and that is what we ve got to get back to those core american values that moves everybody forward and builds a broad middle class where everybody can prosper now i know that times are tough columbus and when times are tough it can be easy to give in to cynicism and it can be easy to give in to fear to set our sights lower to settle for the status quo to pit people against each other to find wedge issues to focus on those things that appear to give a tactical advantage but have nothing to do with whether or not our country is going to be successful over the long term that s let s face it that s how politics works too much that s what the other side is counting on in this election they re not offering new plans they re not offering new idea they re just offering cynicism and they re offering fear but that s not who we are that s not the country i know we are americans we do not give up we do not quit we do not fear the future we shape the future we seize our own destiny that s what this election is about and so i need all of you every single one of you to go out there and join me and ted strickland in building a future let s build a future where our small businesses flourish on the power of ideas and ingenuity and a future where clean energy powers the world produced right here in factories and fields in america let s build a future where our children are getting the best education possible so they re competing with anybody let s build a future where we are bound by our sense of optimism and our confidence and our hopefulness our fearlessness all that s made america the most dynamic country on earth that s how we built the last american century that is how we are going to build the next american century the american people do not believe in the words no we can t that s not how this country got built in times of great challenge we pushed forward with the unyielding faith that yes we can thank you very much ohio god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama19 1 10 barack_obama thank you so much to dr degioia thank you thank you very much thank you thank you to dr degioia thank you so much to the entire georgetown family to my cabinet who is working tirelessly each and every day on behalf of the american people to members of congress who are in attendance to dignitaries and ambassadors to tonight s honorees to coach it is wonderful to be here this evening it is a great privilege thank you it is a great privilege to be with all of you tonight in this place that we set aside to celebrate america s arts but on this day we set aside to commemorate an american giant and it s fitting that we are commemorating the life of the reverend dr martin luther king with an evening of song because songs played as all of you know an important part in the civil rights movement that he led it s been said that during the civil rights movement dr king and his associates would go around to different communities in the hopes of organizing and mobilizing them and they d know which were serious about the boycott which had the discipline to actually help pull it off if folks in those communities were singing freedom songs and when he saw young people singing in the face of hostility he said that s when he first saw the real meaning of the movement he said it was about the faith in the future he said that it was based on hope so i m pleased to be here tonight to listen to some beautiful music that i think would have made dr king share a little extra faith in our future of course as we gather here to celebrate dr king s life with an evening of the arts we re also mindful that this is a difficult time for our people and for our world across this country americans are struggling and few more than african americans those very same inheritors of progress sown by dr king and the civil rights movement too many are struggling right now around the world our sons and daughters are fighting two wars closer to home our haitian neighbors are in desperate need across an ocean in africa many people are still living amid poverty and violence and disease of the kind that dikembe mutombo who s being honored here tonight is attacking with the same ferocity with which he used to block shots in the nba and i want to commend dikembe on his outstanding leadership in giving back to his nation and his people and in honoring the life and legacy of dr king by doing such extraordinary acts of service the bottom line is this is a difficult time but we are here tonight to remember and celebrate a man who inspired a people and a nation to overcome another difficult time that s why they sang we shall overcome because it was hard there was something to overcome we re all very familiar of course with the speech dr king delivered from the steps of the lincoln memorial in the late summer of 1963 we re all familiar with the booming voice echoing across a sea of people from all corners of the country we re familiar with the dream he described to a nation but what i don t think we stop to reflect on enough is the strength it took to articulate that dream it would have been easy for dr king to rise to that podium and preach a message of division or hate or blame somebody else this is a man whose own life and whose own family had been the target of attacks a man who had been beaten a man who had been stabbed a man who had been jailed a man who had been denied his most basic rights despite all the erudition despite his fancy degrees because of the color of his skin throughout the land he saw segregation still rife throughout the land he saw states and schools governors and police chiefs unwilling to accept the onward march of history unwilling to accept an expansion of the american dream to include all of its citizens and yet despite all of this despite the bitterness of the past despite the difficulties of the present despite the uncertainty of the future dr king held fast to his dream king rose to that podium and said clear eyed and straight backed to the multitude that had gathered even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow i still have a dream so tonight let us remember the courage of the man who had that dream let us remember the perseverance of all those who have worked to fulfill that dream let us recommit ourselves to doing our part in our own lives and as a nation to make that dream real in the 21st century thank you very much everybody dem bobama19 2 10 barack_obama hello everybody thank you thank you so much thank you everybody please have a seat thank you very much thank you well what a extraordinary introduction from an extraordinary leader i just want to reiterate something i said at the town hall meeting earlier you could not have a better fighter on behalf of the people of nevada than senator harry reid and i am just proud i m proud to call him a friend a lot of people in washington forget where they come from harry reid has not and that s something that i ve always admired about harry ever since i first got to the senate he retains that honesty and decency and homespun good sense and yes sometimes some bluntness that he s carried with him since his boyhood in searchlight we ve got a number of other special guests that i just want to acknowledge first of all i want to thank jim for helping to organize this thank you so much to jim murren i want to acknowledge congresswoman shelley berkley and congresswoman dina titus who are here assemblyman joe hogan is here and state senator david parks i want to thank the las vegas asian henderson latin north las vegas and urban chambers thank you guys for helping to organize this and the las vegas convention and visitors authority you know i was mentioning the fact that harry has retained that sense of who he is despite the extraordinary journey that he s traveled over the past year under very trying circumstances for the country i ve seen something else in harry harry comes across as soft spoken but he s made of very strong stuff he s never been afraid to make tough decisions even if they weren t politically popular if they were the right decisions for his state and the right decisions for america and so i just want to reiterate his leadership has made a tremendous difference and through these economic storms he s never lost sight of the struggles and the hardships of the people who sent him to washington and every nevadan should know the strength and the character of a man that i hope and expect to serve in washington for many years to come so thank you harry for the great work you do harry also gets embarrassed when you compliment him too much you know he kind of see he looks away now before i go any further let me set the record straight i love vegas there you go always have love vegas enjoy myself every time i ve gotten an opportunity to visit in fact just last night i drew a flush on the river and cut the budget deficit in half some of you know i can play some poker now i did receive a little bit of heat i know from maybe some in this room when i said that folks shouldn t blow their college savings in vegas that doesn t mean i don t love vegas it wasn t meant to be a shot i think everybody here would agree that the only place where people should spend their college savings is in college there s no contradiction there but look i understand how hard things have been here in the worst economic turmoil that we ve faced in generations las vegas has been at the eye of the storm when the economy suffers the tourism industry is deeply affected in fact you ve seen perhaps the steepest drop in tourism in the state s history and i know things are starting to bounce back but it s been tough going when folks are hurting and don t have the money to spend on a night out or a weekend getaway that hurts the broader economy as well so what happens in vegas reflects what s happening across america and this area has also been hit by the home mortgage crisis as hard as just about anywhere in america and this doesn t just affect the families at risk of losing their homes as devastating as that can be it also affects the many more families who ve lost value in their homes and the equity that makes it possible to finance a business or secure a retirement from their peak home prices in las vegas have fallen in half this is something all of you are aware of and finally nevada has not escaped the wider devastation that s ripped through the financial markets and the economic fabric of our country a whole as credit became scarce and consumer spending dropped and businesses were forced to close their doors today more than one in eight people in las vegas can t find work so no one needs to explain to the members of the las vegas chamber of commerce that we ve been through a punishing recession as bad as anything since 1930 the recession in 1980 81 doesn t come close to what we ve gone through over the last two years and no one needs to tell you how important it is that we remain absolutely focused on bringing about a strong recovery our great challenge as a country is to create the environment in which businesses can expand and hire workers in which middle class families can find good jobs and save for the future in which our economy is growing and that growth is sustained and broadly shared that s my focus that s harry reid s focus to not only rebuild this economy but to rebuild it stronger than it was before the crisis at the same time standing before this group of business leaders it s important to emphasize that there s only so much that government can do and only so much that government should do sometimes in washington it sounds a little contradictory when i hear folks say obama wants the government to take over the economy then they ll turn around and say why isn t the government doing more to create jobs now harry and i understand that s politics but putting politics aside what i believe and what i know you believe is that the true engine of job creation and economic expansion in this country has never been found in the halls of congress or in the corridors of the white house america s economic success begins elsewhere in more humble settings in garages and basements and rented storefronts it begins when a worker decides to leave her job to be her own boss when an inventor makes his first sale on the way to his first million when an innovator sees a product that could be better or a service that could be provided more smartly when an entrepreneur takes a chance on an idea that just might fail but might also change the world now that s the story of america the land of opportunity a nation where at our best we welcomed all those from around the world who are willing to work hard all who are willing to take themselves as far as their talents would allow and what has made it possible to harness the incredible productive capacity of the american people the greatest economic force in the history of the world has been a free market where people can pursue their dreams their goals and their happiness and where you can take charge of your own destiny so i don t believe my role as president the role of the federal government or the state government or city governments is to stifle the free market i think my role is to strengthen its ability to unleash that creativity and ingenuity which still makes this nation the envy of the world now there are those who suggest that the only way government can promote strong markets is to allow them to operate wholly outside even the most modest rules of the road even the most sensible reforms many of these same folks also suggest whether in regard to proposed consumer protections in the health insurance industry or proposed rules to prevent another financial crisis that these kinds of policies run counter to our economic interests and while i respect those who sincerely hold this view the facts and our history do not favor this argument throughout our past there have been times when markets have fallen out of balance and there have been periods of economic transformation and upheaval when prosperity and even basic financial security have eluded far too many citizens and at those moments government has stepped in not to supplant private enterprise but to catalyze it to create the conditions for entrepreneurs and new businesses to adapt and ultimately to thrive sometimes it requires government investment that s why we laid railroads and highways to spur commerce and industry and stitch this nation together sometimes it means making sure that there s a safety net that s why we created social security while putting in place financial safeguards like the fdic in the wake of the economic dislocations of the 1930s a lot of times it involves investing in our people that s why we passed a gi bill to nurture the skills and talents of an entire generation that s why president kennedy pointed us to the moon knowing that the exploration of the skies above would lead to unimagined discoveries here on earth that s how las vegas became las vegas a balance of private enterprise but also a regulatory structure that made sure that people could come here and enjoy themselves and thrive and bring their families in an environment that was safe for them and secure at these moments of transformation such efforts by government they don t stifle our economy just the opposite they ve helped our economy achieve the growth that was not only more robust but more widely shared by our citizens citizens who were in turn better able to contribute to our economy and when we ve gone without sound rules of the road and sound investments in our future then we ve risked stagnation or worse we ve risked full blown economic crises and that s where we found ourselves one year ago when my administration came through the door i know sometimes we ve got a short term memory it s one of the things that makes america great is we don t brood about the past but it s worth us just remembering where we were five trillion dollars of americans household wealth evaporated in just 12 weeks as the financial markets plummeted 5 trillion several of the world s largest financial institutions were on the brink of collapse some of them disappeared home values were in freefall nobody knew what the floor was businesses could not get credit no matter how creditworthy seven hundred and fifty thousand jobs were vanishing each month more than the entire population of vermont was losing its job every single month when i was sworn in and the fear among economists across the political spectrum was that we were rapidly sinking into a second great depression so we undertook a series of difficult steps and frankly some of them were unpopular deeply unpopular to prevent that outcome and i was at the town hall earlier today and i pointed out it s not as if harry and i don t have pollsters we got very good pollsters and they tell us when things are unpopular n don t do that but we thought it was important to do what was right not what was popular so we acted to get lending flowing again so companies like yours could get loans to buy equipment and restock keep your doors open make payroll we thought it was important for ordinary americans to be able to finance their homes or buying a new car or going to college or starting or running a business we passed tax relief for small businesses and 95 percent of working families for college students for first time homebuyers we extended or increased unemployment benefits not just to help those families but also to make sure that there was some demand in the economy at a time when so much demand had been lost we made health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families relying on cobra we acted to close state budget gaps to prevent hundreds of thousands of teachers and public school workers and firefighters and police officers from being laid off all across the country including right here in nevada and at the same time we initiated investments to spur hiring while laying a foundation for long term lasting growth we doubled our capacity in renewable energy like wind and solar we computerized medical records to save money and lives we provided the largest boost to medical research in history all across the country classrooms and school laboratories are being renovated roads and railways are being upgraded as part of the largest investment in infrastructure since president eisenhower half a century ago initiated the interstate highway system right here in nevada hundreds of entrepreneurs have received small business loans one million nevadans have seen a tax cut hundreds of thousands of seniors and veterans have received emergency assistance a quarter million people in this state have received additional unemployment insurance and across nevada there are dozens of transportation projects and energy projects and construction projects putting people to work doing the work that america needs done and you know what what made all this possible was the recovery act also known as the stimulus bill now there are a bunch of folks out there who would tell you otherwise and would say that the recovery act hasn t made a difference and created a job but you know facts are stubborn things there s a famous story about a former senator daniel patrick moynihan who has having an argument with a fellow senator and the other guy wasn t doing too well in the argument so finally he said well i m entitled to my own opinion and moynihan said yes you re entitled to your own opinion you re not entitled to your own facts economists tell us that the recovery act has helped stop the freefall in our economy and created or saved as many as two million jobs so far and by the way the actions of these critics speak louder than words because many of the members of congress who voted against the recovery act called it a boondoggle funny how they end up making appearances at ribbon cuttings for recovery act projects it s a sight to see they re up there cheesing and grinning they re trying to vote against their cake and eat it too now this is not to say that all of our troubles are over far from it we may have kept 2 million people from the unemployment line in this recession but more than 8 million people have lost their jobs we may have broken the back of the recession when i came in this economy was contracting 6 percent this past quarter it was growing 6 percent a huge reversal so the economy may be growing again but that growth has not nearly made up for the terrible pain and dislocations that rocked businesses and families over the course of a very difficult two years so we ve got a lot of work to do and i m here to tell you i will not rest i know harry will not rest until we re not just recovering but we re prospering i don t want vegas just to be getting by i want vegas to be thriving and i know that s what you want as well so that s why harry and i are working to provide tax breaks for small businesses to spur hiring that s why we re fighting for health insurance reforms to address the crushing cost of health insurance for small businesses and families and that s why we ve continued to seek ways to address the home mortgage crisis which has touched all parts of this country but has hit las vegas particularly hard in large part the broader economic crisis we ve experienced began as a home mortgage crisis and the story is familiar to all of you a lot of people got in over their heads from homeowners on main street to large firms on wall street and many more americans found themselves in a terrible situation by no fault of their own unable to pay a mortgage because of a lost job but they re unable to sell or refinance because their mortgage debt is now higher than the value of their house their home is underwater now government has a responsibility to help deal with this problem i ve got to again repeat government can t stop every foreclosure there s not enough money in the treasury to stop every foreclosure and we shouldn t be using tax dollars to reward the same irresponsible lenders or borrowers who helped precipitate the crisis but what government can do what government can do is to help responsible homeowners to stay in their homes the government can stop preventable foreclosures what we can do is stabilize the housing market so home values can begin to rise again so over the course of the past year we ve taken a number of steps to do just that we ve provided a tax credit for 1 4 million taxpayers to help them buy their first homes we ve made it possible for more than one million struggling homeowners to reduce monthly payments and combined with our broader efforts to spur growth stem job losses and stabilize the financial system we ve helped promote recovery in the housing markets in fact in many markets home values have begun to rebound but we got a ways to go especially in the hardest hit regions like las vegas where there are just too many blocks littered with brown lawns and for sale signs too many mortgage holders are underwater and where job losses continue to exact a terrible toll so for these communities recovery depends on continued responsible efforts to stop the downward spiral of defaults foreclosures and declining home values that s why earlier today i announced a 1 5 billion investment in housing finance agencies in the states hardest hit by this housing crisis and one of those states is nevada so that means that here in nevada we re going to be able to help prevent some foreclosures that otherwise would have happened it s going to allow lenders to help homeowners who are underwater and it will help folks who ve taken out a second mortgage modify their loans so the goal is to target communities at the center of the crisis and to empower local agencies who know these communities best to structure and tailor their programs in ways that are most responsive now these are very difficult times for our country times that demand we put aside the stale debates and the tired arguments times that demand of us something more the fact is the economic crisis of the past two years indeed the growing economic insecurity of the middle class that s been going for a decade was born not just of failures in our economic system these challenges were also born of failures in our political system and while harry has been fighting for us too many folks in washington have been putting off hard decisions so for decades we ve watched as efforts to solve tough problems fall prey to gamesmanship and partisanship to the prosaic concerns of politics the ever quickening news cycle to endless campaigns focused on scoring points instead of meeting our common challenges imagine if you had to run a business like this where the people who are in your office are constantly yelling at you running ads against you more interested inyou failing than the company succeeding that s what we ve been seeing in washington and it s got to stop because the challenges have been mounting all around us a health care system that saddles businesses and families with skyrocketing costs an economy powered by fuels are fuels of the 20th century instead of the 21st and endanger our planet and our security we ve got an education system unsuited for a global era and a financial system that has been rewarding reckless risks and we ve got a structural deficit that threatens to leave our children a mountain of debt so we ve seen the consequences of this failure of responsibility and the american people have paid a heavy price the question we ll have to answer now is if we re going to learn from the past or if even in the aftermath of disaster we re going to repeat it because as the alarm bells fade and the din of washington rises the danger is we just forget what happened and we start thinking we should go back to business as usual that won t work it will not work in this global economy not in this environment i said this during the state of the union i repeated it today in henderson in my town hall other countries are not playing for second they re playing for first one of the things that i know is of great interest to nevada is tourism and what are we doing for tourism promotion i can tell you harry is going to be championing a tourism promotion bill because as he points out why is it that every other country is promoting their tourist industry and america is not doing enough for ours but that s just he s going to have strong support for that effort but that s just one example of the competition that we re facing on everything if china is producing 40 high speed rail lines and we re producing one we re not going to have the infrastructure of the future if india or south korea are producing more scientists and engineers than we are we will not succeed so i hope that all of us democrats republicans public servants and leaders in the business community can keep alive a sense of seriousness a sense of common purpose that s how we can rise to this moment and transcend the failures of the past tackle the challenges before us and leave behind a nation that is more prosperous than ever before but it is going to take work and i am going to need all of you to be partners with harry and partners with myself in moving it forward the days are over where we can keep on organizing ourselves along the lines of business is here and labor is here and government is over here we are all in this together if businesses and nobody understands that more than las vegas if the mgm is doing well that means its workers are doing well and if its workers are doing well that means that the housing market is doing well and if the housing market is doing well then that means that small businesses all across the region are doing well who in turn are hiring more workers that s the model that we ve got to achieve but it also means in order for us to succeed it also means that business labor government democrats republicans we can t be looking for every single edge or advantage on every single issue at some points we ve got to be thinking about the larger good so if we re serious about reforming the health care system we ve got to be thinking even if i ve got health insurance and by the way i ve got really good health insurance i ve got a doctor who follows me around everywhere i ve got to spend some time thinking about the people who don t have health insurance and i ve also got to be thinking about the next generation that s picking up the bill for the health insurance that s currently being provided to me if i m getting a benefit from the government if i m a business leader i ve got to be thinking about my shareholders and my bottom line but i ve also got to be thinking about the people who work for me and i ve got to be thinking about the larger community and i ve got to be thinking about the country that kind of leadership can t just come from the white house it can t just come from the united states senate it s got to come from you in fact that s where it always comes from in america the most profound changes the most dynamic innovations they don t happen from the top down they happen from the bottom up but they always happen not just because of some single individual with some great idea although a lot of times that s what drives innovation in our economy it also comes from a culture of trust and mutual regard america has always been a combination of fierce individualism but also a sense of community the sense that we re looking out for one another and every single successful business leader here understands that s the kind of culture you ve tried to build in your businesses that s the kind of culture we have to reinvigorate all across america i m confident we can do so i am looking forward to coming back to vegas i think my mother in law is going to get here first she comes quite frequently maybe i shouldn t say that in front of the press but i want everybody here to have confidence that if we keep on working hard we don t shy away from these tough challenges and we re not looking backwards we re looking forwards then not only is las vegas going to thrive in the 21st century not only is nevada going to thrive in the 21st century but all the united states of america is going to thrive thank you very much everybody god bless you and god bless america dem bobama19 3 10 barack_obama hello george mason how s everybody doing today thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you everybody it s good to be back with some real patriots i want to thank dr alan merten the president of george mason university and his family dr shirley travis who s here thank you and coach larranaga we were just talking a little bit about looking forward to picking george mason in my bracket next year i love you i don t know if some of you remember but i visited this university about three years ago for the first time this was at just the dawn of my presidential campaign it was about three weeks old i think we didn t have a lot of money we didn t have a lot of staff nobody could pronounce my name our poll numbers were quite low and a lot of people a lot of people in washington they didn t think it was even worth us trying they had counted us out before we had even started because the washington conventional wisdom was that change was too hard but what we had even then was a group of students here at george mason who believed that if we worked hard enough and if we fought long enough if we organized enough supporters then we could finally bring change to that city across the river we believed that despite all the resistance we could make washington work not for the lobbyists not for the special interests not for the politicians but for the american people and now three years later i stand before you one year after the worst recession since the great depression having to make a bunch of tough decisions having had a tumultuous debate having had a lot of folks who were skeptical that we could get anything done and right now we are at the point where we are going to do something historic this weekend that s what this health care vote is all about a few miles from here congress is in the final stages of a fateful debate about the future of health insurance in america it s a debate that s raged not just for the past year but for the past century one thing when you re in the white house you ve got a lot of history books around you and so i ve been reading up on the history here teddy roosevelt republican was the first to advocate that everybody get health care in this country every decade since we ve had presidents republicans and democrats from harry truman to richard nixon to jfk to lyndon johnson to every single president has said we need to fix this system it s a debate that s not only about the cost of health care not just about what we re doing about folks who aren t getting a fair shake from their insurance companies it s a debate about the character of our country about whether we can still meet the challenges of our time whether we still have the guts and the courage to give every citizen not just some the chance to reach their dreams at the heart of this debate is the question of whether we re going to accept a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the american people because if this vote fails the insurance industry will continue to run amok they will continue to deny people coverage they will continue to deny people care they will continue to jack up premiums 40 or 50 or 60 percent as they have in the last few weeks without any accountability whatsoever they know this and that s why their lobbyists are stalking the halls of congress as we speak and pouring millions of dollars into negative ads and that s why they are doing everything they can to kill this bill so the only question left is this are we going to let the special interests win once again or are we going to make this vote a victory for the american people george mason the time for reform is right now not a year from now not five years from now not 10 years from now not 20 years from now it s now we have had we have had a year of hard debate every proposal has been put on the table every argument has been made we have incorporated the best ideas from democrats and from republicans into a final proposal that builds on the system of private insurance that we currently have the insurance industry and its supporters in congress have tried to portray this as radical change now i just i just want to be clear everybody listen up because we have heard every crazy thing about this bill you remember first we heard this was a government takeover of health care then we heard that this was going to kill granny then we heard well illegal immigrants are going to be getting the main benefits of this bill there has been they have thrown every argument at this legislative effort but when it it turns out at the end of the day what we re talking about is common sense reform that s all we re talking about if you like your doctor you re going to be able to keep your doctor if you like your plan keep your plan i don t believe we should give government or the insurance companies more control over health care in america i think it s time to give you the american people more control over your health and since you ve been hearing a whole bunch of nonsense let s just be clear on what exactly the proposal that they re going to vote on in a couple of days will do it s going to it s going to change health care in three ways number one we are going to end the worst practices of insurance companies this is this is a patient s bill of rights on steroids starting this year thousands of uninsured americans with preexisting conditions will be able to purchase health insurance some for the very first time starting this year insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions starting this year insurance companies will be banned from dropping your coverage when you get sick and they ve been spending a lot of time weeding out people who are sick so they don t have to pay benefits that people have already paid for those practices will end if this reform becomes law all new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care to their customers if you buy a new plan there won t be lifetime or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care you receive from your insurance companies and by the way to all the young people here today starting this year if you don t have insurance all new plans will allow you to stay on your parents plan until you are 26 years old so you ll have some security when you graduate if that first job doesn t offer coverage you re going to know that you ve got coverage because as you start your lives and your careers the last thing you should be worried about is whether you re going to go broke or make your parents broke just because you get sick all right so that s the first thing this legislation does the toughest insurance reforms in history and by the way when you talk to republicans and you say well are you against this a lot of them will say no no that part s okay all right so let s go to the second part the second thing that would change about the current system is that for the first time small business owners and people who are being priced out of the insurance market will have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of congress give to themselves so what this means is is that small business owners and middle class families they re going to be able to be part of what s called a big pool of customers that can negotiate with the insurance companies and that means they can purchase more affordable coverage in a competitive marketplace so they re not out there on their own just shopping they re part of millions of people who are shopping together and if you still can t afford the insurance in this new marketplace even though it s going to be cheaper than what you can get on your own then we re going to offer you tax credits to help you afford it tax credits that add up to the largest middle class tax cut for health care in american history now these tax credits cost money helping folks who can t afford it right now that does cost some money it costs about 100 billion per year but most of the cost well here s the reason it s all right here s the reason it s all right it wouldn t be all right if we weren t paying for it and by the way that s what a previous congress did with the prescription drug plan all they did was they gave the benefits and they didn t pay for it that s not what we re doing what we re doing is we re taking money that america is already spending in the health care system but is being spent poorly that s going to waste and fraud and unwarranted subsidies for the insurance companies and we re taking that money and making sure those dollars go towards making insurance more affordable so we re going to eliminate wasteful taxpayer subsidies to insurance companies we re going to set a new fee on insurance companies that stand to gain millions of new customers so here s the point this proposal is paid for unlike some of these previous schemes in washington we re not taking out the credit card in your name young people and charging it to you we re making sure this thing is paid for all right so that s the second thing now the third thing that this legislation does is it brings down the cost of health care for families and businesses and the federal government americans who are buying comparable coverage in the individual market would end up seeing their premiums go down 14 to 20 percent americans who get their insurance through the workplace cost savings could be as much as 3 000 less per employer than if we do nothing now think about that that s 3 000 your employer doesn t have to pay which means maybe she can afford to give you a raise and by the way if you re curious well how exactly are we saving these costs well part of it is again we re not spending our health care money wisely so for example you go to the hospital or you go to a doctor and you may take five tests when it turns out if you just took one test then you send an e mail around with the test results you wouldn t be paying 500 per test so we re trying to save money across the system and altogether our cost cutting measures would reduce most people s premiums and here s the bonus it brings down our deficit by more than 1 trillion over the next two decades so you ve got you ve got a whole bunch of opponents of this bill saying well we can t afford this we re fiscal conservatives these are the same guys who passed that prescription drug bill without paying for it adding over 1 trillion to our deficit oh we can t afford this but this bill according to the congressional budget office which is the referee the scorekeeper for how much things cost says we ll save us 1 trillion not only can we afford to do this we can t afford not to do this so here s the bottom line that s our proposal toughest insurance reforms in history one of the biggest deficit reduction plans in history and the opportunity to give millions of people some of them in your own family some of the people who are in this auditorium today an opportunity for the first time in a very long time to get affordable health care that s it that s what we re trying to do that s what the congress of the united states is about to vote on this weekend now it would be nice if we were just kind of examining the substance we were walking through the details of the plan what it means for you but that s not what the cable stations like to talk about what they like to talk about is the politics of the vote what does this mean in november what does it mean to the poll numbers is this more of an advantage for democrats or republicans what s it going to mean for obama will his presidency be crippled or will he be the comeback kid that s what they like to talk about that s what they like to talk about i understand one of the things you realize is basically that a lot of reporting in washington it s just like sportscenter it s considered a sport and who s up and who s down and everybody s keeping score and you got the teams going at it it s rock em sock em robots look let me say this george mason i don t know how this plays politically nobody really does i mean there s been so much misinformation and so much confusion and the climate at times during the course of this year has been so toxic and people are so anxious because the economy has been going through such a tough time i don t know what s going to happen with the politics on this thing i don t know whether my poll numbers go down they go up i don t know what happens in terms of democrats versus republicans but here s what i do know i do know that this bill this legislation is going to be enormously important for america s future i do know the impact it will have on the millions of americans who need our help and the millions more who may not need help right now but a year from now or five years from now or 10 years from now if they have some bad luck if heaven forbid they get sick if they ve got a preexisting condition if their child has a preexisting condition if they lose their job if they want to start a company i know the impact it will have on them i know what this reform will mean for people like leslie banks a single mom i met in pennsylvania she s trying to put her daughter through college just like probably some of your moms and dads are trying to put you through college and her insurance company just sent her a letter saying they plan to double her premium this year have it go up 100 percent and she can t afford it so now she s trying to figure out am i going to keep my insurance or am i going to keep my daughter in college leslie banks needs us to pass this reform bill i know what reform will mean for people like laura klitzka i met laura up in green bay wisconsin while i was campaigning she thought she had beaten her breast cancer then she discovered it had spread to her bones and she and her insurance she and her husband they were lucky enough to have insurance but their medical bills still landed them in debt so now she s spending time worrying about the debt when all she wants to do is think about how she can spend time with her two kids laura needs us to pass this reform bill i know what reform will mean for people like natoma canfield when her insurance company raised her rates she had to give up her coverage even though she had been paying thousands of dollars in premiums for years because she had beaten cancer 11 years earlier they kept on jacking up her rates jacking up her rates finally she thought she was going to lose her home she was scared that a sudden illness would lead to financial ruin but she had no choice right now she s lying in a hospital bed faced with paying for such an illness after she had to give up her health insurance she s praying that somehow she can afford to get well she knows that it is time for reform so george mason when you hear people saying well why don t we do this more incrementally why don t we do this a little more piecemeal why don t we just help the folks that are easiest to help my answer is the time for reform is now we have waited long enough we have waited long enough and in just a few days a century long struggle will culminate in a historic vote we ve had historic votes before we had a historic vote to put social security in place to make sure that our elderly did not live out their golden years in poverty we had a historic vote in civil rights to make sure that everybody was equal under the law as messy as this process is as frustrating as this process is as ugly as this process can be when we have faced such decisions in our past this nation time and time again has chosen to extend its promise to more of its people you know the naysayers said that social security would lead to socialism but the men and women of congress stood fast and created that program that lifted millions out of poverty there were cynics that warned that medicare would lead to a government takeover of our entire health care system and that it didn t have much support in the polls but democrats and republicans refused to back down and they made sure that our seniors had the health care that they needed and could have some basic peace of mind so previous generations those who came before us made the decision that our seniors and our poor through medicaid should not be forced to go without health care just because they couldn t afford it today it falls to this generation to decide whether we will make that same promise to hardworking middle class families and small businesses all across america and to young americans like yourselves who are just starting out so here s my bottom line i know this has been a difficult journey i know this will be a tough vote i know that everybody is counting votes right now in washington but i also remember a quote i saw on a plaque in the white house the other day it s hanging in the same room where i demanded answers from insurance executives and just received a bunch of excuses and it was a quote from teddy roosevelt the person who first called for health care reform that republican all those years ago and it said aggressively fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords now i don t know how passing health care will play politically but i know it s right teddy roosevelt knew it was right harry truman knew that it was right ted kennedy knew it was right and if you believe that it s right then you ve got to help us finish this fight you ve got to stand with me just like you did three years ago and make some phone calls and knock on some doors talk to your parents talk to your friends do not quit do not give up we keep on going we are going to get this done we are going to make history we are going to fix health care in america with your help god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama19 4 10 barack_obama hello california hello i am fired up it s good to see you it s good to see you it s good to see you all right all right all right okay thank you thank you california i want to begin by just thanking everybody is a special guest but let me just point out some folks who are here who i want to acknowledge first of all somebody who was one of the finest governors in the country is now one of the best dnc chairmen of the country tim kaine give it up for tim kaine attorney general and may soon be another great governor jerry brown where s jerry he s around here somewhere state superintendent of public instruction jack o connell is in the house congresswoman outstanding congresswoman jane harman congressman joe baca congresswoman diane watson congresswoman laura richardson congresswoman judy chu former governor gray davis speaker emeritus that s a pretty fancy title speaker emeritus of the california assembly karen bass is in the house i haven t seen her but i m told she s here and i love this woman s music and her spirit india arie is supposedly in the house hello india wherever you are where is she right there no where you are backstage she s backstage okay i was like where i don t see her somebody else who i m very honored to have i want everybody to acknowledge there she is there s my girl india arie and while we re at it with special people somebody who helped major league baseball become what it is but also helped america become what it is hall of fame pitcher don newcombe is in the house i just had the honor of meeting him just had the honor of meeting him and taking a picture with him and he was very gracious in saying you know jackie would be proud and i said well i would not be here if it were not for jackie and it were not for don newcombe it is nice to be back it is nice to be in california not just because it s good to get out of washington but one of the things that i enjoy most about coming to events like this is the chance to be with some old friends to be with some of the people who were there with me at the beginning who knocked on doors and made telephone calls who helped us win the presidency in 2008 but as happy as i am to see you as happy as i am to see you i am even happier to be with my good friend and great senator barbara boxer it was one of the privileges of being a senator that i had a chance to work alongside barbara you know california has been you know california has been a leader in promoting hybrids and cleaner burning fuels and appropriately you have in barbara boxer a subcompact senator with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy now a lot of you are aware of how deeply barbara cares about the environment about her work to pursue a clean energy future and that work is vitally important but what i also want you to know is that this is a woman who has a deep passion for fighting for you fighting for all her constituents here in california she s passionate about fighting for jobs jobs with good wages jobs with good benefits she s passionate about fighting for california s families she is we are going to do that hey hold on a second hold on a second we are going to do that here we go all right guys guys all right i agree i agree i agree now no no no no listen what the young man was talking about was we need to we need to repeal don t ask don t tell which i agree with and which we have begun to do but let me say this when you ve got an ally like barbara boxer and you ve got an ally like me who are standing for the same thing then you don t know exactly why you ve got to holler because we already hear you all right i mean it would have made more sense to holler that at the people who oppose it when you ve got barbara boxer who is passionate to give people all across this state a fair shake to put the american dream within reach for all americans then what we should be worried about is how are we going to make sure barbara boxer gets elected and that s mostly what i want to talk about tonight i am proud of the work we ve done to bring the world together around a host of problems from terrorism to the nuclear threat from climate change to deprivation and poverty around the globe i was gratified to sign a new start treaty with russia and to host so many world leaders in washington last week working in concert to reduce the perilous risk that nuclear materials could fall into the wrong hands but reviving our own economy remains the central challenge that we re facing today i don t have to tell you that this state has been hit as hard as any state in the union with economic troubles these past few years jobs have been lost at a heartbreaking level all across this state and they ve devastated families and devastated communities the housing crisis hit this state with a particular vengeance driving your friends your neighbors out of their homes injecting a sense of fear and financial insecurity into too many people s lives i m sorry do you want to come up here you know the all right because can i just say once again barbara and i are supportive of repealing don t ask don t tell so i don t know why you re hollering now the problems that we have here put a further strain on folks in this state forcing painful choices about where to spend and where to save and the challenges folks have been facing here barbara i just everybody i just wanted to confirm i just wanted to confirm i just checked with barbara so if anybody else is thinking about starting a chant barbara didn t even vote for don t ask don t tell in the first place so you know she s going to be in favor of repealing don t ask don t tell now that is a key issue but i think putting californians back to work is also a key issue because there are folks gay and straight who are out of work right now and the challenges that are being faced right here in california are facing americans all across the country now these aren t challenges that suddenly appeared when i got sworn into office they didn t come out of nowhere when i walked into the white house on that very first day america was embroiled in a series of crises the likes of which we hadn t seen in some time abroad we were confronting a war in iraq that needed to come to a responsible end a war in afghanistan that demanded a greater focus a new world of threats and new dangers and at home we were facing a financial crisis that just about every credible economist said had the potential to plunge us into another great depression an economic crisis that was producing stagnant wages falling incomes and a shaken middle class and a deficit crisis that was saddling our children with a mountain of debt that s what we inherited when we came in and while we ve still got a long and difficult road ahead of us while too many of our neighbors are still struggling especially here in california these are challenges that barbara and i and others are working hard to solve together we re beginning to see some signs of progress all across america adding jobs instead of losing them spending people spending again orders rising again an economy that s growing instead of shrinking and california this progress this progress we re seeing didn t happen by accident it happened because we ve taken a number of necessary but not always popular steps to break the back of this recession and to get our economy moving again but you didn t send us to washington just to manage the crisis or rescue the economy you sent us there to rebuild it so that it was stronger than before to make it more prosperous than it was before more competitive than it was before you sent us there to make the 21st century another american century and lay a new foundation for growth that will reach all our people and that s what health insurance reform was about that s why we embarked on historic education reforms that s why we re embarking on clean energy reform that s what our future is about that s why we have restored science to its rightful place that s why we renewed our commitment to research and development from medical labs to nanotechnology we re focusing on the next generation california not just the next election that s the mission that i have been trying to faithfully carry out on your behalf and that s the mission that members of congress like barbara have been carrying out faithfully on your behalf now i ll be honest it would have been nice if we have had a little more help from the other side of the aisle sometimes say any help just a smidgen of help and i ve been disappointed sometimes that that little smidgen hasn t been more forthcoming you would have expected that republican leaders would have been willing to help out cleaning up after this mess since they had more than a little to do with creating it and we all have a stake in cleaning it up we re all after all americans not democrats not republicans first we re americans first so we should all have a stake in seeing success in cleaning this situation up and yet after driving our economy into the ditch they decided to stand on the side of the road and watch us while we pulled it out of the ditch they asked why haven t you pulled it out fast enough i noticed there s like a little scratch there in the fender why didn t you do something about that now look you know that s their prerogative california that s also what elections are for and the american people will have a clear choice when they head to the polls in november and they ll have to do all they ll have to do is look what we ve been for and what the other side has been against for example tax cuts you know we just had tax day and there a bunch of folks out there complaining about their taxes i understand that nobody likes paying taxes except i just want to make sure their anger is properly directed because we were for putting 200 billion in tax cuts into the pockets of the american people tax cuts for making college more affordable tax cuts for buying a first home altogether we gave 25 different tax cuts for families and for businesses several of them directed at small businesses that are the backbone of our economy here in california 98 percent of working families are getting a tax cut so that s what we were for and that s what the other side was against you re welcome barbara and i and other members of congress here we thought it was wasteful and wrong to give billions of dollars to banks to act as unnecessary middlemen in administering student loans so we said let s use that money to help more students go to college and get the skills they need to outcompete workers around the world we said let s make the repayment of student loans more manageable so that kids don t start out with a crushing debt that s what we were for that s what they were against we thought it was unfair to deny health insurance to americans with preexisting conditions we thought it was wrong to let hardworking families and small businesses continue to get crushed by skyrocketing health care costs and families go bankrupt because somebody gets sick in their family so we did what americans have been trying to do for a century republican presidents and democratic presidents and republican congresses and democratic congresses and we finally enshrined the principle that all of us ought to have a sense of security when it comes to our health care that s what we were for that s what they were against in fact the republican leader in the house said the other day that repealing health insurance reform would be his number one priority if he becomes speaker of the house in november so he would say to you and 800 000 californians with preexisting conditions you know what we think it was a mistake to make sure that you can get coverage and he d tell all those seniors give back that 250 you ll get this year to help pay for prescription drugs and then he ll say to millions of small business men and women who today qualify for new tax credits to help them cover their workers you know what your workers don t need health insurance and you don t need help either now that if he wants to run on that appealing agenda go ahead but barbara boxer is not going to let it happen and i m not going to let it happen and you re not going to let it happen and the american people are not going to let it happen because we believe that americans should have affordable quality health care you re welcome even as we speak we re in the midst of another important battle in washington i want everybody to be paying attention these next several weeks because one of the main reasons our economy faltered was because some on wall street made irresponsible bets with no accountability the rules weren t adequate sometimes the government simply looked the other way and as a result we had a financial crisis that led to the loss of eight and a half million jobs a crisis that s caused millions of californians to lose their homes and cost families and businesses trillions of dollars in savings and assets i ve said this many times before i believe in the free financial market i believe that s that it s essential that we have a strong financial market because that helps to boost dynamic economic growth but a free market doesn t mean you should be free to do whatever you want however you can get it without regard to consequences there have to be some rules of the road there s got to be some accountability there s got to be some transparency or else we re going to see more abuses and disastrous meltdowns like the ones we just experienced so barbara and the members of congress who are here and i believe that we ve got to update the rules governing the financial markets to bring greater accountability greater transparency to wall street and greater protections to consumers and taxpayers and the broader economy and not surprisingly wall street has fought some of these reforms shocking they ve sent down an army of lobbyists they re just waiting to water them down the truth is that s a big reason we got into this mess in the first place because of the disproportionate power of these lobbyists so this time we ve got to get it right this time we have a responsibility to meet a responsibility to the american people and to america s future now the senate republican leader he paid a visit to wall street a week or two ago he took along the chairman of their campaign committee he met with some of the movers and shakers up there i don t know exactly what was discussed all i can tell you is when he came back he promptly announced he would oppose the financial regulatory reform he would oppose it shocking and once again he s threatening to tie up the senate with a filibuster to try to block progress and he made the cynical argument that is just plain false that this plan that is essential to avoiding future taxpayer bailouts was somehow going to create taxpayer bailouts now understand i m not saying democrats and republicans ought to agree on everything there are some things we just philosophically disagree on and that s a good thing that s part of our democracy but a wise man once said he has the right to criticize who has the heart to help and all we re looking right now for is some help some common sense and some help that s what we hope the other side is going to do not just criticize but help exercise some common sense don t just stand in the way but lend a hand and help because the fact is we need everybody s help the problems we face are too great for any one party to solve and all of us democrats and republicans have to come together to solve them all of us together have to tackle exploding deficits that s why i directed my team to go through the budget line by line to cut what we don t need so we can pay for what we do that s why i took a republican idea an idea they had been fighting for and set up a bipartisan fiscal commission to rein in our deficits and barbara and i set a clear goal to cut our deficits in half over the next three years all of us need to come together on behalf of clean energy it s the right thing to do for the environment it s the right thing to preserve our natural heritage it s the right thing to do for our economy and that s why following california s lead that s why following california s lead i worked to bring everybody up to a tough new standard for cars and trucks ushering in the first national standard for fuel economy and greenhouse gas reductions that s why barbara and i worked together to provide incentives for companies building wind turbines and solar panels and green jobs that can t be outsourced that s why we need to build on barbara s good work and pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation because the country that leads the energy economy will lead the global economy barbara and i want that country to be the united states of america all of us all of us need to come together to expand the reach of the american dream and that s why the first bill i signed as president helps ensure equal pay for equal work for men and women alike and yes that s why i m committed to ending don t ask don t tell and upholding nondiscrimination in the workplace that s why last week i signed an order to help end the cruel practice of denying loved ones hospital visitation rights because of who they are we need to keep a fundamental promise of america we ve got to keep a fundamental promise that it doesn t matter who you are what you look like where you come from the blessings of this country are open to every single american so let me close by saying this these have been difficult years for california and they have been difficult years for america and i can t pretend we re over all the tough times there are going to be some more hard days ahead but here is what i want you to know i have never been more optimistic about america s future and i am optimistic because i know there are people like you out there and i know there are people like barbara boxer in the senate who s fighting to change this country for the better and because you are out there fighting and because barbara is there fighting i draw inspiration and there are people all across this country who are dreaming of a better tomorrow and then they are willing to fight for those dreams to come true and you know what that s the story of california this is a state that always drew dreamers men and women with the courage to pursue their dreams it s a state that inspired pioneers to head out across an unforgiving wilderness a state that spurred glory seekers to rush westward for gold the state that draws innovators and entertainers from hollywood hills to mountain view and there s always been something about california that inspires us to dream that s called on us to build a better life that has helped us imagine the world as it is and then recognize that the world as it might be is out there and i m absolutely confident that if folks in washington can recapture that same spirit that same boundless resilient american spirit we re not only going to rescue our economy we re not only going to rebuild it stronger than before but we re going to do what generations did before and make the american dream more secure for our children and our grandchildren that s what barbara boxer is about that s what you re about and that s why i expect you to be out there making phone calls and knocking on doors and rallying the troops just like you did in 2008 to make sure that you returned barbara boxer to the united states senate thank you very much california god bless you dem bobama19 5 09a barack_obama thank you very much thank you please everybody have a seat have a seat what an extraordinary day the sun is out because good things are happening before i get started just some preliminary introductions i ll probably repeat them in my formal remarks but i want to make sure that i acknowledge some people who have been critical to this effort and critical to so many efforts at the state and federal levels first of all speaker nancy pelosi who has just been cracking the whip and you know making congress so productive over these last several days we are grateful for her my wonderful secretary of transportation ray lahood is in the house lisa jackson the outstanding administrator of epa some of the finest governors in the country are here let me take them in order of good looks sorry arnold jennifer granholm of michigan governor deval patrick of massachusetts and governor arnold schwarzenegger of california barbara boxer just had to leave the head of the environment committee in the senate who d done just outstanding work and senators feinstein levin and stabenow couldn t be here because they re busy voting on credit card legislation that we re going to get done before memorial day and we ve got two outstanding members of the house of representatives john dingell where s john right here the dean of the house who s done so much extraordinary work around these issues sandy levin please give them a round of applause i also want to mention ron gettlefinger of the uaw our president who s just been a great leader during some very trying times in the auto industry and carol browner who helped to make this all happen today please give carol browner a big round of applause since i m acknowledging everybody i m in a voluble mood today let me go ahead and acknowledge my other members of the cabinet who are here who are part of our energy green team and do just outstanding work on an ongoing basis first of all my secretary of labor hilda solis the guy who s just cleaning up the department of interior and doing an extraordinary job ken salazar our head of hud shaun donovan and our commerce secretary gary locke now thank you all for coming to the white house today and for coming together around what i consider to be a historic agreement to help america break its dependence on oil reduce harmful pollution and begin the transition to a clean energy economy this is an extraordinary gathering here we have today standing behind me along with ron gettlefinger and leadership of the uaw we have 10 of the world s largest auto manufacturers we have environmental advocates as well as elected officials from all across the country and this gathering is all the more extraordinary for what these diverse groups despite disparate interests and previous disagreements have worked together to achieve for the first time in history we have set in motion a national policy aimed at both increasing gas mileage and decreasing greenhouse gas pollution for all new trucks and cars sold in the united states of america and i want to applaud the leadership of the folks at the environmental protection agency the department of transportation and the white house office of energy and climate change who ve worked around the clock on this proposal which has now been embraced by so many now in the past an agreement such as this would have been considered impossible it s no secret that these are folks who ve occasionally been at odds for years even decades in fact some of the groups here have been embroiled in lawsuits against one another so that gives you a sense of how impressive and significant it is that these leaders from across the country are willing to set aside the past for the sake of the future for what everyone here believes even as views differ on many important issues is that the status quo is no longer acceptable while the united states makes up less than 5 percent of the world s population we create roughly a quarter of the world s demand for oil and this appetite comes at a tremendous price a price measured by our vulnerability to volatile oil markets which send gas prices soaring and families scrambling it s measured by a trade deficit where as much as 20 percent of what we spend on imports is spent on oil it s measured in billions of dollars sent to oil exporting nations many that we do not choose to support if we had a choice it s measured in a changing climate as sea levels rise and droughts spread forest burns and storms rage and what is all the more tragic is that we ve known about these costs in one way or another since the gas shortages of the 1970s and yet all too little has been done calls for action rise and fall with the price of a barrel of oil worn arguments are traded across entrenched divides urgency fades complacency grows and time passes as a result we have done little to increase the fuel efficiency of america s cars and trucks for decades think about this consider how much has changed all around us think of how much faster our computers have become think about how much more productive our workers are think about how everything has been transformed by our capacity to see the world as it is but also to imagine a world as it could be that s what s been missing in this debate for too long and that s why this announcement is so important for it represents not only a change in policy in washington but the harbinger of a change in the way business is done in washington no longer will we accept the notion that our politics are too small our nation too divided our people too weary of broken promises and lost opportunities to take up a historic calling no longer will we accept anything less than a common effort made in good faith to solve our toughest problems and that is what this agreement seeks to achieve right now the rules governing fuel economy in this country are inadequate uncertain and in flux first there is the standard for fuel economy administered by the department of transportation on top of that the environmental protection agency in response to a decision by the supreme court may have to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles establishing another standard california has sought permission under the clean air act to require that vehicles sold in california meet yet another even stricter emission rule and 13 states and the district of columbia have agreed to adopt california greenhouse gas reductions if the permission called a waiver is granted car companies might then face three different sets of overlapping requirements one administered by the department of transportation one administered by the epa and still a third administered by california and 13 other states this proposed national policy under the leadership of two agencies and bringing together 14 states 10 companies as well as auto workers and environmental groups changes all that the goal is to set one national standard that will rapidly increase fuel efficiency without compromising safety by an average of 5 percent each year between 2012 and 2016 building on the 2011 standard my administration set shortly after taking office a series of major lawsuits will be dropped in support of this new national standard the state of california has also agreed to support this standard and i want to applaud california and governor schwarzenegger and the entire california delegation for their extraordinary leadership they have led the way on this as they have in so many other efforts to protect our environment in addition because the department of transportation and epa will adopt the same rule we will avoid an inefficient and ineffective system of regulations that separately govern the fuel economy of autos and the carbon emissions they produce and at a time of historic crisis in our auto industry when domestic auto manufacturers are making painful choices and restructuring their businesses to be viable in the future this rule provides the clear certainty that will allow these companies to plan for a future in which they are building the cars of the 21st century yes it costs money to develop these vehicles but even as the price to build these cars and trucks goes up the cost of driving these vehicles will go down as drivers save money at the pump and this is a point i want to emphasize if you buy a car your investment in a more fuel efficient vehicle as a result of this standard will pay off in just three years in three years time you will have paid off the additional investment required so this is a winning proposition for folks looking to buy a car in fact over the life of a vehicle the typical driver would save about 2 800 by getting better gas mileage the fact is everyone wins consumers pay less for fuel which means less money going overseas and more money to save or spend here at home the economy as a whole runs more efficiently by using less oil and producing less pollution and companies like those here today have new incentives to create the technologies and the jobs that will provide smarter ways to power our vehicles and that s why in the next five years we re seeking to raise fuel economy standards to an industry average of 35 5 miles per gallon in 2016 an increase of more than eight miles per gallon per vehicle that s an unprecedented change exceeding the demands of congress and meeting the most stringent requirements sought by many of the environmental advocates represented here today as a result we will save 1 8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years just to give you a sense of magnitude that s more oil than we imported last year from saudi arabia venezuela libya and nigeria combined here s another way of looking at it this is the projected equivalent of taking 58 million cars off the road for an entire year i also want to note that the agreement we have announced today is part of a far larger effort in fact on the other end of pennsylvania avenue henry waxman is chairing a meeting of the energy and commerce committee which is working on an equally historic energy bill that will not only help our dependence on foreign oil prevent the worst consequences of climate change and build a clean energy economy but will provide more than 15 billion to help build the cars and trucks of the future right here in america and the recovery plan we ve put in place as well as the budget that builds on it makes historic investments in a clean energy economy doubling our capacity to generate renewable energy like wind and solar investing in new battery technologies for plug in hybrids and building a smarter stronger grid on which the homes businesses and vehicles of the future will run too often lost in the back and forth of washington politics absent in arguments where the facts opponents use depend on the conclusions they ve already reached absent all that is this ending our dependence on oil indeed ending our dependence on fossil fuels represents perhaps the most difficult challenge we have ever faced not as a party not as a set of separate interests but as a people we have over the course of decades slowly built an economy that runs on oil it has given us much of what we have for good but also for ill it has transformed the way we live and work but it s also wreaked havoc on our climate it has helped create gains in prosperity unprecedented in history but it also places our future in jeopardy ending this dependence will take time it will take an incredible effort it will take a historic investment in innovation but more than anything it will take a willingness to look past our differences to act in good faith to refuse to continue the failures of the past and to take on this challenge together for the benefit not just of this generation but generations to come all the people who have gathered here today all the auto executives all our outstanding elected officials and appointees ron gettlefinger members of congress governors all these folks here today have demonstrated that this kind of common effort is possible they ve created the template for more progress in the months and years to come everything is possible when we re working together and we re off to a great start so thank you everybody i appreciate it by the way i just want to mention i think i still have my ford parked in chicago it s a ford hybrid it runs great you guys should take a look but there are also some outstanding hybrids and energy independent cars represented up here so i didn t want to just advertise for one dem bobama19 5 09b barack_obama well thank you very much good afternoon everybody and thank you lisa i think you can see that she s pretty good at making a pitch and we re grateful for sharing your story and your enthusiasm with all of us and congratulations to you and everybody who is being honored here today as some of america s most outstanding business owners and lenders and counselors and coaches i want also all of you to know that i am so pleased with my selection as sba administrator karen mills is somebody who is passionate about small business she understands the ins and outs of it the nuances of it she is fighting for bringing sba into the 21st century so i think you ll find just an outstanding partner in her please give her a big round of applause running a successful small business is impressive in any year but it s especially impressive this year at this moment when we re facing the most serious economic downturn in generations and i know that what you do isn t easy i know that for every contract you ve won every sale that you ve made and job you ve created you ve had plenty of setbacks and false starts and late nights wondering how on earth you re going to keep everything together and why you decided to take this path in the first place but you kept on going you scrimped and you saved and you borrowed and you improvised and your failures didn t discourage you they educated you and they motivated you to succeed the next time around and today we honor that courage and determination and daring just as much as we honor the success that it ultimately brought you and that s the spirit that led lisa a single mom a former hairstylist you know the hair looks good so you in the back room while she s scooping ice cream running the construction company she s been doing her hair i think there was a song about you wasn t there to set out a little over a year ago a little over 10 years ago with nothing but a loan from her parents and a big idea and her company now has 78 employees it s grossed nearly 4 million in sales last year it s what led tom masterson where s tom tom s right here tom after working for 30 years in the electrical industry to co found t e m electric funded it entirely on his own and working out of his living room until he won his first major contract today the company employs 75 people and has over 12 million in revenues it s what led andy wells a member of the red lake ojibwa tribe to invest 1 300 back in 1989 where s andy right here 1 300 back in 1989 to found wells technology manufacturing industrial tools and fasteners and creating jobs near reservations in minnesota where he lives in 2008 his company generated 54 million in revenues and his customers include coca cola and boeing and oshkosh so small businesses like these are driving our economy you re the job creators responsible for half of all private sector jobs you re innovators producing 13 times more patents per employee than large companies you re the starting point for the products and brands that have redefined the market after all google started out as a small business that was a research project hewlett packard began with two guys in a garage the first apple computers were built by hand one at a time mcdonald s started with just one restaurant and small businesses don t just strengthen our economy they also strengthen our communities your customers aren t just anonymous folks who buy what you sell they re your friends they re your neighbors the place where you set up shop often isn t just your business address but it s also your hometown and sometimes it s your home and i know what you do to give back sponsoring sports leagues and service projects serving on boards donating to charities mentoring other small business owners to help them be as successful as you are so with all that you do for this nation i think our nation s government should be there to support you to help you grow and expand and succeed so i m pleased that nearly all of you have benefited from sba s services from sba loans programs advice counseling and i m pleased about that but i m not satisfied i think we can do more we can do more to help small business owners especially right now and that s why our recovery plan raises the guarantees on sba loans to 90 percent eliminates costly fees for borrowers and lenders and includes a series of tax cuts for small businesses as well as incentives to encourage investment in small businesses and that s why my proposed budget reduces the capital gains tax for investments in small or startup businesses to zero zero capital gains tax that s why i intend to pass comprehensive health care reform this year so we can lower costs raise quality and make it easier for many of you to not only get health care for your employees but also for yourselves and that s why we re announcing a new sba loan program the america s recovery capital or arc program and this new program will provide up to 35 000 to help struggling but still credit worthy small businesses pay off non sba debts money they can use to pay suppliers and vendors or pay down credit card debts and the loans will be guaranteed 100 percent by the sba and they ll be available starting june 15th and i believe they will be a lifeline to help viable small businesses through these difficult times so all of this is a good start but it s only a start we still have much work ahead to support our small businesses and restore our economy it won t be easy we ll need to be bold and creative and take risks just like all of you have done but that s always been the american story that belief that all things are possible that we are limited only by our willingness to take a chance and work hard to achieve our dreams and i m confident that we will do exactly that together we are going to meet the challenges of our times so congratulations again to all of you for what you have succeeded and please make sure to keep feeding us good ideas so that we can help you help the american economy and the american people thank you very much dem bobama19 5 10a barack_obama michelle and i are extraordinarily honored as we host you but most importantly as we host president calderon and first lady margarita zavala yes i m sorry please be seated we welcome them and the mexican delegation for our second state dinner here at the white house tonight la casa blanca in our visit to mexico the president and first lady have treated me and michelle to a celebration of mexico s rich heritage including the stunning anthropology museum and some wonderful mariachi tonight we celebrate the bonds we share as neighbors and as friends we celebrate all that mexico and its ancient civilizations has given the world throughout history advances in architecture and astronomy mathematics and medicine and of course some very good food including the food of the gods chocolate as mexico marks the bicentennial of its independence and the centennial of its revolution we celebrate a proud people who have defined their own destiny with patriots like hidalgo and juarez and giants in the arts and literature and science and like the united states a pretty good soccer team we celebrate all that mexican americans have contributed to the united states leaders in every segment of our society including many of the guests who are here tonight and a culture that treasures family and faith indeed america is enriched by el sabor de mexico and we celebrate the partnership between our two countries mr president i must say it again in the fight for your country s future you ve shown extraordinary courage extraordinary bravery and you and the mexican people have a full and committed partner in the united states as we look to the future i m reminded of all the young people who ve become part of our visits the children in mexico city waving american and mexican flags the students who shared their dreams with michelle and some very excited kids that along with michelle and margarita did a little exercise today each of those children has a dream and yet we know that in life it s not enough to want your dream as the extraordinary writer octavio paz wrote in one of his poems you must deserve your dream and so mr president i propose a toast to the dreams of our children together may we realize those dreams and together may we deserve them by going forward in partnership and respect cheers salud dem bobama19 5 10b barack_obama good morning buenos dias on behalf of michelle myself and the american people it is my great honor to welcome our neighbor friend and partner president caldern along with first lady margarita zavala and members of the mexican delegation welcome to the united states bienvenidos president caldern was the first foreign leader that i met after my election and this visit is an opportunity to return the extraordinary warmth and hospitality that the president the first lady and the people of mexico have shown to me during my visits to mexico as well as to michelle during her first solo international trip as first lady mr president it is fitting that your visit comes during this year of celebration the bicentennial of mexican independence and the centennial of the mexican revolution and you and the mexican people draw strength from your proud past to forge your future we recall the words of the great octavio paz who said between tradition and modernity there is a bridge with this visit we can also strengthen the many bridges that bind our two nations the united states and mexico are not simply neighbors bound by geography and history we are by choice friends and partners we are bound by our business partners workers and tourists who fuel our prosperity by our students and educators who broaden our horizons and by our men and women in uniform who serve and sacrifice to keep us safe in the united states we re also proud of another bond the ties of family mexican american families have been here for centuries as well as those who continue to our proud tradition as a nation of immigrants all of whom strengthen our american family and who join us today mr president working together we have built upon these bridges we forged a new era of cooperation and partnership between our countries based on mutual interest mutual respect and mutual responsibility and with your visit we can advance our partnership even further together we can help create jobs and prosperity for our people we can ensure that our common border is secure modern and efficient including immigration that is orderly and safe we can stand firm and deepen our cooperation against the drug cartels that threaten our people and given mexico s global leadership we can stand together for the opportunity and security of all people in our hemisphere and beyond finally mr president your visit speaks to a truth of our time in north america and the world in the 21st century we are defined not by our borders but by our bonds so i say to you and to the mexican people let us stand together let us face the future together let s us work together trabajemos juntos president caldern senora zavala welcome to the united states dem bobama19 6 09a barack_obama thank you buenos das it is good to see everybody here just a few quick acknowledgments our outstanding secretary of department of homeland security janet napolitano is here please give her a big round of applause the great governor of the state of pennsylvania ed rendell two special members of my staff that i want all of you to get to know first of all we have a white house office of faith based and neighborhood partnerships if you haven t already met him joshua debois is just a wonderful young man please give him a big round of applause he helps to organize a lot of our faith outreach and our director of intergovernmental affairs one of my favorite people cecilia muoz please give her a big round of applause i want to thank reverend cortes for the wonderful introduction and the wonderful prayer for me and my family i want to thank esperanza and all of you who worked so hard to put together the national hispanic prayer breakfast and conference and i also want to join you in honoring the work of adolfo carrion sr on this father s day weekend on this father s day weekend i know that my director of urban affairs adolfo s son is particularly proud of his dad i also want to thank all of you for the work that you do each and every day through your service to your communities you represent the very best in our country and i m honored to join you in prayer this morning at a time when there s no shortage of challenges to occupy our time it s even more important to step back and to give thanks and to seek guidance from each other but most importantly from god that s what we ve come here to do we can begin by giving thanks for the legacy that allows us to come together for it was the genius of america s founders to protect the freedom of all religion and those who practice no religion at all so as we join in prayer we remember that this is a nation of christians and muslims and jews and hindus and non believers it is this freedom that allows faith to flourish within our borders it is this freedom that makes our nation stronger for those of us who draw on faith as a guiding force in our lives prayer has many purposes for many it is a source of support when times are hard president lincoln who reverend cortes mentioned once said i have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that i had nowhere else to go and while the challenges that i ve faced pale in comparison to lincoln s i know that more than once i ve been filled with the same conviction over the last five months but prayer is more than a last resort prayer helps us search for meaning in our own lives and it helps us find the vision and the strength to see the world that we want to build and that s what i d like to talk about for just a few minutes today as i look out at this audience i m reminded of the power of faith in america faith in god and a faith in the promise of this great country each of us come from many different places we trace our roots back to different nations and we represent a broad spectrum of personal and political beliefs but all of us pray to god all of us share a determination to build a better future for our children and grandchildren and that must be a starting point for common ground and for the america that we want to build like some of you i am the son of a parent who came to these shores in search of a better future and while i may be the first african american president there is nothing unique or unusual about the opportunities that this country gave to me instead like generations of americans i could count on the basic promise that no matter what you look like or where you come from america will let you go as far as your dreams and your hard work will carry you and that promise is at the heart of the american story it s a story shared by many of you by clergy and members of congress by business leaders and community organizers it s the story of every young child who has the opportunity to go farther in life than their parents were able to go it s the story of a young girl who could rise from a public housing project to be nominated for the highest court in the land and i am confident that it s a story that will someday be told by the first hispanic president of the united states of america but we know there is much more work to be done to extend the promise of a better life to all our children and grandchildren in all that we do we must be guided by that simple command that binds all great religions together love thy neighbor as thyself in the 21st century we ve learned that this truth is central not just to our own lives but to our success as a nation if our children cannot get the world class education they need to succeed then america will not be able to compete with other countries if our families cannot afford health care then the costs go up for all of us individuals businesses and government if folks down the street can t pay their mortgage and folks across town can t find a job then that pain is going to trickle into other parts of our economy and that s why we ve come together on behalf of the future that we want to build one where all of our children go to the best schools all our people can go to work and make a living all our families can afford health care and prosperity is extended to everybody together we must build a future where the promise of america is kept for a new generation we also know that keeping this promise means upholding america s tradition as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants those things aren t contradictory they re complementary that s why i m committed to passing comprehensive immigration reform as president of the united states the american people the american people believe in immigration but they also believe that we can t tolerate a situation where people come to the united states in violation of the law nor can we tolerate employers who exploit undocumented workers in order to drive down wages that s why we re taking steps to strengthen border security and we must build on those efforts we must also clarify the status of millions who are here illegally many who have put down roots for those who wish to become citizens we should require them to pay a penalty and pay taxes learn english go to the back of the line behind those who played by the rules that is the fair practical and promising way forward and that s what i m committed to passing as president of the united states we must never forget that time and again the promise of america has been renewed by immigrants who make their story part of the american story we see it in every state of our country we see it in our families and in our neighborhoods as president i ve been honored to see it demonstrated by the men and women who wear the uniform of the united states last month i had the honor of welcoming a group of our service members as citizens for the very first time in that crowd there were faces from every corner of the world and one man from nicaragua jeonathan zapata had waited his whole life to serve our country even though he was not yet a citizen by serving in the military he said i can also give back to the united states he s done so in afghanistan and he even helped man the 400 000th aircraft landing aboard the uss kitty hawk and jeonathan s story is not unique either he s part of a proud legacy of service for generations hispanic americans have served with great commitment and valor and there are now nearly 150 000 hispanic americans serving under our flag and today we are proud today we are proud to welcome several of them who are wounded warriors recovering at walter reed please join me in honoring their service and in keeping them and all of our troops in our thoughts and prayers please these troops have dedicated their lives to serving their fellow americans their example like those of all of our men and women in uniform should challenge us to ask what we can do to better serve our communities and our country because the greatest responsibility that we have as citizens is to one another that s the spirit we need to build that s the america that we seek and to do so we must look past our divisions to serve the hopes and dreams that we hold in common we must give life to that fundamental belief that i am my brother s keeper that i am my sister s keeper scripture tells us the word is very near to you it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it today let us pray for the strength to find the word in our hearts and for the vision to see the america that we can build together as one nation and as one people thank you for your partnership thank you for your prayers may god bless all of you and may god bless the united states of america dem bobama19 6 09b barack_obama hello everybody everybody have a seat first of all let s give thanks that it s not raining because we thought it might be and we were worried that bobby would be sending smoke into the white house but it s a beautiful day i want to personally acknowledge once again they ve already been introduced but i want to introduce them because some of you young people are sitting with them you may not know who you re sitting with the extraordinary men who are participating in this event today first of all chief quartermaster john lehnen thank you so much john some of you may know this guy dwayne wade i hear he plays basketball pretty good etan thomas another ball player joseph jones the center for urban families greg brown who is the ceo of motorola antwaan randle el outstanding football player dr steve rosen northwestern cancer center jorge ramos one of the premier journalists in the country b d wong outstanding actor tony hawk who is the best skateboarder in the world coach bill cowher of the championship steelers darryl dmc mcdaniels mike laas who is a small businessman senator evan bayh former colleague of ours fatherhood dads inc president david ladd the president of morehouse college dr robert franklin as well as some of the outstanding members of my staff mike strautmanis denis mcdonough reggie love and we also want to thank bobby flay one of the best chefs in the world for providing us with this unbelievably good looking grub over here i don t want to talk long i want to come around and say hello to everybody i just want to thank all of you for participating for the young people who are here today i just hope that the message that we re sending out about how important fathers are is something that you will internalize because all of you are probably going to end up being fathers and the time is now to start thinking about what that means in terms of responsibilities what it means to be a man and the men who are you re going to be sitting with today i think exemplify whether they re famous or not famous rich or not so rich they embody that spirit of love and dedication and commitment that fatherhood is all about so we appreciate all of you i don t want to get in the way of the food thank you for participating hope you guys have a good time and to all the fathers out there happy father s day all right dem bobama19 7 10a barack_obama all right everybody have a seat now have a seat well it is just wonderful to welcome all of you here to the white house and congratulations to the phoenix mercury on winning your second wnba title in the last three years now i noticed my department of homeland security secretary is kind of horning in on our event here she has been a huge fan of mercury ever since her days as governor of arizona she s i didn t know you d been a guest coach that is cool did you guys win that game nice nice nice so i m impressed i want to congratulate head coach corey gaines he won a ring as assistant coach now he s got a ring as head coach so congratulations i know how much hard work goes into a championship you guys all right back there i know how much hard work goes into a championship season but i hear that one of the real keys to the mercury s title is sitting in the audience for those of you who don t know assistant coach julie hairgrove and her kids are the lucky charms of this team where are they sleeping not that excited to see the president my understanding when the mercury won their first title in 2007 julie was pregnant with her second child where s julie by the way nice when they won their second title julie was pregnant with her third child grace who s now three months old and i understand the team is trying to talk julie and her husband into their fourth one more but beyond your lucky charms the sacrifice the dedication and the heart that all of you have put into this sport is obvious team captain diana taurasi was named regular season and wnba finals mvp this year that s pretty good last week she won the espy award for best wnba player of 2010 congratulations tangela smith became only the fourth player in wnba history to score 4 500 career points and rack up 2 000 rebounds congratulations tangela nice nice but this is a true team when diana was named finals mvp she turned around and gave the trophy to her teammates she said it s not one player that makes an mvp it never has beenand it never will be and this team set a new wnba scoring record with 92 8 points per game they made their way onto a box of wheaties i understand but they have managed to keep themselves pretty grounded i hear that rookies taylor lilley and sequoia holmes are still doing luggage duty is that true you guys didn t even rooks huh that s rough that s rough this team also goes above and beyond in serving the phoenix community from putting on basketball camps for children of veterans to collecting clothes for the homeless and today they re bringing that commitment here to the white house after we re done here they ll be holding a clinic as part of michelle s let s move initiative to help our young people live healthy and active lives so i want to thank all of you guys for your extraordinary service as well as your championship spirit and i want to thank you for setting a wonderful example because i live with three tall good looking women who are quite competitive and push me around under the boards all the time but i want malia and sasha to know that there is absolutely no contradiction between women who are beautiful and healthy and contributing and good athletes and competitive and when they see you guys every day that helps them in a way that i think if you heard from michelle sometimes she feels like when she was coming up she didn t always have that and i think that is just so important to everybody so as a basketball fan i congratulate you on your second championship as a father i thank you for being great role models and good luck with the rest of the season all right dem bobama19 7 10b barack_obama thank you everybody everybody please have a seat let s put on a show welcome to the white house i am just thrilled and i know michelle is thrilled to host the sixth in a series of evenings celebrating the music that helped to shape america now so far we have heard from some of the biggest names in jazz in country in latin classical and the music of the civil rights movement and tonight we are honored to be joined by some of the biggest and brightest stars on broadway and i notice i should just point out that i see a lot of members of the new york delegation here they take great pride in broadway i want to start by thanking george c wolfe and margo lion for making this event possible so please give them a big round of applause and i want to thank all of tonight s performers for sharing their gifts with us they are just so generous with their time and this will be a wonderful evening i also want to recognize my outstanding secretary of labor hilda solis who is in the house here she is right here as well as the other members of the administration thank you guys for the hard work you do each and every day thank you to the national endowment for the arts and the president s council on the arts and the humanities for their continued support and i finally want to recognize jerry mitchell and everybody who participated in the dance workshop earlier this afternoon and helped inspire the next generation of performers as well as my wife to do a few dances she was showing off backstage now as we re about to see this evening there s nothing quite like the power and the passion of broadway music at its heart it s the power of a story of love and of heartbreak of joy and sorrow singing witches dancing ogres musicals carry us to a different time and place but in the end they also teach us a little bit of something about ourselves it s one of the few genres of music that can inspire the same passion in an eight year old that it can an 80 year old and make them both want to get up and dance it transcends musical tastes from opera and classical to rock and hip hop and whether we want to admit it or not we all have the lyrics to a few broadway songs stuck in our heads in many ways the story of broadway is also intertwined with the story if america some of the greatest singers and songwriters broadway has ever known came to this country on a boat with nothing more than an idea in their head and a song in their heart and they succeeded the same way that so many immigrants have succeeded through talent and hard work and sheer determination over the years musicals have also been at the forefront of our social consciousness challenging stereotypes shaping our opinions about race and religion death and disease power and politics but perhaps the most american part of this truly american art form is its optimism broadway music calls us to see the best in ourselves and in the world around us to believe that no matter how hopeless things may seem the nice guy can still get the girl the hero can still triumph over evil and a brighter day can be waiting just around the bend as the great mel brooks once said musicals blow the dust off your soul so to everyone watching both here and at home here s a taste of broadway to help us do just that thank you very much everybody dem bobama19 8 09 barack_obama good afternoon everyone please have a seat welcome to the white house just before i begin there are a couple of acknowledgements i want to make first of all we ve got some wounded warriors from walter reed and national naval medical center and i want everybody to give them a big round of applause we are grateful to them they re big nascar fans i also want to thank a good friend and a terrific governor brad henry from oklahoma is here stand up brad you know it is not every day that we have a championship stock car parked out on the south lawn fortunately we got jimmie to agree not to do any burnouts or tear up my backyard i also suggested to jimmie that in exchange for free parking he should let me take the 48 out for a few laps he said that was fine but secret service didn t think it was fine but that s okay because i m just glad jimmie could be here so we can honor him for winning his third consecutive sprint cup championship give him a big round of applause jimmie got his start racing in motocross events at the age of five and has been racking up trophies and titles for nearly three decades now but like me i think his greatest achievement is probably just how far he married up i had a chance to meet his wife chandra and i m so glad that she could be here today as well congratulations for your family s success we want to keep everyone who keeps the 48 up front we want to congratulate all of them owner rick hendrick the crew chief rick deserves a round of applause crew chief chad knaus did i say that right and all the folks at hendrick motorsports because we all know nascar winning isn t just about who s behind the wheel during the race it s also about who s got your back in the pit and everyone back at the shop who preps these cars week after week with these folks at his side jimmie is hoping for a fourth series championship in a row this year but i think there s another group of guys back here who may have something to say about that jeff good luck in your drive for five and good luck to all the other chase drivers joining us today i m extraordinarily grateful to them we re also joined today by one of nascar s all time greats the king richard petty sitting right here with a family tradition that s generations strong the pettys are about as close as you can get to a nascar dynasty and finally i want to recognize mike helton nascar s president for his dedicated leadership and of course brian france nascar s chairman and his wonderful wife amy who ve done so much for the sport please give them a big round of applause and let me also take the opportunity to say that our thoughts are with the nascar community at the recent passing of tom murphy a man who put his heart and soul into nascar over the years you know it s fitting that you ve all come here to the white house the american people s house because nascar is a uniquely american sport since its humble beginnings when moonshiners raced on the sands of daytona beach during prohibition it s grown into a sport with tens of millions of fans here in america and around the world but nascar is about a lot more than just racing cars it s as much about what you give back off the track as you give on the track it s about what you re doing to protect our environment and help america become energy independent using solar energy and working to offset carbon emissions and even hiring a director of green innovation to take your commitment to the next level it s about supporting our troops and our veterans from flyovers and red white and blue paint jobs on memorial day to your visits to walter reed and iraq and afghanistan that show our appreciation for the brave men and women who are serving our country and it s about all the foundations nascar has started to support schools and hospitals combat hunger and homelessness and work to help folks in our communities like the campers here from victory junction kids who can teach us all a thing or two about courage and hope and i hope had the time of their lives at summer camp after all one of the core values of the nascar community is the belief that service isn t just something you do once in a while when it s convenient it s a way of life i think jeff gordon put it best when he said simply any person out there should do something some way to give back to their community and that s what folks from more than 150 countries see around the world when they tune in to your races not just your speed and your skill but also your compassion your dedication to your families and our communities how much you love this country and how strongly you support the heroes who serve it that s the face of america that you show to the world so today i want to thank all of you for that and for everything you do to make this country a better country and i wish you all the best of luck in this year s chase god bless all of you and god bless the united states of america thank you very much everybody i think i ve got to take a shot next to the cup here dem bobama2 2 07 barack_obama what s going on democrats oh you look fired up thank you thank you so much i see some familiar faces around here we got some illinoisans in the house thank you so much thank you everybody what a wonderful reception i want to start by congratulating governor dean and the entire dnc for the victory that you made possible in november you proved that a progressive common sense practical message is not restricted to red states it s not restricted to blue states it s not restricted to one region of the country it s not even restricted to one party that it can sell everywhere and everywhere is where we re going to compete from here on out wherever we can go we are going to be able to win elections with that message and we thank you for the great work that you did if you look at all the cameras gathered around and the clicking of the photographers and the pundits who are collected i love you back you know sometimes you feel like you re part of a reality tv show you know you feel like this is american idol or survivor you re trying to figure out are you going to go to hollywood are you going to be voted off the island but that s not why i m here and that s not why you re here the decisions that have been made by this president and the challenges that have been ignored over the last six years have brought this country to a sobering place and that s raised the stakes to the point where the decisions that we make in the next decade will determine the future of our children and the future of our grandchildren this is not a game it s not a contest for the tv cameras this is a serious moment for america and the american people understand that they re in a sober mood every single democrat who speaks before you today is going to have something important and valuable to offer over the next year of a primary and the next two years leading to the election of the new president the campaigns the campaigns shouldn t be about making each other look bad they should be about figuring out how we can all do some good for this precious country of ours that s our mission and in this mission our rivals won t be one another and i would assert it won t even be the other party it s going to be cynicism that we re fighting against it s the cynicism that s born from decades of disappointment amplified by talk radio and 24 hour news cycle reinforced by the relentless pounding of negative ads that have become the staple of modern politics it s a cynicism that asks us to believe that our opponents are never just wrong that they re bad that our motives in politics can never be pure that they re only driven by power and by greed that the challenges that we face today aren t just daunting but they re impossible and if this is true then politics is not a noble calling it s a game it s a blood sport with folks keeping score about who s up and who s down at best it s a diversion with such cynicism government doesn t become a force of good a means of giving people the opportunity to lead better lives it just becomes an obstacle for people to get rid off too often this cynicism makes us afraid to say what we believe it makes us fearful we don t trust the truth it has caused our politics to become small and timid calculating and cautious we spend all our time thinking about tactics and maneuvers knowing that if we spoke the truth if we addressed the issues with boldness that we might be labeled it might lead to our defeat if you oppose the war then you re not a patriot if you oppose tax cuts then you re engaging in class warfare we internalize those fears we edit ourselves we censor our best instincts it s an america that suffers most from this can t do won t do won t even try style of politics at the very moment when americans are feeling anxious about the future uncertain as to whether their children are going to have a better life than they do we ve been asked to null our hopes diminish our dreams we ve been told that consensus on any issue is no longer possible that we should settle for tinkering around the edges year after year after year and along the way we ve lost faith in the political process we don t really think that we can transform this country but the times we live in are too serious to let the cynics win this time health care costs have never been higher our workers face enormous insecurity they ve had the rugs pulled out from under them they don t know whether they re going to not just get a raise or see a boost in benefits but whether they re still going to have health care and whether they re still going to have a pension after working 30 years of hard labor our oil dependence is threatening not just our pocketbooks but the safety of our planet we ve got 130 000 americans fighting halfway across the world in a war that should have never been waged led by leaders who have no plan to end it we don t have time to be cynical we don t have time democrats this is not a game this is not a game this can t be about who digs up more skeletons on who who makes the fewest slip ups on the campaign trail we owe it to the american people to do more than that we owe them an election where voters are inspired where they believe that we might be able to do things that we haven t done before we don t want another election where voters are simply holding their noses and feel like they re choosing the lesser of two evils so we ve got to rise up out of the cynicism that s become so pervasive and ask the people all across america to start believing again we have always been at our best in this country when we aim high when our politics aims to match the height of our ideals when we ve conquered that fear and we speak the truth we ve reached for what so many other people said was unreachable so let s have a discussion everybody s going to have a health care plan let s have a robust serious discussion on health care what to do about rising premiums and rising co payments and rising deductibles and the fact that our companies are no longer competitive because of the health care situation but let s take advantage of the fact that we re seeing a consensus between business and labor that the status quo is unsustainable let s talk to conservatives as well as liberals about the need for reform and let s agree right here right now that we can find the will to pass health care for all by the end of the first term of the very next president of the united states there s no reason why we can t do it this is our time in this primary everybody s going to have good ideas about how to achieve energy independence some of us are going to talk about raising cafe standards others about biodiesel and ethanol energy efficiency we can have a vigorous robust honest debate but let s agree that our dependence is a threat not only to our economy not only to our national security but also the welfare of this planet and let us pledge that there is no reason why we can t wean ourselves off middle eastern oil we don t have to send our young people to fight if we make sacrifices here at home we can agree on that let s have an honest debate about how to end this war in iraq as was mentioned i was opposed to this invasion publicly frequently before it began i thought it was a tragic mistake but whether you were for it or against it then we all have a responsibility now to put forth a plan that offers the best chance of ending the bloodshed and bringing the troops home we all have that obligation the american people are ready for that to be addressed it was enough to run against george bush during this past congressional election it will not be enough now the american people are expecting more they want to know what we are going to do and every candidate for office in the next election should put forward in clear unambiguous uncertain terms exactly how they plan to get out of iraq and while we re at it we all have a responsibility to articulate a new foreign policy for the 21st century one that refocuses our strengths on the wider struggle against terror and renews america s image as the last best hope on earth now i know that it s hard to believe that we can do this it s hard to believe that we might come together around a set of solutions to the challenges that we face we ve been disappointed before and the american people have reason to doubt but we have to remember what s at stake we have to remember that for all the talking heads that fill the airwaves on the cable news stations that there is an untold story of another family that s gone bankrupt because they didn t have health insurance that for every campaign gaffe that gets amplified throughout the news media that there s a child somewhere that s trapped in a failing school whose call for help has gone unanswered where every attack ad that questions the character or honesty or patriotism of somebody there are real patriots fighting and dying in iraq whose families deserve to know how we plan to bring them home democrats this is our time to lead democrats it is time for us to turn the page it is time for us to free our straits free ourselves from the constraints of politics it s time for us to stop settling for the world as it is and start reimagining the world as it might be democrats this is america we all have doubts but wherever there s doubt the sense of possibility in america looms larger wherever there s despair faith is more powerful where there s cynicism hope is always stronger that s what we offer in this campaign that s what we offer the american people hope there are those who don t believe in talking about hope they say well we want specifics we want details we want white papers we want plans we ve had a lot of plans democrats what we ve had is a shortage of hope and over the next year over the next two years that will be my call to you i can t do it on my own but together we can hope i m calling on you to hope thank you democrats i love you dem bobama2 3 09 barack_obama hello everybody last week i unveiled a fiscal blueprint for america s future one that reflects the stark reality of our financial crisis while laying a lasting foundation for our common prosperity it makes both the sacrifices and the investments necessary to tackle the great challenges of our time challenges we face today as a consequence of decisions we deferred yesterday and one of these great challenges is health care the good news is that we have already done more to advance the cause of health care reform in the last month than we have in the last decade we ve provided and protected health insurance for 11 million children whose parents work full time we ve invested in preventive care to help keep people from having to go to the doctor in the first place and in electronic health records and new technology that will ensure privacy while saving billions of dollars and countless lives and today i can announce that under the recovery plan we ve put into action 155 million will go toward supporting 126 new health centers across america these health centers will expand access to care by helping people in need many with no health insurance obtain access to comprehensive primary and preventive health care services that helps relieve the burden on emergency rooms across the country which have become primary care clinics for too many who lack coverage often at taxpayer expense this action will create thousands of new jobs help provide health care to an estimated 750 000 low income americans across the country and take another important step toward affordable accessible health care for all but our current economic crisis has only heightened the urgency of our health care challenge in the last eight years premiums have grown four times faster than wages in each of these years 1 million americans have lost their health insurance the crushing cost of health care causes a bankruptcy in america every 30 seconds and by the end of this year it could cause 1 5 million americans to lose their homes it s a crisis punishing families battering businesses squeezing our states and increasingly imperiling our own budget health care is one of the fastest growing expenses in the federal budget and it s one we simply cannot sustain that is why we cannot fail to act yet again if we re going to help families save businesses and improve the long term economic health of our nation we must realizing that fixing what s wrong with our health care system is no longer just a moral imperative but a fiscal imperative health care reform that reduces costs while expanding coverage is no longer just a dream we hope to achieve it s a necessity we have to achieve today i m proud to announce key members of the team i m assembling to help do just that kansas governor kathleen sebelius for my secretary of health and human services and nancy ann deparle as director of the white house office for health reform now there s no easy formula for fixing our health care system there will be many different opinions and ideas about how to achieve this reform and that s why i m bringing together business and labor doctors and insurers democrats and republicans as well as ordinary americans from all walks of life to the white house this thursday for a historic health care forum what is required however is a commitment to reform that focuses not on democratic ideas or republican ideas but on ideas that work to rein in costs expand access and improve the quality of health care for the american people kathleen sebelius embodies such a commitment to bipartisan accomplishment she is after all the daughter of a democratic governor and the daughter in law of a republican congressman but she s forged a reputation for bipartisan problem solving in her own right as governor of kansas she inherited a billion dollar deficit but by eliminating waste and inefficiency while making smart choices she balanced the state budget without raising taxes and time and again on energy and education jobs and health care she s bridged the partisan divide and worked with a republican legislature to get things done for the people of kansas and that s why i m so proud that one of the most esteemed political leaders of our time bob dole is here as well as my former colleague pat roberts here as well people in kansas we stick together and i ve got my own kansas roots here so i m particularly pleased to be joined by so many so many kansans now kathleen has all also knows health care inside and out she s won praise for her expertise from stakeholders across the spectrum from consumer groups to insurers over eight years as state insurance commissioner she refused campaign contributions from insurance companies and protected the people of kansas from increases to their premiums by blocking a takeover of the state s largest insurer she helped draft a proposed national bill of rights for patients and served as the president of the national associate of insurance commissioners and as a governor she s been on the front lines of our health care crisis she has a deep knowledge of what the burden of crushing costs does to our families and businesses that s why she fought to guarantee kansans access access to quality affordable health care and sought to secure it for every kansas child from birth to age five kathleen has a remarkable intellect unquestioned integrity and the kind of pragmatic wisdom you ll tend to find in a kansan i know she will bring some much needed grace and good humor to washington and she will be a tremendous asset to my cabinet now as critical as the task of health care reform is governor sebelius will also oversee a department with wide ranging responsibilities essential to the well being of the american people we rely on the food and drug administration to ensure the safety of our nation s food and drug supply we depend on the center for disease control to make certain our nation is prepared for pandemic disease outbreak or bioterrorism attacks we expect the national institutes of health to keep america at the forefront of medical research and work toward a cure for cancer in our time and for as long as i am president these agencies will be led by exceptional individuals who stand on the side of the american people who push politics aside in favor of proven science who eschew stale ideology for sound ideas and a focus on what works i m also proud to announce that kathleen will have an excellent partner at the white house in nancy one of the nation s leading experts on health care and regulatory issues as commissioner of the department of human services in tennessee she saw firsthand our health care system s impact on workers and families in the clinton administration she handled budget matters for federal health care programs and took on the tremendous task of managing medicare and medicaid i have absolute confidence in her ability to lead the public and legislative effort to ensure quality affordable health care for every american let me close by saying one last thing i realize that there are those who simply don t believe washington can bring about this change and the odds are long it s failed too many times there are too many special interests and entrenched lobbyists invested in the status quo that s the conventional wisdom and i understand those doubts but i also know this i didn t come to washington to take the easy route or to work for the powerful and the well connected interests who have run this city for too long i came here to work for the american people i came here to deliver the sweeping change that they demanded when they went to the polls in november kathleen and nancy share my resolve i look forward to working with them as we begin the urgent and immediate task of ensuring quality affordable health care for every american and we also know that we re going to need important partners there so that s why i m so proud that we have the outstanding member of the house of representatives henry waxman and my own colleague and the head of the finance committee max baucus they have already shown extraordinary leadership in this process the fact that we ve got democrats and republicans here i hope is a symbol of how we can move this issue forward i don t think anybody has a silver bullet when it comes to health care there are some difficult tradeoffs to be made there are some difficult choices to be made but what i do know is this that people of goodwill collectively recognize that the path we re on is unsustainable it s going to be kathleen s job and nancy s job to work with extraordinary leaders like the ones on this stage to make sure that we finally deliver health care reform that will save our federal budget and help american families for generations to come thank you very much kathleen dem bobama2 3 10 barack_obama hello everybody well thank you so much everybody please have a seat have a seat thank you it is good to be back in georgia it is good to be back in georgia although where s the sun guys i was looking forward to i m still fired up but we ve been getting a lot of snow in washington d c so i was looking forward to maybe 60 70 degrees but i guess i ll take 50 i want to first of all just make some acknowledgments of some wonderful leaders who are here first of all i want to thank president kathy love and the entire savannah tech community for their hospitality i want to thank your governor who i just had a chance to see recently host him in the white house with the other governors mr sonny perdue your mayor otis johnson is in the house congressman john barrow you re in his district that s right congressman jack kingston congressman sanford bishop and congressman hank johnson are all in the house well thank you so much for taking the time to be here today i really appreciate the opportunity to visit here at savannah tech and i just took a brief tour of some of the classrooms where students are learning about clean energy they re learning about solar cells they re learning about efficient heating and cooling systems you ve got young people here who through the youthbuild program are gaining job skills that will help them the rest of their lives and by the way they re building a house right now while they re at it from the instructors to the students you saw just an incredible enthusiasm for america s future and i was just talking to president love about the focus of savannah tech on clean energy the idea that this can be a real model for green energy as a way of linking students to the enormous job opportunities and business opportunities that exist in the future these are the skills that will help our country transform the way we produce and use energy and that s so important especially as families in georgia and across america continue to experience the painful consequences of the worst economic crisis that we ve had in generations i had also had a chance to meet with some business owners who told me what i ve heard time and again that it s tough out there unemployment in georgia is still above 10 percent that doesn t include folks who have had to accept part time jobs or in some cases have given up finding a job altogether and when it comes to domestic policy i have no more important a job as president than seeing to it that every american who wants to work and is able to work can find a job and a job that pays a living wage that was my focus last year and that is my focus this year to lay a foundation for economic growth that will create jobs that raises incomes that will foster a secure economic future for middle class families this depends on not just spurring hiring but doing so in the areas that will create lasting opportunities and prosperity that s why we ve invested in roads and railways so that our economy has room to grow and we re laying the infrastructure for the future in fact because of the recovery act there are more than 300 transportation projects underway in georgia right now that s why we invested in schools and prevented layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and public school workers including thousands of educators in this state because we know we will not be able to compete in new industries unless we ve got workers ready to fill jobs in those industries and i d also point out that i ve proposed the largest ever investment in community colleges and technical schools like this one to produce millions more graduates who are ready to meet the demands of a 21st century economy and to spur hiring and sustain growth we ve placed a big emphasis on energy just a few weeks ago i announced a loan guarantee to break ground on the first new nuclear power plant in our country in nearly three decades a project right here in georgia right here in georgia a project that s going to create more than 3 000 construction jobs in the next few years and ultimately 800 permanent jobs operating the plant we re on track to create 700 000 jobs across america building advanced batteries for hybrid cars and modernizing our electric grid and doubling our capacity to generate clean energy and in fact here at savannah tech the recovery act provided a grant to youthbuild to help provide training in these very fields because i m convinced that the country that leads in clean energy is also going to be the country that leads in the global economy and i want america to be that nation i don t want us to be second place or third place or fourth place when it comes to the new energy technologies i want us to be in first so we have the potential to create millions of jobs in this sector these are jobs building more fuel efficient cars and trucks to make us energy independent these are jobs producing solar panels and erecting wind turbines these are jobs designing and manufacturing and selling and installing more efficient building materials because 40 percent of the energy we use is used by our homes and buildings think about that all of us know that we use a lot of gas in our cars but in terms of energy usage 40 percent of it goes to our homes and our buildings so as we re looking for additional initiatives to spur hiring i think we ought to embrace what s happening on this campus i think we ought to continue to embrace the incredible potential that awaits us across america in clean energy so in my state of the union address i called on congress to pass a set of initiatives for homeowners who make their homes more energy efficient to continue the energy transformation that s already begun so today i want to explain the details of this program and i also want to thank the members of the house and the senate who are helping to usher this proposal through congress now many of you have heard of energy star how many people have heard of energy star you ve seen that energy star sticker on a computer or on a microwave the energy star program was created to promote energy efficiency by letting consumers know which appliances which electronics would save electricity and therefore would save them money over time the program i m describing today applies this concept not to the appliances but to the home itself and it takes it further so we re going to call it homestar just to make it easy to remember here s how it would work we d identify the kinds of building supplies and systems that would save folks energy over time and here s one of the best things about energy efficiency it turns out that energy efficient windows or insulation those things are products that are almost exclusively manufactured right here in the united states of america it s very hard to ship windows from china so a lot of these materials are made right here in america so we take these materials and if a homeowner decides to do work on his or her house to put in new windows to replace a heating unit to insulate an attic to redo a roof the homeowner would be eligible for a rebate from the store or the contractor for 50 percent of the cost of each upgrade up to 1 500 now if you decided to retrofit your whole house to greatly reduce your energy use you d be eligible for a rebate of up to 3 000 now these are big incentives and you d get these rebates instantly from the hardware store or the contractor so if you went to lowe s or home depot or wherever you went right there when you paid at the cash register you d get that money you wouldn t have to mail in a long form wait for a check to arrive months later now we know this will save families as much as several hundred dollars on their utilities we know it will make our economy less dependent on fossil fuels helping to protect the planet for future generations but i want to emphasize that homestar will also create business and spur hiring up and down the economy i was just meeting with a number of business leaders in different segments of this industry we ve got some manufacturers making insulation and windows and other products we ve got folks who are contractors so stand up guys the guys i just met with see they re already they re ready to work they re ready to go so we were just talking about how they are geared up and they ve got the capacity to guarantee a homeowner that if they re willing to do this work on their house they will get their money back not just through the rebate but in the energy savings that you re seeing each year let s say you decide to use this rebate to seal up and insulate your attic because you want to save electricity but also because you re tired of a drafty house think about all the ways in which that will stimulate jobs and growth if you really knew what you were doing you might do it yourself but you re probably going to have somebody come to the house to carry out the installation work because you did the smart thing and you refused to let your husband do it himself that s the smart thing he ll be stubborn he ll tell you he can do it but don t listen to him so that creates work for small businesses and contractors like some of the folks who are here today and obviously construction work is that s been as hard hit as anything during this recession so you ve got a lot of skilled contractors ready to go and that in turn means that the contractors start hiring some of these folks who may have been laid off some of them may have been trained right here at savannah tech now you also have to buy the insulation and the other materials and that means you re producing business for your local retailer and that retailer has to purchase those supplies from manufacturers as i said most of them located right here in the united states of america and i mentioned these domestic manufacturers who are in the crowd they would benefit they would benefit from this program and then there s this huge amount of capacity excess capacity in construction and related industries to meet any surge in demand that was out there so the fact is that there s nearly 25 percent unemployment in the construction industry so far so construction companies hardware stores contractors manufacturers they faced a rapid decline in demand in the wake of the mortgage crisis and to make matters worse these businesses have seen the same decline in credit that has hurt every sector of our economy so these are companies ready to take on new customers they re workers eager to do new installations and renovations factories ready to produce new building supplies all we ve got to do is create the incentives to make it happen and this is not a democratic idea or a republican idea this is a common sense approach that will help jumpstart job creation while making our economy stronger ultimately that s what we re called to do just like a responsible homeowner will invest in their homes in the near term to fortify their economic security in the long term we ve got to do the same as a country it will have some costs on the front end you buy a new boiler or you get some insulation or you get some new windows that s going to have an initial cost and the same is true from a government perspective and it s going to be politically difficult to do some of this but it s what s right to plan for our future the same is true when it comes to reforming our education system the same is true when it comes to trying to make our health care system more affordable the same is true when it comes to energy each of these things are hard some of them have some costs on the front end and working stuff through congress is more than a notion but by taking these steps we ll help foster the kind of broadly shared growth that will serve us in the years and the decades to come that s how we ll create the conditions for businesses to expand and hire that s how we ll truly grow our middle class again that s how we ll not only rebuild our economy but we ll rebuild it stronger than it was before this crisis i am confident that we can do it savannah tech is leading the way a whole bunch of folks in this room are leading the way and i just hope that washington stands alongside you in making sure that we ve got the kind of energy future that we need thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama2 5 10a barack_obama good afternoon everybody first let me say a few words about the incident in new york city i want to commend the work of the nypd the new york fire department and the fbi which responded swiftly and aggressively to a dangerous situation and i also want to commend the vigilant citizens who noticed this suspicious activity and reported it to the authorities i just got off the phone on the way down here with mayor bloomberg to make sure that state and federal officials are coordinating effectively since last night my national security team has been taking every step necessary to ensure that our state and local partners have the full support and cooperation of the federal government we re going to do what s necessary to protect the american people to determine who is behind this potentially deadly act and to see that justice is done and i m going to continue to monitor the situation closely and do what it takes at home and abroad to safeguard the security of the american people now we just finished a meeting with admiral thad allen our national incident commander for this spill as well as coast guard personnel who are leading the response to this crisis and they gave me an update on our efforts to stop the bp oil spill and mitigate the damage by the way i just want to point out i was told there was drizzling out here is this louisiana drizzle right here they gave me a sense of how this spill is moving it is now about nine miles off the coast of southeastern louisiana and by the way we had the governor of louisiana bobby jindal as well as parish presidents who were taking part in this meeting because we want to emphasize the importance of coordinating between local state and federal officials throughout this process now i think the american people are now aware certainly the folks down in the gulf are aware that we re dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster the oil that is still leaking from the well could seriously damage the economy and the environment of our gulf states and it could extend for a long time it could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of americans who call this place home and that s why the federal government has launched and coordinated an all hands on deck relentless response to this crisis from day one after the explosion on the drilling rig it began with an aggressive search and rescue effort to evacuate 115 people including three badly injured and my thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the 11 workers who have not yet who have not been found when the drill unit sank on thursday we immediately and intensely investigated by remotely operated vehicles the entire 5 000 feet of pipe that s on the floor of the ocean in that process three leaks were identified the most recent coming just last wednesday evening as admiral allen and secretary napolitano have made clear we ve made preparations from day one to stage equipment for a worse case scenario we immediately set up command center operations here in the gulf and coordinated with all state and local governments and the third breach was discovered on wednesday we already had by that time in position more than 70 vessels and hundreds of thousands of feet of boom and i dispatched the secretaries of the interior and homeland security the administrator of the epa lisa jackson who is here my assistant for energy and climate change policy and the administrator of noaa to the gulf coast to ensure that we are doing whatever is required to respond to this event so i want to emphasize from day one we have prepared and planned for the worst even as we hoped for the best and while we have prepared and reacted aggressively i m not going to rest and none of the gentlemen and women who are here are going to rest or be satisfied until the leak is stopped at the source the oil on the gulf is contained and cleaned up and the people of this region are able to go back to their lives and their livelihoods currently the most advanced technology available is being used to try and stop a leak that is more than 5 000 feet under the surface because this leak is unique and unprecedented it could take many days to stop that s why we re also using every resource available to stop the oil from coming ashore and mitigating the damage it could cause and much of the discussion here at the center was focused on if we and when we have to deal with these mitigation efforts thus far as you can tell the weather has not been as cooperative as we d like on this front but we re going to continue to push forward i also want to stress that we are working closely with the gulf states and local communities to help every american affected by this crisis let me be clear bp is responsible for this leak bp will be paying the bill but as president of the united states i m going to spare no effort to respond to this crisis for as long as it continues and we will spare no resource to clean up whatever damage is caused and while there will be time to fully investigate what happened on that rig and hold responsible parties accountable our focus now is on a fully coordinated relentless response effort to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf i want to thank the thousands of americans who ve been working around the clock to stop this crisis whether it s the brave men and women of our military or the local officials who call the gulf home they are doing everything in their power to mitigate this disaster prevent damage to our environment and help our fellow citizens during this visit i am hoping to have the opportunity to speak with some of the individuals who are directly affected by the disaster i ve heard already that people are understandably frustrated and frightened especially because the people of this region have been through worse disasters than anybody should have to bear but every american affected by this spill should know this your government will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to stop this crisis this is one of the richest and most beautiful ecosystems on the planet and for centuries its residents have enjoyed and made a living off the fish that swim in these waters and the wildlife that inhabit these shores this is also the heartbeat of the region s economic life and we re going to do everything in our power to protect our natural resources compensate those who have been harmed rebuild what has been damaged and help this region persevere like it has done so many times before that s a commitment i m making as president of the united states and i know that everybody who works for the federal government feels the exact same way thank you very much everybody dem bobama2 5 10b barack_obama thank you so much ed and to all the other board members to honored guests and to the lovely first lady good evening ed is right i work a lot and so i wasn t sure that i should actually come tonight biden talked me into it he leaned over and he said mr president this is no ordinary dinner this is a big meal it s been quite a year since i ve spoken here last lots of ups lots of downs except for my approval ratings which have just gone down but that s politics it doesn t bother me beside i happen to know that my approval ratings are still very high in the country of my birth and then just the other day my dear friend hillary clinton pulled me aside and she gave me a pep talk she said despite the numbers she said don t worry barack you re likeable enough which made me feel better of course i may not have had the star power that i once had but in my defense neither do all of you people say to me mr president you helped revive the banking industry you saved gm and chrysler what about the news business i have to explain hey i m just the president i m not a miracle worker here though i am glad that the only person whose ratings fell more than mine last year is here tonight great to see you jay i m also glad that i m speaking first because we ve all seen what happens when somebody takes the time slot after leno s by the way all of the jokes here tonight are brought to you by our friends at goldman sachs so you don t have to worry they make money whether you laugh or not we do have a number of notable guests in attendance here tonight obviously i m most pleased that michelle accompanied me she doesn t always go to these things and there are few things in life that are harder to find and more important to keep than love well love and a birth certificate the jonas brothers are here they re out there somewhere sasha and malia are huge fans but boys don t get any ideas i have two words for you predator drones you will never see it coming you think i m joking speaking of tween heartthrobs scott brown is here i admire scott a rare politician in washington with nothing to hide now you should be aware that scott brown is not the only one with a salacious photo spread floating around recently david axelrod was offered a centerfold opportunity of his own now i did not know that krispy kreme had a catalog but it s true i saw michael steele backstage when we were taking pictures aka notorious gop michael who knows what truly plagues america today taxation without representin my brother i did a similar routine last year but it always works odds are that the salahis are here there haven t been people that were more unwelcome at a party since charlie crist unfortunately john mccain couldn t make it recently he claimed that he had never identified himself as a maverick and we all know what happens in arizona when you don t have id adios amigos look i feel for john you know we were on the road together and obviously had a hard fought battle and you learn certainly at the national level politics isn t easy this year i ve experienced my share of disappointments for example i had my heart set on the nobel prize for physics but hey you can t win em all speaking of undeserved honors a few weeks ago i was able to throw out the first pitch at the nationals game and i don t know if you saw it but i threw it a little high and a little outside this is how fox news covered it president panders to extreme left wing of batter box on the other hand msnbc had a different take president pitches no hitter and then cnn went a different way altogether i guess that s why they re the most trusted name in news now look i have a reputation for giving cable a hard time so let s pick on politico for a while you know people attack politico for putting a new focus on trivial issues political fodder gossip sheet that s not fair politico has been doing this for centuries now just check out these headlines our researchers found these japan surrenders where s the bounce then there s this one lincoln saves union but can he save house majority i don t know if you can see there s a little portion there he s lost the southern white vote it s an astute analysis there and my favorite july 3 1776 senior whig official talks break down independence dead so this is nothing new but even though the mainstream press gives me a hard time i hear that i m still pretty big on twitter facebook or as sarah palin calls it the socialized media of course that s not the only thing that we ve been accused of socializing this year you might have heard we passed a health care bill and is that roger ailes applauding out there some republicans have suggested that the bill contains a few secret provisions that s ridiculous there aren t a few secret provisions in the health care plan there are like hundreds tonight in the interest of transparency i d like to share a couple let s see this provision is called the bay state of denial it reads this bill shall cover short term memory loss related to the passage of massachusetts health care reform so good news mitt your condition is covered this next provision is called the jersey shore up it reads the following individuals shall be excluded from the indoor tanning tax within this bill snooki j woww the situation and house minority leader john boehner this provision ought to put a common misperception to rest it says right here if you do not like the ruling of your death panel you can appeal now look obviously i ve learned this year politics can be a tough business but there are times where you just can t help but laugh you know what really tickles me eric massa apparently massa claimed that rahm came up to him one day in the house locker room stark naked started screaming obscenities at him to which i say welcome to my world i feel you it s a tense moment you know even as we enjoy each other s company tonight we re also mindful of the incredible struggles of our fellow americans in the gulf coast both those leading the efforts to stem this crisis and those along the coast whose livelihoods are in jeopardy as a result of the spill also in our thoughts and prayers tonight are the men and women in uniform who put their lives at risk each and every day for our safety and freedom so in that spirit i d also like to pay a tribute to the journalists who play an extraordinary role in telling their stories earlier today i gave the commencement address at michigan where i spoke to the graduates about what is required to keep out democracy thriving in the 21st century and one of the points i made is that for all the changes and challenges facing your industry this country absolutely needs a healthy vibrant media probably needs it more than ever now today s technology today s technology has made it possible for us to get our news and information from a growing range of sources we can pick and choose not only our preferred type of media but also our preferred perspective and while that exposes us to an unprecedented array of opinions analysis and points of view it also makes it that much more important that we re all operating on a common baseline of facts it makes it that much more important that journalists out there seek only the truth and i don t have to tell you that some of you are seasoned veterans who have been on the political beat for decades others here tonight began their careers as bloggers not long ago but i think it s fair to say that every single reporter in this room believes deeply in the enterprise of journalism every one of you even the most cynical among you understands and cherishes the function of a free press and the preservation of our system of government and of our way of life and i want you to know that for all the jokes and the occasional gripes i cherish that work as well in fact tonight i wanted to present all of you with a bipartisan congressional resolution that honors all those wonderful contributions that journalists have made to our country and the world but unfortunately i couldn t break the filibuster thank you very much everybody god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama2 6 10 barack_obama thank you thank you very much thank you everybody please have a seat thank you very much let me begin by thanking dr jared cohon and the entire carnegie mellon community for welcoming me once again and for the terrific work that he and the administration faculty and staff do here each and every day i also want to acknowledge your outstanding mayor who doesn t look any older than the last time i saw him mayor luke ravenstahl there he is right there it is great to be back at carnegie mellon and in the beautiful city of pittsburgh i love visiting a good sports town last year i stole dan rooney to serve as my ambassador to ireland to make it up i invited both the steelers and the penguins to the white house to celebrate their championships seeing how the blackhawks are headed to philly tonight with a 2 0 lead in the stanley cup finals i m just glad that we re on this side of the state i noticed a couple of people said they were rooting for the blackhawks which tells me something about the rivalry between pittsburgh and philly of course we meet here at an incredibly difficult time for america among other things it s a time when the worst environmental disaster of its kind in our nation s history is threatening the gulf coast and the people who live there right now stopping this oil spill and containing its damage is necessarily the top priority not just of my administration but i think of the entire country and we re waging this battle every minute of every day but at the same time we re continuing our efforts to recover and rebuild from an economic disaster that has touched the lives of nearly every american that s what i want to talk about today the state of our economy the future we must seize and the path we chose to get there it has now been a little over 16 months since i took office amid one of the worst economic storms in our history and to navigate that storm my administration was forced to take some dramatic and unpopular steps these steps have succeeded in breaking the freefall we re again moving in the right direction an economy that was shrinking at an alarming rate when i became president has now been growing for three consecutive quarters after losing an average of 750 000 jobs a month during the winter of last year we ve now added jobs for five of the last six months and we expect to see strong job growth in friday s report the taxpayer money it cost to shore up the financial sector and the auto industry that s being repaid and both gm and chrysler are adding shifts and operating at a profit so despite temporary setbacks uncertain world events and the resulting ups and downs of the market this economy is getting stronger by the day now that doesn t mean this recession is by any means over for the millions of americans who are still looking for a job or a way to pay the bills not by a long shot the devastation created by the deepest downturn since the great depression has hit people and communities across our country very hard and it s not going to be a real recovery until people can feel it in their own lives in the immediate future this means doing whatever is necessary to keep the recovery going and to spur job growth but in the long term it means recognizing that for a lot of middle class families for entire communities in some case a sense of economic security has been missing since long before the recession began over the last decade these families saw their income decline they saw the cost of things like health care and college tuition reach record highs they lived through a so called economic expansion that generated slower job growth than at any prior expansion since world war ii some people have called the last 10 years the lost decade so the anxiety that s out there today isn t new the recession has certainly made it worse but that feeling of not being in control of your own economic future that sense that the american dream might slowly be slipping away that s been around for some time now and for better or for worse our generation of americans has been buffeted by tremendous forces of economic change long gone are the days when a high school diploma could guarantee a job at a local factory not when so many of those factories had moved overseas pittsburgh a city that once was defined by the steel industry knows this better than just about anybody and today the ability of jobs and entire industries to relocate where there s skilled workers and an internet connection has forced america to compete like never before from china to india to europe other nations have already realized this they re putting a greater emphasis on math and science and demanding more from their students some countries are building high speed railroads and expanding broadband access they re making serious investments in technology and clean energy because they want to win the competition for those jobs so we can t afford to stand pat while the world races by the united states of america did not become the most prosperous nation on earth by sheer luck or happenstance we got here because each time a generation of americans has faced a changing world we have changed with it we have not feared our future we have shaped it america does not stand still we move forward and that s why i ve said that as we emerge from this recession we can t afford to return to the pre crisis status quo we can t go back to an economy that was too dependent on bubbles and debt and financial speculation we can t accept economic growth that leaves the middle class owing more and making less we have to build a new and stronger foundation for growth and prosperity and that s exactly what we ve been doing for the last 16 months it s a foundation based on investments in our people and their future investments in the skills and education we need to compete investments in a 21st century infrastructure for america from high speed railroads to high speed internet investments in research and technology like clean energy that can lead to new jobs and new exports and new industries this new foundation is also based on reforms that will make our economy stronger and our businesses more competitive reforms that will make health care cheaper our financial system more secure and our government less burdened with debt in a global economy we can t pursue this agenda in a vacuum at the height of the financial crisis the coordinated action we took with the nations of the g20 prevented a global depression and helped restore worldwide growth and as we ve recently witnessed in europe economic difficulties in one part of the world can affect everybody else and that s why we have to keep on working with the nations of the g20 to pursue more balanced growth that s why we need to coordinate financial reform with other nations so that we avoid a global race to the bottom it s why we need to open new markets and meet the goal of my national export initiative to double our exports over the next five years and it s why we need to ensure that our competitors play fair and our agreements are enforced this too is part of building a new foundation now some of you may have noticed that we have been building this foundation without much help from our friends in the other party from our efforts to rescue the economy to health insurance reform to financial reform most have sat on the sidelines and shouted from the bleachers they said no to tax cuts for small businesses no to tax credits for college tuition no to investments in clean energy they said no to protecting patients from insurance companies and consumers from big banks and some of this of course is just politics before i was even inaugurated the congressional leaders of the other party got together and made a calculation that if i failed they d win so when i went to meet with them about the need for a recovery act in the midst of crisis they announced they were against it before i even arrived at the meeting before we even had a health care bill a republican senator actually said if we re able to stop obama on this it will be his waterloo it will break him so those weren t very hopeful signs but to be fair a good deal of the other party s opposition to our agenda has also been rooted in their sincere and fundamental belief about the role of government it s a belief that government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges it s an agenda that basically offers two answers to every problem we face more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations the last administration called this recycled idea the ownership society but what it essentially means is that everyone is on their own no matter how hard you work if your paycheck isn t enough to pay for college or health care or childcare well you re on your own if misfortune causes you to lose your job or your home you re on your own and if you re a wall street bank or an insurance company or an oil company you pretty much get to play by your own rules regardless of the consequences for everybody else now i ve never believed that government has all the answers government cannot and should not replace businesses as the true engine of growth and job creation government can t instill good values and a sense of responsibility in our children that s a parent s job too much government can deprive us of choice and burden us with debt poorly designed regulations can choke off competition and the capital that businesses need to thrive i understand these arguments and it s reflected in my policies after all one third of the recovery act we designed was made up of tax cuts for families and small businesses and when you think back to the health care debate despite calls for a single payer government run health care plan we passed reform that maintains our system of private health insurance but i also understand that throughout our nation s history we have balanced the threat of overreaching government against the dangers of an unfettered market we ve provided a basic safety net because any one of us might experience hardship at some time in our lives and may need some help getting back on our feet and we ve recognized that there have been times when only government has been able to do what individuals couldn t do and corporations wouldn t do that s how we have railroads and highways public schools and police forces that s how we ve made possible scientific research that has led to medical breakthroughs like the vaccine for hepatitis b and technological wonders like gps that s how we have social security and a minimum wage and laws to protect the food we eat and the water we drink and the air that we breathe that s how we have rules to ensure that mines are safe and yes that oil companies pay for the spills that they cause now there have always been those who ve said no to such protections no to such investments there were accusations that social security would lead to socialism and that medicare was a government takeover there were bankers who claimed the creation of federal deposit insurance would destroy the industry and there were automakers who argued that installing seatbelts was unnecessary and unaffordable there were skeptics who thought that cleaning our water and our air would bankrupt our entire economy and all of these claims proved false all of these reforms led to greater security and greater prosperity for our people and our economy so what was true then is true today as november approaches leaders in the other party will campaign furiously on the same economic arguments they ve been making for decades fortunately we don t have to look back too many years to see how their agenda turns out for much of the last 10 years we ve tried it their way they gave us tax cuts that weren t paid for to millionaires who didn t need them they gutted regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight they shortchanged investments in clean energy and education in research and technology and despite all their current moralizing about the need to curb spending this is the same crowd who took the record 237 billion surplus that president clinton left them and turned it into a record 1 3 trillion deficit so we know where those ideas lead us and now we have a choice as a nation we can return to the failed economic policies of the past or we can keep building a stronger future we can go backward or we can keep moving forward and i don t know about you but i want to move forward i think america wants to move forward now the first step in building a new foundation that allows us to move forward has been to address the costs and risks that have made our economy less competitive outdated regulations crushing health care costs and a growing debt to start with we can t compete as a nation if the irresponsibility of a few folks on wall street can bring our entire economy to its knees that s why we re on the verge of passing the most sweeping financial reform since the great depression it s a reform that will help prevent another aig it will end taxpayer funded bank bailouts it contains the strongest consumer protections in history protections that will empower americans with the clear and concise information they need before signing up for a credit card or taking out a mortgage financial reform will not guard against every instance of greed and irresponsibility on wall street but it will enshrine a new principle in our financial system from now on instead of competing to see who can come up with the cleverest scheme to make the quickest buck financial institutions will compete to see who can make the better product and the better service and that s a competition that benefits wall street and main street that s why we need to get this legislation done it s why we can t afford to go back we have to move forward we also know we can t compete in a global economy if our citizens are forced to spend more and more of their income on medical bills if our businesses are forced to choose between health care and hiring if state and federal budgets are weighed down with skyrocketing health care costs that s why we finally passed health insurance reform now let s be clear the costs of health care are not going to come down overnight just because legislation passed and in an ever changing industry like health care we re going to continuously need to apply more cost cutting measures as the years go by but once this reform is in full effect middle class families will pay less for their health care and the worst practices of the insurance industry will end people with preexisting medical conditions will no longer be excluded from coverage people who become seriously ill will no longer be thrown off their coverage for reasons contrived by the insurance company taxpayers will no longer have to pay in the form of higher premiums for trips to the er by uninsured americans businesses will get help with their health care costs in fact small businesses are already learning they re eligible for tax credits to cover their workers this year and with less waste and greater efficiency in the system this reform will do more to bring down the deficit than any step we have taken in more than a decade the other party has staked their claim this november on repealing these health insurance reforms instead of making them work they want to go back we need to move forward making health care more cost efficient is critical because it s also true that we cannot be competitive as a nation if we remain dragged down by our growing debt so let me talk about debt just for a second by the time i took office we had a one year deficit of over 1 trillion and projected deficits of 8 trillion over the next decade most of this was the result of not paying for two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and a worthy but expensive prescription drug program that wasn t paid for i always find it interesting that the same people who participated in these decisions are the ones who now charge our administration with fiscal irresponsibility and the truth is if i had taken office in ordinary times i would have liked nothing more than to start bringing down the deficits that they created but we took office amid a crisis and the effects of the recession put a 3 trillion hole in our budget before i even walked through the door additionally the steps that we had to take to save the economy from depression temporarily added more to the deficit by about 1 trillion of course if we had spiraled into a depression our deficits and debt levels would be much worse now the economy is still fragile so we can t put on the brakes too quickly we have to do what it takes to ensure a strong recovery a growing economy will unquestionably improve our fiscal health as will the steps we take in the short term to put americans back to work and that s why i signed a bill that will provide tax cuts for small businesses that hire unemployed workers that s why i ve urged congress to pass a small business lending fund so that small businesses can get the credit they need to create jobs and grow that s why i believe it s critical we extend unemployment insurance for several more months so that americans who ve been laid off through no fault of their own get the support they need to provide for their families and can maintain their health insurance until they re rehired and we have to work with state and local governments to make sure they have the resources to prevent the likely layoffs of hundreds of thousands of public school teachers across the country over the next few months but as we look ahead we can t lose sight of the urgent need to get our fiscal house in order there are four key components to putting our budget on a sustainable path maintaining economic growth is number one health care reform is number two the third component is the belt tightening steps i ve already outlined to reduce our deficit by 1 trillion starting in 2011 we will enact a three year freeze on all discretionary spending outside of national security something that was never enacted in the last administration we will allow the tax cuts for the wealthiest americans to expire we ve gone through the budget line by line and identified more than 120 programs for elimination we ve restored a simple budgeting rule that every family and business understands called pay as you go and we will charge the largest wall street firms a fee to repay the american people for rescuing them during the financial crisis a fee that will bring down the deficit by 90 billion a fee that will bring down the deficit by 90 billion over the next decade by the way that 90 billion represents about one eighth of the amount these banks will pay out in bonuses over the same time period in time now finally the fourth component in improving our fiscal health is the bipartisan fiscal commission that i ve established that will provide a specific set of solutions by the fall to deal with our medium and long term deficit and i have to warn you this will not be easy i know that some like to make the argument that if we would just eliminate pork barrel projects and foreign aid we could eliminate our deficit turns out such spending makes up just 3 percent of our deficit you combine all foreign aid and all earmarks that s 3 percent of our budget so meeting the deficit challenge will require some very difficult decisions about the largely popular programs that make up the other 97 percent it means we ll have to sort through our priorities and figure out what programs that we can do without on this point i strongly agree with my friends in the other party what i don t agree with is the notion that we should also sacrifice critical investments in our people and our future you know if you re a family who s tightening your belt you will definitely sacrifice going out to dinner but you re not going to sacrifice saving for your child s college education it s precisely our investments in education and innovation that will make america more competitive in the 21st century and we can t go back we ve got to move forward that s why i ve made education reform a top priority because countries that out educate us today will out compete us tomorrow and so we want every citizen to have the skills and training they need in a global economy from the day that you re born through whatever career you may choose last year we launched a national competition to improve our schools based on a simple idea instead of funding the status quo we will only invest in reform reform that raises student achievement that inspires students to excel in math and science and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young americans and to achieve my goal of ensuring america once more has the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 we passed a law that will make college more affordable by ending the unnecessary taxpayer subsidies that go to financial institutions for student loans that means we re saving billions of dollars that will go directly to students including students right here at carnegie mellon it s a bill that will also revitalize our community colleges which are a career pathway to the children of so many working families in addition to training our workers for the jobs of the future we re also investing in the innovation that will create those jobs here in america the research the technology the infrastructure that will secure our economic future right now as we speak the recovery act is putting americans to work building a 21st century america there s no reason china should have the fastest trains or that rural pennsylvania should be without high speed internet access we ve got to make those investments from the first railroads to the interstate highway system this nation has always been built to compete so we re going to invest and are investing right now in new infrastructure expanding broadband health information technology advanced manufacturing facilities america s first high speed rail network we re also investing in the ideas and technologies that will lead to new jobs and entire new industries consider what we ve done with clean energy the tax credits and loan guarantees in the recovery act alone will lead to 720 000 clean energy jobs in america by 2012 720 000 i ll give you one example the united states used to make less than 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries for hybrid cars by 2015 because of the investments that we made we ll have enough capacity to make up to 40 percent of these batteries now this brings me to an issue that s on everybody s minds right now namely what kind of energy future can ensure our long term prosperity the catastrophe unfolding in the gulf right now may prove to be a result of human error or of corporations taking dangerous shortcuts to compromise safety or a combination of both and i ve launched a national commission so that the american people will have answers on exactly what happened but we have to acknowledge that there are inherent risks to drilling four miles beneath the surface of the earth and these are risks these are risks that are bound to increase the harder oil extraction becomes we also have to acknowledge that an america run solely on fossil fuels should not be the vision we have for our children and our grandchildren we consume more than 20 percent of the world s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world s oil reserves so without a major change in our energy policy our dependence on oil means that we will continue to send billions of dollars of our hard earned wealth to other countries every month including countries in dangerous and unstable regions in other words our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardize our national security it will smother our planet and it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk now i understand that we can t end our dependence on fossil fuels overnight that s why i supported a careful plan of offshore oil production as one part of our overall energy strategy but we can pursue such production only if it s safe and only if it s used as a short term solution while we transition to a clean energy economy and the time has come to aggressively accelerate that transition the time has come once and for all for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future now that means continuing our unprecedented effort to make everything from our homes and businesses to our cars and trucks more energy efficient it means tapping into our natural gas reserves and moving ahead with our plan to expand our nation s fleet of nuclear power plants it means rolling back billions of dollars of tax breaks to oil companies so we can prioritize investments in clean energy research and development but the only way the transition to clean energy will ultimately succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed and the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution no many businesses have already embraced this idea because it provides a level of certainty about the future and for those that face transition costs we can help them adjust but if we refuse to take into account the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction if we don t factor in the environmental costs and the national security costs and the true economic costs we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future the house of representatives has already passed a comprehensive energy and climate bill and there is currently a plan in the senate a plan that was developed with ideas from democrats and republicans that would achieve the same goal and pittsburgh i want you to know the votes may not be there right now but i intend to find them in the coming months i will continue to make the case for a clean energy future wherever and whenever i can i will work with anyone to get this done and we will get it done the next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century we are not going to move backwards we are going to move forward this overarching principle that we must invest in and embrace the innovation and technology of the future and not the past that applies beyond our energy policy that s why we ve decided to devote more than 3 percent of our gdp to research and development to spur the discovery of services and products and businesses that we have yet to imagine we ve proposed making the research and experimentation tax credit permanent a tax credit that helps businesses afford the high costs of developing new technologies and new products last year we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history the possibilities of where this research might lead are endless imagine a new treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched regenerative medicine that ends the agonizing wait for an organ transplant imagine a lightweight vest for soldiers and police officers that can stop armor piercing bullets educational software that s as effective and engaging as a personal tutor intelligent prosthetics that can enable a wounded veteran to play the piano again and now imagine all the workers and small business owners and consumers who would benefit from these discoveries we can t know for certain what the future will bring we can t guess with 100 percent accuracy what industries and innovations will next shape our world i m sure there were times when this city couldn t imagine life without steel mills and heavy smog that filled these streets and when that industry shrank and so many jobs were lost who could have guessed that pittsburgh would fare better than many other rust belt cities and reemerge as a center for technology and green jobs health care and education who would have thought that the university of pittsburgh medical center s logo would one day adorn the u s steel tower or that this institute carnegie mellon would be the region s largest employer all of this came to be because as a community you prepared and adapted and invested in a better future even if you weren t always sure what that future would look like and that s what america does that s what we ve always done the interests of the status quo will always have the most vocal and powerful defenders at every level of government there will always be lobbyists for the banks or the insurance industry that doesn t want more regulation or the corporation that would prefer to see more tax breaks instead of more investments in infrastructure or education and let s face it a lot of us find the prospect of change scary even when we know the status quo isn t working for us but there s no natural lobby for the clean energy company that may start a few years from now there s no natural lobby for the research that may lead to a lifesaving medical breakthrough there s no natural lobby for the student who may not be able to afford a college education but if they got one could end up making discoveries that would transform america and the world it s our job as a nation to advocate on behalf of the america that we hope for to make decisions that will benefit the next generation even if it s not always popular even if we can t always see those benefits in the short term we make decisions like this on behalf of our own children every single day and while it s harder to do with an entire country as large and diverse as ours it s no less important the role of government has never been to plan every detail or dictate every outcome at its best government has simply knocked away barriers to opportunity and laid the foundation for a better future our people with all their drive and ingenuity always end up building the rest and if we can do that again if we can continue building that foundation and making those hard decisions on behalf of the next generation i have no doubt that we will leave our children the america that we all hope for thank you everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama2 7 10 barack_obama thank you to mona and marjorie and to senator byrd s entire family including those adorable great granddaughters that i had a chance to meet michelle and i offer you our deepest sympathies to senator byrd s friends including the speaker of the house the majority leader the republican leader president clinton vice president biden vicki kennedy nick rahall and all the previous speakers senator rockefeller for the outstanding work that you ve done for the state of west virginia to his larger family the people of west virginia i want you all to know that all america shares your loss may we all find comfort in a verse of scripture that reminds me of our dear friend the time of my departure has come i have fought the good fight i have finished the race i have kept the faith it s interesting that you ve heard that passage from several speakers now because it embodies somebody who knew how to run a good and long race and somebody who knew how to keep the faith with his state with his family with his country and his constitution years from now when i think of the man we memorialize today i ll remember him as he was when i came to know him his white hair full like a mane his gait steadied with a cane determined to make the most of every last breath the distinguished gentleman from west virginia could be found at his desk until the very end doing the people s business delivering soul stirring speeches a hint of the appalachians in his voice stabbing the air with his finger fiery as ever years into his 10th decade he was a senate icon he was a party leader he was an elder statesman and he was my friend that s how i ll remember him today we remember the path he climbed to such extraordinary peaks born cornelius calvin sale jr corny he joked for short his mother lost her life in the great influenza pandemic of 1918 from the aunt and uncle who raised him amid west virginia s coal camps he gained not only his byrd name but a reverence for god almighty a love of learning that was nurtured at mark twain school and there he met erma his sweetheart for over 70 years by whose side he will now rest for eternity unable to afford college he did what he could to get by finding work as a gas station attendant a produce salesman a meat cutter and a welder in the shipyards of baltimore and tampa during world war ii returning home to west virginia after the war he ran for the state house of delegates using his fiddle case as a briefcase the better to stand out on the stump before long he ran for congress serving in the house before jumping over to the senate where he was elected nine times held almost every leadership role imaginable and proved as capable of swaying others as standing alone marking a row of milestones along the way longest serving member of congress nearly 19 000 votes cast not a single loss at the polls a record that speaks to the bond that he had with you the people of his state transplanted to washington his heart remained here in west virginia in the place that shaped him with the people he loved his heart belonged to you making life better here was his only agenda giving you hope he said was his greatest achievement hope in the form of new jobs and industries hope in the form of black lung benefits and union protections hope through roads and research centers schools and scholarships health clinics and industrial parks that bear his name his early rival and late friend ted kennedy used to joke about campaigning in west virginia when his bus broke down ted got hold of the highway patrol who asked where he was and he said i m on robert byrd highway and the dispatcher said which one it s a life that immeasurably improved the lives of west virginians of course robert byrd was a deeply religious man a christian and so he understood that our lives are marked by sins as well as virtues failures as well as success weakness as well as strength we know there are things he said and things he did that he came to regret i remember talking about that the first time i visited with him he said there are things i regretted in my youth you may know that and i said none of us are absent some regrets senator that s why we enjoy and seek the grace of god and as i reflect on the full sweep of his 92 years it seems to me that his life bent towards justice like the constitution he tucked in his pocket like our nation itself robert byrd possessed that quintessential american quality and that is a capacity to change a capacity to learn a capacity to listen a capacity to be made more perfect over his nearly six decades in our capitol he came to be seen as the very embodiment of the senate chronicling its history in four volumes that he gave to me just as he gave to president clinton i too read it i was scared he was going to quiz me but as i soon discovered his passion for the senate s past his mastery of even its most arcane procedures it wasn t an obsession with the trivial or the obscure it reflected a profoundly noble impulse a recognition of a basic truth about this country that we are not a nation of men we are a nation of laws our way of life rests on our democratic institutions precisely because we are fallible it falls to each of us to safeguard these institutions even when it s inconvenient and pass on our republic more perfect than before considering the vast learning of this self taught senator his speeches sprinkled with the likes of cicero and shakespeare and jefferson it seems fitting to close with one of his favorite passages in literature a passage from moby dick and there is a catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces and even if he forever flies within the gorge that gorge is in the mountains so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than any other bird upon the plain even though they soar robert byrd was a mountain eagle and his lowest swoop was still higher than the other birds upon the plain may god bless robert c byrd may he be welcomed kindly by the righteous judge and may his spirit soar forever like a catskill eagle high above the heavens thank you very much dem bobama2 8 10a barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you thank you everybody thank you so much thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you everybody please have a seat have a seat well we have some just extraordinary leaders here today i want to acknowledge a few of them first of all please give another round of applause to your outstanding young mayor kasim reed three wonderful members of congress who are fighting day in day out on behalf of the people of georgia but also on behalf of people all across this country congressman sanford bishop congressman david scott and one of the genuine heroes of this country congressman john lewis our labor commissioner and u s senate candidate michael thurmond is in the house attorney general thurbert baker i think is here if not give him a round of applause anyway ag commissioner tommy irvin state party chair jane kidd and the dnc southern finance chair daniel halpern is in the house so atlanta it is wonderful to be here wonderful to be among so many good friends a lot of people here worked hard on behalf of my campaign i am reminded of the story president lincoln told about one of his supporters who came to the white house seeking some patronage seeking a job and apparently in the outdoor reception area he said look i want to see lincoln personally because i m responsible for him getting that job nobody did more than me it s payback time so lincoln lets him into his office he says sir i understand that you take responsibility for me having this job the guy says that s right and lincoln says you re forgiven look we all know that the last few years have been extraordinarily challenging for the united states eighteen months ago i took office after nearly a decade of economic policies that gave us sluggish growth falling incomes and a record deficit and policies that culminated in the worst financial crisis that we ve seen since the great depression in the last six months of 2008 three million americans lost their jobs the month i was sworn january of 2009 750 000 americans lost their jobs 600 000 were lost a month later all told 8 million jobs lost as a consequence of this crisis now we didn t get here by accident we got here after 10 years of an economic agenda in washington that was pretty straightforward you cut taxes for millionaires you cut rules for special interests and you cut working folks loose to fend for themselves that was the philosophy of the last administration and their friends in congress if you couldn t find a job or you couldn t go to college tough luck you re on your own but if you re a wall street bank or an insurance company or an oil company then you got to write your own ticket and play by your own rules and we know how this turned out so when i took office because of the help of some of the people in this room we put forward a new economic plan a plan that rewards hard work instead of greed a plan that rewards responsibility instead of recklessness a plan that s focused on making our middle class more secure and our country more competitive in the long run so that the jobs and industries of the future aren t all going to china and india but are being created right here in the united states of america instead of spending money on tax breaks for folks who don t need them and weren t even asking for them we re making smart investments in innovation and clean energy and education that are going to benefit all of our people and our entire economy over the long run and instead of giving special interests free reign to do whatever they want we re demanding new accountability from wall street to washington so that big corporations have to play by the same rules that small businesses and entrepreneurs do now because the policies of the last decade got us in such a deep hole it s going to take some time for us to dig ourselves out we re certainly not there yet but i want everybody to understand after eighteen months i can say with confidence we are on the right track when we were instead of losing millions of jobs we have created jobs for six straight months in the private sector instead of an economy that is contracting we ve got an economy that is expanding so the last thing we would want to do is go back to what we were doing before and i want everybody in this room to understand that is the choice in this election the choice is the choice is whether we want to go forward or we want to go backwards to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place now understand it d be one thing if the republicans had seen the error of their ways right i mean if after the rejections of 2006 and 2008 realizing gosh look at this big disaster that we caused and taking record surpluses into record deficits and causing all this hardship we re going to rethink our approach and go out in the wilderness for a while come back with some new ideas but that s not what happened it s not like they ve engaged in some heavy reflection they have not come up with a single solitary new idea to address the challenges of the american people they don t have a single idea that s different from george bush s ideas not one instead they re betting on amnesia that s what they re counting on they re counting on that you all forgot they think that they can run the okey doke on you bamboozle you i mean think about it these are the folks who were behind the steering wheel and drove the car into the ditch so we ve had to put on our galoshes we went down there in the mud we ve been pushing we ve been shoving they ve been standing back watching say you re not moving fast enough you ain t doing it right why are you doing it that way you got some mud on the car right that s all right we don t need help we re just going to keep on pushing we push we push the thing is slipping a little bit but we stay with it finally finally we get this car out of the ditch where we re just right there on the blacktop we re about to start driving forward again they say hold on we want the keys back you can t have the keys back you don t know how to drive you don t know how to drive and i do want to point out when you get in your car when you go forward what do you do you put it in d when you want to go back what do you do you put it in r we won t do want to go into reverse back in the ditch we want to go forwards we got to put it in d can t have the keys back the choice in this election is between policies that encourage job creation here in america or encourage jobs to go elsewhere that s why i ve said instead of giving tax breaks to corporations that want to ship jobs overseas we want to give tax breaks to companies that are investing right here in the united states of america and by the way we ve already cut taxes for businesses eight times since i ve been president eight times and we want to do more because small business owners are the lifeblood of this economy right now as we speak as we speak there s a bill in the senate that would cut taxes for small businesses would help them get the loans they need to hire again the members of congress who are here they already voted on this they already passed this bill and by the way this is a bill that s based on democratic and republican ideas it s been praised by groups like the chamber of commerce they never praise me the national federation of independent business it s a bill that s fully paid for doesn t add to our deficit so you would think republicans say they re the pro business party isn t that what they say you would think this is a bill that they would want to pass and yet day after day week after week they keep on stalling this bill and stonewalling this bill and opposing this bill why pure politics they re more interested in the next election than the next generation and that s why they can t have the keys back because we need somebody who is driving with a vision to the future that s what we ve been doing over these last 20 months we re also jumpstarting a homegrown clean energy industry because i don t want to see the solar panels and the wind turbines and the biodiesel created in other countries i don t want china and germany and brazil to get the jump on us in the industries of the future i want to see all that stuff right here in the united states of america with american workers and the investments we ve made so far are expected to create 800 000 jobs by 2012 800 000 jobs in an industry of the future we want to create the infrastructure for the future not just roads and bridges but also the broadband lines and the smart grid lines that will ensure we stay competitively on top for years to come creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs all across the country in the process so that s our plan to create jobs right here in america not just short term but long term but the fact is most of the members of the other party voted no on each and every one of these initiatives no on tax cuts to small businesses no to clean energy jobs no to the railroad and highway projects now i want to point out that doesn t stop them from showing up at the ribbon cuttings john you notice that they ll be voting no no this is obama s no we don t believe in recovery we don t believe in all this and then you show up at that ribbon cutting and they re all there right in the front cheesing and grinning sending out press releases so a few weeks ago the republican leader of the house was asked what s your jobs plan if your party takes control of congress next year he said well you know our number one priority he was asked what s your jobs plan your number priority is to repeal the health care bill now this is a bill that makes sure that insurance companies can t deny you coverage if you ve got a preexisting condition makes sure that young people can stay on their parents insurance till they re 26 provides a 35 percent tax credit to small businesses that are doing the right thing giving their employees health care makes sure that companies can t drop you when you get sick now i have no idea why you would want to repeal that in the first place but i sure don t understand how repealing it would create jobs unless it s for some folks in the insurance company who are being hired to deny you your claims but that can t be a real jobs plan now look i may be wrong maybe they know something i don t or no other economist or expert understands and if you think that s a good idea then you should vote for them but i ve got a different view the health insurance reform we passed isn t just preventing insurance companies from denying you coverage it s making the coverage that you got more secure and is ultimately going to lower costs for all americans and one of the most important things we can do to reduce our budget deficit is to get control of health care costs these guys don t have a plan for that they just have a plan to say no because they re thinking about the next election instead of the next generation and that s the choice that we re going to be making in this next election the choice in this election is between policies that strengthen the hand of the special interests or strengthen america s middle class they want to repeal health care we re not going to let it happen we want to move forward they pledged to repeal wall street reform here we ve got the biggest financial crisis since the great depression everybody knows having looked at it that the incentives on wall street were skewed and people were doing crazy things with other people s money making huge risky bets and then expecting taxpayers to bail them out if it didn t work out so after all the hardship we ve gone through to repair this economy you d think it would be common sense to say let s have some basic rules of the road in place to ensure that a crisis like this doesn t happen again but what did the other party say no they want to go back to the status quo that got us into this same situation the reforms we passed protect consumers and responsible bankers and responsible business owners that s what the free market is supposed to be about setting some basic rules for the road so that everybody can compete not on how to game the system but how to provide good service and good products to customers make sure that mortgage companies can t give you a mortgage that you don t understand make sure that credit card companies can t jack up your rates without providing you some notification common sense stuff but they want to repeal it because they re more interested in the next election than they are in the next generation and that s the choice that we will face in this next election if the other party wants to keep on giving taxpayer subsidies to big banks that s their prerogative but that s not what america is about that s not going to move us forward i ll give you another example we had a law in place when i took office in which the government was guaranteeing student loans except they were going through financial middlemen who were taking out billions of dollars of profits issuing the loans but the loans were guaranteed so they weren t taking any risks they were just making billions of dollars of money we said well that doesn t make sense at a time when young people are trying to get to college so what we re going to do is we re going to cut out the middle man we ve added tens of billions of dollars to the student loans program more than a million young people are going to get help that wouldn t otherwise get help because of the decision we ve made what side do you think they were on the other party voted no we passed a law to prohibit pay discrimination my attitude is equal pay for equal work women should be paid just like men for doing the same job they said no they want to go backwards we want to move forwards they want to extend the bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires now i believe in tax cuts for the right folks i kept my campaign promise cut taxes for 95 percent of working americans but i don t understand how do you get up here and talk about how you care so deeply about the deficit and yet you want to perpetuate a tax cut that costs 700 billion with a b 700 billion and would not provide the kind of economic growth or benefits for the vast majority of americans that s the choice that we face in this election they voted to make sure that oil companies continue to get protected from some liabilities with respect to oil spills how do you do that we just spent all this time and energy trying to cap this well in the gulf you d think it would make just common sense to ensure that oil companies are fully accountable they voted no against that when we forced bp to put 20 billion aside to make sure those fishermen and store owners and hotel owners were protected and what happened the guy who would be the chairman of the energy committee in the house apologized to bp sure did apologized said we engaged in a shakedown to protect ordinary families from the devastation that had taken place so look you go across the board atlanta there s going to be a choice in this election it s the choice between special interest policies that led us into this mess and policies that are finally leading us out that are finally helping america grow again policies that are making middle class americans more secure and giving them greater opportunity i know this nation has been through incredibly difficult times and i also know by the way that not all the steps we took have been popular folks in washington these pundits sometimes they write they re all surprised president obama went ahead with some of these steps like health care reform and helping the auto companies and those weren t popular well i knew they weren t popular i ve got pollsters too you don t think i ve got polls that tell me what s popular and what s not but for the last 20 months my job has been to govern so when i went to detroit last week and i look out and i see plants producing clean energy cars that otherwise would have been shut down a million jobs that would have been lost cars no longer made in america because the entire industry had collapsed and i say we made the right decision and now ford and chrysler and gm are all making a profit they ve all hired 55 000 workers back they are on the move they re about to pay the taxpayers back for every investment that we made then i say to myself i m not here just to do what s popular i m here to do what s right and that s the kind of leadership you need and you deserve that s the choice we face in this election and democrats if you work hard as hard as you worked for me in 2008 we re going to keep going forward we are not going backwards thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama2 8 10b barack_obama thank you thank you thank you so much thank you thank you everyone please have a seat thank you thank you very much thank you thank you so much thank you it is thank you it is a great honor and it is true i will be 49 this week i have a lot more gray hair than i did last year it is an extraordinary honor to be here thank you commander barrera for your kind introduction and for your lifetime of service in the marines in vietnam but also as a tireless advocate for your fellow disabled veterans we are grateful to you thank you for everything that you ve done i want to thank your great leadership team for welcoming me today chairman ray dempsey absolutely incoming commander wally tyson national adjutant art wilson judy hezlep of the dav auxiliary and your outstanding executive director in washington dave gorman and i am pleased to be joined by a decorated vietnam veteran wounded warrior and a lifetime member of the dav my outstanding secretary of veterans affairs ric shinseki disabled american veterans i valued your advice and counsel when i was a senator when i co sponsored the post 9 11 gi bill you were one of the first veterans organizations that i called upon when i began my presidential campaign and as president it s been my pleasure to welcome you to the white house to make sure america is serving our veterans as well as you ve served us and most recently to sign advanced appropriations into law so that veterans health care will never again be held hostage to the budget battles and the political games in washington now there s another visit i won t forget i was in the oval office expecting a visit from the dav and in comes bobby carrying a baseball bat now it s not every day that somebody gets past the secret service carrying a baseball bat you may have heard about this it turns out it was a genuine louisville slugger a thank you for going to bat for our veterans on advanced appropriations so i m grateful for that symbol of our partnership and i m proud of the progress we ve achieved together but as one of your outstanding dav members from illinois just reminded me this is a promise i made during the campaign it was a promise made and it was a promise kept and i intend to keep on keeping my promises to the veterans of america in the life of our nation not every generation has been summoned to defend our country in its hour of need but every generation to answer that call has done so with honor and with courage among you are members of that generation that saved the world from fascism i was honored to stand with our world war ii vets at normandy last year for the anniversary of d day and this year as we mark this year as we mark the 65th anniversary of our victory in that war we once again salute our veterans of the second world war others among you faced a brutal foe on a cold korean peninsula this year as we mark the 60th anniversary of that conflict i will be proud to travel to the republic of korea in november to pay tribute to our veterans of the korean war many of you served in the jungles of vietnam you also served with honor exemplary dedication and courage but were often shunned when you came home that was a national disgrace and it must never happen again and that s why we re making sure our veterans from today s wars are shown the respect and the dignity they deserve and whether you served in the gulf to free a captive kuwait or fought in the streets of mogadishu or stopped an ethnic slaughter in the balkans you too are part of an unbroken line of service stretching across two centuries for you coming home was the beginning of another battle the battle to recover you fought to stand again and to walk again and to work again you fought for each other and for the benefits and treatment you had earned you became leaders in our communities in our companies and our country including a former vietnam vet and senator max cleland who reminded us that america s disabled veterans are strong at the broken places today your legacy of service is carried on by a new generation of americans some stepped forward in a time of peace not foreseeing years of combat others stepped forward in this time of war knowing they could be sent into harm s way for the past nine years in afghanistan and iraq they have borne the burdens of war they and their families have faced the greatest test in the history of our all volunteer force serving tour after tour year after year through their extraordinary service they have written their own chapter in the american story and by any measure they have earned their place among the greatest of generations now one of those chapters is nearing an end as a candidate for president i pledged to bring the war in iraq to a responsible end shortly after taking office i announced our new strategy for iraq and for a transition to full iraqi responsibility and i made it clear that by august 31st 2010 america s combat mission in iraq would end and that is exactly what we are doing as promised and on schedule already we have closed or turned over to iraq hundreds of bases we re moving out millions of pieces of equipment in one of the largest logistics operations that we ve seen in decades by the end of this month we ll have brought more than 90 000 of our troops home from iraq since i took office more than 90 000 have come home today even as terrorists try to derail iraq s progress because of the sacrifices of our troops and their iraqi partners violence in iraq continues to be near the lowest it s been in years and next month we will change our military mission from combat to supporting and training iraqi security forces in fact in many parts of the country iraqis have already taken the lead for security as agreed to with the iraqi government we will maintain a transitional force until we remove all our troops from iraq by the end of next year and during this period our forces will have a focused mission supporting and training iraqi forces partnering with iraqis in counterterrorism missions and protecting our civilian and military efforts these are dangerous tasks there are still those with bombs and bullets who will try to stop iraq s progress and the hard truth is we have not seen the end of american sacrifice in iraq but make no mistake our commitment in iraq is changing from a military effort led by our troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats and as we mark the end of america s combat mission in iraq a grateful america must pay tribute to all who served there remember our nation has had vigorous debates about the iraq war there are patriots who supported going to war and patriots who opposed it but there has never been any daylight between us when it comes to supporting the more than one million americans in uniform who have served in iraq far more than any conflict since vietnam these men and women from across our country have done more than meet the challenges of this young century through their extraordinary courage and confidence and commitment these troops and veterans have proven themselves as a new generation of american leaders and while our country has sometimes been divided they have fought together as one while other individuals and institutions have shirked responsibility they have welcomed responsibility while it was easy to be daunted by overwhelming challenges the generation that has served in iraq has overcome every test before them they took to the skies and sped across deserts in the initial charge into baghdad and today we re joined by an infantryman who was there as part of the 101st airborne division sergeant nicholas bernardi is here when invasion gave way to insurgency our troops persevered block by block city by city from baghdad to fallujah as a driver in a transportation company this soldier endured constant attacks but never waivered in his mission and we thank sergeant dan knabe thank you dan when terrorists and militias plunged iraq into sectarian war our troops adapted and adjusted restoring order and effectively defeating al qaeda in iraq on the battlefield and among those who served in those pivotal days was a scout with the 1st cavalry division specialist matt seidl matt for each of these men and women there are countless others and we honor them all our young enlisted troops and noncommissioned officers who are the backbone of our military the national guardsmen and reservists who served in unprecedented deployments more women tested by combat than in any war in american history including a marine here today sergeant patricia ruiz patricia i teased patricia i said she looks like she s still in high school but she s a marine and we salute the families back home they too have sacrificed in this war that s why my wife michelle and the vice president s wife dr jill biden have made it their mission to make sure america takes care of our remarkable military families including our veterans now this summer tens of thousands of our troops in iraq are coming home last week vice president biden was at fort drum to help welcome back members of the legendary 10th mountain division families are being reunited at bases across the country from fort bragg in north carolina to fort riley in kansas to fort lewis in washington and in this season of homecomings every american can show their gratitude to our patriots who served in iraq as we do we are humbled by the profound sacrifice that has been rendered each of the veterans i have mentioned carried with them the wounds of this war and as a nation we will honor forever all who gave their lives that last true measure of devotion in service in iraq soldiers sailors airmen marines coast guardsmen active guard reserve even as we end the war in iraq even as we welcome home so many of our troops others are still deployed in afghanistan so i want to remind everyone it was afghanistan where al qaeda plotted and trained to murder 3 000 innocent people on 9 11 it is afghanistan and the tribal regions of pakistan where terrorists have launched other attacks against us and our allies and if afghanistan were to be engulfed by an even wider insurgency al qaeda and its terrorist affiliates would have even more space to plan their next attack and as president of the united states i refuse to let that happen the effort in afghanistan has been long and been difficult and that s why after years in which the situation had deteriorated i announced a new strategy last december a military effort to break the taliban s momentum and train afghan forces so that they can take the lead for their security and a civilian effort to promote good governance and development that improves the lives of the afghan people and deeper cooperation with pakistan to root out terrorists on both sides of the border we will continue to face huge challenges in afghanistan but it s important that the american people know that we are making progress and we are focused on goals that are clear and achievable on the military front nearly all the additional forces that i ordered to afghanistan are now in place along with our afghan and international partners we are going on the offensive against the taliban targeting their leaders challenging them in regions where they had free reign and training afghan national security forces our thoughts and prayers are with all our troops risking their lives for our safety in afghanistan and on the civilian front we re insisting on greater accountability and the afghan government has taken concrete steps to foster development and combat corruption and to put forward a reintegration plan that allows afghans to lay down their arms in pakistan we ve seen the government begin to take the fight to violent extremists within its borders and major blows have been struck against al qaeda and its leadership because in this region and beyond we will tolerate no safe haven for al qaeda and their extremist allies we will disrupt we will dismantle and we will ultimately defeat al qaeda and we will give our troops the resources and the equipment to get the job done and keep our country safe at the same time every american who has ever worn the uniform must also know this your country is going to take care of you when you come home our nation s commitment to our veterans to you and your families is a sacred trust and to me and my administration upholding that trust is a moral obligation it s not just politics that s why i ve charged secretary shinseki with building a 21st century va and that includes one of the largest percentage increases to the va budget in the past 30 years we are going to cut this deficit that we ve got and i ve proposed a freeze on discretionary domestic spending but what i have not frozen is the spending we need to keep our military strong our country safe and our veterans secure so we re going to keep on making historic commitments to our veterans for about 200 000 vietnam vets who may have been exposed to agent orange and who now suffer from three chronic diseases we re making it easier for you to get the health care and benefits you need for our gulf war veterans we ve declared that nine infectious diseases are now presumed to be related to your service in desert storm for our disabled veterans we ve eliminated co pays for those of you who are catastrophically disabled we ve kept our promise on concurrent receipt by proposing legislation that would allow severely disabled retirees to receive your military retired pay and your va disability benefits it s the right thing to do we ve dramatically increased funding for veterans health care across the board and that includes improving care for rural veterans and women veterans for those half million vets who had lost their eligibility our priority 8 veterans we re restoring your access to va health care and since the rumors continue to fly even though they are wrong let me say it as clearly as i can the historic health care reform legislation that i signed into law does not i repeat does not change your veterans benefits the va health care benefits that you know and trust are safe and that includes prosthetics for our disabled veterans thanks to advanced appropriations the delays for funding for veterans medical care are over and just as those delays were unacceptable so too are long delays in the claims process so secretary shinseki is working overtime to create a single lifetime electronic record that our troops and veterans can keep for life and today today i can announce that for the first time ever veterans will be able to go to the va website click a simple blue button and download or print your personal health records so you have them when you need them and can share them with your doctors outside of the va that s happening this fall we re hiring thousands of new claims processors to break the backlog once and for all and to make sure the backlog doesn t come back we re reforming the claims process itself with new information technologies and a paperless system we got an amen over here as a result of the innovation competition that i announced last summer our dedicated va employees suggested more than 10 000 new ways to cut through the red tape and the bureaucracy and we re already putting dozens of these innovative ideas into action additionally we re enabling more veterans to check the status of their claims online and from their cell phone as a next step we re opening this competition to entrepreneurs and academics so the best minds in america can help us develop the technologies to serve our vets including those of you with multiple traumatic injuries and we re going to keep at this until we meet our commitment to cut those backlogs slash those wait times and deliver your benefits sooner this is a priority and we are going to get it done we re making progress in ending homelessness among our veterans today on any given night there are about 20 000 fewer veterans on the streets than there were when we took office but we re not going to be satisfied until every veteran who has fought for america has a home in america we will not stop finally we re keeping faith with our newest veterans returning from afghanistan and iraq we re offering more of the support and counseling they need to transition back to civilian life that includes funding the post 9 11 gi bill which is already helping more than 300 000 veterans and family members pursue their dream of a college education and for veterans trying to find work in a very tough economy we re helping with job training and placement and i ve directed the federal government to make it a priority to hire more veterans including disabled veterans and every business in america needs to know our vets have the training they ve got the skills they have the dedication they are ready to work and our country is stronger when we tap the incredible talents of our veterans for those coming home injured we re continuing to direct unprecedented support to our wounded warriors in uniform more treatment centers more case managers delivering the absolute best care available for those who can we want to help them get back to where they want to be with their units and that includes service members with a disability who still have so much to offer our military we re directing unprecedented resources to treating the signature wounds of today s wars traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder and i recently signed into law the caregivers and veterans omnibus health services act that s a long name but let me tell you what it does it not only improves treatment for traumatic brain injury and ptsd it gives new support to many of the caregivers who put their own lives on hold to care for their loved one and as so many of you know ptsd is a pain like no other the nightmares that keep coming back the rage that strikes suddenly the hopelessness that s led too many of our troops and veterans to take their own lives so today i want to say in very personal terms to anyone who is struggling don t suffer in silence it s not a sign of weakness to reach out for support it s a sign of strength your country needs you we are here for you we are here to help you stand tall don t give up reach out we re making major investments in awareness outreach and suicide prevention hiring more mental health professionals improving care and treatment for those of you suffering from ptsd we re making it a whole lot easier to qualify for va benefits from now on if a va doctor confirms a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder that is enough no matter what war you served in these are the commitments my administration has made these are the promises we ve worked to keep this is the sacred trust we have pledged to uphold to you and all who serve i want to make special mention of a truly inspiring american staff sergeant cory remsburg he was at bethesda during one of my periodic visits to see our wounded warriors and as i walked into his room i saw a picture on the wall and it was a picture of the two of us together see i had met cory before back at the d day anniversary in normandy a good looking young man a proud army ranger he had joined in a reenactment of that historic paratroop jump then soon after cory served on his 10th deployment since 9 11 that s right his 10th deployment and that s when an ied nearly took his life the traumatic brain injury was severe cory was in a coma for months it seemed possible that he would never wake up but then something happened his doctors still can t explain it his parents called it a miracle cory opened one of his eyes then a few weeks later he moved a leg then he moved an arm and there at bethesda we were meeting again and cory still couldn t speak but he looked me in the eye he lifted his arm and he shook my hand firmly and when i asked how he was feeling he held up his hand pulled his fingers together and gave a thumbs up today cory is at a va hospital in florida and with the support of his family and va staff he s working hard every day to regain his strength he s got to learn to speak all over again he s grateful for the visits he s received from friends and supporters including the disabled american veterans and cory is only 27 years old he knows he s got a long and very hard road ahead but he pushes on and he s determined to get back to his fellow rangers and when someone at the hospital said cory you re going to walk out of here someday he said no i m going to run out of here so to staff sergeant cory remsburg to the disabled american veterans i want to say to all of you you are the very essence of america the values that sustain us as a people and the virtues our nation needs most right now and the resilience that in the face of great loss so many of you experienced i know you like cory know what it means to pick yourselves up and keep pushing on and that sense of purpose that tells us to carry on not just when it s easy but when it s hard even when the odds seem overwhelming that s what we re about the confidence that our destiny is never written for us it s written by us the faith that fundamental american faith that there are always brighter days ahead and that we not will not simply endure but we will emerge from our tests and trials and tribulations stronger than before that is your story that is america s story and i m proud to stand with you as we write the next proud chapter in the life of the country we love god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama20 1 09 barack_obama my fellow citizens i stand here today humbled by the task before us grateful for the trust you ve bestowed mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors i thank president bush for his service to our nation as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition forty four americans have now taken the presidential oath the words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace yet every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms at these moments america has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office but because we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents so it has been so it must be with this generation of americans that we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood our nation is at war against a far reaching network of violence and hatred our economy is badly weakened a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age homes have been lost jobs shed businesses shuttered our health care is too costly our schools fail too many and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet these are the indicators of crisis subject to data and statistics less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land a nagging fear that america s decline is inevitable that the next generation must lower its sights today i say to you that the challenges we face are real they are serious and they are many they will not be met easily or in a short span of time but know this america they will be met on this day we gather because we have chosen hope over fear unity of purpose over conflict and discord on this day we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises the recriminations and worn out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics we remain a young nation but in the words of scripture the time has come to set aside childish things the time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit to choose our better history to carry forward that precious gift that noble idea passed on from generation to generation the god given promise that all are equal all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness in reaffirming the greatness of our nation we understand that greatness is never a given it must be earned our journey has never been one of short cuts or settling for less it has not been the path for the faint hearted for those that prefer leisure over work or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame rather it has been the risk takers the doers the makers of things some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor who have carried us up the long rugged path towards prosperity and freedom for us they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life for us they toiled in sweatshops and settled the west endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth for us they fought and died in places like concord and gettysburg normandy and khe sahn time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life they saw america as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction this is the journey we continue today we remain the most prosperous powerful nation on earth our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began our minds are no less inventive our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year our capacity remains undiminished but our time of standing pat of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions that time has surely passed starting today we must pick ourselves up dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking america for everywhere we look there is work to be done the state of our economy calls for action bold and swift and we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth we will build the roads and bridges the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together we ll restore science to its rightful place and wield technology s wonders to raise health care s quality and lower its cost we will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories and we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age all this we can do all this we will do now there are some who question the scale of our ambitions who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans their memories are short for they have forgotten what this country has already done what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage what the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage care they can afford a retirement that is dignified where the answer is yes we intend to move forward where the answer is no programs will end and those of us who manage the public s dollars will be held to account to spend wisely reform bad habits and do our business in the light of day because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye the market can spin out of control the nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous the success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product but on the reach of our prosperity on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart not out of charity but because it is the surest route to our common good as for our common defense we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals our founding fathers our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man a charter expanded by the blood of generations those ideals still light the world and we will not give them up for expedience sake and so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born know that america is a friend of each nation and every man woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity and we are ready to lead once more recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions they understood that our power alone cannot protect us nor does it entitle us to do as we please instead they knew that our power grows through its prudent use our security emanates from the justness of our cause the force of our example the tempering qualities of humility and restraint we are the keepers of this legacy guided by these principles once more we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort even greater cooperation and understanding between nations we will begin to responsibly leave iraq to its people and forge a hard earned peace in afghanistan with old friends and former foes we ll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat and roll back the specter of a warming planet we will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken you cannot outlast us and we will defeat you for we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength not a weakness we are a nation of christians and muslims jews and hindus and non believers we are shaped by every language and culture drawn from every end of this earth and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve that as the world grows smaller our common humanity shall reveal itself and that america must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace to the muslim world we seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect to those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society s ills on the west know that your people will judge you on what you can build not what you destroy to those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent know that you are on the wrong side of history but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist to the people of poor nations we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds and to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders nor can we consume the world s resources without regard to effect for the world has changed and we must change with it as we consider the role that unfolds before us we remember with humble gratitude those brave americans who at this very hour patrol far off deserts and distant mountains they have something to tell us just as the fallen heroes who lie in arlington whisper through the ages we honor them not only because they are the guardians of our liberty but because they embody the spirit of service a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves and yet at this moment a moment that will define a generation it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all for as much as government can do and must do it is ultimately the faith and determination of the american people upon which this nation relies it is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours it is the firefighter s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke but also a parent s willingness to nurture a child that finally decides our fate our challenges may be new the instruments with which we meet them may be new but those values upon which our success depends honesty and hard work courage and fair play tolerance and curiosity loyalty and patriotism these things are old these things are true they have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history what is demanded then is a return to these truths what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility a recognition on the part of every american that we have duties to ourselves our nation and the world duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task this is the price and the promise of citizenship this is the source of our confidence the knowledge that god calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny this is the meaning of our liberty and our creed why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath so let us mark this day with remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled in the year of america s birth in the coldest of months a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river the capital was abandoned the enemy was advancing the snow was stained with blood at the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt the father of our nation ordered these words to be read to the people let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter when nothing but hope and virtue could survive that the city and the country alarmed at one common danger came forth to meet it america in the face of our common dangers in this winter of our hardship let us remember these timeless words with hope and virtue let us brave once more the icy currents and endure what storms may come let it be said by our children s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end that we did not turn back nor did we falter and with eyes fixed on the horizon and god s grace upon us we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama20 1 10 barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you please have a seat thank you anthony for that outstanding introduction and thank you michelle obama also known around here as flotus which stands for first lady of the united states i m potus good afternoon everybody and welcome i m glad you all could join us today as we mark national mentoring month here at the white house and as i said anthony did a wonderful job introducing me i m told that with the guidance of his mentor ben de leon where s ben there s ben right there anthony i hear you re working hard doing great in school and so we are very proud of you and we expect you to keep up the good work and ben thank you for your extraordinary service i do want to thank michelle for launching our white house mentoring program this is one of those that i can t take full credit for she has shown extraordinary leadership on this issue in our administration we ve got several members of congress here representatives susan davis gwen moore and mike rogers why don t you guys stand up so everybody can see you they ve done terrific work promoting mentoring thanks to acting ceo nicky goren as well as john kelly and kristin mcswain from the corporation for national and community service and to the members of our federal mentoring council for all their great work please give them a big round of applause and i want to recognize all the mentors who are here including the people who are up on stage with their mentees for their encouragement their inspiration the example they re providing to young people all across this country and finally i want to recognize the outstanding young men who are here today who are joining our white house mentoring program it s going to be a program that matches them up with caring adults from our staff here at the white house and i had a chance to meet them earlier they re wonderful young men although one of them started talking trash about basketball already i mean it didn t take but five minutes before he was explaining how he was going to rain down jumpers on me now to all those young men you were chosen because of the promise that you ve shown because of your willingness to work your eagerness to learn your determination to succeed and all of you deserve enormous credit for that it s not easy being a young person these days fewer young people are growing up in homes with two parents i m one of those people who didn t grow up with two parents in a household parents are working longer hours and they ve got less time to spend with their kids and many young people don t have the advantage of living in those tight knit neighborhoods that many of us who are older grew up in where people looked out for each other and for each other s children we ve also seen a rise of a popular culture that doesn t exactly celebrate diligence and self discipline but instead sends a message that you can be rich and famous without doing any work that your ticket to success is only through rapping or basketball or being a reality tv star and many young people don t have anyone in their lives to counteract that message to tell them that gratification that comes instantaneously usually disappears just as quickly and that real success in life comes from commitment and persistence effort hard work i know something about the impact these factors can have in the life of a child as i mentioned earlier my father left my family when i was two years old i was raised by a single mom who struggled at times to provide for me and my sister and while i was lucky to have loving grandparents who poured everything they had into helping my mother take care of us i still felt the weight of my father s absence throughout my childhood so i wasn t always focused in school the way i should have been i did some things i m not proud of i got in more trouble than i should have without a bunch of second chances and a whole lot of luck my life could have taken easily a turn for the worse but many kids today aren t as lucky they ve got a much smaller margin for error a generation or two ago if you didn t finish school or if you only had a high school diploma you could still make a pretty decent living that s usually not the case today more than ever success in life depends on success in school and young people who start down the wrong path and don t have anybody to steer them straight aren t just consigning themselves to a life of financial hardship they re consigning all of us to an economy that s less competitive and a nation that doesn t fulfill its promise that s why mentoring is so important we know the difference a responsible caring adult can make in a child s life buck them up when they re discouraged provide tough love when they veer off track being that person in their lives who doesn t want to let them down and that they don t want to let down and refusing to give up on them even when they want to give up on themselves studies have shown that young people in mentoring relationships get better grades in school they re less likely to drink they re less likely to do drugs and you ask any successful person how they got to where they are today chances are they ll tell you about a mentor they had somewhere along the way the great poet and author maya angelou didn t discover poetry until her mentor took her to the tiny library at her school and challenged her to read every book in the room co founder and ceo of apple steve jobs was an incorrigible troublemaker until his 4th grade teacher took him under her wing and convinced him to focus on math instead of mischief that turned out pretty well ray charles first discovered his gift for music when at the age of three his next door neighbor taught him how to play the piano and it was the enthusiasm of her mentor dr elizabeth blackburn that drew dr carol greider to the groundbreaking work in genetics that would win both of them the nobel prize for medicine so there s no doubt about the value of mentoring and there s no doubt about the tremendous need for mentors in this country with at least 15 million young people in need of a mentor what we need now is for committed adults to step forward and help us meet that need now i understand times are tough and i know people are busy and so sometimes people think well i d like to do it but i m not sure i can make the commitment here s the thing people need to understand it doesn t take much to make a big difference a couple of hours a week shooting hoops helping with homework talking about what s going on in their lives can make a big lasting impact in the life of a young person and as the folks up here on stage will tell you the mentor usually gets as much or more out of it than the mentee so i m pleased that non profit organizations like big brothers big sisters are stepping up expanding their efforts to connect children of deployed service members to mentors who are often veterans themselves corporations are stepping up as well viacom for example is working with a national non profit called mentor to provide flextime to employees who sign up to be mentors and to produce educational materials for mentoring organizations across the country government is doing its part too launching the serve gov mentor web site to help people find mentoring opportunities and expanding mentoring efforts in native american communities and in rural areas working with the federal mentoring council to ensure that our initiatives and investments are coordinated effective and focused on those most in need but here s the thing and i m talking specifically to the young people who are here today in the end we can start all kinds of mentoring programs and give you guys all the mentors in the world but it won t make much of a difference unless you do your parts as well that s the thing about mentoring it s a two way street so we need you engaged here we need you to open up as michelle said you ve got to ask questions you ve got to ask for help when you need it i do that every day michelle does that every day it s not a sign of weakness to look for help to try to answer questions that you don t know the answers to it s a sign of strength when you do that it shows that you have the courage to admit when you re unsure of yourself and the willingness to learn and grow and become a better person if young people like you are willing to do this and if compassionate committed adults are willing to step up then think about the incredible impact that we can have think about the potential that we will discover and the talent that we will nurture and the lives that we can turn around and the effect that we can have on our schools and our communities and the future of this country that s the power of mentoring that s the purpose of what all of you are doing across america and today i thank you for your work and i look forward to working with all of you in the months and years ahead and i m especially looking forward to seeing all the young men who are here as they spend time in the white house over the next several months so thank you very much everybody dem bobama20 10 09b barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you new york thank you thank you very much thank you so much everybody thank you so much thank you everybody i love new york i love new yorkers and now that the white sox are out of it if there are any yankees fans here i wish you guys some good luck i am thrilled to be here there are some all of you are special guests but we ve got some folks that i want to make sure to acknowledge individually first of all we ve got some outstanding members of congress here all of whom are completely supportive of the agenda that we are moving forward nita lowey anthony weiner joe crowley carolyn maloney steve israel give them a big round of applause i think they re over here thank you guys i want everybody to know how much i appreciate everything you ve done for me for this country for the candidates in this room at a time when we need your efforts more than ever i want to thank you for supporting our candidate for city comptroller john liu who s here in the house our nominee for public advocate bill de blasio is here and a great city comptroller our candidate for mayor my friend billy thompson is in the house now many of you both here in this room and watching via webcast a lot of you guys were on the front lines of our campaign you knocked on doors you made calls you devoted your time and your energy and you wrote those checks even when you couldn t afford it that s what you told your spouse yes we can all because you understood that we were at a special moment in our country s history and i want you to know that not a day goes by when i don t think about those efforts of yours and the obligation as a consequence of you giving me this great honor the obligation that i have to every american not just those who worked in the campaign but every american everybody who put their faith and hopes their sweat and tears into a campaign that wasn t just about winning an election but was about changing a country now it s been less than a year since the obama family packed up and moved to washington people don t so much has happened that we tend to forget it s only been nine months since i was sworn in nine months to the day and i want to report to you that malia and sasha are doing fine michelle is a pretty good first lady we got bo he s handling his business in the white house but it s important for all of us to remember what the situation was when we came in nine months ago because there s some people out there who seem to have a selective memory there s sort of a revisionist history about what was waiting for us when we began this presidency we were facing an economic crisis unlike any we had seen in generations losing 700 000 jobs a month financial system on the verge of meltdown economists of every political persuasion they were fearful that we might fall into a great depression you remember that and that s why we acted boldly and we acted swiftly to pass a recovery act that s made a difference in the lives of families across america people don t i think remember where we were and where we are now we put a tax cut into the pockets of small business owners and 95 percent of working families just like i promised during the campaign the most progressive tax cut in history 7 million families here in new york have benefitted from it we extended unemployment insurance increased unemployment insurance for 12 million americans to help them get through tough times that s helped millions of new yorkers we made cobra 65 percent cheaper to make sure that if you were looking for a job your family wouldn t go without health care that was in the recovery act we gave relief to states including new york to help prevent more teachers and firefighters and police officers from being laid off according to initial reports 250 000 jobs in our schools were saved as a consequence of the recovery act a quarter of a million teachers and educational specialists we ve supported more than 30 000 loans to small businesses including 2 000 in this state alone we ve helped create thousands of private sector jobs but not only did we provide tax cuts not only did we provide relief to states that needed it and individuals that were having a tough time that s not just what this recovery act was about we also happened to in the recovery act invest a greater sum in education than any time in our history and coupled that with critical reforms that had been bottlenecked in congress for years the recovery act was the largest investment in clean energy in american history it was the largest boost to medical research and basic research in history it was the single largest investment in infrastructure since eisenhower built the interstate highway system back in the 1950s and it s putting people back to work all across america rebuilding roads and bridges and dams so that was pretty good that was the first month but we didn t stop there as tim kaine mentioned we passed the lilly ledbetter fair pay act because i think women should get the pay the same as men for doing the same work we lifted the ban on stem cell research and reaffirmed science to its rightful place in america we extended health care to 11 million children in this country including 4 million who didn t have health insurance we passed the ted kennedy service bill expanding peace corps and americorps creating service opportunities all across america we appointed a new yorker from the bronx to the supreme court named sonia sotomayor we passed legislation to protect consumers from credit card abuse we passed a law to prevent abuse in the mortgage industry we passed a law that will protect our children from being targeted from big tobacco companies for the first time in history we ve begun to put in place a new national policy aimed at both increasing fuel economy and reducing greenhouse gas pollution for all new trucks and cars sold in the united states of america that s in the first nine months the fact is we ve already had one of the most productive first years of any administration in decades that s because of you that s because of the work you did that s what knocking on doors and making phone calls was all about and by the way that s just what we ve done at home i ve got a whole other portfolio abroad we ve begun a new era of engagement we re working with our partners to stop the spread of nuclear weapons seeking the goal of a safer more secure world that s free of nuclear weapons we re working in concert with nations on just about every continent to stem the economic downturn and to finally confront the challenge of climate change we banned torture we committed to closing guantanamo we re rebuilding our military we re reaffirming our alliances we re getting out of iraq we ve made progress in fight al qaeda in pakistan and somalia and indonesia that s in the first nine months but the reason you re here tonight the reason i m here tonight the reason tim kaine is here tonight is because our work is not done we re just getting started because we know that there s still far too many americans who are out of work too many americans seeing their hours and their wages cut too many americans who still don t have health care and if they ve got health care they re seeing their insurance companies more worried about turning a profit than maintaining coverage they re dropping folks discriminating against them because of preexisting conditions we know that we still have so much work to do on the energy front we know that we still have so much work to do on education we know that this country still faces enormous challenges and that s not news to you you didn t sign up thinking this would be easy and i just have to remind everybody i know the campaign got fun but those of you who were there early you remember that when nobody could pronounce my name what is it that motivated you it was the notion that there s this gap between what s possible in america and what we had achieved now we didn t think that on election day suddenly that gap would close and that same energy that same enthusiasm that same passion that you displayed during the campaign that applies now more than ever because now is when the work begins that was just the end of the beginning we ve got so much work to do we all remember back in the very beginning a lot of people said having hope was nave you remember that that our faith in this country was misplaced there s a whole industry feeding cynicism and skepticism and promoting a notion of well it hasn t happened yet so it s not going to happen and for a while you remember those folks looked like they were right you remember until we proved them wrong until we proved there isn t anything false about hope until we proved that in america nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices that are calling for change that s the spirit that we need right now because the same folks are out there now they say lower our sights you re doing too much scale back accept less i didn t run for president to accept mediocrity that s not what this country is about that s not why you got involved and got engaged you didn t decide oh this is actually harder than we expected the insurance companies don t like health reform i guess we ll just pack up and go home oh well the banks they don t want financial regulation i guess it s just too hard you know that poster was nice during the campaign we had some fun but oh well we didn t work so hard to leave our problems to the next generation the next administration we came to solve these problems right here right now now is the time to build a clean energy economy that can put people back to work now is the time to educate every american child so they can compete in a global economy now is the time to make sure that every american has affordable health care that s what we re fighting for not later but now you fired up i want to recognize the people in this room and the folks watching online who are helping us do exactly that i want to thank all the organizing for america volunteers for making calls knocking on doors keeping up the fight you know why this is so important you know premiums have doubled over the past decade some of you have seen it your employer said i m sorry i don t want to do it to you but i m doubling your premiums in some cases what they re paying your employers are paying is going up even faster than what you re paying it s unsustainable it could double again in the next decade you know that millions of people in this country have been discriminated because they don t of a preexisting condition you know that more companies are dropping coverage you know that more and more families are struggling to pay for health care even if they have insurance out of pocket costs going up faster and faster and you know what tim kaine understood and underscored we are closer than we ve ever been this has been a battle that has lasted since teddy roosevelt the basic principle that part of our social contract is you don t go bankrupt if you get sick that families shouldn t have to worry if their children need help that we are looking after each other enough to make sure that everybody has health care in this country we re closer than we ve ever been five committees of congress all voted out legislation as tim said the differences are starting to narrow and we re going to pretty soon be hitting the floor of the house and the senate with bills then we re going to reconcile them and then we re going to have to vote on them again and then i m going to sign it now there are still some details and some disagreements that have to be worked out let me say this because somebody just brought up something among democrats and progressives there are a whole set of views about how we should do health care but understand that the bill you least like in congress right now the one you least like of the five that are out there would provide 29 million americans health care 29 million americans who don t have it right now would get it the bill you least like would prevent insurance companies from barring you from getting health insurance because of preexisting conditions whatever the bill you least like would set up an exchange so that people right now who are having to try to bargain for health insurance on their own are suddenly part of a pool of millions that forces insurance companies to compete for their business and give them better deals and lower rates so there are going to be some disagreements and details to work out but to the democrats i want to say to you democrats let s make sure that we keep our eye on the prize and that is all those millions of americans who don t have health insurance and all those who do have health insurance that are seeing their costs go up if we get a bill when we get a bill that delivers on those issues when that s what i said then we have to do everything we can to support it you know sometimes democrats can be their own worst enemies democrats are an opinionated bunch you know the other side they just kind of sometimes do what they re told democrats you all are thinking for yourselves i like that in you but it s time for us to make sure that we finish the job here we are this close and we ve got to be unified and to all those non democrats who may be in the audience or who are watching our webcast or who will hear about this on cable i want you to know i believe in a strong and loyal opposition i believe in a two party system where ideas are tested and assumptions are challenged that s made this legislation that we re working on better and more durable that s how our democracy works that s a good thing but what i reject is when some folks decide to sit on the sidelines and root for failure on health care or they root for failure on reforming our energy system or they root for failure on getting the olympics i mean who s against the olympics what s up with that you know that s a sad thing isn t it i mean i don t care if you re democrat or republican you know it s the olympics come on what i reject is when some folks all they ve got to say is let s go back and do the things that we were doing that got us into this mess in the first place that s all that s all they ve got to say like we forgot we didn t forget it was only nine months ago we understand exactly who and what got us into this mess now we don t mind cleaning it up i m grabbing my mop and my broom and we re scrubbing the floors and trying to neaten things up but don t just stand there and say you re not holding the mop right don t just stand there and say you re not mopping fast enough don t accuse me of having a socialist mop instead of standing on the sidelines why don t you grab a mop help us clean up this mess and get america back on track grab a mop that s right hey i don t mind cleaning it up but you know sheesh feel a little shame help out a little bit all of us in washington democrats republicans we all have a responsibility to rise to this occasion to look past our differences recognize that we ve got to move past the failed policies and broken politics that allowed our unresolved problems to stay unsolved for decades i will work with anyone and everyone that s willing to do exactly that and in their heart of hearts even some of our opponents they know they know we had bill frist and bob dole both say we need to do a health care bill now they didn t endorse some specific bill they said let s work constructively of course they re retired so they could go ahead and speak the truth but there are times there are moments in this country where everybody needs to speak the truth and act on the truth that s what people are counting on right now look i understand that a lot of folks are going through tough times right now and understandably they re feeling impatient they wish the minute we had gotten elected that suddenly things we re going to change overnight and i understand that because they feel a sense of urgency and we ve all got to feel that sense of urgency but the thing is most people their expectations are very modest they re not looking to government to solve all their problems they don t want a handout all they want is a chance to succeed if they re willing to work that they can find a job that pays a living wage that they don t have to worry about being bankrupt if they get sick that they can send their kids to college so that they can do a little better than they did that they can retire with some dignity and respect and those things are within our grasp if we all work together people just want an opportunity to make the most of their lives and that s the chance that every american deserves that s the american dream that s a promise i m working to fulfill every day and that s why you re here this is such a rare moment in our history now is not the time to start getting disillusioned or now is not the time to start thinking oh this is too hard we ve got this opportunity to change our world for the better but the change we said this in the campaign it is true now it never starts in washington it always starts with you it starts with ordinary people men and women who love their country who are standing together and fighting for its future it happens when citizens reject the cynicism and the skepticism and all the pundits yakking about why we can t do that and we can t do this it s when you fight and you organize you advocate you walk the streets and you hit the phones and people slam the door in your faces and they say uhh get out of here i m not interested and you keep on doing it that s how we succeeded before that s how we ll succeed again so i just want everybody here to understand we are in this for the long haul some of these changes may not happen in 18 months or 36 months or 72 months it s going to take time but i don t know about you i just want to let you know just getting started i m not tired i don t know about you but i m not tired all these folks who are throwing stuff at us and getting all crazy and you know i m just getting started i feel refreshed i feel energized and it s because of you so if you re willing to keep on going if you re willing to keep on marching then i guarantee you we are going to succeed yes we can wasn t just a motto that s what we re all about and we are going to pass health care we are going to get energy done we re going to get education done we are going to turn this country around thank you new york god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama20 11 09 barack_obama hello osan it is good to be here thank you so much first of all please give staff sergeant randy gray a big round of applause for the outstanding introduction i want to thank randy for his service as one of the best warriors in the united states army randy is a reminder that our noncommissioned officers are the strength of america s military so thanks to randy and to all the ncos thank you lieutenant colonel glover for the invocation and please give a big round of applause to katherine dennison for singing our national anthem to the 8th army band where you guys at there they are up there you look fantastic to all the airmen and soldiers behind me you guys make a pretty good photo op we are grateful for your service i want to thank your local leaders at osan for welcoming me here today including brigadier general michael keltz and colonel tom big deale your great senior enlisted leaders including command sergeant major robert winzenried and chief master sergeant michael williams we are joined by america s outstanding representatives here in the republic of korea i want you guys to give it up for ambassador kathleen stephens and general skip sharp give them a big round of applause this is a wonderful story that i just heard that the day skip sharp was born in west virginia his dad was here serving in the korean war and that just says something about the extraordinary tradition of your family and service to our country and we salute you for that we are grateful to you thank you so much listen it is great to be here at osan air base we ve got the 51st fighter wing we ve got the 7th air force and air forces korea but i know we have folks from all across u s forces korea we ve got the 8th army and army forces korea we ve got the naval forces korea we ve got marine forces korea special operations command and we ve got a whole lot of dod civilians too i love you back now joanne sharp and michelle remington were there to greet me and i see that we ve got a whole lot of spouses and family here to you and all the spouses back home i just want to remind you that you serve and sacrifice too and america honors you as well and we are joined by our great allies chairman of the joint chiefs of staff general lee and mrs hwang we are so nice so grateful that you are here thank you members of the republic of korea armed forces and to all our katusa partners your english is better than my korean but let me say katchi kapshida for those of you guys who have not been doing your homework while you re in korea that means we go together and to your neighbors the people of osan and this country for more than a half a century your steadfast resolve has earned you the respect of the world and your hospitality to americans serving far from home has earned you the gratitude of the united states on behalf of us all thank you to the people of the republic of korea today i m finishing my first visit to asia as president in tokyo we renewed and deepened the u s japan alliance in singapore we worked with leaders from across the asia pacific to strengthen the global economic recovery and in china we worked to advance the partnership between our two countries on global issues because cooperation between the united states and china will mean a safer more prosperous world for all of us including right here on the korean peninsula in seoul president lee and i reaffirmed the enduring alliance between our countries an alliance rooted in shared sacrifice common values mutual interest and mutual respect and as we look to the future with a shared vision of our alliance for the 21st century i made it clear america s commitment to the defense of the republic of korea will never waver and our alliance has never been stronger and i want to deliver actually just a quick story go a little off script president lee talked to me about what it was like when he was a young child here in korea this country having been torn by war and the poverty that still existed in the country and he said i hope the american people understand how grateful we are for what you ve done because we would not be the extraordinarily strong prosperous nation that we are had it not been for the sacrifices of your armed services and the continued contributions that you ve made and i thought when the president of a country that s become so successful says that america and america s armed services in particular had something to do with the extraordinary success of their country he said that s something you should take great pride in and i want all of you to know that because you are carrying that tradition on right here at osan i couldn t come to the republic of korea without coming to see you to deliver a simple message a message of thanks to you and your families because of all the privileges of serving as president i have no greater honor than serving as commander in chief of the finest military that the world has ever known at every stop on my journey one truth is clear the security that allows families to live in peace in asia and america the prosperity that allows people to pursue their dreams the freedoms and liberties that we cherish they re not accidents of history they are the direct result of the work that you do the strong alliances that we have that s the legacy that you are carrying forward it is no exaggeration to say that the progress we ve seen not just in korea but in this part of the world would not have been possible without the security and stability provided by generations of american men and women in uniform it has transformed the lives of millions of people many people have to wait a lifetime to see the difference they ve made but you see the legacy of your service and you only have to look around like generations before you you ve helped keep the peace on this peninsula working with the wonderful people of the republic of korea as they forged a vibrant democracy and an example that the world admires of progress and tradition go hand in hand backed by our alliance this is one of the world s most dynamic economies and one of america s largest trading partners bringing prosperity and opportunity to both our people that s the legacy of our armed services backed by our alliance the republic of korea has taken on a leadership role promoting security and stability around the world in iraq in afghanistan in the waters off the horn of africa and here in asia helping to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction that makes us all more secure that too is part of your legacy but the story of your service goes beyond this peninsula for you are members of a generation that has earned your place among the greatest in american history you volunteered in a time of war knowing that you could be sent into harm s way many of you served in iraq you ve given people a chance at self government there others among you served in afghanistan and you ve denied a safe have to those who attacked us eight septembers ago and would do so again if given the opportunity others among you will deploy yet again so you and your families have served tour after tour year after year and while you made sacrifices that few americans will ever truly understand i want to assure you every american appreciates what you do i say today on behalf of the american people we thank you for your service we honor you for your sacrifices and just as you ve fulfilled your responsibilities to your nation your nation will fulfill its responsibilities to you so as commander in chief here s the commitment i make we ll make sure you can meet the missions we ask you to go on that s why we re increasing the defense budget to keep you the best trained best led best equipped military in the world we ve increased the size of the army and marines corps ahead of schedule we ve approved a temporary increase in the army and we ve halted reductions in the navy and the air force which will give you more time home between deployments and it will help us to put an end once and for all for stop loss for those who ve done their duty we ll spend our defense dollars wisely so we re cutting tens of billions of dollars in waste and unnecessary projects that even the pentagon says it doesn t need so that we can spend that money on building the 21st century military that we do need so we can maintain our military superiority and i promise you this i will not hesitate to use force to protect the american people or our vital interests but i will also not risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary and when it is necessary america will back you up to the hilt we ll give you the strategy the clear mission the equipment and the support you need to get the job done that s the promise i make to you as you fulfill your duties we re going to take care of your families that s why we re increasing pay that s what s called an applause line in the business that s why we re increasing child care that s why we re increasing support to help spouses and families deal with the stress and separation of war and i want to commend general sharp for working to normalize your tours so more of your families can join you here in korea and everywhere i go from what i ve heard there s an extraordinary quality of life here for our troops the fact that we can extend these tours a little bit longer just provides more stability and security for your families finally we pledge to be there when you come home i mean it s nice here but we want you coming home we re improving care for our wounded warriors especially those with post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury we re funding the post 9 11 gi bill to give you and your families the chance to pursue your dreams we ve made the biggest commitment to our veterans through the largest percentage increase requested for the va s budget in more than 30 years so these are the commitments i make to you because you ve always taken care of america and america needs to take care of you for you are the latest chapter in a long story of proud service a story told in quiet places of reflection and tribute including a memorial on the national mall in washington not far from the white house there between the monument to washington and the memorial to lincoln you can find it 19 statutes a squad on patrol as they might have appeared on this peninsula six decades ago their packs on their backs clad in their helmets and ponchos carrying their rifles and radios every service army air force navy marines every race white black brown standing together serving together moving on pushing ahead and etched into the black granite wall beside them thousands of faces the nurses the mechanics the support personnel who served alongside them there at the korean war veterans memorial beside the tranquil waters that help us remember are the statistics of their sacrifice the wounded the captured the missing the dead from that war and under a bright american flag etched in stone are timeless words we know to be true freedom is not free freedom is not free and it is paid in the service and the sacrifice of all who wear america s uniform it was paid by their generation from the pusan perimeter to the landings at inchon from the skies of mig alley to the heroism of heartbreak ridge it s been paid by every generation since and it s being paid by you in service that inspires us all and for this your country and generations yet unborn will be forever grateful so god bless you all god bless the armed services and god bless the united states of america thank you everybody dem bobama20 2 09 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you please have a seat thank you so much whenever i have the opportunity to meet with mayors i think about how i got my start doing what you do each day working with folks at the local level and doing our best to make a real impact on the lives of ordinary americans and that s just another reason why i m so happy to welcome all of you here today i want to offer take a little personal prerogative here and welcome my own hometown mayor my friend rich daley his steady leadership has proven again and again that the american city can be a place of boundless opportunity and a source of solutions to our public problems he has made a deep and lasting difference in the quality of life for millions of chicagoans i m surprised he s still talking to me because i stole arne duncan from him but i am confident that he will continue to make great strides i see friends from all over the place some old friends not old in years but people who i ve known a long time my other hometown mayor mufi it s great to see you all the way from honolulu i ve got mayor riley and others who are in attendance shirley franklin doing great work and mayor villaraigosa and mayor dellums from we ve got the california contingent so i m grateful to all of you and i think all of you understand that we meet at such an urgent time last night i signed an executive order establishing the white house office of urban affairs i ve chosen adolfo carrin to be its first director adolfo wrote a real success story in the bronx as borough president and now he s going to be working with all of you to write our next success stories in cities across the country he s going to be responsible for coordinating all federal urban programs and i ve asked him to set up an advisory council with mayors and other urban leaders so that we can develop a new metropolitan strategy based on the lessons you ve learned now rebuilding our economies and renewing our cities is going to require a true partnership between mayors and the white house and that partnership has to begin right now those of you who have traveled great distances to be here come from different parties and philosophies you govern very different cities they re made up of different citizenries with different demographic makeups but today in the face of our common challenges you re all hearing the same stories i know because i m getting letters from constituents all across the country in many of your cities but you re on the front lines in our communities you know what happens when folks get laid off or they lose their homes or their health care and they turn to the mayor s office for help and just as your services stretch your classrooms get crowded and your streets grow less safe your budgets shrink you can t deficit spend so you face impossible choices raising taxes cutting essential services laying off teachers firefighters police officers and that s why the recovery plan we put into action this week is so important it s a plan that will save or create 3 5 million jobs over the next two years will help those hardest hit by our economic crisis it will aid state and local governments in hopes you can avoid those excruciating choices it provides greater unemployment insurance for nearly 18 million americans and protects health care for 7 million who lost their health care along with their jobs it includes the most progressive tax cuts in our history spurring job creation and putting money into the pockets of 95 percent of all hardworking families it invests in what works for our cities by funding programs like the byrne justice assistance grant and the cops program which boost public safety and bring down crime it rewards responsibility making sure that if you work hard you won t have to raise a child below the poverty line but what makes this recovery plan so important isn t just the jobs it will create or the immediate help it provides it s that we are putting americans to work doing the work america needs done in critical areas that have been neglected for too long so this plan does more to lay a new foundation for our cities growth and opportunity than anything washington has done in generations and it will bring real and lasting change for generations to come because we know we can t build our economic future on the transportation and information networks of the past we re remaking our cities with the largest new investment in our nation s infrastructure since eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s ray lahood is going to be busy because we re putting 400 000 men and women to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and our bridges repairing our faulty dams and levees replacing our aging water and sewer pipes and rolling out broadband lines to nearly every community in america we re going to unleash the potential of all our regions by connecting them with world class transit systems and high speed rail making our metropolitan areas more livable and sustainable in the process because we know education is the single best bet we can make to change the odds of our children and our cities we are making the largest investment in education in our nation s history it will prevent harmful education cuts and save jobs of tens of thousands of teachers 14 000 just in new york city and it will make a historic investment in early childhood education and upgrade classrooms and libraries and labs across america so that millions of our children are prepared to compete in the 21st century because we know that spiraling health care costs are crushing families and businesses alike and straining budgets across government we re taking the most meaningful steps in years to modernize our health care system we re going to computerize america s medical records while maintaining rigorous privacy standards saving billions of dollars and countless lives we ll focus on prevention keeping millions of americans from having to set in the doctor s office in the first place taken together with the earlier enactment this month of long delayed laws to extend health care to millions more children of working families we ve done more in 30 days to advance the cause of health care reform than this country has done in a decade and because we know we can t power america s future on energy that s controlled by foreign dictators we re making an investment that within three years will double the renewable energy output it s taken us 35 years to reach we ll provide tax credits and loan guarantees to companies that create this energy allowing them to expand rather than lay people off we ll fund the energy efficiency and conservation block grant you conceived saving our cities and our consumers money we ll build a bigger better smarter electricity grid that delivers clean energy from communities that produce it to the cities that need it so these are the steps we re taking to help you turn this crisis into opportunity and bring our cities into the future now washington can t solve all the problems facing our cities and i know you don t expect us to instead of waiting for washington many of you have already made our cities laboratories of change coming up with innovative new ways to solve the problems of our time one of the great pleasures of running for president was having a chance to see great work on renewable energy in des moines or you know seeing what kinds of wonderful companies are being created in seattle and hearing about some of the urban planning strategies that are taking place in charleston so all of you have already taken the ball and run with it even when you weren t getting help from here but it won t be bad to get some help because you know instead of debating the existence of climate change mayors like greg nickels in seattle are leading efforts to make cities greener and more efficient instead of just talking about health care mayors like gavin newsom in san francisco have been ensuring that those in need receive it instead of wringing your hands over poverty you ve got antonio in los angeles making relentless efforts to alleviate it you shouldn t have to succeed though despite washington you should be succeeding with a hand from washington and that s what you re going to get now now what is required in return what i will need from all of you is unprecedented responsibility and accountability on all of our parts the american people are watching they need this plan to work they expect to see the money that they ve earned that they ve worked so hard to earn spent in its intended purposes without waste without inefficiency without fraud and that s why i m assigning a team of managers to ensure that every dollar is spent wisely and that s why we ve created recovery gov so that every american can go online to see how their money is spent and hold their federal state and local officials to the highest standards they expect so i want to be clear about this we cannot tolerate business as usual not in washington not in our state capitols not in america s cities and towns we will use the new tools that the recovery act gives us to watch the taxpayers money with more rigor and transparency than ever if a federal agency proposes a project that will waste that money i will not hesitate to call them out on it and put a stop to it and i want everybody here to be on notice that if a local government does the same i will call them out on it and use the full power of my office and our administration to stop it we have asked for the unprecedented trust of the american people to deal boldly with the greatest economic crisis we ve seen in decades and the privilege of investing unprecedented amounts of their hard earned money to address this crisis and with that comes unprecedented obligations to spend that money wisely free from politics and free from personal agendas on this i will not compromise or tolerate any shortcuts the american people are looking to us each of you as well as myself and joe and others in our administration for leadership and it s up to us to reward their faith now this plan doesn t mark the end of what we ll do together it marks the beginning my administration has outlined plans to stabilize repair and reform our banking system to get credit flowing to families and businesses to stem the spread of foreclosures and keep families in their homes together we will tackle the urban challenges of our time and foster diverse creative and imaginative economies that bring opportunity to every corner of our cities we ll do all this because despite the different backgrounds of the mayors in this room we all share the same vision for our cities vibrant places that provide our children with every chance to learn and to grow that allow our businesses and workers the best opportunity to innovate and succeed that let our older americans live out their best years in the midst of all that metropolitan life can offer i know this change is possible i know because i saw it in all those years ago in neighborhoods on the south side of chicago where ordinary americans came together and worked alongside the mayor s office to forge a better future i know because i ve seen it in cities across this country where many of you that i had a chance to meet with i saw how you focused on fresh ideas over stale ideology and you moved your cities forward and i know it because i see it in the faces of americans everywhere who are ready to roll up their sleeves and join in the work of remaking this nation so now it falls to us to seize the possibilities of this moment and convert peril into promise see to it that our cities and our people emerge from this moment stronger than they were before starting today that s what you and i are going to do together and i m absolutely confident that our people will benefit and people will look back and say that this was a turning point this was a moment where in the midst of great crisis leadership was shown and we created a new platform for success for all americans in the future thank you so much everybody appreciate it dem bobama20 3 10 barack_obama thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you very much thank you everybody please have a set to leader reid to steny hoyer john larson xavier becerra jim clyburn chris van hollen to an extraordinary leader and extraordinary speaker of the house nancy pelosi and to all the members here today thank you very much for having me thanks for having me and thanks for your tireless efforts waged on behalf of health insurance reform in this country i have the great pleasure of having a really nice library at the white house and i was tooling through some of the writings of some previous presidents and i came upon this quote by abraham lincoln i am not bound to win but i m bound to be true i m not bound to succeed but i m bound to live up to what light i have this debate has been a difficult debate this process has been a difficult process and this year has been a difficult year for the american people when i was sworn in we were in the midst of the worst recession since the great depression eight hundred thousand people per month were losing their jobs millions of people were losing their health insurance and the financial system was on the verge of collapse and this body has taken on some of the toughest votes and some of the toughest decisions in the history of congress not because you were bound to win but because you were bound to be true because each and every one of you made a decision that at a moment of such urgency it was less important to measure what the polls said than to measure what was right a year later we re in different circumstances because of the actions that you ve taken the financial system has stabilized the stock market has stabilized businesses are starting to invest again the economy instead of contracting is now growing again there are signs that people are going to start hiring again there s still tremendous hardship all across the country but there is a sense that we are making progress because of you but even before this crisis each and every one of us knew that there were millions of people across america who were living their own quiet crises maybe because they had a child who had a preexisting condition and no matter how desperate they were no matter what insurance company they called they couldn t get coverage for that child maybe it was somebody who had been forced into early retirement in their 50s not yet eligible for medicare and they couldn t find a job and they couldn t find health insurance despite the fact that they had some sort of chronic condition that had to be tended to every single one of you at some point before you arrived in congress and after you arrived in congress have met constituents with heart breaking stories and you ve looked them in the eye and you ve said we re going to do something about it that s why i want to go to congress and now we re on the threshold of doing something about it we re a day away after a year of debate after every argument has been made by just about everybody we re 24 hours away as some of you know i m not somebody who spends a lot of time surfing the cable channels but i m not completely in the bubble i have a sense of what the coverage has been and mostly it s an obsession with what will this mean for the democratic party what will this mean for the president s polls how will this play out in november is this good or is this bad for the democratic majority what does it mean for those swing districts and i noticed that there s been a lot of friendly advice offered all across town mitch mcconnell john boehner karl rove they re all warning you of the horrendous impact if you support this legislation now it could be that they are suddenly having a change of heart and they are deeply concerned about their democratic friends they are giving you the best possible advice in order to assure that nancy pelosi remains speaker and harry reid remains leader and that all of you keep your seats that s a possibility but it may also be possible that they realize after health reform passes and i sign that legislation into law that it s going to be a little harder to mischaracterize what this effort has been all about because this year small businesses will start getting tax credits so that they can offer health insurance to employees who currently don t have it because this year those same parents who are worried about getting coverage for their children with preexisting conditions now are assured that insurance companies have to give them coverage this year because this year insurance companies won t suddenly be able to drop your coverage when you get sick or impose lifetime limits or restrictive limits on the coverage that you have maybe they know that this year for the first time young people will be able to stay on their parents health insurance until they re 26 years old and they re thinking that just might be popular all across the country and what they also know is what won t happen they know that after this legislation passes and after i sign this bill lo and behold nobody is pulling the plug on granny it turns out that in fact people who like their health insurance are going to be able to keep their health insurance that there s no government takeover people will discover that if they like their doctor they ll be keeping their doctor in fact they re more likely to keep their doctor because of a stronger system it ll turn out that this piece of historic legislation is built on the private insurance system that we have now and runs straight down the center of american political thought it turns out this is a bill that tracks the recommendations not just of democrat tom daschle but also republicans bob dole and howard baker that this is a middle of the road bill that is designed to help the american people in an area of their lives where they urgently need help now there are some who wanted a single payer government run system that s not this bill the republicans wanted what i called the foxes guard the henhouse approach in which we further deregulate the insurance companies and let them run wild the notion being somehow that that was going to lower costs for the american people i don t know a serious health care economist who buys that idea but that was their concept and we rejected that because what we said was we want to create a system in which health care is working not for insurance companies but it s working for the american people it s working for middle class families so what did we do what is the essence of this legislation number one this is the toughest insurance reforms in history we are making sure that the system of private insurance works for ordinary families a prescription this is a patient s bill of rights on steroids so many of you individually have worked on these insurance reforms they are in this package to make sure that families are getting a fair deal that if they re paying a premium that they re getting a good service in return making sure that employers if they are paying premiums for their employees that their employees are getting the coverage that they expect that insurance companies are not going to game the system with fine print and rescissions and dropping people when they need it most but instead are going to have to abide by some basic rules of the road that exemplify a sense of fairness and good value that s number one the second thing this does is it creates a pool a marketplace where individuals and small businesses who right now are having a terrible time out there getting health insurance are going to be able to purchase health insurance as part of a big group just like federal employees just like members of congress they are now going to be part of a pool that can negotiate for better rates better quality more competition and that s why the congressional budget office says this will lower people s rates for comparable plans by 14 to 20 percent that s not my numbers that s the congressional budget office s numbers so that people will have choice and competition just like members of congress have choice and competition number three if people still can t afford it we re going to provide them some tax credits the biggest tax cut for small businesses and working families when it comes to health care in history and number four this is the biggest reduction in our deficit since the budget balance act one of the biggest deficit reduction measures in history over 1 3 trillion that will help put us on the path of fiscal responsibility and that s before we count all the game changing measures that are going to assure for example that instead of having five tests when you go to the doctor you just get one that the delivery system is working for patients not just working for billings and everybody who s looked at it says that every single good idea to bend the cost curve and start actually reducing health care costs are in this bill so that s what this effort is all about toughest insurance reforms in history a marketplace so people have choice and competition who right now don t have it and are seeing their premiums go up 20 30 40 50 percent reductions in the cost of health care for millions of american families including those who have health insurance the business roundtable did their own study and said that this would potentially save employers 3 000 per employee on their health care because of the measures in this legislation and by the way not only does it reduce the deficit we pay for it responsibly in ways that the other side of the aisle that talks a lot about fiscal responsibility but doesn t seem to be able to walk the walk can t claim when it comes to their prescription drug bill we are actually doing it this is paid for and will not add a dime to the deficit it will reduce the deficit now is this bill perfect of course not will this solve every single problem in our health care system right away no there are all kinds of ideas that many of you have that aren t included in this legislation i know that there has been discussion for example of how we re going to deal with regional disparities and i know that there was a meeting with secretary sebelius to assure that we can continue to try to make sure that we ve got a system that gives people the best bang for their buck so this is not there are all kinds of things that many of you would like to see that isn t in this legislation there are some things i d like to see that s not in this legislation but is this the single most important step that we have taken on health care since medicare absolutely is this the most important piece of domestic legislation in terms of giving a break to hardworking middle class families out there since medicare absolutely is this a vast improvement over the status quo absolutely now i still know this is a tough vote though i know this is a tough vote i ve talked to many of you individually and i have to say that if you honestly believe in your heart of hearts in your conscience that this is not an improvement over the status quo if despite all the information that s out there that says that without serious reform efforts like this one people s premiums are going to double over the next five or 10 years that folks are going to keep on getting letters from their insurance companies saying that their premium just went up 40 or 50 percent if you think that somehow it s okay that we have millions of hardworking americans who can t get health care and that it s all right it s acceptable in the wealthiest nation on earth that there are children with chronic illnesses that can t get the care that they need if you think that the system is working for ordinary americans rather than the insurance companies then you should vote no on this bill if you can honestly say that then you shouldn t support it you re here to represent your constituencies and if you think your constituencies honestly wouldn t be helped you shouldn t vote for this but if you agree that the system is not working for ordinary families if you ve heard the same stories that i ve heard everywhere all across the country then help us fix this system don t do it for me don t do it for nancy pelosi or harry reid do it for all those people out there who are struggling some of you know i get 10 letters a day that i read out of the 40 000 that we receive started reading some of the ones that i got this morning dear president obama my daughter a wonderful person lost her job she has no health insurance she had a blood clot in her brain she s now disabled can t get care dear president obama i don t yet qualify for medicare cobra is about to run out i am desperate don t know what to do do it for them do it for people who are really scared right now through no fault of their own who ve played by the rules who ve done all the right things and have suddenly found out that because of an accident because of an ailment they re about to lose their house or they can t provide the help to their kids that they need or they re a small business who up until now has always taken pride in providing care for their workers and it turns out that they just can t afford to do it anymore and they ve having to make a decision about do i keep providing health insurance for my workers or do i just drop their coverage or do i not hire some people because i simply can t afford it it s all being gobbled up by the insurance companies don t do it for me don t do it for the democratic party do it for the american people they re the ones who are looking for action right now i know this is a tough vote and i am actually confident i ve talked to some of you individually that it will end up being the smart thing to do politically because i believe that good policy is good politics i am convinced that when you go out there and you are standing tall and you are saying i believe that this is the right thing to do for my constituents and the right thing to do for america that ultimately the truth will out i had a wonderful conversation with betsy markey i don t know if betsy is around here there she is right there betsy is in a tough district the biggest newspaper is somewhat conservative as betsy described they weren t real happy with health care reform they were opposed to it betsy despite the pressure announced that she was in favor of this bill and lo and behold the next day that same newspaper runs an editorial saying you know what we ve considered this we ve looked at the legislation and we actually are pleased that congresswoman markey is supporting the legislation when i see john boccieri stand up proud with a whole bunch of his constituencies in as tough a district as there is and stand up with a bunch of folks from his district with preexisting conditions and saying you know i don t know what is going on washington but i know what s going on with these families i look at him with pride now i can t guarantee that this is good politics every one of you know your districts better than i do you talk to folks you re under enormous pressure you re getting robocalls you re getting e mails that are tying up the communications system i know the pressure you re under i get a few comments made about me i don t know if you ve noticed i ve been in your shoes i know what it s like to take a tough vote but what did lincoln say i am not bound to win but i am bound to be true two generations ago folks who were sitting in your position they made a decision we are going to make sure that seniors and the poor have health care coverage that they can count on and they did the right thing and i m sure at the time they were making that vote they weren t sure how the politics were either any more than the people who made the decision to make sure that social security was in place knew how the politics would play out or folks who passed the civil rights acts knew how the politics were going to play out they were not bound to win but they were bound to be true and now we ve got middle class americans don t have medicare don t have medicaid watching the employer based system fray along the edges or being caught in terrible situations and the question is are we going to be true to them sometimes i think about how i got involved in politics i didn t think of myself as a potential politician when i get out of college i went to work in neighborhoods working with catholic churches in poor neighborhoods in chicago trying to figure out how people could get a little bit of help and i was skeptical about politics and politicians just like a lot of americans are skeptical about politics and politicians are right now because my working assumption was when push comes to shove all too often folks in elected office they re looking for themselves and not looking out for the folks who put them there that there are too many compromises that the special interests have too much power they just got too much clout there s too much big money washing around and i decided finally to get involved because i realized if i wasn t willing to step up and be true to the things i believe in then the system wouldn t change every single one of you had that same kind of moment at the beginning of your careers maybe it was just listening to stories in your neighborhood about what was happening to people who d been laid off of work maybe it was your own family experience somebody got sick and didn t have health care and you said something should change something inspired you to get involved and something inspired you to be a democrat instead of running as a republican because somewhere deep in your heart you said to yourself i believe in an america in which we don t just look out for ourselves that we don t just tell people you re on your own that we are proud of our individualism we are proud of our liberty but we also have a sense of neighborliness and a sense of community and we are willing to look out for one another and help people who are vulnerable and help people who are down on their luck and give them a pathway to success and give them a ladder into the middle class that s why you decided to run and now a lot of us have been here a while and everybody here has taken their lumps and their bruises and it turns out people have had to make compromises and you ve been away from families for a long time and you ve missed special events for your kids sometimes and maybe there have been times where you asked yourself why did i ever get involved in politics in the first place and maybe things can t change after all and when you do something courageous it turns out sometimes you may be attacked and sometimes the very people you thought you were trying to help may be angry at you and shout at you and you say to yourself maybe that thing that i started with has been lost but you know what every once in a while every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself about this country where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made in all those town meetings and all those constituency breakfasts and all that traveling through the district all those people who you looked in the eye and you said you know what you re right the system is not working for you and i m going to make it a little bit better and this is one of those moments this is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself doggone it this is exactly why i came here this is why i got into politics this is why i got into public service this is why i ve made those sacrifices because i believe so deeply in this country and i believe so deeply in this democracy and i m willing to stand up even when it s hard even when it s tough every single one of you have made that promise not just to your constituents but to yourself and this is the time to make true on that promise we are not bound to win but we are bound to be true we are not bound to succeed but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine we have been debating health care for decades it has now been debated for a year it is in your hands it is time to pass health care reform for america and i am confident that you are going to do it tomorrow thank you very much house of representatives let s get this done dem bobama20 4 09 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you well thank you for the extraordinary welcome and thanks for those of you who prepared from the cia gift shop the t shirts the caps the water bottles michelle and the girls will appreciate that very much it is a great honor to be here with the men and women of the cia i ve been eager to come out here to langley for some time so i can deliver a simple message to you in person on behalf of the american people thank you thank you for all the work that you do to protect the american people and the freedom that we all cherish the cia is fundamental to america s national security and i want you to know that that s why i nominated such an outstanding public servant and close friend leon panetta to lead the agency he is one of our nation s finest public servants he has my complete confidence and he is a strong voice in my national security team as well as a strong advocate for the men and women of the cia i also benefit from the counsel of several agency veterans chief among them steve kappes who s stayed on to serve as leon s deputy and he s done outstanding work i have to add just as an aside by the way i just met with a smaller group of about 50 so we could have a dialogue and all of you look really young and so to have a graybeard literally and figuratively like steve kappes here i think is absolutely critical i also want you to know that we have one of your own john brennan who is doing a terrific job as my advisor for counterterrorism and homeland security and we are very grateful for the work that he does and the insights that he brings from his long years of service here at the cia and i d be remiss if i didn t mention the extraordinary former cia officer and director of central intelligence bob gates who is also part of our cabinet and every once in a while gives me a few tips let me share with you just a few thoughts about the situation in which we find ourselves first i want to underscore the importance of the cia when the cia was founded you were focused on one overarching threat the soviet union and for decades the cia carried out a critically important mission with the end of the cold war some wondered how important the cia would be to our future now we know here in the 21st century we ve learned that the cia is more important than ever for as leon mentioned we face a wide range of unconventional challenges stateless terrorist networks like al qaeda the spread of catastrophic weapons cyber threats failed states rogue regimes persistent conflict and now we have to add to our list piracy the cia is unique in the capabilities of collection analysis and operation that you bring to bear so you are an indispensable tool the tip of the spear in america s intelligence mission and our national security it is because of you that i can make good decisions you prove that the key to good intelligence is not simply technology it s the quality of the men and women who have signed up to serve you re on the front lines against unconventional challenges you help us understand the world as it is you support the work of our troops and our diplomats and law enforcement officers you disrupt terrorist plots and you re critical to our efforts to destroy terrorist networks you serve capably courageously and from here in virginia to dangerous outposts around the globe you make enormous sacrifices on our behalf so you should be proud of what you do second you need to know that you ve got my full support for decades the american people have counted on you to protect them i know that i ve come to personally count on your services i rely on your reporting and your analysis which finds its way onto my desk every single day and i know you ve got a tough job i know there s no margin for error and i know there are endless demands for intelligence and there is an urgent necessity to collect and analyze information and to work seamlessly with other agencies to act on it and what makes it tougher is when you succeed as you so often do that success usually has to stay secret so you don t get credit when things go good but you sure get some blame when things don t now i got a amen corner out here now in that context i know that the last few days have been difficult as i made clear in releasing the olc memos as a consequence of a court case that was pending and to which it was very difficult for us to mount an effective legal defense i acted primarily because of the exceptional circumstances that surrounded these memos particularly the fact that so much of the information was public had been publicly acknowledged the covert nature of the information had been compromised i have fought to protect the integrity of classified information in the past and i will do so in the future and there is nothing more important than protecting the identities of cia officers so i need everybody to be clear we will protect your identities and your security as you vigorously pursue your missions i will be as vigorous in protecting you as you are vigorous in protecting the american people now i have put an end to the interrogation techniques described in those olc memos and i want to be very clear and very blunt i ve done so for a simple reason because i believe that our nation is stronger and more secure when we deploy the full measure of both our power and the power of our values including the rule of law i know i can count on you to do exactly that there have been some conversations that i ve had with senior folks here at langley in which i think people have expressed understandable anxiety and concern so i want to make a point that i just made in the smaller group i understand that it s hard when you are asked to protect the american people against people who have no scruples and would willingly and gladly kill innocents al qaeda is not constrained by a constitution many of our adversaries are not constrained by a belief in freedom of speech or representation in court or rule of law i m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we re operating with one hand tied behind our back or that those who would argue for a higher standard are nave i understand that you know i watch the cable shows once in a while what makes the united states special and what makes you special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it s hard not just when it s easy even when we are afraid and under threat not just when it s expedient to do so that s what makes us different so yes you ve got a harder job and so do i and that s okay because that s why we can take such extraordinary pride in being americans and over the long term that is why i believe we will defeat our enemies because we re on the better side of history so don t be discouraged by what s happened in the last few weeks don t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we ve made some mistakes that s how we learn but the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward that is precisely why i am proud to be president of the united states and that s why you should be proud to be members of the cia third point third point i want you to know how much the american people appreciate your service sometimes it s hard to acknowledge sacrifices made by the people whose work or even identity must remain secret and that s part of the enormous burden that you carry when you sign up you make extraordinary sacrifices giving up parts of your life in service to your country many of you take long deployments overseas you miss seeing your families you miss weekend barbecues and the birthday parties watching your children grow up you can t even exchange in the simplest pleasure of talking about your job or complaining about your job openly there are few signs of patriotism more powerful than offering to serve out of the limelight and so many of you have signed up to serve after 9 11 that s partly why you re all so young fully aware of the dangers before you you serve courageously but your courage is only known to a few you accomplish remarkable things but the credit you receive is the private knowledge that you ve done something to secure this country that s a sacrifice that s carved into those marble walls those 89 stars stand as a testament to both the men and women of the cia who gave their lives in service to their country and to all who dedicate themselves to the mission of this agency now we must look forward to the future with confidence all that you ve achieved i believe that the cia s best days are still yet to come and you will have my support and appreciation as you carry on this critical work we live in dangerous times i am going to need you more than ever precisely because we re seeing changes in our foreign policy and we want to send a new message to the world that requires better intelligence not less of it that means that we re going to have to operate smarter and more effectively than ever so i m going to be relying on you and the american people are going to rely on you and i hope that you will continue to take extraordinary pride in the challenges that come with the job thank you very much god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama20 4 10a barack_obama hello everybody hello hello hello thank you everybody please have a seat have a seat i ve got so many good friends in this magnificent setting that i don t want to single anybody out but there are a couple of people that i do have to acknowledge first of all our two dnc southern california co chairs john emerson and ken solomon thank you for everything that you ve done to make this evening possible i feel bad for the emersons though apparently they were on their way to paris and the ash got in the way so this is a consolation spending time with me but i m thrilled to be here they ve been longtime supporters ever since i first ran for the united states senate and ken has been just a terrific supporter of democratic causes and my campaigns as well so thank you to all of you he started off not only as one of the finest governors in the country he was also the first person to endorse me outside of the state of illinois now i have to admit that he was term limited so maybe there wasn t that much of a downside to it but at a time when nobody could pronounce my name and nobody gave me a chance this person stood beside me in the seat of the old confederacy in richmond virginia and i am so grateful to him for not only the leadership he showed on behalf of the commonwealth of virginia but the leadership he s shown as our dnc chair please give tim kaine a big round of applause now i don t know if he s still here but you ve got an outstanding mayor in mayor villaraigosa so please give him a big round of applause and obviously i want everybody to give a bunch of whoops and hollers on behalf of our honoree the person who we are going to make sure gets four terms in the united states senate barbara boxer give barbara a big round of applause and give stu a big round of applause for putting up with barbara thank you stu you know many of you know that barbara has been a huge champion of clean energy energy independence environmental protection she loves hybrids and plug ins and it is therefore appropriate that we have as a senator a sub compact model with inexhaustible energy i m not going to be long tonight i just want to say a little bit about barbara but also a little bit about the state of our union you know when we came into office at the beginning of last year we were confronting as many difficulties as many challenges as probably any president since fdr we had a war in iraq that required us to begin phasing down effectively we had a war in afghanistan that needed more focus we had the worst financial crisis since the great depression losing 750 000 jobs every single month and california has obviously been hit as hard as any state in the union we had a housing crisis a crisis in the auto industry we had a crisis in the financial industry that looked like it might be on the verge of meltdown and obviously the pain and difficulty that small businesses large businesses and their employees were suffering throughout this state and states all across the country were something that we just had not seen in a generation and so we had to act swiftly and we did we put in place the largest stimulus in history that included the largest investigation in clean energy in history the largest investment in federal education in history the largest investment in r d in science in history the biggest tax cuts that we ve seen in a very very long time going to 98 percent of californians all of which were designed to do two things not just to wrench ourselves out of this immediate crisis but were also designed to start laying a foundation for growth because we knew that we couldn t keep repeating a pattern of bubble and bust that we d been seeing that it wasn t a tenable model for our future the future of our children and our grandchildren and we still have a long way to go you travel across this state or you travel across this country and people are hurting everywhere people are still out of work small businesses are still struggling to get credit and we re not going to rest until those folks who are willing to work hard and put their blood sweat and tears into achieving the american dream have that opportunity once again but what we can say is that an economy that was shrinking rapidly is now growing again that businesses that were shedding workers are now hiring again that consumers are now spending again that business investment is taking place again that the financial market is stabilized and a lot of folks who were counting on that 401 k being there for their retirement that that has not if not completely been restored in value has come a long way from those dark days just a year ago all of this would not have been possible had it not been for folks like barbara boxer and i don t want you to underestimate the courage of barbara because we knew some of the steps that we were taking were going to be unpopular at the time sometimes reporters act as if we don t have pollsters we do we take polls all the time we know when something is not going to be popular but we also know that sometimes if you re doing right by the country you ve got to ignore the short term politics you can t make decisions based on what s good for the next election you make decisions based on what s good for the next generation and that s what barbara boxer has done consistently throughout her career i love a story she told me backstage she said a reporter came up to her and said you know what you ve been one of the most consistent senators politically i ve ever seen but your hair is not consistent sometimes it s my hair is consistent barbara by the way but it s true one of the reasons to support barbara boxer is because you know exactly where she stands you know where she came from you know that she cares about working families you know that she cares about giving them not a handout but a hand up you know that she cares about making sure that every child gets a decent education that workers are getting decent wages and basic workplace protections you know that she cares about making sure this environment and our natural resources are passed on to the next generation you know that she cares about making sure that we ve got a foreign policy that is smart and balanced and thinks about how we can work cooperatively with other nations even as we are adamant about our security and barbara hasn t wavered and she wants to cooperate with folks on the other side of the aisle where she can but she s willing to fight where she has to and that s not a bad adage by the way for the democratic party in this entire year and a half of cleaning up the mess it s been tough because the folks very responsible for a large portion of this mess decided to stand on the sidelines it was as if somebody had driven their car into the ditch and then just watched you as you had to yank it out and asked you why didn t you do it faster and why do i have that scratch on the fender and you want to say why don t you put your shoulder up against that car and help to push that s what we need is some help and it wasn t forthcoming it wasn t forthcoming when it came to economic recovery and i don t know if you noticed but it wasn t forthcoming when it came to trying to make sure that every american has secure health care in this country and yet we got it done anyway without their help but you know they ve still got some opportunities to help right now there s some unfinished business that remains we have passed a historic health care bill because of people like barbara boxer we have seen the economy begin to recover but there remains some structural changes some structural fixes to this extraordinary system that we ve got that we re going to have to undertake and we re going to need people like barbara in the trenches fighting for those things we re going to need a comprehensive energy bill that makes sure that we are finally moving away from the old ways of doing business into the new ways of doing business that we re seizing the opportunities of the 21st century that we re creating jobs here in the united states building wind turbines and solar panels and making sure that those jobs are created right here in the united states that we re building the cars of the future just one small statistic because it gives you a sense of what s possible before the recovery act the united states made 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries we are now poised to have 20 percent of the market and in a few years we can have as much as 40 percent of the market we re seeing an entirely new industry being created right here in the united states of america because of the investments we made in clean energy now you duplicate that across sectors and you think about what that can do to put californians back to work because californians have always been at the forefront of this stuff and do it in a way that at the same time deals with this threat of climate change and makes sure that we are preserving our natural inheritance for the next generation it is something that we re going to have to do and we will do building on the work that barbara has already done in her committee we thank you barbara for that and i m going to be right next to you to make sure that we can get a comprehensive energy bill done that is something that we ve got to fight for and then we ve got financial regulatory reform now i have consistently said i believe fiercely in a free market and i believe that a vibrant dynamic financial sector is part of that free market we can t have successful businesses if we don t have a successful and vibrant financial sector but we have to acknowledge that the status quo has not worked we ve got to acknowledge that it hasn t worked for ordinary americans it hasn t worked for the economy as a whole it s worked for a few but not for the many when we ve got a situation where people are allowed to take wild risks and all the downsides are socialized even as the profits are privatized then something s going to have to change when we don t have basic rules of the road in place that assures that consumers aren t abused and tricked and investors don t know what s going on then something s got to change now we ve got the opportunity to change coming up in the next few weeks and you watch where barbara boxer is going to be because she s going to be on the sides of investors and consumers and small businesses and on the side of making sure that we never again have any kind of taxpayer bailouts and then you look at some of the rhetoric that s coming out of the other side of the aisle and you see folks that so far at least don t seem to acknowledge that we re going to have to make some tough decisions and reform the system the american people understand it it should be common sense but unfortunately the lobbies and the money that is poured into campaigns has ended up distorting that basic truth fortunately barbara boxer is not swayed she knows what she stands for she knows whose side she s on and that s why you ve got to send her back to the united states senate because she is going to help us she is going to help us get this stuff done comprehensive immigration reform we ve got to get done making sure that we continue the progress that s already been made and we overturn don t ask don t tell that has to get done making sure that we re investing in science and technology and continuing to make our education system work better than any education system in the world so that our children can compete that remains to be done so we ve got a lot of business to do here and i can t think of somebody i d rather have beside me somebody who has been a tougher fighter but also a happy warrior somebody who is just thrilled every day to serve her constituents and just bleeds with them when they re down and celebrates with them when they re doing well who just wears her heart on her sleeve and cares so deeply about this country than barbara boxer and so these mid year races are the ones where historically it s always been hardest to get folks activated particularly the party in power you remember 2008 that was fun right because it was so obvious that the course we were on wasn t working and everything felt fresh and new and now we ve gone through a year and a half of tough fights and some folks are impatient and some folks just didn t realize how long this was going to take how hard each battle was going to be and so people get kind of worn down and in some cases people get complacent some people take things for granted but you can t take them for granted you can t take for granted that the next supreme court appointee or the supreme court appointee after that is going to reflect your values you can t take that for granted unless you know that you ve got not just a president but also a united states senate that is willing to work on behalf of the things that we care about making sure that everybody s got a chance making sure that opportunity is open to all making sure that those ladders into the middle class into the american dream are there making sure that there s a basic safety net for the vulnerable and the aged and the infirm making sure that the thing that makes us democrats this notion that this country is there for everybody and everybody has got to have a shot and that it s nothing there s nothing wrong with us even as we affirm our individualism saying you know what i m going to help my neighbor i m going to help my friend i m going to help my coworker i m going to help somebody i may not know because that s part of what america is all about you can t take for granted that spirit it has to be fought for it has to be worked on and people who embody it have to be supported barbara boxer is one of those people and so i want you to work just as hard i want you to write just as many checks i want you to call just as many people i want you to knock on just as many doors as you did for me on behalf of barbara boxer and if you do i guarantee you we re going to send her back for another term as a great united states senator from the great state of california thank you very much everybody god bless you and god bless america dem bobama20 4 10b barack_obama hello hello good to see you we ve got a whole bunch of the congressional delegation you know who you are i see a whole bunch of supporters from way back it s good to see you again it is just wonderful to be back in california and i can t think of a better reason to come back to california than to get barbara boxer reelected barbara was taking us down memory lane there for a second so i won t go into every detail about what barbara and i together and every member of congress here together has had to deal with over the last year and a half barbara mentioned two wars the worst financial crisis since the great depression a housing market that had completely collapsed i forgot about the pirates but you you forgot about the pandemic that was kind of that was like seventh or eighth on the list but look the fact is is that as tough as the situation has been in washington it s been a lot tougher on the ground for american people all across this country you know about it because you ve been dealing with it in your capacity as community leaders as elected leaders you ve seen what s happening here in california and california in a lot of ways has been ground zero for what s been happening all across the country millions of people thrown out of work millions of people losing their health care in the process of being thrown out of work choices having to be made by local and state officials about are they going to hang on to teachers are they going to lay off teachers how are they going to pay off a burgeoning debt how are we going to deal with the social services that are needed more than ever because of the crisis but unfortunately we ve got less revenue to deal with so there have been a lot of people hurting out there and i know that i get 10 letters every single day that i read out of the 40 000 that i receive and about half of them call me an idiot because the charge of those selecting the letters is to make sure that we re even handed but the other half actually the other three quarters tell again and again just heartbreaking stories about children asking why is it that they re having to move even though they really like the house they re living in and the neighborhood they live in or families talking about how are they going to take care of their parents now that their retirement accounts were completely decimated or how are they going to make their mortgage when both adults in the household have lost their jobs and nothing is harder and nothing is more heartbreaking than reading these letters and knowing that change has not come as fast as we d like but here is the main message that i have for all of you change is coming change has come an economy that was contracting is now expanding folks who were losing their jobs now we re seeing employers hiring again businesses are beginning to invest again tax revenue is starting to percolate up again and the reason is is because we made a series of decisions that were not always popular but were the right thing to do and nobody is tougher and nobody is more determined to do the right thing even when in the face of fierce opposition than barbara boxer you all know that barbara is a huge champion for clean energy she is a huge champion for the environment she is a huge champion of hybrid cars and electric plug ins so it s appropriate that we have here this sub compact model that is an inexhaustible source of energy and i could not have a better partner in the fights that have to be fought now we ve made all this progress because of people like barbara boxer and the members of congress who are here today and if you just tick off what has been accomplished this year in yanking this economic out of depression and getting it on a trajectory again on having about as ambitious a education reform agenda that not many people talk about but millions more young people are going to be able to afford to go to college we ve cracked down on housing fraud we ve cracked down on credit card fraud we are moving through the stimulus package are you stealing my lines here come on talk about wasn t it w c fields who said you never perform with kids or animals because they always like steal your thunder on clean energy on investments in science on reversing the stem cell ban we re now moving forward and reversing don t ask don t tell on health care reform so that every single on each and every one of those issues barbara boxer has been right in but here is my message we ve got a lot more work to do our work is not yet done and because some of the things that we did were not popular we re going to have a tough political fight coming up november is going to be tough barbara is going to have a tough race it s always a tough race if you re an incumbent in this kind of economic environment even though it s picking up people are still hurting like they haven t hurt in a long time and so it s tough being an incumbent and it s even tougher when you ve got the other side of the aisle which helped to cause the mess but doesn t seem to want to help in cleaning up after the mess distorting the record of somebody like barbara boxer so we re going to have some work ahead of us but when you re asked by your friends your neighbors people who you re making sure contribute to barbara boxer s campaign i just want you to remind them what barbara has been for and what the other side has been for if they want to talk about the stimulus you just remind them that one third of that is tax cuts we have 25 different tax cuts and 98 percent of californians got a tax cut because of the vote that barbara boxer cast the biggest tax cut in history biggest investment in clean energy in history biggest investment in education in history when they were against it barbara boxer was for it you ask them are you in favor of children with preexisting conditions not being able to get insurance and parents having to figure out how to scramble to find the care that their children need because they were against health care reform barbara boxer was for health care reform you ask them if they want to give away those millions of dollars worth of tax credits to small businesses so they can do the right thing by their employees barbara boxer was for it they are against it we re going to have some more choices coming up because right now we ve got a big battle on financial regulatory reform and i don t know about you the notion that we would settle for the status quo and create a situation in which wall street could gamble with somebody else s money take exorbitant risks and put the entire economy at risk and force taxpayers to try to pick up the tab when things went south on them makes absolutely no sense which is why barbara boxer and the present congressional delegation right here want to do something about it and have tough restrictions on the kinds of risks that and where the consumers can be protected and i think that that s something that is worthy of support now it turns out mitch mcconnell thinks differently i don t know exactly what happened but he and the chairman of the senate committee went up to wall street had a pow wow with them and came away the next thing we knew they were all opposed to financial regulatory reform i don t know the nature of the conversation but i m hoping that they will do the right thing i don t welcome some of the pitched partisan rhetoric that we ve been seeing barbara doesn t either none of us do because the problems we face are big enough that we ve got to have republicans and democrats working together but here s what i won t do what i m not going to do and what barbara boxer is not going to do is compromise our principles and sell out the american people just in order to try to create some false sense of peace there are some stands that are worth fighting for and financial regulatory reform is one of those stands here is my bottom line we ve got a lot of work to do on a whole range of issues we still need comprehensive immigration reform we still need we still need to make sure our k through 12 education is serving our children we still have to make our economy more competitive and spur on greater innovation and investment in research and development we ve still got to have some control over our fiscal system and you are going to need somebody who is as passionate and as caring and as committed and as tough as the senator that you ve got right here right now so i don t want anybody here taking this for granted a lot of you worked on my campaign in 2008 and sometimes it s easy to get excited about presidential campaigns but you know what this is where the rubber hits the road and unless barbara gets the help that she needs from all of you and that means digging deep and reaching out to your friends and your neighbors and carrying that message forward everywhere you go unless she s got our support she might not win this thing and i don t think that s an acceptable outcome all right so i want everybody to work hard make phone calls knock on doors talk to your friends talk to your neighbors write big checks be fired up and be ready to go because barbara boxer is ready to go and you are not going to have a better senator than barbara boxer thank you very much everybody dem bobama20 5 09 barack_obama good morning everybody good afternoon please everybody have a seat everybody have a seat it is wonderful to see all of you four months ago today we took office amidst unprecedented economic turmoil and ever since that day we ve worked aggressively across all fronts to end this crisis and to build a new foundation for our lasting prosperity step by step i believe we re moving in the right direction i know my administration will be judged by various markers but there s only one measure of progress that matters to me and that s the progress that the american people see in their own lives day to day because right now despite progress too many americans are hurting they re americans desperate to find a job or unable to make ends meet despite working multiple jobs americans who pay their bills on time but can t keep their heads above water americans living in fear that they re one illness or one accident away from losing their home hardworking americans who did all the right things met all of their responsibilities yet still find the american dream slipping out of reach now much of what caused this crisis was an era of recklessness where short term gains were too often prized over long term prosperity and too often in our nation s capital we said the right words we patted ourselves on the back but ultimately failed to do what we were actually sent here to do and that is to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the american people well standing up for the american people is exactly what we re doing here today with two bills that i m about to sign the helping families save their homes act and the fraud enforcement and recovery act these landmark pieces of legislation will protect hardworking americans crack down on those who seek to take advantage of them and ensure that the problems that led us to this crisis never happen again thanks in large part to some of the men and women here both onstage as well as in the audience each bill passed by overwhelmingly bipartisan majorities but we wouldn t be here without the leadership of my good friend chris dodd and i want to thank him and senator richard shelby chris and richard shelby over on the senate side and then on the house side chairman barney frank and representative maxine waters have done a great job and i want to thank senators patrick leahy and chuck grassley as well as representatives conyers and bobby scott for leading the way on the fraud enforcement bill these two laws together with the comprehensive credit card reforms that i hope to sign later this week represent fundamental change that will help ensure a fair shake for hardworking americans and i think it s important for people to understand the significance of this week this has been one of the most productive congressional work periods in some time and i am grateful to have harry reid here as well as nancy pelosi who could not be here and the other key members of congress for assigning these measures the urgency that they deserve and that the times demand let me talk a little bit about the housing bill the helping families save their homes act advances the goals of our existing housing plan by providing assistance to responsible homeowners and preventing avoidable foreclosures last summer congress passed the hope for homeowners act to help families who found themselves underwater as a result of declining home values families who owed more on their mortgages than their homes are worth but too many administrative and technical hurdles made it very difficult to navigate and most borrowers didn t even bother to try this bill removes those hurdles getting folks into sustainable and affordable mortgages and more importantly keeping them in their homes and it expands the reach of our existing housing plan for homeowners with fha or usda rural housing loans providing them with new opportunities to modify or refinance their mortgages to more affordable levels because many responsible renters are being unfairly evicted from homes that go through foreclosure because the owners haven t been paying their mortgages it requires banks to honor existing leases or provide at least 90 days notice for renters on month to month leases and because far too many americans go homeless on any given night this bill provides comprehensive new resources for homeless americans focusing specifically on families with children the fastest growing segment of the homeless population so altogether it s a bill that builds on the housing plan we already put into action to stabilize the housing market and stem foreclosures and because of that plan all of you should know that interest rates are down refinancings are up and americans who participate can save up to 2 000 a year in effect a 2 000 pay cut per family tax cut excuse me they don t need pay cuts that wouldn t be a good bill any american who wants to learn more about this plan should visit makinghomeaffordable gov and thanks to the efforts of the men and women gathered up here more families will stay in their homes more neighborhoods will remain vibrant and whole more dreams will be defended and america will take another step from recession to recovery so what i m going to do now is i m going to sign the housing bill and then i ll talk a little bit about the anti fraud bill all right let s get the rest of this crew up here the other bill that i m signing today gives prosecutors and regulators new tools to crack down on what s helped cause this crisis in the first place and that s the twin scourges of mortgage fraud and predatory lending last year the treasury department received 62 000 reports of mortgage fraud more than 5 000 each month the number of criminal mortgage fraud investigations opened by the fbi has more than doubled over the past three years and yet the federal government s ability to investigate and prosecute these frauds is severely hindered by outdated laws and a lack of resources and that s why this bill nearly doubles the fbi s mortgage and financial fraud program allowing it to better target fraud in hard hit areas that s why it provides the resources necessary for other law enforcement and federal agencies from the department of justice to the sec to the secret service to pursue these criminals bring them to justice and protect hardworking americans affected most by these crimes it s also why it expands doj s authority to prosecute fraud that takes place in many of the private institutions not covered under current federal bank fraud criminal statutes institutions where more than half of all subprime mortgages came from as recently as four years ago and furthermore it allows doj to prosecute anyone who fraudulently obtains recovery act or tarp funds precious taxpayer dollars we ve carefully invested in order to turn this crisis around and finally it creates a bipartisan financial markets commission to investigate the financial practices that brought us to this point so that we make sure a crisis like this never happens again our current troubles were born of eroding home values and portfolio values but also an erosion of our common values so if we want to fully dig ourselves out of this crisis we re going to need to do more than just change policy we need all of us to live up to our responsibilities government must set the rules of the road that are fair and fairly enforced banks and lenders must end the practices that added to this mess individuals must take responsibility for their own actions and all of us must learn to live within our means again i believe we re moving in the right direction but i want to remind everybody that it took many years and many failures to get us here and it s going to take some time to get us out the stock market will rise and fall the job market has taken a beating and won t be back immediately the housing market still has a long way to go but i m confident we will get there and if we keep at it if we all do our part to usher in a new era of responsibility then i m convinced that we will recover from this recession and we re going to come out on the other side stronger and more prosperous as a nation and as a people so with that i m going to sign the fraud enforcement and recovery act along with these extraordinary legislators who helped to make it happen give them a big round of applause dem bobama20 6 09 barack_obama thank you thank you so much thank you very much thanks to all of you please everybody have a seat before i get started as the father of two girls can i just say how incredibly impressive those three young ladies were dad would be proud to heather and all the others who have made this evening possible thank you so much it is wonderful to be here i want to express my appreciation for the opportunity to tell jokes that weren t funny enough for me to use when we did this five weeks ago whatever the jokes may not be as good but neither is the guest list i m just joking for me there s no contest why bother hanging out with celebrities when i can spend time with the people who made me one i know where my bread is buttered plus we have our own luminaries here in attendance the junior senator from wyoming john barasso is here i m sorry john barasso skipped this evening let me tell you though for those who haven t met him john barasso is the george clooney of junior senators from wyoming it is great to be here with so much talent from the world of tv and radio despite the flood of new media i think your programming is more relevant than ever before at least that s the impression i get when i read the blogs every day it s good to see a number of hardworking correspondents here tonight journalists like chuck todd i think i spotted chuck over there somewhere at this dinner chuck embodies the best of both worlds he has the rapid fire style of a television correspondent and the facial hair of a radio correspondent mika brzezinski is here i believe in the house mika and i have a lot in common we both have partners named joe who used to be in congress and don t know when to stop talking and happening now wolf blitzer is here he s the only man the only other man in america with his own situation room people assume that mine is cooler but this is not the case as hard as we ve tried we have not been able to generate the bandwidth necessary to turn larry summers into a hologram we can t do it now one person that you know could not be here tonight is secretary hillary clinton as most of you know hillary broke her elbow a few days ago on her way to the white house and we all wish her a very speedy recovery i do have to say though that while it s been reported as an accident there were some suspicious just before the incident secret service spotted richard holbrooke spraying wd 40 all over the driveway so now on top of the costs of health care and energy and the recovery plan we ve got another fiscal problem fortunately the lawyers tell me that hillary is ready to settle i have to admit though it wasn t easy coming up with fresh material for this dinner a few nights ago i was up tossing and turning trying to figure out exactly what to say finally when i couldn t get back to sleep i rolled over and asked brian williams what he thought now the truth is brian williams is actually a terrible house guest he put an empty milk carton back in the fridge he leaves his wet towels all over the roosevelt room we re pretty sure he clogged the toilet and didn t tell anybody although i must say the whole thing was worth it inside the obama white house is my favorite new show there s just something really compelling about the main character it s wonderful narrative in fact the show has been such a hit that all of you guys now want to come and tape one in my house abc is planning a series called dancing with the czars tlc has got something called john kate plus peter orszag that s going to be good nick at nite has a new take on an old classic leave it to uigurs i thought that was pretty good of course given the fiscal crisis in california these shows all will be competing directly with governor schwarzenegger s new reality series i m a celebrity get me out of here that s how i feel tonight look it s nothing personal but this dinner conflicts with my date night i was supposed to be going out with michelle for thai food in bangkok but i have been doing a lot of traveling i just returned from a trip abroad as you know in egypt we had the opportunity to tour the pyramids by now i m sure all of you have seen the pictures of rahm on a camel i admit i was a little nervous about the whole situation i said at the time this is a wild animal known to bite and kick and spit and who knows what the camel might do but i have to say as i traveled to all these countries i saw firsthand how much people truly have in common with one another because no matter where i went there s one thing i heard over and over again from every world leader no thanks but have you considered palau of course most of my attention has been focused here back home as you know we ve been working around the clock to repair our major financial institutions and our auto companies but you probably wouldn t understand the concept of troubled industries working as you do in the radio and television oh we don t joke about that huh that s not funny one problem we re trying to solve is the high cost of health care in america and i m pleased that in our quest to reform the health care system i ve gained the support of the american medical association it proves true the old expression that it s easier to catch flies with honey and if honey doesn t work feel free to use an open palm and a swift downward movement now the challenges we face are many and i ll be honest i don t have all the answers and when i m not sure what s right i often ask myself wwld what would a wise latino do i m proud of my nominee sonia sotomayor and all those who oppose her to all those who say that there s no place for empathy on the bench i say this i completely understand how you re feeling when you re upset i m upset another difficult challenge is how to help our automakers thrive in the 21st century we ve tried a number of different approaches and tonight i m announcing a new one it s a plan passed on to me by a close friend and advisor oprah winfrey so if each of you will look under your seat you find that you get a car company you get a car company and fox you get aig enjoy the truth is as i ve said all along i have no ambition to run an auto company i m not the salesman in chief and gm will rise or fall on the quality of its products like the taut athletic design of the new buick enclave it s french seamed leather and warm wood tones make the enclave more than transportation it s a modern driver s retreat come on work with me here i ve got cars to move people in all seriousness despite the jokes i ve told i m here tonight because i appreciate the work that all of you do and the role that you play you report the news as it happens and you re covering history as it s made with a handheld camera or a mic or now even a cell phone or a blog you bring the truth to people and allow people to bring truth to the world we re seeing that now as history is unfolding in the sounds and images broadcast from iran over the last week we ve seen professional and citizen journalists act as a voice for those who want to be heard bearing witness to universal aspirations of democracy and freedom often at great risk and sometimes with great sacrifice they do it because the rest of us need to hear the stories that they tell in recent years we ve seen the same courageous reporting in iraq in afghanistan and the congo and in every dangerous corner of the world and everywhere there s a story that needs to be told i think all of you understand these are changing times as journalists you understand that better than anyone but one thing that will never change is the need to report the news as it happens wherever it happens this is what you do and this is what will help us meet the challenges of our time we are grateful to you for that thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama21 1 09 barack_obama hello everybody please be seated still getting used to that whole thing please be seated thank you so much i wanted to get everyone together on the first day to welcome you to the white house from our vantage point yesterday you couldn t help but be inspired by the sight of americans as far as the eye could see they were there because they believe this is a moment of great change in america a time for reinvigorating our democracy and remaking our country they ve entrusted all of us with a great responsibility and so today i d like to talk with you about our responsibility to keep that trust in a few minutes i m going to be issuing some of the first executive orders and directives of my presidency and these steps are aimed at establishing firm rules of the road for my administration and all who serve in it and to help restore that faith in government without which we cannot deliver the changes we were sent here to make from rebuilding our economy and ensuring that anyone who is willing to work and find a well paying job to protecting and defending the united states and promoting peace and security however long we are keepers of the public trust we should never forget that we are here as public servants and public service is a privilege it s not about advantaging yourself it s not about advancing your friends or your corporate clients it s not about advancing an ideological agenda or the special interests of any organization public service is simply and absolutely about advancing the interests of americans the men and women in this room understand this and that s why you re here all of you are committed to building a more responsible more accountable government and part of what that means is making sure that we re spending precious tax dollars wisely and cutting costs wherever possible during this period of economic emergency families are tightening their belts and so should washington and that s why i m instituting a pay freeze on the salaries of my senior white house staff some of the people in this room will be affected by the pay freeze and i want you to know that i appreciate your willingness to agree to it recognizing that it s what s required of you at this moment it s a mark of your commitment to public service but the american people deserve more than simply an assurance that those who are coming to washington will serve their interests they also deserve to know that there are rules on the books to keep it that way they deserve a government that is truly of by and for the people as i often said during the campaign we need to make the white house the people s house and we need to close the revolving door that lets lobbyists come into government freely and lets them use their time in public service as a way to promote their own interests over the interests of the american people when they leave so today we are taking a major step towards fulfilling this campaign promise the executive order on ethics i will sign shortly represents a clean break from business as usual as of today lobbyists will be subject to stricter limits than under any other administration in history if you are a lobbyist entering my administration you will not be able to work on matters you lobbied on or in the agencies you lobbied during the previous two years when you leave government you will not be able to lobby my administration for as long as i am president and there will be a ban on gifts by lobbyists to anyone serving in the administration as well now the new rules on lobbying alone no matter how tough are not enough to fix a broken system in washington that s why i m also setting new rules that govern not just lobbyists but all those who have been selected to serve in my administration if you are enlisting in government service you will have to commit in writing to rules limiting your role for two years in matters involving people you used to work with and barring you from any attempt to influence your former government colleagues for two years after you leave and you will receive an ethics briefing on what is required of you to make sure that our government is serving the people s interests and nobody else s a briefing i m proud to say i was the first member of this administration to receive last week but the way to make a government responsible is not simply to enlist the services of responsible men and women or to sign laws that ensure that they never stray the way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable and the way to make government accountable is make it transparent so that the american people can know exactly what decisions are being made how they re being made and whether their interests are being well served the directives i am giving my administration today on how to interpret the freedom of information act will do just that for a long time now there s been too much secrecy in this city the old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the american people then it should not be disclosed that era is now over starting today every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known to be sure issues like personal privacy and national security must be treated with the care they demand but the mere fact that you have the legal power to keep something secret does not mean you should always use it the freedom of information act is perhaps the most powerful instrument we have for making our government honest and transparent and of holding it accountable and i expect members of my administration not simply to live up to the letter but also the spirit of this law i will also hold myself as president to a new standard of openness going forward anytime the american people want to know something that i or a former president wants to withhold we will have to consult with the attorney general and the white house counsel whose business it is to ensure compliance with the rule of law information will not be withheld just because i say so it will be withheld because a separate authority believes my request is well grounded in the constitution let me say it as simply as i can transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency our commitment to openness means more than simply informing the american people about how decisions are made it means recognizing that government does not have all the answers and that public officials need to draw on what citizens know and that s why as of today i m directing members of my administration to find new ways of tapping the knowledge and experience of ordinary americans scientists and civic leaders educators and entrepreneurs because the way to solve the problem of our time is the way to solve the problems of our time as one nation is by involving the american people in shaping the policies that affect their lives the executive orders and directives i m issuing today will not by themselves make government as honest and transparent as it needs to be and they do not go as far as we need to go towards restoring accountability and fiscal restraint in washington but these historic measures do mark the beginning of a new era of openness in our country and i will i hope do something to make government trustworthy in the eyes of the american people in the days and weeks months and years to come that s a pretty good place to start thank you very much thank you lisa our schedule now the swearing in is going to be taking place and the vice president is going to be carrying that out okay before the vice president does that let me just say how proud i am of all of you this is an extraordinary collection of talent and you inspire great confidence in me i think the more the american people get to know you the more you will inspire great confidence in the american people all of you have made extraordinary sacrifices to be here many of you have brought your families here they re making extraordinary sacrifices but what a what a moment we re in what an opportunity we have to change this country and for those of us who have been in public life before these kinds of moments come around just every so often the american people are really counting on us now let s make sure we take advantage of it i know you will so thank you for your commitment joe do you want to administer the oath for the senior staff yes a number of cabinet members have already a whole bunch of senior staff rise marvin button up your coat our senior staff dem bobama21 1 10 barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you so much thank you thank you everybody please sit down thank you very much please have a seat have a seat well welcome to the white house everybody and let me first of all say what a outstanding job that the vice president has done not just on a whole range of issues in this administration but in working with the mayors to make sure this recovery act works the way it should so please give joe biden a big round of applause a couple of other acknowledgements i have to make first of all i want to say congratulations to elizabeth kautz the new president congratulations give elizabeth a big round of applause i have to acknowledge my own mayor mayor richard daley for the outstanding work he s done in chicago i want to say thank you to joe riley of charleston not only for creating one of the greatest helping to make one of greatest cities in the country bloom but also for giving us david agnew so give him a big round of applause mayor john hickenlooper of denver who also is running for the governor of colorado i hope you all talk to him still even when he becomes governor and i ve got to acknowledge mufi hannemann because he was such a great host for me and my family when we were there in honolulu i have to say rich the weather was a lot better in honolulu i just want to let you know now i know all of you met the first lady yesterday to begin an important begin an important national discussion on our national childhood obesity epidemic i hate following my wife she s more charming smarter tougher better looking but i am looking forward to a productive discussion with all of you on the urgent need to create jobs and move our metropolitan areas forward i always enjoy meeting with mayors because it reminds me of where i got my start working with folks at the local level doing our best to make a real impact on the lives of ordinary americans and that s what each of you does every single day you re the first interaction citizens have with their government when they step outside every morning the things that make our cities work and our people go transit and public safety safe housing sanitation parks recreation all these tasks fall to you it was president johnson who once said when the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy i always remind myself it could be worse i could be a mayor so it s why we organized this meeting today i look at all of you and i say i m doing fine it s just not easy being a mayor but rarely if ever has it been more difficult than it is today your constituents are feeling the pain of the greatest economic crisis since the great depression not to mention an economy that wasn t working for a lot of them long before this particular crisis hit many have lost jobs many have lost their health care some maybe even have lost their homes and they re looking to you and all of us to regain some sense of economic security and just when they need more from you you re stuck with falling revenues leaving you with impossible choices that keep mounting up putting projects on hold or having to furlough key employees i know some of you have had the heartbreak of laying folks off i also know that each and every one of you is 100 percent resolved to pick your city up and move it forward and that s why even as we worked to rescue our broader economy last year we took some steps to help we cut taxes as joe mentioned for workers and small businesses we extended unemployment insurance and health benefits for those who lost their jobs we provided aid to local governments so you could keep essential services running and keep cops and firefighters and teachers who make your cities safe places to grow and to learn on your payroll we invested in proven strategies like the cops program and the byrne grants that you rely on to bring down crime and boost public safety we funded and awarded more than 1 800 of the energy efficiency and conservation block grants that you conceived flexible products that reduce energy use put people back to work and save taxpayers money we increased funding for the summer youth employment program helping more than 300 000 young people hit especially hard by the recession that did more than just give them a chance to earn money it gave them the critical chance to gain experience in good jobs that build good skills so that they can come out of this crisis in a better position to build a life for themselves and we re working every day to get our economy back on track and put america back to work because while wall street may be recovering you and i know your main streets have a long way to go unemployment in your cities is still far too high and because our metropolitan areas account for 90 percent of our economic output they are the engines that we need to get started again last month i announced some additional targeted steps to spur private sector hiring and boost small businesses by building on the tax cuts in the recovery act and increasing access to the loans they desperately need to grow i said we d rebuild and modernize even more of our transportation and communication networks across the country in addition to the infrastructure projects that are already scheduled to come online this year i called for the extension of emergency relief to help hurting americans who ve lost their jobs and you can expect a continued sustained and relentless effort to create good jobs for the american people i will not rest until we ve gotten there but i also know that each of you worries about the longer term effects this economy might have on your children on your families and on workers you worry about what shape everything will be in once we emerge from this crisis so you re focused on addressing the pressing problems we face today but you ve got a vision for your city and no matter what party you belong to or where you ve traveled here from that vision is one i share of vibrant communities that provide our children with every chance to learn and to grow that allow our businesses and workers the best opportunity to innovate and succeed that let our older americans live out their best years in the midst of all that metropolitan life has to offer all of us have an obligation to make sure that even as we work to rescue and rebuild our economy we don t lose sight of that because job creation and investing in our communities aren t competing priorities they re complementary two years ago i addressed your gathering and i outlined a new strategy for urban america that changed the way washington does business with our cities and our metropolitan areas and since taking office my administration has taken a hard look at that relationship from matters of infrastructure to transportation education to energy housing to sustainable development my staff has traveled around the country to see the fresh ideas and successful solutions that you ve devised and we ve learned a great deal about what we can do and shouldn t do to help rebuild and revitalize our cities and metropolitan areas for the future so the budget that i ll present next month will begin to back up this urban vision by putting an end to throwing money after what doesn t work and by investing responsibly in what does our strategy to build economically competitive environmentally sustainable opportunity rich communities that serve as the backbone for our long term growth and prosperity three items first we ll build strong regional backbones for our economy by coordinating federal investments in economic and workforce development because today s metropolitan areas don t stop at downtown what s good for denver for example is usually good for places like aurora and boulder too strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions and strong regions are essential for a strong america second we ll focus on creating more livable and environmentally sustainable communities because when it comes to development it s time to throw out old policies that encouraged sprawl and congestion pollution and ended up isolating our communities in the process we need strategies that encourage smart development linked to quality public transportation that bring our communities together that s why we ll improve our partnership for sustainable communities by working with hud epa and the department of transportation in making sure that when it comes to development housing energy and transportation policy go hand in hand and we will build on the successful tiger discretionary grants program to put people to work and help our cities rebuild their roads and their bridges train stations and water systems third we ll focus on creating neighborhoods of opportunity many of our neighborhoods have been economically distressed long before this crisis hit for as long as many of us can remember and while the underlying causes may be deeply rooted and complicated there are some needs that are simple access to good jobs affordable housing convenient transportation that connects both quality schools and health services safe streets and parks and access to a fresh healthy food supply so we ll invest in innovative and proven strategies that change the odds for our communities strategies like promise neighborhoods neighborhood level interventions that saturate our kids with the services that offer them a better start in life strategies like choice neighborhoods which focuses on new ideas for housing by recognizing that different communities need different solutions and by the way we re also expanding the successful race to the top competition to improve our schools and raise the bar for all our students to local school districts that are committed to change that s what we re doing to bring jobs and opportunity to every corner of our cities and our economy focusing on what works and that s what all of you do each and every day you re not worried about ideology obviously all of you are elected so you think about politics but it s not in terms of scoring cheap political points you re going to be judged on whether you deliver the goods or not you focus on solving problems for people who trusted us with solving them and that s a commitment that all of us who serve should keep in mind as long as i m president i m committed to being your partner in that work we re going to keep on reaching out to you and listening to you and working with you towards our common goals and i want to start that right now by taking some of your questions but first i think all these cameras are going to move out so you can tell me the truth all right thank you dem bobama21 10 09a barack_obama hello new jersey it s good to be back in the garden state thank you thank you it s good to be here i want to make some quick thank yous here first of all to the president of this outstanding university dr michael adams to my dear friend caroline kennedy to our lieutenant governor candidate state senator loretta weinberg my dear friend frank lautenberg senator from new jersey two outstanding congressmen who supported me early in my race for the presidency steve rothman and john adler give them a big round of applause one of the finest mayors not just in new jersey but in the country cory booker is in the house to all the other elected officials to all the labor leaders and religious leaders that are in the house and to all of you who are just just leaders period i am so proud to be here on behalf of a man who is absolutely committed to fighting for new jersey s families and new jersey s future your governor my friend jon corzine now i think it s important for us to have an honest conversation here let s examine the facts let s examine the facts jon is running for reelection during a challenging time for new jersey and for america i don t have to tell you that you see it in your own lives you ve seen it in your own communities there are too many folks who are out of work and too many people who are looking for a job there are too many hardworking families being squeezed by skyrocketing costs on the one side and shrinking wages on the other you got men and women who ve worked hard all their lives who ve done the right thing all their lives and now they re worried they won t be able to be the kinds of husbands and wives mothers and fathers they d hoped to be because of economic factors beyond their control seniors worried about whether they can stay on retirement young people worried about whether they re going to be able to afford a college education so i know these are challenging times and jon knows these are challenging times i know folks are hurting but i also know this for the past four years you ve had an honorable man at the helm of this state during one of the most difficult periods in its history you ve had a leader who s put the interests of hardworking new jersey families ahead of the special interests you ve had a leader who s fought for what matters most to the people of new jersey that s the kind of jon the kind of governor that jon corzine has been that s the kind of governor that jon corzine will continue to be and that s why new jersey needs to give jon corzine another four years let s look at the record let s look at the record let s look at the record because i know there s a tendency for politicians to distort their opponents records in the heat of a campaign so let s just review some history this is a governor who s provided more property tax relief than any governor in new jersey s history this is the first governor in 60 years who s reduced the size of government but at the same time this is also a leader who s stood up against those who want to cut what matters like education jon corzine expanded early childhood education for more than 5 000 children because he understood that pre k isn t babysitting it s the cornerstone of a world class education under jon s leadership the children s health insurance program expanded by nearly 100 000 kids in this state think about it kids who didn t have care now have it new jersey is now a leader in clean energy and working families can spend time with a newborn baby or a sick loved one because of paid sick leave that has been signed into law by jon corzine when it comes to the issues that matter most to folks job creation and economic growth jon s been a true leader first governor in this country to pass a recovery plan to get this economy moving in his state now listening to jon s opponent you d think that new jersey was the only state in america that s been swept up in the worst economic crisis since the great depression which by the way did not start under jon corzine s party s watch there seems to be some selective memory here about how we got into this fix listening to his opponent you d think new jersey was the only state in america that s been facing layoffs you d think new jersey was the only state in america where hardworking men and women are worried about their family s futures i don t need to tell you you know the truth it s not just teaneck that s been going through tough times it s not new jersey that s been going through tough times americans in every corner of this country have been going through tough times and let s be honest this crisis came about because of the same sorts of lax regulation and trickle down economic theory that the other guy s party has been peddling for years i m telling you these folks they got a lot of nerve they leave this big mess and suddenly they re complaining about how fast we re cleaning it up and i ll tell you what we don t need to do right now we don t need politicians who are more interested in scoring points than solving problems we don t need politicians who are offering the same answers that got us into this mess in the first place we don t need politicians who d rather sit on the sidelines and point fingers than offer any answers any real solutions we ve had enough of those kinds of politicians in trenton and in washington we don t need any more what we need are leaders that are committed to moving this country forward moving this state forward that s the kind of leader jon corzine is that s why he deserves another four years four more years now let me say something about jon the man because we served together in the united states senate and i learned what kind of man he is i learned about his service as a united states marine semper fi i learned about how he was born into a middle class family how he worked his way up how he s committed to giving every american the same opportunities he had jon corzine was one of the best colleagues i had in the senate and he s one of the best partners i have in the white house jon and i worked jon and i worked together to enact a recovery act that s making a meaningful difference for families in new jersey and across america i want you to understand this because of the recovery act we ve prevented the police officers and firefighters americans rely on from being laid off across this state and across this country we ve put a middle class tax cut into the pockets of 95 percent of hardworking families that includes 3 million hardworking new jersey families we increased and extended unemployment insurance for 12 million americans to help them weather this economic storm including 600 000 men and women in this state we made cobra 65 percent cheaper so if you ve lost your job you ve still got your health care while you re looking for a new one we invested more than 12 000 in scholarships for disadvantaged students right here right here at this university while keeping teachers in the classroom and improving schools all across this state and the recovery act didn t just include the most progressive tax cuts in american history it didn t just include emergency relief for families that needed them or for states that were seeing their tax revenues dwindle the recovery act was also the largest investment in education in american history it was the largest investment in clean energy in american history it was the largest investment in our nation s infrastructure since eisenhower built the interway highway system back in the 1950s rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our crumbling infrastructure that s what we ve been fighting for cleaning up the mess we found the reason i m here today the reason jon corzine is here today the reason you are here today is because you know our work is far from over you know we still have big challenges ahead in new jersey and across america we are not going to rest until we solve them we re not going to rest until anyone who s looking for a job can find a job and a job that pays a living wage we re not going to rest until our markets are not just are markets are rising again but our businesses are hiring again we re not going to rest until the american dream is within reach for anybody who s willing to believe in it and work for it and fight for it and overcoming enormous challenges is not going to be easy it s not going to happen overnight but here s what i can say with absolute certainty the difficult work of building a better future it has begun it s beginning right here in new jersey it s begun in washington it s begun across america we ve begun to build a clean energy economy that is going to free our nation from the grips of foreign oil and generate green jobs in the process putting people back to work in jobs that can t be outsourced we ve begun to put better standards into our schools make college and advanced training more affordable and prepare every child in america to succeed in the 21st century economy we ve begun the work of reforming america s health care system you know why it why that s so important premiums have risen almost 90 percent here in new jersey over the last decade and that pace is only going to continue if we fail to act i love you back but i m making an important point right now we know but listen up we know that millions of people in this country have been denied coverage because of a preexisting condition we know that more and more companies are dropping coverage we know more and more families are having to do without insurance or they re struggling to pay out of pocket costs now jon corzine has begun to move new jersey past this status quo expanding coverage for nearly 150 000 people last year and we re close to moving america past the status quo closer to passing serious health insurance reform than at any time in our generation giving coverage to people who don t have it giving stability to people who do have it controlling skyrocketing health care costs that are crushing our families and our businesses and our state and federal budgets so that s what we re fighting for quality affordable insurance a world class education a stronger economy that doesn t just work for some folks but everybody that s what matters to jon corzine that s what he s fighting for as governor that s what he ll continue fighting for if the people of new jersey give him that chance so let me just let me just be clear i know there are folks here who may be cynical about politics certainly there are folks watching who might be cynical about politics i know that folks are skeptical about whether their elected leaders can or will do anything about the problems they face and you ve got a right to be cynical year after year decade after decade you ve seen progress stymied partisan gridlock whether it s in your state capitols or your nation s capitol but here s the thing new jersey now has a governor who s bucking that trend who s refusing to go along with business as usual he s telling the truth about the challenges you face and he s making every effort to meet them and i m here today to urge you to cast aside the cynics and the skeptics and prove to all americans that leaders who do what s right and who do what s hard will be rewarded and not rejected that s what so much of this campaign comes down to it s a matter of trust you know i have traveled all across the country and i ve traveled all across new jersey and everywhere i go people s expectations are pretty modest they don t want government to solve all their problems they know they ve got to work hard they ve got to meet their responsibilities their commitments all they re looking for is a shot they just want an opportunity they just want to be able to find a job that pays a living wage they want to be able to send their kids to college so they can have a better life than they did they want to make sure they re not bankrupt when they get sick they want to be able to retire with some dignity and some respect and the thing is what they want from their political leaders i think this is i hope what you want is not somebody who s slick is not somebody who you know always look well groomed i mean jon s hair kind of goes frizzy sometimes and you know his beard gets a little you know straggly sometimes it s not somebody who s going to pretend that everything is okay is going to spend all his time blaming other people i hope what you want is somebody who s going to be straight with you somebody who s got your interests at heart and who s going to be out there every single day working for you because he cares about public service and he understands that if it hadn t been for some folks fighting for him nobody he would have never gotten to where he got to right so i want everybody who s watching to understand jon corzine is a serious man and he is serious about solving the problems of new jersey and we are coming down to the home stretch in this election there s not a lot of time left and in the days ahead jon is going to be talking to a lot of voters he s going to be making a lot of speeches he s going to be visiting a lot of towns and cities but ultimately the outcome of this race is not up to jon it s up to you it s up to you it s up to everybody who cares about this state everybody who wants to build a better life for themselves and for their children and we are at one of those rare moments in history where we ve been given the opportunity to change our country for the better but it s never easy and it never starts in washington it starts with you when you elected me as president just remember nobody gave me a chance we never promised it was going to be easy but the excitement and the hope and the energy that came out of your belief that that gap between what is and what s possible that gap can be closed if everybody pulls together if everybody s serious if everybody is committed we need that same kind of energy excitement commitment around this campaign and if you do that if you do that i guarantee you re going to have jon corzine as governor and so i m going to close with a story that some of you may have heard i m going to close with a story that some of you may have heard because i want you to go out there and start knocking on some doors and making some phone calls i heard somebody out here saying fired up i don t know if you guys remember where that story fired up comes from jon corzine remembers but i love this story so i like telling it it started very early in my campaign when you guys couldn t pronounce my name no you couldn t you said who he s running for what so back early in that campaign i went down to south carolina an early state and i went to a legislative dinner i had been invited to speak it was very early and i needed some endorsements so i m sitting next to this state legislator i said ma am i d like you to endorse my candidacy for president she looked at me she said obama i will give you my endorsement if you come to my hometown of greenwood south carolina and i i must have had a glass of wine because right away i just said okay you got a date come to find out greenwood is an hour and a half from every place else so about a month later i come in i arrive about midnight i m exhausted i ve been campaigning in iowa new hampshire nonstop haven t seen my family i m feeling grumpy i get to the hotel i want to hit the bed suddenly i get a tap on the shoulder it s my staff person saying senator i was senator back then senator we need you in the car at 6 30 a m tomorrow morning i said what six thirty i said why said because you got to go to greenwood like you promised so the next morning i wake up and i feel terrible i m exhausted and i go to the window i open it up it s pouring down rain outside i go get some coffee i open up the newspaper there s a bad story about me in the new york times jon you know what that s like i go downstairs my umbrella blows open i get poured on i m soaked so by the time we re driving i m soaked i m tired i m sleepy i m mad and we re driving and driving and it takes forever finally we get to greenwood an hour and a half later although you don t know you re in greenwood right away because not a lot of buildings there we pull alongside the little park a little field house we go inside lo and behold there are only 20 people there 20 people so i m a professional i ve got a job to do i shake hands with everybody how do you do what do you do nice to meet you and suddenly out of the blue i hear this person shout out fired up and everybody in the room acts like this is normal they say fired up then i hear ready to go and everybody in the room suddenly says ready to go i don t know what s going on i look back there s a little lady little women she can t be more than 5 2 5 3 about middle aged she s dressed like she just came from church got a big church hat and she smiles at me and she points at me and she says fired up turns out this woman is a city councilwoman from greenwood who is famous for her chants she also by the way i find out later moonlights as a private detective it s a true story but wherever she goes she always likes to chant and so for the next it seemed like five minutes she would just say fired up and everybody would say fired up ready to go ready to go and i realized very quickly that i m being upstaged by this person it s irritating me a little bit i m looking at my staff they re shrugging their shoulders they don t know but here s the thing new jersey after about a minute i suddenly start feeling like i m fired up i feel like i m kind of ready to go so i start joining in the chant and for the rest of the day whenever i d see my staff i d say are you fired up they d say i m fired up you ready to go i m ready to go boss and this becomes the mantra of our campaign everywhere we go fired up here s the moral of this story one voice can change a room and if one voice can change a room it can change a city and if it can change a city it can change a state if it can change a state it can change a nation change a nation it can change the world it can change in new jersey right here your voice can change this election don t give up don t lose heart don t get impatient support the guy who s fighting for you your voice can change the world your voice can elect jon corzine governor once again of new jersey i need you jon needs you getting health care done depends on you getting energy done depends on you improving our schools depends on you so i ve just got one question for you are you fired up are you ready to go are you fired up are you ready to go are you fired up are you ready to go let s get jon corzine reelected god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama21 10 09b barack_obama thank you please everybody have a seat thank you so much thank you joe for that introduction and for inviting us here to metropolitan archives i want to acknowledge a few other extraordinary guests first of all the governor of the great state of maryland martin o malley is here senator ben cardin who is doing an outstanding job on behalf of the state house majority leader hoyer representative chris van hollen representative donna edwards whose congressional district we are in county executive jack johnson mayor william gardner the mayor of hyattsville and my outstanding secretary of the treasury tim geithner as well as my extraordinary sba administrator karen mills i am so glad to have them standing behind me today five years ago this company was founded by joe and his old fraternity brother doug peters i have not had a chance to ask them what they were doing during those frat years but they were two friends who had known each other since middle school and today their families took this company from an empty warehouse to a small business that stores and delivers records for some of the largest firms in the world and the success the story of their success has been the story of small business owners all across the country men and women from big cities and from small towns who ve had both a good idea and the drive to follow through on it who ve convinced family and friends to join them in taking a chance on a dream now these entrepreneurial pioneers embody that spirit of possibility and the tireless work ethic and the simple hope for something better that lies at the heart of the american ideal and they ve always formed the backbone of the american economy they re the ones who ve opened up the mom and pop stores and started the computer tinkering that s led to some of the biggest innovations and corporations in the world after all hewlett packard began in a garage google began as a research project mcdonald s started with just one restaurant over the past decade and a half america s small businesses have created 65 percent of all new jobs in the country and more than half of all americans working in the private sector are either employed by a small business or own one more than half these companies are the engine of job growth in america they fuel our prosperity and that s why they have to be at the forefront of our recovery the problem is our small businesses have been some of the hardest hit by this recession from the middle of 2007 through the end of 2008 small businesses lost 2 4 million jobs and because banks shrunk from lending in the midst of the financial crisis it s been difficult for entrepreneurs to take out the loans they need to start a business for those who do own a small business it s been difficult to finance inventories and make payroll or expand if things are going well and that s why we made sure the recovery act focused on helping small businesses expand and create jobs in it we temporarily reduced or eliminated fees on sba loans loans that give small businesses more money to reinvest in their own futures and we guaranteed some of these loans by up to 90 percent which has given local banks and credit unions the confidence they need to lend in the last eight months these steps have made a real difference for small businesses across america so far the recovery act has supported over 33 000 loans to small businesses that have already helped save or create nearly tens of thousands of jobs nearly 13 billion in new lending 13 billion and more than 1 200 banks and credit unions that had stopped issuing sba loans when the financial crisis hit are lending again today and more than 4 3 billion in federal contracts are now going to small businesses we re also providing tax relief to small businesses under the recovery act relief that will give these businesses back over 5 billion this year and we re giving tax cuts directly to 95 percent of working americans which includes the vast majority of small business owners and their employees so there s no question that our recovery act has given a boost to every american who works at a small business or owns one or aspires to own one there s no question that the steps we ve taken have improved the overall climate for small business across the country but there s also no question that we ve got a long way to go there s still too little credit flowing to our small businesses there s still too many entrepreneurs who can t get the loans they need to open up their doors and start hiring there s still too many who are struggling to make payroll and to stay open and there s still too many successful small businesses that want to expand further and hire more but just don t have the capital to do it metropolitan archives is one of these companies last february joe and doug were able to purchase the building we re standing in with an sba loan an expansion that has already helped them retain 10 jobs and one that will create 10 new ones in the months ahead in fact business is going so well that they re already hoping to expand again but they need another loan to make it happen these are the kind of stories i hear from small business owners all the time and they re the kind of stories that my unbelievable administrator for the sba karen mills hears every single day and that s why today we re announcing new steps to support more lending to america s small businesses steps that will lead to more jobs more growth and a stronger economic recovery the first thing we need to do is increase the maximum size of various sba loans so i m calling on congress to increase the cap on what s called 7 a loans to 5 million these are the loans most frequently handed out by the small business administration to help folks open their doors and buy machinery equipment land and buildings these larger loans will help more small business owners and franchisees grow we also need to increase the maximum size of what s called 504 loans to 5 million these are the type of loans that joe and doug used to expand this business and create new jobs and we should also increase the maximum size of microloans these are smaller loans that go to start ups and other smaller businesses today we re also taking additional steps to boost credit for small businesses through our financial stability plan the major banks that were in critical condition a year ago need no new assistance from the government and so we re winding down that portion of the tarp program but to spur lending to small businesses it s essential that we make more credit available to the smaller banks and community financial institutions that these businesses depend on these are the community banks who know their borrowers who gave them their first loan who ve watched them grow from down the street not from wall street the large majority of the business loans from these smaller banks are not to major corporations they re to entrepreneurs like joe and doug and when banks like these are hit by recession and financial crisis creditworthy small businesses lose out and that means less expansion and fewer new jobs just when we need them most and that s why we must do more to give these new opportunities to smaller banks so that they have the ability to access capital so that they can lend to small businesses in their communities so under the new steps that we re announcing today if these institutions put forth a plan to increase lending to small businesses we will help them get the credit they need to do it at rates that are more affordable than the ones offered to our largest financial institutions and we will make capital even more affordable to the community development financial institutions that focus on providing credit to america s small businesses in our hardest hit rural and underserved communities finally i ve asked tim geithner and karen mills to convene a conference in the coming weeks that will bring together regulators congressional leaders lenders and small businesses to determine what additional steps we can take to get credit flowing to small businesses that want to expand and create more jobs of all the steps we re taking to move this economy from recession to recovery i continue to believe that the success of our small businesses will be a foundation upon which our future prosperity is built so we will continue to do whatever we can to help these businesses grow and thrive and i m confident that the steps we announced today will do that for small business owners across the country men and women we hear from every day they re people like andy cabral son of portuguese immigrants andy started his business on an sba loan and now runs 10 stores across maryland and virginia that employ 130 people and andy has already seen one loan fall through the cracks because of the financial crisis and he s hit the cap on his sba loans but the measure we re announcing today will help andy and other franchisees pursue their plans to expand and create more jobs and these steps will make a difference for more small businesses like pete s apizza in washington d c i recommend it that everybody go out there when the three owners had little more than a dream of opening up a casual pizza restaurant they found it challenging to get financing ultimately they got a loan through city first bank a community development bank right in washington today business is booming and the initiative we re announcing today will help more banks provide more loans to businesses like pete s and the steps we ve announced will make a difference for joe and doug and all the folks who work here at metropolitan archives in the past five years you ve done all that s asked of americans who hope to pursue a dream of owning their own business you ve taken a risk on a good idea you ve worked hard for your success you ve met your responsibilities to your employees and your customers it s time that responsibility and that success are rewarded with the opportunity to keep growing keep hiring keep contributing to the success of your community and of your country that s the opportunity we re providing today and that s the opportunity i will continue to fight for as your president in the weeks and months ahead so to all the small business owners out there i just want to close by saying this i know that times are tough and i can only imagine what many of you are going through in terms of keeping things going in the midst of a very tough economic climate but i guarantee you this this administration is going to stand behind small businesses you are our highest priority because we are confident that when you are succeeding america succeeds thank you very much everybody dem bobama21 4 09 barack_obama thank you please be seated thank you well what an extraordinary day it is good to be here with all of you i want to first of all thank president bill clinton for joining us here today where s president clinton for his lifetime of service to our country but also the fact that he created americorps and that not only made this day possible it has directly enlisted more than half a million americans in service to their country service that has touched the lives of millions more now it just so happens that one of those people who have been touched by americorps was flotus otherwise known as first lady of the united states michelle obama who ran a americorps sponsored program public allies in chicago i also want to thank former first lady rosalynn carter for being here for her advocacy on behalf of those with mental illness and for her husband s continued good works that inspire us all i am thrilled to have caroline kennedy here for carrying on her family s long legacy of service to my congressional colleagues who did such a fantastic job on a bipartisan basis ushering this through starting with the two leaders of the house and the senate nancy pelosi and harry reid i m grateful to them and obviously to barbara mikulski and orrin hatch george miller the entire delegation who helped to shepherd this through please give them a huge round of applause to my outstanding vice president joe biden to dr jill biden a couple of outstanding public servants in their own right please a warm welcome for general colin powell and his wonderful wife alma for the outstanding mayor of new york city michael bloomberg and i ve got to give some special props to my fellow illinoisan a great friend dick durbin finally and i know that i ve got some prepared remarks but i just want to go ahead and say it now there are very few people who have touched the life of this nation in the same breadth and the same order of magnitude than the person who is seated right behind me and so this is just an extraordinary day for him and i am truly grateful and honored to call him a friend a colleague and one of the finest leaders we ve ever had ted kennedy all right i want to thank the students and the faculty of the seed school our hosts for today and their headmaster charles adams where s mr adams is he here a shining example of how americorps alums go on to do great things this school is a true success story a place where for four of the last five years every graduate from the seed school was admitted to college every graduate it s a place where service is a core component of the curriculum and just as the seed school teaches reading and writing arithmetic and athletics it also prepares our young americans to grow into active and engaged citizens and what these students come to discover through service is that by befriending a senior citizen or helping the homeless or easing the suffering of others they can find a sense of purpose and renew their commitment to this country that we love and that is the spirit in which we gather today as i sign into law a bill that represents the boldest expansion of opportunities to serve our communities and our country since the creation of americorps a piece of legislation named for a man who has not only touched countless lives but who still sails against the wind a man who s never stopped asking what he can do for his country and that s senator edward m kennedy in my address to a joint session of congress in february i asked for swift passage of this legislation and these folks on the stage came through so again i want to thank wide bipartisan majorities in the house and the senate who came together to pass this bill especially barbara mikulski mike enzi chris dodd john mccain who s not here thad cochran as well as on the house side representatives miller and carolyn mccarthy buck mckeon and howard berman more than anyone else the new era of service we enter in today has been made possible by the unlikely friendship between these two men orrin hatch and ted kennedy they may be the odd couple of the senate one is a conservative republican from utah the other is well ted kennedy but time and again they placed partnership over partisanship to advance this nation even in times when we were told that wasn t possible senator hatch was shaped by his experience as a young missionary serving others a period he has called the greatest of his life and last year he approached senator kennedy to share his ideas about service out of that conversation came this legislation and last month at senator hatch s selfless request the senate unanimously chose to name this bill after his dear friend ted that s the kind of class act that orrin hatch is now ted s story and the story of his family is known to all it s a story of service and it s also the story of america of hard work and sacrifice of generation after generation some called upon to give more than others but each committed to the idea that we can make tomorrow better than today i wouldn t be standing here today if not for the service of others or for the purpose that service gave my own life i ve told this story before when i moved to chicago more than two decades ago to become a community organizer i wasn t sure what was waiting for me there but i had always been inspired by the stories of the civil rights movement and president kennedy s call to service and i knew i wanted to do my part to advance the cause of justice and equality and it wasn t easy but eventually over time working with leaders from all across these communities we began to make a difference in neighborhoods that had been devastated by steel plants that had closed down and jobs that had dried up we began to see a real impact in people s lives and i came to realize i wasn t just helping people i was receiving something in return because through service i found a community that embraced me citizenship that was meaningful the direction that i had been seeking i discovered how my own improbable story fit into the larger story of america it s the same spirit of service i ve seen across this country i ve met countless people of all ages and walks of life who want nothing more than to do their part i ve seen a rising generation of young people work and volunteer and turn out in record numbers they re a generation that came of age amidst the horrors of 9 11 and katrina the wars in iraq and afghanistan an economic crisis without precedent and yet despite all this or more likely because of it they ve become a generation of activists possessed with that most american of ideas that people who love their country can change it they re why the peace corps had three applications for every position available last year why 35 000 young people applied for only 4 000 slots in teach for america why americorps has seen a 400 percent increase in applications in just the past four months and yet even as so many want to serve even as so many are struggling our economic crisis has forced our charities and non for profits to cut back what this legislation does then is to help harness this patriotism and connect deeds to needs it creates opportunities to serve for students seniors and everyone in between it supports innovation and strengthens the nonprofit sector and it is just the beginning of a sustained collaborative and focused effort to involve our greatest resource our citizens in the work of remaking this nation we re doing this because i ve always believed that the answers to our challenges cannot come from government alone our government can help to rebuild our economy and lift up our schools and reform health care systems and make sure our soldiers and veterans have everything they need but we need americans willing to mentor our eager young children or care for the sick or ease the strains of deployment on our military families that s why this bill will expand americorps from 75 000 slots today to 250 000 in less than a decade and it s not just for freshly minted college grads as i said my wife michelle left her job at a law firm to be the founding director of an americorps program in chicago that trains young people for careers in public service and michelle can tell you the transformation that occurred in her life as a consequence of being able to follow her passions follow her dreams programs like these are a force multiplier they leverage small numbers of members into thousands of volunteers and we will focus their service toward solving today s most pressing challenges clean energy energy efficiency health care education economic opportunity veterans and military families we ll invest in ideas that help us meet our common challenges no matter where those ideas come from all across america there are ideas that could benefit millions of americans if only they were given a chance to take root and to grow ideas like the one that eric adler and raj vinnakota had that led to this school and expanded its model to others that s why this bill includes a new social innovation fund that will bring nonprofits and foundations and faith based organizations and the private sector to the table with government so that we can learn from one another s success stories we ll invest in ideas that work leverage private sector dollars to encourage innovation expand successful programs to scale and make them work in cities across america because we must prepare our young americans to grow into active citizens this bill makes new investments in service learning and we ve increased the americorps education award and linked it to pell grant award levels another step toward our goal of ensuring that every american receives an affordable college education because millions of americans are out of school and out of work it creates an energy corps that will help people find useful work and gain skills in a growing industry of the future because our boomers are the most highly educated generation in history and our seniors live longer and more active lives than ever before this bill offers new pathways to harness their talent and experience to serve others and because this historic expansion of the corporation for national and community service requires someone with both bold vision and responsible management experience i have chosen mary eitel where s mary there she is stand up mary as its new ceo the founder and first president of the nike foundation maria is a smart and innovative thinker and a leader who shares my belief in the power of service and i also wanted to thank the acting ceo nicky goren where s nicky for guiding the corporation through this transition a week from tomorrow marks the 100th day of my administration in those next eight days i ask every american to make an enduring commitment to serving your community and your country in whatever way you can visit whitehouse gov to share your stories of service and success and together we will measure our progress not just in the number of hours served or volunteers mobilized but in the impact our efforts have on the life of this nation we re getting started right away this afternoon i ll be joined by president clinton and michelle and joe biden and dr biden to plant trees in a park not far from here it s as simple as that all that s required on your part is a willingness to make a difference and that is after all the beauty of service anybody can do it you don t need to be a community organizer or a senator or a kennedy or even a president to bring change to people s lives when ted kennedy makes this point he also tells a story as elegantly simple as it is profound an old man walking along a beach at dawn saw a young man pick up a starfish and throwing them out to sea why are you doing that the old man inquired the young man explained that the starfish had been stranded on the beach by a receding tide and would soon die in the daytime sun but the beach goes on for miles the old man said and there are so many how can your effort make any difference the young man looked at the starfish in his hand and without hesitating threw it to safety in the sea he looked up at the old man smiled and said it will make a difference to that one to ted that s more than just a story for even in the midst of his epic fights on the floor of the senate to enact sweeping change he s made a quiet trek to a school not far from the capitol week after week year after year without cameras or fanfare to sit down and read with one solitary child ted kennedy is that young man who will not rest until we ve made a difference in the life of every american he walks down that beach and he keeps on picking up starfish tossing them into the sea and as i sign this legislation i want all americans to take up that spirit of the man for whom this bill is named of a president who sent us to the moon of a dreamer who always asked why not of a younger generation that carries the torch of a single family that has made an immeasurable difference in the lives of countless families we need your service right now at this moment in history i m not going to tell you what your role should be that s for you to discover but i m asking you to stand up and play your part i m asking you to help change history s course put your shoulder up against the wheel and if i if you do i promise you your life will be richer our country will be stronger and someday years from now you may remember it as the moment when your own story and the american story converged when they came together and we met the challenges of our new century thank you very much everybody i m going to sign this bill dem bobama21 5 09a barack_obama good morning everybody please be seated thank you all for being here let me just acknowledge the presence of some of my outstanding cabinet members and advisors we ve got our secretary of state hillary clinton we have our cia director leon panetta we have our secretary of defense william gates secretary napolitano of department of homeland security attorney general eric holder my national security advisor jim jones and i want to especially thank our acting archivist of the united states adrienne thomas i also want to acknowledge several members of the house who have great interest in intelligence matters i want to thank congressman reyes congressman hoekstra congressman king as well as congressman thompson for being here today thank you so much these are extraordinary times for our country we re confronting a historic economic crisis we re fighting two wars we face a range of challenges that will define the way that americans will live in the 21st century so there s no shortage of work to be done or responsibilities to bear and we ve begun to make progress just this week we ve taken steps to protect american consumers and homeowners and to reform our system of government contracting so that we better protect our people while spending our money more wisely the it s a good bill the engines of our economy are slowly beginning to turn and we re working towards historic reform on health care and on energy i want to say to the members of congress i welcome all the extraordinary work that has been done over these last four months on these and other issues in the midst of all these challenges however my single most important responsibility as president is to keep the american people safe it s the first thing that i think about when i wake up in the morning it s the last thing that i think about when i go to sleep at night and this responsibility is only magnified in an era when an extremist ideology threatens our people and technology gives a handful of terrorists the potential to do us great harm we are less than eight years removed from the deadliest attack on american soil in our history we know that al qaeda is actively planning to attack us again we know that this threat will be with us for a long time and that we must use all elements of our power to defeat it already we ve taken several steps to achieve that goal for the first time since 2002 we re providing the necessary resources and strategic direction to take the fight to the extremists who attacked us on 9 11 in afghanistan and pakistan we re investing in the 21st century military and intelligence capabilities that will allow us to stay one step ahead of a nimble enemy we have re energized a global non proliferation regime to deny the world s most dangerous people access to the world s deadliest weapons and we ve launched an effort to secure all loose nuclear materials within four years we re better protecting our border and increasing our preparedness for any future attack or natural disaster we re building new partnerships around the world to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda and its affiliates and we have renewed american diplomacy so that we once again have the strength and standing to truly lead the world these steps are all critical to keeping america secure but i believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values the documents that we hold in this very hall the declaration of independence the constitution the bill of rights these are not simply words written into aging parchment they are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country and a light that shines for all who seek freedom fairness equality and dignity around the world i stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents my father came to these shores in search of the promise that they offered my mother made me rise before dawn to learn their truths when i lived as a child in a foreign land my own american journey was paved by generations of citizens who gave meaning to those simple words to form a more perfect union i ve studied the constitution as a student i ve taught it as a teacher i ve been bound by it as a lawyer and a legislator i took an oath to preserve protect and defend the constitution as commander in chief and as a citizen i know that we must never ever turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake i make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism we uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe time and again our values have been our best national security asset in war and peace in times of ease and in eras of upheaval fidelity to our values is the reason why the united states of america grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world it s the reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle knowing they d receive better treatment from america s armed forces than from their own government it s the reason why america has benefitted from strong alliances that amplified our power and drawn a sharp moral contrast with our adversaries it s the reason why we ve been able to overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism and enlist free nations and free peoples everywhere in the common cause and common effort of liberty from europe to the pacific we ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law that is who we are and where terrorists offer only the injustice of disorder and destruction america must demonstrate that our values and our institutions are more resilient than a hateful ideology after 9 11 we knew that we had entered a new era that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to our application of the law that our government would need new tools to protect the american people and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out unfortunately faced with an uncertain threat our government made a series of hasty decisions i believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the american people but i also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions instead of strategically applying our power and our principles too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford and during this season of fear too many of us democrats and republicans politicians journalists and citizens fell silent in other words we went off course and this is not my assessment alone it was an assessment that was shared by the american people who nominated candidates for president from both major parties who despite our many differences called for a new approach one that rejected torture and one that recognized the imperative of closing the prison at guantanamo bay now let me be clear we are indeed at war with al qaeda and its affiliates we do need to update our institutions to deal with this threat but we must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process in checks and balances and accountability for reasons that i will explain the decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time tested institutions and that failed to use our values as a compass and that s why i took several steps upon taking office to better protect the american people first i banned the use of so called enhanced interrogation techniques by the united states of america i know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe i could not disagree more as commander in chief i see the intelligence i bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe and i categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation what s more they undermine the rule of law they alienate us in the world they serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists and increase the will of our enemies to fight us while decreasing the will of others to work with america they risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle and more likely that americans will be mistreated if they are captured in short they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts they undermined them and that is why i ended them once and for all now i should add the arguments against these techniques did not originate from my administration as senator mccain once said torture serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us and even under president bush there was recognition among members of his own administration including a secretary of state other senior officials and many in the military and intelligence community that those who argued for these tactics were on the wrong side of the debate and the wrong side of history that s why we must leave these methods where they belong in the past they are not who we are and they are not america the second decision that i made was to order the closing of the prison camp at guantanamo bay for over seven years we have detained hundreds of people at guantanamo during that time the system of military commissions that were in place at guantanamo succeeded in convicting a grand total of three suspected terrorists let me repeat that three convictions in over seven years instead of bringing terrorists to justice efforts at prosecution met setback after setback cases lingered on and in 2006 the supreme court invalidated the entire system meanwhile over 525 detainees were released from guantanamo under not my administration under the previous administration let me repeat that two thirds of the detainees were released before i took office and ordered the closure of guantanamo there is also no question that guantanamo set back the moral authority that is america s strongest currency in the world instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law in fact part of the rationale for establishing guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law a proposition that the supreme court soundly rejected meanwhile instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism guantanamo became a symbol that helped al qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause indeed the existence of guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained so the record is clear rather than keeping us safer the prison at guantanamo has weakened american national security it is a rallying cry for our enemies it sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries by any measure the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it that s why i argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign and that is why i ordered it closed within one year the third decision that i made was to order a review of all pending cases at guantanamo i knew when i ordered guantanamo closed that it would be difficult and complex there are 240 people there who have now spent years in legal limbo in dealing with this situation we don t have the luxury of starting from scratch we re cleaning up something that is quite simply a mess a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant almost daily basis and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country indeed the legal challenges that have sparked so much debate in recent weeks here in washington would be taking place whether or not i decided to close guantanamo for example the court order to release 17 uighurs 17 uighur detainees took place last fall when george bush was president the supreme court that invalidated the system of prosecution at guantanamo in 2006 was overwhelmingly appointed by republican presidents not wild eyed liberals in other words the problem of what to do with guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility the problem exists because of the decision to open guantanamo in the first place now let me be blunt there are no neat or easy answers here i wish there were but i can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo as president i refuse to allow this problem to fester i refuse to pass it on to somebody else it is my responsibility to solve the problem our security interests will not permit us to delay our courts won t allow it and neither should our conscience now over the last several weeks we ve seen a return of the politicization of these issues that have characterized the last several years i m an elected official i understand these problems arouse passions and concerns they should we re confronting some of the most complicated questions that a democracy can face but i have no interest in spending all of our time relitigating the policies of the last eight years i ll leave that to others i want to solve these problems and i want to solve them together as americans and we will be ill served by some of the fear mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue listening to the recent debate i ve heard words that frankly are calculated to scare people rather than educate them words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country so i want to take this opportunity to lay out what we are doing and how we intend to resolve these outstanding issues i will explain how each action that we are taking will help build a framework that protects both the american people and the values that we hold most dear and i ll focus on two broad areas first issues relating to guantanamo and our detention policy but second i also want to discuss issues relating to security and transparency now let me begin by disposing of one argument as plainly as i can we are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security nor will we release detainees within the united states who endanger the american people where demanded by justice and national security we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders namely highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety as we make these decisions bear in mind the following face nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal supermax prisons which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists as republican lindsey graham said the idea that we cannot find a place to securely house 250 plus detainees within the united states is not rational we are currently in the process of reviewing each of the detainee cases at guantanamo to determine the appropriate policy for dealing with them and as we do so we are acutely aware that under the last administration detainees were released and in some cases returned to the battlefield that s why we are doing away with the poorly planned haphazard approach that let those detainees go in the past instead we are treating these cases with the care and attention that the law requires and that our security demands now going forward these cases will fall into five distinct categories first whenever feasible we will try those who have violated american criminal laws in federal courts courts provided for by the united states constitution some have derided our federal courts as incapable of handling the trials of terrorists they are wrong our courts and our juries our citizens are tough enough to convict terrorists the record makes that clear ramzi yousef tried to blow up the world trade center he was convicted in our courts and is serving a life sentence in u s prisons zacarias moussaoui has been identified as the 20th 9 11 hijacker he was convicted in our courts and he too is serving a life sentence in prison if we can try those terrorists in our courts and hold them in our prisons then we can do the same with detainees from guantanamo recently we prosecuted and received a guilty plea from a detainee al marri in federal court after years of legal confusion we re preparing to transfer another detainee to the southern district court of new york where he will face trial on charges related to the 1998 bombings of our embassies in kenya and tanzania bombings that killed over 200 people preventing this detainee from coming to our shores would prevent his trial and conviction and after over a decade it is time to finally see that justice is served and that is what we intend to do the second category of cases involves detainees who violate the laws of war and are therefore best tried through military commissions military commissions have a history in the united states dating back to george washington and the revolutionary war they are an appropriate venue for trying detainees for violations of the laws of war they allow for the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence gathering they allow for the safety and security of participants and for the presentation of evidence gathered from the battlefield that cannot always be effectively presented in federal courts now some have suggested that this represents a reversal on my part they should look at the record in 2006 i did strongly oppose legislation proposed by the bush administration and passed by the congress because it failed to establish a legitimate legal framework with the kind of meaningful due process rights for the accused that could stand up on appeal i said at that time however that i supported the use of military commissions to try detainees provided there were several reforms and in fact there were some bipartisan efforts to achieve those reforms those are the reforms that we are now making instead of using the flawed commissions of the last seven years my administration is bringing our commissions in line with the rule of law we will no longer permit the use of evidence as evidence statements that have been obtained using cruel inhuman or degrading interrogation methods we will no longer place the burden to prove that hearsay is unreliable on the opponent of the hearsay and we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel and more protections if they refuse to testify these reforms among others will make our military commissions a more credible and effective means of administering justice and i will work with congress and members of both parties as well as legal authorities across the political spectrum on legislation to ensure that these commissions are fair legitimate and effective the third category of detainees includes those who have been ordered released by the courts now let me repeat what i said earlier this has nothing to do with my decision to close guantanamo it has to do with the rule of law the courts have spoken they have found that there s no legitimate reason to hold 21 of the people currently held at guantanamo nineteen of these findings took place before i was sworn into office i cannot ignore these rulings because as president i too am bound by the law the united states is a nation of laws and so we must abide by these rulings the fourth category of cases involves detainees who we have determined can be transferred safely to another country so far our review team has approved 50 detainees for transfer and my administration is in ongoing discussions with a number of other countries about the transfer of detainees to their soil for detention and rehabilitation now finally there remains the question of detainees at guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the american people and i have to be honest here this is the toughest single issue that we will face we re going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at guantanamo who pose a danger to our country but even when this process is complete there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes in some cases because evidence may be tainted but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the united states examples of that threat include people who ve received extensive explosives training at al qaeda training camps or commanded taliban troops in battle or expressed their allegiance to osama bin laden or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill americans these are people who in effect remain at war with the united states let me repeat i am not going to release individuals who endanger the american people al qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the united states and those that we capture like other prisoners of war must be prevented from attacking us again having said that we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded they can t be based simply on what i or the executive branch decide alone that s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law we must have clear defensible and lawful standards for those who fall into this category we must have fair procedures so that we don t make mistakes we must have a thorough process of periodic review so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified i know that creating such a system poses unique challenges and other countries have grappled with this question now so must we but i want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework in our constitutional system prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man if and when we determine that the united states must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight and so going forward my administration will work with congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our constitution now as our efforts to close guantanamo move forward i know that the politics in congress will be difficult these are issues that are fodder for 30 second commercials you can almost picture the direct mail pieces that emerge from any vote on this issue designed to frighten the population i get it but if we continue to make decisions within a climate of fear we will make more mistakes and if we refuse to deal with these issues today then i guarantee you that they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat terrorism in the future i have confidence that the american people are more interested in doing what is right to protect this country than in political posturing i am not the only person in this city who swore an oath to uphold the constitution so did each and every member of congress and together we have a responsibility to enlist our values in the effort to secure our people and to leave behind the legacy that makes it easier for future presidents to keep this country safe now let me touch on a second set of issues that relate to security and transparency national security requires a delicate balance one the one hand our democracy depends on transparency on the other hand some information must be protected from public disclosure for the sake of our security for instance the movement of our troops our intelligence gathering or the information we have about a terrorist organization and its affiliates in these and other cases lives are at stake now several weeks ago as part of an ongoing court case i released memos issued by the previous administration s office of legal counsel i did not do this because i disagreed with the enhanced interrogation techniques that those memos authorized and i didn t release the documents because i rejected their legal rationales although i do on both counts i released the memos because the existence of that approach to interrogation was already widely known the bush administration had acknowledged its existence and i had already banned those methods the argument that somehow by releasing those memos we are providing terrorists with information about how they will be interrogated makes no sense we will not be interrogating terrorists using that approach that approach is now prohibited in short i released these memos because there was no overriding reason to protect them and the ensuing debate has helped the american people better understand how these interrogation methods came to be authorized and used on the other hand i recently opposed the release of certain photographs that were taken of detainees by u s personnel between 2002 and 2004 individuals who violated standards of behavior in these photos have been investigated and they have been held accountable there was and is no debate as to whether what is reflected in those photos is wrong nothing has been concealed to absolve perpetrators of crimes however it was my judgment informed by my national security team that releasing these photos would inflame anti american opinion and allow our enemies to paint u s troops with a broad damning and inaccurate brush thereby endangering them in theaters of war in short there is a clear and compelling reason to not release these particular photos there are nearly 200 000 americans who are serving in harm s way and i have a solemn responsibility for their safety as commander in chief nothing would be gained by the release of these photos that matters more than the lives of our young men and women serving in harm s way now in the press s mind and in some of the public s mind these two cases are contradictory they are not to me in each of these cases i had to strike the right balance between transparency and national security and this balance brings with it a precious responsibility there s no doubt that the american people have seen this balance tested over the last several years in the images from abu ghraib and the brutal interrogation techniques made public long before i was president the american people learned of actions taken in their name that bear no resemblance to the ideals that generations of americans have fought for and whether it was the run up to the iraq war or the revelation of secret programs americans often felt like part of the story had been unnecessarily withheld from them and that caused suspicion to build up and that leads to a thirst for accountability i understand that i ran for president promising transparency and i meant what i said and that s why whenever possible my administration will make all information available to the american people so that they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable but i have never argued and i never will that our most sensitive national security matters should simply be an open book i will never abandon and will vigorously defend the necessity of classification to defend our troops at war to protect sources and methods and to safeguard confidential actions that keep the american people safe here s the difference though whenever we cannot release certain information to the public for valid national security reasons i will insist that there is oversight of my actions by congress or by the courts we re currently launching a review of current policies by all those agencies responsible for the classification of documents to determine where reforms are possible and to assure that the other branches of government will be in a position to review executive branch decisions on these matters because in our system of checks and balances someone must always watch over the watchers especially when it comes to sensitive administration information now along these same lines my administration is also confronting challenges to what is known as the state secrets privilege this is a doctrine that allows the government to challenge legal cases involving secret programs it s been used by many past presidents republican and democrat for many decades and while this principle is absolutely necessary in some circumstances to protect national security i am concerned that it has been over used it is also currently the subject of a wide range of lawsuits so let me lay out some principles here we must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government and that s why my administration is nearing completion of a thorough review of this practice and we plan to embrace several principles for reform we will apply a stricter legal test to material that can be protected under the state secrets privilege we will not assert the privilege in court without first following our own formal process including review by a justice department committee and the personal approval of the attorney general and each year we will voluntarily report to congress when we have invoked the privilege and why because as i said before there must be proper oversight over our actions on all these matters related to the disclosure of sensitive information i wish i could say that there was some simple formula out there to be had there is not these often involve tough calls involve competing concerns and they require a surgical approach but the common thread that runs through all of my decisions is simple we will safeguard what we must to protect the american people but we will also ensure the accountability and oversight that is the hallmark of our constitutional system i will never hide the truth because it s uncomfortable i will deal with congress and the courts as co equal branches of government i will tell the american people what i know and don t know and when i release something publicly or keep something secret i will tell you why now in all the areas that i ve discussed today the policies that i ve proposed represent a new direction from the last eight years to protect the american people and our values we ve banned enhanced interrogation techniques we are closing the prison at guantanamo we are reforming military commissions and we will pursue a new legal regime to detain terrorists we are declassifying more information and embracing more oversight of our actions and we re narrowing our use of the state secrets privilege these are dramatic changes that will put our approach to national security on a surer safer and more sustainable footing their implementation will take time but they will get done there s a core principle that we will apply to all of our actions even as we clean up the mess at guantanamo we will constantly reevaluate our approach subject our decisions to review from other branches of government as well as the public we seek the strongest and most sustainable legal framework for addressing these issues in the long term not to serve immediate politics but to do what s right over the long term by doing that we can leave behind a legacy that outlasts my administr dem bobama21 5 09b barack_obama hello everybody i first of all want to just acknowledge a few people that are here first of all some of my cabinet members secretary of agriculture tom vilsack who grew up as a maniacal pittsburgh steeler fan he is here secretary of veterans of the veterans administration eric shinseki a war hero and somebody that is doing an outstanding job on behalf of our veterans we have the chairman of the joint chiefs admiral mullen mike mullen as well as his lovely wife are here please give them a big round of applause we ve got some pennsylvania folks around here senator bob casey senator arlen specter teresa heinz kerry representatives tim murphy mike doyle glenn thompson tom rooney and charlie wilson give them all a big round of applause welcome to the white house everybody before we begin i want to offer a special welcome to the wounded warriors who have joined us today from walter reed and from the national naval medical center in bethesda thank you for your service and welcome back dan rooney and the entire rooney family for nearly five decades dan has been a tremendous ambassador for pro football and for the city of pittsburgh and in the years to come all americans will be fortunate to have his service as our united states ambassador to ireland just a personal note i had occasion of meeting a lot of people during the course of my campaign for the presidency i can tell you that i don t know anybody who is more of a gentleman who is more loyal who is more committed to excellence than mr rooney and he and his family have just been such an extraordinary pillar for the city of pittsburgh i d like everybody to give them a big round of applause one more time and he s humble this kind of attention embarrasses him but he has no choice congratulations to the super bowl champion pittsburgh steelers for the nfl record sixth lombardi trophy some are calling it sixburgh these days congratulations to all the fans of the steeler nation who wave that terrible towel every sunday now i already told these guys no matter how big they are i am a bears fan but it s no secret that i was pulling for the steelers during the super bowl last year and that s part of the reason why this is so much fun for me this isn t me trying to have it both ways everybody knows i m pretty serious about my sports teams but growing up in hawaii when i was a kid we didn t have a local football team and when i started playing and i started paying attention to football it was guys like terry bradshaw and franco harris and the steel curtain and mean joe greene who is here where s mean joe there he is right there those were the guys that were playing and so i became a steelers fan and last march i actually got to hang out with franco and the bus jerome bettiss at an event in pittsburgh and jerome even joined me when we went to meet some steelworkers on a shift change and i got my own terrible towel but this is a new team for a new era and that s embodied by coach tomlin who s here with his lovely wife and i want everybody to give coach tomlin a huge round of applause he didn t just win the super bowl he also happened to be nfl coach of the year the youngest coach ever to win a super bowl and there s the new steel curtain the nfl s best defense last year thanks to dick lebeau who i think everybody acknowledges is one of the greatest defensive coordinators of all time where s dick there he is over there we ve got the team captains up here big ben roethlisberger give him come on give big ben a round of applause here james farrior a pro bowler who made 133 tackles this season jeff reed who was clutch in the super bowl hines ward who was the super bowl mvp four years ago who s always the happiest man in football hines is always happy and we ve got this year s super bowl mvp santonio holmes who made one of the greatest touchdown catches i ve ever seen that means two of the last four super bowl mvps hail from the pittsburgh wide receiving corps now i pointed out that that was a heck of a pass that ben threw but then one of linemen pointed out that was some blocking on that play so that just reminds you that s what steeler football is all about it s a team effort and this is a team that entered the season facing the most difficult schedule in the league but guys like these thrive on that they plowed through the regular season they won every game in the afc north they took down the chargers and the ravens in the playoffs and i can t remember a more exciting super bowl arizona took the lead with three minutes left pittsburgh comes back with just two with that winning touchdown santonio had 73 of those yards on that drive including the incredible game winning touchdown catch and now they re champs so obviously these are guys who take their responsibilities on the football field seriously but they take them just as seriously off the field they re generous with their time for charity and for their communities so that explains why we re doing something a little bit different here today than when sports champions usually come to visit the white house these guys have agreed to stick around for a while and we re going to team them up not to run some plays but to serve others i often say that the beauty of serving others is that anyone can do it you don t have to be president and you don t have to be a pro football player all you need to do is to have a desire to make a difference to give back to your community and to contribute to your nation and that s what we re going to do right here we re going to work with the uso to put together 3 000 care packages for our troops serving in harm s way we re going to give back to those who ve given so much for us and i find that fitting and proper a good way to kick off a weekend that serves to honor all the men and women who have worn the proud uniform of this country that we love so congratulations again steelers for a extraordinary season good luck next year and thank you again for your willingness to go above and beyond and not just come here for a photo op but to join the men and women who protect this country to make sure that we are safe thank you very much everybody god bless you thank you all right now i also want to give notice i told coach i m going to take off my jacket while we re putting this thing here so he s allowed to too he s showing no disrespect to the white house dem bobama21 5 10 barack_obama good morning everybody good morning everybody please have a seat it is wonderful to have you all here welcome to the white house i want to introduce some of the folks who are onstage who have been integral in making today possible you ve already heard about the wonderful team here at the white house carol browner ray lahood and lisa jackson but in addition we have onstage a number of people who were absolutely critical martin daum the ceo of daimler trucks mr anthony dunkley who is a driver for waste management mr g tommy hodges chairman of the board american trucking association mr alan reuther legislative director for the uaw mr dennis slagle ceo of volvo mr tim solso ceo of cummins and mr daniel ustian ceo of navistar please give them a big round of applause we also have with us some legislative leaders who have been champions of not only the auto industry but also the environmental movement and i want to thank them for being here one of the deans of the house of representatives representative john dingell please give him a big round of applause representative ed markey is here from massachusetts representative chris van hollen is here and representative henry waxman now it was one year ago today that i stood here in the rose garden on a similarly beautiful day with some of the same folks to announce a historic agreement to help break america s dependence on oil to protect the planet that we ll leave to our children and to spur jobs and growth in the industries of the future it was an agreement the first of its kind to raise the fuel efficiency and reduce the greenhouse pollution for cars and light trucks sold in the united states of america a lot of people thought such an agreement was impossible after all for decades we had made little headway in improving the fuel efficiency of our cars we d hear a lot of urgent talk in washington when oil prices went up then we d see politicians rush to the local gas stations i remember going to gas stations holding press conferences announcing new legislation but the impetus for action would fade when gas prices started to go back down meanwhile progress was mired in a lot of old arguments traded across entrenched political divides left versus right management versus labor business leaders versus environmental advocates but what we showed here one year ago today is that we could do something different we proved that these were false choices we brought together all the stakeholders including former adversaries to support a policy that would benefit consumers workers and the auto industry while strengthening the economy and protecting the planet one year later we re beginning to see the results instead of fighting higher standards auto manufacturers are engaged in a race to meet them and over the next five years we expect fuel efficiency standards in cars and light trucks to reach an average of 35 5 miles per gallon as a result everybody wins the typical driver will save roughly 3 000 over the life of the vehicle we ll reduce our dependence on oil by 1 8 billion barrels and cut nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions this is the equivalent of taking 50 million cars off the road lowering pollution while making our economy more secure and by setting a single standard in place rather than a tangle of overlapping and uncertain rules auto companies will have the clear incentive to develop more efficient vehicles this in turn will foster innovation and growth in a host of new industries so that s what we set in motion one year ago and today we re going even further proposing the development of a national standard for medium and heavy duty trucks just as we did for cars and light trucks in a few moments i m going to sign a presidential memorandum coordinated by my chief energy advisor carol browner it directs my administration under the leadership of transportation secretary ray lahood and epa administrator lisa jackson to develop a standard to improve fuel efficiency and reduce harmful emissions for trucks starting with the model year 2014 this is the first time we ll have such a standard and as a sign of the broad support behind this plan we are joined by the representatives from more than a dozen car and truck manufacturers as well as fleet operators auto workers labor leaders environmental groups and officials from california and other states this is going to bring down the costs for transportating for transporting goods serving businesses and consumers alike it will reduce pollution given that freight vehicles produce roughly one fifth of the greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation we estimate for example that we can increase fuel economy by as much as 25 percent in tractor trailers using technologies that already exist today and just like the rule concerning cars this standard will spur growth in the clean energy sector we know how important that is we know that our dependence on foreign oil endangers our security and our economy we know that climate change poses a threat to our way of life in fact we re already seeing some of the profound and costly impacts and the disaster in the gulf only underscores that even as we pursue domestic production to reduce our reliance on imported oil our long term security depends on the development of alternative sources of fuel and new transportation technologies but we also know that our economic future depends on our leadership in the industries of the future around the globe countries are seeking an advantage in the global marketplace by investing in new ways of producing and saving energy from china to germany these countries recognize that the nation that leads in the clean energy economy will lead the global economy and i want america to be that nation and that s why when we fashioned the recovery act to get our economy moving again we emphasized clean energy today we re supporting the development of advanced battery technologies we re doubling the capacity to generate renewable electricity we re building a stronger smarter electric grid which will be essential to powering the millions of plug in hybrids cars and trucks that we hope to see on the roads it s estimated that through these investments we ll create or save more than 700 000 jobs and these investments will help businesses develop new technologies that vehicle makers can use to meet higher fuel efficiency standards in addition the standard we set last year for cars and light trucks runs through 2016 i m proposing we start developing right now a new and higher standard to take effect beginning 2017 so that we can make more and more progress in the years to come through the directive i m signing we re also going to work with public and private sectors to develop the advanced infrastructure that will be necessary for plug in hybrids and electric vehicles and we re going to continue to work to diversify our fuel mix including biofuels natural gas and other cleaner sources of energy i believe that it s possible in the next 20 years for vehicles to use half the fuel and produce half the pollution that they do today but that s only going to happen if we are willing to do what s necessary for the sake of our economy our security and our environment today s announcement is an essential part of our energy strategy but it s not a substitute for other necessary steps to ensure our leadership in a new clean energy economy i m heartened by the good work that s been done by senator kerry and lieberman on a comprehensive energy and climate bill to reduce our dependence on foreign oil to prevent the worst consequences of climate change and foster the millions of new jobs that are possible if we rise to this challenge and this follows the passage of comprehensive legislation through the house last june so as i ve said before i intend to work with members of both parties to pass a bill this year in the meantime i m going to take every sensible responsible action that i can use that i can take using my authority as president to move our country in the right direction that s what we ve done today that s what we re going to continue to do in the days weeks and months ahead so thank you very much for being here everybody and i m going to now sign this memorandum dem bobama21 6 10 barack_obama hello hello everybody thank you so much thank you thank you very much everybody please have a seat thank you very much thank you let me just begin by making a few acknowledgements first of all i ve got some outstanding fathers here in the first row who aren t seeing their kids enough because i m working them all the time three members of my cabinet secretary of the treasury tim geithner attorney general eric holder and secretary of commerce gary locke are here in addition we ve got one of my heroes and i m sure one of yours somebody whose shoulders i stand on and allowed me to become president of the united states and that s congressman from the great state of georgia john lewis is here a fierce advocate on behalf of the district of columbia congresswoman eleanor holmes norton is here i want to acknowledge the mayor of washington d c adrian fenty in the house the executive director of arc edmund fleet is here i want to thank all the panel discussion participants who are involved in today s events and i want to thank nurney mason a washington d c icon nurney founded mason s barbershop in 1961 that s the year i was born it s still going strong he is here with his children and his grandchildren where is he there he is right there i could use a little trim one year ago this week we kicked off a national conversation on fatherhood and personal responsibility and members of our administration fanned out all across the country to hear from fathers and families about the challenges that they face secretary arne duncan our secretary of education held a discussion in new hampshire about the link between fatherhood and educational achievement gary locke talked to fathers in california about balancing the needs of their families with the demands of their jobs secretary shinseki of veterans affairs held a town hall for military and veteran dads in north carolina and attorney general holder traveled to georgia for a forum about fathers in our criminal justice system and in each of these places each of these leaders posed a simple question how can we as a nation not just the government but businesses and community groups and concerned citizens how can we all come together to help fathers meet their responsibilities to our families and communities and we did this because we know the vital role fathers play in the lives of our children fathers are our first teachers and coaches or in my house assistant teachers and assistant coaches to mom but they re our mentors our role models they show us by the example they set the kind of people they want us to become but we also know that what too many fathers being absent means too many fathers missing from too many homes missing from too many lives we know that when fathers abandon their responsibilities there s harm done to those kids we know that children who grow up without a father are more likely to live in poverty they re more likely to drop out of school they re more likely to wind up in prison they re more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol they re more likely to run away from home they re more likely to become teenage parents themselves and i say all this as someone who grew up without a father in my own life he left my family when i was two years old and while i was lucky to have a wonderful mother and loving grandparents who poured everything they had into me and my sister i still felt the weight of that absence it s something that leaves a hole in a child s life that no government can fill so we can talk all we want here in washington about issues like education and health care and crime we can build good schools we can put money into creating good jobs we can do everything we can to keep our streets safe but government can t keep our kids from looking for trouble on those streets government can t force a kid to pick up a book or make sure that the homework gets done government can t be there day in day out to provide discipline and guidance and the love that it takes to raise a child that s our job as fathers as mothers as guardians for our children the fact is it s easy to become a father technically any guy can do that it s hard to live up to the lifelong responsibilities that come with fatherhood and it s a challenge even in good times when our families are doing well it s especially difficult when times are tough families are straining just to keep everything together in a time of war many of our military families are stretched thin with fathers doing multiple tours of duty far away from their children in difficult economic times a lot of fathers are worried about whether they re going to be able to keep their job or find a job or whether they ll be able to pay the bills and give their children the kinds of opportunities that if they didn t have them themselves at least they wished for their children and there are a lot of men who are out of work and wrestling with the shame and frustration that comes when you feel like you can t be the kind of provider you want to be for the people that you love but here s the key message i think all of us want to send today to fathers all across the country our children don t need us to be superheroes they don t need us to be perfect they do need us to be present they need us to show up and give it our best shot no matter what else is going on in our lives they need us to show them not just with words but with deeds that they those kids are always our first priority those family meals afternoons in the park bedtime stories the encouragement we give the questions we answer the limits we set the example we set of persistence in the face of difficulty and hardship those things add up over time and they shape a child s character build their core teach them to trust in life and to enter into it with confidence and with hope and with determination and that s something they ll always carry with them that love that we show not with money or fame or spectacular feats but through small daily acts the love we show and that we earn by being present in the lives of our children now unfortunately the way we talk about fatherhood in this country doesn t always reinforce these truths when we talk about issues like child care and work family balance we call them women s issues and mothers issues too often when we talk about fatherhood and personal responsibility we talk about it in political terms in terms of left and right conservative liberal instead of what s right and what s wrong and when we do that we ve gotten off track so i think it s time for a new conversation around fatherhood in this country we can all agree that we ve got too many mothers out there forced to do everything all by themselves they re doing a heroic job often under trying circumstances they deserve a lot of credit for that but they shouldn t have to do it alone the work of raising our children is the most important job in this country and it s all of our responsibilities mothers and fathers now i can t legislate fatherhood i can t force anybody to love a child but what we can do is send a clear message to our fathers that there is no excuse for failing to meet their obligations what we can do is make it easier for fathers who make responsible choices and harder for those who avoid those choices what we can do is come together and support fathers who are willing to step up and be good partners and parents and providers and that s why today we re launching the next phase of our work to promote responsible fatherhood a new nationwide fatherhood and mentoring initiative this is a call to action with cities and states with individuals and organizations across the country from the nfl players association to the national pta to everyday moms and dads we re raising awareness about responsible fatherhood and working to re engage absent fathers with their families as part of this effort we ve proposed a new and expanded fatherhood marriage and families innovation fund and we plan to seek out and support the very best most successful initiatives in our states and communities those that are offering services like job training or parenting skills classes domestic violence prevention all which help provide the kind of network of support for men particularly those in vulnerable communities we re also going to help dads who get caught up we want to make sure that they re caught up on child support payments and that we re engage them in their children s lives we re going to support efforts to build healthy relationships between parents as well because we know that children benefit not just from loving mothers and loving fathers but from strong and loving marriages as well we re also launching a new transitional jobs initiative for ex offenders and low income non custodial fathers because these are men who often face serious barriers to finding work and keeping work we ll help them develop the skills and experience they need to move into full time long term employment so they can meet their child support obligations and help provide for their families and under eric holder s direction our justice department is planning to create its first fathering re entry court for ex offender dads and to help replicate this program in courts across the country the idea here is very simple to reach fathers right as they re leaving the criminal justice system and connect them immediately to the employment and services they need to start making their child support payments and reconnecting them with their families this program was inspired by leaders like peter spokes who was the executive director of the national center for fathering a good friend to many in our administration all of whom were deeply saddened by his recent passing and we are honored to have peter s wife barbara with us here today where s barbara i just saw her earlier there she is thank you so these initiatives are a good start but ultimately we know that the decision to be a good father that s up to us each of us as individuals it s one that men across this country are making every single day attending those school assemblies parent teacher conferences coaching soccer little league scrimping and saving and working that extra shift so that their children can go to college and plenty of fathers and men who aren t fathers as well are stepping up to serve as mentors and tutors and big brothers and foster parents to young people who don t have any responsible adult in their lives even when we give it our best efforts there will still be plenty of days of struggle and heartache when we don t quite measure up talking to the men here now even with all the good fortune and support michelle and i have had in our lives i ve made plenty of mistakes as a parent i ve lost count of all the times when the demands of work have taken me from the duties of fatherhood and i know i ve missed out on moments in my daughters lives that i ll never get back and that s a loss that s hard to accept but i also know the feeling that one author described when she wrote that to have a childis to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body think about that to have a child is to have your heart walking around outside your body i m sure a lot of fathers here know that same memory that i have of driving home with michelle and malia right after she was born going about 10 miles an hour your emotions swinging between unadulterated joy and sheer terror and i made a pledge that day that i would do everything i could to give my daughter what i never had that if i could be anything in life i would be a good father and like a lot of the men here since that time i ve found there s nothing else in my life that compares to the pleasures i take in spending time with my girls nothing else comes close to the pride i feel in their achievement and the satisfaction i get in watching them grow into strong confident young women over the course of my life i have been an attorney i ve been a professor i ve been a state senator i ve been a u s senator and i currently am serving as president of the united states but i can say without hesitation that the most challenging most fulfilling most important job i will have during my time on this earth is to be sasha and malia s dad so you don t need a fancy degree for that you don t need a lot of money for that no matter what doubts we may feel what difficulties we may face we all have to remember being a father it s not just an obligation and a responsibility it is a privilege and a blessing one that we all have to embrace as individuals and as a nation so happy father s day everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama21 7 09 barack_obama welcome to the white house tonight marks the second in a series that we are using to celebrate the music that s contributed to the life of this nation and chronicled the history of our people we began this tradition last month with an evening of jazz and tonight we celebrate another uniquely american art form country music we are thrilled and honored to be joined by three of country music s biggest acts three of music s biggest acts period alison krauss and union station brad paisley and charley pride and i want to thank and i want to thank and applaud alison and brad for taking some time earlier today to lead a country music workshop here at the white house for the next generation of young musicians now i know folks think i m a city boy but i do appreciate listening to country music because like all americans i appreciate the broad and indelible impact that country has had on our nation it s touched countless lives it s influenced all genres of music it s helped us make the american people more hopeful it s captured our restlessness and resilience and told so much of our story in the process after all that s what country music is all about storytelling it s about folks telling their life story the best way they know how stories of love and longing hope and heartbreak pride and pain stories that help us celebrate the good times and get over the bad times stories that are quintessentially american after all name me any other country that would have produced a hank williams or a willie nelson and like all great art a great country song also has a commitment to truth to telling the truth like it is without pulling any punches and generations of performers have honored that commitment harlan howard proclaimed country music three chords and the truth garth brooks said it s honesty sincerity and real life to the hilt and dierks bentley called it the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy so to all those watching either here or at home here s a free session with some of the best storytellers and truth sellers around we hope that you have a wonderful time this evening thank you enjoy dem bobama21 7 10 barack_obama well good morning everyone we are gathered in the heart of our nation s capital surrounded by memorials to leaders and citizens who served our nation in its earliest days and in its days of greatest trial today is such a time for america over the past two years we have faced the worst recession since the great depression eight million people lost their jobs tens of millions saw the value of their homes and retirement savings plummet countless businesses have been unable to get the loans they need and many have been forced to shut their doors and although the economy is growing again too many people are still feeling the pain of the downturn now while a number of factors led to such a severe recession the primary cause was a breakdown in our financial system it was a crisis born of a failure of responsibility from certain corners of wall street to the halls of power in washington for years our financial sector was governed by antiquated and poorly enforced rules that allowed some to game the system and take risks that endangered the entire economy unscrupulous lenders locked consumers into complex loans with hidden costs firms like aig placed massive risky bets with borrowed money and while the rules left abuse and excess unchecked they also left taxpayers on the hook if a big bank or financial institution ever failed now even before the crisis hit i went to wall street and i called for common sense reforms to protect consumers and our economy as a whole and soon after taking office i proposed a set of reforms to empower consumers and investors to bring the shadowy deals that caused this crisis into the light of day and to put a stop to taxpayer bailouts once and for all today thanks to a lot of people in this room those reforms will become the law of the land for the last year chairmen barney frank and chris dodd have worked day and night barney and chris have worked day and night to bring about this reform and i am profoundly grateful to them i would be remiss if i didn t also express my appreciation to senator harry reid and speaker nancy pelosi for their leadership it wouldn t have happened without them passing this bill was no easy task to get there we had to overcome the furious lobbying of an array of powerful interest groups and a partisan minority determined to block change so the members who are here today both on the stage and in the audience they have done a great service in devoting so much time and expertise to this effort to looking out for the public interests and not the special interests and i also want to thank the three republican senators who put partisanship aside judged this bill on the merits and voted for reform we re grateful to them and the republican house members good to see you joe now let s put this in perspective the fact is the financial industry is central to our nation s ability to grow to prosper to compete and to innovate there are a lot of banks that understand and fulfill this vital role and there are a whole lot of bankers who want to do right and do right by their customers this reform will help foster innovation not hamper it it is designed to make sure that everybody follows the same set of rules so that firms compete on price and quality not on tricks and not on traps it demands accountability and responsibility from everyone it provides certainty to everybody from bankers to farmers to business owners to consumers and unless your business model depends on cutting corners or bilking your customers you ve got nothing to fear from reform now for all those americans who are wondering what wall street reform means for you here s what you can expect if you ve ever applied for a credit card a student loan or a mortgage you know the feeling of signing your name to pages of barely understandable fine print what often happens as a result is that many americans are caught by hidden fees and penalties or saddled with loans they can t afford that s what happened to robin fox hit with a massive rate increase on her credit card balance even though she paid her bills on time that s what happened to andrew giordano who discovered hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees on his bank statement fees he had no idea he might face both are here today well with this law unfair rate hikes like the one that hit robin will end for good and we ll ensure that people like andrew aren t unwittingly caught by overdraft fees when they sign up for a checking account with this law we ll crack down on abusive practices in the mortgage industry we ll make sure that contracts are simpler putting an end to many hidden penalties and fees in complex mortgages so folks know what they re signing with this law students who take out college loans will be provided clear and concise information about their obligations and with this law ordinary investors like seniors and folks saving for retirement will be able to receive more information about the costs and risks of mutual funds and other investment products so that they can make better financial decisions as to what will work for them so all told these reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history in history and these protections will be enforced by a new consumer watchdog with just one job looking out for people not big banks not lenders not investment houses looking out for people as they interact with the financial system and that s not just good for consumers that s good for the economy because reform will put a stop to a lot of the bad loans that fueled a debt based bubble and it will mean all companies will have to seek customers by offering better products instead of more deceptive ones now beyond the consumer protections i ve outlined reform will also rein in the abuse and excess that nearly brought down our financial system it will finally bring transparency to the kinds of complex and risky transactions that helped trigger the financial crisis shareholders will also have a greater say on the pay of ceos and other executives so they can reward success instead of failure and finally because of this law the american people will never again be asked to foot the bill for wall street s mistakes there will be no more tax funded bailouts period if a large financial institution should ever fail this reform gives us the ability to wind it down without endangering the broader economy and there will be new rules to make clear that no firm is somehow protected because it is too big to fail so we don t have another aig that s what this reform will mean now it doesn t mean our work is over for these new rules to be effective regulators will have to be vigilant we may need to make adjustments along the way as our financial system adapts to these new changes and changes around the globe no law can force anybody to be responsible it s still incumbent on those on wall street to heed the lessons of this crisis in terms of how they conduct their businesses the fact is every american from main street to wall street has a stake in our financial system wall street banks and firms invest the capital that makes it possible for start ups to sell new products they provide loans to businesses to expand and to hire they back mortgages for families purchasing a new home that s why we ll all stand to gain from these reforms we all win when investors around the world have confidence in our markets we all win when shareholders have more power and more information we all win when consumers are protected against abuse and we all win when folks are rewarded based on how well they perform not how well they evade accountability in the end our financial system only works our market is only free when there are clear rules and basic safeguards that prevent abuse that check excess that ensure that it is more profitable to play by the rules than to game the system and that s what these reforms are designed to achieve no more no less because that s how we will ensure that our economy works for consumers that it works for investors that it works for financial institutions that it works for all of us this is the central lesson not only of this crisis but of our history ultimately there s no dividing line between main street and wall street we rise or fall together as one nation so these reforms will help lift our economy and lead all of us to a stronger more prosperous future and that s why i m so honored to sign these reforms into law and i m so grateful to everybody who worked so hard to make this day possible thank you very much everybody dem bobama21 9 09 barack_obama thank you hello hudson valley thank you very much everybody please have a seat thank you thank you very much what a wonderful reception it is great to be here thanks for whoever organized the weather i want to first of all say thank you to jill biden who has been a teacher for almost three decades and she s spent most of that time in community colleges she understands as all of you do the power of these institutions to prepare students for 21st century jobs and to prepare america for a 21st century global economy and that s what s happening right here at hudson valley community college so give yourselves a big round of applause we ve got some special guests here that i want to acknowledge in addition to jill first of all a wonderful man the governor of the great state of new york david paterson is in the house your shy and retiring attorney general andrew cuomo is in the house andrew is doing great work enforcing the laws that need to be enforced i want to thank the comptroller thomas dinapoli is in the house speaker sheldon silver is in the house the democratic conference leader state senator john sampson albany mayor gerald jennings we ve got three outstanding members of congress who are just doing great work every single day maurice hinchey paul tonko scott murphy please give them a big round of applause the president of hudson valley community college andrew matonak is in the house did i pronounce that right andrew and joe sarubbi executive director of tec smart who did a gave me a wonderful tour now you may ask why are we here at hudson valley we re here because this is a place where anyone with the desire to take their career to a new level or start a new career altogether has the opportunity to pursue that dream this is a place where people of all ages and backgrounds even in the face of obstacles even in the face of very difficult personal challenges can take a chance on a brighter future for themselves and for their family i was just talking to the mayor of troy who was we were in a room and he was saying how he had studied calculus in the room where we were taking a picture and i had to inform him i didn t take calculus but he was testimony he was an example of what you can do because of an institution like this and i know that here in troy you want and need that chance after so many years of hard times communities like this one were once the heart of america s manufacturing strength but over the last few decades you ve borne the brunt of a changing economy which has seen many manufacturing plants close in the face of global competition so while all of america has been gripped by the current economic crisis folks in troy and upstate new york have been dealing with what amounts to almost a permanent recession for years an economic downturn that s driven more and more young people from their hometowns i also know that while a lot of people have come here promising better news that news has been hard to come by despite the determined efforts of leaders who are here today and many who are not part of the reason is that while people in this city work hard to meet their responsibilities i have to confess that some in washington haven t always lived up to theirs for too long as old divisions and special interests reigned washington has shown neither the inclination nor the ability to tackle our toughest challenges meanwhile businesses were saddled with ever rising health care costs the economy was weakened by ever growing dependence on foreign oil our investment in cutting edge research declined our schools fell further short growth focused on short term gains and fueled by debt and reckless risk which led to a cycle of precipitous booms and painful busts and meanwhile too many in washington stood by and let it happen now after so many years of failing to act there are those who now suggest that there s really not much the government can or should do to make a difference that what we ve seen in places like troy is inevitable that somehow the parts of our country that helped us lead in the last century don t have what it takes to help us lead in this one and i m here to tell you that that is just flat out wrong what we have here in this community is talented people entrepreneurs world class learning institutions the ingredients are right here for growth and success and a better future these young people are testimony to it you are proving that right here in the hudson valley students here are training full time while working part time at ge energy in schenectady becoming a new generation of american leaders in a new generation of american manufacturing ibm is partnered with the university at albany their partnership in nanotechnology is helping students train in the industries in which america has the potential to lead rensselaer is partnering not only with this institution but with businesses throughout the tech valley and early next year hudson valley community college s state of the art tec smart training facility is set to open side by side with global foundry s coming state of the art semiconductor plant so we know that upstate new york can succeed just like we know that there are pockets in the midwest that used to be hubs of manufacturing they re now retooling they re reinventing themselves we know that can happen we know that in the global economy where there s no room for error and there s certainly no room for wasted potential america needs you to succeed so as we emerge from this current economic crisis our great challenge will be to ensure that we don t just drift into the future accepting less for our children accepting less for america we have to choose instead what past generations have done to shape a brighter future through hard work and innovation that s how we ll not only recover but that s how we ll also build stronger than before strong enough to compete in the global economy strong enough to avoid the cycles of boom and bust that have wreaked so much havoc strong enough to create and support the jobs of the future in the industries of the future so today my administration is releasing our strategy to foster new jobs new businesses and new industries by laying the groundwork and the ground rules to best tap our innovative potential this work began with the recovery plan that we passed several months ago which devoted well over 100 billion to innovation from high tech classrooms to health information technology from more efficient homes to more fuel efficient cars from building a smart electricity grid to laying down high speed rail but our efforts don t end there for this strategy is about far more than just recovery it s about sustained growth and widely shared prosperity and it s rooted in a simple idea that if government does its modest part there s no stopping the most powerful and generative economic force that the world has ever known and that is the american people our strategy begin where innovation so often does in the classroom and in the laboratory and in the networks that connect them to the broader economy these are the building blocks of innovation education infrastructure research we know that the nations that out educate us today will out compete us tomorrow the ability of new industries to thrive depends on workers with the knowledge and the know how to contribute in those fields unfortunately today our primary and secondary schools continue to trail many of our competitors especially in the key areas of math and science hundreds of thousands of high school graduates who are prepared for college don t go to four year or two year schools because it s just too expensive they run out of money and roughly 40 percent of students who start college don t complete college so all along that education pipeline too many people too many of our young talented people are slipping through the cracks it s not only heartbreaking for those students it s a loss for our economy and our country i know that for a long time politicians have spoken of training of job training as a silver bullet of college as a cure all it s not i don t want to pretend that it is we know that but we also know that in the coming years jobs requiring at least an associate s degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience think about that twice as fast we will not fill those jobs or keep those jobs here in america without graduating more students including millions more students from community colleges that s why i ve asked dr biden to travel the country promoting the opportunities that community colleges offer that s why i m grateful that senator chuck schumer who couldn t be here today has shown tremendous leadership on this issue and that s why i ve set this ambitious goal by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world we used to be number one we should be number one again now to achieve this goal we re going to need motivated students motivated families motivated communities local leaders who are doing their part state leaders who are doing their part but the federal government has its part to do as well so to reach this goal we ve increased pell grants and created a simplified 2 500 tax credit for college tuition we ve made student aid applications less complicated and ensured that that aid is not based on the income of a job that you ve lost i hear too much from folks who say i can t get any student aid because they re still looking at my income taxes when i had a job as opposed to my situation right now we ve also passed a new g i bill of rights to help soldiers coming home from iraq and afghanistan begin a new life in a new economy and the recovery plan has helped close state budget shortfalls i think the governor will testify because those shortfalls put enormous pressure on public universities and community colleges while also we ve made historic investments in elementary and secondary schools so we re helping states get through some very tough times without having to drastically cut back on the critical education infrastructure that s going to be so important now finally through the american graduation initiative that i ve proposed we re going to reform and strengthen community colleges to help an additional 5 million americans earn degrees and certificates in the next decade because a new generation of innovations depends on a new generation of innovators and just last week the house of representatives passed a bill that will go a long way to reform the student loan system so that college is more affordable for more people right now the federal government provides a subsidy to banks to get them to lend money to students the thing is the federal government also guarantees the loans in case the students don t repay so we re subsidizing banks to take on the risk of giving loans to students even though taxpayers are absorbing the risk anyway that doesn t make much sense it costs us more than 80 billion if we just cut out the middle man the banks and lent directly to the students the federal government would save that money and we could use it for what s actually important helping students afford and succeed in college that s what the bill i want to emphasize this just because every once in a while you may not know what your members of congress are doing for you these three guys right here are standing up for young people we need senators to do the same the bill that they voted on the bill that i proposed here s what it does it takes the 80 billion the banks currently get and uses it to make pell grants larger it uses those funds to focus on innovative efforts to help students not only go to college but to graduate and just as important these savings will allow us to make the largest investment ever in the most underappreciated asset in our education system and that is community colleges like hudson valley which are so essential for the future of our young people so we hope to improve on this bill in the senate and go even further on behalf of students ending this unwarranted subsidy for the big banks is a no brainer for folks everywhere except some folks in washington in fact they re already seeing we re already seeing special interests rallying to save this giveaway and the large banks many who have benefited from taxpayer bailouts during the financial crisis are lobbying to keep this easy money flowing that s exactly the kind of special interest effort that has succeeded before and we can t allow it to succeed this time this is exactly the kind of waste that leaves people wary of government leaves our country straddled with trillions of dollars of deficits and debt with little to show for it and that s why i went to washington to change that kind of stuff and i look forward to winning this fight in the senate just as we won it in the house and signing this bill into law now another key to strengthening education entrepreneurship and innovation in communities like troy is to harness the full power of the internet and that means faster and more widely available broadband as well as rules to ensure that we preserve the fairness and openness that led to the flourishing of the internet in the first place so today fcc chairman julius genachowski is announcing a set of principles to preserve an open internet in which all americans can participate and benefit and i m pleased that he s taking that step that s an important role that we can play laying the ground rules to spur innovation that s the role of government to provide investment that spurs innovation and also to set up common sense ground rules to ensure that there s a level playing field for all comers who seek to contribute their innovations and we have to think about the networks we need today but also the networks we need tomorrow that s why i ve proposed grants through the national science foundation and through the defense advanced research projects agency or darpa which helped develop the internet to explore the next communications breakthroughs whatever they may be that s why i ve appointed the first ever chief technology officer charged with looking at ways technology can spur innovations that help government do a better and more efficient job we also have to strengthen our commitment to research including basic research which has been badly neglected for decades that s always been one of the secrets of america s success putting more and more money into research to create the next great inventions the great technologies that will then spur further economic growth the fact is though basic research doesn t always pay off immediately it may not pay off for years when it does the rewards are often broadly shared enjoyed by those who bore it costs but also by those who didn t pay a dime for that basic research that s why the private sector generally under invests in basic science that s why the public sector must invest instead while the risks may be large so are the rewards for our economy and our society i mean understand it was basic research in the photoelectric effect that would one day lead to solar panels it was basic research in physics that would eventually produce the cat scan the calculations of today s gps satellites they re based on basic research equations einstein put on paper more than a century ago nobody knew they d lead to gps but they understood that as we advance our knowledge that is what is going to help advance our societies when we fail to invest in research we fail to invest in the future yet since the peak of the space race in the 1960s our national commitment to research and development has steadily fallen as a share of our national income that s why i set a goal of putting a full 3 percent of our gross domestic product our national income into research and development surpassing the commitment we made when president kennedy challenged this nation to send a man to the moon towards this goal the recovery act has helped achieve the largest increase in basic research in history this month the national institutes of health will award more than a billion dollars in research grants through the recovery act focused on what we can learn from the mapping of the human genome in order to treat diseases that affect millions of americans from cancer to heart disease i also want to urge congress to fully fund the defense advanced research projects agency or darpa because since its creation it has been the source of cutting edge breakthroughs from that early internet to stealth technology so as we invest in the building blocks of innovation from the classroom to the laboratory it s also essential that we have competitive and vibrant markets that promote innovation as well education and research help foster new ideas but it takes fair and free markets to turn those ideas into industries my budget finally makes the research and experimentation tax credit permanent this is a tax credit that helps companies afford the often high costs of developing new ideas new technologies new products which means new jobs and this tax incentive returns two dollars to the economy for every one dollar we spend time and again i ve heard from leaders from silicon valley to the tech valley about how important it is i ve also proposed reducing to zero the capital gains tax for investments in small or startup businesses because small businesses are innovative businesses they produce 13 times more patents per employee than large companies do now these tax incentives will spur entrepreneurship but there are other important steps to foster markets that value and promote risk takers and idea makers who ve always been the center of our success that s why it s essential that we enforce trade laws and work with our trading partners to open up markets abroad that we reform and strengthen our intellectual property system that we sustain our advantage as a place that draws and welcomes the brightest minds from all over the world and that we unlock sources of credit and capital which have been in short supply as a result of the financial crisis now there are some other fundamental barriers to innovation and economic growth that we re going to have to tackle in order to ensure american leadership and prosperity continues into the 21st century for as a nation we face enormous challenges from ending our dependence on foreign oil to finally producing providing all americans with quality affordable health care we ve got to attack these challenges to create a climate for innovation and innovation can then be an important part of how we meet these challenges so let me give you an example health care costs they leave our small businesses at a disadvantage when competing with our large businesses and they leave our large businesses at a disadvantage when competing around the world we will never know the enormity of the costs of our economy to the countless americans unable to become entrepreneurs to start a small business to follow their dreams because they re afraid of losing their health insurance so to lead in the global economy we must pass health insurance reform that brings down costs and provides more security for people who have insurance and offers options to people who don t have health insurance health insurance reform will be good for business and especially good for small business especially good for small business now in the meantime the recovery plan that we passed earlier this year has begun to modernize our health system so innovation can also help drive down the cost for everybody we are taking long overdue steps to computerize america s health records and this is going to reduce the waste and errors that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives while protecting patients privacy and it s important to note as well that the records that are held each of us having our own medical records in digital form holds the potential of offering patients the chance to be more active participants in the prevention and treatment of illness and health it health information technology if implemented effectively has the potential to unlock so many unanticipated benefits because it provides patterns of data that we don t yet collect but could reveal discoveries that we can t predict in terms of how to cure illnesses the same thing is true when it comes to energy no area will need innovation more than in the development of new ways to produce and use and save energy and you understand that here at hudson valley i firmly believe that the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy and that s why we re doubling our capacity to generate renewable energy building a stronger and smarter electric grid and i was meeting some young people who are being trained right here so that they re going to be working on creating this smart grid we re investing in technologies to power a new generation of clean energy vehicles we ve helped reach an agreement to raise fuel economy standards and for the first time in history we passed a bill to create a system of clean energy incentives which will help make renewable energy a profitable kind of energy in america while helping to end our dependence on oil and protect our planet for future generations this bill has passed the house we re now working to pass legislation through the senate it is time to get this done we have to lead on energy we can t be lagging behind so that s an overview of our strategy all these pieces fit together it s a strategy that s essential for our recovery today but more importantly for our prosperity tomorrow it s a strategy rooted in a deep and abiding faith in the ability of this country to rise to any challenge because that s our history we re a people with a seemingly limitless supply of ingenuity and daring and talent and at its best our government has harnessed those qualities without getting in the way that s what led to the building of the erie canal which then helped put cities like troy on the map that linked east and west and allowed commerce and competition to flow freely between that s what led a pretty good inventor and a pretty good businessman named thomas edison to come to schenectady and open what is today a thriving mom and pop operation known as general electric a former senator from new york robert kennedy once told us the future is not a gift it is an achievement it was not an accident not a gift that america led the 20th century it was the result of hard work and discipline and sacrifice and ambition that served a common purpose so it must be in the 21st century future success is no guarantee as americans we always have to remember that our leadership is not an inheritance it is a responsibility so from biotechnology to nanotechnology from the development of new forms of energy to research into treatments of ancient diseases there is so much potential to change our world and improve our lives while creating countless jobs all across america the question is if we are ready to embrace that potential if we re ready to lead the way once more i think we re ready i ve seen it all across america this generation generation of young people sitting here they have an unparalleled opportunity we are called upon to help them seize that opportunity that s what you re doing here at hudson valley community college that s what i intend to make sure that we do in washington that s what we will do as a nation thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama22 10 09 barack_obama thank you please everybody have a seat good afternoon before we begin i d actually like to say a few words about something that is of interest to the broader public obviously how we treat our veterans is hugely important but i just want to make a quick comment about the decision made public today by ken feinberg on executive compensation i ve always believed that our system of free enterprise works best when it rewards hard work this is america we don t disparage wealth we don t begrudge anybody for doing well we believe in success but it does offend our values when executives of big financial firms firms that are struggling pay themselves huge bonuses even as they continue to rely on taxpayer assistance to stay afloat and that s why last summer we gave ken feinberg and his team the task of making an independent judgment on the executive pay packages for firms that received extraordinary assistance from the federal government he was faced with the difficult task of striking the proper balance between standing up for taxpayers and returning a measure of stability to our financial system under these competing interests i believe he s taken an important step forward today in curbing the influence of executive compensation on wall street while still allowing these companies to succeed and prosper but more work needs to be done which is why i urge the senate to pass legislation that will give company shareholders a voice on the pay packages awarded to their executives and i also urge congress to continue moving forward on financial reform that will help prevent the crisis we saw last fall from happening again now in just a few days a few weeks we will be observing veterans day we ll pause again to pay tribute to all those who have worn america s uniform we reflect on their sacrifices and those of their families citizens who ve done their duty and who have fulfilled their responsibilities to their nation as a nation we ll pledge to fulfill our responsibilities to our veterans because our commitment to our veterans is a sacred trust and upholding that trust is a moral obligation on that day on veterans day after all the parades and all the solemn ceremonies a lot of veterans may ask does america really mean it will america keep its promise not simply with words but with deeds since taking office my administration has worked hard with many of you to make sure that america fulfills our obligations to our veterans and their families with secretary ric shinseki in the lead we re building a 21st century va we re harnessing technologies to cut the red tape and backlogs we re investing in mobile clinics to reach rural areas we re moving towards a single lifetime electronic health record for everyone in uniform we re making it a top priority to end homelessness among our veterans we dramatically increased funding for veterans health care more care for women s veterans for our wounded warriors from iraq and afghanistan suffering from post traumatic stress disorder traumatic brain injuries for 500 000 priority 8 veterans we re restoring va health care coverage all told we have made the biggest commitment to veterans the largest percentage increase in the va budget in more than 30 years and this includes funding the post 9 11 gi bill making sure it works as intended so our newest veterans and their families have the chance to pursue their education and live out their dreams so we re keeping our promises we re making real progress for our vets like those with us today including maryland lieutenant governor anthony brown the highest ranking elected official in the nation who has served a tour of duty in iraq thank you colonel brown but we re here today because a problem that s gone on for far too long the delays and uncertainty that often plague funding for veterans health care over the past two decades the va budget has been late almost every year often by months at this very moment the va is operating without a budget making it harder for va medical centers and clinics to deliver the care our vets need the hardworking folks at the va know this i was there at headquarters this spring michelle was there if i m not mistaken ric just this tuesday it s frustrating for them and it s frustrating for our vets who pay the price when budgets are delayed the new doctors nurses and critical staff that aren t hired the new medical equipment that isn t purchased the construction of new facilities and clinics that isn t started the new programs for medical care that are delayed this is inexcusable it s unacceptable it s time for it to stop and that s just what we ll do with this landmark legislation the veterans health care budget reform and transparency act i want everybody to know today is a victory for all the veterans organizations who are represented on this stage who fought for years for reform they deserve a huge congratulations today is a tribute to those who led the fight in congress senator and world war ii vet danny akaka and representative bob filner thank you for your leadership all the leaders who made this possible starting with speaker nancy pelosi who made this commitment to veterans organizations when she became minority leader i was told some people didn t believe nancy when she made that promise nancy keeps her promises and i want all our vets to remember that senator tim johnson for his great work in the senate somebody who has been fighting for veterans since he entered into congress and is just tireless on this issue chet edwards please give chet a big round of applause the other members of congress who worked so hard michael michaud phil hare phil is right here harry brown harry brown did great work on this and so many others this is a reminder of what s possible when we come together democrats and republicans to do right by our veterans and let me say that i take special pride in this legislation because as a senator i was a proud co sponsor of this legislation i served on the veterans affairs committee in the campaign last year you all remember i made a promise to pass it and today as president i m fulfilling that promise and i m going to sign it into law with this legislation we re fundamentally reforming how we fund health care for our veterans with advance appropriations veterans medical care will be funded a year in advance for the va this means timely sufficient and predictable funding from year to year for va hospitals and clinics it means more time to budget to recruit high quality professionals and to invest in new health care equipment and most of all for our veterans it will mean better access to the doctors and nurses and the medical care that they need specialized care for our wounded warriors with post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries and the staffing to welcome back to the va those half million priority 8 vets in short this is common sense reform it promotes accountability at the va it ensures oversight by congress it is fiscally responsible by not adding a dime to the deficit and it ensures that veterans health care will no longer be held hostage to the annual budget battles in washington of course as we all know keeping faith with our veterans is work that is never truly done today s veterans expect and deserve the highest quality care as will tomorrow s veterans especially our men and women serving in iraq and afghanistan and should they ask this veterans day will america back up its words with deeds because of everyone in this room because of this reform legislation the answer will be yes the united states of america will keep our promise to our veterans we will fulfill our responsibilities we will uphold our obligations to all who serve and that s why i am thrilled to be signing this legislation into law right now thank you very much god bless you dem bobama22 2 10a barack_obama thank you please everybody have a seat thank you i hope nobody stayed up too late last night because i m looking forward to a productive challenge and challenging conversation this morning joe thank you very much for your remarks and i want to again thank governor douglas and governor manchin for their outstanding leadership with this organization i want to spend most of my time exchanging ideas with you and answering questions but let me just preface this with a few remarks i want us to begin by remembering where we were just one year ago as i mentioned last night our economy was in a full blown crisis 750 000 americans were losing their jobs each month and millions more were hurting at the end of one of the toughest decades for the middle class on record and just as they turned to you like never before budget shortfalls threatened your capacity to help and that was just a few days before i signed the recovery act into law a plan that many of you were instrumental in devising that plan cut taxes for small businesses and for 95 percent of working americans it gave direct relief to those hardest hit by the recession including workers who lost their jobs and families who lost their health care because of it it helped most of you close some of those budget gaps that had developed which kept 300 000 teachers and education workers in your schools and tens of thousands of first responders on your streets and it began rebuilding our economy on a new and stronger foundation for growth we helped to jumpstart a clean energy industry in places where there were none as governor granholm can attest in michigan we followed the gospel of governors rendell and schwarzenegger and invested in our infrastructure creating private sector jobs rebuilding today s crumbling roads and bridges but also constructing the smart grids and the high speed rails that are so critical to our future and that s helping many of you prepare your states for future growth like governor baldacci who s accelerating his vision to connect broadband to every corner of maine or governor barbour who s boosting plans to bring more commerce into mississippi ports and out by rail to the rest of america independent economists credit the recovery act with growing the economy and for 2 million jobs that otherwise wouldn t exist now i understand that some of you still claim it s not working or wasn t worth it but i also know that you ve used it to close your budget gaps or break ground on new projects i ve seen the photos and i ve read the press releases so it must be doing something right overall the economy is in a better place than it was a year ago we were contracting by 6 percent and we re now growing by 6 percent but i know that your states are still in a very tough situation and too many americans still haven t felt the recovery in their own lives so we re working to create jobs by all means necessary be it by cutting taxes for small businesses that create them to investing more in infrastructure and in energy efficiency or giving you more help to close budget shortfalls and i am not going to rest until we see more progress in each and every one of your states as governors i know you feel the same responsibility to see the people we serve through difficult times and i know you share my feelings that we ve also got a responsibility to think beyond the crisis and build an economy that works for our future to tackle some of the problems and barriers that have held us back and to secure our rightful place as the preeminent economy in the 21st century and that s why we ve taken up the cause of better health care that works for our people our businesses and our governments alike that s why we will continue to fight for the cause of clean energy an economy that will free ourselves from the grips of foreign oil and generate millions of good jobs and good wages in the process that s why we ve taken up the cause of guaranteeing that americans have the knowledge and the skills and education they need in this new and changing world america s prosperity has always rested on how well we educate our children but never has that been more true than it is today and it s true for our workers as well when a college graduate earns over 60 percent more in a lifetime than a high school graduate this is true for our businesses when according to one study six in 10 simply cannot find the qualified workers that they need are ready and willing to hire unfortunately we continue to lag in several critical areas our eighth grade students are ninth in the world in math and 11th in science in response to assessments like these some states have upped their game i want to point to massachusetts as an example where eighth graders now tie for first in science around the world some unfortunately some states have actually done the opposite and between 2005 and 2007 under no child left behind 11 states actually lowered their standards in math that may make those states look better relative to other states but it s not going to help our students keep up with their global competitors when i visited south korea last year and i ve told this story before i had lunch with president lee and i asked him what s your biggest education challenge and he said my biggest issue my toughest fight is that korean parents are too demanding they want their kids to learn english in first grade and so i ve had to ship in a whole bunch of foreign speaking teachers to meet the demand they want their students learning everything math science foreign languages all as soon as possible they want their kids to excel because they understand that whichever country out educates the other is going to out compete us in the future so that s what we re up against that s what s at stake nothing less than our primacy in the world as i said at the state of the union address i do not accept a united states of america that s second place and that means that all of us are going to have to work together to make sure that we are taking seriously the investments we make in our children s future that s the reason that we launched the race to the top a national competition to spur reform and improvements in our schools we put 4 billion on the table and challenged states to compete for it saying that if you embrace reforms that raise achievement if you track and respond to student needs if you evaluate and reward great teachers and principals and turn around failing schools then we re going to help you make those reforms a reality many of you and your states already have and that s why we re going to expand the race to the top program and i want to commend all of you for acting collectively through the national governors association to develop common academic standards that will better position our students for success many states have already positioned themselves to adopt higher standards and today i m announcing steps to encourage and support all states to transition to college and career ready standards on behalf of america s students and i know that many of you have had a chance to interact with our secretary of education arne duncan who s doing a terrific job and i think you understand when you talk to him that this administration is serious about breaking down some of the barriers to reform that have existed in the past we are tired of arguments between the left and the right between reformers and teachers unions we want to figure out what works and we want to make sure that we are giving you the support and the resources that you need to implement what works now of course lifting achievement and transforming our schools is going to require more than new standards it s going to require better teaching better curricula it s going to require better assessments so we are calling for a redesigned elementary and secondary education act that better aligns the federal approach to your state led efforts while offering you the support that you need let me just be specific on some things that we re looking to do this year first as a condition of receiving access to title i funds we will ask all states to put in place a plan to adopt and certify standards that are college and career ready in reading and math once you ve got those standards in place you ll be able to better compete for funds to improve teaching and upgrade curricula if a university state or school district begins preparing educators to teach to higher standards we ll give them the support that they need and to make sure that we re delivering for our kids we re launching a competition to reward states that join together to develop the highest quality cutting edge assessments required to measure progress and we ll help support their implementation this all goes hand in hand with our efforts to give every american a complete and competitive education we are making college more affordable by increasing pell grants we re continuing a new 2 500 tax credit for four years of college tuition we are working to ease graduates debt burdens because i believe and i think you do too that nobody should go broke because they decided to go to college we ve provided the resources to effectively implement the post 9 11 gi bill because every returning soldier should have the chance to begin a new life prepared for the new economy we re strengthening our community colleges because all of you know that they are outstanding career pathways for the children of so many working families and we re working to reform the student loan program and save tens of billions of dollars that currently go to subsidizing financial intermediaries because instead of having that money go to middle men we think it makes sense to spend that money educating the next generation now if we can come together and do all this in washington in state houses and across party and ideology we re going to raise the quality of american education we ll give our students our workers and our businesses every chance to succeed and we are going to secure this next century as another american century let me just close by saying this we ve been trusted with the responsibility to lead at a defining moment in our history we ve been tasked to not only see this country through difficult times but to keep the dream of our founding alive for the next generation that s not something to shy away from it s something to live up to and i intend to work closely with all of you democrats and republicans to do just that so with that what i d like to do is start the discussion i think that what we re going to do is i m going to call on jim and joe first and then after they ve made their opening statements and remarks then we ll kick the press out and everybody will roll up their sleeves and we ll get to work dem bobama22 2 10b barack_obama thank you everybody thank you please everybody have a seat have a seat good evening and welcome back to the white house for some of you this is the first time welcome i want to begin by acknowledging your outstanding chairs of this extraordinary organization jim douglas of vermont and joe manchin of west virginia thank you so much for the great work that you guys do each and every day i also want to let everybody know that this is not too stiff of an affair because last year ed rendell led a conga line we still have photographs of some of you that we may use at any point but it s interesting to think about where we were last year last year we were in the midst of what was the worst economic crisis since the great depression each of you in your own respective states i think saw how brutal it was on so many families hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs every month home foreclosures small businesses having to shut down unable to make payroll and people not sure about the future and unclear about whether or not we were going to be able to pull ourselves out and i think that it is worth it is worth reminding ourselves of how urgent the situation was and it s worth this organization taking some extraordinary credit for helping to right the ship working i know with my vice president joe biden who s done outstanding work we took some swift and decisive action and because of that swift and decisive action not only were folks in your states able to get unemployment insurance and get cobra at a much cheaper rate not only were you able to fill some of those budget holes that i know are still tough and i suspect we ll be talking about tomorrow but we also started to begin entire new industries and start moving towards a extraordinary future through some of the infrastructure projects and research and development clean energy projects that are so many of you have been leaders of if you think about it i was in newton iowa seeing a plant that had been closed now reopened building wind turbines in michigan i was just talking to governor granholm about the fact that last year we accounted for 2 percent of the advanced battery technology in the entire world and by 2015 we are going to account for 40 percent by the end of this year we re going to account for 20 percent of that advanced battery technology the truth is the reason it worked is because of some very tough choices that many of you made but the ability to work across state lines and party lines to try to get people focused not just on the past but also on the future and one of the things that i ve always said about governors that washington could learn from is that it s hard to be overly ideological as a governor because the fact of the matter is the rubber hits the road with you you guys can have all kinds of abstract thoughts but when families come to you looking for help when communities have been devastated you re the ones they turn to and so these arguments become a lot less abstract and i think it s a reflection of that experience as chief executives in each of your state that makes you able to work together so effectively in this organization so i want to congratulate you for having worked through a very difficult year i want you to know that this white house wants to continue to partner with you and not just not just in terms of us telling you what we think we can do to help but more importantly us listening and finding out from you the kinds of extraordinary ideas that all these states represent you guys are continue to be the laboratory for our democracy and so we welcome your ideas we welcome your input the main thing tonight though is we expect you to have a good time so with that what i d like to do is to offer a toast i d like to offer this toast not only to our constituents who put up with us and have gone through some extraordinarily difficult times but i also want to offer a toast to our spouses and families who make extraordinary sacrifices some of them oftentimes don t always michelle she s starting to clank already but our families our children all those people who are so supportive of these extraordinary efforts that we re making so cheers everybody dinner is served oh wait wait wait this is not the waiter although he can read the menu jim douglas has been an extraordinary partner with this white house always constructive always thoughtful and we are so pleased to have him here tonight and so he s going to offer his own toast please dem bobama22 4 09 barack_obama thank you so much thank you rich for the great introduction thank you very much please everybody have a seat it is good to be back in newton and it s a privilege to be here at trinity structural towers i ve got a couple of special thank yous that i want to make because i ve got a lot of old friends not old in years but been friends for a long time now first of all your outstanding governor chet culver please give him a big round of applause his wonderful wife mari i see over here she s not on the card but my outstanding secretary of agriculture who i plucked from iowa tom vilsack and his wonderful wife christie vilsack we ve got the attorney general of iowa one of my co chairs when i ran in the iowa caucus and nobody could pronounce my name tom miller my other co chair mike fitzgerald treasurer of iowa we got the iowa secretary of state mike mauro there he is we ve got your outstanding member of congress who s working hard for newton all the time leonard boswell and your own pride of newton mayor chaz allen there he is back there it s good to see you again chaz it is terrific to be here and by the way i ve got a whole bunch of folks here who were active in the campaign and precinct captains and i just want to thank all of them for showing up and to all the great workers who are here at this plant thank you i just had a terrific tour of the facility led by several of the workers and managers who operate this plant it wasn t too long ago as rich said that maytag closed its operations in newton and hundreds of jobs were lost these floors were dark and silent the only signs of a once thriving enterprise were the cement markings where the equipment had been before they were boxed up and carted away look at what we see here today this facility is alive again with new industry this community is still going through some tough times if you talk to your neighbors and friends i know they the community still hasn t fully recovered from the loss of maytag not everybody has been rehired but more than 100 people will now be employed at this plant maybe more if we keep on moving many of the same folks who had lost their jobs when maytag shut its doors now are finding once again their ability to make great products now obviously things aren t exactly the same as they were with maytag because now you re using the materials behind me to build towers to support some of the most advanced wind turbines in the world when completed these structures will hold up blades that can generate as much as 2 5 megawatts of electricity enough energy to power hundreds of homes at trinity you are helping to lead the next energy revolution but you re also heirs to the last energy revolution think about it roughly a century and a half ago in the late 1950s the seneca oil company hired an unemployed train conductor named edwin drake to investigate the oil springs of titusville pennsylvania around this time oil was literally bubbling up from the ground but nobody knew what to do with it it had limited economic value and often all it did was ruin crops or pollute drinking water now people were starting to refine oil for use as a fuel collecting oil remained time consuming though and it was back breaking and it was costly it wasn t efficient as workers harvested what they could find in the shallow ground they d literally scoop it up but edwin drake had a plan he purchased a steam engine and he built a derrick and he began to drill and months passed and progress was slow the team managed to drill into the bedrock just a few feet each day and crowds gathered and they mocked mr drake they thought him and the other diggers were foolish the well that they were digging even earned the nickname drake s folly but drake wouldn t give up and he had an advantage total desperation it had to work and then one day it finally did one morning the team returned to the creek to see crude oil rising up from beneath the surface and soon drake s well was producing what was then an astonishing amount of oil perhaps 10 20 barrels every day and then speculators followed and they built similar rigs as far as the eye could see in the next decade the area would produce tens of millions of barrels of oil and as the industry grew so did the ingenuity of those who sought to profit from it as competitors developed new techniques to drill and transport oil to drive down costs and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace now our history is filled with such stories stories of daring talent of dedication to an idea even when the odds are great of the unshakeable belief that in america all things are possible and this has been especially true in energy production from the first commercially viable steamboat developed by robert fulton to the first modern solar cell developed at bell labs from the experiments of benjamin franklin to harness the energy of lightning to the experiments of enrico fermi to harness the power contained in the atom america has always led the world in producing and harnessing new forms of energy but just as we ve led the global economy in developing new sources of energy we ve also led in consuming energy while we make up less than 5 percent of the world s population we produce roughly a quarter of the world s demand for oil and this appetite comes now at a tremendous cost to our economy it s the cost measured by our trade deficit 20 percent of what we spend on imports is the price of our oil imports we send billions of dollars overseas to oil exporting nations and i think all of you know many of them are not our friends it s the same costs attributable to our vulnerability to the volatility of oil markets every time the world oil market goes up you re getting stuck at the pump it s the cost we feel in shifting weather patterns that are already causing record breaking droughts unprecedented wildfires more intense storms it s a cost we ve known ever since the gas shortages of the 1970s and yet for more than 30 years too little has been done about it there s a lot of talk of action when oil prices skyrocket like they did last summer and everybody says we got to do something about energy independence but then it slips from the radar when oil prices start falling like they have recently so we shift from shock to indifference time and again year after year we can t afford that approach anymore not when the cost for our economy for our country and for our planet is so high so on this earth day it is time for us to lay a new foundation for economic growth by beginning a new era of energy exploration in america that s why i m here now the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy the choice we face is between prosperity and decline we can remain the world s leading importer of oil or we can become the world s leading exporter of clean energy we can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc across the landscape or we can create jobs working to prevent its worst effects we can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors or we can confront what countries in europe and asia have already recognized as both a challenge and an opportunity the nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy america can be that nation america must be that nation and while we seek new forms of fuel to power our homes and cars and businesses we will rely on the same ingenuity the same american spirit that has always been a part of our american story now this will not be easy there aren t any silver bullets there s no magic energy source right now maybe some kid in a lab somewhere is figuring it out twenty years from now there may be an entirely new energy source that we don t yet know about but right now there s no silver bullet it s going to take a variety of energy sources pursued through a variety of policies to drastically reduce our dependence on oil and fossil fuels as i ve often said in the short term as we transition to renewable energy we can and should increase our domestic production of oil and natural gas we re not going to transform our economy overnight we still need more oil we still need more gas if we ve got some here in the united states that we can use we should find it and do so in an environmentally sustainable way we also need to find safer ways to use nuclear power and store nuclear waste but the bulk of our efforts must focus on unleashing a new clean energy economy that will begin to reduce our dependence on foreign oil will cut our carbon pollution by about 80 percent by 2050 and create millions of new jobs right here in america right here in newton my administration has already taken unprecedented action towards this goal it s work that begins with the simplest fastest most effective way we have to make our economy cleaner and that is to make our economy more energy efficient california has shown that it can be done while electricity consumption grew 50 percent in this country over the last three decades in california it remained flat think about this i want everybody to think about this over the last several decades the rest of the country we used 50 percent more energy california remained flat used the same amount even though that they were growing just as fast as the rest of the country because they were more energy efficient they put in some good policy early on that assured that they weren t wasting energy now if california can do it then the whole country can do it iowa can do it through the american recovery and reinvestment act we ve begun to modernize 75 percent of all federal building space which has the potential to reduce long term energy costs just in federal buildings by billions of dollars on behalf of taxpayers we re providing grants to states to help weatherize hundreds of thousands of homes which will save the families that benefit about 350 each year that s like a 350 tax cut consumers are also eligible as part of the recovery act for up to 1 500 in tax credits to purchase more efficient cooling and heating systems insulation and windows in order to reduce their energy bills and i ve issued a memorandum to the department of energy to implement more aggressive efficiency standards for common household appliances like dishwashers and refrigerators we actually have made so much progress just on something as simple as refrigerators that you have seen refrigerators today many times more efficient than they were back in 1974 we save huge amounts of energy if we upgrade those appliances through this through these steps over the next three decades we will save twice the amount of energy produced by all the coal fired power plants in america in any given year we re already seeing reports from across the country of how this is beginning to create jobs because local governments and businesses rush to hire folks to do the work of building and installing these energy efficient products and these steps will spur job creation and innovation as more americans make purchases that place a premium on reducing energy consumption business across the country will join the competition developing new products seeking new consumers in the end the sum total of choices made by consumers and companies in response to our recovery plan will mean less pollution in our air and water it ll reduce costs for families and businesses money in your pocket and it will lower our overall reliance on fossil fuels which disrupt our environment and endanger our children s future so that s step number one energy efficiency that s the low hanging fruit but energy efficiency can only take us part of the way even as we re conserving energy we need to change the way we produce energy today america produces less than 3 percent of our electricity through renewable sources like wind and solar less than 3 percent now in comparison denmark produces almost 20 percent of their electricity through wind power we pioneered solar technology but we ve fallen behind countries like germany and japan in generating it even though we ve got more sun than either country i don t accept this is the way it has to be when it comes to renewable energy i don t think we should be followers i think it s time for us to lead we are now poised to do exactly that according to some estimates last year 40 percent of all new generating capacity in our country came from wind in iowa you know what this means this state is second only to texas in installed wind capacity which more than doubled last year alone the result once shuttered factories are whirring back to life right here at trinity at tpi composites where more than 300 workers are manufacturing turbine blades same thing elsewhere in this state and across america in 2000 energy technology represented just one half of one percent of all venture capital investments today it s more than 10 percent the recovery plan seeks to build on this progress and encourage even faster growth we re providing incentives to double our nation s capacity to generate renewable energy over the next few years extending the production tax credit providing loan guarantees offering grants to spur investment in new sources of renewable fuel and electricity my budget also invests 15 billion each year for 10 years to develop clean energy including wind power and solar power geothermal energy and clean coal technology and today i m announcing that my administration is taking another historic step through the department of interior we are establishing a program to authorize for the very first time the leasing of federal waters for projects to generate electricity from wind as well as from ocean currents and other renewable sources and this will open the door to major investments in offshore clean energy for example there is enormous interest in wind projects off the coasts of new jersey and delaware and today s announcement will enable these projects to move forward it s estimated that if we fully pursue our potential for wind energy on land and offshore wind can generate as much as 20 percent of our electricity by 2030 and create a quarter million jobs in the process 250 000 jobs in the process jobs that pay well and provide good benefits it s a win win it s good for the environment it s great for the economy even as we pursue renewable energy from the wind and the sun and other sources we also need a smarter stronger electricity grid some of you have been hearing about this this smart grid a grid that can carry energy from one end of this country to the other so when you guys are building these amazing towers and the turbines are going up and they re producing energy we ve got to make sure that energy produced in iowa can get to chicago energy produced in north dakota can get to milwaukee that s why we re making an 11 billion investment through the recovery plan to modernize the way we distribute electricity and as we re taking unprecedented steps to save energy and generate new kinds of energy for our homes and businesses we need to do the same for our cars and trucks right now two of america s iconic automakers are considering their future they re facing difficult challenges i m talking about chrysler and gm but one thing we know is that for automakers to succeed in the future these companies need to build the cars of the future they can t build the cars of the past yet for decades fuel economy and fuel economy standards have stagnated leaving american consumers vulnerable to the ebb and flow of gas prices when gas prices spike up like they did last summer suddenly the market for american cars plummets because we build suvs that s it it leaves the american economy ever more dependent on the supply of foreign oil we have to create the incentives for companies to develop the next generation of clean energy vehicles and for americans to drive them particularly as the u s auto industry moves forward on a historic restructuring that can position it for a more prosperous future and that s why my administration has begun to put in place higher fuel economy standards for the first time since the mid 1980s so our cars will get better mileage saving drivers money spurring companies to develop more innovative products the recovery act also includes 2 billion in competitive grants to develop the next generation of batteries for plug in hybrids we re planning to buy 17 600 american made fuel efficient cars and trucks for the government fleet and today vice president biden is announcing a clean cities grant program through the recovery act to help state and local governments purchase clean energy vehicles too we can clean up our environment and put people back to work in a strong u s auto industry but we ve got to have some imagination and we ve got to be bold we can t be looking backwards we ve got to look we ve got to look forward my budget is also making unprecedented investments in mass transit high speed rail and in our highway system to reduce the congestion that wastes money and time and energy we need to connect des moines to chicago with high speed rail all across the midwest that way you don t have to take off your shoes when you want to go visit chicago going through the airport my budget also invests in advanced biofuels and ethanol which as i ve said is an important transitional fuel to help us end our dependence on foreign oil while moving towards clean homegrown sources of energy and while we re creating the incentives for companies to develop these technologies we re also creating incentives for consumers to adapt to these new technologies so the recovery act includes a new credit new tax credit for up to 7 500 to encourage americans to buy more fuel efficient cars and trucks so if you guys are in the market to buy a car or truck check out that tax credit in addition innovation depends on innovators doing the research and testing the ideas that might not pay off in the short run some of them will be dead ends won t pay off at all but when taken together hold incredible potential over the long term and that s why my recovery plan includes the largest investment in basic research funding in american history and my budget includes a 10 year commitment to make the research and experimentation tax credit permanent that s a tax credit that returns 2 to the economy for every dollar we spend that young guy in the garage designing a new engine or a new battery that computer scientist who s imagining a new way of thinking about energy we need to fund them now fund them early because that s what america has always been about technology and innovation and this is only the beginning my administration will be pursuing comprehensive legislation to move towards energy independence and prevent the worst consequences of climate change while creating the incentives to make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in america now there s been some debate about this whole climate change issue but it s serious it could be a problem it could end up having an impact on farmers like rich if you re starting to see temperatures grow rise 1 2 3 percent have a profound impact on our lives and the fact is we place limits on pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide and other harmful emissions but we haven t placed any limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases it s what s called the carbon loophole now last week in response to a mandate from the united states supreme court the environmental protection agency determined that carbon dioxide and other tailpipe emissions are harmful to the health and well being of our people so there s no question that we have to regulate carbon pollution in some way the only question is how we do it i believe the best way to do it is through legislation that places a market based cap on these kinds of emissions and today key members of my administration are testifying in congress on a bill that seeks to enact exactly this kind of market based approach my hope is that this will be the vehicle through which we put this policy in effect and here s how a market based cap would work we d set a cap a ceiling on all the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that our economy is allowed to produce in total combining the emissions from cars and trucks coal fired power plants energy intensive industries all sources and by setting an overall cap carbon pollution becomes like a commodity it places a value on a limited resource and that is the ability to pollute and to determine that value just like any other traded commodity we d create a market where companies could buy and sell the right to produce a certain amount of carbon pollution and in this way every company can determine for itself whether it makes sense to spend the money to become cleaner or more efficient or to spend the money on a certain amount of allowable pollution over time as the cap on greenhouse gases is lowered the commodity becomes scarcer and the price goes up and year by year companies and consumers would have greater incentive to invest in clean energy and energy efficiency as the price of the status quo became more expensive what this does is it makes wind power more economical makes solar power more economical clean energy all becomes more economical and by closing the carbon loophole through this kind of market based cap we can address in a systematic way all the facets of the energy crisis we lower our dependence on foreign oil we reduce our use of fossil fuels we promote new industries right here in america we set up the right incentives so that everybody is moving in the same direction towards energy independence and as we pursue solutions through the public and private sectors we also need to remember that every american has a role to play this is not just a job for government you know some of you may remember during the campaign when gas was real high i suggested during the campaign that one small step americans could take would be to keep their tires inflated do you remember that everybody teased me they said oh look look that s obama s energy policy my opponents sent around tire gauges but i tell you what it turns out that saves you an awful lot of gas money in your pocket it also made sense for our energy use as a whole if everybody kept their tires inflated that would have a big dent it would produce as much oil savings as we might be pumping in some of these offshore sites by drilling so we ve got to get everybody involved in this process i don t accept the conventional wisdom that suggests that the american people are unable or unwilling to participate in a national effort to transform the way we use energy i don t believe that the only thing folks are capable of doing is just paying their taxes i disagree i think the american people are ready to be part of a mission i believe that it s not just keeping your tires inflated if each one of us replaced just one ordinary incandescent light bulb with one of those compact fluorescent light bulbs you know the swirly ones that could save enough energy to light 3 million homes just one light bulb each 3 million homes worth of energy savings that s just one small step so all of us are going to have to be involved in this process and like i said if you make the investment upfront you the individual consumer will save money in the long term and all of us collectively will be better off now this is also a global problem so it s going to require a global coalition to solve it if we ve got problems with climate change and the temperature rising all around the world that knows no boundaries and the decisions of any nation will affect every nation so next week i will be gathering leaders of major economies from all around the world to talk about how we can work together to address this energy crisis and this climate crisis truth is the united states has been slow to participate in this kind of a process working with other nations but those days are over now we are ready to engage and we re asking other nations to join us in tackling this challenge together all of these steps all of these steps we ve taken in just the first three months probably represents more progress than we ve achieved in three decades on the energy front we re beginning the difficult work of reducing our dependence on foreign oil we re beginning to break the bonds the grip that fossil fuels has on us we re beginning to create a new clean energy economy and the millions of jobs that will flow from it now there are those who still cling to the notion that we ought to just continue doing what we do that we can t change americans like to use a lot of energy that s just how we are that government has neither the responsibility nor the reason to address our dependence on energy sources even though they undermine our security and threaten our economy and endanger our planet and then there is this even more dangerous idea the idea that there s nothing we can do about it our politics is broken our people are unwilling to make hard choices so politicians decide look even though we know it s something that has to be done we re just going to put it off that s what happened for the last three four five decades everybody has known that we had to do something but nobody wanted to actually go ahead and do it because it s hard so the implication in this argument is that we ve somehow lost something important that perhaps because of the very prosperity we ve built over the course of generations that we ve given up that fighting american spirit that sense of optimism that willingness to tackle tough challenges that determination to see those challenges to the end the notion that we ve gotten soft somehow i reject that argument i reject it because of what you re doing right here at trinity what s happening right here in newton after folks have gone through hard times i reject it because of what i ve seen across this country in all the eyes of the people that i ve met in the stories that i ve heard in the factories i ve visited in the places where i ve seen the future being pieced together test by test trial by trial so it will not be easy there will be bumps along the road there will be costs for our nation and for each of us as individuals as i said before there s no magic bullet there s no perfect answer to our energy needs all of us are going to have to use energy more wisely but i know that we are ready and able to meet these challenges all of us are beneficiaries of a daring and innovative past our parents our grandparents our great grandparents adapted to much more difficult circumstances to deliver the prosperity that we enjoy today and i m confident that we can be and will be the benefactors of a brighter future for our children and grandchildren that can be our legacy a legacy of vehicles powered by clean renewable energy traveling past newly opened factories of industries employing millions of americans in the work of protecting our planet of an economy exporting the energy of the future instead of importing the energy of the past of a nation once again leading the world to meet the challenges of our time that s our future i hope you re willing to work with me to get there thank you very much god bless you god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama22 4 10a barack_obama hello everybody how are you this is a good looking crowd thank you so much everybody for coming today we celebrate 40 years of earth day now obviously earth has been around longer than that but we have been celebrating earth day for 40 years which was a bright moment in our nation s history and a milestone in the ongoing fight to protect our environment many of you know the history in 1970 a senator from wisconsin named gaylord nelson hired a young graduate student named dennis hayes who is with us today where s dennis there he is he still looks like a young graduate student and so dennis helped to coordinate the first earth day and together they raised their voices and called on every american to take action on behalf of our environment and in the four decades since millions of americans have heeded that call and joined together to protect the planet and we ve made immense progress since that day from the landmark legislation of the 1970s the clean air and the clean water act to the conservation of america s precious landscapes i know that many of you have played an important role at one stage or another in these victories and their impact can be felt today and will be felt tomorrow and as a parent i m grateful for the good fight that so many of you have fought because it means that i m going to be able to pass on to malia and sasha and maybe some grandchildren down the line this incredible bounty not only of the united states of america but the world as a whole and along the way earth day has become much more than a date on the calendar it s come to represent the simple truth that with each challenge comes the opportunity to make the world a better place so since taking office we have seized that opportunity with your help we ve made a historic investment in clean energy that will not only create the jobs of tomorrow but will also lay the foundation for long term economic growth we ve continued to invest in innovators and entrepreneurs who want to unleash the next wave of clean energy we ve strengthened our investment in our most precious resources the air we breathe the water we drink and the parks and public spaces that we enjoy and together we ve also renewed our commitment to passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill that will safeguard our planet and spur innovation and help us to compete in the 21st century so looking out into the rose garden today we see a lot of people who will help us achieve these goals the business owners who know that protecting our environment is good for business the members of congress who are helping to carry us along in the house and the senate the members of my green cabinet who are helping to shape the policies that we re fighting for and the environmental leaders who are on the ground fighting each and every day because they understand what s at stake so together you represent what i believe is most inspiring about earth day and that is the belief that each of us individually from different backgrounds and different walks of life have the capacity to make an enormous difference i think we all understand that the task ahead is daunting that the work ahead will not be easy and it s not going to happen overnight it s going to take your leadership it s going to take all of your ideas and it will take all of us coming together in the spirit of earth day not only on earth day but every day to make the dream of a clean energy economy and a clean world a reality i m confident though that we can do it and i want to thank all of you for your support your counsel your occasional grumbling and your dedication because without you we couldn t accomplish everything that needs to be accomplished so thank you very much everybody enjoy the rose garden thank you dem bobama22 4 10b barack_obama thank you very much everybody please have a seat thank you very much well thank you it is good to be back it is good to be back in new york it is good to be back in the great hall at cooper union we ve got some special guests here that i want to acknowledge congresswoman carolyn maloney is here in the house governor david paterson is here attorney general andrew cuomo state comptroller thomas dinapoli is here the mayor of new york city michael bloomberg dr george campbell jr president of cooper union and all the citywide elected officials who are here thank you very much for your attendance it is wonderful to be back in cooper union where generations of leaders and citizens have come to defend their ideas and contest their differences it s also good to be back in lower manhattan a few blocks from wall street it really is good to be back because wall street is the heart of our nation s financial sector now since i last spoke here two years ago our country has been through a terrible trial more than 8 million people have lost their jobs countless small businesses have had to shut their doors trillions of dollars in savings have been lost forcing seniors to put off retirement young people to postpone college entrepreneurs to give up on the dream of starting a company and as a nation we were forced to take unprecedented steps to rescue the financial system and the broader economy and as a result of the decisions we made some of which let s face it were very unpopular we are seeing hopeful signs a little more than one year ago we were losing an average of 750 000 jobs each month today america is adding jobs again one year ago the economy was shrinking rapidly today the economy is growing in fact we ve seen the fastest turnaround in growth in nearly three decades but you re here and i m here because we ve got more work to do until this progress is felt not just on wall street but on main street we cannot be satisfied until the millions of our neighbors who are looking for work can find a job and wages are growing at a meaningful pace we may be able to claim a technical recovery but we will not have truly recovered and even as we seek to revive this economy it s also incumbent on us to rebuild it stronger than before we don t want an economy that has the same weaknesses that led to this crisis and that means addressing some of the underlying problems that led to this turmoil and devastation in the first place now one of the most significant contributors to this recession was a financial crisis as dire as any we ve known in generations at least since the 30s and that crisis was born of a failure of responsibility from wall street all the way to washington that brought down many of the world s largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second great depression it was that failure of responsibility that i spoke about when i came to new york more than two years ago before the worst of the crisis had unfolded it was back in 2007 and i take no satisfaction in noting that my comments then have largely been borne out by the events that followed but i repeat what i said then because it is essential that we learn the lessons from this crisis so we don t doom ourselves to repeat it and make no mistake that is exactly what will happen if we allow this moment to pass and that s an outcome that is unacceptable to me and it s unacceptable to you the american people as i said on this stage two years ago i believe in the power of the free market i believe in a strong financial sector that helps people to raise capital and get loans and invest their savings that s part of what has made america what it is but a free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get however you can get it that s what happened too often in the years leading up to this crisis some and let me be clear not all but some on wall street forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged there s family looking to buy a house or pay for an education open a business save for retirement what happens on wall street has real consequences across the country across our economy i ve spoken before about the need to build a new foundation for economic growth in the 21st century and given the importance of the financial sector wall street reform is an absolutely essential part of that foundation without it our house will continue to sit on shifting sands and our families businesses and the global economy will be vulnerable to future crises that s why i feel so strongly that we need to enact a set of updated commonsense rules to ensure accountability on wall street and to protect consumers in our financial system now here s the good news a comprehensive plan to achieve these reforms has already passed the house of representatives a senate version is currently being debated drawing on ideas from democrats and republicans both bills represent significant improvement on the flawed rules that we have in place today despite the furious effort of industry lobbyists to shape this legislation to their special interests and for those of you in the financial sector i m sure that some of these lobbyists work for you and they re doing what they are being paid to do but i m here today specifically when i speak to the titans of industry here because i want to urge you to join us instead of fighting us in this effort i m here because i believe that these reforms are in the end not only in the best interest of our country but in the best interest of the financial sector and i m here to explain what reform will look like and why it matters now first the bill being considered in the senate would create what we did not have before and that is a way to protect the financial system and the broader economy and american taxpayers in the event that a large financial firm begins to fail if there s a lehmans or an aig how can we respond in a way that doesn t force taxpayers to pick up the tab or alternatively could bring down the whole system in an ordinary local bank when it approaches insolvency we ve got a process an orderly process through the fdic that ensures that depositors are protected maintains confidence in the banking system and it works customers and taxpayers are protected and owners and management lose their equity but we don t have that kind of process designed to contain the failure of a lehman brothers or any of the largest and most interconnected financial firms in our country that s why when this crisis began crucial decisions about what would happen to some of the world s biggest companies companies employing tens of thousands of people and holding hundreds of billions of dollars in assets had to take place in hurried discussions in the middle of the night and that s why to save the entire economy from an even worse catastrophe we had to deploy taxpayer dollars now much of that money has now been paid back and my administration has proposed a fee to be paid by large financial firms to recover all the money every dime because the american people should never have been put in that position in the first place but this is why we need a system to shut these firms down with the least amount of collateral damage to innocent people and innocent businesses and from the start i ve insisted that the financial industry not taxpayers shoulder the costs in the event that a large financial company should falter the goal is to make certain that taxpayers are never again on the hook because a firm is deemed too big to fail now there s a legitimate debate taking place about how best to ensure taxpayers are held harmless in this process and that s a legitimate debate and i encourage that debate but what s not legitimate is to suggest that somehow the legislation being proposed is going to encourage future taxpayer bailouts as some have claimed that makes for a good sound bite but it s not factually accurate it is not true in fact the system as it stands the system as it stands is what led to a series of massive costly taxpayer bailouts and it s only with reform that we can avoid a similar outcome in the future in other words a vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer funded bailouts that s the truth end of story and nobody should be fooled in this debate by the way these changes have the added benefit of creating incentives within the industry to ensure that no one company can ever threaten to bring down the whole economy to that end the bill would also enact what s known as the volcker rule and there s a tall guy sitting in the front row here paul volcker who we named it after and it does something very simple it places some limits on the size of banks and the kinds of risks that banking institutions can take this will not only safeguard our system against crises this will also make our system stronger and more competitive by instilling confidence here at home and across the globe markets depend on that confidence part of what led to the turmoil of the past two years was that in the absence of clear rules and sound practices people didn t trust that our system was one in which it was safe to invest or lend as we ve seen that harms all of us so by enacting these reforms we ll help ensure that our financial system and our economy continues to be the envy of the world that s the first thing making sure that we can wind down one firm if it gets into trouble without bringing the whole system down or forcing taxpayers to fund a bailout number two reform would bring new transparency to many financial markets as you know part of what led to this crisis was firms like aig and others who were making huge and risky bets using derivatives and other complicated financial instruments in ways that defied accountability or even common sense in fact many practices were so opaque so confusing so complex that the people inside the firms didn t understand them much less those who were charged with overseeing them they weren t fully aware of the massive bets that were being placed that s what led warren buffett to describe derivatives that were bought and sold with little oversight as financial weapons of mass destruction that s what he called them and that s why reform will rein in excess and help ensure that these kinds of transactions take place in the light of day now there s been a great deal of concern about these changes so i want to reiterate there is a legitimate role for these financial instruments in our economy they can help allay risk and spur investment and there are a lot of companies that use these instruments to that legitimate end they are managing exposure to fluctuating prices or currencies fluctuating markets for example a business might hedge against rising oil prices by buying a financial product to secure stable fuel costs so an airlines might have an interest in locking in a decent price that s how markets are supposed to work the problem is these markets operated in the shadows of our economy invisible to regulators invisible to the public so reckless practices were rampant risks accrued until they threatened our entire financial system and that s why these reforms are designed to respect legitimate activities but prevent reckless risk taking that s why we want to ensure that financial products like standardized derivatives are traded out in the open in the full view of businesses investors and those charged with oversight and i was encouraged to see a republican senator join with democrats this week in moving forward on this issue that s a good sign that s a good sign for without action we ll continue to see what amounts to highly leveraged loosely monitored gambling in our financial system putting taxpayers and the economy in jeopardy and the only people who ought to fear the kind of oversight and transparency that we re proposing are those whose conduct will fail this scrutiny third this plan would enact the strongest consumer financial protections ever and that s absolutely necessary because this financial crisis wasn t just the result of decisions made in the executive suites on wall street it was also the result of decisions made around kitchen tables across america by folks who took on mortgages and credit cards and auto loans and while it s true that many americans took on financial obligations that they knew or should have known they could not have afforded millions of others were frankly duped they were misled by deceptive terms and conditions buried deep in the fine print and while a few companies made out like bandits by exploiting their customers our entire economy was made more vulnerable millions of people have now lost their homes tens of millions more have lost value in their homes just about every sector of our economy has felt the pain whether you re paving driveways in arizona or selling houses in ohio or you re doing home repairs in california or you re using your home equity to start a small business in florida that s why we need to give consumers more protection and more power in our financial system this is not about stifling competition stifling innovation it s just the opposite with a dedicated agency setting ground rules and looking out for ordinary people in our financial system we will empower consumers with clear and concise information when they re making financial decisions so instead of competing to offer confusing products companies will compete the old fashioned way by offering better products and that will mean more choices for consumers more opportunities for businesses and more stability in our financial system and unless your business model depends on bilking people there is little to fear from these new rules number four the last key component of reform these wall street reforms will give shareholders new power in the financial system they will get what we call a say on pay a voice with respect to the salaries and bonuses awarded to top executives and the sec will have the authority to give shareholders more say in corporate elections so that investors and pension holders have a stronger role in determining who manages the company in which they ve placed their savings now americans don t begrudge anybody for success when that success is earned but when we read in the past and sometimes in the present about enormous executive bonuses at firms even as they re relying on assistance from taxpayers or they re taking huge risks that threaten the system as a whole or their company is doing badly it offends our fundamental values not only that some of the salaries and bonuses that we ve seen creates perverse incentives to take reckless risks that contributed to the crisis it s what helped lead to a relentless focus on a company s next quarter to the detriment of its next year or its next decade and it led to a situation in which folks with the most to lose stock and pension holders had the least to say in the process and that has to change let me close by saying this i have laid out a set of wall street reforms these are reforms that would put an end to taxpayer bailouts that would bring complex financial dealings out of the shadows that would protect consumers and that would give shareholders more power in the financial system but let s face it we also need reform in washington and the debate the debate over these changes is a perfect example i mean we have seen battalions of financial industry lobbyists descending on capitol hill firms spending millions to influence the outcome of this debate we ve seen misleading arguments and attacks that are designed not to improve the bill but to weaken or to kill it we ve seen a bipartisan process buckle under the weight of these withering forces even as weve produced a proposal that by all accounts is a commonsense reasonable non ideological approach to target the root problems that led to the turmoil in our financial sector and ultimately in our entire economy so we ve seen business as usual in washington but i believe we can and must put this kind of cynical politics aside we ve got to put an end to it that s why i m here today that s why i m here today and to those of you who are in the financial sector let me say this we will not always see eye to eye we will not always agree but that doesn t mean that we ve got to choose between two extremes we do not have to choose between markets that are unfettered by even modest protections against crisis or markets that are stymied by onerous rules that suppress enterprise and innovation that is a false choice and we need no more proof than the crisis that we ve just been through you see there has always been a tension between the desire to allow markets to function without interference and the absolute necessity of rules to prevent markets from falling out of kilter but managing that tension one that we ve debated since the founding of this nation is what has allowed our country to keep up with a changing world for in taking up this debate in figuring out how to apply well worn principles with each new age we ensure that we don t tip too far one way or the other that our democracy remains as dynamic and our economy remains as dynamic as it has in the past so yes this debate can be contentious it can be heated but in the end it serves only to make our country stronger it has allowed us to adapt and to thrive and i read a report recently that i think fairly illustrates this point it s from time magazine i m going to quote through the great banking houses of manhattan last week ran wild eyed alarm big bankers stared at one another in anger and astonishment a bill just passed would rivet upon their institutions what they considered a monstrous system such a system they felt would not only rob them of their pride of profession but would reduce all u s banking to its lowest level that appeared in time magazine in june of 1933 the system that caused so much consternation so much concern was the federal deposit insurance corporation also known as the fdic an institution that has successfully secured the deposits of generations of americans in the end our system only works our markets are only free when there are basic safeguards that prevent abuse that check excesses that ensure that it is more profitable to play by the rules than to game the system and that is what the reforms we ve been proposing are designed to achieve no more no less and because that is how we will ensure that our economy works for consumers that it works for investors and that it works for financial institutions in other words that it works for all of us that s why we re working so hard to get this stuff passed this is the central lesson not only of this crisis but of our history it s what i said when i spoke here two years ago because ultimately there is no dividing line between main street and wall street we will rise or we will fall together as one nation and that is why i urge all of you to join me i urge all of you to join me to join those who are seeking to pass these commonsense reforms and for those of you in the financial industry i urge you to join me not only because it is in the interest of your industry but also because it s in the interest of your country thank you so much god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama22 5 09a barack_obama hello everybody please have a seat i m sorry it is a great pleasure to have all of you here at the white house on this gorgeous sunny day the sun is shining the birds are singing change is in the air this has been a historic week a week in which we ve cast aside some old divisions and put in place new reforms that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil prevent fraud against homeowners and save taxpayers money by preventing wasteful government contracts a week that marks significant progress in the difficult work of changing our policies and transforming our politics but the real test of change ultimately is whether it makes a difference in the lives of the american people that s what matters to me that s what matters to my administration that s what matters to the extraordinary collection of members of congress that are standing with me here but also who are in the audience and we re here today because of a bill that will make a big difference the credit card accountability responsibility and disclosure act i want to thank all the members of congress who were involved in this historic legislation but i want to give a special shout out to chris dodd who has been a relentless fighter to get this done chris wouldn t give up until he got this legislation passed he s spent an entire career fighting against special interests and fighting for ordinary people and this is just the latest example i want to thank his partner in crime senator richard shelby on the house side representatives barney frank carolyn maloney and luis gutierrez for their outstanding work and i want to also thank all the consumer advocates who are here today who fought long and hard for these kinds of reforms you know most americans use credit cards all the time in the majority of cases this is a convenience or a temporary occasional crutch a means to make life a little easier to make the rare large or unexpected purchase that s paid off as quickly as possible we ve also seen credit cards become for a minority of customers part of an uneasy unstable dependence some end up in trouble because of reckless spending or wishful thinking some get in over their heads by not using their heads and i want to be clear we do not excuse or condone folks who ve acted irresponsibly we don t excuse irresponsibility but the reason this legislation is so important is because there are many others many who have written me letters or grabbed my arm along rope lines or shared their stories while choking back tears who relied on credit cards not because they were avoiding responsibilities but precisely because they wanted to meet their responsibilities and got trapped these are hardworking people whose hours were cut or the factory closed who turned to a credit card to get through a rough month which turned into two or three or six months without a job these are parents who found to their surprise that their health insurance didn t cover a child s expensive procedure and had to pay the hospital bill families who saw their mortgage payments jump and used the credit card more often to make up the difference these are borrowers who discovered that credit card debt is all too easily a one way street it s easy to get in but almost impossible to get out it s also by the way a lot of small business owners who have helped to finance their dream through credit cards and suddenly in this economic downturn find themselves getting hammered part of this is the broader economy but part of it is the practices of credit card companies contracts are drafted not to inform but to confuse mysterious fees appear on statements payment deadlines shift terms change interest rates rise and suddenly a credit card becomes less of a lifeline and more of an anchor that s what happened to janet hard of freeland michigan who s here today where s janet right here janet is a nurse her husband is a pipefitter they ve got two boys janet and her husband have tried to be responsible she s made her payments on time but despite this janet s interest rate was increased to 24 percent and that 24 percent applied not just for new purchases but retroactively to her entire balance and so despite making steady payments totaling 2 400 one year her debt went down only by 350 that year and janet s family is not alone over the past decade credit card debt has increased by 25 percent in our country nearly half of all americans carry a balance on their cards those who do carry an average balance of more than 7 000 and as our economic situation worsened and many defaulted on their debt as a result of a lost job for example a vicious cycle ensued borrowers couldn t pay their bills and so lenders raised rates as rates went up more borrowers couldn t pay millions of cardholders have seen their interest rates jump in just the past six months one in five americans carry a balance that has been charged interest rates above 20 percent one in five i also want to emphasize these are costs that often hit responsible credit card users interest can be charged even if you pay your bill on time rates can be increased on outstanding balances even if you aren t late with a payment and if you sit if you start to pay down your balance which is the right thing to do a company can require you to pay down the debt with the lowest interest rate first instead of the highest which makes it much harder to ever get out of the red so we re here to put a change to all that with this bill we re putting in place some common sense reforms designed to protect consumers like janet i want to be clear about this credit card companies provide a valuable service we don t begrudge them turning a profit we just want to make sure that they do so while upholding basic standards of fairness transparency and accountability just as we demand credit card users to act responsibly we demand that credit card companies act responsibly too and that s not too much to ask and that s why because of this new law statements will be required to tell credit card holders how long it will take to pay off a balance and what it will cost in interest if they only make the minimum monthly payments we also put a stop to retroactive rate hikes that appear on a bill suddenly with no rhyme or reason every card company will have to post its credit card agreements online and we ll monitor those agreements to see if new protections are needed consumers will have more time to understand their statements as well companies will have to mail them 21 days before payment is due not 14 and this law ends the practice of shifting payment dates this always used to bug me when you d get like suddenly it was due on the 19th when it had been the 31st lastly among many other provisions there will be no more sudden charges changes to terms and conditions we require at least 45 days notice if the credit card company is going to change terms and conditions so we re not going to give people a free pass we expect consumers to live within their means and pay what they owe but we also expect financial institutions to act with the same sense of responsibility that the american people aspire to in their own lives and this is a difficult time for our country born in many ways of our collective failure to live up to our obligations to ourselves and to one another and the fact is it took a long time to dig ourselves into this economic hole it s going to take some time to dig ourselves out but i m heartened by what i m seeing by the willingness of old adversaries to seek out new partnerships by the progress we ve made these past months to address many of our toughest challenges and i m confident that as a nation we will learn the lessons of our recent past and that we will elevate again those values at the heart of our success as a people hard work over the easy buck responsibility over recklessness and yes moderation over extravagance this work has already begun and now it continues i thank the members of congress for putting their shoulder to the wheel in a bipartisan fashion and getting this piece of legislation done congratulations to all of you the least i can do for you is to sign the thing all right everybody thank you have a great weekend dem bobama22 5 09b barack_obama thank you so much thank you thank you very much please be seated governor o malley thank you for your generous introduction and for your leadership here in maryland vice admiral fowler and faculty distinguished guests parents family and friends the brigade of midshipmen and most importantly the graduates of the class of 2009 seven hundred and fifty six navy and i am told the largest number of marines in naval academy history now i know it s customary at graduation for guests to bring a gift and i have all midshipmen on restriction for minor conduct offenses are hereby officially absolved i did say minor midshipmen i m told that the extra ribbon on your chest is for the honor you earned for only the second time in the storied history of the naval academy the navy s meritorious unit commendation award so i ve consulted with admiral fowler and i can make this announcement for all you midshipmen returning next fall i hereby grant you something extra an extra weekend i should stop now i am extraordinarily honored to be with you today because of all the privileges of serving as president i have no greater honor than serving as your commander in chief every day i count on naval academy graduates like admiral mike mullen the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff the cno admiral gary roughead and my director of national intelligence admiral dennis blair i ll also be counting on ray mabus a former surface warfare officer as our new secretary of the navy every day i rely on former sailors and marines on my staff young men who served as intelligence officers in iraq and afghanistan and the 32nd commandant of the marine corps supreme allied commander and now my national security advisor general jim jones i ve admired your prowess on the football field at the white house last month i was proud to present the team and coach ken with the commander in chief trophy which you won for the sixth straight time and i know you beat army seven straight times but most of all most of all i ve admired the spirit of your service because it s not the strength of our arms or the power of our technology that gives the united states our military dominance it s our people it s our sailors and marines soldiers and airmen and coast guardsmen who perform brilliantly in every mission we give them and class of 2009 today is your day it s your day to reflect on all you ve achieved or should i say all that you endured the madness of i day that began your transformation from civilians to sailors and marines that endless plebe summer when you were pushed to new levels new heights physically mentally morally and speaking of new heights i m told that one of your proudest achievements still stands one of the fastest times for the herndon climb congratulations on that and families today is your day too it s the latest in a line of proud firsts the first time you saw your son or daughter with that navy haircut that first time you saw them in their summer whites and today the first time you ll see them as officers so to all of you moms and dads brothers and sisters aunts and uncles grandmas and grandpas and all the local sponsor families who opened your homes to these midshipmen thank you for your support and for your patriotism we are grateful this class is about to become the latest link in a long unbroken chain of heroism and victory a chain forged in battles whose names are etched in the stone of this stadium from coral sea to midway to guadalcanal from iwo jima to inchon from the mekong delta to desert storm for some among us these are not just places on a map they re the stories of their lives and we honor all of our veterans here today this chain of service calls to mind words that were spoken here in annapolis on another spring day a century ago the crowds assembled the bands played the cannons roared as john paul jones body was carried to the yard president teddy roosevelt spoke to the midshipmen gathered there that day remember he said our words of admiration are but as sounding brass and tinkling symbols if we do not prepare to emulate their deeds emulate their deeds that is what you are called upon to do and in doing so these past four years you ve not only given meaning to your own lives you serve as a reminder and a challenge to your fellow americans to fulfill the true meaning of citizenship america look at these young men and women look at these sailors and marines here are the values that we cherish here are the ideals that endure in an era when too few citizens answer the call to service to community or to country these americans choose to serve they did so in a time of war knowing they might be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice indeed as we near memorial day we pay tribute to all those who have given their lives so that we might live free including those aboard that navy helicopter who were lost this week in the waters off california we send our prayers to their families and to all who loved them in a culture where so many chase the outward markers of success that can so often lead us astray the titles and status the materialism and money the fame and popularity these americans have embraced the virtues that we need most right now self discipline over self interest work over comfort and character over celebrity after an era when so many institutions and individuals acted with such greed and recklessness it s no wonder that our military remains the most trusted institution in our nation and in a world when so many forces and voices seek to divide us it inspires us that this class came together and succeeded together from every state and every corner of the world by building an institution that s more diverse than ever more women more hispanics more african americans the naval academy has reaffirmed a fundamental american truth that out of many we are one we see these values in every one of these sailors and marines including those who have already served their country the dozens among you with prior enlisted service it s the perseverance of elvin vasquez a marine supply chief in iraq who finally got into the naval academy on his third try who never gave up trying because he says there s just something about being a marine it s the example of carlos carbello who left the tough streets of l a to serve on a destroyer in the pacific and who has used his time here to mentor others because he s the oldest midshipman the old man at the age of 26 it s the patriotism of sade holder who came to america as a child from trinidad enlisted in the navy and then earned the titles she values most u s citizen and navy midshipman and today ensign and it s the reverence for tradition shown by james p heg a communications a communications maintenance marine in iraq who today is joined by the man who first urged him to sign up his grandfather returning six decades after he was a midshipman a submariner from world war ii 89 year old captain james e heg honor courage commitment these are the values that have defined your years in the yard and that you ll need in the years ahead as you join the fleet and as you join and lead the marines as you confront the ever changing threats of an ever changing world for history teaches us that the nations that grow comfortable with the old ways and complacent in the face of new threats those nations do not long endure and in the 21st century we do not have the luxury of deciding which challenges to prepare for and which to ignore we must overcome the full spectrum of threats the conventional and the unconventional the nation state and the terrorist network the spread of deadly technologies and the spread of hateful ideologies 18th century style piracy and 21st century cyber threats so seals and special operations forces we need you for those short notice missions in the dark of night but we ll also need you for the long term training of foreign militaries so they can take responsibility for their own security marines we need you to defeat the insurgent and the extremist but we also need you to work with the tribal sheikh and local leaders from anbar to kandahar who want to build a better future for their people naval aviators and flight officers we need you to dominate the airspace in times of conflict but also to deliver food and medicine in times of humanitarian crisis and surface warfare officers and submariners we need you to project american power across the vast oceans but also to protect american principles and values when you pull into that foreign port because for so many people around the world you are the face of america these great opportunities come with great responsibilities indeed midshipmen and presidents swear a similar oath not only to protect and defend the american people but the constitution of the united states yesterday i visited the national archives and the halls that holds our constitution our declaration of independence and our bill of rights i went there because as our national debate on how to deal with the security challenge that we face proceeds we must remember this enduring truth the values and ideals in those documents are not simply words written into aging parchment they are the bedrock of our liberty and our security we uphold our fundamental principles and values not just because we choose to but because we swear to not because they feel good but because they help keep us safe and keep us true to who we are because when america strays from our values it not only undermines the rule of law it alienates us from our allies it energizes our adversaries and it endangers our national security and the lives of our troops so as americans we reject the false choice between our security and our ideals we can and we must and we will protect both and that is just what you will pledge to do in a few moments when you raise your right hand and take your oath but that simple act by that simple act you will accept a life of great sacrifice long deployments separation from loved ones tests and trials that most americans can t imagine but that is the oath you take the life you choose the promise you make to america and today this is the promise i make to you it s a promise that as long as i am your commander in chief i will only send you into harm s way when it is absolutely necessary and with the strategy and the well defined goals the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done this includes the job of bringing the iraq war to a responsible end and pursuing a new comprehensive strategy to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda and its allies in afghanistan and pakistan and to get you the support you need we re enlisting all elements of our national power our diplomacy and development our economic might and our moral suasion so that you and the rest of our military do not bear the burden of our security alone we ll also ensure you can meet the missions of today which is why we ve halted reductions in navy personnel and increased the size of the marine corps and we will ensure you can meet the missions of tomorrow which is why we re investing in the capabilities and technologies of tomorrow the littoral combat ships the most advanced submarines and fighter aircraft so that you have what you need to succeed in short we will maintain america s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen now as you advance through the ranks and start families of your own know that we will be with you every step of the way increasing your pay increasing child care and helping families deal with the stress and separation of war because as my wife michelle has come to see in her visits with military families across the country when a loved one is deployed the whole family goes to war and finally whether you re 26 years old or 89 if you ve worn the uniform and taken care of america then america will take care of you with a modern va that keeps faith with our veterans and wounded warriors with a 21st century gi bill that gives our veterans and their families the chance to live out their dreams this is america s covenant with you a solemn commitment to all those who serve and while our nation has not always fulfilled its duties to its armed forces let there be no doubt america s men and women in uniform have always fulfilled theirs and that s exactly what america s navy did just last month in the seas off somalia i will not recount the full story of those five days in april much of it is already known some of it will never be known and that s how it should be but here on this day at this institution it must be said the extraordinary precision and professionalism displayed that day was made possible in no small measure by the training the discipline and the leadership skills that so many of those officers learned at the united states naval academy and after that operation after captain phillips was freed i spoke to one of the navy seals who was there and with the skipper of the uss bainbridge commander frank castellano naval academy class of 1990 and i can tell you as they would that the success of that day belongs not only to a single commander or a small team of seals it belongs to the many it belongs to all the sailors officers and enlisted not on one ship but several who diligently stood their watch it belongs to the pilots and airmen who gave cover overhead to the intelligence specialists and negotiators and translators to all the people who worked day after night on the scene and in command centers half a world away to save one man they knew only as a fellow american and we recall that in those moments of danger and decision these americans did what they were trained to do they remembered their skills they did their duty they performed their job they stood their watch they took their time and then they took their shot and they brought that captain home and as commander castellano said later of his sailors every citizen in the country should be happy and thankful that they re there and i told him that we are so class of 2009 months or years or decades from now should you find yourself in a moment of danger a moment of decision and should you wonder what is expected of me what should i do just look at that ring on your finger remember your days on the bank of the severn remember all you achieved here and all that you learned here devotion to honor strength from courage live these values live these virtues emulate the deeds of those who have gone before you do this and you will not only distinguish yourselves as sailors and marines you will be in the lead as we write the next proud chapter in the story of this country that we love congratulations class of 2009 god bless the navy god bless the marine corps and god bless the united states of america dem bobama22 5 09c barack_obama good morning everybody please have a seat well long before i took office i argued that meeting our greatest challenges would require not only changing policies in washington but changing the way we do business in washington it would require reforming a culture where the influence of lobbyists too often trumps the will of the people rethinking government so that it works as effectively and efficiently as possible and renewing our sense of common purpose so that we can bring people together in common effort that s exactly what we ve done this week on tuesday we brought auto executives labor unions environmental groups democrats and republicans together to set a national fuel efficiency standard for our cars and trucks for the first time in history on wednesday i signed bipartisan legislation to help homeowners and to crack down on the predatory lenders who seek to take advantage of them and later this afternoon i ll sign bipartisan legislation that protects consumers from the unfair rate hikes and abusive fees levied by many credit card companies and this morning i m proud to join democratic and republican members of congress for the signing of a bill that will eliminate some of the waste and inefficiency in our defense projects reforms that will better protect our nation better protect our troops and save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars now let me be clear as commander in chief i will do whatever it takes to defend the american people which is why i ve increased funding for the best military in the history of the world we ll continue to make new investments in 21st century capabilities to meet new challenges and we will always give our men and women in uniform the equipment and the support that they need to get the job done but i reject the notion that we have to waste billions of taxpayer dollars to keep this nation secure when it comes to purchasing weapons systems and developing defense projects the choice we face is between investments that are designed to keep the american people safe and those that are simply designed to make a defense company or a contractor rich last year the government accountability office or the gao looked into 95 major defense projects and found cost overruns that totaled 295 billion wasteful spending comes from exotic requirements lack of oversight and indefensible no bid contracts that don t make our troops or our country any safer to put this in perspective these cost overruns would have paid our troops salaries and provided benefits for their families for more than a year at a time when we re fighting two wars and facing a serious deficit this is unexcusable and unconscionable as secretary gates has said one dollar of waste in our defense budget is a dollar we can t spend to support our troops or prepare for future threats or protect the american people well it s finally time to end this waste and inefficiency already i ve announced reform that will greatly reduce no bid defense contracts and save the government billions of dollars and secretary gates working with our military leadership has also proposed a courageous set of reforms in our defense budget that will target waste and strengthen our military for the future in taking on this enormously difficult task he s done a tremendous job and i want to publicly commend secretary gates for that the bill i m signing today known as the weapons system acquisition reforms act represents an important next step in this procurement reform process it reforms a system where taxpayers are charged too much for weapons systems that too often arrive late a system that suffers from spending on unproven technologies outdated weapons and a general lack of oversight the purpose of this law will be to limit cost overruns before they spiral out of control it will strengthen oversight and accountability by appointing officials who will be charged with closely monitoring the weapons systems we re purchasing to ensure that costs are controlled if the cost of certain defense projects continue to grow year after year those projects will be closely reviewed and if they don t provide the value we need they will be terminated this law will also enhance competition and end conflicts of interest in the weapons acquisitions process so that american taxpayers and the american military can get the best weapons at the lowest cost and this legislation is long overdue and it s been a long time coming but we re finally signing it into law because of the dedication and commitment of a few key members of congress who ve been fighting for years for this reform senators carl levin and john mccain representatives ike skelton john mchugh rob andrews and mike conaway i m very proud of the extraordinary work that all these gentlemen have done who are standing behind me today senator mccain couldn t be here today because he s making sure he has a good seat to watch his son graduate from the naval academy in a few hours and that s where i m headed as soon as i catch my ride over here but i will tell you that defense procurement reform was one of the issues that john mccain and i discussed in our first meeting after the election we pledged to work together to get it done and today i m extraordinarily proud to stand here and sign a bill that passed with unanimous support from both parties at every step of the way what all the gentlemen standing behind me as well as senator mccain knows what secretary gates knows what all members of congress who have worked on this legislation understand is that we have no greater responsibility than to ensure that our men and women in uniform have everything they need to do their jobs and every penny we waste on this effort because of no bid contracts or cost overruns is not only an affront to american taxpayers it s an affront to our military and while we have a long way to go to end this waste once and for all the legislation i m about to sign is a very important step in creating a government that is more efficient more accountable and more responsible in keeping the public s trust so once again i want to thank all these members of congress who did extraordinary work not only to pass the bill but to get it here on time i m proud of them i m proud of congress for sending me this legislation that s why i m going to go sign it right now thank you very much dem bobama22 5 10 barack_obama thank you thank you thank you thank you please be seated thank you very much good morning it is wonderful to be back at the united states military academy the oldest continuously occupied military post in america as we commission the newest officers in the united states army thank you general hagenbeck for your introduction on a day that holds special meaning for you and the dean general finnegan both of you first came to west point in the class of 1971 and went on to inspire soldiers under your command you ve led this academy to a well deserved recognition best college in america and today you re both looking forward to a well deserved retirement from the army general hagenbeck and judy general finnegan and joan we thank you for 39 years of remarkable service to the army and to america to the commandant general rapp the academy staff and faculty most of whom are veterans thank you for your service and for inspiring these cadets to become the leaders of character they are today let me also acknowledge the presence of general shinseki secretary mchugh the members of congress who are with us here today including two former soldiers this academy knows well senator jack reed and congressman patrick murphy to all the families here especially all the moms and dads this day is a tribute to you as well the decision to come to west point was made by your sons and daughters but it was you who instilled in them a spirit of service that has led them to this hallowed place in a time of war so on behalf of the american people thank you for your example and thank you for your patriotism to the united states corps of cadets and most of all the class of 2010 it is a singular honor to serve as your commander in chief as your superintendent indicated under our constitutional system my power as president is wisely limited but there are some areas where my power is absolute and so as your commander in chief i hereby absolve all cadets who are on restriction for minor conduct offenses i will leave the definition of minor to those who know better class of 2010 today is your day a day to celebrate all that you ve achieved in the finest tradition of the soldier scholar and to look forward to the important service that lies ahead you have pushed yourself through the agony of beast barracks the weeks of training in rain and mud and i m told more inspections and drills than perhaps any class before you along the way i m sure you faced a few moments when you asked yourself what am i doing here i have those moments sometimes you ve trained for the complexities of today s missions knowing that success will be measured not merely by performance on the battlefield but also by your understanding of the cultures and traditions and languages in the place where you serve you ve reached out across borders with more international experience than any class in academy history you ve not only attended foreign academies to forge new friendships you ve welcomed into your ranks cadets from nearly a dozen countries you ve challenged yourself intellectually in the sciences and the humanities in history and technology you ve achieved a standard of academic excellence that is without question tying the record for the most post graduate scholarships of any class in west point history this includes your number one overall cadet and your valedictorian liz betterbed and alex rosenberg and by the way this is the first time in academy history where your two top awards have been earned by female candidates this underscores a fact that i ve seen in the faces of our troops from baghdad to bagram in the 21st century our women in uniform play an indispensable role in our national defense and time and again they have proven themselves to be role models for our daughters and our sons as students and as soldiers and as leaders in the united states armed forces and the faces in this stadium show a simple truth america s army represents the full breadth of america s experience you come from every corner of our country from privilege and from poverty from cities and small towns you worship all of the great religions that enrich the life of our people you include the vast diversity of race and ethnicity that is fundamental to our nation s strength there is however one thing that sets you apart here in these quiet hills you ve come together to prepare for the most difficult test of our time you signed up knowing your service would send you into harm s way and you did so long after the first drums of war were sounded in you we see the commitment of our country and timeless virtues that have served our nation well we see your sense of duty including those who have earned their right shoulder patch their right shoulder combat patches like the soldier who suffered a grenade wound in iraq yet still helped his fellow soldiers to evacuate your first captain of the corps of cadets tyler gordy we see your sense of honor in your respect for tradition knowing that you join a long grey line that stretches through the centuries and in your reverence for each other as when the corps stands in silence every time a former cadet makes the ultimate sacrifice for our nation indeed today we honor the 78 graduates of this academy who have given their lives for our freedom and our security in iraq and afghanistan and we see your love of country a devotion to america captured in the motto you chose as a class a motto which will guide your lives of service loyal til the end duty honor love of country everything you have learned here all that you ve achieved here has prepared you for today when you raise your right hand when you take that oath when your loved one or mentor pins those gold bars on your shoulders when you become at long last commissioned officers in the united states army this is the ninth consecutive commencement that has taken place at west point with our nation at war this time of war began in afghanistan a place that may seem as far away from this peaceful bend in the hudson river as anywhere on earth the war began only because our own cities and civilians were attacked by violent extremists who plotted from a distant place and it continues only because that plotting persists to this day for many years our focus was on iraq and year after year our troops faced a set of challenges there that were as daunting as they were complex a lesser army might have seen its spirit broken but the american military is more resilient than that our troops adapted they persisted they partnered with coalition and iraqi counterparts and through their competence and creativity and courage we are poised to end our combat mission in iraq this summer even as we transition to an iraqi lead and bring our troops home our commitment to the iraqi people endures we will continue to advise and assist iraqi security forces who are already responsible for security in most of the country and a strong american civilian presence will help iraqis forge political and economic progress this will not be a simple task but this is what success looks like an iraq that provides no haven to terrorists a democratic iraq that is sovereign and stable and self reliant and as we end the war in iraq though we are pressing forward in afghanistan six months ago i came to west point to announce a new strategy for afghanistan and pakistan and i stand here humbled by the knowledge that many of you will soon be serving in harm s way i assure you you will go with the full support of a proud and grateful nation we face a tough fight in afghanistan any insurgency that is confronted with a direct challenge will turn to new tactics and from marja to kandahar that is what the taliban has done through assassination and indiscriminate killing and intimidation moreover any country that has known decades of war will be tested in finding political solutions to its problems and providing governance that can sustain progress and serve the needs of its people so this war has changed over the last nine years but it s no less important than it was in those days after 9 11 we toppled the taliban regime now we must break the momentum of a taliban insurgency and train afghan security forces we have supported the election of a sovereign government now we must strengthen its capacities we ve brought hope to the afghan people now we must see that their country does not fall prey to our common enemies cadets there will be difficult days ahead we will adapt we will persist and i have no doubt that together with our afghan and international partners we will succeed in afghanistan now even as we fight the wars in front of us we also have to see the horizon beyond these wars because unlike a terrorist whose goal is to destroy our future will be defined by what we build we have to see that horizon and to get there we must pursue a strategy of national renewal and global leadership we have to build the sources of america s strength and influence and shape a world that s more peaceful and more prosperous time and again americans have risen to meet and to shape moments of change this is one of those moments an era of economic transformation and individual empowerment of ancient hatreds and new dangers of emerging powers and new global challenges and we re going to need all of you to help meet these challenges you ve answered the call you and all who wear america s uniform remain the cornerstone of our national defense the anchor of global security and through a period when too many of our institutions have acted irresponsibly the american military has set a standard of service and sacrifice that is as great as any in this nation s history now the rest of us the rest of us must do our part and to do so we must first recognize that our strength and influence abroad begins with steps we take at home we must educate our children to compete in an age where knowledge is capital and the marketplace is global we must develop clean energy that can power new industry and unbound us from foreign oil and preserve our planet we have to pursue science and research that unlocks wonders as unforeseen to us today as the microchip and the surface of the moon were a century ago simply put american innovation must be the foundation of american power because at no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy and so that means that the civilians among us as parents and community leaders elected officials business leaders we have a role to play we cannot leave it to those in uniform to defend this country we have to make sure that america is building on its strengths as we build these economic sources of our strength the second thing we must do is build and integrate the capabilities that can advance our interests and the common interests of human beings around the world america s armed forces are adapting to changing times but your efforts have to be complemented we will need the renewed engagement of our diplomats from grand capitals to dangerous outposts we need development experts who can support afghan agriculture and help africans build the capacity to feed themselves we need intelligence agencies that work seamlessly with their counterparts to unravel plots that run from the mountains of pakistan to the streets of our cities we need law enforcement that can strengthen judicial systems abroad and protect us here at home and we need first responders who can act swiftly in the event of earthquakes and storms and disease the burdens of this century cannot fall on our soldiers alone it also cannot fall on american shoulders alone our adversaries would like to see america sap its strength by overextending our power and in the past we ve always had the foresight to avoid acting alone we were part of the most powerful wartime coalition in human history through world war ii we stitched together a community of free nations and institutions to endure and ultimately prevail during a cold war yes we are clear eyed about the shortfalls of our international system but america has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don t so we have to shape an international order that can meet the challenges of our generation we will be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well including those who will serve by your side in afghanistan and around the globe as influence extends to more countries and capitals we also have to build new partnerships and shape stronger international standards and institutions this engagement is not an end in itself the international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times countering violent extremism and insurgency stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth helping countries feed themselves and care for their sick preventing conflict and healing wounds if we are successful in these tasks that will lessen conflicts around the world it will be supportive of our efforts by our military to secure our country more than anything else though our success will be claimed by who we are as a country this is more important than ever given the nature of the challenges that we face our campaign to disrupt dismantle and to defeat al qaeda is part of an international effort that is necessary and just but this is a different kind of war there will be no simple moment of surrender to mark the journey s end no armistice no banner headline though we have had more success in eliminating al qaeda leaders in recent months than in recent years they will continue to recruit and plot and exploit our open society we see that in bombs that go off in kabul and karachi we see it in attempts to blow up an airliner over detroit or an suv in times square even as these failed attacks show that pressure on networks like al qaeda is forcing them to rely on terrorists with less time and space to train we see the potential duration of this struggle in al qaeda s gross distortions of islam their disrespect for human life and their attempt to prey upon fear and hatred and prejudice so the threat will not go away soon but let s be clear al qaeda and its affiliates are small men on the wrong side of history they lead no nation they lead no religion we need not give in to fear every time a terrorist tries to scare us we should not discard our freedoms because extremists try to exploit them we cannot succumb to division because others try to drive us apart we are the united states of america we are the united states of america and we have repaired our union and faced down fascism and outlasted communism we ve gone through turmoil we ve gone through civil war and we have come out stronger and we will do so once more and i know this to be true because i see the strength and resilience of the american people terrorists want to scare us new yorkers just go about their lives unafraid extremists want a war between america and islam but muslims are part of our national life including those who serve in our united states army adversaries want to divide us but we are united by our support for you soldiers who send a clear message that this country is both the land of the free and the home of the brave you know in an age of instant access to information a lot of cynicism in the news it s easy to lose perspective in a flood of pictures and the swirl of political debate power and influence can seem to ebb and flow wars and grand plans can be deemed won or lost day to day even hour to hour as we experience the immediacy of the image of a suffering child or the boasts of a prideful dictator it s easy to give in to the belief sometimes that human progress has stalled that events are beyond our control that change is not possible but this nation was founded upon a different notion we believe that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that truth has bound us together a nation populated by people from around the globe enduring hardship and achieving greatness as one people and that belief is as true today as it was 200 years ago it is a belief that has been claimed by people of every race and religion in every region of the world can anybody doubt that this belief will be any less true any less powerful two years two decades or even two centuries from now and so a fundamental part of our strategy for our security has to be america s support for those universal rights that formed the creed of our founding and we will promote these values above all by living them through our fidelity to the rule of law and our constitution even when it s hard even when we re being attacked even when we re in the midst of war and we will commit ourselves to forever pursuing a more perfect union together with our friends and allies america will always seek a world that extends these rights so that when an individual is being silenced we aim to be her voice where ideas are suppressed we provide space for open debate where democratic institutions take hold we add a wind at their back when humanitarian disaster strikes we extend a hand where human dignity is denied america opposes poverty and is a source of opportunity that is who we are that is what we do we do so with no illusions we understand change doesn t come quick we understand that neither america nor any nation can dictate every outcome beyond its borders we know that a world of mortal men and women will never be rid of oppression or evil what we can do what we must do is work and reach and fight for the world that we seek all of us those in uniform and those who are not and in preparing for today i turned to the world to the words of oliver wendell holmes and reflecting on his civil war experience he said and i quote to fight out a war you must believe in something and want something with all your might so must you do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching holmes went on more than that you must be willing to commit yourself to a course perhaps a long and hard one without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out america does not fight for the sake of fighting we abhor war as one who has never experienced the field of battle and i say that with humility knowing as general macarthur said the soldier above all others prays for peace we fight because we must we fight to keep our families and communities safe we fight for the security of our allies and partners because america believes that we will be safer when our friends are safer that we will be stronger when the world is more just so cadets a long and hard road awaits you you go abroad because your service is fundamental to our security back home you go abroad as representatives of the values that this country was founded upon and when you inevitably face setbacks when the fighting is fierce or a village elder is fearful when the end that you are seeking seems uncertain think back to west point here in this peaceful part of the world you have drilled and you have studied and come of age in the footsteps of great men and women americans who faced times of trial and who even in victory could not have foreseen the america they helped to build the world they helped to shape george washington was able to free a band of patriots from the rule of an empire but he could not have foreseen his country growing to include 50 states connecting two oceans grant was able to save a union and see the slaves freed but he could not have foreseen just how much his country would extend full rights and opportunities to citizens of every color eisenhower was able to see germany surrender and a former enemy grow into an ally but he could not have foreseen the berlin wall coming down without a shot being fired today it is your generation that has borne a heavy burden soldiers graduates of this academy like john meyer and greg ambrosia who have braved enemy fire protected their units carried out their missions earned the commendation of this army and of a grateful nation from the birth of our existence america has had a faith in the future a belief that where we re going is better than where we ve been even when the path ahead is uncertain to fulfill that promise generations of americans have built upon the foundation of our forefathers finding opportunity fighting injustice forging a more perfect union our achievement would not be possible without the long grey line that has sacrificed for duty for honor for country and years from now when you return here when for you the shadows have grown longer i have no doubt that you will have added your name to the book of history i have no doubt that we will have prevailed in the struggles of our times i have no doubt that your legacy will be an america that has emerged stronger and a world that is more just because we are americans and our destiny is never written for us it is written by us and we are ready to lead once more thank you may god bless you and may god bless the united states of america dem bobama22 6 09a barack_obama oh wow thank you maria oh my goodness i am thrilled to be here this is my first trip i think to the west coast since i ve been first lady i think so and this is a great way to spend it i have to give kudos back to maria she is a girlfriend she has been such a tremendous support through me she has been a role model in so many ways and she s such a gifted individual and she s provided me with the kind of inspiration that it takes to get through this wonderful journey that i ve been on and i am so glad to be working on this project with her let s give our first lady your first lady a round of applause so one of the reasons why i m here is that we re here to kick off what we re calling united we serve yes they re excited about it they are fired up about united we serve we should be fired up as you may know and as maria said community and national service is something that s near and dear to my heart it s not something that we just started to do in the white house it s been sort of the air that we breathe in the obama household in so many ways and i see faces of people that i have served with who have helped bring me to this point in time friends folks hey friends who have helped get me to this point in time so it is just a tremendous honor for me to be here and as we think about what we re trying to do through united we serve i just think imagine the changes that happen with the creation of this park kids who were never able to play on a swing set get the opportunity to play and that just doesn t happen here on this site think about the libraries that will be changed because each of us donates a book or two or think about the smiles that are on some homeless person s face because you took the time to spend a couple of hours to feed somebody a healthy meal that s what united we serve is all about it s a nationwide effort to call americans to make service a daily part of their lives like all of you here it s not something that you do in your spare time as history has shown again and again when we come together as a nation we can really get things done we saw that in this past election we ve seen it time and time again service is how we get where we need to be and united we serve is going to focus on a couple of key strategies one is education health energy and the environment and community renewal and the project that we re working on here today has a clear focus on health and community renewal and i ve been talking a lot about health lately america s children as we all know deserve the healthiest start that we can possibly give them and there are several components to a healthy start and one is eating right and that s something that i ve been talking about with the creation of the first white house kitchen garden we just harvested from that garden earlier this week it was a wonderful event the garden is blooming if you visit the white house you ve got to see this garden the rain has just made it a tremendous just bursting with vegetation it s really good but health is just one part of it the other component as we all know is that kids have to be active they have to move their bodies in order to get their minds flowing it s important for us to help our children understand that connection between what they eat and how they feel and the fact that if they move their bodies and get their self going they just have more energy to get through the day that s our job as the adults in their life and as the president and congress begin to tackle health care reform which is coming up we will begin to see the costly effects of unhealthy habits that burden our health care system we re going to see the costs where it s going to be more clear to us obesity diabetes heart disease high blood pressure are all diet related health issues that cost this country more than 120 billion a year and that s a conservative figure while that dollar amount is shocking and it should be the effect on our children should be even more shocking childhood obesity in the united states is reaching epidemic proportions i talked about this last week at the garden harvest nearly a third of the children in this country are either overweight or obese and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime these are children and in the african american and hispanic communities those numbers climb even higher so that nearly half okay half of the children in those communities are going to suffer that fate and for the first time and this is the thing that shocked me in this history of our nation medical experts have warned that our youngest generation may be on track to have a shorter life span than their parents as a direct result from obesity this has serious consequences for the immediate and long term health of individual children and for our national health care system there are just too many kids that are living a life off of high calorie food and they re not getting enough exercise and in order to stay healthy children are supposed to get 60 minutes of activity every single day now how many kids in your lives are doing that these days at least 60 minutes every single day so that s why we can t underestimate the value of having safe and quality playgrounds in every single community you know that s why this project that we re doing here today is so important and why organizations like kaboom are just necessary not just to the health of our children but to the health of the entire nation and i ve known kaboom for a long time they ve done stuff not just here in san francisco but around the country they ve done projects in chicago my hometown for the last 14 yes a little shout out for chicago there s nothing wrong with a little shout out for chicago for the last 14 years kaboom has been building playgrounds in under served communities across the country and their vision is to have great places for kids to play within walking distance of their homes and they do this by enlisting the help of communities and people like you from around the country that s why we re here so now the focus becomes exercise we ve got to get kids moving we ve got to get them active and the truth is we all know this but at the same time there are so many kids around this country who don t have access in their schools to recess or outside play too many kids are sitting around watching tv playing computer games and i don t know about you but we ve instituted camp obama in my house which means that the television and the computers are off all day until after dinner and right before bedtime bedtime is early so we re shutting off the tv and turning off the computers in our house and our kids are fortunate because as you know we have a swing set finally in the white house and there s nothing like watching kids play and my kids they get to swing on the swings climb on the jungle gym they re playing they don t even know they re getting exercise that s the value of play and that s what we need to get our kids to do in this community but we have to provide them with resources to make that happen this project is so critical so i want people as they think about how they re going to spend this summer in addition to making your kids play think about engaging in united we serve and think about ways that you can take more time to devote to activities and projects that are going to get our kids healthy and moving whether it s serving a healthy meal at a soup kitchen building a play lot finding a project in your area that s going to focus on the health of our kids taking time to tutor mentor taking a kid to the beach i know in chicago there are kids all over my city at home who have never seen the lake i know that this is true for many communities across the city kids don t even know where they can play or what they can play that s where we all come in that s where we need your help and today is just the beginning it is a great honor for me to be here i am so delighted to be a part of the conference that s coming up to be hanging out with my good friend and to be able to spend some time getting this playground together so let me stop talking and let s get to work thank you so much dem bobama22 6 09b barack_obama please everybody have a seat have a seat i am thrilled to be here for what is i think an extraordinary accomplishment by this congress a bill we re about to sign into law i want to acknowledge a few of our special guests first of all we ve got the crew from the campaign for tobacco free kids eamon christopher sarah and hoai nam we have our fda commissioner dr peggy hamburg we have our cdc director tom frieden and we have just some extraordinary members of congress here on stage senator dodd senator durbin senator enzi senator harkin senator lautenberg representative waxman representative dingell representative christensen representative pallone and representative platts all of whom did extraordinary work in helping to move this legislation forward please give them a big round of applause i want to thank all of them now there are three members of congress that i have to especially thank representative waxman representative dodd and excuse me senator dodd and most importantly senator ted kennedy who can t be here today you know the legislation i m signing today represents change that s been decades in the making since at least the middle of the last century we ve known about the harmful and often deadly effects of tobacco products more than 400 000 americans now die of tobacco related illnesses each year making it the leading cause of preventable death in the united states more than 8 million americans suffer from at least one serious illness caused by smoking and these health problems cost us all more than 100 billion a year what s even worse are the effects on our children one out of every five children in our country are now current smokers by the time they leave high school think about that statistic one out of every five children in our country are now current smokers by the time they leave high school each day 1 000 young people under the age of 18 become new regular daily smokers and almost 90 percent of all smokers began at or before their 18th birthday i know i was one of these teenagers and so i know how difficult it can be to break this habit when it s been with you for a long time and i also know that kids today don t just start smoking for no reason they re aggressively targeted as customers by the tobacco industry they re exposed to a constant and insidious barrage of advertising where they live where they learn and where they play most insidiously they are offered products with flavorings that mask the taste of tobacco and make it even more tempting we ve known about this for decades but despite the best efforts and good progress made by so many leaders and advocates with us today the tobacco industry and its special interest lobbying have generally won the day up on the hill when henry waxman first brought tobacco ceos before congress in 1994 they famously denied that tobacco was deadly nicotine was addictive or that their companies marketed to children and they spent millions upon millions in lobbying and advertising to fight back every attempt to expose these denials as lies fifteen years later their campaign has finally failed today thanks to the work of democrats and republicans health care and consumer advocates the decades long effort to protect our children from the harmful effects of tobacco has emerged victorious today change has come to washington this legislation will not ban all tobacco products and it will allow adults to make their own choices but it will also ban tobacco advertising within a thousand feet of schools and playgrounds it will curb the ability of tobacco companies to market products to our children by using appealing flavors it will force these companies to more clearly and publicly acknowledge the harmful and deadly effects of the products they sell and it will allow the scientists at the fda to take other common sense steps to reduce the harmful effects of smoking this legislation is a victory for bipartisanship and it was passed overwhelmingly in both houses of congress it s a victory for health care reform as it will reduce some of the billions we spend on tobacco related health care costs in this country it s a law that will reduce the number of american children who pick up a cigarette and become adult smokers and most importantly it is a law that will save american lives and make americans healthier we know that even with the passage of this legislation our work to protect our children and improve the public s health is not complete today tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death not just in america but also in the world if current trends continue 1 billion people will die from tobacco related illnesses this century and so the united states will continue to work with the world health organization and other nations to fight this epidemic on a global basis but no matter how long or how hard this fight may be what s happening today gives us hope when i ran for president i did so because i believed that despite the power of the status quo and the influence of special interests it was possible for us to bring change to washington and the progress we ve made these past five months has only reinforced my faith in this belief despite the influence of the credit card industry we passed a law to protect consumers from unfair rate hikes and abusive fees despite the influence of banks and lenders we passed a law to protect homeowners from mortgage fraud despite the influence of the defense industry we passed a law to protect taxpayers from waste and abuse in defense contracting and today despite decades of lobbying and advertising by the tobacco industry we ve passed a law to help protect the next generation of americans from growing up with a deadly habit that so many of our generation have lived with when henry waxman opened that first hearing back in 94 on tobacco with the industry ceos he began by quoting an ancient proverb a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step our journey for change is far from over but with the package of passage of the kids tobacco legislation that i m about to sign we re taking another big and very important step a step that will save lives and dollars so i want to thank not only the members of congress who are up on stage but also all the members of congress in the audience and all the health advocates that fought so long for this to happen we hope you feel good about the extraordinary service that you ve rendered this country thank you very much let s go sign the bill dem bobama22 6 10a barack_obama thank you what do you think taylor she did a pretty good job yes she was solid welcome to the white house everybody and thank you amy for the wonderful introduction thank you taylor for being here stories like amy s and taylor s are exactly why we passed the affordable care act and the courage that you and so many americans have shown in sharing your stories is what kept us going until we actually got it done and so we re very grateful to you i want to thank all the members of congress who are here today who helped to make reform a reality the secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius is here as is secretary of labor hilda solis and they are two of the members of my cabinet who are helping to implement this law i just finished a meeting with the ceos of some of america s largest insurance companies and some of our state insurance commissioners where we discussed how we re going to work together to implement health insurance reform it was more than a year ago that some of these same ceos came to the white house for one of the first meetings about what this reform would look like and we knew we wouldn t see eye to eye on everything but for the first time nearly everyone involved in this debate patients hospitals doctors nurses businesses large and small democrats and republicans even those most invested in the status quo including our insurance companies everybody knew that finally something needed to be done about america s broken health care system it was no longer working for families who were seeing more and more of their incomes eaten by health costs causing real hardships for working people it was no longer working for small businesses who were burdened by the weight of premiums that had doubled more than doubled over the last decade it was no longer working for state and federal governments imperiling our fiscal future and all the while the number of americans without insurance kept rising compounded by a horrific recession with people losing their jobs and then losing their health care so one thing was clear to everybody we couldn t keep traveling down the same road for the sake of our families our businesses and the fiscal future of this country we had to change course and that s why three months ago in this very room i signed the affordable care act into law this law will cut costs and make coverage more affordable for families and small businesses it s reform that brings that begins to bring down our government s long term structural deficit it s reform that finally extends the opportunity to purchase coverage to the millions who currently don t have it and includes tough new consumer protections to guarantee greater stability security and control for the millions who do have health insurance while it will take a few years to fully implement this law we can already see it taking effect last month 4 million small business owners found a postcard in their mailbox informing them that they could be eligible for a health care tax cut this year worth tens of thousands of dollars to help them cover their employees and america s largest businesses are filling out applications for critical relief to help them provide coverage for retirees who aren t yet eligible for medicare two weeks ago tens of thousands of seniors who fall into the medicare prescription drug coverage gap known as the doughnut hole began receiving a 250 check to help them afford their medicine and by the end of the year we estimate that 4 million seniors will receive this help and by 2020 this law will close the doughnut hole completely we re also strengthening medicare by going after waste and fraud and abuse in the system and aggressively pursuing those who prey on seniors with scams in many cases young adults without insurance can now stay on their parents plan until they re 26 years old that lifts a lot of worry from some parents shoulders even though the insurance companies had until september to comply with this rule my administration asked them to do so immediately to avoid coverage gaps for young adults and i want to thank those companies that agreed to do this on july 1st uninsured americans who ve been locked out of the insurance market because of a preexisting condition will now be able to enroll in a new national insurance pool where they ll finally be able to purchase quality affordable health care some for the very first time in their lives for states that opt to run their own insurance pools using funds from the new law my administration is urging them to begin enrolling people as soon as possible and in a few years once the new competitive marketplace comes online through insurance exchanges discrimination against americans with preexisting conditions will be banned for good that s when individuals and small businesses will finally have the same access to the same types of insurance plans that members of congress have for themselves and today i m announcing that the departments of health and human services labor and treasury are issuing new regulations under the affordable care act that will put an end to some of the worst practices in the insurance industry and put in place the strongest consumer protections in our history finally what amounts to a true patient s bill of rights this long overdue step has one overriding focus and that s looking out for the american consumer it s not punitive as i said when i met with the insurance executives it s not meant to punish insurance companies they provide a critical service they employ large numbers of americans and in fact once this reform is fully implemented a few years from now america s private insurance companies have the opportunity to prosper from the opportunity to compete for tens of millions of new customers we want them to take advantage of that competition now what americans expect in return is a greater level of accountability and fairness and security we expect to get what we pay for and these rights guarantee just that basic rules of the road that will make america s health care system more consumer driven and more cost effective and give americans the peace of mind that their insurance will be there when they need it give amy that piece of mind that her insurance will be there when she needs it so starting in september some of the worst abuses will be banned forever no more discriminating against children with preexisting conditions no more retroactively dropping somebody s policy when they get sick if they made an unintentional mistake on an application no more lifetime limits or restrictive annual limits on coverage those days are over and i m pleased to say that some insurance companies have already stopped these practices when news reports indicated that a company was dropping coverage for women diagnosed with breast cancer my administration called on the industry to end the practice immediately don t wait until september and soon after the entire industry announced that it would comply with the new law early and stop the practice of dropping people s coverage when they fall ill and need it most some also questioned whether insurance companies might find a loophole in the new law and continue to discriminate against children with preexisting conditions and to their credit when we called the insurance companies to provide coverage to our most vulnerable americans the industry agreed those were the right things to do for their consumers their customers the american people and i applaud industry for that and we re going to hold industry to that standard a standard in which industry can still thrive but americans are getting a fair shake the patient s bill of rights also eliminates the barriers that stand between the american people and their doctors americans will be able to keep the primary care doctor or pediatrician they choose you ll be able to see an obgyn without a referral you ll be able to seek emergency care at a hospital outside the plan s network without fighting to get approval from an insurance company first and consumers will finally have access to simple clear information about their choices and their rights these protections to preserve america s choice of doctors made up the original patient s bill of rights it was a proposal that was debated over a decade ago with significant bipartisan support but was never enacted until now as part of the affordable care act so this is a long overdue victory for america s consumers and patients and yes it does away with the status quo that some insurance companies have taken advantage of for so long but insurance companies should see this reform as an opportunity to improve care and increase competition they shouldn t see it as an opportunity to enact unjustifiable rate increases that don t boost care and inflate their bottom line and the fact is some insurance companies tried to raise rates even before we passed the law even though some of them were making record profits earlier this year for example more than 800 000 anthem blue cross customers in california opened their mail to see that their premiums would go up by as much as 39 percent my administration wanted to know why people s wages aren t going up 39 percent and the company s expenses didn t rise by 39 percent and when pressed they took a look at it and said well our math was wrong we didn t justify that kind of rate increase so they withdrew it the point is that there are genuine cost drivers that are not caused by insurance companies but what is also true is we ve got to make sure that this new law is not being used as an excuse to simply drive up costs so what we do is make sure that the affordable care act gives us new tools to promote competition transparency and better deals for consumers the ceos here today need to know that they re going to be required to publicly justify unreasonable premium increases on your websites as well as the law s new website healthcare gov as we set up the exchanges we ll be watching closely and we ll fully support states if they exercise their review authority to keep excessively expensive plans out of their insurance exchanges none of this is designed to deprive insurance companies of fair rates and as i mentioned when we were meeting with the ceos there are a lot of cost drivers other than those that are within insurance companies control but it is important to have these steps in places to protect consumers from unjustifiable rate increases in fact many states are already exercising their review authority we re already seeing a wave of change that s lifting up consumers and leveling the playing field maine rejected a proposed 18 percent rate hike there pennsylvania is investigating premium increases made by nine of the state s largest insurers new york recently passed a law granting the state the authority to review and approve premium increases before they take effect and we re working with other states and the state insurance commissioners here today to support similar efforts secretary sebelius has urged them to investigate other rate hikes we ve set up a new office of consumer information and insurance oversight to help and we ll provide grants to the states that run the best most innovative oversight programs to protect their consumers and beginning next year insurance companies will be required to spend at least 80 or 85 percent of health care dollars where they should be spent on health care and on efforts to improve its quality not on profits not on bonuses not on administrative costs that don t make people healthier ultimately all these reforms are about more than just ending a dangerous status quo they re about offering stability and security to americans who need it now we re in washington so obviously there s politics involved and i ve got some folks on the other side of the aisle that still think none of this should happen and in fact have said they re going to run on a platform of repeal they want to go back to the system we had before would you would you want to go back to discriminating against children with preexisting conditions would you want to go back to dropping coverage for people when they get sick would you want to reinstate lifetime limits on benefits so that mothers like amy have to worry we re not going back i refuse to go back and so do countless americans who bravely shared their stories with me over two years as i traveled this country and who wrote letter after letter to me in the white house a lot of them are here today you heard amy s story taylor got ill and the treatment produced multiple costly side effects and now just three years after diagnosis they re picking and choosing which tests and treatments to pursue because they don t want to exceed their plan s lifetime limits so amy you and taylor are why the affordable care act bans those lifetime limits and you re why these members of congress right here fought so hard despite some very tough politics to make this happen i met nathan wilkes from englewood colorado last august his son thomas was born with hemophilia in 2003 at the time the wilkes family had high quality insurance through the high tech company that nathan helped to found but when that insurer saw thomas s claims it began jacking up premiums for all of nathan s employees and their families no other insurer would take nathan as long as thomas was on the policy get out of here you ve seen me grab one of those before so as nathan s family neared their lifetime limit a social worker actually suggested that nathan and his wife get divorced so that she could go on medicaid nobody should face a choice like that in america so nathan you and your family you re why the affordable care act bans those lifetime limits and ends the discrimination that young thomas faced i met laura klitzka last year in green bay wisconsin laura it s wonderful to see her here with her crew laura was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago she s undergone eight rounds of chemotherapy a double mastectomy 33 rounds of radiation then the cancer returned spread to her bones she lost her job during treatment the coverage she had through her husband s employer has a lifetime limit of 1 million and so like nathan they worry they ll hit that limit they re struggling to pay their medical bills laura is worried about losing their house she just wants to make sure that she can spend time focused on being well and not worrying about her medical bills laura you re why we banned those lifetime limits too i met katie gibson last year in bozeman montana because katie once had cancer her insurance policy was suddenly revoked when she needed it most even though she was paying her premiums i called katie the day after the house passed a reform bill last november and i told her then that when it finally became law we d be able to protect americans like her from the kind of abuses she s had to endure and katie now we can so anybody who favors repeal is welcome to come talk to these people and tell them why we should go back to the status quo prior to us signing this bill go back to the way things were they are going to need to explain why they and tens of millions of americans should have their new rights taken away i don t think they ll have that conversation because in the end folks like amy and nathan and laura and katie are who this law was made to help americans who work hard who do the right thing and just expect a fair shake in return in every story i heard out there in every letter i read at night people were not asking for much more than that nobody ever asked for a handout nobody ever asked for a free ride a lot of times folks wrote they were embarrassed or guilty about asking for help at all when so many of their fellow americans were hurting as well some even apologized for writing in the first place but they all said the same thing please do something for people like me and families like mine so we did the stories of everyday americans and more importantly the courage it took to share those stories is what kept this effort alive and moving forward even when it looked like it was lost they are why we got this done they are why i signed this bill into law it wasn t easy and it isn t perfect change never is in a country as big and busy and diverse as this one but every time this country has moved forward it s because ordinary americans like these summoned what s best in each of us to make life better for all of us and it s because we as a people find the will to cobble together out of all of our differences that american sense of common interest and common purpose that s always been required to advance the dreams of all of our people that s why we got this done and that s what the affordable care act does and as long as i have the honor of being your president that s what we re going to keep on doing together thank you very much god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama22 6 10b barack_obama hello hello hello hello everybody i was going to say welcome to the white house but you guys seem like you feel right at home you don t need me to tell you it s the people s house a couple of acknowledgements that i want to make very quickly first of all our director of the office of personnel management who has just done an extraordinary job across the government give john berry a big round of applause all right john our chair of the export import bank helping to bring jobs here to the united states of america fred hochberg our chair of the council on environmental quality doing outstanding work each and every day nancy sutley where is she nancy is a little vertically challenged but i see her over there we ve got here a trailblazer for federal appointees we are so proud of her ms roberta achtenberg is here give roberta a big round of applause and then i understand we ve got a terrific country singer chely wright is in the house in addition i know they had to leave because they had votes but you guys obviously don t have just fiercer warriors on your behalf than a couple of our openly gay and lesbian members of congress tammy baldwin and jared polis they are openly terrific they do great work and it is also great to have so many activists and organizers from around the country folks who fight every day for the rights of parents and children and partners and citizens to be treated equally under the law and so we are very proud of all of you oh and by the way the guy standing next to me this is joe biden just because he s a phillies fan he s from delaware now look the fact that we ve got activists here is important because it s a reminder that change never comes or at least never begins in washington it begins with acts of compassion and sometimes defiance across america it begins when ordinary people out of love for a mother or a father son or daughter or husband or wife speak out against injustices that have been accepted for too long and it begins when these impositions of conscience start opening hearts that had been closed and when we finally see each other s humanity whatever our differences now this struggle is as old as america itself it s never been easy but standing here i am hopeful one year ago in this room we marked the 40th anniversary of the stonewall protests some of you were here and you may remember that i pledged then that even at a time when we faced enormous challenges both on the economy and in our foreign policy that we would not put aside matters of basic equality and we haven t we ve got a lot of hard work that we still have to do but we can already point to extraordinary progress that we ve made over the past year on behalf of americans who are gay and lesbian bisexual and transgender just stay with me here for a second last year i met with judy shepard matthew shepard s mom and i promised her that after a decade s long struggle we would pass inclusive hate crimes legislation i promised that in the name of her son we would ensure that the full might of the law is brought down on those who would attack somebody just because they are gay and less than six months later with judy by my side we marked the enactment of the matthew shepard act it s now the law of the land just a few moments ago i met with janice langbehn and her children where did janice go there they are right there and when janice s partner of 18 years lisa suddenly collapsed because of an aneurysm janice and the couple s three kids were denied the chance to comfort their partner and their mom barred from lisa s bedside it was wrong it was cruel and in part because of their story i instructed my secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius to make sure that any hospital that s participating in medicare or medicaid that means most hospitals allow gay and lesbian partners the same privileges and visitation rights as straight partners after i issued that memorandum i called janice and i told her the news and before we came out here today i wanted to make sure that i had followed up secretary sebelius will officially be proposing this regulation and i can also announce that the secretary has sent a letter today asking these hospitals to adopt these changes now even before the rule takes effect nothing can undo the hurt that her that janice s family has experienced and nothing can undo the pain felt by countless others who ve been through a similar ordeal for example charlene strong is here she lost her wife kate fleming and charlene is here along with kate s mom who said on behalf of all mothers thank you because we think it s the right thing to do in addition i ve issued an executive order to extend as many partnership benefits to gay and lesbian federal employees as possible under current law and i m going to continue to fight to change the law to guarantee gay federal employees the exact same benefits as straight employees including access to health insurance and retirement plans and in an announcement today the department of labor made clear that under the family and medical leave act same sex couples as well as others raising children are to be treated like the caretakers that they are because i believe in committed i believe that committed gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights and responsibilities afforded to any married couple in this country i have called for congress to repeal the so called defense of marriage act we are pushing hard to pass an inclusive employee non discrimination bill no one in america should be fired because they re gay it s not right it s not who we are as americans and we are going to put a stop to it and finally we re going to end don t ask don t tell that is a promise i made as a candidate it is a promise that i reiterated as president it s one that this administration is going to keep now the only way to lock this in the only way to get the votes in congress to roll back this policy is if we work with the pentagon who are in the midst of two wars and that s why we were gratified to see for the first time ever the secretary of defense bob gates testify in favor of repeal and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff mike mullen has repeatedly and passionately argued for allowing gay men and women to serve honestly in the military we know that forcing gay and lesbian soldiers to live a lie or to leave the military that doesn t contribute to our security it harms our security and thanks to patrick murphy and others for the first time in history the house has passed a repeal that would allow gay men and women to openly serve in our armed forces and this repeal is authored so that the pentagon can complete its review of the policy which is critical by the way not only to passage but it s also critical to making sure that the change is accepted and implemented effectively in the senate the armed services committee has approved repeal for the first time and the full body is poised to vote soon so here s the bottom line we have never been closer to ending this discriminatory policy and i m going to keep on fighting until that bill is on my desk and i can sign it of course ultimately change is about more than just policies in our government and that s why i want to close by recognizing all the young people who are here i had a chance to take a bunch of pictures with them just really impressive folks who are advocating on their behalf i know there are some in the audience who have experienced pain in their lives who at times have been felt like outcasts who have been scorned or bullied and i know that there are families here on behalf of loved ones who are no longer with us some in part because of the particularly difficult challenges that gay men and women still face this is a reminder that we all have an obligation to ensure that no young person is ever made to feel worthless or alone ever now at the same time i think there s plenty of reason to have some hope for many of the young people including those who are here today they ve shown incredible courage and incredible integrity standing up for who they are they ve refused to be anything less than themselves and we all remember being young sort of but it s not easy it s not easy standing up all the time and being who you are but they re showing us the way forward these young people are helping to build a more perfect union a nation where all of us are equal each of us is free to pursue our own versions of happiness and i believe because of them that the future is bright it s certainly bright for them of course it does depend on all of us it depends on the efforts of government and the activism of ordinary citizens like yourselves it depends on the love of families and the support of communities and i want you all to know that as this work continues i m going to be standing shoulder to shoulder with you fighting by your side every step of the way so thank you god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama22 9 09a barack_obama please please have a seat thank you thank you so much good evening and thank you president clinton for the extraordinary brief introduction which during the u n general assembly week does not happen that often i want to acknowledge bob harrison and the outstanding work that he s doing as ceo of cgi as well as ed hughes the deputy director of cgi for their excellent work some of you are aware that last week president clinton and i were here in new york together we were having lunch in a small italian restaurant and we talked about the economy we talked about health care we talked about pressing global challenges and then he said to me would you pass the parmesan and then he said to me would you speak to our annual meeting now i think everyone knows what it s like when bill clinton asks you to make a commitment he looks you in the eye he feels your pain he makes you feel like you re the only person in the room what could i say i was vulnerable just as all of you have been vulnerable to his charms so i am happy to be here and honored by the invitation and i ve always appreciated president clinton s valuable advice and the ideas he s offered my administration i do understand that the president has been having trouble getting a hold of my secretary of state lately but i hope he doesn t mind because hillary clinton is doing an outstanding job for this nation and we are so proud of her i also want to just very briefly take this opportunity to thank president clinton for his service in his eight years in office he helped swing open the doors of opportunity and prosperity to millions of americans and as the first u s president to face the full force of globalization he worked to share that prosperity with people around the world from promoting trade to expanding education to forging a historic global compact on debt relief after a lifetime of service he would have been forgiven had he settled for a life of quiet a life of ease a life of improved golf scores my understanding is they have not improved that much since he was in office but he chose a different path he asked what can i do to keep making a difference and what an extraordinary difference he working with all of you have made for the victims of disaster from the asian tsunami to hurricane katrina he s made a difference for those in need from parents and children battling hiv aids to your efforts today on behalf of the people of haiti he s made a difference it s no exaggeration around the world bill clinton has helped to improve and save the lives of millions that is no exaggeration and this week even as we gather at the united nations to discuss what governments can do to confront the challenges of our time even as we ve we re joined tonight by so many extraordinary leaders presidents and prime ministers this global initiative reminds us of what we can each do as individuals that you don t have to hold a public office to be a public servant that s the beauty of service anybody can do it and everyone should try to all the cgi members here tonight i want you to know how grateful i am for your efforts and i know that those efforts require greater commitment at such difficult economic times indeed your work and the spirit of service behind it is deeply personal to me i ve seen it i ve been shaped by it my entire life i first saw it in my mother she was an anthropologist who dedicated her life to understanding and improving the lives of the rural poor from indonesia to pakistan whether working with usaid or the asian development bank the ford foundation bank rakyat in jakarta or women s world banking here in new york she championed the cause of women s welfare and helped pioneer the micro loans that have helped lift millions from poverty my mother understood that whether you live in the foothills of java or the skyscrapers of manhattan we all share common principles justice and progress tolerance and the dignity of all human beings and we all share common aspirations for ourselves and our children to get an education to work with dignity and to live in peace and security that s where i first saw that spirit that s who planted it in me and i saw this spirit again when i moved to chicago working as a community organizer on some of the poorest streets in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the united states in neighborhoods devastated by steel plant closings i worked with local churches to help people in need and change didn t come easy but with a lot of time and effort it did come block by block neighborhood by neighborhood that s when i learned that real progress does not just come from the top down not just from government it comes from the bottom up from people if you want to bring about change in the world you can t just be an advocate of somebody else doing it you can t just preach lofty goals and wait for somebody else act you have to step up you have to serve i ve seen this spirit of service in my wife michelle one of the millions of people whose lives has been touched by americorps created by president clinton she left her job at a law firm to be the founding director of an americorps program in chicago that trains young people for careers in public service i ve seen the transformation that occurs in their lives in hers when people are empowered to live their dreams and that s the spirit that s represented here tonight in the difference that cgi members have made around the world the greenhouse gases you ve cut the entrepreneurs you ve empowered with micro loans all the people many of them children you ve helped to lead healthier more productive lives more than 200 million in more than 150 countries that s the meaning of service that s the difference we can make when we remember our common humanity or when we embrace our common responsibilities when we recognize our common destiny your ability to serve people in the disconnected corners of the world reminds us of another truth we stand at a transformational moment in world history when our interconnected world presents us at once with great promise but also with great peril the very technologies that empower us to create and build also empower those who would destroy and disrupt the extremists in the mountains of afghanistan and pakistan who fuel attacks from new york to london to bali from mombasa to madrid to mumbai reckless speculation in any financial sector of the world or someone s failure to pay a mortgage in florida can contribute to a global recession that undermines all of us poverty in somalia the poppy fields of afghanistan the northbound flow of drugs from colombia and the southbound flow of american guns and cash into mexico all this fuels violence that endangers each and every one of us a flu that starts in one country can become a pandemic that sickens millions carbon emissions from cars in boston and factories in beijing are melting the ice caps and imperiling the planet and by the way we re joined here by the leader who made that particular truth impossible to ignore former vice president al gore and we owe a great debt of thanks to him these are the threats of the 21st century these are the challenges we face and just as no nation can wall itself off from the world no one nation no matter how large no matter how powerful can meet these challenges alone nor can governments alone today s threats demand new partnerships across sectors and across societies creative collaborations to achieve what no one can accomplish alone in short we need a new spirit of global partnership and that is exactly the spirit that guides this organization i hope that it is the spirit that guides my administration here at home we ve summoned the american people to a new era of service launching a historic expansion of community service more than tripling the size of americorps creating a new model an innovation fund to bring together nonprofits foundations the private sector and government to find the community solutions that work to fund them and then replicate them across america around the world even as we pursue a new era of engagement with other nations we re embracing a broader engagement new partnerships between societies and citizens community organizations business faith based groups that s why we ve been speaking directly to people around the world including our friends across the muslim world with whom we ve launched a new beginnings based on mutual interests and mutual respect it s why you ve seen secretary clinton in so many countries at town halls on local television programs reaching out to citizens and civil society that s why she s created a new initiative to promote global partnerships between business nonprofits and faith groups to promote development in fact this spirit of partnership is a defining feature of our foreign policy because government and the military can work to disrupt dismantle and defeat terrorist networks but while the violent extremists only destroy we have to make it clear the kind of future we want to build that s why we re investing in people s education and health and welfare as we are doing in afghanistan and pakistan and we need to build new partnerships across regions and religions and that requires religious leaders and ngos citizens to help build the good governance and transparent institutions and basic services upon which true security depends we re making historic investments in clean energy and working toward deep cuts in emissions but we still need business to unleash new innovations and nonprofits to keep up the pressure to end the threat of climate change we re making substantial increases in foreign assistance but we still need civil society to help host nations deliver aid without corruption because foreign assistance is not an end in itself the purpose of aid must be to create the conditions where it is no longer needed where we help build the capacity for transformational change in a society we re pursuing a comprehensive global health strategy building on successes in the fight against hiv aids and working to end deaths from malaria and tb and to end polio but these efforts will only be sustained if we improve the capacity of public health systems to deliver care especially for mothers and children we re making major new investments in food security but this can t simply be hand outs of american food we need to share new methods and technologies so that countries and communities can become more self sufficient in short we re renewing development as a key element of american foreign policy not by lecturing and imposing our ideas but by listening and working together by seeking more exchanges between students and experts new collaborations among scientists to promote technological development partnerships between businesses entrepreneurs to advance prosperity and opportunity for people everywhere that s how we ll confront the challenges of our time this is how we will seize the promise of this moment in history standing together working together and building together it s the spirit i ve seen in my travels around the world in elected leaders and entrepreneurs the heroic civil society groups in the students from ankara to cairo from south bend to strasbourg the optimism and the faith and the confidence that we each can make a difference and that s the spirit that i see here tonight the spirit that says we can rise above the barriers that too often divide us country and culture color and creed race and religion and region that we can come together and that we can leave this world even better even more hopeful than we found it so to all of you thank you for your vision for your engagement for your stick to it ness as hard as it may be to sustain during these difficult times your commitments have never been more needed they have never been more inspired and i am grateful to president clinton for having the vision and leadership to help catalyze this extraordinary collection of individuals and the commitments you make that are making such a difference all around the world thank you very much everybody dem bobama23 10 09 barack_obama thank you very much please have a seat thank you thank you mit i am i am hugely honored to be here it s always been a dream of mine to visit the most prestigious school in cambridge massachusetts hold on a second certainly the most prestigious school in this part of cambridge massachusetts and i ll probably be here for a while i understand a bunch of engineering students put my motorcade on top of building 10 this tells you something about mit everybody hands out periodic tables what s up with that i want i want to thank all of you for the warm welcome and for the work all of you are doing to generate and test new ideas that hold so much promise for our economy and for our lives and in particular i want to thank two outstanding mit professors eric lander a person you just heard from ernie moniz for their service on my council of advisors on science and technology and they have been hugely helpful to us already on looking at for example how the federal government can most effectively respond to the threat of the h1n1 virus so i m very grateful to them we ve got some other special guests here i just want to acknowledge very briefly first of all my great friend and a champion of science and technology here in the great commonwealth of massachusetts my friend deval patrick is here our lieutenant governor tim murray is here attorney general martha coakley is here auditor of the commonwealth joe denucci is here the mayor of the great city of cambridge denise simmons is in the house the mayor of boston tom menino is not here but he met me at the airport and he is doing great he sends best wishes somebody who really has been an all star in capitol hill over the last 20 years but certainly over the last year on a whole range of issues everything from afghanistan to clean energy a great friend john kerry please give john kerry a round of applause and a wonderful member of congress i believe this is your district is that correct mike mike capuano please give mike a big round of applause now dr moniz is also the director of mit s energy initiative called mitei and he and president hockfield just showed me some of the extraordinary energy research being conducted at this institute windows that generate electricity by directing light to solar cells light weight high power batteries that aren t built but are grown that was neat stuff engineering viruses to create to create batteries more efficient lighting systems that rely on nanotechnology innovative engineering that will make it possible for offshore wind power plants to deliver electricity even when the air is still and it s a reminder that all of you are heirs to a legacy of innovation not just here but across america that has improved our health and our wellbeing and helped us achieve unparalleled prosperity i was telling john and deval on the ride over here you just get excited being here and seeing these extraordinary young people and the extraordinary leadership of professor hockfield because it taps into something essential about america it s the legacy of daring men and women who put their talents and their efforts into the pursuit of discovery and it s the legacy of a nation that supported those intrepid few willing to take risks on an idea that might fail but might also change the world even in the darkest of times this nation has seen it has always sought a brighter horizon think about it in the middle of the civil war president lincoln designated a system of land grant colleges including mit which helped open the doors of higher education to millions of people a year a full year before the end of world war ii president roosevelt signed the gi bill which helped unleash a wave of strong and broadly shared economic growth and after the soviet launch of sputnik the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth the united states went about winning the space race by investing in science and technology leading not only to small steps on the moon but also to tremendous economic benefits here on earth so the truth is we have always been about innovation we have always been about discovery that s in our dna the truth is we also face more complex challenges than generations past a medical system that holds the promise of unlocking new cures is attached to a health care system that has the potential to bankrupt families and businesses and our government a global marketplace that links the trader on wall street to the homeowner on main street to the factory worker in china an economy in which we all share opportunity is also an economy in which we all share crisis we face threats to our security that seek there are threats to our security that are based on those who would seek to exploit the very interconnectedness and openness that s so essential to our prosperity the system of energy that powers our economy also undermines our security and endangers our planet now while the challenges today are different we have to draw on the same spirit of innovation that s always been central to our success and that s especially true when it comes to energy there may be plenty of room for debate as to how we transition from fossil fuels to renewable fuels we all understand there s no silver bullet to do it there s going to be a lot of debate about how we move from an economy that s importing oil to one that s exporting clean energy technology how we harness the innovative potential on display here at mit to create millions of new jobs and how we will lead the world to prevent the worst consequences of climate change there are going to be all sorts of debates both in the laboratory and on capitol hill but there s no question that we must do all these things countries on every corner of this earth now recognize that energy supplies are growing scarcer energy demands are growing larger and rising energy use imperils the planet we will leave to future generations and that s why the world is now engaged in a peaceful competition to determine the technologies that will power the 21st century from china to india from japan to germany nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to producing and use energy the nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy i am convinced of that and i want america to be that nation it s that simple that s why the recovery act that we passed back in january makes the largest investment in clean energy in history not just to help end this recession but to lay a new foundation for lasting prosperity the recovery act includes 80 billion to put tens of thousands of americans to work developing new battery technologies for hybrid vehicles modernizing the electric grid making our homes and businesses more energy efficient doubling our capacity to generate renewable electricity these are creating private sector jobs weatherizing homes manufacturing cars and trucks upgrading to smart electric meters installing solar panels assembling wind turbines building new facilities and factories and laboratories all across america and by the way helping to finance extraordinary research in fact in just a few weeks right here in boston workers will break ground on a new wind technology testing center a project made possible through a 25 million recovery act investment as well as through the support of massachusetts and its partners and i want everybody to understand governor patrick s leadership and vision made this happen he was bragging about massachusetts on the way over here i told him you don t have to be a booster i already love the state but he helped make this happen hundreds of people will be put to work building this new testing facility but the benefits will extend far beyond these jobs for the first time researchers in the united states will be able to test the world s newest and largest wind turbine blades blades roughly the length of a football field and that in turn will make it possible for american businesses to develop more efficient and effective turbines and to lead a market estimated at more than 2 trillion over the next two decades this grant follows other recovery act investments right here in massachusetts that will help create clean energy jobs in this commonwealth and across the country and this only builds on the work of your governor who has endeavored to make massachusetts a clean energy leader from increasing the supply of renewable electricity to quadrupling solar capacity to tripling the commonwealth s investment in energy efficiency all of which helps to draw new jobs and new industries that s worth applause now even as we re investing in technologies that exist today we re also investing in the science that will produce the technologies of tomorrow the recovery act provides the largest single boost in scientific research in history let me repeat that the recovery act the stimulus bill represents the largest single boost in scientific research in history an increase that s an increase in funding that s already making a difference right here on this campus and my budget also makes the research and experimentation tax credit permanent a tax credit that spurs innovation and jobs adding 2 to the economy for every dollar that it costs and all of this must culminate in the passage of comprehensive legislation that will finally make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy in america john kerry is working on this legislation right now and he s doing a terrific job reaching out across the other side of the aisle because this should not be a partisan issue everybody in america should have a stake everybody in america should have a stake in legislation that can transform our energy system into one that s far more efficient far cleaner and provide energy independence for america making the best use of resources we have in abundance everything from figuring out how to use the fossil fuels that inevitably we are going to be using for several decades things like coal and oil and natural gas figuring out how we use those as cleanly and efficiently as possible creating safe nuclear power sustainable sustainably grown biofuels and then the energy that we can harness from wind and the waves and the sun it is a transformation that will be made as swiftly and as carefully as possible to ensure that we are doing what it takes to grow this economy in the short medium and long term and i do believe that a consensus is growing to achieve exactly that the pentagon has declared our dependence on fossil fuels a security threat veterans from iraq and afghanistan are traveling the country as part of operation free campaigning to end our dependence on oil we have a few of these folks here today right there the young people of this country that i ve met all across america they understand that this is the challenge of their generation leaders in the business community are standing with leaders in the environmental community to protect the economy and the planet we leave for our children the house of representatives has already passed historic legislation due in large part to the efforts of massachusetts own ed markey he deserves a big round of applause we re now seeing prominent republicans like senator lindsey graham joining forces with long time leaders john kerry on this issue to swiftly pass a bill through the senate as well in fact the energy committee thanks to the work of its chair senator jeff bingaman has already passed key provisions of comprehensive legislation so we are seeing a convergence the naysayers the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue they are being marginalized but i think it s important to understand that the closer we get the harder the opposition will fight and the more we ll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we re engaged in there are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy when it s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs there are going to be those who cynically claim make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary so we re going to have to work on those folks but understand there s also another myth that we have to dispel and this one is far more dangerous because we re all somewhat complicit in it it s far more dangerous than any attack made by those who wish to stand in the way progress and that s the idea that there is nothing or little that we can do it s pessimism it s the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and our people too unwilling to make hard choices for us to actually deal with this energy issue that we re facing and implicit in this argument is the sense that somehow we ve lost something important that fighting american spirit that willingness to tackle hard challenges that determination to see those challenges to the end that we can solve problems that we can act collectively that somehow that is something of the past i reject that argument i reject it because of what i ve seen here at mit because of what i have seen across america because of what we know we are capable of achieving when called upon to achieve it this is the nation that harnessed electricity and the energy contained in the atom that developed the steamboat and the modern solar cell this is the nation that pushed westward and looked skyward we have always sought out new frontiers and this generation is no different today s frontiers can t be found on a map they re being explored in our classrooms and our laboratories in our start ups and our factories and today s pioneers are not traveling to some far flung place these pioneers are all around us the entrepreneurs and the inventors the researchers the engineers helping to lead us into the future just as they have in the past this is the nation that has led the world for two centuries in the pursuit of discovery this is the nation that will lead the clean energy economy of tomorrow so long as all of us remember what we have achieved in the past and we use that to inspire us to achieve even more in the future i am confident that s what s happening right here at this extraordinary institution and if you will join us in what is sure to be a difficult fight in the months and years ahead i am confident that all of america is going to be pulling in one direction to make sure that we are the energy leader that we need to be thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama23 11 09a barack_obama thank you i am extraordinarily excited to have you all here today a couple of special acknowledgements i want to make first of all two of my outstanding cabinet members secretary arne duncan our education secretary and secretary steven chu who is our energy secretary they are both doing outstanding work each and every day i want to acknowledge representative eddie bernice johnson who is from texas and she is one of the members of our science and technology committee and doing outstanding work nasa administrator charlie bolden is in the house where s charlie there he is right there in front nsf director dr arden bement is here right there dr john holdren my science and technology advisor where s john right there melody barnes our domestic policy council chair or head director director and then we ve got some students from some wonderful students from some wonderful schools oakton high school in vienna virginia longfellow middle school in fairfax virginia the washington mathematics science technology public charter high school here in d c and the herndon high school in herndon virginia welcome everybody now the students from oakton high school are going to be demonstrating the cougar cannon designed to scoop up and toss moon rocks i am eager to see what they do for two reasons as president i believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering and i also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything it s an honor to be here and to be joined by sally ride the first american woman in space sally this is a person who s inspired a generation of girls and boys to think bigger and set their sights higher i want to thank nasa and charlie for providing the interactive globe an innovative and engaging way of teaching young people about our world welcome mythbusters from discovery channel where are they there they are i hope you guys left the explosives at home and finally allow me to thank the many leaders here today who ve agreed to be part of this historic effort to inspire and educate a new generation in math and science we live in a world of unprecedented perils but also unparalleled potential our medical system holds the promise of unlocking new cures but it s attached to a health care system that s bankrupting families and businesses and our government the sources of energy that power our economy are also endangering our planet we confront threats to our security that seek to exploit the very openness that is essential to our prosperity and we face challenges in a global marketplace that link the trader to wall street to the homeowner on main street to the office worker in america to the factory worker in china an economy in which we all share in opportunity but we also share unfortunately in crisis the key to meeting these challenges to improving our health and well being to harnessing clean energy to protecting our security and succeeding in the global economy will be reaffirming and strengthening america s role as the world s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation and that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today especially in those fields that hold the promise of producing future innovations and innovators and that s why education in math and science is so important now the hard truth is that for decades we ve been losing ground one assessment shows american 15 year olds now rank 21st in science and 25th in math when compared to their peers around the world and this isn t news we ve seen worrying statistics like this for years yet time and again we ve let partisan and petty bickering stand in the way of progress and time and again as a nation we ve let our children down so i m here and you are here because we all believe that we can t allow division and indifference to imperil our position in the world it s time for all of us in washington and across america to take responsibility for our future and that s why i m committed to moving our country from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math education over the next decade to meet this goal the recovery act included the largest investment in education in history while preventing hundreds of thousands of educators from being fired because of state budget shortfalls under the outstanding leadership of arne duncan we ve launched a 4 billion race to the top fund one of the largest investments in education reform in history and through the race to the top states won t just be receiving funding they ll have to compete for funding and in this competition producing the most innovative programs in math and science will be an advantage in addition we are challenging states to improve achievement by raising standards using data to better inform decisions and taking new approaches to turn around struggling schools and because a great teacher is the single most important factor in a great education we re asking states to focus on teacher effectiveness and to make it possible for professionals like many of the people in this room to bring their experience and enthusiasm into the classroom but you are here because you know the success we seek is not going to be attained by government alone it depends on the dedication of students and parents and the commitment of private citizens organizations and companies it depends on all of us that s why back in april at the national academy of sciences i issued a challenge to encourage folks to think of new and creative ways of engaging young people in science and engineering and we are here because the leaders in this room answered that call to action today we are launching the educate to innovate campaign a nationwide effort to help reach the goal this administration has set moving to the top in science and math education in the next decade we ve got leaders from private companies and universities foundations and non profits and organizations representing millions of scientists engineers and teachers from across america the initial commitment of the private sector to this campaign is more than 260 million and we only expect the campaign to grow business leaders from intel xerox kodak and time warner cable are teaming up with sally ride and the bill and melinda gates foundation as well as the carnegie corporation to find and replicate successful science math and technology programs all across america sesame street has begun a two year initiative to teach young kids about math and science and discovery communications is going to deliver interactive science content to 60 000 schools reaching 35 million students these efforts extend beyond the classroom time warner cable is joining with the coalition for science after school and first robotics the program created by inventor dean kamen which gave us the cougar cannon to connect one million students with fun after school activities like robotics competitions the macarthur foundation and industry leaders like sony are launching a nationwide challenge to design compelling freely available science related video games and organizations representing teachers scientists mathematicians and engineers joined by volunteers in the community are participating in a grassroots effort called national lab day to reach 10 million young people with hands on learning students will launch rockets construct miniature windmills and get their hands dirty they ll have the chance to build and create and maybe destroy just a little bit to see the promise of being the makers of things and not just the consumers of things the administration is participating as well we ve already had a number of science focused events with young people at the white house including astronomy night a few weeks ago the national science foundation and the department of energy under the leadership of a terrific scientist steven chu have launched an innovative an initiative to inspire tens of thousands of students to pursue careers in clean energy and today i m announcing that we re going to have an annual science fair at the white house with the winners of national competitions in science and technology if you win the ncaa championship you come to the white house well if you re a young person and you ve produced the best experiment or design the best hardware or software you ought to be recognized for that achievement too scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models and here at the white house we re going to lead by example we re going to show young people how cool science can be through these efforts we re going to expand the scope and scale of science and math education all across america and we re going to expand opportunities for all our young people including women and minorities who too often have been underrepresented in scientific and technological fields but who are no less capable of succeeding in math and science and pursuing careers that will help improve our lives and grow our economy i also want to note that this is only the beginning we re going to challenge the private sector to partner with community colleges for example to help train the workers of today for the jobs of tomorrow even as we make college more affordable so that by 2020 america once again leads the world in producing college graduates now i have to say to the young people who are here we can t let students off the hook in the end the success of this campaign depends on them but i believe strongly that america s young people will rise to the challenge if given the opportunity and given a little bit of a push we ve got to work together to create those opportunities because our future depends on it and i just want to mention the importance not only of students but also of parents you know i was in asia i think many of you are aware for a week and i was having lunch with the president of south korea president lee and i was interested in education policy they ve grown enormously over the last 40 years and i asked him what are the biggest challenges in your education policy he said the biggest challenge that i have is that my parents are too demanding he said even if somebody is dirt poor they are insisting that their kids are getting the best education he said i ve had to import thousands of foreign teachers because they re all insisting that korean children have to learn english in elementary school that was the biggest education challenge that he had was an insistence a demand from parents for excellence in the schools and the same thing was true when i went to china i was talking to the mayor of shanghai and i asked him about how he was doing recruiting teachers given that they ve got 25 million people in this one city he said we don t have problems recruiting teachers because teaching is so revered and the pay scales for teachers are actually comparable to doctors and other professions that gives you a sense of what s happening around the world there is a hunger for knowledge an insistence on excellence a reverence for science and math and technology and learning that used to be what we were about that s what we re going to be about again and i have to say that this doesn t get a lot of focus not once was i asked about education policy during my trip by the press and oftentimes events like this get short shrift they re not what s debated on cable but this is probably going to make more of a difference in determining how well we do as a country than just about anything else that we do here everyone in this room understands how important science and math can be and it goes beyond the facts in a biology textbook or the questions on an algebra quiz it s about the ability to understand our world to harness and train that human capacity to solve problems and think critically a set of skills that informs the decisions we make throughout our lives so yes improving education in math and science is about producing engineers and researchers and scientists and innovators who are going to help transform our economy and our lives for the better but it s also about something more it s about expanding opportunity for all americans in a world where an education is the key to success it s about an informed citizenry in an era where many of the problems we face as a nation are at root scientific problems and it s about the power of science to not only unlock new discoveries but to unlock in the minds of our young people a sense of promise a sense that with some hard work with effort they have the potential to achieve extraordinary things this is a difficult time in our country and it would be easy to grow cynical and wonder if america s best days are behind us especially at a time of economic uncertainty especially when we ve seen so many from wall street to washington fail to take responsibility for so long but i believe we have an opportunity now to move beyond the failures of the recent past and to recapture that spirit of american innovation and optimism this nation wasn t built on greed it wasn t built on reckless risk it wasn t built on short term gains and short sighted policies it was forged on stronger stuff by bold men and women who dared to invent something new or improve something old who took big chances on big ideas who believed that in america all things are possible that s our history and if we remain fixed on the work ahead if we build on the progress we ve made today this is going to be our legacy as well so with that just as proof of the extraordinary promise of american young people i d like to invite steven harris and brian hortelano from oakton high school to come up here and demonstrate what their team has built and it s flashing so far i don t see it whirling where are they give them a big round of applause dem bobama23 11 09b barack_obama thank you so much thank you please everybody have a seat everybody have a seat what a wonderful evening before i begin let me just acknowledge some folks here in the crowd first of all ms kerry kennedy for the great work that she s doing day in and day out mr philip johnston thank you to both of you for helping to organize this tonight obviously i ve got to say thanks to my favorite people mrs robert f kennedy also known as ethel kennedy to representative donald payne representative gregory meeks and representative edward markey who are all here thank you for your attendance and your support of this important award you know every year for 24 years starting the year this award was established my friend senator edward ted kennedy spoke at this event and i m told that he looked forward to it all year that he relished the chance to shine a bright light on an injustice and on those fighting it and to support them in that fight he also enjoyed a family reunion he relished the chance to pay tribute to those carrying on the unfinished work of his brother s life work that for nearly half a century in the u s senate he made his own he was pleased that this award honored men and women across the globe doing a wide range of urgent work fighting to end apartheid advance democracy empower minorities and indigenous peoples promote free speech and elections and more because ted understood that bobby s legacy wasn t a devotion to one particular cause or a faith in a certain ideology but rather it was a sensibility a belief that in this world there is right and there is wrong and it is our job to build our laws and our lives around recognizing the difference a sensitivity to injustice so acute that it can t be relieved by the rationalizations that make life comfortable for the rest of us that others suffering is not our problem that the ills of the world are somehow not our concern a moral orientation that renders certain people constitutionally incapable of remaining a bystander in the face of evil a sensibility that recognizes the power of all people however humble their circumstances to change the course of history those are the traits of bobby kennedy that this award recognizes the very traits that define the character and guide the life of this year s recipient and while we feel a certain sadness that senator kennedy is not with us to honor her let us also take pleasure tonight in knowing just how much he would have loved and admired magodonga mahlangu and the organization that she helps lead woza which stands for women of zimbabwe arise and is represented tonight by one of its founders jenni williams as a young girl raised in matabeleland in the matabeleland region of zimbabwe in the early 1980s magodonga witnessed the i ve got to make sure i get this right gukurahundi massacres the systematic murder of many thousands of people including her uncle and several cousins many of whom were buried in mass graves that they d been forced to dig themselves she witnessed the fearful silence that followed as talking about these events was forbidden magodonga found this to be intolerable she wanted to speak out she wanted people to know the truth about what was happening in her country so it was a revelation when years later she discovered a group called woza whose mission is the very opposite of silence woza was started back in 2003 to empower women to speak out about the issues affecting their families and their country desperate hunger crumbling health and education systems domestic violence and rape and government repression ranging from restrictions on free expression to abduction and murder of dissidents woza s guiding principle is tough love the idea that political leaders in zimbabwe could use a little discipline and who better to provide that than the nation s mothers since its founding the organization has grown from a handful of activists to a movement of 75 000 strong there s even a men s branch i understand moza and over the past seven years they have conducted more than a hundred protests maids and hairdressers vegetable sellers and seamstresses taking to the streets singing and dancing banging on pots empty of food and brandishing brooms to express their wish to sweep the government clean they often don t get far before being confronted by president mugabe s riot police they have been gassed abducted threatened with guns and badly beaten forced to count out loud as each blow was administered three thousand woza members have spent time in custody or in prison sometimes dragged with their babies into cells magodonga and jenni are due back in court on december 7th charged with conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace they face a five year sentence if convicted that so many women have decided to risk and endure so much is in many ways a testament to the extraordinary example of tonight s honoree each time they see magodonga beaten back beaten black and blue during one protest only to get right back up and lead another singing freedom songs at the top of her lungs in full view of security forces the threat of a policeman s baton loses some of its power each time her house is searched or her life is threatened or she s once again arrested more than 30 times so far she continues to stand in public and inspire the people of zimbabwe the power of the state then seems a little less absolute each time she has emerged from incarceration after enduring deplorable conditions and brutal abuse and gone right back to work the prospect of prison loses some of its capacity to deter by her example magodonga has shown the women of woza and the people of zimbabwe that they can undermine their oppressors power with their own power that they can sap a dictator s strength with their own her courage has inspired others to summon theirs and the organization s name woza which means come forward has become its impact its impact has been even more as people know of the violence that they face and more people have come forward to join them more people have come to realize what magodonga and the women of woza have known all along that the only real way to teach love and non violence is by example even when that means sitting down while being arrested both as a sign that they refuse to retaliate absorbing each blow without striking back and a warning that come what may they re not going anywhere they even manage to show love to those who imprison them as jenni put it many a time we have in effect conducted a workshop for our jailers acting out the role of a mother and teaching how the country can be rebuilt if we have love in our hearts when asked how they can endure so much violence and what keeps them going in the face of such overwhelming odds the women of woza reply simply each other and that may be magodonga s greatest achievement that she has given the women of zimbabwe each other that she has given people who long for peace and justice each other that she has given them a voice they can only have collectively and a strength that they can only have together they are a force to be reckoned with because history tells us truth has a life of its own once it s told love can transform a nation once it s taught courage can be contagious righteousness can spread and there is much wisdom in the old proverb that god could not be everywhere so he created mothers in the end history has a clear direction and it is not the way of those who arrest women and babies for singing in the streets it s not the way of those who starve and silence their own people and cling to power by threat of force it is the way of the maid walking home in montgomery the young woman marching silently in the streets of tehran the leader imprisoned in her own home for her commitment to democracy it is the way of young people in cape town who braved the wrath of their government to hear a young senator from new york speak about the ripples of hope one righteous act can create and it is the way that magadonga mahlangu and jenni williams and the women and men who take to the streets of harare and bulawayo and victoria falls because they love their country and love their children and know that something better is possible bobby kennedy once said all great questions must be raised by great voices and the greatest voice is the voice of the people speaking out in prose or painting or poetry or music speaking out in homes and halls streets and farms courts and cafes let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind magodongo and woza have given so many of their fellow citizens of zimbabwe that voice and tonight we express our gratitude for their work it is now my pleasure to join with mrs robert f kennedy to present the 2009 robert f kennedy human rights award to magodonga mahlangu and woza dem bobama23 2 09b barack_obama thank you very much everybody please have a seat first of all thanks for not breaking anything last night thank you also for waiting until i had left before you started the congo line i don t know whether rendell was responsible for that but i hear it was quite a spectacle michelle and i just had a wonderful time last night and i hope all of you enjoyed it it was a great kick off of what we hope will be an atmosphere here in the white house that is welcoming and that reminds everybody that this is the people s house we are just temporary occupants this is a place that belongs to the american people and we want to make sure that everybody understands it s open almost three months ago we came together in philadelphia to listen to one another to share ideas and to try to push some of our ideology rigidity aside to formulate a recovery plan that would bring some relief to your states and to the american people and i want to thank so many of you who were active throughout this process to get the american recovery and reinvestment act done i don t want to single out too many folks but governor rendell governor douglas worked tirelessly we had people like governor patrick and governor schweitzer schwarzenegger crist who were out there consistently promoting the plan and as a consequence we got this passed through congress in record time because of what we did together this plan will save or create at least 3 5 million jobs in every state across the country it will keep your police officers on the beat your firefighters on the job your teachers in the classroom it will provide expanded unemployment insurance and protect health care for your residents who have been laid off and beginning april 1st it will put more money back into the pockets of 95 percent of your working families so this plan will ensure that you don t need to make cuts to essential services that americans rely on now more than ever and to show you we re serious about putting this recovery plan into action swiftly i m announcing today that this wednesday our administration will begin distributing more than 15 billion in federal assistance under the recovery act to help you cover the costs of your medicaid programs i know something that is going to be of great relief to many of you that means that by the time most of you get home money will be waiting to help 20 million vulnerable americans in your states keep their health care coverage children with asthma will be able to breathe easier seniors won t need to fear losing their doctors and pregnant women with limited means won t have to worry about the health of their babies so let me be clear though this is not a blank check i know you ve heard this repeatedly over the last few days but i want to reiterate it these funds are intended to go directly towards helping struggling americans keep their health coverage we want to make sure that s what s happening and we re going to work with you closely to make sure that this money is spent the way it s supposed to we will get the rest of this plan moving to put americans to work doing the work america needs done making an immediate impact while laying the foundation for our lasting growth and prosperity these are the steps we re taking to help you turn this crisis into opportunity and pave the way for future prosperity but i know that many of you rather than wait for washington have already made your states you are innovators and much of the work that you ve done has already made a lasting impact and change in people s lives instead of debating the existence of climate change governors like the seven of you of you working together in the western climate initiative and the 10 of you who are working together on the regional greenhouse gas initiative are leading the way in environmental and energy policy instead of waiting around for the jobs of the future governors like governor gregoire and governor granholm have sparked the creation of cutting edge companies and tens of thousands of new green jobs and instead of passing the buck on accountability and efficiency governors like martin o malley and governor kaine have revolutionized performance management systems showing the american people precisely how their governments are working for them the point that i made yesterday or last night is something that i want to reiterate though you shouldn t be succeeding despite washington you should be succeeding with a hand from washington and that s what we intend to give you in this administration in return we ll expect a lot from you as the hard work of making the recovery plan s promise a reality begins and that s why i m announcing today that i m asking my vice president joe biden to oversee our administration s implementation efforts beginning this week joe will meet regularly with key members of my cabinet to make sure our efforts are not just swift but also efficient and effective joe is also going to work closely with you our nation s governors as well as our mayors and everyone else involved in this effort to keep things on track and the fact that i m asking my vice president to personally lead this effort shows how important it is for our country and our future to get this right and i thank him for his willingness to take on this critical task in the coming weeks we re also going to appoint some of the nation s best managers and public officials to work with the vice president on this effort and i m pleased to make the first of those announcements today with the appointment of earl devaney as the chair of the recovery act transparency and accountability board where did earl go there he is stand up earl so everybody can see you for nearly a decade as inspector general at the interior department earl has doggedly pursued waste fraud and mismanagement he has the reputation of being one of the best igs that we have in this town and joe and i can t think of a more tenacious and efficient guardian of the hard earned tax dollars the american people have entrusted us to wisely invest i pointed out just when i saw him he looks like an inspector there he s tough you know he barely cracks a smile earl is here with us today i thank him for his willingness to take on this difficult new assignment and i expect each of you to approach implementation of this recovery plan with the same seriousness of purpose and the same sense of accountability because the american people are watching they need this plan to work and they expect to see their money spent in its intended purpose and that s why we ve created recovery gov a web site so that every american can go online to see how their money is spent and hold their federal state and local officials to the high standards that they expect and i want to applaud governors kaine patrick and strickland for already having created their own recovery implementation web sites to allow for the monitoring and accountability at the local level i encourage every one of you to follow suit let me be clear we cannot tolerate business as usual not in washington but also not in our state capitals with mr devaney s leadership we will use the new tools that the recovery act gives us to watch the taxpayers money with more rigor and transparency than ever if a federal agency proposes a project that will waste that money i will put a stop to it but i want everybody here to be on notice that if a state government does the same then i will call them out on it and use the full power of my office and our administration to stop it we are addressing the greatest economic crisis we have seen in decades by investing unprecedented amounts of the american people s hard earned money and with that comes an unprecedented obligation to do so wisely free from politics and personal agendas and on this i will not compromise or tolerate shortcuts the american people are looking to us for leadership and it falls on us now to reward their faith and build a better future for our country and i have every confidence that we can all do this let me make one last point and then i m going to bring joe up there has been some healthy debate over the last few weeks last few days about this stimulus package even among the governors and i think that s a healthy debate and that keeps me on my toes it keeps our administration on our toes but i just want us to not lose perspective of the fact that most of the things that have been the topic of argument over the last several days amount to a fraction of the overall stimulus package this sometimes gets lost in the cable chatter for example i think there are some very legitimate concerns on the part of some about the sustainability of expanding unemployment insurance what hasn t been noted is is that that is 7 billion of a 787 billion program and it s not even the majority of the expansion of unemployment insurance so it is possible for those who are concerned about sustaining a change that increases eligibility for part time workers to still see the benefit of 30 billion plus that is going even if you don t make the change so the reason i make that point is i just want to make sure that we re having an honest debate and presenting to the american people a fulsome accounting of what is going on in this program you know when i hear people say well there s a lot of waste in this program well from my perspective at least keeping teachers in the classroom is not wasteful from my perspective tax cuts to 95 percent of working families is not wasteful from my perspective providing all of you additional resources to rebuild roads and bridges and levees and dams that will enhance the quality of life of your state but also make it more economically competitive that s not wasteful and so if we agree on 90 percent of the stuff and we re spending all our time on television arguing about 1 2 3 percent of the spending in this thing and somehow it s being characterized in broad brush as wasteful spending that starts sounding more like politics and that s what right now we don t have time to do so i will always be open to honest disagreements and i think there are some legitimate concerns that can be raised on a whole host of these issues and you re responsible at the state level and if the federal government gives you something now and then two years later it s gone and people are looking to you and starting to blame you i don t want to put you in that position and so you need to think about how this money is going to be spent wisely what i don t want us to do though is to just get caught up in the same old stuff that inhibits us from acting effectively and in concert there s going to be ample time for campaigns down the road right now we ve got to make sure that we re standing up for the american people and putting them back to work all right joe dem bobama23 3 09 barack_obama thank you paul for talking about the work that you re doing at serious materials and thank you susan for describing the research that s taking place under your leadership at mit i have to say that susan made sure to tell me not to touch anything on the table i was going to do some experiments for you today but we decided not to finally i d like to thank everyone who s here for joining us this afternoon and i want to introduce a few people on our team that are critical to this effort as was already mentioned john holdren has now been confirmed our white house office of science and technology policy carol browner is here assistant to me for energy and climate change and behind her is nancy sutley who is the chair of the white house council on environmental quality so thanks to them thanks to all of you for coming welcome to the white house we gather at a challenging time for our country we face an economic crisis unlike any we ve known in a generation we ve lost 4 4 million jobs since this recession began millions of families are at risk of losing their homes and tens of millions more have lost value in their homes our financial system has been severely undermined by the collapse of a credit bubble that was is as irresponsible as it was unsustainable now many of you in this room i know are experiencing this crisis in one way or another perhaps you ve won fewer investors than you d hoped or you ve earned lower revenues than you expected perhaps your share price has fallen or the cost of securing a loan has risen but you re also helping us to overcome this crisis paul s company serious materials just reopened as he mentioned a manufacturing plant outside of pittsburgh last year that factory was shuttered and more than one hundred jobs were lost the town was devastated today that factory is whirring back to life and serious materials is rehiring the folks who lost their jobs and these workers will now have a new mission producing some of the most energy efficient windows in the world we ve got other examples in this room deepika singh where is deepika is she here there you are right there deepika is here from gainesville florida she s the founder and president of sinmat did i pronounce that correctly that s developing new ways to manufacture microchips that can help power smarter energy systems from more fuel efficient hybrid cars to more responsive efficient lighting for homes and businesses so these are the stories that are being told all across our country i remember during the campaign i visited mckinstry company in seattle which is retrofitting schools and businesses to make them more energy efficient mckinstry is expanding and expects to hire as many as 500 new workers in the next few years i visited another company pv powered a company developing more reliable solar technology in bend oregon and then there was bombard electric in las vegas which is building up nevada s renewable energy capacity and just last week i visited the electric vehicle technical center in pomona california which is testing batteries to power a new generation of plug in hybrids that will help end our dependence on foreign oil i have to say susan the battery i saw was bigger than that one that s on the desk but that may be the direction we re moving so innovators like you are creating the jobs that will foster our recovery and creating the technologies that will power our long term prosperity so i thank you for your work it s said that necessity is the mother of invention at this moment of necessity we need you we need some inventiveness your country needs you to create new jobs and lead new industries your country needs you to mount a historic effort to end once and for all our dependence on foreign oil and in this difficult endeavor in this pursuit on which i believe our future depends your country will support you your president will support you my administration has begun implementing the american recovery and reinvestment act which will create or save 3 5 million jobs and 90 percent of those will be in the private sector through 59 billion invested in clean energy and in tax incentives to promote clean energy the recovery act is estimated to create more than 300 000 jobs and these are jobs that will be created as we double our country s supply of renewable energy and make the largest investment in basic research funding in american history these are jobs developing new batteries to power the next generation of plug in hybrid cars like those being tested at the facility i visited in california last week these are jobs upgrading our power grid so that it can carry renewable energy from the far flung places that where it s produced to the cities that use it and these are jobs that will be created through today s announced 1 2 billion for research through the department of energy s national labs as we speak my secretary of energy steven chu is visiting brookhaven national laboratory on long island where recovery funds will speed construction of a laboratory that will help develop materials for new solar cells and other clean energy technologies through this plan we have achieved more in two months in support of a new clean energy economy than we ve achieved in perhaps 30 years and the budget i ve proposed builds on this foundation the budget is a comprehensive strategy to grow this economy we will attack the problems that have held us back for too long the high cost of health care the budget deficit our broken education system and our energy dependence we have a choice we can choose to do what we ve done we can leave these problems for the next budget or the next administration but more likely for the next generation but we ve seen the consequences of this failure to take responsibility this failure to seize the moment we ve seen the cycles of boom and bust we ve seen our dependence on foreign oil rise we ve seen health care premiums nearly double over the past eight years we ve seen our schools fall short in other words we ve seen enough we can remain the world s leading importer of foreign oil or we can become the world s leading exporter of renewable energy we can allow climate change to wreck unnatural havoc or we can create jobs preventing its worst effects we can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors or we can create those jobs right here in america we know the right choice we have known the right choice for a generation the time has come to make that choice to act on what we know and that s why my budget makes a historic investment 150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and energy efficiency building on what we ve achieved through the recovery plan and it includes a 10 year commitment to make the research and experimentation tax credit permanent this is a tax credit that serious materials has used to grow its business and one i m sure others here today have used as well this is a tax credit that returns 2 to the economy for every dollar we spend yet over the years we ve allowed this credit to lapse or we ve extended it year to year even just a few months at a time under my budget this tax credit will no longer fall prey to the whims of politics and partisanship it will be far more effective when businesses like yours can count on it when you ve got some stability and reliability i ve also proposed reducing to zero the capital gains tax for investments in small or startup businesses expanding and making permanent one of the tax cuts in the recovery plan and federal agencies will continue to set aside a portion of r d budgets for small businesses because small businesses are innovative businesses producing 13 times more patents per employee than large companies finally building on the recovery plan my administration is implementing and the budget i have proposed we will be pursuing comprehensive legislation to finally end our addiction to foreign oil and prevent the worst consequences of climate change while creating the incentives to finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in america and we know how much promise this holds orion energy systems is a perfect example which neal verfuerth did i say that neal properly is that you right there okay neal just spoke to you about this orion employs more than 250 people providing energy saving lighting to fortune 500 companies and it recently began work on a new 70 000 square foot office and technology center long before this success neal had tried his hands at clean energy he bought two solar panel distributorships but the manufacturing companies he depended on went under years later he started orion as a distributor for lighting systems growing with the help of loans through the small business administration then about 10 years ago he had an idea it was in the middle of the night but neal hopped in his car and drove to a factory in plymouth this was one of those moments when the future refused to wait until morning he grabbed two by fours and a broom handle he tinkered until somebody else arrived he had finally figured out a design for a new lighting fixture that made it possible to produce twice the light using half the energy but as neal will tell you this is when the real work began seeking capital seeking customers seeking the support that would allow him to test and improve and perfect what he had designed and that took time and that took patience and it took creativity progress is rarely easy and i know people in this room understand that sometimes it takes months to learn that your ideas just won t work or years to learn that it will sometimes the funding dries up or the investors walk away sometimes you have to fail before you can succeed and often it takes not just the commitment of an innovator but the commitment of a country to innovation often what s required is the support of government recognizing that our future is what we make of it our future is what we build it to be so all of you you are helping us to build a cleaner brighter future and a stronger more prosperous economy and my administration and our country will support you in that difficult work thank you by the way i was just thinking about it i suspect this is orion as opposed to orion but the way it was written up i just wanted to make sure while i was giving you a plug that that we got the right plug all right it s orion all right thank you guys dem bobama23 3 10a barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you everybody please have a seat we wanted to do this twice because there are so many people we have to thank and as i look around the room we ve got leaders of labor who helped to make this happen we ve got ordinary folks who knocked on doors and made phone calls at the last minute to get this thing over the top my extraordinary members of my cabinet we ve still got some additional members of congress who helped lead the charge on this there s my staff who i see are still here at any given moment i thought they were going to quit but they just stuck it out with me so the main purpose here is to say thank you and thank you on behalf of the american people after a century of striving after a year of debate after a historic vote health care reform is no longer an unmet promise it is the law of the land it is the law of the land and although it may be my signature that s affixed to the bottom of this bill it was your work your commitment your unyielding hope that made this victory possible when the special interests deployed an army of lobbyists an onslaught of negative ads to preserve the status quo you didn t give up you hit the phones and you took to the streets you mobilized and you organized you turned up the pressure and you kept up the fight when the pundits were obsessing over who was up and who was down you never lost sight of what was right and what was wrong you knew this wasn t about the fortunes of a party this was about the future of our country and when the opposition said this just wasn t the right time you didn t want to wait another year or another decade or another generation for reform you felt the fierce urgency of now you met the lies with truth you met cynicism with conviction most of all you met fear with a force that s a lot more powerful and that is faith in america you met it with hope despite decades in which washington failed to tackle our toughest challenges despite the smallness of so much of what passes for politics these days despite those who said that progress was impossible you made people believe that people who love this country can still change it so this victory is not mine it is your victory it s a victory for the united states of america for two years on the campaign trail and for the past year as we ve worked to reform our system of health insurance it s been folks like you who have propelled this movement and kept us fixed on what was at stake in this fight and rarely has a day gone by that i haven t heard from somebody personally whether in a letter or an email or at a town hall who s reminded me of why it was so important that we not give up who reminded me why we could not quit i heard from ryan smith who s here today and runs a small business with five employees he is trying to do the right thing paying for half of the cost of coverage for his workers but as his premiums keep on going up and up and up he s worried he s going to have to stop offering health care for his people but because of this bill he is now going to be getting tax credits that allow him to do what he knows is the right thing to do and that s going to be true for millions of employers all across america i heard the story of 11 year old marcelas owens who s right here looking sharp he and i made sure to coordinate our ties today yes it looks good marcelas is a wonderful young man and he lost his mom to illness and she didn t have insurance and couldn t afford the care that she needed so in her memory marcelas 11 years old has told her story across america so that no other children have to go through what his family has experienced that s why we don t quit i heard from folks like natoma canfield who had to give up her health coverage after her rates were jacked up by more than 40 percent she was terrified that an illness would mean she d lose the house that her parent built but she also knew that if she was burdened by these huge premiums that she wouldn t be able to pay the mortgage so she finally decided not to not to keep her health insurance and she s now lying in a hospital bed as we speak faced with just such an illness and she s praying that she can somehow afford to get well and her sister connie is here today and it s because of natoma s family that we could not quit i ve met people like ashley baia who worked for my campaign where s ashley she s around here somewhere i know she is there she is right in front she just doesn t like waving ashley decided to get involved with our campaign a couple of years ago because her own mother lost her job and with it her health insurance when she got sick and they had to file bankruptcy and so ashley worked tirelessly not to get me elected but to solve a problem that millions of families across the country were facing each of these americans made their voices heard it s because of them and so many others so many of you that real meaningful change is coming to the united states of america it is because of you that we did not quit it s because of you that congress did not quit it s because of you that i did not quit it s because of you now let me tell you what change looks like because those fighting change are still out there still making a lot of noise about what this reform means so i want the american people to understand it and look it up for yourself go on our web site whitehouse gov or go to any credible news outlet s web site and look in terms of what reform will mean for you i said this once or twice but it bears repeating if you like your current insurance you will keep your current insurance no government takeover nobody is changing what you ve got if you re happy with it if you like your doctor you will be able to keep your doctor in fact more people will keep their doctors because your coverage will be more secure and more stable than it was before i signed this legislation and now that this legislation is passed you don t have to take my word for it you ll be able to see it in your own lives i heard one of the republican leaders say this was going to be armageddon well two months from now six months from now you can check it out we ll look around and we ll see you don t have to take my word for it so what works in our system won t change and a lot of people are happy with the health care that they ve got and that won t change because of this legislation here s what will change and here s what will change right away this year we ll start offering tax credits to about 4 million small businesses to help them cover the cost of coverage and that means that folks like ryan will immediately get a tax break so that he can better afford the coverage he s already providing for his employees and who knows because of that tax break he may decide to hire a couple more folks in his small business because of this legislation this year tens of thousands of uninsured americans with a preexisting condition and parents whose children have a preexisting condition will finally be able to purchase the coverage they need and that means folks like natoma canfield will have access to affordable insurance that happens this year this year insurance companies will no longer be able to drop people s coverage when they get sick or place lifetime limits or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care they can receive this year all new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care and this year young adults will be able to stay on their parents policies until they re 26 years old that all happens this year this year seniors who fall in the coverage gap known as the doughnut hole will get some help to help pay for prescription drugs and i want seniors to know despite what some have said these reforms will not cut your guaranteed benefits let me repeat that they will not cut your guaranteed benefits period i d be wary of anybody who claimed otherwise so these are the reforms that take effect right away these reforms won t give the government more control over your health care they certainly won t give the insurance companies more control over your health care these reforms give you more control over your health care and that s only the beginning that s only the beginning after more than a decade we finally renewed the indian health care improvement act and the other changes i m signing into law will take several years to implement fully but that s because this is a difficult complex issue and we want to get it right one of these reforms is the creation of a health insurance exchange this is one of the most important reforms and by the way originally i should point out a republican idea imagine that the idea is is that right now there are a lot of people out there buying health insurance on their own or small businesses buying health insurance on their own they don t work for a big company they re not part of a big pool so they have no leverage they ve got no bargaining power with insurance companies but now what we re going to do is create exchanges all across the country where uninsured people small businesses they re going to be able to purchase affordable quality insurance they will be part of a big pool just like federal employees are part of a big pool they ll have the same choice of private health insurance that members of congress get for themselves that s going to happen as a consequence of this legislation and when this exchange is up and running not only because of better bargaining power will they see their premiums reduced will people get a better deal but millions of people who still can t afford it are going to get tax breaks so they can afford coverage and this represents the largest middle class tax cut for health care in our history and it s going to mean that millions of people can get health care that don t have it currently now for those of us who fought so hard for these reforms and believe in them so deeply i have to remind you our job is not finished we re going to have to see to it that these reforms are administered fairly and responsibly and this includes rooting out waste and fraud and abuse in the system that s how we ll extend the life of medicare and bring down health care costs for families and businesses and governments and in fact it is through these reforms that we achieve the biggest reduction in our long term deficits since the balanced budget act of the 1990s so for all those folks out there who are talking about being fiscal hawks and didn t do much when they were in power let s just remind them that according to the congressional budget office this represents over a trillion dollars of deficit reduction that is being done in a smart way and for those who ve been suspicious of reform and there are a lot of wonderful folks out there who with all the noise got concerned because of the misinformation that has marred this debate i just repeat don t take my word for it go to our web site whitehouse gov go to the web sites of major news outlets out there find out how reform will affect you and i m confident that you will like what you see a common sense approach that maintains the private insurance system but makes it work for everybody makes it work not just for the insurance companies but makes it work for you so that s what health reform is all about now as long a road as this has been we all know our journey is far from over there s still the work to do to rebuild this economy there s still work to do to spur on hiring there s work to do to improve our schools and make sure every child has a decent education there s still work to do to reduce our dependence on foreign oil there s more work to do to provide greater economic security to a middle class that has been struggling for a decade so this victory does not erase the many serious challenges we face as a nation those challenges have been allowed to linger for years even decades and we re not going to solve them all overnight but as we tackle all these other challenges that we face as we continue on this journey we can take our next steps with new confidence with a new wind at our backs because we know it s still possible to do big things in america because we know it s still possible to rise above the skepticism to rise above the cynicism to rise above the fear because we know it s still possible to fulfill our duty to one another and to future generations so yes this has been a difficult two years there will be difficult days ahead but let us always remember the lesson of this day and the lesson of history that we as a people do not shrink from a challenge we overcome it we don t shrink from our responsibilities we embrace it we don t fear the future we shape the future that s what we do that s who we are that makes us the united states of america god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama23 3 10b barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you everybody thank you so much thank you thank you thank you everybody please have a seat thank you joe today after almost a century of trying today after over a year of debate today after all the votes have been tallied health insurance reform becomes law in the united states of america today it is fitting that congress passed this historic legislation this week for as we mark the turning of spring we also mark a new season in america in a few moments when i sign this bill all of the overheated rhetoric over reform will finally confront the reality of reform and while the senate still has a last round of improvements to make on this historic legislation and these are improvements i m confident they will make swiftly the bill i m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see it will take four years to implement fully many of these reforms because we need to implement them responsibly we need to get this right but a host of desperately needed reforms will take effect right away this year we ll start offering tax credits to about 4 million small businessmen and women to help them cover the cost of insurance for their employees that happens this year this year tens of thousands of uninsured americans with preexisting conditions the parents of children who have a preexisting condition will finally be able to purchase the coverage they need that happens this year this year insurance companies will no longer be able to drop people s coverage when they get sick they won t be able to place lifetime limits or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care they can receive this year all new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care and this year young adults will be able to stay on their parents policies until they re 26 years old that happens this year and this year seniors who fall in the coverage gap known as the doughnut hole will start getting some help they ll receive 250 to help pay for prescriptions and that will over time fill in the doughnut hole and i want seniors to know despite what some have said these reforms will not cut your guaranteed benefits in fact under this law americans on medicare will receive free preventive care without co payments or deductibles that begins this year once this reform is implemented health insurance exchanges will be created a competitive marketplace where uninsured people and small businesses will finally be able to purchase affordable quality insurance they will be able to be part of a big pool and get the same good deal that members of congress get that s what s going to happen under this reform and when this exchange is up and running millions of people will get tax breaks to help them afford coverage which represents the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history that s what this reform is about this legislation will also lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government reducing our deficit by over 1 trillion in the next two decades it is paid for it is fiscally responsible and it will help lift a decades long drag on our economy that s part of what all of you together worked on and made happen that our generation is able to succeed in passing this reform is a testament to the persistence and the character of the american people who championed this cause who mobilized who organized who believed that people who love this country can change it it s also a testament to the historic leadership and uncommon courage of the men and women of the united states congress who ve taken their lumps during this difficult debate you know there are few tougher jobs in politics or government than leading one of our legislative chambers in each chamber there are men and women who come from different places and face different pressures who reach different conclusions about the same things and feel deeply concerned about different things by necessity leaders have to speak to those different concerns it isn t always tidy it is almost never easy but perhaps the greatest and most difficult challenge is to cobble together out of those differences the sense of common interest and common purpose that s required to advance the dreams of all people especially in a country as large and diverse as ours and we are blessed by leaders in each chamber who not only do their jobs very well but who never lost sight of that larger mission they didn t play for the short term they didn t play to the polls or to politics one of the best speakers the house of representatives has ever had speaker nancy pelosi one of the best majority leaders the senate has ever had mr harry reid to all of the terrific committee chairs all the members of congress who did what was difficult but did what was right and passed health care reform not just this generation of americans will thank you but the next generation of americans will thank you and of course this victory was also made possible by the painstaking work of members of this administration including our outstanding secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius and one of the unsung heroes of this effort an extraordinary woman who led the reform effort from the white house nancy ann deparle where s nancy today i m signing this reform bill into law on behalf of my mother who argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days i m signing it for ryan smith who s here today he runs a small business with five employees he s trying to do the right thing paying half the cost of coverage for his workers this bill will help him afford that coverage i m signing it for 11 year old marcelas owens who s also here marcelas lost his mom to an illness and she didn t have insurance and couldn t afford the care that she needed so in her memory he has told her story across america so that no other children have to go through what his family has experienced i m signing it for natoma canfield natoma had to give up her health coverage after her rates were jacked up by more than 40 percent she was terrified that an illness would mean she d lose the house that her parents built so she gave up her insurance now she s lying in a hospital bed as we speak faced with just such an illness praying that she can somehow afford to get well without insurance natoma s family is here today because natoma can t be and her sister connie is here connie stand up i m signing this bill for all the leaders who took up this cause through the generations from teddy roosevelt to franklin roosevelt from harry truman to lyndon johnson from bill and hillary clinton to one of the deans who s been fighting this so long john dingell to senator ted kennedy and it s fitting that ted s widow vicki is here it s fitting that teddy s widow vicki is here and his niece caroline his son patrick whose vote helped make this reform a reality i remember seeing ted walk through that door in a summit in this room a year ago one of his last public appearances and it was hard for him to make it but he was confident that we would do the right thing our presence here today is remarkable and improbable with all the punditry all of the lobbying all of the game playing that passes for governing in washington it s been easy at times to doubt our ability to do such a big thing such a complicated thing to wonder if there are limits to what we as a people can still achieve it s easy to succumb to the sense of cynicism about what s possible in this country but today we are affirming that essential truth a truth every generation is called to rediscover for itself that we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations we are not a nation that falls prey to doubt or mistrust we don t fall prey to fear we are not a nation that does what s easy that s not who we are that s not how we got here we are a nation that faces its challenges and accepts its responsibilities we are a nation that does what is hard what is necessary what is right here in this country we shape our own destiny that is what we do that is who we are that is what makes us the united states of america and we have now just enshrined as soon as i sign this bill the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care and it is an extraordinary achievement that has happened because of all of you and all the advocates all across the country so thank you thank you god bless you and may god bless the united states thank you thank you all right i would now like to call up to stage some of the members of congress who helped make this day possible and some of the americans who will benefit from these reforms and we re going to sign this bill this is going to take a little while i ve got to use every pen so it s going to take a really long time i didn t practice we are done dem bobama23 4 10 barack_obama good morning everybody thank you secretary napolitano for being here to administer the oath for making it official thank you also for leading our efforts to achieve comprehensive immigration reform so that america keeps faith with our heritage as both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws to director mayorkas and all the dedicated folks at u s citizenship and immigration services thank you for your help to these men and women and so many of our troops to realize their dreams of citizenship we are joined by congresswoman susan davis deputy secretary of defense bill lynn and the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff general jim hoss cartwright most of all to america s newest citizens it is a great honor to serve as your commander in chief and it is my greatest pleasure to be among the first to greet you as a fellow american to you and your families welcome to the white house today is your day a celebration of 24 inspiring men and women and the remarkable journeys that have brought you together on this beautiful spring morning to our nation s capitol the paths that led you here began in more than a dozen countries from peru to poland from kenya to the philippines some of you came to america as children holding tight to your parents hands as you arrived in a new world some of you came as adults leaving everything you knew behind in pursuit of a new life and while your stories are your own today we celebrate the common spirit that lives within each of you a spirit that has renewed and strengthened america for more than two centuries we celebrate the love of family your moms and dads who were willing to say good bye to their own families their own countries so they could have an opportunity to give you the opportunity you never had like generations of immigrants before them they worked hard they scrimped and they saved they deferred their own dreams so that you could realize yours so today is a tribute to their sacrifices as well and i would ask that you join me in honoring your moms and dads and the families that helped bring you to this day we celebrate the spirit of possibility an ethic that says if you re willing to put your shoulder to the wheel and apply your god given talents if you believe in yourself and you play by the rules then there is a place for you in the united states of america no matter where you come from and no matter what you look like it s the spirit that brought a young woman from the people s republic of china and inspired her to enlist in the united states air force where she excels as a material management specialist so today we congratulate our fellow citizen yu yuan it s the spirit that brought a refugee from ethiopia and led him to enlist in the u s army because he said he wanted to give back to the country that has given me the opportunity to be all that i can be and today we congratulate berhan teferi we celebrate the true meaning of patriotism the love of a country that s so strong that these men and women were willing to risk their lives to defend our country even before they could call it their own it s a patriotism of a daughter of mexico who came to america in those first terrible days after 9 11 joined the u s navy and says i take pride in our flag and the history that forged this great nation and the history we write day by day so today we congratulate perla ramos and it s the patriotism of a young man from papua new guinea who joined the united states marine corps and deployed to iraq not once not twice but three times asked why he would choose to become an american citizen he said simply i might as well i love this country already and so we congratulate granger michael the four of you can sit down you represent not only the branch of the armed services that you are a part of but also the other members who are your fellow citizens here today and we thank you very much we re grateful to you in short today we celebrate the very essence of the country that we all love an america where so many of our forbearers came from someplace else a society that s been enriched by traditions and cultures from every corner of the world a dynamic economy that s constantly renewed by the talents and energies of each new citizen and a people who understand that citizenship is not just a collection of rights but it s also a set of responsibilities like so many others these men and women met their responsibilities they played by the rules they have earned their citizenship and so on a day like this we are also reminded of how we must remain both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws this includes fixing america s broken immigration system over the years many have attempted to confront this challenge but passions are great and disagreements run deep yet surely we can all agree that when 11 million people in our country are living here illegally outside the system that s unacceptable the american people demand and deserve a solution and they deserve common sense comprehensive immigration reform grounded in the principles of responsibility and accountability government has a responsibility to enforce the law and secure our borders and set clear rules and priorities for future immigration and under secretary napolitano s leadership at the department of homeland security that s exactly what we re doing we ve strengthened security at our borders ports and airports and we will continue to do so because america s borders must be secure that s part of what these young people here today stand for businesses have a responsibility to obey the law and not undermine american workers especially when so many americans are out of work many businesses work to comply with the law every day but for those that don t those that ignore the law and exploit and abuse vulnerable workers and try to gain an unfair advantage over all the businesses that do follow the law we will hold them accountable and people who are in america illegally have a responsibility to pay their back taxes and admit responsibility for breaking the law pay a penalty learn english pass criminal background checks and get right with the law or face removal before they can get in line and eventually earn their citizenship so responsibility accountability common sense comprehensive immigration reform i thank secretary napolitano for helping to lead our efforts both on and off capitol hill and i thank senators schumer and graham for working with us to forge a bipartisan consensus on a framework for moving forward and i welcome the commitment of house and senate democratic leaders to take action i ll continue to consult with democrats and republicans in congress and i would note that 11 current republican senators voted to pass immigration reform four years ago i m hopeful that they will join with democrats in doing so again so we can make the progress the american people deserve indeed our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others and that includes for example the recent efforts in arizona which threatened to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as americans as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe in fact i ve instructed members of my administration to closely monitor the situation and examine the civil rights and other implications of this legislation but if we continue to fail to act at a federal level we will continue to see misguided efforts opening up around the country as a nation as a people we can choose a different future a future that keeps faith with our history with our heritage and with the hope that america has always inspired in the hearts of people all over the world for just as each of these 24 new citizens once cast their eyes upon our country from afar so too somewhere in the world today is a young boy or a young girl wondering if they too might someday share in america s promise in the example of these new citizens and in the actions we take as a nation let us offer our answer with confidence and optimism yes there is a place called america that still welcomes those yearning to breathe free a country where if you work hard and meet your responsibilities you can pursue your dreams a society where out of many we are one one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all that s the promise of america that is the spirit that all of you are renewing here today we are incredibly proud of you god bless you and may god bless the united states of america now we have one other piece of business would sergeant ledum ndaanee please come forward there he is how are you sir growing up in nigeria ledum probably never imagined he d be standing on this stage today neither did i but thanks to the generosity of churches in virginia he and his parents found a home in the united states and ledum who says i always wanted to be in the military found his calling in the united states marine corps he deployed to iraq and was serving his second tour when his unit was struck by an improvised explosive device in the weeks and months that followed he battled to recover from traumatic brain injury at a va medical center with his parents at his side he was presented a purple heart and a few moments later he was sworn in as an american citizen this marine was not only determined to recover he was determined to help others he has been a leader and mentor to his fellow wounded warriors in fact i hear he s quite an athlete he agrees he will compete next month in the first warrior games at the u s olympic training center in colorado so for his distinguished service to country and for inspiring us all with his example of what citizenship truly means i am proud to join the u s citizenship and immigration services in presenting this recognition the outstanding american by choice award to sergeant ledum ndaanee do we have the award with that i d ask sergeant ndaanee to conclude our ceremony by leading us all in the pledge of allegiance thank you everybody dem bobama23 9 09a barack_obama good morning mr president mr secretary general fellow delegates ladies and gentlemen it is my honor to address you for the first time as the 44th president of the united states i come before you humbled by the responsibility that the american people have placed upon me mindful of the enormous challenges of our moment in history and determined to act boldly and collectively on behalf of justice and prosperity at home and abroad i have been in office for just nine months though some days it seems a lot longer i am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world these expectations are not about me rather they are rooted i believe in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences and outpaced by our problems but they are also rooted in hope the hope that real change is possible and the hope that america will be a leader in bringing about such change i took office at a time when many around the world had come to view america with skepticism and distrust part of this was due to misperceptions and misinformation about my country part of this was due to opposition to specific policies and a belief that on certain critical issues america has acted unilaterally without regard for the interests of others and this has fed an almost reflexive anti americanism which too often has served as an excuse for collective inaction now like all of you my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people and i will never apologize for defending those interests but it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009 more than at any point in human history the interests of nations and peoples are shared the religious convictions that we hold in our hearts can forge new bonds among people or they can tear us apart the technology we harness can light the path to peace or forever darken it the energy we use can sustain our planet or destroy it what happens to the hope of a single child anywhere can enrich our world or impoverish it in this hall we come from many places but we share a common future no longer do we have the luxury of indulging our differences to the exclusion of the work that we must do together i have carried this message from london to ankara from port of spain to moscow from accra to cairo and it is what i will speak about today because the time has come for the world to move in a new direction we must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect and our work must begin now we know the future will be forged by deeds and not simply words speeches alone will not solve our problems it will take persistent action for those who question the character and cause of my nation i ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months on my first day in office i prohibited without exception or equivocation the use of torture by the united states of america i ordered the prison at guantanamo bay closed and we are doing the hard work of forging a framework to combat extremism within the rule of law every nation must know america will live its values and we will lead by example we have set a clear and focused goal to work with all members of this body to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda and its extremist allies a network that has killed thousands of people of many faiths and nations and that plotted to blow up this very building in afghanistan and pakistan we and many nations here are helping these governments develop the capacity to take the lead in this effort while working to advance opportunity and security for their people in iraq we are responsibly ending a war we have removed american combat brigades from iraqi cities and set a deadline of next august to remove all our combat brigades from iraqi territory and i have made clear that we will help iraqis transition to full responsibility for their future and keep our commitment to remove all american troops by the end of 2011 i have outlined a comprehensive agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons in moscow the united states and russia announced that we would pursue substantial reductions in our strategic warheads and launchers at the conference on disarmament we agreed on a work plan to negotiate an end to the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons and this week my secretary of state will become the first senior american representative to the annual members conference of the comprehensive test ban treaty upon taking office i appointed a special envoy for middle east peace and america has worked steadily and aggressively to advance the cause of two states israel and palestine in which peace and security take root and the rights of both israelis and palestinians are respected to confront climate change we have invested 80 billion in clean energy we have substantially increased our fuel efficiency standards we have provided new incentives for conservation launched an energy partnership across the americas and moved from a bystander to a leader in international climate negotiations to overcome an economic crisis that touches every corner of the world we worked with the g20 nations to forge a coordinated international response of over 2 trillion in stimulus to bring the global economy back from the brink we mobilized resources that helped prevent the crisis from spreading further to developing countries and we joined with others to launch a 20 billion global food security initiative that will lend a hand to those who need it most and help them build their own capacity we ve also re engaged the united nations we have paid our bills we have joined the human rights council we have signed the convention of the rights of persons with disabilities we have fully embraced the millennium development goals and we address our priorities here in this institution for instance through the security council meeting that i will chair tomorrow on nuclear non proliferation and disarmament and through the issues that i will discuss today this is what we have already done but this is just a beginning some of our actions have yielded progress some have laid the groundwork for progress in the future but make no mistake this cannot solely be america s endeavor those who used to chastise america for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for america to solve the world s problems alone we have sought in word and deed a new era of engagement with the world and now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges now if we are honest with ourselves we need to admit that we are not living up to that responsibility consider the course that we re on if we fail to confront the status quo extremists sowing terror in pockets of the world protracted conflicts that grind on and on genocide mass atrocities more nations with nuclear weapons melting ice caps and ravaged populations persistent poverty and pandemic disease i say this not to sow fear but to state a fact the magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the measure of our actions this body was founded on the belief that the nations of the world could solve their problems together franklin roosevelt who died before he could see his vision for this institution become a reality put it this way and i quote the structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man or one party or one nation it cannot be a peace of large nations or of small nations it must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world the cooperative effort of the whole world those words ring even more true today when it is not simply peace but our very health and prosperity that we hold in common yet we also know that this body is made up of sovereign states and sadly but not surprisingly this body has often become a forum for sowing discord instead of forging common ground a venue for playing politics and exploiting grievances rather than solving problems after all it is easy to walk up to this podium and point figures point fingers and stoke divisions nothing is easier than blaming others for our troubles and absolving ourselves of responsibility for our choices and our actions anybody can do that responsibility and leadership in the 21st century demand more in an era when our destiny is shared power is no longer a zero sum game no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation no world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed no balance of power among nations will hold the traditional divisions between nations of the south and the north make no sense in an interconnected world nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone cold war the time has come to realize that the old habits the old arguments are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people they lead nations to act in opposition to the very goals that they claim to pursue and to vote often in this body against the interests of their own people they build up walls between us and the future that our people seek and the time has come for those walls to come down together we must build new coalitions that bridge old divides coalitions of different faiths and creeds of north and south east west black white and brown the choice is ours we can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st that put off hard choices refused to look ahead failed to keep pace because we defined ourselves by what we were against instead of what we were for or we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings and finally gives meaning to the promise embedded in the name given to this institution the united nations that is the future america wants a future of peace and prosperity that we can only reach if we recognize that all nations have rights but all nations have responsibilities as well that is the bargain that makes this work that must be the guiding principle of international cooperation today let me put forward four pillars that i believe are fundamental to the future that we want for our children non proliferation and disarmament the promotion of peace and security the preservation of our planet and a global economy that advances opportunity for all people first we must stop the spread of nuclear weapons and seek the goal of a world without them this institution was founded at the dawn of the atomic age in part because man s capacity to kill had to be contained for decades we averted disaster even under the shadow of a superpower stand off but today the threat of proliferation is growing in scope and complexity if we fail to act we will invite nuclear arms races in every region and the prospect of wars and acts of terror on a scale that we can hardly imagine a fragile consensus stands in the way of this frightening outcome and that is the basic bargain that shapes the nuclear non proliferation treaty it says that all nations have the right to peaceful nuclear energy that nations with nuclear weapons have a responsibility to move toward disarmament and those without them have the responsibility to forsake them the next 12 months could be pivotal in determining whether this compact will be strengthened or will slowly dissolve america intends to keep our end of the bargain we will pursue a new agreement with russia to substantially reduce our strategic warheads and launchers we will move forward with ratification of the test ban treaty and work with others to bring the treaty into force so that nuclear testing is permanently prohibited we will complete a nuclear posture review that opens the door to deeper cuts and reduces the role of nuclear weapons and we will call upon countries to begin negotiations in january on a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons i will also host a summit next april that reaffirms each nation s responsibility to secure nuclear material on its territory and to help those who can t because we must never allow a single nuclear device to fall into the hands of a violent extremist and we will work to strengthen the institutions and initiatives that combat nuclear smuggling and theft all of this must support efforts to strengthen the npt those nations that refuse to live up to their obligations must face consequences let me be clear this is not about singling out individual nations it is about standing up for the rights of all nations that do live up to their responsibilities because a world in which iaea inspections are avoided and the united nation s demands are ignored will leave all people less safe and all nations less secure in their actions to date the governments of north korea and iran threaten to take us down this dangerous slope we respect their rights as members of the community of nations i ve said before and i will repeat i am committed to diplomacy that opens a path to greater prosperity and more secure peace for both nations if they live up to their obligations but if the governments of iran and north korea choose to ignore international standards if they put the pursuit of nuclear weapons ahead of regional stability and the security and opportunity of their own people if they are oblivious to the dangers of escalating nuclear arms races in both east asia and the middle east then they must be held accountable the world must stand together to demonstrate that international law is not an empty promise and that treaties will be enforced we must insist that the future does not belong to fear that brings me to the second pillar for our future the pursuit of peace the united nations was born of the belief that the people of the world can live their lives raise their families and resolve their differences peacefully and yet we know that in too many parts of the world this ideal remains an abstraction a distant dream we can either accept that outcome as inevitable and tolerate constant and crippling conflict or we can recognize that the yearning for peace is universal and reassert our resolve to end conflicts around the world that effort must begin with an unshakeable determination that the murder of innocent men women and children will never be tolerated on this no one can be there can be no dispute the violent extremists who promote conflict by distorting faith have discredited and isolated themselves they offer nothing but hatred and destruction in confronting them america will forge lasting partnerships to target terrorists share intelligence and coordinate law enforcement and protect our people we will permit no safe haven for al qaeda to launch attacks from afghanistan or any other nation we will stand by our friends on the front lines as we and many nations will do in pledging support for the pakistani people tomorrow and we will pursue positive engagement that builds bridges among faiths and new partnerships for opportunity our efforts to promote peace however cannot be limited to defeating violent extremists for the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the hope of human beings the belief that the future belongs to those who would build and not destroy the confidence that conflicts can end and a new day can begin and that is why we will support we will strengthen our support for effective peacekeeping while energizing our efforts to prevent conflicts before they take hold we will pursue a lasting peace in sudan through support for the people of darfur and the implementation of the comprehensive peace agreement so that we secure the peace that the sudanese people deserve and in countries ravaged by violence from haiti to congo to east timor we will work with the u n and other partners to support an enduring peace i will also continue to seek a just and lasting peace between israel palestine and the arab world we will continue to work on that issue yesterday i had a constructive meeting with prime minister netanyahu and president abbas we have made some progress palestinians have strengthened their efforts on security israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement for the palestinians as a result of these efforts on both sides the economy in the west bank has begun to grow but more progress is needed we continue to call on palestinians to end incitement against israel and we continue to emphasize that america does not accept the legitimacy of continued israeli settlements the time has come the time has come to re launch negotiations without preconditions that address the permanent status issues security for israelis and palestinians borders refugees and jerusalem and the goal is clear two states living side by side in peace and security a jewish state of israel with true security for all israelis and a viable independent palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967 and realizes the potential of the palestinian people as we pursue this goal we will also pursue peace between israel and lebanon israel and syria and a broader peace between israel and its many neighbors in pursuit of that goal we will develop regional initiatives with multilateral participation alongside bilateral negotiations now i am not nave i know this will be difficult but all of us not just the israelis and the palestinians but all of us must decide whether we are serious about peace or whether we will only lend it lip service to break the old patterns to break the cycle of insecurity and despair all of us must say publicly what we would acknowledge in private the united states does israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the palestinians and and nations within this body do the palestinians no favors when they choose vitriolic attacks against israel over constructive willingness to recognize israel s legitimacy and its right to exist in peace and security we must remember that the greatest price of this conflict is not paid by us it s not paid by politicians it s paid by the israeli girl in sderot who closes her eyes in fear that a rocket will take her life in the middle of the night it s paid for by the palestinian boy in gaza who has no clean water and no country to call his own these are all god s children and after all the politics and all the posturing this is about the right of every human being to live with dignity and security that is a lesson embedded in the three great faiths that call one small slice of earth the holy land and that is why even though there will be setbacks and false starts and tough days i will not waver in my pursuit of peace third we must recognize that in the 21st century there will be no peace unless we take responsibility for the preservation of our planet and i thank the secretary general for hosting the subject of climate change yesterday the danger posed by climate change cannot be denied our responsibility to meet it must not be deferred if we continue down our current course every member of this assembly will see irreversible changes within their borders our efforts to end conflicts will be eclipsed by wars over refugees and resources development will be devastated by drought and famine land that human beings have lived on for millennia will disappear future generations will look back and wonder why we refused to act why we failed to pass on why we failed to pass on an environment that was worthy of our inheritance and that is why the days when america dragged its feet on this issue are over we will move forward with investments to transform our energy economy while providing incentives to make clean energy the profitable kind of energy we will press ahead with deep cuts in emissions to reach the goals that we set for 2020 and eventually 2050 we will continue to promote renewable energy and efficiency and share new technologies with countries around the world and we will seize every opportunity for progress to address this threat in a cooperative effort with the entire world and those wealthy nations that did so much damage to the environment in the 20th century must accept our obligation to lead but responsibility does not end there while we must acknowledge the need for differentiated responses any effort to curb carbon emissions must include the fast growing carbon emitters who can do more to reduce their air pollution without inhibiting growth and any effort that fails to help the poorest nations both adapt to the problems that climate change have already wrought and help them travel a path of clean development simply will not work it s hard to change something as fundamental as how we use energy i know that it s even harder to do so in the midst of a global recession certainly it will be tempting to sit back and wait for others to move first but we cannot make this journey unless we all move forward together as we head into copenhagen let us resolve to focus on what each of us can do for the sake of our common future and this leads me to the final pillar that must fortify our future a global economy that advances opportunity for all people the world is still recovering from the worst economic crisis since the great depression in america we see the engine of growth beginning to churn and yet many still struggle to find a job or pay their bills across the globe we find promising signs but little certainty about what lies ahead and far too many people in far too many places live through the daily crises that challenge our humanity the despair of an empty stomach the thirst brought on by dwindling water supplies the injustice of a child dying from a treatable disease or a mother losing her life as she gives birth in pittsburgh we will work with the world s largest economies to chart a course for growth that is balanced and sustained that means vigilance to ensure that we do not let up until our people are back to work that means taking steps to rekindle demand so that global recovery can be sustained and that means setting new rules of the road and strengthening regulation for all financial centers so that we put an end to the greed and the excess and the abuse that led us into this disaster and prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again at a time of such interdependence we have a moral and pragmatic interest however in broader questions of development the questions of development that existed even before this crisis happened and so america will continue our historic effort to help people feed themselves we have set aside 63 billion to carry forward the fight against hiv aids to end deaths from tuberculosis and malaria to eradicate polio and to strengthen public health systems we are joining with other countries to contribute h1n1 vaccines to the world health organization we will integrate more economies into a system of global trade we will support the millennium development goals and approach next year s summit with a global plan to make them a reality and we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time now is the time for all of us to do our part growth will not be sustained or shared unless all nations embrace their responsibilities and that means that wealthy nations must open their markets to more goods and extend a hand to those with less while reforming international institutions to give more nations a greater voice and developing nations must root out the corruption that is an obstacle to progress for opportunity cannot thrive where individuals are oppressed and business have to pay bribes that is why we support honest police and independent judges civil society and a vibrant private sector our goal is simple a global economy in which growth is sustained and opportunity is available to all now the changes that i ve spoken about today will not be easy to make and they will not be realized simply by leaders like us coming together in forums like this as useful as that may be for as in any assembly of members real change can only come through the people we represent that is why we must do the hard work to lay the groundwork for progress in our own capitals that s where we will build the consensus to end conflicts and to harness technology for peaceful purposes to change the way we use energy and to promote growth that can be sustained and shared i believe that the people of the world want this future for their children and that is why we must champion those principles which ensure that governments reflect the will of the people these principles cannot be afterthoughts democracy and human rights are essential to achieving each of the goals that i ve discussed today because governments of the people and by the people are more likely to act in the broader interests of their own people rather than narrow interests of those in power the test of our leadership will not be the degree to which we feed the fears and old hatreds of our people true leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home the people of the world want change they will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history this assembly s charter commits each of us and i quote to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights in the dignity and worth of the human person in the equal rights of men and women among those rights is the freedom to speak your mind and worship as you please the promise of equality of the races and the opportunity for women and girls to pursue their own potential the ability of citizens to have a say in how you are governed and to have confidence in the administration of justice for just as no nation should be forced to accept the tyranny of another nation no individual should be forced to accept the tyranny of their own people as an african american i will never forget that i would not be here today without the steady pursuit of a more perfect union in my country and that guides my belief that no matter how dark the day may seem transformative change can be forged by those who choose to side with justice and i pledge that america will always stand with those who stand up for their dignity and their rights for the student who seeks to learn the voter who demands to be heard the innocent who longs to be free the oppressed who yearns to be equal democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside each society must search for its own path and no path is perfect each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people and in its past traditions and i admit that america has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy but that does not weaken our commitment it only reinforces it there are basic principles that are universal there are certain truths which are self evident and the united states of america will never waver in our efforts to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their own destiny sixty five years ago a weary franklin roosevelt spoke to the american people in his fourth and final inaugural address after years of war he sought to sum up the lessons that could be drawn from the terrible suffering the enormous sacrifice that had taken place we have learned he said to be citizens of the world members of the human community the united nations was built by men and women like roosevelt from every corner of the world from africa and asia from europe to the americas these architects of international cooperation had an idealism that was anything but nave it was rooted in the hard earned lessons of war rooted in the wisdom that nations could advance their interests by acting together instead of splitting apart now it falls to us for this institution will be what we make of it the united nations does extraordinary good around the world feeding the hungry caring for the sick mending places that have been broken but it also struggles to enforce its will and to live up to the ideals of its founding i believe that those imperfections are not a reason to walk away from this institution they are a calling to redouble our efforts the united nations can either be a place where we bicker about outdated grievances or forge common ground a place where we focus on what drives us apart or what brings us together a place where we indulge tyranny or a source of moral authority in short the united nations can be an institution that is disconnected from what matters in the lives of our citizens or it can be an indispensable factor in advancing the interests of the people we serve we have reached a pivotal moment the united states stands ready to begin a new chapter of international cooperation one that recognizes the rights and responsibilities of all nations and so with confidence in our cause and with a commitment to our values we call on all nations to join us in building the future that our people so richly deserve thank you very much everybody dem bobama23 9 09b barack_obama well thank you very much mr secretary general on behalf of the united states and on behalf of the extraordinary city of new york we want to welcome all of you we also want to encourage you to do some shopping while you re here there are wonderful restaurants i ve talked enough this morning so i m going to be very very brief but mr secretary general i just wanted to thank you for your unwavering commitment to the ideals upon which this body was founded in your tenure at the united nations you ve shown your dedication to the pursuit of peace and security to protection of human rights the promotion of democracy and development and the advancement of international justice over the past year your leadership has directly helped to prevent the use and spread of nuclear weapons it s improved this institution s peacekeeping efforts to battle hunger and increase food security and as we saw yesterday you are reminding all the world of the urgency and magnitude of our climate challenge and on this i think you ve led by example and spurred all of us on towards the common goal of saving our common home and we re very grateful to you for that the institution that you lead was founded decades ago in a different world that faced different threats and different challenges and yet the size and the scope of the challenges we currently face are immense and the united nations has never held more promise than it does today whether we realize that promise is far from certain as i said this morning the magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the scope of our action but days like this offer renewed hope that we will find it within ourselves the courage and the determination to meet our responsibilities to ourselves to our citizens and to future generations it falls to us progress will not come without setbacks and cooperation does not come without debate and disagreement and this institution will be what we make of it so on this september day i would like to offer a toast to what can be in the years to come a place where we forge common ground and recognize our common humanity a source of moral authority a force for peace and above all an indispensible institution in helping all of us build a better future for our children and our grandchildren to the united nations dem bobama24 11 09a barack_obama prime minister singh mrs gursharan kaur members of the indian delegation on behalf of michelle and myself it is a great pleasure to welcome you to the white house on behalf of the american people it is my great honor to welcome you to the united states mr prime minister yours is the first official state visit of my presidency and it is fitting that you and india be so recognized this visit reflects the high esteem in which i and the american people hold your wise leadership it reflects the abiding bonds of respect and friendship between our people including our friends in the indian american community who join us here today but above all your visit at this pivotal moment in history speaks to the opportunity before us to build the relationship between our nations born in the last century into one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century for while our two nations have taken different paths to reach this moment ours is a common story it s the story of two proud people who struggled to break free from an empire and declare their independence two bold experiments in democracy with constitutions that begin with the same simple words we the people two great republics dedicated to the ideals of liberty justice equality and the never ending work of perfecting their union it s the story of two economic marvels fueled by an ethic of hard work and innovation and today our nations are two global leaders driven not to dominate other nations but to build a future of security and prosperity for all nations mr prime minister as we work to build that future india is indispensable as leading economies the united states and india can strengthen the global economic recovery promote trade that creates jobs for both our people and pursue growth that is balanced and sustained as nuclear powers we can be full partners in preventing the spread of the world s most deadly weapons securing loose nuclear materials from terrorists and pursuing our shared vision of a world without nuclear weapons as people who ve known the pain and anguish of terrorism we can stand together cooperating to prevent future attacks and promote the development and prosperity that undermines violent extremism as india becomes an increasingly influential global power we can partner to meet other transnational challenges developing clean energy partnerships confronting climate change stopping infectious disease reducing hunger and working to end extreme poverty in our time and as the world s largest democracies we can keep faith with our common values speaking out and standing up for the rights and dignity to which all human beings are entitled and showing that nations that respect the rights and aspirations of their people are ultimately more stable more secure and more successful this is the india that america welcomes today a leader in asia and around the world these are the challenges we are summoned to meet in partnership this is the progress that is possible today and in the days and years ahead and mr prime minister as we build our common future we can draw strength from our shared past for it was exactly 60 years ago in a ceremony not unlike this that an american president welcomed to the white house the first prime minister of an independent india and while the decades that followed were not without their challenges the spirit of that first visit is with us today the same sense of possibility the same hope for the future so as president truman said of president nehru it is my privilege to welcome the respected leader of a great nation of free people and as prime minister nehru said of the work before them may our two great nations find many ways of working together in friendly and fruitful cooperation to our mutual advantage and for the good of humanity mr prime minister mrs kaur in that spirit i welcome you to the united states of america dem bobama24 11 09b barack_obama good evening everyone on behalf of michelle and myself welcome to the white house aapka swagat hai many of you were here when i was honored to become the first president to help celebrate diwali the festival of lights some of you were here for the first white house celebration of the birth of the founder of sikhism guru nanak tonight we gather again for the first state dinner of my presidency with prime minister manmohan singh and mrs gursharan kaur as we celebrate the great and growing partnership between the united states and india as we all know in india some of life s most treasured moments are often celebrated under the cover of a beautiful tent it s a little like tonight we have incredible food and music and are surrounded by great friends for it s been said that the most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us mr prime minister today we worked to fulfill our duty bring our countries closer together than ever before tonight under the stars we celebrate the spirit that will sustain our partnership the bonds of friendship between our people it s a bond that includes more than two million indian americans who enrich every corner of our great nation leaders in government science industry and the arts some of whom join us tonight and it s the bond of friendship between a president and a prime minister who are bound by the same unshakable spirit of possibility and brotherhood that transformed both our nations a spirit that gave rise to movements led by giants like gandhi and king and which are the reason that both of us can stand here tonight and so as we draw upon these ties that bind our common future together i want to close with the words that your first prime minister spoke at that midnight hour on the eve of indian independence because nehru s words speak to our hopes tonight the achievement we celebrate today is but a step an opening of opportunity to the great triumphs and achievements that await usthe past is over and it is the future that beckons us now so i propose a toast to all of you does the prime minister get a glass thank you just logistically we want to make sure the prime minister has a glass here to the future that beckons all of us let us answer its call and let our two great nations realize all the triumphs and achievements that await us cheers dem bobama24 2 10 barack_obama thank you thank you ivan for the terrific introduction which was short and that s how i like it i want to thank john for the great work that he s been doing with our team and thank you all welcome to washington it is wonderful to be back here with the men and women of the business roundtable over the last year we ve worked together on a number of issues from economic recovery and tax policy to education and to health care and more often than not we ve found common ground this is important because we meet at a time as all of you are aware a time of great economic anxiety and sharp political divisions we re still emerging from the worst economic crisis since the great depression eight million americans have lost their jobs over the last two years home values in too many parts of the country have plummeted and too many businesses are still reluctant to invest and expand and what s more this recession follows what some have called the lost decade a decade in which the average family income fell while the costs of health care and tuition skyrocketed a decade in which a continued erosion of america s manufacturing base hollowed out many communities around the country and put too many good jobs out of reach it s no wonder then that people are frustrated they re frustrated with government and they re frustrated with business they re angry at a financial sector that took exorbitant risks by some in pursuit of short term profits and they re angry at a government that failed to catch the problem on time they re angry at the price they paid to prevent a financial meltdown that they didn t cause and they re angry that recovery in their own lives seems to be lagging the recovery of bank profitability they re angry at the lobbyists who use their influence to put their clients special interests ahead of the public interest and although both parties are predictably scrambling to align themselves with people s frustrations neither the usual answers from the left or the right seem to be inspiring much confidence so we ve got some big challenges ahead and i think all of us know that we can t meet them by returning to the pre crisis status quo an economy that was too dependent on a housing bubble on consumer debt on financial speculation and on growing deficits that s not sustainable for american workers and it s not sustainable for american businesses instead we need an economy where we borrow less and produce more we need an economy where we generate more jobs here at home and send more products overseas we need to invest and nurture the industries of the future and we need to train our workers to compete for those jobs and nations around the world from asia to europe have already realized this they re putting more emphasis on math and science they re building high speed railroads and expanding broadband access they re making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs these countries know what s required to compete in the 21st century and so do we as i said in the state of the union i do not accept second place for the united states of america we did not achieve global leadership in the last century by luck or by happenstance we earned it by working together to define our own destiny and seize the future and to maintain our leadership in this new century we must summon that same resolve a thriving competitive america is within our reach but only if we move forward as one nation only if we move past the old debates and the crippling divides between left and right between business and labor between private enterprise and the public sector whatever differences we have in this country all of us have a stake in meeting the same goal which is an america in which a growing prosperity is shared widely by its people so today i want to spend most of my time talking about the specific steps we need to take to build this more competitive america but before i do i want to talk a little bit about the relationship between business and government in promoting economic growth now contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages i am an ardent believer in the free market i believe businesses like yours are the engines of economic growth in this country you create jobs you develop new products and cutting edge technologies and you create the supply chains that make it possible for small businesses to open their doors so i want everyone in this room to succeed i want your shareholders to do well i want your workers to do well i want you to do well because i firmly believe that america s success in large part depends on your success internationally now i also believe this government has a vital if limited role to play in fostering sustained economic growth and creating the foundations for you to succeed throughout our history government has done so in three ways first government has set up basic rules of the marketplace from the enforcement of contracts and managing the money supply to maintaining airline safety standards and creating federal deposit insurance and on balance these rules have been good for business not bad for they ensure honest competition and fair dealing and a level playing field second only government can make those investments in common goods that serve the general welfare but are too expensive for any individual or firm to purchase on their own our armed forces is the most obvious example but government has also built infrastructure from roads and ports to railways and highways that enabled commerce and spurred entire industries government has invested in basic research that led to new crop yields for farmers and the internet government has invested in our people through land grant colleges and the gi bill and finally government has also provided a social safety net to guarantee a basic level of security for all our citizens now this last role has been obviously a source of great controversy over the last several decades but i think most americans and most business leaders would agree that programs like social security and medicare and medicaid and unemployment insurance haven t just saved millions from poverty they ve helped secure broad based consensus that is so critical to a functioning market economy now the business roundtable has always understood that in each of these instances government hasn t stepped in to supplant private enterprise but to catalyze it to create the conditions for entrepreneurs and new businesses to adapt and to thrive but i take the time to make these points because we ve arrived at a juncture in our politics where reasonable efforts to update our regulations or make basic investments in our future are too often greeted with cries of government takeover or even socialism not only does that kind of rhetoric deny our history but it prevents us from asking hard questions about the right balance between the private and public sectors let me give you some examples too little investment in a competitive infrastructure or an education system that works for our children and we risk falling behind countries that are making these investments right now on the other hand if we just throw money at poorly planned projects or failing schools then we ll remain in debt to those same countries for decades to come if we don t pass financial reform we can expect more crises in the future of the sort that we just saw on the other hand if we design the new rules carelessly they could choke off the supply of capital to businesses and families if we allow our safety net to be weakened or lose a sense of fairness in our tax code then we can expect more anger and frustration from citizens across the political spectrum and at the same time if an exploding entitlement state is gobbling up more and more of our tax dollars there s no way we ll retain our competitive edge so rather than hurling accusations about big government liberals or mean spirited conservatives we re going to have to answer those tough questions and getting that balance right has less to do with big government or small government than it has to do with smart government it s not about being anti business or pro government it s about being pro growth and pro jobs and while there are no simple formulas or bumper stickers that can encapsulate all the work that has to be done here i do want to discuss a few specific areas where we have to get things right now our first and most immediate task is to complete the economic recovery by taking additional steps to bolster demand and keep credit flowing along with our efforts to unfreeze credit and stabilize the housing market the recovery act helped to do this and it s one of the main reasons our economy has gone from shrinking by 6 percent to growing by nearly 6 percent but we need to do more we should make it easier for small businesses to get loans and give them a tax credit for hiring new workers or raising wages we should invest in infrastructure projects that lead to new jobs in the construction industry and other hard hit businesses and we should provide a tax incentive for large businesses like yours to invest in new plants and equipment that would make a difference now and we need businesses to support these efforts the business roundtable supported the recovery act and for that i m grateful but i think one of the reasons businesses haven t been as vocal about their support is a belief that extraordinary measures like the recovery act or our financial stability plan somehow represent a lasting increase in government intervention so let me assure you let me be clear they do not one year ago we were looking at the possible end of general motors today gm has increased production is paying us back ahead of schedule yesterday we learned they re hiring 1 200 more workers in their lordstown ohio plant one year ago there was a chance we would lose most of the 700 billion we were given to rescue the financial system today most of that money has been repaid the financial fee we ve proposed would recover the rest and close the books on government s involvement and let me say a word about compensation here most americans including myself do not begrudge reasonable rewards for a job well done what s outraged people are outsized bonuses at firms that so recently required massive public assistance once that money is fully repaid i don t believe it s appropriate for the government to be in the business of setting compensation levels i do believe that shareholders should have a say in compensation packages given to top executives and that those packages should be based on long term performance instead of short term profits and i think that s particularly important in the financial industry where reckless risks in pursuit of short term gain helped create a crisis that engulfed the world economy but here s the larger point that i m trying to make the steps we took last year were about saving the economy from collapse not about expanding government s reach into the economy the jobs bill working through congress right now are similarly designed to be targeted and temporary and i m pleased that a few hours ago the senate just passed a series of tax cuts for small businesses that hire more workers this is an important step forward in putting more americans back to work as soon as possible now the larger question is this beyond the immediate requirements of recovery how do we lay the foundation for a more competitive america how do we help you succeed now i believe it starts with investments in innovation in education and a 21st century infrastructure to build the infrastructure of tomorrow we re investing in expanded broadband access and health information technology clean energy facilities and the first high speed rail network in america to spur the discovery of services and products and industries we have yet to imagine we re devoting more than 3 percent of our gdp to research and development an amount that exceeds the level achieved at the height of the space race we ve also proposed making the research and experimentation tax credit permanent a tax credit that helps companies like yours afford the high costs of developing new technologies and new products to train our workers for the jobs of tomorrow we ve made education reform a top priority in this administration we are not interested in just putting more money into our schools we want that money moving toward reform and last year we launched a national competition to improve our schools based on a simple idea instead of funding the status quo we will only invest in reform reform that raises student achievement and inspires students to excel in math and science and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young americans i just met this week with the nation s governors and education reform is one of those rare issues where both democrats and republicans are enthusiastic and to achieve my goal of ensuring america again has the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 i m urging the senate to pass a bill that will make college more affordable by ending the unnecessary taxpayer subsidies that go to financial intermediaries for student loans it s a bill that will also revitalize our community colleges which this organization has recognized are a career pathway to the children of so many working families and just as government needs to support young people eager to learn i m very pleased to see that the business community has already begun to bet on the next generation of american talent just yesterday 17 high tech companies announced plans to hire over 10 000 college graduates this year that s good news that s the kind of partnership that we need finally we re investing in innovation that will lead to a more efficient affordable and consumer friendly federal government almost all of you have harnessed new technologies to build thriving businesses and provide better services to your customers there s no reason government shouldn t do the same and give taxpayers a better bang for their buck with new technology we re creating a single electronic medical record for our men and women in uniform that will follow them from the day they enlist until the day that they are laid to rest we re cutting down the time it takes to get a patent approved by cutting out unnecessary paperwork and modernizing the process and my secretary of commerce gary locke is here today and is doing an outstanding job leading that effort we re working to give people the chance to go online and book an appointment at the social security office or check the status of their citizenship application services countless businesses already provide government should be doing the same so in all of these areas in infrastructure in research in education and in government reform we re making investments that will lead to new products and services that will help america compete on the world stage it means increases in productivity and increases in efficiency and that s where we re going to need to be competitive now winning that competition also means we need to export more of our goods and services to other nations something that supports more jobs here in the united states of america unfortunately the federal government has not done a great job advocating for companies exports abroad that s why in the state of the union i set a goal of doubling our exports over the next five years an increase that will support 2 million jobs and to help me meet this goal gary locke recently announced that we re launching a national export initiative where the federal government will significantly ramp up its advocacy on behalf of u s exporters we re substantially expanding the trade financing available to exporters including small and medium sized companies and while always keeping our security needs in mind we re going to reform our export controls to eliminate unnecessary barriers so some of the sectors where we have a huge competitive advantage in high tech areas we re going to be able to send more of those products to markets overseas and we re going to pursue a more strategic and aggressive effort to open up new markets for our goods now i know that trade policy has been one of those longstanding divides between business and labor between democrats and republicans to those who would reflexively support every and any trade deal i would say that our competitors have to play fair and our agreements have to be enforced we can t simply cede more jobs or markets to unfair trade practices at the same time to those who would reflexively oppose every trade agreement they need to know that if america sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores in other countries whether china or germany or brazil they ve been able to align the interests of business workers and government around trade agreements that open up new markets for them and create new jobs for them we must do the same and i m committed to making that happen that s why we launched the trans pacific partnership to strengthen our trade relations with asia the fastest growing market in the world that s why we will work to resolve outstanding issues so that we can move forward on trade agreements with key partners like south korea and panama and colombia and that s why we will try to conclude a doha trade agreement not just any agreement but one that creates real access to key global markets a competitive america is also america that finally has a smart energy policy we know there s no silver bullet here we understand that to reduce our dependence on oil and the damage caused by climate change we re going to need more production in the short term we re going to need more efficiency and we need more incentives for clean energy and already the recovery act has allowed us to jumpstart the clean energy industry in america an investment that will lead to 720 000 clean energy jobs by the year 2012 to take just one example the united states used to make less than 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries for hybrid cars by 2015 we ll have enough capacity to make up to 40 percent of these batteries we ve also launched an unprecedented effort to make our homes and businesses more energy efficient we ve announced loan guarantees to break ground on america s first new nuclear plant in nearly three decades we re supporting three of the largest solar plants in the world and i ve said that we re willing to make tough decisions about opening up new offshore areas for oil and gas development so what we re looking at is a comprehensive strategy not an either or strategy but a both and strategy when it comes to energy but to truly transition to a clean energy economy i ve also said that we need to put a price on carbon pollution many businesses have embraced this approach including some who are represented here today still i am sympathetic to those companies that face significant potential transition costs and i want to work with this organization and others like this to help with those costs and to get our policies right what we can t do is stand still the only certainty of the status quo is that the price and supply of oil will become increasingly volatile that the use of fossil fuels will wreak havoc on weather patterns and air quality but if we decide now that we re putting a price on this pollution in a few years it will give businesses the certainty of knowing they have the time to plan for the transition this country has to move towards a clean energy economy that s where the world is going and that s how america will remain competitive and strong in the 21st century we will also be more competitive if we address those costs and risks that are preventing our economy from reaching its full potential i ll list three critical areas outdated financial regulations crushing health care costs and a growing deficit right now we have a financial system with the same vulnerabilities that it had before this crisis began and as i said in the state of the union my goal is not to punish wall street i believe that most individuals in the financial sector are looking to make money in an honest and transparent way but if there aren t rules in place to guard against the recklessness of a few and they re allowed to exploit consumers and take on excessive risk it starts a race to the bottom that results in all of us losing and that s what we need to change we can t repeat the mistakes of the past we can t allow another aig or another lehman to happen again we can t allow financial institutions including those that take your deposits to make gambles that threaten the whole economy what does that mean it means we ve got to ensure consolidated supervision of all institutions that could pose a risk to the system it means we have to close loopholes that allow financial firms to evade oversight and circumvent rules of the road it means that we need more robust consumer and investor protections and i ask the business roundtable to support these efforts there are lobbyists on the hill right now trying to kill reform by claiming that it would undermine businesses outside of the financial sector that is not true this is about putting in place rules that encourage drive and innovation instead of shortcuts and abuse and those are rules that will benefit everybody now another undeniable drag on our economy is the cost of health care and i appreciate the willingness of the business roundtable to work with us on health care reform when you ve had concerns about specific measures or policies we ve listened and in many cases we ve made changes but i know that there are many who have been skeptical of our reform efforts because in the wake of extraordinary measures that we took to rescue our economy it s been an easy political tactic to characterize any effort at health reform as a big government takeover but let s look at the truth because the truth is just the opposite we have not called for the elimination of private insurance we have not we ve been extraordinarily careful not to in any way undermine the employer based system what we ve called for is an insurance exchange where individuals and small businesses can pool together in order to get a better deal from their insurance companies in return for getting more customers we would require insurance companies not to discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions or arbitrarily jack up premiums we ve also incorporated almost every serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising costs of health care as a result our proposal would reduce the deficit by as much as a trillion dollars over the next decades and would directly affect your bottom lines each and every one of you who are already providing insurance to your employees by a significant amount all these steps would provide more certainty for your businesses not less because there s no certainty in a future where premiums rise without limit there s certainly no certainty where companies are forced to drop coverage or cut back elsewhere that can t be good for business our proposal contains good ideas from democrats and republicans and health care experts across the spectrum and tomorrow i look forward to a good exchange of ideas at the blair house with some of the legislative leaders and i hope everyone comes with a shared desire to solve this challenge not just score political points and i hope the roundtable supports our efforts to finally pass reform that works for the american people and for american businesses now one of benefits of health care reform is that by bringing down the cost of medicare and medicaid it would significantly reduce our deficit and i know this is an issue of great concern to many of you my omb director peter orszag will be here soon to give you the scary numbers i promise you this is on my mind each and every day i walked into office facing a massive deficit most of which was the result of not paying for two wars two tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug program keep in mind the budget was balanced in fact we were running a surplus in 2000 when we walked in we had a deficit of 1 3 trillion and projected debt over the course of a decade of 8 trillion the lost revenue from this recession put us in an even deeper hole and the steps we took to save the economy from depression last year have necessarily added to the deficit about 1 trillion compared to the 8 trillion that we inherited now i ve said we intend to pay for what we added so my administration is doing what families and businesses all across the country are doing during these difficult times we re tightening our belts and making tough decisions we re investing only in what we need and sacrificing what we can do without we ve gone line by line through the federal budget and identified more than 120 programs for elimination a total of 20 billion in savings just for next year starting in 2011 i ve proposed a freeze on non security discretionary government spending for three years something that was never enacted in the last administration i m also grateful that congress responded to my request and restored a simple budgeting rule that every family and business understands called pay as you go and i ve established a bipartisan fiscal commission that will provide a specific set of solutions by the fall to deal with our medium and long term deficit of course as many of you have reminded us budget cuts aren t the only step we ve proposed this year to help bring down the deficit which brings me to everybody s favorite topic taxes you ll notice i ve saved the best for last now i want to set the record straight on this issue because it s been one of the largest sources of tension between our administration and the business community during the campaign i promised a tax cut for 95 percent of working americans i kept that promise we ve provided over 150 billion in tax cuts to small businesses and to families we haven t raised anybody s income taxes by a single dime this year i expect to sign into law another 70 billion worth of business tax cuts for 2010 and 2011 a more than 10 percent cut in corporate taxes now that may not jibe with what you re hearing or what you re reading but those are the facts they re indisputable now i ve also made two other promises during the campaign i promised that folks making over 250 000 a year meaning everybody in this room plus me would go back to paying the marginal tax rates they did in the 1990s a time when businesses did pretty well a lot of millionaires were made i m not doing this to be punitive or because i love paying taxes i m doing it because at a time of two wars and massive deficits i can t justify continuing to give millionaires or billionaires big tax cuts the other promise i made during the campaign was to ensure that our tax code doesn t provide relief and a competitive advantage to companies that move jobs and investment outside of the united states relative to companies that are investing here in the united states now a number of you have made the point that we shouldn t discourage anyone from keeping headquarters and operations in america and that we have to balance your needs to compete overseas i m sympathetic to that and after listening to you we ve made some modifications to our proposal but as president of the united states my interest is to reward or at least not disadvantage companies who are creating more jobs and doing more business within the borders of this country that s not anti business it s pro america and i don t apologize for it on all these issues from education to health care to taxes my first question can t be is this good for business or is this good for labor it can t be is this good politics are folks going to tag me as a liberal or a conservative the only question i have to ask myself is is this good for america does it help us compete does it grow our economy does it create jobs for middle class and those trying to join the middle class is it fostering innovation and creating new business opportunities that s my job as president having said that i also know that government can t meet all of these challenges on its own ultimately the success of this economy is going to depend on you and people like you all across the country and it s going to depend on our workforce and our families you know when it comes to education we need parents who are willing to read to their children and help with their homework regardless of how much government is going to reform the school system if we re going to compete when it comes to energy we need consumers who are willing to buy more efficient appliances and automobiles and conserve where they can and when it comes to an economy that works for every american we need business leaders like you who understand that private enterprise also entails some public responsibility andy grove who most of you know was the ceo of intel once gave an interview where he said those of us in business have two obligations in my opinion the one that s undebatable is that we have a fiduciary responsibility tothe shareholders who put us in our place there s another obligation that i feel personally is what mr grove said given that everything i ve achieved in my career and a lot of what intel has achieved in its career were made possible by a climate of democracy an economic climate and investment climate provided by our domicile the united states now it s undoubtedly in the short term interests of individual corporations at any given moment to pay less in taxes to deal with fewer regulations i understand that but it s in the long term interest of all companies to do business in a nation that maintains the world s best research facilities and universities a nation with public schools that graduate highly skilled highly educated young people a nation with functioning railways and airports a nation that s not dragged down by crushing debt a nation in which families are getting good jobs and when they work hard they can support those families if you pay your workers a salary they can raise a family on they re going to feel more loyalty to your company and if we have rules of the road that guard against recklessness in our financial system it will protect the interests of everyone from the wealthiest ceos to the lowest paid workers if we give that kid in the bronx a world class education it doesn t just benefit that child it benefits the company that might hire him down the road and it benefits the country that child lives in to put it simply we are all in this together i am a big booster of each and every one of you and i will go to bat for you every time as you compete in a tough international environment but we re going to have to do this together and we face some very big challenges right now the only way we re going to get through them and the only way we ever have is if we align the interests of workers and businesses and government around a common purpose if we all pick up an oar and start rowing in the same direction at a time of such economic anxiety it s tempting and maybe it s easier to turn against one another and to find scapegoats to blame so politicians can rail against wall street or against each other and businesses can fault capitol hill and all of it makes for easy talking points and good political theater but dem bobama24 5 10 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you so much it is wonderful to see all of you some of you back for the second time some of you work for me so you re here all the time i want to before i start off acknowledge that we ve got just some outstanding members of congress who are always fighting the good fight for the aapi community it starts at the top though and i want to give a huge welcome and big round of applause for somebody who will go down as one of the greatest speakers in our history speaker nancy pelosi i want to thank father vien for his introduction he s led mary queen of vietnam church in louisiana through some pretty hard days after katrina he served not only as a spiritual advisor but also as a community organizer making sure his parishioners got the help that they needed in fact shortly after returning to new orleans when much of the city was dark he convinced the utility company to divert electricity to the neighborhood around his church so nobody messes with father vien he tends to get what he wants today as communities in the gulf face new hardships as the result of this ongoing oil spill he s once more taken up the cause of his community he s advocating on behalf of the many vietnamese and cambodian americans and others who make their living shrimping and fishing and i want him to know that we are going to be tireless in working to do everything we can to support the community and everybody whose livelihoods have been imperiled down in the region i want to not only thank all the members of congress who are here i think ric shinseki may be here has he made it yet he may be late give ric shinseki a round of applause anyway because he s doing a great job as our secretary of veterans affairs i want to thank dj rekha who s been spinning a little east room bhangra for everybody mixing a hip hop beat with the sounds of her heritage making a uniquely american sound that may not have been heard in the white house before but you know that speaks to the promise of this country a nation that welcomes contributions from all peoples all colors all creeds we draw strength from the rich tradition that everybody can call america home because we all came from somewhere else except for the first americans e pluribus unum out of many one and there s no better example of this than the communities that are represented in this room your role in america s story has not always been given its due and many asian americans and pacific islanders have known tremendous unfairness and injustice during our history but we also know that generations of asian americans and pacific islanders helped to build this country defend this country and make america what it is today from the chinese laborers who scaled cliffs and laid ties to connect our coasts by rail to the members of the 442nd regimental combat team who fought and bled overseas while their families were interned back home from the hundreds of thousands who bore hardship and sacrifice on the journey to angel island a century ago to the more than 16 million asian americans and pacific islanders whose talents and efforts strengthen our economy and protect our security and enliven our communities each and every day and obviously this is personal for me since you need to look no further than my family my sister maya and brother in law konrad and my two mischievous nieces suhaila and savita to know that it is part of america s past but is also going to be part of america s future and for this reason we are here today to celebrate these contributions but we re also holding this event because i want to make sure that we are hearing from you so that the government does its part on your behalf just as you re doing your part on america s behalf and that s why i signed an executive order to reestablish the white house initiative on asian americans and pacific islanders it s chaired by my commerce secretary gary locke and my education secretary arne duncan are they here there s arne it s easier to spot arne than gary that s why we re always welcoming your input from meetings with sikh americans to native hawaiians the goal is to make sure that our government is successfully working to address disparities in health care in education and economic opportunity that exists within various aapi communities sometimes these disparities don t get the attention they deserve people get lumped into one category and obviously so many asian americans are doing so well that the fact of disparity is lost and forgotten but as you know beneath the label of aapi are dozens of communities and each is facing their own unique challenges and that s part of what this education effort within government is all about to make sure we re not making generalizations but rather we re thinking in very particular terms about how we can help to give everyone in this country the opportunity they deserve i m also going to fight have been fighting and will keep on fighting for comprehensive immigration reform that respects our nation s heritage we have to respect our heritage as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants and that means that everybody is going to have to take responsibility government has a responsibility to secure the border and enforce laws washington has an obligation to set clear common sense rules including rules that no longer punish and divide families that are doing the right thing and following the law that s why addressing the backlogs problem in our immigration system is an important part of reform business has to be held accountable when they exploit undocumented workers individuals who are here illegally they have to take responsibility by paying a fine and back taxes learning english and going to the back of the line so that they take a legal path towards citizenship these are the essential elements of comprehensive reform and i m going to work with members of both parties to get it done it may not be the easiest thing to do politically but i also know that it is the right thing to do for our country in addition we ve sought to honor aapi heritage commemorating hmong new year marking good to see you i know i remember you how s your kid she s doing good good good good didn t know we were going to have that little colloquy but we ve marked diwali in the white house and with my appointments and nominations i ve worked to make sure that we ve got a government that is reflective of all america including americans of asian descent and pacific islanders but i think it s also important to stress that while you confront some specific challenges to aapi communities everybody here understands that nobody is immune from the problems that our country is confronted with as a whole as small business owners asian americans and pacific islanders know how important it is that we continue to spur growth after a long and brutal recession as parents everybody here is concerned about the quality of our education system and making college more affordable and accessible as americans we want to make sure that we re giving our children the same opportunities that were given to us and you know that it s up to each generation of americans to pass on that legacy to make sure that america is living up to its promise a place where all things are possible if you re willing to put in a lot of hard work asian americans and pacific islanders have helped to fulfill that promise for generations now and because of the leadership of all of you in this room and people all across the country i m confident that that will continue into this century so thank you so much everybody for being here god bless you god bless america thank you dem bobama24 7 09a barack_obama hello chicago it is good to be home we got connie howard in the house who else we got here let s see we got the governor pat quinn is here my old friend senate president john cullerton is here the comptroller of the state dan hynes is here treasurer alexi giannoulias is here where s alexi she s around here somewhere and a great friend somebody who helped look after me while i was down in the state senate former president of the senate emil jones is here give emil a big round of applause thank you it is good to see everybody it s good to be home i miss you all i love you all i wouldn t be where i am today if it wasn t for the support and love that this city has given our family over the years so thank you and i have to say i guess today everybody is a white sox fan i was up on the north side and all these cubs fans were all like what about buehrle i said that s right that was extraordinary i told i spoke to buehrle on the phone on air force one that s one of the privileges of the presidency see you can call up a guy after he pitches a perfect game i told him that he had to buy a big steak dinner for that centerfielder wise because he saved that perfect game that was exciting somebody just asked me what s more exciting that or the dow going over 9 000 and i said i promise you a perfect game now that s big that is big it has now been six months since michelle and sasha and malia and marian robinson my mother in law said goodbye and moved into a nice little spot in washington d c and we arrived there at an incredibly difficult moment in this country s history it was a time when we faced the worst recession in half a century we were losing an average of 700 000 jobs per month our financial system was on the verge of collapse and because the folks running washington got in the habit of spending money they didn t have we inherited a deficit of 1 3 trillion that s what we faced when i took office in january but because of the actions that we took in those first weeks we ve been able to pull the economy back from the brink we still have a long way to go but the recovery act we passed has already saved jobs and created new ones delivered billions in tax relief to families and small businesses extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who have been laid off this plan will continue to save and create more jobs over the next two years just like it was designed to do i realize this is little comfort to those americans who are currently out of work and i ll be honest with you new hiring is usually the last thing to come back after such a severe1 recession but here s the thing to remember even before the crisis hit chicago we had an economy that was not doing everything it needed to be doing it was not firing on all cylinders it was good at creating a great deal of wealth for folks at the very top but not a lot of good paying jobs for the rest of america it was an economy that wasn t built to compete in the 21st century it was an economy where we ve been slow to invest in clean energy technologies that will create new jobs and industries in other countries we ve been good at creating jobs in other countries because we have not invested in the clean energy that we need to we ve watched our graduation rates lag behind too much of the world we spend much more on health care than any nation on earth by far but we re not any healthier for it now that was the america of yesterday chicago but that doesn t have to be the america of tomorrow that cannot be the america that all these young people inherit you see what we re facing right now is more than a passing crisis it is a transformative moment we are at an unmistakable crossroads there are some in washington who want us to go down the path that we ve already traveled for the last decade or so a path where we just throw up our hands and say oh this is too hard too tough we can t do it so we do nothing more than just hand out more tax breaks to the wealthiest few that make the rich even richer and the deficit even larger it s a path where our health care costs keep rising our oil dependency keeps on growing our financial markets remain an unregulated crapshoot our workers lose out on the jobs of tomorrow that s one path that s not the future i accept for the united states of america we did not come this far as a country because we looked backwards or stood still in the face of great challenges we didn t get here by lowering our sights or shrinking our dreams we are a forward looking people a people who have always faced the future not with fear but with determination not with doubt but with hope we ve always taken great chances we ve reached for new horizons and remade the world around us and that s what we are going to do again that s what are we are going to do again i m confident that we re going to weather this economic storm but once we clear away the wreckage the real question is are we going to build something better in its place i believe we have to rebuild it better than before i believe we have to lay a new foundation that will allow the united states of america to thrive and compete in a global economy and that means investing in the clean energy jobs of the future it means educating and training our workers for those jobs it means finally controlling the health care costs that are driving this nation into debt i want to talk about health care for a minute because we re having a debate in washington right now about this issue you may have noticed you know what harry truman actually said when somebody said give em hell harry he said i m going to tell the truth they ll think it s hell so we re just going to tell the truth about what s going on in health care right now because it s going to affect every single one of you health insurance reform is not just about the 46 million americans who don t have coverage it is about them we have to in a country this wealthy recognize that it is unacceptable to have 46 million people without health insurance that is unacceptable there is a moral imperative for us to help but this is also about those of you who have got health insurance the vast majority of americans still have their health insurance but you know what s happening reform is about every one of you who has ever faced premiums and co payments that are rising faster than you can afford it s about every one of you who has ever worried that you might lose your health insurance if you lose your job or if you change your job it s about anyone who s ever worried that you may not be able to get insurance or change insurance companies if you or somebody in your family has a pre existing medical condition health insurance reform is about the man from baltimore who sent us his story middle class college graduate but when he changed jobs his health insurance expired during that time he needed emergency surgery woke up with 10 000 worth of debt that has left him unable to save or buy a home or make a career change that s who health reform is about or it s about the woman from colorado who told us that when she was diagnosed with breast cancer her insurance company who had been taking 700 a month from her in premiums refused to pay for anything connected to her disease she felt like she had been given a second death a second death sentence and she had to pay for her own treatment with her retirement funds that woman from colorado is who health insurance reform is about it s about the small business owner from new jersey who told us that he employs eight people and provides health insurance for all of them but his policy goes up 20 percent each year it s his highest business expense besides his employees he s already had to let two go he may be forced to eliminate health insurance altogether that s who health reform is all about i have heard these stories in town hall meetings i read them in letters that i get i see them on our web site more times than i can remember we have talked and talked and talked about fixing health care costs for decades and we have finally reached a point where inaction is no longer an option chicago the choice is clear doing nothing is defending the status quo and i m not going to stand for a future where health care premiums rise three times faster than people s wages and 14 000 americans lose their health insurance every day this nation cannot afford a future where our government spends more on medicare and medicaid than we spend on anything else this is the price of doing nothing about health care a price that every taxpayer and every business and every family will have to pay it is unacceptable it is unsustainable and it is why we are going to pass health care reform in 2009 now we won t get there without all of you hearing a lot of the same scare tactics that you always hear they ve used it to kill health insurance reform for decades i know a lot of americans are also satisfied with their health care right now they re wondering what are they going to get out of it so let me be absolutely clear about what health reform means for you if you already have health insurance the reform that we re proposing will provide you with more security and more stability it will keep government out of health care decisions it will give you the option to keep your insurance if you re happy with it it will prevent insurance companies from dropping your coverage if you get too sick it will give you the security of knowing that if you lose your job or you move or you change jobs you will still have coverage it will limit the amount your insurance company can force you to pay for your medical costs out of your own pocket it will cover preventive care like check ups and mammograms that save lives and money and if you don t have health care or you re a small business looking to cover your employees you will be able to choose a quality affordable health plan through a health insurance exchange a marketplace that promotes choice and competition and you will get help on your premiums and finally no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre existing medical condition those days are over one other key point i want to make i have promised that reform will not add to our deficit it will be paid for and i mean it we ve already determined that about two thirds of the cost of reform can be paid for by reallocating money that is simply being wasted in federal health care programs and this includes over 100 billion in unwarranted subsidies that go to insurance companies as part of medicare subsidies that do nothing to improve care for our seniors and while congress is currently working through proposals to finance the remaining costs i continue to insist that health reform not be paid for on the backs of middle class families but in addition to making sure that this plan doesn t add to the deficit in the short term we also have to slow the growth of health care costs in the long run and to do that we want to change incentives so that doctors and nurses are free to give the best care to their patients not just the most expensive care we want to create an independent group of doctors and medical experts who will be able to eliminate waste and inefficiency which could save us money and strengthen programs for our seniors this is what reform would mean for all of us and right now we are closer to that reality than we have ever been we ve got the support of hospitals and doctors and nurses who represent the best of our health care system and know what s broken about it we ve made unprecedented progress in congress so even though we still have a few issues to work out what s remarkable about this point is not how far we have left to go it s how far we ve already come i understand how easy it is for folks in washington to become consumed by the game of politics they want to turn everything into a tally of who s up and who s down you ve got republican strategists who are telling the party that don t compromise go in for the kill defeating health care reform is about breaking president obama let me tell you something i m from chicago i don t break and let me tell you something what s even more important this isn t about me this is about a health care system that s breaking american families and breaking american businesses and breaking america s economy i ve got great health insurance i said last night i ve got a doctor who follows me everywhere every member of congress has great health insurance so this is not about me it s about the letters i read in the oval office the stories i hear at town hall meetings this is about that woman from colorado and the college graduate from maryland and the small business owner from new jersey it s about all of you all of you who are still shouldering the burden of a problem that should have been solved decades ago it s not a game for those americans it s not a game for you we can t afford to wait any longer so when it comes to health care when it comes to energy when it comes to improving our schools when it comes to regulating our financial markets we don t have time for the usual petty arguments it is time right now for everybody to come together now when buehrle pitched that perfect game it s because teammates were making the plays and this is the american team right now the team of the united states of america that has to come together and make some plays for each other not think about i not think about what s in it for me let s figure out how to move this country forward chicago i am confident we can do it but i m going to need your help i m going to need you working with me so let s go do it thank you very much everybody god bless dem bobama24 7 09b barack_obama thank you for the outstanding introduction from matthew and matthew s teacher you re doing obviously an outstanding job although i understand matthew s mom is also a teacher who has also won awards for her outstanding work so the acorn doesn t fall far from the tree we are very proud of him obviously i want to thank my wonderful secretary of education arne duncan who has helped to lead us i want to thank all the members of congress who are here the governors who are in attendance and i want to give a special shout out to chairman george miller of the education committee in the house who has just been a outstanding partner for reform please give him a big round of applause you know from the moment i entered office my administration has worked to beat back this recession by creating jobs unfreezing credit markets extending unemployment insurance and health benefits to americans who are out of work but even as we ve worked to end this immediate crisis we ve also taken some historic measures to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity that can help secure our economic future for generations to come one pillar of this new foundation is health insurance reform that can control deficits and reduce costs for families and businesses provide quality affordable care for every american another pillar is energy reform that makes clean energy profitable that creates green jobs that can t be outsourced and frees america from the grip of foreign oil we re also working to enact financial reforms that will set up firm rules of the road to help prevent an economic crisis like the one we ve just gone through from ever happening again but even if we do all of those things america will not succeed in the 21st century unless we do a far better job of educating our sons and daughters unless every child is performing the way matthew is performing in an economy where knowledge is the most valuable commodity a person and a country have to offer the best jobs will go to the best educated whether they live in the united states or india or china in a world where countries that out educate us today will out compete us tomorrow the future belongs to the nation that best educates its people period we know this but we also know that today our education system is falling short we ve talked about it for decades but we know that we have not made the progress we need to make the united states a country that has always led the way in innovation is now being outpaced in math and science education african american latino students are lagging behind white classmates in one subject after another an achievement gap that by one estimate costs us hundreds of billions of dollars in wages that will not be earned jobs that will not be done and purchases that will not be made and most employers raise doubts about the qualifications of future employees rating high school graduates basic skills as only fair or poor of course as i said before we ve talked about this problem for years for years we ve talked about bad statistics and an achievement gap for years we ve talked about overcrowded classrooms and crumbling schools and corridors of shame across this country we ve talked these problems to death year after year decade after decade while doing all too little to solve them but thanks to arne s leadership thanks to george miller s leadership thanks to all the dedicated americans in statehouses and schoolhouses communities across this country that s beginning to change we re beginning to break free from the partisanship and the petty bickering that have stood in the way of progress for so long we re beginning to move past the stale debates about either more money or more reform because the fact is we need both we re beginning to offer every single american the best education the world has to offer from the cradle to the classroom from college to careers in recent months i ve spoken about the different parts of this strategy i ve spoken about what we re doing to prepare community college students to find a job when they graduate to make college and advanced training more affordable and to raise the bar in early learning programs today i want to talk about what we can do to raise the quality of education from kindergarten through senior year because improving education is central to rebuilding our economy we set aside over 4 billion in the recovery act to promote improvements in schools this is one of the largest investments in education reform in american history and rather than divvying it up and handing it out we are letting states and school districts compete for it that s how we can incentivize excellence and spur reform and launch a race to the top in america s public schools that race starts today i m issuing a challenge to our nation s governors to school boards and principals and teachers to businesses and non for profits to parents and students if you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom if you turn around failing schools your state can win a race to the top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the world but let them fulfill their god given potential this competition will not be based on politics or ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group instead it will be based on a simple principle whether a state is ready to do what works we will use the best evidence available to determine whether a state can meet a few key benchmarks for reform and states that outperform the rest will be rewarded with a grant not every state will win and not every school district will be happy with the results but america s children america s economy and america itself will be better for it and one of the benchmarks we will use is whether states are designing and enforcing higher and clearer standards and assessments that prepare a student to graduate from college and succeed in life right now some states like massachusetts are setting high standards but many others are not many others are low balling expectations for students telling our kids they re prepared to move on to the next grade even if they aren t awarding diplomas even if a graduate doesn t have the knowledge and skills to thrive in our economy that s a recipe for economic decline and it has to stop with the race to the top fund we will reward states that come together and adopt a common set of standards and assessments now let me be clear this is not about the kind of testing that has mushroomed under no child left behind this is not about more tests it s not about teaching to the test and it s not about judging a teacher solely on the results of a single test it is about finally getting testing right about developing thoughtful assessments that lead to better results assessments that don t simply measure whether students can use a pencil to fill in a bubble but whether they possess basic knowledge and essential skills like problem solving and creative thinking creativity and entrepreneurship and already 46 states are working to develop such standards i urge those 46 states to finish the job i urge the other four to get onboard one of the other benchmarks we ll be using in awarding race to the top grants is whether outstanding teachers are being placed in our classrooms from the moment a student enters a school the single most important factor in their success is the person in front of the classroom every one of us can point to a teacher who inspired us and in some way shaped the course of our lives great teachers are the bulwark of america they should be valued and they should be honored few have worked harder to do that than our national union leaders randi weingarten is right here and dennis van roekel are two union leaders who are here and i m very pleased that they re with us today but if we re honest with ourselves we ll admit that in too many places we have no way at least no good way of distinguishing good teachers from bad ones as arne has pointed out in the past they have 300 000 teachers in california the top 10 percent are 30 000 of the best that are out there the bottom 10 percent are 30 000 of the worst out there the problem is we have no way to tell which is which that s where data comes in some places are keeping electronic records of how a student does from one year to the next and how a class does in any given year this helps students parents teachers principals and school boards know what s working and what s not in the classroom you know basketball coaches have a game tape for the team to see what they did right and what they did wrong after a tough series teachers and principals should have a way of doing the same now i recognize there s a concern among some that a teacher won t be judged fairly when we start linking students performance to the performance of their teachers and that s why we need to bring teachers into the process and make sure their voices are heard and that s why we need to make sure we use tests as just one part of a broader evaluation of teachers performance but let me be clear success should be judged by results and data is a powerful tool to determine results we can t ignore facts we can t ignore data that s why any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways if it wants to compete for a grant that s why the race to the top grants will go to states that use data effectively to reward effective teachers to support teachers who are struggling and when necessary to replace teachers who aren t up to the job and we also need to reward states that are placing outstanding teachers in schools and subjects like math and science where they re needed most that s one way to foster the next generation of math and science teachers and by the way everyone has a role to play in training these teachers so universities and nonprofit organizations can launch programs like uteach at ut austin that allows aspiring teachers to get a math or science degree and teaching certificate at the same time and businesses can follow the examples of intel and microsoft by developing the software tools and cutting edge technologies that prepare today s students to be tomorrow s teachers so we know we need better standards and we know we need excellent teachers but we also know that a number of chronically underperforming schools will require an extra effort to get back on their feet roughly 5 000 schools across this country the bottom five percent fall into this category in fact just 2 000 high schools produce over 50 percent of america s dropouts now there is no silver bullet when it comes to turning these schools around we know that many of these schools are in very tough neighborhoods and kids are coming to school already with some significant problems and the most effective and innovative approaches will be developed outside of washington in communities across this country the best ideas will come from educators who are helping a young man who s far behind to catch up or helping a young woman master the english language or going the extra mile for a student with special needs change will come from the bottom up but what we can do all of us in federal government is reward states that are pursuing forceful and effective and consistent approaches with race to the top grants there are a number of different strategies that school districts are employing to fix these schools that are in such tough shape one strategy involves replacing the principal replacing much of the staff and giving the school a second chance another strategy involves inviting a great nonprofit to help manage a troubled school a third strategy involves converting a dropout factory into a successful charter school these are public schools funded by parents teachers and civic or community organizations with broad leeway to innovate now we can t hold charter schools to lower standards than traditional public schools if a charter school is falling short year after year it should be shut down but if we re holding charter schools accountable and if we are holding them to a high standard of excellence then i believe they can be a force for innovation in our public schools and that s why i ve encouraged states to lift caps on the number of charter schools that are allowed something being done in louisiana indiana and across the country and that s why we will reward states that pursue rigorous and accountable charter schools with race to the top fund grants better standards better teaching better schools data driven results that s what we will reward with our race to the top fund but as i ve said before fixing the problem in our schools is not a task for washington alone it will take school administrators board presidents and local union leaders making collective bargaining a catalyst and not an impediment to reform it will take business leaders asking what they can do to invest in education in their communities it will take parents asking the right questions at their child s school and making sure their children are doing their homework at night and it will take students i m not worried about matthew but all the other ones including my daughters showing up for school on time and paying attention in class ultimately their education is up to them it s up to their parents it s up to their teachers it s up to all of us i ll never forget a school i visited one day when i was a community organizer in chicago as i walked around the school with the principal i remember saying to her how wonderful it was to see all these kids so full of energy and hope and the spark in their eye and when he asked them what they were going to be when they grew up they said we re going to be doctors and lawyers and they all had these big dreams for the future and i remember the principal saying that soon all that would change that in a year or two something would shut off inside as they began to realize their hopes wouldn t come to pass not because they weren t smart enough not because they weren t talented enough but because they didn t see a pathway to success and that s true of too many children in this country maybe they don t have a great teacher maybe they don t find their classes exciting maybe they aren t being challenged at school maybe their parents aren t pushing them the way they need to maybe nobody is setting high expectations for them maybe they can t afford a college education maybe they don t know anybody who s ever gone to college and the reason you re here the reason arne is here the reason i m here is to make sure that we are giving all of those children all our children the pathways they need to make the most of their abilities to make the most of their opportunities to make the most of their lives i am absolutely confident that if i do my part if arne does his part if our teachers do their part if you do yours if the american people do theirs then we will not only strengthen our economy over the long run and we will not only make america s entire education system the envy of the world but we will launch a race to the top that will prepare every child everywhere in america for the challenges of the 21st century i m convinced we can do that but it s not going to come easy it s not going to come quick we re going to have to have staying power we re going to have to be consistent we re going to have to put the interests of our children ahead of our own parochial interests but we have no choice and i m absolutely confident that we can make it happen thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama24 7 09c barack_obama thank you for the outstanding introduction from matthew and matthew s teacher you re doing obviously an outstanding job although i understand matthew s mom is also a teacher who has also won awards for her outstanding work so the acorn doesn t fall far from the tree we are very proud of him obviously i want to thank my wonderful secretary of education arne duncan who has helped to lead us i want to thank all the members of congress who are here the governors who are in attendance and i want to give a special shout out to chairman george miller of the education committee in the house who has just been a outstanding partner for reform please give him a big round of applause you know from the moment i entered office my administration has worked to beat back this recession by creating jobs unfreezing credit markets extending unemployment insurance and health benefits to americans who are out of work but even as we ve worked to end this immediate crisis we ve also taken some historic measures to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity that can help secure our economic future for generations to come one pillar of this new foundation is health insurance reform that can control deficits and reduce costs for families and businesses provide quality affordable care for every american another pillar is energy reform that makes clean energy profitable that creates green jobs that can t be outsourced and frees america from the grip of foreign oil we re also working to enact financial reforms that will set up firm rules of the road to help prevent an economic crisis like the one we ve just gone through from ever happening again but even if we do all of those things america will not succeed in the 21st century unless we do a far better job of educating our sons and daughters unless every child is performing the way matthew is performing in an economy where knowledge is the most valuable commodity a person and a country have to offer the best jobs will go to the best educated whether they live in the united states or india or china in a world where countries that out educate us today will out compete us tomorrow the future belongs to the nation that best educates its people period we know this but we also know that today our education system is falling short we ve talked about it for decades but we know that we have not made the progress we need to make the united states a country that has always led the way in innovation is now being outpaced in math and science education african american latino students are lagging behind white classmates in one subject after another an achievement gap that by one estimate costs us hundreds of billions of dollars in wages that will not be earned jobs that will not be done and purchases that will not be made and most employers raise doubts about the qualifications of future employees rating high school graduates basic skills as only fair or poor of course as i said before we ve talked about this problem for years for years we ve talked about bad statistics and an achievement gap for years we ve talked about overcrowded classrooms and crumbling schools and corridors of shame across this country we ve talked these problems to death year after year decade after decade while doing all too little to solve them but thanks to arne s leadership thanks to george miller s leadership thanks to all the dedicated americans in statehouses and schoolhouses communities across this country that s beginning to change we re beginning to break free from the partisanship and the petty bickering that have stood in the way of progress for so long we re beginning to move past the stale debates about either more money or more reform because the fact is we need both we re beginning to offer every single american the best education the world has to offer from the cradle to the classroom from college to careers in recent months i ve spoken about the different parts of this strategy i ve spoken about what we re doing to prepare community college students to find a job when they graduate to make college and advanced training more affordable and to raise the bar in early learning programs today i want to talk about what we can do to raise the quality of education from kindergarten through senior year because improving education is central to rebuilding our economy we set aside over 4 billion in the recovery act to promote improvements in schools this is one of the largest investments in education reform in american history and rather than divvying it up and handing it out we are letting states and school districts compete for it that s how we can incentivize excellence and spur reform and launch a race to the top in america s public schools that race starts today i m issuing a challenge to our nation s governors to school boards and principals and teachers to businesses and non for profits to parents and students if you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom if you turn around failing schools your state can win a race to the top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the world but let them fulfill their god given potential this competition will not be based on politics or ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group instead it will be based on a simple principle whether a state is ready to do what works we will use the best evidence available to determine whether a state can meet a few key benchmarks for reform and states that outperform the rest will be rewarded with a grant not every state will win and not every school district will be happy with the results but america s children america s economy and america itself will be better for it and one of the benchmarks we will use is whether states are designing and enforcing higher and clearer standards and assessments that prepare a student to graduate from college and succeed in life right now some states like massachusetts are setting high standards but many others are not many others are low balling expectations for students telling our kids they re prepared to move on to the next grade even if they aren t awarding diplomas even if a graduate doesn t have the knowledge and skills to thrive in our economy that s a recipe for economic decline and it has to stop with the race to the top fund we will reward states that come together and adopt a common set of standards and assessments now let me be clear this is not about the kind of testing that has mushroomed under no child left behind this is not about more tests it s not about teaching to the test and it s not about judging a teacher solely on the results of a single test it is about finally getting testing right about developing thoughtful assessments that lead to better results assessments that don t simply measure whether students can use a pencil to fill in a bubble but whether they possess basic knowledge and essential skills like problem solving and creative thinking creativity and entrepreneurship and already 46 states are working to develop such standards i urge those 46 states to finish the job i urge the other four to get onboard one of the other benchmarks we ll be using in awarding race to the top grants is whether outstanding teachers are being placed in our classrooms from the moment a student enters a school the single most important factor in their success is the person in front of the classroom every one of us can point to a teacher who inspired us and in some way shaped the course of our lives great teachers are the bulwark of america they should be valued and they should be honored few have worked harder to do that than our national union leaders randi weingarten is right here and dennis van roekel are two union leaders who are here and i m very pleased that they re with us today but if we re honest with ourselves we ll admit that in too many places we have no way at least no good way of distinguishing good teachers from bad ones as arne has pointed out in the past they have 300 000 teachers in california the top 10 percent are 30 000 of the best that are out there the bottom 10 percent are 30 000 of the worst out there the problem is we have no way to tell which is which that s where data comes in some places are keeping electronic records of how a student does from one year to the next and how a class does in any given year this helps students parents teachers principals and school boards know what s working and what s not in the classroom you know basketball coaches have a game tape for the team to see what they did right and what they did wrong after a tough series teachers and principals should have a way of doing the same now i recognize there s a concern among some that a teacher won t be judged fairly when we start linking students performance to the performance of their teachers and that s why we need to bring teachers into the process and make sure their voices are heard and that s why we need to make sure we use tests as just one part of a broader evaluation of teachers performance but let me be clear success should be judged by results and data is a powerful tool to determine results we can t ignore facts we can t ignore data that s why any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways if it wants to compete for a grant that s why the race to the top grants will go to states that use data effectively to reward effective teachers to support teachers who are struggling and when necessary to replace teachers who aren t up to the job and we also need to reward states that are placing outstanding teachers in schools and subjects like math and science where they re needed most that s one way to foster the next generation of math and science teachers and by the way everyone has a role to play in training these teachers so universities and nonprofit organizations can launch programs like uteach at ut austin that allows aspiring teachers to get a math or science degree and teaching certificate at the same time and businesses can follow the examples of intel and microsoft by developing the software tools and cutting edge technologies that prepare today s students to be tomorrow s teachers so we know we need better standards and we know we need excellent teachers but we also know that a number of chronically underperforming schools will require an extra effort to get back on their feet roughly 5 000 schools across this country the bottom five percent fall into this category in fact just 2 000 high schools produce over 50 percent of america s dropouts now there is no silver bullet when it comes to turning these schools around we know that many of these schools are in very tough neighborhoods and kids are coming to school already with some significant problems and the most effective and innovative approaches will be developed outside of washington in communities across this country the best ideas will come from educators who are helping a young man who s far behind to catch up or helping a young woman master the english language or going the extra mile for a student with special needs change will come from the bottom up but what we can do all of us in federal government is reward states that are pursuing forceful and effective and consistent approaches with race to the top grants there are a number of different strategies that school districts are employing to fix these schools that are in such tough shape one strategy involves replacing the principal replacing much of the staff and giving the school a second chance another strategy involves inviting a great nonprofit to help manage a troubled school a third strategy involves converting a dropout factory into a successful charter school these are public schools funded by parents teachers and civic or community organizations with broad leeway to innovate now we can t hold charter schools to lower standards than traditional public schools if a charter school is falling short year after year it should be shut down but if we re holding charter schools accountable and if we are holding them to a high standard of excellence then i believe they can be a force for innovation in our public schools and that s why i ve encouraged states to lift caps on the number of charter schools that are allowed something being done in louisiana indiana and across the country and that s why we will reward states that pursue rigorous and accountable charter schools with race to the top fund grants better standards better teaching better schools data driven results that s what we will reward with our race to the top fund but as i ve said before fixing the problem in our schools is not a task for washington alone it will take school administrators board presidents and local union leaders making collective bargaining a catalyst and not an impediment to reform it will take business leaders asking what they can do to invest in education in their communities it will take parents asking the right questions at their child s school and making sure their children are doing their homework at night and it will take students i m not worried about matthew but all the other ones including my daughters showing up for school on time and paying attention in class ultimately their education is up to them it s up to their parents it s up to their teachers it s up to all of us i ll never forget a school i visited one day when i was a community organizer in chicago as i walked around the school with the principal i remember saying to her how wonderful it was to see all these kids so full of energy and hope and the spark in their eye and when he asked them what they were going to be when they grew up they said we re going to be doctors and lawyers and they all had these big dreams for the future and i remember the principal saying that soon all that would change that in a year or two something would shut off inside as they began to realize their hopes wouldn t come to pass not because they weren t smart enough not because they weren t talented enough but because they didn t see a pathway to success and that s true of too many children in this country maybe they don t have a great teacher maybe they don t find their classes exciting maybe they aren t being challenged at school maybe their parents aren t pushing them the way they need to maybe nobody is setting high expectations for them maybe they can t afford a college education maybe they don t know anybody who s ever gone to college and the reason you re here the reason arne is here the reason i m here is to make sure that we are giving all of those children all our children the pathways they need to make the most of their abilities to make the most of their opportunities to make the most of their lives i am absolutely confident that if i do my part if arne does his part if our teachers do their part if you do yours if the american people do theirs then we will not only strengthen our economy over the long run and we will not only make america s entire education system the envy of the world but we will launch a race to the top that will prepare every child everywhere in america for the challenges of the 21st century i m convinced we can do that but it s not going to come easy it s not going to come quick we re going to have to have staying power we re going to have to be consistent we re going to have to put the interests of our children ahead of our own parochial interests but we have no choice and i m absolutely confident that we can make it happen thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama24 7 09d barack_obama thank you please everybody be seated thank you first of all how about my secretary of state give it up for senator hillary clinton she is doing an unbelievable job she s traveling all around the world delivering a message that america is back and ready to lead and everywhere she goes she is representing us with grace and strength and we are very fortunate to have her i m also lucky to have an outstanding attorney general in eric holder so i wanted to make sure that we thank him for being here my secretary of labor who is committed to these issues hilda solis we ve got a couple of governors in the house at least i see one of them over here governor david paterson of new york and i think that christine gregoire was here there she is right here from washington state i want to thank the outstanding members of congress who are on the stage senator dan inouye representative steny hoyer representative robert andrews representative james sensenbrenner representative jim langevin thank you so much please give them a big round of applause and not on the stage but extraordinarily important are three key figures who helped to get the original ada passed i want to acknowledge them first of all not able to attend but this guy is a fierce warrior on behalf of the disabilities community tom harkin he couldn t be here but give him a round of applause another person who could not be here but was instrumental in guiding the passage of this landmark legislation bob dole but his wonderful partner elizabeth dole senator elizabeth dole is here so please give her a round of applause on behalf of bob dole and attorney general and somebody who worked very hard on this issue richard thornburgh please give him a big round of applause where s richard there he is well welcome to the white house we are thrilled to have you all here for an historic announcement regarding our global commitment to fundamental human rights for persons with disabilities i m also honored to mark the anniversary of a historic piece of civil rights legislation with so many of the people who helped make it possible and i d like to reflect on that for a few moments i m reminded today of my father in law some of you have heard his story fraser robinson he was michelle s hero when you talk to her about her dad even today she just lights up he was a vibrant and athletic man who provided for his family as a shift worker at a water treatment plant in chicago and in his early 30s he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and even as it progressed even as he struggled to get dressed in the morning and used two canes to get himself to work every day despite the fact that he had to wake up a little bit earlier and work a little harder to overcome the barriers he faced every day he never complained he never asked for special treatment he just wanted to be given the opportunity to do right by his family never missed a day of work would have trouble buttoning his own shirts but he would make sure that he woke up in time to do it and by the time i met him he would struggle with those two canes but even if he had to go over a bumpy patch of grass to watch his son s ball games or go up a flight of stairs so that he could see his daughter dance he would do it this was before the ada passed and i think about him all the time when i think about these issues it s a reminder of the very promise of the ada nineteen years ago this weekend democrats and republicans advocates and ordinary americans came together here at the white house to watch president george h w bush sign the ada into law folks traveled from all across america to witness a milestone in the long march to achieve equal opportunity for all but like all great movements this one did not begin or end in washington d c it began in small towns and big cities across this country it began with people like fraser robinson showing that they can be full contributors to society regardless of the lack of awareness of others it began when people refused to accept a second class status in america it began when they not only refused to accept the way the world saw them but also the way they had seen themselves and when quiet acts of persistence and perseverance were coupled with vocal acts of advocacy a movement grew and people marched and organized and testified and parents of children with disabilities asked why their children who had the same hopes and dreams as children everywhere else were left out and left behind and wounded veterans came home from war only to find that despite their sacrifice for america they now felt excluded from america s promise we had a little meeting before we came out and tony coelho who was instrumental on this issue spoke in just incredibly moving terms about what it meant for him to be an epileptic and the fact that discrimination was rife he was rejected from the priesthood because that was considered unacceptable he was rejected from the army because that was considered unacceptable those experiences could have just been internalized and people could have felt doubt but instead it became a source of strength and step by step progress was won laws were changed americans with disabilities were finally guaranteed the right to vote a right that only carries real meaning when you can enter the voting booth to cast that vote folks were extended certain protections from discrimination and given the needed rehabilitation and training to go to the job and even though we still have a long way to go with regard to education children with disabilities were no longer excluded no longer kept separate and then no longer denied the opportunity to learn the same skills in the same classroom as other children now even two decades ago too many barriers still stood too many americans suffered under segregation and discrimination americans with disabilities were still measured by what folks thought they couldn t do not by what can employers often assumed disabled meant unable millions of americans with disabilities were eager to work but couldn t find a job an employer could have told a person with a disability no we don t hire your kind that person then could have tried to find recourse at the courthouse only to find that she couldn t enter the building and wouldn t find a receptive audience even if she did what was needed was a bill of rights for persons with disabilities and that s what the ada was it was a formal acknowledgment that americans with disabilities are americans first and they are entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else a right to belong and participate fully in the american experience a right to dignity and respect in the workplace and beyond the freedom to make of our lives what we will in a time when so many doubted that people with disabilities could participate in our society contribute to our economy or support their families the ada assumed they could americans with disabilities didn t ask for charity or demand special treatment they only wanted a fair shot at opportunity they didn t want to be isolated they wanted to be integrated not dependent but independent and allowing all americans to engage in our society and our economy is in our national interest especially now when we all have a part to play to build a new foundation for america s lasting prosperity so the ada showed the world our full commitment to the rights of people with disabilities and now we have an opportunity to live up to that commitment today 650 million people 10 percent of the world s population live with a disability in developing countries 90 percent of children with disabilities don t attend school women and girls with disabilities are too often subject to deep discrimination disability rights aren t just civil rights to be enforced here at home they re universal rights to be recognized and promoted around the world and that s why i m proud to announce that next week the united states of america will join 140 other nations in signing the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities the first new human rights convention of the 21st century this extraordinary treaty calls on all nations to guarantee rights like those afforded under the ada it urges equal protection and equal benefits before the law for all citizens reaffirms the inherent dignity and worth and independence of all persons with disabilities worldwide i ve instructed ambassador susan rice to formally sign the convention at the united nations in new york next week and i hope that the senate can give swift consideration and approval to the convention once i submit it for their advice and consent and even as we extend our commitment to persons for with disabilities around the world we re working to deepen that commitment here at home we ve lifted the ban on stem cell research we ve reauthorized the children s health insurance program continuing coverage for 7 million children and covering an additional 4 million children in need including children with disabilities i was proud to sign the landmark christopher and dana reeve paralysis act the first piece of comprehensive legislation specifically aimed at addressing the challenges that are faced by americans living with paralysis we ve nearly doubled funding for the individuals with disabilities education act we re strengthening anti discrimination enforcement at the justice department we re creating a new special assistant position at the department of transportation just to focus on accessible transportation we ve launched the year of community living to affirm the fundamental right of people with disabilities to live with dignity and respect wherever they choose so i m proud of the progress we ve made but i m not satisfied and i know you aren t either until every american with a disability can learn in their local public school in the manner best for them until they can apply for a job without fear of discrimination and live and work independently in their communities if that s what they choose we ve got more work to do as long as we as a people still too easily succumb to casual discrimination or fear of the unfamiliar we ve still got more work to do as we continue that work we should remember just who it was that the ada was all about it was about the young girl with cerebral palsy who just wanted to see a movie at her local theater but was turned away it was about the vietnam veteran who returned home paralyzed and said he felt like he d fought for everyone but himself it was about the thousands of people with disabilities who showed up at public hearings all across the country to share their stories of exclusion and injustice and the millions more they spoke up for because they did we live in a country where our children can grow up with every opportunity to learn and compete where our disabled veterans returning from iraq and afghanistan can navigate public places more easily and where 54 million americans with disabilities can pursue their full measure of happiness and what we ve learned what we ve what they have taught us is that it is far more noble and worthwhile and valuable to make it possible for these americans to live up to their full potential because when we do it makes all of us more whole it makes our union more perfect it makes the united states of america strong every morning i walk along the colonnade that connects this house to the oval office and there s something you might not notice unless you re really paying attention and i ll be honest when i take that walk i usually have a lot on my mind but there s a gentle slope at the end of that colonnade a ramp that was installed during a renovation of the west wing 75 years ago making it much easier for one of my predecessors to get to work back then fear and prejudice towards americans with disabilities was the norm but most americans didn t even know that president roosevelt had a disability that means that what most americans also didn t know was that president roosevelt s disability made absolutely no difference to his ability to renew our confidence or rescue our economy and mobilize our greatest generation to save our way of life let me correct that i actually think it did make a difference in a positive way what he told us was that further progress must of necessity depend on a deeper understanding on the part of every man and woman in the united states i believe we re getting there and today because more than one in five americans live with a disability and chances are the rest of us love somebody with one we remember our obligation to ensuring their every chance to pursue the american dream we celebrate the courage and commitment of those who brought us to this point and we recommit ourselves to building a world free of unnecessary barriers and full of that deeper understanding so thank you all for being here let s sign this bill there the go thank you everybody dem bobama25 1 10b barack_obama hello hello how are you thank you everybody thank you very much thank you so much everybody please have a seat welcome to the white house and congratulations a little belatedly to the los angeles lakers for winning your 15th 15th nba title and fourth in the past 10 years before i say a few things about the lakers i just want to acknowledge some wonderful members of congress and big lakers fans who are here congresswoman jane harman congresswoman laura richardson congressman adam schiff congressman brad sherman and lucille roybal allard please everybody give them a big round of applause now as folks here will tell you the only thing that is better than playing basketball the only thing that s better than watching basketball is playing basketball but i m 48 and soon to be 49 and it s a little harder these days to move around on the court especially when you re playing against kids who are half your age but i still get enormous enormous pleasure from watching great athletes on the court and nobody exemplifies excellence in basketball better than the los angeles lakers last year i want to congratulate everybody who helped make this team what it is from the assistants to the front office staff to the trainers and the ticket takers all the fans back in l a who bleed purple and gold you all should be very proud that s you i want to congratulate jeanie buss and the rest of the buss family for guiding this team so well for the last 30 years i m especially excited to meet coach phil jackson the zen master i ve been a fan of coach jackson s ever since his days running the triangle offense in chicago i want to congratulate him on his tenth nba championship the most in history i do want to point out that six of them came with the bulls i just want to point that out you remember that magic 90 91 remember when you know they won the first game and they were feeling cocky and paxson was hitting all those shots anyway we re not that s not why we re here i was hoping that coach you were going to bring some books for republicans and democrats in congress maybe to get them to start playing like a team together coach is famous for passing out books and helping people get the job done we are obviously honored to have one of the all time greats in nba history magic johnson magic did pretty well during his time with the lakers he wasn t bad and now a new generation is continuing his legacy but obviously part of what makes magic special wasn t just how he played on the court but also just the infectious enthusiasm about life and what he s now doing with businesses and minority communities he s just been an outstanding leader in our country for a long time of course i ve got to recognize kobe bryant one of the most competitive players i ve ever seen for being named finals mvp last year obviously already mvps under his belt the youngest player ever to reach 25 000 points in his career and he s playing with a broken finger now if i was if i had a broken finger i would have trouble getting out of bed and he s still leading the team day in and day out this is a team that never lost its focus last season from the first tip off to the final buzzer i know that the lakers have a tradition of ending each team gathering whether it s a practice or a game or a team meeting by with the chant 1 2 3 rings as lamar odom said we kind of always saw that light everyone was willing to do what it took to get a little stronger to play a little harder and to bring home that title but i think it s important to note that this team also knows that being a champ is about more than trophies and rings it s about being a winner off the court as well as on it and giving back to those who are less fortunate the lakers and the nba have always been about serving others at home and around the world and that tradition continued last week when the nba and the players association led by derek fisher pledged to donate 1 million to support relief efforts in haiti jordan farmar and pau gasol are also donating their money to the clinton bush haiti fund pau pledged 1 000 for every point he scored against the knicks and i m glad he dropped 20 helping the lakers to beat new york and changing the lives of haitians thousands of miles away and earlier today the team joined with our united we serve initiative to hold a fitness clinic for kids from stanton elementary school right here in washington d c teaching them about a few moves but also how to live healthy and active lives so i just want to again thank the entire lakers organization for your service for the great joy that you have given the city of los angeles but also the incredible competition you re your organization has graced the basketball court with for decades now if this season is anything like the last one i know that you guys have your sights on the nba finals so we might see you here before long but we are very grateful for your presence here today give them a big round of applause now one last thing i was also told that mr brown here intends to win the dunk contest so we ll see how that goes dem bobama25 11 09 barack_obama happy thanksgiving everybody welcome to the white house on behalf of sasha and malia and myself we re thrilled to see you i want to thank walter pelletier chairman of the national turkey federation and joel brandenberger its president for donating this year s turkey his name is courage and he traveled here from goldsboro north carolina where he was raised under walter s own precious care there you go now the national turkey federation has been bringing its finest turkeys to the white house for more than 50 years i m told presidents eisenhower and johnson actually ate their turkeys you can t fault them for that that s a good looking bird president kennedy was even given a turkey with a sign around its neck that said good eatin mr president but he showed mercy and he said let s keep him going and 20 years ago this thanksgiving the first president bush issued the first official presidential pardon for a turkey today i am pleased to announce that thanks to the interventions of malia and sasha because i was planning to eat this sucker courage will also be spared this terrible and delicious fate later today he ll head to disneyland where he ll be grand marshal of tomorrow s parade and just in case courage can t fulfill his responsibilities walter brought along another turkey carolina as an alternate the stand in now later this afternoon michelle malia sasha and i will take two of their less fortunate brethren to martha s table an organization that does extraordinary work to help folks here in d c who need it the most and i want to thank jaindl s turkey farm in orefield pennsylvania for donating those dressed birds for dinner so today all told i believe it s fair to say that we have saved or created four turkeys you know there are certain days that remind me of why i ran for this office and then there are moments like this where i pardon a turkey and send it to disneyland but every single day i am thankful for the extraordinary responsibility that the american people have placed in me i am humbled by the privilege that it is to serve them and the tremendous honor it is to serve as commander in chief of the finest military in the world and i want to wish a happy thanksgiving to every service member at home or in harm s way we re proud of you and we are thinking of you and we re praying for you when my family and i sit around the table tomorrow just like millions of other families across america we ll take time to give our thanks for many blessings but we ll also remember this is a time when so many members of our american family are hurting there s no question this has been a tough year for america we re at war our economy is emerging from an extraordinary recession into recovery but there s a long way to go and a lot of work to do in more tranquil times it s easy to notice our many blessings it s even easier to take them for granted but in times like these they resonate a bit more powerfully when president lincoln set aside the national day of thanksgiving for the first time to celebrate america s fruitful fields healthful skies and the strength and vigor of the american people it was in the midst of the civil war just when the future of our very union was most in doubt so think about that when times were darkest president lincoln understood that our american blessings shined brighter than ever this is an era of new perils and new hardships but we are as ever a people of endless compassion boundless ingenuity limitless strength we re the heirs to a hard earned history and stewards of a land of god given beauty we are americans and for all this we give our humble thanks to our predecessors to one another and to god so on this quintessentially american holiday as we give thanks for what we ve got let s also give back to those who are less fortunate as we give thanks for our loved ones let us remember those who can t be with us and as we give thanks for our security let s in turn thank those who ve sacrificed to make it possible wherever they may be now before this turkey gets too nervous that bo will escape and screw up this pardon or before i change my mind i hereby pardon courage so that he can live out the rest of his days in peace and tranquility in disneyland and to every american i want to wish you on behalf of myself malia sasha and michelle the happiest of thanksgivings thank you very much everybody dem bobama25 2 10 barack_obama thank you everybody please have a seat i m sorry i m a little late i had this thing i had to do but i understand that people have been drinking and and eating the big shrimp around here and i have to say that the wait will have been worth it because we are honoring an extraordinary group of individuals before i begin i just want to make a few acknowledgements first of all somebody who was busy with me today and is busy every day on behalf of the american people we have speaker nancy pelosi who is here we have somebody who has been a great entrepreneur of the arts who we re glad accepted the position of chairman of the nea mr rocco landesman who is here please give him a big round of applause another individual who had an extraordinarily distinguished career in congress and has been a consistent supporter of the arts and the humanities and is somebody who doesn t just talk bipartisan but has always walked the bipartisan walk we re grateful to have him here mr jim leach chairman of the neh where s jim there he is two great friends of mine and the co chairs of the president s commission on the arts and humanities ms margo lion and mr george stevens and all the commission members who are here will you please stand and let us give you a round of applause and two recipients who were not able to be here today but i want to make mention of them because obviously their careers have helped to mark the landscape of american culture for decades mr bob dylan and clint eastwood who are both recipients but could not make it today so i wanted to make sure that we acknowledge them now all of us are here to share a recognition of the importance of the arts and the humanities pursuits and professions that enrich the mind and nourish the soul and strengthen the character of this country they bring us joy they bring us understanding and insight they bring us comfort in good times and perhaps especially in difficult times in our own lives and in the life of our nation this recognition is what led to the founding of the committee on the arts and humanities the national endowment for the arts and the national endowment for the humanities each of these institutions plays a vital role in preserving and enhancing america s cultural legacy they promote works of the past they cultivate the talent of the future they deserve our thanks it is one of the special privileges of this office that i have an opportunity from time to time to take part in award ceremonies like this to honor individuals and institutions that are important to me personally and important to all of our citizens to celebrate triumphs of the arts and the humanities that bring us closer to an understanding of what makes us american but also what makes us human and one of the most extraordinary features of america s cultural inheritance is its dynamism and its diversity it s a culture that produced mark twain and toni morrison john philip sousa and louis armstrong marian anderson and alvin ailey it s a culture in which all of us can find a place in which all of us can take great pride the men and women that we honor today are a part of this unique american tradition in a cultural moment that too often prizes the sensational over the enduring the trivial over the profound it s worth recalling the contributions of the honorees in this room contributions that at once reflect and rise above the particular moments in which they re made with us are actors and authors singers and sculptors conductors curators collectors civic leaders champions of the arts and the humanities each has taken a different path to get here each has made the most of different gifts but all of them have reached the peaks of cultural achievement and all of them are a testament to the breadth and depth of the human spirit it s through contributions like theirs as much as anything else that a nation s legacy is forged ancient greece and rome are remembered for the rulers who conquered the known world but also for the odyssey and the iliad for a forum and a coliseum europe from the renaissance through the enlightenment is remembered for wars of religion and the stirrings of revolution but also for the sistine chapel and the encyclopedia the china that invented gunpowder and paper is also known for its poetry that is the legacy of these civilizations that s how they are remembered and we will be remembered i hope for what we do in our time to deliver progress for our people and to advance the dreams of all people but i hope we will be remembered for something else as well i hope we will be remembered for the metropolitan museum of art for the school of american ballet for all that you the honorees here today have done to enrich and enhance america s legacy and that legacy will be forged by all of us doing our part by those of us here in washington doing what needs to be done to improve the lives of people who are we were elected to serve by brave men and women fighting under our flag by citizens and neighborhood organizations and places of worship that are giving back to the communities and by scientists that are advancing what we know about the workings of the world and the universe but also by americans like you creators imaginers entertainers helping each of us understand the human experience and helping all of us recognize that common humanity that task is especially important i think right now it s easy in times like these with all the talk about what makes us different and what divides us what keeps us apart to lose sight of what holds us together to forget that no matter what our differences some things speak to all of us it doesn t matter whether we re democrats or republicans all of us are profoundly moved by our reflection in black granite no matter what the color of our skin or what beliefs we hold all of us can draw lessons from the works of history no matter what community we call our own all of us can be moved by a symphony or an aria all of us can be moved by a soprano s voice all of us can be moved by a film s score the arts the humanities they appeal to a certain yearning that s shared by all of us a yearning for truth and for beauty for connection and the simple pleasure of a good story more than 200 years and 25 225 years ago on february 18 1784 george washington sat down at his home in mount vernon to write a letter it was just a month after congress officially put an end to the war with the british empire and it was still years before the constitutional convention met in philadelphia years before this general ended up becoming president years before 13 newly independent colonies became one nation indivisible under god but the letter washington sat down to write that day was not about the recent triumph over the british it was not about what shape a young america might take instead it was a letter to a bookseller before requesting a few volumes washington expressed a belief and i quote to encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country a duty of every good citizen so speaks the father of our country even then amid all the concerns of those heady and dangerous days washington took time to reflect on the infinite value of what were then called the elegant arts even then he foresaw the essential role that the arts and the humanities would play in the formation of our country s character and if washington were with us today i think he would agree that all of you have fulfilled your duties that all of you are good citizens that all of you have enriched the legacy of the united states of america so with that i now ask the honorees to come up one by one as their citations are read dem bobama25 3 09 barack_obama thank you well what a great honor i will tell michelle that i ve been compared to alexander the great i will see whether that gets me a little more respect at home she knows she s still the boss your eminence it is a great honor to have you here and i want to mention a few others who are here that deserve acknowledgment father alex karloutsos father alex where did you go there he is the greek minister of justice is here where there he is dendias did i say that properly we also have the greek ambassador mallias and we have the cypriot ambassador kakouris thank you all and i see a lot of good friends a few from chicago we ve got the chicago contingent in the house wonderful supporters great friends of mine welcome to the white house it is a great honor to be here with his eminence as we mark the 10th anniversary since he became archbishop and it is a privilege to join all of you as we celebrate the contributions of greece and those of greek heritage to this country and to the world today we commemorate the 188th anniversary of greek independence and we reaffirm a bond between our two nations born through struggle but also through shared ideals it is a bond that s on display today in towns and cities across the united states in chicago we have a thriving greek american community centered around a neighborhood known as greektown there s a parade marking independence each year in fact at this very moment you might find young people in chicago s streets paying tribute to their greek heritage by wearing the traditional foustanellas i notice some of you aren t dressed appropriately i haven t seen any around the white house today but i m keeping an eye out next year alexi where s yours because as you know there are many proud greek americans in my administration and this bond we share dates to our founding america s revolutionaries imagined a new system of government but they drew upon an ancient precedent it s no coincidence that the leaders of the american revolution jefferson and madison adams hamilton were students of greek history and greek philosophy as a boy thomas jefferson the author of the declaration of independence was said to prefer spending time with his greek grammar books than with his classmates in our darkest days when our revolution was a fading hope when friends were few and victories were rare these leaders found allies in ancient texts and just as america s founders sought guidance and inspiration from greece greek revolutionaries drew strength and support from the united states as was just mentioned by his eminence in fact these leaders appealed directly to the american people offering respect and seeking support they wrote it is your land it is in your land that liberty has fixed her abode in imitating you we shall imitate our ancestors and be thought worthy of them if we succeed in resembling you in a message to congress soon after the inception of fighting president monroe affirmed our kinship with the greeks who were contending in favor of their liberties he spoke of a strong hope that these people will recover their independence and resume their equal station among the nations of the earth of course it s been a difficult and long enduring struggle both in the many centuries before the call for independence and in the nearly two centuries since it s perhaps the cruelest of ironies that a people who first tested a free and democratic form of government were doomed to live so long without it but it s also one of history s great triumphs that even in the darkest periods the light of those ideals were never extinguished through brutal wars instead people who were inspired by the ideals met them with bravery through occupations that were met with defiance through hardship met with incredible character and character of a people that never lost hope in the values greece has always represented today greece stands as a testament of that unflinching character as does the steadfast allegiance between our two nations and i am proud to welcome so many greek citizens and greek americans to the white house as we celebrate this occasion and our continued partnership in the years ahead so thank you your eminence thanks all of you for taking the time to be here thank you dem bobama25 3 10 barack_obama hello iowa are you fired up oh it is good to be back in iowa i got to take off my jacket when i m in iowa it is good to be back in iowa it s a little colder than it is in d c i got to admit but i can feel spring coming i want to make a couple of acknowledgements first of all university of iowa president dr sally mason and the entire hawkeye community thanks for hosting us the outstanding governor of the great state of iowa chet culver and first lady mari culver there he is back there a couple of great friends lieutenant governor patty judge the cochairs of my campaign here in iowa attorney general tom miller and treasurer mike fitzgerald the former governor of iowa who is now i think going to end up being one of the greatest secretaries of agriculture in history tom vilsack is in the house i want to acknowledge iowa city mayor matt hayek the entire iowa delegation could not be here because they are still busy finishing business crossing t s and dotting i s in washington but i want every single person to know that this celebration would not be happening if it were not for your members of congress leonard boswell bruce braley your own personal congressman dave loebsack and senator tom harkin now thank you secretary sebelius for the introduction but more importantly for all the amazing and tireless work that you ve done to make health care reform a reality i too feel your pain because in my bracket i had kansas winning it all i feel a little bitter the president of northern ireland came here and he was just big smile he was gloating i now i m sold i want to congratulate all the northern iowa fans in this part of the state on their big win and since you ruined my bracket i m rooting for you now i want you to just go ahead and take it go all the way i also want to start things off oh there s one other thing some of you know that i have a military aide that travels with me wherever i go this is one of the things the president does is carries a big satchel with all kinds of important stuff in there and the military aide i have with me today is a guy named lieutenant colonel dave kalinske and dave was strong safety for the hawkeyes there he is right there there s dave kalinske strong safety see that briefcase is big so you got to have a former strong safety carrying it i want to start off by telling folks here how inspired that i ve been by your continued resilience in the wake of the floods that devastated this region a few years back and i remember traveling here right after they happened and how tough things were i know i know the rebuilding has been difficult but you should know that you always have a committed partner in this administration to support the road to recovery and we know that iowa city is going to be as good as new and better cedar rapids all across the state we re seeing that rebuilding take place so it s just good to be back in iowa this is the state that first believed in our campaign when all the pundits had written us off when we were down in the polls this is the state that inspired us to keep on going even when the path was uncertain and because of you this is the place where change began three years ago i came here to this campus to make a promise just a few months into our campaign i stood at the university of iowa hospital right around the corner and i promised that by the end of my first term in office i would sign legislation to reform our health insurance system on tuesday after a year of debate a century of trying after so many of you shared your stories and your heartaches and your hopes that promise was finally fulfilled and today health insurance reform is the law of the land all across america yes we did yes we did just like the campaign that led us here this historic change didn t start in washington it began in places like iowa city places just like this with americans just like you it began when people had the courage to stand up in town hall meetings and talk about how insurance companies were denying their families coverage because of a preexisting condition it began when folks wrote letters about how premium hikes of 40 and 50 and a hundred percent were forcing them to give up their insurance it began when countless small business owners and families and doctors shared stories about a health care system that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the american people so this is your victory because when the special interests sent an army of lobbyists to congress they blanketed the airwaves with millions of dollars of negative ads you mobilized and you organized and you refused to give up and when the pundits were obsessing over who was up and who was down and how is this affecting the obama administration and what s going on over in the house you never lost sight of what was right and what was wrong you knew this was not about the fortunes of one party this was about the future of our country and today because of what you did that future looks stronger and more hopeful and brighter than it has in some time because of you three years ago we made a promise that promise has been kept of course of course over the last year there s been a lot of misinformation spread about health care reform there s been plenty of fear mongering plenty of overheated rhetoric you turn on the news you ll see the same folks are still shouting about there s going to be an end of the world because this bill passed i m not exaggerating leaders of the republican party they called the passage of this bill armageddon armageddon end of freedom as we know it so after i signed the bill i looked around to see if there any asteroids falling or some cracks opening up in the earth it turned out it was a nice day birds were chirping folks were strolling down the mall people still have their doctors from this day forward all of the cynics all the naysayers they re going to have to confront the reality of what this reform is and what it isn t they ll have to finally acknowledge this isn t a government takeover of our health care system they ll see that if americans like their doctor they ll be keeping their doctor you like your plan you ll be keeping your plan no one is taking that away from you three months from now six months from now you re going to look around you re going to be sitting in a doctor s office reading through the old people magazines and you ll say hey this is the same doctor same plan it wasn t armageddon what this reform does is build on the system of private health insurance that we already have so does that mean that it s going to solve every health care problem that we have no but it finally tells oops it looks like somebody may have fainted that happens sometimes in the crowd just give him some space if the medics can make sure to check on them in the meantime just make sure that they ve got some air and if anybody has some water down there that d be great they ll be all right but here s what the bill does it finally tells the insurance companies that in exchange for all the new customers they re about to get they ve got to start playing by a new set of rules that treats everybody honestly and treats everybody fairly the days of the insurance industry running roughshod over the american people are over so if you already if you already have insurance this reform will make it more secure and more affordable if you can t afford insurance right now or if you ve been denied coverage and i ll bet there are some folks here who don t have insurance or can t afford it or have been denied coverage you re going to finally be able to get it costs will come down for families and businesses and the federal government reducing our deficit by more than 1 trillion over the next two decades that s what reform is going to do now it s going to take about four years to implement this entire plan because we ve got to do it responsibly and we need to do it right so i just want to be clear that means that health care costs won t go down overnight not all the changes are going to be in place there are still going to be aspects of the health care system that are very frustrating over the next several years but we have built into law all sorts of measures that in the years to come health care inflation which has been rising about three times as fast as people s wages is finally going to start slowing down we ll start reducing the waste in the system from unnecessary tests to unwarranted insurance subsidies so that over time americans are going to save money and meanwhile there are a set of reforms that begin to take into effect this year so i want to talk about this this year millions of small business owners will be eligible for tax credits that will help them cover the cost of insurance for their employees this year millions of small businesses will benefit so let me talk to you about what this means for a business like your own prairie lights bookstore downtown this is a small business that s been offering coverage to their full time employees for the last 20 years last year their premiums went up 35 percent which made it a lot harder for them to offer the same coverage on tuesday i was joined at the bill signing by ryan smith who runs a small business with five employees his premiums are going up too he s worried about having to stop offering health insurance to his workers so starting now small business owners like ryan and the folks at prairie light they re going to have the security of knowing that they ll qualify for a tax credit that covers up to 35 percent of their employees health insurance starting today starting today small business owners so starting today small business owners can sit down at the end of the week look at their expenses and they can begin calculating how much money they re going to save and maybe they can even use those savings to not only provide insurance but also create jobs this health care tax credit is pro jobs it is pro business and it starts this year and it s starting because of you starting this year tens of thousands of uninsured americans with a preexisting condition and parents whose children have a preexisting condition will finally be able to purchase the coverage they need on tuesday right after i signed the bill i met david gallagher whose daughter lauren had written me a letter last year and when lauren s mom lost her job the entire family lost their health insurance and when they tried to get new insurance david was denied coverage because he once had a complication free hernia surgery so lauren s been worried sick about what would happen if her father became ill or injured but now because of this reform david gallagher can finally have access to health insurance again that starts this year because of you and the work that you did this year insurance companies will no longer be able to drop people s coverage when they get sick or place lifetime limits or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care they can receive this year all new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care and by the way for all the students who are here today starting this year if you don t have insurance or if you re about to graduate and you re not sure what your next job is going to be or there s a little gap between getting that job with insurance all new plans and some current ones will allow you to stay on your parents insurance policy until you re 26 years old starting this year because as you start your lives and your careers the last thing you should worry about is whether you go broke just because you get sick this year for the seniors who are in the audience if you fall in the coverage gap known as the doughnut hole you re going to receive 250 to help pay for prescriptions which will be the first step toward closing that doughnut hole that gap completely and i want seniors to know that despite what some have said these reforms will not cut your guaranteed benefits in fact under this law americans on medicare will receive free preventive care without co payments and deductibles darlyne neff is here today she s a breast cancer survivor she has fought her heart out for reform over the last few years today the preventive care she needs will finally be covered without charge that s what this reform will do that s what s happening because of you and once this reform is implemented then health insurance exchanges are going to be created this is the core the core aspect of this bill that is going to be so important to americans who are looking for coverage basically we set up a competitive marketplace where people without insurance small businesses people who were having to pay through the teeth because they re just buying insurance on their own maybe you re self employed you re finally going to be able to purchase quality affordable health insurance because you re going to be part of a big pool by the way with members of congress so you will be able to get the same good deal that they re getting because if you re paying their salary you should have health insurance that s at least as good as theirs that s what s going to happen in the next few years and when this exchange is up and running millions of people are going to be getting tax breaks to help them afford coverage and the credits add up to the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history this is a that s the basic aspects of reform that s not in it because we couldn t get it through congress that s why so they let s there s no need to shout young man no need to shout thirty two people 32 million people are going to have health insurance because of this legislation that s what this work is about so that s what s going to happen now i want to just make this point this legislation is not perfect as you just heard this young man is dissatisfied with an aspect of it which is fine i mean that s part of what democracy is about but what this is is a historic step to enshrine the principle that everybody gets health care coverage in this country every single person and it s absolutely true it s absolutely true this is a middle of the road bill this isn t single payer which some people wanted it s also not what the republicans were looking for which was basically to deregulate the insurance industry arguing that somehow this would cut down costs something that defies the experience of everybody who s dealt with an insurance company out there so yes this is a common sense bill it doesn t do everything that everybody wants but it moves us in the direction of universal health care coverage in this country and that s why everybody here fought so hard for it this is the reform that some folks in washington are still hollering about still shouting about now that they passed it now that we passed it they re already promising to repeal it they re actually going to run on a platform of repeal in november you ve been hearing that and my attitude is go for it if these congressmen in washington want to come here in iowa and tell small business owners that they plan to take away their tax credits and essentially raise their taxes be my guest if they want to look lauren gallagher in the eye and tell her they plan to take away her father s health insurance that s their right if they want to make darlyne neff pay more money for her check ups her mammograms they can run on that platform if this young man out here thinks this is a bad bill he can run to repeal it if they want to have that fight we can have it because i don t believe that the american people are going to put the insurance industry back in the driver s seat we ve already been there we re not going back this country is moving forward the road to this victory iowa has been long it has been difficult it s a struggle that a lot of brave americans have waged for years for others like our friend ted kennedy it s a struggle that was waged for nearly a lifetime but what this struggle has taught us about ourselves and about this country is so much bigger than any one issue because it s reminded us what so many of us learned all those months ago on a cold january night here in iowa and that s that change is never easy but it s always possible it comes not from the halls of power but from the hearts of our people amid setbacks it requires perseverance amid calls for delay it requires the fierce urgency of now in the face of unrelenting cynicism it requires unyielding hope and when i came here three years ago i told the story of when lyndon johnson stood with harry truman and signed medicare into law that wasn t perfect either i m sure there was somebody who was dissatisfied with it at the time and as he looked out over the crowd in independence missouri that day he said history shapes men but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can shape history what this generation has proven today is that we still have the power to shape history in the united states of america it is still a necessary faith that our destiny is written by us not for us our future is what we make it our future is what we make it look this is not the end of difficult times for america from creating jobs to reducing deficits to making sure every child has a decent education we still face enormous challenges in this country and as we meet those challenges we re going to face more resistance we re going to face more doubt we re going to face more cynicism we re going to hear more voices who will warn us that we re reaching too far that we re going too fast who are going to tell us that we can t who are going to just make wild accusations about what we re trying to do and when that happens we ve got to remember the promise that we have already fulfilled and the people who fulfilled it and the generations before us who made it possible we re going to have to respond with the creed that continues to define the character of this country we love and it s my favorite memory of iowa that creed that says yes we can iowa yes we did because of you and it s because of you that we are going to keep on going to make sure that we fulfill every promise to every child in this country for a brighter future thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama25 4 10 barack_obama to all the families who loved so deeply the miners we ve lost to all who called them friends worked alongside them in the mines or knew them as neighbors in montcoal and naoma or whitesville in the coal river valley and across west virginia let me begin by saying that we have been mourning with you throughout these difficult days our hearts have been aching with you we keep our thoughts with the survivors who are recovering and resting at the hospital and at the homes we re thankful for the rescue teams but our hearts ache alongside you we re here to memorialize 29 americans carl acord jason atkins christopher bell gregory steven brock kenneth allan chapman robert clark charles timothy davis cory davis michael lee elswick william i griffith steven harrah edward dean jones richard k lane william roosevelt lynch nicholas darrell mccroskey joe marcum ronald lee maynor james e mooney adam keith morgan rex l mullins joshua s napper howard d payne dillard earl persinger joel r price deward scott gary quarles grover dale skeens benny willingham and ricky workman nothing i or the vice president or the governor none of the speakers here today nothing we say can fill the hole they leave in your hearts or the absence that they leave in your lives if any comfort can be found it can perhaps be found by seeking the face of god who quiets our troubled minds a god who mends our broken hearts a god who eases our mourning souls even as we mourn 29 lives lost we also remember 29 lives lived up at 4 30 a m 5 00 in the morning at the latest they began their day as they worked in darkness in coveralls and hard toe boots a hardhat over their heads they would sit quietly for their hour long journey five miles into a mountain the only light the lamp on their caps or the glow from the mantrip they rode in day after day they would burrow into the coal the fruits of their labor what so often we take for granted the electricity that lights up a convention center that lights up our church or our home our school our office the energy that powers our country the energy that powers the world and most days they d emerge from the dark mine squinting at the light most days they d emerge sweaty and dirty and dusted from coal most days they d come home but not that day these men these husbands fathers grandfathers brothers sons uncles nephews they did not take on their job unaware of the perils some of them had already been injured some of them had seen a friend get hurt so they understood there were risks and their families did too they knew their kids would say a prayer at night before they left they knew their wives would wait for a call when their shift ended saying everything was okay they knew their parents felt a pang of fear every time a breaking news alert came on or the radio cut in but they left for the mines anyway some having waited all their lives to be miners having longed to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and their grandfathers and yet none of them did it for themselves alone all that hard work all that hardship all the time spent underground it was all for the families it was all for you for a car in the driveway a roof overhead for a chance to give their kids opportunities that they would never know and enjoy retirement with their spouses it was all in the hopes of something better and so these miners lived as they died in pursuit of the american dream there in the mines for their families they became a family themselves sharing birthdays relaxing together watching mountaineers football or basketball together spending days off together hunting or fishing they may not have always loved what they did said a sister but they loved doing it together they loved doing it as a family they loved doing it as a community that s a spirit that s reflected in a song that almost every american knows but it s a song most people i think would be surprised was actually written by a coal miner s son about this town beckley about the people of west virginia it s the song lean on me an anthem of friendship but also an anthem of community of coming together that community was revealed for all to see in the minutes and hours and days after the tragedy rescuers risking their own safety scouring narrow tunnels saturated with methane and carbon monoxide hoping against hope they might find a survivor friends keeping porch lights on in a nightly vigil hanging up homemade signs that read pray for our miners and their families neighbors consoling each other and supporting each other and leaning on one another i ve seen it the strength of that community in the days that followed the disaster emails and letters poured into the white house postmarked from different places across the country they often began the same way i am proud to be from a family of miners i am the son of a coal miner i am proud to be a coal miner s daughter they were always proud and they asked me to keep our miners in my thoughts in my prayers never forget they say miners keep america s lights on and then in these letters they make a simple plea don t let this happen again don t let this happen again how can we fail them how can a nation that relies on its miners not do everything in its power to protect them how can we let anyone in this country put their lives at risk by simply showing up to work by simply pursuing the american dream we cannot bring back the 29 men we lost they are with the lord now our task here on earth is to save lives from being lost in another such tragedy to do what must do individually and collectively to assure safe conditions underground to treat our miners like they treat each other like a family because we are all family and we are all americans and we have to lean on one another and look out for one another and love one another and pray for one another there s a psalm that comes to mind today a psalm that comes to mind a psalm we often turn to in times of heartache even though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death i will fear no evil for you are with me your rod and your staff they comfort me god bless our miners god bless their families god bless west virginia and god bless the united states of america dem bobama25 5 09 barack_obama thank you admiral mullen for that generous introduction and for your sterling service to our country to members of our armed forces to our veterans to honored guests and families of the fallen i am deeply honored to be with you on memorial day thank you to the superintendent john metzler jr who cares for these grounds just as his father did before him to the third infantry regiment who regardless of weather or hour guard the sanctity of this hallowed ground with the reverence it deserves we are grateful to you to service members from every branch of the military who each memorial day place an american flag before every single stone in this cemetery we thank you as well we are indebted we are indebted to all who tend to this sacred place here lie presidents and privates supreme court justices and slaves generals familiar to history and unknown soldiers known only to god a few moments ago i laid a wreath at their tomb to pay tribute to all who have given their lives for this country as a nation we have gathered here to repeat this ritual in moments of peace when we pay our respects to the fallen and give thanks for their sacrifice and we ve gathered here in moments of war when the somber notes of taps echo through the trees and fresh grief lingers in the air today is one of those moments where we pay tribute to those who forged our history but hold closely the memory of those so recently lost and even as we gather here this morning all across america people are pausing to remember to mourn and to pray old soldiers are pulling themselves a little straighter to salute brothers lost a long time ago children are running their fingers over colorful ribbons that they know signify something of great consequence even if they don t know exactly why mothers are re reading final letters home and clutching photos of smiling sons or daughters as youthful and vibrant as they always will be they and we are the legacies of an unbroken chain of proud men and women who served their country with honor who waged war so that we might know peace who braved hardship so that we might know opportunity who paid the ultimate price so we might know freedom those who rest in these fields fought in every american war they overthrew an empire and gave birth to revolution they strained to hold a young union together they rolled back the creeping tide of tyranny and stood post through a long twilight struggle and they took on the terror and extremism that threatens our world s stability their stories are the american story more than seven generations of them are chronicled here at arlington they re etched into stone recounted by family and friends and silently observed by the mighty oaks that have stood over burial after burial to walk these grounds then is to walk through that history not far from here appropriately just across a bridge connecting lincoln to lee union and confederate soldiers share the same land in perpetuity just down the sweeping hill behind me rest those we lost in world war ii fresh faced gis who rose to the moment by unleashing a fury that saved the world next week i ll visit normandy the place where our fate hung on an operation unlike any ever attempted where it will be my tremendous honor to address some of the brave men who stormed those beaches 65 years ago and tucked in a quiet corner to our north are thousands of those we lost in vietnam we know for many the casualties of that war endure right now there are veterans suffering and families tracing their fingers over black granite not two miles from here they are why we pledge anew to remember their service and revere their sacrifice and honor them as they deserve this cemetery is in and of itself a testament to the price our nation has paid for freedom a quarter of a million marble headstones dot these rolling hills in perfect military order worthy of the dignity of those who rest here it can seem overwhelming but for the families of the fallen just one stone stands out one stone that requires no map to find today some of those stones are found at the bottom of this hill in section 60 where the fallen from iraq and afghanistan rest the wounds of war are fresh in section 60 a steady stream of visitors leaves reminders of life photos teddy bears favorite magazines friends place small stones as a sign they stopped by combat units leave bottles of beer or stamp cigarettes into the ground as a salute to those they rode in battle with perfect strangers visit in their free time compelled to tend to these heroes to leave flowers to read poetry to make sure they don t get lonely if the fallen could speak to us what would they say would they console us perhaps they might say that while they could not know they d be called upon to storm a beach through a hail of gunfire they were willing to give up everything for the defense of our freedom that while they could not know they d be called upon to jump into the mountains of afghanistan and seek an elusive enemy they were willing to sacrifice all for their country that while they couldn t possibly know they would be called to leave this world for another they were willing to take that chance to save the lives of their brothers and sisters in arms what is thing this sense of duty what tugs at a person until he or she says send me why in an age when so many have acted only in pursuit of the narrowest self interest have the soldiers sailors airmen and marines of this generation volunteered all that they have on behalf of others why have they been willing to bear the heaviest burden whatever it is they felt some tug they answered a call they said i ll go that is why they are the best of america and that is what separates them from those of us who have not served in uniform their extraordinary willingness to risk their lives for people they never met my grandfather served in patton s army in world war ii but i cannot know what it is like to walk into battle i m the father of two young girls but i can t imagine what it s like to lose a child these are things i cannot know but i do know this i am humbled to be the commander in chief of the finest fighting force in the history of the world i know that there is nothing i will not do to keep our country safe even as i face no harder decision than sending our men and women to war and no moment more difficult than writing a letter to the families of the fallen and that s why as long as i am president i will only send our troops into harm s way when it is absolutely necessary and i will always provide them with the equipment and support they need to get the job done i know that military families sacrifice more than we can understand and feel an absence greater than we can comprehend and that s why michelle and i are committed to easing their burden and i know what a grateful nation owes to those who serve under its proud flag and that s why i promise all our servicemen and women that when the guns fall silent and you do return home it will be to an america that is forever here for you just as you ve been there for us with each death we are heartbroken with each death we grow more determined this bustling graveyard can be a restless place for the living where solace sometimes comes only from meeting others who know similar grief but it reminds us all the meaning of valor it reminds us all of our own obligations to one another it recounts that most precious aspect of our history and tells us that we will only rise or fall together so on this day of silent remembrance and solemn prayer i ask all americans wherever you are whoever you re with whatever you re doing to pause in national unity at 3 00 this afternoon i ask you to ring a bell or offer a prayer say a silent thank you and commit to give something back to this nation something lasting in their memory to affirm in our own lives and advance around the world those enduring ideals of justice equality and opportunity for which they and so many generations of americans have given that last full measure of devotion god bless you god bless the fallen and god bless the united states of america dem bobama25 5 10 barack_obama good afternoon everybody everybody please have a seat it is wonderful to see all of you welcome to the white house i want to acknowledge a couple folks before we get started first of all we ve got some special guests who are here from wonderful states they are doing great work we re very very proud of them michigan governor jennifer granholm and wisconsin governor jim doyle please give them a big round of applause stand up guys so everybody can see you on the stage with me we ve got some the reason we re here people who have helped to live out the american dream and created jobs and we are extraordinarily proud of them we ve got trapper clark and thomas sturtevant right over here we ve got charles reid right down here and we ve got tamara marquez nugent these are the outstanding winners of this award and you re going to be hearing more about them i also want to introduce somebody who i m very proud of who s doing just a great job as our sba administrator karen mills please give her a round of applause and we ve got some wonderful members of congress who are here i love them all dearly and we re going to talk about the role congress can play in doing the work that needs to be done right now this is the beginning of national small business week which every president has recognized since john f kennedy started the tradition in 1963 with us are some of the most successful most hardworking entrepreneurs from across america each of you has distinguished yourselves as the small business owner of the year in your state or your region later today a national winner will be announced but all of you should be extremely proud of what you ve accomplished this year i know that i m extremely proud of what you ve accomplished being a successful small business person isn t just about collecting a profit or outperforming your competition it s about contributing to the success of this country s economy it s about contributing to your country s continued growth and prosperity and it s about securing your piece of the american dream and helping your employees and your suppliers and all the people you work with secure their piece of the american dream what s always distinguished us as a nation is a belief that it s a place where anybody with a good idea and a willingness to work can succeed it s the belief that has brought millions of people to our shores and carried us through even the toughest economic times it s how small businesses begin maybe somebody finally decides to take a chance on his dream maybe a worker decides it s time to become her own boss either way these entrepreneurial pioneers embody the spirit of possibility the tireless work ethic and the simple hope for something better that lies at the heart of the american ideal some of you have opened mom and pop stores that have led to america s biggest most successful companies some have launched technology companies software and it services that have redefined the marketplace you collectively create two out of every three jobs here in the united states of america two out of every three jobs and that s why small businesses aren t just the backbone of this economy you re also the driving force behind this recovery the problem is is that small business owners have also been the hardest hit by this recession from the middle of 2007 through the end of 2008 small businesses lost 2 4 million jobs and because banks shrunk from lending in the midst of the financial crisis it s been difficult for small business owners to take out the loans they need to open up shop or to expand for those who do own a small business it s hard to finance inventories make payrolls or to do that additional work that could make your business grow now government can t create jobs but it can help create the conditions for small businesses to grow and to thrive and to hire more workers government can t guarantee a company s success but it can knock down the barriers that prevent small business owners from getting loans or investing in the future and that s why so much of our economic agenda has been focused on america s small businesses last year we enacted seven tax cuts for america s small businesses as well as making work pay tax credits that go to the vast majority of small business owners so far the recovery act has supported over 64 000 loans to small businesses more than 27 billion in new lending more than 1 200 banks and credit unions that had stopped making sba loans when the financial crisis hit are lending again today and more than 8 billion in federal recovery act contracts are now going to small businesses so right now a series of additional tax incentives and other steps to promote hiring are taking effect because of a bill i signed into law a few months ago businesses are now eligible for tax cuts when they hire unemployed workers companies are also able to write off more of their investments in new equipment and as part of the health reform package 4 million small business owners recently received a postcard in their mailboxes telling them that they could be eligible for a health care tax credit this year it s worth perhaps tens of thousands of dollars to your companies and it will provide welcome relief to small business owners who i know you guys understand all too often have to choose between hiring or keeping your health care for yourselves and your workers i also want to say a few words about what the sba has been doing to help those workers and business owners who ve been affected by the oil spill in the gulf coast from the very beginning of this disaster the sba has acted quickly to assist fishermen and fishing dependent small businesses they re offering low interest loans and deferrals of existing loans and while small businesses are encouraged to file claims with bp these loans and deferrals can provide much needed temporary assistance so all of these steps have made a real difference in the lives of the people who own and work at small businesses all across america and that includes all of you who are here with us today i just met with trapper and tom who are the state of maine s small business owners of the year karen assures me that the reason they re on stage is not because they re from maine her home state they started a company that manufactures aluminum trailers about four years ago with 20 employees they ve grown rapidly over the last few years and that growth has been supported by a recovery act loan from the small business administration they got some of their fees waived and today they have 85 employees are planning to add another 15 by the end of this year and hope to add another 30 by the end of 2011 frank and donna masley are here they are delaware s small business owners of the year where are they there they are right there congratulations ten years ago they launched a glove making business to provide flexibility and protection for our men and women in uniform when they won a contract to supply gloves for soldiers in iraq and afghanistan in 2009 they received a recovery act loan through the sba and saved thousands on fees it was that loan that allowed frank and donna to rehire some employees who had been laid off during this recession and today their business is growing and thriving once more so many people who are here today have stories just like this their success isn t the result of a heavy handed government it s the result of a government that lent a helping hand that complements the sheer grit and determination of america s small business owners and i believe we need to do even more to give these men and women a boost so that s why i m calling on congress to pass small business jobs a small business jobs package as soon as possible this legislation should ensure that creditworthy small business owners can get the capital they need to expand and create jobs it should include needed tax relief like our proposal to completely eliminate capital gains taxes for those making key long term investments in small businesses it should include expansions of vital small business administration loan programs that are needed now more than ever and it should include two important lending initiatives that i recently sent to congress the first initiative is the 30 billion small business lending fund i called for in my state of the union address this fund would target only small community and neighborhood banks and it would help these institutions increase lending to small businesses the second initiative is a new state small business credit program that we recently proposed working with governors like governor doyle and governor granholm it s an initiative that will help expand private lending for small businesses and manufacturers at a time when budget shortfalls are leading states to cut back on vitally important lending programs now i m very pleased that elements of this small business jobs package have already passed the house financial services committee last week and i know that the senate is working on the issue as well i urge both chambers to act on these proposals as soon as possible this shouldn t be a partisan issue this is not a republican issue or a democratic issue this should not be an issue about big government versus small government this is an issue that involves putting government on the side of small business owners who create most of the jobs in this country it s about giving them tax credits and loans and tax cuts so they can keep growing and keep hiring it s about unleashing the great power of our economy and the ingenuity of our people and when you have a chance to talk to charles and you find out what he s been doing in michigan creating a business that is expanding working with restaurants and other institutions on their designs when you think about somebody like tamara who started her own business after her husband i believe actually had to take disability and she s now growing and hiring employees getting into a business that historically has been male dominated the moving business when you hear their stories you can t help but be inspired and you realize that there are thousands of people all across america who despite the odds despite the naysayers are going out there and making their dreams happen so that s what today should be about and that s what this package in congress should be about unleashing the great power of our economy and the ingenuity of our people in so many ways each of you today have shown that ingenuity as you ve successfully navigated your companies through an extraordinarily difficult time the toughest time that we ve seen since the great depression you should be proud of that achievement and know that as you continue that journey you re always going to have a fierce advocate in your president and in your sba administrator and in your government so thank you very much everybody congratulations dem bobama25 6 09 barack_obama hello everybody thank you thank you well first of all it is great to see all of you here today i want to thank all the members of congress who are here participating all the families and young people who are here i obviously have to thank my wife michelle obama who has spent much of her adult life focused on service now she understands that nothing is more powerful than when you enlist the skill and talent and passion of the american people on behalf of helping others and she s been doing that all her life and she s doing just a great job as first lady in making that happen i want to thank all the men and women here at fort mcnair and all those who serve our country under our proud flag we re grateful to each and every one of you those americans in uniform it s clear the nature of their service i think sometimes what s forgotten is when one person in the family serves in our armed forces that means the entire family is serving and it s very gratifying to see all of you committed to helping to put together some backpacks and care packages for military families all across the country this is an issue that michelle has taken extraordinary interest in during the course of our campaign she would meet with military families and discover that despite all the things that government may want to do there are still a lot of holes and a lot of gaps that need to be filled in terms of giving the support to our military families that s necessary and that s where you come in so we re very proud of them but we re very proud of you and we always want to remember that serving our country is not just something that we should expect our members of our armed forces to do that s something that we should expect all of us as citizens to do on monday we launched united we serve our summer service initiative it s going to run all the way through our national day of service on september 11th we want to ask every american to take some time out this summer to do something for others parents take your kids they re going to have fun they re going to be in sports camps they re going to be watching tv and playing video games once a week take them down whether it s to a soup kitchen or to volunteer on a community project teach them what it means to be a real citizen you ll find that actually the kids love it and it s going to make a lasting impression on them and if all of us are doing that this summer then we re going to make this country stronger we re working hard and members of congress are working really hard right now to make our government work for people but government can only do so much ultimately the strength of america doesn t come from capitol hill it doesn t come from the white house it comes from the grassroots and that s what all of you are about so i appreciate you i hope you guys have some great fun today i notice the air conditioning is on in here which sometimes with some of these service projects you got to change shirts at the end of the day so enjoy yourselves and i hope i get a chance to say thank you personally and shake some hands before the day is done all right thank you very much everybody oh one other thing that i wanted to mention and since we ve got a lot of press here sometimes people want to be involved in service but don t know how to get involved in service and so what i want to do is just remind people if you go to serve gov serve gov that will give you an entire toolkit for how you can sign up for service in your communities so there s no excuses and you can find the service project that s right for you if you care about animals you can find a shelter that helps with stray animals if you care about tutoring kids or you ve got an education background you ll be able to find something that allows you to use your particular skills so get on serve gov and that s how you re going to be identify going to be able to identify the service project that s right for you and your family all right thank you everybody have fun dem bobama25 9 09 barack_obama good afternoon let me first of all thank mayor luke ravenstahl county executive dan onorato and the people of pittsburgh for being just extraordinary hosts last night during the dinner that i had with world leaders so many of them commented on the fact that sometime in the past they had been to pittsburgh in some cases it was 20 or 25 or 30 years ago and coming back they were so impressed with the revitalization of the city a number of them remarked on the fact that it pointed to lessons that they could take away in revitalizing manufacturing towns in their home countries the people here have been just extraordinary and so i want to thank all of you for the great hospitality i will tell you i m a little resentful because i did not get to pamela s diner for pancakes although prime minister yukio hatoyama of japan did get pancakes and i don t know how he worked that but he was raving about them six months ago i said that the london summit marked a turning point in the g20 s effort to prevent economic catastrophe and here in pittsburgh we ve taken several significant steps forward to secure our recovery and transition to strong sustainable and balanced economic growth we brought the global economy back from the brink we laid the groundwork today for long term prosperity as well it s worth recalling the situation we faced six months ago a contracting economy skyrocketing unemployment stagnant trade and a financial system that was nearly frozen some were warning of a second great depression but because of the bold and coordinated action that we took millions of jobs have been saved or created the decline in output has been stopped financial markets have come back to life and we stopped the crisis from spreading further to the developing world still we know there is much further to go too many americans are still out of work and struggling to pay bills too many families are uncertain about what the future will bring because our global economy is now fundamentally interconnected we need to act together to make sure our recovery creates new jobs and industries while preventing the kinds of imbalances and abuse that led us into this crisis pittsburgh was a perfect venue for this work this city has known its share of hard times as older industries like steel could no longer sustain growth but pittsburgh picked itself up and it dusted itself off and is making the transition to job creating industries of the future from biotechnology to clean energy it serves as a model for turning the page to a 21st century economy and a reminder that the key to our future prosperity lies not just in new york or los angeles or washington but in places like pittsburgh today we took bold and concerted action to secure that prosperity and to forge a new framework for strong sustainable and balanced growth first we agreed to sustain our recovery plans until growth is restored and a new framework for prosperity is in place our coordinated stimulus plans played an indispensable role in averting catastrophe now we must make sure that when growth returns jobs do too that s why we will continue our stimulus efforts until our people are back to work and phase them out when our recovery is strong but we can t stop there going forward we cannot tolerate the same old boom and bust economy of the past we can t grow complacent we can t wait for a crisis to cooperate that s why our new framework will allow each of us to assess the others policies to build consensus on reform and to ensure that global demand supports growth for all second we agreed to take concrete steps to move forward with tough new financial regulations so that crises like this can never happen again never again should we let the schemes of a reckless few put the world s financial system and our people s well being at risk those who abuse the system must be held accountable those who act irresponsibly must not count on taxpayer dollars those days are over that s why we ve agreed on a strong set of reforms we will bring more transparency to the derivatives market and we will strengthen national capital standards so that banks can withstand losses and pay for their own risks we will create more powerful tools to hold large global financial firms accountable and orderly procedures to manage failures without burdening taxpayers and we will tie executive pay to long term performance so that sound decisions are rewarded instead of short term greed in short our financial system will be far different and more secure than the one that failed so dramatically last year third we agreed to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels so that we can transition to a 21st century energy economy an historic effort that would ultimately phase out nearly 300 billion in global subsidies this reform will increase our energy security it will help transform our economy so that we re creating the clean energy jobs of the future and it will help us combat the threat posed by climate change as i said earlier this week in new york all nations have a responsibility to meet this challenge and together we have taken a substantial step forward in meeting that responsibility finally we agreed to reform our system of global economic cooperation and governance we can no longer meet the challenges of the 21st century economy with 20th century approaches and that s why the g20 will take the lead in building a new approach to cooperation to make our institutions reflect the reality of our times we will shift more responsibility to emerging economies within the international monetary fund and give them a greater voice to build new markets and help the world s most vulnerable citizens climb out of poverty we established a new world bank trust fund to support investments in food security and financing for clean and affordable energy and to ensure that we keep our commitments we agreed to continue to take stock of our efforts going forward we have learned time and again that in the 21st century the nations of the world share mutual interests that s why i ve called for a new era of engagement that yields real results for our people an era when nations live up to their responsibilities and act on behalf of our shared security and prosperity and that s exactly the kind of strong cooperation that we forged here in pittsburgh and earlier this week in new york indeed on issue after issue we see that the international community is beginning to move forward together at the g20 we ve achieved a level of tangible global economic cooperation that we have never seen before while also acting to address the threat posed by climate change at the united nations security council we passed a historic resolution to secure loose nuclear materials to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to seek the security of a world without them and as we approach negotiations with iran on october 1st we have never been more united in standing with the united kingdom france russia china and germany in demanding that iran live up to its responsibilities on all of these challenges there is much more work to be done but we leave here today more confident and more united in the common effort of advancing security and prosperity for all of our people so i m very grateful to the other world leaders who are here today and with that let me take a few questions i ll start with ben feller of ap i think it s important to see what happened today building on what happened in new york you had an unprecedented show of unity on the part of the world community saying that iran s actions raised grave doubts in terms of their presentation that their nuclear program was for peaceful purposes not only did the united states france and the united kingdom who initiated the intelligence that brought this to light stand before you but you had china and russia as well issue statements calling for an immediate iaea investigation that kind of solidarity is not typical anybody who s been following responses to iran would have been doubtful just a few months ago that that kind of rapid response was possible so i think iran is on notice that when we meet with them on october 1st they are going to have to come clean and they are going to have to make a choice are they willing to go down the path which i think ultimately will lead to greater prosperity and security for iran giving up the acquisition of nuclear weapons and deciding that they are willing to abide by international rules and standards in their pursuit of peaceful nuclear energy or will they continue down a path that is going to lead to confrontation and as i said before what has changed is that the international community i think has spoken it is now up to iran to respond i m not going to speculate on the course of action that we will take we re going to give october 1st a chance but i think you ve heard that even countries who a year ago or six months ago might have been reluctant to even discuss things like sanctions have said that this is an important enough issue to peace and stability in the world that iran would make a mistake in ignoring the call for them to respond in a forthright and clear manner and to recognize that the choice they make over the next several weeks and months could well determine their ability to rejoin the international community or to find themselves isolated last point i ll make specifically with respect to the military i ve always said that we do not rule out any options when it comes to u s security interests but i will also reemphasize that my preferred course of action is to resolve this in a diplomatic fashion it s up to the iranians to respond patricia zengerle at reuters first of all let me be clear on our goals we went into afghanistan not because we were interested in entering that country or positioning ourselves regionally but because al qaeda killed 3 000 plus americans and vowed to continue trying to kill americans and so my overriding goal is to dismantle the al qaeda network to destroy their capacity to inflict harm not just on us but people of all faiths and all nationalities all around the world and that is our overriding focus stability in afghanistan and in pakistan are critical to that mission and after several years of drift in afghanistan we now find ourselves in a situation in which you have strong commitments from the isaf coalition our nato allies all of them are committed to making this work but i think there s also a recognition that after that many years of drift it s important that we examine our strategies to make sure that they actually can deliver on preventing al qaeda from establishing safe havens obviously the allegations of fraud in the recent election are of concern to us and we are still awaiting results we re awaiting the iec and the ecc issuing their full report what s most important is that there is a sense of legitimacy in afghanistan among the afghan people for their government if there is not that makes our task much more difficult in terms of the review process that we re going through the minute i came into office we initiated a review and even before that review was completed i ordered 21 000 additional troops into afghanistan because i thought it was important to secure the election to make sure that the taliban did not disrupt it what i also said at the time was that after the election we are going to reassess our strategy precisely because so much of our success has to be linked to the ability of the afghan people themselves to provide for their own security their own training the afghan government s ability to deliver services and opportunity and hope to their people so we are doing exactly what i said we would do in march i put in a new commander general mcchrystal and i asked him to give me an unvarnished assessment of the situation in afghanistan and he has done that as well but keep in mind that from the start my belief was and this is shared with our isaf allies that our military strategy is only part of a broader project that has to include a civilian component has to include a diplomatic component and all those different factors are being weighed and considered at this point and i will ultimately make this decision based on what will meet that core goal that i set out at the beginning which is to dismantle disrupt and destroy the al qaeda network with respect to public opinion i understand the public s weariness of this war given that it comes on top of weariness about the war in iraq every time we get a report of a young man or woman who s fallen in either of those theaters of war it s a reminder of the extraordinary sacrifice that they re making i know that our partners in afghanistan feel that same pain when they see their troops harmed so this is not easy and i would expect that the public would ask some very tough questions that s exactly what i m doing is asking some very tough questions and we re not going to arrive at perfect answers i think anybody who s looked at the situation recognizes that it s difficult and it s complicated but my solemn obligation is to make sure that i get the best answers possible particularly before i make decisions about sending additional troops into the theater jon delano of kdka is jon around good to see you jon well first of all i think it s important just to keep things in perspective for the people of pittsburgh if you have looked at any of the other summits that took place i mean in london you had hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in most of these summits there has been a much more tumultuous response and i think the mayor and the county executive and all the people of pittsburgh deserve extraordinary credit for having managed what is a very tranquil g20 summit you know i think that many of the protests are just directed generically at capitalism and they object to the existing global financial system they object to free markets one of the great things about the united states is is that you can speak your mind and you can protest that s part of our tradition but i fundamentally disagree with their view that the free market is the source of all ills ironically if they had been paying attention to what was taking place inside the summit itself what they would have heard was a strong recognition from the most diverse collection of leaders in history that it is important to make sure that the market is working for ordinary people that government has a role in regulating the market in ways that don t cause the kinds of crises that we ve just been living through that our emphasis has to be on more balanced growth and that includes making sure that growth is bottom up that workers ordinary people are able to pay their bills get make a decent living send their children to college and that the more that we focus on how the least of these are doing the better off all of us are going to be that principle was embodied in the communiqu that was issued and so i would recommend those who are out there protesting if they re actually interested in knowing what was taking place here to read the communiqu that was issued laurent lozano is laurent here there he is well first of all with respect to the intelligence that we presented to the iaea this was the work product of three intelligence agencies not just one these intelligence agencies checked over this work in a painstaking fashion precisely because we didn t want any ambiguity about what exactly was going on there and i think that the response that you saw today indicates the degree to which this intelligence is solid and indicates the degree to which iran was constructing an enrichment facility that it had not declared contrary to u n resolutions and contrary to the rules governing the iaea in terms of meeting i have said repeatedly that we re going to operate on two tracks that our preferred method of action is diplomatic but if that does not work then other consequences may follow i also said and this was debated extensively here in the united states because there were some who suggested you can t talk to iran what s the point that by keeping the path of diplomacy open that would actually strengthen world unity and our collective efforts to then hold iran accountable and i think you re starting to see the product of that strategy unfold during the course of this week what we saw at the united nations in the security council was a strong affirmation of the principles of the nuclear non proliferation treaty and as a consequence the iaea is strengthened and those countries who follow the rules are strengthened when it comes to dealing with countries like north korea and iran that don t follow the rules and that means that when we find that diplomacy does not work we will be in a much stronger position to for example apply sanctions that have bite now as i said that s not the preferred course of action i would love nothing more than to see iran choose the responsible path whether they do so or not will ultimately depend on their leaders and they will have the next few weeks to show to the world which path they want to travel this isn t a football game so i m not interested in victory i m interested in resolving the problem the problem is is that iran repeatedly says that it s pursuing nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes and its actions contradict its words and as a consequence the region is more insecure and vital u s interests are threatened my job is to try to solve that and my expectation is that we are going to explore with our allies with the p5 plus 1 a wide range of options in terms of how we approach iran should iran decline to engage in the ways that are responsible you just told me i m not going to get into details about sanctions and you re right i will not but i think that if you have the international community making a strong united front that iran is going to have to pay attention in terms of why we didn t come out with it sooner i already mentioned to laurent that it is very important in these kinds of high stakes situations to make sure that the intelligence is right and we wanted all three agencies the french the brits and the americans to have thoroughly scrubbed this and to make sure that we were absolutely confident about the situation there we are and now it s up to iran to respond okay thank you very much everybody i hope you enjoy pittsburgh thank you dem bobama26 10 09a barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you so much thank you everybody how s it going jacksonville let me begin by thanking secretary mabus for the introduction for your service ray i know we ve got a lot of naval aviators here and ray is a former surface warfare officer but don t hold that against him don t hold that against him now because ray mabus is doing an outstanding job as secretary of the navy i also want to thank all your outstanding local leaders for welcoming me here today admiral tim alexander your co captain jack scorby and your command master chief jeff hudson to chris scorby and all the spouses who are with us you hold our military families together we honor you and we are grateful to you now it is great to be here at one of america s finest naval air stations but we also have folks from mayport and kings bay and we have every service represented navy army air force coast guard and united states marines from blount island now military communities like this one take care of their own your people your families but keeping you strong also takes the civilian community beyond the gate so we want to thank mayor john peyton and all your great neighbors the people of jacksonville for their incredible support give them a big round of applause keeping you strong also takes leaders in congress like those here today two great friends of yours representatives ander crenshaw and corrine brown who are here give them a big round of applause right here and a leader who fights for you as a member of the armed services committee senator and army veteran bill nelson is in the house keeping you strong takes something else a country that never forgets this simple truth it s not the remarkable platforms that give the united states our military superiority although you ve got some pretty impressive aircraft here i got to admit it s not the sophisticated technologies that make us the most advanced in the world although you do represent the future of naval aviation no we have the finest navy and the finest military in the history of the world because we have the finest personnel in the world you are the best trained the best prepared the best led force in history our people are our most precious resource we re reminded of this again with today s helicopter crashes in afghanistan fourteen americans gave their lives and our prayers are with these service members their civilian colleagues and the families who loved them and while no words can ease the ache in their hearts today may they find some comfort in knowing this like all those who give their lives in service to america they were doing their duty and they were doing this nation proud they were willing to risk their lives in this case to prevent afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for al qaeda and its extremist allies and today they gave their lives that last full measure of devotion to protect ours now it is our duty as a nation to keep their memory alive in our hearts and to carry on their work to take care of their families to keep our country safe to stand up for the values we hold dear and the freedom they defended that s what they dedicated their lives to and that is what we must do as well so i say to you and all who serve of all the privileges i have as president i have no greater honor than serving as your commander in chief you inspire me and i m here today to deliver a simple message a message of thanks to you and your families being here you join a long unbroken line of service at jacksonville from the naval aviators from world war ii to korea to vietnam among them a great patriot named john mccain you embody that sailor s creed the spirit of the navy and all who have gone before honor courage commitment in recent years you ve been tested like never before we re a country of more than 300 million americans but less than 1 percent wears the uniform and that 1 percent you and those in uniform bear the overwhelming burden of our security after months of exercises in the pacific and stopping narcotraffickers off south america you the mad foxes joined the recovery of that air france crash off brazil after hundreds of combat missions over iraq and afghanistan when somali pirates kidnapped captain richard phillips you the fighting tigers were first on the scene and others among you the nightdippers were part of the carrier group that brought our captain home you ve delivered medical care to people around the world as my wife michelle saw this summer when she welcomed back to port the comfort including those of you from naval hospital jacksonville and like thousands of sailors in today s navy you ve gone ashore to meet the mission of our time like the desert lions who served in iraq today we also send our thoughts and prayers to all the folks from jacksonville on the front lines at this very moment pilots and aircrews around the world navy corpsmen on the ground in afghanistan and those of you the dusty dogs who ll deploy next month to the persian gulf you re going to make us proud but there is no service without sacrifice and though few americans will ever truly understand the sacrifices that you and your family make day in day out tour after tour year after year i want you to know this your dedication to duty is humbling your love of country is inspiring the american people thank you for your service we honor your sacrifices and just as you have fulfilled your responsibilities to our nation your nation will fulfill its responsibilities to you that s the message that i just offered to the inspiring gold star families i met with a few moments ago families who ve made the ultimate sacrifice and whom we honor and that s the message i bring to you and all our forces families and veterans around jacksonville and across america you ve made the most profound commitment a person can make to dedicate your life to your country and perhaps give your life for it so as your commander in chief here s the commitment i make to you to make sure you can meet the missions we ask of you we are increasing the defense budget including spending on the navy and marine corps this week i ll sign that defense authorization bill into law to make sure we re spending our defense dollars wisely we re cutting tens of billions of dollars in waste and projects that even the military says it doesn t need so that that money can be better spent on taking care of you and your families and building the 20th 21st century military that we do need to make sure we have the right force structure we ve halted reductions in navy personnel and increased the size of the marine corps and this year the first time in the history of the all volunteer force the navy and every component of every branch of the military active guard and reserve met or exceeded their recruiting and retention goals and yes that s due in part to tough economic times but i say it s also a testament to you and everyone who volunteers to serve to make sure you re not bearing the burden of our security alone we re enlisting all elements of our national power diplomacy development and a positive vision of american leadership in the world and while i will never hesitate to use force to protect the american people or our vital interests i also promise you this and this is very important as we consider our next steps in afghanistan i will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm s way i won t risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary and if it is necessary we will back you up to the hilt because you deserve the strategy the clear mission and the defined goals as well as the equipment and support that you need to get the job done we are not going to have a situation in which you are not fully supported back here at home that is a promise that i will always make to you now as you meet your missions around the world we will take care of your families here at home that s why michelle has been visiting bases across the country that s why the recovery act is funding projects like improvements to your hospital and a new child development center at mayport it s why we re increasing your pay increasing childcare helping families deal with the stress and separation of war and finally we pledge to be there when you come home we re improving care for our wounded warriors especially those with post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries we re funding the post 9 11 gi bill to give you and your families the chance to pursue your dreams and we are making the biggest commitment to our veterans the largest percentage increase in the va budget even when we ve got very difficult times fiscally in more than 30 years now these are the commitments i make to you the obligations that your country is honor bound to uphold because you ve always taken care of america and america must take care of you always and know this it s the spirit you live by every day it s the pride and yes sometimes the anxiety when you wave goodbye to your loved ones on the tarmac it s the joy and relief when those loved ones come safely home it s the dignity and respect you show every fallen warrior who comes home to jacksonville like the naviator navy aviator you honored two months ago captain michael scott speicher kid from orange park loving husband devoted father based at cecil field not far from here on the first day of operation desert storm he was taken from us and in the long years that followed a navy family and this city would endure the heartache of the unknown through all those years no one missed scott more or fought harder to bring him home than his wife joanne his friend and former navy pilot buddy harris their children meghan michael madison and makenzie they were among the gold star families i met with and we thank them for being here with us today where are they please stand up stand up guys this summer the news came after 18 years after all the dashed hopes we found him scott s remains were finally coming home the evening news and the morning papers told the story of that day but few told the story of the days that followed it s the story of how you greeted the plane upon landing hundreds of sailors and escorted scott s flag draped casket to your chapel how navy honor guards kept constant vigil through the night as so many of you passed by to pay your respects how thousands of you sailors and civilians lined the streets of this base as you gave scott back to the city he loved that s what you did that s what you do not only for scott but for all the fallen warriors you bring home it s the story of how that procession retraced the steps of scott s life past the jacksonville veterans memorial that now bears his name past the church where he worshiped the high school where he excelled and cecil field where he served it s the story of how jacksonville seemed to come to a standstill as people lined street after street to honor one of their own scott s friends but also total strangers police and firefighters standing at attention small children holding american flags graying veterans giving a firm salute and then as scott was finally laid to rest a final fitting tribute his old squadron roared overhead high across the sky that s the spirit we see here today you men and women devoted to each other and to your country and a proud country devoted to you the example you set for all of us that if you can come together from every corner of america every color faith creed every background and belief to take care of each other and to serve together to succeed together then so can we all so can america so thank you for your service and thank you for reminding us of the country we can and must always be god bless you jacksonville and god bless the united states of america thank you very much dem bobama26 10 09b barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you everybody please have a seat thank you so much thank you some special acknowledgments first of all i don t think people quite understand nancy pelosi is not simply the first woman speaker of the house i think she s going to go down as one of the greatest speakers of all time and she s very nice and she s very friendly but boy she is tough and that s what you need when you re putting up with all the criticism and the carping and the griping and that s from the democrats i mean you should see what she has to put up with from the republicans so i could not have a better partner in trying to move the country than nancy pelosi we ve got some wonderful other elected officials that i want to acknowledge very briefly first of all my former colleague a great senator and most importantly former astronaut bill nelson please give bill a big round of applause somebody who is doing a great job on behalf of the dccc chris van hollen is in the house three outstanding members of congress from florida who are here debbie wasserman schultz kendrick meek alan grayson and it is my expectation that she will be the next governor of the great state of florida alex sink is in the house now i saw you guys taking pictures and i talked about the family and you know i don t know how much more you want to hear from me before you get to dinner but i want to start off mainly by saying thank you there are a lot of people in this room who were there from the start when nobody could pronounce my name and when you tried to explain to your friends that you were supporting barack obama they d say huh and then there are people in this room who picked up the baton once a hard fought nomination was completed but across the board you have people in this room who have not just contributed money but contributed time and energy their reputations to moving this country in a new direction and whether it s at the dnc level the dscc level the dccc whatever d it is that you participated in i want you to know that i m incredibly grateful and it has made an enormous difference to our country if you think about what we were confronting nine months ago i think people are starting to have some selective memory it s starting to get a little hazy so let me just remind you first of all it s only been nine months since the obama family moved into the white house i m here to report by the way malia and sasha are doing great michelle is a fabulous first lady we have a new dog bo who is the only other male in the household and he and i are often in the doghouse together but let s just think about what it was like when we entered into the white house nine months ago we were losing 700 000 jobs a month the financial system was on the brink of meltdown prominent economists from both sides of the economic spectrum were suggesting that we might be going into a great depression not a recession but a great depression and i think people were fearful that things might start spinning out of control and that s why working with nancy pelosi and the other members of congress here we acted so swiftly and we acted so boldly to pass a recovery act that has pulled us back from the brink and although usually i try not to do a tally of what it is that we ve accomplished since you guys are early stakeholders in what we ve done i want you to understand what we did just with the recovery act first of all as a consequence of the recovery act we provided millions of people unemployment insurance who otherwise would have been in a hopeless situation we made sure that cobra which is the main health care program for people who ve lost their job was 65 percent cheaper so that they could hang on to their health insurance while they were looking for a job we made sure that the states had enough money so that they didn t have to lay off teachers and police officers and firefighters it s estimated that just in schools alone we saved 250 000 jobs across america 250 000 educators education professionals would have been laid off had it not been for our swift action but we didn t just help states who were burdened under plummeting tax revenues we didn t just help individuals who were losing their jobs or seeing their hours cut back the recovery act was also the largest federal investment in education in history in history it also happened to be the largest investment in clean energy in history it was also the largest investment in basic research and science and r d in history it also happened to be the largest investment in infrastructure since eisenhower built the interstate highway system so all told this not only helped pull us back from the brink and now suddenly everybody takes for granted the stock market at 9 000 or 10 000 people just take for granted that well you know it looks like industrial production is kicking back up not only did we steer the economy away from potential catastrophe but we also laid the groundwork now for making sure that our kids are going to be able to compete in an international global marketplace we also made sure that we can get back on the frontlines of energy and not simply react to whatever oil producers decide should be the price of a barrel of oil today or tomorrow we also set in motion the kinds of innovation and technological investment that is going to determine whether or not america remains at the cutting edge for the foreseeable future so that s just the recovery act we did that by the way in january the first month i was in now we didn t stop there so let s see what else we did we passed something called the lilly ledbetter act because we believe that women should be paid the same as men for the same work we lifted the ban on stem cell research because we believe that science should guide federal policy we made sure that we passed the toughest bill regulating credit cards in a generation we banned housing fraud and put some serious teeth into enforcement we made sure that 11 million children had health insurance including 4 million who had never had it before we passed a national service act that allows young people and not so young people to participate in community service the kind of programs that where s alonzo and tracy the kinds of programs that you see the outstanding work that s being done in miami we re giving opportunities for young people to get involved all across the country in those kinds of service activities giving back to their community what else nancy veterans we just made sure that veterans are not going to have to wait for their budgets and that they re going to be in place and by the way we increased funding for veterans services by more than had been done in 30 years now this is all this is all just domestically then it turns out i got this other side of my portfolio two wars and as promised we are on a pathway to removing our troops from iraq and putting iraq in the position where they can secure their own country we are finally getting afghan policy right after long years of drift we ve put forward a vision for reducing nuclear stockpiles and moving towards a safer and more secure world without nuclear weapons we have mended fences and strengthened our alliances with countries on every continent so that they know that they have a partner in america and america once more is viewed as a leader now that s just been in nine months here is my main message to you we re just getting started i know that i know that the battles out there seem bruising and there are people saying mean things about me and folks are worried and i try to explain to dwyane and these other ball players just because i m skinny doesn t mean i m not tough i don t i don t rattle i m not going to shrink back because now is the time for us to continue to push and follow through on those things that we know have to be done that haven t been done for decades we know that our education system is inadequate to a new global economy i mean if you looked at how african american and hispanic children are doing here in miami or anywhere in the country it is unacceptable and we know that is our future workforce and if they are not trained and getting a decent education then nobody is going to be doing well in this country we know that it is unsustainable for us to keep on importing more and more oil when opec first started and jimmy carter and richard nixon and all those folks announced that we were going to move on the path of energy independence we were importing 30 percent of our oil we re now importing 70 percent do the math our economy can t sustain it and by the way neither can the environment and every time i fly into florida i got to say you know that water is really close everywhere you go you don t want an extra foot or two of sea and so we ve got to take that seriously now is the time to do it by passing serious energy legislation now is the time to pass health care and for those of you who have health insurance i know that sometimes this seems like well is this something we can afford to do let me tell you premiums doubled for individuals over the last decade they will double again in the coming decade but for businesses it s even worse anybody here who s a businessperson knows what s happened to your premiums you ve seen them go up in one year 28 percent 30 percent and at some point you had to make a decision and then you ve got to tell your employees look i know it s right to cover you i want to cover you but i can no longer afford to cover you and so this is not just an issue for the millions of people who don t have health insurance this is an issue for the people who have health insurance and don t understand what it is that could be happening in almost certainly will happen in the years ahead unless we get a handle on it and by the way the federal government can t afford it either and neither can state governments we will go bankrupt so if you re out there thinking we also have to get control of our budget and we do the single best way for us to do it is to make sure that we pass health care reform now this is not going to be easy but i am absolutely confident that we are going to get health care done by the end of this year and nancy pelosi is just as confident that s part of the reason i m so confident is nancy is confident and we are going to get an energy bill that is serious and deals not only with dependence on oil but also on climate change and we re going to get a serious education bill that makes college more affordable for young people but none of these things are easy and one of the things that i always try to emphasize to folks is we have to take a long view in this process i was talking to some g20 leaders who were kind of surprised on some of the debates about health care they were saying barack why are these people running around putting a hitler moustache on you you re just trying to give health care to people i said yes that s unusual but what i said was you know america is not a speed boat it s an ocean liner and it takes time to move a country this big particularly because we are a democracy and that s a good thing we re supposed to have robust debate change isn t supposed to be easy we re supposed to have to fight for it and the fact that we ve got the other party challenging us and pushing us and poking us on that s a good thing ultimately we will have a better product as a consequence of that i want a competition of ideas i want a strong and loyal opposition now what i won t abide by are people just standing on the sidelines who prefer to see defeat to actually getting something done because they think it provides a political advantage these are folks who are cheering about us not getting the olympics what s up with that it s the olympics i mean the olympics who roots against the united states getting the olympics so my door is going to be open to working with the other side and i know nancy feels the same way if they actually want to solve the challenges that we face but if you re just going to stand on the sidelines then i m not going to have too much time for you in fact lately i ve been feeling like somebody made a big mess and i m i got my mop and i m mopping the floor and the folks who made the mess they re standing there you re not mopping fast enough you re not holding the mop the right way it s a socialist mop you know what just grab a mop help me out here help out your country clean up the mess that you made so let me leave you with this thought though that as difficult as these last nine months have been and as challenging as the next nine months and the next nine months after that will be i just want to remind everybody what i meant when i talked about hope during the campaign you know hope is not blind optimism it s not pie in the sky everything is going to be just fine we re just going to sit back and somehow those things that we wish for magically happen that s not hope hope is understanding what needs to be done and having confidence that if you work hard enough if you sweat hard enough if you re willing to mix it up and overcome setbacks and stare challenges in the face that you can still achieve that was the essence of our campaign when we started off we didn t think boy this is going to be a cakewalk getting a guy named barack hussein obama elected president jeremy do you remember us saying that we didn t say that what we did say was this is what has to happen this is where the country needs to go and we are going to put our heart and soul into it because we have confidence in the american people and we have confidence that if we do the right thing then you know what the country is going to be better off that was the source of excitement in our campaign that was why it felt special that s why we did something that nobody thought could be done and that s the same attitude that i want all of you to have as we move forward none of this is a sure thing don t sign up to improve america if you think that it s just automatically going to happen on your timetable and if it doesn t you get disheartened but if you are willing to stand with us and work hard if you understand how difficult and challenging it s going to be and yet you still are determined to move forward anyway then i m telling you i don t think there s anything that can stop us and when i say us i don t mean democrats i mean us as americans there is nothing this country cannot accomplish and i am absolutely confident that our best days are still ahead of us but we ve got to earn it it s not a given the future is something you earn that s what we re fighting for right now and you re helping us do it so thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless america dem bobama26 2 10 barack_obama thank you everybody please have a seat thank you very much well it is wonderful to be here and thank you for the outstanding introduction by mr smart and i was complimenting him on his bowtie as well as the excellent scholarship that he s showing i want to thank all the student leaders from hbcus and some of the fantastic men and women that i ve named to serve on my hbcu advisory board so thank you all of you for what you are contributing to this important cause i have a few members of congress that are in the audience that i want to acknowledge at least i think they re here i haven t spotted everybody first of all one of our outstanding leaders in the house of representatives and the whip in the house of representatives james clyburn james clyburn is right here one of the deans of the congress and the chairman of the judiciary committee john conyers is in the house a great friend from the great state of maryland elijah cummings the chair of the congressional black caucus barbara lee a champion on behalf of d c statehood or at least voting rights representative eleanor holmes norton congressman bobby scott from the great state of virginia and one of our foremost exports experts on foreign policy congressman donald payne from new jersey i also want to acknowledge dr earl richardson who is finishing tenure as president of morgan state university please sir and a great friend president of hampton university for more than 30 years dr william harvey i promised him i d come back to hampton so i m going to be speaking at his commencement this year and then the trojan explosion drum line from virginia state university i m told this is the first time there s been a drum line in the white house this is what i ve been told before the civil war and the creation of what we now call the historically black colleges and universities an education much less a higher education just wasn t possible for most african americans where it was happening reading and writing were often taught in secret but as the civil war ended and the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments were signed a freed people demanded a freed mind and the war on illiteracy and ignorance began there were some like booker t washington a freed slave who walked 500 miles from the mines of west virginia to study at hampton who argued that these colleges should focus on teaching blacks skilled trades and vocations there were others like w e b dubois who studied at fisk and became the first african american to earn a doctorate from harvard who advocated for education in the arts and the sciences to cultivate the leaders and teachers of the next generation today at america s 105 historically black colleges and universities our young men and women prepare to do both they re the campuses where a people were educated where a middle class was built where a dream took hold they re places where generations of african americans have gained a sense of their heritage their history and their place in the american story but like all colleges and universities hbcus face tough challenges today endowments and state budgets are shrinking too many facilities are deteriorating enrollment is falling and the cost of education keeps going up and these schools feel the pain more acutely they do more with less and they enroll higher proportions of low and middle income students and that s why the recovery act that was passed last year invested in their infrastructure and technology and nearly doubled the pell grant award and that s why the budget i ve proposed this year increases hbcu funding by nearly 100 million at the department of education alone but helping hbcus chart a new path in this new century will require much more on all of our parts and that s why today i m signing an executive order strengthening the white house initiative on historically black colleges and universities this initiative originated in president carter s administration it expanded under president reagan and its been renewed by each president since to help these schools give their students every chance to live up to their full potential and i ve asked dr john s wilson a morehouse man to lead it under my administration and dr harvey to serve as chairman of its advisory board and i want to be clear strengthening america s historically black colleges and universities isn t a task that falls to these men or to the department of education alone i expect agencies across the federal government to help support this mission we re not doing this because these schools well we re not only doing this because these schools are a gateway to a better future for african americans we re doing it because their success is vital to a better future for all americans we know that americans with college degrees far out earn those without we know that our businesses too often can t find qualified candidates for open positions we know that other countries are out educating their kids to out compete ours and yet year after year a stubborn gap persists between how well african americans are doing compared to their white classmates year after year american students trail their foreign peers in too many areas and year after year those students who do make it to college often find themselves unprepared for its rigors that s why education reform has been a top priority of my administration we launched a national competition to improve our schools by investing only in reform that closes the achievement gap and inspires students to excel in math and science and turns around failing schools that steal the future from too many young americans we re working with states and governors to develop and implement standards that better position all our students to graduate high school prepared for college and careers i ve urged the senate to pass a bill that will make college more affordable by ending unnecessary taxpayer subsidies that go to financial intermediaries for student loans revitalize our community colleges that serve as career pathways for the children of so many working families and invest more than 2 billion in minority serving institutions including hbcus all of this will help achieve our goal of ensuring that america once again has the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 and keeping our hbcus strong is vital to achieving that goal still there are some who question the continued relevance of hbcus who say that they ve fulfilled their purpose who say that after all the progress that we ve made their reason for being is now somehow obsolete but it was because of these schools that a young prankster discovered the sense of purpose that led him ultimately to sit on the supreme court it was because of these schools that a young broadcaster with a funny name oprah could make that name into an empire it was because of hbcus that a young preacher grew into a king that shared his dream with all of america it was because of these schools that america s middle class was filled with black doctors and educators and judges and lawyers and engineers and entrepreneurs and today it s because of these schools that one out of every two wide eyed freshmen who who arrives on their campuses with big backpacks and bigger dreams is the first in his or her family to go to college and that s why we re here today to ensure that these schools remain the beacons that they ve been for more than a century and a half crucibles of learning where students discover their full potential and forge the character required to realize it catalysts of change where young people put their hands on the arc of history and move this nation closer to the ideals of its founding and the cradles of opportunity where each generation inherits the american dream and keeps it alive for the next that s what hbcus are about and that s why i m proud to now sign this executive order there we go dem bobama26 4 10a barack_obama hello everybody everybody have a seat please hello everybody and welcome to the white house and congratulations on being world series champions as you can see we ve got a few yankees fans here in the white house who are pretty excited about your visit i want to actually start by recognizing secretary of treasury tim geithner who is here and secretary of transportation ray lahood now i understand ray and joe went to the same high school a few years apart but they grew up obviously big yankees fans i want to congratulate the steinbrenner family brian cashman and all the folks who helped to make this team what it is and i want to thank all of the members of the new york congressional delegation and i noticed a couple of connecticut and north dakota guys showing up here too all of whom take credit for the yankees success now it s been nine years since your last title which must have felt like an eternity for yankees fans i think other teams would be just fine with a spell like that the cubs for example but this is a team that goes down to spring training every year expecting to win it all and more often than not you guys get pretty close of course if i had rivera i d get pretty close too my white sox would get close every year that attitude that success has always made the yankees easy to love and let s face it easy to hate as well for a white sox fan like me it s painful to watch mariano s cutter when it s against my team or to see the yankees wrap up the pennant while the sox are struggling on the south side although i do remember 2005 people so don t get too comfortable but for the millions of yankees fans in new york and around the world who bleed blue nothing beats that yankee tradition 27 world series titles 48 hall of famers a couple i expect standing behind me right now from ruth to gehrig mantle to dimaggio it s hard to imagine baseball without the long line of legends who ve worn the pinstripes last season this team continued that legacy winning 103 games and leaving no doubt who was the best team in baseball but what people tend to forget especially after watching their teams lose is that being a yankee is as much about character as it is about performance as much about who you are as what you do being successful in new york doesn t come easy and it s not for everybody it takes a certain kind of player to thrive in the pressure cooker of yankee stadium somebody who is poised and professional and knows what it takes to wear the pinstripes it takes somebody who appreciates how lucky he is and who feels a responsibility for those who are less fortunate so it s somebody like mark teixeira before he was a three time golden glove winner mark was a 21 year old kid fresh out of georgia tech shortly after signing his first major league contract mark visited his old high school and asked how much it would cost to set up a scholarship in the name of a friend who had been killed in a car accident and when he was told it would cost 75 000 he wrote a check on the spot he s been funding that scholarship ever since helping to make the dream of college a reality for students in his hometown someone like jorge posada the first time i met jorge was with his wife where d jorge go right here at a fundraiser on behalf of folks who needed help in new york city five time all star one of the emotional leaders of this team but he s also the father of a son born with a rare birth defect that has required numerous surgeries and expensive treatments and jorge and his wife have made it their mission to reach out to families who aren t as fortunate as they are offering resources providing a support network for parents helping children who suffer from the disease live healthy and happier lives and so we re very proud of the kind of work that jorge has done and of course then there s jeter where s jeter there he is right there sportsman of the year according to sports illustrated and you can see why passed lou gehrig to become the all time yankee hit leader but derek would rather tell you a story about being in spring training with another yankee legend don mattingly i love this story walking off an empty field together one day mattingly suggested they run to the clubhouse telling derek you never know who s watching and derek took that lesson to heart and 15 years later he still runs everywhere like he s trying out for the track team always setting an example always hustling which is why i think everybody says that he epitomizes the best of the yankee tradition and then somebody like joe a proud son of illinois i want to note as the youngest manager in yankee history to win a world series joe is still in better shape than some of the players i just want to he looks good but what makes joe proudest is hope week a program where the yankees help make a difference in the lives of folks in need last year joe put out a sign up sheet for anyone who wanted to participate and when he checked the next day every player manager and coach had written their name down the team ended up winning all five games that week a fact that joe doesn t think was a coincidence and this summer they ll be doing it all over again that same spirit was on display today when the team visited members of our armed forces recovering at walter reed they spent time with soldiers and their families bringing hope and joy to folks who really need it at a time of great difficulty and so i just want to thank you personally for taking the time to do that in the end that s what makes the yankees special it s not simply the names on the roster or the size of their trophy case it s the people underneath the pinstripes that set this team apart it s the players and coaches who shoulder a legacy unlike any other but who share a belief that anybody blessed with first class talent also has an obligation to be a first class person that s what being a yankee is all about that s why i want to congratulate this team for winning the world series and for showing every young person what it means to be a true professional congratulations everybody dem bobama26 4 10b barack_obama thank you very much everybody please have a seat good evening everyone and welcome to washington in my life and as president i have had the great pleasure of visiting many of your countries and i ve always been grateful for the warmth and the hospitality that you and your fellow citizens have shown me and tonight i appreciate the opportunity to return the hospitality for many of you i know this is the first time visiting our country so let me say on behalf of the american people welcome to the united states of america it is an extraordinary privilege to welcome you to this presidential summit on entrepreneurship this has been a coordinated effort across my administration and i want to thank all the hardworking folks and leaders at all the departments and agencies who made it possible and who are here tonight that includes our united states trade representative ambassador ron kirk where s ron there he is i especially want to thank the two departments and leaders who took the lead on this summit secretary of commerce gary locke and secretary of state hillary clinton please give them a big round of applause we re joined by members of congress who work every day to help their constituents realize the american dream and whose life stories reflect the diversity and equal opportunity that we cherish as americans nydia velazquez who is also by the way the chairwoman of our small business committee in the house of representatives keith ellison is here and andre carson is here most of all i want to thank all of you for being part of this historic event you ve traveled from across the united states and nearly 60 countries from latin america to africa europe to central asia from the middle east to southeast asia and you bring with you the rich tapestry of the world s great traditions and great cultures you carry within you the beauty of different colors and creeds races and religions you re visionaries who pioneered new industries and young entrepreneurs looking to build a business or a community but we ve come together today because of what we share a belief that we are all bound together by certain common aspirations to live with dignity to get an education to live healthy lives maybe to start a business without having to pay a bribe to anybody to speak freely and have a say in how we are governed to live in peace and security and to give our children a better future but we re also here because we know that over the years despite all we have in common the united states and muslim communities around the world too often fell victim to mutual mistrust and that s why i went to cairo nearly one year ago and called for a new beginning between the united states and muslim communities a new beginning based on mutual interest and mutual respect i knew that this vision would not be fulfilled in a single year or even several years but i knew we had to begin and that all of us have responsibilities to fulfill as president i ve worked to ensure that america once again meets its responsibilities especially when it comes to the security and political issues that have often been a source of tension the united states is responsibly ending the war in iraq and we will partner with iraqi people for their long term prosperity and security in afghanistan in pakistan and beyond we re forging new partnerships to isolate violent extremists but also to combat corruption and foster the development that improves lives and communities i say it again tonight despite the inevitable difficulties so long as i am president the united states will never waver in our pursuit of a two state solution that ensures the rights and security of both israelis and palestinians and around the world the united states of america will continue to stand with those who seek justice and progress and the human rights and dignity of all people but even as i committed the united states to addressing these security and political concerns i also made it clear in cairo that we needed something else a sustained effort to listen to each other and to learn from each other to respect one another and i pledged to forge a new partnership not simply between governments but also between people on the issues that matter most in their daily lives in your lives now many questioned whether this was possible yet over the past year the united states has been reaching out and listening we ve joined interfaith dialogues and held town halls roundtables and listening sessions with thousands of people around the world including many of you and like so many people you ve extended your hand in return each in your own way as entrepreneurs and educators as leaders of faith and of science i have to say perhaps the most innovative response was from dr naif al mutawa of kuwait who joins us here tonight where is dr mutawa his comic books have captured the imagination of so many young people with superheroes who embody the teachings and tolerance of islam after my speech in cairo he had a similar idea so in his comic books superman and batman reached out to their muslim counterparts and i hear they re making progress too absolutely by listening to each other we ve been able to partner with each other we ve expanded educational exchanges because knowledge is the currency of the 21st century our distinguished science envoys have been visiting several of your countries exploring ways to increase collaboration on science and technology we re advancing global health including our partnership with the organization of the islamic conference to eradicate polio this is just one part of our broader engagement with the oic led by my special envoy rashad hussain who joins us here tonight where s rashad and we re partnering to expand economic prosperity at a government level i d note that putting the g20 in the lead on global economic decision making has brought more voices to the table including turkey saudi arabia india and indonesia and here today we re fulfilling my commitment in cairo to deepen ties between business leaders foundations and entrepreneurs in the united states and muslim communities around the world now i know some have asked given all the security and political and social challenges we face why a summit on entrepreneurship the answer is simple entrepreneurship because you told us that this was an area where we can learn from each other where america can share our experience as a society that empowers the inventor and the innovator where men and women can take a chance on a dream taking an idea that starts around a kitchen table or in a garage and turning it into a new business and even new industries that can change the world entrepreneurship because throughout history the market has been the most powerful force the world has ever known for creating opportunity and lifting people out of poverty entrepreneurship because it s in our mutual economic interest trade between the united states and muslim majority countries has grown but all this trade combined is still only about the same as our trade with one country mexico so there s so much more we can do together in partnership to foster opportunity and prosperity in all our countries and social entrepreneurship because as i learned as a community organizer in chicago real change comes from the bottom up from the grassroots starting with the dreams and passions of single individuals serving their communities and that s why we re here we have jerry yang who transformed how we communicate with yahoo is jerry here where is he he ll be here tomorrow as well as entrepreneurs who have opened cybercafs and new forums on the internet for discussion and development together you can unleash the technologies that will help shape the 21st century we have successes like dr mohamed ibrahim who i met earlier who built a telecommunications empire that empowered people across africa and we have aspiring entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their businesses and hire new workers together you can address the challenges of accessing capital we have trailblazers like sheikha hanadi of qatar along with waed al taweel who i met earlier a 20 year old student from the west bank who wants to build recreation centers for palestinian youth so together they represent the incredible talents of women entrepreneurs and remind us that countries that educate and empower women are countries that are far more likely to prosper i believe that we have pioneers like chris hughes who created facebook as well as an online community that brought so many young people into my campaign for president mybarackobama com we have people like soraya salti of jordan who are empowering the young men and women who will be leaders of tomorrow together they represent the great potential and expectations of young people around the world and we ve got social entrepreneurs like tri mumpuni who has helped rural communities in indonesia harness the electricity and revenues of hydro power and andeisha farid an extraordinary woman from afghanistan who s taken great risks to educate the next generation one girl at a time together they point the way to a future where progress is shared and prosperity is sustainable and i also happened to notice dr yunus it s wonderful to see you again i think so many people know the history of grameen bank and all the great work that s been done to help finance entrepreneurship among the poorest of the poor first throughout south asia and now around the world so this is the incredible potential that you represent the future we can seize together so tonight i m proud to announce a series of new partnerships and initiatives that will do just that the united states is launching several new exchange programs we will bring business and social entrepreneurs from muslim majority countries to the united states and send their american counterparts to learn from your countries so women in technology fields will have the opportunity to come to the united states for internships and professional development and since innovation is central to entrepreneurship we re creating new exchanges for science teachers we re forging new partnerships in which high tech leaders from silicon valley will share their expertise in venture capital mentorship and technology incubators with partners in the middle east and in turkey and in southeast asia and tonight i can report that the global technology and innovation fund that i announced in cairo will potentially mobilize more than 2 billion in investments this is private capital and it will unlock new opportunities for people across our countries in sectors like telecommunications health care education and infrastructure and finally i m proud that we re creating here at this summit not only these programs that i ve just mentioned but it s not going to stop here together we ve sparked a new era of entrepreneurship with events all over washington this week and upcoming regional conferences around the world tonight i am pleased to announce that prime minister erdogan has agreed to host the next entrepreneurship summit next year in turkey and so i thank the prime minister and the people and private sector leaders of turkey for helping to sustain the momentum that we will unleash this week so as i said there are those who questioned whether we could forge these new beginnings and given the magnitude of the challenges we face in the world and let s face it a lot of the bad news that comes through the television each and every day sometimes it can be tempting to believe that the goodwill and good works of ordinary people are simply insufficient to the task at hand but to any who still doubt whether partnerships between people can remake our world i say look at the men and women who are here today look at the professor who came up with an idea micro finance that empowered the rural poor across his country especially women and children that s the powerful example of dr yunus look what happened when muhammad shared his idea with a woman from pakistan who has since lifted hundreds of thousands of families and children out of poverty through a foundation whose name literally means miracle that s the example of roshaneh zafar look what happened when that idea spread across the world including to people like my own mother who worked with the rural poor from pakistan to indonesia that simple idea began with a single person has now transformed the lives of millions that s the spirit of entrepreneurship so yes the new beginning we seek is not only possible it has already begun it exists within each of you and millions around the world who believe like we do that the future belongs not to those who would divide us but to those who come together not to those who would destroy but those who would build not those trapped in the past but those who like us believe with confidence and conviction in a future of justice and progress and the dignity of all human beings regardless of their race regardless of their religion that s the enormous potential that we re hoping to unlock during this conference and hoping to continue not only this week but in the months and years ahead so i m grateful that all of you are participating may god bless you all and may god s peace be upon you thank you very much thank you dem bobama26 5 09 barack_obama thank you well i m excited too of the many responsibilities granted to a president by our constitution few are more serious or more consequential than selecting a supreme court justice the members of our highest court are granted life tenure often serving long after the presidents who appointed them and they are charged with the vital task of applying principles put to paper more than 20 centuries ago to some of the most difficult questions of our time so i don t take this decision lightly i ve made it only after deep reflection and careful deliberation while there are many qualities that i admire in judges across the spectrum of judicial philosophy and that i seek in my own nominee there are few that stand out that i just want to mention first and foremost is a rigorous intellect a mastery of the law an ability to hone in on the key issues and provide clear answers to complex legal questions second is a recognition of the limits of the judicial role an understanding that a judge s job is to interpret not make law to approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda but rather a commitment to impartial justice a respect for precedent and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand these two qualities are essential i believe for anyone who would sit on our nation s highest court and yet these qualities alone are insufficient we need something more for as supreme court justice oliver wendell holmes once said the life of the law has not been logic it has been experience experience being tested by obstacles and barriers by hardship and misfortune experience insisting persisting and ultimately overcoming those barriers it is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live and that is why it is a necessary ingredient in the kind of justice we need on the supreme court the process of reviewing and selecting a successor to justice souter has been rigorous and comprehensive not least because of the standard that justice souter himself has set with his formidable intellect and fair mindedness and decency i ve sought the advice of members of congress on both sides of the aisle including every member of the senate judiciary committee my team has reached out to constitutional scholars advocacy organizations and bar associations representing an array of interests and opinions and i want to thank members of my staff and administration who ve worked so hard and given so much of their time as part of this effort after completing this exhaustive process i have decided to nominate an inspiring woman who i believe will make a great justice judge sonia sotomayor of the great state of new york over a distinguished career that spans three decades judge sotomayor has worked at almost every level of our judicial system providing her with a depth of experience and a breadth of perspective that will be invaluable as a supreme court justice it s a measure of her qualities and her qualifications that judge sotomayor was nominated to the u s district court by a republican president george h w bush and promoted to the federal court of appeals by a democrat bill clinton walking in the door she would bring more experience on the bench and more varied experience on the bench than anyone currently serving on the united states supreme court had when they were appointed judge sotomayor is a distinguished graduate of two of america s leading universities she s been a big city prosecutor and a corporate litigator she spent six years as a trial judge on the u s district court and would replace justice souter as the only justice with experience as a trial judge a perspective that would enrich the judgments of the court for the past 11 years she has been a judge on the court of appeals for the second circuit of new york one of the most demanding circuits in the country there she has handed down decisions on a range of constitutional and legal questions that are notable for their careful reasoning earning the respect of colleagues on the bench the admiration of many lawyers who argue cases in her court and the adoration of her clerks who look to her as a mentor during her tenure on the district court she presided over roughly 450 cases one case in particular involved a matter of enormous concern to many americans including me the baseball strike of 1994 1995 in a decision that reportedly took her just 15 minutes to announce a swiftness much appreciated by baseball fans everywhere she issued an injunction that helped end the strike some say that judge sotomayor saved baseball judge sotomayor came to the district court from a law firm where she was a partner focused on complex commercial litigation gaining insight into the workings of a global economy before that she was a prosecutor in the manhattan da s office serving under the legendary robert morgenthau an early mentor of sonia s who still sings her praises today there sonia learned what crime can do to a family and a community and what it takes to fight it it s a career that has given her not only a sweeping overview of the american judicial system but a practical understanding of how the law works in the everyday lives of the american people but as impressive and meaningful as judge sotomayor s sterling credentials in the law is her own extraordinary journey born in the south bronx she was raised in a housing project not far from yankee stadium making her a lifelong yankee s fan i hope this will not disqualify her in the eyes of the new englanders in the senate sonia s parents came to new york from puerto rico during the second world war her mother as part of the women s army corps and in fact her mother is here today and i d like us all to acknowledge sonia s mom sonia s mom has been a little choked up but she sonia s mother began a family tradition of giving back to this country sonia s father was a factory worker with a 3rd grade education who didn t speak english but like sonia s mother he had a willingness to work hard a strong sense of family and a belief in the american dream when sonia was nine her father passed away and her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for sonia and her brother who is also here today is a doctor and a terrific success in his own right but sonia s mom bought the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood sent her children to a catholic school called cardinal spellman out of the belief that with a good education here in america all things are possible with the support of family friends and teachers sonia earned scholarships to princeton where she graduated at the top of her class and yale law school where she was an editor of the yale law journal stepping onto the path that led her here today along the way she s faced down barriers overcome the odds lived out the american dream that brought her parents here so long ago and even as she has accomplished so much in her life she has never forgotten where she began never lost touch with the community that supported her what sonia will bring to the court then is not only the knowledge and experience acquired over a course of a brilliant legal career but the wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life s journey it s my understanding that judge sotomayor s interest in the law was sparked as a young girl by reading the nancy drew series and that when she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of eight she was informed that people with diabetes can t grow up to be police officers or private investigators like nancy drew and that s when she was told she d have to scale back her dreams well sonia what you ve shown in your life is that it doesn t matter where you come from what you look like or what challenges life throws your way no dream is beyond reach in the united states of america and when sonia sotomayor ascends those marble steps to assume her seat on the highest court of the land america will have taken another important step towards realizing the ideal that is etched above its entrance equal justice under the law i hope the senate acts in a bipartisan fashion as it has in confirming judge sotomayor twice before and as swiftly as possible so that she can take her seat on the court in september and participate in deliberations as the court chooses which cases it will hear this coming year and with that i d like all of you to give a warm greeting as i invite judge sotomayor to say a few words dem bobama26 5 10a barack_obama thank you everybody please have a seat it is wonderful to be here and to see all of you here today and i would be remiss if i did not note the presence of your governor give him a big round of applause arnold schwarzenegger i m just going to go ahead and mention our district attorney kamala harris who s here it is great to be in fremont good to be back in northern california i was reminiscing a little bit michelle and i took our honeymoon in napa valley that was almost 17 years ago when we drove down the pacific coast highway and so i was i was fantasizing about going and renting a car but i was told that would cause a stir so next time but it s wonderful to be here in northern california it is always nice to get out of washington a little bit now don t get me wrong the capital is a beautiful place nice monuments i have no commute which very few people in california can say is true for them but the truth of the matter is is that when you re in washington a lot of times all you re thinking about or all that s being talked about is politics who s up who s down the contest between the parties instead of people remembering why it is that they aspired to go into politics in the first place we end up getting caught up in the moment instead of what is important for the future so i try to visit places like this about once a week hear from folks as often as possible who are actually doing the extraordinary work of building up america and i appreciated the chance to tour your plant and to see the incredible cutting edge solar panels that you re manufacturing but also the process that goes into the manufacturing of these solar panels and it is just a testament to american ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world the best technology in the world and most importantly the best workers in the world and you guys all represent that so thank you very much for that and while i m at it i also want to give some credit to those guys in the back who have been building this facility so that we can put more people back to work and build more solar panels to send all across the country thank you for the great work that you guys are doing now it s fitting that this technology is being pioneered here in california where else right for generations this part of the country has embodied the entrepreneurial spirit that has always defined america s success people heading west it was here where weary but hopeful travelers came with pickaxes in search of a fortune it was here that tinkerers and engineers turned a sleepy valley into a center of innovation and industry it s here that companies like solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future and you re doing so at a time of real challenge for america i don t have to tell you that the governor doesn t have to tell you that california was hit as hard as any state by the home mortgage crisis and the economic storms that followed even this high tech corridor wasn t immune foreclosures skyrocketed home values fell businesses slowed from family restaurants to fortune 500 companies fremont lost thousands of jobs as the nummi auto plant slowed production and shut down and that hurt not only autoworkers but local businesses and parts suppliers many in this community are still reeling from the effects of the recession and that followed a decade of struggle and growing economic insecurity for a lot of middle class families the truth is even though the economy is growing and adding jobs again it s going to take a while to create the favorable conditions for communities like this one to rebound and to flourish but what was clear when i walked through the oval office door at a time of maximum peril in our economy when economists were warning we might be going into a great depression the financial system might be on the verge of collapse what was clear was that even though it might be difficult and even though some of the things we had to do might not be politically popular we had to act we couldn t accept a future that was marked by decline and that s why we took a series of steps to stop what was nothing short of an economic freefall we passed a series of tax cuts to put more money in the pockets of working families right away including more than 12 million families in california we increased the pell grant which brought 4 million additional dollars 4 million of additional aid to students right here in fremont we backed loans to small businesses including 20 million to companies in this community alone we also provided relief for those hardest hit who not only needed help but would most likely use the relief to generate more economic activity so we extended unemployment benefits for more than 3 million california residents and made cobra cheaper for people who d lost their jobs so they could keep their health care for their families we provided 250 in relief to more than 5 million california seniors many whose life savings had taken a big hit in the financial crisis and we provided emergency assistance to our governors to prevent teachers and police officers and firefighters from being laid off as a result of state budget shortfalls at a time when california is facing a fiscal crisis we know that this has saved the jobs of tens of thousands of educators and other needed public servants just in this state and what was true in california was true all across the country but our goal in dealing with this economic crisis wasn t just about bringing an end to the recession we said to ourselves we ve got to build a new foundation for lasting growth we can t have an economy that s just built on maxing out on credit cards and home equity loans and complex financial instruments that are generating big bonuses but can potentially bring an entire economy down so we recognized that we ve got to go back to basics we ve got to go back to making things we ve got to go back to exports we ve got to go back to innovation and we recognized that there was only so much government could do the true engine of economic growth will always be companies like solyndra will always be america s businesses but that doesn t mean the government can just sit on the sidelines government still has the responsibility to help create the conditions in which students can gain an education so they can work at solyndra and entrepreneurs can get financing so they can start a company and new industries can take hold so that s why even as we cut taxes and provided emergency relief over the past year we also invested in basic research in broadband networks in rebuilding roads and bridges in health information technology and in clean energy because not only would this spur hiring by businesses it would create jobs in sectors with incredible potential to propel our economy for years for decades to come there is no better example than energy we all know the price we pay as a country as a result of how we produce and use and yes waste energy today we ve been talking about it for decades since the gas shortages of the 1970s our dependence on foreign oil endangers our security and our economy climate change poses a threat to our way of life in fact we re already beginning to see its profound and costly impact and the spill in the gulf which is just heartbreaking only underscores the necessity of seeking alternative fuel sources we re not going to transition out of oil next year or 10 years from now but think about it part of what s happening in the gulf is that oil companies are drilling a mile underwater before they hit ground and then a mile below that before they hit oil with the increased risks the increased costs it gives you a sense of where we re going we re not going to be able to sustain this kind of fossil fuel use this planet can t sustain it think about when china and india where consumers there are starting to buy cars and use energy the way we are so we ve known that we ve had to shift in a fundamental way and that s true for all of us now earlier today i spoke to energy secretary steven chu who as you know is a nobel prize winning physicist and he s been on the scene in the gulf deeply involved in our efforts to bring this crisis to an end and we discussed today s attempt to stop the leak through what s known as the top kill plugging the well with densely packed mud to prevent any more oil from escaping if it s successful and there are no guarantees it should greatly reduce or eliminate the flow of oil now streaming into the gulf from the sea floor and if it s not there are other approaches that may be viable and as work continues in the next couple of months to complete relief wells my administration is intensively engaged with scientists and engineers to explore all alternative options and we re going to bring every resource necessary to put a stop to this thing but a lot of damage has been done already livelihoods destroyed landscapes scarred wildlife affected lives have been lost our thoughts and prayers are very much with the people along the gulf coast and let me reiterate we will not rest until this well is shut the environment is repaired and the cleanup is complete and i look forward to returning there on friday to review the efforts currently underway and lend my support to the region but even as we are dealing with this immediate crisis we ve got to remember that the risks our current dependence on oil holds for our environment and our coastal communities is not the only cost involved in our dependence on these fossil fuels around the world from china to germany our competitors are waging a historic effort to lead in developing new energy technologies there are factories like this being built in china factories like this being built in germany nobody is playing for second place these countries recognize that the nation that leads the clean energy economy is likely to lead the global economy and if we fail to recognize that same imperative we risk falling behind we risk falling behind fifteen years ago the united states produced 40 percent of the world s solar panels 40 percent that was just 15 years ago by 2008 our share had fallen to just over 5 percent i don t know about you but i m not prepared to cede american leadership in this industry because i m not prepared to cede america s leadership in the global economy so that s why we ve placed a big emphasis on clean energy it s the right thing to do for our environment it s the right thing to do for our national security but it s also the right thing to do for our economy and we can see the positive impacts right here at solyndra less than a year ago we were standing on what was an empty lot but through the recovery act this company received a loan to expand its operations this new factory is the result of those loans since the project broke ground last fall more than 3 000 construction workers have been employed building this plant across the country workers across the country workers in 22 states are manufacturing the supplies for this project workers in a dozen states are building the advanced manufacturing equipment that will power this new facility when it s completed in a few months solyndra expects to hire a thousand workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across america and around the world and this in turn will generate business for companies throughout our country who will create jobs supplying this factory with parts and materials so there s a ripple effect it s not just localized to this area meanwhile down the road we re seeing some other welcome signs i know the closure of the nummi plant was devastating to this community and thousands of jobs were lost and it was all the more painful and heartbreaking because the factory had been held up as an example of how america could lead in manufacturing but thanks to loans through the department of energy which helped provide tesla motors with the financial wherewithal to expand that shuttered plant is soon going to reopen and once again once again it will be a symbol of promise an example of what s possible here in america tesla is joining with toyota in a venture to put a thousand skilled workers back to work manufacturing an all electric car and this is only the beginning we re investing in advanced battery technologies to power plug in hybrid cars in fact today in tennessee there s a groundbreaking for an advanced battery manufacturing facility that will generate hundreds of jobs and it was made possible by loans through the department of energy as well as tax credits and grants to increase demand for these vehicles we used to account for about 2 percent of advanced battery technologies for cars we re expecting in the next couple years to get up to 20 30 maybe even 40 percent building our market share right here in the united states of america we re investing in an advanced electricity grid and governor schwarzenegger and i were just talking about this before we came out because this has been a big priority for him that will be more efficient and better able to harness renewable energy sources we re providing grants to build wind farms and install these solar panels helping us double our ability to generate renewable energy we re expanding our capacity in biofuels to reduce our dependence on oil we ve helped forge one historic agreement and are on track to produce a second to dramatically increase the fuel efficiency of america s cars and trucks so we are making progress it s progress that s going to produce jobs that s going to help secure our future but we ve still got more work to do and that s why i m going to keep fighting to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation in washington we re going to try to get it done this year because what we want to do is create incentives that will fully unleash the potential for jobs and growth in this sector already we re seeing the results of the steps we ve taken as i said before the recovery act we had the capacity to make less than 2 percent of the world s advanced vehicle batteries in the next five years we ll make 40 percent of these batteries here in the united states before the recovery act we could build just 5 percent of the world s solar panels in the next few years we re going to double our share to more than 10 percent here at this site solyndra expects to make enough solar panels each year to generate 500 megawatts of electricity and over the lifetime of this expanded facility that could be like replacing as many as eight coal fired power plants it s also worth noting to achieve this doubling of our share of solar capacity we actually need to make four times as many solar panels because other countries are adding capacity too nobody in this race is standing still so these steps are helping to safeguard our environment they re helping to lower our dependence on oil at a time when people are struggling and looking for work these steps are helping to strengthen our economy and create jobs we all know how important that is because times here in california are still tough it s going to take time to replace the millions of jobs we lost in this recession unemployment remains high even though the economy is growing and has started adding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month so it took years to dig our way into this hole we re not going to dig our way out overnight but what you are proving here all of you collectively is that as difficult as it will be as far as we ve got to go we will recover we will rebuild we will emerge from this period of turmoil stronger than ever before that s not all you re also proving something more every day that you build this expanded facility as you fill orders for solar panels to ship around the world you re demonstrating that the promise of clean energy isn t just an article of faith not anymore it s not some abstract possibility for science fiction movies or a distant future 10 years down the road or 20 years down the road it s happening right now the future is here we re poised to transform the ways we power our homes and our cars and our businesses and we re poised to lead our competitors in the development of new technologies and products and businesses and we are poised to generate countless new jobs good paying middle class jobs right here in the united states of america that s the promise of clean energy and thanks to the men and women here today and the innovators and the workers all across america it s a promise that we ve already begun to fulfill so thank you very much god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama26 5 10b barack_obama hello hello everyone how s it going california love you back this is a good looking crowd well she s just precious and i know her pretty well hey mom how are you well it is so nice to see everybody thank you for the wonderful welcome and the genuine san francisco weather i mean i wouldn t have wanted to come here and it was all sunny and bright no that s not the way it s supposed to work thank you we just flew in today from washington and i have to say that we ve got a lot on our plate right now so i don t travel for just anybody but when it comes to barbara boxer i m a lot like many of you which is if she calls and she says i need some help then we re going to give her some help because she has helped millions of californians and millions of americans all across the country and we re going to make sure that barbara boxer is in office for an awful long time to come whether stu likes it or not i was talking to stu in the back and you know when you re a senator an elected official right around this time of year you basically become a widow or a widower until your spouse is finished with their race but stu has been so supportive because he knows the value of what barbara does each and every day now let s face it this has been as tough a year and a half as any year and a half in our history since the 1930s when i came into office when i was sworn in we were on the brink of what many economists thought might be another great depression at minimum we knew we were going to have the worst recession since the great depression we were losing 750 000 jobs per month the economy had contracted 6 5 percent i had wrapped like a gift a welcoming gift for me a 1 3 trillion deficit and so we had to act quickly and that meant that right away we had to make sure that we put in place mechanisms to put people back to work to get the economy growing again we had to cut taxes for small businesses and for individuals so that they would boost demand in the economy that was caving it meant that we had to make sure that unemployment insurance and cobra was in place so that people would have some safety net under them when they lost a job through no means of their own through no fault of their own but it also meant that we had to make investments so that we would create a foundation for long term growth in this country see we couldn t keep on doing the same things we had been doing it wasn t good enough just to go back to the status quo ante we couldn t have a situation in which growth was premised on everybody maxing out on their credit cards and taking out home equity loans and getting deeper and deeper into debt and wild speculation on the financial markets what we had to do was to go back to basics and think about what has made america great well one of the things that has always made america great is innovation and so through our recovery act we made the largest investment in clean energy in our history and we made the largest investment in science and while we were making all those investments in research and development we also elevated science once again and we said we would make decisions on stem cell research and other issues based on what science tell us and so we had an innovation agenda then we had an agenda with respect to making sure that we made the health care system more efficient and so even before we got into the health care bill we invested in information technology so that when you go to the doctor you don t have to take five tests we re just going to take one test and then you re going to e mail the five tests to everybody else and by the way you won t get charged for five tests or medicaid or medicare won t get charged for five tests and we thought about how could we restore an auto industry that was on the brink but again we couldn t go back to the status quo so what we did was we said you know what we re going to make sure that gm and chrysler aren t liquidated but we re going to make sure that we invest in advanced battery technologies and hybrid technologies so that we can start seeing a future of plug in hybrids that get 150 miles a gallon so that we can start breaking our dependence on foreign oil and we said you know part of the innovation economy is making sure every child in america has a decent education which meant we made the largest investment we made the largest investment in education in our history not only at the k 12 level but also at the community college level and at the university level and then we said you know we if we re going to innovate and grow we ve got to have great infrastructure and so we passed the largest investment in infrastructure since eisenhower built the interstate highway system and we said if we re going to cut taxes let s make sure we cut taxes for the right folks and so as a consequence we passed the most progressive tax cut in our history to make sure that people who really needed it got the benefits now california i want you to understand we did all that in the first month that was in the first month and in the first couple of months we had already provided 4 million more children health care under the children s health insurance bill we had already passed legislation to make sure that a basic principle that women if they re working on the job should get paid the same for doing the work that a man is doing in the first six months we had already made sure that tobacco companies couldn t market to our kids and the toughest credit card regulations in our history and legislation to prevent housing fraud we did that in the first six months but that wasn t enough to start building this new foundation for our economy so we just kept on going and as barbara mentioned we ended up doing something that seven congresses and seven presidents have failed to do had failed to do for a century and that is start providing basic security for all americans when it comes to their health care because in a country this wealthy no person should go bankrupt because they get sick no child should go unattended if they ve got a chronic illness that is a basic principle of america and by the way it turns out that by making these changes we can actually make the health care system more efficient and drive down costs and drive down premiums and help small businesses now we decided that s still not enough in order to make the changes that are necessary and so we said we re never going to have the situation again where taxpayers are forced to choose between the entire economy collapsing or having to bail out a bunch of folks who ve been irresponsible so we decided we had to create a financial regulatory structure that continues to affirm the power of the free market that recognizes that financial institutions have to be there to be able to finance small businesses and individuals buying homes and cars and that s all good that s part of what makes america so creative and so dynamic that drives our growth but there have got to be basic rules of the road so consumers aren t getting cheated so people aren t missing the fine print and suddenly find themselves way overextended so that you don t have financial instruments that can blow the entire economy apart and so after the over the last several months after we finished with health care we ve tackled financial regulatory reform we ve now passed it through the house we ve now passed it through the senate and we are going to pass it through congress and then i m going to sign that bill to make sure that we don t have taxpayer bailouts for irresponsible behavior in our financial sector all right so that s not a bad 18 months work that s pretty good but here s the thing i couldn t have done that by myself i mean one of the things you learn as president is because you ve got this title and you know there s the plane and the helicopter and all that stuff that people expect you to solve problems and when things go wrong they re definitely going to blame you if things go right occasionally you might get the credit but the truth is is that in order for us to succeed in bringing about the kind of america where everybody has opportunity where our economy is growing and innovative and more stable where our children are getting a good education where we ve got a sound health care system where we ve got an actual energy agenda i can t do that by myself i ve got to have strong allies i ve got to have people with passion i ve got to have people who are willing to fight for what s right i ve got to have people who always have the voices of their constituents in their ear and understand and remember no matter how long they ve been in washington who it is that they re fighting for and nobody is a better example of that than barbara boxer which is why you are here today on every fight that needed to be fought barbara was there standing right there next to me and sometimes we were in a foxhole together and shots were being fired that s just a figure of speech i don t want the secret service getting excited but barbara is always there she s been there for you she s been there for california she s been there for me and now we ve got a boxer in our corner that s a good one so now we ve got to be there for her because the truth is our work is not yet done and i actually visited the republican caucus today and it was a very warm and cuddly meeting but the truth is i want the country to come together in dealing with some big problems that we ve still got and barbara wants the same thing and here s what i told them i m not going to get into all the details of the meeting because they wanted the meeting closed we had a meeting that was open with the republican caucus on the house side and i had a lot of fun there so but basically i said we ve done some good work unfortunately sometimes we haven t gotten a lot of help from the other side of the aisle but we still are hopeful that you are willing to put party below what needs to be done for the american people and here are some areas where we know we ve got to make progress we know we still have to make progress on energy this situation in the gulf is heartbreaking and the day that it was reported to me that this riser and the drilling situation had blown i said to my team we ve got to put every bit of energy time all the resources we ve got to make sure that we deal with this and we ve now got over a thousand people from the federal government deployed down there we are doing everything we can to contain the damage but the fact of the matter is is that not only do we have to revisit how these oil companies are operating to make sure that they re operating in a safe and effective way but we ve also still got this overarching issue even if you hadn t seen the catastrophe down in the gulf the reason that folks are now having to go down a mile deep into the ocean and then another mile drilling into the ground below that is because the easy oilfields and oil wells are gone or they re starting to diminish and what does that tell us that tells us that we ve got to have a long term energy strategy in this country and we ve got to start we ve got to start cultivating we ve got to start cultivating solar and wind and biodiesel and we ve got to increase energy efficiency across our economy in our buildings and our automobiles and we ve got to also make sure that oops you don t agree and we ve got to make sure that as these technologies develop the government is not creating these technologies but it s supporting them because that s how the railroads got built and that s how the internet got developed for there was some measure of government support and we ve got to stop subsidizing those industries that are not going to lead us to the future now so i said to the republicans join with me there s been some good work done by john kerry and joe lieberman and lindsey graham let s go let s not wait let s show the american people that in the midst of this crisis all of us are opening our eyes to what s necessary to fulfill the promise to our children and our grandchildren and then i talked about immigration reform another area where there are a lot of passions right now and i said i said to them i said to them look i disagree with this arizona law i think it s a bad idea but i also said i understand the frustration of folks in arizona i understand they re feeling that somehow the federal government can t control the border effectively and i m willing to work with my republican colleagues to create a stronger border here in california new mexico and in arizona i think everybody understands that that s an important investment to make and i told them if we actually want to solve the problem as opposed to just score political points then we can t just have one leg of the stool we ve got to make sure that we re dealing with employers who are dealing in unscrupulous ways with undocumented workers we ve got and for the millions of folks who are already here we ve got to say to them you ve got to take responsibility you broke the law you ve got to pay a fine you ve got to pay your back taxes you ve got to learn english you ve got to go to the back of the line but here s a pathway whereby you can get right with our community and contribute to the larger american project those are issues that we re going to have some legitimate differences on some of those differences were expressed in the republican caucus and i expressed my opinions as well but you know what if you talk to most americans on these issues they re not thinking republican they re not thinking democrat they re not thinking liberal they re not thinking conservative they re thinking what s common sense what s decent what s right what does the science say what do the facts say what will work what won t work solve the problem and that s what i m prepared to do and that s what barbara boxer has always stood for and that s why it s so important that you re here tonight because that s the kind of politics that is going to create a better future for california that s the kind of politics that s going to create a better future for the nation and that s why i know that you are going to make sure that barbara boxer gets another six years in the united states senate thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama26 5 10c barack_obama hello california thank you thank you thank you you doing a little dance thank you thank you everybody thank you oh thank you now it is good to be back but i resent i didn t get a chance hear the choir sing i was up somewhere they were working me hard and i could have used a little lift of the spirit there now fortunately if i m not mistaken i recognize reverend williams being here i know he s sitting right in front and i recognize this choir because i saw you guys a while back when i was here so i have heard them in the past to the glide methodist church choir thank you so much reverend williams thank you to musician brett dennen thank you very much for helping out here uh oh down yeah if you ve got a chair go ahead and use it feel free feel free it is wonderful it is wonderful to be back in california it s also wonderful to be back in the home district of one of the greatest speakers in the history of the house of representatives nancy pelosi and it s good to be here in the home state of my friend somebody who has been fighting the good fight for this state for so many years and then you look at her and you realize she started when she was 12 your outstanding senator barbara boxer i talked to stu barbara s husband beforehand and he told me that barbara has not changed a bit since she first went to congress as beautiful as ever the only difference was she was actually 5 10 when she went there and just got worn down but that s okay i didn t have any gray hair when i went there right yours turned blonde now it is one of the great privileges having been a senator that i had a chance to work alongside barbara california has been a leader in promoting hybrids and compact cars and cleaner burning fuels and appropriately you ve got senator barbara boxer a sub compact senator with a seemingly inexhaustible source of energy and she already talked about how deeply she cares about the environment about her work to pursue a clean energy future and that work has never been more important than it is now but i also want you to understand this is a woman with extraordinarily deep passion to fight for all of you on a whole range of issues absolutely barbara is somebody who hasn t forgotten why she went to washington she remembers the people of california the stories she s heard the people she s talked to the woman without health insurance the child who is in a substandard school the guy who s lost his job that s what she s passionate about especially right now fighting for jobs jobs right here in california jobs with good wages jobs with good benefits she s passionate for fighting for california s families and making sure that everybody here has got a fair shake that if they re willing to work hard that they can reach for that american dream and that s what i want to talk to you about tonight because reviving our economy remains the central challenge that we re facing today i don t have to tell you folks here in california this state has been hit as hard as any state with economic troubles over the past few years jobs have been lost in heartbreaking numbers up and down the coast the housing crisis hit the state with a vengeance the budget problems have put a further strain on people here at a time when they really need help and that forces the state government to make painful choices about where to spend where to save the challenges here reflect challenges that are facing people all across america i m trying to get out of washington once a week it s good for me i mean there are good things about washington i ve got no commute which i know you ll appreciate here in california but it s good to get out of town and you talk to everybody you see the letters that are being sent and i m reminded first of all of what we confronted when we got here when we got into office 750 000 jobs per month being lost 750 000 the economy was contracting at 6 5 percent that quarter that i was sworn in the worst financial crisis since the great depression now you ve heard that said before but think about that think about that this is the worst economic crisis that many of the people in this room have seen in their lifetimes and the fact is is that a lot of folks didn t know what to do and there were some economists who said that we may be falling over a precipice the banking sector had completely locked up no credit was flowing and we might end up seeing a global depression that rivaled what happened in the 1930s and so we had to act quickly we had to act fast and unfortunately we didn t have all the tools that we needed to act fast because you had a previous congress and a previous administration that had left a 1 3 trillion deficit wrapped up in a bow that turned surpluses into deficits as a consequence of a whole host of irresponsible policies these problems that we confronted didn t come out of nowhere they didn t just happen there was a consequence of policies that had been in place for years that barbara s opponents that the other party have promoted and so we had to move fast and that s what we did on day one we took the reins and we said are going to make sure that we don t slip into a great depression and we are it s good to see you again i have to say you know i saw this guy down in l a at a barbara boxer event about a month and a half ago and i would two points i want to make number one he should i hate to say this but he really should like buy a ticket to if he wants to demonstrate buy a ticket to a guy who doesn t support his point of view and then you can yell as much as you want there the other point is maybe he didn t read the newspapers because we are working with congress as we speak to roll back don t ask don t tell i actually think he does read the newspapers because he wasn t as his heart didn t seem in it he said do it faster it s like come on man i m dealing with congress here it takes a little bit of time where was i i was going down memory lane so we ended up initiating a series of steps the largest investment in clean energy in our history restoring the primacy of science and investing in research and development the largest investment in infrastructure since eisenhower built the interstate railway system the largest investment in education by the federal government in our history the most progressive the most progressive tax cut in our history to restore a sense of fairness to our tax system help for states so that they didn t have to lay off teachers and firefighters and police officers including right here in california talk to governor schwarzenegger if you don t believe the kinds of help that was involved and we did all this in the first month the first month and just as an aside we passed legislation to make sure that 4 million kids could get health insurance that didn t have it before we passed the lilly ledbetter law that put forward the basic principle that an equal s day that a day s work should get an equal day s pay regardless of whether it s a man or a woman who is doing the work made sure tobacco companies couldn t market to kids made sure that have the toughest credit card anti fraud provisions that we had seen anti housing fraud provisions biggest national service investment all that we did in the first few months now and that was before we got to health care to make sure that every american had the chance to get decent health care and people weren t going bankrupt when they got sick you re welcome you re welcome it s nice to feel appreciated once in a while so now here s the thing though i love you back but here s the thing california we ve still got work to do because of those folks that i talked about unemployment in california and all across the country is still unacceptably high people are still losing their homes folks are still seeing premium increases on their health care and we ve got some big issues that congress hasn t yet tackled in the way that we know they have to be tackled if we want a better future for our kids and our grandkids now some of you heard i went to the republican caucus today it was a warm and cuddly meeting the last time i appeared it was before the house republican caucus and we agreed to let the press in on that one this one not so much and but i wanted to talk to them about the fact that as busy as people have been as hard as we ve been working we ve got more work to do and everybody knows it in their gut everybody knows that we are at an inflection point in our history that we ve got a choice between going back to the same status quo except the status quo won t work any more we re not going to be able to run an economy based on maxing out your credit cards and taking out home equity loans and running up debt and the financial sector getting exorbitant profits based on a bunch of financial shenanigans we know that if we want to build a real future in an economy this competitive with china and india and brazil and other countries on the rise that we re going to have to go back to basics we ve got to fix our education system we ve got to make sure that every young person in america has a chance to go to college we ve got to make sure and by the way you may have missed it during the health care debate but we added billions of dollars in funding to student loans by cutting out the financial middlemen that was just that didn t even get front page news we ve got to strengthen our community colleges we re going to have work to do implementing our health care bill and we ve also got some critical issues that all of us have in mind right now and i m going to mention two and i mentioned these to the republican caucus so the first is energy now there s not a person who has just felt that sense of despair in watching the broadcasts about oil spill down in the gulf nobody is more upset than me because ultimately like any president when this happens on your watch then every day you are thinking how does this get solved and so we ve sent over a thousand people down to the gulf boom equipment legal advisors helping fishermen who have lost their livelihoods as a consequence of this and we are now having to do a thoroughgoing review to see how it is that oil companies can say that they know how to handle these problems when it turns out actually that they don t and that s a responsibility of government but we also have to face a broader fact there s a reason why those folks are out there drilling a mile down in the water and then when they hit ground a mile down they have to go another mile down to get oil that s an expensive proposition it s a dangerous proposition it s a risky proposition why are we doing it well we re doing it because we have not made a transition to a new energy future and we ve been putting it off for decade after decade after decade and it is about time that we said to ourselves that we re ready to make a change on behalf of the future of our children and our grandchildren and it won t happen overnight it won t happen tomorrow it won t happen next week but if we start investing in clean energy technology and solar and wind and biodiesel if we invest in hybrid plug ins that can get 150 miles a gallon if we start making our buildings more efficient and if we start finally saying to ourselves we can t just let everybody pollute for free if we follow science and we follow some common sense principles then look oil is still going to be in the energy mix we re not going to eliminate that completely but we are going to over time transition to ourselves and we will become more energy efficient which will be good for our national security it will be good for our economy it will be good for our environment it will be good for our future and by the way we can create millions of jobs right here in the united states of america investing in a new clean energy future and i told the republicans i am ready to work with you right now to get this done second issue is immigration now folks are out there looking at the arizona law and it s divided the country now i ve been very clear i think the arizona law was a mistake and my justice department is looking very carefully at the nature of this law but i understand the frustrations of folks in arizona the fact of the matter is is that for decades we keep on talking about solving the problems of the border and we don t truth of the matter is is that you ve got hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers coming over the border and that gets people stressed you ve got employers who are exploiting undocumented workers all across america actively recruiting them and often taking advantage of them when they get here so there is a whole bunch of work that has to be done but we can t solve the problem by playing politics we can t solve the problem by demagogueing the issue and so what i told my republican colleagues is look i ll be there with you in terms of securing the border that s part of my responsibility as commander in chief and as president but you ve got to meet me on solving the problem long term it s not enough to just talk about national guard down at the border you ve got to talk about how we re going to hold employers accountable and how are we going to take the folks who are living in the shadows right now and say to them you ve got a responsibility you ll have to pay a fine you ll have to pay back taxes you ll have to learn english but we are going to give you a pathway in order for you to be a part of this community legally that is something we ve got to work on together now california the last thing i said to my republican colleagues was you don t even have to meet me halfway i ll bring most democrats on these issues i m just looking for eight or 10 of you you know i mean the day has passed when i expected this to be a full partnership i mean it s just you know i understand the strategy of sitting on the sidelines and let s face it politically it hasn t been bad for them it made a lot of people forget how we got into this mess in the first place just sitting there and saying no to everything well barbara points out i ve said this before you know folks here you got folks driving a car in the ditch and then we re out there in the mud pulling the car out of the ditch and they re sitting there comfortable drinking on a slurpee or something saying you know you re not pulling the car out of the ditch fast enough you re not doing that the right way when you put your shoulder behind you got to lean into it so then we finally get the car out of the ditch and they want the keys back say no you can t have the keys you can t you don t know how to drive you can t have the keys can t have them if you want to get in we ll give you a ride but we re not going to let you drive no keys no you don t get the keys back but here s my point look and then after the meeting we got some of the usual stuff about well he talks about bipartisanship but we don t really see partisanship in the financial regulatory bill you know it just passed with mostly democratic votes few republican votes to break the filibuster look understand this about bipartisanship i have a track record in my legislative career of working with folks across the aisle and i also by the way am sympathetic to the fact that it s hard for republicans to work with me right now because there are members of their base who if somebody even smiles at me they think you re a traitor you smiled at obama you re nice to him you were polite and if you re rude to obama we can raise money so the incentive structure right now for cooperation within the republican party is not real strong so i m sympathetic to that but when we talk about bipartisanship what we mean is is that there s going to be some negotiation and no the republicans aren t going to get their way on everything and there are going to be some times where we disagree and when we disagree if we re not doing everything the way they want and they say i m going to take my ball and go home and i won t vote for anything that s not a failure of bipartisanship on our part there s got to be some give on the other side particularly when you drove the car into the ditch you know we can t just go back to business as usual so on immigration meet me a quarter of the way we ll deal with border security issues and i ll be serious about it and by the way sometimes i ll get attacked in my own base right because sometimes some of the things i ve done some of you guys aren t happy with but what i said to them today was if i m willing to make decisions that aren t always comfortable for me politically i need you to make some decisions that aren t always comfortable for you politically and if they re willing to do that we can get immigration reform done and it needs to be done comprehensive immigration reform and if they are willing to do it we can get an energy package that puts us on the path to a clean energy future so i remain hopeful remember hope i know it s been 18 tough months and i know i ve got more gray hair i know some folks say well you know he s not as cool as he was when they had all the posters around and everything now i ve got a hitler mustache on the posters that s quite a change you know my approval ratings kind of start sinking and some people are just not entirely satisfied you know what the health care bill wasn t everything i wanted it s the biggest deal since medicare but you know it wasn t everything i wanted look i understand i understand that but remember what the campaign was about hope change people weren t paying attention to me when i said change is hard people a lot of folks they just missed that part they were like hope change and they thought nice swearing in you got bruce springsteen singing everybody is feeling good this is going to happen fast well no if it was easy it would ve happened before if it was easy we would have put in place mileage standards on cars 30 years ago 40 years ago 50 years ago on trucks we didn t do it because it s hard and it s hard not just because of the special interests although they re there but it s also hard because you know what everybody gets kind of comfortable with the devil they know and change can be scary and people can be frightened and issues can be demagogued and the talking head media debate can get everybody confused and cynical and feeling like you know what nothing is changing the fact of the matter is over the last year and a half we have moved this country in powerful ways and the reason we ve been able to do it is because i ve had a partner barbara boxer of california who has fought with me and marched with me and held hands with me and if you want to see that change happen for the next 18 months and the next 18 months after that and the next 18 months after that well then doggone it reelect barbara boxer to be your united states senator thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless america dem bobama26 7 10 barack_obama thank you good evening everybody thank you so much well we have a gorgeous day to celebrate an extraordinary event in the life of this nation welcome all of you to our white house and thank you robert for the wonderful introduction it is a pleasure and honor to be with all of you on the 20th anniversary of one of the most comprehensive civil rights bills in the history of this country the americans with disabilities act i see so many champions of this law here today i wish i had time to acknowledge each and every one of you i want to thank all of you but i also want to thank our cabinet secretaries and the members of my administration here today who are working to advance the goals of the ada so that it is not just the letter of the law but the spirit of the law that s being applied all across this country i want to thank the members of congress in attendance who fought to make ada possible and to keep improving it throughout the years i want to acknowledge dick thornburgh who worked hard to make this happen as attorney general under president george h w bush and by the way i had a chance to speak to president bush before i came out here and he sends heartfelt regards to all of you and it s he s extraordinarily proud of the law that was passed he was very humble about his own role but i think it s worth acknowledging the great work that he did we also remember those we ve lost who helped make this law possible like our old friend ted kennedy and i see patrick here and justin dart jr a man folks call the father of the ada whose wife yoshiko is here yoshiko so nice to see you i also notice that elizabeth dole is here and i had a chance to speak to bob dole as well and thank him for the extraordinary role that he played in advancing this legislation let me also say that congressman jim langevin wanted to be here today but he s currently presiding over the house chamber the first time in our history somebody using a wheelchair has done so today as we commemorate what the ada accomplished we celebrate who the ada was all about it was about the young girl in washington state who just wanted to see a movie at her hometown theater but was turned away because she had cerebral palsy or the young man in indiana who showed up at a worksite able to do the work excited for the opportunity but was turned away and called a cripple because of a minor disability he had already trained himself to work with or the student in california who was eager and able to attend the college of his dreams and refused to let the iron grip of polio keep him from the classroom each of whom became integral to this cause and it was about all of you you understand these stories because you or someone you loved lived them and that sparked a movement it began when americans no longer saw their own disabilities as a barrier to their success and set out to tear down the physical and social barriers that were it grew when you realized you weren t alone it became a massive wave of bottom up change that swept across the country as you refused to accept the world as it was and when you were told no don t try you can the you responded with that age old american creed yes we can yes we can sit ins in san francisco demonstrations in denver protests in washington d c at gallaudet and before congress people marched and organized and testified and laws changed and minds changed and progress was won now that s not to say it was easy you didn t always have folks in washington to fight on your behalf and when you did they weren t as powerful as well connected as well funded as the lobbyists who lined up to kill any attempt at change and at first you might have thought what does anyone in washington know or care about my battle but what you knew from your own experience is that disability touches us all if one in six americans has a disability then odds are the rest of us love somebody with a disability i was telling a story to a group that was in the oval office before i came out here about michelle s father who had ms by the time i met him he had to use two canes just to walk he was stricken with ms when he was 30 years old but he never missed a day of work had to wake up an hour early to get dressed to get to the job but that was his attitude so what he could do it didn t miss a dance recital did not miss a ball game of his son everybody has got a story like that somewhere in their family and that s how you rallied an unlikely assortment of leaders in congress and in the white house to the cause congressmen like steny hoyer who knew his wife judy s battle with epilepsy and tony coehlo who waged his own and jim sensenbrenner whose wife cheryl is a tremendous leader and advocate for the community and they re both here today senators like tom harkin who s here today and who signed who signed part of a speech on the ada so his deaf brother frank would understand and ted kennedy whose sister had a severe intellectual disability and whose son lost a leg to cancer and bob dole who was wounded serving heroically in world war ii senior officials in the white house and even the president himself they understood this injustice from the depths of their own experience they also understood that by allowing this injustice to stand we were depriving of our nation we were depriving our nation and our economy of the full talents and contributions of tens of millions of americans with disabilities that is how the ada came to be when to his enduring credit president george h w bush signed it into law on this lawn on this day 20 years ago that s how you changed america equal access to the classroom the workplace and the transportation required to get there equal opportunity to live full and independent lives the way we choose not dependence but independence that s what the ada was all about but while it was a historic milestone in the journey to equality it wasn t the end there was and is more to do and that s why today i m announcing one of the most important updates to the ada since its original enactment in 1991 today the department of justice is publishing two new rules protecting disability based discrimination or prohibiting disability based discrimination by more than 80 000 state and local government entities and 7 million private businesses and beginning 18 months from now all new buildings must be constructed in a way that s compliant with the new 2010 standards for the design of doors and windows and elevators and bathrooms buildings like stores and restaurants and schools and stadiums and hospitals and hotels and theaters my predecessor s administration proposed these rules six years ago and in those six years they ve been improved upon with more than 4 000 comments from the public we ve heard from all sides and that s allowed us to do this in a way that makes sense economically and allows appropriate flexibility while ensuring americans with disabilities full participation in our society and for the very first time these rules will cover recreational facilities like amusement parks and marinas and gyms and golf facilities and swimming pools and municipal facilities like courtrooms and prisons from now on businesses must follow practices that allow individuals with disabilities an equal chance to purchase tickets for accessible seating at sporting events and concerts and our work goes on even as we speak attorney general eric holder is preparing new rules to ensure accessibility of websites yes we can we re also placing a new focus on hiring americans with disabilities across the federal government today only 5 percent of the federal workforce is made up of americans with disabilities far below the proportion of americans with disabilities in the general population in a few moments i ll sign an executive order that will establish the federal government as a model employer of individuals with disabilities so we re going to boost recruitment we re going to boost training we re going to boost retention we ll better train hiring managers each agency will have a senior official who s accountable for achieving the goals we ve set and i expect regular reports and we re going to post our progress online so that you can hold us accountable too and these new steps build on the progress my administration has already made to see it that no one who signs up to fight for our country is ever excluded from its promise we ve made major investments in improving the care and treatment for our wounded warriors to ensure full access to participation in our democracy and our economy we re working to make all government websites accessible to persons with disabilities we re expanding broadband internet access to americans who are deaf and hard of hearing we ve followed through with a promise i made to create three new disability offices at the state department and department of transportation and at fema and to promote equal rights across the globe the united states of america joined 140 other nations in signing the u n convention on the rights of persons with disabilities the first new human rights convention of the 21st century america was the first nation on earth to comprehensively declare equality for its citizens with disabilities we should join the rest of the world to declare it again and when i submit our ratification package to congress i expect passage to be swift and to advance the right to live independently i launched the year of community living on the 10th anniversary of the olmstead decision a decision that declared the involuntary institutional isolation of people with disabilities unlawful discrimination under the ada so hhs secretary kathleen sebelius and hud secretary shaun donovan have worked together to improve access to affordable housing and community supports and independent living arrangements for people with disabilities and we continued a program that successfully helps people with disabilities transition to the community of their choice and i m proud of the work that the department of justice is doing to enforce olmstead across the country and we ve finally broken down one discriminatory barrier that the ada left in place because for too long our health care system denied coverage to tens of millions of americans with preexisting conditions including americans with disabilities it was time to change that and we did yes we did so the affordable care act i signed into law four months ago will give every american more control over their health care and it will do more to give americans with disabilities control over their own lives than any legislation since the ada i know many of you know the frustration of fighting with an insurance company that s why this law finally shifts the balance of power from them to you and to other consumers no more denying coverage to children based on a preexisting condition or disability no more lifetime limits on coverage no more dropping your coverage when you get sick and need it the most because your insurance company found an unintentional error in your paperwork and because americans with disabilities are living longer and more independently this law will establish better long term care choices for americans with disabilities as a consequence of the class act an idea ted kennedy championed for years equal access equal opportunity the freedom to make our lives what we will these aren t principles that belong to any one group or any one political party they are common principles they are american principles no matter who we are young old rich poor black white latino asian native american gay straight disabled or not these are the principles we cherish as citizens of the united states of america they were guaranteed to us in our founding documents one of the signers of those documents was a man named stephen hopkins he was a patriot a scholar a nine time governor of rhode island it s also said he had a form of palsy and on july 4 1776 as he grasped his pen to sign his name to the declaration of independence he said my hand trembles but my heart does not my hand trembles but my heart does not life liberty the pursuit of happiness words that began our never ending journey to form a more perfect union to look out for one another to advance opportunity and prosperity for all of our people to constantly expand the meaning of life liberty the pursuit of happiness to move america forward that s what we did with the ada that is what we do today and that s what we re going to do tomorrow together so thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america let me sign this order dem bobama27 1 10 barack_obama madam speaker vice president biden members of congress distinguished guests and fellow americans our constitution declares that from time to time the president shall give to congress information about the state of our union for 220 years our leaders have fulfilled this duty they ve done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility and they ve done so in the midst of war and depression at moments of great strife and great struggle it s tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable that america was always destined to succeed but when the union was turned back at bull run and the allies first landed at omaha beach victory was very much in doubt when the market crashed on black tuesday and civil rights marchers were beaten on bloody sunday the future was anything but certain these were the times that tested the courage of our convictions and the strength of our union and despite all our divisions and disagreements our hesitations and our fears america prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation as one people again we are tested and again we must answer history s call one year ago i took office amid two wars an economy rocked by a severe recession a financial system on the verge of collapse and a government deeply in debt experts from across the political spectrum warned that if we did not act we might face a second depression so we acted immediately and aggressively and one year later the worst of the storm has passed but the devastation remains one in 10 americans still cannot find work many businesses have shuttered home values have declined small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard and for those who d already known poverty life has become that much harder this recession has also compounded the burdens that america s families have been dealing with for decades the burden of working harder and longer for less of being unable to save enough to retire or help kids with college so i know the anxieties that are out there right now they re not new these struggles are the reason i ran for president these struggles are what i ve witnessed for years in places like elkhart indiana galesburg illinois i hear about them in the letters that i read each night the toughest to read are those written by children asking why they have to move from their home asking when their mom or dad will be able to go back to work for these americans and so many others change has not come fast enough some are frustrated some are angry they don t understand why it seems like bad behavior on wall street is rewarded but hard work on main street isn t or why washington has been unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems they re tired of the partisanship and the shouting and the pettiness they know we can t afford it not now so we face big and difficult challenges and what the american people hope what they deserve is for all of us democrats and republicans to work through our differences to overcome the numbing weight of our politics for while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds different stories different beliefs the anxieties they face are the same the aspirations they hold are shared a job that pays the bills a chance to get ahead most of all the ability to give their children a better life you know what else they share they share a stubborn resilience in the face of adversity after one of the most difficult years in our history they remain busy building cars and teaching kids starting businesses and going back to school they re coaching little league and helping their neighbors one woman wrote to me and said we are strained but hopeful struggling but encouraged it s because of this spirit this great decency and great strength that i have never been more hopeful about america s future than i am tonight despite our hardships our union is strong we do not give up we do not quit we do not allow fear or division to break our spirit in this new decade it s time the american people get a government that matches their decency that embodies their strength and tonight tonight i d like to talk about how together we can deliver on that promise it begins with our economy our most urgent task upon taking office was to shore up the same banks that helped cause this crisis it was not easy to do and if there s one thing that has unified democrats and republicans and everybody in between it s that we all hated the bank bailout i hated it i hated it you hated it it was about as popular as a root canal but when i ran for president i promised i wouldn t just do what was popular i would do what was necessary and if we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system unemployment might be double what it is today more businesses would certainly have closed more homes would have surely been lost so i supported the last administration s efforts to create the financial rescue program and when we took that program over we made it more transparent and more accountable and as a result the markets are now stabilized and we ve recovered most of the money we spent on the banks most but not all to recover the rest i ve proposed a fee on the biggest banks now i know wall street isn t keen on this idea but if these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need now as we stabilized the financial system we also took steps to get our economy growing again save as many jobs as possible and help americans who had become unemployed that s why we extended or increased unemployment benefits for more than 18 million americans made health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families who get their coverage through cobra and passed 25 different tax cuts now let me repeat we cut taxes we cut taxes for 95 percent of working families we cut taxes for small businesses we cut taxes for first time homebuyers we cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children we cut taxes for 8 million americans paying for college i thought i d get some applause on that one as a result millions of americans had more to spend on gas and food and other necessities all of which helped businesses keep more workers and we haven t raised income taxes by a single dime on a single person not a single dime because of the steps we took there are about two million americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed two hundred thousand work in construction and clean energy 300 000 are teachers and other education workers tens of thousands are cops firefighters correctional officers first responders and we re on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year the plan that has made all of this possible from the tax cuts to the jobs is the recovery act that s right the recovery act also known as the stimulus bill economists on the left and the right say this bill has helped save jobs and avert disaster but you don t have to take their word for it talk to the small business in phoenix that will triple its workforce because of the recovery act talk to the window manufacturer in philadelphia who said he used to be skeptical about the recovery act until he had to add two more work shifts just because of the business it created talk to the single teacher raising two kids who was told by her principal in the last week of school that because of the recovery act she wouldn t be laid off after all there are stories like this all across america and after two years of recession the economy is growing again retirement funds have started to gain back some of their value businesses are beginning to invest again and slowly some are starting to hire again but i realize that for every success story there are other stories of men and women who wake up with the anguish of not knowing where their next paycheck will come from who send out resumes week after week and hear nothing in response that is why jobs must be our number one focus in 2010 and that s why i m calling for a new jobs bill tonight now the true engine of job creation in this country will always be america s businesses but government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire more workers we should start where most new jobs do in small businesses companies that begin when companies that begin when an entrepreneur when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream or a worker decides it s time she became her own boss through sheer grit and determination these companies have weathered the recession and they re ready to grow but when you talk to small businessowners in places like allentown pennsylvania or elyria ohio you find out that even though banks on wall street are lending again they re mostly lending to bigger companies financing remains difficult for small businessowners across the country even those that are making a profit so tonight i m proposing that we take 30 billion of the money wall street banks have repaid and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat i m also proposing a new small business tax credit one that will go to over one million small businesses who hire new workers or raise wages while we re at it let s also eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment and provide a tax incentive for all large businesses and all small businesses to invest in new plants and equipment next we can put americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow from the first railroads to the interstate highway system our nation has always been built to compete there s no reason europe or china should have the fastest trains or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products tomorrow i ll visit tampa florida where workers will soon break ground on a new high speed railroad funded by the recovery act there are projects like that all across this country that will create jobs and help move our nation s goods services and information we should put more americans to work building clean energy facilities and give rebates to americans who make their homes more energy efficient which supports clean energy jobs and to encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders it is time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the united states of america now the house has passed a jobs bill that includes some of these steps as the first order of business this year i urge the senate to do the same and i know they will they will people are out of work they re hurting they need our help and i want a jobs bill on my desk without delay but the truth is these steps won t make up for the seven million jobs that we ve lost over the last two years the only way to move to full employment is to lay a new foundation for long term economic growth and finally address the problems that america s families have confronted for years we can t afford another so called economic expansion like the one from the last decade what some call the lost decade where jobs grew more slowly than during any prior expansion where the income of the average american household declined while the cost of health care and tuition reached record highs where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial speculation from the day i took office i ve been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious such an effort would be too contentious i ve been told that our political system is too gridlocked and that we should just put things on hold for a while for those who make these claims i have one simple question how long should we wait how long should america put its future on hold you see washington has been telling us to wait for decades even as the problems have grown worse meanwhile china is not waiting to revamp its economy germany is not waiting india is not waiting these nations they re not standing still these nations aren t playing for second place they re putting more emphasis on math and science they re rebuilding their infrastructure they re making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs well i do not accept second place for the united states of america as hard as it may be as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may become it s time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth now one place to start is serious financial reform look i am not interested in punishing banks i m interested in protecting our economy a strong healthy financial market makes it possible for businesses to access credit and create new jobs it channels the savings of families into investments that raise incomes but that can only happen if we guard against the same recklessness that nearly brought down our entire economy we need to make sure consumers and middle class families have the information they need to make financial decisions we can t allow financial institutions including those that take your deposits to take risks that threaten the whole economy now the house has already passed financial reform with many of these changes and the lobbyists are trying to kill it but we cannot let them win this fight and if the bill that ends up on my desk does not meet the test of real reform i will send it back until we get it right we ve got to get it right next we need to encourage american innovation last year we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history an investment that could lead to the world s cheapest solar cells or treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched and no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy you can see the results of last year s investments in clean energy in the north carolina company that will create 1 200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries or in the california business that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels but to create more of these clean energy jobs we need more production more efficiency more incentives and that means building a new generation of safe clean nuclear power plants in this country it means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development it means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies and yes it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in america i am grateful to the house for passing such a bill last year and this year i m eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the senate i know there have been questions about whether we can afford such changes in a tough economy i know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change but here s the thing even if you doubt the evidence providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy and america must be that nation third we need to export more of our goods because the more products we make and sell to other countries the more jobs we support right here in america so tonight we set a new goal we will double our exports over the next five years an increase that will support two million jobs in america to help meet this goal we re launching a national export initiative that will help farmers and small businesses increase their exports and reform export controls consistent with national security we have to seek new markets aggressively just as our competitors are if america sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores but realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules and that s why we ll continue to shape a doha trade agreement that opens global markets and why we will strengthen our trade relations in asia and with key partners like south korea and panama and colombia fourth we need to invest in the skills and education of our people now this year we ve broken through the stalemate between left and right by launching a national competition to improve our schools and the idea here is simple instead of rewarding failure we only reward success instead of funding the status quo we only invest in reform reform that raises student achievement inspires students to excel in math and science and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young americans from rural communities to the inner city in the 21st century the best anti poverty program around is a world class education and in this country the success of our children cannot depend more on where they live than on their potential when we renew the elementary and secondary education act we will work with congress to expand these reforms to all 50 states still in this economy a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job that s why i urge the senate to follow the house and pass a bill that will revitalize our community colleges which are a career pathway to the children of so many working families to make college more affordable this bill will finally end the unwarranted taxpayer subsidies that go to banks for student loans instead let s take that money and give families a 10 000 tax credit for four years of college and increase pell grants and let s tell another one million students that when they graduate they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service because in the united states of america no one should go broke because they chose to go to college and by the way it s time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs because they too have a responsibility to help solve this problem now the price of college tuition is just one of the burdens facing the middle class that s why last year i asked vice president biden to chair a task force on middle class families that s why we re nearly doubling the child care tax credit and making it easier to save for retirement by giving access to every worker a retirement account and expanding the tax credit for those who start a nest egg that s why we re working to lift the value of a family s single largest investment their home the steps we took last year to shore up the housing market have allowed millions of americans to take out new loans and save an average of 1 500 on mortgage payments this year we will step up refinancing so that homeowners can move into more affordable mortgages and it is precisely to relieve the burden on middle class families that we still need health insurance reform yes we do now let s clear a few things up i didn t choose to tackle this issue to get some legislative victory under my belt and by now it should be fairly obvious that i didn t take on health care because it was good politics i took on health care because of the stories i ve heard from americans with preexisting conditions whose lives depend on getting coverage patients who ve been denied coverage families even those with insurance who are just one illness away from financial ruin after nearly a century of trying democratic administrations republican administrations we are closer than ever to bringing more security to the lives of so many americans the approach we ve taken would protect every american from the worst practices of the insurance industry it would give small businesses and uninsured americans a chance to choose an affordable health care plan in a competitive market it would require every insurance plan to cover preventive care and by the way i want to acknowledge our first lady michelle obama who this year is creating a national movement to tackle the epidemic of childhood obesity and make kids healthier thank you she gets embarrassed our approach would preserve the right of americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan it would reduce costs and premiums for millions of families and businesses and according to the congressional budget office the independent organization that both parties have cited as the official scorekeeper for congress our approach would bring down the deficit by as much as 1 trillion over the next two decades still this is a complex issue and the longer it was debated the more skeptical people became i take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the american people and i know that with all the lobbying and horse trading the process left most americans wondering what s in it for me but i also know this problem is not going away by the time i m finished speaking tonight more americans will have lost their health insurance millions will lose it this year our deficit will grow premiums will go up patients will be denied the care they need small business owners will continue to drop coverage altogether i will not walk away from these americans and neither should the people in this chamber so as temperatures cool i want everyone to take another look at the plan we ve proposed there s a reason why many doctors nurses and health care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo but if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums bring down the deficit cover the uninsured strengthen medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses let me know let me know let me know i m eager to see it here s what i ask congress though don t walk away from reform not now not when we are so close let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the american people let s get it done let s get it done now even as health care reform would reduce our deficit it s not enough to dig us out of a massive fiscal hole in which we find ourselves it s a challenge that makes all others that much harder to solve and one that s been subject to a lot of political posturing so let me start the discussion of government spending by setting the record straight at the beginning of the last decade the year 2000 america had a budget surplus of over 200 billion by the time i took office we had a one year deficit of over 1 trillion and projected deficits of 8 trillion over the next decade most of this was the result of not paying for two wars two tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug program on top of that the effects of the recession put a 3 trillion hole in our budget all this was before i walked in the door now just stating the facts now if we had taken office in ordinary times i would have liked nothing more than to start bringing down the deficit but we took office amid a crisis and our efforts to prevent a second depression have added another 1 trillion to our national debt that too is a fact i m absolutely convinced that was the right thing to do but families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions the federal government should do the same so tonight i m proposing specific steps to pay for the trillion dollars that it took to rescue the economy last year starting in 2011 we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years spending related to our national security medicare medicaid and social security will not be affected but all other discretionary government programs will like any cash strapped family we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don t and if i have to enforce this discipline by veto i will we will continue to go through the budget line by line page by page to eliminate programs that we can t afford and don t work we ve already identified 20 billion in savings for next year to help working families we ll extend our middle class tax cuts but at a time of record deficits we will not continue tax cuts for oil companies for investment fund managers and for those making over 250 000 a year we just can t afford it now even after paying for what we spent on my watch we ll still face the massive deficit we had when i took office more importantly the cost of medicare medicaid and social security will continue to skyrocket that s why i ve called for a bipartisan fiscal commission modeled on a proposal by republican judd gregg and democrat kent conrad this can t be one of those washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem the commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline now yesterday the senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission so i ll issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward because i refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of americans and when the vote comes tomorrow the senate should restore the pay as you go law that was a big reason for why we had record surpluses in the 1990s now i know that some in my own party will argue that we can t address the deficit or freeze government spending when so many are still hurting and i agree which is why this freeze won t take effect until next year when the economy is stronger that s how budgeting works but understand understand if we don t take meaningful steps to rein in our debt it could damage our markets increase the cost of borrowing and jeopardize our recovery all of which would have an even worse effect on our job growth and family incomes from some on the right i expect we ll hear a different argument that if we just make fewer investments in our people extend tax cuts including those for the wealthier americans eliminate more regulations maintain the status quo on health care our deficits will go away the problem is that s what we did for eight years that s what helped us into this crisis it s what helped lead to these deficits we can t do it again rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated washington for decades it s time to try something new let s invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt let s meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here let s try common sense a novel concept to do that we have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now we face a deficit of trust deep and corrosive doubts about how washington works that have been growing for years to close that credibility gap we have to take action on both ends of pennsylvania avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists to do our work openly to give our people the government they deserve that s what i came to washington to do that s why for the first time in history my administration posts on our white house visitors online that s why we ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions but we can t stop there it s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or with congress it s time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office with all due deference to separation of powers last week the supreme court reversed a century of law that i believe will open the floodgates for special interests including foreign corporations to spend without limit in our elections i don t think american elections should be bankrolled by america s most powerful interests or worse by foreign entities they should be decided by the american people and i d urge democrats and republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems i m also calling on congress to continue down the path of earmark reform democrats and republicans democrats and republicans you ve trimmed some of this spending you ve embraced some meaningful change but restoring the public trust demands more for example some members of congress post some earmark requests online tonight i m calling on congress to publish all earmark requests on a single web site before there s a vote so that the american people can see how their money is being spent of course none of these reforms will even happen if we don t also reform how we work with one another now i m not nave i never thought that the mere fact of my election would usher in peace and harmony and some post partisan era i knew that both parties have fed divisions that are deeply entrenched and on some issues there are simply philosophical differences that will always cause us to part ways these disagreements about the role of government in our lives about our national priorities and our national security they ve been taking place for over 200 years they re the very essence of our democracy but what frustrates the american people is a washington where every day is election day we can t wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side a belief that if you lose i win neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can the confirmation of i m speaking to both parties now the confirmation of well qualified public servants shouldn t be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual senators washington may think that saying anything about the other side no matter how false no matter how malicious is just part of the game but it s precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the american people worse yet it s sowing further division among our citizens further distrust in our government so no i will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics i know it s an election year and after last week it s clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual but we still need to govern to democrats i would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades and the people expect us to solve problems not run for the hills and if the republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the senate are required to do any business at all in this town a supermajority then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well just saying no to everything may be good short term politics but it s not leadership we were sent here to serve our citizens not our ambitions so let s show the american people that we can do it together this week i ll be addressing a meeting of the house republicans i d like to begin monthly meetings with both democratic and republican leadership i know you can t wait throughout our history no issue has united this country more than our security sadly some of the unity we felt after 9 11 has dissipated we can argue all we want about who s to blame for this but i m not interested in re litigating the past i know that all of us love this country all of us are committed to its defense so let s put aside the schoolyard taunts about who s tough let s reject the false choice between protecting our people and upholding our values let s leave behind the fear and division and do what it takes to defend our nation and forge a more hopeful future for america and for the world that s the work dem bobama27 10 09 barack_obama thank you guys thank you very much please have a seat thank you so much well first of all let me thank lew hay and his visionary leadership at florida power light it s an example of a company that is doing well by doing good and i think it s a model for what we could duplicate all across the country to greg bove who just gave me the tour and was a construction manager for this facility congratulations we ve got a couple of special guests here representative kathy castor from tampa a great friend arcadia mayor dr roosevelt johnson and state representative keith fitzgerald from sarasota and i want to once again thank lew for the generous introduction i want to congratulate you and all the workers who are involved in this outstanding facility for florida power light it s an honor to be here on a very big day not just for arcadia but for the cause of clean energy in america with the flip of a switch fp l will has moved the solar panels behind me into a position where they can catch the sun s rays and now for the very first time a large scale solar power plant the largest of its kind in the entire nation will deliver electricity produced by the sun to the citizens of the sunshine state and i think it s about time this plant will produce enough power to serve the entire city of arcadia its construction was a boost to your local economy creating nearly 400 jobs in this area and over the next three decades the clean energy from this plant will save 575 000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions which is the equivalent of removing more than 4 500 cars from the road each year for the life of the project think about that 45 000 cars from the road each year for the life of the project and yet to realize the full potential of this plant and others like it we ve got to do more than just add extra solar megawatts to our electrical grid that s because this grid which is made up of everything from power lines to generators to the meters in your home still runs on century old technology it wastes too much energy it costs us too much money and it s too susceptible to outages and blackouts to offer one analogy just imagine what transportation was like in this country back in the 1920s and 1930s before the interstate highway system was built it was a tangled maze of poorly maintained back roads that were rarely the fastest or the most efficient way to get from point a to point b fortunately president eisenhower made an investment that revolutionized the way we travel an investment that made our lives easier and our economy grow now it s time to make the same kind of investment in the way our energy travels to build a clean energy superhighway that can take the renewable power generated in places like desoto and deliver it directly to the american people in the most affordable and efficient way possible such an investment won t just create new pathways for energy it s expected to create tens of thousands of new jobs all across america in areas ranging from manufacturing and construction to it and the installation of new equipment in homes and in businesses it s expected to save consumers more than 20 billion over the next decade on their utility bills and i know nobody minds seeing their utility bills cut i m sorry lew but they really don t mind that it will make our grid more secure and more reliable saving us some of the 150 billion we lose each year during power outages it will allow us to more effectively transport renewable energy generated in remote places to large population centers so that a wind farm in rural south dakota can power homes in chicago and by facilitating the creation of a clean energy economy building this 21st century energy infrastructure will help us lay a foundation for lasting growth and prosperity so that s why today i m pleased to announce that under the recovery act we are making the largest ever investment in a smarter stronger and more secure electric grid this investment will come in the form of 100 grants totaling 3 4 billion grants that will go to private companies utilities cities and other partners who have applied with plans to install smart grid technologies in their area and throughout this week the members of my cabinet are going to be fanning across the country talking about some of the winning projects some of the projects involve modernizing old inefficient transmission lines that just waste too much energy and to speed that process along nine federal agencies have signed an agreement that will help break down the bureaucratic barriers that currently make it slow and costly to build new transmission lines on federal lands but most of the projects that are receiving grants involve the installation of what are known as smart meters devices that will have a direct benefit for consumers who want to save money on their electric bills for example even as florida power light is bringing this solar plant online today it also is deploying hundreds of thousands of these smart meters in people s homes throughout florida much like the recovery through retrofit plan we launched last week to boost the weatherization and retrofit industry these devices will help you greatly improve the energy efficiency in your own home now let me explain what s going on with these smart meters smart meters will allow you to actually monitor how much energy your family is using by the month by the week by the day or even by the hour so coupled with other technologies this is going to help you manage your electricity use and your budget at the same time allowing you to conserve electricity during times when prices are highest like hot summer days through these investments in a variety of smart grid technologies utilities like florida power light will also be able to monitor the performance of its electricity grid in real time which means they ll be able to identify and correct service interruptions more quickly and effectively and all this information will help increase renewable energy generation provide support for plug in electric vehicles and reduce the carbon pollution that causes climate change here in this region of florida this project will reduce demand for electricity by up to 20 percent during the hottest summer days that stress the grid and power plants it will provide smart meters to 2 6 million more customers and most importantly it will create thousands of jobs good jobs by the way that can t be outsourced jobs that will last and jobs that pay a decent wage on their own the opening of this new solar plant or the installation of new smart meters or the investment in grid modernization will not be enough to meet the challenges posed by our dependence on fossil fuels but together we can begin to see what a clean energy future will look like we can imagine the day when you ll be able to charge the battery on your plug in hybrid car at night because your smart meter reminded you that nighttime electricity is cheapest in the daytime when the sun is at its strongest solar panels like these and electricity stored in car batteries will be able to power the grid with affordable emission free energy the stronger more efficient grid would be able to transport power generated at dams and wind turbines from the smallest towns to the biggest cities and above all we can see all this work that would be created for millions of americans who need it and who want it here in florida and all across the country so we re on the cusp of this new energy future in fact a lot of it is already taking place even as i m here today vice president biden is in delaware announcing the reopening of a once shuttered gm factory that will soon put people back to work building plug in electric hybrid vehicles on friday i was in boston that s good news on friday i was in boston where workers will soon be breaking ground on a new wind technology testing center that will allow researchers in the united states to test the world s newest and largest wind turbine blades for the very first time and there are recovery projects like this in cities and counties all across the country so at this moment there is something big happening in america when it comes to creating a clean energy economy but getting there will take a few more days like this one and more projects like this one and i have often said that the creation of such an economy is going to require nothing less than the sustained effort of an entire nation an all hands on deck approach similar to the mobilization that preceded world war ii or the apollo project and i also believe that such a comprehensive piece of legislation that is taking place right now in congress is going to be critical that s going to finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in america legislation that will make the best use of resources we have in abundance through clean coal technology safe nuclear power sustainably grown biofuels and energy we harness from the wind waves and sun the house has already acted and passed such legislation and the senate is on the way in fact just today the environment and public works committee under the leadership of senator barbara boxer is holding the senate s first hearings on this bill the creation of a clean energy economy has to be made as swiftly and carefully as possible to ensure that what it takes to grow this economy in the short medium and long term is no longer delayed and i m pleased to report that a consensus is growing to achieve exactly that consensus between democrats and republicans environmentalists and evangelicals labor leaders and especially so many business leaders like lew that are ready to jump on board because they understand that the growth of clean energy can lead to the growth of our economy now i have to be honest with you though the closer we get to this new energy future the harder the opposition is going to fight the more we re going to hear from special interests and lobbyists in washington whose interests are contrary to the interests of the american people now there are those who are also going to suggest that moving towards a clean energy future is going to somehow harm the economy or lead to fewer jobs and they re going to argue that we should do nothing stand pat do less or delay action yet again i just want to point out we ve heard such arguments before we ve engaged in this same type of debate a lot of times through our history people don t like change and they get nervous about it lew and i were just talking about it he said especially utility executives get nervous about change it s a debate between looking backwards and looking forward between those who are ready to seize the future and those who are afraid of the future and we know which side the united states of america has always come down on we know that we ve always been a people who were unafraid to reach for that more promising future we know that the promise of places like desoto and projects like the creation of a modern electricity grid mean a continuation of that long march of progress in this country and we refuse to believe that our politics are too broken to make the energy future we dream of a reality i know what the american people are capable of when they re called upon to meet big challenges i know it because of i ve seen here in arcadia and i ve seen it all across america this is the nation after all that harnessed electricity and the energy contained in an atom that developed the steamboat and the modern solar cell that connected a continent with a massive system of highways and railroads and i believe we can blaze such trails again and i commend all of you for being so critical in these early first steps congratulations to you on your extraordinary achievement and when it comes to the development of clean renewable energy i hope there are going to be a lot of days like this one to come i know i m going to be working as hard as i can to make it possible and while i m here i just want to introduce carol browner who works with me in our white house and she is helping to lead the charge in washington she just happens to be from florida and so she knows a little bit about the sunshine state we are so excited by what you ve done and we are absolutely confident we re just going to keep on building on the great progress that you ve already made thank you arcadia thank you florida dem bobama27 3 09a barack_obama i am proud to be here today for the installation of my friend eric holder as the 82nd attorney general of the united states i want to recognize our deputy attorney general david ogden for his outstanding service to this department both in this tour of duty and in his last where did david go he was here just a second ago here he is come on out here that s david i d like to thank special agent earl camp for starting things off with the pledge of allegiance and for his tremendous sacrifice for this nation thanks also to members of congress who have joined us to president steven knapp for hosting us and to judge robert richter for administering the oath thank you very much i also want to welcome eric s entire family who is here today like me eric married up and we are grateful to his extraordinary wife dr sharon malone and their children brooke maya and eric for sharing him with all of us so sharon thank you thank you guys there are few more important jobs in our nation s government than that of attorney general as president i swore an oath to preserve protect and defend our constitution and as eric himself has said it is the attorney general who serves as the guardian of that revered document that is the basis of our laws and the driving force of our democracy and that s what s always distinguished this nation that we are bound together not by a shared bloodline or allegiance to any one leader or faith or creed but by an adherence to a set of ideals that s the core notion of our founding that ours is a government of laws and not men it is the motto inscribed on the library of my law school alma mater not under man but under god and law but today as we install the man charged with upholding our laws we are reminded that the work of translating law into justice of ensuring that those words put to paper more than two centuries ago mean something for all of our people that is a fundamentally human process it is what so many of you the men and women of our justice department do every single day keeping us safe from terrorist attacks bringing to justice those who would do us harm rooting out corruption and fighting violent crime protecting our markets from manipulation and our environment from pollution and upholding our most fundamental civil rights that s why i sought to appoint an attorney general who understands that justice isn t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook it s about how our laws affect the daily realities of people s lives whether they can make a living and care for their families whether they feel safe in their own homes and welcome in their own nation i sought someone who recognizes the very real threats we face but has the wisdom in those hard to call cases to find that fine balance between ensuring our security and preserving our liberty and most of all i was looking for someone who believes deeply enough in the american people s cause to serve as the american people s lawyer and taken together i think that s a pretty good description of our new attorney general it s a reflection of how he was raised and of the choices he s made throughout his life eric s father came to this country as a boy and served in the army during the second world war and even though he couldn t get served at a lunch counter in the nation he defended he never stopped believing in its promise he and eric s mother worked hard to seize that promise for their sons and give them every opportunity to succeed but eric was never content to achieve just for himself each time he rose he worked to pull others up with him mentoring young people in college working for the naacp legal defense and education fund in law school distinguishing himself as a prosecutor a judge and a leader in this department all along working tirelessly to right the balance of power so ordinary people could get a fair shake all along showing the independence of mind that justice requires never hesitating to take on members of his own party including those to whom he owed his job in fact several months ago eric even had the audacity to comment to a reporter on my basketball skills he said and i quote here s what he said he said i m not sure he s ready for my new york game we will see about that mr attorney general now i can t vouch for eric s skills on the basketball court but i can confirm that he is thoroughly prepared to take on the law enforcement challenges of this new century as a student of history he also knows history s lessons about what happens when we let politics and ideology cloud our judgment and let fear and anger rather than reason dictate our policy these are mistakes he will not repeat because in the end eric comes to this job with only one agenda to do what is right under the law it s no easy task and it is one that falls to every member of this department because our laws are only as effective only as compassionate only as fair as those who enforce them in the end our union is only as perfect as we are willing to work for it endures only to the extent that we are willing to fight for the ideals on which it is based to do our part as generations before us to breathe new life into them with the more enlightened understandings of our time that has always been the core mission of this department it is the story told by the murals that adorn the walls of your headquarters installed years ago to illustrate the power of law to improve our lives now i haven t yet seen it yet myself but i m told that one of these murals painted back in the 1930s depicts black children and white children attending school together sitting side by side in the same classroom this was years before brown vs board of education at a time when washington d c was still a segregated city it is to this day a moving reminder that sometimes law lags behind justice and it is up to us to bridge that distance that s been the work of eric holder s life and so many of yours i thank you for answering the call to serve this nation and i look forward to working with you in the months and years ahead to meet the urgent challenges of our time so thank you god bless you keep up the great work and let s install our outstanding attorney general dem bobama27 4 09a barack_obama hello everybody please have a seat have a seat except you guys you guys can t sit it is just wonderful to be here on this beautiful day congratulations to coach geno on just the incredible season that took place as a consequence of these extraordinary young women i want to just say it is a thrill this is one of my favorite things about the job i am a big fan i want to congratulate everybody who runs the uconn program from the assistants to the trainers to the students to the ticket takers and of course the uconn fans everywhere you should all be extraordinarily proud and i want to thank again coach and his wife kathy for being here congratulations also on being coach of the year although when you re winning by an average of 30 points it s not that hard of a selection to make and we are thrilled that you re going to be coaching the women s basketball team in the 2012 olympics you re going to do a great job under coach auriemma s leadership this huskies program has redefined excellence again and again six of the last 15 ncaa titles five undefeated regular seasons three undefeated championship seasons two 39 0 seasons but for this team an undefeated season just wasn t enough they became the first team in ncaa history men or women s to win every single game by double digits which is just an unbelievable unbelievable statistic i want to congratulate also maya who is here maya moore there you are raise your hand naismith award national player of the year and an equally impressive achievement maya was one of only five players chosen nationwide as first team academic all american so give it up for maya renee montgomery where s renee there you are renee holding the ball for winning the honda sports award that recognizes the top women s player in the country not just for athletics but also academics leadership and willingness to give back to her community and to all the players who make a true team it s clear these women have a competitive streak from what i understand they have trouble sometimes turning off that competitive streak i ve heard that movie pictionary gets pretty fierce among the women here but coach geno and each of these women also understands that being champion doesn t stop when you step off the court just last week these ladies were recognized by the ncaa for top academic performance as a team and over the course of 24 seasons coach auriemma s teams have a 100 percent graduation rate that is worthy of some applause they also spend time off the court in service to others geno s cancer team and i m wearing a bracelet that i just got right here i want to show it off raises money to fight cancer and these young women visit pediatric patients mentor at risk youth to show they can make something of themselves and give their time to folks in the communities who need it most all of this makes the storrs community stronger it makes the state of connecticut stronger it makes our country stronger and i know this team gets a lot out of it in return i also want to say something as a father you know it was this program in the mid 1990s as much as anything that helped propel women s basketball into the national consciousness and thanks to players like each of these women and those who came before them our young women today look at themselves differently especially tall young women like my daughters my girls look at the tv when i m watching sportscenter and they see women staring back that shows them that they can be champions too and so as a father i want to thank all of you thank you to all the ncaa female athletes who work hard day in day out to set a positive example to which our daughters can all aspire to be healthy and active to be part of a team finally i understand that coach auriemma has promised to go 40 0 next season so coach if that happens i guarantee you that you will be welcome back at the white house all right give them a big round of applause dem bobama27 4 09b barack_obama well thank you so much for the wonderful welcome to president cicerone thank you very much for your leadership and for hosting us today to john holdren thanks john for the outstanding work that you are doing i was just informed backstage that ralph and john both are 1965 graduates of mit same class and so i m not sure this is the perfectly prescribed scientific method but they re sort of a control group who ages faster the president s science advisor or the president of the academy and we ll check in in a couple of years but it is wonderful to see them to all of you to my cabinet secretaries and team who are here thank you it is a great privilege to address the distinguished members of the national academy of sciences as well as the leaders of the national academy of engineering and the institute of medicine who ve gathered here this morning and i d like to begin today with a story of a previous visitor who also addressed this august body in april of 1921 albert einstein visited the united states for the first time and his international credibility was growing as scientists around the world began to understand and accept the vast implications of his theories of special and general relativity and he attended this annual meeting and after sitting through a series of long speeches by others he reportedly said i have just got a new theory of eternity so i will do my best to heed this cautionary tale the very founding of this institution stands as a testament to the restless curiosity the boundless hope so essential not just to the scientific enterprise but to this experiment we call america a few months after a devastating defeat at fredericksburg before gettysburg would be won before richmond would fall before the fate of the union would be at all certain president abraham lincoln signed into law an act creating the national academy of sciences in the midst of civil war lincoln refused to accept that our nation s sole purpose was mere survival he created this academy founded the land grant colleges and began the work of the transcontinental railroad believing that we must add and i quote the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery of new and useful things this is america s story even in the hardest times against the toughest odds we ve never given in to pessimism we ve never surrendered our fates to chance we have endured we have worked hard we sought out new frontiers today of course we face more complex challenges than we have ever faced before a medical system that holds the promise of unlocking new cures and treatments attached to a health care system that holds the potential for bankruptcy to families and businesses a system of energy that powers our economy but simultaneously endangers our planet threats to our security that seek to exploit the very interconnectedness and openness so essential to our prosperity and challenges in a global marketplace which links the derivative trader on wall street to the homeowner on main street the office worker in america to the factory worker in china a marketplace in which we all share in opportunity but also in crisis at such a difficult moment there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science that support for research is somehow a luxury at moments defined by necessities i fundamentally disagree science is more essential for our prosperity our security our health our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before and if there was ever a day that reminded us of our shared stake in science and research it s today we are closely monitoring the emerging cases of swine flu in the united states and this is obviously a cause for concern and requires a heightened state of alert but it s not a cause for alarm the department of health and human services has declared a public health emergency as a precautionary tool to ensure that we have the resources we need at our disposal to respond quickly and effectively and i m getting regular updates on the situation from the responsible agencies and the department of health and human services as well as the centers for disease control will be offering regular updates to the american people and secretary napolitano will be offering regular updates to the american people as well so that they know what steps are being taken and what steps they may need to take but one thing is clear our capacity to deal with a public health challenge of this sort rests heavily on the work of our scientific and medical community and this is one more example of why we can t allow our nation to fall behind unfortunately that s exactly what s happened federal funding in the physical sciences as a portion of our gross domestic product has fallen by nearly half over the past quarter century time and again we ve allowed the research and experimentation tax credit which helps businesses grow and innovate to lapse our schools continue to trail other developed countries and in some cases developing countries our students are outperformed in math and science by their peers in singapore japan england the netherlands hong kong and korea among others another assessment shows american 15 year olds ranked 25th in math and 21st in science when compared to nations around the world and we have watched as scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas we know that our country is better than this a half century ago this nation made a commitment to lead the world in scientific and technological innovation to invest in education in research in engineering to set a goal of reaching space and engaging every citizen in that historic mission that was the high water mark of america s investment in research and development and since then our investments have steadily declined as a share of our national income as a result other countries are now beginning to pull ahead in the pursuit of this generation s great discoveries i believe it is not in our character the american character to follow it s our character to lead and it is time for us to lead once again so i m here today to set this goal we will devote more than 3 percent of our gdp to research and development we will not just meet but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race through policies that invest in basic and applied research create new incentives for private innovation promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine and improve education in math and science this represents the largest commitment to scientific research and innovation in american history just think what this will allow us to accomplish solar cells as cheap as paint green buildings that produce all the energy they consume learning software as effective as a personal tutor prosthetics so advanced that you could play the piano again an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge about ourselves and world the around us we can do this the pursuit of discovery half a century ago fueled our prosperity and our success as a nation in the half century that followed the commitment i am making today will fuel our success for another 50 years that s how we will ensure that our children and their children will look back on this generation s work as that which defined the progress and delivered the prosperity of the 21st century this work begins with a historic commitment to basic science and applied research from the labs of renowned universities to the proving grounds of innovative companies through the american recovery and reinvestment act and with the support of congress my administration is already providing the largest single boost to investment in basic research in american history that s already happened this is important right now as public and private colleges and universities across the country reckon with shrinking endowments and tightening budgets but this is also incredibly important for our future as vannevar bush who served as scientific advisor to president franklin roosevelt famously said basic scientific research is scientific capital the fact is an investigation into a particular physical chemical or biological process might not pay off for a year or a decade or at all and when it does the rewards are often broadly shared enjoyed by those who bore its costs but also by those who did not and that s why the private sector generally under invests in basic science and why the public sector must invest in this kind of research because while the risks may be large so are the rewards for our economy and our society no one can predict what new applications will be born of basic research new treatments in our hospitals or new sources of efficient energy new building materials new kinds of crops more resistant to heat and to drought it was basic research in the photoelectric field in the photoelectric effect that would one day lead to solar panels it was basic research in physics that would eventually produce the cat scan the calculations of today s gps satellites are based on the equations that einstein put to paper more than a century ago in addition to the investments in the recovery act the budget i ve proposed and versions have now passed both the house and the senate builds on the historic investments in research contained in the recovery plan so we double the budget of key agencies including the national science foundation a primary source of funding for academic research and the national institute of standards and technology which supports a wide range of pursuits from improving health information technology to measuring carbon pollution from from testing smart grid designs to developing advanced manufacturing processes and my budget doubles funding for the department of energy s office of science which builds and operates accelerators colliders supercomputers high energy light sources and facilities for making nano materials because we know that a nation s potential for scientific discovery is defined by the tools that it makes available to its researchers but the renewed commitment of our nation will not be driven by government investment alone it s a commitment that extends from the laboratory to the marketplace and that s why my budget makes the research and experimentation tax credit permanent this is a tax credit that returns two dollars to the economy for every dollar we spend by helping companies afford the often high costs of developing new ideas new technologies and new products yet at times we ve allowed it to lapse or only renewed it year to year i ve heard this time and again from entrepreneurs across this country by making this credit permanent we make it possible for businesses to plan the kinds of projects that create jobs and economic growth second in no area will innovation be more important than in the development of new technologies to produce use and save energy which is why my administration has made an unprecedented commitment to developing a 21st century clean energy economy and why we put a scientist in charge of the department of energy our future on this planet depends on our willingness to address the challenge posed by carbon pollution and our future as a nation depends upon our willingness to embrace this challenge as an opportunity to lead the world in pursuit of new discovery when the soviet union launched sputnik a little more than a half century ago americans were stunned the russians had beaten us to space and we had to make a choice we could accept defeat or we could accept the challenge and as always we chose to accept the challenge president eisenhower signed legislation to create nasa and to invest in science and math education from grade school to graduate school and just a few years later a month after his address to the 1961 annual meeting of the national academy of sciences president kennedy boldly declared before a joint session of congress that the united states would send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth the scientific community rallied behind this goal and set about achieving it and it would not only lead to those first steps on the moon it would lead to giant leaps in our understanding here at home that apollo program produced technologies that have improved kidney dialysis and water purification systems sensors to test for hazardous gasses energy saving building materials fire resistant fabrics used by firefighters and soldiers more broadly the enormous investment in that era in science and technology in education and research funding produced a great outpouring of curiosity and creativity the benefits of which have been incalculable there are those of you in this audience who became scientists because of that commitment we have to replicate that there will be no single sputnik moment for this generation s challenges to break our dependence on fossil fuels in many ways this makes the challenge even tougher to solve and makes it all the more important to keep our eyes fixed on the work ahead but energy is our great project this generation s great project and that s why i ve set a goal for our nation that we will reduce our carbon pollution by more than 80 percent by 2050 and that is why and that is why i m pursuing in concert with congress the policies that will help meet us help us meet this goal my recovery plan provides the incentives to double our nation s capacity to generate renewable energy over the next few years extending the production tax credit providing loan guarantees and offering grants to spur investment just take one example federally funded research and development has dropped the cost of solar panels by tenfold over the last three decades our renewed efforts will ensure that solar and other clean energy technologies will be competitive my budget includes 150 billion over 10 years to invest in sources of renewable energy as well as energy efficiency it supports efforts at nasa recommended as a priority by the national research council to develop new space based capabilities to help us better understand our changing climate and today i m also announcing that for the first time we are funding an initiative recommended by this organization called the advanced research projects agency for energy or arpa e this is based not surprisingly on darpa the defense advanced research projects agency which was created during the eisenhower administration in response to sputnik it has been charged throughout its history with conducting high risk high reward research and the precursor to the internet known as arpanet stealth technology the global positioning system all owe a debt to the work of darpa so arpa e seeks to do the same kind of high risk high reward research my administration will pursue as well comprehensive legislation to place a market based cap on carbon emissions we will make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy we will put in place the resources so that scientists can focus on this critical area and i am confident that we will find a wellspring of creativity just waiting to be tapped by researchers in this room and entrepreneurs across our country we can solve this problem now the nation that leads the world in 21st century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the 21st century global economy i believe america can and must be that nation but in order to lead in the global economy and to ensure that our businesses can grow and innovate and our families can thrive we re also going to have to address the shortcomings of our health care system the recovery act will support the long overdue step of computerizing america s medical records to reduce the duplication waste and errors that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives but it s important to note these records also hold the potential of offering patients the chance to be more active participants in the prevention and treatment of their diseases we must maintain patient control over these records and respect their privacy at the same time we have the opportunity to offer billions and billions of anonymous data points to medical researchers who may find in this information evidence that can help us better understand disease history also teaches us the greatest advances in medicine have come from scientific breakthroughs whether the discovery of antibiotics or improved public health practices vaccines for smallpox and polio and many other infectious diseases antiretroviral drugs that can return aids patients to productive lives pills that can control certain types of blood cancers so many others because of recent progress not just in biology genetics and medicine but also in physics chemistry computer science and engineering we have the potential to make enormous progress against diseases in the coming decades and that s why my administration is committed to increasing funding for the national institutes of health including 6 billion to support cancer research part of a sustained multi year plan to double cancer research in our country next we are restoring science to its rightful place on march 9th i signed an executive memorandum with a clear message under my administration the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over our progress as a nation and our values as a nation are rooted in free and open inquiry to undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy it is contrary to our way of life that s why i ve charged john holdren and the white house office of science and technology policy with leading a new effort to ensure that federal policies are based on the best and most unbiased scientific information i want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions and not the other way around as part of this effort we ve already launched a web site that allows individuals to not only make recommendations to achieve this goal but to collaborate on those recommendations it s a small step but one that s creating a more transparent participatory and democratic government we also need to engage the scientific community directly in the work of public policy and that s why today i am announcing the appointment we are filling out the president s council of advisors on science and technology known as pcast and i intend to work with them closely our co chairs have already been introduced dr varmus and dr lander along with john and this council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experiences and views and i will charge pcast with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation in addition to john sorry the i just noticed that i jumped the gun here go ahead and move it up i d already i d already introduced all you guys in biomedicine just to give you an example of what pcast can do we can harness the historic convergence between life sciences and physical sciences that s underway today undertaking public projects in the spirit of the human genome project to create data and capabilities that fuel discoveries in tens of thousands of laboratories and identifying and overcoming scientific and bureaucratic barriers to rapidly translating scientific breakthroughs into diagnostics and therapeutics that serve patients in environmental science it will require strengthening our weather forecasting our earth observation from space the management of our nation s land water and forests and the stewardship of our coastal zones and ocean fisheries we also need to work with our friends around the world science technology and innovation proceed more rapidly and more cost effectively when insights costs and risks are shared and so many of the challenges that science and technology will help us meet are global in character this is true of our dependence on oil the consequences of climate change the threat of epidemic disease and the spread of nuclear weapons and that s why my administration is ramping up participation in and our commitment to international science and technology cooperation across the many areas where it is clearly in our interest to do so in fact this week my administration is gathering the leaders of the world s major economies to begin the word of addressing our common energy challenges together fifth since we know that the progress and prosperity of future generations will depend on what we do now to educate the next generation today i m announcing a renewed commitment to education in mathematics and science this is something i care deeply about through this commitment american students will move from the middle of the top from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math over the next decade for we know that the nation that out educates us today will out compete us tomorrow and i don t intend to have us out educated we can t start soon enough we know that the quality of math and science teachers is the most influential single factor in determining whether a student will succeed or fail in these subjects yet in high school more than 20 percent of students in math and more than 60 percent of students in chemistry and physics are taught by teachers without expertise in these fields and this problem is only going to get worse there is a projected shortfall of more than 280 000 math and science teachers across the country by 2015 and that s why i m announcing today that states making strong commitments and progress in math and science education will be eligible to compete later this fall for additional funds under the secretary of education s 5 billion race to the top program and i m challenging states to dramatically improve achievement in math and science by raising standards modernizing science labs upgrading curriculum and forging partnerships to improve the use of science and technology in our classrooms i m challenging states as well to enhance teacher preparation and training and to attract new and qualified math and science teachers to better engage students and reinvigorate those subjects in our schools and in this endeavor we will work to support inventive approaches let s create systems that retain and reward effective teachers and let s create new pathways for experienced professionals to go into the classroom there are right now chemists who could teach chemistry physicists who could teach physics statisticians who could teach mathematics but we need to create a way to bring the expertise and the enthusiasm of these folks folks like you into the classroom there are states for example doing innovative work i m pleased to announce that governor ed rendell of pennsylvania will lead an effort with the national governors association to increase the number of states that are making science technology engineering and mathematics education a top priority six states are currently participating in the initiative including pennsylvania which has launched an effective program to ensure that the state has the skilled workforce in place to draw the jobs of the 21st century and i want every state all 50 states to participate but as you know our work does not end with a high school diploma for decades we led the world in educational attainment and as a consequence we led the world in economic growth the g i bill for example helps send a generation to college but in this new economy we ve come to trail other nations in graduation rates in educational achievement and in the production of scientists and engineers that s why my administration has set a goal that will greatly enhance our ability to compete for the high wage high tech jobs of the future and to foster the next generation of scientists and engineers in the next decade by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world that is a goal that we are going to set and we ve provided tax credits and grants to make a college education more affordable my budget also triples the number of national science foundation graduate research fellowships this program was created as part of the space race five decades ago in the decades since it s remained largely the same size even as the numbers of students who seek these fellowships has skyrocketed we ought to be supporting these young people who are pursuing scientific careers not putting obstacles in their path so this is how we will lead the world in new discoveries in this new century but i think all of you understand it will take far more than the work of government it will take all of us it will take all of you and so today i want to challenge you to use your love and knowledge of science to spark the same sense of wonder and excitement in a new generation america s young people will rise to the challenge if given the opportunity if called upon to join a cause larger than themselves we ve got evidence you know the average age in nasa s mission control during the apollo 17 mission was just 26 i know that young people today are just as ready to tackle the grand challenges of this century so i want to persuade you to spend time in the classroom talking and showing young people what it is that your work can mean and what it means to you i want to encourage you to participate in programs to allow students to get a degree in science fields and a teaching certificate at the same time i want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering whether it s science festivals robotics competitions fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent to be makers of things not just consumers of things i want you to know that i m going to be working alongside you i m going to participate in a public awareness and outreach campaign to encourage students to consider careers in science and mathematics and engineering because our future depends on it and the department of energy and the national science foundation will be launching a joint initiative to inspire tens of thousands of american students to pursue these very same careers particularly in clean energy it will support an educational campaign to capture the imagination of young people who can help us meet the energy challenge and will create research opportunities for undergraduates and educational opportunities for women and minorities who too often have been underrepresented in scientific and technological fields but are no less capable of inventing the solutions that will help us grow our economy and save our planet and it will support fellowships and interdisciplinary graduate programs and partnerships between academic institutions and innovative companies to prepare a generation of americans to meet this generational challenge for we must always remember that somewhere in america there s an entrepreneur seeking a loan to start a business that could transform an industry but she hasn t secured it yet there s a researcher with an idea for an experiment that might offer a new cancer treatment but he hasn t found the funding yet there s a child with an inquisitive mind staring up at the night sky and maybe she has the potential to change our world but she doesn t know it yet as you know scientific discovery takes far more than the occasional flash of brilliance as important as that can be usually it takes time and hard work and patience it takes training it requires the support of a nation but it holds a promise like no other area of human endeavor in 1968 a year defined by loss and conflict and tumult apollo 8 carried into space the first human beings ever to slip beyond earth s gravity and the ship would circle the moon 10 times before returning home but on its fourth orbit the capsule rotated and for the first time earth became visible through the windows bill anders one of the astronauts aboard apollo 8 scrambled for a camera and he took a photo that showed the earth coming up over the moon s horizon it was the first ever taken from so distant a vantage point and it soon became known as earthrise anders would say that the moment forever changed him to see our world this pale blue sphere without borders without divisions at once so tranquil and beautiful and alone we came all this way to explore the moon he said and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth yes scientific innovation offers us a chance to achieve prosperity it has offered us benefits that have improved our health and our lives improvements we take too easily for granted but it gives us something more at root science forces us to reckon with the truth as best as we can ascertain it and some truths fill us with awe others force us to question long held views science can t answer every question and indeed it seems at times the more we plumb the mysteries of the physical world the more humble we must be science cannot supplant our ethics or our values our principles or our faith but science can inform those things and help put those values these moral sentiments that faith can put those things to work to feed a child or to heal the sick to be good stewards of this earth we are reminded that with each new discovery and the new power it brings comes new responsibility that the fragility the sheer specialness of life requires us to move past our differences and to address our common problems to endure and continue humanity s strivings for a better world as president kennedy said when he addressed the national academy of sciences more than 45 years ago the challenge in short may be our salvation thank you all for all your past present and future discoveries may god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama27 4 10 barack_obama hello everybody oh it s good to be good to be back in iowa good to be in fort madison thank you everybody please have a seat i want to just acknowledge some of our special guests first of all my secretary of agriculture you may still know him as governor vilsack i know him as secretary vilsack give tom vilsack a big round of applause your current governor who is doing an outstanding job chet culver the mayor of fort madison steve ireland steve it s good to see you again the president and ceo of siemens peter loescher is here and our plant manager robert gjuraj who just gave me a terrific tour so thank you robert where s robert there he is right there i have just been on an incredibly impressive tour of this facility and saw how these giant blades are created and they look even cooler up close unbelievably impressive technologies and it was remarkable just to see how these things are made but it s even more remarkable when you consider that just a few short years ago this facility was dark it was quiet nothing was going on and today it s alive and humming with more than 600 employees almost two thirds of whom found themselves unemployed before they were here this plant robert was telling me i may get my facts wrong here but even two years ago you had only 200 employees now we ve got 600 employees two years later and this plant supports more than 350 other jobs throughout lee county so you re manufacturing blades for some of the most advanced wind turbines in the world each one as tall as air force one is long each is capable of generating enough power for hundreds of homes just by harnessing the wind so what s going on here what each of the employees of siemens are involved with is helping stake america s claim on a clean energy future and you re staking fort madison s claim on america s future and that s why i come to iowa here today some of the one of the reporters said why iowa i said well i love iowa first of all wouldn t have been president if it wasn t for iowa it s close to illinois but also i wanted to come here because to talk with folks like you about the economic hardship and the pain that this town has gone through and so many people are still feeling is important but it s also to talk about the economic potential lately we ve been able to report some welcome news after a hard two years our economy is finally growing again our markets are climbing our businesses are beginning to create jobs again now in too many places though the recovery isn t reaching everybody just yet times are still tough in towns like fort madison and times are still tough for middle class americans who have been swimming against the current for years before this economic tidal wave hit so even as we took steps to rescue our economy and recover from this crisis we also wanted to take steps to rebuild our economy on a new foundation a firmer foundation for long term growth and prosperity to create conditions so that folks who work hard can finally get ahead and that means making our schools more competitive it means making our colleges more affordable yes it means making health insurance affordable and giving families and businesses more choice and more competition and more protection from the worst abuses of the insurance industry and it means common sense reforms that prevent irresponsibility of a few on wall street from threatening the dreams of millions on main street but the reason we re here is because it also means igniting a new clean energy economy that generates good jobs right here in the united states now we ve talked about this for decades we talked about how our dependence on fossil fuels threatened our economy but after all the talk a lot of times our will to act rose and fell depending on what the price of a gallon of gas was at the pump during the summer when prices went up everybody was all for clean energy and when prices went back down suddenly everybody forgot about it so we ve talked about this problem for a long time how it threatened future generations we talked about issues of how the climate is changing we talked about how it threatened our national security because we re dependent on other countries for what makes our country run dependence that grew deeper with every passing year and meanwhile while we talked other nations acted from spain to china other nations recognized that the country that leads the clean energy economy will be the country that leads the 21st century global economy they were making serious investments to win that race and the jobs that come with it and some of you may have heard me say this before i don t accept second place for the united states of america and that s why our energy security has been a top priority for my administration since the day i took office we began early last year by making the largest investment in clean energy in our nation s history it s an investment expected to create or save more than 700 000 jobs across america by the end of 2012 jobs manufacturing next generation batteries for next generation vehicles jobs upgrading to a smarter stronger power grid jobs doubling america s capacity to generate renewable electricity from sources like the sun and the wind just like you do here and that investment was all part of the recovery act this facility took advantage of that act s advanced energy manufacturing tax credit and we were just talking robert and i were talking about the fact that part of what s allowed us to have these new platforms and these new molds is this tax credit it allowed you to add equipment and boost output and hire new workers right here in fort madison so in the midst of the economic turmoil the recovery act helped make it possible for america to install nearly 10 gigawatts of new wind generating capacity last year alone and that s enough to power more than 2 4 million american homes so when people ask you what was the recovery act about what was the stimulus about it was about this this plant and each new wind farm has the potential to create hundreds of construction jobs and dozens of permanent local jobs in communities just like fort madison robert we were talking about the fact that who s catering the food here at the factory that s suddenly a whole bunch of business for the local grocers the folks who are installing the electricity here additional work so there s a ripple effect that occurs and one study suggests that if we pursue our full potential for wind energy and everything else goes right wind could generate as much as 20 percent of america s electricity 20 years from now that s right 20 percent and secretary vilsack was telling me that iowa is at the cutting edge iowa has already hit that mark hasn t it because of governor culver and his predecessor tom vilsack it may be a reality right here in iowa this state already generates a higher percentage of its electricity from wind than any other state and that number is only growing that number is only growing and as extraordinary as this facility is here s the thing wind power isn t a silver bullet it s not going to solve all our energy challenges there s no single energy source the key is to understand that this is a key component a key part of a comprehensive strategy to move us from an economy that just runs on fossil fuels to one that relies on more homegrown fuels and clean energy i believe that we can come together around this issue and pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation that will ignite new industries spark new jobs in towns just like fort madison make america more energy independent our security our economy the future of our planet all depend on it this is what s possible in a clean energy economy and while it may not feel like it every day when you punch in to all the folks who work here at siemens i want you to understand you re making it possible you are blazing a trail you re showing america our future and some day our children and our children s children will look back at this factory this moment and they will be proud at a generation that chose in a time of crisis to place its bet on the future and to reopen factories and restart assembly lines and retrain workers a generation that chose once again to step forward and meet the challenges of our time that s what this represents that s what you represent and we could not be prouder so thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama27 5 09a barack_obama thank you so much everybody please have a seat thank you so much i ve got some special acknowledgments that i have to make first of all we ve got some members of the congressional delegation nevada who are doing outstanding jobs not only for nevada but also for the men and women in uniform so please give a warm welcome to congresswoman shelley berkley congresswoman dina titus and we re in his district he couldn t be here but congressman dean heller please give him a big round of applause i also want to thank the state controller kim wallin for her great work the nevada secretary of state ross miller nevada state treasurer kate marshall i want to thank the brigadier general stanley kresge for the wonderful outstanding work that he does as well as colonel dave belote who just gave me an outstanding tour of the solar panel facility out here but mainly i want to thank all of you the men and women in uniform for your service to our country we re grateful to you thank you i just spoke to a handful of your commanders here i know some are about to be deployed to iraq and afghanistan many have just come back the fact that you serve each and every day to keep us safe is something that every american is grateful for and so if i don t do anything else as your commander in chief i m going to make sure that we re there for you just as you ve been there for us so thank you very much finally let me acknowledge senator reid not just for the generous introduction not only because he s been a great friend not only because he s been an outstanding majority leader but also because of everything that he s done for the people of nevada and for the armed services he is somebody who has never forgotten his roots after all these years he still brings the voices and values of searchlight nevada to the nation s most important debates in washington d c and we are better off because he does so please give harry reid a big round of applause you know it s always a pleasure to get out of washington a little bit washington is okay but it s nice taking some time to talk to americans of every walk of life outside of the nation s capital and there s nothing like a quick trip to vegas in the middle of the week like millions of other americans we come to this beautiful city for the sights and for the sounds and today we come for the sun because right now we re standing near the largest solar electric plant of its kind in the entire western hemisphere the entire western hemisphere more than 72 000 solar panels built on part of an old landfill provide 25 percent of the electricity for the 12 000 people who live and work here at nellis that s the equivalent of powering about 13 200 homes during the day it s a project that took about half a year to complete created 200 jobs and will save the united states air force which is the largest consumer of energy in the federal government nearly 1 million 1 million a year it will also reduce harmful carbon pollution by 24 000 tons per year which is the equivalent of removing 4 000 cars from our roads most importantly this base serves as a shining example of what s possible when we harness the power of clean renewable energy to build a new firmer foundation for economic growth now that s the kind of foundation we re trying to build all across america one hundred days ago in the midst of the worst economic crisis in half a century we passed the most sweeping economic recovery act in history a plan designed to save jobs create new ones and put money in people s pockets it s a plan designed not only to revive the economy in the short term but to rebuild the economy over the long term it s a plan that we passed thanks to the tireless efforts of harry reid and congresswoman berkley and congresswoman titus and all the other outstanding public servants in washington but if it hadn t been for harry reid because the senate is tough moving this recovery act through congress with the skill and tenacity and urgency of somebody who knows the struggles that millions of people are going through we would have not gotten it done so i am eternally grateful to him and the other members of the congressional delegation for helping to pass this plan and 100 days later we re already seeing results and today we re releasing a report that details the progress that we ve made in every region of the country in these last few months the american recovery and reinvestment act has saved or created nearly 150 000 jobs jobs building solar panels and wind turbines making homes and buildings more energy efficient they re the jobs of teachers and police officers and nurses who have not been laid off as a consequence of this recovery act they re the jobs fixing roads and bridges jobs at start ups and small businesses and jobs that will put thousands of young americans to work this summer also in the recovery act by the way is all sorts of construction taking place on bases just like nellis to support military families and i know that that is something that michelle obama has taken a lot of time looking into that s something that i m spending a lot of time thinking about we want to make sure that our bases and our facilities are the best in the world for our best troops ninety five percent of all working families saw their take home pay increase because of the tax cut that we provided in the recovery act fifty four million seniors received 250 extra in their social security checks laid off workers have received greater unemployment benefits and paid less for their health care for the thousands of families whose homes have been made more energy efficient it s also saved them about 350 on their energy bills other americans saved thousands by taking advantage of the tax credits the recovery act has provided for the purchase of a new home or a new fuel efficient car or energy efficient cooling and heating systems windows and insulation and all of this has helped to fuel demand that is helping businesses put more americans back to work but this is just the beginning there are still too many americans out of work and too many who still worry that their job may be next there are still too many families struggling to pay the bills and too many businesses struggling to keep their doors open and that s why we will continue to implement the recovery act as quickly and effectively as possible over the next two years we re just at the start of this recovery act we are going to keep on going through this year and into next year because we are going to make sure that not only are we putting people back to work but we re laying the foundation for a better economy and that s why my administration will continue an unrelenting day by day effort to fight for economic recovery on all fronts now i just want to emphasize even as we clear away some of the wreckage and debris of this extraordinary recession i ve also said that our next task is making sure that this doesn t happen again we can t return to the same bubble and bust economy borrow and spend economy based on maxed out credit cards and overleveraged banks and financial profits that were only real on paper see that young lady agrees with me we have to lay a new foundation for prosperity a foundation constructed on the pillars that will grow our economy and help america compete in the 21st century and a renewable energy revolution is one of those pillars we know the cost of our oil addiction all too well it s the cost measured by the billions of dollars we send to nations with unstable or unfriendly regimes we help to fund both sides of the war on terror because of our addiction to oil it s the cost of our vulnerability to the volatility of the oil markets it s the cost we feel in shifting weather patterns that are already causing unprecedented droughts and more intense storms it s a cost we can t bear any longer today projects like the one at nellis are still the exception to the rule unfortunately america produces less than 3 percent of our electricity through renewable sources of energy like wind and solar less than 3 percent in contrast denmark produces 20 percent of their electricity through wind we pioneered solar technology but we ve fallen behind countries like germany and japan in generating it even though they get less sun than we do they certainly get less sun than nevada so we ve got a choice we can remain the world s leading importer of oil sending our money and our wealth away or we can become the world s leading exporter of clean energy we can hand over the jobs of the future to our competitors or we can confront what they ve already recognized as the great opportunity of our time the nation that leads the world in creating new sources of clean energy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy and that s the nation i want america to be and i know that s the nation you want america to be already we ve made more progress on this front in the last four months than we have in the last three decades last week i brought auto executives labor unions environmental groups democrats and republicans together to set the toughest ever national fuel efficiency standard for our cars and trucks a standard that will save 1 8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years in congress leaders like harry reid are also working to pass a historic energy plan that will help end our dependence on foreign oil while preventing the worst consequences of climate change it s a system it s a plan that will create a system of clean energy incentives that will create good american jobs and crack down on polluters who pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink finally by the end of the next two years the recovery act will have enabled a doubling of our nation s capacity to generate renewable energy by investing in projects just like the one on this air force base and today i m announcing the availability of funding for two recovery act programs that will help us reach that goal the first is a solar energy technologies program that will help replicate the success of the nellis project in cities and states across america because in this case what happens in vegas should not stay in vegas we want everybody to know what we re doing here in vegas we ll invest in the development and deployment of solar technology wherever it can thrive and we ll find the best ways to integrate solar power into our electric grid the second program i m announcing will help develop the use of geothermal energy in america as many of you in nevada know geothermal energy is literally defined as heat from the earth this heat can then be harnessed as a clean affordable and reliable source of energy and already nevada has 17 industrial scale geothermal plants and your capacity to generate this type of power is expected to increase in the next few years the program we re announcing will help accelerate this process here and across america so this is something that we expect will this will create more jobs it will create more businesses and more affordable electricity for the american people now from where we stand today the road to economic recovery is still long we ve got a lot of work to do there are a lot of folks who are still hurting out there and the road to a new clean energy economy is even longer we re not going to do it overnight but after four months of this administration and 100 days of this recovery act we have carved out a path toward progress it s a path that begins in places just like this air force base where ordinary citizens tap into their sense of innovation and ingenuity to reinvent the world around them this base has been known as the home of the fighter pilot now it s the home of the largest solar energy installation of its kind in the western hemisphere and by the way the two concepts are connected because it is good for our national security if we ve got more control over our own energy use and that s the story that will be told all across america in cities and towns where a shuttered factory reopens to build wind turbines where a hospital treats patients with new technology and pulls up their history with new electronic records where a young entrepreneur with a nest egg and a good idea starts a business and creates more jobs that s how we move america forward this is how we ve always moved forward it happens slowly in fits and starts but it always happens surely when we are dedicated to bringing about change it happens not by chance or by luck but because the american people keep pushing ahead persevering through hardship growing through challenge building something firmer and stronger in place of what was that s the work we ve begun in these last few months and with your help this is the work we will continue to do in the days and months ahead for all of you who are serving in our armed forces we want to make sure that our civilians are mobilizing and working on behalf of this country just as ably as you are we salute you we thank you thank you everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama27 5 09b barack_obama thank you so much it is good to be back in vegas i was telling people i am back in caesars that was the hotel where we stayed at when we were campaigning here in nevada i thought i had a pretty nice room but now that i m president they upgraded me i got the upgrade and it s a really nice room now man it is good to see all of you how about bette midler right sheryl crow rachael yamagata rita rudner and clint holmes give it up for our outstanding performers i want to thank all of the hardworking elected officials in nevada many of whom are here tonight but there are a handful that i ve got to give a special shout out to first of all congresswoman shelley berkley our new congresswoman dina titus a great friend of mine our of my earliest supporters co chair for obama nevadans for obama steven horsford and although she s not here tonight she s doing a great job on behalf of everybody here in vegas the nevada assembly speaker barbara buckley please give her a big round of applause it is a pleasure to be here tonight on behalf of my good friend your senator this nation s senate majority leader harry reid the last few years harry has done an extraordinary job as the leader of the u s senate and that s not easy by the way one of the last majority leaders wrote a book titled it herding cats and that s what dealing with the senate is all about it is not easy but harry is somebody who has consistently fought on those issues that matter not just to democrats but to middle class families all across america good jobs affordable health care clean energy world class schools this is a man who still makes his decisions and chooses battles based on the values that he was raised with in searchlight nevada are you from searchlight we got some searchlight folks here and that s why we need to keep harry reid exactly where he belongs as the leader of the u s senate as somebody who carries the voices and the values of searchlight and nevada all the small towns across america that have been forgotten for so long he gives voice to forgotten people in washington d c now being back here with all of you in nevada tonight reminds me of why i like getting out of washington every so often because it brings back a lot of memories of all those days that i spent here on the campaign trail and i want to start tonight by saying thank you because i know that i m here because of so many people like you people all across the country who made calls and knocked on doors and registered voters and dug deep and gave what they could because you were hungry for new leadership and new ideas and a new kind of politics and working with harry reid that s what i m delivering right now you believed that after an era of selfishness and greed we can reclaim a sense of responsibility from main street to wall street to washington you believed that instead of huge inequalities we can restore a sense of fairness to our economy building a new foundation for lasting growth and prosperity you believed that in a time of war and turmoil we can stand strong against our enemies and stand firmly for our ideals and show a new face of american leadership to the world that s the change you believed in that s the trust you placed in me and that s something i ll never forget but we all know that winning the election was just the beginning of our work that victory alone wasn t the change that we sought it was just the opportunity to make change and i don t know about you but i think it s fair to say that over these past four months we ve done a pretty good job of seizing that opportunity to jumpstart job creation get our economy moving again we helped with we passed with the help of harry reid and both houses of congress the most ambitious economic recovery package in our nation s history gave tax cuts to 95 percent of working families put people back to work modernizing our health care system rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges investing in renewable energy that will help boost our economy and preserve our planet we launched plans to stabilize our housing market unfreeze our credit markets and ensure the survival of our auto industry in this new century we passed a budget that will cut our deficit in half while making investments to spur long term growth we lifted the ban on federal funding for stem cell research we expanded the children s health insurance program to cover 11 million children in need we passed a national service bill to create hundreds of thousands of opportunities for people to serve in their communities we passed the lilly ledbetter fair pay act the first bill i signed into law because we should have equal pay for equal work and just last week we passed a series of reforms that won t just change policies in washington they ll change the way business is done in washington last tuesday we brought auto executives labor unions environmental groups democrats and republicans together to set a national fuel efficiency standard for our cars and trucks for the first time in history weaning ourselves off of middle eastern oil but also saving our planet in the process on wednesday i signed bipartisan legislation to help homeowners and crack down on predatory lenders who seek to take advantage of them on friday i signed two laws one that will protect consumers from unfair rate hikes and abusive fees levied by credit card companies another that will eliminate waste in our defense budget and save taxpayers billions of dollars and today i nominated a brilliant individual to serve on the united states supreme court judge sonia sotomayor let me just tell you a little bit about this woman this is a woman who will bring more experience on the bench than anyone currently serving on the supreme court had when they were appointed she graduated the top of her class at princeton editor of the law journal at yale prosecutor in the manhattan da s office corporate litigator six years as a trial judge on the u s district court her 11th year on the u s court of appeals the second highest court in the land nobody can say she s not qualified to be on the supreme court but as impressive and meaningful as judge sotomayor s sterling credentials in the law are her extraordinary life journey is even more exceptional born in the south bronx raised in a hey south bronx we got everybody here we got searchlight we got south bronx all right i m not going to shout out everybody s where was i i m talking about the next supreme court justice born in the south bronx raised in a housing project by parents who came to new york from puerto rico during the second world war father was a factory worker with a third grade education didn t speak english when sonia was just nine her father passed away her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for sonia and her brother buying the only encyclopedias in the neighborhood sending their children to catholic school out of a belief that with a good education here in america all things are possible sonia sotomayor s life is proof that all things are possible and when she ascends those marble steps to assume her seat on the highest court of the land america will take another important step towards realizing the ideal that s chiseled above its entrance equal justice under the law so i m inspired by her i m honored to nominate her and i know that harry reid and others in the senate will make sure that she is confirmed as our next supreme court justice and i know that because harry has just as improbable a story and so do i and that s what politics should be about remembering remembering that for a whole lot of folks life isn t easy they re not born into advantage but what sets america apart is the fact that we can make of our lives what we will yes we can and that s what we re doing that s what we re doing in washington every day figuring out how can we give a helping hand to ordinary americans like sonia sotomayor s mother like a young harry reid who needs a scholarship maybe like a barack obama who might need that inspiring teacher in a school and all in all we re making progress on the important issues of the day the issues that are going to matter not just for this generation but for the next generation i m pleased with how far we ve come but i m not satisfied i m confident in the future but i m not content not when there are workers out there still out of a job and families who still can t pay their bills not when there are too many americans who can t afford health care and so many of our kids being left behind not when we re not leading the world in developing the new energy sources of the 21st century we have come a long way we can see the light on the horizon but we ve got a much longer journey ahead and that s why all of you are here tonight that s why you re digging deep that s why i know you re going to make those phone calls and knock on those doors and get to the polls again next november so that we make sure that harry reid continues his devoted service to this great state and that s why i m here tonight because i can t bring the change i promised all by myself i can t rebuild an economy by myself i can t reform our health care system and education systems and preserve our environment and keep our nation safe all alone that s not how it works i need partners in congress leaders who are determined to make a difference for the folks they represent and right now more than ever before we need their help america needs their help we need their help to build schools that meet high standards and close the achievement gap and prepare our kids for the challenges of the 21st century reward teachers for performance and give them new pathways for advancement we need their help to reach the goal i ve set for our education in this country that by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world we need their help to pass a comprehensive energy and climate bill that will finally reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil offer new energy incentives to reduce the pollution that threatens our health and our climate we need a plan that will create millions of new jobs producing wind turbines and solar panels like you re doing right here in nevada because the nation that leads the 21st century in clean energy that nation will lead in the global economy america can and must be that nation we need help to create a 21st century health care system to cut costs for families and businesses across america and working with harry reid and other members of congress we are going to do everything we can to achieve comprehensive health care reform by the end of this year we ve been waiting too long we re going to make it happen this year and finally even as we do all this we need to restore fiscal discipline in washington so we don t leave our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt already my administration has identified more than 100 government programs that we can reduce or eliminate they re not working the way they should that will save taxpayers nearly 17 billion next year alone we re going through the budget line by line looking for more places where we can shift dollars from things that don t work to things that do we re living through extraordinary times we didn t ask for the challenges that we face but we are determined to answer the call to meet those challenges to cast aside the old arguments and overcome the stubborn divisions and move forward as one people and one nation it won t be easy nevada there will be setbacks las vegas it will take time but i promise you i promise you i ll always tell you the truth about the challenges we face i ll always tell you the truth about the steps we re taking to meet them i will continue to measure my progress by the progress that the american people see in their own lives and so if you stand with me if you stand with harry reid i know that years from now we will look back on this time at this moment and say that s when the american people came together to reclaim their future to write the next great chapter of the american story we can only do it with harry reid and i can only do it with you the people of las vegas the people of nevada the people of america thank you god bless you may god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama27 5 10 barack_obama hello everybody please have a seat welcome to the white house welcome to the rose garden you know when i woke up this morning and i saw a few hundred students camping out on my lawn i remembered that today is duke day congratulations to the 2010 men s ncaa basketball national champions the bluke the duke blue devils give them a big round of applause we ve got some big duke fans here today my outstanding secretary of veterans affairs ric shinseki is here he got a graduate degree from duke and both he and coach k are proud graduates of west point they missed each other by one year we ve got some members of the north carolina congressional delegation who are here we ve also got some proud duke alumni serving in congress representative shelly moore capito is a alum representative david price has been a professor at duke since 1973 and under secretary of energy dr kristina johnson is here and she was the dean of the pratt school of engineering at duke for eight years so you can give them all a big round of applause the archivist of the united states david ferriero is here and he once ran the duke library system today he takes care of the constitution and the declaration of independence north carolina attorney general roy cooper and durham mayor bill bell are here as well give them a big round of applause now i know that all of you remember last year when i filled out my bracket i picked north carolina to win it all it wasn t anything personal just trying to win some money i was right coach k wasn t too happy he basically told me to stick it or stick to my day job is what he said and then this year he went out with all these guys and he won so he could come to the white house and crow about it payback is sweet isn t it coach congratulations on your fourth national championship at duke obviously it s not a smart thing to bet against coach k this is a guy who has 868 wins 12 acc championships 11 final fours four ncaa championships a couple of olympic gold medals for men s basketball including in 2008 when he brought the gold back to where it belongs the usa and congratulations to coach k s lovely wife mickie mrs k who s been with him for all of it so we are very grateful to them now some of you may know that my assistant reggie love used to play for coach k at duke reggie played on the 2001 national championship team and he was a team captain in 2005 in fact reggie was so excited to see his old coach today that i had to make him come out and run some sprint drills just to calm him down and then coach and i were both discussing i play with reggie now and when reggie was playing coach said don t shoot and when he s on my team i say to reggie don t shoot so things haven t changed that much go down in the post rebound i also want to congratulate the assistant coaches chris collins nate james and steve wojciechowski i ll just call him wojo like everybody else all of whom were once captains on coach k s teams as well and congratulations to all the players especially the seniors jordan davidson jon scheyer my homeboy from the chicago area lance thomas and brian zoubek it s really been a four year journey for these guys and each year they ve gotten better together when they were freshmen they lost in the first round of the tournament as sophomores they made it to the second round as juniors they made it to the sweet 16 and this year they won it all that s the kind of progress that you want to see in your college career jon scheyer kyle singler and nolan smith were the top scoring trio in the ncaa this year and i should also mention that when i was running for president we did a campaign event in medford oregon in the gym where singler grew up so i was the second most famous person to ever show up in medford it s true i understand that zoubek is unique in duke history the only player that coach k ever allowed to grow a beard talk about somebody who s overcome a lot who powered through setbacks and injuries to set a new duke record for most offensive rebounds in a single season this year including some critical boards in the title game and it was as everybody here knows an incredible tournament from start to finish one of the most exciting tournaments any of us have ever seen the championship game against butler the most watched championship game in more than 10 years was everything fans hoped it would be it came down to the final possession and these guys hung in there and won it all i know that coach k has said that this is as close a team as he s ever had a bunch of throwback guys who hustle and work and have fun together and they play by his one of his philosophies which is think of a hand if you attach if you attack with your hand open as five fingers individually you re more likely to break a finger but if you bring them together and make a fist you can pound really somebody it s very subtle coach k now there is a softer side of these guys too coach k is an integral part of the durham community in so many ways whether it s helping change the odds for underprivileged kids through the emily k center he founded and named after his mom or just buying pizza for the cameron crazies who camp outside for days at a time his players participate in the read with the blue devils program and visit patients at the children s hospital in durham giving as much as they can to the duke community that gives so much to them and seeing as how coach is a proud graduate of west point and a former army basketball player under bobby knight they re going to the pentagon after this to thank some of the folks who bravely and selflessly serve our country day in and day out so congratulations coach k congratulations to the team and good luck next year i suspect that you re going to try to bust my bracket once again but i may not make the same mistake twice oh look at this that s nice you know reggie is going to make me hang this in the oval office take down lincoln or something dem bobama27 7 04 barack_obama thank you so much thank you thank you thank you so much thank you so much thank you dick durbin you make us all proud on behalf of the great state of illinois crossroads of a nation land of lincoln let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention tonight is a particular honor for me because let s face it my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely my father was a foreign student born and raised in a small village in kenya he grew up herding goats went to school in a tin roof shack his father my grandfather was a cook a domestic servant to the british but my grandfather had larger dreams for his son through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place america that s shown as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him while studying here my father met my mother she was born in a town on the other side of the world in kansas her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the depression the day after pearl harbor my grandfather signed up for duty joined patton s army marched across europe back home my grandmother raised a baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line after the war they studied on the gi bill bought a house through fha and later moved west all the way to hawaii in search of opportunity and they too had big dreams for their daughter a common dream born of two continents my parents shared not only an improbable love they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation they would give me an african name barack or blessed believing that in a tolerant america your name is no barrier to success they imagined me going to the best schools in the land even though they weren t rich because in a generous america you don t have to be rich to achieve your potential they re both passed away now and yet i know that on this night they look down on me with great pride and i stand here today grateful for the diversity of my heritage aware that my parents dreams live on in my two precious daughters i stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger american story that i owe a debt to all of those who came before me and that in no other country on earth is my story even possible tonight we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation not because of the height of our skyscrapers or the power of our military or the size of our economy our pride is based on a very simple premise summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that is the true genius of america a faith a faith in simple dreams an insistence on small miracles that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm that we can say what we think write what we think without hearing a sudden knock on the door that we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution and that our votes will be counted or at least most of the time this year in this election we are called to reaffirm our values and our commitments to hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up to the legacy of our forbearers and the promise of future generations and fellow americans democrats republicans independents i say to you tonight we have more work to do for the workers i met in galesburg illinois who are losing their union jobs at the maytag plant that s moving to mexico and now they re having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay 7 bucks an hour more to do for the father i met who was losing his job and chocking back the tears wondering how he would pay 4 500 a months for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits that he counted on more to do for the young woman in east st louis and thousands more like her who have the grades have the drive have the will but doesn t have the money to go to college now don t get me wrong the people i meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks they don t expect government to solves all of their problems they know they have to work hard to get a head and they want to go into the collar counties around chicago and people will tell you they don t want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or by the pentagon go into any inner city neighborhood and folks will tell you that government alone can t teach kids to learn they know that parents have to teach that children can t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white they know those things people don t expect people don t expect government to solve all their problems but they sense deep in their bones that with just a slight change in priorities we can make sure that every child in america has a decent shot at life and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all they know we can do better and they want that choice in this election we offer that choice our party has chosen a man to lead us who embodies the best this country has to offer and that man is john kerry john kerry understands the ideals of community faith and service because they ve defined his life from his heroic service to vietnam to his years as prosecutor and lieutenant governor through two decades in the united states senate he has devoted himself to this country again and again we ve seen him make tough choices when easier ones were available his values and his record affirm what is best in us john kerry believes in an america where hard work is rewarded so instead of offering tax breaks to companies shipping jobs overseas he offers them to companies creating jobs here at home john kerry believes in an america where all americans can afford the same health coverage our politicians in washington have for themselves john kerry believes in energy independence so we aren t held hostage to the profits of oil companies or the sabotage of foreign oil fields john kerry believes in the constitutional freedoms that have made our country the envy of the world and he will never sacrifice our basic liberties nor use faith as a wedge to divide us and john kerry believes that in a dangerous world war must be an option sometimes but it should never be the first option you know a while back i met a young man named seamus in a vfw hall in east moline illinois he was a good looking kid 6 2 6 3 clear eyed with an easy smile he told me he d joined the marines and was heading to iraq the following week and as i listened to him explain why he had enlisted the absolute faith he had in our country and its leaders his devotion to duty and service i thought this young man was all that any of us might ever hope for in a child but then i asked myself are we serving seamus as well as he s serving us i thought of the 900 men and women sons and daughters husbands and wives friends and neighbors who won t be returning to their own hometowns i thought of the families i had met who were struggling to get by without a loved one s full income or whose loved ones had returned with a limb missing or nerves shattered but still lacked long term health benefits because they were reservists when we send our young men and women into harm s way we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they are going to care for their families while they re gone to tend to the soldiers upon their return and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war secure the peace and earn the respect of the world now let me be clear let me be clear we have real enemies in the world these enemies must be found they must be pursued and they must be defeated john kerry knows this and just as lieutenant kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in vietnam president kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep america safe and secure john kerry believes in america and he knows that it s not enough for just some of us to prosper for alongside our famous individualism there s another ingredient in the american saga a belief that we are all connected as one people if there s a child on the south side of chicago who can t read that matters to me even if it s not my child if there s a senior citizen somewhere who can t pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent that makes my life poorer even if it s not my grandparent if there s an arab american family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process that threatens my civil liberties it is that fundamental belief it is that fundamental belief i am my brother s keeper i am my sisters keeper that makes this country work it s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams yet still come together as a single american family e pluribus unum out of many one now even as we speak there are those who are preparing to divide us the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes well i say to them tonight there s not a liberal america and a conservative america there s the united states of america there s not a black america and white america and latino america and asian america there s the united states of america the pundits the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states red states for republicans blue states for democrats but i ve got news for them too we worship an awesome god in the blue states and we don t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states we coach little league in the blue states and yes we ve got some gay friends in the red states there are patriots who opposed the war in iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in iraq we are one people all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes all of us defending the united states of america in the end that s what this election is about do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope john kerry calls on us to hope john edwards calls on us to hope i m not talking about blind optimism here the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don t think about it or health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it that s not what i m talking i m talking about something more substantial it s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the mekong delta the hope of a millworker s son who dares to defy the odds the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that america has a place for him too hope in the face of difficulty hope in the face of uncertainty the audacity of hope in the end that is god s greatest gift to us the bedrock of this nation a belief in things not seen a belief that there are better days ahead i believe that we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity i believe we can provide jobs for the jobless homes to the homeless and reclaim young people in cities across america from violence and despair i believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs and that as we stand on the crossroads of history we can make the right choices and meet the challenges that face us america tonight if you feel the same energy that i do if you feel the same urgency that i do if you feel the same passion that i do if you feel the same hopefulness that i do if we do what we must do then i have no doubt that all across the country from florida to oregon from washington to maine the people will rise up in november and john kerry will be sworn in as president and john edwards will be sworn in as vice president and this country will reclaim it s promise and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come thank you very much everybody god bless you thank you dem bobama27 7 09a barack_obama hey guys hello hello hello please everybody be seated be seated well welcome to the white house everybody and we are so pleased to have the detroit shock here we want to congratulate them and all your fans for your third wnba championship in six years give them a big round of applause we ve got some special fans from capitol hill here who take great pride in detroit senator carl levin is in the house representative sandy levin is in the house and representative carolyn kilpatrick is in the house i want to thank donna orender the president of the wnba who s here today donna is right back there she is right there congratulations on the success of this league and the inspiration it provides to young women everywhere i also want to thank the owner of the detroit shock and the detroit pistons karen davidson for coming your husband go ahead give her a round of applause your husband bill had a great impact not just in the nba and the wnba but also on countless individuals who benefit from his giving spirit now i have to say everybody knows i m a chicago bulls fan and a few years ago when the bulls and the pistons were thick in the middle of their rivalry i never imagined that i d be saying congratulations bill laimbeer or congratulations rick mahorn if i knew i was president then to think that i d be inviting them to the white house is hard to take but let s face it these guys are winners they always have been they know how to win and i want to congratulate the finals mvp katie smith team captain cheryl ford and all the other women that make this such an outstanding team i also want to salute this organization and this team for donating so much time and energy to lifting up the detroit community they ve given free tickets to underprivileged youth mentored abused women and children donated backpacks filled with school supplies to foster kids restored a rundown library into a safe clean place for kids to play and to grow and i want to thank them for participating in our united we serve summer of service earlier today these players took time to host a wnba fit clinic for young boys and girls at a local boys and girls club to teach fitness and nutrition and self confidence and i understand they brought some of the young participants along with them to the white house i suspect it must be these young people here today let me also say something as a father i was mentioning it to the team before we came out it s hard to believe the wnba has already been around for 12 years and that means that my daughters have never known a time when women couldn t play professional sports they look at the tv and they see me watching sportscenter and they see young women who look like them on the screen and that lets them and all our young women as well as young men know that we should take for granted that women are going to thrive and excel as athletes and it makes my daughters look at themselves differently to see that they can be champions too so as a father i want to say thank you and thank you to all the wnba athletes who work hard each day to set a positive example to which all our daughters can aspire congratulations again on your championship season good luck this year and coach congratulations all right thank you dem bobama27 7 09b barack_obama thank you good morning it is a great honor to welcome you to the first meeting of the strategic economic dialogue between the united states and china this is an essential step in advancing a positive constructive and comprehensive relationship between our countries i m pleased that president hu shares my commitment to a sustained dialogue to enhance our shared interests president hu and i both felt that it was important to get our relationship off to a good start of course as a new president and also as a basketball fan i have learned from the words of yao ming who said no matter whether you are new or an old team member you need time to adjust to one another well through the constructive meetings that we ve already had and through this dialogue i m confident that we will meet yao s standard i want to acknowledge the remarkable american and chinese leaders who will co chair this effort hillary clinton and tim geithner are two of my closest advisors and they have both obtained extraordinary experience working with china and i know that they will have extremely capable and committed chinese counterparts in state councilor dai and vice premier wang thank you very much for being here i m also looking forward to the confirmation of an outstanding u s ambassador to china governor jon huntsman who is here today jon has deep experience living and working in asia and unlike me he speaks fluent mandarin chinese he also happens to be a republican who co chaired senator mccain s campaign and i think that demonstrates jon s commitment to serving his country and the broad bipartisan support for positive and productive relations between the united states and china so thank you jon for your willingness to serve today we meet in a building that speaks to the history of the last century it houses a national memorial to president woodrow wilson a man who held office when the 20th century was still young and america s leadership in the world was emerging it is named for ronald reagan a man who came of age during two world wars and whose presidency helped usher in a new era of history and it holds a piece of the berlin wall a decades long symbol of division that was finally torn down unleashing a rising tide of globalization that continues to shape our world one hundred years ago in the early days of the 20th century it was clear that there were momentous choices to be made choices about the borders of nations and the rights of human beings but in woodrow wilson s day no one could have foreseen the arc of history that led to a wall coming down in berlin nor could they have imagined the conflict and upheaval that characterized the years in between for people everywhere from boston to beijing the 20th century was a time of great progress but that progress also came with a great price today we look out on the horizon of a new century and as we launch this dialogue it s important for us to reflect upon the questions that will shape the 21st century will growth be stalled by events like our current financial crisis or will we cooperate to create balanced and sustainable growth lifting more people out of poverty and creating a broader prosperity around the world will the need for energy breed competition and climate change or will we build partnerships to produce clean power and to protect our planet will nuclear weapons spread unchecked or will we forge a new consensus to use this power for only peaceful purposes will extremists be able to stir conflict and division or will we unite on behalf of our shared security will nations and peoples define themselves solely by their differences or can we find common ground necessary to meet our common challenges and to respect the dignity of every human being we can t predict with certainty what the future will bring but we can be certain about the issues that will define our times and we also know this the relationship between the united states and china will shape the 21st century which makes it as important as any bilateral relationship in the world that really must underpin our partnership that is the responsibility that together we bear as we look to the future we can learn from our past for history shows us that both our nations benefit from engagement that is grounded in mutual interest and mutual respect during my time in office we will mark the 40th anniversary of president nixon s trip to china at that time the world was much different than it is today america had fought three wars in east asia in just 30 years and the cold war was in a stalemate china s economy was cut off from the world and a huge percentage of the chinese people lived in extreme poverty back then our dialogue was guided by a narrow focus on our shared rivalry with the soviet union today we have a comprehensive relationship that reflects the deepening ties among our people our countries have now shared relations for longer than we were estranged our people interact in so many ways and i believe that we are poised to make steady progress on some of the most important issues of our times my confidence is rooted in the fact that the united states and china share mutual interests if we advance those interests through cooperation our people will benefit and the world will be better off because our ability to partner with each other is a prerequisite for progress on many of the most pressing global challenges let me name some of those challenges first we can cooperate to advance our mutual interests in a lasting economic recovery the current crisis has made it clear that the choices made within our borders reverberate across the global economy and this is true not just in new york and seattle but in shanghai and shenzhen as well that is why we must remain committed to strong bilateral and multilateral coordination and that is the example we have set by acting aggressively to restore growth to prevent a deeper recession and to save jobs for our people going forward we can deepen this cooperation we can promote financial stability through greater transparency and regulatory reform we can pursue trade that is free and fair and seek to conclude an ambitious and balanced doha round agreement we can update international institutions so that growing economies like china play a greater role that matches their greater responsibility and as americans save more and chinese are able to spend more we can put growth on a more sustainable foundation because just as china has benefited from substantial investment and profitable exports china can also be an enormous market for american goods second we can cooperate to advance our mutual interest in a clean secure and prosperous energy future the united states and china are the two largest consumers of energy in the world we are also the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world let s be frank neither of us profits from a growing dependence on foreign oil nor can we spare our people from the ravages of climate change unless we cooperate common sense calls upon us to act in concert both of our countries are taking steps to transform our energy economies together we can chart a low carbon recovery we can expand joint efforts at research and development to promote the clean and efficient use of energy and we can work together to forge a global response at the climate change conference in copenhagen and beyond and the best way to foster the innovation that can increase our security and prosperity is to keep our markets open to new ideas new exchanges and new sources of energy third we can cooperate to advance our mutual interests in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons make no mistake the more nations acquire these weapons the more likely it is that they will be used neither america nor china has an interest in a terrorist acquiring a bomb or a nuclear arms race breaking out in east asia that is why we must continue our collaboration to achieve the denuclearization of the korean peninsula and make it clear to north korea that the path to security and respect can be traveled if they meet their obligations and that is why we must also be united in preventing iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and urging the islamic republic to live up to its international obligations this is not about singling out any one nation it is about the responsibility of all nations together we must cooperate to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world which will be a focus of our global nuclear summit next year and together we must strengthen the nuclear non proliferation treaty by renewing its basic bargain countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy a balance of terror cannot hold in the 21st century a strong and global regime is the only basis for security from the world s deadliest weapons and fourth we can cooperate to advance our mutual interests in confronting transnational threats the most pressing dangers we face no longer come from competition among great powers they come from extremists who would murder innocents from traffickers and pirates who pursue their own profits at the expense of others from diseases that know no borders and from suffering and civil wars that breed instability and terror these are the threats of the 21st century and that is why the pursuit of power among nations must no longer be seen as a zero sum game progress including security must be shared through increased ties between our militaries we can diminish causes for dispute while providing a framework for cooperation through continued intelligence sharing we can disrupt terrorist plots and dismantle terrorist networks through early warning and coordination we can check the spread of disease and through determined diplomacy we must meet our responsibility to seek the peaceful resolution of conflict and that can begin with a renewed push to end the suffering in darfur and to promote a comprehensive peace in sudan all of these issues are rooted in the fact that no one nation can meet the challenges of the 21st century on its own nor effectively advance its interests in isolation it is this fundamental truth that compels us to cooperate i have no illusion that the united states and china will agree on every issue nor choose to see the world in the same way this was already noted by our previous speaker but that only makes dialogue more important so that we can know each other better and communicate our concerns with candor for instance the united states respects the progress that china has made by lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty just as we respect china s ancient and remarkable culture its remarkable achievements we also strongly believe that the religion and culture of all peoples must be respected and protected and that all people should be free to speak their minds and that includes ethnic and religious minorities in china as surely as it includes minorities within the united states support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in america our nation is made up of immigrants from every part of the world we have protected our unity and struggled to perfect our union by extending basic rights to all our people and those rights include the freedom to speak your mind to worship your god and to choose your leaders these are not things that we seek to impose this is who we are it guides our openness to one another and to the world china has its own distinct story that shapes its own worldview and americans know the richness of china s history because it helped to shape the world and it helped to shape america we know the talent of the chinese people because they have helped to create this great country my own cabinet contains two chinese americans and we know that despite our differences america is enriched through deeper ties with a country of 1 3 billion people that is at once ancient and dynamic ties that can be forged through increased exchanges among our people and constructive bilateral relations between our governments that is how we will narrow our divisions let us be honest we know that some are wary of the future some in china think that america will try to contain china s ambitions some in america think that there is something to fear in a rising china i take a different view and i believe president hu takes a different view as well i believe in a future where china is a strong prosperous and successful member of the community of nations a future when our nations are partners out of necessity but also out of opportunity this future is not fixed but it is a destination that can be reached if we pursue a sustained dialogue like the one that you will commence today and act on what we hear and what we learn thousands of years ago the great philosopher mencius said a trail through the mountains if used becomes a path in a short time but if unused becomes blocked by grass in an equally short time our task is to forge a path to the future that we seek for our children to prevent mistrust or the inevitable differences of the moment from allowing that trail to be blocked by grass to always be mindful of the journey that we are undertaking together this dialogue will help determine the ultimate destination of that journey it represents a commitment to shape our young century through sustained cooperation and not confrontation i look forward to carrying this effort forward through my first visit to china where i hope to come to know better your leaders your people and your majestic country together i m confident that we can move steadily in the direction of progress and meet our responsibility to our people and to the future that we will all share thank you very much dem bobama27 9 09 barack_obama they didn t want me to be on the right it says cbc to all the outstanding guests here tonight to our outstanding chair of the congressional black caucus barbara lee please give her a big round of applause to her outstanding foundation chair kendrick meek please give them a round of applause majority leader steny hoyer is in the house the house majority whip james clyburn is in the house chairman of the dccc chris van hollen is in the house and my great friend and the chair of the dnc tim kaine please give him a big round of applause governor of the commonwealth of virginia i want to begin by congratulating all of the recipients of the phoenix award for outstanding contributions to american life i have to single out one of tonight s honorees for whom i can personally vouch our ambassador to the united nations susan rice susan is doing a fantastic job as ambassador especially this past week when we were at the united nations and we are all lucky all of america is lucky to have her representing us there so please give her a big round of applause i look out at all of you tonight on members of congress on state and local officials on leaders of all kinds and i am reminded of the extraordinary acts of public service being rendered by african americans today i m reminded of the difference each of you is making at every level of government in the quiet neighborhoods of our small towns and the bustling streets of our big cities but i m also reminded that it wasn t always this way i m reminded of a time long before the cbc was formed long before the civil rights movement was sparked when just a lone african american was serving in the united states congress a north carolinian by birth the child some say of slaved george henry white was the last of that first generation of african americans elected to congress in the aftermath of appomattox but at the end of the 1800s with a segregationist supreme court handing down separate but equal with african americans being purged from the voter rolls with strange fruit growing on the poplar trees white decided against seeking reelection meaning that once again neither the house nor the senate would be occupied by a single african american member at the end of an inspiring farewell address the gentleman from north carolina said this mr chairman is perhaps the negroes temporary farewell to the american congress but let me say phoenix like he will rise up some day and come again members of the cbc all of you gathered here today tonight is a fulfillment of that prophecy while george henry white might not have foreseen the exact details of montgomery and selma while he might not have foreseen the precise outlines of the civil rights act and the voting rights act and all the struggles to come he knew that someday african americans would sit in our city halls and state houses he knew that someday the halls of congress would be walked by representatives and senators of every creed and color he knew as frederick douglass knew as harriet tubman knew as martin luther king jr knew that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice more than a century has passed since congressman white left congress in that time we have faced a number of difficult tests and bitter trials as a people and as a nation there have been dangers to peace and security there have been barriers to justice and equality there have been threats to opportunity so we are by no means the first generation of americans to be tested but tested we have been most recently we ve been tested by an economic crisis unlike any that we ve seen since the great depression now i have to say that some folks seem to have forgotten just how bad things were when i took office they seem to be exercising some selective memory so let s just take a stroll down memory lane our economy was shedding 700 000 jobs every single month more than the entire population of baltimore losing work every month credit had dried up loans for nearly everything from college to cars were nearly impossible to come by our entire financial system was poised on the brink of collapse with many fearing that what has been called the great recession would become another great depression you remember that that s why we acted boldly that s why we acted swiftly to put in place a recovery act that was passed with the help of members of congress here tonight and that s being carried out with help from governors and mayors here tonight as a consequence of those early actions we re cutting taxes for 95 percent of working families not for the rich folks but for ordinary folks putting some money in their pockets we re extending and increasing unemployment insurance for 12 million americans to help them weather this economic storm we are making cobra 65 percent cheaper so americans don t lose their health care coverage if they re out there looking for work we are saving the jobs of teachers and police officers that americans rely on all across the nation and we re putting americans to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges schools and waterways with the largest investment in our infrastructure since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s because of the actions we ve taken so far we have stopped the bleeding in our economy so the next time some of these folks come up asking you what the recovery act has done you tell them it has prevented us going into a much worse place that much we know that s been confirmed but we also know that we ve got a long way to go the progress we ve made has been uneven and that this recession has hit communities of color with a particular ferocity today more than one in seven african americans are out of work the highest in nearly a quarter century more than two out of 10 african americans and three out of 10 black children are living in poverty so this economic crisis has made the problems in the communities of color much worse but we all know that these problems have been there for a long time communities were struggling to catch up long before this economic storm came ashore one study that looked at trends in this country over the past few decades found that while roughly seven out of every 10 middle class white children end up surpassing their parents income roughly seven out of every 10 middle class black children do not think about that for the majority of some americans upward mobility for the majority of others stagnation or even downward mobility that was taking place over the last decade before the economic crisis that kind of inequality is unacceptable in the united states of america bringing hope and opportunity to places where they re in short supply that s not easy it will take a focused and sustained effort to eradicate the structural inequalities in our communities structural inequalities that make it difficult for children of color to make a success of their lives no matter how smart or how driven or how talented they are that s why we re launching promise neighborhoods to build on geoffrey canada s success in harlem with a comprehensive approach to ending poverty by giving people the tools they need to pull themselves up that s why i ve created an office of urban affairs to lift up our cities with a coordinated strategy to unleash their potential that s why my administration under the leadership of attorney general eric holder is serious about enforcing our civil rights laws and tearing down barriers to equal opportunity but of all the barriers still standing in 2009 few are more unjust few are more entrenched few are more inhumane than the barriers to a healthy life and a good education barriers that constrain the dreams not only of african americans but of all americans barriers that can and must and shall be overcome for the sake of every american living today and for the sake of every american yet to be born we must bring about a better health care system not in 10 years not in five years not in one year this year i know there are voices out there telling us we re moving too fast when it comes to health insurance reform they re telling us to slow down they re telling us to wait but how are we supposed to tell americans like easter spencer to wait this is a woman who discovered a lump in her breast back in june and was told it would be six months before she was eligible for health insurance that would cover the cost of removing it we re telling her to wait how are we supposed to tell americans like nathan wilkes to wait this is a man whose health insurance came with a cap so when the claims started piling because he had a sick child he was left to frantically search for another option or face 10 000 in out of pocket costs let me tell you we have been waiting for health reform since the days of teddy roosevelt we ve been waiting since the days of harry truman we ve been waiting since johnson and nixon and clinton we cannot wait any longer there comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over there comes a time to remember the fierce urgency of right now now is the time to enact health insurance reform in the united states of america now is the time to offer stability and security to americans who have insurance now is the time to make it affordable for those who don t have health insurance now is the time to slow the growth of health care costs for our families and business our government that s the kind of reform that we need now is the time and that s what so many members of congress here tonight and all across the country are working so hard to produce now many of you are probably familiar with our plan but i just want to go over a few things so you know what to tell your friends and neighbors and folks in the community who ask about it because they may be seeing some misinformation just a little bit i was up at the g20 just a little aside i was up at the g20 and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and michelle and i are shaking hands with them one of the leaders i won t mention who it was he comes up to me we take the picture we go behind he says barack explain to me this health care debate he says we don t understand it you re trying to make sure everybody has health care and they re putting a hitler mustache on you i don t that doesn t make sense to me explain that to me he didn t understand so let me just clarify if you already have health insurance under the plan we ve developed you will not i repeat you will not have to change your coverage or your doctor we are not requiring those changes in this legislation what we will do is make insurance work better for everybody it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre existing condition it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most they won t be able to place some arbitrary cap on how much coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out of pocket expenses because in the united states of america nobody should go broke because they got sick we will make it easier to identify health care disparities and work to close them that s long overdue and insurance companies will be required to cover at no extra charge routine checkups and preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies there s no reason we shouldn t be catching diseases like breast cancer before they get worse that makes sense it saves money it saves lives that s what we re going to do so that s what we do for the folks with health insurance and we ll finally offer the tens of millions of americans who don t have health insurance some affordable choices we ll do this with a new insurance exchange a marketplace where individuals and small businessmen can shop for an affordable health insurance plans that works for them as one big group so they ll have leverage to get a better deal than they get right now a much better deal that is going to save them money now there are going to be some who claim that well this is a government takeover of health care there are going to be some who suggest that they re going to lose their choices we are talking about expanding choices and i just want everybody to remember that they said the same thing when we tried to pass social security they called fdr all kinds of things that we cannot repeat here today they said the same thing about lyndon johnson when we tried to pass medicare they are saying the same things now trying the same tactics but we are going to get this done this year thanks to members of the cbc and members of congress all across the country and thanks to you at the grassroots level that are going to stand up and insist that we cannot afford to wait any longer now the key to progress for all americans is not just healthy bodies it s also a well educated mind and we know that the african american community will fall behind in the united states and the united states will fall behind in the world unless we do a far better job than we ve been doing of educating our sons and daughters unless we close the achievement gap that sees black students and brown students lag behind their white classmates year after year decade after decade unless we reach all the students who are dropping out of school and giving up on their future today almost a third of students drop out of high school a third and a disproportionate number of them are african american or hispanic that s not just a loss for the african american community or the hispanic community that s a loss for all americans that s the future workforce in the 21st century when a good education is a prerequisite for success when the jobs of tomorrow require a bachelor s degree or more when the countries that out educate us today will out compete us tomorrow we need the talents the energy the contributions of all our children not just some we need to prepare every child in america to compete with any worker in the world now there are a number of things government can do to offer our kids a 21st century education it can increase pell grants and perkins loans and simplify financial aid forms it can establish better standards and assessments in our schools it can reward teachers who are doing a great job and move bad ones out of the classroom it can it can improve quality in early learning initiatives it can rebuild our crumbling schools it can offer all our children a complete and competitive education from cradle to the classroom from college through a career that s what government can do that s what government must do and that s exactly what we ve begun to do here in washington across this country and i ve said it before and i know i may sound like a broken record but i m going to say it again government alone cannot get our children to the promised land government can t put away the playstation government can t put our kids to bed at a reasonable hour government can t attend those parent teacher conferences government can t read a book to your child at night government can t help them with their homework government can t make sure they leave to school on time these are things only a mother can do and a father can do these are things that a parent can do we need to accept our responsibilities as parents and community leaders we need to be good role models and encourage excellence in all our children every last one of them we need to let them know there are no excuses for not doing your best every day all the time in order to achieve your dreams we ve got to push our kids to aim higher i don t want all our kids aspiring to be ballers and rappers i want them aspiring to be teachers and doctors and scientists and engineers i want them aspiring to be members of congress and supreme court justices i want them aspiring to be the president of the united states of america i want them to have their sights set high no excuses for mediocrity if they come home with a b don t tell them that s great i know some of you all do that tell them to work harder and get an a set their sights high a world class education affordable quality health insurance jobs and opportunity all of us accepting responsibility for ourselves and our children and our common future that s how we ll make life better for the african american community and thereby make life better for the larger american community that is how we will build a new foundation for our economy that yields lasting shared prosperity that s how we ll take up the cause of freedom and justice and equality in our time just as earlier generations of americans took it up in theirs remember what it was like for george henry white in the early days of the 20th century as he was bidding farewell to the house of representatives the last african american to serve there for a quarter century remember the taunts the threats and the attacks braved by white braved by lewis braved by chisholm remember all they did all so many others did to make it possible for us to be here tonight to make it possible for you to be here tonight to make it possible for me to be here tonight because i know that if we can act as they did with the same sense of unity the same sense of possibility the same determination the same sense of purpose then we will not only help america s people live healthier lives we won t just help america s children live out their dreams but it will be said of us as it is said of our forbearers that when the need was great when the moment was hard when the odds seemed against us we did our part to perfect our union thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama28 10 09a barack_obama it is an extraordinary privilege to be here today and let me begin by acknowledging this distinguished group gathered on the platform our extraordinary speaker of the house nancy pelosi majority leader harry reid republican leader mitch mcconnell majority leader steny hoyer republican leader john boehner senator john kerry representative eleanor holmes norton representative patrick kennedy my dear friend vicki kennedy to our honoree senator edward brooke his wife anne and family it is a great privilege to be here today as we confer the congressional gold medal on a man who s spent his life breaking barriers and bridging divides across this country senator edward brooke now with his lifetime of achievement ed is no stranger to a good awards ceremony he s been through a few of these he s won the bronze star the presidential medal of freedom honorary degrees from 34 colleges and universities and more so he s a pro when it comes to getting awards but i think today s honor bears a unique significance bestowed by this body of which he was an esteemed member presented in this place where he moved the arc of history surrounded by so many myself included who have followed the trail that he blazed ed s journey to this day was by any measure an unlikely one raised nearby in a neighborhood so fiercely segregated that black residents needed a note from a white person to pass through at a time when so many doors of opportunity were closed to african americans others might have become angry or disillusioned they might have concluded that no matter how hard they worked their horizons would always be limited so why bother but not ed brooke serving in a segregated army barred from facilities at the base where he trained he fought heroically in europe leading a daring daylight attack against a heavily armed enemy rejected from boston s old line firms despite his success in law school he established his own practice handling everything from wills and divorces to real estate and criminal cases and when he ran for statewide office in massachusetts and one reporter pointed out that he was black republican and protestant seeking office in a white democratic and catholic state and also quote a carpetbagger from the south andpoor ed was unfazed it was to say the least an improbable profile for the man who would become the first african american state attorney general and the first popularly elected african american senator but that was ed brooke s way to ignore the naysayers reject the conventional wisdom and trust that ultimately people would judge him on his character his commitment his record and his ideas he ran for office as he put it to bring people together who had never been together before and that he did i don t know anyone else whose fan base includes gloria steinem barney frank and ted kennedy as well as mitch mcconnell mitt romney and george w bush that s a coalition builder and few have matched his reach across the aisle from working with birch bayh to protect title ix so girls can compete on a level playing field to sponsoring the fair housing act with walter mondale and small business legislation with ted kennedy one of the many bills he would sponsor with the senior senator from massachusetts he didn t care whether a bill was popular or politically expedient democratic or republican he cared about whether it helped people whether it made a difference in their daily lives that s why he fought so hard for medicare for mass transit and the minimum wage for civil rights and women s rights it s why he became a lifelong advocate for affordable housing establishing protections that are the standard to this day so it s a record that defies the labels and categories for which he had little use and even less patience when pressed to define himself he d offer phrases like creative moderate or a liberal with a conservative bent but in truth ed brooke s career was animated not by a faith in any particular party or ideology but rather by a faith in the people he served ed always got to see the best in people because that was the effect he had maybe it was his old fashioned manners his unfailing courtesy and warmth maybe it was his charm and charisma known to melt even the staunchest adversary or maybe it was his genuine interest in people s stories the way he listened to their concerns and worked to ease their struggles whatever it was even if people didn t fully agree with him they saw how hard he fought for them and how much he respected them and they respected him back they rose to meet his esteem for them around ed people wanted to be their better selves over the years he made an impression on just about everyone he encountered including a young congressman named john f kennedy whom he met back in 1952 the two men had a lively conversation and as they parted ways the future president said you know you ought to be a democrat and ed smiled and replied you know you ought to be a republican it was a sentiment that many in my party would share including the president s brother our dear friend ted kennedy while ted campaigned vigorously for ed s democratic opponent the two later became lifelong friends and four decades later ted would campaign even more vigorously to secure ed s nomination for this medal so while we grace senator brooke with this honor today perhaps a better tribute to him would be to embrace that spirit to compete aggressively at the polls but then work selflessly together to serve the nation we love to look for the best in each other to give each other the benefit of the doubt and to remember that we re here for a purpose far greater than the sum of our own hopes needs and ambitions that s the legacy of our friend senator edward brooke and may we each do our part to carry it forward thank you god bless you congratulations senator brooke and god bless the united states of america dem bobama28 10 09b barack_obama thank you so much everybody thank you so much and welcome to the white house there are several people here that i want to just make mention of because they helped to make today possible we ve got attorney general eric holder a champion of this legislation and a great speaker of the house nancy pelosi my dear friend senior senator from the great state of illinois dick durbin the outstanding chairman of armed services carl levin senator arlen specter chairman of the judiciary committee in the house representative john conyers representative barney frank representative tammy baldwin representative jerry nadler representative jared polis all the members of congress who are here today we thank you mr david bohnett and mr tom gregory and the david bohnett foundation they are partners for this reception thank you so much guys for helping to host this and finally and most importantly because these were really the spearheads of this effort denis judy and logan shepard as well as betty byrd boatner and louvon harris sisters of james byrd jr to all the activists all the organizers all the people who helped make this day happen thank you for your years of advocacy and activism pushing and protesting that made this victory possible you know as a nation we ve come far on the journey towards a more perfect union and today we ve taken another step forward this afternoon i signed into law the matthew shepard and james byrd jr hate crimes prevention act this is the culmination of a struggle that has lasted more than a decade time and again we faced opposition time and again the measure was defeated or delayed time and again we ve been reminded of the difficulty of building a nation in which we re all free to live and love as we see fit but the cause endured and the struggle continued waged by the family of matthew shepard by the family of james byrd by folks who held vigils and led marches by those who rallied and organized and refused to give up by the late senator ted kennedy who fought so hard for this legislation and all who toiled for years to reach this day you understood that we must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones but to break spirits not only to inflict harm but to instill fear you understand that the rights afforded every citizen under our constitution mean nothing if we do not protect those rights both from unjust laws and violent acts and you understand how necessary this law continues to be in the most recent year for which we have data the fbi reported roughly 7 600 hate crimes in this country over the past 10 years there were more than 12 000 reported hate crimes based on sexual orientation alone and we will never know how many incidents were never reported at all and that s why through this law we will strengthen the protections against crimes based on the color of your skin the faith in your heart or the place of your birth we will finally add federal protections against crimes based on gender disability gender identity or sexual orientation and prosecutors will have new tools to work with states in order to prosecute to the fullest those who would perpetrate such crimes because no one in america should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hands of the person they love no one in america should be forced to look over their shoulder because of who they are or because they live with a disability at root this isn t just about our laws this is about who we are as a people this is about whether we value one another whether we embrace our differences rather than allowing them to become a source of animus it s hard for any of us to imagine the mind set of someone who would kidnap a young man and beat him to within an inch of his life tie him to a fence and leave him for dead it s hard for any of us to imagine the twisted mentality of those who d offer a neighbor a ride home attack him chain him to the back of a truck and drag him for miles until he finally died but we sense where such cruelty begins the moment we fail to see in another our common humanity the very moment when we fail to recognize in a person the same fears and hopes the same passions and imperfections the same dreams that we all share we have for centuries strived to live up to our founding ideal of a nation where all are free and equal and able to pursue their own version of happiness through conflict and tumult through the morass of hatred and prejudice through periods of division and discord we have endured and grown stronger and fairer and freer and at every turn we ve made progress not only by changing laws but by changing hearts by our willingness to walk in another s shoes by our capacity to love and accept even in the face of rage and bigotry in april of 1968 just one week after the assassination of martin luther king as our nation mourned in grief and shuddered in anger president lyndon johnson signed landmark civil rights legislation this was the first time we enshrined into law federal protections against crimes motivated by religious or racial hatred the law on which we build today as he signed his name at a difficult moment for our country president johnson said that through this law the bells of freedom ring out a little louder that is the promise of america over the sounds of hatred and chaos over the din of grief and anger we can still hear those ideals even when they are faint even when some would try to drown them out at our best we seek to make sure those ideals can be heard and felt by americans everywhere and that work did not end in 1968 it certainly does not end today but because of the efforts of the folks in this room particularly those family members who are standing behind me we can be proud that that bell rings even louder now and each day grows louder still so thank you very much god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama28 10 09c barack_obama thank you please everybody be seated good afternoon i have often said that meeting our greatest challenges would require not only changing policies in washington but changing the way business is done in washington that it would require a government that s more efficient and effective and less influenced by lobbyists and parochial politics and i m pleased to say that when it comes to the defense bill i m about to sign into law we ve taken some important steps towards that goal i want to acknowledge my outstanding vice president joe biden attorney general eric holder is here and all members of congress who are joining us here today thank you very much for your outstanding work you can give members of congress a round of applause as commander in chief i will always do whatever it takes to keep the american people safe to defend this nation and that s why this bill provides for the best military in the history of the world it reaffirms our commitment to our brave men and women in uniform and our wounded warriors it expands family leave rights for the family members of our troops and veterans and it makes investments in the capabilities necessary to meet 21st century challenges but i have always rejected the notion that we have to waste billions of dollars of taxpayer money to keep this nation secure in fact i think that wasting these dollars makes us less secure and that s why we have passed a defense bill that eliminates some of the waste and inefficiency in our defense process reforms that will better protect our nation better protect our troops and save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars now at the outset let me just say that this effort would not have been possible without an extraordinary secretary of defense and so i want to thank publicly bob gates for his service to our nation having served under eight presidents of both parties this is a man who understands that our defense budget isn t about politics it s about the security of our country and who knows that every dollar wasted is a dollar we can t spend to care for our troops or protect the homeland and over the last several months he took that fight to congress he challenged conventional thinking and he emerged with several critical victories so on behalf of the american people i want to thank you bob for your extraordinary efforts now bob couldn t have been successful had it not been for the next person i want to introduce admiral mike mullen the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff he provided wise counsel and stood with us in our efforts to initiate reform even though it probably occasionally caused some heartburn inside of the pentagon as well because change is hard and so i m very grateful for his leadership and excellent work please give and finally i want to thank the members of congress particularly senators carl levin and john mccain and congressmen ike skelton and buck mckeon as the chairmen and ranking members of their respective committees they did an outstanding job now this bill isn t perfect this bill is an important step forward but it s just a first step there s still more waste we need to cut there are still more fights that we need to win changing the culture in washington will take time and sustained effort and that s why secretary gates and i will continue waging these battles in the months and years ahead but i will say that when secretary gates and i first proposed going after some of these wasteful projects there were a lot of people in this town who didn t think it was possible who were certain we were going to lose who were certain that we would get steamrolled who argued that the special interests were too entrenched and that washington was simply too set in its ways and so i think it s important to note today we have proven them wrong today we re putting an end to some wasteful projects that lawmakers have tried to kill for years and we re doing this because secretary gates and i both know that we can t build the 21st century military we need unless we fundamentally reform the way our defense establishment does business the government accountability office the gao has looked into 96 major defense projects from the last year and found cost overruns that totaled 296 billion an amount of money that would have paid our troops salaries and provided benefits for their families for more than a year and we all know where this kind of waste comes from indefensible no bid contracts that cost taxpayers billions and make contractors rich special interests and their exotic projects that are years behind schedule and billions over budget entrenched lobbyists pushing weapons that even our military says it doesn t want and doesn t need the impulse in washington to win political points back home by building things that we don t need at costs we can t afford this waste would be unacceptable at any time but at a time when we re fighting two wars and facing a serious deficit it s inexcusable it s unconscionable it s an affront to the american people and to our troops and it has to stop and already i ve put an end to unnecessary no bid contracts i signed bipartisan legislation to reform defense procurement so weapons systems don t spin out of control and even as we made critical investments in the equipment and weapons our troops do need we re eliminating tens of billions of dollars in waste we don t need so no longer will we be spending nearly 2 billion to buy more f 22 fighter jets that the pentagon says they don t need this bill also terminates troubled and massively over budget programs such as the future combat systems the airborne lasers the combat search and rescue helicopter and a new presidential helicopter that costs nearly as much as air force one i won t be flying on that at the same time we accelerated or increased weapons programs needed to confront real and growing threats the joint strike fighter the littoral combat ship and more helicopters and reconnaissance support for our troops at the front and this bill also reduces waste and fraud in our contracting system as well as our reliance on private contractors for jobs that federal employees have the expertise and the training to do so today i m pleased to say that we have proved that change is possible it may not come quickly or all at once but if you push hard enough it does come eventually now speaking of that there is one more long awaited change contained within this legislation that i ll be talking about a little more later today after more than a decade of opposition and delay we ve passed inclusive hate crimes legislation to help protect our citizens from violence based on what they look like who they love how they pray or who they are i promised judy shepard when she saw me in the oval office that this day would come and i m glad that she and her husband dennis could join us for this event i m also honored to have the family of the late senator ted kennedy who fought so hard for this legislation and vicki and patrick kara everybody who s here i just want you all to know how proud we are of the work that ted did to help this day make this day possible so and thank you for joining us here today so with that i m going to sign this piece of legislation thank you all for doing a great job all right dem bobama28 3 10 barack_obama how s it going bagram well you know it turns out that the american people they let me use this plane called air force one and so i thought i d come over and say hello couple of people i want to thank in addition to sergeant major eric johnson for the outstanding introduction and his great service i want to thank major general mike scaparrotti thank you for your great work as commanding general i want to thank ms dawn liberi who is the senior civilian representative of regional command east for her outstanding work and brigadier general steven kwast commander commander 455th air expeditionary wing thank you all for your outstanding service give them a big round of applause thank you for the unbelievable welcome i know this was on a little bit of short notice no worries it is great to be here at bagram and it s great to see all the services we ve got air force we ve got army we ve got navy we ve got some marines in the house and we ve got a lot of civilians here too who are making an outstanding contribution to this effort and i m honored to be joined by america s outstanding civilian military leadership team here in afghanistan ambassador karl eikenberry who s doing outstanding work and the commander of our 43 nation coalition general stan mcchrystal the two of them together have paired up to do an extraordinarily difficult task but they are doing it extraordinarily well and we are proud of them please give your outstanding team a big round of applause they ve got my full confidence and my full support we re also joined by troops from some of our coalition partners because this is not simply an american mission or even just a nato mission al qaeda and their extremist allies are a threat to the people of afghanistan and a threat to the people of america but they re also a threat to people all around the world and that s why we re so proud to have our coalition partners here with us thank you very much for the great work that you do we salute you and we honor you for all the sacrifices you make and you are a true friend of the united states of america thank you very much and we also salute the members of the afghan national army who are fighting alongside all of you they re risking their lives to protect their country and as i told president karzai today the united states is a partner but our intent is to make sure that the afghans have the capacity to provide for their own security that is core to our mission and we are proud of the work that they are doing and the continuing increased capacity that we re seeing out of afghan national security forces so thank you very much for the great work you re doing to take responsibility for security here in your own country and to the afghan people i want to say that i m honored to be a guest in your country now the afghans have suffered for decades decades of war but we are here to help afghans forge a hard won peace while realizing the extraordinary potential of the afghan people afghanistan s sons and daughters from the soldiers and the police to the farmers and the young students and we want to build a lasting partnership founded upon mutual interests and mutual respect and i m looking forward to returning to afghanistan many times in the years to come now i know for most of you you didn t get a lot of notice that i was coming but i want you to understand there s no visit that i considered more important than this visit i m making right now because i have no greater honor than serving as your commander in chief and it is a privilege to look out and see the extraordinary efforts of america s sons and daughters here in afghanistan so my main job here today is to say thank you on behalf of the entire american people you are part of the finest military in the history of the world and we are proud of you and so i want you to know that everybody back home is proud of you everybody back home is grateful and everybody understands the sacrifices that you have made and your families have made to keep america safe and to keep america secure in this vital mission and i know it s not easy you re far away from home you miss your kids you miss your spouses your family your friends some of you this is your second or your third or your fourth tour of duty i ll tell you right now the same thing that i said at west point last december if i thought for a minute that america s vital interests were not served were not at stake here in afghanistan i would order all of you home right away so i want you to know i want every american serving in afghanistan military and civilian to know whether you re working the flight line here at bagram or patrolling a village down in helmand whether you re standing watch at a forward operating base or training our afghan partners or working with the afghan government your services are absolutely necessary absolutely essential to america s safety and security those folks back home are relying on you we can t forget why we re here we did not choose this war this was not an act of america wanting to expand its influence of us wanting to meddle in somebody else s business we were attacked viciously on 9 11 thousands of our fellow countrymen and women were killed and this is the region where the perpetrators of that crime al qaeda still base their leadership plots against our homeland plots against our allies plots against the afghan and pakistani people are taking place as we speak right here and if this region slides backwards if the taliban retakes this country and al qaeda can operate with impunity then more american lives will be at stake the afghan people will lose their chance at progress and prosperity and the world will be significantly less secure and as long as i m your commander in chief i am not going to let that happen that s why you are here i ve made a promise to all of you who serve i will never send you into harm s way unless it s absolutely necessary i anguish in thinking about the sacrifices that so many of you make that s why i promise i will never send you out unless it is necessary but that s only part of the promise because the other part of the promise is that when it is absolutely necessary you will be backed up by a clear mission and the right strategy to finish the job to get the job done and i am confident all of you are going to get the job done right here in afghanistan i am confident of that that s why i ordered more troops and civilians here into afghanistan shortly after taking office that s why we took a hard look and forged a new strategy and committed more resources in december that s why we pushed our friends and allies and partners to pony up more resources themselves more commitments of aid and additional forces and trainers our broad mission is clear we are going to disrupt and dismantle defeat and destroy al qaeda and its extremist allies that is our mission and to accomplish that goal our objectives here in afghanistan are also clear we re going to deny al qaeda safe haven we re going to reverse the taliban s momentum we re going to strengthen the capacity of afghan security forces and the afghan government so that they can begin taking responsibility and gain confidence of the afghan people and our strategy includes a military effort that takes the fight to the taliban while creating the conditions for greater security and a transition to the afghans but also a civilian effort that improves the daily lives of the afghan people and combats corruption and a partnership with pakistan and its people because we can t uproot extremists and advance security and opportunity unless we succeed on both sides of the border most of you understand that many of the troops that i ordered to afghanistan have begun to arrive and more are on the way and we ll continue to work with congress to make sure that you ve got the equipment that you need particularly as we complete our drawdown in iraq we re providing more helicopters we re providing more intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities more special operations forces more armored vehicles that can save lives and here in afghanistan you ve gone on the offensive and the american people back home are noticing we have seen a huge increase in support in stateside because people understand the kinds of sacrifices that you guys are making and the clarity of mission that you re bringing to bear and together with our coalition and afghan partners our troops have pushed the taliban out of their stronghold in marja we ve changed the way we operate and interact with the afghan people we see afghans reclaiming their communities and we see new partnerships that will help them build their own future and increase their security and across the border pakistan is mounting major offensives we ve seen violent extremists pushed out of their sanctuaries we ve struck major blows against al qaeda leadership as well as the taliban s they are hunkered down they re worried about their own safety it s harder for them to move it s harder for them to train and to plot and to attack and all of that makes america safer and we are going to keep them on the run because that is what s going to be required in order to assure that our families back home have the security that they need that s the work that you are doing so thanks to you there s been progress these last several months but we know there are going to be some difficult days ahead there s going to be setbacks we face a determined enemy but we also know this the united states of america does not quit once it starts on something you don t quit the american armed services does not quit we keep at it we persevere and together with our partners we will prevail i am absolutely confident of that and i also want you to know that as you re doing your duty here we re going to do right by you back home we re going to help take care of your families and that s why the first lady michelle obama visited with military families and makes sure that their needs are met that s why she stays after me once she gets home when i m at the white house and we re going to make sure that we are keeping to improve your pay and your benefits but also things like childcare and support that ensure that you ve got a little bit of security knowing your family is being looked after back home and we ll be there for your when you come home it s why we re improving care for our wounded warriors especially those with ptsd and traumatic brain injuries we re moving forward with the post 9 11 gi bill so you and your families can pursue your dreams and we ve made the biggest increase in the va budget in 30 years because we re going to keep our sacred trust with all those who serve you ve been there for us tour after tour year after year at a time when too many american institutions have let us down when too many institutions have put short term gain in front of a commitment to duty and a commitment to what s right you ve met your responsibilities you ve done your duty not just when it s easy that s why you ve inspired your fellow americans that s why you inspire me that s why you ve earned your place next to the very greatest of american generations and all of you represent the virtues and the values that america so desperately needs right now sacrifice and selflessness honor and decency that s why you re here today that s what you represent i ve seen your sense of purpose and your willingness to step forward and serve in a time of danger i ve seen it from the marines i ve met at camp lejeune to the cadets at west point from the midshipmen at annapolis to the troops i ve met in iraq and at bases across america and here in afghanistan i ve seen your courage and your heroism and the story of a young sergeant first class named jared monti who gave his life here in afghanistan to save his fellow soldiers and his parents i was proud to present with our nation s highest military declaration the medal of honor i ve seen your tenacity i ve seen your tenacity and determination in our wounded warriors in landstuhl and walter reed americans fighting to stand again and to walk again and to get back with get back with their units incredible dedication incredible focus incredible pride and i ve been humbled by your sacrifice and the solemn homecoming of flag draped coffins at dover to the headstones in section 60 at arlington where the fallen from this war rest in peace alongside the fellow heroes of america s story so here in afghanistan each one of you is part of an unbroken line of american servicemembers who ve sacrificed for over two centuries you re protecting your fellow citizens from danger you re serving alongside old allies and new friends you re bringing hope and opportunity to a people who have known a lot of pain and a lot of suffering and i know that sometimes when you re watching tv the politics back home may look a little messy and people are yelling and hollering and democrats this and republicans that i want you to understand this there s no daylight when it comes to support of all of you there s no daylight when it comes to supporting our troops that brings us together we are all incredibly proud we all honor what you do and all of you show all of america what s possible when people come together not based on color or creed not based on faith or station but based on a commitment to serve together to bleed together and to succeed together as one people as americans make no mistake this fight matters to us it matters to us it matters to our allies it matters to the afghan people al qaeda and the violent extremists who you re fighting against want to destroy but all of you want to build and that is something essential about america they ve got no respect for human life you see dignity in every human being that s part of what we value as americans they want to drive races and regions and religions apart you want to bring people together and see the world move forward together they offer fear in other words and you offer hope and that s why it is so important that you know that the entire country stands behind you that s why you put on that uniform because in an uncertain world the united states of america will always stand up for the security of nations and the dignity of human beings that s who we are that is what we do much has happened to our country and to the world since 9 11 but i m confident that so long as brave men and women like you americans who are willing to serve selflessly half a world away on behalf of their fellow citizens and the dreams of people they ve never met so long as there are folks like you then i m confident that our nation will endure and hope will overcome fear and i am confident that better days lie ahead so thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states armed forces and god bless the united states of america dem bobama28 4 09a barack_obama please everybody have a seat on this beautiful day welcome this is our first official rose garden ceremony a place where so many yes that s worth applause sure why not this is place where so many presidents have honored so many citizens who ve made extraordinary contributions to the life of our nation before i get to the main event i want to make sure that we acknowledge first of all somebody who i think will end up being written up as one of the greatest secretaries of education we ve ever had please give a round of applause to arne duncan an outstanding educator in her own right dr jill biden and i want to give credit to representative jim hines who s here and he represents the fourth district of connecticut which includes mr mullen s school district so jim you know we ve got a lot of teachers here today and i m a big fan of teachers because every single day in classrooms all across america you are making a difference you don t always get the recognition that you deserve we don t always value the teaching profession like we should but every once in a while i think people start to understand not just in their own lives but in the lives of the nation how important the teaching profession is and how we ve got to do a better job of lifting it up in a global economy where the greatest job qualification isn t what you can do but what you know our teachers are the key to our nation s success to whether america will lead the world in the discoveries and the innovations and economic prosperity of this new century and that s why as president i m committed to doing everything i can to support the work of teachers that s why we re working to create better standards and assessments that teachers can use in their classroom that s why we re promoting innovation in teaching and learning making critical investments in early childhood education and helping more americans walk through the door of higher education and it s why we re taking ground breaking steps to recruit prepare support and reward outstanding teachers to encourage our best and brightest young people to follow in the footsteps of folks just like you this is especially critical right now as so many teachers from the baby boom generation are preparing to retire although they all look pretty young back here we re not worried about that and recent evaluations of student performance show that while we re making progress we still have a long way to go i know personally michelle knows that what teachers do is not easy my sister maya is a teacher jill biden a teacher we know how hard teachers work and i know what all of you do by staying past that last bell staying up late grading those papers putting together lesson plans spending your own money on books and supplies and going beyond the call of duty you do it because you know that s what will make a difference because you believe that there s no such thing as a child that can t learn that every child has their own gifts and it s up to us to discover them and it s up to us to see in our children what they can t yet see in themselves and for you those teachers who are in attendance today and for so many of your colleagues across this country teaching is not just about a paycheck it s a passion and it s a calling now nobody i think exhibits that more than our honoree today our teacher of the year tony mullen you know tony knew early on in life that he wanted to be a teacher but his parents passed away when he was young and he had to find work first at a factory then at the new york police department where he rose from police officer all the way to captain but tony never lost sight of his dream attending college while he worked becoming the first in his family to get a degree and going on to get a masters degree in education and during his time on the force tony saw a lot of young people who d gotten themselves in trouble and he knew he wanted to give kids like that a second chance so when he left the nypd tony actively searched for a job description that included phrases like working with students with severe behavioral and emotional problems kids whom others might see as difficult or impossible or lost causes tony didn t see them as lost causes as his superintendent put it tony considers working with these students an honor and a privilege in his application for this award tony emphasized the importance of passion which as he puts it ignites a flame too bright to be ignored by students that is the passion tony brings to his classroom every day striving to engage every student connecting with those no one else can reach spending hours counseling students individually listening compassionately giving them his fullest attention and that s just the beginning in his spare time tony mentors fellow teachers he leads a program to provide academic support to students who ve been expelled and he s the volunteer commissioner for a youth baseball league that grew from 200 to 1 000 children under his leadership giving so many young people the self confidence and teamwork skills they need to succeed tony doesn t ask for anything in return as he put it a teacher can receive no greater reward than the knowledge that he or she helped recover a lost student each of us carries with us in life the love and wisdom of people like tony the special few who were there for us when we needed it most who pushed us when we were afraid who pulled us back when we were headed in the wrong direction who refused to give up on us no matter how difficult we were i know that s certainly true for me i was telling tony and his family in the office michelle and i don t come from a fancy background the only reason that we re here is because at some point there were people like tony who helped steer us in the right direction in recognizing tony and all of you today we re also recognizing countless others who make the lives of our young people a little bit better and for that we honor you we thank you today and every single day so tony mullen god bless you and god bless the united states of america give tony a big round of applause dem bobama28 4 09b barack_obama good afternoon everybody well it is a good excuse for you to be outside and it is a great honor to be here with the men and women of the federal bureau of investigation i am grateful to the fbi for the t shirts for the teddy bear for the girls even though we ve kept our promise on the dog i wouldn t want to come home empty handed i want to thank your outstanding director robert mueller not just for the introduction but because bob has led the bureau during incredibly challenging times he became only the sixth director of the fbi just one week before the 9 11 attacks and since then he has worked as hard as anybody to prevent additional attacks and to carry out the fbi s enormous responsibilities so i appreciate him and i appreciate all of you thank you so last summer the fbi celebrated its 100th anniversary i think it s safe to say that it has been an eventful century for the bureau back in 1908 oh did somebody faint do we have an emt here right down here just give him a little bit of space this happened during my political campaign all the time i was talking too long people would be falling out every which way they re usually fine they just need a little bit of air and a little bit of water right down here right in the middle not you all right i think they ll be all right so back in 1908 there were just 34 special agents reporting to theodore roosevelt s attorney general today there are over 30 000 men and women who work for the fbi back in 1908 those agents worked out of one building here in washington and today you work here at fbi headquarters and at field offices across america and in countries around the world so much has changed in the last 100 years thank god for change and part of what makes the fbi so unique is its ability to adapt to an ever changing world back in 1908 even the most imaginative of minds would have struggled to anticipate all of the challenges that would confront the bureau from bank robbers to bootleggers from hate crimes to white collar criminals from public corruption to counter intelligence from international terrorism to cyber threats the challenges of the 21st century have called on us to think anew and to act anew and in recent years the bureau has undergone a profound transformation to keep pace with the attacks of 9 11 your mission became focused more than ever before on prevention so that we have the capacity to uncover terrorist plots before they take hold with the spread of new technologies you increasingly confront adversaries in unconventional areas from transnational networks to cyber crimes and espionage and through it all you must continue to stay one step ahead of all who step outside of the law and i know that change means much more than moving around some boxes on an organizational chart you ve set new priorities you ve developed new capabilities you re working to use new technologies and teach new skills and because these challenges cross borders both seen and unseen you ve developed new partnerships abroad while sharing information more effectively with law enforcement here at home this is a tough business but it is essential to protecting our country because in the end it s your hard work that makes the difference your decisions your analysis your action because of you the men and women of the fbi the american people are safer and our country is stronger for that you have my personal gratitude but you also have the thanks of a grateful nation so i know that much has changed in the last 100 years but as your director said i know that some things have remained constant that starts with the values that we have sworn to uphold liberty and equality opportunity and the rule of law that s the foundation upon which america is built that s the purpose that has always guided our power and that is why we must always reject as the false as false choices the choice between our security and our ideals in so many ways the fbi is a unique institution you re unique because the fbi is both an intelligence agency and a law enforcement agency you must both prevent danger and help us pursue those who carry it out you protect us and you protect the civil liberties that we cherish but after all that is why america is unique because of that fundamental belief that we are committed both to our security and to the rule of law because of that hard earned truth that we are always stronger when we act in concert with our most deeply held values i have no illusions that this is simple or easy many of you made enormous sacrifices and are incredibly dedicated living our values means that we must hold ourselves to higher standard than our enemies we face a long struggle against a determined adversary we know that al qaeda is not constrained by a constitution or by allegiance to anything other than a hateful ideology and a determination to kill as many innocents as possible but what makes the united states of america so special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals not just when it s easy but when it s hard we ve been called to serve in such a time and i have to say that i am heartened but what i see here today each of you has made the decision to serve your country and you are dong so at a critical time and you know none of us can know with certain what the future will hold but i do know that the fbi can and will continue to adapt to new dangers that you will be critical in leading the way in keeping this country safe and we are counting on you there s much to celebrate from the fbi s first 100 days we remember notorious criminals who have been caught and public corruption that has been ended and civil rights that have been protected and terrorist plots that have been uncovered none of that would have been possible without the work of men and women like you and we re calling on you again behind me is the motto that you carry forward and that your director alluded to fidelity bravery and integrity these are more than words etched into a building they re a signal of the character of the men and women who work here and i am confident that if you stay true to those words no matter what challenge may come our way we ll be able to look back a hundred years from now with the satisfaction that you advanced the cause of america s security and america s ideals in your time what an enormous gift that is to give back to your country thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama28 4 09c barack_obama please everybody have a seat on this beautiful day welcome this is our first official rose garden ceremony a place where so many yes that s worth applause sure why not this is place where so many presidents have honored so many citizens who ve made extraordinary contributions to the life of our nation before i get to the main event i want to make sure that we acknowledge first of all somebody who i think will end up being written up as one of the greatest secretaries of education we ve ever had please give a round of applause to arne duncan an outstanding educator in her own right dr jill biden and i want to give credit to representative jim hines who s here and he represents the fourth district of connecticut which includes mr mullen s school district so jim you know we ve got a lot of teachers here today and i m a big fan of teachers because every single day in classrooms all across america you are making a difference you don t always get the recognition that you deserve we don t always value the teaching profession like we should but every once in a while i think people start to understand not just in their own lives but in the lives of the nation how important the teaching profession is and how we ve got to do a better job of lifting it up in a global economy where the greatest job qualification isn t what you can do but what you know our teachers are the key to our nation s success to whether america will lead the world in the discoveries and the innovations and economic prosperity of this new century and that s why as president i m committed to doing everything i can to support the work of teachers that s why we re working to create better standards and assessments that teachers can use in their classroom that s why we re promoting innovation in teaching and learning making critical investments in early childhood education and helping more americans walk through the door of higher education and it s why we re taking ground breaking steps to recruit prepare support and reward outstanding teachers to encourage our best and brightest young people to follow in the footsteps of folks just like you this is especially critical right now as so many teachers from the baby boom generation are preparing to retire although they all look pretty young back here we re not worried about that and recent evaluations of student performance show that while we re making progress we still have a long way to go i know personally michelle knows that what teachers do is not easy my sister maya is a teacher jill biden a teacher we know how hard teachers work and i know what all of you do by staying past that last bell staying up late grading those papers putting together lesson plans spending your own money on books and supplies and going beyond the call of duty you do it because you know that s what will make a difference because you believe that there s no such thing as a child that can t learn that every child has their own gifts and it s up to us to discover them and it s up to us to see in our children what they can t yet see in themselves and for you those teachers who are in attendance today and for so many of your colleagues across this country teaching is not just about a paycheck it s a passion and it s a calling now nobody i think exhibits that more than our honoree today our teacher of the year tony mullen you know tony knew early on in life that he wanted to be a teacher but his parents passed away when he was young and he had to find work first at a factory then at the new york police department where he rose from police officer all the way to captain but tony never lost sight of his dream attending college while he worked becoming the first in his family to get a degree and going on to get a masters degree in education and during his time on the force tony saw a lot of young people who d gotten themselves in trouble and he knew he wanted to give kids like that a second chance so when he left the nypd tony actively searched for a job description that included phrases like working with students with severe behavioral and emotional problems kids whom others might see as difficult or impossible or lost causes tony didn t see them as lost causes as his superintendent put it tony considers working with these students an honor and a privilege in his application for this award tony emphasized the importance of passion which as he puts it ignites a flame too bright to be ignored by students that is the passion tony brings to his classroom every day striving to engage every student connecting with those no one else can reach spending hours counseling students individually listening compassionately giving them his fullest attention and that s just the beginning in his spare time tony mentors fellow teachers he leads a program to provide academic support to students who ve been expelled and he s the volunteer commissioner for a youth baseball league that grew from 200 to 1 000 children under his leadership giving so many young people the self confidence and teamwork skills they need to succeed tony doesn t ask for anything in return as he put it a teacher can receive no greater reward than the knowledge that he or she helped recover a lost student each of us carries with us in life the love and wisdom of people like tony the special few who were there for us when we needed it most who pushed us when we were afraid who pulled us back when we were headed in the wrong direction who refused to give up on us no matter how difficult we were i know that s certainly true for me i was telling tony and his family in the office michelle and i don t come from a fancy background the only reason that we re here is because at some point there were people like tony who helped steer us in the right direction in recognizing tony and all of you today we re also recognizing countless others who make the lives of our young people a little bit better and for that we honor you we thank you today and every single day so tony mullen god bless you and god bless the united states of america give tony a big round of applause well thank you everybody and with that enjoy the day i m going to shake a few hands and i m sure the first lady will as well dem bobama28 4 10a barack_obama hello everybody hello poet thank you so much thank you everybody please have a seat it is wonderful to be here it is wonderful to be in missouri it is wonderful to be this close to my house i want to thank poet for their great hospitality today i want to make a few acknowledgements we ve got some special guests first of all your outstanding governor of the great state of missouri jay nixon the mayor of macon doug bagley one of my favorite people who i believe is going to be doing outstanding things has already done great work as secretary of state and i think is going to be an outstanding eventually united states senator as well robin carnahan your attorney general chris koster is here the missouri director of agriculture dr john hagler is here the ceo of poet jeff broin is here where s jeff the president of poet macon john eggleston and the general manager who gave me an outstanding tour steve burnett where did steve go there he is back there also in the house is the secretary of agriculture for the united states of america former governor of iowa tom vilsack well thank you so much for the warm welcome it is good to be in missouri it is good to be with all of you here at poet steve just gave secretary vilsack and myself a tour of this outstanding facility and i know steve is very proud of the anniversary that s going to be coming up 10 years ago next month this plant produced its first gallon of ethanol and steve was there and and others were there and that s something to be very proud of today you ve got 45 employees who are producing 46 million gallons a year so that means one of you is overachieving congratulations to all of you i came here today and i visited iowa yesterday because there s a lot that towns here in the heartland here in middle america can teach the rest of the country there s certainly a lot that you can share with washington including some common sense so i wanted to talk with you about your community what you re going through what you re experiencing not only the economic pain which i think a lot of us have heard about and experienced but also the economic opportunity the economic possibilities lately we ve seen some welcome news around the country after two hard years our economy is growing again and our markets are climbing again and our businesses are beginning to create jobs again but when you come out to macon and surrounding areas whether it s in iowa or illinois or missouri or kansas or other parts of the heartland you understand that the recovery hasn t reached everybody yet times are tough out here in some places times have been tough for a very long time in the two years that i spent running for president and visiting towns like macon a lot of folks talked about how the american dream seemed like it was starting to slip away it was getting harder and harder to reach families were having a tougher time getting ahead farmers were having a tough time getting by worse yet many young people had been convinced that the only way that they could make a go of it was if they moved someplace else but success stories like poet what you ve achieved here prove that that doesn t have to be the case and i believe that your company and companies like yours can replicate this success all across the country since i took office we had to take a series of steps to rescue our economy from the immediate crisis we were going through the worst crisis since the great depression and we had to make sure that we didn t slip into a second great depression and some of those decisions we made weren t popular but they were the right ones and now the economy is stabilizing here s the thing though i didn t run for president just to get back to where we were i ran for president so that we could move forward and finally start dealing with some of the problems that we ve had for a very long time i want our economy to be on a new foundation for long term growth and prosperity and to create the kinds of conditions so that folks can work hard to finally get ahead that means making our schools more competitive and our colleges and our community colleges more affordable to young people that means health insurance reform that gives families and businesses more choice and more competition and better protection from some of the worst abuses of the insurance industry it means common sense reforms that prevent the irresponsibility of a few people on wall street wreaking havoc all across main street all across america and it means igniting a new clean energy economy that generates good jobs right here in the united states and starts freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil now for decades we ve talked about doing this for decades we ve talked about how our dependence on oil from other countries threatens our economy but usually our will to act kind of rises or falls depending on the price at the pump we talked about how it threatens future generations even as we witnessed some funny things going on in terms of our climate change and recognizing the environmental costs of relying on fossil fuels but frankly we always said we ll get to it tomorrow we talked about how it threatened our security but we ve grown actually more dependent on foreign oil every single year since richard nixon started talking about this danger of dependency on foreign oil and as we talked about it other nations were acting china spain countries that recognized that the country that leads the clean energy economy will be the country that leads the 21st century economy and they ve made serious investments to win that race and the jobs that come with it well i ve said before i don t accept second place for the united states of america i want us to be first in wind power first in solar power and i want us to be first when it comes to biodiesel and the technologies that are being developed in places like poet and that s why my energy security plan has been one of the top priorities of my administration since the day i took office we began early last year by making the largest investment in clean energy in our nation s history it s an investment that we expect will create or save up to 700 000 jobs across america by the end of 2012 jobs manufacturing next generation batteries for next generation vehicles jobs upgrading a smarter stronger power grid jobs doubling the capacity to generate renewable energy from sources like sun and wind and biofuels just like you do here and that investment was part of the recovery act it included 800 million in funding for ethanol fueling infrastructure biorefinery construction advanced biofuels research to help us reach the goal that i ve set which is to more than triple america s biofuels production in the next 12 years that is a goal that we can achieve and it s being worked on right here at poet and we re very proud of that i ve also created a biofuels working group led by secretary vilsack our energy secretary steven chu and our epa administrator lisa jackson and they re working to promote this generation of biofuels and help you deliver on the next generation of biofuels and i was talking to your ceo about the incredible progress that s already being made around cellulosic ethanol and how potentially we can have facilities that are producing cellulosic right here right next to the existing plant and create overall energy efficiencies that we just have not seen before and effectively compete with biofuels from anyplace in the world using brand new technologies in part that are being developed right here so i may be the president these days but i want to remind everybody i was the senator from illinois i didn t just discover the merits of biofuels like ethanol when i first hopped on the campaign bus i was telling steve this was not the first ethanol plant i visited and i believe in the potential of what you re doing right here to contribute to our clean energy future but also to our rural economies by the way so does our military some of you may have seen just last week the navy tested a fighter jet which was named the green hornet it is the first plane ever to fly faster than the speed of sound while running on a mix of half biofuel i actually saw the plane myself when i visited andrew s air force base and i have to say it s pretty cool so there shouldn t be any doubt that renewable homegrown fuels are a key part of our strategy for a clean energy future a future of new industries new jobs in towns like macon and new independence here at poet i believe that you re doing more than just helping stake america s claim on our future you re staking macon s claim on america s future and i m committed to making sure that communities like this one have a bright future of opportunity going forward and i pledge to work with you and the great folks at the state level like governor nixon our secretary of agriculture all of us are going to be collaborating day in and day out to make sure that you re successful and that we continue to build on the outstanding work ten years from now i want us to look back and say that the first 10 years were nothing that the next 10 years were even better all right thank you very much everybody god bless you thank you dem bobama28 4 10b barack_obama hello everybody it s good to be home it is good to be back in quincy thank you everybody thank you it is good to be back in quincy we ve got some special guests here i want to acknowledge the outstanding governor of the great state of illinois patrick quinn is here your fine mayor john spring give him a big round of applause attorney general lisa madigan treasurer and soon to be senator alexi giannoulias secretary of state and tumbler supreme jesse white so i missed you guys you know now being president is nice you live above the store so it s a really short commute there s a nice plane but one of the toughest things about being president is i don t get a chance to come home as much i d like and visit with all of you like i used to i see a lot of familiar faces in the crowd here now part of the problem is is that when i travel now it kind of causes a ruckus i do remember though the last time i was here i think it was in this building that we were filling up sandbags weren t we and i still remember that day because it was the picture of what america is about you had people from all different walks of life the whole community coming together everybody was working hard everybody knew that there was a challenge coming from the potential flooding but everybody was in good spirits because they figured if we re all working together then there s no reason why we can t handle this we ve handled things before and that s the american spirit on display and that s the spirit of quincy and the spirit of illinois so it s just good to be reminded of that and to come back and spend some time with you all we spent a couple of days in iowa and missouri and now back here yea missouri how about iowa have we got some iowans here we got a few iowans but we are in illinois but over the last couple of days we ve talked to workers who are busy building wind blades for these big wind turbines and a biofuel plant families and small business owners trying to navigate through a tough economy talking to farmers about what s happening to family farms in the region and because it s folks like all of you and towns like quincy that give america its heartbeat that s why it s so important for me to be able to visit it s towns like this where working men and women built the american dream with their bare hands this is where our roots are i just met a young man coming in he says he s my cousin there he is right there seriously it s what is it fourth generation four generations back i told him he was a little better looking than me but all of us trace back to this experience of parents grandparents great grandparents building this american dream not having much to begin with and that dream is shared by every illinoisan and every american the chance to make a good living to raise a healthy and secure family and most of all to give our kids opportunities that we didn t have ourselves now the truth is is that sometimes it feels like that dream is slipping away times are tough in quincy times are tough all across america we ve gone through the worst economy since the great depression even though our economy is growing again even though our markets are climbing again and our businesses are finally beginning to create jobs again there are a lot of folks who still aren t feeling that recovery in their own lives and i ve heard their stories across the country i ve read it in the letters that i get each night and a lot of them are worried about whether or not they re going to be able to sustain their dream for a better life many felt that way even before this most recent crisis even before the economic storm of the past two years folks were living up to their responsibilities as best they could working hard looking after their families giving back to their communities but they kept on finding themselves getting hurt in this economy in ways they didn t expect and part of it was because washington and wall street weren t living up to their responsibilities that s why i asked to be your president that s why so many of you joined the campaign you joined me because you believed we had it within our power to change things you figured we could solve the problems that had been holding us back year after year after year and focus on working americans again you believed we could keep the american dream alive in our time and for all time and so that s what i want to talk about today when i took office we were in the midst of this historic financial crisis brought on by reckless and irresponsible speculation on wall street that in turn had led to a recession that hammered main street across america and you saw lost jobs and lost homes and lost businesses and downscaled dreams the first thing we had to do then was mount an aggressive response to make sure that this terrible recession didn t turn into another great depression and let s face it that required some tough steps to stabilize the financial sector and some of those steps weren t popular i knew they weren t popular i ve got pollsters they told me boy that s really going to be unpopular but we made those decisions anyway because the well being of millions of americans depended on them even if they didn t poll well they were the right thing to do it was the only thing we could do to take those steps so we took these steps to get america back on its feet we aimed tax relief right at the middle class the cornerstone of the american dream we made sure that we cut taxes for 95 percent of working families put money in their pockets because they were experiencing hard times fewer hours or somebody in the family being laid off making sure that they could still buy groceries and pay the bills to keep the economy afloat we cut taxes for small businesses we cut taxes for first time homebuyers we cut taxes for students and parents paying for college and all of this not only did this help those individual families but it increased purchasing power and spending power for businesses all across the country and then we extended unemployment benefits and we made cobra cheaper for folks who had lost their jobs and then we helped give help to the states and pat quinn will tell you because of the federal assistance that was provided we averted some massive layoffs of teachers and police officers and firefighters all across the country so we did what it took to rescue our economy and spark its recovery and that work goes on and so i m pleased to see that we were losing 700 000 jobs a month when i came into office now we re gaining jobs the economy was contracting now the economy is growing the markets are back we re making progress we re moving in the right direction but keep in mind i didn t run for president just to get back to where we were when we started i want us to do better than we were doing i want folks to have more opportunity i want people to have more and better jobs and i want our young people to be getting better educations and more access to college it s time to rebuild our economy on a new foundation so that we ve got real and sustained growth it s time to extend opportunity to every corner of main street in every city and every town and every county in america so that young people don t feel like they ve got to move someplace else to make their way they can stay right here in quincy they can stay in monroe they can stay in macon they can stay in fort madison it s time to create conditions so that americans who work hard can gain ground again and they don t have to take out a bunch of credit card debt they don t have to endanger their long term financial future and that s what that s at the heart of all our efforts it s why we made the biggest investment in clean energy in our history creating middle class jobs in middle america that harness the wind and the sun and biofuels that won t be shipped away jobs that will stay right here in the united states of america and create energy independence so we don t have to import as much oil it s why we took on the special interests and reformed the student loan system so that it works for students not bankers i don t know if people paid attention to this because we were having such a big debate around health care people may have missed this the way the student loan system was working the federal government was guaranteeing these loans but the banks were still taking billions of dollars of profits out of the student loan program and my attitude is well if we re guaranteeing them then where s the risk so what are you getting paid for so we said we ll just lend the money directly to the students that saved tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending that we re now reinvesting in making college more affordable and upgrading america s community colleges so that every young person in america can get ahead in the 21st century and yes quincy that s why we finally passed health reform in america reform that will begin to end some of the worst practices in the insurance industry this year so this year they re going to they will have to stop dropping you when you get sick this year children with preexisting conditions they ve got to be able to buy insurance this year some of these lifetime limits that mean that you got insurance but you still end up being bankrupt those practices are going to end and in a few years millions of families and small business owners are going to have more choice more competition you re going to be able to purchase the same kind of high quality affordable care that members of congress get and you know that s going to be pretty good you know they re going to give themselves good insurance you re going to be able to buy it too and by the way this reform will reduce our deficit by more than 1 trillion and listen don t this notion i know the debate was contentious but the truth of the matter is since i ve been here i ve already met i was in mount pleasant iowa met a woman met a woman at jerry s you know jerry s right this is a restaurant there and met a woman and she said she came up and she said my husband is self employed i m a homemaker we both have preexisting conditions we need help now and i told her this is exactly why we fought so hard for health care reform and then today i met a woman who had breast cancer and she was wondering how soon can we start moving on some of these programs inside the health care legislation this isn t some abstraction sometimes the folks who were fighting us they made it sound as if oh he just wants big government this no i just want people to be able to not go bankrupt and lose their house when they get sick i just want them not to have see their premiums doubled i don t want them to be taken advantage of by insurance companies i want you to get a fair deal and a fair shake and that s part of my job as president of the united states of america i love you back now speaking of speaking of you getting a fair shake that s why we need good old common sense wall street reform and we need it today we don t need it next year we don t need to do another study and examine it we need it now and in case you re wondering let me just take a minute to explain why it s important to you the crisis we went through it wasn t part of the normal economic cycle what happened was you had some people not all people there s some very decent people here who are in the financial sector but you had some people on wall street who took these unbelievable risks with other people s money they made bets they were making bets on what was going to happen in the housing market and they would create these derivatives and all these instruments that nobody understood but it was basically operating like a big casino and it was producing big profits and big bonuses for them but it was all built on shaky economics and some of these subprime loans that had been given out and because we did not have common sense rules in place those irresponsible practices came awfully close to bringing down our entire economy and millions of dreams along with it we had a system where some on wall street could take these risks without fear of failure because they keep the profits when it was working and as soon as it went south they expected you to cover their losses so it was one of those heads they tail tails you lose so they failed to consider that behind every dollar that they traded all that leverage they were generating acting like it was monopoly money there were real families out who were trying to finance a home or pay for their child s college or open a business or save for retirement so what s working fine for them wasn t working for ordinary americans and we ve learned that clearly it doesn t work out fine for the country it s got to change now what we re doing i want to be clear we re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that s fairly earned i mean i do think at a certain point you ve made enough money but part of the american way is you can just keep on making it if you re providing a good product or you re providing a good service we don t want people to stop fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow the economy i ve said this before i ve said this on wall street just last week i believe in the power of the free market and i believe in a strong financial system and when it s working right financial institutions they help make possible families buying homes and businesses growing and new ideas taking flight an entrepreneur may have a great idea but he may need to borrow some money to make it happen it would be hard for a lot of us to buy a house our first house at least if we weren t able to take out a mortgage so there s nothing wrong with a financial system that helps the economy expand and there are a lot of good people in the financial industry who are doing things the right way and it s in our interest when those firms are strong and when they re healthy but some of these institutions that operated irresponsibly they re not just threatening themselves they threaten the whole economy and they threaten your dreams your prospects everything that you worked so hard to build so we just want them to operate in a way that s fair and honest and in the open so that we don t have to go through what we ve already gone through we want to make sure the financial system doesn t just work for wall street but it works for main street too it works for quincy it works for mount pleasant it works for macon and fort madison now let me explain to you what this reform should look like because one of the things you discover when you get to washington is what s black is white and what s up is down and sometimes people will i didn t say lie but they will tell stories about what s going on so let me just be very clear in terms of what we re proposing on financial reform first and i know this is important to you because it s important to me we re going to make sure the american taxpayer is never again on the hook when a wall street firm fails never again we don t want to see another bailout that s what this reform does now you ve got some you had some who were saying cynically just claiming the opposite that somehow this was a bill that institutionalized bailouts what this bill did was it said no if you have a firm on wall street that fails the financial industry is going to pay not taxpayers so a vote for reform is a vote to end taxpayer funded bailouts once and for all if a crisis like this again happens financial firms are going to foot the bill that s point number one point number two we re going to close the loopholes that allowed derivatives and all these other large risky deals that don t make a lot of economic sense and that could threaten our entire economy we want to bring those deals out into the out of the dark alleys of our financial system into the light of day so that everybody knows exactly what s happening what risks are being taken investors shareholders everybody knows what s going on that s the second thing number three this reform is going to give you more power because we re going to put in place the strongest consumer financial protections in history because and the reason this is important the reason this is important this crisis wasn t just the result of what happened on wall street it also happened because there were a lot of decisions by folks out on main street who were taking out mortgages they didn t understand credit cards they didn t understand auto loans that weren t a good deal some took on obligations they couldn t afford but millions of others were deceived or misled by shifting terms and confusing conditions and forests of fine print and your attorney general lisa madigan has been fighting on behalf of consumers in this state and she knows how badly we need these protections in fact lisa and a bunch of other attorney generals came to testify on behalf of the need for these consumer protection bills because they see this stuff in their offices every day and it s true all across the country now some argue that giving consumers more information in clear concise ways is somehow going to stifle competition i believe the opposite see i think if you know what you re buying you can make a good decision and that means that the companies instead of competing to see who can offer the most confusing products companies will have to compete the old fashioned way by offering the best product but that s not going to reduce innovation or competition you just should be knowing what you re buying it s like a lemon law right you don t want to go into the used car lot and get something where they ve changed the odometer and put a fresh coat of paint on some old beater and pretend like it s a new car well it s the same thing with financial products you should know what you re getting all right so that s the third thing finally we re going to give the people who own these companies these financial companies mainly investors and pension holders and shareholders like many of you we want you to have more say in the way they re run because some of these firms they ve got these huge salaries huge bonuses that create a perverse incentive to encourage people to take reckless risks but if you own stock in these companies you need to get some say in how they operate you ll get to decide how managers are paid and how those firms operate and that means that we ll actually increase the connection between main street and wall street they ll be more accountable to you so that s the reform we ve put forward these are the reforms that we re putting forward accountability which means no more bailouts closing loopholes no more trading of things like derivatives in the shadows consumer protections no more deceptive products a say on pay so that we give shareholders a more powerful voice that s what we re trying to do now i don t think this should be a partisan issue everybody republicans and democrats and independents were hurt by this crisis so everybody should want to fix it so i m very pleased that after a few days of delay it appears an agreement may be at hand to allow this debate to move forward on the senate floor on this critical issue i m very pleased by that and i want to work with anyone republican or democrat who wants to pursue these reforms in good faith and there can be some legitimate differences on certain issues but the bottom line is consumers have to be protected we have to end bailouts we ve got to make sure that these trading practices are out in the open we ve got to make sure that people have a say in terms of how these firms operate so they re more accountable so as long as we re adhering to those clear principles then i feel okay what i don t want is a deal made that is written by the financial industry lobbyists we ve had enough of that we ve had enough of that i want to listen to what they have to say but i don t them writing the bill i don t want democrats and republicans agreeing to a bill written by them for them i want a bill that s written for you for the american people so we re going to see how this debate unfolds we re going to get this done and we re going to get it done because you demand it it s been two years since this crisis born on wall street slammed into main street with its full fury and while things aren t nearly back to normal out here they re getting back to normal pretty quick up there some in washington think this debate is moving too fast they think well this is kind of a political game let s see how this whole thing can play to our advantage in november see that s not how i play i ve been calling for better rules on wall street since 2007 before this crisis happened so i don t think we re moving too fast i think we ve been moving too slow it s time to get this done and i don t think you want to see us wait for another year or two years i don t think you think washington is moving too fast i think you want to get this done you shouldn t have to wait another day for the protections from some of the practices that got us into this mess we can t let the recovery that s finally beginning to take hold fall prey to a whole new round of recklessness if we don t learn the lessons of this crisis we doom ourselves to repeat it and i refuse to let that happen so the time for reform is now quincy let me just say this through all the noise and the lobbyists and the partisanship and i know sometimes you re watching tv and saying sheesh everybody is yelling and hollering and why are they so mad but this debate comes down to a simple choice are we going to go down the same road where irresponsibility of a few can put millions of families at risk and stick taxpayers with a tab or are we going to protect consumers and strengthen our financial system and put rules in place that keep this from happening ever again are we going to give in to the special interests or are we going to score another victory for the american people are we going to stick with the status quo or are we going to bring about fundamental change that makes things work for ordinary americans we ve got the power to do something about this that s all it comes down to the will to act i still believe we can come together just like you all came together during those floods filling those sandbags everybody joining together everybody breaking a little sweat everybody helping out that s how america got built we are not powerless in the face of our challenges we don t quit when things get tough we re not afraid when something happens we come together we move forward we act we are americans our destiny is written by us not for us and if we remember that and summon that spirit once again we re going to strengthen our economy today and tomorrow and restore security to the middle class that s what we re fighting for the american dream right here in quincy right here in illinois all across the country god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama28 5 10 barack_obama good afternoon everybody i know it s a little warm out here so want to get started i ve just had a meeting with these governors members of congress local officials as well as admiral thad allen the national incident commander in charge of response efforts to the bp oil spill admiral allen gave us an update the latest information on both the efforts to plug the well as well as giving us an update on arrangements and coordination that s being made with respect to mitigating this damage that s been done he updated us on these latest efforts to stop the leak mitigate the damage to the great beaches of the gulf coast and i had the chance to visit with charlotte a beach like port fourchon that gives you a sense of what extraordinary efforts are being made at the local level but also the damage that we re already starting to see as a consequence of this spill now our mission remains the same as it has since this disaster began since the day i visited louisiana nearly four weeks ago we want to stop the leak we want to contain and clean up the oil and we want to help the people of this region return to their lives and their livelihoods as soon as possible and our response treats this event for what it is it s an assault on our shores on our people on the regional economy and on communities like this one this isn t just a mess that we ve got to mop up people are watching their livelihoods wash up on the beach parents are worried about the implications for their children s health every resident of this community has watched this nightmare threaten the dreams that they ve worked so hard to build and they want it made right and they want to make it right now i just had a chance to listen to mayor david carmadelle of grande isle our host here telling us heartbreaking stories about fishermen who are trying to figure out where the next paycheck is going to come from how are they going to pay a mortgage or a note on their boat and he is having to dig into his pocket at this point to make sure that some of them are able to deal with the economic impact so this is something that has to be dealt with immediately not sometime later and that s everybody s driving focus everybody who is standing behind me this is our highest priority and it deserves a response that is equal to the task that s why this has already been the largest cleanup effort in u s history on the day this disaster began even as we launched a search and rescue effort for workers on the drilling rig we were already staging equipment in the event of a larger scale spill by the time we discovered the third breach a week after the deepwater horizon platform sank we had already stationed more than 70 vessels and hundreds of thousands of feet of protective boom on site today there are more than 20 000 people in the region working around the clock to contain and clean up this spill we ve activated about 1 400 members of the national guard across four states nearly 1 400 vessels are aiding in the containment and cleanup effort and we deployed more than 3 million feet of hard and sorbent boom including an additional 100 000 just yesterday for these parishes in louisiana that face the greatest threat now i ve made clear to admiral allen and i did so again today that he should get whatever he needs to deal with this crisis whatever he needs he will get right now we re still within the window where we don t yet know the outcome of the highly complex top kill procedure that the federal government authorized bp to use to try to stop the leak if it is successful it would obviously be welcome news if it s not a team of some of the world s top scientists engineers and experts led by our energy secretary and nobel prize winning physicist steven chu has for some time being has for some time been exploring any and all reasonable contingency plans but our response will continue with its full force regardless of the outcome of the top kill approach because even if the leak was stopped today it wouldn t change the fact that these waters still contain oil from what is now the largest spill in american history and more of it will come ashore to ensure that we re fully prepared for that and in accordance with input from folks down here i ve directed secretary napolitano and admiral allen to triple the manpower in places where oil has hit the shore or is within 24 hours of impact this increase will allow us to further intensify this already historic response contain and remove oil more quickly and help minimize the time that any oil comes into contact with our coastline that means deploying more boom cleaning more beaches performing more monitoring of wildlife and impact to this ecosystem we re also going to continue to do whatever it takes to help americans whose livelihoods have been upended by this spill gulf coast residents should know that we ve gathered all pertinent information regarding available assistance and the federal response in one place at whitehouse gov we have ordered bp to pay economic injury claims and we will make sure they deliver and the parish presidents and governors here in louisiana were already giving us some sense of some of the bureaucratic problems that we re going to have to cut through but we are going to cut through them and for those who are in economic distress if you ve already filed a claim and you re not satisfied with the resolution then whitehouse gov will point you in the right direction as i said yesterday the small business administration has stepped in to help businesses by approving loans but also as important allowing many to defer existing loan payments a lot of folks are still loaded up with loans that they had from katrina and other natural disasters down here so they may need some additional help if you re a small business owner and you weren t aware of some of the programs that have been put in place or haven t participated then again the white house website will connect you to the resources you need and we are making sure that all the parish presidents know and folks like the mayor other local officials are going to be aware of how they can get immediate help from us what s more we ve stationed doctors and scientists across the five gulf states to look out for people s health and then to monitor any ill effects felt by cleanup workers and local residents and we ve begun setting up a system to track these efforts excuse me to track these effects and ensure folks get the care that they need and we ve told bp that we expect them to pay for that too as i ve said before bp is the responsible party for this disaster what that means is they re legally responsible for stopping the leak and they re financially responsible for the enormous damage that they ve created and we re going to hold them accountable along with any other party responsible for the initial explosion and loss of life on that platform but as i said yesterday and as i repeated in the meeting that we just left i ultimately take responsibility for solving this crisis i m the president and the buck stops with me so i give the people of this community and the entire gulf my word that we re going to hold ourselves accountable to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to stop this catastrophe to defend our natural resources to repair the damage and to keep this region on its feet justice will be done for those whose lives have been upended by this disaster for the families of those whose lives have been lost that is a solemn pledge that i am making i think i can speak for anybody here and for anybody who has been involved in the response and the cleanup effort and for most americans when i say that i would gladly do whatever it takes to end this disaster today but i want to also repeat something that i said to the group as a whole while we were meeting this is a manmade catastrophe that s still evolving and we face a long term recovery and restoration effort america has never experienced an event like this before and that means that as we respond to it not every judgment we make is going to be right the first time out sometimes there are going to be disagreements between experts or between federal and state and local officials or among state officials or between states about what the most effective measures will be sometimes there are going to be risks and unintended consequences associated with a particular mitigation strategy that we consider in other words there are going to be a lot of judgment calls involved here there are not going to be silver bullets or a lot of perfect answers for some of the challenges that we face understandably the feelings of frustration and anger the sense that any response is inadequate we expect that frustration and anger to continue until we actually solve this problem but in the meantime we ve got to make sure that everybody is working in concert that everybody is moving in the same direction and i want everybody to know that everybody here at every level is working night and day to end this crisis we re considering every single idea out there especially from folks who know these communities best admiral allen announced yesterday for example that after a bunch of back and forth between state and federal experts he is prepared to authorize moving forward with a portion of the idea for a barrier island that may stop some of the oil from coming ashore we had an extensive conversation about this and to see whether additional steps can be taken on this barrier island idea and what i told the parish president what i told the governor is that if there is an idea that can be shown to work then we should move forward on it and they deserve quick answers but i also reminded everybody that we ve got to make sure that whatever we do is actually going to work particularly because we re going to have not unlimited resources at least not right now for example there s a limited amount of boom we re going to try to get more boom manufactured but that may take some time and that means we re going to have to make some decisions about how to deploy it effectively the bottom line is this every decision we make is based on a single criterion what s going to best protect and make whole the people and the ecosystems of the gulf and i want to thank everybody in this region who s rolled up their sleeves and pitched in to help from the national guard putting their experience to the task to the local officials and every citizen who loves this area and calls it home every american who s traveled to the region to lend a hand if any american is looking for ways to volunteer and help then we ve put links to that information on our website as well that s whitehouse gov and all these governors bobby jindal as well as charlie crist and bob riley they want and i know haley barbour is not here but i think he agrees with this as well one of the powerful ways that you can help the gulf right now is to visit the communities and the beaches off of the coast except for three beaches here in louisiana all of the gulf s beaches at this moment are open they are safe and they are clean and so that s always a good way to help is to come down and provide support to the communities along the coasts to the people of the gulf coast i know that you ve weathered your fair share of trials and tragedy i know there have been times where you ve wondered if you were being asked to face them alone i am here to tell you that you re not alone you will not be abandoned you will not be left behind the cameras at some point may leave the media may get tired of the story but we will not we are on your side and we will see this through we re going to keep at this every day until the leak has stopped until this coastline is clean and your communities are made whole again that s my promise to you and that is a promise on behalf of a nation it is one that we will keep and i will make one last point and i said this to every leader who is here if something is not going right down here then they need to talk to thad allen and if they re not getting satisfaction from thad allen then they can talk to me there s nobody here who can t get in touch with me directly if there is an idea a suggestion or a logjam that needs to be dealt with so we re in this together and it s going to be a difficult time and obviously the folks down here are going to be feeling the brunt of it but we re going to make sure that we re doing everything we can to get this solved as quickly as possible and i want to again think everybody here for the extraordinary work that they re putting in you shouldn t underestimate how hard these folks are working day in day out on behalf of their constituencies so thank you very much thank you everybody all i can say is that we ve got the best minds working on it and dem bobama29 1 09 barack_obama all right everybody please have a seat well this is a wonderful day first of all it is fitting that the very first bill that i sign the lilly ledbetter fair pay restoration act that it is upholding one of this nation s founding principles that we are all created equal and each deserve a chance to pursue our own version of happiness it s also fitting that we re joined today by the woman after whom this bill is named someone who michelle and i have had the privilege to get to know ourselves and it is fitting that we are joined this morning by the first woman speaker of the house of representatives nancy pelosi it s appropriate that this is the first bill we do together we could not have done it without her madam speaker thank you for your extraordinary work and to all the sponsors and members of congress and leadership who helped to make this day possible lilly ledbetter did not set out to be a trailblazer or a household name she was just a good hard worker who did her job and she did it well for nearly two decades before discovering that for years she was paid less than her male colleagues for doing the very same work over the course of her career she lost more than 200 000 in salary and even more in pension and social security benefits losses that she still feels today now lilly could have accepted her lot and moved on she could have decided that it wasn t worth the hassle and the harassment that would inevitably come with speaking up for what she deserved but instead she decided that there was a principle at stake something worth fighting for so she set out on a journey that would take more than ten years take her all the way to the supreme court of the united states and lead to this day and this bill which will help others get the justice that she was denied because while this bill bears her name lilly knows that this story isn t just about her it s the story of women across this country still earning just 78 cents for every dollar men earn women of color even less which means that today in the year 2009 countless women are still losing thousands of dollars in salary income and retirement savings over the course of a lifetime equal pay is by no means just a women s issue it s a family issue it s about parents who find themselves with less money for tuition and child care couples who wind up with less to retire on households where one breadwinner is paid less than she deserves that s the difference between affording the mortgage or not between keeping the heat on or paying the doctor bills or not and in this economy when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month s paycheck to simple and plain discrimination so signing this bill today is to send a clear message that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody that there are no second class citizens in our workplaces and that it s not just unfair and illegal it s bad for business to pay somebody less because of their gender or their age or their race or their ethnicity religion or disability and that justice isn t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook it s about how our laws affect the daily lives and the daily realities of people their ability to make a living and care for their families and achieve their goals ultimately equal pay isn t just an economic issue for millions of americans and their families it s a question of who we are and whether we re truly living up to our fundamental ideals whether we ll do our part as generations before us to ensure those words put on paper some 200 years ago really mean something to breathe new life into them with a more enlightened understanding that is appropriate for our time that is what lilly ledbetter challenged us to do and today i sign this bill not just in her honor but in the honor of those who came before women like my grandmother who worked in a bank all her life and even after she hit that glass ceiling kept getting up and giving her best every day without complaint because she wanted something better for me and my sister and i sign this bill for my daughters and all those who will come after us because i want them to grow up in a nation that values their contributions where there are no limits to their dreams and they have opportunities their mothers and grandmothers never could have imagined in the end that s why lilly stayed the course she knew it was too late for her that this bill wouldn t undo the years of injustice she faced or restore the earnings she was denied but this grandmother from alabama kept on fighting because she was thinking about the next generation it s what we ve always done in america set our sights high for ourselves but even higher for our children and our grandchildren and now it s up to us to continue this work this bill is an important step a simple fix to ensure fundamental fairness for american workers and i want to thank this remarkable and bipartisan group of legislators who worked so hard to get it passed and i want to thank all the advocates who are in the audience who worked so hard to get it passed this is only the beginning i know that if we stay focused as lilly did and keep standing for what s right as lilly did we will close that pay gap and we will make sure that our daughters have the same rights the same chances and the same freedoms to pursue their dreams as our sons so thank you lilly ledbetter dem bobama29 1 10 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you so much i ve got a couple of introductions that i want to make very quickly first i want to thank terry and his family for greeting me here today and i want to thank terry and joe for giving us a tour of chesapeake machine company in addition we ve got secretary ray lahood secretary of transportation where is he ray way in the back he s waving we ve got your governor martin o malley in the house we ve got i believe your outstanding senator barbara mikulski a couple of great members of congress congressman john sarbanes and congressman elijah cummings and we ve got council president stephanie rawlings blake your next mayor of baltimore now i was thrilled to get the tour first of all i just like getting out of the white house and then i like tooling around companies that are actually making stuff and i want to tell you all i m very impressed with the work that you do and you know i have to say that when you get out of washington and you come here it s nice to see a functioning well oiled machine that s a nice change of pace from what we see sometimes up in washington as we stand here today our country is still reeling from a recession that s as tough as deep and as dire as anything that we ve known for generations and i don t need to tell you a lot of families are hurting out there businesses are struggling one in 10 americans can t find work so i know that during these tough times folks at this company feel relatively lucky to be working even when the work is hard and the days are long because everybody knows that there s somebody out there who s not as fortunate a friend or a neighbor maybe even a husband or a wife but even in the face of these challenges we have reason to remain hopeful as i was listening to terry and joe talk about some of the business opportunities that are out there for solar panel construction and high speed rail construction the great work that they re doing on behalf of our troops as part of a contract all those things are going to be making a difference and it points to the possibilities of sustainable growth and the fact is we re standing in a very different place than we were just a year ago just last year businesses were cutting 700 000 jobs per month the markets were plummeting many people feared another great depression today we ve stopped the flood of job losses we ve stabilized the financial system and we can safely say that we ve avoided that looming depression this morning we received a report that affirms our progress and the swift and aggressive actions that made it possible we learned that the economy grew over the past three months at a rate of 5 7 percent now just to give you a sense of perspective there that s the fastest economic growth in six years and it s a stark improvement over the rapid and terrible decline that we were experiencing one year ago earlier this week i spoke to congress and the american people about the steps that we took to pull us out of this nosedive through the recovery act we cut taxes for 95 percent of working families you guys may not have noticed it in your paychecks but each month it s a little bit bigger because of those tax cuts that we put in two million families just in this state of maryland have benefited we cut taxes for college students and first time homebuyers and small businesses we made health insurance cheaper through cobra so some of you know friends or family members who ve lost their jobs but they kept their health insurance because cobra was 65 percent cheaper than it would have otherwise been and we extended unemployment insurance for folks who have lost their jobs including more than 200 000 people here in maryland we ve created and saved 2 million jobs that s 2 million teachers and firefighters police officers builders manufacturing workers and others who are on the job today because of some of the steps that we took now i ve got to admit not all the steps we took were great politics you know i talked about this a little bit at my state of the union if you were going to list the hundred most popular things that i have done as president being married to michelle obama is number one bailing out banks and rescuing failing auto companies doesn t make the list those things weren t popular but i didn t run for president just to do what was popular i ran for president to do what was right for the country in the midst of a really bad recession and the possibility of financial meltdown preventing the collapse of our banks and with it the access to lending and credit and preventing hundreds of thousands of job losses that would have followed the collapse of two of our major automakers that was the right thing to do it was the right thing to do it was the necessary thing to do it might have not been popular and i sure didn t like doing it but it was the right thing to do and as bad as the damage has been in this recession without those actions the damage could have been far more extensive now even though the storms of the past two years are starting to lessen the wreckage that s been left behind remains while the recovery act has created and saved 2 million jobs this recession has cost us 7 million jobs so there s still a big gap still a big hole that we have to fill and it represents a terrible human tragedy as families are thrown into hardship and uncertainty but the good news is today s report means that we re increasing gdp we re increasing economic growth that means businesses are going to start to see more customers and hopefully even here at chesapeake you might start seeing enough orders that you start needing to hire that extra shift that could make a big difference now in the meantime though there are a lot of folks who are still out of work and what they re saying is when am i going to get some help when am i going to get some relief for these folks a good job is the only good news that matters and that s why when i spoke to the nation earlier this week i called on congress to pass a jobs bill without delay and this jobs bill should start where most new jobs do in america s small businesses companies like this one today i m proposing what i believe is the best way to cut taxes while promoting hiring by small businesses through a tax credit for companies that add workers or increase salaries this year now is the perfect time for this kind of incentive because the economy is growing but businesses are still hesitant to start hiring again the economy is growing but job growth is lagging companies are recovering but not yet taking that next step and taking on somebody full time and while businesses will always be the engines of job creation in this country government can create the conditions for those businesses to expand and hire more workers so here s how the tax credit would work employers like terry would get a tax credit of up to 5 000 for each and every employee that they add in 2010 and you would get a tax break for increases in salaries as well so if you raise wages for employees making under 100 000 we d refund your payroll taxes for every dollar that you increase those wages faster than inflation so this is a simple easy to understand mechanism that will cut taxes for more than 1 million small businesses it ll give them an incentive to hire more people and a little bit of extra money to pay higher wages to expand work hours or invest in their company and in order to get this incentive working quickly employers would actually be able to receive this money every quarter as opposed to waiting a whole year to see it benefit their taxes so the chesapeake machine company is a perfect example i understand terry that you may be thinking about hiring a couple of new workers this year well this tax credit could help you do it and it would mean 5 000 per worker that you hire now it s true that in some instances this tax credit will go to businesses that were going to hire folks anyway but then it simply becomes a tax cut for small businesses that will spur investment and expansion and that s a good thing too and that s why this type of tax cut is considered by economists who rarely agree on anything to be one of the most cost effective ways of accelerating job growth especially because we will include provisions to prevent people from gaming the system so for example you won t get a tax credit for doubling your workforce while cutting the hours of each worker in half we re not going to let you game the system to take advantage of the tax credit unless you re doing right by your workers now finally this is only one part of the jobs package that i ve proposed i m also calling for additional investments in infrastructure we were just talking terry and i were and joe we were just talking about the fact that part of their business right now has to do with rail lines and doing some work for amtrak we were just talking about the fact that part of it has to do with solar companies well we want to increase our investment in clean energy all of this is going to create jobs in the short term while helping our economy in the long run and i ve proposed taking some of the money that went to the big banks on wall street to help bolster the financial system and give it to smaller community banks that lend to small businesses like chesapeake because too many companies that i m seeing out there still can t find affordable credit the house of representatives has passed a jobs bill that includes some of these proposals i expect the senate to do the same i m open to any good ideas from democrats or republicans in fact several members of congress have proposed tax breaks for businesses similar to what i ve proposed and i m looking forward to working with them the key thing is it s time to put america back to work we ve had two very tough years and while these proposals will create jobs all across america we ve got a long way to go to make up for the millions of jobs that we lost in this recession and i don t have to tell folks in baltimore that even before this recession hit the middle class was facing real hardships stagnant incomes rising costs growing economic security so rebuilding this economy and rebuilding and rebuilding it stronger than before will take time and it s going to take hard work and vigilance but i know we can do it you don t need to look any further than the folks here at this company in one form or another people have been working and building right here for nearly a century starting back when terry s grandfather was calling the shots in good times and bad through storms and still waters men like you have gotten up and women like you have gotten up and gone to work and put in long days and headed home you re a little tired but you re glad for the opportunity to make a living while helping this country become the most productive innovative economy in the world small businesses have powered our economy in the past they are fostering our recovery today i have no doubt if we support you that small businesses like this one will lead us to more prosperous days ahead so thanks for all the great work you do thanks for hosting me i know you guys probably had to fuss a little bit to get ready for us but i can tell you from my perspective at least it was a great visit i appreciate everything you do good luck dem bobama29 10 09 barack_obama good afternoon everybody please have a seat before i begin i want to just acknowledge two people who are working extraordinarily hard on behalf of small businesses first of all the administrator of our small business administration karen mills is here the other individual who is on his way and will be here in a hot second but we didn t want to keep everybody waiting is a dear friend of mine a great former governor of virginia is now the senator from the great state of virginia and a huge supporter of small business and trying to figure out how to help all of you control your costs and that s senator mark warner so when he comes in please give him a smile i asked you here today to talk about health insurance reform and why it s so critical to the success of small businesses across our country but before i do let me talk a minute just briefly about the new economic numbers that were released this morning i am gratified that our economy grew in the third quarter of this year we ve come a long way since the first three months of 2009 when our economy shrunk by an alarming 6 4 percent in fact the 3 5 percent growth in the third quarter is the largest three month gain we have seen in two years this is obviously welcome news and an affirmation that this recession is abating and the steps we ve taken have made a difference but i also know that we got a long way to go to fully restore our economy and recover from what s been the longest and deepest downturn since the great depression and while this report today represents real progress the benchmark i use to measure the strength of our economy is not just whether our gdp is growing but whether we re creating jobs whether families are having an easier time paying their bills whether our businesses are hiring and doing well and that s what i m here to talk with you about today i know many of you have come from different corners of our country to be here and looking out at all of you i m reminded of the extraordinary diversity of america s small businesses you re owners of coffee shops and diners and hotels you re florists exterminators builders each of your shops and firms reflects different passions and different ideas and different skills but what you share is a willingness to pursue those passions take a chance on those ideas and make the most of those skills what you share is an entrepreneurial spirit a tireless work ethic and a simple hope for something better that lies at the heart of the american ideal businesses like yours are the engines of job growth in america over the past decade and a half america s small businesses have created 65 percent of all new jobs in this country and more than half of all americans working in the private sector are either employed by a small business or own one now even in good times starting a business as all of you know is not easy it takes moxie it takes gumption it takes ingenuity and failure is often more likely than success but i don t have to tell you that it s been particularly difficult over the past few years from the middle of 2007 through the end of 2008 small businesses lost 2 4 million jobs thousands have shut their doors altogether and because of the credit crunch banks have shrunk back from lending making it harder to get loans to branch out or finance your inventories or maybe even to make payroll maybe you ve had to forgo raises maybe you ve had to do the unthinkable and lay off friends or family so we know how tough times have been for small businesses that s why i made sure the recovery act included a number of measures to help small businesses weather this economic storm we ve put a tax cut a tax cut not a tax hike a tax cut into the pockets of the vast majority of small business owners and employees we ve supported nearly 65 000 loans to small businesses more than 13 billion in new lending more than 1 200 banks and credit unions that had stopped issuing sba loans when the financial crisis hit are lending again today and just last week we proposed increasing the cap on what are called 7 a and 504 loans some of the loans most frequently handed out by the sba but given the enormous problems small businesses and all americans are facing today we re aware that these steps are by no means enough if we re serious about strengthening small businesses if we re serious about creating a climate where our entrepreneurs can succeed if we re serious about giving you the chance to prosper and grow i believe this administration firmly believes that we need to pass health insurance reform in the united states of america now few have a bigger stake in what happens than all of you few have a bigger stake than the men and women who own a small business work at a small business or rely on someone who does few have a bigger stake in what happens because few are struggling more under the status quo you all know the story we all know that family premiums have skyrocketed more than 130 percent over the past decade they have more than doubled but small businesses have been hit harder than most a story in the paper just the other day said that many small businesses may see their premiums rise about 15 percent over the coming year twice the rate they rose last year and in part because small businesses pay higher administrative costs than larger ones your employees pay up to 18 percent more in premiums for the very same health insurance in one national survey nearly three quarters of small businesses that don t offer benefits cited high premiums as the reason and that s not surprising the bottom line is that too many americans like you can t afford to build the kinds of businesses you d been hoping to build too many budding entrepreneurs can t afford to take a gamble on a smart idea because they can t give up the health insurance they get in their current job too many of you not only can t afford to provide health insurance to your employees too many of you are having a tough time just affording health insurance for yourselves that s bad for our economy it s bad for our country and that s what we ll change when health insurance reform becomes law just this morning the house of representatives released its version of health reform legislation and i want to commend nancy pelosi and the democratic caucus for their leadership in achieving this critical milestone they forged a strong consensus that represents a historic step forward this bill includes reforms that will finally help make quality insurance affordable importantly this bill is also fully paid for and will reduce the deficit in the long term now there is no doubt that this legislation and the legislation that s being drafted in the senate would benefit millions of small businesses it s being written with the interests of americans like you and your employees in mind and yet there are those who have a vested interest in the status quo who are claiming otherwise and they re using misleading figures and disingenuous arguments so i want to try to explain as clearly as i can exactly what health reform would mean for small business owners like you and the workers you employ the first thing i want to make clear is that if you are happy with the insurance plan that you have right now if the costs you re paying and the benefits you re getting are what you want them to be then you can keep offering that same plan nobody will make you change it what we will do is make the coverage that you re currently providing more affordable by offering a tax credit to small businesses that are trying to do the right thing and provide coverage for their employees under the house and senate bills millions of small businesses would be eligible for a tax credit of up to 50 percent of their premiums that s in the legislation that s already been proposed we ll also make your coverage more stable and more secure right now if just one of your workers falls seriously ill it could spell disaster for your entire business you could see your premiums shoot up and you face a painful choice do you eat the costs and ask your workers to contribute more do you seek another insurance plan without any guarantee that you ll be able to find one that s affordable or do you just scale back benefits or drop coverage altogether i don t think that you should have to make that choice in the united states of america under health insurance reform we put an end to the days when an insurance company could use one worker s illness to justify jacking up premiums for everybody we ll crack down on excessive overhead charges by setting strong standards on how much of your premium can go towards administrative costs and requiring insurers to give you a refund if they violate those standards it ll be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition and it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most they ll no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime if you get your insurance through your employer we ll change the cutoff on how old your kids can be to remain on your plan we ll raise that to 26 years old we ll place a limit on how much you can be charged for out of pocket expenses and insurance companies will be required to cover with no extra charge routine checkups and preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies because there s no reason we shouldn t be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse and cost more money that makes sense it saves money and it saves lives so that s what we ll do for all the small businesses that have insurance that are currently providing insurance and for all the small businesses that can t afford to provide insurance right now and small business owners who can t even afford to get coverage themselves we ll finally make quality coverage affordable and here s how we ll do it one of the biggest problems in our health care system right now is if you re a small business owner or if you re self employed you often have such a small number of workers that insurance companies aren t all that interested in your business it s basic economics you don t have a lot of leverage as a small customer and as a result you end up paying higher costs than big businesses that can get better deals because they ve got more workers they got more purchasing power so what we ll do is to set up what we re calling an exchange that will pool small businesses together and that will mean it s not just you bargaining with insurance companies it s you and many other small business owners and self employed individuals all across the country and with all that additional leverage you ll be able to get better deals than you could have ever received on your own in fact small businesses that choose one of the plans in this exchange could save 25 percent on their premiums by 2016 only two years after the exchange has been set up and we ll also offer tax credits to make insurance even more affordable for millions of small businesses so meanwhile by expanding coverage for more americans we re going to help eliminate the hidden tax of more than a thousand dollars that the average worker is paying to cover the medical expenses of the uninsured now nothing is free and it s true that when reform becomes law businesses of a certain size who do not offer their workers health care coverage may be required to contribute to the costs and that makes a lot of small business owners nervous opponents of reform have tried to say that you d be subject to this penalty and it could potentially drive up your costs but here are the facts because this has been analyzed repeatedly about 90 percent 90 percent of all small businesses regardless of what version of this plan you re talking about that s currently going through congress 90 percent of all businesses would be exempt from this requirement so if your business is anything like the vast majority of small businesses out there this requirement simply won t apply to you because i don t think it s fair to impose a penalty on small businesses that are already operating at very narrow margins so that s what health insurance reform would mean for you and for all our small businesses it would reduce your costs it would prevent small business owners from facing exorbitant rate hikes it will make coverage affordable for all small businesses that can t afford it right now and if you re providing health insurance to your employees it gives you more predictability more security more stability it will help remove the worry that if you have the courage to strike out on your own and open a business you ll be doomed from the start it will help give entrepreneurs and all americans the assurance of knowing they won t go broke when they get sick it will help ensure that no small business owner in america has to choose between being a successful employer and an employer who cares deeply about the well being of his employees or her employees it will help us be the kind of country we know ourselves to be so what s at stake isn t just the success of our businesses or the strength of our economy or even the health of our people what s at stake is that most american of ideas that this is a place where you can make it if you try where you can be your own boss where the only limits to what you can achieve are your smarts your savvy your dreams your willingness to work hard where you can pass on to your children a better life than you inherited that s what s at stake that s what we re fighting for and i m absolutely confident that if we do what has to be done if we can build an economy that works for all americans if we can promote innovation and foster growth and build a better health care system that is not a drag on each and every one of you then not only will we ease the burdens on entrepreneurs not only will we give our small businesses a huge boost not only will we produce the kind of growth we so desperately need in this country but we ll secure the blessings of america for our children and our grandchildren that s what we re fighting for i need your help to make it happen thank you very much everybody thank you god bless america dem bobama29 4 09 barack_obama thank you so much thank you everybody please have a seat have a seat thank you so much what a wonderful introduction it s good to be out of washington good to be back in the midwest love you back let me first of all ask everybody to give a huge round of applause to linda for the great introduction and everything that she s been doing in the community thank you so much i ve got a few other friends who are here you may know them i want to make sure that i acknowledge them one of i think the finest members of congress that we have and somebody who s just been a great friend of mine she is somebody you want in the foxhole with you when you got a tough fight please give a huge round of applause to claire mccaskill we ve got one of the finest new governors in the country jay nixon where did jay go there he is an outstanding secretary of state and somebody who i think may turn out to be pretty good in washington if she just so decides robin carnahan we ve got attorney general chris koster here state treasurer clint zweifel a great friend who was with me from the start susan montee your state auditor we have our outstanding host today mayor ron counts of arnold we ve got congressman russ carnahan who is voting on the budget today but i want everybody to give him a big round of applause anyway i want to thank everybody here at fox high school for their hospitality i want to thank your lovely school superintendent who is just doing an outstanding job please stand up i want to thank the warriors for the basketball jersey which i will wear with pride yeah if i ever get to play basketball again they ve been keeping me a little busy it is great to be back in the middle of america where common sense often reigns and this reminds me of why i like to get out of washington now and again the last time i was in missouri was just under six months ago at a high school a lot like this one we were in springfield it was two days before the election and i was making my final case to the american people and it was just an unbelievable crowd bigger than anything anybody had expected and so we re here in missouri to we were here in missouri at the end of a long journey to the white house and so now i want to come back and speak to you at the beginning of another long journey today marks 100 days since i took the oath of office to be your president one hundred days it s a good thing thank you thank you now back in november some folks were surprised that we showed up in springfield at the end of our campaign but then again some folks were surprised that we even started our campaign in the first place they didn t give us much of a chance they didn t think we could do things differently they didn t know if this country was ready to move in a new direction but here s the thing my campaign wasn t born in washington my campaign was rooted in neighborhoods just like this one in towns and cities all across america rooted in folks who work hard and look after their families and seek a brighter children future for their children and for their communities and for their country it was driven by workers who were tired of seeing their jobs shipped overseas their health care costs go up their dreams slip out of reach it was grounded in a sense of unity and common purpose with every single american whether they voted for me on election day or voted for somebody else it was energized by every citizen who believed that the size of our challenges had outgrown the smallness of our politics my campaign was possible because the american people wanted change i ran for president because i wanted to carry those voices your voices with me to washington and so i just want everybody to understand you re who i m working for every single day in the white house i ve heard your stories i know you sent me to washington because you believed in the promise of a better day and i don t want to let you down you believed that after an era of selfishness and greed that we could reclaim a sense of responsibility on wall street and in washington as well as on main street you believed that instead of huge inequalities and an economy that s built on a bubble we could restore a sense of fairness to our economy and build a new foundation for lasting growth and prosperity you believed that at a time of war we could stand strong against our enemies and stand firmly for our ideals and show a new face of american leadership to the world that s the change that you believed in that s the trust you placed in me it s something i will never forget the fact that you made this possible so today on my 100th day in office i ve come to report to you the american people that we have begun to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and we ve begun the work of remaking america we re working to remake america now we ve got a lot of work to do because on our first day in office we found challenges of unprecedented size and scope our economy was in the midst of the most serious downturn since the great depression banks had stopped lending the housing market was crippled the deficit was at 1 3 trillion and meanwhile families continued to struggle with health care costs too many of our kids couldn t get the education they needed the nation remained trapped by our dangerous dependence on foreign oil now these challenges could not be met with half measures they couldn t be met with the same old formulas they couldn t be confronted in isolation they demanded action that was bold and sustained they demand action that is bold and sustained they call on us to clear away the wreckage of a painful recession but also at the same time lay the building blocks for a new prosperity and that s the work that we ve begun over these first 100 days to jumpstart job creation and get our economy moving again we passed the most ambitious economic recovery plan in our nation s history and already we re beginning to see this change take hold in jefferson city over 2 500 jobs will be created on missouri s largest wind farm so that american workers are harnessing clean american energy across the state roughly 20 000 transportation jobs will be supported by the recovery act so that missourians are rebuilding your roads your bridges your rails to restore fairness to our economy we ve taken several steps with congress to strengthen the middle class we cut taxes for 95 percent of american households through a tax cut that will put 120 billion directly into your pockets we finally signed a law long overdue that will protect equal pay for equal work for american women we extended health care to millions of children across this country we launched a housing plan that has already contributed to a spike in the number of homeowners who are refinancing their mortgages which is the equivalent of another tax cut for them and if you haven t refinanced you might want to take a look and see if it s possible because that can save people a lot of money we ve taken steps to unfreeze the market for auto loans and student loans and small business loans and we re acting with the full force of the federal government to ensure that our banks have the capital and the confidence to lend money to the families and business owners who keep this economy running now even as we cleared away the wreckage i ve also said that we can t go back to an economy that s built on a pile of sand on inflated home prices and maxed out credit cards on over leveraged banks and outdated regulations that allowed the recklessness of just a few people to threaten the prosperity of all of us so that s why i introduced a budget and other measures that build on the recovery act to lay a new foundation for growth a foundation that s built on five pillars that will strengthen our economy and help us compete in the 21st century number one new investments in education that will equip our workers with the right skills and training number two new investments in renewable energy that will create millions of jobs and new industries number three new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses number four new savings that will bring down our deficit and number five new rules for wall street that reward drive and innovation now i ve got to say that some of the people in washington have been surprised they said boy he s so ambitious he s been trying to do so much now maybe they re not accustomed to this but there s no mystery to what we ve done the priorities that we ve acted upon were the things that we said we d do during the campaign i mean it s not like anybody should be surprised the policies we ve proposed were plans we talked about for two years in places like this all across the country with ordinary americans the changes that we ve made are the changes we promised that s what you should expect from a president you may not always agree with me but if you take a look at what i said i was going to do when i was running for office and you now look at what we are in the middle of doing we re doing what we said we d do now after 100 days i m pleased with the progress we ve made but i m not satisfied i m confident in the future but i m not content with the present not when there are workers who are still out of jobs families who still can t pay their bills not when there are too many americans who can t afford their health care so many of our children being left behind and our nation is not leading the world in developing 21st century energy i m not satisfied and i know you aren t either the crisis that we re confronting was many years in the making it will take us time to overcome it we ve come a long way we can see the light on the horizon but we ve got a much longer journey ahead and one of the encouraging things for me is the fact that the american people know this you know that our progress has to be measured in the results that we achieve over many months and years not the minute by minute talk in the media and you know that progress comes from hard choices and hard work not miracles i m not a miracle worker we ve got a lot of tough choices and hard decisions and hard work ahead of us the 100th day might be a good time to reflect on where we are but it s more important to where we re going that we focus on the future because we can t rest until our economy is growing and we ve built that new foundation for our prosperity we can t rest until we reform those outdated rules and regulations that allowed this crisis to happen in the first place and that s why i ve called for tough new common sense rules of the road that punish abuse and reward drive and innovation in the financial sector i expect a bill to arrive on my desk for signature before this year is out we are going to make sure this kind of crisis does not happen again we can t rest until we have schools that prepare our children for the challenges of the 21st century and we ve already made historic investments in education and college affordability i was talking to your superintendent about all the wonderful things that she s going to be able to do with some of the money that came out of the recovery package we re going to continue to help our schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps and we re going to reward teachers for performance and give them new pathways for advancement we are going to seek the goal of once again having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world we re going to do it by 2020 we can t rest until we harness the renewable energy that can create millions of new jobs and new industries the recovery act will double the supply of renewable energy but the only way to truly spark an energy transformation is through a gradual market based cap on carbon pollution so that energy clean energy is the profitable kind of energy and we can do this in a way that creates jobs that s how we can grow our economy enhance our security and protect our planet at the same time i don t think we can rest until we have a 21st century health care system that makes sense one that cuts costs for families and businesses across america that s why we invested in preventative care we ve invested in electronic records that s why my budget makes a down payment on reform that will finally make quality health care affordable for every american and i look forward to working with both parties in congress to make this reform a reality in the months to come and we can t rest until we restore the fiscal discipline that will keep us from leaving our children with a mountain of debt and working with people like claire mccaskill we have already put forward a budget that will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term we ve launched a procurement reform effort that will greatly reduce no bid contracts and will save 40 billion we re going through the budget line by line page by page we ve already identified more than 100 programs to reduce or eliminate because they don t work and i ve personally asked the leadership in congress to pass into law rules that follow the simple principle you pay for what you spend so that government acts the same way any responsible family does if you want a tax cut you got to pay for it if you want a new program you got to pay for it tell the american people the truth how are you going to pay for it and finally we can t rest until america is secure and our leadership is restored and that s why i ve begun to end the war in iraq through a responsible transition to iraqi control it is their country they need to take control that s why we have a new strategy to disrupt and dismantle and defeat al qaeda in afghanistan and pakistan that s why we ve renewed our diplomacy to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons to speak directly to our adversaries and strengthen relations in the hemisphere and that s why we have rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals that s why i ordered the closing of the detention center at guantanamo that s why i prohibited the use of torture because america is stronger than any enemy and we always have been precisely because we do what s right not just when it s easy but when it s hard that s what sets us apart we re living through extraordinary times we didn t ask for all the challenges that we face but we re determined to answer the call to meet them that s that spirit i see everywhere i go that s the spirit we need to sustain because the answer to our problems will ultimately be found in the character of the american people we need soldiers and diplomats scientists teachers workers entrepreneurs we need your service we need your active citizenship that s why i recently signed a bill that will create hundreds of thousands of opportunities for the american people to serve that s why i will continue to ask for your help and your ideas and your support to make the changes that we need i want to warn you there will be setbacks it will take time but i promise you i will always tell you the truth about the challenges that we face and the steps that we are taking to meet them i will continue to measure my progress by the progress that you see in your own lives and i believe that years from now we are going to be able to look back at this time as the moment when the american people once again came together to reclaim their future that s what this is about thank you everybody thank you all right this is the fun part everybody sit back down i m going to take questions there are no rules nobody has been pre screened and we re not going to be able to get through all of the questions that people want to ask so if you can raise your hand i will try to call on you we re going to go girl boy girl boy so nobody thinks i m biased i ll try to just go around the gym and we ll get to as many as we can if you can stand up introduce yourself when the question has been asked and we should have some microphones in the audience right where are microphone people raise up your mics okay so we ve got a few here so wait for the microphone so everybody can hear your question all right this gentleman right here right there yes you i guess we re going boy girl you can go ahead and hand him the mic keep the mic near you well it s a good question let me talk about what s happening with autos because obviously this is a big concern for everybody i believe that the u s should have a strong auto industry i believe that one of the things one of the transitions i want to make i want us to get back to making things not just shuffling paper around and so the auto industry is a major part of that now what is also true is that the decisions that were made over decades put the u s auto industry in a bad spot we used to build the cars that consumers wanted and at a certain point those weren t the cars that were being designed now in fairness to the auto industry a lot of the cars that are coming out of detroit have gotten really good they are on par with foreign imports but the problem is is that because of a lot of those bad decisions catching up even though there s some very good products out there overall the companies were in really bad shape now the bush administration had already given several billions of dollars worth of aid and gm and chrysler were told to come up with a plan when they presented the plan to us my responsibility to taxpayers is to look at those plans in a realistic way and figure are these plans going to work in order to put these auto companies on a firm solid footing where they can operate without government subsidies and succeed and compete in the marketplace because we ve got the best workers we just need the best plans right unfortunately the plan that they presented just weren t realistic i mean we did a pretty thoroughgoing analysis of this thing and you couldn t what they were doing wasn t painting a picture of how they could be viable over the long term without being wards of the state and frankly there s no way that we were going to get taxpayers to just every few months just give a few more billion dollars because there are a lot of other industries that would love to have those kinds of subsidies so we are now at the point where chrysler is supposed to report back to us in the next day or two about their plans for a potential merger with fiat and the fiat management has actually done a good job transforming their industry we re hoping that you can get a merger where the taxpayers will put in some money to sweeten the deal but ultimately the goal is we get out of the business of building cars and chrysler goes and starts creating the cars that consumers want and one of the potential advantages of a merger is new technologies where chrysler starts making fuel efficient clean energy cars that will meet the needs of the future market we don t know yet whether the deal is going to get done i will tell you that the workers at chrysler have made enormous sacrifices enormous sacrifices to try to keep the company going one of the key questions now is are the bond holders the lenders the money people are they willing to make sacrifices as well we don t know yet so there s still a series of negotiations that are taking place i can tell you that no matter what happens we want to provide certain protections to retirees for their health care and their pensions that will also be expensive for taxpayers but my attitude is we got here not because our workers didn t do a great job trying to build a great product it was because management decisions betrayed workers there are going to be some long term adjustments that have to be made though both for chrysler and gm gm by the way has 30 more days because their restructuring is more thoroughgoing than what was required with chrysler but i can guarantee you i will i look at this from the perspective of how can i create a strong viable competitive auto industry that is giving workers an opportunity to build a great product take pride in that product and continue to support their families and build communities that are strong that s my entire orientation and how do i do that in a way that doesn t waste taxpayer money because as i said people in other industries would love help as well and i ve got to be fair to people who aren t in the auto industry if we re going to do it it s got to be because we think that we ve got a long term plan that actually makes sense i think we can get there but we ve still got a little more work to do all right young lady up there in the pink right there there we go okay excellent question i believe that we ve got a multitude of challenges so rather than just isolate on one let me talk about several our children are coming out of high school in some cases they re not even graduating high school but even if they graduate from high school ranked lower on math and science scores than many other advanced industrialized countries nations like china and india are starting to turn out more engineers more scientists if we aren t able to compete technologically we re not going to be able to compete because this is a knowledge based economy we can have some people who are really willing to work hard but if the technology is coming from overseas and all we re competing for is just our labor then over time those countries will get richer our countries will get poorer so we ve got to upgrade across the board not just in poor underprivileged schools but across the board we ve got to upgrade the performance levels of our young people now in order to do that the single biggest ingredient is the quality of our teachers single most important factor single most important factor in the classroom is the quality of the person standing at the front of the classroom and that s why our recovery package put a lot of emphasis on teacher training teacher recruitment teacher retention professional development and i ve got a terrific young secretary of education arne duncan who is and he is so passionate but he s tough and he wants to push school districts to really do what it takes to give teachers the support that they need now that involves a whole range of things it means that how we train and recruit teachers in the first place how do we match them up with master teachers so that they learn best practices how do we make sure that if they re coming in and they don t have all the professional background they need in something a subject area like science that we give them the training they need and how do we recruit people who might be great teachers but didn t go through the conventional channels if there s a chemist out there somewhere who wants to teach we should be able to get him into the classroom in an expedited way because he or she is bringing skills that we need i just gave an award to the teacher of the year who was a police officer a cop had gone to the had become a captain in the new york city police department and then decided that he wanted to pursue his lifelong love of learning and went back to teach and asked for the toughest to teach kids well we want to encourage people like that who have a passion for teaching now i also want to increase teacher pay so that a lot more people want to go into teaching the deal i ve got to strike with teachers though i may not get as much applause on this is i would like to work with teachers and the teachers unions because i m a union guy but i do believe but i do believe that it s important for the unions to work flexibly with school districts in a consensual fashion to find ways so that if you ve got a really excellent teacher after 15 20 years they can get paid a little bit more right if they re doing a really good job and now the flip side i m telling you i m getting to the point where i m not going to get applause if you ve got a bad teacher who can t after given all the support and the training that they need is just not performing up to snuff we ve got to find that person a new job just a couple more comments on education generally a lot of schools still aren t using technology as well as they could in the classroom and one of the things we re trying to do with the recovery act is to help schools get broadband get computers but then also train people to use it properly i think we can do more with technology once kids get out of high school making college affordable is absolutely critical we have to redesign the college experience so that not everybody is going to go to school for four years right in a row when they re 18 some people are going to work for two years then go back to school for two years once they figure out something they re interested in go back to work maybe five years down the road they need to retrain we ve got to create a pathway for lifelong learning for young people and not so young people so that all american workers are continually upgrading their skills so we want to put a lot more emphasis on community colleges and how they are working effectively together let me make a last point because i don t want to i could talk about this stuff forever one last point which i always have to remind people of i said that the biggest ingredient in school performance is the teacher that s the biggest ingredient within a school but the single biggest ingredient is the parent so this is an example where people are always trying to say oh obama is he liberal is he conservative well i want government to do what it should do but there s some things government can t do that s where i m conservative government can t force parents to turn off the tv set and tell your kid to sit down and do their homework i can t do that that s not my job that s your job well it is my job with sasha and malia those two i m responsible for but the other part of it is it s not just making sure your kids are doing their homework it s also instilling a thirst for knowledge and excellence it s been noted widely that there are a lot of immigrant students who come from very modest backgrounds economically that end up doing very well and why is that well the difference is is that in their families and in their communities a lot of times they ve got that attitude that used to be prevalent but sometimes we re losing sometimes i worry we re losing and that is boy it is a privilege to learn it s a privilege to discover new things it s cool to be smart we want to reward kids for doing well in school and the community can help the parents listen i love basketball but the smartest kid in the school the national science award winner should be getting as much attention as the basketball star that s a change that we ve got to initiate in our community all right gentleman in the tie there since he wore a tie that was really nice of him we appreciate that thank you all right that s a good question let me first of all a lot of people know this but i always want to try to explain how social security works so that you have a better sense of what we have to do going forward social security is not an individual account when you pay your payroll tax it doesn t go into i m sorry what was your name jay it doesn t go into jay s account your social security tax goes to pay for current retirees and hopefully when you retire young people who are working then their money will go to pay for your retirement so it s an intergenerational commitment that we make to each other what we say is look all of us are going to grow old so we re going to make sure that there s enough money in there for your retirement and those of us who are currently working we pay into the kitty to make sure that that happens and then we expect that the next generation is going to do the same all right now here s the problem that we confront and this is a solvable problem i ve got there are some problems that are really hard to solve this is actually one that we can solve and that is the problem is that the baby boomers there were a lot of them and they re getting older even though they deny it they re getting older so what s happening is you re getting a big bulge of people who are retiring and you ve got fewer workers supporting more retirees that means you got more money going out less money coming in and so you get a mismatch now what s been happening is up until very recently we ve been running a surplus in the social security account so there should be enough money and if we were wise then all that money would be there and then we we re going to start running a deficit as the baby boomers start retiring but we would have accumulated all this money and everything would be fine but a couple of things have happened number one is that the social security trust fund there wasn t a fence around it so people started borrowing out of it for other things that s not helpful but the other part of it is is that there s still going to be a gap if we don t do anything even if we repay all the money into the trust fund there s still a gap because there are too many retirees so it s not that social security would go away jay the problem would be that by the time you retire you d be getting 75 cents for every dollar that was promised to you so you d get cheated out of a little bit of your social security that s why when people say social security is going bankrupt that s not true the problem is not that it s going bankrupt the problem is just that your benefit it would be the equivalent of a benefit cut of about 25 percent if we don t start making some changes now there are only a handful of ways to make these changes number one you could just keep on trying to borrow a trillion dollars or a couple trillion or however much it takes from china but that s not such a good solution because you d end up having to pay interest on it and at some point they re just going to be tired of lending to us because they ve got their own senior citizens that they want to take care off second option is to gradually raise the retirement age now i don t think this is the best option just because we just talked to an auto worker over here that s hard work and if people s if the retirement age is already 67 and now you want to get it up to 68 or 69 if you re working on an assembly line and you ve been doing that for 50 years or 40 years that s some tough stuff if you re a senator you can work until you know but if you re doing real work now that s except for claire claire does some real work claire is a hard worker claire is a hard worker you could cut benefits you could raise the tax on everybody so everybody s payroll tax goes up a little bit or you can do what i think is probably the best solution which is you can raise the cap on the payroll tax now let me explain one last point about this whether you are bill gates or you are jay a junior at fox high school you pay the same rate on your payroll tax but what happens is is that it gets capped out at 102 000 now the majority of people here for almost everybody here what that means is is that you pay a payroll tax on every dime that you earn but dem bobama29 4 10 barack_obama good afternoon everybody hello everybody please have a seat welcome to the white house welcome to the rose garden this is an extraordinary occasion a beautiful day appropriately so so i hate to intrude on it but before we begin i do want to speak briefly to the american people about the recent bp oil spill in the gulf of mexico i ve been receiving frequent briefings from members of my cabinet and white house staff including an update last night on the additional breach and another update this morning and while bp is ultimately responsible for funding the cost of response and cleanup operations my administration will continue to use every single available resource at our disposal including potentially the department of defense to address the incident earlier today dhs secretary napolitano announced that this incident is of national significance and the department of interior has announced that they will be sending swat teams to the gulf to inspect all platforms and rigs and i have ordered the secretaries of interior and homeland security as well as administrator lisa jackson of the environmental protection agency to visit the site on friday to ensure that bp and the entire u s government is doing everything possible not just to respond to this incident but also to determine its cause and i ve been in contact with all the governors of the states that may be affected by this accident now earlier this week secretaries napolitano and salazar laid out the next steps for a thorough investigation into what precipitated this event i am sure there may be a few science teachers here who have been following this issue closely with their classes and if you guys have any suggestions please let us know that s the real reason why all of you are here because you are great teachers engaging your students in the world around you so i want to start by congratulating all of you for your extraordinary achievement we could not be prouder and i had occasion to meet each and every one individually you could not ask for a better bunch and it made me want to go back to school maybe not take the exams but but you could just tell these are people who love their work i want to acknowledge our wonderful secretary of education arne duncan who is your biggest booster day in and day out as well as my good friend and a teacher herself dr jill biden who is here i also want to thank senator harkin representative boswell and dennis van roekel president of the national education association for their leadership and for joining us here today so to all the award winners congratulations we are thrilled to have you in what has been a long tradition here at the white house for nearly six decades through 12 presidential administrations we ve gathered here to honor america s teachers and to celebrate your contribution to the life of our country and we do this because we recognize the role that you play in sustaining our democracy in creating the informed citizenry and engaged leaders that we need for our government a government of and by and for the people and we do this because you re the key to our success in the global economy preparing our kids to compete at a time when a nation s most valuable currency is the knowledge and skills of its people and we do this because the impact you ve had on all of our lives pushing us believing in us insisting sometimes despite all evidence to the contrary that we have potential and that we have something worthy to contribute as president kennedy once said our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education the human mind is our fundamental resource and it s all of you who we entrust every day with that resource and that responsibility and that s why as president i m committed to doing every single thing that i can do to support your work to create better standards and assessments that you can use in your classrooms to make critical investments in education at every level from early childhood education through college and to recruit and develop and reward excellent teachers and it s why through our recovery efforts we ve provided emergency aid that saved the jobs of more than 400 000 teachers and other education jobs and why i believe these efforts must continue i believe these efforts must continue as states face severe budget shortfalls that put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk we need and our children need our teachers in the classroom we need your passion and your patience your skill and experience your determination to reach every single child the very qualities that define this year s teacher of the year sarah brown wessling from johnson high school in johnson iowa so congratulations sarah whether teaching basic writing to at risk freshmen or literary theory to advanced placement seniors sarah writes i see a story in every learner unique and yearning to be read that s why she creates individualized podcasts for each student with extensive feedback on their papers prompting one parent to report that his own writing had improved just by listening to sarah s comments to her daughter to his daughter sarah also helped develop 15 new courses this year alone taking into account a wide array of interests and learning styles and her students don t just write five paragraph essays but they write songs public service announcements film storyboards even grant proposals for their own non for profit organizations one of her students reports that in sarah s class no discussion was fruitless no assignment was pointless and not one day was boring and i m not sure i could have said that when i was in school and all of this is in addition to her work mentoring other teachers organizing a statewide teaching symposium helping design iowa s core curriculum serving as president of the iowa council of teachers of english and much more slow down plus she s got these three cute kids in front with sarah as a teacher good students have become great students student who had been discouraged and disengaged have discovered a passion for learning and many of her students have gone on to become teachers themselves one of the best tributes any teacher could ask for in her application essay sarah wrote movingly about the achievements of several of her students describing the transformation of one student as follows instead of asking what she asked why instead of asking why she asked why not instead of asking why not she asked what if in honoring sarah brown wessling and all of you we also honor all those teachers across america who inspire students to ask what if who enrich their lives and their prospects every single day but let s be clear i think all the teachers here would agree with me this is not the responsibility of teachers alone our teachers can prepare the best lesson plans imaginable but you all can t guarantee that your students will show up ready to learn you can be there for them before school after school and during lunch but you can t be there at night to make sure those assignments get done or in the morning to make sure they re out of bed and to school on time you can give your students all the encouragement in the world but you can t give them the constant support and unconditional love that they need to succeed all of that is our job as parents so today even as we honor america s teachers let s not forget that we all have a responsibility to educate our children it is not just the job of schools it s not just the job of teachers but it s the job of our parents it s the job of our communities our places of worship the message that we send in terms of our children being curious and active and aspiring for excellence that s a job that all of us have to take on so let s turn off the tv let s put away the video games let s read to our kids once in a while let s make sure that homework is done and that they get a good night s sleep and a decent breakfast let s reach out to their teachers and ask what we can do to help let s be partners with teachers to prepare our kids to lead productive fulfilling lives in the end i think sarah put it best when she wrote simply my greatest contributions are my students that s true of us as a society as well that our greatest contribution is what we do for the next generation the sacrifices we make the examples that we set and all that we do to give them opportunities that we never dreamed of all of you have dedicated your lives to that work and for that we honor you and we thank you today and every day congratulations everybody and it s now my pleasure to introduce the 2010 teacher of the year sarah brown wessling and invite her to say a few words but first i m going to give her the apple dem bobama29 5 09a barack_obama it s good to be back in l a everybody have a seat have a seat who knows the score lakers by one what is it third quarter all right well good luck it s not the bulls joe baca is not the bulls man but the lakers are pretty good i got to admit i want to acknowledge the extraordinary performance this evening first of all chicago s own jennifer hudson the group i grew up with earth wind fire roberto granado the crenshaw high school choir i love you back and the rickey minor band give it up for rickey minor they were sounding good i was going to come out and sing but my political advisors told me not to it is good to be back in l a my main task here tonight is just to say thank you first of all i want to thank so many of you who were knocking on doors and making phone calls and traveling to other cities turning an election into a movement a movement for change but the fact that the fact that you re here tonight indicates that you understand the campaign just gave us a chance to bring about change it didn t actually deliver the change it gave us the chance the opportunity it put us in place to bring about change so now the hard part starts so i decided i should come back to los angeles with all my great supporters and just to give you a little progress report just a little progress report we started off in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the great depression and so what we decided to do was pass the largest economic recovery package in the history of the united states of america and we got it done in one month all across america you ve got folks who are going to work rebuilding roads and bridges but also building an electric grid that can help move renewable energies from production to conception saving teachers jobs that might have been eliminated if we hadn t passed it making sure that folks who lose their jobs still have health care providing providing a whole host of support services to communities that were in need then we signed something called the lilly ledbetter act because we thought it made sense that women should get equal pay for equal work i don t know if you agree with that we removed the ban on funding stem cell research because we believe in the possibilities of science what else did we do let s see we we put in place a whole series of measures to stabilize the housing market to stabilize the credit markets we passed i m getting to that relax we passed historic legislation to crack down on predatory abuses on credit cards so you guys aren t paying those extra fees we expanded the children s health insurance program so that 11 million children who didn t have health insurance now have it including the children of undocumented workers that was all just in the first couple of months this past week just this past week we brought together in an historic meeting we brought together auto executives labor unions democrats republicans to announce for the first time ever a national fuel efficiency standard that applies across the board 35 5 miles per gallon which will save the united states 1 8 billion dollars of oil and may just help us save the planet in the process we re dealing with climate change in a way that we haven t dealt with and then a couple of days ago i nominated this lady sonia sotomayor to be the next supreme court justice of the united states of america i mean think about the journey this woman has traveled from south bronx goes to princeton summa cum laude summa cum laude not just you know magna or laude laude but summa cum laude goes on to yale serves on the law journal manhattan da private practice partner in a big law firm goes on to become a district trial judge and then an appellate judge has more experience than any of the current supreme court justices when they were nominated this woman is brilliant she is qualified i want her confirmed i want her walking up those marble steps and starting to provide some justice so we ve made some progress yes we have but we ve got more work to do we can t rest on our laurels because we ve got a lot of work to do all across america right now millions have lost their jobs or are fearful of losing their jobs all across america all across america people have lost their homes or are fearful of losing their homes all across america people have lost their health care or are waking up in the middle of the night wondering if their child gets sick will they be bankrupt because they don t have decent health care or they just can t afford the premiums they re paying all across america there are children who are trapped who are trapped in schools that don t educate them and they look out and they see very little hope on the horizon and around the world we ve got a host of challenges ending a war in iraq making sure that we come to a that we re able to achieve our goals of rooting out al qaeda in afghanistan making sure that we reconcile our need for security with our need to uphold our values even when it s difficult even when it s hard even when we d like to just push those ideals aside that s not who we are as a people so we ve got some work to do there we have to deal with climate change here in the united states and internationally we ve got to be leaders and not followers so we ve got a full menu we ve got a lot of work to do but i am confident that we re going to get it done because what you taught me during the campaign and what you continue to teach me through your involvement in this process is that when the american people decide it s time to bring about change change happens when the american people are determined to bring about justice justice happens when the american people decide we re going to give opportunity to all children and not just some children then we can make sure that those children are going to get a decent shot at life so your determination your willingness to provide support not just to me but to the democratic party to dig deep even when times are tough to continue to get involved not just through your financial contributions but through all the activism that you represent on a whole host of issues all across this state and all across the country that s my insurance that change is going to come administrations come and go but the american people and that spirit of innovation and that willingness to take on the toughest challenge and that belief that there are always brighter days ahead if we re willing to work for it that s my insurance policy that s how we re going to bring about change so take heart of the change we ve already brought but i want you to know los angeles you ain t seen nothing yet we are going to deal with these issues we are going to bring about a better america and you and me we re going to do it together arm in arm we re going to march forward thank you god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama29 5 09b barack_obama everybody please be seated we meet today at a transformational moment a moment in history when our interconnected world presents us at once with great promise but also great peril now over the past four months my administration has taken decisive steps to seize the promise and confront these perils we re working to recover from a global recession while laying a new foundation for lasting prosperity we re strengthening our armed forces as they fight two wars at the same time we re renewing american leadership to confront unconventional challenges from nuclear proliferation to terrorism from climate change to pandemic disease and we re bringing to government and to this white house unprecedented transparency and accountability and new ways for americans to participate in their democracy but none of this progress would be possible and none of these 21st century challenges can be fully met without america s digital infrastructure the backbone that underpins a prosperous economy and a strong military and an open and efficient government without that foundation we can t get the job done it s long been said that the revolutions in communications and information technology have given birth to a virtual world but make no mistake this world cyberspace is a world that we depend on every single day it s our hardware and our software our desktops and laptops and cell phones and blackberries that have become woven into every aspect of our lives it s the broadband networks beneath us and the wireless signals around us the local networks in our schools and hospitals and businesses and the massive grids that power our nation it s the classified military and intelligence networks that keep us safe and the world wide web that has made us more interconnected than at any time in human history so cyberspace is real and so are the risks that come with it it s the great irony of our information age the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy and this paradox seen and unseen is something that we experience every day it s about the privacy and the economic security of american families we rely on the internet to pay our bills to bank to shop to file our taxes but we ve had to learn a whole new vocabulary just to stay ahead of the cyber criminals who would do us harm spyware and malware and spoofing and phishing and botnets millions of americans have been victimized their privacy violated their identities stolen their lives upended and their wallets emptied according to one survey in the past two years alone cyber crime has cost americans more than 8 billion i know how it feels to have privacy violated because it has happened to me and the people around me it s no secret that my presidential campaign harnessed the internet and technology to transform our politics what isn t widely known is that during the general election hackers managed to penetrate our computer systems to all of you who donated to our campaign i want you to all rest assured our fundraising website was untouched so your confidential personal and financial information was protected but between august and october hackers gained access to emails and a range of campaign files from policy position papers to travel plans and we worked closely with the cia with the fbi and the secret service and hired security consultants to restore the security of our systems it was a powerful reminder in this information age one of your greatest strengths in our case our ability to communicate to a wide range of supporters through the internet could also be one of your greatest vulnerabilities this is a matter as well of america s economic competitiveness the small businesswoman in st louis the bond trader in the new york stock exchange the workers at a global shipping company in memphis the young entrepreneur in silicon valley they all need the networks to make the next payroll the next trade the next delivery the next great breakthrough e commerce alone last year accounted for some 132 billion in retail sales but every day we see waves of cyber thieves trolling for sensitive information the disgruntled employee on the inside the lone hacker a thousand miles away organized crime the industrial spy and increasingly foreign intelligence services in one brazen act last year thieves used stolen credit card information to steal millions of dollars from 130 atm machines in 49 cities around the world and they did it in just 30 minutes a single employee of an american company was convicted of stealing intellectual property reportedly worth 400 million it s been estimated that last year alone cyber criminals stole intellectual property from businesses worldwide worth up to 1 trillion in short america s economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cybersecurity and this is also a matter of public safety and national security we count on computer networks to deliver our oil and gas our power and our water we rely on them for public transportation and air traffic control yet we know that cyber intruders have probed our electrical grid and that in other countries cyber attacks have plunged entire cities into darkness our technological advantage is a key to america s military dominance but our defense and military networks are under constant attack al qaeda and other terrorist groups have spoken of their desire to unleash a cyber attack on our country attacks that are harder to detect and harder to defend against indeed in today s world acts of terror could come not only from a few extremists in suicide vests but from a few key strokes on the computer a weapon of mass disruption in one of the most serious cyber incidents to date against our military networks several thousand computers were infected last year by malicious software malware and while no sensitive information was compromised our troops and defense personnel had to give up those external memory devices thumb drives changing the way they used their computers every day and last year we had a glimpse of the future face of war as russian tanks rolled into georgia cyber attacks crippled georgian government websites the terrorists that sowed so much death and destruction in mumbai relied not only on guns and grenades but also on gps and phones using voice over the internet for all these reasons it s now clear this cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation it s also clear that we re not as prepared as we should be as a government or as a country in recent years some progress has been made at the federal level but just as we failed in the past to invest in our physical infrastructure our roads our bridges and rails we ve failed to invest in the security of our digital infrastructure no single official oversees cybersecurity policy across the federal government and no single agency has the responsibility or authority to match the scope and scale of the challenge indeed when it comes to cybersecurity federal agencies have overlapping missions and don t coordinate and communicate nearly as well as they should with each other or with the private sector we saw this in the disorganized response to conficker the internet worm that in recent months has infected millions of computers around the world this status quo is no longer acceptable not when there s so much at stake we can and we must do better and that s why shortly after taking office i directed my national security council and homeland security council to conduct a top to bottom review of the federal government s efforts to defend our information and communications infrastructure and to recommend the best way to ensure that these networks are able to secure our networks as well as our prosperity our review was open and transparent i want to acknowledge melissa hathaway who is here who is the acting senior director for cyberspace on our national security council who led the review team as well as the center for strategic and international studies bipartisan commission on cybersecurity and all who were part of our 60 day review team they listened to a wide variety of groups many of which are represented here today and i want to thank for their input industry and academia civil liberties and private privacy advocates we listened to every level and branch of government from local to state to federal civilian military homeland as well as intelligence congress and international partners as well i consulted with my national security teams my homeland security teams and my economic advisors today i m releasing a report on our review and can announce that my administration will pursue a new comprehensive approach to securing america s digital infrastructure this new approach starts at the top with this commitment from me from now on our digital infrastructure the networks and computers we depend on every day will be treated as they should be as a strategic national asset protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority we will ensure that these networks are secure trustworthy and resilient we will deter prevent detect and defend against attacks and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage to give these efforts the high level focus and attention they deserve and as part of the new single national security staff announced this week i m creating a new office here at the white house that will be led by the cybersecurity coordinator because of the critical importance of this work i will personally select this official i ll depend on this official in all matters relating to cybersecurity and this official will have my full support and regular access to me as we confront these challenges today i want to focus on the important responsibilities this office will fulfill orchestrating and integrating all cybersecurity policies for the government working closely with the office of management and budget to ensure agency budgets reflect those priorities and in the event of major cyber incident or attack coordinating our response to ensure that federal cyber policies enhance our security and our prosperity my cybersecurity coordinator will be a member of the national security staff as well as the staff of my national economic council to ensure that policies keep faith with our fundamental values this office will also include an official with a portfolio specifically dedicated to safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of the american people there s much work to be done and the report we re releasing today outlines a range of actions that we will pursue in five key areas first working in partnership with the communities represented here today we will develop a new comprehensive strategy to secure america s information and communications networks to ensure a coordinated approach across government my cybersecurity coordinator will work closely with my chief technology officer aneesh chopra and my chief information officer vivek kundra to ensure accountability in federal agencies cybersecurity will be designated as one of my key management priorities clear milestones and performances metrics will measure progress and as we develop our strategy we will be open and transparent which is why you ll find today s report and a wealth of related information on our web site www whitehouse gov second we will work with all the key players including state and local governments and the private sector to ensure an organized and unified response to future cyber incidents given the enormous damage that can be caused by even a single cyber attack ad hoc responses will not do nor is it sufficient to simply strengthen our defenses after incidents or attacks occur just as we do for natural disasters we have to have plans and resources in place beforehand sharing information issuing warnings and ensuring a coordinated response third we will strengthen the public private partnerships that are critical to this endeavor the vast majority of our critical information infrastructure in the united states is owned and operated by the private sector so let me be very clear my administration will not dictate security standards for private companies on the contrary we will collaborate with industry to find technology solutions that ensure our security and promote prosperity fourth we will continue to invest in the cutting edge research and development necessary for the innovation and discovery we need to meet the digital challenges of our time and that s why my administration is making major investments in our information infrastructure laying broadband lines to every corner of america building a smart electric grid to deliver energy more efficiently pursuing a next generation of air traffic control systems and moving to electronic health records with privacy protections to reduce costs and save lives and finally we will begin a national campaign to promote cybersecurity awareness and digital literacy from our boardrooms to our classrooms and to build a digital workforce for the 21st century and that s why we re making a new commitment to education in math and science and historic investments in science and research and development because it s not enough for our children and students to master today s technologies social networking and e mailing and texting and blogging we need them to pioneer the technologies that will allow us to work effectively through these new media and allow us to prosper in the future so these are the things we will do let me also be clear about what we will not do our pursuit of cybersecurity will not i repeat will not include monitoring private sector networks or internet traffic we will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as americans indeed i remain firmly committed to net neutrality so we can keep the internet as it should be open and free the task i have described will not be easy some 1 5 billion people around the world are already online and more are logging on every day groups and governments are sharpening their cyber capabilities protecting our prosperity and security in this globalized world is going to be a long difficult struggle demanding patience and persistence over many years but we need to remember we re only at the beginning the epochs of history are long the agricultural revolution the industrial revolution by comparison our information age is still in its infancy we re only at web 2 0 now our virtual world is going viral and we ve only just begun to explore the next generation of technologies that will transform our lives in ways we can t even begin to imagine so a new world awaits a world of greater security and greater potential prosperity if we reach for it if we lead so long as i m president of the united states we will do just that and the united states the nation that invented the internet that launched an information revolution that transformed the world will do what we did in the 20th century and lead once more in the 21st thank you very much everybody thank you dem bobama29 6 09 barack_obama hello everybody hello hello hello hey good to see you i m waiting for flotus here flotus always politics more than potus it is great to see everybody here today and they re just i ve got a lot of friends in the room but there are some people i want to especially acknowledge first of all somebody who helped ensure that we are in the white house steve hildebrand please give steve a big round of applause where s steve he s around here somewhere the new chair of the export import bank fred hochberg where s fred there s fred good to see you fred our director of the institute of education sciences at doe john easton where s john a couple of special friends bishop gene robinson where s gene hey gene ambassador michael guest is here ambassador jim hormel is here oregon secretary of state kate brown is here all of you are here welcome to your white house so somebody asked from the lincoln bedroom here you knew i was from chicago too it s good to see so many friends and familiar faces and i deeply appreciate the support i ve received from so many of you michelle appreciates it and i want you to know that you have our support as well and you have my thanks for the work you do every day in pursuit of equality on behalf of the millions of people in this country who work hard and care about their communities and who are gay lesbian bisexual or transgender now this struggle i don t need to tell you is incredibly difficult although i think it s important to consider the extraordinary progress that we have made there are unjust laws to overturn and unfair practices to stop and though we ve made progress there are still fellow citizens perhaps neighbors or even family members and loved ones who still hold fast to worn arguments and old attitudes who fail to see your families like their families and who would deny you the rights that most americans take for granted and i know this is painful and i know it can be heartbreaking and yet all of you continue leading by the force of the arguments you make but also by the power of the example that you set in your own lives as parents and friends as pta members and leaders in the community and that s important and i m glad that so many lgbt families could join us today for we know that progress depends not only on changing laws but also changing hearts and that real transformative change never begins in washington whose duck is back there there s a duck quacking in there somewhere where do you guys get these ring tones by the way i m just curious indeed that s the story of the movement for fairness and equality not just for those who are gay but for all those in our history who ve been denied the rights and responsibilities of citizenship who ve been told that the full blessings and opportunities of this country were closed to them it s the story of progress sought by those who started off with little influence or power by men and women who brought about change through quiet personal acts of compassion and courage and sometimes defiance wherever and whenever they could that s the story of a civil rights pioneer who s here today frank kameny who was fired frank was fired from his job as an astronomer for the federal government simply because he was gay and in 1965 he led a protest outside the white house which was at the time both an act of conscience but also an act of extraordinary courage and so we are proud of you frank and we are grateful to you for your leadership it s the story of the stonewall protests which took place 40 years ago this week when a group of citizens with few options and fewer supporters decided they d had enough and refused to accept a policy of wanton discrimination and two men who were at those protests are here today imagine the journey that they ve travelled it s the story of an epidemic that decimated a community and the gay men and women who came to support one another and save one another and who continue to fight this scourge and who demonstrated before the world that different kinds of families can show the same compassion and support in a time of need that we all share the capacity to love so this story this struggle continues today for even as we face extraordinary challenges as a nation we cannot and will not put aside issues of basic equality we seek an america in which no one feels the pain of discrimination based on who you are or who you love and i know that many in this room don t believe that progress has come fast enough and i understand that it s not for me to tell you to be patient any more than it was for others to counsel patience to african americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago but i say this we have made progress and we will make more and i want you to know that i expect and hope to be judged not by words not by promises i ve made but by the promises that my administration keeps and by the time you receive we ve been in office six months now i suspect that by the time this administration is over i think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the obama administration now while there is much more work to do we can point to important changes we ve already put in place since coming into office i ve signed a memorandum requiring all agencies to extend as many federal benefits as possible to lgbt families as current law allows and these are benefits that will make a real difference for federal employees and foreign service officers who are so often treated as if their families don t exist and i d like to note that one of the key voices in helping us develop this policy is john berry our director of the office of personnel management who is here today and i want to thank john berry i ve called on congress to repeal the so called defense of marriage act to help end discrimination to help end discrimination against same sex couples in this country now i want to add we have a duty to uphold existing law but i believe we must do so in a way that does not exacerbate old divides and fulfilling this duty in upholding the law in no way lessens my commitment to reversing this law i ve made that clear i m also urging congress to pass the domestic partners benefits and obligations act which will guarantee the full range of benefits including health care to lgbt couples and their children my administration is also working hard to pass an employee non discrimination bill and hate crimes bill and we re making progress on both fronts judy and dennis shepard as well as their son logan are here today i met with judy in the oval office in may and i assured her and i assured all of you that we are going to pass an inclusive hate crimes bill into law a bill named for their son matthew in addition my administration is committed to rescinding the discriminatory ban on entry to the united states based on hiv status the office of management and budget just concluded a review of a proposal to repeal this entry ban which is a first and very big step towards ending this policy and we all know that hiv aids continues to be a public health threat in many communities including right here in the district of columbia and that s why this past saturday on national hiv testing day i was proud once again to encourage all americans to know their status and get tested the way michelle and i know our status and got tested and finally i want to say a word about don t ask don t tell as i said before i ll say it again i believe don t ask don t tell doesn t contribute to our national security in fact i believe preventing patriotic americans from serving their country weakens our national security now my administration is already working with the pentagon and members of the house and the senate on how we ll go about ending this policy which will require an act of congress someday i m confident we ll look back at this transition and ask why it generated such angst but as commander in chief in a time of war i do have a responsibility to see that this change is administered in a practical way and a way that takes over the long term that s why i ve asked the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff to develop a plan for how to thoroughly implement a repeal i know that every day that passes without a resolution is a deep disappointment to those men and women who continue to be discharged under this policy patriots who often possess critical language skills and years of training and who ve served this country well but what i hope is that these cases underscore the urgency of reversing this policy not just because it s the right thing to do but because it is essential for our national security now even as we take these steps we must recognize that real progress depends not only on the laws we change but as i said before on the hearts we open for if we re honest with ourselves we ll acknowledge that there are good and decent people in this country who don t yet fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters not yet that s why i ve spoken about these issues not just in front of you but in front of unlikely audiences in front of african american church members in front of other audiences that have traditionally resisted these changes and that s what i ll continue to do so that s how we ll shift attitudes that s how we ll honor the legacy of leaders like frank and many others who have refused to accept anything less than full and equal citizenship now 40 years ago in the heart of new york city at a place called the stonewall inn a group of citizens including a few who are here today as i said defied an unjust policy and awakened a nascent movement it was the middle of the night the police stormed the bar which was known for being one of the few spots where it was safe to be gay in new york now raids like this were entirely ordinary because it was considered obscene and illegal to be gay no establishments for gays and lesbians could get licenses to operate the nature of these businesses combined with the vulnerability of the gay community itself meant places like stonewall and the patrons inside were often the victims of corruption and blackmail now ordinarily the raid would come and the customers would disperse but on this night something was different there are many accounts of what happened and much has been lost to history but what we do know is this people didn t leave they stood their ground and over the course of several nights they declared that they had seen enough injustice in their time this was an outpouring against not just what they experienced that night but what they had experienced their whole lives and as with so many movements it was also something more it was at this defining moment that these folks who had been marginalized rose up to challenge not just how the world saw them but also how they saw themselves as we ve seen so many times in history once that spirit takes hold there is little that can stand in its way and the riots at stonewall gave way to protests and protests gave way to a movement and the movement gave way to a transformation that continues to this day it continues when a partner fights for her right to sit at the hospital bedside of a woman she loves it continues when a teenager is called a name for being different and says so what if i am it continues in your work and in your activism in your fight to freely live your lives to the fullest in one year after the protests a few hundred gays and lesbians and their supporters gathered at the stonewall inn to lead a historic march for equality but when they reached central park the few hundred that began the march had swelled to 5 000 something had changed and it would never change back the truth is when these folks protested at stonewall 40 years ago no one could have imagined that you or for that matter i would be standing here today so we are all witnesses to monumental changes in this country that should give us hope but we cannot rest we must continue to do our part to make progress step by step law by law mind by changing mind and i want you to know that in this task i will not only be your friend i will continue to be an ally and a champion and a president who fights with you and for you thanks very much everybody god bless you thank you it s a little stuffed in here we re going to open we opened up that door we re going to walk this way and then we re going to come around and we ll see some of you over there all right but out there but thank you very much all for being here enjoy the white house thank you dem bobama29 7 10a barack_obama thank you everybody please have a seat have a seat take a load off thank you good morning urban leaguers yes it is wonderful to be here with all of you it is wonderful to be here and let me begin by congratulating marc morial for his outstanding leadership his great friendship i want to thank the entire national urban league on your centennial from your founding amid the great migration to the struggles of the civil rights movement to the battles of today the urban league has been on the ground in our communities working quietly day in day out without fanfare opening up opportunity rolling back inequality making our union just a little more perfect america is a better place because of the urban league and i m grateful to all of you for the outstanding contributions that you ve made the last time i spoke with you was during your orlando conference in august got orlando in the house orlando conference back in august of 2008 i didn t have any gray hair back then say that s all right but i want to remind you what things were like in august of 2008 our economy was in freefall we had just seen seven straight months of job loss foreclosures were sweeping the nation and we were on the verge of a financial crisis that threatened to plunge our economy into a second great depression so from the moment i took office we had to act immediately to prevent an even greater catastrophe and i knew that not everything we did would be popular sometimes when we do things the scribes the pundits here in washington they act surprised they say why would you do such a thing it doesn t poll well and i have to explain to them i ve got my own pollsters but i wasn t elected just to do what s popular i was elected do what was right that s what you supported me for and because of what we did america as a whole is in a different place today our economy is growing instead of shrinking our private sector has been adding jobs for six straight months instead of losing them yesterday a report was put out by two prominent economists one of them john mccain s old economist that said if we hadn t taken the actions that we took we would have had an additional 8 million people lose their jobs now that doesn t mean we re out of the woods yet every sector of our economy was shaking by the crisis every demographic group felt its impact and as has been true in the wake of other recent recessions this one had an especially brutal impact on minority communities communities that were already struggling long before the financial crisis hit the african american unemployment rate was already much higher the incomes and wealth of african american families already lower there was less of a cushion many minority communities whether in big cities or rural towns had seen businesses and opportunities vanish for years stores boarded up young people hanging out on the street corners without prospects for the future so when we came in to office we focused not just on rescuing our economy in the short run but rebuilding our economy for the long run creating an economy that lifts up all americans not just some but all that s why we passed health insurance reform that will give every american more choices more control over their health care will narrow the cruel disparities between americans of different backgrounds that s why we passed wall street reform not only to make sure that taxpayers aren t paying for somebody else s foolishness but also to protect consumers from predatory credit cards and lending practices regulating everything from mortgages to payday loans making sure that we re protecting our economy from the recklessness and irresponsibility of a few across agencies we re taking on the structural inequalities that have held so many of our fellow citizens back whether it s making more housing available and more affordable making sure civil rights and anti discrimination laws are enforced making sure our crime policy is not only tough but also smart so yesterday we took an important step forward when congress passed a fair sentencing bill that i look forward to signing into law a bipartisan bill to help right a longstanding wrong by narrowing sentencing disparities between those convicted of crack cocaine and powder cocaine it s the right thing to do we ve gotten that done so we ve made progress and yet for all of our progress progress that s come through the efforts of groups like the urban league progress that makes it possible for me to stand here as president we were reminded this past week that we still got work to do when it comes to promoting the values of fairness and equality and mutual understanding that must bind us together as a nation now last week i had the chance to talk to shirley sherrod an exemplary woman whose experiences mark both the challenges we have faced and the progress that we ve made she deserves better than what happened last week when a bogus controversy based on selective and deceiving excerpts of a speech led her led to her forced resignation now many are to blame for the reaction and overreaction that followed these comments including my own administration and what i said to shirley was that the full story she was trying to tell a story about overcoming our own biases and recognizing ourselves in folks who on the surface seem different is exactly the kind of story we need to hear in america it s exactly what we need to hear because we ve all got our biases and rather than jump to conclusions and point fingers and play some of the games that are played on cable tv we should all look inward and try to examine what s in our own hearts we should all make more of an effort to discuss with one another in a truthful and mature and responsible way the divides that still exist the discrimination that s still out there the prejudices that still hold us back a discussion that needs to take place not on cable tv not just through a bunch of academic symposia or fancy commissions or panels not through political posturing but around kitchen tables and water coolers and church basements and in our schools and with our kids all across the country if we can have that conversation in our own lives if we can take an opportunity to learn from our imperfections and our mistakes to grow as individuals and as a country and if we engage in the hard work of translating words into deeds because words are easy and deeds are hard then i m confident that we can move forward together and make this country a little more perfect than it was before now since we re on the topic of speaking honestly with one another i want to devote the balance of my time the balance of my remarks to an issue that i believe will largely determine not only african american success but the success of our nation in the 21st century and that is whether we are offering our children the very best education possible i know some argue that as we emerge from a recession my administration should focus solely on economic issues they said that during health care as if health care had nothing to do with economics said it during financial reform as if financial reform had nothing to do with economics and now they re saying it as we work on education issues but education is an economic issue if not the economic issue of our time it s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who ve never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have gone to college it s an economic issue when eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade it s an economic issue when countries that out educate us today are going to out compete us tomorrow now for years we ve recognized that education is a prerequisite for prosperity and yet we ve tolerated a status quo where america lags behind other nations just last week we learned that in a single generation america went from number one to 12th in college completion rates for young adults used to be number one now we re number 12 at the same time our 8th graders trail about eight 10 other nations 10 other nations in science and math meanwhile when it comes to black students african american students trail not only almost every other developed nation abroad but they badly trail their white classmates here at home an achievement gap that is widening the income gap between black and white between rich and poor we ve talked about it we know about it but we haven t done enough about it and this status quo is morally inexcusable it s economically indefensible and all of us are going to have to roll up our sleeves to change it and that s why that is why from day one of this administration we ve made excellence in american education excellence for all our students a top priority and no one has shown more leadership on this issue than my secretary of education arne duncan who is here today i chose arne not only because he s a great ballplayer arne and i play a little bit on the weekends i choose arne because i knew that for him closing the achievement gap unlocking the potential of every child isn t just a job it s been the cause of his life now because a higher education has never been more important or more expensive it s absolutely essential that we put a college degree within reach for anyone who wants it and that s why we re making higher education more affordable so we can meet the goals i ve set of producing a higher share of college graduates than any other nation by 2020 i want us to be back at number one instead of number 12 and in pursuit of that goal we eliminated taxpayer subsidies to big banks we saved tens of billions of dollars and we used those savings to open the door to additional financial aid to open the door for college to millions more students this is something that a lot of you may not be aware of but we have added tens of billions of dollars that were going to bank middlemen so that that money is now going to students millions more students who are getting scholarships to go to college that s already been done we re making loan repayment more manageable so young people don t graduate like michelle and me with such big loan payments every month you re welcome right there you can relate and we re reinvesting in our historically black colleges and universities our hbcus we are reinvesting in them while at the same time reforming and strengthening our community college which are great undervalued assets great assets that are a lifeline to so many working families in every community across america but here s the thing even if we do all this good stuff for higher education too many of our children see college as nothing but a distant dream because their education went off the rails long before they turned 18 these are young people who ve been relegated to failing schools in struggling communities where there are too many obstacles too few role models communities that i represented as a state senator communities that i fought to lift up as a community organizer i remember going to a school back in my organizing days and seeing children young children maybe five or six eyes were brimming with hope had such big dreams for the future you d ask them what do you want to be when you grow up they d want to be a doctor they d want to be a lawyer and then i remember the principal telling me that soon all that would change the hope would start fading from their eyes as they started to realize that maybe their dreams wouldn t come to pass not because they weren t smart enough not because they weren t talented enough but because through a turn of fate they happened to be born in the wrong neighborhood they became victim of low expectations a community that was not supporting educational excellence and it was heartbreaking it is heartbreaking and it reinforced in me a fundamental belief that we ve got an obligation to lift up every child in every school in this country especially those who are starting out furthest behind that s why i want to challenge our states to offer better early learning options to make sure our children aren t wasting their most formative years so that they can enter into kindergarten already ready to learn knowing their colors knowing their numbers knowing their shapes knowing how to sit still right that s no joke you got to learn that especially when you re a boy that s why we placed such heavy emphasis on the education our children are getting from kindergarten through 12th grade now over the past 18 months the single most important thing we ve done and we ve done a lot i mean the recovery act put a lot of money into schools saved a lot of teacher jobs made sure that schools didn t have to cut back even more drastically in every community across this country but i think the single most important thing we ve done is to launch an initiative called race to the top we said to states if you are committed to outstanding teaching to successful schools to higher standards to better assessments if you re committed to excellence for all children you will be eligible for a grant to help you attain that goal and so far the results have been promising and they have been powerful in an effort to compete for this extra money 32 states reformed their education laws before we even spent a dime the competition leveraged change at the state level and because the standards we set were high only a couple of states actually won the grant in the first round which meant that the states that didn t get the money they ve now strengthened their applications made additional reforms now 36 have applied in the second round and 18 states plus the district of columbia are in the running to get a second grant so understand what s happened in each successive round we ve leveraged change across the country and even students in those districts that haven t gotten a grant they ve still benefited from the reforms that were initiated and this process has sown the seeds of achievement it s forced teachers and principals and officials and parents to forge agreements on tough and often uncomfortable issues to raise their sights and embrace education for the most part states educators reformers they ve responded with great enthusiasm around this promise of excellence but i know there s also been some controversy about race to the top part of it i believe reflects a general resistance to change we get comfortable with the status quo even when the status quo isn t good we make excuses for why things have to be the way they are and when you try to shake things up some people aren t happy there have been criticisms from some folks in the civil rights community about particular elements of race to the top so i want to address some of those today i told you we re going to have an honest conversation first i know there s a concern that race to the top doesn t do enough for minority kids because the argument is well if there s a competition then somehow some states or some school districts will get more help than others let me tell you what s not working for black kids and hispanic kids and native american kids across this country is the status quo that s what s not working what s not working is what we ve been doing for decades now so the charge that race to the top isn t targeted at those young people most in need is absolutely false because lifting up quality for all our children black white hispanic that is the central premise of race to the top and you can t win one of these grants unless you ve got a plan to deal with those schools that are failing and those young people who aren t doing well every state and every school district is directly incentivized to deal with schools that have been forgotten been given up on i also want to directly speak to the issue of teachers we may have some teachers here in the house i know urban league has got some teachers nothing is more important than teachers my sister is a teacher i m here because of great teachers the whole premise of race to the top is that teachers are the single most important factor in a child s education from the moment they step into the classroom and i know firsthand that the vast majority of teachers are working tirelessly are passionate about their students are often digging into their own pockets for basic supplies are going above and beyond the call of duty so i want teachers to have higher salaries i want them to have more support i want them to be trained like the professionals they are with rigorous residencies like the ones that doctors go through i want to give them a career ladder so they ve opportunities to advance and earn real financial security i don t want talented young people to say i d love to teach but i can t afford it i want them to have a fulfilling and supportive workplace environment i want them to have the resources from basic supplies to reasonable class sizes that help them succeed and instead of a culture where we re always idolizing sports stars or celebrities i want us to build a culture where we idolize the people who are shaping our children s future i want some teachers on the covers of some of those magazines some teachers on mtv featured i was on the the view yesterday and somebody asked me who snooki was i said i don t know who snooki is but i know some really good teachers that you guys should be talking about i didn t say the teacher part but i just the question is who are we lifting up who are we promoting who are we saying is important so i am 110 percent behind our teachers but all i m asking in return as a president as a parent and as a citizen is some measure of accountability so even as we applaud teachers for their hard work we ve got to make sure we re seeing results in the classroom if we re not seeing results in the classroom then let s work with teachers to help them become more effective if that doesn t work let s find the right teacher for that classroom arne makes the point very simply our children get only one chance at an education so we need to get it right i want to commend some of the teachers unions across this country who are working with us to improve teaching like the delaware education association which is working with state leaders as part of their race to the top efforts not only to set aside 90 minutes of collaboration time a week to improve instruction but to strengthen teacher development and evaluation that s the right way to go so for anyone who wants to use race to the top to blame or punish teachers you re missing the point our goal isn t to fire or admonish teachers our goal is accountability it s to provide teachers with the support they need to be as effective as they can be and to create a better environment for teachers and students alike now there s also the question of how hard our teachers should push students in the classroom nations in asia and europe have answered this question in part by creating standards to make sure their teachers and students are performing at the same high levels throughout their nation that s one of the reasons that their children are doing better than ours but here at home there s often a controversy about national standards common standards that violates the principle of local control now there s a history to local control that we need to think about but that that s the argument so here s what race to the top says instead of washington imposing standards from the top down let s challenge states to adopt common standards voluntarily from the bottom up that doesn t mean more standards it means higher standards better standards standards that clarify what our teachers are expected to teach and what our children are expected to learn so high school graduates are actually prepared for college and a career i do not want to see young people get a diploma but they can t read that diploma now so far about 30 states have come together to embrace and develop common standards high standards more states are expected to do so in the coming weeks and by the way this is different from no child left behind because what that did was it gave the states the wrong incentives a bunch of states watered down their standards so that school districts wouldn t be penalized when their students fell short and what s happened now is at least two states illinois and oklahoma that lowered standards in response to no child behind no child left behind are now raising those standards back up partly in response to race to the top and part of making sure our young people meet these high standards is designing tests that accurately measure whether they are learning now here too there s been some controversy when we talk about testing parents worry that it means more teaching to the test some worry that tests are culturally biased teachers worry that they ll be evaluated solely on the basis of a single standardized test everybody thinks that s unfair it is unfair but that s not what race to the top is about what race to the top says is there s nothing wrong with testing we just need better tests applied in a way that helps teachers and students instead of stifling what teachers and students do in the classroom tests that don t dictate what s taught but tell us what has been learned tests that measure how well our children are mastering essential skills and answering complex questions and tests that track how well our students are growing academically so we can catch when they re falling behind and help them before they just get passed along because of race to the top states are also finding innovative ways to move beyond having just a snapshot of where students are and towards a real time picture that shows how far they ve come and how far they have to go and armed with this information teachers can get what amounts to a game tape that they can study to enhance their teaching and their focus on areas where students need help the most now sometimes a school s problems run so deep that you can do the better assessments and the higher standards and a more challenging curriculum and that s not enough if a school isn t producing graduates with even the most basic skills year after year after year after year something needs to be done differently you know the definition somebody once said of madness is you do the same thing over and over again and keep expecting a different result if we want success for our country we can t accept failure in our schools decade after decade and that s why we re challenging states to turn around our 5 000 lowest performing schools and i don t think it s any secret that most of those are serving african american or hispanic kids we re investing over 4 billion to help them do that to transform those schools 4 billion which even in washington is real money this isn t about unlike no child left behind this isn t about labeling a troubled school a failure and then just throwing up your hands and saying well we re giving up on you it s about investing in that school s future and recruiting the whole community to help turn it around and identifying viable options for how to move forward now in some cases that s going to mean restarting the school under different management as a charter school as an independent public school formed by parents teachers and civic leaders who ve got broad leeway to innovate and some people don t like charter schools they say well that s going to take away money from other public schools that also need support charter schools aren t a magic bullet but i want to give states and school districts the chance to try new things if a charter school works then let s apply those lessons elsewhere and if a charter school doesn t work we ll hold it accountable we ll shut it down so no i don t support all charter schools but i do support good charter schools i ll give you an example there s a charter school called mastery in philadelphia and in just two years three of the schools that mastery has taken over have seen reading and math levels nearly double in some cases triple chaka fattah is here so he knows what i m talking about one school called pickett went from just 14 percent of students being proficient in math to almost 70 percent now and here s the kicker at the same time academic performance improved violence dropped by 80 percent 80 percent and that s no coincidence now if a school like mastery can do it if pickett can do it every troubled school can do it but that means we re going to have to shake some things up setting high standards common standards empowering students to meet them partnering with our teachers to achieve excellence in the classroom educating our children all of them to graduate ready for college ready for a career ready to make most of their lives none of this should be controversial there should be a fuss if we weren t doing these things there should be a fuss if arne duncan wasn t trying to shake things up so race to the top isn t simply the name of an initiative it sums up what s happening in our schools it s the single most ambitious meaningful education reform effort we ve attempted in this country in generations and i know there are a number of other steps we need to take to lift up our education system like saving teachers jobs across this country from layoffs and i ll continue fighting to take those steps and save those jobs but i ll also continue to fight for race to the top with everything i ve got including using a veto to prevent some folks from watering it down now let me wrap up by saying this i know there are some who say that race to the top won t work there are cynics and naysayers who argue that the problems in our education system are too entrenched that think that we ll just fall back into the same old arguments and divides that have held us back for so long and it is true as i ve said since i ran for president and that everybody here knows firsthand change is hard i don t know if you ve noticed that s why i ve got all this gray hair fixing what was broken in our health care system is not easy fixing what was broken on wall street is not easy fixing what s broken in our education system is not easy we won t see results overnight it may take a decade for these changes to pay off but that s not a reason not to make them it s a reason to start making them right now to feel a sense of urgency the fierce urgency of now we also know that as significant as these reforms are there s going to be one more ingredient to really make a difference parents are going to have to get more involved in their children s education now in the past even that statement has sparked controversy folks say well why are you talking about parents parents need help too i know that parents need jobs they need housing they need in some cases social services they may have substance abuse problems we re working on all those fronts then some people say well why are you always talking about parental responsibility in front of black folks and i say i talk about parent responsibility wherever i talk about education michelle and i happen to be black parents so i may i may add a little umph to it when i m talking to black parents but to paraphrase dr king education isn t an either or proposition it s a both and proposition it will take both more focus from our parents and better schooling it will take both more money and more reform it will take both a collective commitment and a personal commitment so yes our federal government has responsibilities that it has to meet and i will keep on making sure the federal government meets those responsibilities our governors our superintendants our states our school districts have responsibilities to meet and parents have responsibilities that they have to meet and our children have responsibilities that they have to meet it s not just parents it s the children too our kids need to understand nobody is going to hand them a future an education is not something you just tip your head and they pour it in your ear you ve got to want it you ve got to reach out and claim that future for yourself and you can t make excuses i know life is tough for a lot of young people in this country the places where urban league is working to make a difference you see it every day i m coming from the southside of chicago so i know i see what young people are going through there and at certain points in our lives young black men and women may feel the sting of discrimination too many of them may feel trapped in a community where drugs and violence and unemployment are pervasive and they are forced to wrestle with things that no child should have to face there are all kinds of reasons for our children to say no i can t but our job is to say to them yes you can yes you can overcome yes you can persevere yes you can make what you will out of your lives i know they can because i know the character of america s young people i saw them volunteer on my campaign they asked me questions in town hall meetings they write me letters about their trials and aspirations i got a letter recently postmarked covington kentucky it was from na dreya lattimore 10 years old about the same age as sasha and she told me about how her school had closed so she had enrolled in another then she had bumped up against other barriers to what she felt was her potential so na dreya was explaining to me how we need to improve our education system she closed by saying this one more thing she said it was a long letter you need to look at us differently we are not black we re not white biracial hispanic asian or any other nationality no she wrote we are the future na dreya you are right and that s why i will keep fighting to lead us out of this storm but i m also going to keep fighting alongside the urban league to make america more perfect so that young people like na dreya people of every race in every region are going to be able to reach for that american dream they re going to know that there are brighter days ahead that their future is full of boundless possibilities i believe that and i know the urban league does too thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama29 7 10b barack_obama thank you everybody please have a seat i want to start obviously by thanking lisa for her introduction and having the courage to share her story with all of us today it s for every survivor like lisa who has never gotten their day in court and for every family that feels like justice is beyond reach and for every tribal community struggling to keep its people safe that i ll be signing the tribal law and order act into law today and in doing so i intend to send a clear message that all of our people whether they live in our biggest cities or our most remote reservations have the right to feel safe in their own communities and to raise their children in peace and enjoy the fullest protection of our laws as many of you know i campaigned on this issue and during our last during our tribal conference last year i pledged my administration s fullest support for this bill and i told senator dorgan last week that i intended to sign it in a ceremony here at the white house with all of you so today i am proud to make good on my word now i m told there s a seneca proverb that says he who would do great things should not attempt them all alone and that s particularly true of this legislation which is the product of tireless efforts by countless individuals across this country congressional leaders like senator dorgan representative herseth sandlin and others who are here today and tribal leaders like chairman marcus levings president theresa two bulls president diane enos chief chad smith vice chairman jonathan windy boy we are grateful to all of them for their extraordinary support and then we ve got leaders in our administration like attorney general holder and secretary salazar kimberly teehee jodi gillette here at the white house who work tirelessly on this legislation and that s nothing to say of all the dedicated judges and prosecutors and tribal and bia law enforcement officers some of whom are here today who ve supported these efforts and the determined survivors most of all like lisa who even when it s too late to undo what happened to them still speak out to seek justice for others all of you come at this from different angles but you re united in support of this bill because you believe like i do that it is unconscionable that crime rates in indian country are more than twice the national average and up to 20 times the national average on some reservations and all of you believe like i do that when one in three native american women will be raped in their lifetimes that is an assault on our national conscience it is an affront to our shared humanity it is something that we cannot allow to continue so ultimately it s not just the federal government s relationship with tribal governments that compels us to act it s not just our obligations under treaty and under law but it s also our values as a nation that are at stake and that s why earlier this year after extensive consultations with tribal leaders attorney general holder announced significant reforms to increase prosecutions of crimes committed in indian country he hired more assistant u s attorneys and more victim witness specialists and he even created a position for a national indian country training coordinator who will work with prosecutors and law enforcement officers throughout indian country and under secretary salazar s leadership we re launching new community policing pilot programs we ve overhauled the recruitment process for bia officers resulting in a 500 percent jump in applications and the largest hiring increase in history and we re working to deploy those officers to the field as quickly as possible the bill i m signing into law today will build on these efforts because it requires the justice department to disclose data on cases in indian country that it declines to prosecute and it gives tribes greater authority to prosecute and punish criminals themselves it expands recruitment and retention and training for bia and tribal officers and gives them better access to criminal databases it includes new provisions to prevent counterfeiting of indian produced crafts and new guidelines and training for domestic violence and sex crimes and it strengthens tribal courts and police departments and enhances programs to combat drug and alcohol abuse and help at risk youth so these are significant measures that will empower tribal nations and make a real difference in people s lives because as i said during our tribal conference i have no interest in just paying lip service to the problems we face i know that too often this community has heard grand promises from washington that turned out to be little more than empty words and i pledged to you then that if you gave me a chance this time it would be different i told you i was committed to moving forward and forging a new and better future together in every aspect of our government to government relationship and slowly but surely that is exactly what we are doing at this moment agencies across our government are implementing detailed plans to increase coordination and consultation with tribal governments and i intend to hold them accountable for following through we ve also included a permanent reauthorization of the indian health care improvement act in the health care reform legislation we passed this spring we re strengthening tribal education we re working to spur economic development throughout indian country and in consultation with indian tribes we re now formally reviewing the united nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples and after 14 long years we ve finally settled the cobell case and we re working with congress to get the settlement approved as quickly as possible so we re moving forward and we re making progress and as we celebrate today i m reminded of a visit i made a couple of years ago to the crow nation out in montana while i was there i was adopted into the nation by a wonderful couple hartford and mary black eagle so i m barack black eagle but i was also i was also given a crow name that means one who helps people throughout the land and it s a name that i view not as an honor that i deserve but as a responsibility that i must work to fulfill and looking back i can t help but think that only in america could a guy like me named barack obama adoptive son of the crow nation go on to become president that was improbable when it happened two years ago but it would have been inconceivable a generation or two before that and i think the same could be said of this legislation and that should ultimately give us all hope it should remind us that our union has a way of over time becoming more and not less perfect more inclusive more fair more free and that s because of people like you leaders and public servants and everyday folks who understand that we re more than just heirs to a difficult past here in america we have a chance to choose a different future and to heed those better angels of our nature and cast our lot with something bigger than ourselves so it s in that spirit that i hope we define the relationship between our nations in the years ahead and it is the goal of this legislation that i am proud to sign into law today thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama29 8 09 barack_obama your eminence vicki kara edward patrick curran caroline members of the kennedy family distinguished guests and fellow citizens today we say goodbye to the youngest child of rose and joseph kennedy the world will long remember their son edward as the heir to a weighty legacy a champion for those who had none the soul of the democratic party and the lion of the united states senate a man who graces nearly 1 000 laws and who penned more than 300 laws himself but those of us who loved him and ache with his passing know ted kennedy by the other titles he held father brother husband grandfather uncle teddy or as he was often known to his younger nieces and nephews the grand fromage or the big cheese i like so many others in the city where he worked for nearly half a century knew him as a colleague a mentor and above all as a friend ted kennedy was the baby of the family who became its patriarch the restless dreamer who became its rock he was the sunny joyful child who bore the brunt of his brothers teasing but learned quickly how to brush it off when they tossed him off a boat because he didn t know what a jib was six year old teddy got back in and learned to sail when a photographer asked the newly elected bobby to step back at a press conference because he was casting a shadow on his younger brother teddy quipped it ll be the same in washington that spirit of resilience and good humor would see teddy through more pain and tragedy than most of us will ever know he lost two siblings by the age of 16 he saw two more taken violently from a country that loved them he said goodbye to his beloved sister eunice in the final days of his life he narrowly survived a plane crash watched two children struggle with cancer buried three nephews and experienced personal failings and setbacks in the most public way possible it s a string of events that would have broken a lesser man and it would have been easy for ted to let himself become bitter and hardened to surrender to self pity and regret to retreat from public life and live out his years in peaceful quiet no one would have blamed him for that but that was not ted kennedy as he told us individual faults and frailties are no excuse to give in and no exemption from the common obligation to give of ourselves indeed ted was the happy warrior that the poet wordsworth spoke of when he wrote as tempted more more able to endure as more exposed to suffering and distress thence also more alive to tenderness through his own suffering ted kennedy became more alive to the plight and the suffering of others the sick child who could not see a doctor the young soldier denied her rights because of what she looks like or who she loves or where she comes from the landmark laws that he championed the civil rights act the americans with disabilities act immigration reform children s health insurance the family and medical leave act all have a running thread ted kennedy s life work was not to champion the causes of those with wealth or power or special connections it was to give a voice to those who were not heard to add a rung to the ladder of opportunity to make real the dream of our founding he was given the gift of time that his brothers were not and he used that gift to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow we can still hear his voice bellowing through the senate chamber face reddened fist pounding the podium a veritable force of nature in support of health care or workers rights or civil rights and yet as has been noted while his causes became deeply personal his disagreements never did while he was seen by his fiercest critics as a partisan lightning rod that s not the prism through which ted kennedy saw the world nor was it the prism through which his colleagues saw ted kennedy he was a product of an age when the joy and nobility of politics prevented differences of party and platform and philosophy from becoming barriers to cooperation and mutual respect a time when adversaries still saw each other as patriots and that s how ted kennedy became the greatest legislator of our time he did it by hewing to principle yes but also by seeking compromise and common cause not through deal making and horse trading alone but through friendship and kindness and humor there was the time he courted orrin hatch for support of the children s health insurance program by having his chief of staff serenade the senator with a song orrin had written himself the time he delivered shamrock cookies on a china plate to sweeten up a crusty republican colleague the famous story of how he won the support of a texas committee chairman on an immigration bill teddy walked into a meeting with a plain manila envelope and showed only the chairman that it was filled with the texan s favorite cigars when the negotiations were going well he would inch the envelope closer to the chairman when they weren t he d pull it back before long the deal was done it was only a few years ago on st patrick s day when teddy buttonholed me on the floor of the senate for my support of a certain piece of legislation that was coming up for vote i gave my pledge but i expressed skepticism that it would pass but when the roll call was over the bill garnered the votes that it needed and then some i looked at teddy with astonishment and asked how had he done it he just patted me on the back and said luck of the irish of course luck had little to do with ted kennedy s legislative success he knew that a few years ago his father in law told him that he and daniel webster just might be the two greatest senators of all time without missing a beat teddy replied what did webster do but though it is teddy s historic body of achievements that we will remember it is his giving heart that we will miss it was the friend and the colleague who was always the first to pick up the phone and say i m sorry for your loss or i hope you feel better or what can i do to help it was the boss so adored by his staff that over 500 spanning five decades showed up for his 75th birthday party it was the man who sent birthday wishes and thank you notes and even his own paintings to so many who never imagined that a u s senator of such stature would take the time to think about somebody like them i have one of those paintings in my private study off the oval office a cape cod seascape that was a gift to a freshman legislator who had just arrived in washington and happened to admire it when ted kennedy welcomed him into his office that by the way is my second gift from teddy and vicki after our dog bo and it seems like everyone has one of those stories the ones that often start with you wouldn t believe who called me today ted kennedy was the father who looked not only after his own three children but john s and bobby s as well he took them camping and taught them to sail he laughed and danced with them at birthdays and weddings cried and mourned with them through hardship and tragedy and passed on that same sense of service and selflessness that his parents had instilled in him shortly after ted walked caroline down the aisle and gave her away at the altar he received a note from jackie that read on you the carefree youngest brother fell a burden a hero would have begged to been spared we are all going to make it because you were always there with your love not only did the kennedy family make it because of ted s love he made it because of theirs especially because the love and the life he found in vicki after so much loss and so much sorrow it could not have been easy for ted to risk his heart again and that he did is a testament to how deeply he loved this remarkable woman from louisiana and she didn t just love him back as ted would often acknowledge vicki saved him she gave him strength and purpose joy and friendship and stood by him always especially in those last hardest days we cannot know for certain how long we have here we cannot foresee the trials or misfortunes that will test us along the way we cannot know what god s plan is for us what we can do is to live out our lives as best we can with purpose and with love and with joy we can use each day to show those who are closest to us how much we care about them and treat others with the kindness and respect that we wish for ourselves we can learn from our mistakes and grow from our failures and we can strive at all costs to make a better world so that someday if we are blessed with the chance to look back on our time here we know that we spent it well that we made a difference that our fleeting presence had a lasting impact on the lives of others this is how ted kennedy lived this is his legacy he once said as has already been mentioned of his brother bobby that he need not be idealized or enlarged in death because what he was in life and i imagine he would say the same about himself the greatest expectations were placed upon ted kennedy s shoulders because of who he was but he surpassed them all because of who he became we do not weep for him today because of the prestige attached to his name or his office we weep because we loved this kind and tender hero who persevered through pain and tragedy not for the sake of ambition or vanity not for wealth or power but only for the people and the country that he loved in the days after september 11th teddy made it a point to personally call each one of the 177 families of this state who lost a loved one in the attack but he didn t stop there he kept calling and checking up on them he fought through red tape to get them assistance and grief counseling he invited them sailing played with their children and would write each family a letter whenever the anniversary of that terrible day came along to one widow he wrote the following as you know so well the passage of time never really heals the tragic memory of such a great loss but we carry on because we have to because our loved ones would want us to and because there is still light to guide us in the world from the love they gave us we carry on ted kennedy has gone home now guided by his faith and by the light of those that he has loved and lost at last he is with them once more leaving those of us who grieve his passing with the memories he gave the good that he did the dream he kept alive and a single enduring image the image of a man on a boat white mane tousled smiling broadly as he sails into the wind ready for whatever storms may come carrying on toward some new and wondrous place just beyond the horizon may god bless ted kennedy and may he rest in eternal peace dem bobama29 8 10 barack_obama hello everybody it is good to be back it is good to be back i m glad and due to popular demand i decided to bring the first lady down here we have just an extraordinary number of dedicated public servants who are here if you will be patient with me i want to make sure that all of them are acknowledged first of all you ve got the governor of the great state of louisiana bobby jindal is here we have the outstanding mayor of new orleans mitch landrieu we have the better looking and younger senator from louisiana mary landrieu i believe that senator david vitter is here david right here we have hold on a second now we ve got congressman joe cao is here congressman charlie melancon is here congressman steve scalise is here secretary of housing and urban development who has been working tirelessly down here in louisiana shaun donovan we ve got our epa administrator lisa jackson here homegirl administrator of fema craig fugate is here the person who s heading up our community service efforts all across the country patrick corvington is here louisiana s own regina benjamin the surgeon general a xavier grad i might add we are very proud to have all of these terrific public servants here it is wonderful to be back in new orleans and it is a great honor it is a great honor you can see me now okay it is a great honor to be back at xavier university and i it s just inspiring to spend time with people who ve demonstrated what it means to persevere in the face of tragedy to rebuild in the face of ruin i m grateful to jade for her introduction and congratulate you on being crowned miss xavier i hope everybody heard during the introduction she was a junior at ben franklin high school five years ago when the storm came and after katrina ben franklin high was terribly damaged by wind and water millions of dollars were needed to rebuild the school many feared it would take years to reopen if it could be reopened at all but something remarkable happened parents teachers students volunteers they all got to work making repairs and donations came in from across new orleans and around the world and soon those silent and darkened corridors they were bright and they were filled with the sounds of young men and women including jade who were going back to class and then jade committed to xavier a university that likewise refused to succumb to despair so jade like so many students here at this university embody hope that sense of hope in difficult times that s what i came to talk about today it s been five years since katrina ravaged the gulf coast there s no need to dwell on what you experienced and what the world witnessed we all remember it keenly water pouring through broken levees mothers holding their children above the waterline people stranded on rooftops begging for help bodies lying in the streets of a great american city it was a natural disaster but also a manmade catastrophe a shameful breakdown in government that left countless men and women and children abandoned and alone and shortly after the storm i came down to houston to spend time with some of the folks who had taken shelter there and i ll never forget what one woman told me she said we had nothing before the hurricane and now we ve got less than nothing in the years that followed new orleans could have remained a symbol of destruction and decay of a storm that came and the inadequate response that followed it was not hard to imagine a day when we d tell our children that a once vibrant and wonderful city had been laid low by indifference and neglect but that s not what happened it s not what happened at ben franklin it s not what happened here at xavier it s not what happened across new orleans and across the gulf coast instead this city has become a symbol of resilience and of community and of the fundamental responsibility that we have to one another and we see that here at xavier less than a month after the storm struck amidst debris and flood damaged buildings president francis promised that this university would reopen in a matter of months some said he was crazy some said it couldn t happen but they didn t count on what happens when one force of nature meets another and by january four months later class was in session less than a year after the storm i had the privilege of delivering a commencement address to the largest graduating class in xavier s history that is a symbol of what new orleans is all about we see new orleans in the efforts of joycelyn heintz who s here today katrina left her house 14 feet underwater but after volunteers helped her rebuild she joined americorps to serve the community herself part of a wave of americorps members who ve been critical to the rebirth of this city and the rebuilding of this region so today she manages a local center for mental health and wellness we see the symbol that this city has become in the st bernard project whose founder liz mccartney is with us this endeavor has drawn volunteers from across the country to rebuild hundreds of homes throughout st bernard parish and the lower ninth ward i ve seen the sense of purpose people felt after the storm when i visited musicians village in the ninth ward back in 2006 volunteers were not only constructing houses they were coming together to preserve the culture of music and art that s part of the soul of this city and the soul of this country and today more than 70 homes are complete and construction is underway on the ellis marsalis center for music we see the dedication to the community in the efforts of xavier grad dr regina benjamin who mortgaged her home maxed out her credit cards so she could reopen her bayou la batre clinic to care for victims of the storm and who is now our nation s surgeon general and we see resilience and hope exemplified by students at carver high school who have helped to raise more than a million dollars to build a new community track and football field their field of dreams for the ninth ward so because of all of you all the advocates all the organizers who are here today folks standing behind me who ve worked so hard who never gave up hope you are all leading the way toward a better future for this city with innovative approaches to fight poverty and improve health care reduce crime and create opportunities for young people because of you new orleans is coming back and i just came from parkway bakery and tavern five years ago the storm nearly destroyed that neighborhood institution i saw the pictures now they re open business is booming and that s some good eats i had the shrimp po boy and some of the gumbo but i skipped the bread pudding because i thought i might fall asleep while i was speaking but i ve got it saved for later five years ago many questioned whether people could ever return to this city today new orleans is one of the fastest growing cities in america with a big new surge in small businesses five years ago the saints had to play every game on the road because of the damage to the superdome two weeks ago we welcomed the saints to the white house as super bowl champions there was also food associated with that we marked the occasion with a 30 foot po boy made with shrimps and oysters from the gulf and you ll be pleased to know there were no leftovers now i don t have to tell you that there are still too many vacant and overgrown lots there are still too many students attending classes in trailers there are still too many people unable to find work and there are still too many new orleanians folks who haven t been able to come home so while an incredible amount of progress has been made on this fifth anniversary i wanted to come here and tell the people of this city directly my administration is going to stand with you and fight alongside you until the job is done until new orleans is all the way back all the way when i took office i directed my cabinet to redouble our efforts to put an end to the turf wars between agencies to cut the red tape and cut the bureaucracy i wanted to make sure that the federal government was a partner not an obstacle to recovery here in the gulf coast and members of my cabinet including epa administrator lisa jackson who grew up in pontchartrain park they have come down here dozens of times shaun donovan has come down here dozens of times this is not just to make appearances it s not just to get photo ops they came down here to listen and to learn and make real the changes that were necessary so that government was actually working for you so for example efforts to rebuild schools and hospitals to repair damaged roads and bridges to get people back to their homes they were tied up for years in a tangle of disagreements and byzantine rules so when i took office working with your outstanding delegation particularly senator mary landrieu we put in place a new way of resolving disputes we put in place a new way of resolving disputes so that funds set aside for rebuilding efforts actually went toward rebuilding efforts and as a result more than 170 projects are getting underway work on firehouses and police stations and roads and sewer systems and health clinics and libraries and universities we re tackling the corruption and inefficiency that has long plagued the new orleans housing authority we re helping homeowners rebuild and making it easier for renters to find affordable options and we re helping people to move out of temporary homes you know when i took office more than three years after the storm tens of thousands of families were still stuck in disaster housing many still living in small trailers that had been provided by fema we were spending huge sums of money on temporary shelters when we knew it would be better for families and less costly for taxpayers to help people get into affordable stable and more permanent housing so we ve helped make it possible for people to find those homes and we ve dramatically reduced the number of families in emergency housing on the health care front as a candidate for president i pledged to make sure we were helping new orleans recruit doctors and nurses and rebuild medical facilities including a new veterans hospital well we have resolved a long standing dispute one that had tied up hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the replacement for charity hospital and in june veterans secretary ric shinseki came to new orleans for the groundbreaking of that new va hospital in education we ve made strides as well as you know schools in new orleans were falling behind long before katrina but in the years since the storm a lot of public schools opened themselves up to innovation and to reform and as a result we re actually seeing rising achievement and new orleans is becoming a model of innovation for the nation this is yet another sign that you re not just rebuilding you re rebuilding stronger than before just this friday my administration announced a final agreement on 1 8 billion dollars for orleans parish schools this is money that had been locked up for years but now it s freed up so folks here can determine best how to restore the school system and in a city that s known too much violence that s seen too many young people lost to drugs and criminal activity we ve got a justice department that s committed to working with new orleans to fight the scourge of violent crime and to weed out corruption in the police force and to ensure the criminal justice system works for everyone in this city and i want everybody to hear to know and to hear me thank mitch landrieu your new mayor for his commitment to that partnership now even as we continue our recovery efforts we re also focusing on preparing for future threats so that there is never another disaster like katrina the largest civil works project in american history is underway to build a fortified levee system and as i just as i pledged as a candidate we re going to finish this system by next year so that this city is protected against a 100 year storm we should not be playing russian roulette every hurricane season and we re also working to restore protective wetlands and natural barriers that were not only damaged by katrina were not just damaged by katrina but had been rapidly disappearing for decades in washington we are restoring competence and accountability i am proud that my fema director craig fugate has 25 years of experience in disaster management in florida he came from florida a state that has known its share of hurricanes we ve put together a group led by secretary donovan and secretary napolitano to look at disaster recovery across the country we re improving coordination on the ground and modernizing emergency communications helping families plan for a crisis and we re putting in place reforms so that never again in america is somebody left behind in a disaster because they re living with a disability or because they re elderly or because they re infirmed that will not happen again finally even as you ve been buffeted by katrina and rita even as you ve been impacted by the broader recession that has devastated communities across the country in recent months the gulf coast has seen new hardship as a result of the bp deepwater horizon oil spill and just as we ve sought to ensure that we are doing what it takes to recover from katrina my administration has worked hard to match our efforts on the spill to what you need on the ground and we ve been in close consultation with your governor your mayors your parish presidents your local government officials and from the start i promised you two things one is that we would see to it that the leak was stopped and it has been the second promise i made was that we would stick with our efforts and stay on bp until the damage to the gulf and to the lives of the people in this region was reversed and this too is a promise that we will keep we are not going to forget we re going to stay on it until this area is fully recovered that s why we rapidly launched the largest response to an environmental disaster in american history 47 000 people on the ground 5 700 vessels on the water to contain and clean up the oil when bp was not moving fast enough on claims we told bp to set aside 20 billion in a fund managed by an independent third party to help all those whose lives have been turned upside down by the spill and we will continue to rely on sound science carefully monitoring waters and coastlines as well as the health of the people along the gulf to deal with any long term effects of the oil spill we are going to stand with you until the oil is cleaned up until the environment is restored until polluters are held accountable until communities are made whole and until this region is all the way back on its feet so that s how we re helping this city and this state and this region to recover from the worst natural disaster in our nation s history we re cutting through the red tape that has impeded rebuilding efforts for years we re making government work better and smarter in coordination with one of the most expansive non profit efforts in american history we re helping state and local leaders to address serious problems that had been neglected for decades problems that existed before the storm came and have continued after the waters receded from the levee system to the justice system from the health care system to the education system and together we are helping to make new orleans a place that stands for what we can do in america not just for what we can t do ultimately that must be the legacy of katrina not one of neglect but of action not one of indifference but of empathy not of abandonment but of a community working together to meet shared challenges the truth is there are some wounds that have not yet healed and there are some losses that can t be repaid and for many who lived through those harrowing days five years ago there s searing memories that time may not erase but even amid so much tragedy we saw stirrings of a brighter day five years ago we saw men and women risking their own safety to save strangers we saw nurses staying behind to care for the sick and the injured we saw families coming home to clean up and rebuild not just their own homes but their neighbors homes as well and we saw music and mardi gras and the vibrancy the fun of this town undiminished and we ve seen many return to their beloved city with a newfound sense of appreciation and obligation to this community and when i came here four years ago one thing i found striking was all the greenery that had begun to come back and i was reminded of a passage from the book of job there is hope for a tree if it be cut down that it will sprout again and that its tender branch will not cease the work ahead will not be easy and there will be setbacks there will be challenges along the way but thanks to you thanks to the great people of this great city new orleans is blossoming again thank you everybody god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama3 12 09a barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you very much please have a seat good afternoon everybody i m glad you all could join us today for this job forum here at the white house we ve got leaders from just about every sector of the economy government labor academia non profits and businesses of all sizes and i know that your unions or universities or cities or companies don t run themselves so i appreciate that you ve taken the time to be here today and i appreciate the unique perspective each of you brings to the great economic challenge before us the continuing plight of millions of americans who are still out of work sometimes in this town we talk about these things in clinical and academic ways but this is not an academic debate with one in 10 americans out of work and millions more underemployed not having enough hours to support themselves this is a struggle that cuts deep and it touches people across this nation every day i meet people or i hear from people who talk about sending out resume after resume and they ve been on the job hunt for a year or year and a half and still can t find anything and are desperate they haven t just lost the paycheck they need to live they re losing the sense of dignity and identity that comes from having a job i hear from business owners who face the heartbreak of having to lay off longtime employees or shutting their doors altogether in some cases businesses that they ve taken years to build in some cases businesses that they inherited from their parents or their grandparents and i see communities devastated by lost jobs and devastated by the fear that those jobs are never coming back now as joe mentioned it s true that we ve seen a significant turnaround in the economy overall since the beginning of the year our economy was in a freefall our financial system was on the verge of collapse we were losing 700 000 jobs per month and it was clear then that our first order of business was to keep a recession from slipping into a depression from preventing financial meltdown and getting the economy growing again because we knew that without economic growth there would be little to nothing we could do to stem job losses and we knew that trying to create jobs in an economy based on inflated home prices and maxed out credit cards and overleveraged banks was akin to building a house on sand so we implemented plans to stabilize the financial system and revive lending to families and businesses we passed the recovery act which stopped our freefall and help spur the growth that we ve seen today our economy is growing again for the first time in a year and at the fastest pace that we ve seen in two years and productivity is surging companies are reporting profits the stock market is up but despite the progress we ve made many businesses are still skittish about hiring some are still digging themselves out of the losses they incurred over the past year many have figured out how to squeeze more productivity out of fewer workers and that cost cutting has become embedded in their operations and in their culture that may result in good profits but it s not translating into hiring and so that s the question that we have to ask ourselves today how do we get businesses to start hiring again how do we get ourselves to the point where more people are working and more people are spending and you start seeing a virtuous cycle and the recovery starts to feed on itself we knew from the outset of this recession particularly a recession of this severity and a recession that is spurred on by financial crisis rather than as a consequence of the business cycle that it would take time for job growth to catch up with economic growth we all understood that that s always been the case with recessions but we cannot hang back and hope for the best when we ve seen the kinds of job losses that we ve seen over the last year i am not interested in taking a wait and see approach when it comes to creating jobs what i m interested in is taking action right now to help businesses create jobs right now in the near term that s why we made more credit available to small banks that provide loans to small businesses that s why we provided tax relief to help small businesses stay afloat and proposed raising sba loan limits to help them expand that s why we created the cash for clunkers program and made sure the recovery act included investments that would start saving and creating jobs this year as joe mentioned as many as 1 6 million so far is estimated according to the most recent analysis and that s why i ve been working continuously with my economic advisors as well as congressional leaders and others on new job creation ideas and i ll be speaking in greater detail about several ideas that have already surfaced early next week but i want to be clear while i believe that government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector we don t have enough public dollars to fill the hole of private dollars that was created as a consequence of the crisis it is only when the private sector starts to reinvest again only when our businesses start hiring again and people start spending again and families start seeing improvement in their own lives again that we re going to have the kind of economy that we want that s the measure of a real economic recovery so that s why i ve invited all of you here today many of you run businesses yourselves each of you is an expert on some aspect of job creation collectively your views span the spectrum that was deliberate we ve looking for fresh perspectives and new ideas i want to hear about what unions and universities can do to better support and prepare our workers not just for the jobs of today but for the jobs five years from now and 10 years from now and 50 years from now i want to hear about what mayors and community leaders can do to bring new investment to our cities and towns and help recovery dollars get to where they need to go as quickly as possible i want to hear from ceos about what s holding back our business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring and if there are things that we re doing here in washington that are inhibiting you then we want to know about it and i want to continue this conversation outside of washington which is why i ll be meeting with some of the small business owners that you saw in the video in allentown pennsylvania tomorrow to get their ideas it s also why we ve asked state and local officials and community organizations to hold their own jobs forums over the next week or so and to report back with the ideas and recommendations that result now let me be clear i am open to every demonstrably good idea and i want to take every responsible step to accelerate job creation we also though have to face the fact that our resources are limited when we walked in there was an enormous fiscal gap between the money that is going out and the money coming in the recession has made that worse because of fewer tax receipts and more demands made on government for things like unemployment insurance so we can t make any ill considered decisions right now even with the best of intentions we re going to have to be surgical and we re going to have to be creative we re going to have to be smart and strategic we ll need to look beyond the old standbys and fallbacks and come up with the best ideas that give us the biggest bang for the buck so i need everybody here to bring their a game here today i m going to be asking some tough questions i will be listening for some good answers and i don t want to just brainstorm up at 30 000 feet i want details in our discussion today i m looking for specific recommendations that can be implemented that will spur on job growth as quickly as possible i want to be clear we won t overcome our unemployment challenge in just a few hours this afternoon i assure you there is extraordinary skepticism that any discussions like this can actually produce results i m well aware of that i don t mind skepticism if i listened to the skeptics i wouldn t be here but i am confident that we ll make progress i m confident that people like you who ve built thriving businesses or revolutionized industries or brought cities and communities together and changed the way we look at the world and innovated and created new products that you can come up with some additional good ideas on how to create jobs and i m confident that the spirit of bold persistent experimentation that fdr talked about and that s gotten this country through some of our darkest hours remains alive and well not just in this room but all across the country we still have the best universities in the world we ve got some of the finest science and technology in the world we ve got the most entrepreneurial spirit in the world and we ve got some of the most productive workers in the world and if we get serious then the 21st century is going to be the american century just like the 20th century was but we re going to have to approach this with a sense of seriousness and try to set the politics and the chatter aside for a while and actually get to work so welcome thank you for participating we are going to maximize the productivity of this effort over the next several hours and i will be returning back with you so that i can get a report on what kinds of ideas seem to make the most sense thank you very much everybody dem bobama3 12 09b barack_obama thank you merry christmas happy holidays washington d c i want to first of all thank secretary salazar for not only the kind introduction but the extraordinary work he is doing in preserving the incredible bounty and natural resources of this country i want to thank all those involved in helping to organize this great event thank you to randy jackson and all the performers putting on an incredible show i told sasha we re not on american idol no singing i also want to thank neal mulholland jon jarvis and peggy o dell from the national park service for being with us and all the park service employees who ve worked so hard to put this event together give them a big round of applause and i want to thank my outstanding vice president and his gorgeous granddaughters joe biden stand up joe in 1923 the washington d c public schools wrote a letter to the white house asking if they could put up a christmas tree on the south lawn and first lady grace coolidge said they could use the ellipse and in the eight decades since in times of war and peace hardship and joy americans from every corner of this nation have gathered here to share in the holiday spirit tonight we celebrate a story that is as beautiful as it is simple the story of a child born far from home to parents guided only by faith but who would ultimately spread a message that has endured for more than 2 000 years that no matter who we are or where we are from we are each called to love one another as brother and sister while this story may be a christian one its lesson is universal it speaks to the hope we share as a people and it represents a tradition that we celebrate as a country a tradition that has come to represent more than any one holiday or religion but a season of brotherhood and generosity to our fellow citizens it s that spirit of unity that we must remember as we light the national christmas tree a tree that will shine its light far beyond our city and our shores to every american around the world and that s why tonight our thoughts and prayers are with the men and women who will be spending this holiday far from home the mothers and fathers the sons and daughters of our military who risk their lives every day to keep us safe we will be thinking of you and praying for you during this holiday season and let s also remember our neighbors who are struggling here at home those who ve lost a job or a home a friend or a loved one because even though it s easy to focus on receiving at this time of year it s often in the simple act of giving that we find the greatest happiness so on behalf of michelle and malia and sasha and my mother in law mama robinson i want to wish all of you a very merry christmas may you go out with joy and be led forth in peace and now to the serious business of pressing the button and lighting this beautiful tree so guys come up here i need some assistance i m technologically challenged and i might not get this right so we re going to do a countdown starting from five everybody has got to help me out here five four three two one ho it worked dem bobama3 3 09 barack_obama thank you thank you dot thank you very much please have a seat thank you vice president biden secretary lahood our co chairs of the tiger team lana hurdle and joel szabat thank you all for the extraordinary work that you guys are doing each and every day i want to begin with some plain talk the economy s performance in the last quarter of 2008 was the worst in over 25 years and frankly the first quarter of this year holds out little promise for better returns from wall street to main street to kitchen tables all across america our economic challenge is clear and now it is up to us to meet it one of the challenges is to jumpstart lending so businesses and families can finance the purchases of everything from inventory and payroll to a home a car or a college education we have to jumpstart the credit markets and get private lending going again no matter how good of a job we do here that s going to be critical and that s why the treasury and the federal reserve are launching today the consumer and business lending initiative which when fully implemented will generate up to a trillion dollars of new lending for the american people and this will help unlock our frozen credit markets which is absolutely essential for economic recovery but we also know that there cannot be a sustained recovery unless and until we put americans back to work and put money in their pockets two weeks ago i signed into law the american recovery and reinvestment act the most sweeping economic recovery plan in history and already its impact is being felt across this nation hardworking families can now worry a little less about next month s bills because of the tax cut they ll soon find in the mail renewable energy companies that were once downsizing are now finding ways to expand and transportation projects that were once on hold are now starting up again as part of the largest new investment in america s infrastructure since president eisenhower built the interstate highway system of the 3 5 million jobs that will be created and saved over the next two years as a result of this recovery plan 400 000 will be jobs rebuilding our crumbling roads bridges and schools repairing our faulty levees and dams connecting nearly every american to broadband and upgrading the buses and trains that commuters take every day many of these projects will be coordinated by secretary lahood and all of you at the department of transportation and i want you to know that the american public is grateful to public servants like you men and women whose work isn t always recognized but whose jobs are critical to our nation s safety security and prosperity you have never been more important than you are right now and for that we are all grateful now in the coming days and weeks my administration will be announcing more details about the kinds of transportation projects that will be launched as part of the recovery plan but today i want to speak about an investment we are making in one part of our infrastructure through the recovery act we will be investing 28 billion in our highways money that every one of our 50 states can start using immediately to put people back to work it s an investment being made at an unprecedented pace thanks in large part to joe biden who s leading the effort to get the money out the door quickly because of joe and because of all the governors and mayors county and city officials who are helping implement this plan i can say that 14 days after i signed our recovery act into law we are seeing shovels hit the ground as secretary lahood noted the first contract will be awarded to american infrastructure a family business in pennsylvania that will be resurfacing a road in maryland more than 100 other people will begin receiving funds today as well over the next few weeks we will launch more than 200 construction projects across this country fueling growth in an industry that s been hard hit by our economic crisis altogether this investment in highways will create or save 150 000 jobs by the end of next year most of them in the private sector and just to give you a sense of perspective that s more jobs being created or saved in one year than gm ford and chrysler have lost in manufacturing over the past three years combined the job the jobs that we re creating are good jobs that pay more than average jobs grinding asphalt and paving roads filling potholes making street signs repairing stop lights replacing guard rails but what makes this investment so important is not simply that we will jumpstart job creation or reduce the congestion that costs us nearly 80 billion a year or rebuild the aging roads that cost drivers billions more a year in upkeep what makes it so important is that by investing in roads that have earned a grade of d by america s leading civil engineers roads that should have been rebuilt long ago we can save some 14 000 men and women who lose their lives each year due to bad roads and driving conditions like a broken levee or a bridge with a shaky foundation poor roads are a public hazard and we have a responsibility to fix them now we have another responsibility having inherited a trillion dollar deficit that we re working to cut in half we also need to ensure that tax dollars aren t wasted on projects that don t deliver results and that s why as part of his duty joe will keep an eye on how precious tax dollars are being spent to you he s mr vice president but around the white house we call him the sheriff because if you re misusing taxpayer money you ll have to answer to him and to help him i ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general to root out waste and fraud and i m also deputizing every single american to visit a new website called recovery gov so you can see where your tax dollars are going and hold us accountable for results we re also making it easier for americans to see what projects are being funded with their money as part of our recovery so in the weeks to come the signs denoting these projects are going to bear the new emblem of the american recovery and reinvestment act that s it right there transportation projects will be stamped with another emblem as well these emblems are symbols of our commitment to you the american people a commitment to investing your tax dollars wisely to put americans to work doing the work that needs to be done so when you see them on projects that your tax dollars made possible let it be a reminder that our government your government is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of recovery and so in the days and years ahead as you re driving on new roads or roads that are newly paved i hope it will give you some measure of satisfaction to know that it was all done by putting your fellow citizens to work i hope it will give you a sense of pride to know that even as we pursued our economic recovery we renewed our american landscape throughout our history there have been times when a generation of americans seized the chance to remake the face of this nation it s what we did in the midst of civil war by connecting our coasts with a transcontinental railroad it s what we did in the midst of depression by putting up a golden bridge in san francisco and electrifying rural america and completing a great dam in the southwest it s what we re doing once more by building a 21st century infrastructure that will make america s economy stronger and america s people safer that s the reason we re here today that s the purpose of our recovery plan that s the cause of my presidency and i need it to be your cause as well each and every one of you have a role to play there are those out there who say this can t be done it can t be done efficiently it can t be done effectively we ve gone through a lot of years where we were told what government cannot do government can t do anything by itself we ve got to have the private sector involved but there are critical things the government can do right here at the department of transportation each and every one of you have a critical role to play and if you do your work if you do your job as well as you can do if you feel as inspired as i do about the work that lies ahead i m absolutely confident that we re going to look back on this time and say to ourselves this was a moment where we really made a difference what an extraordinary opportunity that is i hope all of you seize it thank you everybody god bless you dem bobama3 3 10 barack_obama thank you so much all of you for joining us today and i want to thank julie barbara roland stephen renee and christopher standing behind me physicians physicians assistants and nurses who understand how important it is for us to make much needed changes in our health care system i want to thank all of you who are here today i want to specially recognize two people who have been working tirelessly on that on this effort my secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius as well as our quarterback for health reform out of the white house nancy ann deparle we began our push to reform health insurance last march in this room with doctors and nurses who know the system best and so it s fitting to be joined by all of you as we bring this journey to a close last thursday i spent seven hours at a summit where democrats and republicans engaged in a public and very substantive discussion about health care this meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago and since then every idea has been put on the table every argument has been made everything there is to say about health care has been said and just about everybody has said it so now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works not just for the insurance companies but for america s families and america s businesses now where both sides say they agree is that the status quo is not working for the american people health insurance is becoming more expensive by the day families can t afford it businesses can t afford it the federal government can t afford it smaller businesses and individuals who don t get coverage at work are squeezed especially hard and insurance companies freely ration health care based on who s sick and who s healthy who can pay and who can t that s the status quo that s the system we have right now democrats and republicans agree that this is a serious problem for america and we agree that if we do nothing if we throw up our hands and walk away it s a problem that will only grow worse nobody disputes that more americans will lose their family s health insurance if they switch jobs or lose their job more small businesses will be forced to choose between health care and hiring more insurance companies will deny people coverage who have preexisting conditions or they ll drop people s coverage when they get sick and need it most and the rising cost of medicare and medicaid will sink our government deeper and deeper and deeper into debt on all of this we agree so the question is what do we do about it on one end of the spectrum there are some who ve suggested scrapping our system of private insurance and replacing it with a government run health care system and though many other countries have such a system in america it would be neither practical nor realistic on the other end of the spectrum there are those and this includes most republicans in congress who believe the answer is to loosen regulations on the insurance industry whether it s state consumer protections or minimum standards for the kind of insurance they can sell the argument is is that that will somehow lower costs i disagree with that approach i m concerned that this would only give the insurance industry even freer rein to raise premiums and deny care so i don t believe we should give government bureaucrats or insurance company bureaucrats more control over health care in america i believe it s time to give the american people more control over their health care and their health insurance i don t believe we can afford to leave life and death decisions about health care to the discretion of insurance company executives alone i believe that doctors and nurses and physician assistants like the ones in this room should be free to decide what s best for their patients now the proposal i put forward gives americans more control over their health insurance and their health care by holding insurance companies more accountable it builds on the current system where most americans get their health insurance from their employer if you like your plan you can keep your plan if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor i can tell you as the father of two young girls i would not want any plan that interferes with the relationship between a family and their doctor essentially my proposal would change three things about the current health care system first it would end the worst practices of insurance companies no longer would they be able to deny your coverage because of a preexisting condition no longer would they be able to drop your coverage because you got sick no longer would they be able to force you to pay unlimited amounts of money out of your own pocket no longer would they be able to arbitrarily and massively raise premiums like anthem blue cross recently tried to do in california up to 39 percent increases in one year in the individual market those practices would end second my proposal would give uninsured individuals and small business owners the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of congress get for themselves because if it s good enough for members of congress it s good enough for the people who pay their salaries the reason federal employees get a good deal on health insurance is that we all participate in an insurance market where insurance companies give better coverage and better rates because they get more customers it s an idea that many republicans have embraced in the past before politics intruded and my proposal says that if you still can t afford the insurance in this new marketplace even though it s going to provide better deals for people than they can get right now in the individual marketplace then we ll offer you tax credits to do so tax credits that add up to the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history after all the wealthiest among us can already buy the best insurance there is and the least well off are able to get coverage through medicaid so it s the middle class that gets squeezed and that s who we have to help now it is absolutely true that all of this will cost some money about 100 billion per year but most of this comes from the nearly 2 trillion a year that america already spends on health care but a lot of it is not spent wisely a lot of that money is being wasted or spent badly so within this plan we re going to make sure the dollars we spend go towards making insurance more affordable and more secure we re going to eliminate wasteful taxpayer subsidies that currently go to insurance and pharmaceutical companies set a new fee on insurance companies that stand to gain a lot of money and a lot of profits as millions of americans are able to buy insurance and we re going to make sure that the wealthiest americans pay their fair share on medicare the bottom line is our proposal is paid for and all the new money generated in this plan goes back to small businesses and middle class families who can t afford health insurance it would also lower prescription drug prices for seniors and it would help train new doctors and nurses and physician assistants to provide care for american families finally my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions families businesses and the federal government we have now incorporated most of the serious ideas from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising cost of health care ideas that go after the waste and abuse in our system especially in programs like medicare but we do this while protecting medicare benefits and extending the financial stability of the program by nearly a decade our cost cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current senate bill which reduces most people s premiums and brings down our deficit by up to a trillion dollars over the next two decades brings down our deficit those aren t my numbers those are the savings determined by the congressional budget office which is the washington acronym for the nonpartisan independent referee of congress in terms of how much stuff costs so that s our proposal this is where we ve ended up it s an approach that has been debated and changed and i believe improved over the last year it incorporates the best ideas from democrats and republicans including some of the ideas that republicans offered during the health care summit like funding state grants on medical malpractice reform and curbing waste and fraud and abuse in the health care system my proposal also gets rid of many of the provisions that had no place in health care reform provisions that were more about winning individual votes in congress than improving health care for all americans now despite all that we agree on and all the republican ideas we ve incorporated many probably most republicans in congress just have a fundamental disagreement over whether we should have more or less oversight of insurance companies and if they truly believe that less regulation would lead to higher quality more affordable health insurance then they should vote against the proposal i ve put forward now some also believe that we should instead of doing what i m proposing pursue a piecemeal approach to health insurance reform where we tinker around the edges of this challenge for the next few years even those who acknowledge the problem of the uninsured say we just can t afford to help them right now which is why the republican proposal only covers 3 million uninsured americans while we cover over 31 million the problem with that approach is that unless everyone has access to affordable coverage you can t prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions you can t limit the amount families are forced to pay out of their own pockets the insurance reforms rest on everybody having access to coverage and you also don t do anything about the fact that taxpayers currently end up subsidizing the uninsured when they re forced to go to the emergency room for care to the tune of about a thousand bucks per family you can t get those savings if those people are still going to the emergency room so the fact is health reform only works if you take care of all of these problems at once now both during and after last week s summit republicans in congress insisted that the only acceptable course on health care reform is to start over but given these honest and substantial differences between the parties about the need to regulate the insurance industry and the need to help millions of middle class families get insurance i don t see how another year of negotiations would help moreover the insurance companies aren t starting over they re continuing to raise premiums and deny coverage as we speak for us to start over now could simply lead to delay that could last for another decade or even more the american people and the u s economy just can t wait that long so no matter which approach you favor i believe the united states congress owes the american people a final vote on health care reform we have debated this issue thoroughly not just for the past year but for decades reform has already passed the house with a majority it has already passed the senate with a supermajority of 60 votes and now it deserves the same kind of up or down vote that was cast on welfare reform that was cast on the children s health insurance program that was used for cobra health coverage for the unemployed and by the way for both bush tax cuts all of which had to pass congress with nothing more than a simple majority i therefore ask leaders in both houses of congress to finish their work and schedule a vote in the next few weeks from now until then i will do everything in my power to make the case for reform and i urge every american who wants this reform to make their voice heard as well every family every business every patient every doctor every nurse every physician s assistant make your voice heard this has been a long and wrenching debate it has stoked great passions among the american people and their representatives and that s because health care is a difficult issue it is a complicated issue if it was easy it would have been solved long ago as all of you know from experience health care can literally be an issue of life or death and as a result it easily lends itself to demagoguery and political gamesmanship and misrepresentation and misunderstanding but that s not an excuse for those of us who were sent here to lead that s not an excuse for us to walk away we can t just give up because the politics are hard i know there s been a fascination bordering on obsession in this media town about what passing health insurance reform would mean for the next election and the one after that how will this play what will happen with the polls i will leave it to others to sift through the politics because that s not what this is about that s not why we re here this is about what reform would mean for the mother with breast cancer whose insurance company will finally have to pay for her chemotherapy this is about what reform would mean for the small business owner who will no longer have to choose between hiring more workers or offering coverage to the employees she has this is about what reform would mean for middle class families who will be able to afford health insurance for the very first time in their lives and get a regular checkup once in a while and have some security about their children if they get sick this is about what reform would mean for all those men and women i ve met over the last few years who ve been brave enough to share their stories when we started our push for reform last year i talked to a young mother in wisconsin named laura klitzka she has two young children she thought she had beaten her breast cancer but then later discovered it had spread to her bones she and her husband were working and had insurance but their medical bills still landed them in debt and now she spends time worrying about that debt when all she wants to do is spend time with her children and focus on getting well this should not happen in the united states of america and it doesn t have to in the end that s what this debate is about it s about what kind of country we want to be it s about the millions of lives that would be touched and in some cases saved by making private health insurance more secure and more affordable so at stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem but our ability to solve any problem the american people want to know if it s still possible for washington to look out for their interests and their future they are waiting for us to act they are waiting for us to lead and as long as i hold this office i intend to provide that leadership i do not know how this plays politically but i know it s right and so i ask congress to finish its work and i look forward to signing this reform into law thank you very much everybody let s get it done dem bobama3 5 10 barack_obama hello everybody please have a seat welcome to the white house and congratulations on winning your seventh straight commander in chief s trophy does this ever get old i do have to warn you that i consulted with the white house counsel and according to the 22nd amendment you re only allowed to come back here one more time before it s somebody else s turn but we are honored to have you here today i want to start by acknowledging a few people who are with us of course i want to thank your superintendent vice admiral jeffrey fowler for being here and the outstanding work that he does i also want to recognize the secretary of the navy ray mabus who is with us and is doing an outstanding job as secretary of the navy i want to welcome lieutenant commander wesley brown class of 1949 back to the white house there he is right here wesley was the academy s first african american graduate so we are extremely honored to have you here today sir thank you finally i obviously want to congratulate coach ken a fellow hawaiian i should point out on winning another having another great season a winning season in annapolis now i know it s an understatement to say that this program has been pretty successful over the years you ve been to a bowl game every year since 2003 you ve pulled off seven straight wins against air force eight against navy or against army excuse me excuse me it would be hard for navy to beat navy that s even more impressive coach ken says because the army navy game isn t just one of the biggest rivalries in college football it s one of the biggest rivalries in sports period but last season was special from the very beginning in your first game you gave the buckeyes a run for their money in front of 105 000 fans you beat notre dame for the second time in three years proving once again that even though your lineman are going up against guys who are 40 or 50 pounds heavier than they are the midshipmen can still run with the big dogs speaking of running i want to congratulate ricky dobbs for setting the ncaa rushing record for touchdowns by a quarterback this season with 27 where s ricky where is he the previous record was held by a guy named tebow so that s not an easy feat now i also understand ricky has announced for the presidency in the year 2040 i know people are announcing early these days but ricky that s a bit much but it does mean that when navy comes back for the commander in chief s trophy 30 years from now you might hear a speech from this guy this team wouldn t be the same without your captains osei asante and ross pospisil and so where are those guys osei ross where are you beside their leadership on the field i was incredibly proud to hear about the toy drive that ross organized last year the team raised 1 700 and bought wrapped and delivered toys to four needy families and you guys did it in the middle of a blizzard so we are very proud of you for that and i want to thank all of you guys for your compassion and your generosity in the end it s the willingness to put others above yourselves that sets this team and all the service academies apart your days are packed with morning inspections and a full load of classes football practice and military duties and oftentimes you re lucky if you can get a few minutes to yourselves before studying into the night but you do it because each of you has a higher calling to serve your country in a time of war as ross says we are always going to be remembered for what we have done on the football field that s all well and good but we want to make a difference outside bancroft hall and outside the academy walls and that i think is the kind of ethic that makes us all so proud in a few short weeks 32 of you will have that chance when you become officers in the united states navy and marine corps last year i was honored to attend the academy commencement and see firsthand the incredible spirit that drives every midshipman at annapolis in addition to getting two chest bumps it s true wherever you go you ll remember the brothers standing with you today and you ll remember the lessons that you learned at the academy and as a member of this team and you ll know what it takes to go through fire and emerge a better man and a better leader so i want you to know that i have no greater honor and no greater responsibility than serving as your commander in chief and i promise you that this country will stand with you from the moment you put on the uniform to the moment you take it off as you devote your lives to freedom s cause god bless you god bless the united states of america thank you very much coach dem bobama3 6 10a barack_obama thank you thank you so much thank you everybody please everybody have a seat the show is not over to all the tremendous artists from all the genres and backgrounds who ve joined us tonight to pay tribute to the one and only sir paul mccartney thank you so much stevie wonder the jonas brothers faith hill emmylou harris lang lang herbie hancock elvis costello jack white corinne bailey rae david grohl and the funny man jerry seinfeld give it up for them we also want to thank the gershwin family as well as the library of congress and dr james billington as well as pbs for helping to put this together dr billington has done extraordinary work at the library of congress and his deep commitment to preserving america s cultural heritage for future generations is something that we all treasure we have a number of members of congress number of dignitaries here tonight i want to make special mention of our outstanding speaker of the house nancy pelosi you will not find a bigger supporter of the arts than nancy pelosi and so we re grateful for that even as we gather here tonight to present this annual award for extraordinary contributions to american music and culture that s right we stole you paul it goes without saying that this has been a very difficult time we ve gone through a difficult year and a half and right now our thoughts and our prayers are with friends in another part of the country that is so rich in musical heritage the people of the gulf coast who are dealing with something that we simply had not seen before and it s heartbreaking and we reaffirm i think together our commitment to see to it that their lives and their communities are made whole again but part of what gets us through tough times is music the arts the ability to capture that essential kernel of ourselves that part of us that sings even when times are hard and it s fitting that the library has chosen to present this year s gershwin prize for popular song to a man whose father played gershwin compositions for him on the piano a man who grew up to become the most successful songwriter in history sir paul mccartney by its very definition popular music is fleeting rarely is it composed with an eye towards standing the test of time rarer still does it actually achieve that distinction and that s what makes paul s career so legendary it s hard to believe it s been nearly half a century since four lads from liverpool first landed on our shores and changed everything overnight and i have to share this story while we were sitting here i learned that the bass that paul was playing on stage is the same bass that he played at the ed sullivan show which he told me it cost him 30 pounds he says he suspects it s worth a little more now but the beatles they weren t the first rock stars they d be the first to say that others had opened that door for them but they blew the walls down for everybody else in a few short years they had changed the way that we listened to music thought about music and performed music forever they helped to lay the soundtrack for an entire generation an era of endless possibility and of great change and over the four decades since paul mccartney has not let up touring the world with the band wings or on his own rocking everything from small halls to super bowls he s composed hundreds of songs over the years with john lennon with others or on his own nearly 200 of those songs made the charts think about that and stayed on the charts for a cumulative total of 32 years and his gifts have touched billions of lives as he later confessed of the beatles first appearance on the ed sullivan show where he carried that bass out that one evening that changed everything paul said luckily we didn t know what america was we just knew our dream of it or we probably would have been too intimidated tonight it is my distinct pleasure to present america s highest award for popular music on behalf of a grateful nation grateful that a young englishman shared his dreams with us sir paul mccartney dem bobama3 6 10b barack_obama thank you very much good evening everyone namaste i want to thank secretary clinton for your outstanding leadership and i want to thank minister krishna for both the kind words and the incredible work that you ve put in to try to strengthen even more and deepen even more the relationship between the two largest democracies in the world secretary clinton i think as you may be aware is a great admirer of india and i know the sentiment is shared in return in fact i m told that one of the secretary s favorite restaurants in delhi added a new item to the menu the hillary platter this is true what does it have chapati i will try that too now it s been said and hillary alluded to this that there are two kinds of people in the world those who do the work and those who take the credit there s a corollary to the saying try to be in the first group because there s much less competition it s a lot less crowded well prime minister singh and i are very proud to take credit for our two nations forging an unprecedented partnership through this strategic dialogue but tonight i wanted to come by and express my gratitude to all of you not only secretary clinton and minister krishna but also everybody in attendance who are actually doing the hard work of advancing the goals that prime minister singh and i set forward in our bilateral meetings i want to not only thank minister rao minister krishna but i also want to thank secretary rao and members of the indian delegation our two wonderful ambassadors meera shankar where did she go there she is as well as my great friend tim roemer and leaders from across my administration and i want to thank everybody who s here from india and the united states who works every day to bring our countries even closer together leaders in business in civil society academia faith groups especially our many friends from our very strong very proud very vibrant indian american community i was just telling minister krishna that right before i came here i was congratulating the national spelling bee champion who was a young indian american young lady and her parents could not have been prouder and it just was a wonderful reminder of how strong the bonds between our two countries are michelle and i were honored to welcome prime minister singh and mrs kaur to the white house for the very first official state visit of my presidency it was a state visit that demonstrated that our relations with india are at the highest of priorities for my administration and for me personally as president of the united states i said then that india is a leader in asia and around the world it s a rising power and a responsible global power that s why i firmly believe that the relationship between the united states and india will be a defining partnership in the 21st century the new national security strategy that i released last week makes this absolutely clear a fundamental pillar of america s comprehensive engagement with the world involves deepening our cooperation with 21st century centers of influence and that includes india moreover the relationship between the united states and india is fundamentally unique because as our strategy explains we share common interests but we also share common values as the world s two largest democracies and as countries that are rich in diversity with deep and close connections among our people in other words the united states values our partnership not because of where india is on a map but because of what we share and where we can go together india is indispensable to the future that we seek a future of security and prosperity for all nations that s why a third of my cabinet has already visited india not only for the chapatis that is why officials from across my administration are part of this strategic dialogue that s why i want to thank you for the progress that we ve made together since prime minister singh s visit we re deepening our economic cooperation on finance and investment and the trade that creates jobs in both of our countries and i look forward to working with prime minister singh and our fellow g20 partners this month in toronto as we work to foster economic growth that is both balanced and sustained with our agreement on fuel reprocessing we re moving ahead with our civil nuclear agreement we re expanding our green partnership to promote green buildings energy efficiency and the sustainable development that creates jobs and reduces poverty and as we strive to implement our copenhagen commitments we ll be working together to ensure a successful climate conference in mexico later this year we re cooperating more closely than ever before against transnational threats this includes as minister krishna alluded to making progress for the afghan people and preventing terrorism whether it s in manhattan or in mumbai it includes securing vulnerable nuclear materials a goal we advanced at our nuclear security summit where i thanked prime minister singh for committing india to building a new center of excellence for nuclear energy and security and our efforts include a stronger global nonproliferation regime where all nations live up to their obligations we re broadening partnerships between our people especially in science technology and global health more students are taking advantage of our expanded fulbright nehru program we re working to expand ties between our universities and community colleges and we re partnering on agriculture and research to reduce global hunger and to share india s incredible progress with other countries finally as global partners we re going to sustain this momentum at the highest levels during his state visit the prime minister graciously invited me and my family to visit india this year and i happily accepted and as i confirmed to him when we spoke last week i am delighted to announce tonight that i plan to visit india in early november i look forward to advancing our partnership to experiencing all that india and its people and its incredible ancient culture have to offer and i intend to create an obama platter as i look ahead to my visit i ve got another quote that matches up pretty well with mark twain s there s a scholar from europe who traveled to india more than a century ago and he said whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study whether it be language or religion or mythology or philosophy whether it be law or customs primitive art or science you have to go to india because he said some of the most valuable and instructive material of the history of man are treasured up in india and india only so when it comes to the sphere of our work building a future of greater prosperity opportunity and security for our people there is no doubt i have to go to india but even more i am proud to go to india and i look forward to the history that we will make together progress that will be treasured not just by this generation but by generations to come thank you very much everybody dem bobama3 8 09 barack_obama hello thank you please have a seat good morning everybody it is wonderful to see all of you and wonderful to have one of the best partners that anybody could have in elected office our vice president joe biden thrilled to have him here i want to thank staff sergeant miller for the gracious introduction i want to thank president merten for his hospitality there are a couple of people here who deserve all the credit because they got a very tough bill done and part of the reason they were able to get it done was just because of their extraordinary personal credibility these are one is new to the senate and one had been there a while and yet together they formed an incredibly formidable team they re both class acts please give a big round of applause to virginia s own john warner and jim webb i know that we ve got a number of members of congress who are here and i want to thank them all for their outstanding work i want to point out that senator mark warner could not be here but we appreciate him we ve got the secretary of veterans affairs a hero in his own right general eric shinseki and i want everybody to please acknowledge him and of the original bill sponsors who could not be here today we ve got senator chuck hagel senator frank lautenberg representative harry mitchell representative bobby scott representative ginny brown waite and representative peter king all of them worked hard along with the delegation that is present so we are very grateful to all of them i want to join all of today s speakers in thanking those of you who worked so hard to make this occasion possible but above all i want to pay tribute to the veterans who are now advancing their dreams by pursuing an education obviously i m honored to be here and to renew our commitment to ensure that the men and women who wear the uniform of the united states of america get the opportunities that they have earned i was a proud co sponsor of the post 9 11 gi bill as senator i m committed to working with secretary shinseki to see that it is successfully implemented as president and we do this not just to meet our moral obligation to those who ve sacrificed greatly on our behalf and on behalf of the country we do it because these men and women must now be prepared to lead our nation in the peaceful pursuit of economic leadership in the 21st century this generation of servicemen and women has already earned a place of honor in american history each of them signed up to serve many after they knew that they would be sent into harm s way over the last eight years they have endured tour after tour of duty in dangerous and distant places they ve experienced grueling combat from the streets of fallujah to the harsh terrain of helmand province they ve adapted to complex insurgencies protected local populations and trained foreign security forces so by any measure they are the authors of one of the most extraordinary chapters of military service in the history of our nation and i don t make that statement lightly for we know that anyone who puts on the uniform joins an unbroken line of selfless patriots that stretches back to lexington and concord the freedom and prosperity that we enjoy would not exist without the service of generations of americans who were willing to bear the heaviest and most dangerous burden but we also know this the contributions that our servicemen and women can make to this nation do not end when they take off that uniform we owe a debt to all who serve and when we repay that debt to those bravest americans among us then we are investing in our future not just their future but also the future of our own country now this was the lesson that america was sometimes too slow to learn after the civil war and world war i we saw far too many veterans who were denied the chance to live their dreams men who were unable to find in peace the hope that they had fought for in war and fdr knew this in 1943 before the beaches of normandy were stormed and the treacherous terrain of iwo jima was taken he told the nation that the veterans of world war ii would be treated differently he said that they must not be demobilized and i quote to a place on a bread line demobilized to a place on a bread line or on a corner selling apples instead roosevelt said the american people will insist on fulfilling this american obligation to the men and women in the armed forces who are winning this war for us that is precisely what the american people did the gi bill was approved just weeks after d day and carried with it a simple promise to all who had served you pick the school we ll help pick up the bill and what followed was not simply an opportunity for our veterans it was a transformation for our country by 1947 half of all americans enrolled in college were veterans ultimately this would lead to three presidents three supreme court justices 14 nobel prize winners and two dozen pulitzer prize winners but more importantly it produced hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers doctors and nurses the backbone of the largest middle class in history all told nearly 8 million americans were educated under the original gi bill including my grandfather no number can sum up this sea change in our society reginald wilson a fighter pilot from detroit said i didn t know anyone who went to college i never would have gone to college had it not been for the gi bill h g jones a navy man from north carolina said what happened in my rural caswell county community happened all over the country going to college was no longer a novelty indeed one of the men who went to college on the gi bill as i mentioned was my grandfather and i would not be standing here today if that opportunity had not led him west in search of opportunity so we owe the same obligations to this generation of servicemen and women as was afforded that previous generation that is the promise of the post 1911 gi bill it s driven by the same simple logic that drove the first gi bill you pick the school we ll help pick up the bill and looking out at the audience today i m proud to see so many veterans who will be able to pursue their education with this new support from the american people and this is even more important than it was in 1944 the first gi bill helped build a post war economy that has been transformed by revolutions in communications and technology and that s why the post 1911 9 11 gi bill must give today s veterans the skills and training they need to fill the jobs of tomorrow education is the currency that can purchase success in the 21st century and this is the opportunity that our troops have earned i m also proud that all who have borne the burden of service these last several years will have access to this opportunity we are including reservists and national guard members because they have carried out unprecedented deployments in afghanistan and iraq we are including the military families who have sacrificed so much by allowing the transfer of unused benefits to family members and we are including those who pay the ultimate price by making this benefit available to the children of those who lost their life in service to their country this is not simply a debt that we are repaying to the remarkable men and women who have served it is an investment in our own country the first gi bill paid for itself many times over through the increased revenue that came from a generation of men and women who received the skills and education that they needed to create their own wealth the veterans who are here today like the young post 9 11 veterans around the country can lead the way to a lasting economic recovery and become the glue that holds our communities together they too can become the backbone of a growing american middle class and even as we help our veterans learn the skills they need to succeed i know that all of us can learn something from the men and women who serve our country we have lived through an age when many people and institutions have acted irresponsibly when service often took a backseat to short term profits when hard choices were put aside for somebody else for some other time it s a time when easy distractions became the norm and the trivial has been taken too seriously the men and women who have served since 9 11 tell us a different story while so many were reaching for the quick buck they were heading out on patrol while our discourse often produced more heat than light especially here in washington they have put their very lives on the line for america they have borne the responsibility of war and now with this policy we are making it clear that the united states of america must reward responsibility and not irresponsibility now with this policy we are letting those who have borne the heaviest burden lead us into the 21st century and so today we honor the service of an extraordinary generation and look to america that they will help build tomorrow with the post 9 11 gi bill we can give our veterans the chance to live their dreams and we can help unleash their talents and tap their creativity and be guided by their sense of responsibility to their fellow citizens and to this country that we all love so much may god bless our troops and our veterans and may god bless the united states of america thank you very much everybody thank you dem bobama30 10 09 barack_obama good morning everybody we often speak about aids as if it s going on somewhere else and for good reason this is a virus that has touched lives and decimated communities around the world particularly in africa but often overlooked is the fact that we face a serious hiv aids epidemic of our own right here in washington d c and right here in the united states of america and today we are taking two important steps forward in the fight that we face here at home it has been nearly three decades since this virus first became known but for years we refused to recognize it for what it was it was coined a gay disease those who had it were viewed with suspicion there was a sense among some that people afflicted by aids somehow deserved their fate and that it was acceptable for our nation to look the other way a number of events and advances over the years have broadened our understanding of this cruel illness one of them came in 1984 when a 13 year old boy from central indiana contracted hiv aids from a transfusion doctors assured people that ryan white posed no risk to his classmates or his community but ignorance was still widespread people didn t yet understand or believe that the virus couldn t be spread by casual contact parents protested ryan s attendance in class some even pulled their kids out of school things got so bad that the white family had to ultimately move to another town it would have been easy for ryan and his family to stay quiet and to fight the illness in private but what ryan showed was the same courage and strength that so many hiv positive activists have shown over the years and shown around show around the world today and because he did we didn t just become more informed about hiv aids we began to take action to fight it in 1990 the year ryan passed away two great friends and unlikely political allies ted kennedy and orrin hatch came together and introduced the comprehensive aids resources emergency act the care act which was later named after ryan in a few minutes i m going to sign the fourth reauthorization of the ryan white care act now in the past policy differences have made reauthorizations of this program divisive and controversial but that didn t happen this year and for that the members of congress that are here today deserve extraordinary credit for passing this bill in the bipartisan manner that it deserves tom harkin and mike enzi in the senate we are grateful to you for your extraordinary work speaker pelosi who s always leading the charge on so many issues frank pallone jr joe barton barbara lee and donna christensen in the house thank you for your extraordinary work oh don t worry i m getting to henry nancy is always looking out for members but we ve got a special section for henry and chairman henry waxman who began holding hearings on aids in 1982 before there was even a name for aids was leading here in washington to make sure that this got the informed attention that it deserved and who led the house in passing the original ryan white legislation in 1990 i also want to acknowledge the hiv community for crafting a consensus document that did so much to help move this process forward some of the advocates so important to this legislation are with us here today ernest hopkins from cities advocating for emergency aids relief frank oldham jr president and ceo of the national association of people with aids and julie scofield executive director of the national alliance of state and territorial aids directors and i m especially honored that ryan s mother jeanne white ginder is here today for 25 years jeanne had an immeasurable impact in helping ramp up america s response to this epidemic while we lost ryan at too young an age jeanne s efforts have extended the lives and saved the lives of so many others we are so appreciative to you thank you you know over the past 19 years this legislation has evolved from an emergency response into a comprehensive national program for the care and support of americans living with hiv aids it helps communities that are most severely affected by this epidemic and often least served by our health care system including minority communities the lgbt community rural communities and the homeless it s often the only option for the uninsured and the underinsured and it provides life saving medical services to more than half a million americans every year in every corner of the country it s helped us to open a critical front on the ongoing battle against hiv aids but let me be clear this is a battle that s far from over and it s a battle that all of us need to do our part to join aids may no longer be the leading killer of americans ages 25 to 44 as it once was but there are still 1 1 million people living with hiv aids in the united states and more than 56 000 new infections occur every single year some communities still experience unacceptably high rates of infection gay men make up 2 or 3 percent of the population but more than half of all new cases african americans make up roughly half of all new cases nearly half of all new cases now occur in the south and a staggering 7 percent of washington d c s residents between the ages of 40 and 49 live with hiv aids and the epidemic here isn t as severe as it is in several other u s cities so tackling this epidemic will take far more aggressive approaches than we ve seen in the past not only from our federal government but also state and local governments from local community organizations and from places of worship but it will also take an effort to end the stigma that has stopped people from getting tested that has stopped people from facing their own illness and that has sped the spread of this disease for far too long a couple of years ago michelle and i were in africa and we tried to combat the stigma when we were in kenya by taking a public hiv aids test and i m proud to announce today we re about to take another step towards ending that stigma twenty two years ago in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact the united states instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with hiv aids now we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease yet we ve treated a visitor living with it as a threat we lead the world when it comes to helping stem the aids pandemic yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people from hiv from entering our own country if we want to be the global leader in combating hiv aids we need to act like it and that s why on monday my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the new year congress and president bush began this process last year and they ought to be commended for it we are finishing the job it s a step that will encourage people to get tested and get treatment it s a step that will keep families together and it s a step that will save lives we are continuing the work of crafting a coordinated measurable national hiv aids strategy to stem and suppress this epidemic i m pleased to report that the office of national aids policy led by jeffrey crowley has already held eight in a series of 14 community discussions in cities across the country they ve brought together faith based organizations and businesses schools and research institutions people living with hiv and concerned citizens gathering ideas on how to target a national response that effectively reduces hiv infections improves access to treatment and eliminates health disparities and we are encouraged by the energy the enthusiasm and great ideas that we ve collected so far we can t give ryan white back to jeanne back to his mom but what we can do what the legislation that i m about to sign has done for nearly 20 years is honor the courage that he and his family showed what we can do is to take more action and educate more people what we can do is keep fighting each and every day until we eliminate this disease from the face of the earth so with that let me sign this bill dem bobama30 3 09 barack_obama well thank you so much ken for that extraordinary introduction and for the work that you and your team are undertaking at the department of the interior we re going to add a little bit to your plate today as a consequence of this extraordinary piece of legislation i want to thank all the members of the legislature who helped to craft this many of them are on the stage here today obviously i ve got to single out the speaker of the house nancy pelosi for her extraordinary leadership but also our leader in the senate harry reid who worked so diligently on this bill and made sure that it got done and so please give all of these legislators a big round of applause if you ll indulge me there are just a couple other people i want to acknowledge nancy sutley who is the chair of our council on environmental quality who is here where s nancy there she is right in front jane lubchenco who is the administrator of the national oceanic and atmospheric administration please jane a couple of great friends from indian nation president joe shirley of navaho nation who is here go ahead joe stand up and tribal chairman robert bear of the duck valley shoshone paiute tribes thank you so much it is fitting that we meet on a day like this winter s hardships are slowly giving way to spring and our thoughts naturally tend to turn to the outdoors we emerge from the shelter offered by home and work and we look around and we re reminded that the most valuable things in this life are those things that we already possess as americans we possess few blessings greater than the vast and varied landscapes that stretch the breadth of our continent our lands have always provided great bounty food and shelter for the first americans for settlers and pioneers the raw materials that grew our industry the energy that powers our economy what these gifts require in return is our wise and responsible stewardship as our greatest conservationist president teddy roosevelt put it almost a century ago i recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land but i do not recognize the right to waste them or to rob by wasteful use the generations that come after us that s the spirit behind the bipartisan legislation i m signing today legislation among the most important in decades to protect preserve and pass down our nation s most treasured landscapes to future generations many senators and congressmen here deserve enormous credit for making this bill possible i m grateful to all their hard work as i mentioned before harry reid made this a top priority he made sure this was the first bill the senate passed this year this day would not be possible without his tireless dedication to protecting our treasured lands this legislation just to give you a sense of the scope this legislation guarantees that we will not take our forests rivers oceans national parks monuments and wilderness areas for granted but rather we will set them aside and guard their sanctity for everyone to share that s something all americans can support and that s why so much of this legislation some of it decades in the making has the backing of americans from every walk of life and corner of this country ranchers and fishermen small business owners environmentalists conservative republicans and liberal democrats on the local state and federal levels all united around the idea that there should be places that we must preserve all doing the hard work of seeking common ground to protect the parks and other places that we cherish we re talking about places like colorado where this bill will realize a vision 35 years in the making by protecting the wild back country of rocky mountain national park which attracts 3 million visitors a year folks in communities around this park know they don t have to choose between economic and environmental concerns the tourism that drives their local economy depends on good stewardship of their local environment and year after year these communities have worked together with members of congress in an attempt to ensure that rocky mountain national park will forever remain as breathtaking as it is today and that is what this bill does from coast to coast it protects treasured places from the appalachians of virginia and west virginia to michigan s upper peninsula from the canyons of idaho to the sandstone cliffs of utah from the sierra nevadas in california to the badlands of oregon it designates more than 2 million acres across nine states as wilderness almost as much as was designated over the past eight years combined it creates thousands of miles of new scenic historic and recreational trails cares for our historic battlefields strengthens our national park system it safeguards more than 1 000 miles of our rivers protects watersheds and cleans up polluted groundwater defends our oceans and great lakes and will revitalize our fisheries returning fish to rivers that have not seen them in decades and it wisely faces our future challenges with regard to water this bill assesses how growth and climate change will affect our access to water resources especially in the west and southwest and it includes solutions to complex and long simmering water disputes it s hard to overstate the real and measurable impact this will have on people s lives people like frank chee willetto a navajo code talker in world war ii who s joined us today and because of this legislation frank along with 80 000 others in the navajo nation will have access to clean running water for the very first time that s something worth applauding thank you for your service when coupled with the recovery act which makes an historic 3 billion investment creating jobs that will restore and protect our landscapes and our ecosystems preserve our national monuments retrofit our facilities for energy efficiency and renewable energy taken together today s legislation takes another step toward fulfilling teddy roosevelt s vision for this land that we love it s a vision that sees america s great wilderness as a place where what was and what is and what will be all are the same a place where memories are lived and relived a place where americans both young and young at heart can freely experience the spirit of adventure that has always been at the heart of the rugged character of america now the legislation i m signing today also makes progress on another front for which many americans have long waited the christopher and dana reeve s paralysis act is the first piece of comprehensive legislation specifically aimed at addressing the challenges faced by americans living with paralysis many folks and organizations from across the disability community worked hard to get this bill passed and we are grateful to each of you for bringing us that much closer to providing all americans with disabilities a full fair and equal opportunity to achieve the american dream this act creates new coordinated research activities through the national institutes of health that will connect the best minds and best practices from the best labs in the country and focus their endeavors through collaborative scientific research into the cure for paralysis saving effort money and most importantly time it promotes enhanced rehabilitation services for paralyzed americans helping develop better equipment and technology that will allow them to live full and independent lives free from unnecessary barriers and it will work to improve the quality of life for all those who live with paralysis no matter what the cause that s the mission of the christopher and dana reeve foundation in the lobby of their facility in new jersey sits christopher s empty wheelchair and his son matthew reeve was once asked if the sight of it ever saddened him and he replied no he said empty chairs that was dad s goal he said we hope there will be many more of them matthew is here with us today and the legislation i m about to sign makes solid progress toward the realization of that hope and the promise of a brighter future all in all this legislation is that rare end product of what happens when americans of all parties and places come together in common purpose to consider something more than the politics of the moment it s the very idea at the heart of this country that each generation has a responsibility to secure this nation s promise for the next and by signing this bill into law that s what we re doing today so is matthew here by the way matthew come on up let s sign this bill dem bobama30 3 10 barack_obama thank you alexandria thank you very much thank you thank you so much thank you everybody please have a seat thank you dr biden for that outstanding introduction and for putting up with joe i want to also thank dr biden for being one of the thousands of instructors all across the country who make such a difference in the lives of students each and every day so we are very proud of you for that i want to thank president templin and the entire nova community college family for hosting us here today you can applaud for that on stage we ve got a couple of my outstanding cabinet members secretary sebelius and secretary arne duncan please give them a big round of applause in the audience we ve got secretary salazar of interior secretary donovan of hud and ambassador ron kirk our u s trade representative please give them a big round of applause to all the outstanding members of congress who made this day possible and i m going to mainly single out the amazing speaker of the house nancy pelosi today we mark an important milestone on the road to health insurance reform and higher education reform but more broadly this day affirms our ability to overcome the challenges of our politics and meet the challenges of our time when i took office one of the questions we needed to answer was whether it was still possible to make government responsive to the needs of everyday people middle class americans the backbone of this country or whether the special interests and their lobbyists would continue to hold sway like they ve done so many times before and that s a test we met one week ago when health insurance reform became the law of the land in the united states of america and it s a test we met later in the week when congress passed higher education reforms that will have a tremendous impact on working families and america s future that s two major victories in one week that will improve the lives of our people for generations to come now i ve said before and i ve repeated this week the health insurance reform bill i signed won t fix every problem in our health care system in one fell swoop but it does represent some of the toughest insurance reforms in history it represents a major step forward towards giving americans with insurance and those without a sense of security when it comes to their health care it enshrines the principle that when you get sick you ve got a society there a community that is going to help you get back on your feet it represents meaningful progress for the american people and today i m signing a bill that will make a number of improvements to these core reforms we ll increase the size of tax credits to help middle class families and small businesses pay for their health insurance we re going to offer 250 to seniors who fall in the medicare coverage gap known as the doughnut hole to help them pay for prescriptions and that s a first step towards closing that gap completely we ll make a significant new investment in community health centers all across america that can provide high quality primary care to people who need it most and we ll strengthen efforts to combat waste and fraud and abuse to make sure your dollars aren t lining the pockets of insurance companies when they should be making your health care better now the debate on health care reform is one that s gone on for generations and i m glad i m gratified that we were able to get it done last week but what s gotten overlooked amid all the hoopla all the drama of last week is what happened in education when a great battle pitting the interests of the banks and financial institutions against the interests of students finally came to an end you see for almost two decades we ve been trying to fix a sweetheart deal in federal law that essentially gave billions of dollars to banks to act as unnecessary middlemen in administering student loans so those are billions of dollars that could have been spent helping more of our students attend and complete college that could have been spent advancing the dreams of our children that could have been spent easing the burden of tuition on middle class families instead that money was spent padding student lenders profits now it probably won t surprise you to learn that the big banks and financial institutions hired a army of lobbyists to protect the status quo in fact sallie mae america s biggest student lender spent more than 3 million on lobbying last year alone but i didn t stand with the banks and the financial industries in this fight that s not why i came to washington and neither did any of the members of congress who are here today we stood with you we stood with america s students and together we finally won that battle i don t have to tell folks here at nova why this victory matters in the 21st century when the success of every american hinges more than ever on the quality of their education and when america s success as a nation rests more than ever on an educated workforce that is second to none we can t afford to waste billions of dollars on giveaways to banks we need to invest that money in our students we need to invest in our community colleges we need to invest in the future of this country we need to meet the goal i set last year and graduate more of our students than any other nation by the year 2020 and through the extraordinary leadership of education secretary arne duncan that s what the reforms i m signing today will help us do by cutting out the middleman we ll save american taxpayers 68 billion in the coming years 68 billion that s real money real savings that we ll reinvest to help improve the quality of higher education and make it more affordable now we ve already taken a number of steps through the recovery act and through my budget to significantly increase the support provided to young people attending colleges and universities all across the country and i just president templin handed me a sheet just as i walked in just in case you re wondering whether this makes a difference so far this year and the year isn t over right here at nova pell grant recipients increased by 41 percent over last year the total dollar amount of pell grants increased by 59 percent the number of federally guaranteed loans increased by 43 percent and loan awards increased by 68 percent that s right here at this one community college because of the steps that we had already taken so using the 68 billion that we re saving that had been going to the banks here s what we re going to be able to do first we will reinvest a portion of those savings to upgrade our community colleges which are one of the great undervalued assets in our education system community colleges like nova are incredibly important because they serve a varied group of learners from recent high school grads seeking a pathway to a college degree to adults seeking training for the jobs of tomorrow by forging private sector partnerships community colleges can offer students the education and training they need to find a good job when they graduate and it helps offer businesses the assurance they need that graduates will be ready for the jobs that they re hired to do and because community colleges like nova are so essential to a competitive workforce i ve asked your outstanding professor dr jill biden who does not have enough to do to host a summit on community colleges at the white house this fall and we re going to bring everybody together from educators to students experts to business leaders we are going to bring everybody together to share innovative ideas about how we can help students earn degrees and credentials and to forge private sector partnerships so we can better prepare america s workforce and america s workers to succeed in the 21st century now to help open the doors of higher education to more students we ll also reinvest part of that 68 billion in savings in pell grants one of the most popular forms of financial aid pell grants once covered more than three quarters of the cost of going to college but now because the cost of college has skyrocketed the amount pell grants cover is about one third today students hoping to attend college on a pell grant are going to be able to feel more secure because not only are we going to offer over 800 000 additional pell awards over the next 10 years we re also going to raise the amount they re worth to almost 6 000 so that inflation doesn t erode the value of your grant and we ll put the entire pell grant program on firmer footing for years to come altogether we are more than doubling the amount of pell grant funding that was available when i took office it s one of the most significant investments in higher education since the g i bill now third we re going to restore a measure of fairness to how students repay their loans today two out of every three students graduates with help from a loan and often they take on a mountain of debt as a result here in virginia the typical student carries almost 20 000 in debt across the country the average student graduates with over 23 000 in debt i know what that s like michelle and i had big debts coming out of school debts we weren t able to fully repay until just a few years before i started running for office today we re making it easier for responsible students to pay off their loans right now if you re a borrower you don t have to spend more than 15 percent of your income on loans but starting in 2014 you won t have to pay more than 10 percent of your income in repaying your student loans that will make a meaningful difference for over one million more students we re also going to give students an incentive to do what s right if you pay your loans on time you ll only have to pay them off for 20 years and you ll only have to pay them off for 10 years if you repay them with service to your community and to our country as a teacher or a nurse or a member of our armed forces finally we ll reinvest some of the 68 billion in savings to strengthen our historically black colleges and universities and minority serving institutions these are institutions that have struggled more than most in these tough economic times the reforms in this bill are significant but they re just part of a broader effort to strengthen our entire higher education system we re putting college tuition tax credits in the pockets of millions of students from working families to help them pay for college we ve taken steps to simplify the federal college assistance form called the fafsa because it shouldn t take a phd to apply for financial aid and we re helping ensure that america s high school graduates are ready for college all of this is paid for we re redirecting money that was poorly spent to make sure we re making investments in our future now this won t solve all of our problems in higher education we continue to expect colleges and universities to do their part to hold down tuition increases that has to happen we ve got to work on that and we also need to take greater initiative not only to help more students enter college we ve got to make sure that we see more students successfully earn a college degree but what we ve done over the past year represents enormous progress so i ll close by saying this for a long time our student loan system has worked for banks and financial institutions today we re finally making our student loan system work for students and our families but we re also doing something more from the moment i was sworn into office i ve spoken about the urgent need for us to lay a new foundation for our economy and for our future and two pillars of that foundation are health care and education and each has long suffered from problems that we chose to kick down the road with the bill i signed last week we finally undertook meaningful reform of our health care system with this bill and other steps we ve pursued over the last year we are finally undertaking meaningful reform in our higher education system so this week we can rightly say the foundation on which america s future will be built is stronger than it was one year ago and so at the end of this extraordinary week i want to acknowledge some of the people who made it possible there isn t time to single out everyone who s here the outstanding members of congress but i want to make sure i once again say this would not have happened had it not been for the leadership of speaker nancy pelosi senate majority leader harry reid senator dick durbin and congressman steny hoyer all provided outstanding leadership that our nation needed on health care max baucus chris dodd henry waxman charlie rangel and so many others offered invaluable expertise throughout the year congressmen george miller jim clyburn dale kildee ruben hinojosa led the way in the house on education reforms that i sign today senator tom harkin s dedication ensured that the senate would include these reforms in this bill virginia s own bobby scott and an outstanding freshman tom perriello helped to make this thing possible we are grateful to them courage is an essential ingredient in any landmark legislation particularly when the attacks are as fierce and unrelenting and inaccurate as they have been over the past year i just want to commend members of congress who had the courage to do what s right and to say a special thank you to all of the newer members the past couple of years have brought one challenge after another and you ve risen to the moment each time i could not be prouder of the work that all of you have done and it would not have happened had it not been for the incredible persistence and stick to itiveness of all the folks in the audience here today ultimately congress responds to the voices that they re hearing in their communities and so many of you have written letters and come to meetings and let people know of the ordinary struggles that people are going through each and every day you re what provided members of congress the courage that they needed to do what was right and so on behalf of all of us who are serving in washington we want to thank you the american people for your outstanding leadership and with that i m going to sign this bill thank you very much dem bobama30 4 09 barack_obama thank you it s good weather for a race not too hot thank you secretary gates for your introduction and more importantly for the extraordinary job you re doing as our secretary of defense i want to thank secretary shinseki who served our country with extraordinary valor and courage who was wounded in vietnam and who s leading our efforts to create a 21st century va i want to thank my friend tammy duckworth who lost her legs in iraq and never stopped serving her country when she came home i got to know tammy in my home state of illinois and i know that she is going to be a great assistant secretary of the va and thanks to all of those at walter reed and the national naval medical center in bethesda the va and the pentagon who have joined us today and for all that you do for our wounded warriors welcome to the white house there are heroes among us today men and women who served their country without falter without fail men and women who selflessly risked their lives on behalf of others so that others might live soldiers like sergeant jeremiah church who was shot while defending his unit from an ambush in iraq but kept fighting until he lost consciousness soldiers like sergeant first class rashe hall who despite being badly wounded by a rocket propelled grenade repeatedly charged a taliban ambush in afghanistan so that his men might get to safety then returned to give them first aid before receiving his own and soldiers like staff sergeant dillon behr from my home state of illinois while in afghanistan last year his unit came under heavy fire despite sustaining not one but two life threatening injuries he held his position and fought for six and a half hours until he could no longer hold a weapon all so that american and afghan troops might move to safety today he s undergoing rehab at walter reed and he s going to college as he pursues the next chapter in his life of service these men served with extraordinary bravery they saved lives and these men were awarded the silver star for valor they were there for their brothers and sisters in the united states armed forces no matter what and that s the idea behind the soldier ride we re kicking off today now like a lot of great ideas this one was conceived in a bar a young bartender on long island named chris carney began talking about biking across the country to raise funds and awareness for returning troops and wounded warriors and his boss said to him if you don t do it i ll find somebody who will so chris hopped on his bike for what became the first annual soldier ride the next year a couple of wounded warriors joined him a year later even more civilians started to ride along grateful americans began lining the streets to cheer and show their support more rides were added and more money was raised and five years after that first ride i m honored to have 40 wounded warriors gathered here on the south lawn to kick off the third annual white house to the lighthouse challenge over the next three days over the next three days these men and women along with family and supporters will ride from here to annapolis on bicycles and in wheelchairs raising money and awareness for others returning from iraq and afghanistan with serious injuries keep in mind that today s riders once faced down the possibility that they might never have an active lifestyle again some are missing limbs coping with nerve damage living with traumatic brain injury or blindness some have endured painful rehabilitation some still are and some have battles yet to come these wounded warriors didn t get to choose the direction their lives would take the instant they were injured but now they choose to prove that life after injury isn t about what you can t do it s about what you can they choose to keep their faith with the future they choose to keep fighting for their brothers and sisters and show them that they re not alone we also remember that so many are supported by spouses and children parents and siblings who suffered the absence of a loved one and then stood by their side through their recovery these military families are heroes too and they are a top priority for michelle and me and they will always have our support to anyone who s along their route this weekend i ask you to go out there and cheer salute say thank you and we ll do our part to support our troops their families and all who have worn the uniform of the united states of america because when it comes to their service and sacrifice warm words and gestures are more than warranted but they re not nearly enough our veterans deserve the care they were promised and the benefits that they have earned and as long as i m commander in chief that s what they ll get just as these wounded warriors are there for one another this country is going to be there for them and now i m going to blow a horn and get this thing started so who has got the horn oh this is the official horn hair trigger white button all right everybody let s make sure everybody is lined up properly everybody all set i don t want to catch anybody off guard here all right on your mark get set dem bobama30 6 09a barack_obama thank you all right everybody have a seat settle down what a joy it is to see so many good friends people who it s no exaggeration without whom we would not be here and there are just a lot of folks in this audience who took an early bet on somebody who i think the professionals didn t give much of a shot at winning the presidency and i m grateful to all of you all of you i m happy to see there are four people i want to acknowledge just because they re carrying a little extra burden right now first of all somebody who was great for our campaign is now doing great work for the dnc please give jane stetson a big round of applause thank you jane our fearless leader during the campaign who never wavered never waffled and cracked the whip with grace and good cheer penny pritzker somebody who was there for us day in day out andy tobias and somebody who i think some of you know this this was the first elected official outside of illinois to endorse my campaign now think about this this is in february of 2007 he is the governor of the commonwealth of virginia he stands beside me in richmond the seat of the old confederacy and says i m endorsing barack obama for president of the united states he s been there ever since he s my friend a great governor a great dnc leader tim kaine he hadn t been in office that long he didn t know any better and anne i think was whispering in his ear but tim has just been an extraordinary friend and he is now just doing an extraordinary job on behalf of the dnc as i said before without you we would not be here because all of you were here in the beginning when it was hard when people in this town didn t give us much of a chance you stuck in there and you didn t just fundraise you put your hearts and souls into this campaign i look at every single table and there are people here who took their families took their grandparents took their cousins and nephews and went into iowa and went to new hampshire and campaigned and knocked on doors and insisted to skeptics that now was the time for change in america and lo and behold we re bringing about some change in america we knew from the start that change wouldn t be easy but we also understood we were living in extraordinary times and that we ve been asked to confront challenges of a size and a scope that hadn t been seen in recent history a set of challenges that few generations of americans have ever been asked to confront two wars a debilitating recession a global financial crisis a crisis that faces the planet when it comes to climate change and we understood that meeting these challenges was going to require some tough choices it required us to do what was right even if it wasn t necessarily always popular at least not at first it required taking on the status quo in washington that unfortunately tends to favor inertia over action and tinkering over real reform and we knew that it would require looking beyond the next news cycle and the next election to the next generation to do what we had to do to ensure that our children and grandchildren inherit an america that is as ascendant as bold as imaginative as the america that we inherited from our parents now that s not just a responsibility meeting these challenges is a privilege and an opportunity for in our hands lies the chance to shape the world for good and for ill so let s just take a look at what we ve done so far over the last six months because in the blur of activity i think we may be taking some things for granted not one month into this administration we responded to this financial crisis with the most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation s history a plan that has already provided tax relief to 95 percent of working families as we had promised a plan that s saving jobs and creating new ones in construction and clean energy and small business across the country we passed a budget resolution that helps to cut our deficit in half while laying the foundations for all the building blocks required for a post bubble economy reforming our health care system initiating a clean energy agenda revamping our education system so that our kids can compete in the 21st century we lifted a ban on federal funding of stem cell research we expanded the children s health insurance program to cover 11 million children in need we passed a national service bill to create hundreds of thousands of opportunities for people to serve their communities we passed the lilly ledbetter fair pay act the first bill i signed so that equal pay for equal work is a reality all across this country that was just the beginning we passed a series of reforms that won t just change policy in washington but changes how washington work we brought together auto executives and labor unions and environmental groups democrats and republicans together to set national fuel efficiency standards for our cars and trucks for the very first time in history we will save 1 8 billion barrels of oil as a consequence of this agreement we passed bipartisan legislation to help homeowners and to crack down on predatory lenders who are seeking to take advantage of them we passed laws to protect consumers from unfair rate hikes and abusive fees leveled by many credit card companies a law that will eliminate waste in our defense budget and save taxpayers billions of dollars and after decades of opposition we passed legislation that will prevent tobacco companies from marketing to our children it s not bad for six months so we should feel proud for what we ve accomplished but we can t be satisfied we should feel confident in the future but not complacent we can t be content with the present not when there are workers that are still worried about losing their jobs or their homes or their health care not when there are so many children out there who aren t getting the skills that they need to compete in the 21st century not when justice is still elusive for too many in our society this is when it gets hard this is when the criticism gets louder when the pundits grow impatient when cynicism seeks to reassert itself this is when we hear the same voices advocating the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place this is where we hear that change just isn t possible so this is exactly the moment when we need to fight the hardest this is going to be the time when we need to band together and when we decide we re going to do what s right for the country and deliver the change that we promised when i was elected last november now is the time to build the schools that meet high standards and close the achievement gap and prepare our kids for the challenges of the 21st century this is where we start rewarding teachers for performance and create new pathways for advancement and this is when we start reaching that goal that i ve set for 2020 that we once again are going to have the highest college graduation rates of any advanced country in the world because we know that s what it s going to take to compete in a 21st century economy now is the time when we re going to pass comprehensive energy legislation that caps carbon emissions and creates energy efficiency and millions of new jobs on friday the house of representatives took a historic vote and ignored the naysayers and said we are going to reach for the future and not look backwards not cling to the past i don t know about you but i have never looked at a american history book that praised america for not taking a chance that said you know the thing that really stands out about america is we just stood pat back in the agricultural era when things were getting industrial we decided no we re not going to change when the industrial era started moving into the information era no no no no we can t handle the internet we re not going to do that that s not who america is you keep on hearing these folks making these arguments about how we ve got to be fearful of the future i m not interested in being afraid of the future i m interested in seizing the future for our children and our grandchildren and that s what this bill is about now is the time for us to finally do something about health care we have been talking about it enough we have had commissions we have had white papers we have had blue ribbons we have talked about it and talked about it and now it s time to act and for those who would oppose our efforts just turn to them and say is there any way for you to defend the status quo and you ll hear a bunch of muttering and yammering and they ll say well well we agree with reform too okay if you agree with reform then step up because we know that right now families are being crushed by the cost of health care right now businesses are being crushed by the cost of health care right now our government is going bankrupt at the state and federal level because of health care right now 46 million people are without insurance right now there s a woman in wisconsin that i had a chance to meet who s got breast cancer and two small children she s 36 years old she had a job her husband has a job she s got health insurance and she still has 50 000 in debt and instead of worrying about how to get well all she can think about is whether she s going to be leaving a legacy of debt to her family if she doesn t survive this cancer that s not the kind of country that any of us are willing to accept we know we can do better and so i am saying to congress and i m saying to the american people don t be afraid let us step forward we know what needs to happen we know that if we start applying common sense rules to raise quality and reduce costs that we can have a health care system that is uniquely american but finally provides coverage for all and is sustainable for the long term you re going to help us make this happen it s going to happen this year we are going to have health care this year we re going to have health care this year we re going to have health care this year we are going to have health care this year we are going to reform the financial industry this year and we are going to get energy done this year and we are going to and then we got a whole nother year after that but you ve heard the argument people say oh this is overload we can t do this much and i keep on trying to explain to people i don t do this just for fun if the health care system was working we wouldn t remake it if we weren t dependent on foreign oil and watching the arctic circle melt then we wouldn t go to the trouble of passing a energy bill the naysayers seem to think somehow that we can just keep on doing what we re doing and the american people understand we can t but the american people are also justifiably concerned about how change is going to come about and that s completely understandable because we are going through the toughest economic times in our living memory and most of the people here enjoy great good fortune there are a whole lot of folks out there who are just barely hanging on and so when they hear the fearmongerers suggesting that this is going to cost them more money or this is going to cost them jobs or their health care is going to be taken away from them and this is all a plot to grow the government of course they take pause because you know they haven t been given a real fair shake for quite some time and washington hasn t been working for them and most of the legislation that s coming out of this town has been a bait and switch on them they ve been promised one thing and they ve gotten something else so i understand why there s going to be some skepticism out there and by the way this stuff is not going to be easy there are going to be bumps in the road and there are going to be times where people get impatient there are going to be times where folks lose heart there are going to be times where we feel like maybe we bit off too much and we can t get to our goal and when we have those times i just want you to know that that all sounds pretty familiar doesn t it because when tim announced that he was supporting my campaign the odds of us getting that done were a lot higher than the odds of getting health care done or the odds of getting energy done or the odds of reforming our financial institutions i want everybody here to understand that at this moment we have the opportunity to seize the future and as painful as that is sometimes and as difficult as that is sometimes it is inherent in the american spirit that we go forward we don t look backwards that s what this party is about that s what this administration is about you ve proven that s what you re about so help me we re going to get there for the american people thank you everybody god bless you dem bobama30 6 09b barack_obama thank you very much well it is wonderful to see all these do gooders in one room and it is always a dangerous thing trying to follow geoffrey canada but i thank you all for being here before we begin the subject of today s gathering i want to say a few words about an important milestone that we ve reached in iraq today american troops have transferred control of all iraqi cities and towns to iraq s government and security forces this transition was agreed to last year as part of our status of forces agreement with the sovereign iraqi government it s a part of our strategy to responsibly end the war by removing all american combat brigades from iraq by next september and all of our troops from iraq by the end of 2011 so the iraqi people are rightly treating this day as a cause for celebration this is an important step forward as a sovereign and united iraq continues to take control of its own destiny and with this progress comes responsibility iraq s future is in the hands of its own people and iraq s leaders must now make some hard choices necessary to resolve key political questions to advance opportunity and to provide security for their towns and their cities in this effort america will be a strong partner to the iraqi people on behalf of their security and prosperity make no mistake there will be difficult days ahead we know that the violence in iraq will continue we see that already in the senseless bombing in kirkuk earlier today and there are those who will test iraq s security forces and the resolve of the iraqi people through more sectarian bombings and the murder of innocent civilians but i m confident that those forces will fail the future belongs to those who build not those who destroy and today s transition is further proof that those who have tried to pull iraq into the abyss of disunion and civil war are on the wrong side of history finally the very fact that iraqis are celebrating this day is a testament to the courage the capability and commitment of every single american who has served in iraq that s worth applause through tour after tour of duty our troops have overcome every obstacle to extend this precious opportunity to the iraqi people these women and men are not always in the headlines but they re in our hearts and prayers and we will forever honor their selfless service and sacrifice as well as the service and sacrifice of their families there is more work to be done but we ve made important progress in supporting a sovereign stable and self reliant iraq and everyone who has served there both in uniform as well as our civilians deserves our thanks now it s fitting that we re here today to talk about what each of us can do to lift up this nation because our troops sacrifice challenges all of us to do what we can do to be better citizens that s what the people that you ve heard from already are doing every single day so i want to start off thanking geoffrey canada robert chambers pat christen who s here with one of hope lab s student testers richard ross richard wave to everybody for speaking with us about the extraordinary work their organizations are doing in their communities and i want to thank richard and vanessa nunez for sharing their stories with us today thank you very much you both clearly have very bright futures ahead of you i want to acknowledge our outstanding education secretary arne duncan he s worth giving a round of applause as well as if i m not mistaken congressman jim moran is here there he is right here in the front with his daughter dorothy i want to thank steve goldsmith for moderating we were discussing the fact that at harvard vanessa you were there how long ago was that fifteen years ago we were together on a conference talking about this very issue and so it s nice to see steve one of the outstanding mayors at the time and now continuing to do great work helping people to think about how we can all fulfill our civic responsibilities more effectively so thank you very much i also want to thank dave cieslewicz i want to make sure i say that properly of madison wisconsin and mayor sara presler of flagstaff arizona for their commitment as well please give them a big round of applause and finally i want to thank all of you here today for everything you re doing to find new solutions to some of our oldest toughest problems i know what you do is not easy i know that for many of you the hours are long the pay could be better let s face it but i also know the difference that each of you make i know the lives that you change every single day you teach us that there s no such thing as a lost cause if you re willing to be creative and challenge the conventional wisdom and take some risks if you re willing to try and fail and then try again until you find something that works and today i want to recognize that pioneering spirit and thank you all for the contributions that you re making to our communities what you all do is important in any year but at this particular moment when we re facing challenges unlike any we ve seen in our lifetime it s absolutely critical because while we re working hard to rebuild our economy and help people who are struggling let s face it there s only so much that washington can do government can t do everything and be everywhere nor should it be for example government can help rebuild schools and arne duncan is working as hard as anybody but we need new ways to teach our children and train our teachers and get parents more involved in their children s education government can reform our health care system but we need innovative approaches to help people manage their illnesses and lead healthier lives government can invest in clean energy but we need new initiatives to get people to train for green jobs and make their homes and offices more energy efficient so if anyone out there is waiting for government to solve all their problems they re going to be disappointed because ultimately the best solutions don t come from the top down not from washington they come from the bottom up in each and everyone one of our communities as some of you know i first saw this years ago when i worked as a community organizer in chicago neighborhoods devastated by steel plant closings and i spent hours going door to door meeting with anyone who would talk to me asking people about their struggles and what an organization could do to help and it was slow laborious going we had plenty of setbacks and failed more often than we succeeded but we listened to the people in the community and we learned from them and got them engaged and got them involved and slowly block by block we began to turn those neighborhoods around fighting for job training and better housing and more opportunity for young people the lesson i learned then still holds true today that folks who are struggling don t simply need more government bureaucracy that top down one size fits all program usually doesn t end up fitting anybody people don t need somebody out in washington to tell them how to solve their problems especially when the best solutions are often right there in their own neighborhoods just waiting to be discovered so right now in communities across america people are hard at work developing and running programs that could be the next harlem children s zone or the next genesys works or the next hope lab and idealistic young people like wendy kopp who refused to listen to the skeptics years ago and pushed ahead to bring her vision for teach for america to life we ve got young at heart people like robert chambers who finish out careers in business or health care or education and instead of transitioning into retirement they re just too busy they re too restless so they come back for an encore plowing a lifetime of experience into helping people in need we ve got people from all backgrounds all walks of life succeeding where others have failed getting real measurable results changing the way we think about some of our toughest problems the bottom line is clear solutions to america s challenges are being developed every day at the grass roots and government shouldn t be supplanting those efforts it should be supporting those efforts instead of wasting taxpayer money on programs that are obsolete or ineffective government should be seeking out creative results oriented programs like the ones here today and helping them replicate their efforts across america so if the harlem children s zone can turn around neighborhoods in new york then why not detroit or san antonio or los angeles or indianapolis if bonnie clac can help working people purchase cars and manage their finances in new hampshire then they can probably do it in vermont or all across new england or all across america now it s not going to be easy to scale up some of these great ideas if it was easy you would have already done it and you wouldn t be here today except maybe to just check out the white house it s hard but it s also critical and it s absolutely possible if we re willing to work together to give organizations like these the resources they need to reach their fullest potential and have their fullest impact and if we re able to ensure that best practices are shared all across the country that we ve set up a strong network of ideas and that s precisely the idea behind the 50 million innovation fund included in the edward m kennedy serve america act an initiative designed to assist community solutions like these that we re asking congress to fund this year we re going to use this fund to find the most promising non profits in america we ll examine their data and rigorously evaluate their outcomes we ll invest in those with the best results that are most likely to provide a good return on our taxpayer dollars and we ll require that they get matching investments from the private sector from businesses and foundations and philanthropists to make those taxpayer dollars go even further and today i m announcing that i ll be asking melody barnes who is our director of the domestic policy council and our innovation team to lead this process traveling across the country to discover and evaluate the very best programs in our communities and we won t just be looking at the usual suspects in the usual places we won t just be seeking the programs that everybody already knows about but we also want to find those hidden gems that haven t yet gotten the attention they deserve and we ll be looking in all sorts of communities rural urban and suburban in every region of this country because we know that great ideas and outstanding programs are everywhere and it s up to us to find them we re going to take this new approach this new way of doing business government wide so we ve already set up a what works fund at the department of education 650 million in the recovery act that we ll be investing in the most successful highest impact initiatives in our school districts and communities it s not just going to be the usual formulas here from pioneering teacher training programs and efforts to bring new technologies into our schools to early learning programs and programs to help at risk kids these are the kinds of initiatives that arne and his staff at the department are looking to support at the department of health and human services we re working on a new home visiting initiative connecting nurses and other trained professionals with at risk families to ensure that children get a healthy safe and smart start to life we ll be seeking out the very best programs to achieve those goals ones with the strongest record of success and we ll test promising approaches to see what works and what doesn t so all of this represents a new kind of partnership between government and the non profit sector but i can tell you right now that partnership isn t complete and it won t be successful without help from the private sector and that s why i m glad that there are some deep pockets in the audience here foundations corporations and individuals you need to be part of this effort as well and that s my challenge to the private sector today our non profits can provide the solutions our government can rigorously evaluate these solutions and invest limited taxpayer dollars in ones that work but we need those of you from the private sector to step up as well we need you to provide that critical seed capital to launch these ideas we need you to provide those matching funds to help them grow and we need you to serve as a partner providing strategic advice and other resources to help them succeed if we work together if we all go all in here think about the difference we can make think about the impact we could have with just the organizations represented in this room we ve got jim mccorkell here from admission possible a group that helps promising young people from low income families attend college ninety nine percent of the admission possible class of 2008 got into college 99 percent where s jim where s jim there he is back there the vast majority stay in college and earn their degrees admission possible operates in just two states now so imagine if it was 10 or 20 or 50 we ve got alfa demmellash here from rising tide capital where is alfa right over there did i pronounce your name right good when your name is barack obama you re sensitive to these things so alfa is with rising tide capital an organization that helps struggling mom and pop entrepreneurs get loans run their businesses and improve their profit margins seventy percent of their clients are single moms all of them rely on their businesses to support their families so far rising tide has helped 250 business owners in the state of new jersey so imagine if they could help 500 or 1 000 or more all across america if we empower organizations like these think about the number of young people like vanessa and richard whose lives we can change the number of families whose livelihoods we can boost the number of struggling communities we can bring back to life in the end that s what this effort is about it s not about the old partisan lines in the sand we know there s nothing democratic or republican about just doing what works so we want to cast aside worn ideological debates and focus on what really helps people in their daily lives that s what each and every one of you are doing all across america for that i honor you i thank you and i look forward to working with you in the days and months and years ahead to address the urgent challenges of our time thank you very much everybody good luck dem bobama30 7 10 barack_obama hello detroit well it is good to be here everybody if you have a seat have a seat it is good it s good to be back it s good to be back first off give it up give it up to leah for that wonderful introduction we ve got some special guests here that i want to acknowledge first of all your secretary of transportation who has helped to make sure that we are guiding this process of rebuilding the american auto industry and is doing an outstanding job from peoria illinois secretary ray lahood give him a big round of applause because of a funeral she couldn t be here but i want everybody to give a huge round of applause to one of the best governors in very tough times that exists anywhere in the country jennifer granholm she s doing a great job your outstanding new mayor and close to my heart nba hall of famer dave bing is in the house two of the hardest working senators anywhere and they are always thinking about michigan and michigan manufacturing making stuff right here in the united states of america carl levine and debbie stabenow outstanding member of congress representative carolyn cheeks kilpatrick uaw president bob king is in the house and chrysler ceo sergio marchionne sergio is modest he doesn t stand up but he s doing a great job so i just had a tour of this outstanding plant with sergio and pat walsh your plant manager general holiefield now that s a name right there general holiefield vice president of the uaw cynthia holland your local uaw president and it was great to see the work that you re doing and the cars that you re building especially when you consider the fact that just over a year ago the future here seemed very much in doubt now before i make my remarks i ve got to disclose i m a little biased here because the first new car that i ever bought was a grand cherokee first new car up until that point i had had some old beat up used cars they were not state of the art and i still remember walking into that showroom and driving out with that new car it had that new car smell and everything worked i wasn t used to that had all these everything was electronic and i had all my i d had to roll up my windows up until that point so i ve got some good memories of that car but i ve got to tell you when i sat in this car this is a better car this is a state of the art car this is a world class car right here now i want everybody to think about where we were we were in the midst when i took office of a deep and painful recession that cost our economy about 8 million jobs 8 million jobs and took a terrible toll on communities like this one our economy was shrinking about 6 percent per quarter now this morning we learned that our economy grew by 2 4 percent in the second quarter of the year so that means it s now been growing again for one full year our economy is growing again instead of shrinking that s a welcome sign compared to where we were but we ve got to keep on increasing that rate of growth and keep adding jobs so we can keep moving forward and that s especially important for places like this in the 12 months before i took office the american auto industry lost hundreds of thousands of jobs sales plunged 40 percent think about that the industry looked like it was going over a cliff as the financial crisis and the vicious recession collided with an industry that for too long had avoided hard choices and hadn t fully adapted to changing times we finally reached the point where two of the big three chrysler and gm were on the brink of liquidation and that left us with very few choices one choice one option was to keep the practice of giving billions of dollars of taxpayer money to the auto industry but not really forcing any accountability or change so you just keep on kicking the tough problems down the road year after year and hopefully seeing if you can get more and more money out of washington a second option was to do nothing and risk allowing two of the big three to disintegrate and that could have meant the end of an industry that like no other industry represents so much of what makes up the american spirit this industry has been the source of deep pride for generations of american workers whose imaginations led to some of the finest cars the world has ever known and whose sweat built a middle class that has held the dreams of millions of our people i just met one of your co workers on a line he is third generation working at chrysler his grandfather worked at chrysler his father worked at chrysler and now he is on the line at chrysler and that could have all vanished now the worse thing about it is that if we had done nothing not only were your jobs gone but supplier jobs were gone and dealership jobs were gone and the communities that depend on them would have been wiped out and by the way when you talk to the ceo of ford he ll tell you that wouldn t have been good for ford either because a lot of those suppliers that they depend on might have gone out of business independent estimates suggest that more than 1 million jobs could have been lost if chrysler and gm had liquidated and in the middle of a deep recession that would have been a brutal irreversible shock not just to detroit not just to the midwest but to our entire economy so i refused to let that happen and we came up with a third way what we said was if you re willing to take the tough and painful steps necessary to make yourselves more competitive if you re willing to pull together workers management suppliers dealers everybody to remake yourself for changing times then we ll stand by you and we ll invest in your future our strategy was to get this company and this industry back on its feet taking a hands off approach saying you guys know the business we don t we re going to give you a chance but we do know you ve got to change now not surprisingly a lot of folks were skeptical you remember last year a lot of folks were saying well this is stupid we shouldn t be helping them and i understood that look this was a hard decision i didn t want government to get into the auto business i ve got enough to do and the politics of it weren t good your delegation was supportive but debbie and carl and carolyn and others they ll tell you there are a lot of folks in washington who said it couldn t be done but i believed that if each of us were willing to work and sacrifice in the short term workers management creditors shareholders retirees communities it could mark a new beginning for a great american industry and if we could summon that sense of teamwork and common purpose we could once again see the best cars in the world designed engineered forged and built right here in detroit right here in the midwest right here in the united states of america so i placed that faith in you and all of america s autoworkers and you ve vindicated that belief the fact that we re standing in this magnificent factory today is a testament to the decisions we made and the sacrifices that you and countless stakeholders across this industry and this country were willing to make so today this industry is growing stronger it s creating new jobs it s manufacturing the fuel efficient cars and trucks that will carry us toward an energy independent future you are proving the naysayers wrong all of you they thought it would be impossible for your company to make the kind of changes necessary to restore fiscal discipline and move towards viability today for the first time since 2004 all three u s automakers are operating at a profit the first time in six years last year sales plummeted and manufacturers and suppliers across the country were forced to idle plants and furlough workers today chrysler is responding to more demand than anticipated by keeping this plant and others running through the usual summer shutdown the same goes for gm s plants sales have rebounded across the supply chain plants that wouldn t exist without the sacrifices made across this industry are running at nearly full capacity last year many thought this industry would keep losing jobs as it had for the better part of the past decade today u s automakers have added 55 000 jobs since last june the strongest job growth in more than 10 years in the auto industry this plant just hired a new shift of 1 100 workers last week i met one of your co workers on the line he said thank you mr president i needed to get out of the house i said i know your wife really felt that way i m sure you were driving her crazy the dundee chrysler plant will begin production of an american made advanced technology fuel efficient engine this december the sterling heights chrysler plant that was scheduled to close after 2012 will stay open and add a second shift of 900 workers next year and when a plant thrives that doesn t just affect the new workers that affects the entire community now it also helped that we took steps to stimulate demand steps like cash for clunkers which said that if you trade in your old car in for a new more fuel efficient model you d get a rebate that program was good for automakers it was good for consumers but you know what it was also good for the environment it was more successful than we ever imagined and it saved at least 100 000 jobs giving dealerships sales numbers they hadn t had in years and communities an economic boost they wouldn t have otherwise seen so there s no doubt that the auto industry is growing stronger but look the hard truth is this industry lost a lot of jobs in recent years some of those jobs aren t coming back partly because automakers have become so much more efficient than they used to be this is a lean mean operation and so there are people who have still lost their jobs haven t been hired back and it wasn t their fault mistakes were made in managing the company that weren t theirs so that s why we still also got to make targeted investments to encourage new private sector manufacturing growth we got to encourage clean energy that s why we re taking steps to help communities revitalize and redevelop old shuttered auto facilities preparing them for new industries and new jobs and new opportunities i ll give you an example those investments that we re making are helping to create an entire new advanced battery industry take root right here in michigan that industry was producing only 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries last year but by 2015 we expect to produce 40 percent of the advanced batteries that go into our cars and we re going to do it right here in michigan all across the midwest investments like those mean jobs for american workers to do what they ve always done build great products and sell them around the world so the bottom line is this we ve got a long way to go but we re beginning to see some of these tough decisions pay off we are moving forward i want you to remember though if some folks had their way none of this would have been happening i just want to point that out right i mean this this plant this plant and your jobs might not exist there were leaders of the just say no crowd in washington they were saying oh standing by the auto industry would guarantee failure one of them called it the worst investment you could possibly make they said they said we should just walk way and let those jobs go i wish they were standing here today i wish they could see what i m seeing in this plant and talk to the workers who are here taking pride in building a world class vehicle i don t think they d be willing to look you in the eye and say that you were a bad investment they might just come around if they were standing here and admit that by standing by a great american industry and the good people who work for it that we did the right thing it s hard for them to say that you know they like admitting when i do the right thing but they might have had to admit it and i want all of you to know i will bet on the american worker any day of the week you know when world war ii hit pearl harbor we didn t throw up our arms and said boy this is tough i don t know what we re going to do we rolled up our sleeves we got to work and it was workers just like you right here in detroit who built an arsenal of democracy that propelled america to victory it was workers like you that built this country into the greatest economic power the world has ever known it workers like you that manufactured a miracle that was uniquely american we faced down impossible odds we can rise to meet any challenge as i was thinking about what to say today an extraordinary story was brought to my attention i don t know if they re here but i think some of you just know 14 of your fellow employees at the plant won the lottery where are they that s one a couple of them right there you know lunch is on them by the way now the first assumption people might make is you know after you win the lottery you just kick back and you retire nobody d fault folks for that this is tough work but most of them they just want to keep on working and i is william shanteau here he s not well he was one of the guys who bought one of the he bought the winning ticket right turns out he used some of the winnings to buy his wife one of the jeep grand cherokees that you build right here he called it a sweet ride and he s going to pay for new american flags for his hometown because he loves his country and he s going to keep coming to work because he loves this plant and he loves these workers so don t bet against the american worker don t bet against the american people we got more work to do it s going to take some time to get back to where we need to be but i have confidence in the american worker i have confidence in you i have confidence in this economy we are coming back thank you everybody thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama30 9 09 barack_obama thank you thank you so much francis thank you for the extraordinary introduction i want to echo what has just been said about my secretary of hhs she is i just think outstanding she hit the ground running and with all the burdens that she carries she always has a sense of fun and energy and is just good to be around so please give kathleen sebelius a big round of applause i want to acknowledge that we are in congressman chris van hollen s district a democrat from maryland and chris is here and a great supporter of nih historically we are very grateful for him and we are so happy to have senator arlen specter who is directly responsible for so much of the funding for nih research he is a huge champion for your cause and i know you already gave him a rousing round of applause but i just want to echo what a great job he s been doing and what a great partner he s been finally somebody who s not here but deserves a little credit is my vice president joe biden who is managing the stimulus process whoa that s joe trying to call in joe is doing a great job but he is pretty tough when it comes to tracking the money and so he s going to be paying attention doc to make sure that it s going where it s supposed to be going before i begin my remarks about this extraordinary institution i want to say a word about the tragic events that took place yesterday in america samoa my deepest sympathies are with the families who ve lost loved ones and the many people whose lives have been affected by the earthquake and the tsunami to aid in the response i declared this a major disaster to speed the deployment of resources and fema the federal emergency management agency is working closely with emergency responders on the ground and the coast guard is helping to provide immediate help to those in need we also stand ready to help our friends in neighboring samoa and throughout the region and we ll continue to monitor the situation closely as we keep the many people who ve been touched by this tragedy in our thoughts and in our prayers now today i m here to talk about our nation s commitment to research i want to thank dr collins and his team for showing me and kathleen some of the extraordinary groundbreaking research being done at the national institutes of health the work you do is not easy it takes a great deal of patience and persistence but it holds incredible promise for the health of our people and the future of our nation and our world that s why i m here today for decades the nih has been at the forefront of medical invention and innovation helping to save countless lives and relieve untold suffering and yet if we re honest in recent years we ve seen our leadership slipping as scientific integrity was at times undermined and research funding failed to keep pace we know that the work you do would not get done if left solely to the private sector some research does not lend itself to quick profit and that s why places like the nih were founded and that s why my administration is making a historic commitment to research and the pursuit of discovery and that s why today we re announcing that we ve awarded 5 billion that s with a b in grants through the recovery act to conduct cutting edge research all across america to unlock treatments to diseases that have long plagued humanity to save and enrich the lives of people all over the world this represents the single largest boost to biomedical research in history now one of the most exciting areas of research to move forward as a result of this investment will be in applying what scientists have learned through the human genome project to help us understand prevent and treat various forms of cancer heart disease and autism and having been a leader of the human genome project dr collins knows this promise all too well and it s a promise that we ve only just begun to realize in cancer we re beginning to see treatments based on our knowledge of genetic changes that cause the disease and the genetic predispositions that many of us carry that make us more susceptible to the disease but we ve only scratched the surface of these kinds of treatments because we ve only begun to understand the relationship between our environment and genetics in causing and promoting cancer so through the recovery act the nih is expanding the cancer genome atlas collecting more than 20 000 tissue samples to sequence the dna of more than 20 types of cancer and this has extraordinary potential to help us better understand and treat this disease cancer has touched the lives of all americans including my own family s 1 5 million people will be diagnosed in the next year half a million people will lose their lives we all know the terrible toll on families and the promise of treatments that will allow a mother to be there for her children as they grow up that will make it possible for a child to reach adulthood that will allow countless people to survive a disease that s claimed far too many lives through these investments in research we will also have the opportunity to make strides in the treatment and prevention of heart disease the leading cause of death in the united states since 1948 for example researchers have been following generations of residents in the town of framingham massachusetts to better understand the cause of cardiovascular illness now we have a chance to study the dna of these participants and connect what we know after decades of observation to what we ll soon know about their genetic makeup and perhaps we can identify those who are likely get high blood pressure or high cholesterol and find ways to intervene before heart disease even develops and finally we ll also provide the largest ever infusion of funding into autism research across the country grant recipients will have the opportunity to study genetic and environmental factors of a disease that now touches more than one in every 150 children what we learn will hopefully lead to greater understanding early interventions more effective treatments and therapies to help these children live their lives and achieve their fullest potential which is extraordinary now we know that these investments in research will improve and save countless lives for generations to come and as i was taking a tour with dr collins and dr fauci and others just listening to the possibility of a hiv aids vaccine or hearing the latest treatments of cancer that allow people who previously only had resort to the most violent types of radiation or chemotherapy now being able to take pills and seeing extraordinary progress it is something that is entirely inspiring but we also know that these investments will save jobs they ll create new jobs tens of thousands of jobs conducting research and manufacturing and supplying medical equipment and building and modernizing laboratories and research facilities all across america and that s also what the recovery act is all about it s not just about creating make work jobs it s about creating jobs that will make a lasting difference for our future from the beginning our goal has been to rescue the economy at the same time as we re laying a new foundation for lasting economic growth and central to that foundation is a health care system that can deliver the treatments and cures you discover in an affordable way after all decades of research make no difference to the family that is dropped from an insurance policy when a child gets sick and breakthroughs with the potential to save lives don t matter when your insurance doesn t cover a pre existing condition and as costs rise and rise that leaves less and less for the kinds of investments in health care and in basic research that will actually improve our well being that s why we re working so hard to pass long overdue reforms now i should point out there are some who have opposed the reforms we re suggesting saying it would lead to a takeover by the government of the health care sector but this concern about the involvement of government i should point out has been present whenever we have sought to improve our health care system here s an interesting quote from fdr he addressed it nearly 70 years ago right here at the dedication of nih and he said and i quote neither the american people nor their government intends to socialize medical practice any more than they plan to socialize industry in american life the family doctor the general practitioner performs a service which we rely upon and which we trust as a nation and there can be no substitute for the personal relationship between doctor and patient which is a source of strength of our medical practice in our land fdr was being accused of a government takeover of health care but he thought nih was a pretty good idea and think about everything that s happened and all the lives that have been saved and all the progress that s been made and all the commercial activity that s been generated as a consequence of that early investment these words are a reminder that while we ve made great advances in medicine our debates haven t always kept pace and these words remind us that there have always been those who argued against progress but that at our best we ve never allowed our fears to overwhelm our hopes for a brighter future that s been at the heart of the work of the national institutes of health for decades it was here that dr roy hertz would develop the first successful cure of metastatic cancer through chemotherapy as a group of women who would have surely died began actually to get better it was here that dr nina braunwald the first woman ever to be board certified in cardiothoratic surgery conducted some of the earliest operations to replace heart valves it was here in the years after president roosevelt s visit that polio vaccines would be tested to end a scourge that affected millions including obviously the president that helped make the research possible we can only imagine the new discoveries that will flow from the investments we make today breakthroughs in medical research take far more than the occasional flash of brilliance as important as that can be progress takes time it takes hard work it can be unpredictable it can require a willingness to take risks and going down some blind alleys occasionally figuring out what doesn t work is sometimes as important as figuring out what does all of this needs the support of government it holds promise like no other area of human endeavor but we ve got to make a commitment to it and here at the national institutes of health and at universities and research institutions across this country you are demonstrating our capacity not just as a nation but as human beings to harness our creativity and our ingenuity to save lives to spare suffering to build a better world for ourselves our children and our grandchildren that is our great promise and it is one that we ve once again begun to fulfill so thank you for your extraordinary work and we are going to keep on providing the support that you need the american people are looking forward to the next set of discoveries that all of you are working on today thank you so much dem bobama31 3 10 barack_obama thank you everybody hello hello hello thank you everybody please please have a seat first one caveat i will not be good as good as michelle so keep your expectations lower i want to first of all acknowledge john berry for the extraordinary work he s doing here and for helping to organize this thank you john in addition we ve got secretary hilda solis is here from our department of labor dr christina romer who s the chair of our council of economic advisers where are you christina right there valerie jarrett a senior advisor and chair of the white house council on women and girls ms melody barnes i actually just saw run off to the garden she was on my list the chair of our domestic policy council but she s not here karen mills who is the administrator for our small business administration and ms martha johnson administrator of the general services administration so i understand you ve had a wonderful session i heard all about it and i want to thank all of you for joining us today and sharing your thoughts on what we can do as business leaders and advocates as employees and as government officials to modernize our workplaces to meet the needs of our workforce and our families and all of us here today know just how wide that gap has grown and we re all familiar with the economic and demographic changes that have brought us to this point how over the past generation or two as costs have risen and wages have lagged many families have found they can no longer survive on just one income and at the same time we ve broken down barriers and opened up opportunities so more women have entered into the workforce bringing home paychecks that are increasingly critical to supporting families today two thirds of american families with kids are headed by two working parents or a single working parent and the result is the rise of what one expert i know refers to as the juggler family for these families every day is a high wire act everything is scheduled right down to the minute there s no room for error if the car breaks down or somebody gets sick or there s a problem at school that begins a cascading domino effect that leaves everybody scrambling and i have to say that this is something that michelle and i have struggled with in our own family as she told you earlier today it wasn t that long ago that both of us were working full time outside the home while raising two young daughters i was away for days on end for my job and michelle was working hard at hers so a lot of times we felt like we were just barely keeping everything together when we were at work we were worrying about what was happening at home when we were at home we were worrying about work we both felt our overloaded schedules were taking a toll on our marriage and we had it relatively easy we could afford good health care we had a wonderful mother in law grandmother who could help out we had to ship her in even in the white house we both had jobs where we could rework our schedules in an emergency without risking being fired or having our paychecks docked now most folks just aren t that lucky particularly in today s economy when many people aren t just working one job but are having to work two or three to get by or they re working longer hours or they re out of a job and they can t afford to be choosy about things like flexibility and benefits and this disconnect between the needs of our families and the demands of our workplace also reflects a broader problem that today we as a society still see workplace flexibility policies as a special perk for women rather than a critical part of a workplace that can help all of us there s still this perception out there that an employee who needs some time to tend to an aging parent or attend to a parent teacher s conference isn t fully committed to his or her job or that if you make a workplace more flexible it necessarily will be less profitable now it s true that women are still disproportionately affected by this issue something michelle always reminds me of which is another reason why it s such great concern for me but plenty of fathers out there wish they had more time to spend with their kids plenty of sons wish they could do more for their elderly parents plenty of workers both women and men wish they could go back to school so they can beef up their skills and advance their careers and there are plenty of communities that desperately need the new jobs we can create when we embrace teleworking and mobile workplaces and as for how this issue affects companies bottom lines a report by the white house council of economic advisers that we re releasing today found that companies with flexible work arrangements can actually have lower turnover and absenteeism and higher productivity and healthier workers so let s be clear workplace flexibility isn t just a women s issue it s an issue that affects the well being of our families and the success of our businesses it affects the strength of our economy whether we ll create the workplaces and jobs of the future we need to compete in today s global economy and ultimately it reflects our priorities as a society our belief that no matter what each of us does for a living caring for our loved ones and raising the next generation is the single most important job that we have i think it s time we started making that job a little easier for folks many of you here represent companies and workplaces that are already doing just that embracing telecommuting flextime compressed work weeks job sharing flexible start and end times and helping your employees generally find quality childcare and eldercare and if you re doing this not just because it s the right thing to do but because you ve found that what s good for your workers and is good for your families can be good for your bottom lines and your shareholders as well then you need to spread the word my administration is committed to supporting efforts like these our budget for next year includes competitive grants to help states launch their own paid leave programs it increases funding for childcare and nearly doubles the child care tax credit for millions of middle class families and it provides support for folks caring for aging relatives and for seniors who want to live independently for as long as possible we re also committed to practicing what we preach and serving as a model for the policies that we re encouraging john has been all over this that s the purpose of the pilot project that john just told you about and that s why john is working with our chief technology officer aneesh chopra to provide opportunities for federal employees here in washington but also all across america to telework on a regular basis where regulations are in the way we ll see what we can do to change them where new technology can help we ll find a secure cost effective way to install it where training is needed to help managers and workers embrace this approach we ll adopt the best practices from the private sector because in the end we believe that all of this isn t just about providing a better work experience for our employees it s about providing better more efficient service for the american people even in the face of snowstorms and other crises that keep folks from getting to the office i do not want to see the government close because of snow again it s about attracting and retaining top talent in the federal workforce and empowering them to do their jobs and judging their success by the results that they get not by how many meetings they attend or how much face time they log or how many hours are spent on airplanes it s about creating a culture where as martha johnson puts it work is what you do not where you are and in these efforts we ll be looking to all of you for advice and ideas and we plan to continue this conversation in the coming months holding forums and roundtables in communities across the country so we can seek out more good ideas and best practices that we can adopt and promote so again i thank you for being part of this forum i look forward to hearing about what you all came up with today and i look forward to working with all of you in the years to come thank you very much everybody dem bobama31 8 10 barack_obama hello everybody everybody have a seat well listen i am extraordinarily honored to be with all of you today and i want to thank general pittard i want to thank command sergeant major dave davenport who have shown such extraordinary leadership here i wanted to come down to fort bliss mainly to say thank you and to say welcome home i m going to make a speech to the nation tonight it s not going to be a victory lap it s not going to be self congratulatory there s still a lot of work that we ve got to do to make sure that iraq is an effective partner with us but the fact of the matter is that because of the extraordinary service that all of you have done and so many people here at fort bliss have done iraq has an opportunity to create a better future for itself and america is more secure now i just met with some gold star families and yesterday i was at walter reed and there are no moments when i feel more keenly and more deeply my responsibilities as commander in chief than during those moments i know we lost 51 fellow soldiers from here in fort bliss a lot more than that were injured some of them very severely a million men and women in uniform have now served in iraq and this has been one of our longest wars but the fact of the matter is that there has not been a single mission that has been assigned to all of you in which you have not performed with gallantry with courage with excellence and that is something that the entire country understands there are times where in our country we ve got political disagreements and appropriately we have big debates about war and peace but the one thing we don t argue about is the fact that we ve got the finest fighting force in the history of the world and the reason we have it is because of the men and women in uniform in every branch of service who make so many sacrifices and their families make those sacrifices alongside them and so the main message i have tonight and the main message i have to you is congratulations on a job well done the country appreciates you i appreciate you and the most pride i take in my job is being your commander in chief it also means that as we transition in iraq that the one thing i will insist upon for however long i remain president of the united states is that we serve you and your families as well as you served us so we spent a lot of time over the last couple of years making sure that we re increasing our support of veterans that we are making sure that our wounded warriors are cared for that some of the signature injuries of our war like post traumatic stress disorder traumatic brain injury that we are devoting special services there that we ve got a post 9 11 gi bill that ensures that you and your family members are able to come back and fully contribute and participate in our economy that our veterans are constantly getting the care and honor that they have earned so that s part of my message to the country and one of the great things about the last several years has been to see how unified the country is around support of our veterans and of our men and women who are currently serving now i know that as i said at the beginning our task in iraq is not yet completed our combat phase is over but we ve worked too hard to neglect the continuing work that has to be done by our civilians and by those transitional forces including some folks who are going to be deploying i understand today and i m going to be talking to them later the work that continues is absolutely critical providing training and assistance to iraqi security forces because there s still violence in iraq and they re still learning how to secure their country the way they need to and they ve made enormous strides thanks to the training that they ve already received but there s still more work to do there we re going to have to protect our civilians our aid workers and our diplomats who are over there who are still trying to expand and help what s going to be a long road ahead for the iraqi people in terms of rebuilding their country we re still going to be going after terrorists in those areas and so our counterterrorism operations are still going to be conducted jointly but the bottom line is is that our combat phase is now over we are in transition and that could not have been accomplished had it not been for the men and women here at fort bliss and across the country the other thing that i m going to talk about this evening is the fact that we obviously still have a very tough fight in afghanistan and a lot of families have been touched by the way in iraq a lot of families are now being touched in afghanistan we ve seen casualties go up because we re taking the fight to al qaeda and the taliban and their allies it is going to be a tough slog but what i know is that after 9 11 this country was unified in saying we are not going to let something like that happen again and we are going to go after those who perpetrated that crime and we are going to make sure that they do not have safe haven and now under the command of general petraeus we have the troops who are there in a position to start taking the fight to the terrorists and that s going to mean some casualties and it s going to mean some heartbreak but the one thing that i know from all of you is that when we put our minds to it we get things done and we re willing to make some sacrifices on behalf of our security here at home so to all of you and to your families i want to express my deepest gratitude the gratitude of michelle the first lady and our entire family but also i just want to say thank you on behalf of the country because without you we couldn t enjoy the freedoms and the security that are so precious and all of you represent that long line of heroes that have served us so well generation after generation you know when i was talking to the gold star families there there were some widows dating back to world war ii and then there was a young woman who had just had a baby and had just lost her husband and that describes the arc of heroism and sacrifice that s been made by the men and women in uniform for so many generations you re part of that line part of that tradition part of that heroism so what i d like to do is just to come around and shake all of your hands personally to say thank you to all of you to say thank you for a job well done and to know that you are welcome home with open arms from every corner of this country people could not be prouder of you and we are grateful thank you very much everybody dem bobama4 11 09a barack_obama thank you thank you thank you so much everybody please have a seat well welcome to the white house michelle and i are delighted to host the fourth evening in a series showcasing the achievements of american musicians i d like to welcome the many members of congress who ve joined us tonight despite what you may have heard they are actually a civilized bunch please join me in acknowledging our outstanding secretary of veterans affairs ric shinseki is here as well doing a tremendous job on behalf of our wounded warriors i would also like to welcome the president s committee on the arts and the humanities a group of men and women dedicated to inspiring creative endeavors and strengthening america s deep commitment to the arts and i understand that you had a wonderful program this afternoon and this morning with michelle it s been a busy day of classical music here at the white house earlier more than 100 students participated in a terrific workshop and concert led by tonight s performers i want to thank those performers for coming to share their passion and their talent with us tonight joshua bell sharon isbin awadagin pratt and alisa weilerstein any one of them would tell you that they re only here because of the hard work dedication and the fact that somebody along the way was there for them so i want to thank them for setting an important example for our gifted young musicians who someday might be performing up here themselves tonight s performance also continues a long tradition of sorts in the east room over 120 years ago the first formal concert was held here as president chester a arthur and guests listened to her majesty s opera company performing the works of mozart verdi and wagner since then it s earned a rich history as a venue for white house concerts and especially for those dedicated to classical music from van cliburn to yo yo ma to our own marine chamber orchestra and marine chamber ensembles this room has been a stage for some of the nation s most accomplished classical musicians now if any of you in the audience are newcomers to classical music and aren t sure when to applaud don t be nervous apparently president kennedy had the same problem he and jackie held several classical music events here and more than once he started applauding when he wasn t supposed to so the social secretary worked out a system where she d signal him through a crack in the door to the cross hall now fortunately i have michelle to tell me when to applaud the rest of you are on your own this is of course a unique concert venue but tonight all across america in community centers and concert halls in homes and in schools the sounds of classical music are lifting hearts and spurring imagination just as they always have and it s easy to understand why there s precision of course but there s also great feeling and improvisation there s structure but there s also creativity it s music that defies simple definition even as it speaks to a common universal language so whether you are new to classical music or have been an aficionado for many many years we hope that you enjoy tonight thank you so much dem bobama4 11 09b barack_obama thank you everybody hello madison thank you so much thank you everybody please have a seat have a seat it is good to see all of you good to be back in madison i want to first of all just say that jim doyle is not only one of the finest governors we have in the country but is also a great friend a great supporter his entire family has been wonderful and so i just could not be prouder to associate myself with the outstanding work that jim has done in the state please give him a big round of applause we ve got two wonderful mayors in the house first of all your own dave cieslewicz is here dave and milwaukee s outstanding mayor tom barrett is in the house i am so impressed with the work that s been done here at wright middle school and i know that principal nancy evans deserves a huge amount of credit so please give her a big round of applause and to the faculty and the staff but most importantly the students who i had a chance to meet with earlier today they are just some outstanding young people so if there are any parents of students in the house you should be proud and give them all a big round of applause now it s great to be back in madison great to be back in wisconsin and i ve heard great things about wright so i ve got very high expectations for all the students here and i told them this i expect them to keep up the good work that you ve already been putting in to make sure that you succeed not just in middle school but also in high school also in college and for the rest of your lives and parents i want you to stay on them because because that is an absolutely critical ingredient for their success you know one year ago americans all across this country went to the polls and cast ballots for the future they wanted to see election day was a day of hope it was a day of possibility but it was also a sobering one because we knew even then that we faced an array of challenges that would test us as a country we already saw that there was a financial crisis that threatened to plunge our economy into a great depression the worst that we ve seen in generations we had record deficits two wars frayed alliances around the world facing this reality my administration had two fundamental obligations the first was to rescue the economy from imminent collapse and while we still have a long way to go we have made meaningful progress toward achieving that goal we acted boldly and swiftly to pass a recovery act that has made a difference for families right here in wisconsin and jim your governor described the difference that it s made we ve put a tax cut into the pockets of 95 percent of hardworking families we created or saved over one million jobs including 4 000 education jobs right here in wisconsin we ve taken steps to unlock our frozen credit markets so that the ordinary american can get the loan that he or she needs to buy a home or a car to go to college or start a new business we ve enacted measures to stem the crisis in our housing market to help responsible homeowners stay in their homes and curb the decline of home values overall so all these things contributed to the first quarter of economic growth that we ve had as a nation in over a year the rate of job loss is slowing although not nearly fast enough yet the work continues but we re moving in the right direction and we are going to keep on fulfilling our obligation to do every single thing we possibly can to pull this economy out of the ditch and to make sure that people can find jobs that pay good wages that s our top priority so that was the rescue part of our job just solving the immediate crisis but we also came into office with another goal another obligation not simply to do what needed to be done to deal with an emergency crisis but to make those long term investments necessary to build our economy stronger than before it was an obligation to tackle problems that had been festering problems that had been kicked down the road year after year decade after decade problems that have to be overcome for america to move forward see even before the crisis we were having big problems we were just papering them over manufacturing was declining and we weren t producing as many high tech high skilled jobs as we needed to be we had an energy situation where suddenly oil producers or speculators want to constrict supply and next thing you know you re paying four bucks at the pump so we didn t have energy independence health care costs were skyrocketing before the crisis so that families were seeing more and more out of pocket costs and essentially trading away salary and wages just to keep up with their premiums so we had an obligation to create a better health care system that works for our people our businesses and our government alike and that s why we ve been pushing so hard on health care reform that s why we took up the cause of a clean energy economy that will free america from the grip of foreign oil and generate millions of good paying jobs in the process green jobs in retrofitting old buildings to make them more energy efficient creating the batteries and other technologies needed for plug in hybrids that can get 150 miles a gallon and will help to curb climate change and that s why we re taking up the cause that i m here to talk about today and that is offering the best possible education to america s sons and daughters american prosperity has long rested on how well we educate our children but this has never been more true than it is today in the 21st century when countries that out educate us today will out compete us tomorrow there is nothing that will determine the quality of our future as a nation and the lives our children will lead more than the kind of education that we provide them nothing is more important and here is what we know over the course of a lifetime those with a college degree and i want the young people here especially to listen to this over the course of a lifetime those with a college degree earn over 60 percent more than those with only a high school diploma 60 percent more most of the fastest growing jobs require a bachelor s degree or more this is what we were talking about earlier in the classroom four out of every 10 new jobs will require at least some advanced education or training within the next decade so put simply the right education is a prerequisite for success there was a time when if you just got a high school education and you were willing to work hard you could get a job in a trade or in the factory that paid a middle class wage and those days are declining the currency of today s economy is knowledge and yet we continue to trail other countries in a number of critical areas the united states a nation that has always led the way in innovation is now being outpaced in math and science education a handful of states have even gone in the wrong direction lowering their standards at the very moment that they should be raising them we used to rank number one in the number of college graduates and advanced degrees that s not the case anymore meanwhile african american and latino students continue to lag behind their white classmates an achievement gap that will ultimately cost us hundreds of billions of dollars because that s our future workforce of course these problems aren t new we ve heard about them for years but instead of coming together to solve them we ve let partisanship and petty bickering stand in the way of progress it s been democrat versus republican it s been democrat versus republican it s been voucher versus public schools it s been more money versus more reform in some cases people have seen schools as sort of a political spoil having to do with jobs and contracts instead of what we re teaching kids and this status quo has held back our children it s held back our economy and it s held back our country for too long it s time to stop just talking about education reform and start actually doing it it s time to make education america s national mission now i m proud to say that thanks to one of the best secretaries of education america has ever had arne duncan who s here today stand up arne so everybody can see thanks to arne s passion and understanding of these issues and the ability to bring people together that s exactly what we re going to do we are making this america s national mission improving our schools not in unrealistic ways not in abstract ways not in pie in the sky ways in concrete ways we are putting our resources behind the kinds of reforms that are going to make a difference in the coming weeks states will be able to compete for what we re calling a race to the top award we re putting over 4 billion on the table 4 billion with a b one of the largest investments that the federal government has ever made in education reform but we re not just handing it out to states because they want it we re not just handing it out based on population it s not just going through the usual political formulas we re challenging states to compete for it and i have to tell you this was not an easy thing to get through congress this is not normally how federal dollars work but because of arne s tenacity and our commitment to make sure that reform happens that s how we ve structured it we re saying to states if you are committed to real change in the way you educate your children if you re willing to hold yourselves more accountable and if you develop a strong plan to improve the quality of education in your state then we ll offer you a big grant to help you make that plan a reality now before a state is even eligible to compete they ll have to take an important first step and this has caused some controversy in some places but it shouldn t be controversial any state that has a so called firewall law will have to remove them now here s what a firewall law is it basically says that you can t factor in the performance of students when you re evaluating teachers that is not a good message in terms of accountability so we said if you ve got one of those laws if you want to compete for these grants you got to get rid of that law and we ll encourage states to take a better approach when it comes to charter schools and other innovative public schools when these schools are performing poorly they ll be shut down but when innovative public schools are succeeding they shouldn t be stifled they should be supported and i m proud to say that already a number of states have taken us up on this challenge across the country different groups are coming together to bring about change in our schools teachers unions and parents groups businesses and community organizations in places like new haven educators and city leaders have come together to find a smarter way to evaluate teachers and turn around low performing schools in states like california and indiana and wisconsin you re seeing steps taken to remove these so called firewall laws so we can have a clear look at how well our children are learning and what can be done to help them learn better states like delaware and louisiana tennessee and illinois are all making efforts to let innovative charter schools flourish so a race to the top has begun in our schools but the real competition will begin when states apply for the actual race to the top grants see they had to make some changes just to even join the race but now the race starts and we re going to start seeing even more interesting changes at the local level so we ll take a hard look at states applications to determine whether they measure up we ll take a look at a state s track record to determine whether the steps they ve taken have had real results when it comes to their students education we ll take a look at whether states are taking an all hands on deck approach when it comes to reform and in particular we ll take a look at how states are doing when it comes to four key measures of reform and i want to get into some details about this because i want you as parents as well as the educators to understand what the data and the science and the studies and the research show actually make a big difference in terms of school improvement because that s what we are basing this stuff on we didn t just kind of make it up didn t just do it because it sounded good this is what the research shows is really going to make a difference the first measure is whether a state is committed to setting higher standards and better assessments that prepare our children to succeed in the 21st century and i m pleased to report that 48 states are now working to develop internationally competitive standards internationally competitive standards because these young people are going to be growing up in an international environment where they re competing not just against kids in chicago or los angeles for jobs but they re competing against folks in beijing and bangalore this is something i called for earlier this year and i want to commend the leadership of the governors and school chiefs who ve joined together to get this done and because of these efforts there will be a set of common standards that any state can adopt beginning early next year and i urge all our states to do so and to upgrade what s taught in the classroom accordingly to meet these international standards i also challenge states to align their assessments with high standards because we should we should not just raise the bar we should prepare our kids to meet it there s no point in having really high standards but we re not doing what it takes to meet those standards and i want to be clear this is not just about more tests because i know that in the past people have been concerned about you know is this about standardized tests or are we going to have our young people being taught to the test that s the last thing we want but what we want to do what we want to do is finally get testing right so it s not about more tests it s about being smarter about our assessments it s about measuring not only whether our kids can master the basics but whether they can solve challenging tasks do they have the skills like critical thinking and teamwork and entrepreneurship assessments that don t just give us a snapshot of how a student is doing in a particular subject but a big picture look at how they re learning overall and assessments that will help tell us if our kids have the knowledge and the skills to thrive when they graduate so we re not just interested in can they fill out a bubble what we want to do is to take a look generally are kids learning and gaining the critical thinking skills that they need to succeed now these are the kinds of assessments that our states should be putting in place and we re setting up a separate competition where they can win grants extra grants to help them do just that so standards and assessments that s the first measure are we doing that well if the state wants to get a race to the top grant they ve got to do that well and because we know that from the moment our kids enter a school the most important factor in their success other than their parents is the person standing in front of the classroom the teacher the second measure is whether a state is committed to putting effective teachers in its classrooms and effective principals at the helm of its schools now it s time to start taking this commitment seriously we ve got to do a better job recruiting and preparing new teachers we ve got to do a better job of rewarding outstanding teachers and i ve got to be honest we ve got to do a better job of moving bad teachers out of the classroom once they ve been given an opportunity to do it right and that means creating alternate pathways to teaching for talented young people by expanding programs like the one used in boston where aspiring teachers work side by side with effective mentors in a year long residency it means bringing quality teachers in it means bringing quality teachers to the neighborhoods that need them the most because right now a lot of what happens is is that some of the best teachers as they get seniority they move on to the places the school districts that pay better and frankly are easier to teach and we ve got to give them some incentives to stay so that the kids who need the most help are getting some of the best teachers it means boosting the number the numbers of quality teachers who can help our special education and english language learners meet high standards and you ve done that here at wright so congratulations on that it means improving instruction in science technology reading math and ensuring that more women and people of color are doing well in those subjects so that s the second the second factor third factor third measure we ll use in this race to the top competition is whether states are tracking the progress of our students and teachers to make sure every child graduates ready for college and a career so as i said earlier as i said earlier before a state can even apply for a grant it has to change any laws that prevent us from factoring in the performance of students when they re evaluating their teachers but that s not enough if a state wants to increase its chances of actually winning a grant it s going to have to do more it s going to have to collect information about how students are doing in a particular year and over the course of an academic career and make this information available to teachers so they can use it to improve the way they teach one of the things that teachers get so frustrated about is these standardized tests come at a time when it s too late to use to actually help the students improve their performance so if we re going to collect if we re going to collect data on how kids are doing let s make sure the teachers have it in usable form so that they can actually start doing a better job that s how teachers can determine what they should be doing differently in the classroom that s how principals can determine what changes need to be made in our schools and that s how school districts can determine what they need to be doing better to prepare our teachers and principals now even with stronger standards better assessments outstanding teachers some schools will still be difficult to turn around i want us to be honest about this there are some schools that are starting in a tough position a lot of kids coming from impoverished backgrounds a lot of kids coming in that may have not gotten the kind of head start that they needed they start school already behind and even though there are heroic teachers and principals in many of these schools the fact is that they need some extra help and that s why the fourth measure we ll use in awarding race to the top grants is whether a state is focused on transforming not just its high performing schools not just the middle of the pack schools but the lowest performing schools we ll look at whether they re willing to remake a school from top to bottom with new leaders and a new way of teaching replacing a school s principal if it s not working and at least half its staff close a school for a time and then reopen it under new management even shut down the school entirely and send its schools send its students to a better school nearby there s always excuses for why these schools can t perform but part of what we want is an environment in which everybody agrees from the governor to the school superintendent teachers principals and most importantly parents and students that there s no excuse for mediocrity and we will take drastic steps when schools aren t working so these are the kinds of vigorous strategies that are necessary to turn around our most troubled schools transforming our lowest performing schools using timely information to improve the way we teach our children outstanding teachers and principals in our classrooms and our schools that are getting the support they need higher standards and better assessments that prepare our kids for life beyond a classroom these are the challenges the four challenges that states have to take up if they want to win a race to the top award and these are the four challenges that our country has to meet for our children to outcompete workers around the world for our economy to grow and to prosper and for america to lead in the 21st century now let me just close by saying this i ve said this before but i never miss an opportunity to impress this upon an audience lifting up american education is not a task for government alone it will take parents getting more involved it will take parents getting more involved in their child s education it will take schools doing more to reach out with parents it will take students students accepting more responsibility for their own education i was explaining to them that education is not saying where you know you just tilt your ear and you just pour it in your ear you ve got to be an active participant in wanting to get an education these aren t in my prepared remarks but i think it s important to note that malia and sasha are just wonderful kids and michelle is a wonderful mother but in our own household with all the privileges and opportunities that we have there are times look there are times when kids slack off there are times where they would rather be watching tv or playing a computer game than hitting the books and part of our job as parents michelle and my job is not just to tell our kids what to do but to start instilling in them a sense that they want to do it for themselves so malia came home the other day she had gotten a 73 on her science test now she s a 6th grader there was a time a couple years ago when she came home with like an 80 something and she said i did pretty well and i said no no no that s i said our goal is our goal is 90 percent and up here is the interesting thing she started internalizing that so she came and she was depressed i got a 73 and i said well what happened well the teacher the study guide didn t match up with what was on the test so what s your idea here well i m going to start i ve got to read the whole chapter i m going to change how i study how i approach it so she came home yesterday she was i got a 95 right so she s high fiving but here s the point she said she said i just like having knowledge that s what she said and what was happening was she had started wanting it more than us now once you get to that point our kids are on our way but the only way they get to that point is if we re helping them get to that point so it s going to take that kind of effort from parents to set a high bar in the household don t just expect teachers to set a high bar you ve got to set a high bar in the household all across america it will take teachers unions and parents and elected leaders working together as partners in common effort not seeing each other as antagonists but all of us having the same goal it will take each and every one of us doing our part on behalf of our children and our country and the future that we share i ll never forget a moment many years ago this is long before i ran for president before i ran for elected office i was just starting out as a community organizer in chicago and we had set up a meeting to figure out how to rebuild our neighborhoods that i was working in very impoverished neighborhoods on the south side and nobody showed up to the meeting this is my first big meeting nobody showed up so i was pretty depressed i had some community leaders some volunteers who had helped me try to organize this thing and they were depressed they felt so defeated they were talking about quitting everybody was too apathetic they said there s no point in trying but then i looked outside as i was listening to them talk and i saw some young boys playing in a vacant lot across the street and they were just throwing rocks at an old apartment building that was boarded up and those boys reminded me of me who didn t have a father in the house and who had gotten in some trouble when he was young and i turned to those volunteers and i said before we quit i want to ask you a question what s going to happen to those boys if we quit if we give up on them and i thought if we can t see that we have got a stake in those young boys if we re not willing to do our part on their behalf if we fail to recognize that the fight for their future is the fight for our own future well who is going to do it so one by one those volunteers they stayed family by family we reached out to the community slowly people started coming to meetings block by block we helped to turn those neighborhoods around and helped to improve some of those schools in the area and that s the common spirit the spirit of common purpose that all of us have to have in america today and i m absolutely confident that if we re all willing to come together and embrace that spirit in the living room in the classroom and the state house on capitol hill then not only will we see our students reaching farther not only will we see our schools performing better not only are we going to help ensure our children outcompete workers abroad and that america outcompetes nations but we re going to protect the dream of our founding and give all of our children every last one of them a fair chance and an equal start in the race to life thank you very much everybody all right thank you god bless and god bless the united states of america dem bobama4 2 10a barack_obama hello everybody thank you well thank you it is wonderful to see so many good friends first of all i want to thank michele for the wonderful introduction and great story that she told i want to thank tim kaine who has been not only an outstanding leader for us but one of the best governors virginia has ever had give tim kaine a big round of applause i understand we ve got thousands of people online so i just want to say to all the folks online thank you for joining us we appreciate it and i want all of you to know right off the bat how much i appreciate what each and every one of you has done not just for me but for the country many of you were on the front lines in our campaign some of you from the very beginning making phone calls and knocking on doors and trudging through the frozen fields of iowa you didn t know the snow was moving this way we can handle it you staked your reputation on some guy that nobody had ever heard of couldn t pronounce my name some of you got involved in a campaign for the very first time in some cases you just got involved for the first time in a very long time because you believed that we were at a defining moment in our nation s history that your voice could make a difference and not a single day goes by when i don t think of the time the energy the money the undying faith that you put into a campaign that wasn t just about winning an election it was about changing a country last year we asked you to take on something new we asked you to help us make the promise of the campaign a reality and i know how hard many of you have worked in your communities to do that either as part of organizing for america or simply by talking to your friends and neighbors your coworkers what you do matters it s made the successes of the last year possible it s because of you that we were able to uphold the principle of equal pay for equal work it s because of you that we lifted the ban on stem cell research and began restoring science to its rightful place in america it s because of you that we extended the promise of health care to 4 million children who didn t have it it s because of you that we passed the strongest veterans budget in decades it s because of you that we protected families from getting ripped off by credit card companies and children from being targeted by big tobacco and responsible consumers from the twin plagues of mortgage fraud and predatory lending we appointed sonia sotomayor to the supreme court we passed a service bill named for ted kennedy that s giving young people and not so young people new ways to give back to their community we ve begun working with congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay americans the right to serve the country that they love because of who they are that s what your support has helped us do here at home abroad we ve begun a new era of engagement we re working with our partners to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and seek a world free of them we re working with other nations to confront climate change we banned torture we re rebuilding our military and reaffirming our alliances we ve begun to leave iraq to its own people we ve charted a new way forward in afghanistan and pakistan and we ve made progress in taking the fight to al qaeda across the globe i went to cairo on behalf of america to begin a new dialogue with the muslim world and we are living up to a moment that demands american leadership by standing tall alongside the people of haiti so in ways large and small we ve begun to deliver on the change that you believed in but the reason you and i are here tonight is because there s so much more work to be done on the day i took office we confronted a financial system on the brink of collapse an economy bleeding 700 000 jobs per month a 1 3 trillion deficit and two wars that were costly in every sense of the word the solutions to these challenges wouldn t be quick or easy and sometimes they wouldn t be popular we knew that but we decided that we were going to govern we decided that we were going to lead we didn t have our finger out to the wind we weren t reading the polls every minute we decided that we would begin a long and difficult journey to get this country back where it needs to be because of the bold swift and coordinated action we took we can stand here today and say we prevented another depression we broke the back of the recession the economy that was shrinking by 6 percent a year ago is now growing by 6 percent so the worst of the storm has passed but all of you from what you see in your own lives what you see in your neighborhoods what you see on the job is that a lot of devastation remains many of you are seeing it in your own communities shuttered businesses foreclosed homes friends neighbors family members who still can t find work and on top of all this you ve got the underlying challenges that middle class families were dealing with for decades for two years i traveled this country with you and everywhere i went i heard stories of folks who were trying their best to hold it all together while working harder and harder for less money we heard families sitting around the kitchen table wondering if a secure retirement was even possible if a college education was still achievable if the climb of health care costs would ever stop we heard people wondering if the dream that generations of americans had built and defended was slowly slipping away those are the stories that caused me to run for president of the united states those are the stories that led you to support me those are the stories that lead us to do every single thing that we can to create an economy that hasn t just recovered but where hard work is valued and responsibility is rewarded where businesses are hiring and wages are rising where our middle class is getting stronger and feeling more secure now our most urgent task is job creation that was our number one priority last year it s our number one priority this year so we ll give tax breaks and loans to small business to help them hire new workers and raise wages and invest in new plants and equipment we ll put even more americans to work constructing clean energy facilities and upgrading our infrastructure for the future we ll create incentives for consumers to make their homes more energy efficient creating jobs and saving families money and it s time that we put an end to tax breaks for companies that are shipping jobs overseas we need to give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the united states of america but the truth is these steps alone won t make up for the 7 million jobs that we ve lost over the last two years those steps alone won t make up for the economic security insecurity that middle class families have lost over the past decade the only way to do that is to lay a new foundation for long term economic growth the only way to do that is to finally confront the problems that washington has put off for too long and that we ve been talking about for decades now here s the deal though folks this is where change gets hard when you start going after the real hard things that have been holding us back for so long this is where we start running headlong into the lobbyists and the special interests this is where the bitterness and misinformation that has come to characterize so much of our politics starts rearing its ugly head i know some of you might feel discouraged because changing the ways of washington is hard it s harder than a lot of you thought it might be sometimes it may make you feel like that it s not possible you might want to give up don t give up i don t want you to feel discouraged i want you to understand that it just means we got to push that much harder it means that we ve got to keep up the fight the forces of the status quo may not give an inch but we will not give an inch because we didn t come this far to put things off we didn t come here to play it safe we didn t do all this work to take the easy road to get through the next election that s not why you elected me you came here to solve problems once and for all for the next generation that begins by opening this government up to the people we were the first white house ever to post all our visitors online we excluded lobbyists from policy making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions i ve called on congress to make all earmark requests public on one central web site before they come up for a vote so that you can see how your money is spent and even as we open up government we also have to change its tone and i won t give up on that either the american people are right to be frustrated by a washington where every single day is election day it s a place so absorbed with how each party is doing that it loses sight of how the american people are doing and that s why i went and visited with the house republican caucus last friday we had a good exchange a good discussion about the challenges facing the american people our ideas to solve them we think it was good for the country i had fun now look obviously there s some issues where we don t agree that s okay vigorous debate is healthy we ll tussle from time to time that s what democracy is all about but there s some issues we do agree on so i told my republican friends i want to work together when we can and i meant it i believe that if we put a focus on solving problems instead of scoring political points we can get a lot done together i also made clear that i m going to call them out if what they re offering are political talking points that won t solve problems and i had to insist that we have to throw out that tired old playbook that says blocking everything is easier than actually delivering for the american people otherwise we won t move this country forward and ultimately that s why i m here that s why you re here that s why you joined this campaign that s why you ve helped this past year that s why i need your help now because you know as well as anyone that change never comes without a fight and we ve got we ve got some fights to wage we re going to keep fighting to spark innovation and ignite a clean energy sector where american workers are making solar panels and wind towers and cutting edge batteries because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy we re going to keep fighting to give every american the best education possible that s why we launched the race to the top program to make sure every school lives up to its potential so that every child lives up to their potential that s why we re strengthening our community colleges that s why we re making higher education more affordable because nobody should go broke because they chose to go to college that s why we re going to keep fighting for common sense rules of the road for wall street look let me be clear we need a strong financial sector i want our banks to thrive in loaning money to businesses who are hiring workers and investing in plants and equipment and making things without a stable strong financial sector businesses can t get the capital they need to grow and create jobs and families can t finance a home loan or education and the truth is is that not every person on wall street was engaging in shenanigans not all of them and the truth is is that the i want to hear ideas about how we can strengthen the financial sector in a responsible way but surely we can all agree that we have to ensure our economy is never again brought to its knees by outdated and inadequate financial rules or by the irresponsibility of the few so we re going to keep on fighting for that i would think this is going to be a bipartisan effort i would think because everybody has been harmed by what s happened and every voter out there democrat republican independent is furious about what happened my hope would be that washington would respond and yes we are going to keep fighting to fix a health system that too often works better for the insurance industry than it does for the american people now i you heard me at the state of the union i didn t take this on because it was good politics i love how the pundits on these cable shows they all announce oh boy this was really tough politically for the president well i ve got my own pollsters i know i knew this was hard i knew seven presidents had failed i knew seven congresses hadn t gotten it done you don t think i got warnings don t try to take this on i got those back in december of last year so yes we knew this was hard but i took it on because families were at the mercy of skyrocketing premiums soaring out of pocket costs insurance companies that routinely deny coverage because of preexisting conditions or see their insurance dropped altogether because they get sick we took it on because costs were closing small businesses they were keeping larger ones from competing on a level playing field they were eating into workers take home pay they were canceling raises we took it on because it s the single best way to bring down our deficits by the way nobody has disputed that when i was before the republican caucus it was very clear i said look you say you re concerned about deficit reduction nobody can dispute the fact that if we don t tackle surging health care costs that we can t get control of our budget and by the way the approach that we put forward would reduce our deficit by as much as a trillion dollars over the next two decades we took it on because every single day 15 000 americans join the tens of millions who don t have health insurance and every single year 18 000 americans die because of it i got a letter i got a note today from one of my staff they forwarded it to me from a woman in st louis who had been part of our campaign very active who had passed away from breast cancer she didn t have insurance she couldn t afford it so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed and she had fought a tough battle for four years all through the campaign she was fighting it but finally she succumbed to it and she insisted she s going to be buried in an obama t shirt but think about this she was fighting that whole time not just to get me elected not even to get herself health insurance but because she understood that there were others coming behind her who were going to find themselves in the same situation and she didn t want somebody else going through that same thing how can i say to her you know what we re giving up how can i say to her family this is too hard how can democrats on the hill say this is politically too risky how can republicans on the hill say we re better off just blocking anything from happening that can t be the message that the american people are delivering yes they re nervous they re anxious they re in a tough time right now the thing they want most are jobs they really don t like the process in washington the sausage making that part i understand but i know that they don t but i know they don t want to just offer nothing to the millions of people in america who are in the situation that that woman was in that s what we campaigned on and we are going to keep on working to get it done with democrats and i hope with republicans and everybody else in between to bring down costs to end the worst practices of the insurance industry to finally give every american the chance to choose quality affordable health care we are going to keep on working to get it done i am not going to walk away from these fights and i know you won t because you didn t before you didn t when folks were slamming doors in your faces barama who you didn t quit when you heard voices saying we should scale back and throttle down and accept less you remember that when folks were saying our sights were set too high that our faith in this country was misplaced that our hope was nave that you couldn t change washington that you had to accommodate yourself to the political realities you ve all heard that you didn t listen to those voices then your voice proved them wrong you proved that nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices that are calling for change that is what you did that s what i m asking you to do again now and it s even tougher now than it was because governing delivering for the american people is harder than campaigning it s going to and you guys i heard you the first time sister we re fighting for that too you guys i just want to remind you this is an extraordinary moment in our history we have been given the opportunity to change our country for the better that change begins with each of you in this room and all of you watching all across america it begins when you refuse to settle for the status quo when you reject the cynicism and the skepticism that we can no longer do big things in america when you believe that people who love their country can change it that s how we re going to finish what we started because we do not back down we don t quit i don t quit i m still fired up i m still ready to go and it s because of you thank you everybody god bless you hello hello hello hello hello now my understanding everybody know mitch mitch has i believe four questions that he has drawn from the list of questions that were sent from all across the country and i m going to try to answer them so with that mitch it is a good question we are closer to a health care reform system that works for all americans than we have ever been never before have you seen a bill pass through the house and then a bill pass through the senate and where 90 percent of those bills those two bills overlap democrats in the house and the senate have been in discussions over the last several weeks to finalize a package that represents the best ideas of both the house and the senate here s what we know will be in it it provides coverage to at least 30 million americans who don t have it many of those are small business owners or workers for small businesses it creates an exchange a marketplace where people who don t have health insurance or small businesses that want to get a better deal can pool their purchasing power and then negotiate with insurance companies to drive down costs and drive down premiums the same way by the way that federal workers and members of congress by the way and people who work for big companies are able to get a better deal because they re part of a bigger pool it has insurance reforms that benefit everybody potentially who has health insurance or currently doesn t have health insurance so that we put an end to for example the practice of not being able to get health insurance because of a preexisting condition we make sure that they can t just drop you when you get sick and you need insurance the most and we ve got a whole series of measures for cost reductions in the health care system over the long term by reducing waste and unnecessary tests that are duplicative and end up wasting money by ensuring that there s strong prevention funding so that children are getting regular checkups and they can go to see a doctor instead of going to the emergency room so and by the way all of it is paid for and not only is it deficit neutral but the congressional budget office which is the bipartisan office that s the scorekeeper for how much things cost in congress says it s going to reduce our costs by a trillion dollars now those two bills weren t identical so it was important for folks in both the house and the senate to sit down and figure out what s the final bill that the democrats believe in and want to move forward the next step is what i announced at the state of the union which is to call on our republican friends to present their ideas what i d like to do is have a meeting whereby i m sitting with the republicans sitting with the democrats sitting with health care experts and let s just go through these bills their ideas our ideas let s walk through them in a methodical way so that the american people can see and compare what makes the most sense and then i think that we ve got to go ahead and move forward on a vote we ve got to move forward on a vote but as i said at the state of the union i think we should be very deliberate take our time we re going to be moving a jobs package forward over the next several weeks that s the thing that s most urgent right now in the minds of americans all across the country and that will allow everybody to get the real facts both about the health care crisis that we face why it s so important for deficit reduction why it s so important for families all across the country it allows us to see are there in fact some better ideas out there when i was at the republican caucus somebody told me they had an idea to provide universal coverage and it wouldn t cost anything which i thought that s great i want to see that now i did say i want to make sure that s there are some independent health care experts and economists and doctors who would confirm this but if they can confirm it why wouldn t i want to take that i wish i d thought of that before but here s the key is to not let the moment slip away and i have to say i have to say part of what makes health care so hard and why we are the only advanced nation on earth that doesn t have some form of universal health care is because even when the system doesn t work people still want to kind of cling on to the devil they know because they re worried about the devil they don t it s very easy to scare folks i mean if you go out there right now and you ask the average person and some of you have done this talked to your friends talked to your neighbors they re certain that they would have to go into a government plan which isn t true but that s still a perception a lot of people have they re still pretty sure that they d have to give up their doctor they re still pretty sure that if they re happy with their health care plan that it s bad for them they re still positive that this is going to add to the deficit so there s a lot of information out there that people understandably are concerned about and that s why i think it s very important for us to have a methodical open process over the next several weeks and then let s go ahead and make a decision and it may be that you know if congress decides if congress decides we re not going to do it even after all the facts are laid out all the options are clear then the american people can make a judgment as to whether this congress has done the right thing for them or not and that s how democracy works there will be elections coming up and they ll be able to make a determination and register their concerns one way or the other during election time all right this is a really important question i ve been traveling a lot lately doing town hall meetings and then talking to small business owners as i m traveling around the country and everywhere i go i hear the same thing which is we feel like the economy is starting to improve and we re starting to get orders again we want to expand or we need to replenish our inventory or we are interested in maybe hiring another two or three workers because we can t just keep on putting all our current workers on overtime so they re on the brink of wanting to expand move hire but what they re saying is we still can t get financing now credit is now available for the biggest companies and they are actually starting to make investments every indicator out there is that the economy across the board including in manufacturing is starting to make investments again but the big companies may be able to get credit small companies still can t and when you talk to the smaller banks what they ll say is well on the one hand the regulators are looking over our shoulder they used to say it was fine for us to make these loans now they re saying we shouldn t so that s one concern and another concern is some of them still have pretty tough liabilities on their books because a lot of them lent into commercial real estate or other loans that they re not sure are going to get repaid so what we ve done is twofold one is we ve said how can we get some money directly out there through the small business administration and we ve ramped up lending through the small business administration by 70 percent and we have eliminated fees and we have increased guarantees so that you re seeing a huge increase in the volume of small business loans the problem is the sba can t cover all the need out there and there are 30 000 community banks out there that are serving their communities and small businesses so we ve got to get money to them that s why what we ve said is let s get 30 billion that s been repaid as a consequence of the big banks getting well and having to repay their tarp money let s take that money and set up a fund whereby we can start lending that money through small banks now the last thing i d say is i was asked is there a way of stipulating that this will go to particular loans we don t want the government to be in the business of saying you have to give this loan or deny that loan because we re not on the ground and we can t review each and every one of those loans but we are very confident that the most efficient way for us to get money to small businesses is to make sure that the community banks are getting these financing facilities that allow them to get money out and if they do we think that that s going to be a major job creator right now well i had lunch with some corporate ceos big companies we want to increase exports we want to start selling overseas we ve been an economy that just is consuming that s not good for our long term economic growth we want to produce and sell so i talked to them about this and every one of them was concerned about us falling behind in some key areas relative not just to china but countries like south korea and other asian countries in some cases in some sectors european countries number one we have to revamp our education system that s why i m so proud of what we ve done with that s why i m so proud with what we ve done with race to the top we want to reward excellence now the federal government doesn t provide the majority of funding for schools mostly it comes from local school districts but the money that we do give let s make sure we re incentivizing best practices getting the best teachers in front of the classroom making sure that we ve got the best data on how to improve school performance making sure that we re targeting some of those low performing schools because we can t just look at the schools that are in the middle we ve got to bring schools that are at the bottom up to snuff because that s going to be our future workforce so that s number one that includes by the way making sure that we meet our 2020 goal of once again having the highest rate of college graduation in the world we used to be number one we re not number one any longer we ve got to produce more math and science graduates those are all going to be top priorities the second thing everybody sees energy as a prime source of growth in the future and we re already slipping behind we re slipping behind in some traditional industries like the nuclear industry that i think is a mistake if you care about greenhouse gases we ve got to look at a safe and secure nuclear industry but we have to look at new alternative energy sources of the future and i m proud that the recovery act gave the biggest investment of clean energy made the biggest investment of clean energy both in research and development but also actual construction and commercial application in history and we ve got to build on that investment from last year we ve got to push hard this year so that we are once again the leaders in solar and wind and high efficiency batteries that can lead to the plug in automobiles of the future we ve got to finally set up an infrastructure that spurs on that kind of long term growth and that means having a smart electricity grid that can take all that good energy from solar and wind and take it from a place like south dakota down to chicago into a garage where somebody is then plugging in that plug in hybrid that s getting 150 miles per gallon of gas which will lead us to energy independence it will lead to jobs right here in the united states of america but it requires leadership and it requires us to build for the future and not just look backwards and the most important thing right now i think for our economic growth is for the american people to feel confident about our future you know we ve gone through these periods before some of you are old enough not all of you but remember back in the 80s how everybody was saying oh japan is taking over and they re buying everything here and we re on decline this happens periodically every 30 40 years or so maybe every 25 suddenly everybody announces oh america is on decline and there s some new competitor out there it was japan now it s china we have the best workers in the world we got the best universities in the world we ve got the most dynamic economy in the world but we can t be afraid of the future and we ve got to have a government a political system that works not as an impediment to business but one that works to lay the conditions for business success that s how we grew in the past we built an interstate railroad system that was not just done on its own we built an interstate highway system that wasn t that didn t just happen overnight the internet didn t just you know suddenly appear those were all investments in which government helped to seed and catalyze growth and then it moved forward and that s what we ve got to do today all right last question here s what we ve already done we ve significantly increased pell grants made them more accessible to more people and increased the level so that they would actually pay for a community college education or a four year college education the next step is to relieve the burden that so many young people are feeling in terms of the amount of debt that they re taking out just to go to school so what we ve said is this and there s legislation pending right now that we want to get passed this year that says to every young person in america you go to college you will not have to pay more than 10 percent of your income in repaying student loans so you are assured not to go broke you will not go broke when you choose to go to college not only that after 20 years assuming you ve been making regular payments your debt is forgiven and if you go into public service if you re a teacher or a firefighter or some other or you re working for nasa or any other any other public service out there then we will see your loans forgiven after 10 years because you re probably not going to be making as much money not only is the legislation pending but we know how it can be paid for which is to stop providing subsidies to banks and financial institutions that are serving as middlemen on student loans dem bobama4 2 10b barack_obama hello everybody thank you thank you please everybody have a seat especially tom mcmullen and dikembe mutombo every time i stand next to them i look like a little kid i want to thank three people who are just extraordinarily important to the project of rebuilding our country and have just been great friends of mine great friends of the democratic party you already heard from one please give it up for governor tim kaine our dnc finance chair jane stetson who s racking up a lot of frequent flier miles and andy tobias our dnc treasurer hey andy it is great to see all of you here tonight wonderful to see so many good friends many of you who were there from the beginning of this campaign and i want you to all know that i appreciate everything that you ve done not just for the campaign but also what you ve done for the country and what you ve done for the party many of you were invested in this campaign at the very beginning when nobody could pronounce my name and you d tell your friends there s this young guy i really think he s got something what s his name barack obama yeah so you had to confront a lot of skepticism a lot of confusion some of you were involved in a campaign for the first time and some of you got involved for the very first time in a very long time because you believed that we were in a defining moment in our history and that your voice could make a difference not a single day goes by where i don t think about all the time and the energy the money the commitment the unyielding faith that you put into our campaign because it wasn t just about winning an election it was about changing a country last year we asked you to take on something new we asked you to help us keep the promises that we made in the campaign help to bring about the changes that we had talked about together and a lot of you have worked hard to do that you ve continued to be engaged in education policy in foreign policy and helping us at a grassroots level and continuing to finance our ability to get our message out and it matters it s made the successes of the last year possible sometimes i think we got so many things done so quick that people forgot but let s just think about this we upheld the principle of equal pay for equal work we lifted the ban on stem cell research and restored science to its rightful place in america we provided health care to 4 million children who now have it who didn t have it before we passed the strongest veterans budget in decades we protected families from getting ripped off by credit card companies and children from being targeted by big tobacco and helped consumers deal with the twin plagues of mortgage fraud and predatory lending we appointed sonia sotomayor to the supreme court we passed a service bill named for ted kennedy that s giving young and old a chance to serve their country and their communities we re working with congress to finally repeal the law that denies gay americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are oh and by the way and in the meantime we prevented the worst financial crisis from getting even worse turned the economy from contraction to expansion made the largest investment in clean energy in history the largest investment in education in decades expanded the pell grant program dealt with a h1n1 virus on the side that s what your support has helped us do at home abroad we ve begun a new era of engagement we re working with our partners to stop the spread of nuclear weapons seeking a world free of them we re working with other nations to confront climate change we are now a leader and not a follower in that critical mission we banned torture we re rebuilding our military we re reaffirming our alliances we ve begun to leave iraq to its own people as i committed to doing in the campaign and we ve charted a new way forward in afghanistan and pakistan we re making progress every single day in taking the fight to al qaeda and across the globe and i went to cairo on behalf of the american people to begin a new dialogue with the muslim world we re living up to our obligations as a wealthy nation helping to promote food security around the world helping to deal with diseases around the world we re living up to a moment that demands american leadership by standing with the people of haiti as we speak so in ways large and small we ve begun to deliver on the change that we talked about the change that you believed in and that you campaigned hard for but the reason that you and i are here tonight is because we re not done we ve got a lot more work to do as i said the day we took office we confronted a financial system on the verge of collapse we were losing 700 000 jobs per month a 1 3 trillion deficit two wars that frankly had not been paid for and were costly in every sense of the word a lot of the solutions we proposed the decisions we took they weren t quick they weren t easy and they weren t popular but we decided we were going to go govern we were going to put politicking on hold to get this country out of the mess it was in i mentioned this to a group i spoke to earlier you know pundits act surprised about the fact that we spent so much political capital well you know i didn t get elected to play it safe and i didn t govern and i don t govern by checking the polls every few days i know that s the habit in washington but that s not the obligation i owe the american people that s not the promise i made to you and because we took bold and swift and coordinated action we can stand here today and say we averted another depression we broke the back of the recession the economy is growing again so the worst of the storm has passed but as all of you know the devastation remains we ve got 10 percent unemployment many of you watching at home as you go around the country and your individual communities you see the stores shuttered and the foreclosed businesses friends and neighbors family members who still can t find work this is on top of a decade that had been tough for middle class families all across the country they hadn t seen their incomes go up in years their costs skyrocketing at the same time as their wages were stagnant for two years i heard stories all across the country everywhere i go i heard stories about people trying their best to hold on a family sitting around the kitchen table wondering if they were going to be able to retire on schedule if they were going to be able to finance a college education for their kids wondering when would health care costs stop climbing when would their premiums start stabilizing people started expressing doubts about whether the dream that generations built and defended the american dream was slipping away that s the reason i ran for president that s the reason you supported me and that s why we are going to continue to do everything we can to create an economy that hasn t just recovered back to the status quo but an economy where hard work is valued and responsibility is rewarded and where businesses are hiring and wages are rising and where our middle class is getting stronger and more secure now our most urgent task is job creation that was our number one priority last year and our number one priority this year and the first task was to make sure the economy is growing it is growing but we ve got to do more so we re going to give tax breaks and loans to small businesses to help them hire new workers and raise wages and invest in new plants and equipment we re going to put even more americans to work on clean energy facilities and upgrading our infrastructure to meet the challenges of the 21st century we re going to create incentives for consumers to make their homes more energy efficient creating jobs and saving families money and we re going to look at our tax code because it s time we ended practices like giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas instead of investing in companies that are creating jobs right here in the united states of america but the truth is these steps alone won t make up for 7 million jobs that have been lost over the last two years they re not going to alone provide the economic security that s been dwindling for middle class families over the last decade the only way we do that is to lay a strong foundation for growth over the long term and the things that we talked about during the campaign are the things that still need to be done they ve been put off by washington for too long and this is where change gets hard change is easy if you re just talking about tinkering around the edges change is harder when you actually dig in and try to deal with the structural problems that have impeded our progress for too long this is where we run headlong into the lobbyists and the special interests and the bitterness and misinformation that characterizes so much of our politics which means that some of you may be feeling discouraged because it feels like things have taken longer than you might have expected well don t be discouraged i m not discouraged i knew this was going to take a long time but i knew the fight was worth it and we ve got to keep up on this fight the forces of the status quo they may not give an inch but i don t give an inch either and you shouldn t give an inch either we didn t come this far to put things off or to play it safe or to take the easy road that wasn t why we were elected we came here to solve problems for the next generation not for the next election that means opening up this government to the people that s why we post all our visitors online that s why we ve excluded lobbyists from policy making jobs and seats on boards and commissions that s why i ve called on congress to put their earmark online so everybody can see what s going on that s part of the change that we promised we ve got to change the tone of government and politics here in washington and all across america i m not going to give up on that either you know the american people are right to be frustrated about a washington where every day is election day and the basic theory is if you lose i win where we re not measuring success by what we re doing for the american people but how we look in the latest gallup no wonder people are frustrated that s why i went to the house republican caucus the other day we had a good discussion about the challenges that are facing the american people our ideas to solve them that was good for the country it s good for our democracy i had fun now there are some issues that democrats and republicans aren t going to agree on and that s okay vigorous debate is healthy we re going to tussle from time to time and you know what there may be some issues that we do agree on or at least we say we agree on and we have to test whether or not people are serious so i told my republican friends i want to work together with them where i can and i meant it because i don t want to just score political points i ve got time to campaign down the road in the meantime there s a lot of work that we ve got to get done together and we can get a lot done together and i told then i will also call them out if they say they want to work on something and then when i offer a hand i get nothing in return the american people have to understand that the old playbook of just blocking everything i understand that s easier than actually doing something and sometimes it may be more politically effective but that s not what s going to move our country forward that s why i m here that s why you joined our campaign that s what you ve helped deliver over the last year that s why i need your help now that s why tim and everybody in the party needs your help now because you know as well as anyone that change doesn t come without a fight we ve got some fights to wage we ve got some fights to make sure that we re sparking innovation and igniting a clean energy sector where american workers are making solar panels and wind towers and cutting edge batteries for the new plug in hybrid that leads on clean energy because the economy that leads on clean energy i believe is going to lead the global economy and i want america to be that nation we re going to keep fighting to make sure that america has the best education possible for every child and we re going to reward success through our race to the top program we want every child to meet their potential and that s why we re going to make sure that young people all across america can afford college without going broke that s a priority we can do that and we can do it this year we re going to keep fighting for common sense rules of the road for wall street i want to be clear there s a lot of talk about wall street main street we need a financial sector that works that s a priority we need businesses that are thriving and they ve got to raise capital that will help them hire workers so there s no separation between our financial system and the real economy that s part of what this crisis has reminded us but we ve got to ensure that our economy isn t brought to its knees by outdated and antiquated financial rules and the irresponsibility of a few and that s why i expect democrats and republicans to want to make sure that we don t find ourselves in this same situation again that s why we have to have financial regulatory reform and yes that is why we re going to fix the health care system a health care system that too often works for insurance companies better than it does for individual americans and again i didn t take this on because it was easy i got david axelrod he does all the polls he whispers in my ear man this health care thing is hard i am a amateur historian so i know that seven presidents starting with teddy roosevelt couldn t get this done we understood this was going to be hard but i took it on not for its political value i took it on because families are dealing with skyrocketing premiums and skyrocketing out of pocket costs and insurance companies that routinely deny coverage because of preexisting conditions or drop people altogether when they get sick we took it on because the costs were killing small businesses and creating an uneven playing field for our international companies and it was eating into workers take home pay and canceling raises and we took it on because it s the single best way in fact the only way that we are actually going to get control of our federal budget so when i hear deficit hawks out there who say they want to control the federal budget and aren t willing to do a darn thing about the skyrocketing costs of health care i get a sense they re not entirely on the level because our proposal for health care reform according to the congressional budget office would bring it down by 1 trillion over the next two decades and even in washington that s a lot of money i took it on because every single day 15 000 americans join the tens of millions who don t have health insurance and 18 million 18 000 americans die because of the lack of health insurance that s what we campaigned on that s what we re working to get it done with democrats and with independents and with republicans we want to bring down costs and end the worst insurance practices and finally give every american a chance to have the security of quality affordable health care i am not going to walk away from those fights and i don t expect you will either you ve come this far the odds were a lot less that i d ever be standing here than they are that we can solve some of these big problems i mean think about it tim was when tim endorsed me in richmond first endorsement i got outside of illinois of any elected official here he is newly minted governor for the commonwealth of virginia there was one thing that was clear and that is he was term limited but don t you guys you remember this nobody gave us a chance this campaign was declared dead what 10 times you know the same folks who are now writing about what next and what s happened to the obama these are the same folks who were writing about how he doesn t stand a chance how after new hampshire that was it after pennsylvania that was it right we went through this and they were saying your faith was misplaced and you set your sights to high and your hope is nave and washington won t change and now all of them are feeling like see we told you washington doesn t change and they re feeling kind of self satisfied about the fact that we haven t yet gotten health care done well let me tell you something you didn t listen to those voices then your voice proved them wrong you proved that nothing can stop the power of millions of people who want to see an america that s living up to its values and its ideals that s what you did and that s what i m asking you to do again this is an extraordinary moment i want to remind you we don t quit and i don t quit and we are going to bring about the changes that you believe in and i believe in and that ultimately will help our children and grandchildren believe as they grow up an america in which everybody has got a decent shot at life in which we re leading in innovation in which we re proud of our foreign policy that s what we were fighting for then that s what we re fighting for now we ve taken some good steps we got many miles to go on this journey i hope you join me thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama4 2 10c barack_obama thank you thank you very much please be seated thank you so much heads of state cabinet members my outstanding vice president members of congress religious leaders distinguished guests admiral mullen it s good to see all of you let me begin by acknowledging the co chairs of this breakfast senators isakson and klobuchar who embody the sense of fellowship at the heart of this gathering they re two of my favorite senators let me also acknowledge the director of my faith based office joshua dubois who is here where s joshua he s out there somewhere he s doing great work i want to commend secretary hillary clinton on her outstanding remarks and her outstanding leadership at the state department she s doing good every day i m especially pleased to see my dear friend prime minister zapatero and i want him to relay america s greetings to the people of spain and johnny you are right i m deeply blessed and i thank god every day for being married to michelle obama i m privileged to join you once again as my predecessors have for over half a century like them i come here to speak about the ways my faith informs who i am as a president and as a person but i m also here for the same reason that all of you are for we all share a recognition one as old as time that a willingness to believe an openness to grace a commitment to prayer can bring sustenance to our lives there is of course a need for prayer even in times of joy and peace and prosperity perhaps especially in such times prayer is needed to guard against pride and to guard against complacency but rightly or wrongly most of us are inclined to seek out the divine not in the moment when the lord makes his face shine upon us but in moments when god s grace can seem farthest away last month god s grace god s mercy seemed far away from our neighbors in haiti and yet i believe that grace was not absent in the midst of tragedy it was heard in prayers and hymns that broke the silence of an earthquake s wake it was witnessed among parishioners of churches that stood no more a roadside congregation holding bibles in their laps it was felt in the presence of relief workers and medics translators servicemen and women bringing water and food and aid to the injured one such translator was an american of haitian descent representative of the extraordinary work that our men and women in uniform do all around the world navy corpsman christian brossard and lying on a gurney aboard the usns comfort a woman asked christopher where do you come from what country after my operation she said i will pray for that country and in creole corpsman brossard responded etazini the united states of america god s grace and the compassion and decency of the american people is expressed through the men and women like corpsman brossard it s expressed through the efforts of our armed forces through the efforts of our entire government through similar efforts from spain and other countries around the world it s also as secretary clinton said expressed through multiple faith based efforts by evangelicals at world relief by the american jewish world service by hindu temples and mainline protestants catholic relief services african american churches the united sikhs by americans of every faith and no faith uniting around a common purpose a higher purpose it s inspiring this is what we do as americans in times of trouble we unite recognizing that such crises call on all of us to act recognizing that there but for the grace of god go i recognizing that life s most sacred responsibility one affirmed as hillary said by all of the world s great religions is to sacrifice something of ourselves for a person in need sadly though that spirit is too often absent when tackling the long term but no less profound issues facing our country and the world too often that spirit is missing without the spectacular tragedy the 9 11 or the katrina the earthquake or the tsunami that can shake us out of complacency we become numb to the day to day crises the slow moving tragedies of children without food and men without shelter and families without health care we become absorbed with our abstract arguments our ideological disputes our contests for power and in this tower of babel we lose the sound of god s voice now for those of us here in washington let s acknowledge that democracy has always been messy let s not be overly nostalgic divisions are hardly new in this country arguments about the proper role of government the relationship between liberty and equality our obligations to our fellow citizens these things have been with us since our founding and i m profoundly mindful that a loyal opposition a vigorous back and forth a skepticism of power all of that is what makes our democracy work and we ve seen actually some improvement in some circumstances we haven t seen any canings on the floor of the senate any time recently so we shouldn t over romanticize the past but there is a sense that something is different now that something is broken that those of us in washington are not serving the people as well as we should at times it seems like we re unable to listen to one another to have at once a serious and civil debate and this erosion of civility in the public square sows division and distrust among our citizens it poisons the well of public opinion it leaves each side little room to negotiate with the other it makes politics an all or nothing sport where one side is either always right or always wrong when in reality neither side has a monopoly on truth and then we lose sight of the children without food and the men without shelter and the families without health care empowered by faith consistently prayerfully we need to find our way back to civility that begins with stepping out of our comfort zones in an effort to bridge divisions we see that in many conservative pastors who are helping lead the way to fix our broken immigration system it s not what would be expected from them and yet they recognize in those immigrant families the face of god we see that in the evangelical leaders who are rallying their congregations to protect our planet we see it in the increasing recognition among progressives that government can t solve all of our problems and that talking about values like responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage are integral to any anti poverty agenda stretching out of our dogmas our prescribed roles along the political spectrum that can help us regain a sense of civility civility also requires relearning how to disagree without being disagreeable understanding as president kennedy said that civility is not a sign of weakness now i am the first to confess i am not always right michelle will testify to that but surely you can question my policies without questioning my faith or for that matter my citizenship challenging each other s ideas can renew our democracy but when we challenge each other s motives it becomes harder to see what we hold in common we forget that we share at some deep level the same dreams even when we don t share the same plans on how to fulfill them we may disagree about the best way to reform our health care system but surely we can agree that no one ought to go broke when they get sick in the richest nation on earth we can take different approaches to ending inequality but surely we can agree on the need to lift our children out of ignorance to lift our neighbors from poverty we may disagree about gay marriage but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are whether it s here in the united states or as hillary mentioned more extremely in odious laws that are being proposed most recently in uganda surely we can agree to find common ground when possible parting ways when necessary but in doing so let us be guided by our faith and by prayer for while prayer can buck us up when we are down keep us calm in a storm while prayer can stiffen our spines to surmount an obstacle and i assure you i m praying a lot these days prayer can also do something else it can touch our hearts with humility it can fill us with a spirit of brotherhood it can remind us that each of us are children of a awesome and loving god through faith but not through faith alone we can unite people to serve the common good and that s why my office of faith based and neighborhood partnerships has been working so hard since i announced it here last year we ve slashed red tape and built effective partnerships on a range of uses from promoting fatherhood here at home to spearheading interfaith cooperation abroad and through that office we ve turned the faith based initiative around to find common ground among people of all beliefs allowing them to make an impact in a way that s civil and respectful of difference and focused on what matters most it is this spirit of civility that we are called to take up when we leave here today that s what i m praying for i know in difficult times like these when people are frustrated when pundits start shouting and politicians start calling each other names it can seem like a return to civility is not possible like the very idea is a relic of some bygone era the word itself seems quaint civility but let us remember those who came before those who believed in the brotherhood of man even when such a faith was tested remember dr martin luther king not long after an explosion ripped through his front porch his wife and infant daughter inside he rose to that pulpit in montgomery and said love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend in the eyes of those who denied his humanity he saw the face of god remember abraham lincoln on the eve of the civil war with states seceding and forces gathering with a nation divided half slave and half free he rose to deliver his first inaugural and said we are not enemies but friends though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection even in the eyes of confederate soldiers he saw the face of god remember william wilberforce whose christian faith led him to seek slavery s abolition in britain he was vilified derided attacked but he called for lessening prejudices and conciliating good will and thereby making way for the less obstructed progress of truth in the eyes of those who sought to silence a nation s conscience he saw the face of god yes there are crimes of conscience that call us to action yes there are causes that move our hearts and offenses that stir our souls but progress doesn t come when we demonize opponents it s not born in righteous spite progress comes when we open our hearts when we extend our hands when we recognize our common humanity progress comes when we look into the eyes of another and see the face of god that we might do so that we will do so all the time not just some of the time is my fervent prayer for our nation and the world thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama4 5 09 barack_obama hello gracias bienvenidos welcome to cinco de cuatro cinco de mayo at the white house we are a day early but we always like to get a head start here at the obama white house cinco de mayo marks a singular moment in mexican history nearly 150 years ago a ragtag band of soldiers and citizens badly outnumbered and facing impossible odds held their ground on a muddy hill to defend their nation from what was at the time the most fearsome fighting force in the world that decisive victory at what became known as the battle of puebla ignited a pride in country and culture that mexican americans feel to this day and tomorrow on both sides of our border we ll pay tribute to our shared heritage by celebrating with friends and family with love and laughter we ll remember that america is a richer and more vibrant place thanks to the contributions of mexican americans i knew that was manny over there pat do something about manny we ll remember that the contributions of commerce and culture in language and literature in faith and in food have all made america a better place and we will honor the service of mexican americans who have worn the uniform of the united states we ll also recommit to advancing the ambitions and the dreams of generations of mexican americans and all latinos who have had an immeasurable impact on the life of this nation but even as we mark this joyous and festive occasion we do so mindful of the fact that this is a difficult time for mexico the pain our global economic downturn has inflicted has only been deepened by the outbreak of the h1n1 flu as well as the drug related violence that has robbed so many of their future one thing we know good neighbors work together when faced with common challenge and that s why we re working closely with the mexican government to identify and treat illnesses that are caused by this new flu strain i spoke to president caldern on saturday about this joint approach that s why we re working in an urgent and coordinated fashion to end the drug wars that s why we ll continue to stand side by side with the mexican people in pursuit of our common security and our common prosperity so i know this is a tough time on both sides of the border i know some of tomorrow s celebrations have been downsized or cancelled out of an abundance of caution from puebla to mexico city to my hometown of chicago and while we hope and pray that all these precautions and preparations will prove unnecessary i applaud the mexican government and all the leaders who are taking responsibility and appropriate steps in order to keep the people safe as we honor our heritage and our heroes tomorrow i also know this mexicans americans and mexican americans are all a people who ve known trial and persevered in the face of incredible odds we re a people of revolution who value hard work and sacrifice who forever look forward to the future with a deep and abiding faith that the dream of opportunity is still real and alive in our time and when one of my predecessors once visited mexico city he said that while geography has made us neighbors tradition has made us friends economics has made us partners and necessity has made us allies two great and independent nations united by hope instead of fear john f kennedy s message nearly a half century ago is my message now and when i made my first trip to mexico as president not just just three weeks ago i was greeted by the children of both our nations waving flags of both our nations a powerful reminder that in the end everything we do is done to guarantee a better future for our children and our grandchildren and while i was there i found it impossible not to be touched by the warmth the vigor and the forceful vitality of the mexican people a love of life i ve seen in mexican american communities throughout this nation and that s what we ll celebrate tomorrow that s what we celebrate tonight and that s what we will celebrate in the future so feliz cinco de mayo thank you very much for being here and party on oh i also want to i want to make sure that everybody knows the bidens but i want to make sure to acknowledge my good friend and a great friend of the united states ambassador arturo sarukhan and his lovely wife valencia excuse me in an incredible breach of protocol i introduced my good friend the ambassador but he has greetings from the people of mexico so i take complete responsibility for that i apologize will everybody please settle down and let s hear from our ambassador from mexico dem bobama4 6 09 barack_obama thank you very much good afternoon i am honored to be in the timeless city of cairo and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions for over a thousand years al azhar has stood as a beacon of islamic learning and for over a century cairo university has been a source of egypt s advancement and together you represent the harmony between tradition and progress i m grateful for your hospitality and the hospitality of the people of egypt and i m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the american people and a greeting of peace from muslim communities in my country assalaamu alaykum we meet at a time of great tension between the united states and muslims around the world tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate the relationship between islam and the west includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation but also conflict and religious wars more recently tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many muslims and a cold war in which muslim majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations moreover the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many muslims to view the west as hostile to the traditions of islam violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of muslims the attacks of september 11 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view islam as inevitably hostile not only to america and western countries but also to human rights all this has bred more fear and more mistrust so long as our relationship is defined by our differences we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity and this cycle of suspicion and discord must end i ve come here to cairo to seek a new beginning between the united states and muslims around the world one based on mutual interest and mutual respect and one based upon the truth that america and islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition instead they overlap and share common principles principles of justice and progress tolerance and the dignity of all human beings i do so recognizing that change cannot happen overnight i know there s been a lot of publicity about this speech but no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust nor can i answer in the time that i have this afternoon all the complex questions that brought us to this point but i am convinced that in order to move forward we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors there must be a sustained effort to listen to each other to learn from each other to respect one another and to seek common ground as the holy koran tells us be conscious of god and speak always the truth that is what i will try to do today to speak the truth as best i can humbled by the task before us and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart now part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience i m a christian but my father came from a kenyan family that includes generations of muslims as a boy i spent several years in indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk as a young man i worked in chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their muslim faith as a student of history i also know civilization s debt to islam it was islam at places like al azhar that carried the light of learning through so many centuries paving the way for europe s renaissance and enlightenment it was innovation in muslim communities it was innovation in muslim communities that developed the order of algebra our magnetic compass and tools of navigation our mastery of pens and printing our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires timeless poetry and cherished music elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation and throughout history islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality i also know that islam has always been a part of america s story the first nation to recognize my country was morocco in signing the treaty of tripoli in 1796 our second president john adams wrote the united states has in itself no character of enmity against the laws religion or tranquility of muslims and since our founding american muslims have enriched the united states they have fought in our wars they have served in our government they have stood for civil rights they have started businesses they have taught at our universities they ve excelled in our sports arenas they ve won nobel prizes built our tallest building and lit the olympic torch and when the first muslim american was recently elected to congress he took the oath to defend our constitution using the same holy koran that one of our founding fathers thomas jefferson kept in his personal library so i have known islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed that experience guides my conviction that partnership between america and islam must be based on what islam is not what it isn t and i consider it part of my responsibility as president of the united states to fight against negative stereotypes of islam wherever they appear but that same principle must apply to muslim perceptions of america just as muslims do not fit a crude stereotype america is not the crude stereotype of a self interested empire the united states has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known we were born out of revolution against an empire we were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words within our borders and around the world we are shaped by every culture drawn from every end of the earth and dedicated to a simple concept e pluribus unum out of many one now much has been made of the fact that an african american with the name barack hussein obama could be elected president but my personal story is not so unique the dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in america but its promise exists for all who come to our shores and that includes nearly 7 million american muslims in our country today who by the way enjoy incomes and educational levels that are higher than the american average moreover freedom in america is indivisible from the freedom to practice one s religion that is why there is a mosque in every state in our union and over 1 200 mosques within our borders that s why the united states government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it so let there be no doubt islam is a part of america and i believe that america holds within her the truth that regardless of race religion or station in life all of us share common aspirations to live in peace and security to get an education and to work with dignity to love our families our communities and our god these things we share this is the hope of all humanity of course recognizing our common humanity is only the beginning of our task words alone cannot meet the needs of our people these needs will be met only if we act boldly in the years ahead and if we understand that the challenges we face are shared and our failure to meet them will hurt us all for we have learned from recent experience that when a financial system weakens in one country prosperity is hurt everywhere when a new flu infects one human being all are at risk when one nation pursues a nuclear weapon the risk of nuclear attack rises for all nations when violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountains people are endangered across an ocean when innocents in bosnia and darfur are slaughtered that is a stain on our collective conscience that is what it means to share this world in the 21st century that is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings and this is a difficult responsibility to embrace for human history has often been a record of nations and tribes and yes religions subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests yet in this new age such attitudes are self defeating given our interdependence any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail so whatever we think of the past we must not be prisoners to it our problems must be dealt with through partnership our progress must be shared now that does not mean we should ignore sources of tension indeed it suggests the opposite we must face these tensions squarely and so in that spirit let me speak as clearly and as plainly as i can about some specific issues that i believe we must finally confront together the first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms in ankara i made clear that america is not and never will be at war with islam we will however relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject the killing of innocent men women and children and it is my first duty as president to protect the american people the situation in afghanistan demonstrates america s goals and our need to work together over seven years ago the united states pursued al qaeda and the taliban with broad international support we did not go by choice we went because of necessity i m aware that there s still some who would question or even justify the events of 9 11 but let us be clear al qaeda killed nearly 3 000 people on that day the victims were innocent men women and children from america and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody and yet al qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people claimed credit for the attack and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale they have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach these are not opinions to be debated these are facts to be dealt with now make no mistake we do not want to keep our troops in afghanistan we see no military we seek no military bases there it is agonizing for america to lose our young men and women it is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict we would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in afghanistan and now pakistan determined to kill as many americans as they possibly can but that is not yet the case and that s why we re partnering with a coalition of 46 countries and despite the costs involved america s commitment will not weaken indeed none of us should tolerate these extremists they have killed in many countries they have killed people of different faiths but more than any other they have killed muslims their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings the progress of nations and with islam the holy koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as it is as if he has killed all mankind and the holy koran also says whoever saves a person it is as if he has saved all mankind the enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism it is an important part of promoting peace now we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in afghanistan and pakistan that s why we plan to invest 1 5 billion each year over the next five years to partner with pakistanis to build schools and hospitals roads and businesses and hundreds of millions to help those who ve been displaced that s why we are providing more than 2 8 billion to help afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend on let me also address the issue of iraq unlike afghanistan iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world although i believe that the iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of saddam hussein i also believe that events in iraq have reminded america of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible indeed we can recall the words of thomas jefferson who said i hope that our wisdom will grow with our power and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be today america has a dual responsibility to help iraq forge a better future and to leave iraq to iraqis and i have made it clear to the iraqi people i have made it clear to the iraqi people that we pursue no bases and no claim on their territory or resources iraq s sovereignty is its own and that s why i ordered the removal of our combat brigades by next august that is why we will honor our agreement with iraq s democratically elected government to remove combat troops from iraqi cities by july and to remove all of our troops from iraq by 2012 we will help iraq train its security forces and develop its economy but we will support a secure and united iraq as a partner and never as a patron and finally just as america can never tolerate violence by extremists we must never alter or forget our principles nine eleven was an enormous trauma to our country the fear and anger that it provoked was understandable but in some cases it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals we are taking concrete actions to change course i have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the united states and i have ordered the prison at guantanamo bay closed by early next year so america will defend itself respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law and we will do so in partnership with muslim communities which are also threatened the sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in muslim communities the sooner we will all be safer the second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between israelis palestinians and the arab world america s strong bonds with israel are well known this bond is unbreakable it is based upon cultural and historical ties and the recognition that the aspiration for a jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied around the world the jewish people were persecuted for centuries and anti semitism in europe culminated in an unprecedented holocaust tomorrow i will visit buchenwald which was part of a network of camps where jews were enslaved tortured shot and gassed to death by the third reich six million jews were killed more than the entire jewish population of israel today denying that fact is baseless it is ignorant and it is hateful threatening israel with destruction or repeating vile stereotypes about jews is deeply wrong and only serves to evoke in the minds of israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve on the other hand it is also undeniable that the palestinian people muslims and christians have suffered in pursuit of a homeland for more than 60 years they ve endured the pain of dislocation many wait in refugee camps in the west bank gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead they endure the daily humiliations large and small that come with occupation so let there be no doubt the situation for the palestinian people is intolerable and america will not turn our backs on the legitimate palestinian aspiration for dignity opportunity and a state of their own for decades then there has been a stalemate two peoples with legitimate aspirations each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive it s easy to point fingers for palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by israel s founding and for israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond but if we see this conflict only from one side or the other then we will be blind to the truth the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states where israelis and palestinians each live in peace and security that is in israel s interest palestine s interest america s interest and the world s interest and that is why i intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience and dedication that the task requires the obligations the obligations that the parties have agreed to under the road map are clear for peace to come it is time for them and all of us to live up to our responsibilities palestinians must abandon violence resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed for centuries black people in america suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation but it was not violence that won full and equal rights it was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of america s founding this same story can be told by people from south africa to south asia from eastern europe to indonesia it s a story with a simple truth that violence is a dead end it is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children or to blow up old women on a bus that s not how moral authority is claimed that s how it is surrendered now is the time for palestinians to focus on what they can build the palestinian authority must develop its capacity to govern with institutions that serve the needs of its people hamas does have support among some palestinians but they also have to recognize they have responsibilities to play a role in fulfilling palestinian aspirations to unify the palestinian people hamas must put an end to violence recognize past agreements recognize israel s right to exist at the same time israelis must acknowledge that just as israel s right to exist cannot be denied neither can palestine s the united states does not accept the legitimacy of continued israeli settlements this construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace it is time for these settlements to stop and israel must also live up to its obligation to ensure that palestinians can live and work and develop their society just as it devastates palestinian families the continuing humanitarian crisis in gaza does not serve israel s security neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the west bank progress in the daily lives of the palestinian people must be a critical part of a road to peace and israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress and finally the arab states must recognize that the arab peace initiative was an important beginning but not the end of their responsibilities the arab israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of arab nations from other problems instead it must be a cause for action to help the palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state to recognize israel s legitimacy and to choose progress over a self defeating focus on the past america will align our policies with those who pursue peace and we will say in public what we say in private to israelis and palestinians and arabs we cannot impose peace but privately many muslims recognize that israel will not go away likewise many israelis recognize the need for a palestinian state it is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true too many tears have been shed too much blood has been shed all of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of israelis and palestinians can see their children grow up without fear when the holy land of the three great faiths is the place of peace that god intended it to be when jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for jews and christians and muslims and a place for all of the children of abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of isra as in the story of isra when moses jesus and mohammed peace be upon them joined in prayer the third source of tension is our shared interest in the rights and responsibilities of nations on nuclear weapons this issue has been a source of tension between the united states and the islamic republic of iran for many years iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us in the middle of the cold war the united states played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected iranian government since the islamic revolution iran has played a role in acts of hostage taking and violence against u s troops and civilians this history is well known rather than remain trapped in the past i ve made it clear to iran s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward the question now is not what iran is against but rather what future it wants to build i recognize it will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust but we will proceed with courage rectitude and resolve there will be many issues to discuss between our two countries and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect but it is clear to all concerned that when it comes to nuclear weapons we have reached a decisive point this is not simply about america s interests it s about preventing a nuclear arms race in the middle east that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path i understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons and that s why i strongly reaffirmed america s commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons and any nation including iran should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear non proliferation treaty that commitment is at the core of the treaty and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it and i m hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal the fourth issue that i will address is democracy i know i know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years and much of this controversy is connected to the war in iraq so let me be clear no system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other that does not lessen my commitment however to governments that reflect the will of the people each nation gives life to this principle in its own way grounded in the traditions of its own people america does not presume to know what is best for everyone just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election but i do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice government that is transparent and doesn t steal from the people the freedom to live as you choose these are not just american ideas they are human rights and that is why we will support them everywhere now there is no straight line to realize this promise but this much is clear governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable successful and secure suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away america respects the right of all peaceful and law abiding voices to be heard around the world even if we disagree with them and we will welcome all elected peaceful governments provided they govern with respect for all their people this last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy only when they re out of power once in power they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others so no matter where it takes hold government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who would hold power you must maintain your power through consent not coercion you must respect the rights of minorities and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party without these ingredients elections alone do not make true democracy thank you the fifth issue that we must address together is religious freedom islam has a proud tradition of tolerance we see it in the history of andalusia and cordoba during the inquisition i saw it firsthand as a child in indonesia where devout christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly muslim country that is the spirit we need today people in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul this tolerance is essential for religion to thrive but it s being challenged in many different ways among some muslims there s a disturbing tendency to measure one s own faith by the rejection of somebody else s faith the richness of religious diversity must be upheld whether it is for maronites in lebanon or the copts in egypt and if we are being honest fault lines must be closed among muslims as well as the divisions between sunni and shia have led to tragic violence particularly in iraq freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together we must always examine the ways in which we protect it for instance in the united states rules on charitable giving have made it harder for muslims to fulfill their religious obligation that s why i m committed to working with american muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat likewise it is important for western countries to avoid impeding muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit for instance by dictating what clothes a muslim woman should wear we can t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism in fact faith should bring us together and that s why we re forging service projects in america to bring together christians muslims and jews that s why we welcome efforts like saudi arabian king abdullah s interfaith dialogue and turkey s leadership in the alliance of civilizations around the world we can turn dialogue into interfaith service so bridges between peoples lead to action whether it is combating malaria in africa or providing relief after a natural disaster the sixth issue the sixth issue that i want to address is women s rights i know i know and you can tell from this audience that there is a healthy debate about this issue i reject the view of some in the west that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal but i do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality and it is no coincidence that countries where women are well educated are far more likely to be prosperous now let me be clear issues of women s equality are by no means simply an issue for islam in turkey pakistan bangladesh indonesia we ve seen muslim majority countries elect a woman to lead meanwhile the struggle for women s equality continues in many aspects of american life and in countries around the world i am convinced that our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons our common prosperity will be advanced by allowing all humanity men and women to reach their full potential i do not believe that women must make the same choices as men in order to be equal and i respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles but it should be their choice and that is why the united states will partner with any muslim majority country to support expanded literacy for girls and to help young women pursue employment through micro financing that helps people live their dreams finally i want to discuss economic development and opportunity i know that for many the face of globalization is contradictory the internet and television can bring knowledge and information but also offensive sexuality and mindless violence into the home trade can bring new wealth and opportunities but also huge disruptions and change in communities in all nations including america this change can bring fear fear that because of modernity we lose control over our economic choices our politics and most importantly our identities those things we most cherish about our communities our families our traditions and our faith but i also know that human progress cannot be denied there need not be contradictions between development and tradition countries like japan and south korea grew their economies enormously while maintaining distinct cultures the same is true for the astonishing progress within muslim majority countries from kuala lumpur to dubai in ancient times and in our times muslim communities have been at the forefront of innovation and education and this is important because no development strategy can be based only upon what comes out of the ground nor can it be sustained while young people are out of work many gulf states have enjoyed great wealth as a consequence of oil and some are beginning to focus it on broader development but all of us must recognize that education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st century and in too many muslim communities there remains underinvestment in these areas i m emphasizing such investment within my own country and while america in the past has focused on oil and gas when it comes to this part of the world we now seek a broader engagement on education we will expand exchange programs and increase scholarships like the one that brought my father to america at the same time we will encourage more americans to study in muslim communities and we will match promising muslim students with internships in america invest in online learning for teachers and children around the world and create a new online network so a young person in kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in cairo on economic development we will create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in muslim majority countries and i will host a summit on entrepreneurship this year to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders foundations and social entrepreneurs in the united states and muslim communities around the world on science and technology we will launch a new fund to support technological development in muslim majority countries and to help transfer ideas to the marketplace so they can create more jobs we ll open centers of scientific excellence in africa the middle east and southeast asia and appoint new science envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy create green jobs digitize records clean water grow new crops today i m announcing a new global effort with the organization of the islamic conference to eradicate polio and we will also expand partnerships with muslim communities to promote child and maternal health all these things must be done in partnership americans are ready to join with citizens and governments community organizations religious leaders and businesses in muslim communities around the world to help our people pursue a better life the issues that i have described will not be easy to address but we have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world that we seek a world where extremists no longer threaten our people dem bobama4 6 10a barack_obama good morning everybody well let me just please everybody have a seat have a seat it is wonderful to be here and i want to make a couple of quick acknowledgments this guy behind me you may know him he s the vice president of the united states joe biden maryland s lieutenant governor anthony brown is here got the mayor of hyattsville william gardiner and of course we ve got to acknowledge the big man here and he is big owner of k neal international stephen neal now i want to thank k neal for having us here today giving us a quick tour and having us look at all these all these trucks this is a business that has been selling commercial trucks for over 40 years this company employs workers from all over the greater washington area after two years of recession that caused so much pain in so many communities this is also an example of a company that is starting to see business pick up again i was talking to stephen and he told me that rental and lease sales have improved that there s a pent up demand out there for new equipment and you ve added workers over the last few months and stephen said if things keep on going well he ll add more in the months ahead we re hearing more and more stories like that all across america a lot of businesses were hit hard during this downturn but they re starting to hire again workers who were laid off they re starting to get their jobs back companies that were almost forced to close their doors are making plans to expand and invest in new equipment and this progress is reflected in the monthly jobs reports that we get each month we received one today in may the economy added 431 000 jobs now this is the fifth month in a row that we ve seen job gains and while we recognize that our recovery is still in its early stages and that there are going to be ups and downs in the months ahead things never go completely in a smooth line this report is a sign that our economy is getting stronger by the day now i want to emphasize that most of these jobs this month that we re seeing in the statistics represent workers who ve been hired to complete the 2010 census so these are temporary jobs that are only going to last until the fall and that may be reflected in future jobs reports but even if you put those temporary jobs aside there s no doubt that we saw another month of private sector job growth and that is obviously critical because when businesses are hiring again people start spending again that in turn gives businesses more and more incentive to grow now this doesn t mean that the recession is over for the millions of americans who are still out of work or the millions more who are still struggling to make ends meet no words no statistics can take away the pain and the anxiety that a family feels because of this downturn that can only be relieved with a steady paycheck and the security that a steady job brings what these numbers do mean though is that we re moving in the right direction the economic policies that we put in place are working an economy that was shrinking at a scary rate when i was sworn in as president has now been growing for three consecutive quarters we were losing 750 000 jobs a month during the winter of last year we ve now added jobs for six out of the last seven months the taxpayer money it cost to shore up the financial sector and the auto industry is being repaid i know it was unpopular but it was the right thing to do and both gm and chrysler both gm and chrysler are adding shifts and operating at a profit which nobody would have imagined just a year ago the question now is how do we keep this momentum going how do we keep adding jobs raising incomes how do we keep growing not just our economy but growing our middle class in the short term we have to keep creating the conditions for companies like k neal to succeed to keep growing to keep hiring because of a bill i signed into law a few months ago businesses are now eligible for tax cuts for hiring unemployed workers companies are also able to write off more of their investments in new equipment and as part of health reform 4 million small businesses recently received a postcard in their mailbox telling them that they will be eligible for health care tax cuts this year and that those tax cuts could be worth tens of thousands of dollars to those companies i ve also urged congress to cut more taxes for small businesses and pass a small business lending fund so that small businesses can get the incentives and the credit that they need to create jobs and grow i believe it s absolutely critical that we extend unemployment insurance for several more months so that americans who ve been laid off through no fault of their own get the support they need to provide for their families and they can maintain their health insurance until they re rehired and we should provide further support so that states are not cutting back on jobs and vital services as well as incentives to create clean energy jobs now in the long run all that s in the short term that s still part of the emergency effort to help build the economy and grow it coming out of the recession but in the long run we need to invest in the technologies and innovation that will lead to the jobs and the industries of tomorrow so i want to introduce to everybody who s here we ve got dan ustian who is the president of navistar dan stand up now navistar is a company that sometimes does business with k neal international and for months navistar s indiana manufacturing plant has been working on an electric delivery truck that s fueled entirely by plug in power in fact i visited the plant before it had produced its very first truck and my understanding dan is we re ready to go thanks to the investments that we made in the recovery act it just delivered its first truck a few weeks ago now this is a plant that gave jobs to unemployed factory workers and they re now part of a cutting edge industry that will create even more jobs and businesses in the months and years ahead that s what the future can look like if we keep on making investments in research and development in technology and clean energy products and industries that we haven t even imagined yet can find a home right here in the united states of america and if we provide our citizens with the education and training they need to do these jobs we re again going to see rising incomes and a growing middle class that s what we can do to make this economy stronger rebuild it even stronger than it was before and i have to say that joe biden oversaw the execution of our recovery act and hasn t gotten a lot of credit for it but it has been scandal free the money has been spent on time i was just talking to stephen and as he indicated what the recovery act did was to help during a bad winter during a tough time helped him to keep that business if not growing then at least stable and it helped him keep folks on the job that otherwise might have lost their jobs and joe deserves a lot of credit for that so give joe biden a big round of applause by the way joe says he used to be able to drive some of these trucks but i would suggest he not not to lend him a car that was a long time ago now let me tell you what we can t do we can t go backwards what we can t do is go back now that we re starting to climb out of this hole that was dug for us we can t go back to the very same policies that failed us in the last decade the same policies that led us into that hole think about it we ve already tried scaling back our investments in clean energy and education and innovation so that we could give tax breaks to the wealthiest americans and the biggest corporations and that didn t work we already tried putting industry insiders in charge of oversight didn t work we already tried stripping away rules and regulations that kept wall street banks and oil companies in bounds we let them play by their own rules instead and it didn t work so we already know where these ideas led us and we re going to have a choice as a nation moving forward we re going to be able to return if we want to the failed economic policies of the past policies that gave us record deficits and declining incomes and sluggish job growth even before the recession policies that led in fact to us almost going into a depression we can take that road again or we can decide we want to move forward we can keep building a stronger economy we can keep pursuing the policies that have started to create jobs again policies that invest in companies like k neal policies that invest in companies like navistar policies that invest in our people and in our future so i don t know about you i don t want to go backwards i want to move forward and i believe that the american people want to move forward as well this economy hasn t returned to prosperity yet but we re heading in the right direction there are going to be some ups and downs there are going to be some months where people start worrying that maybe we re not out of the hole yet but if we remain determined if we stick to it if we stay the course of investing in our people and businesses like k neal that are the heart and soul of america then i m absolutely positive we can succeed and with your help with the hard work and ingenuity of workers and entrepreneurs like the ones at this company i m absolutely positive we re going to have a brighter future so thanks for the great work you do thanks to joe biden for the great work that he does god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama4 6 10b barack_obama hello everybody please have a seat well welcome to the white house and congratulations on winning your first mls cup championship and for bringing the state of utah its first professional sports title in almost 40 years that s a pretty big deal you can give them a round of applause for that i want to acknowledge the senator from the great state of utah senator bennett who is here he is incredibly proud of this team too tall to play soccer i want to congratulate dave checketts for his leadership and for dedicating his career to expanding the world of professional sports and of course i want to congratulate the players and coaches from real salt lake i know that this team had a pretty unlikely journey to get here you qualified for the playoffs on the last day of the season with a losing record that s cutting it a little close guys you beat your biggest rival took down the defending champions on your way to the title game and with the cup on the line you held two of the game s biggest stars scoreless in regulation and went on to win in a shootout all of which goes to show that in major league soccer there s no such thing as a foregone conclusion now you did it because in the words of coach kreis and i have to say this is one of the rare coaches that i see in these events who i think might be able to still play he looks very fit but coach kreis said we believe in each other as much as everybody disbelieved in us for this group the team really is the star this is a team that shows up every day puts in an honest effort no matter what the critics say or how steep the odds and last season that attitude paid off for a group that prides itself on unity i m a little hesitant to acknowledge any individuals but there are a few people who did an exceptional job of helping this team go all the way i want to congratulate robbie findley for becoming salt lake s all time leading scorer and for being named to this year s world cup roster so give robbie a big round of applause where is he he s already left i just realized i met robbie last week when the world cup team was here i thought he might be stopping by we are incredibly proud obviously of everyone who s going to be representing our country this month joe biden will be leading the american delegation to the world cup and the rest of us are going to be cheering them on here at home but it is because of the efforts of robbie and the rest of the folks here today that soccer continues to get more popular every year in the united states and as the father of soccer playing daughters i can tell you that it shows no sign of slowing down i want to recognize nick rimando for being named mvp of the championship game and for being such a force in goal for this team and of course i want to congratulate coach kreis for becoming the youngest mls manager ever to win the cup just two years after retiring see i wasn t wrong just two years after retiring as the third leading scorer in league history and for doing it with such a diverse group of players this team includes members from argentina armenia brazil canada colombia haiti holland jamaica and the united states and so besides overcoming language and cultural barriers this is also a team that understands their responsibilities aren t limited to the soccer field or even our own borders that s why yesterday afternoon they put on a clinic to teach local kids some soccer skills while also raising awareness about the threat of malaria around the globe they helped educate young people about the importance of preventing disease and how we can each do our part to help the less fortunate even if they live thousands of miles away so congratulations to all of you for an outstanding season for the championship to everybody back in salt lake cherish your team and best of luck this season dem bobama4 7 09 barack_obama welcome to the white house and happy fourth of july michelle and i are honored and proud to have you here on the fourth and we re humbled to be joined up here by heroes men and women who went beyond the call of duty in battle some selflessly risking their lives again and again so that others might live true to form they like all of you say they were just doing their job that s what makes you the best of us and that s why we simply want to say thank you to each and every one of you for your extraordinary service to our country we re joined in that sentiment by vice president joe biden who as many of you know is marking independence day with troops in iraq and jill biden who s spending it with military families in germany i should say that there s also one girl in particular who s just thrilled that all of you are here and that is malia obama because this happens to be her birthday as well when she was younger i used to say that all these fireworks were for her i m not sure she still buys that but even if this backyard is a little bit unique our gathering tonight is not so different from gatherings that are taking place all across the country in parks and fields and backyards all across america in small towns and big cities folks are firing up grills laughing with family and friends and laying out a blanket in preparation for the big show they re reliving the simple unmistakable joys of being an american but i suspect they re also taking some time to reflect on the unique nature of what it means to be an american to give thanks for the extraordinary blessings that we enjoy to celebrate and uphold the ideas and values that have invigorated and sustained this democracy and made it the lasting beacon for all of the world just imagine the extraordinary audacity it took 233 years ago for a group of patriots to cast off the title of subject for citizen and put ideas to paper that were as simple as they were revolutionary that we are equal that we are free that we can pursue our full measure of happiness and make of our lives what we will in retrospect it seems inevitable but i think it s fair to say that even the framers of that declaration especially the framers of that declaration would be astonished to see the results of their improbable experiment a nation of commerce that led future revolutions in industry and information a nation of discovery that blazed a trail west cured disease and put a man on the moon a nation of progress that strives perpetually to perfect itself and a nation of hope that has again and again inspired people the world over to reach for the same freedoms we hold so dear and at each and every moment generations of brave and selfless men and women like those standing alongside me have defended those freedoms and served our country with honor waging war so that we might know peace braving hardship so that we might know opportunity and sometimes paying the ultimate price so we might know freedom you are the latest strongest link in that unbroken chain that stretches back to the continental army you re the heirs of that legacy of proud men and women who strained to hold together a young union who rolled back the creeping tide of tyranny who stood post through a long twilight struggle who have taken on the terror and extremism that threatens the world s stability and because of your brave efforts american troops this week transferred control of all iraqi cities and towns in iraq s government to iraqi security forces because of what you did because of the courage and capability and commitment of every single american who has served in iraq a sovereign and united iraq is taking control of its own destiny iraq s future now rests in the hands of its own people as extraordinary an accomplishment as that is we know that this transition won t be without problems we know there will be difficult days ahead and that s why we will remain a strong partner to the iraqi people on behalf of their security and prosperity but i want to say this to all of you you have done everything that has been asked of you the united states of america is proud of you i m proud to be your commander in chief and that s why this fourth of july i renew my pledge to each and every one of you that for as long as i have that immeasurable honor you will always have the equipment and support you need to get the job done your families will always be a priority of michelle s and mine and remain on our hearts and on our minds and when our service members do return home it will be to an america that always welcomes them home with the care that they were promised it is after all your service the service of generations of soldiers sailors airmen marines and coast guardsmen that makes our annual celebration of this day possible it s your service that proves that our founding ideals remain just as powerful and alive in our third century as a nation as they did on that first fourth of july and it is your service that guarantees that the united states of america shall forever remain the last best hope on earth so happy fourth of july everybody right now the marine band is going to pay tribute to your service with a few songs that i think you know dem bobama4 8 10a barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you everybody please have a seat thank you it is good to spend my birthday with some good friends and as i look around the room there are very few of you who i haven t in some form or fashion worked directly with on an issue some of you dating back to when i was in the state legislature some of you who i ve worked with in the united states senate and all of you who i ve had the opportunity to work with as president of the united states so i am grateful and i want to first of all thank rich not only for inviting me here not only for i know making clear my commitment to all of you during an earlier session today but also for your outstanding leadership of the labor movement and we very much appreciate everything that you do i want to thank liz and arlene for bucking up rich all the time and making him look good this is a shared leadership and we are very proud of them i want to thank all the members of the executive council all my brothers and sisters in the afl cio together you are fighting for the hardworking men and women in this country after nearly 10 years of struggle the middle class has been struggling now for about a decade 10 years in which folks felt the sting of stagnant incomes and sluggish job growth and declining economic security as well as at least eight years in which there was a profound animosity towards the notion of unions it s going to take some time to reverse all that s been done but we re on the right track we re moving forward and that s what i m going to want to talk to you about briefly today i hope you don t mind me interjecting though a topic because it s in the news right now and i want to make sure that all of you are aware of it one place in our country where people have faced particular struggles in the last few months is in the gulf of mexico as a result of the bp oil spill so it was very welcome news when we learned overnight that efforts to stop the well through what s called a static kill appear to be working and that a report out today by our scientists show that the vast majority of the spilled oil has been dispersed or removed from the water so the long battle to stop the leak and contain the oil is finally close to coming to an end and we are very pleased with that our recovery efforts though will continue we have to reverse the damage that s been done we will continue to work to hold polluters accountable for the destruction they ve caused we ve got to make sure that folks who were harmed are reimbursed and we re going to stand by the people of the region however long it takes until they re back on their feet now beyond the gulf many of those who ve been hit hardest by the economic upheaval of recent years have been the people that you represent for generations manufacturing was the ticket to a better life for the american worker but as the world became smaller outsourcing an easier way to increase profits a lot of those jobs shifted to low wage nations so many who held those jobs went to work in the construction industry as we had the housing boom but when the subprime mortgage crisis hit when those mortgages were called up on wall street that bubble burst leaving devastation everywhere so now we ve got millions of our fellow americans swept up in that disaster hardworking people who ve been left to sit idle for months and even years as their lives have been turned upside down and there s one last element to it obviously having been plunged into a recession it also means that teachers and firefighters and people who are providing public services each and every day are threatened because tax revenues at the state level and at the local levels have crashed and so you have a perfect economic storm that s hit our middle class directly in every region every segment of this country you know the stories i don t need to tell you you know what happens when a plant closes and hundreds of your members are suddenly without work and an entire community is devastated you know how hard it is for somebody who s worked his whole life to be unable to find a job and that pain goes beyond just the financial pain it goes to who they are as a person it hits them in their gut having a conversation with your spouse and saying you know maybe we can t afford this house anymore maybe we re going to have to give up on being able to save for our kids college education that goes directly to people s identities to their cores and this is something that all of you know all too well but i m here to tell you we are not giving up and we are not giving in we are going to keep fighting for an economy that works for everybody not just for a privileged few we want an economy that rewards once again people who work hard and fulfill their responsibilities not just people who game the system and that s been at the heart of the economic plan that we put in place over the past year and a half and i want to thank the afl cio for all you ve done to fight for jobs to fight for tax cuts for the middle class to fight for reforms that will rein in the special interests and to fight for policies that aren t just going to rebuild this economy but are actually going to put us on a long term path of sustainable growth that is good for all americans because of you we ve been able to get a lot done over the last 20 months together we re jumpstarting a new american clean energy industry an industry with the potential to generate perhaps millions of jobs building wind turbines and solar panels and manufacturing the batteries for the cars of the future building nuclear plants developing clean coal technology there are other countries that are fighting for those jobs in china and india and in germany and other parts of europe but the united states doesn t play for second place as long as i m president i m going to keep fighting night and day to make sure that we win those jobs that those are jobs that are created right here in the united states of america and that your members are put to work so the message i want to deliver to our competitors and to those in washington who ve tried to block our progress at every step of the way is that we are going to rebuild this economy stronger than before and at the heart of it are going to be three powerful words made in america made in america that s why we re finally enforcing our trade laws in some cases for the very first time that s why we re fighting for tax breaks for companies that invest here in the united states as opposed to companies that are investing overseas or that keep their profits offshore because it is my belief and i know it s the belief of this room that there are no better workers than u s workers there are no better workers than your members and they are absolutely committed to making sure that america is on the rise again and we are going to keep moving forward with them not moving backwards but moving forward with them as we rebuild our economy we re going to rebuild america as well over the last 20 months bulldozers and backhoes have been whirring in communities across the country as construction crews from local companies repair roads and bridges railways and ports that was part of our plan and it s put hundreds of thousands of folks to work but there s a lot more to do to rebuild our infrastructure for the 21st century and a lot more americans who are ready and willing to do that work so that too is an area where we ve got to keep moving forward we re going to have to cut taxes for middle class families and after a tough fight we finally extended emergency unemployment assistance for folks who had lost their jobs we passed the fair pay act to help put a stop to pay discrimination we ve reversed the executive orders of the last administration that were designed to undermine organized labor i ve appointed folks who actually are fulfilling their responsibilities to make sure our workplaces are safe whether in a mine or in an office a factory or anyplace else and we are going to keep on fighting to pass the employee free choice act with your help we passed health reform enshrining the idea that everybody in america should be able to get decent health care and shouldn t go bankrupt when they get sick health reform that is preventing insurers from denying and dropping people s coverage that s lowering the price of prescription drugs for our seniors it s going to make health care more affordable for everybody including businesses which means they can hire more workers together we passed wall street reform to protect consumers in our financial system and put an end to taxpayer bailouts and stop the abuses that almost dragged our economy into another great depression now the steps we re taking are making a difference but the fact is and rich mentioned this it took us nearly a decade to dig ourselves into the hole that we re in it s going to take a lot longer than any of us would like to climb out of that hole and i d be lying to you if i thought that all these changes are going to be happening overnight we ve still got some tough times ahead and your members obviously are bearing the brunt of a lot of those tough times but here s what we re not going to do we re not going to go back to digging the hole we re not going to go back to the policies that took bill clinton s surplus and in eight years turned it into record deficits we re not going back to policies that saw people working harder and harder but falling further and further behind we re not going back to policies that gave corporate special interests free rein to write their own rules and produced the greatest economic crisis in generations we are not going back to those ideas because as hard as it is out there right now for a lot of folks as far as we ve got to go what s clear is that our nation is headed in the right direction our economy is growing again instead of shrinking we re adding jobs in the private sector instead of losing them america is moving forward and we re moving forward largely without any help from the opposition party a party that has voted no on just about every turn no on making college more affordable no on clean energy jobs no on broadband no on high speed rail no on water and highway projects that doesn t stop them from showing up at the ribbon cuttings it doesn t stop them from sending out press releases they ve even said no to tax cuts for small businesses and 95 percent of working families they just said no to a small business tax cut again just last week as we speak they ve been trying to block an emergency measure to save the jobs of police officers and firefighters and teachers and other critical public servants across the country who may be laid off because of state and local budget cuts and as if that was not enough now they re talking about repealing this and repealing that i guess they want to go back to hidden credit card fees and mortgage penalties buried in the fine print they want to go back to a system that allowed for taxpayer bailouts they want to go back to allowing insurance companies to discriminate against people based on preexisting conditions they would repeal the tax cuts for small businesses that provide health care for their employees they want to go backwards we want to move america forward and that s what the choice is going to be in this upcoming election and all your members need to understand it i know if you re talking to a lot of your locals i m sure they re feeling like boy change is not happening fast enough we are still hurting out here they re frustrated they ve got every right to be frustrated and i am happy as president of the united states to take responsibility for making decisions now that are going to put us in a strong position down the road and they need to know that that we re going to be working with you to make sure that we re putting ourselves in a position where folks are working and working for a good wage and good benefits but you have to remind them for the next three months this election is a choice you ve got these folks who drove america s economy into a ditch and for the last 20 months we put on our boots and we got into the mud and we ve been shoving that car out of the ditch inch by inch and they ve been standing on the side the whole time watching telling us no you re not pushing hard enough you re not doing it the right way not lifting a finger to help and now we ve finally got that car up on the blacktop there about to drive and they say they want the keys back well you can t have the keys because you don t know how to drive you don t know how to drive you re not going to get the keys back you re not going to get them back somebody pointed out to me that when you re in a car and you want to go forward you put it in d you want to go back in the ditch you put it on r so i just want everybody to think about that all right let me close by saying this a few weeks ago i had the opportunity to visit not a few weeks ago just a few days ago i had the opportunity to visit a chrysler plant in detroit this is a place obviously that s been harder hit than just about anywhere not just during this financial crisis but for a couple of decades now the auto industry alone lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the year before i took office so we had to make a very difficult decision when i became president about whether to walk away from american automakers or help them get back on their feet and i decided we couldn t walk away from what could be a million middle class jobs so we told the automakers that we would give them temporary assistance if they restructured to make themselves competitive for the 21st century and most of the just say no crowd in washington didn t agree with this decision and let s face it it was not popular in the polls a lot of people weren t happy with that decision but today all three u s automakers are operating at a profit for the first time in more than five years they ve had the strongest job growth in more than 10 years 55 000 workers have been hired instead of a planned shutdown the plant that i was at is staying open this summer just to meet increased demand they ve even added another shift now just a few weeks before i visited that auto plant 14 of its employees won the lottery this is a true story now you d think they would have decided to retire cash out walk away but most of them didn t they re staying on their jobs and the guy who bought the ticket was a guy named william shanteau took the money and he bought his wife one of the jeep cherokees that they make at the plant and then he bought a bunch of american flags for his hometown because he loves his country just like he loves the company that he works for and the workers that he works with and the union that represents him and he s going to keep on showing up every day because he loves that plant he loves his coworkers and he loves the idea of making something right here in the united states that s worth something he loves the idea of being productive and creating something of value for people that s the true character of our people that s been the essence of the afl cio that s why even in these difficult times i remain confident about our future because of people like that because of the workers that i meet all across this country members of your unions who get up every morning and put in a hard day s work to build a company build a future support their families as americans they don t give up they don t quit i don t give up i don t quit the afl cio does not give up it does not quit if we stand together then i am absolutely confident that we are going to rebuild america not just to where it was before this financial crisis but stronger than it has ever been that is a commitment that i am making to you thank you for the commitment that you ve made to me god bless you thank you guys thank you i m a little disappointed there wasn t a cake though i m going to have to talk to secret service they re probably eating it right now that s some good cake had some frosting on his i noticed that all right now we re going into a congressional election three months from today and i think it s fair to say that workers hopes for congressional action to protect workers rights and to create jobs have been frustrated by a republican minority that has filibustered every matter in front of them every single thing that s been good for us well you guys don t need advice from me but let me tell you what i see out there we were hurt by this recession badly hurt this is going to take some time to recover unemployment is at unacceptably high levels but as i said before we d had challenges before the crisis hit a lot of your membership had been hurting long before partly because we just live in a more competitive world there s nothing we can do about that that s just the truth but a lot of it also had to do with the fact that we put policies in place that were not good for working families there s a reason why incomes wages were stagnant for average workers even while the costs were going up and part of it had to do with the fact that we had a philosophy that said that providing help to workers allowing them to collectively bargain allowing them to negotiate for better benefits that that all was something of the past instead of something we need for the future so on the one hand i think everybody here understands we ve got to be competitive in america we ve got to have competitive price structures we ve got to make the best products possible workers have to be invested in trying to help the companies they work for succeed with respect to public employees we ve all got to work together to make sure that whatever we re doing whether it s as firefighters or as teachers or postal workers whatever it is that we re providing the best possible service i think everybody understands that there s no operation in the united states of america that shouldn t be efficient and effective in doing what it does but it is my profound belief that companies are stronger when their workers are getting paid well and have decent benefits and are treated with dignity and respect it is my profound belief that our government works best when it s not being run on behalf of special interests but it s being run on behalf of the public interest and that the dedication of public servants reflects that so fdr i think said he was asked once what he thought about unions he said if i was a worker in a factory and i wanted to improve my life i would join a union well i tell you what i think that s true for workers generally i think if i was a coalminer i d want a union representing me to make sure that i was safe and you did not have some of the tragedies that we ve been seeing in the coal industry if i was a teacher i d want a union to make sure that the teachers perspective was represented as we think about shaping an education system for our future and that s why my administration has consistently implemented not just legislative strategies but also where we have the power through executive orders to make sure that those basic values are reflected i m not telling anybody anything you don t know getting efca through senate is going to be tough it s always been tough it will continue to be tough we ll keep on pushing but our work doesn t stop there i mean there s a reason why we nominated people to the national mediation board that would ensure that folks in the rail industry and in the air industry were going to end up having a better deal we are going to make sure that the national labor relations board is restored to have some balance so that if workers want to form a union they can at least get a fair vote in a reasonable amount of time and we don t want by the way government dollars going in to pay for union busting that s not something that we believe in that s not right that tilts the playing field in an unfair way so you re going to have an administration that s working alongside you there are going to be times where we want to get something done and we can t get it done at least not immediately and we re going to just keep on at it i think people have started to figure out i m a persistent son of a gun i just stay on things if i think they re the right thing to do and we should be looking for opportunities by the way to make sure that the labor movement is wherever possible finding common ground with the business community because i want america as a whole to be competitive one of the problems that we ve had over the last decade is that so often the business community sees labor as the problem and their basic attitude is well you know what we ll just go to wherever we don t have any problems with labor and we can pay them the lowest wages and the fewest benefits and then just ship the stuff back here and our profits will be good but over time that hollows out america and hollows out our middle class that makes us weaker not stronger now on the other hand when business and labor are working together then we can compete against anybody and we can knock down trade barriers in other countries and we can start selling products around the world and we make great products in this country we ve got the best workers in the world the best universities in the world got the most dynamic economy in the world we have the freest market system in the world and all those things give us a huge competitive advantage if we re all working together so my bottom line is this i m going to continue to work with all of you on behalf of working families around the country and i m going to continue to reach out to businesses to try to make the argument that what s good for workers is going to be good for business they re your customers as well as your workers and if they ve got a decent living standard that s lifting the entire economy up and they re going to be buying more products and they re going to be buying more services and all of us are going to be growing together and the 21st century is going to end up being the american century just like the 20th century was but we re not going to be able to do it when we re pitted against each other and i m actually confident that once we get through some of the political posturing and shenanigans that we ve been seeing over the last several years people are going to step back and say you know what the lesson we needed to learn out of hardship is we re all in this thing together we are all in this thing together that s what the union movement s always been about we re stronger together than we are on our own that is true within individual unions that is true within industries that is true for the country as a whole and i hope that i will be your partner in trying to bring about that unity of purpose in the years to come all right thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless america dem bobama4 8 10b barack_obama thank you everybody thank you thank you please have a seat have a seat thank you very much senator burris and hello everybody welcome to the white house i want to start by recognizing the very proud members of congress who are joining us to help celebrate a few of their outstanding constituents so thank you all for coming we are here to recognize and this is one of my favorite events that i do every year we re here to recognize winners of the citizens medal this is one of the highest honors a president can bestow for 40 years this medal has been given to men and women who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens and their lives stand as shining examples of what it means to be an american today we ve got an opportunity to tell their stories to say thank you and to offer them a small token of our appreciation now at first glance the honorees behind me don t seem to have too much in common although i did point out that the guys are outnumbered which tells you something about who really gets stuff done in the neighborhoods but they are mothers and fathers nurses and bus drivers veterans and immigrants they come from different backgrounds and they hail from every corner of our country but what unites these citizens what makes them special is the determination they share to right a wrong to see a need and then meet it to recognize when others are suffering and take it upon themselves to make a difference when they saw a veteran in need of proper care or a teenage mom who could use a helping hand they didn t just shake their heads and keep on walking they didn t write it off as another example of life not being fair instead they saw it as a problem to solve a challenge to meet a call to action that they could not ignore so just to give a few examples here when jorge muoz saw homeless men gathered on a street corner with nothing to eat he could have rolled up his window and driven away instead he came home from his job as a school bus driver and started cooking hot meals for anyone who was hungry these days the angel of queens feeds over 100 people every night rain or shine and jorge says you have to see their smile that s what i get paid or susan retik s husband was killed when his plane was flown into the world trade center on september 11th and nobody would have blamed susan if she had turned inward with grief or with anger but that isn t who she is so instead she and another widow started beyond the 11th and this is a group that empowers afghan widows affected by war and terrorism and susan says these women are not our enemy so for jorge and susan and the rest of today s honorees the words not my problem don t exist instead they ask themselves if i don t help this person who will they recognize that no matter how difficult their lives may be no matter how daunting their own challenges may seem someone else will always have it harder than they do there will always be a more important cause to fight for for these men and women serving others isn t just the right thing to do it s the obvious thing to do they may not be rich or powerful in the traditional sense but they believe that those of us with a roof over our heads with loved ones to go home to with food in our stomachs and strength in our limbs have been blessed and in return it s our duty to use those gifts to reach out to those who aren t so lucky and this humility and this selflessness has always been a part of the american story from the patriots who have worn our nation s uniform to everyday americans who have marched and fought and raised their voices to help perfect our union it s no coincidence that our founding document begins with the words we the people ours is a nation founded on the power and freedom of individuals but also on the belief that i am my brother s keeper and i am my sister s keeper and that only if we look out for one another can we all move forward together as lisa nigro another one of today s honorees said once you find a common bond in your humanity you start to see the less fortunate as people not them or those people they are you and me that was the idea behind the edward m kennedy serve america act a landmark piece of legislation that i signed into law last year and together with the work of the corporation of national and community service as well as the office of social innovation it s giving more americans the opportunity to serve others and help address our greatest challenges and i want to thank patrick corvington and melody barnes for their leadership because we know that real change does not come from washington it comes from the grassroots from men and women in communities all across the country working together to make a difference in the end that s what service is all about it s not about the recognition or the awards and it s obviously not about the money to quote george weiss who s being honored here today we don t do it for the notoriety we do it because we felt it has to be done and that s why it is my hope that if this award serves a purpose it will be to inspire more americans to open their hearts to strengthen their communities and to follow the example of these amazing men and women who are here today so congratulations to all of the winners of the citizens medal i ve got some military aides here and one of them is going to read the citations and i am going to get the medals to present to each of our honorees with that let s get started dem bobama5 10 09 barack_obama thank you so much thank you guys thank you please have a seat on this spectacular day here in the rose garden i want to welcome all the doctors who gave joined us today at the white house but there are a couple that i want to make special mention of first of all on stage behind me dr hershey garner dr mona mangat dr richard evans and dr amanda mckinney who are representing as we were talking about in the oval office red states blue states recalcitrant states high cost states low cost states rural and urban states and so we re so pleased to have them in addition the organizations that are represented here today the american medical association the national medical association the family physicians the american college of physicians the doctors for america american college of pediatrics and american college of cardiology i am thrilled to have all of you here today and you look very spiffy in your coats all of you represent all 50 states some of you are members of physicians organizations and others are simply respected members of their community who work in hospitals and clinics and private practices all have devoted their lives to the healing of others and all understand that their jobs would be a lot easier if we finally reformed our system of health insurance we have now been debating this issue of health insurance reform for months the united states congress has been working on it for better for the better part of a year and last week the final congressional committee involved in shaping legislation completed their proposal and will soon vote on it at this point we ve heard all the arguments on both sides of the aisle we have listened to every charge and every counter charge from the crazy claims about death panels to misleading warnings about a government takeover of our health care system but when you cut through all the noise and all the distractions that are out there i think what s most telling is that some of the people who are most supportive of reform are the very medical professionals who know the health care system best the doctors and nurses of america these men and women here would not be supporting health insurance reform if they really believed that it would lead to government bureaucrats making decisions that are best left to doctors they wouldn t be here today if they believed that reform in any way would damage the very critical and sacred doctor patient relationship instead the reason these doctors are here is because they have seen firsthand what s broken about our health care system they ve seen what happens when their patients can t get the care they need because some insurance company has decided to drop their coverage or water it down they ve seen what happens when a patient is forced to pay out of pocket thousands of dollars she doesn t have for treatments that she desperately needs they ve seen what happens when patients don t come in for regular check ups or screenings because either their insurance company doesn t cover it or they can t afford insurance in the first place and they ve seen far too much of time that they want to devote to taking care of patients spent filling out forms and haggling with insurance companies about payments so these doctors know what needs to be fixed about our health care system and they know that health insurance reform will do that it will go a long way towards making patients healthier and doctors and nurses to be able to perform that those tasks that are so important to them and led them into medicine in the first place so let me just outline once again what exactly we re seeing coming out of all these committees and although there are still some details to be worked out there are some general principles that i think we can have confidence on number one if you have insurance the reforms we ve proposed will offer you more security it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it most insurance companies will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on how much coverage you can receive in a given year or a given lifetime or in a lifetime we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out of pocket expenses and insurance companies will be required to cover at no extra charge routine checkups and preventive care now if you don t have health insurance reform will finally offer you affordable choices we ll set up a new insurance exchange a marketplace where individuals and small businesses can shop for an affordable health insurance plan that works for them this is how everyone in the federal government including members of congress get affordable insurance and there s no reason we shouldn t give every american the same opportunity that we give ourselves now these doctors also know that reform will make their lives easier by moving to electronic medical records in a system carefully constructed to protect patient privacy physicians will have less paperwork to fill out more critical information at their fingertips and more time to spend with their patients expensive tests won t have to be repeated over and over again there are also proposals to provide loan forgiveness for primary care physicians who choose to practice in rural and underserved areas since i ve talked to enough doctors who feel they re forced to practice defensive medicine i ve also directed my secretary of health and human services to move forward with programs that will help us put patient safety first while still allowing doctors to focus on practicing medicine and we are working to fix the flawed sustainable growth rate formula by which doctors are reimbursed under medicare every one of you here today took an oath when you entered the medical profession it was not an oath that you would spend a lot of time on the phone with insurance companies it was not an oath that you would have to turn away patients who you know could use your help you did not devote your lives to be bean counters or paper pushers you took an oath so that you could heal people you did it so you could save lives the reforms we re proposing to our health care system will help you live up to that oath they will make sure they will make sure that neither some government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between a patient and their doctor and they ll offer they ll offer security to those americans who have insurance and insurance to those who don t and i want to thank every single doctor who is here and i especially want to thank you for agreeing to fan out across the country and make the case about why this reform effort is so desperately needed you are the people who know this system best you are the experts nobody has more credibility with the american people on this issue than you do and so if you re willing to speak out strongly on behalf of the things you care about and what you see each and every day as you re serving patients all across the country i m confident we are going to get health reform passed this year thank you very much everybody thank you dem bobama5 2 09a barack_obama thank you thank you democrats thank you please everybody have a seat everybody have a seat it is great to be here with so many friends thank you for giving me a reason to use air force one it s pretty nice i m glad to see the house democratic caucus is getting by just fine without my chief of staff i don t know how many of you were at the alfalfa dinner but i pointed out you know this whole myth of rahm being this tough guy mean is just not true at least once a week he spends time teaching profanity to underprivileged children so he s got a soft spot i want to thank john larson for inviting me here tonight this is john s first conference as chairman of the democratic caucus so we re both new at this john congratulations i want to acknowledge the great speaker of the house nancy pelosi she is our rock who s proven to be an extraordinary leader for the american people and i want to thank nancy and steny hoyer and jim clyburn and the entire caucus javier becerra all the leadership working so hard all the chairmen like david obey who ve worked so hard in passing an economic recovery plan that is so desperately needed for our country all of you acted with a discipline that matches the urgency and the gravity of the crisis that we face because you know what s at stake every weekend you go home to your districts and you see factories that are closing and small businesses shutting their doors you hear from families losing their homes students that can t pay their tuition seniors who are worrying about whether they can retire with dignity or see their kids and grandkids lead a better life so you went to work and you did your job for that you have my appreciation and admiration and more importantly you ve got the american people s thanks because they know it is time to get something done here in washington as we meet here tonight we know that there s more work to be done the senate is still acting and after it has its final vote we still need to resolve differences between the house and senate bills so we re going to still have to work and i m going to urge you to complete that work without delay and i know that nancy and steny all the rest of the leadership is committed to making that happen now i just want to say this i value the constructive criticism and the healthy debate that s taking place around this package because that s the essence the foundation of american democracy that s how the founders set it up they set it up to make big change hard it wasn t supposed to be easy that s part of the reason why we ve got such a stable government is because no one party no one individual can simply dictate the terms of the debate i don t think any of us have cornered the market on wisdom or that do i believe that good ideas are the province of any party the american people know that our challenges are great they re not expecting democratic solutions or republican solutions they want american solutions and i ve said that same thing to the public and i ve said that in a gesture of friendship and goodwill to those who have disagreed with me on aspects of this plan but what i have also said is don t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis you know all of us here imperfect and everything we do and everything i do is subject to improvement michelle reminds me every day how imperfect i am so i welcome this debate but come on we re not we are not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin we can t embrace the losing formula that says only tax cuts will work for every problem we face that ignores critical challenges like our addiction to foreign oil or the soaring cost of health care or falling schools and crumbling bridges and roads and levees i don t care whether you re driving a hybrid or an suv if you re headed for a cliff you ve got to change direction that s what the american people called for in november and that s what we intend to deliver so the american people are watching they did not send us here to get bogged down with the same old delay the same old distractions the same talking points the same cable chatter you know aren t you all tired of that stuff they did not vote for the false theories of the past and they didn t vote for phony arguments and petty politics they didn t vote for the status quo they sent us here to bring change we owe it to them to deliver this is the moment for leadership that matches the great test of our times and i know you want to work with me to get there if we do not move swiftly to sign the american recovery and reinvestment act into law an economy that is already in crisis will be faced with catastrophe this is not my assessment this is not nancy pelosi s assessment this is the assessment of the best economists in the country this is the assessment of some of the former advisors of some of the same folks who are making these criticisms right now millions more americans will lose their jobs homes will be lost families will go without health care our crippling dependence on foreign oil will continue that is the price of inaction this isn t some abstract debate last week we learned that many of america s largest corporations already laid off thousands and are planning to lay off tens of thousands of more workers today we learned that in the previous week the number of new unemployment claims jumped to 626 000 tomorrow we re expecting another dismal jobs report on top of the half a million jobs that were lost last month on top of the half a million jobs that were lost the month before that on top of the 2 6 million jobs that were lost last year for you these aren t just statistics this is not a game this is not a contest for who s in power and who s up and who s down these are your constituents these are families you know and you care about i believe that it is important for us to set aside some of the gamesmanship in this town and get something done now i believe i just want to repeat because i don t want any confusion here i believe that legislation of this enormous magnitude that by necessity we are moving quickly we re not moving quickly because we re trying to jamb something down people s throats we re moving quickly because we re told that if we don t move quickly that the economy is going keep on getting worse and we ll have another 2 or 3 or 4 million jobs loss this year i d love to be leisurely about this my staff is worn out working around the clock so is david obey s staff so is nancy pelosi s staff we re not doing this because we think this is a lark we re doing this because people are counting on us so legislation of this magnitude deserves the scrutiny that it s received and all of you will get another chance to vote for this bill in the days to come but i urge all of us not to make the perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary understand the scale and the scope of this plan is right and when you start hearing arguments on the cable chatter just understand a couple of things number one when they say well why are we spending 800 billion we ve got this huge deficit first of all i found this deficit when i showed up number one i found this national debt doubled wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as i stepped into the oval office number two it is expected that we are going to lose about a trillion dollars worth of demand this year a trillion dollars of demand next year because of the contraction in the economy so the reason that this has to be big is to try to fill some of that lost demand and as it is there are many who think that we should be doing even more so we are taking prudent steps but you talk to ted strickland and what s happening in ohio and you ask him whether they need some relief in terms of the unemployment insurance rates that are going sky high and him having to pick up all kinds of folks who are suddenly seeking food stamps who had been working all their lives and he ll tell you that this not something that we re just doing to grow government we re doing this because this is what the best minds tell us needs to be done that s point number one point number two when they start talking about well we need more tax cuts we started this package with a healthy amount of tax cuts in the mix recognizing that some tax cuts can be very beneficial particularly if they re going to middle class and working families that will spend that money that s not me talking that s the economists talking who insisted that they re most likely to spend and get that money into circulation and stimulate the economy now in fact when we announced the bill you remember this is only about what two weeks ago when we announced the framework and we were complimented by republicans saying boy this is a balanced package we re pleasantly surprised and suddenly what was a balanced package needs to be put out of balance don t buy those arguments then there s the argument well this is full of pet projects when was the last time that we saw a bill of this magnitude move out with no earmarks in it not one and when you start asking well what is it exactly that is such a problem that you re seeing where s all this waste and spending well you know you want to replace the federal fleet with hybrid cars well why wouldn t we want to do that that creates jobs for people who make those cars it saves the federal government energy it saves the taxpayers energy so then you get the argument well this is not a stimulus bill this is a spending bill what do you think a stimulus is that s the whole point no seriously that s the point so i mean i get carried away we ve got to leave some time for questions and answers here s the point i m making this package is not going to be absolutely perfect and you can nit and you can pick and that s the game we all play here we know how to play that game what i m saying is now we can t afford to play that game we ve got to pull together there are going to be some things that don t get included that each of us would like to see included all of us are going to have to make some sacrifices and we have to accommodate the interests of a range of people and the house is going to have to work with the senate but let s think big right now let s not think small let s not think narrowly just as past generations of americans have done in trying times we can and must turn this moment of challenge into one of opportunity the plan that you ve passed has at its core a simple idea let s put americans to work doing the work that america needs done this plan will save or create over three million jobs almost all of them in the private sector this plan will put people to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges our dangerously deficient dams and levees this plan will put people to work modernizing our health care system that doesn t just save us billions of dollars it saves countless lives because we ll reduce medical errors this plan will put people to work renovating more than 10 000 schools giving millions of children the chance to learn in 21st century classrooms and libraries and labs creating new scientists for a new future this plan will provide sensible tax relief for the struggling middle class and unemployment insurance and continued health care coverage for those who ve lost their jobs and it will help prevent our states and local communities it will help governor ritter and governor strickland not have to lay off firefighters and teachers and police because when they get laid off not only do we lose services but maybe they can t make payments on their home maybe they get foreclosed on and the economy goes down further and finally this plan will begin to end the tyranny of oil in our time doubles our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind and solar and biofuels and it does it in three years saves taxpayers billions of dollars makes federal buildings more efficient saves the average working family hundreds of dollars on their energy bills after decades of empty rhetoric that s the down payment that we need on energy independence you know there s a lot about running for president that is tough especially i don t miss sleeping in motels and hotels and i don t miss not being with my kids as much as i d like but the best thing about being a candidate and all of you know this because those members of congress who are here you ve run you know what it s like you get to see the country you get to know the character of the american people over the last two years i visited almost all 50 states i ve got to admit the one i missed was alaska we re going to get there i ve been in so many of your districts i ve passed through towns and cities farms and factories and i know what you know people are hurting i ve looked in their eyes i ve heard their stories i ve sensed their deep frustration and they re just hoping that we re working for them they re so strong and they re so decent the american people and those struggles haven t diminished that strength and that decency we hold in our hands the capacity to do great things on their behalf but we re going to have to do it by not thinking about ourselves not thinking about how does this position me how am i looking we re going to have to just think about how are we delivering for them it starts with this economic recovery plan and soon we ll take on the big issues like addressing the foreclosure problem by passing a budget tackling our fiscal problems fixing our financial regulation securing our country and we won t approach these challenges just as democrats because we remember the look in the eyes of our constituents we know even though they ve been cynical that they re thinking maybe this time is going to be different they know we ve got to overcome all these problems as americans and that s why we have to work in a serious substantive and civil way and we will keep working to build bipartisan support for action i promise you that my door is always open and my administration will consult closely with each and every one of you the people s representatives as we take on these pressing priorities already you ve made a difference nancy mentioned i m so proud of that day that we signed the lilly ledbetter fair pay act to see lilly ledbetter on the stage representing the american people representing all the women out there who want their daughters to have the same opportunities as our sons and then we signed children s health insurance to provide coverage for 11 million and make a down payment on comprehensive health care reform and it wasn t easy you worked hard to make it happen which means we can work hard to make sure that we ve got jobs all across america and energy independence all across america and we will not stop until we deliver for our constituents that s what the democratic party is all about that s what this caucus is all about that s what my presidency is all about thank you guys i love you thank you dem bobama5 2 09b barack_obama thank you so much well it is a thrill to be here thank you secretary chu for bringing your experience and expertise to this new role and thanks to all of you who have done so much on behalf of the country each and every day here at the department you know your mission is so important and it s only going to grow as we transform the ways we produce energy and use energy for the sake of our environment for the sake of our security and for the sake of our economy as we are meeting in the halls of congress just down the street from here there s a debate going on about the plan i ve proposed the american recovery and reinvestment plan this isn t some abstract debate last week we learned that many of america s largest corporations are planning to lay off tens of thousands of workers today we learned that last week the number of new unemployment claims jumped to 626 000 tomorrow we re expecting another dismal jobs report on top of the 2 6 million jobs that we lost last year we ve lost half a million jobs each month for the last two months now i believe that legislation of such magnitude as has been proposed deserves the scrutiny that it has received over the last month i think that s a good thing that s the way democracy is supposed to work but these numbers that we re seeing are sending an unmistakable message and so are the american people the time for talk is over the time for action is now because we know that if we do not act a bad situation will become dramatically worse crisis could turn into catastrophe for families and businesses across the country and i refuse to let that happen we can t delay and we can t go back to the same worn out ideas that led us here in the first place in the last few days we ve seen proposals arise from some in congress that you may not have read but you d be very familiar with because you ve been hearing them for the last 10 years maybe longer they re rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems that government doesn t have a role to play that half measures and tinkering are somehow enough that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges the crushing cost of health care the inadequate state of so many of our schools our dangerous dependence on foreign oil so let me be clear those ideas have been tested and they have failed they ve taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars and they ve brought our economy to a halt and that s precisely what the election we just had was all about the american people have rendered their judgment and now is the time to move forward not back now is the time for action just as past generations of americans have done in trying times we can and we must turn this moment of challenge into one of opportunity the plan i ve proposed has at its core a simple idea let s put americans to work doing the work that america needs to be done this plan will save or create over 3 million jobs almost all of them in the private sector this plan will put people to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges our dangerous dangerously deficient dams and levees this plan will put people to work modernizing our health care system not only saving us billions of dollars but countless lives this plan will put people to work renovating more than 10 000 schools giving millions of children the chance to learn in 21st century classrooms libraries and labs and to all the scientists in the room today you know what that means for america s future this plan will provide sensible tax relief for the struggling middle class unemployment insurance and continuing health care coverage for those who ve lost their jobs and it will help prevent our states and local communities from laying off firefighters and teachers and police and finally this plan will begin to end the tyranny of oil in our time after decades of dragging our feet this plan will finally spark the creation of a clean energy industry that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next few years manufacturing wind turbines and solar cells for example millions more after that these jobs and these investments will double our capacity to generate renewable energy over the next few years we ll fund a better smarter electricity grid and train workers to build it a grid that will help us ship wind and solar power from one end of this country to another think about it the grid that powers the tools of modern life computers appliances even blackberrys looks largely the same as it did half a century ago just these first steps towards modernizing the way we distribute electricity could reduce consumption by 2 to 4 percent we ll also lead a revolution in energy efficiency modernizing more than 75 percent of federal buildings and improving the efficiency of more than 2 million american homes this will not only create jobs it will cut the federal energy bill by a third and save taxpayers 2 billion each year and save americans billions of dollars more on their utility bills in fact as part of this effort today i ve signed a presidential memorandum requesting that the department of energy set new efficiency standards for common household appliances this will save consumers money this will spur innovation and this will conserve tremendous amounts of energy we ll save through these simple steps over the next 30 years the amount of energy produced over a two year period by all the coal fired power plants in america and through investments in our mass transit system to boost capacity in our roads to reduce congestion and in technologies that will accelerate the development of innovations like plug in hybrid vehicles we ll be making a significant down payment on a cleaner and more energy independent future now i read the other day that critics of this plan ridiculed our notion that we should use part of the money to modernize the entire fleet of federal vehicles to take advantage of state of the art fuel efficiency this is what they call pork you know the truth it will not only save the government significant money over time it will not only create manufacturing jobs for folks who are making these cars it will set a standard for private industry to match and so when you hear these attacks deriding something of such obvious importance as this you have to ask yourself are these folks serious is it any wonder that we haven t had a real energy policy in this country for the last few years i ve talked about these issues with americans from one end of this country to another and washington may not be ready to get serious about energy independence but i am and so are you and so are the american people inaction is not an option that is acceptable to me and it s certainly not acceptable to the american people not on energy not on the economy not at this critical moment so i am calling on all the members of congress democrats and republicans house and senate to rise to this moment no plan is perfect there have been constructive changes made to this one over the last several weeks i would love to see additional improvements today but the scale and the scope of this plan is the right one our approach to energy is the right one it s what america needs right now and we need to move forward today we can t keep on having the same old arguments over and over again that lead us to the exact same spot where we are wasting previous energy we re not creating jobs we re failing to compete in the global economy and we end up bickering at a time when the economy urgently needs action i thank all of you for being here and i m eager to work with secretary chu and all of you as we stand up to meet the challenges of this new century that s what the american people are looking for that s what i expect out of congress that s what i believe we can deliver to our children and our grandchildren in their future thank you so much everybody i appreciate it thank you dem bobama5 3 09a barack_obama to sir edward kennedy that s the kind of greeting a knight deserves it is thrilling to see you here teddy we are so grateful for you taking the time to be here and the extraordinary work that your committee has already started to do along with mike enzi i know max baucus and chuck grassley on the senate side henry i know that you guys are gearing to go on the house side so i just want to first of all thank all of you for participating today was the first discussion in this effort but it was not the last in the coming days and weeks we ll be convening a series of meetings with senior administration officials here at the white house to further explore some of the key issues that were raised today and to bring more voices into the conversation but my understanding is is that we had an extraordinarily productive set of sessions throughout the day and i ve gotten a readout from some of the breakout groups and breakout sessions and i just want to summarize a few things that my staff thought were notable and that i thought were notable and are worth mentioning before i start taking some questions or some comments first of all a clear consensus that the need for health care reform is here and now senators hatch enzi congressman jim cooper and many others agreed that we can do health care reform senator hatch said that we needed leadership on both sides and he believes that democrats and republicans need to put politics aside and work together to do it senator whitehouse said this isn t a harry and louise moment it s a thelma and louise moment we re in the car headed toward the cliff and we must act now i just want to be clear if you actually saw the movie they did drive over the cliff so i just want to be clear that s not our intention here insurers agree scott serota with blue cross blue shield association said to consider past opposition the past it is not the present the time is right for action now the american medical association said that they are here to be partners and to help tom donahue with the chamber of commerce said that in the previous debate we knew where everyone stood people are in different places now including business and that there is a vigorous understanding with all parties that improvements are needed and congressman joe barton complimented the process we ve begun and said that he can agree with the principles that we ve laid out my staff thought that was a very notable statement they complimenting the process melody i think slipped that one in with respect to the cost of care richard kirsch with the health care for america now said that we can t have a false dichotomy between coverage and costs that by covering more people we can also lower costs at the same time presumably because those who are not insured at the moment are ending up using extraordinarily expensive emergency room care senator whitehouse you ve got two quotes in here senator whitehouse pointed out that we pay more than a trillion dollars we pay more than a trillion dollars more than other countries for the same or lower qualities of care ken powell ceo of general mills and a member of the business roundtable stressed the need to preserve the role of employers and that many employers are investing in excellent prevention programs that are reducing costs and improving productivity and i can testify to that i ve met a lot of extraordinary companies that have really taken the bull by the horns and are doing extraordinary work many participants stressed the need to invest in prevention to lower costs and improve care to tackle obesity manage chronic care invest in comparative effectiveness congressman dingell talked about the need to simplify the system to reduce costs and medical errors senator baucus mentioned the need to make investments up front such as health it and comparative effectiveness to get big savings and that we have to align incentives towards quality and congressman waxman suggested the same point that s been made earlier that we can t control costs unless everyone is covered with respect to the public plan congressman jan schakowsky and the afl cio talked about the need to create a public option in order to reduce cost to consumers and save money within the system there were others who raised the some concerns about the impact of a public plan limiting choices as for paying for reform congressman rob andrews challenged the group to identify additional ways to pay for reform and suggested that everyone needs to put something on the table to get reform done and senator wyden raised the issue of modifying the tax exclusion for higher income americans last set of points that we thought were notable senators grassley and hatch and congressman dingell all discussed the need to address medical malpractice and reduce defensive medicine as a cost saving measure so that s just some of the points that were made i know that many of you had other insights they have all been recorded and we are going to be generating a document coming out of this that summarizes much that was heard in these various breakout sessions but what i want to do is just take some time now to give all of you a chance to hear from me directly and i m going to call on some members i m going to call from some of the groups that were participating as well i m not going to be able to get to everybody and since he got such a weak reception when he walked in i think that it s only fitting that we give ted kennedy the first question so we ve got a microphone here ted go ahead or comment it doesn t have to be a question dem bobama5 3 09b barack_obama thank you so much travis for the wonderful introduction thank you for melody barnes who has done more than anyone to help coordinate this forum and its extraordinary work and so we appreciate her leadership we re here today to discuss one of the greatest threats not just to the well being of our families and the prosperity of our businesses but to the very foundation of our economy and that s the exploding costs of health care in america today in the last eight years premiums have grown four times faster than wages an additional 9 million americans have joined the ranks of the uninsured the cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in america every 30 seconds by the end of the year it could cause 1 5 million americans to lose their homes even for folks who are weathering this economic storm and have health care right now all it takes is one stroke of bad luck an accident or an illness a divorce a lost job to become one of the nearly 46 million uninsured or the millions who have health care but really can t afford what they ve got we didn t get here by accident the problems we face today are a direct consequence of actions that we failed to take yesterday since teddy roosevelt first called for reform nearly a century ago we have talked and we have tinkered we have tried and fallen short we ve stalled for time and again we have failed to act because of washington politics or industry lobbying and today there are those who say we should defer health care reform once again that at a time of economic crisis we simply can t afford to fix our health care system as well well let me be clear the same soaring costs that are straining families budgets are sinking our businesses and eating up our government s budget too too many small businesses can t insure their employees major american corporations are struggling to compete with their foreign counterparts and companies of all sizes are shipping their jobs overseas or shutting their doors for good medicare costs are consuming our federal budget i don t have to tell members of congress this medicaid is overwhelming our state budgets i don t need to tell governors and state legislatures that at the fiscal summit that we held here last week the one thing on which everyone agreed was that the greatest threat to america s fiscal health is not social security though that s a significant challenge it s not the investments that we ve made to rescue our economy during this crisis by a wide margin the biggest threat to our nation s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care it s not even close that s why we cannot delay this discussion any longer that s why today s forum is so important because health care reform is no longer just a moral imperative it s a fiscal imperative if we want to create jobs and rebuild our economy and get our federal budget under control then we have to address the crushing cost of health care this year in this administration making investments in reform now investments that will dramatically lower costs won t add to our budget deficits in the long term rather it is one of the best ways in fact maybe the only way to reduce those long term costs now i know people are skeptical about whether washington can bring about this change our inability to reform health care in the past is just one example of how special interests have had their way and the public interest has fallen by the wayside and i know people are afraid we ll draw the same old lines in the sand and give in to the same entrenched interests and arrive back at the same stalemate that we ve been stuck in for decades but i am here today and i believe you are here today because this time is different this time the call for reform is coming from the bottom up and from all across the spectrum from doctors from nurses from patients from unions from businesses from hospitals health care providers community groups it s coming from mayors and governors and legislatures democrats republicans all who are racing ahead of washington to pass bold health care initiatives on their own this time there is no debate about whether all americans should have quality affordable health care the only question is how and the purpose of this forum is to start answering that question to determine how we lower costs for everyone improve quality for everyone and expand coverage to all americans and our goal will be to enact comprehensive health care reform by the end of this year that is our commitment that is our goal now in the past month alone we ve done a lot more to advance that goal than we ve done in the past decade we ve provided and protected coverage for 11 million children from working families and for 7 million americans who ve lost their jobs in this downturn we ve made the largest investment in history in preventive care invested in electronic medical records that will save money ensure privacy and save lives we ve launched a new effort to find a cure for cancer in our time we ve also set aside in our budget a health care reserve fund to finance comprehensive reform i know that more will be required but this is a significant down payment that s fully paid for does not add one penny to our deficit and i look forward to working with congress and the american people to get this budget passed now as we work to determine the details of health care reform we won t always see eye to eye we may disagree and disagree strongly about particular measures but we know that there are plenty of areas of agreement as well and that should serve as the starting points for our work we can all agree that if we want to bring down skyrocketing costs we ll need to modernize our system and invest in prevention we can agree that if we want greater accountability and responsibility we have to ensure that people aren t overcharged for prescription drugs or discriminated against for pre existing conditions and we need to eliminate fraud waste and abuse in government programs i think most of us would agree that if we want to cover all americans we can t make the mistake of trying to fix what isn t broken so if somebody has insurance they like they should be able to keep that insurance if they have a doctor that they like they should be able to keep their doctor they should just pay less for the care that they receive and finally we can all agree that if we want to translate these goals into policies we need a process that is as transparent and inclusive as possible and that s why i ve asked all of you representatives of organizations interests and parties from across the spectrum to join us here today in fact this was the hottest ticket in town that s why we asked concerned citizens like the folks on this stage to organize open meetings across america where people could air their views as travis said more than 3 000 meetings were held in all 50 states and d c more than 30 000 people attended i thank them for their input and their ideas and look forward to reading the report that travis has presented to me in this effort every voice has to be heard every idea must be considered every option must be on the table there should be no sacred cows each of us must accept that none of us will get everything that we want and that no proposal for reform will be perfect if that s the measure we will never get anything done but when it comes to addressing our health care challenge we can no longer let the perfect be the enemy of the essential and i don t think anybody would argue that we are on a sustainable path when it comes to health care finally i want to be very clear at the outset that while everyone has a right to take part in this discussion nobody has the right to take it over and dominate the status quo is the one option that s not on the table and those who seek to block any reform at all any reform at any costs will not prevail this time around i didn t come here to washington to work for those interests i came here to work for the american people the folks i met on the campaign trail the people i hear from every single day in the white house folks who are working hard making all the right decisions but still face choices that no one in this country should have to make how long to put off that doctor s appointment whether to fill that prescription when to give up and head to the emergency room because there are no other options i ve read some of the many letters they ve sent asking me for help and they re usually not asking for much i don t get letters where people are just asking for a free ride for a handout most of them are embarrassed about their situation they would rather not have to ask for help they start usually by saying that they ve never written a letter like this before some end by apologizing saying they ve written to me because they have nowhere else to turn asking me not to forget about them not to forget about their families but there are a lot of people out there who are desperate there s a lot of desperation out there today i want them and people like them across this country to know that i have not forgotten them we have not forgotten them they are why we re here today to start delivering the change they demanded at the polls in november that they have continued to demand since the election and if we re successful if we can pass comprehensive reform these folks will see their costs come down they ll get the care they need and we ll help our businesses create jobs again so our economy can grow so it s not going to be easy and there are going to be false starts and setbacks and mistakes along the way but i m confident if we come together and work together we will finally achieve what generations of americans have fought for and fulfill the promise of health care in our time and what a remarkable achievement that would be something that democrats and republicans business and labor consumer groups and providers all of us could share extraordinary pride in finally dealing with something that has been vexing us for so long so let s get to work thank you dem bobama5 3 10 barack_obama good morning everybody it is great to be here at opower and just looking around this looks like a fun place to work the work you do here as we just heard is making homes more energy efficient it s saving people money it s generating jobs and it s putting america on the path to a clean energy future and i understand last year that you doubled your workforce thanks to bonnie you re hoping to hire another hundred workers this year and so this is a model of what we want to be seeing all across the country our goal for the economy is to show similar job growth in the months ahead this morning we learned that in february our economy lost an additional 36 000 jobs now this is actually better than expected considering the severe storms all along the east coast are estimated to have had a depressing effect on the numbers and it shows that the measures that we re taking to turn our economy around are having some impact but even though it s better than expected it s more than we should tolerate far too many americans remain out of work far too many families are still struggling in these difficult economic times and that s why i m not going to rest and my administration is not going to rest in our efforts to help people who are looking to find a job to help business owners who want to expand feel comfortable hiring again and we re not going to rest until our economy is working again for the middle class and for all americans and that s why my immediate priority is not only providing relief to people who are out of work but also to help the private sector create jobs and put america back to work earlier this week after breaking through a political logjam that some of you probably saw if you were watching tv congress passed and i signed into law a bill that extends unemployment insurance to help people who ve been laid off get through these hard times it also extended cobra so that folks who ve lost their jobs don t lose their health insurance and it extended financing for small businesses and makes it possible for 2 000 furloughed transportation workers to go back to work so signing this bill and getting relief out the door swiftly is absolutely essential but it s only a temporary step the relief i signed into law will last about a month and that s why i m calling on congress to extend this relief through the end of the year and because the best form of economic relief is a quality job i m also calling on congress to pass jobs measures that cut taxes increase lending incentivize expansion for businesses both large and small now both the house and the senate have passed a bill that would give businesses a payroll tax refund for every person hired this year and for companies that are considering expanding this credit could help them decide to bring an extra employee or two this year so for companies like opower that are doing pretty well and already expanding the tax credit may help them decide to hire even more workers more quickly so instead of a hundred maybe we get 110 115 we ll see this bill would also encourage small companies to expand by permitting them to write off expenses for new equipment and while it s by no means enough this legislation is an important step on the road to recovery and i look forward to signing it into law now even as we fight to help the private sector create more jobs and even as we fight to bring about a full economic recovery we know that there have been success stories all across america opower is one of those success stories this is a company that works with utilities to help folks understand their energy costs and how they can save money on their energy bills and for the press if you weren t able to hear this board testifies to the number of kilowatt hours that have been saved the amount of money that s gone back into consumers pockets and the amount of carbon that has been taken out of the atmosphere as a consequence of the great work that these people at opower are doing now part of the reason i suspect you re growing is that you re doing your jobs well but i also know that a big part of the reason is that you re seizing the opportunities of the future the jobs of tomorrow will be jobs in the clean energy sector and this company is a great emblem for that that s why my administration is taking steps to support a thriving clean energy industry across this country an industry that s making solar panels and building wind turbines producing cutting edge batteries for fuel efficient cars and trucks and helping consumers get more control over their energy bills and that s also why earlier this week i urged congress to enact a new initiative we re calling homestar that would offer homeowners rebates for making their homes more energy efficient rebates worth up to 1 500 for individual home upgrades and up to 3 000 for retrofitting their entire home so if they re getting this good information from opower and they see that boy that drafty window is costing me a couple of hundred bucks a year they re now going to have an incentive to go to home depots or go to lowes to hire a certified contractor and make the changes that will ultimately pay for themselves improve our environment and improve our economy i want to thank by the way your home state senator mark warner for his great work on homestar in the senate think about the way that the rebates we re talking about could help spur private sector job growth it could not only help businesses like opower to help consumers make their homes more energy efficient it s also going to create business for the local contractors and the companies hired to upgrade homes these companies then in turn have to purchase supplies and that creates business for retailers these retailers would need to restock their shelves and that creates business for manufacturers and almost all the goods that are required to make homes more energy efficient are actually produced right here in the united states of america it s very hard to ship an energy efficient window across an ocean so yes people who are out of work right now need some immediate relief yes we need to extend unemployment insurance and cobra to help americans weather these tough times and yes we ve got to do everything we can to help the private sector create jobs right now but even as we do we also need to replicate the success of clean energy companies like opower we need to invest in the jobs of the future and in the industries of the future because the country that leads in clean energy and energy efficiency today i m absolutely convinced is going to lead the global economy tomorrow i want that country to be the united states of america i want companies like opower to be expanding and thriving all across america it s good for consumers it s good for our economy it s good for our environment it s wonderfully exciting to be here and i think when you look at this group that s gathered here you can see the future in this company so thanks for the great work you guys are doing let s see if we can replicate your success all across the country thank you very much everybody dem bobama5 4 09 barack_obama thank you so much thank you for this wonderful welcome thank you to the people of prague thank you to the people of the czech republic today i m proud to stand here with you in the middle of this great city in the center of europe and to paraphrase one of my predecessors i am also proud to be the man who brought michelle obama to prague to mr president mr prime minister to all the dignitaries who are here thank you for your extraordinary hospitality and to the people of the czech republic thank you for your friendship to the united states i ve learned over many years to appreciate the good company and the good humor of the czech people in my hometown of chicago behind me is a statue of a hero of the czech people tomas masaryk in 1918 after america had pledged its support for czech independence masaryk spoke to a crowd in chicago that was estimated to be over 100 000 i don t think i can match his record but i am honored to follow his footsteps from chicago to prague for over a thousand years prague has set itself apart from any other city in any other place you ve known war and peace you ve seen empires rise and fall you ve led revolutions in the arts and science in politics and in poetry through it all the people of prague have insisted on pursuing their own path and defining their own destiny and this city this golden city which is both ancient and youthful stands as a living monument to your unconquerable spirit when i was born the world was divided and our nations were faced with very different circumstances few people would have predicted that someone like me would one day become the president of the united states few people would have predicted that an american president would one day be permitted to speak to an audience like this in prague few would have imagined that the czech republic would become a free nation a member of nato a leader of a united europe those ideas would have been dismissed as dreams we are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change we re here today because of the courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a right for all people no matter what side of a wall they live on and no matter what they look like we are here today because of the prague spring because the simple and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a people we are here today because 20 years ago the people of this city took to the streets to claim the promise of a new day and the fundamental human rights that had been denied them for far too long sametov revoluce the velvet revolution taught us many things it showed us that peaceful protest could shake the foundations of an empire and expose the emptiness of an ideology it showed us that small countries can play a pivotal role in world events and that young people can lead the way in overcoming old conflicts and it proved that moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon that s why i m speaking to you in the center of a europe that is peaceful united and free because ordinary people believed that divisions could be bridged even when their leaders did not they believed that walls could come down that peace could prevail we are here today because americans and czechs believed against all odds that today could be possible now we share this common history but now this generation our generation cannot stand still we too have a choice to make as the world has become less divided it has become more interconnected and we ve seen events move faster than our ability to control them a global economy in crisis a changing climate the persistent dangers of old conflicts new threats and the spread of catastrophic weapons none of these challenges can be solved quickly or easily but all of them demand that we listen to one another and work together that we focus on our common interests not on occasional differences and that we reaffirm our shared values which are stronger than any force that could drive us apart that is the work that we must carry on that is the work that i have come to europe to begin to renew our prosperity we need action coordinated across borders that means investments to create new jobs that means resisting the walls of protectionism that stand in the way of growth that means a change in our financial system with new rules to prevent abuse and future crisis and we have an obligation to our common prosperity and our common humanity to extend a hand to those emerging markets and impoverished people who are suffering the most even though they may have had very little to do with financial crises which is why we set aside over a trillion dollars for the international monetary fund earlier this week to make sure that everybody everybody receives some assistance now to protect our planet now is the time to change the way that we use energy together we must confront climate change by ending the world s dependence on fossil fuels by tapping the power of new sources of energy like the wind and sun and calling upon all nations to do their part and i pledge to you that in this global effort the united states is now ready to lead to provide for our common security we must strengthen our alliance nato was founded 60 years ago after communism took over czechoslovakia that was when the free world learned too late that it could not afford division so we came together to forge the strongest alliance that the world has ever known and we should stood shoulder to shoulder year after year decade after decade until an iron curtain was lifted and freedom spread like flowing water this marks the 10th year of nato membership for the czech republic and i know that many times in the 20th century decisions were made without you at the table great powers let you down or determined your destiny without your voice being heard i am here to say that the united states will never turn its back on the people of this nation we are bound by shared values shared history we are bound by shared values and shared history and the enduring promise of our alliance nato s article v states it clearly an attack on one is an attack on all that is a promise for our time and for all time the people of the czech republic kept that promise after america was attacked thousands were killed on our soil and nato responded nato s mission in afghanistan is fundamental to the safety of people on both sides of the atlantic we are targeting the same al qaeda terrorists who have struck from new york to london and helping the afghan people take responsibility for their future we are demonstrating that free nations can make common cause on behalf of our common security and i want you to know that we honor the sacrifices of the czech people in this endeavor and mourn the loss of those you ve lost but no alliance can afford to stand still we must work together as nato members so that we have contingency plans in place to deal with new threats wherever they may come from we must strengthen our cooperation with one another and with other nations and institutions around the world to confront dangers that recognize no borders and we must pursue constructive relations with russia on issues of common concern now one of those issues that i ll focus on today is fundamental to the security of our nations and to the peace of the world that s the future of nuclear weapons in the 21st century the existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the cold war no nuclear war was fought between the united states and the soviet union but generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light cities like prague that existed for centuries that embodied the beauty and the talent of so much of humanity would have ceased to exist today the cold war has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not in a strange turn of history the threat of global nuclear war has gone down but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up more nations have acquired these weapons testing has continued black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound the technology to build a bomb has spread terrorists are determined to buy build or steal one our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non proliferation regime but as more people and nations break the rules we could reach the point where the center cannot hold now understand this matters to people everywhere one nuclear weapon exploded in one city be it new york or moscow islamabad or mumbai tokyo or tel aviv paris or prague could kill hundreds of thousands of people and no matter where it happens there is no end to what the consequences might be for our global safety our security our society our economy to our ultimate survival some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped cannot be checked that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction such fatalism is a deadly adversary for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century and as nuclear power as a nuclear power as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon the united states has a moral responsibility to act we cannot succeed in this endeavor alone but we can lead it we can start it so today i state clearly and with conviction america s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons i m not naive this goal will not be reached quickly perhaps not in my lifetime it will take patience and persistence but now we too must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change we have to insist yes we can now let me describe to you the trajectory we need to be on first the united states will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons to put an end to cold war thinking we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same make no mistake as long as these weapons exist the united states will maintain a safe secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary and guarantee that defense to our allies including the czech republic but we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal to reduce our warheads and stockpiles we will negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty with the russians this year president medvedev and i began this process in london and will seek a new agreement by the end of this year that is legally binding and sufficiently bold and this will set the stage for further cuts and we will seek to include all nuclear weapons states in this endeavor to achieve a global ban on nuclear testing my administration will immediately and aggressively pursue u s ratification of the comprehensive test ban treaty after more than five decades of talks it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned and to cut off the building blocks needed for a bomb the united states will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons if we are serious about stopping the spread of these weapons then we should put an end to the dedicated production of weapons grade materials that create them that s the first step second together we will strengthen the nuclear non proliferation treaty as a basis for cooperation the basic bargain is sound countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy to strengthen the treaty we should embrace several principles we need more resources and authority to strengthen international inspections we need real and immediate consequences for countries caught breaking the rules or trying to leave the treaty without cause and we should build a new framework for civil nuclear cooperation including an international fuel bank so that countries can access peaceful power without increasing the risks of proliferation that must be the right of every nation that renounces nuclear weapons especially developing countries embarking on peaceful programs and no approach will succeed if it s based on the denial of rights to nations that play by the rules we must harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change and to advance peace opportunity for all people but we go forward with no illusions some countries will break the rules that s why we need a structure in place that ensures when any nation does they will face consequences just this morning we were reminded again of why we need a new and more rigorous approach to address this threat north korea broke the rules once again by testing a rocket that could be used for long range missiles this provocation underscores the need for action not just this afternoon at the u n security council but in our determination to prevent the spread of these weapons rules must be binding violations must be punished words must mean something the world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons now is the time for a strong international response now is the time for a strong international response and north korea must know that the path to security and respect will never come through threats and illegal weapons all nations must come together to build a stronger global regime and that s why we must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the north koreans to change course iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon my administration will seek engagement with iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect we believe in dialogue but in that dialogue we will present a clear choice we want iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations politically and economically we will support iran s right to peaceful nuclear energy with rigorous inspections that s a path that the islamic republic can take or the government can choose increased isolation international pressure and a potential nuclear arms race in the region that will increase insecurity for all so let me be clear iran s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat not just to the united states but to iran s neighbors and our allies the czech republic and poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles as long as the threat from iran persists we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost effective and proven if the iranian threat is eliminated we will have a stronger basis for security and the driving force for missile defense construction in europe will be removed so finally we must ensure that terrorists never acquire a nuclear weapon this is the most immediate and extreme threat to global security one terrorist with one nuclear weapon could unleash massive destruction al qaeda has said it seeks a bomb and that it would have no problem with using it and we know that there is unsecured nuclear material across the globe to protect our people we must act with a sense of purpose without delay so today i am announcing a new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years we will set new standards expand our cooperation with russia pursue new partnerships to lock down these sensitive materials we must also build on our efforts to break up black markets detect and intercept materials in transit and use financial tools to disrupt this dangerous trade because this threat will be lasting we should come together to turn efforts such as the proliferation security initiative and the global initiative to combat nuclear terrorism into durable international institutions and we should start by having a global summit on nuclear security that the united states will host within the next year now i know that there are some who will question whether we can act on such a broad agenda there are those who doubt whether true international cooperation is possible given inevitable differences among nations and there are those who hear talk of a world without nuclear weapons and doubt whether it s worth setting a goal that seems impossible to achieve but make no mistake we know where that road leads when nations and peoples allow themselves to be defined by their differences the gulf between them widens when we fail to pursue peace then it stays forever beyond our grasp we know the path when we choose fear over hope to denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also a cowardly thing to do that s how wars begin that s where human progress ends there is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted we must confront it not by splitting apart but by standing together as free nations as free people i know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down but that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together those are the voices that still echo through the streets of prague those are the ghosts of 1968 those were the joyful sounds of the velvet revolution those were the czechs who helped bring down a nuclear armed empire without firing a shot human destiny will be what we make of it and here in prague let us honor our past by reaching for a better future let us bridge our divisions build upon our hopes accept our responsibility to leave this world more prosperous and more peaceful than we found it together we can do it thank you very much thank you prague dem bobama5 5 10a barack_obama viva good evening everyone buenas noches michelle and i are so honored to welcome you to the white house and you all brought outstanding weather so we thank you for that thank you i know that a lot of you would rather be watching tonight s game the spurs against los suns from phoenix tonight is another one of our great events here at the white house celebrating latino culture in america including our concert some of you might have attended that we had during hispanic heritage month on the south lawn fiesta latina and malia and sasha will probably never forget playing drums with shelia e michelle on the other hand would prefer to forget the sight of me trying to dance with thalia i didn t think i was that bad but there will be no there will be no repeat performances tonight we gather to mark a day that s become as celebrated here in the united states as it is in mexico and we re honored to be joined by mexico s interior secretary fernando gomez mont and his lovely wife gloria please give them a big round of applause it s good to see you again and a great friend to me and the united states ambassador arturo sarukhan and his wonderful wife veronica who are also here it s good to see you again now the events of this date in history are well known how nearly 150 years ago at the battle of puebla a band of mexican patriots faced off against a massive european army and won a victory that inspires the world to this day less well known is that general zaragoza who led those patriots was born in what is now the town of goliad in texas in fact you can go there today are you from there you can visit his birthplace it s a historical landmark it includes a 10 foot tall statue of the general presented by the people of mexico and preserved by the people of the united states so the glory of this day is shared by both of our countries and so is our pride in the lasting contributions that hispanics have made to america throughout our history including the men and women who join us here tonight we re joined by dedicated members of congress and members of the congressional hispanic caucus as well as some of their staffs this includes senator bob menendez hey bob representative xavier becerra where is xavier there he is back there chairwoman nydia velazquez where s nydia we re joined by outstanding members of my cabinet including secretary of labor hilda solis hilda as well as secretary of homeland security napolitano is here and although she s down although he s down on the gulf helping to lead our response to the oil spill i want to acknowledge my outstanding interior secretary ken salazar we re joined by hispanic americans serving at every level of my government and i m proud that we ve nominated more latinos to senior positions than any administration in history not just because they re latino but because they re the best people for the job and i should note that many of those appointments are latinas wise latinas undoubtedly and although she s not here tonight i think we should give a little round of applause to our first latina on the supreme court sonia sotomayor we re also joined by leaders from every segment of american society and i especially want to welcome those of you serving on the commission to explore the creation of a new museum in washington to celebrate the history of latinos in america and i look forward to seeing the results of the commission s hard work and to the day when we open the doors on a new national museum of the american latino tonight s performers are a wonderful example of how latin culture has shaped and strengthened the fabric of america so i want to say thank you to maru and the montero dance company along with javier cortes thank you very much before i came out i was listening to you guys inside you sounded really good now by celebrating the story of hispanics in america we re really celebrating the larger story of america after all the dreams of mexican americans and all latinos are the same dreams as any other american it s why in the face of an unprecedented economic crisis we took bold action to get our economy growing again creating jobs again and laying the foundation for lasting prosperity that s good for all americans including hispanics among whom the unemployment rate remains unacceptably high and who are ready to go back to work it s why after nearly a century we passed historic health care reform with the help of the congressional hispanic caucus and we re grateful to them that s good for all americans it s good for all americans including the millions of latinos who will finally get the coverage they lack today as well as the latino small business owners who will finally be able to provide coverage for their employees and that allows them to join the children of legal immigrants who are finally able to get health care through the schip program something that we did very early on in my administration it s why we ve made college more affordable why we re reforming education and that s good for all children including latinos who instead of having the highest dropout rate deserve every chance to achieve their god given potential so today reminds us that america s diversity is america s strength that s why i spoke out against the recently passed law in arizona make no mistake our immigration system is broken and after so many years in which washington has failed to meet its responsibilities americans are right to be frustrated including folks along border states but the answer isn t to undermine fundamental principles that define us as a nation we can t start singling out people because of who they look like or how they talk or how they dress we can t turn law abiding american citizens and law abiding immigrants into subjects of suspicion and abuse we can t divide the american people that way that s not the answer that s not who we are as the united states of america and that s why i ve instructed my administration to closely monitor the new law in arizona to examine the civil rights and other implications that it may have that s why we have to close the door on this kind of misconceived action by meeting our obligations here in washington so i want to say it again just in case anybody is confused the way to fix our broken immigration system is through common sense comprehensive immigration reform that means responsibility from government to secure our borders something we have done and will continue to do it means responsibility from businesses that break the law by undermining american workers and exploiting undocumented workers they ve got to be held accountable it means responsibility from people who are living here illegally they ve got to admit that they broke the law and pay taxes and pay a penalty and learn english and get right before the law and then get in line and earn their citizenship comprehensive reform that s how we re going to solve this problem and i know there s been some commentary over the last week since i talked about this difficult issue well is this politically smart to do can you get republican votes look of course it s going to be tough that s the truth anybody who tells you it s going to be easy or i can wave a magic wand and make it happen hasn t been paying attention how this town works we need bipartisan support but it can be done and it needs to be done so i was pleased to see a strong proposal for comprehensive reform presented in the senate last week and i was pleased that it was based on a bipartisan framework i want to begin work this year and i want democrats and republicans to work with me because we ve got to stay true to who we are a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants that s the spirit that i saw in some remarkable men and women that i recently hosted right here in the rose garden they came from more than a dozen countries and even though they weren t yet citizens they had enlisted in the united states military and one woman was named perla ramos and she was born and raised in mexico she came to the united states shortly after 9 11 her husband was a u s marine and she said a passion for the military grew inside me in time she joined herself enlisting in the navy and she said i take pride in our flag and the history that forged this great nation and the history we write day by day and as perla s commander in chief i took great pride in helping to swear her in a daughter of mexico and one of our newest american citizens so she continues a great tradition of mexican americans serving in our military someone in whom both our nations can take great pride so today i want us to remember the united states and mexico are not simply neighbors bound by geography and history we re two societies that are woven together by millions of family and friends by common interests and a shared future those are bonds that are unbreakable they re bonds of an aspirational community you and your mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who struggled and sacrificed to realize the american dream they re also bonds of commerce and trade that sustain millions of jobs both in mexico and in the united states they re bonds that are represented in the trust and respect that i have for president calderon as we work together to create opportunity and prosperity for our peoples and confront the drug cartels and violence that threaten both our countries it s the warmth that michelle felt on her recent trip to mexico her first solo trip as first lady and it s the friendship and cooperation that we ll deepen when we host president calderon and first lady margarita zavala for their state visit and dinner in a couple of weeks that s the spirit that all of you are putting on display today so thank you for living it in your own lives thank you for sharing it with us tonight have a wonderful party you can be as noisy as you want we can hear you though if it goes past a certain hour we ll kick you out all right thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama5 5 10b barack_obama good afternoon everyone danny akaka aloha since the 9 11 attacks more than eight years ago the united states has been a nation at war in this time millions of americans have worn the uniform more than a million have served in afghanistan and iraq many have risked their lives many have given their lives all are the very embodiment of service and patriotism and as a grateful nation humbled by their service we can never honor these american heroes or their families enough along with their loved ones we give thanks every time our men and women in uniform return home but we re forever mindful that our obligations to our troops don t end on the battlefield just as we have a responsibility to train and equip them when we send them into harm s way we have a responsibility to take care of them when they come home as michelle and dr biden have reminded us in all their visits to military bases and communities our obligations must include a national commitment to inspiring military families the spouses and children who sacrifice as well we have a responsibility to veterans like ted wade who joins us here today with his wonderful wife sarah we are so proud of both of them six years ago sergeant wade was serving in the 82nd airborne division in iraq when his humvee was struck by an ied an improvised explosive device he lost much of his right arm and suffered multiple injuries including severe traumatic brain injury he was in a coma for more than two months and doctors said it was doubtful that he would survive but he did survive thanks to the care he received over many months and years thanks to ted s indomitable spirit and thanks to the incredible support from sarah who has been at his side during every step of a long and very difficult recovery as i ve said many times our nation s commitment to our veterans and their families to patriots like ted and sarah is a sacred trust and upholding that trust is a moral obligation since taking office my administration in partnership with many the veterans organizations who are here today has worked to make sure that america fulfills this obligation we ve dramatically increased funding for veterans health care including our wounded warriors especially those with the signature wounds of today s wars post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury under secretary ric shinseki s outstanding leadership we re building a 21st century va including budget reform to ensure predictable funding and a historic increase in the va budget but as we all know keeping faith with our veterans and their families is work that is never truly finished as a nation as the beneficiaries of their service there s always more we can do and more that we must do and that s what we re doing today as i sign this important legislation the caregivers and veterans omnibus health services act with this legislation we re expanding mental health counseling and services for our veterans from afghanistan and iraq including our national guardsmen and reservists we re authorizing the va to utilize hospitals and clinics outside the va system to serve more wounded warriors like ted with traumatic brain injury we re increasing support to veterans in rural areas with the transportation and housing they need to reach va hospitals and clinics we re expanding and improving health care for our women s veterans to meet their unique needs including maternity care for newborn children and we ll launch a pilot program to provide child care for veterans receiving intensive medical care we re eliminating co pays for veterans who are catastrophically disabled and we re expanding support to homeless veterans because in the united states of america no one who has served this nation in uniform should ever be living on the streets finally this legislation marks a major step forward in america s commitment to families and caregivers who tend to our wounded warriors every day they re spouses like sarah they re parents once again caring for their sons and daughters sometimes they re children helping to take care of their mom or dad these caregivers put their own lives on hold their own careers and dreams aside to care for a loved one they do it every day often around the clock as sarah can tell you it s hard physically and it s hard emotionally it s certainly hard financially and these tireless caregivers shouldn t have to do it alone as of today they ll be getting more of the help that they need if you re like sarah and caring for a severely injured veteran from afghanistan or iraq you ll receive a stipend and other assistance including lodging when you travel for your loved one s treatment if you need training to provide specialized services you ll get it if you need counseling you ll receive it if you don t have health insurance it will be provided and if you need a break it will be arranged up to 30 days of respite care each year so today is a victory for all the veterans organizations who fought for this legislation it s a tribute to those who led the fight in congress including senator and world war ii vet danny akaka and senator richard burr and in the house representatives mike michaud and bob filner and i thank all the members of congress who are joining us here today most of all today is a victory for veterans like ted and caregivers like sarah who by the way has become a passionate and very effective voice on behalf of wounded warriors and their families testifying before congress she said of her husband just like he needed a team in the military to accomplish the mission he needs a team at home in the longer war so to ted and to sarah to all our veterans and your families with this legislation we re building a stronger team here at home that you need now and for the long road to recovery and that s why i m very much looking forward to signing this legislation thank you dem bobama5 6 09 barack_obama good afternoon thank you president sarkozy prime minister brown prime minister harper and prince charles for being here today thank you to our secretary of veterans affairs general eric shinseki for making the trip out here to join us thanks also to susan eisenhower whose grandfather began this mission 65 years ago with a simple charge ok let s go and to a world war ii veteran who returned home from this war to serve a proud and distinguished career as a united states senator and a national leader bob dole i m not the first american president to come and mark this anniversary and i likely will not be the last this is an event that has long brought to this coast both heads of state and grateful citizens veterans and their loved ones the liberated and their liberators it s been written about and spoken of and depicted in countless books and films and speeches and long after our time on this earth has passed one word will still bring forth the pride and awe of men and women who will never meet the heroes who sit before us d day why is this of all the battles in all the wars across the span of human history why does this day hold such a revered place in our memory what is it about the struggle that took place on the sands a few short steps from here that brings us back to remember year after year after year part of it i think is the size of the odds that weighed against success for three centuries no invader had ever been able to cross the english channel into normandy and it had never been more difficult than in 1944 that was the year that hitler ordered his top field marshal to fortify the atlantic wall against a seaborne invasion from the tip of norway to southern france the nazis lined steep cliffs with machine guns and artillery low lying areas were flooded to block passage sharpened poles awaited paratroopers mines were laid on the beaches and beneath the water and by the time of the invasion half a million germans waited for the allies along the coast between holland and northern france at dawn on june 6th the allies came the best chance for victory had been for the british royal air corps to take out the guns on the cliffs while airborne divisions parachuted behind enemy lines but all did not go according to plan paratroopers landed miles from their mark while the fog and clouds prevented allied planes from destroying the guns on the cliffs so when the ships landed here at omaha an unimaginable hell rained down on the men inside many never made it out of the boats and yet despite all of this one by one the allied forces made their way to shore here and at utah and juno gold and sword they were american british and canadian soon the paratroopers found each other and fought their way back the rangers scaled the cliffs and by the end of the day against all odds the ground on which we stand was free once more the sheer improbability of this victory is part of what makes d day so memorable it also arises from the clarity of purpose with which this war was waged we live in a world of competing beliefs and claims about what is true it s a world of varied religions and cultures and forms of government in such a world it s all too rare for a struggle to emerge that speaks to something universal about humanity the second world war did that no man who shed blood or lost a brother would say that war is good but all know that this war was essential for what we faced in nazi totalitarianism was not just a battle of competing interests it was a competing vision of humanity nazi ideology sought to subjugate and humiliate and exterminate it perpetrated murder on a massive scale fueled by a hatred of those who were deemed different and therefore inferior it was evil the nations that joined together to defeat hitler s reich were not perfect they had made their share of mistakes had not always agreed with one another on every issue but whatever god we prayed to whatever our differences we knew that the evil we faced had to be stopped citizens of all faiths and of no faith came to believe that we could not remain as bystanders to the savage perpetration of death and destruction and so we joined and sent our sons to fight and often die so that men and women they never met might know what it is to be free in america it was an endeavor that inspired a nation to action a president who asked his country to pray on d day also asked its citizens to serve and sacrifice to make the invasion possible on farms and in factories millions of men and women worked three shifts a day month after month year after year trucks and tanks came from plants in michigan and indiana new york and illinois bombers and fighter planes rolled off assembly lines in ohio and kansas where my grandmother did her part as an inspector shipyards on both coasts produced the largest fleet in history including the landing craft from new orleans that eventually made it here to omaha but despite all the years of planning and preparation despite the inspiration of our leaders the skill of our generals the strength of our firepower and the unyielding support from our home front the outcome of the entire struggle would ultimately rest on the success of one day in june lyndon johnson once said that there are certain moments when history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man s unending search for freedom d day was such a moment one newspaper noted that we have come to the hour for which we were born had the allies failed here hitler s occupation of this continent might have continued indefinitely instead victory here secured a foothold in france it opened a path to berlin it made possible the achievements that followed the liberation of europe the marshall plan the nato alliance the shared prosperity and security that flowed from each it was unknowable then but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century on both sides of the atlantic came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide more particularly it came down to the men who landed here those who now rest in this place for eternity and those who are with us here today perhaps more than any other reason you the veterans of that landing are why we still remember what happened on d day you re why we keep coming back for you remind us that in the end human destiny is not determined by forces beyond our control you remind us that our future is not shaped by mere chance or circumstance our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman it has always been up to us you could have done what hitler believed you would do when you arrived here in the face of a merciless assault from these cliffs you could have idled the boats offshore amid a barrage of tracer bullets that lit the night sky you could have stayed in those planes you could have hid in the hedgerows or waited behind the seawall you could have done only what was necessary to ensure your own survival but that s not what you did that s not the story you told on d day your story was written by men like zane schlemmer of the 82nd airborne who parachuted into a dark marsh far from his objective and his men lost and alone he still managed to fight his way through the gunfire and help liberate the town in which he landed a town where a street now bears his name it s a story written by men like anthony ruggiero an army ranger who saw half the men on his landing craft drown when it was hit by shellfire just a thousand yards off this beach he spent three hours in freezing water and was one of only 90 rangers to survive out of the 225 who were sent to scale the cliffs and it s a story written by so many who are no longer with us like carlton barrett private barrett was only supposed to serve as a guide for the 1st infantry division but he instead became one of its heroes after wading ashore in neck deep water he returned to the water again and again and again to save his wounded and drowning comrades and under the heaviest possible enemy fire he carried them to safety he carried them in his own arms this is the story of the allied victory it s the legend of units like easy company and the all american 82nd it s the tale of the british people whose courage during the blitz forced hitler to call off the invasion of england the canadians who came even though they were never attacked the russians who sustained some of the war s heaviest casualties on the eastern front and all those french men and women who would rather have died resisting tyranny than lived within its grasp it is the memories that have been passed on to so many of us about the service or sacrifice of a friend or relative for me it is my grandfather stanley dunham who arrived on this beach six weeks after d day and marched across europe in patton s army and it is my great uncle who was part of the first american division to reach and liberate a nazi concentration camp his name is charles payne and i m so proud that he s with us here today i know this trip doesn t get any easier as the years pass but for those of you who make it there s nothing that could keep you away one such veteran a man named jim norene was a member of the 502nd parachute infantry division of the 101st airborne last night after visiting this cemetery for one last time he passed away in his sleep jim was gravely ill when he left his home and he knew that he might not return but just as he did 65 years ago he came anyway may he now rest in peace with the boys he once bled with and may his family always find solace in the heroism he showed here in the end jim norene came back to normandy for the same reason we all come back he came for the reason articulated by howard huebner another former paratrooper who is here with us today when asked why he made the trip howard said it s important that we tell our stories it doesn t have to be something bigjust a little story about what happened so people don t forget so people don t forget friends and veterans we cannot forget what we must not forget is that d day was a time and a place where the bravery and the selflessness of a few was able to change the course of an entire century at an hour of maximum danger amid the bleakest of circumstances men who thought themselves ordinary found within themselves the ability to do something extraordinary they fought for their moms and sweethearts back home for the fellow warriors they came to know as brothers and they fought out of a simple sense of duty a duty sustained by the same ideals for which their countrymen had once fought and bled for over two centuries that is the story of normandy but also the story of america of the minutemen who gathered on a green in lexington of the union boys from maine who repelled a charge at gettysburg of the men who gave their last full measure of devotion at inchon and khe san of all the young men and women whose valor and goodness still carry forward this legacy of service and sacrifice it s a story that has never come easy but one that always gives us hope for as we face down the hardships and struggles of our time and arrive at that hour for which we were born we cannot help but draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore to those men who achieved that victory 65 years ago we thank you for your service may god bless you and may god bless the memory of all those who rest here dem bobama5 8 09 barack_obama thank you so much well it is wonderful to be in wakarusa thank you so much for the wonderful welcome herman thanks for the great introduction it is great to be back in indiana this is as close as i ve gotten to home in a while and i flew out here with somebody who i think the people of indiana have known for a long time have trusted for a long time because he s fighting for working families in indiana each and every day and that is our great senator evan bayh please give evan a big round of applause and it s nice to get out of washington and spend some time with people who actually sent me to washington too often there are those in washington who focus on the ups and downs of politics but my concern is the ups and downs in the lives of the american people the families feeling the pain of this recession the folks i ve met across this country who ve lost jobs and savings and health insurance but haven t lost hope the men and women who still believe in the capacity the ability of this nation to meet the challenges of our times now these are challenges you know all too well here in wakarusa and in elkhart county this area has been hit with a perfect storm of economic troubles over the last few decades you ve borne the brunt of a steadily weakening of american manufacturing in the face of global competition you ve felt the impact of the struggles of american auto industry and the repercussions that have hit the midwest especially hard and you re living every day with the consequences of this recession and the financial meltdown and you ve felt it in the form of lost jobs and lost savings so as a result the elkhart area has experienced the second greatest increase in the rate of unemployment in the country up 10 points in a year it s an astonishing statistic and there have been times where nearly one in five people in this area have been looking for work you ve seen factories close and your sons and daughters move away in searches of jobs and opportunity so this is more than an economic crisis this goes to the heart and soul of a community it tests the strength of families and the spirit of good people hardworking folks who ve given their all to a company and now don t know where to turn there are some who see what s taking place here and suggest that it s all somehow inevitable and that the only way for america to get ahead is for places like elkhart to be left behind you hear that argument sometime in washington but i know and you know that the truth is exactly the opposite i m here because i believe our ability to recover and to prosper as a nation depends on what happens in communities just like this one the battle for america s future will be fought and won in places like elkhart and detroit goshen and pittsburgh south bend youngstown in cities and towns across indiana and across the midwest and across the country that have been the backbone of america it will be won by making places like elkhart what they once were and can be again and that s centers of innovation and entrepreneurship and ingenuity and opportunity the bustling whirring humming engines of american prosperity for as the world grows more competitive we can t afford to run the race at half strength or half speed if we hope to lead this century like we did the last century we have to create the conditions and the opportunities for places like elkhart to succeed we have to harness the potential the innovative and creative spirit that s waiting to be awakened all across america that s how we ll rebuild this economy stronger than before strong enough to compete in the global economy strong enough to avoid the cycles of boom and bust that have wreaked so much havoc on our economy strong enough to support the jobs of the 21st century and strong enough to unleash prosperity for everybody not just some but before we can rebuild our economy for tomorrow we have to rescue it today now that s why we passed a recovery act less than one month after i took office and we did so without any of the earmarks or pork barrel spending that s so common in washington d c and let me just talk about the so called stimulus package or the recovery act because there s been a lot of misinformation out there about the recovery act let me tell you what it is and what it s not the plan was divided into three parts one third of the money has gone to tax relief for families and small businesses one third of the money is cutting people s taxes for americans struggling to pay rising bills with shrinking wages we kept a campaign promise to put a middle class tax cut in the pockets of 95 percent of working families a tax cut that began showing up in paychecks of 4 8 million indiana households about three months ago we also cut taxes for small businesses on the investments that they make and more than 425 small businesses in indiana have received sba loans through the recovery package so that s one third of the money was tax cuts another third of the money in the recovery act has been for emergency relief that is helping folks who ve borne the brunt of this recession for americans who were laid off we expanded unemployment benefits and that s already made a difference for 12 million americans including 220 000 folks right here in indiana we re making health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families relying on cobra while looking for work some of you know people who lost their jobs were worried about losing their health care couldn t afford cobra we were able to reduce their costs by 65 percent so they could keep their health care while they looking for jobs and for states facing historic budget shortfalls we provided assistance that has saved the jobs of tens of thousands of teachers and public and police officers and other public servants so that you wouldn t see the recession get even worse so that s the second half first half tax relief second half support for individuals small businesses and states that had fallen on hard times the last third of the recovery act and that s what we re going to talk about here today is for investments that are not only putting people back to work in the short term but laying a new foundation for growth and prosperity in the long run these are the jobs of building the future of america upgrading our roads and our bridges renovating schools and hospitals the elkhart area has seen the benefits dozens were employed to resurface the runway at elkhart airport a four mile stretch of highway is being upgraded on us 33 the heart city health center has received recovery dollars to expand services and hire additional staff and as part of the recovery plan we re making a historic commitment to innovation the recovery act creates jobs doubling our capacity to generate renewable energy building a new smart grid that carry electricity from coast to coast laying down broadband lines and high speed rail lines and providing the largest boost in basic research in history to ensure that america leads in the breakthrough discoveries of the new century just as we led in the last because that s what we do best in america we turn ideas into inventions and inventions into industries now history should be our guide the united states led the world s economies in the 20th century because we led the world in innovation today the competition is keener the challenge is tougher and that s why innovation is more important than ever that s the key to good new jobs in the 21st century that s how we will ensure a high quality of life for this generation and future generations with these investments we re planting the seeds of progress for our country and good paying private sector jobs for the american people so that s why i m here today to announce 2 4 billion in highly competitive grants to develop the next generation of fuel efficient cars and trucks powered by the next generation of battery technologies all made right here in the u s of a right here in america made in america for too long we failed to invest in this kind of innovative work even as countries like china and japan were racing ahead that s why this announcement is so important this represents the largest investment in this kind of technology in american history see i m committed to a strategy that ensures america leads in the design and the deployment of the next generation of clean energy vehicles this is not just an investment to produce vehicles today this is an investment in our capacity to develop new technologies tomorrow this is about creating the infrastructure of innovation indiana is the second largest recipient of grant funding and it s a perfect example of what this will mean you ve got purdue university notre dame indiana university and ivy tech and they re all going to be receiving grant funding to develop degree and training programs for electric vehicles that s number one we ve got enerdel a small business in indianapolis that will develop batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles you ve got allison transmission in indianapolis delphi in kokomo remy in pendleton and magna located in muncie all who will help develop electric drive components for commercial and passenger vehicles and right here in elkhart county navistar which has taken over two monaco coach manufacturing facilities will receive a 39 million grant to build 400 advanced battery electric trucks with a range of a hundred miles like the trucks here today just a few months ago folks thought that these factories might be closed for good but now they re coming back to life you re welcome thank the american people the company estimates that this investment will help create or save hundreds of jobs in the area and already folks like herman are being rehired so overall the companies believe these investments in battery technology will save or create thousands of hoosier jobs and i want to point out these thousands of jobs wouldn t be possible if it weren t for the leaders in congress who supported the recovery act leaders like evan bayh and joe donnelly who s here today and andre carson and brad ellsworth and peter visclosky and these grants will create tens of thousands of jobs all across america in fact today vice president biden is announcing grant winners in michigan members of my cabinet are fanning out across the country announcing recipients elsewhere we re providing the incentives to those businesses large and small that stand ready to help us lead a new clean energy economy by developing new technologies for new kinds of vehicles see i don t want to just reduce our dependence on foreign oil and then end up being dependent on their foreign innovations i don t want to have to import a hybrid car i want to be able to build a hybrid car here i don t want to have to import a hybrid truck i want to build a hybrid truck here i don t want to have to import a windmill from someplace else i want to build a windmill right here in indiana i want the cars of the future and the technologies that power them to be developed and deployed right here in america and that s just the beginning in no area will innovation be more important than in the development of new ways to produce use and save energy so we re not only doubling our capacity to generate renewable energy and building a stronger and smarter electric grid we ve helped reach an agreement to raise fuel economy standards and for the first time in history we passed a bill to create a system of clean energy incentives which will help make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy in america while helping to end our dependence on foreign oil and protect our planet for future generations the bill passed the house we re now working to pass legislation through the senate because we know that real innovation depends not on government but on the generative potential of the american people if the american people get a clear set of rules if they know what s needed what challenges we ve got to meet they ll figure out how to do it in fact that s why our budget makes the research and experimentation tax credit permanent the r d tax credit this is a tax credit that helps companies afford what are sometimes very high costs in developing new ideas and new technologies and new products and that means new jobs this tax credit returns 2 to the economy for every 1 we spend and for a long time we were just trying to renew it once every year and companies didn t know whether or not they were going to be able to get it for the next year that s changed we ve now made it permanent i ve also proposed reducing to zero the capital gains tax for investments in small or startup businesses because small businesses are innovative businesses small businesses produce 13 times more patents per employee than large companies of course in order to lead in the global economy and ensure that our businesses can grow and innovate we also have to pass health insurance reform that brings down costs reform that brings down costs and provides more security for folks who have insurance and affordable options for those who don t i promise you we will pass reform by the end of this year because the american people need it the american people need some relief we re going to have to make it happen in fact the recovery plan began the process of reform by modernizing our health care infrastructure we took some long overdue step of computerizing america s health records which can reduce all the waste and errors that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives while protecting patients privacy it s important also to know that these records hold the potential of offering patients the chance to be more active participants in the prevention and treatment of illnesses you won t have to fill out the same form a dozen times you won t have to rely on your memory when talking to your doctor about your medical history all those things make people healthier but they also reduce your costs lower your premiums give you more security in your health care now in addition to energy and in addition to health care we also know that the nation that out educates us today will out compete us tomorrow so we re making a historic commitment to strengthening and improving education from cradle through career right now our schools continue to trail many of our competitors and that s why i ve challenged states to dramatically improve achievement by raising standards and modernizing science labs upgrading curriculum forming new partnerships to promote math and science and improving the use of technology in the classroom and i ve set this goal in the next decade by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world we used to be number one we will be number one again when it comes to college graduates now to reach this goal we ve provided tax credits and grants to make college education more affordable and we ve made a historic commitment to community colleges which are the unsung heroes in america s education system america can and must have the best educated highest skilled workforce in the world because if we re building new cars here in america if we re building a new clean energy grid in america then we re also going to need to build engineers in america and scientists in america and skilled technicians right here in america so all these pieces end up fitting together energy and innovation health care and education these are the pillars of the new foundation that we have to build this is how we won t just rescue the economy but we re going to rebuild it stronger than before now there are a lot of people out there those who are looking to defend the status quo there are those who want to seek political advantage they want to oppose these efforts some of them caused the problems that we got now in the first place and then suddenly they re blaming other folks for it they don t want to be constructive they don t want to be constructive they just want to get in the usual political fights back and forth and sometimes that s fed by all the cable chatter on the media but you and i know the truth we know that even in the hardest times against the toughest odds we have never surrendered we don t give up we don t surrender our fates to chance we have always endured we have worked hard and we have fought for our future our parents had to fight for their future our grandparents had to fight for their future that s the tradition of america this country wasn t built just by griping and complaining it was built by hard work and taking risks and that s what we have to do today so i know these are tough times if you haven t lost a job you know somebody who has maybe a family member a neighbor a friend you know that as difficult as the financial struggle can be the sense of loss when you lose your job is about more than just a paycheck we as americans we define ourselves by the work we do it s a source of pride a sense that you re contributing that you re supporting your family that you re doing the right thing that you re responsible and the truth is it can be easy to lose hope especially when you see a lot of folks out there who failed to meet their responsibilities from wall street to washington it can be easy to grow cynical when you see politicians say one thing and then do another or say one thing and then do nothing when you ve seen decades of broken promises and broken politics but this is a rare moment in which we re called upon to rise above the failures of the past this is a chance to restore that spirit of optimism and opportunity which has always been central to our success we ve got to set our sights higher not lower we ve got to imagine a future in which new american cars are powered by new american innovation a future in which cities that led the global economy before are leading it again a brighter future for elkhart a brighter future for indiana and for the united states of america that s what we re fighting for that s what this plant is about that s what you re about that s what we re going to achieve in the weeks and months to come so thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america thank you dem bobama5 8 10a barack_obama hello hello hello thank you thank you so much everybody hello hello it is good to be back in chicago somebody has got the obama 44 license plate thank you everybody thank you so much what a wonderful birthday gift to be back home with so many good friends there are a number of people i just want to make mention of you probably have already heard from them but i want you to know how much i appreciate what they are doing each and every day outstanding leadership leadership that s going to move this country forward first of all our wonderful governor and the next lieutenant governor of illinois pat quinn and sheila simon give them both big rounds of applause dear friend who fights each and every day on behalf of working families across her district this state and the country jan schakowsky is in the house senate president john cullerton is here one of the smartest guys in the state legislature and one of the funniest as well and did great work with me when i was in the state senate we ve got the next congressman from illinois 10th congressional district dan seals in the house there s dan i want to thank the preprogram speakers sheena patton from organizing for america and morgan mcclelland who is a first time voter i like that and i ve got a few things to say about alexi before i do that though one other person who actually wasn t on my sheet but i see her right in front so i have to say something this was this is i guess still my state representative almost i m right at the border but also was a great friend for a very long time and is a wonderful leader in the house of representatives barbara flynn currie so i just wanted to acknowledge barb now i see so many good friends who ve been with me since i was skinnier less gray and when nobody could pronounce my name and i know that if it weren t for you i might not be standing here tonight as president i am reminded of the story abraham lincoln told about a guy who comes to the white house insists on seeing the president he says i worked tirelessly on the president s behalf and he was seeking a patronage job and he insisted on an audience and finally lincoln says okay the guy comes in he says i am responsible if it weren t for me you would not be president and lincoln says i forgive you it s a true story it is an extraordinary honor and privilege to be able to serve and i m able to serve because of you i m also proud to be here tonight with the next senator from the state of illinois and that s alexi giannoulias i want to say to everybody here alexi is my friend i know his character i know how much he loves this country i know how committed he is to public service i know he is in this race for the right reasons i know he has been a great advocate on behalf of the people of illinois he s not in this to help lobbyists or special interests he s not one of those politicians who s going to put out his finger to the wind to see which way it s blowing he is somebody who is committed to you you can trust him he is going to be an outstanding senator and i need you to fight for him so he can fight for you in washington because we ve got a lot of work to do now look the last few years have been incredibly challenging over almost 20 months ago i stood in the capitol and was sworn in as the president and that month some of you might have been there it was cold remember it was cold but a hopeful day but even as everybody was feeling that sense of hope and optimism we had lost almost 800 000 jobs in that month alone the economy was contracting at about 6 percent ultimately we discovered that we lost 8 million jobs in this recession the worst by far since the great depression and had we not taken some steps immediately to address the crisis we might have tipped into a second great depression now this would have caused enough hardship but it was also compounded by the fact that we had had 10 years of sluggish growth 10 years of inadequate job production 10 years of incomes and wages that were flat lining even as the costs for middle class families were going up on everything from health care to tuition so the middle class working families across america were already feeling under enormous pressure a lot of them were just barely hanging on and then suddenly this storm sweeps in in the last six months of 2008 alone 3 million americans lost their jobs and so these aren t just statistics behind each of these numbers is a story of heartache and frustration a factory worker who might have just been a few years short of retiring suddenly he s lost his job maybe he s lost his pension a single mom who s sent out job applications to everywhere she can think of she s still waiting for the phone to ring day after day after day a college graduate who thought her degree would land her a good job with a decent paycheck suddenly all she s got is a mountain of debt i hear these stories every day i read them in letters each night i hear them when i m on the road traveling these struggles but also the hope of these americans are why i ran for office in the first place that s why we re going to work as hard as we can as long as it takes to turn this economy around and move this country forward that s why i m here that is our goal but we re not going to be able to get to where we need to go unless we understand how in fact we got here we spent nearly 10 years on an economic agenda that was pretty straightforward you cut taxes for the wealthiest among us folks who didn t need tax cuts and weren t even asking for them you cut rules for special interests and you cut working folks loose so they ve got to fend for themselves that was the philosophy of the last administration and that was the philosophy of their friends in congress and basically what they said is if you can t find a job tough luck you re on your own if you don t have health insurance too bad tough luck you re on your own if you re a young person who s trying to get to college tough luck you re on your own now if you re a wall street bank or an insurance company or an oil company like bp then you can write your own rules and we know how this turned out so when we came into office we said we are going to have a whole new approach we want an economic plan that rewards hard work instead of greed that rewards responsibility instead of recklessness a plan that s more focused on securing the middle class and making our country more competitive for the global economy and we know there are other countries fighting for the jobs of the future countries like china and india and if we don t have the best education system in the country if we don t have the most college graduates in the country if we don t have if we don t have the most productive research and development in the world then we re not going to make it and i i tell you this the united states of america does not play for second place we are going to rebuild this economy better and stronger than it was before and at the heart of our economic plan is three powerful words made in america we want to start making things here in the united states and selling things to other countries and creating good jobs and opportunity right here so instead of spending money for tax breaks that we can t afford we re making smart investments in education and r d and innovation and clean energy so we re building wind turbines and solar panels and biodiesel plants that will point us towards a clean energy future instead of giving special interests free reign to do what they please we re demanding new accountability from wall street to washington so that everybody big corporations have play by the same rules as small businesses and as workers do that s only fair now if you re unemployed or you can t pay the bills i know the only plan you want to hear about is getting a job right now and i wish i could stand here and tell you that there s a way to bring back all the jobs that were lost overnight that the economy right away is going to get back to full strength and between now and november you re going to hear a lot of promises from a lot of politicians and they re going to be saying to you you know what if we just do this or we just do that all your problems will be solved i can t do that because not only did i run for president promising that i wouldn t just tell you what you want to hear but tell you what you need to know but now that i am president and the sober realities of this job are ones that i ve experienced over the last two years i will tell you i can t stand here and just tell you what you want to hear we re going to have to work our way out of this hole that s been dug it s going to take time but here s what i also know even though it s going to take years to repair all the damage caused by this recession i am absolutely convinced that this nation is finally headed in the right direction our economy is growing again we are adding jobs again america is moving forward again and the last thing we can afford to do is go back to the policies that got us into this mess in the first place that s the choice in this election you ve got a pretty simple choice either you can support those policies that got us into this mess or you can support those policies that are getting us out of the mess think about it think about it this is not a situation in which the republicans after everything that they did to take record surpluses into record deficits after all the failed policies that resulted ultimately in the worst recession since the 1930s it s not as if they went back and they said you know what let s reflect on what we did wrong you know obviously there were some problems there let s see if we ve got a different set of theories about how we should approach the economy and how we should look after the middle class i mean that would be one thing if they had kind of gone off in the wilderness they meditated they came back they said we ve learned from our mistakes we ve got a whole new set of approaches a whole new set of policies but they re not saying that they have not come up with a single solitary idea that is any different from the policies of george w bush the policies that they had in place for eight years before we had a crisis what they are betting on is amnesia they are betting that you don t remember that they were in charge all this time i think pat may have mentioned to you they re trying to get you to forget that they drove the car into the ditch and after we ve pushed it out now they re saying give us the keys back but we don t we haven t forgotten because we ve got mud on our shoes our back is sore from pushing that car out of the ditch i mean if they want to get in the back seat that s okay but we re not going to put them behind the wheel i pointed out at lunch today also just to carry this metaphor a little further when you get in your car and you want to go forward you put it in what d when you want to go backwards what do you do you put it in r so that s the choice that s the choice we re facing this is the choice we re facing this is the choice we re facing we want to take away tax breaks for companies that are shipping jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that are investing here in the united states of america they ve got a different vision we ve already cut taxes for small businesses eight times right now there s a debate in the senate as we speak we want to eliminate capital gains for small businesses and help them with getting more credit and the republicans are saying just say no we believe in jumpstarting a homegrown clean energy industry because i don t want us to be second to china or germany or anybody else when it comes to the clean energy technologies of the future putting americans back to work we have we ve already made investments that will lead to 800 000 clean energy jobs by 2012 but you know what the other side they ll have none of it we want to invest in the 21st century infrastructure of high speed rail and broadband and a smart grid that can make our electric system more efficient they don t want to see those investments made we ve got plans to keep jobs in america not just for the short term but over the long run but on every single issue just about the other side has just said no no to small business tax cuts no to clean energy jobs no to railroad and highway projects that doesn t mean they don t show up at the ribbon cuttings trying to take credit even though they vote no they ll show up cheesing and grinning in front of the camera they ll be waving but it s not just on these issues it s not just on jobs issues when we say that we want a country that s more equal and so we re fighting for equal pay for equal work so that women are getting paid just the same as men we don t get help when we said that it makes sense to reform our health insurance system so that people aren t left without health insurance because of a preexisting condition and insurance companies can t drop you when you get sick or impose an arbitrary lifetime limit they said no in fact the leader in the republicans in the house when asked what s your jobs plan he said repeal health care i mean now other than giving jobs for folks who want to deny you coverage i don t know what kind of jobs plan that is on wall street reform here we have the worst financial crisis since the great depression we pass financial reform have to eke it out with almost no help from the other side except for a couple brave republicans and you re scratching your head saying well do they think that hidden fees in credit cards are good do they think that mortgage companies being able to steer you to unaffordable mortgages are a smart thing to do apparently so they must think that s good stuff look on each of these items they want to take us backwards they basically think that the status quo before all that we ve been through over the last two and a half years is perfectly fine i think we can do better i think we can do better than that i think we can have an america in which our health care system works for all americans and we re driving down costs i think we can have a financial sector that is fair and productive and won t require taxpayer bailouts i think we can have an america in which women are being treated just like men in the workplace i think we can have an america in which tobacco companies aren t marketing their products to kids i think we can have an america an america in which people who work hard who take pride in their job who are responsible to their families who are responsible for their communities that they ve got opportunity an america in which our young people have a chance to get a first class education and can go to college and are able to go on and make a career for themselves an america in which we are outcompeting every other country in the world and we are doubling exports and in which the dynamism and innovation of this country continues throughout the 21st century just like it existed in the 20th century all those things are possible but this november is going to be a choice and all of you are going to have to think about what kind of legacy are we going to leave for our kids we are at a crossroads here we are not through we are not out of the woods and we are going to need your help so to all of you who worked so hard to help me get elected you ve got to work just as hard to get alexi elected you ve got to work just as hard to get our congressional candidates like dan elected you ve got to work just as hard to get our governor and lieutenant governor elected you ve got to go out there and knock on doors you ve got to go out there and make phone calls you ve got to you ve got to understand what s at stake here because the other side does they are going to be well financed and they are going to be working hard they see this as their best opportunity to go back to the same system that they had in place all those years now ultimately though you know when i ran for office a lot of people were skeptical that i could win the senate obviously people were skeptical we could win the presidency there were times where i was skeptical but the one thing i wasn t skeptical about was you the american people i ve always had confidence in you that ultimately despite all the special interest ads and by the way right now we ve got a supreme court decision that s allowing uninhibited special interest spending on ads and we ve got legislation in the senate and the house to try to fix this but the other side of course is saying no and we re going to keep on fighting to make sure that foreign corporations and big special interests can t just fund unlimited ads without even disclosing who they are but despite all that i always have confidence that the american people can cut through the nonsense and ultimately do what s best not just for the next election but for the next generation i have confidence in you and so if you will stand with me and if you will stand with all these outstanding candidates in the weeks to come i promise you we will work as hard as we have ever worked for as long as it takes to create the kind of america that our children and our grandchildren deserve god bless you chicago god bless you illinois god bless the united states of america thank you everybody thank you dem bobama5 8 10b barack_obama hello everybody hello chicago thank you very much thank you thank you everybody have a seat have a seat everybody it is good to be back home it is good to be back home and i am so proud to be standing here with the next senator from the great state of illinois alexi giannoulias now we ve got some other important personages here so i want to make sure to make mention because they have been great friends for many years to me and to so many of you first of all our outstanding governor pat quinn is here where s pat there he is one of america s greatest mayors richard m daley is in the house secretary of state jesse white is here a great friend of mine comptroller dan hynes senate president john cullerton is here where s john over there he s also a funny guy speaker mike madigan is here where s the speaker congressman danny davis from the west side congresswoman jan schakowsky from the north side and congresswoman debbie halvorson from the south side it is wonderful to be here and it wonderful to be with alexi alexi is my friend i know his character i know how much he loves this country i know how committed he is to public service for all the right reasons i appreciate his strong sense of advocacy for ordinary americans he s not doing this to help the lobbyists he s not doing it to help special interests alexi is not one of these politicians who puts his finger to the wind and who changes who he is or where he stands to suit the political moment you can trust him you can count on him on his very first day in office alexi enacted the most sweeping ethics reforms of any illinois state treasurer and ensured that contractors and banks couldn t pay to play for state business and he s not funding this campaign with federal pac or lobbyist money not a dime because he wants to make a strong statement about who he will be fighting for in the united states senate and as state treasurer alexi has proven himself as someone who isn t afraid to stand up to special interests he took on credit card companies and banned them from aggressively marketing on college campuses so that our kids don t graduate with credit card debt on top of tuition debt he s reformed our state s college savings program so that it s now ranked one of the best in the country and i m sure a lot of you have heard of what he did for hartmarx this is a clothing company that s employed people in this state for more than a century and by the way i m a customer and when they fell on hard times and a big bank threatened to pull their credit and destroy more than 600 jobs alexi stepped in and he told the bank that if they did that they would no longer be managing the money of illinois taxpayers and because of what he did alexi helped save that company and save those jobs that s the kind of person you want in the united states senate somebody who s not going to forget where they came from why they re in this and who they re fighting for so we need fighters like alexi in washington because i don t know if you ve noticed but we ve got a lot of work to do the last few years have been incredibly challenging for the united states eighteen months ago when i took office after nearly a decade of economic policies that gave us sluggish job growth falling incomes a record deficit all culminating in the worst recession of our lifetimes the worst recession since the great depression that month that i was sworn in in january of 2009 we lost 750 000 jobs in that month alone in total we lost 8 million jobs during that recession now we didn t get to that point by accident we got to that point after nearly 10 years of an economic agenda in washington that was pretty straightforward it basically said we re going to cut taxes for the wealthiest americans folks who don t need it and weren t even asking for it we re going to cut rules for special interests and then we re going to cut working folks loose to fend for themselves so if you were a kid in chicago whose family had never gone to college and you aspire to go to college but you didn t have the money tough luck you re on your own if you were a worker who was just barely hanging on didn t have health insurance even if you were working two jobs those are the breaks tough luck you re on your own that was the philosophy of the last administration and their friends in congress they called it the ownership society but it really meant you were on your own and if you were a wall street banker or an insurance company or an oil company like bp you got to write your own rules and we know how this turned out so when i took office we decided not only were we going to have to heal the economy short term we had to revamp how we thought about the american economy and put families and middle class workers at the center of it we put in place a new economic plan a plan that rewards hard work instead of greed a plan that rewards responsibility instead of recklessness a plan that s focused on making our middle class more secure and our country more competitive in the long run so that the jobs and industries of the future aren t just found in china or india or brazil but right here in the united states of america instead of spending money that we don t have on tax breaks for those who don t need them we re making smart investments in education and innovation and clean energy that will benefit all people and our entire economy instead of giving special interests free reign to do what they please we re demanding new accountability from wall street to washington so that big corporations play by the same rules that workers and small businesses do it s only fair now because the policies of the last decade landed us in such a deep hole it takes time to dig ourselves out and we re not there yet we ve got a lot more work to do there are a lot of people hurting all across this region and all across the country but after 18 months i can say unequivocally with confidence that our nation is finally headed in the right direction it is headed in the right direction instead of shrinking our economy is growing again instead of losing jobs we re adding jobs america is moving forward and the last thing we can afford right now is to go back to the very same special interest laden policies that created this mess in the first place and that s the choice in this election that s the decision you ll have to make when you walk into the voting booth in november and everybody here in illinois and all across the country are going to have to make a choice do we go back to the policies of the past or do we keep this country moving forward i believe we have to keep on moving forward alexi believes we ve got to keep on moving forward and i think the american people want to keep moving forward now if you doubt that that s the choice if you re thinking well that s just some political rhetoric i want you to think about what s transpired within the republican party it would be one thing if after 2006 and 2008 and all the problems that have been taking place that they went off into the wilderness and they meditated and they thought boy we really screwed up and we ve got to think of some new ways of approaching things if they were full of reflection and soul searching and then they finally came back and said we ve got some new ideas we re going to do things differently we may not agree with the president but we have a vision for the future that might work then you could say okay maybe we should give them a shot but that s not what s happened they haven t learned from all the mistakes that they made they promise to do the exact same things that got us into this mess they haven t come out with a single solitary idea that is different from the policies that held sway for eight years before democrats took over not a single policy difference that s discernable from george w bush not one so what they re really betting on is amnesia they re betting that you just forgot about the eight years that they were in charge of washington they re betting that you didn t notice that the recession started under their watch and the deficits started under their watch and that instead of trying to work with us they have been trying to oppose us every step of the way in solving these problems i mean remember these are the folks who spent almost a decade driving the economy into a ditch and now they re asking for the keys back so car went into the ditch we had to put on our boots we got in the mud we re pushing we re shoving we re tired sweaty they re standing watching you re not doing that fast enough why don t you push a little harder why don t you i think if you put your shoulder here you ll get a better grip so after all our huffing and puffing we finally get the car out of the ditch finally back on blacktop on level ground and what do they say give us the keys back well you can t have the keys back you don t know how to drive you got us into the ditch in the first place we can t give you these keys i also want to make a simple point not to belabor this analogy but when you want to go forward what do you put the car in d when you want to go backwards what do you do you put it in r we want to go forward we don t want to go backwards they can t have the keys because they want to take us back in the ditch don t want to do it you thought that was just an accident it s not there was a sign there look the choice in this election is between policies that encourage job creation in america and policies that encourage job creation somewhere else we ve said repeatedly instead of giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas we want to give tax cuts to small business owners who are creating jobs right here in the united states of america these other folks talk about tax cuts we ve already cut taxes eight times for small businesses since i ve been president and we want to do more because america s small business owners are the backbone of america s economy we re also jumpstarting a homegrown clean energy industry because i don t want to see new solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars built in china i want to see them built right here in chicago right here in the midwest right here in the united states the investments we ve made so far will lead to more than 800 000 clean energy jobs by 2012 800 000 and because our nation has always been built to compete from the transcontinental railroad to the interstate highway system we re investing in a 21st century infrastructure not just new roads and bridges but faster internet access and high speed railroads projects that will lead to hundreds of thousands of new private sector jobs but will also create the platform for us to compete in the future that s our plan to keep jobs in america not just short term but over the long term and yet most of the folks in the other party they voted no on just about every one of these policies no on tax cuts for small businesses no on clean energy jobs no on railroad and highway projects although john it doesn t stop them from showing up at ribbon cuttings sending out press releases they vote no for them but they show up try to get credit they re pretty good at finding the cameras they re waving and grinning the point is their votes their obstruction that takes us backwards we want businesses to create jobs in america we want clean energy here in the united states we want young people to be able to go to college in record numbers we want it the principle that everybody in america should be able to get affordable health care we want that enshrined in this country and that s the choice in this election it s between policies that strengthen the hand of special interests and policies that strengthen america s middle class a few weeks ago the republican leader of the house was asked what his jobs plan for the party let s say they took control of congress next year he said his number one priority is repealing the law we passed to prevent health insurance companies from denying you coverage or dropping your coverage just because you got sick repealing the health care law that s his jobs plan now i m not sure exactly how that creates jobs it might create jobs for insurance executives or the folks who deny you claims but it s not creating jobs for the american people but if they think that s a look if you think that s a good idea if you think that s a good jobs plan you should vote for the other party we ve got a different view the health insurance reform we passed isn t just preventing insurers from denying you coverage it s cutting taxes for small business owners who cover their employees it s allowing young adults to stay on their parents coverage until they re 26 it s lowering the price of prescription drugs for our seniors it will ultimately lower the cost of health care for every american we just got a report today from the trust fund that manages medicare saying we ve extended the life of medicare by 12 years because of the health insurance reform it is going to be more secure for our seniors and it s going to be there for future generations because of the changes we made they want to repeal that reform take us back to the days when insurance companies could deny you care we re not going to let that happen we re moving forward the other party wants to repeal wall street reform most of them voted against it including alexi s opponent now they want to repeal it now think about it worst financial crisis since the great depression almost put the entire economy over a cliff 8 million people unemployed as a consequence of it and their answer is go back to the status quo that got us into this this is reform that s finally going to stop credit card companies from charging you hidden fees and unfair rate hikes that stops the abusive practices of mortgage lenders that ends taxpayer bailouts of wall street banks says we re going to be able to resolve problems in any single bank quarantine them isolate them without dragging the whole system with it this is reform that protects consumers responsible business owners and our entire economy we need this reform we can t go back to the same rules the same regulations that allowed this crisis to happen and yet alexi s opponent wants to get rid of that that s the choice in this election on almost every issue that matters to middle class families that s the choice the other party voted to keep taxpayer subsidies for big banks that offer loans to college i don t know if everybody understands the federal government guaranteed these loans for young people so they can go to college banks were taking out tens of billions of dollars in profits despite the fact that the loans were guaranteed we said let s cut out the middleman we ll have an extra 40 billion that we can give to millions more college students so they can afford to go to college got no support on the other side for years they did nothing about the fact that too many women aren t paid as much as men for doing the same work i signed a law that helps end discrimination so that in the united states of america an equal day of work means an equal day of pay they didn t support it they want to extend the bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires that have exploded our deficit they talk a good game about deficit reduction and then every time you ask them what s your plan they don t have one i kept my campaign promise and gave a tax cut to the middle class 95 percent of working americans they voted against it they voted against holding oil companies like bp accountable for every dime of the spills they cause we forced bp to set aside 20 billion for the men and women of the gulf coast whose livelihoods depend on clean water and clean beaches and then what happens after we do that the guy who if they took over in the house of representatives would be the chairman of the energy committee apologizes to bp says i m so sorry that the president is making you pay these fishermen and these hotel owners and others whose livelihoods by been wrecked by your carelessness apologized to them called what we did a shakedown i think he might have added chicago shakedown in there that s the choice in this election a choice between folks who apologize to bp and folks who are looking out for small business owners and fishermen policies that are helping our economy grow again and policies that are going to make america more competitive and our middle class more secure or more of the same i know this nation has been through an incredibly difficult time not all the steps we took to dig us out of this recession have been popular the pundits in washington i have befuddled them over the last 20 months they keep on saying well why is he doing that that doesn t poll well and i keep on explaining to them i have my own pollsters i know how it polls i know these things some things we did were not popular but they were right i wasn t elected just to do what was popular i was elected to do what was right my job is not to focus on the next election it s to focus on the next generation that s why i ran for office that s what i try to do every day that s why alexi is running for the united states senate that s what he will do every day when he s in the united states senate we need your help and if you re willing to invest in our future we are going to keep on moving forward for years and decades to come thank you chicago god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama5 8 10c barack_obama hello hello hello what s going on thank you everybody and listen it is good to see everybody i appreciate everybody way back there hello hello it is wonderful to be here there are a couple of special guests i want to mention here before we get started first of all we got the governor of the great state of illinois pat quinn give it up for pat got one of the finest mayors in the country mayor richard daley is in the house our treasurer and soon to be united states senator alexi giannoulias is here a number of outstanding members of congress who ve been very supportive of the auto industry congressman jesse jackson jr congressman bobby rush congressman danny davis congresswoman jan schakowsky congressman mike quigley we ve got fred hochberg of the who s the chairman and president of the export import bank which is going to help ford sell all these outstanding cars overseas not just here in the united states and your own president mark fields is in the house give it up so it is good to be back in chicago it s good to see some friendly faces be back in the old neighborhoods thank you i ve gotten a little more gray hair since i was last down here but it is wonderful to be back home now don t get me wrong the white house is nice and i ve got a really short commute from my office to the house i don t have to drive too far and there s no greater honor than being your president but let me tell you something there s nothing like coming home especially when your home is chicago and i just had a chance to tour this extraordinary plant to see the great work that you re doing here i notice that mark and everybody they put all the white sox fans in front for me to meet i didn t see a lot of cubs guys on the line or cardinals fans but this plant has a remarkable history henry ford built it henry ford built this plant in 1924 to manufacture the model t when the great depression struck and 25 ford plants closed down this one stayed open when world war ii was raging this plant was churning out armored vehicles that helped make victory possible in the 1990s workers at this plant built the best selling car in america five years in a row so this plant is part of american history for nearly nine decades this plant has been the backbone of this community there are workers here whose fathers worked on this line i just met one while i was on my way over here whose fathers fathers worked this line this plant like the entire industry has been a source of deep pride for generations of american workers whose imaginations and hard work led to some of the finest cars that the world has ever known and whose sweat helped build up the middle class that lifted up the dreams of millions of people all across america this plant has stood through the good times when american auto industry ruled the world and in the not so good times when the future of the auto industry was very much in doubt and let s face it we ve seen some of those not so good times in recent years the year before i took office this industry lost hundreds of thousands of jobs sales plunged 40 percent 40 percent when the financial crisis hit and this great recession hit that collided with an industry that for a long time had put off some hard choices had put off adapting to changing times and we had to face a hard unimaginable reality which was two of the big three automakers gm and chrysler were on the brink of liquidation if that had happened more than 1 million jobs could have been lost and that would have been a devastating blow to the entire economy now ford was in better financial shape and was able to weather the storm without federal assistance that s a testament to the hard work you all do and the choices this company made but i don t have to tell you and your ceo will has said this publicly if your competitors had gone down they would have taken down a whole bunch of the suppliers you depend on the brand of american autos would have diminished that would have had severe consequences for ford and that s the challenge we faced when i took office an industry that was on the brink there were a lot of folks who were ready to write off the american auto industry who thought we should just have walked away from you some still think that today but you know what that s not how you build a better future that s not how you build a better america we don t give up the united states does not quit we always compete that s what we do and that s what we re doing with the u s auto industry so i refused to walk away from this industry and american jobs i put my faith in the american worker i believe the american worker is the best worker in the world and if we were willing to work hard together and rebuild and sacrifice in the short term it would be a new beginning for a great american industry if we could just get a sense of common purpose we could once again see the best cars in the world designed engineered forged right here in chicago right here in the midwest right here in the united states of america so i tell you what last friday i stood with workers at a gm plant i stood with workers at a chrysler plant today i m standing with workers at a ford plant i put my money on the american worker i d place my bets on the american worker any day of the week and because of your efforts and the sacrifice that have been made across this industry over the past year this industry is growing stronger it s creating new jobs it s manufacturing the fuel efficient cars and trucks that will carry america towards an energy independent future each and every one of you is proving the naysayers wrong all three automakers all three u s automakers are now operating at a profit that s the first time it s happened in six years america s automakers have added 55 000 jobs since last june that s the best job growth in more than 10 years in this industry sales have rebounded automakers are keeping plants open through the usual summer shutdown to keep up with demand across the supply chain plants that would not exist without the sacrifices made across industry are running at max or near full capacity and this plant right here is shifting into higher gear what i said last year was if american automakers were willing to make the tough choices necessary to make them more competitive in the future america would stand by them and one thing we did was put in place a new national fuel efficiency standard for all new cars and trucks sold in america this was good for consumers it was good for the environment and it finally gave our automakers the certainty they needed to plan for the future a future where american workers build 21st century cars that the world wants to buy so ford dedicated itself to increasing fuel efficiency of more than a dozen of its models and the department of energy awarded ford a two year loan commitment to help make that happen and ford used that loan to retool this factory to build the next generation explorer that s a model that will be up to 30 percent more fuel efficient now i should add by the way my most recent car was a ford i had one of those ford escapes and that was a spiffy car now i have to admit that i bought it about two months before i got secret service and they wouldn t let me drive anymore so it only had like 2 000 miles after five years but i really enjoyed those 2 000 miles but i just got in that explorer and that s an outstanding car and over the next two months this plant will bring on a second shift of 1 200 workers to build that explorer nearly doubling your workforce that s not just good for this plant that s good for the stamping plant in chicago heights it s good for the suppliers who are investing in new facilities and adding shifts and hiring more than 600 workers in illinois and indiana and michigan it s good for the entire community it s good for the city it s good for the state and ford has also committed to selling more of the cars you build around the world including the explorer that you manufacture right here we re going to sell it in up to 90 countries so today today to support those efforts my administration is announcing a new 250 million export import bank loan guarantee for ford and what this does what this does is this helps ford export this will help ford export more than 200 000 cars and trucks overseas and that means more production and more manufacturing jobs right here in the united states of america and it s going to help us reach the goal that i set in my state of the union address which is we are going to double america s exports of goods and services over the next five years we re tired of just buying from everybody else we want to start selling to other people because we know we can compete that s how we re going to grow our economy that s how we re going to support millions of good jobs for american workers to do what they ve always done build great products and sell them around the world our workers can compete with anybody and america is going to compete aggressively for every job out there and every industry out there and every market out there so chicago here s the bottom line we ve still got a long way to go we ve gone through a very very difficult time the auto industry has gone through a difficult time and it s not back to where it needs to be our economy is not yet where it needs to be it s going to take more time to heal from all the damage that was done but we re beginning to see our efforts pay off we are headed in the right direction we are moving forward the industry isn t just on the way back it s on the way to being number one again and i am convinced i m convinced we re going to rebuild not only the auto industry but the economy better and stronger than before and at its heart is going to be three powerful words made in america made in america and to all those naysayers in washington what we call the just say no crowd who said that investing in you would guarantee failure who said we should just walk away from this industry who said that standing by america s automakers was the worst investment you could make who tried to block us at every turn i wish they were standing here today and saw what i see i wish they could see the pride you take in building these great cars american made cars and my message to them is this don t bet against the american worker don t lose faith in the american people don t lose faith in american industry we are coming back just a few weeks before i visited that chrysler plant this is a true story i went to a chrysler plant a few weeks before 14 employees had won the lottery and when they won everybody thought they were just going to cash in and kick back and retire nobody would have blamed them for that this is tough work but here s the thing most of them aren t retiring and the worker who bought the winning ticket what he did was he went out and bought for his wife one of the new cars that was being made in that plant and then he went out and he bought american flags for his hometown because he s proud of his country and he keeps on showing up to work every single day because he s proud of his job and that s the character of america proud of your job proud of your community proud of your country proud of the company you work for that s what ford is about that s what you are about that s what chicago is about that s what illinois is about that s what the united states of america is about we are coming back thank you very much everybody god bless you and god bless america dem bobama6 1 10 barack_obama thank you thank you everybody please have a seat thank you well it is wonderful to be here barbara thank you for the outstanding introduction i want to acknowledge a few other special guests that we have here first of all my terrific vice president mainly because he takes orders from dr jill biden dr jill biden and vice president joe biden are here somebody i ve never met somebody who s more passionate about making sure that young people do well than my secretary of education arne duncan arne duncan my before i won a nobel peace prize this guy had won it and nobody questioned whether he deserved it or not my secretary of energy steven chu three wonderful members of congress who have devoted a lot of energy to the issue of science and math education i want to acknowledge them representative bart gordon who is the chairman of the science and technology committee democrat from tennessee where s bart there he is thank you bart representative william lacy clay from the great state of missouri and his district is home to two teachers who are being honored here today so he s very proud of them and a great champion of education generally he s the chairman of the education and labor committee representative george miller of california is in the house we also since so many people were inspired in this country originally from our space program to think about math and science in new ways it s terrific to have our nasa administrator and former astronaut charles bolden in the house we ve got regina dugan who is the director of the defense advanced research projects agency or darpa as many of you know we can thank them for the internet and all kinds of other stuff so please give regina a big round of applause and our national science foundation director arden bement is here thank you so much arden now most importantly to all the teachers who are here as president i am just thrilled to welcome you teachers and mentors to the white house because i believe so strongly in the work that you do and as i mentioned to some of you because i ve got two girls upstairs with math tests coming up i figure that a little extra help from the best of the best couldn t hurt so you re going to have assignments after this these awards were not free we are here today to honor teachers and mentors like barb who are upholding their responsibility not just to the young people who they teach but to our country by inspiring and educating a new generation in math and science but we re also here because this responsibility can t be theirs alone all of us have a role to play in building an education system that is worthy of our children and ready to help us seize the opportunities and meet the challenges of the 21st century whether it s improving our health or harnessing clean energy protecting our security or succeeding in the global economy our future depends on reaffirming america s role as the world s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation and that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today especially in math science technology and engineering but despite the importance of education in these subjects we have to admit we are right now being outpaced by our competitors one assessment shows american 15 year olds now ranked 21st in science and 25th in math when compared to their peers around the world think about that 21st and 25th that s not acceptable and year after year the gap between the number of teachers we have and the number of teachers we need in these areas is widening the shortfall is projected to climb past a quarter of a million teachers in the next five years and that gap is most pronounced in predominately poor and minority schools and meanwhile other nations are stepping up a fact that was plain to see when i visited asia at the end of last year the president of south korea and i were having lunch and i asked him what s the biggest education challenge that you have he told me his biggest challenge in education wasn t budget holes it wasn t crumbling schools it was that the parents were too demanding he s had to import thousands of foreign teachers because parents insisted on english language training in elementary school the mayor of shanghai china a city of over 20 million people told me that even in such a large city they had no problem recruiting teachers in whatever subject but particularly math and science because teaching is revered and the pay scales are comparable to professions like doctors so make no mistake our future is on the line the nation that out educates us today is going to out compete us tomorrow to continue to cede our leadership in education is to cede our position in the world that s not acceptable to me and i know it s not acceptable to any of you and that s why my administration has set a clear goal to move from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math education over the next decade to reach this goal we ve paid particular attention to how we can better prepare and support reward and retain good teachers so the recovery act included the largest investment in education by the federal government in history while preventing more than 300 000 teachers and school workers from being fired because of state budget shortfalls the department of education will be announcing an additional 10 million in grants for innovative programs to train new teachers whether a young person embarking on his or her first career or a scientist or engineer starting his or her second and under the outstanding leadership of arne duncan we ve launched a 4 billion race to the top fund one of the largest investments in education reform in history through the race to the top states are competing for funding and producing the most innovative programs in science and math will be an advantage in this competition as will allowing scientists and statisticians and engineers to more easily become teachers we want states and school districts to start being more creative about how they can attract more science and math teachers we re also pursuing reforms to better serve america s math and science teachers so that each and every one can be as effective as the educators that we honor today so we re challenging states to raise standards to use data to better inform decisions to recruit and retain more good teachers and to promote stronger curricula that encourage young people to not only learn the facts in a textbook but to explore and discover the world around them now as important as this will be the success we seek is not going to be attained by government alone and that s why i ve challenged the scientific community to think of new and creative ways to engage young people in their fields that s why we launched the educate to innovate campaign a nationwide effort by citizens non for profits universities and companies from across america to help us move to the top of the pack in math and science education and today we re expanding this campaign several new public private partnerships are going to offer additional training to more than 100 000 teachers and prepare more than 10 000 new teachers in the next five years alone and through the partnerships we are announcing today support for the educate to innovate campaign has doubled to more than half a billion dollars in private funding that s a figure that we only expect to grow to help educators already in the classroom intel is launching a 10 year 200 million campaign to train math and science teachers in all 50 states to better use new technologies and techniques in their lessons plans pbs and the national science teachers association will also create a new online platform so science and math teachers can share best practices and learn from one another to bring more educators into the classroom the national math and science initiative is working with texas instruments and the dell foundation to prepare almost 5 000 new math and science teachers in the next five years through a program that allows young people to earn teaching certificates and science degrees at the same time and presidents from more than 75 of the largest public universities in the country have committed to produce thousands of additional science and math teachers at their institutions and the woodrow wilson national fellowship foundation is expanding with the help of several states and non profits to place more math and science teachers in more high need schools and just because you aren t a teacher that doesn t mean you can t help educate our young people we need to look no further than the mentors that we honor here today i m calling on all 200 000 scientists who work for the federal government to do their part in their communities to speak at schools to create hands on learning opportunities through efforts like national lab day and to help stoke that same curiosity in students which perhaps led them to pursue a career in science in the first place nasa will also be launching an enrichment program to bring their scientists and engineers to students in the classroom and to bring students to nasa so that they might experience that same sense of wonder and excitement while maybe learning a little bit at the same time and finally as president i m going to try to do my part we ve held science themed events like astronomy night here at the white house that was very fun by the way we re planning an annual science fair to honor the student winners of national science and technology competitions secretary duncan and i will be working to promote the teaching profession to show young people that teaching is one of the best and most rewarding ways to serve our country and we are of course recognizing the folks in this room with awards for excellence in teaching and mentoring it s with these men and women that i d like to conclude today because in the end the work that you do and the difference you make are what all these reforms are all about whether it s showing students how to record the habits of a resident reptile or teaching kids to test soil samples on a class trip to costa rica whether it s helping young people from tough neighborhoods in chicago to become junior paleontologists or creating a mentoring program that connects engineering students with girls and minorities who are traditionally underserved in the field all of you are demonstrating why teaching and mentoring is so important and why we have to support you equip you and send in some reinforcements for you every person in this room remembers a teacher or mentor that made a difference in their lives every person in this room remembers a moment in which an educator showed them something about the world or something about themselves that changed their lives it could be a word of encouragement a helping hand a lesson that sparked a question that ignited a passion and ultimately may have propelled a career and innovators folks like michael dell who are here today are made in those moments scientists and engineers are made in those moments doctors are made in those moments teachers are made in those moments those small interactions so yes improving our schools is about training a new generation of workers and succeeding in new industries but a good education provided with the help of great teachers and mentors is about something more it s about instilling in a young person a love of learning and a sense of possibility in their own lives an understanding of the world around them that will serve them no matter what they do that s what we have to do as a nation that s what all of you do every day and that s what at root will lead to greater opportunities and brighter horizons for the next generation and for generations to come so thank you very much everybody congratulations dem bobama6 10 09 barack_obama thank you so much mike for the introduction usually it s mike who comes to brief me at the white house today it s my honor to visit you in your house i was just told this is called the bat cave is that correct mike thank you for your many years of public service and your outstanding leadership at the national counterterrorism center it is great to be with all of you it is great to be here at the hub at the headquarters of our efforts to defend america from those who threaten our country and so many others our intelligence community is comprised of 16 organizations we have countless federal and state and local and international partners and this is where it has to all come together so i m pleased to see denny blair and those of you from the office of the director of national intelligence we have folks here from the fbi and the cia we have folks from across the federal government intelligence law enforcement homeland security and so many others my understanding is we ve even got some of new york s finest some nypd folks who are here standing together and serving together it s clear for all to see that you are one team that you are more integrated and more collaborative and more effective than ever before and you re focused on one defining mission and that is to protect the united states of america and thwarting terrorist attacks around the world now i just received an extraordinary briefing from some of your colleagues i have to tell you i was surprised to see how young everybody is around here it is a sign of my age that everybody is starting to look young but the capacity and the dedication that s on display was remarkable and look all of you have some of the most important work that is done in this country you re doing it these big screens i understand are not just to watch sportscenter but i wanted to come here today and take a few minutes just to deliver a simple message and i delivered it inside and that is the message of thanks to say thank you from me who use your product each and every day to make some very tough decisions and to thank you on behalf of the american people who may not even know that you re here but are relying on you each and every day to make sure that their kids get home safely and that when they commute to work it s going to be okay to think about the profound impact that all of you are having on the day to day life of this nation i think is extraordinary your professionalism is essential to protecting this country now we recently observed the eighth anniversary of that terrible day when terrorists brought so much death and destruction to our shores and once more we remembered all the lives that were lost and once more we redoubled our resolve against the extremists who continue to plot against the united states and our allies so we need you more than ever our troops and our intelligence officers in the field our diplomats overseas our law enforcement here at home they all depend on you your analysis your insights your ability to work together across divisions and disciplines turning information into intelligence and sharing it quickly in real time with those who need it as i said before i am one of those consumers of your work product here at nctc every morning i look to you for the latest intelligence in fact i think so highly of nctc that i picked the guy who put nctc together john brennan as my chief adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security and by the way john brennan is here and doing an outstanding job each and every day he s also by the way i think responsible for getting this spiffy building up and running now again a lot of you are working in some obscurity right now few americans know about the work that you do and this is how it should be your assignments require it and obviously you didn t go into this line of work for the fame and glory or the glare of the spotlight you re in this to serve and protect but today i want every american to know about the difference you ve made especially in recent months and days because of you and all the organizations you represent we re making real progress in our core mission to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda and other extremist networks around the world we must never lose sight of that goal that s the principal threat to the american people that is the threat that led to the creation of this center and that must be the focus of our efforts to defend the homeland and our allies and defeat extremists abroad we know that al qaeda and its extremist allies threaten us from different corners of the globe from pakistan but also from east africa and southeast asia from europe and the gulf and that s why we re applying focused and relentless pressure on al qaeda by sharing more intelligence strengthening the capacity of our partners disrupting terrorist financing cutting off supply chains and inflicting major losses on al qaeda s leadership it should now be clear the united states and our partners have sent an unmistakable message we will target al qaeda wherever they take root we will not yield in our pursuit and we are developing the capacity and the cooperation to deny a safe haven to any who threaten america and its allies we also know that success against al qaeda must go beyond destroying their network it must be about the future that we want to build as well and that s why we re putting forward a positive vision of american leadership around the world one where we lead by example and engage nations and peoples on the basis of mutual interest and mutual respect as one counterterrorism expert recently observed because of our efforts al qaeda and its allies have not only lost operational capacity they ve lost legitimacy and credibility of course nobody does a better job of discrediting al qaeda than al qaeda itself which has killed men and women and children of many faiths in many nations and which has absolutely no positive future to offer the people of the world so even as we target al qaeda and its bankrupt vision we also know that we have to be vigilant in defending our people at home and that takes aggressive intelligence collection and skillful analysis and that demands the effective and efficient coordination between federal government and our state and local partners and that s what we ve seen from you in recent years we ve seen your success here in america in the last several weeks you ve stayed vigilant you watched for signs you stitched together the intelligence you worked together across organizations as one team and then arrests in denver and new york and still more in illinois and texas have made us safer so i say to every american you see the headlines but here are some of the people who help write them who keep you safe and i say to all of you you are setting the standard you re showing us what focused and integrated counterterrorism really looks like and the record of your service is written in the attacks that never occur because you thwarted them and in the countless americans who are alive today because you saved them for that america is in your debt of course you know that we re facing determined adversaries who are resourceful who are resilient and who are still plotting and no one can ever promise that there won t be another attack on american soil but i can promise you this i pledge to do everything in my power as president to keep america safe and i pledge to give all of you the tools and support you need to get the job done around the world and here at home and i pledge to stay focused on that mission just as you stay focused on your mission so we all have to redouble our efforts in the face of a threat that persists we re going to have to draw strength from the values that we hold dear we must keep our eye fixed on the world we seek to build one that defeats our adversaries but that also promotes dignity and opportunity and justice for all who stand with us to do that we need you to keep standing and serving together every agency every department every branch every level one team one mission that s how we re going to prevail in this fight and that s how we re going to protect this country that we all love so thanks to all of you continue the outstanding work god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you very much dem bobama6 12 09 barack_obama thank you on behalf of michelle and myself welcome to the white house thank you this a season of joy tradition and celebration yes and today it is our great joy to continue a white house holiday tradition a celebration of performers who have transformed the arts in america our extraordinary kennedy center honorees we are joined by speaker nancy pelosi members of congress and members of the kennedy family i see sprinkled through the crowd some pretty fancy company as well you ve got the queen of soul you ve got martin scorsese he knows a little bit about film making and my spectacular first lady is here as well i especially want to thank the man who created these honors more than three decades ago and who has produced them ever since and whom i was proud to name as co chair of the president s committee on the arts and humanities george stevens jr george and i want to also thank stephen schwarzman and the kennedy center trustees as well as president michael kaiser and all those who sustain president kennedy s vision of a great stage celebrating the best coming from this country and abroad these performers are indeed the best they are also living reminders of a simple truth and i m going to steal a line from michelle here the arts are not somehow apart from our national life the arts are at the heart of our national life in times of war and sacrifice the arts and these artists remind us to sing and to laugh and to live in times of plenty they challenge our conscience and implore us to remember the least among us in moments of division or doubt they compel us to see the common values that we share the ideals to which we aspire even if we sometimes fall short in days of hardship they renew our hope that brighter days are still ahead so let s never forget that art strengthens america and that s why we re making sure that america strengthens its arts it s why we re reenergizing the national endowment of the arts that s why we re helping to sustain jobs in arts communities across the country it s why we re supporting arts education in our schools and why michelle and i have hosted students here at the white house to experience the best of american poetry and music and it s why we re honored to celebrate these five remarkable performers who for decades have helped to sustain and strengthen the american spirit you can t understand america without understanding jazz and you can t understand jazz without understanding dave brubeck his mother was a classical pianist with high hopes for her son and by the time he was four he was playing himself but by the time he was a teenager he was tearing up local honky tonks even his mother had to admit there is some hope for david after all and perhaps it was world war ii his service in patton s army that changed his sound forcing him as he said to work the war out of his system by playing some pretty vicious piano whatever it was his sound the distinctive harmonies and improvisations of the dave brubeck quartet would change jazz forever prompting time magazine to put him on the cover as the leader of a new jazz age having brought jazz into the mainstream he then transformed it with innovative new rhythms on albums like time out the first jazz album to ever sell more than a million copies and still one of the best selling jazz albums of all time dave brubeck has never stopped reaching new audiences performing for presidents from johnson to reagan composing orchestral tributes to martin luther king and pope john paul ii and even in his 80s dazzling jazz festivals across america and i know personally how powerful his performances can be i mentioned this to dave backstage in the few weeks that i spent with my father as a child he came to visit me for about a month when i was young one of the things he did was to take me to my first jazz concert in honolulu hawaii in 1971 and it was a dave brubeck concert and i ve been a jazz fan ever since the world that he opened up for a 10 year old boy was spectacular and dave for the joy that you ve given millions of jazz lovers like me for your six decades of revolutionary rhythms you are rightly honored especially today on your 89th birthday he was born melvin kaminsky he s still messing it up mel mel i m trying to say something nice about you now please don t upstage me as you can tell he was born to entertain or as mel brooks explains it look at jewish history unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable so every 10 jews god designed one to be crazy and amuse the others according to mel by the time i was five i knew i was that one and by the time he was nine this boy from brooklyn had seen his first musical and dreamed of becoming the king of broadway but world war ii meant service in the army or as he put it the european theater of operations with lots of operations and very little theater returning home he found success cranking out quips for sid ceasar or as mel described his reaction to success panic hysteria insomniaand years of psychoanalysis that s right we re reading back all your golden moments here mel unfortunately many of the punch lines that have defined mel brooks success cannot be repeated here i was telling him that i went to see blazing saddles when i was 10 and he pointed out that i think according to the ratings i should not have been allowed in the theater that s true i think i had a fake id but the statute of limitations has passed suffice it to say in his satires and parodies no cow is sacred no genre is safe he mocked the musical and hitler in the producers the western in blazing saddles and the horror film in young frankenstein but behind all the insanity and absurdity there s been a method to mel s madness he s described his work as unearthing the truth that is all around us and by illuminating uncomfortable truths about racism and sexism and anti semitism he s been called our jester asking us to see ourselves as we really are determined that we laugh ourselves sane for this he is one of the few people ever to receive an emmy and a grammy and an oscar and a tony writer director actor producer composerfor his success and for his psychoanalysis we honor mel brooks reflecting on the challenge of finding one s voice grace bumbry once said god has already planted that in your throat it s your job to free it up to allow that beautiful thing to shine through true to her name grace allowed her voice to shine through and touch all those within its range around her family s piano in st louis on the talent show where as a teenager she moved the host to tears and then after being turned away from one music school because of the color of her skin her triumphant international debut at the paris opera when she was just 23 years old with a pitch and presence like no other she became a global sensation moving audiences at the great opera houses of the world and performing here at the white house it was said that she moved jacqueline kennedy to lean over and gently sing along the words to the president defying every expectation grace bumbry then made the transition from mezzo to soprano and over the decades that followed she displayed a range like few others sometimes the middle ranges as a mezzo sometimes the highs of a soprano sometimes both in the same performance grace not only triumphed in different techniques she transformed them and though she gave her final operatic performance in 1997 she appears in recitals to this day after nearly 50 years she remains the definition of a diva in the classical sense a divine voice worthy of the heavens and tonight 32 years after she performed at the first kennedy center honors for her mentor marian anderson we honor grace bumbry growing up in new york city s little italy bobby de niro always knew what he wanted to be coming home from the movies he d act out the parts at age 10 in his school play he made a rather unlikely debut in the wizard of oz as the cowardly lion he has said my joy as an actor is to live different lives and in more than 60 films spanning more than 40 years robert de niro has lived some of the most iconic and intense characters ever portrayed on film a dying baseball player in bang the drum slowly a young vito corleone in the godfather part ii a deranged taxi driver a troubled veteran in the deer hunter a brutal boxer in raging bull a vengeful ex con in cape fear let s hope that martin scorsese was kidding when he said that robert is full of something that he wanted to express don t worry we did a vet on him before he came in tonight but alongside his oscar winning emotional audacity there s his versatility from a coma patient in awakenings to an ever possessive father in meet the parents there s his legendary method not simply portraying characters but becoming them emotionally and physically and there is his love for his city whether it s directing films like a bronx tale or founding the film center and festival that has energized the arts in new york city it is perhaps the great irony of his life one of america s greatest cinematic actors is a man famously of few words off the screen and i can attest to this so i ll simply say thank you robert de niro finally we honor the quiet kid from jersey who grew up to become the rock n roll laureate of a generation for in the life of our country only a handful of people have tapped the full power of music to tell the real american story with honesty from the heart and one of those people is bruce springsteen he has said i ve always believed that people listen to your music not to find out about you but to find out about themselves and for more than three decades in his songs of dreams and despair of struggle and hope hardworking folks have seen themselves they ve seen their great state of new jersey and they ve seen their america in songs that become anthems restless kids who were born to run the struggles of workers in my hometown the sacrifices of vets who were born in the u s a love and loss in streets of philadelphia a resilient nation in the rising and this year a country working on a dream it s no wonder that his tours are not so much concerts but communions there s a place for everybody the sense that no matter who you are or what you do everyone deserves their shot at the american dream everybody deserves a little bit of dignity everybody deserves to be heard i ve seen it myself bruce was a great fan a great friend over the last year and when i watched him on the steps of the lincoln memorial when he rocked the national mall before my inauguration i thought it captured as well as anything the spirit of what america should be about on a day like that and today i remember i m the president but he s the boss and bruce continues to inspire along with his house rocking earth shaking e street band at 60 years old he s still filling stadiums still whipping fans into a frenzy still surfing the crowd still jumping off pianos and still reaching new fans and still being nominated for grammys it s been a long road from that stage at stone pony in asbury park to this stage today but this much we know after more than 30 years and 120 million albums sold bruce springsteen is still one cool rockin daddy dave brubeck mel brooks grace bumbry robert de niro bruce springsteen their stories are their own but the part that they play in the larger american story that s what we honor here tonight what they say is that with respect for the past we can keep strong the traditions and values that enrich us all that with confidence in the present and in ourselves we can overcome whatever comes our way and that with faith in the future america s greatest glory days are still to come so thank you to all of our honorees thank you all very much for the joy and the beauty that you ve contributed to our lives we are very grateful thank you dem bobama6 3 09 barack_obama thank you very much please everybody have a seat thank you so much well what a wonderful reception thank you very much i want to begin by thanking mayor coleman director brown and the entire columbus police force for inviting me to be a part of this ceremony it is a great honor and a privilege to stand with the men and women of this police academy s 114th graduating class you have studied hard you have trained tirelessly and there is no longer any doubt that you will be employed as officers of the law when you leave here today i also want to just very quickly acknowledge one of the finest governors in the country who s been just dealing with all kinds of stuff and doing it with grace and aplomb and never breaks a sweat but is working hard on behalf of his constituency ted strickland the attorney general of the united states eric holder i came out here with a number of members of the ohio congressional delegation but i want to make a special note of my former colleague when i was in the senate who is just as passionate about working people as anybody in the country sherrod brown give sherrod a big round of applause this city of columbus needs the courage and the commitment of this graduating class to keep it safe to make sure that people have the protection that they need this economy needs your employment to keep it running just this morning we learned that we lost another 651 000 jobs throughout the country in the month of february alone which brings the total number of jobs lost in this recession to an astounding 4 4 million four point four million jobs i don t need to tell the people of this state what statistics like this mean because so many of you have been watching jobs disappear long before this recession hit and i don t need to tell this graduating class what it s like to know that your job might be next because up until a few weeks ago that is precisely the future that this class faced a future that millions of americans still face right now well that is not a future i accept for the united states of america that is why i signed the american recovery and reinvestment act into law now there were those there were those who argued that our recovery plan was unwise and unnecessary they opposed the very notion that government has a role in ending the cycle of job loss at the heart of this recession there are those who believe that all we can do is repeat the very same policies that led us here in the first place but i also know that this country has never responded to a crisis by sitting on the sidelines and hoping for the best i know that throughout our history we have met every great challenge with bold action and big ideas that s what s fueled a shared and lasting prosperity and i know that at this defining moment for america we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our children to do it once again we have a responsibility to act and that s what i intend to do as president of the united states of america so for those who still doubt the wisdom of our recovery plan i ask them to talk to the teachers who are still able to teach our children because we passed this plan i ask them to talk to the nurses who are still able to care for our sick and the firefighters and first responders who will still be able to keep our communities safe i ask them to come to ohio and meet the 25 men and women who will soon be protecting the streets of columbus because we passed this plan i look at these young men and women i look into their eyes and i see their badges today and i know we did the right thing these jobs and the jobs of so many other police officers and teachers and firefighters all across ohio will now be saved because of this recovery plan a plan that will also create jobs in every corner of this state last week we announced that ohio would receive 128 million that will put people to work renovating and rebuilding affordable housing on tuesday on tuesday i announced that we d be sending another 935 million to ohio that will create jobs rebuilding our roads our bridges and our highways and yesterday vice president biden announced 180 million for this state that will go towards expanding mass transit and buying fuel efficient buses money that will be putting people to work getting people to work altogether this recovery plan will save and create over three and a half million american jobs over the next two years because of this plan those who have lost their jobs in this recession will be able to receive extended unemployment benefits and continued health care coverage because of this plan 95 percent of working americans will receive a tax break that you will see in your paychecks starting on april 1st and because of this plan stories like the one we re celebrating here in columbus will soon take place all across this nation today i m pleased to announce that attorney general eric holder and the department of justice are making available 2 billion in justice assistance grants from the recovery act that s funding that will help communities throughout america keep their neighborhoods safer with more cops more prosecutors more probation officers more radios and equipment more help for crime victims and more crime prevention programs for youth cities and states can apply for these funds right away and as soon as those applications are received the justice department will start getting the money out the door within 15 days in savannah georgia the police department would use this funding to hire more crime and intelligence analysts and put more cops on the beat protecting our schools in long beach california it will be able to help fund 17 000 hours of overtime for law enforcement officials who are needed in high crime areas west haven connecticut will be able to restore crime prevention programs that were cut even though they improved the quality of life in the city s most troubled neighborhoods and the state of iowa will be able to rehire drug enforcement officers and restart drug prevention programs that have been critical in fighting the crime and violence that plagues too many cities and too many towns so the list goes on and on from maine to san francisco from colorado to new jersey these grants will put americans to work doing the work necessary to keep america safe they ll be directed only towards worthy programs that have been carefully planned and proven to work and vice president biden and i will be holding every state and community accountable for the tax dollars they spend now by itself this recovery plan won t turn our economy around or solve every problem in the flight over here with the ohio delegation i talked to them about the fact that we ve got big challenges ahead of us we inherited a big mess this police force still faces budget challenges down the road there are still workers in columbus who are losing their jobs and there is still so much work to be done throughout ohio to lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity that s the work we must continue in the days and months ahead that s why my administration is also moving quickly and aggressively to restart lending for families and businesses to help responsible homeowners pay their mortgages and refinance their homes to address the major economic challenges of our time the cost of health care our dependence on foreign oil the state of our schools all of this takes time and it will take patience it will entail great effort and cooperation but most of all it will require a renewed sense of responsibility from every american a responsibility to ourselves and one another a responsibility that s already been demonstrated by the men and women who are sitting behind me here today the job you signed up for is not easy it can mean long shifts and late nights it demands focus and determination and great bravery in the face of unknown dangers when you run into that building or chase down that suspect you will be risking your own life in order to protect the lives of men and women you have never met and some that you may never know but you knew all that when you joined the academy you knew the risks involved you knew the sacrifices required and yet you stood up and said i ll take that risk i ll make that sacrifice i will do that job and that columbus is the very essence of responsibility that s the spirit we need in this country right now no matter what our role is or what our profession that we ve chosen it s a spirit that asks us to look beyond our own individual ambitions to the wider obligations we have as the good citizens of a great nation a spirit that calls on us to say i ll make that sacrifice i ll do that job if we can summon that spirit once more if we re willing to look out for one another and listen to one another if we are willing to pull together and do our part if we can show even a fraction of the courage and selflessness that these cadets have already demonstrated then i have no doubt that we will emerge from this crisis stronger than before and keep this nation s dream alive for future generations thank you god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama6 4 09 barack_obama mr speaker madam deputy speaker distinguished members i am honored to speak in this chamber and i am committed to renewing the alliance between our nations and the friendship between our people this is my first trip overseas as president of the united states i ve been to the g20 summit in london and the nato summit in strasbourg and the european union summit in prague some people have asked me if i chose to continue my travels to ankara and istanbul to send a message to the world and my answer is simple evet yes turkey is a critical ally turkey is an important part of europe and turkey and the united states must stand together and work together to overcome the challenges of our time this morning i had the great privilege of visiting the tomb of your extraordinary founder of your republic and i was deeply impressed by this beautiful memorial to a man who did so much to shape the course of history but it is also clear that the greatest monument to ataturk s life is not something that can be cast in stone and marble his greatest legacy is turkey s strong vibrant secular democracy and that is the work that this assembly carries on today this future was not easily assured it was not guaranteed at the end of world war i turkey could have succumbed to the foreign powers that were trying to claim its territory or sought to restore an ancient empire but turkey chose a different future you freed yourself from foreign control and you founded a republic that commands the respect of the united states and the wider world and there is a simple truth to this story turkey s democracy is your own achievement it was not forced upon you by any outside power nor did it come without struggle and sacrifice turkey draws strength from both the successes of the past and from the efforts of each generation of turks that makes new progress for your people now my country s democracy has its own story the general who led america in revolution and governed as our first president was as many of you know george washington and like you we built a grand monument to honor our founding father a towering obelisk that stands in the heart of the capital city that bears washington s name i can see the washington monument from the window of the white house every day it took decades to build there were frequent delays over time more and more people contributed to help make this monument the inspiring structure that still stands tall today among those who came to our aid were friends from all across the world who offered their own tributes to washington and the country he helped to found and one of those tributes came from istanbul ottoman sultan abdulmecid sent a marble plaque that helped to build the washington monument inscribed in the plaque was a poem that began with a few simple words so as to strengthen the friendship between the two countries over 150 years have passed since those words were carved into marble our nations have changed in many ways but our friendship is strong and our alliance endures it is a friendship that flourished in the years after world war ii when president truman committed our nation to the defense of turkey s freedom and sovereignty and turkey committed itself into the nato alliance turkish troops have served by our side from korea to kosovo to kabul together we withstood the great test of the cold war trade between our nations has steadily advanced so has cooperation in science and research the ties among our people have deepened as well and more and more americans of turkish origin live and work and succeed within our borders and as a basketball fan i ve even noticed that hedo turkoglu and mehmet okur have got some pretty good basketball games the united states and turkey have not always agreed on every issue and that s to be expected no two nations do but we have stood together through many challenges over the last 60 years and because of the strength of our alliance and the endurance of our friendship both america and turkey are stronger and the world is more secure now our two democracies are confronted by an unprecedented set of challenges an economic crisis that recognizes no borders extremism that leads to the killing of innocent men and women and children strains on our energy supply and a changing climate the proliferation of the world s deadliest weapons and the persistence of tragic conflict these are the great tests of our young century and the choices that we make in the coming years will determine whether the future will be shaped by fear or by freedom by poverty or by prosperity by strife or by a just secure and lasting peace this much is certain no one nation can confront these challenges alone and all nations have a stake in overcoming them that is why we must listen to one another and seek common ground that is why we must build on our mutual interests and rise above our differences we are stronger when we act together that is the message that i ve carried with me throughout this trip to europe that is the message that i delivered when i had the privilege of meeting with your president and with your prime minister that will be the approach of the united states of america going forward already america and turkey are working with the g20 on an unprecedented response to an unprecedented economic crisis now this past week we came together to ensure that the world s largest economies take strong and coordinated action to stimulate growth and restore the flow of credit to reject the pressures of protectionism and to extend a hand to developing countries and the people hit hardest by this downturn and to dramatically reform our regulatory system so that the world never faces a crisis like this again as we go forward the united states and turkey can pursue many opportunities to serve prosperity for our people the president and i this morning talked about expanding the ties of commerce and trade there s enormous opportunity when it comes to energy to create jobs and we can increase new sources to not only free ourselves from dependence of other energies other countries energy sources but also to combat climate change we should build on our clean technology fund to leverage efficiency and renewable energy investments in turkey and to power markets in turkey and europe the united states will continue to support your central role as an east west corridor for oil and natural gas this economic cooperation only reinforces the common security that europe and the united states share with turkey as a nato ally and the common values that we share as democracies so in meeting the challenges of the 21st century we must seek the strength of a europe that is truly united peaceful and free so let me be clear the united states strongly supports turkey s bid to become a member of the european union we speak not as members of the eu but as close friends of both turkey and europe turkey has been a resolute ally and a responsible partner in transatlantic and european institutions turkey is bound to europe by more than the bridges over the bosphorous centuries of shared history culture and commerce bring you together europe gains by the diversity of ethnicity tradition and faith it is not diminished by it and turkish membership would broaden and strengthen europe s foundation once more now of course turkey has its own responsibilities and you ve made important progress towards membership but i also know that turkey has pursued difficult political reforms not simply because it s good for eu membership but because it s right for turkey in the last several years you ve abolished state security courts you ve expanded the right to counsel you ve reformed the penal code and strengthened laws that govern the freedom of the press and assembly you ve lifted bans on teaching and broadcasting kurdish and the world noted with respect the important signal sent through a new state kurdish television station these achievements have created new laws that must be implemented and a momentum that should be sustained for democracies cannot be static they must move forward freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state which is why steps like reopening halki seminary will send such an important signal inside turkey and beyond an enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people robust minority rights let societies benefit from the full measure of contributions from all citizens i say this as the president of a country that not very long ago made it hard for somebody who looks like me to vote much less be president of the united states but it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation this work is never over that s why in the united states we recently ordered the prison at guantanamo bay closed that s why we prohibited without exception or equivocation the use of torture all of us have to change and sometimes change is hard another issue that confronts all democracies as they move to the future is how we deal with the past the united states is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history facing the washington monument that i spoke of is a memorial of abraham lincoln the man who freed those who were enslaved even after washington led our revolution our country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation the past treatment of native americans human endeavor is by its nature imperfect history is often tragic but unresolved it can be a heavy weight each country must work through its past and reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future i know there s strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915 and while there s been a good deal of commentary about my views it s really about how the turkish and armenian people deal with the past and the best way forward for the turkish and armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest open and constructive we ve already seen historic and courageous steps taken by turkish and armenian leaders these contacts hold out the promise of a new day an open border would return the turkish and armenian people to a peaceful and prosperous coexistence that would serve both of your nations so i want you to know that the united states strongly supports the full normalization of relations between turkey and armenia it is a cause worth working towards it speaks to turkey s leadership that you are poised to be the only country in the region to have normal and peaceful relations with all the south caucasus nations and to advance that peace you can play a constructive role in helping to resolve the nagorno karabakh conflict which has continued for far too long advancing peace also includes the disputes that persist in the eastern mediterranean and here there s a cause for hope the two cypriot leaders have an opportunity through their commitment to negotiations under the united nations good offices mission the united states is willing to offer all the help sought by the parties as they work towards a just and lasting settlement that reunifies cyprus into a bizonal and bicommunal federation these efforts speak to one part of the critical region that surrounds turkey and when we consider the challenges before us on issue after issue we share common goals in the middle east we share the goal of a lasting peace between israel and its neighbors let me be clear the united states strongly supports the goal of two states israel and palestine living side by side in peace and security that is a goal shared by palestinians israelis and people of goodwill around the world that is a goal that the parties agreed to in the road map and at annapolis that is a goal that i will actively pursue as president of the united states we know the road ahead will be difficult both israelis and palestinians must take steps that are necessary to build confidence and trust both israelis and palestinians both must live up to the commitments they have made both must overcome longstanding passions and the politics of the moment to make progress towards a secure and lasting peace the united states and turkey can help the palestinians and israelis make this journey like the united states turkey has been a friend and partner in israel s quest for security and like the united states you seek a future of opportunity and statehood for the palestinians so now working together we must not give into pessimism and mistrust we must pursue every opportunity for progress as you ve done by supporting negotiations between syria and israel we must extend a hand to those palestinians who are in need while helping them strengthen their own institutions we must reject the use of terror and recognize that israel s security concerns are legitimate the peace of the region will also be advanced if iran forgoes any nuclear weapons ambitions now as i made clear in prague yesterday no one is served by the spread of nuclear weapons least of all turkey you live in a difficult region and a nuclear arm race would not serve the security of this nation well this part of the world has known enough violence it has known enough hatred it does not need a race for an ever more powerful tool of destruction now i have made it clear to the people and leaders of the islamic republic of iran that the united states seeks engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect we want iran to play its rightful role in the community of nations iran is a great civilization we want them to engage in the economic and political integration that brings prosperity and security but iran s leaders must choose whether they will try to build a weapon or build a better future for their people so both turkey and the united states support a secure and united iraq that does not serve as a safe haven for terrorists i know there were differences about whether to go to war there were differences within my own country as well but now we must come together as we end this war responsibly because the future of iraq is inseparable from the future of the broader region as i ve already announced and many of you are aware the united states will remove our combat brigades by the end of next august while working with the iraqi government as they take responsibility for security and we will work with iraq turkey and all iraq s neighbors to forge a new dialogue that reconciles differences and advances our common security make no mistake though iraq turkey and the united states face a common threat from terrorism that includes the al qaeda terrorists who have sought to drive iraqis apart and destroy their country that includes the pkk there is no excuse for terror against any nation as president and as a nato ally i pledge that you will have our support against the terrorist activities of the pkk or anyone else these efforts will be strengthened by the continued work to build ties of cooperation between turkey the iraqi government and iraq s kurdish leaders and by your continued efforts to promote education and opportunity and democracy for the kurdish population here inside turkey finally we share the common goal of denying al qaeda a safe haven in pakistan or afghanistan the world has come too far to let this region backslide and to let al qaeda terrorists plot further attacks that s why we are committed to a more focused effort to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda that is why we are increasing our efforts to train afghans to sustain their own security and to reconcile former adversaries that s why we are increasing our support for the people of afghanistan and pakistan so that we stand on the side not only of security but also of opportunity and the promise of a better life turkey has been a true partner your troops were among the first in the international security assistance force you have sacrificed much in this endeavor now we must achieve our goals together i appreciate that you ve offered to help us train and support afghan security forces and expand opportunity across the region together we can rise to meet this challenge like we have so many before i know there have been difficulties these last few years i know that the trust that binds the united states and turkey has been strained and i know that strain is shared in many places where the muslim faith is practiced so let me say this as clearly as i can the united states is not and will never be at war with islam in fact our partnership with the muslim world is critical not just in rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject but also to strengthen opportunity for all its people i also want to be clear that america s relationship with the muslim community the muslim world cannot and will not just be based upon opposition to terrorism we seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect we will listen carefully we will bridge misunderstandings and we will seek common ground we will be respectful even when we do not agree we will convey our deep appreciation for the islamic faith which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world including in my own country the united states has been enriched by muslim americans many other americans have muslims in their families or have lived in a muslim majority country i know because i am one of them above all above all we will demonstrate through actions our commitment to a better future i want to help more children get the education that they need to succeed we want to promote health care in places where people are vulnerable we want to expand the trade and investment that can bring prosperity for all people in the months ahead i will present specific programs to advance these goals our focus will be on what we can do in partnership with people across the muslim world to advance our common hopes and our common dreams and when people look back on this time let it be said of america that we extended the hand of friendship to all people there s an old turkish proverb you cannot put out fire with flames america knows this turkey knows this there s some who must be met by force they will not compromise but force alone cannot solve our problems and it is no alternative to extremism the future must belong to those who create not those who destroy that is the future we must work for and we must work for it together i know there are those who like to debate turkey s future they see your country at the crossroads of continents and touched by the currents of history they know that this has been a place where civilizations meet and different peoples come together they wonder whether you will be pulled in one direction or another but i believe here is what they don t understand turkey s greatness lies in your ability to be at the center of things this is not where east and west divide this is where they come together in the beauty of your culture in the richness of your history in the strength of your democracy in your hopes for tomorrow i am honored to stand here with you to look forward to the future that we must reach for together and to reaffirm america s commitment to our strong and enduring friendship thank you very much thank you thank you dem bobama6 4 10 barack_obama good morning everybody thank you please have a seat have a seat what a great honor and pleasure it is to have all of you here today before i begin i want to just acknowledge two members of my cabinet who i believe are here secretary gary locke is that correct where s gary there he is our commerce secretary and secretary janet napolitano who s keeping us safe each and every day i also want to acknowledge the mount ennon clinton children s chorus for being here they re going to be giving us a medley later on there they are up there looking very serious before i begin i want to send my deepest condolences our thoughts and prayers to the families and the friends of the workers who lost their lives after an explosion took place in a west virginia mine yesterday at this moment there are still people missing there are rescue teams that are searching tirelessly and courageously to find them i spoke with governor manchin of west virginia last night and told him that the federal government stands ready to offer whatever assistance is needed in this rescue effort so i would ask the faithful who ve gathered here this morning to pray for the safe return of the missing the men and women who put their lives on the line to save them and the souls of those who have been lost in this tragic accident may they rest in peace and may their families find comfort in the hard days ahead one of my hopes upon taking this office was to make the white house a place where all people would feel welcome to that end we held a seder here to mark the first passover we held an iftar here with muslim americans to break the daily fast during ramadan and today i m particularly blessed to welcome you my brothers and sisters in christ for this easter breakfast with us are christian leaders from all across america men and women who lead small town churches and big city congregations and major organizations in service of others folks whose sermons are heard and whose examples are followed by millions all across the country so i wanted to join you for a brief moment today to continue the easter celebration of our risen savior and to reflect on the work to which his promise calls all of us i can t tell any of you anything about easter that you don t already know i can t shed light on centuries of scriptural interpretation or bring any new understandings to those of you who reflect on easter s meaning each and every year and each and every day but what i can do is tell you what draws me to this holy day and what lesson i take from christ s sacrifice and what inspires me about the story of the resurrection for even after the passage of 2 000 years we can still picture the moment in our mind s eye the young man from nazareth marched through jerusalem object of scorn and derision and abuse and torture by an empire the agony of crucifixion amid the cries of thieves the discovery just three days later that would forever alter our world that the son of man was not to be found in his tomb and that jesus christ had risen we are awed by the grace he showed even to those who would have killed him we are thankful for the sacrifice he gave for the sins of humanity and we glory in the promise of redemption in the resurrection and such a promise is one of life s great blessings because as i am continually learning we are each of us imperfect each of us errs by accident or by design each of us falls short of how we ought to live and selfishness and pride are vices that afflict us all it s not easy to purge these afflictions to achieve redemption but as christians we believe that redemption can be delivered by faith in jesus christ and the possibility of redemption can make straight the crookedness of a character make whole the incompleteness of a soul redemption makes life however fleeting here on earth resound with eternal hope of all the stories passed down through the gospels this one in particular speaks to me during this season and i think of hanging watching christ hang from the cross enduring the final seconds of his passion he summoned what remained of his strength to utter a few last words before he breathed his last breath father he said into your hands i commit my spirit father into your hands i commit my spirit these words were spoken by our lord and savior but they can just as truly be spoken by every one of us here today their meaning can just as truly be lived out by all of god s children so on this day let us commit our spirit to the pursuit of a life that is true to act justly and to love mercy and walk humbly with the lord and when we falter as we will let redemption through commitment and through perseverance and through faith be our abiding hope and fervent prayer many of you are living out that commitment every day so we want to honor you through this brief program celebrating both the meaning of easter and the spirit of service that embodies so much of your work and our first celebrant today is reverend dr cynthia hale who will deliver our opening prayer thank you all for being here dem bobama6 7 10 barack_obama good evening everybody on behalf of michelle and myself and the girls and bo welcome to the white house and happy fourth of july all across our great country today folks are coming together decked out in their red and white and blue firing up the grill having a good time with family just like here today now of course i ll admit that the backyard is a little bigger here but it s the same spirit and michelle and i couldn t imagine a better way to celebrate america s birthday than with america s extraordinary men and women in uniform and your families now we decided to let you leave your uniforms at home although i have to say i met a young corporal here who was wearing a black suit and i said man it s hot here he said i m sorry sir i know you re my commander in chief but my grandma told me i had to wear a suit i can t you can t argue with grandma but we do want all of you to relax and have some fun today and that also goes for the leaders who are joining us here today including deputy secretary of defense bill lynn the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff general jim hoss cartwright navy secretary ray mabus air force secretary mike donley coast guard commandant admiral robert papp and the many outstanding senior enlisted officers who are here today i want to acknowledge that my vice president joe biden and his wonderful wife dr jill biden aren t with us because they re spending the fourth of july with our troops in iraq and i would add that because of the honor and heroism of our troops we are poised to end our combat mission in iraq this summer on schedule that s thanks to so many of you now this is the day when we celebrate the very essence of america and the spirit they re coming this is the day when we celebrate the very essence of america and the spirit that has defined us as a people and as a nation for more than two centuries even now all these years later we still look in awe at the small band of patriots who stood up and risked everything and defied an empire to declare that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states we re amazed at the debt to a founding generation that gave their blood to give meaning to those words pledging to each other their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor and we celebrate the principles that are timeless tenets first declared by men of property and wealth but which gave rise to what lincoln called a new birth of freedom in america civil rights and voting rights workers rights and women s rights and the rights of every american and on this day that is uniquely american we re reminded that our declaration our example made us a beacon to the world not only inspiring people to demand their own freedom from latin american to africa from europe to asia but even now in this time these ideals still light the world two hundred and thirty four years later the words are just as bold just as revolutionary as they were when they were first pronounced we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness these are not simply words on aging parchment they are the principles that define us as a nation the values we cherish as a people and the ideals we strive for as a society even as we know that we constantly have to work in order to perfect our union and that work is never truly done the founders understood this there in that hall in philadelphia as they debated the declaration john adams wrote to his beloved abigail he predicted that independence would be celebrated from one end of the continent to the other from this time forward forever but he added i am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration and support and defend these states so today we also celebrate all of you the men and women of our armed forces who defend this country we love we salute the united states army including a soldier who served on more than 150 combat missions in afghanistan and after losing most of his arm in an ied attack recently completed a grueling 26 mile run inspiring all who know him and all of us that s staff sergeant gabriel garcia gabriel we salute the united states navy and a sailor who excels in a job few can imagine but for which all are grateful a commander of an explosive ordinance disposal team in iraq his nerve and steady hand has diffused countless bombs and saved countless lives that s lieutenant erich frandrup where s erich we salute the united states air force and an airman who during an attack on her vehicle in iraq that left her seriously wounded directed medics to help another wounded american first and offered her own bandages to help save his life that s captain wendy kosek we salute the united states marine corps and a marine who for his heroic actions in afghanistan exposing himself to enemy machine gunfire to help rescue his fellow marines was recognized with the bronze star for valor staff sergeant jonathan piel and we salute the united states coast guard including a coast guardsman who commanded the first u s vessel to arrive in haiti after the earthquake helping to pave the way for the one of the most complex humanitarian efforts ever attempted commander diane durham this is the spirit of which adams spoke so long ago you are the men and women who toil to defend these states you are patriots and you have earned your place among the greatest of generations yet on this day we know that america s journey is not sustained by those in uniform alone it must be the calling and cause of every american so let us ensure that our troops always have the support that they need to succeed in the missions we ask of them and that includes public support here at home let us forge a national commitment to support our extraordinary military families not just now during war but at every stage of your lives and thanks to michelle and jill biden for challenging us to do just that let us resolve as citizens to carry on the improbable experiment that began more than 200 years ago not simply declaring our principles but living them here at home not simply celebrating our union but always working to perfect it and here in a still young century let us renew our commitment to stand with those around the world who like us still believe in that simple yet revolutionary notion that we are all endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights so happy fourth of july everybody god bless all of you and all our men and women in uniform and your families and god bless the united states of america and with that let me turn it over to our outstanding united states marine band dem bobama6 8 10a barack_obama this is a good day good afternoon everybody welcome to the white house i am pleased that all of you could be here today as we celebrate the next member of our nation s highest court and while she may be feeling a twinge of sadness about giving up the title of general a cool title i think we can all agree that justice elena kagan has a pretty nice ring to it we are very honored to be joined today by two of elena s new colleagues justice ruth bader ginsburg and justice anthony kennedy and we re thankful for their presence justice kennedy assured me that he would keep justice kagan out of trouble and justice ginsburg assured me that she would get justice kagan into trouble so we ll see how that works out we re also pleased to have several members of congress as well as our cabinet here today and of course members of elena s family and thanks to all of you for your service and for taking time to be here today i also want to express my gratitude to our senate judiciary committee chairman senator leahy ranking member senator sessions majority leader reid and republican leader mcconnell for seeing to it that elena got a full fair and timely hearing after more than 80 one on one meetings and 17 hours of testimony i d say that the senate got a pretty good look at elena kagan they got a good sense of her judicial philosophy her commitment to the rule of law her rich understanding of our constitution and of course where she can be found on christmas day the bipartisan support she received in yesterday s vote is yet another example of the high esteem in which she s held by folks across the political spectrum there aren t many law school deans who receive standing ovations from both the federalist society and the american constitution society and i don t know too many folks whose fans include president clinton judge abner mikva and justice ginsburg as well as ken starr miguel estrada and justice scalia in fact i understand that justice scalia came to relish their spirited exchanges during elena s appearances before the court even after elena cheerfully informed him that he was and i quote wrong in his understanding of a recent case i m sure that was refreshing for him to hear these folks may not agree on much but they ve all been impressed as i have by elena s formidable intellect and path breaking career as an acclaimed scholar and presidential advisor as the first woman to serve as dean of the harvard law school and most recently as solicitor general they admire how while she could easily have settled into a comfortable practice in corporate law she chose instead to devote her life to public service they appreciate her even handedness and open mindedness and her excellent and often irreverent sense of humor these are traits that she happens to share with the last solicitor general who went on to become a supreme court justice one for whom elena clerked and whom she considers one of her heroes justice thurgood marshall and we are very proud to have justice marshall s widow here today joining us in a tribute she wrote after justice marshall s death elena recalled how she and her fellow clerks took turns standing guard when his casket lay in state at the supreme court and how 20 000 people stood in a line that stretched around the block to pay their respects they were people from every background and every walk of life black white rich and poor young and old many brought their children hoping to impress upon them the lessons of justice marshall s extraordinary life some left notes some left flowers one mourner left a worn slip opinion of brown v board of education it is to this day a moving reminder that the work of our highest court shapes not just the character of our democracy but the most fundamental aspects of our daily lives how we work how we worship whether we can speak freely and live fully whether those words put to paper more than two centuries ago will truly mean something for each of us in our time because as visionary as our founders were they did not presume to know exactly how the times would change and what new questions fate and history would set before us instead they sought to articulate principles that would be timeless ones that would accommodate the changing circumstances of our lives while preserving the rights and freedoms on which this country was founded today is one of those moments when you can t help but appreciate the extraordinary success of their efforts for nearly two centuries there wasn t a single woman on the supreme court when elena was a clerk there was just one but when she takes her seat on that bench for the first time in history there will be three women serving on our nation s highest court it is as justice ginsburg recently put it one of the most exhilarating developments a sign of progress that i relish not just as a father who wants limitless possibilities for my daughters but as an american proud that our supreme court will be a little more inclusive a little more representative more reflective of us as a people than ever before and it is yet another example of how our union has become more not less perfect over time more open more fair more free that s not just a matter of accident or chance while those founding truths about liberty and equality may have been self evident they are not self perpetuating and it is the members of our highest court who do the vital and constant work of ensuring that they endure and that s work that i am confident elena will carry out with integrity with humanity and an abiding commitment to the ideal inscribed above our courthouse doors equal justice under the law so it is now my great pleasure to introduce as our next supreme court justice elena kagan dem bobama6 8 10b barack_obama thank you everybody thank you please everybody have a seat it is wonderful to be here i want to acknowledge a couple folks who are present first of all we ve got representative eleanor holmes norton right here doing great work i want to thank mayor adrian fenty for being here we ve got local city council members who are here with us today and i want to finally make sure to acknowledge luc guy and neil brami the owner of gelberg signs i just had a chance to tour gelberg signs and see the outstanding work that they re doing this is the last sign making company in washington d c i just learned and the brami brothers their father worked here when they were young and they came to buy the company so it s a wonderful story of entrepreneurship and i ve been told that they don t argue as much now as they used to when they were kids that s the story i ve gotten but the work ethic the craftsmanship the entrepreneurialism of this company is an example of what makes our country so great and i really commend them for the fine company that they ve built i ll be speaking about the challenges facing small businesses like gelberg signs in a moment but first i want to say a word about where we are in our economy more broadly we know from economic statistics what the stories of america s families have been telling us for quite some time that the recession that we re still recovering from is the most serious downturn since the great depression we also know from studying the lessons of past recessions that climbing out of any recession much less a hole as deep as this one takes some time the road to recovery doesn t follow a straight line some sectors bounce back faster than others so what we need to do is keep pushing forward we can t go backwards this morning the department of labor released its monthly jobs report showing that july marked the seventh straight month of job creation in the private sector so jobs have been growing in the private sector for seven straight months july s jobs numbers reflect in part expected losses related to the census winding down but the fact is we ve now added private sector jobs every month this year instead of losing them as we did for the first seven months of last year and that s a good sign meanwhile our manufacturing sector that s been hit hard for as long as folks can remember has actually added 183 000 jobs so far this year that s the most robust seven months of manufacturing growth in over a decade just this morning there was a report about the growing trend of manufacturing plants returning to the united states from overseas instead of the other way around same time each of the big three automakers ford gm and chrysler two of which were on the verge of bankruptcy a little over a year ago a liquidation bankruptcy that would have destroyed those companies all three u s automakers are now posting a profit for the first time since 2004 and since they emerged from bankruptcy the auto industry as a whole has added 76 000 jobs so there s some good trends out there that s the good news but for america s workers families and small businesses progress needs to come faster our job is to make sure that happens not only to lay the foundation for private sector job creation but also to accelerate hiring to fuel the small businesses that are the engines of growth to speed our recovery so it reaches the people and places who need relief not a year from now not six months from now but now right now and that s why i welcomed the news earlier this week that after a lot of partisan bickering and delay the senate passed a bill that will not only keep at least 160 000 teachers in the classroom this fall who would otherwise be out of a job but will help states avoid making other painful layoffs of essential personnel like police and firefighters one of the areas where we ve been losing jobs even as we re gaining in manufacturing has actually been in state and local hiring because their budgets have been plummeting all the city council members are nodding here and so this bill will help speaker pelosi said she s going to bring the house back in session to pass this bill and as soon as they do i m ready to sign it into law we ve also got to look at industries of the future and that s why we re investing in a clean energy economy with the potential to create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country by spurring two private sector dollars for every tax dollar we invest strengthening our economy at the same time cleaning up our planet and making all of us more secure in the process and that s why it s so important to pass a jobs bill for america s small businesses small businesses are where most jobs in this country are created small businesses like the one i m visiting today gelberg signs now our small businesses were especially hard hit by this recession and many are having a tough time getting back on their feet but gelberg signs actually is doing pretty well and they re hopeful about the future and that s mainly because of the people who work here some of whom are standing with me today but it s also because we ve helped remove some of the obstacles that make it harder for small businesses like gelberg signs to grow and hire so for example they ve taken advantage of a new hiring tax credit we created that says small businesses don t have to pay a dime of payroll tax when they hire a worker who s been out of a job for at least 60 days so in fact almost half of the employees they ve hired this year qualified for that tax credit including one of the folks standing behind me today they ve also taken out what s called 7 loans that are guaranteed by the small business administration and that s a lifeline for many small businesses that help them pay off old debts buy new equipment and bring on more workers last year we took steps to cut fees and offer more robust guarantees on these loans and partly as a result the number of 7 loans offered to small businesses went up substantially but since these enhancements expired these loans have dried up leaving many small business owners in the lurch so the small business jobs bill that s being debated in congress right now would not only extend these successful policies but the bill would also more than double the size of the loans that small businesses like gelberg signs can take out it would create new small business lending funds to unlock credit for entrepreneurs it would provide new tax cuts to small businessmen and women who want to accelerate investment in their companies and in our economy this is the right thing to do we want gelberg signs not just to hang on we want you guys to thrive and to grow and to hire more and more workers and you know you create a great product you know you provide great service you stand behind what you do but sometimes it s hard to get financing sometimes you need some help in terms of cutting your tax burden that s what this bill does and yet a minority in the senate is standing in the way of giving our small businesspeople an up or down vote on this bill and that s a shame these kinds of delays mean contracts are being put off debts are adding up workers are going without a job and we can t afford it we need to do what s right not what s political and we need to do it right now we need to decide whether we re willing to do what s necessary to keep this economy moving in the right direction whether we re willing to rise above the election time games and come together all of us democrats and republicans and independents all of us coming together not just to pass a jobs bill that is going to help small businesses like this one hire and grow but also to secure a clean energy future and accelerate our recovery and rebuild our economy around three simple words made in america that is what i m committed to doing and that s what i hope members of both parties will join me in doing in the days ahead and beyond so congratulations to this outstanding company for the great work you re doing congratulations to the workers because ultimately you are what makes this company we want you to keep on growing and we want other companies like this one to keep on growing and we want the next generation of young entrepreneurs like these three brothers who ve got an idea to be able to buy a company and grow it just like they have that s our future that s what i m committed to doing and i appreciate all of you being such great models for what america is all about thank you very much everybody thank you dem bobama6 9 10 barack_obama hello milwaukee hello milwaukee thank you it is good to be back in milwaukee it is good to be i m almost home i just hop on the 94 and i m home take it all the way to the south side it is good it is good to be here on such a beautiful day happy labor day everybody i want to say thank you to the milwaukee area labor council and all of my brothers and sisters in the afl cio for inviting me to spend this day with you a day that belongs to the working men and women of america i want to acknowledge your outstanding national president a man who knows that a strong economy needs a strong labor movement rich trumka thank you to the president of wisconsin afl cio dave newby our host your area labor council secretary treasurer sheila cochran i hear it s sheila s birthday tomorrow where is she happy birthday sheila i m proud to be here with our secretary of labor a daughter of union members hilda solis and our secretary of transportation ray lahood is in the house and i want everybody to give it up for people who are at the forefront of every fight for wisconsin s working men and women senator herb kohl congresswoman gwen moore your outstanding mayor and i believe soon to be outstanding governor tom barrett is in the house and i know i know your other great senator russ feingold was here earlier standing with you and your families just like he always has now he s in his hometown of janesville to participate in their labor day parade so it is good to be back now of course this isn t my first time at laborfest some of you remember i stood right here with you two years ago when i was still a candidate for this office and during that campaign we talked about how for years the values of hard work and responsibility that had built this country had been given short shrift and how it was slowly hollowing out our middle class listen everybody who has a chair go ahead and sit down because everybody s all hollering just relax i m going to be talking for a while now everybody take got a lot of hardworking people here you deserve to sit down for a day you ve been on your feet all year working hard but two years ago we talked about some on wall street who were taking reckless risks and cutting corners to turn huge profits while working americans were fighting harder and harder just to stay afloat we talked about how the decks all too often were stacked in favor of special interests and against the interests of working americans and what we knew even then was that these years would be some of the most difficult in our history and then two weeks later two weeks after i spoke here the bottom fell out of the economy and middle class families suddenly found themselves swept up in the worst recession of our lifetimes so the problems facing working families they re nothing new but they are more serious than ever and that makes our cause more urgent than ever for generations it was the great american working class the great american middle class that made our economy the envy of the world it s got to be that way again milwaukee it was folks like you that built this city it was folks like you that built this state it was folks like you who forged that middle class all across the nation it was working men and women who made the 20th century the american century it was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today the 40 hour work week the minimum wage family leave health insurance social security medicare retirement plans the cornerstones of the middle class security all bear the union label and it was that greatest generation that built america into the greatest force of prosperity and opportunity and freedom that the world has ever known americans like my grandfather who went off to war just boys then returned home as men and then they traded in one uniform and set of responsibilities for another and americans like my grandmother who rolled up her sleeves and worked in a factory on the home front and when the war was over they studied under the gi bill and they bought a home under the fha and they raised families supported by good jobs that paid good wages with good benefits it was through my grandparents experience that i was brought up to believe that anything is possible in america but milwaukee they also knew the feeling when opportunity is pulled out from under you they grew up during the depression so they d tell me about seeing their fathers or their uncles losing jobs how it wasn t just the loss of a paycheck that hurt so bad it was the blow to their dignity their sense of self worth i ll bet a lot of us have seen people who ve been changed after a long bout of unemployment it can wear you down even if you ve got a strong spirit if you re out of work for a long time it can wear you down so my grandparents taught me early on that a job is about more than just a paycheck a paycheck is important but a job is about waking up every day with a sense of purpose and going to bed each night feeling you ve handled your responsibilities it s about meeting your responsibilities to yourself and to your family and to your community and i carried that lesson with me all those years ago when i got my start fighting for men and women on the south side of chicago after their local steel plant shut down and i carried that lesson with me through my time as a state senator and a u s senator and i carry that lesson with me today and i know i know that there are folks right here in this audience folks right here in milwaukee and all across america who are going through these kinds of struggles eight million americans lost their jobs in this recession and even though we ve had eight straight months of private sector job growth the new jobs haven t been coming fast enough now here s the honest truth the plain truth there s no silver bullet there s no quick fix to these problems i knew when i was running for office and i certainly knew by the time i was sworn in i knew it would take time to reverse the damage of a decade worth of policies that saw too few people being able to climb into the middle class too many people falling behind we all knew this we all knew that it would take more time than any of us want to dig ourselves out of this hole created by this economic crisis but on this labor day there are two things i want you to know number one i am going to keep fighting every single day every single hour every single minute to turn this economy around and put people back to work and renew the american dream not just for your family not just for all our families but for future generations that i can guarantee you number two i believe this with every fiber of my being america cannot have a strong growing economy without a strong growing middle class and the chance for everybody no matter how humble their beginnings to join that middle class a middle class built on the idea that if you work hard if you live up to your responsibilities then you can get ahead that you can enjoy some basic guarantees in life a good job that pays a good wage health care that will be there when you get sick a secure retirement even if you re not rich an education that will give your children a better life than we had these are simple ideas these are american ideas these are union ideas that s what we re fighting for i was thinking about this last week i was thinking about this last week on the day i announced the end of our combat mission in iraq and i spent some time as i often do with our soldiers and our veterans and this new generation of troops coming home from iraq they ve earned their place alongside the greatest generation just like that greatest generation they ve got the skills they ve got the training they ve got the drive to move america s economy forward once more we ve been investing in new care and new opportunities and a new commitment to our veterans because we ve got to serve them just the way they served us but milwaukee they re coming home to an economy hit by a recession deeper than anything we ve seen since the 1930s so the question is how do we create the same kinds of middle class opportunities for this generation as my grandparents generation came home to how do we build our economy on that same strong stable foundation for growth now anybody who thinks that we can move this economy forward with just a few folks at the top doing well hoping that it s going to trickle down to working people who are running faster and faster just to keep up you ll never see it if that s what you re waiting for you should stop waiting because it s never happened in our history that s not how america was built it wasn t built with a bunch of folks at the top doing well and everybody else scrambling we didn t become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness we didn t come this far by letting the special interests run wild we didn t do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on wall street we built this country by making things by producing goods we could sell we did it with sweat and effort and innovation we did it on the assembly line and at the construction site we did it by investing in the people who built this country from the ground up the workers middle class families small business owners we out worked folks and we out educated folks and we out competed everybody else that s how we built america and milwaukee that s what we re going to do again that s been at the heart what we ve been doing over these last 20 months building our economy on a new foundation so that our middle class doesn t just survive this crisis i want it to thrive i want it to be stronger than it was before and over the last two years that s meant taking on some powerful interests some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in washington for a very long time and they re not always happy with me they talk about me like a dog that s not in my prepared remarks it s just but it s true you know that s why we passed financial reform to provide new accountability and tough oversight of wall street stopping credit card companies from gouging you with hidden fees and unfair rate hikes ending taxpayer bailouts of wall street once and for all they re not happy with it but it was the right thing to do that s why we eliminated tens of billions of dollars in wasteful taxpayer subsidies handouts to the big banks that were providing student loans we took that money tens of billions of dollars and we re going to go to make sure that your kids and your grandkids can get student loans and grants at a cheap rate and afford a college education they re not happy with it but it was the right thing to do yes we re using those savings to put a college education within reach for working families that s why we passed health insurance reform to make coverage affordable reform that ends the indignity of insurance companies jacking up your premiums at will denying you coverage just because you get sick reform that gives you control gives you the ability if your child is sick to be able to get an affordable insurance plan making sure they can t drop it that s why we re making it easier for workers to save for retirement with new ways of saving your tax refunds a simpler system for enrolling in plans like 401 k s and fighting to strengthen social security for the future and if everybody is still talking about privatizing social security they need to be clear it will not happen on my watch not when i m president of the united states of america that s why we ve given tax cuts except we give them to folks who need them we ve given them to small business owners we ve given them to clean energy companies we ve cut taxes for 95 percent of working americans just like i promised you during the campaign you all got a tax cut and instead of giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas we re cutting taxes to companies that are putting our people to work right here in the united states of america see we want to invest in growth industries like clean energy and manufacturing you ve got leaders here in wisconsin tom barrett jim doyle they ve been fighting to bring those jobs to milwaukee fighting to bring those jobs here to wisconsin i don t want to see solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars made in china i want them made right here in the united states of america i don t want to buy stuff from someplace else i want to grow our exports so that we re selling to someplace else products that say made in the u s a that s right there are no better workers than american workers i ll put my money on you any day of the week and when the naysayers said well you can t save the auto industry just go ahead and let hundreds of thousands of jobs vanish we said we re going to stand by those workers if the management is willing to make tough choices if everybody is willing to come together i m confident that the american auto industry can compete once again and today that industry is on the way back they said no we said yes to the american worker they re coming back now let me tell you another thing we ve done is to make long overdue investments in upgrading our outdated our inefficient national infrastructure we re talking roads we re talking bridges we re talking dams levees but we re also talking a smart electric grid that can bring clean energy to new areas we re talking about broadband internet so that everybody is plugged in we re talking about high speed rail lines required to compete in a 21st century economy i want to get down from milwaukee down to chicago quick avoid a traffic jam we re talking investments in tomorrow that are creating hundreds of thousands of private sector jobs right now because of these investments and the tens of thousands of projects they spurred all across the country the battered construction sector actually grew last month for the first time in a very long time but you know the folks here in the trades know what i m talking about nearly one in five construction workers are unemployed one in five nobody has been hit harder than construction workers and a lot of those folks they had lost their jobs in manufacturing and went into construction now they ve lost their jobs again it doesn t do anybody any good when so many hardworking americans have been idled for months even years at a time when there is so much of america that needs rebuilding so that s why milwaukee today i am announcing a new plan for rebuilding and modernizing america s roads and rails and runways for the long term i want america to have the best infrastructure in the world we used to have the best infrastructure in the world we can have it again we are going to make it happen over the next six years over the next six years we are going to rebuild 150 000 miles of our roads that s enough to circle the world six times that s a lot of road we re going to lay and maintain 4 000 miles of our railways enough to stretch coast to coast we re going to restore 150 miles of runways and we re going to advance a next generation air traffic control system to reduce travel time and delays for american travelers i think everybody can agree on that anybody want more delays in airports no i didn t think so that s not a republican or a democratic idea we all want to get to where we need to go i mean i ve got air force one now it s nice but i still remember what it was like this is a plan that will be fully paid for it will not add to the deficit over time we re going to work with congress to see to that we want to set up an infrastructure bank to leverage federal dollars and focus on the smartest investments we re going to continue our strategy to build a national high speed rail network that reduces congestion and travel times and reduces harmful emissions we want to cut waste and bureaucracy and consolidate and collapse more than 100 different programs that too often duplicate each other so we want to change the way washington spends your tax dollars we want to reform a haphazard patchwork way of doing business we want to focus on less wasteful approaches than we ve got right now we want competition and innovation that gives us the best bang for the buck but the bottom line is this milwaukee this will not only create jobs immediately it s also going to make our economy hum over the long haul it s a plan that history tells us can and should attract bipartisan support it s a plan that says even in the aftermath of the worst recession in our lifetimes america can still shape our own destiny we can still move this country forward we can still leave our children something better we can still leave them something that lasts so these are the things we ve been working for these are some of the victories you guys have helped us achieve and we re not finished we ve got a lot more progress to make and i m confident we will but there are some folks in washington who see things differently you know what i m talking about when it comes to just about everything we ve done to strengthen our middle class to rebuild our economy almost every republican in congress says no even on things we usually agree on they say no if i said the sky was blue they say no if i said fish live in the sea they d say no they just think it s better to score political points before an election than to solve problems so they said no to help for small businesses even when the small businesses said we desperately need this this used to be their key constituency they said they said no no to middle class tax cuts they say they re for tax cuts i say okay let s give tax cuts to the middle class no no to clean energy jobs no to making college more affordable no to reforming wall street they re saying right now no to cutting more taxes for small business owners and helping them get financing you know i heard somebody out here was yelling yes we can remember that was our slogan their slogan is no we can t no no no no i mean i personally think yes we can is more inspiring than no we can t to steal a line from our old friend ted kennedy what is it about working men and women that they find so offensive when we passed a bill earlier this summer to help states save jobs the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and nurses and police officers and firefighters that were about to be laid off they said no and the republican who thinks he s going to take over as speaker i m just saying that s his opinion he s entitled to his opinion but when he was asked about this he dismissed those jobs as government jobs that weren t worth saving that s what he said i m quoting government jobs now think about this these are the people who teach our children these are the people who keep our streets safe these are the people who put their lives on the line who rush into a burning building government jobs i don t know about you but i think those jobs are worth saving i think those jobs are worth saving by the way this bill that we passed to save all those jobs we made sure that bill wouldn t add to the deficit you know how we paid for it by closing one of these ridiculous tax loopholes that actually rewarded corporations for shipping jobs and profits overseas i mean this this was one of those loopholes that allowed companies to write off taxes they pay to foreign governments even though they weren t paying taxes here in the united states so middle class families were footing tax breaks for companies creating jobs somewhere else i mean even a lot of america s biggest corporations agreed that this loophole didn t make sense agreed that it needed to be closed agreed that it wasn t fair but the man who thinks he s going to be speaker he wants to reopen this loophole look the bottom line is this these guys they just don t want to give up on that economic philosophy that they have been peddling for most of the last decade you know that philosophy you cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires you cut all the rules and regulations for special interests and then you just cut working folks loose you cut them loose to fend for themselves you remember they called it the ownership society but what it really boiled down to was if you couldn t find a job you couldn t afford college you were born poor your insurance company dropped you even though your kid was sick that you were on your own well you know what that philosophy didn t work out so well for middle class families all across america it didn t work out so well for our country all it did was rack up record deficits and result in the worst economic crisis since the great depression i mean think about it we have tried what they re peddling we did it for 10 years we ended up with the worst economy since the 1930s and record deficits to boot it s not like we haven t tried what they re trying to sell us now i m bringing this up not because i m trying to re litigate the past i m bringing it up because i don t want to re live the past it d be one thing milwaukee if republicans in washington had some new ideas if they had said you know what we really screwed up and we ve learned from our mistakes we re going to do things differently this time that s not what they re doing when the leader of their campaign committee was asked on national television what republicans would do if they took over congress you know what he said he said we ll do exactly the same thing we did the last time that s what he said it s on tape so basically here s what this election comes down to they re betting that between now and november you re going to come down with amnesia they figure you re going to forget what their agenda did to this country they think you ll just believe that they ve changed these are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class they drove our economy into a ditch and we got in there and put on our boots and we pushed and we shoved and we were sweating and these guys were standing watching us and sipping on a slurpee and they were pointing at us saying how come you re not pushing harder how come you re not pushing faster and then when we finally got the car up and it s got a few dings and a few dents it s got some mud on it we re going to have to do some work on it they point to everybody and say look what these guys did to your car after we got it out of the ditch and then they got the nerve to ask for the keys back i don t want to give them the keys back they don t know how to drive i mean i want everything to think about it here when you want to go forward in your car what do you do you put it in d they re going to pop it in reverse they d have those special interests riding shotgun then they d hit the gas and we d be right back in the ditch milwaukee we are not going backwards that s the choice we face this fall do we want to go back or do we want to go forward i say we want to move forward america always moves forward we keep moving forward every day let me say this milwaukee i know these are difficult times i know folks are worried i know there s still a lot of hurt out here i hear it when i travel around the country i see it in the letters that i read every night from folks who are looking for a job or lost their home it breaks my heart because those are the folks that i got into politics for you re the reason i m here and when times are tough when times are tough i know it can be easy to give in to cynicism i know it can be easy to give in to fear and doubt and you know it s easy sometimes for folks to stir up stuff and turn people on each other and it s easy to settle for something less to set our sights a little bit lower but i just want everybody here to remember that s not who we are that s not the country i know we do not give up we do not quit we face down war we face down depression we face down great challenges and great threats we have lit the way for the rest of the world whenever times have seemed at their worst americans have been at their best that s when we roll up our sleeves that s when we remember we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people that s the spirit that started the labor movement the idea that alone we may be weak divided we may fall but we are united we are strong that s why they call them unions that s why we call this the united states of america i m going to make this case across the country between now and november and i am asking for your help and if you are willing to join me and tom barrett and gwen moore and russ feingold and herb kohl we can strengthen our middle class and make this economy work for all americans again and restore the american dream and give it to our children and our grandchildren god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama7 10 09a barack_obama it is good to see you all of you good evening i want to welcome all the students and teachers and amateur astronomers to the white house tonight i won t speak long because we ve got a bunch of telescopes and great exhibits to get our hands on but before we begin let me first acknowledge a few other stars who are out tonight first of all john holdren my science advisor an actual physicist is here and eager to look through one of these telescopes our nasa administrator charles bolden who s spent some time orbiting the earth himself and his deputy lori garver are here where s charles and lori there re in the back there give them a round of applause we ve got some specialists from nasa the smithsonian and the american museum of natural history in new york here with us as well and we ve got some of the heroes who have flown closer to the stars than anybody else buzz aldrin a man who actually walked on the moon where s buzz right there sally ride sally ride the first american woman in space is here mae jemison the first african american woman in space give her a big round of applause and john grunsfeld is here the man they call the hubble repairman not to be mistaken with the maytag repairman for all the upgrades that he s made up there to the telescope that allows us to see farther than anyone ever imagined so give john a big round of applause now nasa s equipment is some pretty powerful stuff but astronomy also depends on the curiosity and the contributions of amateur astronomers and there are two students here tonight who ve made some pretty amazing discoveries of their own first of all caroline moore and her dad robert raise your hand where s dad there s robert they look at the stars together in new york and last year think about this when she was only 14 years old she became the youngest person ever to discover a supernova and not just any supernova but a kind that we may have never seen before and earlier this year lucas bolyard lucas raise your hand where are your folks where s lucas s folks raise your hands i know you guys are proud a high school sophomore from west virginia discovered some unusual data that turned out to be an extremely rare kind of star called a pulsar and lucas was explaining to me just what a pulsar was so that i wasn t embarrassed when i came out here now if they can discover something great so can any of you other students who are here tonight all you need is a passion for science from the moment humans first walked on this earth we ve been endlessly fascinated by the stars as long as we ve been around we ve been trying to unlock the mysteries of the universe and figure out our proper place in the cosmos and somehow make sense of it all it was 400 years ago this year that galileo built his first telescope it was just three times more powerful than the naked eye but he kept on working on it and improving on it until he built one 33 times as powerful and then he turned it towards the sky and he discovered that our moon wasn t smooth that venus had phases that jupiter had moons and that copernicus was right that we do revolve around the sun now we ve come a long way since then while galileo s first telescope had lenses an inch wide the hubble space telescope has mirrors about seven and a half feet wide a few years ago the hubble showed us the deepest image of the universe ever taken and in that image we can see about 10 000 galaxies and each of those galaxies can hold billions of stars now that s a lot but get this it would take 13 million of those images to map the entire sky that s how immense it is so there are a lot of mysteries left and there are a lot of problems for you students to solve and i want to be a president who makes sure you have the teachers and the tools that you need to solve them and that s why we re working to reinvigorate math and science in your schools and attract new and qualified math and science teachers into your classrooms some with lifetimes of experience that s why we ve launched a race to the top to raise standards and upgrade your curricula and improve teaching and learning in math and science that s why we re making a college education more affordable so that by the time many of you graduate in 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world and that s how we ll move american students to the top of the pack in math and in science over the next decade and guarantee that america will lead the world in discovery in this new century but that s going to take more than just what i as president or anybody in government can do it s going to take each and every one of you students it ll take your sense of wonder your passion your persistence your willingness to dedicate your lives to the pursuit of discovery and it s going to take some hard work caroline and lucas didn t just get lucky they pored over data before they knew what they had found galileo worked for years to prove his theories the hubble s journey from paper to space took decades because that s how success is won test by test and trial by trial now this morning i awarded the national medals of science and technology to individuals who ve made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of human knowledge and here s my question which one of you are going to come back here to claim your prize i like that are you going to find a new star or a cure for a disease will you invent the next iphone or a brand new industry that no one s even dreamed of yet what will your great discovery be galileo changed the world when he pointed his telescope to the sky and now it s your turn we need you to study do well in school explore everything from the infinite reaches of space to the microscopic smallness of the atom we need you to think bigger and to dig deeper and to reach higher and we need your restless curiosity and your boundless hope and imagination our future depends on it so don t let anybody tell you that there isn t more to discover don t let anybody tell you that there s knowledge that s beyond your reach there s something out there for each and every one of you to discover and seeing how it s a beautiful night and we ve got a bunch of telescopes out on the lawn let s get started together all right so thank you very much everybody i m glad you guys are here let s go have some fun i think i m going to get the first dibs at looking through one of these telescopes is that right john all right now why don t you explain to us what exactly this telescope is here what do we got talk in the mic a hundred and sixty light years that s far away let s take a look that s pretty far away that s pretty cool all right all right outstanding well let s go take a look at everything all right all right guys have fun dem bobama7 10 09b barack_obama thank you so much thank you everyone please have a seat before i begin the ceremony to introduce these extraordinary innovators let me just mention a few people who are in the audience today first of all we ve got some outstanding members of my cabinet secretary locke secretary sebelius secretary chu and administrator jackson we are very grateful for all the outstanding work they re doing we ve got some wonderful partners in congress that i want to mention senator jeff merkley of oregon senator jim risch of idaho senator representative rush holt rush i almost gave you a promotion there or a demotion depending on how you look at it of new jersey representative anna eshoo of california and representative zoe lofgren of california i also want to mention my science advisor who is doing outstanding work dr holdren is here as well as nasa administrator charles bolden and we want to thank some of the people who helped to organize today s event the national science foundation and its director arden bement the u s patent and trademark office and its director dave kappos and linda katehi the chair of the national medals of science and technology and innovation committee so give all of them a big round of applause now it s also a real pleasure to have so many distinguished researchers and innovators joining us although i must admit that i have an ulterior motive for presenting these awards today you see sasha has a science fair coming up and i was thinking that you guys could give us a few tips michelle and i are a little rusty on our science in all seriousness it is a privilege to present these medals our nation s highest honor for scientific and technological achievement to the folks who ve come here today from all parts of our country and all areas of scientific investigation the scientists in this room have plumbed the furthest reaches of the universe and the deepest recesses of the human mind they ve sequenced the human genome and stimulated the workings of the atom they ve developed technologies that have greatly improved our understanding of the human body and the natural world and they ve fostered innovations that have saved millions of lives and improved countless more so this nation owes all of you an enormous debt of gratitude far greater than any medal can bestow and we recognize your contributions but we also celebrate the incredible contributions of the scientific endeavor itself we see the promise not just for our economy but for our health and well being in the human capacity for creativity and ingenuity and we are reminded of the power of free and open inquiry which is not only at the heart of all of your work but at the heart of this experiment we call america because throughout our history amid tumult and war and against tough odds this nation has always looked toward the future and then led the way it was during the darkest days of the civil war that president lincoln established the land grant colleges and the national academy of science it was during world war ii that president roosevelt requested that vannevar bush his science advisor and a future recipient of the national medal of science outline a set of policies to maintain our scientific and technological leadership in the 20th century and it was in the years that followed the soviet launch of sputnik the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth that the united states would create darpa nasa and the national defense education act which helped improve math and science education from grade school to graduate school in fact the national medal itself was established just two years after that launch as a sign to the world and to ourselves of how highly we valued the work of the nation s scientists today we face more complex challenges than generations past a medical system that holds the promise of unlocking new cures attached to a health care system that has the potential to bankrupt families and businesses a system of energy that powers our economy but endangers our planet threats to our security that seek to exploit the very interconnectedness and openness that s so essential to our prosperity and challenges in a global marketplace which link the trader on wall street to the homeowner on main street and the office worker in america to the factory worker in china we all share an opportunity but we also all share in crisis at such a difficult moment there are those who say we can t afford to invest in science that it s a luxury at a moment defined by necessities i could not disagree more science is more essential for our prosperity our security and our health and our way of life than it has ever been and the winners we are recognizing only underscore that point with achievements in physics and medicine computer science and cognitive science energy technology and biotechnology we need to ensure that we are encouraging the next generation of discoveries and the next generation of discoverers that s why my administration has set this goal by investing in education funding basic and applied research and spurring private innovation we will devote 3 percent of our gross domestic product to research and development that s more than at any point in recent history and as part of this effort we re putting in place policies that will move us from the middle to the top of the pack in math and science education over the next decade we are challenging states to dramatically improve achievement by raising standards by improving the use of technology and by making it possible for professionals like our honorees to bring a lifetime of experience and enthusiasm into the classroom and we ve also launched a race to the top fund to encourage states to compete for the most innovative programs in math and science as part of a broader effort to foster new ways of engaging young people in these fields the white house is participating too tonight in fact we re bringing children to the south lawn for a night of astronomy i am really looking forward to this this is going to be fun they ll peer through telescopes wander through exhibits and hopefully feel a sense of wonder that might one day lead them here to receive a medal themselves and my administration has set another goal to compete for the jobs of the future and to encourage the scientists and engineers of the future by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world we used to be number one we have fallen behind we are going to regain our position to meet this goal we ve increased the pell grant and passed legislation through the house which we re working to pass through the senate to end more than 80 billion in wasteful subsidies to lenders and use that money instead to help students beyond the classroom the recovery act that we passed is funding the largest single boost to biomedical research in history my budget makes the research and experimentation tax credit permanent to help companies afford the often high cost of innovation i ve proposed eliminating the capital gains tax for investments in startups and small companies because countless big ideas begin in small businesses and we are doubling our capacity in renewable energy even as we seek to create a system of incentives to make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in america for at our best this nation has never feared the future we ve shaped the future even when we ve endured terrible storms we haven t given up or turned back we ve remain fixed on that brighter horizon that s how we ve led in the pursuit of scientific discovery and in turn that s how science has helped us lead the world there s no better illustration than what took place at the close of world war ii when the united states transported dozens of captured v 2 rockets from germany to new mexico these were among the most sophisticated weapons in the world a reminder that much of world war ii was fought far from the battlefield by alan turing in bletchley park and oppenheimer in los alamos and by countless others who developed radar and aircraft and antibiotics the military wanted to understand this new missile technology that the v 2 represented but scientists were also invited to use these tests to take measurements of the atmosphere and then one engineer had an idea to rig a camera and attach it to one of the rockets and so in this brief moment between the end of a world war and the start of a cold war a group of scientists erupted with joy as they discovered that they had captured the very first photos of our world as seen from space their work would continue as the rocket and satellite research panel and after the launch of sputnik in 1957 the work of this panel would be assumed by a new agency called nasa the research into these weapons of war would lead to the missions of mercury and gemini and apollo that s the incredible promise of the work scientists do every day like the scientists researchers and engineers and innovators we honor with these medals yes scientific progress offers us a chance to achieve prosperity and defend our nation it has offered us benefits that have improved our lives and our health improvements that we often take for granted but it also gives us something more at root science forces us to reckon with the truth as best as we can ascertain it and to reckon with the power that comes from this knowledge for good and for ill with each new discovery brings new responsibility to move past our differences and to address our shared problems to embrace a sense of wonder and our common humanity carl sagan who helped broaden the reach of science to millions of people once described his enthusiasm for discovery in very simple terms he said somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known thank you all for the incredible discoveries that you have made the progress you ve invented and the benefits you ve bestowed on the american people and the world so it is now my honor to ask the recipients to come forward to receive their medals and as their citations are read i will you ll just have to bend down a little bit and we will bestow on you the highest honor that our nation can give you for your science technology and innovation so do we have someone here for the citations dem bobama7 4 09 barack_obama thank you thank you guys let me say multinational force iraq multinational corps iraq multinational security transition command iraq first corps america s corp band thanks to all of you listen i am so honored i love you back i am honored i m honored and grateful to be with all of you and i m not going to talk long because i want to shake as many hands as i can and i ve been talking all week but there s a couple of things i want to say number one thank you you know when i was at camp lejeune i spoke about what it means for america to see our best and brightest our finest young men and women serve us and what i said then is something that i want to repeat to you which is you have performed brilliantly in every mission that has been given to you under enormous strain and under enormous sacrifice through controversy and difficulty and politics you ve kept your eyes focused on just doing your job and because of that every mission that s been assigned from getting rid of saddam to reducing violence to stabilizing the country to facilitating elections you have given iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country that is an extraordinary achievement and for that you have the thanks of the american people that s point number one point number two is this is going to be a critical period these next 18 months i was just discussing this with your commander but i think it s something that all of you know it is time for us to transition to the iraqis they need to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty and in order for them to do that they have got to make political accommodations they re going to have to decide that they want to resolve their differences through constitutional means and legal means they are going to have to focus on providing government services that encourage confidence among their citizens all those things they have to do we can t do it for them but what we can do is make sure that we are a stalwart partner that we are working alongside them that we are committed to their success that in terms of training their security forces training their civilian forces in order to achieve a more effective government they know that they have a steady partner with us and so just as we thank you for what you ve already accomplished i want to say thank you because you will be critical in terms of us being able to make sure that iraq is stable that it is not a safe haven for terrorists that it is a good neighbor and a good ally and we can start bringing our folks home so now is not the time to lose focus we have to be even more focused than we ve been in order to achieve success the last point i want to make is i know how hard it s been on a lot of you you ve been away from your families many of you for multiple rotations you ve seen buddies of yours injured and you remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice there are probably some people here who have seen children born and have been missing watching them grow up there are many of you who have listened to your spouse and the extraordinary sacrifices that they have to make when you re gone and so i want you to know that michelle and myself are doing everything are doing everything we can to provide additional support for military families the federal budget that i have introduced increases support for military families we are going to do everything required to make sure that the commitment we make to our veterans is met and that people don t have to fight for what they have earned as a consequence of their service the main point i want to make is we have not forgotten what you have already done we are grateful for what you will do and as long as i am in the white house you are going to get the support that you need and the thanks that you deserve from a grateful nation so thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama7 6 10a barack_obama please have a seat well michelle and i are just thrilled to be part of this spectacular evening to the performers who lent their voices to this celebration to the honored guests to everyone who helped make tonight such a success i want to say thank you i also want to thank the staff and supporters of ford s theatre for creating a place where education and the arts can thrive and where the legacy of our nation s greatest president will be preserved for generations and i especially want to thank the members of one of our nation s most hallowed fraternities the men who were recipients of the medal of honor please give them another round of applause to each of those men i want you to know your heroism is unquestioned your stories are inspirational your actions above and beyond the call of duty have earned the admiration of a grateful nation and we are incredibly honored that you could join us here tonight it s that kind of heroism that has always defined what this nation is all about after all it was exactly 234 years ago that a group of patriots farmers and merchants lawyers physicians pledged their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor to an improbable experiment called america they risked everything in the name of a few simple ideas freedom equality and the right to pursue our full measure of happiness and even though the odds of success were not great even though they were opposed by a powerful and far reaching empire these framers had the courage to take the first steps towards what would become the greatest democracy that the world has ever known it was a spirit that would echo through time and space to an illinois rail splitter who vowed that a government of the people by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth to a young preacher who believed that even if he didn t get there with us we would reach the promised land and across an ocean to generations of south africans who rose up in search of the same inalienable rights that had been put to paper in this country so many years ago as a lawyer fighting for the rights of black south africans in the age of apartheid albie sachs was thrown in jail without charge and was nearly killed when a bomb took part of his arm and the sight of one eye despite that fact albie knew he was part of something bigger than himself and after returning from exile he helped shape south africa s constitution and held a spot on his nation s constitutional court for 15 years then there s archbishop desmond tutu as a crusader for freedom a spiritual leader and chair of the truth and reconciliation commission and a respected statesman he has become a symbol of kindness and hope far beyond the borders of his native land through it all he has been guided by the belief that in his words my humanity is bound up in yours and we can only be human together there are few people more deserving of the lincoln medal an honor bestowed on those who exemplify the singular focus dedication and generosity of spirit of our 16th president and as we celebrate independence day there are few better examples of how the spirit of our founding founders did more than just create a nation it inspired people in every corner of the globe yearning to be free so i want to congratulate tonight s honorees and i thank all of you for being part of this extraordinary celebration we thank all the talent who performed here today we thank all the supporters of the ford s theatre god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem bobama7 6 10b barack_obama hello everybody it is a pleasure to welcome all of you to the white house i m going to be very brief because i know you re all looking forward to heading down the street a little bit later for a wonderful night and michelle just mentioned and the women are wearing heels that s why i want to take a moment to thank all the performers for taking time out of their busy schedules to share their gifts with us and be part of this wonderful event i also want to thank the cabinet officials and members of congress who are with us including senator reid thank you all for coming and for your support of this wonderful institution tonight is about celebrating the great work at ford theatre what it s done to preserve the legacy of our 16th president and highlight the importance of the arts and education in our own lives and in the life of our nation in many ways it s impossible to separate the history of america from the history of its music and its spoken word soldiers have sung as they marched to war and raised their voices again while laying a brother to rest lyrics on a page and voices on a stage have helped connect us across generations and across cultures backgrounds and faiths our greatest leaders including lincoln himself have drawn inspiration and courage from the arts and on a personal level they help each of us express the joys and hardships of life while bringing us closer to each other this is especially true during moments of trial and we have had a lot of trials over the past year and a half right now we ve got brothers and sisters in the gulf coast who are going through an incredibly difficult time in the face of a disaster unlike any that we ve ever seen of late i want to emphasize again that we re going to do everything we can in the weeks and months and years ahead to make things right and i know everybody here feels the same way but tonight we will celebrate not only music and song and performances but we re also going to be celebrating the incredible legacy of the ford s theatre celebrating some award recipients who are extraordinarily worthy and have done so much to help not just people in this country but all around the world so on behalf of michelle and our entire family i want to say how grateful i am that all of you are here thank you for support the theatre we are looking forward to a wonderful evening good night dem bobama7 6 10c barack_obama thank you thank you thank you thank you everybody please be seated hello giants it is good it is good to be here and congratulations class of 2010 i am honored to be part of this special occasion and i love you back let me acknowledge your extraordinary governor jennifer granholm superintendent rice thank you for your inspiring words your mayor bobby hopewell who i understand is a proud kalamazoo graduate himself thanks to principal washington for not just for the warm introduction but for his enthusiasm and his energy and his leadership and his nice singing voice thank you to all the trustees to the alumni to the parents grandparents aunts uncles cousins everybody who s been a part of this extraordinary place and i want to recognize our student speakers cindy who embodies the best of our traditions in this country arrived three or four years ago and graduates as the valedictorian this is what is continually replenishing the energy and the dynamism and the innovation of this country and we could not be prouder of you thank you and to simon i m glad that according to the constitution you can t run till you re 35 so i ll be long gone by then but it gives me great confidence to know that we ve got such incredible young leaders who are going to be remaking the world in so many different ways now recently an article from your local paper the kalamazoo gazette was brought to my attention and it ran just after this school had been chosen as one of the six finalists in our race to the top commencement challenge and for those who aren t aware of it this is a contest to highlight schools that promote academic excellence personal responsibility and that best prepare students for college and careers and this article in the gazette quoted a young lady named kelsey wilson where is is kelsey here she right over there anyway she s over there hey kelsey how are you so kelsey was quoted as saying we re the kind of school that never gets credit for what we do and our school is amazing this is what kelsey said our school is amazing well kelsey class of 2010 members of the kalamazoo community i m here tonight because after three rounds of competition with more than a thousand schools and more than 170 000 votes cast i know and america knows what you ve done at kalamazoo central you are amazing we know we know our amazing secretary of education arne duncan knows folks in washington know folks across the country know and hopefully after tonight everybody knows now together as a community you ve embraced the motto of this school district every child every opportunity every time every time every child every opportunity every time because you believe like i do that every young person every child regardless of what they look like where they come from how much money their parents have every child who walks through your schoolhouse doors deserves a quality education no exceptions and i m here tonight because i think that america has a lot to learn from kalamazoo central about what makes for a successful school in this new century you ve got educators raising standards and then inspiring their students to meet them you ve got community members who are stepping up as tutors and mentors and coaches you got parents who are taking an active interest in their child s education attending those teacher conferences yes turning off the tv once in a while making sure homework gets done arne duncan is here tonight because these are the values these are the changes that he s encouraging in every school in this nation it s the key to our future but the most important ingredient is you students who raised your sights who aimed high who invested yourselves in your own success it s no accident that so many of you have received college admissions letters class of 2010 that didn t happen by accident it happened because you worked for it as the superintendent said you earned it so kelsey i agree with you what you ve done here at kalamazoo central is amazing i am proud of you your parents are proud of you your teachers your principal we re all incredibly proud now graduates all these folks around you i have to say though with the cameras and the beaming smiles they ve worked hard to give you everything you need to pursue your dreams and fulfill your god given talent unfortunately you can t take them with you when you leave here no one is going to go follow you around making sure that you re getting to class on time making sure you re doing your work nobody is going to be doing that for you going forward that s all on you responsibility for your success is squarely on your shoulders and the question i have for you today is this what is each what are each of you going to do to meet that responsibility now right now you re getting plenty of advice from everybody some of it s helpful and so i hate to pile on with advice but while i m here what the heck i figure i should offer a few thoughts based on my own experiences but also based on my hopes for all of you and for our country in the years ahead first understand that your success in life won t be determined just by what s given to you or what happens to you but by what you do with all that s given to you what you do with all that happens to you how hard you try how far you push yourself how high you re willing to reach true excellence only comes with perseverance this wasn t something i really understood when i was back your age my father some of you know left my family when i was two years old i was raised by a single mom and my grandparents and sometimes i had a tendency to goof off as my mother put it i had a tendency sometimes to act a bit casual about my future sometimes i was rebellious sometimes i partied a little too much oh yes yes this is a cautionary tale don t be cheering when i say that studied just enough to get by i thought hard work responsibility that s old fashioned that s just people want to tell me what to do but after a few years after i was living solely on my own and i realized that living solely for my own entertainment wasn t so entertaining anymore that it wasn t particularly satisfying anymore that i didn t seem to be making much of a ripple in the world i started to change my tune i realized that by refusing to apply myself there was nothing i could point to that i was proud of that would last now you come of an age in a popular culture that actually reinforces this approach to life you watch tv and basically what it says is you can be rich and successful without much effort you just have to become a celebrity if you can achieve some reality tv notoriety that s better than lasting achievement we live in a culture that tells you there s a quick fix for every problem and a justification for every selfish desire and all of you were raised with cell phones and ipods and texting and emails and you re able to call up a fact or a song or a friend with the click of a button so you re used to instant gratification but meaningful achievement lasting success it doesn t happen in an instant it s not about luck it s not about a sudden stroke of genius it s not usually about talent it s usually about daily effort the large choices and the small choices that you make that add up over time it s about the skills you build and the knowledge you accumulate and the energy you invest in every task no matter how trivial or menial it may seem at the time you ve got an alum who plays for the yankees i hear he s supposed to be pretty good now derek jeter wasn t born playing shortstop for the yankees he got there through years of effort and his high school baseball coach once remarked i m surprised he still doesn t have blisters and that i don t have the blisters on my hands from hitting ground balls just for derek he always wanted more how about one more turn in the batting cage or 25 more ground balls thomas edison tested more than 6 000 different materials for just one tiny part of the light bulb that he invented think about that 6 000 tests j k rowling s first harry potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published mozart was a musical prodigy but he practiced for hours each day accumulating thousands of hours at the piano by the time he was just six years old i understand that your boys basketball team did pretty good first state champions for the first time in 59 years that didn t happen by accident they put in work they put in effort so today you all have a rare and valuable chance to pursue your own passions chase your own dreams without incurring a mountain of debt what an incredible gift so you ve got no excuse for giving anything less than your best effort no excuses that s my second piece of advice very simple don t make excuses take responsibility not just for your successes take responsibility where you fall short as well now the truth is no matter how hard you work you re not going to ace every class well maybe cindy will but but you re not going to ace every class you re not going to succeed the first time you try something there are going to be times when you screw up there will be times where you hurt people you love there will be times where you make a mistake and you stray from the values that you hold most deeply and when that happens it s the easiest thing in the world to start looking around for somebody else to blame your professor was too hard your boss was a jerk the coaches was playing favorites your friend just didn t understand your wife oh no i m just messing with michelle right there that was all in fun no but this is an easy habit to get into you see it every day in washington every day folks calling each other names making all sorts of accusations on television everybody is always pointing a finger at somebody else you notice that now this community could have easily gone down that road this community could have made excuses well our kids have fewer advantages our schools have fewer resources how can we compete you could have spent years pointing fingers blaming parents blaming teachers blaming the principal blaming the superintendent blaming the president but that s class of 2010 i want you to pay attention on this because that s not what happened instead this community was honest with itself about where you were falling short you resolved to do better push your kids harder open their minds wider expose them to all kinds of ideas and people and experiences so graduates i hope you ll continue those efforts don t make excuses and i hope that wherever you go you won t narrow the broad intellectual and social exposure you ve had here at kalamazoo central instead seek to expand it don t just hang out with people who look like you or go to the same church you do or share your political views broaden your circle to include people with different backgrounds and life experiences because that s how you ll end up learning what it s like to walk in somebody else s shoes that s how you ll come to understand the challenges other people face and this is not just an academic exercise it s a way to broaden your ambit of concern and learn to see yourselves in each other which brings me to my final piece of advice for today and that s to give back to be part of something bigger than yourselves hitch your wagon to something that is bigger than yourselves i know that so many of you have already served your community through efforts like your stuff the bus food drives and groups like activists for action and i commend you for that but i also know that many of you are the first in your family to go to college and right about now you may be feeling all the weight of their hopes and expectations coming down on your shoulders and once you start juggling those classes and activities and that campus job and you get caught up in your own dreams and your own anxieties and dating you may feel like you ve got enough on your plate just dealing with your own life it might be easier to turn the channel when the news disturbs you to avert your eyes when you pass that homeless man on the street to tell yourself that other people s problems really aren t your responsibility but just think about what the consequence of that approach to life would have been if that s how folks had acted here in this community what if those kalamazoo promise donors had said to themselves well you know what i can pay for my own kid s education why should i have to pay for somebody else s think about the consequences for our country what if our founding fathers had said you know colonialism is kind of oppressive but i m doing okay my family s doing all right why should i spend my summer in philadelphia arguing about a constitution what if those abolitionists those civil right workers had said you know slavery is wrong segregation is wrong but it s kind of dangerous to get mixed up in that stuff i don t have time for all those meetings and marches i think i m going to take a pass i hope it works out but that s not something i want to do i want you to think for a minute about the extraordinary men and women who ve worn our country s uniform and have given their last full measure of devotion to keep us safe and free what if they said what if they said i really do love this country but why should i sacrifice so much for people i ve never even met young men and women in uniform right now making those sacrifices so you and i are here today because those people made a different choice they chose to step up they chose to serve and i hope you will follow their example because there is work to be done and your country needs you we ve got an economy to rebuild we ve got children to educate we ve got diseases to cure we ve got threats to face we ve got an oil spill to clean up we ve got clean energy to discover and it is going to be up to you to meet all of those challenges to build industries and make discoveries and inspire the next generation it s going to be up to you to heal the divide that continues to afflict our world now i m not saying you got to do it here all at once but as theodore roosevelt once put it i m asking you to do what you can with what you ve got where you are and i can guarantee that wherever your journey takes you there are going to be children who need mentors and senior citizens who need assistance folks down on their luck who could use a helping hand and once you ve reached out and formed those connections you ll find it s a little harder to numb yourself to other people s suffering it s a little harder to ignore the national debates about the issues that affect their lives and yours in the end service binds us to each other and to our communities and our country in a way that nothing else can it s how we become more fully american that s the reason those donors created the kalamazoo promise in the first place not for recognition or reward but because of their connection to this community because their belief in your potential because their faith that you would use this gift not just to enrich your own lives but the lives of others and the life of the nation and i m told that soon after the promise was established a first grader approached the superintendent at the time and declared to her i m going to college first grader i m going to college i don t know what it is but i m going we may never know those donors names but we know how they helped bring this community together and how you ve embraced their promise not just as a gift to be appreciated but a responsibility to be fulfilled we know how they have helped inspire an entire generation of young people here in kalamazoo to imagine a different future for themselves and graduates today i m asking you to pay them back by seeking to have the same kind of impact with your own lives by pursuing excellence in everything you do by serving this country that you love i know that you can do it after all you are the giants and with the education you ve gotten here there s nothing you can t do thank you very much everybody god bless you and god bless the united states of america and god bless the class of 2010 dem bobama7 7 09a barack_obama good afternoon dobryy den it is a great privilege to join all of you today with president medvedev from our first meeting at the g20 summit in london to our discussions here in moscow president medvedev s leadership has been critical to new progress in u s russian relations and the fact that he has experience in business in the private sector makes him an invaluable ally in our efforts to improve the commercial ties between our two countries i want to thank our ambassador john beryle for all the work that he does here in moscow and i want to thank all the organizations that helped to bring us here today the u s russia business council the american chamber of commerce in moscow the russian union of industrial entrepreneurs business russia and so many others all of you are part of a long line of commerce and trade between our peoples russia and the u s first established diplomatic relations more than 200 years ago but before we ever exchanged ambassadors we exchanged goods along the way you gave us a pretty good deal on alaska thank you even during a long cold war trade endured american grains russian raw materials and in recent years russian american trade surged so i want to thank all of you for your outstanding ideas on how our two countries can deepen these ties even further with new trade and investments that will create new jobs and prosperity for people in our countries this was a key message of the speech that i just delivered this morning at the new economic school where you ve got some of the most talented young people in russia studying business and economics recognizing that the future of russia is intimately wrapped up with commerce now i ve called for a reset in relations between russia and the united states but this can t just be a matter of two presidents it has to go deeper it has to be between our people it has to be more than just security or dismantling weapons it has to be about our common prosperity the jobs we create the innovation we unleash the industries that we build and that s why i made it very clear america seeks a prosperous russia that partners with us on a broad range of issues we want russia to be selling us goods and we want russia to be buying goods from us and that s why we ve created a u s russia bilateral presidential commission to explore new opportunities for partnership now many of you here are part of this important work and i want to thank you and i also want to thank our commission co chairs for their leadership and i am confident that they are going to do an outstanding job our minister nabiullina and commerce secretary gary locke they both bring a long track record of forging trade relationships and creating jobs in the 21st century in agriculture in health in energy science and technology our commission reflects a fundamental truth of the global economy and that is that prosperity is shared when russia buys aircrafts from u s aerospace companies that sustains jobs in america when an american soda company opens a new bottling plant outside of moscow that creates jobs for russians when our economies grow more intertwined all of us can make progress but if the opportunities of our global economy are shared so are the risks reckless speculation of bankers in one country reverberates on the floor of the moscow stock exchange a contracting global economy and shrinking trade means closed factories and lost jobs from north america to northern russia so our fortunes are linked and yet so much potential remains untapped i said that we have made progress but consider this total trade between our countries is just 36 billion our trade america s trade with russia is only about 1 percent of all our trade with the world 1 percent a percent that s virtually unchanged since the cold war and that 36 billion is about the same as our trade with thailand a country with less than half the population of russia surely we can do better in fact russia and the united states are natural economic partners between us we re a market of some 440 million consumers including russia s growing middle class there s russia s skilled workers vast scientific establishment and natural resources on the other hand there s american leadership in high tech manufacturing agriculture and capital so we need to make it easier for american companies to invest in russia and make it easier for russian companies to invest in the united states there are so many opportunities for cooperation some of which have already been mentioned but in order to achieve this better future we re going to have to do some work and some of the areas where our governments are going to have to do work have already been mentioned we have to promote transparency accountability rule of law on which investments and economic growth depend and so i welcome very much president medvedev s initiatives to promote the rule of law and ensure a mature and effective legal system as a condition for sustained economic growth we also have to work on bureaucracy the small example that was just mentioned i m sure is costing millions billions cumulatively over time of lost opportunities and spent person hours unnecessarily because we simply haven t updated our laws russian and american collaboration could unleash opportunities and prosperity across a whole range of endeavors from agriculture to aerospace from green construction to clean energy from transportation to telecommunications if we seize this moment if we work together now government can promote this cooperation we can help to get out of the way and we will but ultimately individual entrepreneurs and businesses have to advance the agenda and i commend you for being here to do precisely that because entrepreneurship and innovation are among the greatest forces in human history when it comes to progress and prosperity it s our workers it s our people it s our ideas who are the greatest engines of economic resource it will be with their skills and talent that ultimately will determine the fate of nations in the 21st century not simply the bountiful natural resources that both america and russia share i m told there s a russian proverb that says every seed knows its time so today i hope that we ve planted a seed a seed of new cooperation and new commerce and now we must do the work of seeing that that seed grows into a relationship that advances prosperity for our peoples so thank you very much for gathering in that spirit thank you for your commitment to progress we need to grow this economy and we re going to be able to do it faster and more effectively if we re doing it together thank you very much dem bobama7 7 09b barack_obama thank you well good afternoon dobryy den i apologize that i think i m running late and i m leaving early this is a good reason why civil society is so important because you can t always count on politicians it is a great pleasure to be with all of you through the work that you do you underscore what i believe is a fundamental truth in the 21st century that strong vibrant nations include strong vibrant civil societies this was also a key message of the speech this morning at the new economic school we not only need a reset button between the american and russian government but we need a fresh start between our societies more dialogue more listening more cooperation in confronting common challenges for history teaches us that real progress whether it s economic or social or political doesn t come from the top down it typically comes from the bottom up it comes from people it comes from the grassroots it comes from you the best ideas and solutions come from ordinary citizens who become involved in their communities and in their countries and by mobilizing and organizing and changing people s hearts and minds you then change the political landscape and oftentimes politicians get the credit for changing laws but in fact you ve created the environment in which those new laws can occur i learned this myself when i worked as a community organizer in chicago i m glad to see my friend here from chicago calvin holmes who we used to work together on a range of civic issues i was working in communities that were devastated by steel plant closings and so i went door to door i worked with churches trying to learn what people needed and we had a lot of setbacks in fact we had more failures than successes but we kept on listening to the people we learned from them we got them involved and over time they chose projects to work on whether it was building a new play lot or improving a neighborhood park or improving the local school or improving housing in the community and slowly block by block neighborhood by neighborhood you started to see change happen more jobs better housing more opportunities for young people and i learned a lesson that if you want to bring change it s not enough just to be an advocate it s not enough to just wait for the government to act you have to step up and deliver results real impact on people s lives and that is something that i think is lost sometimes when we discuss civil society there s a tendency sometimes for this to be a very abstract conversation with very lofty goals and since i am a former law professor i love abstractions and lofty goals but your neighbor your friend your coworker they re struggling with very immediate things right now can they pay the rent can their child go to a school that is going to teach them so that they can succeed in the future those are the day to day struggles that they re wrestling with and if they can t see a connection between what you are doing and their lives getting better in the short term as well as the long term then it s very hard to get any traction over time now no community is the same and every country will follow its own path so let me be very clear russia s future is up to the russian people not every choice that s good for the united states is going to be good for russia not every model of organization or development or democracy may be easily transplantable from one country to the next but let me also say that we can learn from each other and i do think there s some universal principles so i commend you for this summit designed not to lecture but to listen as was already pointed out not teach or impose solutions but to learn from each other from the bottom up as today s speakers explained there are so many opportunities for new partnerships developing strong prosperous communities expanding education and exchanges that open young minds to each other s countries promoting healthy lifestyles that help people live longer more productive lives discovering the clean energy technologies we need to protect our environment and confront climate change these are the challenges that we can meet together and meeting these challenges in turn requires what many of you have dedicated your lives to sustaining a vibrant civil society the freedom of people to live as they choose to speak their minds to organize peacefully and to have a say in how they are governed a free press to report the truth confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice a government that s accountable and transparent and we honor all of you for the passion and perseverance that you bring to these causes as i ve said elsewhere i don t think these are american ideals and i don t think they are the monopoly of one country they re universal values they re human rights and that s why the united states of america will support them everywhere that is our commitment and that is our promise and in supporting these ideals it s also important that we uphold them ourselves and that s why i take the last speaker s admonition as a useful reminder that what we do matters in part because although we know that sometimes we ll fall short of our ideals when we do they can be an excuse for others our journey to perfect our union goes on to this day and that s why i did order the closing of the guantanamo bay prison and i did ban torture without equivocation and without exception here in russia i welcome the steps that president medvedev has taken so that civil society groups can play a more active role on behalf of the russian people and i want to acknowledge that we are joined today by representatives of two important organizations the office of the human rights ombudsman and the presidential commission on human rights and civil society make no mistake civil society civil groups hold their governments to high standards and i know because this audience includes americans who ve been critical of me for not moving fast enough on issues that are of great importance they ve said it to my face in the oval office while i was president they told me i was wrong and in some cases they changed my mind in some cases they didn t and that s okay because we re not going to agree on everything but i know this their voices and their views and their criticism ultimately will make my decisions better they will make me ask tougher questions and ask my staff tougher questions and we ll find out are there ways of doing what we need to do that conform to our deepest held values and our ideals and that are sustainable over the long term that makes our country stronger in the long term and i wouldn t want it any other way so this summit reminds us the fresh starts have to be between more than just two presidents they have to be between our two peoples our two societies they have to be more than just common security the cold war weapons we dismantle it must be about our common opportunity the future of progress and prosperity that we build together and i think that the leadership here in russia both civil and governmental understand this i had lunch with president medvedev this afternoon and we started talking about health issues and the continuing high mortality rate among russian men in particular and we talked about alcoholism and we talked about smoking and we talked about the fact that government programs can be initiated but to the extent that there s been success in the united states around reducing smoking levels it s not only a matter of changing laws it s also been changing attitudes so that people feel that they need to change and they internalize these different attitudes that s something that civic society can do in a way that government never can i then met the leader of the russian orthodox church and he talked about how you know government exchanges are useful but religious organizations they can help melt away the suspicions and mistrust that have built between people over time so just in those two conversations in the span of 15 minutes essentially what i heard was a call for action from you confidence that what you are doing matters even when sometimes it seems hard and it seems as if nobody is listening that s what our work here on earth must be about what tolstoy called the sole meaning of life to serve humanity thank you for making that cause the meaning of your lives and good luck to all of you spasibo dem bobama7 7 09c barack_obama thank you so much well congratulations oxana and to the entire class of 2009 congratulations to you i don t know if anybody else will meet their future wife or husband in class like i did but i m sure that you re all going to have wonderful careers i want to acknowledge a few people who are here we have president mikhail gorbachev is here today and i want everybody to give him a big round of applause i want to thank sergei gurief director of the new economic school max boiko their chairman of the board and arkady dvorkovich who is the nes board member president of the alumni association and is doing an excellent job for president medvedev because he was in our meeting yesterday good morning it is a great honor for me to join you at the new economic school michelle and i are so pleased to be in moscow and as somebody who was born in hawaii i m glad to be here in july instead of january i know that nes is a young school but i speak to you today with deep respect for russia s timeless heritage russian writers have helped us understand the complexity of the human experience and recognize eternal truths russian painters composers and dancers have introduced us to new forms of beauty russian scientists have cured disease sought new frontiers of progress and helped us go to space these are contributions that are not contained by russia s borders as vast as those borders are indeed russia s heritage has touched every corner of the world and speaks to the humanity that we share that includes my own country which has been blessed with russian immigrants for decades we ve been enriched by russian culture and enhanced by russian cooperation and as a resident of washington d c i continue to benefit from the contributions of russians specifically from alexander ovechkin we re very pleased to have him in washington d c here at nes you have inherited this great cultural legacy but your focus on economics is no less fundamental to the future of humanity as pushkin said inspiration is needed in geometry just as much as poetry and today i want particularly to speak to those of you preparing to graduate you re poised to be leaders in academia and industry in finance and government but before you move forward it s worth reflecting on what has already taken place during your young lives like president medvedev and myself you re not old enough to have witnessed the darkest hours of the cold war when hydrogen bombs were tested in the atmosphere and children drilled in fallout shelters and we reached the brink of nuclear catastrophe but you are the last generation born when the world was divided at that time the american and soviet armies were still massed in europe trained and ready to fight the ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero sum game if one person won then the other person had to lose and then within a few short years the world as it was ceased to be now make no mistake this change did not come from any one nation the cold war reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years and because the people of russia and eastern europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful with the end of the cold war there were extraordinary expectations for peace and for prosperity for new arrangements among nations and new opportunities for individuals like all periods of great change it was a time of ambitious plans and endless possibilities but of course things don t always work out exactly as planned back in 1993 shortly after this school opened one nes student summed up the difficulty of change when he told a reporter and i quote him the real world is not so rational as on paper the real world is not so rational as on paper over two tumultuous decades that truth has been borne out around the world great wealth has been created but it has not eliminated vast pockets of crushing poverty poverty exists here it exists in the united states and it exists all around the world more people have gone to the ballot box but too many governments still fail to protect the rights of their people ideological struggles have diminished but they ve been replaced by conflicts over tribe and ethnicity and religion a human being with a computer can hold the same amount of information stored in the russian state library but that technology can also be used to do great harm in a new russia the disappearance of old political and economic restrictions after the end of the soviet union brought both opportunity and hardship a few prospered but many more did not there were tough times but the russian people showed strength and made sacrifices and you achieved hard earned progress through a growing economy and greater confidence and despite painful times many in eastern europe and russia are much better off today than 20 years ago we see that progress here at nes a school founded with western support that is now distinctly russian a place of learning and inquiry where the test of an idea is not whether it is russian or american or european but whether it works above all we see that progress in all of you young people with a young century to shape as you see fit your lifetime coincides with this era of transition but think about the fundamental questions asked when this school was founded what kind of future is russia going to have what kind of future are russia and america going to have together what world order will replace the cold war those questions still don t have clear answers and so now they must be answered by you by your generation in russia in america and around the world you get to decide and while i cannot answer those questions for you i can speak plainly about the future that america is seeking to begin with let me be clear america wants a strong peaceful and prosperous russia this belief is rooted in our respect for the russian people and a shared history between our nations that goes beyond competition despite our past rivalry our people were allies in the greatest struggle of the last century recently i noted this when i was in normandy for just as men from boston and birmingham risked all that they had to storm those beaches and scale those cliffs soviet soldiers from places like kazan and kiev endured unimaginable hardships to repeal to repel an invasion and turn the tide in the east as president john kennedy said no nation in history of battle ever suffered more than the soviet union in the second world war so as we honor this past we also recognize the future benefit that will come from a strong and vibrant russia think of the issues that will define your lives security from nuclear weapons and extremism access to markets and opportunity health and the environment an international system that protects sovereignty and human rights while promoting stability and prosperity these challenges demand global partnership and that partnership will be stronger if russia occupies its rightful place as a great power yet unfortunately there is sometimes a sense that old assumptions must prevail old ways of thinking a conception of power that is rooted in the past rather than in the future there is the 20th century view that the united states and russia are destined to be antagonists and that a strong russia or a strong america can only assert themselves in opposition to one another and there is a 19th century view that we are destined to vie for spheres of influence and that great powers must forge competing blocs to balance one another these assumptions are wrong in 2009 a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries the days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over as i said in cairo given our independence any world order that given our interdependence any world order that tries to elevate one nation or one group of people over another will inevitably fail the pursuit of power is no longer a zero sum game progress must be shared that s why i have called for a reset in relations between the united states and russia this must be more than a fresh start between the kremlin and the white house though that is important and i ve had excellent discussions with both your president and your prime minister it must be a sustained effort among the american and russian people to identify mutual interests and expand dialogue and cooperation that can pave the way to progress this will not be easy it s difficult to forge a lasting partnership between former adversaries it s hard to change habits that have been ingrained in our governments and our bureaucracies for decades but i believe that on the fundamental issues that will shape this century americans and russians share common interests that form a basis for cooperation it is not for me to define russia s national interests but i can tell you about america s national interests and i believe that you will see that we share common ground first america has an interest in reversing the spread of nuclear weapons and preventing their use in the last century generations of americans and russians inherited the power to destroy nations and the understanding that using that power would bring about our own destruction in 2009 our inheritance is different you and i don t have to ask whether american and russian leaders will respect a balance of terror we understand the horrific consequences of any war between our two countries but we do have to ask this question we have to ask whether extremists who have killed innocent civilians in new york and in moscow will show that same restraint we have to ask whether 10 or 20 or 50 nuclear armed nations will protect their arsenals and refrain from using them this is the core of the nuclear challenge in the 21st century the notion that prestige comes from holding these weapons or that we can protect ourselves by picking and choosing which nations can have these weapons is an illusion in the short period since the end of the cold war we ve already seen india pakistan and north korea conduct nuclear tests without a fundamental change do any of us truly believe that the next two decades will not bring about the further spread of these nuclear weapons that s why america is committed to stopping nuclear proliferation and ultimately seeking a world without nuclear weapons that is consistent with our commitment under the nuclear non proliferation treaty that is our responsibility as the world s two leading nuclear powers and while i know this goal won t be met soon pursuing it provides the legal and moral foundation to prevent the proliferation and eventual use of nuclear weapons we re already taking important steps to build this foundation yesterday president medvedev and i made progress on negotiating a new treaty that will substantially reduce our warheads and delivery systems we renewed our commitment to clean safe and peaceful nuclear energy which must be a right for all nations that live up to their responsibilities under the npt and we agreed to increase cooperation on nuclear security which is essential to achieving the goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear material within four years as we keep our own commitments we must hold other nations accountable for theirs whether america or russia neither of us would benefit from a nuclear arms race in east asia or the middle east that s why we should be united in opposing north korea s efforts to become a nuclear power and opposing iran s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon and i m pleased that president medvedev and i agreed upon a joint threat assessment of the ballistic challenges ballistic missile challenges of the 21st century including from iran and north korea this is not about singling out individual nations it s about the responsibilities of all nations if we fail to stand together then the npt and the security council will lose credibility and international law will give way to the law of the jungle and that benefits no one as i said in prague rules must be binding violations must be punished and words must mean something the successful enforcement of these rules will remove causes of disagreement i know russia opposes the planned configuration for missile defense in europe and my administration is reviewing these plans to enhance the security of america europe and the world and i ve made it clear that this system is directed at preventing a potential attack from iran it has nothing to do with russia in fact i want to work together with russia on a missile defense architecture that makes us all safer but if the threat from iran s nuclear and ballistic missile program is eliminated the driving force for missile defense in europe will be eliminated and that is in our mutual interests now in addition to securing the world s most dangerous weapons a second area where america has a critical national interest is in isolating and defeating violent extremists for years al qaeda and its affiliates have defiled a great religion of peace and justice and ruthlessly murdered men women and children of all nationalities and faiths indeed above all they have murdered muslims and these extremists have killed in amman and bali islamabad and kabul and they have the blood of americans and russians on their hands they re plotting to kill more of our people and they benefit from safe havens that allow them to train and operate particularly along the border of pakistan and afghanistan and that s why america has a clear goal to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda and its allies in afghanistan and pakistan we seek no bases nor do we want to control these nations instead we want to work with international partners including russia to help afghans and pakistanis advance their own security and prosperity and that s why i m pleased that russia has agreed to allow the united states to supply our coalition forces through your territory neither america nor russia has an interest in an afghanistan or pakistan governed by the taliban it s time to work together on behalf of a different future a future in which we leave behind the great game of the past and the conflict of the present a future in which all of us contribute to the security of central asia now beyond afghanistan america is committed to promoting the opportunity that will isolate extremists we are helping the iraqi people build a better future and leaving iraq to the iraqis we re pursuing the goal of two states israel and palestine living in peace and security we re partnering with muslim communities around the world to advance education health and economic development in each of these endeavors i believe that the russian people share our goals and will benefit from success and we need to partner together now in addition to these security concerns the third area that i will discuss is america s interest in global prosperity and since we have so many economists and future businessmen and women in the room i know this is of great interest to you we meet in the midst of the worst global recession in a generation i believe that the free market is the greatest force for creating and distributing wealth that the world has known but wherever the market is allowed to run rampant through excessive risk taking a lack of regulation or corruption then all are endangered whether we live on the mississippi or on the volga in america we re now taking unprecedented steps to jumpstart our economy and reform our system of regulation but just as no nation can wall itself off from the consequences of a global crisis no one can serve as the sole engine of global growth you see during your lives something fundamental has changed and while this crisis has shown us the risks that come with change that risk is overwhelmed by opportunity think of what s possible today that was unthinkable two decades ago a young woman with an internet connection in bangalore india can compete with anybody anywhere in the world an entrepreneur with a start up company in beijing can take his business global an nes professor in moscow can collaborate with colleagues at harvard or stanford that s good for all of us because when prosperity is created in india that s a new market for our goods when new ideas take hold in china that pushes our businesses to innovate when new connections are forged among people all of us are enriched there is extraordinary potential for increased cooperation between americans and russians we can pursue trade that is free and fair and integrated with the wider world we can boost investment that creates jobs in both our countries we can forge partnerships on energy that tap not only traditional resources like oil and gas but new sources of energy that will drive growth and combat climate change all of that americans and russians can do together now government can promote this cooperation but ultimately individuals must advance this cooperation because the greatest resource of any nation in the 21st century is you it s people it s young people especially and the country which taps that resource will be the country that will succeed that success depends upon economies that function within the rule of law as president medvedev has rightly said a mature and effective legal system is a condition for sustained economic development people everywhere should have the right to do business or get an education without paying a bribe whether they are in america or russia or africa or latin america that s not a american idea or a russian idea that s how people and countries will succeed in the 21st century and this brings me to the fourth issue that i will discuss america s interest in democratic governments that protect the rights of their people by no means is america perfect but it is our commitment to certain universal values which allows us to correct our imperfections to improve constantly and to grow stronger over time freedom of speech and assembly has allowed women and minorities and workers to protest for full and equal rights at a time when they were denied the rule of law and equal administration of justice has busted monopolies shut down political machines that were corrupt ended abuses of power independent media have exposed corruption at all levels of business and government competitive elections allow us to change course and hold our leaders accountable if our democracy did not advance those rights then i as a person of african ancestry wouldn t be able to address you as an american citizen much less a president because at the time of our founding i had no rights people who looked like me but it is because of that process that i can now stand before you as president of the united states so around the world america supports these values because they are moral but also because they work the arc of history shows that governments which serve their own people survive and thrive governments which serve only their own power do not governments that represent the will of their people are far less likely to descend into failed states to terrorize their citizens or to wage war on others governments that promote the rule of law subject their actions to oversight and allow for independent institutions are more dependable trading partners and in our own history democracies have been america s most enduring allies including those we once waged war with in europe and asia nations that today live with great security and prosperity now let me be clear america cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country and we haven t always done what we should have on that front even as we meet here today america supports now the restoration of the democratically elected president of honduras even though he has strongly opposed american policies we do so not because we agree with him we do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders whether they are leaders we agree with or not and that leads me to the final area that i will discuss which is america s interest in an international system that advances cooperation while respecting the sovereignty of all nations state sovereignty must be a cornerstone of international order just as all states should have the right to choose their leaders states must have the right to borders that are secure and to their own foreign policies that is true for russia just as it is true for the united states any system that cedes those rights will lead to anarchy that s why we must apply this principle to all nations and that includes nations like georgia and ukraine america will never impose a security arrangement on another country for any country to become a member of an organization like nato for example a majority of its people must choose to they must undertake reforms they must be able to contribute to the alliance s mission and let me be clear nato should be seeking collaboration with russia not confrontation and more broadly we need to foster cooperation and respect among all nations and peoples as president of the united states i will work tirelessly to protect america s security and to advance our interests but no one nation can meet the challenges of the 21st century on its own nor dictate its terms to the world that is something that america now understands just as russia understands that s why america seeks an international system that lets nations pursue their interests peacefully especially when those interests diverge a system where the universal rights of human beings are respected and violations of those rights are opposed a system where we hold ourselves to the same standards that we apply to other nations with clear rights and responsibilities for all there was a time when roosevelt churchill and stalin could shape the world in one meeting those days are over the world is more complex today billions of people have found their voice and seek their own measure of prosperity and self determination in every corner of the planet over the past two decades we ve witnessed markets grow wealth spread and technology used to build not destroy we ve seen old hatreds pass illusions of differences between people lift and fade away we ve seen the human destiny in the hands of more and more human beings who can shape their own destinies now we must see that the period of transition which you have lived through ushers in a new era in which nations live in peace and people realize their aspirations for dignity security and a better life for their children that is america s interest and i believe that it is russia s interest as well i know that this future can seem distant change is hard in the words of that nes student back in 1993 the real world is not so rational as on paper but think of the change that has unfolded with the passing of time one hundred years ago a czar ruled russia and europe was a place of empire when i was born segregation was still the law of the land in parts of america and my father s kenya was still a colony when you were born a school like this would have been impossible and the internet was only known to a privileged few you get to decide what comes next you get to choose where change will take us because the future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground the future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create that is the source of power in this century and given all that has happened in your two decades on earth just imagine what you can create in the years to come every country charts its own course russia has cut its way through time like a mighty river through a canyon leaving an indelible mark on human history as it goes as you move this story forward look to the future that can be built if we refuse to be burdened by the old obstacles and old suspicions look to the future that can be built if we partner on behalf of the aspirations we hold in common together we can build a world where people are protected prosperity is enlarged and our power truly serves progress and it is all in your hands good luck to all of you thank you very much dem bobama7 7 10 barack_obama thank you very much everybody please be seated well good morning thank you jim mcnerney for being here and thank you to members of my cabinet and my administration for coming thank you gary locke for that introduction and the outstanding work that you ve been doing at commerce to move america s economy forward now that work has been my driving focus since we walked through these doors a year and a half ago and at that time our economy was shrinking at an alarming rate nearly 3 million jobs were lost in the last half of 2008 in january 2009 alone more than 750 000 jobs had been lost here in the united states so every alarm bell was ringing at the prospect of a second great depression so our imperative was to stop that freefall and reverse direction to get our economy moving and get jobs growing again which meant we took a series of dramatic and frankly sometimes unpopular actions but as a result of those actions we broke the recession s momentum and we re in a much different place today our economy has now grown for three consecutive quarters and created nearly 600 000 private sector jobs in the first half of this year a stark contrast to the 3 7 millions we lost over the first half of last year and despite uncertain world events and the resulting ups and downs in the market we are moving america forward again but the progress we ve made to date isn t nearly enough to undo the damage that the recession visited on people and communities across our country our businesses are hiring again but there are still five unemployed workers for each job opening the economy is growing but empty storefronts still haunt too many main streets and the truth is the middle class families that are the backbone of our economy have felt their economic security eroding since long before this recession hit so we ve got much more work to do to spur stronger job growth and to keep the larger recovery moving the question is over the months and years to come how do we encourage the strong and lasting economic growth required for america to lead in this new century where are we going to find the growth necessary to help us address all of our priorities from creating jobs and prosperity to boosting our businesses and our workers to improving our fiscal health and reducing our long term deficits one thing we know is this growth won t come from an economy where prosperity is based on fleeting bubbles of consumption of debt it can t rely on paper gains we ve seen where that led us and we re not going back the truth is we ve had to face over the past year and a half the truth that if we want to once again approach full employment and fuel real economic growth then we need to put an end to the policies that got us here tackle the challenges we ve put off for decades and move this economy forward we need to lay a new and stronger foundation on which businesses can thrive and create jobs and rising incomes on which innovators and entrepreneurs can lead the world in generating new technologies and products and services we have to rely on a new foundation on which america can harness what has made our economy the engine and the envy of the world the talent and drive and creativity of our people so as business leaders and labor leaders representing some of america s largest corporations and america s workers that s what i want to talk to you about all today because america s success ultimately depends on your success it s the private sector that has always been the source of our job creation our economic growth and our prosperity and it s our businesses and workers who will take the reins of this recovery and lead us forward same time some might argue that government has no role to play at all in our economy but everybody in this room understands that the free market depends on a government that sets clear rules that ensure fair and honest competition that lives within its means that invests in certain things that the private sector can t invest on its own in the absence of this kind of responsible government whenever government is dragged too far to one end or the other of the spectrum we see negative consequences for our economy too much regulation or too much spending can stifle innovation can hamper confidence and growth and hurt business and families a government that does too little can be just as irresponsible as a government that does too much because for example in the absence of sound oversight responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment or take advantage of middle class families or threaten to bring down the entire financial system that s bad for everybody that s the reason we pursued wall street reforms and when the senate takes up its business again i hope it moves as quickly as possible to finish this chapter and settle this issue in the absence of sensible policies that invest in long term public goods like education or basic research roads railways broadband a smart electric grid an absence of those investments can be equally disastrous over time failure to make such investments slowly degrades our competitiveness leaving us without the skilled workforce or the technologies or the basic infrastructure that a 21st century economy requires so to make sure our workers can out compete anybody anywhere in the world we ve invested in the skills and education of our people through the race to the top we re challenging our schools to raise their standards and i ve pledged that by 2020 america will once again lead the world in the percentage of students graduating from college and by making higher education more affordable we re on our way to achieving that goal to strengthen our standing in a 21st century economy we ve invested in upgrading our critical infrastructure from high speed rail to high speed internet we ve enacted reforms that will reduce the drag of health care costs on businesses and consumers alike and we are committed to bringing down the unsustainable debt that has ballooned over the past 10 years to spur lasting growth we ve invested in science and technology research and development and clean energy projects that will strengthen our global leadership eighteen months ago for example american companies commanded just 2 percent of the global capacity for advanced battery technology today the seed money we provided has helped leverage substantial private investment and by 2012 we expect america s capacity to reach 20 percent of the global market and as high as 40 percent in 2015 but government has another responsibility and that is to remove barriers that stand in the way of opportunity and prosperity so that our people all of our people our workers our entrepreneurs our ceos can build the future that we seek and that s what i want to focus on now in my state of the union address i set a goal for america over the next five years we will double our exports of goods and services around the world an increase that will boost economic growth and support millions of american jobs in a manner that is deficit friendly export growth leads to job growth and economic growth in 2008 american exports accounted for nearly 7 percent of our total employment one in three manufacturing jobs and supported 10 3 million jobs in all jobs that pay 15 percent more than average so at a time when jobs are in short supply building exports is an imperative but this isn t just about where jobs are today this is where american jobs will be tomorrow ninety five percent of the world s customers and fastest growing markets are beyond our borders so if we want to find new growth streams if we want to find new markets and new opportunity we ve got to compete for those new customers because other nations are competing for those new customers as i ve said many times the united states of america should not cannot will not play for second place we mean to compete for those jobs and we mean to win but we re going to have to change how we do business to meet this goal we launched the national export initiative an ambitious effort to team up with america s businesses large and small and help them unleash their energy and innovation grow their markets support new jobs selling their goods and services all across the globe and we re bringing to bear the full resources of the united states government one of the first things we did was establish an export promotion cabinet made up of cabinet members and senior administration officials whose work affects exports yesterday i assembled this cabinet for an update on our efforts so far we re going to hold these meetings every few months and i ve asked for a progress report at our next meeting in september but this is about more than what government can do this is about what our businesses can do and that s why we are re launching the president s export council a group that includes business and labor leaders who will offer their unfiltered advice and expertise on how best to promote exports we ve also included congressional leaders and senior representatives of my administration and earlier today members of my cabinet and i met with this council to begin soliciting advice and i want to again thank jim president and ceo of boeing as well as ursula burns ceo of xerox for agreeing to serve as the chair and vice chair our efforts are off to a solid start american exports grew almost 17 percent over the first four months of this year compared to the same period last year part of this of course is due to the global recovery but we re also moving forward on improving conditions for america s exporters and since we launched the national export initiative we ve made progress across its five objectives first we said that america would be a strong partner and better advocate in the international marketplace for its businesses and workers and we re going to go to bat for everyone from the largest corporations to the smallest business owner with an idea that she wants to market and sell to the world so for example already this year the commerce department has coordinated 18 trade missions with over 160 companies that compete in 24 countries and we ve got 8 more planned over the next three months their advocacy center has assisted american companies competing for export opportunities supporting 11 4 billion in exports and an estimated 70 000 jobs secretary clinton recently held a roundtable with businesses in shanghai and next week she ll host another one with secretary locke to discuss removing barriers that stand in the way of their success meanwhile we re moving forward with strengthening our business assistance centers across the country and in our embassies and consulates abroad so that they can provide a comprehensive toolkit of services to help potential exporters gain a foothold in new markets and expand especially small businesses that might not know how to sell their products abroad second we re increasing access to export financing for small and medium sized businesses that want to export their goods and services but just need a boost so the export import bank has more than doubled its loans in support of american exporters since last year and that step alone has helped support nearly 110 000 jobs third we re upping our efforts to remove barriers to trade and open new markets and new opportunities for american business on a global level this begins with pushing hard in the doha round to improve those negotiations so that they have a higher level of ambition in the way that will translate directly into more opportunities for american exporters regionally we re working on the trans pacific partnership free trade agreement to expand our commercial presence in some of the most dynamic markets in asia and where our businesses run up against barriers in individual markets we are acting in march for example we reached an agreement with china to reopen their market to american pork and pork products and last month during president medvedev s visit we reached an agreement with russia to reopen their market to american poultry and these steps are worth more than 1 billion to american business we re also reforming our own restrictions on exports consistent with our national security interests and we hope to move forward on new agreements with some of our key partners i ve instructed u s trade representative ron kirk to begin discussions to help resolve outstanding issues with the pending korean free trade agreement before my visit to korea in november it s an agreement that will create new jobs and opportunity for people in both of our countries we also want to deepen and broaden our relations with panama and colombia so we re working to resolve outstanding issues with the free trade agreements with those key partners and we re focused on submitting them as soon as possible for congressional consideration and we ll make sure each agreement we pursue doesn t just advance the interests of our businesses workers and farmers but also upholds our most cherished values fourth as we help american businesses access new markets we re making sure that the access is free and fair the united states offers some of the world s lowest barriers to trade and when we give other countries the privilege of that free and fair access we expect it in return where american producers face unfair trade practices we ll use every tool at our disposal to enforce trade agreements last week for example the wto ruled in favor of the united states on a case that found european governments were subsidizing planes that airbus manufactures that practice was unfair and hurt american workers this ruling will help keep the playing field level and boost american jobs and finally we continue to coordinate with other nations around the world to promote strong sustainable and balanced growth at last month s g20 summit we built on the actions we took last year actions that have replaced global contraction with global growth and trade that was plummeting with trade that s bounced back sustaining that recovery however also involves rebalancing our economies as i told other leaders at the g20 after years of taking on too much debt americans will no longer borrow and buy the world s way to lasting prosperity we alone cannot be the engines of economic growth furthermore a strong and durable recovery requires that countries not have an undue advantage so we discussed the need for market driven currencies and i welcome china s decision to allow its currency to appreciate in response to market forces our discussion with china has also addressed the important challenge of how to create a more level playing field for american companies seeking to expand their access to the growing chinese market and i made it clear to all that the united states of america is prepared to compete aggressively for the jobs and industries and markets of the future the bottom line is this for a long time we were trapped i think in a false political debate in this country where business was on one side labor was on the other there were partisan divides the argument was either you were pro trade or you were anti trade what we now have an opportunity to do is to refocus our attention where we re all in it together businesses workers government everybody is focused on the same goal we live in a interconnected world there are global challenges and global opportunities this nation has never shied away from the prospect of competition we thrive on competition and we are better positioned than anybody as uniquely positioned as ever to compete with anyone in the world we ve got the most respected brands the best products the most vibrant companies in the world we ve got the most productive workers in the world we ve got the finest universities in the world we ve got the most open dynamic and competitive market in the world when the playing field is even nobody can beat us and we are upping our game for the playing field of the 21st century but we ve got to do it together we ve got to all row in the same direction there s no doubt that these are challenging times but i m absolutely convinced that we will rise to meet them to grow our economy to put our people back to work to forge our own future once more we are americans and that is what we do i appreciate all your participation and i m looking forward to getting busy working with you thank you dem bobama7 8 09 barack_obama hello virginia are you fired up are you ready to go it is good to be in virginia a place that has been good to me first of all it s just good to be next to a guy who spends every single day thinking about your future thinking about your children s future and the future of this commonwealth one of my best friends somebody who is dedicated to the kind of public service that i so deeply believe in please give it up for your governor tim kaine i think some of you know that tim was the first statewide official outside of illinois to endorse me in richmond virginia i called him up just a few weeks after i d announced and he was kind of new so he didn t know any better so he said yeah sure i ll endorse you i think his wife anne had something to do with it also and he has stood with me ever since on every tough battle that we ve had and so i am just grateful for him he was there when people couldn t even pronounce my name now part of the reason i like being in virginia is because there is a tradition here that has been developing starting with your former governor and now outstanding senator mark warner a tradition that it starts off with the basic idea that we re all in this together mark warner came in at a time when the fashionable politics was the nasty kind of politics the slash and burn politics the arguing and arguing without everything ever getting anything done kind of politics and mark warner said you know what we can try something different what we re going to do is we re going to be pragmatic instead of ideological we are going to try to bring people together rather than push them apart we are going to make sure that we listen to other people s ideas we re going to bring labor and business together we re going to make sure that we don t have a southern virginia and a northern virginia we ve got one commonwealth of virginia and so what he was able to do was to shape a kind of politics here in the commonwealth that has resulted in one of the best managed states in the country a state that was able to make investments in education even as it was dealing with a fiscal crisis a state that has now been able to navigate some of the toughest economic times that we ve seen in the history of the country because of that foundation of civility and practicality and hard work tim kaine embodied that tradition and he has now continued it during his term in office that s not just a stroke of good luck here in the state of virginia it s because you stood up and chose that kind of politics you decided to take the better way and now you ve got the chance to keep moving forward by electing somebody who is cut from the same cloth somebody who has that same vision for the commonwealth creigh deeds now i admit i m a little biased here i m a little biased first of all creigh deeds and i both have some wonderful daughters creigh deeds and i both served in the state senate i served for eight years and he s now served for eight years creigh deeds and i both have let s face it sort of funny names still trying to figure out the spelling of creigh but that s not the reason i m here tonight it s not just because of my personal bias this is a man who s spent his life working to do right by his family and the last two decades working to do right by the people of virginia as a prosecutor as a delegate as a state senator he has worked tirelessly to advance this commonwealth that he s loved his whole life he wrote megan s law advocated for the amber alert program to protect our children he s worked to preserve open space and protect the environment when virginia faced that financial crisis a few years back he was on mark warner s team up to make sure that you reformed the budget and controlled spending and even in the face of that crisis record investments in education laying a foundation for virginia s growth creigh will continue the progress that has been made in this great commonwealth he will continue to make that progress especially when it comes to education you heard the commitment to education that he made today and i know he will follow through because that s been the key to our lives growing up neither one of us had much but we had mothers who loved us and pushed us who instilled a belief that education was the best shot that we were going to have at life we are living proof that education is the single best investment we can make in our future and our children s future and the people of virginia understand that that s why he s going to invest in pre kindergarten programs and support our teachers and expand access to higher education he knows the smartest workforce is going to attract the best jobs and i want to partner with creigh deeds because we re going to make some commitments at the national level i ve already made sure that we strengthen and improve our education system from the cradle to graduation from college through career so that by 2020 america will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world and we re going to have them right here in virginia smart decisions sound investments a civility to our politics that s why virginia has become the nation s number one state to do business in that s why virginia is going to come out of the other side of this recession stronger and better prepared than before because of the forward thinking leadership of mark warner and tim kaine and creigh deeds now we have to be honest though even though virginia is weathering this recession this storm better than most states primarily because of this democratic leadership i know that too many families in virginia are still hurting unemployment is still over 7 percent folks here are still losing their homes or being crushed by health premiums that have doubled over the past nine years but without the steps we ve taken our troubled economy and the pain it s inflicting on virginia s families would be a lot worse i m always amused when i hear some folks some critics start talking about well look at the mess that the economy is in they seem to have some selective memory it didn t just happen somehow when my administration took office about six months ago we faced the worst recession since the great depression we were losing an average of 700 000 jobs a month it was nearly impossible to take out a home loan or a car loan or a student loan or loans for small business to make payroll and keep the doors open and economists all across the ideological spectrum left and right were saying we might be tipping over into a great depression at the time there were some who thought that doing nothing was an option remember that i disagreed i thought we had to act boldly and firmly and so we took steps to arrest our housing crisis and avert the collapse of our financial system less than one month after taking office we enacted the most sweeping recovery package in history and by the way we did it without earmarks and the pork barrel projects that the previous administration had loaded up with now there s been a lot of misinformation out there about the recovery plan i hope you don t mind virginia i just want to set the record straight this is very simple stuff here the recovery act is made up of three parts the first part about one third of the recovery act is a middle class tax cut for 95 percent of working americans a tax cut and by the way that s exactly what i promised you when i was running for president of the united states so when you hear the naysayers and the critics saying this plan isn t money well spent just remember one third of it is going right into your pockets that seems like well spent money to me another third all right so one third tax cuts sometimes i see folks outside with signs don t raise my taxes i haven t raised your taxes i ve lowered your taxes that s point number one another third was relief for people and states who had fallen on hard times because of the economic crisis so we expanded unemployment benefits to help folks who had lost their jobs and we re looking for work that s made a difference for about 150 000 virginians we made health insurance cheaper for families who rely on cobra after they ve lost a job and they re out there looking for a job we made it 65 percent cheaper that s you right there that s you right there i ve got some testimony i ve got an amen corner right here we helped states facing historic budget shortfalls which prevented layoffs and protected essential services in virginia that means 13 000 folks who are still working in our schools more than 300 deputy sheriffs who are still keeping communities safe state colleges and universities like the uva and virginia tech that haven t had to raise tuition because of the recovery package so i just want to know these critics i want to make sure are they opposed to the tax cuts that went into your pockets are they opposed to making sure that we re not cutting back on vital services and giving states some relief that s two thirds of the recovery act now the last third is making the vital investments that are putting people back to work today to create a stronger economy tomorrow the largest new investment of infrastructure in america since eisenhower built the interstate highway system back in the 1950s around here that means upgrading the lake barton dam improving the fairfax county parkway building new roads across northern virginia to ease congestion and make your lives a little better so step by step we are moving forward the american people understand the recession was years in the making it didn t just start last month that bank crisis didn t happen on my watch let s get the history straight and then we start getting into the whole issue of spending now let me tell you virginia has a history of prudent fiscal policy that s what tim kaine has been about and that s what mark warner has been about and that s what creigh deeds is going to be about so now you ve got folks on the other side of the aisle pointing at the federal budget and somehow trying to put that at our feet well let s look at the history when i walked in we had a 1 3 trillion deficit that was gift wrapped and waiting for me when i walked in the oval office without my policies we d have an even higher deficit going forward the one exception is the recovery package that we had to do in order to get this economy moving again so you can t go out there and charge up the credit card go on an all kinds of things shopping spree that didn t grow the economy hand over the bill to us and then say why haven t you paid it off yet i got that bill from you so we ve got some work to do i don t mind by the way being responsible i expect to be held responsible for these issues because i m the president but i don t want the folks who created the mess i don t want the folks who created the mess do a lot of talking i want them just to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess i don t mind cleaning up after them but don t do a lot of talking am i wrong virginia so i m convinced that the actions we ve taken in the first six months have helped stop our economic freefall we re losing jobs at half the rate we were at the beginning of this year our financial system is no longer on the verge of collapse the market is up housing prices are up for the first time in nearly three years we may just be seeing the very beginnings of the end of this recession but if we re going to move from recovery to prosperity we need to rebuild our economy stronger than before because even before this crisis hit we had an economy that was failing to create the kinds of good jobs with rising incomes for middle class families that is the bedrock of america there was a lot of money being made at the very top but it wasn t an economy that was built to compete in the 21st century one where we spend more on health care than any nation but aren t any healthier that s not sensible where we ve been slow to invest in clean energy technologies that have created new jobs and new industries in other countries where we watched our graduation rates lag behind too much of the world that s not a recipe for success that s why even as we work to rescue our economy from this crisis we re now laying the new foundation for the country to thrive in the 21st century we are going to prepare every child everywhere in america to compete and win with a world class education we re going to invest in the clean energy jobs of the future and train our workers for those jobs we re going to finally protect consumers and bring down the health care costs that are driving this nation into debt we re going to pass reform to ensure that a health care system doesn t just work for insurance companies but for all the people of virginia and all the people of the united states yes we can there are those out there who want us to go down the same old path the path where we just throw up our hands and say we can t do anything about education it s too hard we can t do anything about health care it s too tough a path where our children fall behind our workers lose out they watch jobs being shipped overseas our health care costs keep rising our oil dependency keeps on growing all we do is just then bicker and point fingers well that s not the future i accept for the united states of america that s not the future that creigh deeds accepts for the future of virginia that s not what you want for your children and your grandchildren we re setting a new course for this nation it s the one that mark warner and tim kaine and creigh deeds have already begun blazing right here in virginia they know that leadership is more than just about managing crises it s about making smart decisions for the future even in the toughest times that s what creigh deeds will do and that s why every single one of you is going to have to do the work to put him into office to carry on that tradition of leadership to bring about a brighter future for generations of virginians we did not come this far by lowering our sights or scaling back our dreams that s not the american way it s not about looking backwards it s about looking forward we didn t become the greatest nation on earth because we just stood still in the face of great challenges shrugged our shoulders and said no we can t we are americans we re a forward looking people we stare down challenges we ve always faced the future not with fear but with determination not with doubt but with hope we ve always taken great chances and reached for new horizons and remade the world around us last year virginia you helped lead a movement of americans who believed that their voices could make a difference a movement of young and old rich and poor democrat and republican black white latino asian native american gay straight disabled not disabled everybody was involved it didn t come from washington it came from the bottom up that s what we need to do in this race that s what creigh deeds is committed to that s what this election is all about i need every one of you to knock on doors and make phone calls and get fired up once again so that we can go towards the future confident with creigh deeds leading the great commonwealth of virginia thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama7 9 09 barack_obama hello cincinnati thank you thank you ohio thank you thank you labor all righty it is good to be back in cincinnati it s good to be back in ohio it s good to be back among great friends great leaders and i want everybody to give a big round of applause to charlie dilbert for that great introduction and i want to thank kathy mattea and the band for the entertainment give kathy a big round of applause how you all feeling today are you fired up are you ready to go i can t think of a better place to be on labor day than at america s biggest labor day picnic and with the workers and families of the cincinnati afl cio i m so proud to be on the stage with charlie because charlie reminds us that in these tough times america s working men and women are ready to roll up their sleeves and get back to work i want to salute your local afl cio local leaders executive secretary treasurer doug sizemore president joe zimmer state president joe rugola and your outstanding national leaders a man who we thank for devoting his life to working americans president john sweeney he s right there and the man who will pick up the mantle who will take the baton of leadership who we need to succeed because a strong labor movement is part of a strong economy is part of a strong economy secretary treasurer rich trumka although ohio s wonderful governor and great friend of mine ted strickland couldn t be here we ve got lieutenant governor lee fisher in the house secretary of state jennifer brunner attorney general richard cordray cincinnati mayor mark mallory hamilton county commissioner commission president david pepper we re joined by members of ohio s outstanding congressional delegation congressman steve driehaus and a great friend who is at the forefront of every fight for ohio s working men and women including the battle for health insurance reform senator sherrod brown i m also proud to be here with a leader who is reenergizing the department of labor who realizes that it s not the department of management it s the department of labor a daughter of union members a daughter of a teamster secretary hilda solis my director of recovery for auto communities and workers ed montgomery is in the house and he s doing outstanding work now cincinnati like a lot of americans you re having some fun today taking the day off spending time with the kids some of you may be proud of your grilling skills every man thinks he can grill whether he can or not that s what michelle says michelle says she s a better griller than me i don t know we ll have to have a grill off someday but you re enjoying some good music some good food some famous cincinnati chili but today we also pause we pause to remember and to reflect and to reaffirm we remember that the rights and benefits we enjoy today weren t simply handed to america s working men and women they had to be won they had to be fought for by men and women of courage and conviction from the factory floors of the industrial revolution to the shopping aisles of today s superstores they stood up and they spoke out to demand a fair shake and an honest day s pay for an honest day s work many risked their lives some gave their lives some made it a cause of their lives like senator ted kennedy who we remember today so let us never forget much of what we take for granted the 40 hour work week the minimum wage health insurance paid leave pensions social security medicare they all bear the union label it was the american worker men and women just like you who returned from world war ii to make our economy the envy of the world it was labor that helped build the largest middle class in history even if you re not a union member every american owes something to america s labor movement so as we remember this history let s reflect on its meaning in our own time like so many americans you work hard you meet your responsibilities you play by the rules you pay your bills but in recent years the american dream seems like it s been slipping away because from washington to wall street too often a different attitude prevailed wealth was valued over work selfishness over sacrifice greed over responsibility the right to organize was undermined rather than strengthened that s what we saw and it may have worked out well for those folks at the top but it didn t work out for you and it didn t work out well for our country that culture that culture and the policies that flowed from it undermined the middle class and helped create the greatest economic crisis of our time so today on this labor day we reaffirm our commitment to rebuild to live up to the legacy of those who came before us to combine the enduring values that have served us so well for so long hard work and responsibility with new ideas for a new century to ensure that our great middle class remains the backbone of our economy not just a vanishing ideal we celebrate at picnics once a year as summer turns to fall we want it a reality for the families of ohio and the families of america that s what we ve been working to do ever since i took office now i notice some people have already forgotten how bad it was just seven months ago you notice that they ve got sort of selective amnesia so let s just remind them for a second a financial system on the verge of collapse about 700 000 workers losing their jobs each month the worst recession of our lifetimes threatening to become another great depression that s what was happening just seven months ago and that s why we took bold swift action that s why we passed an unprecedented recovery act and we did it without the usual washington earmarks and pork barrel spending and ohio it is working times times are still tough times are still tough i know that but we have given 95 percent of america s working families a tax cut 4 5 million families in ohio including here in cincinnati a promise we made during the campaign a promise i kept as president of the united states we cut taxes for small businesses made new loans to more than 1 000 small businesses in ohio so they could grow and hire more workers we extended unemployment benefits for 12 million americans including charlie and nearly 570 000 ohio citizens across america we ve saved the jobs of tens of thousands of state and local workers including teachers and first responders right here in ohio don t take my word for it ask folks here in ohio what they would have done if we hadn t passed the recovery act the cuts they would have had to make the taxes they would have had to raise we re rebuilding america s infrastructure including improvements to i 75 in hamilton county led by a local cincinnati contractor we ve got more than 200 other highway projects across ohio and we re making a historic commitment to innovation much of it still to come in the months and years ahead doubling our capacity to generate renewable energy building a new smart grid to carry electricity from coast to coast laying down broadband lines and high speed rail lines and providing the largest boost in basic research in our history all of which will put people back to work steelworkers plumbers pipe fitters engineers you name it so our recovery plan is working bricklayers too the financial system financial system has been saved from collapse home sales are up we re seeing signs of life in the auto industry business investment is starting to stabilize for the first time in 18 months we re seeing growth in manufacturing when was the last time you heard that here in the united states of america now on friday we learned that the economy lost another 216 000 jobs in august and whenever americans are losing jobs that s simply unacceptable but for the second straight month we lost fewer jobs than the month before and it was the fewest jobs that we had lost in a year so make no mistake we re moving in the right direction we re on the road to recovery ohio don t let anybody tell you otherwise yes we will yes we are but but my friends we still have got a long way to go we re not going to rest we re not going to let up not until workers looking for jobs can find them good jobs that sustain families and sustain dreams not until responsible mortgage owners can stay in their homes not until we ve got a full economic recovery and all americans have their shot at the american dream now we can t do that if we go back to that old economy overleveraged banks inflated profits maxed out credit cards ceos and bankers getting multimillion dollar bonuses an economy of bubbles and bursts your wages and incomes stagnant while corporate profits soar so even as we recover from the recession and work to cut the deficit we have to build a new foundation for prosperity we need an america with a reformed financial system we got to have regulations in place that protect consumers so that we never have a crisis like this again i don t want to have to bail out any more banks and we got to make sure we ve got regulations in place to prevent it an america where energy reform creates green jobs that can never be outsourced and that finally frees america from the grip of foreign oil an america that commits to education because the countries that out educate us today will out compete us tomorrow and the best jobs will go to the best educated so we got to do a better job educating our sons and our daughters and yes i m going to have something to say tomorrow to our children telling them to stay in school and work hard because that s the right message to send we need an america that once again invests in the middle class which is why i ve created our task force for middle class working families led by my outstanding vice president joe biden to make sure that our policies always benefit you the american worker today we re taking another step i m naming ron bloom who s right here raise your hand ron he s right down in the front here i m naming ron bloom to lead our efforts to revitalize the sector that helped build the middle class american manufacturing ron has worked with steelworkers service employees and management to create jobs he helped guide our auto task force and as my new point person on manufacturing he s going to help us craft the policies that will create the next generation of great manufacturing jobs and ensure american competitiveness in the 21st century oh and by the way just in case you were wondering we re also going to build an america where health reform delivers more stability and security to every american we are going to reform the system for those who have insurance and those who don t now i ll have a lot more to say about this on wednesday night i might have to save my voice a little bit not get too excited i don t want to give anything away i want you all to tune in but let me just say a few things about this health care issue we ve been fighting for quality affordable health care for every american for nearly a century since teddy roosevelt think about that long time the congress and the country have now been vigorously debating the issue for many months the debate has been good and that s important because we ve got to get this right but every debate at some point comes to an end at some point it s time to decide at some point it s time to act ohio it s time to act and get this thing done we have never been this close we ve never had such broad agreement on what needs to be done and because we re so close to real reform suddenly the special interests are doing what they always do which is just try to scare the heck out of people but i ve got i ve got a question for all these folks who say you know we re going to pull the plug on grandma and this is all about illegal immigrants you ve heard all the lies i ve got a question for all those folks what are you going to do what s your answer what s your solution and you know what they don t have one their answer is to do nothing their answer is to do nothing and we know what that future looks like insurance companies raking in the profits while discriminating against people because of preexisting conditions denying or dropping coverage when you get sick it means you re never negotiating about higher wages because all you re spending your time doing is just trying to protect the benefits that you already fought for it means premiums continuing to skyrocket three times faster than your wages it means more families pushed into bankruptcy more businesses cutting more jobs more americans losing health insurance 14 000 every day it means more americans dying every day just because they don t have health insurance that s not the future i see for america i see reform where we bring stability and security to folks who have insurance today where you never again have to worry about going without coverage if you lose your job or you change your job or you get sick you ve got coverage there for you where there is a cap on your out of pocket expenses so you don t have to worry that a serious illness will break you and your family even if you have health insurance where you never again have to worry where you never again have to worry that you or someone you love will be denied coverage because of a preexisting condition i see reform where americans and small businesses that are shut out of health insurance today will be able to purchase coverage at a price they can afford where they ll be able to shop and compare in a new health insurance exchange a marketplace where competition and choice will continue to hold down costs and help deliver them a better deal and i continue to believe that a public option within that basket of insurance choices will help improve quality and bring down costs i see reform where we protect our senior citizens by closing the gaps in their prescription drug coverage under medicare that costs older americans thousands of dollars every years out of their pockets reforms that will preserve medicare and put it on a sounder financial footing and cut waste and fraud the more than 100 billion in unwarranted public subsidies to already profitable insurance companies i want a health insurance system that works as well for the american people as it does for the insurance industry they should be free to make a profit but they also have to be fair they also have to be accountable that s what we re talking about security and stability for folks who have health insurance help for those they don t the coverage they need at a price they can afford finally bringing costs under control that s the reform that s needed that s the reform we re fighting for and that s why it s time to do what s right for america s working families and put aside partisanship stop saying things that aren t true come together as a nation pass health insurance reform now this year few have fought harder or longer for health care in america s workers than you our brothers and sisters of organized labor and just as we know that we have to adapt to all the changes and challenges of a global economy we also know this in good economic times and in bad labor is not the problem labor is part of the solution that s why secretary solis made it her priority at the labor department to protect workers your safety your benefits your right to organize your right to bargain collectively that s why some of the first executive orders i issued overturned the previous administration s attempts to stifle organized labor that s why i support efca to level the playing field so it s easier for employees who want a union to form a union nothing nothing wrong with that because when labor is strong america is strong when we all stand together we all rise together that s why the first piece of legislation i signed into law was the lilly ledbetter fair pay act guaranteeing equal pay for equal work lilly worked at a factory in alabama she did her job and she did it well and then after nearly two decades she discovered that for years she was paid less than her male colleagues for doing the very same work over the years she had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and in pension and social security benefits lilly could have just moved on instead this alabama grandmother made a decision she said a principle was at stake she stood up and she spoke out for what was right all the way to the supreme court and then congress and finally the white house where she stood next to me as i signed the law that bore her name ohio that s the lesson this day that some things are worth fighting for equal pay fair wages dignity in the workplace justice on the job an economy that works for everybody because in america there are no second class citizens an economy where you can make a living and care for your families where you re leaving your kids something better where we live up to our fundamental ideals those words put on paper some 200 years ago that we re all created equal that we all deserve a chance to pursue our happiness that s the calling to which we are summoned this labor day that s the cause of my presidency and that is the commitment we must fulfill to preserve the american dream for all of america s working families but i m going to need you to do it at the beginning of this speech i talked about whether you were fired up i know that over the last couple months the economy has been bad the recession has been wearing on folks people losing their jobs people losing their health care people losing their homes in some cases it s been the usual bickering in washington doesn t seem like that ever stops pundits on tv they re saying how oh this isn t working and that s not working you know you start getting into a funk and whenever i see folks in that negative place i always think back to a story i told during the campaign some of you have heard it but i just thought i d say it again it s about where the phrase fired up comes from so this is when we were right at the beginning of the campaign for the presidency nobody gave us a chance none of you all could pronounce my name and i went down to south carolina i went down i think i was where was i i was in greenville am i right greenville and the legislators were having a little banquet and they had invited me to come down to speak and i sat next to a state representative i had nobody supporting me back then so i had to ask everybody i said will you support my campaign for the presidency of the united states and this state rep looked me up and down and she said you know i will give you my endorsement if you come to my hometown at greenwood south carolina now i had had a glass of wine so i said right away i said okay let s shake on it come to find out that greenwood is about an hour and a half from everyplace else so about a month later i fly in i ve been campaigning for two weeks straight haven t seen my family i m exhausted i m tired get to the hotel room i m dragging my bag into my room about to go to bed i get a tap on my shoulder it s my staff member says excuse me sir i said what he said you have to be in the car tomorrow at 6 30 a m in the morning i said why he said because we got to go to greenwood like you promised so the next day i wake up and i feel worse than when i went to bed i stagger over the window open up the blinds it s pouring down rain outside ugly day i go out get my newspaper open it up there s a bad story about me in the new york times i pack up my stuff i go downstairs my umbrella breaks and i get soaked so that by the time i m in the car i m sleepy i m wet and i m mad and we start driving and we just keep on driving we re driving we re driving we drive goes on forever hour and a half we re driving finally we get to greenwood although you don t know that you re in greenwood right away it s kind of a lot of fields and we pull up next to a little field house in a park and i get back out and i get a little more wet and i go inside and after this hour and a half drive lo and behold there are only 20 people inside and most of them are wet and don t look like they really want to be there either so you know i m a professional i go and shake everybody s hands and i ve got kind of a tight smile on my face how do you do what do you do nice to meet you suddenly i hear this voice behind me shouting out fired up and i m surprised i m scared almost but everybody else acts like this was normal and they all say fired up ready to go people around me they all say ready to go i don t know what s going on i look behind me there is a little woman she couldn t be more than 5 2 watch out you re little too little lady she s about 50 60 years old she dressed like she just came from church she got a big church hat and she s smiling at me she looks at me and she says fired up turns out this woman is a city council member from greenwood who is famous for her chant every event she goes to she likes chanting she goes fired up fired up ready to go ready to go and she does a little dance while she s doing it so for the next five minutes it seems like she just keeps on saying this little chant fired up fired up ready to go ready to go and i m standing there and i m thinking this woman is upstaging me i don t know what to do i m looking at my staff i m thinking when is this thing going to be over but here s the thing ohio after about a minute or two i m starting to feel kind of fired up i m starting to feel like i m ready to go so i start joining in the chant and it s making me feel good and for the rest of the day whenever we campaigned the whole day whenever i saw my staff i said are you fired up they said i m fired up boss are you ready to go and i d say i m ready to go it just goes to show you how one voice can change a room and if it can change a room it can change a city and if it can change a city it can change a state and if it can change a state it can change a nation and if it can change a nation it can change the world your voice can change the world your voice will get health care passed your voice will make sure that the american worker is protected you can build america i need your help thank you cincinnati are you fired up ready to go fired up ready to go fired up ready to go i love you bye bye dem bobama8 12 09 barack_obama thank you so much strobe for your extraordinary leadership here at brookings and thanks to all of you in attendance almost exactly one year ago on a frigid winter s day i met with my new economic team at the headquarters of my presidential transition offices in chicago and over the course of four hours my advisors presented an analysis of where the economy at that time stood accompanied by a chilling set of charts and graphs predicting where we might end up it was an unforgettable series of presentations christy romer who s here today tapped to head the council of economic advisers as well as larry summers who i d chosen to head the national economic council described an imminent downturn comparable in its severity to almost nothing since the 1930s tim geithner my incoming treasury secretary reported that the financial system shaken by the subprime crisis had halted almost all lending which in turn threatened to pull the broader economy in a downward spiral peter orszag my incoming budget director closed out the proceedings with an entirely dismal report on the fiscal health of the country with growing deficits and debt stretching to the horizon having concluded that it was too late for me to request a recount i tasked my team with mapping out a plan to tackle the crisis on all fronts it wasn t long after that meeting as we shaped this economic plan that we began to see some of these forecasts materialize over the previous year it was obvious that folks were facing hard times as i traveled across the country during the long campaign i would meet men and women bearing the brunt of not only a deepening recession but also years even decades of growing strains on middle class families but now the country was experiencing something far worse our gross domestic product the sum total of all that our economy produces fell at the fastest rate in a quarter century five trillion dollars of americans household wealth evaporated in just 12 weeks as stocks pensions and home values plummeted we were losing an average of 700 000 jobs each month equivalent to the population of the state of vermont that was true in december january february march the fear among economists across the political spectrum that was was that we were rapidly plummeting towards a second great depression so in the weeks and months that followed we undertook a series of difficult steps to prevent that outcome and we were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party which unfortunately after having presided over the decision making that had led to the crisis decided to hand it over to others to solve we acted to get lending flowing again so businesses could get loans to buy equipment and ordinary americans could get financing to buy homes and cars to go to college and to start or run businesses we enacted measures to stem the tide of foreclosures in our housing market helping responsible homeowners stay in their homes and helping to stop the broader decline in home values which was eating away at what tends to be a family s largest asset to achieve this and to prevent economic collapse we were forced to extend assistance to some of the very banks and financial institutions whose actions had helped precipitate the turmoil we also took steps to prevent the rapid dissolution of the american auto industry which faced a crisis partly of its own making to prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs during an already fragile shaky time these were not decisions that were popular or satisfying these were decisions that were necessary now even as we worked to address the crises in our banking sector in our housing market and in our auto industry we also began attacking our economic crisis on a broader front less than one month after taking office we enacted the most sweeping economic recovery package in history the american recovery and reinvestment act the recovery act was divided into three parts one third went for tax relief for small businesses and 95 percent of working families another third was for emergency relief to help folks who ve borne the brunt of this recession we extended or increased unemployment benefits for more than 17 million americans made health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families relying on cobra and for state and local governments facing historic budget shortfalls as demand for services went up and revenues went down we provided assistance that has saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and public school workers firefighters and police officers the last third of the recovery act is for investments to put americans to work doing the work that america needs done doubling our capacity in renewable energy like wind and solar computerizing medical records to save money and lives providing the largest boost to medical research in history renovating classrooms and school laboratories and upgrading roads and railways as part of the largest investment in infrastructure since the creation of the interstate highway system half a century ago and even as the recovery act has created jobs and spurred growth we have not let up in our efforts to take every responsible action to get the economy growing and america working this fall i signed into law more than 30 billion in tax cuts for struggling businesses extended an effective tax credit for homebuyers and provided additional unemployment insurance for one million americans and the treasury is continuing to adapt our financial stability plan helping to facilitate the flow of small credit to small businesses and families in addition we re working to break down barriers and open overseas markets so our companies can better compete globally creating jobs in america by exporting our products around the world now partly as a result of these and other steps we are in a very different place today than we were one year ago we may forget but we re in a very different place we can safely say that we are no longer facing the potential collapse of our financial system and we ve avoided the depression many feared our economy is growing for the first time in a year and the swing from contraction to expansion since the beginning of the year is the largest in nearly three decades finally we re no longer seeing the severe deterioration in the job market that we once were in fact we learned on friday that the unemployment rate fell slightly last month this is welcome news and news made possible in part by the up to 1 6 million jobs that the recovery act has already created and saved according to the congressional budget office but i m here today because our work is far from done for even though we ve reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who ve been swept up in the flood there are more than 7 million fewer americans with jobs today than when this recession began that s a staggering figure and one that reflects not only the depths of the hole from which we must ascend but also a continuing human tragedy it was mentioned that i was in allentown pennsylvania this past weekend and went to a job center where people were engaged in job search and it ran the spectrum blacks whites hispanics young people who were just starting their careers individuals 50 60 years old looking for a job and they were putting a brave face on it confident that eventually things would work out but you could also see the sense of anxiety the fear that perhaps this time it was different sometimes it s hard to break out of the bubble here in washington and remind ourselves that behind these statistics are people s lives their capacity to do right by their families it speaks to an urgent need to accelerate job growth in the short term while laying a new foundation for lasting economic growth my economic team has been considering a full range of additional ideas to help accelerate the pace of private sector hiring we held a jobs forum at the white house that brought together small business owners ceos union members economists folks from non profits and state and local officials to talk about job creation and i ve asked people to lead forums in their own communities sending the results to me so we are hearing as many voices as possible as we refine our proposals we ve already heard a number of good ideas and i know we ll learn of many more so today i want to outline some of the broader steps that i believe should be at the heart of our effort to accelerate job growth those areas that will generate the greatest number of jobs while generating the greatest value for our economy first we re proposing a series of steps to help small businesses grow and hire new staff over the past 15 years small businesses have created roughly 65 percent of all new jobs in america these are companies formed around kitchen tables in family meetings formed when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream formed when a worker decides it s time she became her own boss these are also companies that drive innovation producing 13 times more patents per employee than large companies and it s worth remembering every once in a while a small business becomes a big business and changes the world that s why it s so important that we help small business struggling to stay open or struggling to open in the first place during these difficult times building on the tax cuts in the recovery act we re proposing a complete elimination of capital gains taxes on small business investment along with an extension of write offs to encourage small businesses to expand in the coming year and i believe it s worthwhile to create a tax incentive to encourage small businesses to add and keep employees and i m going to work with congress to pass one now these steps will help but we also have to address the continuing struggle of small businesses to get loans that they need to start up and grow to that end we re proposing to waive fees and increase the guarantees for sba backed loans and i m asking my treasury secretary to continue mobilizing the remaining tarp funds to facilitate lending to small businesses second we re proposing a boost in investment in the nation s infrastructure beyond what was included in the recovery act to continue modernizing our transportation and communications networks these are needed public works that engage private sector companies spurring hiring all across the country already more than 10 000 of these projects have been funded through the recovery act and by design recovery act work on roads bridges water systems superfund sites broadband networks and clean energy projects will all be ramping up in the months ahead it was planned this way for two reasons so the impact would be felt over a two year period and more importantly because we wanted to do this right the potential for abuse in a program of this magnitude while operating at such a fast pace was enormous so i asked vice president biden and others to make sure to the extent humanly possible that the investments were sound the projects worthy and the execution efficient what this means is that we re going to see even more work and workers on recovery projects in the next six months than we saw in the last six months even so there are many more worthy projects than there were dollars to fund them i recognize that by their nature these projects often take time and will therefore create jobs over time but the need for jobs will also last beyond next year and the benefits of these investments will last years beyond that so adding to this initiative to rebuild america s infrastructure is the right thing to do third i m calling on congress to consider a new program to provide incentives for consumers who retrofit their homes to become more energy efficient which we know creates jobs saves money for families and reduces the pollution that threatens our environment and i m proposing that we expand select recovery act initiatives to promote energy efficiency and clean energy jobs which have been proven to be particularly popular and effective it s a positive sign that many of these programs drew so many applicants for funding that a lot of strong proposals proposals that will leverage private capital and create jobs quickly did not make the cut with additional resources in areas like advanced manufacturing of wind turbines and solar panels for instance we can help turn good ideas into good private sector jobs finally as we are moving forward in these areas we should also extend the relief in the recovery act including emergency assistance to seniors unemployment insurance benefits cobra and relief to states and localities to prevent layoffs this will help folks weathering these storms while boosting consumer spending and promoting job growth of course there s only so much government can do job creation will ultimately depend on the real job creators businesses across america we were encouraged today to hear from the business roundtable that their survey showed greater confidence and greater potential investment coming out of the business community government can help lay the groundwork on which the private sector can better generate jobs growth and innovation after all small business tax relief is not a substitute for ingenuity and industriousness by our entrepreneurs but it can help those with good ideas to grow and expand incentives to promote energy efficiency and clean energy manufacturing don t automatically create jobs or lower carbon emissions but these steps provide a framework in which companies can compete and innovate to create those jobs and reduce energy consumption and while modernizing the physical and virtual networks that connect us will create private sector jobs they ll do so while making it possible for companies to more easily and effectively move their products across this country and around the world and that will create more jobs and given the challenges of accelerating the pace of hiring in the private sector these targeted initiatives are right and they are needed but with a fiscal crisis to match our economic crisis we also must be prudent about how we fund it so to help support these efforts we are going to wind down the troubled asset relief program or tarp the fund created to stabilize the financial system so banks would lend again i don t think i have to tell you there has rarely been a less loved or more necessary emergency program than tarp which as galling as the assistance to banks may have been indisputably helped prevent a collapse of the entire financial system launched hastily understandably but hastily under the last administration the tarp program was flawed and we have worked hard to correct those flaws and manage it properly and today tarp has served its original purpose and at much lower cost than we expected in fact because of our stewardship of this program and the transparency and accountability we put in place tarp is expected to cost the taxpayers at least 200 billion less than what was anticipated just this past summer and the assistance to banks once thought to cost taxpayers untold billions is on track to actually reap billions in profits for the taxpaying public so this gives us a chance to pay down the deficit faster than we thought possible and to shift funds that would have gone to help the banks on wall street to help create jobs on main street small business infrastructure clean energy these are areas in which we can put americans to work while putting our nation on a sturdier economic footing that foundation for sustained economic growth that must be our continuing focus and our ultimate goal i ve said this before even before this particular crisis much of our growth for a decade or more had been fueled by unsustainable consumer debt and reckless financial speculation while we ignored the fundamental challenges that hold the key to our economic prosperity we cannot simply go back to the way things used to be we can t go back to an economy that yielded cycle after cycle of speculative booms and painful busts we can t continue to accept an education system in which our students trail their peers in other countries and a health care system in which exploding costs put our businesses at a competitive disadvantage and we cannot continue to ignore the clean energy challenge or cede global leadership in the emerging industries of the 21st century and that s why even as we strive to meet the crisis of the moment we have insisted on laying a new foundation for the future because an educated workforce is essential to a 21st century global economy we ve launched a competitive race to the top fund through the recovery act to reform our schools and raise achievement especially in math and science and we ve made college more affordable proposed a historic set of reforms and investments in community college and set a goal of once again leading the world in producing college graduates by the year 2020 because even the best trained worker in the world can t compete if our businesses are saddled with rapidly increasing health care costs we are fighting to do what we have discussed in this country for generations finally reforming our nation s broken health insurance system and relieving this unsustainable burden because our economic future depends on a financial system that encourages sound investments honest dealings and long term growth we ve proposed the most ambitious financial reforms since the great depression we ll set and enforce clear rules of the road close loopholes in oversight charge a new agency with protecting consumers and address the dangerous systemic risks that brought us to the brink of disaster these reforms are moving through congress we re working to keep those reforms strong and i m looking forward to signing them into law and because our economic future depends on our leadership in the industries of the future we are investing in basic applied research and working to create the incentives to build a new clean energy economy for we know the nation that leads in clean energy will be the nation that leads the world i want america to be that nation i want america s prosperity to be powered by what we invent and pioneer not just what we borrow and what we consume and i know that we can and will be that nation if we are willing to do what it takes to get there now there are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other this is a false choice ensuring that economic growth and job creation are strong and sustained is critical to ensuring that we are increasing revenues and decreasing spending on things like unemployment insurance so that our deficits will start coming down at the same time instilling confidence in our commitment to being fiscally prudent gives the private sector the confidence to make long term investments in our people and in america so one of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility even as we have had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term we ve begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run so let me just be clear here despite what some have claimed the cost of the recovery act is only a very small part of our current budget imbalance in reality the deficit had been building dramatically over the previous eight years we have a structural gap between the money going out and the money coming in folks passed tax cuts and expansive entitlement programs without paying for any of it even as health care costs kept rising year after year as a result the deficit had reached 1 3 trillion when we walked into the white house and i d note these budget busting tax cuts and spending programs were approved by many of the same people who are now waxing political about fiscal responsibility while opposing our efforts to reduce deficits by getting health care costs under control it s a sight to see the fact is we have refused to go along with business as usual we are taking responsibility for every dollar we spend we ve done what some said was impossible preventing wasteful spending on outdated weapons systems that even the pentagon said it didn t want we ve combed the budget cutting waste and excess wherever we could i m still committed to halving the deficit we inherited by the end of my first term cutting it in half and i made clear from day one that i would not sign a health insurance reform bill if it raised the deficit by one dime and neither the house nor the senate bill does we ve begun not only changing policies in washington we ve also begun to change the culture in washington in the end the economic crisis of the past year was not just the result of weaknesses in our economy it was also the result of weaknesses in our political system because for decades too many in washington put off the hard decisions for decades we ve watched as efforts to solve tough problems have fallen prey to the bitterness of partisanship to prosaic concerns of politics to ever quickening news cycles to endless campaigns focused on scoring points instead of meeting our common challenges we ve seen the consequences of this failure of responsibility the american people have paid a heavy price and the question we ll have to answer now is if we re going to learn from our past or if even in the aftermath of disaster we re going to repeat those same mistakes as the alarm bells fade the din of washington rises as the forces of the status quo marshal their resources we can be sure that answering this question will be a fight to the finish but i have every hope and expectation that we can rise to this moment that we can transcend the failures of the past that we can once again take responsibility for our future every night i read letters and e mails sent to me from people across america ordinary folks people who share their hopes and their hardships their faith in this country their frustration with what s happened in this economy i hear from small business owners worried about making payroll keeping their doors open i hear from mothers and fathers sons and daughters who ve seen one or two or more family members out of work the toughest letters are in children s handwriting kids write to me my dad just lost a job my grandma is sick she can t afford health insurance kids who can t just be kids because they re worried about mom having her hours cut or dad losing a job or a family without health insurance these folks aren t looking for a handout they re not looking for a bailout just like those people i visited in allentown all they re looking for is a chance to make their own way to work to succeed using their talents and skills and they re looking for folks in washington to have a seriousness of purpose that matches the reality of their struggle everywhere i ve gone every stop i ve made there are people like this men and women who have faced misfortune but who stand ready to build a better future students ready to learn workers eager to work scientists on the brink of discovery entrepreneurs seeking the chance to open a small business everywhere i go there are once shuttered factories just waiting to whir back to life in burgeoning industries there is a nation ready to meet the challenges of this new age and to lead the world in this new century and as we look back on the progress of the past year and look forward to the work ahead i have every confidence that we will do exactly that these have been a tough two years and there will no doubt be difficult months ahead but the storms of the past are receding the skies are brightening and the horizon is beckoning once more thank you very much dem bobama8 3 10a barack_obama that would be me thank you everybody thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you everybody please have a seat let me begin by just thanking some of the people who are participating here today michelle mentioned my outstanding cabinet members the extraordinary members of congress and people who are in our senior white house team i also want to thank ms kerry washington for emceeing today give kerry a big round of applause where is she there she is ms katharine mcphee who s going to be performing a song in the program where s katharine she s around she s practicing she s here i just saw her secretary madeline albright is here today and ms mozhdah jamalzadah is also going to be here performing a song in the program so we want to thank her give her a big round of applause and then there s this lady here flotus that s what we call her flotus she is i m biased i acknowledge but i think she s a pretty good first lady don t you think she s pretty good and i m very sincere when i look at you adoringly the story of america over the past 200 years past 233 years is one of laws becoming more just of a people becoming more equal of a union being perfected it s a story of captives being set free and a movement to fulfill the promise of that freedom it s a story of waves of weary travelers reconsecrating america as a nation of immigrants it s a story of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters making the most of that most american of demands to be treated the same as everybody else and it s a story of women from those on the mayflower to the one i m blessed to call my wife who looked across the dinner table and thought i m smarter than that guy the story of america s women like the story of america itself has had its peaks and valleys but as one of our great american educators once said if you drew a line through all the valleys and all the peaks that line would be drawn with an upward curve that upward curve what we call progress didn t happen by accident it came about because of daring indomitable women women like abigail adams who brought on the ridicule of her husband john by advising him to remember the ladies in our founding documents women like the pioneers and settlers who in the words of one said i thought where he could go i could go women like dorothy height and sylvia mendez and betty friedan and gloria steinem and sandra day o connor and madeline albright upending assumptions and changing laws and tearing down barriers women like hillary rodham clinton who throughout her career has put millions of cracks in america s glass ceiling it s because of them and so many others many who aren t recorded in the history books that the story of america is ultimately one of hope and one of progress of an upward journey but even as we reflect on the hope of our history we must also face squarely the reality of the present a reality marked by unfairness marked by hardship for too many women in america the statistics of inequality are all too familiar to us how women just earn 77 cents for every dollar men make how one in four women is the victim of domestic violence at some point in her life how women are more than half the population but make up only 17 percent of the seats in congress and less than 3 percent of fortune 500 ceos these and any number of other facts and figures reflect the fundamental truth that in 2010 full gender equality has not yet been achieved that the task of perfecting america goes on and that all of us men and women have a part to play in bending the arc in america s story upward in the 21st century i m proud of the extraordinary women and the extraordinary americans i ve appointed to help take up this task in addition to our outstanding secretary of state we ve got hilda solis serving where the first female cabinet secretary frances perkins once served at the labor department we ve got kathleen sebelius leading our health and human services department janet napolitano running the department of homeland security susan rice is our ambassador to the united nations the chair of my council of economic advisors is christy romer we got lisa jackson who s doing great work at the epa we have just extraordinary talent all across this administration and from health insurance reform to climate and energy to matters of domestic policy i m seeking the counsel of brilliant women and that list doesn t include by the way the justice i appointed to the supreme court ms sonia sotomayor so yes i m very proud to have appointed so many brilliant women to so many essential posts in our government but i m even prouder of what each of them is doing and what all of us are doing to make life better in america and around the world because lifting up the prospects of our daughters will require all of us doing our part and that s why we ve established a new white house council on women and girls chaired by my friend and senior advisor valerie jarrett that will help make sure that every part of our government is working to address the challenges faced by women and girls at a time when women are on the verge of making up the majority of america s workforce the very first bill i signed into law a bill named after lilly ledbetter was designed to help keep america s promise if you do the same work as a man you ought to be paid the same wage as a man to help parents balance work and family we re offering states more support for quality affordable child care and paid family leave at a time when we are waging two wars and fighting a global network of hatred and violence we need the service of all those patriotic americans who are willing to do their part and that s why chairman of the joint chiefs of staff admiral mullen and top navy officers decided to end an old barrier against women so our skilled and brave navy women as well as men can serve on submarines at a time when it s still legal for health insurance companies to discriminate against the victims of domestic violence in eight states plus the district of columbia we re seeking health insurance reforms that would finally rein in the worst practices of the insurance industry and i m also proud to note that i ve appointed the first white house advisor on violence against women lynn rosenthal at a time when the jobs of tomorrow will go to workers with the knowledge and skills to do them we re ramping up efforts to educate our young people in science and technology engineering and math and we re making a special effort to recruit women to those fields because i want to see more teenage astronomers like caroline moore in fact transportation secretary ray lahood has launched a new partnership with spelman college to train women engineers and help put them to work rebuilding our highways and our infrastructure and since today happens to be international women s day it s also worth mentioning what secretary clinton and ambassador rice and this administration are doing on behalf of women around the globe we lifted what s called the global gag rule that restricted women s access to family planning services abroad we re pursuing a global health strategy that makes important investments in child and maternal health we sponsored a u n resolution to increase protection for women and girls in conflict torn countries to help make it possible for more women like mozhdah who traveled from afghanistan to join us here today to reach for their dreams we created the first office of global women s issues at the state department and appointed ambassador melanne verveer to run it we re investing 18 million we re investing 18 million to combat the unconscionable cruelties being committed against girls and women in the democratic republic of congo and next month i ll host an entrepreneurship summit to help fulfill a commitment i made in cairo a summit that will focus in part on the challenges facing women entrepreneurs in muslim communities around the world we re doing all of this not only because promoting women s empowerment is one of the best ways to promote economic development and economic success we are doing it because it s the right thing to do i say that not only as a president but also as the father of two daughters as a son and a grandson and as a husband growing up i saw my mother dedicate most of her life to promoting the rights and well being of women overseas to empowering them to take more control over their economic lives and be able to empower their families as well i saw my grandmother work her way up to become vice president at a bank in hawaii starting as a secretary never had more than a high school education but i also saw how she hit a glass ceiling and had to watch as men no more qualified than she was rise up the corporate ladder before we got to the white house where we are grateful for the extraordinary support that we receive from the white house staff i d see the challenges michelle faced as a working mom and as usual she handled it with grace and skill but she d be the first one to tell you it wasn t always easy balancing the responsibilities of being a hospital executive with those of being a mother and sometimes worrying about the girls when she was at work and sometimes worrying about work when she was with the girls and today as i see sasha and malia getting older i think about the world that they and all of america s daughters will inherit and i think about all of the opportunities that are still beyond reach for too many young women and too many of our brothers and sisters too many of our sisters and mothers and aunts all of the glass ceilings that have yet to be shattered we have so much more work to do and that s why we re here today i think about this because it reminds me of why i m here i didn t run for president so that the dreams of our daughters could be deferred or denied i didn t run for president to see inequality and injustice persist in our time i ran for president to put the same rights the same opportunities the same dreams within the reach for our daughters and our sons alike i ran for president to put the american dream within the reach of all of our people no matter what their gender or race or faith or station if we can stay true to that cause if we can stay true to our founding ideals then i m absolutely confident that the line that runs through america s story will in the future as it has in the past be drawn with an upward curve and i m especially pleased that these young ladies are here today because they re the ones who are going to help bend that curve towards justice and equality thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama8 3 10b barack_obama hello pennsylvania thank you thank you very much thank you this is a nice crowd thank you very much thank you well what a wonderful crowd love you back i am i m kind of fired up i m kind of fired up so listen we this is just an extraordinary crowd and i i love you back i want there s some people i want to point out who are here who ve just been doing great work first of all give leslie a great round of applause for her wonderful introduction somebody who s been working tirelessly on your behalf doing a great job the secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius is in the house one of the finest governors in the country ed rendell is in the house everybody notice how good ed is looking by the way he s been on that training program eating egg whites and keeping his cholesterol down your senior senator who has just been doing outstanding work in the senate arlen specter is in the house one of my great friends somebody who supported me when nobody could pronounce my name bob casey is in the house your congressman the person who gave me confidence that i could win even though nobody could pronounce my name chaka fattah is in the house i figured if they could elect a chaka then they could elect a barack a couple other outstanding members of congress first of all from pennsylvania allyson schwartz is in the house somebody who rendered outstanding service to our nation before he was in congress joe sestak is in the house one of the sharpest members of congress technically not his state but he s just from right next door new jersey so he s practically see we ve got some jersey folks here rob andrews is in the house and the great mayor of philadelphia mike nutter it s a little hot i think and to arcadia university thank you thank you guys for hosting us i was asking about that castle on the way in by the way that s a i thought the white house was pretty nice but that castle that s well it is great to be back here in the keystone state it s even better to be out of washington d c first of all the people of d c are wonderful they re nice people they re good people love the city the monuments everything but when you re in washington folks respond to every issue every decision every debate no matter how important it is with the same question what does this mean for the next election what does it mean for your poll numbers is this good for the democrats or good for the republicans who won the news cycle that s just how washington is they can t help it they re obsessed with the sport of politics and so that s the environment in which elected officials are operating and you ve seen all the pundits pontificating and talking over each other on the cable shows and they re yelling and shouting they can t help themselves that s what they do but out here and all across america folks are worried about bigger things they re worried about how to make payroll they re worried about how to make ends meet they re worried about what the future will hold for their families and for our country they re not worrying about the next election we just had an election they re worried about the next paycheck or the next tuition payment that s due they re thinking about retirement you want people in washington to spend a little less time worrying about our jobs a little more time worrying about your jobs despite all the challenges we face two wars the aftermath of a terrible recession i want to tell everybody here today i am absolutely confident that america will prevail that we will shape our destiny as past generations have done that s who we are we don t give up we don t quit sometimes we take our lumps but we just keep on going that s who we are but that only happens when we re meeting our challenges squarely and honestly and i have to tell you that s why we are fighting so hard to deal with the health care crisis in this country health care costs that are growing every single day i want to spend some time talking about this the price of health care is one of the most punishing costs for families and for businesses and for our government it s forcing people to cut back or go without health insurance it forces small businesses to choose between hiring or health care it s plunging the federal government deeper and deeper and deeper into debt the young people who are here you ve heard stories some of you guys still have health care while you re in school some of you may still be on your parents plans but some of the highest uninsurance rates are among young people and it s getting harder and harder to find a job that s going to provide you with health care and a lot of you right now feel like you re invincible so you don t worry about it but let me tell you when you hit 48 you start realizing things start breaking down a little bit and the insurance companies continue to ration health care based on who s sick and who s healthy on who can pay and who can t pay that s the status quo in america and it is a status quo that is unsustainable for this country we can t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the american people we need to give families and businesses more control over their own health insurance and that s why we need to pass health care reform not next year not five years from now not 10 years from now but now now since we took this issue on a year ago there have been plenty of folks in washington who ve said that the politics is just too hard they ve warned us we may not win they ve argued now is not the time for reform it s going to hurt your poll numbers how is it going to affect democrats in november don t do it now my question to them is when is the right time if not now when if not us who think about it we ve been talking about health care for nearly a century i m reading a biography of teddy roosevelt right now he was talking about it teddy roosevelt we have failed to meet this challenge during periods of prosperity and also during periods of decline some people say well don t do it right now because the economy is weak when the economy was strong we didn t do it we ve talked about it during democratic administrations and republican administrations i got all my republican colleagues out there saying well no no no we want to focus on things like cost you had 10 years what happened what were you doing every year the problem gets worse every year insurance companies deny more people coverage because they ve got preexisting conditions every year they drop more people s coverage when they get sick right when they need it most every year they raise premiums higher and higher and higher just last month anthem blue cross in california tried to jack up rates by nearly 40 percent 40 percent anybody s paycheck gone up 40 percent i mean why is it that we think this is normal in my home state of illinois rates are going up by as much as 60 percent you just heard leslie who was hit with more than a hundred percent increase 100 percent one letter from her insurance company and her premiums doubled just like that and because so many of these markets are so concentrated it s not like you can go shopping you re stuck so you ve got a choice either no health insurance in which case you re taking a chance if somebody in your family gets sick that you will go bankrupt and lose your home and lose everything you ve had or you keep on ponying up money that you can t afford see these insurance companies have made a calculation listen to this the other day there was a conference call that was organized by goldman sachs you know goldman sachs you ve been hearing about them right so they organized a conference call in which an insurance broker was telling wall street investors how he expected things to be playing out over the next several years and this broker said that insurance companies know they will lose customers if they keep on raising premiums but because there s so little competition in the insurance industry they re okay with people being priced out of the insurance market because first of all a lot of folks are going to be stuck and even if some people drop out they ll still make more money by raising premiums on customers that they keep and they will keep on doing this for as long as they can get away with it this is no secret they re telling their investors this we are in the money we are going to keep on making big profits even though a lot of folks are going to be put under hardship so how much higher do premiums have to rise until we do something about it how many more americans have to lose their health insurance how many more businesses have to drop coverage all those young people out here after you graduate you re going to be looking for a job think about the environment that s going to be out there when a whole bunch of potential employers just tell you you know what we just can t afford it or you know what we re going to have to take thousands of dollars out of your paycheck because the insurance company just jacked up our rates how many years how many more years can the federal budget handle the crushing costs of medicare and medicaid that s the debt you re going to have to pay young people when is the right time for health insurance reform is it a year from now or two years from now or five years from now or 10 years from now i think it s right now and that s why you re here today leslie is a single mom just like my mom was a single mom trying to put her daughter through college she knows that the time for reform is now natoma canfield self employed cancer survivor from ohio she wrote us a letter last year her insurance company charged her over 6 000 in premiums paid about 900 worth of care now they ve decided to jack up her rates 40 percent next year so she s had to drop her insurance even though it may cost her the house that her parents built natoma knows it s time for reform laura klitzka this is a friend of mine somebody i met when i was campaigning in wisconsin green bay wisconsin she s a young mother she s got two kids she thought she had beaten her breast cancer but later discovered it had spread to her bones she and her husband had insurance but their medical bills still landed them with tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt and now she spends her time worrying about that debt when all she wants to do is spend time with her children i just talked to laura this past weekend and let me tell you she knows that the time for reform is right now so what should i tell these americans that washington is not sure how it will play in november that we should walk away from this fight or do something do something like some on the other side of the aisle have suggested well we ll do it incrementally we ll take baby steps we ll do so they want me to pretend to do something that doesn t really help these folks we have debated health care in washington for more than a year every proposal has been put on the table every argument has been made i know a lot of people view this as a partisan issue but both parties have found areas where we agree what we ve ended up with is a proposal that s somewhere in the middle one that incorporates the best from democrats and republicans best ideas think about it along the spectrum of how we could approach health care on one side of the spectrum there were those at the beginning of this process who wanted to scrap our system of private insurance and replace it with a government run health care system like they have in some other countries look it works in places like canada but i didn t think it was going to be practical or realistic to do it here on the other side of the spectrum there are those who believe that the answer is just to loosen regulations on insurance companies this is what we heard at the health care summit they said well you know what if we had fewer regulations on the insurance companies whether it s consumer protections or basic standards on what kind of insurance they sell somehow market forces will make things better well we ve tried that i m concerned that would only give insurance companies more leeway to raise premiums and deny care so the bottom line is i don t believe we should give government or insurance companies more control over health care in america i believe it s time to give you the american people more control over your own health insurance and that s why my proposal builds on the current system where most americans get their health insurance from their employer if you like your plan you can keep your plan if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor but i can tell you as the father of two young girls i don t want a plan that interferes with the relationship between a family and their doctor so we re going to preserve that essentially my proposal would change three things about the current health care system listen up first it would end the worst practices of insurance companies within the first year of signing health care reform thousands of uninsured americans with preexisting conditions would suddenly be able to purchase health insurance for the very first time in their lives or the first time in a long time this year insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions this year they will be banned from dropping your coverage when you get sick and they will no longer be able to arbitrarily and massively hike your premiums just like they did to leslie or natoma or millions of others americans those practices will end if this reform becomes law all new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care to their customers starting this year free check ups so that we can catch preventable illnesses on the front end starting this year there will be no more lifetime or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care that you can receive from your insurance companies there s a lot of fine print in there that can end up costing people hundreds of thousands of dollars because they hit a limit if you re a young adult which many of you are you ll be able to stay on your parents insurance policy until you re 26 years old and there will be a new independent appeals process for anybody who feels they were unfairly denied a claim by their insurance company so you ll have recourse if you re being taken advantage of so that s the first thing that would change and it would change fast insurance companies would finally be held accountable to the american people that s number one number two second thing that would change about the current system is this for the first time in their lives or oftentimes in a very long time uninsured individuals and small business owners will have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of congress get for themselves if it s good enough for congress it should be good enough for the people paying congress its salary that s you now the idea is very simple here and it s one i m sorry go ahead let me explain how this would work because it s an idea that a lot of republicans have embraced in the past what my proposal says is that if you aren t part of a big group if you don t work for a big company you can be part of a pool which gives you bargaining power over insurance companies it s very straightforward suddenly just like the federal employees there are millions of them so they can drive a harder bargain with insurance companies you as an individual or a small business owner could be part of this pool which would give you more negotiating power with the insurance companies for lower rates and a better deal right now if you still can t afford the insurance that s offered even though it s a better deal than you can get on your own but you still just can t get it then what we re going to do is give you a tax credit to do so and these tax credits add up to the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history because the wealthiest among us they can already afford to buy the best insurance there is the least well off are already covered through medicaid it s the middle class that gets squeezed that s who we need to help with these tax credits that s what we intend to do now i want to be honest let s be clear this will cost some money it s going to cost about 100 billion per year most of this comes from the nearly 2 5 trillion a year that america already spends on health care it s just that right now a lot of that money is being wasted or it s being spent badly so with this plan we re going to make sure that the dollars we spend go to making insurance more affordable and more secure so i ll give you an example we re going to eliminate wasteful taxpayer subsidies that currently go to insurance and pharmaceutical companies they are getting billions of dollars a year from the government from taxpayers when they re making a big profit i d rather see that money going to people who need it we ll set a new fee on insurance companies that stand to gain as millions of americans are able to buy insurance they re going to have 30 million new customers there s nothing wrong with them paying a little bit of the freight and we ll make sure that the wealthiest americans pay their fair share of medicare just like everybody else does so the bottom line is this our proposal is paid for all the new money generated in this plan goes back to small business owners and individuals in the middle class who right now are having trouble getting insurance it would lower prescription drug prices for seniors it would help train new doctors and nurses to provide care for american families and physicians assistants and therapists i know there are got great programs here at arcadia i was hearing about the terrific programs you have at arcadia in the health care field well you know what we re going to need more health care professionals of the sorts that are being trained here and we want to help you get that training and that s in this bill so i ve mentioned two things now insurance reform and making sure the people who don t have health insurance are able to get it finally my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions families businesses and the federal government as i said you keep on hearing from critics and some of the republicans on these sunday shows say well we want to do more about cost we have now incorporated almost every single serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising cost of health care ideas that go after waste and abuse in our system including in programs like medicare but we do this while protecting medicare benefits and we extend the financial stability of the program by nearly a decade our cost cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current senate bill which reduces most people s premiums and brings down our deficit by up to 1 trillion over the next decade because we re spending our health care dollars more wisely those aren t my numbers those aren t my numbers they are the savings determined by the congressional budget office which is the nonpartisan independent referee of congress for what things cost so that s our proposal insurance reform making sure that you can have choices in the marketplace for health insurance and making it affordable for people and reducing costs now think about it i think how many people would like a proposal that holds insurance companies more accountable how many people would like to give americans the same insurance choices that members of congress get and how many would like a proposal that brings down costs for everyone that s our proposal and it is paid for and it s a proposal whose time has come the united states congress owes the american people a final up or down vote on health care it s time to make a decision the time for talk is over we need to see where people stand and we need all of you to help us win that vote so i need you to knock on doors talk to your neighbors pick up the phone when you hear an argument by the water cooler and somebody is saying this or that about it say no no no no hold on a second and we need you to make your voices heard all the way in washington d c they need to hear your voices because right now the washington echo chamber is in full throttle it is as deafening as it s ever been and as we come to that final vote that echo chamber is telling members of congress wait think about the politics instead of thinking about doing the right thing that s what mitch mcconnell said this weekend his main argument was well this is going to be really bad for democrats politically now first of all i generally wouldn t take advice about what s good for democrats but setting aside that that s not the issue here the issue here is not the politics of it but that s what people that s what members of congress are hearing right now on the cable shows and in the sort of the gossip columns in washington it s telling congress comprehensive reform has failed before remember what happened to clinton it may just be too politically hard yes it s hard it is hard that s because health care is complicated health care is a hard issue it s easily misrepresented it s easily misunderstood so it s hard for some members of congress to make this vote there s no doubt about that but you know what else is hard what leslie and her family are going through that s hard the possibility that natoma canfield might lose her house because she s about to lose her health insurance that s hard laura klitzka in green bay having to worry about her cancer and her debt at the same time trying to explain that to her kids that s hard what s hard is what millions of families and small businesses are going through because we allow the insurance industry to run wild in this country so let me remind everybody those of us in public office were not sent to washington to do what s easy we weren t sent there because of the big fancy title we weren t sent there to because of a big fancy office we weren t sent there just so everybody can say how wonderful we are we were sent there to do what was hard we were sent there to take on the tough issues we were sent there to solve the big challenges and that s why we re there and at this moment at this moment we are being called upon to fulfill our duty to the citizens of this nation and to future generations so i ll be honest with you i don t know how passing health care will play politically but i do know that it s the right thing to do it s right for our families it s right for our businesses it s right for the united states of america and if you share that belief i want you to stand with me and fight with me and i ask you to help us get us over the finish line these next few weeks the need is great the opportunity is here let s seize reform it s within our grasp thank you very much everybody god bless dem bobama8 3 10c barack_obama hello everybody please have a seat have a seat have a seat crimson tide go tide well welcome to the white house and congratulations on your 13th let me check that 13th national championship the first in 17 years i think it s safe to say that the tide is back i ve got to tell you everyone was really excited about this team coming today except for my press secretary robert gibbs because he was born and raised in auburn he s hiding in his office right now but we do have some tide fans here that are worth a little bit of acknowledgment i want to start by thanking robert witt the president of the university of alabama i also want to acknowledge the mayor of tuscaloosa walter maddox you can give them a round of applause i want to recognize senator shelby and senator sessions who are here stand up please and our terrific surgeon general who s an alabama native regina benjamin is in the house where s regina there she is over there and to all those who make this program what it is the students and the trainers and the staff and the ticket takers fans in tuscaloosa and all across the country you should all be very proud and i want to congratulate you obviously i want to congratulate coach saban and thank him and his wife terry for being with us today there s no question that this team is here in large part because of what coach saban has done there aren t too many coaches in the country who have the knowledge the motivational skills the program discipline to win two national championships in six years let alone at two different schools and i think it s a testimony to his incredible skills as a coach i ve got to congratulate mark ingram for becoming the first heisman trophy winner in alabama history mark rushed for over 1 500 yards last season the most ever by a crimson tide running back and i know his selflessness and dedication has made his team and his family very very proud i also want to recognize your captains rolando mcclain mike johnson and javier arenas and all the upperclassmen for their leadership on this team congratulations to all of you i especially want to congratulate rolando for winning the butkus award as the nation s top linebacker and i know that part of rolando s talent comes from his intelligence and his judgment in fact one of his teammates was asked to describe him he said just picture coach saban being huge and being able to play football now one of the trademarks of this team has always been its unwavering focus on what s important and i know shortly after the 2008 season ended coach hung a picture of the florida gators winning the national championship in the locker room not too subtle what he was saying he asked his players if they wanted to work hard enough to beat their teammates in a drill or if they wanted to work hard enough to be the best team in the country and it s pretty clear what choice they made that s the kind of tone this team sets both on and off the field it s why these young men and this is something i m very proud of had the second highest graduation rate of any team ranked in the top 25 it shows that these guys have their priorities straight together they contributed more than 3 500 hours of community service that alabama students student athletes performed last year and that spirit continued earlier today when the team met with a group of kids from one of d c s roughest neighborhoods and helped teach them about the importance of staying in school and making healthy choices that s how champions act in football and in life as coach bryant once said i think the most important thing of all for any team is a winning attitude i think this team would make him proud because they ve got that winning attitude so congratulations to all of you the best of luck next season i know spring practice starts on friday woo man next friday huh so enjoy these last few days off and congratulations to all of you for just an extraordinary season roll tide dem bobama8 5 09 barack_obama hello everybody hola thank you please everybody have a seat muchas gracias thank you very much please everybody have a seat now i don t want to take up too much time i just wanted to stop by and let you know how important i think this is obviously all of us are concerned about the health of our families and our children and our experience with the h1n1 virus over the last couple of weeks is a sobering reminder of how vital it is that we all recognize we re all in this together we re one country we re one community when one person gets sick that has the potential of making us all sick and when we help to make everybody well one person well then everybody has the potential to get well we can t be divided by communities and that means that government at every level has to make sure that good information is getting out to every part of the broader american community and that s part of the reason why we wanted to do this today it s our first step in making sure that whenever we have a public health issue that has to be addressed that everybody is on the same page so i want to ensure everybody that we re seeing that the virus may not have been as virulent as we at first feared but we re not out of the woods yet and we still have to take precautions many of you are community leaders obviously those who are viewing this on television are going to be able to give information to your friends and family about washing your hands about covering your mouths staying home if you re sick keeping children home from school if they re sick that kind of common sense approach can make all the difference in the world and so i just want to thank the center for disease control they ve been vigilant on this issue they believe that we re going to have to keep on taking some precautions and we may have to prepare for an even worse flu season sometime in the fall this h1n1 flu obviously has hit mexico much more badly than it s hit us so far and i ve been working very closely i spoke to president caldern last weekend to ensure that we were providing mexico with the assistance that it needed because one of the things that we have to understand is public health issues like this not only is it important for all communities within the united states to be working together it s also important to be working internationally together so i m very proud of this first white house town hall meeting conducted entirely in spanish i am grateful except for my part you know i m kind of messing up the whole thing i m grateful for univision for hosting us and i m happy to see that we ve got officials from many different departments including my secretary of labor hilda solis so i want to let you continue with your conversation i hope you learn something please ask questions these folks are extraordinarily well informed and then distribute the information that you learn from this town hall throughout your communities and this is just the first of many i hope mechanisms for outreach that will improve the quality of service that the white house provides to the american people so muchas gracias thank you dem bobama8 6 10 barack_obama hello everybody well how s the food we could not have a more beautiful day for this annual picnic and we are just thrilled that all of you had a chance to get over i know that folks were running a little bit late many of you because of votes but you know the fact of the matter is is that we have had as tough a year and a half as america has seen in a couple of generations and that s meant that congress has had to do more on a whole range of issues right now obviously we re looking at what s happening in the gulf with deep concern and that s going to put more additional pressure on congress to work with states and the administration to help deal with this tragedy and this crisis it is important though given the incredible sacrifices that so many of you have made and frankly from my perspective just as important are the sacrifices that your family makes you being away you missing family events that every once in a while we have an opportunity to get together and for me to say thank you to you for your incredible devotion to the country regardless of party and for both michelle and i to say to your families how grateful we are for your service and hopefully to have a little bit of time for fun and for fellowship and to remind ourselves of what s so important in life so i m thrilled to see all the young people here who are here today and we hope that you have a wonderful time band you guys are great as always chefs i think people are all voting with their mouths around here i suspect there s not going to be a lot of leftovers and on behalf of michelle and myself we hope that you enjoy the evening and we are grateful to all of you for being here so thank you very much dem bobama8 7 10a barack_obama thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you so much thank you everybody have a seat everybody have a seat everybody enjoy themselves how s lunch all right good hello kansas city it is good to be back in the midwest even better to be back in the midwest with robin carnahan you all have had a long tradition of sending tough independent no nonsense leaders to washington from harry truman to my great friend claire mccaskill to some wonderful missourians who go by the name of carnahan nobody fits this mold better than robin she s not going to washington to represent the oil industry or the insurance industry or the banks on wall street she s not even going there to represent every aspect of either party s agenda or my agenda she s going to washington to represent one constituency and that s you the people of missouri she s going to call them like she sees them and she sees them the same way that most of you do the same way that most of the people of missouri do robin is a small business owner still runs her family farm that s why as your secretary of state she cut red tape for small businesses and saved small business owners millions of dollars so they can focus on growing their companies and creating jobs right here in this state that s why she spent her time in office standing up for consumers got 10 billion back for missourians who were being taken advantage of by big institutions that s worth applauding 10 billion is real money that s why she worked with democrats and republicans to pass one of the strictest laws in the nation protecting seniors from fraud that s why missouri needs somebody like robin carnahan in washington d c she is a fighter she is a survivor and she will never forget where she comes from or who she represents and that s why i m glad to see that all of you are here today because you know that about robin we need tough leaders like robin in washington because these are tough times for america i don t need to tell you that eighteen months ago i took office after almost a decade of economic policies that gave us sluggish growth and falling or flat incomes and record deficits they were the policies that culminated in an economic crisis that was the worst since the great depression three million americans lost their jobs in the last six months of 2008 the month i was sworn in in january of 2009 more than 750 000 jobs were lost in that month alone these aren t just numbers most of you in this room were either touched by this or know somebody who was the policies that led to this economic disaster were pretty straightforward you cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires who don t need the tax cuts didn t even ask for them you cut rules and regulations for the most powerful institutions whether it s big banks on wall street or big oil companies in the gulf and you cut working people loose to fend for themselves you tell them you re on your own you put a fancy name on it you call it the ownership society or whatever the new slogan is but it s the same policy over and over again i think everybody here would agree those policies were bad for the people of missouri they were bad for workers they were bad for responsible business owners they were bad for america and that s why we took a different path when i got elected so we could stop the freefall and rebuild our economy for the long run and our ideas have been pretty straightforward we cut taxes didn t raise them we cut them for 95 percent of working families and small business owners the people who need it the most and were most impacted by the recession we re making sure that everybody the wall street banks other big corporations are playing by the same rules as small business owners and everybody else in america we can t have two sets of rules and we re investing in our people investing in them and their future in the skills and education of our workforce in the research and clean energy technologies that will create thousands of new jobs and new industries and make our country competitive in the 21st century that s our vision for america now we knew from the very beginning that some of the steps that we had to take would be difficult and unpopular i love sometimes the pundits will say boy obama is doing this stuff it s not very popular i ve got pollsters too i know before we make decisions we know initially how they re going to play but our decision was not to worry about the next election we decided to worry about the next generation we knew it took years to dig the hole that we were in and it would take some time to dig out longer than anybody would like but here s what i also know an economy that was shrinking if we did what we needed to do would be growing and it has now been growing for the better part of a year an economy that was once losing jobs an economy that was once losing jobs has now been adding private sector jobs for six consecutive months during that time we have created nearly 600 000 jobs in the private sector not public sector jobs private sector jobs 600 000 now that s not enough not when there s still five folks out of work for every available job not when there are still storefronts on main streets all across the country that are sitting there empty it s frustrating and it s heartbreaking and we ve got plenty more work to do but here s what you need to know we are headed in the right direction and the last thing we should do is go back to the very ideas that got us into this mess in the first place that s the choice that you re going to be facing in november it s a choice between the policies that led us into this mess and the policies that are leading us out of this mess it s a choice between falling backwards or moving forward robin wants to move us forward i want to move us forward and i believe that you and the rest of america are ready to move forward and that s why you re going to send robin carnahan to washington d c some of the same folks in the other party whose policies gave us the economic crisis are now looking for another chance to lead they spent nearly a decade driving the economy into the ditch and now they re asking for the car keys back they can t have them back they don t know how to drive don t know how to drive drive in the wrong direction get us stuck and by the way robin s opponent hasn t just been along for the ride as one of the republican leaders in the house of representatives he had his hands on the wheel he was there giving those tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires and oil companies without paying for them adding to our deficit adding to our debt he fought for fewer rules and less oversight for wall street still fighting for them that s how he makes his money so we already know how this story ends we don t have to guess how the other party will govern because we re still living with the results from the last time they governed and in the 18 months since i ve been president they have been singing from the same hymnal right after i took office we passed an economic plan that cut taxes for over 2 million missouri families a plan that provided more than 1 500 loans to missouri small businesses a plan that has extended unemployment benefits to 170 000 missourians who lost their jobs through no fault of their own fifty five thousand men and women in this state are working today because of this plan i just met 50 of them at the smith electric vehicles plant in kansas city that i visited right before i came here so our plan was to provide grants to companies like smith electric vehicles all across america businesses that are investing in clean energy manufacturing and technology smith electric is making the world s largest battery electric powered trucks but there are also companies like siemens wind power in iowa that are making these wind turbines delivering energy clean energy all across america or celgard in north carolina which is a battery technology company or a biofuel refinery plant called poet right here in missouri that s how we create jobs and economic growth that s how we ensure that america leads in the industries of the future i ll give you an example just a few years ago america had the capacity to build only 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries for electric and hybrid cars and trucks today thanks to our policies thanks to a new focus on clean energy and the work taking place at plants like smith electric in five years we could have as much as 40 percent of the world s capacity to build these batteries 40 percent that means jobs right here in missouri it also means we re developing the expertise in a sector that is going to keep building and growing and innovating far into the future that s what our economic plan is doing robin carnahan supports that plan her opponent doesn t like almost every member of the other party in congress he said no if he had his way there would be a lot of missouri families and small businesses paying higher taxes today there would be a lot of small business owners who wouldn t have received the loans they need to keep their doors open and make payroll those jobs at smith electric those clean energy jobs and businesses that our policies are supporting across america a lot of them wouldn t be here today these folks in the other party in washington want to take us backwards but robin and i and claire mccaskill jay nixon we want to take america forward and that s the choice in this election you d think that after this devastating financial crisis we d all agree that we believe in the free market system we want a dynamic financial sector but it makes sense to have a little better oversight on wall street to prevent something like this from happening again that would be the sensible thing to do you d think that would be a nonpartisan issue when we lost trillions of dollars of wealth people s 401 k s plunged stock market plunged the entire economy went into a tailspin maybe we just want to make sure that doesn t happen again that d be the sensible approach robin s opponent and almost all of our friends in the other party are against wall street reform the republican leader mr boehner said this reform was like employing nuclear weapons to kill an ant he said an ant that s what he called what we just went through you can imagine a movie the ant that ate our economy that s a big ant so they continue to defend the status quo that got us into this mess a system that allowed reckless speculators to gamble and left the rest of america to pay for their mistakes that doesn t make sense to you it doesn t make sense to me it s not good for our country in the end it s not good for all the hardworking honest people in the financial industry who were put at a competitive disadvantage because of the recklessness of a few so let me tell you when the senate returns we re going to pass reform that ends this era of irresponsibility reform that protects consumers against unfair practices of credit card companies and mortgage lenders reform that makes sure taxpayers are never again on the hook for wall street s mistakes it d be a lot easier to get it passed it would already have been done if i had robin carnahan there she doesn t want to move us backwards she wants to move us forward and that s the choice in this election i need another vote it d be helpful despite the growing burdens on middle class families struggling to send their kids to college robin s opponent and almost all our friends in the other party voted against a law that provides billions of dollars that were going to financial institutions senseless subsidies and now will be going to young people for scholarships billions of dollars for student loans paid for because we re eliminating subsidies that shouldn t have been there in the first place nearly a million more students from working families will have access to financial aid access to college because of what we did the other side said no they said no to laws that we passed to stop insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions they said no to requiring women to get equal pay for equal work they said no to extended unemployment insurance for folks who desperately needed help they said no to holding oil companies accountable when they bring on catastrophe you may have read the top republican on the house energy committee mr barton publicly apologizing to bp after we compelled them to set aside 20 billion to pay for the folks who have suffered as a consequence of the oil spill does anybody here think bp should get an apology mr barton did he called this a tragedy this fund that we had set up to compensate fishermen and small business owners throughout the gulf that s not the tragedy the tragedy is if they didn t get compensated so this is the leadership that we ve gotten from barton and boehner and blunt sometimes i wonder if that no button is just stuck in congress so they just they can t do what s right for the american people and this isn t just about politics but an awful lot of it has to do with politics because i think they figure if they just keep on saying no to everything and nothing gets done they re going to get more votes in november the theory is if i lose then they win but that s the old brand of politics that just takes us backwards robin wants to move america forward we want america to win not just democrats to win that s the choice in this election are we all going to pull in a single direction to get this country moving last point i m going to make a lot of our friends in the other party like to talk a big game about fiscal responsibility and out of control spending i ll be honest with you it s one of the things that keeps me up at night thinking about all the debt and deficits that we inherited that have accumulated often i hear claire mccaskill s voice in my head reminding me of that maybe it s just my voicemail robin feels the same way she s a small business owner she knows about making sure that she stays on budget that she s not spending more than she takes in and families around the country have been tightening their belts for a few years now so rightly they think it s time that their government did the same thing that s why we proposed a three year freeze on all government spending outside of national security something that was never enacted in the previous administration that s why we ve gone through the budget line by line identified more than 120 programs for elimination that s why we put forward a fiscal commission that s bringing both parties together to come up with a long term solution for our deficit and working with leaders like claire and robin we re going to keep on taking the steps we need to in the months and years ahead steps that don t just make government leaner but also smarter and more efficient and more accountable that s what harry truman did when he fought to hold war profiteers accountable that s what claire and i are fighting for today so i got to say when i hear the other party talking about fiscal responsibility criticizing us for fiscal responsibility when i had a 1 3 trillion deficit wrapped in a big bow waiting for me when i got to the white house i ve got to scratch my head a little you d think that after turning a record clinton surplus into a record deficit and record debt they d be a little shy about this on their watch they neglected to pay for two wars neglected to pay for two tax cuts for the wealthiest americans didn t control spending set up a worthy but expensive prescription drug program didn t pay for any of it so it s a little odd getting lectures on sobriety from folks who spent like drunken sailors for the better part of the last decade they want to take us backwards robin and i and claire we want to take america forward that s the choice in this election so here s the bottom line these are incredibly challenging times there s no doubt about it as i said every day during the campaign change is hard change takes time the problems we face have been building up for decades they re not going to go away overnight not in one year not in four years no president no politician has the power to snap their fingers and fix everything a lot of folks will tell you that the closer you get to election day that they can but you can t believe them here s what we can do we can make choices about which direction we want to take this country we can stop putting off the things that have been holding us back and going ahead and tackling them and fixing them we can do what we ve always done whether it was on a farm or dealing with a crisis overseas we shape our own destiny as a nation we decide what we re going to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren the interests of the status quo they ll always have the most influential and vocal defenders there will always be lobbyists for the powerful industries that don t want more regulation or would rather see tax breaks instead of more investments in education and infrastructure and let s face it the prospect of change is scary even when we know the status quo isn t working but there are no powerful interests to lobby for the clean energy company that may start for a few hiring folks a few years from now or the research that may lead to a lifesaving medical breakthrough or the student who may not be able to afford a college education but if they got that education their dreams would not just carry them but carry other people with them it s our job as a nation to advocate on behalf of the america that we hope for even when it s not popular even if we can t always see benefits in the short term because we know it will pay off in the long term it s our job to fight not just for the next election but for the next generation for our children and our children s children and that s what i ve tried to do every day as president that s what robin carnahan will do when she is the next great senator from the state of missouri i need all of you to join us on this journey and if you re willing to make that investment i guarantee you our better days are not behind us they are in front of us thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama8 7 10b barack_obama hello everybody good to see you you don t need to do that it s good to see you thank you very much thank you thank you so much everybody everybody have a seat usually they announce me with some fancy thing and i think i messed up i just walked out here so i hope you didn t mind but on the way out if you want we can play the ruffles and flourishes and all that i want to before i start acknowledge some people who have just done a wonderful job for this area but also a wonderful job for the country first of all one of the best governors that we ve got in the united states of america governor jay nixon one of my not just my favorite senators but one of my favorite people and a great friend of mine who is fighting every day for the people of missouri senator claire mccaskill we ve got two outstanding members of congress one from this side and one from that side congressman emanuel cleaver and congressman dennis moore and finally i just want to acknowledge all the wonderful people at smith electric vehicles and their energetic and outstanding staff it is outstanding to be here and i m not going to take a long time i just want to spend some time shaking hands and thanking you for the great work that you ve done i just had a chance to get a tour and saw some of the battery powered trucks that you re manufacturing i had a chance to talk to some of the folks who build them but the reason i m here today is because at this plant you re doing more than just building new vehicles you are helping to fight our way through a vicious recession and you are building the economy of america s future now it s not easy we ve gone through as bad a economic situation as we ve had since the great depression and this recession was a culmination of a decade of irresponsibility a decade that felt like a sledgehammer hitting middle class families for the better part of 10 years people have faced stagnant incomes skyrocketing health care costs skyrocketing tuition costs and declining economic security and this all came to a head in a massive financial crisis that sent our economy into a freefall and cost 8 million american jobs including many in this community so it was in the middle of this crisis that my administration walked through the door and we had to make some difficult decisions at a moment of maximum peril to avoid a great depression to make sure that we didn t have a complete meltdown in our financial system it was a moment when the markets were in turmoil and we were losing 750 000 jobs every month some of the decisions we made weren t popular at the time and some of them may still be unpopular today but we made those decisions because we had to stop that freefall and because we made those hard choices our economy is in a different place today than it was just a year ago one of those decisions was to provide critical funding to promising innovative businesses like smith electric vehicles and because we did there is a thriving enterprise here instead of an empty darkened warehouse because of the grant that went to this company we can hear the sounds of machines humming and people doing their work instead of just the ghostly silence of an emptied out building and the memory of workers who were laid off a long time ago and we made that kind of decision all across america last year and we were guided by a simple idea government doesn t have all the answers ultimately government doesn t create all the jobs government can t guarantee growth by itself but what government can do is lay the foundation for small businesses to expand and to thrive for entrepreneurs to open up shop and test out new products for workers to get the training that they need and for families to achieve some measure of economic security and that role is especially important in tough economic times and that s why when my administration began we immediately cut taxes that s right you wouldn t know it from listening to folks but we cut taxes for working families and for small business owners all across american to help them weather the storm through our small business loans and our focus on research and development and our investment in high tech fast growing sectors like clean energy we re helping to speed our recovery by harnessing the talent and the drive and the innovative spirit of the american people so our goal has never been to create another government program our goal has been to spur growth in the private sector for example right here at smith you ve recently passed a milestone hiring a 50th employee and i know you re on the way to hire 50 more and we re seeing similar things all across america with incentives and investments that are creating wind turbines and solar panels we re seeing investments in energy efficient appliances and home building materials and in advanced battery technologies and clean energy vehicles so just give you a couple examples just last week abound manufacturing in colorado received backing for two plants to produce solar panels this is going to create 2 000 construction jobs and 1 500 permanent jobs one of the plants is actually taking over what s now an empty chrysler supplier factory another company called abengoa solar is now planning to build one of the world s largest solar plants right here in the united states and when it s finished this facility will be the first large scale solar plant in the united states that can actually store energy that it creates for later use even at night all told we expect energy investments alone to generate 700 000 jobs over the next few years and this is not just going to boost our economy in the short term this is going to lay a platform for the future it s going to create opportunities year after year after year decade after decade after decade as companies like smith that start small begin to expand and i was just talking to your ceo and he says he wants to open up 20 of these all across the country so that in each region you re able to service smith is able to service its customers and they re going to have a reliable sense that smith is always going to be there for them making sure that customer satisfaction and performance is high i ll give you another example just a few years ago america had the capacity to build only about 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles like smith s 2 percent that was it we account for 25 percent of the world s economy and we were only making 2 percent of the world s advanced batteries but thanks to our new focus on clean energy and the work that s taking place in plants like this one we could have as much as 40 percent of the world s market by 2015 five years that means jobs but that also means we re going to have an expertise in a sector that s just going to keep on growing all around the world for years to come so all these efforts taken together are making a difference a year and a half ago our economy was shrinking at 6 percent a year now it s growing the economy was bleeding jobs we ve now created private sector jobs added private sector jobs for six consecutive months now obviously the progress we ve made isn t nearly enough to undo all the damage that was done as a consequence of the economic crisis there are still five unemployed workers for every vacancy there s still too many empty storefronts on main street all across america and i ve said since i took office that my administration will not rest until every american who is able and ready and willing to work can find a job and a job that pays a decent wage and has decent benefits to support a family we re not there yet we ve got a long way to go but what is absolutely clear is we re moving in the right direction we are headed in the right direction and that s the surest way out of this storm is to go forward not to go backwards there are some people who argue that we should abandon some of these efforts some people who make the political calculation that it s better to just say no to everything than to lend a hand to clean up the mess that we ve been in but my answer to those who don t have confidence in our future who want to stop my answer is come right here to kansas city come see what s going on at smith electric i think they re going to be hard pressed to tell you that you re not better off than you would be if we hadn t made the investments in this plant for the naysayers they ought to travel all across america and meet the people that i ve met at places like navistar in indiana where folks are being hired to build new electric trucks or siemens wind power in iowa where they re making wind turbines in a factory that used to be empty just like this one or celgard which is a battery technology company in north carolina that hired more than 50 people because of the investments we made or poet biorefinery here in missouri that s putting people to work harvesting homegrown energy while they re at it they ought to talk to all the small business owners who ve gotten tax breaks to pay for their health plans and new sba loans to expand or keep their doors open and that includes tens of millions of dollars in loans for companies right here in kansas city or they ought to talk to the crews that are rebuilding all the highways and laying tracks for new rail lines including road projects that are putting hundreds of people to work in this area they ought to talk to the scientists who are toiling day and night to develop the technologies and the cures with the potential to improve our economy and our health and our well being and they might want to talk to the teachers who didn t get laid off because of the budget help that we gave the state of missouri who are then going to be teaching our kids and they re being incentivized to reform how they do business so we ve got the best education system in the world and we ve got the highest number of folks who are going to community colleges or four year colleges than anyplace in the world that s how we re going to take charge of our destiny that s how we create jobs and create lasting growth that s how we ensure that america doesn t just limp along maybe recover to where we were before but instead that we re prospering that this nation leads the industries of the future i mean this has been a difficult time for america right now two years of brutal recession a decade of economic insecurity and there are going to be some hard days ahead that s the truth it s going to take a while for us to dig ourselves out of this hole but what you are proving here each and every one of you who work here at smith electric is the promise of a brighter future what you re proving is that if we hold fast to that spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that s always defined america we re not just going to emerge from this period of turmoil we re going to emerge stronger than we were before you re proving that as long as we keep on moving forward nobody can stop us and for that i want to thank you you are setting a model for what we need to be doing all across the country so congratulations thank you very much dem bobama8 7 10c barack_obama hello vegas si se puede oh it is good to be back in vegas this is a pretty good crowd i know you re disappointed but i m not singing tonight listen i love being in vegas again love being in vegas i love this town maybe not as much as my staff for some reason every time we come here air force one is a little more crowded i m seeing people in the couches and i love you back i love you back a couple other people i love here i want to make mention congresswoman dina titus is in the house love dina secretary of state ross miller is in the house give a big round of applause to ross right here one of my earliest supporters not just here in nevada but anywhere in the country state senate majority leader steven horsford is in the house he s somewhere out here your wonderful speaker of the state assembly barbara buckley is here give it up for brandon david and mark the killers these guys by the way for the fourth of july performed for military families on the south lawn and so have just been unbelievable for us really nice guys they don t look like killers let s face it i mean one of them is tall but they don t look like you d be scared of them but they are wonderful people and we are grateful to them and then how about sarah mclachlan she was i met her back stage just delightful and a couple of beautiful daughters and i m always partial to daughters now despite the entertainment despite the nice digs despite seeing all these old friends the main reason i m here is because there s a guy from searchlight nevada who has been fighting on behalf of nevada for most of his life and is now fighting for working families all across america and that s your senate majority leader harry reid i have known harry since i arrived in the senate five years ago and we have become dear friends he is a man of principle he is a straight shooter he is a man of his word he comes across as soft spoken you know how he s all like well you know even when he s in front of a big crowd he s like well you know okay okay we re trying here trying hard i mean that s just how harry is but anybody who knows harry knows he is made of strong stuff this is one tough guy a lot of people talk tough harry is tough a lot of people in washington forget where they came from harry remembers every single day a lot of people instead of taking the tough votes showing leadership making difficult decisions they do what s politically expedient they re not making the choices that give them the best chance of staying in washington that s not harry reid he doesn t always do what s easy he doesn t always do what is popular but he always does what s right for the people of nevada and that s why you ve got to send him back there for one more for one more term as the senate majority leader he has always done what s right you ve got to send him back you know harry used to be a boxer he likes to brag about this but it s you know he brags in his harry way he s all well i used to box he ll say you know i wasn t the most talented guy i wasn t very fast i wasn t big obviously but i could take a punch i could take a punch he would outlast the other guys and that s exactly how harry reid has been able to orchestrate one of the most productive legislative sessions in the history of america and that s how he s going to win this race so he can serve the people of nevada one more time he s taken his lumps we all have but i have no doubt that the people of nevada will realize the quality of public servant that they have in harry reid partly because he knows no matter what kind of lumps he s taking they re nothing compared to lumps that folks back home have been taking harry comes from humble beginnings he knows what s it like not to have a lot he knows what it s like to see your folks scraping by and have to tell you no i m sorry we can t afford this we can t afford that he s been there so when he hears the stories of nevadans who are losing their homes when he hears stories of nevadans who have lost their jobs when he hears stories about people who are feeling desperate who after doing the right thing somehow have gotten the short end of the stick that s who he identifies with that s who he s fighting for i just came from the birthplace of another harry a guy named harry truman harry truman was a lot like harry reid you know in 1948 harry truman campaigned across this country making the case against the do nothing republicans in congress for the last two years harry has been dealing with the do nothing republican leadership in the senate just like harry truman but despite all their tactics despite all their political maneuvering he s just been steady and we keep on making progress he does not give up he does not give in he keeps on fighting and he outlasts them and he s changed the landscape of america as a consequence we need harry reid because we ve taken quite a few punches as a nation about 17 months ago i took office after almost a decade of economic policies a decade of economic policies that gave us sluggish job growth falling incomes a record deficit i want everybody to remember this a decade of economic policies that culminated in the worst crisis since the great depression three million americans had lost their jobs in the last six months of 2008 another 750 000 americans lost their jobs in the month i was sworn in the month i was sworn in the next month it was 600 000 and these weren t just numbers most of you have somebody in your family who was touched by this crisis if you weren t yourself and the economic policies that led to this economic disaster were pretty straightforward harry mentioned it you cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires even if they don t need them and weren t even asking for them you cut rules and regulations for the most powerful industries big banks on wall street big oil on the gulf and then you cut working families loose you tell people you re on your own you don t have health care too bad you re on your own young person born into poverty can t afford college tough luck you re on your own that was their reigning philosophy they might call it different things the ownership society or laissez faire or whatever but this was their philosophy now i want somebody to argue that somehow this was working well for the people in nevada it was bad for workers it was bad for business owners and it was bad for this country and that s why with harry reid s help i took a different path as president i had a different philosophy one that s based on how do we help ordinary families seize opportunity and use their innovation and their drive to rebuild an america that s stronger than before that was our job that was our task so we ve got a different philosophy we said we d cut taxes for the 95 percent of working families and small business owners who really needed help in this recession we believe in the free market but we also think that everybody should be following basic rules of the road so we made sure wall street banks and other big corporations have to play by the same rules that small banks and small business owners have to play with that just makes sense there shouldn t be two sets of rules there shouldn t be loopholes and special tax breaks and lack of oversight and we decided that we were going to invest in our people and in our future in the skills and education of our workforce in the research and clean energy technologies that will create new jobs and new industries and make sure america is competitive in the 21st century that s our vision for america now since we had a crisis on our hands since the financial system was melting down since we people couldn t get auto loans couldn t get home loans people weren t traveling you remember you remember last year so we had to make a bunch of decisions and we had to make them fast and they were tough decisions difficult decisions some of them weren t popular and by the way well i know it s all right because because you know what let me tell you something as we were making these decisions sometimes the pundits would say boy you know why is he doing that why is harry reid doing that that s not going to be popular well we ve got polls you know harry reid and i we ve got pollsters they let us know when things aren t going to be popular it s not like we were surprised but my job isn t to put my finger up to the wind and see which way the wind is blowing that s not harry reid s job that s not leadership our job is to focus not on the next election but on the next generation and that s why we made those decisions we knew it would take us months years to dig ourselves out of the holes that we found ourselves in that s longer than anybody would like but here s what i also know an economy that last year was shrinking by 6 percent is now growing an economy that was shredding jobs at an unbelievable pace we ve now had six months in a row of private sector job growth that s because of policies that harry reid helped bring about we have turned things around and we are moving in the right direction that s not enough it hasn t moved as fast as i want i m not going to be satisfied and harry won t be satisfied until everybody in nevada who wants a job can find a job we don t want to just survive we want to thrive we want nevada to be on the move we want the las vegas dream to be a reality for everybody and so we understand we ve got a lot of work to do basically the other party their whole argument is based on the notion well it hasn t moved fast enough well i agree i d like to see us get out of this hole sooner but you have to understand we are heading in the right direction and what the other side is offering is basically to go back to the same ideas that got us into this mess in the first place that s all they re doing this is a choice between the policies that led us into the mess or the policies that are leading out of the mess this is the choice between falling backwards or moving forward now i don t know about you but harry reid wants to move forward i want to move forward i think most people in nevada want to move forward they don t want to go backwards america doesn t go backwards we go forwards that s who we are as americans what the other party is counting on is that all of you don t have very good memories i mean think about it they re not making new arguments it s not like they re coming back and saying you know what we know we screwed up and we learned from our mistakes and we re going to do things differently this time that s not what that s not what you re hearing they are peddling the same stuff they ve been peddling for years and years and years they basically they spent a decade driving the economy into a ditch and now they re asking for the keys back and my answer is no you cant have the keys you can t drive you don t know how to drive you drive in the wrong direction you can t have them back we re just getting the car out of the ditch we can t have you drive it back in the ditch harry reid and i we got mud on our shoes we re we ve been pushing and shoving car is just kind of getting out almost almost on some pavement some they re all no no we want to pull into reverse run right over harry and me get you back in the mud that doesn t make sense i mean look harry reid s opponent doesn t just believe in these old worn out theories on a lot of these issues she favors an approach that s even more extreme than the republicans we got in washington that s saying something that is saying something i mean she wants to phase out and privatize social security and medicare phase out and privatize them wants to eliminate our investment in clean energy wants to eliminate the federal investment in our children s educations said the answer to the bp oil spill is to deregulate the oil industry i m not making this up harry am i making this up i know some of you are saying no she didn t really say that she said it she said that if only there were fewer rules and safeguards then bp would have been more careful about their drilling some of you might have heard about the republican congressman who apologized to bp i think you heard harry mention him this by the way is the guy who heads up the energy committee for the republicans we decided let s get 20 billion to make sure the fishermen and small business people and hotels are compensated for their loss that makes sense i mean most people around the country it doesn t matter whether you re a democrat republican independent you say well yeah of course that makes sense they shouldn t be punished for somebody else s carelessness well this congressman he in a hearing apologized to bp executives said said that the fund we d set up was a tragedy a shakedown a tragedy you think about all those people down there who a lot of folks down there just like vega rely on tourism and it s much more seasonal than vegas so they ve got basically three four months where they make money for the entire year you talk to some fishermen they had already or guys who own boats who take fishermen out they d already bought all their supplies bought all their gasoline and suddenly that s it wiped out that s the tragedy it s not asking bp to do what s right and what s fair but harry s opponent she agreed with this guy she called the compensation we re providing a slush fund to compensate fishermen and compensate shrimpers and compensate small restaurant owners now a few hours later her campaign puts out a memo saying well she didn t mean that they said there was some confusion and i m sure she meant slush fund in the nicest possible way let me tell you most nevadans i meet and i ve spent a lot of time here you know that i ve been seeing you most of the people i meet here in this state they don t think like that they don t subscribe to that kind of thinking so why would you want somebody who has that philosophy representing the people of nevada you need somebody like harry reid representing you in nevada my simple point is this you have a choice in this election and look obviously you re here you guys are some diehards you guys are supporters and you need to be energized in this election but when you re talking to your friends and your neighbors they re not following politics as closely they re not sure how things should go they re frustrated about what s happening and they say ah it doesn t make any difference you have to remind them it makes a difference there is a real choice here we know how the movie ends if the other party is in charge you don t have to guess how they ll govern because we re still living with the damage from the last time they were governing and they re singing from the same hymnal they haven t changed they want to do the same stuff right after we took office working with harry we passed tax cuts for over one million families here in nevada made over 400 loans to nevada s small businesses extended unemployment benefits to 300 000 nevadans who d lost their jobs twenty seven thousand men and women in this state are working today because of what harry reid did they re in clean energy companies producing solar power and geothermal power and new jobs that s what harry reid fought for but you know what his opponent she s got a different way of seeing things and if we had had her way there would be a lot of nevada families and small businesses right now paying higher taxes there would be a lot of small business owners who wouldn t have received those loans to keep their doors open and make payroll those 27 000 jobs they wouldn t be there today all that clean energy work that those companies are doing wouldn t be here today they want to take us backwards we want to move forwards that s the choice in this election you would have thought you would have thought that after this financial crisis bear with me here because you might be scratching your head you would think that everybody would agree that proper oversight over the financial sector would be the smart thing to do just to prevent this from happening again we want businesses to thrive we want banks to thrive but we want to make sure that they re doing sensible things we don t want them selling crazy derivatives that nobody understands we don t want them selling subprime mortgages with fine print that result in people losing their homes and entire communities collapsing we don t want them overcharging people on their credit cards for hidden fees so harry and i and a bunch of people just tried to put together a sensible bit of reform now the republican leader in the house says no we can t do that we re against that he says having this big financial regulatory reform that s like killing an ant with a nuclear weapon that s what he said so he thinks the worst crisis since the worst since the great depression he analogized to an ant it s like it should be a movie the ant that ate the economy so all the republicans a whole bunch of the republican leadership fought against wall street reform there are a handful of republicans who are supporting it and we appreciate that and they re pretty much the same handful that have been supporting us on just about everything and they re good people but harry s opponent said she d leave everything exactly the way it is the status quo now i don t believe in the status quo harry reid doesn t believe in the status quo you don t believe in the status quo so thanks to harry s leadership we are about to pass this landmark legislation that will end this era of irresponsibility that s the kind of leadership that you ll have in place that s what he s fighting for that s why you ve got to send him back for one more term you go through the list health care now this is an interesting example people in washington they were all surprised when i said well i said in the campaign i was going to do health care so yes we re going to do health care reform they said well no this is hard this is hard you re going to use up a lot of political capital they said the same thing to harry harry you re going to have a tough race you don t want to do this this is hard but we said we were going to do it because we had met too many families out there who because of a preexisting condition couldn t get insurance we had met folks working two three jobs still couldn t get insurance we d met too many people who had hit lifetime limits couldn t get insurance so we said we re going to do the right thing and we did it even though it was hard because it was the right thing to do now not only do the folks in the other party say no to reform now they say they want to repeal it go back to the days when insurance companies could jack up your rates any time they felt like it or drop your coverage when you get sick that s going backwards what do you want to do i want to go forward but in order to go forward you got to send harry for another term as the senior senator from nevada look the bottom line is this this is going to be a tough race harry reminds me he s never been in an easy race that s because he talks softly and says well you know i don t like to brag about myself i m from searchlight so harry is always in a tough race he s just not a flashy guy i mean considering we re in vegas you d think somebody could give him some tips you know spruce up the wardrobe a little bit take some voice lessons so he s always in a tough race but ultimately what you want out of your elected officials is somebody who knows your life who remembers what it s like to struggle so that when we re making a whole bunch of decisions that continue to face us over the next several months and next several years that person is going to advocate for you he s going to have you in mind when he s deciding are we going to have an energy future that is clean and bright and creating jobs and allowing us to compete are we going to make sure that young people continue to get the student loans and scholarships they need so we ve got the best trained workforce in the world are we finally going to get our budget and our debt under control in a way that doesn t do it on the backs of working families let me just talk about let me talk about this whole debt and deficit thing this keeps me up this keeps me up at night we ve got serious issues with debt and deficits and debt now keep in mind that we had a surplus remember that with the last democratic president do you remember that but when i walked in this is right in the middle of this huge crisis what had been a record surplus was suddenly a 1 3 trillion deficit that was when we walked in all right so we said even though we re doing all these other things even though we re giving tax cuts even though we have to make sure that small businesses get loans even though we are making sure that the economy stays afloat despite all that let s start taking some steps that over the long term can help control the budget so i proposed a three year freeze on all government spending outside of national security something that was never enacted by the previous administration and then we identified 120 government programs that weren t working that well so we said let s eliminate those and consolidate and streamline and make them work and then i then we said well let s form a bipartisan fiscal commission an idea of a republican senator and a democratic senator the two leading experts on the budget in the senate let s go ahead and adopt this proposal to come up with a long term solution on how we re going to deal with entitlements and all this stuff now here s what happens harry knows this harry remember this we had seven republicans who were sponsors of this fiscal commission they said we ve got to deal with the deficit we ve got to deal with debt so i say okay let s do it i make an announcement and in front of the entire country i said i embrace this bipartisan fiscal commission idea let s get this legislation passed i ll sign it into law next thing you know the seven folks on the republican side who had been co sponsors of it voted against it their legislation now this is typical so look i don t want you guys to get bamboozled i don t want when these folks start running the okeedoke on you i want you to be clear when they start intoning about how we care so much about the deficit and debt and we re tired of this out of control government spending look these are the folks who delivered to you a structural debt deficits that broke the record turned record surpluses into record deficits so this is like a lecture on sobriety from folks who had been spending money like drunken sailors you don t want to put them in charge you definitely don t want to put them behind the wheel given their track record they ve been weaving on the road when it comes to fiscal responsibility that s part of the reason they drove us into the ditch don t give them the keys back you got to make sure that harry reid is in a position to look after you when we make these difficult debates so here s my hope this is going to be close election everybody here i expect will vote for harry that s good everybody here will vote for harry a couple of you who won the you know because you re scouting out what we re saying that s okay that s part of politics and then the other two of you who thought this was how you got to the slots but all the rest of you you re going to all vote for harry reid but it s not enough for you just to vote for him i need you to work for him i need you to knock on doors for him i need you to make phone calls for him don t do it for me do it for you more importantly do it for your children and do it for your grandchildren and do it because do it because despite the storm clouds we ve been going through you see out in the horizon a future that s bright you see a future where we re no longer relying just on dirty energy and expensive energy but clean energy and it s creating jobs all across nevada we re harnessing the sun and the wind you see a future where every child in nevada has a world class education and they re getting the jobs of the future you see a future where health care is available for every american and we re driving the costs of health care down for every american and you see a future where we re respected around the world and you see a future where you can retire with dignity and respect and you see a future where our air and water is clean and you see a future where the 21st century is just like the 20th century it is the american century and you know in your heart of hearts the only way that s going to happen is if we make sure that leaders with the integrity and honesty and the willingness to take tough decisions like harry reid are sent back to washington to fight for you i need you to work for harry reid and if you do then our future is indeed bright and nevada s future is bright and las vegas future is bright thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama8 9 09 barack_obama hello everybody thank you thank you thank you everybody all right everybody go ahead and have a seat how is everybody doing today how about tim spicer i am here with students at wakefield high school in arlington virginia and we ve got students tuning in from all across america from kindergarten through 12th grade and i am just so glad that all could join us today and i want to thank wakefield for being such an outstanding host give yourselves a big round of applause i know that for many of you today is the first day of school and for those of you in kindergarten or starting middle or high school it s your first day in a new school so it s understandable if you re a little nervous i imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now with just one more year to go and no matter what grade you re in some of you are probably wishing it were still summer and you could ve stayed in bed just a little bit longer this morning i know that feeling when i was young my family lived overseas i lived in indonesia for a few years and my mother she didn t have the money to send me where all the american kids went to school but she thought it was important for me to keep up with an american education so she decided to teach me extra lessons herself monday through friday but because she had to go to work the only time she could do it was at 4 30 in the morning now as you might imagine i wasn t too happy about getting up that early and a lot of times i d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table but whenever i d complain my mother would just give me one of those looks and she d say this is no picnic for me either buster so i know that some of you are still adjusting to being back at school but i m here today because i have something important to discuss with you i m here because i want to talk with you about your education and what s expected of all of you in this new school year now i ve given a lot of speeches about education and i ve talked about responsibility a lot i ve talked about teachers responsibility for inspiring students and pushing you to learn i ve talked about your parents responsibility for making sure you stay on track and you get your homework done and don t spend every waking hour in front of the tv or with the xbox i ve talked a lot about your government s responsibility for setting high standards and supporting teachers and principals and turning around schools that aren t working where students aren t getting the opportunities that they deserve but at the end of the day we can have the most dedicated teachers the most supportive parents the best schools in the world and none of it will make a difference none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities unless you show up to those schools unless you pay attention to those teachers unless you listen to your parents and grandparents and other adults and put in the hard work it takes to succeed that s what i want to focus on today the responsibility each of you has for your education i want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself every single one of you has something that you re good at every single one of you has something to offer and you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is that s the opportunity an education can provide maybe you could be a great writer maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper but you might not know it until you write that english paper that english class paper that s assigned to you maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor maybe even good enough to come up with the next iphone or the new medicine or vaccine but you might not know it until you do your project for your science class maybe you could be a mayor or a senator or a supreme court justice but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team and no matter what you want to do with your life i guarantee that you ll need an education to do it you want to be a doctor or a teacher or a police officer you want to be a nurse or an architect a lawyer or a member of our military you re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers you cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job you ve got to train for it and work for it and learn for it and this isn t just important for your own life and your own future what you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country the future of america depends on you what you re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future you ll need the knowledge and problem solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and aids and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment you ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness crime and discrimination and make our nation more fair and more free you ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy we need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems if you don t do that if you quit on school you re not just quitting on yourself you re quitting on your country now i know it s not always easy to do well in school i know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork i get it i know what it s like my father left my family when i was two years old and i was raised by a single mom who had to work and who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn t always able to give us the things that other kids had there were times when i missed having a father in my life there were times when i was lonely and i felt like i didn t fit in so i wasn t always as focused as i should have been on school and i did some things i m not proud of and i got in more trouble than i should have and my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse but i was i was lucky i got a lot of second chances and i had the opportunity to go to college and law school and follow my dreams my wife our first lady michelle obama she has a similar story neither of her parents had gone to college and they didn t have a lot of money but they worked hard and she worked hard so that she could go to the best schools in this country some of you might not have those advantages maybe you don t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need maybe someone in your family has lost their job and there s not enough money to go around maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don t feel safe or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren t right but at the end of the day the circumstances of your life what you look like where you come from how much money you have what you ve got going on at home none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school that s no excuse for talking back to your teacher or cutting class or dropping out of school there is no excuse for not trying where you are right now doesn t have to determine where you ll end up no one s written your destiny for you because here in america you write your own destiny you make your own future that s what young people like you are doing every day all across america young people like jazmin perez from roma texas jazmin didn t speak english when she first started school neither of her parents had gone to college but she worked hard earned good grades and got a scholarship to brown university is now in graduate school studying public health on her way to becoming dr jazmin perez i m thinking about andoni schultz from los altos california who s fought brain cancer since he was three he s had to endure all sorts of treatments and surgeries one of which affected his memory so it took him much longer hundreds of extra hours to do his schoolwork but he never fell behind he s headed to college this fall and then there s shantell steve from my hometown of chicago illinois even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods in the city she managed to get a job at a local health care center start a program to keep young people out of gangs and she s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college and jazmin andoni and shantell aren t any different from any of you they face challenges in their lives just like you do in some cases they ve got it a lot worse off than many of you but they refused to give up they chose to take responsibility for their lives for their education and set goals for themselves and i expect all of you to do the same that s why today i m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education and do everything you can to meet them your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework paying attention in class or spending some time each day reading a book maybe you ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity or volunteer in your community maybe you ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look because you believe like i do that all young people deserve a safe environment to study and learn maybe you ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn and along those lines by the way i hope all of you are washing your hands a lot and that you stay home from school when you don t feel well so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter but whatever you resolve to do i want you to commit to it i want you to really work at it i know that sometimes you get that sense from tv that you can be rich and successful without any hard work that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality tv star chances are you re not going to be any of those things the truth is being successful is hard you won t love every subject that you study you won t click with every teacher that you have not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this minute and you won t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try that s okay some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who ve had the most failures j k rowling s who wrote harry potter her first harry potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published michael jordan was cut from his high school basketball team he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career but he once said i have failed over and over and over again in my life and that s why i succeed these people succeeded because they understood that you can t let your failures define you you have to let your failures teach you you have to let them show you what to do differently the next time so if you get into trouble that doesn t mean you re a troublemaker it means you need to try harder to act right if you get a bad grade that doesn t mean you re stupid it just means you need to spend more time studying no one s born being good at all things you become good at things through hard work you re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport you don t hit every note the first time you sing a song you ve got to practice the same principle applies to your schoolwork you might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right you might have to read something a few times before you understand it you definitely have to do a few drafts of a paper before it s good enough to hand in don t be afraid to ask questions don t be afraid to ask for help when you need it i do that every day asking for help isn t a sign of weakness it s a sign of strength because it shows you have the courage to admit when you don t know something and that then allows you to learn something new so find an adult that you trust a parent a grandparent or teacher a coach or a counselor and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals and even when you re struggling even when you re discouraged and you feel like other people have given up on you don t ever give up on yourself because when you give up on yourself you give up on your country the story of america isn t about people who quit when things got tough it s about people who kept going who tried harder who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best it s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago and went on to wage a revolution and they founded this nation young people students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a depression and won a world war who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded google and twitter and facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other so today i want to ask all of you what s your contribution going to be what problems are you going to solve what discoveries will you make what will a president who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country now your families your teachers and i are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions i m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books and the equipment and the computers you need to learn but you ve got to do your part too so i expect all of you to get serious this year i expect you to put your best effort into everything you do i expect great things from each of you so don t let us down don t let your family down or your country down most of all don t let yourself down make us all proud thank you very much everybody god bless you god bless america thank you dem bobama8 9 10 barack_obama thank you ohio thank you cleveland thank you so much thank you very much everybody everybody please have a seat have a seat we ve got some business to do today thank you very much i love you back thank you before we get started i want to just acknowledge some outstanding public servants who are here first of all somebody who i believe is one of the finest governors in this country ted strickland is here the lieutenant governor and soon to be junior senator from the great state of illinois or ohio i was thinking about my own home lee fisher is here i used to hear that line all the time about senator from illinois that would be me outstanding mayor of cleveland frank jackson is here the mayor of parma dean depiero somebody who is fighting for working families each and every day senator sherrod brown is here and three of the hardest working and finest members of the house of representatives dennis kucinich marcia fudge and john boccieri good afternoon everybody it is good to be back in ohio you know in the fall of 2008 one of the last rallies of my presidential campaign was right here in the cleveland area it was a hopeful time just two days before the election and we knew that if we pulled it off we d finally have the chance to tackle some big and difficult challenges that had been facing this country for a very long time we also hoped for a chance to get beyond some of the old political divides between democrats and republicans red states and blue states that had prevented us from making progress because although we are proud to be democrats we are prouder to be americans and we believed then and we believe now that no single party has a monopoly on wisdom that s not to say that the election didn t expose deep differences between the parties i ran for president because for much of the last decade a very specific governing philosophy had reigned about how america should work cut taxes especially for millionaires and billionaires cut regulations for special interests cut trade deals even if they didn t benefit our workers cut back on investments in our people and in our future in education and clean energy in research and technology the idea was that if we just had blind faith in the market if we let corporations play by their own rules if we left everyone else to fend for themselves that america would grow and america would prosper and for a time this idea gave us the illusion of prosperity we saw financial firms and ceos take in record profits and record bonuses we saw a housing boom that led to new homeowners and new jobs in construction consumers bought more condos and bigger cars and better tvs but while all this was happening the broader economy was becoming weaker nobody understands that more than the people of ohio job growth between 2000 and 2008 was slower than it had been in any economic expansion since world war ii slower than it s been over the last year the wages and incomes of middle class families kept falling while the cost of everything from tuition to health care kept on going up folks were forced to put more debt on their credit cards and borrow against homes that many couldn t afford to buy in the first place and meanwhile a failure to pay for two wars and two tax cuts for the wealthy helped turn a record surplus into a record deficit i ran for president because i believed that this kind of economy was unsustainable for the middle class and for the future of our nation i ran because i had a different idea about how america was built it was an idea rooted in my own family s story you see michelle and i are where we are today because even though our families didn t have much they worked tirelessly without complaint so that we might have a better life my grandfather marched off to europe in world war ii while my grandmother worked in factories on the home front i had a single mom who put herself through school and would wake before dawn to make sure i got a decent education michelle can still remember her father heading out to his job as a city worker long after multiple sclerosis had made it impossible for him to walk without crutches he always got to work he just had to get up a little earlier yes our families believed in the american values of self reliance and individual responsibility and they instilled those values in their children but they also believed in a country that rewards responsibility a country that rewards hard work a country built on the promise of opportunity and upward mobility they believed in an america that gave my grandfather the chance to go to college because of the gi bill an america that gave my grandparents the chance to buy a home because of the federal housing authority an america that gave their children and grandchildren the chance to fulfill our dreams thanks to college loans and college scholarships it was an america where you didn t buy things you couldn t afford where we didn t just think about today we thought about tomorrow an america that took pride in the goods that we made not just the things we consumed an america where a rising tide really did lift all boats from the company ceo to the guy on the assembly line that s the america i believe in that s the america i believe in that s what led me to work in the shadow of a shuttered steel plant on the south side of chicago when i was a community organizer it s what led me to fight for factory workers at manufacturing plants that were closing across illinois when i was a senator it s what led me to run for president because i don t believe we can have a strong and growing economy without a strong and growing middle class now much has happened since that election the flawed policies and economic weaknesses of the previous decade culminated in a financial crisis and the worst recession of our lifetimes and my hope was that the crisis would cause everybody democrats and republicans to pull together and tackle our problems in a practical way but as we all know things didn t work out that way some republican leaders figured it was smart politics to sit on the sidelines and let democrats solve the mess others believed on principle that government shouldn t meddle in the markets even when the markets are broken but with the nation losing nearly 800 000 jobs the month that i was sworn into office my most urgent task was to stop a financial meltdown and prevent this recession from becoming a second depression and ohio we have done that the economy is growing again the financial markets have stabilized the private sector has created jobs for the last eight months in a row and there are roughly 3 million americans who are working today because of the economic plan we put into place but the truth is progress has been painfully slow millions of jobs were lost before our policies even had a chance to take effect we lost 4 million in the six months before i took office it was a hole so deep that even though we ve added jobs again millions of americans remain unemployed hundreds of thousands of families have lost their homes millions more can barely pay the bills or make the mortgage the middle class is still treading water and those aspiring to reach the middle class are doing everything they can to keep from drowning and meanwhile some of the very steps that were necessary to save the economy like temporarily supporting the banks and the auto industry fed the perception that washington is still ignoring the middle class in favor of special interests and so people are frustrated and they re angry and they re anxious about the future i understand that i also understand that in a political campaign the easiest thing for the other side to do is to ride this fear and anger all the way to election day that s what s happening right now a few weeks ago the republican leader of the house came here to cleveland and offered his party s answer to our economic challenges now it would be one thing if he had admitted his party s mistakes during the eight years that they were in power if they had gone off for a while and meditated and come back and offered a credible new approach to solving our country s problems but that s not what happened there were no new policies from mr boehner there were no new ideas there was just the same philosophy that we had already tried during the decade that they were in power the same philosophy that led to this mess in the first place cut more taxes for millionaires and cut more rules for corporations instead of coming together like past generations did to build a better country for our children and grandchildren their argument is that we should let insurance companies go back to denying care for folks who are sick or let credit card companies go back to raising rates without any reason instead of setting our sights higher they re asking us to settle for a status quo of stagnant growth and eroding competitiveness and a shrinking middle class cleveland that is not the america i know that is not the america we believe in a lot has changed since i came here in those final days of the last election but what hasn t is the choice facing this country it s still fear versus hope the past versus the future it s still a choice between sliding backward and moving forward that s what this election is about that s the choice you will face in november now we have a different vision for the future see i ve never believed that government has all the answers to our problems i ve never believed that government s role is to create jobs or prosperity i believe it s the drive and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs our small businesses the skill and dedication of our workers that s made us the wealthiest nation on earth i believe it s the private sector that must be the main engine for our recovery i believe government should be lean government should be efficient i believe government should leave people free to make the choices they think are best for themselves and their families so long as those choices don t hurt others but in the words of the first republican president abraham lincoln i also believe that government should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves and that means making the long term investments in this country s future that individuals and corporations can t make on their own investments in education and clean energy in basic research and technology and infrastructure that means making sure corporations live up to their responsibilities to treat consumers fairly and play by the same rules as everyone else their responsibility is to look out for their workers as well as their shareholders and create jobs here at home and that means providing a hand up for middle class families so that if they work hard and meet their responsibilities they can afford to raise their children and send them to college see a doctor when they get sick retire with dignity and respect that s what we democrats believe in a vibrant free market but one that works for everybody that s our vision that s our vision for a stronger economy and a growing middle class and that s the difference between what we and republicans in congress are offering the american people right now let me give you a few specific examples of our different approaches this week i proposed some additional steps to grow the economy and help businesses spur hiring one of the keys to job creation is to encourage companies to invest more in the united states but for years our tax code has actually given billions of dollars in tax breaks that encourage companies to create jobs and profits in other countries i want to change that i want to change that instead of tax loopholes that incentivize investment in overseas jobs i m proposing a more generous permanent extension of the tax credit that goes to companies for all the research and innovation they do right here in ohio right here in the united states of america and i m proposing that all american businesses should be allowed to write off all the investment they do in 2011 and this will help small businesses upgrade their plants and equipment and will encourage large corporations to get off the sidelines and start putting their profits to work in places like cleveland and toledo and dayton now to most of you i ll bet this just seems like common sense but not to mr boehner and his allies for years republicans have fought to keep these corporate loopholes open in fact when mr boehner was here in cleveland he attacked us for closing a few of these loopholes and using the money to help states like ohio keep hundreds of thousands of teachers and cops and firefighters on the job mr boehner dismissed these jobs we saved teaching our kids patrolling our streets rushing into burning buildings as government jobs jobs i guess he thought just weren t worth saving and i couldn t disagree more i think teachers and police officers and firefighters are part of what keeps america strong and ohio i think if we re going to give tax breaks to companies they should go to companies that create jobs in america not that create jobs overseas that s one difference between the republican vision and the democratic vision that s what this election is all about let me give you another example we want to put more americans back to work rebuilding america our roads our railways our runways when the housing sector collapsed and the recession hit one in every four jobs lost were in the construction industry that s partly why our economic plan has invested in badly needed infrastructure projects over the last 19 months not just roads and bridges but high speed railroads and expanded broadband access altogether these projects have led to thousands of good private sector jobs especially for those in the trades mr boehner and the republicans in congress said no to these projects fought them tooth and nail though i should say it didn t stop a lot of them from showing up at the ribbon cuttings trying to take credit that s always a sight to see now there are still thousands of miles of railroads and railways and runways left to repair and improve and engineers economists governors mayors of every political stripe believe that if we want to compete in this global economy we need to rebuild this vital infrastructure there is no reason europe or china should have the fastest trains or the most modern airports we want to put people to work building them right here in america so this week i ve proposed a six year infrastructure plan that would start putting americans to work right away but despite the fact that this has traditionally been an issue with bipartisan support mr boehner has so far said no to infrastructure that s bad for america and that too is what this election is all about i ll give you one final example of the differences between us and the republicans and that s on the issue of tax cuts under the tax plan passed by the last administration taxes are scheduled to go up substantially next year for everybody by the way this was by design when they passed these tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 they didn t want everybody to know what it would do to our deficit so they pretended like they were going to end even though now they say they don t now i believe we ought to make the tax cuts for the middle class permanent for the middle class permanent these families are the ones who saw their wages and incomes flat line over the last decade you deserve a break you deserve some help and because folks in the middle class are more likely to spend their tax cut on basic necessities that strengthens the economy as a whole but the republican leader of the house doesn t want to stop there make no mistake he and his party believe we should also give a permanent tax cut to the wealthiest 2 percent of americans with all the other budgetary pressures we have with all the republicans talk about wanting to shrink the deficit they would have us borrow 700 billion over the next 10 years to give a tax cut of about 100 000 each to folks who are already millionaires and keep in mind wealthy americans are just about the only folks who saw their incomes rise when republicans were in charge and these are the folks who are less likely to spend the money which is why economists don t think tax breaks for the wealthy would do much to boost the economy so let me be clear to mr boehner and everybody else we should not hold middle class tax cuts hostage any longer we are ready this week if they want to give tax cuts to every american making 250 000 or less that s 98 97 percent of americans now for any income over this amount the tax rates would just go back to what they were under president clinton this isn t to punish folks who are better off god bless them it s because we can t afford the 700 billion price tag and for those who claim that our approach would somehow be bad for growth and bad for small businesses let me remind you that with those tax rates in place under president clinton this country created 22 million jobs and raised incomes and had the largest surplus in our history in fact if the republican leadership in congress really wants to help small businesses they ll stop using legislative maneuvers to block an up or down vote on a small business jobs bill that s before the senate right now right now this is a bill that would do two things it would cut taxes for small businesses and make loans more available for small businesses it is fully paid for won t add to the deficit and it was written by democrats and republicans and yet the other party continues to block this jobs bill a delay that small business owners have said is actually leading them to put off hiring look i recognize that most of the republicans in congress have said no to just about every policy i ve proposed since taking office i realize in some cases that there are genuine philosophical differences but on issues like this one a tax cut for small businesses supported by the chamber of commerce the only reason they re holding this up is politics pure and simple they re making the same calculation they made just before my inauguration if i fail they win well they might think that this will get them to where they want to go in november but it won t get our country going where it needs to go in the long run it won t get us there it won t get us there it won t get us there so that s the choice ohio do we return to the same failed policies that ran our economy into a ditch or do we keep moving forward with policies that are slowly pulling us out do we settle for a slow decline or do we reach for an america with a growing economy and a thriving middle class that s the america that i see we may not be there yet but we know where this country needs to go we see a future where we invest in american innovation and american ingenuity where we export more goods so we create more jobs here at home where we make it easier to start a business or patent an invention where we build a homegrown clean energy industry because i don t want to see new solar panels or electric cars or advanced batteries manufactured in europe or asia i want to see them made right here in the u s of a by american workers we see an america where every citizen has the skills and training to compete with any worker in the world that s why we ve set a goal to once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 that s why we re revitalizing community colleges like this one that s why we re reforming our education system based on what works for our children not what perpetuates the status quo we see an america where a growing middle class is the beating heart of a growing economy that s why i kept my campaign promise and gave a middle class tax cut to 95 percent of working americans that s why we passed health insurance reform that stops insurance companies from jacking up your premiums at will or denying coverage because you get sick that s why we passed financial reform that will end taxpayer funded bailouts reform that will stop credit card companies and mortgage lenders from taking advantage of taxpayers and consumers that s why we re trying to make it easier for workers to save for retirement and fighting the efforts of some in the other party to privatize social security because as long as i m president no one is going to take the retirement savings of a generation of americans and hand it over to wall street not on my watch that s why we re fighting to extend the child tax credit and make permanent our new college tax credit because if we do it will mean 10 000 in tuition relief for each child going to four years of college and i don t want any parent not to be sending their kids in good time or bad to college because they can t afford it and finally we see an america where we refuse to pass on the debt we inherited to the next generation now let me spend just a minute on this issue because we ve heard a lot of moralizing on the other side about this government spending and debt along with the tax cuts for the wealthy the other party s main economic proposal is that they ll stop government spending now it s right to be concerned about the long term deficit if we don t get a handle on it soon it can endanger our future and at a time when folks are tightening their belts at home i understand why a lot of americans feel it s time for government to show some discipline too but let s look at the facts when these same republicans including mr boehner were in charge the number of earmarks and pet projects went up not down these same republicans turned a record surplus into a record deficit when i walked in wrapped in a nice bow was a 1 3 trillion deficit sitting right there on my doorstep a welcoming present just this year these same republicans voted against a bipartisan fiscal commission that they themselves had proposed once i decided i was for it they were against it and when you ask them what programs they d actually cut they don t have an answer that s not fiscal responsibility that s not a serious plan to govern now i ll be honest i refuse to cut back on those investments that will grow our economy in the future investments in areas like education and clean energy and technology i don t want to cut those things and that s because economic growth is the single best way to bring down the deficit and we need these investments to grow but i am absolutely committed to fiscal responsibility which is why i ve already proposed freezing all discretionary spending unrelated to national security for the next three years and once the bipartisan fiscal commission finishes its work i ll spend the next year making the tough choices necessary to further reduce our deficit and lower our debt whether i get help from the other side or not of course reducing the deficit won t be easy making up for the 8 million lost jobs caused by this recession won t happen overnight not everything we ve done over the last two years has worked as quickly as we had hoped and i am keenly aware that not all of our policies have been popular so no our job is not easy but you didn t elect me to do what was easy you didn t elect me to just read the polls and figure how to keep myself in office you didn t elect me to avoid big problems you elected me to do what was right and as long as i m president that s exactly what i intend to do this country is emerging from an incredibly difficult period in its history an era of irresponsibility that stretched from wall street to washington and had a devastating effect on a lot of people we have started turning the corner on that era but part of moving forward is returning to the time honored values that built this country hard work and self reliance responsibility for ourselves but also responsibility for one another it s about moving from an attitude that said what s in it for me to one that asks what s best for america what s best for all our workers what s best for all of our businesses what s best for all of our children these values are not democratic or republican they are not conservative or liberal values they are american values as democrats we take pride in what our party has accomplished over the last century social security and the minimum wage the gi bill and medicare civil rights and worker s rights and women s rights but we also recognize that throughout our history there has been a noble republican vision as well of what this country can be it was the vision of abraham lincoln who set up the first land grant colleges and launched the transcontinental railroad the vision of teddy roosevelt who used the power of government to break up monopolies the vision of dwight eisenhower who helped build the interstate highway system and yes the vision of ronald reagan who despite his aversion to government was willing to help save social security for future generations working with democrats these were serious leaders for serious times they were great politicians but they didn t spend all their time playing games or scoring points they didn t always prey on people s fears and anxieties they made mistakes but they did what they thought was in the best interests of their country and its people and that s what the american people expect of us today democrats independents and republicans that s the debate they deserve that s the leadership we owe them i know that folks are worried about the future i know there s still a lot of hurt out here and when times are tough i know it can be tempting to give in to cynicism and fear and doubt and division and just settle our sights a little bit lower settle for something a little bit less but that s not who we are ohio those are not the values that built this country we are here today because in the worst of times the people who came before us brought out the best in america because our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents were willing to work and sacrifice for us they were willing to take great risks and face great hardship and reach for a future that would give us the chance at a better life they knew that this country is greater than the sum of its parts that america is not about the ambitions of any one individual but the aspirations of an entire people an entire nation that s who we are that is our legacy and i m convinced that if we re willing to summon those values today and if we re willing to choose hope over fear and choose the future over the past and come together once more around the great project of national renewal then we will restore our economy and rebuild our middle class and reclaim the american dream for the next generation thank you god bless you and may god bless the united states of america dem bobama9 10 09 barack_obama patricia thank you so much for sharing your story and doing such a wonderful job good afternoon everybody before i start with my remarks i want to acknowledge some people who ve been working diligently on this issue in some cases for years first of all our secretary of the treasury tim geithner is here christina romer the chair of there she is of my council of economic advisers is here senator danny akaka from hawaii representative steve driehaus of ohio representative walt minnick of idaho representative paul kanjorski of pennsylvania representative al green of texas karen mills our outstanding administrator of the small business administration sheila bair who s been doing a heroic job trying to deal with the banking situation as chairman of the fdic mayor michael nutter of philadelphia and my national economic advisor larry summers and finally we ve got some special guests some of the finest attorney generals who are fighting against consumer fraud and have been dealing with some of the consequences of the issues that we re discussing here today i m proud to have them here my former seatmate in the illinois state senate attorney general lisa madigan andrew cuomo of new york martha coakley of massachusetts and roy cooper of north carolina please give them all a big round of applause now for the last several months this administration has been working with congress to reform an outdated system of financial regulations and lax oversight that helped lead to last year s crisis and i want to thank some people here who are working tirelessly on this issue first of all chairman chris dodd of the senate banking committee chairman barney frank of the house financial services committee richard shelby also of the senate banking committee for the leadership and enthusiasm that they have shown throughout this process part of our reform effort involves putting in place new safeguards that would help prevent the irresponsibility and recklessness of a few from wreaking havoc on our entire financial system we want to close gaps in regulation we want to eliminate overlap and we want to set rules of the road for wall street that make fair dealing and honest competition the only way for financial firms to win and prosper but a central part of our reform effort is also aimed at protecting americans who buy financial products and services every day from mortgages to credit cards it s true that the crisis we faced was caused in part by people who took on too much debt and took out loans they couldn t afford but my concern are the millions of americans who behaved responsibly and yet still found themselves in jeopardy because of the predatory practices of some in the financial industry these are folks who signed contracts they didn t always understand offered by lenders who didn t always tell the truth they were lured in by promises of low payments and never made aware of the fine print and hidden fees secretary geithner and i just finished meeting with some of these americans who ve joined us here today and you ve already heard from patricia who was forced to pay thousands of dollars in interest on a 550 payday loan and we also had a chance to hear from susan chapman who had excellent payment history until she was contacted by a broker who told her that she could lower the monthly payments on her mortgage instead the loan they sold her ended up increasing her debt and her principal has now gone up 20 000 we talked to karen cappuccio who is still fending off foreclosure because her mortgage company duped her into taking out two expensive loans when they had originally promised her one low fixed rate mortgage we talked to maxine given whose bank hit her with four separate overdraft charges because of one mortgage check that they ended up rejecting the very next day and i should add by the way that this is a cpa that we re talking to here so if it s happening to her if it s happening to maxine then imagine what the rest of us who can barely add are dealing with here we talked to andrew giordano whose bank made a mistake that cost him 800 in overdraft fees and when he caught their mistake the bank only refunded part of the fees as we ve seen over the last year abuses like these don t just jeopardize the financial well being of individual americans they can threaten the stability of the entire economy and yet the patchwork system of regulations we have now has failed to prevent these abuses with seven different federal agencies each having a role there s too little accountability there are too many loopholes and no single agency whose sole job it is to stand up for people like patricia susan maxine andrew and karen no one whose chief responsibility it is to stand up for the american consumer and for responsible banks and financial institutions who are having to compete against folks who are not responsible so under the reforms we ve proposed that will change the new consumer financial protection agency that i ve asked congress to create will have just one mission to look out for the financial interests of ordinary americans it will be charged with setting clear rules of the road for consumers and banks and it will be able to enforce those rules across the board this agency will have the power to make certain that consumers get information that is clear and concise in plain language so they can compare products and know exactly what they re getting themselves into it will ensure that banks and other firms can t hide behind these ridiculously confusing contracts pages and pages of fine print that nobody can figure out it will have the ability to enforce and build on the credit card reforms we passed earlier this year so that consumers aren t hit with unfair rate hikes and penalties or hidden charges it will require brokers to look out for the interests of families if they give advice about mortgages and it will ensure transparency and fair dealing for other financial products like bank overdraft services and payday loans in a financial system that s never been more complicated it has never been more important to have a watchdog function like the one we ve proposed and yet predictably a lot of the banks and big financial firms don t like the idea of a consumer agency very much in fact the u s chamber of commerce is spending millions on an ad campaign to kill it you might have seen some of these ads the ones that claim that local butchers and other small businesses somehow will be harmed by this agency this is of course completely false and we ve made clear that only businesses that offer financial services would be affected by this agency i don t know how many of your butchers are offering financial services contrary to what some have argued this agency would not restrict consumer choice and innovation nothing could be further from the truth in the past a lack of clear rules led to innovation of the wrong kind the firms that did best were the ones who did the best job of hiding the real cost to consumers we don t want them competing by figuring out how much they can fool ordinary americans by contrast the consumer agency we re proposing would set ground rules so that firms don t have to compete to confuse families but they have to compete to give them better choices this will also help small business entrepreneurs who often rely on credit cards and home equity loans to finance their start up businesses all this hasn t stopped the big financial firms and their lobbyists from mobilizing against change they re doing what they always do descending on congress using every bit of influence they have to maintain the status quo that has maximized their profits at the expense of american consumers despite the fact that recently a whole bunch of those same american consumers bailed them out as a consequence of the bad decisions that they made and since they re worried they may not be able to kill this agency they re trying their hardest to weaken it by asking for exemptions from this agency s rules and enforcement by fighting to keep every gap and loophole they can find they re very good at this because that s how business has been done in washington for a very long time in fact over the last 10 years the chamber alone spent nearly half a billion dollars on lobbying half a billion dollars the stories we heard today they remind us that the american people can t afford business as usual any longer these americans can t afford high priced lobbyists to argue their case they re counting on us to be their advocates to be their voice to restore a sense of responsibility from wall street to washington that s why we need a consumer financial protection agency that will stand up not for big banks not for financial firms but for hardworking americans that s why we need regulatory reform that will reward innovation and competition instead of short cuts and abuses that s why we can t let special interests win this fight we ve already seen and lived the consequences of what happens when there s too little accountability on wall street and too little protection for main street and i will not allow this country to go back there it is time for us to move forward it is time for real change and i m confident that we re going to get it done with the help of all the people who are here today and most importantly with the help of the american people who are going to demand a better deal from their financial services thank you very much everybody dem bobama9 12 09 barack_obama good afternoon everybody i am pleased that you could all join us today as we announce three new initiatives to help our community health centers provide better care to people in need all across america i want to thank our secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius our surgeon general dr regina benjamin our administrator of the health resources and services administration dr mary wakefield and our deputy secretary of hhs bill corr for being here today and for their outstanding work to support community health centers there they are by the way regina it s good to see you in your uniform we had been waiting for that i also want to thank the many members of congress who are with us today both in the audience and up on the stage particularly bernie sanders and representative jim clyburn we are grateful for all that you ve done and i especially want to recognize the leaders here today from health centers across the country for what all of you are doing in your communities every day working long hours to provide quality care at prices that people can afford with the dignity and respect they deserve and in a way that takes into account the challenges that they face in their lives for you folks health care isn t just about diagnosing patients and treating illness it s about caring for people and promoting wellness it s about emphasizing education and prevention and helping people lead healthier lives so they don t get sick in the first place and it works studies show that people living near a health center are less likely to go to the emergency room and less likely to have unmet critical medical needs chcs are proven to reduce ethnic and racial disparities in care and the medical expenses of regular chc patients are nearly 25 percent lower than those folks who get their care elsewhere 25 percent lower so you can see why in a speech marking the first anniversary of the first community health centers in america senator ted kennedy declared you have not only assured the best in health care for your families and neighbors but you ve also begun a minor revolution in american medicine now unfortunately today nearly 45 years later that care has yet to reach many of the folks in this country who need it most today millions of americans still have difficulty accessing primary health care and many of them are uninsured many have insurance but live in underserved areas whether in urban or rural communities so they don t get regular checkups they don t get routine screenings when they get sick or hurt they tough it out and hope for the best and when things get bad enough they head to the emergency room so we end up treating complications crises and chronic conditions that could have been prevented in the first place and the cost is measured not just in dollars spent on health care or in lost workplace absences and lower productivity but in the kind of raw human suffering that has no place in the united states of america in the year 2009 no matter what party we belong to or where on the political spectrum we fall none of us thinks this is acceptable none of us would defend this system and that s why we ve taken up the cause of health insurance reform this year it s why many of the folks in this room fought so hard to ensure that the recovery act included unprecedented investments a total of 2 billion to upgrade and expand our health centers investments that embody the act s core mission to help folks hardest hit by this recession to put people back to work and to leave a legacy of improvements that will continue to lift up communities for generations to come today we re well on our way to meeting these goals we ve created or saved up to 1 6 million jobs according to the cbo the congressional budget office through the recovery act our economy is growing again we re doubling our capacity in renewable energy and rebuilding schools and laboratories railways and highways yesterday the kaiser family foundation issued a new report showing the recovery act has helped many states keep and improve access to health insurance for families in need and so far we ve allocated nearly 1 4 billion to health centers across america so they can get to work building and renovating and hiring new staff this year and today i m pleased to announce that we re awarding more than 500 million to 85 centers in more than 30 states and puerto rico that are providing critical care for so many folks with nowhere else to turn we re investing in places like canyonlands community health care in arizona that has one facility operating in a building originally constructed as a chicken coop and another in a cramped fire station we re investing in places like avis goodwin community health center in dover new hampshire that s become so overcrowded you must be from there it s become so overcrowded the doctors are using bathrooms and closets as offices we re investing in bucksport regional health center in maine where doctors are double booked and the waiting rooms are often standing room only we re giving places like these the funding they need to upgrade and expand their facilities so they can meet the skyrocketing demand for services that s come with this economic downturn but we won t just want our health centers to provide more care for more patients we want them to provide better care as well so starting today we re making 88 million in funding available for centers to adopt new health information technology systems to manage their administrative and financial matters and transfer old paper files to electronic medical records these investments won t just increase efficiency and lower costs they ll improve the quality of care as well preventing countless medical errors and allowing providers to spend less time with paperwork and more time with patients that s the purpose of the final initiative i m announcing today as well a demonstration project to evaluate the benefits of the medical home model of care that many of our health centers aspire to the idea here is very simple that in order for care to be effective it needs to be coordinated it s a model where the center that serves as your medical home might help you keep track of your prescriptions or get the referrals you need or work with you to develop a plan of care that ensures your providers are working together to keep you healthy so taken together these three initiatives funding for construction technology and a medical home demonstration they won t just save money over the long term and create more jobs they re also going to give more people the peace of mind of knowing that health care will be there for them and their families when they need it and ultimately that s what health insurance reform is really about that s what the members of congress here today will be voting on in the coming weeks now let me just end by saying a little bit about this broader effort i know it s been a long road i know it s been a tough fight but i also know the reason we ve taken up this cause is the very same reason why so many members from both parties are here today because no matter what our politics are we know that when it comes to health care the people we serve deserve better the legislation in congress today contains both democratic ideas and republican ideas and plenty of compromises in between the senate made critical progress last night with a creative new framework that i believe will help pave the way for final passage and a historic achievement on behalf of the american people i support this effort especially since it s aimed at increasing choice and competition and lowering cost so i want to thank all of you for sticking with it for all those late nights all the long weekends that you guys have put in with so much at stake this is well worth all of our efforts it is now my pleasure to sign the memo that will direct secretary sebelius to get started on that medical home demonstration so let s do that dem bobama9 2 10 barack_obama good morning everybody i am so proud of the work that the first lady along with the cabinet secretaries behind me have done in trying to tackle one of the most urgent health issues that we face in this country and that is the increase of childhood obesity and because of the outstanding planning that they ve done they are going to be rolling out a terrific plan of action that involves the private sector as well as government agencies coordinating much more effectively a lot of public information out there to help parents make good decisions about allowing their children to be active and eating healthier and what the executive order i m going to be signing today does is to create a 90 day plan that allows optimal coordination as we move forward in addition to the coordination that we re doing with private sector companies and not for profits and other organizations out there that are interested in this issue so we think that this has enormous promise in improving the health of our children in giving support to parents to make the kinds of healthy choices that oftentimes are very difficult in this kind of environment and so i just want to say how proud i am of the first lady for her outstanding work and i will now sign this order there you go it s done honey thanks now they get to work thank you guys dem bobama9 3 10 barack_obama thank you so much well good evening everybody and welcome to the white house i can t imagine a better way to celebrate the independence of greece than with the prime minister of greece so prime minister papandreou to your lovely wife mrs papandreou we are honored by your presence here today and we are pleased that you were able to bring your extraordinary delegation from athens now like his father and his grandfather before him the prime minister is leading greece through challenging times but as i told him during our meeting in the oval office today whether in good times or in bad times the people of greece will always have a friend and a partner in the united states of america thank you your eminence for your very kind introduction and for the wisdom and compassion that has always defined your ministry archbishop demetrios marks his second decade guiding the greek orthodox church and community in america four decades as a bishop and recently his 82nd birthday and he is looking really good i need to find out what he s eating last year his eminence tried to compare me with alexander the great i thought this would get me more respect from michelle and the girls it did not they reminded me instead that greek literature is full of very strong women i want to acknowledge the fact that we re joined by leaders who have strengthened the bonds between us including our ambassador kaskarelis and from cyprus ambassador kakouris please stand up we have some outstanding members of congress who are here and we ve got at least one potential member of congress alexi stand up from the state of illinois we ve got in fact in addition to alexi we ve got a lot of greek american friends here who ve been great friends and supporters of mine including folks here from chicago i think we ve got just about all of greektown here and we also have some of the outstanding greek americans who are serving in my administration now greek independence day isn t for another few weeks but i ll be on a trip to asia so i appreciate you coming early not that greeks have ever needed an excuse to celebrate let s face it but on that day we ll remember how 189 years ago another bishop stood up in a monastery in the mountains raised the greek flag declared independence and began the struggle to restore democracy to its birthplace but on that day we ll not only celebrate a singular moment in time we ll be reminded of the spirit that has defined greece and its people for all time there s a concept that captures it and it doesn t translate easily it doesn t really have an equivalent in english but it s a virtue that all of you know well because it s the very essence of being greek and you will forgive if my pronunciation is just so so philotimo right philotimo literally it translates as love of honor i love that concept love of honor but of course it means much more than that it s a sense of love to family and to community and to country the notion that what we re here on this earth to do is to be all in this together we all have obligations to each other and to work together and so it was that the democratic example of a small group of city states more than 2 000 years ago could inspire the founding generation of this country that led one early american to imagine that the days of greece may be revived in the woods of america it s the sense of nobility and morality written in the pages of those timeless greek texts which have instructed students and tormented them down the ages in every corner of the world indeed when i was living in indonesia as a child when my mother would wake me up early in the morning to teach me among the books that she used to pull off the shelf were the legends of greek mythology philotimo it s a sense of right and wrong and a duty to do what s right and so 189 years ago americans of greek origin crossed the oceans and fought for greek independence greek americans in turn served and fought to preserve our union and through two world wars and a long cold war america stood with our greek allies and friends and since the prime minister is here let me acknowledge greece s efforts to extend the security and stability in our time toward a just and final settlement in cyprus fully integrating the balkans into europe and the prime minister s personal work to improve relations with turkey we thank you for your leadership and let me commend greece our close nato ally for standing up for the security and opportunity of people around the world from the balkans to afghanistan where greek service members are helping to give people who have know too much war the chance to live in peace and security this solidarity continues today whether it s the close counterterrorism efforts between our governments or the deep partnerships between our people indeed as the prime minister and i discussed this afternoon greece s participation in the visa waiver program will strengthen security in both our countries and whether it s to do business or visit family and friends it will now be easier for our greek friends to visit the united states and philotimo is a sense of dignity and respect as well it s the determination that has driven generations of greek americans like those here tonight to struggle and sacrifice for the same things that all americans want to pursue our dreams to realize our god given potential and to give our children an even better life that s the simple hope that caused a bishop to raise that flag on a mountaintop so many years ago that s the profound sense of friendship that will guide our work in the years ahead because what one patriot of greek independence wrote to john quincy adams nearly 200 years ago remains true today we are friends co patriots and brothers so thank you all for coming god bless you god bless america and zito i ellas dem bobama9 4 09 barack_obama thank you john for your outstanding service and your friendship is greatly appreciated i want to thank my two outstanding secretaries who are behind me bob gates who is doing just an extraordinary job over at the pentagon and general shinseki now secretary shinseki who has served our country with extraordinary valor i also want to acknowledge all the wounded warriors and veterans and all those who care for them who are here today you make us very very proud to the vso and mso leaders who work hard on behalf of those who serve this nation thank you for your advocacy and your hard work as i look out in the audience especially seeing these folks in their uniforms i am reminded of the fact that we have the best fighting force in world history and the reason we do is because of all of you and so i m very grateful for what you ve done to protect and serve this country it is good to be back we ve had a productive week working to advance america s interests around the world we worked to renew our alliances to enhance our common security we collaborated with other nations to take steps towards rebuilding the global economy which will revitalize our own and before coming home i stopped to visit with our men and women who are serving bravely in iraq first and foremost i wanted to say thank you to them on behalf of a grateful nation they ve faced extraordinary challenges and they have performed brilliantly in every mission that s been given to them they have given iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country and that is a great gift you know we often talk about ideals like sacrifice and honor and duty but these men and women like the men and women who are here embody it they have made sacrifices many of us cannot begin to imagine we re talking about men like specialist jake altman and sergeant nathan dewitt two of the soldiers who i had the honor to meet when i was in baghdad in 2007 as specialist altman was clearing mines so that other soldiers might travel in safety he lost his hand when an ied struck his vehicle and at walter reed he asked to relearn the skills necessary to perform his duties with a prosthetic so that he could rejoin his old battalion sergeant dewitt was severely injured in an attack last september but he refused to let his injuries stop him from giving first aid to his wounded comrades today they re both back alongside their fellow soldiers in their old units and we re talking about women like tammy duckworth who i think is here tammy where are you there you are a great friend who lost her legs when a rocket struck the black hawk helicopter she was piloting over iraq and when she returned home she continued to serve her country heading the department of veterans affairs in illinois and she serves her country still as my nominee for assistant secretary of the department of veterans affairs we re talking about heroes like all the service members and veterans of the united states armed forces including the veterans who ve joined us here today many who gave up much yet signed up to give more many with their own battles still to come all with their own stories to tell for their service and sacrifice warm words of thanks from a grateful nation are more than warranted but they aren t nearly enough we also owe our veterans the care they were promised and the benefits that they have earned we have a sacred trust with those who wear the uniform of the united states of america it s a commitment that begins at enlistment and it must never end but we know that for too long we ve fallen short of meeting that commitment too many wounded warriors go without the care that they need too many veterans don t receive the support that they ve earned too many who once wore our nation s uniform now sleep in our nation s streets it s time to change all that it s time to give our veterans a 21st century va over the past few months we ve made much progress towards that end and today i m pleased to announce some new progress under the leadership of secretary gates and secretary shinseki the department of defense and the department of veterans affairs have taken a first step towards creating one unified lifetime electronic health record for members of our armed services that will contain their administrative and medical information from the day they first enlist to the day that they are laid to rest currently there is no comprehensive system in place that allows for a streamlined transition of health records between dod and the va and that results in extraordinary hardship for a awful lot of veterans who end up finding their records lost unable to get their benefits processed in a timely fashion i can t tell you how many stories that i heard during the course of the last several years first as a united states senator and then as a candidate about veterans who were finding it almost impossible to get the benefits that they had earned despite the fact that their disabilities or their needs were evident for all to see and that s why i m asking both departments to work together to define and build a seamless system of integration with a simple goal when a member of the armed forces separates from the military he or she will no longer have to walk paperwork from a dod duty station to a local va health center their electronic records will transition along with them and remain with them forever now this would represent a huge step towards modernizing the way health care is delivered and benefits are administered for our nation s veterans it would cut through red tape and reduce the number of administrative mistakes it would allow all va sites access to a veteran s complete military medical record giving them the information they need to deliver high quality care and it would do all this with the strictest and most rigorous standards of privacy and security so that our veterans can have confidence that their medical records can only be shared at their direction now the care that our veterans receive should never be hindered by budget delays i ve shared this concern with secretary shinseki and we have worked together to support advanced funding for veterans medical care what that means is a timely and predictable flow of funding from year to year but more importantly that means better care for our veterans and i was pleased to see that the budget resolution passed by the senate supports this concept in a bipartisan manner i m also pleased that the budget resolutions adopted by both houses of congress preserve priorities that i outlined in my budget priorities that will go a long way towards building that 21st century va that we re looking for the 2010 budget includes the largest single year increase in va funding in three decades and all told we will increase funding by 25 billion over the next five years this budget doesn t just signify increased funding for the va health care program it significantly expands coverage so that 500 000 more veterans who have previously been denied it will receive it and it strengthens care and services across a broad range of areas because the nightmares of war don t always end when our loved ones return home this budget also meets the mental health needs of our wounded warriors untold thousands of servicemen and women returning from iraq and afghanistan suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or other serious psychological injury the growing incidence of suicide among active military returning veterans is disturbing sometimes the deadliest wounds are the ones you cannot see and we cannot afford to let the unseen wounds go untreated and that s why this budget dramatically increases funding for mental health screening and treatment at all levels it increases the number of vet centers and mobile health clinics expanding access to this needed care in rural areas and it helps reduce the stigma of seeking care by adding mental health professionals to educate veterans and their families about their injuries and their options and because thousands of iraq and afghanistan veterans have suffered from traumatic brain injury one of the signature injuries of these wars this budget improves services for cognitive injuries and many with tbi have never been evaluated by a physician and because such injuries can often have long term impacts that only show up down the road this funding will help ensure they receive the ongoing care they need because we all share the shame of 154 000 veterans going homeless on any given night this budget also funds a pilot program with not for profit organizations to make sure that veterans at risk of losing their homes have a roof over their heads and we will not rest until we reach a day when not one single veteran falls into homelessness finally this budget recognizes that our veterans deserve something more an equal chance to reach for the very dream they defend it s the chance america gave to my grandfather who enlisted after pearl harbor and went on to march in patton s army when he came home he went to college on the gi bill which made it possible for him and so many veterans like him to live out their own version of the american dream and now it s our turn to help guarantee this generation the same opportunity that the greatest generation enjoyed by providing every returning service member with a real chance to afford a college education and by providing the resources to effectively implement the post 9 11 gi bill that is what this budget does and even as we care for veterans who ve served this country bob gates has helped us design a budget that does more for our soldiers more for their families and more for our military it fully protects and properly funds the increase to our army and marine force strength and halts reductions in the air force and navy allowing fewer deployments and more time between each it builds on care for our wounded warriors and on our investments in medical research and development it deepens our commitment to improve the quality of life for military families military child care spousal support and education because they re deployed when their loved one gets deployed on my visit to baghdad this week i was inspired all over again by the men and women in our armed services they re proud of the work they re doing and we are all deeply proud of them and through their service they are living out the ideals that stir something deep within the american character honor sacrifice and commitment to a higher purpose and to one another that after all is what led them to wear the uniform in the first place their unwavering belief in america and now we must serve them as well as they ve served us and as long as we are fortunate to have leaders like secretary gates and secretary shinseki and as long as i am commander in chief i promise that we will work tirelessly to meet that mission and make sure that all those who wear this nation s uniform know this when you come home to america america will be there for you thank you very much everybody dem bobama9 5 10 barack_obama thank you thank you very much thank you thank you hampton thank you class of 2010 please everybody please have a seat i love you back that s why i m here i love you guys good morning everybody to all the mothers in the house as somebody who is surrounded by women in the white house grew up surrounded by women let me take a moment just to say thank you for all that you put up with each and every day we are so grateful to you and it is fitting to have such a beautiful day when we celebrate all our mothers thank you to hampton for allowing me to share this special occasion to all the dignitaries who are here the trustees the alumni parents grandparents aunts uncles cousins that s a cousin over there now before we get started i just want to say i m excited the battle of the real h u will be taking place in washington this year you know i am not going to pick sides but my understanding is it s been 13 years since the pirates lost as one hampton alum on my staff put it the last time howard beat hampton the fugees were still together well let me also say a word about president harvey a man who bleeds hampton blue in a single generation hampton has transformed from a small black college into a world class research institution and that transformation has come through the efforts of many people but it has come through president harvey s efforts in particular and i want to commend him for his outstanding leadership as well as his great friendship to me most of all i want to congratulate all of you the class of 2010 i gather that none of you walked across ogden circle you did okay you know we meet here today as graduating classes have met for generations not far from where it all began near that old oak tree off emancipation drive i know my university 101 there beneath its branches by what was then a union garrison about 20 students gathered on september 17th 1861 taught by a free citizen in defiance of virginia law the students were escaped slaves from nearby plantations who had fled to the fort seeking asylum and after the war s end a retired union general sought to enshrine that legacy of learning so with a collection from church groups civil war veterans and a choir that toured europe hampton normal and agricultural institute was founded here by the chesapeake a home by the sea now that story is no doubt familiar to many of you but it s worth reflecting on why it happened why so many people went to such trouble to found hampton and all our historically black colleges and universities the founders of these institutions knew of course that inequality would persist long into the future they were not nave they recognized that barriers in our laws and in our hearts wouldn t vanish overnight but they also recognized the larger truth a distinctly american truth they recognized class of 2010 that the right education might allow those barriers to be overcome might allow our god given potential to be fulfilled they recognized as frederick douglass once put it that educationmeans emancipation they recognized that education is how america and its people might fulfill our promise that recognition that truth that an education can fortify us to rise above any barrier to meet any test is reflected again and again throughout our history in the midst of civil war we set aside land grants for schools like hampton to teach farmers and factory workers the skills of an industrializing nation at the close of world war ii we made it possible for returning gis to attend college building and broadening our great middle class at the cold war s dawn we set up area studies centers on our campuses to prepare graduates to understand and address the global threats of a nuclear age so education is what has always allowed us to meet the challenges of a changing world and hampton that has never been more true than it is today this class is graduating at a time of great difficulty for america and for the world you re entering a job market in an era of heightened international competition with an economy that s still rebounding from the worst crisis since the great depression you re accepting your degrees as america still wages two wars wars that many in your generation have been fighting and meanwhile you re coming of age in a 24 7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments some of which don t always rank that high on the truth meter and with ipods and ipads and xboxes and playstations none of which i know how to work information becomes a distraction a diversion a form of entertainment rather than a tool of empowerment rather than the means of emancipation so all of this is not only putting pressure on you it s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy class of 2010 this is a period of breathtaking change like few others in our history we can t stop these changes but we can channel them we can shape them we can adapt to them and education is what can allow us to do so it can fortify you as it did earlier generations to meet the tests of your own time and first and foremost your education can fortify you against the uncertainties of a 21st century economy in the 19th century folks could get by with a few basic skills whether they learned them in a school like hampton or picked them up along the way as long as you were willing to work for much of the 20th century a high school diploma was a ticket into a solid middle class life that is no longer the case jobs today often require at least a bachelor s degree and that degree is even more important in tough times like these in fact the unemployment rate for folks who ve never gone to college is over twice as high as for folks with a college degree or more now the good news is you re already ahead of the curve all those checks you or your parents wrote to hampton will pay off you re in a strong position to outcompete workers around the world but i don t have to tell you that too many folks back home aren t as well prepared too many young people just like you are not as well prepared by any number of different yardsticks african americans are being outperformed by their white classmates as are hispanic americans students in well off areas are outperforming students in poorer rural or urban communities no matter what skin color globally it s not even close in 8th grade science and math for example american students are ranked about 10th overall compared to top performing countries but african americans are ranked behind more than 20 nations lower than nearly every other developed country so all of us have a responsibility as americans to change this to offer every single child in this country an education that will make them competitive in our knowledge economy that is our obligation as a nation but i have to say class of 2010 all of you have a separate responsibility to be role models for your brothers and sisters to be mentors in your communities and when the time comes to pass that sense of an education s value down to your children a sense of personal responsibility and self respect to pass down a work ethic and an intrinsic sense of excellence that made it possible for you to be here today so allowing you to compete in the global economy is the first way your education can prepare you but it can also prepare you as citizens with so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs and on cable on talk radio it can be difficult at times to sift through it all to know what to believe to figure out who s telling the truth and who s not let s face it even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction i ve had some experience in that regard fortunately you will be well positioned to navigate this terrain your education has honed your research abilities sharpened your analytical powers given you a context for understanding the world those skills will come in handy but the goal was always to teach you something more over the past four years you ve argued both sides of a debate you ve read novels and histories that take different cuts at life you ve discovered see i got a little amen there somebody you ve discovered interests you didn t know you had you ve made friends who didn t grow up the same way you did you ve tried things you d never done before including some things we won t talk about in front of your parents all of this i hope has had the effect of opening your mind of helping you understand what it s like to walk in somebody else s shoes but now that your minds have been opened it s up to you to keep them that way it will be up to you to open minds that remain closed that you meet along the way that after all is the elemental test of any democracy whether people with differing points of view can learn from each other and work with each other and find a way forward together and i d add one further observation just as your education can fortify you it can also fortify our nation as a whole more and more america s economic preeminence our ability to outcompete other countries will be shaped not just in our boardrooms not just on our factory floors but in our classrooms and our schools at universities like hampton it will be determined by how well all of us and especially our parents educate our sons and daughters what s at stake is more than our ability to outcompete other nations it s our ability to make democracy work in our own nation now years after he left office decades after he penned the declaration of independence thomas jefferson sat down a few hours drive from here in monticello and wrote a letter to a longtime legislator urging him to do more on education and jefferson gave one principal reason the one perhaps he found most compelling if a nation expects to be ignorant and free he wrote it expects what never was and never will be what jefferson recognized like the rest of that gifted founding generation was that in the long run their improbable experiment called america wouldn t work if its citizens were uninformed if its citizens were apathetic if its citizens checked out and left democracy who those to those who didn t have the best interests of all the people at heart it could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged if we held our government accountable if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship the success of their experiment they understood depended on the participation of its people the participation of americans like all of you the participation of all those who have ever sought to perfect our union i had a great honor of delivering a tribute to one of those americans last week an american named dorothy height and as you probably know dr height passed away the other week at the age of 98 one of the speakers at this memorial was her nephew who was 88 and i said that s a sign of a full life when your nephew is 88 dr height had been on the firing line for every fight from lynching to desegregation to the battle for health care reform she was with eleanor roosevelt and she was with michelle obama she lived a singular life one of the giants upon whose shoulders i stand but she started out just like you understanding that to make something of herself she needed a college degree so she applied to barnard college and she got in except when she showed up they discovered she wasn t white as they had believed and they had already given their two slots for african americans to other individuals those slots two had already been filled but dr height was not discouraged she was not deterred she stood up straight backed and with barnard s acceptance letter in hand she marched down to new york university and said let me in and she was admitted right away i want all of you to think about this class of 2010 because you ve gone through some hardships undoubtedly in arriving to where you are today there have been some hard days and hard exams and you felt put upon and undoubtedly you will face other challenges in the future but i want you to think about ms dorothy height a black woman in 1929 refusing to be denied her dream of a college education refusing to be denied her rights refusing to be denied her dignity refusing to be denied her place in america her piece of america s promise refusing to let any barriers of injustice or ignorance or inequality or unfairness stand in her way that refusal to accept a lesser fate that insistence on a better life that ultimately is the secret not only of african american survival and success it has been the secret of america s survival and success so yes an education can fortify us to meet the tests of our economy the tests of our citizenship and the tests of our times but what ultimately makes us american quintessentially american is something that can t be taught a stubborn insistence on pursuing our dreams it s the same insistence that led a band of patriots to overthrow an empire that fired the passions of union troops to free the slaves and union veterans to found schools like hampton that led foot soldiers the same age as you to brave fire hoses on the streets of birmingham and billy clubs on a bridge in selma that led generation after generation of americans to toil away quietly your parents and grandparents and great grandparents and great great grandparents without complaint in the hopes of a better life for their children and grandchildren that is what makes us who we are a dream of brighter days ahead a faith in things not seen a belief that here in this country we are the authors of our own destiny that is what hampton is all about and it now falls to you the class of 2010 to write the next great chapter in america s story to meet the tests of your own time to take up the ongoing work of fulfilling our founding promise i m looking forward to watching thank you god bless you and may god bless the united states of america dem bobama9 6 09 barack_obama thank you thank you all for joining us here in the white house before i begin i want to comment briefly on the announcement by the treasury department with regard to the financial stability plan as you know through this plan and its predecessor taxpayer dollars were used to stabilize the financial system at a time of extraordinary stress and these funds were also meant to be an investment and they were meant to be temporary and that s why this morning s announcement is important several financial institutions are set to pay back 68 billion to taxpayers and while we know that we will not escape the worst financial crisis in decades without some losses to taxpayers it s worth noting that in the first round of repayments from these companies the government has actually turned a profit this is not a sign that our troubles are over far from it the financial crisis this administration inherited is still creating painful challenges for businesses and families alike and i think everybody sees it in their own individual districts but it is a positive sign we re seeing an initial return on a few of these investments we re restoring funds to the treasury where they ll be available to safeguard against continuing risks to financial stability and as this money is returned we ll see our national debt lessened by 68 billion billions of dollars that this generation will not have to borrow and future generations will not have to repay i ve said repeatedly that i have no interest in managing the banking system or for that matter running auto companies or other private institutions so today s announcement is welcome news to me but i also want to say the return of these funds does not provide forgiveness for past excesses or permission for future misdeeds it s critical that as our country emerges from this period of crisis that we learn its lessons that those who seek reward do not take reckless risk that short term gains are not pursued without regard for long term consequences at the same time as we seek greater responsibility from those in the private sector it s my view and the view of those who are standing behind me today as well as those in the audience that greater responsibility is required on the part of those who serve the public as well as a nation we have several imperatives at this difficult moment in our history we re confronting the worst recession this country has faced in generations and this has required extraordinary investments in the short term another imperative is addressing long deferred priorities health care energy education which threaten the american economy and the well being of american families and we ve begun to tackle these problems as well but we are also called upon to rein in deficits by addressing these and other challenges in a manner that is fiscally responsible this in part requires the kind of line by line review of the budget that is ongoing to remove things that we don t need and make the programs we do need work more efficiently there are billions of dollars to be saved this way but much of our effort will entail going after the big ticket items that drive the deficits by ending unnecessary no bid contracts and reforming the way government contracts are awarded we can save the american people up to 40 billion every year in addition secretary robert gates has proposed a badly needed overhaul of a defense contracting system riddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns and the cancelation of superfluous defense systems unnecessary to combat the threats of the 21st century we re also going to eliminate unwarranted subsidies currently lavished on health insurance companies through medicare which will save roughly 177 billion over the next decade and this is part of broader health reform about which i ll have more to say in the coming days which will both cut costs and improve care so all told in the next four years the deficit will be cut in half over the next decade non defense discretionary spending will reach its lowest level as a share of our national income since we began keeping records in 1962 but we must go further and one important step we can and must take is restoring the so called pay as you go rule or paygo this is a rule i championed in the senate and called for time and again on the campaign trail today with the support of these legislators including the speaker of the house my administration is submitting to congress a proposal to codify this rule into law and i hope that the house and senate will act quickly to pass it the pay as you go rule is very simple congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere and this principle guides responsible families managing a budget and it is no coincidence that this rule was in place when we moved from record deficits to record surpluses in the 1990s and that when this rule was abandoned we returned to record deficits that doubled the national debt entitlement increases and tax cuts need to be paid for they re not free and borrowing to finance them is not a sustainable long term policy paying for what you spend is basic common sense perhaps that s why here in washington it s been so elusive of course there have been those in washington leading the charge to restore paygo and many of them are here today i want to recognize congressman george miller who introduced the first paygo bill in the house i want to thank the house blue dogs and their leader especially baron hill who has been a driving force in favor of paygo i want to acknowledge senator claire mccaskill who s shown real leadership on this issue in the senate and as i said i want to acknowledge the speaker of the house as well as leader steny hoyer who are here because they understand the importance of this principle and are fully supportive of our efforts in fact two years ago a new democratic congress put in place congressional rules to restore this principle but could not pass legislation without the support of the administration i want you all to know you now have that support the fact is there are few who aren t distressed by deficits it s a concern that crosses party lines geographic boundaries and ideological divides but often in the give and take of the political process the vested interests of the few overtake the broader interests of the many the debate of the day drowns out those who speak of what we may face tomorrow and that s why pay as you go is essential it requires congress to navigate the ebb and flow of politics while remaining fixed on that fiscal horizon the reckless fiscal policies of the past have left us in a very deep hole and digging our way out of it will take time patience and some tough choices i know that in the face of this historic challenge there are many across this country who are skeptical of our collective ability to meet it they re not wrong to feel that way they re not wrong to draw this lesson after years in which we ve put off difficult decisions in which we ve allowed our politics to grow smaller as our challenges grew ever more daunting but i think everybody understands this is an extraordinary moment one in which we are called upon not just to restore fiscal responsibility but to once again live up to the broader responsibilities we have to one another and i know that we can summon that sense of shared obligation that we have the capacity to change and to grow and to solve even our toughest of problems and that s at the heart of why we re here i appreciate the work of the people in this room who ve shown a willingness to make hard choices and do the hard work that s essential to overcoming the challenges of the present while leaving our nation better off in the future so this is going to be a lift we know it s going to be tough i think we can get it done especially with the extraordinary leadership that is on display here today thank you very much everybody dem bobama9 7 10 barack_obama thank you everybody thank you please have a seat have a seat well thank you harry thanks for giving me a chance to get out of washington it s very hot there it s hot here too but there s a little more humidity there and i just love coming to vegas i love being here i mentioned last night i m not the only one who loves it because i noticed that for some reason air force one is more crowded when we re coming to vegas somehow i need more staff and logistical support and a couple extra secret service guys we ve got some wonderful leaders here and i just want to acknowledge them very quickly u s representative dina titus is here doing a great job and nevada s secretary of state ross miller is here dr neal smatresk is here and his family and they re doing a great job on behalf of unlv and all of you are here and i am thrilled to see you but i m especially here to be with my friend and your senator harry reid one of the first stories i heard about harry was that he was a boxer back in the day here in nevada and i was mentioning last she s laughing she s oh i can t believe it no he was you wouldn t know that because he s so soft spoken he s all well i m harry reid but when he first told me he was a boxer he said barack i wasn t the fastest i wasn t the hardest hitting but i knew how to take a punch he knew how to take a punch and harry reid became a pretty good boxer because he would simply outlast his opponents he had a stronger will i think that tells you something about the kind of person he is the kind of senator he is the kind of senate majority leader he is he s a fighter and you should never bet against him and that s just what we need right now that s what nevada needs right now that s what nevada needs is somebody who s going to fight for the people of nevada and for the american people and you know that he wasn t born with a silver spoon in his mouth in searchlight nevada so when you re going through tough times harry reid has been there he knows what it feels like to be scraping and scrimping and struggle to make ends meet and so when his home state is having a tough time when the country is having a tough time he knows that he s got to be fighting on behalf of not those who are powerful but on behalf of those who need help the most now let me tell you when we first took office amidst the worst economy since the great depression we needed harry s fighting spirit because we had lost nearly three million jobs during the last six months of 2008 the month i was sworn in january 2009 we lost 750 000 jobs in that month alone the following month we lost 600 000 jobs and these were all the consequence of a decade of misguided economic policies a decade of stagnant wages a decade of declining incomes a decade of spiraling deficits so our first mission was to break the momentum of the deepest and most vicious recession since the great depression we had to stop the freefall and get the economy and jobs growing again and digging out of this mess required us taking some tough decisions and sometimes those decisions were not popular and harry knew they weren t popular i knew they weren t popular but they were the right thing to do and harry was willing to lead those fights because he knew that we had to change course that to do nothing to simply continue with the policies that had gotten us into this mess in the first place would mean further disaster and to fail to act on some of the great challenges facing the country that we had been putting off for decades would mean a lesser future for our children and our grandchildren now as a result of those tough steps that we took we re in a different place today than we were a year ago an economy that was shrinking is now growing we ve gained private sector jobs for each of the past six months instead of losing them almost 600 000 new jobs but as harry pointed out that s not enough i don t have to tell you that the unemployment rate is still unacceptably high particularly in some states like nevada and a lot of you have felt that pain personally or you ve got somebody in your family who s felt the pain maybe you found yourself underwater on your mortgage and faced the terrible prospect of losing your home maybe you re out of work and worried about how you re going to provide for your family or maybe you re a student at unlv and you re wondering if you re going to be able to find a job when you graduate or if you re going to be able to pay off your student loans or if you re going to be able to start your career off on the right foot now the simple truth is it took years to dig this hole it s going to take more time than any of us would like to climb out of it but the question is number one are we on the right track and the answer is yes and number two how do we accelerate the process how do we get the recovery to pick up more steam how do we fill this hole faster there s a big debate in washington right now about the role that government should play in all this as i said in the campaign and as i ve repeated many times as president the greatest generator of jobs in america is our private sector it s not government it s our entrepreneurs and innovators who are willing to take a chance on a good idea it s our businesses large and small who are making payroll and working with suppliers and distributing goods and services across the country and now across the world the private sector not government is was and always will be the source of america s economic success that s our strength the dynamism of our economy and that s why one of the first things harry reid did one of the first things we did was cut dozens of taxes not raise them cut them for middle class and small business people and we extended loan programs to put capital in the hands of startups and we worked to reduce the cost of health care for small businesses and right now harry is fighting to pass additional tax breaks and loan authority to help small businesses grow and hire all across the country but he has also tried to look out specifically for nevada he understands for example that tourism is so enormous an aspect of our economy and so helped to move our trade promotion act that is going to be helping to do exactly what it says promote tourism and bring folks here to enjoy the incredible hospitality the point is our role in government especially in difficult times like these is to break down barriers that are standing in the way of innovation to unleash the ingenuity that springs from our people to give an impetus to businesses to grow and expand that s not some abstract theory we ve seen the results we ve seen what we can do to catalyze job growth in the private sector and one of the places we ve seen it most is in the clean energy sector an industry that will not only produce jobs of the future but help free america from our dependence on foreign oil in the process clean up our environment in the process improve our national security in the process so let me give you an example just yesterday i took a tour of smith electric vehicles in kansas city missouri on the way here this is a company that just hired its 50th worker it s on the way to hiring 50 more and is aiming to produce 500 electric vehicles at that plant alone and these are spiffy looking trucks i mean they are and they re used by fortune 500 companies for distribution pepsico frito lay they re also used for the united states military electric trucks with a lot of they re very strong great horsepower and the reason for their success is their entrepreneurial drive but it s also partly because of a grant that we re offering companies that manufacture electric vehicles and the batteries that power them because of these grants we re going to be going from only having 2 percent of the global capacity to make advanced batteries that go in trucks and cars run on electricity we re going to go from 2 percent of advanced battery market share to 40 percent just in the next five years just in the next five years and that will create thousands of jobs across the country thousands of jobs across the country not just this year not just next year but for decades to come so it s a powerful example of how we can generate jobs and promote robust economic growth here in nevada and all across the country by incentivizing private sector investments that s what we re working to do with the clean energy manufacturing tax credits that we enacted last year thanks to harry s leadership thanks to harry s leadership some people know these tax credits by the name 48c which refers to their section in the tax code but here s how these credits work we said to clean energy companies if you re willing to put up 70 percent of the capital for a worthy project a clean energy project we ll put up the remaining 30 percent to put it another way for every dollar we invest we leverage two more private sector dollars we re betting on the ingenuity and talent of american businesses now these manufacturing tax credits are already having an extraordinary impact a solar panel company a solar power company called amonix received a roughly 6 million tax credit for a new facility they re building in the las vegas area a tax credit they were able to match with roughly 12 million in private capital that s happening right now and that s just one of over that s just one of over 180 projects that received manufacturing tax credits in over 40 states now here s the the only problem we have is these credits were working so well there aren t enough tax credits to go around there are more worthy projects than there are tax credits when we announced the program last year it was such a success we received 500 applications requesting over 8 billion in tax credits but we only had 2 3 billion to invest in other words we had almost four times as many worthy requests as we had tax credits now my attitude and harry s attitude is that if an american company wants to create jobs and grow we should be there to help them do it so that s why i m urging congress to invest 5 billion more in these kinds of clean energy manufacturing tax credits more than doubling the amount that we made available last year and this investment would generate nearly 40 000 jobs and 12 billion or more in private sector investment which could trigger an additional 90 000 jobs now i m gratified that this initiative is drawing support from members of congress from both sides of the aisle including republican senators richard lugar and orrin hatch unfortunately that kind of bipartisanship has been absent on a lot of efforts that harry and i have taken up over the past year and a half we fought to keep nevada teachers and firefighters and police officers on the job and to extend unemployment insurance and cobra so folks have health insurance while they re looking for work we fought to stop health insurance companies from dropping your coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions or right when you get sick or placing lifetime limits on the amount of care that you can receive we fought to eliminate wasteful subsidies that go to banks that were acting as unnecessary middlemen for guaranteed student loans from the federal government and as a consequence freed up tens of billions of dollars that are now going directly to students which means more than a million students have access to financial aid that they didn t have before and we re now on the cusp of enacting wall street reforms that will empower consumers with clear and concise information that they need to make financial decisions that are best for them and to help prevent another crisis like this from ever happening again and putting an end to some of the predatory lending and the subprime loans that had all kinds of fine print and hidden fees that have been such a burden for the economy of a state like nevada and haven t been fair to individual consumers in the process so that s what harry and i fought for and frankly at every turn we ve met opposition and obstruction from a lot of leaders across the aisle and that s why i m glad i ve got a boxer in the senate who is not afraid to fight for what he believes in and harry and i are going to keep on fighting until wages and incomes are rising and businesses are hiring again right here in nevada and americans are headed back to work again and we ve recovered from this recession and we re actually rebuilding this economy stronger than before that s what we re committed to doing so nevada i know we ve been through tough times and not all the difficult days are behind us there are going to be some tough times to come but i can promise you this we are headed in the right direction we are moving forward we are not going to move backwards and i m absolutely confident that if we keep on moving forward if we refuse to turn backwards if we re willing to show the same kind of fighting spirit as harry reid has shown throughout his career then out of this storm brighter days are going to come thank you very much everybody god bless you dem bobama9 8 10a barack_obama hello everybody hello austin thank you so much thank you very much please have a seat have a seat have a seat well first of all thank you linda for that terrific introduction i would have heard it again i would have been happy a few other great friends your own somebody from texas but who is doing a great job internationally on behalf of all the american people as my trade representative ambassador ron kirk is here more importantly ambassador ron kirk s mom is here a wonderful congressman who is battling day in day out on behalf of the people of texas and the folks in his district lloyd doggett is here i want to thank mayor lee leffingwell for his hospitality texas democratic party chair boyd richie and his lovely wife betty are here and our dnc deputy national finance chair kirk rudy is here it s good to be back in texas and it s really good to be back in austin i just love austin texas i do every time i come here i like the people i like the food i like the music i like that there are a bunch of democrats here i like that too it is wonderful and as i look out throughout this crowd there s so many of you who did so much on behalf of our campaign on behalf of my election you were with us when we were up you were with us when we were down and you will recall we had some down days and i know that if it weren t for you i might not be standing here as president of the united states so to all my good friends here in texas thank you very much for everything that you ve done of course whenever i talk to my supporters i am reminded of a story abraham lincoln liked to tell a man comes to the white house demanding to see the president and this is at a time when things were a little more relaxed in terms of security so he insists that he was a big supporter of president lincoln finally he gets through reception gets an audience with the president and says if it weren t for me you would not be president of the united states and president lincoln says i forgive you it is an extraordinary honor obviously to be your president but i will also say that the last few years have been incredibly challenging for so many people throughout america you know that here it s certainly true all across the country eighteen months ago when i took office after nearly a decade of economic policies that has given us little more than sluggish job growth sluggish economic growth falling incomes falling wages a record deficit all which culminated in the worst recession that we had experienced since the great depression that s what we were walking into the month i was sworn in we lost 750 000 jobs just in that one month we had lost 3 million jobs in the previous six months the next month we lost 600 000 so we were facing what many economists thought might be a return not just to a recession but a great depression now we didn t get to that point by accident we got there after nearly 10 years of an economic theory in washington that was pretty straightforward you cut taxes for the wealthiest americans you cut back rules and enforcement when it comes to special interests and then you cut the middle class loose to fend for themselves so if you re a young person who couldn t afford to go to college tough luck you re on your own if you re a child here in texas that doesn t have health insurance them s the breaks pull yourself up by your own bootstraps if you re a worker who had been laid off maybe short of retirement and couldn t find anything that would allow you to pay the bills or pay the mortgage that s too bad you re on your own now on the other hand if you re a wall street bank or an insurance company or an oil company then you got to write your own ticket we know how this approach turned out so when i took office we put in place a new economic plan a plan that rewards hard work instead of greed a plan that rewards responsibility instead of reckless a plan that focused on our middle class making them more secure and making sure that our country was competitive over the long run so the jobs and industries of the future weren t going to china or india or germany but were going to the united states of america right here and instead of spending money on special interest tax loopholes that don t create american jobs we said we re going to make smart investments in education and innovation and clean energy that will benefit all people and our entire economy instead of giving special interests free rein to write their own regulations we demanded new accountability from washington to wall street so that big corporations had to play by the same rules as small companies and by individuals that s only fair now it took us nearly a decade to dig ourselves into a very deep hole and so i m here to tell you that it s going to take us some more time to dig our way out of that hole the devastation that has touched so many of our families so many of our communities that is going to take some time to heal and i hear those stories firsthand wherever i travel i hear about them in the letters that i receive every night that i read from people who are doing their best to keep on striving towards that american dream but keep on hitting a bunch of road blocks and are looking for help so the road to recovery is long and it s filled with challenges and i m under no illusion that we ve gotten there yet we ve got a lot more work to do but here is the thing i want everybody here to understand because you were part of that journey that we started three years ago after 19 months in office we are on the right track an economy that was shrinking by up to 6 percent when i took office is now growing not as fast as we want but it is growing we were losing all those jobs every month we re now adding private sector jobs seven consecutive months now that we ve seen private sector job growth it s being offset some because state and local budgets are getting hammered so hard that they re laying off folks even as the private sector is starting to pick up but we re moving in the right direction and so the last thing we can afford to do at this critical juncture in our history is to go back to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place and that is what this november election is going to be all about are we going to move forward or are we going to move backwards policies that crashed the economy that undercut the middle class that mortgaged our future do we really want to go back to that or do we keep moving this country forward now when we talk about this going back thing i notice some republicans say well he just wants to bash the previous administration he s looking backwards he s trying to take the focus off the tough economic situation that a lot of people are feeling no no no the reason we re focused on it is because the other side isn t offering anything new i mean it would be one thing if having run the economy into the ground having taken record surpluses and turned them into record deficits if having presided over the meltdown of our financial system that they had gone off into the desert for a while and reflected and said boy we really screwed up what we were selling didn t work it badly damaged the american economy and now we re going to come back with a whole new set of ideas but that s not what s happening instead they are trotting out the exact same ideas that got us into this mess in the first place their big economic plan is to renew the tax cuts that helped to turn surpluses into deficits tax cuts for the wealthiest americans and once you get past that they don t have another new idea that s it in fact when the leader of the republicans in the house of representatives was asked what s your big jobs plan he said well we should repeal health care that was it i don t know how that would create jobs other than maybe for folks who want to deny you coverage for health care but it sure isn t a new plan and so we ve got a choice between a forward looking agenda that is rebuilding the structure of this economy so it s working for all americans or just going back to the same stuff that got us into this mess in fact i ve been traveling around the country trying to use an analogy here and it s as if these guys took the car drove it into the ditch then so we put our boots on we walked down into the ditch into the mud we pushed we shoved meanwhile they re standing back they re watching us drinking a slurpee or something and saying well you re not pushing fast enough and you should push this way instead of that way and they had a lot of commentary but they sure weren t putting their shoulder behind pushing and finally we get this car up on level ground finally we get it back on the road and these guys turn to us and say give us the keys back well no you can t have the keys back because you don t know how to drive you do not know how to drive and so you can t have the keys back now here s another interesting thing i want you guys to think about this if you have a car and you want to go forward what do you do you put it in d when you want to go backwards what do you do you put it in r i m just saying that s no coincidence we are not going to give them the keys back what they re really counting on is amnesia that s their basic theory in this election they know they messed up and they know that we pulled the country out of the problems that we were in but they figure well you know what he s been in office long enough and this was a deep enough tough enough recession and things aren t where people know they should be and so maybe they ll forget that actually this was the result of our economic policies so we ll just offer the same policies but i think the american people are smarter than that i think they understand that if we want the kind of america for our children and our grandchildren that we truly hope for then we ve got to move in a new direction not only to solve some of these short term economic problems but to lay a foundation for long term economic growth and what does that mean that means that instead of giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas we ve got to give tax breaks to companies that are creating jobs right here in the united states of america we have started to do that we ve given eight tax cuts to small businesses so far and we are not done but you know what the other side has resisted every attempt we ve got a bill right now that was pending in the senate to provide assistance to small businesses now this should be as american as apple pie small businesses create two out of every three jobs in america so we put together a package paid for doesn t add to the deficit that would help small businesses get loans would eliminate the capital gains rate for small business start ups the chamber of commerce endorses it now let me tell you the chamber of commerce doesn t always go out of its way to say nice things about me and yet we still can t get it moving through the senate because these folks their basic theory is we don t want to do anything that helps the president move the country forward because they re thinking about the next election instead of the next generation we ve got a different approach we ve started to jumpstart a homegrown clean energy economy all across the country you re seeing wind turbines and solar panels and biodiesel that is being built right here in the united states of america we have single handedly started a advanced battery manufacturing industry right here we used to have 2 percent of the batteries that go into electric cars we re going to have 40 percent of that industry right here in the united states of america by 2015 thanks to some of the work that we ve already done now the other side they don t want to do that they ve been saying no to a clean energy future we ve said we needed 21st century infrastructure that could put people back to work particularly all those folks who ve been laid off of the construction industry now that the housing bubble has burst put them to work not just rebuilding roads and bridges dams and sewer lines all the traditional infrastructure but building a smart grid that can carry energy efficiently all across america or creating broadband lines into rural areas so that they can compete in the global economy or the others say what did the other side say they said no because they re thinking about the next election instead of the next generation no to small business tax cuts no to clean energy jobs no to infrastructure projects i have to say though they do show up at the ribbon cuttings for the infrastructure projects lloyd knows this they will fulminate and say it s going to be armageddon if we pass all this stuff but then they re cheesin and grinnin right there got the shovel all ready sending out the press releases but the point is that there s been a fundamental lack of seriousness on the other side we have spent the last 20 months governing they spent the last 20 months politicking now we ve got three months to go and so we ve decided well we can politick for three months they ve forgotten i know how to politick pretty good and so i m happy to make this argument i am happy to have this debate over the next several months about what their vision of the future is because they don t have one they are trying to move us backwards and we need to move us forward so i just want everybody here to understand here in texas there s been some controversy around the issues of health care no state stands to benefit more from our health care reform than the state of texas which has so many people who are insured in this state the health insurance reform we passed it s not just preventing insurers from denying you coverage it s cutting taxes for small business owners that cover their employees by up to 35 percent of the premiums they re paying for their employees it s saying to young people you can stay on your parent s health insurance until you re 26 so that there s not that gap in coverage just as they re starting their careers it s providing assistance to seniors so that they can help to deal with that doughnut hole that was created by the prescription drug plan and slowly this plan is going to eliminate it and then there was just news last week that showed that because of our health reform plan the life of medicare is going to be extended for an additional 12 years it has made social security it has made medicare stronger for the next generation as well as this generation and in the meantime it has enshrined a basic principle which is in a country as wealthy as ours nobody should go bankrupt just because they get sick and no child should go without basic preventive care those are basic principles that we should all be able to agree on unless you re thinking about the next election instead of the next generation the other party has pledged to repeal wall street reform now this gives you some indication of what this election should be about here we have a situation in which the recklessness of a few on wall street and i don t want to paint with a broad brush here there are some people on wall street and in banks across america that do right by their customers but a handful of folks took exorbitant bets with huge leverage and other people s money and almost brought this entire economy to a halt businesses large and small couldn t get credit everybody was panicked the stock market plunged people lost trillions of dollars worth of wealth and we are going to be digging ourselves out from that destructive force for years to come now you would think in the aftermath of that that anybody sensible would say you know what we need to have some stronger rules of the road in place not to stifle innovation not to strangle the free market but rather to make sure that everybody is playing by some basic rules that financial institutions are making their money by providing good products and good services to their customers instead of trying to game the system and yet if you ask the republican leaders in washington they all want to repeal the reforms that we just passed makes no sense unless you re thinking about the next election or you re thinking about the special interests that you ve been working with hand in glove for the last 20 months or the last decade it doesn t make sense unless you re only thinking about the next election we re in a college town here one of the things we did was we said we ve got to make college more affordable to all americans and yet a system where the government was guaranteeing loans but they were sending them through financial institutions who were skimming billions of dollars in profits and so we said you know what let s just cut out the middleman give that money directly to young people we re now providing more than a million young people loans that they weren t getting before because of this single measure that we took but we got no help from the other side we got no help from the other side for years the other side did nothing about the fact that too many women aren t paid the same as men for doing the exact same work we decided to pass a law that says we mean what we say equal pay for equal work we didn t get help on that they want to talk about tax cuts for the wealthiest americans we provided 95 percent of working families here in america a tax cut we believe in trying to keep taxes low for folks who really need help especially at a time when their incomes and their wages are flat lining but for you to talk about being a deficit hawk that you want responsible deficit hawk that want responsible governance and then you re willing to argue for 700 billion worth of tax cuts for people who don t need them and weren t even asking for them that tells me you re thinking about the next election instead of the next generation and then most recently we ve got the crisis in the gulf now thankfully because of incredibly hard work by people from all across government we are now finally able to say that the well is contained and we could get a permanent kill of that well over the next couple of weeks but the kind of damage that s been done obviously to the gulf has been tremendous and small business owners and fishermen who ve been impacted when you talk to them directly and they start tearing up because these are businesses and a way of life that has been in their families for generations they feel like may be lost that prompted me to say to bp we want you to be responsible do the right thing and put in place 20 billion to make sure that these folks get paid because they were not at fault in this crisis and what does the ranking member who would be the chairman of the energy committee if the republicans took over the house next year what did he have to say he apologized to bp said i m sorry i m sorry the president shook you down i think he may have added in there chicago shakedown i m not sure maybe it was somebody else apologized to bp because we decided we needed to hold a company accountable for the environmental devastation and the economic devastation that had been caused in the gulf i don t even think he was thinking about the next election i don t know what he was thinking about but it s consistent with a governing philosophy that says there shouldn t be any rules on the most powerful forces they should be able to operate unconstrained right now all around this country there are groups with harmless sounding names like americans for prosperity who are running millions of dollars of ads against democratic candidates all across the country and they don t have to say who exactly the americans for prosperity are you don t know if it s a foreign controlled corporation you don t know if it s a big oil company or a big bank you don t know if it s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it s good for their bottom line even if it s not good for the american people a supreme court decision allowed this to happen and we tried to fix it just by saying disclose what s going on and making sure that foreign companies can t influence our elections seemed pretty straightforward the other side said no they don t want you to know who the americans for prosperity are because they re thinking about the next election but we ve got to think about future generations we ve got to make sure that we re fighting for reform we ve got to make sure that we don t have a corporate takeover of our democracy so austin the bottom line is this we ve traveled a long way over the last 19 months in large part thanks to folks like you we have had historic challenges and we ve had historic responses but right now the choice is between whether we go back to those policies that got us into this mess or we continue with the policies that are getting us out of this mess and i m confident that the american people when they re focused as tough as these times are they re going to say you know what we can t go back to policies that were eroding our middle class and leaving jobs to move overseas and leaving our incomes and wages stagnant and vulnerable to forces that we don t have any control over i m confident that the american people want something different yes it s hard washington a lot of times during the course of these last 19 months the pundits have written or they ve talked to our press people and they say what s the president doing doesn t he know some of these steps that he s taking don t poll well yes i do i have pollsters too they tell me before any decision boy this is really unpopular our decision on the autos was really unpopular and we now have an auto industry that has posted profits in all three auto companies for the first time in a long time and we re going to pretty soon get all our taxpayer dollars back that my administration put in because of the steps that we took and we ve hired 50 000 new autoworkers and saved about a million jobs but at the time it was really unpopular it polled really well but you did not elect me to just try to do what was politically expedient at the moment you supported me to do what was right and that s what we ve been doing you did not elect me to think about how i could get reelected you hired me to make sure that i was thinking about how your children and your grandchildren are going to have an america that is strong and vibrant and competitive all around the world that s why you put us in charge so austin i am here to tell you we are going to keep on moving this country forward but we are going to need your help we are going to need your help because this is a tough environment people are frustrated people have been traumatized by what s taken place over the last couple of years and members of congress who ve been taking tough votes courageous votes folks like lloyd have time and again stood up against the prevailing political winds in order to do what s right they are going to need your help so i need you to make phone calls i need you to write i need you to talk to your friends i need you to talk to your neighbors i need you to help them raise money i need you to get information out i need you to have the same kind of passion and the same kind of hope that helped elect me a couple of years ago and it s places like this and supporters like you that ultimately are going to make all the difference if you are standing with us i m absolutely confident we re going to do well in november but understand this more importantly i m absolutely confident that america is going to be back not just to as strong as we were before this crisis but stronger than we ve been before thank you so much everybody god bless you god bless the united states of america dem bobama9 8 10b barack_obama thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you everybody hello austin hello longhorns it is good to be back it is good to be back i love you back i love austin love austin i remember by the way anybody who s got a seat feel free to take a seat i remember paying you a visit during the campaign mack brown gave me a tour of the stadium along with colt and a couple other guys and i got a photo with the heisman i rubbed the locker room s longhorns for good luck and i m just saying it might have had something to do with how the election turned out there might be a connection there i also remember the first time that i came to austin on the campaign and there are a number of friends who are here who have been great supporters i want to make mention of them representative lloyd doggett is here a great friend senator kirk watson is here congressman sheila jackson lee is here mayor leffingwell is here and your own president bill powers is in the house but this is back in 2007 february 2007 it was just two weeks after i had announced my candidacy i know it s hard to believe but it s true my hair was not gray back then not many people thought i had much of a shot at the white house let me put it this way a lot of folks in washington didn t think i had a shot at the white house a lot of people couldn t pronounce my name they were still calling me alabama or yo mama that was so then i come to austin this was back in february of 2007 and it was a drizzly day and that usually tamps down turnout but when i got to the rally over at auditorium shores there was a crowd of over 20 000 people 20 000 people it was people of all ages and all races and all walks of life and i said that day all these people they hadn t gathered just for me you were there because you were hungry to see some fundamental change in america because you believed in an america where all of us not just some of us but all of us no matter what we look like no matter where we come from all of us can reach for our dreams all of us can make of our lives what we will that we can determine our own destiny and that s what we ve been fighting for over the past 18 months i said then that we d end the iraq war as swiftly and as responsibly as possible and that is a promise that we are keeping this month we will end combat operations in iraq i said we d make health insurance more affordable and give you more control over your health care and that s a promise we re keeping and by the way young people are going to be able to stay on their parents health insurance until they re 26 because of the law that we passed i said we d build an economy that can compete in the 21st century because the economy that we had even before the recession even before the financial crisis wasn t working for too many americans too many americans had seen their wages flat line their incomes flat line we were falling behind and unable to compete internationally and i said we need an economy that puts americans back to work an economy that s built around three simple words made in america because we are not playing for second place we are the united states of america and like the texas longhorns you play for first we play for first now when it comes to the economy i said that in today s world we re being pushed as never before from beijing to bangalore from seoul to san paolo new industries and innovations are flourishing our competition is growing fiercer and while our ultimate success has and always will depend on the incredible industriousness of the american worker and the ingenuity of american businesses and the power of our free market system we also know that as a nation we ve got to pull together and do some fundamental shifts in how we ve been operating to make sure america remains number one so that s why i ve set some ambitious goals for this country i ve called for doubling our exports within the next five years so that we re not just buying from other countries i want us to sell to other countries we ve talked about doubling our nation s capacity to generate renewable energy by 2012 because i m actually convinced that if we control the clean energy future then our economic future will be bright building solar panels and wind turbines and biodiesel and and i want us to produce 8 million more college graduates by 2020 because because america has to have the highest share of graduates compared to every other nation but texas i want you to know we have been slipping in a single generation we ve fallen from first place to 12th place in college graduation rates for young adults think about that in one generation we went from number one to number 12 now that s unacceptable but it s not irreversible we can retake the lead if we re serious about making sure america s workers and america itself succeeds in the 21st century the single most important step we can take is make is to make sure that every one of our young people here in austin here in texas here in the united states of america has the best education that the world has to offer that s the number one thing we can do now when i talk about education people say well you know what right now we re going through this tough time we ve emerged from the worst recession since the great depression so mr president you should only focus on jobs on economic issues and what i ve tried to explain to people i said this at the national urban league the other week education is an economic issue education is the economic issue of our time it s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who ve never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have gone to college education is an economic issue when nearly eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade education is an economic issue when we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that countries that out educate us today they will out compete us tomorrow the single most important thing we can do is to make sure we ve got a world class education system for everybody that is a prerequisite for prosperity it is an obligation that we have for the next generation and here is the interesting thing austin the fact is we know what to do to offer our children the best education possible we know what works it s just we re not doing it and so what i ve said is let s get busy let s get started we can t wait another generation we can t afford to let our young people waste their most formative years that s why we need to set up an early learning fund to challenge our states and make sure our young people our children are entering kindergarten ready for success that s something we ve got to do we can t accept anything but the best in america s classrooms and that s why we ve launched an initiative called race to the top where we are challenging states to strengthen their commitment to excellence and hire outstanding teachers and train wonderful principals and create superior schools with higher standards and better assessments and we re already seeing powerful results across the country but we also know that in the coming decades a high school diploma is not going to be enough folks need a college degree they need workforce training they need a higher education and so today i want to talk about the higher education strategy that we re pursuing not only to lead the world once more in college graduation rates but to make sure our graduates are ready for a career ready to meet the challenges of a 21st century economy now part one of our strategy is to make college more affordable i suspect that that s something you re all interested in i don t have to tell you why this is so important many of you are living each day with worries about how you re going to pay off your student loans and we all know why even as family incomes have been essentially flat over the past 30 years college costs have grown higher and higher and higher and higher they have gone up faster than housing gone up faster than transportation they ve even gone up faster than health care costs and that s saying something so it s no wonder that the amount student borrowers owe has risen almost 25 percent just over the last five years think about that just in the last five years the debt of students has done up 25 percent and this isn t some abstract policy for me i understand this personally because michelle and i we had big loans to pay off when we graduated i remember what that felt like especially early in your career where you don t make much money and you re sending all those checks to all those companies and that s why i m absolutely committed to making sure that here in america nobody is denied a college education nobody is denied a chance to pursue their dreams nobody is denied a chance to make the most of their lives just because they can t afford it we are a better country than that and we need to act like we re a better country than that now there are a couple of components to this part of the responsibility for controlling these costs falls on our colleges and universities some of them are stepping up public institutions like the university of maryland university of north carolina some private institutions like cornell they re all finding ways to combat rising tuition without compromising on quality and i know that your president is looking at some of these same approaches to make sure that the actual costs of college are going down i want to challenge every university and college president to get a handle on spiraling costs so university administrators need to do more to make college more affordable but we as a nation have to do more as well so that s why we fought so hard to win a battle that had been going on in washington for years and it had to do with the federal student loan program see under the old system we d pay banks and financial companies billions of dollars in subsidies to act as middlemen see these loans were guaranteed by the federal government but we d still pass them through banks and they d take out billions of dollars in profits so it was a good deal for them but it wasn t a very good deal for you and because these special interests were so powerful this boondoggle survived year after year congress after congress this year we said enough is enough we said we could not afford to continue subsidizing special interests to the tunes of billions of dollars a year at the expense of taxpayers and of students so we went to battle against the lobbyists and a minority party that was united in their support of this outrageous status quo and texas i am here to report that we won we won so as a result instead of handing over 60 billion in subsidies to big banks and financial institutions over the next decade we re redirecting that money to you to make college more affordable for nearly 8 million students and families across this country eight million students will get more help from financial aid because of these changes we re tripling how much we re investing in the largest college tax credit for our middle class families and thanks to austin s own lloyd doggett that tax credit is now worth 2 500 a year for two years of college and we want to make it permanent so it s worth 10 000 over four years of college 10 000 and because the value of pell grants has fallen as the cost of college keeps going up the cap on how much pell grants are worth we have decided to offer more support for the future so the value of pell grants don t erode with inflation they keep up with inflation and we re also making loan repayments more manageable for over 1 million more students in the coming years so students at ut austin and across this country don t graduate with massive loan payments each month all right that s we re working on that right now now i should mention by the way we re also making information more widely available about college costs and completion rates so you can make good decisions you can comparison shop and we re simplifying financial aid forms by eliminating dozens of unnecessary questions you should not have to take you should not have to have a phd to apply for financial aid you shouldn t have to do it i want a bunch of you to get phds don t get me wrong i just don t want you to have to do it for your financial aid form so if you re married for example you don t need to answer questions anymore about how much money your parents have made if you ve lived in the same place for at least five years you don t need to answer questions about your place of residency soon you ll no longer need to submit information you ve already provided on your taxes and that s part of the reason why we ve seen a 20 percent jump in financial aid applications because we re going to make it easier and make the system more accessible so college affordability is the first part of the strategy that we re pursuing the second part is making sure that the education being offered to our college students especially by the way our students at community colleges that it s preparing them to graduate ready for a career see institutions like the ut are essential to our future but community colleges are too they are great under appreciated assets that we have to value and we have to support so that s why we re upgrading our community colleges by tying the skills taught in our classrooms to the needs of local businesses in the growth sectors of our economy and we re giving companies an assurance that the workers they hire will be up to the job we re giving students the best chance to succeed we re also that way giving america the best chance to thrive and to prosper and that s why we re also reinvesting in our hbcus and hispanic serving institutions like huston tillotson and st edwards the third part of our strategy is making sure every student completes their course of studies i want everybody to think about this over a third of america s college students and over half of our minority students don t earn a degree even after six years so we don t just need to open the doors of college to more americans we need to make sure they stick with it through graduation that is critical and that means looking for some of the best models out there there are community colleges like tennessee s cleveland state that are redesigning remedial math courses and boosting not only student achievement but also graduation rates and we ought to make a significant investment to help other states pick up on some of these models so we ve got to lift graduation rates we ve got to prepare our graduates to succeed in this economy we ve got to make college more affordable that s how we ll put a higher education within reach for anybody who is willing to work for it that s how we ll reach our goal of once again leading the world in college graduation rates by the end of this decade that s how we ll lead the global economy in this century just like we did in the last century when i look out at all the young people here today i think about the fact that you are entering into the workforce at a difficult time in this country s history the economy took a body blow from this financial crisis and this great recession that we re going through but i want everybody here to remember at each and every juncture throughout our history we ve always recognized that essential truth that the way to move forward in our own lives and as a nation is to put education first it s what led thomas jefferson to leave as his legacy not just the declaration of independence but a university in virginia it s what led a nation that was being torn apart by civil war to set aside acreage as a consequence of president lincoln s vision for the land grant institutions to prepare farmers and factory workers to seize the promise of an industrial age it s what led our parents and grandparents to put a generation of returning gis through college and open the doors of our schools and universities to people of all races which broadened opportunity and grew our middle class and produced a half a century of prosperity and that recognition that here in this great country of ours education and opportunity they always go hand in hand that s what led the first president of the university of texas to say as he dedicated the cornerstone of the original main building smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth that s the promise at the heart of ut austin but that is also the promise at the heart of our colleges and of our universities and it is the promise at the heart of our country the promise of a better life the promise that our children will climb higher than we did that promise is why so many of you are seeking a college degree in the first place that s why your families scrimped and saved to pay for your education and i know that as we make our way through this economic storm some of you may be worried about what your college degree will be worth when you graduate and how you re going to fare in this economy and what the future holds but i want you to know when i look out at you when i look into the faces of america s young men and women i see america s future and it reaffirms my sense of hope it reaffirms my sense of possibility it reaffirms my belief that we will emerge from this storm and we will find brighter days ahead because i am absolutely confident that if you keep pouring yourselves into your own education and if we as a nation offer our children the best education possible from cradle through career not only will america workers compete and succeed america will compete and succeed and we will complete this improbable journey that so many of you took up over three years ago and we re going to build an america where each of us no matter what we look like or where we come from can reach for our dreams and make of our lives what we will thank you austin thank you texas god bless you and god bless the united states of america thank you good luck to the t dem bobama9 8 10c barack_obama well welcome everybody please have a seat have a seat it is wonderful to see all of you welcome and congratulations to the 2009 super bowl champions the new orleans saints i want to start by recognizing some folks in my administration who are big fans of this team lisa jackson from the epa secretary donovan from hud craig fugate from fema we ve got a few very proud members of congress with us senator mary landrieu and representative steve scalise are in the house congratulations to the owner tom benson who has led this team through times that would test anybody and general manager mickey loomis for building this extraordinary championship squad congratulations to your outstanding head coach sean payton who s done just great work i must point out sean is a chicago guy i m just saying by way of naperville you ve got to be tough to be a chicago guy i make some tough decisions every day but i never decided on an onside kick in the second half of the super bowl that took some guts were you okay with that did he check off with you i m glad that thing went all right coach payton led this team to a remarkable season 13 0 start a franchise record for wins a heck of an overtime win in the nfc championship and then after falling behind in the super bowl with the onside kick huge second half tracy porter s interception guaranteeing that the lombardi trophy would go to the city of new orleans for the very first time it was an unbelievable moment i want to congratulate the super bowl mvp your quarterback your captain drew brees i have to say all of us were very excited after the game all my wife wanted to talk about was baylen that little boy sitting with drew and everybody going awww which i m just saying you made a lot of fans then drew and his wife brittany are expecting their second child in october so congratulations to you both drew threw six touchdowns in the opening weekend making it pretty clear that the saints were coming to play and over the course of the season he set a new nfl record for accuracy completing more than 70 percent of his passes i have a few staffers who were thrilled to have drew on their fantasy team so they are grateful for that and by the way this is not drew s first time to the white house last year we filmed a psa some of you may have seen encouraging america s youth to get 60 minutes of physical activity every day he tossed me a nice tight spiral that i then lateraled to a kid on demarcus ware s shoulders i also want to point out i beat troy polamalu over the middle on that throw you remember i m not sure he was going top speed but finally drew has agreed to serve as co chair of the new president s council on fitness sports and nutrition and i want to thank all the players who put on a clinic earlier this morning with children from the boys and girls club as part of the let s move and the nfl s play60 program so thank you very much guys for participating in that so this was an unbelievable season after decades of frustration the saints finally won the big one the ain ts and the sad sacks gave way to the who dats local musicians even gave a jazz funeral to retire the ain ts nickname but i think we all know that this season meant far more than that to the city of new orleans and to all americans really look i m a bears fan i m not going to lie but this was a big win for the country not just for new orleans because five years ago this team played its entire season on the road it didn t have a home field the superdome had been ruined by hurricane katrina the heartbreaking tragedies that unfolded there when it was used as a shelter from that terrible storm lingered all too fresh in a lot of people s minds and back then people didn t even know if the team was coming back people didn t know if the city was coming back not only did the team come back it took its city s hands and helped its city back on its feet this team took the hopes and the dreams of a shattered city and placed them squarely on its shoulders and so these guys became more than leaders in the locker room they became leaders of an entire region and the victory parade that we saw earlier this year made one thing perfectly clear that new orleans and the new orleans saints are here to stay so plenty of cities carry their sports teams through a tough season it s a rare thing when a sports team carries a city through tough times and that s why there s such a deep bond between this organization and the city i m not sure there s any other city that feels that same way right now and that s not just for what the saints have done on the field but what they ve done off it to see that the city keeps rising in fact nfl commissioner roger goodell recently said that every team in professional sports should use the saints as a model for how to interact with their community this entire team has worked with habitat for humanity to rebuild neighborhoods in new orleans many of these guys and the coaches and the players run foundations to help children in need all of them are off to walter reed later this morning to spend some time with wounded warriors who served our country and obviously the gulf region has spent the last few months besieged by yet another crisis but last week we received the news that we had hoped for yesterday we learned that a procedure to prevent any more oil from spilling with a cement plug appears to have succeeded and the final steps will be taken later in august when the relief well is completed but what is clear is that the battle to stop the oil from flowing into the gulf is just about over our work goes on though i made a commitment to the people of the gulf coast that i would stand by them not just until the well was closed but until they recovered from the damage that s been done and that s a commitment my administration is going to keep so with the ongoing reopening of gulf fisheries we re excited that fishermen can go back to work and americans can confidently and safely enjoy gulf seafood once again we re certainly going to enjoy it here at the white house in fact we had some yesterday while they re here today several saints players are going to spend some time teaching our staff their favorite gulf seafood recipes so who s cooking which one it s you back there all right and sam kass the white house he s very excited he s very excited and after weeks of hearing about food from our response teams down in the gulf i can tell you that our staff is excited about the 30 foot po boy we re serving at lunch today but let me just say in closing we are very proud of this team and we are very proud of the owner of this team because it required a great commitment on your part to help pull this team and this city along and so there is a heartfelt congratulations not just from those of us here in the white house but i think all across america these are big guys with big hearts and shoulders big enough to carry the hopes and dreams of an entire city with them so with that congratulations to all of you the new orleans saints 2009 super bowl champions congratulations dem bobama9 9 09a barack_obama madam speaker vice president biden members of congress and the american people when i spoke here last winter this nation was facing the worst economic crisis since the great depression we were losing an average of 700 000 jobs per month credit was frozen and our financial system was on the verge of collapse as any american who is still looking for work or a way to pay their bills will tell you we are by no means out of the woods a full and vibrant recovery is still many months away and i will not let up until those americans who seek jobs can find them until those businesses that seek capital and credit can thrive until all responsible homeowners can stay in their homes that is our ultimate goal but thanks to the bold and decisive action we ve taken since january i can stand here with confidence and say that we have pulled this economy back from the brink i want to thank the members of this body for your efforts and your support in these last several months and especially those who ve taken the difficult votes that have put us on a path to recovery i also want to thank the american people for their patience and resolve during this trying time for our nation but we did not come here just to clean up crises we came here to build a future so tonight i return to speak to all of you about an issue that is central to that future and that is the issue of health care i am not the first president to take up this cause but i am determined to be the last it has now been nearly a century since theodore roosevelt first called for health care reform and ever since nearly every president and congress whether democrat or republican has attempted to meet this challenge in some way a bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by john dingell sr in 1943 sixty five years later his son continues to introduce that same bill at the beginning of each session our collective failure to meet this challenge year after year decade after decade has led us to the breaking point everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy these are not primarily people on welfare these are middle class americans some can t get insurance on the job others are self employed and can t afford it since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer many other americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or too expensive to cover we are the only democracy the only advanced democracy on earth the only wealthy nation that allows such hardship for millions of its people there are now more than 30 million american citizens who cannot get coverage in just a two year period one in every three americans goes without health care coverage at some point and every day 14 000 americans lose their coverage in other words it can happen to anyone but the problem that plagues the health care system is not just a problem for the uninsured those who do have insurance have never had less security and stability than they do today more and more americans worry that if you move lose your job or change your job you ll lose your health insurance too more and more americans pay their premiums only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick or won t pay the full cost of care it happens every day one man from illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn t reported gallstones that he didn t even know about they delayed his treatment and he died because of it another woman from texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne by the time she had her insurance reinstated her breast cancer had more than doubled in size that is heart breaking it is wrong and no one should be treated that way in the united states of america then there s the problem of rising cost we spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country but we aren t any healthier for it this is one of the reasons that insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages it s why so many employers especially small businesses are forcing their employees to pay more for insurance or are dropping their coverage entirely it s why so many aspiring entrepreneurs cannot afford to open a business in the first place and why american businesses that compete internationally like our automakers are at a huge disadvantage and it s why those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it about 1 000 per year that pays for somebody else s emergency room and charitable care finally our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers when health care costs grow at the rate they have it puts greater pressure on programs like medicare and medicaid if we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs we will eventually be spending more on medicare and medicaid than every other government program combined put simply our health care problem is our deficit problem nothing else even comes close nothing else now these are the facts nobody disputes them we know we must reform this system the question is how there are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single payer system like canada s where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everybody on the right there are those who argue that we should end employer based systems and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own i ve said i have to say that there are arguments to be made for both these approaches but either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have since health care represents one sixth of our economy i believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn t rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch and that is precisely what those of you in congress have tried to do over the past several months during that time we ve seen washington at its best and at its worst we ve seen many in this chamber work tirelessly for the better part of this year to offer thoughtful ideas about how to achieve reform of the five committees asked to develop bills four have completed their work and the senate finance committee announced today that it will move forward next week that has never happened before our overall efforts have been supported by an unprecedented coalition of doctors and nurses hospitals seniors groups and even drug companies many of whom opposed reform in the past and there is agreement in this chamber on about 80 percent of what needs to be done putting us closer to the goal of reform than we have ever been but what we ve also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many americans have towards their own government instead of honest debate we ve seen scare tactics some have dug into unyielding ideological camps that offer no hope of compromise too many have used this as an opportunity to score short term political points even if it robs the country of our opportunity to solve a long term challenge and out of this blizzard of charges and counter charges confusion has reigned well the time for bickering is over the time for games has passed now is the season for action now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together and show the american people that we can still do what we were sent here to do now is the time to deliver on health care now is the time to deliver on health care the plan i m announcing tonight would meet three basic goals it will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance it will provide insurance for those who don t and it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families our businesses and our government it s a plan that asks everyone to take responsibility for meeting this challenge not just government not just insurance companies but everybody including employers and individuals and it s a plan that incorporates ideas from senators and congressmen from democrats and republicans and yes from some of my opponents in both the primary and general election here are the details that every american needs to know about this plan first if you are among the hundreds of millions of americans who already have health insurance through your job or medicare or medicaid or the va nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have let me repeat this nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have what this plan will do is make the insurance you have work better for you under this plan it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition as soon as i sign this bill it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most they will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out of pocket expenses because in the united states of america no one should go broke because they get sick and insurance companies will be required to cover with no extra charge routine checkups and preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies because there s no reason we shouldn t be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse that makes sense it saves money and it saves lives now that s what americans who have health insurance can expect from this plan more security and more stability now if you re one of the tens of millions of americans who don t currently have health insurance the second part of this plan will finally offer you quality affordable choices if you lose your job or you change your job you ll be able to get coverage if you strike out on your own and start a small business you ll be able to get coverage we ll do this by creating a new insurance exchange a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices insurance companies will have an incentive to participate in this exchange because it lets them compete for millions of new customers as one big group these customers will have greater leverage to bargain with the insurance companies for better prices and quality coverage this is how large companies and government employees get affordable insurance it s how everyone in this congress gets affordable insurance and it s time to give every american the same opportunity that we give ourselves now for those individuals and small businesses who still can t afford the lower priced insurance available in the exchange we ll provide tax credits the size of which will be based on your need and all insurance companies that want access to this new marketplace will have to abide by the consumer protections i already mentioned this exchange will take effect in four years which will give us time to do it right in the meantime for those americans who can t get insurance today because they have preexisting medical conditions we will immediately offer low cost coverage that will protect you against financial ruin if you become seriously ill this was a good idea when senator john mccain proposed it in the campaign it s a good idea now and we should all embrace it now even if we provide these affordable options there may be those especially the young and the healthy who still want to take the risk and go without coverage there may still be companies that refuse to do right by their workers by giving them coverage the problem is such irresponsible behavior costs all the rest of us money if there are affordable options and people still don t sign up for health insurance it means we pay for these people s expensive emergency room visits if some businesses don t provide workers health care it forces the rest of us to pick up the tab when their workers get sick and gives those businesses an unfair advantage over their competitors and unless everybody does their part many of the insurance reforms we seek especially requiring insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions just can t be achieved and that s why under my plan individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance just as most states require you to carry auto insurance likewise likewise businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers there will be a hardship waiver for those individuals who still can t afford coverage and 95 percent of all small businesses because of their size and narrow profit margin would be exempt from these requirements but we can t have large businesses and individuals who can afford coverage game the system by avoiding responsibility to themselves or their employees improving our health care system only works if everybody does their part and while there remain some significant details to be ironed out i believe i believe a broad consensus exists for the aspects of the plan i just outlined consumer protections for those with insurance an exchange that allows individuals and small businesses to purchase affordable coverage and a requirement that people who can afford insurance get insurance and i have no doubt that these reforms would greatly benefit americans from all walks of life as well as the economy as a whole still given all the misinformation that s been spread over the past few months i realize i realize that many americans have grown nervous about reform so tonight i want to address some of the key controversies that are still out there some of people s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost the best example is the claim made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts but by prominent politicians that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens now such a charge would be laughable if it weren t so cynical and irresponsible it is a lie plain and simple there are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants this too is false the reforms the reforms i m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally it s not true and one more misunderstanding i want to clear up under our plan no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions and federal conscience laws will remain in place now my health care proposal has also been attacked by some who oppose reform as a government takeover of the entire health care system as proof critics point to a provision in our plan that allows the uninsured and small businesses to choose a publicly sponsored insurance option administered by the government just like medicaid or medicare so let me set the record straight here my guiding principle is and always has been that consumers do better when there is choice and competition that s how the market works unfortunately in 34 states 75 percent of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies in alabama almost 90 percent is controlled by just one company and without competition the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down and it makes it easier for insurance companies to treat their customers badly by cherry picking the healthiest individuals and trying to drop the sickest by overcharging small businesses who have no leverage and by jacking up rates insurance executives don t do this because they re bad people they do it because it s profitable as one former insurance executive testified before congress insurance companies are not only encouraged to find reasons to drop the seriously ill they are rewarded for it all of this is in service of meeting what this former executive called wall street s relentless profit expectations now i have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business they provide a legitimate service and employ a lot of our friends and neighbors i just want to hold them accountable and the insurance reforms that i ve already mentioned would do just that but an additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not for profit public option available in the insurance exchange now let me be clear let me be clear it would only be an option for those who don t have insurance no one would be forced to choose it and it would not impact those of you who already have insurance in fact based on congressional budget office estimates we believe that less than 5 percent of americans would sign up despite all this the insurance companies and their allies don t like this idea they argue that these private companies can t fairly compete with the government and they d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option but they won t be i ve insisted that like any private insurance company the public insurance option would have to be self sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects but by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries it could provide a good deal for consumers and would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities now it is it s worth noting that a strong majority of americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort i ve proposed tonight but its impact shouldn t be exaggerated by the left or the right or the media it is only one part of my plan and shouldn t be used as a handy excuse for the usual washington ideological battles to my progressive friends i would remind you that for decades the driving idea behind reform has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage available for those without it the public option the public option is only a means to that end and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal and to my republican friends i say that rather than making wild claims about a government takeover of health care we should work together to address any legitimate concerns you may have for example for example some have suggested that the public option go into effect only in those markets where insurance companies are not providing affordable policies others have proposed a co op or another non profit entity to administer the plan these are all constructive ideas worth exploring but i will not back down on the basic principle that if americans can t find affordable coverage we will provide you with a choice and i will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need finally let me discuss an issue that is a great concern to me to members of this chamber and to the public and that s how we pay for this plan and here s what you need to know first i will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future i will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit now or in the future period and to prove that i m serious there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don t materialize now part of the reason i faced a trillion dollar deficit when i walked in the door of the white house is because too many initiatives over the last decade were not paid for from the iraq war to tax breaks for the wealthy i will not make that same mistake with health care second we ve estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system a system that is currently full of waste and abuse right now too much of the hard earned savings and tax dollars we spend on health care don t make us any healthier that s not my judgment it s the judgment of medical professionals across this country and this is also true when it comes to medicare and medicaid in fact i want to speak directly to seniors for a moment because medicare is another issue that s been subjected to demagoguery and distortion during the course of this debate more than four decades ago this nation stood up for the principle that after a lifetime of hard work our seniors should not be left to struggle with a pile of medical bills in their later years that s how medicare was born and it remains a sacred trust that must be passed down from one generation to the next and that is why not a dollar of the medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan the only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud as well as unwarranted subsidies in medicare that go to insurance companies subsidies that do everything to pad their profits but don t improve the care of seniors and we will also create an independent commission of doctors and medical experts charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead now these steps will ensure that you america s seniors get the benefits you ve been promised they will ensure that medicare is there for future generations and we can use some of the savings to fill the gap in coverage that forces too many seniors to pay thousands of dollars a year out of their own pockets for prescription drugs that s what this plan will do for you so don t pay attention to those scary stories about how your benefits will be cut especially since some of the same folks who are spreading these tall tales have fought against medicare in the past and just this year supported a budget that would essentially have turned medicare into a privatized voucher program that will not happen on my watch i will protect medicare now because medicare is such a big part of the health care system making the program more efficient can help usher in changes in the way we deliver health care that can reduce costs for everybody we have long known that some places like the intermountain healthcare in utah or the geisinger health system in rural pennsylvania offer high quality care at costs below average so the commission can help encourage the adoption of these common sense best practices by doctors and medical professionals throughout the system everything from reducing hospital infection rates to encouraging better coordination between teams of doctors reducing the waste and inefficiency in medicare and medicaid will pay for most of this plan now much of the rest would be paid for with revenues from the very same drug and insurance companies that stand to benefit from tens of millions of new customers and this reform will charge insurance companies a fee for their most expensive policies which will encourage them to provide greater value for the money an idea which has the support of democratic and republican experts and according to these same experts this modest change could help hold down the cost of health care for all of us in the long run now finally many in this chamber particularly on the republican side of the aisle have long insisted that reforming our medical malpractice laws can help bring down the cost of health care now there you go there you go now i don t believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet but i ve talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs so i m proposing that we move forward on a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first and let doctors focus on practicing medicine i know that the bush administration considered authorizing demonstration projects in individual states to test these ideas i think it s a good idea and i m directing my secretary of health and human services to move forward on this initiative today now add it all up and the plan i m proposing will cost around 900 billion over 10 years less than we have spent on the iraq and afghanistan wars and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few americans that congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration now most of these costs will be paid for with money already being spent but spent badly in the existing health care system the plan will not add to our deficit the middle class will realize greater security not higher taxes and if we are able to slow the growth of health care costs by just one tenth of 1 percent each year one tenth of 1 percent it will actually reduce the deficit by 4 trillion over the long term now this is the plan i m proposing it s a plan that incorporates ideas from many of the people in this room tonight democrats and republicans and i will continue to seek common ground in the weeks ahead if you come to me with a serious set of proposals i will be there to listen my door is always open but know this i will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it s better politics to kill this plan than to improve it i won t stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are if you misrepresent what s in this plan we will call you out and i will not and i will not accept the status quo as a solution not this time not now everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing our deficit will grow more families will go bankrupt more businesses will close more americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it the most and more will die as a result we know these things to be true that is why we cannot fail because there are too many americans counting on us to succeed the ones who suffer silently and the ones who shared their stories with us at town halls in e mails and in letters i received one of those letters a few days ago it was from our beloved friend and colleague ted kennedy he had written it back in may shortly after he was told that his illness was terminal he asked that it be delivered upon his death in it he spoke about what a happy time his last months were thanks to the love and support of family and friends his wife vicki his amazing children who are all here tonight and he expressed confidence that this would be the year that health care reform that great unfinished business of our society he called it would finally pass he repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity but he also reminded me that it concerns more than material things what we face he wrote is above all a moral issue at stake are not just the details of policy but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country i ve thought about that phrase quite a bit in recent days the character of our country one of the unique and wonderful things about america has always been our self reliance our rugged individualism our fierce defense of freedom and our healthy skepticism of government and figuring out the appropriate size and role of government has always been a source of rigorous and yes sometimes angry debate that s our history for some of ted kennedy s critics his brand of liberalism represented an affront to american liberty in their minds his passion for universal health care was nothing more than a passion for big government but those of us who knew teddy and worked with him here people of both parties know that what drove him was something more his friend orrin hatch he knows that they worked together to provide children with health insurance his friend john mccain knows that they worked together on a patient s bill of rights his friend chuck grassley knows that they worked together to provide health care to children with disabilities on issues like these ted kennedy s passion was born not of some rigid ideology but of his own experience it was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer he never forgot the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is badly sick and he was able to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance what it would be like to have to say to a wife or a child or an aging parent there is something that could make you better but i just can t afford it that large heartedness that concern and regard for the plight of others is not a partisan feeling it s not a republican or a democratic feeling it too is part of the american character our ability to stand in other people s shoes a recognition that we are all in this together and when fortune turns against one of us others are there to lend a helping hand a belief that in this country hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise this has always been the history of our progress in 1935 when over half of our seniors could not support themselves and millions had seen their savings wiped away there were those who argued that social security would lead to socialism but the men and women of congress stood fast and we are all the better for it in 1965 when some argued that medicare represented a government takeover of health care members of congress democrats and republicans did not back down they joined together so that all of us could enter our golden years with some basic peace of mind you see our predecessors understood that government could not and should not solve every problem they understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom but they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little that without the leavening hand of wise policy markets can crash monopolies can stifle competition the vulnerable can be exploited and they knew that when any government measure no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial is subject to scorn when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un american when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter that at that point we don t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges we lose something essential about ourselves that was true then it remains true today i understand how difficult this health care debate has been i know that many in this country are deeply skeptical that government is looking out for them i understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road to defer reform one more year or one more election or one more term but that is not what the moment calls for that s not what we came here to do we did not come to fear the future we came here to shape it i still believe we can act even when it s hard i still believe i still believe that we can act when it s hard i still believe we can replace acrimony with civility and gridlock with progress i still believe we can do great things and that here and now we wil dem bobama9 9 09b barack_obama thank you thank you very much to chip kathy and nancy who graciously shared your father with a nation that loved him to walter s friends colleagues protgs and all who considered him a hero to the men of the intrepid to all of you who are gathered here today i am honored to be here to pay tribute to the life and times of the man who chronicled our time i did not know mr cronkite personally and my regret is made more acute by the stories that have been shared here today nor for that matter did i know him any better than the tens of millions who turned to him each night in search of the answer to a simple question what happened today but like them and like all of you i have benefited as a citizen from his dogged pursuit of the truth his passionate defense of objective reporting and his view that journalism is more than just a profession it is a public good vital to our democracy even in his early career walter cronkite resisted the temptation to get the story first in favor of getting it right he wanted to get it first but he understood the importance of getting it right during one of his first jobs in kansas city walter s program manager urged him to go on the air reporting a massive blaze and we just heard how much he loved fires a massive blaze at city hall that had already claimed lives when walter reached for the telephone his boss asked what are you doing get on the air walter replied that he was calling the fire department to confirm the story you don t need to confirm it the manager shouted my wife is watching the whole thing needless to say walter made the call and even as the program manager took to the air himself to broadcast the unfolding tragedy walter discovered that it had been nothing more than a small fire that hadn t resulted in any injuries he lost his job but he got the story right walter wasn t afraid to rattle the high and the mighty either but he never dared to compromise his integrity he got along with elected officials even if they were wary of one another s motives one politician once remarked walter my friend you ve got to believe me fully 85 percent of everything i told you today is the absolute truth he shared a complicated relationship with presidents of both parties who wanted him on their side even as they were convinced that he wasn t president johnson called walter after the evening news from time to time to voice his displeasure over a certain story but walter knew that if he was receiving vociferous complaints from both sides he must be doing his job his endless inquisitiveness about our world i can imagine came from a mother who sold encyclopedias for a living as a boy walter spent countless hours getting lost within their pages endlessly sidetracked by new and interesting entries that branched off from one another fascinated by the world around us and how it worked and that s the way he lived his life with curiosity exploring our planet seeking to make sense of it and explaining it to others he went everywhere and he did everything he raced cars and boats he traveled everywhere from the amazon to the arctic he plunged 8 000 feet below the sea trekked 18 000 feet up into the himalayas and experienced weightlessness in the upper reaches of our atmosphere all with one mission to make it come alive for the rest of us and as our world began to change he helped us understand those changes he was forever there reporting through world war and cold war marches and milestones scandal and success calmly and authoritatively telling us what we needed to know he was a voice of certainty in a world that was growing more and more uncertain and through it all he never lost the integrity or the plainspoken speaking style that he gained growing up in the heartland he was a familiar and welcome voice that spoke to each and every one of us personally so it may have seemed inevitable that he was named the most trusted man in america but here s the thing that title wasn t bestowed on him by a network we weren t told to believe it by some advertising campaign it was earned it was earned by year after year and decade after decade of painstaking effort a commitment to fundamental values his belief that the american people were hungry for the truth unvarnished and unaccompanied by theatre or spectacle he didn t believe in dumbing down he trusted us when he was told of this extraordinary honor that he was the most trusted man in america he naturally downplayed it by saying the people had not polled his wife when people of both political parties actually tried to recruit him to run for office without even asking for his stances on the issues he said no to the relief of all potential opponents and when even a decade and a half after his retirement he still ranked first in seven of eight categories for television journalists he was disbelieving that he hadn t won the eighth category attractiveness through all the events that came to define the 20th century through all our moments of deepest hurt and brightest hope walter cronkite was there telling the story of the american age and this is how we remember him today but we also remember and celebrate the journalism that walter practiced a standard of honesty and integrity and responsibility to which so many of you have committed your careers it s a standard that s a little bit harder to find today we know that this is a difficult time for journalism even as appetites for news and information grow newsrooms are closing despite the big stories of our era serious journalists find themselves all too often without a beat just as the news cycle has shrunk so has the bottom line and too often we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that walter disdained rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed what happened today is replaced with who won today the public debate cheapens the public trust falters we fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation we seem stuck with a choice between what cuts to our bottom line and what harms us as a society which price is higher to pay which cost is harder to bear this democracy walter said cannot function without a reasonably well informed electorate that s why the honest objective meticulous reporting that so many of you pursue with the same zeal that walter did is so vital to our democracy and our society our future depends on it walter was no naive idealist he understood the challenges and the pressures and the temptations facing journalism in this new era he believed that a media company has an obligation to pursue a profit but also an obligation to invest a good chunk of that profit back into news and public affairs he was excited about all the stories that a high tech world of journalism would be able to tell and all the newly emerging means with which to tell it naturally we find ourselves wondering how he would have covered the monumental stories of our time in an era where the news that city hall is on fire can sweep around the world at the speed of the internet would he still have called to double check would he have been able to cut through the murky noise of the blogs and the tweets and the sound bites to shine the bright light on substance would he still offer the perspective that we value would he have been able to remain a singular figure in an age of dwindling attention spans and omnipresent media and somehow we know that the answer is yes the simple values walter cronkite set out in pursuit of to seek the truth to keep us honest to explore our world the best he could they are as vital today as they ever were our american story continues it needs to be told and if we choose to live up to walter s example if we realize that the kind of journalism he embodied will not simply rekindle itself as part of a natural cycle but will come alive only if we stand up and demand it and resolve to value it once again then i m convinced that the choice between profit and progress is a false one and that the golden days of journalism still lie ahead walter cronkite invited a nation to believe in him and he never betrayed that trust that s why so many of you entered the profession in the first place that s why the standards he set for journalists still stand and that s why he loved and valued all of you but we loved and valued walter not only as the rarest of men but as an indispensable pillar of our society he s reunited with his beloved betsy now watching the stories of this century unfold with boundless optimism every so often punctuating the air with a gleeful oh boy we are grateful to him for altering and illuminating our time and for the opportunity he gave to us to say that yes we too were there thank you very much dem hclinton1 7 99 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you very much and i especially want to thank all of the students who are here with us today especially jasmine kevin and nora for reading to us the words that launched our nation and have inspired and challenged us ever since imagine how significant those phrases are we the people life liberty and the pursuit of happiness congress shall make no law there is so much about these charters of freedom that we learned about as children and that we still every day attempt to live up to in our country and i want to thank all of you who are gathered here for this important announcement i want to thank secretary and mrs riley who have joined us a number of other officials from the administration congressman regula who is here with us the center for civic education and all of you the students the educators and the citizens who are helping to pass on the charters of freedom and the values they teach to every generation i m especially pleased to be here with michael armstrong and at t for your extraordinary generosity for generations at t connected us as individuals and now it is helping to connect us to the past and move us forward into the future by helping to save our founding documents and make them come alive for our children i cannot think of a better gift than the gift that at t is announcing today to the archives the gift that they ve given to the save america s treasures initiative that is part of the white house millennium council that truly is making it possible for us to give gifts to the future that will carry us into the next century and the next millennium so on behalf of the white house millennium council on behalf of all of us who care about preserving and enhancing our past let me again thank michael armstrong and at t for this generous generous gift and none of what we are celebrating today would have been possible without the early support of the pew charitable trust which allowed the national archives the department of commerce and nasa to create new cases for the charters and none of that would have been possible without the commitment and leadership of john carlin and the entire staff of the national archives john and i first spoke about this project two years ago this month and he has been a tireless advocate for the need to enhance and preserve better the work that is maintained here in the archives the safety deposit box which mr armstrong referred to so i want to thank john the staff of the archives and everyone who has helped us understand how we could preserve and protect the charters imagine if you will the long tradition of citizens who have made it possible for us to meet here on the brink of a new century and a new millennium citizens who in the past protected our charter imagine stephen pleasanton a state department clerk in 1814 who received word that the british forces were coming and that the should take care of the papers in his office now when he asked the secretary of war the secretary told him he shouldn t be so worried because it was unlikely that the british would break through the line but as i have often told the story in the white house we know indeed that the british did and burned the white house to the ground and thankfully mr pleasanton did not listen to those optimistic reports instead he and others gathered up the declaration of independence laws letter from george washington and the unpublished journals of congress and brought them to a grist mill two miles from georgetown but he decided that that was not far enough away from danger so he found wagons and took the documents another 35 miles to leesburg he made sure they were safe in an empty house he locked the doors and he went to bed exhausted when he woke up he did hear the news that washington had been set on fire the night before our public buildings had been burned to the ground but thankfully our founding documents were unharmed because he had saved them well he was the first in a long line of concerned americans and now it is our turn because of today s announcement we can help ensure that the charters of freedom will be saved for all time and accessible to all people we can help ensure that 100 years from now children will be able to visit this sacred place and to hear and see the words and the work of our founding fathers and so many others who have made america what it is today imagine seeing the notes that president eisenhower wrote to memorialize what he did during the little rock crisis or to look over the papers showing the arrest and conviction of susan b anthony because she had the audacity to vote our children will see this and so much more that is part of the american legacy and that is exactly what the president and i had in mind two years ago when we came here in august to announce the white house millennium council we wanted to mark this important point in history and to provide an opportunity for americans to take stock of who we are as we end the 20th century and to decide what of our culture our history and our values we will bring with us into the next century we chose a theme for these activities honor the past imagine the future and that is what we ve been trying to do we ve used the white house our oldest continuous venue for presenting the arts in america to showcase the best or our creativity and scholarship in seven millennium evenings that we have held since 1998 we ve heard about the future of science from stephen hawking we ve heard winton marsalis and marian mcpartland explore jazz as an expression of our democracy we ve heard nobel prize winner elie wiesel talk about the perils of indifference from nazi germany to the balkans two years ago we invited americans to think about ways each of us could give gifts to the future today there are more than 135 millennium communities we re also seeing citizens coming together to build new parks plants trees create millennium trails all of which help to explore our history and help us appreciate our beautiful outdoors because after all it is not just our charters of freedoms that help us define who we are as americans there are many artifacts and documents all over our country so we ve tried through the save america s treasures campaign to help preserve that history it is a public private partnership designed to highlight what is special about america s past and this year the president proposed grants to save some of our most endangered sites and collections and i m very pleased that the congress with the leadership of congressman regula and with bipartisan support approved 30 million for this important effort and i m very pleased that our partner the national trust for historic preservation represented here by dick moe has helped to raise an additional 33 million in private funding so we can see all over the country that saving treasures is not just the work of the federal government nor even of our major corporate citizens like at t or even of our philanthropic foundations like pew but indeed it is the work of all of us from the youngest of our citizens to the oldest when i was recently at the ancient cliff dwellings at mesa verde i learned about a 3rd grade class in boulder colorado that did extra chores to create something that they called adopt a ruin calendars and by selling these calendars they raised 15 one girl wrote to us and said i ve raised 15 so far i feel very special about that because it will mean that my kids get the experience to see all of these wonderful important sites well that is one of the reasons why this particular announcement is so important i m reminded about the students from woodlawn high school in arlington who are making the lessons about our democracy come alive they re having town meetings where they give everyone something to say and those town meetings are exploring all kinds of issues from the number of teachers they should hire to whether they have compulsory study halls which incidentally the lobbied to overturn they ve interviewed veterans of world war ii to ask them about the rights they were fighting for they ve done so much including studying the bill of rights and learning more about what it means to be an american citizen so as we are now quickly approaching another 4th of july i hope we will continue to think about how we pass on the values and the blessings that we enjoy as americans and that always we will pay particular attention to preserving that of our past that tells us who we are today and where we re going tomorrow passing on the gift of freedom and the opportunity that comes with being an american may be our most important obligation and by doing so we help create the kind of future that we want for these young people and for all american children it s been a great pleasure working these last two years on the enterprises of the white house millennium council and we have another year and some months to go in order to continue to spread the word about what we are trying to accomplish and it s been a particular delight that the president has been so involved in these efforts he s a great history buff and has contributed greatly to the ideas that we have developed about honoring the millennium so it gives me great pleasure to introduce the president of the united states dem hclinton12 10 99 hillary_rodham_clinton good evening and welcome to the white house imagine for a moment that it is the year 2030 you could instantly teleconference with your children any time anywhere if they will accept the teleconference you could speak into a computer and have your words instantly translated into any language if you re paralyzed in an accident you can regain your mobility and if you lose your sight you will regain it well welcome to the future and to the 8th millennium evening at the white house tonight we will explore the explosion of information technology and genetic research and how they are combining to shape how we live learn and think in the next century i d like to thank our sponsor the national endowment for the humanities which every day helps create informed citizens and public debates like this one and i d like to recognize its chairman bill ferris for his work i also want to recognize the many members of the president s administration who are here including secretary donna shalala secretary dick riley nih director harold varmus nasa administrator dan goldin national science foundation director rita colwell director of the nih human genome project francis collins and the president s science advisor neal lane i also want to thank the library of congress and the smithsonian for the exhibits in the foyer we re actually using some of the science that we are celebrating tonight people from all over the world can participate in this event via satellite and over the internet thanks to john shoemaker and the entire team at sun microsystems and you will watch video all evening on these plasma screens thanks to pioneer new technologies for the past two years we have used these millennium evenings to showcase the art culture history and science that define us as a people and as a nation when professor bernard bailyn lectured this room was filled with historians when wynton marsalis played here it was filled with musicians and it s safe to say tonight that we have the largest gathering of geneticists and it experts ever assembled together in the east room of the white house these lectures are part of the work of the white house millennium council that the president and i started to encourage all americans to use this unique moment in time to honor the past and imagine the future and that is exactly what we will do this evening if we pick up any magazine or newspaper these days these are the kinds of headlines we re likely to find twins unlocking the secret of identity how the wireless world will change your life dna mapping light at the end of the tunnel we are on the brink of discoveries that are astonishing in their complexity and implications for human life in the decades ahead but they didn t happen overnight these revolutions have been driven by our american quest for knowledge and discovery and the willingness of both the public and private sectors to invest in the necessary research more than 200 years ago before we had even drafted a constitution our second president john adams created the american academy of arts and sciences to in their words cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interests honor dignity and happiness of a free independent and virtuous people that same spirit is what drives us to go to the next generation internet and to find the 3 billion letters of genetic instructions to the human body and it must continue to drive us as we educate and inspire americans to understand these breakthroughs and continue investing in science and technology research well before we know whether it has any commercial applications after all when vint cerf and robert kahn found a way for computers to talk to one another they certainly didn t imagine e bay or amazon com but now even in the face of these great breakthroughs there are many who rightly worry that our science is developing faster than our ability to understand its implications because behind each of the headlines we read we find not only great possibilities but also profound ethical questions that we must answer together as we gather more information whether it is commercial transactions posted on the internet or genetic information collected by doctors who owns that information how will we protect our privacy how will we make sure that knowledge about our genes is used to heal us not deny us health insurance or jobs what do justice and equality mean in a digital age in one of his short stories ray bradbury s vision of the year 2030 has some similarities to the one i started with tonight the windows wash themselves breakfast cooks itself and a voice machine reminds you of birthdays anniversaries and bills to be paid which is especially handy as one gets older there s only one big difference there are no people the population has been completely wiped out and all that s left are machines standing here with only 80 days left until the year 2000 we have a chance to imagine and create a very different future one in which the revolutions in information and biology benefit rather than eclipse our humanity where our ethics keep pace with our science where our investments in science dramatically improve not only how long we live but how well we live because unlike science fiction how this story ends is in all of our hands so i want to thank you for coming this evening and we have invited two distinguished scientists to help us understand that promises and perils of information tm prestigious universities and both are visionaries first dr vinton cerf will give us a quick overview of the growth and future of the internet then dr eric lander will tell us about the revolution in genetics and where it is leading us dr lander actually started his career as a mathematician as a high school student he even won a place on the u s team to the international mathematical olympiad held in east germany this was at the height of the cold war but when his team and the russian math team met at the competitions they hit it off they spent evenings together tossing water balloons down on to the streets of east germany in defiance and he has been bringing people and disciplines together ever since he s built bridges to public policy and by contributing his time has really added to the public debate as an nih advisor he s also the founder of millennium pharmaceuticals and now he s building bridges between genetic discoveries and their potential to improve our lives as the director of the whitehead institute mit center for genome research now i m told that dr cerf one of the fathers of the internet also got his start in high school back then he and his best friend got permission to use a computer at ucla when the building was locked on weekends they would simply climb up to an open third story window the machine was a size of a refrigerator and had the computing power of today s hand held calculators but he was consumed by the possibility computers held and has been scaling wall after wall ever since then to fulfill it as the advanced research projects agency of the department of defense he helped to develop the procedures or protocols that computers use to communicate with each other and he s chairing the new internet societal task force that is helping to make the internet accessible to everyone he s a senior vice president at mci worldcom for internet architecture and technology and i think that every parent should take heart that people who throw water balloons and scale to third floor windows do have a future that will in one way or another be redemptive therefore i am especially honored to introduce our first speaker vint cerf dem hclinton14 2 97 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you principal mayer and good morning to all of you and thank you for inviting me to this historic school in this historic shaw neighborhood i am delighted to be joined by general becton and by mayor barry i ve heard wonderful things about what this school is doing and i am particularly pleased by what i ve heard about the partnership between a law firm named holland and knight and the cleveland elementary school community and i m delighted that i ve had a chance to come today to get a sense of that relationship firsthand i also want to thank everyone at the school and at holland and knight as well as the washington lawyers committee represented today by its head rod boggs and i also want to acknowledge and thank reading is fundamental represented by its chairwoman lynda robb a friend of mine of many years standing for making this partnership such a success i m also pleased that myles link the president of the d c bar could also join us today as all of you know the district of columbia is a special place to live to work and to do business not only is it the capital city it is a mecca for tourists a meeting center for biotechnology and medical research and a nerve center for international communications it is a city whose greatest resource is its people and whose future lies with its children washington d c is also a city full of lawyers and i say that as a recovering lawyer every sector of washington from the federal and local governments to churches to businesses has a role in bringing greater prosperity and progress to the district of columbia and i believe that lawyers and law firms have a particular opportunity and i would add obligation while much maligned these days lawyers who are possessed of so many skills expertise and boundless energy can take a leadership role in this task of making washington d c the capital city it deserves to be washington law firms employ nearly 30 000 highly educated disciplined and hard working individuals and each of those employees can make a difference in our schools for example lawyers and staff from the firm of holland and knight have tutored students and spent afternoons reading with them they have taken children on field trips helped repair school facilities and helped reclaim the historic kennedy park and playground from drug dealers they have donated computers supplies and clothing they have helped parents with legal problems and they have supported the studio school program which has provided so much of the artwork that decorates this building over the last 15 months this law firm has spent 650 hours which law firms keep track of worth about 115 000 which law firms also keep track of helping cleveland elementary school in addition attorneys have donated about 920 hours of pro bono legal work on behalf of nonprofit organizations in the shaw neighborhood and i want to thank all the members of holland and knight for their outstanding service and ask everyone associated with holland and knight just to stand so that we can thank you personally i want to mention a few of the people from the firm who have had important roles in making this partnership successful steve hanlon ted small hank brothers and melinda burrows who we will meet in a few minutes i also want to emphasize something that principal mayer said when she talked about the idea of the village because we do think that working on improving a school providing support for the teachers and the staff and the school is the first priority but also helping to improve conditions in the surrounding neighborhood is a very important supplementary task and holland and knight has understood that and the work that has been done with organizations in the neighborhood and providing support and assistance for them have made it possible for the entire neighborhood to feel the kind of stake in this school that so many of you have been associated with it for so long know is important holland and knight is not the only law firm that has given generously of its time and resources several other firms have also formed partnerships with the d c public schools including covington and burling steptoe and johnson and the district of columbia office of corporation counsel now each of these firms has also sent representatives to join us today and i would like to ask those from other law firms including covington and burling and steptoe and johnson and the d c office of corporation counsel who are working with other schools please stand as well not only do the volunteers reap the personal rewards of working with children they are also helping develop individuals who can very well become future colleagues by helping students to read to think creatively and to stay in school and follow their own dreams the volunteers are preparing these young people to meet the challenges of working in the 21st century i understand that covington and burling for example hire students from high school every year for summer jobs the partnership has also enabled volunteer lawyers to meet and develop friendships with some of washington s most interesting and dynamic citizens people they might never have the opportunity of meeting at the office so i would like today to challenge each and every single law firm in the district of columbia to share its talents and resources with a school in this city i challenge each managing partner to call the washington lawyers committee and volunteer to adopt a school and i thank general becton for pledging his support for this effort one of the hallmarks of general becton s leadership over the last months has been his understanding that in order to fix our schools all of us must pitch in and make a contribution to support the hard working principals and teachers who are on the front lines of caring for children who come from some very difficult circumstances we know more about what works in schools today there is a lot of research there is a lot of personal experience out there and we frankly need more adults to be involved in the lives of our children and to be there for them reading to them mentoring to them helping them and their families solve problems that often seem overwhelming at first without some kind of help navigating through life education is the single most important tool our children will need to thrive in the coming century and if this city and this country are to succeed as the president has often said we cannot afford to leave any child behind and all of us who are members of the d c village can make a positive difference so i thank this school i thank particularly volunteers like mr wood and others who have supported this school and i thank all the new volunteers from holland and knight and from every other law firm who are willing to help our children and i hope that i ll be able to travel around over the next months highlighting the work that other volunteer groups are doing in every single school in this city thank you very much dem hclinton18 11 04 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you thank you so much for your forbearance and your extraordinary patience today as we celebrate the dedication of this extraordinary institution thank you well i m going to cut my remarks short and you can read them all on the clintonfoundation org web site but what i want to make is just three points first i m thrilled to have everyone here on this stage who represents the past the present and the future of our country and this is a special moment where people come together and make it clear that we are unified as americans and i m grateful for this moment and i thank the former presidents and president bush and the first ladies for being here secondly i want to thank all of you and millions more who have been so kind in supporting us during the recent weeks following bill s surgery i thank you for your prayers and your good wishes and i think you can see that he s back and strong and going forward but all of that support meant the world to chelsea and me and i m grateful to you finally i cannot wait for you to see this and to tour this museum the building is like my husband it s open it s expansive it s welcoming it s filled with light and the exhibits tell a story of someone who loves his fellow man who cares deeply about the future of all of our children who recognizes our common humanity and for all those reasons and many many more i m so proud to introduce the 42nd president of the united states william jefferson clinton dem hclinton19 7 96 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you dr walker and this is such a great honor and privilege for us to be here with all of you i want to thank dr walker for his tireless efforts as president of the u s olympic committee these past four years and for his lifetime of commitment to american and international sports as a coach and educator and administrator dr walker has touched the lives of countless athletes and young people and he has nurtured not just national and olympic champions but also great citizens of this country and i m very privileged to be here to thank you on behalf of all of us dr walker i am also delighted to see so many former olympians behind us who i m thrilled to see in person having watched and followed for years and i m also delighted that two other former olympians are here with us to now serve as the co chairs of the council on physical fitness and i would like to introduce them to you they really need no introduction but i d like to ask them to stand tom mcmillan and florence griffith joyner the last time well not the last time but the most memorable time that tom and flo jo and i were together was at lillehammer and we were freezing to death it was so cold a total contrast to the weather today and tom and i were not prepared tom actually wore i m going to tell a story on tom cowboy boots to the opening ceremony where it was 20 degrees below zero but flo jo who does everything to perfection sat there without a hat that great smile signing autographs never looking like she was freezing to death at all i considered that olympic class to the ultimate i also want to thank wayne clough and the great staff and administration here of georgia tech for sharing this campus i know all of you who are competing have been working for this day for years and years and many of the rest of us here in this country have been waiting for this day to arrive chelsea and i had the great privilege of seeing the lighting of the olympic flame amid the olive and orange and lemon groves in the ancient stadium at olympia it was an extraordinary experience to be there in that stadium where the very first games were held and now here we are in the united states in atlanta waiting for these games to begin that flame which was lit there and which will gloriously be passed on tonight represents that spirit that all of you embody a spirit that has already inspired millions of americans who turned out on main streets and in town squares and on front porches to cheer the olympic torch on its way i felt that same spirit when i had the privilege of being in lillehammer and cheering for some of the athletes here on this stage and knowing that they were representing the best of what our country has to offer but i don t think there s ever been an olympics that more embodies not only the olympian spirit but the american spirit than this one each of you is a guardian of that olympic spirit whether you are multiple gold medalists or first time olympians and to those who have competed before and have won medals we thank you for the inspiration you give to all of us but particularly to young people and to all of you the athletes who will compete in these next two weeks i know that many of you have already overcome extraordinary challenges to be here we are already very proud of each and every one of you and i want you all to know that that as these games begin and as you compete in your events you are in our eyes already winners and we are grateful to you and the president and chelsea and i will be sitting either live at some of the events or more often in front of our tv sets or doing whatever we can to get word of what is happening to you and sending you all our best wishes and prayers it s now my honor to introduce the person that you have chosen to carry the american flag as most of you know so well he is already one of the greatest wrestlers not only in american history but in international history a four time olympian comes to atlanta already having won two gold medals and one silver medal and he s already won the hearts of you his teammates and the rest of our country so join me again in welcoming here to the podium a great champion and a great american bruce baumgartner dem hclinton2 5 00 hillary_rodham_clinton good morning and please be seated and welcome to the white house we have been looking forward to this conference for nearly a year now as we have talked with and explored all the ways that we can raise resourceful and responsible young people and many people have asked me why a conference on teenagers why make teenagers the focus of a fully day s discussion at the white house well i think that as we just saw in the video and i want to thank and applaud the families that participated in that video many of us are concerned about what we can do as parents and as citizens as employers or educators as public officials or community leaders to give more support to teenagers and their families the president and i speak of course with great authority having just graduated from being the parents of a teenager to being the parents of a 20 year old and having survived it but believe me this conference is more than just a trip down memory lane or an exercise in nostalgia for us we believe strongly that our young people deserve our very best efforts i want to thank many of the people who are here today who have been part of putting this conference together but more than that for the work that they have done over so many decades first let me thank david and betty hamburg who are here david and betty in many ways inspired this conference i began working with them more than 20 years ago now and i can think of no people who are more dedicated to helping all young people whether they re in the forgotten or not forgotten half whether they are going through great transitions or turning points in their lives and i think many of us in this room owe both david and betty a great deal of gratitude i would like to ask them to stand so we could thank them both also with us today is congresswoman stephanie tubbs jones and secretary donna shalala deputy attorney general eric holder secretary alexis herman national service corps ceo harris wofford the director of personnel management janis lachance the deputy drug czar vereen annie e casey foundation the w t grant foundation and the ymca of the usa are all sponsors and supporters of this conference now all of us are here because we believe there is no group of americans more full of promise or potential but we also believe there is no group of americans more in need of the support guidance and committed efforts of all of us than today s teenagers ask any teen and i do i ve been privileged to speak to so many in sort of personal and informal ways and in more formal settings just last week at a high school town hall in watkins glen new york where the teens lined up and asked all kinds of questions if you ask teens and you listen to teens you can hear directly and indirectly their voices telling us that growing up today feels tougher than ever before i happen to think that s right i think it s harder being a teen today than it was certainly when i was one so many years ago but i also think that the wonder and hope and exciting choices that teenagers face in their lives are too often becoming times of great stress alienation and confusion and that too has always been part of the teen experience but the environment and context in which that occurs is more dangerous than ever before and if it s tough to be a teenager today it s probably even tougher to be a parent more and more parents are working outside our homes they re struggling to do right by their families and their jobs and i have met so many mothers and fathers who tell me that they just feel inadequate and anxious about navigating those teenage years more so than they certainly felt when their kids were younger we re all worried about the choices our teenagers make about how the best laid plans for a bright future can disintegrate with a single bad decision to drink to try drugs to drive too fast to trust the wrong person parents are worried about the movies their children are seeing the web sites they re visiting the music they re listening to and there s a lot of worry that all those heart to heart talks and those efforts to communicate which are sometimes so awkward and difficult about values and good behavior are getting drowned out by a popular culture filled with gratuitous sex and violence in our two panels this morning and in the breakout sessions this afternoon we will tackle the challenges facing today s teenagers and their parents but it won t just be a session for everyone to share their worries more importantly we re going to be highlighting some of the latest research about teen years and the innovative ways that americans can work together to ensure that every teenager has a safe passage to adulthood three years ago in this room we held the first white house conference on early learning and childhood development we sought to raise awareness about the critical growth that takes place in the brain during the first three years of life and to explore the implications of this knowledge on parenting education and child care in many ways that conference and today s conference can be viewed as bookends because now we re beginning to learn that the brain goes through yet another and equally critical growth spurt during the early teenage years though the research is still preliminary scientists now believe that this is the time when all the hard wiring of the brain takes place when a teenager s intellectual emotional and physical capacities are developed for a lifetime now i remember the very wise advice i got from a friend of mine when my daughter was very small and she was raising three teenagers and she said you know the two times in a child s life that seem most similar to me are those toddler years and the teenage years it s when we need to give so much more attention to our children and now we didn t know back when i heard this advice about 19 or so years ago that there would be brain research to support that anecdotal experience that parents had but i remembered that so often during the times when our own daughter was growing up that even if your teenager or your preteen doesn t want you following her or him around in many ways think of that toddler metaphor they need you around and it s hard for a lot of parents to figure out exactly how to do that this research has therefore important implications for parents because teenagers need the guidance and support of their parents more than ever it is still difficult for many of us to remember that teenagers want our attention after all this is the time when the real or the imaginary keep out signs start appearing on closed bedroom doors when many of our children would rather spend two hours talking to a friend on the phone than 10 minutes talking to their mother or father in person but what we are learning is that for all their declarations of independence america s teenagers still want and need the everyday love involvement and discipline of their parents today we are releasing a new poll commissioned by the ymca which found that parents are still the most important adults in their teenagers lives more than three out of four teens say they still turn to their parents in times of trouble in fact while parents and this is so interesting while parents list the threat of drugs and alcohol as their top concerns about their teens teens themselves list education and not having enough time with their parents as their top concern so it s time that we respond to these concerns and many of us have been struggling with ways to do that i believe one of the biggest casualties of modern life has been family time especially time during meals when parents and children can check out of their busy schedules and check in with each other before out daughter left for college the three of us made it a priority to share at least one meal together a day with our hectic schedules it wasn t always easily and occasionally wasn t possible but we sure tried and when we were able to that hour or half hour in the small kitchen of the private quarters upstairs in the white house was truly my favorite part of the day because bill and i were very convinced that we wanted to convey to our daughter a simple message one that we hoped she would carry away to college that whenever she does need someone to talk to or ask for advice or just wants to say hello we will be available and eager to listen i also know though the experience of hanging around waiting for a sighting you know when we were first in washington in the first term a lot of people some of the pundits and others would say well the clintons don t go out they don t socialize enough you know why aren t they going to camp david enough and those are people who had forgotten or never had a teenager and when you have one in your home you want to hang around with the hope that just maybe they ll deign to say something to you occasionally that works but not always and we hope this conference will inspire even more parents to stay involved in their teenagers lives and to open new lines of communication i m very pleased to announce the national partnership for women and families along with the families and work institute will lead a new campaign to promote the importance of spending time with your teenagers now there are some lessons we parents have to learn about this that is not the time when you unload every piece of worldly advice you have stored up for your entire lifetime it is not the time when you lecture and fill up the space with all the words that you want to fill these are things that i ve learned from experience it is instead a time when you hopefully are there to inspire the communication that is two way and principally coming from your teen the time with teens campaign will challenge parents to take stock of their own lives and work habits and look for ways to make more time for their children it will challenge businesses to offer more flexible work schedules and policies for parents and it will challenge churches and synagogues and mosques and schools and health care agencies and all community organizations to create more opportunities for families to spend time together but we have to do more than just raise awareness among parents we have to give parents the tools we all need to stay involved in our children s lives that s why we re also launching a new white house task force on navigating the new media age comprised of members from both the public and private sectors this task force will find ways to transform the tools of the media age namely the internet into tools for parents the task force will develop two new internet portals one that will link parents to information and advice on raising teens from health and safety to child care and education and a second to link teens to a variety of age appropriate resources on the internet we also recognize it is more difficult for parents to keep track of what teens are watching and learning on tv or on their home computer the ymca poll you ll hear about found that six out of 10 teenagers are watching television without parental supervision while 45 percent of all teens say they surf the internet on their own you know when we only had one tv in the home and you had to fight with your parents and your brothers and sisters to figure out which one of the three stations you were going to watch it was a lot easier for parents to supervise what their children were watching now we have so many opportunities for kids to see things without any parental supervision or even without an older brother or sister around saying that s stupid or how dumb that is trying to interject some reality into the world that the media conveys to our kids we also know that the v chip is now in effect and i strongly urge parents particularly of young kids but also of teenagers to learn how to program that v chip and to use it there are several media rating systems in place to help parents determine the appropriateness of the shows their children watch but with so many different systems parents must hunt for the information needed to decode these various ratings that s why we will ask the task force to work with the entertainment and media industries to create a single web site to help parents make sense of all the various rating systems and use them to monitor their children s interactions with the media i hope eventually we will get to a uniform system of ratings so that what is used on the video shows is used on the movies is used on the tv is used across the board this is only a temporary step the web site but i renew therefore my challenge to the entertainment industry let s create a voluntary uniform rating system so that all parents can better decide what s appropriate and what is not appropriate for their children to see the challenges before us are great and the time between childhood and adulthood as bill and i can attest is all too short but if there is one message we hope all americans will take away from this conference it is that each of us has the power to make a difference in every teenager s life and it is not just a task for parents the research and our own experience shows that oftentimes it is a teacher or a coach a minister or an employer a neighbor or another relative who can provide the mentoring and the stability that every young person needs and sometimes during a rocky period in a teen s life it may be somebody outside of a parent who can be turned to with good advice and suggestions so it is not just a conference aimed at teens and their parents it s really a conference for our entire country to be committed to make what is biologically a disorienting time for our teens and a time of exploration a confusing time to make it more of an opportunity and a real journey to self discovery to take a time of peril and turn it into a time of promise we have a lot of experts and certainly we have teens and parents as well we re going to be talking about what has worked for them and it will be a challenge to us but when i speak to groups of teenagers i always start by telling them how proud i am of the way that they are coping with their lives because the great vast majority of our kids are good kids that is not the message that we often receive on the media where we only see the stereotypes and the negative depictions and a lot of these kids are doing the very best they can in fact the flip side of our concern is that some of them take their lives so seriously and strive for such perfection that the teen years are a time of even heightened misery and anxiety because they don t think they re measuring up so we have got to do a better job in sending a message to our kids that we value them we love them we care about them and that s why we want to be as involved in their lives as possible so let me now introduce my co parent and someone who has been deeply committed to the young people of our country the president of the united states dem hclinton20 4 93 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you very much i want to thank eli segal for all of the work that he is doing in leading the charge to translate into reality the belief that national service is something that young people and not so young people all of us want to be a part of and i want to thank all of you who have gathered here at the white house for this celebration now this is how campaign promises sort of take on a new life a year ago i have to confess i never had any doubt that my husband would be president because i believed it was the right thing and i thought that the country was ready for the kind of change that he was advocating so when in a moment of careless aside i told vanessa this is such a great program and we believe in it so much why don t we do it in the rose garden next year i assumed that she was busy she had a lot on her mind it didn t rank way up there with recruiting more people to be part of public allies and i frankly didn t remember it either so when our collective memory kicked in and we all remembered that i had invited all of you to come i was very excited but then as often happens with campaign promises you get to the small print the small print is that i think specifically vanessa i said next year we ll do this in the rose garden but then there were too many of you to fit in the rose garden and so we fulfilled the campaign promise but not exactly so you re here at the white house and we re delighted you re here and we re excited by what your being here represents we ve already heard three of the most eloquent testimonies to service that anyone could hear when we heard from carl and sarah and maria because each in his and her ways talked about how service is not a one way street service is not doing something for somebody else and that s the end service is being committed and being part of the community in which you live and it means then that you get as well as you give there s a young man named matthew whose life has been changed because of carl just as matthew has changed carl s life there are 20 children in a classroom whom i wish you had brought with you whose lives are being changed on a daily basis because someone named sarah decided that teaching and using her education to help other people was something that would not only be good for her to do but something she would be educated because she had done and then there are a lot of people like maria who now feel part of our country because they have voted and because they have convinced other people to vote and because they now see that they have a stake in helping to change what goes on around them when i talk about service i often quote my friend marian edelman with that wonderful line from her in which she said that service is the rent we pay for living and service is a very fundamental way we connect with one another while we live it is the way that we find meaning in our lives both individually and collectively because we see what we are capable of and we watch it being reflected in the faces of others we see it in the houses we build we see it in the neighborhoods we help reclaim we see it in the lives we touch and then we come home and look in the mirror and know that we ve been reclaimed we ve been touched we ve been served and that is why this whole concept of national service that my husband believes in so passionately is at the root of what he sees as the need to rebuild and reclaim america and it is founded on very simple core values and i d like to talk about those core values because community opportunity responsibility and education are really at the core and the more we can expand the idea that we are interconnected and interdependent that we need one another in order to be fully whoever we were intended by god to be the more we understand the role that service has to play in an individual s life in a community s life in a nation s life so arrayed behind me are young people who are being honored for what they have done and what they represent but also arrayed behind me are lives that have been changed because of service i am very hopeful that the decade of the 80s in which individuality and selfishness and greed were viewed as virtues is over and i am particularly hopeful that the promise of the 90s will be fulfilled now will it be easy of course it won t as eli said i ve been doing service in some way or another for many many years and has it always been a success no it hasn t have i always felt that maybe i helped to change something not always but on balance in my life it has enriched my life and it has given me an opportunity to give back what i ve been blessed with but it is not going to be easy on a national level to translate those very personal values into widely spread concepts and programs that will take root and grow no matter who is president no matter what vanessa does next year no matter who is the esteemed senator from pennsylvania or illinois translating that kind of value into action and then making sure that action lives beyond the actors is what is behind our commitment to national service because we believe the american social contract the american dream america itself as we love it and understand it and believe in it is at stake as we move forward from this day and this occasion where we take a few minutes out to not only say thank you but to celebrate the accomplishments of these young people let s use the energy and the feeling that is gathered here to fuel us for the struggles that lie ahead which are not really over a program called national service but over the future of a country over what kind of people we are and will be what kind of opportunities our children will have what responsibilities all of us will feel for one another service goes far beyond what we can even put into words but those of us who have done it and believe in it know that it is part of what makes life meaningful and makes it possible for us to look each other in the eye as carl has done in his own face and say i can be somebody i can do something i can make a contribution and that s about the best definition of an american i ve ever heard thank you all very much dem hclinton20 9 93 hillary_rodham_clinton good morning and thank you all please be seated for joining us we were talking so much with dr koop in the back none of us heard our names and so that s one of the reasons we were a little bit slow getting here i want to welcome you to the white house i want to thank you for coming and being part of this process that we believe will lead to the kind of reforms in our health care system that many of you have talked about have spoken about and have actually done in the practices you have in the centers in which you practice at the medical schools that you direct and it is a particularly exciting moment for all of us to be on the brink of what we hope will be the kind of changes that will assure health security to every american and give opportunities again to physicians and nurses and those on the front lines of health care to make the decisions about what needs to be done for the patients in our country i want to acknowledge secretary donna shalala who is here she s not only doing an excellent job at hhs there are some who will argue that she may be the best golfer in the administration she played with the president last weekend also dr joycelyn elders our newly confirmed surgeon general is back there i think when it comes to prevention and communicating with large groups of americans who have not been part of the health care system but need to be for their own and their families well being dr elders will be an extraordinary voice dr phil lee the longtime advocate for for better health care for americans we enticed him out of his position which i think he thought was a position he would not move from in california to come back and i personally have been very grateful for dr lee s counsel and advice throughout this process ira magaziner dr judy feder others who are here judy and ira if you would stand the team that they have put together thanks to many of your institutions which as several of the deans of the medical schools have told me have meant you ve lost people for long periods of time to be part of this process we are very grateful i also want to thank the chairs of the health professions review group dr steve gleason and dr irwin redlener if you would stand please and there are many others who are in this room who have been such great helps to us and will continue to be as we move forward i m particularly pleased that an old friend of mine dr terry brazelton would be here dr brazelton who gives the kind of gives the kind of confidence to young mothers that dr spock used to give to mine and that many of you have given and we re very grateful for that we want to spend a few minutes this morning talking about where we go and how we get there and how we hope all of you will be involved in this process and i would like to introduce the vice president to say a few words about the way this relates to what we re doing across the board in the administration vice president al gore dem hclinton20 9 97 hillary_rodham_clinton well i want to thank all of you for sharing your experiences and success stories about charter schools and i think that there are just a couple of general points that i would make first what the congresswoman just said is critical when she talked about test kitchens because my husband i have said together and often that there is a good public school in every community in america but the problem is they don t learn from each other and they don t get to scale in the sense that we know what works but for too many years we have not been motivated sufficiently to do what worked in every school and so we are now seeing with the charter school movement an effort to do just that to take these in some ways old fashioned ideas that are now married to technology and very much motivated to be successful by the demands of the new economy and put them into action in schools across the country when we talk about parental involvement that is a very old fashioned idea that we have had to relearn when we talk about empowering teachers to design curriculum that too is something we know will work if we unleash the creative energies of teachers when we talk about giving students a chance to explore and learn and develop their own capacities that s what many of us try to do with our own children but which we deny to other children because of the bureaucratic structures and expectations of the old system so there are many aspects of what we heard today which would be very familiar in any setting 30 or 40 or 50 years ago in many parts of america but which we somehow lost track of as we got bigger and bigger and schools became impersonal and anonymous and really we lost our way in the very important connections that have to be made between homes and schools students and teachers and the understanding of how community has to support that magic secondly i think that the charter school movement should not be seen as a threat to public schools it should be seen as a liberation of public schools and particularly teachers and administrators who for many years have known what should be done but have felt unable to do so and there is certainly nothing hidden about the president s agenda on this he wants every school whether it is formally called a charter school or not to act like a charter school and that is our real objective in the charter school movement not only to create thousands more charter schools but to take the lessons from the charter school movement and literally infect every public school in america so that parents are standing at the door of principals offices so that teachers will not feel so oppressed in their classrooms but will join together to demand from administrators and school boards what they know their children need and for businesses which have in many ways the greatest stake in the future of our public school system to be constantly be prodding for academic excellence as in may communities they now prod for athletic excellence so the charter school movement is really a rallying cry that we hope will not only create more charter schools like the ones we have heard about today but encourage and give courage to public school patrons teachers and students around the country to say well you know if jose could find a home in a new charter school in san francisco why can t all the joses in our public schools feel similarly welcomed and supported and if gregg can go into competition with oracle in the 6th grade why can t all the greggs in america feel similarly encouraged to pursue their own intellectual excitement so we re very much appreciative of what all of you on the front lines are doing from san francisco to south central la to san diego to right here in this community and we really do appreciate the zeal with which you have expressed your excitement about this because we do want it to infect and to be contagious so that as yvonne said when i saw firsthand visiting her school every child will feel that that child is special and valued and appreciated and that s really what we re hoping to achieve with this kind of effort so thank you for doing what needs to be done in american public education dem hclinton21 6 96 hillary_rodham_clinton good morning and welcome to the white house the president the vice president mrs gore and i are very happy all of you could join us for this very special departure ceremony i would like to welcome billy and martha payne and other distinguished guests from the atlanta committee for the olympic games also georgia governor zell miller and his wife shirley are here and we want to say a special word of welcome and thanks to donna and mack mclarty who have been working closely with vice president gore to coordinate the administration s activities in support of the 1996 olympics and paralympics we re also pleased we could be joined by members of congress the cabinet the white house task force on the olympic and paralympic games and also the president s council on physical fitness and sports especially the cochair tom mcmillan all of whom are with us this morning we are also honored to have here today the ambassadors from nations that have hosted past summer olympic games i d like to extend a special welcome and congratulations to the men and women who carried the torch here in the district especially to the two runners who carried the torch to the white house last night dr i king jordan the president of gallaudet university and sister mary poppett i d also like to acknowledge martin begosh who is here as well as one of the torch bearers there were community hero torchbearers that the president first introduced in his state of the union address many months ago lucius wright of jackson mississippi and jennifer rogers of oklahoma city oklahoma and finally let us welcome some of the wonderful exemplars of excellence the former and current olympians from the d c area the u s men s soccer team and this year s who are doing well and this year s brilliant group of presidential scholars some of you may remember that my daughter and i had the privilege of witnessing the lighting of this same flame almost three months ago in olympia greece it was the traditional ceremony set amid the ancient ruins of olympia where the original games were held more than 2500 years ago on that beautiful sunny day in a place surrounded by olive orange and lemon groves it was very easy for us to feel the tradition history and symbolism of the olympic flame this flame carries much more than light and heat it carries the spirit of our family of nations the legacy of friendships formed over centuries of olympic contests and the hopes of the young men and women who will convene in atlanta this summer through them the olympic spirit will only grow faster and higher and stronger enabling all of us to renew bonds of international goodwill and understanding that is the heart of the olympic ideal that we honor here at the white house today now let me introduce to you a great friend of mine and a great athlete in her own right tipper gore dem hclinton25 3 98 hillary_rodham_clinton bana uganda muli mutyano it is such a great honor and pleasure for me to be here on the campus of this great university before i begin i want to thank president and mrs museveni for the warm hospitality that they have extended to us during our visit and i particularly want to thank mrs museveni not only for that kind introduction but i want to acknowledge her leadership on so many fronts especially her creation of the uganda women s effort to save the orphans i also want to congratulate her on her recent graduation from the university thank you for your warm welcome mr vice chancellor and no i do not mind at all for you re asking that the needs of the students and faculty here be met and i will carry your message back to the united states it is a pleasure once again to be with your vice president whom i admire so much and who told me that she too was a student and a teacher here at the university i am also delighted to be joined by the speaker of the parliament the deputy speaker of the parliament the minister of justice and attorney general the chief justice of the supreme court and deputy chief justice the minister of education the minister of gender and community development and so many of you distinguished guests and faculty and students it is wonderful for me to have been able to return to uganda last year when i visited with my daughter i made the promise that i would return with my husband and i m very pleased i could keep that promise i learned a lot about your country your struggles and challenges last year since then i have followed your development with great interest and very great admiration because i have some small sense from the conversations i have had with many men and women here in uganda and ugandans in the united states about what you have had to overcome as the choir sang the uganda national anthem a few minutes ago i thought about how appropriate it is for these words to fill freedom square today united free for liberty for 75 years makerere university has stood for those principles and yet i know that that forces of evil stole the life of makerere s first ugandan vice chancellor i know that the forces of evil arrested tortured and vilified students they pushed faculty out of the country and tried to demean those who stayed they wanted to destroy this world class university people like idi amin and his ilk are not comfortable in the light of freedom and education they prefer ignorance and backwardness and you did not let them succeed instead you healed the wounds of the past and you are now building this university for the future just as uganda is doing just as africa is doing out of the hard soil of the cold war democracies free market economies and civil societies are all taking root students who once fought oppression underground re emerged as liberators and now as leaders of a free uganda and voices for freedom and dignity and human rights once silenced are now again echoing through the halls of this university and across this country many such voices are here with us today i could call the names of many faculty and students government and academic leaders members of the professions and the businesses here in uganda people who stood up for freedom when it really counted we can hear the voices of freedom from sister rachele frassera the deputy head mistress of st mary s college in aboke when the lord s resistance army kidnapped 139 girls 75 percent of the student body she chased down the terrorists convinced them to release 109 girls and is working day and night to make sure all of them return safely we can hear the voice of freedom from dr joy kwesiga the former chair of action and development the former chair of the women s studies department and now dean of social sciences here at makerere she has worked hard to ensure that the victims of domestic violence are heard that their accusations are treated seriously and that the crimes are punished we can hear the voice of freedom from sarah bagalaliwo as a founder and chair of the ngo fida sarah instituted a legal aid clinic which over the last 10 years has helped thousands of vulnerable women understand and exercise their fundamental legal rights just a few hours ago my husband and i were in rwanda where we spoke with survivors of the 1994 genocide it is still hard to imagine that in the space of three months one million people were murdered nowhere has that number of people ever been murdered in such a short period of time in history we listened to a delegation of six rwandans who spoke of their experiences one member was a woman whom i met exactly a year ago here in kampala i could not myself go to rwanda but several women came to see me and we met here to talk about their experiences last year and again today i will forever see the faces of the people i spoke with as they described the human toll of rwanda s violence and what they were doing to rebuild their lives and communities as my husband said in his remarks today genocide destroys not only individuals but our humanity we must continue to bring healing to the victims and we must bring the perpetrators of genocide to justice we must continue to be vigilant about the dangers that still exist and do everything we can to make sure that nothing like what happened in uganda in the 70s and what happened in rwanda in 1994 happen again that means every one of us must act not just our leaders we must hold our leaders accountable it is for all of us to stand up for the rights of all people we must work to end atrocities around the world not just the ones that grab headlines but the indignities that people suffer quietly when they are denied the chance to speak or learn to work or eat when they re denied the chance to live free from fear or want in other words we should stand up for the rights of all persons to be fully human you have made many steps toward that goal here at this university i could not name them all but i want particularly to commend the university for creating the department of women s studies and now for creating the human rights and peace center there is no better time than for all of us now to reaffirm our commitment to human rights and peace for it was 50 years ago that the universal declaration of human rights was born and the world acknowledged a common standard for human dignity the document puts it very directly all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights all human beings not just men not just adults not just people of particular cultures or nations races or religions this declaration means that we must expand the circle of human dignity to all human beings and just think how much wider that circle has grown in africa in just a few short years only a decade ago who would have imagined that nelson mandela would move triumphantly from prisoner to president in south africa or that more than 30 years of turmoil would give way to healing and unity in mozambique and who would have imagined that it would have been your brave president president museveni that would have taken on the scourge of aids with his public health campaign and that he would and you would working together stem the rise of aids in uganda that is also standing up for human rights and who would have imagined that uganda would produce your vice president the highest ranking woman in any african government i could add the highest ranking woman in many governments around the world not just in africa and yet despite the steady march of progress the commitment here to universal primary education for example there are still who will claim that human rights are a luxury of the west that they have nothing to do with africa or asia that they are just the province of people like americans but the beliefs inscribed in the universal declaration were not invented 50 years ago they are not the work of any single culture of country they are universal and timeless sophocles wrote about universal human rights 25 years ago when he had antigone declare that there were ethical laws higher than those of even kings confucius articulated them in ancient china and we can look throughout this continent and find examples of ancient leaders of africa who also said that all people walk the same way all people must be treated with dignity these are the core teachings of all major faiths in the world they are the foundation of what it means to be a respected human being in africa in asia in america because they live in the human soul around the globe i have seen many women and men pushed to the margins of their societies they may know nothing of the universal declaration of human rights but they are eloquent in their beliefs that they were born with god given rights just as surely as they were born into the human family it is absolutely untrue that individual human rights and community rights cannot co exist the truth is they are indispensable to each other democratic progress is possible when all citizens can be heard economic progress is possible when all citizens have the tools of opportunity such as education and health care that will enable them to support their families yesterday president and mrs museveni went with my husband and me to visit a village the jinja village we saw women who are working together through a village bank to make their lives better increasing their income helping their husbands support their families better taking care of the children that were orphaned that they have taken in from brothers or sisters or other relatives and they are doing it because they ve been given access to credit they ve been given tools to enable them to make economic progress real security is only possible when we learn to live together and to respect each other s fundamental differences i found a quote i particularly like from a dinka chief who put it like this if you see a man walking on his two legs do not despise him he is a human being bring him close to you and treat him like a human being this is how you will secure your own life but yet it is not an easy task in my own country or any country to make human rights a reality the work is not done when a law is passed or a constitution is drafted securing human rights for all people is a never ending struggle in my own country it has taken most of our 222 years some of them bloody and few of them easy to extend the benefits of citizenship to all americans we went from a very small group of white property owning men having citizenship and gradually expanded it to include black men and then to include women but then we had to work to make sure that the words in a constitution meant what they said one of my predecessors eleanor roosevelt who helped to write the universal declaration of human rights was 35 years old before she could vote my own mother was born before women were allowed to vote in the united states and yet if we do not secure human rights for all none of us is secure in our own rights some of you may recall the words of the protestant minister living in nazi germany who said in germany first they came for the communists but i didn t speak out because i wasn t a communist then they came for the jews and i didn t speak out because i wasn t a jew then they came for the trade unionists and i didn t speak out because i wasn t a trade unionist then they came for the catholics and i didn t speak out because i was a protestant then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak out at the dawn of the millennium those of us who have the power to speak and all of you here associated with this great university by virtue of you being here and attaining this education not only have the power to speak but the obligation we must speak up wherever we see injustice and inequality and particularly today i want to speak up and ask you to speak up for the women in africa and all over the globe too many of them every day do the work that needs to be done managing the home feeding schooling and caring for children providing water and fuel but every day too many women are also being fed less and last too many are trafficked like drugs and sold into prostitution too many are left out when important decisions are made about their lives and their families and in their communities i want to commend uganda for your new local government act which will help more women be part of the decisions that affect their lives i am pleased to announce today that the united states government will provide 2 million to help train these elected official women as they assume their new roles and responsibilities because yes women s rights are human rights and everywhere i travel i meet women who are struggling to make sure that occurs we have to speak out when either law or customs treat women like children or second class citizens when women are blocked from owning land receiving inheritances securing credit or participating in the political process we also have to speak out for more countries like uganda to make sure that girls are educated two thirds of the 130 million children out of school worldwide are girls i wish that some of the people in those countries that still prevent girls from being educated would come and visit the classrooms i have seen here in uganda the bright faces of young boys and girls ready to learn so that they can become better citizens i am so pleased that universal primary education is a critical part of uganda s future there is much else we must speak up against violence against women the practice of genital mutilation women and children who are brutalized by conflict wherever it occurs in uganda a pilot program here has reduced the number of women who endure genital mutilation by more than one third and when i go to senegal in a few days i will meet with a group of women who over the last year have voted in their villages to end this practice and are helping others to do the same we must also speak up for women and children caught up in war and conflict around the world it used to be that women children and civilians were to be protected during a war today they are increasing the targets of war since the turn of this century civilian fatalities during war have increased from 5 percent to 90 percent and 80 percent of war s refugees are women and children you have seen this here in your country because nothing so offends any definition of human rights than the use of children as pawns of war and the mistreatment and abuse of women as a tactic of war the war in rwanda was waged against the lives and dignity of women rape and sexual assault were committed on a mass scale here according to a u n report the children of northern uganda like children throughout the world are also at risk last year when i spoke with president museveni he talked to me about the more than 10 000 ugandan children who have been abducted by the lords resistance army one of those children is charlotte and she is one of the girl s that sister rachele tried to save i met with her mother angelina at the white house a few weeks ago before we came on this trip she told me what had happened the night that the lra kidnapped charlotte and the other girls from st mary s school how they broke the windows tied up the girls beat them if they cried took them away into a life of unspeakable horrors thankfully many have been rescued or escaped or their freedom has been purchased but many others like angelina s daughter have not returned like terrorists and dictators throughout history the lra claims to be doing the lord s work but there is no greater sin than forcing children to murder each other family members and even the parents who brought them into existence there is no greater sin than raping young girls and sending them into slave labor and there is no greater sin than using children as human shields in battle the lra call themselves soldiers but they are cowards for only cowards would hide behind children in battle through a group called concerned parents association sister rachelle angelina and other parents are working to save their children and all children one of charlotte s classmates who escaped talked about what happened when another girl tried to escape listen to her words the girl who is brought in front of us and the rebels told us to stomp her to death we killed the poor innocent girl if we did not kill the girl we were going to be shot by guns we prayed for that girl in our hearts silently and asked god to pardon us and forgive us because it was not our will to kill her another girl who was rescued wrote i m pleading with you to find a way of stopping this rebel activity so they we children of northern uganda could also share in the peace that other children around the world are sharing in we need peace i m hoping that every government around the world and every citizen joins your government and people in uganda in your fight for peace and in your efforts to save these children already human rights watch and amnesty international are shining a spotlight on this tragedy unicef is helping to get assistance to groups working at the local level and non governmental organizations like world vision and gulu save the children organization are caring for children who escape there are three of those children here with us that i just had a chance to meet before i came out to see you their names are isaac and janet and betty they were kidnapped by the lra in the north they managed to escape eventually finding refuge as i looked into their faces and their eyes i saw the faces and eyes of children the world over and i thought to myself as i looked at these young men and women of uganda that we owe them and the thousands more like them everything we can do to make sure that they too have a chance like the children i saw yesterday to grow up in peace to be educated and to look forward to their own families and futures there are no easy answers but i want janet and betty and isaac to know and i hope that someday angelina will be able to tell her daughter charlotte as well that america cares about your children and we want to work with you to try to stop this tragedy and to care for the children who are its victims that s why i am very pleased to announce new steps our government is taking through the united states agency for international development first we will provide 500 000 directly to local groups like the concerned parents association and gusco to help them find abducted children and give them the medical care they need to heal second we will provide 2 million over the next three years for a new northern uganda initiative that will help the people living there plagued by rebel activity get jobs rebuilding roads dams schools health clinics and their own communities i am very pleased that other donors including the world bank have agreed to support these efforts third we will provide 10 million to local african ngos who are working to improve food security and to prevent ease and respond to conflict in the region and finally my husband and our government will increase their efforts to pressure sudan to end its support for the lra and their cowardly abductions of children we will work with you to end this terror and we will work with you to continue your rebuilding of your country but i want to add just one more thought because when we talk about democracy and human rights we know how important laws and institutions are we know that strong and free markets are also important because they unleash so much creative entrepreneurial energy from people like the women i saw in jinja yesterday but ultimately the struggle to protect human rights depends upon the millions of decisions and actions that are taken every day by ordinary people like us it is what alexis de tocqueville called the habits of the heart it is what we tell our children do we continue to tell them to hate those who our grandparents hated or do we try to help them give up that hatred it is what we tell each other in our neighborhoods our villages our workplaces when we hear someone making disparaging comments about someone of another ethnicity or tribal or racial or religious background do we say why do you say that about a person s group do you know the person can you make a judgment about that person as an individual if you cannot don t engage in stereotypes there have been too many stereotypes between us in so many ways every day each of us can stand up for human rights we don t have to be as brave as sister rachele rescuing girls we don t have to be as brave as these three young children who have endured so much but have come back to build their own lives we can in so many ways stand up for human rights every day that is why i m pleased that the human rights and peace center is developing a curriculum to be used throughout the campus so that the lessons taught and learned here will stay with everyone forever because ultimately all the work that the president or mrs museveni or the vice president or the vice chancellor any of those who are currently leaders in uganda can do will not be successful unless the students at this university and the children in the schools today understand how important it is to stand up for democracy and freedom and human rights no one understands better the importance of human rights than ugandans you understand the nightmares that come when they are abused no one is in a better position to honor the past generations by passing these lessons on to the next generations i hope that you will accept this challenge not only now as you are doing but for many years in the future many of us will look to uganda as an example as a country that is putting the past behind it in ways that the rest of us not only can admire but follow you have a historic opportunity to build a future that is not only one that you are proud to pass on to your children but one that stands as a beacon not only for africa but for the world many of us know what you suffered today we stand in admiration of what you are doing now to build a better future and we will look to you as we move toward this new century and new millennium to show us how people develop new habits of the heart to make it clear that every person is worthy of dignity and respect and that peace and freedom democracy and human rights will always be part of uganda s life thank you all very much dem hclinton27 4 99 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you please be seated and good afternoon it s an honor to join the president in welcoming all of you to the white house this afternoon we are especially honored to be joined by a very large number of senators and representatives from both parties who are here on the stage for this event also secretary rubin and attorney general reno secretary riley deputy attorney general eric holder under secretary of the treasury jim johnson and you will hear in just a few minutes from senator feinstein senator chafee representative conyers representative mccarthy also in the audience is mayor paul helmke from fort wayne indiana and bob walker president of handgun control inc we have come together in the wake of a terrible tragedy that has put our entire nation in mourning and that has reminded all of us once again that everything in life pales in comparison to our ability to keep our children safe and out of harm s way today our thoughts and prayers remain with the families and friends and the citizens of littleton as they bid emotional farewells to their beloved children and a dedicated teacher yet even in the midst of this terrible tragedy we also see the people of littleton pulling together to pray and comfort and sustain each other and many of the rest of us are gathering strength and hope from their example there are many people here today out in the audience and on this stage who have worked tirelessly to create the safe schools and communities that we all want for our children i particularly want to thank attorney general reno and secretary of education dick riley and secretary bob rubin because they have worked together tirelessly to try to create better conditions to provide for the safety of our children i also want to thank all the members of congress who are here who have proved that ending the violence and limiting access to firearms can be and should be a bipartisan goal there are many others in this room who are on the frontlines in creating safer communities religious groups advocates for gun control victims groups child advocates law enforcement community and parent organizations and we thank you all for coming you represent literally thousands if not millions of your fellow americans all of us here are searching for answers to what happened in littleton i don t know that anyone will ever be able to explain fully the events of a week ago nor i doubt can we create a perfect set of solutions that if followed would have prevented what happened at columbine high school or would stop forever acts of violence that occur in our communities around our country but that does not mean that we are either hopeless or helpless in the face of this tragedy instead we have to work together to come up with the best possible solutions that we can craft that we believe will make a difference for our children we come here to say simply that there are some tough things we must be willing to say and some tough steps we must be willing to take if we are to stop the violence now i hope that everyone does know that the vast majority of america s schools are safe but we also know that these schools in our country are not islands cut off from the rest of society no school security system or metal detector can keep out the culture of violence that dominates the lives of so many of our children when our culture romanticizes and glorifies violence on tv in the movies on the internet in songs and when there are video games that you win based on how many people you kill then i think the evidence is absolutely clear our children become desensitized to violence and lose their empathy for fellow human beings studies show what many of us have believed that such exposure causes more aggression and anti social behavior so today we must fully acknowledge once and for all that america s culture of violence is having a profound effect on our children and we must resolve to do what we can to change that culture it will take strong leadership i remember well when the president convened a 1996 white house conference on children s television where television industry leaders joined him in agreeing to air more educational children shows and also to work with the administration to establish a rating system to help parents navigate what s appropriate and what s not for their kids and soon we will have the v chip available for every home in our country but it will take more than strong leadership from the media and entertainment world to stop the culture of violence that surrounds our children kids need more caring responsible adults in their lives yet when single parenthood and two working parents are on the rise too many of america s children are growing up alone parents are the central figures in their children s lives but parents need help they need help from the larger community and that means all of us teachers police counselors community and religious leaders elected officials all of us have to help parents find the help they need and we have to work together to keep our children and our communities safe we also know that we have to do everything possible to ensure that young people do not have easy access to weapons we now know that includes not only firearms but bomb making materiel now any one of us that hasn t become completely amnesiac about our own growing up years know that children will have disagreements and arguments they sometimes will even have fights among themselves part of growing up is learning how to control one s impulses which is often difficult for young people but there is a very big difference between a schoolyard fight that many of us can remember and what happens today with the access to the arsenal of guns rifles and bombs that the two young men in littleton were able to bring into their school it is criminal how easy it is for children in america to obtain guns just last year 6 000 students were expelled for bringing guns to school and littleton is the latest tragic example of how the availability of those guns can turn a sense of alienation of rage of not belonging of not fitting in into a deadly encounter every day in america we lose 13 precious children to gun related violence every two days therefore we lose the equivalent of a classroom of students guns and children are two words that should never be put together in the same sentence and this president and this administration have been working hard and successfully to try to keep them apart i think we all in america should take pride in the passage of the brady bill which has denied handguns to 250 000 felons fugitives and stalkers and since the crime bill was enacted 19 of the deadliest assault weapons are harder to find on our streets we will never know how many tragedies we ve avoided because of these efforts but we do know how much more remains to be done today we will hear about further steps that we hope all of us are willing to take to make our schools and communities places in which all citizens can live in safety free from violence and fear in a few minutes the people of littleton denver and indeed all of colorado will be stopping whatever they do for a moment of silence on behalf of those who lost their lives i think it would be appropriate here in the white house that we join them and that we not only use that moment of silence to remember the victims of this tragedy and the perpetrators but that we think about all of the other children in america who tell us often that they re scared they re scared to go outside they re scared because they know people who bring guns to school they re scared because of what they see happening around them our first obligation is to try to make our children free from that kind of fear so if we could just take a moment in solidarity with the people not only in colorado who have suffered this loss but people throughout our country on behalf of our children thank you dem hclinton28 11 00 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you please be seated welcome to the east room of the white house for this important conference and i am delighted to welcome all of you here and particularly secretary albright and secretary riley senator leahy and congressman leach members of the diplomatic corps the nea chairman bill ivey and the neh chairman bill ferris librarian of congress james billington and all of the other distinguished guests who are here the president and i welcome you to the first ever white house conference on culture and diplomacy you know it has been said that culture may be described simply as that which makes life worth living it is the arts and humanities that give us roots that foster our civil society and democracy and that create a universal language so that we can understand each other better as nations and human beings even when the dialogue of diplomacy is strained or doesn t exist at all i recall so many occasions in talking with people who fought for democracy in their own societies often against great odds who told me how art and music kept their spirit going and kept them persevering in the face of often intolerable burdens and seemingly insurmountable odds at a time when resources are scarce and fears of a global consumer culture that threatens to homogenize us all are on the rise we are searching for new ways to share and preserve our unique cultures around the world and i cannot think of a more distinguished gathering to do that than our first panel whom we will hear from in a few moments we ll hear from one of the world s great musicians yo yo ma who has often entertained us here at the white house with his performances and who just stood in with the marine band strings much to their great delight and i think senator leahy because at the moment there was no white house photographer around but the senator who is quite an accomplished photographer memorialized this occasion for the white house archives i want to thank poet laureate rita dove who was also once a fulbright scholar in germany and whose german born husband accompanies us here on this conference today we re honored to have a nobel laureate among us you know wole soyinka is someone who means so much not only to his own culture but to the universal culture that respects not only great writing and thinking but a great human spirit i want to thank her excellency the imaginative minister of culture from italy i first met giovanna melandri in florence when the italian government sponsored a wonderful millennial conference on culture and the arts and giovanna played the leading role in pulling that together i want to thank his highness the aga khan for joining us today he is a powerful voice for culture and development around the world and for respecting the unique culture and history of different societies and joan spero the president of the doris duke charitable foundation a former state department official serving in this administration who is a great champion of the arts now that is just the panel and in the audience we could literally introduce everyone here with similar descriptions we have an extraordinary group of scholars creators government officials foundation heads business leaders from around the world i know that many of them will be introduced to you and you will be hearing from them as the day goes on our friend john brademus is here who is a champion of the arts in the congress and has gone on to be a champion as the head of a university and in his many other roles congressman lee hamilton who played a similar role my friend chuck close meryl streep john lithgow many many people who have really added to the culture not only of the united states but of their own nations and of the world so let me thank all of you for being here and for the important role that you will play this conference grew out of the ongoing efforts by secretary albright and under secretary evelyn lieberman to ensure that culture is not marginal but central to our diplomacy and it grew out of the many recommendations we ve received about how to strengthen u s cultural life and understanding around the world including the report done in 1997 by the president s committee on the arts and humanities which specifically suggested a white house forum now this idea is catching on around the world when i participated in the major world bank conference in florence on the role of culture in sustainable development there were people from all over the world in addition to the minister and myself who were thinking about how to take it to the next stage and many people have understood that if we want history and identity to be preserved in the global marketplace culture matters during these last eight years i ve been privileged to travel around my country and around our world meeting with people from turkey to vietnam to new mexico who are trying to save historic places documents and communities and who understand how important it is that there can be no freedom of speech or press or freedom of religion or political expression unless culture is free to thrive there can be no vibrant democracy unless people understand and preserve their own history and have a say in creating their culture and their future i remember in this room at president havel s suggestion when we had a state dinner for him that we invite lou reed as the entertainment and we ve received a little criticism from time to time in the last eight years nothing really that amounted to much and when word went out that lou reed was performing at a state dinner some in the press didn t understand but when we explained that it was lou reed s music and the velvet underground that he represented that really did help president havel get through some very tough times it really became clear that culture and the arts are powerfully political in individual lives and in the lives of our societies we hope that the work that comes out of this conference and that really is the impetus behind what we hope to achieve in the future really does have a life of its own after today and that each of us in our various roles will understand how significant it is that we pause for a moment here in the white house to recognize respect and honor culture no one has worked harder or more effectively to make that point here and around the world than our next speaker from her very first day at the state department the secretary has made sure that culture has been integrated into our overall foreign policy she s known around the world as a skilled diplomat a tough negotiator a tireless peacemaker a dancer extraordinaire a wonderful friend and an absolutely first class secretary of state madeleine albright dem hclinton30 11 95 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you very much lord mayor and thank all of you tonight is a night filled with hope and peace and for those of us gathered here throughout northern ireland and around the world often it is our children who offer us the clearest and purest reasons why peace and why this peace process is so important in a national competition asking students to share their hopes for a peaceful northern ireland in letters to my husband two students whom you see here tonight cathy harte and mark lennox won the top prize we will be privilege to have them in america at summer camp this coming summer tonight it is my privilege to read excerpts from their letters this is what cathy said my name is cathy harte and i am a 12 year old catholic girl i live in belfast in northern ireland and i love it here it s green it s beautiful and well it s ireland all my life i have only known guns and bombs with people fighting now it is different there are no guns and bombs cathy continues my dream s for the future well i have a lot of them hopefully the peace will be permanent that one day catholics and protestants will be able to walk hand in hand and will be able to live in the same areas catholics protestants black or white it is the person inside that counts what i hope said cathy is that when i have my own children that there will still be peace and that belfast will be a peaceful place from now on thank you cathy mark lennox is the same age as our daughter 15 and he explains in his letter the simple hows of achieving peace and this is what he says i am a 15 year old schoolboy from glengormley high school i am very pleased about the chance of permanent peace in northern ireland and the chances of living in a secure atmosphere if northern ireland is to have a future then we must all learn to live with each other in a more tolerant way also we must all work hard for peace and make a real effort we will have to change our ideas and work for change change must mean changing our own understanding of each other we must learn together and know more about our different traditions some people want to destroy peace and the peace process in northern ireland and mark says we must not allow this to happen as the lord mayor said in a moment the christmas tree will be lit as christmas trees will be lit all over the world in the days to come this christmas let us remember the reason behind why we light christmas trees let us remember the reason for this great holiday celebration and let us remember that we seek peace most of all for our children may this be one of many many happy and peaceful christmases in northern ireland this year and for many years to come and may god keep you and bless you and hold all of you in the palm of his hand thank you and god bless you dem hclinton5 12 99 hillary_rodham_clinton please be seated those of you who can be seated welcome to the white house it s a longstanding tradition for the kennedy center honors reception to be the first event we hold in the white house after all of the christmas decorations have been put up and are in place and i can think of no better way to kick off a season of celebration than by celebrating some of our most gifted and beloved artists through music and dance on film and on the stage the men and woman we honor tonight have stirred our hearts and soothed our souls over the years they ve made us hold our sides with laughter wipe away tears of sorrow and leap to our feet in appreciation one of them has even taught us how to shake a proper martini but most of all they have reminded us of the vital role that the arts can and should play in helping all of us appreciate the rich and complex world in which we live so we thank you we thank you for blessing our lives with your creativity and passion with your talent and imagination in a few hours you will be honored on america s stage but now we welcome and celebrate you here in america s house and to lead that celebration it is my great pleasure and privilege to introduce the president of the united states dem hclinton5 2 99 hillary_rodham_clinton welcome and please be seated the president and i are delighted to have you all here for the second presentation of the presidential awards for excellence in microenterprise development each of today s awardees is showing the power of microenterprise the power to transform welfare checks to paychecks poverty to economic growth and income despair to hope later in the program we ll hear from carol willoughby who will tell us how her life and family was forever changed by microenterprise i had the chance to see carol s work firsthand at a speech i gave last april at a microenterprise meeting she had made the banners hanging behind the podium or rather i should say her company had made them because with opportunity and hard work that s what she has created a thriving business and the name of that company as you ve heard appropriately enough is let the whole world know well when it came time to pick someone to participate in this program it was a very difficult choice because the stories from all of these award winners are going to really warm your heart and make you understand our commitment to microenterprise but let the whole world know really sounded a theme that we wanted to make sure could be sounded here there are many people in this room who have worked for years to make this day possible and i want to recognize and thank them starting with secretary rubin who has led the treasury in exemplary ways at the micro level but also understood the importance of the micro as well as the macro and so i m grateful to him and the work that s been done at the treasury department senator don riegle i believe is here former senator and don thank you for the work you did in championing the community development financial institutions fund while you were in the senate and there are other members of congress i want to thank senator harkin senator kennedy senator wellstone congresswoman eleanor holmes norton congressman oberstar and as well as our officials from the congress we also have the lieutenant governor of iowa sally peterson and a number of the agency heads who are responsible for the government s microenterprise program starting with usaid administrator brian atwood as well as the deputy administrator hattie babbitt small business administrator aida alvarez cdfi director ellen lazar the director of the national economic council gene sperling mary ellen withrow the treasurer of the united states and a former omb director who was on the team for microenterprise frank raines i want to thank all of you and the people you work with for the extraordinary job you have done you know many of us have heard about microenterprise over a number of years bill and i were trying to determine when we had heard about it and as we get older it seems harder to remember we think it was somewhere in the early 80s somewhere between 84 and 86 and we had heard about this because it was an idea that had been transplanted from bangladesh to the south shore bank in chicago a place that i am very familiar with and i was very anxious to learn more about how microenterprise was transforming both rural areas among some of the poorest people on our planet and urban areas in our own city i have been now around our country and around the world meeting with people who are the recipients of microenterprise awards and i have been just struck time and time again by the heroic stories that they tell i ll never forget the look of pride on the face of a woman i met from guatemala who told me that with the help of a small loan she had gone from being a mango seller on the streets to owning a market stall and eventually running a small business with 15 employees so from the time she had started on the streets selling mangoes to the age of 12 she had had a long hard effort of a lot of work but it paid off and she told me with great pride that she was sending her son to college in the united states in western india i walked into a women s bank which had only one room and the teller s counter was an old kitchen table and bank clerks transcribed all of the recorded transactions by hand on yellow sheets of paper but while i was there i met women who walked 12 to 15 hours from remote villages to take out loans some as small as 1 to invest in dairy cows plows or goods to sell at market these women were among some of the poorest and least educated of all indians but their loan repayment rate was nearly 100 percent and they told me what they had done with their loans and how that had transformed their lives enabling them to give their children better housing health care and other opportunities i was also very pleased last year in africa when i accompanied the president and the president of the uganda to a microenterprise site in a village some distance from the capital of kampala i don t think that a head of state had ever visited a village site of a microenterprise group and i know that two heads of state at the same time have never done that and i was delighted that both the president and president museveni had the same reaction that i always have a great deal of interest and a great deal of pride in what they were hearing on behalf of the people who were telling their stories but microenterprise had not only transformed lives abroad they are transforming lives right here at home i remember visiting the mi casa microlending program in denver and speaking to a group of women who told me about how they had had good ideas but they couldn t get any capital anywhere one woman memorably remarked you know a lot of good ideas die in the parking lots of banks she said you know i knew i was a good baker i knew i could open a bakery i knew i could employ people but i didn t have any collateral and the amount of money that i wanted was below the lending limit of the bank well thanks to microenterprise she was doing what she had dreamed of the origin of these awards go back to the united nations fourth world conference on women in beijing when i pledged on behalf of the president and the administration a commitment to spread microenterprise and microlending through our nations and also to have these awards as well we ve now seen the fruits of that effort from one end of our country to the other and you re going to hear about some of the exemplary programs in just a few minutes i believe that this is part of the president s strong initiative to try to bring free enterprise and capital development to those parts of our country that are still left out you know we ve done extraordinarily well thanks to the leadership of the president and the secretary of treasury and the others in the administration but we still have a ways to go in some of our inner city neighborhoods in some of our rural areas and in some of our indian communities particularly so what we re trying to do is to say we want a multi pronged strategy to provide economic opportunity to every american willing to work hard to achieve it on his or her behalf and no one understands the importance of the free enterprise system and the need for us to spread its benefits to every american than someone who has worked tirelessly over the past years to ensure that every american would have an opportunity to be successful and it is my great honor and personal privilege to introduce to you the secretary of the treasury bob rubin dem hclinton7 1 01 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you thank you thank you thank you so very much i am so gratified and so honored to be here with all of you and once again to take the oath administered by the vice president that will give me the privilege of serving you i m so pleased that so many people can be here and in addition to everyone who has spoken and everyone whom judith has introduced i would also like to acknowledge that included in the audience our speaker peter vallone and public advocate mark green and controller alan hevesi and bronx borough president freddy ferrer c virginia fields the president of the borough of manhattan and two men who gave me so much support good advice made me laugh and were there with me every step of the way my mayors ed koch and david dinkins it is such a great pleasure to be here with judith hope who has done a superb job on behalf of our party throughout new york and particularly in making it clear that there was an active dynamic democratic party in upstate new york and bringing people together who had never been brought into the political process on behalf of the democratic party or democratic candidates before i think it s important that we continue that work and i know that chuck and judith and every one of us will continue to work to make sure that upstate democrats have a place at the table and are included as we keep building a strong democratic party for the future and i thank all of you for your help and for being here with me today i want to thank again not only charlie rangel but the other democratic members of the congressional delegation some of whom could be with us today i m so grateful to all of you for your help and i look forward charlie to working with you and the entire delegation as we really put the priorities of new york on the front of the congressional agenda i think that there s an opportunity for us if we are united and focused to make real progress in the congress and i look to all of you to be good partners with chuck and me i cannot think of a better partner to have than chuck schumer i remember campaigning for chuck in 1998 and knowing because of his energy and determination that he would not only win but that he would be such a successful senator and after he was elected he d occasionally call me from other places in the state and talk about what was going on and his excitement was still as great as it had ever been and is continuing today he is so well respected in the senate and i am just so looking forward to working with my senior senator on behalf of all of you in the united states senate and again i want to thank al and tipper gore for being here and i have to say that it s been such a great pleasure for me to get to know al and tipper i remember when we first met when bill asked al to join the ticket i remember the convention of 1992 right here i remember getting on that bus and starting our journey to the white house together and along the way over the last eight years i have just grown in appreciation for both al and tipper and their commitment to public service and their commitment to our country i believe that this election of 2000 is not only one that we have to learn lessons from but that we can never let anything like it ever happen again i know that there are a lot of members of churches that i attended and visited during the past 16 months and actually going back eight or nine years and i know how often in a church or in a union hall or in an athletic field or anywhere that i appeared i would urge people to be sure to vote because i believed with all my heart that the real secret of our democracy is not our leadership but our citizenship and that our most fundamental obligation as a citizen is to vote and when i think of all of those people in florida who went to the trouble and took the time because they believed they were exercising their citizenship responsibility to vote and that their votes were not counted it only deepens my commitment to ensuring that our democracy will remain strong and we will do whatever is necessary to reform our election system so that every person s vote will always be counted at every election from now into the future i want to thank all of the entertainers and the artists who are with us people whom i admire and have such great feeling for i want to thank again the friendship baptist church choir from buffalo i want to tell them i m glad they made the journey down to be with us i want to thank the magnificent jessye norman the nobel prize winner toni morrison and the incomparable billy joel for everything they added to this event today and i particularly want to thank my husband and my daughter and my family you know when i began my listening tour and i started traveling all over the state and i spent the night in people s homes and i had breakfasts lunches and dinners with you and i went into supermarket aisles and stood and talked with people and i went to factory floors and i visited every kind of setting you can imagine i thought about how different it was to listen to the problems and challenges facing new yorkers in 1999 and 2000 than it had been in 1991 and 1992 i remember very well what our country was like and what was happening because of the failure of leadership at our national level right here in new york and i am so proud of the leadership that the president has brought to new york and america and the world because we are a better nation today then we were in 1992 and i could never have made this race and waged this campaign without the support of both bill and chelsea but now we have to ask ourselves where do we go from here you know when the curtain comes down here and chuck and i and charlie and the other members of the delegation return to washington and begin the work of the senate and the house we know that we ve got some big questions to answer we ve got some real hard issues to confront i m looking forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle i m looking forward to working with the new administration whenever and wherever that s possible but my first and primary obligation is to you is to serve the people of this city and state and to make sure that new york s interests and needs are never forgotten to be there constantly as a voice and a vote pointing out that this state which has given so much to this country deserves to have its fair share deserves to be taken seriously deserves to have the kind of economic educational health care environmental and other policies that the people of new york are demanding so when i go back to the senate and start the work of the 107th congress i m going to take with me all of the stories and memories the faces of everyone i ve met from the little girl in buffalo who asked me to please be sure that we could remain safe and that the crime rate would keep going down and that people who shouldn t have them wouldn t have access to guns to the factory workers in binghamton who wanted to be sure that the economy kept growing and that jobs kept being produced and that we were on the cutting edge of technology throughout new york and who understand that if our economy is not strong and well led from the top it will have an impact on our bottom line and our futures here in new york and i remember all of the farmers that i met from the tip of long island to jamestown and i respect so deeply the work they do because it s not only the work of producing food it s the work of maintaining a way of life that generations of new yorkers have enjoyed and cherished and as i walked the streets of brooklyn or the bronx or queens as i visited with transit workers on staten island as i went from one end of manhattan to the other i could see the hope and the dreams and the aspirations of people of all ages but none of this will be possible if we don t continue to build on the policies that have worked for america i want to be sure that the prosperity the progress and the peace that we ve enjoyed the last eight years under the leadership of the president and the vice president continues and i will be a strong voice and a strong vote along with chuck schumer to make sure we do everything possible to make that happen you know when we got on the bus and we headed out our first stop was in camden new jersey and there was a big banner that had been put up that was a scriptural quote that bill had used throughout the campaign from isaiah where there is no vision the people perish well for eight years we ve had a vision we ve had a vision of inclusion that brings people together regardless of race or gender ethnicity sexual orientation disability or any other reason for divisiveness we ve had a vision of expanding economic opportunity that made it clear we were going to pay down our debt and close our deficit and spur investment and keep us on a steady course we had a vision of educational attainment for every child no matter where that child is or who that child s parents are and i will not rest until we can look any child in this state in the eye and say we are giving you equality of educational opportunity now it is up to you to do the rest with your teachers and your parents and your community we cannot say that yet today you know as well as i do that i ve been in schools where children don t have access to libraries where they re crowded into the classrooms where the building is falling down around them where the number of computers is so few that they get on it maybe once every two weeks we can do better than that and i have a vision of making sure we provide quality affordable health care to every new yorker and every american regardless of age regardless of geography regardless of any other condition and as someone who has traveled this state in places where my friends who were privileged to be born and grow up here have not yet seen let me just tell you this is the most beautiful state in the entire country we have everything and it is up to us to be good stewards of that beautiful environment to make sure that the water we drink and the air we breathe and the ground we build on and that our children play on is safe and i am committed in every way that i can to build on the legacy of progress that not only this administration leaves behind but those who have filled this seat before me have helped to shape i am very grateful to senator moynihan for his leadership his guidance and his vision of the kind of government and people we could be and finally let me say that i believe that politics and government are a team sport no one gets to any position in any organization alone everyone stands on the shoulders of others everyone is held up by countless hands and i among all of you know so well i would not be here were it not for each and every one of you everyone who hosted a house party everyone who passed out literature everyone who sent a letter everyone who made a telephone call everyone who contributed everyone who worked a poll every single one of you and every day that i get up and go to work in the senate or travel throughout our state meeting with you i will never forget the honor you have given me and i hope that together we will demonstrate what is possible when there is a vision and people work side by side in order to realize it thank you all so much for this honor and god bless you god bless new york and god bless america dem hclinton7 2 97 hillary_rodham_clinton thank you thank you terry and thank all of you from the department of education who are here for your hard work and vision not only in this area but in so many of the others on which we have made progress in the last four years i want to thank the sponsors of these awards terry s already mentioned nortel and glaxo wellcome and keenan and the regional education laboratories this is one of the most important statements that we could make about how we will achieve the high educational goals that the president outlined in his call for action last evening i had the opportunity as all i hope of you did as well to listen to that speech and to hear the emphasis that the president placed on education as a national security issue as one that we should turn our attention to with the same commitment and nonpartisan zeal that we in the last 50 years gave to our foreign policy in our efforts to win the cold war there are some who still will question why is the president of the united states on the eve of a new century spending about half of his state of the union talking about education to those who might ask that question i would reply as the president did last evening that it is through education and a national commitment to education that we have the best opportunity to lift up all of our people to be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities that will be available to them in the future you saw last evening that there were two students and a teacher who had participated in a rather remarkable consortium in the area north of chicago to put together best practices so that 20 school districts could pool that information and they could prepare their students to compete in the third international math and science study test for a number of years starting back in 1983 when my husband asked me to chair the education standards committee in arkansas i have followed with great interest the international measurements that have been utilized to determine where our students stacked up against their peers around the world now i know and those of you who are educators know that our kids are as bright as and hard working as children anywhere in the world it is not a question of who our kids are we also know that our teachers are as dedicated and hard working and committed as teachers anywhere in the world and yet somehow when we were being measured on international tests our students were not scoring as high as i think they could and yet it became clear as we look at programs like the one that the president highlighted last night from the chicago suburbs that with the proper focus and teacher training and understanding of what the standards are our children can be competitive with anyone and in fact those youngsters who took those tests as the president said were first in the world in science and second only i believe to singapore in mathematics so we know that properly organized with the right tools at hand our children can be competitive and be prepared for whatever the 21st century has to offer now in order to improve student achievement we have to have good teachers and good teaching and yet too often teachers are left out of the equation when it comes to discussing reform and as terry said too often the tools for advancing teacher professional development are considered extraneous or marginal that they are not part of what it takes to create world class schools and yet every one of us in this room who are here to celebrate these awards knows how important it is to provide for the kind of continuing development that is provided in other professions we expect other professionals to have ongoing professional development they are tested periodically in order to advance in their profession they are required to attend certain kinds of programs they may be evaluated on a regular basis and now all of us who care about education and particularly educators know that that is exactly the model that we need to follow here in our country when it comes to preparing and maintaining the best teachers in the world that is why the president s budget which will be released tomorrow invests in teacher training it provides funding so that 100 000 teachers nationwide can seek national certification as master teachers and contains a 25 percent increase in the amount of funding devoted to goals 2000 it s also why he has called on the national commission on teaching and america s future for a new effort to help communities and states promote excellence and accountability in teaching we need to value our teachers more we need to help them set and meet higher standards not only for their students but for themselves today in georgia along with secretary riley the president will be releasing this call to action for american education in the 21st century which takes the 10 points that he spoke about last evening and expands on them in some detail giving examples about what works and also providing more information about what he is going to be requesting in the budget i am so pleased that the successes that are being highlighted here will be spread throughout the country so that other districts will learn from what you have already achieved one of our challenges in education whether it comes to standards or professional development is to take what works in one district and translate it and transplant it into another to learn from one another to offer technical assistance so that we can see how with some modification perhaps what worked in one of the award winners here can work in its neighbors i know we re going to have the presentation of the awards in a minute but i would like to just call out the names and have everyone associated with these various districts just raise your hands so that i can have an idea of who is here and congratulate you a little bit ahead of time from the samuel mason school in roxbury massachusetts who is here good from the san francisco unified school district who is here for that good from the wilton school district in connecticut who came from the woodrow wilson elementary school in manhattan kansas and from the lawrence public schools in kansas i know that you will be awarded a cash prize funded by the private interests that are the sponsors here to be able to support professional development activities and to help share the strategies and lessons that you have learned and i would only ask one thing from those of you who are winners and all of you who have supported this process we have to do a better job getting the word out when terry referred to the sit and get strategy of professional development unfortunately she was describing what is still too often the norm in many districts and schools around our country but if we have enough people like those of you gathered here to spread the word about professional development and to demonstrate how it works i believe we can see a grass roots movement around the country embracing professional development and using best practices i hope that these awards which will be annually awarded will send a very strong signal to educators and to those who we hope to enlist in becoming educators that the role teachers play in our children s lives is second only to parents and it is the most important job anyone can do for pay to go into a school and to work with young people and particularly since we know so many of our children face challenges that were not part of our growing up to be there to know how to handle the intellectual and emotional and social needs that our children present to us is the most difficult but certainly based on my friends and my own observation one of the most rewarding ways anyone can contribute to society and i hope also that we will put to rest the idea that the work of teaching belongs to any one group or any one level of government or any one sector of our society the president was right in calling for a national effort you are demonstrating that that national effort must be implemented on the local level but that we need to support one another in meeting the challenges our children face i have said before that i remember clearly many many years ago when i was in elementary school and sputnik went up that the entire nation became mobilized around how we would teach math and science more effectively to people like me in the fifth or sixth grade and i can remember clearly my teachers saying to me you should learn this because your president needs you to learn this well that was a little daunting when you re 10 or 11 but i took it seriously and i felt as though and my classmates did and my teachers did that we were engaged in a great national effort now nobody from washington told miss metzger or mrs krause or mrs king how they were supposed to teach me but the fact that they had the big stick of the president that they could use to intimidate us into learning all of this stuff that we didn t understand really worked i would make the same argument today it is a little more difficult perhaps for some to see that in the absence of an obvious challenge like the soviet union and international communism that we should have the same emphasis on our national need to inspire better teaching and better learning but i think we are at just the same moment of challenge as we were those many years ago because we know that it may not be with weapons that we will be facing across an ocean that will endanger our security but it will be with competitiveness and perhaps across a negotiating table or in front of a computer that we will determine not only our own individual futures but the future of our country and in order to be prepared we must have the best teachers we possibly can have we must have students who understand what it means to go into this new global economy and we must have parents and citizens and political leaders who support all of you in the work that you do so congratulations and thank you for this commitment dem hdean11 4 02 howard_dean thank you the parade was a lot of fun it was the greek independence parade in boston and mike dukakis said well if you re going to go in that parade i ll come down and march with you so that was great we re marching down and we get past the reviewing stand it s a pretty fantastic parade and every speech from the reviewing stand was in greek i don t know how many votes are there but they are fluent and totally in greek only but it was an interesting parade and perhaps not an auspicious start i m going to say one word that is going to be out of context here and i ll get it over with early in the speech i m a fiscal conservative i ve never submitted a budget in 11 years as governor that exceeded the gross domestic product of the state i ve cut the income tax twice what in the hell am i doing here with a group of progressive politicians i m here because i think social justice can t be accomplished without a balanced budget i m here because i think president bush has returned us to the days of borrow and spend republican politics which may sound fine on a temporary basis but we are undermining social security undermining medicare and have not stimulated the economy let me tell you what s in this budget if you don t know just for openers not only has he cut immunization money for children in order to finance tax cuts for people like ken lay but the amount of money that s coming to the states next year for highway construction is 30 percent lower than it is this year that means that there are going to be 150 000 construction workers in america out of work by this time next year and the congress is going to put some of that money back but they can t put it all back and why is that because in a single year we have gone from surpluses as far as the eye can see to deficits as far as the eye can see and it s now not responsible to add all that highway money back in to the federal budget so you tell me how it is that we have passed a stimulus package which results in 150 000 american construction workers out of work you tell me how that s a stimulus package forty percent of that money went to people who make 350 000 a year or more if this administration is about cutting immunizations so that ken lay can have a tax cut then we better change this administration and we better do it right now when i came into the governorship it was in 1991 those of you who are from new england know that that was the worst recession since the depression the peace dividend was great for the country but it wasn t so great for california and new england which were heavily defense dependent i had the largest deficit in the history of the state and the highest marginal income tax in the united states of america and in the history of the state we had to balance the budget we had to cut taxes i knew we were never going to get any investment and jobs in vermont if we had the highest marginal income tax in the united states and while we were cutting taxes and balancing the budget and struggling to do what we could to fund programs the commissioner of corrections comes to me he says governor i need a 14 percent increase i said all kinds of things which we haven t heard presidents say since we heard the nixon tapes then i said you can t have a 14 percent increase if you have a 14 percent increase that means i have to cut health care or education or something like that this is a level funded budget the long and the short of it was that he got his 14 percent increase we were being sued for prison overcrowding my predecessor had built a new prison which i had kept closed because we couldn t afford the operating money we had to open it i promised myself then that 20 years from that time some other governor wouldn t be sitting in my chair adding 14 percent to the corrections budget while we were cutting health care and education we plan in this country and this is the second reason that this administration has to be changed in this administration and in this country we plan for two and four and six year cycles we don t think about what happens 20 or 50 or 100 years down the line the roads that we drive on today in vermont with the exception of the interstate were set out 200 years ago by people who walked from connecticut to get to vermont for a better life then they became horse trails then they became wagon trails eventually they became roads which are inadequate for our transportation network the moral of the story is that the people who set those roads out didn t realize there was going to be an automobile but we re still living with the consequences of those decisions that were made hundreds of years ago we live with the consequences of our lack of investment in children 20 years after the investments don t get made prisons are a necessary part of american life you can t allow bad guys and violent people to run around bopping people over the head but prisons are the most expensive and the least effective social service intervention that we do the question is this any competent qualified kindergarten teacher can tell you who the five kids in his or her class are who are most likely to end up in jail 15 years later if we know who is likely to end up in jail 15 years later why is it that we re not making the investments now so that those children don t use up money in foster care and special education and ultimately the prison system and then end up worse than they were when they went into prison why is it that we are not making that investment so we started in our state right then and there although we had no money investing in a program called success by six we stole the name from minnesota we started the program on our own every mother who gives birth in our state is visited by somebody from the community and offered a home visit eighty seven percent of those folks say sure that would be great this is not a low income program this is for everybody in the state when we visit those homes most people don t need services they re happy to see us a little reassurance sure give us a call if things aren t going well but the people that do need services get services when that child is 2 weeks old not when they arrive at the schoolhouse door at 5 years of age and the kindergarten teacher says oh my lord imagine what s been going on at home i started off by telling you i was a fiscal conservative and i am i don t think we ought to pour money into social services programs if we don t think they re going to work or if they re just on somebody s theory so we measure everything we do four or five years later we looked at child abuse rates for kids 0 to 6 in our state for physical child abuse the rate was down 50 percent and for sexual child abuse it was down 70 percent in those years those are investments that are never going to have to be made because those kids are not going to grow up to be abusers when they re teenagers and they re not going to end up in prison for violent crimes that s what needs to happen in this country we need to think about the very small amount of money that it takes for children and families to grow strong that is such a tiny amount of money we did it while we were cutting the budget and cutting taxes and yet the investment is enormous we haven t seen what s going to happen 20 years from now when hopefully the prison incarceration rates are going to start to go down let me tell you one other thing that we did during this time of cutting the budget because i m a physician i thought carefully about what mark i wanted to try to leave on this office i decided that ever since i was in medical school i wanted americans to have health insurance and that we were the last industrial country in the world without universal health insurance of some kind and that ought not to be the case so we tried as president clinton did to have a bill that would insure all americans and harry and louise didn t do us any favors either but we got something that the president didn t get in our state today if your family makes 52 000 a year or less every child in that family under the age of 18 is entitled to health insurance 96 percent of all our kids have health insurance in vermont 96 percent 92 percent of all adults have health insurance in the state of vermont now look i m not a political idiot harry and louise got there because they did something that was pretty smart even though it wasn t entirely honest what harry and louise did and the message that we need to take home from this is that harry and louise convinced the 80 some odd percent of americans who had health insurance through their employer that they were going to lose something in terms of quality and choice if we did anything to help the 16 or 18 percent of americans who don t have health insurance they convinced americans that that was the gospel truth we can get universal health insurance in this country we can do it without the kind of pain that we went through in 1993 and that we ve been through before we ought to have a program in this country for everybody up to age 22 to get health insurance through our dr dynasaur program which is essentially medicaid with federal payments it ought to be run through the states like medicaid is the states will complain a minute about unfunded mandates until i tell them that what we re going to do at the federal level is take back all the responsibility for dual eligibles that s poor people over the age of 65 who can t use medicare because it s too expensive for them and they need help paying for drugs and basic health care that s a switch that s pretty even although the states make a little money but the growth rate in dual eligibles is a lot higher than it is in taking care of kids i think the states would be delighted if we would take responsibility at the federal level for those over 65 so that takes care of everybody under 22 now why is it 22 and not 18 because 18 to 22 there is a lot of transition in those years some kids are in college some are in the work force the truth is if the 18 to 22 year old hand the money they wouldn t spend in on health insurance they would buy a motorcycle they re dirt cheap to insure so we might as well do that and make sure that everybody under 22 has health insurance over 65 we already have the problem solved except that we need an adequate prescription drug benefit for seniors and we cant have one why because the money went to ken lay the first thing we need to do is roll back those tax cuts that s what were going to do when the next administration comes in the american people know those tax cuts were a farce they didn t ask for them in the first place it was the right wing of the republican party that wanted them they know they were sold a bill of goods because they believed in the eighties maybe that you could use supply side economics everybody believed that except george bush s father and we all should have listened to him right they know that that was a farce in the eighties because we piled up enormous deficits and more than tripled the national debt they certainly don t think it s going to work right now if you ask the question this way is it more important for seniors to have access to prescription drugs or is it more important that we have a 1 6 trillion tax cut because you know what i know a lot of middle class people who are doing their taxes right now when you find out you had to pay tax on that 300 or 600 rebate you realize what a hocus pocus scheme this was i knew it the minute i opened the check that i got because i looked at it and it was from austin texas what a coincidence was yours from austin texas or is that just because i live in vermont and they happened to send the checks from texas we can pay for that prescription benefit and social security could be stable and we wouldn t have to be raiding their trust fund if we didn t have those tax cuts which went again to benefit the folks that gave you enron for those between 18 and 65 i think we ought to have a health care system that s built on the present employer based system now i know when you come to a group of progressive people and there s a lot of people here who would like single payer and so forth and so on but i m telling you right now i m a total pragmatist i want health insurance i ve been working on it for 20 years i want everybody to be insured i really don t care what kind of a system we have but i know when you go over to congress and see all the folks spreading around money and giving 1 000 and up contributions to all the folks we re not going to get a single payer system so let s not talk about it now we ll settle for a single payer for kids a single payer for adults which is what we have in this country let s look at those working americans it s not people who don t work who don t have health insurance it s working people who work for small businesses who cant afford it they work for big corporations who only want to hire part time so they donut have to give benefits they work for themselves and they cant write that kind of a big check to insure their families those people need insurance we can deliver it with an existing system they can buy into government programs weave already passed that program in the senate if the house wasn t republican in our state we would have passed the thing and we would have something approaching universal health insurance for working people in our state if we can do it in a small state like vermont which is 27th in income in the entire country we ought to be able to do it in the united states of america this party ought to lead that fight let me just close out with a couple of other things that i think are important we haven t talked about the environment i m not going to go into great detail other than to say that again we see the case of planning for two and four and six years and don t see the long term i was flying to california two days ago on an airplane and suddenly realized that if we ever do get in trouble the automobile industry is going to be okay because we re going to have hybrids and we re going to have ev s and we re going to have fuel cells but you can t stick a zillion lead zinc batteries in an airplane so there are a lot of folks in the industry in the industrial world that ought to be with us when we re starting to talk about renewable energy it s not just a matter of dealing with anwr do you think drilling in anwr is going to solve our energy problem do you realize that if you increased the corporate average fuel economy standards for trucks and cars in this standard by 3 miles per gallon 3 miles per gallon not what just got defeated in the senate but just simply 3 miles per gallon that is twice as much oil saved in one year as exists in anybody s estimate of what s in anwr let s not get divided in the labor movement about whether we should drill in anwr or not let s look four and six and 10 years down the line about renewable energy which is what we need to be focusing on let s talk about pensions the pension system in this country is a disgrace six years ago there was a small trucking business called saint johnsbury trucking that was based in my state they had a couple of hundred people and some offices and trucks elsewhere that were driving around they went bankrupt and people were laid off i went up there and a guy came to me who was three weeks short of retirement come to find out that the pension funds had been raided there was nothing left for him he was going to live out his days on social security three weeks short of retirement the guys who did the leveraged buyout to take over saint johnsbury trucking so they could raid the assets had paid themselves off 4 million bonuses before the company went bankrupt there is no reason for that we need real pension reform not the kind of pension reform they re talking about in the house with all these loopholes in it not the kind of pension reform george bush is talking about so his buddies from enron can still steal from the company while they re telling everybody to buy the stock and the financial condition is going to hell not that kind of pension reform we need pension reform so that companies cant raid the pension funds if they get into trouble its not their money because it isn t their money its the working peoples money and they are the ones that earned it in the first place they are the ones who have to survive on it ken lay is going to be okay in his 8 by10 cell in allentown when he gets to be 65 years old at least that s where i hope he is i would be happy to pay his pension from there we need pension reform we need to work towards a livable wage one of the proudest moments as governor that i had was when we were negotiating with our employees union and the management we put on the table that we were going to give everybody an across the board same dollar amount raise i ll be honest with you the middle level of that management raised hell the people at the upper pay scale didn t like it but in this country and i make this point not because i m a socialist and i believe each according to his means and all that stuff i make this observation as a social observer if in any country democracy or not the gap between the rich and the poor gets too large civil unrest is often the result that happened in this country in the depression so conservatives ought to like the notion of a livable wage just as well as liberals ought to because if you want a society that works everybody who participates in it has to be able to support their families if we talk about welfare to work and i was the first governor in the country that did welfare to work we got waivers from bill clinton when he walked in the door you ve got to talk about dignity and the ability to support your family at the same time and that means a livable wage free trade i think free trade is a good thing but i think it has to be accompanied by fair trade the reason free trade is a good thing is this we talk about how important the military is for our national security it is important and they do a great job but the truth is that something that s even more important in our national security is building stable democracies around the world because by and large democracies do not go to war with each other we ve got a hell of a job in front of us afghanistan is basically a nation in the 12th century which we suddenly have to figure out how to get into the 21st century economic opportunity is part of that one of my great hopes is that by improving the economies of other parts of the world women will become economically empowered and politically empowered in order to build a stable middle class which creates the climate for a stable democracy women have to participate fully in the political and cultural and economic life of that country the key to a strong foreign policy is trade but we can t have trade if all we have recreated is the conditions that led to the trade union movements in the 1880 s in the united states we cant have trade if 12 year olds are working 12 hour shifts in cotton mills with no light if women are exploited and living in small windowless 8 by 8 shacks put together by whatever is handy at the local dump so they can work a 12 hour shift in the maquiladora with no benefits and if that maquiladora is dumping chemicals into the local river some of which incidentally run into the united states fair labor standards and environmental standards are critical and essential to free trade and we should never pass another free trade fast track agreement without themever i say this as somebody who believes in market economics i think the capitalist system is the greatest system that has ever been invented by man because it takes advantage of all our talents and our faults but the role of government is to make sure that the excesses of a capitalist system don t undermine that s why we need things like ergonomics regulation that s why we need things like free trade and fair trade it s why we need international labor standards and it is why we need international environmental standards so that we aren t subsidizing with our children s health in this country and with the children s health in the countries that we trade with the price of goods that moves back and forth i m not asking that the wages be the same in every country but i am asking that working conditions and environmental conditions be the same that is also part of the level playing field finally i don t believe that with president bush and his 75 percent favorability rating that that entitles us to give up our principles and entitles us to keep quiet when we shouldn t keep quiet my reputation is as somebody who is blunt and i daresay i haven t disappointed nobody is going to agree with everything that i say but one thing that i say we have in common is this if we don t stand up to the principles of this party we are making a terrible mistake i don t care if the president s favorability rating is 110 percent the truth is that working people in this country are still struggling through the decade of prosperity and now through the recession that pensions are still being stolen because of the laxity in congress and in the administration that health care still is being done without for hundreds of thousands of children all over this country the largest percentage of which i might add happens to be in the state of texas that working people still work harder than any of us in this room for less money and less benefits that single mothers still have to go to work and leave their children unsupervised because we won t put money into after school programs and we won t put money into child care these are things that the american people need to hear about they need to have a choice in the election about whose policies they re going to support are they going to support tax cuts for ken lay are they going to support rolling back immunization money so that we can fund those tax cuts are they going to support less money available for the nations highways so that folks who make 350 000 a year can somehow stimulate the economy are they going to appreciate itthank you so much for the 300 checkwhen they find out that nine months after they got it they have to pay taxes on it and pay it back donut the american people have a right to hear about these issues and make a choice i think they do and you know what i think they re going to appreciate hearing about it and you know something else in 2004 i think there s a pretty good chance if we take that tactic and if we show what the agenda is and what the difference is that were going to win thanks very much dem hdean18 2 04 howard_dean my thanks to all of you who got this crowd together in about three hours notice i appreciate that very much and my thanks to an awful lot of people but my particular thanks to vermont i started this two years ago and i see governor kunin is here in the crowd so i m going to tell a story that she s going to appreciate in particular but all of you will because it s a local story the first thing i ever did is i went down to a chamber of commerce meeting in portsmouth new hampshire i was invited down so i went down with a few brochures in my back pocket and i got down there and gave the speech and then they asked questions as they do at rotaries it s a lot like going to a rotary or chamber here and the last question was somebody who got up and said this they said well governor you have a great business climate in vermont it s just terrific and the one here in new hampshire stinks can you send your people down here to tell us what to do i thought you d like that that s an inside joke for those of you who are from vermont we love to hear people talk about new hampshire that way well actually i did pretty well in new hampshire we did have a have had a real record of achievement in this state creating jobs providing health insurance investing in children balancing budgets and i said when i left the governor s office that if the rest of this country were like vermont this country would be much better off and what we set out to do was make the rest of the country more like vermont and so far we haven t succeeded but we have a long way to go what we did show is that by standing up and telling the truth and not worrying about polls and focus groups you could actually get support in this country from voters we started the campaign office in burlington there are an awful lot of people and some of you should raise your hands who drove up here unrequested unknowing showed up no salary finally we grew in to you and we were able to pay you a little something but we really appreciate people from all over the country particularly young people one quarter of all our people who gave us money were under 30 years old in this campaign i have not seen that happen since i was under 30 years old and that was a long time ago this has been a campaign that has been extraordinarily different the new approach planting seeds on the internet strengthening grassroots face to face obtaining support from hundreds of thousands of small donors all these steps can revitalize our democracy and return power to ordinary americans all of us have done these things together we have exposed the dangerous radical nature of george w bush s agenda we have demonstrated to other democrats that it is a far better strategy to stand up against the right wing agenda of george w bush than it is to cooperate with it we have led this party back to considering what its heart and soul is although there is a lot of work left to do i am very proud of all of you and very grateful to all of you for your extraordinary hard work to the staff who ve worked exceptionally hard very long hours worse than mine sometimes for all of you who traveled around the country showed up at our office worked around the clock because they believed in what we were doing thousands of americans who have given generously of their time in their states because they believed in our cause i want to particularly thank all our congressional supporters many of whom signed on with us when we were an asterisk in the polls because they believed that it was the right thing to do for their country there are people in washington who are going to do the right thing in this party stand up and be recognized and stand up for what s right with america instead of being poll driven and believe me we are going to support those people in september and in november september if they have a primary and then in november i want to thank the service employees international union and the painters they stuck with me they stood with us when the others abandoned us and i am forever grateful to those people in the labor movement who stood up for what was right and not what was popular i want to thank all the state and local officials who stood with us many of them like governor kunin and others who went to other states for us to represent us all over america i want to thank the dean s list these are the big donors we didn t have a lot of big donors but the ones that we had signed on with us when we were nowhere we were an asterisk in the polls they did not do what the establishment of the democratic party did they followed their hearts and stood up for what was right and they changed this party too i want to thank the 300 000 small donors that decided that they wanted their country back and we are now in the process of taking our country back thanks to you i want to thank all the people in every state who heard our message and supported us and i of course finally and most importantly want to thank my wonderful wife who finally after 12 years made her political debut in wisconsin iowa new hampshire i also i also want to thank judy for at least promoting the debate that s needed to happen in this country for a long time about whether a woman needs to gaze adoringly at her husband or follow her own career now i lost my place i am no longer actively pursuing the presidency we will however continue to build a new organization using our enormous grassroots network to continue the effort to transform the democratic party and to change our country and i and speaking to all of you and all of the hundreds of thousands of people around america who are going to get this word either by the establishment media or the internet i have some things that i specifically want to ask of our supporters first keep active in the primary sending delegates to the convention only continues to energize our party fight on in the caucuses we are on the ballots use your network to send progressive delegates to the convention in boston we are not going away we are staying together unified all of us secondly dean for america will be converted into a new grassroots organization we need everybody to stay involved we are as we always have going to look at what you had to say about which directions we ought to be going in and what we ought to continue to do together we are determined to keep this entire organization as vibrant as it has been through this campaign there are a lot of ways to make change we are leaving one track but we are going on another track that will take back america for ordinary people again third there have been a lot of people who have decided to run for office locally as a result of this campaign we want to encourage you out there in the grassroots effort run for office support candidates like you who run for office and we will use this enormous organization to support you as you run so we will change the face of democracy so that it represents ordinary americans once again government that will not be bought and sold let me be clear i will not run as an independent or third party candidate and i urge my supporters not to be tempted to support any effort by another candidate the bottom line is that we must beat george w bush in november whatever it takes i will support the nominee of our party i will do everything i can to beat george w bush i urge you to do the same but we will not be above in this organization of letting our nominee know that we expect them to adhere to the standards that this organization has set for decency honesty integrity and standing up for ordinary american working people well we re going to take back congress but we re going to take the white house too believe in yourself and we re all together we can believe in ourselves let me just say something to the younger folks here those of us who do not have my hair color one of the advantages of age and they re less than i thought there were when i was 25 is that you get to see things come around a second or third time and one of the things that i realized a long time ago is that change is very difficult there is enormous institutional resistance to change in this country we have seen that in this campaign as we literally terrified people sitting in their salons in georgetown that they might have to look for work someplace else if we ever won it is natural for people to resist but it is also inevitable that we will win change is difficult you cannot expect people with great privileges taken at the expense of ordinary working people to surrender them lightly but the history of humanity is that determined people will overcome obstacles and we will overcome the problems that this country is facing as a result of george w bush and as a result of a washington establishment that has forgotten who sent them there some of you have been on the road with me or have seen the speeches have heard this before but it s true we have been here before in this country when william mckinley was president enormous trusts were put together which made it impossible for ordinary americans to start their own business make any money without enormous pressure from those trusts which destroyed their business teddy roosevelt came along busted up the trusts and made it possible to earn a living for ordinary americans and small businesses again under harding and coolidge and hoover calvin coolidge said the business of america is business but forgot that human beings are not meant to be cogs in an enormous government corporate machine that we are spiritual people who need connections and have to have community again franklin roosevelt came along and took america back for ordinary working people again my favorite however is this one in 1824 john quincy adams the son of a one term president john adams beat andrew jackson of tennessee in an election where andrew jackson received more votes it was decided in congress by one vote electing john quincy adams as president in 1828 four years later john quincy adams became the one term son of a one term president change is hard work change does not happen simply because you go to a rally and simply because you make phone calls and i know how hard everybody here has worked but change is a process that you can never give up on because change is the state of america and change is the state of humankind so we will continue to fight this is the end of phase one of this fight but the fight will go on and we will be together in that fight we will continue to bring our message of hope and change to the american people we will speak out we will fight on we will continue to stand up against the dangerous foreign policy which weakens our security and stand up against this president who weakens our civil rights we will continue to stand up against special interest that prevent change and we will stand for america s working families for jobs and health care investment in our children the chance of all americans to pursue their dreams we will continue to stand up against the divisive policies of the far right we will no longer be divided by race we will no longer be divided by gender we will no longer be divided by sexual orientation we will no longer be divided by religion we will no longer be divided by income and we will no longer be divided by george w bush in the white house and now that the campaign is stopped i m going to say something that all of you have heard me say before but i want you to think about it now because now is the most important time that you have heard it and this is the real message of this campaign and you ll hear it in a different way because i am no longer a candidate the biggest lie that people like me tell people like you at election time is that if you vote for me i ll solve your problems the truth is the power is in your hands not mine abraham lincoln said that a government of the people by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth you have the power to take back the democratic party and make us stand up for what s right again allow us to fulfill the dream of harry truman in 1948 that he laid out where we would no longer be the last industrial country on the face of the earth without health insurance allow us to stand up again for the rights to organize for ordinary men and women allow us to stand again for the principles of equal rights under the law for every single american you have the power to take our country back so that the flag of the united states of america no longer is the exclusive property of john ashcroft and dick cheney and rush limbaugh and jerry falwell that it belongs to all of us again and together we have the power to take back in the white house in 2004 and that is exactly what we re going to do thank you very much dem hdean19 1 04 howard_dean well you guys you have already got the picture here i was about to say you know i m sure there are some disappointed people here you know what you know something you know something if you had told us one year ago that we were going to come in third in iowa we would have given anything for that and you know something you know something not only are we going to new hampshire tom harkin we re going to south carolina and oklahoma and arizona and north dakota and new mexico and we re going to california and texas and new york and we re going to south dakota and oregon and washington and michigan and then we re going to washington d c to take back the white house yeah we will not give up we will not give up in new hampshire we will not give up in south carolina we will not give up in arizona or new mexico oklahoma north dakota delaware pennsylvania ohio michigan we will not quit now or ever we ll earn our country back for ordinary americans i and we re going to win in massachusetts and north carolina and missouri and arkansas and connecticut and new york and ohio let me wait a minute wait a minute wait i there are some polite things we have to do here and the first is to thank some people and i want to thank jeani murray and her extraordinary iowa people she has worked so hard come on up here jeani come on up come on up jeani murray come on let me thank jeani and all her people in iowa you worked hard you got our ticket punched to new hampshire and i appreciate it you should be so proud of it you are a hardworking iowa staff let me thank let me thank tom harkin you are so lucky you are so lucky you are so lucky to have a united states senator who understands what it is to stand up for ordinary americans and he is the leader in the united states senate to take our country back for ordinary americans again let me thank burt libadel and dave nagle two former congressmen from iowa who have been all over iowa for us helping us i don t know where dave is tonight but i want to thank him let me thank the international union of painters and allied trades for standing up let me thank the american federation of state and county and municipal employees for all the help they ve been the service employees international union seiu thank you so much but most of all let me thank you from all over america coming to change this country we haven t seen this in 30 years now in my generation was the last time i saw all this stuff going on with people your all age under 30 years old and we were a little more we were what now when i was when i was your age when i was your age we did change two presidents and change the foreign policy of the united states of america now the only difference is it took six years and we ve got six months to go before we re going to do it here this is the changing of the generations the passing of the torch to the new generation it is your generation and it s your generation that s fueling this campaign because you know that the half trillion dollar deficit this president is piling up are going to be billed to you and your children because of the terrible damage this president is doing to the environment are going to be things that you re going to have to live with and we re going to change that and you have the power to change that and we are starting right tonight we have just begun to fight we have just begun to fight and we re going to fight and fight and fight until this country becomes a place where we ll put more money into small children and their families than we will into prisons where instead of giving 16 billion worth of tax breaks to oil companies and gas companies we ll put it into renewable energy and ethanol and biodiesel where instead of giving 200 billion to the hmos and insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies we ll give seniors a real prescription benefit i would have liked to come in first tonight and so would you but you know what i want to thank the people of iowa i do i have spent two years here i ve gone to all 99 counties this is a wonderful wonderful state with wonderful wonderful people and i appreciate very very much i have called senator kerry and senator edwards and congratulated them and told them we would see them around the corner on the other side of the block starting tomorrow morning i have called representative gephardt and thanked him for a courageous run i worked for him in 1988 i still feel some loyalty to him he did the best he could and i appreciate his long career of service for the united states of america and now i want every single one of you who can do it to go to new hampshire and if you can t go to new hampshire i want you to go to arizona or new mexico or oklahoma or delaware or south carolina or north dakota viva new mexico si se puede si se puede si se puede si se puede dem hdean21 1 03 howard_dean thank you i saw rev sharpton in a restaurant in new york the other day and i was very pleased he offered me a vice presidential spot on his ticket and i really appreciate reverend very very much you know we all have our reasons for running i m running because i don t like extremism and i think extremism has taken over our country i m going to talk to you as a governor and as a doctor tonight but i was thinking as i was listening to the four speakers how much is at stake it s not just abortion rights or reproductive freedoms title ix is under attack by this administration and i think if one of us doesn t win next thing girls won t be able to go to school in america you watch now vermont is the promised land for you folks i m the governor i was the governor up til last week i served on the board of planned parenthood of northern new england for five years when i became governor i had to resign because all we contracted all our family planning services through planned parenthood in vermont we do not hearken to the term partial birth abortion in my state because because partial birth abortion is like the word quota the president used it six times last night it s a code word it s designed to appeal to people s fears to divisiveness partial birth abortion is the same thing the truth is i went and checked and tried to figure out because i was running against a conservative person the last two times i ran i checked because i knew this would come up how many late third trimester abortions had been done in the state of vermont in the last four years the number was zero this is an issue about nothing it s an issue about extremism it s an issue about appealing to people s fears it is the wrong thing to do and people who use the term partial birth abortion are leading an america in a bad place they are trying to divide us people of conscience it is the wrong thing to do it s no more honorable for the president of the united states using the word quota because he knows it divides us by race and use of the word partial birth abortion divides us by conscience there are many good people who on moral grounds are opposed to abortion i respect them i do not respect the people who defend the throwing of bombs and murders of doctors however and some of those exist in our very administration people who have not stood up against violence they thought it would be better for their political careers if they didn t say too much about it the chairman of the judiciary committee last year who refused to allow the banking bill to go through cause it outlawed terrorism at abortion clinics that is a shameful act and the american people ought to be ashamed of that let me tell you a story as many of you know i m a doctor i m an internist and i take care of all ages pretty much from five to 105 and one time i was sitting in my office and it was not unusual for young kids to come and talk to me because i knew the whole family and one time a young lady came into my office who was 12 years old and she thought she might be pregnant and we did the tests and did the exam and she was pregnant she didn t know what to do and after i had talked to her for a while i came to the conclusion that the likely father of her child was her own father you explain that to the american people who think that parental notification is a good idea i will veto parental notification in vermont we don t have parental notification bills but you know what 85 percent of all minors that seek an abortion bring their parent with them voluntarily it is the right thing to do when i was practicing medicine if a young lady came to me and she was pregnant i d sit with her in her office and the first thing i d do is try to convince her she ought to tell her folks cause i know her folks i usually treated them too and sometimes she d even say i don t dare i don t dare my father ll kill me in a small percentage of the cases that s true and that s why we don t want the government telling us how to practice medicine abortion is connected to civil rights because the government is so impressed with itself in promoting individual freedom they can t wait to get into your bedroom and tell you how to behave and i don t think as a physician people ask me what s your position on abortion it s very simple it s a single sentence the practice of medicine is none of the government s business and they ought to stay out of it this is a private relationship this is a private relationship between the physician the patient and whoever the patient chooses to involve in that position if you become pregnant unexpectedly and it s an unwanted pregnancy you have three choices and you have to live with those choices for the rest of your life you can give that baby up for adoption and you can talk to women who have done that and they wonder for the rest of their lives what where that child might be and what might have become of that child you can have the baby and keep that child sometimes that works out sometimes with 14 and 15 year olds it doesn t work out very well a teenager who has a child below the age of 18 has an 80 percent chance of being on welfare for the forseeable future we can do better than that and the last choice is to have an abortion and for those who have had abortions that is also a very difficult decision and also a decision that you will wonder about for the rest of your life this is an extraordinarily difficult decision it s certainly a decision that has to be lived with by the patient for the rest of your life and what in the world can the government be thinking about for the president of the united states and nine old folks on the supreme court five of whom are so far to the right that we can t see them any more what in the world what in the world can they be thinking that they have the right to decide the life a young woman who has the choice of adopting keeping or aborting they have to live with that decision for the rest of their life president bush can go cut brush on his ranch in crawford and not give it a second thought we can do better we can do better we can do better dem hdean21 2 03 howard_dean first let me thank my wonderful and loyal advance team don t they deserve a hand and did you all like the maple syrup and the cheese and all that stuff what i want to know is why in the world the democratic party leadership is supporting the president s unilateral attack on iraq what i want to know is why are democratic party leaders supporting tax cuts the question is not how big the tax cut should be the question should be can we afford a tax cut at all with the largest deficit in the history of this country what i want to know is why we re fighting in congress about the patient s bill of rights when the democratic party ought to be standing up for health care for every single american man woman and child in this country what i want to know is why our folks are voting for the president s no child left behind bill that leaves every child behind every teacher behind every school board behind and every property tax payer behind i m howard dean and i m here to represent the democratic wing of the democratic party if you if you if you want young people to vote in this country and if you want the 50 percent of adults over 30 to vote in this country that don t vote that do not vote in today s election then we had better stand for something because that s why they re not voting let me tell you what i want to do for america and what we ve done in vermont i do want to balance the budget there has not been one republican president that has balanced the budget in this country in 34 years and if you want someone who can be responsible for your money and take care of your tax dollars you had better elect a democrat because the republicans cannot manage money in our state i had the privilege of serving long enough so i served through two recessions not one recession and when all that money was coming in in between the recessions between the two bush recessions well that s what they were that is what they were when all that money was coming in during the good times thanks to bill clinton s being willing to balance the budget without a single republican party vote when all that money was coming in we did give some tax cuts but we also saved money in the rainy day fund we paid down a quarter of our debt and today not only is the budget balanced in these very difficult times but my successor does not have to cut health care does not have to cut higher education and does not have to cut k through 12 education i m the only governor running for president and i m the only one that s balanced a budget including george bush because in texas the lieutenant governor s in charge of balancing the budget in our state virtually every child under the age of 18 has health insurance we made medicaid into a middle class entitlement if i become president with your help the first item of business on our agenda is to do something that harry truman put in the democratic platform in 1948 we re going to bring health insurance to every man woman and child in america i m the only doctor in this race and i ve done it i want an environmental policy in this country that respects and preserves public lands not to drill on them in our state we ve preserved hundreds of thousands of acres that will always be available for hunting and fishing and trapping sss and hiking and canoeing it will never be developed the vermont that i left as governor in january of this year will be the same vermont a hundred years from now because we have stewarded our natural resources and this president would like to drill on our natural resources we can do better than that let me tell you something else i m going to do one of the things i thought was terrific about bill clinton was that when he became president in 1992 he said that his cabinet would look like the rest of america and he did it and he did it i want all of our institutions of higher learning our law schools our medical schools our best universities to look like the rest of america and i thought i thought that one of the most dispicable moments of this president s administration was three weeks ago when on national primetime television he used the word quota seven times the university of michigan does not now have quotas it has never had quotas quotas is a race loaded word designed to appeal to people s fears of losing their jobs i intend to talk about race during this election in the south because the republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us and i m going to bring us together because you know what you know what white folks in the south who drive pick ups with confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us and not them because their kids don t have health insurance and their kids need better schools too we re not done yet yeah most of you know most of you know that six months before my last re election i signed a bill into law that made vermont the first state in america that guaranteed equal rights to every person under the law every person under the law that bill that bill was called the civil unions bill and it said marriage is between a man and a woman but same sex couples are entitled to exactly the same legal rights as i have hospital visitation insurance inheritance rights all americans all americans all americans are equal under the law in our state this bill was at about 40 percent in the polls when i signed it 60 percent against six months before the election and i never got a chance to ask myself whether it was a good idea to sign this bill or not because i knew that if i were willing to sell out the rights of a whole group of people because it was politically inconvenient for some future office i might run for then i had wasted my time in public service because because i looked in the mirror and i knew that if my political career were about myself then i would not have signed that bill but my political career has never been about getting elected i didn t even seek the governorship i became governor because my predecessor died in office twelve years ago my political career is about change and this campaign is about change and what we re going to do here is we re first going to change this party because this party needs to look in the mirror and ask itself is this party about the next election or is it about changing america about changing america this party i know this party needs to be about changing america because only by changing america will we win back the white house i want a party that stands unashamedly for equal rights for all americans i want a party that stands unashamedly for health care for every single american i want a party that stands unashamedly for balanced budgets and taking care of poor kids and voting together and healing the divides instead of expressing the divides and exploiting them the way the republican party has so shamelessly done since 1968 i need your help i need your help we re going to change this party and then we re going to change this country and we re going to take back the white house and we re going to balance the budget and we re going to have health care for everybody and we re going to have an america with its best institutions right up to the cabinet that looks once again like america we re going to bring hope to america jobs to america peace to america we re going to bring pride to the democratic party i need your help let s go get it let s go do it let s win the white house in january of 2004 thank you very much dem hdean27 7 04 howard_dean thank you thank you maine and vermont thank you texas and michigan thank you thank you very much thank you my lord thank you very much i was hoping thank you very much thank you so much i was hoping for a reception like this i was just kind of hoping it was going to be on thursday night instead of tuesday night i may not be the nominee but i can tell you this for the next 100 days i ll be doing everything that i can to make sure that john kerry and john edwards take this country back for the people who built it because tonight we are all here to represent the democratic wing of the democratic party i am proud of john kerry s leadership and i intend to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as we fight for the things that harry truman promised us in 1948 health insurance for every single american a jobs program that will create jobs instead of destroying them standing up for middle class and working americans who got a tax increase not a tax cut and standing up for a foreign policy that relies on the president of the united states telling the truth to the american people before we send our brave soldiers to fight in a foreign war i d like a commander in chief who supports our soldiers and supports our veterans instead of cutting their hardship pay abroad and cutting their health benefits when they get back home i m howard dean and i m voting for john kerry i m voting for john kerry and john edwards because i want a president and vice president as good and as strong as the american people i m voting for john kerry and john edwards because i want to see an america that s restored as the moral leader of the world america s greatness rests on far more than the power of our arms our greatness is also measured by our goodness it is in the capacity of our minds of our hearts and it s in the strength of our democracy as i ve traveled america i ve seen that strength i ve seen it in the people i ve met i ve seen it in their desire to take our country back for the american people i saw it in a college student in pennsylvania who sold her bicycle and sent us a check for 100 with a note that said i sold my bicycle for democracy i saw it in a woman from iowa who handed me 50 all in quarters she saved it from her monthly disability check because she wanted to make america well again i saw it i saw it in a 19 year old from alabama who had never been involved in politics before he got in his car and drove to vermont because he didn t feel like anybody was listening to him in washington they learned that politics is too important to be left to politicians they didn t just pack their bags they packed their hopes that we can take our country back you know what we will we are not going to be afraid to stand up for what we believe in ever again we are not going to let those who disagree with us shout us down under a banner of false patriotism we are not going to give up a single voter or a single state because we re going to be proud to call ourselves democrats not just here in boston we re going to be proud to call ourselves democrats in mississippi we re going to be proud to call ourselves democrats in utah and idaho and we re going to be proud to call ourselves democrats in texas never again will we be ashamed to call ourselves democrats never never never we re not just going to change presidents we re going to change this country and we re going to reclaim the american dream to everyone who supported me you ve given me so much and i can t thank you enough this was never about me this was about us this was about giving new life to our party this was about giving new energy to our democracy and providing hope again for the greatest nation on the face of the earth and so today even though you ve already given so much i want to ask you to give one more thing i want you to give america president john kerry together together we can take our country back and only you have the power to make it happen you have the power you have the power you have the power to make it happen thank you very much thank you very much dem hdean3 10 03 howard_dean thank you thank you very much last february i came here and i essentially asked i want to know what this party stands for and i told you i wanted an america which is going to stand up for a foreign policy consistent with american values i told you i wanted balanced budgets in this country so we could have jobs again in america i told you that i wanted health insurance for every american very much like what we have in my home state and what i want to know now is if we re the kind of party that is going to stand up for america or if we re the kind of party that represents the status quo we know now that we will beat george bush in november and the question is are we the party of the status quo or are we the party that s going to bring hope to a new generation to remake this country and to remake the democratic party since february our candidacy has raised 25 million breaking the record that bill clinton set in 1995 that that is not the important part the important part is we have 200 000 people who gave us money and the average gift in the last quarter was 77 that is campaign finance reform we are taking our democracy and our country back piece by piece from the rush limbaughs and the jerry falwells and the dick cheneys and the don rumsfelds of the world because john ashcroft is running around defending the patriot act does not make john ashcroft a patriot if this administration values patriotism then the president and his people will step forward and explain to us how they misled us on the way into iraq and what the reason we really are there is if the president and his people are true patriots then they will stand up and ask the people who unveiled the name publicly of the cia agent to resign right now the real patriots in this country are the parents who are struggling to keep their kids in college who are struggling to keep food on their table and keep them in the schools the real patriots in this country are the people who have lost their jobs to foreign countries and are making are getting by on half the salaries they had before let me tell you a story about a patriot when you run for president you meet extraordinary people and i met one almost a year ago i gave a speech in washington and i don t remember who the speech was to and i don t remember exactly what it was about but i remember getting off the stage and a guy came up to me and he said governor i m 80 years old i want to thank you for the civil unions bill and i was taken aback i said oh thank you very much do you have a son who s gay or a daughter who s a lesbian he said no governor i m a veteran i fought on the beach at d day a lot of my friends were killed and i m gay now there s a guy who did what all those people in the white house who never served a day abroad in their life are talking about he he was willing to give his life for the defense of freedom in the united states of america his friends did give their lives for the defense of the western world and if that guy doesn t deserve exactly the same rights that everybody else has when he gets back to this country then we need a new administration who will give him that right almost a year ago five of us who were running for president either voted for the war or advised support of the war i disagreed then and i disagree now the president i supported the first iraq war because one of our allies had been attacked and i felt we had an obligation to come to their defense i supported the afghan war because 3 000 of our people had been murdered and i think we have an obligation to defend the united states of america but this time the president allowed us to think that al qaeda and saddam were one and the same and that saddam had something to do with 9 11 last week he admitted that wasn t true this time the president in the state of the union said iraq was purchasing uranium from africa that turned out not to be true the secretary of defense said he knew exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were right around tikrit and baghad that turned out not to be true as commander in chief of the united states military i will never hesitate to send our troops anywhere in the world to defend the united states of america but as commander in chief of the united states military i will never send our sons and daughters and our grandchildren and our brothers and sisters to a foreign land to fight without telling the truth to the american people about why they re going there i don t i don t want this to come out of my time whoever s keeping the time let me let me talk a little bit about defense i don t think this president understands defense he has three trillion of our taxpayer dollars if you include the 600 billion in interest costs to give away to ken lay and the boys but he doesn t have enough money to inspect the cargo containers coming into the united states last week a major news organization smuggled uranium from jakarta indonesia into los angeles and we didn t find out about it yet three trillion of our tax dollars to give away to ken lay and the boys but not enough to purchase the enriched uranium stocks of former soviet union which we re entitled to buy under cooperative threat reduction if that gets in terrorist hands then we really have a serious problem this president s allowed is about to allow north korea to become a nuclear power because he loathes the president of north korea and he won t sit down and enter into bilateral negotiations with him well i don t think the president of north korea s such a great guy either but i think it s time to end a foreign policy based on the petulance of the chief executive of the united states of america i don t think this president understands defense i ll tell you why over a decade ago the berlin wall came down and the soviet union collapsed without america firing a shot there were some reasons inside the soviet union for that but there were two reasons that have had to do with us one was that we have a strong military and that s important the other was the majority of people behind the iron curtain wanted to be like america and they wanted to be like americans and you would be hard pressed after two and a half years of this presidency to find in too many countries around the world a majority of people who want to be like america anymore i promise you that i will restore the dignity and the respect and the integrity of this country and which this country deserves around the rest of the world if you make me president of the united states there are a lot of people who are depending on you we have less than four months to the iowa caucuses and what this election s going to be about is what kind of party you want and what kind of country you want when i was 21 years old it was the end of the civil rights movement martin luther king had been killed bobby kennedy had been killed and there are some people whose names maybe aren t so well known denise mcnair medger evers michael schwerner but it was a time of great hope for this country because we believed we were all in this together we had medicare pass and head start and the civil rights bill and the voter rights bill the first african american chief justice of the united states supreme court it was a time of hope it was a time we were together this president ran as a uniter not as a divider and that was not true either he used the word quota five or six times on the evening news to talk about the university of michigan and affirmative action now the word quota first of all doesn t apply to the university of michigan secondly the word quota is a race loaded word which is deliberately designed to appeal to the fears of americans that they re going to lose their place in university or in college to a member of the minority community this president played the race card and for that alone he deserves to go back to crawford texas i am tired i am tired of being divided by race in this country i m tired of being divided by gender when the president of the united states thinks that he can tell a woman what kind of reproductive health care she has i am tired of being divided by sexual orientation when the president of the united states says what a fine inclusive senator rick santorum is and how antonin scalia ought to be the next chief justice of the united states supreme court we can do better than this i want a president who s going to appeal to the very best in us and not the very worst in us there are over a half million americans nearly a half million americans who have joined our campaign who need you they need you to make them proud to be democrats and proud to be americans again they want us to stand up and be proud of ourselves again they want us to lead they want us to help them believe in america again and they want us to help them hope in america again martin luther king said that our lives begin to end the day that we become silent about the things that matter we have been silent too long we are not out of power in the white house and the senate and the congress because george bush ran a great campaign we are out of power in the white house and the congress and the united states senate and the united states supreme court because we didn t stand up for what we believed in and now we re going to stand up for what we believe in again i want to thank the dnc you have done an extraordinary job and now the hardest part of that job is before us and i want to close the way i ve closed thousands of speeches around the country in front of hundreds of thousands of americans and i want you to remember this this is not about my campaign or this is not about anybody s campaign to take back the white house this is about our campaign to take our country back so we can have our values and the values of ordinary americans we are all in this together and you have the power to take this party back and make it believe and stand for something again and you have the power to take this country back so that those flags belong to every american including all of us and we have the power to take the white house back in 2004 and together that is exactly what we re going to do thank you very very much dem hdean3 2 04 howard_dean thank you now i ve got some people i want to thank here first i ve got to say thank you to some people i want to thank state senator rosa franklin for her wonderful very nice introduction and tacoma councilwoman julie anderson i want to thank my campaign co chair karen markiaro where is karen i know she s here someplace there she is i don t know if my other state campaign chairman former governor booth gardner is here but we want to thank him state democratic party chair paul barron thank him all right and national finance co chair pam eakes i don t know if she s here or not but she s been great state director betty means and all of the incredible volunteers and staff members well the votes are starting to come in and we re going to have a tough night tonight but you know what here s why we re going to keep going and going and going and going and going just like the energizer bunny we re going to pick up some delegates tonight and this is all about who gets the most delegates in boston in july and it s going to be us and here is why with your help we re going to win washington on saturday this campaign is simply going to offer people something different than everybody else you know i think all of these folks running in the democratic party are fine people but this campaign is about doing something for ordinary americans you cannot say you re going to get rid of the special interests in washington if you have taken more money than any other senator in the last 15 years from special interests you cannot offer concrete change look i am going to vote for whoever the nominee of the democratic party is which i hope will be me because anybody is better than george w bush but what i want in this country and i think what every single person in this auditorium in this theater wants in this country is fundamental institutional change and we re not going to get that with somebody from inside washington the state of washington has a chance on saturday to say do you want real change in this country or do you just want to shift the power to somebody else in washington i want real change in america and let me tell you what i mean let me tell you some of the reasons that you ought to talk to your folks about to get out the vote to that caucus at 10 o clock on saturday morning let me give you some of the reasons reason number one i ll stand up for what i believe in whether it s right or whether it s popular i was the only one who was willing to stand up against the iraq war from those people who are left because it was the wrong thing to do in america i was the only one to stand up and say no to no child left behind the other guys all voted for it do you want fundamental change in america or do you want to have democrats who behave like republicans half the time do you want jobs in this country again because if you want jobs in this country again we ve got to stop giving tax credits to the biggest companies in the world who move their jobs to china and their headquarters to bermuda we need those jobs here if you want jobs in america we have to change every trade agreement that we have so that labor rights and human rights and environmental rights are part of those trade agreements if you want jobs in america you have to make it easier to join a trade union so that low income workers and immigrants will be protected if you want jobs in america we have to start investing in small businesses and self employed people they create 80 percent of all the new jobs in this country and they don t move their jobs out of their community do you want real change fundamental institutional change or do you just want to elect somebody else from inside washington let me tell you reason number two reason number two is that in my state everybody under 18 has health insurance in my state everybody under 150 percent of poverty has health insurance in my state one third of all our seniors and disabled people have prescription benefits if anybody from washington d c had done that then that wouldn t be an issue in this campaign fifty six years ago harry truman promised health insurance for all americans in the 1948 democratic party platform for 56 years special interests who have been giving money to the democrats and the republicans have stopped that from happening if you want real change in america we ll have health insurance for all our children within a month and for all americans within a year of the time i take office if you want jobs in america we ve got to balance the budget every politician from both parties is promising you a middle class tax cut health insurance funding of special education free college do you believe them the reason that 50 percent of the people in this country don t vote anymore is because politicians behave like that at election time the president is the worst of all he s promising you a 1 trillion tax cut and a trip to mars and i think we ought to give him the trip to mars dem hdean3 5 03 howard_dean thank you you know as most of you know i did not support the war in iraq but let me also remind you that the military that kicked saddam hussein out of iraq was bill clinton s and democrats built by bill clinton and the democrats and let s not forget that and if the president keeps talking about a strong military which i certainly support he had better stop talking about 670 billion worth of tax cuts paid for by cutting veteran s health care benefits i m in this race because i want jobs back in america i m in this race because like fritz hollings i want a balanced budget and i m not kidding i m in this race because i want like we have in vermont health insurance not just for everybody under 18 which we have but i want health insurance for every single american and we need to do that now but when we come to the south democrats have got to start talking about race because the republicans always talk about race they talk about it and try to keep people from voting they talk about it by using divisive words like quotas which are race based words and race baiting words but what i want to say is in the south we have discovered that when white voters and black voters vote together we all make progress not here but everywhere in the country and the message i want to give today before i get gonged the message i want to give today is two fold we have an obligation to the african american base in this party to be sure that we do not ignore them and we have an obligation at the same time to talk to white people in the south that have been voting republican for 30 years and this is what we re going to say there are 103 000 kids with no health in this state most of em are white there are an awful lot of people whose jobs are going to china a lot of people that haven t had a raise in five years a lot of people who need schools better they re not just african americans they re whites as well and so i want to say to white southerners let s put aside those divisive issues that the republicans always bring up and let s vote together for a better future for our children because you started out here in the south voting together for a better future for our children we re going to build this party back and we re going to start right here today because this is an extraordinary opportunity for the democratic party nationally to show we are serious about competing in the south we are going to win in the south we are going to make sure that our base does not feel neglected it s time to inject some backbone into our party to stand up for the things that we need to stand up for but it s also time to talk to folks who haven t voted for us for 30 years and say this you ve been voting for republicans for 30 years what do you have to show for it because as long as the republican party s in power none of our kids are going to have health insurance as long as the republican party s in power none of us are going to have raises as long as the republican party s in power none of us are going to have health insurance for adults we can do better we want jobs we want health insurance we want better education white people and black people are going to vote together in the south and they re going to vote democratic just like they did when franklin roosevelt was president when harry truman was president we re going to stand up again for what we believe in in this country thank you very very much dem hdean4 4 03 howard_dean thank you very much that s the only area outside my state that i have any advantage in because plattsburg gets all the burlington media so all the delegates from new york are going to be from plattsburg let me start off on a more serious note i think you know that i m the only major candidate that did not support and does not support the president s policy in iraq but i also think that its very very important that those of us who do not support his policy don t not make this mistake that we made during the vietnam war and we do need to be very clear that we support our troops our troops did not make the decision to go there they are simply serving their country and i think we do need to make it clear that these young men and women who are in harm s way are people that we care about we want them home soon and safely i want to talk for a couple of minutes about some of the things we ve done in vermont because as you re going to find out it has a lot to do with education i have a lot of differences with the president s administration foreign policy s one of them which we re not going to get into today but budgets are the other ones you cannot continue to run budget deficit after budget deficit after budget deficit and somehow expect us to meet our responsibilities in health care and education and transportation and job creation now we have here a group of folks who came in a little over two years ago who have managed the extraordinary miracle of turning the largest surplus in the history of the united states to the largest deficit in the history of the united states in only two years why is that a problem you know why it s a problem that s why we re meeting in albany on may 3rd let me tell you how i like to run things in our state i served as governor long enough 11 1 2 years to actually go through both bush recessions not just one of them and the first one we came in there was a big deficit we had the highest marginal income tax in the country we had to pay off the deficit we had to level fund all kinds of things and we had to even cut taxes because you can t get jobs to come to your state if you have the highest marginal income tax in the country but during the 90s when lots of money was coming in we set money aside in a rainy day fund we never let the legislature spend more than the rate of growth of the economy and we paid off almost a quarter of our debt between 1996 and 2003 and as a result today two years into the recession we have a balanced budget we are not cutting k 12 education we are not cutting higher education and we re not cutting health care for kids if you care about social justice you ve got to stand for a balanced budget and you have to mean it because at the very time when revenues go down for the states as they have with my state at that very time is when the folks who depend on state government the most need the most help and we re not just talking about poor people how many middle class kids are not going to be able to go to the state university system in new york because of the enormous tuition hikes that are going on there because the budget s not balanced it is middle class kids and middle class families that suffer as well in fact it s everybody except for those people who got those enormous tax cuts who make more than a million dollars a year what this president has done is taken 1 7 trillion out of the social security trust fund to give tax cuts to to give people tax cuts who make more than a million dollars a year it seems to me that we need a change in washington while we were balancing the budget and limiting spending we did some other things as well the first thing we did is to make sure every kid in vermont had health insurance if you make 54 000 or less in our state your kids under 18 are entitled to health insurance now we charge something at the top end of that we charge fifty bucks a month fifty bucks includes and insures everybody in your house under 18 if we can do that in a small rural state which is 26th in income in the country surely the most wealthy and powerful society on the face of the earth can do what every other industrialized country does which is make sure that all its citizens have health insurance and i intend to do that there are three promises that i make for the first year in a dean administration first we re going to set our path back towards a balanced budget secondly i m going to submit a plan to insure every single american and thirdly we re going to fully fund special education in the first year of my administration let me be very clear about this i hate unfunded mandates now of course having said that somebody for the press s going to go dig through my record and find out that i signed a few as governor and i m sure i did but when we required high standards in our state with a new standards reference exam we told the local folks we want you to test kids in reading in the second grade 4th 8th and 10th grade the new standards reference exam and we re going to pay for every dime of it and we have we don t require any tests in vermont that we don t pay for and i have to say that all these folks that i m running against for president were happy to vote for the no school board left standing bill there wasn t any money in and there was an awful lot of power that was taken away from local folks and it seems to me that some of the things in that bill ought to be pretty worrisome and one of the things that i can t get over is all the democrats that voted for it because here s what s in that bill there s some money for title i and these are good things but the bill says that every school has to sign off and assure the government the federal government that they offer quote unquote constitutionally protected school prayer whatever that might be the bill says that the boy scouts have to be allowed to meet in every school building in the country and you have to sign off the bill says that we have to send the names of every rising junior and senior to every higher education establishment and the military now it seems to me that these may be good policies and they may be bad policies but these are the kinds of policies that ought to be resolved by local school boards local administrations and local teachers not by the federal government i have a few regrets about not running for a sixth term for governor one of them is that had i run and been re elected we would have refused the money from no child left behind because we would have been better off without the small amount of money and still being able to run our own school system but we need an overhaul of an american of american education and in my view an overhaul of american education starts with making the public schools stronger and not starting to talk about voucher programs i don t think that putting taxpayer s money into private schools is the right thing for america let me tell you why america is the most diverse country on the face of the earth and american public schools are far from perfect we can do better but the truth is american public schools are where people learn about each other the education that goes on in schools is not just about what goes on in the classroom it s about how we get along with each other what we know about each other you know diversity s not something that comes naturally to people when i was governor my chief of staff was a woman and chiefs of staff do the hiring not governors so about two or three years into my governorship i noticed that my office was a matriarchy it s true you needn t applaud quite so loudly and so one day the chief of staff came in and said well governor one of the policy analysts left i ll be hiring somebody else just wanted to let you know and i said well now you know it s none of my business i don t do the hiring around here but i ve noticed there s kind of a gender imbalance in the office i wondered if we could find a man and she looked at me she wasn t kidding around and she said governor your absolutely right there is a gender imbalance in the office and we really should hire a man but it s really hard to find a qualified man now there s a reason i tell this story we all tend to hire people like ourselves it ain t just 50 year old wasps like me that do it everybody does it right we re all more comfortable with the people we grew up with the people we have things in common with people we re comfortable with diversity is not something that comes normally to human beings that s why you need affirmative action the low point of this president s the low point of this president s presidency of many low points was his using the word quota five or six times on the evening news when he came out against the university of michigan affirmative action program because the university of michigan does not now have quotas it has never had quotas and quotas is a race loaded word designed to appeal to people who are afraid they may lose their jobs or their place in universities the truth is we need affirmative action in this country because in 50 years as is the case now in california there will be no such thing as a majority there will be lots of minorities and we had better in this country learn to take advantage of that which the public schools do better than any other institution s that is learn about each other do our best to be with each other so we become comfortable with each other so we get along together because this country will not survive if we don t and the public schools are a key piece of that in our state during the first recession i was governor in during the 1990s the prison budget went up 14 percent the first year i was furious we had a level funded budget so we started a program for twenty years later we started a program called success by six we hospital visit every mother who gives birth in our state whether she s the richest or the poorest woman in the state we ask if they d like a home visit ninety one percent say yes so we visit 91 percent of all the newborn kids within two or three weeks of their birth most of those families don t need any help but the ones that do get child care health care parenting skills job training skills and programs to try to keep the dads interested in the kids ten years later our child abuse rate is down 43 percent and child sexual abuse is down 70 percent in the state of vermont what does this have to do with teaching the first goal of the national education goals panel is every child arrives in school ready to learn we have gone to far expecting five year olds to get to the schoolhouse door and expecting you all to turn them around between the time they re 5 and 10 school systems aren t made to do that we have a responsibility to really be serious about every child arriving at the schoolhouse door ready to learn and not be the 43 percent drop in child abuse in the first ten years i hope very much is going to lead to a big drop in our incarceration rate because i am tired of having a country that has almost as many people in the jail system as it does in the higher education system we can do better and we have got to stop the school system to get around that and give you all a hand by making sure that kids get pre school education which ought to be something we do national all over the country by making sure that kids within the ages of zero and three have adequate child care in our state we subsidize child care up to 39 000 a year for a family because we want working people to make sure that really no child is left behind and i can tell you that the president may have passed a bill called no child left behind but his welfare reform which requires 40 hours a work week for single moms is every child left behind because there s no child care money in there and we re going to do better than that we can do this in our state we give bonuses in child care when we pay our child care subsidy we give a 20 percent bonus to any center or home that s certified by the national association for the education of young children because we don t want em parked in front of television that s not child care we want them intellectually stimulated with an educational component so when they get to you you can do your job in the classroom and not be turned into social workers let me close by something i mentioned briefly early on i said i wanted full funding of special education and i want to thank vick mills for this here he is our former commissioner who s now your commissioner i guess things didn t go quite as well in new york as they did in vermont let me tell you what we did and this is going to scare some of you this is going to scare some of you so don t get nervous because our teachers didn t like it much at first either in our state we believe in inclusion in special ed so we include 82 percent of all our kids who are special ed with in mainstream classrooms now that scares a lot of teachers and it scared a lot of our teachers there s a lot of nervousness about how in the world a classroom teacher was going to handle a big influx of kids with disabilities i think today they wouldn t trade it for anything because what we did of course is have those kids go in with adequate funding and with para professionals let me tell you what that meant it means that teachers have other adults in the classroom they re not certified teachers but they are adults and because there s very few disabled kids with para professionals that need a hundred percent all the time so that frees up the para professionals to help once in a while with some of the teacher s duties teaching duties kids make more progress who require special ed but let me talk to you about what i think is the most important thing about this is for me it s very personal i have two kids neither of whom require special education when we made this change in vermont my daughter was in the sixth grade my son was in the 4th grade my daughter s now a freshman in college my son s a junior in high school our daughter is too far advanced for this to affect here we phased it in but my son was affected he had a child in his 4th grade class that couldn t speak and of course didn t have any other skills in terms of communication other than very very basic ones that child not only got to the 8th grade was still included and one day i asked him how is patrick doing he said he s doing pretty well he talks and he writes the effect it had on patrick was extraordinary but the effect it had on my son was more extraordinary because we have a whole generation of kids who are now growing up understanding that people with disabilities are just people who have some differences like every other person has differences but they re people that is an and one of the greatest shames of the federal government not just in this administration but in all administrations since idea was passed was underfunding of special education it is an unfunded mandate it set the parents of kids with disabilities against the parents of kids without disabilities every time there s budget crunches we have to fund it one way or the other because the courts and the congress say so there s never enough money for the other things that need to be done whether its arts whether its languages whether its enrichment whether its sports we ve got to stop that that is why one of the first three things i m going to do is in the first year 27 billion is all it costs two percent of all our budget in this country at the federal level goes to k through 12 education 27 billion one quarter of the money that we re spending in iraq one tenth of 1 percent of our federal budget we can afford that and we don t have to phase it in we want to do it in the first year and stop fooling around and call it like it is no more unfunded mandates it is it is so hard for our public school systems to do that let me close by saying this first i want you to go to your e mail or your website and look us up deanforamerica com secondly i want you to e mail us so you re on our e mail list thirdly i want to tell you that i at this time two years from now intend to be president of the united states and i m going to be and i ll tell you why i m going to tell you why we cannot win the presidency if we if our program is let s vote for the most conservative president in our lifetime 85 percent of the time we need a different message in the democratic party we need to stand up for traditional democratic ideals like health insurance for everybody balanced budgets like fully funding special education like supporting public education we can do those things and we need a democrats from the democratic wing of the democratic party to do it thank you very much dem hdean8 1 03 howard_dean thank you this is something i ve wanted to do a long time and that s give a speech without a written text i don t like to speak from written texts but every time i ve come before you before in the end of the session speeches which usually are at 3 o clock in the morning i ve had to speak from a written text so who knows what may happen but i should i can t resist even on what should be a very solemn occasion and it is one passing on a remark that the speaker who i congratulate on his newly elected position that the speaker passed on to me as we got up he said you know governor this reminds me of something you said to me last year at this time which is that they always clap the most when you re going out twenty years ago to this day i was right over here in seat number 26 with bob harris on one side and jean o sassey on the other and there are not a lot of people here who remember jean o and bob and they were great people and i learned a lot and i just want to first say that those of you who are new to this body are about to come into an extraordinary experience because the legislative body is a place where you learn an enormous amount about vermont and where you really do give back to the people who sent you here and its a huge honor and its also an enormous amount of fun and it brings up in my mind what an extraordinary thing having a citizen legislature is a citizen legislature is about people who do their job in the legislature part time and then go home and do their other job part time as well and it has a wonderfully refreshing effect on democracy because you have to live with the laws that you pass and i ve always believed that this country would be better off if every legislature were a citizen legislature and this state is better off because of it i congratulate you i thank you for the very very hard work that you re about to do one of the things that s important in a citizen legislature is that you will make friends and you will make friends i hope across the aisle some of your close friends will be of the opposite party that you are because the people sent us here not because we re republicans or democrats they sent us here because we re vermonters and we re vermonters above all else and in that spirit i want to urge you to join me in supporting governor elect douglas because it is in our best interest as vermonters that jim douglas have a most successful governorship and i intend to do my part to make sure that he could jim please stand and be recognized i have a lot of thank yous and i hope you ll bear with me the first thing i want to say and it also pertains to those of you who are sitting in this chamber particularly for the first time politics is a business where we need to go out and convince people that they ought to vote for us and so we tend to emphasize all the things that we have done as individuals that require people now to vote for us in exchange but the truth is that not one of us not me not you not any elected official ever accomplishes anything by themselves and for the eleven and a half years that i ve been extraordinarily privileged to serve you and the things that i m most proud of fiscal discipline health insurance for all kids under 18 kids prevention conservation of hundreds of thousands of acres all these things state buildings in downtowns all these things were done with lots of help and the first people i want to thank are the extraordinary people in the administration secretaries deputies commissioners deputy commissioners and particularly the staff on the fifth floor and i d like to ask them to rise and thank them very very much i also want to thank a group of people who never get enough credit because we re always tempted to blame faceless people in the bureaucracy when things don t go well but the truth is that not one implementation of any bill that is ever passed by you or signed by me would ever be done if it were not for the roughly 7 500 people that work for us as salaried employees and i d like to ask all state employees in this building to stand up and be thanked for eleven and a half years by me and all of us who owe you so much for delivering on the things that we ve been asked to do finally on a very personal actually not quite finally on a very personal note i think only jim douglas will know why and he won t know this for a while but he s beginning to learn it now will know why i m about to thank the next group of people because there s one group of people that spends more time with me that are state employees than anybody else and they have a serious charge and worked very very hard i d like to thank all the members of the state police detail who have been with me for the past eleven and a half years please rise past and present thank you very much i have two more thank yous the first is that i would be remiss if i did not thank a man who s given a great deal of his career to the people of this state who s a committed idealist a hard working person someone to who i owe a great deal and i think to every person in this state owes a great deal i would like to ask lieutenant governor doug racine to stand and be recognized and thanked and lastly the most important thank you this is a thank you to the people of the state of vermont you have sustained me and supported me through some very difficult times and some very wonderful times you have allowed me to be in the greatest job in the state of vermont longer than anybody else in 200 years i can t tell you how grateful i am many of the ideas that we have put forward and that you have passed have come from you they come from conversations in general stores in hockey rinks they come from conversations on main streets every year after the legislature closed i used to go on a tour of vermont election year or no election year and over that next month or two i just listened to ordinary vermonters telling me their stories telling me their hopes telling me their dreams telling me their sorrows and out of that would come most of the legislative agenda for the following year this is the people s house and i have been very very proud to be able to start my government service in this house and i m very very grateful for the people of this state who allowed me to stay here for 20 years i deeply thank the voters and the people of this state the exercise that we begin today with the election of officers and tomorrow with the election of the governor is an extraordinary process which is a relatively new process in human history the peaceful transfer of power between two unrelated individuals and in this case between different parties we are extraordinarily lucky to live in a country where this exists and we too often take it for granted in vermont it is a particularly extraordinary ritual because of the extraordinary state that vermont is we are in many ways unique we have a citizen legislature we have growing diversity we have a sense of community that many other states never have except when tragedy strikes and yet we have it every day and i ask you to remember as you continue in your public careers in vermont how lucky we are how lucky we are that we live in a state where you can have a big argument with somebody at town meeting over the school budget and three days later if their barn burns down you re there with a covered dish we live in an extraordinary society because we deeply value each other as human beings i think that vermont is the way that america ought to be america would be a stronger country if we valued each other as human beings more america would be a stronger country if we admitted that we were dependent on each other and that we were responsible for each other and that we were connected to each other every human being whether we like them or not that we are connected to and that we have an obligation to as fellow americans and as fellow human beings i have been so proud and so privileged and so honored to serve as governor of this state where at our core belief in who we are we believe that whether we are republicans or whether we are democrats or whether we are progressives or whether we are independents we believe that and there are friendships that you will make in this body and beyond as your careers prosper that will remind you every day that it is important who somebody is not what they are we can set an example for the rest of this country because these are values that used to be very american and we re starting to lose them as the middle class gets more and more pressed by a more and more global society and a more and more difficult society economically what i have tried to do in vermont above all is to build what i call a middle class safety net so that two wage earners in a family who often may hold three jobs working hard to make ends meet may someday hope that their kids will be able to go to college just as we were this is the first generation that we are facing where it s more difficult for parents to pay for college than it was for my parents generation and we can do better and you have in this room over the last 20 years that i have served made sure that that is fixed in vermont with your generous support of higher education your generous insistence in support of vesa act this is a legislature with a heart and i mean that about all legislators republican democrat independent and progressive because i know i tried to push back in the budget and it didn t matter who was in control you still wanted to support all those programs but i salute you for that i do want you to be fiscally conservative i think jim will be fiscally conservative i want him to succeed and i want you to pay attention to what he says but i am proud in a way although we had fights about the budget and how much money we were spending i am proud because what was in your hearts at those times was supporting the people who sent you here a recognition of how tough it is to make a living of how difficult the circumstances can be to send kids to college and to hope that your kids do better than you did that s not the case everywhere in america there are an awful lot of legislators that forget who sent them here an awful lot of people in government who have fogotten how tough it is to make a living and as long as vermont believes in the values that you hold today strong rural values of community where we truly believe that all of us are responsible to each other and all of us are responsible for each other this state will continue to be a great and wonderful state and my job that i ve had for the last eleven and a half years will continue to be the greatest job in vermont thank you very very much dem hdean9 12 03 howard_dean i want to note that we have the speaker of the city council here gifford miller i don t where he is but i know he s here we thank him for being here and i also want to note in addition to our special guest that we have karenna gore here and we thank you very much for being here as well i am deeply grateful to my former roommate ralph dawson and all his friends and committee that put this together it is great to be back in harlem and i really appreciate all the community leaders that have come out and i thank you for your help i am of course going to make very brief remarks when we set this even up i had absolutely no idea that we were going to have the elected president of the united states here with us today and i am very very grateful for our special guest i m just going to make a few very very short remarks first i think many of you know that this campaign is about some issues that are important about jobs in america again about investing instead of giving 3 trillion worth of tax cuts to the top 1 percent of americans it s about mass transit and schools and investing in roads and bridges and renewable energy and broadband telecommunications so we can eliminate the digital divide and have jobs all over america it s about health insurance for every american in my state everybody under 18 has health insurance and if we can do those kinds of things in a small rural state we can do that in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth it s about educational opportunity it s about a president who says no child left behind but leaves many children behind we re going to change that and this time there really will be no child left behind we re going to start right here in harlem but there s also a much broader theme and that is a theme to do with community when i was 21 years old it was toward the end of the civil rights movement and it had been a very difficult time for america martin luther king had been killed bobby kennedy had been killed and a number of other people including four little girls in a birmingham church gave their lives so that every american could have equal rights under the law but it was also a time of extraordinary hope a time where we felt like we were all in it together that if one person was left behind then america wasn t as good as it could be or as strong as it should be that s the kind of america we want back again the america where medicare passed for the first time head start passed the voting rights act the civil rights act the first african american justice of the united states supreme court a time when it wasn t enough for me as a citizen of vermont to say i wanted good schools or you as a citizen of new york to say you want good schools but i had a responsibility not just to have good schools in vermont or you to have good schools in new york but as americans we had a responsibility to have good schools in our states and our towns and good schools in alabama and in mississippi and in brownsville texas and in oakland california and east new york that was our responsibility too what we want is our community back and our country back the country where we are all in this together it is an extraordinary honor for me to be standing on the stage with someone who i have admired greatly who has taught me a great deal during this campaign on issues such as foreign policy such as defense he s an extraordinary human being who i have gotten to know over the past few years someone who has a long career in public service who served his country honorably in the armed services someone who i believe in and somebody who we believe in and we admire it is an honor and privilege to present to you former vice president of the united states al gore mr vice president i want to thank you for your generous and thoughtful words particularly those words that said that the 11th commandment now also ought to apply to democrats as you know i ve been picking buckshot out of my rear end in these some of these debates and we re going up to new hampshire tonight and see if i do some more and i particularly appreciate all the people that put this event together i think it s important that we started in harlem and the reason i think it s important that we started in harlem is because in 2002 we lost a lot of races in the democratic party because we decided that we were going to go to the swing votes and we were going to try to get them and our base is going to come along later on i think it s important in this campaign that we recognize those people who were with us all the time and so we made a conscious decision to start with women to start with the african american community to start with the latino community to start with the trade union movement and make sure that people understood that when they went to the polls this time we lost five great governors and some senators in the last three years because our campaign was i voted with the president 85 per cent of the time if you re a democrat and your campaign is that you voted 85 percent of the time with the president who s the most conservative well he s not a conservative radical president since we ve had in my lifetime then of course the people are going to say let s vote for the guy that s going to be with the president 100 percent of the time i thank al gore for his extraordinary leadership in this party in the last couple of years i told him and i m embarrassing him in front of you all but i told him you know how i am i say what i think for better or worse i told him that the two best speeches in this campaign were given for somebody who s not running for president and that was his march speech and his september speech about the war and about foreign policy we have needed a strong steady hand in this party and i appreciate al s willing to stand up and be one and so let me thank you again this event turned out a little differently than i expected a little more higher profile the one thing i regret is that i have not had a chance to come around and meet all of the people individually who have come here and made this event i am proud to be here in the city of my birth i am proud to be here in the capital of african american community in the country in the united states of america a community that goes back a long long time and has contributed so much to america and i am very proud of your support this campaign is not about howard dean going to the white house this campaign is about us going to the white house all of us and i look forward to the day on january 20th 2005 when we do what andrew jackson another great tennessean did we will open the doors to the white house and let the american people back in thanks very much dem hdean9 4 03 howard_dean thank you very much it s a great pleasure to be here i usually get introduced to cope conferences up my way as the only doctor in america with a 100 percent cope record but what i really want to know this morning is where has the democratic party gone what are we doing voting for 350 billion worth of tax cuts to people who don t need em what are we doing voting for the supposed no child left behind bill the no school board left standing bill which takes money out of local school systems and controls them from the federal level what are we doing arguing about the patient s bill of rights it s an important bill but if it passes not one more person has health insurance it s not five cents cheaper how come democrats in congress aren t standing up for universal health insurance for every single american harry truman put that in the democratic platform in 1948 it s been 55 years we can do better and we re going to do better with your help in our state everybody under 18 has health insurance we simply expanded medicaid to cover people who make 54 000 a year or less if they re under 18 now if we can do that in a small rural state which is 26th in income in the country surely the most wealthy and powerful society on the face of the earth can join every single other industrialized country and make sure that all of its people have health insurance we need a balanced budget in this country you know no republican president has balanced the budget in 34 years in america i always like to say that if you want someone you can trust with your taxpayers dollars to in the white house you d better elect a democrat because the republicans can t manage money it s true they certainly haven t managed yours 1 7 trillion worth of tax cuts that s with the president s first year of office can you imagine what 1 7 trillion would have done for our infrastructure building roads building bridges building railroads rebuilding airports and building our schools that s where the 1 7 trillion should have gone to because that would have created thousands and thousands of jobs this country has lost over two million jobs since this president came into office and created from the largest surplus in the history of the country the largest deficit in the history of this country without one job to show for it how many americans would be at work today if we d spent that money on infrastructure and how long will that infrastructure last to support an economy that will recover when a democratic president takes office in january 2005 i want pension reform i had a small company in my state it was a trucking company went out of business about ten years ago but before it went out of business the management looted the pension funds in order to stave off bankruptcy i had guys three weeks from retirement with nothing left that money doesn t belong in corporate america it belongs to the working people who earned it we need a change in our pension companies should not be allowed to run pensions any more we ought to have those pensions run independently so that money is protected with trustees so that money can t be looted i want a different trade policy in america free trade started out as a good thing my company my state s got a lot of jobs because of free trade we re right up along the canadian border but if free trade is going to work to create a middle class in other countries that can buy our products then we can t have any more trade agreements without labor standards and environmental standards because without labor standards and environmental standards free trade is not fair trade a hundred years ago there was a different reward for capital as it was for labor and what the trade union movement did for this country is to create the largest middle class in the world when people say the trade union movement built this country they think about the brooklyn bridge or the empire state building but the truth is the trade union movement made this country strong because it was possible to work at a factory or work in a mine and live a middle class living standard and hope that one day you can send your kids to college we re starting to lose that now we have an administration in washington that divides us they divide us by race they divide us by income they divide us by who works where i want to change that i want to get guns off the table as a national issue in my state we don t have any gun control we also have the lowest homicide rate in america i support the assault weapons ban the brady bill and all that and i think we ought to enforce it but i think each state after that ought to make whatever gun laws it needs because what you need in new york and california and new jersey is not what you need in vermont or wyoming and montana until the democrats get this off the table we re not going to win elections anymore so the things i m going to do if i become president in january of 2004 are this i m going to ask the congress to repeal the majority of the bush tax cuts so we can balance the budget and have health insurance for every single american i m going to undo all the work this administration has done to get rid of project labor agreements we need i m going to appoint people to the national labor relations board who believe in enforcing labor laws and giving working people a chance i m going to support card checks so they can t hire union busting people anymore to take jobs away from but most of all i m going to try to bring this country back together again we built this country together we all of us did it it was a hard thing to do because we had to bring in folks that were on the outside that you organized we had to learn through the 60s about what made a strong america and to include everybody we had to find laws that made it possible so that working people wouldn t lose their jobs when executives made hundreds of millions of dollars a year in compensation for shareholders whose value was going down i want to change that we built this country together we want our country back we want our country back so the average working people the middle class people can have hope again we want our country back so that every kind of american can be proud that they re american again we want this country back so that it s not just my children that have health insurance and whose work it s everybody s children it s my neighbors children we want this country back so we can have better schools so the federal government can stand up and put money into crumbling infrastructure in this country that you all can have better jobs and i can have better jobs and my children can have better jobs and it s not going to happen under a president whose principal interest is to cut taxes on people that make more than a million dollars a year we can do better than that so the only promise that i m going to make to you is this you may not agree with everything i want to do and you may not want to think that we re going to have to change presidents i know that this president is very popular right now but we are going to change presidents and when we do working people in this country are going to be able to stand up and say not only are we proud to be american but we re proud because america is a country for everybody once again thank you very much dem jedwards11 8 2006 john_edwards thank you very much i m happy to be here with all of you let me give you a quick report on elizabeth elizabeth s doing great which is the good news doing very very well and what i d like to do is just take a few minutes to talk about sort of what s happening in the world today and particularly what all of us have been seeing on our television screens for the last few days you know we have this ongoing conflict between hezbollah and the israelis we ve got hamas launching missiles out of gaza into israel we have the ongoing war in iraq which is an extraordinary mess something i think we have a responsibility to do something about to change the failed policy that we re seeing now from the bush administration and let me just say to all of you most of you know this already one of the reasons that you re probably here but i voted for the iraq resolution and i have since said and i stand by this that my vote was a mistake i take responsibility for that i think it s important for us to tell the truth about those of us who supported this war and now believe it was a mistake i thought some time ago it was a mistake in addition to that we have in iran as president ahmadinejad trying to obtain a nuclear weapon which is an extraordinarily dangerous thing so we live in a very dangerous world there s no question about that but if you look at the way this administration and america for that matter has been reacting which is really what it is reacting you don t see any long term view about what america needs to be doing i ve spent a lot of time traveling around the world the last couple of years and i give speeches i ve met with a lot of leaders around the world the one thing that s clear to me is the world does not see you they don t see your character they don t see what you re made of they don t see what you care about what your priorities are here s what they see they see america expanding america s use of its military they see what they perceive to be america trying to expand its influence in the world what they don t see is they don t see our better angels they don t see that we re willing to engage in issues that are outside our own self interest they don t see that we care about the huge moral issues that face the planet and there s so many chances for us to do something about this i mean global poverty half our planet lives on 2 or less a day three billion people and where is america where s american leadership we are dragged kicking and screaming to doing anything right now there s a genocide going on in africa in sudan and darfur hundreds of thousands have already died women are being raped families driven from their homes we said my country said after rwanda we would never let this happen again not on our watch remember the phrase it s happening right now right in front of us genocide where is america we re better than this i m telling you tonight there will be a child born more than one in africa with aids because their mother has aids and they can t afford a 4 dollar dose of medicine a whole new generation of children with aids where is america human rights abuses in russia and china you know the world does not see who you are they don t they don t see what we re made of we desperately need for the world to see who you are and who the american people are i want to say something about our party we get all caught up in very important local races statewide races and then national races where we go out and work for our party i love the democratic party but i want you to know something i love my country more and there is so much more than our party at stake if you think about this for a minute there are really only two major parties in america and we ve seen what one party will do over the last six years we ve alienated and driven away the rest of the world they have absolutely no idea what we re made of and what we care about we have to be the saviour our party has to be the leader we have to bring america to the right place and when i say it s not just about our party it s about the future of the country we live in for that matter it s about the future of the world we live in because we are the only superpower when we don t lead no one leads so when you re out there working in these elections these local elections these statewide elections and the national elections i want you to think beyond the democratic party because literally the future of america and the world is at stake here and the world needs to see who we are the need to see what we re made of and i ll tell you something else they need to see not just what we would do around the world but they need to see what we would do here at home you know i always believed i bet many of you did too when i was growing up america was this great model for the rest of the world this was before abu ghraib this was before guantanamo it was before the war in iraq we were the country that was looked up to everyone wanted to be like us they wanted to emulate us well they don t look at what we do around the world they also look at what we do here at home when those images that came on to our television screens out of new orleans we re not the only ones who saw em the whole world saw em what they want to know from us is will the richest and most powerful nation on the face of the planet actually turn its back on 37 million of its own people who wake up every day worried about feeding and clothing their children and one thing that our country our people understand that politicians just don t seem to get is what we do for the victims of the hurricane for that matter what we do for millions of americans who live in poverty every day it s not about them we don t do it for them we do it for us because it says something about who we are it says something about the character of america how our people respond to now if they want to you know i don t want to be pie in the sky you know like i don t believe in the real world but there is one thing i am sure of i spent the last three or four years going all over this country there is a hunger in america a hunger to be inspired again people are looking for something big and important we our party we need to give it to them we used to be the party of big ideas we were the party of backbone and courage and leadership we need to be that party again not just for the world and not just for our party but for america our country needs us so badly and by the way it s not just doing something about poverty that s a piece of it it s just a piece of it you know we have a huge moral obligation to do something about 46 47 million of our own people who have no health care coverage and when i say do something about it let me be very clear i m talking about universal health care coverage every man woman and child in america which includes dental coverage it includes mental health care coverage mental health parity there s another issue we should be the party that leads the apollo project that takes america away from its dependence on oil in the middle east we have to change where we are today we have to but i want to say something about this this applies across the board to what i m talking about we ve got plenty of politicians in america what we need are leaders and we need leaders that will tell us the truth you cannot you cannot you listen to these politicians listen do we need to invest in clean alternative sources of energy of course we do wind solar biomass biofuels ethanol all things that people in iowa know a great deal about but it is not the truth to tell the country that we re going to solve our dependence on oil just by doing that we need to ask america for a new kind of patriotism patriotism about something more than war we need to say to the country it is important for your country for you to be willing to conserve it is important for your country for you to be willing to sacrifice because we can t innovate our way out of this we can t it s going to require both people are going to have to be willing to sacrifice we can t drive vehicles that get 12 miles to the gallon and think that we re going to solve this problem it will never happen and just one other issue you know i don t you about you but i don t want to live in an america where we re giving up our individual liberties in the name of freedom we ve seen too much of that one thing we should not doubt all of us would embrace the intelligence operation the law enforcement operation that brought down this planned attack announced yesterday that s a great thing but we should never for a minute doubt we the democratic party we will america safe we will keep america strong economically militarily but we should never doubt that our liberties are most in jeopardy in times like this every single day and we cannot give up what we are and who we are in the name of the war we can t do it possibly missing a bit due to tape you know i remember when i i was a teenager when this happened i remember watching bobby kennedy go through appalachia and show this country the other america so many americans didn t know anything about it didn t want to think about it and he inspired me and in fact a whole generation of americans to engage to care to get involved we need to give america something big and important to engage in again and one of those things needs to be ending poverty we can end poverty in the next 30 years we can reduce poverty by at least a third in the next ten years and people who say there s nothing by the way and by the way i listen to these politicians i hear this all the time they say well you know if you ve been successful in your life it s because of your own hard work and your responsibility and if you ve failed it s because of your failure it s just not the truth all of us know it s not the truth and i use my own life as an example i grew up in a family some of you might even remember that i m the son of a mill worker i started thinking what i should say is now i m the son of a dot dot dot cause anybody in american can fill in the blank but it is true that i like many of you grew up in a normal american family my parents worked in the mill my grandparents did they didn t go to college and i was lucky to be the first person in my family to actually go to college but more important i ve now had everything you could every have in this country i didn t get here by myself i had my country with me every step of the way and that means public school teachers and a great state university for my education listen national community matters it matters what we do together because i said earlier it says something about who we are and what we care about and those people who say there s nothing that can be done they re wrong there are lots of things that can be done we can raise the minimum wage in america ought to be at least 7 50 an hour we can expand the earned income tax credit give low income families a refundable tax credit we can help make it easier not harder for unions to organize in the workplace so working people have a voice we can help people save we can set up savings accounts for low income families match what they re able to save we can do something about the extraordinary racial and economic segregation that exists in america you know those pictures that came out of new orleans into our living rooms were disturbing but that doesn t just exist in new orleans it s all across this country we have to face up to this we can t continue to put our head against a wall like we have for decades and pretend it s not true here s an idea about what we can do suppose we take the housing vouchers we ve used for decades to cluster poor people together in bad neighborhoods and instead we expand them we have more but we use them in a different way to create some mobility for these families so they can move across these economic and racial barriers that exist in america access to college you know we have so many young people who want to go can t go because they can t pay for it bush has cut billions of dollars out of the federal budget from the student loans here s what we ought to do instead we ve got a model that we re doing this in a poor county in eastern north carolina we call it college for everyone what we say is you graduate from high school you re qualified to go to college if you commit to work your first year at least ten hours a week we pay for your tuition and books in other words we give these kids a simple way to go to college we don t just give it to them they have to work for it but then it makes it what we ve learned is it works a huge percentage of the kids in this small county in eastern north carolina have signed up for it so don t tell me there s nothing we can do there are things we can do about health care about poverty in america about energy independence changing the way the world looks at us allowing the world to see who we really are and what we re made of what our moral fiber is but what i want to say to you and i m going to actually end with this what i want to say to you is we can t stand by and hope somebody else is going to do this for us we can t when i talk about us needing to do these things i m not talking about me i m talking about us all of us because our strength and our power is when we act together when we stand arm and arm for the things that we believe in with backbone and strength and vision and passion and so i ll end tonight i want to take a few minutes to be able to speak to y all but i want to end tonight with a line that i borrowed from a woman who is no longer living but she would end her speeches when she was rallying people around important causes by saying you know the leaders we ve been waiting for are us she s exactly right if we want to live in a moral just america and if we want america to lead in a moral and just world we can t stand on the sideline and hope somebody else will do it we have to do it every single one of us together we can do it we can inspire this country god bless you thank you all for coming a pleasure to meet with you dem jedwards16 9 03 excerpt john_edwards good morning and welcome to my hometown robbins north carolina it is great to be home with family my parents my wife elizabeth all my children and with my dearest friends thank you for giving me the life and for the example that you have set for me thank all of you for being here today i have come home to stand in the shadow of the mill where my father worked where i myself worked as a young boy and where i learned the value of hard work and a hard day s work we re not far today from the post office where my mother worked the church which is right over here where we went to church every sunday and the high school where i played football and dreamed that i d be the first person in my family to go to college i grew up in an american town and i grew up with america s dream i owe everything i have to the america that i grew up in this is where i learned that a job is about more than a paycheck it s about dignity self respect self worth this is where i learned that the simple promise of america is the enduring greatness of america a better life for all who worked for it and so this is where today to make opportunity the birth right of every single american i declare myself a candidate for president of the united states thank you thank you thank you america deserves a president who understands that the people of this country work and the people of this country work hard and a president who will stand up for those people someone who will stop at nothing to create opportunity for all the great people of this country that s the promise of america a fair shake for all and a free ride for none we want to live in a country where the promise of america is always kept and never broken we want the america we believe in to be the america our children grow up in where all children have the same opportunity that i had the chance to live out their dreams and make the most of the talents god gave them we want to live in an america that works for all of us that s the america i grew up in that is the america i believe in i have spent my life fighting my heart out for the kind of people that i grew up with right here in robbins as a lawyer for two decades i stood with families and children against hmos and insurance companies standing up for folks who played by the rules against those who didn t we fought those battles and we won and i promise to fight for you with the same passion and energy that i fought for them i haven t spent most of my life in politics which most of you know but i have spent enough time in washington to know how much we need to change washington you know the truth is folks from here in robbins they don t have lobbyists in washington d c they don t have lobbyists working for them and fighting for them they count on their government to protect them to protect their interests and they deserve a president who goes to work every day thinking about them fighting for them protecting them that s the president that the people of robbins need well i have never taken a dime from special interest pacts or washington lobbyists i have spent my life working for people against those special interests i know this fight i am ready for this fight and we will win this fight and we deserve a president who s close to our people not close to the lobbyists who listens to our people because he knows them because he works for them a president who hearse them even when they can t speak when they can t speak because they ve lost their job because they re caring for a child or just because the simple struggle to make ends meet leaves them with no time for anything else well george bush s guiding principle is a twisted reflection of the american bargain instead of opportunity for all special privileges for none he s given us opportunity for all the special interests dem jedwards19 1 04 excerpt john_edwards i came here a year ago with a belief that we could change this country with a belief that the politics of what was possible the politics of hope could overcome the politics of cynicism i have been all over the state of iowa i have been on main streets in cafes in people s homes the people of iowa tonight confirmed that they believe in a positive uplifting vision to change america and not only that tonight we started a movement to change this country that will sweep across america tonight we began it you know we still live in a country where in so many ways there are two separate americas one for those in positions of privilege one for everybody else it doesn t have to be that way we have two health care systems one for those who can afford the best health care money can buy one for everybody else rationed out by insurance companies and hmos it doesn t have to be that way we have two public school systems one for those who live in the most affluent communities one for everybody else we have two tax systems one for those who have lawyers and accountants and can take care of every tax loophole and every tax advantage that comes down the pike then one for everybody else folks who just work hard every single day and pay their taxes we have two economies in america one for all of those families who have everything they need security their kids their grandkids are all going to be ok and they know it and then there s one for all of those families who work paycheck to paycheck they save nothing they go into debt they struggle every single day to build a better life for themselves and their families we also have 35 million americans who every single day live in poverty in america i know the politicians don t talk about this much the reason is these folks usually don t vote doesn t come up high in polls we should talk about lifting these americans out of poverty because it is wrong to have 35 million people living in our country living in poverty every single day not in the america you and i are going to build together we have a moral responsibility to lift these families out of poverty we have children in a country of our wealth going to be bed hungry we have children who don t have the clothes to keep them warm we have millions of americans who are working hard every single day for minimum wage living in poverty in america you and i will build together we will say no to kids going to bed hungry no to kids who don t have the clothes to keep them warm and no forever for any american working full time and living in poverty not in our america not in our america we still have two governments in washington d c one for the insiders the lobbyists those powerful lobbyists that are there every single day and then one for the rest of this country america still has two images around the world the one we used to have of america this great shining light this beacon of freedom democracy and human rights that everyone looked up to and instead the image we have today america acting on its own unilaterally using its power when it chooses to ignoring and disrespecting its allies it doesn t have to be that way you and i can build an america and an image of america that we will be proud of this campaign this cause this movement is about bringing real change to america it s about lifting up the american people and making them believe again and i want to say a word about some of the other folks who were involved in this race here in the state of iowa first my congratulations to senator john kerry for running a very good campaign in the state of iowa to governor dean and congressman kucinich both of whom are very good people good leaders who also ran a good campaign but i want to particularly take a moment to say a word about congressman dick gephardt a man i have so much personal respect and affection for here is a man who has stood up and fought for working people every single day of his life and he deserves to be lifted up by us tonight for all of the work he has done over his entire life for the kind of people that deserve a champion we should be proud of what he s done i also want to say a thank you to my team here in the state of iowa dem jedwards21 1 03 john_edwards thank you it s an honor to be here kate tonight to celebrate the 30th anniversary of roe v wade you know when i was in law school we actually talked about roe v wade unlike some famous people that we all know about we were proud to live in north carolina a state that protected a woman s right to choose even before roe but when roe came the decision in roe came along we many of us learned for the first time how the law can actually block genuine equality for women one of the people who taught me that in my law school class and has been teaching it to me on almost a daily basis for the last 27 years is my wife elizabeth who s with us here tonight and i m honored to have her here justice harry blackmun in thornburg explained the core principle embodied in roe and i quote the constitution embodies a promise that a certain private sphere of individual liberty will be kept largely beyond the reach of government that promise extends to women as well as men these are powerful words guaranteeing every woman a power only she should have but they are not just some golden legal principle this is about real people it s about real lives and it s about difficult choices tonight while we gather to celebrate the 30th anniversary of roe in this room somewhere in america a woman sits alone struggling suffering anxious trying to confront a difficult decision that millions of women have faced before she ll call on her own experience she ll call on her own religious beliefs her sense of right and wrong and she ll make that decision but the important thing is that that decision is hers and it is hers alone it is because of roe v wade it is because of naral it is because of people in this room that tonight tonight she has that right but make no mistake about it that right is under attack every single day justice blackmun in 1989 as the court was getting more reagan appointees more bush appointees and a woman s right to choose was increasingly under in jeapordy justice blackmun said warned actually a chill wind blows that chill wind blows tonight it blows from the white house it blows from the house it blows from the senate these people believe that politicians and judges in their wisdom are in a better place to make the decision that can so profoundly affect a woman s life they are wrong they are wrong they are wrong and we must stop them and we will stop them now speaking for myself and i hope for you i m energized by that chill wind as kate says we have to do everything in our power to ensure that less and less women confront this difficult decision but as long as i have anything to do with it every woman who faces it will make the decision on her own based on her own moral and religious beliefs without any interference from politicians or judges my whole life i have trusted ordinary people to make decisions that so profoundly affect their own lives this is exactly that kind of decision those decisions belong to you they do not belong to the government and so you have my word tonight that i will help lead a fight to pass a federal freedom of choice act so that your right to choose is guaranteed and protected no matter what the court does but the right to choose is not just about a woman s privacy it s about her equality it s about her personal dignity it s about her right to share as a proud and independent equal in this society the right to choose is an essential ingredient to real equality in america until we recognize that fully finally without any equivocation we can never reach the promise of america the promise guarantees freedom liberty and justice for every man woman and child in america just as we can t leave john ashcroft in charge of our liberties and our freedoms we can t leave people like john ashcroft in charge of your rights your personal dignity and your right to choose now as you all know yesterday was the day set aside to honor martin luther king it was an extraordinary and wonderful day for me coming from the south it was a reminder of the special burden that we carry the special responsibility to lead to lead on issues of civil rights to lead on issues of equal rights it was an honor yesterday to mark that anniversary and it is an honor tonight to mark this anniversary tonight all of us reaffirm our belief that in america all men and all women are created equal and we all have rights that no government can ever ever take from us thank you all very much and god bless you dem jedwards22 2 03 john_edwards good morning it s great to be here it s also great to be here with my wife of 25 years who s with me here today my wife elizabeth across america every day people go to work believing that hard work will give them a chance to get ahead every day people do what s right for their family and what s right in their job because they think that s more important than a fast buck and every day this president finds another way to let them down if you re wealthy or well connected in america if you re a big donor or a big business looking for a loophole then george bush is your man but if you re working for a living if you re worried about health care for your parents if your worried about college for your kids if you ve lost your pension in just a few short months if your business has been surrounded in corporate scandal then don t look to the white house for help don t even look to the white house for understanding because you will not find it there this presidency is a failure for the great middle class of america and for everyone struggling to meet it it is wrong this is the people s government and we deserve to take it back our job our job in 2004 is to give the american people a clear choice if you make me your nominee let me tell you what choice the american people will have they ll have somebody who comes from them my dad worked in a mill all his life my mother s last job was working at the post office i was the first person in my family to be able to go to college i worked my way through college worked my way through law school and then spent 20 years as a lawyer fighting for the same people i d grown up with people just like my father people who worked in the mill with him they are most of america they are the reason i ran for the united states senate they are the reason i want to be president i want to be a champion for the regular people of this country who make america great people like my father you know he s not an insider i promise you he doesn t have any lobbyists in washington dc his only hope is that his president will go to work every single day with ideas and vision about how to make his life better and with the backbone and courage to fight against anything that gets in the way and then we have this president george w bush comes from a very different place and he governs in a very different way he believes that he and his friends they know what s best for us they govern looking down on all the rest of us they ll tell us what they think we need to know when they think we need to know it under them we get government of the insiders by the insiders for the insiders the people get left behind well the people deserve better and we need to stand up and say so this president s record of false promises this president s record of false promises and broken promises starts with the economy george bush promised remember this prosperity for every forgotten corner of this country well here s his record 2 365 000 lost jobs 400 billion in lost retirement savings 4 5 trillion in stock market losses and a 307 billion deficit that is record setting we ve seen this movie before haven t we george bush promised affordable prescription drugs for every senior citizen and then he fought a bill written by senator schumer senator mccain myself and others that would have closed loopholes that would have helped bring down the cost of prescription drugs for every american george bush promised to make power plants comply with clean air standards what he didn t tell us is that is the middle of the night he would weaken those standards and subject thousands of children and thousands of seniors to asthma attacks and respiratory problems the truth is any promise made by george bush to the american people that has come into conflict with insiders interests you can just consider the promise broken every single time compassionately of course and so i ask you and i ask the american people are you better off than you were two years ago in two short years george w bush has taught us what that w stands for wrong wrong for our children wrong for our parents wrong for our values wrong wrong wrong for america so if you think this administration has changed your life for the better i m not your guy if you think your government should be run from the top down without any consideration for what regular people need and what regular people think i m not your guy and if you think the only way to restore faith in government is to have somebody who s been involved in washington politics for decades i m not your guy but if you want somebody who has spent their life fighting for average americans if you want somebody who will dig in take hold and never let go if you want somebody that will take this fight to george bush s doorstep and then inside i am your guy in america in america do we still believe that the son of a mill worker can go toe to toe with the son of a president i do you know the president has attacked me over and over for having spent 20 years of my life fighting for kids and victims and families against the most powerful opposition big insurance companies so i want to be as clear as i can be about this i am proud of my career i am proud of the children i represented i am proud of the cases i won and so mr president if you want to talk about the insiders you ve fought for versus the kids and families that i ve fought for here s my message to you mr president bring it on and if this party if this party makes me its nominee and i m standing on a stage with george bush i hope he attacks me for my work because i m going to tell him a story i m going to tell him the story of a little boy named ethan bedrick my law firm represented ethan bedrick he had cerebral palsy every doctor he had said ethan needed daily physical therapy so he could keep his freedom of movement everybody agreed everybody except some bureaucrat sitting behind a desk hundreds of miles away working for an insurance company who had never seen ethan and he said we re not going to pay for it well here mr president we re going let you take the side of the people you ve always taken the side of we re going to let you take the side of the insurance companies speaking for my self i m going to stand with the people i have always stood for i will stand with ethan bedrick and so will every single person in this room and so we ll win this election but we won t win it just by telling people what went wrong the last two years we re going to win it by telling them what we re going to do to make it right yeah this party needs to stand for something but what we stand for can t just be clichs and criticism we have to stand for a vision of america that s true to our values and energized energized with new ideas so i want to tell you about some of my ideas first we have to get this economy in order and recognize what every single family in america already knows you can t keep spending money you don t have we have to put off this tax cut that president bush gave to the wealthiest americans he is using his own recession and don t doubt it for a minute he owns it this is the bush recession he is using it as an excuse to put money in the pockets of people at the top who don t need it while he s doing almost nothing for the rest of america we should make the middle class tax cut permanent we should give every american family a 500 tax credit to help them with these rising heating bills that they re confronted with and we ought to help states we ought to help em deal with the worst budget shortfalls they ve had since world war ii so they don t have lay off firefighters lay off police officers and don t have to raise property taxes and we have to do more to restore fiscal responsibility in this country because let s be honest that s a challenge for both sides you know the republicans they ve never seen a corporate loophole they re not in love with and sometimes sometimes its hard for us to say no to spending projects well we have to be willing to be tough on both if we do that we ll be able to do what we need to do for regular americans and we need to say to this president it s time to stop saying one thing about education and doing something else mr president your own budget underfunds your own plan by 10 billion my plan helps schools get good teachers pay the teachers better and get teachers to the place they re needed the most and my college for everyone plan will make college available to every single young person first year tuition free who s willing to work for it education education we will be where we need to be in education in america when we can say that the sons and daughters of mill workers will have just as good an education as the sons and daughters of millionaires in america that s when we ll be where we need to be in public education in america we need to pass a prescription drug benefit under medicare we need to stop drug company efforts to keep less expensive drugs off the market we need to make the patients bill of rights the law of the land and we need to end the national disgrace of 40 million americans who don t even have access to health insurance finally our party has to recognize that if we want to win back the white house we have to provide real leadership real leadership on domestic defense and national security i am not going to cede this issue to an administration who believes plastic wrap and duct tape is the answer to national security mr president if you re going to tear down patriots like max cleland over homeland security the very least you can do is actually make our homeland secure after lobbying by chemical companies the president cancelled plans to improve security at chemical plants we need to do more not less we need a domestic intelligence agency that can track down terrorists in our midst infiltrate their ranks and stop them before they do harm we need more border patrols to keep terrorists out we need more port inspections to keep weapons out and we need to improve domestic readiness so police firefighters and emts have all the resources they need to deal with any threat that may come up we are the world s superpower we should stay there we should maintain our strength our military strength our economic strength our political strength we should use that strength to promote the things we care about democracy freedom human rights but we should lead in a way that brings others to us not in a way that drives others away now i know that there are a lot of you here don t agree with me about this i do believe that saddam hussein needs to be disarmed including if necessary the use of military force he has chemical and biological weapons he s used them in the past we cannot let him have nuclear capability but the real test for america will come in the post saddam iraq will we make the commitment to give the iraqi people a real chance for success a real chance for a democratic government or will we have the same kind of follow through that we had in afghanistan once we got rid of the taliban the world is watching us they know we are powerful they know we are strong now they want to know do we care not just about our peace not just about our prosperity but about theirs and i will say to every family in america your family is safer and more secure in a world where america is looked up to and respected than in a world where america is hated and we must never forget that what we fight for above all are the basic values of freedom and justice and we need to have the backbone and the courage to say that we will not let john ashcroft in the name of the war on terrorism take away our rights take away our freedoms take away our liberties they go to the heart and soul of what we are as a country and we have to do more to create freedom and opportunity for all our people this is personal for me i grew up in the south i grew up with the civil rights movement i was raised to believe in an america where we embrace everybody no matter where you live no matter who your family is no matter what the color of your skin that s the america we believe in we believe in lifting people up and so i will not follow on civil rights i will lead on civil rights we have a responsibility i feel a personal responsibility to lift up all people who today not 40 years ago today still suffer the effects of discrimination every minute of their lives we need to defend programs that provide real opportunity for people like the affirmative action program at the university of michigan and yes mr president we have we are and we will always demand judges who will enforce and protect our civil rights the people i grew up with in robbins are the people all across real america people like my own father they don t ask much from government but what they ask for matters they ask us to honor their values they ask us to have courage the courage of our convictions they want us to keep their country safe and strong and they want us to give them a real chance to do everything they re capable of doing with their lives george w bush does not work for them he never has he never will he is out of touch out of tune and in november 2004 he will be out of time we will call him to account for his broken promises we will challenge him on his duplicity we will hold him responsible for his failures i will offer a clear alternative i will offer an honest vision i will place my trust in the american people and we will prevail thank you dem jedwards27 1 04 excerpt john_edwards look at what we ve done this momentum is extraordinary and now and now and now and now we re going to take this energy and momentum that we saw in iowa this extraordinary energy and momentum that we have seen in new hampshire and we re going to take it right through february 3 and we re going so to see great victories on february 3 yes we are but we re going to take not only this momentum and this energy but we re going to take this message this positive uplifting vision of hope that has captivated iowa has captivated new hampshire and will captivate the rest of the country we have so much work to do we still live in a country where there are two different americas one for all those families all those families who never have to worry about a thing and then one for everybody else it doesn t have to be that way you and i can build an america one america where we don t have two health care systems one for families that can afford the best health care money can buy in a country that has it and one for everybody else rationed out by insurance companies drug companies millions of americans who have no health care coverage at all we shouldn t have two public school systems in america one for the most affluent communities one for everybody else we shouldn t have two tax systems one for the special interests the big corporations many of whom pay no taxes at all and one for all of those families who just work hard every year and pay their taxes and carry the tax burden in america we shouldn t have two economies in america one for all those families who struggle every single day to get by to pay their bills it takes every dime they make just to pay their bills they can t save anything because in fact they re going into debt we can do something for those families and the other families who never have to worry about a thing we should not have two different economies in america one other thing an issue you don t hear much about around america today which is 35 million americans who live in poverty every single day i know why politicians don t talk about it it s not high on any poll and those folks for the most part don t vote here is why we should not only talk about 35 million americans who live in poverty but do something about it because it is wrong and you and i together have a moral responsibility to lift these families out of poverty we can do it you and i together yes we can dem jedwards28 7 04 john_edwards thank you now you know why elizabeth is so amazing right i am a lucky man to have the love of my life at my side both of us have been blessed with four extraordinary children wade cate who you heard from emma clair and jack we are having such an extraordinary time myself and my entire family at this convention and by the way how great was teresa heinz kerry last night my father and mother wallace and bobbie edwards are also here tonight you taught me the values that i carry in my heart faith family responsibility opportunity for everyone you taught me that there s dignity and honor in a hard day s work you taught me to always look out for our neighbors to never look down on anybody and treat everybody with respect those are the values that john kerry and i believe in and nothing makes me prouder than standing with him in this campaign i am so humbled to be your candidate for vice president of the united states i want to talk about our next president for those who want to know what kind of leader he ll be i want to take you back about 30 years when john kerry graduated college he volunteered for military service volunteered to go to vietnam volunteered to captain a swiftboat one of the most dangerous duties in vietnam that you could have as a result he was wounded honored for his valor if you have any question about what he s made of just spend three minutes with the men who served with him then and who stand with him now they saw up close what he s made of they saw him reach into the river and pull one of his men to safety and save his life they saw him in the heat of battle make a decision in a split second to turn his boat around drive it through an enemy position and chase down the enemy to save his crew decisive strong is this not what we need in a commander in chief you know we hear a lot of talk about values where i come from you don t judge somebody s values based upon how they use that word in a political ad you judge their values based upon what they ve spent their life doing so when a man volunteers to serve his country the man volunteers and puts his life on the line for others that s a man who represents real american values this is a man who is prepared to keep the american people safe to make america stronger at home and more respected in the world john is a man who knows the difference between right and wrong he wants to serve you your cause is his cause and that is why we must and we will elect him the next president of the united states you know for the last few months john s been traveling around the country talking about his positive optimistic vision for america talking about his plan to move this country in the right direction but what have we seen relentless negative attacks against john so in the weeks ahead we know what s coming don t we more negative attacks aren t you sick of it they are doing all they can to take the campaign for the highest office in the land down the lowest possible road but this is where you come in between now and november you the american people you can reject the tired old hateful negative politics of the past and instead you can embrace the politics of hope the politics of what s possible because this is america where everything is possible i am here tonight for a very simple reason because i love my country and i have every reason to love my country i have grown up in the bright light of america i grew up in a small town in rural north carolina a place called robbins my father he worked in a mill all his life and i still remember vividly the men and women who worked in that mill with him i can see them some of them had lint in their hair some of them had grease on their faces they worked hard and they tried to put a little money away so that their kids and their grand kids could have a better life the truth is they re just like the auto workers the office workers the teachers and shop keepers on main streets all across this country my mother had a number of jobs she worked at the post office so she and my father could have health care she owned her own small business she refinished furniture to help pay for my education i have had such incredible opportunities in my life i was blessed to be the first person in my family to go to college i worked my way through and i had opportunities beyond my wildest dreams and the heart of this campaign your campaign our campaign is to make sure all americans have exactly the same kind opportunities that i had no matter where you live no matter who your family is no matter what the color of your skin is this is the america we believe in i have spent my life fighting for the kind of people i grew up with for two decades i stood with kids and families against big hmos and big insurance companies when i got to the senate i fought those same fights against the washington lobbyists and for causes like the patients bill of rights i stand here tonight ready to work with you and john to make america stronger and we have much work to do because the truth is we still live in a country where there are two different americas one for all of those people who have lived the american dream and don t have to worry and another for most americans everybody else who struggle to make ends meet every single day it doesn t have to be that way we can build one america where we no longer have two health care systems one for families who get the best health care money can by and then one for everybody else rationed out by insurance companies drug companies hmos millions of americans have no health coverage at all it doesn t have to be that way we have a plan we have a plan that will offer all americans the same health care that your senator has we can give you tax breaks to help you pay for your health care and when we re in office we will sign a real patients bill of rights into law so that you can make your own health care decisions we shouldn t have two public school systems in this country one for the most affluent communities and one for everybody else none of us believe that the quality of a child s education should be controlled by where they live or the affluence of the community they live in it doesn t have to be that way we can build one school system that works for all our kids gives them a chance to do what they re capable of doing our plan will reform our schools and raise standards we can give our schools the resources that they need we can provide incentives to put our best teachers in the subjects and the places where we need them the most and we can ensure that 3 million children have a safe place to go when they leave school in the afternoon we can do this together you and i john kerry and i believe that we shouldn t have two different economies in america one for people who are set for life they know their kids and their grand kids are going to be just fine and then one for most americans people who live paycheck to paycheck you don t need me to explain this to you do you you know exactly what i m talking about can t save any money can you takes every dime you make just to pay your bills and you know what happens if something goes wrong if you have a child that gets sick a financial problem a layoff in the family you go right off the cliff and when that happens what s the first thing that goes your dreams it doesn t have to be that way we can strengthen and lift up your families your agenda is our agenda so let me give you some specifics first we can create good paying jobs in this country again we re going to get rid of tax cuts for companies who are outsourcing your jobs and instead we re going to give tax breaks to american companies that are keeping jobs right here in america and we will invest in the jobs of the future and in the technologies and innovation to ensure that america stays ahead of the competition and we re going to do this because john and i understand that a job is about more than a paycheck it s about dignity and self respect hard work should be valued in this country so we re going to reward work not just wealth we don t want people to just get by we want people to get ahead so let me give you some specifics about what we re going to do first we re going to help you pay for your health care by having a tax break and health care reform that can save you up to 1 000 on your premiums we re going to help you cover the rising costs of child care with a tax credit up to 1 000 so that your kids have a place to go when you re at work that they re safe and well taken care of if your child if your child wants to be the first in your family to go to college we re going to give you a tax break on up to 4 000 in tuition and everyone and everybody listening here and at home is thinking one thing right now ok how are you going to pay for it right well let me tell you how we re going to pay for it and i want to be very clear about this we are going to keep and protect the tax cuts for 98 percent of americans 98 percent we re going to roll back we re going to roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest americans and we re going to close corporate loopholes we re going to cut government contractors and wasteful spending we can move this country forward without passing the burden to our children and our grandchildren we can also do something about 35 million americans who live in poverty every day and here s why we shouldn t just talk about but do something about the millions of americans who live in poverty because it is wrong and we have a moral responsibility to lift those families up i mean the very idea that in a country of our wealth and our prosperity we have children going to bed hungry we have children who don t have the clothes to keep them warm we have millions of americans who work full time every day to support their families working for minimum wage and still live in poverty it s wrong these are men and women who are living up to their bargain they re working hard they re supporting their families their families are doing their part it s time we did our part and that s what we re going to do that s what we re going to do when john is in the white house because we re going to raise the minimum wage we re going to finish the job on welfare reform and we re going to bring good paying jobs to the places where we need them the most and by doing all those things we re going to say no forever to any american working full time and living in poverty not in our america not in our america not in our america let me talk about let me talk about why we need to build one america because i like many of you i saw up close what having two americas can do to our country from the time i was very young i saw the ugly face of segregation and discrimination i saw young african american kids being sent upstairs in movie theaters i saw white only signs on restaurant doors and luncheon counters i feel such an enormous personal responsibility when it comes to issues of race and equality and civil rights and i ve heard some discussions and debates around america about where and in front of what audiences we ought to talk about race and equality and civil rights i have an answer to that questions everywhere everywhere everywhere this is not an african american issue this is not a latino issue this is not an asian american issue this is an american issue it is about who we are what our values are and what kind of country we live in the truth is the truth is that what john and i want what all of us want if for our children and our grandchildren to be the first generations that grown up in an america that s no longer divided by race we must build one america we must be one america strong and united for another very important reason because we are at war none of us will ever forget where we were on september the 11th we all share the same terrible images the towers falling in new york the pentagon in flames a smoldering field in pennsylvania we share a profound sadness for the nearly 3 000 lives that were lost and as a member of the senate intelligence committee i know that we have to do more to fight the war on terrorism and keep the american people safe we can do that we are approaching the third anniversary of september 11th and one thing i can tell you when we re in office it won t take three years to get the reforms in our intelligence that are necessary to keep the american people safe we will do whatever it takes as long as it takes to make sure this never happens again in our america and when john is president we will listen to the wisdom of the september 11th commission we will lead strong alliances we will safeguard and secure our weapons of mass destruction we will strengthen our homeland security protect our ports protect our chemical plants and support our firefighters police officers emts we will always we will always use our military might to keep the american people safe and we john and i we will have one clear unmistakable message for al qaeda and these terrorists you cannot run you cannot hide we will destroy you john understands personally about fighting in a war and he knows what our brave men and women are going through right now in another war the war in iraq the human cost and the extraordinary heroism of this war it surrounds us it surrounds us in our cities and our towns and we ll win this war because of the strength and courage of our own people some of our friends and neighbors they saw their last images in baghdad some took their last steps outside of fallujah some buttoned their uniform for the last time before they went out and saved their unit men and women who used to take care of themselves they now count on others to see them through the day they need their mother to tie their shoe their husband to brush their hair their wife s arm to help them across the room the stars and stripes wave for them the word hero was made for them they are the best and the bravest and they will never be left behind you understand that and they deserve a president who understands that on the most personal level what they ve gone through what they ve given and what they ve given up for their country to us the real test of patriotism is how we treat the men and women who have put their lives on the line to protect our values and let me tell you the 26 million veterans in this country will not have to wonder when we re in office whether they ll have health care next week or next year we will take care of them because they have taken care of us but today our great united states military is stretched thin we ve got more than 140 000 troops in iraq almost 20 000 in afghanistan and i visited the men and women there and we re praying as they try to give that country hope like all of those brave men and women john put his life on the line for our country he knows that when authority is given to a president much is expected in return that s why we will strengthen and modernize our military we will double our special forces we will invest in the new equipment and technologies so that our military remains the best equipped and best prepared in the world this will make our military stronger it ll make sure that we can defeat any enemy in this new world but we can t do this alone we have got to restore our respect in the world to bring our allies to us and with us it is how we won the cold war it is how we won two world wars and it is how we will build a stable iraq with a new president who strengthens and leads our alliances we can get nato to help secure iraq we can ensure that iraq s neighbors like syria and iran don t stand in the way of a democratic iraq we can help iraq s economy by getting other countries to forgive their enormous debt and participate in the reconstruction we can do this for the iraqi people we can do it for our own soldiers and we will get this done right a new president will bring the world to our side and with it a stable iraq a real chance for freedom and peace in the middle east including a safe and secure israel and john and i will bring the world together john and i will bring the world together to face the most dangerous threat we have the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on a chemical biological weapon or nuclear weapon with our credibility restored we can work with other nations to secure stockpiles of the world s most dangerous weapons and safeguard this extraordinarily dangerous material we can finish the job and secure the loose nukes in russia we can close the loophole in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty that allows rogue nations access to the tools they need to develop these weapons that s how we can address the new threats we face that s how we can keep you safe and that s how we can restore america s respect around the world and together we will ensure that the image of america the image all of us love america this great shining light this beacon of freedom democracy and human rights that the world looks up to is always lit and the truth is the truth is that every child every family in america will be safer and more secure if they grow up in a world where america is once again looked up to and respected that is the world we can create together tonight as we celebrate in this hall somewhere in america a mother sits at the kitchen table she can t sleep because she s worried she can t pay her bills she s working hard trying to pay her rent trying to feed her kids but she just can t catch up it didn t use to be that way in her house her husband was called up in the guard now he s been in iraq for over a year they thought he was going to come home last month but now he s got to stay longer she thinks she s alone but tonight in this hall and in your homes you know what she s got a lot of friends we want her to know that we hear her it is time to bring opportunity and an equal chance to her door a we re here to make america stronger at home so that she can get ahead and we re here to make america respected in the world again so that we can bring him home and american soldiers don t have to fight this war in iraq or this war on terrorism alone so when you return home some night you might pass a mother on her way to work the late shift you tell her hope is on the way when your brother calls and says he s spending his entire life at the office and he still can t get ahead you tell him hope is on the way when your parents call and tell you their medicine s going through the roof they can t keep up you tell them hope is on the way and when your neighbor calls and says her daughter s worked hard and she want s to go to college you tell her hope is on the way and when your son or daughter who is serving this country heroically in iraq calls you tell them hope is on the way when you wake up and you re sitting at the kitchen table with your kids and you re talking about the great possibilities in america your kids should know that john and i believe to our core that tomorrow can be better than today like all of us i have learned a lot of lessons in my life two of the most important are that first there will always be heartache and struggle we can t make it go away but the second is that people of good and strong will can make a difference one is a sad lesson and the other is inspiring we are americans and we choose to be inspired we choose hope over despair possibilities over problems optimism over cynicism we choose to do what s right even when those around us say you can t do that we choose to be inspired because we know that we can do better because this is america where everything is still possible what we believe what john kerry and i believe is that you should never look down on anybody we ought to lift people up we don t believe in tearing people apart we believe in bringing them together what we believe what i believe is that the family you re born into and the color of your skin in our america should never control your destiny join us in this cause let s make america stronger at home and more respected in the world let s ensure that once again in our one america our one america tomorrow will always be better than today thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem jedwards3 2 04 excerpt john_edwards tonight you said that the politics of lifting people up beats the politics of tearing people down and today and today and today we said clearly to the american people that in our country our america everything is possible now i want to take just a moment on this night of extraordinary celebration of a great political victory to talk just for a moment about the millions of americans who will not go home go to bed and celebrate tonight the millions of americans who struggle every single day just to provide for their own families tonight tonight somewhere in america a 10 year old little girl will go to bed hungry hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn t have the coat to keep her warm hoping and praying that she doesn t get sick as she did last year because it means 24 hours waiting in an emergency room to try to get medical care hoping hoping that her father who lost his job when the factory closed and has not been able to find steady work will actually get a job that allows him to provide for his family she s one of 35 million americans who live in poverty every single day unnoticed unheard well tonight we see her we hear her we embrace her she is part of our family and we will lift her up and she is and her family is like millions of americans that work hard every day struggle to get by these are the americans no one pays attention to they re unheralded they re unnoticed the truth of the matter is this they are heroes in our america they are the reason i m running for president of the united states and the message i want you and i to send loud and clear to all those millions of americans tonight we see them tonight we hear them we believe in them we will lift them up we will give them hope and we will give them back the white house because the truth is as all of us know we do still live in two different americas two different health care systems two different public school systems two tax systems two governments two economies it doesn t have to be that way you and i together we re going to build one america that works for everybody that s what the so tonight we stand at a crossroads will we have a leader a president who actually understands the problems of working people will we have the courage to use new fresh ideas to solve old problems like poverty will we have the strength and conviction to make this vision of hope and optimism into a reality if the american people give me a shot at george bush next november i will give them back the white house because the truth is this what you and i believe is that we should never look down on anybody we should lift people up we don t believe in tearing people apart we believe in bringing them together we believe i believe that the family you re born into and the color of your skin in our america should never control what you re able to do i can t change this country by myself but i know that you and i can change this country together and the reason is very simple because i believe in you and you deserve a president who actually believes in you thank you join me join me in this campaign together we will change america thank you all very much thank you for being here tonight thank you dem jedwards3 3 04 john_edwards its good to be home i m so glad to be here i have never loved my country more than i do today you know the truth is all my life america has smiled at me and today i am smiling right back more than anything i love the american people the people i ve listened to the people i ve embraced the people who ve made me laugh people who have inspired me inspired you people who ve made me think people who ve made me reach and today i see their faces i see the faces of the men and women who work in the mill in robbins north carolina the mill that my father worked in the mill i myself worked in i mean i can picture their faces as clear as they re in front of me right now lint in their hair grease on their faces men and women who represent the best of what america is who went to work day after day decade after decade in that mill because they believe that if they worked hard and did what was right they could build a better life for themselves and their families i see the faces of the workers at tower automotive in milwaukee wisconsin who i saw wondering after the doors to their factory closed where do they go what do they do have they not done the right things in america have they not worked hard been responsible raised their kids where do they go now and will they have a president and an administration who understands their lives and who will stand up for them i see the faces of the young men and women that i met in afghanistan dark in the night proud of their country proud of serving their country but worried about their families back home worried about what would happen when they went back i see the men and women at page belting in concord new hampshire who wonder if anyone understands the struggles that they face and that most americans face every day in their lives and i also see the earnest young wise faces from central high school in des moines to pomona college in california young people young people who are looking desperately for inspiration someone who will lift them up make them believe again that in our america with their help with their energy and their enthusiasm everything is possible most of all i see all of these faces turning from skepticism and despair to inspiration and hope because they believe in this country they believe in themselves and they know that you and i together are going to change this country and build one america that works for all of us it has been my greatest honor though to have walked with you because from the beginning this has never been my campaign this has been your campaign and i am blessed to have been a part of it and i m also blessed to be back here at broughton high school with so many friends and families members of my community thank you thank you today i ve decided to suspend my campaign for the presidency of the united states but i want to say a word about a man who is a friend of mine somebody who i believe has great strength and great courage my friend senator john kerry somebody who has fought for and will continue to fight for the things that all of us believe in more jobs better health care cleaner air cleaner water a safer world the truth is all these they are the causes of our party the democratic party they are the causes of america and they are the reasons we will prevail come november and take back this country you know it wasn t very long ago you will remember it it wasn t very long ago that all the pundits and pollsters said that by the time we get to super tuesday there won t be a john even competing much less fighting for the nomination well we proved those pundits and pollsters wrong and we are going to prove them all wrong come november when we take back this country and i want to say a personal word about my friend john kerry who i know very well this is a man that from the time he served this country courageously in vietnam all the way through this campaign i saw it i know it i saw what we went through in november and december and back in the summer when everyone said he didn t have a chance but he showed the strength the resilience the courage that he has shown his entire life when he fought for us and for our country in vietnam he s done it throughout this campaign the truth of the matter is that john kerry has what it takes right here to be president of the united states and i for one intend to do everything in my power to make him the next president of the united states and i ask you to join me in this cause for our country for our america i see my kids are about as patient as they usually are with my speech they want a sign they want a sign today today somewhere in america a child plays on a sandy lot it could be like the lot that i played on when my parents brought me home to the mill village it could be in a barrio or on a farm or it might actually be in a vacant lot somewhere in a city we want now he s happy what we want what we want is we want that child and all of our children to have a chance to do everything that they re capable of doing in this extraordinary country of ours all things should be possible for that child for every one of our children as they have been for me this cause this challenge to change america now it belongs to you you should not step back you should step up it is up to every single one of you to make certain that in our america our children can prosper and grow it s up to you to choose a president who will make sure that we end the two americas that we live in so that every child has exactly the same chance that i ve had it s up to you to make sure that the 35 million americans who live in poverty every day and who tug at the soul of america and the soul of every one of us are never ignored again that they know we see them we hear them we embrace them we lift them up and in our america we will end poverty as we know it today it is up to you to make sure that in our america our children and our grandchildren are the first generations that grow up in a country in an america that s no longer divided by race and it s also up to you to demand a campaign that is about addressing the problems of the american people and lifting them up and not politicians attacking one another that is the campaign that you deserve because the truth is that those of you who cast your votes for me you voted for a new kind of politics you wanted a positive campaign you wanted real change in this country you wanted hope optimism not fear i could not ask for better company than i have today you know with the love of my life for 26 years married and even before that the love of my life elizabeth who i m so proud to have with me here today i ve had a life blessed with four beautiful children extraordinary friends and families who are with me today my parents who raised me to believe in the values of faith family hard work responsibility i d like a round of applause for them and to all my staff my supporters thank you from the bottom of my heart i will never forget your hard work what you did to help change this country to everyone who gave their time their energy their heart their passion 18 20 hours a day you deserve nothing but a huge of round of applause and i want to year it hear it for yourselves thank you for what you ve done all of you who are here dem jedwards3 5 03 john_edwards now i m one alternative compare it to our other choice president bush who as you all know comes from a completely different place among other things his father was president of the united states son of a mill worker can beat the son of a president for the white house do we believe that in america is that what we stand for is that part of the american dream that s what we re about with this president we have gotten government of the insiders by the insiders for the insiders let s think about what it s given us in two years 2 6 million jobs lost four and a half trillion dollars lost in the stock market a 5 6 trillion federal budget surplus gone 400 billion in retirement savings disappeared i want to be on the stage with george w bush in 2004 because i have a question for the american people are you better off than you were four years ago we will get this economy going again we will stop this tax cut for the richest one to two percent of the american people we will stand up for economic fairness in this country we will actually do something instead of sloganeering about public education in america we still have two public schools systems i have a plan pay our teachers better give teachers bonus pay to go to the schools where we need them the worst give kids scholarships if they re willing to commit to go to a school in a chronically disavantaged area and invest in early childhood programs programs like the one here in south carolina like smart start under gov hunt in north carolina these programs make an enormous difference and we should say to every young person in america who wants to go to college 500 000 young people who don t believe they can afford it if you are qualified to be in college and you are willing to work ten hours a week your first year we will let you go tuition free to a state university or community college that s part of what we believe in in america we will provide the american people all of the american people access to quality health care we will provide a prescription drug benefit we in north carolina and south carolina we will stand up and protect our mountains our beaches our streams our air we will stand up against this administration ruining our environment for our children i want to say a thank you to the men and women from south carolina and north carolina who fought a war half a world away we re proud of them we re proud of what they accomplished it s important for their sake and ours that we do the right thing going forward i also want to end with something that s enormously important to me personally something that i have been criticized for recently in recent days it is so important folks from south carolina that we show the american people what we re made of we cannot follow on civil rights we must lead on civil rights we must show we must show this country that those of us who grew up in the south in south carolina in north carolina in the rural areas of the south we believe in an america where we embrace everybody where we lift everybody up where we give real opportunity and hope to every single american and so i say to those who are critical of me i have stood for it my whole life i will stand for it now i will talk about it in every speech i make because the american people need to know that we in the south believe in civil rights we will stand for civil rights we will fight for civil rights and we will lead on civil rights and finally in closing we will not only fight for civil rights we will fight for equal rights we will fight for a woman s right to choose we will fight for pay equity so that women no longer make 78 cents on the dollar for doing the same work that men are doing and those of us from the south who know what america is about who know what the heart and soul of america is we will not in the name of safety in the name of the war on terrorism allow people like john ashcroft to take away our rights take away our freedom take away our liberties take away those things that make america everything that it is thank you all for what you re doing we will take back the white house in 2004 and change the direction of america thank you all very much dem jfk1 10 60 john_f _kennedy governor freeman senator humphrey senator mccarthy members of the congress ladies and gentlemen the outstanding news story of this week was not the events of the united nations or even the presidential campaign it was a story coming out of my own city of boston that ted williams of the boston red sox had retired from baseball it seems that at 42 he was too old it shows that perhaps experience isn t enough this week i had the opportunity to debate with mr nixon i feel that i should reveal that i had a great advantage in that debate and i am not referring to anyone s makeup man the advantage that i had was that mr nixon had just debated with khrushchev and i had debated with hubert humphrey and that gave me an edge that is much tougher but i am delighted to be here tonight grover cleveland many years ago said what good is a politician and what good is a political party unless it stauds for something he would never ask that question here in minnesota because the political leaders of this party and the party have stood for something and that is progress and the welfare of the people of this state and country governor freeman senator humphrey senator mccarthy and the members of the congress have all spoken powerfully for the well being of the people of this state and they have also spoken for the united states and i am proud to be with them here tonight in an election that we are going to win here in minnesota and across the country i stand here tonight as the nominee of the democratic party in a difficult and somber time in the life of our country it is our hope i know that whether we win or lose this election that we will during these weeks and months serve a great national function and that is to present to the american people the great issues which face us in this watershed of our history and i think we have made a contribution already six months ago the republicans were running on a slogan of peace and prosperity three months ago they were running on a slogan of you never had it so good now even they are saying it is time america woke up and started to move ahead i stand here tonight where woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman stood in their time and though the problems were entirely different in their day and though our generation of americans faces new challenges nevertheless i sing the same song they sang and that is the song that the american people and the democratic party when working together have fulfilled their destiny i belong to the democratic party and the democratic party belongs to the people and it stands for progress i think in 1960 it has as it has had in great years of our history a chance for distinguished service a chance to speak for the public interest a chance to turn the attention of the american people into the 1960 s and the challenges that face us in the sixties franklin roosevelt said in 1933 this generation has a rendezvous with destiny i think in 1960 this generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny it is not the preservation of freedom here in the united states which he helped save it is the preservation of freedom around the world that is the responsibility and destiny of the united states in the 1960 s in his second inaugural address before 100 000 people at franklin field philadelphia president roosevelt said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think that is what we had and i think that if the republicans win this election i think we will have again a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference speaking in my own city of boston this week mr nixon said the american people believe in measuring promises against the solid performance and they are going to vote for real performance and not unreal problems i agree with nixon i agee that the american people are not going to be taken in by the presidential year election promises by leap year liberalism every 4 years which comes about during the fall but where are they when the congress is in session where are the republican party s record of their performance against the promises of senate when the issues which affect the welfare of our people come before us to vote that is the question of 1960 and i think that we can compare very satisfactorily not only mr nixon but the republican party s record of their performance against the promises of this campaign for the republican party the same party which gave us the missile gap and the economic gap have also given us a performance gap and that is the gap which will bring about the rejection of the republican party this november this month mr nixon promised us better schools and better salaries for our teachers but this year in the month of february mr nixon cast the deciding vote in the u s senate against the federal aid for teachers salaries and this summer in august the house of representatives led by the republican members of the rules committee killed federal aid for education this month mr nixon promised a new housing program and slum clearanee but the same edition of the new york times which gave us the details of this program also pointed out that mr nixon as a congressman had voted against the housing act of 1949 and public housing for our people and that he had cast as vice president of the united states the deciding vote which would have decreased interest on gi home loans this month nixon promises to keep the cost of living down but in the past 8 years mr nixon has supported republican policies which have increased medical care in the last 8 years 32 percent rent 20 percent and the cost of household management 23 percent and which have added 3 billion a year to the interest on the debt over 1952 this month mr nixon promises you medical care for our older citizens but last august mr nixon directed the opposition to a democratic bill which would have provided medical care for the aged under social security only one republican voted for that bill as only one republican had voted in 1935 for the original social security act a national news magazine reported that when the senate rollcall came killing medical care and when it was announced the vice president smiled but the older people of this country who must take a pauper s oath to receive medical care as aged citizens are not smiling and i do not believe mr nixon will smile on november 9 all this is wrapped up in the poem by t s eliot the rock and in that poem he says and the wind shall say these were decent people their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls we can do better than that this month mr nixon has promised equality of opportunity for all americans but i am not aware that the republican party has supported our efforts in the congress to secure the passage of legislation which will provide equality of opportunity nor am i aware that the president of the united states and this administration has ever given their endorsement to the 1954 supreme court decision a decision which is in accordance with the constitution and the declaration of independence we believe it we believe in it but i think the greatest gap between performance and promise is in mr nixon s agricultural program underneath the phrases operation consume and operation safeguard lie the same policies and the same programs which have brought american agriculture to its lowest level in 20 years for mr nixon has simply refurbished the programs which mr benson introduced a program which mr benson endorsed a program which bears a remarkable resemblance to the very language which ezra taft benson used in describing his program for example mr nixon promised last week to reduce farm production through a massive land retirement program we will he said and i quote him use the surplus to use up the surplus who said those words first mr benson in 1956 in talking about the soil bank said this and i quote we will use the surplus to use up the surplus secondly mr nixon said last week in dealing with the problems of increasing farm income he said we promise a long term price support system with levels based on an average of market prices under the immediately preceding crop year who said those words first it was mr benson in 1959 who said price supports will be based on the average of market prices for the immediately preceding year this is not a new program this is an old program dressed up with old slogans it uses the very language mr benson used it provides the same protection that mr benson s program provided it provides a support price tied to the market price of the preceding year and as the market price drops support price will drop in 1952 corn sold at 1 50 yesterday in sanborn minn it sold for 85 cents next year the market price will be lower because the support price will be tied to this year s price and then in 1962 it will drop lower and lower because there is no support tied to parity instead it is tied to the support price for the preceding year i think the farmers of this country should understand it then they can make a decision they can decide whether they want to continue to count down the steps step by step step by step until they are ruined as mr nixon said on monday night until we get rid of the farmers as part of operation consume mr nixon promises to use the food surpluses of our country to take care of the needy abroad and the needy at home food for peace was devised by hubert humphrey it was never supported by the administration and as for operation consume here in the united states the republicans have opposed every effort we have made to increase the school lunch program mr nixon voted against it when he was in the house of representatives and they have refused to expand its distribution to our needy citizens in the last few years hubert humphrey and i spent 6 weeks in west virginia we did not see operation consume we saw operation misery five cents a day of surplus food for each person in west virginia in the richest country on earth a country that has 9 billion of surplus food stored away and yet this administration opposed the food stamp program which senator humphrey and others supported they opposed a program which i suggsted to distribute surplus food through the department of health education and welfare and then they come and talk about it in the election of 1960 all these programs which they opposed for 8 years which they have opposed for 25 years i said on sunday that i could not think of a single original piece of progressive legislation for the benefit of the people suggested originally by the republican party and a local paper said i was wrong that president taft had initiated the child labor laws i think the differences between our two parties are important mr nixon says party labels don t make any difference it is the man i think party labels do mean something because they tell us something about the history of this country they tell us about where we are going and where we have been the democratic slogans of this century have been woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal adlai stevenson s new america the republican slogans have been stand pat with mckinley return to normalcy with harding keep cool with coolidge two chickens in every pot with herbert hoover repeal social security with alf landon and i don t know what thomas dewey ran on nor does he these are all important issues because they affect the security of the united states we are not talking about issues which are domestic issues we are talking about the security of their country because if we are building a stronger society here if we are solving the problems of our agricultural surpluses in such a way as to shower blessings on the world instead of to store and rot if we are taking care of our older citiens if we are providing the best education for our children if we are developing our natural resources if we are providing full employment then this country is strong and growing then it has vitality then it is moving ahead and then it serves as an inspiration to the world around us people in africa and latin america and asia who stand today on the razor edge of decision trying to decide which way the future is moving they look at us and they look at the communists and they wonder have we reached our high noon are our best days in the past are we unable to solve our problems is the communist way the way that they should organize their society i don t think it is i think ours is the right way but we have to serve freedom we cannot expect that our problems will be solved without the devoted effort of our people without the recognition that they require great leadership the unfinished business of this society is the maintenance of freedom here and around the world thomas paine said during the american revolution the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america if we remain strong here i think the future is assured i do not say that if i am elected president that life will be easy but i do say that if we are successful in november if we win this election i can assure you that this country will be given leadership through the democratic party that the unfinished business before our society will be placed before the american people and this country will begin to move again thank you dem jfk1 10 60a john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen members of the congress mr mayor my nephew ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you i came to chicago today to address an audience of poles who are also americans who believe in the close ties which have always existed between the united states and poland and who believe poland must one day be free i come here today because in the last 3 weeks in new york city at the united nations speaker after speaker from mr khrushchev has spoken about the evils of colonialism the soviet union today is the greatest colonial master in the world and until they are ready to permit the people of eastern europe to have free elections and a free choice then they stand indicted before world opinion i was in poland in 1939 and i spent a month there from warsaw to danzig and i saw poland free and i was in poland in 1955 and i saw poland under the domination of the soviet union but in my visit in 1955 i visited czestochowa and saw the mattabuca and saw the free spirit of poland i think poland will someday be free but poland will be free as long as we have the united states and all who believe in the cause of freedom maintain our conviction i am a descendant of irishmen who were under servitude and domination for 700 years the polish people will remain free as long as we are free as long as we believe in their freedom the polish national anthem says as long as you live poland lives as long as we in the united states retain our conviction that someday not only will maintain our freedom but others shall also be free whether they live in latin america whether they live in africa whether they live in asia whether they live in europe or wherever they may live they shall be free that is the policy this country s freedom was won by us by the people of this country and people who came from europe including distinguished poles who came here to fight for freedom the u s congress gave those people who came to this country each a bequest each an award and kosciuszko who was the most celebrated of all of them when he died he left his entire american estate all the property he had in this country to thomas jefferson for what reason to free the slaves he believed that he could not be free until all men were free and that is what we believe here today i want mr khrushchev who spoke about colonialism in the united nations and about what has happened in africa i want him to look not only at africa but also at eastern europe the purpose of our meeting today is a simple one to determine what steps we can take usefully here in the united states and i have attempted to do so i do not believe that the united states should turn a deaf ear there are many things we can do we can maintain our belief that eastern europe will someday be free we can never agree to any concessions that would recognize soviet domination as long as we live poland lives as long as we live our country lives as long as this country lives what thomas jefferson called the disease of liberty will be catching other people know that until we have been destroyed their chance of independence is good the reason the communists attack us is because they know when the united states fails the cause of freedom fails but as long as we maintain our strength as long as we identify ourselves with the cause of independence with the cause of liberty for ourselves and others we and our generation can do for poland what kosciuszko and pulaski and the others did for us in 1776 i ask your help in this campaign i ask your help in building a stronger america and in building a stronger america to advance the cause of freedom wherever it may be enslaved to tell all the people around the world that the united states is on the move again and as long as we move forward they move forward dem jfk1 10 60b john_f _kennedy mayor daley congressman dawson members of the assembly representatives ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming over and giving me a warm hand of friendship i think this is an important election mr nixon has said that party labels don t make so much difference what we want is the man i think we want the man who is a democrat because the democratic party stands for the people every program which we now put forward and which both parties now endorse was written into the statute books over the opposition of a substantial group of the republican party things which make life decent for all americans a chance for social security for minimum wage for unemployment compensation for public housing i have stood for those things in 14 years in the congress mr nixon now says he stands for them but i was in congress when he was i remember when he made effort after effort to get better housing for our people to get a better minimum wage i am chairman of the subcommitee on labor we tried to put through a minimum wage of 1 25 an hour the average wage to laundrywomen in five large cities of the united states and most of them are negro women is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week every time that we fail to build better homes and public housing we fail our people there are 5 million homes in the united states in the cities of this country that lack plumbing of any kind fifteen million american families live in inadequate housing the average social security benefit is less than 78 a month for someone who is retired and out of that he has to pay food and housing and medical care anyone who says that there is nothing left to do that all the things that had to be done were done by truman or roosevelt i think is wrong i think we in our time still have responsibilities left if we are going to build a stronger society here in the united states i gave some figures on television which are true which is if a white baby and a negro baby are born in houses next to each other that the negro baby has one half as much chance of finishing high school one third as much chance of getting to college there are four times as many chances that he will be out of a job why should it be so and he will live on the average 7 years less why it is because they do not have a fair chance to develop their talents that is what we want in this country you cannot possibly maintain your families unless you get a decent education you cannot possibly live in decent homes unless you are treated fairly and secure a decent job as it is now the first to be fired at the time a recession comes are mostly those who are negroes because they have not had a chance to finish school and because they have not had a chance to learn skills everyone says we should do these things because the communists are talking about them i think we ought to do them because that is the way we build a better country that is the way we build a better country this is not just a problem for one section i read a story in the new york herald tribune yesterday morning that 14 of the delegates who had come from africa to this country for the first time wanted the united nations moved from the united states to another country because they had not been treated with courtesy here in this country i want to build a strong society here not merely because we sit in a goldfish bowl but because by building a stronger society we show we really believe in the cause of freedom i am speaking today to the polish congress which is meeting downtown the great polish hero who helped free the united states was kosciuszko when kosciuszko died he was given a good deal of money by the congress and he left his money to thomas jefferson to free the american slaves he was a pole he fought here for freedom and he wanted everyone to be free that is the spirit in which we move in the united states today what we want for ourselves we want for others we want freedom and a decent standard of living which is what people want around the world franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor around the world because he was a good neighbor in the united states i come here today and i ask your help i support the democratic platform which stands for equality in the rights of man and i stand for it as the democratic candidate whether i am president or senator we will continue this fight until every american regardless of their religion regardless of their race or creed steps forward and stands in the sun thank you dem jfk1 10 60c john_f _kennedy mr president mayor daley congressman machrowicz congressman pucinski members of your organization ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for your generous invitation to be here today i hope i can in the words of the oldtime orators claim kinship here i am not of polish extraction but i have been interested in poland and the people of polish extraction for many years stretching all the way back to 1939 when i visited warsaw and danzig and spent nearly a month of late july and early august in the summer of 1939 traveling through poland on that occasion i came to have the greatest possible respect for those who faced with threats east and west were nevertheless willing to stand up for their country and to die for it if necessary that interest built then was stimulated some years later when i read a book written about the polish army in exile which had been captained by general anders originally and which had of course fought in the middle east and italy after the war i visited the polish cemetery in italy some of you who have been there may recall that at the cemetery are written the words these polish soldiers for your freedom and theirs have given their bodies to the soil of italy their hearts to poland and their souls to god i am a friend of freedom and where freedom is i feel at home and therefore i feel at home today as a result of that visit and that book i cosponsored at the end of the 1940 s a bill which would have permitted members of the polish army in exile most of whom had gone to england after the war to come into the united states in greater numbers than our immigration laws permitted it has been a source of regret to me that the united states did not do in that case as much as some other countries scattered around the world many of those soldiers settled in england some in canada some in australia some in the united states but no nearly as many as i think this contribution to our security and freedom warranted in 1955 i visited poland again and spent some days there and traveled on that occasion to czestochowa it is an interesting fact that those of us who are students of american history to some degree and who have seen the names of pulaski and kosciuszko and the others who came to the united states and helped fight for our freedom it was interesting to me on that occasion to see the sword of john sobieski with which he had saved vienna in the battle against the turks in the middle of the last of the loth century to see a crucifix of kosciuszko to see a tiny model carved by pulaski of czestochowa all of which are in the great library in that old shrine which symbolizes the great religious and national heritage of that great country since that time i have labored in the congress in attempts to try to establish closer ties between the people of poland and the people of the united states poland moves into a dark period of its history and has since 1939 but my own conviction is that the words of the polish national anthem have great relevances to this meeting today as long as you live poland lives as long as you continue to meet together as long as we in the united states continue to maintain our strength and send out rays of freedom around the world then in my judgment the situation behind the iron curtain can only be regarded as a temporary one during the last months many of us have read some of the speeches given by distinguished world figures before the united nations and one of the subjects which is constantly discussed and constantly harped upon are the evils of colonialism this is particularly stressed by the people of africa who have emerged in some cases from two or three hundred years of colonialism and are now independent nations they were joined in those attacks on colonialism and the definition of colonialism of course is the rule of one country by another they were joined by mr khrushchev and i thought that surprisingly few found that completely unsatisfactory the fact of the matter is that the greatest slave master and colonial power in the world today is the soviet union and should so be regarded i have never defended western colonialism in fact i have criticized it when it existed in indochina or algeria or any other place in africa but therefore i think we are in a good position as long as we maintain that we are for freedom wherever it may exist i think we are in a very good position to demand an accounting of the soviet union because it holds a great it holds as a colonial power not only the baltic republics and poland and czechoslovakia and hungary and bulgaria and rumania it holds as a colonial power countries within the boundaries of the u s s r countries which up to the end of world war i had a long tradition of freedom and independence countries which have the mohammedan religion which are descended from the people of the middle east which had an ancient culture which worshipped their own gods in their own ways therefore it is only in recent years that the soviet union has extended its power to them to destroy their culture destroy their religious freedom destroy their traditions it is within the boundaries of the soviet union as well as eastern europe that the soviet union holds under its sway the greatest number of people that any colonial power has for many many hundreds of years and they hold them with little hope for freedom the british the french the belgians however unfortunate their record may have been in the past at least their countries now that they once held are moving into the sunlight of freedom and within 2 or 3 years one quarter of all the nations of the general assembly of the united nations will be africans which 5 or 10 years ago were held by the colonial powers of the west now we ask the soviet union to do the same now we ask them to match their deeds with their words now we ask the africans who are now independent to join with us in the fight against the colonialism wherever it may exist and whoever may be the colonial power this convention meets every 4 years you meet the same year that there are presidential elections and i think it is appropriate that candidates for the presidency should speak to you because all of us as americans are concerned about what our country must do and what it must be and what it must stand for and what it must symbolize i believe that in meeting here today you serve the united states because you serve the cause of freedom and what serves the cause of freedom serves us it serves this country it reminds us of what we stand for it reminds us of our unfinished business around the world therefore in coming here today and in considering the problems that may exist in poland you are serving the united states in the best sense of the word it has been easy in recent years to make speeches for some people to audiences of polish extraction we denounce the soviets we talk about liberty but the question is what real contribution what genuine contribution can we now make given the condition of the world given the intransigence of the soviet union what contribution can we make in 1960 what is the policy that the united states should follow that has been a matter of great importance to me for some years in the congress and we have attempted as some of you may know to pass legislation in the congress which would permit an easing of the tension which now exists between poland and the united states to hold out the hand of friendship to the polish people to recognize that even though they are in prison nevertheless we still are tied to them by history and by a common purpose i think that this is most important that we do so for mr khrushchev knows very well he can read the signs of the times he knows that the strongest tie that has swept the world since the end of 1945 is the desire of the people to be free and independent the african experience indicates it clearly the hungarian experience indicates it even more clearly and so does the experience of poland these people are determined to be free they have not accepted the idea that their culture their religious heritage their traditions can be destroyed by domination by a foreign power therefore as long as that spirit remains alive whether it is in eastern europe or whether it is in any other part of the globe ultimately the communist empire is doomed to destruction it is our function to maintain that principle i spoke in 1956 in regard to algeria and the necessity of the french recognizing the right of self determination the reason i did was a simple one it was because that september and october before the united nations the hungarian resolution was coming how can we possibly be indifferent and stand for an important principle which is the right of people to be free unless we did it regardless of whether it be a friend or a foe the principle is the important thing the principle serves us the principle serves the cause of freedom i want africa to be free and i want eastern europe to be free and i want those who are now free in africa i want them to look to the remaining areas of the world and if we are wrong i want them to tell it to us i want the principle to be stood for wherever it may be i will take the chances in the united states and i want them to look at the soviet union also i want them to stand for the principle now the question is what should the american policy be under these conditions we recognized after the experience of the 1960 s the limitations of the so called policy of liberation we do not want to mislead the people of poland or hungary again that the united states is prepared to liberate them therefore within the general framework of present events what policies should we carry out what can we do to maintain the spirit of independence what can we do to help in thomas jefferson s words the disease of liberty to spread poland is a satellite government but the poles are not a satellite people we have no right unless we are prepared to meet our commitments to incite them to national suicide but neither can we abandon them leaving them without hope for the future in 1647 when the famous irish revolutionary general o neill was poisoned the poets compared the fate of the irish people to sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky we cannot let that be true of poland today this nation under the new administration must be their shepherd until freedom is theirs again our task is to encourage and pursue a policy of patiently encouraging freedom and carefully pressuring tyranny a policy that looks to evolution and not toward immediate revolution more is involved than our policy to poland alone in europe we must show in west berlin that we have no intention of yielding to soviet claims that we believe that history will yield in time a free and united berlin and a free and united europe we must convince the russians that we are rebuilding our defensive strength so that the route of military force can no longer be open to them but the next administration must also devise a specific policy for poland and eastern europe and i would suggest these seven points first we must arm ourselves with more flexible economic tools in 1951 as you know the congress passed the battle act the battle act says that if any country is dominated by the soviet union no economic assistance no export import bank loans no food loans no nothing can be granted to any country that is dominated by the soviet union the difficulty of course is that the situation has changed to a degree since 1951 therefore 2 years ago in the congress i offered an amendment to the battle act which would provide that some degree of economic assistance some loaning back of the money we may have tied up the zlotys we may have tied up in poland as a result of our surplus food sales could be loaned back for specific purposes for health and food and so on and that this could be done when in the judgment of the president of the united states and the consent of the congress it was in the interest of the united states this amendment failed by one vote 3 years ago it passed in the senate last year by seven votes and failed again this year in the house of representatives my judgment is that it is in the interest of the united states and in the interest of poland and the other countries behind the iron curtain that we should have some flexible tools so that if the situation develops that closer relations are desirable that assistance to the polish people is necessary if they should be stricken by economic difficulties which increase their independence on the soviet union then i think we should have tools available to the president and to the congress we should prepare the way therefore in my judgment the next congress and the next administration should support our efforts to amend the battle act in the interest of international security second we must never at the summit in any treaty declaration in our words or even in our minds recognize the soviet domination of eastern europe as permanent we must never do it poland s claim to independence and liberty is not based on sentiment or politics it is rooted in history and it is to history that we must address ourselves third we must strengthen the economic and cultural ties between poland and the united states by expanding reciprocal trade by tourism by information services we can encourage the investment of american capital and technology and recognize the needs of polish ships and airlines and perhaps most important of all we can open our doors to refugees from the tyranny of eastern europe fourth we can increase the exchange of students and teachers and technicians to give more poles an opportunity to see the blessing of liberty to give us an opportunity to assist poland in building an independent economy particularly in agriculture and the management of medium sized industries the facts of the matter are that there are 10 times as many students from the ryukyu islands in the united states studying with the assistance of the government as there are from poland 10 times i think we can do better i think we can do better fifth we must strive to restore the traditional identification which poland has had with the western european community which goes back into history it is tied by culture ties poland has always looked to the west never to the east therefore anything that we can do to encourage more intimate relations between france and poland italy and poland and the test i think is in the interest of peace and in the interest of maintaining an independent spirit sixth we must eliminate poland s fear of the west fears that are very real and this includes in particular fear of germany we must make plain our intention that disputes between west and east can be settled by peaceful negotiations and not by force that never again will eastern european nations be violently stripped of their territories and their resources and we should work to encourage a peaceful and mutual accommodation in the spirit of a free europe seventh and finally we must make use of our frozen polish funds to remind the people of that nation that we share their traditional pride in culture learning and human welfare and offer the use of these funds to build a national library an archives or housing districts new schools and i think this would be particularly effective the reconstruction of the warsaw palace which is a great symbol of national independence and national liberty the united states under public law 480 sells food surplus food to poland the zlotys that we secure for that food is tied up in poland and in most cases is unused i think there are things that we can use it for which will help maintain the life of the people there and help maintain their spirit and help them know that here in the united states we are still concerned with their welfare still concerned with their progress none of the things that i have mentioned perhaps have the immediate force of the word liberation but we are concerned with trying to help people not misleading them we are trying to hold out the hand of friendship to them anyone who has looked at the history of the world for the last 15 years and seen friends become enemies and enemies friends who have seen all the changes in the globe and in science and technology cannot help but feel that what is now happening in eastern europe represents only a step in a long evolution of history i hold that view and therefore i consider our immediate function to be to maintain the spirit in that country to let them know that we are still concerned that we are still identified with them that we believe that they will be free and that we are devoting our energies to that cause that is what you do today that is what we ought to try to do in our national policy if we do and if we maintain this spark this fire even if it is in the ashes then some day they will be free and we will have played our proper role i know some of the people will say that all this is a wasted effort that the people of poland however brave are in a prison from which there is no escape or early escape but is this the reason to ignore their needs is this an excuse for inaction have we forgotten the words i was hungry and you gave me to eat naked and you covered me sick and you visited me i was in prison and you came unto me thank you dem jfk1 11 60a john_f _kennedy dr topping distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be here again at this distinguished university as a former student of political science at southern california in the east harvard university it is a great pleasure to address this body beginning 7 days from now november 8 the responsibilities of mr nixon and myself will have ceased and your responsibility as voters will begin you have to make your judgment between the two candidates between the parties that they represent between the two political philosophies that they symbolize and between their two different of this country and its needs and let me make it very clear that i think that there are very sharp differences which separate mr nixon and myself we hold entirely different views we hold entirely different views of our country s position in the world of the needs of our time of the responsibilities of our national government of our responsibilities as individual citizens you have to make your judgment a week from today of what you believe of what you see is our role in the world whether you share mr nixon s view that our prestige in the world has never been higher and that of the communists never lower you have to find out whether you share his view that we have never had such great prosperity in this country that everything that must be done is being done in its proper time and that what we need is a continuation of the past i want to make it clear that i wholly disagree with this view i don t believe that everything is being done in its proper time i do not believe that our prestige in the world is at a record high i do not believe that we have met our responsibilities as individuals and citizens of this great country 1960 is the beginning of a great new revolutionary period i cannot believe that in these changing times these times of hazard and opportunity that the voters of this country as citizens will choose the status quo david lloyd george once said a tired nation is a tory nation and i do not hold the view that the united states is either tired or tory you have to decide as young voters as young voters who have the longest stake in the great republic who are the most concerned with the search for truth who have the least ties to the present and the most ties in the future you have to decide which party which candidate most nearly approximates your judgment of our country its needs and its future we are going into problems which are entirely different from any that this country has ever faced the problem of how a free society with its freedom of choice its breadth of opportunity its range of alternatives how that free society can successfully compete with a totalitarian society we believe that our society is the best but that does not mean that it automatically survives the whole history of the world from the struggle of the athenians against the macedonians to the experience of the british before world war ii in their competition with the nazis all show that for a free society to survive to successfully compete the leaders have to tell the truth they have to be informed they have to share their information with the people i was in england and saw what happened in 1935 when stanley baldwin went to the people of england and told them that everything was being done in good measure that the prestige of the british was at its height that their security was insured he won that election and the british almost lost the war we are not going to have a repetition of that in 1960 i don t believe our economic growth is sufficient i don t believe that the influence of the united states in latin america africa and asia is growing but diminishing i don t believe that the united states has allied itself with those people in their fight against poverty ignorance and disease we have regarded them as pawns in the struggle against communism and as a result of the 16 new nations admitted to the united nations this summer not 1 voted with us on the admission of red china the soviet union has 10 times the broadcasts we have in latin america in spanish in 1957 we had more people stationed in west germany in our embassies than in all of the embassies of africa combined we have 100 people working in the u s government on the subject of disarmament do you really believe those of you who hold the signs of mr nixon do you really believe that this government this administration this party do you really believe the economic growth the struggle for security the struggle for the uncommitted world the struggle for the minds of men do you really believe that we have developed in this country a society that augments freedom that has purpose and growth do you really believe that this country is meeting in its own good time all of the problems that it must that the problems that are suggested by the republican candidate and his party show an awareness of the future i want to make it clear that you must make your decision you must make your judgment you must decide yourself and it is your decision all i want to do and my responsibility is to make clear as the standard bearer for the democratic party that i believe the united states if it is going to maintain its position as the leader of the free world i believe the united states has to move again i believe we have to pick ourselves up and start forward into the sixties i believe we need the best talent we can get to serve this country in a time of change a time that can be as dickens said the worst of times or the best of times you have to decide what your judgment is i want to make it clear that if i am elected on tuesday november 8 this country is going to move again thank you dem jfk1 11 60b john_f _kennedy senator engle congressman roosevelt mr hawkins mr unruh ladies and gentlemen photographers ladies and gentlemen i come here today to the golden state of california and ask your support in this campaign in this campaign for a stronger and better state of california and for a stronger and more progressive america i come here and ask your help let me make it very clear that i stand today as the standard hearer of the democratic party in direct line and succession to woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and others who believe that this country must move ahead you have to make your judgment about what kind of a country you want what kind of a philosophy you want to govern your country i want to make it very clear that the differences between mr nixon and myself the differences between the republican party and the democratic party are clear mr nixon represents a party a philosophy which he believes in which voted against social security and minimum wage and housing and unemployment compensation the fact of the matter is that the republican party controlled the congress and the presidency for years and no civil rights bill ever saw the light of day i was in the senate in 1953 and 1954 the republicans controlled the senate and the house and the presidency and no civil rights bill came to the floor of either the house or the senate i was in the house in the late forties and i served on a committee headed by congressman powell of new york a committee which was devoted to providing protection to all americans in their employment rights seven times the subcommittee and the full committee and on the floor of the house that bill came to a vote seven times mr nixon voted against it seven times and seven times i voted for it in the debate 2 or 3 weeks ago mr nixon stated that he thought 1 25 minimum wage was extreme do you know what the average wage for laundrywomen and most of them are negroes in five large cities of the united states is sixty five cents an hour for a 48 hour week mr nixon came out about 3 weeks ago for a new housing program and in it he said the housing act of 1949 which provided the basis for all later housing bills the housing act of 1949 has worked well do you know mr nixon voted against the housing act of 1949 as a congressman how short does he think our memory is i want to make it very clear that i am not satisfied as an american to know that if a white baby and a negro baby are born side by side that that white baby has three times as much chance of getting to college as the negro baby three times as much chance of finishing high school that negro baby has four times as much chance statistically of being out of work in his life that negro baby has four times as much chance of owning his own house and how much chance does that negro baby have of sending his children through college the fact of the matter is we don t say that everybody s talent is equal but what we say is that every body should have the same chance to develop their talent do you know the greatest minority in the world today the greatest minority in the world today is the whites the whole world africa asia the middle east people who are colored yellow brown black they look to us they look to the communists and they want to decide which road they will take we preach the doctrine of democracy it is the most difficult of all doctrines but we have to live up to it we have to practice what we preach and that is what we are going to do we are going to move ahead we are going to provide a fair chance for our people full protection for their constitutional rights to that we are committed and that we are going to do and we are going to move this country ahead do you know the most important new area of the world today is africa it controls one fourth of all the votes in the general assembly i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the senate foreign relations committee do you know how many negroes we have in our state department foreign service out of 6 000 twenty six do you know how many federal judges there are federal district judges zero out of 220 we can do better we can do better so i come here today saying that this country is faced with difficulty and hazardous days we need all the talent we can get what we want is a fair chance and a fair opportunity to move ahead to strengthen our country develop the potential of our people and to that we are committed thank you dem jfk1 11 60c excerpt john_f _kennedy congressman roosevelt attorney general mosk can you hear that back there i want everybody to hear what i am going to say can you hear this back there well we will go on anyway first of all can anyone in this square tell me one piece of progressive legislation sponsored by mr nixon or the republican party that is the party which voted 90 percent against social security in the midthirties voted 90 percent against medical care for the aged in 1960 mr nixon represents a party which voted 95 percent against tlie 25 cent minimum wage in the thirties he represents a party which voted i am doing my best mr nixon represents a party which voted 90 percent against the 1 25 wage for those employees of a million dollar company which side is he on which side are the republicans on for progress or for standing still mr nixon stands where mckinley stood and harding and coolidge and dewey and landon and i stand where wilson stood and franklin roosevelt and harry truman this country is going to have to move forward in the sixties this country cannot stand still this country needs progress and action thirty five percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of college i don t see any reason why four and a half million people are out of work i don t see any reason why the prestige and influence of this country is dropping i come here today and ask your support california is key to this election if we can carry this state if we can carry this state we will win california is a beautiful state mr nixon will enjoy it so i come here today and ask you to give me your hand give me your voice let us move this country forward ladies and gentlemen let me just say there are only 7 more days in this campaign next tuesday november 8 you decide you decide what kind of an america you want you decide whether you want this country to move forward you decide whether you want to look to the past or look to the future viva let s go let s move ahead dem jfk1 11 60d john_f _kennedy mr gould mr mayor pat o hearn the next congressman from this congressional district mr douglas ladies and gentlemen i come here to california in the last 7 days of this campaign to ask your help in retiring the republicans and sending them out of washington i come to this plant in this state of california in this country of ours and i ask you what in the last 25 years or in the last 8 years the republican party has ever done for the working people of this country i understand that the republicans here in california are showing some spots on television which say that if i am elected president all of the defense industry is going to go away from california to massachusetts that is typical these plants were built most of them before and during world war ii do you know who was president franklin roosevelt do you know where he lived do you know where franklin roosevelt lived in new york and the plants were in california how could anyone be so stupid as to think in the most dangerous time in the life of our country somebody would run for president in order to take defense plants from one state and put them in another that about as well describes their campaign that is about what they are reduced to mr nixon takes a ride through new york city tomorrow he has with him governor rockefeller henry cabot lodge president eisenhower where is barry goldwater i think it is only fair that they all get in the car and ride down broadway yesterday i understand mr nixon spent 2 hours and a half in the white house asking the president to go with him to pittsburgh and cleveland mr eisenhower is not a candidate mr nixon is and if he can t stand up to the american people if he won t come and meet me in a fifth debate how is he going to stand up to mr khrushchev the fact of the matter is that the defense industries of california have been moving out we passed in the last session of the congress 370 million for the b 70 the administration would not do it until 7 days before election they finally decided to support the program that is about the responsibility of the party that we have come to know in the last 8 years here in this plant and i want to make it clear long before i came to this plant i said that it was incumbent upon the next president of the united states to provide airlift for the conventional forces if we are going to protect our commitments around the world and to make them jet when we transported the united nations forces to the congo the british flew some troops in in jets and so did the russians we took them in in the props i believe that the united states is going to meet its commitments to 50 countries the next president of the united states whomever he may be is going to have to recommend to the congress sustaining and increasing the airlift if we are going to move this force of ours around the world now i come here you are all going home and i am not going to hold you up except i want to say three things first i want to ask you what you know from your own experience in the last 25 years or in the last 14 years what mr nixon or the republican party ever suggested in the field of progressive legislation for the people of this country social security they voted against it minimum wage unemployment compensation housing name it this administration has stood still and the result is that the image of america as a moving society throughout the world has stood still i come here to ask your help in rebuilding that image in rebuilding the united states as a strong and vital forward looking society a society on the move the reason franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor in the united states and therefore i come here today in the last 7 days of this campaign asking you to make your judgment as responsible citizens of this country where we stand in the most difficult hazardous time in the life of our country at a time when the united states is still the only hope of freedom and i ask you to join with me in committing this country to progress in moving this country forward mr nixon is saying that he is a conservative i believe in 1960 and the 1960 s the united states is going to have to be progressive we are going to have to move again and i come here and ask your help in doing it thank you dem jfk1 11 60e john_f _kennedy mayor richards governor brown my distinguished colleague and friend in the house of representatives from this district and your next congressman congressman king mr braydon mr kimball ladies and gentlemen a week from tuesday i get the message thank you a week from today attaboy thank you now if we can just get this sign down we will be all set a week from today 7 days from this tuesday this election for the president of the united states is going to be held a week from today you must make your decision of which party which candidate which political philosophy which view of the future you hold for the united states and i want to make it very clear that there are very sharp differences between mr nixon and myself mr nixon has chosen to run for the presidency with the argument that our prestige has never been higher in the world he argues that everything that must be done is being done that we have never had in this state of california or in the country such prosperity i hold a different view i hold the view that this is a great country but it must be greater it is a powerful country but it must be more powerful and i hold the view that in the 1960 s this country either moves ahead or it slips back and if we slip back we fail not only ourselves and those who come after us we fail all those people stretching around the globe who desire to be free and to look to us this is one of the most important elections in the history of our country i believe it is a choice between a candidate and a party that is willing to break new ground that is willing to move ahead that is willing to take this country off dead center and between a party the republican party that looks to the past now as long as we in this country stand still as long as we do not take advantage of our opportunities we fail ourselves and we fail those who desire to be free this is a deadly struggle in which we are engaged and we can t afford to be second best we can t afford to be second best in outer space we cannot afford to have 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never get to college we can t afford men and women in the state of california out of work unable to find a job we can t afford to have 16 million americans over the age of 65 who live on an average social security check of less than 72 a month this administration argues about its progress if you buy today a 10 000 home in this community on a 30 year mortgage as a result of the high interest rate policy of this administration you pay 3 300 more than you would have paid 8 years ago for that house if you build a school you pay another percentage more than you would have paid 8 years ago here is this country of ours the richest country on earth with a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 and today in san diego and in parts of los angeles nearly 7 percent of the labor force is out of work now i think we are going to have to do better i think we are going to have to move ahead i think the united states has unlimited potential but i cannot believe in the difficult and changing times in which our country lives i cannot believe that we will put our confidence and our hopes for the future in a party which has always stood still and with a candidate which symbolizes that party mr nixon can you tell me one single program in the last 25 years domestically or abroad that the republican party has ever proposed has ever suggested we are going to provide our security and we are going to provide peace only as long as the united states gives the image of a strong and vital society today in latin america and africa and asia what is the image of the united states what vision do we give to them of their future the government took polls this summer which showed that our prestige has dropped and which they will not release but it shows in country after country people stretching around the globe have begun to believe that the way of the future is not the united states but belongs to our adversaries i don t want that kind of experience for the future i want to see us do better i want to move this country ahead i come to you today and ask your help in doing it you cannot be a concerned citizen of this country who must vote on tuesday on what is best for our country you cannot possibly read your papers of cuba of latin america of africa of western europe of eastern europe of mr khrushchev on the march you cannot possibly look around you and come to the conclusion that all is well i think we have to begin another great movement forward i think we have to build in this country a strong and vital and progressive society one that ornaments the cause of freedom one that demonstrates what freedom can do one that holds out a helping hand to all those who desire to be free i want mr khrushchev to know that a new generation of americans has taken over in this country a generation of americans who fought in europe and in the pacific for freedom before and who will build in this country the kind of society that defends freedom in the 1960 s i ask your help to join me in picking america up and moving it one hundred years ago in the presidential campaign of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later the contest still is between freedom and slavery we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming we see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for us i believe we are ready i ask your help next tuesday thank you dem jfk1 11 60f john_f _kennedy thank you governor stevenson governor brown senator engle thank you distinguished members of congress ladies and gentlemen i am grateful to our distinguished leader governor stevenson for his warm and generous introduction tonight as i am grateful for his support and counsel in this campaign i am glad to be marching on his side and we are going to march forward together for success and victory governor brown senator engle members of the congress the people of california i come here tonight and ask your help in this campaign i come here tonight and ask your support in moving this country forward again i ask your help in bringing mr nixon back to the beauties of california seven days from tonight one week this long trail will have ended and the moment of truth will have arrived the ballots will be counted the shouting will be over and so will the campaigning one candidate will accede and the other will accept either mr nixon or myself will turn to the task of governing the great republic whoever wins the task will not be easy whoever wins the task will not be easy i am just trying to keep it open you know what is going to happen the next president s desk will not be clear waiting for new problems and responsibilities it will be piled high with old problems inherited chronic problems old bills demanding payment ambassadors demanding new instructions legislation previously submitted needing to be redrafted but as the new president turns to meet these old problems new pressures will rush upon him new crises from every section of the world new decisions on weapons on strategy on economic policy and a thousand other items there on that one desk on the shoulders of the next president of the united states will converge all the hopes and fears of every american and indeed all the hopes and fears of every person in the world who believes in peace and freedom whatever the issue however critical the problem the president will sit alone he will have his advisers his cabinet the sources of information and ideas the final decision is the president s alone harry truman used to have on his desk the sign the buck stops here for 4 years the reins of this nation will be in his hands and he will speak for america for 4 years no other decision that you make will be half so important no other act in your daily life will entrust so much of your future to one man one party in his judgment and his foresight fully aware of this grave and somber and sober responsibility i am asking the people of california and the nation to place their trust and confidence in me i do not ask you to choose merely between two men i ask you to choose the kind of state of california you want the kind of united states of america you want what kind of an effort you will make to sustain the cause of freedom all around the globe mr nixon and i represent two wholly different parties with wholly different records of the past and wholly different views of the future we disagree and our parties disagree on where we stand today and where we will stand tomorrow during the past 2 years and in the 14 years that we have served in the government we have made known our views on these matters mr nixon and the republicans stand for the past we stand for the future mr nixon represents the republican party which has put up in recent years mr dewey mr landon mr coolidge mr harding mr taft mr mckinley i represent the party which has run woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and adlai stevenson some may feel that their life is wholly unaffected by this decision that their job is secure that their rent is paid that their taxes are paid and are all likely to be the same whichever man and whichever candidate holds this high office but i want to make it clear that every american is affected by what happens our prestige abroad what other people think of us is not of importance only to those americans who work abroad the sign yankee go home does not apply only to our diplomats and our soldiers the great struggle in the world is not one of popularity but one of power and our power in considerable measure depends upon our ability to influence other nations to identify ourselves with them upon their willingness to associate with us upon their willingness to follow our leadership when mr nixon says our prestige has never been higher i say he is either misinformed or misleads for our own administration this summer in polls taken in 10 countries of the world has proved that the people of the world the great majority believe that the balance of power is shifting against us and that by 1970 in 9 out of 10 countries polled polls which the usia now has in 9 out of 10 countries the majority of the people thought the soviet union would be stronger in 1970 than the united states do you know what that means that means that people who are now undecided may not be so willing to follow our leadership in the future may hang back may be neutral may be uncommitted may vote against us in the united nations may stand aside as we become gradually weaker i want the people of the world and mr khrushchev to know that a new generation of americans has taken leadership of this country and that this free society speaks with power force and decision all of these problems all of the hopes for peace all of our hopes for security all hang on the question of what kind of a society we can build in the united states if we can build a strong and productive society if we can educate our children make sure that all young men and women of talent go to college if we can provide jobs for our people and today i spoke in a defense factory that is laying off 400 men a week what happens to those men where do they go how do they pay their bills how do they pay their rent how do they meet their obligations this administration has sat by while here in california in los angeles in san diego in pennsylvania where i was yesterday in ohio in west virginia and in kentucky nearly 4 5 million americans are wholly out of work and 3 million others work 1 2 or 3 days a week when they can get it as long as this administration holds back in providing assistance to education practical physical and monetary policies that hold back employment hold back the distribution of defense in a stronger problem our indifference in the problem of medical care for our older citizens mr nixon says it is too extreme he prefers a proposal that provides that the 16 million americans who live on an average income of 73 a month should take a pauper s oath rather than put it under social security where it has been for 25 years i want to make it clear that this country has to move again that we want to get off of dead center that we want to build in this country the kind of society which will ornament the cause of freedom a society which moves ahead which no longer tarries no longer rests no longer sits encumbered but instead picks itself up and starts to move ahead in the sixties i ask your help in doing that i ask you to join us franklin roosevelt in 1936 said shall we pause now and turn our back upon the road that lies ahead shall we call this the promised land and he answered no and in 1960 we answer no again we are going to move again we are going to demonstrate what this country can do let me just say as i understand we are now coming to a conclusion of this half hour of television as this is coming to the end of this campaign i want to make it very clear that this is an important choice that you must make on next tuesday the choice that involves the future of our country of your recognition of your obligation to our country of your willingness to move this country ahead of your willingness to bear the burdens that go with citizenship that go with the burdens of being the chief defender of freedom at a time when freedom is in danger i have the greatest hopes for this country and the greatest confidence in it i have traveled in every state in the union in the last 2 years this is a great country but i believe it can be greater and i believe it is a powerful country but it can be more powerful i ask your help dem jfk10 10 60a john_f _kennedy governor lawrence mayor barr senator clark congressman powell dr mcclelland dave roberts members of the congress ladies and gentlemen fellow shriners guests i am grateful to the governor for his introduction and for putting it right on the line mr nixon said in one of his franker moments i am a conservative at home and a risktaker abroad and i don t think the american people want either in 1960 i think the american people in 1960 want somebody who is liberal at home and who is careful abroad i think they want somebody who builds the strength of this country who carries a big stick and speaks softly around the world during my visit to pittsburgh i have seen pictures of mr khrushchev with mr nixon s finger under his nose friday night after the debate when i went over to shake hands with mr nixon and the photographers came suddenly the finger came up in my nose i thought here it comes he is going to tell me how wrong i am about the plight of america and do you know what he said senator i hear you have been getting better crowds than i have in cleveland that isn t what the american people want in 1960 i think they want someone and a party that stands for the truth north south east and west that runs on a record not on leap year liberalism every 4 years like the republican candidates always run i wonder when he put his finger in mr khrushchev s nose whether he was saying which he said on that interview i know you are ahead of us in rockets mr khrushchev but we are ahead of you in color television i would just as soon look at television black and white and be ahead of them in rockets mr nixon was in oregon the other day he said we had been downgrading america he said look at the shopping center the biggest in the world have the russians got anything like that they have rockets they are turning out twice as many scientists and engineers as we are their economy according to mr dulles the head of the central intelligence agency is moving ahead at twice to three times the rate of ours i suggest to mr nixon to read the record and that he bring senator scott home to study the truth i suggest that instead of senator scott traveling around the united states in a truth squad which could not stand a lie detector that he come back to pennsylvania and look at the problems of his people that he is paid to represent to tell mr nixon who said on friday night there is not going to be a recession that the wall street journal which every republican candidate is committed by his platform to read every morning they said several weeks ago that there is a recession but the only question is when is it going to end there is a recession and those who work part time one third of the steelworkers of the united states who work part time or don t work at all the 100 000 of them i want him to tell them there is no recession i want him to come and tell them they have never had it so good i want him to tell the thousands of families in pennsylvania who wait every month for a surplus food package from the government which is some rice some flour some dried eggs all adding up to 6 25 for a family of four every 30 days 5 cents per person in the state of pennsylvania not india not russia not latin america but here in pennsylvania and west virginia nearly 5 million americans wait every month for those packages and finally this summer they added lard to it and when we attempted to pass a bill for food stamps when i offered a bill to put the distribution of surplus food in the department of hew and add some meat chicken and milk this administration opposed it i believe the american people in 1960 are going to move them out i believe they are sending mr nixon right back to california i think the american people are tired of a party which sends barry goldwater through the south calling for the repeal of social security saying they don t mean anything of this at all on civil rights and sending senator scott traveling through the north committing them to all kinds of programs i think the american people want a party which stands on the record i think they want a party which says i believe in a party i believe a party should stand for something instead of a candidate who says party labels don t mean anything i don t blame the republicans for saying that i would say it myself because that record is written on the books in the last 25 years will you tell me one single piece of progressive legislation ever suggested by the republican party in the last 25 years i asked someone in cleveland that and the next day the cleveland paper said senator you are so wrong you forgot what president taft did on child labor in 1903 well i was wrong what have they done since president taft what have they done on social secunty and minimum wages and housing and resource development on which they run and issue papers today where do they stand when those measures were proposed where do they stand in 1960 when we tried to move the minimum wage from 1 an hour to 1 25 mr nixon says it is too extreme when we try to provide medical care for the aged on social security instead they pass a bill by which you have to take a pauper s oath before you are entitled to medical care what do they do on resource development their policy was officially called no new starts i cannot believe in the most dangerous time in the history of this country in 1960 when if there was ever a time when we had to begin to move i cannot believe that they would put their confidence in a bankrupt political leadership and i believe the republican party s leadership relative to the needs of our people is bankrupt i cannot believe that they are going to put their confidence in a party which in 1952 came to pittsburgh and promised liberation for eastern europe and now has a communist satellite 90 miles off the coast of florida i cannot believe they are putting their confidence in a political party and leader who commits us to the defense of quemoy and matsu even though he says in the same statement that the people don t count even though it is admitted that it is indefensible even though he states that the chiefs of staff which is a fact will not defend it under certain conditions but will under others and two rocks 6 miles off the coast of china this is the party of peace and prosperity by their fruits you shall know them and i think the american people know them and i believe they friday night in the debate mr nixon said our prestige has never been higher look at the votes in the united nations it just so happens that the next day s vote was the best vote of all and look at our prestige on the question of admission of red china into the united nations do you know how many african nations voted with us two liberia which has been tied to us for a century and the union of south africa which does not represent african opinion two nations nine nations in asia voted against us eight for us and the rest abstained not one of the new nations admitted from august on into the united nations and there were 15 or so not one of them voted with us what about our prestige if that is the test the united nations why is it that they decided to want to move in that direction and not with us why is it that the candidate for the presidency of brazil felt it necessary to visit castro during his campaign why was it necessary for both candidates in brazil to take an anti american position how many latin american politicians in the next 5 years will do likewise in order to prove that they are good latins how popular is it to be associated with the united states what is our image around the world what are we identified with the status quo the past the special few in the interests in a few countries those on their way out or are we identified with the fight against poverty and hunger and the aspiration of the people what would we stand for in this country do we stand for a better chance for all our people do we practice what we preach and i agree what we preach is difficult to practice but we do preach it and we must practice it the communists do not practice what they preach and they preach a different doctrine but we preach the best doctrine ever known the equality of man the government gets consent from the governed and that everyone is entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and we will maintain that position i came from warm springs ga this morning the house where franklin roosevelt died and i come to pittsburgh pa and invoke his spirit i think it is incumbent upon us to continue a long fight which has gone on since this country began which was divided from the beginning we are the heirs of jefferson we could not conserve and look backward if we tried we must look forward the democratic party is the party of progress and i cannot believe in 1960 when the world is in revolution when all is movement that here in the united states we are going to say it is good enough what we are doing there are no challenges left no unfinished business it is merely a question of administration i think it is a question of force and vision and foresight and vitality and energy and i come here to pittsburgh and ask your help in this campaign two thousand years ago after the battle of thermopylae where 300 spartans were wiped out by all the persians they carved above the graves a sign in the rock which said passerby tell sparta we fell faithful to her service now in 1960 in another crisis of freedom we are asked to live faithful to the service of the united states and the things for which she stands and that is our commitment and that is the commitment of the democratic party i can assure you that if we are successful on november 8 we are going to set before this country its unfinished business the agenda for the american people in the sixties to build our strength to maintain our freedom to reestablish our position as a source and inspiration and friend of freedom around the globe as a good neighbor to all those who wish to trod on freedom s road i come here to pittsburgh and commit ourselves to leading this country on november 8 if we are given the mandate and if we lead we are going to get america moving again thank you dem jfk10 10 60b john_f _kennedy thank you mr chairman governor vandiver senator talmadge congressman flynt members of congress ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to you for coming out here and greeting a yankee and i also want to say as a democrat and as the standard bearer of the democratic party it is a source of satisfaction to me to be in a state which has never voted republican in the last 100 years and i am confident that georgia will lead all the rest come november in supporting the democratic party i come here to this state which has been the scene of franklin roosevelt s visits throughout his political career and even before and i come here on this occasion standing here in succession to woodrow wilson who came from this stage originally to franklin roosevelt and to harry truman and i ask you what did the republican party ever do for georgia what agricultural program did it develop which wouldd benefit the people of this state what programs to move our country forward what contribution did it make to rea what contribution did it make to tva what contribution did it make to bring this country out of a great depression to move it forward to provide a better life for all our people i come here and stand where they stood mr nixon stands where mckinley stood and coolidge and harding and landon and dewey and i must say given the contrast between these two records between records of service to our party i believe and service to our country in these difficult and dangerous times when the security of the united states is threatened when it is essential to us that we build our strength that we build in this great country of ours a greater country that we build in this strong country of ours a stronger country that we build in this powerful country of ours a more powerful country i believe it is incumbent upon us in this year of crisis to return leadership to those who look forward to those who wish to move in the sixties to those who recognize the unfinished business of our society i am glad to be in georgia again and i want to say to you that if we are successful on november 8 we are going to give leadership to the united states and we are going to start this country moving again thank you dem jfk10 10 60c john_f _kennedy distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen it is a source of satisfaction to me as the standard bearer for the oldest political party in the world to come to a state which in good times and bad in sunshine and adversity has been the most loyal democratic state in the united states and it is also a source of satisfaction to me that my colleagues in the house and senate and your distinguished governor your former governors your neighboring governor have been generous enough to join us today i am grateful to all of them all of us are proud to be here at warm springs today no american no democrat especially no democrat who aspires to lead his party and his country can come to this spot without a sense of gratitude and a sense of appreciation and a sense of admiration admiration for the man who lived here gratitude for the spirit which he showed which helped give us our great country as it is today and also a source of pride in the banner which he raised for all americans a banner which we raise again in 1960 franklin roosevelt was the champion of the aged and of children and of the handicapped and of the farmer of those who had been forgotten of those who had not been remembered of those who needed a helping hand of those who needed a good neighbor the basic force in all of this was not his party or his intellect but it was his spirit a spirit which he breathed into our party a spirit which we carry on today it was not the spirit of condescension it was the spirit of compassion it was the compassion of a man who had suffered deeply himself and through his own suffering had identified himself with the needs of his fellow men and women in this country it was the compassion of a man who was never poor but who held a helping hand out to his needy americans he expressed that sentiment best in his second acceptance speech before 100 000 people speaking in philadelphia and in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference franklin roosevelt knew who had been omitted and ignored and he knew who had omitted and ignored them and he set about to help the forgotten man to light the farms to help the aged to protect the worker to open new doors to the negroes to care for the needs of millions of americans in thousands of different ways he was challenged on every front by those who said he was destroying the country by those who said he would bankrupt it those who fought the new deal as they fight progress in 1960 but can anyone in this country who now lives whatever party they may be a member of can they imagine america without the accomplishments of the new deal of social security of care for the aged of protection for bank deposits protection for investments of help for the farmers development of our natural resources can they image an america without all these things being done not easily but over opposition reluctantly but moving this country steadily forward that was his great accomplishment and that was the spirit which he breathed into our party as thomas jefferson did when he founded it there were many conferences on all these programs held here at warm springs president roosevelt used to talk about the spirit of warm springs the general feeling that we were all part of a family it was here in warm springs that the idea of rea came to him when he found that his electric light bills were four times as much as he had paid at hyde park and he realized then without the cooperation of the people of these states and a national government that cared we would never light the farms of america today they are lit and it was due to warm springs franklin roosevelt did not believe there was any magic in tax money flowing from georgia or any other state to washington to be spent he did not believe that government should do things that the people or local government or local community could do better but he believed that there were some things that must be done by the people acting together for the very simple reason he said that if the government does not do it nobody else can or will and even in the field of health which we have seen the benefits of private action in under the leadership of the people who make this foundation possible even in the field of health he saw the need for cooperative effort by the private sources of this country and also by the national government illness is a national problem it knows neither barriers of region or race or religion or creed for the protections of our government must be given to every american who needs the attention of our people who needs the attention of vigorous national action as i have said in every part of this country all over the nation if this nation is to be true to its ideals and obligations we must make it possible for all to participate fully in our national life we must assure every citizen of the full protection of his constitutional rights and equal opportunity to participate with every other american in every phase of our national life franklin roosevelt s record in this area and in the field of health and in all the others has left a great impact but he did not rest on what he found he had served in the administration of woodrow wilson he was a supporter of the new freedom but he realized in 1932 that the new freedom was not enough and now in 1960 in the most perilous time in the life of our country in a time of maximum danger in a time of maximum opportunity we who invoke the name of franklin roosevelt know that the accomplishments of his administration are not enough if the united states is going to not only endure but prevail i do not run for the presidency under any expectation that life will be easy for the next president of the united states or easy for the citizens of the united states to be a citizen of this country is to live with great responsibility and great burdens the united states must be true to itself if must meet its own responsiblities it must build greater strength in this country because it alone defends freedom all around the globe my judgment is that unless this country begins to move again unless we realize the full importance of the times in which we live unless we are ready to say to those who say you have never had it so good that we can do better unless we are willing to recognize that a great country must be greater unless we in our day and generation recognize that we have unfinished business then we will not be true to this country we will not maintain our freedom we will not meet our responsibilities and history will record that in the 1960 s when the world exploded and when the world moved the united states stood still unless we build a strong country here we are not going to be strong around the world the reason that franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor in the united states because he cared for the people living here because he developed the natural resources of this country of the tennessee valley he let people all around the world know that they could do it also because he cared for people who worked because he protected the rights of people who worked in our textile mills because he protected the rights of the cotton farmer because he moved this country forward in his tune the united states was a source of inspiration around the world very few people in the world to the south of us in latin america and africa and asia ever quoted modern american statesmen they quote jefferson and lincoln or wilson or roosevelt but the united states has ceased to be a source of inspiration to them a source of energy a source of vitality and example i believe it our function to so build our society here to so reinvigorate it to so move it that people around the globe ought to wonder how they can follow our role what the president of the united states is doing not merely what they are doing in the far east and what mr khrushchev is saying or doing that is the issue which this country and georgia faces whether what we are doing now is good enough whether any american can read his papers and determine that everything that must be done is being done whether our strength is as great as our obligations whether the tide of history is moving with us or whether historians will record 10 years from now with the perspective of a decade that in the late fifties the tide began to run out for us it is because i believe that this is the most important election it is because there are sharp differences between us it is because there are two different philosophies now contending for the attention of the american people those who stand still and those who move forward those who say we must move in the sixties and those who say the good old days that is the great decision that the people of this country must face and it is the most serious decision that they have faced since 1932 and i could not leave here today this great source of national strength here in warm springs without reminding all of us that there is still unfinished business before us in the health field that there are still over 18 million americans over the age of 65 who live out their lives without assistance without a recognition of the great problems that they face in the field of health and i believe it incumbent upon the next congress and the next administration to permit them to participate in the development of a trust fund which will provide protection in their old age without their having to take as they now take a pauper s oath before they can receive medical assistance and medical care second we must provide for the development of doctors and nurses we are graduating 7 500 doctors a year 7 500 doctors and yet our population is increasing over 3 million a year we don t have enough doctors to maintain our present population and we shall need half again as many by 1975 this will require at least 20 new medical schools and yet our efforts so provide those schools and those doctors for your people and your children has been held back in the last years third we must provide loans and scholarships to those who want to study it costs 12 500 as well as years of work to become a doctor how many families can afford to send their sons and daughters through medical school today only 1 out of every 10 gets a scholarship of any kind and the scholarship averaged less than 500 per person low interest loans and fellowships will make it possible for us to meet our responsibility in this area and in some cities there is 1 doctor for every 250 people and in some rural communities in my state and in your state there is 1 doctor for every 3 000 people i think we can do better and i think we must do better and then finally i think we must provide the kind of stimulus to long term research the kind of long term research which has meant so much to so many people who might otherwise have been stricken by polio an example of what could be done by a private foundation i suggest in the future in cancer in heart disease diseases of the nerves psychiatric diseases all the rest can all be attacked in the same way that polio was by the cooperation of private foundations doctors working and by a government which provides stimulus to this research which will make the lives of our people happy finally let me say that there are 2 million handicapped and disabled americans in our country today we are providing for about 88 000 and the rest of them live out their lives when they could live usefully without hope life passing them by there are many areas of unfinished business for our society in the next years and it all comes down to the kind of country we want the kind of vision that we have of a strong america the kind of society that we want to build here i want to build a society here in the united states that provides a better life for our people that maintains our freedom within our own country that maintains the energies of a private enterprise system that maintains a stronger country moving ahead meeting its problems providing employment for its people developing its resources so that by the year 2000 when the question will then be decided whether the world will exist half slave or half free or whether it will move in the direction of slavery or in the direction of freedom it will say we want to be free we want to do what they have done we want to follow in their road we want to move with freedom we want to move with the united states that is the opportunity before us franklin roosevelt said in his second inaugural address this generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny i believe in 1960 a new generation of americans who fought for freedom on all fronts in world war ii have now come to where they have a rendezvous with destiny that their generation must bear its responsibilities of leadership i want khrushchev to know that a new generation of americans has assumed the leadership a generation of americans that is not satisfied to be second best that wants to be first not first if but when or sometime but first period so i come here to old georgia and ask georgia to join with us again in 1960 in building a better state here in building a better country recognizing in the last words of franklin roosevelt that the only limitations of our realizations of tomorrow are our fears and doubts of today i think we must move i think we must push the united states ahead again i think we must give this country leadership i think america must move again thank you dem jfk10 10 60d john_f _kennedy governor hollings senator johnston ladies and gentlemen i am grateful for the generous introduction of an old friend of my brother s and mine of many years your distinguished and vigorous governor fritz hollings i am grateful to him for his invitation to be here today and i appreciate the presence on this platform of my friend and colleague in the u s senate senator olin johnston with whom i served for many years i am glad to be in a state which cast its vote for me at the democratic convention in 1956 for vice president i am glad to be in a city the home of the university of south carolina which honored me in 1957 and i am glad to be the first democratic candidate in the history of south carolina to come to this state and ask your help what did the republicans ever do for south carolina actually i am here to pay tribute to a great south carolinian who speaks unknown to every american the new york yankee s bobby richardson apparently he is one yankee who has your blessing and i am here to gain them too actually baseball and politics are different the other day with the boston red sox ted williams retired they said he was too old at 42 perhaps experience does not count i want to express my regrets for being late and more than i can say they told me 5 days ago a storm was coming up here so we waited but there is a storm coming up here next november 8 that is going to sweep mr nixon all the way back to california actually i was not playing golf in georgia i was at warm springs i was at warm springs visiting the home of a great democratic president franklin roosevelt for 8 years in the u s senate i have occupied a seat which was once held in the senate from massachusetts by a distinguished senator senator daniel webster he served in the time before 1850 when the senate was at its height and included within its ranks lewis cass clay douglas benton and all the rest but none of these were considered by daniel webster to match the talents and the character of the senator from south carolina john c calhoun they were both born in the same year calhoun was a native of abingdon s c they both went to college in new england one to yale and the other to dartmouth they had both entered congress as young men and they stayed in congress for 40 years until they died in 1850 john calhoun and in 1852 senator daniel webster they worked together on foreign relations the development of the united states fiscal improvements each served in the house as well as in the senate each was secretary of state and yet through most of their lives they also differed on great questions but to his dying day senator daniel webster said of john c calhoun he was much the ablest man i ever knew he could have demolished newton calvin or locke as a logician he admired above all his powerful mind and his courage sitting as i do in the u s senate succeeding senator webster in succession i have also admired john c calhoun when i was selected as chairman of a commitee to pick five outstanding senators in the history of this country john c calhoun s name led all the rest and his painting is now in the senate reception room and when i wrote a book about courageous senators i mentioned john c calhoun i am not here in south carolina to make glittering promises or glowing predictions but to express the hope that in 1960 south carolina and the nation will be guided by the spirit of calhoun and his courage i never know what south carolina thinks of a measure he once said i act to the best of my judgment and according to my conscience if she approves well and good if she does not and wishes anyone to take my place i am ready to vacate we are even he demonstrated this in 1816 when he voted to raise the pay of congressman from 6 a day to the munificent sum of 1 500 a year congressman after congressman was defeated and yet john c calhoun speaking in the house spoke words that i invoke today this house is at liberty to decide on this question according to the dictates of its best judgment are we bound in all cases to do what is popular have the people of this country snatched the power of deliberation from this body if we act in opposition to conscience and reason are political errors once prevalent never to be corrected that is the spirit of the democratic party that is the spirit of thomas jefferson and woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman are we bound in all cases to do what is popular in 1960 the people of the united states have a very clear choice to make between mr nixon and myself we see america in different terms and we see the future in entirely different terms he runs on a slogan of you have never had it so good i run on the slogan this is a great country that must be greater i think we can do better we must say as john calhoun said that we must appeal to conscience and reason and not merely to what is popular mr nixon has taken a different course for he does not belong as i do to the party of calhoun he belongs to the party of herbert hoover who promised a chicken for every pot he belongs to the party that kept cool with coolidge that returned to normalcy with harding that tried to repeal social security with landon that ran dewey we never did that mr nixon is true to the traditions of his party popularity not logic is his standard he promises a vast new program of aid to education he promises in the last 2 weeks a great and vast housing program and he promises to outdo the democrats in agriculture public works foreign aid defense and all the rest but then he journeys south and he talks to you and he comes out against the federal bureaucracy he comes out against the spending he comes out against the democratic party because we support these programs i believe the american people and the people of south carolina and the south and the north should be dealt with more frankly i believe that the american people are wise enough to know that these promises are either election year oratory or they will require funds and effort by the federal government i am just as opposed as mr nixon to unbalanced budgets and to federal deficits the largest deficit in the history of this country was in 1958 12 billion i do not believe that washington should be the center of all action we do not know as much about your problems as you do there is no magic in tax money that comes to washington and then is spent by us but i must say that i believe not in big government for big government s sake but i believe in effective government and i believe there is a responsibility for the national government the farmers in this state who grow cotton they cannot protect themselves without a national policy the textile workers of this state who are working in some cases 2 3 or 4 days they cannot protect themselves against the imports that may destroy them without national action we cannot develop the tennessee valley without the people working together there is a place for action on every level and those who say that they are against action i believe are against the united states moving ahead in the 1960 s and instead of talking out of both sides of our mouth i think every candidate should take his stand with lyndon johnson of texas who said he talks not as a texan not as a southerner not as a white man but as an american in a united country and i speak in that spirit today the test of popularity rather than calhoun s test of conscience has also been applied by my opponent in the sensitive area of civil rights he makes a great show of discussing this subject when he comes south but it is hardly the same speech he delivered in new york city last week up north he talks about legislation down here he emphasizes that laws alone are not enough up there he stresses how quickly he will act in all these areas down here he says i know this is a difficult problem up there he criticizes the democratic party for having nominated a southerner on the ticket down here he omits the civil rights plank in his own platform i don t think mr nixon is fooling anyone north or south i think it is clear that if we are to have progress in this area and we must have progress to be true to our ideals and responsibilities then presidential leadership is necessary so that every american can enjoy his full constitutional rights some of you may disagree with that view but at least i have not changed that view in an election year or according to where i am standing i don t send senator hugh scott of pennsylvania to campaign for me in the north and senator barry goldwater to come south and say we don t need any of this all these are important issues but i must say what is most important is that the united states recognize in the 1960 s that these are difficult and dangerous times that it is going to require the best of all of us whether we live in massachusetts or whether we live in south carolina i do not go to the american people and it is upon your shoulders that the great decision will rest promising that if i am elected life will be easy i think to be a citizen of the united states in the 1960 s is going to be a burdensome and hazardous occupation but i have the greatest confidence in this country i have the greatest confidence in our system of government i know we can meet our responsibilities and i do not agree with those who say that we downgrade the united states when we downgrade republican leadership i am not satisfied in our most dangerous years to have our steel mills working 50 percent to have 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls never get to college to be turning out half as many doctors and nurses as we now need to find the largest agricultural surplus 9 billion stored away rotting while more than 5 million americans go to bed every night on a substandard diet of 5 cents a day of surplus foods i am not satisfied to see the united states stand still to see farmers income driven down and given only for relief the same promises of mr benson applied with new lighting and new makeup these are dangerous days but it is upon us that the hope of freedom lies it is upon the united states it is upon our vitality and our vigor and our willingness to embrace the future i come as the candidate of the oldest political party on earth in direct succession from thomas jefferson in direct succession and standing where woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman stood in this century and saying that we also in our day have a rendezvous with destiny our generation of americans must meet its responsibility not only to ourselves but to all those who wish to trod on freedom s road i want mr khrushchev to know that a new generation of americans has taken over in this country men who fought in italy and the south pacific in order to maintain this country s freedom men who have the greatest confidence in our country men who want to see it move again men who want to set it going again and i come to south carolina and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in building a stronger america an america which will serve as an example to a watching world as we sit on a most conspicuous stage we will give leadership if we are successful and i can promise you this country will start to move again thank you dem jfk10 10 60e john_f _kennedy distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to take this opportunity to thank you for a great georgia reception i must say you held out the hand of friendship and i appreciate it very much indeed especially your coming to see us off georgia has much to be proud of and among those things is the fact that in this ce ntury you did not vote for mckinley and georgia did not vote for harding and georgia did not vote for coolidge and georgia did not vote for hoover and georgia did not vote for landon dewey and i don t think in 1960 it is going to vote for mr nixon in this century georgia voted for woodrow wilson and it voted for franklin roosevelt and it voted for harry truman and i believe as long as there are farmers who do not have the means of living off their land as long as there are textile workers working 2 or 3 or 4 days a week as long as there are older people who do not have the means of maintaining themselves and protecting their health as long as there are people looking for work and can t find it as long as there are natural resources that must be developed as long as there is need for a stronger america so long will there be need for the democratic party and so long will georgia stand with the democratic party we now say goodby but i want you to know that we take you with us thank you dem jfk11 9 60a john_f _kennedy senator fisher congressman to be wencke mr chairman our national vice chairman mrs price my old friend and colleague from the congress clint mckinnon my sister pat my old nurse she is here ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for having been kind enough to come together on a short notice of 48 hours i think if we had given you about 2 weeks we could really run a rally down here after a look at this in coming back i was going to come yesterday but i only have one voice left in this campaign so we decided to come today this port this city has been a great launching site for ships missiles planes and you are about to launch me into orbit over texas later this afternoon i come to this city because i think that this state is a key state in the coming election i think that in many ways the issues are clearer here than they may be in any other part of the united states i say that because in a very real sense the state of california in the last decade has experienced the same problems which the united states will experience over a period of 50 years tremendous growth tremendous economic change development of your natural resources the effect of a war economy and a peace economy on this state the necessity of building new schools of educating our children here in california the necessity of meeting the needs of our older citizens particularly in the field of medical care i think in a very real sense california has had the problems of the country forced upon them in a concentrated period of time you have done an extraordinary job under a distinguished governor a democratic legislature and a democratic senate but even the problems that california faces the problems that my own state of massachusetts faces cannot be solved on a state level they really depend upon national policy here in san diego which is particularly dependent upon those industries which serve our national defense you have seen the effect of a governmental policy which i consider to be shortsighted and that is a policy which takes risks i believe unnecessarily with our national security i think the united states should be second to none i say it should be second to none both because it provides for our own security and the security of those who look to us for protection but also it represents the road to peace if the united states is strong then the soviet union or the chinese communists will not feel that the balance of power is moving in their direction but instead will make a determination that while other kinds of competition will go on they will not be tempted to take a shortcut road to world domination i think we are going to have to have a stronger national defense the united states will never attack first we always have to judge our defenses by what they would look like after the soviet union had made the initial attack would we have the capacity then to defend ourselves to retaliate if we have that capacity then we have taken not a step toward war but a step toward peace and that is our objective i visited 2 weeks ago the sac headquarters at omaha while i was there the secretary of the interior mr seaton arrived he was asked if the vice president ever visited sac and he said no the vice president did not need that kind of briefing because he was briefed in washington well i did need that kind of briefing and i think it would be valuable to any american whether he is the vice president of the united states or whether he is a citizen to have an opportunity to see there the center point of the great shield of freedom around the world but from my trip on that occasion and from my information as a member of the senate foreign relations committee it seems to me that there are three areas where the united states should strengthen itself and i think this city has a particular role to play in that strengthening if you have unemployment here it is not only citizens who want a job who can t find work there are some of the most highly skilled people in the united states whose skills as a team and as individuals could be dissipated therefore i think the united states should make a greater effort in the field of missiles first secondly it should do a greater job and a better job in the field of developing an airlift capacity nearly all the planes that took the u n forces to the congo were american planes but most of them were planes which are becoming obsolete and they contrasted in some cases to the jets which the russians and the british used for transportation of u n personnel and thirdly i think that we should strengthen our retaliatory capacity the traditional manned bomber unless the united states is prepared to give up the lead in this vital form of national defense and national security i talk about a matter which is not a pleasant matter but i think the president of the united states who has many responsibilities also has the responsibility of being commander in chief he must under his oath of office provide for the common defense one of the areas is in the field of national security i think we can do more and having known we can do more i think we should not do less this city has a great future and a great role to play this election will be decided on many issues which candidate and which party can provide for our security can give vigor to our foreign policy and provide a shine and a fresh force to our image as a friend of freedom around the world meet the problems of economic growth developing our natural resources educating our children caring for the aged in that contest on those issues i don t think there is a contest the democratic record and history is one that i think the american people will endorse in the election of 1960 i hope that the incumbent congressman mr wilson and i hope the one who is going to be the congressman will debate these issues i think it will be illuminating the vice president and i shall do so on several occasions but even aside from the debate the records of the parties are written on the statute books of the united states on the bills that become law on the bills that the republicans prevented from becoming law i am coming back here to san diego but i ask your help in the intervening period to carry our message that the future is unlimited for the united states and that the help of all citizens is needed thank you dem jfk11 9 60b john_f _kennedy senator fisher ladies and gentlemen first of all i want to express my thanks to all of you for taking sunday off and coming to the airport to greet us this is the beginning of this campaign in the state of california and across the nation i think here in california in this community of san diego i think we can win the presidential election with your support the basic issue which separates the republicans and democrats is this campaign is whether we are doing as well as we can do we hold the view that while this is a great country we can do better while this is a great state we can do better while this is a powerful country it can be stronger and i think here in san diego which has been one of the boiler points for the building of american strength and american force and american vitality i think here in san diego we can lead the democratic tide thank you very much dem jfk12 10 60 john_f _kennedy senator humphrey mrs roosevelt senator lehman mayor wagner governor harriman senator morse mr reeves mr nash congressman celler governor williams senator hart mrs price mr williams whom have we omitted so many chiefs are assembled with so few indians up here and in the audience i am grateful to all of you i am grateful to senator humphrey he permitted me to grab his coattails once more in minnesota by coming east i must say to take time out in an intense campaign which involves his future greatly and which is hard fought in minnesota to give up 2 days at this crucial point in the campaign i think first indicates how strongly he believes in this cause and also how great a man he is you can tell who isn t running for office by that relaxed posture that they assume up here hubert and i are the only ones on edge andy desellerelli is not running he just puts out his name i am particularly grateful to mrs roosevelt for her generosity and for members of the senate wayne morse who has been carrying the banner for the united states in the last few weeks at the united nations and for all the rest of you who came so many miles from over 42 states to take part in this conference on constitutional rights and american freedom as hubert said this morning as mrs roosevelt said last night and he said this is the kind of conference which could have been so usefully called in 1954 and 1955 i hope this is not the end this is a long business that we are engaged in and therefore other conferences should be held i hope after election i hope if we are successful in this election in the days after that so that the best information the best consensus the moral imperative behind this whole great issue can be brought to bear constantly i therefore feel that this is a welcome precedent that comes in the middle of this campaign and which i think establishes an important principle of consultation between those who bear responsibility in the government and those who live as citizens and work in the field and know it and feel it and therefore this is only the beginning of what i hope will be a long series of conferences in and out of the white house in and out of the government in new york and around the united states i must say on this issue as in so many others we do not walk into this campaign with a banner that bears a large question mark a question mark in some cases in the other party which is still there the democratic platform pointed the way on the great issue of constitutional rights and on other issues the task of the new democratic administration will be to turn it into a reality to translate it into action into legislative and executive action i asked several weeks ago senator clark in the senate and congressman celler in the house to join together and organize a committee of the house and senate members to prepare legislation for the new year to implement the commitments made in the platform i think that their experience in this conference will be most helpful i have had assurances from both of them that their work is progressing and that they will continue during this fall to work on this most important and responsible assignment i assure you that the new democratic congress and i hope a new democratic administration will press for action to implement their work to me it is not merely for legislation it is also for executive leadership aud executive action and i think the division of labor in this conference has been most significant two conferences on executive action and one on legislative action two panels that indicate i think the importance and the broad range of opportunity which is open to the next president of the united states the constitution is a wonderful document and it gives great powers to the president and great influence it is as franklin roosevelt said above all a place for moral leadership and as this is a moral question it is upon the president the central responsibility will bear as you have indicated many things can be done by a stroke of the presidential pen an executive order for equal opportunity in housing such as the commission on civil rights i believe unanimously recommended over a year ago executive reorganization of mr nixon s government contracts commission to turn it from what your testimony and the facts indicate has been a do nothing agency which has carried out only two cases involving very minor action in the district of columbia into an effective instrument against discrimination in the handling of government contracts a matter on which there must be general agreement throughout the united states executive initiative on a hold and large scale area to use the power already given by the congress to protect the rights of voters and this as hubert humphrey said of course is basic moral and persuasive leadership by the president to create the conditions in which compliance with the constitutional requirements of school desegregation takes place this is the kind of leadership i intend to give the kind of action that we shall take by coming here by giving your ideas by discussing by participating in discussions by exchange of views we help lay the groundwork for action in the future if there is anything that history has taught us it is that the great accomplishments of woodrow wilson and of franklin roosevelt were made in the early days months and years of their administrations that was the time for maximum action and unless the groundwork is laid now for action in a whole variety of areas if we are successful then our success cannot mean as much now is the time to prepare for what we must do in the winter of 1961 to advance the opportunity for all americans to protect their security to strengthen our country and therefore october is the month to prepare for action in january february and march in the campaign i tried to lay the groundwork for such action i have stated again and again the obvious truth that freedom is indivisible and is not it an ironic fact that that has been brought home to us in the last month when africans who have come here as part of the united nations delegation have talked about some of their difficulties in housing when african diplomats have come to washington and have discussed some of the difficulties that they have had in getting good facilities for their people they do not get those facilities for their people because some of our own people don t get those facilities and as soon as our own people get those facilities then they will get them they are closely linked it is interchangeable the effect on our foreign policy in africa as i am sure senator morse and others in the united nations have said all of these failures are serious the indivisibility of progress here and around the world has never been more significantly indicated than in the last 5 or 6 weeks because we have not been interested in education in our own country we have not been interested in education for those overseas because we have not practiced what we have preached in our own country we have not been able to practice it in their experience in visiting our shores the tie is intimate and as long as this is a struggle in which we are engaged as long as this is a matter on which we have set a high standard for ourselves fortunately then of course we have to move forward or otherwise stand condemned as unwilling to meet the letter and the spirit of the constitution and the declaration of independence freedom is indivisible too in all its aspects to provide equal rights for all requires that we respect the liberties of speech and belief and assembly guaranteed by the constitution and these liberties in turn are hollow mockeries unless they are maintained also by a decent economic life that is why franklin roosevelt linked freedom from want and freedom from fear with freedom to believe and freedom to speak those who are too poor uninformed too uneducated to enjoy their constitutional freedoms of choice do not really possess those freedoms that is why we fight so hard for minimum wage legislation for better housing for social security protection in illness in old age in order to participate in the other great freedoms we have to have a standard of living for our people so that they can enjoy them if the average wage for laundry women in five large cities of the united states is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week then the other benefits that we may guarantee them of freedom of speech freedom of religion and all the rest do not have the significance that they would have if they were participating fully in the economic life of our country these are the indispensible foundations of a free society and i am concerned with what is on the other side of the moon but i am also concerned as we all are with the condition or life of the man or woman on the other side of the street in america there must be only citizens not divided by grade first and second but citizens east west north and south voting schooling housing and jobs and all the resources of the government must be pledged to that end the resources of our people there is more power in the presidency than to let things drift and then suddenly to call out the troops the president is more than the commander in chief of the armed forces of the united states president truman showed what could be done by executive order in the desegregation of the armed forces of the united states we have lost valuable years by a failure of the presidential leadership by a failure of moral leadership three years ago there was an unrehearsed radio symposium in little rock the participants were white and negro students a remarkable thing occurred the white students became convinced during the program that desegregation of schooling was right and feasible when the moderator asked one of the white students what her parents would say to this she replied i think i will have a long talk with my parents how tragic that the long talk had to come from a teenage girl that it did not come in the center of responsibility the center of responsibility as provided by the constitution and by events the white house the president of the united states can you imagine the long talk that president roosevelt would have had with the parents of the country and with all the centers of good will that are waiting to be stirred it is this kind of leadership that we need again it is that high standard and that great goal that we commit ourselves to it is the interest of the forces of construction of reason of action that we convene this conference the task is just beginning but i thank you for joining us in this great beginning i thank all of you who came here i think the work that we have done here on this occasion can have lasting significance in the months to come and i look forward to your company as we have this nation move into the great new frontiers that await us all thank you dem jfk12 10 60a john_f _kennedy my friend your county chairman jack english mr nickerson your congressman to be john drewry julius rosen and otis pike your assemblyman and fellow democrats you know mr nixon never begins his speeches fellow republicans and i don t blame him he says party labels are not significant friday night he said in the debate what really counts is the man not the party i think what counts is the man the party puts forward because the party tells us what the man stands for and i must say that on the great issues which separate our country the great issues which face the united states the great issues which face the next generation of americans there are very sharp differences between mr nixon and myself and very sharp differences between the democratic party and the republican party and i think those who live in this county and who live in new york state and those who live in the united states should ponder carefully these issues because i believe on the solution to the challenges which face the united states the vigor and vitality with which we attack them our ability to recognize them lies the future not only of this country but of the cause of freedom this is an important election this election does matter and there isn t anyone today standing in this park regardless of their age regardless of the circumstances whose life will not be affected one way or the other by the judgment the vision the good sense the sense of progress of the next president of the united states this is an important election i say that party labels have significance because at campaign time candidates make many speeches and talk about many things but if those programs are going to become reality if those matters to which we now address ourselves are going to be accomplished it will be by the day to day work of a congress and the executive branch working closely together i must say that i come as a candidate for this ancient party in the most dangerous and promising and significant and ominous time in the long life of the great republic 1960 1965 and 1970 will he the most changing for good or bad years in the life of our country i talk about american prestige dropping and your distinguished governor said that while he did not agree wholly with mr nixon he thinks perhaps we talk too much about whether people love us that is not the issue whether they love us the question is whether people around the world want to follow the same system of freedom that has so benefited us that is the great issue not whether we are loved i am not so interested so much in whether they like americans personally what i want is whether they are interested in loving freedom whether they like the same kind of system that has been so generous to us and whether we meet our obligations whether we move forward on that great issue will hang the future of freedom in this country and around the world the reason that franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in the united states and the reason he was a good neighbor around the world was because of what he did here because he was moving this country because he had a compassionate understanding of the needs of our time and the foresight and energy to push forward he became a symbol to people all around the globe whose life was not as happy as they wished it to be now in 1960 people all over the globe are determined to better their lives and the great question of the 1960 s the great question of our time is whether they will follow our example and our road or whether they will move to the east whether they will determine that mr khrushchev and the chinese communists have the system and secret of organizing society so that it benefits all people that is why what we do here and the kind of society we build here and the vitality and force of our national life really will affect the cause of freedom all around the globe that is why i disagree with mr nixon when he says that everything we are now doing is as good as we can do when he runs on the slogan you ve never had it so good i run on the slogan we must do better and i run with the full knowledge that we can do better this is a rich country and we have been treated generously by nature but can we afford to waste 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who never go to college can we afford to have a negro baby and a white baby born side by side and merely because of his skin not because of his talent and motivation can we afford the prospect that 60 to 70 percent of those negroes will drop out of school before they finish high school they have one third as much chance that negro baby of getting through college as the white baby has or one fourth as much chance of being a professional man owning his own house four times as much chance that he will be out of work much more chance that he will spend his life in manual labor can we afford to waste a talent all men are created equal they may not be equal in talent they may not be of equal in motivation they may not be equal in their ability to accomplish things but they should be equal in their chance and that is what we stand for as long as there are 15 million american homes substandard as long as there are 5 million americans who live on a surplus food package from the government which amounts to 5 cents a day as long as there are millions of americans who are denied the protection of even 1 minimum wage as long as there are americans who do not enjoy their full constitutional rights in every sense as long as america has ceased to be a source of inspiration to all those who wish to be free as long as in the united nations and elsewhere there are serious indications that we have lost the imagination of the world as long as there is unfinished business for our generation so long is there need for the democratic party and so long is their need for us to win this election i come here to this county which is not known as the strongest democratic county in the united states and i come here and ask your help we have 1 month from yesterday to this election we will win or lose depending on what happens on your street in your county in your state the next president of the united states will carry new york because the next president of the united states cannot be elected unless he wins new york s 45 votes this is not a contest merely between mr nixon and myself it is not really a contest between in a great sense just the democratic party and the republican party it is a contest between the contented and those who wish to move ahead between those who are satisfied and those who want to do better between those who look back and those who say it is time america moved again thank you dem jfk12 10 60b excerpt john_f _kennedy after that speech i am ready to put the question right now are we going to vote democratic adam i am going to sit down and turn it all over to you congressman powell says he is my senior i respect age i admire his speech it was very good mrs roosevelt senator lehman mayor wagner governor harriman governor williams distinguished democrats ladies and gentlemen i am grateful for the generous introduction of my friend and colleague with whom i have served in the congress for 14 years and i am happy to come to this hotel a little late but i am happy to come here i am delighted to come and visit behind the fact of castro coming to this hotel khrushchev coming to castro there is another great traveler in the world and that is the travel of a world revolution a world in turmoil i am delighted to come to harlem and i think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognize that we all live right next to each other whether here in harlem or on the other side of the globe we should be glad they came to the united states we should not fear the 20th century for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original american revolution when the indonesians revolted after the end of world war ii they scrawled on the walls give me liberty or give me death they scrawled on the walls all men are created equal not russian slogans but american slogans when they had a meeting for independence in northern rhodesia they called it a boston tea party they quoted jefferson they quoted jackson they quoted franklin roosevelt they don t quote any american statesmen today there are children in africa called george washington there are children in africa called thomas jefferson there are none called lenin or trotsky or stalin in the congo or nixon there may be a couple called adam powell but we have to prove what they hear we are talking about what we are preaching about what the declaration of independence says what the constitution says we have to prove that we mean it not last year not 10 years ago not during roosevelt s administration but today 1960 the years after if we are going to live by these high words we are going to have to live it every day we can t turn it on and off here in new york today we just concluded a conference on constitutional rights and american freedom people who work in this field for years have come here from all parts of the country and they sit right here today they did not begin to work on it today or last week they worked on it years ago and they are going to continue to work on it for years to come and it is a source of satisfaction to me as the standard bearer for the democratic party that here in front are the men and women of all parts of the country who led this fight and you know them all when the vote comes in the house and senate as adam powell knows and senator lehman knows who provides the majority of the votes on every issue on civil rights on housing and minimum wage sickness health good days and bad who provides the majority of the votes who offers the amendments who tries to get them through a majority of the democrats and the record shows that the majority of those who oppose are republicans and on all the issues i don t lead a party which believes 1 25 an hour is extreme mr nixon said that on the debate a week ago that is the same party that voted 90 percent against 25 cents minimum wage i don t lead a party which voted 90 percent against social security which ran a presidential candidate alf landon in 1936 calling for the repeal of social security and yet that is the same party in 1960 that voted against medical care for the aged i think the record tells us something by their fruits you shall know them nineteen hundred and sixty has brought up a real difference everyone talks about civil rights now but the republican candidate is the only one who talks about rights and talks about human rights in the north and states rights in the south the only one who has a negro traveling with him in the north but not in the south the only one who sent senator scott of pennsylvania to represent him in the north instead of barry goldwater who represents him in the south there is only one candidate and i hope that is me who is willing to talk about his record on civil rights i never concealed my votes for fepc for title iii for majority rule in the senate mr nixon talks of what will be done in the future not what he has done for his party has done in the past for his past is a record of opposition to fepc both as a congressman and as a senator and as a consistent do nothing policy as chairman of the government contracts commission after all the government spends a lot of money and there are a lot of companies involved how many times have they really acted in order to compel them to provide that when they spend the money they should spend it in a way that people are treated fairly that is all we ask this is mr nixon s record and i think it is a record that we should consider in the next 4 weeks i want to make it clear that all this is important not only to ourselves but all those who look to us in the cause of freedom when an african diplomat cannot get a good house in washington it isn t because he is an african it is because his own people the afro americans in this country cannot get good housing this isn t a matter that we turn on and off what we are speaks louder than our words and if we are building a better society here if we are treating our people fairly regardless of their race or their religion then everyone who comes to our country will see what we are and go away impressed this is the unfinished business that we have woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt harry truman each of their generations met their responsibilities now it is ours now it is ours to finish the job last saturday at the vote of the united nations do you know how many african nations voted with us on the question of red china two do you know which ones they were liberia and the union of south africa none of the rest voted with us more countries voted against us in asia than voted with us last saturday on the admission of red china what has happened to america we are the great revolutionarv people we believe in freedom we believe in independence the communists do not they preach a doctrine they are colonialists and we are not and yet for some reason we have lost the imagination of a people and they are beginning to gain it what is wrong i believe it is important that the president of the united states personify the ideals of our society speak out on this associate ourselves with the great fight for equality the white people are a minority in the world we want to hold our hand out in friendship we want to be as franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor to latin america by being a good neighbor in the united states if a negro baby is born here and a white baby is born next door that negro baby s chance of finishing high school is about 60 percent of the white baby this baby s chance of getting through college is about a third of that baby s his chance of being unemployed is four times that baby s his chance of owning a house is one third his chance of educating his children is that much less his chance of being a federal district judge is non existent because there aren t any they point to those who work in the federal service messengers laborers clerks typists how many heads of departments how many members of the foreign service are of african descent there are over 6 000 people involved in the whole foreign servic 23 out of 6 000 that is not very many when africa will poll one fourth of all the votes in the general assembly by 1962 one fourth of all the votes of the general assembly by 1962 will be african again he will have the same vote as the united states in the general assembly we want them to join us in moving forward we want to move forward ourselves we want to build a stronger america we want to provide equality of opportunity for that child and that child whatever ability they have whatever motivation they have they will have a chance to develop that equally but it is a doctrine and we stand for it and we are going to move ahead on it whether we win or lose this election this i can tell you so i come to harlem today to ask you to join us to register this week to vote to stand for progress to move to go forward until the united states achieves this great goal of practicing what it preaches thank you dem jfk12 9 60a john_f _kennedy mr mahon my running mate and friend lyndon johnson speaker rayburn my colleague in the congress paul kilday senator gonzales sheriff kilday distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen it is a source of pride and satisfaction to me to come and speak before this distinguished american memorial when the texans died for texan independence there were not only native born texans in the alamo there were not only citizens of tennessee and north carolina but there was a citizen from massachusetts william lynn who came here to shed his blood with the other people in the alamo and it is a source of pride to me that my friend vivian scribner who served with me on a pt boat who i have not seen since 1944 drove up the rio grande valley 250 miles to be with us on this platform and bert thompson from your own city of san antonio i am delighted to be here today it is also a source of satisfaction to me that when my brother s plane was lost his copilot was lieutenant willey from fort worth tex i come here today in a campaign for the office of the presidency i don t run for the office of the presidency in this difficult and dangerous period saying that if i am going to be elected that life will be easy and the problems of texas and the united states will be solved lyndon johnson and i run for the office of president and vice president recognizing that this is a difficult and trying time for us all that it calls for the best in the american republic the best spirit the best determination the feeling that the future can belong to us that the republicans have been willing to stand still but that we have the greatest possible confidence in the future of our country in the future of the american people if we are elected we are going to build an american security and an american defense second to none if we are elected every american man or woman who seeks to work will find it in a growing and expanding economy and if we are elected every american regardless of his race or his creed or his color will be given his full constitutional rights we honor the independence of texas today but it is a fact that 150 years ago this week father hidalgo in mexico raised his famous plea will you have freedom and the people of mexico responded they are responding today they are responding today all over latin america seven years ago there were 15 strong men in latin america dominating the life of their countries today there are only five three years from now there won t be any latin america will be free but the fact of the matter is that while the people of latin america upon whom our security depends just as upon our freedom their security depends have turned increasingly away from the good neighbor policy which once was a source of comfort and satisfaction both to the north and to the south the united states failed to recognize under this administration the necessity of holding out a hand of friendship until castro s actions forced us to do so franklin roosevelt held out the hand of friendship and the good neighbor policy not because he had to do it but because he wanted to do it because he thought it was the right policy for the united states and for latin america i don t want to see the united states do anything in latin america at the point of castro s pistol i want us to do it because we believe in it regardless of all problems we are going to move ahead they are not going to be able regardless of how many plugs are pulled or how many mikes to stop us from moving ahead i mentioned latin america because it is only one of the great areas of unfinished business for our country i think the future is unlimited for us but i think if we are going to move ahead it requires the best from us all i ask your help in this campaign give lyndon johnson and us a great vote of confidence in the state of texas texas through lyndon and speaker rayburn has led the democratic party into positions of responsibility in the last 6 years in the congress i think it is important that in addition to controlling the congress that the democratic party also speak with a strong voice in the administration this is what we ask for the new frontier of which i speak does not consist of the things which we promise we will do for you it consists of the things which you can do for your country the opportunity for service the opportunity to help this country realize its great potential here and around the world in the american revolution thomas paine said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america if we succeed here if we are strong in this country if we are carrying out policies of assistance to our people if we hold out the hand of friendship abroad if we present an image of vitality and strength then the people around the world will determine that the future belongs to freedom but if we stand still if we look back if we mark time while the communists move ahead then people in latin america africa and asia will determine that the future belongs to the east and not to the west this is an important election in many ways it is more important than the election of 1932 for what was at stake in 1932 was the preservation of freedom here in the united states what is at stake in the election of 1960 is the preservation of freedom all over the globe it is to that great responsibility that we dedicate ourselves i ask you to join us in this great effort and i can assure you that if we are successful this country will begin to move again thank you dem jfk12 9 60b john_f _kennedy thank you i was just relaxing to hear lyndon johnson make a 15 or 20 minute speech here this morning i can see it will be a hard day for me senator johnson speaker rayburn mrs price mr mayor senator yarborough ladies and gentlemen i want to express our thanks to you both for the breakfast this morning and for the reception last night at the airport this really starts an important experience for senator johnson and myself traveling through the state of texas i felt that i was most fortunate at the democratic convention as i said last night that he would agree to run because if the democratic party has a great national function which i think it does i think more than anything it is due to two things first that it is the oldest political party in history and therefore it has its roots deep in american history stretching all the way back to jefferson and jackson and also it is the only national party in the united states and therefore includes within its ranks texas and massachusetts florida and oregon and washington and the middle west i think that the democratic party can continue to function if it looks not only to the past but to the future and if it looks to all sections of the united states for support when we do that in other words we speak not just for one section or one interest we speak for all sections and all interests the democratic party is a multi interest party it includes ranchers and farmers from texas it includes textile workers from massachusetts it includes businessmen in california therefore in the congress and we hope in the executive branch of the government we can speak for all the people and i think it is most appropriate that we begin this very significant part of our campaign in the state of texas and that we come into texas through el paso the pass of the north this city is also the pass to the south this happy combination of geography and experience make el paso an admirable link not only with the western united states but also with the countries to the south of us i can think of no assignment more important for a new administration than to try to reestablish the atmosphere which was so happily established in the administration of franklin roosevelt the good neighbor policy times and the problems since the good neighbor policy have changed but the thing that was most important about roosevelt s administration was the atmosphere that was established the feeling of interest and support he gave to the people of latin america the feeling of sharing in this country their aspirations for their own country i think this administration until the last 6 months has almost ignored latin america they have forgotten that here is the bulwark of american security the bulwark of american stability and carrying on as we do in a great tradition i think that this would be an opportunity early in the administration of the democratic president to go and stretch his hand out once again to the south of us to build strong those chains and then look to the rest of the world for action to protect our mutual security i start in this campaign in this state in this city i am grateful to all of you i am grateful to the mayor i think it bodes as a happy omen that texas and massachusetts and the democratic party are once again on the move together thank you dem jfk12 9 60c john_f _kennedy senator yarborough senator johnson mrs johnson my sister pat speaker rayburn congressman rutherford ladies and gentlemen there is a story about a texan who went to new york and told the new yorker that he could jump off the empire state building and live the easterner said well that would be an accident he said suppose i did it twice the easterner said that would be an accident too suppose i did it three times and the easterner said that would be a habit texas twice in 1952 and 1956 jumped off the democratic band wagon we are down here to see it is not going to be a habit we had lyndon up in massachusetts last week and we turned out a pretty good crowd in a small town of boston but i think el paso has it stopped i want to express my thanks to all of you this is not only the gateway to the north the pass to the north it is the pass to the south the east and the west i wanted senator johnson to run on this ticket for two reasons first because i thought it vitally important that we maintain the democratic party as the national party speaking for all the people in texas and massachusetts in california and new york speaking for a powerful and great country as it has through the greatest crises of our history secondly i serve with him in the senate he has on three separate occasions been chosen unanimously by senators from all sections of the united states to be their leader texas has led the democratic party in the congress it is therefore appropriate that texas play a role in leading the country in the next democratic administration texas has a democratic governor it has two democratic senators it has 21 democratic congressmen what reason would you want a republican president for that is like getting in a car stepping on the accelerator and turning it in reverse for everything that the congress does everything that the democratic party stands for the republican party is opposed to now if you have confidence in a governor and confidence in your senators and confidence in the speaker and confidence in congressman rutherford why do you say for the key office of the presidency and the vice presidency for the great powers which the president and the vice president have the power to veto the power to represent the united states in foreign policy the power to speak for the united states why do you then say we don t want to move with the democratic tide we want to go against it i see no sense in it i am confident that this state of texas as it did in the administration of franklin roosevelt when john garner associated himself with that administration i am confident that in 1960 massachusetts and texas the united states and the democratic party will be associated in a great national effort texas looks north and texas looks south texas is a bridge i think that there is no problem which should occupy the attention of the next administration in foreign policy more immediately than reestablishing the harmonious relations which existed in the administration of franklin roosevelt the administration of franklin roosevelt looked south they held out the hand of friendship to mexico to the argentine to peru to brazil they recognized that there was no security for the united states unless there was a happy atmosphere existing a good neighbor policy existing between latin america and the united states and it is an unfortunate fact that this administration has waited to the last month when their time is running out when their days are on the yellow leaf before they have looked south before they have held out the hand of friendship to the people of latin america we together with latin america are one when the united states moves in a different direction from latin america we adversely affect the security of every american i ask you to join up with us in this effort the democratic party has a great past but i believe the democratic party has a greater future the democratic party belongs to all the people it has spoken for the people in the great moments of crisis which our country has faced wilson roosevelt and truman and spoken on behalf of the men and women of this state and the men and women of this country i ask you to join us now to join in establishing once again the kind of progressive administration which has served this country so well in the past in the american constitutional convention there was a painting behind the desk of george washington of the sun low in the horizon and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising sun or a setting sun at the conclusion benjamin franklin stood up he said we have now signed the constitution we now know looking at that picture that it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i think in 1960 if we do our job if we meet our responsibilities if we recognize our obligation to serve our country in a hazardous and dangerous period we can look out and see not a setting sun but a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk12 9 60d john_f _kennedy mr jaworski senator johnson speaker rayburn lieutenant governor ramsey attorney general wilson senator yarborough congressman wright congressman thomas congressman casey congressman brooks congressman john young homer thornberry i came well attended before i came to houston tex ladies and gentleman we had the great honor and opportunity to this is an emergency to have murphy lively call wayside 1 1380 ladies and gentlemen we had an opportunity today to go to san antonio and visit the great texas shrine the alamo you remember the very old story about a citizen of boston who heard a texan talking about the glories of bowie travis crockett and all the rest and finally said haven t you heard of paul revere the texan said well he is the man who ran for help i am down here in texas running for help and i must say we are getting it lyndon was up in massachusetts last week and they turned out 10 000 people i never got more than 1 000 today we had 30 000 people in san antonio and he said he had never done that well so i think in spite of all the people who have been burying the democratic party as a national party it is still strong in texas and in massachusetts and across the country i am delighted to be in this city named after a great texan and a great american some years ago when i was out of the senate for nearly a year i wrote a book on eight senators who i thought had shown unusual courage in serving not their private interest but the public interest one of those senators was the senator from texas senator sam houston i did not select senator houston because of his bravery at the battle of san jacinto i selected senator houston because in the 1850 s in the days before the civil war he had fought for the closer ties between texas and the union in spite of the strong wave that was sweeping across texas in support of the confederacy i did not make a judgment as to whether senator houston was right or wrong but i did make a judgment that he demonstrated the kind of service to what he thought was right that i thought entitled him to a place of honor as a senator of the united states as well as a senator from texas it has been that kind of spirit from my own state of massachusetts senator webster senator clay of kentucky and the others who stood powerfully for this country as a united party i don t think that it is any inaccuracy that before this country broke up in 1861 the democratic party first broken up in charleston s c in 1860 i am a great believer in a national democratic party which includes in it a vice president from texas and a president from massachusetts or i am happy to say in 1956 when the state of texas under the leadership of sam rayburn and lyndon johnson was generous enough to reach across the country and support me for the office of vice president of the united states i was impressed by what sam rayburn said i don t think there is any man in this century who has written more significant legislation of benefit to the people than speaker rayburn he does it he secures the support of the members of the house of representatives from all states of the union he secures the undeviating loyalty of the majority leader from massachusetts john mccormack his strong right arm because they know that he speaks not only for bonham tex he speaks for the united states and lyndon johnson unanimously chosen on three different occasions by every senator of the united states in the democratic party to be the majority leader was chosen because he was not only a senator from texas but a senator of the united states i come today as a candidate for the office of the presidency who lives in massachusetts who is a senator from massachusetts but who runs as a candidate for a united national democratic party i know no north and south east or west i believe in a party which stretches from texas to maine from florida to washington which stretches all the way across the country representing all groups speaking for the people that is the kind of party which i believe in and that is the kind of party which can lead this country texas has sent two distinguished senators ralph yarborough with whom i sit on the labor committee and 21 democrats out of the 22 that represent the state of texas can you tell me any reason why texas should not elect a democratic governor 21 democratic congressmen 2 democratic senators a lieutenant governor and an attorney general and then turn around and reverse the whole procedure and elect a republican president james madison and john quincy adams and benjamin franklin wrote sufficient checks and balances into the american constitutional system without adding another one of a republican president and a democratic congress everyone who wants to stand still everyone who wants to look back everyone who feels that everything that could be done has been done that the best government is that which does not govern they should vote for a system like that but we think differently we want to move ahead we want to serve the great republic this is not a contest between vice president nixon and myself between henry cabot lodge and lyndon johnson this is a contest between two great parties and the character and quality growing out of those two parties is written in the history books of the united states it is written in the political slogans which they have carried in their campaigns listen to the republican ones in this century to stand pat with mckinley to keep cool with coolidge to return to normalcy with harding a chicken in every pot with herbert hoover had enough and no new starts look at the democratic slogans of which we are proud woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal and now in 1960 we are going to take our place on the new frontier franklin roosevelt said it for us in 1936 before 100 000 people speaking at franklin stadium in accepting his second presidential nomination and in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference that is what we have had in the last 8 years and robert sherwood the new president s friend in 1933 contrasted the two parties for all time plodding feet tramp tramp the grand old party breaking camp blare of bugles din din the new deal is moving in today on every major crisis that threatens us at home and abroad from cuba to formosa from berlin to the middle east from africa to latin america in the plight of our cities the plight of our older cities the lack of schools for our children the decay of our agricultural income we hear no blare of bugles din din we see only plodding feet tramp tramp and the grand old party breaking camp i do not run for the office of the presidency and lyndon johnson does not run for the office of the vice presidency on these great and trying occasions saying that if we are elected life will be easy and all the problems which disturb the life of the people in texas or in massachusetts or across the united states will be solved this is a most dangerous and hazardous time for us all because what we do here the kind of record we make in the united states the kind of vitality and leadership which we shown in our own country and around the world really can affect greatly the survival or the destruction of the cause of freedom when the united states moves ahead at one third of the rate of economic growth of the soviet union when we graduate one half as many scientists or engineers when we find billions of dollars of food rotting in surplus cellars while hundreds of millions of people go hungry when we see the communists spreading their influence in cuba the congo and laos then it is not merely our people who suffer or our country it is the cause of freedom thomas paine said it in the revolution of 1776 the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think the cause of all mankind is the cause of america i think it is our obligation it is our obligation and our privilege to be the defenders of the gate in a time of maximum danger to be the only hope for freedom if we fail all fail if we succeed all succeed has any people since the time of ancient athens ever had a comparable opportunity a comparable responsibility i ask your help in this election on behalf of the election of a democratic administration which has the greatest possible faith in this country which chief argument with the republicans has been that they lack faith that they have in the prophet isaiah look backward that they have not grasped the future realized the potential of this country that they have not been willing as franklin roosevelt was to look the future in the face and set before the american people the unfinished business of our society we ask your help in this election we do not promise that we can do everything overnight but we do promise that if we are successful this country will being to move again in 1789 in hartford conn the skies at noon turned one day from blue to gray and by midafternoon the city had darkened over so that in that religious age men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came the connecticut house of representatives was in session and many of the members clamored for an immediate adjournment the speaker of the house one colonel davenport came to his feet and he silenced the din with these words the day of judgment is either approaching or it is not if it is not there is no cause for adjournment if it is i choose to be found doing my duty i wish therefore that candles be brought i hope in these trying days of the great republic that all of us can bring candles to help illuminate our country s way thank you dem jfk12 9 60e john_f _kennedy congressman my friend and colleague congressman george mahon senator johnson speaker rayburn senator yarborough lieutenant governor of texas the attorney general of texas national committeewomen distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i come to this state of texas in good company i come with lyndon johnson and sam rayburn and george mahon and i travel this state of texas asking you to once again put your confidence in the democratic party and put your confidence in the leadership which texas has given that party some years ago when i was out of the senate in the hospital i wrote a book on eight u s senators who i thought had set a standard for public service who had served the public and not always their own private careers one of those eight senators and i selected them from all sections of the united states was a distinguished texan sam houston and the reason i selected sam houston was because though he was a faithful son of texas he was also a faithful son of the united states and even though he strongly believed and helped found the texas republic he journeyed to tennessee to tell andrew jackson that he was leading texas into the u s union even in the end of the 1850 s when forces were dividing texas from the union sam houston to the end of his career even though his son finally was wounded at shiloh he fought for texas as part of the united states i come today not as a citizen of massachusetts but as a fellow american you know yourselves that in spite of your great pride in texas you have sent to washington men like george mahon who leads the u s house of representatives in a fight for a strong national defense you have sent from texas sam rayburn who every member of the house of representatives for the last two decades has chosen to speak for them as the leader of the house of representatives you have sent to the u s senate lyndon johnson who every member of the u s senate not just those from texas or from georgia but from massachusetts and pennsylvania and california have voted to have him lead the u s senate in other words the distinguishing characteristic of texas leadership has been that they have concerned themselves with the interests of texas and have also concerned themselves with the interests of the united states that is why we have confidence in them that is why i come here today asking your help that is why i wanted lyndon johnson to serve with me as a partner in the powerful influential position of the american presidency in the executive branch not because i thought we could do it by ourselves in massachusetts but because i wanted massachusetts texas and the united states and a national democratic party to join together and defend the interests of the people of this country you have powerful resources in texas you grow cotton and grains in this congressional district but every cotton farmer and every grain farmer in this district knows that he is successful or unsuccessful depending upon the policies of the u s government one eighth of all the national defense projects of the united states are located in texas but you know in texas that you live or die that you are at war or at peace that you are secure or in danger not based upon the policies of one district or one state but based upon the policies of the united states i am asking texas to join as it has so many years in the past to join again with the democratic party on this occasion the democratic party and texas have been joined throughout our history you play a powerful role in it you lead the democratic party you supported me the texas delegation in the 1956 campaign you supported lyndon johnson on this occasion lyndon johnson and i are united now leading a national democratic party on the road of progress not the road of standing still not the road of second best not the road of diminishing prestige not first if not first but not first when but first i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that if i am elected life will be easy but i do assure you that if we are elected we will cause this country to move again the republican party since its earliest inception has been a party which has stood still i was in havana cuba 3 years ago and i was informed that the american ambassador was the second most powerful man in cuba today the soviet ambassador is in 1952 the united states was the most powerful military country in the world if this administration continues in office we will be in 1961 1962 and 1963 in a position of being second best i ask your help in this campaign i think together texas and massachusetts and the united states can begin to move again give me your help give us your voice work with us and we will carry this country dem jfk13 9 60 john_f _kennedy thank you speaker rayburn senator lyndon johnson lieutenant governor senator yarborough general phinney members of the congress distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i am grateful for a generous endorsement and statement by a great democrat sam rayburn in the city of dallas twenty four hours ago a well known american the vice president of the united states made a speech in this same auditorium in that speech he raised some question of whether lyndon johnson and i were members of the party of jefferson and jackson let me make it very clear that we are in a great tradition stretching all the way back to the beginning of this country and that tradition includes jefferson and jackson and wilson and roosevelt and truman and stevenson and johnson and kennedy and let me make it very clear that there is no question that the vice president is in the tradition of the republican party taft harding coolidge dewey landon and all the others no one will doubt where he stands no one will doubt there he stands no one will doubt the party for which he speaks no one will doubt the interests which the republican party defends as they have ever since their party began after the death of lincoln this is a very clear question which divides us today whether we in the united states wish to stand still whether we wish to develop a policy of no new starts or whether we will carry on the great tradition of the democratic party of looking forward of breaking new ground of starting in the 1960 s to revitalize the great boiler which is the united states that is the mission of the democratic party since its earliest beginnings thomas jefferson and andrew jackson were not popular with the nixons of their day and many of them lived in my own state of massachusetts woodrow wilson was regarded as a dangerous man franklin roosevelt was hated harry truman was despised and yet today those men are regarded as the great ground breakers of the democratic party and of the united states our credentials in the democratic party go back a long way lyndon johnson has been on capitol hill for 30 years as a democrat my grandfather was the only democrat from new england in the administration of grover cleveland we believe in the democratic party we grew up in it we support it we run with it we carry its standards because we believe the democratic party representing all interests and all sections has a great role to play as it has in the past to speak for the people in a dangerous time lieutenant governor ramsey put the issue to us the question is which party and which candidates can best build a stronger america which party and which candidates can revitalize our country so once again it serves as an inspiration and a comfort to those who look to us for safety at a time of maximum danger in a few days our shores will be visited by the grand master of the communist party mr khrushchev and his satellites they will come to the united nations but his eyes will be fixed upon the united states what kind of a nation must mr khrushchev see what kind of a nation do we want him to see what will impress him what will cause him to halt on his headlong rush toward world conquest some say it will be arguments arguments in the kitchen debates in the united nations that those that we must select to lead us should be those most skilled in the last 8 years from arguing against the communist advance but i suggest to you that there are more impressive things that we can do that will impress mr khrushchev he has engaged in his life in many arguments he has engaged as a member of the communist party in many debates he has exchanged threats and insults with the best of them and the worst of them but he continues to move ahead to probe the weaknesses of the west to exploit chaos and disorder to strengthen and expand the influence of the communist system aided by chinese reds he expands his power others say that our propaganda will deter mr khrushchev if we keep saying that we are assured of a continued military leadership if we keep saying that our economic growth is superior if we keep saying that we are first in space and first in research then according to this view mr khrushchev and the world will believe us if the skeptics and the critics and the democrats only keep quiet it will be obvious that our system not theirs represents the way of the future but i suggest to you that saying does not make it so mr khrushchev and the world know that the first space satellite was called sputnik not vanguard the first country to place its national emblem on the moon was not the united states but the soviet union the first passengers to return safely from a trip to outer space were named strelka and belka not rover or fido or checkers they know that russia has an economic growth twice as much as ours they know that russia is turning out scientists and engineers twice as fast as we do and if they know it the people of america are entitled to know it the facts of the matter are that arguments are not enough and propaganda is not enough and self contentment is not sufficient the only thing that will deter mr khrushchev from loosing his hounds on us will be a strong america what do i mean by a strong america first of all i believe a strong america is a united america uniting all parts of the country and all groups in a common effort to build a better society here at home we have that kind of unity here in the democratic party we can have that kind of unity uniting all parts and all races and all creeds in an effort to demonstrate to the world that here in the united states we live up to the principles of the democratic ideal the democratic party is not preaching disunity mr khrushchev our program is not one that will please you the democratic party wants to win this election not to preside over the liquidation of the free world or the destruction of mankind but to achieve peace and regain our security by rebuilding our country secondly i believe a strong america is a militarily secure america secure enough to convince any present or future enemy that an act aggression would be a mistake his mistake and to obtain that kind of strength requires two things an invulnerable atomic striking force strong enough to persuade any aggressor that our force could survive in sufficient numbers and capable of penetrating his defense and retaliating on his country secondly a modern conventional force of sufficient strength firepower and mobility to intervene quickly and effectively before any brush fire war causes a holocaust only when both of these objectives are attained so secure that our enemies know it and respect our strength can we talk successfully with mr khrushchev about peace third i believe a strong america is one that leads the free world not just because we are the richest or the strongest or the most powerful but because we exert that leadership for the cause of freedom around the globe because we act as well as react because we propose as well as oppose and because we have earned the respect of our friends as well as the respect of our enemies and because we are moving on the road to peace fourth and finally i believe a strong america is a growing america a nation that is developing all of its resources to the fullest possible potential human scientific economic and natural and developing these resources under a free enterprise system that looses the energy of our people the splendor of this city is proof of what can be done the vitality of this state is proof of what can be done this country can move ahead and it is that great object that we are dedicating ourselves to in this campaign but that requires a country that looks to the future that makes the best possible use of its soil and water and natural resources and it requires an atmosphere in which that kind of energy can flourish an atmosphere of fair competition available credit low interest rates expanding markets and increased purchasing power for our people the texas constitution says that monopolies are contrary to the genius of a free people and ever since the day of jim hogg texans have been found not on the side of monopolies but on the side of free people i come here today from the oldest section of the united states the state of massachusetts and i come here to the last frontier in the state of texas i come here joining with my running mate from this state demonstrating that the democratic party still has vitality still in spite of its long history stretching back 160 years looks ahead still looks into the future we ask your help in this campaign give us your voice give us your help join with us in this effort to move this country ahead lyndon johnson and i do not promise a life of ease we cannot promise a solution to the problems which disturb our lives but we can promise that if we are successful we can move with vigor and vitality on the problems which disturb us here and around the world thomas paine in the revolution of 1776 said that the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in the revolution of 1966 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america and as we move ahead we think not only of the city of dallas and the city of boston the state of massachusetts and the state of texas the united states we think of all those who wish to join us in a great effort around the world to maintain their freedom and maintain the peace and we take as our message the words which are written in a plaque behind the desk of speaker rayburn in the house of representatives which i read nearly every day during the 6 years when when i was in the house they are from a speech given by a distinguished senator from my own state of massachusetts daniel webster in that speech he said let us develop the resources of our land call forth its power build up all its institutions and see whether we in our day and generation may not perform something to be remembered thank you dem jfk13 9 60a john_f _kennedy congressman patman governor members of the congress speaker rayburn mrs price national committee man and woman ladies and gentlemen i am proud to have accepted the invitation of your distinguished congressman wright patman to attend this fair and come to these two states on this occasion arkansas senator fulbright is the chairman of the senate foreign relations committee on which i serve senator mcclellan of arkansas is the chairman of the rackets committee on which i served for 3 years members of the house and senate from both of these states have been my companions and colleagues in the house and the senate for the past 14 years and i am delighted to be here on this occasion massachusetts and texas are several thousand miles apart but boston tex and boston mass are only a few inches apart in their common devotion to the principles of this country i have been taken from the pass of the north el paso on sunday night across the great state of texas to the eastern borders of texas and arkansas louisiana i come to this state on this occasion as the democratic standard bearer representing not massachusetts but representing a national democratic party which has its roots in texas as well as in my own state yesterday i was shown the alamo and i was informed of all the brave deeds of all the texans of bowie and crockett and all the rest so i said last night haven t you heard of paul revere they said yes he is the one who ran for help well i have come down here to texas to ask your help on this occasion in this election to rebuild our state and country this is a contest not merely between the vice president of the united states and myself this is a contest between the republican party and the democratic party between all that the democratic party has done to rebuild the economy of this section of the west all that the democratic party has done through the administrations of jefferson and wilson and roosevelt and truman and all that the republican party has not done under coolidge mckinley taft dewey landon nixon and the others for progress for the people i put the new freedom of wilson the new deal of roosevelt the fair deal of truman i put that against the stand pat with mckinley return to normalcy with harding keep cool with coolidge a chicken in every pot and had enough i think that the democratic party is best equipped in a time of a anger here in texas and arkansas and in a time of danger around the world there is not a single farmer in this state of texas there is not a farmer in the state of arkansas whose income has not deteriorated under the administration of benson and nixon and the others there is not a citizen in the united states who looks around the world who feels he is secure as he was 10 years ago who feels that the strength and prestige of the united states in comparison to that of the communist world is increasing or decreasing is our prestige in latin america and asia and africa is our military strength in comparison to that of the communist bloc is our position in outer space compared to the communist position as strong as it was some years ago i don t think it is i don t think we have done enough i think we can do better i ask your help in this campaign i think all those who feel that everything that is being done is being done right now all those who are satisfied to stand still all those who wish to look back and not forward all those who have enough the way they are all those who are satisfied to fall into a position of relative weakness i hope that they will support the republican party but all those who want to move forward all those who believe in the democratic party who believe in what sam rayburn and lyndon johnson and ralph yarborough and wright patman and oren harris and others have done for the democratic party since its earliest beginnings i come in a great tradition now down to 1960 lyndon johnson and i seek to represent the united states in a difficult and dangerous period we do not run for the presidency and the vice presidency promising that if we are elected life will be easy but we do promise that if we are elected this country will begin to move again this country will move forward this country will stand strong this country s brightest days will be ahead i ask your support in this campaign one hundred years ago a great american president wrote a friend i see the storm coming i know there is a god and that he hates injustice if he has a part and a place for me i believe that i am ready now in 1960 we know there is a god we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk13 9 60b john_f _kennedy governor daniel senator johnson congressman thornberry lieutenant governor general wilson distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express my warm appreciation to your distinguished governor for his generous welcome this morning the u s senate is filled with governors that wanted to get to the senate he is the only one i know in the senate who wanted to come back here and be governor of a great state i can understand why we have been traveling since the night before last when we came into the pass of the north from el paso down through san antonio houston and today in austin one of the things that has impressed me most about texas which i regard as a forward looking and progressive state has been the care and attention which the people of texas have given to the past yesterday we visited the alamo coming into the city of austin last night the governor pointed with pride to a building which has been developed under his administration which will house the archives of texas which will house as said the letter which travis wrote from the alamo which will house the documents which houston wrote which will house the documents which have helped build the state of texas why would a state like texas which lives on a frontier which has had a record of progress look to the past the reason is simple we look to the past so we will know where we are going in the future we look to the past because it tells us what we have been able to do we look to the past because it gives us confidence that this country has been built by men of courage men of character men who are willing to risk all to develop the state of texas and the united states we look today to the past both as democrats and as americans because it is the past that tells us most about what the future can be i look to the past of the democratic party as the standard bearer of that party i look to the record of lyndon johnson as the vice presidential candidate of this party because i think that record has been a good one for texas and the united states the resources of this district were developed in part by the initiative of lyndon johnson followed by a distinguished congressman homer thornberry the resources of this state were developed in part under the leadership of sam rayburn the democratic party and history the democratic party and texas have been jointed intimately together therefore i consider it a source of strength to the party nationally as well as in the state of texas as well as in the state of massachusetts as well as in the state of florida as well as in the state of washington that the democratic party on this occasion presents a united national front to the country we are able to serve the people because the people belong to the democratic party we include yankees from the north and texans from the south we include farmers from lubbock we include rangers from california we include citrus growers from oregon we include all of the people and because we include every interest and every group we speak for the people in the congress and in the executive branch texas has sent 21 democratic congressmen to the congress and 1 republican a fair proportion a good average you have elected two democratic senators senator johnson and senator ralph yarborough with whom i serve on the committee on labor and public welfare you have elected a man who is the speaker of the house you have elected a senator who leads the democratic party both unanimously both chosen by democrats in all parts of the united states to lead them in the house and senate and speak for them now if the democratic party and texas have been so intimately joined it seems to me that you can place your confidence in the democratic party in the future we seek to lead not merely one section of the united states or one interest we see senator johnson and i seek to lead the united states in a difficult and dangerous time we do not do so saying that if we are elected the problems of texas will be over the problems of the united states will be solved because they will not be solved in our generation or our time but we do promise that if we are elected that this country will be strong and this country will present an image to the world of vitality and energy that we will represent to the world not only our own interests but also extend a hand to all those who wish to associate with us in the great fight for freedom and independence the democratic presidents in this century have been successful here in the united states wilson roosevelt and truman they have been successful around the world because they were successful here because they moved this country ahead because they demonstrated that here in this country we were still revolutionaries that we still believed in the doctrines which are far more progressive and vigorous than the doctrines of the communists mr khrushchev came to the senate foreign relations committee and he predicted that our children would be communists he went to china after a visit to the united states and said that he capitalistic system is a sick and dying and faltering horse that is about to collapse to the ground i do not agree with him i think our brightest days are ahead i think it is incumbent upon us to demonstrate that this system of ours can work that it can work in a period of danger that it can work at a time when it is being challenged all over the globe that we can hold out a hand of friendship to those to the south of us to those in africa those in asia that we represent the way to the future and that the communist system is as old as egypt i ask your support in this election not merely for the state of texas but also for the united states not merely for the united states but for all those who desire to join us in a great effort to maintain their freedom the hard tough question for the next decade for this or any other group of americans is whether a free society can maintain itself whether we can demonstrate to a watching world as we sit on a most conspicuous stage that the future and the united states are one i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in turning this state and this country back on the road of progress thank you dem jfk13 9 60c john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague congressman wright my running mate lyndon johnson speaker rayburn senator yarborough lieutenant governor and the governor of texas ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to you for your generous welcome today i hope the vice president of the united states will not confine his visits to texas to the city of dallas but instead will drive the 30 miles to fort worth and see a great texas city texas and massachusetts are 2 000 miles apart but they are sisters under the skin it is a source of satisfaction to me that mrs willey is here today my brother flew for many months over the bay of biscay in the winter of 1943 44 in a liberator a b24 built in this city so i am honored to come here today this city of fort worth was built as an armed camp for the defense of this part of texas during the days of the indian wars the city of fort worth tex serves today as a defense not for the indian wars in the state of texas but for the security of the entire free world all over the free world for the planes and the missiles built in fort worth serve as a shield for the united states i saw over the sac base in omaha nebr 3 weeks ago a b 58 built in this city refueled it is capable of flying to the opposite ends of the earth in defense of the united states those planes those pilots serve as our shield fort worth and massachusetts boston and texas and we are united today because massachusetts and texas lyndon johnson and myself serve as the standard bearers for a great democratic party a party which rose in the south which grew in the north which developed in the west and is strong in the east the only national party in the united states today the vice president speaking in dallas yesterday said that the party of kennedy and johnson is not the party of jefferson and jackson when woodrow wilson ran for the presidency in 1912 they said woodrow wilson was not part of the party of jefferson and jackson and when franklin roosevelt ran in 1932 they said that franklin roosevelt was not part of the party of jefferson and jackson and wilson and when truman ran in 1948 they said he was not in the tradition of wilson or roosevelt or jefferson or jackson we do not need members of the republican party to tell us for what the democratic party stands i have been endorsed by the 21 members of the congressional delegation who are democrats i have not been endorsed by the one member of the texas delegation who is a republican i wanted lyndon johnson of texas to join me in this fight because i believe that here in this state a great progressive vigorous democratic party was existing had led the party under sam rayburn and lyndon johnson in the house and senate had sent distinguished governors and senators to represent this state this state belongs to the democratic party and the democratic party belong to it we ask your help in this campaign the democratic party has in my opinion as great an opportunity for service in the future as it ever has been in the past a strong country a country second to none a national security position which is first not first but not first if not first when but first that s what we want in this country so we ask you to join us on the new frontier not saying that if we re elected life will be easy but promising you that if we are elected if the democratic party once more in the great tradition controls the executive branch of the government that this party will lead and this country will move again thank you dem jfk14 10 60 john_f _kennedy governor williams senator mcnamara congressman to be dan reid joseph minolfo your next governor john swainson mrs price ladies and gentlemen about a week ago i visited the house that franklin roosevelt was staying in at the time that he died in april 1944 you will recall that on the day that he died he was working on a speech which he was to deliver the next day which finished with the lines which suggested that the only limit to our realization of tomorrow was our doubts and fears of today about a month before that i visited hyde park n y and i saw where franklin roosevelt was born and where he lived much of his life it is interesting to recall that in his first inaugural speech he used words almost similar to those that he used the day before he died that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself i must say that that confidence in this country that feeling when the american people are given leadership when they have pointed out the unfinished business of our society that they can accomplish anything i believe is strong in the democratic party today and i think it is strong in your distinguished governor and i think that is what has made him a great governor of the great state of michigan and it is strong in pat mcnamara who i have sat next to in the senate for many years and who has voted for the people and i hope the people of michigan will compare his voting record with that of his opponent on the great issues which face this country and john swainson a distinguished veteran of the last war who follows in mennen williams footsteps i believe he will be a great governor and a great leader of the democratic party in this state and in the country and i am glad to run and dan reid who i am hopeful will be your congressman we need some good congressmen from michigan from all over the country franklin roosevelt in accepting his second nomination before 100 000 people in franklin field said in that speech governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference and i am asking you in 1960 in making a determination between the republican party and the democratic party between mr nixon and myself to consider whose record and which record is frozen in the ice of its own indifference i will now quote mr nixon i have in my hand a document i know how mr nixon feels about having the record quoted against him he is very much opposed to it he regards it as underhanded but i am going to quote him tonight and i am going to quote him accurately here is what mr nixon said making one of his speeches to republican businessmen in hot springs va here is what he said unless unemployment goes over 4 5 million mr nixon says unless unemployment goes over 4 5 million it cannot become a significant issue in the minds of a great many people there must after all be some unemployment i would think it would become a significant issue to the 4 499 000 people who might be unemployed who might be less than 4 500 000 before it would become significant to mr nixon about 2 weeks ago he attacked senator mcnamara and myself for supporting medical care for the aged in social security mr nixon s criticism was that this would take care of a lot of wealthy people that is the tiredest oldest argument used against social security even alf landon has forgotten that one just 1 percent of our population over the age of 65 has an income of over 10 000 just 1 percent so mr nixon uses that old argument to prevent 99 percent of the people over 65 who live on an average social security check of less than 78 a month from getting medical care after they have retired frozen in the ice of its own indifference mr nixon is about 2 weeks ago mr nixon and i met in a debate and in that we discussed 1 25 minimum wage senators are paid much more than that and so are vice presidents but mr nixon stated that he regarded 1 25 minimum wage for those businesses making more than 1 million in interstate commerce as extreme he regarded a bill which passed the u s senate aid to education he regarded that bill and i quote him again as extreme in my judgment mr nixon fits very well the description which franklin roosevelt gave in 1936 about governments frozen in the ice of their own indifference and i think especially that that is true of the 900 000 americans who in this rich country have been out of work for more than 15 weeks already i think it is a matter of great importance and i think the people of michigan in making a judgment as to which candidate and which party they wish to entrust the presidency they want a responsible and i hope far sighted leader with judgment but they also want one who looks at america who looks at what america can be who looks at the problems of his fellow americans as franklin roosevelt looked at them in the 1930 s that is what we are going to try to do in the 1960 s i think that the most important domestic problem which will face the next president of the united states is the decline in agricultural income and the attrition in jobs the loss of jobs our inability to maintain full employment in the united states it is the most serious problem that we face it is one of the most complicated problems that any free society can face but it is a problem which we must face because if our society is unable to keep our people working we know that we have made a failure and i cannot believe that this country can possibly agree to a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 a partial recession in 1960 with the prospect of a serious recession if the economy should go down further in the winter of 1961 nearly 250 000 people in the state of michigan are out of work over 4 million people out of work in this country 3 million working part time and the prospects for the future uncertain that is the problem that the united states faces and it is a problem that this administration has not approached with the vigor required and the compassion required if we are going to maintain full employment in this country i want to make it clear that a democratic administration will do the following things in order to stimulate employment first we will not rely on a monetary policy that puts its emphasis on tight money and high interest rates the fact of the matter is as frank church said in his keynote speech if rip van winkle went to sleep and he woke up and he wanted to know whether the republicans or the democrats were in office he would just say how high are the interest rates if you bought a house today for 10 000 15 000 and you have a 30 year mortgage on it you pay about seven or eight thousand dollars more than you would have paid 10 years ago just for the interest on that investment that is what the high interest rate policy of this administration has cost you pay nearly 3 billion more in taxes to sustain our debt because this administration has put its reliance on a monetary policy which has been deflationary and which has had a serious effect in the last 3 years i believe we can do better and i believe the central responsibility of the adininistration that is coming in in january is to maintain full employment i would far rather secondly use the federal budget and use fiscal policy as a method of controlling inflation than i would be to rely on the tools that this administration has used used in my opinion at the wrong time in the wrong place in the wrong way in such a way as to increase the recession of 1958 and the prospects of recession in 1960 third this administration has relied in the development of our natural resources on a policy of no new starts you cannot possibly move ahead in this country we cannot possibly develop our resources we cannot possibly develop our strength unless we make the best use we can of the land the water the minerals that have been given to us and which have made our country great i can assure you that in addition to this we will make the best possible use of our people and that is wherever they may live and regardless of their race or their creed we have to use all the talent that we have in this country there is no excuse in the world for bright boys and girls who graduate from high school to fail to get into college there is no reason at all that a young boy or girl of talent merely because their skin is a different color should be denied an opportunity to realize their talents that is what this is about all things are possible in my opinion to this country if once we determine where we want to go and what we must do in order to get there lincoln said 100 years ago the times are new and the perils are new we must disentangle ourselves from the past and i believe we must in 1960 the problems are entirely new and the solutions must be as new but i believe the same spirit which in other days and in other years and in other times served this country so well the spirit of the 1930 s must motivate this country in the 1960 s i call upon all of those of you who have on other occasions supported the democratic party and the democratic candidates to once more join with us in one great effort to move this country off dead center to start this country on the upward trail to try to demonstrate in this country that a free society cannot only be free but strong and i believe it is incumbent upon the american people to make a careful judgment between the republicans and their policies of the last 8 years and the promise of the future that is ours if we are given the opportunity to lead it is no easy task to lead the united states in the 1960 s upon every decision hangs the welfare and perhaps the survival of this country but in my judgment the job can be done in my judgment the job must be done and i do not have the slightest doubt in the world that we can do the job infinitely better than mr nixon and the republican party of that i am sure and if i had had the slightest doubt about that before this campaign i do not have it now i believe this is an important election i believe it is important for this country that the democratic party be successful i believe it is important that this country have new leadership and i can assure you that if we have anything to say about it in the next 25 days we are going to point out the record we are going to indicate mr nixon s positions of the last 14 years on the issues which affect the security of the people of this country and their welfare and in my judgment come november 8 the people of the united states are going to determine that they have no place in the white house for a government and a president frozen in the ice of their own indifference thank you dem jfk14 10 60a john_f _kennedy i have seen that face someplace but i don t know exactly where i have seen that one too in 1952 governor williams john swainson the next governor of the state of michigan my friend and colleague and valuable senator in the united states senate pat mcnamara the candidate for congress from this district ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you particularly those of you who are college students who can t vote who came down here anyway i recognize that the sacrifice is not extensive as i am doing the work this morning and you are not in class i am glad that you are participating actively in the political process artemus ward 50 years ago said i am not a politician and my other habits are good i believe all of us recognize now in a free society that we are all politicians in a sense we are all officeholders in a sense we all bear part of the burden of maintaining free government and this election of 1960 i believe is one of the most significant elections of the 20th century because we have candidates and political parties who divide sharply over the responsibility which the united states must bear the burdens it must assume the obligations it must meet in the next decade if we are not only going to endure but prevail i hold the view that in these difficult and dangerous times it is the function of the opposition if it is going to meet its responsibility as a party to try to suggest alternative courses of action i do not downgrade the united states i have the greatest confidence in it i have the greatest confidence that it can meet its responsibilities but i do downgrade its present leadership i do believe that this leadership and the leadership which is suggested by the republicans for the future falls to take into account the sober problems which the united states faces at home and abroad you come from the state of michigan here in this state which is one of the great industrial complexes of the united states you are going to see in the next 5 and 10 years the problem of maintaining full employment at a time of automation at a time when we have increased our productive capacity more than our ability to consume and to maintain full employment and prosperity in this state and country in the next decade will take far greater imagination and far greater vigor and a far greater sense of what is needed than this administration has shown if the united states is going to maintain its position of being a friend of freedom in latin america if we are going to be successful in this struggle which is now going on not merely on the island of cuba but all over latin america we have to be identified not merely in the fight against communism but in the fight against poverty and disease in the fight that those people are waging for a better life for themselves and in my judgment the united states is not now in their minds identified with that fight if we lose that psychological struggle if castro or his counterparts in other countries of latin america are able to suggest that we are indifferent that we are rich that we are prosperous that we do not look at their problems i believe the future of latin america will be far different than it could be if we identify ourselves as franklin roosevelt did with their problems with their opportunities and join with them those of you who may be supporters of the opposition party supporters of mr nixon and mr lodge you should take scant comfort in the fact and mr nixon in the debate before the one last night referred to our votes in the united nations as a source of strength and prestige and the next day the saturday after the friday on the question of the admission of red china two african nations voted on the same side as we did liberia which after all we helped found and the union of south africa which is outside the compartment of the rest of africa because of its policies toward its negroes the rest of africa guinea ghana all the rest none voted with us more countries in asia voted against us than voted with us how can you take satisfaction as young republicans in the record of our country in the last 8 years in outer space how can you take satisfaction in the fact that in 1959 the united states not only had a lower economic growth than the soviet union but one half of that of western germany less than italy less than france less than japan percentage points economic growth economic growth finding jobs for people there are 7 million americans today only 2 years after the recession of 1958 that are either unemployed or working 2 or 3 days a week if you feel that that is a good record if you feel that the united states has shown sufficient vision sufficient foresight sufficient recognition of the changing nature of our time then you should stay with the republican party and mr nixon but if you believe that the united states has to demonstrate a whole new concept in our relations abroad if we have to associate ourselves intimately with the problems of these people if you are not satisfied to have the united states offer the congo 300 scholarships last june and the year before 200 for all africa do you know how many of those congolese students are here in the united states now as the result of those scholarships seven if you think that is a good record stick with mr nixon well i want to say to you five girls i appreciate that in any case republican or democrat success or failure in november this is a great country i don t think there is a disagreement on that the whole question really in this election is what must the united states do what must the leadership set before the american people as the unfinished business what responsibilities must we meet what philosophy of government what philosophy of our times must motivate our president and our congress i hold with the democratic party on this occasion i think this year we serve the national interest i have bad news for you gentlemen i think we might even beat you in michigan thank you dem jfk14 10 60b john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague in the senate whom i sit next to daily and whom i hope to sit next to in the future senator mcnamara i don t quite mean it that way governor williams sam clark who i hope will be the congressman from this district john swainson who i hope is going to be the next governor of the state of michigan ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to you for being kind enough to come down here and for giving me an opportunity to speak to you i come here as the standard bearer of the democratic party in the campaign of 1960 many of the problems which we discuss here in this campaign which we ordinarily would consider domestic problems also have their implications in our position around the world the tennessee valley which franklin roosevelt developed in the thirties was a great asset to the tennessee valley but it also has demonstrated since that time to people all over the world how a free people can harness their resources and now in persia and now in the indus river and now in colombia in south america other free people are building tennessee valleys the same is true of education here in the united states about 10 years ago the united states graduated from two to three times as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union last year the soviet union graduated twice as many scientists and engineers as we did the long range implication of that concentration of that ability to speed up when they thought it was needed indicates how serious is the competition in which we are now engaged i want to make it very clear that i believe that the united states must have an educational system second to none and i believe that the federal government has a responsibility in this area for school construction and for teachers salaries and it is on this issue i believe that the republican party and the democratic party the question which is frequently asked is is it possible for the federal government to assist education without the federal government controlling education all of you who live in michigan live in what was originally the northwest territory and all of you know that in the original northwest ordinance at the end of the 18th century one sixteenth of all of the land was set aside by the national government for education at the beginning of our country by thomas jefferson and by john adams all of you know of the university of michigan and of the other state universities and colleges in this state the university of michigan was established around 1837 and it was financed by lands of this state to support education the land grant act of 1862 set aside land by the federal government public land belonging to all the people in order to support public education in the states of the united states the federal government is now paying out money for vocational training it is also paying out money for schools in areas where there is a defense impact my feeling is that this should be more orderly that the federal government should assist in school construction it should give funds to local communities and they should make the judgment how the money should be spent in cooperation with their own expenditures i believe the federal government must provide loan funds for students who wish to go to college over 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college can we afford to waste that talent in the most difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country this issue separates mr nixon and myself and it separates the republican and democratic parties we have stood on this program for many years and we stand on it now and will stand on it next year this is only one of many problems which we face but education is going to be necessary if the young men and women in this audience are going to get good jobs they are going to have to be well educated if the boys and girls of this country are going to meet their responsibilities as americans if they are going to find employment and decent wages if they are going to maintain the freedoms of this country we are going to have to have the best educational system in the world our lack of interest in intellectual pursuits is reflected in the fact that 10 years ago there were more foreign students studying sponsored by the government in the united states than there are today last year we gave 200 scholarships to all of africa to come here to the united states in the congo 8 or 9 million people who could go communist at any time there are 12 college graduates in all of the congo in all of africa 1 percent or less have finished high school and yet we expect them to maintain a free society and the u s government did not even establish a bureau of african affairs until 1957 we see two independent countries guinea independent in 1958 now supports the communist position at the u n ghana independent in 1958 now supports the communist position at the u n do you know when guinea became independent the soviet ambassador showed up that day we did not recognize guinea for 2 months and did not send an ambassador there for 8 months i think the issues are very clear not merely whether it is mr nixon or myself it is two different philosophies it is two different views of the necessity for vigorous foresighted farsighted action do you know what position the united states holds in radio propaganda broadcasts today fourth in the world moscow is ahead of us peiping is ahead of us radio cairo is ahead of us and we are a poor fourth do you know how many programs we send to latin america the basic defense area of the united states in spanish none in the last 8 years these are all serious problems they affect the education here they affect our employment here they affect the ability of michigan to meet competition in the sixties they affect security of the united states and i believe that this country has to once again determine what it wants to be in my judgment it wants to be not only a great country which it is it wants to be a greater country it wants to protect not only its own people but it wants to serve as an example and inspiration to all these who wish to move along the road of freedom so i come here today as the nominee for the oldest political party on earth the democratic party founded founded by the most extraordinary individual of the 18th century the most gifted the most farsighted thomas jefferson and i come in 1960 and say that we need men of intellectual curiosity farsighted concerned interested who want this country to be what it can and must be thank you dem jfk14 10 60c john_f _kennedy lt gov john swainson who is going to be the next governor of michigan pat mcnamara who sits next to me in the u s senate and who i am confident will speak for michigan again in the future for liberal progressive government in this state and country my friend and colleague pat mcnamara and your next congressman sam clark and my name is kennedy i appreciate the chance to come here to battle creek and also to the state of michigan in this campaign for the presidency of the united states i believe that this is an important election and i believe that there are great issues which separate our parties separate the candidates issues which divide not the united states but which indicate a different philosophy for the future my philosophy is a progressive one i stand in direct succession to woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt who in their day and generation recognized that there was a responsibility for the people as a whole working through their government to move this country ahead and i stand in that tradition i come here to this community and to this state and i come here and ask your support the decision which you must make between now and november 8 is whether you put your confidence whether you put your future in the democratic party or in the republican party in mr nixon or myself and i do not believe that that should be a difficult decision because mr nixon and i are sharply divided we do not agree on the basic questions which face our society and therefore as all of you must have some vision of this country s future as all of you must share some concern you must be able to decide whether you agree with the candidate who runs on a slogan of you never had it so good or a candidate who runs on a slogan that this country is going to have to do better if we are going to meet our responsibilities at home and abroad the question is not merely who can argue with mr khrushchev it is a far more difficult question than that mr khrnshchev has spent his life in arguments the question is which candidate and which political party can mobilize the resources of the united states and the resources of the entire free world to turn the tide of freedom against the communists that is the issue it is not a debate it is a matter of consistent work of setting before the american people the unfinished business of our society i do not believe that this administration has met its responsibilities in the great areas of freedom do you know that there were more foreign students studying in the united states 10 years ago from all the countries of the world than there are today we have less scholarships given to students to study here in the united states from abroad so that they can learn something about our country than we did a decade ago do you know there are less students from the sudan and yemen and guinea and ghana here in the united states than there are in moscow do you know that there are five countries of africa where there is no american representative today newly independent countries that are members of the united nations and yet do not have even a single foreign service officer there do you know that africa will have one quarter of all the nations of the general assembly as votes in the next 2 years and we have 26 negroes out of 6 000 in our foreign service do you know that there are countries in africa in fact in all of africa a year ago we had less foreign service representatives than we did in western germany do you know that the united states did not even establish a bureau of african affairs until 1957 even though africa was in turmoil and change and even though it is the center of one of the great struggles of history to see which direction it will move in we are second in space and we are becoming second in other areas we have an economic growth almost a third that of the soviet union by 1975 their hydroelectric capacity will be greater than ours and the question is whether you feel that this administration in all of the changing areas of life has shown sufficient intellectual vitality has brought to washington men of foresight and judgment in all these areas and i think on that question the issue stands i spent some months in england in the 1930 s and i heard winston churchill speak again and again about the perils that england faced and i heard stanley baldwin and chamberlain run on programs of never had it so good that everything was being done in its proper time and in its proper place i believe that those who serve freedom in 1960 should tell the american people that this is the best of times but it is also then a time of hazard that the united states is not meeting its responsibility that the tide is not moving in our favor that the power of the communists relative to ours is mounting and that we cannot afford to lose more time in the fight for freedom around the globe castro is only the beginning of the struggle which will take the next decade in latin america whether the people of latin america will continue to identify themselves with us or whether they will decide that the only way to lick poverty and ignorance and disease is to move in the direction of castro why did the candidate for the presidency of brazil decide to go to cuba and call on castro during the campaign it was because he recognized the strength of castro in his own country i do not come as the candidate of the democratic party in 1960 saying to you that the future is black but i do say to you that what we are doing today is not good enough here in michigan here in the country unless we move ahead unless we provide employment for our people unless we treat all of our people with fairness unless we make sure that our brightest boys and girls get to college and get an education and nearly 35 percent of them never go to college today 35 percent of our best students in high school never get a college education unless we are sure that those who seek jobs can find them unless we are sure we are developing our resources unless we are sure we are concerned with what is on the other side of the moon and also in the life of the people across the street i don t believe the united states is meeting its responsibilities to itself so i come to battle creek and i ask your support in this campaign not in my campaign but i believe in a campaign in which you are intimately associated and that is for a stronger country for identifying ourselves more strongly with the cause of freedom persuading all those millions of people to the south of us that we represent the way of the future castro what is happening in africa what is happening in asia can be stopped if the united states once more stands as the great champion of liberty all over africa there are boys named washington and jefferson and lincoln and roosevelt i want them to be named after american statesmen of the sixties and seventies up to now there are no lenins in africa no trotskys no stalins we want to make sure that the united states which has always stood for freedom continues to be identified in their minds as a revolutionary country believing in the most drastic doctrine that mankind has ever known government by the consent of the governed i come today to ask you to join in this effort to strengthen our country to strengthen freedom and extend our hand around the world in friendship during the campaign of 1860 when the issue was much the same as it is today whether the country would exist half slave or half free abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later when the issue in a wider sense is still whether the world will exist half slave and half free we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe we are ready thank you dem jfk14 10 60d john_f _kennedy john swainson who i believe will be the next governor of the state of michigan mennen williams your distinguished and progressive governor pat mcnamara with whom i served in the u s senate for many years and who has rendered valuable service not only for michigan but for the united states my friend and comrade in the u s navy bill liebenow members of the state legislature ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to you for being kind enough to come out here and welcome us i think you do so because you realize that this is an important election and that the decisions that the american people must make on november 8 go to the life the fortunes and the future of every man and woman in this square every man and woman in the state of michigan every man and woman in the united states this is one of the great critical election periods of american history because we have two parties and two candidates with different historical views of the united states and different views of our present peril and different views of the problems that we must face in the united states in the future i come here in 1960 as a candidate for the presidency in the most difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country i come here to grand rapids which was the home of senator arthur vandenburg who was the father of the bipartisan foreign policy which secured the united states at the end of world war ii let me make it clear that i regard bipartisanship not as a means of stifling debate not as a means of preventing discussion of the problems that face us but i regard bipartisanship as putting the interest of our country first and i can assure you that in this campaign when we discuss the foreign and domestic opportunities and responsibilities which are facing our country we do so from the best interest not of our party but of our country which is the obligation of all of us i want to make it clear that i think this state and country will face entirely different problems in the next few years than it has ever faced before we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years if every man and woman in this country who wants a job can find one and we are going to have to do that at a time when machines are taking the jobs of men when one machine can take the job of 10 men what is going to happen to those 10 men i am running for the office of the presidency during a period of time when the whole balance of power in the world is shifting today why do you think mr khrushchev spent a month at the u n the reason he stayed at the u n was not because he thought that today he had the votes because he wanted to impress on every country there that he is on the march that he is confident of the future that he is determined it shall be communist and that any country and any people and any system that stands in his way will be crushed why do you think it was a week ago saturday that only two countries in africa voted with us on the admission of red china and all those other countries either voted against us or abstained why did those countries vote against us on the resolution 3 days before that only two countries voted with us what impression did mr khrushchev make at the united nations the only way i think that we can record present history is to study the history of the 1930 s i was in england and saw mr baldwin and mr chamberlain they were fine englishmen but hitler was on the move he was mobilizing the resources of his country he was indicating to all powers that if they stood in his way they would be crushed now that is the problem that we face as americans we have only ourselves to depend on for our security we have to build in this country a strong enough society so that we can protect our own people and so that those who stand today in latin america and africa and asia and western europe and eastern europe who stand today on the razor edge of decision wondering which way they should go wondering which side represents the way of the future they will be persuaded that we do we are on the march that mr khrushchev is wrong when he says we are a sick society that is about to collapse he said before the foreign relations committee a year ago on which i serve you people are not communists but your children will be are we as confident that his children will be freemen as he is that ours will be communist i believe we can be but we cannot possibly do that we cannot possibly meet our obligations we cannot possibly build a strong society we cannot possibly find jobs for our people we cannot possibly impress the world that we are a society on the march unless we recognize where we stand and what we must do in order to prevail and that is the dispute between mr nixon and myself he runs on the slogan you have never had it so good i run on the slogan that this is a great country but it must be greater and it is a powerful country but it must be more powerful and i am not as a citizen of the united states after 18 years in the service of this country i am not about to take anyone s word that we are going to be first if first but first when i want us to be first period strong powerful moving going ahead if you feel that everything that must be done is being done in good time that in outer space in education in jobs in industrial growth in our influence around the world in our prestige we are on the tide the tide is coming in we are moving ahead then vote for mr nixon but if you think if you recall the sober lessons of history if you realize with some perspective that in these difficult days only the best is good enough then under those conditions i ask your help i ask you to join us i can assure you that if we are given the responsibility of leadership this country will move again thank you dem jfk14 10 60e john_f _kennedy lieutenant governor and the next governor of michigan john swainson my friend and colleague in the u s senate pat mcnamara the next u s senator from michigan mennen williams ladies and gentlemen and here is tom payne your next congressman from this district this community is celebrated as john swainson said as one of the two birthplaces of the republican party and the reason of course was because when the republican party was founded on this occasion it served a great national purpose it is the function of politicians and of political parties to serve a national purpose grover cleveland once said grover cleveland once said what good is a politician unless he stands for something and i say what good is a political party unless it stands for something the question which the people of this community and the people of the state of michigan and the people of the united states must decide is which political party in 1960 serves a great national purpose mr nixon has said that party labels don t mean very much what counts is the man i believe what counts is the man the party nominates what counts are the things for which the party stands and i believe in 1960 as in 1860 in this community the republican party stood for something i believe in 1960 in the community the democratic party stands for something i believe we stand for a great national purpose i believe that we stand for rebuilding the united states for developing our economy for moving ahead here at home and building our strength around the world we look to the future in the same way as in other days and in other years franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson looked to the future i run against a candidate mr nixon who runs on the slogan you never had it so good i want him to run on that slogan in the state of michigan i want him to run on that slogan in this community i want him to run on that slogan all over the state the state of michigan has not recovered from the recession of 1958 over 7 percent of its people are out of work and now at this hme in october when the auto industry is at its height what is going to happen in january february march what is the winter of 1961 going to be like here in this state and here in the united states as long as in the fall of 1960 we are using only 50 percent of our steel capacity as long as 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls never go to college as long as there are things which are left to be done i think it is the function of the democratic party to complete the unfinished business of this society to get our country moving again to provide jobs for our people in the next 10 years we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 10 years which political party do you think could do that better which political party has stood for full employment we are going to have to build from 200 000 to 300 000 more homes every year than we are now building which party do you think stands for that we are going to have to make it possible for every boy and girl who is qualified to go to college who has talent to go to college which party has stood for that issue in the past and in the future we are going to have to have to make it possible for every american regardless of his race or his religion or the color of his skin to realize his talents and we stand for that so i come to this community which 100 years ago 104 years ago saw the birth of a great party and i come in 1960 to that same community and say that on this occasion in this year in these dangerous times we in the democratic party serve the national interest and the national purpose i come here and ask your support not merely to build this state of michigan not merely to strengthen this community but to strengthen the united states to move it forward to have it stand once again as an inspiration to all those who wish to be free and i do that shoulder to shoulder with tom payne pat mcnamara john swainson and all those who believe that the years of the 1960 s can be the brightest in our history thank you dem jfk14 10 60f john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague in the senate whom i sit next to daily and whom i hope to sit next to in the future senator mcnamara i don t quite mean it that way governor williams sam clark who i hope will be the congressman from this district john swainson who i hope is going to be the next governor of the state of michigan ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to you for being kind enough to come down here and for giving me an opportunity to speak to you i come here as the standard bearer of the democratic party in the campaign of 1960 many of the problems which we discuss here in this campaign which we ordinarily would consider domestic problems also have their implications in our position around the world the tennessee valley which franklin roosevelt developed in the thirties was a great asset to the tennessee valley but it also has demonstrated since that time to people all over the world how a free people can harness their resources and now in persia and now in the indus river and now in colombia in south america other free people are building tennessee valleys the same is true of education here in the united states about 10 years ago the united states graduated from two to three times as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union last year the soviet union graduated twice as many scientists and engineers as we did the long range implication of that concentration of that ability to speed up when they thought it was needed indicates how serious is the competition in which we are now engaged i want to make it very clear that i believe that the united states must have an educational system second to none and i believe that the federal government has a responsibility in this area for school construction and for teachers salaries and it is on this issue i believe that the republican party and the democratic party the question which is frequently asked is is it possible for the federal government to assist education without the federal government controlling education all of you who live in michigan live in what was originally the northwest territory and all of you know that in the original northwest ordinance at the end of the 18th century one sixteenth of all of the land was set aside by the national government for education at the beginning of our country by thomas jefferson and by john adams all of you know of the university of michigan and of the other state universities and colleges in this state the university of michigan was established around 1837 and it was financed by lands of this state to support education the land grant act of 1862 set aside land by the federal government public land belonging to all the people in order to support public education in the states of the united states the federal government is now paying out money for vocational training it is also paying out money for schools in areas where there is a defense impact my feeling is that this should be more orderly that the federal government should assist in school construction it should give funds to local communities and they should make the judgment how the money should be spent in cooperation with their own expenditures i believe the federal government must provide loan funds for students who wish to go to college over 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college can we afford to waste that talent in the most difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country this issue separates mr nixon and myself and it separates the republican and democratic parties we have stood on this program for many years and we stand on it now and will stand on it next year this is only one of many problems which we face but education is going to be necessary if the young men and women in this audience are going to get good jobs they are going to have to be well educated if the boys and girls of this country are going to meet their responsibilities as americans if they are going to find employment and decent wages if they are going to maintain the freedoms of this country we are going to have to have the best educational system in the world our lack of interest in intellectual pursuits is reflected in the fact that 10 years ago there were more foreign students studying sponsored by the government in the united states than there are today last year we gave 200 scholarships to all of africa to come here to the united states in the congo 8 or 9 million people who could go communist at any time there are 12 college graduates in all of the congo in all of africa 1 percent or less have finished high school and yet we expect them to maintain a free society and the u s government did not even establish a bureau of african affairs until 1957 we see two independent countries guinea independent in 1958 now supports the communist position at the u n ghana independent in 1958 now supports the communist position at the u n do you know when guinea became independent the soviet ambassador showed up that day we did not recognize guinea for 2 months and did not send an ambassador there for 8 months i think the issues are very clear not merely whether it is mr nixon or myself it is two different philosophies it is two different views of the necessity for vigorous foresighted farsighted action do you know what position the united states holds in radio propaganda broadcasts today fourth in the world moscow is ahead of us peiping is ahead of us radio cairo is ahead of us and we are a poor fourth do you know how many programs we send to latin america the basic defense area of the united states in spanish none in the last 8 years these are all serious problems they affect the education here they affect our employment here they affect the ability of michigan to meet competition in the sixties they affect security of the united states and i believe that this country has to once again determine what it wants to be in my judgment it wants to be not only a great country which it is it wants to be a greater country it wants to protect not only its own people but it wants to serve as an example and inspiration to all these who wish to move along the road of freedom so i come here today as the nominee for the oldest political party on earth the democratic party founded founded by the most extraordinary individual of the 18th century the most gifted the most farsighted thomas jefferson and i come in 1960 and say that we need men of intellectual curiosity farsighted concerned interested who want this country to be what it can and must be thank you dem jfk14 10 60g john_f _kennedy senator menamara governor williams congressman to be o rourke governor to be swainson distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i first of all want to express my appreciation at the courtesy of the governor of this state my friend and colleague mennen williams with whom i have worked closely in recent months in building a stronger and more responsible democratic party i believe that the record that he has made in this state will last and i think the things for which he has fought in michigan better education fair equality for americans regardless of their race or their color the movement forward of the state of michigan i think those things will last and so will his reputation as a distinguished public servant i am delighted to salute him on the occasion of visiting his state capitol governor williams and i am delighted to tour the state of michigan with my colleague in the u s senate senator mcnamara senator mcnamara has been chairman of the committee on aging of the senate there are 17 million americans over the age of 65 who live on an average social security check of less than 78 a month many of them live at least 9 million of them live on less than 1 000 a year and until senator mcnamara began to turn the spotlight of public attention on this problem they were forgotten i salute him for a job well done a job still unfinished and this job will not be finished until we provide medical care for the aged under social security finally let me say that i am glad to be here with a young and progressive figure from the state of michigan who i believe will succeed mennen williams as a great governor who will lead michigan forward john swainson and lastly i want to pay tribute to what i hope will be the congressman from this district congressman to be o rourke i knew him when i was a member of the rackets committee and he was carrying out courageous actions against those who lived off the reputation of labor and management he is a young man of courage and even though this ticket may be overbalanced with some irish names o rourke kennedy and mcnamara nevertheless i hope you will support him the state of michigan has many problems and so does the united states but most of the problems a michigan has are the same problems that our country has if someone in this country of ours finds their income drop in connecticut and they decide that they will not buy a new car this year you feel it in lansing and you feel it all over the state of michigan if our steel industry produces at 50 percent of capacity you feel it here in michigan if we build 200 000 less homes a year than we should which we are now doing you feel it here in michigan michigan is a great industrial state and it is sensitive to the rises and falls of the american economy michigan itself can only move forward you can provide employment for the 180 000 of the citizens of this state who are now out of work only if the economy of the united states is on the rise fifty percent of our capacity in steel is unused one third of our steel workers are part time or out of work seven percent of the labor force of michigan is unemployed michigan in a very real sense and the united states never fully recovered from the recessions of 1958 unless this country is able to stimulate the economy of the united states to move ahead 4 percent or 5 percent a year we are not going to find jobs for all the young men and women of this state who get out of high school and college next year where are they going to find work in michigan or in the united states if there are 4 million people unemployed and 3 million employed part time we have to do better than that we have to do better than that not only because we should adopt the national goal of full employment but also if the u s economy drags we are not able to maintain our strength as a nation and if we do not maintain our strength as a nation all those who look to us with confidence and hope for leadership turn in another direction the place to start is here in the united states the place to build our prestige in the world is here in the united states the place to build strength for freedom is here in the united states if we are on the upward move if the wave of our vitality and energy as a nation is coming in if we are providing employment for our people if we are consuming all that we produce if we are able to provide a better distribution of the great wealth of this country than we have in the past then the united states is strong and when the united states is strong the world is strong the chance of freedom is strong the u s influence is strong our prestige is greater i do not suggest in any way that the problem ot maintaining full employment the problem of solving automation the problem of stimulating our housing industry the problem of increasing educational opportunities the problem of caring for our aged the problem of balancing supply and demand in agriculture the problem of maintaining our military strength the problem of disarming if we can disarm under safe conditions i do not suggest that there are easy answers to the most difficult and complicated problems that this country has ever faced the only question is has this administration and has mr nixon my opponent and has the republican party not only indicated the problems but has it attacked them with vigor in recent years that is the decision which you must make have we done what needs to be done do you feel as an american that this country is meeting its responsibilities at home and abroad in full measure do you feel we can do better do you feel we must do better it is upon your judgment of that great question that the decision of november 8 1960 will be made i believe an election time serves more than to have candidates make speeches i hope it is a chance as it has been in our history for the united states to make a determination as to what it wants to be and what it must do it was true in 1932 it was true in 1912 i think in 1960 that the people of this country are coming to a conclusion that if this state and country are going to maintain their freedom if we are going to occupy a position of leadership in the world then we have to move again i believe that will be the result of the election of 1960 which in many ways will transcend the results of any party s success i believe in part as a result of this campaign in part by the force of events and the pressure of history that the united states in the 1960 s will fulfill its destiny as the leader of the free world this country will move again thank you dem jfk14 10 60h john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague in the u s senate the senator from the state of michigan and i hope the next u s senator senator pat mcnamara john swainson the candidate for governor and i hope the next governor of michigan sam clark the next congressman from this district ladies and gentlemen if you just stay up there until november 9 we can settle this whole matter i want to express my thanks to you for coming down to the station whistlestopping is an old american tradition stretching all the way back to the first campaign at the turn of the century i come here to this community to ask your support in this election i come as the democratic candidate as the leader of the opposition as the leader of a party which in good times and bad i believe has been willing to press forward and i believe in 1960 unlike other years in our history this is a time when we must press forward when we need a political party and when we need a president and when we need a congress which can make a correct assessment of our times our needs our perils and our opportunities two thousand years ago demosthenes in his address to the athenians at the time of the invasion of philip of macedonia said our trouble is from those who would please us rather than those who would serve us i do not come here today in 1960 saying that this is an easy time in the life of our country saying that the job of the next president of the united states will be easy i think in many ways it will be the most difficult since the administration of abraham lincoln and because of the danger of weapons because the problems are increasing in complexity i think in many ways it may he the most difficult since the first administration of general washington but i run for the presidency because the presidency under the american constitutional system is the center of action it is as franklin roosevelt said above all a place for moral leadership only the president speaks for the country i speak for massachusetts senator mcnamara speaks for michigan senator engle for california but only the president of the united states can speak for massachusetts and michigan and california and i think the job of the next president of the united states is to tell the american people the sober facts of life to ask of them a greater effort to suggest that it is incumbent upon us to build our strength here in this country if we are going to maintain ourselves i do not want it said of the united states by historians in 1970 or 1975 or 1980 after a perspective of a decade over our present time that it was in these years at the end of the fifties that the balance of power in the world began to swing against us eastern europe russia and china are now assembled against us if india should fail to maintain its economic viability and its democracy if it should decide that the only way it can solve its problems is to follow the example of the chinese then the balance of power would turn against us guinea and ghana have begun to indicate in africa that that is their decision cuba already has laos may in the next week or two iraq is in danger the congo is in danger all these countries which stand poised facing overwhelming problems trying to determine whether the way of the future is with us or with the communists and within the next decade they will begin to make up their minds that is why i think this election is so important that is why i think the times in which we live are so important in the next 10 years the balance of power in the would may begin to move either inevitably in the direction of the communists or in the direction of freedom and i want to be sure that in these changing years in these years so fraught with opportunity and so fraught with peril the united states meets its responsibilities that it has leadership sensitive to these problems that we associate ourselves with these people that we build our strength here at home and that we hold out a hand to all those who wish to follow our example in the last 8 years the voice of america made spanish broadcasts to latin america only during the 3 months of the hungarian crisis we offered two or three or four hundred scholarships a year to all of latin america for young leaders to come and study in this country less than 200 to all of africa only 5 percent of all the people in our foreign service are now stationed in africa a year ago more were stationed in western germany than in all of africa and yet by 1962 africa will have one quarter of the votes of the general assembly we are now the fourth country in the world in radio propaganda broadcasts moscow is 1 peking 2 cairo 3 radio cairo egypt 3 the united states 4 the question which you have to decide is whether the view of the world which i hold or the view of the world which mr nixon holds is the one that you hold that you believe the united states should hold do you believe we are meeting our responsibilities do you believe that we are sensitive to the changes that are taking place around us i said last night in the debate we have less than 100 people working in the entire federal government on the subject of disarmament 100 people on the most complicated perhaps important and perhaps fruitful responsibility which the government now faces i believe we can do better and i believe we must do better if we are going to maintain our own freedom and the freedom of all those around the world who want to be free so i come to marshall not the biggest city in the world but a city and town which must make the same decision that every other american must make not merely between mr nixon and i as personalities the issue is what is your view of our country what is your view of the future what is you view of our own on that basis i ask your support on that basis i believe the united states is going to choose on november 8 to march forward thank you dem jfk14 10 60i john_f _kennedy senator menamara gov mennen williams mrs harden the next governor john swainson ladies and gentlemen all of us who are in american polities all of us who take an interest in our country all of us have heard of this community and heard of a very great american who came from here who stood for fighting dynamic leadership who was not a member of my party james oliver curwood i appreciate the chance to come here as the standard bearer of the democratic party and i come here to the state of michigan on this occasion those of you who live in this state those of you who are citizens of the united states know that this is a most important election in a most important time in the life of our country there are 180 000 citizens of this state who are out of work who want to find a job but it is not just in michigan it is in west virginia and kentucky and massachusetts and pennsylvania and southern illinois and southern ohio and the reason is that because the united states has a tremendous capacity to produce goods but it is not able to consume at a decent price all that we are able to put into the market the result has been that in 1954 and in 1958 and now in 1960 our economy has stood still there are going to have to be found in the next 10 years 25 000 new jobs every week for the next 10 years if everybody searching for a job is going to find one thirty five percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college here in michigan here in the united states in the next 10 years we are going to have to build more college dormitory and classrooms than we have built all the rest of the time in the history of this country put together so great is the increase in our population so great is the increase in the number of boys and girls who will be going to college and some should go to college who really have not had a chance to go so great are the problems facing the united states so great is the dependence of people all over the globe upon us that i believe nothing less than our best would be good enough i come as the standard bearer of the oldest political party in the history of the world i come at a difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country and i say that while this is a great country i believe it must be a greater country and while it is a powerful country i believe it must be more powerful every american who seeks a job should have an opportunity to find one i spent a month in west virginia running in the primary there are 100 000 families in west virginia who live on surplus food packages from the government which average for a family of four in the united states not 500 miles from this state 6 50 per month per family of four which comes to 5 cents a day per individual you can boo it but don t eat it let me say that you can t possibly dispose of problems of need of unemployment of americans who are experiencing difficulty by booing you have to do something about it that is what this election is all about the decision is not mine alone you can decide what you want to do the decision is yours boos shouts screams applause on november 8 you have to make a judgment as to what kind of a country you want whether you feel what we are doing now is good enough whether you feel that the prestige and power of the united states in the world is rising fast enough whether you are satisfied to see the united states and cuba 90 miles from the shores of the united states dominated by a communist satellite whether you are satisfied to see two countries of africa independent in the last 2 years now supporting the communist party whether you are satisfied to see laos upon whom the future of all indochina may rest now slipping tonight not a year ago tonight and the next few days maybe slipping beyond the iron curtain these are not matters that any american in 1960 can boo about they can think about them they can decide what they want to do they can decide if what we are doing now is good enough i think it is not i think the united states if it is going to maintain its independence if it is going to maintain the independence of those who look to us i don t want to see the united states or historians say that in 1960 we stood still that we accepted a second position that we did not meet our responsibilities as free citizens that we did not make a careful judgment in this election of what the two alternatives are and let me make them clear they are between a party which runs on a slogan you never had it so good and a party which i represent which runs on the slogan we must do better and it is on that basis after serving this country for 18 years that i come to this community rain shine day or night and ask your support thank you dem jfk14 10 60n john_f _kennedy senator menamara gov mennen williams mrs harden the next governor john swainson ladies and gentlemen all of us who are in american polities all of us who take an interest in our country all of us have heard of this community and heard of a very great american who came from here who stood for fighting dynamic leadership who was not a member of my party james oliver curwood i appreciate the chance to come here as the standard bearer of the democratic party and i come here to the state of michigan on this occasion those of you who live in this state those of you who are citizens of the united states know that this is a most important election in a most important time in the life of our country there are 180 000 citizens of this state who are out of work who want to find a job but it is not just in michigan it is in west virginia and kentucky and massachusetts and pennsylvania and southern illinois and southern ohio and the reason is that because the united states has a tremendous capacity to produce goods but it is not able to consume at a decent price all that we are able to put into the market the result has been that in 1954 and in 1958 and now in 1960 our economy has stood still there are going to have to be found in the next 10 years 25 000 new jobs every week for the next 10 years if everybody searching for a job is going to find one thirty five percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college here in michigan here in the united states in the next 10 years we are going to have to build more college dormitory and classrooms than we have built all the rest of the time in the history of this country put together so great is the increase in our population so great is the increase in the number of boys and girls who will be going to college and some should go to college who really have not had a chance to go so great are the problems facing the united states so great is the dependence of people all over the globe upon us that i believe nothing less than our best would be good enough i come as the standard bearer of the oldest political party in the history of the world i come at a difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country and i say that while this is a great country i believe it must be a greater country and while it is a powerful country i believe it must be more powerful every american who seeks a job should have an opportunity to find one i spent a month in west virginia running in the primary there are 100 000 families in west virginia who live on surplus food packages from the government which average for a family of four in the united states not 500 miles from this state 6 50 per month per family of four which comes to 5 cents a day per individual you can boo it but don t eat it let me say that you can t possibly dispose of problems of need of unemployment of americans who are experiencing difficulty by booing you have to do something about it that is what this election is all about the decision is not mine alone you can decide what you want to do the decision is yours boos shouts screams applause on november 8 you have to make a judgment as to what kind of a country you want whether you feel what we are doing now is good enough whether you feel that the prestige and power of the united states in the world is rising fast enough whether you are satisfied to see the united states and cuba 90 miles from the shores of the united states dominated by a communist satellite whether you are satisfied to see two countries of africa independent in the last 2 years now supporting the communist party whether you are satisfied to see laos upon whom the future of all indochina may rest now slipping tonight not a year ago tonight and the next few days maybe slipping beyond the iron curtain these are not matters that any american in 1960 can boo about they can think about them they can decide what they want to do they can decide if what we are doing now is good enough i think it is not i think the united states if it is going to maintain its independence if it is going to maintain the independence of those who look to us i don t want to see the united states or historians say that in 1960 we stood still that we accepted a second position that we did not meet our responsibilities as free citizens that we did not make a careful judgment in this election of what the two alternatives are and let me make them clear they are between a party which runs on a slogan you never had it so good and a party which i represent which runs on the slogan we must do better and it is on that basis after serving this country for 18 years that i come to this community rain shine day or night and ask your support thank you dem jfk14 10 60o john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen the first presidential candidate to come here to ann arbor was woodrow wilson in 1912 woodrow wilson was not running on a platform of experience the only place that he had learned to stand firm was as a college professor at princeton university for a number of years the next presidential candidate to come here was franklin d roosevelt in 1932 three times during this century the democratic party has elected presidents one was woodrow wilson no 2 was franklin roosevelt and no 3 was president truman in 1948 on many different occasions the other party has elected presidents mr mckinley mr harding mr coolidge they ran mr landon they ran mr dewey and we come to 1960 i believe that parties are important i believe that the kind of men that parties pick are important i believe that the party label tells us something about the candidate something about the things for which they stand something of their political philosophy and i stand here with some pride and satisfaction as the direct successor to the democratic presidents who in this century carried the banner of the new freedom the new deal and the fair deal in my judgment woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman were successful in their foreign policy because it fitted in exactly with what they were trying to do here in the united states the 14 points of woodrow wilson were the international counterpart of the new freedom the four freedoms of franklin roosevelt were directly tied to the aspirations of the new deal and the marshall plan nato the truman doctrine and point 4 were directly tied to the kind of america that president truman was trying to build you cannot run as a risktaker abroad as mr nixon has said and a conservative at home there has to be a country moving here in the united states if we are going to be moving around the world now let s see where were we anyway the point of the matter is that the united states in the 1960 s is going to have to build a society with sufficient vigor develop its resources with sufficient energy provide a better life for our people with fair opportunity with a sufficient sense of justice if the united states is going to be in fact the leader of the free world what we are speaks far louder than what we say we are all of the voice of america all of the radio broadcasts all of the books we send abroad pale in significance to the kind of society that we are building here in the united states the reason that franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor here in the united states therefore i come as the candidate for the democratic party i come here asking you to join in building a stronger country asking you to demonstrate as we sit in edmund burke s words on a most conspicuous stage in the most trying and difficult time in the history of the free world i ask you to help in building here the kind of society which will serve as an example to those who wish to trod on freedom s road i come here to ann arbor mich and i ask your support last saturday michigan beat duke and i think on november 8 michigan and the united states will beat duke s favorite son and alumnus mr richard nixon thank you dem jfk14 9 60a john_f _kennedy mr hayes ladies and gentlemen it is a great honor to come to this convention to join my colleagues in the congress congressman sullivan congressman karsten congressman mel price and it is an honor and a pleasure to be before this machinists union i come here this morning not only to salute you in the work that you have done for the members of your union but i also salute you for the work that you have done for labor as a whole and for the general public this union has had a long and laudable history its leaders like m hayes alvin walker and roy c miller have served this country in important positions in war and peace during world war ii and during the korean war therefore as a member of the labor committee of the congress for the past 14 years i am honored to be here this morning i come here this morning to ask you to join me on the great task which lies before the american people and that is the task of responsibility of rebuilding the strength vitality and the energy of the great republic of the united states the effort to which i summon you will not be easy the road ahead for america is perilous but i believe that with your help and with the help of all americans we will find that our real greatness and our finest years lie ahead in the 1960 s my campaign for the presidency is founded on a single assumption the assumption that the american people are tired of the drift in our national course that they are weary of the continual decline in our national prestige a decline which has led to economic injustice at home and peril abroad and that they are ready to move again this is the central issue in this campaign the willingness of the american people to accept the great challenges which now confront them and to rise to those challenges with effort and dedication i believe that the guide that the american people will have to the choice that they must make in november can be found in the history of the two political parties mr nixon and i the republican party and the democratic party have not been collected in amber nor frozen in ice or suddenly emerged on the political scene our parties are like two histories two rivers which flow back through our history and you can judge the force the power and the direction of those rivers by studying where they rose where they flow and the course of those rivers throughout the history of the united states there is no better guide to the history of our two political parties than to study their campaign slogans in the 20th century stand pat with mckinley keep cool with coolidge return to normalcy with harding a chicken in every pot with hoover time for a change these are the weakest and least constructive slogans in the history of american political thought contrast those slogans with the slogans which we democrats are proud of woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal and adlai stevenson s new america and you can contrast the slogans of this campaign the republican slogan you never had it so good with the democratic slogan of the new frontier we are not talking just about political slogans we are talking about the spirit behind those slogans what they represent for our country what actions were taken under them what they meant to the future of the american people the history of the democratic party is founded in progress in this century from the beginning until today but the story of the republican party is a different story there is no new republican party no old republican party there is only the same republican party which for a half century has opposed every major piece of social legislation passed by the congress and approved by democratic administrations a party which opposed social security which tried to repeal it a party which opposed minimum wage and tried to repeal it a party which has opposed our efforts to pass in this congress medical care for the aged to the social security franklin roosevelt put it to us in 1936 when before 100 000 people in franklin field philadelphia he accepted his second presidential nomination and in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think in the last 8 years we have had a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference where franklin roosevelt set before our country its unfinished business the agenda of our people this administration has set ceilings and limitations i think it is time we started to move again i think it is time that the democratic party reasserted its full vigor and vitality as long as there are 15 million americans who live in substandard housing 5 million american families which lack plumbing of any kind who live in our cities as long as 9 million of our older citizens receive an income of less than 20 a week as long as there are millions of americans who lack the protection of even an inadequate minimum wage of 1 as long as there are millions of americans who lack an opportunity to develop their full resources as long as there are 100 000 odd families in the state of west virginia receiving inadequate surplus food packages so long as there is need for us to recognize there is unfinished business in our society in our generation in our day i think with the help of the american people we can return to the spirit of the full employment act of 1946 we can make our economy not the lowest in percentage of economic growth which it was last year of any major industrialized society in the world but instead we can unleash its energy and start this country on the upward climb we can meet the problems which face the united states at home and abroad by strengthening our economy by assisting those who are old to meet their problems by educating our children by moving this country ahead here at home we shall move this country at home and abroad the reason that franklin roosevelt woodrow wilson and harry truman were successful in their foreign policy was because they were successful here in the united states because they held out a sympathetic hand to the people of this country because their country had a sense of direction and purpose then people around the world wanted to be associated with a vital and progressive country but now people of latin america africa and asia who stand today on the razor edge of decision they look at us and they look at the vitality of the communist system and they wonder which way the future lies i think the future lies with us but we must help that future we must work for it we must not say we have never had it so good we must say we can do better i don t run for the office of the presidency in these difficult times saying that if i am elected life will be easy i think for americans life will be more difficult and challenging in the 1960 s than it has ever been in the past but i do say that if we are successful that i think it is possible for this country to regain its sense of national purpose we are the great defenders of freedom not only here in the united states but all around the world during the american revolution thomas paine said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think today that the cause of all mankind is the cause of america and i don t think that there is any american who would not be willing to bear burdens and meet his responsibilities if he can insure the freedom of his own country and the success of freedom around the world that in my opinion is the great issue of the 1960 election which party and which candidates can build a stronger america and in building a stronger america can advance the cause of freedom i call upon all of you to join us in a journey to the new frontier the voyage is a long and hazardous one but we are all partners in a great and historic journey i think in many ways that the brightest days of this country can be ahead in the election of 1860 lincoln said this nation cannot exist half slave and half free i don t think the world can exist indefinitely half slave and half free i think it is going to move by the end of this century in the direction of freedom or in the direction of slavery i think it is up to us to determine which way it will go i think it is up to the american people during that same election 100 years ago lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i am ready in 1960 we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe we are ready thank you dem jfk14 9 60b john_f _kennedy dr niebuhr professor hayes governor stevenson mr meany distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i accept your nomination and i am proud of it i am proud to be the only candidate in 1960 with the nomination of two political parties although i m not certain how many tickets are now headed in how many states by senator goldwater we had an interesting convention at los angeles and we ended with a strong democratic platform which we called the rights of man the republican platform has also been presented i do not know its title but it has been referred to as the power of positive thinking i do not regard the title of liberal as an honorary degree i regard it as a license to preach the gospel of liberalism across this country but i think you know why this title could be conferred on my candidacy just before you met a weekly news magazine with wide circulation featured a section entitled kennedy s liberal promises and described me and i quote as the farthest out liberal democrat around unquote while i am not certain of the beatnik definition of farthest out i am certain that this was not intended as a compliment and last week as further proof of my credentials a noted american clergyman was quoted as saying that our society may survive in the event of my election but it certainly won t be what it was i would like to think he was complimenting me but i m not sure he was but a more serious challenge to my credentials this time as a democrat was issued in dallas tex in his address to a large gathering of texas republicans and there are no purer breed anyplace in the united states mr nixon complained that what he called the party of schlesinger galbraith and bowles was not the party of jefferson jackson and wilson i do not agree but i have no intention of issuing a similar challenge to my opponent s credentials for i know full well that the party of nixon dirksen and goldwater is the party of hoover harding coolidge mckinley and the rest the final proof is the old political adage that you can tell a friend by the enemies that he makes and by this standard you and i are the closest of friends for mr nixon and mr dirksen and mr mundt and mr goldwater don t like my liberal policies i m glad to say any more than they do yours they are fighting a rear guard action against the 20th century and they fear that our time is coming and theirs is going i do not mean to say that the fight is wholly between the democratic and the republican parties those of you who are here tonight are proof of the fact that some of the best friends that the democrats have are not in the democratic party i think in november that some of them may be in the republican party but i hold out no hope at all for the vast and impressive number of republicans who suddenly just before election time those who are running for office suddenly begin to sound like true lincolns eight years ago on this occasion adlai stevenson called this quadrennial outburst of affection that pause in the real republican occupation known as the liberal hour and he added it should never be confused and he was right with any period when congress is in session what do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label liberal if by liberal they mean as they want people to believe someone who is soft in his policies abroad who is against local government and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer s dollar then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of liberal but if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions someone who cares about the welfare of the people their health their housing their schools their jobs their civil rights and their civil liberties someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad if that is what they mean by a liberal then i m proud to say that i m a liberal but first i would like to say what i understand the word liberal to mean and explain in the process why i consider myself to be a liberal and what it means in the presidential election of 1960 in short having set forth my views i hope for all time 2 nights ago in houston on the proper relationship between church and state i want to take this opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen this is my political credo i believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose in human liberty as the source of national action and the human heart as the source of national compassion and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas it is i believe this faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith for liberalism is not so much a party creed or a set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart a faith in man s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves i believe also in the united states of america in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind i do not believe in a super state i see no magic to tax dollars which are sent to washington and then returned i abhor the waste and incompetence of large scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others i do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well but i believe in a government which acts which exercises its full powers and its full responsibilities government is an art and a precious obligation and when it has a job to do i believe it should do it and this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them our responsibility is not discharged by an announcement of virtuous ends our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention with political skill and executive vigor i believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and our only hope in the world today for the liberal society is a free society and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them only liberalism in short can repair our national power restore our national purpose and liberate our national energies and the only basic issue in the 1960 presidential campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring of breaking new ground of doing in our generation what woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and adlai stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins most of us are descended from that segment of the american population which was once called an immigrant minority today along with our children and grandchildren we do not feel minor we feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose for many years new york represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars the horrors of the nazis the tyranny of hunger who came here to the new frontier in the state of new york these men and women a living cross section of american history indeed a cross section of the entire world s history of pain and hope made of this city and only a new world of opportunity but a new world of the spirit as well tonight we salute governor and senator herbert lehman as a symbol of that spirit and as a reminder that the fight for full constitutional rights for all americans is a fight that must be carried on in 1961 many of these same immigrant families produced the pioneers and builders of the american labor movement they are the men who sweated in our shops who struggled to create a union who were driven by longing for education for their children and for their children s development they went to night schools they built their own future their union s future and their country s future brick by brick block by block neighborhood by neighborhood and now in their children s time suburb by suburb tonight we salute george meany as a symbol of that struggle and as a reminder that the fight to eliminate poverty and human exploitation is a fight that goes on in our own day but in 1960 the cause of liberalism cannot content itself with carrying on the fight for human justice and economic liberalism here at home for here and around the world the fear of war hangs over us every morning and every night it lies expressed or silent in the minds of every american we cannot banish it by repeating that we are economically first or that we are militarily first for saying so doesn t make it so more will be needed than good will missions or talking back to soviet politicians or increasing the tempo of the arms race more will be needed than good intentions for we know where that paving leads in winston churchill s words we cannot escape our dangers by recoiling from them we dare not pretend such dangers do not exist and tonight we salute adlai stevenson as an eloquent spokesman for the effort to achieve an intelligent foreign policy our opponents would like the people to believe that in the time of danger it would be hazardous to change the administration that has brought us to this time of danger i think it would be hazardous not to change i think it would be hazardous to continue 4 more years of stagnation and indifference at home and abroad of starving the underpinnings of our national power including not only our defense but our image abroad as a friend this is an important election this is an important election in many ways as important as any in this century and i think that the democratic party and the liberal party here in new york and those who believe in progress all over the united states should be associated with us in this great effort the reason that woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and adlai stevenson had influence abroad and the united states in their time had it was because they moved this country here at home because they stood for something here in the united states of expanding the benefits of our society to our own people and the people around the world looked to us as a symbol of hope i think it is our task to recreate that same atmosphere in our own time our national elections have often proved to be the turning point in the course of our country i am proposing that 1960 be another turning point in the history of the great republic some pundits are saying that it s 1928 all over again i say it s 1932 all over again i say it is the great opportunity that we will have in our time to move our people and this country and the people of the free world beyond the new frontiers of the 1960 s thank you dem jfk14 9 60c john_f _kennedy thank you governor lehman my wife ladies and gentlemen i personally have lived through 10 presidential campaigns but i must say the 11th makes me feel like i lived through 25 we age fast in this business of running for the greatest office in the country the greatest office in the free world i remember reading when i was at school when governor lehman was running for his third term as governor that the rally in madison square garden when president roosevelt was running for a second term that some garment workers unfolded a great sign that said we love him for the enemies he has made well i have been making some good enemies lately i find it a rather agreeable experience but i am also rather pleased in this case with the friends that i have and that i have made and i am most honored that one of them stretching back all the way through 14 years of congressional service has been senator lehman i am most indebted to him i do not recall in my service in the congress a man who was more consistent and single minded in his pursuit of what he thought was right and therefore his endorsement and his support means more to us in this campaign than i can possibly say someone was kind enough though i don t know whether he meant it kindly to say the other night that in my campaign in california i sounded like a truman with a harvard accent i don t know whether that is accurate or not but i appreciate it because in some ways this campaign does resemble the campaign of 1948 and i hope it will on november 8 in going around the country we have a tendency in the democratic party and as candidates and in fact politicians in general and we are frequently accused of it of oversimplifying the issues and particularly as a democratic candidate i do find myself talking about many issues which have been with us for many years but which i still consider to be important they are issues which were alive in some cases in the administration of woodrow wilson they were other issues which came to fruition in the administration of franklin roosevelt and harry truman i am talking about the traditional democratic issue with which i have been associated in my 14 years in the congress and with which i believe the democratic party must continue to be associated housing care for the aged education for our children equality of opportunity civil rights and all the rest i associate myself strongly with those issues in this campaign because i think in our time and in our own generation we have the same rendezvous with destiny that franklin roosevelt spoke about 25 years ago we have still unfinished business in our society and anyone who thinks that all of the responsibilities that we may have in this field were met satisfactorily and completely during the administration of roosevelt and truman is wrong problems change populations increase economies change and the problems continue so i can assure you that in addition to concerning ourselves with the new challenges which i see ahead in the 1960 s the democratic party must be faithful and i as the democratic candidate and standardbearer will be faithful to the traditional task of government caring for those who cannot meet their own problems joining as a people together in solving problems that face us across the nation but these as i have said are problems which are traditional i think in many ways the next president of the united states is going to have to meet problems which are entirely new for which we have no precedent which were only clouds the size of a man s hand when franklin roosevelt or harry truman took office i am thinking of the problem of economic growth which has come upon us in an entirely different form than it came upon franklin roosevelt or harry truman how is it going to be possible for a free society based on a free economy to successfully stimulate its economy so that it is able to put to work a million and a half people who come every year into the labor market at a time when machines are coming in which dislocate men and put them out of work and maintain our economy at a comparable rate of growth if not to the soviet union at least to western germany france and england and last year as you know ours was the lowest rate of economic growth of any modern industrialized society how is it possible for us to maintain full employment at a time and in a decade when automation will become a by word i lived with it for a month in west virginia i spent some time in mcdowell county w va which mines more coal than it ever did in history more coal than any county in the united states and has more people getting surplus packages from our government than any county in the united states what is true of mcdowell county and true of the coal industry will be true of other industries stretching across the united states this is going to be a problem for the next president of the united states these problems which i now discuss and mention the problem of an abundant agriculture and an inability to distribute it effectively all of these problems are so called domestic problems and the vice president of the united states has said i am a risk taker abroad and a conservative at home well i am not a conservative at home and i am not a risk taker abroad the point of the matter is you cannot possibly separate our domestic policy from our foreign policy as the republicans seek to do one is bound to another as one succeeds the other will succeed as one fails the other will fail the reason that woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman had impact abroad was because they were having impact at home because franklin roosevelt worked on behalf of his people here in the united states the people of latin america were prepared to accept him as a good neighbor because woodrow wilson worked as the apostle of the new freedom in the united states it was logical extension of his domestic policy when he put forward the 14 points and stood for the league of nations i think that the democratic party can be a successful party here at home i think it has the kind of quality and courage and initiative and energy and vigor and has people in its ranks of sufficient vitality both physical and intellectual that it can begin to move the united states here in this country i think as we move here at home our success will be reflected in policies around the world i don t think any democratic administration would have waited 8 years as the years of franklin roosevelt to hold out a hand of friendship to latin america and then do so only i am afraid because our relations with castro had so soured that we felt we must rebuild our position in the rest of latin america i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the foreign relations committee and i can tell you that no modern american statesman is quoted today in africa they are not impressed by what is happening here in our own country they are not impressed by the vigor with which we expand equal rights in the united states they are not impressed that we are on the move they feel that we are a society which may have seen its high noon and that its brightest days were in the past and now some of them look in other directions students come here with difficulty labor union officials come here in slender numbers and many of them come to see me in washington with a handful one month and then another there is no steady flow back and forth between the countries of africa which will in the next 2 or 3 years number one quarter of all the nations of the general assembly the day when the united states could summon up great numbers of votes in the general assembly is passing from the scene it is going to be more difficult and i do not necessarily object to that but it will require reason and identification and a close working partnership with those countries on the problems that they face as well as our own problems before they will associate themselves with us in great enterprises this is an important election i think it is an election that can be won i think it can be done in new york state i do not accept the view that there are no differences between the candidates or the parties i think there are i think that we have seen them in the last 8 years and will see them in the next 4 years finally may i say that we pass on i go through some tunnel tomorrow morning and i am in new jersey but you stay here i hope that in the coming 6 weeks you can associate with us not because the democratic candidates i hope promise that if they are elected life will be easy and the problems all solved i think to be an american in the next decade will be a hazardous experience we will live on the edge of danger but i do believe that if this country begins to move forward again that we can once again regain our position as a great revolutionary country which believes in doctrines with which all people will wish to be associated it is to this great effort that i think we should dedicate our cause it is to this great effort that i think we can make it possible for all of us in the 1960 s to move forward to the new frontiers we say yes to the next decade the republicans say no and i think on november 8 the american people are going to say yes with us dem jfk14 9 60d john_f _kennedy mrs guggenheim mayor wagner mrs price mrs kelly mrs daniels governor ribicoff my wife mrs wagner ladies and gentlemen i have come back from a 2 day trip through america s last frontier from el paso to texarkana and it is a pleasure to come back to new york and the newest frontier of america which i think new york is in traveling around the united states from maine to alaska and from texas to new york there is no doubt in my mind that the major issue which this country faces and which the people of the united states are most concerned about is how we can protect our security and how we can maintain our peace i think that this matter will be in our minds even more in the next week for while we meet today only a few blocks from the united nations i think in the next 7 days the attention of the world as well as the united states will be on what happens at the united nations we have been successful in limiting mr khrushchev to new york but we have not been successful in limiting his influence in africa asia and latin america at its best or at its worst the united nations remains a symbol of all that we hope of all that we believe of all that we look forward to our aspiration is for peace not merely a peace which lasts between wars not merely a peace which hangs on the brink of war not merely a peace of the death but a peace enforced and controlled by the united nations against the universal danger of common destruction we want a peace in which the funds now poured into the destructive implements of war may be channeled into the constructive results of disarmament in a great multinational effort to harness our rivers eradicate disease take care of our children care for the aged we want a peace in which we can truly beat our swords into plowshares and our hydrogen bombs into atomic reactors we are a great distance from that kind of peace today and the distance is growing greater every day we do not have that kind of peace when one half of our national budget is devoted to the purposes of war and the purposes of national defense and when the soviet union s leader boasts that our children will grow up to be communists we are on the contrary engaged in a great struggle but we ought to know by now that it is a struggle that will not be won by words it is not a struggle that can be won by debates or by arguments in or out of kitchens for words are not a substitute for action and committee appointments are not a substitute for decision i know no single issue that is of greater concern to all the american people men or women republican or democrats than the issue of peace no political party has a monopoly on that policy there is no party of peace in this country just as there is no party of war or party of appeasement the sooner we get away from these artificial labels the sooner we can get down to discussing the real issues and the real decisions that face us for there are real issues and there are real differences in approach i want to talk briefly about those differences today the differences and the steps which must be taken by the united states if it is to move forward on the road to peace first peace requires unfortunately an american defense posture strong enough to convince any potential aggressor that a war would be a mistake his mistake a democratic administration can never and will never negotiate with the russians in a position of weakness over 11 years ago winston churchill said it succinctly we arm to parley we must do what is necessary and spend what is necessary to convince the men in the kremlin that the balance of power is not shifting in their direction we must have in other words an invulnerable retaliatory force and sufficient strength in our conventional forces to make sure that any brushfire war would not quickly become a holocaust only when both of these objectives are secured so secure that our enemies know it and respect our strength can we talk successfully with mr khrushchev about peace and the democratic party is dedicated to securing that kind of defense for our nation second peace requires an america that is planning and preparing and striving for disarmament under this administration less than 100 people have been working in the entire federal government on the vital subject of disarmament a subject deeply complicated and in some ways requiring more modern scientific experiments than the preparation of instruments of war after all these years the present administration is now talking of establishing a special arms control agency in the executive branch but the hour has grown late the weapons are more deadly atomic know how has spread and the next administration must devote the same effort to the struggle for peace the same resources and energies that we now put into the preparation for war third peace requires an america standing shoulder to shoulder with other free nations united by close ties of commerce friendship and mutual respect americans cannot stand alone as a tiny minority in a hostile world without friends and allies without international effort to stem aggression from any source but if we want the support and cooperation of others we must earn that friendship and respect we must consider their problems as well as ours and joined by other free nations of the west whom we helped so greatly at the end of the second world war we must help strengthen the political economic and social independence of those countries in the bottom half of the globe who are now emerging on the road to independence to prevent those countries from succumbing to the chaos and despair which comes with poverty with no hope of release if communism should obtain a permanent foothold in latin america and it was not until our relations with castro had become strained to the breaking point that this administration proposed to the congress a program for latin america 8 years too late if a new soviet satellite should be established in africa if communist china should win her race with india for the political and economic leadership of all of asia then the balance of power would move against us and peace would be even more insecure our purpose is not to buy friends or hire allies our purpose is to defeat poverty our primary weapons must be long term loans technical assistance and regional development plans and our goal is to again influence history instead of merely observing it fourth peace requires positive american leadership in a more effective united nations working toward the establishment of a worldwide system of law enforced by worldwide sanctions of justice in this age of jets and atoms we can no longer put our faith in war as a method of settling international disputes we can no longer tolerate a world which is like a frontier town without a sheriff or a magistrate but the united nations can be no stronger and more effective or more imaginative than the nations which make it up unless we are willing to take the leadership in the united states next week as well as next year unless we are willing to channel more of our ideas and our programs and delegate power to that body in the fight for peace then we may expect to see the last great hope of peace swallowed up in the oceans of indifference and hate fifth and finally peace requires an america that stands as the model of harmonious relations all around the world the reason that woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman were so effective in their foreign policy was because they were effective in their domestic policy because they were building a better country here if a country is moving ahead if the government and the people are engaged together in great enterprises if the government and the people are associating themselves together in securing equal opportunity for all their citizens then quite obviously this spills over this has its influence in those countries which stand today on the razor edge of decision and attempt to make a judgment which way history is moving if we are moving ahead if we are demonstrating the vitality of our society if the communist system which is as old as egypt looks as if it is moving ahead and we look like we are standing still then quite obviously those people will decide that the future belongs to them and not to us i think the future belongs to us but we must work for that future this is a bipartisan effort and i think it is incumbent upon the next president of the united states whoever he may be in january 1961 to use people in both parties to use the national assets that we now have to use the great image which president truman has abroad and president eisenhower has abroad in the fight for peace that is the responsibility of the next president to use the men in both parties whose vision whose energy whose resources are such that their influence has spread beyond their own country the president of the united states president eisenhower is a man of peace and there is no doubt that that has had its effect abroad and so was president truman and so is mr stevenson senator lehman mrs roosevelt and the others those are the assets that we have in this country i would hope who ever was president in this great cause would use every man and woman in this country who seeks to serve who seeks to play a part who seeks to contribute in the great fight for peace this is a difficult and dangerous time i don t run for the office of the presidency thinking that if we are elected life will be easy or the problems all solved but i do say that if we are successful i think it is possible for the united states to regain its position as a vigorous and vital society i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the foreign relations committee few africans today are quoting modern american statesmen they used to quote 20 years ago roosevelt jefferson lincoln and others but now the united states has fallen away as a vigorous and progressive force in their fight for national independence and economic self sufficiency we have to reestablish that image we are a great revolutionary power a great modern revolutionary country which believes in the most progressive concepts which any country has ever been able to develop why should we look pallid and tired while the soviet union whose system of government is hostile to all the aspirations of human personality should look progressive and new and attract the intelligentsia and the students it is our fault it is our fault that we are missing our chance in this great watershed of history i can assure you that if we are successful we are going to begin to move again this country will move and our position will be known around the world one hundred years ago during the presidential campaign of 1860 president lincoln to be wrote a friend i know there is a god and he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk14 9 60e john_f _kennedy mayor wagner members of the central labor union retired members ladies and gentlemen i am grateful for a very generous introduction by the distinguished mayor of this city whose interest in the problems which he was now discussing and which we are meeting to discuss today the problems of our senior citizens has been handed to him from father to son i come here today as the standard bearer for the democratic party that is a proud title because i stand in succession to woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and adlai stevenson during the last session of the congress in august we offered on the floor of the u s senate a bill which would tie medical care for the aged to the social security system we failed by five votes and this was regarded as an ignominious defeat i don t think it is at all because that defeat is going to bring a victory in january for this cause when the social security system was put in in the mid 1930 s it did not suddenly leap out of the forehead of a senator or a congressman or a president it had been worked on for a decade by men and women such as yourselves in all parts of the country in the state of wisconsin by gov al smith and franklin roosevelt in the state of new york this is a long struggle this is a long struggle the struggle to tie medical care for the aged to social security began in the administration of harry truman he was defeated we were defeated in this summer but we have come closer every defeat in the long run in a cause like this is a victory we are going to win that fight next year because it must be won in the same way that bob wagner and franklin roosevelt in the 1930 s won their fight for social security and it is not just social security franklin roosevelt said this generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny and so does this one so does this one 25 years later it is not only medical care for the aged it is minimum wage it is housing for the elderly public housing it is all under social security it is an end to racial discrimination it is the same fight begun by woodrow wilson in 1913 and carried on then by the democratic party since its earliest inception and anyone who thinks the fight is over that there are no longer any major issues that all the things that had to be done were done in the 1930 s or the 1940 s and that the only function of government is to be a caretaker they should vote republican but anyone who believes regardless of their age anyone who is still young in heart who looks to the future not to the past who sees the unfinished business of this society they should come with us across a new frontier of this country in 1960 i think that this business of our country is for the government and the people to be associated together in great enterprises the care of the aged to make their life more secure to house them full employment for those working the education of our children those are common responsibilities which any administration must face but which some administrations have turned a deaf ear to i think that this job can be done i think the brightest days of this country in a sense of a country on the move and energetically still lie ahead of us and the important thing to recognize as we look to the problems that face us abroad is that they are interconnected it is a country that is moving at home that moves abroad a distinguished republican said some time ago i am a liberal abroad and a conservative at home well i am not i don t think you can be successful abroad unless you are successful in the united states unless you are a liberal here you can t be a liberal abroad this is an important election and all elections are important but this is important because the united states is important and because the challenges of our country are greater today than they have ever been in the past we want your help in this campaign we want you to help us register all those who believe in our cause we want you to help us on election day get everyone out to vote how can we sit in a country which gives us so many blessings and when election day comes say well i am going to stay home when traveling through countries of europe the vice president of the united states himself when he went to poland a half million people turned out and i am sure he would say himself not because he was the vice president of the united states but because the united states stands for something and because they wanted to be free too but we are free and it is worth an effort to maintain it so i come today assuring you of our continued interest in policies which the democratic party originated sponsored fathered and will fight for today and in the future and in return we want your help we want your support we want you to stand with us in this election to join us and give us your heart and your hand and your voice and we will win thank you dem jfk15 10 60a john_f _kennedy governor my friend and colleague in the u s senate joe clark and your able and distinguished congressman from this district congressman frank clark whom i know you are going to reelect when i came to washington to the u s senate at first in january 1953 i brought down a number of young ladies from boston mass when i came down in january 1953 i brought a number of young ladies from massachusetts to be secretaries they all got married one of them married a young man from this town i would like to have you meet my former secretary jean mcgonigle now mrs lannox of this community then i got a whole new set of girls and they got married so if many of you girls feel the prospects are limited to this community come to washington and work for senator clark and myself then i got married and then the whole office we don t just tend to business down in washington i want you to understand that i am delighted to come here this morning and to carry our democratic campaign to this community mr nixon is out in los angeles mr lodge is in pittsburgh mr lodge made a speech one day in the north pledging a negro in the cabinet and the next day he said he had no right to make any pledges when he was down south mr nixon sent senator goldwater down south to talk about civil rights and say he does not mean anything by it and then he sent senator scott to the north to assure the negroes he is with them all the way the democratic party stands for one program and one platform north and south east and west i think senator scott who has been traveling around the united states as a member of the truth squad of the republican party should come home to pennsylvania and look after his people and worry about the truth in this state five hundred thousand people in the state of pennsylvania get food packages from the federal government do you know what those packages consist of dried eggs some rice some cornmeal for a family of four people in this rich country 6 25 a month 5 cents a day per person half a million people in the state of pennsylvania and the administration mr nixon runs on a slogan of you never had it so good i want him to run on that slogan in pennsylvania i want him to tell the people in this area where there is over 9 percent of the people out of work a quarter of them for more than 15 weeks i want him to come on that slogan of peace and prosperity people of pennsylvania and people of the country are not interested in deathbed conversion election time commitments they want a candidate and a party who stand on the issues day in and day out year in and year out as your congressman does your senator does and your governor does there is not an old governor lawrence and a new one like there is an old and a new mr nixon there is a democrat who stands for the democratic party and the things for which the democratic party stands the democratic party s candidates in this century never ran on slogans like stand pat with mckinley return to normalcy with harding keep cool with coolidge and two chickens in every pot with hoover i don t know what dewey s slogan was because he never worked it out we know what truman s slogan is but there are children in the audience as the vice president would say our slogans have meaning woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal and today we stand on the threshold of a new frontier for all americans we commit ourselves to a minimum wage of 1 25 an hour we commit ourselves to medical care for the aged tied to social security which has worked for 25 years we commit ourselves to a fight against the problems as suggested by automation i spent a month running in the primary in west virginia you have seen it in pennsylvania a machine comes in it takes the job of 10 men what happens to those 10 men where do they go to work they may be 45 they may be 50 they may have worked in a steel mill or in a coal mine where do they get a job in the united states when there are more than 4 1 2 million people out of work too young to retire too young to die too old to work and this administration has never discussed the problem of automation i believe the president of the united states in january 1961 should recognize this as a national problem and in every basic industry set up committees of labor management and the government i do not suggest these problems are new those of you who work in this area know the steel industry we are going 50 percent of capacity and yet we are producing almost as much steel as we did 6 years ago so great has our capacity increased and yet we are employing less people than we did 5 years ago what is happening in coal steel paper pottery printing name it it is going to happen in every industry across the united states in the next 10 years machines are coming in i visited factories in recent weeks where three or four men a tremendous factory over an acre all machines this is a problem which is going to face this rich country of ours it is the kind of problem which is new different it is the kind of problem that is difficult of solution but it is the kind of problem that the republicans never think about they have never concerned themselves in the last 25 years with the problems of employment of social security of housing of minimum wage of social justice of equality of treatment of aid to education of a stronger better america to which we are committed so i come here to pennsylvania a state which has not gone democratic in a presidential election for 20 years and i come here and ask your belp in this campaign the u s senate is going to be democratic if we lost every senate seat this year the democrats would still control the senate it would take the greatest landslide since 1952 for the house to be republican so you are going to have the senate democratic and the house democratic and people are thinking of electing a republican who stands in opposition to everything that the majority of the democrats in the house and senate stand for and divide our country between the executive the president and the congress for 4 years the most difficult years in our history if there was ever a formula for inaction for standing still for those americans who don t want anything done that is the solution but for those americans who recognize that this is the most dangerous time in the life of our country that we must build our strength here that we must develop our resources that we must begin to move off dead center then i ask you to join us in moving this country ahead in giving this country new leadership during the american constitutional convention there was behind the desk of general washington a painting of a sun low on the horizon and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising sun or a setting sun and at the conclusion benjamin franklin of pennsylvania stood up we now know that because of what we have done here today it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i think in 1960 if we choose progress it can be a rising sun for this country and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk15 10 60b john_f _kennedy senator to be i hope donald oesterling william patten who i hope is going to be elected the congressman from this district wade reeser lewis poundstone candidate for the state legislature my colleague in the u s senate senator clark your distinguished governor david lawrence ladies and gentlemen i understand that there are a few republicans who live in this community we ought to have a testimonal now how many republicans do we have here today would you hold up your hands well we are going to talk to you we do have one of their representatives here today and we appreciate her coming we have a few democrats we have a few people in 1960 who believe it is time that the united states began to move forward and i am glad we are divided as you know in this country into two parties one is the republican party and one is the democratic party and at different times in the history of our country a majority of the american people have put their confidence in one party and then on other occasions they put their confidence in another and i think the reason they choose one party at one time and another party at another is because history and events and the mood of history swings like a pendulum back and forth i believe that in 1912 the pendulum swung for the new freedom of woodrow wilson and in 1932 certainly a majority of the american people decided it was time they began to move ahead again and they voted for franklin roosevelt now the question which you have to decide in 1960 is which mood of the world which kind of a world which place in world history are we in today and which political party happens to fit the needs of our country and that is the question which you as citizens of this country must decide it is not merely a question saying i am a democrat and i vote democratic or being a republican i vote republican but which candidate in your judgment fits the needs of our country in 1961 and 1962 i want to make it clear so that you can make your judgment how i stand on the great issues which face our country in 1960 my own judgment is that what we are now doing in this country is not good enough that when mr nixon runs on a slogan of you ve never had it so good that isn t a good enough slogan in my opinion because what we are now doing in this country what is now happening in the state of pennsylvania what is now happening around the world is not good enough from the point of view of our own security and on this issue mr nixon and i separate secondly i do not believe that the united states is increasing its economic growth and development at a fast enough rate to provide full employment in the state of pennsylvania and full employment in the united states this matter of so called growth is at the heart of your job this country has grown in the last 8 years on the average of 2 1 2 percent a year that means that we have increased our strength each year 2 1 2 percent but because machinery has come in because our productivity has increased at a faster rate even than our economic growth it means that we have in 1960 4 1 2 million people out of work we are going to face the same problem in 1961 1962 1963 1964 and 1965 some of you may work in the glass factory you know that every year we increase the productivity capacity of our glass factories and if we don t provide economic growth at least twice what we now have you are not going to find as many people working in the united states as work today we have 50 percent of our steel mills producing 50 percent stand idle and yet we produce almost as much steel today as we did with 100 percent of capacity 7 years ago the reason is that new machines make it possible to produce more steel therefore not as many men are needed and therefore 100 000 steelworkers are out of work now mr nixon and i have discussed economic growth on these debates i have pointed out that the soviet union is growing two and a half times as fast as us but that is not the most ominous sign the fact is that western germany which is a great competitor of the united states in all the markets of the world is growing at twice the rate we are italy which we helped on its feet in 1947 1948 and 1949 is now growing at a faster rate than we are we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years in order to maintain full employment in this country and therefore i don t think what we are now doing is good enough i don t think the monetary and fiscal policies which this administration has followed are good enough i believe that when they stand against the minimum wage of 1 25 an hour i think they are standing in the way of progress we have high interest rates and as a partial result we built this year 200 000 less homes than we needed in this country to stay up with our population we are going to double the population of the united states in the next 40 years and yet slums are developing faster than we are building new homes and partly because of the high interest rate policy that this administration has followed which has held our economy back so the first difference with mr nixon and the republicans and this is the question you have to decide are you satisfied with the rate of growth in this country do you feel that we are moving ahead fast enough do you feel that our strength is increasing do you feel we must do better the second matter that i think is of great importance to us as citizens is in our security around the world i believe that we face two problems in our security around the world and they both affect your decision on november 8 one is the question of whether we have and are developing sufficient military strength i believe that the present rate of growth of the soviet union in military strength particularly in long range missiles is greater than ours and while i believe that today the united states is secure i believe there is a danger in 1962 1963 and 1964 that unless we move ahead at a greater rate we won t meet it that is only one of the dangers the other danger is that the soviet union and the communist system will move into these areas of the world like they did in cuba like they are now doing today in laos and will extend their influence without any military action in the last 2 years five countries once independent now support the communist foreign policy line cuba guinea ghana iraq and there is every evidence in the next week that it will include laos five countries that the communists now control in the fields of foreign policy that 3 years ago they did not influence in other words there is every chance that the pattern of conquest of the communists will not be military action but will be by subversion by fear by persuading the people of those countries and their leaders that the communist system represents the way of the future i don t believe the administration has recognized that danger i don t believe that our influence has increased as fast in recent years abroad as that of the communists when we had the issue in the united nations a week ago on the admission of red china only two nations in africa voted with us when we had that same issue more countries in asia voted against us we have lost about 10 votes in the last 4 years on that one issue and i think all this indicates that our position in the world is not as strong as it needs to be if we are going to maintain our security so i want to make it clear that on these two issues the development of the economy of the united states the problem of full employment the problem of increasing our economic growth and the problem of maintaining freedom around the world on these two issues the parties disagree mr nixon says our prestige has never been higher i say it isn t high enough i say the tide is not moving in our direction we haven t beamed a single program in spanish to all of latin america in the last 8 years except during the hungarian revolution we bring less students to the united states than we did 10 years ago we offered more scholarships to the congo in one day we offered them 300 last june than we gave to all of africa the year before we have the development loan fund to assist the underdeveloped countries we gave less than 2 percent of all of africa from that fund last year we have ignored africa we are in danger of ignoring others we have ignored latin america and the result is that a candidate for the presidency of brazil felt it necessary to go to havana and pay a call on castro in order to secure the support of castro supporters in the last election now these are problems that face you in this city they go to the security of our children they go to the future of freedom not only here but around the world therefore let me say in conclusion the question you have to decide on november 8 is is it good enough are you satisfied if you look at this state this country and the world and decide that the foresight and vision and long range planning that this administration has carried out and that mr nixon promises to continue is good enough i don t think it is and if you don t think it is i want your support if you think it is you should vote for mr nixon that is the issue that you have to decide on november 8 let me say finally that i appreciate your coming this is an important election these are serious issues they involve us all and regardless of whether a republican president or democratic president wins on november 8 this country is going to move through difficult times which will require the best of all of us as the leader of the party in the minority i present to you our belief that in these serious days this country has the last great hope of freedom but we must move i can assure you that if we are successful on november 8 this country will move again dem jfk15 10 60c john_f _kennedy congressman frank clark who has served this district well and also served the united states senator joseph clark my friend and colleague in the u s senate your distinguished governor gov david lawrence members of the pirates baseball team ladies and gentlemen the pirates have the biggest squad in the united states about 10 million people i come here today as the democratic candidate can you hear can you hear the word democratic out there then we are all tuned in i shouldn t really make a democratic speech outside of that wonderful hotel i run as the democratic candidate and i know that it seems to me that in this election all of us as americans face two different sets of opportunities and two different sets of problems one i believe is the responsibility of all of us those of us who serve in the congress those of us who may serve in the presidency or in the executive branch to bring up to date to make modern those programs which have been part of our political life part of our national life for 20 or 25 or 30 years in other words to pass a minimum wage bill which brings wages up to date the first minimum wage bill in 1935 was 25 cents an hour so you cannot say that everything that had to be done was done in the roosevelt administration or in the truman administration or in the eisenhower administration every administration and every 3 or 4 years this country has to recognize that we must move ahead so there is one set of opportunities which will be open to the next president and the next congress minimum wage of 1 25 an hour medical care for the aged tied to social security aid to education stimulation of housing urban renewal these are all programs which have been part of our life for a great many years really since franklin roosevelt s first administration but there are a second set of opportunities and a second set of problems which are entirely new which are new to our time which were never thought of in the administrations of franklin roosevelt truman or president eisenhower and it is to these problems that i think we should devote particular attention now one is the problem of automation it is going to be a problem for every citizen of the country as it has been a problem for every citizen of pennsylvania pennsylvania relies on two industries basically coal mining and steelmaking both of these industries have experienced automation and it is the reason that there is unemployment of 9 percent in this general area of these counties in western pennsylvania 9 percent you have not really recovered in a very real way in the state of pennsylvania from the recession of 1958 your steel mills in this state are working at 50 percent of capacity and yet they produce almost as much steel as they did in 1952 and 1951 the reason is automation and what is true of steel is true of coal there are literally a half million people 750 000 in the state of pennsylvania that get food packages from the government every month they amount to 5 cents a day per person to keep them alive and many of them are people who worked in the coal mines those coal mines are mining more coal than they ever mined before in history but they don t need the people because 1 machine has taken the job of 10 men so i would say of the new problems which were not problems years ago but which are going to be problems in the sixties i would say one is automation the second problem is economic growth which we talk about so much but which means whether your children are going to get jobs we have to get 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years in order to have full employment in the united states and we do that at a time when machines are taking the jobs of men therefore my criticism of this administration in this area has been that for the last 8 years we have moved ahead each year growing at about 2 5 percent each year the soviet union grows at about 7 5 percent each year western germany grows at about 5 to 6 percent a year italy grows from 4 to 5 percent a year france about 4 percent a year we had the lowest rate of economic growth last year 1959 not a depression year of any major industrialized society in the world and unless we move ahead unless we can stimulate our economic growth there are not going to be jobs there are going to be more and more machines and fewer and fewer jobs that is why i believe that this is an entirely new time that is coming out in 1961 1962 1963 the problems are entirely changing the old slogans the old battles still have to be fought but the problems in many ways are going to be new the third problem of course is the kind of image which we present abroard i criticized this administration as a citizen and as the standard bearer of the opposition party because i believe in the last few years the united states has ceased to present an image of an advancing and vigorous society to a watching world you know for the last 8 years we have not had in the voice of america a single spanish speaking program to all of latin america for the last 8 years do you know we brought more foreign students to study here 10 years ago by the u s government than study here today at the time of the congo crisis in june in the whole of the congo there were only 12 college graduates and 7 or 8 million people we offered them 300 scholarships that is more scholarships than we offered to all of africa the year before do you know that with the voice of america our radio broadcasts we are fourth in the world now moscow is ahead of us china peiping is ahead of us radio cairo in egypt more broadcasts come from radio cairo than from the voice of america we had in 1959 last year in 1957 we had more of our foreign service personnel stationed in western germany than in all of africa we did not even have a bureau of african affairs until 1957 and africa contains one fourth of all the votes in the general assembly now so i don t believe that this administration and our country has recognized its responsibilities that the world is changing as fast as it is mr castro is only a symptom he is not a freak he is the kind of problem we are going to face in country after country in the next 10 years ghana and guinea in africa newly independent 2 years ago both vote with the soviet union in the united nations it isn t going to be just guinea and ghana and cuba but we are going to meet that problem in every country in the world in the future unless young leaders in those countries feel that we are on the move that the future belongs to the free world that the communist system which is as old as egypt is finally going to collapse if they feel that they are moving that they have the solutions to the future and we are standing still then they would decide that there is the direction they ought to go and not with us let me make it clear i think this is a great country i have served it for 14 years in the congress and in the service 4 years before that but i believe that if we are going to maintain our strength if we are going to maintain not only our freedom but the freedom of all those who look to us we are going to have to do better and that is the issue of this campaign and it is serious those of you who are republicans those of you who are democrats and those of you who are independent should understand this is not a personal controversy between mr nixon and myself we represent two political views of the direction our country should take two different views of the needs of our time you have to decide as voters which is your view with which philosophy do you wish to be associated which comes closest to meeting your decisions as to what your needs are those who run for office on the slogans that we never had it so good who say our prestige has never been higher who say that our strength is growing who say that the balance of power is moving with us if you decide that then you should vote for mr nixon but if you take the view which i take and i take it as a dedicated citizen of this country that the balance of power is not shifting in our direction that our economy is not growing as fast as it must that we are not catching the imagination of the people around the world that we do not give the appearance of a society on the move then i ask your help in this campaign that is the issue thank you dem jfk15 10 60d john_f _kennedy governor lawrence senator clark my colleague in the u s senate who has spoken for pennsylvania and the country your distinguished congressman frank who i think has been an outstanding representative for the people of this distric the kind of man we want in office and i am delighted and appreciate the fact that he has introduced me today i want to thank you for the plates we will try to find a suitable house for them we are looking now golf clubs i will be all ready to be president yesterday in fact this morning i read in the newspaper that mr nixon in answer to a question has defined his political philosophy by saying that he was a practical progressive now that is interesting because last may 5 months ago writing to a conservative republican mr nixon says i have consistently and outspokenly classified myself as an economic conservative what is mr nixon is he a practical progressive what nixon are we voting for in 1960 the practical progressive the outspoken conservative the old nixon the new nixon the modern republican the old fashioned republican or are we voting for a man and a party that stand where they have always stood for the people if mr nixon will make up his mind what he is and say it and live it and think it and vote it then the american people will know what they are voting for i never used to hear about the old lincoln and the new lincoln the old woodrow wilson and the new woodrow wilson the modern franklin roosevelt and the old fashioned franklin roosevelt i am a democrat without prefix or suffix rather than all these definitions which mr nixon and madison avenue developed which are market tested and then put forth i prefer to go by the old words of the bible by their fruits you shall know them when a political party votes in 1935 98 percent against the 25 cent minimum wage i know what the party stands for and when that same political party in 1960 votes in the house of representatives 85 percent against 1 25 minimum wage in 1960 i know the republican party stands where it has always stood against not for but against mr nixon leads a party which regards 1 25 minimum wage as extreme which regards medical care for the aged tied to social security as extreme mr nixon leads a party which alf landon once led from pennsylvania i went through his town i thought i saw him out there cheering for us today even he could not stand the present policy of mr nixon because nobody knows what it is he puts out papers on housing and education and yet his party and he have voted against them or he last 14 years they vote against the area distress bills they veto them and then mr nixon calls for their passage during the campaign people are not interested in leap year liberalism every 4 years at campaign time we hear the most glowing promises from the republican party and their candidates but the record is written in the congress day in and day out on medical care for the aged tied to social security which would cost 3 cents a day per person an average of 12 a year it would insure any person retiring that they would receive medical care nursing care the cost of their medicine now under the bill which the president signed if you get sick and you are retired and you have saved up 500 or 800 you have to first exhaust all of that for medical bills then you take a pauper s oath that you are medically indigent then you receive some assistance which is the american way which is the way we stand for the record is written the record is written opposition to all these basic pieces of legislation which mean so much to the security of this country i said about 2 weeks ago in cleveland ohio i could not think of one piece of original progressive legislation suggested by the republicans in the last 25 years and the papers said you are wrong what about president taft s child labor in 1904 well what have they done since then all this is important because if this community which now has 12 percent of its people out of work which has never really gotten back on its feet economically with full employment since the recession of 1958 is going to move ahead then we have to have policy that moves our country ahead that pays a decent wage that builds homes that uses steel that uses pottery if you are building 200 000 homes fewer each year than you should be you are not selling any pottery to those families if you have an economic recession people are not going to buy a new car and when they don t buy a new car in detroit the steel mills in pennsylvania don t work and the coal mines in pennsylvania and west virginia remain idle the country is tied together and a rising tide lifts all the boats if our economy is moving upward then people are working but if we stand still if we have an administration frozen in the ice of its own indifference if we have an administration which is interested mr nixon spoke at white sulphur w va to a group of businessmen in may he said as long as unemployment is under 4 5 million it is not and i quote him a significant issue in the minds of the people i think it is if you have 4 5 million people out of work it is significant to them and their families and it is significant to the rest of the americans who are concerned that every american who seeks a job shall find one we are committed to that policy i want to make it clear that this i believe is an important election we are concerned about the security of the united states we are concerned about the cause of freedom but freedom and our security and the things for which we stand will never be strong will never be safe unless our country is strong if we are building and moving ahead here in the united states then we can meet our commitments around the globe and we will meet those commitments but if we are standing still if people are out of work if we are not moving into the sixties with the vigor that is required then the united states stands still and all those people who look to us as an inspiration wonder whether our high noon has passed whether our brightest days were in the past and whether the future belongs perhaps to those who live in the communist system i don t believe it mr khrushchev says your children will be communists he told us that on the senate foreigu relations committee a year ago i believe his children can be free but it depends on us mr nixon has said that he wants to spend the next 3 weeks discussing quemoy and matsu i would be delighted to do so if mr nixon wants to engage the united states in military action 4 miles from the mainland of china if he wants to commit us to the security of those islands which president eisenhower has never been willing to do i will talk about it from now on because war and peace is the great issue but i also want him to come here to new castle i want him to talk about cuba 90 miles off the coast off he united states i want him to talk about what is happening to this country i want him to talk about the record of his party i want him to look at america i want him to recognize that unless this country is strong the cause of freedom is not strong i am not so anxious that he take us into military action on the mainland of china as i am that we maintain our commitments that we maintain our freedom i spent long enough in the pacific ocean to know the difficulties with which mr nixon is now facing the united states if he has his way and i do not want any young man in this community involved in a military action on islands that the admiral of the pacific fleet admiral yarnell said were not worth the bones of a single american soldier mr nixon will not be in those islands and neither will i but neither will anybody else if we have our way thank you dem jfk15 10 60e john_f _kennedy governor senator clark governor edmondson ladies and gentlemen one of the things about running for the presidency is that you have to be prepared to make speeches before breakfast and on any other occasion i am delighted to be here this morning we arrived at 2 30 last night and we are going to campaign with the governor all through the state of pennsylvania i have said on many occasions that pennsylvania is key to the success of this election and also i believe pennsylvania a great industrial complex has seen the effects of 8 years of republican indifference to the needs of this state and the needs of this country i believe that the people of pennsylvania and the people of the united states recognizing that this is a difficult time and an important election are going to put their confidence in progress which is our most important product i saw yesterday that mr nixon said he was a practical progressive i read a letter the other day that he wrote in may of 1960 saying he had been throughout his entire career not a liberal but an economic conservative if he would make up his mind what he is we could make a better judgment whether the people of this country want an economic conservative a practical conservative or a democrat i think they want a democrat i think they want a candidate who does not have to issue statements every day saying what he is and what he is not depending on what section of the country he is in and which audience he is talking to i am a democrat east west north south a democrat who stands in the tradition of franklin roosevelt in pennsylvania in california in georgia in massachusetts mr nixon is we do not know what but whatever it is i think mr nixon and the republican party will be rejected on november 8 1960 dem jfk15 10 60f john_f _kennedy i have been presented with this donkey by two young ladies down there for my daughter my daughter has the greatest collection of donkeys she doesn t even know what an elephant looks like we are going to protect her from that knowledge too i am delighted to be here with my friend and colleague in the senate who has fought for pennsylvania and this country with your distinguished governor the great sports columnist gov david lawrence with your congressional candidate chester hampton and your assembly candidates and william reagle and harry boyd ladies and gentlemen mr nixon has announced we are running a high level campaign mr nixon has announced that he proposes to spend the next 3 weeks talking about quemoy and matsu i am delighted to do so i am delighted to discuss this effort by a trigger happy candidate to involve the united states in a commitment of these islands 4 and 5 miles off the coast of china a commitment which president eisenhower never made in the treaty of 1955 and has not made until the present time i am delighted to discuss it but i would also like to turn the vice president s attention to pennsylvania to sharon pa i believe that the people of the united states would like to hear him discuss his views on an island not 4 miles off the coast of china but 90 miles off the coast of the united states cuba but i also think he should talk about what his administration has done and plans to do for the people of pennsylvania and i can tell you what they have done so far they add up to five words the republican party has vetoed the needs of pennsylvania has vetoed pennsylvania twice the congress of the united states has passed legislation to aid areas where there is high unemployment senator clark fought for the second bill i was the floor manager for the first bill the distressed area bill the area redevelopment bill and twice this administration vetoed that bill which would have helped this county and would have helped sharon we passed two bills for housing and for urban renewal which would have helped pennsylvania twice this administration vetoed them we passed a bill expanding our loans to colleges for college dormitories and this administration vetoed it we passed a bill to speed up cleansing our rivers and our streams and this administration vetoed it the republican administration vetoed a bill which the congress passed which would have provided for research in the new uses of coal but let s come right close to home here to sharon to this town in the public works bill last year the democratic party added the sharpville dam this administration vetoed the bill and we had to override their veto to meet this need this protection against the floods i want mr nixon to come here and discuss these problems in this community not 4 miles from sharon i must say that all the time when this country fails to educate a boy or girl fails to make it possible for that boy or girl to go to college and get an education fails to clean our rivers fails to find employment for our people fails to find research for new uses for our old commodities fails to move this state and country ahead that administration has failed the country and i must say that i cannot believe in this great industrial state of pennsylvania which has seen in the last 8 years a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 and now just 2 years later a partial recession in this state and across the country behind that sign up there behind that sign i hear that there is a slogan experience counts well if you want experience which consists of opposition to basic programs programs of 1 25 minimum wage programs of housing programs of industrial growth programs of strength programs of peace then experience does count i have been in the congress for 14 years i arrived there the day mr nixon did i was on the labor committee with mr nixon i came to mckeesport pa in 1947 to debate mr nixon on the taft hartley act he did not wear makeup on that occasion but regardless of whether the makeup is changed and the lighting is changed mr nixon remains the same for 14 years he is still opposing as he opposed in 1947 programs which serve the people and in serving the people serve the cause of freedom i say as the standard bearer for the democratic party as a member of a party which has produced franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson and governor lawrence and senator clark a party which believes in progress we commit ourselves to a policy of full employment we have to put this country back to work if the united states is going to meet its commitments around the world and i favor the united states meeting all of its commitments if we are going to maintain in this country and around the world the cause of freedom if we are going to defend ourselves and all those who look to us for help we have to be strong we have to be moving ahead here at home we have to be developing our resources we have to be educating our children we have to be meeting the problems of our older citizens we have to find jobs for our people and i can assure you in 1960 if we are successful in this election we will give this country leadership and the united states will start moving once again thank you dem jfk15 9 60 john_f _kennedy governor lawrence colonel rice governor leader ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you and to the people of pennsylvania if it had not been for the write in vote that i secured in the democratic pennsylvania primary i would not have come to the los angeles convention in any position of strength and if it had not been for the support that governor lawrence and the pennsylvania delegation gave me at the convention i would not have been nominated but my appreciation to your distinguished governor goes beyond that he was unfailing in the counsel and support and advice he gave me during the convention and the support he has given me since the convention i therefore feel a sense of warm appreciation to all of you and to him and i am delighted to be here in pennsylvania tonight in addition i am glad to be here because i feel a sense of kinship with the pittsburgh pirates like my candidacy they were not given much chance in the spring but fighting youth is winning out in the fall and neither of us is going to settle for second place this city escaped hurricane donna it looks like you will have no trouble from hurricane ethel but next november 8 hurricane democrat is going to sweep the state of pennsylvania i was interested to have colonel rice tell something of the difficulties of divided government in pennsylvania we have been talking about the same thing in washington and now the congo is providing an example for us all i think we need a united government in the united states and in the state of pennsylvania if we are going to carry out action if we are going to carry out the commitments of a great democratic platform to which we are all pledged our platform is called the rights of man i am not sure what the republicans are calling theirs but some have suggested that it might be called the power of positive thinking in any case i stand here tonight as the standard bearer for the democratic party and i therefore stand in succession not only to great democrats of the far past jefferson jackson and cleveland and the others but i also stand here in succession to three great democratic presidents of the 20th century woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman i run for the presidency in probably the most difficult time in the history of this country certainly the most difficult in the past 100 years because while the election of 1932 of franklin roosevelt meant that we would preserve freedom here in the united states the great stakes in the election of 1960 i truly believe is the preservation of freedom around the world i do not therefore run for the presidency under any expectation that life will be easy for americans if we are successful i think to be an american citizen in the 1960 s will be a hazardous and dangerous occupation but i do think we bear great responsibility and i think we have great opportunities to meet those responsibilities as the chief defender of freedom in a time when freedom is under attack all over the globe the challenge that faces this generation of americans is as great as the challenge that faced that generation of americans who in 1932 franklin roosevelt informed that they had a rendezvous with destiny i believe that our generation of americans also has a rendezvous with destiny which we are prepared to meet across the face of the globe freedom and communism are locked in a deadly embrace at this moment and during the past few months and years the communist expansion has been on the move we see it beginning to move we see it beginning to penetrate in asia we have seen it recently in the chaos of africa and we have seen communists which this administration promised in the 1952 campaign to roll back in eastern europe while they unleashed chiang kai shek in asia we have seen that same communism expand to within 90 miles of the coast of the united states 8 minutes by jet from the coast of florida i was in havana 3 years ago the american ambassador informed me on that occasion that he was the second most powerful and influential man in cuba today the american ambassador is not he does not see the president the prime minister or the foreign minister the soviet ambassador is the second most powerful man in cuba today that is the record that we have seen of an administration which committed itself to the liberation of eastern europe and now finds an old and traditional friend cuba under the domination of the communists while their power begins to express to all of latin america it is up to our generation of americans to check this advance my campaign for the presidency therefore is an effort to mobilize the great strength which is in the great american republic and mobilize the resources of the most powerful and rich country which i believe our country is to mobilize those resources for the great struggle there is only one thing that will impress the russians and the chinese and that is not debates and that is not conferences and those are not words it is a strong america not strong if not strong but not strong when but strong first and the fact of the matter is that the united states cannot be strong in its foreign policy unless it is also strong domestically the reason that woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman were influential and stood as great world leaders was because they led the united states here at home because they concerned themselves with the position and plight of their fellow citizens because they held out their hands to their fellow americans the people of the world wanted to grasp the same hand the people of the world want to know that freedom can bring the good life that if they follow the road that we have marked that their life will be productive their people will be working they will be solving their problems at home and therefore when the republican candidate states that he is a liberal abroad and a conservative at home i could not disagree more unless we are progressive and liberal and forward looking here at home we cannot possibly be progressive and forward looking and liberal abroad the two are tied together therefore a liberal foreign policy marked by leadership and strength must be marked by a domestic policy here in the state of pennsylvania and around the country that moves we will not win the greatest contest in our history if our economy limps along at the lowest rate of growth of any major industrialized society in the world last year behind not only the russians and it was one half to one third of that of the soviet union but lower than germany france or england countries who we helped 10 years ago to rebuild their economies the resources that we need for the great contest of the 1960 s to demonstrate that we are the most vital society are lost when we do not use our hands when men are out of work and cannot find work and when we have a lack of economic growth this is the reason that i think that those people of pennsylvania and the united states who desire to see our country move ahead who desire us to be successful in our world policy also should recognize that the democratic party in its long history especially in the 20th century has been successful here at home and has been successful abroad franklin roosevelt speaking before 100 000 people at franklin field philadelphia in accepting the second presidential nomination put the choice and the alternatives before us clearly in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference that is what we have had in the last 8 years and no state in the union has learned that hard lesson more than the state of pennsylvania where 335 000 men and women were unemployed last month 1 out of every 14 people actively seeking a job and unable to find it the vice president s slogan is you never had it so good well they have never had it worse those people who want to work and can t work at a time when we are enjoying prosperity in certain sections of the country i know we can do better this is not 1932 we are not moving back i cannot believe that a country which is faced by so many challenges at home and abroad cannot meet the problem of full employment so that our people can find work when they want it i lived with this problem for a month in the state of west virginia the same problem that hundreds of thousands of people in this state are faced with and in southern illinois and in kentucky and in my own state of massachusetts where hundreds of thousands of families wait every month for a surplus food package from the government which consists of rice grain or dry or powdered eggs and this summer they announced that they are going to add lard i think we can do better than that i think we must do better than that i am not satisfied at all as a citizen of the united states with a country with the richest agricultural production in the world to be distributing the kind of surplus food that we are distributing which lack in my opinion the essential requirements which any american should have to sustain himself and his family but this is not all during the last session of the congress in august we attempted to pass through the u s senate a bill which would have provided medical care or our aged on social security we received the support of 45 democrats and 1 republican we were threatened with a veto if we had passed it we failed by five votes i can assure you that if we are successful in this election that is going to be at the top of our agenda we attempted to pass in the senate of the united states a bill providing 1 25 minimum wage the average wage for laundry women in five large cities of the united states and many of them are negroes is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week i think we can do better i think this administration has been frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think the fundamental responsibility of all of us who wish to survive who wish to live our lives in peace who wish to see the influence of the united states extend around the world as a vital and vigorous society whose brightest days are ahead whose economic growth is increasing whose devotion to the public interest is being maintained i think it is essential that we go out of here and win this election and demonstrate as franklin roosevelt did in his day and wilson in his day and truman in his day that a government and the people can work together i said at the beginning that i thought that the problems facing the united states and the problems facing the next president of the united states were more difficult than they had been since the time of lincoln during the 1860 campaign lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and he hates injustice i see the storm coming if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later in a comparable period in the national history we know there is a god and we know there is a storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk15 9 60a john_f _kennedy mr mayor needless to say this is not my automobile i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming out with the mayor with the keys i am as you know the democratic candidate for the office of the presidency of the united states i will tell you what our policy is and that is to advance the power and influence and prestige of this country so that we are secure and so that we can live in peace and so that we advance the cause of freedom around the world and what is our policy here in the united states it is to make more secure the life of our citizens to make sure that those who want to work can find a job to make sure that those who are retired have security for those who are retired to have housing and medical care this is a great country but i think we can make it a greater country this is a powerful country but i think we can make it a more powerful country i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in this great effort to start the united states moving again in the great years of the 1960 s i ask your help we are going to win it dem jfk15 9 60b john_f _kennedy mayor carlin governor meyner ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for your kindness in coming out and giving us a great welcome to a great city i campaign as the democratic nominee for the office of the presidency of the united states and in that position i follow a great line of democrats who in difficult and dangerous times in the life of our country have played a great role woodrow wilson and the new freedom franklin roosevelt and the new deal harry truman and the fair deal who fought for the people of this country i don t think there is anyone in this city today who can say that all the things that had to be done were done in the past administrations i think that in our generation as franklin roosevelt said about his generation we also have a rendezvous with destiny as long as there are millions of our fellow americans who lack decent housing as long as there are millions of our fellow americans who receive an average unemployment compensation check of less than 31 a week across the country as long as there are millions of our fellow americans who reach the age of 60 without security without the means of paying for their medical bills and decent housing so long is there need for the democratic party so long as there are millions of our fellow americans in parts of this country who are denied their equal opportunity denied their right to serve because of race or religion so long is there need for the democratic party let me make it very clear that there are very sharp issues which separate us from mr nixon and the republicans the republican party has opposed every effort they vetoed the housing bill they killed the 1 25 minimum wage they opposed medical care for the aged they have stood against every program in this century which would help our people we have to win this election and with your help we are going to let me make it very clear that i don t think the united states will be strong in our relations with the communist world i don t think the prestige of the united states will continue to grow unless we are a strong and vital country here at home the reason franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor to the people of this country the reason woodrow wilson could put forward his 14 points was because he stood for the new freedom here in the united states the fair deal of harry truman and the marshall plan were closely linked i can say to you that if we win this election we are going to work for the welfare of this country to strengthen it to make it first not first but not first if not first when but first i don t run for the presidency saying that if i am elected life will be easy but i can say that if we are successful if you send thorn lord to the senate as the democratic senator if you elect my colleagues in the congress pete rodino and hugh addonizio and send congressman to be pete peacock to join them i can assure you that a democratic president working with a democratic house and a democratic senate will start this country moving again thank you dem jfk15 9 60c john_f _kennedy governor meyner mayor wykowsky congressman daniels and congressman gallagher my old friend mayor kenny sheriff flannagan ladies and gentlemen 10 years ago as a congressman i came to this city at 1 o clock in the morning for a democratic rally and you were all here then i don t know whether you have left this hall in the last 10 years but only in this city could they get a turnout for a democratic candidate at 8 o clock in the morning or at midnight that is the kind of a democratic city to have i stand here today as the standard bearer for the oldest political party in this country the contest between mr nixon and myself is one thing i think in a great sense this is a contest between a republican party which has produced mckinley harding coolidge dewey and the vice president and a democratic party which in this century has produced woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman this is a contest between a party which says no to the next decade and a party which says yes as it has in so many years of our history as long as there are millions of americans who live in substandard housing as long as there are millions of our older citizens who wait out their lives with an income of less than 20 a week without hope of good housing or medical care in their old age as long as there are children in this country who go to school on a part time basis with teachers inadequately compensated as long as there is unfinished business in this country so long is their need for the democratic party and there is need for the democratic party today as long as the power and prestige and strength of the united states in relationship to that of the communist world is deteriorating so long is there a need for a strong and vital country so long is there need for democratic leadership i do not say that if i am elected president that life will be easy and the problems all solved but i do say that if we win this election and you and i are both involved you and i are running together in this election i can assure you that this country will start moving again that its power will start growing that its economy will start going ahead that we shall stand as we stood in years past as the leader of the free world and the hope of all those who wish to trod the same road that we are trodding this is an important election there are those who say that this is 1928 all over again i don t hold that view i think this is 1932 and 1948 all over again i think we can win this election one hundred years ago in the election of 1860 lincoln wrote a friend i know that there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk15 9 60d john_f _kennedy governor meyner your next congresswoman mrs white your next congressman jerry taub your next u s senator thorn lord ladies and gentlemen for 6 years i represented middlesex county mass in the house of representatives i would like to represent middlesex county n j in the white house every 4 years ever since alf landon ran as a republican and got snowed under the republican candidates for president run on a plank that says it really doesn t matter which party wins what matters is which candidate wins i think it matters which candidate wins but i think it also matters which party wins because the two parties stand for different things in different times i drive to work every morning past the archives building in washington and on that building it says what is past is prologue the past tells us something of the future and it is a fact though we all regret it that since the administration of franklin roosevelt in 1933 the republican party has tried to block for the last 25 years every progressive piece of social legislation that we have tried to pass you name it social security they voted against it minimum wage housing unemployment compensation and in the last session of the congress in august when we brought up a bill for medical care for the aged we received 45 democrats and 1 republican who supported it and we were told it would be vetoed if it passed i want to say right here that that bill must pass next year and there will be a president we hope in the white house who will not veto it but encourage it if anyone thinks that all the things that had to be done by the people of the united states working together for the care of the aged the education of our children to provide full employment and decent housing and decent wages if you feel that all the things that could he done have been done then i agree with you it is not time for a change but if you feel that this is a great country but it could be greater if you feel that our generation of americans has as franklin roosevelt said about his generation of americans that we too have a rendezvous with destiny then i ask your help in this campaign the point i want to make is that we cannot be strong abroad that we cannot he respected that we cannot stop the communist advance unless we are strong here at home unless we are building a better country and a better society where all americans regardless of their race or religion are citizens of the united states the democratic party has been identified in this century as it has been throughout its history stretching back to jefferson and jackson and in this century woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal they stood for a better america and we stand today on the threshold of a new frontier i ask you to join with us in rebuilding the power of this country in building a stronger america a better life for our people and also a day when the united states once again will be looked upon in latin america and africa and asia as the friend of freedom the way of the future the hope of the future the country with which they wish to be associated mr khrushchev and mr castro may be confined to manhattan island next week but they are not limited in their expansion in latin america and africa and asia i think it is time that the united states started its forward move again i think the future can belong not only to us but to all those who believe in the cause of freedom i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in making this country move again thank you dem jfk15 9 60e john_f _kennedy thank you very much governor meyner daniel amster mayors the next u s senator thorn lord why don t you stand up thorn the next two congressmen congressman dobbins to be and congressman mckenna to be ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for being kind enough to come out to a rally at 10 o clock in the morning i have been campaigning in the last 10 days all the way from maine to alaska through california and texas the state of idaho and michigan and now in the state of new jersey i really say the same thing in a sense every place because i think it is the basic issue before the united states at this very difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country and that is which candidate and which party and what action can best insure a stronger america a freer world and the peace of the united states it is to those great problems that we address ourselves as americans in the campaign of 1960 i think this campaign can serve a useful purpose if it gives the american people clear alternatives a clear choice of action so they can determine what they want their country to be in the 1960 s and what they want their lives to be my own feeling is that in the last few years the influence the power and the prestige of the united states in relationship to the communist world has begun to decline relatively we are still moving ahead but we are not moving ahead fast enough we are still strong but we are not strong enough we are still meeting our traditional responsibilities but we are not doing it with traditional vigor and traditional energy in other words i don t think that there is any man or woman here today who feels that the position of his family and the position of his country is as secure as it was 10 or 15 years ago partly i think it is because we have not recognized that in a difficult world it is necessary for us to to to work here in the united states to build our strength here in the united states if we are going to build our strength around the world if the u s economy is moving ahead at a rate one half that of the soviet union or western europe or germany or france or england that is not really just a domestic problem that is not a problem just to us in new jersey or massachusetts or california it affects our position around the world it affects our ability to do the things that must be done if americans here in this country are producing one half as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union don t you think that is going to affect our relative power in 1970 or 1986 if we waste food in this country if we store billions of dollars and are not able to distribute it effectively that is not a domestic problem that is a problem which stares us in the face all over the globe in africa in asia i think the basic issue which separates us at this time in the two parties at least in their leadership which separates mr nixon and myself is not because we don t both desire the best for our country but i think that the leadership of the republicans on this occasion say we never had it so good and i say we can do better i say we are going to have to move ahead i don t run for the office of the presidency in these dangerous days saying that if i am elected life will be easy and the problems all solved because i think to be an american in the next decade is to bear heavy responsibilities and great burdens but i do say that if we are successful if i am elected if the democratic leadership is successful then i think we can begin to move in this country on all of the problems that now face us and by so moving here we strengthen ourselves around the world i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in this great effort not merely for the success of a political party but because i think our best days in many ways are to be ahead thomas paine in the revolution of 1776 said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 that the cause of all mankind is the cause of america if we meet our responsibility in this time as we did in the days of wilson and roosevelt i think we can meet our responsibilities to ourselves in this state to ourselves in this country and to the cause of freedom around the world i ask your help in that effort thank you during the american constitutional convention there was a painting of a sun behind george washington s desk very low on the horizon and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising or a setting sun at the conclusion benjamin franklin stood up he said we now know we have made our judgment it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i think in 1960 it can be for the united states and the free world a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk15 9 60f john_f _kennedy governor mr mayor senator grosse distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for your kindness in coming out today and giving us a great democratic reception here in the city of paterson i stand today as the democratic standardbearer in succession to other great democrats who in this century bore that banner woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman the issue which is now before us the issue which divides the two political parties are the same issues which have divided the two political parties during this century the republican party has opposed every effort that we have made in this century in the administrations of wilson and roosevelt and truman to advance the welfare of our people can you think of one single piece of progressive legislation to benefit our people in the last 8 years i cannot every effort that we have made to provide protection for our older citizens to increase the educational opportunities for our children to increase the minimum wage to 1 25 an hour they have opposed in 1952 the republicans ran on a program of rolling back the iron curtain in eastern europe today the iron curtain is 90 miles off the coast of the united states is there any american who feels more secure today than he did 10 years ago the last few years have seen a steady increase in the power and prestige of the communist world i think it is time we reverse it we may be able next week to confine mr khrushchev to the island of manhattan and mr castro to the island of manhattan but we have not confined mr khrushchev in africa and we have not confined mr castro in latin america i think it is time that this country started to move again i can assure you that if we are elected in november that we will carry on in this country the same policies which have distinguished for so many years other great democratic administrations the equality of opportunity for our people the protection of their rights better housing better schools better attention to the needs of the people of the united states and i can assure you in so doing that we will build in this country a stronger america which will make its influence felt around the world i ask your help give us your voice your hands your help in this campaign and we are going to win it one hundred years ago in the election of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later in the great election of 1960 we know there is a god and that he hates injustice and we see a a storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk15 9 60g john_f _kennedy governor meyner the next u s senator from the state of new jersey thorn lord your present and future congressman frank thompson freeholders ladies and gentlemen we started at new york this morning at about 8 30 and we have traveled across in a few hours one section of the state of new jersey i must say that this has been the best day of our campaign and i am most grateful to you all and i am grateful to your distinguished governor bob meyner for riding with me and for his hospitality in his state on this occasion in this most important election many of us are government employees i have a different office in washington than you who work here in the city of trenton but i think that all of us who work for the government in one service or another or all of us who work in other capacities have a great and common interest in this campaign and that is the advancement of the interest of the united states to increase its power and prestige to make it more secure to make it possible in a dangerous world when hazard surrounds us on every side to make it possible for us to move safely ahead in a world of peace protecting not only the security of the united states but holding out the hand of friendship to all those who wish to be associated with us other democratic presidents in this country woodrow wilson who served in this city in this state franklin roosevelt and harry truman all faced difficult and dangerous times the election of 1932 i think meant the preservation of freedom here in the united states but i think the election of 1960 may well mean the preservation of freedom all around the globe i have no argument with the republican party and their desire to see a better country what i argue is is their ability to do it whether they have demonstrated any time in this century whether in our position to wilson roosevelt or truman or whether in the days of their power mckinley harding coolidge hoover dewey and the others whether they have demonstrated an understanding of how our country moves and how it works and how necessary it is for the president of the united states to set before the american people the unfinished business of our society we face problems more complicated and as difficult as any that faced any american president in the 100 years i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that if we are elected life will be easy i think life for an american citizen if he meets his responsibilities if we meet it as a nation will be as hazardous as trying as burdensome and as responsible as it has ever been during our long history but i do promise that under the leadership of the democratic party in this time of crisis as in so many crises in our history i think it is possible to make our country move forward i think it is possible for us to regain the position of leadership we once had in the days when roosevelt and truman and wilson spoke with a force of vigor as a great revolutionary country i do not accept the view that our high noon is in the past and that we are moving into the late afternoon i think our brightest days can be ahead i think it is up to us to build the kind of country here the kind of economic society the kind of equality for all our citizens regardless of their race or their religion so that people around the world wish to move with us and not with our adversaries i ask your help in this campaign i ask your assistance we cannot possibly win without you but i think if we can move we can start this great boiler which is the united states fired up again and we can make this country move thank you dem jfk16 10 60a john_f _kennedy congressman thompson ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming down here and greeting all of us i particularly want to express my appreciation to thorn lord who i hope you are going to elect as senator from the state of new jersey we need a good democratic senator from this state and i think thorn can do the job and frank thompson our congressman who has been in charge of our registration drive in this campaign who has registered 10 million new democrats i think in the last 2 months stand up please i come here today as the standard bearer for the democratic party in this most important election actually there have been many significant elections in the history of this country and it is my hope that as a result of this campaign as a result of our efforts that the people of this country all of them republicans and democrats will come as a result of our effort of the last few months to some definite conclusions about what our country must do i believe if this election is to serve a national purpose the best purpose it can serve is to inform our people not of all the things that are good about our country because we know there are many things that are good about our country but the things that we must do if we are going to maintain our country s freedom that is the purpose of this election that is the purpose of our campaign and i must say on this great issue which goes to the freedom of our country the peace of the world the success of freedom around the globe i believe on this great issue mr nixon and i have sharp disagreements and they involve very definitely mr nixon s views are subject to change frequently so i think we disagree on this question yesterday in arizona he made a speech to a group that senator goldwater had gathered together saying he is all for the republican party and all of its candidates and then he spoke about an hour later and said well the party does not make much difference it is the man well i think it is the man who the party selects that makes the difference grover cleveland said about 70 years ago what good is a politician unless he stands for something and i say what good is a political party unless it stands for something and i want to make very clear where we stand in 1960 we say that this is a great country that must be greater it is a powerful country that must be more powerful and as an american citizen of this country as well as the standard bearer of the democratic party i want to make it clear that what we are doing now is not good enough mr nixon runs on a slogan we ve never had it so good he says that our prestige in the world has never been as high i don t agree with that i don t agree with that as long as we are using only 50 percent of our capacity in the production of steel as long as our economic growth is only one third that of the soviet union as long as 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never get to see the inside of a college as long as the votes in the united nations are beginning to move against us as long as castro is strong not only in cuba but is spreading his influence throughout latin america i cannot say we have never had it so good mr nixon debates quemoy and matsu and i am delighted to debate them with him because i believe in strength and i believe in peace but i also would like to hear him debate cuba africa latin america economic growth i saw in the paper that he is going to discuss those two islands 4 miles from the coast of china for the next 3 weeks i am delighted to discuss those islands and our responsibilities toward them an a toward peace and toward strength but i would like to also hear his plans to prevent the communization of other areas of the world what are his plans to prevent africa from slipping an area of poverty and disease what is his plan and what is the administration s plan to prevent communist influence from growing in africa what is the program of this administration toward latin america last june we offered 300 scholarships to the congo you know that was more scholarships than we had offered to all of africa the year before we had more people stationed in west germany in our foreign service in 1957 than in all of africa there are four countries in africa now members of the united nations and we don t even have an american representative in any of the four in the vote on the admission of red china into the united nations do you know how many african nations voted with us two one liberia which we helped found and the other the union of south africa every other country of africa either voted against us or abstained do you know more countries voted against us on that issue from asia than voted with us do you know why a candidate for the presidency of brazil took a trip to see castro because he realized the popularity that castro has been gaining in latin america because the united states is indifferent we gave more aid in the last 10 years to yugoslavia than we gave to all of latin america combined these are the problems that we must discuss because they go to the security of every person here everyone here knows that unless the balance of power in the world is moving in the direction of freedom then the united states is in peril as long as countries in africa and leaders begin to feel that the future belongs to the communists and not to us as long as they begin to fear the russians more than they trust us as long as those people in latin america think that we are uninterested in their fight against poverty and disease and ignorance as long as they think we regard them merely as pawns in the cold war then they begin to wonder whether they should do what castro has done these are the struggles which we are going to face in the next 10 years how could a free society increase its economic growth there are a good many people here who work whose children will be trying to get a job in the next 12 months we are going to have to find in the next 10 years 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 10 years to provide jobs for all the people in our country who want them and we are going to have to do that at times when automation is taking the jobs of men when 1 machine can do the jobs of 10 men and yet we are going to have to provide full employment we have 16 million americans over the age of 65 who live on an average social security check of less than 78 a month how are they going to get by and find homes shelter and medical care these are the problems that the united states must face i am delighted to discuss any problems that anyone wants to raise in this campaign but i want to turn mr nixon s attention not only to the coast of china but to the united states and new jersey and the problems it faces and our people face in different times in our history the american people have chosen the republicans and at other times they have chosen the democrats i believe in 1960 that when we analyze our perils and our opportunities because our opportunities are greater than our perils i believe the american people are going to come to the conclusion that it is time this country started moving again and that is the issue in 1912 woodrow wilson of new jersey ran for the presidency and he ran on the slogan the new freedom i run in 1960 not saying that if i am elected life will be easy but saying that this is a great country which deserves the best from us all this is a great country which deserves the best that all of us can do it is a country which is the chief defender of freedom and upon us and upon our willingness to meet our responsibilities rests not only our own security but rests the hope of freedom all around the globe abraham lincoln said 100 years ago this nation cannot exist half slave and half free the question is whether the world can exist in 1960 half slave and half free whether it will move in the direction of freedom or whether it will move in the direction of slavery and upon us upon our willingness to meet our responsibilities hinges this great question i come to new jersey and ask your help in this campaign and i can assure you that if we are successful we will set before this country its unfinished business and this country will move again thank you dem jfk16 10 60b john_f _kennedy mr lee mr parker if we can get the voting age to 16 we are going to skip this election otherwise it might be close our two county chairman senator kefauver congressman lankford congressman foley my old friend and colleague from the house of representatives congressman sasscer distinguished comptroller ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to the county officials and to all of you for your kindness in holding this rally tonight we have been to new jersey today and delaware and to the 51st state as i call meet the press and tonight we go to the state of ohio and carry on this campaign in this state and ohio for the next 3 weeks until we win this is an important campaign because the office of the presidency is important senator kefauver and i have been in the congress for a good many years he nearly 20 and 114 i think both of us would agree after having been in the house and the senate that because of the constitution and because of the force of events more and more depends upon the vigor the vitality the good judgment the sense of history the sense of the future the foresight of the next president of the united states the congress has an important function but in a very real sense the congress can block but only the president of the united states can propose and i am waiting now for 2 months to see what proposals mr nixon would put forward for the great problems which disturb the tranquillity of this country i know he feels strongly about mr truman s use of the word hell but otherwise what is the issue those of us who run in the democratic party in the names of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman not because we think the problems that we now face bear a great resemblance to the problems that they faced in their time but because we approached their different problems with a spirit which i think is common to the democratic party today woodrow wilson could run on the new freedom and franklin roosevelt could serve in the administration of woodrow wilson and then run in 1932 on the new deal and harry truman could serve as a senator in the thirties in the new deal and run in 1948 on the fair deal and i could serve in the congress led by president truman in 1947 and 1948 and run in 1960 on the fair deal the succession follows year after year decade after decade back through our history and though the problems change i believe the spirit which motivates the democratic party is the same spirit of progress which motivated it when thomas jefferson made the louisiana purchase i believe that we can divide generally the responsibilities which we will meet in the sixties into two categories the first of those is to attempt to bring up to date those pieces of social legislation passed in the 1930 s which still have great significance in the lives of our citizens today and therefore while franklin roosevelt could propose in 1935 a 25 cent minimum wage we proposed in 1960 a 1 25 minimum wage where franklin roosevelt proposed social security in 1935 we propose in 1960 medical care for the aged tied to social security these problems of housing and social security unemployment compensation minimum wages and the others fall into the general category of proposals put forward either in the administration of president wilson or president roosevelt or president truman in that field though in some ways it is a new problem but an old one i would include education because this country has been aiding education since the country began since the northwest ordinance set aside one sixteenth of the territory in order to help education back when this country was founded to the land grant colleges in 1862 to the vocational aids to the aids to impacted districts we have provided for aid to education since the beginning of this country and will continue to do so in spite of the fact that mr nixon has stated that it would result in federal control over education the federal government and the states and the local communities have harmonized their respective responsibilities and we have begun to move ahead though we still have great unfinished business in that area as well but these are the traditional problems which have faced our country and the solutions fall into the general category with which we are familiar however there are i believe in 1961 a whole new set of problems that are coming on which are not common to the past which will require new solutions problems which our party must consider and problems which i believe we must address ourselves to in the coming months in order to prepare ourselves for action in 1961 no 1 how is it possible for a free society to stimulate its economic growth to provide for an economic growth at least twice that which we now have to provide 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years at the very time when new machinery is taking the jobs of men in the basic industries the result of the layoffs now is not merely that there is a general economic decline but it is also due to the fact that one machine can do the job of five men we produce now and use only 50 percent of our steel capacity and yet we produce almost as much steel as we did in 1952 with 100 percent of capacity what are the prospects of hiring those steelworkers back what are the prospects in a free enterprise system of maintaining full employment in the 1960 s what are the solutions for the problem of automation that will be a problem for the next president of the united states and i have not even heard it discussed in the last 8 years secondly how is it possible for the united states to provide for an orderly system of disarmament how is it possible for us to reach an agreement with the soviet union which will permit a cessation of nuclear tests and begin to control outer space and prevent one power or another making a decisive breakthrough in those far distant regions the united states in the last years has had less than 100 people working in the entire field of government on the highly sophisticated highly technical highly scientific subject of disarmament mr nixon said the other night that they had quality not quantity i don t know who the geniuses are but 100 men it is a terrible burden for them third how is it possible for countries to the south of us latin america africa asia how is it possible for those countries with an inadequate resource base with a steadily increasing population with widespread ignorance misery starvation a lack of education a lack of potential how is it possible for them to maintain a free society how is it possible for them to be devoted to freedom particularly when they look to the example of the soviet union which 40 years ago was the most backward country in western europe and now has passed even the great united states in some areas of science in some areas of productivity and which is turning out twice as many scientists and engineers as we are each year what is the example that these people will choose to follow and what inspiration have we offered to them i think the most serious problem that the united states has faced in many ways certainly the most undiscussed problem is the problem of ghana why did the people of ghana and the leadership decide even though an independent country even with a great tradition of being tied to the british even though they had every prospect of maintaining a society tied to the west why have they in the last 3 years since they have been independent suddenly begun to tie their policies closely to that of the soviet union it is not chaos it is not a military seizure of power like cuba yet mr herter said 3 weeks ago that ghana is supporting the foreign policy of the soviet union what made nkrumah who studied in pennsylvania who got his education in this country who went to i believe lincoln college in pennsylvania what made him decide even though he had as his economic advisor an englishman what made him decide that the soviet union had more to offer him than the west and what effect will that have not only on ghana but the same experience in guinea and what effect will that have on the newly emerging countries of africa and what have we done about it in 1957 we had more foreign service personnel stationed in western germany than we did in all of africa we had more people coming to this country sponsored by the federal government 10 years ago then we do today we offered more scholarships to the congo in june than we did to all of africa the year before and of the 300 scholarships that we offered to the congo less than 7 congolese citizens are now studying in the united states we gave more aid to yugoslavia since the end of the war up to a year ago then we gave to all latin america until the inter american bank was founded until we broke with castro on the sugar quota and decided we had almost ignored the needs of this vital hemisphere and why is it that the candidate for the presidency of brazil feels it incumbent upon him for his political safety to take a journey to see castro not the president of the united states to see castro in order to build his political fences in brazil mr nixon says our prestige has never been higher yet on the question of admission of red china only two countries voted with us the night before in the debate he called attention to the vote in the u n as evidence of our high prestige the next day two countries in africa voted with us one liberia bound to us by ancient ties and the other the union of south africa hardly a country which enjoys close solidarity with the rest of africa more countries voted against us in asia than voted for us i mention these things not because they are a source of satisfaction to any american but because not only do i think we must do better but i think we can do better i do not hold the idea at all that there is any inevitability about this movement i do not believe that the communists have something to offer africa and latin america and asia superior to what we offer i believe that in addition to freedom our system does permit a development of the resources of the country i believe with help india can prove it and i believe it incumbent upon us to meet our responsibilities in this area through long range loans of the kind that this administration has been unwilling to sponsor so i would say the problems are difficult but that should not faze a country which has passed through the experiences that we have had in our long history but it certainly cannot say that the present leadership based on its experience deserves another term i believe that on that basis the american people who know just as well as anyone else the exact place in history that they are now occupying who can judge the current of the tide of history as well as anyone else in the world who know generally whether the tide is moving in their favor or not who can look to outer space and look to the home across the street know that this country is not meeting its maximum capability i do not downgrade america i do not downgrade america i downgrade the prospective leadership which is offered by the republican party mr nixon says the party doesn t matter at least he said that yesterday and he also said the party did matter in an earlier speech but whichever view you take and you can have your pick whichever view you take i believe the party does matter the kind of candidates the party puts forward estes kefauver would never have run as a republican nor would congressman lankford or congressman foley there is a difference between the two parties there is a difference in their judgment of the future there is certainly a difference in their record of the past and therefore the same political party which could vote nearly 90 to 1 against social security in 1935 could vote against medical care with only 1 vote for it in 1960 or the same party that voted 95 percent against the 25 cent minimum wage in 1935 could be opposed to 1 25 in 1960 i believe that individuals and parties have characteristics and therefore the republican candidates could run from the 20th century on slogans like stand pat with mckinley and return to normalcy with harding and keep cool with coolidge i don t know what dewey s slogan was because he never worked it out in any case i come tonight and ask your support in this very important campaign i feel that this campaign has an opportunity to render a service and that is that when the campaign is over in my judgment the american people will have made their choice and their choice will be progress their choice will be to move off dead center their choice will be to move into the 1960 s their choice will be to assume the burdens and responsibilties of leadership their choice will be yes to the next 10 years their choice will be the choice they have made in other great crises of our history in 1860 when the choice was somewhat similar in this country the question of whether the world would exist and this country would exist half slave and half free lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates unjustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand and is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming and we see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready dem jfk16 10 60c john_f _kennedy thank you very much girls senator allen frear congressman mcdowell governor to be carvell mr potter state chairman national committeewoman ladies and gentlemen i want to apologize for keeping you waiting i was not playing golf we were over in new jersey campaigning but i have come here for several reasons first because i think the important thing that the citizens of delaware return to the u s senate allen frear who has been a responsible senator and who i know will fight for this state and country once he returns to washington as a member of important committees in the senate so i join with him today and hope that you will support him at election time november 8 and reelect him to the u s senate and my friend and colleague in the house of representatives your congressman from this state who has served as i did on the house foreign affairs committee who has brought to foreign policy a recognition that this country must begin to move forward must extend its influence around the world with greater vigor and i am confident that delaware will reelect to the house of representatives harris mcdowell and also reelect as governor the biggest governor in the country and also from a small state of delaware send a governor who will speak for this state and fight for it i know you will elect again as you did in 1948 your next governor governor carvell and when you have done all that kennedy is the name i come here today and i must confess that i am finding greater difficulty running against mr nixon than i had imagined the reason is not because he is such a magnificent debater and it is not because he is using new lighting but because his positions change so fast that it is very difficult to know where he stands and therefore it is very difficult to know what policy he is advocating for our country in the future for example for 10 days he took on the islands of quemoy and matsu an entirely different position than the president of the united states has taken since 1955 he attempted to involve us in a commitment of those islands as a matter of principle when the fact of the matter is that the president of the united states and mr dulles and secretary herter has never taken that position now if he agrees with the president and his view on quemoy and matsu i agree with him and have agreed with it for several years and i am glad to have mr nixon come back home mr nixon has campaigned around the country that parties don t mean very much what counts is the man and yet yesterday he went to arizona and in the heartland of senator goldwater he said he is supporting the republican ticket from top to bottom and if there was a single republican he could not support he would get out of the party he is in the party he is in the party and so is mundt curtis dirksen and goldwater and they are the people with whom we have a very sharp disagreement a disagreement about the problems of our country about what must be done if this country is going to remain secure i do not run for the office of the presidency and i don t come to this community or state and tell you that if i am elected life will be easy i think to be a citizen of the united states in the next 10 years will require us to assume great responsibilities and great burdens but i do believe that we have an obligation not only to ourselves but to all those who wish to live their lives in freedom around the globe during the american revolution thomas paine said that the cause of america is the cause of all mankind now in 1960 in a very real sense the cause of all mankind is the cause of america if we remain strong here in the country if we are building a more vigorous society if we are meeting our responsibilities in this country and around the world then we strengthen not only ourselves but we strengthen the cause of freedom the reason that franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor in the united states because he believed that this society must not stand still it must move that we must provide greater opportunity for our people that we must build our strength and in building our strength we strengthen the cause of freedom all around the globe wherever it hangs in doubt now the issue which separates mr nixon and myself and on this issue the people of delaware must make their own sober judgment and i believe the issue is quite clear whether the united states now is at the peak of its power mr nixon says and runs on the slogan we ve never had it so good he says our prestige in the world has never been so high that our strength relative to the communists is increasing i hold a different view and i believe it incumbent upon all of us who bear any position of responsibility that we state the facts i do not believe our position is at a high i do not believe our prestige is steadily growing i do not believe that our strength is relative to the communists steadily increasing i believe we have to do better it is that great question which you must decide yourselves after looking here in this state and country and making our own judgment of the stream of events around the world you must decide do you think we are secure do you think we are doing enough do you think our prestige is higher than it has even been do you feel the balance of power in the world is shifting in our direction do you feel that the communist threat is disappearing do you feel our position in latin america is stronger than a decade ago or that the balance of power in africa is moving with us or that we are meeting the problems of people all around the globe in expressing ourselves with vigor are we meeting the problems that we face in this country when we have 50 percent of our steel capacity unused when nearly 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college when the soviet union which in 1950 was producing half as many scientists and engineers as we are now produces twice as many and its economic growth is three times ours and ours is less not only than the soviet union but of france germany italy i believe the united states moves through a difficult time i believe we can move through it successfully but i certainly do not believe we can do so if we have leaders who do not tell us the facts who say as demosthenes said 2 000 years ago to the athenians our peril comes from those who seek to please us rather than serve us i believe on this occasion we serve the people can you possibly say that our power is increasing when you know that next winter and next spring the united states will face a most serious crisis over berlin at a time when our strength is not rising in relation to that of the communists do you feel that this administration has solved the problem of unemployment when we have more people out of work now this fall than any time except for the three postwar recessions do you feel that your children are going to get jobs when you realize that we have to find 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 10 years in order to provide employment for our people i believe this country can meet its responsibilities to its own citizens and those around the world but i think we have to do better than we are doing and that is the issue do you agree i think you do i think as americans you do agree this country is as i said the hope of freedom but unless we show vigor unless we show foresight unless we are able to develop in the minds of people around the globe an image of ourselves as a society which is on the move then it seems to me we have lost a most important struggle do you realize that the united states has not had a program in the voice of america in spanish to latin america any time in the last 8 years except for the 3 months of the hungarian crisis do you realize that we brought more foreign students to study in the united states 10 years ago that we do today do you realize that we got less votes at the united nations on the admission of red china than ever before in our history and that in all of africa only two countries voted with us 10 days ago mr nixon points to the votes at the u n as evidence of our high prestige two countries voted with us on the question of the admission of red china liberia and the union of south africa every other country either voted against us or abstained yesterday the new york herald tribune said we had given up hope that laos would remain an independent country out of the communist orbit mr nixon says he is going to spend the next 3 weeks talking about quemoy and matsu i am delighted to engage him in discussion if it serves a national purpose but i want him to address himself to the problems in this country to our problems in cuba to our problems in latin america to our problems around the world and tell us how he is going i am not interested in engaging in foreign policy debates in order to gain a partisan advantage but as i said a week ago i say today those islands are not worth the bones and i quote admiral yarnell of a single american soldier the united states will meet its treaty commitments i support the position of the president mr nixon says he does too now mr nixon let us talk about some of the real problems that this country faces how are you going to move this economy ahead and provide employment for our people how are you going to build the homes which need to be built how are you going to provide for the implementation of the supreme court decision of 1954 mr nixon sent senator goldwater through the south saying he does not mean anything he says on civil rights and senator scott of pennsylvania through the north assuring the negroes that he is with them all the way he gives a commitment to the repeal of the connally amendment and then when senator goldwater objects he puts forward new reservations i stand where the democratic party has always stood and i stand to make it very clear that i stand with pride as a democrat in 1960 i stand where franklin roosevelt stood in 1932 and where woodrow wilson stood in 1912 and where harry truman stood in 1948 i stand there because i believe that after 8 years after the last 8 years the united states is preparing i believe another great movement forward in our history and i believe as we release our energy as a nation the democratic party with all of its vitality with all recognition that it is an old party i believe in 1960 the democratic party fits the needs of our time we need progress and i believe that progress is our most important commodity i think we stood for progress and we stand for it in 1960 so i come here today and ask your help the democrats have a majority in the state of delaware but we have not always carried delaware now this year i come up here and ask your assistance in this campaign i do it not merely because i am the candidate but because i really believe that this country is worthy of our best efforts i really believe that we have a chance to serve the united states i really believe that it is possible for us in the next 4 years to so indicate our vitality and strength to set before the american people our unfinished business so that people around the world will once more feel that we are on the move again they stand today on the razor edge of decision trying to decide whether the future belongs to us or to the communists i believe it belongs to us but if it is going to belong to us if people around the world are going to decide to follow our leadership we must lead we must set an example we must meet our own problems we must hold out a helping hand to them that is our opportunity i cannot believe that given that free choice the american people are going to decide to stand still i think they are going to move and i can assure you that if we are successful in this campaign we will give leadership to the country and the united states will move forward again thank you dem jfk16 10 60d john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen congressman foley congressman lankford senator i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming here tonight and also to express my hope that the state of maryland will send back to the u s congress congressman foley and congressman lankford who have served their districts and have served the united states i come here tonight as a candidate for the office of the presidency of the united states and i run for that office with full recognition that the united states is moving through a most difficult and dangerous time but can move through it i believe with renewed vigor and confidence if it is given leadership and i do not believe that mr nixon since his nomination has indicated any understanding or willingness to face up to the problems that this country faces i find myself running against many candidates i run against the old nixon and the new nixon i run against a man who in may could write to clarence budington kelland of arizona that he had been all his life and i quote him an economic conservative and who could say this week in california that he was a practical progressive i run against a man who wanted to send american troops into indochina in 1954 and yet could say last year at the time of difficulty in tibet that he was unconcerned about the communist advance in that area i run against a man who on this desperate occasion in the life of the free world can say that our prestige has never been higher that our strength has been unequaled that this country is on the ascendency that if u n and other standards are used to test our prestige it is secure and could not be better i could not disagree more it seems to me that the basic responsibility for the next president of the united states is to do what franklin roosevelt did in the 1930 s to set before our country its unfinished business and only the president of the united states could do that not the senate i represent massachusetts in the senate and senator engle represents california but only the president of the united states speaks for massachusetts and california only the president of the united states speaks for the united states i believe it incumbent upon the next president to set before us the things we must do in order to maintain our strength in order to build a more vigorous society in order that the people of our country may express better the real opportunities of freedom and in order that we may hold out ourselves to the world as an example as we sit on a most conspicuous stage of what freedom would really be that is the assignment and the burden that all of us as citizens of this country must bear in the 1960 s i do not run for the presidency with any expectation that life will be easy for any of us but i do run with the greatest possible confidence in the vitality of our system in our ability to move forward in our willingness to assume all challenges that come our way once we are given the direction once we are given the leadership once we are informed of what our goals must be if we are going to protect ourselves and those who look to us for help i think franklin roosevelt set before us in his second acceptance speech in 1936 the issues which separate our two parties in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference and i believe in the plight of our schools the decline of american agriculture our inability at this competetive time to maintain full employment and full use of our facilities in our policy of no new starts in the development of our natural resources in our willingness to accept a secondary position in the development of scientists and engineers and the building of our cities i believe that we have followed too often in this administration the words which t s eliot wrote in his poem the rock and the wind shall say these were a decent people their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls we can do better than that so i come here tonight to southern maryland and ask your support in this campaign i ask you to join us all those who regardless of age look to the future all those who regardless of their party are concerned about the fate of their country all those who wish us to meet our responsibilities both at home and abroad all those who wish the united states to move again we come here and ask your help during the american revolution of 1776 thomas paine said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind now i believe in the 1960 s we return that service and the cause of all mankind is the cause of america i am confident that this country will move ahead i am confident that the 1960 s can be not as dickens says the worst days but the best of days i am confident that the democratic party will be called once again to assume its historic task of providing leadership in a dangerous time in the life of our country thank you dem jfk16 9 60 john_f _kennedy governor members of congress mr chairman national committeeman national committeewoman ladies and gentlemen i first of all want to express my appreciation to you and to the people of maryland for their generous support to me in may which made it possible for me to win the nomination and made it possible for me to be here tonight i would like to set aside on this occasion my role as democratic nominee and speak tonight as a citizen of the united states i would like to set aside on this occasion those issues that divide us and speak instead of what unites us and i would like to address my remarks not only to the people of maryland and america but also to the ruler of the soviet union i know something about mr khrushchev whom i met a year ago in the senate foreign relations committee and i know something about the nature and history of his country which i visited in 1939 mr khrushchev himself it is said told the story a few years ago about the russian who began to run through the kremlin shouting khrushchev is a fool khrushchev is a fool he was sentenced the premier said to 23 years in prison 3 for insulting the party secretary and 20 for revealing a state secret but mr khrushchev is not a fool and we ought to realize that before he comes he is shrewd he is vigorous he is informed and he is competent he is not putting on an act when he talks about the inevitable triumph of the communist system for this is what he believes and this is what he is determined to achieve and this is what we in this nation are equally determined to prevent we would not and could not prevent mr khrushchev coming here at the head of the soviet delegation we did not invite you but i think most americans would agree that we would rather meet at the u n than in nuclear combat but nevertheless the american people are wondering mr khrushchev why you decided to come at your last chance to discuss with us the world s drift toward war you not only sabotaged the summit conference but insulted the president of the united states as well and americans of all parties regard an insult to the president as an insult to every citizen surely you do not believe that you can use the united nations as a forum for your discourtesies nor can you believe that this country would ever be intimidated by your threats that is not our tradition during the american revolution and just before samuel adams from my own state of massachusetts following the boston massacre went to call on the british governor the governor warned of mass arrests samuel adams warned of the american revolution it was then he wrote in his diary that i saw his knees tremble but samuel adams knees did not tremble and our knees do not tremble today before the threat of rockets or mass intimidation why then mr khrushchev have you decided to come it has been suggested that there are four possible reasons for your visit to the united states first it has been suggested that it is your objective to pose as a champion of disarmament you are said to be bringing new disarmament proposals with you if they are at all constructive and negotiable i hope we in this country will stand ready to consider them but the bible the one book with which you may not be familiar warns us against those of whom it may be said the words of his mouth were as smooth as butter but war was in his heart for the cold war the korean war the indochina war and ever present threat of new war have all been initiated by the communists and not by the west today you are threatening and encouraging further disorders in latin america africa southeast asia germany and the middle east you have defied and hamstrung the united nations in the congo yet you now come talking of disarmament under the old english legal maxim he who seeks equity must come with clean hands and you do not come to the united states mr khrushchev with clean hands i believe that this country can do more for peace than it has done i am not satisfied to have only 100 experts scattered through the u s government working on the sensitive and complex issue of disarmament i regret that our negotiators at previous disarmament conferences too often have been ill prepared ill advised and ill staffed we sincerely desire to live at peace with our neighbors we abhor the idea of conquest while you and your chinese friends in particular talk of peace only while you work to undermine it second it has been suggested that you are coming to the united nations to talk of colonialism there will be controversial issues on this question questions on which the west is not wholly prepared or united the algerian problem in particular has been allowed to fester too long without a solution until now the commitments and bitterness on both sides have made any settlement difficult but the record of the west especially in recent years the french and british in africa and asia in encouraging the political and economic independence of their own colonies is in sharp contrast with the soviet record as the most ruthless colonial power in the history of the world to rail against colonialism while holding an iron empire in your grasp all the way from east berlin to vietnam in the half circle is to achieve new heights of hypocrisy to bring with you your puppet rulers of your satellite states only indicates to us that while there may be satellite rulers there are never satellite peoples and any u n debate on the subject of colonialism should bring out the subject of the soviet union s butchery in budapest perhaps in the coming year by probing new areas you will be able to add to your satellites in cuba and possibly in the congo but i cannot believe particularly if we win to this country again all those friends who used to support the united states abroad because they admired our example here at home i cannot believe that in the long run the people of these two nations will not be willing to accept your type of dictatorship instead of the road to freedom which we offer them third mr khrushchev it has been suggested that you come to the united nations in order to flaunt the supposed advantages of your system over ours without doubt if you succeed in putting a man into outer space and bringing him back alive you will have scored another impressive triumph it would confirm your lead in rocket thrust and there are many of us who are deeply concerned about it we are concerned too that your economy is growing at a faster rate than ours and we are concerned that you are producing scientists and engineers at twice the rate of the united states and you may be tempted to make the most of these differences but this country is still far from fitting your description of a senile capitalistic system that is about to collapse into the ground for while you may be an expert on karl marx karl marx was not an expert on the united states i think the united states is still capable of achieving greater heights than we have ever achieved in the past it is still capable of building all the defenses that we need and all the schools and hospitals that our people require and help stabilize the non communist world at the same time we have our share of low paid workers and poor housing but ours is the exception and yours is the rule and our teachers and other citizens who may on occasion complain would not for the world change our system to yours whatever propaganda value you may seek in enticing two defectors across your borders in recent weeks the fact of the matter is since the end of world war ii the steady flow has been from the communist world to freedom across the iron curtain for people around the world know mr khrushchev that while you may learn on occasion to bring a man back from outer space alive you rarely bring them back from siberia in short mr khrushchev it is not your system that is making progress toward the future it is our system you must still maintain your political monopoly through secret police and the threat of concentration camps and the people of the world including your own want more than economic progress they want peace and freedom which is ultimately why we are going to prevail fourth and finally mr khrushchev it has been suggested that your objective is to divide our country in the middle of an election let me say as emphatically as i can those tactics will not work you may try to praise or condemn one candidate or another you may try to express directly or indirectly your preferences or your doubts but the american people are not going to be influenced in this election by what the kremlin does or says or does not say you may not be familiar with our free elections mr khrushchev because you do not know what free elections are so perhaps you have been misled into believing that we are a divided country or that one side favors appeasement or that the humiliation of our president would be pleasing to his political opponents nothing could be further from the truth for democrats and republicans and independents alike are united in our opposition to your system and everything it stands for in our hatred for war in our stand for peace and in our refusal to tolerate appeasement you may hear us inquiring into our lost prestige our shaky defenses our lack of leadership but do not be deceived the democratic party is not preaching disunity our program is not one that will please you the democratic party wants to win this election not to preside over the liquidation of the free world or the destruction of mankind but to achieve peace and regain our security and rebuild america s strength once we are as strong as we need to be and can be militarily economically scientifically and politically i think then you will want to talk more sensibly with us you will want to talk peace with us i think then you will want to avoid the catastrophe of an arms race the spread of war and the spread of nuclear weapons i think then that you may want the benefits of a world truly at peace with a greater flow of goods and ideas and people between our two nations but until we can achieve that balance our task here is to remain strong and alert and moving ahead a great poet once wrote the world is large when its weary leagues two loving hearts divide but the world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side tonight we know that our world grows smaller every day that our enemy is loose that he is coming now even to our side of the world but we shall neither be deceived nor dismayed neither shall we retreat for while there may be fearless men in both of our countries mr khrushchev this is not only the home of the brave it is also the home of the free and in the long run mr khrushchev that will make the difference thank you dem jfk16 9 60a john_f _kennedy governor lawrence senator clark mr rice ladies and gentlemen i heard this was the strongest democratic town in this part of pennsylvania my message is a simple one there have been three democratic presidents in this century woodrow wilson who stood for the new freedom franklin roosevelt who stood for the new deal harry truman who stood for the fair deal there have been a number of republican presidents mckinley whose motto was stand pat harding whose motto was return to normalcy coolidge whose motto was keep cool with coolidge hoover whose motto was a chicken in every pot landon dewey and the others these slogans i think indicate a whole state of mind and that is the republican policy which in my opinion has prevented the passage or has attempted to block the passage of every single piece of progressive legislation from wilson s federal reserve board to our attempt to provide medical care for the aged in the last session of the congress can you tell me one piece of new legislation which benefits our people that has been passed in the last 8 years i can t name one the point is that we pay for that every time the president vetoes a housing bill every time a republican member votes against the 1 25 minimum wage every time we are unable to get any support on our bill to tie medical care for the aged to social security it is not the congress that suffers it is not the administration it is the people of the united states who require in my opinion a progressive forward looking government if this country is going to move forward it is no accident that 400 000 people in a rich state like pennsylvania wait every month for surplus food packages from the federal government it is no wonder with the policies which are restrictive which fail to look ahead that the steel mills of this state work 50 percent of capacity i think we can do better than that and i think when this country moves ahead here at home when oar people are working when our economy is moving then our power and influence increases around the world franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor to latin america because he was a good neighbor of the united states you cannot separate a strong foreign policy from a strong vigorous domestic economy so i ask your help in this campaign i served for 14 years in the congress and i can say after that long time that i think this country is powerful i think it is great but i think it can be more powerful and i think it can be greater i am not satisfied to see mr castro and mr khrushchev quarantined in manhattan and moving around the world i ask your help in this campaign i think it is time we recognized that there are new frontiers to cross in the 1960 s and we can cross them thank you for your help i can assure you that if we are successful we are going to move in the 1960 s thank you dem jfk16 9 60b john_f _kennedy mr mayor governor senator clark mayor dilworth fellow candidates on the democratic ticket mrs price ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to the mayor and to the governor senator clark and to all of you for coming out this morning and giving us a warm welcome i run for the office of the presidency in a very difficult time in the life of our country i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that if we are elected life will be easy and the problems all solved i think the 1960 s are going to be difficult for us all but i do think that the contribution which the democratic party can make on this occasion is in many ways comparable to the contribution it made during the lifetime of three great presidents in this century woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman and i think the common denominator of all their servies the common threat that ran through the administrations of these three americans during the 20th century was their faith in this country their faith in its unlimited capacity to meet our problems here at home and lead the free world all over the globe i think that can still be done my argument with the republicans is not because i do not believe that they share our aspirations for this country my argument is that they have been content with too little they have been content with an economy which has expanded too little we in this state of pennsylvania know better than almost any state in the union that we are not realizing our potential when half of the steel mill capacity in this state is unused and therefore half of the steelworkers in this state do not find a good job then you know that a basic asset which distinguishes us from our adversaries the productive capacity of the united states is not being used when the prestige and power of the united states around the globe deteriorates in relation to that of the communist power then we know we are not meeting our responsibilities because if the united states is not the great defender of freedom no other country is if we fail the cause of freedom fails if we succeed the cause of freedom succeeds and i don t think there is any american regardless of party who can possibly feel as secure as he did 5 6 or 7 years ago all over the globe the communists have been on the move it is not merely cuba it is through other sections of latin america africa and asia this question is not going to be solved in 1960 but i don t want a historian in 1970 to write that it was during these years of our responsibility that the tide began to go out for freedom that the influence of the united states as a great world power began to fade and that the future began to move in the direction of the communists this is a great country but i think we can make it a greater country and it is a powerful country but i think we can make it a more powerful country i ask your help in this election mostly because i believe that while the future may be hazardous for us all i do think we can move ahead i think we can play our traditional role and i think if we do not do it we fail ourselves and the cause of freedom i ask your help in this election i think here in the state of pennsylvania this election may well be decided i ask your assistance not merely for my own candidacy but because i believe that we have a great opportunity to serve freedom around the world and in so doing serve ourselves thank you dem jfk16 9 60c john_f _kennedy senator clark my friends and colleagues ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for being kind enough to come out and welcome a candidate for the democratic nomination i run for the democratic nomination at a very difficult time but i don t think that there is anyone in this city who feels that there are no longer any major issues between the two parties i think there are just as many issues today as there were in the 1930 s or the 1940 s or there were during the administration of woodrow wilson the fact of the matter is that i cannot think of a single piece of progressive legislation recommended initially by this administration during the past 8 years during the last session of the congress in august we attempted to pass a bill which i considered to be vitally needed which is to provide medical protection for the aged under social security we received the support of 44 democratic senators and 1 republican senator and we were warned that there would be a veto when we tried to pass a bill to provide 1 25 minimum wage which is 50 a week for our workers we passed it in the senate and we were warned that if we passed it in the conference it would be vetoed the fact of the matter is that the republican party in this century has said no to progress and the democrats have said yes i ask your help in this campaign i think that what we must do is not only rebuild the strength of the united states in foreign policy but i think if the united states is going to be strong abroad it must also be strong at home you cannot live in the state of pennsylvania which is one of the great industrial states of this country and have only 50 percent of the steel capacity of the united states working if the soviet union destroyed one half of our steel capacity we would think we had been ruined and yet by the economic policies followed by this administration our steel mills are working 44 percent of capacity i think we can do better i think we must do better i ask your help in this campaign this is an important election the issues which divide the republican party and the democratic party are the issues which have divided us in this century woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal all were programs on behalf of the american people and they were opposed in their day as we are in our day by a republican party whose motto has been no new starts no new starts any place in the united states as a result the strength the power the influence and the prestige of the united states has deteriorated relative to that of the communists around the world when we are strong when we are moving ahead in the united states then we are moving ahead abroad the reason franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was that he was a good neighbor to the american people i ask your help in this campaign not saying that if we are elected life will be easy but saying that if we are elected we are going to move ahead on education and housing and care for the aged on all the programs which face us in the 1960 s to make a strong and vital country equality of opportunity for all americans regardless of their race or their religion this is the great challenge of the new frontier during the american constitutional convention there was a painting in the state of pennsylvania in the city of philadelphia there was a painting of a sun low on the horizon behind the desk of general washington and at the conclusion many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising or a setting sun at the end benjamin franklin stood up and said because of what we have done here today we now know it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i think in the revolutions of the 1960 s if we take the path of progress if we look forward not backward it can be for the united states and the free world a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk16 9 60d john_f _kennedy governor tawes mr kaul mayor grady mrs otenesek mr birmingham mr goldstone senator goodman attorney general ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to both the governor of your state to my friend and colleague in the congress your congressman whom i hope you are going to return not only for the benefit of this district but also for the country congressman danny brewster who has been our host today and also my appreciation to you for two things first because you are kind enough to stand up and listen at the end of a long day and also because it was my success in the maryland primary that helped make it possible for me to win the nomination and secure the support of the maryland delegation at the convention so having gotten me halfway around the track i would like to have you push me the rest of the way home i run for the office of the presidency in probably the most difficult and dangerous time in the life our country i heard president eisenhower speaking at a dinner some months ago saying that while he had a personal preference for president he could predict that after the first week of commitment which the next president would have that the chiefs of staff would come some afternoon and say that the united states is faced with a difficult and dangerous situation someplace in the world and what did he the president think they should do i don t think that there is any doubt that during the next 4 years the task of the president the burdens that will be placed upon him the responsibilities which all americans must meet will be heavier than they have been any time since the administration of abraham lincoln so i do not run for the presidency feeling it is a ceremonial or caretaker s office i run for the presidency because i feel strongly that the united states has a great role to fulfill in the world to maintain its own freedom and to serve as the chief defender of freedom around the world i don t think that there is any american who has lived through the past few years who can possibly feel that the balance of power is moving in our direction i think this is a great country but i think we can make it a greater country and i think it is a powerful country but i think we can make it more powerful all over africa and asia and latin america i think the prestige and influence and the image of the united states as a revolutionary and free country is diminished i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the foreign relations committee twenty years ago african nationalists quoted roosevelt lincoln and jefferson but today thousands of young students thousands of their trade unionists and those who will be leaders go to school in moscow or czechoslovakia or eastern germany or peking and come back because they believe that we are tired and that the communist system represents the way to the future i think we represent the way to the future but the reason that franklin roosevelt was able to be a good neighbor to latin america was because he was a good neighbor in the united states because we were on the move here in america the reason that woodrow wilson was able to extend his 14 points was because they were a logical extension of his new freedom which carried the day here in this country the same is true of the truman fair deal which had its partnership in the marshall plan abroad i speak of the 1960 s as a new frontier and i don t speak of the 1960 s or my own candidacy in the sense of promising that life will be easy if i am elected the new frontier of which i speak is the opportunity for all of us to be of service to the great republic in a difficult and dangerous time during the campaign of 1860 lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and that he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe we are ready thank you dem jfk16 9 60e john_f _kennedy thank you very much i want to express my great appreciation for a very nice introduction by a distinguished son of the great state of pennsylvania former governor leader i appreciate that very much indeed i am delighted to be here with governor lawrence who has traveled with me through this state today i must say that the pennsylvania dutch have been very generous since early morning i come as the standard bearer for the democratic party which is as you know the oldest political party in the history of this country dating back all the way to thomas jefferson and andrew jackson our roots are deep in the soil of the united states we represent the only national party in this country we represent farmers in maine steelworkers in pennsylvania and farmers in pennsylvania we represent farmers and pioneers in the state of alaska and ranchers in texas i think the great contribution which the democratic party has made since its earliest inception has been its sense of looking forward to the new of breaking new ground jefferson did it jackson did it cleveland did it woodrow wilson stood for the new freedom franklin roosevelt for the new deal harry truman for the fair deal adlai stevenson for the new america and now i run on a platform which i call the new frontier no democratic president in this century has run on a plank or a platform or a program which can be entitled as mckinley s was stand pat with mckinley no democratic president kept cool with coolidge or returned to normalcy with harding or had enough in 1946 or today you never had it so good i think this country has not had it so good i am not pleased as an american nor do i feel secure as a citizen of the free world to see the power and prestige and the influence from the united states declining in relation to that of the communist world because there are no second chances in this life there are no chances that we can turn to other powers to defend our interests as in world war i and world war ii when other countries turned to help us we stand as the last thin line between the spread of communism and a free world if we fail here if we don t fulfill our potential if our society is not expanding and developing then we fail not only ourselves but we fail the cause of freedom i don t think since the time of athens 2 000 years ago has any people had placed upon them the same burden of responsibilities that we have placed here until we build a strong country here until we have full employment in the united states until our economy is expanding until there is a sense of vitality here in this country in our life then our influence will spread or if it does not it won t spread latin america africa and asia stand today on a thin line of decision attempting to determine which way the future lies does it lie with khrushchev and peking or does it lie with us i think it lies with us but i think it must be made to lie with us by our own efforts and our own exertions i don t run for the office of the presidency promising an easy life and i don t run for the office of the presidency promising that if i am elected the problems of this country will be over they won t be over i think our life will be hazardous in the 1960 s and 1970 s but i think if we remain strong here if we have a defense second to none if our economy is expanding then i think the world will determine that the future lies with us if we ever stayed second to the soviet union or the chinese if our economy is on a plateau if we are not moving ahead in this country then we won t move ahead around the world in the next 10 years the united states is going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week if we are going to maintain full employment for our population i don t think the republican party in the last 8 years or in this century has been willing to take this country and move it forward as franklin roosevelt and wilson did in their day i think we have a great opportunity for service i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join with me in a journey into the 1960 s whereby we will mold our strength and become first again not first if not first but and not first when but first and i want the people of the world to wake up and wonder not what mr khrushchev is doing or what the chinese communists are doing but i want them to wonder what the united states is doing i ask your help in this campaign thank you dem jfk17 10 60 john_f _kennedy governor di salle candidates for congress mr state chairman state senator distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen during the contest between lincoln and general mcclellan in 1864 and when the issue was still in doubt as to who would be president in january 1865 he received word that ohio had voted for him and he sent word that night thank god ohio has saved the union well on the night of november 8 i would like to send a similar wire if that is all right with you i would like to see ohio go democratic i would like to send a wire to your distinguished governor saying thank god ohio has gone democratic again when i was on meet the press last night i was reminded that i had come to ohio seven times in the last 3 months that is a lot of times but i come to ohio because in my judgment this state may be decisive in the election of the next president of the united states and on your judgment on your sense of the future of this country on your estimate of our present position and the needs of our country may well hang the determination as to which party which candidate which political philosophy will lead the united states in the dangerous years of the 1960 s mr nixon has stated mr nixon has said the goals of our two parties are the same where we differ are the means i don t accept that view at all we have disagreed mr nixon considers a minimum wage of 1 25 to be extreme mr nixon considers federal aid to make sure that teachers are paid a decent salary to be extreme mr nixon believes a housing bill which will build homes for our people is extreme mr nixon believes that medical care for our older citizens tied to social security is extreme we disagree on the goals of our country and we disagree on the means of attaining these goals and it is a source of interest to me that i feel that it would be in the interest of this country for mr nixon and i to continue these discussions on tv to have a fifth debate i received word today that mr nixon would not agree to a fifth debate i don t understand anyone who can stand up to mr khrushchev can argue with mr khrushchev can put his finger in mr khrushchev s face who isn t willing to meet his democratic competitor here in the united states maybe it is easier to do it over there but i think it would be advantageous for the people of this country to hear us on television to discuss how we shall win the peace and maintain our freedom how we shall build the economy of this country how we shall provide full employment for our people how we shall carry on and turn the balance of power in our direction that certainly is worth an hour of mr nixon s time in the last 18 days of the campaign i stand tonight where franklin roosevelt began his campaign in 1932 for the presidency of the united states here in this state in this very city he came here and began the new deal he began the march forward that resulted in the progress of the thirties and the forties he laid the groundwork on which we run now in 1960 during franklin roosevelt s second speech when he accepted the nomination for the second time before 100 000 people in franklin field in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference and that is the choice the people of this country have do you want a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference do you want a government that moves this country forward that sets before the american people the unfinished agenda the things we must do if we are going to maintain our freedom and the freedom of those who look to us for help that is the issue and in my judgment it is as important an issue as this country ever faced it is my judgment a question as to whether the united states is meeting its responsibilities here at home and abroad whether the tide of history is moving in our favor or that of the communists whether our prestige has been at a record high as mr nixon says it is and that of the communists at a new low or whether historians will say in 1970 that in these years the united states stood still in these years the communist advance increased in these years in latin america and africa and asia the image of the united states as a vital power began to fade that is the question that you must decide as voters no one else will make that decision you must determine whether in your judgment this country must do more in order to move ahead whether what we are doing now is enough or whether we must do better that is the basic question it is on that question that we differ it is on that question that our two parties divide and it is a question that only you can answer on november 8 i want to make it perfectly clear where i stand i believe that this is a great country but it must be greater i believe this is a powerful country but it must be more powerful i do not believe the tide of history is moving in our favor i do not believe that we are doing enough i do not believe that we occupy a position in latin america and africa and asia as strong as we did a decade ago i do not believe that our relative position in the world militarily vis a vis the soviet union is as strong as it was a decade ago i am not satisfied as an american where 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never get to college i am not satisfied as an american to have the soviet union producing twice as many scientists and engineers as we are i am not satisfied as an american to have them first on the moon nor am i satisfied as an american to know that in the united states today we use only 50 percent of our steel capacity and there are 100 000 steelworkers out of work i am not satisfied with those things and you have to determine whether you are and the fortunate thing is that when you read about cuba when you read about khrushchev in the united nations when you read about the problems that disturb us you can do something about it you can make a judgment that this country must go ahead you can make a judgment to place responsibility on those who believe it must move you can make a judgment to sustain us in this election and on that basis i come here tonight and ask your help as long as there are 15 million americans who live in substandard homes as long as the average wage for laundry women in five large cities of the united states and most of them are negroes is 65 cents for a 48 hour week as long as the average unemployment compensation check in this rich country is less than 31 a week for a man out of work to support his family as long as nearly 5 million americans live on a surplus food package from the government that amounts to 5 cents a day per person as long as in cuba and in other places in latin america as long as africa begins to turn against us as long as we no longer possess an image in the world of a society on the move so long is there need for our party on this occasion and i come and ask your support i do not want it said in our generation i do not want it said of americans what t s eliot wrote in his poem the rock and the wind shall say these were decent people their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls we can do better than that we do not want to take the cash and let the credit go nor heed the rumble of a distant drum i can predict to you that if this country does not make a decision for progress on november 8 if we continue in our present sense of urgency which is a lack of it if we select leadership which believes that everything is right in its time then i believe that we will judge 4 years from now that we have made a serious error we have a chance to correct the future we have a chance to participate in it we have a chance to rejoin the world as a leader of the free world we have a chance to build in this country the kind of society which people all over the world who want to be free say this is the direction i want to go and it is on that basis not saying that life is easy not saying that if i am elected the problems will easily be solved but promising that if i am elected this country will start to move again this country will start to meet its responsibilities i leave ohio tonight and i go to miami fla and we come back again on november 4 in the meanwhile the campaign has 3 weeks to go and i hope in those 3 weeks it will be possible for those of us who are devoted to our country those of us who wish to serve it it will be possible for us to communicate to the american people the serious prospects which lie in store for us the bright future which can be ours the necessity for us to move as we moved before in other great times woodrow wilson once said the success of a party means little unless it is being used by the nation for a great purpose the great purpose which i would like to see the nation use the democratic party for is to provide leadership to set before the american people the unfinished business of our generation our generation of americans also has a rendezvous with destiny and i believe they can meet it on november 8 during the constitutional convention there was behind the desk of general washington a painting of a sun low on the horizon and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising sun or a setting sun and after the constitution had been agreed to benjamin franklin stood up he said we now know because of our decision this day that it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day now in our days if we make a choice yes if we make a choice for forward motion if we make the choice for progress if we say we are going to move in the sixties i believe it can be a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk17 10 60a john_f _kennedy mr chairman governor di salle chairman holbrooke distinguished democrats ladies and gentlemen in the first place i am grateful to the governor for what he said there used to be an old expression that ohio is the mother of presidents you have run more candidates for the presidency than any other state of the union but in a very real sense i believe that ohio has had a maternal effect on my candidacy when the governor announced his support for me last january it was the first major support we had received after becoming a candidate and his support and the support of the delegation in july his present support and your support and i hope the support of the state of ohio in november i think will let us win i would like to congratulate the butler county democrats this is about the size program that they have in new york city or philadelphia at some major evening meetings at which all the important democrats from around the country come up but to do all this for breakfast in the morning arrange this program and for all of you to contribute the way you have i think shows that you really believe that a political party should serve the nation and this time the democratic party can serve not merely ourselves as a political exercise but is serving a great national purpose and i believe that your contribution here in this county here in the state of ohio i hope you will feel if we are successful that it has contributed to the well being of our country which is our object in addition i have never seen this quotation of andrew jackson s i think it is ideal for this campaign at this time the eyes of the people are fast opening fight on we will use that as our slogan for the next 3 weeks i assume that your presence here indicates that you are all politicians artemus ward from massachusetts my own state 50 years years ago said i am not a politician and my other habits are good also this time we are politicians we are politicians in the sense that we believe political action through one of the political parties in our case the democratic party is the best means of achieving service for our country by participating in the democratic party as you have done and as the people before you in this county have done you made a direct contribution to the success of woodrow wilson s new freedom the democrats like you in this county and state before made a direct contribution not merely to the election of franklin roosevelt but all the things that flowed from that election those of you who participated in the election of president truman in 1948 when he carried ohio by 7 ooo votes you contributed to the nato the truman doctrine the marshall plan point 4 these matters do not end on election day all this is a means to an end not an end in itself and the end is service to our country its well being its strength its prosperity jobs for our people better homes better working conditions strengthening the cause of freedom that is what we are engaged in that is the purpose of our assembling together and i congratulate you and i express my appreciation to you forty years ago this year a young new yorker journeyed to ohio and called on your governor james cox he was of course franklin d roosevelt who was running in 1920 for the vice presidency of the united states with governor cox of ohio governor cox and franklin roosevelt then journeyed to washington d c and went to see woodrow wilson sick aging and at the end of his career after woodrow wilson talked for a few minutes however with great feeling and great fire of his desire for a unified world and a world of peace governor cox broke in and said we are behind you 100 percent and they fought that campaign in part to implement the ideal of woodrow wilson for the establishment of the league of nations and lost but governor cox and franklin roosevelt in losing that election in 1920 held before themselves and the people their concept of the service that they can render in an election of attempting to turn the attention of the people to the great issues that face us and the great possibilities that lie in action in the future and i believe in this election 40 years later we merely do not run for office but we also seek to establish a basic point that what this country is now doing is not good enough that in the 1960 s if we are going to maintain our freedom if we are going to meet our commitments at home and abroad we have to do better and that is the basic issue which has separated mr nixon and myself they have not noted a sense of urgency they have run on the slogan of peace and prosperity they have run on the slogan of you never had it so good if mr nixon honestly believes that then in my judgment he has completely misread the trend of the times if he does not believe it and runs on those slogans merely as a device for winning this election then he makes the same mistake that stanley baldwin made in 1935 in england which cost the british so heavily and almost resulted in the enslavement of europe i believe that on this occasion this year in this election the democratic party is on the side of right because our basic feeling is that unless this country is prepared to move again in the 1960 s we will not lose only our position as the leaders of the free world but we will also endanger our security therefore being on the right side win or lose i believe we contribute to the well being of this nation and my judgment is we will win thank you dem jfk17 10 60b john_f _kennedy doctor governor di salle mr mayor mr sullivan distinguished guests i am very grateful to your president for his warm welcome this is an old university and has sheltered many ideas in its search for the truth and today it shelters the democratic candidate and i hope with some effect i come here today to ask you to join us in this campaign with full recognition that as your president said i seek the office of the presidency in the most difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country and i think it appropriate that i should bring this campaign to the campus of this distinguished university for two reasons first because the students who study here have the longest investment in life in our country secondly because this university stands for freedom for intellectual freedom for the search for the truth and we are all engaged in that great endeavor and perhaps lastly because if this country is going to not only survive to endure but to prevail at least its system then there must be the closest cooperation between our universities and our politicians between our academicians and intellectuals and those who guide our governmental life during the 19th century america had many distinguished senators presidents congressmen many of them have come down as the most celebrated political figures in the history of our country daniel webster john calhoun henry clay stephen douglas all the rest but it is an interesting fact that most of these men dealt in their whole entire political life which in the case of calhoun clay and webster stretched over a period of 40 years dealt with only four or five major problems tariffs the development of the west the admission of new states the role of slavery the ending of slavery our relations with england our relations with france it occupied them from the first day they went into politics until in the case of webster he died 40 years later now the problems swarm across the desk of the political leaders of this country monetary and fiscal policy the control of outer space disarmament nuclear cessations control of agricultural surpluses control of business cycles automation stimulation of our economy the extension of the franchise to our citizens the extension of our influence around the world the struggle for a better world the struggle for a stronger america and unless there is the most intimate association between those who look to the far horizons and those who deal with our daily problems then quite obviously we shall not pass through these stormy times with success so i am delighted to come here today i think it is appropriate we bring this campaign here i hope the republicans do likewise and i hope whichever candidate is successful that the association will endure prince bismarck once said that one third of the students of german universities broke down from overwork another third broke down from dissipation and the other third ruled germany i do not know which third of the student body of wittenberg is here today but i am confident i am talking to the future rulers of america in the sense that all educated citizens participate in government and i am also pleased to see that there are students in this college who are availing themselves of the right of petition as expressed in the american constitution a petition for a most important cause the extension of the franchise to all americans i join you in that effort many americans sometimes point out to those who criticize us from abroad that this is a great country that we have a free system that we are moving steadily forward in the implementation of our ideals and then they are disappointed that they are not more impressed abroad i think the reason is that we have set an extremely high standard for ourselves we have set a higher standard than any other country really than any other system the promise of the declaration of independeuc the promise of the american constitution the words which have been used to implement it by jefferson lincoln roosevelt wilson and the rest set a standard which we must live up to if we are going to extend our influence not only through our own country but if we are going to associate ourselves intimately with those who also seek the road of freedom and therefore in carrying out your effort today you serve your country and you serve the cause of freedom and let me make it clear and there should be no disagreement between the two parties on this issue i believe that every american regardless of their race their creed or their color is entitled not only to vote but to hold office in our country in considering what we shall do in the sixties there is one subject that i have not discussed in this campaign and that i have chosen to discuss here today it involves the recognition that if we are to be successful in the days to come if we are to implement a program for the 1960 s then we need the government that is honest a government that is efficient a government that is dedicated a government that is committed solely to the public interest one cannot make such sweeping promises without recognizing that these promises have been made before every challenger for public office especially for the presidency talks about a great crusade to end corruption to obtain government clean as a hound s tooth but experience has shown that promises are not enough for ours is a government of men not of promises and some men yield to temptation other men lack discrimination and other men see no wrong in pursuing their private interest in their public capacity the problem is not merely one of deep freezes and vicuna coats less flamboyant but at least equally flagrant are the cases of those who use their office to obtain contracts for firms in which they have a financial interest those who use their position to repay political or financial debts those who extract power from the information they receive or the power they wield these cases are not only tragic in the public sense in terms of justice denied of taxes wasted of problems ignored these tragedies have their private effects as well for cheating in the government cannot help but affect cheating in the classroom on the quiz show in the expense account the appointment of good men moreover is not a matter of morality alone it may not be unethical to appoint an ambassador who is not acquainted with the language or the problems of the countries involved but it is harmful to the interest of our nation it may not be immoral to appoint to key positions men drawn only from the area of private business who intend to return to that business as soon as possible but the national interest cannot be maintained by men in our defense department with an average tenure of less than 1 year it may not be improper to confine presidential appointees to the members of one party but the whole nation was the beneficiary of the service of stimson knox forrestal mccloy and lovett and i can not recall in the last 8 years a single major member of my party who has been appointed to a high position in the national security field in defense or in state with the exception of one man the ambassador to germany mr david bruce and if we are to open employment opportunities in this country for members of all races and creeds then the federal government must set an example there are 26 negroes in the foreign service of the united states and there are 6 000 members of the foreign service there is not a district judge federal district judge who is a negro in the united states and there are more than 200 there are messengers laborers clerks very few heads of departments very few of our facilities and people have been used in extending our influence around the world it is an interesting fact today that africa has one fourth or will shortly have of all the votes of the general assembly and yet 26 negroes spread throughout the entire world are speading for us as a source of democracy in this country i believe we can do better the president himself must set the key example i am not going to promise a cabinet post or any other post to any race or ethnic group that is racism in reverse at its worst so i do not promise to consider race or religion in my appointments if i am successful i promise only that i will not consider them if we are going to keep the cost of living in line and protect the interest of the consumers then those agencies which regulate the cost of the public services must be dedicated to that mission and not concern themselves with future employment or personalities i am making no charges and mentioning no names for history teaches us that no political party has a monopoly on honesty both parties attract their share of crooks and weaklings but that does not mean that these problems are incapable of solution that does not mean that a campaign promise is enough a new administration must screen out those who regard government service as a door to power or wealth those who cannot distinguish between private gain and the public interest and those who believe that old fashioned honesty with the public s money is both old and out of fashion and the next president himself must set the moral tone and i refer not only to his language but to his actions in office for the presidency as franklin roosevelt himself has said is preeminently a place of moral leadership and i intend if successful to try to restore that leadership and atmosphere beginning in 1961 should i be elected president it would be my intention to ask the ablest men in the country to make whatever sacrifice is required to bring to the government a ministry of the best talents available men with a single minded loyalty to the national interest men who would regard public office as a public trust for no government is better than the men who compose it and i want the best and we need the best and we deserve the best it would further be my intention at the earliest possible opportunity to submit to the congress a single comprehensive code on conflicts of interest aimed at eliminating duplications inadvertencies and gaps and drawing a clearer line between propriety and impropriety and protecting the public against the unethical behavior without making it impossible for the able and conscientious citizen to serve his government it would also be my intention through executive orders the appointing power and legislation to reform and streamline our lagging administrative agencies of all the undiscussed problems of this campaign one of the most important is the fact that it takes from 1 year to 3 years for a businessman a labor union an interest involved to get a decision out of our national government and justice delayed is justice denied it would not have been necessary perhaps for us to have passed a labor management reform bill a year ago if it did not require 3 years for the national labor relations board to give the employer or the employee involved relief we have to do better than this if this great bureaucracy of ours if this great government of ours is going to function in the sixties we have to prepare it for motion we have to prepare it to move we have to get the best people we can get and then we have to organize our structure so that they can act and that is not the situation today i therefore take this opportunity to give you the eight basic principles which i would use if elected president as a guide to the appointment and conduct of those who would serve in a new administration it is not complete but i think it does suggest at least the spirit with which we shall move first no officer or employee of the executive branch shall use his official position for financial profit or personal gain or reveal to others confidential information acquired through his position second no officer or employee shall engage in any business transactions with or hold any financial interest in or accept any gift favor or substantial hospitality for himself and his family from any enterprise or person who is doing business or seeking to do business with that unit of the government which he serves or is able to influence or who is subject to regulation investigation or litigation under the jurisdiction of that unit to be above criminality is not enough good judgment is also required third all gifts which cannot appropriately be refused such as gifts from public organizations or from foreign governments to the president of the united states shall immediately be assigned to the smithsonian institution or other federal agencies for historic scientific or welfare use the president must set the example not only for those babes who mr nixon described the other day who were held up in mothers arms at these meetings who must be protected but for all his subordinates as well fourth no federal appointee to any public regulatory agency shall represent any view other than the public interest appointments to such agencies and it has been unfortunate in both parties that these agencies which were manned at the beginning of the thirties by men of vision men of conviction men of vitality men of interest because public attention has passed away from the agencies it is difficult to get the best talent to come to washington and work but we have to do it because your future the future of this country is tied up with the quality of our leadership in all branches of our national service fifth no member of any such agency and no person who assists in its decisions shall entertain any ex parte communication from any person including political pressure or requests originating within the executive or legislative branches i think it would be a source of satisfaction to congressmen if this principle were passed into law that their intervention in these cases is not welcome so that those people who come down and attempt to pressure congressmen and senators to write to executive agencies to gain special privilege for them if the congressman or senator could say that day is past from now on the agency will determine unless there is abuse of the public trust and all communications from the executive branch or the legislative branch shall be made a part of the record the public record and every party in interest is given an opportunity to reply as finley peter dunne s mr dooley used to say trust everyone but cut the cards sixth all appointments both high and low will be made on the basis of ability without regard to race creed national origin sex or occupation campaign contributions and this may be bad news for us at least for the next 3 weeks campaign contributions will not be regarded as a substitute for training and experience for diplomatic positions and appointees shall be drawn from all segments of the community wherever the best talent can be found this will not be a businessman s administration with business in the saddle as secretary mckay once described his mission but neither will it be a labor administration or a farmers administration it will be an administration for and by the people seventh senior positions in the state department the foreign service the defense department shall be filled by the best talent in both parties and from the ranks of career diplomats and civil servants and officials engaged primarily in the conduct of foreign and defense activities will not be permitted to participate actively in political campaigns i do not want our politics colored by considerations of national security and i do not want our national security colored by considerations of politics eighth and finally preferences in appointments will be given to those willing to commit themselves to stay on the job long enough to learn what they must learn the goal is a full time effort for the full tenure of the presidential term without regard to any prior affiliation or prospective employment the prospects for the nation in the coming years are not easy the tasks facing the president will not be easy and no appointee should assume that his life will be any easier these eight guidelines are not a magic formula for achieving a government perfect in all its parts all human weaknesses cannot be avoided all errors of judgment can not be predicted a code of ethics by itself may be found to be either too general to be meaningful or too specific to be enforceable but these guidelines can illustrate the atmosphere a tone of government an attitude which the new president must take we emphasize this basic principle the essence of any government that belongs to the people must lie in the biblical injunction no man can serve two masters for either he will hate one and love the other or else he will hold to one and despise the other all america seeks a government which no man holds to his own interest and despises the public interest and where all men serve only the public and love that master well this is a problem which has disturbed our country for many years and i do not suggest that the proposals that i have put forward will end the problem but i do believe it incumbent upon any candidate for the presidency to indicate in advance to all those who might serve in his office if he is successful or in his administration the standards which he will try to apply which will be applied with vigor will be applied with a sense of responsibility i hope in closing may i say that all of those of you who are students at this college will consider during your lifetime embarking on a career of public service in the next 10 years we are going to try to develop in this country a sense of the public interest comparable or superior to what the soviet union is able to develop in its country by power of the police state how many young students at this college are willing to spend part of their lives in africa or latin america or asia are willing to spend part of their time in this college learning not merely french or spanish or italian but learning some of the esoteric dialects of india or africa learning something about those countries preparing themselves as doctors or teachers or engineers or scientists or nurses or public health officials or foreign service officers to contribute part of your talents part of the benefits of your education to society as a whole this college was not founded and has not been maintained merely to give this school s graduates an economic advantage in the life struggle there is a higher purpose prof woodrow wilson said that every man sent out from a college should be a man of his time as well as a man of his nation i ask you to consider how you can best use the talents which society is now helping develop in you in order to maintain that free society all of us are involved in the discipline of self government all of us in this country in a sense are officeholders all of us make an important decision as to what this country must be and how it must move and what its function shall be and what its image shall be and whether it shall stand still as i believe it is now doing or whether it shall once again move forward i think the basic issue in this campaign is the very serious disagreement which mr nixon and i have as to our relative position in the world today he has argued that we have never had it so good that our prestige is at the summit that we merely have to look at the votes at the united nations to see where our prestige may stand that we are the strongest nation in the world and all is being done in its own good time i could not disagree more so that you may have my position clearly when you mabe your judgment on november 8 i could not disagree more i do not believe when two countries only in africa vote with us at the united nations on the admission of red china liberia and the union of south africa i do not agree we are doing everything when we had more foreign students studying here in the united states 10 years ago under the federal government programs than we do today i do not agree when we do not have a single voice of america program in spanish to all of latin america for the last 8 years except for 2 months i do not agree when there are 4 countries in africa members of the united nations without a single american diplomat now in occupancy in those countries i do not agree when africa which is going to control one fourth of all the votes of the general assembly receives less than 2 percent of all the development loan assistance that we have poured out for underdeveloped countries last year i do not agree when west germany in 1957 had more diplomats stationed within the frontiers of germany than in all the countries of africa i don t agree that everything is being done in good measure that is the issue which separates mr nixon and myself if you do not believe that we are moving ahead that we are developing our strength here that we are presenting an image to the world of a vital and vigorous society then in my judgment you should support our cause if you do agree then i think you should support mr nixon and hold on tight thank you dem jfk17 10 60c john_f _kennedy mr patterson and i hope the next congressman gov mike di salle distinguished county officials ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for being kind enough to come out and welcome us today i come here as the democratic candidate for the presidency of the united states i come here in 1960 just 40 years after a young man franklin d roosevelt jr came in 1920 to this state to this city to visit governor cox who had been nominated for the office of president of the united states after franklin roosevelt and governor cox met in 1920 they journeyed to washington and there called on president woodrow wilson who was then old and sick and finishing as president of the united states when president wilson described to them his view of a world at peace a world in which the united states assumed the burdens of world peace governor cox broke in and said president wilson we are with you 100 percent and they ran on the wilson program and were defeated but they ran on that program because they felt it incumbent upon them to bear the burden of responsibility and to serve the democratic party for the people of this country what good is a political party woodrow wilson once said unless it is fulfilling a great purpose for the nation and i want to make it clear the basis upon which we run this year our argument with mr nixon and the republicans is very clear and very important and very sharp and very distinct and it involves the lives and the fortunes of everyone in this square mr nixon holds the view of the world which believes that the power of the united states is at its highest that our power is steadily rising that our influence is growing and he points to our position at the united nations our position around the world our military power our economic growth the strength of our educational system our vitality as a nation to justify his argument that what we need is 4 more years of what we have had i want to make it clear that i disagree with that view completely i do not hold with the view that everything we are now doing is being done in good measure i do not hold with the view that the relative power and influence of the united states is increasing in relation to that of the communists i do not hold with the view that we are growing sufficiently here at home to provide full employment for our people i do not hold with the view that everything that should be done is being done when 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college i do not hold with that view when i read this morning s paper from cuba i do not hold with that view when i look at the united nations and see on the vote to admit red china that we received the support of only two nations in all of africa i do not hold with that view that everything is proper and everything is secure when i see us using only 50 percent of our steel capacity i hold the view that if we continue our present policies that the tide of american freedom will go out i believe that this election is important and i want to make it very clear that any american who considering carefully our present position who considering carefully the needs of his state and the needs of his country and the position of freedom around the world any american who can get reassurance from that view should vote for mr nixon but any american who holds the view that i hold that what we are now doing is not good enough that this is a great country but it must be greater it is a powerful country but it must be more powerful who holds the view that the tide of history can only move in our favor if we move here at home who holds the view that the power of the united states in recent years has not grown sufficient to our needs who holds the view that the image of america as a strong and vital and revolutionary country has begun to fade around the world and that too many leaders in too many countries begin to look now to the east for the solution of their problems this is the issue it is as important an issue as any this country has faced in the last 100 years if mr nixon honestly believes that this is the position of our country in the world then in my opinion he is either misinformed or he misleads because you cannot possibly be a citizen of the united states as governor rockefeller pointed out so many times before the republican convention this country needs to go ahead this country cannot be satisfied with being second best this country cannot settle for being first if first but first when first maybe we want to be first on the far side of the moon and here in this country and that is the issue as long as there are americans who want to work and can t find it as long as there are 15 million american homes which are substandard as long as some of our brightest children never get to realize their opportunities as long as there are some americans who because of their race or their color are denied their chance to develop their talents and that of their children as long as those people to the south of us in latin america africa and asia who stand today on the razor edge of decision and wonder whether they should move east or west as long as the world stands poised as it now stands i believe there is need for action here in the united states and i ask your help in that effort abraham lincoln put the issue 100 years ago when he said the question was whether this nation could exist half slave and half free now the question is whether the world will exist half slave and half free whether it will move in the direction of freedom or whether it will move in the direction of slavery and in the last 3 years cuba now perhaps this week laos countries which have fallen into the sphere of foreign influence who fall into a position of supporting communist policy guinea to a degree ghana perhaps the congo before we are finished in the fall all this indicates a sense of vitality and motion in the communist expansion which we have not matched i hold the greatest possible confidence in this country i do not believe that there are any problems which once set before us cannot be met but what i object to is reassurances that everything is sound now and that no greater effort is needed that is the issue which faces us and you have an opportunity to choose on november 8 you individually can make your judgment of what your country is what it must be what it should do what responsibilities you are willing to assume whether you feel individually not because somebody says so but because it is your judgment and you can make this judgment as well as anybody in the world do you feel yourself that this country is moving the way it should if you do then of course there is no doubt of your decision but if you hold with our view that action is required the same kind of action that franklin roosevelt presented to the american people in the early years of the 1930 s the same kind of action which woodrow wilson presented to the american people in the new freedom away back in 1913 and 1914 if you hold with that view that the united states has stood still long enough and now once again we are about to begin a great march forward on that basis i ask you to join with us i ask you to join with us in moving this country forward again let me make it very clear that this country will not be in a position of influence around the world we will not be the great defender of freedom around the globe unless we are strong here in the united states unless we are moving here in this country the reason franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor here in the united states because he set before our society its unfinished business so i come to dayton in the state of ohio which in the next 3 weeks will make the great judgment for the 1960 s and i come not with any alarm but with a sense of urgency and ask you to join us ask you to contribute to the welfare of this country not merely as a great country but also because what we do here the vitality which we show here then will really determine whether the world will exist free or slave one hundred years ago lincoln wrote a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part of us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk17 10 60d john_f _kennedy my close friend and just about first supporter governor di salle mayor patterson who i hope will be the next congressman from the district al horstman ladies and gentlemen this is the first time in 14 years of politics that i have ever heard of a democratic meeting and the rotary club joining together i don t know whether it means the democrats are broadminded or the rotary club is broadminded but i am all for it because i believe that the kind of people we have in our party the kind of men who are active in the rotary club have many things in common they start off by being citizens of the united states they start off by recognizing that the next president of the united states will face difficult and dangerous burdens that when he is in trouble the country is in trouble when he is doing well the country is doing well so we are all bound together really in a very real sense republicans and democrats rotary club members and those of us in politics all bound together by common aspirations for our country we may differ on some occasions as to the means of achieving these goals and these differences are quite important we may sometimes differ on the goals we may certainly differ on what our country may need for the future we certainly differ between our parties today on the position of our country and the kind of leadership it is going to need in the sixties but i am confident that when november 9 comes that whoever is elected president of the united states will have the good wishes support and sympathy and right hand of every american regardless of their party franklin roosevelt started his campaign here in ohio i don t know what has happened to politics but whenever i read about the 1932 campaign franklin roosevelt stayed in albany all winter spring sunmer didn t go to the convention until he was nominated he then took a boating trip up the coast of maine with his son started his campaign late in september made some speeches and was elected by a tremendous majority it hasn t been quite that way in 1960 i have been on the road since january and we don t know what is going to happen but in any case 1932 is a little different than 1960 but in some ways the problems are the same that is the basic problem of how a country such as ours can maintain full employment full employment not only of our people but also of our facilities there has never been any question in my debates with mr nixon about the economic growth of the united states there has never been any question i don t think in any american s mind that if we used our facilities our man power our resources our engineers and our scientists and our governmental influences to the maximum that the soviet union would never catch us regardless of whether their economic growth may be greater than ours today or not the question has always been how do we provide for that full use of our facilities how do we provide for 100 percent use of our capacity in steel how do we move ahead in the development of our hydroelectric capacity how do we move ahead in providing that the atomic force shall be used for peaceful use how do we provide that our scientists and engineers shall be used to the maximum of their talent how do we provide all of the skilled personnel that we need the question is how in our country with a private enterprise system we can stimulate our economic growth in order to maintain our pace that is the great question which faces the next president of the united states and the people of this country domestically in my judgment the record of the last 8 years is not satifactory enough there is no sense in trying to compare it to what might have happened 15 or 20 years before you have to compare what we are now doing with our needs with our requirements with what our adversary is doing the situation changes continually therefore we must always compare our effort with what needs to be done not what might have been done before therefore when we increase our economic growth on the average for the last 8 years 2 4 percent and the soviet union s is 7 to 8 percent a year and western germany s is nearly 6 percent a year and italy s is nearly 5 percent a year and france is 5 percent a year and we had the lowest rate of economic growth last year of any major industrialized society it is a matter of concern to us all economic growth is not a technical term it goes to the kind of profit which businessmen make it goes to the question of whether our children will get jobs it goes to the question of whether there will be full employment here in dayton we have to provide 25 000 new jobs every week for the next 10 years if we are going to maintain full employment in the country and we are going to have to do it at a time when machines are taking the jobs of men this is a tremendously difficult challenge for us all quite obviously if we don t save it if we don t maintain our people working if we waste our facilities if we provide a gradual paralysis of our economic growth and development then quite obviously in one particular category our system has failed and we cannot permit failure in the race of the sixties so i address myself to that problem and i feel very strongly about it i think i disagreed with mr nixon on it he states that he is satisfied with what we are now doing he referred to the term growthmanship somewhat disparagingly i think it is a very important matter because it goes to the future of our position around the world now the question is what can we do to stimulate our growth one of the things which this administration has relied on in the fight against inflation which has not been a particularly successful fight has been of course a policy of high interest rates this is a rather technical subject but everyone of you in this room is involved in it it has raised the rates as a result of relying on a high interest rate policy it has raised the rate on prime business loans in the last 8 years by 76 percent that involves every businessman in this room it has raised the rate on fha that is housing loans by 34 percent it has raised the rate on treasury bills that is the financing of the government debt 95 percent it has raised the rate on long term government bonds by 52 percent the result is that we are paying nearly 3 billion more in carrying charges on our government debt interest on our debt than we did a decade ago it has raised the rate on municipal bonds in everything that you build for the community of dayton it has raised them including building schools by 45 percent it has raised the rate on everything these are not mimbers these are just people they are involved very definitely in our home commitment and in life the banks in the federal reserve system increased their earnings by 81 percent between 1952 and 1959 but what happened to the farmers who have to rely on credit to survive what happened to the small businessman who must go into the open market for his financing what happened to the homeowner who buys his home with a mortgage how fared the student and the teacher and the parent and i think the answer is plain they did not fare as well as they should have take the case of a farmer he has to pay 6 to 7 percent now on his notes maybe 8 with that money he could buy new equipment or more land or more feed or new machinery but instead he is paying off old debts that is one of the reasons why farm income sagged nearly 4 billion in the last 7 years that is why 700 000 family farm units have been liquidated in the last 7 years take the case of the small businessman he has to compete with the gigantic corporation the gigantic corporations have no difficulty getting credit they are prime borrowers they can borrow out of their own funds or they can go to the bank and stand at the head of the line the smaller businessman who is not as good a credit risk who must finance his expansion out of loans he is hit when he has to pay 5 or 6 percent instead of 4 percent that is one reason why small business profits have been cut in half since 1947 that is why there were three times as many small business failures in 1959 as in 1947 take the case of a homeowner the interest a man would have to pay on a 10 000 house with a 30 year mortgage rose by only 1 1 2 percent that does not sound like much but that means 3 000 more he pays for that house before he pays off his mortgage and that is one reason why housing starts are off 20 percent this year even though our population is increasing by 3 million a year that is why there is unemployment in lumberyards and that is why some of our mills in oregon are closing down in 1952 a typical school district wanting to build a million dollar school faced interest on their bonds of 328 000 now it would have to face charges of 628 000 in the short space of 8 years i know of a school district in hempstead n y that recently floated a 5 million school bond at an interest of 4 3 percent if the 1952 rate had been in effect that district would have saved 1 300 000 enough to build a school for 900 people but the high interest rate was in effect and it cost so much more to get started on your schools and it costs so much more to provide for your state financing in the state of ohio mr nixon may be satisfied with what we are now doing i am not this is a subject which does not command great interest but it should because it is a factor in providing stimulation to our economic growth or providing limitation on our economic growth and to concentration by the administration on monetary policy which has included high interest rates in my opinion contributed to the recession of 1954 intensified the recession of 1958 every businessman here knows that in the fall of 1957 the federal reserve with deflation coming on and recession coming on instead of relaxing credit intensified credit in september 1957 which intensified the recession of 1958 i do not say that monetary policy is the entire answer there are other problems which go to economic growth but i must say that i do not believe we have been so successful in our fight against an increase in the cost of living to warrant the reliance on this policy in the next 4 years i feel that by a suitable adjustment of monetary and fiscal policies particularly a fiscal policy which goes to the government obligations per year our surplus on our expenditures and all the rest i believe it is possible to maintain a greater stimulation to our economy and at the same time provide a reasonable control over increase in inflation the fact of the matter is inflation would be far more apparent if it had not been for the sharp decline in farm income actually those of us who may be in business know that industrial costs have gone up nearly 30 percent in the last 8 years some due to labor costs some due to other reasons but one of the reasons has been the monetary policy of this administration it is one of the issues which separates mr nixon and myself and i believe that in attempting to make a judgment on what this country must do we consider our obligations at home and abroad we consider the needs of our time we consider the kind of judgment which has been rendered on the great questions which face our country we consider what the candidates view is of our peril and our opportunities and i must say that in my opinion after having been on the foreign relations committee for a number of years and serving in the congress there is no doubt in my mind that the judgment reached by bipartisan committees of the best talents we have in the last 3 years the gaither committee the rockefeller brothers report governor rockefeller s own speeches general gavin general taylor ridgway and all the others have held the view that the peril of the united states is increasing and therefore any american who does not agree with that who feels that the kind of leadership which we now have should be maintained who feels that candidates who looking at the world around them are reassured in my opinion the choice is between not merely the republicans and the democrats it is between the concerned and the comfortable i believe that this is not merely a contest if i may say so between mr nixon and myself it is a contest between a whole group of people on both sides i hope that if we are successful in this campaign it will be possible for us to bring to governmental service the best talent we have in america the best kind of talent we have in both parties the kind of talent which is concerned about our position in the world which looks to the future that believes that the united states is due for another great surge forward i must say that the problems that we will face in the next 10 years are far more complex than any that franklin roosevelt or harry truman faced particularly in the field of foreign policy what has happened in the last 2 years in the field of foreign policy indicates a whole technique of subversion and infiltration which will be extremely hard to counter the threat that franklin roosevelt faced and harry truman faced was the threat of military action across national boundaries the kind of action taken by hitler in poland the kind of action taken by the japanese at pearl harbor that was a formidable challenge but it represented a simple kind of challenge in the sense that it required us to mobilize our resources and go to work the same really was true at the time of the truman doctrine the same was true at the time of nato and even the marshall plan now however the experience of cuba the experience of laos the increasing communist influence in ghana and guinea the turmoil in the congo indicates the situation the situation in tibet all of that indicates a technique of conquest which does not rely on direct military intervention across national boundaries it relies in part on the threat of that intervention but not the reality but instead relies on building cells within those countries playing on the hostility to us playing in some cases on our indifference to the problems of the people playing on their poverty and disease and ignorance playing on our wealth playing on our sense of comfort playing on the inadequacy on occasion of our representatives abroad playing on the image of america as no longer a vital vigorous moving society and therefore young men on the make turn often in many of those countries to the far left for aid and comfort and what is true in cuba is going to be a struggle all over latin america every politician who is out who seeks power will decide whether the future lies with us or with the castros and their running mates therefore in my judgment to fight that kind of intervention will require that kind of conquest will require a far greater subtlety far more constant vigilance far greater personnel far greater foresight than we have ever shown before we spent more money in laos than any other country we have been paying the army of laos for years yet according to the headlines of the last 2 or 3 days laos may slip behind the bamboo curtain three hundred million dollars went into laos in the last few years mostly in surplus military equipment and yet when a captain of the paratroopers made his determinations it may mean that laos which holds the key to much of southeast asia may be lost when a minor general of the iraqui army made his decision for power and seized control of iraq against the forces of the west it changed the whole balance of power in the middle east a bomb which might go off in jordan killing the king might change the whole balance of power in jordan so hazard is going to be our companion and those who can find reassurance in present events in my opinion should not hold power in the 1960 s thank you dem jfk17 10 60e john_f _kennedy governor di salle congressman to be mr sullivan local candidates ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming today this election is important and i think your presence today indicates that you recognize that upon your decision of november 8 upon the decision that you render as to which political party and which candidates and which political philosophy will lead this country rests in good measure the position of the united states in the 1960 s i come here today as the democratic candidate for the presidency and i divide the problems which our country will face in the 1960 s into two parts in the first place we have our responsibilities toward our people in this country toward the 15 million americans over the age of 65 who live on an average social security check of less than 78 a month and yet this administration has refused to provide medical care for the aged tied to social security in the same way as they opposed social security itself 25 years ago but in this area and in minimum wage and in housing and in social justice we move in the tradition of franklin roosevelt i want to emphasize that that is only one phase of our problems in the 1960 s the other phase deals with the problem that you and this community face every day every day at this airbase and it deals with what i consider to be a most important policy for the next president of the united states in 1941 albert einstein and several other people came to see franklin roosevelt and told him that an investment of over 2 billion would make the united states the strongest military power in the history of the world by cracking the atom franklin roosevelt could have dismissed it but the same man who saw in the tennessee valley an opportunity for harnessing the resources of that valley for the service of our country was the same man who said yes to that long gamble and provided security for the united states in the last 20 years now the same situation faced the united states in 1954 and 1955 and that was the question of how important it was to be first in outer space and what answer did this administration give it regarded it as a scientific experiment mr wilson the secretary of defense said he was not interested to know what was on the other side of the moon he said money spent on basic research was unimportant because he was not interested to find out why fried potatoes turned brown the result is that the soviet union today is no 1 in outer space the difference between franklin roosevelt s response at the beginning of world war ii and this administration s response to this question in the middle fifties in my opinion indicates a basic difference between the two political philosophies that are now contending i could not possibly say what the problems will be in the 1960 s that are going to face the united states that are going to be new no one knows dwight eisenhower and adlai stevenson did not run on the question of outer space in 1952 nor did wendell willkie and franklin roosevelt run on harnessing the atom in 1940 there are going to be problems entirely new in space in the air in the water under ground in men s minds in 1957 we had more people in west germany in u s embassies than we did in all of africa because no one imagined in 1953 1954 and 1955 and 1956 that africa would come to be one of the most important continents of the world we have in the whole foreign service today 26 negroes out of 6 000 people and yet a majority of the world is colored and africa will hold one fourth of all the votes in the general assembly mr nixon went to cuba in 1955 he praised the competence and i quote him and stability of the batista regime three years later mr castro was to dominate cuba with all of the effects it has on our own security the problem that you have to decide you cannot tell what is going to happen in this country in the next 4 or 8 years you have to make a judgment as to which candidates in discussing the problems that we now face the problems that we now see the responsibilities which the president and the government and the people must meet which candidate in your judgment and which party comes closest to being prepared to move into the 1960 s and on that basis i stand here as the descendant politically of thomas jefferson who made the louisiana purchase of woodrow wilson s new freedom of franklin roosevelt who extended the boundaries of our influence around the globe there are in africa today children called roosevelt washington jefferson there are none called mr nixon i do not say these problems are easy the problem of full employment of automation of increasing educational opportunities of providing for constitutional rights for all americans so that every american can realize his talents of providing an image around the world to africa and asia and latin america of a vital and vigorous and revolutionary society all that is incumbent upon us as citizens the question is which party which candidate can best move this country can best strengthen the cause of freedom can best assemble the talent that is in our country to move to the far horizons of human experience and knowledge i come from the oldest political party on earth the democratic party but i come with a party which is young which is willing in my opinion to move out to move beyond that does not run in 1960 on the platform of we ve never had it so good i run on a program that we must do better that we owe it to ourselves and our country and our system to give it the best we have i come here to ohio today as we move into the last 3 weeks of a great presidential campaign which involves a very basic decision by each of you what do you see for yourselves what responsibility would you like our country to bear do you feel the tide of history is moving with us do you feel we are riding the crest or do you feel that there is around the world a sense that america s high noon is past i don t believe it i hold the view that the tide and history can move with us that those people who desire to be free outnumber those who are willing to sell their lives to the communist system but we have to give leadership therefore i ask your support in this campaign not saying that life will be easier but promising that if we are successful this country and freedom will move again thank you dem jfk17 10 60f john_f _kennedy governor di salle our next congressman to be sullivan we hope ladies and gentlemen there is a terrible rumor to the effect that this is a republican community i am sure it is not true but it would be interesting to know how many republicans have we here today will you hold up your hands let us see how many republicans with an open mind we have got two well there is some prospect i am delighted to be here today and whether you came as democrats republicans independents convinced unconvinced i do appreciate the chance to speak with you this is an important election our role mr nixon s and mine is important because it is our function to present the position of our party on the great issues which face our country we work hard from the time we are nominated until election day november 8 and then you work because then you make your judgment and any citizen of this country who on this occasion takes that judgment lightly of course does not meet his responsibilities as a citizen i would say the judgment you make on november 8 1960 as to which candidate you select not only for the congress and for the various other offices your judgment as to which political philosophy should lead our country your judgment of the state of our national development the state of our national opportunities the state of our national peril the state of our national challenge all that meets on november 8 when you make your judgment as to who you want to be the president of the united states i know in these times and through our history that many people feel the whole trend of our history is due completely to our power as a nation through the forces of history and that human decisions and human personality and the judgment of the president do not really affect directly your lives your fortunes i don t think that is true in the 1960 s the president of the united states has the great power not only of war and peace not only of defending our commitments abroad but also of setting before the american people the unfinished business of our society i will give you two problems which face us as citizens and face the next president of the united states one of them is called industrial employment in the state of ohio and around the country and the other involves agriculture there are in this country now nearly 4 1 2 million people out of work there are 3 million people who are working part time and yet we had a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 now 2 years later we have a slowdown we are using today only 50 percent of the capacity of our steel the soviet union last week came close to outproducing us even though they have only one half of our capacity the reason of course is that we can produce more than we can consume we can produce more in our factories and more on the farms than we can consume at a decent price therefore our steel mills work 50 percent 100 000 steelworkers are out of work it affects coal chemicals paper everything it affects detroit how can the next administration so provide an atmosphere for our economy where our country begins to move ahead where our people work where our facilities are used particularly at a time when machines are taking the jobs of men those of you who are farmers have seen that on your farms in the last 20 years those of you who live in the city know that a machine comes along and takes the jobs of 5 men or 10 men we are going to have to provide in order to get a job for every american who wants one and this affects those of you who are on farms because many of you hold part time jobs in the city and if you are not finding full employment in the cities you are the first to be laid off because you have a part time job the fact of the matter is you are going to have to find in this country the next president is going to have to give leadership 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years and we are going to have to do that if we are going to keep our people working and we are going to have to do that if we are going to strengthen our country and we are going to have to do that if we are going to protect our commitments around the world we are going to have to move we are going to have to provide an economy an atmosphere and leadership which will provide full employment for our people that is one problem the second problem is the decline in agricultural income i believe that the decline in agricultural income is the most difficult and important domestic problem facing the united states both because of its effect on farmers and because of its effect on industry the farmers of the united states are the no 1 market for detroit automobiles when farm income drops detroit slows up when detroit slows up pittsburgh steel slows up and we have lost in the last 8 years nearly 33 billion of farm income this administration and some of you are republicans you feel you want to vote for the republicans because they run a careful frugal responsible government mr benson has spent more money in the last 8 years than all of the secretaries of agriculture in the history of our country stretching back 100 years we now have 9 billion of surplus food stored away in a hungry world our farm income has dropped nearly 23 percent in the last 18 months the average wage for a dairy farmer in a state like this or wisconsin is about 53 cents an hour if a farmer was paid according to his hours the money he has invested in his farm and his managerial skill farm prices would have to go up 60 percent so low is his income now this decline is continuing and the program that mr nixon has put forward in my opinion will provide for a further decline in farm income because he provides the same program that mr benson provides which is a support price for corn or wheat soybeans whatever it may be which is tied to 90 percent of the average market price for the 3 previous years now as the market price drops so drops the support price where you had 1 50 for corn 8 years ago you may be getting 90 cents for corn today or 93 cents that is the market price mr nixon will pay you 90 percent of that market price next year and if it drops to 85 cents he will pay you 90 percent of that and that is the step down down down until farmers are driven off their farms in increasing numbers now you have to make a judgment whether you consider that policy to be in your interest if you do you should vote with mr nixon if you consider the position of the united states in the world improving if you feel secure if you think the possibilities of your children living in peace and freedom if you look to the news in the morning paper of mr castro s utter contempt for the united states because that is what he was demonstrating his indifference to our reaction his conviction that time is on his side not only in his own country but throughout latin america if you can support a candidate who in this most dangerous time runs on the slogan you never had itso good then you should vote for mr nixon but if you hold the view whether you are a farmer whether you are an industrial worker whether you are a citizen whether you have children in school who want and need a good education whether you have a view of the united states as fulfilling a great destiny in a dangerous time in the life of freedom then i ask you to join us this is not a fight between republicans and democrats this is a fight between the comfortable and the concerned between those who look forward and those who stand still between those who believe that all we have to do is what we are doing now and more and those who believe it is time for a great movement forward for our country again so i come to london ohio and i come to this republican community and i come here without any hesitation at all in asking your support i come because because i believe that this country deserves the best that we have i believe that this country requires leadership which will place before us the things we must do if we are going to maintain our freedom because i would like to see the united states which sits on a most conspicuous stage set an example of what freedom can mean that freedom and prosperity go hand in hand that liberty is the handmaiden of abundance and that this great country of ours can be greater this powerful country of ours can be more powerful this country of ours can move again thank you dem jfk17 5 61 john_f _kennedy mr speaker of the senate mr speaker of the house mr prime minister members of the canadian houses of parliament distinguished guests and friends i am grateful for the generous remarks and kind sentiments toward my country and myself mr prime minister we in the united states have an impression that this country is made up of descendants of the english and the french but i was glad to hear some applause coming from the very back benches when you mentioned ireland i am sure they are making progress forward je me sens vraiment entre amis it is a deeply felt honor to address this distinguished legislative body and yet may i say that i feel very much at home with you here today for one third of my life was spent in the parliament of my own country the united states congress there are some differences between this body and my own the most noticeable to me is the lofty appearance of statesmanship which is on the faces of the members of the senators who realize that they will never have to place their cause before the people again i feel at home also here because i number in my own state of massachusetts many friends and former constituents who are of canadian descent among the voters of massachusetts who were born outside the united states the largest group by far was born in canada their vote is enough to determine the outcome of an election even a presidential election you can understand that having been elected president of the united states by less than 140 thousand votes out of 60 million that i am very conscious of these statistics the warmth of your hospitality symbolizes more than merely the courtesy which may be accorded to an individual visitor they symbolize the enduring qualities of amity and honor which have characterized our countries relations for so many decades nearly forty years ago a distinguished prime minister of this country took the part of the united states at a disarmament conference he said they may not be angels but they are at least our friends i must say that i do not think that we probably demonstrated in that forty years that we are angels yet but i hope we have demonstrated that we are at least friends and i must say that i think in these days where hazard is our constant companion that friends are a very good thing to have the prime minister was the first of the leaders from other lands who was invited to call upon me shortly after i entered the white house and this is my first trip the first trip of my wife and myself outside of our country s borders it is just and fitting and appropriate and traditional that i should come here to canada across a border that knows neither guns nor guerrillas but we share more than a common border we share a common heritage traced back to those early settlers who traveled from the beachheads of the maritime provinces and new england to the far reaches of the pacific coast henry thoreau spoke a common sentiment for them all eastward i go only by force westward i go free i must walk towards oregon and not towards europe we share common values from the past a common defense line at present and common aspirations for the future our future and indeed the future of all mankind geography has made us neighbors history has made us friends economics has made us partners and necessity has made us allies those whom nature hath so joined together let no man put asunder what unites us is far greater than what divides us the issues and irritants that inevitably affect all neighbors are small indeed in comparison with the issues that we face together above all the somber threat now posed to the whole neighborhood of this continent in fact to the whole community of nations but our alliance is born not of fear but of hope it is an alliance that advances what we are for as well as opposes what we are against and so it is that when we speak of our common attitudes and relationships canada and the united states speak in 1961 in terms of unity we do not seek the unanimity that comes to those who water down all issues to the lowest common denominator or to those who conceal their differences behind fixed smiles or to those who measure unity by standards of popularity and affection instead of trust and respect we are allies this is a partnership not an empire we are bound to have differences and disappointments and we are equally bound to bring them out into the the open to settle them where they can be settled and to respect each other s views when they cannot be settled thus ours is the unity of equal and independent nations co tenants of the same continent heirs of the same legacy and fully sovereign associates in the same historic endeavor to preserve freedom for ourselves and all who wish it to that endeavor we must bring great material and human resources the result of separate cultures and independent economies and above all that endeavor requires a free and full exchange of new and different ideas on all issues and all undertakings for it is clear that no free nation can stand alone to meet the threat of those who make themselves our adversaries that no free nation can retain any illusions about the nature of the threat and that no free nation can remain indifferent to the steady erosion of freedom around the globe it is equally clear that no western nation on its own can help those less developed lands to fulfill their hopes for steady progress and finally it is clear that in an age where new forces are asserting their strength around the globe when the political shape of the hemispheres are changing rapidly nothing is more vital than the unity of the united states and of canada and so my friends of canada whatever problems may exist or arise between us i can assure you that my associates and i will be ever ready to discuss them with you and to take whatever steps we can to remove them and whatever those problems may be i can also assure you that they shrink in comparison with the great and awesome tasks that await us as free and peace loving nations so let us fix our attention not on those matters that vex us as neighbors but on the issues that face us as leaders let us look southward as part of the hemisphere with whose fate we are both inextricably bound let us look eastward as part of the north atlantic community upon whose strength and will so many depend let us look westward to japan to the newly emerging lands of asia and africa and the middle east where lie the people upon whose fate and choice the struggle for freedom may ultimately depend and let us look at the world in which we live and hope to go on living and at the way of life for which canadians and i was reminded again of this this morning on my visit to your war memorial and americans alike have always been willing to give up their lives in nearly every generation if necessary to defend and preserve freedom first if you will consider our mutual hopes for this hemisphere stretching virtually from pole to pole the nations of the western hemisphere are bound together by the laws of economics as well as geography by a common dedication to freedom as well as a common history of fighting for it to make this entire area more secure against aggression of all kinds to defend it against the encroachment of international communism in this hemisphere and to see our sister states fulfill their hopes and needs for economic and social reform and development are surely all challenges confronting your nation and deserving of your talents and resources as well as ours to be sure it would mean an added responsibility but yours is not a nation that shrinks from responsibility the hemisphere is a family into which we were born and we cannot turn our backs on it in time of trouble nor can we stand aside from its great adventure of development i believe that all of the free members of the organization of american states would be heartened and strengthened by any increase in your hemispheric role your skills your resources your judicious perception at the council table even when it differs from our own view are all needed throughout the inter american community your country and mine are partners in north american affairs can we not now become partners in inter american affairs secondly let us consider our mutual hopes for the north atlantic community our nato alliance is still as it was when it was founded the world s greatest bulwark of freedom but the military balance of power has been changing enemy tactics and weaponry have been changing we can stand still only at our peril nato force structures were originally devised to meet the threat of a massive conventional attack in a period of western nuclear monopoly now if we are to meet the defense requirements of the 1960 s the nato countries must push forward simultaneously along two lines first we must strengthen the conventional capability of our alliance as a matter of the highest priority to this end we in the united states are taking steps to increase the strength and mobility of our forces and to modernize their equipment to the same end we will maintain our forces now on the european continent and will increase their conventional capabilities we look to our nato allies to assign an equally high priority to this same essential task second we must make certain that nuclear weapons will continue to be available for the defense of the entire treaty area and that these weapons are at all times under close and flexible political control that meets the needs of all the nato countries we are prepared to join our allies in working out suitable arrangements for this purpose to make clear our own intentions and commitments to the defense of western europe the united states will commit to the nato command five and subsequently still more polaris atomic missile submarines which are defensive weapons subject to any agreed nato guidelines on their control and use and responsive to the needs of all members but still credible in an emergency beyond this we look to the possibility of eventually establishing a nato sea borne force which would be truly multi lateral in ownership and control if this should be desired and found feasible by our allies once nato s non nuclear goals have been achieved both of these measures improved conventional forces and increased nuclear forces are put forward in recognition of the fact that the defense of europe and the assurances that can be given to the people of europe and the defense of north america are indivisible in the hope that no aggressor will mistake our desire for peace with our determination to respond instantly to any attack with whatever force is appropriate and in the conviction that the time has come for all members of the nato community to further increase and integrate their respective forces in the nato command area coordinating and sharing in research development production storage defense command and training at all levels of armaments so let us begin our opponents are watching to see if we in the west are divided they take courage when we are we must not let them be deceived or in doubt about our willingness to maintain our own freedom third let us turn to the less developed nations in the southern half of the globe those who struggle to escape the bonds of mass misery which appeals to our hearts as well as to our hopes both your nation and mine have recognized our responsibilities to these new nations our people have given generously if not always effectively we could not do less and now we must do more for our historic task in this embattled age is not merely to defend freedom it is to extend its writ and strengthen its covenant to peoples of different cultures and creeds and colors whose policy or economic system may differ from ours but whose desire to be free is no less fervent than our own through the organization for economic cooperation and development and the development assistance group we can pool our vast resources and skills and make available the kind of long term capital planning and know how without which these nations will never achieve independent and viable economies and without which our efforts will be tragically wasted i propose further that the oecd establish a development center where citizens and officials and students and professional men of the atlantic area and the less developed world can meet to study in common the problems of economic development if we in the atlantic community can more closely coordinate our own economic policies and certainly the oecd provides the framework if we but use it and i hope that you will join as we are seeking to join to use it then surely our potential economic resources are adequate to meet our responsibility consider for example the unsurpassed productivity of our farms less than 8 percent of the american working force is on our farms less than 11 percent of the canadian working force is on yours fewer men on fewer acres than any nation on earth but free men on free acres can produce here in north america all the food that a hungry world could use while all the collective farms and forced labor of the communist system produce one shortage after another this is a day to day miracle of our free societies easy to forget at a time when our minds are caught up in the glamor of beginning the exploration of space as the new nations emerge into independence they face a choice shall they develop by the method of consent or by turning their freedom over to the system of totalitarian control in making that decision they should look long and hard at the tragedy now being played out in the villages of communist china if we can work closely together to make our food surpluses a blessing instead of a curse no man woman or child need go hungry and if each of the more fortunate nations can bear its fair share of the effort to help the less fortunate not merely those with whom we have traditional ties but all who are willing and able to achieve meaningful growth and dignity then this decade will surely be a turning point in the history of the human family finally let me say just a few words about the world in which we live we should not misjudge the force of the challenge that we face a force that is powerful as well as insidious that inspires dedication as well as fear that uses means we cannot adopt to achieve ends we cannot permit nor can we mistake the nature of the struggle it is not for concessions or territory it is not simply between different systems it is an age old battle for the survival of liberty itself and our great advantage and we must never forget it is that the irresistible tide that began five hundred years before the birth of christ in ancient greece is for freedom and against tyranny and that is the wave of the future and the iron hand of totalitarianism can ultimately neither seize it nor turn it back in the words of macaulay a single breaker may recede but the tide is coming in so we in the free world are not without hope we are not without friends and we are not without resources to defend ourselves and those who are associated with us believing in the peaceful settlement of disputes in the defense of human rights we are working throughout the united nations and through regional and other associations to lessen the risks the tensions and the means and opportunity for aggression that have been mounting so rapidly throughout the world in these councils of peace in the un emergency force in the middle east in the congo in the international control commission in south east asia in the ten nations commission on disarmament canada has played a leading important and constructive role if we can contain the powerful struggle of ideologies and reduce it to manageable proportions we can proceed with the transcendent task of disciplining the nuclear weapons which shadow our lives and of finding a widened range of common enterprises between ourselves and those who live under communist rule for in the end we live on one planet and we are part of one human family and whatever the struggles that confront us we must lose no chance to move forward towards a world of law and a world of disarmament at the conference table and in the minds of men the free world s cause is strengthened because it is just but it is strengthened even more by the dedicated efforts of free men and free nations as the great parliamentarian edmund burke said the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing and that in essence is why i am here today this trip is more than a consultation more than a good will visit it is an act of faith faith in your country in your leaders faith in the capacity of two great neighbors to meet their common problems and faith in the cause of freedom in which we are so intimately associated dem jfk17 9 60 john_f _kennedy thank you chairman roberts distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen it is an honor to be in this city and to be accompanied by distinguished democrats who have served the interest of north carolina and of the united states i refer to your distinguished governor who has been kind enough to assist us closely in the organization of our business and professional men s committee whom i lean on for counsel and who if elected i hope would continue to advise and counsel with me in an administration governor hodges i am delighted to be here with senator ervin with whom i served in the senate and with whom i served on the rackets committee for 3 years protecting the interests of honest labor and management alike and with senator jordan who runs this year and i would grab his coattails who has spoken powerfully for the interest of the textile industry in this state and also for our country and with your next governor i hope terry sanford who seeks to build in this state a new day as we do in the country a new frontier and dave clark every 4 years the republican candidate or his supporters comes down to north carolina texas or some other southern state and warns the democrats in this section of the united states that they have been abandoned by the national party and they should put their confidence and hope in the republicans mr nixon suggested the other day in dallas that senator johnson and i were not in the jefferson and jackson tradition this state of north carolina has contributed three presidents to the united states one of them was andrew jackson a distinguished president who helped form the modern democratic party the only thing is that the whig party which was the intellectual forefather of the republican party provided that andrew jackson should be the only u s president who was ever officially censured by the u s senate evidently andrew jackson was not of the party of thomas jefferson another president from this state was james polk the other president was andrew johnson who was a republican but because he opposed the attempt to liquidate the south after the civil war the radical republicans impeached him in the house and came within one vote of impeaching him in the u s senate in other words when jackson ran he was not of the party of jefferson when wilson ran he was not of the party of jefferson and jackson when roosevelt ran he was not the party of jefferson or jackson or wilson and when harry truman ran he certainly was not of the party of jefferson jackson wilson or roosevelt and now when we run we are not in the tradition of jefferson jackson wilson roosevelt or truman and i suppose and i hope that 20 years from now a democratic candidate will come down here in 1980 and perhaps and just perhaps they might say be is not of the tradition of wilson roosevelt truman and i hope kennedy i hope north carolina which has put its trust in the democratic party in nearly every presidential election in the last 100 years will put its trust in us again the democratic party is all north carolina you elect democratic congressmen you elect two democratic senators you elect a democratic governor what is it that makes anyone think that the democratic party nationally is not part of the north carolina democratic party and the party of massachusetts and the party of california the fact of the matter is that our strength is there we are a national party we are not a sectional party we have farmers from maine and farmers from north carolina and textile workers in massachusetts and textile workers in north carolina and peachgrowers in california and salmon fishermen in washington and ranchers in texas we are a party of all interests and therefore we belong to the people and our success has been in the past that we have associated ourselves with progressive programs on behalf of our country and that is what we seek to do in 1960 the democratic party was founded as a national party when thomas jefferson moved north on the expedition up the hudson river with james madison to hunt butterflies and fish traveling down the river they stopped in new york and formed the alliance between the rural south and the industrial north which has been maintained to this day now i have not come to north carolina hunting butterflies but i have come here asking your support in a difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country i run as a senator from massachusetts and lyndon johnson as a senator from texas but we also run as candidates for a great national party in a trying time in the life of our states and our country i don t think the democratic ticket runs i am sure they don t promising that if they are elected life will be easy i think to be an america citizen is going to be a heavy and burdensome task in the 1960 s but i do think that we can move ahead can you tell me in this century let alone the last 8 years one single piece of new progressive legislation on behalf of the people of this state or country which has been initiated by a republican president or a republican congress no democratic president ever ran in this section on a slogan of stand pat with mckinley or keep cool with coolidge or return to normalcy with harding or had enough or time for a change or you never had it so good the democratic presidents in this century have looked to the future the new freedom the new deal the fair deal the new america and now i hope the new frontier there is only one great issue before the american people in 1969 and wrapped up in that one issue are all the other issues and that is which party and which candidates can in this trying time build a stronger country build a country which is more firmly associated with the cause of freedom maintain the peace and exist in a world with dangerous adversaries who are spreading their influence all over the globe which party which candidates can best revitalize the great american republic that is the great issue before us not the traditional ones over which the parties have argued in past years i think that the democratic party which looks to the future which has during the administrations of three democratic presidents in this century built a strong country here is best able to build a strong country around the world the reason that woodrow wilson was able to be the great defender of freedom in europe after the end of world war i the reason that his 14 points had such impact was because wilson in his domestic policy has been associated with the great program of the new freedom the reason that franklin roosevelt was accepted as a friend of freedom and a spokesman for freedom in africa in asia and in latin america was because he stood for progress and freedom here in the united states and the reason that harry truman had such powerful influence in europe at the end of the war the marshall plan nato and all the rest was because they flowed from his domestic policy of progress you cannot be as the vice president said some time ago a liberal in foreign policy and a conservative in the united states if by being a conservative means you stand still i think that this country needs to look forward i think we want to build a better life for our people in the last 8 years the united states has had an annual increase in growth of about 2 5 percent under the last 8 years of harry truman this country had an economic growth of 4 5 percent last year the united states had the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world if the united states which is the productive power of the world is not able to use that power in an affirmative way then our influence drops our prestige goes down and communist leaders and nationalist leaders and young men of ambition in latin america africa and asia begin to look to peiping and moscow for the future i think this is going to be a difficult time because to be the defender of freedom is a hazardous occupation but it has been thrust upon us because only the united states stands between the communists and world domination therefore we must be prepared to bear our burdens i am not satisfied to see the united states second in space i am not satisfied to see the united states turning out one half as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union i am not satisfied to see the u s annual rate of economic growth increasing at only one third the rate of the soviet union and lower than western germany or france or england i am not satisfied to see us stand still i want us to move i ask your help in this campaign i think it is a crucial election in many ways it is the most crucial election of this century even more crucial than the election of 1932 for in that year or the election of roosevelt the great issue was the preservation of freedom here in the united states now i think the great issue that faces us is the preservation of freedom all over the globe i see no reason why men of brains and talent young students who live in latin america or africa or asia who will be leaders of the future why they should possibly feel that we are a society that is standing still and the communist society is moving ahead why should we be connected with indifference why should the communist system give the appearance of vitality i think the reason is because we do not have a sense of national purpose in the united states i think that only the president of the united states can set before the american people the unfinished business of our society the goals that we must attempt to achieve over the next 10 years militarily economically scientifically educationally and then a free people can do the job we have the best economic system the best structure of government the most vitality in our system i think what we need is a sense of purpose a sense of leadership it is for that great cause that the democratic party has traditionally been connected i hope north carolina this year will stay with the democratic party as we look forward both in this state and around the country we do not seek election in order to preside over the liquidation of the free world we seek election in order to build this country stimulate its economy provide employment for our people and cause people all over the world to wake up in the morning and wonder not what mr khrushchev has done or not what peking has done but wonder what the united states is doing each day during the american constitutional convention just before the convention there was in hartford conn one day a storm which overcast the united states and in that religious day men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came the connecticut house of representatives was in session and many of the members clamored for immediate adjournment the speaker of the house one colonel davenport came to his feet and he silenced the din with these words the day of judgment is either approaching or it is not if it is not there is no cause for adjournment if it is i choose to be found doing my duty i wish therefore that candles may be brought i hope in a dark and uncertain period in our own country that we too may bring candles to help light our country s way thank you dem jfk17 9 60a john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to the man whom i hope you are going to elect the next lieutenant governor of north carolina for a very generous introduction i don t know what is locked up in greensboro or high point but obviously it is something much bigger i am sure it is not better but it is bigger in high point since we have the key to unlock it i am here today as the democratic nominee for the presidency i am reminded somewhat of the celebrated speech which the most celebrated senator from my own state of massachusetts gave during the great debate which led to the compromise of 1860 in that famous speech daniel webster began his talk by saying i speak today not as a massachusetts man and not as a northerner i speak today as an american merely for my cause i speak today not as a massachusetts man and not as a northerner and not just as an american i speak today in north carolina as the standard bearer for the oldest political party in the world the democratic party and i am especially proud to be in good company today to be traveling the state of north carolina with your distinguished governor luther hodges who was generous enough to support me for the vice presidency in 1956 as did a majority of the north carolina delegates and who now serves as the chairman of our business and professional committee in the united states i hope that he will be able if we are successful to help us do in the country what he has done in rebuilding the economic vitality in the past year i am proud to be traveling also with my friend who i hope will be the governor of this state who if we are both successful will be working with me for a new day in north carolina while we work for a new frontier in the united states and members of your senatorial delegation sam ervin with whom i served on the rackets committee for the united states and for honest labor and management for 3 years senator jordan who has spoken for north carolina and the country in the united states members of your congressional delegation carl durham who was in the congress when i came there in 1947 and who is being succeeded this year by a man who is able to follow in carl durham s footsteps your next congressman from this district horace kornegay and my friend and former colleague charlie deane who has been my friend in other years and who is my friend this year i am delighted to be here today and i come as i say as the standard bearer of the democratic party i am sure the people of north carolina who have paid steadfast allegiance to our party since earliest beginnings now come to the election of 1960 and they are sure that they will make a careful judgment as to which way they shall go i think they should go with the democrats and i think they should go for this reason that every time we have had a crisis in our history and we have had many in my judgment the democratic party beginning in the days of jefferson jackson and cleveland and in this century in the days of wilson roosevelt and truman have come down on the side of progress have come down on the side of the people have moved this country forward have not stood still and have made the name of the united states not only a powerful image to our citizens here in this country but all around the world the new freedom of woodrow wilson was the domestic application of his 14 points the new deal of franklin roosevelt fitted in with his whole aspirations for the four freedoms around the world and the fair deal of harry truman had its counterpart in world politics in the marshall plan because they led here in the united states they led around the world i am not satisfied as an american to live in the most powerful country the greatest country in the world and see the balance of power begin to move away from us and in the direction of our adversaries i don t want some historian 5 or 10 years from now to look at 1950 and 1955 and 1960 and say in those years the balance of power began to ebb the tide began to run out on the united states i think our brightest days are ahead but i don t think we are going to grasp the future unless we are willing to work for it i think the chief task of a president of the united states is to set before the american people the unfinished business of our society the things we have to do i speak for massachusetts in the senate senator jordan speaks for north carolina but the president of the united states speaks for massachusetts north carolina and the country and unless he speaks no one speaks for him no senator no congressman no governor only the president can do what franklin roosevelt did and that is put before us what we must do to maintain our power and our influence to build the economy of this state it is a source of satisfaction to me that every 4 years the republican candidates run on the democratic platform i am glad that they do but what i would like to see them do is put it into effect for the next 4 years mr benson who has been the secretary of agriculture for 8 years is in mr nixon s own words the most remarkable secretary of agriculture in history and the reason is that he has spent more money than any secretary of agriculture he has been 8 years in office he has high surpluses and a lower farm income in 20 years and still says it is the democrats farm mr nixon in iowa yesterday tried to cut mr benson out of the herd but i think that there is always going to be an equivalent of mr benson as there was in the 1920 s as there has been in the 1950 s and as there was in the twenties and forties in the opposition to the program which franklin roosevelt and harry truman put forward by their works ye shall know them in 1930 1940 and 1950 i cannot recall a single piece of new and progressive legislation at home or abroad put forward by the republican party i don t say that if we win life will be easy i think life will be difficult in the 1960 s and 1970 s but this is a great country i think its capacity is unlimited why should we be second best in the 1960 s militarily why should the soviet union produce twice as many scientists and engineers as we do why should young intellectuals and students and union leaders in africa latin america and asia why should they look to peking for hope for the future instead of the united states why should both candidates in the presidential election in brazil be running on an anti american platform when we were in the 1930 s a good neighbor i think the united states has lost its image as a revolutionary forward looking country we celebrate today the anniversary of the constitution day i hold the view that the constitution is the most revolutionary document with the declaration of independence ever written and it should to the new countries serve as a source of stimulation and enterprise to them we hold the view that the people will come first not the government we hold the view that every american regardless of his religion or his race is entitled to his constitutional rights we hold the view that the people make the best judgment in the long run that is a revolutionary document i don t hold mr khrushchev s view that the united states is a sick and faltering horse but i do realize that though we may quarantine him in manhattan next week and though we may do the same to mr castro we have not quarantined castro in latin america or mr khrushchev in africa they move steadily outward i therefore ask your support i ask your support to rally around again as north carolina has on so many occasions a democratic party which has produced men in this century like wilson and roosevelt and truman and more importantly has produced a party and popular support which has permitted them to move this country ahead if we win this election i can assure you that the democratic party will lead again and this country will move thank you dem jfk17 9 60b john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague senator ervin governor hodges senator jordan congressman bonner my fellow members of the congressional delegation your next governor of north carolina i hope terry sanford distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i come here today from a section of the united states which claims to be the oldest section of the united states to north carolina which is the oldest section of the united states i am very grateful to be the guest of eastern carolina college i understand that they have had a most rapid growth and now wish to play in the southern conference i am scheduled in the southern conference too and find it with some difficulty and i hope you have success and that i do also i come here today as the nominee of the democratic party and therefore i stand in succession to a number of distinguished americans who have borne the banner of the democratic party in good times and bad but they have borne it high for the benefit of the united states of america north carolina helped create the democratic party the state of virginia founded it thomas jefferson and james madison and our party was given its modern form as the party of the people by a great citizen of this state andrew jackson i therefore come here today to ask your support in a difficult and trying time in the life of our country i do not run for the office of the president saying that if i am elected life will be easy i think to be an american citizen in the 1960 s will be a difficult and hazardous occupation i believe that this is a great country but i do believe that it can be a greater country this is a powerful country but i think it can be a more powerful country my chief disagreement with the republicans in this campaign is that they have had too little faith in the development of this country i think we can do better their campaign motto has been you never had it so good well i think as a citizen of the united states as well as a democrat that it is our obligation to do better to build the economy of the state of north carolina to build the economy of the united states and in so doing build the strength of the united states as a great and free country i think what woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman recognized was that this country cannot be strong and powerful in its world position unless it is strong and powerful here in the united states i think that there is a direct relationship between the deterioration of our relative standing in the world in the last few years and the fact that we have not moved ahead here at home fast enough last year the united states had the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world and when we grow at home here slowly our prestige and power and influence around the world begins to diminish here we are the richest country on earth and yet in a hungry world we find ourselves unable to use in an imaginative and affirmative way the great surpluses that the lord gave us here today in the richest and most productive tobacco country in the united states i come as the democratic standard bearer affirming the confidence and faith of the democratic party in a strong agricultural program it is a source of satisfaction to me that for 2 months every 4 years the republican candidate for the presidency whoever he may be comes out strongly for an affirmative agricultural program but day by day month by month year by year in the congress the burden has been carried by congressman cooley the democratic senators from this state democratic congressmen and senators from the south and the midwest we believe as franklin roosevelt believed in his day in an agricultural program that lifts the farmer up that does not liquidate him that does not catch him in a cost price squeeze that liquidates his profits and drives him into the urban centers of the united states i stand in direct succession in a great tradition which i think has meant a good deal to north carolina and to my own state of massachusetts and to the united states i ask your support in this election not merely as the democratic standard bearer but as one who has the greatest possible confidence and faith in the future of this country thomas paine during the american revolution said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 and in the next decade the cause of all mankind is the cause of america our responsibility is to be the chief defender of freedom at a time when freedom is under attack all over the globe the future will not be easy but i do think that if we meet our responsibilities here here in the state of north carolina here in the united states if we build a better life for our citizens here whether they live in the cities of the north or the south or whether they live on the farms of this country upon which our economy has traditionally depended i think as we grow strong here we hold out an inspiration to all those who wish to follow our example the reason that franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor to latin america was because he was a good neighbor to the people of this country today we celebrate constitution day which is the day at the end of the constitutional convention when george washington sent the constitution to be ratified by the states i stand to say that as the supporter of the american constitution as the best and most happy way for the organization of our life and i think our great ambition is to see the blessings of freedom spread riot only in our own country but around the world a strong america believing in freedom for all our citizens i think offers the best hope of freedom to all those who look to us with confidence and hope i ask your help in this campaign i ask your help and i can assure you that if we are successful it will be my daily task to care for the needs and the hopes of our citizens and also to defend the united states in a time of great danger during the constitutional convention there was behind the desk of general washington a painting of a sun low on the horizon and many of the delegates wondered during the debate whether it was a rising or a setting sun at the conclusion benjamin franklin stood up he said because of what we have done here we now know that it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i think in 1960 it can be for the united states a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk17 9 60c john_f _kennedy i want to thank all of you i understand this was a special day and i want to thank you for coming in very much it added to my education let me just say that i appreciate the plaque that plaque describes the farm program which i think the democratic party stands for and which i stand for i am glad to say that this is not a commitment which is made at election time but a commitment which has been made and kept by harold cooley the senators from this state the congressmen from this state congressman bonner and the rest as the standard bearer of the democratic party it is to that program that i commit the party on this occasion and if elected in january 1961 thank you dem jfk18 10 60a john_f _kennedy dante fascell senator smathers congressman rogers fred dickinson ladies and gentlemen first of all i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming out here this morning i think the reason that you are here is the same reason that i run for the presidency of the united states this year in 1960 and that is because all of us are devoted to our country wish to serve it wish the best for it wish it to be secure wish it to live in peace wish it to move forward and that is the service which we hope to render to this country this year on different occasions in our history the american people have selected one party or the other depending on their judgment of the times and on the program and viewpoint of the party and its leaders now let me make it very clear that mr nixon and i disagree very basically on the position of the united states on what must be done to increase our security and what must be done to maintain the peace this is a serious dispute which involves the lives and the fortune of everyone here when you make your judgment on november 8 as to which candidate and which party you want to lead you should i think bear the following things in mind mr nixon and i disagree on the position of the united states in the world today he says our prestige was never higher that we have never been stronger that the tide in world history is moving in our direction and that if we continue our present policies by 1965 and 1970 the united states will be secure and the world will begin to move in the direction of freedom i could not disagree more i could not believe that that is the world doctrine at this time the fact of the matter is that in the last 8 years not a single soviet soldier has crossed the frontiers of russia or their present territory and yet cuba laos in part iraq their influence in ghana and guinea their influence in latin america their influence in africa their influence in asia their influence at the united nations their military position their scientific position their production of scientists and engineers have all steadily increased in relation to ours and the judgment that you must make as you sit here in florida 90 miles from cuba 8 minutes by jet you have to determine whether you can support the leadership of a candidate and a party which runs on a slogan of we ve never had it so good i don t run on that slogan i don t run on that slogan i have the greatest confidence in this country in my judgment the united states can meet any burden can meet any challenge can meet any responsibility but it cannot possibly do so unless the president of the united states and the country moves to finish the unfinished business of our society recognizes the perils that we are in recognizes the challenges determines that this country shall move again determine that we shall work in the sixties determine that we shall be in this country an inspiration to all those who wish to be free and to hold out a helping hand to all those who desire to follow our example mr castro in cuba is not alone the threat why was the candidate for the presidency of brazil in the recent election why did he feel compelled in the middle of his election to pay a journey to havana and call on mr castro it was because he knew in his own country there was sufficient support for castro there was sufficient advantage in looking anti american that he felt compelled to gain that support anyone who sits in this country who reads the newspapers who has children who is concerned about the future who desires to maintain our peace who desires to maintain our freedom who desires to maintain our security and can choose to stand still in 1961 i believe is wholly wrong and i disagree with it i come here to florida today where my family has lived for 30 years where they have already voted for one of the two candidates and i feel it looks pretty good at least to get two votes in florida but i came here to this state which reaches like an arm toward latin america which is surrounded by sea the water which laps miami laps africa and latin america and europe this state here is an advancing moving and progressive state its brightest days are bound to come in the years of the 1960 s and 1970 s and what i feel we have to do and i say this after 14 years in the congress after serving in the senate for 8 years with both of your senators in the house of representatives with your congressmen in my judgment this great country deserves the best from all of us it is a great country but i believe it must be greater and it is a powerful country but i believe it must be more powerful and i believe that our responsibility in the 1960 s is to restore to the world the image of america as a society on the move a society whose high noon is just ahead not a society which stands still which begins to lose its vitality which begins to lose its image as a moving society a moving country so those are the basic matters which separate us and it is to your good judgment your sense of responsibility your concern for your country your identification with the cause of freedom that we entrust this decision on november 8 i can assure you that if we are successful we will give leadership to this country and florida and the united states will move again thank you dem jfk18 10 60b john_f _kennedy senator smathers mr mayor senator dickinson congressman fascell red mcewen who is going to be the next congressman from this congressional district ladies and gentlemen i come here all the way from massachusetts 1 500 miles away and ask your support in this campaign i come to this state of florida where my family has been residents for 30 years and i can tell you that massachusetts and florida and the united states i believe need a change they need motion they need the democratic party and they need new leadership in the united states massachusetts and florida voted republican in 1952 and 1956 but i cannot believe in the most difficult and dangerous time that this republic has ever faced that we are going to elect a president of the united states who runs on the slogan we ve never had it so good in electing a president of the united states you must make above all your judgment of how good his judgment is can he predict with any degree of certainty the flow of events through the world can he make a judgment which involves the security of the united states your well being your prosperity your peace your future what is his judgment like mr nixon s judgment i believe is indicated by his willingness in this time of hazard to go to the american people with a campaign promise the campaign statement that our prestige has never been higher that of the communists has never been lower that everything that must be done is being done and just leave it to him and we will be secure i don t hold that view at all i believe that this is a time of danger and of opportunity i believe the 1960 s can be the best of days or the worst of days and i believe in the final analysis that it will be secure that it will be peaceful that it will be strong that the economy will go ahead only if the american people have leadership prepared to face the facts and do something about it this is no old republican and democratic fight it is true that there are issues which separate us which are traditional the democratic party in my opinion and i have been there for 14 years and i have served in the congress with democrats and i have served with republicans my judgment is that on those issues with which we are familiar issues involving small business care for the aged education for our children economic growth full employment development of our resources in my opinion time after time after time the majority of the republicans have voted no and the majority of the democrats have voted yes but i do not run on that record i run as a candidate for the presidency with full knowledge that unless this country is prepared to pick itself up and get itself off dead center and begin to lead begin to set an example to the world of what a vital society freedom can be this country is not going to survive as the strongest freest country in the world that is the issue that is the issue not any old fights which took place in the administration of franklin roosevelt those fights may still go on we might be defeated on that basis and the country survive older people might not be as secure our schools might not be as good but the real issue is your judgment as citizens as informed citizens capable of exercising your franchise it is your judgment of whether this country can afford to stand still or whether we can be secure whether living in florida 90 miles as senator smathers said off the coast of cuba and close to all the world a few minutes from all the world whether this country can afford leadership as usual leadership which is so misinformed about the current of history that it chooses to run on the slogan in 1960 of peace and prosperity as if nothing was wrong as if everything was being done as if our society was on the move as if we did not live face to face with risk i don t run on that basis and it is your judgment what kind of leadership you want if you want leadership that seeks to please you if you want leadership that will tell you that everything is all right when it is not vote for mr nixon but if you have the courage to face the facts of our time to recognize that this country deserves the best of all of us and more than anything it deserves the truth then i ask your support twenty years ago this month franklin roosevelt talked to the nations of latin america and this is what he said about the nazi menace so bound together as we can be we are able to withstand any attack from the east or from the west together we are able to ward off any infiltration of alien political and economic ideas that would destroy our freedom and our democracy and as a result of his leadership as a result of his call to arms the nazi effort to destroy freedom in latin america was defeated i contrast that call to the dim silent trumpet that this administration has given forth in the last few years in cuba the communists have established a satellite in venezuela angry mobs assault the vice president of the united states in mexico city rioting mobs have protested american policy and castigated america itself in panama anti american demonstrations have imperiled the canal in brazil the newly elected president of brazil felt it incumbent upon him to make a journey to havana to call on mr castro in order to get his benediction in that race for the presidency of brazil not to washington not to washington to havana every report from latin america every new dispatch from the south brings fresh news of unrest and tension and we have not seen the worst of it we have not seen the worst of it this struggle is going to go on through all of latin america through all of africa and through all of asia for the next decade i am confident that we can be successful but we cannot be successful if we demonstrate the lamentable lack of concern that we have shown for the last eight years with the great tide sweeping latin america that wanted freedom what did this administration do in 1953 the dictator of peru was given a medal by the united states in 1954 the dictator of venezuela was awarded the legion of merit by the american ambassador in 1956 the dictator of paraguay received his medal from america in 1955 our secretary of the navy compared peron to lincoln in peron s favor the results of these blunders have been disastrous the people of latin america have not felt we are concerned about freedom they fear we are really concerned about them only as pawns in the cold war we are more interested they think in our investments in those countries than in the people and thus when the dictatorships fell and they are falling every day our actions and our identification was remembered secondly our major failure in that area has been to assist these people in achieving any kind of economic existence do you know that with these people who need a better life who need land reform who need a new deal that there is in every square of every city in latin america a franklin d roosevelt park there is no park named after harding or coolidge or the president or the vice president there is franklin d roosevelt park this has been the basic area of our national security since monroe in the last 8 years we gave 5 percent of all of our economic aid to latin america 95 percent to the rest of the world and we wonder why castro spreads the doctrine of communism and revolt throughout all of latin america mr nixon himself was in latin america 5 years ago and here is what he said if we had produced economic progress in cuba we might have averted the cuban takeover why didn t we that is what he said a month ago why didn t we in 1955 come forward with a program that would have prevented castro from taking power when he was there in 1955 he said and you can judge his experience i am convinced that communism has passed its highwater mark in latin america at a time when the communists were about to communize cuba our third failure has been our inability to establish contact with the young people of that area that will run the country we have brought in the last 8 years less than 400 young men and women from all the countries of latin america each year to study in our great country to learn about freedom to identify themselves with us and we have suspended in the last 8 years the voice of america program in spanish to latin america the only time we ran a regular voice of america program to latin america was 3 months during the hungarian crisis can you tell me what they have been doing for the last 8 years when in africa and latin america and asia the united states has been on the decline as a powerful country at the very time when these people stand as they now do on the edge of decision we have been indifferent we have been indifferent these are the problems that the united states is going to have to begin to face we are going to have to begin to build a strong society here in the united states franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america because he was a good neighbor in the united states and because he ran an administration which was progressive which was compassionate which identified itself with the people of this country if we are building a strong society here if our economy is on the move here in the united states if we identify ourselves with the people if we provide a better life for all americans regardless of their race regardless of their religion the full use of their constitutional rights if we hold out the hand of friendship to all those around the world then once more the united states can serve as the symbol of freedom then once more people will begin to feel that we are on the rise that we are on the move and i cannot believe that given a choice between two societies a dictatorship and a vital society identified with freedom i believe they will choose us i believe they will say freedom yes franklin roosevelt said 20 years ago i well recall during my recent visit to the three great capitals in south america i heard one constant cry viva la democracia now 20 years later do our presidents and vice presidents hear that call do we hear that call through latin america and around the world i believe that it is incumbent on the next president of the united states to at the beginning of his term of office indicate by action and word his belief in the solidarity of the western hemisphere his belief in a western hemisphere which is common to democracy from top to bottom his belief that the people of this hemisphere can provide through freedom a better life his undying hostility to the communist system his undying hostility to all dictatorships his belief that the cause of freedom and the cause of people identifying themselves and developing their own resources is the great cause of the 1960 s that is what we fight for the most revolutionary of all doctrines the right of people to be free mr castro is identified with a tired and aging system that ultimately will collapse but we have to demonstrate to them that we are not a finished country that we are not an old country that we are not an old people but instead we are a young people on the move the youngest republic in the world in many ways therefore i come to florida tonight and i come as the leader of the oldest political party in the world the democratic party but i want mr khrushchev and mr castro to know that after this election a new generation of americans has assumed responsibility of leadership men who fought in europe and in the pacific in order to maintain this country s freedom and they are not going to preside over its liquidation here in latin america in africa asia or any place in the world i want the people of latin america and africa and asia to wake up in the morning and wonder what this country is doing and wonder what the president of the united states is doing and saying and not what castro or khrushchev is saying so we come here and ask your help this decision is yours it is not ours all we can do is present a sober analysis of our problems and opportunities and in this great country of ours you must make the final judgment and i believe that in your judgment you will come to the conclusion really of what kind of a society you want what kind of a country you want what kind of a world you want what kind of a system you want to prevail throughout the world i believe that we are going to choose in the 1960 s progress that we are going to make the same decision in 1960 that we made in 1932 we are going to say yes to progress we are going to say it is time for a change it is time to turn those out of office who look at the world around us and our own problems with a pallid pale view of life and its possibilities i believe the revitalization of the american system is our challenge and the great issue of the 1960 campaign and on that basis i ask your help thank you dem jfk18 10 60c john_f _kennedy senator smathers my friend and colleague of many years in the house your distinguished congressman charley bennett mayor burns senator dickinson distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i am grateful to senator smathers for his introduction of me tonight i served with him in the congress for over 14 years and when i was married he stood up for me at my wedding we are friends and therefore i am honored by his introduction to you who have supported him on the several occasions for the senate of the united states i appreciate it and i am glad to be in jacksonville my older brother who was in the u s navy as a flier graduated from the jacksonville air base in 1942 my first sea duty was to take a motor torpedo boat from rhode island to the hutchins naval base here in jacksonville where i stayed a month so i am glad to be back in jacksonville mr nixon had a few critical remarks to make in this same park and one of them was about the democratic party i love these republicans who every 4 years say the party doesn t mean anything what counts is the man i think what counts is the man the party puts up the democratic party never would have nominated the democratic party never would have nominated alf landon they never would have nominated thomas e dewey and they never would have nominated richard milhous nixon i don t understand mr nixon he journeys to phoenix ariz to call on his southern manager barry goldwater and there he says i support the republican party from top to bottom i am a republican he writes to clarence budington kelland i am an economic conservative i am all the way then he comes to jacksonville and says party does not mean anything what counts is the man i am a practical conservative whatever that may be but i am a democrat i am a democrat the work of my party is not so bad that i have to deny it every 4 years no democratic candidate for the presidency in this century ever ran on a slogan of keep cool with coolidge or return to normalcy whatever that might be with warren g harding or two chickens in every pot where do they get those slogans and where do they get the candidates we ran on the slogan of the new freedom with woodrow wilson we ran with franklin roosevelt and the new deal and we ran with harry truman and the fair deal i don t say that parties are an end in themselves and i don t say that anyone should select a man merely because he has a party label but i believe in this difficult and dangerous time that the parties do mean something he said we were not in the jackson tradition he goes down to virginia and says we are not in the jefferson tradition then he goes down and says we are not in the woodrow wilson tradition and then we are not in the franklin roosevelt tradition well he is in the mckinley coolidge harding dewey tradition right down the line let me make it clear that the democratic party is a national party i am proud that lyndon johnson is running with me i run as a democrat the democratic party will continue to serve our entire country this state sends two u s senators to the senate it sends every congressman but one as a democrat to the congress it is about to elect a democratic governor now can you tell me why florida puts its confidence in the democratic party why i come here to jacksonville and am introduced by your senator senator smathers i sit here with your congressman congressman bennett they have served with mr nixon and they have served with me they have served with republicans and they have served with democrats and they have chosen to support our ticket thomas jefferson founded the democratic party when he went on a botanical expedition up the hudson river with james madison searching for butterflies and they met people in new york and they formed the tie between the rural south and the industrial north and that tie has been maintained to the present time i come to jacksonville not chasing butterflies but coming here at this time and asking your support and i come here and ask you to join ask you to join us in serving our country mr nixon said this morning that i should be ashamed of myself to quote him and that i should apologize i don t know to whom for saying that the united states is not doing as well as it must do economically and militarily well i say it here right in the park and i do not express the slightest bit of regret because it is my function and it is my duty as the standard bearer for my own party to tell the american people the truth as we see it and then let you make your honest judgment mr nixon said this morning mr khrushchev never fooled him i did not invite mr khrushchev to travel around the united states with mr henry cabot lodge as a guest of the american people i didn t invite him to camp david i was glad he came i approved of his trip but who does mr nixon think he fools in the last 3 weeks of an election who does he think he fools when he says we will have no more debates after this week as he goes around the country casting his innuendoes suggesting that we in the democratic party are not as devoted to the cause of freedom implying that for some reason or other we were misled by khrushchev and he understood him all the time i was not the vice president of the united states who presided over the communization of cuba franklin roosevelt traveling 20 years ago said every place i went in latin america they cheered long live democracy i suppose mr nixon read that just before his trip i would have thought when the first rock hit him that he would have begun to wonder what had happened he talked movingly today this morning and this afternoon and every day about the cheers the polish people gave him what has this administration ever done for the polish people what has this administration done in building the strength and prestige of the united states he talks about not losing a single inch of free territory cuba now laos possibly guinea ghana voting with the communists possibly later in the year another country communist influence growing the candidate for the presidency of brazil travels not to washington to get our blessing but to havana to see castro does anyone think that mr nixon was right when 5 years ago our experienced vice president pointed his finger at some unknown face and said communism is on the decline in latin america i don t believe that that is the experience that the american people are going to want for 4 more years i knew a banker once who served 30 years as president of a bank he had more experience until his bank went broke than any other banker in massachusetts but if i ever go in the banking business i do not plan to hire him and he knows the operation from top to bottom i want to make it clear that this is an important election and i believe the alternatives are very clear to the people of this country it is between a candidate who when hazard and danger and opportunity and challenge are facing us as the defenders of freedom around the world campaigns on the slogan we ve never had it so good i don t run on that slogan i run on the slogan we must do better this isn t the end of the struggle we have not finished with mr castro this is a struggle for freedom in latin america that will go on for the next 10 years it is a struggle that will go on for the next decade in africa it is a struggle that is now going on tonight and will go on for the next decade in asia the question you have to decide is whether this administration and mr nixon demonstrated sufficient foresight sufficient knowledge of the twisting currents that surround us that ebb and flow through every country of the world do you feel the balance of power of the world is shifting with us are you satisfied to be second in outer space producing in 1950 twice as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union and today one half our economic growth is one half or less that of the soviet union every year the soviet union last week produced more steel than the united states mostly because 50 percent of our steel capacity is unused florida depends on the economy of the rest of the country you depend on people visiting the state you depend on business being good around the country a rising tide lifts your boats but this tide is not rising our strength is not growing and up our challenges are growing this is a great country and i have the greatest possible confidence that our generation of americans can meet any challenge presented to us but how can we do so when our leadership decides that rather than tell the people the truth they will carry on this campaign of vague innuendo and suggestion reassuring our people that everything is all right the same thing that stanley baldwin and neville chamberlain did in the thirties to england and england s fall was all too close we don t run on that basis but if that is what the american people want if they want to close in and let the future pass them by take mr nixon but if you want to move again if you want this country to meet its responsibilities if you have confidence that there is nothing we cannot do once given the opportunity to do so if you believe that people want to be free as they do that khrushchev and castro and the rest of them represent a system which is as old as time domination of one man by another which goes against the grain of every person whether they live in the soviet union or whether they live in cuba they want to be free they may be misled they may be dominated by a police state they may be scared in other countries that the tide is moving in the direction of the communists but ultimately they want to be free our experience has shown it best hungary s experience showed it poland s experience showed it east germany showed it tibet has shown it the world will show it but people will not stay free this country will not lead unless we are prepared to meet our responsibilities and on that basis i come here tonight and ask your help i ask you to join us in starting again to move this country forward in 1936 franklin d roosevelt said this generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny now in 1960 an entirely new generation of americans is about to assume the leadership of this country and you as citizens of this city and state have to make your determination of what you want your country to be the candidates are sharply divided they present different views of different problems and it is on your good judgment your long view your concern about your own fate the lives of your children the security of your country the cause of freedom it is on the basis of your good judgment that i rest my case i want mr khrushchev and mr castro to know that a new generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny and men who fought for this country s freedom in africa and italy and the south pacific are about to strike another blow for freedom in this great country of ours thank you dem jfk18 10 60d john_f _kennedy thank you i would like to have you give a cheer for the waltham post of the american legion of massachusetts that is down at the convention and came over to play for us today harvard university ought to get that song they could really do something with it mayor high my old friend and supporter governor collins who became known through the country at the democratic convention as he was in this state as a distinguished and able american my friend and colleague for 14 years in the congress who was an usher at my wedding your senator george smathers dante fascell who has spoken for the interest of this district and the united states in the congress of the united states farris bryant who will be a distinguished democratic governor of a great democratic state florida congressman rogers commissioners fellow democrats ladies and gentlemen and members of the band i want to thank you i want to express my appreciation to all of you for coming here today your presence is a testimony to your belief that this is an important election and that all of us as citizens of this country have an obligation to make a careful judgment as to who shall be the next president of the united states i have served in the congress for 14 years and i must say i have come to the conclusion and i am sure george smathers and dante fascell would agree that however important the senate may be and however important the house of representatives may be in the final analysis our fortunes as a nation depend particularly because of the pressure of events as well as the provisions of the constitution on the good judgment the vigor the sense of precision the sense of foresight the historical sense of the president of the united states this country stood still when mckinley was president and when harding was president and when coolidge was president and this country moved when woodrow wilson was president and franklin roosevelt was president and harry truman was president and i must say that those of you who live in this state of florida depend upon a moving and expanding country i know something about the economy of this state when the rest of the country catches cold florida gets pneumonia and miami is very sick if we should have a recession in the winter of 1961 and the wall street journal already says we have a recession what effect does that have on miami and miami beach and the counties to the north this country cannot afford in 1961 4 more years of republican leadership i wish i could take mr nixon s attention for just 5 minutes from the coast of china where there is no disagreement where we both agree with the eisenhower administration i wish i could move him off the coastline of china 2 miles away from the mainland of china and move him about 90 miles off the coast of florida he has announced that he is going to spend the next 3 weeks talking of those two islands about which there is no debate every week once i would like to have him tell us about cuba i would like to have him tell us we don t want it often but i would like to have him tell us what he is going to do i would like to have him tell us how when he stands up to khrushchev what he is going to do about castro i would like to have him explain his statement of 1955 because foresight and good judgment are essential qualities of the next president of the united states and in 1955 mr nixon flatly said as he says today our prestige is at an alltime high just to know how good his judgment is in 1955 he said communism in latin america is on the decline just like he said when he pointed his finger in mr khrushchev s face you may be ahead of us in rocket engines but we are ahead of you in color television i want mr nixon to come home for a while i want him to tell those steelworkers who work in steel mills which are working at 50 percent of capacity i want him to talk to the parents of 35 percent of our brightest children who graduate from high school and never see the inside of a college i want him to talk to the homebuilders of this country who are building 209 000 homes less than they should be to keep up with our population in part because the interest rates now are at an alltime high i want him to tell us about the peace which is in the world when in the last 8 years not one soviet soldier has crossed the frontiers of 1952 and yet now they control cuba they are about to control laos they are in a strong position in iraq the foreign policy of guinea and ghana matches theirs there is talk this morning in the newspaper that in the next 2 months there may be a crisis in iran i want him to tell us again that the power and the prestige of the united states is at an alltime high how can any american in the most dangerous time in the life of our country when it is incumbent upon politicians in both parties to tell the truth how can he possibly campaign in 1960 on a program in complete contradiction to that of every objective committee and commission appointed in the last 3 years composed of members of both parties the rockefeller brothers the gaither committee the committees of lyndon johnson of stuart symington of mr rockefeller himself they have all said this is the time of danger for the american people general ridgeway general gavin general taylor only mr nixon holds the view that everything is being done in its proper measure that everything that must be done to maintain the peace and maintain our security is being done and will be done by a candidate who runs on a platform of we ve never had it so good that is the issue which you must decide and that issue is as important as any that this country has ever faced demosthenes 2 000 years ago warning the athenians of their danger said our peril comes from those who seek to please us rather than to serve us i regard and we regard the responsibility of our party not to downgrade our country but to state that this country which has unlimited capacity for action this country must get ready for another movement forward we cannot maintain our position we cannot maintain our strength we cannot serve as an inspiration to freedom around the globe if we move at a slow pace in the sixties this country is the only hope of freedom if we move forward freedom moves forward if we stand still we give hope and encouragement to those who wish to destroy us i sound the alarm not with the idea that this country is doomed but with the idea that if this country moves again nothing can stop it and that is where we differ the bible said it long ago who will prepare for the battle if the trumpet sounds an uncertain note governor rockefeller before he began to swim happily in mr nixon s pool after the convention said this country could not be led by a question mark our position is not that of question our position is one of certainty that the future can belong to freedom that this country can be secure that we can turn the balance of power in our direction all of these things can be done and all these things must be done by a united states on the move again so i come to florida i come to miami and i come and ask you citizens of this country i ask your support in this campaign this is not merely a contest between republicans and democrats this is a contest between those who are concerned and those who are comfortable between those who are fat and happy and those who wish to see our country succeed this is a great and powerful country we can make it greater and more powerful we can give this country leadership we can make america move again thank you dem jfk18 10 60e john_f _kennedy thank you commander mckneally mr gray mr drummey commander mcguiness of my own native massachusetts member of the executive committee gabriel ottoer fellow legionnaires i am proud as the nominee of my party to come here to this convention i have been a member of the american legion for 15 years and i have learned a good deal about the legion especially since 1949 about the work that this organization has done for national defense for the youth of america for the strengthening of our country for its concern about those americans who have borne the burden of battle in the defense of their country and i am proud to be here today distinguished guests members of congress the fundamental problem of our time is the critical situation which has been created by the steady erosion of american power relative to that of the communists in recent years that is the fundamental problem which we face as americans in 1960 we have heard many general claims and boasts we have heard how we are first in every area of international competition we have heard about what must be done to stand firm and to stand up to khrushchev and all the rest but no amount of oratory no amount of oratory no amount of claims no unjustified charges can hide the harsh facts behind the rhetoric behind the soothing words that our prestige has never been higher and that of the communists never lower they cannot hide the basic facts that american strength in relation to that of the sino soviet bloc relatively has been slipping and communism has been steadily advancing until now it rests 90 miles from this city of miami the implacable communist drive for power takes many forms and works in many ways but behind it all behind every weapon that they have in their arsenal is one basic fact and that is the military power of the communist bloc for it is here that the communist advance and relative american decline can be most sharply seen and it is here that the danger to our survival is the greatest the development in 1953 of a relatively small hydrogen warhead made missiles the key to future military power the soviet union decided then to go all out in missile development but here in the united states we cut back our funds for missile development and in our race for outer space we slowed up the modernization of our conventional forces we will not have for example the new rifle to replace the m 1 which was used by you in world war ii and korea for 5 years before there is a complete replacement and still today the soviet union is rapidly building up a striking force that endangers our power to retaliate and our survival itself for the harsh facts of the matter are that our relative military strength has not increased as fast as the russians in ground forces submarines and missiles and our 17 ground divisions are opposed to more than 150 soviet armored and infantry divisions two that our ability to meet our commitments to more than 50 countries around the globe has been critically impaired by our failure to develop a jet airlift capacity have you seen the pictures of the planes that flew the united nations forces to the congo or to the lebanon how many of them were jets and how long did they take to fly from western germany to the congo and back that we are moving into a period where the soviet union will be outproducing us 2 to 3 to 1 according to the administration s own testimony before the armed services committee of the senate foreign relations committee on which i serve that this dangerous deterioration in our military strength has been the result of our willingness to cut our budget to bear a much lower burden which is not large enough if we are going to maintain our freedom and words are not a substitute for strength these are the facts behind our speaking louder and louder while we carry a smaller and smaller stick but i do not ask you to take my word for it for it is your responsibility as members of the american legion and as citizens of the united states to make your own judgment that record shows after you examine it that every objective expert every study commission official or unofficial republican or democratic came to the same conclusion we have been slipping and we are moving into a period of danger the gaither committee report prepared in 1957 has been best summed up as portraying this nation and i quote moving in frightening course to the status of a second class power the rockefeller brothers reported in 1958 and i quote the united states is rapidly losing its lead over the u s s r in the military race governor rockefeller himself has said and i quote him i believe that our position is dramatically weaker than it was 15 years ago robert a lovett lifelong republican former secretary of defense testified before a senate committee this year and i quote we are doing something short of our best robert sprague republican consultant to the national security council testifying before the same committee our military program is inadequate and its inadequacy and i quote him is a danger to our survival lt gen james gavin these are the questions that you must decide not only as legionnaires but as citizens of this country in the next few weeks lt gen james gavin who jumped in normandy who was director of army research and development said and i quote him accurately we are in mortal danger the missile lag portends serious trouble gen maxwell taylor in 1959 we are now threatened with a missile gap that leaves us in a position of potentially grave danger and the american legion itself only last year urged that our conventional forces be maintained at a higher level and it has not been done talk is cheap words are not enough waving our finger under khrushchev s face does not increase the strength of the united states especially when you say to him especially when you say as you wave your finger you may be ahead of us in rockets but we are ahead of you in color television i will take my television black and white the question is what must we do to regain our strength in my judgment in january 1961 the next president of the united states whoever he may be should do the following things first we must take immediate steps to protect our present nuclear striking force from surprise attack today more than 90 percent of our retaliatory force is made up of aircraft and missiles which move from unprotectable bases whose location is known to the russians second we must step up crash programs on the ultimate weapon the polaris submarine the minuteman missile which will eventually close the missile gap third we must modernize and i think especially give an airlift capacity to the armed services particularly the army it does not do any good to have 17 divisions stationed here if you can t move them around the world within 24 or 48 hours i would put that near the top to move them by jet all around the globe to increase our forces substantially but i want to make it clear that this is only the background to the struggle of power not one soviet soldier in the last 8 years has crossed the frontiers of the free world not one soviet bomb has dropped from missiles or from airplanes and yet the soviet power has steadily increased cuba has been lost for the time being i hope to the communists laos has begun to slip behind the iron curtain and may in the next 7 or 8 days ghana and guinea in africa have moved toward the soviet bloc a revolution in iraq destroyed the middle eastern pact the communists have captured control of one of the key factions in the fight for power in the congo and communist influence propaganda and subversion are moving in latin america africa and asia i believe the american legion should consider carefully the present technique which the soviet union and the chinese communists are employing in order to increase their power when president roosevelt was president when president truman was president in the early part of the 1950 s the struggle was to build sufficient military power to prevent the soviet union from crossing national frontiers but now they move in and begin to capture the nationalist movement in nigeria they captured the movement of lumumba in congo they captured the castro movement in cuba they are working to capture other movements in south america and without a soldier crossing into those countries without a shot being fired by the change of mind of a paratroop commander in laos a country which we spent more money in per capita than any other country in the world a country where we spent 300 million where we have been paying the army for the last 2 years they are about to seize control of laos and not a communist soldier or a russian soldier has crossed the boundary of laos how do we stop this kind of conquest in the sixties this is the kind of conquest that we are going to have to face the kind that puts heat on in the united nations the kind that puts the pressure on the kind that compels the countries of africa to vote against us on the admission of red china the kind of heat that causes a candidate for president of brazil to come up and call on castro in order to secure his support in the fight in brazil they work in venezuela they work in mexico russian soldiers do not move and yet their power increases they could by 1970 control great sections of the earth without ever advancing their armies beyond their present frontiers so we have to concern ourselves with building up our military power because their military power is behind their expansion but that is not enough if we are going to stop the communist advance in the 1960 s basically they believe that the united states lacks the nerve the will and the determination for a long long hard fight it is one thing to stand up to a military invasion it is one thing to go to war and defeat the japanese and hitler it is quite another thing year after year decade after decade to be engaged in struggles all around the world in countries which we did not know anything about 10 years ago but where we and the communists are now locked in deadly embrace if they capture more countries of latin america if they increase their influence in africa if india should begin to move in another direction if they are successful this week this month or this fall in iran in taking iran away from its western ties they have gained a great victory and we sit back that is my dispute with this administration that is the issue which this country has to face are we doing enough i don t think we are i want to make it very clear to mr khrushchev and to anyone else who wonders i will not cut our present commitments to the cause of freedom if i am elected president of the united states anywhere in the world the formosa straits latin america africa asia i support our present effort to build strength not merely to hold the line but to expand freedom all around the globe i have never believed in retreating under any kind of fire and although i do not want to get into any comparison of military experience i believe it clear that anyone who says the reverse is guilty of a malicious distortion and i want mr khrushchev and anyone else to understand that if the democratic party wins this election he will confront in the 1960 s an america which is not only militarily strong but which is waging the offensive for freedom all over the globe and i want to make it clear that if the democratic party is not successful in this campaign we will continue to fight for the maintenance of freedom around the globe we will rebuild our diplomatic corps so we don t send ambassadors and others out because they have contributed to a campaign who can t even speak the language who can t even pronounce the names who can t even pronounce the names of the heads of the countries who have never been there who want to stay there for a year while the communists stay there day after day speaking the dialect working subversion attempting to win control of the country there are four countries in africa which are independent which are members of the united nations and there is not an american diplomatic member of our foreign service in residence in any of the four when guinea became independent it took us 2 months to recognize its independence it took us 8 months to send an ambassador was there the day they got independence and guinea now supports the communist foreign policy we brought more students from africa 10 years ago than we do today from all over the world we brought more foreign students by the u s government a decade ago than we do today we had more diplomatic personnel in western germany in 1957 than we did in all of africa we offered 300 scholarships to the congo in june that is more scholarships than we offered to all of africa the year before do you know how many congolese are studying here six i don t think it is good enough i don t think this is good enough i don t think we have never been stronger i don t think our prestige is so high that we can t do better i don t think the communists are about to collapse i believe we have to build strength we have to stand for freedom we have to demonstrate some vigor in our foreign policy do you know how many voice of america programs in spanish we have had to latin america in the last 8 years none except for the 3 months of the hungarian crisis do we have a voice of america program to cuba today to tell them that castro is lying when he speaks about us to tell them that we want them to be free that we believe in the democracy that we are telling them our story do you think we have a government sponsored voice of america program in spanish to cuba today no let us come back from the mainland of china for a minute and worry about what is happening right off the mainland of the united states i want to make it clear that the united states is a great revolutionary country that believes in the most extraordinary doctrine that man has ever put forward that the communist system is as old as egypt and if we give our cause dedication and vitality and energy and foresight if we build strength here in the united states if we get our economy moving again if we educate our children if we say that being second is not good enough that being first if first but first when and first maybe is not good enough i have the greatest possible confidence that we can meet any challenges can you tell me one good reason why the united states should have been producing twice as many scientists and engineers 10 years ago as the soviet union and producing half as many today those of you who are legionnaires maintain your membership in the legion because in time of war you responded to the service of our country you will recall that in the novel on the beach the lone american survivors of world war iii are standing on the beach in australia awaiting the inevitable end from a cloud of radioactivity the senior officer in the group turns to the others and says you know i could run for president that is not the presidency for which i run i don t want to be the president of a nation perishing under the mushroom cloud of a nuclear warhead and i intend if president or if i continue in the senate to build the defenses which this country needs and which freedom needs but neither do i wish to be the president of a nation which is being driven back which is on the defensive because of its unwillingness to face the facts of our national existence to tell the truth to bear the burdens which freedom demands a nation which may be declining in relative strength and with the world coming to an end as t s eliot said not with a bang but with a whimper that isn t what we are going to do i have the greatest feeling that the 1960 s can be a bright period in our national history but in order to determine whether we are going to pick ourselves up again we are going to have to have leadership which is willing to tell the truth which does not run on a program of everything is being done that must be done but says instead what other leaders have said in other times of crisis it is time we went to work again it is time we started our country moving again it is time we picked ourselves up and moved ourselves into the 1960 s that is the great question that we face after the spartans were wiped out at the battle of thermopylae fighting against the persians there was carved in the rock above their graves 300 of them passerby tell sparta we fell faithful to her service now legionnaires who were willing in war to follow faithful to the service of our country i ask you in the 1960 s to live and live faithfully to the service of the cause for freedom and the cause of the united states thank you dem jfk19 10 60a john_f _kennedy mayor wagner members of congress governor harriman city officials ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to mayor wagner for being generous enough to invite any wife and me here today he has promised he is going to do the same for the vice president some time late in november or december and we are going to welcome him i stand today as the standard bearer of the democratic party which is the oldest political party in the world today the democratic party was founded late in the 18th century when thomas jefferson and james madison came to new york met the leaders here in new york and founded the alliance of the rural part of the united states with the cities which has served this country so well in the last 160 years and we seek to serve it again grover cleveland once said what good is a politician unless he stands for something and i say what good is a political party unless it stands for something i want to make it very clear what we stand for in 1960 we stand as we have always stood for the service of the people we believe that this is a great country but it is incumbent upon us as americans who bear responsibility to make this the greatest country on earth we believe that this is a powerful country but it must be more powerful i want to get mr nixon who campaigns in the most dangerous time in the life of our country who campaigns on the slogan we have never had it so good i don t think it is good enough i believe the issue before the people of this country is to make their judgment on november 8 about the world in which they live their country what it can be what it must be what our responsibilities are what our burdens are what our obligations are if we are going to bear the burdens of being the leader of the free world my disagreement is with those who run on slogans which do not represent the facts who run on a slogan of peace and prosperity who say that our prestige has never been higher and that of the soviets never lower that is not the way we are going to survive that is not the way we survived in the past it has been on our willingness to face facts to tell the truth to tell the truth in new york and in arizona and in florida and in california to stand for the same things and we stand for strengthening this country of ours making it stronger here at home building the kind of society in this country so that people around the world who wish to be free wish to follow us wish to identify themselves with us wish to follow our leadership abraham lincoln said in the election of 1860 that this nation cannot exist half slave and half free i don t think in the long run the world can exist half slave and half free and whether it moves in the direction of slavery whether it moves in the direction of the communists or whether it moves in the direction of freedom will depend in the final analysis upon us upon our vigor upon our energy upon our determination and on that basis on our commitment to build a strong country and a free world i come to new york city on the steps of this old city hall and ask your support thank you dem jfk19 10 60b john_f _kennedy thank you ladies and gentlemen i have come here today to request your help in this election whenever it rains the republicans go inside but we stay outside and fight we are up here today in a campaign we are up here today in yonkers in a campaign to ask your support to ask you to join us to ask you to build a stronger country i ask your help our obligation is to build a stronger country we seek in our party today to serve the united states to move it forward and rain or shine good times or bad this country is going to move in the sixties thank you dem jfk19 10 60d john_f _kennedy mr dave mr rose leaders of unions in new york ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you we have been up in the rain in yonkers we are going to do well in yonkers and we are going to do well in new york state and i think we are going to do well in the united states if we do well in new york it will be due in good measure to the tremendous job that was done by all of you the democratic party the citizens the liberals and others in providing for maximum registration and therefore for maximum participation on november 8 this was an outstanding piece of constructive public service and i congratulate you for the part that you played in it we believe in a maximum extension of the right to vote we believe in participation we believe that everyone should vote and i believe that if we can get a good vote out on november 8 now that we have them registered i cannot believe in 1960 with all of the problems that this country faces at home and abroad that the american people are going to do anything else but say yes to progress that they are going to vote i believe the democratic ticket let me say briefly i believe there are two points first those of you who are active in labor those of you who lead organized labor movements are concerned about the welfare of your people and concerned about the welfare of the general public and you know very well perhaps better than anyone that this country still has unfinished business that we have to maintain full employment that we have to advance the standards of living of our people of better housing of better minimum wage of medical care for the aged franklin roosevelt could put forward a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour in 1935 but that does not mean the job was finished ninety percent of the republicans could vote against 25 cents an hour in 1935 just as they voted against 1 25 minimium wage in 1960 the principle is the same it is our responsibility to bring those programs extension of the right to vote civil rights minimum wage housing education to increase the opportunity for all americans to share in the abundance and i do not share the view of the vice president that these programs are extreme 1 25 minimum wage not this year not until 1962 for those people already covered not until 1964 for the newly covered and still that bill was voted against by 75 to 80 percent of the members of the house of representatives who are republicans now i believe the issue is quite clear in this field of social legislation on those matters of concern to the people matters which go to the right of a person to participate as an active citizen because he has to live i believe we stand on the side of the future secondly those of you who are active in organized labor are concerned about your country you hold no narrow view i am confident of your position in society you believe the labor movement and all americans have an obligation to participate in strengthening our country making it work making our system move providing employment for our people a better standard of living setting an example to the world so i appreciate your support i can asure you we are going to keep working and i hope if we are successful on november 8 that it can be the beginning of a great movement forward in this country thank you dem jfk19 10 60e john_f _kennedy your eminence cardinal spellman mr silver mr vice president governor rockefeller mayor wagner mrs warner members of the senate distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen fellow voters i am glad to be here at this notable dinner once again and i am glad that mr nixon is here also now that cardinal spellman has demonstrated the proper spirit i assume that shortly i will be invited to a quaker dinner honoring herbert hoover cardinal spellman is the only man so widely respected in american politics that he could bring together amicably at the same banquet table for the first time in this campaign two political leaders who are increasingly apprehensive about the november election who have long eyed each other suspiciously and who have disagreed so strongly both publicly and privately vice president nixon and governor rockefeller mr nixon like the rest of us has had his troubles in this campaign at one point even the wall street journal was criticizing his tactics that is like the observatore romano criticizing the pope but i think the worst news for the republicans this week was that casey stengel has been fired it must show that perhaps experience does not count on this matter of experience i had announced earlier this year that if successful i would not consider campaign contributions as a substitute for experience in appointing ambassadors ever since i made that statement i have not received one single cent from my father one of the inspiring notes that was struck in the last debate was struck by the vice president in his very moving warning to the children of the nation and the candidates against the use of profanity by presidents and ex presidents when they are on the stump and i know after 14 years in the congress with the vice president that he was very sincere in his views about the use of profanity but i am told that a prominent republican said to him yesterday in jacksonville fla mr president that was a damn fine speech and the vice president said i appreciate the compliment but not the language and the republican went on yes sir i liked it so much that i contributed a thousand dollars to your campaign and mr nixon replied the hell you say however i would not want to give the impression that i am taking former president truman s use of language lightly i have sent him the following wire dear mr president i have noted with interest your suggestion as to where those who vote for my opponent should go while i understand and sympathize with your deep motivation i think it is important that our side try to refrain from raising the religious issue one of the subjects that interests candidates and those who write about candidates is whether 1960 will be another 1928 i have had some interest in that question myself and looking at the speeches of governor smith in the 1928 campaign i am struck by the continuity of the themes the 1928 and 1960 campaign with all of the obvious differences have much in common in 1928 as in 1960 the yankees won the penant the postmaster general was promising efficient mail delivery at last farm purchasing power was down some 20 percent in 1928 compared to 8 years earlier just as it is today three million people had left the farms in that period just as they have in the last 8 years the stock market was unstable and two thirds of all corporate profits went to one fourth of 1 percent of the corporations in september 1928 the republican candidate for the presidency declared real wages have improved more during the past 7 1 2 years than in any similar period in the history of our country he spoke of the country s unparalleled progress he stressed american comfort hope and confidence for the future are immeasurably higher than they were 7 1 2 years ago the democratic candidate in 1928 questioned how stable our prosperity was he pointed to the pockets of industries we warned of a farm depression he criticized administration farm vetoes he stressed and i quote him the necessity for the restoration of cordial relations with latin america and he called for more effective action against disarmament the democratic nominee in 1928 spoke 30 years ago tonight about building a stronger america strengthening not only our economy but our sense of moral purpose and our public duty in all of these and other ways 1960 and 1928 may be sisters under the skin some say that this will also be true when the ballots are counted that the religious convictions of the candidates will influence the outcome more than their convictions on the issues but this is where i believe that 1928 and 1960 are very different regardless of the outcome and regardless of these similarities i do not believe the american voter in 1960 is the same as the american voter of 1928 for we live in a different world there are a billion more people crowding our globe and every american can hear the rumbling of a distant drum the next president will have a budget 25 times as large as that of the candidates in al smith s time and he will face problems unprecedented in that time or in any time in our long history automation and unemployment farm surpluses and food shortages a high cost of living in the midst of an economic slump new nations new leaders the world is different across the street and on the other side of the moon the white race is in the minority the free enterprise system is in the minority and the majority are looking at us harder and longer than they ever looked before the people who live in the tenements of africa and asia and latin america want to fight their way out of the slums the lower east side of the world is looking for help and unlike 1928 the lower east side of the world has a voice and a vote the world is large john boyle o reilly wrote the world is large when its weary league two loving hearts divide but the world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side in 1960 as never before our enemy is loose on the other side in 1928 the voters perhaps could be excused for not seeing the storm coming the depression the japanese conquest of manchuria hitler s rise and all the rest but in 1960 the citizens of this country face the great question of whether freedom will not only endure but whether it will also prevail thus 1960 and 1928 are very different it will be with this view of america that we shall accept the fortunes of november 8 1960 be they favorable or unfavorable good or bad the american people in 1960 see the storm coming they see the perils ahead 1960 is not 1928 i am confident that whatever their verdict republican or democratic myself or mr nixon that their judgment will be based not on any extraneous issue but on the real issues of our time on what is best for our country on the hard facts that face us on the convictions of the candidates and their parties and on their ability to interpret them when this happens then the bitter memory of 1928 will begin to fade and all that will remain will be the figure of al smith large against the horizon true courageous and honest who in the words of the cardinal served his country well and having served his country well nobly served his god dem jfk19 9 60a john_f _kennedy officers of the chemical workers ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be here today and i am delighted to be in the company of my colleague in the congress of the united states my colleague on the labor committee your next speaker congressman james roosevelt and with the distinguished governor of the state of new jersey robert meyner i come here today not only as the candidate of the democratic party in this most vital election but i come here as chairman of the subcommittee on labor of the senate after having served for over 14 years on the labor committees of the congress the united states is faced today with a difficult and dangerous period of history and i think that in the coming week or two the greatest sense of responsibility the greatest restraint will be placed upon all of us those of us who conduct the campaigns in this difficult time upon the president of the united states upon the secretary of state so that when the present period of tension which now exists at the united nations shall be over we shall find i hope the united states in a stronger position rather than in a weaker position therefore what i say to you today is devoted to what we can do in our own area of competence in order to strengthen the united states i think that those of you who are members of this important union recognize that the 1960 s are going to bring you union problems because it is going to bring the united states many industrial changes and many problems which will affect your union and also affect the men and women who work in the chemical industry in your paper the chemical workers which is distributed here and which i was just looking at there is an article on page 9 which i would like to see the next president of the united states study very carefully whoever he may be and that is the article which says automation turns from blue to white i have traveled in the last 2 years to every state in the united states i spent a month in west virginia and i saw not only the coal mines of west virginia and the coal miners who had been displaced i spent some days in mcdowell county w va which mines more coal than it ever has in history and has more families receiving more surplus food packages than any county of the united states but i also traveled in the ohio valley and in the kanawha valley which has two great industrial complexes which particularly feature chemical production and there we would drive for yard after yard or walk yard after yard and every 100 yards we would see one worker or two workers and this tremendous industrial complex administered by relatively few men when i am sure 15 or 20 years ago in a comparable output we would have seen dozens and hundreds of men and women working in those plants the task which faces you as a union is to adjust yourselves to these tremendous industrial changes which are going to bring white collar workers where blue collar workers once dominated the problem for us as citizens of the united states the problem for us those of us who serve in the government in the congress or in the executive branch is how we can maintain full employment how we can absorb the production of our industries how we can provide for the orderly transition from present production methods into new production methods without displacing our workers how we can in short in the steel industry in the chemical industry in the oil industry in the newspaper industry how we can provide labor saving machinery at the same time maintaining full employment at the same time making sure that those machines produce a better life rather than a life of unemployment for so many of our citizens i consider that to be in agriculture and industry the no 1 domestic problem which the next president of the united states is going to have to face i don t think this administration really has thought about it at all i do not recall except occasional speeches spaced months apart where this government has turned its attention to the problems of automation to the problems of employment to the problems of maintaining full employment in a technological revolution here at home as well as around the world i would think that one of the first things that the next president of the united states must do is to call a conference of the federal government of the basic industries the managers of the basic industries the leaders of organized labor in the basic industries to consider what steps can be taken to provide for the orderly transition of new machinery into our government into our industry in other words to address ourselves as a national problem not as an industry problem not as a company problem but as a national problem to the problem of automation in the early 1960 s i think it is an entirely new problem it is a problem which did not disturb the administrations of franklin roosevelt or harry truman it is a problem which is now on the horizon no bigger than a man s hand but it is a problem which will disturb the lives of all of us in the next decade unless we move to it at once i can assure you that if i am elected to the office of the presidency or if i maintain my position as chairman of the subcommittee on labor that i think it is a problem to which we must address ourselves early in 1961 we will require the cooperation of the members of the chemical union we will require the cooperation of the leadership of this union the kind of studies which you are undertaking today in cooperation with management in these companies and in other industries stretching across the united states it is the kind of new problem which i think our party which i am a member of the democratic party is best equipped to meet if there is one contribution or one quality for which the democratic party has been noted since its earliest beginnings since the time of thomas jefferson and andrew jackson stretching through the administrations of wilson and roosevelt and truman it has been its willingness to break new ground to look ahead not to stand still no democrat has ever run for the presidency with a motto you never had it so good every democratic president who has served this country in times of crisis has looked to the future the slogans of our party in this century tell the story of our party woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal adlai stevenson s new america and now i talk today in 1960 about the new frontiers of the 1960 s no democrat has ever run for the presidency standing pat with mckinley or returning to normalcy with harding or keeping cool with coolidge those who are satisfied with things as they are those who wish to stand still those who look back to the good old days i don t think they should come with us in the 1960 s but those who want to move this country those who think we can do better those who think that there are better days still ahead those who think that it is time that the government and the people devoted themselves to the great unfinished business of our society as franklin roosevelt did in his administration and woodrow wilson in his and harry truman in his i hope they will come with us we don t promise any easy future at home and abroad because there is no easy life for a citizen of the united states who bears his responsibilities in 1960 but we can say to you that the democratic party as it has so often in the past is prepared to lead and if we are successful this country will move again thank you dem jfk19 9 60b john_f _kennedy president mcdonald secretary treasurer abel vice president hague delegates to the 10th constitutional convention of the united steel workers of america and their friends this is the third time in 4 years that i have been the guest of the united steelworkers and i am proud to be here today we have met together in los angeles in atlantic city and we are going to meet together in a discussion of the problems that face this country in the coming years let me say first that i am proud to have the endorsement of the united steel workers for the office of the president of the united states i accept that endorsement last week at the machinists convention mr nixon criticized me and misquoted me for identifying myself too closely with the aims of organized labor he took out of context a speech that i made at detroit on labor day in which i said that i know that organized labor wants the things that i want for the united states they want better schools and better hospitals and they want this country to move forward and i said on that occasion that organized labor opposes lethargy and economic standstill and weakness at home and weakness abroad i think the working men and women of this country want what everyone else wants they want this country to be second to none they want this country to move i would remind mr nixon of what another american said on an earlier occasion all that serves labor serves the nation all that harms labor is treason to america no line can be drawn between the two that was not harry truman and it was not franklin roosevelt it was abraham lincoln we come and meet at this convention in a difficult and trying time in the life of our country and as the standard bearer for the oldest political party on earth i bear and i think my party bears a great responsibility the united states moves in a period of danger we are anxious that from this campaign the united states shall gather renewed strength it is our obligation during the coming 6 or 7 weeks to present to the american people an alternative course of action so that they shall have the opportunity the american people to make a choice as to which way they want to go i think the choice is very clear and i think the choice has been placed before us not only by the democrats and by myself but it has been placed before us by mr nixon and the members of the republican party who speak for him mr nixon has gone through the country saying that we cry doom and gloom he has gone through the country saying we have never had it so good i go through the country saying that this is a great and rich country but i think it can be a greater country and a richer country and a more powerful country i do not believe that the period of the 1960 s is a period in which we can conserve in which we stand still in which we gather ourselves for renewed effort we have done that in the 1950 s i think the 1960 s are the time for new effort this election is not 1900 this election is 1912 and 1932 and 1948 this is a time for new go ahead for this country and the american people and i shall continue during the coming 6 weeks to present the alternative to the present course of action to the american people and what is that alternative i think the alternative is written in the record of the two parties in this history i did not suddenly spring up after the democratic convention the democratic party was not invented in the last 6 weeks nor was the republican party mr nixon s record and my record are not both statements we have made in the last few days of the campaign the record which i have written the record which i have written for 14 years in the congress and the record which the democratic party has written through 160 years of service to the nation are well known to the american people and i put the challenge to them in a few words can you tell me not in the last 8 years but in the last century since the administration of theodore roosevelt can you tell me a single piece of domestic social legislation that served the people that has been initially proposed by the republican party social security minimum wage civil rights legislation in the congress the republicans dominated the country and the congress for years for nearly a century after the civil war can you tell me when the congress ever passed a single piece of legislation giving equal rights to our citizens in all that period of time did they in 1953 and 1954 when the congress was dominated by the republican party pass a single piece of legislation protecting the rights of our citizens was a single piece of legislation passed in those years that increased the minimum wage of our people that increased their social security that increased public housing that increased private housing can you tell me what the position was of the republican party in the august session of the congress on minimum wage it was opposition to the 1 25 an hour and it was opposition wholehearted opposition to providing medical care for our elder citizens one republican voted for it and 44 democrats voted for it that is the record which is before the american people i think the choice is very clear to those americans who want to stand still who look back i say they should vote for the republican party to those americans who are not satisfied who may feel that we are ahead as mr nixon said to mr khrushchev in color television i am not satisfied while he was ahead in rockets i am not satisfied i can look at color television and have rockets mr nixon speaking in portland oreg said there are those who are going around the country crying doom and gloom but we just built the largest shopping center in the world i am not satisfied to have the largest shopping center as long as the soviet union is moving in latin america asia and cuba i think we can do better that is the question before us in 1960 now if there is any group in the united states who recognizes the need to do better it is the men and women who are here at this convention the production of steel is the hallmark of an industrial society if the soviet union overnight should knock out 50 percent of our steel capacity we would feel we were ruined and yet the economic policies of this administration have contributed to one half of our steel capacity being unused 100 000 of our steelworkers out of work other thousands working part time who can say that they have never had it so good they have had it better and they are going to have it better are we going to slip and slide through the 1960 s are we going to have a recession in 1954 and 1958 and a slowdown in 1960 and the future bringing we don t know what in 1961 are we going to have economic policies and leadership which provides a stifling of the american economy when we need schools and hospitals and roads and private investment are we going to stand still and become as we were last year the lowest country or economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world or are we going to go ahead are we going to move again i think this is a serious election and i think we offer a clear alternative to the american people this union has seen good times and bad times this union went through a strike of over 6 months during the last year that strike came in part because the steel companies in 1957 had their last great year when their productive capacity was used to the full steel settlements come from two factors first from both the union and the company recognizing their public obligation and secondly when the economy is moving along so that there is an incentive on both the company and the union to get together to make a contract to go back to work but if the steel companies find that one half of their capacity produces as much steel as the market is consuming or if they feel that they can produce in 6 months what the market consumes in a year then they would just as soon face up and say let s settle this matter right now let us rewrite our working standards let s stand still let them strike we will use up our inventory use up our backlog and 6 months from now we can go back to work and our profits will still be up you get an agreement when there is a need for steel you get an agreement when the economy is moving ahead you get an agreement when there is incentive on both sides to sign a contract and get back to work so the difficulties of last year were not only tied up with the inequities of the taft hartley act emergency section but they were also tied up with the fact that 1959 was not a boom year as long as you have a slowdown in our economy so long will you find it difficult to work out satisfactory collective bargaining procedures dave mcdonald who has been a friend of mine and supporter for many months and years has put forward a suggestion that the only way to meet the problem of overabundance is to have a 32 hour week my own feeling is i would prefer a different solution i would prefer the solution of this economy going ahead at such full blast that in 40 hours a week we barely produce what we can consume that at the time when we have a productive race with the soviet union at a time when we need all the steel we can get to take care of a population which is increasing and which will double in 40 years i would like to see economic and fiscal policies by this government will be directed toward stimulating the economy so that the steel industry works full time and so your people go back to work i respect his suggestion and we are friends enough so that we can disagree our objective is the same full time work for our people enough leisure to enjoy themselves but i feel before we move to 32 hours that we should try an administration which is dedicated to full economic growth which wants our people and our country working which wants our steel pouring out which wants us to grow comparable to that of western germany and france and england which doubled the economic growth of the united states last year i come here today as a man who has served on that committee on labor for 14 years and i come here today as the candidate for the democratic party and more important than that i come here as the standard bearer for a party in direct line of succession with three great presidents of this country in this century woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman i think the theme for our party and country was said by franklin roosevelt when he came before 100 000 people in franklin field philadelphia in 1936 to accept the second presidential nomination in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think for the last 8 years we have had a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference as long as there are 15 million americans living in substandard housing as long as the average unemployment compensation check for workers thrown out of work in this country is 32 a week as long as there are millions of americans who do not even receive the inadequate 1 an hour minimum wage as long as the average check for laundry women in five large cities of this country is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week as long as there are 4 million families receiving a food surplus package from our government every month so long is there need for the democratic party what i have been saying to you today affects the security of the united states and it affects our security around the world if the united states is strong and moving here at home then we will be moving around the world the reason that franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor to latin america was because he was a good neighbor to the americans if we are moving at home if we have full employment in this country if our automobile and steel and oil and coal is working and putting our people to work and producing then our future is secure because we set up here in the united states not only the kind of society under which we want to live but we set up the kind of society which people all over the world will want to follow i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that if i am elected life will be easy i think the 1960 s will be difficult but i do run for the office of the presidency saying that we can do better and that we must do better this is the great issue those who want to stay and those who want to go those who say yes to the 1960 s and those who say no those who look to the past and those who look to the future i think the alternative is clear before us and i join with those who in this country during the last century have moved ahead have broken new ground i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join me give me your help your hand your voice and we can move this country ahead thank you i will give you one more thought before i leave this happy hall let me just say that in this election i am reminded 100 years later and i think all of us are interested in our families in their security and our country s security and we are also interested in what happens to the united states around the world i think whoever is going to be the next president of the united states must recognize that it will be a task more burdensome more heavy with decisions which involve us all more deeply than ever before in this country s history but this is not a race merely between mr nixon and myself and in a very real sense it is not a race just between the members of two political parties i think it is the kind of decision which is comparable to the decision which the united states made in 1932 in 1932 the united states i think took a decision which preserved freedom here in the united states i think the great issue in 1960 is for us to take the kind of decisions which will preserve freedom around the world thomas paine said in the revolution of 1776 that the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america if we fail i think the case of freedom fails not only in the united states but every place if we succeed if we meet our responsibilities if we bear our burdens than i think freedom succeeds here and also it succeeds around the world mr khrushchev has said that our children will be communists i don t accept that view i think if we do what we have to do if we start this country boiling again then i think there is every prospect that his children will be communists i am reminded in the fact of the election of 1860 that lincoln hard pressed wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i see his hand in it if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk19 9 60c john_f _kennedy thank you senator byrd hewlitt smith ladies and gentlemen i am grateful for the generous introduction of your distinguished u s senator who has given lyndon johnson and myself unstinting support since the democratic convention and i appreciate what he said here tonight thank you very much and i am delighted to be here on this platform with my friend and colleague in the u s senate who has spoken powerfully for the interests of west virginia and also for the united states senator jennings randolph and your next u s senator this state needs leadership if it is going to move forward there is a federal responsibility and a state responsibility and i think that state responsibility can be met by electing your attorney general your governor wally barron i am here tonight with governor lawrence senator clark and members of your congressional delegation and people from nine states who have come to this conference in charleston in order to talk about new jobs and new growth i come back here to this state where i started last spring to express my appreciation for the support you gave me on that occasion and now in view of the fact that west virginia made it possible for me to be nominated i am just asking you to help me along for another 6 weeks and get us elected i think it can be safely said that i am the only presidential candidate who does not need a guide to show him the road from charleston to beckley i am the only presidential candidate who knows that you spell mullens w va m u l l e n s i have seen the industrial resources of the kanawha valley and the ohio valley and i have traveled in counties in this state that desperately need the attention and the assistance of a government which looks forward and does not stand still this conference here today on new jobs and new growth is part of the commitment which i made to the people of west virginia in the primary that 60 days after my election if i am elected i will send to the congress of the united states a program to assist west virginia to move forward and what i said last fall and what i say tonight i mean i think this state has a great future i took my case to the people of west virginia last spring but i have taken the case for west virginia all over the united states because i think what i have seen in west virginia a state which has fought for this country in wartime where the spirit runs strong in peacetime which wants a chance to move ahead i think west virginia and parts of pennsylvania and parts of kentucky and southern illinois and parts of indiana and parts of ohio and parts of maryland i think those sections of the united states which have been forgotten under this administration are only symptomatic of the lack of leadership which this country has had for the last 8 years the republican candidate for the presidency is running on a platform that you never had it so good i would like them to tell that to the families in mcdowell county and logan and mingo i would like them to tell that to those americans who see our prestige fading around the world who see the communists who now stride across the stage of the united nations who may be quarantined as mr khrushchev and castro are in manhattan but are not quarantined as they spread their influence across asia and latin america and africa i think we can do better i think we can do better i think we are a great country but we can be a greater country and i think we are a powerful country but i think we can be more powerful and the democratic party says of the sixties yes we want to move forward and the republican party has said in the last 8 years as it has said in every administration in this century it has said no to progress it has vetoed progress it has had a program of no new starts and on education and housing and distressed areas and employment this country has been standing still i spoke this afternoon to the united steel workers convention we are using today only 50 percent of our capacity and when we don t make steel they don t mine coal in west virginia and when you don t make autos in detroit you don t make steel and you don t mine coal and you don t make chemicals and you stand still i think we are going to have to do better we are going to have to find 25 000 jobs every week for the next 10 years if we are going to keep our people working let me make it clear that i have come to this conference as the standard bearer for the democratic party and i commit our party to a policy of full employment as franklin roosevelt committed it in his generation during his administration and on inauguration day next january i pledge my administration to this policy and i will send to the congress specific programs designed to carry out the following objectives first we will develop the resources of this country clean our rivers build our roads put our workers to work in companies arid businesses which have the resources to use the great wealth which the lord gave us in this state and around the country secondly we will stimulate private investment in a growing america by eliminating the artificial restrictions which this administration s high interest rate tight money policy has placed on the growth of our economy we spend 4 billion a year on interest on our debt more than we did 10 years ago and every family that buys a car a television set an automobile or a house pays interest on that additional debt i think we should unleash the economy rather than attempting to restrict it if we are going to put our people back to work third this administration has talked about federal aid to education and they have talked about the desirability of having assistance for teachers salaries but in the last 8 years no bill has passed the future of west virginia and the future of the united states is tied up in our obtaining the best possible educational system for our children the soviet union is turning out twice as many scientists and engineers and technicians as we are if we are going to absorb the new technology we are going to have to have the best trained people in the world and they are going to come out of this state and the other 49 states therefore we will suggest a program of federal aid to education and for teachers salaries to make sure that they are well trained and well paid fourth we must recognize that the problem of automation is not a problem for a family or even for a company or even for an industry the problem of automation is a national problem and i think it is incumbent on the next administration to call a national conference of representatives of our basic industries of labor unions of working people and the government to try to bring better relief to our people so that new machinery means better life rather than people out of work mcdowell county w va mines more coal than it ever mined before and there are more people receiving surplus food packages in mcdowell county than in any other county of the united states automation did it and automation will do it in the steel industry and the auto industry and the chemical industry and the glass industry of this state unless the federal government turns its attention to it i do not recall that this administration has concerned itself in the slightest with a problem which is entirely new which can mean great blessings to us but which can also mean great dangers to the american working men and women who need a job and we will enact a bill which has passed the u s senate twice which has been vetoed twice which provides assistance to those who live in distressed areas which will help send government contracts which will provide loans for businessmen which will provide vocational retraining which will provide supplemental unemployment compensation benefits so that in these distressed areas where unemployment is 8 9 and 10 percent we can help these places move again this is a national problem not a problem for a county in west virginia or a county in my own state of massachusetts this is a problem which faces the united states it crosses into 9 10 or 11 states and these are not people who live in india or latin america these are fellow americans and if i got any benefit out of my experience in west virginia it was because i saw what men and women and children in a rich country like the united states have passed through because of the indifference of this administration let me say that this is not a problem just for west virginia this is a problem for the country because if we are moving ahead here in the united states if we are strengthening ourselves here then the power and prestige of the united states increases if we are standing still if we give the impression that the future belongs to the communists and not to us if we are not able to meet our own problems then we affect ourselves and our position and our children s position in the future i ask your help in this campaign i think this country is a great country and i think it requires the dedicated effort of all of us i think this country should move again i can assure you that i stand here tonight as the standard bearer of a party which has been led in other years by great americans in this century like woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and i pledge to you that what they tried to do what they tried to do in their day and in their generation we are going to do again if we win this election the democratic party will lead and the united states will move again thank you dem jfk19 9 60d john_f _kennedy senator randolph senator byrd your next governor wally barron governor lawrence senator clark members of the congress ladies and gentlemen i not only know where west virginia is but i am the only presidential candidate i think since 1924 when a west virginian ran for the presidency who knows where slab fork is and has been there i said during the primaries that if i won in west virginia i could win the nomination and there isn t any doubt here that our success here in this primary and the generous support given by the people of west virginia on that occasion made it possible for us to go to the convention in a position of strength so i want to express my appreciation to you and i want to thank you for helping out the democratic party in the way that you are it would be nice to run this campaign on goodwill and wishes but this is what makes the mare go you don t want wally barron or jennings or any of the candidates to be stuck around the state or our presidential campaign to run out of gas in billings mont or some other western point president truman told me the other night that his campaign train ran out of funds three times in 1948 and they had to come and get him we are trying to keep going we are in shape for the next week or l0 days but we have to have some help so i want to express my appreciation to you i know you have a good many other problems and responsibilities but this kind of assistance you are giving us is the kind of assistance that will permit us to carry our message through this state and through the united states we have many obstacles many responsibilities in this campaign but i do feel after having been on the road now for more than 2 weeks i do feel that if we can keep this campaign moving for the next 6 weeks if we can keep the campaign presented to the american people if we can go on radio and television if we can do all the things that need to be done to get our message across i think in 1960 the people of this state and the people of this country are going to choose to move forward with the democratic party once again i think you are all coming to the auditorium where we are going to go through a lot of this again i did want to come down today specifically to thank you because this is the kind of thing which makes it possible for us to carry this campaign and i am most appreciative thank you dem jfk2 10 60 john_f _kennedy senator humphrey governor freeman congressmen mr thatcher gentlemen i want to express great appreciation to hubert as i told him this morning having to run against him in a couple of states it is like playing ohio state and then having to play harvard it is much easier to play harvard after you have played ohio state so i find this fall not as difficult as last spring in many ways i am here today with him because we all agree in common that the problems that american agriculture faces i believe is the no 1 domestic problem the reason of course is a simple one from 12 to 13 percent of the population have a steadily diminishing income and sooner or later it spreads its influence to the rest of the country farmers are the no 1 market for the auto industry and the auto industry is the no 1 market for the steel industry sooner or later if farming comes to decline the economy of the rest of the country declines therefore as i come from boston mass not a great agricultural center and from massachusetts i also serve the united states and the economy of the united states is interdependent and therefore i believe that on the front of the desk of the next president of the united states is going to have to be the problems of american agriculture one of the most unfortunate factors i think of present agricultural policies has been the effort to persuade people from the cities and towns of the united states that a satisfactory farm income is going to serve them unsatisfactorily when i ran for reelection to the senate in 1958 the chairman of the republican national committee came to massachusetts and said i had voted for higher support prices which were against the interests of the people of my state i said i didn t think so at all the people of my state of massachusetts could not possibly sell fish and television sets and shirts to the people of minnesota or wisconsin or the dakotas or montana unless the people of the dakotas and montana and wisconsin and minnesota were able to sell their agricultural products at a decent price the american economy is interdependent and a decline in one area inevitably brings a decline in another i feel this is an important principle and i think the democratic party has an opportunity to make a real contribution in this point the reason we have not been able to rebuild our older cities of the east is too often congressmen and senators from the agricultural areas vote against us they don t serve the farmer by keeping slums in the cities of boston and new york and the congressmen and senators from the urban areas of the united states do not serve their people by depressing farm income the democratic party is a national party i think this year we have a chance to emphasize the interdependence of the american economy that when one section and another section join together then the economy of this country begins to move forward so i emphasize though i come from an urban section of the united states i think we have a chance to make a real contribution to the farm families with whom you work secondly we had a good chance to see this in action when our bill which senator proxmire and senator humphrey and i cosponsored in the senate came to a vote in august to increase the support price for b milk from i think 3 05 to 3 24 or 3 25 i was able to persuade the members from new england in the congress in the house of representatives to support that bill because i emphasized this point that we can never get movement on the things that we need in our own section unless we also recognize that we must cooperate together in lifting the economy of this country so i hope that if i am successful in this election and if we do control the house and senate which i believe we will if we do have democratic governors like orville freeman that we can emphasize the national state in a prosperous agriculture mr nixon on the debate on monday night said that the farm program which i suggested would increase prices to the consumer the old game of trying to turn the city against the farmer now how much does a farmer get out of a loaf of bread and how much of his income was up a dairy farmer how much would that cost the consumer very very little as we know three cents on a loaf of bread which may cost 25 cents 6 1 2 cents on a quart of milk which may sell for 25 or 26 or 27 cents eggs cotton as hubert said last night to me it cost more to launder this shirt in the hotel where we were staying than the cotton farmer gets for the cotton that he sold for this shirt so i think that in trying to improve farm income we serve the consumer and the farmer and the country now let me say that there are four principles which if i am successful will guide us in attempting to develop an agricultural policy first let me say that i think that the farm program put forward by the vice president is much much more of the same and i can t believe that farmers in the middle west are going to buy the same they are not going to get any guarantee that however bad things are now they are going to stay this good because they are going to go down and down and down because the support price which mr nixon the support price which mr nixon advocates is not tied to any increase in the cost of the farmer doing business it is tied to the average market price for the past 3 years and as that price drops which it has been for the last 8 years so the support price will drop if the support price for corn which may be higher than the market price this year the market price for corn as i said last night the governor had said that the figures were 85 cents in st paul minn and on friday that is the market price then that was what the support price will be and down it will go mr thatcher gave us some figures this morning on what corn was selling for and barley and oats in 1932 6 8 10 12 cents there is no check on the downward drop of farm income under the program put forward by the vice president and you can t eat that amount of surplus to quote mr benson and mr nixon first let me say that for secretary of agriculture we are going to take someone and select someone as secretary who really has a sympathetic understanding of the problems of the farmer here in the middle west of the united states i want a secretary of agriculture who believes in and follows the principles of farmer elected committees of farmers to carry out farm programs on the local and county levels secondly we must make the fullest use consistent with our national interest of any agricultural abundance i talked about that briefly last night in our own country we are not doing a job at all that we ought to be doing distributing our farm abundance to those americans who need help we are not doing it in europe we are not doing it in africa latin america and asia someone said to me recently if mr khrushchev had his choice of 50 of the best farmers in the united states and 50 percent of our scientists he would take our farmers because this is a great asset that we have in this country and an asset that he wants he always has emphasized food production in his whole career he runs to the middle west and koslov comes and mikoyan comes because they want to know the secret of how we can produce so much food with so few people and if they can master that secret then they are going to use that as a great weapon in the cold war i don t think we should use food as a weapon in the cold war i think we should hold out the hands of friendship and i think the bread we float on the water will come back to us many times over in the coming years here is an example of how we can really help our friends abroad and also our farmers the democratic congress in 1958 specifically passed a law authorizing the secretary of agriculture to buy farm produced fats and oils for relief feeding abroad this was done at the suggestion of the national council of churches which had distributed very successfully with other church groups a good deal of our agricultural produce in countries that needed it these church organizations of all faith have requested mr benson for some fats and oils to be used as part of their program over all the world they donate their time and effort to distributing these goods but the secretary of agriculture has consistently refused to implement the will of congress i think the next president of the united states and the next administration should inaugurate a program of buying soybean oil and cottonseed oil and lard for feeding abroad and i would do this before harvest time when the farmers have soybeans to sell not later when their crop is already owned by the processors third i would support farm program which will raise farm income to full parity levels as soon as it is feasible to do so by parity income i mean an income which will give average farm producers a return on their farming investment their labor and their managerial effort equal to the returns that are earned by comparable resources in other industries parity income should be the yardstick of equity for the farmers after all it is income that has real meaning in terms of farmers needs and no fairminded american who seeks the same for themselves can possible object to this goal as part of our national policy fourth after all that we have done that can be done to find useful outlets for our food and fiber products and after we have provided for fully adequate safety reserves for essential farm products then we must find effective ways to bring supplies into balance under the total expanded demand we need a positive policy of managing our agricultural surplus in the interest of avoiding waste and securing fair prices and incomes for the farm people who produce them there are many different ways and many devices for managing these supplies and we do not say that every commodity should use the same device but we are determined to make the laws of supply and demand work for the farmer for a change fifth we must find a way to get credit down for the farmers farmers are paying 6 to 8 percent for money that bankers are getting for a good deal less this is a very good markup and let me say that i think that the excessive cost of credit is one of the most serious factors affecting not only farmers but also small businessmen stretching across the united states sixth i think the federal crop insurance program must be expanded and revitalized into a program that works let me say finally that this is a very difficult problem i do not underrate i know that those of you who have worked with it for years know that the technological revolution which is taking place in agriculture has produced many problems in its wake and anybody who feels that we can bring an instantaneous solution to all the problems misleads but i do think by the devices which i have suggested by using the best talent that we can get that we can stop the downward drop in prices and begin again on the upward curve that is our objective that is our commitment and i am confident that this can be done i want to assure you that i will work as hard as i can whether i am elected president of the united states or whether i continue in the senate for a program which in serving agriculture serves the united states and in serving the united states serves the cause of freedom we have great assets here and i think they should be used beneficially the lord has been good to us and i think we can repay his generosity by devising programs that feed our people well and also feed those who look to us whose assistance we need whose good feeling we welcome whose identification of interest is necessary if this country is going to maintain its position you work with farmers who serve the cause of freedom and i want to make it clear to you if i am elected i will join you in that effort dem jfk2 10 60a john_f _kennedy governor freeman congressman blatnik ladies and gentlemen first of all i want to say that i am most indebted to my friend and colleague senator humphrey for his kind and generous introduction hubert and i chased each other all over northern wisconsin during january february and march and now we run together on a democratic ticket for the democratic party and a country which we feel can best be led by democrats in the senate and in the house and in the executive branch of the government everything that has happened since he was no longer a candidate has been easy he made it so tough last winter that this fall is very pleasant i am enjoying it mr nixon was staying home in bed when we were running all over wisconsin and west virginia and i think we are ready to continue the fight through the month of october and i am delighted to be here at this university prince bismarck once said that one third of the students of german universities broke down from overwork another third broke down from dissipation and the other third ruled germany i don t know which third of the student body is here today of the university of minnesota in duluth but i am confident i am talking to the future rulers of this state and country in the sense that all educated men and women have an obligation to participate to govern to join in the great discipline of self government and i am proud to be here and i am proud of the fact that the governor of this state has been farsighted enough to know that no state and no country can move ahead without the best educational system in the world i wish the present administration had had the vision in washington that he has had in the state of minnesota and i am delighted to be here with john blatnik he and i came to congress the same year 14 years ago he came after a distinguished war record and he has served this state and country in peace he speaks for this district but he also speaks for the united states he represents the kind of man of integrity and vigor which i think this country is going to need if it is going to move ahead if it is going to meet his obligations this is an important election and i think the people of minnesota have a most important judgment and decision to make mr nixon said on monday night and he said on other occasions that parties don t make much difference what counts is the man i think what counts is the kind of a man a political party chooses mr nixon and i were not suddenly discovered after our two conventions we have not been kept in ice we are part of a long tradition both of us of a political service and political philosophy which stretches back in the case of the democratic party to the beginning of this country and stretches back over 100 years in the case of the republican party and consistently on issue after issue the two parties have taken different positions because they represent different interests the democratic party is the only national party in the united states it is composed of miners and farmers it is composed of potato growers in maine it is composed of fishermen in washington state it is composed of ranchers in texas and peanut farmers in georgia it is composed of all the interests in the united states and therefore speaks for the people the base of the republican party is far narrower it is not accident that the president in this century who broke away from the boundaries which had been set by his party was theodore roosevelt and they read him out of the party in 1912 or he left and the reason is simple a republican candidate and a republican president representing as he does those interests and members of the republican party must take a particular position on a particular issue is it any accident that for the last 25 years the republicans have voted against the minimum wage nearly every time they voted against the 25 cents in 1935 and they voted against the 1 25 in 1960 they voted against the social security in 1935 and they voted against the medical care for the aged in 1960 they opposed unemployment compensation in the thirties after the state of wisconsin had originally invented it and they opposed federal standards for unemployment compensation in 1958 and 1959 parties do mean something if they don t mean something we ought to get rid of them if parties don t tell us something about the political philosophy of a man then it means that our parties have outrun their usefulness but they do tell us something they do give us a point of view mr nixon never would have been nominated by the democratic party and i never would have been nominated by the republican party because he does not agree with us and we do not agree with him on monday night he said the goals of both parties are the same the means are different i do not accept that view i do not accept the view that the republican party s goals and our goals are the same because if they are the same why have they opposed progressive social legislation during the last quarter of a century why have they not been willing to grasp the future why have they not been willing to recognize that the united states moves in a difficult and dangerous time that requires a maximum effort i don t think any democratic president would have run this summer on the party labels that they had originally designed in the most dangerous time in the life of our country i don t think any democratic president would have counted the first vote of the united nations 70 to nothing as a great success for the united states and felt that what was happening at the united nations was a source of strength to us it is no accident mr khrushchev spends a month there he is a busy man he thinks he is fulfilling a useful purpose day in and day out he confers with the neutralists attempting to win their loyalty attempting to win their commitments as he has in the case of cuba as he is beginning to do in the case of guinea and ghana he is a busy man if he will stay in new york until october 15 it is because he feels that the time is moving in his direction before the united nations ends there will be other votes and we will see what should be apparent that the prestige and power of the united states is not increasing in relationship to that of a communist world that we are moving in the most hazardous period that this country has ever moved in and i do not say that because i enjoy saying it it is because i think it is the function of the democratic party in this election as the only opposition party as the only means of presenting alternative courses of action to sound the alarm bell in the night the american people have 6 weeks in which to make a judgment as to what kind of america and what kind of a future they want i hope that they give us the opportunity to serve this country not because the future is easy but because i think the future can be realized as a bright and promising one for us and for the cause of freedom if we are willing to recognize facts as they are if we are willing to recognize that there is an opportunity for us but that it cannot be seized by dismissing the world around us as one which is bright and promising and moving in our direction in the next 4 years in the next 8 years in the next administration of the next president africa latin america and asia will all change the question is will they move with us or will they move with mr khrushchev will they decide that the future belongs to him or to us will they decide that they want to mobilize their resources through a system of freedom or will they determine that the way of the future is in the east not the west all this is tied into the problems that this district faces this is a great boiler in the u s economy the reason that this section of minnesota has suffered three recessions in recent years is because the economy of the united states has not been moving we are producing 50 percent of our capacity in steel last week the soviet union outproduced us not because they have more capacity they have less than half our capacity but they are using their capacity to the fullest here we are with a great food reserve the strongest in the world and yet we have not used that in an imaginative way we are not using our steel capacity we are not using our iron ore capacity we are not using the st lawrence seaway to capacity this country cannot possibly maintain itself unless it moves here at home if this country moves at home if we maintain full employment if we meet our responsibilities to our own citizens if we spread the same image of vitality abroad then i think those people who stand today on the razor edge of decision may decide that we represent the future the communist system the past we after all represent the kind of country in which they want to live they do not want to move to the east most of them have not thrown out colonial powers in order to substitute that of the soviet union i believe that we can change the movement of history i believe that the brightest days as far as service are not even those of wilson or roosevelt i believe in the 1960 s the united states can fulfill destiny as the great defender of freedom at a time of maximum danger but it requires us to realize where we are and what we must do it requires the next president of the united states to set before the american people our unfinished business to give an impression around the world of force and vitality that which we do here that which we are as emerson said speaks far louder than what we say i am tired of seeing us follow the advice of the poet to take the cash and let the credit go nor heed the rumble of a distant drum i heed that rumble and i am sure the american people do dem jfk2 10 60b john_f _kennedy mr bush president truman senator symington governor blair mayor tucker john dalton ed long members of the congress ladies and gentlemen the big news story of the past 7 days was not mr khrushchev or the presidential campaign it was the news out of boston that mr ted williams had retired as an active ballplayer for the boston red sox it seems that at 42 he was too old it does show that perhaps experience doesn t count massachusetts and missouri are closely linked in the history of the united states both have been cradles of american freedom the french who founded the city of st louis and the germans who came after were searching for a freedom stronger and better than they had ever known and if there is one principle that has stood out in the careers of the men that this state has sent to washington it has been their devotion to freedom and their willingness to fight for it if there is one principle that has stood out in the career of senator stuart symington it is the principle that to protect individual liberties you must be strong as a nation and there is one principle which stood out in the career of the late beloved senator hennings it was that to be strong we must protect individual liberties and every citizen of my state and yours every citizen of this free nation and every other is obligated to the missourian who fought for both liberty and strength president harry truman last thursday night in boston mr nixon dismissed me as and i will quote him another truman i regard that as a great compliment but observing the content of mr nixon s campaign i have no hesitation in returning the compliment i consider him another dewey like mr dewey he represents a do nothing party like mr dewey he is a say nothing candidate and like mr dewey he will win nothing in november some of the experts are saying that this is 1928 all over again for the sake of the farmer the worker the merchant and the teacher for the sake of all those who remember the days of 10 cent corn and 10 percent interest i trust it will not be 1928 all over again i think it will be 1948 all over again i think the american people are going to turn thumbs down just as they did in 1948 on a candidate who is running away from his party who is trying to hide his party s record and who is now saying me too to all the democratic programs he fought during his entire political public life harry truman attacked in 1948 from both left and right carried the banner of a liberal responsible democratic party that believed in the people and i am proud to carry the same banner in 1960 much is different between 1948 and 1960 but much is the same it was 2 years earlier in 1946 that president truman brought to fulton college one of the great figures of the english speaking world and on that historic day in march winston churchill bluntly confronted our nation and the world with the fact that from stettin in the baltic to trieste in the adriatic an iron curtain had descended across the continent he warned the world that time is plenty short that we cannot and i quote him take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late and that our difficuties and dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them or by merely waiting to see what happens he called for action to establish conditions of freedom throughout the world to strengthen our western alliances and the united nations and he particularly emphasized these words which have meaning for us today from what i have seen of our russian friends and allies during the war i am convinced that there is nothing they so much admire as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness we cannot afford if we can help it to work on narrow margins offering temptations to a trial of strength these prophetic words of 1946 are true in 1960 if we are to protect our heritage of freedom if we are to maintain it around the world we must be strong militarily educationally scientifically and morally strong and that is why i am dedicating this campaign to the goal of a stronger america to the proposition that this nation is strong but can be stronger that this nation is powerful but can be more powerful mr nixon says that my call for a stronger america demonstrates a lack of confidence if by that he means a lack of confidence in republican leadership if by that he means a lack of confidence in his policies and in his platform if by that he means a lack of confidence in the same republican campaign promises that have been repeatedly broken in the last 8 years then he is absolutely correct i do lack confidence in that leadership and so do the american people but i have great confidence in this nation and in the american people i have confidence that this nation is strong enough to permit a free and open discussion of the great probems which face us in this difficult and somber time in the life of our country i have confidence in our ability to close the missile gap to modernize our conventional forces and to give this country the kind of defensive strength that stuart symington has been warning for years we will need if we are going to remain free at the end of the next years i have confidence in this nation s ability to look out for its older citizens to see that they have a decent pension and a decent home and decent medical care the people who oppose this program for medical care under social security are the very same people who fought president roosevelt in 1935 the very same people who supported alf landon in his campaign in 1936 running on the single platform of repealing social security they said then it would mortgage our future and socialize our economy but the democratic party of franklin roosevelt had confidence in the united states and i have equal confidence that we can do a far better job than this administration has done in this area as in so many others i have confidence in an america where the farmer is not treated as a second class citizen where he can obtain through joint action by his own efforts and the co ops and governmental action the kind of bargaining power in the marketplace that will permit him to have a decent livable income i think it is time that this nation faced up to the agricultural revolution which is a great asset which is a great source of defense which is a great source of peace and a great source of security to us in a hungry world and i cannot believe that the same programs which have left us with 9 billion of surplus food rotting away in a country which has over 4 million people living on surplus food packages and hundreds of millions around the world i cannot believe that the american people in 1960 are going to endorse that kind of an agricultural program again i think we can do a better job we have confidence in the united states that is the difference between the republicans and the democrats this year they say we have never had it so good and we say we can do better they say they have never done so much and i say we can do more and i say we have to do more because if the united states is not prepared to realize its potential to the fullest to have the best educational system in the world to give our citizens their equal constitutional rights to move ahead as a vital and strong economy then this country is not going to be able to sustain itself and will not serve as the chief defender of freedom around the world what has been good enough in the past will not be good enough in the 1960 s the united states has no other country to which it can turn if world events go against us we are the only sentinel at the gate therefore it is incumbent upon us for our own survival as well as for our responsibility to the cause of freedom all over the globe that we move ahead in all these areas that we build a stronger and more vital society here in the united states one that can serve as an inspiration to people all around the world who stand today on the razor edge of decision trying to decide whether the future belongs to the communists or whether it belongs to us i think it belongs to us but i do not believe it is going to belong to us merely by wishing it i think it will come when the next president of the united states sets before the american people the unfinished business of our society our national goals what we must hope to achieve in the next 10 years if we are going to maintain our independence if we are going to build our strength if we are going to provide greater security for ourselves and for those who wish to move in the same direction that we are moving latin america and africa and asia all stand now wondering which road to take they will come with us if we can demonstrate here in this country that we are moving ahead that we are solving our problems and that we are holding out the hand of friendship to them the reason that franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson and harry truman were successful in their foreign policy was because they were successsful in their own country the new freedom of woodrow wilson had its logical extension in the 14 points the new deal of franklin roosevelt was the domestic counterpart of the good neighbor policy and the fair deal of president truman had its match in the marshall plan and nato and point 4 and the truman doctrine you cannot move abroad unless you move at home mr nixon has said that i am a conservative at home and a risk taker abroad i am neither i do not believe that in the united states and in the world as difficult and somber as tbe world around us i think we need a progressive at home a progressive society one that moves ahead one that solves its problems one that serves as an example as it sits on a most conspicuous stage that is the decision before the people of the united states this year which road they want to take whether they feel what we are now doing is good enough or whether they have confidence that there are unrealized powers in our free society i think that in 1960 the american people are going to say yes to the next 10 years they are going to give it the green light as one indication of how serious is the debate now taking place last week monday night in the debate i said that our power superiority is threatened by growing soviet hydropower a growth which is so rapid that it threatens to overtake the united states by 1975 mr nixon said later this week that that statement was false he boasts of tremendous power development during the past 8 years and he asserted that the russians can overtake us only if we did nothing for 15 years while they built eight grand coulee dams a year that is his charge and what are the facts the facts were reported last year by a committee of the u s senate over which mr nixon occasionally presides that committee s findings and i quote were although the united states is still far ahead the russians could overtake us in 1975 in 15 years unless we speed up or they slow down both countries will have the senate said an equal power generating capacity which will be 337 500 000 kilowatts in 1975 it would not take eight grand coulee dams a year to bridge the gap it would not even take three the facts of the matter are that this year the soviets are building three dams larger than grand coulee two of which are more than twice as large on this issue of power development economic growth of better schools of a sound agricultural program of moving ahead in a whole variety of areas i think there is a very sharp difference between the two political parties mr nixon has said recently that parties don t count what counts are the men but i think what counts are the kinds of parties and the kind of men that those parties produce i would not have been nominated by the republican party nor would have harry truman and the democrats never would have nominated richard nixon the fact is that the parties tell something the political parties run like rivers through the history of this country and their force and power and direction and the movement of the flow all tell something about the movement in the future what is past is prologue and the record of our two parties is written for the future as it has been for the past i think the democratic party has again a rendezvous with destiny an opportunity to be of service not only to ourselves not only to our own country but to all those who look to us wilson roosevelt and truman have been the democratic presidents who have led this country in the 20th century mckinley coolidge harding landon dewey and the vice president have led the republican party in the 20th century i cannot believe faced with the difficult problems that this country now faces that the american people are going to turn back to a republican leadership i cannot believe that the american people are going to say in 1960 that we have never had it so good and we want more of the same i think they are going to want to cross the new frontier i think that all those who agree that we never want to have a trial of strength agree that it is incumbent upon us to rebuild the strength of the united states in 1964 this city will observe its 200th anniversary i hope the next president of the united states comes to that occasion and i hope he is able to say that this country has turned the corner that the tide of history is once more moving in the direction of freedom that america is on the way i do not say that that job will be easy during the next 4 years the american presidency will be at all times what harry truman called the loneliest job in the world there will be dangers and difficulties on every side for our country there will be crises both within and without but it is i think our intention to bear in mind the words of lincoln during the darkest days of the civil war many were fearful of the outcome and many were concerned about our survival and when a delegation called on the president to express its fears lincoln told them of an experience of his youth one night in november he said a shower of meteors fell from the clear night sky a friend standing by was frightened but i looked up and between the falling stars i saw the fixed stars beyond shining serene in the firmament and i said let us not mind the meteors let us keep our eyes on the stars as we face a difficult and sometimes dangerous future let us look beyond the fiery meteors of the present and look to the steady stars that have guided this country through so many difficult times thank you dem jfk2 10 60c john_f _kennedy i understand that daniel webster used to address 100 000 people without any trouble at all and without a mike so it should be easy for us we are a little softer than they used to be however i want to thank you very much for a generous reception i am particularly proud that i am associated on the ticket here in minnesota with your distinguished congressman who has served this district and served the country joe karth whom i know you are going to send back to the house of representatives and with your great governor orville freeman who was generous enough to nominate me at the convention but that is not the reason you ought to reelect him the reason you ought to reelect him is because he has served this state and i don t know of a more difficult job in the united states than to be governor of an expanding state with problems of education taking care of our older people the mentally retarded and all the rest i think orville freeman has moved forward with courage i am confident that this state is going to respond to that kind of leadership and hubert of course is surely going to he reelected he prepared me and took me out into spring training which was far tougher than it is this fall i chased him all over wisconsin and then all over the hills of west virginia and now we are running against mr nixon i ask your help in this campaign the candidates kind of pour through these cities and leave but for the next 6 weeks the campaign in minnesota is in your hands i think it is an important election i think we can do a great job for this country and this state and i feel that the democratic party which in other days and in other crises has produced great leadership i think we can do the same job again i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in crossing the new frontier i feel we can be of service to our country and in serving our country we can serve a great cause all around the world thank you very much dem jfk2 10 60d john_f _kennedy congressman karth senator humphrey governor freeman senator mccarthy if i put this on i will tell you what i will do i will wear it at the next st patrick s day parade in boston but i am very grateful it is a beautiful hat i did not know that this was old mexico here in st paul i am very grateful it is a beautiful hat i am grateful for joe karth s introduction i don t know whether you realize it but the constitution of the united states gives different responsibilities to the senate and the house in the u s senate we are given the responsibility of ratifying treaties and confirming presidential appointments the house of representatives however is given far greater power they are given the power to levy taxes and appropriate money so any time you don t like the way your money is being spent or what the taxes are do not write to senator humphrey mccarthy or me but write to congressman karth actually he represents the kind of able vigorous progressive congressman in fact public servant that i think this country needs i think this is an important election i know that candidates say that about every election but i think in many ways the issues which face the united states in 1960 are the most significant that we have ever faced even more significant than 1932 because in 1932 the issue was whether freedom would remain here in the united states i think the question in 1960 is whether it will remain around the world i don t think it is any accident that mr khrushchev spends a month at the united nations he is a busy man he is the dictator of a large country which has many projects at home and abroad but he chooses to spend a month at the united nations many of us in the united states have rather igiiored the united nations and presidents have visited it for a day and made a speech and then gone back to washington and the united nations continues why does he spend a month there why do all the members of his empire come with him why does nasser and those from every other nation around the world come to the united nations this year he is there for a very significant reason and he stays there for a very significant reason and that is because he realizes that the balance of power now hangs in the finest balance that it has hung in the last 2 000 years that if he can win the loyalty and good will if he can win a commitment to the future from the leaders of africa who are not committed to any course of action today the leaders of asia if castro can spread his influence throughout all of latin america then the balance of power will begin to move in the direction of the communist world and his future and the communist future is assured that is why i say 1960 is the most significant time in the history of not only the american republic but i think the history of freedom what course of action in the next 10 years will these people take we have seen in the case of guinea that they moved in the direction of the communists we have seen it in the case of ghana when mr herter said somewhat unwisely i think that the ghana government has moved in the direction of the communists we have seen it in the case of powerful groups in the congo three countries of africa newly independent in the last 2 years have begun to move in the direction of the communists we have seen it in the case of cuba india hangs in the balance these are the most vital days of our lives and when i said the other day that i was tired of reading about castro and khrushchev and i wanted to read what the united states was doing and what the president of the united states is doing i meant it because these are dangerous times mr nixon in this morning s paper chose to regard that as a personal attack on president eisenhower and he came to president eisenhower s defense he is going to be coming to president elsenhower s defense in the next 5 weeks during august he was coming to governor rockefeller s defense and he wasn t mentioning the president and he was not in september but now he is attempting to embrace the president i don t quarrel with the president of the united states the question is the future the question is not president eisenhower but president nixon that is the question the american people have to contend with in the next 6 weeks do they want to move in the direction of mr nixon do they want to move in the direction of the republican party or do they want to move with progress do they want to say in the 1960 s that the united states is ready to move ahead do they want to say to the people of africa asia and latin america that here in the united states is a strong and vital society that represents a far greater hope for the future than the communist system which is as old as egypt we represent we think the way of the future mr khrushchev says we are a sick and dying and faltering horse that is about to collapse into the ground i don t believe it i don t believe that the people of africa have become independent in order to sell their birthright to communism i don t think the people of eastern europe who have demonstrated in the last 10 years what they think of the communist system are prepared to say that the communist system represents the way to the future the communists hold an empire and i feel if we remain strong in this country if we are building our economy if we are building a vital society if we are practicing what we preach and what we are then what we are will be far stronger than what we say we are we have a chance to demonstrate that freedom can work the next president of the united states must personify the spirit of this great society of ours he must set before us the things we must do if by the year 1970 we are not only going to be free but strong and moving here and around the world i think the opportunity before the united states is bright in many ways our time is like the time dickens described at the beginning of his book it was the best of times and the worst of times it is the worst of times because we face the most severe challenge that we have ever faced and because in many ways the future will be somber but it is the best of times because we have a chance to strike a blow not only for our own security but for the freedom of those who look to us for assistance and succor who look to us for an example of what freedom can do here in the last 8 years i think the united states has drifted at the time of the congo crisis the united states offered scholarships to the congo at the time of the break with castro we offered aid in latin america what were we doing for the last 8 years in regard to africa and latin america that it was necessary for us to be reminded by mr castro and by the threat of communist takeover in the congo that africa is foresight is needed by the next administration what were we doing in the early fifties when the soviet union was making a decisive breakthrough in outer space it is because we have drifted with the times it is because we have been rowing across what we thought were passive seas ignoring the subterranean explosions underground that we find ourselves today faced with the most serious crises that we have ever known i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that if i am elected life will be easy but i run for the office of the presidency with the greatest possible confidence in this country mr nixon says i downgrade america i downgrade the leadership but i do not downgrade america i have the greatest confidence in it and i think that if we go to work if we start this country moving again that the cause of freedom will not only endure but it will prevail thank you dem jfk2 11 60 john_f _kennedy governor brown senator engle members of the congress distinguished state officials ladies and gentlemen while we meet tonight in the golden gate of california the rescue squad has been completing its operation in the city of new york governor rockefeller henry cabot lodge the vice president and president eisenhower all rode up together i thought it was very unfair not to have barry goldwater along we have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks ivory in their head and thick skins who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them dick nixon grabbed that tail in 1952 and 1956 but this year he faces the american people alone we are not choosing a team we are not choosing a triumvirate we are choosing a president of the united states president eisenhower is not running mr nixon is and the american people have to choose between mr nixon and the republican party that he represents and the democratic party and progress and i ask your support i come here and ask your support i cannot believe that a state like california which is committed to progress i cannot believe that california or the nation on next tuesday in the most difficult and dangerous and revolutionary period in world history can put the control of this country in the hands of those who have opposed progress for 25 years i come here tonight and i ask your support in picking this country up and moving it forward one week from tonight the next president of the united states will be turning to the arduous task that lies ahead the preparation of a legislative program the selection of men and women to serve our country and of preparation for the fight for peace abroad but whoever our next president may be his efforts for a successful policy abroad will depend on the men and women whom he selects to conduct that policy speaking in this state a month ago mr nixon showed an incapacity to grasp the essential fact he set up a new machinery intended to win the struggle for peace and freedom but it turned out to be nothing more than a series of conferences committees and goodwill tours this should come as no surprise for the last 8 years we have faced problem after problem and the solution to each of them has been to appoint a committee i think it is time for action i think it is time we met our problems it takes more than words hard or soft more than tours more than parades more than conferences it takes a stronger america militarily economically scientifically and educationally we need a stronger free world a stronger attack on world poverty a stronger united nations a stronger united states foreign policy speaking for a stronger america and that is what we are going to get we can push a button to start the next war but there is no push button magic to winning a lasting and enduring peace to be peace loving is not enough for the sermon on the mount saved its blessings for the peacemakers the generation which i speak for has seen enough of warmongers let our great role in history be that of peacemakers but in the two areas two areas where peace can he won in the field of disarmament and in our representations abroad this country has been ill served disarmament planning is the most glaring omission in the field of national security and world peace of the last 8 years this administration has less than 100 people working full time on the subject in the entire national government this is one fifth as many government employees as take care of the cemeteries and memorials for the u s battle commission one hundred people working for peace as a result we have gone to every conference unprepared our chief negotiator admitted at the 1958 conference on preventing surprise attacks that we and i quote him hadn t up to this time really given the intense study of the kind of measure which would make this kind of measure possible had not even intense study to the very program that they were then putting forward a year ago when we went to the disarmament conference we appointed an attorney from massachusetts to set up an ad hoc committee that committee met for 3 months it was then dismissed four months before the conference began we drafted an attorney from new york to head our mission the result was we had no program and we accepted that of the british how could we be so indifferent to one of our great chances for peace we are going to have to do better if we are successful on tuesday we are going to set up in the national government a national peace agency an arms research institute to prepare the studies which are necessary to conduct the scientific research which is essential if we are going to speak with vigor and precision in this vital area of opportunity secondly we are going to have to be better represented we are going to have to have the best americans we can get to speak for our country abroad all of us have admired what dr tom dooley has done in laos and others have been discouraged at the examples that we read of the ugly american and i think that the united states is going to have to do much better in this area if we are going to defend freedom and peace in the 1960 s for the fact of the matter is that out of moscow and peiping and czechoslovakia and eastern germany are hundreds of men and women scientists physicists teachers engineers doctors nurses studying in those institutes prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism a friend of mine visiting the soviet union last summer met a young russian couple studying swahili and african customs at the moscow institute of languages they were not language teachers he was a sanitation engineer and she was a nurse and they were being prepared to live their lives in africa as missionaries for world communism this can only be countered by skill and dedication of americans who are willing to spend their lives serving the cause of freedom the key arm of our foreign service abroad are the ambassadors and members of our missions too many have been chosen too many ambassadors have been chosen who are ill equipped and ill briefed campaign contributions have been regarded as a substitute for experience men who lack compassion for the needy here in the united states were sent abroad to represent us in countries which were marked by disease and poverty and illiteracy and ignorance and they did not identify us with those causes and the fight against them they did not demonstrate compassion there men who do not even know how to pronounce the name of the head of the country to which they are accredited as we saw 2 years ago in the case of our ambassador to ceylon have been sent to important countries essential countries in the struggle between east and west how can they compete with communist emissaries long trained and dedicated and committed to the cause of extending communism in those countries in 1958 it was reported that our ambassador to moscow was the only american ambassador who could speak the language accredited behind the iron curtain only one only two of the nine ambassadors to the arabic speaking countries spoke arabic in 8 of the 12 non english speaking countries of western europe our ambassadors lack a workable knowledge of the language of the country to which they were accredited our ambassador to paris could not even discuss negotiations with general de gaulle because he lacked that skill in french a man who is ignorant of foreign languages this country is going to have to do much better it was reported last month that 70 percent of all new foreign service officers had no language skill at all last year only 3 of 44 americans in our embassy in belgrade could speak yugoslavian in athens only 6 of 79 americans spoke the modern language of greek in new delhi not a single american could speak an indian dialect fluently we cannot understand what is in the minds of other people if we cannot even speak to them that is why we are given tongues yet do you think it is possible for us in the most deadly struggle in which freedom has ever been engaged to win if we approach it as casually as these statistics indicate that we are after the key african state of guinea now voting with the soviet union in communist foreign policy after it gained its independence a russian ambassador showed up the next day our ambassador did not show up for 9 months today we do not have a single american diplomat in residence in six new countries of africa which are now members of the united nations not a single american diplomat in residence in any of the 6 and of the 16 new african countries which were admitted to the united nations do you know how many voted with us on the admission of red china none there are only 26 negroes in the 6 000 of our foreign service officers and yet africa today contains one quarter of all the votes in the general assembly i think we can do better i therefore propose that our inadequate efforts in this area be supplemented by a peace corps of talented young men and women willing and able to serve their country in this fashion for 3 years as an alternative or as a supplement to peacetime selective service well qualified through rigorous standards well trained in the languages skills and customs they will need to know and directed and paid by the ica point 4 agencies we cannot discontinue training our young men as soldiers of war but we also want them to be ambassadors of peace the combat soldiers like general gavin who jumped with his division in northern france said that no young man today could serve his country with more distinction than in this struggle for peace around the world this would be a volunteer corps and volunteers would be sought among not only talented young men and women but all americans of whatever age who wished to serve the great republic and serve the cause of freedom men who have taught or engineers or doctors or nurses who have reached the age of retirement or who in the midst of their work wished to serve their country and freedom should be given an opportunity and an agency in which their talents could serve our country around the globe i am convinced that the pool of people in this country of ours anxious to respond to the public service is greater than it has ever been in our history i am convinced that our men and women dedicated to freedom are able to be missionaries not only for freedom and peace but join in a worldwide struggle against poverty and disease and ignorance diseases in latin america and brazil which prevented any child in two villages in the last 12 months from reaching 1 year of age i think this country in the 1960 s can start to move forward again can demonstrate what a free society freely moving and working can do archimedes said give me a fulcrum and i will move the world we in the sixties are going to move the world again in the direction of freedom and i ask your help in doing so thank you dem jfk2 11 60a john_f _kennedy roz mrs warschaw mrs mosk governor brown mrs price mr reeves ladies and gentlemen governor brown just said that all the beautiful girls were up in front but having been in the back i don t appreciate that view in any case i appreciate your welcome as the cow said to the maine farmer thank you for a warm hand on a cold morning i am delighted to be here this morning and i appreciate all you are doing in this campaign this is a beautiful state i am confident that mr nixon will enjoy it after the election mr nixon is calling me a liar so much every day and other choice adjectives that used to be reserved for the california scenes which is now being exposed to the nation it is rather difficult for me to confirm anything other than to confirm what governor brown said that there are the most beautiful women in california and i challenge him to call me a liar but we are going to keep at it in the next 4 or 5 days i had to have governor brown ride with me down the center of los angeles and mr nixon requires president eisenhower to ride down the streets of new york with him yesterday i said governor rockefeller henry cabot lodge vice president nixon and i thought they ought to have barry goldwater so they can all be in the car together this is an important election and really it just isn t between mr nixon and myself or really just between our two parties i really believe mr nixon after he was nominated could have made a judgment of the needs of our country and the needs around the world and conducted a campaign based on those needs in my judgment governor rockefeller would have conducted that kind of campaign but mr nixon chose to go in a different direction he chose to run on a program which says that our prestige has never been higher in the world in spite of the fact that the usia studies locked up in his own state department completely refute that position studies which they refuse to release and he has chosen to run at home here on our unexampled prosperity there is no note of urgency there there is not any doubt in my mind that the success of woodrow wilson the success of franklin roosevelt came in the early days of their administrations there are months of grace governor brown is familiar with that where a governor is permitted to proceed on his program without too much difficulty and it is true of a president they talk of the 100 days of franklin roosevelt there is not any doubt that the first 2 years of woodrow wilson s administration saw many of the domestic reforms which were so essential the federal reserve board and all the rest written into law but unless the groundwork is laid during the campaign all that valuable time is then lost the next president of the united states takes office on january 20 he then has to go to work his time begins to run out almost immediately so unless he is prepared for action then valuable time is lost never to be regained the point of all this is that unless you lay the groundwork in a campaign for later administrative and legislative and executive action then your chances of providing progress for our country and our people needed actions become lessened mr nixon has not sounded any note of urgency in his campaign he is accompanied in his travels by cabinet members mr seaton mr schreiber mr rogers and the others who are familiar figures in washington there is no idea that a new fresh vigor is going to take over a sense of urgency a sense of commitment a sense of the feeling that in this great republic we are going to have to move forward again if we don t feel it now the chances of feeling it next january or february or march in a congress controlled by the democrats a president who has run for office perhaps and won on a program which bears little recognition of the facts which is my polite way of referring to mr nixon and he refers to me impolitely i think that our chances that never happens with the vice president i understand that everything is in perfect order it does not get the votes but it is well organized i am now going to have to give a new speech evidently you all know pat hillings don t you one of the subjects on which we are going to have to act and on which i am really not convinced that the republican party and mr nixon are committed despite the position papers is on the subject of education thomas jefferson once said if you expect a nation to be ignorant and free you expect what never was and never will be so from the time of the northwest ordinance which was written by john adams and thomas jefferson and other distinguished founders of our country which set aside in the northwest territory one lot out of every township for the maintenance of education we have recognized that education is not only a local responsibility not only a responsibility of the state but also a responsibility of the national government when the land grant college act was passed in the administration of abraham lincoln it provided that public lands in every state would be set aside for the maintenance of state universities and state colleges the same is true in our own day we need the best educated citizens in the world to maintain a free society the property tax in all of your communities is already heavily burdened in many places in the united states it is a confiscatory tax and i don t want any young man or woman in the united states to be denied an education merely because we rely on one source of revenue without using wisely the sources of revenue that are available to us even today 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college in the next 10 years we are going to have to build as many college classrooms and dormitories as we have built in the last 200 years we are going to have twice as many boys and girls applying for college in 1970 as are applying in 1960 that represents a responsibility for us all ten years ago we were turning out twice as many scientists and engineers as the russians today they are turning out twice as many as we are and even more ominous because i don t say that scientists and engineers are all that we need but even more ominous is the fact that they are devoting a far larger percentage of their national income their gross national product to education than we are we need in a free society where the responsibility lies with the people with their own good judgment and sense of responsibility and restraint we want the best educated people in the world we are at the mercy and the cause of freedom is at the mercy of a majority of our citizens and as one of those citizens who is so involved as you all are all of us want those citizens to be well educated in 1957 a majority of the republicans in the house killed aid to school construction in 1958 every republican in the key education and labor committee voted against aid for school construction and in 1960 when we tried again to provide aid for the construction of public school classrooms 67 percent of all the republicans in the house voted against it and all four republicans in the house rules committee joined together with two unwise democrats and we have some of them all four of the republicans joined together to kill the bill from ever getting to the floor of the house that is the party that mr nixon leads and he is part of it he cast the deciding vote in the senate after making one of his moving and emotional speeches the deciding vote a week before about the plight of our teachers cast the deciding vote in the senate against aid for teachers salaries we need 135 000 more teachers there are 3 million children in the united states being taught by teachers who do not have teacher certificates the republican secretary of hew says these low salaries of teachers are the most serious weakness in our country s educational system and i hope he tells that to the vice president or writes it to him in whittier here is what i think we ought to do in the next congress first we ought to pass a bill which will provide assistance to the states the states then to make the judgment of what percentage of the aid should be turned over to the teachers salaries and school construction in that way we can insure local control over education local control over curriculum and all the rest but at the same time make sure that our schools are built and our teachers are compensated once we do that we have a right to expect that our teachers will be well trained will be imaginative will be dedicated we must search for new teaching methods i have a professor from harvard law school who is working to help us in this campaign and he spends a good percentage of his time in a rather old fashioned way correcting exams and all the rest i believe that we can develop new techniques for treating those with the most talent television and all the rest to provide the widest dissemination of the best teaching skills we have in the country in addition we have to make sure that our schools meet their responsibility which is a responsibility of yours in some states of the united states and i don t know whether this is true of california every graduate from high school regardless of the standards of the high school is admitted automatically to college and then 45 to 50 percent of them flunk out after the first year we ought to have a right to expect that every high school in the country will meet high school standards and will make it possible for any child that graduates from that high school who has talent who has ability who has motivation who desires to go to college will have the skills study and application applied to them in their earlier years so that they are able to make the grade when they enter college and then fourthly i think that what we can do is provide scholarships for not only the brightest boys and girls there are quite a lot of scholarships but we still have to do more in that area that is only one of the problems there are an awful lot of boys and girls who may not be brilliant in high school but who later do very well indeed and make some of our best citizens but who nevertheless cannot win scholarships i think what we could do is what we have done in massachusetts which is to provide loans guaranteed by the state to any boy or girl who is able to demonstrate competence in their ability to survive the first 6 months which would be paid back with interest after they graduated professor harris at harvard university and other places has demonstrated the actual financial return which a college education means to any boy or girl in their livelihood the chances of earning a much greater amount of money in their lives as a result of the college education therefore for those young men and women who do not have the talent for scholarships and who do not have the resources themselves i believe that some form of a national reinsurance of state programs of state banking programs which would provide these loans at low rates of interest for those who have desire for those who can do the job for those who can survive in college and contribute i believe that that offers the best way of providing them with an education and at the same time maintaining the fiscal responsibility of the national government i hope the next administration will devote itself to securing this kind of a plan which we have done so well with in housing by reinsurance of mortgages i think we can reinsure a young man s education or a young woman s education and finally in the next decade by 1970 in order to provide all those buildings for all your sons and daughters we are going to have to spend 6 billion more governor brown deals with these statistics every day the colleges just are not there i am an officer of harvard university which is privately financed and we just got through the largest fund raising drive in the history of the united states to raise 83 million to try to build the buildings we are going to need and provide compensation for our teachers in order to maintain harvard university s high standards the state of california has far greater problems almost than any other state because of the increase in population and no state has met its responsibility better i drive around the united states and i see more mothers with young children who are going to pour into the colleges and universities in this state than in any state in the union we need them this is not a waste we need them therefore we have to think of ways by which these buildings can be built and maintained and still maintain the fiscal responsibility of our state government and national government which is a great responsibility one of the ways by which this can be done and one of the unfortunate vetoes of the present administration was the veto of the program to provide loans to colleges at low rates of interest to build classrooms and dormitories i believe that that kind of a program is fruitful that it comes within the proper relationship between the national government and the state colleges and universities it provides them some assistance but still maintains the burden upon them of course but it does at least provide a helping hand at a crucial time and the next 10 years i think are crucial this is only one of many problems we are going to have our responsibility is to demonstrate that a free society with its freedom of choice breadth of opportunity its reliance on a private enterprise system that this kind of society by ingenuity by attracting the best people we can get by application by foresight and a sense of commitment can compete with a totalitarian system that is the most difficult of all assignments since the time of ancient athens history is replete with garrison states that have overcome free cities and free states and free countries this is not any automatic contest in which our virtues will inevitably triumph it will require the best we have that is one of my basic disagreements fundamental disagreements with mr nixon and the republicans for him to use the arguments he is now using in this hazardous time in the life of our country seems to ignore the basic challenge that society now faces i saw enough of it in the thirties in england of a free society competing with a totalitarian society they have young men and women in moscow studying esoteric doctrine and dialects of africa and asia we have ambassadors who can t even speak french they have young men and women who not only speak arabic but swahili and all the others that we can t even pronounce we are going to have to do much better as a nation as well as individuals i don t believe that the republican party or mr nixon are prepared to make that kind of commitment and i think it involves the future of us all abraham lincoln once said he has the right to criticize who has the heart to help we criticize but we are going to help thank you dem jfk2 11 60b john_f _kennedy byron rumford distinguished californians jeff cohelan who i hope you are going to elect congressman from this district he is a great one i want us to go all the way for him because he is fighting for this district and the united states george p miller with whom i served in the congress for 14 years who speaks for this district and for the united states governor brown allen broussard ladies and gentlemen we are not discriminating against you over there i am here tonight here in california in the closing days of this campaign to ask your help to ask your help in defeating the republican party i understand mr nixon is coming here on saturday he is going to south carolina on thursday and coming here on saturday i want you to ask him three questions first name one piece of progressive legislation in behalf of the people that he has supported that has been enacted into law just one that served the people second i would like to have him explain why when a bill was up seven times seven times in the house of representatives when he and i were both on the labor committee seven times to provide fair employment practices why i voted for it seven times and he voted against it seven times ladies and gentlemen we are on again ladies and gentlemen this is an important election and i come here and ask your help i speak for the party of progress in 1960 i speak for the party that is committed to a progressive platform to advance equal opportunity for all americans mr nixon represents a party which has opposed progress for 25 years it opposed progress under franklin roosevelt mr nixon leads a party that voted 90 percent in the 1930 s against a 25 cent minimum wage he leads a party that voted 90 percent against 1 25 minimum wage in 1960 mr nixon leads a party that controlled the house the senate and the white house in 1953 and 1954 not a single civil rights bill saw the light of day in either body i am not interested in commitments to progress in 1960 i want to look at the record i want to look at the record and i want the people of this state and country to know the record of richard nixon and the republican party it has stood against progress for 25 years and we stand for progress and this country needs it this country has to move ahead i don t see any reason why here in this rich country of ours 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college i don t see any reason why 15 million americans should live in substandard housing i don t see any reason why a negro baby and a white baby born side by side on the same day that that white baby has three times as much chance of finishing high school four times as much chance of finishing college one fourth as much chance of being out of work four times as much chance of owning his own home we want opportunities for all we want fairness for all we want progress for all today the most important new continent in the world is africa do you know how many negroes there are in our foreign service out of 6 000 people do you know how many federal district judges there are in the united states who are negroes i think we can do better i don t say that everyone has the same talent but i think everyone should have the same chance to develop his talent that is what we say we are committed to progress we are committed to national justice we are committed to using the talents of every man and woman we are committed to moving this country ahead we are committed to full employment we are committed to going ahead the republican party is committed to standing still and looking to the past and i come here tonight in oakland once again in the closing days of this campaign and ask your hand your voice i ask you to join us in moving this country ahead franklin d roosevelt fought this same fight in the 1930 s social security minimum wage housing unemployment compensation and fair opportunity we fight it now in the sixties this is your fight you are involved in this you hold jobs you live in homes you want your children educated you want full employment you want medical care when you are older and social security you want progress you know this country either moves ahead or falls back nobody stands still in the 1960 s this is your country this is your fight and i ask you to join me in retiring richard nixon to whittier calif i want the people of the world to know that in 1960 a new generation of americans is taking over a generation committed to progress committed to picking this country up and moving it forward i want america to stand as a symbol around the world of what freedom can do i want everyone in latin america in africa in asia to look to us not to khrushchev but to us what this country can do fairness for all people justice i want progress and we are going to get it i ask your help i ask you to march with us i want to make it clear that the fight in 1960 is between those who are comfortable and those who are concerned between those who want progress and those who look to the good old days between those who stand where dewey stood and landon and all the others and those who stand where woodrow wilson stood and franklin roosevelt i come here to oakland in the last 5 days of this campaign and i ask your help in moving california and the nation and strengthening the cause of freedom join us move with us let s go dem jfk2 11 60c john_f _kennedy senator fisher senator engle governor brown my sister ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you for coming out to the airport this campaign now is coming into its final 5 or 6 days i am here in the state of california because i think this state is key in this campaign and i think this is the state that we must carry on november 8 right here i think that you know the issues of this campaign well there is no community in the united states in the last 2 or 3 years that has learned a harder lesson of what it means to live under a republican administration and an administration which has permitted unemployment in this community to double in the last 12 months this year in this state and in every state in the union we are going to build 30 percent less homes than a year ago we are not providing aid for our education we are not providing defense contracts which protect the united states and employment i want to make it very clear that the choice which you face on next tuesday is not merely between mr nixon and myself but it is between those who sit still and those who want to move again therefore i come here today and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us i ask you to work with us i ask you to help us in the next 5 days to win california and win the united states thank you dem jfk2 11 60d john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen governor brown senator engle senator hugo fisher walter wencke who i am confident will be the next congressman from this district ladies and gentlemen i come here to san diego in the last 6 days of this campaign and ask your support on november 8 now there may be some people who are tired of politics and tired of this campaign but i want to make it very clear that this campaign has not been entirely wasted i want to show you the progress we have made in the last 2 months for example 3 weeks ago mr nixon issued a statement calling for a housing program and saying that the housing act of 1949 which is the basis of all other housing acts is working well however years ago as a congressman mr nixon voted against the housing act of 1949 there is progress for you we are making a progressive out of mr nixon two weeks ago he issued a statement for social security advancement do you know that mr nixon leads a party which in the midthirties voted 90 percent against social security and voted 98 percent this summer against the medical care for the aged tied to social security and now he calls all of these programs as progress we are bringing him along for 14 years he did not see the light it just took 1 month of this campaign and now he is for federal aid to education the republicans have been in control of the administration for 8 years eighty percent of them voted against the federal aid to education in 1957 65 percent of them in 1958 and this summer when we wanted an aid to education bill every republican on the rules committee of the house voted in the house of representatives against it and now mr nixon is for it you can t tell us we are wasting our time in this campaign we are bringing him along now if we can just send him back to california for 4 more years to study up we are going to make a good public servant out of him now we have 5 days before this campaign is over i cannot predict what is going to happen the truth squad has been ditched they told the truth once and they don t let them travel around any more instead president eisenhower is now leading the rescue squad what mr nixon does not understand is the president of the united states mr eisenhower is not the candidate you have seen those elephants in the circus do you know how they travel around the circus by grabbing the tall of the elephant in front of them that was all right in 1952 and 1956 mr nixon hung on tight but now mr nixon meets the people the choice is not president eisenhower the choice is whether the people of this country want the leadership of mr nixon and the republican party who have never stood for progress to show you how desperate and despicable this campaign has become they are handing out outside defense plants a poster which says jack kennedy is after your job i am after mr eisenhower s job these were passed around without a signature now they sign them john b starkey whoever he is san diego it says attention defense workers jack kennedy is after your job he urges moving defense industries back east now let me just say this only to mr starkey mr nixon and mr murray chotiner would it occur in the last week of an important campaign when our survival is at stake to try to pass out literature like this to try to tell people that i want to run for the presidency in order to take defense contracts from one state and put them in another if i were president of the united states i would represent the united states mr nixon has not understood that we represent one people if i were elected president i would represent california massachusetts hawaii and not only the cause of freedom here but the cause of freedom around the world the point of the matter is that most of these defense plants were built here in the administration of franklin d roosevelt do you know where he came from new york state did he put all of the defense plants in hyde park and a good many of them were built in the administration of harry truman i have been in independence mo and i have not seen a defense plant in independence mo the defense plants were put out here for good reason and they are going to stay here for the same reason it has not anything to do with whether i come from massachusetts or california california has seen defense plants leave with mr nixon as the vice president of the united states this year as a result of the efforts of senator engle and others the congress of the united states appropriated 300 million for the b 70 s i endorse wholeheartedly the b 70 manned aircraft we could not get the administration to release the funds until this week that is progress and why do you think they did it this week i wonder i have a higher opinion of the people of this united states and their intelligence than to think they are going to buy mr nixon and the republican party in 1960 a party which has stood for 25 years against progress here in this community of san diego with twice as much unemployment as a year ago you are building 30 percent less homes than a year ago you have 6 000 homes unsold what happens to a worker who is thrown out of work what does he do how does he pay his bills how does he feed his family what are his chances who does he sell his house to in san diego this administration has stood still and junk like this is not going to convince the people of san diego that mr nixon or the republican party care because they don t care mr nixon leads a party which voted 95 percent 95 percent against a 25 cent minimum wage increase in the midthirties and he leads a party which voted 90 percent in the house of representatives this summer against the minimum wage of 1 25 per hour do you call that progress do you stand in this country now on the verge of the great sixties with revolution and change all around us castro and khrushchev and the chinese communists and africa and latin america and space and every part of the world exploding and think that we can elect an administration and a president who wishes to sit down who wishes our country to stand still if this country does not move if we do not go ahead if we do not build stronger defenses if we do not stand for a better society here in the united states what chance do we have to lead the free world the bible tells us when the trumpet blows an uncertain note who prepares for the battle i want that trumpet to blow a certain note i want mr khrushchev to know that a new generation of americans who fought in italy and europe who fought in the pacific for freedom in world war ii is going to fight in the 1960 s for the defense of freedom in the united states and all around the world and i come to san diego and ask your help in doing so i ask you in this community hard hit but a basic defense area of the united states i ask you as citizens of this country can we entrust the leadership to mr nixon and the republican party they say whittier is beautiful in the spring and i think that is the place for mr nixon to ruminate over the problems of this country in 1960 this country will be prepared to move again california and the nation cannot provide education for our children jobs for our people opportunities for our people medical care tied to social security under the bill that they have you have to take a pauper s oath we provide it under social security we want action i want to see this country move again and i come here to san diego and california and i ask your help in securing the future dem jfk2 9 60 john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague ed muskie my friend and your next governor frank coffin lucia cormier dave roberts john donovan ladies and gentlemen i came here to maine to start this campaign in my own backyard i do so not merely because i live in massachusetts i do so because here in this part of the united states we have in a very real sense the same feeling of a new frontier that i talked about in los angeles when i accepted the democratic nomination and i am here also because we have in this state i think a singular opportunity to send some distinguished people to hold positions of responsibility in the government of this state and nation in the next 4 years i must say i don t come here and speak for them just because they are democrats i think in this election the democratic party and the republican party are means to an end not an end in themselves they are a means of providing gifted men and women for the service of this country in a difficult and dangerous time i think that lucia cormier frank coffin dave roberts and john donovan follow in the tradition of ed muskie who was chosen by a state which had been republican not because he was a democrat but because they thought that he was the kind of a man that they wanted to speak for them in this state and in the nation and what is true of ed muskie is true of frank coffin it is true of lucia cormier it is true of dave roberts and it is true of john donovan adversity brings out the best in a man and in a country and it brings out the best in a political party the reason that the democrats of this state have selected unusual people is because it isn t easy now the challenges that face this country aren t easy but because it isn t easy i think it is going to get the best from us i run for the office of the presidency because i believe because i know that this is the great office in the gift of the united states and really the great office in the gift of the free people of the world we represent not only ourselves the president of the united states represents not only the democrats of this country he represents all of the people around the world who want to live in freedom who look to us for hope and leadership i must say that if i am elected president of the united states i am not going to attempt only to select men for positions of high leadership who happen to have the word democrat after their name when franklin roosevelt became president in 1932 he selected three republicans to be members of his first cabinet when president truman was the president he selected men like john mccloy robert lovett he continued men like james forrestal he brought john foster dulles into the state department to negotiate the japanese treaty he secured for the great positions of responsibility the best men and women he could get that is what we are going to do in the future can you name me a man or woman in the great offices of this country in the last 8 years involving the security of all of our people who was a member of the democratic party comparable to the positions held by knox stimson and all the rest during world war ii and afterward the reason is simple we believe in securing the best for our country because nothing but the best will do because we believe this is the best country and because we realize that it isn t the president of the united states that is in trouble it isn t the republican party that is in trouble it is the country that is in trouble and it is we who are in trouble the reason we are in trouble is because we are faced by a dedicated and determined adversary who recognizes that we live in a revolutionary world and who is reaching toward the future i don t want it said that here in the 1950 s and the 1960 s we began to be passed by that kind of leadership is what we need a helping hand in any case we are here today to ask your help we have about 65 days between now and the first part of november when this election is going to be decided in spite of all the debate between political parties we have a common interest today to select the best people we can get people who recognize the kind of state we live in the kind of country we live in the kind of world we live in people who look to the future who are ready to break into that future who are ready to lead and who want this country to move again thank you very much dem jfk20 10 60a john_f _kennedy i come here tonight to ask your support in this campaign i think this campaign in its own way and considering the problems that our country faces is as important as the campaign of 1932 that elected franklin roosevelt president of the united states put your thumb down regardless of what you do we are fighting a candidate the republican party that for 20 years has opposed what the people need minimum wage housing unemployment compensation the real issue is which party and which candidate can best strengthen the united states can best serve the public interest i run against a candidate who in 1960 says we have never had it so good as a democratic candidate for the presidency i run on a platform that this is a great country that must be greater a powerful country that must be more powerful and the chief responsibility of the next president of the united states is to build the strength of america and when we build the strength of america we build the strength of freedom we oppose those who wish to stand as we are and i come over here to brooklyn a democratic county and ask your support in this campaign this is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned and here in brooklyn they are concerned as they are all over america i come over here and ask your help dem jfk20 10 60b john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to present to you judge ughetta who is running for the court of appeals in new york state your congressman today my name is john kennedy and i come here as the democratic candidate for the presidency of the united states i come here as the standard bearer of a party which in this century has run men like woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and i run in their tradition i want to make it clear that this is a contest between two candidates and two political parties who disagree on what is needed to be done to make our country strong the democratic party and i believe in a minimum wage of 1 25 we believe in urban renewal and better housing we believe in a stronger economy that provides full employment and we believe in equal opportunity for all americans regardless of their race or regardless of their religion and i come over here to brooklyn and ask your help in the first television debate with mr nixon i said in this country of ours which prides itself on being the symbol of freedom i saw no reason why if a negro baby and a white baby were born side by side that white baby had twice as much chance of finishing high school as the negro baby he had three times as much chance of getting to college as the negro baby he had four times as much chance the white baby did of having a job and of being a professional man as that negro baby and that negro baby was four times more likely to be unemployed in his life than that white baby i don t say that all people have equal talent but what i do say is that everyone should have their chance to develop their talent equally and i want to make it clear that whether i am elected president of the united states or not whether i continue in the senate or whether i win the office this country in the next 4 years is going to make progress forward in providing every american with his constitutional rights i want it said at the end of our administration if we are successful that every american had an equal chance every american had a fair chance to develop his talents and that is all we ask and that is all that any american asks we stand for that win or lose up or down fair winds or not we are committed to that program not just as democrats but as americans we are a free country and there are not many free countries and we want everyone to be free when an african diplomat comes here and can t find decent housing in washington it isn t because he is an african it is because he is a negro do you know of 200 federal district judges there is not one that is a negro do you know how many members of our foreign service are negroes even though the majority of the world is colored twenty six out of 6 000 well we can do better and we are going to have to do better if we are going to survive africa today has one fourth of all the votes in the general assembly do you know there are four countries in africa without a single american diplomat representing us do you know that we brought more students from all over the world to study here than we did 10 years ago we offered at the time of the congo in june 300 scholarships do you know that was more scholarships to africa and the congo than we had offered to all of africa the year before i believe we can do better i think it is time we stopped standing still i think it is time we started moving ahead as americans and as believers in freedom i want to make it very clear that we stand on this issue we stand for moving ahead in the 1960 s we stand for full employment and better housing i stand where franklin roosevelt stood and i come to brooklyn which supported him and ask your help dem jfk20 10 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentleman i have come over here to brooklyn to ask your help in this campaign we are waging a campaign to build a stronger country in order to protect our security protect the future of freedom and also to move this country forward provide jobs for our people get off dead center and i come over here to ask your help in this campaign in a great democratic county thank you very much i would like to have you meet you all know former congressman o toole i served in the congress with him 14 years ago and here is going to be your next congressman from this district congressman to be carey and judge ughetta who is running for the court of common pleas and assemblyman turpin and al burns i want to thank you very much and i appreciate your coming out i would be glad to shake hands with anybody dem jfk20 10 60d john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to introduce to you the next congressman from this district congressman to be carey and i want you to meet state senator jerry bloom and i want you to meet judge ughetta jerry bloom ughetta kennedy and here is the candidate for assemblyman after you have voted for all of them vote for me i come over here to brooklyn in this campaign i come over here to brooklyn in this campaign to ask your help this is an important campaign because the office of the presidency is important and on the good judgment responsibility sense of vigor sense of progress foresight of the next president of the united states hangs the lives of all of us so i run for the presidency after 14 years in the congress because i believe that it is time this country began to move forward again before i believe that in 14 years in the congress on every piece of legislation which benefits the people i believe the majority of the democrats have voted yes and the majority of the republicans have voted no i run against mr nixon i wish he were here to hear that cheer i wish he would accept the fifth debate so the people of the country could hear he runs on a slogan of standing up to khrushchev and yet he is not willing to let the american people hear him for the fifth time espouse his views of what our country must do i come over here to brooklyn to ask your help i run for the presidency in the most difficult time in the life of our country but with the greatest confidence that if this country is given the kind of leadership which i believe it needs if we are willing to go to work again this country can meet any obstacle and can serve as an inspiration to freedom around the globe so i come to brooklyn to ask your help in this campaign and if we are elected we are going to go to work dem jfk20 10 60e john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thank you anyway i want to express my thanks to all of you i come over here and ask your support in brooklyn to vote democratic i ask the support of all those who want to move in this country off dead center who want to get started again i ask the support of all those who believe in progressive government the government that goes to work i stand where franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson and harry truman stood and i want your help thank you dem jfk20 10 60f john_f _kennedy my friend bob wagner guest of honor pat clancy reverend clergy bert kobler frank o connor ladies and gentlemen i am grateful to bob wagner he and i are graduates of the al smith school of dinners of last night the vice president claimed al smith for his work in his latter years and i claimed him for his work in the 1928 campaign neither one of us indicated what al smith would do in 1960 it is possible he would have voted republican but i think he would have prayed democratic this year in any case i am delighted to be here because pat clancy and bert and the members of the queens group were generous enough to support me at the convention and if i had not been supported by new york i would not have been nominated and if i had not been nominated i would not have taken that fine drive with bob wagner yesterday and over there with joe sharkey tonight i want to tell you there are still some democrats in brooklyn i don t know what the new york daily news will report about brooklyn but the sample we took tonight is very good i come here tonight as the standard bearer for the democratic party and that i do with a sense of responsibility to lead a great party on any occasion is a burden is an obligation to lead a great party in an election like 1960 where i think the issues are quite sharp where i think the matters in dispute are of great importance where the burdens that the next president will bear are extremely heavy where the responsibilities that the citizens of this country will meet in the coming year must make us all conscious that to be a citizen of the united states in the 1960 s will be a hazardous occupation a political campaign i think should be more than just a contest between two men or two political parties in a very real sense it should be a time of decision for the nation and my judgment is that if we are successful it will be because the american people have decided for their own good and because they are conscious of their responsibilities to the cause of freedom that it is time this country started to move again that really is the issue of the 1960 campaign it is not merely a contest between mr nixon and myself it is not really just a contest between our two political parties it is a contest between two views of where the united states stands in 1960 and where it must stand in the sixties if it is going to not only endure but prevail as a great free country that is why i think this election is important i want to pay tribute to the democratic organization of queens this organization made it possible for franklin roosevelt in another time to be elected president of the united states earlier it made it possible for woodrow wilson to be elected president of the united states by your actions up to the election time of franklin roosevelt in 1932 this organization played a part in all the things that he did that were of service to the country in 1960 if we are successful your commitment to the democratic party your efforts in this campaign do not stop with november 8 all that we do all that we are able to do in meeting our responsibilities if i am successful as president of the united states you will participate in political action is the highest responsihility of a citizen i hold the view that any american in these times should be willing to accept the discipline of political action by your being willing to do it by your making it possible for us to win this campaign as i hope we will you then participate not only in the struggle of election but you participate in all that is done afterward and it is my hope that what is done afterward will make you feel that your efforts have been worthwhile so i come here tonight to join you in paying tribute to a citizen who has met his responsibilities as a citizen who has shown versatility in meeting his obligation head of the chamber of commerce as an attorney as a political leader he has met his obligation to queens to new york and to the country and as one who is attempting to do the same in a difficult time i am honored to have the chance to come and pay tribute to him i admire him he has been a friend of mine and as the mayor said i feel on these occasions it is a privilege to come and join you this is an important election whoever wins new york will be the next president of the united states and i think it is very possible that whoever carries queens will be the next president of the united states queens is going democratic in local elections with jimmy delaney and all the rest but it goes republican nationally that is a terrible habit i hope you will be voting democratic locally and nationally actually i have been encouraged in the developments this week particularly with what happened to the new york yankees casey stengel s experience shows that perhaps experience does not count i believe that we can win this election so i come to you tonight we have about 2 1 2 weeks to go but i stand on the right hand of mr clancy on this occasion whether elected to continue as a senator in the days to come i will also stand with him if elected president of the united states i will consider it an honor to join you on any occasion that you pay him tribute thank you dem jfk20 9 60 john_f _kennedy governors and senators fellow democrats ladies and gentlemen 100 years ago this year the american people were engaged in a great presidential campaign one of the nominees abraham lincoln put the issue to the country as to whether the country could exist half slave and half free today 100 years later we are now engaged in another presidential campaign and the great question confronting the country today is can the world exist half slave and half free will it begin to move in the direction of freedom will it move in the direction of freedom in the next half decade will it move in the direction of slavery or will the world be destroyed in another nuclear war that is the question which faces our generation and it is the most solemn question that this nation or the world has ever faced on my way to visit russia in 1939 i passed through poland and estonia latvia lithuania and czechoslovakia and hungary they were free and independent nations while the soviet union was isolated in its tyranny but in 1955 i saw the people of eastern europe again their freedom was gone and in its place was the most cruel change that one nation ever had applied to another no man could speak his mind no home was safe and there was no freedom of religious worship mr khrushchev is in our country now as he was a year ago confident that all is going his way smug in his recent successes and piously talking about peace colonialism and disarmament but how can you talk of peace mr khrushchev when you and your chinese communist friends are undermining the peace every day creating disorder and danger wherever you move how can you talk of colonialism when you are surrounded by your puppet dictators and when you hold in an iron grip a great empire stretching from east berlin to vietnam how can you talk of the achievements of your system even if you beat us again by putting a man into outer space for we know that while you may bring a man back from outer space you rarely bring one back alive from siberia and that is why this nation and the next president must dedicate every effort of mind and spirit to the fight for peace and freedom shaking our finger at mr khrushchev is not enough debating him at the united nations is not enough restricting him to manhattan island this week is not enough because this does not confine him in asia africa or latin america this is no ordinary enemy and this is no ordinary struggle extraordinary efforts are called for by every american who knows the value of freedom and who believes that this country still has its greatest contributions to make to that cause some people say it is wrong to say that we could be stronger it is dangerous to say that we could be more secure but in times such as these i say it is wrong and dangerous for any american to keep silent about our future if he is not satisfied with what is being done to preserve that future for i am not satisfied when the president of the united states is insulted by a dictator in paris or by a mob in tokyo i am not satisfied to be second in outer space and second to the moon i have heard all the excuses but i believe not in an america that is first but first if or first when but first period finally i am not satisfied to have the hand of the communists move 3 000 miles from east berlin to our former good neighbor in cuba only 90 miles from the coast of florida only 8 minutes by jet three years ago when i was in cuba the american ambassador was the second most influential man in cuba today the soviet ambassador is these are not problems to be set aside in a neat compartment called foreign policy my opponent says that he is a risk taker abroad and a conservative at home i am neither i am not a risk taker abroad and i am not a conservative at home if by being a conservative means that we say no to the next decade if it means we look back instead of ahead if it means we lack the passion for our own people and lack vigor in our policies when we waste food in this country when we condemn millions of our older citizens to live out their lives without security and without medical care when we condemn millions of our children to live in inadequate housing or go to schools part time taught by teachers inadequately paid when we fail to make full use of our steel and our coal and our lead and our zinc when we permit racial or religious discrimination in any part of our country what effect does that have on the rest of the world where we are a small minority this nation if it is not to stand alone has to earn the trust and respect of others the reason why woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman were successful in their policies around the world the reason that franklin roosevelt was greeted as a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor in the united states and because the world knew that they practiced at home what they preached abroad but today the communists stir up their troubles their anti american resentment that festers in too many countries particularly among the people who are hungry sick and poor and almost every area of crisis in the last years has been in countries where the people are poor laos and cuba and the congo and algeria and iraq and guatemala and all the rest these nations know that we are against communism but they want to know are we also for the people they judge us abroad by what we do here at home by what our two great parties stand for here in the united states a party that opposes decent medical care for our older citizens that opposes building classrooms for our children that says though it is the richest and most prosperous country in the world that it cannot afford the best educational system that it opposes paying a minimum wage to women who work long hours in some of our stores we cannot on that basis appeal to people in less fortunate countries that grew up reading lincoln and wilson and roosevelt they were the presidents of the united states who led and i think in the next 8 years the united states is going to have to lead again we cannot be bound by the last 8 years we cannot be committed by a party of the past we cannot wait for mr khrushchev s words for the communists are not satisfied with their gains of the last months with their lead in missiles and space and their foothold in cuba and half of indochina and their new influence in laos and africa and asia they will keep on driving and expanding and gaining without regard to all the kitchen debates and without regard to what goes on in the united nations unless we have a president and a country in the 1960 s that acts first and acts fast much can be done in the next 4 years but the administrations of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt show that the first 90 days of the next president s administration will be the crucial days therefore i think the next president of the united states must assert leadership on three fronts first on the military front the next president must promptly send to the congress a special message requesting the funds and the authority necessary to give us a nuclear capacity second to none making us invulnerable to any attack and have conventional forces so strong and so mobile that they can stamp out a brush fire war before it spreads only then can we get mr khrushchev and the chinese communists to talk about disarmament because having the second best defensive hand in the 1960 s will be like having the second best poker hand second on the nonmilitary front the next president must promptly request our more prosperous nato allies and i hope japan and others to join with us in approaching each underdeveloped nation of the world latin america africa the middle east and asia to request the establishment either multilaterally bilaterally or through the united nations of regional development plans coordinating and stimulating the flow of those are as of long term public and private capital surplus foods and technical assistance with special emphasis on assisting those countries to educate their citizens so that they can be prepared for self government third the next president of the united states must be prepared in the first 3 months of his office to send to the congress messages that will deal with wiping out poverty here in the united states which will deal with the problems of full employment of a higher minimum wage of better social security for our older citizens more slum clearance and aid to depressed areas more help for the marginal farmer and the sharecropper a concentrated drive on illiteracy improved distribution of surplus foods because over 4 million americans wait every month for those surplus food packages and a better economic break for all americans regardless of where they live and regardless of their economic status the effect of an economic drive on poverty here in the united states of going to work in this country of moving our country again can have the greatest possible repercussions abroad in the security of the united states these are of course only three items on a long agenda that will face the country and the president and the next congress in january 1961 and i do not pretend that we in the democratic party have all the answers to most difficult questions senator johnson and i do not run for the office of the presidency and vice presidency promising that life is going to be easy in the future we do not campaign stressing what our country is going to do for us as a people we stress what we can do for the country all of us we stress the point that if we meet our public and our private responsibilities and obligations if we recognize that self government requires qualities of self denial and restraint then future historians will be able to say these were the great years of the american republic these were the years when america began to move again but there is very little time the enemy is lean and hungry and the united states is the only strong sentinel at the gate this is no time to say that we can outtalk or outshout mr khrushchev i want to outdo him to outproduce him i think we must prove to a watching world that we are the way of the future and that the communist system is as old as the pharaoes i think this nation will rise to the test and when we do mr khrushchev will know that a new generation of americans is taking over this country a generation that did not fight for world freedom at anzio or the solomons in order to see it ripped away and he will know that america is once more on the move in 1780 in hartford conn the skies at noon turned one day from blue to gray and by midafternoon the city had darked over so densely that in that religious age men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came the connecticut house of representatives was in session and many of the members clamored for immediate adjournment the speaker of the house one colonel davenport came to his feet and he silenced the din with these words the day of judgment is either approaching or it is not if it is not there is no cause for adjournment if it is i choose to be found doing my duty i wish therefore that candles may be brought i hope that all of us in a difficult and somber time in our country s history may also bring candles to help illuminate our country s way thank you dem jfk21 10 60 john_f _kennedy mayor wagner mrs wagner harry van arsdale your distinguished president mr freeman joe keenan jeremiah sullivan ladies and gentlemen i was glad to accept your invitation to come here for two or three reasons in the first place after 14 years on the labor committee i knew a good deal about the brotherhood of electrical workers i know a good deal about this union i know a good deal about its leadership i know what it has stood for i know what its contribution has been therefore i was delighted to accept the invitation to come here tonight and join you on this occasion secondly at the time that i was engaged in a hard fight in the west virginia primary when the issue was greatly in doubt your distinguished president gordon freeman issued a statement in my behalf one of the few people who did it and therefore that gives me another reason for being here tonight joe keenan who has been your secretary has been traveling with me as my assistant on labor matters in this campaign for many months harry van arsdale was a supporter of mine at the democratic convention so i feel tonight that i am among friends this union has the responsibility to its members to the community at large and by joining together you work to protect the interest of your members and you have and have had in your history a sense of responsibility to the public interest i run for the office of the presidency because i believe that only a national leadership which attempts to build our country which attempts to build our economy which attempts to move our country forward to strengthen our position here at home and abroad that is the only kind of leadership that america needs and deserves in the 1960 s this issue which divides mr nixon and myself which divides the republican party and the democratic party has divided us through many years of our history it divided the country in l932 and the american people choose progress it divided the country in 1912 and the american people chose the new freedom and woodrow wilson the repubiclan party has been the party of the status quo it has opposed most of the pieces of progressive legislation which now are generally accepted as being useful useful to the public interest but which were fought tooth and nail through the 1930 s and 1940 s now we come forward with new programs and new solutions to new problems but i do not know that this administration has given us leadership i don t think this administration has set before the country the unfinished business of our society the last 9 months of thisyear do you know what the economic growth of the united states is and that goes to the question of whether you are going to have jobs and your children have jobs it was minus 0 3 percent the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years we are going to have to do that at a time when machines are taking the place of men one machine coal steel automobiles paper even in your business 1 machine can take the job of 5 or 10 men what happens to those 5 or 10 men unless our economy is moving ahead and this is the central domestic responsibility of the next administration unless our economy is moving ahead you are going to have a gradual slackening of people working and instead of there being 4 million it will be more and more i think this is not an easy problem i don t run for the presidency saying that these problems are easy or the solutions are readily available but i do say we can move off dead center i do say that we have to bring people to washington who are concerned with the public interest who can look forward over the horizons of experience at home and abroad and give this country leadership and this fight is a continuing one in 1935 90 percent of the republicans voted against social security in 1937 and 1938 90 percent of the republicans voted against the 25 cent minimum wage this summer when we tried to improve the standards of social security by providing medical care for the aged tied to social security again the great majority of the republicans over 90 percent voted against medical care for the aged tied to social security eighty percent of the members of the house of representatives who are republicans voted against the 1 25 minimum wage 50 a week for a 40 hour week for an industry a business that makes more than a million dollars a year how can anybody live on it no member of the congress could i believe that we can do better i come tonight and ask your help i don t say this is an easy campaign i don t say the problems that the next president will face are easy but i believe that we have a great country and i believe it is incumbent upon us to use our human and material resources to the fullest we are the defenders of freedom if we fail if we stand still if we give the impression that our brightest days are in the past then it affects not only us but all those who look to us for leadership so i come here and stand as the democratic nominee for the presidency i stand where in this century stood woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman mr nixon stands in this century where mckinley stood and harding and coolidge and landon and dewey and i believe the choice is clear i believe in 1960 the american people are going to say yes i believe that they are tired of standing still i believe this country is about to begin another great movement forward and i come here tonight and ask your help in this effort i want the people of the world to know those who live in the world south of us i want those who live behind the iron curtain to know that here in this country a new and vital leadership has taken over a society which is determined to move ahead a society which is determined to identify itself with the aspirations of people everywhere to be free to live in dignity to enjoy the rights which freedom gives them i come here tonight and ask you to join us in this effort to build a stronger country thank you dem jfk21 8 60 john_f _kennedy lyndon opened with a statement fellow farmers but i am not quite ready to go quite that far i want to say after hubert i don t think nixon can be quite that rough after running against hubert it is all going to be easy any time any truth squad or senator scott or the vice president says anything unkind about me or gets rough or anything i will say i have been through it much tougher than this in wisconsin and west virginia in any case i am delighted to have him with me now and i must say that he has been a constant friend since our traveling days together in wisconsin and west virginia i think this is an important conference this conference has two purposes first because we were anxious senator johnson and myself to establish contact with farmers in the midwest of the united states in order to get their latest views and their reactions to the democratic platform and also because this is the only meeting we have had and will have in the month of august which both of us are going to attend which demonstrates our strong feeling that this is the no 4 domestic issue in the united states today the problem of the family farm i talked to governor loveless at cape cod and i said i thought that we should have a farm conference and i hoped that he would take the leadership in it this is the result this is the work that he has done in the month that has elapsed since our meeting i want to express our appreciation to him for the leadership he has given to this conference to the members of congress to senator kefauver who has been through an exhausting campaign and yet came out here to lend a helping hand to the democratic party again and to congressman poage and the others from an entirely different part of the united states but who recognize the interdependence of the american economy i come from massachusetts but my state and this country cannot possibly move ahead unless the farmers of this country move ahead i don t think that any farmer in the united states is going to buy the crop of campaign promises that are going to be made in 1960 by the republican candidate in view of the fact that they bought even better campaign promises in 1952 and also to senator symington who has served on the agriculture committee who has associated himself with us in this campaign and who was with us this afternoon this is a great party i think it is dedicated to the improvement of american agriculture and it has been throughout its entire history since the time that a farmer thomas jefferson founded the democratic party its strength down through the days of bryan and all of the rest has been in the midwestern united states and in the farmers of this country south and southwest so this is an important election i think that those of you who served in congress know that there is not any use in electing a democratic house and a democratic senate we have had that the last 6 years but unless you have an administration and a secretary of agriculture and a president who will support a program then the congress is up against a stone wall the president of the united states has vetoed bill after bill and if a republican president is again elected he will veto bill after bill so this is a joint effort in which we are engaged i think that if we are going to do anything to move the american farmer ahead like he must be if this economy is going to be maintained throughout the country we need a democratic house and a democratic senate i say this even though i know i am the candidate we need also a democratic president and vice president if we are going to do the job i ask your help i think this job is going to be done i think we can win this election in the heartland of the united states i think the republicans are in trouble we are going to campaign in every one of these states we want your help governor freeman mentioned the fact that i brought to the floor and passed a bill for 1 25 minimum wage that is my responsibility and i am chairman of the subcommittee on labor president eisenhower recommended 2 weeks ago that the congress adopt a minimum wage bill when that bill came for a final passage the democrats voted for it 3 to 1 but a majority of the republicans led by senator dirksen and senator goldwater and senator bridges the three most powerful republicans on that side all voted against it a majority of them opposed 1 25 minimum wage by 1964 now what is true of the minimum wage is true of agricultural programs we are going to hear more commitments to more social welfare programs in the next 3 months but in the final analysis when they come to the vote and when they come for the president s signature they are going to be opposed it has always been that way in the republican party and it is that way that is why i think it is important that we win this election thank you dem jfk21 9 60 john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you to my friend mr green from nebraska who i understand spoke for 2 hours and 45 minutes tonight and filled in most of the program and to all of you for being willing to wait so long we were in tennessee all day by way of washington and therefore we were on a good cause i want to express my appreciation at your coming to this hall tonight and filling it for a democratic rally i want to express my appreciation for the generous introduction of your distinguished governor governor loveless i think that there is every prospect that i would not be here tonight that i would not be the standard bearer of the democratic party that i would not have the opportunity to present the issues on behalf of the democratic party this year if it had not been for the support given to me at the convention by your distinguished governor and the members of the iowa delegation so i am here tonight to express my appreciation to him and to all of you and in addition he has been kind enough to serve as chairman of our advisory committee on agricultural policy i must say that if we are successful and if he is advising the american farmer i think will get a better deal than they will get from being advised by the advisers that mr nixon has appointed especially the ones from this district that is a long sentence but you do get the idea i want to also say that the state of iowa even though i come from a different state this is one country i think the state of iowa has an opportunity to continue the same kind of responsible government which governor loveless has given this state when you elect nick mcmanus the next governor of the state of iowa i have known him for a great many years and i think he can do a good job i hope that you will send a young man this ticket is well balanced o brien mcmanus and kennedy i hope you will send a young man and loveless i hope you will send a young man down there to represent this district i thought he made in a short time about as concise and effective a political speech as i have heard the only thing is that he stopped too soon he was about to suggest the remedies for the agricultural problems and i would have like to have heard him but we will hear him on television i think that he deserves the support of this district because you cannot live in iowa you cannot depend on a good agricultural economy and possibly be satisfied with the kind of leadership which this administration and the republicans in the house and senate have given in the search for a new and effective program i hope you elect congressman o brien and i don t hold his name against him i come from a nonagricultural state massachusetts and therefore i am sure that there are some farmers in iowa and south dakota and north dakota who say why should we elect someone from new england why shouldn t we elect a farmer well there is no farmer up for the office this year whittier calif is not one of the great agricultural sections of the united states but i think there is more to it than that that is that i consider the agricultural income to be the no 1 problem that the united states faces it is not just a problem for iowa indiana or the dakotas but it is a problem for the united states of america i don t think that there is any accident that the farm income which has declined over the past few years has also seen detroit mich have a relatively secondary year in the sale of automobiles because farmers are the no 1 market for automobiles in the united states i don t think it is entirely unconnected that we find a country which has the greatest capacity to produce steel in the world producing steel at 50 percent of capacity the economy of the united states is interconnected it is interdependent it is interrelated when there is a recession on the farm sooner or later and the twenties taught us it was sooner there is a recession in the cities so i speak tonight as the standard bearer for a national party which is represented east and west north and south whose strength has been for much of its history has been the support it has received from the o briens and others from the western united states who spoke for the farmer and the small businessman i come here tonight pledging that if i am successful in this campaign that i will speak as an american to try to solve what is at one time the most fruitful and promising opportunity we have and on the other hand it represents the greatest technological revolution the world has ever seen an american said to me the other day that if mr khrushchev could have 50 american scientists or 50 of the best american farmers he would take the american farmers and he would be right because the solution to the staggering problem of a shortage of food which faces the world which requires 70 and 80 and 85 percent of the world s population to spend their day searching for food we have solved here in the united states and we consider it our no 1 problem surpluses which are in effect blessings from the lord on this country at a time when as congressman to be o brien said we are fighting a battle for men s minds we have in iowa more wealth than was ever mined in the gold of california and it comes out of the ground i do not say the solution to the problem of a balance between supply and demand is an easy one but i do say that this administration has not had the answer a reporter asked president eisenhower about a month ago what suggestions and ideas mr nixon has had and the president said give me a week and i will let you know well after the next week the press conference was called off and another week went by then at the next press conference no one asked the president what the idea was but i am here to say what the idea was and it was described by mr benson earlier this year mr benson may not be the most unusual secretary of agriculture in history as mr nixon once described him but he is a truthful man he said early this year that mr nixon was one of the architects of his farm program there it is i am ready to give it to you here is the answer we have been waiting for for a month one idea suggested by the vice president and we have it in the benson farm program people of this state will have to make a judgment in the next 6 weeks as to which party and which candidate they should support i speak tomorrow at the plowing contest in south dakota and the vice president of the united states speaks the next day i cannot predict how different our messages will be the same phrases perhaps will be used cost price squeeze the necessity of a good income for the farmer the necessity of distributing our surplus food all the rest i think a better judgment from any speeches which may be made by any candidates during the next 6 weeks is written in the record of the last 8 years and written in the record of the democratic party in the last 25 years and written in the republican party during the same period of time by their fruits you shall know them and i think the farmers of this state can make a judgment based on vote after vote in the congress in the last 5 or 6 years on every effort made to increase income for our farmers five vetoes an attempt made effort after effort to try to improve a difficult situation without success i think the speeches weighed on that scale may count for little i think the record is clear i think there is an entirely different philosophy which motivates the republican party from the democratic party in its history and not just in agriculture during the session of august when we tried to get medical care for our older citizens we got 44 democrats and i republican governor rockefeller was right when he rejected today the program that the congress finally passed and that the president signed it is a useless and a wasteful bill far better it would have been to have put that under social security as we recommended it we were threatened with a veto and we were defeated i spend today in iowa and tennessee the great issue iii this campaign of course is the struggle for peace i think in tennessee and iowa we have learned a wise lesson i spent today in the tennessee valley and i received a letter tonight on the plane from one of the men who built the tennessee valley he described how project after project had sprung up in southeast persia in the indus river in colombia and all over the world modeled after what we did in the tennessee valley because we could do it they wanted to do it because we showed them that a free society was able to organize its resources other countries wanted to come to our country and learn how to do it and follow our example the most effective blow in the struggle for peace that we could have waged i see the same thing for iowa here in this rich and productive state which has seen this extraordinary revolution in agricultural production in the last 50 years we show people around the world how to do it the reason mr khrushchev comes here is because he knows in our own country almost unknown to our people we have had a revolution in the last 50 years which can have more significance and bring more happiness and more well being to people than sputnik or any other scientific discovery almost in this century how to produce food with a few people and feed them well that is the secret of iowa just as the secret of tennessee is how to harness the resources of the land and use it for the benefit of the people these programs i think are the kind of programs which in the past and again in the future the democratic party has been identified it is a source of pride to me that i am able to represent this party on this occasion because the more i look at the record the more i study the leadership which our parties have given the more study the record of the men whom the democrats have produced in the last 50 years to lead this country wilson roosevelt and truman and the men who have been produced to lead the republican party since the end of theodore roosevelt s administration how glad i am that i am a democrat and how proud i am to carry our banner a strong america is our objective a strong country which can live in peace and set an example to men all over the world we wish to show men and women all over the world that we are able to harness the resources of our society that what we have done they can do and be strong in the meantime to protect ourselves against any action so that we can keep the peace beneath that great shield and beneath that umbrella beneath that wall build the kind of society which can serve as an inspiration to people around the world to cause people to think that the people of this country are on the move that they are solving their problems that they are feeding their people that they are building better cities that they are using their natural resources that they are cleansing their water that they are developing their power that they are on the move that they are a vital society which represents the future not the past we are not finished we are on the way in this country we have more to offer than any society ever developed the communist society is hostile to the basic aspirations of the people of latin america africa and asia and eastern europe and it is hostile to the aspirations of the russians if we can maintain our strength if we can maintain those qualities of character and restraint and self discipline and will if we bring imagination and energy to the solution of the problems that we face if we mobilize ourselves for the public interest i believe this country will not only endure but prevail i think the future can be bright i ask your support in this campaign because i think we have a chance to serve our country in a difficult and dangerous period it requires the best from all of us it requires your best in this district and in this state and in this country but the country is worth it we have our chance in our generation to contribute to the welfare of our country i think it is a chance that all of us welcome we want to lead and we want this country to move again thank you dem jfk21 9 60a john_f _kennedy governor ellington senator gore members of the congress visitors from three states ladies and gentlemen it is my understanding that the last candidate for the presidency to visit this community in a presidential year was herbert hoover in 1928 senator kennedy president hoover initiated on the occasion of his visit the slogan two chickens for every pot and it is no accident that no presidential candidate has ever dared come back to this community since but we are here today because we begin in tennessee today a campaign for the office of the presidency in this state and we ask your support i think it is most appropriate that we should begin in this community with visitors from three states virginia north carolina and tennessee because it was virginia which produced thomas jefferson who founded the democratic party and it was north carolina and tennessee that produced and brought to fruition andrew jackson who built the democratic party i run for the office of the presidency in a difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country senator johnson and i do not run for president and vice president promising that if we are elected life will be easy i think to be an american in the 1960 s will be a responsible and difficult and hazardous occupation yesterday mr nixon suggested that during the time that the united nations was in session that we should diminish our campaign that we should support the president that we should rally around the united states i support the president i did not need to be reminded of that yesterday and so does every american here republican or democrat and we support the united states but i am concerned about the future of our country and i think it would be far more hazardous and far more dangerous for any american who is concerned about the future of our country to stay still to say nothing to keep his peace we settle in the next 6 weeks we make a decision in the coming days which way this country will move not from now to january but for the next 4 years and possibly the next 8 years and i will not miss a single occasion to see what is on my side and that is that this is a great country but it can be a greater country it is a powerful country but it can be a more powerful country mr khrushchev is not impressed by words nor is mr castro nor are the satellite leaders they are not impressed by speeches they are not impressed by debates they are impressed by power they are impressed by strength they are impressed by the determination of the american people they are impressed by our vitality as a free society and it is my responsibility as the standard bearer for the democratic party in this election to speak the truth to say what we think the democratic party does not run on a program in this election which will give any satisfaction at all to mr khrushchev if we are successful our objective will be to rebuild our country to strengthen our country and strengthen its position around the world to strengthen its defenses to rebuild the economy of this united states the reason that franklin roosevelt and harry truman and woodrow wilson were successful in their day around the world was because they were successful here in the united states the 14 points of woodrow wilson were greeted with such significance in europe were the logical extension of the new freedom of woodrow wilson here in the united states and the hand of friendship which franklin roosevelt held out to people around the world was the same hand he held out to the people of tennessee in the tennessee valley and the people of the united states and the marshall plan and nato and the truman doctrine had their counterpart in the fair deal here in the united states i come as the standard bearer for the oldest political party on earth i think the people of tennessee and virginia and north carolina and kentucky can make a clear judgment in this campaign and that is on the record of the two parties which party is good for the people which party has fought for the interest of this part of the united states which party has concerned itself with education and the position of our older citizens and full employment for our people and party income for our farmers which party has fought for the american people which party has said yes to the future and which party has stood still and which party has looked back i think that this can be not a period of gloom for us i have confidence in this country i don t downgrade the united states i say we can do better i have more confidence in the united states and its potential than our adversaries who say what we are doing now is as much as we can do i know we can do better this valley and this state included in 1932 and 1933 and 1934 and 1935 there were those who saw no future for tennessee or parts of north carolina or virginia but franklin roosevelt saw it and harry truman in his day saw it and woodrow wilson in his day saw it i run as the democratic candidate for the presidency and i ask your support i don t say that life will be easy but i say this country and this state and this area can move i think our brightest days as the defender of freedom around the world are still ahead i think the 1960 s can be days which historians will say this is when the country moved i ask your help in this campaign as we move across the new frontiers of the 1960 s not resting on our oars not saying what other presidents in other times have done not saying that previous generations had a rendezvous with destiny but saying our generation does our generation does during the election of 1860 one of the candidates lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now in 1960 we know there is a god and we know that he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk21 9 60b john_f _kennedy i would just as soon sit and listen to albert some more i want to thank my friend albert gore for his generous words today in his own state and also for his friendship stretching back over 14 years in the house and the senate he speaks for tennessee in the senate and he also speaks for the united states i am proud to be here today with your distinguished governor buford ellington who has devoted himself who was a strong supporter of senator johnson for the presidency before the convention has shown the same friendship and the same support for the ticket of johnson and kennedy after the convention i stand here as the democratic nominee for the office of the presidency i think the state of tennessee knows something about the job of president because you have sent from this state three distinguished presidents of the united states one was james polk who in character and accomplishment i think resembles harry truman one of the great unknown presidents of the united states and you sent two other presidents to the united states capital to washington one was andrew jackson who is the only president of the united states whom the senate has officially censured and the other was andrew johnson who is the only president of the united states whom the house of representatives ever impeached why did they impeach johnson and why did they impeach jackson they impeached them for doing their duty regardless of the popular pressures they censured jackson because he fought against the bank at philadelphia which was trying to strangle the economic life of this country they impeached andrew johnson because he would not liquidate the south after the civil war they recognized that the obligation of the president is not please the people but to serve them that is the recognition which tennessee has given to this country in the past and gives it today i stand here in this state and i come from 1 500 miles away i support the tennessee valley not because massachusetts gained but because the country gained because it was in the national interest the tennessee valley was conceived originally and developed by two men one from nebraska and the other from new york one was george norris and the other was franklin roosevelt and they recognized that a rising tide lifts all the boats if this country moves ahead if the tennessee valley moves ahead massachusetts and nebraska and the united states move ahead if i am elected president or if i stay in the senate i will fight and give you three guarantees first that the headquarters of the tennessee valley in spite of all the rumors spread by distinguished newspapers will stay here in this state secondly i will never call the tennessee valley creeping socialism thirdly i think the tennessee valley has been a source of strength not only to the tennessee valley and not only to the united states but the tennessee valley typifies in my opinion the kind of domestic program which has far reaching implications around the world one of the great influences of the tennessee valley has been that it has been the best ambassador that the united states has ever had in the middle east and africa and asia if we want people to follow up we have to lead if we want the newly emerging countries of africa and asia and latin america to want to associate with us they have to feel that there is something in our lives and in our experience that is common to them the reason that mr lilienthal works in iran today is because he worked in the tennessee valley when they talk about damming the jordan river they talk about making another tennessee valley in the middle east in the days of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman we carried on great agricultural experiments great progress in the damming of our rivers and cleaning them and therefore people in their own countries newly independent newly emerging wanting to make a better life for their citizens came to this part of the united states because they saw an area that was desolate and hopeless 25 years ago that is now one of the richest parts of the country they know what we did here by the initiative of the people in this part of the united states joined by a government which saw the necessity of cooperation they know what we did they can do what we have done in the past they can do what we will do in the future they can do that is the great lesson that is the great experience i think that the united states has that is the best hope for peace not by trying to buy allies not by trying to pour out sums of money suddenly when a crisis comes along but by doing things in our country using our natural resources using our food surpluses imaginatively building a better life for our people solving our urban problems moving ahead here in this country so that people around the world look at us and say the future belongs to them not to the communists i campaign in this campaign and have spoken around the country and yesterday the vice president said that during this period of crisis at the united nations we should cease all talk about the united states being weak i don t say the united states is weak i say it is a strong country but i say it could be stronger i would much rather mr khrushchev and mr castro while they are visiting the united states should hear the voice of the opposition which does not want appeasement which wants to see our country grow which wants to see freedom expand which wants to see a strong military defense which wants to see a brighter life for our people that is the voice of the united states i want mr khrushchev to hear i don t want him to hear uniformity i don t want him to hear silence i want him to know that this is a vital country that we are a strong people that we believe our best days are ahead and that we believe and that we believe that the democratic party can lead and that if we are successful in january this country will move again thank you dem jfk21 9 60c john_f _kennedy senator gore your distinguished governor congressman cliff davis congressman everett rev james elder ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to albert gore who has traveled with me through tennessee today and traveled with me a great many legislative battles over the past 14 years to your distinguished governor who has shown us constant support and friendship to both senator johnson and myself during the days since the end of the convention and in the days to come until the election and to your mayor who was a shipmate of mine during world war ii and to reverend elder all of whom have held out the hand of friendship to me in tennessee today i want you to know i am most grateful i hope though i come from a state which is over 2 000 miles from tennessee the state of massachusetts that i do not come as a stranger because i come as the standard bearer for the democratic party and tennessee is the state that was the native home of one of the two founders of the democratic party andrew jackson nearly 75 years ago a great southerner henry grady used to tell a story about a poor arkansas farmer who died across the river in our neighboring state when they buried him mr grady said his tombstone was made of vermont marble his coffin was made of wood from oregon the nails were of iron from pittsburgh he wore shoes from boston he wore a shirt from cincinnati and his suit came from new york and all the south contributed mr grady said was the hole in the ground those days are gone forever those days when the needs of the south were ignored those days before the administrations of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt who helped rebuild the south and the country i come to you today as a candidate for the democratic party and in the next 6 weeks the people of tennessee and of arkansas and of the entire united states must make a judgment between mr nixon and myself we have both emerged on the scene as the standard bearers for our two parties but mr nixon and i did not commence in the last 6 weeks the story of this campaign did not commence 14 years ago when we both came to congress the position of the candidates and their story and the viewpoint they hold for the future can best be determined by the record of the two parties during the years of their existence it is on that basis the democratic party and the republican party which have flowed like two rivers through the history of the united states and by their fruits you shall know them i put the record of the democratic party before the people of tennessee and the people of arkansas and i ask you what has the republican party ever done for the people of these two states the tennessee valley was built by the work of the people of this valley and by the vision of franklin roosevelt this administration has substituted that policy the policy of no new starts and the contract that is so famous in the city of memphis for which you are paying and the american people are paying dixon yates i think the decision is very clear because i think in many ways that we begin in the sixties and particularly in 1960 another great milestone in the story of american development in some ways this is 1932 and 1912 and 1948 i think that in the 1960 s this country is going to have to begin a great new movement forward i don t think we can live off the accomplishments of past generations franklin roosevelt said in his first inaugural this generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny i think this generation in 1960 also has a rendezvous with destiny a rendezvous far more trying far more hazardous far more fraught with danger for us all but also filled with opportunity than any rendezvous this group of americans or any group of americans has ever faced we stand today as the only sentinel at the gate in the great struggle for freedom freedom here in the united states and freedom around the world i see an america which will reestablish itself as a great symbol in the battle for men s minds in the battle for freedom all over the globe mr khrushchev after his visit to the united states said that the united states is a sick and dying and faltering horse that is about to collapse into the ground i don t hold that view at all i think our brightest days are ahead i think our high noon can be in the future not in the past yesterday speaking in michigan mr nixon suggested that those who were going around the country saying the united states is second and that we are weak are giving aid and comfort to mr khrushchev i do not say we are second and i do not say we are weak i say we are a great country that can be greater we are a powerful country we are a powerful country that can be more powerful i don t think that there is anything that we have said or that we will say that gives any comfort at all to mr khrushchev because our program is a simple one to strengthen the united states to make it more powerful here at home and around the world to check the advance of the communists to have a defense second to none and to reestablish ourselves in the imagination of people all over the world i want mr khrushchev to hear that message i want him to know that there is a free election in the united states and that the democratic party the party of wilson and roosevelt and truman wants to move forward that we are not a sick and dying and faltering horse but instead a country which is on the move again we do not fool mr khrushchev we confine him to manhattan and we confine mr castro there but they know that they are on the move i am not satisfied and i think this is the basic question which the american people must decide are they satisfied with the position of the united states today do they feel that the relative power and strength and prestige of the united states is growing in comparison to that of the communist world do they think that the position of the united states in latin america is stronger than it was 10 or 20 years ago do they think the people of africa who used to quote franklin roosevelt and jefferson and lincoln do they think they quote american leaders today do you think the people of asia who stand on the razor edge of decision do they look to us or do they look to the communist world if you feel that what we are doing now is right that we can do no better i suggest you vote for an administration whose motto has been no new starts but if you feel we can do better if you feel that this is a great country which deserves the united effort of all of us if you feel that we can move in the sixties that we can bring a better life for our people that we can provide security for the farmers of tennessee and arkansas that we can develop our resources that we can use our steel capacity instead of 50 percent of it that we can provide for a more secure life for our older citizens that we can provide the best educational system in the world that we can move i want you to join with us i want you to help us i want to see an america which is free for everyone which develops the constitutional rights of all americans which will serve as our own symbol our own identification with the cause of freedom the hard tough question for the next decade for this or any other group of americans is whether a free society with its freedom of choice its breadth of opportunity its range of alternatives can meet the single minded advance of the communists can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure can we carry through at an age where never before we will witness not only new development of weapons not only of destruction but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain the ocean and the tides the far side of space and the inside of men s minds we and the russians now have the power to destroy at one blow one quarter of the earth s population a feat not accomplished since cain slew abel we need leadership better equipped than any we have had in 100 years if the united states is not only going to survive but prevail it is to that great cause that i ask your help it is to the future that i ask you to give ourselves it is to this campaign that i ask your assistance thank you dem jfk21 9 60d john_f _kennedy governor ellington senator gore mrs kefauver former distinguished governors of the state of tennessee congressman loser distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i come from massachusetts which is over 2 000 miles away but no democrat who comes to tennessee the state of andrew jackson comes as a stranger i don t know whether those two signs hanging on that hotel mean anything but we will settle for that big a majority next november 8 i am grateful for all of you being kind enough to come here today and greet us i am grateful to your distinguished governor who was a loyal supporter of senator johnson before the convention and who has given equal support and equal friendship to a ticket of johnson and kennedy after the convention to albert gore and estes kefauver who have spoken for the interests of this state and the country and who speak now as democrats who believe in a national democratic party i come here to tennessee which helped start the democratic party i come here to the home of andrew jackson and i ask tennessee to come back home i ask you to this state and this country have seen in the last 8 years you cannot live in the tennessee valley and say that it does not make any difference which party is in control of the government you cannot live in this valley which was built by the people of this area and the democrats and say that a government which has made a boast of no new starts is good enough for the 1960 s andrew jackson in 1812 sent out a notice to the people of this state which was answered on that occasion and in that statement he said we are freeborn sons we are going to fight for the reestablishment of the national character we are going to fight for the reestablishment of the national strength mr nixon said yesterday that the members of the democratic party should not go around the country saying the country is weak because it will give mr khrushchev encouragement i want to make it clear that nothing that i am saying will give mr khrushchev the slightest encouragement he is encouraged enough as he stands 90 miles off the coast of the united states i propose to discourage him i propose that when the democratic party assumes its control in november that we rebuild our national strength and vitality the most ominous sound that mr khrushchev can hear this week is not in the debates of the united nations but a sound of the united states on the move again of a country ready to move i am not satisfied to see a communist satellite 90 miles off the coast of florida 8 minutes by jet those who say that they will stand up to khrushchev have not demonstrated any ability to stand up to mr castro this state is an important state in this election and i think this state shows not only what the country can do and what our people can do but what the cause of freedom can do because along with andrew jackson this state has a great inspiration not only to our country but to the people of the free world and that is the tennessee valley i do not come to tennessee and say that this is a noble experiment and then go back to washington and say it is creeping socialism the tennessee valley is the greatest asset we could have not just to the tennessee valley and not just to the united states but to all those people who stand today in the underdeveloped world and try to make a judgment which road they will take will they go the road of freedom or will they take the road of moscow and peiping the tennessee valley shows them what freedom can do by the collective action of the people and the vision of the leadership i run in the tradition of great democratic presidents no democratic president in this century has ever run on a slogan of stand pat with mckinley return to normalcy with harding keep cool with coolidge no new starts with this administration the democratic slogans have told something of the democratic party the new freedom of woodrow wilson the new deal of franklin roosevelt the fair deal of harry truman and i ask you today to come with us across the new frontier of the sixties only an america which is strong and developing only an america which is using its own resources to the maximum only an america which is rebuilding its cities and distributing its food in a way that benefits our people and the free world only an america which has a strength second to none can lead the free world this is a great election in many ways it is more critical than the election of 1932 because in 1932 what was at stake was the preservation of freedom in this country what is at stake in the election of 1960 is the preservation of freedom all around the globe lyndon johnson and i do not run for president and vice president promising that if we are elected life will be easy but we do promise that if we are elected this country will start to go forward again this country s strength will increase this country s momentum will quicken and we will once more as we were in the days of roosevelt and wilson be a source of inspiration to all those who wish to travel freedom s way during the american constitutional convention there was behind the desk of general washington a picture of a sun low in the horizon and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising or a setting sun at the conclusion benjamin franklin stood up because of what we have done here today he said we know it is not a setting sun but it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i think in 1960 if we are willing to bear our burdens and meet our responsibilities and look to the future and say yes to the next decade i think it can be a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk21 9 60e john_f _kennedy governor ellington senator gore members of congress ladies and gentlemen i want to express my great appreciation to you all and to the governor for the generous invitation to come today this fair is an evidence of the traditional desire of americans to improve themselves and improve their work in the past 2 weeks i have been in the fairgrounds in portland maine in palmer alaska and in the states of oregon and california in every fair we see americans collecting themselves together and preparing themselves for a better future i am particularly glad to come to this fair on farmers day i have been in the congress for 14 years and i come from a section of the united states which does not directly depend on agriculture but if the economy and experience of our country has told us anything if the lesson of the twenties and the lesson of the fifties has any meaning for us today it is that we cannot be prosperous as a nation unless agriculture is prosperous also i must say that i wholly disagree with the programs put forward by this administration for the support of american agriculture because it has brought the dairy farmer of this country to an average income across the nation that he had between 1939 and 1941 the only program which has worked well in recent years has been the program on tobacco and the reason has been because we have had a high support price and an effective balance between supply and demand my judgment is that a new administration must put forward an agricultural program which has two basic ingredients first a balance between supply and demand a determination must be made as to how much we can usefully consume here in the united states how much we need for our surplus foods to take care of our own people and how much we can usefully distribute in the cause of peace around the world and then we should put a limit on the production five percent surplus production in milk or in cheese or butter or tobacco or wheat or corn breaks the market price 15 or 20 percent i think effective control with a high support price is the common denominator which must affect all agricultural programs across the united states if we are going to have security for the american farmer therefore though i come from a section which is not agricultural i know enough about the experience of our country to know that if our agriculture is prosperous we will be prosperous in our cities if our cities are prosperous we will be prosperous we will be prosperous in our country a rising tide lifts all the boats and i preach the doctrine of the interdependence of the american economy a strong america from one shore to the other north and south east and west in which all americans share their prosperity i want to express my appreciation i come as the democratic nominee for the office of the president and i come to this area of tennessee which was the home of andrew jackson who helped found the party which i now lead i therefore am honored to come to this state and i am grateful to you all for the courtesy in permitting me to say hello thank you dem jfk22 10 60 john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen senator symington president truman mr mayor governor senator long governor to be dalton attorney general to be tom eagleton your distinguished congressmen and my colleagues in the congress congressman bolling congressman randall ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be here and i am extremely proud that our distinguished former president president truman who has laid the issues out and mr nixon in this campaign who came 700 miles to be with us tonight he has talked to everyone in the united states and everyone in missouri knew where he stood what he liked and what he didn t like i am delighted he is here on our platform with us tonight i speak tonight in the presence of a great tradition this auditorium was dedicated 24 years ago by a great democratic president franklin d roosevelt and standing by him on that occasion was a young senator from the state of missouri who is younger today former senator harry truman i must say they have made it easy to run as the democratic candidate for the presidency in 1960 mr nixon has to talk about mckinley and harding and coolidge and landon and dewey sometimes i think it isn t fair to us who can i talk about woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt harry truman mr nixon has two speeches one is the speech that he gives in some parts of the country where he suspects some unsuspecting democrats may be possibly passing by and turn to listen in that speech he says party labels don t mean a thing what counts is the man i am not really anything therefore you can elect me i am not a republican then he gets down to arizona in the land of goldwater and he says i am a republican from top to bottom i endorse everybody i believe in the principles of the republican party now i don t have to do that i can go north south east and west and say i am a democrat i stand in the democratic tradition and i believe party labels do mean something do you think the democrats would ever have run a candidate like mckinley who ran on the slogan stand pat do you think they ever would have returned to normalcy with warren g harding or kept cool with coolidge we ran on slogans in our day like the new freedom which had its international counterpart in the 14 points franklin roosevelt ran on the new deal which had its international counterpart in the four freedoms harry truman ran on the fair deal which had its international counterpart in the truman doctrine the marshal plan nato point four they didn t go around the world president truman and president roosevelt saying all was well you never had it so good they took the american people into their confidence they realized that these were challenging days for any free society and it was incumbent upon the president and only the president could do this to set before the american people the unfinished agenda the business the things we must do if we are going to maintain our freedom and our independence i am here in part to repay an obligation which is more than a century old senator john quincy adams from my own state who after being president of the united states represented a small district in massachusetts in the congress of the united states for 20 years there made his most distinguished record as a great fighter against slavery and when he died the man who gave the eulogy was a man from a different section a different party a different experience a different state it was the first senator from the state of missouri one of the alltime greats who served this state with courage and the union senator thomas hart benton for 30 years senator benton said he had relied upon the intelligence and the fairness of the people of missouri and they had never disappointed him in his speech once he said i despise the bubble popularity that is won without merit and lost without pride i value solid popularity the esteem of good men for good action that is what this world needs and that is what our country needs not words and speeches given by candidates and others what we need are good works and the esteem of good men backed by good action that is why the name of wilson and roosevelt and truman goes ringing down the corridors because they matched their words with action mr nixon in our tv debate last night said america s prestige will be just as high abroad as the spokemen for america allow it to be that is the kind of sentence we have seen a good deal of in this campaign then he went on to say that any of the statements which we may have made in this campaign as the representatives of the democratic party on space and education and economic growth our influence in latin america and all the rest can only have the effect of reducing our prestige mr nixon could not be more wrong our prestige abroad is not what we say it is but what it is it is not the esteem of good men for good words it is the esteem of good men for good action what we are here at home speaks far louder than what we say the kind of society that we build here the fairness with which we treat our people their equal opportunity for development of their talents the kind of jobs they hold and wages they earn the kind of houses in which they live the kind of education which they get the kind of security which they achieve in their older age these are the things that build a strong and vital society the soviets reaching the moon was not an invention of my campaign the first vehicle of space was called sputnik not vanguard the first passengers to return safely from outer space were named strelka and belka not rover or fido or even checkers i did not invent our overcrowded schools i did not invent the 5 or 6 million americans that live out their lives waiting for food packages from the federal government which amount to 5 cents per day per person i did not invent the fact that our steel capacity today is moving ahead and being used only 50 percent of capacity i did not invent the fact that there is 9 billion worth of surplus food stored away in this rich country of ours and farm income has dropped 25 percent in the last 8 years a farmer in missouri said last spring i am going to plant corn and i hope i break even i need the money they have not been breaking even and even mr nixon admitted it in the great debate he had with mr krushchev when he stuck his finger in mr khrushchev s face and said you may be ahead of us in rockets but we are ahead of you in color television these rockets impress people how impressed have they been with our color television mr george allen the head of the usia the director of our information service made the most alarming statement when he said last june that 40 years ago the soviet union was the most backward country in europe now because they had achieved a significant breakthrough in space many of the people of the underdeveloped world began to think that they equaled the united states in science and productivity and a gallup poll taken last february in 9 out of 10 countries showed that a majority of people thought that the soviet union would be the first in science in 1970 and first in military power i did not invent it mr nixon the facts are there it has been achieved this image of america during an administration which you have claimed to be a partner and as a citizen of the united states i believe it is time for a change i believe that we can get at this matter very fairly there are now within the department of state certain studies and certain polls which have been made of our position overseas the state department has been reluctant and unwilling to release them even though they have been paid for by the taxpayers of the united states and even though the chairman of the senate foreign relations committee mr fulbright has asked that they be made public for our information mr nixon said that he had no objection and i will quote him he would have no objection to making them public i challenge him to demonstrate his influence with this administration and his willingness to have the real facts known i challenge him to have these facts made public and then we can determine which candidate which party addresses itself and themselves to the great issues which face our country in the coming years we must rebuild our strength around the world we must demonstrate that we are a strong and vital society that we are solving our own problems that we are identified with the fight which is going on against the poverty and disease and illiteracy and ignorance that in this free country of ours we are our brothers keeper and that here in the united states we are building the kind of society which they can build in their own time with our help i think the next president of the united states should reestablish the atmosphere that existed in the 1930 s of the good neighbor policy we must demonstrate in africa by an imaginative use of technical assistance a program initiated by president truman on what can be done in those great countries where people live on an income of 35 40 or 45 a year how can we hope where ignorance is their constant companion where there is in the congo less than 12 college graduates where the standard of living is pathetically low how can we expect them to choose freedom how can we expect them to identify themselves with us how can we expect to block the communist advance when we have been wholly indifferent i believe the responsibilities which the next president and the next administration will bear are as great as any in our history i believe that this country can meet any of its responsibilities i have the greatest possible confidence in it i believe with new leadership this country can begin the great march forward in the sixties that must be taken if we are going to maintain the peace and maintain our own security this is a great country but this country cannot move forward unless the people of this country will make a decision for progress on november 8 the kind of decision which they made in november of 1948 and november of 1932 and november of 1912 the decision to pick themselves up and start along the road of motion of vigor mr nixon suggests that everything that could be done is being done he says our prestige is so high he runs on a slogan we never had it so good what kind of leadership can that party and that candidate give in the changing years of the 1960 s if he cannot read the map of the world and see our dangers and see our opportunities i come here to missouri and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in building this country i ask you to take your decision for progress on november 8 to build missouri to build the united states to build the cause of freedom franklin roosevelt in accepting his second presidential nomination before 100 000 people at franklin field said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i do not believe in 1961 the people of this country want a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think in 1960 and 1961 they are going to choose the kind of government identified with the names of truman and symington and bolling and dalton and the others they are going to choose progress one hundred years ago in the campaign of 1860 lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe i am ready now 100 years later in 1960 when the issues are much the same though the scale is larger we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice we see the storm coming and we know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for us i believe we are ready thank you dem jfk22 10 60b john_f _kennedy mr governor senator ed long larry cox my friend and colleague in the u s senate senator stuart symington your county chairman george johnson ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming this morning i came here this morning from new york and you came here today from your homes because all of us share an interest and concern for our country and all of us want to do the best things for it i am the standard bearer for the democratic party and as such i consider it our responsibility to put forward our views of what we would do if our country is going to maintain its position in the world and the people of this country will live a more prosperous life during the long history of the united states the pendulum between the two parties republican and democratic has swung back and forth back and forth depending on the candidates depending on the parties depending on the needs of our time i don t think there is anyone in this country republican or democratic that would deny that the republican party has been and is on the whole a conservative party and that the democratic party is a progressive party and it has depended on which party and which times for the majority of the people which way they wished to go do they wish to more or less conserve themselves or build their strength have they determined that now is the time to move forward again the decision you have to make as voters on november 8 is which time is this in the life of our country what are the problems that our country faces is it a time when we can stand still more is it a time for conserving our resources looking at ourselves or is it a time for moving forward again i don t think there is any doubt personally i don t think there is any question the people of this country elected president eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 that is 8 years now in 1960 you cannot be a citizen of this country you cannot read the papers you cannot look at outer space you cannot look across the street you cannot travel missouri you cannot travel the united states you cannot look at the world around us without deciding that it is time as americans for another great movement forward we are here in this state in the heartland of the united states a state which has produced in the last 15 years a great president about 2 weeks ago mr nixon thought that he would dismiss me by calling me he is just another truman i said i regarded that as a compliment because he was just another dewey and after we had exchanged those remarks i never heard that statement from him again in any case in the most serious time in the life of our country and this is a serious time because in the next 10 years around the world i believe the balance of power in the world may shift in one direction or another if the communists should make a decisive breakthrough in india or in africa or we should have other cubas in latin america then the balance may turn in their direction then they may have the resources and the manpower and the technology and the military strength the scientific strength the educational strength to begin to really surround the united states to begin to move against us in a more direct way otherwise we will make the decisive breakthrough russia and china might split apart india succeed in its planning africa could determine to make itself free cuba could change all these things could move in one direction or another in the next 10 years i believe in these years of transition during these year s of hazard during these years of change we need a new administration in washington which can bring to washington to our administrative positions to the congress of the united states a spirit of movement a spirit of looking to the future foresight judgment some recognition of the turbulent world in which we live some desire to maintain our freedom in this country to develop our resources to have the best educational system in the world all these things the president of the united states cannot do this is a free society and the kind of country we have the kind of strength we have depends in the final analysis upon the people themselves but the function and responsibility of the president is to set before the american people the unfinished business the things we must do if we are going to succeed as a nation my argument with mr nixon and my disagreement with him in this campaign and i believe the basic issue of the campaign is the way we look at our country and its problems he says our prestige has never been higher he says that of the communists has never been lower and he points at the world around us he points to the world around us i look at the world around us and at our country and i say this is a great country but it must be greater i say it is time we started moving again so i come here today and ask your help in this campaign this state is a key state in this campaign whoever carries missouri may well carry the united states you are participating in the election of a president of the united states in the most difficult time in our history and on the president on his judgment on his sense of conviction on his foresight may well hang the security of the united states and the free world with full recognition of the responsibilities of the office after 14 years in the congress after really believing that the president of the united states can strike a blow for freedom i come here to this shopping center and ask your help thank you dem jfk22 10 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen congressman randall can anybody hear that congressman randall senator ed long your candidate for governor who i know is going to be the governor hugh dalton the attorney general ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be in this state and i am delighted to mr nixon 2 weeks ago in boston in my home town attempted to dismiss me as saying that i was just another truman i said i regarded it as a compliment and he was just another dewey and be has not said it since the fact of the matter is that this shopping center is called truman center but also mr truman is remembered for being a fighting president who helped defend freedom after world war ii in greece and turkey and western europe through nato and the marshall plan and the rest the truman center and the truman doctrine rests thousands of miles apart but they are an expression of america at its best i come here tonight to this center of a great democratic state i come here and ask your help i ask you to join us in building the strength of america again i shook hands coming over here tonight with some farmers and how can you tell that they are farmers it is because their hands are twice as big i don t know what they do with it all day but it is twice as big because they work longer and harder than anybody with the possible exception of candidates for the presidency and they average in pay about 60 cents an hour i believe that this administration and its policies pursued by mr benson called by mr nixon the most remarkable secretary of agriculture in history has helped liquidate the american farmer and mr nixon s program will continue it how can any farmer vote republican in 1960 i understand nearby there was a farmer who planted some corn he said to his neighbor i hope i break even this year i really need the money we want him to do more than break even we want him to move ahead that is a massachusetts joke we are a little slow up there i want to express my regrets to all of you for keeping you waiting we were not playing golf we started at midnight in new york after debating the great debater mr nixon the man who stood up to mr khrushchev but won t stand up for a fifth debate we left there at midnight came to st louis then to joplin then wichita now truman corners back to kansas and we end up in green bay wis and we don t even get 60 cents an hour for doing this i come here to missouri and ask your help this state is key if we can carry this state of missouri i think the democrats can win in 1960 i believe this year just as in 1932 and just as in 1948 just as in 1912 when woodrow wilson was elected i believe it in the national interest that a new administration with new people with a new sense of purpose a democratic house and a democratic senate and a democratic president and administration working together to strength our country to move it ahead to protect the interests of our farmers to protect those who live over 65 and are retired to build better schools to set a standard of excellence for our society to demonstrate here in this country that freedom can move so that people around the world will want to be connected with us will want to follow our example will want to be associated with us will wish to follow this leadership not of mr khrushchev not of the chinese communists not of castro but they want to stand with americans all over africa there are children named george washington thomas jefferson abraham lincoln woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt there are none called nixon there are none yet called lenin or stalin and we don t want them to be we want those people to be associated with the cause of freedom because they are impressed by what we have done here because we move because we build a vital society because we move ahead and provide employment for our people a secure life for our people a better life and in so doing we strengthen the cause of freedom your senators men like stuart symington have spoken for missouri and they have also spoken for the united states you cannot live in this state and read his speeches which warn of our peril for the last 8 years without knowing in your heart that the republican party which has always stood still which has always looked back which has always taken the easy way which has always blocked progress which has always stood in the middle of the road against movement you know that that is the program that mr nixon runs on in 1960 that we have never had it so good that our prestige has never been higher that our influence has never been greater you know it is not true you cannot be a citizen of this country and read the paper and listen to the radio and watch television and look at space and look across the street and come here and know that we are doing enough we are americans that is a proud boast that is a great privilege to be a citizen of the united states and we must meet our responsibilities in 1960 and 1961 our responsibility is to pick this country of ours up and move it and that is what we are going to do with your help senator long senator symington this state s saying from the time of its first history has been show me i am attempting to show you in this state before november 8 i am attempting to show you what this country must do if it is going to fulfill its destiny and i hope that on november 8 you will show us that missouri will go democratic dem jfk22 10 60d john_f _kennedy i want to express my thanks to the next governor of missouri john dalton thank you and i know you are going to elect him governor of the state of missouri for continued progress in this state and thomas eagleton who i know you are going to elect the attorney general of the state of missouri melton carpenter who is the candidate for treasurer who counts your money watches it i hope you elect him and larry carp who is running for the congress against a republican in a nearby district we need good congressmen who will support progressive legislation i hope you will support him and your own congressman frank karsten from this district he and i have served together in the congress for 14 years he speaks for the interests of this district and he also speaks for the country i know he is going back to congress and ed long who is succeeding a great u s senator tom hennings ed long who is a candidate for the u s senate i hope you will support his candidacy in a speech on november 23 1953 president eisenhower said this abilene kans has a code and i was raised as a boy to prize that code it was meet anyone face to face with whom you disagree in this country if someone dislikes you or accuses you he must come up in front he cannot hide behind the shadows he cannot assassinate you or your character from behind without suffering the penalties which an outraged citizenry will inflict i hope that the vice president of the united states will abide by that code i wish he were here to hear those cheers i hope the vice president of the united states mr nixon will read those words i have to finish this sentence i hope that he will read those words and accept our invitation to a fifth debate and discuss these issues i read these words to him again it was meet anyone face to face with whom you disagree there are 18 days until the election i am ready to go to any part of the united states to discuss the issues with mr nixon it takes 1 hour it gives the people of this country a chance to see the candidates face to face it gives us a chance to give the issues to mr nixon the truth the facts and not rely on mimeograph machines and statements issued to the press he is running on a slogan that he can stand up to mr khrushchev i am sure he can spare an hour to stand up and debate the issues in front of the american people now if he can t debate me if he can t arrange his schedule so that we can meet perhaps we can arrange for him to debate with mr lodge on who ought to be in the cabinet or perhaps he can debate governor rockefeller on their different views on defense policies and economic growth or perhaps he can debate senator javits of new york who said 2 days ago that anyone who said that our prestige had not dropped was silly i never said anything like that about mr nixon it was senator javits his own republican supporter then perhaps he might get together for an hour s debate with the secretary of state on our far eastern policy so that the formosa resolution can be explained to him and what we have been doing for the last 5 years to implement it or best of all he could call back mr benson from his trips around the world and debate agricultural policy and tell us how in one iota his agricultural policy differs from mr benson s just one iota this is an important election it involves not a choice between two men it involves a choice between two points of view about the united states two points of view about what we must do two groups of men two parties which have strongly different histories which have indicated by their action in the 20th century that they move in a different way to approach the problems that they face i cannot believe in the dangerous years of the 1960 s that the american people are going to say no to progress by electing the republican party again in 1932 the people of this country put their confidence in franklin roosevelt because he promised vigorous new leadership if they had wanted to stay the way they were sunk in the valley of despair they would have continued mr hoover but they chose to move agam now in l960 the problem is not economic depression in the united states the problem is on a worldwide scale but in many ways it is the same choice that was offered in 1932 between mr hoover and mr roosevelt it is between those whose imagination is limited it is between those who represent a party which is circumscribed in action by its very nature it is between those who rely for advice for cabinet appointments for diplomatic appointments on those who have a narrow concept of our role in the world a limited sense of history a limited sense of the future of failure to recognize that we live in the most changing and turbulent times in the history of the world that is the reason that we have been indifferent to the problems of latin america that is the reason that we have shown no recognition of what is happening in africa that is the reason that we don t talk about the real problems which face asia particularly those which face india that is why we don t really decide today what our policy is going to be in outer space and on atomic testing and on defense it is not because there are not men of good will on both sides it isn t because mr eisenhower and mr nixon and the others are not patriotic it is because they represent a party which in domestic policy since theodore roosevelt have opposed progress the democratic party is a national party it represents all groups in our society it represents particularly as our inheritance from thomas jefferson and mr nixon keeps going down south and saying we are not the heirs of thomas jefferson i agree we are not running on the same platform thomas jefferson ran on it is 160 years since he ran for president but we are his inheritors in one particular way i hope and believe and that is thomas jefferson looked to the future the whole louisiana purchase his decision to send lewis and clark to the pacific all that represented a change he was identified with the american revolution he was identified with what was new and changing he was in touch in europe and america with all of the course of intellectual life the same is true with andrew jackson who represented a new tradition mr nixon keeps saying we are not part of the tradition of jefferson jackson and woodrow wilson the point is the problems are entirely new but they all had a willingness in common to move they were the exact opposite in their physical and intellectual qualities from mckinley harding coolidge from massachusetts as a white house usher said in 42 years i never saw a president who slept so much that isn t what you need in 1960 we need a party and candidates and people we need ambassadors and cabinet officers we need people on every level with a sense of our times with a sense of the future with a sense of the difficulties of a free society competing with a communist society to just mouth the old slogans to talk about the problems of china as if it were just a problem of keeping them out of the united nations that is easy that doesn t solve the problem of china which is on the march militant dangerous expanding dedicated now to war about to have in 2 or 3 years atomic weapons the problems are entirely new and we must think anew and i believe we can do it i have the greatest confidence in this country there are people in this country i am sure as there were in the early thirties that can sound the trumpet again and i come to missouri and ask your help dem jfk22 10 60e john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague in the congress charley brown your distinguished united states senator who has served missouri and the united states faithfully and who has been a constant friend of mine and colleague stuart symington ed long your u s senator who succeeded tom hennings and who i know you will elect to the senate in november john dalton who will be the next governor of the state of missouri tom eagleton who is the candidate of the democratic party and i hope the next attorney general of the state of missouri ladies and gentlemen i come here as the democratic standard bearer and you must make your decision on november 8 about the kind of state you want and the kind of district you want and the kind of town you want and the kind of country you want and the kind of world you want all mr nixon and i can do is present our views of that country and that state and that world and that district and then on one day you have to decide and i want to make it very clear what i regard the choice to be it is a choice between the comfortable and the concerned it is a choice between those who run on the slogan you ve never had it so good and i want mr nixon to come here and run on that slogan and between those who say we must do better it is between those who believe that this country is doing everything it must do in order to maintain its independence its security to meet its obligations around the world and between those who say that we are going to have to revitalize our country to move ahead if we are going to fulfill our obligations to ourselves and to those who wish to be free i think this is an important election and it is upon the citizens of the united states not upon the candidates that the burden finally falls upon the miners upon the farmers upon the small businessmen upon the mothers who want their children to be the best educated upon all those who look at the world around them and say in this crucial time in the life of our country i choose progress i come here and ask your support not merely as the democratic standard bearer but as an american who believes it incumbent upon us to be part of a generation to live at a time when motion and action are our distinguishing characteristics and foresight and willingness to look at the truth in the face that has been a quality of this state since it came into the union its first u s senator thomas hart benton was not a popular figure in his own words he despised the bubble popularity but he looked the truth in the face and so did harry truman and so did the men in between and so do our present senators and so do you this state says show me and i think you have to be shown you don t need a map you just have to read your paper you just have to look at latin america and look at joplin look at asia and look at your mind look at your farms and look at the outer side of space look at education in this country and housing look at the prespects for urban renewal and know that the republican party for 25 years has said no maybe perhaps we might or vetoed it i believe this is the year when the american people are going to say they are going to move forward again we have now had 8 years of the republican leadership and i believe for our own sakes and for the sake of our country and i believe this choice does not involve merely mr nixon and myself it involves all those who share the view i do and i am sure you do of this country and its future of men like stuart symington men like charley brown men who have served this state and country and who know the facts of life where we live you say show me i cannot believe that any american in 1960 faced with the problems that this country faces faced with a militant adversary around the world faced with a deteriorating position relative to our strength faced with an economy that is moving ahead slowly that dropped back in the last 9 months that sees our steel mills using only 50 percent which affects your mines in this community sees farm income dropping sharply over 25 percent in the last 8 years sees more small business failures by three than we had 14 years ago 13 years ago sees us pay interest on our debt because of our fiscal policy and monetary policy that is 3 billion more just in interest on our debt than we paid 10 years ago sees all of that and says that is the kind of leadership we want that we want mr nixon to lead us in the dangerous sixties i believe we want new leadership we want new people in washington we want new policies we want to move this district forward we want to continue the kind of leadership which charley brown has given this district truman and roosevelt and wilson which john dalton can give this state and ed long as stuart symington has given it mr nixon stands where mckinley stood and harding and coolidge and dewey and landon where did they get those candidates i stand where woodrow wilson stood they got those candidates right out of the party that was the best they had and that is who they ran harrison some man was found in a depression in his administration eating grass on the front of the white house lawn he said tell him to go behind the grass is longer harding and coolidge and mckinley and the rest of them alf landon who ran in 1936 on a program to repeal social security thomas e dewey i don t know what his program was we never did find out i think the best news we have had is what happened this week to casey stengel it just shows that experience is not enough i come here to joplin here to missouri here in this part of the central united states about 2 weeks ago up in boston my own hometown mr nixon said i was just another truman i said i regarded that as a compliment because he was just another dewey when i first came in here they gave me a hat one size too small which belonged to a miner and there were eight or nine miners up there i spent a month in a state which has a lot of miners in it west virginia my own judgment is i know no tougher occupation in the world that to be a miner lead zinc coal i am always glad to meet them because i think they live with peril they have as tough a life as there is every other one whose hand you shake has a finger off a foot crushed the chances of in 20 years their having a bad accident are more than any of the rest of us and yet in this community and in west virginia and idaho and in other sections of the united states there has been no group that has been harder hit no group that has been more forgotten and yet this administration in spite of the fact that we are talking about people who are americans this administration vetoed twice not once but twice the area redevelopment bill which was to help those sections of the united states hard hit this administration distributes its surplus food to miners and their families and others like them nearly 4 or 5 million of them 5 cents a day per person five cents a day per person 6 50 for a family of four not in india but in america well we are going to change all that we are going to do better i don t think these problems are easy i don t say these problems are easy they are all different maintaining full employment in a free private enterprise economy is difficult maintaining a sound agricultural policy at a time when there is a technological revolution is difficult maintaining our position around the world in view of the changes in the world is difficult but i know we can do better than they are doing i know we can do better than mr nixon ladies and gentlemen on november 8 show me dem jfk22 10 60f john_f _kennedy i am grateful for the introduction of my old friend and colleague newell george he has served this district with vigor and he also has served it responsibly and he speaks also for the united states so i am hopeful that the people of this district will reelect him to the congress of the united states to continue to represent our country in that most important body members of the house of representatives are given under the constitution power to levy taxes the power to appropriate money the senate is confined to approving treaties and appointments by the president to high administrative offices so quite obviously the house is the key job any time you don t like the way your taxes are being raised or your money is being spent it is to the house that you write not to the senate but in any case he has done a good job he is an old friend of mine and i am hopeful that this district and i know that in kansas it is tough for a democrat i am hopeful that the people of this district will support him and send him back in addition i hope that kansas will elect a u s senator frank theis who will speak for kansas there are 100 members of the senate 65 democrats and 35 republicans even if we lost every race if the republicans reelected every one of their incumbents in this fight and we lost every democrat who is up for election mathematically the democrats would still control the u s senate that being true with the problems that kansas has particularly in the field of agriculture particularly in the development of your resources all the problems which a great state in the heartland of the united states has specially in relation to the government it seems to me only commonsense that at least one of the senators should be a member of the majority party participating in the majority decisions speaking for kansas and the country in the democratic party kansas today has two republicans the senate will be democratic i believe that frank theis can serve this state and serve the country and i am hopeful that he will be elected to the senate of the united states i spoke this afternoon in wichita we left new york after mr nixon and i had our strange interlude since then since midnight we have been to st louis joplin wichita kansas city now johnson county and we are going to green bay wis tonight to attempt to carry our message tomorrow to the expectant and waiting voters of wisconsin but i was particularly anxious to come here mr nixon submitted a list or his intimate advisors did to some magazine this week which gave his sure states he gave us massachusetts i think and rhode island he named a good deal of the united states and among the states that he claimed was kansas my impression has been that this election was not until november 8 and kansas did not make up its judgment until then my hope is that kansas will vote democratic as it did in 1936 i don t want to disappoint him but i do think it would be good for everybody if he got some surprises i am delighted to be here with stuart symington he and i had equal claims equal lines on the kansas delegation at the democratic convention you divided yourselves in a solomon like way so we are both happy but not too happy so i am delighted to be over here with him tonight your distinguished governor spoke this afternoon at wichita he had an old commitment to go to a dinner and asked me if i would express his regrets to all of you he did want to be here he has been a distinguished governor he is going to lead the ticket we are all grabbing his coattails and i am confident that docking george then kennedy may win here in kansas let me just say one word we have a tendency in a campaign to simplify issues and talk pretty much in i suppose it comes down to almost slogans and i think that that is important because i do believe that there is a party difference and a difference in point of view of the candidates which has been shown really not so much by their speeches though i hope that they reveal some difference in approach and character but also by their record in the last 14 years but i do want to make the point that all of these old fights which the republicans and democrats have been engaged in which involve so called social legislation those fights are going to go on in the sixties because we have a responsibility to meet our commitments to improve the life of every american so that they participate to some degree or other in our general prosperity in our national life the point i want to make however is that most of the difficult decisions which the next president will meet will involve problems about which we have thought very little in other words in 1940 during the presidential campaign between wendell willkie and franklin d roosevelt there was no discussion of the effects of breaking of the atom and what the effect of possessing atomic weapons would be and yet when albert einstein came in 1941 with a group of other scientists franklin roosevelt endorsed the idea appropriated nearly 2 billion to the manhattan project and of course we made the significant breakthrough in 1952 during the campaign between adlai stevenson and dwight eisenhower there was no discussion really of outer space and yet this administration when a similar opportunity was granted to it to make a significant breakthrough to recognize the implications of the opportunity in the same way that franklin roosevelt had recognized it in 1941 when this administration was informed of the significance of outer space both militarily and scientifically we did not respond my judgment is that we did not respond there as we have not responded to our needs in latin america our needs in africa our needs in asia our needs in disarmament our needs in arms because this administration has not been able to attract people of intellectual vitality curiosity foresight and vigor this is not a contest between mr nixon and myself outer space is one example and our failure to be first in outer space as said mr george allen of the information service cost us more heavily in prestige and i do not define prestige as popularity i define prestige as influence as an ability to persuade people to accept your point of view that probably cost us more in the fifties than any other failure or any other decision or any other action it persuaded people who lived in the underdeveloped countries that the soviet union which was once so far behind was now the equal and the superior in some degree of the united states that is one of the reasons why i believe they are reluctant to release these polls we read about in the department of state because i believe these polls show that american prestige the regard for america as a great scientific power has declined what is true about outer space is true about latin america mr nixon said in september that if we had thought of a program of aid for latin america of the kind we have now put forward as a result of our difficulties with castro in 1955 he and i quote him accurately said we might have been able to avoid castro why didn t they come in 1955 it could not have been so difficult to predict that these people in latin america are part of the revolution of rising expectations they are not going to be satisfied to live at 75 or 100 a year all the time when they see us rich and the communists work among them look at africa not until 1957 was there a bureau of african affairs in 1957 we had more people stationed in western germany than in all of africa we had more students coming from abroad 10 years ago under federal sponsorship than we do today so my feeling is that this issue is not merely the old issue of the new deal fair deal issues but really it is a question of which administration which point of view which philosophy can bring to washington men of talent and curiosity men who have some knowledge of the world in which we live the kind of revolutionary times and what is required of a free society in competing with a totalitarian society my judgment is that the republican party as presently constituted and presently led has not demonstrated either in the past or during this campaign that they have this kind of competence mr nixon could not run on the program that he runs on if he recognized our times he could not run on the program that our power and prestige is at its height that of the communists at the lowest it has been that everything is all right and being done in its proper measure the very fact that he chooses that as his campaign indicates that he could not suddenly reverse in 1961 and determine on action if he really believes these things he says in my opinion he disqualifies himself if he does not believe them and runs on that program he makes the same mistake that stanley baldwin made in england in 1935 which almost destroyed great britain by misleading the people of england in 1935 he prevented them by not telling them the truth he prevented them from arming at a time when it might have been possible to prevent the disaster of munich so i believe this issue involves a good deal more than mr nixon and myself it involves our parties it involves men like the people who are going to represent you in the congress and in the senate men like senator symington dick bolling men like president truman who we were with tonight women like mrs gray and others this is a time once again for action this is a time when we make our choice that it is time that this country picked itself up again and went forward we are encouraged by the fact as mr casey stengel showed us this week experience perhaps does not count laughter standing ovation dem jfk22 10 60g john_f _kennedy governor and mrs docking my old friends frank theis who is going to be the next u s senator from the state of kansas bill robinson who is going to speak for this district and the country in the u s congress congressman hargis congressman newell george congressman floyd breeding and congressmen to be davis and gardiner ladies and gentlemen i saw a list of states mr nixon s headquarters put out of the states that they had sure the states that were doubtful and one or two states that maybe we had and among the states that they had sure that they did not have to worry about was kansas i don t believe it if you can tell me how any farmer in the state of kansas who has complained for 8 years about mr benson s policies can vote for a candidate who is putting forward the very same policies can you tell me how anyone who works in the plants here in wichita or in business across kansas that work at a time when we are moving ahead at the slowest rate of economic growth since the last recession of 1958 can vote for mr nixon and the republican party i can you tell me how a small businessman who has three times as much chance of going bankrupt this year as he did 10 or 12 years ago can you tell me how any citizen can vote for a political party and leadership which permits us to be second in space in danger of being second in missiles which permits 10 years ago when we had twice as many scientists as they do now one half every year and yet a candidate and a party who runs on the slogan we ve never had it so good a candidate and a party who refuses to permit documents paid for by the federal government relating to the taxpayers relating to our position around the world refuse to let the people see them because of the effect it would have on this election can you tell me that kansas this year can support that kind of leadership i say it cannot lyndon johnson speaking recently in this area 2 or 3 weeks ago said the farmers of kansas and these states should sue mr benson for nonsupport and cruelty a kansas farmer said last week as he was planting his wheat i hope i break even this year i need the money i believe we can do better than that mr nixon offers two proposals for the farmer of this rich state one is we eat our way out of the surplus those were mr benson s very words and that is an awfully big meal stored away the second is the other proposal is that if we pay a support price of 90 percent of the market price for the last 3 years as the market price drops year by year so does the support price any farmer in the state of kansas who will just read mr nixon s program and can accept the idea that he wants an agricultural program which provides the support price shall be tied not to a parity standard but tied to the market price i must say that i think the record is clear the warnings are clear in 1952 there may have been some excuse because they were promised 100 percent of parity mr nixon makes it very clear he is promising them an agricultural program which will eat up not only the surpluses but the farmer and then he goes to new jersey this administration is the only administration that ever sent a secretary of agriculture to campaign in the city for votes mr nixon went to new jersey and said our agricultural program will increase the farmers income to such an extent that food prices will go up 25 percent of course that is like so many of his other statements made up of the whole cloth a farmer gets 2 cents on the amount of wheat that is in a loaf of bread that may sell for 25 6 7 or 8 cents in the eastern part of the united states if that farmer s income went up 10 or 15 percent of 2 cents it would be what 2 1 2 cents i think mr nixon ought to get out his adding machine and count our farm program the effect of his farm program and count the electoral votes of kansas and he will come to a different conclusion for 24 long years kansas has been faithful to the republican party now we come and ask your support in this election not merely for kansas not merely for the united states but for all those who believe that the united states has a role to fulfill as the great defender of freedom you cannot be a citizen of this country you cannot read your papers you cannot listen to the discussion of the issues on television and radio without knowing the truth of what i say and that is we are not doing enough our power and prestige is not increasing as fast as it must we are moving into a period of danger and hazard and opportunity and unless this country is ready to go to work and move again by 4 years or 8 years the tide will go out further this is the moment of decision we present our views until november 8 and then you have to decide you have to decide what sort of a district you want what kind of a state you want what kind of a country you want what kind of a world you want don t you agree looking at that state that country and that world that the only way that we can maintain our position is by demonstrating in this country a sense of purpose a sense of vitality a sense of energy a sense of conviction showing the people around the world that our brightest days are still ahead our high noon in wichita and across the world is in the days to come i believe the next president of the united states should set before the american people the things we must do in the next decade if we are going to provide leadership and security for ourselves and the free world everything that you deal with in this state is tied up with our position in the world the food we grow the airplanes we build or do not build the oil that we take out of the ground the resources that we develop the businesses that are maintained the jobs that we provide the security we give to our older citizens the kind of education we give our children the sense of motion in this state the sense of motion in the united states we are a free society it is completely up to you mr khrushchev is able to move his country by force by his own direction we move in this country by your force and by your direction and by your willingness to commit yourselves to progress in the 1960 s and that is the issue governor docking frank theis bill robinson your other congressmen all speak for kansas they all speak with vigor and they all put before us and give to the democratic party and the state a sense of identification i come today and speak on behalf of the nation i ask you as citizens of the united states for your support not just as the democratic standard bearer in just another election but as an american concerned who believes that this country needs leadership and that this country can move again in 1860 during the election 100 years ago when this state was torn and when the issues were much the same in a smaller sense as they are today whether this country could exist half slave and half free abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and his hand is in it if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming we see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk22 5 62 john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i know that all of you join me in expressing our very warm welcome to our distinguished visitors as i said this morning at the airport i do not think that any visitor to our country has had a more constructive career than our distinguished guest of honor and i am not alone referring to the fact that in a free election he was elected by 98 percent of the voters of his country a record which has not been equaled recently in the united states and from all i read will not be in any case to have played such an extraordinary role of being a revolutionary and at the same time a builder of a close bridge between his country and europe between his country and the countries of africa between his country and our country is really an extraordinary accomplishment it s not i suppose so difficult when the moment comes to be a revolutionary and we have seen a good many revolutions in the years since the end of world war ii the difficult task faces a leader when the revolution has been accomplished the immediate one and it is because of his efforts in this regard that i think our guest of honor bears such an extraordinary reputation not only here or in europe but most of all in africa because he is an african and he speaks for africa and his most important influence has been in africa with the countries around him the countries in all of the western part of that old and in a sense new continent so mr president we are delighted to have you here we are separated by many miles of ocean and culture and history and all the rest but we appreciate those who are willing to take the hard road of patient constructive work in building their country and speaking in an age of unreason with the voice of rationalism so mr president we are very honored to have you and i am delighted that this distinguished audience which is made up of some outstanding americans members of congress and others has a chance to express their warm feelings for you i said to the president this morning that africa really has been an almost unknown country or continent for so many americans until recent years and he said that was because of course africa was strongly influenced and controlled by the europeans and now suddenly it has emerged on the world scene and i think how extraordinary it is that all these countries have emerged all of them have maintained their independence all of them facing staggering problems have been able to speak with the greatest vigor and directness on behalf of their people and yet have made such a great effort to maintain their ties with all of us in the free world so we have been very lucky i appreciate senator gore s my colleague s applause that is an ancient senatorial tradition which i missed i was chairman of the committee on africa before senator gore was and had the distinction of never having been to africa and we used to have a map brought in in those days to explain where everything was in africa but senator gore has brought the committee a good deal more distinction in any case he members of congress all of us in the executive are particularly proud to have you here mr president i hope that when you leave that you will realize that in this country there is the warmest possible feeling for you your country and all the things you stand for i want to say that the work of the presidency is not all burdens and that we are very fortunate to have the wife of the president here and all the other members of his party so i hope that you will join me in drinking to our guest to the people of the ivory coast and most especially to president houphouet boigny dem jfk22 9 60 john_f _kennedy mr holum mr patton mr ellis mr graybill mr radin my distinguished colleague in the democratic party lee metcalf congressman lee metcalf paul cannon your lieutenant governor leo graybill who runs in this district if i might bring up a partisan note for congress distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to mr holum for his generous introduction i do come from massachusetts but i speak in the senate of the united states not only for massachusetts i am a senator of the united states and therefore i speak for the united states it is as he said a source of satisfaction i think to all americans that the two americans of this century who did more to develop the resources of the united states to conserve them and protect them for other generations both came from new york state theodore roosevelt and franklin roosevelt this is an important conference and for this reason i have come here tonight to give my views on the development of the natural resources of the united states this conference reminds me of the historic conference called 52 years ago by theodore roosevelt that conference adopted a basic principle which i think should guide this country in the years ahead as it has on occasion guided us in the past it said we agree that the sources of natural wealth exist for the benefit of the people and that monopoly therefore should not be tolerated as the standard bearer for the democratic party i associate myself completely with that remark and i invite the party of theodore roosevelt to associate with it once again more than 1 800 miles from here today another conference is also holding the attention of the american people gathered at the united nations are leaders and spokesmen for world interests the globe over no two conferences could be more different in their appearance our concern is with the improvement of free institutions their concern is with the protection of these institutions from devastation our concern is a better life for all americans their concern is the preservation of life on this planet but these conferences so far apart in geography and in subject matter in reality are closely linked together for our success in checking the advance of communism around the world in expanding the cause of freedom and sending it on an onward march depends in the final analysis upon the strength of the united states we must be strong in purpose we must be strong in leadership we must be strong militarily and we must be strong economically it is no accident that the communists have made their greatest gains from laos to cuba to africa during the period when our relative strength was in decline when 1 out of every 16 americans is unemployed when 1 out of 20 who is employed is forced to work part time when great industries like steel are barely working half of their capacity when for 7 years our farmers have been caught in a cruel squeeze between ever increasing rises in their costs and a decline in their prices which has caused them to be the most oppressed group in the american economy when mining is depressed when lumber production is double and transportation is down and the cost of living goes up mr khrushchev confronts us at the united nations with arrogant confidence because he believes that the economy of the soviet union and the communist bloc is growing at a faster relative rate than is ours he feels that he is rapidly closing the gap between russian and american economic strength and he knows and we know that last year the united states had the lowest rate of economic increase of any major industrialized society in the world and he knows that it is this race for economic strength which can decide which system can best support the best defenses which system can best help other nations and which system will most appeal as a thriving moving system to the underdeveloped people of the world who stand today on the razor edge of decision and will make up their minds in the next decade which way they will go mr khrushchev is not impressed by words he is not going to be slowed down by debate he is not going to care whether we take a hard line or a soft line restrict him to manhattan or invite him to camp david mr khrushchev is going to be impressed by one thing and so is the world community and that is the power of the united states and that includes not only military power it includes industrial power atomic power water power and electric power of every kind the growth of economic power depends on many things it depends on a national policy of full employment it depends on money and credit that will encourage investment policies it depends on a healthy farm economy but most of all in the western half of our nation it depends on vigorous planned development of our natural resources and it depends upon the development of our resources the production of minerals and timber and the availability of power and water no state no region no nation in the world today can be economically strong without an adequate supply of water this country is now using 312 billion gallons a day enough to cover the state of rhode island 1 foot deep this is eight times as much water as we used in 1900 and by 1975 we will use half as much again but already the water shortage is nationwide in scope it is limiting the growth of industry in many sections of the eastern united states and it limits the growth of industry and agriculture here in the west and much of the water that does flow in our streams is polluted and poisoned but in the face of a growing water shortage a growing demand for power and a growing threat from soviet competition this nation has virtually ground to a halt in the development of a great natural resource given to us by the lord i am not satisfied to discuss the subject of resource development in this campaign in terms of future generalities and past performances for this is not only a major issue in this campaign it is a major element of our national strength and the american people have a right to hear not only our goals but how we intend to reach them not only our principles but how we intend to apply them not only our rhetoric but the deeds we plan to match our words i don t say that only federal funds and federal planning can do the job state local and private effort will be needed but we are talking about resources that belong to the public about rivers that belong to the nation about projects that are essential to our security and unless the federal government is going to lead this nation is going to be left behind specifically i propose a nine point program for resource development to be initiated promptly in january of 1961 first we will reverse the policy of no new starts i hope that in the united states in the sixties when we are going to have to move again that no slogan is ever put forward which says no new starts no movement forward let us stand still i could not disagree more and we are going to move ahead under that program on comprehensive plans for multi purpose river development second we will devote the benefits of public resources to the public good that includes adherence to the preference clause carrying out the principles of theodore roosevelt and franklin roosevelt we will not stand by and permit our resources to be wasted or taken for partial development for the benefit of special interests we will not stand by for example and permit another hells canyon blunder in the clark fork basin i think the next president of the united states must support early authorization of the multipurpose project in the paradise knolls area i remember president truman was here in 1952 and he said take a look at hungry horse dam that is the last one you are going to see we are going to see some more in the sixties third we will appoint to the federal power commission to the department of interior to the rural electrification administration and to every other agency men who will put the public interest first who will recognize that they hold high positions that they don t fill time but they hold positions which can be creative for the public interest that they must recognize that they are part of an administration which sees the economy of this country as moving ahead and sees them in the foreground in setting public policy which will permit the maximum development of our resources for the public interest fourth we will establish a council of resources and conservation advisors in the office of the president to coordinate planning of this field we have had many short term limited piecemeal studies we have not had enough of the long range continuing and comprehensive surveys determining the needs of our country the increase in our population the available resources and how they can be fitted together to build a strong and vital country we need a permanent inventory of where we stand now and where we want to be tomorrow in water power timber recreation and other resources we need a rational schedule of action instead of the hit or miss development that depends upon annual political or budgetary pressures we need a national as well as a local and regional view planning for example how we might profitably link the power systems of the columbia and the missouri rivers and deciding where public and cooperative power systems require steam as well as hydro plants i believe the time is coming in the missouri basin for example when power user groups will operate thermal generating plants utilizing the lignite fields of the dakotas montana and wyoming to supplement the hydropower of the missouri river dams fifth we shall i hope develop more businesslike budget practices for the natural resources development practices which distinguished between capital investment and operating expenditures instead of a system which treats capital invested in a wholly self liquidating power project the same as an expenditure which cannot ever be recovered those who cry spending on these essential projects will be less convincing when the ledger shows which projects are income producing wealth creating assets that make money finally for the taxpayer sixth we will restore rea to its former role of preeminence bringing it from cost of concern over political interference higher rates of interest and budgetary starvation and enabling that remarkable american institution to get on with its work of providing low cost electricity and telephones for every american farm family seventh we will step up the fight against the water pollution i can imagine nothing more wasteful than to pollute our rivers and permit valuable water to flow to the sea in conditions where other people cannot use it our goal must be the fullest utilization of every drop and gallon of water in every river system in america and it is a source of regret to me that the potomac river which flows by our capital is one of the most polluted rivers west of the ganges eighth we will restore america s leadership in atomic development and protect the public s tremendous investment in this source of energy which must be tapped for the public good ninth and finally we will apply to the development of our resources the same scientific talents and energies which we have applied to the development of our national defense inquiring into methods of preventing evaporation of controlling weather of retaining snowpacks above all of converting salt water to fresh water for whichever nation wins that race to develop an economical way of using our seas for plants and human consumption will have done more to win the friendship of people who live in deserts around great oceans than all the sputniks in outer space that is our program it is ambitious but in my opinion unless this country is prepared to move forward in this area and in other areas in the sixties all the debates all the talk about the great american past will mean nothing unless we are prepared to build a great american future unless we are able to show as franklin roosevelt showed in the thirties what could be done in the tennessee valley which has been a stronger weapon for the cause of freedom than any other weapon we have almost had in the last 20 years because people from all over the world come to the tennessee valley where i spent yesterday and look at it and say we can do the same under a system of freedom we can harness our resources now in eastern persia in the indus river in colombia and in 20 other countries smaller tva s are being built because we showed them how i want us to do the same in the sixties i want to show the people of the world how freedom can work i want them to see that this is a private system of individual liberty where people join together for the public good that is the best answer if we are strong and vital and moving here we are going to be strong and vital in moving around the world if we sit still here if we look to the past if we stay and say no to the next decade then all the arguments and debates and high sounding speeches of our opposition to communism of our belief in freedom i think they fall flat we sound strongest when we are doing something here at home franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america because he was a good neighbor in the united states and the same is true of woodrow wilson and theodore roosevelt men who moved their country and by moving their country moved the world i think that is the opportunity ahead of us in the sixties and i am proud as a member of the oldest party in the united states to assert that we are the youngest party from the point of view of vitality and new ideas of a recognition of our opportunities and of our challenges and of our responsibilities the inscription on the grand coulee dam powerhouse says begun in time of adversity it stood in war as a sentinel of strength safeguarding the nation forever a monument to those who shared in its conception and its construction in peace it is the key to new american frontiers of opportunity and agriculture and industry i ask that this country pass in the new frontiers of the sixties where opportunity beckons and the challenges are great and we can serve our cause and the cause of freedom thank you dem jfk22 9 60a john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague congressman mcgovern governor herseth congressional candidate and congressman to be ray fitzgerald distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express my great pleasure in coming to this plowing contest i feel it is a most important occasion because as george mcgovern says i consider the decline in agricultural income to be the no 1 domestic problem that the united states faces and therefore as the standard bearer for the democratic party i take this occasion to set before you the farmers of this section of the united states my views on what should constitute agricultural policy for the united states i regret the rain but it remains as the bible tells us on the just and the unjust alike on republicans as well as democrats tomorrow the republican candidate for the presidency will present his views on american agriculture and i have no doubt that as you listen you will find that we use much the same vocabulary that we both proclaim the same friendship for the farmer the same concern about his needs how then in an election year of 1960 is the american farmer going to make a choice between mr nixon and myself between the republican and democratic parties for an answer to that question i think we should return to the ancient biblical injunction by their fruits you shall know them and by their fruits i believe the american farmer has learned the true meaning of republican speeches at campaign time in 1952 they promised not so many miles from here and mr nixon was among them not merely 90 percent of parity but full parity in 1956 they promised and mr nixon was among them and i quote full parity of income in the marketplace and tomorrow in 1960 whatever formula will have been chosen they will again promise new abundance and increased income and protection for rea and the co ops and again mr nixon will be among them what were the fruits of those earlier promises which you should bear in mind this fall they were a 20 percent drop in farm income a 40 percent drop in net farm income from the state of south dakota alone in the last 8 years the destruction of thousands of family farms the liquidation of many holdings and a farm program which cost more in 1 year than all the farm programs of franklin roosevelt and harry truman in any year this is the result of the last 8 years and i cannot believe that in this difficult and dangerous time for the country and for american agriculture the american farmer is ready to move in that direction again i come here today to set before you what i consider we should do in the winter of 1961 and i think this should be the first domestic matter on the desk of the next president of the united states here are my views the farmer of the united states does not need new speeches and new spokesmen they need a new program and new policies and a new approach to the challenge of our farms for today american agriculture as you well know is gripped in a technological revolution which has been a source of strength and vitality to the united states though it has cost in many cases the american farmer greatly it is a revolution which has made the american farmer the most efficient in our history and if there is one area of competition where we are now ahead of the soviet union it is in the area of agricultural production it is no wonder that mr khrushchev and mr koslov and mr mikoyan have come to the middle west because they see here the heart of the american revolution a distinguished american told me some days ago that if mr khrushchev had to pick 50 american scientists or 50 american farmers he would pick the farmers because he realizes that this secret of producing vast quantities of food with only a few people is a revolutionary secret that can change the face of the world but even though this rising productivity is a source of national power and strength it can be a disaster to the individual farmer for when production rises and it exceeds demand then farm prices fall disastrously and farm income drops for all and this fall in income is further intensified by the continual rise in the farmers cost of production the answer of the opposition party the republicans is to increase dependence on the so called free market even though this has meant disaster for thousands of families caught between a dropping income for themselves and a rising cost for the things that they buy other areas of our economy are better able to deal with excess production when more steel is being produced than can be sold the steel companies cut back production and maintain prices steel production in the united states this week is about 54 percent and yet the prices have not dropped the reason of course is that they have cut their production over 46 percent in order to bring into balance supply and demand but the individual farmer and there are hundreds of thousands of them cannot do this on his own he lacks bargaining power in the market he needs help and support of the federal government i come here today to offer you a program of what i believe to be help and support my program for agriculture is consistent with my call to the new frontier it makes no vague promises that can be interpreted different ways it makes no pledge that i cannot keep or that the public interest would not permit i give you no assurances that you can have high income and unlimited production and no controls with no regard to the taxpayers rather it is a program which will take work and sacrifice and discipline but it is i believe in all sincerity an honest program it is carefully thought out and i believe it can be effective for i believe that the american farmer is tired of grandiose promises and unfilled pledges and gimmicks which will save the farmer and save the taxpayer i believe you want to be told what must be done and that you are ready to do it i offer such a program and if you will give us your help and support we will together build once again a farm economy where every man who works the soil can be assured of a decent life for himself and his family first we pledge ourselves to securing full parity of income for the american farmer by parity of income i do not mean a vague target or a high sounding goal i mean a clear easily defined concept which can be mathematically ascertained and computed parity of income is that income which gives average producers a return on their invested capital labor and management equal to that which similar or comparable resources earn in nonfarm employment parity of income under this calculation and this definition can be figured by the department of agriculture for each commodity without difficulty here is a concept which strikes to the heart of the farm problem it does not concern itself directly with prices alone with what the farmer receives but only with his net income his return the only figure which is meaningful in determining his standard of living particularly in this age of the cost price squeeze for the farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything he buys at retail sells everything he sells at wholesale and pays the freight both ways secondly we intend to assure this parity of income for the farmer primarily through supply management the adjustment of supply to demand at parity income prices purchases and loans will be necessary on some commodities at certain times to supplement supply management but a basic instrument of assuring parity of income will be supply management controls including the use of marketing quotas land retirement with conservation practices marketing orders and agreements and other devices to be used either together or separately depending upon the needs of the specific commodities and the desire of the producers the fundamental goal and this is the point the fundamental goal of all of these tools is to bring production and demand into balance and thereby assure a parity of income and unless we bring them into balance unless we bring production and supply into balance what we can consume here at a parity price what can be usefully distributed to people around the country who depend upon our food what can be usefully distributed around the world to those who look to us for help unless we bring those into balance unless we bring production into balance you will find a continuation of the same disastrous occurrences of the last 8 years surpluses heavy tax burdens and a lower farm income for the farmer i think the choice is clear because of the rain i am going to place all of this into the record and i want the press to understand that i am supporting all of this but i don t want to stand you all outside and have you all catch some cold or at least an easterner might catch cold i don t know about all of you but i do want to say three or four more points before i close because this may be the only chance i have to lay down before farmers what i think we ought to do in the coming months in my judgment there is no other way than to apply this principle of supply management which i think should be submitted first to the farmers of this country so that they can give their judgment and endorsement of any program that we wish to put into effect reducing price supports has not worked unlimited production has only driven incomes lower and piled up surpluses only effective supply management bringing a balance between supply and demand will yield good and stable income to our farmers and i believe that we must go ahead on that course third we must use our excess productivity capacity to feed people abroad and at home i spent a month in west virginia there are more than 100 000 families in that state that wait every mouth for surplus food packages from our government there are 4 million americans in this country who wait every month for a package from our government of surplus food you would not believe what is in that package some grain some rice and this summer the department of agriculture is adding lard these are not just people living in india or latin america these are fellow americans thrown out of work many of them sick many of them with families and here in this country which stores food and sees it rot on occasions we cannot find enough good food to feed our own people fourth around the world when we and the soviet union are engaged in a great competition to see whether the world will be free or slave we continue to persist in regarding the production of food from the ground as a problem as a surplus as a burden when it is a blessing from the lord i think we need an administration which so regards it we spend 42 billion on defense every year those ships sail the oceans they protect us but they do not serve our people and the world i do not regard the distribution of food around the world as a great burden upon us i regard it as an opportunity to use our assets in a way which will attract people to the cause of freedom i am glad that this is our problem and not starvation i am glad we can produce more than we can consume if we can share it usefully for we are our brother s keeper and if we have great assets in this country i believe we should hold out the hand of friendship when hundreds of millions of people stagger through their lives searching for food and we have it and we are trying to determine which way the world will go i would rather see our food used in an imaginative way than to argue in kitchens or anyplace else i want to help people and i want the united states to be identified with that cause as it was in the administration of franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson and harry truman fifth we must modernize our specialized farm agencies to meet the farm revolution one thing which is going to be necessary in the next years is credit for our farmers we are going to have to make it possible for those farmers who wish to develop their equipment maintain themselves to have sufficient sources of credit and i don t think 7 percent interest is sufficient sources of credit i don t think it is possible for a farmer to maintain his income to maintain his farm when his receipts are dropping his costs are going up and he must borrow money at the bank for 7 percent interest which is about 3 or 4 percent more than he would have paid 5 6 or 7 years ago these are all things that i think are possible to be done and i don t take the view i don t take the view that these problems cannot be solved i don t say they are easy problems and i don t come before you who live with these problems every day and say that if i am elected life will be easy and your problems will disappear i think it is going to require the dedicated effort of all of us but i do believe it is possible to elect an administration and support a congress which is honestly concerned on its record of 25 years with the problems of american farmers i think the record of the last 8 years is clear and i think the record of the democratic party in the last 25 years in supporting agriculture in electing congressmen and senators who year after year hubert humphrey and gene mccarthy of minnesota and proxmire of wisconsin and george mcgovern in this state and senators and congressmen who have stood for the farmer in all parts of the middle west i come from massachusetts and i live on the ocean and the problems of my state are entirely different from the problems of your state but this is an economy which is interdependent my people cannot manufacture textiles or sell fish or make television sets and sell them to the middle west unless you have the income to buy them and you cannot prosper on the farms unless our cities move ahead i think one of the most unfortunate parts of the present administration s policy has been to preach the doctrine of dissension to tell the people in the cities that the farm programs are expensive burdens that the farmers live off the fat of the land i spent a month in wisconsin in the primary there the average income for a dairy farmer in wisconsin is 50 cents an hour for a very long week i preach the doctrine of the interdependence of our economy i don t see any point in congressmen and senators from the eastern united states voting no on farm programs that does not help the consumers the consumers have never paid such high prices and farm income has not been as low as it is now in some commodities for 20 years this country will move ahead when they prosper on the farm and when they prosper in the city congressmen and senators from the agricultural parts of the united states vote against urban renewal that does not help a farmer because some person in the city has a bad house or lives in a slum i think that the necessity for us is to recognize that we are not 50 separate states we are not 6 different regions of the united states we are one country with one great problem and that is to insure the prosperity of our people and their security in the days ahead and it is to that great task that we shall address ourselves in the coming months i want to make it clear in summing up that my view of the problem facing agriculture is this that unless we bring supply and demand into balance and that demand should include production for our domestic markets production for our world markets production for our school lunch programs and our surplus food programs for our unemployed and older citizens and production for food for peace distributed by the united states individually or through the united nations and after those productions have been determined then we should attempt to limit the production of any commodity to what can be consumed at parity prices that is the point that i am attempting to say simply to try to have effective controls five percent surplus in any commodity can break your price 15 percent and you do not have an effective balance between supply and demand merely by dropping the support price as you drop the support price you increase your production more because it is the only way you can sustain your income by providing more effective controls on production i think it is possible for us to protect the farmer from the hazards of the marketplace and this is the way that freedom can do it because if we don t continue the present way i think we will find the destruction of free agriculture in this country as family farmers move from the farms to the cities i come to you today as the democratic candidate for the presidency i speak not only for myself but i speak for all those in my party who are vitally concerned about this problem who feel that a better job can be done who feel that the security of the american farmer and the security of people all over this country is basic to our survival this problem is not a domestic problem agriculture does not concern only the people of this state or country it is a problem which affects our position all over the world i believe in a strong america i believe in a secure country but we cannot be strong we cannot be respected we cannot hope that people will look to us for leadership unless we are moving ahead solving our own problems here in the united states the reason that franklin roosevelt was greeted as a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor here in the united states and the reason that harry truman could carry on the marshall plan and nato was because he had concerned himself with the lives of the people of his own country we speak and what we do speaks far more strongly than what we say what we are sounds much more significant than what we say we are and if we are moving ahead in this country if we are solving our problems if we are holding out a hand to people around the world then i think we are most effectively answering mr khrushchev then we can provide for our security and then we can be the leader of the free world and a world of peace i don t run for the presidency saying the future is easy but i say we can do better than we are doing this is a great country but i think it can be a greater country and it is a powerful country but i think it can be a more powerful country i am dedicating myself and senator johnson the candidate for the vice presidency and i think all of us to the maintenance of a free society here in the united states during the presidential election 100 years ago abraham lincoln wrote a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later when the great issue is the maintenance of freedom all over the globe we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk22 9 60b john_f _kennedy congressman mcgovern governor and mrs herseth mrs price my sister distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation for the opportunity to be here in george mcgovern s home and in the state where he comes from i appreciated what he said about me and i appreciated it particularly because i think he has the same qualities which he was generous enough to ascribe to me quite obviously i think whether you may be a republican or a democrat i think that you will agree that what we really need is the best talent that we can get the most honest talent we can get the most energetic and vital intellect that we can apply to the great problems that face the united states i know there is a great feeling that the politicians who used to live 100 years ago 75 years ago 125 years ago were far superior to the men who dominate the political life today the halfbacks 30 years ago were faster the girls were prettier and the politicians like daniel webster and john calhoun and all the rest were far abler but i don t know whether you realize that calhoun and clay and stephen douglas and all the men who dominated the political life in the 19th century really dealt in that entire period of time with four or five problems the development of the west the railroads passing through the west the admission of new states slave or free our relations with england france and occasionally with the soviet union we challenge now the united states meets now problems which dwarf in complexity every week the kind of problems which those men dealt with in their lifetimes the problems that you face here in the state of south dakota dealing with the problem of agriculture how we are going to harness our capacity how we are going to harness our abundance and make our abundance fruitful for ourselves and for people all around the world is a problem far more vast far more complicated than any which faced any 19th century statesman what is true of agriculture is true of fiscal policy is true of monetary policy is true of the sophisticated questions which face us in national defense nuclear energy our relations with the soviet union latin america and asia therefore i can say to you that the next president of the united states will deal with problems far more complicated far more difficult of solution requiring greater judgment greater responsibility than any president of the united states in history we don t have candidates who measure up to those presidents of history perhaps but i do want to emphasize that when we can get talent and i think george mcgovern has that kind of talent i think we should seize it i think it is the kind of man that we need in this country i think the same is true of your distinguished governor governor herseth the trouble is the great trouble with american politics today i think is that we talk in slogans too often and symbols and we fight old battles the sixties are going to be entirely different unless the political leaders of both parties can recognize that new problems bring new solutions that the problems which will face the united states bear no comparison with the problems which faced us in the days of eisenhower and truman and roosevelt and wilson we are a new generation which science and technology and the change in world forces are going to require to face entirely new problems which will require new solutions therefore i run for the office of the presidency as head of a party which is the oldest political party on earth but i do believe that the democratic party has had one silver thread which has run through the tapestry of our history since the days of thomas jefferson and that has been the willingness to look ahead to face the future to break new ground to try new solutions to recognize new problems i came today to this state in what i think to be the most dangerous time in the life of our country a time which can be bright for all of us but which is also full of hazards it would be easier perhaps if we were switzerland or norway or denmark or sweden a small country out of the course of world events but world events and our own power and our own desire to be free have made us the leader of the free world if we fail the whole cause of freedom fails if we succeed the cause of freedom succeeds that is the responsibility that is thrust upon a corn farmer or a wheat farmer in the state of south dakota he must concern himself not only with agricultural policy but with our policy toward pakistan and india and latin america and africa and our policy in outer space as well as in the earth of south dakota i think this is the most dangerous time for all of us i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that there are easy solutions to difficult problems there are difficult solutions for difficult problems but there are solutions i have the greatest possible confidence in our system because i think it fits in with the basic aspiration of people not only in the united states but all around the world to be free and independent a common desire possessed by people in latin america and africa and asia and eastern europe and in the soviet union finally itself that is the great force working for us the seed it planted and ultimately is going to reap the harvest the desire of people to be independent whether they live in congo or cuba or russia or poland or east germany sooner or later the basic desire to run their own affairs to be free men and women i think represents the most powerful force that this country has and my great criticism of the foreign policy of this administration has been that we have not associated ourselves with those aspirations we have not recognized that that is the way of the future the united states has not spoken for freedom we did not concern ourselves with the position of the congo when the belgians had it we are concerned that the soviet union will control the congo but we never spoke a word about the congo when it was held in another kind of colonialism unless we identify ourselves with freedom here in the united states and around the world then the united states will appear to have lost its vitality and force that is why we led before the reason franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson were world leaders was not because they forced their solutions but because they stood for great moral principles in good times and bad against friend and foe and i hope it is possible in the sixties if the united states is going to lead the world again that we associate ourselves with great causes once again that we speak strongly for the interests of south dakota that we review and concern ourselves for the interests of agriculture in the state of south dakota that we recognize that this is a blessing from the lord that there are people who are hungry all over the world and in west virginia and pennsylvania and kentucky and here in this state which is a rich and prosperous state potentially in the food that you produce this is one of the great sources of strength for the united states in the next 10 or 20 years i don t regard the problem of agricultural surplus as a problem i regard it as an opportunity to use it imaginatively not only for our own people but for people all around the world there are faces in the united states which you know west virginia kentucky parts of tennessee southern illinois and pennsylvania where over 4 1 2 million people wait every month for surplus food packages from our government they live on an inadequate diet the food packages would not total a cost of 3 25 a month for the government one can of dried eggs some powdered milk some rice some grain and this summer the department of agriculture announced it is going to add lard no chickens no meat no ham no nothing for fellow americans who live out their lives in desperation and without hope and every month we give them a pittance and what is true in this country is true around the world as long as the great battle which occupies the attention of the people around the world is how can we eat three times a day we have strength because we know how to do it 12 percent of our population feeds our people and could feed much of the hungry world 85 percent of the population in other countries searches for food that is the revolution which this state and states like it that is the great miracle of the united states since the end of world war ii the increase of food production and it is a great asset it is a great asset and should be so regarded i hope the next president of the united states in putting forward his proposals for agriculture and if it is me i will make them very clear that we recognize that in every hundred acres there is a percentage of that production which could be produced for a price which would be a parity price in the market if you produce 5 percent more than that 100 acres can consume you break the price divide your 100 acres one part of it will be for domestic production at a parity price the second part will be to feed our own people who are hungry the unemployed the old the sick the third part of it will be a food program for peace through the united nations and through our own distributive agencies the fourth part will be a conservation reserve not whole farms but a conservation reserve sharing and storing our land for the time when we may need it to think that you can possibly control production by dropping support prices down and down and down which causes a farmer to produce more and more has found us in our present situation with great surpluses low farm income high burden on the taxpayer and a farm income which is bringing distress to other sections of the united states i am delighted to come here today i appreciate your invitation i come here as a candidate for the presidency to say this and that is that i hope those of you who are farmers will never get the idea and those who live in cities that there is a hostility which exists between the cities and the farms fellow americans facing a difficult future i think the farmers can bring more credit more lasting good will more chance for freedom more chance for peace than almost any other group of americans in the next 10 years if we recognize that food is strength and food is peace and food is freedom and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want so you are a great source of strength to us in these great years ahead and i come as a presidential candidate with the greatest possible hope for the future and ask you to join in a great effort on behalf of our country and the state of south dakota the motto of the state of south dakota is under god the people rule the motto of the united states could be the same i hope in the next 10 or 20 years when historians write of our times that they will write that that cause of the people ruling under god spread in these years and became stronger increased in strength increased in substance during the american constitutional convention there was a painting of a sun low on the horizon behind the desk of general washington and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising or a setting sun at the conclusion benjamin franklin stood up and he said we now know we have now decided because of what we have done that it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i think it can be for the united states because of what we do in the coming months and years it can be a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk22 9 60c john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague senator burdick state chairman abner lawson mrs knutson the next congresswoman from minnesota mr anderson the next congressman from this district distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for being kind enough to wait at the airport for my sister and myself and also my regrets for being so late in case any of you wanted to run for the presidency i would say we started this morning in iowa we spoke in south dakota we speak now in north dakota we speak at a dinner meeting in montana and end up in wyoming tonight i think that my election chief thinks that the election is october 8 rather than november 8 in any case we are delighted to be here i am glad to be here but there is no doubt also that i would probably not be here if it were not for the support that the democrats gave me at the national convention i doubt very much that i would be nominated so i come here tonight with the hope that having gotten me this far that north dakota would be willing to help me along the rest of the way the sun is setting and i understand there are no lights the lights are going out for the republican party all over the united states but i want to say one or two things i spoke this afternoon at the plowing contest on what i consider to be the no 1 domestic problem which the united states faces and that is the sharp decline in agricultural income i think the farmers of north dakota and the farmers of south dakota and of minnesota and montana have a very clear choice the question is which party and which candidate can meet their problems in this state and meet their problems in this country they have heard from the democratic party and they have heard from the republican party i remember when president truman used to say that the farmers had themselves to blame for their difficulties because they voted republican in 1952 but i don t hold that view wholly because in 1952 the farmers were informed that the republican party stood for 100 percent parity not once but at least three times in this general geographic area the republican candidate for the presidency joined by the republican candidate for the vice presidency assured the farmers that they were in favor of 100 percent parity in the marketplace now it is 8 years later now when the republican candidate for the presidency comes out with campaign assurances and campaign promises you have the right to make a judgment based on the experience of the last 8 years as to which candidate and which party and members of which ground stand strongest for agricultural income in the united states at this time i think the democrats do in this state in minnesota in south dakota and in montana i described the type of agricultural program which we wanted and i applied to wheat and i would like to have you listen to it exactly it is very short and that is here is the way we would handle the problem facing the wheatgrowers and i think comparable programs could be worked out for other commodities under this wheat program the secretary of agriculture would determine the amount of wheat that would be consumed here and abroad at parity income prices this quota would be distributed among farmers on the basis of their historical record of production and they would be issued marketing certificates permitting them to market their share of the national quota all wheat sold for primary use must be accompanied by marketing certificates as a condition of receiving a certificate each farmer would be required to retire a small fixed percentage of his wheat acreage this is not a production control program it does not tell any farmer how much he can produce or in what manner but it does limit his marketing for primary use this is the kind of program which has been endorsed and originally worked out by the national association of wheat growers and i have endorsed it fully i think your distinguished senators from this area of the united states have supported it and i think it offers far more sense than the programs which this administration has worked out and offered the american farmer during the past 8 years 100 percent of parity in the marketplace in 1952 and corn at 65 percent of parity in 1960 i think the record is clear i would like your support in this campaign i ask your help not just as farmers and not just as citizens of north dakota i ask your help as fellow americans in a difficult time in the life of our country i don t think any candidate for the office of the presidency can possibly run in 1960 saying that the problems are easy or that the solutions are easy the problems are difficult the solutions are difficult and the burden that will be placed on the shoulders of americans in the sixties will be heavier than they have been for 100 years but i do think it is possible to move in this country i don t say what we are doing now is as good as we can do this is a great country but i think it must be a greater country we occupy a position of leadership in the world but i think we can do far better than our record of the past 2 or 3 or 4 years can you tell me anywhere in a crisis from cuba to the congo to laos where the united states has been ahead of events we have held out our hands of friendship to the people of latin america before we had to where we did it at our own free will rather than at the point of castro s pistol we go now and offer a program of africa to the united nations we offer a program of aid we offer scholarships to the congo did anyone in this administration talk about africa before 6 months ago i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the foreign relations committee and i can tell you they did not next january or february india will face a major financial crisis unless she receives some financial assistance does anyone in the administration talk about india today does anyone look to the future does anyone make a judgment that such and such a thing will happen in 6 months and let s do something about it now is it necessary for a country to go communist or an area before the united states begins to look at it that isn t the way foreign policy was conducted under the administration of franklin roosevelt we looked ahead whether it was in agriculture here in this state or in foreign policy around the world we must not react we must show some leadership some judgment of events before they hit us that is what leadership is not a response but a judgment of the future and an indication of what policies will bring the most secure future the democratic party is the oldest party on earth that is still functioning but i think in many ways its common denominator has been its willingness to break new ground to look to the future the problems we face now are entirely new nothing that has happened in the last two or three decades gives us any assurances for the future therefore i put my confidence in those who are ready and who have shown their willingness to face the future and to seed it and to make it ours i ask your help in this campaign not merely as citizens of north dakota or citizens of the central united states but as citizens concerned about the future of freedom in the united states and the future of freedom around the world we can do better that is the issue those who feel we can do better those who feel we can make a better life in this country those who feel that the united states can reestablish its leadership as a strong and vital country who can stand for strong image in a world in doubt i would like their help i would like them to join senator johnson and myself and senator burdick and others in trying to fight for a stronger and freer country thank you very much dem jfk22 9 60d john_f _kennedy merwin i am very grateful for the generous introduction of merwin coad with whom i served in the congress for several years and who has been an adviser and a friend of mine particularly on the subject of agriculture so i am most grateful to be his guest today i am confident that this district which is forward looking is going to have the sound judgment on behalf of its own interests and those of the united states to send him back to congress with a warm majority and he can renew his service there with a senator from iowa who will speak as the former governor of this state who was chairman of the advisory committee on agriculture to the democratic party prior to the convention and who is now chairman of farmers for kennedy and johnson your distinguished governor and your next u s senator herschel loveless the way is clear now for herschel loveless to be succeeded as governor by your lieutenant governor and your next governor of the state of iowa nick mcmanus we are about to depart and go to south dakota where i am supposed to speak this afternoon on behalf of the democratic party on agriculture i think the farmers of the united states have a serious decision to make i remember hearing president truman and undoubtedly you heard him make this speech that the farmers maybe deserved what they got because they voted republican in 1952 i am not sure that that judgment is not somewhat harsh because if you recall the farmers voted in 1952 because they were informed by the republican party in 1952 that they were going to get 100 percent parity support prices in the market well now we have had 8 years the farmer in 1960 is not the farmer of 1952 he has had 8 years to study the fruits of his judgment of 1952 we have heard a good deal about operation consume and operation distribution and operation production and will hear more tomorrow when the vice president of the united states addresses the farmers on his farm program but i do not come to the farmers today nor does the vice president come to the farmers tomorrow out of the blue this matter before us has been before us not merely for 8 years but for 25 years i think the farmers of the united states can make a clear and precise judgment as to which party day in day out month after month year after year has been more concerned with the income of the farmers of this country and i have no doubt that when all the speeches are separated when all the promises of this campaign are analyzed i think that we should look at the record the bible says by their fruits you shall know them one hundred percent parity in 1952 and i don t know what we are going to hear tomorrow but we have the record of the last 8 years we have mr benson s own statement that mr nixon was a major participant in the development of the benson program and mr benson may not be as mr nixon says the greatest secretary of agriculture in history but he is a truthful man i don t say there is any easy answer but i do say that the government and the farmers working together recognizing that surpluses which are unconsumed by our own people and by people around the world break the price the balance between supply and demand useful supply supply to our own people and the hungry people around the world i think to bring that kind of supply into balance with that kind of demand i think can bring us a successful farm program i spent a month in west virginia and i saw 100 000 families that wait for surplus food packages which include some grain cornmeal rice and this summer they are going to add lard why should they have to wait to add lard in the richest country on earth operation consume i did not see in west virginia and there are 4 million people in the united states who wait every month for surplus food packages to sustain their lives yet this administration has opposed a food stamp program it has opposed any worthwhile and realistic way of distributing our food to our people i would like to see the next president of the united states take 100 acres of farmland and say this percentage can be grown for distribution of a decent price in the marketplace for our people here at home this percent age can be sold in the marketplaces of the world for a decent price this percentage of that 100 acres will be for our own people for schoolchildren for surplus food for our older people who get surplus food packages that percentage will be used for the american people this percentage will be used and not called a surplus but will be used as an asset in the great struggle of the sixties to decide whether the underdeveloped world where people starves by the millions will come with us or with the communists i said last night if mr khrushchev had the choice between 50 scientists and 50 american farmers he would take the farmers and be right because the secret of growing food with only a small percentage of the population is the great asset which we have in the sixties and an asset greater than sputnik and more meaningful in the long run than any other asset that this country has to grow therefore the remaining percentage to determine which part of that percentage of the 100 acres can be used to distribute food usefully through the united nations and by our own agreements food for peace everyone talks about it but it has not been sustained and supported since we put it forward in 1956 and 1957 hubert humphrey and orville and the others put it forward as a program to spread the message around the world that the american people were not interested just in the cold war not just in the fight against the communism but were interested in people for people s sake that is the spirit which motivated franklin roosevelt and wilson and truman and if we are going to have influence if we are going to stand up to mr khrushchev it isn t just a question of arguments in the kitchen or out of the kitchen it is having policies which move this country and make it stand for something around the world i ask your support in the campaign not because i am the candidate but because i think that this country has a great chance in the sixties and because after 14 years in the congress and after 18 years in the service of our country all of us want the best for our country and i think this year we can do better thank you dem jfk22 9 60e john_f _kennedy lieutenant governor mcmanus who i hope will be the next governor your distinguished congressman who has spoken for the needs of this district and the country merwin coad herschel loveless your present governor and i hope your u s senator ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for a very generous welcome i come here today as the nominee for our party if we can just get organized we will go ahead with the speech can you hear back there i come here today as the candidate for the democratic party and i come in a most important time in a most significant election i think in many ways the election of 1960 is more important than the election of 1932 because what was at stake in 1932 was the preservation of freedom in the united states and i think what is at stake in the election of 1960 is the preservation of freedom around the world there is one issue in this campaign there is one great decision which the american people must make in the coming 6 weeks and that is which candidate which party which program offers the best hope for a stronger america i don t think that there is any american republican or democrat and i would not cast any aspersions upon any american and i do not cast them by innuendo or by implication upon my opponent i think he wants what i want he wants a just peace for the united states and so does his party and so does all america the question is which party which candidate which policy can insure a stronger america and a just peace i i think we can because i think we believe in a strong america which by being strong here reflects its strength around the world i think the question for the people of this district and the question for the people of iowa and the question for the people of the united states is a simple one if you think that we are doing as much as we can do if you think the balance of power is moving in our direction rather than the communists if you are satisfied with the position of the united states in the world if you feel our policies toward latin america and africa and asia are as vigorous and imaginative as they can be if you feel the policies which affect this nation if you feel the agricultural policies of this administration are as good as they can he then you should vote republican but if you think we can do better if you think we can move ahead if you think we can reverse the downward trend of agricultural prices if you think we can build a better educational system and more security for our older people if you think we can build a better defense if you think that the united states should reestablish the atmosphere which existed through latin america in the 1930 s of the good neighbor if you think the power balance in the world is turning against us not with us then i want you to join with us i want you to move with us i want you to decide in 1960 that we say yes to the next decade and not no that we want to move ahead not stand still i want your help in this campaign i want your support not because i run for the presidency but because i think we can make a contribution to the future of our own country to its strength i ask your help i don t say that life is going to be easy in the 1960 s but i think we can do better i do think we can do more i don t underrate this country it is a great country and i have served it for 18 years but i think it can he a greater country i think it is a powerful country but i think it can be a more powerful country i am not satisfied as a citizen let alone as leader of my party i am not satisfied as a citizen to have any question of whether the united states is first i want mr khrushchev and mr castro and those who wish to follow on your road to know that the united states is the leader not that the united states stands still but that we move ahead i want you to join with us i don t preach the doctrine of ease i preach the doctrine of vigor and vitality and energy and force this is a great country and we are going to make it greater i ask your help in this effort thank you dem jfk23 10 60 john_f _kennedy attorney general reynolds gov gaylord nelson lt gov philleo nash your next congressman milo singler ladies and gentlemen i was warned to be out here in plenty of time to permit those who are going to the green bay packers game to leave i don t mind running against mr nixon but i have good enough sense not to run against the green bay packers i will assure you we are not going to hold you up that long i come here this morning back to green bay as the candidate for the office of the presidency i came here last winter as a candidate for the nomination and the support that we received here in wisconsin the support we received in the 8th and 6th congressional districts the support we received in an endorsement of our candidacy in this state led directly to our nomination in july and now i come back here on this occasion as the standard bearer for the oldest political party in history but a political party which is young and vital and forward looking and ask your support again i want to emphasize that this is not a contest merely between mr nixon and myself we run both for the presidency but in a very larger sense it is a contest between two parties and in a larger sense than that it is a contest between two political philosophies between the comfortable and the contented and the concerned between those who look to the future and those who stand still between those who are willing to break new ground and those who say we ve never had it so good and in that contest your distinguished governor is playing a part in moving wisconsin forward our lieutenant governor philleo nash your attorney general and the man who i hope you will elect to be the next congressman from this district we have a democratic senate and a democratic house i hope we can have a democratic president the basic problem which disturbs us all not merely as democrats or republicans but as citizens of the united states is how over a long period of time it is possible for a free society in which we follow our own interests in which we have freedom of choice and a wide range of alternatives how that free society can successfully compete with a totalitarian society in order that we may compete we need strong leadership at the top and in my judgment only the president of the united states can provide that leadership and we also need a house and a senate working with him we have to in our free society and in our free way provide the vigor and the drive to not only match the communist drive but also outdo it and i am confident that we can do that but in order to do it we have to have a president of the united states and an administration and a congress which is willing to set before the american people the unfinished business of our society my disagreement with mr nixon and with the republican party has been throughout its history in fact since the end of theodore roosevelt s administration that party has been identified with the status quo with a refusal to change with a refusal to recognize that change is essential with a refusal to recognize that our times are revolutionary and that progress should be our most important product our most important commodity that has been the difference between the democratic candidates and the republican candidates all through this century it is the republican party which ran mckinley and harding and coolidge and landon and dewey it has been the democratic party that ran wilson roosevelt and harry truman the democrats have run on slogans of the new freedom the new deal the fair deal it has been the republican s slogans that have been stand pat with mckinley keep cool with coolidge return to normalcy with harding and all the rest and i believe that these slogans characterize a very different outlook on life on the function of leadership and the responsibility of our national government i want to make it clear that i come to this section of wisconsin to ask your support in this campaign with the full realization that the responsibility and burdens of the presidency will be greater than they have ever been in the past the whole spread of atomic weapons the whole subject of disarmament the whole crisis over berlin which will hit this country and western germany hard next winter and next spring the problems in the far east the maintenance of freedom in latin america and africa and asia the maintenance of full employment here in this section of wisconsin which depends on the paper industry the maintenance of full employment in pennsylvania which depends on an outgoing steel industry the maintenance of full employment in west virginia and kentucky which depend on coal all these burdens will fall upon the desk of the next president of the united states the tremendous revolution in agriculture which has provided a great increase in the production of food and a sharp decrease in farm income all these will come to rest upon the desk of the next president of the united states i think in many ways his burdens will be more difficult his responsibilities more sharp his alternatives more immediate than any president since the time of lincoln but my judgment is that in this great country of ours there are no burdens and no responsibilities that cannot be met by a strong country with strong national purposes and it is on that basis that i come here as long as there are 15 million american homes which are substandard as long as there are millions of americans who are not even paid a 1 minimum wage as long as there are older people over the age of 65 who live on an average social security check of less than 78 a month as long as there are people around the world who wish to be free but are not free as long as there are people around the world who are fighting to maintain their independence as long as there are people who look to us for leadership i believe we can serve i believe the democratic party has a responsibility i come to this community of green bay which in its own community life has shown vitality and drive i come here and ask you to join me in instilling again those qualities in the united states of vigor of motion of leadership of direction of purpose this campaign has about 2 weeks to go in those 2 weeks the people of this state and you and the people of the united states have to make a final decision as to which candidate and which party you will entrust the high office of the presidency the senate the house the governorship i want to make it very clear what i consider the difference to be mr nixon in these dangerous and difficult times has chosen to run on platforms and slogans which emphasize our present security which emphasize that we have never had it so good which state that our prestige has never been higher and that of the communist system never lower that all things that must be done are being done in their own good time and in good measure and what we must do is continue in the future what we have done in the past i want to make it very dear that i could not disagree more with this approach to the great public questions not only of surviving enduring and prevailing but also which go to the life of freedom around the globe i do not run on the slogan we have never had it so good i run on the slogan that we are going to have to do much better i run with the idea not of downgrading our country because my confidence in this country is unlimited after 14 years of serving it in the congress and after traveling all over it in the last 2 years my confidence in this country is unlimited but my confidence in the republican party s leadership is very limited i do not believe that a political party which in the last 25 years has opposed housing and minimum wage and social security and every great domestic program which has been identified with progress in this country which has refused to recognize our changing times around the world which liquidated the credit which franklin roosevelt and harry truman built up in latin america which has shown itself wholly uninformed of the present revolution now taking place in africa which has failed to maintain our military strength which has given almost no attention to the important subject of disarmament having less than 100 people working on it in the entire federal government which has permitted us to be second best in outer space which has brought less foreign students to study here today than 10 years ago which has in other words presided over the united states in a changing time and refused to change i believe on november 8 the people of this country are going to take progress for the future are going to give the leadership of this country once more to the democrats so let me say in conclusion that i hope that green bay wins today i hope we win november 8 i hope the country will win in january i hope if we are successful that your support will permit us in this state in the congress in the nation to give this country the kind of leadership which will make it move again i hope that if we are unsuccessful in this campaign that the campaign itself the issue of this election we will give the next president of the united states whoever he may be a sense of purpose a sense of his obligation to place before the american people our unfinished business franklin roosevelt said in 1936 that generation of americans had a rendezvous with destiny and so do we in my judgment our destiny is the maintenance of a vigorous society here which serves as an example and inspiration to people around the world who wish also to be free that is our responsibility it is a responsibility that i am confident that we can meet i ask you to join me in meeting it two thousand years ago after the battle of thermopylae when 300 spartans were wiped out by all the hordes of the persians carved in the rock above their graves were the words passerby tell sparta we fell faithful to her service now we ask you and ask all people to live faithful to the cause of freedom faithful to the cause of those who wish to he free thomas paine said in the american revolution the cause of america is the cause of all mankind now in 1960 in this revolutionary period the cause of all mankind is the cause of america and i am confident we are going to meet our responsibilities i am confident we are going to be given the opportunity to give this country leadership and i am confident that this country is going to move again thank you dem jfk23 10 60a john_f _kennedy norm clapp gov gaylord nelson lt gov philleo nash distinguished attorney general john reynolds your distinguished senator and my friend and colleague bill proxmire ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be in this district again i can make one boast that no other presidential candidate in history can make i have spent more time in the third district than any candidate for the presidency since george washington i chased hubert humphrey all over this district and never caught him i am also delighted to be here in wisconsin and in this district because i am associated with the kind of democrats who i believe mean a good deal not only to wisconsin but to the united states i refer particularly to your candidate for the congress norm clapp i came out here in 1958 we had a rally i think at this same airport he didn t win this time we are holding a rally in the daytime the last time it was about midnight we are holding a rally in the daytime because he is the kind of candidate who i believe can serve this district and serve the country i am hopeful he will be elected to the house of representatives and speak for the third district and speak for the united states i endorse him and urge his support with all my heart he is the kind of man we need i am confident that wisconsin will elect as governor the man who has led this state in recent years your distinguished governor gaylord nelson and the men who are joined together with him in his administration we are moving in changing times and no candidate for the presidency or for governor or for congress can possibly discuss in this campaign all of the issues which will disturb our life in the coming months and the coming years in the final analysis it depends on the good judgment the sense of vigor the sense of responsibility the sense of the past the sense of the future of the candidate and therefore wisconsin has shown particular skill in recent years in selecting men who can meet the new problems of the future i recognize that the problems which will face us in 1960 and in the immediate years that follow are in many ways more difficult and more complicated than any in our history how are we going to maintain full employment in this country how are we going to make sure that all of the men and women who need to work can find jobs at good pay how are we going to maintain agricultural income in this country when our productivity is increasing at 6 percent a year and our demand at 3 percent a year how are we going to be first in outer space and first in the minds and the hearts of people all around the globe these are the problems that disturb us these are the problems that go to our survival and it is upon this generation of americans that our survival as a country will rest and also our survival as the great defenders of freedom all around the globe i come to this district which is particularly dependent upon agriculture but i recognize that this district and districts like it also affect the general economy it is no accident that the depression of 1929 followed a consistent farm drop in income all during the 1920 s and i don t think it is any accident that we had a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 and now the beginning of what may be a recession in 1960 all tied to a sharp decrease in farm income in the last 8 years the reason is simple it is the interdependence of the american economy the farmers of this country are the best market for detroit and the automobile industry the automobile industry is the best market for steel in pittsburgh and when farm income goes down so does detroit and so does pittsburgh and so does la crosse seven out of eight of the international harvester machines co plants in illinois right across your state border have been shut down this fall for varying periods throwing nearly 12 000 men out of work because farm income has dropped and what happens to the small businessmen in those communities and what happens finally to chicago this country of ours is tied together it is tied together by geography it is tied together by tradition but it is also tied together by the dependence of each citizen one upon another and this administration s policy which has defeated the farmer also in my opinion has had an effect upon the city mr nixon went to new jersey the other day and in one of those speeches for which he has become famous he said that the proposals that i put forward for increasing farm income would increase food prices 25 percent then he comes out here to la crosse and says that my farm plan would not mean a thing for the farmer he should make up his mind he should say the same thing in la crosse as he does in new jersey the fact is he should say the same thing in the north that he says in the south the same thing that he says in the east that he says in the west the fact of the matter is that in a loaf of bread the farmer gets about 2 cents out of a 25 or 26 cent loaf of bread it costs more to launder this shirt in a hotel than a farmer gets for the cotton in the shirt if that farmer s income went up 10 or 15 percent it could increase the price of that food 1 cent or a half a cent because it goes to the percentage that the farmer gets in that loaf of bread mr nixon s attempt to turn the country against the city to send a secretary of agriculture to campaign in the city rather than on the farms to continue as he has proposed to do the very same agricultural program which has reduced farm income 25 percent which has made the average wage for a dairy farmer in the state of wisconsin according to the university of wisconsin about 55 cents an hour that he would propose in 1960 a continuation of the very same program seems to me to give the farmers a very clear choice mr nixon s program has been expressed in two lines one we will use the surplus to use up the surplus whatever that may mean mr benson in 1956 said those very same words mr nixon is using the exact same phrases as well as the exact same program that mr benson put forward then he said the support price for farm income the long term price support system with levels based on an average of market prices under the immediately preceding crop year those words were spoken first by mr benson several years ago they are an exact quote from mr nixon s speech given in south dakota in which he described his farm program and what did they mean they mean that the support price for farm income will be tied to 90 percent of the market price for the immediate year or the immediate 3 preceding years therefore if corn was selling for 1 50 in 1952 and is now 95 cents or 90 cents the next year the support price will be 90 percent of that 90 cents and then if the market price the next year is 85 cents then the support price will be 90 percent of that 85 cents step by step year by year the farmers income will drop because it is not tied to parity it is not tied to the cost of the things for which he must put out all his purchases it is only tied to what he got in the market the preceding year the farmers of wisconsin and minnesota have a very clear choice mr nixon does not offer a new program he continues the old one and the farmers of this state and minnesota must decide do they want that program is that what they want is that what we have been hearing for 8 years we have not been the farmers know that mr benson s program has brought them close to ruin and mr nixon proposes to continue it i must say that given this very clear choice given the experience of the last 8 years it seems to me that the farmers of this state and minnesota should determine to support our efforts to raise farm income efforts which have been identified with the names of gaylord nelson and bill proxmire in the senate and hubert humphrey in minnesota which i have committed myself to as a presidential candidate in the democratic platform in my speech in south dakota in which we associated the support and farm income with the whole concept of parity the kind of income which a farmer would get if he did the same amount of work with the same managerial skill in a related industry i believe that these are two very clear choices and what the farmer decides affects all of you who do not live on the farm every smalltown merchant in any one of the towns of this district knows that you are affected by the income of the farmers surrounding you the state of wisconsin rises or falls depending on farm income and so does minnesota i could understand in 1952 after president eisenhower made a speech in which he endorsed the concept of parity price at 100 percent that the farmers of this state and minnesota could say that sounds good now we have had 8 years now mr nixon trots out the same old program he has given it new names operation consume and operation safeguard but the words are the same the melody is the same only the lighting and the makeup are different let me just say why i believe we can do a better job one example of this administration s failure to take action in 1954 millions of children in africa asia and south america were suffering from a common deficiency disease called kwashiorkor caused by a lack of protein in the diet it stunts the victims minds and bodies the u n world health organization reported that fully one half of these hospitalized children died yet the management and prevention of this disease were simple a modest daily ration of nonfat dry milk at that time the united states possessed an enormous quantity of this nonfat dry milk the united states could have saved children s lives it could have put this milk to work it could have contributed a helping hand to people around the world who needed it do you know what we did with this milk we negotiated to sell our entire stockpile of nonfat dry milk to animal feed manufacturers without competitive bidding at a price of 3 5 cents per pound about one fifth of the market price it sold the milk for hog feed with the stipulation it could not be used for human consumption in this fashion it sold an unbelievable total of nearly 600 million pounds of milk an amount nearly equal to the production of the state of wisconsin for 1 year and an amount sufficient to provide a glass of milk every day for a full year to 33 million children mr benson was asked why the administration had virtually given the dry milk stockpile away to the animal feed manufacturers and why he had not used our abundance to help fight one of the greatest diseases across the world he replied there were too many difficulties involved now we are going to live with difficulty in the 1960 s anyone who is a citizen of this country who reads the paper knows that events and history and the world and geography are changing every day no candidate for the presidency can map out with certainly any program and be sure that conditions will be the same 4 or 5 years from now the truth squad may be pulling out they can t stand it all we can guarantee all we can guarantee is that we are going to get the best people who have been associated with policies that are progressive in the past the best talent those with the greatest amount of intellectual curiosity foresight knowledge of the world knowledge of our times and with a sense of compassion and we are going to put them to work and we are going to identify this country with the great cause of freedom around the world that is the commitment we make not a life of ease not of a solution of all the problems that disturb us action motion movement identification and i come to this district which i know well and ask your support in this campaign i ask you to join us in giving wisconsin leadership i ask you to join us in getting america moving again thank you dem jfk23 10 60b john_f _kennedy congressman kastenmeier governor nelson senator proxmire mayor nestigan mr lucey mr evjue ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to your congressman and to your state officials bob kastenmeier has been a distinguished congressman an able spokesman for this district mr nixon said the other day that he could endorse any republican running for office with the greatest enthusiasm i endorse bob kastenmeier with the greatest enthusiasm and i am proud to be associated on this platform with the candidates the democrats of wisconsin have put forward your congressman your governor your lieutenant governor your attorney general your u s senator they speak for progress in wisconsin and progress in the nation they are part of the wisconsin idea and i am proud to be here with them we are involved in the last 2 weeks of a hard fought campaign i must admit that there is some difficulty running against mr nixon i never know whether i am running against the republican mr nixon who goes to arizona and who says that he stands as a republican from top to bottom or the mr nixon who goes to jacksonville fla and says that party labels don t mean anything what counts is the man or the man who goes to new york it and strikes a blow for civil rights or the man who goes to virginia and informs them that he knows their problems as he went to school in the south once himself but i know what the issue is it is an old issue that has been fought in this country year after year political generation after political generation and that is between the happy and the content and the fat and the concerned and those who look forward i believe in 1960 the american people are going to move forward again i think this is an important election i believe that the next president of the united states and the next congress are going to have to deal with three sets of problems all of them different one is the longest problem which is most continuing which is a problem and an opportunity which has been with us since our country was founded and which was with us in 1960 and that is to make good on the commitments of the constitution and the declaration of independence that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that they are entitled to fairness and justice and equal opportunity and it is the responsibility of the people speaking through their national government speaking through their president to accord them those rights that is the first opportunity and the first responsibility of the president of the united states i said on the first debate that i was concerned as an american when two children are born in two houses next door to each other one is white and the other is a negro that negro baby has one half regardless of his talents statistically has one half as much chance of finishing high school as the white baby one third as much chance of finishing college one fourth as much chance of being a professional man or woman four times as much chance of being out of work in his life one third as much chance of owning his own home about one fourth as much chance of putting his child through college i believe that there are of course people who are not equal in talent people who are not equal in motivation but if there are going to be inequalities it should be on the grounds of their ability and dedication not on the grounds of their color that is what we wish to wipe out the second set of problems that the president will face are the traditional ones they stem from the administration of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman they are the efforts which democratic presidents and democratic congresses have made to write into law a whole platform of social legislation which permits all americans to participate in our standard of living minimum wage social security unemployment compensation housing aid to education medical care for the aged all of the great litany of pieces of social legislation for which we are distinguished which make it easy for a democratic candidate to run for the presidency and which mr nixon s party has opposed it is our function however not to merely invoke the names of franklin roosevelt and harry truman not to merely live off what they did but to bring these old programs up to date franklin roosevelt proposed a 25 cent minimum wage back in the middle thirties 90 percent of the republicans voted against it we proposed this summer a minimum wage of 1 25 and 90 percent of the members of the house of representatives voted against it these are the traditional issues old but still new and i believe that the next president and the next congress must meet their responsibilities in this field we are talking however about two sets of problems which are familiar with which we dealt in the past the solution of which is easy to get a president and a congress that believe in progress but there are a third set of problems which are entirely new and it is this third set of problems that will most disturb the sleep of the next president of the united states and the next house and the next senate and it is to their solution that we must begin to address ourselves in this campaign because unless the next president of the united states is prepared for action when he gets elected then he will lose january february march april and may of 1961 which should be his best and most vigorous months woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt made their greatest contribution to the advancement of this country in their first 2 years and we as democrats those of us who are committed to progress should now be considering the solutions of the new problems that will face the united states in the 1960 s one how is it possible for a free society operating with a free enterprise economy how is it possible for that free society to double its rate of economic growth we have talked a good deal about economic growth mr nixon has dismissed it as growthmanship but it goes to the heart and survival of our free society we are going to have to find 25 000 jobs a week every week for the next 10 years if we are going to maintain full employment in the united states our average rate of economic growth in the last 8 years was about 2 percent that of western germany 5 to 6 percent that of italy 4 to 4 5 percent that of france nearly 5 percent in the last 8 years overall the united states has had the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world we have an economic growth of about one third that of the soviet union less than japan how is it going to be possible for this country to maintain full employment with a low rate of economic growth especially at a time when machines are taking the jobs of men i would consider that to be the no 1 domestic problem which the next president of the united states will have to meet he will have to use monetary and fiscal tools far more effectively far more vigorously than the present administration has been willing to do in the last 9 months of 1960 the united states had no economic growth we lost minus 0 3 this goes to the question of whether the students at the university of wisconsin will have jobs whether we will be able to maintain full employment whether we are going to drag along with 50 percent of our steel capacity unused as we are today with 100 000 steelworkers out of work with our other industries beginning to go part time because we cannot consume what we are producing this is a new problem entirely different from the kind of problem that franklin roosevelt met in the 1930 s but on its solution goes the survival of our free economy and our free system we need to use our facilities to the utmost we need the revenues which come from full use of our economy in order to meet our obligations at home and abroad we need a strong economy or gold will continue to flow out of the united states we need a strong economy if we are going to meet our obligations to the underdeveloped world to maintain our defenses to meet our needs in education and health and housing i consider this to be tied to the problem of agriculture which is entirely different to be the no 1 domestic problem the next president will face secondly how is it possible for the united states and the soviet union and france and britain to come to a conclusion to cease nuclear testing with some worthwhile inspection system how is it possible for us who initiated the first atomic advance how is it possible for us to make a decisive breakthrough in this area because of experiments now going on in western germany it appears likely that almost 20 countries will have an atomic capacity by 1965 china egypt cuba all the rest of them all possessing atomic weapons all possessing a hydrogen capacity perhaps all possessing ballistic missiles and the means of delivering them when we realize that war has been the constant companion of mankind through the ages we are about to move into a period of history when any country or combination of countries can destroy themselves their adversaries and perhaps the human race all in the next 10 years and this administration has failed to recognize the decisive nature of what science is doing to our hopes for the future this administration has had less than 100 people working in the entire national administration on the subject of disarmament we have gone into every conference unprepared this administration a year ago in order to get a position on disarmament appointed a lawyer from my own state of massachusetts mr coolidge who had had no previous experience in the field after 3 months his report was dismissed and so was he and a new york lawyer after 5 weeks of preparation was sent to head up our mission to the disarmament conference one hundred people working on one of the most important involved specialized fields the subject of disarmament nuclear control i believe we can do better and i believe we must do better the third new question and the last one i wish to mention goes to the problem of the globe to the south of us here in these countries where the average income may be 100 a year it may be 25 a year as it is in libya in these countries with the tremendous increasing population with inadequate resources in many cases can these countries make an economic breakthrough under a system of freedom or is it necessary for them to follow the example of the communists the chinese and the russians they see russia which 40 years ago was the most backward country in europe now moving steadily up on the united states they see china ten years ago china and india started from the same economic base with the same economic problems and yet china by methods repugnant to us has be an to move its industrial growth forward at a faster rate than that of india through freedom what role can we play what role can western europe play does the plan that this administration puts forward really offer hope to latin america and africa and asia what decision will they make in the next 5 or 10 years as to how they shall mobilize their resources this administration has remained almost indifferent to the great challenging problem of the 1950 s not one spanish program to all of latin america the soviet union has 10 times the broadcasts we do to latin america the foreign service we are the 14th country in radio broadcasts to africa even indonesia has more than we do there were more students from those countries 10 years ago in the united states than there are today guinea asked for 500 teachers last year we gave them one we offered 300 scholarships to the congo last june more than we offered to all of africa the year before we had more people stationed in western germany in 1957 than in all of africa out of a foreign service of 6 000 men and women 26 are negroes i think we can do better and i believe we are going to have to do better or otherwise the united states is going to cease to lead mr nixon pointed to the united nations as evidence of our great program the next day the question came on the admission of red china how many african nations voted with us not one of the newly admitted nations of africa voted with us the only two countries in africa to vote with us were liberia and the union of south africa i believe that this administration by its failure to recognize the great questions which disturb our life has demonstrated its unfitness to lead us in the 1960 s i believe that before you can have the answers you must have the questions and i don t think this administration has recognized the changing and revolutionary nature of the world in which we live its solutions have been archaic its proposals have been outdated it has failed to recognize the change in circumstance in africa or latin america or asia mr nixon speaking in september said if we had proposed a program of economic aid to latin america in 1955 castro might never have happened why didn t we do so the only statement that was made in 1955 was made by mr nixon in havana when he praised and i quote him accurately the competence and stability of the batista dictatorship these are the questions that you have to determine does this record give you confidence for the future are the kinds of men that have been appointed to ambassadorships men who cannot even pronounce not only the language but can t even pronounce the name of the head of state men who have been given ambassadorships as a reward for party contributions who are sent to sensitive areas students who have never been given a chance to study sudden emergency programs put forward of 300 offers to the congo do you know how many congo students got to the united states seven how many college graduates in the congo twelve did we ever show any interest in their problems do you know the next part of africa that will be free the portuguese colonies do you know how many students are studying in the united states from the portuguese none they are going to become suddenly independent and we will offer them scholarships as if you can turn out a man or woman as you do an automobile it takes years the spokesmen for this administration spoke for many years about how we lost china i would like to hear them talk about how india is going to be maintained as a free society if india should fail in the third 5 year plan the balance of power in the world would shift against freedom india has within its borders 35 percent of all the underdeveloped people of the world they are a free country with sound economic planning a chance to succeed and yet when has mr nixon in this campaign ever talked about a program which would assist india not only by the united states but by others who might be interested particularly in western europe to hold out the hand at the crucial moment what we need is not hindsight we need foresight and we need men and women who will look beyond the next crisis and make a judgment six countries now in africa members of the united nations have not a single american diplomatic residence in any of them it took us 8 months to recognize guinea and send an ambassador there the soviet union took 1 day and guinea now votes with the soviet union i do not suggest that any of these problems are easy i do not suggest that we have complete answers to any of them but what i do suggest is that at least we have some concern some recognition some idea of the changing nature of our times the whole problem in cuba is not a dialogue about mr castro the whole problem in cuba is what is going to happen in the rest of latin america whose side is going to be successful in those areas which system offers the hope to these people bolivia where the average annual income is about 100 a person are they going to be more impressed by castro and what he says or are they going to be impressed by us franklin roosevelt impressed them not so much because he poured out american money but because he was a moving compassionate figure moving his own society at home identifying himself with people around the world who also wish to live in the sun i believe it is our function and our opportunity and our responsibility in the 1960 s to identify ourselves with the cause of freedom not only with the cause of freedom but with a better life for these people franklin roosevelt put it in 1936 in accepting his second presidential nomination before 100 000 people and in that speech he said governments can err presidents can make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i believe that 4 years of mr nixon would be a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference and i don t think the world can afford it other men who have led that party have tried to remake it and they all failed theodore roosevelt wendell willkie robert lafollette george norris and even nelson rockefeller before he began to graze contentedly in mr nixon s pasture tried to remake the republican party they all failed mr nixon basks in the sun he sends senator goldwater to campaign in the south in an old confederate uniform telling them he does not mean anything he says on civil rights while senator scott of pennsylvania travels through the north and assures he is with them all the way what kind of a party is that what kind of leadership is that the chicago sun times this morning carries an interview with mr nixon s ex adviser murray chotiner who advises mr nixon to become the old mr nixon start hitting again in this campaign what kind of a country will we have with a candidate who cannot make up his mind whether he is going to be old or new i do not run as a candidate who says that party labels are unimportant the significance of the party is its philosophy and the kind of candidates it puts up for office i do not have to run with leap year progressivism which says every 4 years we are for progress and votes against it in the congress day in and day out i run as a democrat i run as a believer in progress i stand in the tradition of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and in my judgment in 1960 the people of this country are going to say yes to the 1960 s and they are going to start this country moving again thank you dem jfk23 10 60c john_f _kennedy gov gaylord nelson lt gov philleo nash distinguished attorney general john reynolds your distinguished members of congress congressman zablocki congressman reuss congressman to be jim megellas pat lucey mr maier dave rabinowitz mrs phillips ladies and gentlemen i come here tonight as the democratic standard bearer to ask the help of the people of wisconsin in this campaign here in wisconsin this campaign began last winter and i think it ought to end right here because the motto of the state of wisconsin and the slogan of this campaign is one and the same forward and that is what this country must do that is the direction it must take that is the direction it will take november 8 when we make an affirmative decision i cannot believe that in these difficult and changing times when we are surrounded by revolution and hazard that the american people are going to choose to sit still that they are going to give their confidence to a political party the republicans who have opposed every measure of progress in the last 25 years led by a candidate who for the last 14 years has opposed progress can you tell me one piece of legislation of benefit to the people housing civil rights aid for the farmer aid for the retired rights for labor can you tell me one program that either mr nixon or the republicans have supported i said in cleveland about 3 weeks ago that i could not think of one program and the cleveland paper said i had forgotten what president taft did about child labor all right what have they done since then what have they done in the last 50 years this fight is important because unless this country is moving ahead this country will not lead a world which is moving ahead the same political party the republicans who could vote against social security in the thirties could vote unanimously against the medical care for the aged in the sixties the same political party that could vote against the minimum wage of 25 cents an hour in 1935 could vote against 1 25 an hour in 1960 and this goes to the heart of the issue a party which fights progress a party which is not prepared to associate with it a party which has stood athwart the great social international and national movements of this century sponsored by wilson and roosevelt and truman how can they lead in the dangerous sixties how can they lead and move this country forward how can they demonstrate to a watching world that we are a strong and vital society in outer space in the world around us in latin america in africa in asia in wisconsin we are associated with a forward motion and they have stood still and i believe on november 8 the people of this country are going to choose to move again i don t believe that this generation of americans wants it said about us what t s eliot in his poem the rock said and the wind shall say these were decent people their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls i don t believe that is what the people want i think they want to move forward the great question of the 1960 s is how the united states can maintain its position in the world how we can increase our security how we can live in peace how we can hold out a helping hand to all those who wish to he free and the decision which you must make as decisions of this country is which administration which candidates which party are best associated with the great issues which are going to distinguish life in the sixties particularly the fight for peace particularly the fight against war especially the fight for security mr nixon and i both want peace all americans do we both want to put an end to the arms race and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust but we do disagree and we disagree very fundamentally on the nature and the effort and the leadership which the pursuit of peace requires a few weeks ago mr nixon set forward his program for peace it consisted of committees set upon committees committees which will meet with other committees stretching around the world and across this country but i don t believe you can talk your way into peace i don t believe you can gain peace by conferences merely i believe that peace like any other goal requires action words alone will never impress mr khrushchev fingers pointed at his face in kitchen debates he has spent his life debating he has spent his life in argument he is concerned only with peace he is concerned only to disarm when he is convinced that that is the best for his system and best for the world and how can we induce that desire in him that is the question for the next president of the united states if we are to secure peace if we are to ever hope to negotiate for an effective arms control agreement we must act immediately for as each year passes the control of increasingly complex mobile and hidden modern armaments becomes more difficult and the chances for country after country to possess an atomic capacity by 1964 or 1965 we may see a world in which 20 countries have a nuclear capacity and the ability to destroy their adversary themselves and perhaps the world in short no problem is more vital no problem is more immediate than the problem of effective control over arms yet in the past 8 years and in my opinion this is one of the most serious indictments that can be leveled against this administration in this vital area in the past 8 years this administration has given this problem no attention in the entire u s government we have had fewer than 100 people working on the complex subject of arms control and disarmament less than 100 people scattered through four or five agencies of the government when i reminded mr nixon of this in one of the debates he gave one of his usual answers well they were of extraordinary high quality who were they can you name one of them who were these geniuses at work that none of us could name less than 100 of them scattered throughout the government working on one of the most vital subjects before the people of the world a recent independent survey concludes and i quote it accurately the only continuous features of our efforts in the disarmament field have been a lack of continuity in top personnel and a paucity of planning and research effort as a result we have been unprepared at every disarmament conference that we have attended at a time when our relative military strength was at its height in the mid fifties at a time when we had the best chance to reach an agreement on control of arms there was not a single top person in the entire government working on this subject we did not come up with a single major new proposal in the field of arms control and we cared so little about it that we regarded the entire effort as merely a part of our effort in psychological warfare at the london conference of 1957 the first important disarmament conference held in the fifties and the one which came closest of any in reaching an agreement on disarmament we sent a man who had not been active in the field harold stassen we sent him to a meeting without formulating an american position mr stassen was never able to get clear instructions at the meeting as to what our position was we came close and in part failed because the american position was never finalized and at the end of the conference when success might have been possible mr stassen was disposed and sent back to pennsylvania at the next important disarmament conference the geneva conference of 1958 we were represented by a businessman who had been out of the government for 5 years and returned to his duties only 5 weeks before the conference almost up to the opening day of the meeting we had no research no position no committees working on the subject the conference was a failure and our chief negotiator said and i quote him i doubt that we have given up to this time the intense study to the kind of measures which will make the prevention of surprise attacks possible our chief negotiator this administration is liable on the whole series of grounds latin america africa asia outer space and here in the field of disarmament which involves the security and peace of every person in and out of the state of wisconsin the head of our mission should say we have given it very little time and attention this is the experience of which so much is heard the last meeting the most recent one the 10 nation conference at geneva this march in september this administration appointed a special committee headed by a lawyer from massachusetts mr coolidge he worked for 3 months he prepared a report the report was thrown aside and this time a new york lawyer without any experience in the field of disarmament became head of our mission we had no position and we adopted that of the british our negotiators had to leave geneva during the conference itself to come to washington to find out what our position was and again we failed to prepare for disarmament throughout the consistent history of indifference and failure the arms race has continued to mount this is an issue which involves the lives of all of us and i must say in this area as in so many others this government has been under the control of those who have been uninterested who have lacked intellectual curiosity who have failed to realize that in these changing times we need the best talent we can get constantly applied to all the new problems that disturb us disarmament is only one failure of the last 8 years therefore i suggest the following things first that we maintain our strength we arm to parley mr winston churchill said a decade ago we cannot parley on the basis of equality with the soviet unless we maintain a military position of equality with them and that goes in the traditional weapons and in missiles and in outer space one of the reasons why we have never been able to get an agreement on the disarmament of outer space is because we are second in outer space and the soviet union will not give way their advantage we arm to parley and we must be strong if we are going to disarm and maintain our security secondly we must establish an arms control research institute working full time under the direction of the president and their function will be to conduct the research and make the studies on which our position will be based at future conferences which must be held in the sixties on the important subject of disarmament and on the important subject of nuclear test control a full time institute manned by men whose mission is peace just as we maintain the pentagon whose mission is war we must also give the same attention certainly as much and if possible more attention to the involved and important subject of peace the struggle for disarmament will not be easy but i don t know any easy struggles in the 1960 s the struggle for freedom in latin america the struggle for freedom in africa the struggle for freedom in asia the maintenance of the security of western europe the maintenance of our commitments to berlin the hope for freedom in eastern europe the development of the american economy the security for american agriculture all these are difficult problems but i do not take the view that they are impossible problems this is not a contest merely between mr nixon and myself it is not a contest in a very real sense between our two parties alone it is a contest between those who look to the future with concern with hope with anxiety and with a desire to serve and between those who stand still between those who have missed opportunity after opportunity in the last 8 years to build our position around the world to demonstrate to the world that we are a vigorous moving country that holds out a hand of friendship to people who wish to be free i believe in the 1960 s that this country must prepare itself for another great movement forward that we must work to strengthen our country not only because of our devotion to it but also because it represents the great hope of freedom in the next 10 years people around the world particularly in the globe to the south of us will begin to make their choice between freedom between the system that we represent and that of the communists we want them to choose to associate with us we want them to choose to follow the same road that we are following but we can only do that if we identify ourselves with them if we move in this country if we follow the roads of a distinguished citizen of the middle west a great son of wisconsin speaking nearly a century ago who said ideals are like stars you will not succeed in touching them with your hands but the seafaring man who follows the waters follows the stars and if you choose them as your guides you can reach your destiny our stars and our ideal is the welfare of our country and the welfare of freedom i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in serving this country in building this country in demonstrating what this country can be in demonstrating what freedom can do in showing the people who sit on the razor edge of decision that we represent the future that the communist system is as old as egypt and in our great free society there are inexhaustible veins of energy we are the great source of the future and i believe under new leadership the kind of leadership which this state has had in recent years i believe this country can be given leadership and i believe it can move again and i ask your help in the american constitutional convention there was a painting of a sun low on the horizon behind the desk of general washington and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising or a setting sun and at the conclusion benjamin franklin stood up he said we now know it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i believe in 1960 if we choose to move forward it can be a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day thank you dem jfk23 9 60 john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague senator carroll distinguished governor of this state governor mcnichols your congressmen byron rogers and byron johnson your next u s senator from the state of colorado bob knous your next congressman from this state frank stewart ladies and gentlemen i bring my case for a stronger america to colorado and i will not be deterred in any degree from feeling that it is important for us during these coming 6 weeks when the american people will make their judgment as to what kind of leadership they want i seek a stronger america and i will not be deterred by mr morton or anyone else not anything we say or anything we preach will bring comfort to mr khrushchev we seek a strong america we seek a stronger society we believe we can do more the republicans believe what we are doing today is enough that is the basic disagreement and that is the issue before the american people i hope that everyone in this country who thinks that this great country is doing everything it can who is satisfied with our position in the world who is satisfied that the united states which 25 years ago was a good neighbor to latin america now sees its name reviled in the streets of havana i want americans who used to look at africa and see them quoting thomas jefferson and franklin roosevelt and now they look to the east instead of the west i want them to vote for the republicans but anyone who thinks we can do better anyone who thinks this is a great country that can be better that must be greater anyone who thinks this is a powerful country that must be more powerful anyone who thinks we can do better than we are doing i want their help i have premised my campaign for the presidency on the single assumption that the american people are uneasy at the present drift in our national course that they are disturbed by the relative decline in our vitality and prestige and that they have the will and the strength to start the united states moving again if i am wrong in this assumption and if the american people are satisfied with things as they are if americans are undisturbed by approaching dangers and complacent about our capacity to meet them then i expect to lose this election but if i am right and i firmly believe i am right then those who have held back the growth of the united states during the last 8 years will be rejected in november and america will turn to the leadership of the democratic party there are those who say it is wrong to call attention to america s need for greater strength at a time when our freedom is being challenged by a ruthless enemy but it is precisely because we are in danger that we have an obligation to state our needs it is not dangerous to reveal what we should do in the future we do not give comfort to mr khrushchev what we hope to do is to build a stronger defense to build a more vital economy to restore the prestige of the united states to hold out the hand of the good neighbor to latin america to once more reassert america s traditional interest in freedom in africa to help those who desire to be independent to lead and not to follow to move and not to stand still that is our program for the united states in the sixties there are those who say that this kind of talk creates disunity in the eyes of the world s leaders who are gathered in new york but it was a great american and a great senator who once said if you permit appeals to unity to bring an end to criticism we endanger not only the constitutional liberties of our country but even its future existence those words were spoken in 1951 by senator robert a taft and i commend them to his successors mr khrushchev and his friends are not impressed by calls for unity they are not impressed by debates or insults or even resolutions but they will be impressed if they see an america desiring to be strong again if they see an america that makes its decisions this fall that we want to move again they will be impressed if they see us on the march they will be impressed by an america rebuilding its economy rebuilding its defenses and rebuilding the strength of the free world personal attacks and insults will not be enough to win the cold war and they will not be enough to win this election finally there are those who say that a call for greater effort and greater strength is to sell america short but i do not equate criticism of republican leadership with criticism of our country on the contrary it is because i have unlimited faith in our country after 18 years in service because i think we can do more and better that i am calling for greater effort and a greater leadership it is those who are satisfied with things as they are those who think we have reached our limit those who are afraid to ask the american people for a greater effort and a greater sacrifice and a greater national contribution who are in reality selling america short it is they who have lost their faith in america and in the american capacity to do great things that is why no attacks no attempts to discredit us will keep us from continuing to speak for a stronger america it is not naive to call for increased strength it is naive to think that freedom can prevail without strength the american people will hear our program for a greater america for a greater national effort for our prestige in our defenses in our economy in our education and in our efforts of peace and they could listen to those who say that all is well that we are strong enough and then the american people can decide who is naive i come today from massachusetts across the united states but i speak today for a great national party which has made under your governor and under your distinguished senator a distinguished contribution to the economy of colorado and also to the nation and we have an opportunity to elect another great senator to join with john carroll in speaking for colorado and our country i ask your support in this election my opponent in this campaign once said that i am a conservative at home and a risk taker abroad i am neither i am not a risk taker abroad and i am not a conservative at home if by conservative you mean no new starts if you mean standing still when we should move if you mean that this country which is the hope of freedom is not able to develop its natural resources it is a source of pride and satisfaction to me that the two americans in this century who did more to develop the resources of the west both came from new york theodore roosevelt and franklin roosevelt and they saw in the west not the assets of a state or a group of states or a region they saw a great national asset these assets belong to the people and not merely to us they belong to those who come after us we do not have the right to exploit the natural resources of this country unless we make provision for the 300 million people who are going to live in the united states by the year 2000 every time a drop of water flows to the ocean without being beneficially used by our people every time polluted water is thrown into the sea without being cleaned every time we waste our chance to build a greater strength here in this country in the west in the east in the north and in the south we sell in a sense our freedom short i think the best arguments we can make for freedom is a strong and vital country here i spent 2 days ago in the tennessee valley the tennessee valley not only rebuilt the economy of that section of the united states it was an advertisement of what a free people joining together can do for themselves and it has served as an inspiration to people all around the world in pakistan and india eastern persia colombia and nearly 18 other countries who build their tva s what you do here to harness the resources of the western united states will serve as an inspiration to young leaders in africa and latin america and asia who wish to solve their great problems and wonder whether it is necessary to turn to the east to the communists to mobilize their resources we want to show we can do it here we want to show that we are able to solve our problems we want to develop our resources we want to move our economy ahead we want to use our farm product with the hand of friendship around the world i represent today and lyndon johnson running for the vice presidency the oldest political party in the world but i represent in many ways i think in 1960 the youngest party i think you can get a clear contrast between our two parties in the slogans the presidents have run on in the 20th century no democrat ever ran on stand pat with mckinley or keep cool with coolidge or return to normalcy with harding or no new starts in 1960 or you never had it so good our presidents have run on the rights of man with thomas jefferson the new freedom of woodrow wilson the new deal of franklin roosevelt the fair deal of harry truman and now we seek a new frontier not only for the united states but for all those who wish to follow us on the road to freedom what we do here is what counts during the american revolution thomas paine wrote the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 and in the next decade the cause of all mankind is the cause of america if we do well here if we do well here if we are a strong and vital country if we maintain our defenses if we lead once again all those who desire to be free and they are the great majority of the world s population then i think we can reestablish our position and we can serve freedom which is our traditional vocation and which we must reassert again during the election of 100 years ago abraham lincoln put the issue whether this country can exist half slave and half free now the question is can the world exist half slave and half free i think it depends upon us i am reminded of a letter that lincoln wrote during the election of 1860 to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk23 9 60a john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague senator mcgee your distinguished governor governor hickey secretary of state jack gage your state chairman teno roncalio your national committeeman tracy mccracken and mrs mccracken your next u s senator ray whitaker your next u s congressman hep armstrong ladies and gentlemen i first of all want to express on behalf of my sister and myself my great gratitude to all of you for being kind enough to have this breakfast and make it almost lunch i understand from tracy that some of you have driven nearly three or four hundred miles to be here this morning yesterday morning we were in iowa and since that time we have been in five states south dakota north dakota montana colorado and now wyoming we have come therefore all of us great distances and i think we have come great distances since the democratic convention at los angeles i know that wyoming is a small state relatively but it is a fact that wyoming which was not talked about as a key state in the days before the convention when they were talking about what california and what pennsylvania and what new york and illinois would do at the convention not very many people talked about what wyoming would do and yet as you know wyoming did it so you can expect in other days other candidates will all be coming here i don t know whether it is going to be that close in november i don t know whether mr nixon and i will be three votes apart but it is possible we will be if so wyoming having gotten us this far we would like to have you take us the rest of the way on november 8 my debt of gratitude therefore to everyone in this room and everyone at the head table goes very deep as gale said i have been to this state five times my brother teddy has been here 10 times and i think that the kennedys have a high regard and affection for the state of wyoming bobby has been here i guess several times we have been here more than we have been to new york state i don t know what the significance is but in any case i am delighted to be back here this morning i am delighted to be here because this is an important election and because wyoming elects not only a president of the united states this year but it elects a u s senator and a congressman the electoral college and the organization of the states is an interesting business new york has 15 million people wyoming has 300 000 people you have 1 congressman they have many congressmen you have more than that odd people well they have a few in new york i guess but in any case you have two senators and new york has two senators this causes a good deal of heartburn in new york but it should be a source of pride and satisfaction to you that when wyoming votes it votes the same number of u s senators as the state of new york and the state of massachusetts and the state of california all states are equal and therefore the responsibility on the people of wyoming is to make sure that they send members to the u s senate who speak not only for wyoming who serve not only as ambassadors from this state but also speak for the united states and speak for the public interest and that i think has been the contribution which senator o mahoney has made to the u s senate and gale mcgee now makes they speak for this state they speak for its interests they speak for its development they speak for its needs but they also speak for the country and therefore our system works and wyoming and the united states flourish together i think we have a chance to carry on that tradition to send as a successor to senator o mahoney who grew up in chelsea mass and who saw the wisdom and came west i think we have a chance to carry on that tradition when you elect ray whitaker as u s senator next november 8 actually as you know the constitution of the united states confines and limits the power of senators we are given the right to approve presidential nominations and to ratify treaties but the house of representatives is given the two great powers which are the hallmark of a self governing society one the power to appropriate money and the second is the power to levy taxes if you don t like the way your taxes are if you don t like the way your money is being spent write to the house of representatives not to the u s senate because our powers and responsibilities are somewhat different therefore in sending a man to fulfill these two functions we want a man of responsibility and competence and energy i therefore am sure that the people of this state will send to the house of representatives to share in the great constitutional powers given to that body hep armstrong with whom i served in the navy and hope to serve in the government of the united states next november during this campaign there are many efforts made to divide domestic and foreign problems and i don t hold that view i think there is a great interrelationship between the problems which face us here in the united states and the problems which face us around the world i think if the united states is moving ahead here at home the u s power and prestige in the world will be strong if we are standing still here at home then we stand still around the world i think in other words as gale mcgee suggested that the 14 points of woodrow wilson were the logical extension of the new freedom here in the united states and the good neighbor policy of franklin roosevelt had its counterpart in his domestic policy of the new deal and the marshall plan and nato and the truman doctrine carried out in foreign policy under the administration of harry truman and point 4 all had their logical extension in the domestic policy of president truman here in the united states i say that because i think that there is a direct relationship between the efforts that we make here in the sixties here in the west here in the state of wyoming here in the united states and what we do around the world two days ago i spent the day in tennessee i think that there is a direct relationship between what was done in the tennessee valley by franklin roosevelt and the democratic party in the thirties and what other countries in africa and the middle east and asia are attempting to do to develop their own natural resources i stand and you stand today in the middle of the great plains of the united states there are great plains in africa and in my judgment africa will be one of the keys to the future the people of africa want to develop their resources they want to develop their resources of the great plains of africa and they look to see what we do here to develop the resources of the great plains of the united states i don t think that there can be any greater disservice to the cause of the united states and the cause of freedom than for any political party at this watershed of history to put forward a policy for developing the resources of the united states of no new starts i don t say that we can do everything in the sixties but i say we can move and start and go ahead and i think it is that spirit which separates our two parties i come from massachusetts but it is a source of satisfaction and pride that the two americans who did more to develop the resources of the west both came from new york theodore roosevelt and franklin roosevelt and they did it because they saw it not as a state problem not as a regional problem but as a national opportunity and it is in that spirit that i look to the future of the great plains of the united states in the sixties we are going to have over 300 million people living in this country in the year 2000 many of them will live in this state we are going to have to make sure that we pass on to our children a country which is using natural resources given to us by the lord to the maximum that every drop of water that flows to the ocean first serves a useful and beneficial purpose that the resources of the land are used whether it is agriculture or whether it is oil or minerals that we move ahead here in the west and move ahead here in the united states i think that there is a direct relationship between the policy of no new starts in developing our water and power resources and irrigation and reclamation and conservation and the fact that our agricultural income has dropped so sharply in the united states in recent years and the fact that we are using our steel capacity 50 percent of capacity pittsburgh wyoming montana wisconsin are allied together a rising tide lifts all the boats if we are moving ahead here in the west if we are moving ahead in agriculture if we are moving ahead in industry if we have an administration that looks ahead then the country prospers but if one section of the country is strangled if one section of the country is standing still then sooner or later a dropping tide drops all the boats whether the boats are in boston or whether they are in this community i can assure you that if we are successful that we plan to move ahead as a national administration with the support of the congress in using and developing the resources which our country has this is a struggle not only for a better standard of living for our people but it is also a showcase as edmund burke said about england in his day we sit on a conspicuous stage what we do here what we fail to do affects the cause of freedom around the world therefore i can think of no more sober obligation on the next administration and the next president and the next congress than to move ahead in this country develop our resources prevent the blight which is going to stain the development of the west unless we make sure that everything that we have here is used usefully for our people the tennessee valley in tennessee the northwest power development the resources of wyoming all harnessed together the missouri river the columbia river the mississippi river the tennessee river all of them harnessed together serve as a great network of strength a stream of strength in this country which is going to be tested to its utmost so i come here today not saying that the future is easy but saying that the future can be bright i don t take the view that everything that is being done is being done to the maximum i think the difference between the republicans and the democrats in 1960 is that we both think it is a great country but we think it must be greater we both think it is a powerful country but we think it must be more powerful we both think it stands as the sentinel at the gate for freedom but we think we can do a better job i think that has been true of our party ever since the administration of theodore roosevelt and i think we can do a job in the sixties i have asked senator magnuson who is the chairman of our resources advisory committee to hold a conference on resources and mineral use here in the city of casper in the state of wyoming during the coming weeks because i think we should identify ourselves in the coming weeks with the kind of programs we are going to carry out in january if there is any lesson which history has taught of the administrations of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt it is the essentiality of previous planning for successful action by a new administration unless we decide now what we are going to do in january february march and april if we should be successful we will fail to use the golden time which the next administration will have i come here today speaking not for wyoming or massachusetts but speaking for a national party which believes in the future of our country which will devote its energies to building its strength and by building our strength here we build the cause of freedom around the world thank you dem jfk23 9 60b john_f _kennedy obviously that is the key how can we stop the advance of world communism how can we maintain the peace how can we maintain our security how can we live on the same globe as the communists both of us having a hydrogen capacity and survive i would say that is the great problem that is going to be before the next president of the united states in addition the problem before him is how a free society can successfully compete with a totalitarian society briefly i would suggest the next president of the united states should consider doing the following things maybe not in the order of their importance but all of them should be done soon in the first place i would request the congress to appropriate additional funds particularly for strengthening our conventional forces for speeding up the minuteman and several other of our missile programs in order that we may not move through a missile gap period in the years 1961 1962 and 1963 i think it is possible by a reunification by a more effective unification of our armed forces and senator symington of missouri has been appointed chairman of a committee which is making a study now of the pentagon to see if we can provide a more effective organization within the pentagon more effective purchasing programs and all the rest it may be possible for us to save some money i hope it is but i would strengthen the armed forces of the united states we deal not only with the soviet union but we deal with the chinese communists and the whole debate is whether the chinese communists will be successful in their viewpoint which is that communist conquest of the world can only come by war we have to look forward to the day when the chinese communists will have a missile capacity and a hydrogen capacity dedicated to the proposition that war is the solution and that they could survive it and we could not so i think we better make a better effort there secondly i think we are to parley if we are strong if we maintain our defenses if we are second to none we are in a better position to negotiate winston churchill said 11 years ago you cannot negotiate successfully with the communists unless you do so from a position of equality one of the reasons we have been unable to secure an effective disarmament policy in outer space was because the soviet union was ahead of us and they said they would not agree to any disarmament of outer space unless we also abandoned our bases overseas because they said they would be giving up their lead in other words maintaining a position of equality permits you to negotiate more successfully it is a source of concern to me that this government has had less than 100 people scattered through the entire federal government working on the subject of disarmament i would put more people into it i would indicate our desire not only to maintain our strength but also to provide for orderly disarmament thirdly i would hope that the united states could make for effective judgments of the events that are going to occur i mentioned our aid to latin america being a result of our difficulties with castro i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa we talk now of what we are going to do about africa but the problems have been there for many years i said earlier at dinner tonight that the united states offered 300 scholarships to the congo they never talked about the congo before june there are only 12 or 15 college people in all of the congo is it any wonder that they have difficulty running a free society did we ever concern ourselves with the educational need of africa in the last 10 years we give less than 200 scholarships for all of africa by the federal government to study here in the united states and yet the need for africa is not only economic development funds but to educate its men and women if they are going to maintain their societies so i would have thought it would have been possible for us to make some judgments some years ago third i would say also that the united states is going to face a severer crisis and a serious problem for us in the case of india in the winter of 1961 the indian 5 year plan is coming forward i think india represents the best chance we have in the underdeveloped world thirty five percent of the people of the underdeveloped world live in india it has a distinguished head of government it has an excellent civil service it has good economic planning and staggering problems if india fails to solve her economic problems if her economic growth increases marginally year by year and the chinese communists starting at the same level as the indians did in 1950 move ahead 10 12 percent in their economic growth then of course the battle for supremacy in asia will have been lost i think long term loans of the kind that made the united states so rich we built the economy of the west the railroads and all the west mostly on the funds that were loans to us for private purposes from europe at the beginning of this century i think that the united states from the point of view of public loans and i have supported the strengthening of the development loan funds should provide assistance with other rich western european countries particularly the germans and i hope the japanese who will join with us in assisting india to make an economic breakthrough there are many other areas but just let me say that i have had a strong conviction for many years and i spoke of the matter in the case of indochina and later in algeria that the greatest asset we have is the desire of all these people to be free and independent therefore if the united states would associate itself with that drive if the united states would be known as we used to be known as the friend of freedom not only for ourselves but also for people all around the world and one of our difficulties has been that we have talked about the enslavement of eastern europe and never said a word about africa for the last 10 years unless we stand for the principle as it affects our friends as well as our enemies then we really lose our moral standing and we lose identification with what is the most powerful force in the world today and the force that represents the greatest source of strength for us we want to be independent we want others to be independent and they want to be independent therefore i have felt that the united states for some years should speak strongly for independence for all people eastern europe and africa and latin america antidictators whether it is castro or some other dictator who may be friendly to us because these people are going to be independent and when they finally are i want them to say the united states are our friends they believe what we believe that the communists are our enemies may i say in closing that you have been extremely generous tonight and i am most honored to have had a chance to come tonight i am grateful for the courtesy and attention which you have given running for the presidency is a very sobering responsibility president moyle said today you are not as gay as you used to be well i think it is a very difficult and somber time in many ways this election is more important than the election of 1932 because in 1932 what was at stake was the preservation of freedom in the united states and now what is at stake is the preservation of freedom around the world i really believe that the united states is the great hope for freedom if we meet our responsibilities if we meet our obligations if we maintain our strength if we build our educational systems if our economic growth is increasing each year if we develop our resources if we build a strong and vital society here in the united states then i think we can lead the free world so i come here tonight as a candidate for the oldest party in the world that is successfully operating today the democratic party and i come with some pride in a party which has produced at critical times men like jefferson jackson wilson roosevelt and truman i hope that the democratic party i hope that our party can play a useful role today i hope this election will not sink to be a name calling contest between my opponent and myself i hope we serve a great national purpose of presenting to the american people alternative courses of action and i think if we do that and that requires the effort of all of us not merely the candidate on one level or another but all of us i think the democratic party can serve once again i will close by reminding you of the election of 1860 when as lincoln said the question was whether the nation would exist half slave and half free now the question is whether the world will exist half slave and half free and in that campaign of 1860 lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk23 9 60c john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague in the senate ted moss congressman king senator mcgee of wyoming your next governor of utah governor to be barlocker your next congressman to be blaine peterson mrs price distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for your kindness and generosity to the democratic party and its candidates i am deeply touched not as deeply touched as you have been by coming to this dinner but nevertheless it is a sentimental occasion i wish there were some other way to have a party run but there is no substitute than to call on our friends i was in new york last week we were trying to raise some support for the party and president truman told me that in 1948 his train was pulled off the tracks three times because they could not get up the carfare to keep it moving but they got it up finally and they won i think we are going to win and we are grateful to you for your help in the last 2 days we have traveled from iowa south dakota north dakota montana wyoming colorado and tonight utah and we leave later tonight for chicago i don t think we have increased the wisdom probably of any of the audiences that have listened but nevertheless i do feel that here in the western united states there is a great recognition of what we are talking about and that is our great interest in seeing these states and our country strong we have engaged in some debate in recent weeks we have been criticized because the argument has been made that we are downgrading the united states we don t downgrade the united states we have faith in the united states we feel it can do better and we feel it must do better if it is going to maintain its own freedom and the freedom of those who look to us for leadership i think this is an important election in a sense of course every election is important but i do think the election of 1960 is particularly important because what we are and what we do and the kind of leadership which we give can make a decisive difference not only to our own security but to those who look to us for friendship and help we have serious problems that are facing us in the sixties in the united states but far more serious problems facing us around the world my chief disagreement with the republicans in the field of foreign policy has been that they have not been able to pierce the veil of the future to make a judgment as to what problems are coming and then to offer solutions i was impressed and admired the speech that the president of the united states made at the united nations and i have been impressed by the effort that has been made in recent months to provide a more effective policy toward latin america but in the case of both africa and latin america the hour is late the world is moving fast our role and our position have changed and i do think it is vitally important in those areas and in other areas that we precede events that we do not move after them in other words i do not like to see the united states offer assistance to latin america as a result of difficulties in cuba i would like to see us offer the hand of friendship to latin america because of a traditional conviction that the united states cannot maintain its freedom unless latin america is a strong and viable and growing hemisphere the same is true of africa i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the foreign relations committee we have given comparatively few scholarships to students who come over from africa each year less than 200 for the whole continent if there is any great need far exceeding any great shortage it is in educated men and women who can maintain a free society you are familiar with what has happened in the congo but what is happening in the congo is happening in every country in africa called on to maintain their freedom there are eight new countries in africa in the last 2 months the united states does not have yet an ambassador in any of them four of them are represented by one man a charg d affaires who is a former consul four of them have no representatives of the united states even though they have been independent for the last 2 months the world is moving and changing and i do not think we have demonstrated an ability to keep up with it two hundred scholarships for all of africa and yet when the crisis began in africa as a result of the belgians leaving we suddenly offered 300 scholarships to the congo alone couldn t it have been possible for us to make a determination that freedom was moving through africa as it is through the rest of the world that self government was going to eventually come and that the united states should hold out the hand of friendship to these people so that they could be prepared to maintain their freedom what is true of africa latin america and asia i think has been true of the conduct of our foreign policy in the last 8 years i think there is a basic difference between us it is that the domestic policies which great democratic presidents have offered in this century have had their logical application in successful foreign policy woodrow wilson s new freedom had its logical application in the 14 points franklin roosevelt s good neighbor policy was the foreign partner of his domestic policy the new deal and harry truman s fair deal had its application in foreign policy in point 4 and the marshall plan and nato and the truman doctrine if a country is moving ahead here at home if it is solving its own problems if it has been able to attract people of imagination and vigor to the government then i think its foreign policy is also on the move because the same problems that face us here at home face us in different forms abroad the ability to predict with some degree of certainty the problems that are just over the horizon that will be upon us 6 months from now or a year from now i think through its history though there have been exceptions through its history this is a contribution which the democratic party has made from the time of jefferson through jackson s administration through that of grover cleveland through woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and adlai stevenson s candidacy i think the democrats have looked to the future they have spoken not for private interests but for the general good i think we are called on i hope for further service in the coming days this is not just a contest between mr nixon and myself it is a contest between two parties it is a contest between your u s senator ted moss and senators who do not share his progressive views it is a contest between the members of the house dave king and the things he stands for and the things which the republican party has stood for it is a contest between our intellectual vitality and curiosity and a point of view which i think has dominated the thinking of this administration for too many years in both domestic and foreign policy we think the best of this country and we want to do the best for it we talk about a lack of leadership only because we know that this country has unbounded energy and a desire to be of service so i come tonight as the candidate for the democratic party asking your help in this state in this campaign ted moss and dave king has shown what can be done the primary in this state was most encouraging i don t give any stakes to mr nixon in this campaign they are all going to be fought over and i think that utah which played a great role in the convention last july which was most helpful and generous to me in nominating me i think that this contest may be close enough so as goes utah so goes the nation and if that is so we want to have it go in the right direction thank you i suppose campaigns are really like parades the music and a lot of confetti and dust and then the candidates pass and move on to another state we are leaving you here so the contest is really in your hands in this state six weeks to go i hope that it is possible for us to try to communicate our desire to serve our strong faith in this country our feeling on domestic policy and foreign policy we can do better our feeling that the greatest days of this country are still ahead and that though we move through a difficult future we are identified with the best of causes my optimism for the future for the country and for the united states and the cause of freedom really goes to our experiences of the last few years in eastern europe in asia and africa if there is any lesson which the last 10 years has shown to me and it is a lesson that i have been particularly interested in in algeria and indochina it is that the strongest force in the world today is the desire to be independent this is going to cause us all kinds of trouble in the next 10 years people who used to support us will be neutral but in the final analysis it is our greatest source of strength we desire to be independent so do they they desire to be independent of us they desire to be independent of western europe but they also desire to be independent of the soviet union and the chinese communists we do not desire to dominate them they do therefore if we can associate ourselves with this great tide and it has been a source of regret to me since the end of world war ii that we have not associated ourselves with it then i think we can move with history and we can help form it and help shape it and by the year 2000 the tide will have turned against the communists and in the direction of freedom we in other words fit in with the basic movement of our time the communists do not therefore while there are a great many clouds on the horizon and there are a great many uncertainties about africa latin america and asia and eastern europe i think that we represent the way to the future if we associate with it if we are identified with it and that is why i was particularly pleased with what the president said yesterday if we associate with it if we become part of it then our security is assured and our leadership is assured and i think that is a contribution which the democratic party can make in the field of foreign policy and the security of the united states thank you dem jfk24 10 60a john_f _kennedy senator douglas otto kerner the next congressman from this district dick estep ladies and gentlemen i come here this noon to this community of peoria and ask your support in this campaign i come here as the standard bearer for my party as a member of a party which believes in progress which believes it vitally important that this city and this state and this country begin again a great movement forward if you live in peoria or illinois or in the united states you know that what this administration has done the basis upon which mr nixon runs for the presidency that we have never had it so good is wholly wrong this country cannot afford to stand still any more i believe the choice is very clear and very sharp the areas of disagreement between mr nixon and i involve very importantly the welfare of this country mr nixon runs on the slogan we ve never had it so good and i run on the slogan that we are going to have to do better as citizens of this country all we can do is try to present the issues and the different positions we take on the great matters that disturb our country but you as citizens on november 8 must make your judgment of what you want this community to be what you want this state to be what you believe we must do as a nation what responsibilities and obligations we must meet as citizens and i believe the choice is between those who feel that what we are now doing is good enough who feel that there is no urgency to the great matters which face us at home and abroad who are not concerned to be second in outer space who are not concerned about our deteriorating position around the world who are not concerned that we are moving into a period when we may be second best to the soviet union even in military power well i am concerned and i believe that you are concerned and that this country of ours which deserves the best from us cannot possibly in the early revolutionary years of the sixties be led by people who are indifferent to the great problems which sweep across the horizon of the united states i want to make it very clear that the problems which will disturb us as americans are difficult we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years in order to maintain full employment our farm income in the last 8 years has dropped 25 percent we are now using our steel mills only 50 percent of capacity here in this community where you rely on building road building material you have laid men off seven out of the eight international harvester plants in illinois have laid men off in this month of october because the farmers income has dropped we are producing today half as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union our rate of economic growth is one third theirs we have nearly 4 million people out of work and 3 million working part time i don t think this is good enough we represent not only ourselves but we represent the hope of freedom around the world and this country i believe and this is the issue has to pick itself up and start moving forward again if you are satisfied with administration policy on agriculture if you feel that employment security in this community and the country is sufficiently good if you feel that the united states is moving ahead around the world that our prestige has never been higher then i would vote for mr nixon but if you believe we can build a better society that we can provide better opportunity for our people that we can enforce constitutional rights for all americans regardless of their race and regardless of their religion if we choose to build in this country the kind of society which causes people around the world to say there is where i want to go that is the example i want to follow we are a revolutionary country mr khrushchev s system is as old as egypt but unfortunately in recent years his outward thrust has had more vitality people around the world have the image of america as a middle aged society which has seen its brightest days i don t agree with that view i want mr khrushchev to know and i want mr castro to know and i want people around the world to know that a new generation of americans is going to lead this country the republican party and the democratic party have entirely different histories and an entirely different approach we stand as we stood in other years in the other great years of our history we stand for the forward look beyond the horizons of present experience i believe that the 1960 s are going to be the most challenging in our history but i believe they can also be our brightest days we have been chosen by history to be the great defenders of freedom at a time when freedom is under attack all around the globe the next 10 years may well be decisive and i don t think any american wants historians to write that these were the years when the tide began to run out for the united states i believe americans want to say again that we believe in this country that our ability to meet our assignments is unlimited that our brightest days are still ahead and that we are going to go to work again i ask your help in this campaign i believe this choice is between those who are comfortable and those who are concerned those who want to serve our country and those who believe that now is good enough i hold the view whether i am elected president of the united states or whether i continue as a senator i hold the view that we wish to serve our country that it deserves the best from us that what we are now doing is not good enough that we need the best education that we must be first in outer space that we must build our economy that we must provide employment for our people that we must move again and i ask you to move with us i ask you to join senator douglas and otto kerner and your next congressman in strengthening this country in restoring its vigor in restoring its vitality in placing before the american people the unfinished business of our society all around the globe we hear the rumble of distant drums i want to beat that drum here in the united states i want us to begin to sing again that this society of ours and this economy can provide for our people and provide an example to freedom all around the globe and on that basis and on that issue i ask your support and help in this campaign in 1789 in hartford conn the skies at noon turned one day from blue to gray and by midafternoon the city had darkened over so densely that in that religious age men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came the connecticut house of representatives was in session and many of the members clamored for an immediate adjournment the speaker of the house one colonel davenport came to his feet and he silenced the din with these words the day of judgment is either approaching or it is not if it is not there is no cause for adjournment if it is i choose to be found doing my duty i wish therefore that candles may be brought i hope that all of us in a somber time in the life of our country may bring candles to help illuminate our country s way thank you dem jfk24 10 60b john_f _kennedy otto kerner your next governor of the state of illinois my friend and colleague in the senate of the united states your distinguished senator who speaks for illinois and the nation senator paul douglas ed nally who i hope will be elected the congressman from this district ladies and gentlemen i have been informed that this is a strong republican center but if this is the way we turn out in these strong republican centers what is happening to mr nixon all over the united states this is an important campaign and these are important issues which face our country and i appreciate your coming here prince bismarck once said that one third of the students i guess maybe you better get down there a little prince bismarck once said that one third of the students of german universities broke down from overwork another third broke down from dissipation and the other third ruled germany i do not know which third of the student body of this university is here today but i am confident i am talking to the rulers of america in the sense that all educated men and women have the obligation to accept the discipline of self government mr nixon and i campaign for the most important office in the free world but in my judgment this is more than a contest between mr nixon and myself it is more than a contest between the republican party and the democratic party it is a contest between the contented and the concerned between those who wish to stand still and those who wish to move ahead mr nixon runs on a slogan we ve never had it so good i run on the slogan we are going to have to do much better a good deal of unfavorable a good deal of comparison and most of it unfavorable is drawn between the lincoln douglas debates and mr nixon s and my weekly brief appearances on what s our line every friday night i am not sure however that we realize how different how numerous how sophisticated are the problems which face us as americans compared to the single significant crucial problem that faced mr lincoln and mr douglas a century ago now the next president of the united states and the senate and the house deal with monetary and fiscal problems that dwarf in significance those that they dealt with a century ago we deal with the problem of outer space the problem of how a free society can successfully maintain itself over a long period of time in competition with a totalitarian society which is able to mobilize all of its resources both human and material for the service of the state i cannot possibly predict what the great issues will be the new great issues in the next 4 or 5 years any more than in 1940 when wendell willkie and franklin roosevelt ran against each other anyone could predict that in 1941 and 1942 franklin roosevelt would be asked by albert einstein and others to support a tremendous expenditure of money in order to break the atom we cannot predict what new problems will come across our desks in the next 4 years we could not have predicted in 1952 when president eisenhower and mr stevenson debated that one of the great issues would be our recognition of the significance of space where franklin roosevelt broke the atom this administration failed to recognize the changing nature of our times and we now see the soviet first on the moon and what is true of outer space is true of every area of national and international government i will itemize that charge one month ago mr nixon said that if we had considered a program of aid to latin america in 1955 we might not have had a castro and why didn t we why does the united states today spend one tenth as much on information programs and radio programs to latin america as the soviet union one tenth as much we are the 14th country of the world in radio programs to africa today we brought more students from around the world 10 years ago to study here under federal auspices than we do today we had more students offered to the congo in the month of june for scholarships as a result of the explosion there than we offered to all of africa the year before do you know last year we had more students from thailand studying here than from africa south of the desert from all of those new countries more students from one country in asia than we did from all of africa do you know how many students came from africa last year all those countries 155 we had more people stationed in western germany in the embassy in 1957 than in all of africa i make the point because africa is new revolutionary it contains one fourth of all the members of the general assembly and this administration has not known that africa has existed until the congo blew up in our face do you know the next countries that are going to try to be independent and will be the portuguese colonies do you know how many students are studying in the united states from the portuguese to prepare for leadership none guinea asked us for 500 teachers last year do you know how many teachers we sent them one guinea got its independence from france 2 years ago i took us 2 months to recognize that independence it took us 8 months to send an ambassador the ambassador from the soviet union arrived there the day guinea was independent there are six countries in africa which are members of the united nations which do not have a single american diplomat in residence in them we spent less than 5 percent of our development loan fund meant for underdeveloped countries last year in africa i could go on and itemize it and the result is that on the admission of red china not one of the 16 new african countries voted with us more countries in asia voted against us than voted with us we are second in outer space but this administration has failed to recognize has failed to recognize that in these changing times with a revolution of rising expectation sweeping the globe the united states has lost its image as a new strong vital revolutionary society this administration will not release the poll which demonstrates that what are we going to do get them released next november or december they show that our prestige has dropped around the world and prove that the vice president is wrong when he says it is at an all time high if mr nixon believes that if he believes that he is misinformed if he does not believe it he should not run on it i run for the presidency in the most series time in the life of our country and these issues involve the security of everybody here in the next 10 years this globe around us is going to move in the direction of freedom or going to move in the direction of slavery the communist system is militant hopeful confident optimistic and it has been able to identify itself all too successfully with the desire of these people in the underdeveloped world to live a better life we have not done so cuba is only a phase of a great struggle which will take place in the next decade we talk about mr castro the great issue is what is the rest of latin america going to do mexico panama bolivia why should the president of brazil in his campaign feel it necessary to make a trip not to washington but to havana in order to get mr castro s blessing to be elected president of brazil anyone who sits in this university and looks at the far reaches of the world looks at the kind of competition which we are now undergoing recognizes that every phase of our national and international life is being tested our economic growth the development of our resources the science the technology and energy of our society ten years ago we produced twice as many scientists and engineers as the russians today one half in the last 9 months the united states had the lowest rate of economic growth almost in its history and the lowest rate of any industrialized society in the world the question you have to decide is is this good enough has this administration demonstrated its awareness of the world around us has it brought men and women to washington and sent them around the world who recognize our changing times or have they sent ambassadors who could not speak the language or even pronounce the name of the head of the state to which they were accredited we have failed in the department of defense with personnel who have averaged less than 18 months in office in this most technical world i do not think that what was good enough in the administrations of harding and coolidge and mckinley is good enough for today we are being tested as we have never been tested before and if we fail we fail not only ourselves but we fail the cause of freedom i come to this university which is a center of knowledge which is a center of truth and you cannot possibly tell me in 1960 that the american people are going to choose to sit still and give power and responsibility to those who in the last 8 years have demonstrated an unawareness of the basic nature of our times the kind of society we build here the kind of country we develop here that is the test of our ability to lead around the world what we are speaks far louder than what we say i come here today and ask you to join in rebuilding the strength and image of the united states as progressive society i want the people of the world to wake up in the morning and wonder what the united states is doing not what mr khrushchev is doing one hundred years ago in the campaign of 1860 lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming we see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for us i believe we are ready thank you dem jfk24 10 60c john_f _kennedy i want to thank judge kerner who i am confident will make a distinguished governor of the state of illinois my friend and colleague senator paul douglas who has served illinois and the country in war and peace john watson who will he a distinguished congressman from this congressional district and speak for it and for the united states our neighbor from across the river lieutenant governor of iowa and the next governor nick mcmanus ladies and gentlemen we have come to illinois which mr nixon keeps insisting he is going to carry because we have a different view of it we have come to illinois because here in the heartland of the united states this election may well be decided and i believe illinois and the united states are going to choose to move forward in 1960 and are going to support the democratic party on this great occasion this is not merely a contest between mr nixon and myself in a real sense it is not merely a contest between the republican party and the democratic party it is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned between those who say what we are now doing is good enough and those who wish to move this country in the 1960 s i believe that here in this state of illinois and in the neighboring state of iowa all of the problems which the united states has are incarnated in this state education the decline in agriculture unemployment layoffs at farm implement machinery civil rights better housing a stronger state a growing state a growing country a stronger country the cause of freedom around the world they are all linked together when farm implement workers in this community are laid off it is tied to a decline in agricultural income which is tied to a decline in steel production which is tied to a decline in national strength which is tied to a lack of leadership in our country they are all tied together there are no domestic issues and foreign issues there are issues which are tied together tied together to bring a stronger america and if this country is strong then we are strong around the world all of the speeches all of the statements all of the propaganda that we send around the world means nothing next to our own record what we are speaks louder than what we say and if we are moving here at home if we find imaginative solutions for the problems that disturb us if we are providing full employment for our people if we are providing the best educational system in the world if we are developing our natural resources if we are holding out a hand of friendship to people who look to us for help then we are not only secure but freedom itself is strong and growing mr khrushchev s power in the world rests on the economic productivity of the communist system the strength of freedom in the world and its vitality rests upon the economic productivity of the united states and one of the great issues of this campaign an issue which up to now mr nixon has not discussed is how this country is going to provide full employment for our people in the sixties how we are going to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years how we are going to find a rising income for our farmers how we are going to build a stronger america i believe the record of our party and the record of the candidates in this great question is on our side we have committed ourselves as a political party for the last 25 years to progress the republican party nor mr nixon have made that their best known products now as a voter in the united states and your obligation comes on november 8 when you must make the decision yourselves as to what kind of state and what kind of country you want all of the things that we now argue about all of the facts that the two sides bring out i believe you yourselves can make the judgment upon and it depends really on what kind of a country you want what kind of a state you want whether you believe that this country must pick itself up again whether you believe that we are sliding whether you believe we are doing enough your answer to that question determines which candidate and which party you will vote for now in making your judgment i would listen to more than the campaign speeches of all the candidates as governor smith used to say i would look at the record the bible said it even more eloquently by their fruits you shall know them mr nixon s record is written in 14 years in the congress and so is mine we have voted time and again on the great issues which now disturb us and i believe it a matter of public importance that that record should be spread out alongside the speeches of this campaign first on the question of agriculture mr nixon now puts the blame on mr benson s lack and i quote him of ability and success but only a few years ago he called mr benson one of the best secretaries of agriculture in our history he proposes in his new farm program a substantial expansion of the conservation reserve and yet as the republican senator from california and as vice president he voted six times in 3 years to cut democratic appropriations for soil conservation he says now we should accelerate our efforts in underdeveloped nations to stimulate commercial markets for our farm people but when in 1952 the department of agriculture sought funds for this very purpose mr nixon voted to cut it by their fruits you shall know them secondly is the nixon gap as an amateur student of american history i know very few candidates for office whose speeches and record are so far apart a second important problem for the people of this country is how we can maintain the best educational system in the world democracy demands more of us than any other system of education character self restraint self discipline how are we going to get the best education in the world one of the ways is to have the best trained teachers the vice president defeated funds for higher teacher salaries only a few days after he made a speech in chicago calling for higher teacher salaries his campaign position on paper supports federal grants to school districts burdened by federal employees or federal installations but as a senator he voted to cut the heart out of the program he calls now for matching grants to private colleges and universities so that every talented student can go to college but when that fight was being waged a few years ago he termed such a program an i quote him undesirable he calls now for a program of loans and grants for college classrooms and dormitories and we are going to have to build more dormitories and classrooms in the next 10 years in this country than we have in our history in 10 years we are going to have to build as many classrooms and dormitories as we have built in 170 years in order to take care of the number of boys and girls who will be applying for our colleges in 1970 and yet when this very proposal to provide loans for this purpose passed the congress this administration vetoed the bill twice and mr nixon never said a word the third area of concern to us all is the nation s health and mr nixon has an interesting experience in that regard his new position paper calls for matching grants to expand medical schools dental schools and medical research facilities and help for our medical students as well a wonderful program but as republican senator he voted against that very same program he calls for increased appropriations for medical research but he never lifted his finger when that program was slashed for the last 8 years he insists now that our older citizens have medical care but he called the bill which senator douglas and i fought for in the senate in august he called it extreme to provide medical care for the aged under social security and it was voted against by 32 out of 33 republicans he now talks about improving social security coverage but as a congressman he voted against it every single time this state of illinois depends upon rea power and so does the united states to light our farms mr nixon now says we must produce the power we need at the lowest possible cost but the record shows that as a congressman and senator he voted four times against the appropriations for rea four times against the tva and consistently against the power development and transmission lines in the missouri valley the grand coulee bonneville and the bureau of reclamation the housing if there is any state in the union that needs housing more it is illinois unless it is my own state of massachusetts there are 15 million american homes according to the last bureau of the census which are substandard mr nixon has issued a paper on housing and this i think is most revealing of all and one of the most endearing qualities of the vice president in his position paper issued in new york within the last 3 weeks he says that the housing act of 1949 has worked very well and do you know as a congressman he voted against it in that position paper he called for greater emphasis on middle income housing and he voted against that in 1950 he calls for a greater flow of housing credit so that the american people can buy homes at low rates of interest but he neglects to mention his vote as vice president to increase the interest rates on the gi housing bans high interest rates never built a single home and one of the reasons why we are building 200 000 less homes each year than we should to keep up with our population increase is because of the high interest rate policy of this administration seventh and finally is the gap between his promise and performance in the field of civil rights we hear a good deal in the winter and the fall of 1960 about civil rights do you know in 1953 and 1954 the republicans controlled the house the senate and the white house and do you know no civil rights bill ever came to the floor of either body it was not until 1957 that we passed the bill on voting and again this year mr nixon s own record he sends senator goldwater to campaign in the south and says he does not mean any of the promises he makes and sends senator scott of pennsylvania an erstwhile member of the truth squad who flunks his test to travel through the north and say he means it all senator scott was removed from the truth squad because he told the truth in one of the visits and they could not stand it i must say the vice president does show some signs of tension now he blames me for the increase in the cost of gold on the london market mr nixon if you are listening i did not do it i promise you well there is the record and i think the people of this country ought to know the record when i drive by in washington down pennsylvania avenue on the way to the capitol you pass the archives building and there is carved in stone the words what is past is prologue and i believe the people of this country the people of this city the people of this state who are about to make a decision to entrust the leadership of this country to one of two candidates should know the record and they are entrusting the job of president of the united states in the most difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country and as a citizen of this country who has served in the congress for 14 years i can say not as a democratic standard bearer but as an assured citizen that this country cannot possibly afford to drift in the next few years cannot possibly afford to stand still it affects not only our own security it affects the hope of freedom of all those who look to us for hope this is an important election involving a high office involving the future of this great country and i come here tonight and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us i can assure you that if we are successful on november 8 we will set before this state and country the unfinished business of the american society and this country will move again thank you dem jfk24 10 60d john_f _kennedy thank you i know you are all going home so i won t hold you up but i do come here today as the democratic standardbearer and come and ask your support in moving this country forward this administration has stood still and so has richard nixon for 14 years that i have been in the congress with him on all the great issues which disturb our country minimum wage social security unemployment compensation houses roads schools hospitals our parties have divided and we have divided and the great questions for the 1960 s are how is it going to be possible to move this country forward build its economy provide employment for its people and there are 4 million of them out of work today our steel mills work 50 percent of capacity and the caterpillar lays off 4 000 in the fall of 1960 we can do better than that the republicans have stood still on every great issue which affects our times and affects our country i believe as in 1932 the united states is going to decide to move into the sixties to provide work for our people to strengthen our country and set an example of what freedom can do around the world i come here today and ask your support in this campaign in building this country of ours thank you dem jfk24 10 60e john_f _kennedy thank you governor kerner senator douglas ed nielson distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen only in rockford do we have rallies at 1 o clock in the morning and 9 o clock in the morning this isn t the way they told me it was when i first decided to run for the presidency after reading about the schedules of the president i thought we all stayed in bed until 10 or 11 and then got out and drove around we are up early and up late and we are not going to slumber or rest until november 8 when the democrats are given the lead i am delighted to be here this county this community has not always been overwhelmingly democratic and i believe that the reception you have given to all of us that are running this year indicates that it is time that the vice president came back to illinois and started to look after it because i think illinois will go democratic on november 8 and so will the united states and i think it would be food for the local paper to report that rockford went democratic mr nixon as you know ordinarily runs as a rather ambiguous figure who is not really attached to any party because parties have no significance but the other day he went down there and senator goldwater got him in a room down in arizona and said dick you are a republican you have got to admit it so nixon came out of the room rather shamefacedly and said yes i am a republican and i endorse every republican candidate from top to bottom with great pride i have been saying that that i am a democrat for the past 14 years because i believe the democratic party is associated with progress because i believe the democratic party is associated with the public interest and i do not need barry goldwater or anyone else to remind me that parties are important in fairness to the vice president i should say that he went to jacksonville fla the next day and said party labels were not important i should bring that out but one of the reasons i am glad to be running this year in this state is because i run with three distinguished citizens of this state and country senator douglas with whom i have served in the u s senate who speaks for the public interest he and i have been together on the labor committee for a number of years he is now the chairman of the joint committee on the economic report on which i serve he is one of the most gifted figures in the senate in this century and i know that illinois and the country will benefit by his service in the future and by otto kerner who runs for the governor who has had a matchless reputation a matchless reputation for honor and integrity and energy as a distinguished judge and will be a great governor of the state of illinois and by your candidate for the congress ed nelson members of the house of representatives have great responsibility placed upon them by the constitution they are the representatives of the people therefore the power to tax to appropriate money other great powers are vested in the members of the house we need the best talent we can get in the sixties on every level every problem that faces us requires new solutions because the problems are new lincoln and douglas who debated in this state really debated one great question in every debate the question of the position of the union of the new states of slavery all tied to one great issue we now face issues involving monetary and fiscal policy full employment outer space control of arms control of weapons stronger defense our influence in latin america and africa and asia new countries new leaders new problems which swarm and pour across our desk and eventually rest on the desk of the next president of the united states harry truman used to have a sign which said the buck stops here and in 1961 the buck will stop on the desk of the president will involve more serious problems involving decisions more highly sophisticated than any in the long history of the united states how to maintain our people working how to maintain economic growth in a free society how to maintain agricultural income when our production increases 6 percent a year and our consumption 3 percent a year how can we maintain the best educational system in the world how can we be first in outer space and first across the street how can we extend our influence of freedom to all those billions of people who live in some cases on an income of 25 50 or 100 a year and look at the chinese and the russians and look at us and wonder in the sixties which road to take all these problems are new all of them are difficult there is no easy answer to any easy question but because they are difficult we need the best talent we can get in every branch of government we need the most vigorous foresighted farsighted intellectually curious well informed and responsible citizens we can get to serve the great republic in the dangerous and changing years of the 1960 s and that is what we intend to do and one of the ways in which we can do it one of the ways in which we can contribute to the maintenance of freedom around the world is to build a strong society here in the united states we really are the best advertisement for freedom if we are moving ahead if our people are working if we have a sense of national purpose then quite obviously people around the world who attempt to decide what they want to be and the kind of life they want to lead they are impressed by us the reason that franklin roosevelt was a figure to contend with in latin america and africa and asia in the thirties was not because american policy was intimately involved in the thirties in most of those areas it was because they realized he was attempting to move his country forward that his country had vigor and therefore it impressed those who needed those qualities in their own lives i have been critical in this campaign that the united states has not carried out a more vigorous policy of information around the world do you know today in the changing and vital area of africa that we are nearly 14th in radio broadcasts that the soviet union broadcasts 10 times as much as we do to latin america in spanish but in the final analysis what we are here as emerson said more than a century ago speaks far louder than what we say what we are doing here our sense of destiny and purpose and in the final analysis the great servants of freedom it is our obligation to build a vital society here which will spread its influence and the influence of freedom throughout the world one of the problems which we meet in building that vital society is how we care for those who have finished their work who are retired whose retirement is imminent what kind of security and what kind of a life we can give them it is on this issue that the parties have divided and it is on this issue that mr nixon and i have disagreed there is not anyone in this room probably who does not have some member of his family who is over the age of 65 who lives with an income which has dropped who live out their lives wondering what the future will hold and who represent a responsibility and an obligation to many of you i will give you what i believe we should do and it involves the lives of 17 million of our fellow americans who live on an average social security check of less than 78 a month nearly 9 million of them live on less than 1 000 a year and they live at a time when this income has dropped their needs for better health have increased they live in inadequate housing in many cases and as the ancient chinese used to remind us the test of a society is how it deals with its older people i believe we can do better in judging the two parties and in judging the two candidates i think on this question we have a strong difference of opinion when franklin roosevelt and the democratic congress passed the first social security act in the mid thirties 90 percent of the republicans voted against it in august of 1960 when we tried to pass a bill for medical care for the aged tied to social security 90 percent of the republicans voted against it now look at the contrast between the present bill which the administration signed and what we proposed under the present bill it is going to cost if fully used 2 billion a year from the taxpayer 1 billion in the states and 1 billion in the national government the bill was so bad that governor rockefeller of new york attacked it and refused to implement it it means before anyone can get medical assistance he must be medically indigent which is the phrase used in other words if he saved up 600 or 700 or 2 000 and the husband or the wife gets a heart disease or some other disease and it requires a medical bill of 500 or 600 to pay the doctors before they can receive assistance under the bill they must indicate that they are medically indigent they must take in effect a pauper s oath that they have no resources and then they can get a handout to help meet their medical obligation that is the republican approach we have proposed that medical care for the aged be tied to social security that all people who participate in social security will pay for their treatment which will average about 3 cents a day which will average about 10 a year during their working years and then when they are retired after they have contributed to that themselves they will receive assistance in paying their bills the doctors and the hospitalization and all the rest the measure is balanced financially it is actuarially sound it is in the tradition of social security there is no pauper s oath there is no commitment that we are medically indigent before we receive the assistance and it does not represent a drain on the treasury of 2 billion because it is paid for on the way now which of us is financially responsive which of us has concern for unreasonable expenditures which of us wants to meet the job or which of us opposes action in this field as we have for 25 years i believe mr nixon has led the wrecking crew not merely been a member of it in 1935 they opposed it in 1949 mr nixon himself and 110 other republicans in the house of representatives voted to cut out benefits for those who were disabled under social security in 1956 this republican administration opposed lowering the retirement age for women to 62 years in 1956 the republican administration and 33 out of 39 republican senators opposed an increase in benefits to meet the cost of living and after he became the vice president mr nixon did not appear in the senate to break a tie vote to increase payments to older people to the blind and the disabled and the measure lost and this is a record of progress this is a candidate who is going to lead the united states ahead in the sixties we are going to study it he announced in this campaign well we studied his record and the republicans record on this issue and in my judgment a sense of responsibility a program which has been identified as a matter of fact with the name of your senator senator douglas throughout the period of 25 years i believe in this area as in so many others which affect our policy at home and abroad this administration has stood still and so has mr nixon and in the 1960 s this country is going to have to move again all these things in my judgment in a great country like ours can be done better housing for our people care for their aged to which they contribute all these things can be done a stronger income a society that moves forward again and i want to make it very clear that i do not run for the office saying that these problems are easy we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years to maintain full employment in this country to find a job for everyone who will want to work will require that kind of expansion and it comes at a time when machines are taking the place of men this county is a rich agricultural county it relies primarily on agriculture and dairying the dairy farmers of this country on the average though this county does better than most average about 60 cents an hour in their pay their income has steadily dropped the reason has been of course that this administration has been manned by people with little imagination with really in my opinion no sense of the changes emerging around us i look at this county i look at illinois i look at the united states i look at outer space i look at africa i look at latin america and in all of the new problems which disturbed our lives in the fifties this administration has not responded it has not taken the initiative there are six countries in africa that are members of the united nations that do not have a single american diplomat in residence in any of the six we offered more scholarships to thailand a year ago than to all of south africa and tropical africa all these new countries that are going to hold the balance of power in the world we failed to be first in outer space and as a result mr allen the head of our information service has said that the united states now is regarded as second in science in many of the countries of the world to the soviet union because this administration regarded it as a bauble and because it was manned by mr wilson the secretary of defense who said he was not interested in spending money to find out why fried potatoes turned brown the point of the matter is that these are new times requiring new people and new solutions and i believe that in these kinds of times when this country must move when it must be inspired by energy when it must drive ahead if we are going to survive if we are going to defend freedom we cannot sit by and let the world move around us we have to move with it we have to lead it we don t want to be like the leader in the french revolution who said there go my people i must find out where they are going so i can lead them we want to lead them ourselves we want to direct them along the road to freedom self government independence their own masters and i think that is what they want but if we give the impression that we are taking a long siesta while all around us energy bubbles that the united states high noon was in the past that our best days were behind us and that we are a society reaching middle age i don t believe it this is a young and vital country its best days are ahead and i come to this county and i come to rockford in illinois and ask your support in making america move again dem jfk24 8 60 john_f _kennedy senator fenwick thank you for that generous introduction governor almond who from the day that i was nominated in los angeles has been my friend and counselor my running mate lyndon johnson and mrs johnson governor battle my friend and campaign chairman in this state bill battle members of the congress the next congressman from this district ralph kaul who will be one of the great ones dorothy mcdiarmid and members of this great democratic meeting in the state of virginia 170 years ago thomas jefferson and james madison left the state of virginia and went to new york on a botanical expedition up the hudson river after they had caught fish and butterflies they rode down the river and stopped in new york city and there they met aaron burr and the knights of st tammany and founded the modern democratic party a party which has united the country and the city the east and the west in the only and oldest national party in the history of the world i come here tonight not on a botanical expedition not to catch fish and butterflies but i come to the home of this party with lyndon johnson and ask for your help you started it you began the democratic party and i cannot believe in the most dangerous time in our country s history that virginia is going to say we will not join up again we ask your help and we are here tonight to begin this campaign virginia is an old state and it values the past but if there is any lesson that history has ever taught us it is that those who hold the past are the ones who move ahead this country was founded by men who valued the past and were revolutionaries to preserve it i cannot believe that there is anyone in the state of virginia who believes that this country should stand still who believes that everything that had to be done was done in the past who does not believe that there is any necessity for us to break new ground in the future if they are they should vote republican because that is what they are going to get standstill i know that there are some americans and some democrats who say that they have now developed a wonderful arrangement in washington the congress is democratic and the president is republican and nothing happens and isn t it wonderful thomas jefferson of the state of virginia was so anxious for this country to move that when he came back from europe after the constitutional convention he objected to george washington because the constitutional convention had agreed to the founding of the senate he said why is a senate necessary and as you know according to the story washington said why do i pour my coffee in a cup to cool it so we need the senate i don t want legislation so cooled off that after it passes the house and the senate that it is vetoed by a republican president and sent back to die i value the american constitution enough to believe that the checks and balances required by our system were written into the constitution the house the senate the legislative the executive the judiciary the federal government the state governments townships those are the checks and balances which permit freedom to develop and yet action to take place they have had a session of the congress for the last 3 weeks it has not been a happy experience but if the people will study it they will see that in the last 3 weeks we will have if the republicans are successful a microcosm of what will happen in the next 4 years of a congress in the hands of one party and an administration in the hands of another party with threats of vetoes with party war in the most dangerous time in the life of our country i think it is time to move i think this country wants to go ahead and the way to do it is to give us the responsibility or give the republicans the responsibility but don t divide it and end up with no one responsible finally let me say what i consider to be a most important issue in this campaign the republican orators are fond of saying that experience in foreign policy is the greatest issue in this campaign i agree but the issue is not merely the experience of the candidates it is the experience which the entire nation has gone through in the last 8 years and what an experience it has been never before has this country experienced such arrogant treatment at the hands of its enemy never before have we experienced a more critical decline in our prestige driving our friends to neutralism and neutrals to our right of hostility never before has the grip of communism sunk so deeply into previously friendly countries mr nixon is experienced in policies of weakness retreat and defeat during the past 8 years that he has presided over the national security council never in all that time in our country s history has our strength declined more rapidly than it has during the comparable period in terms of defensive strength and retaliatory capacity in terms of our alliances in terms of our scientific effort and our national reputation mr nixon may now say that he has been urging an acceleration of our defense effort all along and yet in his august 10 press conference the president said he knew of no such different viewpoint of the vice president adding certainly if there is he has not come to me with it why would anyone boast of presiding over the national security council during the years that it rejected the now accepted findings of the killian report the gaither report the rockefeller brothers report during the years it held back on our progress in missiles and space during the years it failed to come u p with one great single idea of international importance they say he has traveled abroad he has in vietnam he urged the french to continue to fight on formosa he implied our support of an invasion of the mainland of china in india he questioned nehru s right to be neutral in venezuela his goodwill tour provoked a riot and in the soviet union he argued with mr khrushchev in the kitchen it is true pointing out that while we may be behind in space we were ahead in color television but does anyone think for a single moment do they take the communists so lightly that they think mr khrushchev was diverted for a single moment from his objectives by an argument in the kitchen do they think he changed his plans pulled back his forces since that argument he could argue in the kitchen every day and move every night so let us talk about experience in this campaign let s talk about it let s talk about the experience of this nation let s learn from that experience to learn that neither smiles nor frowns and president roosevelt and president truman and president eisenhower had the same experience they all made the effort to get along with the russians but every time finally it failed and the reason it failed was because the communists are determined to destroy us and regardless of what hand of friendship we may hold out or what arguments we may put up the only thing that will make that decisive difference is the strength of the united states three years ago i went to havana i was told that the american ambassador was the second most powerful man in cuba probably he should not be but he is not today we have within 90 miles by the same group who have stood up to khrushchev we have castro who attacks us daily in the congo the most intimate adviser to the new prime minister is the soviet ambassador in laos where we have spent more money per capita than in any country in the world they are moving from neutralism to hostility and the reason is singlefold though it may vary in shape in every country and the reason is the same impression you get from standing by a beach if you look at the ocean and watch it you see no change but if you leave it and come back in 3 hours or 5 hours you may see that the tide has run out we standing here tonight cannot with certainty make a judgment of our times or the last 5 years or the last decade but i think there is a great danger that history will make a judgment that these were days when the tide began to run out for the united states these were the times when the communist tide began to pour in these were the times when people began not to worry what they thought in washington but only to wonder what they thought in moscow and peking i run for the office of the presidency not because i think it is an easy job in soft times i think it is going to be the most difficult and hazardous year in our country s history this is a time of danger i don t think anyone should vote for the democrats if they are satisfied with what is happening if they feel that our status is fine if they are not concerned by the fact that last year we had the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world if you are satisfied then i think this country should make mr nixon the president but if you feel that we have unfinished business that our generation faces the same kind of challenge that franklin roosevelt faced in 1933 then i say to you that this country will move and the democratic party will lead it thank you dem jfk25 10 60a john_f _kennedy mr mayor otto kerner the next governor of the state of illinois paul douglas present and future u s senator the candidate for congress dorothy o brien the candidate from the next district lieutenant governor to be shapiro and my sister eunice mrs sargent shriver she comes from illinois ladies and gentlemen i come here today as the democratic standard bearer in a most important election i have served in the house and the senate for 14 years and after all that time without downgrading the importance of the congress i recognize that i run for the key office not only in the united states but also in the free world on the desk of the next president of the united states in 1961 will come questions involving our defenses in the far east our relations with latin america our relations with africa the whole question of what nato is going to become what it can be a crisis over berlin the position of the united states in outer space the whole question of our economic growth all these are questions which disturb the life not only of the president of the united states but of all of you i come as the democratic standard bearer with full recognition maybe you can just sit down let me put in not more than 4 minutes what i consider to be the basic issues which separate mr nixon and myself and the republican party and the democratic party in 1960 first it is a question which involves the future of every citizen of the city of aurora this community depends upon industry the whole question it is hard to talk girls i know i only have 3 more minutes one of the questions which mr nixon and i have been discussing in this campaign is the whole question of economic growth that is not an argument which is of interest only to economists it concerns the job of every man and woman here we have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next ten years to provide full employment in the united states 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years and we are going to have to do that at a time when machines are taking the place of men when a machine takes the job of 5 men or 10 men where are those men going to get jobs ten out of the twelve international harvester plants in the state of illinois have shut down for a month or 2 months this fall in illinois anyone who does not realize that this is one of the great problems which is going to face us as citizens anyone who does not realize that today we are only using 50 percent of the capacity of our steel mills today in the last 5 or 10 years the farmers of illinois and the farmers of the united states their income has dropped 30 percent this problem goes not only to the question of employment but it goes to the question of our strength in the competition with the soviet union we have increased our economic growth on the average of about 2 5 percent in the last 8 years western germany has increased theirs 5 percent the soviet union 7 5 to 8 percent unless we grow more unless we employ fiscal and monetary policies that stimulate employment we are going to have a recession in the winter of 1961 and it is going to be difficult to find those 25 000 new jobs a week this is only one of the issues which separate our two parties agriculture full employment education development of our resources care for the aged a higher minimum wage an economy that is moving a country that is moving a country which stands for vitality and energy and strength those are the issues which separate the two parties i have here a clipping from this morning s paper it represents the results of a survey which was conducted all around the world to ask the people of the world whether they thought the soviet union or the united states was the stronger military power and do you know what the survey found do you know what the state department found that a majority of the people in all 10 countries thought the soviet union was no 1 how do you like that as americans to know that the people of the world which used to regard the united states as the strongest power as the great hope for freedom now regard the soviet union as no 1 that is the question which disturbs me as an american and you have to decide as citizens of this country 2 weeks from today you have to make your decision of what you want this country to be what you want illinois to be how ready you are to move this country forward that is the question which separates mr nixon and myself it is a contest between a candidate mr nixon who argues that our prestige has never been higher in spite of the record who says that everything is being done in its good time who says our influence has never been greater and between a candidate myself who says that we are going to have to do much better you have to decide which you believe what you want it is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned between those who believe we can do better and those who say we have never had it so good and all of you as citizens of this country as defenders of freedom 2 weeks from today must make your judgment of what you believe what you hope for our country your willingness to see us stand still and grow fat or your willingness to pick yourselves up and the country and move ourselves forward and reestablish our leadership that is the question no one can make that judgment except you no one can make it except you two weeks from today you are going to make it one hundred years ago in the campaign of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote a friend fortunately as the bible tells us it rains on the just and the unjust there are some republicans here and it is raining on them too one hundred years ago abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe i am ready now 100 years later in the great times of 1960 we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk25 10 60b john_f _kennedy i want to express my appreciation to barney ross who comes from this community who served with me in the pacific and who is a great friend of mine barney i want to thank you also i want to hope that this state will show its usual good judgment and send paul douglas back to the u s senate to serve our country as well as illinois and judge kerner to be the next governor of the state of illinois tyler thompson who is running for the congressional seat in this district ladies and gentlemen i come here to a district which is not overwhelmingly democratic in order to ask your support in this campaign as citizens you have to make a judgment about the candidates what we stand for what our view is of the future i want to make it very clear that mr nixon and i differ on many issues he presents his views of what he thinks is best for the country and i present my views but i think the biggest difference and the most significant one and the one that you should consider most carefully is our judgment of our present position in the world and what we must do as citizens in order to build our strength mr nixon runs on a program of saying that our prestige has never been higher do you have the paper here mr nixon 2 weeks ago and i am ready to let this campaign make a judgment on which one of us is informed he made a statement on our debate that our prestige in the world has never been higher you may recall that this is the new york times of tuesday october 25 1960 the front page here is what it says the united states survey finds others consider the soviet mightiest summer poll shows belief is nearly unanimous among the nations sampled lead is expected to hold some expect gap to widen then the story starts an almost unanimous belief that the soviet union is the leading military power was disclosed in a worldwide survey conducted for the u s government during the summer reliable sources abroad report according to these sources the survey also disclosed unanimity among the free and uncommitted nations of the world that the soviet union would maintain and possibly widen its lead over the united states through the next decade these are the major findings of a report drawn up by the office for research and analysis on the basis of the results of the survey the office is part of the u s information service now the fact of the matter is that this administration has refused to make these surveys public i asked mr nixon if he would the other night they have refused to give these surveys to the chairman of the senate foreign relations committee senator fulbright as late as a week ago and the reason is that they show that this administration and mr nixon have been wholly misinformed about our position in the world and this goes to your survival if the people of the world once get the idea that the russians and the the communists represent the strongest power how many of them will stay with us how many people in latin america africa and asia will decide that we represent the way of the future this is what this means once they come to the conclusion that the soviet union is a stronger society than we are what happens to us as leaders of the free world you are citizens of this country you have to make the judgment on what you want this country to be mr nixon has said in the last 3 weeks that our prestige is the highest it has ever been and that of the communists the lowest this survey shows how misinformed he is how wide is the gap between what he believes and what the facts are now is there anyone here who is prepared to say after reading this on the front page of the new york times what the opinion of us is around the world that there isn t time for us to pick ourselves up and start moving forward again that is the issue that you have to decide what do you want you live in this community your children go to school here you are concerned about your survival as a free nation and what we are now talking about is not popularity it is the willingness of the people to follow us to work with them and maintain their freedom to stay out of the communist bloc to stay out of communist influence to support us as the strongest society that is what this all means in the last years people around the world have come to the conclusion that we are not the strongest power now on that basis you must make your judgment on november 8 thank you dem jfk25 10 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen first i would like for you to know judge kerner candidate for governor in the state of illinois on the democratic ticket senator paul douglas the present and future united states senator and the candidate for congress from this district now let us see how many republicans do we have here would you put up your hands let me say that i think you ought to be commended for admitting it have we got any democrats here at all now have we got any citizens who have not decided yet who are open minded well we will talk to you ladies and gentlemen i will be very brief i just come here in this community which is mixed democrats republicans and independents because 2 weeks from today november 8 mr nixon and my work will be finished and then you have to decide you have to make these judgments but what is the area of difference between us what is the issue on which you should base your decision you should not only make a judgment of mr nixon and myself you should also make a judgment about yourselves what you want about what your view is of your country and your community about what your view of the future is whether you are satisfied today or wish to do better if you are satisfied if you feel happy about your life if you feel our country is meeting its responsibilities then you belong in mr nixon s camp but if you share the view that i hold very vigorously that this country is going to have to do better in the future that we have responsibilities to meet not only to ourselves but to the cause of freedom that we are anxious to make sure that in the future people decide that these days were great days in the life of our country that we must move forward we must stimulate our growth we must hold out an image to the world of a vigorous dynamic society if we are going to continue to lead the free world i believe that is the choice i don t think if we continue on our present basis that we will be the leaders of the free world we have a solemn choice to make i think this is an important election and i think the issue is quite clear between us not only our parties but also on the views we have taken in this campaign mr nixon i am sure says what he thinks and he has stated that he has run on a program believing our prestige is at an alltime high and that we never had it so good i don t run on that program at all i run on the program as a citizen of this country who has served it for 14 years in the congress and who is the standard bearer of my party i believe we are going to have to do much better unless there is some dissatisfaction that is what made this country that is what gave us the american revolution dissatisfaction with what was then going on i believe as a dissatisfied citizen as one who has the greatest possible confidence in this country that we are going to have to meet a higher standard as a nation and as leaders of the free world you have to decide now what you want thank you dem jfk25 10 60d john_f _kennedy i want to express my thanks to tyler and i hope that he is going to be elected the congressman from this district and i want to also say it is a pleasure to be here with otto kerner who is going to be the governor of the state of illinois and senator paul douglas who is going to continue to represent illinois and the nation in the united states senate you met my sister eunice let me say that mr nixon and i have one thing in common and that is that he just campaigns in republican districts i looked at his schedule in pennsylvania and he goes where all the republicans live that is what we are going to do we are campaigning where the republicans live i can t believe that any democrats live in lake zurich do they or barrington or milldale what about west dundee well we are going to take the democratic message out to west dundee and libertyville because this election ought to be won in these areas surrounding the great cities the suburbs suburbia or whatever you may call it people who make an independent judgment on what is best for their state their families their country the cause of freedom those are the issues they must decide upon where can they get a government a president a congress which will be responsible progressive which will strength the united states strengthen our influence around the world strike a blow for the cause of freedom build this country until it is stronger that is the issue in this campaign and i think it ought to be heard not merely in the great democratic cities but out in dundee and all the rest so that is where we are going today thank you very much dem jfk25 10 60e john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen first i would like to have you meet my sister eunice mrs sargent shriver who lives in illinois she said she has just been introduced well it is all right to meet her again here is otto kerner the next congressman from this district my friend and colleague in the u s senate paul douglas ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to you for coming today i have been campaigning in the state of illinois which is going to be a key state in the presidential election this state may well determine who will be the next president of the united states and you have to determine as citizens who you want that president to be and more important what are the things you believe he should stand for what are the things that he must do as the leader of our free country in order to maintain our strength around the world one of the subjects that is important to us all as citizens here in this community and around the country is how we are going to have an educational system second to none every child here in this community deserves to be well educated because as thomas jefferson said if you hope that people will be free and ignorant you hope for what never was and never will be in order to maintain a free society in order that we can maintain our independence in the coming year we have to have the best educated citizens in the world that involves a responsibility of the people in this country it involves a responsibility of the governor of the state and it involves the national government because all must work together for this great objective these communities of which this is typical have done more in the last 10 years to build schools and educate our children than ever in our history we had just as many children in school in 1930 as 1940 just as many in 1940 as 1950 but after 1950 in the last 10 years we increased the number of our children in schools by one third and that has meant that every homeowner in this district in this area bears a burden on a 15 000 or 16 000 house in these communities of which this is typical the property tax may be anywhere from 400 to 500 that is the most confiscatory tax of all the property tax even if you are out of work even if you had no income just by owning a home you have to pay that and a good deal of it goes to education the state has responsibility and i believe the national government has a responsibility and that responsibility was recognized from the beginning of our country when the northwest territory was settled of which this is a section 1 out of every 16 acres was put aside in order to sustain education in lincoln s administration in 1862 they set up the land grant act which built your university and others like it and set aside a certain amount of national territory to sustain education now the question is what should we do in the sixties what should the national government do in cooperation with you in order to maintain a strong educational system it can do two or three things and i support them first it can provide scholarships for our brightest children do you know that 35 percent of our brightest children never see the inside of a college after graduating from high school we can t waste that talent we need all the talent we can get so scholarships and loans for students who want to go to college but can t afford it we need them and they have a right to have an education secondly we need loans from the national government to build dormitories and classrooms for our universities because of the number of children that you are having we are going to have more buildings that have to be built for our colleges in the next 10 years than we built in the last 150 years that is a tremendous number we are going to have to double the number of children going to college in 1970 as in 1960 one of the ways by which that can be financed is by loans at low rates of interest to be repaid over a long period of time the third area where i believe the national government can play a role is federal aid to education in the areas for school construction and for teachers salaries there are many thousands of teachers who are underpaid there are many thousands of teachers with inadequate training i want to see the best teachers with the best training but make sure that they are adequately compensated otherwise we are not going to get the best talent and our children will suffer any time that a child grows up without the best education he dooms himself to a life of economic hardship in many ways his children s chances are not so good and it passes on generation after generation a good education is the most valuable resource that you can pass on to your children and i believe it incumbent upon us in the 1960 s to make sure that all of us cooperating in our respective fields to make sure that we do have a good educational system and this is one of the areas where i believe we have disagreed with the republican leadership and with mr nixon he cast the deciding vote after speaking about the need 2 weeks before for well paid teachers he cast the deciding vote in the u s senate against the bill which would have provided aid for teachers salaries these are the problems that we have to meet we build roads we build homes we also need schools i want to make it very clear that one of those areas where we are going to act and this is only one of the areas that need action will be in the field of education ten years ago the united states turned out twice as many scientists and engineers out of our schools as the soviet union today they turn out twice as many as we do and we need a better educated citizenry than any country to maintain a free society so i come here today to this community and ask your help in this area as in so many others in strengthening our country in building our country in making it more secure and making it an inspiration to all those who wish to be free i ask your help in this campaign thank you dem jfk25 10 60f john_f _kennedy judge otto kerner the next governor of illinois senator paul douglas my colleague in the u s senate and a distinguished spokesman for the united states hayes beall the next congressman ladies and gentlemen we have a baby back there i want to thank all of you who came out today this is a strong area in the state of illinois it is not a county that has been known for its democratic majorities but i do appreciate your coming out today i think your presence here whether you are republican or democrat whether you wish to click with dick or whether you wish to move this country forward that is really a strong slogan click with dick whatever your feeling may be of the united states and the state of illinois i appreciate your coming here and i think you come here because you recognize that this is an important election that the office of the presidency is key and whoever may be the next president whether it is mr nixon or myself will be faced with greater responsibilities and greater burdens because we all are than we have ever been in the long history of our country when the united states when the president has difficulties the united states has and i want to make it very clear that the united states is moving into a period which will feature great opportunities for us as well as great responsibilities and great burdens now what is my disagreement with mr nixon what is my disagreement with the republicans it is a very clear one my belief is that mr nixon runs for the office of the presidency without emphasizing in his campaign either because he is not informed or because he does not believe that this is the most serious time in the life of this country i do not detect any note of urgency in the speeches of the vice president you have to decide yourselves as citizens whether you believe that is what you want for the future of the country is it your judgment i will say this to those of you who are republicans is it your judgment that this country can afford to continue as it now is going do you really believe that the tide of history is moving in our favor do you really accept the word of mr nixon that our prestige do you really accept his judgment that our prestige has never been higher that our influence has never been greater do you really believe that the balance of power in the world is shifting with us and that historians will write 10 years from now that these were the great years of the american republic if you do you should click with dick but if you hold the view which i hold that this is a dangerous time that this is a time of challenge and opportunity that this is a time that requires the best of us that the united states has failed to recognize in its leadership that these are changing and different times in a in america africa and asia in western europe and eastern europe in outer space in our own country i note no sense of vitality i do not hear the president of the united states setting before the american people our national goals i read an article in life magazine what is our national purpose in this challenging time when the survival of freedom is at stake we have to wonder what our national purpose is the president of the united states is the voice of america he sets the national purpose and in my judgment the issue in this campaign is between the concerned and the comfortable those who believe what we are now doing is good enough and those who want to start out again here at home in the development of our economic growth in our relations with latin america in our relations with africa in outer space do you really believe this administration has come to grips with change the reason we have difficulty with mr castro is because we do not any longer influence the countries of latin america to join with us in any concerted plan of action the reason that countries of africa no longer support the united states and look to it is because we have been indifferent to the problems of that vital continent in 1957 we had more foreign service people stationed in west germany than we did in all of africa i want to make it very clear because you must make the final judgment i want to make it very clear that i am not a bit satisfied as a citizen of this country with our present rate of growth with our present image in the world with our present sense of national purpose i have unlimited faith in this country but i believe we have to decide and right up there on that plaque are the words we have to decide whether our generation of americans is going to make a sacrifice and a service to our country that the times require or are they going to put a plaque up here 10 years from now that this generation of americans failed its responsibility that is the decision you make on november 8 what kind of a country and world do you want what you see as your responsibility as a citizen of this country i believe that issue sharply divides mr nixon and myself and on the basis that i want this country to resume its forward march i want us to look to the future and not the present or the past i want you to join me in serving this country and moving this country forward dem jfk25 10 60g john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen judge otto kerner the next governor of the state of illinois paul douglas the present u s senator and the next u s senator hayes beall candidate for the congress from this district and my sister eunice mrs sargent shriver who lives in illinois one of my sisters is married to someone who lives in new york one in california we realized long ago we have to carry new york illinois and california in any case i appreciate your coming out here today and i recognize that you come here today for this meeting because you share the view that this is an important election which involves the future of the united states and also because you realize that the office of the presidency is key i speak in the senate for massachusetts senator douglas for illinois senator engle for california but only the president of the united states speaks for california and illinois and massachusetts and he speaks for more than the united states he speaks for the free world i believe there are two basic responsibilities which the next president of the united states must meet one is our domestic strength the maintenance of full employment a strong and vital society a strong educational system the development of our resources and a moving america the second responsibility given to the president by the constitution and by the force of events is the conduct of foreign affairs and it is in this area that the great issues of war and peace of strength and weakness of ebb and flow will meet across the desk of the next president one of the issues in this area which has separated mr nixon and myself and on which you as citizens must render a judgment is whether the strength of the united states and its image around the world has increased or decreased is our prestige as mr nixon says at an all time high and that of the communists at an all time low this is an important question because prestige is not popularity prestige is the image which you give of a vital society which persuades other people to follow our leadership if once they begin to feel that the communist system represents the future and that we represent the past then all those people in western europe latin america and africa and asia who we wish to follow our example who we wish to be free if once they decide the future belongs to the communists and not to us here in elgin you suffer and we suffer across the country this has been an issue in our campaign i have said our prestige is not at its height mr nixon on the debate said it was the new york times this morning reported the results of the survey conducted by our information services this summer around the world and what their image was of the united states here is the headline on these findings which have been kept secret up to today united states survey funds others consider the soviet union the mightiest summer poll shows belief is nearly unanimous among the nations sampled the lead is expected to hold some expect the gap to widen since they have the idea that the communists and the russians are stronger than we are what happens to our alliance in western europe what happens to our commitment to berlin what happens to the nations of africa we saw the result of this on the vote on the admission of red china of the 16 new nations admitted to the united nations from africa do you know how many voted with us none not one voted with us on the admission of red china more nations voted against us from asia than voted with us the reason is right here because we are second in space because the soviet union economic growth is three times ours today and that goes to your job in elgin because they are turning out twice as many scientists and engineers as we are and because khrushchev looks with confidence to the future people begin to feel that our brightest days are in the past i don t share that view i want mr khrushchev and the world to know that a new generation of americans is taking over americans who fought in europe and in the pacific to maintain our freedom in world war ii and who are going to rebuild the image of america as a strong and vital society and that is the issue which you have to decide you have to decide and it is your decision all i can do as a candidate for the presidency all i can do as a candidate for the presidency is to make a judgment on what this country must do but as citizens you have to decide what you want the country to be and you have to decide if what we are now doing is good enough or whether once again the united states should pick itself up and start moving again thank you dem jfk25 10 60h john_f _kennedy senator douglas judge kerner our congressional candidates the next congressman tyler thompson tyler thompson is running for congress from this district and i would like to introduce my sister eunice shriver who lives in chicago ill mrs sargent shriver i have sisters living in all the key electoral states in preparation for this campaign ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for coming this morning i believe that you come here this morning whether you are republicans or democrats or independents because this is an important election for a great office in a great country i run for the office of the presidency after 14 years in the congress with full recognition of the responsibilities of that office only the president of the united states can speak for this country only the president of the united states can place before the american people the unfinished business of our society and i come here this year on this campaign to ask your support in building a stronger state and building a stronger country i want to make it very clear i want to make it very clear that basic issues maybe we can put all the signs down can we all put the signs down and we will have a chance to see everything even that kennedy sign if the nixon signs would drop also then we can get in touch with everybody thank you now can anybody hear anything over this microphone you can t hear anything i would like to have you hear what i am going to say so we will try to get this fixed well here is what i want to say it is going to be a 3 minute speech so let us see if i can get in touch with you for 3 minutes i think this is an important election for the presidency because i think the presidency is important what are the issues that separate mr nixon and myself they are briefly this i don t believe that the united states is meeting its responsibilities to itself and to those around the world who look to it for leadership now why do i say that i say it because i don t believe that we can possibly be satisfied as americans with the rate of growth in our economy we are using today only 50 percent of the capacity of our steel mills we have seen a sharp decline in agricultural income we have not maintained a rate of increase in education necessary to provide the best educated citizens in the world we have permitted our influence and prestige to decline in latin america africa and asia now what does prestige mean prestige means power and influence and our ability to persuade people to follow our leadership that is what is involved in this dispute the question of whether america represents as strong and vigorous an image as it did years ago goes to the security of everyone who lives in libertyville you have to decide as americans whether you believe what we are doing now is good enough or whether you take the view that we must do better that is what separates mr nixon and myself he campaigns on the slogan we ve never had it so good he says our prestige is the highest in history he says our strength is growing he says that everything that must be done is being done in good measure i want to make it very clear that i could not disagree more and i say that not as a democrat but as a concerned citizen of this country i believe if america is going to maintain its position in the world if we are going to maintain our freedom if we are going to maintain the peace if we are going to prevent the balance of power in the world from shifting from us to the communists we are going to have to do much better we are going to have to set before this country its unfinished business we are going to have to go to work again we are going to have to build in this country a strong and vital society that spreads its influence around the world i don t think we have been doing it i am not satisfied with our record and that is the issue which you must determine you have to decide as citizens of this community whether you are satisfied whether you feel that the record of the last years is encouraging enough to you that you want to continue it or whether you feel it is time to start again picking this country up and moving it forward that is the issue that you have to decide this is a contest between the concerned and the comfortable and you have to decide what you are comfortable or concerned whether you look to the future or whether you wish to stand still i want to make it very clear that the next 5 years are going to be decisive years in the life of our country we are concerned in this community of libertyville not only with your own life here but with africa asia the far side of space and the inside of men s minds because i know you are concerned because i know you share the same view of a great country which must fulfill its destiny i come to this community the home of a distinguished american governor stevenson i come here in 1960 and ask your help in this campaign i ask your support i ask you to join me in setting before the american people the image of an america on the move moving once again fulfilling its expectations spreading its influence demonstrating that we represent the way of the future on that basis i ask your support thank you dem jfk25 10 60i john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague senator douglas my sister eunice have you met eunice shriver she lives in illinois meet her again mrs sargent shriver she said yesterday i never used to introduce her so i want to be sure to do it today here is otto kerner otto kerner is going to be your governor i hope hayes beall the candidate for congress mr mayor ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming today i am sorry we are late but we have been campaigning very hard through all of those republican areas of illinois spreading the truth there was some resistance but nevertheless we arrived i campaign for the presidency with a full recognition that that office will bear more responsibility than it has in the last 100 years since the administration of lincoln all of the problems which center upon the united states finally come to rest in a free society upon the desk of the president he is not only the commander in chief he is not only the head of his party he is not only a legislative leader he is not only charged with the power of appointment he also is charged by the constitution and by the force of events with the maintenance of our relations across the seas we have two great problems that face the president and because they face the president they face all of you first can we in this country maintain full employment build a stronger and more vital society that demonstrates that freedom and productivity go hand in hand together secondly how can we maintain the peace and maintain our own security around the world and strengthen freedom now these two questions are interrelated with our productivity our industrial strength our sense of purpose all these help the cause of freedom not only within the united states but all around the world one of the issues which divide mr nixon and myself in this campaign and one of the questions which you will be called upon to render your judgment on november 8 because all mr nixon and i can do is present our views of what our country requires and then you decide on one day is the question of whether what we are doing now is sufficient whether our power and prestige in the world is growing in relation to that of the communists or deteriorating that is the question that involves us all it involves our children it involves the future of our country i have made the charge in this campaign that our prestige has been declining and our prestige is important because it involves the question of whether other countries will follow our leadership will the countries of africa and latin america and asia and western europe and eastern europe will they decide that the communist system represents the future and we represent the past mr nixon and i have differed completely on this question he says that our prestige is at an alltime high he said it on the debate and i say it has been declining and this is an important issue now this morning the papers reveal and i have the new york in my hand that the information service of our state department has been conducting polls throughout 10 countries of the world to try to find out their view of the united states these polls have been confidential but the papers evidently got hold of them here is what the headline says and it really goes to the whole issue of this campaign the u s survey finds that others consider the soviet the mightiest subheadline summer poll shows belief is nearly unanimous among the nations sampled and the lead is expected to hold and some expect the gap to widen here are the countries the survey was made in 9 or 10 countries including france west germany italy the netherlands belgium indonesia britain and pakistan according to these sources the survey also disclosed unanimity among the free and uncommitted nations of the world that the soviet union would maintain and possibly widen its lead over the united states in the next decade you are citizens of this country you have to decide do you want to endorse the leadership of mr nixon and this is the decision you must render who now says and has said it as a basic issue of his position that our prestige has never been higher and that of the communists lower or do you take the view i take that i don t seek to please you but we seek to serve you and in my judgment honesty compels us to say honesty compels us to say that we are going to have to do better that is the question this is a great country and i have unlimited confidence in it and i have served it for 18 years but my judgment is as an american and you must render your judgment 2 weeks from today as an american that this country is going to have to build an image around the world of a strong and vital and progressive society and convince a watching world as we sit on a most conspicuous stage that we represent the way of the future i believe we do and want them to know it thank you dem jfk25 9 60a john_f _kennedy governor di salle mayor celebrezze ray miller congressman vanik congressman feighan congressman to be chat paterson congressman to be winston ladies and gentlemen this is the third time in 3 years that i have been your guest at this steer roast each year it is bigger and i want to come back here next year and really fill this whole park i was most anxious to come on this occasion for two reasons first if i had not received the support of the ohio delegation at the last convention if i had not received the support of your distinguished governor governor di salle your mayor the leader of this county ray miller i would not have been nominated for the office of the president of the united states and let me say that i think ohio is key i think the next president of the united states will carry ohio and we have to carry it i don t think that there is anyone in this county or this city or this state who says that this is an unimportant election you cannot live in ohio you cannot live in cleveland or youngstown you cannot see our steel mills working 50 percent you cannot look at new york city and see the greatest influx of communist leaders in the history of the world gathered in new york city because they feel that time is moving in their direction i think this is an important election and i think the responsibility is very clear upon all of us what contribution what work what service can we make in order to maintain this country s freedom and maintain freedom around the world that is the issue in this campaign and i hope that anyone in this country who looks at the world and looks at the united states who looks at the unfinished business of our country who looks at our agenda who looks at our production who looks at the people out of work who looks at our educational system who looks at our care for our mentally retarded who looks at the care for our older citizens who looks at our failure to provide equality of rights for all americans regardless of their race or their religion i hope that anyone who looks at the world around us and then comes to the conclusion that they want 4 or 8 more years i think they ought to vote for mr nixon if they are satisfied with the things as they are if they don t think we can do better if they feel the balance of power in the world is moving in our direction then i think they should vote for mr nixon but if they think we can do better if they think this is a great country which must be a greater country if they think this is a powerful country that must be a more powerful country if they think we can do better around the world if they think we can provide greater security for the united states and for those who look to us if they think the banner of freedom and its light can be held up higher than we are now holding it i want their help i want your help in this campaign let me make it very clear that i think this is an important election and i think the responsibility upon the standard bearer of the opposition party the democratic party is very clear i am going to continue to say what i think should be said for the next 6 weeks and then and then the american people can make their final judgment it is up to you to choose you can decide what this country wants to be you can decide what it is going to be i can campaign and present my views and what i think the democrats ought to do and mr nixon can present his views and can say what the republicans think the country ought to be but i think in the final analysis you have to decide if you think we can do more if you feel there is unfinished business if you feel that this is one of the great critical areas in the life of our country comparable in many ways to 1860 and 1912 and 1932 i hope you will vote for us if you want this country to move again i don t think the decision is easy and i don t think the judgment which the american people must make in november is a simple one there are i think however very clear facts and that is that the democratic party during its long life stretching back over 160 years i think has served the people franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson and harry truman served the people and in serving the people they served the cause of freedom i cannot think stretching back to the end of the administration of theodore roosevelt i cannot think of one single act major act on behalf of the people of this country that came out of the republican party social security housing minimum wage unemployment compensation educational assistance support for our farmers support for those in trouble public assistance public health the federal reserve board the securities and exchange commission insurance for your deposits in the bank all came from our party and the reason is a simple one and that is by and large across the country the democrats represent every group in our society they represent farmers and small businessmen and working men and women they represent westerners and easterners they represent southern cotton farmers they represent the people of the country they represent the nation and because we represent the people we speak for the people it was very clearly marked in the last session of the congress when we brought up the new bill of medical care for the aged tied to social security we were defeated but 44 democrats voted aye and one republican voted aye and it was not the vice president of the united states one of the great arguments made by the republicans is that the vice president is a man of long experience i don t know if it is the kind of experience we want 4 more years of but at least that is the argument but the fact of the matter is that in 1958 the president of the united states gave the vice president his first executive function they picked him for the position of chairman of a committee on economic growth and anti inflation the new york times called this mr nixon s first formal major executive role they wanted to give him some experience and after some months this committee considered and finally brought forth its recommendations i will read to you the report of the washington post on mr nixon s first executive position the washington post called mr nixon s report one of the most redundant uninspired and generally useless documents lately to come off the government s mimeograph machines the new york herald tribune a republican paper said it was like something you wrote in high school the wall street journal which does not speak for our party said it was fine except that it had no recommendations on what it was appointed to do and the cost of living is at an all time high i think we can do better let me make it very clear what i would like this country to be at the end of the next 4 years or 8 years i would like it to be said that in our administration if we are successful in the next 4 or 8 years that our country moved here at home it began to solve the problems that face our people it put special emphasis on education because no free society can survive without the best educational system in the world it took care of our children and gave attention to the medical care for the aged so that our older citizens could live out their lives in some security and i would like it said that during these 4 years or 8 years we ended discrimination of all kinds in the united states we finished it north or south east or west the american constitution and the declaration of independence are quite clear we want fair treatment for all americans regardless of where they live or what their occupation regardless of their race their creed or their color and i want it said during the next years that the growth of the united states continued that we began to build in this country a stronger economy that made it possible for us to find jobs for the 1 500 000 of your children that are going to be looking for jobs every year for the next 10 years we have to find 25 000 jobs a week for the next 10 years if your boys and girls are going to find work in this country i don t think the republicans consider these problems i don t think they have given consideration to the needs of our economy to say that we have never had it so good to run on a program of peace and prosperity at a time when our prosperity is threatened and the peace of the world hangs in the balance i think they don t look at what is happening at home and they have not looked at what is happening abroad i don t think the united states will be strong and respected again around the world until we are strong and respected here in the united states franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america because he was a good neighbor in the united states he was quoted by africans who wanted to be free because he stood for freedom here in this country harry truman and franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson they showed what our party can do i run in that tradition i want to make it very clear that i stand in direct succession with the political philosophy that motivated those men in the 1930 s and the american people will make their choice by looking at the slogans of the two parties in this century no democrat ever ran like mckinley stand pat with mckinley return to normalcy with harding keep cool with coolidge a chicken in every pot with hoover and now we never had it so good i think the democratic slogans woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal and now the new frontier which we are all going to call attention to all of us value our country all of us wish to serve it all of us wish to preserve it during the next 6 weeks i ask your help in this campaign if we don t carry ohio we are not going to win this election this election may be decided here in your state therefore i come here today and i very earnestly solicit your help not merely because of my own candidacy but because i think we have a great chance to serve our country and in serving our country to serve all mankind during the american revolution of 1775 thomas paine said that the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think the cause of all mankind in 1960 is the cause of america i think everyone who wishes to be free everyone who wishes to move ahead all of them look to us and i look to you join me in this campaign join us in trying to demonstrate to the american people trying to demonstrate to a watching world that this is a great country that we desire to see it move that we will serve it and it will be second to none that is our objective and this is our policy one hundred years ago in the election of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later in this election of 1960 when the issue is not whether this nation will exist half slave or half free but whether the world will we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming we know he has a hand in it but if he has a place and a us i believe that we are ready i ask your help thank you dem jfk25 9 60b john_f _kennedy ray miller ladies and gentlemen this is the third year in a row that i have been honored by being invited to this steer roast and i hope that it is going to be possible for me to come back next year in a somewhat different capacity i want to say just one point about ohio in the 1948 election you will recall president truman carried the state of ohio by 7 200 votes he carried illinois by 17 000 votes and it was the victory in this state and in illinois which permitted him to maintain his office of the presidency i think the presidency is a great office it is enshrined in the constitution and it is also by the force of events and by the pressure of circumstances that it has come to have the greatest possible influence over the lives of us all therefore as i believe that there are sharp differences between the two candidates and great issues which divide historically the two political parties i do hope it is possible for all of you in the next 6 weeks to give us all the help that you can my judgment is that the winner of this presidential election will carry ohio and i think it is possible for us to carry ohio it is possible for us to win ohio and it is possible for us to lose ohio my judgment is that it is a very close tight race in this state in illinois in pennsylvania in new jersey and new york these are the key states whoever carries these major industrial states from illinois east quite obviously will be elected the next president of the united states ohio is very important that and michigan and these other states must be carried by the democratic candidate and the democratic party so i come here today asking all of you who work in the field for the party in this county for many years and in the state i come here asking your help this election will be close and the extra effort that you can put in this in the coming 6 weeks in the next 3 days to get people registered to make sure that when they are registered they come to vote to make sure that this is not merely a contest between two names but it is a contest between two parties and two individuals one of whom says yes to the next 10 years and the other says no i say yes and i think the country says yes in short i thank you for your past help to the party but i must say i think in 1960 the tide can rise and we can carry ohio thank you dem jfk26 10 60a john_f _kennedy lt gov john swainson congressman jim o hara pat mcnamara mennen williams ladies and gentlemen let me say that i am delighted to be back here in michigan mostly because i am running in this state with distinguished public servants your senator pat mcnamara who sits next to me in the u s senate and votes for michigan and the public interest and i know he is going to be reelected by a large majority in this state by your congressman jim o hara who has served this district and served the united states he is the kind of young vigorous leader that this country needs and i am confident that this district will endorse his record and john swainson who has fought for this country in war and peace and who i am confident will be elected the governor of michigan we are now going into the last 13 days of this important presidential campaign two weeks from today the people of michigan and the people of the united states will make their judgment as to what they want their country to be i want to make it very clear that there are sharp differences between mr nixon and myself they go to the future of this state they go to the future of the country they go to the future of freedom all around the world mr nixon runs on a program we ve never had it so good he was nominated by a political party the republicans who have opposed progress for the last 25 years i would like to ask mr nixon one single piece of new progressive legislation benefiting the people that the republicans have put forward in the last 25 years ninety percent of the republican party in 1935 voted against the minimum wage of 25 cents an hour and 80 percent of them voted against 1 25 in 1960 the fact of the matter is that this state and the united states cannot sit still in the 1960 s you are going to have to find and we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years in order to provide full employment and we are going to have to do that at a time when machines are taking the place of men do you believe as an american citizen of this state and country that we can be led by a political party the republicans who have stood still who have opposed progress at every turn or don t you agree we have to move forward again in michigan and across the country one of the arguments and one of the issues which divides mr nixon and myself is the question of our position in the world which goes to the hope of peace and goes to the security of the united states if people in latin america and africa and asia and western europe ever come to the conclusion that the future belongs to the communists and not to us then our hope of leading a great world alliance begins to fade that is why this question of american prestige is so important mr nixon has stated on many occasions that he believes that our prestige is at an alltime high and that of the communists at an alltime low now yesterday the newspapers carried the report of a survey made by the u s government in 10 countries of the world and they asked them the question do you believe the soviet union or the united states is first in military power and science and a majority of the people in 10 countries said the soviet union was first now can we possibly hope to lead a world which begins to think that we are losing our influence and our power that begins to think the tide of history is moving in the direction of the communists i believe that this report should be made public i believe that the american people in 1960 are entitled to the truth the truth with the bark off the facts of the matter the fact of the matter is that either mr nixon was uninformed about the report or he has misled us because in the last debate he said that this report dealt with a survey made in 1957 after sputnik and now yesterday it was revealed that these reports were made this summer they dealt with the time after the u 2 incident and they go to the question of the future of this country as the leader of the free world and now we learn that this administration which has been in the leadership of this country for the last 8 years of which mr nixon has been a part now finds itself and our country in a position in the world where people begin to wonder what the future holds for us and for them i believe the people of this country are strong enough and tough enough and courageous enough to know the truth and when the truth is told to us this country is going to make up its mind as a people that it is time we start moving forward again that is the question at issue you have to decide as citizens one question on november 8 are you satisfied do you believe in michigan and the country that we are moving ahead with vigor do you believe that the republican party is capable of meeting the problems which will face us in the sixties if you do mr nixon is your man but if you agree with me that it is time that michigan and the united states picked itself up and started looking to the future on that basis i ask your help on november 8 thank you dem jfk26 10 60b john_f _kennedy mr mayor congressman machrowicz the next governor of the state of michigan john swainson ladies and gentlemen i am honored to be in the strongest democratic city in the united states a city which in good time and bad in fair wind and storm in rain or in shine turns out and votes democratic and supports the progressive movement in this country i come here tonight as the standardbearer for the oldest political party on earth but i come as the standardbearer for the youngest party on earth and that is the democratic party and i stand here with your mayor with my distinguished friend and colleague of 14 years in the congress of the united states your congressman who speaks for this district and who also speaks for the united states ted machrowicz with pat mcnamara who sits next to me in the u s senate and speaks for michigan and speaks for the country and speaks for progress and who i am confident you will reelect to the u s senate on november 8 and with john swainson who carries on a great tradition of your distinguished governor mennen williams and will lead michigan through the 1960 s when progress will be needed i come here tonight and ask your support in this campaign you cannot be alive today you cannot be a citizen of this state you cannot be a citizen of the united states without knowing that what we are now doing is not good enough mr nixon may run around the country saying you never had it so good but i want him to make that speech in michigan tomorrow on november 15 of this year there will be more automobiles in inventory than ever before in our history this year in september we built 29 percent less homes than last year can you believe that an administration which has permitted economic strength of the united states to decline which has permitted our prestige and image around the world to begin to fade do you think that candidate or that party which has stood still for 25 years can lead the united states in the 1960 s i do not i stand here tonight not saying that there are new and easy solutions to the problems which disturb our tranquillity but i can tell you that i am a member of a party which has believed in progress and i run against a party which has opposed every single piece of progressive legislation which this country has tried to pass in the last 25 years minimum wage social security housing housing for the aged and all the rest the republican party has said no and we have said yes and we are going to say yes on november 8 this is an important election because the presidency of the united states is an important office and what is at stake is not merely the position of our own country our own strength our own vitality our own energy what is at stake is the entire cause of freedom itself in the words of the polish national anthem as long as you live as long as the united states lives so the hope of freedom all around the globe continues to exist when we stand still when we begin to fade they want you to sit down here you see the people run this party you tell us what you want and we will do it well now we will just finish up what i was going to say and that is this and we will speak to everybody around here the function of the president of the united states the president of the united states is to build a strong society here to maintain full employment to educate our children to provide security for our aged citizens to provide justice for our people to build an image of a society on the move so that people around the world who wonder what the future holds for them who wonder which road they should take they decide we want to go with the united states they represent the future as long as the united states lives so freedom lives as long as we build our strength as long as we are on the move as long as we are a progressive society then the future belongs to us and not to mr khrushchev my disagreement with this administration has been that they have permitted the united states to fade as an image of strength around the world every recent poll taken abroad shows that more and more people begin to think that the future belongs to the communists and not to freedom i don t i think the future belongs to freedom i think the future belongs to those who want to be free and that includes the great majority of the population of the world but we have to give them leadership we have to show that freedom can be strong we have to show the people of eastern europe that the struggle is not over that our brightest days are ahead that we do not recognize the present situation and that all people someday will be free that is the basic objective of the american society during the american revolution thomas paine wrote the cause of america is the cause of all mankind now i think in the revolution of 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america we serve not only ourselves we serve others those who wish to follow our example and in order to serve them in order to be faithful to our trust in order to hold out the lamp of hope to all those now subjugated who hope someday to be free we have to build a strong society here we have to demonstrate that in any contest with the communist system that we are going to win i am not satisfied as an american to be first if first but first when first sometimes first perhaps i want to see the united states first period and that is our objective mr nixon presides over the past we look to the future he wants to lead a country standing still we wish to lead a country moving ahead all those who share the view with me of a great and progressive country in a world that is free i hope that you will support us on november 8 and give us an opportunity to get this country moving again one hundred years ago in the campaign of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice we see the storm coming and we know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk26 10 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen governor williams lt gov john swainson who will succeed governor williams and make an equally great governor in the state of michigan my friend and colleague who sits next to me in the u s senate and advises me when i am in doubt senator mcnamara and he is always right congressman o hara who is the kind of young leader that this country needs ladies and gentlemen the bible tells us that it rains on the just and the unjust alike it is raining on vice president nixon today and we don t mind the rain we welcome it we are ready to go to work one of the reasons why i am glad to come to michigan is because i am running with distinguished vigorous progressive democrats one of the great things about being a democrat is you don t have to do what mr nixon does who keeps saying that parties don t mean anything he says i am not really a republican that is i don t think i am until he goes down to arizona and barry goldwater takes him in the room and puts the rubber hose to him and finally he says yes i am a republican but i am a democrat every day of the year and i run as a democrat and i run in the succession of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman mr nixon is the intellectual heir to mckinley dewey landon coolidge harding taft and the rest and i don t believe in 1960 the american people are going to turn over the destinies of this state and the destinies of the united states to a party and leader who stands still who runs on a slogan we ve never had it so good and at a time when all over the state and all over united states and over the world the call is for action the call is for movement forward the call is for progress on that basis i come here today in the rain and ask your help we have many opportunities before us in the 1960 s and many responsibilities one of the things we have to do is make our children the best educated children in the world any time your child does not get a good education by good well paid competent teachers he can never make it up his chances of getting a good job are not as good as they would have been his chance of living out his life in security is not as good as it would have been that is why as americans who are responsible for maintaining a free society we have to have the best educated citizens in the world do you know that 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college we can t waste that talent they might have been the best and most vigorous and intellectually advanced citizens we have but they never get to college either they don t have the money or they have to go to work or they haven t an opportunity we want to have the kind of country where they do have the opportunity where they do have the chance and i believe it incumbent upon the state government the community here and this community has raised its property taxes again and again to maintain education and the national government they all have a responsibility when the northwest ordinance was signed at the end of the 18th century which involved michigan one out of every 16 acres was put aside for education i believe in 1960 i believe it is going to be about 30 more seconds and then i will stop i believe in 1960 we are going to have to provide scholarships for those young men and women we are going to have to provide loans for them loans for our colleges well paid teachers and good constructed schools that is what we are going to do that is only one of the responsibilities we are going to meet in the 1960 s we are going to move this country we are going to go ahead we are going to move michigan we are going to provide jobs for our people and an opportunity for all of them to participate in our lives of a prosperous and growing country so on that basis as one who looks to the future as one who has the greatest confidence in this country as one who believes that we can win this election i come and ask your help thank you dem jfk26 10 60d john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen only in michigan would everybody stand out in the rain the republicans are all home in bed under shelter and we are out here working and we are going to continue to work for the next 13 days we are proud to be here today i am proud to be introduced by my friend and colleague in the senate who speaks for michigan and the united states pat mcnamara with a distinguished congressman who has fought for the interests of this district and who represents the kind of leadership which michigan has produced and which our country needs congressman jim o hara who is going to be returned i know to the house of representatives and john swainson who runs for governor who fought for this country in war and peace who carries on the great progressive tradition of mennen williams your next governor i run with pleasure against mr nixon for the presidency of the united states if he can tell me in the 14 years that he was a member of the house a member of the senate and as a voting vice president can he tell me one single progressive piece of legislation which is connected with his name or the name of the republican party housing he put out a statement 3 weeks ago in new york praising the housing act of 1949 he said it seems to be working very well he neglected to add as a congressman he voted against it he voted as a congressman in 1949 to take 1 million people out from under the coverage of the minimum wage act mr nixon and the republicans have stood against the progress since time began and i believe in 1960 in michigan which knows the significance of this election i believe in michigan and the united states they are not going to entrust leadership to a candidate and a party that looks to the past michigan and the country has to move we know it in warren we know it in the country we know it around the world and i believe in 1960 the course of the country is moving with the democratic party into the future mr nixon issues pious statements about distressed areas we are going to do something about it we are going to put people to work this administration vetoed that bill passed by the congress twice if you are content to stand still if you want an administration that drifts and lies at anchor then mr nixon is your man mr nixon is getting increasingly disconnected with reality two days ago he accuses me of speculating in the london gold market and affecting the price of gold the point of the matter is i want him to come tomorrow to michigan and tell the people of michigan what he is doing and what this administration is doing to put people to work what plans have they had for automation this administration has never discussed it and yet do you know in this state and country we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years to get full employment at a time when machines are taking the jobs of men now this community knows the problem as well as any community in the united states in your two arsenals you have seen employment go from 10 000 to 2 000 this area of the state depends on the jupiter and the jupiter missile program may be coming to an end we have to find jobs in michigan and we have to find jobs in the united states and unless we have people working we are not able to maintain our position any place around the world one of the programs which would help this area was a program which was eliminated in 1953 which provided that defense contracts would go to those areas if they could meet the bid where there was high unemployment senator knowland led the fight against it on the floor of the senate and it was thrown out and i believe that defense manpower policy no 4 as it was known should be reinvoked so those areas of the country which have high unemployment we could use our defense contracts to put people to work as well as make weapons in addition we want to pass the area redevelopment bill to attract industry in there to plan our defense planning on a long range basis so we take advantage not only of the skills of the people in the area but we also recognize their needs the overnight cancellation of contracts which leaves thousands of men stranded on the beach i believe we can do better under a good administration a new administration which is closer to the people which the democratic party is so i come to michigan this state knows the issues of this campaign senior citizens senator mcnamara is chairman of the senate committee on senior citizens i am vice chairman we are both aging fast but this administration the same administration that voted 90 percent against social security in the midthirties voted 95 percent against the medical care for the aged tied to social security if there is anyone here who has a mother or father who is over 65 if they get sick and they are living with you do you know before they can get medical assistance under the program signed by the president you have to prove that they are medically indigent they have to sign an oath a pauper s oath that they haven t any money nor you and then they can get assistance what did we propose we proposed putting it under social security at a cost of 3 cents a day per person and then when they are 65 and then when they need assistance and then when they are sick maybe 1 through 3 or 4 months then you get the assistance that you contributed to which is the best way the way we suggested rain or shine good days or bad days we are going to continue to tell the truth about mr nixon and the republican party we are going to continue to tell how they have presided over the gradual lessening of american strength and prestige around the world and how they are obliged to hide the report from the people of what has happened to our position around the world while mr nixon campaigns on a program that our prestige has never been higher in his own state department there are reports which show that mr nixon is either wholly misinformed or unwilling to tell the truth whichever it is on november 8 we won t have to worry about it any more so i come here today and ask your support for the democratic ticket ask your support for this state ask your support in moving this country forward thank you dem jfk26 10 60e john_f _kennedy lieutenant governor swainson governor williams senator mcnamara congressman machrowicz congressman o hara fellow democrats i come here tonight as the democratic standard bearer for the office of the presidency in the united states and i come here to michigan and ask your help as the standard bearer for our old party i am glad to be on this platform and be introduced by the next governor of the state of michigan john swainson with gov mennen williams who has led this state forward for the last 12 years with pat mcnamara who sits next to me in the u s senate and speaks for michigan and the country this is not merely a contest between mr nixon and myself and in a very real sense in a very real sense it is not merely a contest between the republican party and the democratic party it is a contest between all those who look to the past between all those who wish to stand still and those who wish to move ahead here in the state of michigan in this great industrial state it is between those who are the leaders of the republican party who have spilled this country into three recessions in the last 8 years who have opposed every piece of progressive legislation for the benefit of our people for care to the aged employment for our people minimum wage education for our children better opportunity for all of our citizens it is between that group on the one hand and those who want to pick this country up and move it forward on the other in the state of michigan if you will be satisfied to know that this fall 1960 we have built 30 percent less homes than last year by the middle of november of this year we will have more thousands of cars in inventory waiting to be sold and unsold than we have ever had in the history of the united states are you as a citizen of this country and a citizen of michigan pleased to know in the most dangerous time in the life of our country that we are only using 53 percent of our steel capacity what does mr khrushchev think when he looks at the powerful united states 53 percent of our capacity as a citizen of michigan to know in your great industrial centers that you have unemployment which has never been employed in some cases since the recession of 1958 that the cost of living is now higher than it has ever been anyone who says you have never had it so good i want them to come to michigan and i want them to come to massachusetts now all this is important all this is important not only to you and for the future but it also goes to our position in the world our hopes for peace our hopes for freedom i have made the charge in this campaign as a concerned citizen that our position in the world is not as strong as it was that the relative balance of power in the world is not shifting in our direction and that those who once looked to us as the strongest power in the world now begin to wonder this administration has denied that charge mr nixon says our prestige is higher than it has ever been in history and now we find out and now we find out that the u s information service this summer polled 10 countries around the world and asked them these questions who do you think is first today scientifically the united states or the soviet union then they asked them who do you think will be first in 1970 militarily and scientifically and a majority of the people each 1 of the 10 countries with the exception of 1 a majority thought the soviet union would be first that is what this administration has done to the image of this country now people who used to look to us who used to follow our leadership who joined with us in a battle against the communists around the world now begin to wonder does the future belong to them or to us i believe it belongs to us mr khrushchev says with confidence that our children and grandchildren will be communists i think we should say with the same confidence that his children will be free but he looks to the future he looks to 1970 and 1980 and beyond he believes that the time is on his side that the united states is standing still and he is moving forward the republican candidate tells us in 1960 that all is well and perhaps that fulfills his obligation for this election but i say we have an obligation to the future and we are not meeting that obligation today do you know in the next 10 years by 1970 and we should look to the future and so should the next administration by 1970 we will have 208 million people in this country they will be coming into the labor market looking for jobs at the rate of 3 million people a year and they will be coming into the labor market at a time when automation takes over in every industry when machines take the jobs of men the next 10 years will be a decade of opportunity but it will also be a decade of challenge for if we are going to maintain an increase in the standard of living for our people by 1970 we are going to need a gross national product of three fourths of a trillion dollars we are going to have to grow at the rate of 5 percent a year to keep you working and keep your children working and to date in the last 8 years we have averaged a little more than 2 percent half of that of western germany in the last 9 months we have not increased at all in our growth we have dropped back and that goes to your future employment in this city in the state of michigan and the chance for your children to work in the next 10 years that is what economic growth is all about in the next 10 years in this country we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs every week for the next 10 years to maintain full employment to house our population we are going to have to build twice the number of homes we now build and that is why it is tragic when this year after this administration vetoed the last two housing bills we built 30 percent less homes than a year ago what does that mean for the winter of 1961 when you make your judgment a week from next tuesday you have to make your judgment not between just two candidates but between their concept of the future the security that they bring to our country their vision of a great and strong and growing country or an administration which stands still and can run in 1960 on slogans which have no connection with reality we are going to have to build more schools than we have ever built before we are going to have to build as many college dormitories and classrooms in the next 10 years to educate all your boys and girls who want to go to college and are entitled to go we are going to have to build as many as we built in the last 200 years and we are going to have to use the talent of every boy and girl i don t like to read as an american statistics which say when a negro baby and a white baby are born side by side that that white baby has twice the chance to finish high school as the negro baby three times the chance to get into college one fourth as much chance of being unemployed three times as much chance to own his own house i want to see america where there are no statistics negro and white but all men regardless i want it to be clear that today we are not meeting our responsibilities to the future twenty percent of our industrial capacity is unused more than 5 percent of our labor force is out of work here in detroit in pittsburgh fort worth san diego and seattle we see the effects of this administration s lack of leadership mr nixon does not mention these facts neither does he mention the future responsibilities for his is the party of the past the party of memory the party of the status quo mr nixon represents the party of the republicans of mckinley and taft and harding and coolidge and landon and dewey every one of those candidates brings up an image of a man who sits still even the slogans they used sat still to stand pat with mckinley do you know what a white house usher said about calvin coolidge he comes from my own state he said no man in the 42 years i was at the white house ever slept so much we are going to need a president and a party that can move look who the democrats ran and look at their slogans woodrow wilson the new freedom franklin d roosevelt the new deal harry truman the fair deal programs for the people and today when mr nixon tells us that all is well that we never had it so good he wants us to be satisfied with the record of the last 8 years but i look not to the past but to the future what is going to happen in this country in the next 10 years what must we do what are the goals of our society what is the unfinished business for americans how do we build a strong society here maintain the peace attract those people around the world who wish to be free that is the responsibility and mandate of the people of this country twenty years ago this city of detroit was known as the arsenal of democracy that name spread across the entire world and i think the time has come again to make this city of detroit this state of michigan this united states of ours to make it the workshop of freedom to build the kind of strength to build here the kind of strength the kind of society to demonstrate the kind of vigor which will cause people all over the world to say there is the road that i wish to trod there is the society which has combined strength and freedom there is the way of the future there is the high noon of tomorrow the communist system is as old as egypt it is bound to corrupt and decline but we have to do our job and i come here to michigan and ask your support in the election of november 8 to ask you give us in the next 10 days your voice your hand your heart and let s start this country moving again thank you dem jfk26 9 60 john_f _kennedy mr hutcheson mr lee officers of the carpenters union ladies and gentlemen i appreciate very much your generous invitation to come here today i have served on the labor committees of the house and the senate for over 14 years i am now chairman of the subcommittee on labor of the senate and i hope in that time i have come to have some idea of the problems that you face the opportunities that are yours and the responsibilities that are common to us as citizens of this country this has been billed tonight as a great debate but in effect the carpenters union today have heard one phase of the so called great debate this morning you heard from the vice president of the united states who spoke on behalf of his party and his views and i speak today as the standard bearer for the democratic party the fact of the matter is that though we may debate tonight and though we may discuss issues which face the united states in the domestic sphere we have been debating in a very real sense these issues through all of the 20th century i think since the beginning of woodrow wilson s administration the two parties have taken different positions on the domestic problems that face the united states i think the democratic party has said yes to the future i think the democratic party has recognized that there are obligations which the people have to serve the people that the function of the government is to serve the public interest and i think it is for that reason that the democratic party nominated woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman i think the republicans have had a different conception of their public responsibility and i think it is because of that reason that they nominated mckinley taft harding coolidge landon dewey and now we have today the vice president stated the issue as a simple one he said the question is whether the private sector or the public sector moves ahead he said the question is whether those of us who come with promises for the future that we are going to be taking money out of the pockets of people that we promise to help i don t see it that way at all i don t think that there will be many carpenters working in the united states and i don t think that there will be many homes built in the united states if there was not federal guarantees for the building of those homes do you think many gi s would have come back at the end of world war ii and bought new homes which your people helped to build unless they had been given guarantees of federal credit do you think that there would be enough homes built in the next 15 years and we are going to have to build more homes every year for the next 25 or 30 years than we have ever built in the past do you think they could possibly be done without federal credit without urban renewal without home loan guarantees i don t think they could be at all i think there is a great place and a major place for private responsibility and for individual enterprise it is the system upon which our country is founded it provides great prosperity and it provides great freedom but there is also a responsibility for the people working as a whole if they are going to develop the resources of our country if they are going to provide employment for our people if they are going to provide homes for our people and federal policy affects that program as sharply as any other factor do you think that your people will work as much when interest rates go to the highest they have been in 20 years frank church said at the democratic convention that rip van winkle could go to sleep and could wake up and tell whether the republicans or democrats were in control of the government by asking how high the interest rates were now let us get it clear on the record because there are sharp differences between our two parties the democratic congress passed a housing bill last year which i think would have met the needs of our economy the needs of our people and that bill was vetoed this year the democratic congress in the senate passed another bill and it went to the rules committee of the house and we could not get a single republican in the house rules committee to vote to send it to the floor they joined with three democrats who were opposed to the program and they killed the housing bill this year which our people need and which will cause your people to work so the record is very clear i support the affirmative policy which will move this country s economy ahead which will build homes which will keep our people working and provide an unparalleled level of prosperity if that is the issue let us join it because i never voted against any program which i felt would serve the people which was soundly financed soundly based which was within the means of our people to afford and which would sustain our prosperity if the housing industry fails to move ahead we not only find our people badly housed but we don t find our people working the automobile industry the steel industry and the housing industry are the three industries that must move if the economy of our country is going to move and i don t think you can possibly feel satisfied when there are 15 million american families living in substandard housing when there are 5 million american homes in the cities of the united states which lack plumbing of any kind when at our present rate of constructing homes you are going to have more slums by the year 2000 than you have today when urban renewal which is the hope of the older cities of the east from where i come our only hope of sustaining ourselves when urban renewal is opposed and vetoed and blocked and when interest rates are so high that if a man buys a 20 000 house today he pays over a 30 year mortgage nearly 8 000 more than he might have paid in 1952 so i would just as soon join the issue and i would just as soon debate this matter and i would just as soon have the american people make their decision i am no johnny come lately to situs picketing either i don t know what that means i will tell you what my position is i am in favor of amending the denver building trades case and so introduced a bill so supported it so tried to get it out of the subcommittee and did so tried to get it out of the full committee where it was filibustered to death in the last session of the congress so while we may not be johnny come latelies i would like to know what our individual position is on this question i want to make it clear what my position is it is my understanding that when the taft hartley act was passed it was very clear by the remarks of senator taft that he did not envision that there would be a prohibition against the union activities at a primary site in order to protect its working standards it would not be called when there were subcontractors involved it would not be called a secondary boycott that is what i mean by changing the denver case and i think that the next congress of the united states and whether i sit in the office of the presidency or whether i continue as chairman of the subcommittee on labor we are going to move again on that next january and we invite all those early or late to come and join us finally let me say that i know mr khrushchev too but mr khrushchev is not the enemy mr khrushchev could pass from the scene he is 65 or 66 years of age and all men are mortal and he could pass as stalin passed and the enemy would remain the same the enemy is the communist system and the enemy of the communist system the chief adversary of the communist system is our system therefore the question before us is not the question of comparative growth and statistics compared to what we did 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago the question for the american people to decide in the sixties is are we doing enough to defend ourselves are we doing enough to sustain ourselves are we strengthening ourselves and the cause of freedom around the world that is the question before us not argument with mr khrushchev the system that is opposing us is strong and powerful both because of its ideology and because of the productive power of the soviet union we are strong and powerful and i think stronger and more powerful because we believe that freedom and because of our productive capacity in the united states and therefore the people of this country have to decide by november 8 which way they want to go whether they feel that everything that could be done is being done whether the program offered by the republican party offers hope to the people whether in 1964 at the end of the next president s administration our power and prestige will be increasing relative to that of the communists or whether we will be standing still and the world will begin to move in the direction of the east rather than in the direction of the west that is the issue and it cannot be dismissed and it cannot be put aside by saying we need an argument in a kitchen or out of a kitchen what we need is strength i don t care how skilled mr khrushchev is or how skilled the next president is in debate what counts is the power of the two systems and where they are going and what they stand for and how they associate themselves with the people of the world i am confident we have the greatest system i am confident that what we want they want i am confident that the future can belong to us but it can only be done so by recognizing the realities of the struggle that face us and that can only be done by our willingness to recognize the unfinished business that faces our society the unfinished agenda which franklin roosevelt set before the american people in the thirties the next president of the united states must set before the american people in the sixties when he does so i think this country will move again thank you dem jfk27 10 60a john_f _kennedy ladies and gentleman i want to thank you for coming out here and showing that we believe in the democratic party and in progress i stand here tonight where franklin roosevelt stood when he caused this country to move forward in the 1930 s and i call upon you to join us in moving this state and country forward in the 1960 s we believe in the cause of freedom we believe in a strong and growing country we don t believe in standing still we believe that in 1960 and 1961 this country is going to pick itself up and start forward on the road again and i ask you for your help the next president of the united states will carry new york i come here tonight to the heart of a great democratic section of old brooklyn and ask your help now if you can tell us where there is some place to eat we will go and eat thank you dem jfk27 10 60b john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to your distinguished monsignor for his kindness in being with us tonight in addition to monsignor he is a democrat and to ross delorenzo who is an old friend of mine this district was the first district to endorse me as a candidate for president nearly a year ago my family had not even endorsed me when you endorsed me then there is a candidate for the senate sciarra now listen he lost by 300 votes last time let s put him in this time and assemblyman demartino and judge ughetta who is a candidate for the court of common pleas in new york now we have a couple of irish candidates murphy who is a candidate for congress and kennedy candidate for president now let me say that i am delighted to be here tonight i am proud to be your guest i am grateful to all of you for turning out this is an important campaign it is important for our country and i ask your support in this campaign in moving new york and the united states forward again we have a guest here who is waving mr nixon s sign i want to ask him one question i want to ask you one question in 1952 when the mccarran walter immigration act was up the immigration act which permits even though italy and great britain have the same population 47 million permits 50 000 englishmen to come to this country and 570 italians which permits 350 portuguese to come here permits 400 greeks and almost no poles no lithuanians no roumanians no hungarians no eastern europeans no southern europeans ireland has a population of 2 500 000 seven million irish can come here and 5 700 italians you tell me why mr nixon voted for that bill and voted to override truman s veto and i voted against it and voted to sustain the veto now mr nixon can have everybody who wants to keep that kind of a law on the books and i want the people who want to set an image of america that is fair that stands for the torch of freedom that encourages those to unite their families i ask your help in this campaign in building a stronger america in building the economy of this country in providing employment for our people education for our children security for our aged citizens and to build an image of freedom around the world i ask your help in this campaign and let us move this country forward again thank you dem jfk27 10 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen let me first speak and then you ok ok you and i are in agreement we agree we agree we agree then you come next ladies and gentlemen my colleague former colleague in the senate senator lehman my present colleague mayor wagner my distinguished friend my present colleagues in the congress mrs kelly our national committeewoman from new york and an old friend and colleague of mine congressman anfuso congressman abe multer with whom i served in the congress for 14 years of course your own congressman manny celler a great representative of this district jim farley the former postmaster general mike prendergast the state chairman we have them all here tonight congressman keogh from brooklyn arthur levitt distinguished state officials congressmen and senators assemblymen anyone else who wants to be introduced hold up their hands after november 8 ladies and gentlemen i will make it brief because i know you have been standing for some time this is an important contest for an important office this is a great country of ours and the president of the united states is the spokesman for our national interest and our national purpose and after 14 years in the congress and after campaigning in every state in the union and after looking at this country i have come to the conclusion which you have that it is time america started moving forward again the basic issue which separates mr nixon and myself is that in these turbulent and trying days he has chosen to run on a domestic platform that we have never had it so good and he runs on an international program that our prestige is the highest it has ever been in the world in spite of the fact that his own state department and our state department in their surveys taken this summer which this administration refuses to release shows that our prestige has gone steadily down under this administration we are going to reverse that we are going to move the country forward franklin d roosevelt in accepting the second presidential nomination before 100 000 people in franklin field philadelphia said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference let me give you five ways that mr nixon is frozen in the ice of his own indifference no 1 we have the highest cost of living this week in the history of the united states and in the last few months while costs have been going up the wage level average has been going down who are the people that are hit no 1 those who are retired those who live on an average of 72 a month under social security when we put forward a proposal this summer to provide medical care for the aged tied to social security we had one republican vote in the senate and when the vote was announced time magazine said mr nixon turned and smiled he will not be smiling on november 8 secondly because of the high interest rates of this administration if you buy a 10 000 home today on a 30 year mortgage your interest rate on the loan is 3 300 more than it was 8 years ago this administration vetoed two housing bills last year mr nixon voted against the housing bill of 1949 which is the basis of all subsequent housing bills i don t care what pronouncement he comes out in this campaign the republican party and mr nixon have opposed progressive housing legislation for our people three who is the next group hit by the high cost of living those are who are paid a substandard wage in the midthirties 90 percent of the republican party voted against a 25 cent minimum wage this summer as your congressman can tell you in the house of representatives 90 percent of the republicans voted against a minimum wage of 1 25 an hour 50 a week for a 40 hour week for a business that makes more than a million dollars a year and mr nixon called it extreme he is frozen in the ice of his own indifference if i ever saw a republican candidate who was four if you want to send your child to college today it costs you 1 300 more than it cost you in 1952 last year we passed a bill in the congress which would provide loans to colleges for building dormitories which would be repaid at a low rate of interest for dormitories and classrooms the republican administration vetoed it any time this administration or any other administration stands in the way of educating our children giving them the best education in the world they disqualify themselves in my opinion from leading the united states in the sixties fifth and finally and finally the question of which candidate stands for opportunity to all americans regardless of their race their creed or their color in 1953 and 1954 the republican party controlled the white house the senate and the house a majority in all bodies not one civil rights bill ever saw the light of day in either the house or the senate in the last 4 years we passed two bills i believe we should do better congressman celler was more responsible for those bills probably than any man in the congress they came out of his committee which he headed he is now chairman of a committee which i set up to implement the democratic platform mr nixon is chairman of a committee to end discrimination in government contracts two suits two suits in all that time he sends barry goldwater through the south saying i don t mean any of this and sends senator scott of pennsylvania through the north saying oh we are all for civil rights we are for opportunity for all americans regardless of their race their religion their region their national origin we want everyone to have a fair chance to develop his talents in these five ways in my opinion mr nixon and i differ in these five ways the republican party and the democratic party differ and these are only symptoms only representatives of the great differences between our parties everything that franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson and harry truman tried to do the republican party stood against and in 1960 in a great time of decision i come to brooklyn i come to this district and ask your help in picking this country up and moving it forward again thank you dem jfk27 10 60d john_f _kennedy dave dubinsky alex rose mr hayes distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i come here to this district as the standard bearer for the democratic party and ask your support in this campaign i ask your support in moving this country forward i ask your support in defeating mr nixon and the republican party i believe that this is an important election it involves the future of this state it involves the future of this country it involves the future of the cause of freedom i cannot believe in 1960 as we enter the most difficult and turbulent and revolutionary times in the history of our country that we are going to elect a candidate and a party that looks to the past i think the american people as in 1932 as in 1948 as in 1912 are going to say yes to the future are going to choose to pick this country up and move it ahead and i come here and ask your help in doing that i believe the issues which separate mr nixon and myself are very clear and they go to the future of every man and woman here and they go to the future of our country he has chosen in this difficult time to run on a slogan we ve never had it so good i don t run on that slogan i run on the slogan we are going to have to do much better we are going to have to meet our responsibilities not only to ourselves but to all those who look to us with confidence and hope as an american not as a democratic standard bearer but as an american i believe that this race is between the concerned and the comfortable between those who sit still and those who want to pick themselves up and push forward i run against a candidate and a party which has opposed in the last 25 years every piece of progressive legislation put forward minimum wage mr nixon s republican party voted 90 percent against a 25 cent minimum wage in the midthirties and they voted 90 percent against the 1 25 in 1960 they voted 90 percent against social security in the midthirties and they voted 90 percent against the medical care for the aged tied to social security in 1960 this is the party which has stood still and i don t believe in 1960 any american can stand still these are difficult times and i do not run for the presidency promising that if i am elected life will be easy but i do say that if i am elected the president of the united states must as franklin roosevelt did set before the american people the unfinished business of our society full employment for our people better housing the use of our natural resources a better standard of living building a more vigorous society which can serve as an inspiration to freedom all over the globe i believe the choice is clear and i come to this garment district and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join in meeting our responsibilities as citizens of this great republic as the chief defenders of freedom at a time when freedom is under attack all over the globe i believe the choice is between those who wish to stand still and those who wish to move between those who believe in progress and those who look to the past i believe the choice is between our moving this country as franklin roosevelt and truman and wilson did it or between those who believe with warren g harding and landon and dewey and coolidge and all the rest that back in the old days were the good days i believe that we have to do in our generation what franklin roosevelt did in his generation in 1936 franklin roosevelt said this generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny i believe in 1960 that this generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny to demonstrate that we can build in this country the kind of society which gives opportunity to all americans regardless of their race or their creed or their color a chance to develop their talents to educate their children to live in security to work to strengthen the united states and in so doing strengthen the cause of freedom i ask your help on that basis i ask you to support us i ask you to elect congressman bill vanden heuvel in this district i ask you to choose as americans have chosen in other great crises in our times between those who wish to rest on their oars and between those who wish to break through again into the area of new frontiers give us your hand your voice your support give us this state of new york which is essential to the election of a democratic president give us your help and i believe we can move this country forward mr nixon has chosen in 1960 to run on a platform that our prestige and influence in the world has never been higher and that we are enjoying here in the united states great prosperity well i want to make it clear that i am not satisfied i think this is a great country but i think it can be a greater country this is a powerful country but i think it can be a more powerful country i believe that we have a responsibility as the chief defenders of freedom to build the kind of society here which will cause people all around the globe to say there is the direction that i wish to go there is the way of the future their high noon is yet to come i want mr khrushchev and those on the other side of the iron curtain to know that freedom strength vitality and energy are once more the qualities for which the united states is noted and on that basis we ask you to move forward with us i ask your help i ask you to join us in sweeping the republicans all the way back to california and putting in the place of leadership somebody told that to president truman and that is what started all the trouble let me say finally that in this election which comes a week from tuesday november 8 you have to make your decision it is the responsibility of mr nixon and myself to present the viewpoints for our two parties he has presented his and i have presented mine this is not merely a contest between mr nixon and myself in a very real sense it is not just a contest between the republican party and the democratic party it is a contest between all citizens of this country who believe that progress is our most notable product who believe it incumbent upon us as the chief example of freedom to build a strong and vital society and between those who wish to stand still i ask your help i ask you to join us i ask you to help us move this country forward one hundred years ago in the campaign of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later with the same great issue of freedom or slavery as 100 years ago we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready help us in the next 10 days help us win this election help us move this country forward thank you dem jfk27 10 60e john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen mr potofsky senator lehman congressman to be vanden heuvel arthur levitt our distinguished mayor mayor wagner ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be here today and delighted to be the guest of the amalgamated clothing workers a union which i have known during my 14 years in the congress which has spoken for the interest of its members and also for the public interest i am honored to be your guest i come here today i come here today as the standard bearer for the democratic party a party committed to progress for the american people in 1936 in accepting his second presidential nomination before 100 000 people in franklin field pa president roosevelt said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference the choice which you have to make here in new york city here on november 8 is whether you want a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference or whether you want a government and a people that is moving forward that is standing here in this country and and around the world for progress for progressive leadership the choice between mr nixon and myself is a very sharp one very simple we lead two different parties committed to two different philosophies of government with two different legislative histories both from the party point of view and the individual point of view i represent a party which in the 1930 s passed the social security act mr nixon represents a party which voted against the social security act 90 percent i represent a party which passed the housing act of 1949 mr nixon represents a party that voted against it and mr nixon himself voted against it i represent a party which tried to pass a minimum wage of 1 25 this summer mr nixon represents a party that voted 80 percent against it in the house of representatives i represent a party committed to equality of opportunity for all americans regardless of their race their religion their color their creed mr nixon represents a party which controlled the presidency the house the senate in 1953 and 1954 not one single piece of legislation dealing with civil rights ever saw the light of day in either the house or the senate mr nixon runs for the presidency he runs on a program of progress in 1952 the mccarran walter immigration act came up the mccarran walter immigration act provided that even though the population of england and the population of italy is the same 60 000 english citizens can come to the united states every year and 5 700 italians 350 portuguese 400 greeks few poles few hungarians a few czechs a few rumanians mr nixon voted for that bill and he voted to override the president s veto i voted against it and i voted to sustain the president s veto the fact of the matter is that mr nixon may campaign and say parties don t mean anything but i think the kind of candidates the parties put forward does mean something i stand where franklin roosevelt stood and governor smith and harry truman and woodrow wilson mr nixon stands where mr dewey stood and mr landon the only three candidates in this century who tried to do something about the republicans were theodore roosevelt and they drove him out of the party wendell willkie they rejected him in 1944 and nelson rockefeller and they moved him right out of the picture and brought in dick nixon i want someone to tell me a single piece of domestic legislation that mr nixon ever proposed that stood for progress for the people from minimum wage social security this summer we tried to pass a bill for medical care for the older citizens under the bill which the president signed before you or your mother and father who may be retired who may have a heart attack or cancer or sick for several months before they can get any assistance under that program they first have to sign a petition that they are medically indigent they have to take a pauper s oath and then they can go down and get public assistance do you know what we proposed that it be tied to social security that everyone contribute 3 cents a day and they be given out of a fund to which they contributed medical care when they retired we proposed our bill forty four democrats voted for it in the senate and one republican do you know what a great national magazine said when we were defeated mr nixon turned it said and smiled you have to decide whether that is the kind of leadership you want a leadership frozen in the ice of its own indifference it is no accident that while we have stood still at home we have stood still abroad we stood for the most abroad when we stood for the most at home franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor to latin america because he was a good neighbor to the people of this country woodrow wilson stood for the new freedom at home and he stood for freedom abroad unless you have a progressive forward looking vigorous program as a nation your image abroad is uncertain why is this administration compelled to hide the surveys which show our prestige has dropped you cannot possibly move abroad you cannot possibly attract the image and the commitment and the imagination of people scattered around the world who want leadership who want leadership for freedom unless this country is moving ahead i am not prepared as an american to see three recessions in 8 years you make clothes or hats or work and manufacture you yourselves know that this fall of 1960 this country is not moving the way it should do you know we built 30 percent less homes this year than last year at this time why is that we are using 50 percent of our steel capacity do you know by the middle of november we will have a million unsold cars in inventory the highest in the history of the united states and they run on peace and prosperity and we have never had it so good and experience and reward experience casey stengel showed what happened that experience does not always count well now what counts in this country of ours what we can do for it how we can make it move again i come here today and ask your support in this campaign give us your voice give us your hand and i can assure you that if we are successful on november 8 we will move this country forward we will strengthen this country and once again the title of citizen of the united states will stand for freedom around the world thank you dem jfk27 10 60g john_f _kennedy thank you congressman leonard farbstein who is going to be the next congressman i would say his chances are pretty good and bill van den heuvel who represents the district over there who i hope will be the congressman from this congressional district other candidates fellow democrats ladies and gentlemen i run for the office of the presidency this year after 14 years in the congress with the full recognition of the responsibilities of that office the president of the united states and only the president of the united states speaks for this country i speak for massachusetts and senator douglas speaks for illinois and senator engle speaks for california and these congressmen speak for this district and the next district but the president of the united states speaks for these two districts and massachusetts and illinois and california and i believe it vitally important that the next president of the united states understand the revolutionary times in which we live understand that it is vitally important that this country start to move ahead again and that the next president of the united states place before the american people the unfinished business of our society the things that we must achieve if we are going to maintain our freedom and if we are going to build the kind of society which will inspire people around the world that is why i believe this is the center of action the president of the united states is the key office and only the president of the united states can mobilize the resources of this country so that we begin to move ahead again and i believe it is in our conception of the office in our understanding of the times in our opinion about the future that mr nixon and i sharply disagree the republicans have run on slogans of peace and prosperity i want to make it very clear that i am not satisfied with this kind of prosperity when we only use 50 percent of our steel capacity when we build this month 30 percent less homes than a year ago when the united states economic growth in the last 9 months is minus 0 3 percent we are going to have to find in the next 10 years 25 000 jobs a week every week or he next 10 years to keep our people working we are going to have to build at least 200 000 more homes a year to keep our people adequately housed we are going to have to provide better schools for our children because we need the best educated children in the world we are going to have to provide medical care for the aged tied to social security because all the people are entitled to live out their lives in some kind of dignity and we are going to have to provide equality of opportunity for all americans now you have to decide which party and which candidate based on their history based on their statements in this campaign based on their look into the future can lead this country into the dangerous years of the 1960 s which party and which candidate and which viewpoint can build in this country a strong society which will serve as an inspiration to the people around the world i am sick as an american of reading these studies that are made abroad which show that the image of america as a vital forceful society as it once was under franklin roosevelt has begun to fade i believe it incumbent upon this generation of americans to meet the same rendezvous with destiny of which franklin roosevelt spoke in 1936 this country has to do better this country has to move again this country has to provide full use of all of its people and all of its facilities if we are going to win out i don t run on the presidential program of saying that if i am elected life will be easy i think to be a citizen of the united states in the 1960 s is a hazardous occupation but it is also one that offers challenge and hope and i believe the choice lies with you on november 8 you have to decide what you think of the present what you think of the future what you want this country to be whether you are satisfied or not and based upon your judgment of what is best for our country i am ready to submit my case whether i am the candidate for the presidency or president or stay in the senate i regard our obligation not to please you but to serve you and in my judgment in 1960 a candidate for the presidency should be willing to give the truth to the people and the truth is that what we are now doing is not good enough mr nixon can run on peace and prosperity he can run on a program that our prestige has never been higher that the balance of power in the world is shifting in our direction but as for me i believe that the united states will not meet its commitments to itself and to those who look to it unless we are prepared to face the facts of life and facing them do something about them i stand in the tradition of great democratic presidents who in this century moved this country forward woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman and we are going to do it again in 1960 the republican party has never broken through new ground has never stood for progress has opposed step by step every piece of progressive legislation passed for the benefit of the people in the last 25 years housing social security minimum wage unemployment compensation all of the things which make it possible for us to build a strong and vital society i ask you to join us in 1960 i ask your support in this election i ask you to help us get this country moving again thank you dem jfk27 10 60h john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen can you hear me i want those nixon sign holders to hear what i have to say this loudspeaker is in the engine i come here as the standard bearer of the democratic party and i come here as an american i believe this race and this campaign is between the comfortable and the concerned between those who stand still like mr nixon those who lead a political party the republicans who have opposed every piece of progressive legislation for the last 25 years mr nixon runs on a slogan experience counts just listen you won t learn anything if you are talking let us see what the experience has been which has produced in the last 8 years three recessions which now in the united states has us using 50 percent of the capacity of our steel mills this year we are building in september 30 percent less homes than we built last year we have 4 1 2 million people out of work and 3 million working part time last week the soviet union produced just as much steel pretty nearly as the united states those are the issues in this campaign what kind of experience is it when in a dangerous time in the life of our country the surveys taken of our position abroad show our prestige so deteriorated that the administration would not even release the survey when this administration took control of the united states 8 years ago i don t think that there was any question that our prestige our influence our strength were at a peak now 8 years later the survey printed in the new york times of opinion of england and france showed only 7 percent of the people of those countries thought the united states was ahead scientifically in an opinion taken a survey taken of 10 countries around the world only one country had a majority of the people thinking we would be ahead of the soviet union by 1960 you cannot hear as i was saying let me just say that those of you who are students here have to make a decision if you are of voting age or even if you are not on november 8 which i think goes to the future of the united states the issues which separate mr nixon and myself are very clear and very sharp and i believe that basically they are twofold first mr nixon has chosen to place his campaign on the basis that we ve never had it so good that everything that must be done is being done in its own good time and in our position around the world in our position around the world he has made the statement that our prestige has never been as high now i could not disagree more with both of those statements the fact of the matter is that the prestige is not popularity it is not a matter that can be lightly dismissed we lead an alliance of the free world and we will no longer be the leaders of the free world we will no longer be secure unless we have confidence that we represent the way of the future that we are constructing here in the united states the kind of society which gives them hope that they can follow our example when we drift when we lie at anchor when we are uncertain when we have long debates about what our national purpose is then we give an image of uncertainty mr khrushchev speaks with confidence of the future he says our children and grandchildren will be communists we have to demonstrate our conviction that not only will our children be free but so will the children of men around the world this administration and mr nixon i don t think you are going to get him though let us put this administration s record to the test these are entirely new times and they require new solutions the key decision which this administration had to make in the field of international policy and prestige and power and influence was their recognition of the significance of outer space when they permitted the soviet union to move ahead when we had a secretary of defense who said he was not interested in spending money to find why fried potatoes turned brown the soviet union now is first in outer space mr nixon said the other day that if we had put forward a program of aid to latin america in 1955 that we might not have had a castro well why didn t we why did we wait until this summer the new continent now which will bear great influence in the world is africa do you know that we brought more foreign students to the united states 10 years ago than we do today last year guinea asked for 500 teachers do you know how many we sent them one do you know there are more students studying here from thailand than from africa south of the sahara do you know that we are about 15th or 14th in the world in radio programs to africa that we are behind indonesia do you know that we are fourth in the world behind radio cairo in our radio broadcasts from the united states do you know that the soviet union spends 10 times as much as we do in spanish broadcasts to latin america this administration is experienced i don t think any judge would give a man who had 40 accidents a new driver s license i don t think an administration which has presided over three recessions in the last 8 years which is now presiding over the lessening of the u s position around the world which has permitted the u s image to fade as a vital society our most important asset which has in that way damaged the cause of freedom i cannot believe that any young man or woman who looks to the future can possibly decide to sit down and sit still and look back with mr nixon and the republican party which has always opposed progress let me say to you young nixonites all eight of you let me say this in this 20th century both of our candidates both parties have put up various candidates and i believe that where we stand now and where we are going in the future can best be judged by where we have been hear the republican slogans stand pat with mckinley return to normalcy with harding keep cool with coolidge a chicken in every pot with herbert hoover repeal social security with alf landon and had enough with thomas e dewey who have we run in the 20th century woodrow wilson and the new freedom franklin roosevelt and the new deal and harry truman and the fair deal and every one of their domestic programs had their counterpart in the international policy the 14 points of woodrow wilson was the counterpart of the new freedom the four freedoms of franklin roosevelt were the international counterpart of the new deal technical assistance point 4 the marshall plan the truman doctrine were all the international counterpart of the fair deal now in 1960 the choice lies between the candidate who in this most revolutionary time runs on the slogan you ve never had it so good versus the candidate and a party that runs on the slogan of the new frontiers of the future on that basis i ask your help i ask your support this is not a contest between mr nixon and myself it is a contest between all of us who are devoted to our country who feel that our country has a great role to fulfill as the chief defender of freedom and it involves each one of you how many of you in the next decade will be willing to not only serve your country in the foreign service in latin america in africa in asia as doctors and engineers and teachers and nurses how may of you will be willing to pick this country up and move it forward and make it shine once again we now go to brooklyn thank you dem jfk27 10 60i john_f _kennedy first let me say that you are my type of democrat my friend bob wagner general farley frank o connor pat clancy the irish are very big out here jimmy delaney they really run a balanced ticket lester holtzman and bernard helfat who is running for congress and joe addabbo who is running for the congress and our campaign manager in queens any moray assemblymen and others who wish to run but on another occasion ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for staying so late we have not been playing golf we have been campaigning we have been traveling through brooklyn and now tonight we are here just so you will know if you decide to run for the presidency what it is like we will go to bethlehem pa to carry the message but you were nice to come here tonight i appreciate your staying i think you come here because you feel like i do that after 24 years it is time queens went democratic in a presidential election we have three or four rallies going here you are here tonight for the same reason that i am and that is that you agree and i agree that when we make a decision on november 8 we want to make the best decision possible for the united states we want the best for our country anyone who votes this year i think probably more than ever before in our history will make their judgment on what they believe to be in the best interest of our country mr nixon and i disagree on what is the best interest of our country and you have to make your judgment on november 8 of what you feel what you believe the kind of country that you want in the future the kind of responsibilities that you want to meet as a citizen because he and i do disagree and these disagreements are important mr nixon has run on a slogan that we have never had it so good it indicates his belief that we are moving in a period now to quote him of unparalleled prosperity that the united states is moving in a position of strength and vitality and that everything that must be done is being done in good measure he looks around the world and he sees the united states with our prestige at an alltime high and that of the communists at an alltime low i look at the world and i look at the united states and i don t see his picture at all and i am not as the democratic candidate for office going to run for the presidency in 1960 with any belief or any view that it is worthwhile getting elected president if we have to run on a platform which is totally unrealistic this country is not moving ahead like it is going to have to move ahead if we are going to meet our responsibilities to ourselves to those who come after us to those who look to us around the world for leadership and our position in the world is not unparalleled our prestige has been higher our strength relative to that of the communists has been greater if mr nixon hopes to be president of the united states and present the united states to the world in the same image that he now presents it in this campaign i could not disagree with him more i hope you share the view with me that we want the truth with the bark off the people of the united states want to face the facts you share the same view that i do that this country s potential is unlimited there is no responsibility no burden no hazard that the united states cannot meet but it certainly cannot meet those hazards unless the leadership is prepared to tell the truth what possible use is it for mr nixon to say in a television debate with me a week ago or 2 weeks ago that our prestige is at an all time high when at the very time in the state department there are polls taken in 10 countries this summer all over the world from england to indonesia which show a different result mr nixon either does not know about the polls or he has read the polls and he cannot draw a conclusion from them or another decision must be forthcoming the point of the matter is that this great country of ours deserves the best in leadership it deserves i believe a president of the united states that will set before the american people the unfinished business of this society a president and an administration that believes in america moving ahead in the 1960 s that believes that the best service that we can render to the cause of freedom is to build a strong and vital society here that spreads its influence around the world and demonstrates to the communists that we represent the way of the future that their system is doomed to die but it will die only when we meet our responsibilities the man in the audience said that i should tell mr nixon that experience is what he will have left after this campaign is over i don t know why we never think of those things but of course casey stengel s experience showed that experience is not enough what we have to do in my opinion in 1960 is pick this country up pick this country up pick this free society up and move it forward and i believe we can do it this is a great country but it can be greater it is a powerful country but it can be more powerful and as long as we are the chief hope of freedom as long as we represent the great resistance to the expansion of the communist movement i run for the presidency wanting to see us meet our obligations speak the facts tell the truth and then let the american people make their judgment i will close as we leave for bethlehem pa by quoting from mr robert frost who said i will hitch my wagon to a mule for i have promises to keep and miles to go before i sleep thank you dem jfk27 4 62 john_f _kennedy mr president prime minister mr vice president mr chief justice ladies and gentlemen i have a few opening announcements first the sudden and arbitrary action of the officers of this organization in increasing the price of dinner tickets by 2 50 over last year constitutes a wholly unjustifiable defiance of the public interest if this increase is not rescinded but is imitated by the grid iron radio tv and other dinners it will have a serious impact on the entire economy of this city in this serious hour in our nation s history when newsmen are awakened in the middle of the night to be given a front page story when expense accounts are being scrutinized by the congress when correspondents are required to leave their families for long and lonely weekends at palm beach the american people will find it hard to accept this ruthless decision made by a tiny handful of executives whose only interest is the pursuit of pleasure i am hopeful that the women s press club will not join this price rise and will thereby force a recession i want to congratulate the new officers of the white house press correspondents the old one bill knighton and bob roth but i must say that i am intrigued by the selection of the photographers last year when i came here the president was frank cancellare and this year it was arthur lodovichetti next year is del vecchio i do not want to suggest anything but i do understand that there was a meeting in upstate new york last night and that next year s president is going to be one of the muto boys i m sure i speak in behalf of all of us in expressing our thanks and very best wishes to benny goodman and his group miss gwen verdon and bob fosse miss sally ann howes mr reid who has some talent and mr peter sellers i have arranged for them to appear next week on the united states steel hour actually i didn t do it bobby did it like members of congress i have been during the last few days over the easter holidays back in touch with my constituents and seeing how they felt and frankly i ve come back to washington from palm beach and i m against my entire program i really feel that the only hope in 64 is to on the republican ticket is to nominate barry but to be honest i thought that before i went to palm beach we are glad to have the prime minister tonight last night he was the guest of the publishers and again he is tonight we want him to know how welcome he is lord dunsany a distinguished irishman said many years ago to fight england is to fight faith and i choose to believe in 1962 to be associated with england in a great cause is to be associated with faith prime minister we are proud to have you here again and i think i speak on his behalf in saying that after having been in the hands of 1400 members of the press for over 4 hours we haven t got a single complaint thank you dem jfk27 9 60 john_f _kennedy governor di salle distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express as we leave beautiful ohio i want to express my thanks to all of you we have been campaigning from painesville this morning down through at least 50 percent of the state of ohio i must say i share the view of governor di salle i think that this state is going to go democratic in november last night on television mr nixon stated that we agreed on the goals but that we disagreed on the means that is what the argument has been for 25 years how you move this country ahead how do you provide full employment how do you provide housing how do you provide education how do you develop the natural resources of course we want these things done but the big argument is the means and the democratic party has provided the means franklin roosevelt in accepting the second presidential nomination before 100 000 people in franklin field in 1936 i think said very clearly the differences between our two major parties in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think that is the issue what does this country want does this country want a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference or do we want a government that will move that will care for our people that will set before the american people the unfinished business of our society after franklin roosevelt was elected in 1933 the new president s friend robert e sherwood set it all down in a brief sardonic poem plodding feet tramp tramp the grand old party breaking camp blare of bugles din din the new deal is moving in today on every major crisis that faces the united states from the crisis at formosa to berlin in the plight of our cities of people out of work we hear no blare of bugles din din we see only plodding feet tramp tramp and the grand old party breaking camp i am a democrat and i am proud to lead the democratic party mr nixon says the party labels don t mean anything vote for the man party labels tell us something the democratic party would not have nominated mr nixon and the republican party never would have nominated me we come out of the parties because the parties do stand for something they do stand for a long history and the record is written in the last 25 years and in the last 50 years a democratic majority wrote the social security act and a republican majority tried to kill it the democratic party wrote unemployment compensation and the republicans opposed it a democratic party wrote the minimum wage law a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour away back in the thirties and four fifths of the republicans voted against it i think parties mean something they tell something about the candidates and they tell something about what the candidates will do if they are elected to office mr nixon never would have been the unanimous choice of his party unless they felt they understood where he was going what he believed and that he believed what they believed and i don t i believe what wilson believed and franklin roosevelt and harry truman that it is the function of government not to dominate but to serve i don t believe as i tried to say last night in big government but i believe in government meeting its responsibilities when 50 percent of the steel capacity of the united states is unused when we are building 200 000 homes less than we should when there are 1 800 000 children who go to school part time when teachers across the united states are paid 15 percent less for wages than they are in the manufacturing industries in the united states then i think it is still time for the democratic party i think we still have a function when the average wage of laundry women in five large cities of the united states is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week when the average social security check for people over 65 is 78 a month and at least 9 million live on less than 1 000 a year i think there is still need for the democratic party i think the party i think the next president of the united states will face a difficult time because our country faces a difficult time he is going to be faced with the problem of maintaining our position in berlin of maintaining our position all around the globe of attempting to rebuild the image of the united states as a vital and strong society as a society that is moving ahead and at the same time he is going to be faced with serious problems here in the united states he is going to be faced with the problem of trying to maintain in the first months of his office full employment in the united states and in 1961 we may face a difficult time that will be a matter of the greatest possible concern and the greatest possible importance to our people i think that this administration has not realized that when you have a recession in 1954 and when you have a more serious recession in 1958 and then you begin to have a plateau in 1960 that it should be an indication that it is time that our economy was stimulated rather than was held back by a fiscal policy and monetary policy which i think in the last 8 years which has featured hard money high interest rates which i think has had a deflationary effect on our economy at a time when we needed to stimulate it i think the united states must address itself again to the full employment act of 1946 i think we must attempt to stimulate the growth of the united states we are going to have to find 25 000 jobs a week for the next 10 years if we are going to find jobs for your children who are coming into the labor market 25 000 jobs a week 52 weeks a year for 10 years if we are going to maintain full employment in the united states and it is going to be a matter that is going to be of concern to us all canton ohio and the united states we want to make sure that any american who seeks a job who honestly wants to work will have a chance to work that is our objective and we must do this at a time when automation is throwing men out of work i ran in the primary in west virginia i spent some time in mcdowell county in west virginia mcdowell county mines more coal than it ever has in its history probably more coal than any county in the united states and yet there are more people getting surplus food packages in mcdowell county than any county in the united states the reason is that machines are doing the jobs of men and we have not been able to find jobs for those men i think this is not a problem for mcdowell county nor is it a problem for canton ohio it is a matter that should be of importance to the next administration and to the next president the problem of automation is to make sure that machines make our lives easier not harder for those who are thrown out of work i think we must develop our natural resources you cannot bring industry into ohio unless you have clean rivers i think the greatest asset that has happened to ohio during the last few years except for governor di salle s election was the building of the st lawrence seaway and i was proud though i came from massachusetts to vote for it because it is a national asset and a rising tide lifts all boats if ohio moves ahead so will massachusetts good water power transportation those are necessary to develop the economy of the united states in the 1960 s sixth i think we must formulate special programs which will be of assistance in those areas which are chronically hard hit by unemployment areas where it is 7 8 9 or 10 percent and it may have gone on for 2 or 3 years i had one of them in my own state lawrence mass where the unemployment rate was 35 percent for 3 years and the reason of course was because we lost our textile mills this administration has opposed both area assistance bills i am not interested in seeing people in the united states out of work not for 1 month 4 months or a year or for 2 years or 3 years while they get a surplus food package from the government of 5 cents a day in eggs rice and they are going to add lard this summer this is an important election and we need your help in it we cannot possibly succeed in this area or in this state unless in the next 6 weeks we can carry the state of ohio ohio is key and so is illinois this election will be decided in the major industrial states of this country and the question before the people of ohio is do you think we can do better do you think a democratic administration with new people with a sense of urgency about the affairs of this country at home and abroad do you think we can move this country or do you think or do you think you have never had it so good i don t think khrushchev has had it so good as he has had it lately he has been moving outward and he has done it by unrelenting effort to demonstrate that his society represents the way to the future that is the most powerful weapon he has because if the soviet union was first in outer space that is the most serious defeat the united states has suffered in many many years the reason not merely because outer space is important militarily but because as george adams the head of u s foreign service said earlier this year people around the world equate the mission to the moon the mission to outer space with productive and scientific superiority therefore in spite of all our accomplishments because we failed to recognize the impact that being first in outer space would have the impression began to move around the world that the soviet union was on the march that it had definite goals that it knew how to accomplish them that it was moving and that we were standing still that is what we have to overcome that psychological feeling in the world that the united states has reached maturity that maybe our high noon has passed maybe our brightest days were earlier and that now we are going into the long slow afternoon i don t hold that view at all i don t hold that view at all and neither do the people of this country i hope if we are successful that at the end of the next president s administration people around the world will begin to wonder what is the president of the united states doing what is the united states doing not merely what is mr khrushchev doing i want to entertain him with a vision of the united states on the move i am tired of reading every day what he says and what castro says i want to begin to see the united states moving ahead so we ask your help and assistance in this campaign i will close by reminding you that in the election of 1860 100 years ago the issue was really comparable the question of whether the united states could exist half slave and half free now in this election i am reminded of a letter which abraham lincoln wrote to a friend during that election in that letter he said i know there is a god and i know that he hates injustice i see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk27 9 60a john_f _kennedy i want to thank that band one more chorus of anchors aweigh and we will just float this building right out governor di salle distinguished guests mrs price vice chairman of the democratic national committee ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to you for a very generous welcome tonight i owe a good deal to ohio governor di salle endorsed me at a time that i had few supporters away back last january and there isn t any doubt that without that support given to me on that occasion and later at the democratic convention i would not be standing here tonight i want to thank an old friend of mine the mayor of your city for his warm welcome he and senator dugan and the congressman to be and others really turned out and the reason they turned out was because they know it is important for this district and it is important for the state of ohio and it is important for the united states that we get democratic leadership back in this country again forty years ago next month we returned to normalcy with warren g harding of the state of ohio and wages dropped 44 percent 2 years later thirty two years later herbert hoover was elected and the next year the stock market dropped out of sight now we come to another election with over 4 million americans unemployed many of them for longer than 4 months another 3 million that work part time here in this one county of ohio which is a great industrial county we have more than 10 000 unemployed and 11 500 on relief i know that this is a great and prosperous country but i am not satisfied until we have everyone who searches for a job able to find it whether they live in boston mass or akron ohio or san francisco calif the difference between mr nixon and myself is the same difference that has existed for many years between the republican and the democratic parties i said on sunday in cleveland that i could not think of a single idea which the republican party had produced that constituted major new legislation on behalf of the people the cleveland paper today attempted to correct the record and they mentioned the child labor work that president taft had done 50 years ago they mentioned the antitrust suits that had been brought in at the time of theodore roosevelt i think theodore roosevelt was a great republican president but i want to know what they have done in the last 4 years that has been of benefit to the people i don t mean that they have not come up with new legislation the fact of the matter is that every piece of major legislation which is the hallmark of franklin roosevelt s administration from social security to minimum wage from the securities and exchange act to tva every one of those pieces of legislation was opposed at the time they were written by the republican party they say our goals are the same of course the goals of all americans since the beginning of this country has been the same a better life for our people but it is a question of the means by which we achieve those goals i am not satisfied and i don t think it is significant to say our goals are the same our goals were the same in the thirties and in the twenties and before that and in the fifties what counts in a country what counts in a system what counts in political parties is the means by which you achieve those goals and i think it is on that basis that the people of this country are going to select the democratic party once again there is some value in brand names when you buy something at the store you buy something you know something about mr nixon says don t pay any attention to the party labels vote for the man the party labels tell a story they tell a story of this country they tell a story of the division between the republicans and the democrats on the great issues of benefit to our people whether they are federal aid to education whether they are better unemployment compensation whether they are fiscal and monetary policies which stimulate our economy whether they are housing legislation or roads or whatever it maybe i think our record is clear we have come down on behalf of the people and i therefore am proud as the standard bearer for a party which in this century has produced woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman i am proud to come to this city tonight and ask your support this contest is between those who say you never had it so good and those who say we can do better this contest is between those who say that the power and prestige of the united states has never been higher and between those who say we can be better around the world we can stand as we used to stand for freedom for a better life for all people franklin roosevelt did not pour billions of dollars into latin america and africa and yet every young man of those countries who looked for a future for his country looked to franklin roosevelt because they felt he served the people because the democratic party and roosevelt were identified with the aspirations of people regardless of their race or their creed or their color and what we are in this country speaks much louder than what we say we are if we are building a better society here if we are meeting the problems here in the united states if we are moving ahead if we demonstrate that a free society can be a productive society then i think we serve ourselves and the cause of freedom and all those who are attempting to decide which road they will take i want people to say the way of the future is freedom i want people to say that we want to travel on freedom s road the communist system will be dead we hope if we meet our responsibilities by the turn of the century it does not represent as we do a basic aspiration of the human nature the only thing they have been able to do is by organizing their society by the police power of the state they have been able to move their society ahead physically therefore we have to do the same we have to do more we have to be not only free but strong and therefore i come to you tonight asking your support not saying that if i am elected life will be easy but i can assure you that if i am elected the light which constitutes this country the light which stands for freedom the light which comes when a society moves i think will burn in the united states again i ask your help in this campaign during the american constitutional convention there was behind the desk of general washington a picture of a sun low on the horizon and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising sun or a setting sun at the conclusion benjamin franklin stood up because of what we have done here because we have adopted the constitution we now know it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i think for us for this country for the cause of freedom if we meet our obligations it can be a rising sun and the beginning for us all of a great new day thank you dem jfk27 9 60b john_f _kennedy thank you very much i want to say how much i appreciate your coming to the airport to meet me tonight i know the reason that you do it is because you share the view that i have that it is essential to this country and to the state of pennsylvania that the democrats win this election i think the issue is a plain one and i think we attempted to discuss it last night that is the question of whether the united states can do better whether this is a great country that must be greater a powerful country that must be more powerful i do not run for the presidency on the slogan you never had it so good i think we can do better and i hope that all those who share my views that this country has a most important destiny to be the chief defender of freedom at a time when freedom is under attack all over the world i hope that you feel as i do that the democratic party which in this century produced woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman as a contribution i ask your help in this campaign i think here in this state of pennsylvania this issue may well be decided it is my judgment that the next president of the united states will carry pennsylvania on november 8 i would not have been nominated at the democratic convention if i had not secured the support of the pennsylvania delegation now that you have done that i hope you will go the rest of the way we have a chance to be of service this is a great country and i think it deserves the best of us i must say looking back on the record of the past 25 years that mr nixon has said party labels don t mean much what counts is the man i think party labels mean something the republicans never would have nominated me and the democrats never would have nominated mr nixon i believe in the democratic party because i think it has been of service to the people i think it looks to the future and i think it recognizes that there must be placed before the american people during the next 10 years the unfinished business of our society the things we must do to keep our people working to provide security for our old people to provide good education for our children to provide a defense second to none i hope it may be said at the end of the next president s first term that during those years the world started to look to the united states again and wondered what the united states was doing and wondered what the president was doing not what mr khrushchev was doing i am tired of hearing it i will close by again expressing my thanks i think we have a chance to really be of service now i think that when we serve our country we serve not only our own people but we serve the cause of everyone who wants to be free also during the american revolution thomas paine said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america if we succeed here the cause of freedom succeeds if we fail the cause of freedom fails that is why i run for office this year feeling that we must do better that we must be stronger because what we do i think depends upon the future of the world this is a great opportunity for all of us i think if we can rewrite the history of the world in the next 4 or 8 years we can be of service to ourselves and all those who look to us and historians will later write that these were the great years of the united states thank you dem jfk27 9 60c john_f _kennedy governor di salle senator lausche mayor celebrezze mayor jaworski bill mccray ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for a very generous welcome to ohio i must say i think ohio is going democratic in november of 1960 and is going to lead the united states i am grateful to your governor and to your senator for accompanying me today on a trip through northern ohio this state symbolizes the opportunities and the responsibilities and the problems which face the united states as a whole a great industrial state faced with the problem of growing of finding schools for your children of meeting the problems of those who are old of making sure that those who are old enough to work can find a job of making sure that our economy produces the things we need in this country the things we need if we are going to be strong i look to the 1960 s with a good deal of confidence and hope and i stand here today as the democratic standard bearer of the oldest political party on earth i stand where woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman stood in their time i think the contrast between the two parties and the things for which they stand and their approach to the future and their record of the past can be seen in the men and the slogans that they used in the 20th century no democratic candidate for the presidency ever stood pat with mckinley or kept cool with coolidge or returned to normalcy with harding or had two chickens in every pot with hoover or ran in 1936 as landon did repealing social security or ran like dewey did in 1944 and 1948 or runs in 1960 on the slogan you never had it so good american presidents who were democrats in this century woodrow wilson and the new freedom franklin roosevelt and the new deal harry truman and the fair deal and now we run in 1960 on a program of the new frontier the new frontier represents all of the responsibilities which the american people must meet in the 1960 s and it represents all of the opportunities that are before us as a country and as a people here in the state of ohio and in the united states we have an opportunity to prove that freedom is not only the best system of government but it is also the strongest that productivity is the handmaiden of liberty that you can be free that you can be strong that you can solve your problems that you can build a defense second to none that you can be first in space and first in education and first in employment and first in steel production that you can meet the problems that we face and still maintain our freedom that is the responsibility not of the next president and not of the next congress and not of the house and the senate it is a responsibility in which all of us participate in which all of us share we have seen in the last few days in new york city mr khrushchev and kadar and gomulka and castro they personify the communist system but they are not themselves the great danger the great danger is the communist system itself and its relentless determination to destroy us if mr khrushchev should pass from the scene the communist system would remain so all the debates with mr khrushchev and all the things which we may say to him pale in significance to the relative power of the two systems are we stronger or is the communist system stronger are we going to be stronger in 1970 or are they going to be stronger are we going to be stronger in 1980 or are they going to be stronger my argument with mr nixon and with the republican administration is that they do not have sufficient vision sufficient vigor sufficient imagination sufficient foresight to see that the unfinished business before us calls for us not merely to be first today not merely to be strong enough today but to be strong enough in 1970 in 1980 we protect not only our own security but the security of all those who look to us and the security of our children therefore i think it is incumbent upon us to make the right decisions to choose the strong way to choose if necessary the hard way for ourselves and for those who depend upon us here in lorain in ohio in the united states this fight is going to be fought we cannot possibly miss we cannot possibly fail if we maintain our freedom and our strength because our system represents in my opinion the basic aspiration of people everywhere the experience of eastern germany of hungary of poland of tibet all these show that people want to be free and if they feel that we are strong if they feel that events are moving in our direction and not in the direction of the communists i think they will come with us and what is true of eastern europe is true of africa and asia and latin america the big question in their minds and the question which we have to settle in the next 8 years is is the world moving toward freedom or toward the communists i think it can move toward us i think that we can meet the challenge i think we can demonstrate that we represent the way of the future the communist system is as old as egypt and i think we have the greatest chance in our time and generation to show mr khrushchev that americans who fought in anzio and in the pacific now have determined that the united states will move and meet its responsibilities at home and abroad thank you i just want to say one word about the importance of sending a good man to the house of representatives we need the best people we can get in the house the senate and the executive branch and i think this district has a great chance in doing a service for itself and the country if you elect bill mccray to congress dem jfk27 9 60d john_f _kennedy governor di salle congressman levering distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for being kind enough to stand up there i am sure somewhat uncomfortably in order to say hello to me so i will not talk too long i do come here as a candidate for the office of the presidency and i run for the office of the presidency in a most difficult and dangerous time for us all i think every american who attempts to make a judgment as to what he should do on november 8 considers his own problems here in this state or in other states the problems he may face the necessity of maintaining employment and he also wonders what is happening on the other side of the world what contribution his country can make to the maintenance of freedom around the globe i don t think there has been any presidential election where the issues are so serious the problems facing the united states so burdensome the responsibilities so heavy upon us all this is not an easy time for any american it is not an easy time for any friend of freedom because you must consider not only what happens here in this district but also what happens in the congo and india and latin america you must consider not only what happens here in ohio but also what happens in the far side of space so the american people will make a judgment in november facing as they do the most dangerous and difficult period in a long and honorable history i do not run for the office of the presidency saying that if i am elected life will be easy i don t think life will be easy in the sixties and i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that if i am elected that the problems will disappear i think the problems will travel with us but i do say that if i am elected president of the united states i do think it is possible to set before the american people the things which we must do in order to maintain our freedom the things we must do in order to be second to none the things we must do to build a better society here in the united states and also hold out the hand of friendship around the world twenty years ago franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america today yesterday mr castro raised the standard of revolt the standard of communism through all of latin america not merely in cuba one or two years ago there was not a country in africa that was in any danger of moving in the direction of the communists the other day mr herter said that ghana had joined the communist side and the congo is uncertain a year ago laos was one of the strongest countries on the side of freedom today laos is torn by a civil war these are the issues which are before the united states and before the united nations and before the world in the next 10 years are other countries of africa going to join ghana are other countries of latin america going to join cuba are other countries of asia going to join laos in the next 10 years what contribution can we make to the cause of freedom here in the united states and the cause of freedom around the world i think that is the question that is before us this year it is not the questions that have been traditionally before us not the old arguments that divided our party now the problems are new and they require new solutions one hundred years ago lincoln said as the problems are new we must disenthrall ourselves from the past i ask you to look ahead i ask you to join me in making this the greatest country on earth the strongest country i don t want anyone 10 years from now or any historian to write that these were the years when the balance of power began to turn against the united states these were the years when the tide ran out for freedom i think we should change that i want historians to say that these were the years when the american people began to move again these were the years when the united states met its responsibilities to freedom you have a distinguished congressman from this district the house of representatives under the constitution bears heavy responsibilities the power to appropriate money the power to speak for the people and i hope that this district not only because of the interest in this district but also because he speaks for the united states will send congressman levering back to the congress of the united states during the campaign of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe i am ready now 100 years later with the issue still the same freedom or slavery we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming we know his hand is in it but i think if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready i ask your help in this campaign thank you dem jfk27 9 60f john_f _kennedy i am grateful to governor di salle for his generous introduction of me this morning and of his support and the support of the ohio delegation at the los angeles convention last july and i am grateful also to senator lausche for his generous endorsement he has been a vigorous senator and he has spoken his mind on many occasions on matters of great public policy so i am more than indebted to him for his warm endorsement of me this morning i think we can move ahead in this state with the support of steve young i think that ohio can be democratic in 1960 with your support and i hope that the people of this district will send back to the congress bob cook he has spoken for this district and ohio but he has also spoken for the united states this is an important and difficult and trying time for us all the responsibility which events and circumstances and our own choice have placed on us will weigh heavily on the backs of every american during the next 10 years the real question before us in some ways transcends the differences between the two parties and that is how can we make this country stronger how can we identify more successfully the united states with the cause of freedom around the world we are going to face in the 1960 s problems as difficult and complicated as faced us in the 1930 s we are going to have to find in the 1960 s 25 000 new jobs a week if we are going to maintain full employment and we are going to do that at a time when new machines are coming in and taking the jobs of men we are going to have to build more schools than were ever built before in the next 10 years in the united states we are going to have to build for your children as many college dormitories and buildings as were built in the whole history of the united states all in the period of 10 years we are going to have to develop the resources of this country so that we can maintain the population by the year 2000 twice as large as it is today i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that if i am elected life will be easy i think it will be a difficult and trying time for us all but i do run for the office of the presidency recognizing that if the office has high responsibilities and great opportunities and as i said last night i think the function and responsibility of the next president is to place before the american people what we must do not only to survive but to prevail we cannot be satisfied with things as they are you cannot live in this hostile world as we do and feel that the tide is moving in the direction of freedom the russians the chinese the cubans the eastern european satellite governments are all dedicated to the destruction of the united states because they know that if we fail their victory is assured there is no country and no people to whom we can turn for help we depend up on ourselves and therefore i run for the office of the presidency believing that this great country can meet its responsibilities can assume its functions that a free society does have more vitality and strength than any other system and that it is up to us not only to meet our responsibilities here but to the cause of freedom around the world that is a heavier burden than any people have ever borne in history but it is a burden that i believe we can bear in africa and latin america and asia in the next 10 years i think those people who stand today on the razor edge of decision will be in to make up their minds does the future belong to the west and freedom or does the future belong to the communists in a gallup poll taken in february it showed that a majority of people in 10 countries believed that by 1970 the soviet union would be ahead of the united states both militarily and scientifically i don t agree why should we why should we be behind and what is more important why should they think we are blind i am not satisfied to be second in space to be second in the position that we hold now in some areas of the world i think the united states should be first not first if or but or when or maybe but first because we must be if freedom is to survive so i ask your help in this election i think this election is most important and i think after this election if we are successful we have the chance to be of the greatest possible service to our country all of us wish the best for it all of us have confidence in it all of us believe it is a great country that can be greater all of us believe it is a powerful country that must be more powerful all of us believe that it is time that the united states started moving again thank you dem jfk28 10 60a john_f _kennedy governor lawrence senator clark ladies and gentlemen i come to this district as a candidate for the presidency of the united states in a difficult and challenging time in the life of our country a week from tuesday you must make your decision on which party which candidate which philosophy of the future which judgment of the present because of your own good judgment of what is best for the united states i don t think that any american this year will vote on any other basis than what is best for our country because this is a sober and challenging time in the life of the great republic now on what basis should you make your judgment first i would say this mr nixon and i differ very basically on the present position of the united states in the world on the present position of the american economy and on what must be done to strengthen our country he runs on a program you ve never had it so good and he runs on a program that our prestige in the world is at an all time high i want to make it very clear that i disagree with him on both counts as an american i am not satisfied to pass through in a period of 8 years a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 and now in 1960 to have only 50 percent of the steel mills of pennsylvania and the united states operating to have 100 000 steel workers out of work to build 30 percent less homes this year than last year to find that the prestige and influence of the united states according to studies undertaken by the united states abroad is lower than it has been in many years i am not satisfied as an american and i hope you are not either mr nixon accuses me of downgrading america i do not need any lesson on devotion to my country from mr nixon or anyone else what i do downgrade is the kind of leadership which at this difficult time speaks through the country of our great progress of how well we are doing we never had it so good things are fine there is no sense of urgency no sense of concern this is a race between the comfortable the satisfied the happy and the concerned those that care that this country will move ahead those that want to see us do better those who believe that this great country must do better on that basis i ask your support on november 8 you cannot possibly tell me that we are going to win this competition with mr khrushchev in the future when 20 or 25 percent of our capacity is unused when 4 million americans are out of work when 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls graduating from high school never see the inside of a college and 16 million americans live on an average social security check of less than 72 a month and this administration says when we try to provide aid to education when we try to provide medical care for the aged it is too extreme when we try to pass 1 25 minimum wage per hour 50 a week 50 a week mr nixon says it is extreme mr nixon represents the same party that in the midthirties voted 90 percent against social security 90 percent against the minimum wage of 25 cents an hour and in 1960 voted 90 percent against the 1 25 minimum wage and medical care for the aged tied to social security if that is the kind of leadership in these difficult days that you think is best for your country mr nixon is your man but if you share my view that this country has to move forward again that we will only be strong in latin america africa and asia and europe we will only be as strong as we are here at home our society is on the move if we have purpose and direction and force then what we are will speak far louder than what we say mr nixon chose to devote his speech here to cuba if there would be one topic that i would be reluctant to discuss if i were republican it would be cuba but i would also like to hear him discuss not just cuba but also the united states pennsylvania how we are going to build a strong society here in the united states i don t worry about the cause of freedom i don t worry about our prestige around the world our influence around the globe as long as we are moving here at home but if we sit still if we present an untrue image if we don t look like we know where we are going then people around the world begin to wonder whether the future is with us that is the difference between mr nixon and myself that is why i come here today and ask your support on november 8 this struggle between mr nixon and myself between the leadership of the republican party and the leadership which we represent is as old as this century mr nixon s party has produced in this century mckinley coolidge harding hoover landon dewey and mr nixon the democratic party produced woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman now if you like the mckinley landon coolidge harding viewpoint mr nixon is your man if you have the view that i have that it is time for us to pick ourselves up and move to set before and this the president must do set before the american people the unfinished business of our society to build in this country a strong and vital example of what freedom can do on that basis i ask your help to give us the opportunity to get america moving again thank you dem jfk28 10 60b john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to thank the next congressman from this district stanley prokop governor lawrence mr mayor mr lawlor mr chairman i come here tonight to ask your support for stanley prokop for those candidates who are running for assembly and the state senate because i believe that pennsylvania and the nation needs to have democratic leadership and let me say that i am glad to be in this county in this city because it is my judgment that here in pennsylvania the next president of the united states may well be close even on november 8 i understand that as a result of the registration in this county i was informed by mr lawlor that for the first time in the memory of man it goes back no further for the first time in history pennsylvania now has a democratic majority over 3 000 may i say that i would not he here tonight i would be home to bed if it had not been for the support i received from your distinguished governor and the pennsylvania delegation at the democratic convention the fact is that pennsylvania made it possible for me to be nominated and i would like to have you finish the job i am also glad to be here because the publisher of the scranton times mr miner has been generous enough to endorse my candidacy unlike mr nixon who has hundreds of papers supporting him as they do all republicans democratic candidates have only a few and we really cherish them so we want to thank him very much let me say that i think this choice that lies for the voters of pennsylvania and the nation on november 8 is very clear if you want to sit still in scranton if you want to continue the present leadership if you want to see the united states fail to move forward throughout the world and in our own country mr nixon is your man but if you believe as i believe that now in the united states that this is one of the great watersheds in history as was 1932 when franklin roosevelt was chosen and 1912 when woodrow wilson was chosen i believe that this is a time of decision for america before you decide who should he the next president who should be your congressman you have to decide what your view is of your country your community your history your future you have to decide whether you are comfortable and happy and fat and prosperous today or whether you agree that as a citizen of the united states as a defender of freedom it is our obligation to move our country forward not to be satisfied with anything but the best and we want the best for this country i am not entirely convinced that mr nixon offers it i believe mr nixon offers more of the same but less he continues to look behind him he continues to look in the past he continues to make arguments which have little relevancy with the facts he continues to be further and further removed from reality in discussing the problems of the united states and the problems we face in the world in michigan i saw it when he made a speech about the number of automobiles we were now producing i would like to ask him how many of those automobiles are being sold because by the middle of november according to every calculation we will build more cars in september and october than we have in years and by the middle of november there will be more automobiles unsold than there have been in the history of the united states now what kind of prosperity is that when the auto industry speeds it up now and then leaves them unsold for the dealers in november if that is the kind of prosperity we are talking about i don t think that is the kind that americans want what kind of prosperity is it when we build this year 30 percent less homes than we built last year that affects the job of everyone here everyone who works in construction everyone who works in home materials everyone who works in textiles everyone who works in any industry is affected by the rate of homebuilding and auto building in the united states they are our two basic industries fifty percent of the steel capacity is being used 30 percent less homes nearly 4 5 million people out of work and 3 million working part time the wall street journal which should be mr nixon s bible says it is a recession i don t know what you would call it and i would not calculate what it is but in any case it is not good enough and if mr nixon is satisfied with it that is another difference of opinion that we have the fact of the matter is in this county alone in this area of pennsylvania nearly one quarter of a million people one out of every four have moved to find a better chance someplace else i want rather than young people looking for jobs elsewhere i want the jobs to come here i think franklin roosevelt put the choice for us just about as sharply and clearly as any american has ever put it when he came before 100 000 people in franklin field philadelphia in 1936 to accept his second presidential nomination and in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference and in my opinion that is what our opposition is and mr nixon represents as he approaches the future of this country yesterday i saw he was heckled and to the hecklers he said we are going to take care of you in my judgment the people of the united states will make a judgment on november 8 as to which candidate which party which political philosophy which future they believe best represents the aspirations of our society let me make it very clear that no voter should go to the polls thinking mr nixon and i stand for anywhere near the same thing in 1960 i think the choice is very clear it is written in his record in 14 years in the congress it is written in the republican record of 25 years of opposition to every piece of progressive legislation that has come before the congress the same party that opposed 25 cents for a minimum wage in the mid thirties opposes unanimously pretty nearly in the house 1 25 in 1960 the same party the republicans who opposed social security in the mid thirties opposed medical care for the aged the same party which in 1960 talks about education the same candidate who talks about aid to education cast the decisive vote against aid to teachers salaries in the u s senate the same candidate who talks about housing and about aid to our colleges was a member of the administration which vetoed two housing bills which would have provided low rent housing housing for the elderly and loans to our colleges and universities in order to build college classrooms and dormitories is that progress i always enjoy listening to mr nixon talk about the republican record on area redevelopment on the national debate he talked about what he was going to do about scranton and wilkes barre if i had not been there if i had not observed that i might have been impressed the fact of the matter is he can t possibly explain away two republican vetoes of area redevelopment i was the floor manager of the first bill to pass the senate it came out of the committee of which i was chairman senator clark of this state congressman flood and your own future congressman that is the kind of leadership which stands for this sort of legislation the first bill in 1956 which i managed died in the house the republicans opposed it the next bill passed the senate and the house and was vetoed by the president the next bill passed in the senate and the house and was vetoed by the president they did not even introduce the republican bill they didn t even testify in favor of it until after the president had vetoed the second bill i come from a state which has had a good many people unemployed if anyone can tell me a more desperate fate for an american than wanting to work and unable to find it having children and a family to support and this morning i talked to three steelworkers who have been out of work since april how do you meet the weekly budget what do you do go down and get surplus food which amounts to 5 cents a day per person what do you do about your children what do you do about the mortgage on your house after unemployment compensation runs out then what do you do you move away or you work in another state or your wife goes to work these are the things which divide our two parties medical care for the aged aid to education unemployment compensation insured by federal minimum standards a minimum wage area redevelopment development of our natural resources i don t believe there is any comparison in the record of our parties for 25 years and i don t think that there is any comparison in our approach to progressive social legislation which serves the people between mr nixon and myself i am glad to say so you have to decide i believe that the 1960 s can be in dickens phrase the best of years or the worst of years we can stand still here at home we can see our prestige and influence go down around the world we can see castro s influence spread in latin america we can see the influence of the communists spread in africa we can see the hope of freedom in asia begin to collapse we can see eastern europe permanently subjugated we can see western europe moving toward independent neutrality we can see all these things we can be second in space we can graduate one half as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union we can provide more slums than we now have all these things are possible we can also do other things we can build this country of ours we can provide jobs for our people we can provide good education for our children we can provide security under social security for our older citizens and we can build this country so that it serves as an ornament to people all around the world who also want to be free we can reestablish the same atmosphere which existed in the thirties when franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america mostly because he was a good neighbor here in the united states we can hold out the hand of friendship to people in africa newly independent who want to stay independent and we can demonstrate in europe and in eastern europe that we stand for freedom that we are committed to it that we are its chief defenders and that this strong vital growing country of ours represents the way of the future mr khrushchev speaks with confidence that our children will be communists he could not be more wrong my judgment is that the future belongs to freedom the whole history of the last 10 years in eastern europe and africa all over the world demonstrates that people want to he free freedom will be the ultimate unless we fail because if we fail then freedom has no strong source of power behind it if we move ahead if we build a strong and vital country here if we demonstrate what a free society can do then freedom is strong all around the world we or they the communist system or freedom it depends on us mr khrushchev will move and the communist system will move with all of their energy in every area and we have to move with a vitality that comes from freedom which will be greater but we cannot do it if we go and accept the idea that what we are now doing is good enough that our prestige was never higher that our rate of growth is satisfactory and that all is being done in good time so you have to decide you have to make your individual judgment a week from tuesday what kind of a country you want what kind of a present you judge it to be what kind of a future you feel it can be what obligations and responsibilities as a citizen of a great free country you are willing to meet and then when you make that judgment we will know where america is going let me say in conclusion that this campaign and i hear that some of you have been here since 6 o clock or 7 o clock standing up 5 o clock standing up and i have also been working today but let me say i understand that the republicans have some trouble filling their rooms even with chairs but here they stand up but you have stood long enough and i have spoken long enough today let me just say that i hope you are going to elect stanley prokop to be the congressman i think he stands for progress and the assemblyman and the state senator they will give support to the things that governor lawrence is trying to do in the state of pennsylvania and i hope also you will stand with us nationally that this county of scranton lackawanna and the rest and the state of pennsylvania on the night of november 8 will vote yes to the sixties will vote democratic will vote to move this country off dead center i ask your help in doing that give us your hand your voice your vote and all of us together will move forward in the sixties dem jfk28 10 60c john_f _kennedy congressman walter who has been my friend in the house for over 14 years representing this district with distinction governor lawrence senator clark mr rice distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen first i want to express our appreciation to the president of this distinguished college to the faculty and student body for their hospitality this morning this college stretches back through the history of the united states many great and distinguished american figures have come to this campus which is dedicated to the advancement of truth i am delighted to come here today i am delighted to be your guest i hope that what we say here will come under the general heading of the advancement of the truth at least as we see it in 1960 prince bismarck count bismarck once said one third of the students of german universities broke down from overwork another third broke down from dissipation and the other third ruled germany i do not know which third of the student body of this college is here today or which third or even fifth may be supporting the democrats in 1960 but i am confident that i am talking to the future rulers of america in the sense that all educated men and women must bear the burden of the discipline of self government and i am glad to talk to all of the citizens of this community this is an important election it involves the selection of a president of the united states the highest office in the free world of the senate and of the house and in this sober time in the life of our country this sober time in the life of freedom around the world it is important that we make a careful judgment of what is in the best interest of our country there are sharp issues which separate mr nixon and myself as to how this country should move forward what our obligations are in this country how we can build strength that will make us secure in the world and will advance the cause of freedom i disagree very sharply with the leadership which this administration has given and i do not think that it is an accident that this country has moved through two recessions 1954 and 1958 through a serious slowdown in 1960 at the very time in the world when every impartial objective survey whether released by the state department or not shows that our prestige as the leader of the free world has declined the problem of course for all of us is to build the kind of society here in the united states that strengthens the cause of freedom that strengthens our position emerson said a century ago that what we are speaks far louder than what we say we are if we are moving here at home with a sense of national purpose if we are committed to finishing the unfinished business of our society then in my judgment our position around the world will be advanced rather than diminished mr nixon campaigns on a domestic slogan we ve never had it so good but i will say he did not use that slogan frequently in the state of pennsylvania he campaigns around the world that our prestige is at an alltime high and that of the communists at an alltime low now if he believes that i disagree with him if he does not believe it and it is contradicted by the usia surveys of opinion in 10 countries which show that a majority of people in 10 countries stretching all the way from england to indonesia believe first that the soviet union is now ahead of us in science only 7 percent of the people of england and france according to the survey published 2 days ago taken this summer only 7 percent believe that we are ahead of the soviet union in 9 out of 10 countries a majority of the citizens of those countries believe that by 1970 the soviet union will be first militarily now what does that signify for a citizen of this country our hope for freedom our hope for peace depends upon our leading a free world coalition a coalition that is put together voluntarily how long will they listen to the sound of our trumpet if they believe it blows a faltering note if they believe that we represent the way of the past that the communists represent the way of the future to lead the free world to defend freedom to roll back the communist advance requires a powerful committed dedicated and moving america and that is what we are going to get this is a great and productive country to those of you who are committed to the republicans or those of you who might be committed to mr nixon i would ask the following question how as an american concerned with the full use of our powers can you come to any conclusion but that the domestic economy has been mishandled when we have a recession in 1958 1954 and now a slowdown do you know this year in september we built 30 percent less homes than we did a year ago that our steel mills are working 50 percent of capacity and that by the middle of november we will have more automobiles in inventory than we have ever had in our history it is estimated that there will be by the middle of november in spite of the fact that this is a changing season nearly a million unsold cars in the united states i don t think we can afford in a deadly competition between freedom and totalitarianism we are strong and productive but we cannot possibly afford to have our facilities unused we cannot compete with mr khrushchev we cannot compete with the communist system we cannot lead freedom if we are using our facilities part time and our people even less 20 to 25 percent of our facilities in this country and manpower is unused what does mr khrushchev think when he sees that he has half of our facilities for steel and last week almost out produced us i don t believe that that is a record on which any candidate can run with a good deal of peace of mind as well as success in november the soviet union today is putting twice as high a percentage of its national income into education as we are i don t say we ought to be disturbed i don t say we ought to duplicate but what i say is for our own sake because freedom demands more of people than any other system that it requires a higher development of those qualities of self discipline and character and restraint than any other system it seems to me we should be disturbed when 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of college do you know in the next 10 years we are going to have to build more college buildings more dormitories more classrooms than we built in the history of this country to take care of twice the number of boys and girls who will be trying to go to college in 1970 and yet a bill which this congress passed a year ago to provide loans repayable at a low rate of interest for college classrooms and college dormitories was vetoed by the president of the united states and a program still has not been enacted i don t think this state this country or this society of ours will move ahead until every child who has the talent to develop a superior intelligence capability or skill is given a chance to do it regardless of his race or his color these problems are all difficult running and managing and developing a free society is a difficult problem the real question for our time is can we make a free society develop grow thrive with sufficient purpose sufficient direction to compete with the single minded advance of the communists over a long period of time that is the problem that all of us face as republicans and democrats my disagreement with this administration is that it has not set our goals high enough that it has not provided the means and the mechanism by which we can meet the problems that we face whether it is education whether it is housing whether it is medical care for our older citizens whether it is employment for our people whether it is the development of natural resources whether it is the building of strength throughout the world today latin america africa and asia hang on the razor edge of decision to decide which road they will take will they decide that the only way to mobilize their resources is to follow the example of russia and china or will they say we want to be free and we see what the united states has done and that is the road we want to take that is why i believe this is an important election and that is why i believe this is an important time in the life of our country by the end of the next president s administration 1964 or if he is reelected in 1968 the world will be entirely different than it is today we have seen how in the administration of one president president eisenhower nearly all of africa has become free there are 16 new nations admitted from africa in the last 2 years that is the kind of revolutionary world in which we live and how many of those nations voted with us in the united nations on the question of the admission of red china do you know how many votes we got from those 16 nations none do you know we brought more foreign students here to study 10 years ago than we do today do you know the soviet union has 10 times as many broadcasts in spanish to latin america as we do do you know indonesia has more broadcasts to africa than we do do you know we are fourth in the world now in broadcast moscow one peiping two radio cairo three and we are fourth do you know we had more people stationed in western germany in 1957 in our embassy than all of africa last year guinea asked us for 500 teachers newly independent do you know how many we sent them one we offered 300 scholarships to the congo in june which was more scholarships than we offered all of africa the year before as if you could turn out a college student like that do you know how many of those congolese are studying here six if that is the kind of record you want if that is the kind of international record you want mr nixon is your man but if you take the view i take if yon take the view that i take that this is a great country but it can be greater that what we are now doing is not good enough that this is a powerful country but it must be more powerful not only because of our obligations to ourselves but to all those who look to us i am not satisfied as an american to see the prestige of the united states decline in any degree i am not satisfied to be second in outer space i am not satisfied to see us doing anything but our best and in my judgment the last years have not been our best i come to you today and ask your support those of you who agree those of you who are not comfortable those of you who are not content i ask the support of those who are concerned i ask you to join us in building this country of ours and as we sit on a most conspicuous stage in the history of the world to build a society which will augment freedom which will serve as an example which will serve as a beacon light to all those who now wish to be free thank you dem jfk28 10 60d john_f _kennedy mr ryan mr mayor governor lawrence senator clark congressman to be william deitman ed schlitzer and albert nagle ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming out here this morning you come here and i come here for the same reason and that is that all of us believe that this is an important election which involves our country and that we are involved in selecting the president of the united states who will speak for the united states who will symbolize the united states and the symbol which mr nixon and i present in this election is entirely different you have to judge you have to decide on november 8 a week from tuesday which symbol which leadership which philosophy which party you prefer now let me make it very clear that the differences are sharp i want mr nixon to come here to pottsville and campaign on his slogan you ve never had it so good my own feeling is that this country will be as strong in the world that our chances for peace will be as well assured the united states will speak with vigor and lead the free world only if we have a strong and vital economy and country here in the united states words are not substitutes for strength mr khrushchev has listened to words all his life what he respects is the power of a free society and this country is not moving ahead it is not developing the kind of power that it must if we are going to maintain the leadership of the free world and roll communism back around the world i will make it clear where the republicans and the democrats and mr nixon and i differ i was the floor manager and as chairman of the subcommittee on labor brought the first area redevelopment bill to the floor of the senate we passed that bill for depressed areas and i represented a number of them the city of lawrence mass had 30 percent unemployment for 4 years i brought that bill and managed it through the senate that bill was opposed by the republicans it passed the house and president eisenhower vetoed it we brought the bill through the bill which senator clark led the fight for in the senate we passed it in the senate passed it in the house and the president vetoed it and i don t want mr nixon or anyone else to say that that bill was not infinitely preferable to that half baked bill which they brought forward which would have brought little relief to massachusetts pennsylvania west virginia kentucky southern illinois where the unemployment rate has been in many cases over 10 percent for as long as 3 or 4 years i am not interested in campaign promises i am interested and you should be and you are in what is the record no 2 this government of ours passes out surplus food packages to nearly a half million people in the state of pennsylvania do you know what is in those packages for a family of four some flour some meal some rice they have added lard recently it amounts for a family of four people to 6 50 for a family of four which amounts to a grand total of 5 cents per person per day in the richest country on earth if you feel that a minimum wage of 1 25 is extreme if you believe that medical care for the aged tied to social security is worse than a medical aid bill which requires that an old person must take an oath that he is medically indigent a pauper s oath before he gets public assistance if you feel it is proper to veto two depressed area bills if you are pleased by the fact that we built this year in september 30 percent less homes than a year ago and that this administration has vetoed two housing bills in the last 12 months if you think that is good mr nixon is your man but if you share my view that this country of ours has to move ahead we can t permit 50 percent of our steel capacity to go unused 109 000 steelworkers out of work others working parttime coal miners and i spent a month in west virginia which has the same problem as pennsylvania out of work and this administration has been indifferent to it the first act passed in 1953 pretty nearly by this administration s leader in the senate senator knowland when the republicans controlled the senate was to repeal defense manpower policy no 4 that policy provided that defense contracts would go into those areas where there was high unemployment the fight was led by senator knowland the leader of the senate at that time i don t think that there is any person in the united states that can go to the polls on november 8 and say they stand for the same things i disagree with mr nixon across the board my belief is that the united states has to move ahead we cannot provide security for our people we cannot provide employment for our people we cannot educate our children we cannot care for the aged we cannot speak with strength as the leader of the free world unless we have a strong and vital and prosperous economy here in the united states and that is the question and that is the issue what is the possible use of pointing fingers at khrushchev or making great speeches when every poll taken in the last 12 months by the state department around the world shows that they do not believe any longer that the united states is the strongest country in the world how can we lead an alliance who prepares for battle as the bible tells us when the trumpet blows an uncertain sound we are as strong abroad as we are at home we are as strong in the fight against communism as we are in pennsylvania the hope for freedom in eastern europe rests with our strength our determination our unwavering determinations to carry this fight for freedom in this country and around the world until ultimately freedom prevails and we will not do that unless this community and this state and this country are working forward moving forward and if you believe in a dangerous and challenging and changing time that we ought to stand still if you look to the past instead of the future if you believe that every thing that must be done is being done in its own good time mr nixon is your kind of candidate but if you share my view that the united states as the leader of the free world has to lead that the united states must move in the sixties that this is the most dangerous and challenging and promising time in the long life of our country in the long life of freedom in the next 8 years this world is going to be entirely different it will be freer or it will be more enslaved depending upon what we do the responsibility is ours we are the only sentinel at the gate if we fail freedom fails if we succeed if we present an image of power then freedom is strengthened it is on this basis that i come to this community in the heart of the united states and ask your help on november 8 let me conclude by just saying that 100 years ago in the campaign of 1860 that campaign was fought over the issue of whether this nation could exist half slave and half free now the question 100 years later is whether the world will exist half slave and half free or whether it will move in the direction of freedom or in the direction of slavery i am reminded of what lincoln wrote to a friend in the campaign a century ago i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice we see the storm coming and we see his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk28 10 60e john_f _kennedy mr mayor governor lawrence senator murray congressman flood ladies and gentlemen i come here to this city as the standard bearer for the democratic party and i come here and ask your support on november 8 a week from next tuesday you as citizens of this state and country have a sober judgment to make between the two candidates and the two parties i don t think that there is any american now who can go to the polls on november 8 and be in any doubt that there are sharp differences between mr nixon and myself and they go to the future of our country mr nixon has chosen in the year of 1960 in these changing revolutionary and turbulent years to run on a domestic program of we ve never had it so good i wish he would come here and run on that program and he has chosen at a time when freedom is under attack all over the globe he has chosen to run on an international program that our prestige has never been higher that of the communists never lower that everything is being done that must be done and that the tide of history is moving in our favor i want to make it very clear as an american and as the standard bearer for my party that i do not agree with him in either category i believe this is a great country but think it ought to be greater and i believe it is a powerful country he says we have never had it so good and i say we have to do better my basic conviction is as we look at the world struggle at our chances for peace at our chances for security at our chances to roll back the communist offensive rests in the final analysis upon one factor and that is the strength of the united states the power of the united states a united states on the march and my chief disagreement with mr nixon is that the republican party in the last 8 years instead of setting before the nation its unfinished business has permitted the united states to stand still any administration that vetoes twice the flood douglas clark bill which i managed on the floor of the senate the first time it came up as chairman of the labor subcommittee vetoed it twice for area depressed bills here in the state in my own state of massachusetts can you tell me that is a progressive administration any administration which twice vetoes in the last 18 months two housing bills do you call that a progressive administration one of the results of that is that we this year in september built 30 percent less homes than we did a year ago we tried to pass in the senate of the united states this year a bill for 1 25 minimum wage for a 40 hour week mr nixon says it is extreme does anyone here think 1 25 an hour is extreme we tried to pass a bill for medical care for the aged tied to social security do you know the bill that finally passed that the president signed that provides that if you are over 65 your husband or your wife gets sick and if you are supporting your parents and they get sick a heart attack or any of the others before they can get any assistance under that bill they must sign a petition that they are medically indigent a pauper s oath they have to sell their property have to spend their money and then they can go down and get public assistance we attempted to pass a bill which would provide that it would be under social security everyone on social security would pay 3 cents a day when they are retired they would be entitled to medical attention care doctors and the rest we got 44 democrats and one republican and time magazine reported that when the vote was announced mr nixon turned and smiled i wonder if he is going to be smiling november 9 the fact of the matter is as congressman flood knows that the party that voted 90 percent against the 1 25 minimum wage voted 90 percent in the midthirties against 25 cents the party that voted against medical care for the aged 90 percent in 1960 voted 90 percent against the social security in the midthirties you have to make your judgment you have to decide yourselves this state depends on steel and coal and industry our steel mills today are working 50 percent of capacity last week the soviet union almost out produced us do you know that by mid november we are going to have 1 million unsold cars in the united states the largest number of history and you call this a forward progressive administration that runs on peace and prosperity mr nixon announced today that if he is elected president he is going to take a trip through the satellite countries of eastern europe i remember in 1952 when they were running for president that they announced they were going to liberate eastern europe i think what the people of eastern europe need are not parades but they need a strong america committed to freedom here and around the world let me conclude by making two points first that our chance for peace our chance for freedom our chance to meet our commitments to freedom around the globe depend on one factor a strong progressive forward looking america if we fail freedom fails if we succeed freedom succeeds secondly we cannot have a strong progressive forward looking america unless we get new leadership new leadership that is committed to progress not committed to standing still and looking back mr nixon runs as the republican candidate though he rarely admits it but i would remind you and i would remind you that i am a democratic candidate every day and in every state of the union the republicans have run in this century mr mckinley harding do you know what his slogan was return to normalcy keep cool with coolidge a chicken in every pot with herbert hoover i don t know what dewey s slogan was because we never really found out and now they run mr nixon in the 20th century we ran harry truman the fair deal franklin roosevelt s new deal and woodrow wilson s new freedom and i run in 1960 suggesting that it is time america picks it up and started toward the new frontiers of the 1960 s so i stand here tonight with your congressman dan flood who has spoken for this district and the united states and i stand as the standard bearer of a great old party the oldest political party on earth but i stand here tonight as the standard bearer of the youngest party a party committed to progress and if you in this city and you in this state of pennsylvania share my view that it is time america started moving again i ask your help in this effort give us your hand your voice your support in the constitutional convention in your suburb of philadelphia there was a painting of a sun behind the desk of general washington low on the horizon and many of the delegates wondered whether it was a rising or a setting sun and at the conclusion benjamin franklin stood up he said we now know it is a rising sun and the beginning of a great new day i believe in 1960 for the united states if we choose to look forward if we choose to measure up to our responsibilities as americans as the chief defenders of freedom and as progressive forward looking strong people in my judgment it can be a new day and the beginning of progress for the united states thank you dem jfk28 10 60f john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen governor lawrence senator clark congressman flood mr mayor fellow democrats ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you for coming out here today your presence here indicates that you feel as i do that this is an important election in an important time in the life of our country for a most significant and responsible job the presidency of the united states you have to make your choice as citizens of our country concerned for our country you have to make your choice of which man which party which political philosophy which view of our times shall be elected president of the united states and lead this country in the next 4 years i want to make it clear that mr nixon and i differ i hope that no one will go to the polls on november 8 thinking that there is no clear choice mr nixon and i differ very basically about what our country needs to do about what our position must be in the world and what the responsibilities are of the united states in the turbulent and changing years of the 1960 s mr nixon represents his party he looks in my opinion to the past and present and we look to the future and we ask you to look to the future too i hope a democrat threw that this community probably as well as any community in the united states knows what the issues are in this campaign this community as much as any community in the united states has worked itself it has believed it can do and it has tried to build itself up tried to find work for its people bring industry in here provide employment but you know very well from your own experience that unless there is full employment in the united states unless people are working all around our country it is extremely difficult to find jobs for all the people who need them under this administration we are building 30 percent less homes than we built a year ago our steel mills work 50 percent of capacity and that affects the job of every miner we are going to have by the middle of november 1 million unsold cars the highest inventory of unsold cars in the history of the united states now anyone who believes that under those conditions we should continue that kind of leadership that supports leadership that twice not once but twice vetoed the area redevelopment bill sponsored by your congressman dan flood and your senator joe clark anyone that believes that a minimum wage of 1 25 is extreme mr nixon is your man but anyone who believes as i do that this country will never be strong in the world that we will never be successful in turning mr khrushchev back we will never be successful in expanding freedom around the world unless we have in this country a strong and vital and progressive society and that is what we are committed to that is what we are committed to and i believe the american people on november 8 faced with a choice of a leadership that looks to the past and the present and recognizing that this country the only hope of freedom that there is we are the only sentinel at the gate and if we don t move ahead if we don t provide employment for our people if we don t use our facilities to the fullest if we don t educate our children and provide under social security medical care for our aged and jobs for those in between then the united states instead of being the leader of the free world will cease to count as the only hope of freedom mr khrushchev does not take a country as seriously when he is able last week to produce almost as much steel as the united states and he is now producing twice as many scientists and engineers i believe that this country is a great country i have served it for 18 years i represent the oldest political party in the world but i represent this year the youngest party the party that looks to the future that looks as franklin roosevelt looked to the future and i want your help if you can tell me after 14 years in the congress if you can tell me one single piece of original progressive legislation for the benefit of the people sponsored by either mr nixon or the republican leadership can you tell me one minimum wage social security mr nixon made a speech 3 weeks ago about what we need to do in housing and he said in that speech the housing act of 1949 works very well that is the basic housing act do you know he voted against it as a congressman he leads a party that voted 90 percent against a 25 cent minimum wage in the midthirties and votes 90 percent against 1 25 in 1960 he leads a party that voted 90 percent against social security in the midthirties and voted 90 percent against the medical care for the aged tied to social security under the bill signed by the president if you are over 65 if you have parents over 65 if they get ill do you know what they have to do to get any assistance they have to sign an oath that they are medically indigent a pauper s oath then they go down to the relief station and get public assistance under our bill those who are working would pay an additional tax of 3 cents a day which amounts to 10 a year and when 65 you would be entitled to the benefits to which you contributed the difference between those two approaches in my opinion is the difference between our two parties in 1960 and i believe in 1960 and i say this not as a democrat or a leader or standardbearer of our party but i say it as a concerned american who wishes to see our power and prestige and influence grow as the great hope of freedom i believe that we have to move in this country the bible tells us who prepares to battle when the trumpet sounds an uncertain sound in the last 3 years the influence power and prestige of america has declined relative to that of our adversaries i want to see it built up again i want people all over the world to wake up in the morning and wonder not what mr khrushchev is doing not what mr castro is doing but to wonder what the americans are doing so i come to this community in the heart of pennsylvania the keystone state of the united states and i ask your support i ask you to join me in picking this country up and moving it again i ask you to join me in providing our nation with power force and purpose this is a great country and it deserves the best of us all when you decide on november 8 you look to the future you join with us in saying that it is time america started moving again thank you dem jfk28 9 60a john_f _kennedy governor lawrence reverend clergy mrs price ladies and gentlemen i am very grateful for the governor s generous remarks and his kind analogy with mr perry the only thing is that mr perry did not have to fight three times all over again after having gone through it once it is like playing ohio state every saturday for 4 weeks in a row so we will try again next week i appreciate your coming to the breakfast i am touched by the not as deeply touched as you have been this morning it always warms the hearts of the democrats to see contributors gathered together in one room on an occasion such as this i wish there were some other way to run a campaign but this is what makes the mare go and this is what keeps us moving today from here to buffalo and on through new york you would not have wanted to have gotten a telegram from albany saying we were stranded there so i hope you will keep us going we are very grateful for it this is an important campaign and it does involve us all greatly i have the honor to lead the democratic party in this campaign but the contest is not merely mr nixon versus myself we have a tendency sometimes in this country to personify or personalize all of our issues we look at mr castro and we look at mr khrushchev and we look at mr nasser and all the rest really the important thing about mr khrushchev is not mr khrushchev himself being a formidable figure but it is the communist system we worried the same way about stalin and we worry about khrushchev when khrushchev disappears we will worry about koslov and mikoyan whoever emerges out of that it is the power of the system that counts and it is the same thing of the united states the vigor and leadership of the president is an ingredient in national strength but in the final analysis it is the sum of the total that counts presidents may change but the power of the united states in the balance of world politics in the balance of the power struggle of the world is the great force on the side of freedom so in a very real sense we are all involved when the united states is in trouble it isn t the president that is in trouble it is the united states so this is the struggle between mr nixon and myself i think it is a struggle really in a larger sense between two different concepts of government which has gone on for many years and which continues in 1960 we have a democratic congress i hope we are going to have a democratic executive i hope that the democratic executive and the democratic congress in a responsible and effective way will try to set before the american people the unfinished agenda the unfinished business i think it would be helpful if we could make a determination of what we have to do in the next 10 years to maintain our military position our economic strength our social strength here in the united states and throughout the world then i am confident we can do it i don t think there is any doubt that even though i have been critical of some phases of our national leadership i have never been critical of our country i think its potential is unlimited we proved it in two wars we proved it in peacetime therefore we are all united in support of our country mr nixon persists in saying that i am downgrading america i downgrade the leadership which is getting in some phases of our national lives but i don t downgrade the country i upgrade it after traveling through it for many years after having been in 50 states and after having been as much of it as i have no american could possibly have anything but the greatest confidence in it and its people the problem is that we make sure that in the sixties that we recognize not merely the difficulties we are passing through now but that we try to do everything in relationship to what needs to be done mr nixon monday night and it was well within his debate rights kept applying to the present statistics what might have happened 10 or 12 years ago i prefer to apply what is happening today with what needs to happen i prefer to apply what we are doing with what the communist world is doing i think it better to apply what is happening today is our prestige increasing relative to theirs around the world that is the only question before us in other words by 1970 will we be stronger in relation to them than we are today or weaker that is what the determination is that the american people have to make my judgment is we can be stronger my judgment is that with the present relative rate how ever there is no assurance of that i ask your help in this campaign and i want to express my appreciation for the support you have given this campaign in this state and throughout the country we could not possibly have carried on without help like this i want you to know that i think in addition to being of assistance on this occasion i think that you are also meeting the responsibilities which go with citizenship this campaign cannot possibly be run without money to pay for transportation these are the humdrum things television radio and all the rest where are we going to get the assistance we are going to get it from the people who will be willing to help even though they have many other responsibilities or we just won t get it i think that both parties ought to have assistance in presenting their views then the american people can make a fair choice then there is no inequality in their ability to deliver their message then the choice is very fair and we get democracy at its highest so i hope that you feel as i feel that in helping this campaign you also contribute not merely as democrats or republicans to a campaign but in fulfilling a responsibility which goes with citizenship i appreciate it very much i appreciate your help in this campaign i do think we have a great chance to win but more important than that we do have a chance to be of service to our country thank you dem jfk28 9 60b john_f _kennedy mr mayor congressman dulski congressman to be mccabe my old friend and colleague from the house of representatives ted gorski the county executives ladies and gentlemen earlier this evening i said in rochester n y that i was attending the largest meeting inside that i have had during the entire campaign i am sorry but unfortunately or fortunately buffalo just beat it i come here tonight as the democratic candidate for the office of the presidency in a difficult and somber time in the life of our country this is going to be a close election many people feel that it may well be decided in the state of new york but whether it is decided with us or against us it is my hope that this election will serve a great national purpose that it will remind the people of the united states of the unfinished business before our country and i am glad that the republicans now agree that this country must move ahead six months ago the republican campaign slogan was peace and prosperity three months ago it was you never had it so good now all those slogans all those movies have been scrapped and now they are saying it is time america started to wake up and i agree i stand here tonight where woodrow wilson governor smith franklin roosevelt and harry truman stood in their time and generation 1960 is different from 1912 or 1932 or 1948 but i sing the same song they sang that is that the democratic party belongs to the people and will serve the people and in serving the people serve the cause of freedom franklin roosevelt in his second acceptance speech before 100 000 people speaking in franklin field at philadelphia said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think that is what we have seen and will see unless we are successful in this election a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i will give you one example of it yesterday charleston w va september 27 a m vice president richard m nixon accusing john f kennedy of untruths said today that the best hope for help in distressed areas of west virginia lies in a republican victory those distressed areas have been waiting 8 years and the republicans come around around election time after vetoing two distressed area bills would have helped west virginia and then he goes on to say furthermore nixon said kennedy should correct what he terms his false statement to the effect that 17 million people go to bed every night hungry in the united states he said kennedy should speak up while khrushchev is still in this country i am going to speak up while khrushchev is in the country they may not go to bed hungry every night but they don t go to bed very well fed and here is my source speaking before the senate agricultural committee on june 4 1959 senator george aiken the senior republican member and former chairman of the senate agricultural committee said at present there are more than 26 million people who do not have enough money to afford to purchase food necessary to good health secondly on january 5 1957 mr benson in discussing why he was not for a food stamp program said that there are in this country 25 million people 40 percent of whose income would not be enough to buy a basic low cost adequate diet and they define a low cost adequate diet as one which substitutes beans for meat and potatoes for cereal i don t know what mr khrushchev thinks but i know what i think i think the best way to give the impression to mr khrushchev that everything is right in this country is to make everything right there are 4 million americans in the united states who receive a surplus food package from the government every month that package and i have seen it and some of you have too has included in it 6 50 for a family of four of dried eggs some cereal some rice and this summer the department of agriculture is adding lard that amounts to 5 cents a day per person 4 million of them in the united states now the fact of the matter is that i don t say this is mr nixon s fault but i say we are concerned about it i say the democrats want to do something about it i say these are not statistics to us these are people who need help and in a country that has more surplus than any other we can do better during 1933 after mr roosevelt took office robert f sherwood the new president s friend contrasted the outgoing republican party with the new dynamic drive of the new deal and in that speech he said plodding feet tramp tramp the grand old party is breaking camp blare of bugles din din the new deal is moving in today on every major crisis that faces our country from the problems in east berlin to the problems in africa we hear no blare of bugles din din we see only plodding feet tramp tramp and the grand old party breaking camp i don t say that the administration has remained quiet on all these issues in fact their statesmen sound like an exhortation from king lear that goes i will do such things what they are yet i know not but they shall be the wonders of the earth i think we can do better as long as there are 15 million american families who live in substandard housing as long as the average wage for laundrywomen in the five largest cities of this country is 65 cents for a 48 hour week as long as there are nearly 17 million americans who are not even covered by the dollar minimum wage as long as 17 million americans who are over 65 live on an average social security check of less than 78 a month as long as there is unfinished business before our country i think there is need for our party i come before you and ask your help in this election i think anyone who lives in this country knows the importance of this election this country has 7 percent of its people out of work this country cannot possibly be strong we cannot possibly stand up to mr khrushchev unless we have a strong economy here in the united states we pride ourselves on being the most productive power in the world and yet last week the soviet union produced as much steel as the united states because only 50 percent of our steel capacity was being used we pride ourselves in being the most powerful country and yet by 1970 the soviet union will have more hydroelectric power than the united states we pride ourselves on being the strongest power and yet in 1961 1962 or 1963 unless we are prepared to rebuild our strength the united states will be in a position i think of danger from an attack which could catch us in a position where we would be secure but not secure enough where we would be strong but not strong enough i call for your help in this election at a time when we i want an america that is not first if not first but not first when not first maybe but first period i want a world which looks to the united states for leadership which does not always wonder what mr khrushchev is doing that does not always wonder what mr castro is doing i want them to wonder what the president of the united states is doing in 1952 the republican candidates for office came here to this city of buffalo and promised that they were going to liberate the country behind the iron curtain now the iron curtain and its protectors and defenders is 90 miles off the coast of the united states 8 minutes by jet in the island of cuba and mr castro comes to new york and raises the communist banner throughout all of latin america in 1953 and 1954 chiang kai shek was unleashed against the chinese mainland and yet the chinese are going to be as great a problem to the united states in the 1960 s as the soviet union i think we are moving through a somber time and i don t think there are any easy answers to any of the problems that we face but i think one answer is to build a stronger and better society here in the united states to provide the best education for our children to provide equal opportunity for all americans regardless of their race or regardless of their religion for any job that they are competent to hold in any part of the united states for any office emerson once said what we are speaks louder than what we say the best propaganda for the united states is to have a society which emphasizes opportunity for all our people which develops the personality and talent of our citizens which builds a happy country which serves around the world as a beacon and advertisement for the cause of freedom all the propaganda all of the messengers around the world pale next to the fact of what we are if we can do well here if we can develop our resources if we can protect the rights of our people if we can maximize their opportunities if we can build a strong society then the message of freedom will be carried around the world we won t need voices of america and we won t need propaganda statements because the strength of our society will serve as the best advertisement for freedom african nationalists used to quote thomas jefferson and abraham lincoln franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson not because jefferson or lincoln or wilson did very much about africa and about their problems but because the people of africa felt that they were trying to do something for their own country and because they wanted to be associated with a man who spoke for great principles in times of great crisis the kind of society we build here will cause those people to say we wish to move in the same road that they are taking the great question which we now face in the next 10 years is can we make our system work in such a way that the world around us will wish to come with us or are the communists going to be able to show that they are the ones to whom the future belongs mr khrushchev said that the united states is a sick and dying and faltering horse i don t believe it but i think it is up to us to show him i think it is up to us to the history of the last 8 years has shown that the communist system ultimately will be destroyed the events of eastern germany and poland and hungary show that there is a basic desire of all people to be free and independent and as long as we remain strong as long as the polish anthem says as long as we live poland lives and eastern germany and hungary and africa and we need your help i hope that there is not anyone here who is old enough to vote who is not registered i hope there is not anyone here who wouldn t do their best to get their friends out to vote this is the business of our country we decide on november 8 which way our country is going to go whether it is going to give the green light to the sixties or the red light whether it is going to say yes no or maybe as i said i stand where woodrow wilson stood and roosevelt stood and truman and mr nixon stands where mckinley stood and taft stood and coolidge stood and harding stood and landon stood and dewey stood mr nixon says that parties don t make much difference republicans always say that around election time but they act when they do in the congress as if it made a great deal of difference i would not permit mr nixon to escape from his party and i wish to be identified with mine no democratic candidate for the presidency has ever run and said parties don t matter because we are proud of our record we want to be identified with it we want to follow it i said in cleveland the other day that i could not think of one single original piece of social legislation which had been passed by the republicans in their terms of office the cleveland paper attacked me and said i was highly unfair i forgot completely what president taft did about child labor in 1904 i am prepared to say i was wrong but what have they done since president taft the only president they had in the 20th century who showed an awareness of the future was theodore roosevelt and they read him out of the party at the end of 1912 we run as democrats we run identified with the party that has brought us most of the gains which i think all of us now accept but i don t say that what we have done in the past is sufficient franklin roosevelt and truman and wilson met the problems of their generation now we are a new group of americans with entirely new problems and it does no good to invoke great names unless we are prepared to bring new solutions to new problems i don t run merely against mr nixon this is a contest between all of us between all of us who want to reach for the future between all of us who have unlimited confidence in this country s capacity to lead and be great all of us who look with confidence and hope to the future of this country all of us who agree with thomas paine who said in 1776 the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america that is our goal so i close by expressing my thanks to you for your friendship tonight the state of new york will be the key in this election and as i said this morning the next president of the united states will have to carry new york if he is going to be elected here in this city of buffalo in this county i secured some of my earliest support for my candidacy for the nomination from the mayor and others i come here tonight and ask your help in the campaign itself i close by reminding you that in the election of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later the issue is still freedom or slavery we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk28 9 60c john_f _kennedy mr mayor mayor wagner of new york why don t you stand up mayor he wanted to see what a big city looks like that is why he came to lockport chairman prendergast bob richards candidate for congress mr mayor i understand mr mayor that you are a member of another active party in the united states i hope you won t feel i am abusing the hospitality of the city if i say a few good words on behalf of the democratic party i am a candidate for the office of the presidency and i run for the office with a full recognition that the united states moves through very difficult times i am sure mr nixon would agree that there are no easy solutions to the difficult problems that the united states faces i think one of the tendencies of all of us who are candidates and perhaps all of us who are voters is to think of all of the issues between the parties in the traditional sense and i do think that is valuable because it tells us something about the party but the point i want to emphasize is that i think the problems that the united states is going to face in the next 10 years are entirely different than we have ever faced before we are going to have the great problem of demonstrating to the world that a free society can work better than a communist society we are going to have to show that not by our words but by our deeds mr castro and the head of the ghana government the head of the new laos government the head of the chinese communist government the head of the russian government they believe in their system because they believe that their system represents the best opportunity to bring to the people the material things that they want we believe our system is better for two reasons first because we believe that freedom can produce a better life for our people and also because we believe that freedom is the way people want to live we think people want to be free all over the world i think it is the next function of the next president and the next congress and the country to try to develop policies which will demonstrate here in the united states that we have a vigorous and vital society that we are able to maintain a defense second to none that we are able to assist those countries that wish to follow on freedom s road countries in latin america africa and asia who are going through now the same experience that we went through 100 or 150 years ago i wish i could run for the presidency saying that the only problems that will be before the american people are the problems that face the country here but i run for the office of the presidency with full recognition that as voters and as officeholders we must be concerned not only with what happens in this community and this congressional district and this state and country but also what happens in africa and asia inside of men s minds in those countries and what happens on the farther side of space it may be unfair the burdens placed upon us may be too great i don t think they are i welcome the opportunity for the united states to demonstrate that it is a vigorous and vital society that it can maintain its defenses that it can build an educational system second to none that it can maintain employment at a time when we are increasing our population and when new machines are taking the jobs of men that we can make productive use of our agricultural surpluses i said on television monday night that 4 million americans received food packages from the government which are worth 6 25 a month for a family of 4 that adds up to 5 cents a day those are not just statistics there are 125 000 to 150 000 people in west virginia alone in this rich country who get that 5 cents worth of food every day the reason is because machines have thrown men out of the coal industry now in the 1960 s in coal in steel in automobiles in oil in chemicals in paper in glass we are going to meet the same problem how can you find 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 10 years which we are going to have to find if we are going to maintain full employment at a time when 1 machine will do the job of 10 or 15 men 15 years ago i run for the presidency with full recognition that the problems facing the next president of the united states are more complicated and more difficult and more burdensome than they have ever been in the past how can a free society compete over a long period of time with a totalitarian society that is the question which our generation of americans is going to face i must say i hope after this election that mr khrushchev realizes that a new generation of americans has taken the leadership men who fought in italy and in the pacific and are not prepared to see freedom lose in the 1960 s i want to see in the next 10 years people around the world begin to wonder what the united states is doing not merely what mr khrushchev or castro are doing but what we are doing in this country the most powerful and productive country in the world a country which represents and stands for freedom if we move ahead here if we are first in space and first in defense and first in the things which catch people s imaginations then i think we can demonstrate to the people of latin america and africa and asia that they don t have to follow mr khrushchev or mr castro that they can come with us and meet their problems and also live in freedom we have a great cause with which we are identified and whether i win or lose this election i would hope that this election would give the american people an opportunity to make a judgment about the future that we take a great movement forward in the 1960 s that we recognize that what we are doing now is good but not good enough that this a great country but it is not great enough that it is a powerful country that can be more powerful mr nixon says that i downgrade the united states i don t at all but i give you just one figure to show how serious is our situation mr gallup and i don t always agree with his polls did take a poll in february of this year in 10 countries scattered around the world he asked them the single question do you believe by 1970 the united states or the soviet union will be first militarily and scientifically in every one of those countries a majority of the people thought that the soviet union would be first why a country of one half of our productive power the most backward country of europe 30 years ago and yet the majority of the people around the world think that they will pass us in both of those areas in the next 10 years that is why politicians on the make in africa and latin america begin to wonder whether castro and lumumba and khrushchev may represent the way to the future i think we do but i don t think we are going to be prepared to meet it unless we are prepared to move ahead my invitation to you is to join in building the prestige of the united states in recognizing that we stand today on the razor edge of decision and so does the world and recognizing that if we succeed we succeed not only for ourselves but all those who look to us for leadership i ask your help in this campaign thank you dem jfk28 9 60d john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i would like to have you meet mayor wagner of new york arthur levitt the comptroller of the state and mr prendergast the state chairman we do not come to niagara to see the falls we came to see you and the people of northern new york i am a candidate as you know for the office of the presidency of the united states and i run as a democrat mr nixon has said that party labels don t matter so much this year that the question is the man i think it is also the man and i think it is also the party i think parties do stand for something they ought to grover cleveland a governor of new york as well as a president said what good is a politician unless he stands for something and what good is a party unless it stands for something i want to make it very clear what we stand for in 1960 the democratic party stands for a stronger america not strong if but when or something but strong this year now period i want to make it very clear that i consider it to be a central responsibility of the man who is elected president of the united states on november 8 to send a message to the congress in the first 3 months of his office which will request appropriations which will make us in 1961 1962 and 1963 in a position to stand up to the soviet union or the chinese communists or anyone else who wishes to threaten our security i think it is incumbent and i think it is primary and i think it will provide us and we can provide the kind of security that we need secondly i stand for full employment in the united states there are more people out of work this august than at any time except for the two recessions here in this country you have seen it i think that the federal government and the states and the companies have to devote themselves to the goal of providing work for men who want it for men who need it and providing work under good conditions that has been the goal of the party that i represent since woodrow wilson and it is the goal of the democratic party today i have served on the labor committees of the congress for 14 years and i have traveled in the last year to nearly every state in the union i have been to parts of new york and to west virginia and pennsylvania and southern illinois and i think that it is a problem which is going to face the next president of the united states in the first 6 months i don t think it is any secret for mr khrushchev that the u s economy today is at a plateau that our steel mills are working 50 percent and i don t want to see the winter of 1961 slide as it did in the winter of 1958 and 1954 and 1949 this country cannot maintain its leadership unless our people are working and our machines are working the soviet union last week produced as much steel as the united states and the reason of course is because our steel mills work 54 percent of their capacity what affects the steel mills affects this country if this country is moving ahead if we have fiscal and monetary policies which stimulate employment if we have a defense policy which provides not only protection for the united states but strength for our economy if we provide security for our people then i think we provide security for freedom my program is brief that is to strengthen this country because what we are in this country speaks far louder than what we say if we are building a strong society here and a strong economy if we are providing work for our people there isn t any question that we can outproduce any country in the world that our security will be assured we only fail when we don t measure up to our own potential it is my policy and i think the policy of the democratic party and i think the policy of this country to start this country moving again that is the program to which we commit ourselves i will be glad to answer any questions that anyone might have dem jfk28 9 60e john_f _kennedy mayor wagner mr prendergast arthur levitt mr jordan ladies and gentlemen i hope the mayor who is a distinguished republican i understand will not take my key away if i make a few unkind remarks about his party i won t include him in them at all there is an old saying that you have not seen any falls until you have seen niagara falls i hope they will also say that we have not seen any victory until we see the democratic victory on november 8 this year some of you who are here today are working on the power project and i appreciate very much your coming over here during this period of time i think your presence here and i hope my presence here indicates that we take this election seriously and i think it is a serious election because the united states is moving in a serious time i have never thought that the president of the united states was in difficulty i have always thought that the united states itself faced serious problems and serious challenges you cannot live in this country during the last 2 weeks and possibly feel reassured about the course of world events and you cannot live in western new york and possibly feel confident that in the next 3 4 and 5 years we are going to maintain the economic growth and full employment of this section of the state i think this state and this country have been made by people who were not satisfied mr nixon has said that i am downgrading the united states i am not at all i could not possibly feel stronger about this country and about what it can do but i think the republicans have put limitations on what we can do we want to upgrade the leadership we want to made this country in a position of unmatched security both at home and abroad i stand today as the democratic nominee for the office of the president and where i stand other americans have stood woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman and i stand for the things for which they stood mr nixon has said in recent weeks that party labels don t mean very much in 1960 republicans say that every 4 years but in the intervening 3 years they never do anything in the congress which would make you think that party labels aren t important during the august session of this congress i don t think a party label means anything unless the parties mean something and i think the parties do mean something i think the republicans do stand for something it is not what i stand for but they do stand for something and it is against these programs which i think are in the interest of the people of this country we don t have to go back to franklin roosevelt and we don t have to go back to harry truman we can go back to the august session of this congress when there were three bills which i think tell very well what the issues are in this campaign one was medical care for the aged tied to social security forty four democratic senators supported it only one republican and it is a fact that in the last 7 days the governor of this state a republican has attacked the program which was passed in this last session of the congress because it was not tied to social security everybody here pays social security but everybody here when they retire can look forward to some assistance if we can tie medical care to social security then when we are retired when we do reach the age of 65 for men or 62 for women you do not have to worry about medical care the fact of the matter is that older people in this country and i am vice chairman of the senate committee on aged are hard hit by the problem of finding decent housing and paying for their medical bills under the bill which the congress passed anybody before 65 who needs medical care who has 800 or 1 000 saved up must first spend that money exhaust their savings take an oath that they are needy and then they will get some assistance i believe the other way and that is the way the democratic party favors it the second bill that was up and which is an issue in this campaign was a bill to provide 1 25 minimum wage four fifths of the republicans in the house of representatives including the congressman of this district who is chairman of the congressional committee for all republicans voted against the 1 25 minimum wage for a 40 hour week not for a business which is only ten fifteen or twenty five thousand dollars a year but for a business which makes more than 1 million a year we wanted to pay them 1 25 by 1962 not this year but 1962 and to pay those that were not covered by 1964 1 25 and four fifths of the republicans voted against it i think these issues are important not because the minimum wage is maybe the most important issue in the united states today and not because medical care for the aged itself may be the most important issue and not because aid to education itself may be the most important issue i think the most important issue is the security of the united states and the peace of the world but i don t think we are going to be secure and i don t think we are going to maintain our freedom unless we are building in this country a strong society on all fronts as long as there are 15 million american homes in the united states substandard as long as there are 5 million american homes in the cities of the united states which lack plumbing of any kind as long as 17 million americans live on inadequate assistance when they get older then i think we have unfinished business in this country if we build a strong society here we are strong abroad franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor to latin america because he was a good neighbor in the united states people around the world want the same things that we want they want freedom they want security for themselves and their families they want opportunities and they want peace if the united states stands for freedom as we do if the united states is strong as we are and can be if the united states is building a vigorous society and maintaining employment and solving its problems then people in latin america and africa and asia faced with castro s example or our example will come with us but if castro stands for a movement forward however abhorrent it is to us and we stand still then he raises the banner of revolt all over latin america we want for other people what we want for ourselves and i think that is the most effective foreign policy that we can carry out a hundred years ago during the election of 1860 lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm is coming but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later when the issue is still freedom or slavery the same issue lincoln fought we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice we see the storm coming but i think if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk28 9 60g john_f _kennedy mr posner mayor wagner girls i feel like playing 60 minutes for rochester after that i want to express my appreciation to mr posner and the members of the democratic committee and to all of you i must say i think this is the largest meeting that we have had in the entire campaign and i express my gratitude for it i did not know that rochester was such a strong democratic city i am informed by someone with a long memory that when another presidential candidate mr thomas dewey came here in 1948 he said it is good to be back in syracuse he didn t know where he was going or where he was and i don t think the republicans do today i am glad to be back here in rochester because a year ago almost at this very time i spoke at the university of rochester interestingly enough a year ago as you recall mr khrushchev was visiting the united states on that occasion but then 12 months ago he came as a guest of the government and there were high hopes expressed that this was the beginning of a period of reconciliation between the two great powers therefore i spoke at the university of rochester on that visit of mr khrushchev in 1959 you remember that in those happy days mr lodge was being hailed as the genial host who was showing mr khrushchev america mr nixon was talking about the increased prospects of peace that were coming out of the development of mutual respect that was then moving ahead between the two countries as a result there were some who resented my warning given at the university of rochester in regard to mr khrushchev s visit for i said then what is evident now that a more careful reflection on mr khrushchev s visit was a cause for redoubled effort not for relaxation it justifies more i said not less sacrifice to protect and extend the world s frontiers of freedom we here in the united states in the year 1959 cannot escape our dangers by recoiling from them or by being lulled to sleep the real test of mr khrushchev s desire to end the cold war will be in his deed not his words his deeds in germany in advising the red chinese on laos or in charging his emissaries in the united nations and the geneva nuclear test conference that was 1 year ago and a good deal has changed in that last 12 months but a good deal remains the same his visit in 1960 is again a cause for redoubled effort because the struggle is as constant as it has been for many many years and that is the struggle between two great systems it really does not make a significant difference in that struggle through it is highly desirable if mr khrushchev and the president of the united states can establish cordial relations i would hope they could i would hope the next administration whoever it will be will make it possible to ease the tension which now exists between the soviet union and the united states but even if he should the struggle will go on in germany in the far east in asia in africa and latin america until the balance of power begins to move in one direction or the other the quality which i think the next president of the united states needs and i think we have needed it for some years is the quality of judgment and the quality of foresight the quality of judgment to be able to pick from five or six possible solutions in a crisis which affects the security of the united states experience and judgment but the second quality which is equally important is the quality of foresight the president of the united states made a distinguished speech before the united nations a few days ago and as an american i was glad to support everything he said he did say speaking about africa two things that he thought it vitally important that the united states associate with the united nations and also bilaterally in a great educational program for africa it takes many years to educate a young man or woman it takes years and experience and what have we been doing for the last 10 years in the united states to make anyone think that it is possible for these countries of africa to govern themselves and maintain their freedom when many of them have been denied the rudiments of an educational system and we have been on the whole insufficient it was not until the crisis in the congo that the u s government promised 300 scholarships to the congo and yet there are less than 15 people having college degrees among the natives of the congo how can they maintain a democratic society on that basis we offered 300 scholarships which is more than we have given africa from the federal government in the united states for the last 2 years combined for all the countries of africa you cannot possibly move in an area overnight when the crisis comes we have given in aid or at least have promised it to latin america 500 millions of dollars passed by the last session of the congress not an appropriation but an authorization and why did we do it because our relations with castro became so sour they came to the breaking point and because the oas was going to meet and we wanted them to take a firm stand against the communism in the latin american hemisphere and the hemisphere of the whole western world and because a bogota conference was being held which was going to discuss the economic future of latin america therefore after years had passed in which we were totally indifferent to the needs of latin america we came forth with a program at the point of mr castro s pistol foresight some ability to make a judgment before the event happens we talk today in the united states about mr khrushchev all the time mr khrushchev is a serious opponent and the soviet union is an enemy but what about the chinese communists and what about the relationship which now exists between the chinese communists and the russians and what about the debate that is now going on where the chinese communists say that lenin said that the only means for the communists to succeed in their world revolution was by war how long would it be before the chinese communists have a nuclear weapon how long would it be before they would have an arsenal how long would it be before they decide to put lenin s theory in operation and what will the position be of the soviet union we talk about khrushchev and castro and yet the deadly competition that is now going on in asia is between china and india whether a free country can solve its problems as india is attempting to do or whether they have to follow the example of the chinese communists these are problems that are coming upon us in the next year and yet i do not hear administration spokesmen discussing them if suddenly india began to go communist a crash program would be enacted which would grant all of the things that today might save us these people of the underdeveloped world are not naive they don t expect the united states to sustain them and i don t think we should but i do think that they hope and i do feel that we should act not when a crisis comes not when we have to for our own security pass a desperate action through the congress but that we should over the months and years work with them in cooperation not seeking allies in a cold war struggle but sharing a desire which we have with them to maintain free and independent countries around the world we talk about cuba but what about ghana an independent country granted its independence by the british and recently mr herter stated that they have now passed under the communist influence at least in foreign policy why should they why should the people of ghana decide that that represents the hope for them and not the road of freedom these are the greatest issues which disturb the united states today and will disturb the life of the next president of the united states they are all complicated there are no easy solutions they all require a fine judgment as to what the future holds for us what we can do to influence what should be our function what image what vigor what force should be present ourselves to the world in i think that what we do here in this country has a greater effect as what we do almost any place around the world if we are building a better society here if we are struggling constantly and earnestly if the president of the united states is indicating the moral imperative behind the struggle against discrimination in all parts of the united states if we are maintaining in this country full employment if we are using our great productive capacity to the fullest if we are developing the best educational system in the world a system which will turn out not merely mathematicians and scientists and engineers but educated men and women who can make a judgment about the world around them secretary stimson said some years ago i think in 1947 that everything that we do in the united states must be framed with reference to the world around us every domestic problem that we face really has its counterpart in our foreign relations if our productivity remains high then our tax revenues remain strong then we have sufficient revenues to maintain a defense second to none if we have the ability to meet the problem of an abundance of food in an imaginative way that helps people of the world to realize the blessings the lord has given them then we assist ourselves and assist others if we recognize that we do not have much time that the nuclear capacity is traveling country after country almost like a disease until by the end of the next decade 15 20 or 25 countries will have the power to destroy not merely their adversaries but perhaps human life and yet this a administration has less than 100 people working in the entire federal government on the vital subject of disarmament and our negotiators have reflected that disinterest these are all difficult problems that may confound us but i think to their solution we must address ourselves in the 19th century great presidents and great senators dealt with four five or six issues which flowed in a gentle stream across the panorama of their lives what they talked about when the came to the congress they talked about 4 years later at the end of their congressional terms now the issues are sophisticated they go beyond the understanding of most experts experts disagree on monetary fiscal policy and all the rest sophisticated weapons systems the problems which face emerging countries all these problems dwarf in many cases our understanding therefore this is not merely a contest between two men this is a contest between two parties and the ability of those two parties in the united states to bring men of vigor and intelligence and energy and foresight into the federal government to serve the public interest i want to make it clear that in my judgment the next president of the united states must use all of the talent he can get regardless of the party only skill and talent and a devotion to the public interest franklin roosevelt and truman used lovett and stimson and marshall and knox and forrestal and the others judge patterson from this state i do not recall a single democrat in a high position of national or international responsibility that has served this administration in any position comparable to what foster dulles did in 1950 and 1951 on the japanese treaty i think we must do better i hope whoever is elected president will use the best talent we can get after the fall of france marshal petain said our spirit of enjoyment was greater than our spirit of sacrifice we wanted to have more than we wanted to give we spared effort and we met disaster i want to assure you that if i am elected president of the united states in november we will not spare effort we will devote all of our energy i think the spirit of this country is to give i don t know any american who is not prepared to meet any responsibilities or bear any burdens in order to maintain his society and i think it is proper that we should do so our generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny just as much as the generation of 1933 whom franklin roosevelt addressed in his inaugural speech the contribution of that generation was the maintenance of freedom here in the united states and the maintenance of the private enterprise system i think the contribution of the next generation of americans in the sixties and the seventies can be the maintenance of freedom here in the united states and also the maintenance of freedom around the world can we in our time and generation cause the tide to begin to come in for freedom or shall it ebb and we be left high and dry by 1970 or 1975 isolated with a world turning to the east and not to the west that is the question before us as serious and as great a question as has faced this country since 1860 the same issue in many ways as the issue of 1860 half slave or half free i think it will be free but it will depend in the final analysis upon all of us in the presidential campaign of 1860 lincoln wrote a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk28 9 60h john_f _kennedy governor lawrence ladies and gentlemen does not anyone ever go to school in erie i want to express my thanks to all of you for this morning s reception and also for last night i don t think that in the whole campaign we have had as high a turnout of the people who live in one community as we have had in this community we have been traveling in this campaign from community to community from state to state from region to region and we travel by plane and by car and there are bands and all the rest but we are engaged in a serious business in a serious time in the life of our country i lead on this occasion the democratic party which in other years and other occasions and other great crises had produced jefferson jackson and woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman i think the democratic party has produced these men for two reasons first because the party is a national party it represents potato farmers in maine and steelworkers in pennsylvania and citrusgrowers in california and fishermen in the state of washington it speaks for all the people and all interests and therefore i think looks to the future as the american people do the second reason is because we have had in every year of our great contribution men and women of sufficient vitality and vigor to look to the future woodrow wilson in the campaign of 1912 on the new freedom the first 2 years of his administration were the most productive since the administration of abraham lincoln franklin roosevelt ran with the new deal as governor lawrence said this morning the first 100 days redid the face of america and we still benefit from what he did in the first 12 months of his office harry truman ran on the fair deal to speak on behalf of the people of this country i think that woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman were regarded as great presidents by the people of this country and the world they were regarded as good neighbors by the people of latin america because they were good neighbors to the people of this country you cannot succeed abroad you cannot be strong abroad you cannot have our prestige strong around the world unless you are moving here at home what we are speaks louder than what we say what we are doing here carries its imprint across the face of the globe because franklin roosevelt developed the tennessee valley people all over the world thought they could do the same they wanted to imitate us i want people to look again to the united states for leadership i want them to know that we have in this country not only a free society but also a strong and productive society i want people in this country working i want us developing our natural resources i want us to demonstrate that we can be first not if or but or when but first now period i think the people of this country should make a determination in making a decision as to who they should elect in november they should make a determination not only on what is best for the united states but which party can lead this country to a position of preeminence in the world a gallup poll taken some months ago showed that of the 10 countries polled a majority of the people in every country thought the soviet union would be ahead of the united states in 1970 both scientifically and militarily if people think it so it may be so i don t think it so but i think the important thing is to let people know that it is not going to be so to let people know that we are on the move here in the united states i am tired of reading what khrushchev is doing i would like the people of the world to be reading what the american president is doing and what the united states is doing not merely what castro is doing or khrushchev is doing or kadar is doing or gomulka is doing i make no pretense of saying that if we are elected life will be easier i think the next president s responsibility in the next 6 months will be extremely heavy he will be faced with the problem of maintaining full employment here in the united states of maintaining our economy of trying to stimulate sufficiently so that people who want to find work can find it and in addition he will be face to face with a serious situation in berlin in formosa and around the world he will be face to face with a competition in africa and latin america i don t run for the office of the presidency promising that if i am elected life will be easy for the people or for the president i think it is a difficult time but i think all of us want to serve our country all of us want the best for it and i happen to believe that the democratic party has sufficient energy and vitality sufficient force to lead the united states through dangerous times i ask your help in this campaign i ask your support let me close by saying to you i know that i am doing the work and when i stop you have to go to school and then you have to work in any case i want to express my thanks to you all i think here in pennsylvania you know as much about the issues as you can know you have a distinguished democratic governor you have had serious problems which have faced this state because it is a major industrial component of the united states if our economy is moving ahead then pennsylvania moves ahead if our economy stands still or is on a plateau then pennsylvania stands still this is in a sense a weathervane state because if its basic industries are moving ahead i think the future of this state will be assured what we want for this state we want for our country and what we want for our country we want for the free world in the american revolution of 1776 thomas paine said that the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in this case the cause of all mankind is the cause of america i think we have a great contribution to make and i am satisfied that we are going to make it i want it said not in november but in a later date in our history by 1965 or 1970 or 1975 or 1980 when the world begins to move in the direction of freedom that we have met the enemy and they are ours thank you dem jfk29 10 60 john_f _kennedy distinguished guests members of the congress of the state senate governor lawrence ladies and gentlemen governor lawrence and i have been seeing the state of pennsylvania for the last 2 days i was somewhat discouraged when we started out this morning in delaware county to be informed that in 1936 delaware county went for alf landon 8 to 1 so i knew we were in for one of those political days but i must say that it was very good this morning and in montgomery county and maybe we won t do so badly after all this campaign is now about to move into its last week beginning on tuesday and with nine more days to go i believe the issues are clearly developed the program proposed by the candidates have been frequently stated i don t think there is any doubt that there are serious and significant differences between mr nixon and myself which affect our present position and affect the view of the future of our country my own judgment is and i do not believe that i am being unfair that his message this fall has lacked a certain urgency which i feel the events of this country and the world require i believe they have been committed in his message more to the present than to the future and i think as citizens of the united states we in this country have to consider not only our obligations to ourselves but also our obligations to all those who look to us for leadership tonight i speak in a historic spot a spot which is associated in the minds of all americans with the american revolution and our declaration of independence i speak of course in this campaign of 1960 of a different revolution but one which tests our stamina our perseverance and our determination to survive to endure and ultimately to prevail in the same way that it did at the beginning of this country i had said on many occasions in this campaign that we stand on the edge of the new frontier a frontier that will demand of all of us wherever we may live in the white house or individual homes the same qualities of courage and conviction in 1960 for we are going to move in the next decade into the most challenging changing revolutionary policy and hazardous decade in the long years of this country and perhaps in the long history of freedom but these years can also be rewarding years as well the chinese word crisis is composed of two characters one signifying danger and the other signifying opportunity men knew the meaning of danger but they also preserved the opportunity for the future and the new frontiers of 1960 s will bring us both danger and opportunities our task is to overcome the dangers in order to see the opportunities what are the new frontiers of the 1960 s we can foresee first changing revolution abroad new nations new weapons new shifts in the balance of power new members of the nuclear club but equally earthshaking equally fraught with danger and opportunity are the revolutionary changes which will take place in the life of all americans first is the new frontier of population 1960 will conclude the largest 10 year growth in population in the history of the united states a growth which equals the entire population of poland or of spain by 1970 our population in the united states will number 208 million and to maintain and advance living standards for that number of people will require a gross national income of three quarters of a trillion dollars that requires a rate of growth no less than 5 percent a year and we are not growing at that rate today our average for the past 8 years was 2 5 percent our average for the last 9 months is 0 2 percent to secure full employment for the number of men and women who will come into the labor market in the next decade will require that we secure 25 000 new jobs every week for the next 10 years we are not finding those jobs today to adequately house that population we will have to build double the number of homes we are building today and it is a somber fact that we are building 30 percent less homes today than we did a year ago the new frontier of population holds out great promise for this country and also critical problems second is the new frontier of longevity about 10 percent of our year the percentage of population is over the age of 65 and every year the percentage of our population that is over 65 is increasing and in addition the average longevity per person is increasing what is going to happen to those people who is going to sustain them who is going to help them spend their useful lives with some degree of security housing food and so forth will these extra years that medical experience is adding to their lives be a curse or a blessing will they be in poverty or will they be in security forcing a retired worker to stop working at 65 years of age and depend on an average social security check of 72 a month does not offer that man or woman much security i believe we can do better and i believe the way to do better is to provide medical care for the aged which is tied to social security so that the worker himself during his fruitful years can participate in the sustaining of his security when the time has come to retire the third opportunity is on the new frontier of education pouring into our schools in the next 10 years will be 51 million children who were born in this country between 1946 and 1956 a number greater than the entire population of the united states in 1880 they have already created the most critical classroom shortage in the history of our country in the 1960 s as the problem becomes more acute as the group grows they are going to be pouring into our colleges there will be twice as many young boys and girls applying for admission in 1970 than today we are going to have to build more college classrooms and dormitories in the next 10 years than we built in the history of our country there is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education in a democracy such as ours we must make sure that education wins the race fourth is the new frontier of suburbia the fastest growing portion of the united states most suburban areas have gained more residents in the past 10 years than in the previous century that will be increased in the sixties most suburban areas as you know yourself from your own experience are ill prepared to sustain that growth the property tax in most urban communities has reached the point of diminishing returns it has reached in some communities the point of a capital levy and we cannot expect that the property tax will furnish in the 1960 s the same income for the sustenance of the public sector that it has sustained in the 1940 s and the 1950 s i come from a city where the property tax is about 103 or 104 per thousand dollars and the assessments reasonably high and at that point i say it becomes confiscatory the next administration is going to have the problem of at tempting to provide the necessary revenues to be secured for the local and state and national governments in such a way that these communities can meet their problems fifth are the new frontiers of science and in space the wonders of atomic energy which lay such a curse upon mankind today can also be a blessing for medicine communications and power the conversion of salt water to fresh water all the credit that the soviet union gained when it launched sputnik a credit which they still have in great quantities according to mr george allen of the usia that one scientific breakthrough caused a world change in the opinion of scientific advances relative to the soviet union and the united states imagine the credit that will go to the first country that is able to secure fresh water from salt water at a competitive rate and all those deserts that border the oceans of the world can then be made to produce food and this administration has starved that program treated it as a step child even though it could mean so much to the united states sixth is the problem which is undiscussed today but which may be one of the most difficult problems that the next president of the united states and the united states faces and that of course is the problem of automation i spent enough time in west virginia which shares a comparable problem with pennsylvania which is the present increase in production being far greater per man in coal what has happened in coal will happen in other industries in the united states we have to have 25 000 jobs per week as i stated but what is going to happen to the men and women that will be displaced by these machines unless the next administration is able to stimulate and develop an atmosphere which will develop economic growth provide for replacement of our present machinery in such a way to stimulate the economy by taxation fiscal and monetary policy then of course our hope to maintain full employment will remain a hope but the problem of automation cannot be considered a local problem but a national problem in the 1960 s seventh and finally is the problem of what we are all going to do with our leisure time with the coming of automation the expansion of the labor force the extension of the lifelines of each individual the speed of modern communication and transportation all contribute to the amount of time that each american will have for himself and his family if we continue to ignore the polluting of our streams the littering of our national forests we will be denying to ourselves and to our children a heritage which we were the beneficiaries of with more and more cars on more and more highways requiring more and more of our space if we permit our lives individually to decline so that leisure time becomes a burden rather than an opportunity quite obviously we have lost more than we have gained twenty four years ago franklin roosevelt told the nation i for one do not believe that the era of the pioneer is at an end i only believe that the area of pioneering has changed the new frontiers of which i speak call out for pioneers from every walk of life from the white house in washington and in the country at large their challenge can be concealed for a little while but it cannot be ignored it cannot be met by an easy complacency a satisfaction with things as they are a commitment of things done and not to be done for as the old testament tells us this challenge is not too hard for thee neither is it far off who shall go over the sea for us and bring it on to us that we may do it for the world is very near onto thee in thy mind and in thy heart the new frontier of which i speak is very near to you and to me it is upon us the only question is if the united states is ready for it thank you dem jfk29 10 60a john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen thank you first for standing in the rain i just heard that it is raining where mr nixon is but the republicans are all home we are out here in the rain as we are in the sunshine as we are in the daytime as we are at night because this is an important campaign for a great office of a great country and i come here and ask your support in this campaign this is a campaign between those who want action and those who are ready to stand still between those who look to the future and those who look to the past between those who say that this country is going to have to move in the sixties as long as 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls graduating from high school never get to college as long as 50 percent of the capacity of our steel mills is unused as long as we are building this year 30 percent less homes than we did last year as long as we are sitting still in other words as long as our prestige and influence and power declines in the world in relation to that of our adversary this country cannot be satisfied i don t think any american can accept mr nixon s words that everything that needs to be done is being done in its proper time that our prestige is the highest it has ever been and that of the communists the lowest i am not satisfied as an american to be anything less than first as a country as the defender of freedom as an example of freedom and you have to make up your judgment on november 8 what kind of a country you want what kind of a citizen you are what you look for in the future how ready you are to bear the burdens that go with being a citizen of this country a defender of freedom an example of freedom the united states is going to be only as strong in the world freedom is going to be only as strong in the world in direct ratio to how powerful we are the thing that gives mr khrushchev his power is the productive force of the soviet union the thing that makes the chinese communists now dangerous as opposed to years ago is because they have harnessed all of the energy and the resources human and material for the service of the state we believe in freedom and we believe in the long run that our system has the most staying power and the most vitality but our system cannot work without leadership unless the president of the united states looks to the future unless he is willing to set before our country its unfinished business in the same way that franklin roosevelt set it before it in the thirties and woodrow wilson before him unless he is willing to move ahead this country cannot possibly meet its responsibilities to itself and to those who look to us for assistance and help we are the defenders of freedom and therefore it is incumbent upon us to build a strong and vital society to build a society which is moving here at home to build a society which can be an example of what free men and women can do which permits every american regardless of his race or his creed to develop his talents fully which puts people to work which educates our children which permits those who are retired to live in dignity to build in other words the kind of society which all men over the world will want to duplicate that is our responsibility in the sixties and i believe to do that we have to elect men and women who are committed to progress not those who are committed to the status quo this is a race between the contented and the concerned between those who are satisfied and those who wish to move ahead i am confident that here in this keystone state the people of pennsylvania are prepared for action and progress on that basis i ask your help dem jfk29 10 60b john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen state senator to be mr gore i thank him for his generous introduction and i also want to acknowledge with pleasure the presence on this platform of the next u s congressman from this district henry gouley governor lawrence congressman green ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you for your coming down i think you are here for the same reason that i am here and that is because we are engaged in the most sober function of a citizen of a free country and that is the selection of a president of the united states one of the principles which have guided mr nixon or approaches which have guided mr nixon in his approach to this campaign i sympathize with that sentiment but today one of the matters which mr nixon and i have disagreed on has been his feeling that we could separate domestic policy from international policy he wrote a letter last may that he was a practicing conservative but on another occasion he said he was a risktaker abroad it does not seem to me that you can possibly separate what we do here at home from what we do abroad in other words if 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never finish college or never get to college that affects our position not only in the united states but it affects our position around the world if we are only using our steel capacity in the state of pennsylvania and in the united states at 50 percent of capacity that affects not only the unemployed steelworkers it affects not only the small businessmen who live in the communities where steelworkers work but it also affects our position all around the globe if we are building 29 percent less homes this year than we built last year if we are not practicing the principles that we preach in providing fair opportunity for all americans that affects us not only in this country but it affects our position around the world in other words the influence prestige and purpose of the united states was never more strongly felt around the world than it was in the 1930 s during the administration of franklin roosevelt there are roosevelt parks and squares all over latin america i don t really think that there are very many that are a salute to the present administration and yet during the thirties the good neighbor policy did not really mean very much as far as real policies which benefited the people but they were impressed by president roosevelt and they were impressed by the united states because they had the sense of national purpose here in this country franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america because he was a good neighbor in the united states woodrow wilson was able to put forward his 14 points and have them fall with great impact in europe because he had been identified during his term of office with the new freedom a progressive policy here in the united states the point is that if we are meeting our responsibilities in this country if we are educating our children dick the voters are down here not up there if we are educating our children by giving them the best education we can and it is a sober fact that 10 years ago we were turning out twice as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union and now one half as many if we are going to educate our children providing full use of the capacity of our plants and men and potential of our industries in the united states providing medical care for the aged tied to social security some kind of security to our older citizens if we are providing opportunity for all citizens to advance their potential then we are building a strong and vital society here at home and then we speak with purpose around the world the strongest force of the united states throughout the world rests with a strong and growing and vital society here in the united states in other words you cannot separate progress here at home from progress abroad we are as strong abroad we counter the communist advance as successfully as we build a vital and strong society here at home and i do not believe therefore that it is possible for us to speak with power and vigor that it is possible for us to rally the free people of the world wherever they may live unless we speak with purpose in the united states our function and responsibility as the chief defenders of freedom is to build a strong and shining society here in the united states a society with purpose a society with strength and then hold out hope to all those hundreds of millions of people stretching around the globe who want to live their lives in freedom the most encouraging factor in the last 10 years has been one that has seen in country after country behind the iron curtain in country after country in africa in country after country in asia the desire of people to be free finally in the final analysis if we can maintain our strength if we can last this long race of nerve and will this test of our national determination the final blow which will be struck to the communist empire will be based on this desire of people to govern their own destiny if there is any fact that has emerged from the stream of history whether it is east germany hungary or poland against the communists or the experience of africa against western colonialism it is the desire of people to be independent we know it from our history therefore what we have to do is maintain our strength to spread the umbrella of freedom around the globe as thomas jefferson once said the disease of liberty is catching and ultimately it will catch around the globe what we have to make sure is that during these years when this disease is spreading that we maintain our strength that we offer it shelter that we offer it encouragement that we move this country and in moving our country move the globe thank you dem jfk29 10 60c john_f _kennedy governor lawrence the next congressman from this district warren ballard ladies and gentlemen walter frye who is running for the assembly in this state and we need good assemblymen we need good state senators we need good congressmen we need good u s senators and we need a president and that is why i am here today i was informed when i started out this morning that we were going to travel in delaware county which voted 8 to 1 for alf landon we are going to wipe that record out no county in the united states should have that reputation but this is the year for delaware montgomery massachusetts the united states to choose progress to move forward and i come here today and ask your support no one can say with any certainty what is ever going to happen on election day but i want to make it very clear that when election day is finished or rather when it begins i will be satisfied and hope i will be satisfied when it is over but in any case i believe that the democratic party and this campaign is on the side of right is on the side of the best long range interests of our country stands for the things i hope in 1960 which are in accordance with the best judgment that we can render on the needs of our country i don t know of any democratic candidates certainly this is true of our vice presidential candidate or myself that have gone to the people in the election of 1960 and talked anything but the truth as we understood it and as we saw it and what represented the needs of our country two thousand years ago when athens was under attack from the macedonians demosthenes in a great speech said our trouble comes from those who wish to please us rather than serve us i hope after this campaign is over in 1960 whether it is successful or not though i hope it is successful but whether it is successful or not i hope it will be recorded that the democratic party and its candidates in 1960 sought to serve the people not please them and my best judgment is that those who in 1960 seek to serve the people also please them and i think that is the mistake mr nixon has made to go through the united states and talk about our unparalleled prosperity as if there are no clouds on the horizon bigger than a man s hand to talk about our position in the world as higher and stronger and greater than it has ever been in the past to sound no alarm bell in the night to express no urgency to fail to warn that these are dangerous and hazardous days full of opportunity and also of trouble in my opinion misleads rather than misinforms and no free people can possibly maintain their freedom unless they and those who seek positions of responsibility are willing to face the facts of life the facts with the bark off the truth and the truth in 1960 calls for the american people to render an accurate judgment of their position of their country their position in history where they have been and where they are going we face new problems entirely different from those that have faced the eisenhower administration or that of harry truman or franklin roosevelt or woodrow wilson those names may be invoked by both parties but as we move across the frontier of 1960 into the sixties the problems which our country will face of economic growth of development of our resources of the development of outer space of fresh water from salt water of food from the ocean of new uses for old minerals of the undeveloped world and its economic development of the peaceful use of the atom the control of atomic weapons the developments in the camps of our adversaries between the russians and the chinese the development of countries of africa newly independent but without the resources to maintain their independence in the traditional sense all those are entirely new problems requiring new people new solutions new ideas and requiring above all a sense of dedication to the cause of freedom i do not find in the speeches of my opponent any sound of commitment to this new future any awareness that we live in the most revolutionary of all times that here in this old section of pennsylvania which was the scene of a great revolutionary struggle at the beginning of our country we move through a period far more revolutionary far more promising far more dangerous so i come not merely as a contestant with mr nixon for a prize i come representing a point of view which i hope the majority of our fellow citizens share that in the great days of the 1960 s we as americans individually and as a country must measure up to the responsibility which has been placed upon us by our own free choice and by the pressure of history to be the chief defenders of freedom at a time when freedom is under attack all over the globe i am confident that this country can meet its responsibilities i see no peril no burden that this country cannot sail through unless we attempt to fool ourselves that these are easy gentle and prosperous times without responsibility without burden we face an adversary who mobilizes all of the resources of the state for the service of the state young men and women in moscow are studying esoteric dialectics of africa and india prepared to spend their lives in those countries as servants of international communism prepared to work for the service of the state without regard to their own free choice young men and women in our universities pursue their own interest if they should study language occasionally french some spanish and once in a while russian how many of those young men and women will be willing to spend their lives in far off lands in the service of freedom the 1960 s will require more from each of us than we have given in the past but as for me i am confident that this country will meet challenges i am confident that we will continue to be the great defender of freedom and i am more confident than ever that freedom will prevail thank you dem jfk29 10 60d john_f _kennedy mr chairman the next congressman henry gouley governor lawrence senator clark congressman green mr connor ladies and gentlemen it is 9 in the morning and this will be a quiet dignified speech the interesting thing about campaigning in pennsylvania is that we gave a speech at some banquet at 2 o clock in the morning and now we are starting at the o clock of 2 in the morning but whether it is two o clock in the morning or 9 o clock in the morning i believe that the morning i believe that the message in a real sense is the same that is that this election on next tuesday november 8 a week from tuesday involves the selection of a president not only in the traditional sense but also involves the selection of a president of the united states which is the leader of the free world back in president truman s library in missouri which i visited a month ago he has five hats which the president of the united states wears the legislative leader the employment leader the leader of the nation the leader of the free world the commander in chief the president of the united states after 14 years in the congress without any way downgrading the congress there isn t any doubt that the center of action in the american constitutional system is the president of the united states the constitution places the greatest responsibility for the conduct of our foreign affairs particularly upon the president and unless the president of the united states speaks for the nation unless the president of the united states is able to personify the force of the nation then the nation does not move ahead does not move to accomplish its unfinished business does not give an image of vitality and strength throughout the world one of the issues which has been discussed with the greatest frequency in this campaign and one of the issues on which mr nixon and i have differed has been the position of the united states in the world all summed up in the word prestige by prestige i do not mean popularity i do not think it makes so much difference whether we are loved personally or beloved around the world what does make a difference however is that the people of the world who desire to be free africa latin america western europe asia the middle east i want them to look at the united states not only as a powerful leading nation but also a nation which personifies the ideal of what freedom can accomplish prestige is important but if these people upon whom we depend for our security our support and ultimately the peace ever begin to get the idea that we are tired uncertain not sure where we are going without purpose how can we lead a free alliance as the bible says who prepares for battle when the trumpet gives an uncertain sound no matter how many speeches mr nixon may make about how high our prestige is today the fact of the matter is that the state department s own survey taken this summer shows such a loss in our influence throughout the world that this administration has been unwilling to release it the new york times carried one this morning which shows this week which shows that only 7 percent of the people of england and france thought we were now ahead of the soviet union in science that a majority of people in all the 10 countries polled with the exception of 1 thought that by 1970 the soviet union would be ahead of us militarily and scientifically if the people of the world ever begin to get the idea that our high noon was in the past that the balance of power and the flow of history is moving in the direction of our adversaries we have lost then a decisive battle we depend upon the free support of people but they also depend upon a leadership which is certain which has power which has strength what you have to decide on november 8 is do you believe that mr nixon with the campaign that he has conducted with the statements which he has made which have been so far removed from reality can move this nation in 1961 as it must be moved if we are going to maintain our position in the free world i must say i feel the same as you do i have been trying to get that opinion over i think it is important what kind of campaign a candidate runs i spent some time in england before world war ii and i recall very clearly the election of 1935 when winston churchill was warning of the danger of a rearmed germany stanley baldwin the head of the conservative party of england at that time chose to go to the people in that election telling them that all was well that their future was peaceful and as a result the british lost 2 years which could have been devoted to preparing for action and they had a narrow escape i don t want to play with thin margins i don t think that any candidate for the office of the presidency in 1960 should go to the people with anything but the truth and then the people can decide what they want the decision you must make is what kind of a country do you want what kind of a position do you believe we should occupy in the world i believe the position that we occupy in the world and our chance for peace is directly related to the kind of society that we have here in the united states if we have a country which is on the move if we have an educational system second to none if we can attract people to our government both in this country and throughout the world who are motivated by intellectual curiosity concern for the future foresight responsibility then quite obviously the united states will begin to go forward again do you know that 10 years ago we brought more foreign students to the united states then we do today under the governmental program do you know the soviet union broadcasts 10 times as many programs in spanish to latin america as we do do you know we had more people stationed in west germany in 1957 than throughout all of africa i don t believe that this administration has been foresighted i don t believe that they have understood the kind of revolutionary world in which we live if they had we would not be second in space we would not find ourselves today with six new countries of africa all members of the united nations that do not have a single u s diplomat in residence in any of the countries one of the results of this indifference to the whole change of circumstance in one continent has been on the question of the admission of red china not one of the new nations voted with us all this our position through the world our influence in space and on the globe is all tied to the kind of society that we run here will we move forward with vigor in the united states if we develop our economy here in the country if we provide a strong and fruitful existence for our people here if we the president of the united states and the people set before ourselves the goals which we must accomplish in the next 10 years then i believe the united states can speak with vigor determination and decisiveness throughout the world so i come here today and ask your support this is not merely a contest between mr nixon and myself and in a very real sense it is not a contest just between the two parties it is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned those who are satisfied with things as they are and those on the other hand who wish to move forward so i come here today and ask your support in this campaign support for the candidate for the congress in this district but most of all our support for our country in a difficult time one which can be in mr dickens phrase the worst of times or the best of times in the final analysis it depends on us and what we want for our country for myself what i want is for the united states to meet its responsibilities at home and abroad and for the united states to move again thank you dem jfk29 10 60e john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen warren ballard who i hope will be the congressman from this district mrs granahan the present congresswoman can anybody hear this congressman green did anybody hear that what did i say all right i just wanted to make sure you were listening ladies and gentlemen senator clark governor lawrence what happened to my speech ladies and gentlemen i come here today rain or shine to carry on a campaign for the most important office in the united states it does not make any difference to any of us i am sure whether it is raining shining night or day because this is an important election what you have to decide as voters a week from tuesday you have to make your decision on which candidate which party which political philosophy should lead the united states in the 1960 s and you have to make a judgment specially as to which candidate somebody is pouring water on us which candidate s judgment foresight viewpoint vigor should govern and lead this country in the 1960 s i have several disagreements with mr nixon that are important to you i think in trying to make up your minds the other day about 2 months ago mr nixon in disputing my statements that i thought that we had not had sufficient progress in recent years speaking in portland oreg said if you think the united states has stood still who built the largest shopping center in the world well now the answer to that question is that we did but the soviet union built the largest dam the largest missile the largest army and it was even suggested by mr nixon in his famous debate with mr khrushchev and i wish he would debate me for the fifth time but in his famous debate i find some difficulty understanding why a candidate who is running on a program that he can stand up and debate mr khrushchev but is so unwilling to come and debate the american people i understand that mr nixon issued a statement today saying that he would debate me if i would say i was sorry that i said he would not debate me first he wanted to discuss just cuba and we said well we thought we ought to discuss some other subjects then he wanted the vice presidential candidates in there and i said that was fine then he wanted an hour and a half and i said that was fine i said i would go to any city on any date and i said that was fine then he said you have to say you are sorry you said i would not debate mr nixon can debate or not debate whatever he wants to do i am not going to drag him up in front of the microphone in this famous debate with mr khrushchev he put his finger in mr khrushchev s nose and said you may be ahead of us in rockets but we are ahead of you in color television i would rather take my television black and white and have the largest rockets in the world mr nixon has also said that it is dangerous and naive and all the rest of the adjectives for us to suggest that we may not be doing as well as we should in the world but who do you think said this in february of this year in south bend ind glossing over weaknesses which we may have denying that they exist is not only naive but it is really dangerous that was mr nixon s pre convention and no more unwarranted attack he has been criticizing me for downgrading the united states i don t downgrade the united states i don t downgrade the united states i downgrade the republican leaders and who do you think says these words in 1952 in october this nation has lost its military superiority and the people of the world are 5 to 1 against us instead of being 9 to 1 on our side as was the case when the war ended i never made any rash imprudent statement like that but mr nixon made them in the campaign of 1952 running against the democrats the fact of the matter is that these are difficult dangerous times in which we have great opportunities and great challenges and the only way that i know that a free society can meet its responsibilities is for those who seek to lead a free society to speak the truth what is the possible use in taking a survey of foreign opinion which we took this summer and then putting it in the state department and not letting the people have the country see it what contribution does that make to the government of a free society mr nixon said american prestige is at an all time high 2 weeks ago he denied there was a recent government survey that proved the contrary then he said the government survey was taken in 1957 after sputnik now we find out it was taken in july of this summer and the new york times has printed some of it in the last 2 days and it shows that only 7 percent of the people of france and england believe the united states is now ahead of the russians in science it shows a majority of the people of the world believe the soviet union will be ahead of us militarily by 1970 we should know these things if we seek to lead people and they begin to feel that the balance of power is turning against us how many supporters will we have in the world what good is it to bury it in the state department until after election let us have it now and then the people can make up their minds no 3 as mr nixon said we are first in space and the strongest power militarily in the world but the fact of the matter is and then he said we put up 28 shots into the space and the soviets have put up 8 but the question is what is the tonnage of their shots what was the timing of their shots the fact is in his recent position paper on space he said the space gap is not yet closed if mr nixon and mr nixon would debate we would really have an interesting discussion then no 3 mr nixon said we are enjoying unprecedented prosperity i would like to have him make that speech in some of the places i was in yesterday coal mine areas factories 50 percent of capacity in steel even less than that in coal but then the white house added unemployment is widely disappearing we are nearing the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of our land this year we built 30 percent less homes than last year this year we are only using 50 percent of the capacity of our steel mills i believe we will do better than that and i believe we have to do better than that if we are going to meet our responsibilities in the 1960 s the whole point of this is that this is an important election you have to make up your judgment yourselves nothing that i can say nothing that mr nixon can say especially on different days nothing that he can say or i can say in the final analysis can make you decide better than you can decide yourselves what the position of your country what your view is of the future our greatness is based on the final premise that the people themselves working among themselves making their final decision will make a judgment which fits the best interest of our country if we did not accept that premise then the whole concept upon which a democracy is based would be hollow but we accept that premise we believe it that the majority of the people electing whoever they think best to serve their country in making that judgment you have to make your own conclusion about where your country is and what it needs if you feel that what we are now doing is good enough if you feel that our position in the world is sound enough and on the rise then mr nixon is your man i have that same view if you feel that mr nixon is your man but if you have same view that i do that this great country of ours has to do better that we have to maintain and build and develop a strong enough society here not only to sustain ourselves but also to sustain all those who look to us for hope i believe 1960 can be the worst of years or the best of years i believe it can be the best of years i believe that the 1960 s can be recorded as years in which the great republic moved ahead therefore i come to this shopping center which is not the largest in the world but it is large enough to ask your support i appreciate your coming here in the rain we are engaged in a most important function we are engaged in our great responsibility as citizens my responsibility as leader of the democratic party in this campaign into present our case your responsibility on november 8 is to make your own good judgment about what this country must do thank you dem jfk29 10 60f john_f _kennedy congressman green congressman toll congressman to be i hope ballard from the nearby district we need another democratic congressman from out there if you will elect him governor lawrence senator clark candidates for the assembly and state senate ladies and gentlemen i want to express our thanks for your coming here today we are both here for the same purpose and that is to participate in the election of a president of the united states in a time of danger hazard and opportunity and i want to make it very clear though i keep reading about all the undecided voters that there still are in the united states i think that anyone who listens to the speeches of the two candidates who studies the record of the two parties who studies our position in the world and our position in this country cannot possibly be any longer undecided you have to decide mr nixon said and i have given our views and they are very different you have to decide what you yourself want you have to decide what you want to do what you consider the country to be what you regard our position in the world to be the decision is now yours and will be on november 8 a decision which involves your own conception of your responsibilities as an american whether you look to the future or the present whether you are concerned or confident whether you are satisfied or feel as i do that the united states is going to have to do a great deal better and i don t believe that mr nixon based on the record that he has made in this campaign feels a similar urgency and concern about the future or if he does he has not expressed it i believe the sixties will be difficult for the united states i do not believe that there is any doubt that we can maintain our freedom but i think it is going to be a hard close struggle to maintain the balance of freedom in the world today every advantage is not on our side we are faced by dedicated adversaries who are confident of their ultimate success who are able to mobilize their resources in order to serve their cause and who are now on the offensive all around the globe anyone who feels that under these conditions the conditions which face the united states here and throughout the globe that we can carry on business as usual or that we can entrust the leadership of the free world and the united states to an administration and a leader who runs in 1960 on the platform of peace prosperity we ve never had it so good our prestige has never been higher look how well we have done in the united nations and other similar statements which in my opinion bear increasing distance from reality it seems to me the choice is very clear and that is whether this country will meet its responsibilities to itself and to those who look to us for leadership or whether they will entrust the leadership of this country to the republican party which has not been noted in the past for its commitment to progress to a leader who has not been known in the past or in the present for his commitment to the future to a party which represents a narrow segment of the political philosophy of this country which has opposed progress in nearly every great crisis in the history of this country in this century woodrow wilson and his efforts to commit us to the league of nations franklin roosevelt and the new deal harry truman and much of his program of mutual security the undecided voter has to make his decision not about the candidates but himself what he wants what he believes what he feels there is certainly sufficient difference in this campaign there is certainly sufficient difference in our approach to the future and in our past records and that of our parties so that no voter should be left undecided by november 8 the decision involves your own conceptions it does not need a release of documents from the u s state department to tell you of our position in the world any american who can run for the presidency on the statement that our position has never been more secure that we are the strongest country economically scientifically educationally and productively without suggesting that the ratio of power is not moving in our direction but in that of our adversaries it does not seem to me serves the entire truth all of us are involved heavily in this engagement together there is no separation between the problems that the next president of the united states will face and the problems that the people will face there are common problems there is no such thing as the president being in trouble without the people being in trouble there is no such thing as the president being committed to progress unless the people are committed to progress and in my judgment on november 8 1960 the united states is going to commit itself to progress is going to commit itself to responsibility is going to commit itself to assuming the obligations which go with leading the free world and in my judgment this is an election which represents a watershed in the history of the 20th century in the same way that 1932 did and in the same way that 1912 did i ask your support in this election i ask your support as we face a difficult and troublesome and promising time i ask your support in picking this state of pennsylvania and the united states up and moving it forward every problem that we now have in the world has its direct counterpart here in the united states the economic growth of the united states and the economic growth of underdeveloped countries the distribution of food in underdeveloped countries the distribution of our surplus here the education of citizens for responsibility in the underdeveloped world the education of all young men and women of talent here in the united states the pursuit of science and outer space the pursuit of securing at an economical price fresh water from salt the control of arms the control of nuclear weapons the strengthening of free societies welding them together into a great common force all of that rests with us if the united states fails all this fails if the united states succeeds all this succeeds has any people ever had the responsibility and the opportunity which has been placed upon us by our own free choice as well as by the exigencies of history i i welcome the chance for the united states to be the great defender of freedom at a time when freedom is meeting its most serious test i come here to this shopping center which is a symbol of our material progress and ask you to join in committing the united states to the defense of freedom all over the globe thank you dem jfk29 10 60g john_f _kennedy governor lawrence senator clark congressman green mr rice warren ballard the next congressman and one of the great americans of the day ladies and gentlemen i appreciate that i am understanding it i understand that earlier today there was a meeting here of the children s party for unicef which is a united nations organization which is committed to the ending of children s diseases around the world and instead of having a halloween party everyone contributed to that may i say that i think that is in the best tradition of this country s humane and sympathetic effort government to government work is important but in the final analysis we are a free society depending upon the effort that each of us makes and therefore i congratulate those who were connected with this effort this afternoon when we look at the amount of disease which afflicts children of all parts of the globe particularly in africa and asia it staggers the imagination and offers a great challenge to us it is sometimes tragic for us to realize in thinking of the problems which face us in the 1960 s that one of the great contributions which the united states made to international understanding and good will was the sending of penicillin to cure some of the diseases which inflicted the people of north africa but as a result of ending those diseases the population of those areas so increased beyond the food supply that instead of increasing the per capita standard of living the per capita standard of living went down so it is not enough to cure disease if a standard of living of a country depends in the past on 3 4 or 5 million children out of 10 dying their first year and we are able to save all those children then there is not enough food supply to go around the point of all this is twofold first that i am delighted that the effort is made to participate in a humane and useful work and secondly it suggests the staggering complexity of the problems that face the united states as the leader of the free world in 1960 we fight against disease we insure longer life we do not increase food supply and therefore the standard of living of the people goes down how is it possible for a country like congo to maintain its freedom and independence when it has 12 university graduates in the whole country how is it possible for libya to maintain its freedom when the average income is 25 a year per person how is it possible for india where the average income is 65 per year per person and nearly 50 to 60 million people are unemployed to be the leader of the free world will require the best effort of those of us in the united states the point that i wish to make in this campaign is that we can t do our best to meet our responsibilities around the world unless we do our best here in this country unless we are moving ahead here in the united states as long as there are 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school and never see the inside of a college as long as there are 50 percent of the capacity of our steel mills unused as long as we are today building 30 percent less homes than we did a year ago as long as we are second in space as long as we are not able to make progress to develop all of our potential and all of our resources both human and material to serve the cause of freedom then quite obviously we are not meeting our responsibilities and we cannot meet our responsibilities around the world the difference of opinion between mr nixon and myself in this campaign in short is this he says that our prestige has never been higher that of the communists never lower he suggests that everything that needs to be done is being done in its own good time and he has chosen to run on a slogan of peace and prosperity my judgment is that what we are now doing is not good enough that we need new people new energy new vision new leadership we need to attract people to our government service and the service of our country who today are in universities or like you are following your own interests we need young men and women who will spend some of their years in latin america africa and asia in the service of freedom we need others who will serve in governmental posts which lack glamor but which serve the cause of freedom we have to do through freedom what the communist system attempts to do through the power of the state but to do that in a system of freedom where each man or woman can follow his own individual effort requires the best kind of leadership a leadership which shares with the people the facts of our existence one of my disagreements with this administration and with mr nixon has been on the argument of whether our prestige is the highest it has even been and all of you know now that this summer the u s government paid for polls taken in 10 countries stretching all the way from england to indonesia to ask them what they thought of the united states what they thought of our leadership what they thought of our purpose what they thought of our military power in relation to that of the soviets what they thought of our science in relation to that of the soviets and which system they thought was going to win the long struggle these polls have never been revealed except the newspapers did get two or three of them this week they showed for example that only 7 percent of the people of england and france thought we were ahead of the russians in science the majority of the people in 9 of the 10 countries believe by 1970 the soviet union will be first scientifically and militarily now if they don t have confidence in us if they don t believe that the future belongs to the free belongs to the strong belongs to the productive if they believe that the communist system is moving with more purpose and direction than we are how can we lead to a free world coalition which faces great difficulties anyway i believe we can and i believe that the truth should be told i believe that the american people should have a clear and honest choice between two different candidates between two different philosophies of government between two different views of our present opportunities our present dangers and our future and i believe this country is great i believe it can meet its obligations and responsibilities but i believe it can only do it by moving ahead i do not believe that the republican party and mr nixon are committed to progress i have yet to hear and i have been in the congress for 14 years and i know all about the record then but i have yet to hear of one single original piece of new progressive legislation of benefit to the people suggested and put into a fact by the republican party social security unemployment compensation housing legislation care for the aged all of these programs civil rights in 1953 and 1954 the republican party controlled the white house the senate and the house not one single civil rights bill saw the light of day in either body social security the republicans voted 90 percent against social security in the mid thirties and voted 99 percent against medical care for the aged tied to social security in 1960 the republicans voted 90 percent against a 25 cent minimum wage in the mid thirties and voted 90 percent against the 1 25 minimum wage in 1960 if you think that party is committed to progress then mr nixon is your man but if you share my view if you share my view that this country is going to have to move ahead that progress is our most important commodity if you share my view that it is time we picked ourselves up and moved into the sixties i ask your support thank you dem jfk29 9 60a john_f _kennedy mayor corning congressman o brien mrs price ladies and gentlemen and fellow government employees i don t know how much work is being done in the city of albany this morning but i do appreciate very much your generosity in coming out and the mayor s one hundred sixty five years ago thomas jefferson and james madison came up the hudson river near here searching for butterflies and fish and then sailed down the hudson river met with some new york democrats and formed the national democratic party the union between the rural united states and the cities of the united states which has lasted 165 years i do not come here this morning chasing butterflies i come here asking your help in this campaign i come here asking your support i stand where three distinguished governors of the state of new york have stood theodore roosevelt al smith and franklin roosevelt as candidates for the office of the presidency theodore roosevelt was a man of such understanding and such comprehension of the force of events that ultimately he left the republican party or it left him but al smith stood here on these steps and accepted the nomination in 1928 i do not believe this is 1928 i believe this is 1932 and 1948 and i think the democrats can win this election here in the state of new york the first american to ever sail to and open up the china trade was a captain dean whose street is named after him dean street and after he had gone to china and brought back a good many goods the american paper here in this city had written that he had given an exalted idea of the united states to the people of the world it seems to me that in 1960 that is our function to give an exalted idea of the united states to the world even more importantly to give an exalted idea of freedom to the world there have been suggestions that during the united nations meeting that the debates of this election should be stilled i hold a different view i do not believe there is a more valuable exposition of the vitality of freedom to mr khrushchev and gromyko than it is to see the united states involved in a great free election to have an opportunity to make a freedom of choice to have the issues presented honestly to the american people so that they can make their judgment on november 8 i think this is a serious election in many ways the most serious in many years of this country s long history the issue is the same as it has been for many years how can the united states maintain its freedom how can it live in peace how can it maintain its security how can it hold out a helping hand to those countries to the south of us who stand today on the razor edge of decision trying to determine which road they shall take i believe that the responsibility of our generation of americans is to build a society here in this country so vital so vigorous so effective that it serves as an example to the world that it serves as an example to those who wish to decide which road they shall take i think by the end of the next president s administration the balance of power in the world will begin to change more or less in one direction or another we have seen in the last 3 or 4 years where several countries once independent have now passed into the communist orbit the question is how many more in 1961 1962 1963 and 1964 how many more in 1965 1966 and 1967 will begin to move in the direction of the communist orbit or begin to move in the direction of freedom we do not sit here on a stage watching a slow glacial like movement in history i think these movements may take place in 5 10 or 15 years we have seen since 1945 enemies become friends and friends become enemies the world is moving faster than it ever moved before and therefore we are settling one of the great issues of history whether the communist system will be successful in its charge to dominate the world or whether freedom will spread it is an old struggle but it has a new form and i think in the next 10 years or the next 15 years in the lifetime of nearly everyone here we will see an entirely different world picture than we see today we will either see freedom on the ascendancy around the world or other countries of latin america and africa and asia will begin to move in the direction of china and russia and therefore i think it incumbent upon us to concern ourselves with the problems in new york with the problems here in the united states so that we build a stronger society so that what we are speaks louder than what we say but we should also frame every action with reference to the world around us the security of the united states is the basic responsibility now before us and in my judgment that security can be maintained by the united states once more standing as an example to all mankind i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the foreign relations committee and every african nationalist 20 or 25 or 30 years ago quoted thomas jefferson and abraham lincoln and franklin d roosevelt now many of them quote marx many of them are marxist if not communists many of them believe that that represents the way of the future what has happened to the vitality of the united states that they should feel that history moves in the direction of the most reactionary system of government ever devised why is it that we who represent the final flowering of the human experience in self government should be regarded as a tired country as a country which has seen its best days i don t hold that view think our high noon is yet to come but i think if we devote ourselves to the public interest if we are willing to bear the burdens which go with self government and the maintenance of freedom in a country such as the united states if we say that we will have a defense second to none if we concentrate ourselves on building our economy so that we are the no 1 productive power in the world and maintain that position if we provide equality of opportunity for our citizens regardless of their religion and regardless of their race then what we will be will speak far louder than what the communists say we are i think that is the responsibility of this generation of americans franklin roosevelt early in his administration said that this generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny i think they met that rendezvous i am asking this generation of americans in 1960 to do the same to do in its time what those generations before us did to maintain freedom and serve as an example and a bright light to the world around us that is our opportunity and i think that is our destiny thank you dem jfk29 9 60b john_f _kennedy mayor wagner governor harriman mr prendergast mr chairman congressman stratton ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for being kind enough to come here during your lunch hour i particularly am glad to be here and during my lunch hour i am particularly glad to be here with your distinguished congressman sam stratton who fought for this district and who fights for the united states amsterdam n y and boston mass have many things in common they are among the oldest cities of the united states and like all old cities they meet the same problems which come with maturity with age our responsibility those of us who live in the urban centers of the united states is to try to rebuild our cities and their economies so that they can serve as a place of vitality in the economic life of the united states we are an old section of the united states you who live along the mohawk river or along the ocean in massachusetts senator green who represents rhode island in the u s senate was 12 years old when general custer was slain in montana that is how young america is that is how young the west is that is how old we are if we are going to maintain our economic position if we are going to prevent our factories from leaving us for other sections of the united states sections which have great natural resources which have iron gas and oil underground and coal we have no natural resources in the soil of the northeast united states the only resources we have is the skill of our people i believe it incumbent upon the next president of the united states and the next administration to join together with those who fight for the rebuilding of our american economy especially in those areas which have been hard hit and amsterdam n y is one of them lawrence mass is another and the reason is the same in both cases in lawrence mass we lost our cotton and worsted textiles in amsterdam you lost carpets and some textiles they moved to other sections of the united states how are we going to maintain our employment part of it requires of course local effort we have rebuilt lawrence mass partly by bringing raytheon in there partly by concentrating on electronics and partly by using the skills of our universities and colleges for new research work so part of it requires a local effort and part of it requires a state effort and part of it requires a national effort i believe the next president of the united states should sign the following bills and if i am elected i will do so 1 the area distress bill a bill which put the credit and power and vigor of the economy of the federal government in those areas where unemployment is higher than 7 or 8 percent for a long period of time in other words the federal government will loan its credit to businesses that wish to come to areas such as this will provide vocational retraining for older workers provide supplemental unemployment compensation benefits for those who are out of work for a long time will aid in cleansing the rivers will aid in trying to bring new industry into this area we will if we pass defense manpower policy no 4 again steer defense contracts into those areas with a high level of unemployment 2 i think the president and the administration and the government and the state government and the city should join together in cleaning our polluted rivers they are a great national asset but if you are going to bring industry in here which is going to use fresh clean water they can t use the river as it is today the administration vetoed the distressed area bill the have vetoed the polluted river bill last year our rivers belong to the people who live along them and belong to the people who come after us i live on the most polluted river in the united states the most polluted river in the world west of the ganges the potomac in washington the potomac river in washington but these rivers in the new york area are not so clean and we have to do a better job of maintaining them if you are going to bring industry in that needs fresh water 3 i think this administration should pass a minimum wage of 1 25 an hour the vice president of the united states on monday night s television show said that the 1 25 an hour was extreme 1 25 an hour being 50 a week you will get that under the bill which was considered extreme in 1960 what is extreme about that i want somebody in the senate or the house to live on 1 25 at a time when the bureau of labor statistics says a single woman to even survive in an urban center of the united states it costs her 52 a week yet the average wage for laundry women in five large cities of the united states is 64 cents an hour and for a 48 hour week i believe in 1 25 minimum wage and i think the next congress should pass it and finally i believe in a program of urban renewal for our cities and particularly our older cities i am concerned about these cities of the united states because i think the problems that urban centers have faced such as amsterdam and my own city are really one of the undiscussed problems that face the united states today housing transportation water fresh air space schools libraries hospitals these are all public resources public facilities which are essential to the development of an orderly society and i think the democratic party looks ahead i come here as a democrat mr nixon says it doesn t really make much difference which party you belong to i am not going to let him run away from the republican record on social security minimum wage housing civil rights and the rest i think it makes a difference what party you belong to grover cleveland a president said what good is a politician unless he stands for something and what good is a political party unless it stands for something if i were a republican i would admit it i would run on that record and let the people make their choices between the democratic party and the republican party not saying it does not make any difference i think it does the bible tells us by their fruits you shall know them and they know the democrats and they know the republicans and on november 8 i think the american people are going to say yes to the next 10 years are going to look ahead are going to do in our time what they did in the administrations of woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman say yes say we can do better say we must move ahead so i come here today and ask your help i think we all should try to register and vote franklin roosevelt said some years ago what good is the right of free speech for a man who does not say anything what good is the right to go to church if you don t practice a religion what is the good of the right to vote if you don t register and vote we have these freedoms and i think this is the time we should use the freedom the right of free choice and strike a blow for this country and the cause of freedom strike the blow for a stronger and more powerful america strike a blow for the future of this country thank you dem jfk29 9 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen mr peterson congressman stratton mayor wagner arthur levitt governor harriman fellow democrats independents and a few republicans do we have any republicans here today we will have to be very careful what we say i want to express my appreciation to all of you for being kind enough to come out here i am also delighted to be campaigning with your distinguished congressman and i hope whether you are a democrat independent liberal or republican you reelect sam stratton he speaks for the interests of this district and he also speaks for the united states and i think that is the obligation of us all i come to this old city schenectady running as i do for the democratic candidacy as a democratic candidate for the office of the presidency this city has a long and illustrious history but the security of this city its maintenance its economic prosperity are matters of continuing interest to the people of this area and of the united states schenectady will rise or fall the economy of this area of the state of new york will prosper or decline not merely on what you may do or this community but also on what economic policies are pursued by our government which stimulates business as a whole this community like the cities of my own state massachusetts can fight against recession they can build their own economies they can try to bring business in here but if there isn t business growing in all parts of the united states every effort which schenectady may make or the city of lawrence mass or a city in illinois may make isn t enough if there isn t enough to go around no city of the united states can rebuild itself by its own effort it requires the cooperative effort of the people of this city of labor and management and of economic policies which stimulate our economy carried on by the federal government it is a joint effort by us all if we are going to bring the tide up one of the problems which now affects us is the fact that we have this tremendous industrial capacity in the united states which has been stimulated by automation which has been stimulated by great capital investments in the last 10 years and the question is can we consume in this country and around the world all that we can produce if we can we can maintain full employment if we cannot we will have layoffs and it is a somber economic fact that in the united states in 1960 only 2 years after the recession of 1958 we are using only 50 percent of the capacity of our steel mills steel is basic to the economy of the united states if steel is down then the economy of the united states is on a plateau therefore i consider the most serious domestic problem facing the next administration is to reverse the decline in agricultural income and also the maintenance of full employment in the united states that will be a problem that will affect the administration of the next president in the first 6 months some of the things that i think we can do first i think we can carry on a monetary and fiscal policy that stimulates our economy i don t think that there is any doubt that the high interest rate policy followed by this administration intensified the recession of 1958 and also i think has had a deleterious effect on the economy in 1960 i think the failure of the congress and the administration to agree on an area redevelopment bill which would be of particular benefit in attracting new industry into communities like schenectady i think it is most unfortunate both parties talk about it and it is a fact that twice we passed it in the congress and twice it has been vetoed i think that the administration and the congress in january 1961 should pass an area redevelopment bill because otherwise even if you build the economy of the country as a unit you are going to find areas which because of technological changes because of changes in the use of raw materials or for one reason or another will be left aside and there are over 150 of those communities in the united states today you know all about that in this section of new york therefore i think the passage of the area redevelopment bill will be of the greatest possible help in addition i think we have to develop our natural resources i mention all of these things not because i think the federal government has the answer to all of these problems but because i think there is a proper function for individual effort for community government for state government and for national government and unless each group is meeting its responsibilities toward the community as a whole and toward the country this country does not go ahead mr nixon says i want to centralize everything i have no desire to do so i was the chairman of the governmental reorganization committee which put over 30 of the hoover commission recommendations through the congress in 1954 and 1955 but i do believe in effective government and i do believe that there is a governmental policy now that affects all of our lives education economic and fiscal policy foreign trade our goals all the rest every phase of our national life and personal life is touched by personal policy when you buy a house the interest rates you pay on that house all are affected by national policy i want to make that national policy more effective i want to make it more constructive i think we can do a better job than has been done in recent years the old city of schenectady as all of you know was wiped out by an indian massacre early in its history what is interesting and remarkable about it was that the settlers in schenectady knew about the coming indian attack over 2 years in advance in fact in the summer before they made preparations for resisting it but they did not believe it would come in the winter therefore they laid down in the winter and the attack came and they were wiped out i don t say history repeats itself but i do think there is a somber lesson in history and that is that those who feel that they are secure those who are not willing to work in the summer and in the winter those who are not willing to prepare themselves for hard days ahead have suffered in history the inevitable result this is a difficult time i think the united states is going to pass more difficult times in 1961 1962 1963 and 1964 the next president of the united states is going to have to meet a crisis in berlin in the early days of his administration he is going to have to meet a position in the formosa straits with an increasingly dangerous and belligerent chinese communist government i think the job of the next president will be more difficult more burdensome more responsible than it has been in any administration since the time of lincoln but in the last 4 years i have traveled to every state in the union and i have visited every part of this country and i have the greatest possible confidence in it we have a productive strength which is unequaled we have a form of government which every person in the world around us would most like to live under given their free choice we represent in my judgment the way of the future i do not regard us as an extinct flowering of human experience i regard us as the place where everyone ultimately wants to be and if there is any lesson of the last 10 years in history it is in eastern europe and in africa the same force has been at work in eastern europe against the communists in africa against the western colonial powers and what is it the desire to be free and independent this is the greatest and most heartening event in world history it shows that ultimately the communist experiment is bound to fail because these people are not determined to gain their freedom in order to lose it what i think is important for us is to associate ourselves with that great historical movement i think in the last decade the united states has lost its image around the world as a friend of freedom we have often allied ourselves with dictatorships which are on the way out i think we should raise the standard of freedom as we always did thomas jefferson said the disease of liberty is catching i think it is catching in our time and i want it to spread the world over our function is to maintain its vitality here maintain our example here so that as it starts to spread throughout the world we will be the nucleus of a great army of people the globe around who desire to follow the same road we follow i ask your help in this campaign i think we can win it here in the state of new york dem jfk29 9 60d john_f _kennedy mr mayor ladies and gentlemen first of all i would like to have you meet congressman o brien from this district stick with o brien and kennedy we want you to go all the way with us i want to express my thanks to all of you i run for the office of the presidency in a difficult time about 15 miles from here the independence of the united states was saved at the battle of saratoga now as every generation of americans has had its responsibility to maintain freedom in its time i think the most serious challenge comes in our generation here in the united states we are defending not only ourselves but we also defend the case of freedom if we build a strong and vital country here we affect not only our own independence and those directly allied with us we also affect the security of all those who wish to follow in the same road that we take therefore i think this generation of americans has special responsibilities and special obligations my own feeling is that it is incumbent upon us to build a strong and vigorous economic society here in the united states if we are maintaining full employment if we are using our productive capacity to the fullest if we are building a better society here then it reflects itself around the globe i think our obligation is to concern ourselves with our country here and then hold out the hand of friendship to all those who wish to follow on our road i think that in the administration of the next president of the united states particularly if he is reelected we will begin to see the world move either in the direction of freedom or in the direction of russia and china and i think this decision can be made in the next 10 years i think it is possible for us to reestablish ourselves as a strong and vital country to demonstrate that our capacity for leadership is still unfilled to show the people of africa and latin america and asia who look at mr khrushchev now and look at castro and wonder whether they represent the new way to the future i don t believe they do i think we do but i think it is up to us to demonstrate that we have vitality i think the people of the world should wonder what the president of the united states is doing not what mr khrushchev is doing so i come here to troy and ask your support the name of troy goes back in history therefore in this city you connect the old with the new but the cause is still the same the maintenance of freedom the maintenance of self government at a time when it is under far more serious challenges than the city of ancient troy ever faced i come to troy and ask your help in this campaign does anybody have any questions for 1 or 2 minutes and then we will proceed on thank you very much robert frost from nearby vermont once wrote a poem which i will paraphrase i will hitch my wagon to a mule for i have promises to keep and miles to go before i sleep thank you dem jfk3 10 60 john_f _kennedy mr kerner senator douglas congressman mack mr ronan distinguished guests mrs price ladies and gentlemen in 1936 in accepting his second presidential nomination before 100 000 people in philadelphia pa franklin roosevelt said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i don t believe that the american people in 1960 in these dangerous years of our days are going to elect a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think the american people are going to choose to move forward i come here to illinois tonight and ask your help in this campaign ask your help in moving this country forward again some people have said that this campaign is 1928 all over again for the sake of the farmer the worker the merchant and the teacher for the sake of those who remember 10 percent interest and 10 cent corn i trust it will not be 1928 all over again i trust it will be 1948 all over again last thursday night in my own city of boston mr nixon dismissed me and i will quote him as just another truman i regard that as a great compliment and i have no hesitation in returning the compliment i believe mr nixon is another dewey like mr dewey he represents a do nothing republican leadership like mr dewey he is a say nothing candidate like mr dewey he will win nothing in november i cannot believe that even the republicans can be happy about a candidate who runs on the slogan party labels don t mean anything i believe party labels do mean something because they tell us something about the candidates and they tell us something about the philosophy they tell us something about the future they tell us how a candidate stands on the great progressive measures which face our country and which must be enacted if our country is going to move forward in 1948 the people of illinois made two significant contributions to the future of this country they not only played a major role in the election of president truman but they also sent to washington a great u s senator paul douglas and you elected a great governor in 1948 adlai stevenson and i know in 1960 that this state is going to elect another great governor otto kerner and i am confident that the people of this district will send back to the house of representatives where he speaks for them and speaks for the country will reelect your congressman peter mack it is traditional for presidential candidates who come to springfield ill to invoke the name of abraham lincoln and i invoked his name the other night on monday night in the so called debates or discussions the precedent of which was of course the lincoln douglas debates of 102 years ago i pointed out that in that 102 year ago discussion that abraham lincoln set the issue here in springfield a house divided against itself cannot stand i believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free today i am convinced that the basic issue which faces the american people and indeed the people of the world is whether the world can exist half slave and half free whether it will move in the next decade in the direction of freedom or whether it will move in the direction of slavery that is the great issue which transcends all others the next president of the united states whether he is a republican or a democrat must face up to that issue with to the extent possible the same vision and courage which lincoln showed in a comparable case 100 years ago some may say that a democratic candidate for the presidency has no right to invoke the name of lincoln i disagree abraham lincoln belongs to the ages and he belongs to all americans regardless of their party his boyhood idol was andrew jackson the principles of jefferson were in his political career and he was nominated and renominated and reelected under the union party label nevertheless it is true that the democrats have never claimed abraham lincoln that has been largely an act of generosity on our part we can point to jefferson and jackson and wilson and roosevelt and truman now what are we going to do with the republicans they can point to benjamin harrison who according to legend saw a man forced by the depression to eat grass on the white house lawn and had only one suggestion for him that he go around to the back where the grass was longer they cannot mention william mckinley who according to theodore roosevelt had a backbone as firm as a chocolate eclair they cannot mention warren g harding who made the teapot dome famous they cannot mention calvin coolidge from massachusetts who caused a white house usher to say no other president in my time ever slept so much no wonder coolidge said when they came to him to tell him in the twenties that farm prices were dropping he said farmers never made much money i don t think there is much we can do about it and they have not done anything about it since then they don t often mention herbert hoover and they can t mention theodore roosevelt because he left the party in 1912 and i would like to emphasize tonight that i do not believe that mr nixon can claim wholly the mantle of abraham lincoln one hundred years ago abraham lincoln was not running on a platform of experience it was clear that his opponent had far greater experience as lincoln s experience was confined to a few obscure years in the house of representatives but the country was then suffering from a president with experience james buchanan who had been congressman senator ambassador and secretary of state he had been in public service for almost 42 years herbert a garth the historian has written and he mistakenly believed that he had been learning all the time i don t think experience necessarily counts the three great qualities which characterized lincoln s presidency were leadership courage and foresight the three qualities that the next president of the united states is going to need in full measure if this country is going to meet the challenges at home and abroad when he called his wartime cabinet together to discuss the emancipation proclamation he faced a group of men who were carefully chosen to reflect all views in the country but lincoln did not ask them for a compromise a halfway measure a consensus i have gathered you together he said to hear what i have written down i do not wish your advice about the main matter that i have determined for myself this nation needs that kind of leadership in 1961 from the next president of the united states and no one needs it more than the farmers of illinois i can assure them that they will not find that leadership in a candidate who once praised mr benson as one of the great secretaries of agriculture in history who said in 1958 and i quote mr nixon accurately that the farmer has never had it so good and who revealed his farm policy 2 weeks ago to be a collection of the old benson fables under new nixon labels mr nixon s farm program consists of this one basic principle that the support price for commodities shall be based on the preceding average market price for the past 3 years in 1952 corn was selling for 1 50 in sanborn minn on friday it sold for 85 cents the support price for corn under the nixon program will be tied to the average market price of the preceding 3 years and as that price drops so will the support price down down down and you have not seen the bottom yet you have not seen the bottom at 85 cents because there is nothing to prevent it from going down and down as corn comes out of our ears which it will this year as a result of the benson program and this is not a problem just for the farmers of illinois or the farmers of the united states here in illinois international harvester is shutting down for various periods of time this fall seven out of eight plants throwing 12 400 men out of work some of these plants may never reopen some of these men may not find a job for a long time some of them will be unable to meet their bills on main street and soon hard times will have spread from the farm to the town from the town to the city as it did in the twenties our farmers are the no 1 customer for detroit and the automobile industry detroit is the no 1 market for the steel industry and when the farmer ceases to buy equipment and when he ceases to buy automobiles and detroit starts to close down the steel mills of this country which are operating today at 54 percent of capacity you cannot tell me that this matter is of concern only to those who live on the farm it is of concern to all americans who want our country to fulfill its responsibility and i cannot believe that in 1960 the farmers of illinois missouri or any other state are going to vote for more of the same and that is what they will get when lincoln signed the homestead act he had confidence in the people who till our soil and in my judgment the next farm program should have two features in it first a provision tying support prices to a parity price so that the farmer has assurances that the price will remain in relationship to the things he has to buy and secondly that there will be controls over production which will prevent these surpluses from hanging over the market and breaking the price a balance between supply and demand and a support price that protects them is the democratic program secondly abraham lincoln had courage and the next president of the united states will need courage he knew the storm that would be raised by the emancipation proclamation but when he went to sign that historic document exhausted from several hours of shaking hands at the white house he said to those present if my name goes down in history it will be for this act my whole soul is in it if my hand trembles when i sign this proclamation all who examine this document hereafter will say he hesitated but lincoln s hand did not tremble he did not hesitate he did not equivocate because he was the president of the united states the lincoln tradition is not found in a man who considers 1 25 minimum wage to be and i quote him extreme the lincoln tradition of courage is not found in a man who considers federal aid for education and teachers salaries to be extreme and i quote him accurately and who calls helping our older citizens through the medium of social security to provide medical care for their aged life who considers that to be extreme i do not regard these measures which help our people including the measure for rebuilding our surplus labor areas i do not regard them as extreme i do not regard cleansing our rivers rebuilding our economy fighting our slums to be extreme measures i stand where franklin roosevelt stood and i think in the next few years here in this country we should build a better society where all americans regardless of their race of their creed and their color regardless of the circumstances of their birth have an equal oppportunity to develop their talents that is what we stand for in 1960 finally i said that abraham lincoln believed in foresight during the darkest days of the civil war many were fearful of the outcome and when a delegation called upon the president to express their fears lincoln told them of a youthful experience one night in november he said when i was a boy a shower of meteors fell from a clear november sky a friend standing by was panicked but i looked up and between the falling stars i saw the fixed stars shining serene in the firmament and i said let us not mind the meteors let us keep our eyes on the stars in the 1960 s this country will need leadership that will keep its eyes on the stars on the fixed constellations which have guided this country in so many difficult times in the long history and what are the fixed stars of our constellation they are confidence in our country a sense of the progressive a sense of the new a sense of willingness to break new ground a sense of confidence in the people to meet the great problems that face them a confidence in freedom a confidence in a free society if we in this country can build a strong and free society if we can maintain employment if we can provide a better life for our farmers if we can provide an educational system second to none if we can meet the needs of our older citizens then our system will ornament the cause of freedom we sit in 1960 on a most conspicuous stage we are the great defenders of freedom if we fail here in this country we fail around the world because people in africa and asia and latin america who are attempting to make their judgment which road they shall take they look to us when we are moving they have confidence when we stand still they begin to wonder whether the world is moving in the direction of the communists i say in 1960 that we have to move again that we have to build in this country a strong and vital society that when we are a good neighbor in the united states we shall be a good neighbor around the world i come in this campaign to this old state and this old capital and ask your help i ask you to join me i ask you to give us your hand your voice i ask you to give us your support i ask you to help us lead this country we say to you those of us who seek high office and high responsibility in this somber time in the life of our country we are reminded what lincoln said when he left this city to go to washington my friends i now leave with a task before me greater than any which has rested upon any president since the time of washington without the assistance of that divine being who attended him i cannot succeed with that assistance i cannot fail in that spirit in 1960 we come here tonight and dedicate ourselves to this country dedicate ourselves to its future dedicate ourselves to moving this country forward again thank you dem jfk3 10 60a john_f _kennedy mr kerner who i am confident is going to be the next governor of illinois senator douglas who is the senator and who i must say speaks for this state and the public interest i hope illinois not only for its own interest but for the sake of the united states which needs all the courageous and able and dedicated figures that we can secure in public life will send paul douglas back to the u s senate and your own distinguished congressman mel price will rogers once said it is not the original investment in the congressman that counts it is the upkeep i don t know what the original investment is in mel price or the upkeep but it is worth it in this town in the square the last of the lincoln douglas debates was held and in this debate here in this town abraham lincoln repeated a speech which he had made earlier and in that speech he used the same lines a house divided against itself cannot prevail that this nation cannot exist half slave and half free i think 100 years later the issue is still the same but this time it is written on a wider horizon the question of whether the world will exist half slave and half free and what contribution we in the united states can make to maintain the world in a state of freedom that is the issue before the american people in 1960 how the united states can be strong how we can fulfill our historic destiny to contribute to the cause of freedom around the globe i think we can best do so by maintaining in this country a strong and vital economy by meeting our problems here at home by building a stronger industry by providing for full employment by providing the best educational system in the world by in 1960 returning the leadership of this country to the democratic party i stand in this election where wilson stood in 1912 and roosevelt stood in 1932 and harry truman in 1948 mr nixon stands in this election where mckinley stood and harding stood and coolidge stood and hoover stood and dewey stood and landon stood i think in 1960 that the people of the united states after 8 years have decided that they want to move forward again have decided that they want to regain their national purpose have decided that what we are doing now is not as good as we can do that this is a strong country that must be stronger a more powerful country that must be more powerful i think the issue is clearly joined mr nixon says we have never had it so good and i say we can do better and i say we must do better the issue is still the same the world does not change one hundred years has brought us face to face in this very same square with the issue that was put to the people of illinois by lincoln on that occasion can this nation exist half slave and half free can the world as the united states met its responsibilities in the 1860 s so must the united states meet its responsibilities to the same issue the cause of freedom i ask your help in this election i ask you to strike a blow once more for this country i ask you to join with us in moving this country forward in reestablishing its image as a strong and vital society i ask your help in this election thank you dem jfk3 10 60b john_f _kennedy paul mel price ladies and gentlemen in every presidential candidate s itinerary there is always 5 minutes for lunch and rest and then you move on but i want to express my thanks to you all we have the good fortune to have a member of my crew who was on my torpedo boat in world war ii who lives in this area of east st louis i would like to have you meet my friend mauer would you stand up and take a bow he was on a merchant ship that got sunk in the solomon islands and he had the bad fortune to then come on my boat which got sunk i am glad to see him today it is the first time i have seen him for 17 years we are delighted he is here i would like you to meet mr and mrs zinser the mother and father of another member of our crew perhaps they could stand up mauer zinser and kennedy sort of a german irish boat and this ticket is here in southern illinois with otto kerner who i know will be elected governor and paul douglas who i know you are going to elect to the senate i have served with senator douglas now in the senate for 8 years i have served with mel price for 6 years in the house of representatives i think each in his own way each meeting his responsibility they have fought for the interest of this district and the state of illinois and the country this is not merely a contest between mr nixon and myself or between paul douglas and whoever is his opponent i wish nobody knew the name of my opponent or otto kerner and somebody he is ruuning against i know the name of his opponent which is a good thing for mr kerner that is why he is going to win and i know who i am running against and so do you i can t believe in 1960 the american people are going to turn the united states over to the republican party and mr nixon for 4 more years i spoke the other night about leap year liberalism every 4 years the republican candidate for the presidency says it doesn t matter which party wins we are all for the same things we are all for the same goals well if we are all for the same goals why did the republicans defeat our efforts to provide a minimum wage of 1 25 and medical care for our aged citizens and federal aid to education and housing to rebuild our cities our goals are not the same nor are the means the same nor have they been since theodore roosevelt a democratic party sees the government and the people working together for a stronger and better country for in paul douglas words a juster america the republican party says it is good enough and they have blocked every effort we have made to move this country off dead center this is not just a contest involving mr nixon and myself or the candidates here it is a contest that involves us all we pass on from here but you stay i ask your help in the next 6 weeks if we get out and do the job as we did it in this state in 1948 when president truman carried illinois by only 17 000 votes and he carried ohio by 7 000 votes those are the victories that made it possible for him to resume the leadership of the united states instead of thomas dewey now in 1960 in this state in missouri in ohio and pennsylvania and michigan and new york and new jersey this fight is going to be won or lost you can make the greatest possible contribution and in return we will work this country and this state from one end to another we will carry our message we will inform the american people that the choice is between standing still and moving forward between yes and no between progress and mediocrity i hope that you will join us in this effort it involves us all a stronger america involves us all every governmental action affects our lives for good or for bad every movement forward moves us all forward a rising tide lifts all the boats i hope a new democratic administration can lift all the boats and all the states and all the people therein we ask your help in this campaign thank you dem jfk3 10 60c john_f _kennedy governor the next governor of illinois otto kerner your present u s senator and i am sure your next u s senator my colleague in the senate paul douglas mel price your congressman ladies and gentlemen i feel somewhat embarrassed saying anything unkind about the republicans right in front of their headquarters i don t want them to call the vice president and say we are mean in any way but we are just trying to tell the truth i think the overriding issue which is before the united states in 1960 is how we can maintain our freedom how we can not only survive but how we can prevail there are many domestic matters that disturb us the decline in agriculture the slowdown in industry but they are all wrapped up in the one subject how can the united states maintain its position how can the united states build a stronger country here and help the cause of freedom throughout the world i don t make any mistake ahout it that the 1960 s are going to be the most difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country anyone who says that the future is easy is wholly wrong i think the future is going to be a difficult one and because i think in the next 10 years that the people of latin america and africa and asia will begin to make their judgment as to which direction they should move should they come with us should they follow the road of freedom or should they move in the direction of the communists we can affect that judgment by the kind of society that we build here george allen the head of the u s information service testifying before a congressional committee this year said that ever since sputnik ever since the united states was second in space the people of the world had begun to feel the soviet union is moving ahead faster than we are we cannot afford to fail in any area of our national and international life if the people of the world begin to decide that the soviet union and the chinese communists are strongest if they begin to decide that their educational system is better than ours if they decide that their effort in science and production is better than ours if they decide that they represent the way of the future and that we represent the way of the past then we have lost the battle of the future i do not say that the future is easy i do not say that time and events have not placed a heavy burden upon us all it would be nice to turn those burdens over to some other country and some other people but we have had them placed on us and i do not regret it i cannot possibly afford to permit the soviet union to produce as it now does twice as many scientists and engineers as we do to be first in space to be increasing their economic productivity three times the rate we are i don t say that our future is in danger of a military attack if we maintain our strength what i am concerned about is that the people of the world whose support we need the people of the countries south of us and africa and asia and in europe itself and in eastern europe will begin to feel that the world and history are moving in the direction of our adversaries and that we are standing still that is the basic dispute that i have with the present republican leadership their slogan has been you never had it so good i think that our slogan should be we must do better we must do better we must do better mr nixon has said that when i say that some of these things could be better that i am downgrading the united states i don t downgrade the united states i served it for 18 years i have the greatest confidence in the united states i am not satisfied to see it second best in any area of national and international life i want an america that is not first if not first but not first when but first period and i think we can do it i believe that this generation of americans has the same rendezvous with destiny as that generation of americans in 1936 to whom franklin roosevelt addressed those words that that generation had a rendezvous with destiny i believe we do too the rendezvous was the question of whether freedom could be maintained here in the united states our destiny is to determine whether freedom can be maintained throughout the world whether a house divided against itself can survive whether a world can exist half slave and half free i think we will move in the direction of freedom that is the purpose of this campaign to build a stronger country here and in building a strong country we strengthen the cause of freedom all around the globe i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join me in a journey across the new frontiers of the 1960 s i run for the office of the presidency not promising the things i am going to do for the country but asking you to join with me in serving our country in making it greater in making it stronger in making it fulfill its manifest destiny this campaign is an important one the american people have the choice of whether or not they are going to give the green light to the sixties whether they are going to move ahead as woodrow wilson moved and franklin roosevelt and harry truman whether we are going to say yes to the 1960 s whether we are going to move ahead i ask your help in this campaign thank you dem jfk3 10 60d john_f _kennedy mr powell many thanks governor congressman gray senator douglas otto kerner the next governor ladies and gentlemen i am very grateful to the president and the trustees of southern illinois university for their generosity in having us here today and i am glad to see so many students who are also participating in the profession of politics prince bismarck once said that one third of the students of german universities broke down from overwork another third broke down from dissipation and the other third ruled germany i do not know which third of the student body we have here today at southern illinois university but i am confident i am talking to the future rulers of america in the sense that all future men and women have an opportunity and an obligation to participate in the discipline of self government i come here as the democratic candidate for the office of the president and it is my hope that this campaign will serve a useful national function my responsibility and the responsibility of the democratic candidates is to present alternative courses of action to our present policy so that the people can make a clear choice can make a judgment as to what they want their country to be as to which direction they want their country to go i believe that there is a clear choice in 1960 as there was in 1948 as there was in 1932 as there was in 1912 i believe that the democratic party has once again an opportunity to be of service because i believe that the problems which the united states will face in the 1960 s are entirely new entirely different and require new people and new solutions the hard tough question for the next decade and for this or any other group of americans is whether this country with its freedom of choice its breadth of opportunity its range of alternatives whether that country and that system can successfully over a long period of time compete with a totalitarian state where the total resources of the state both human and material are harnessed to the service of the state how can we over a long period of time maintain our position our strength our leadership relative to that of the communist world that is the question which faces both parties and which faces america and which faces all who believe in the cause of freedom it is for that reason among others that i find it particularly distressing that this country after a recession in 1954 and a recession in 1958 is now moving a short time later less than 3 years into a period of plateau of standstill with nearly 5 million americans out of work and nearly 3 million americans working only part time last year 1959 not a recession year our economic growth was about one third that of the soviet union and one half that of germany italy and france we are going to have to have double the economic growth we had last year if every student here and their successors in the next 10 years is going to find a useful job we are going to have to find in the 1960 s 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 10 years if we are going to maintain full employment in the united states and even when we have done that there are still those eddies still those islands of unemployment because of technological changes because of many conditions and you have seen it in southern illinois and i saw it in the textile towns of massachusetts and i spent a month in it with west virginia and in kentucky and parts of pennsylvania the federal government is going to have to devise a better use of its monetary and fiscal powers if it is going to stimulate the growth of our economy it cannot rely on a high interest rate policy which i believe stifles our expansion and we have to pass once again and have a president who will sign the area redevelopment bill i was the floor manager in 1956 for the first douglas area redevelopment bill i was a cosponsor of it the second time and a cosponsor the third time twice it has been vetoed and there is no indication in 1960 that if we elect a republican president that he will sign a bill which i think will serve the general need you cannot possibly agree that it is in the public interest to have communities which have 15 18 and 20 percent in my own city of lawrence 30 percent unemployed for 3 years what do those americans do i saw them in west virginia over 100 000 families getting surplus food packages and no hope for the future unless the federal government is willing to devote its energies unless it is willing to cooperate with local groups in this area in the field of education in the field of health in the field of minimum wages unless the federal government is able to use its powers affirmatively i don t think then that we can look to the future with the confidence and hope that must be ours if we are not only going to endure but prevail i believe that the assignments facing the next president of the united states are more difficult than any since the administration of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt in many ways they are more difficult than any president has faced since the time of lincoln and in the time of lincoln the issue was just the same as the issue that we face now in his speech in his last debate he repeated his house divided theme and in that speech he said the question is whether this nation can exist half slave and half free now the question is whether the world can and i want to make it clear that i am not satisfied as an american with the drift of events with a gallup poll which showed that a majority of people in 10 countries in february believed that the soviet union would be ahead of us in science and military power in 1970 you cannot stand still against an adversary who is devoting all of his energies to a movement forward mr khrushchev spends a month at the united nations and he is a busy man he does it in order to further his cause he knows that in the next decade people in latin america and africa and asia are going to begin to make a judgment as to which side they are going to take which side represents the best hope for them which system travels better communism or freedom can our system help them solve their problems or must they turn to the east if you think american policy toward these areas has demonstrated any lack of understanding of the serious problems we face i will name only one incident we gave last summer at the time of the uprising in the congo we offered 300 scholarships to the congo that was more than the u s government had given to all of africa in 1959 there are 7 students from that 300 here in the united states today from the congo even though over 800 applied two years ago guinea became free three years ago ghana became free guinea and ghana have both moved in the direction of associating themselves with soviet policy cuba is not the only example what i am concerned about is in 1970 i don t want to see independent country after independent country begin to move where guinea and ghana have gone where the congo almost went and may still go where cuba has already gone because for a simple reason they feel that the communists represent the future they feel that we are identified with the past they feel that we are identified with colonialism they feel that we are identified with the kind of future which they do not want why after all what we want is their independence i think it is because the united states in recent years has not demonstrated the vitality here in the united states i believe that franklin roosevelt and wilson and truman were successful in their foreign policy because they were moving here at home because franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in the united states he was a good neighbor in latin america and what is true of latin america is true of africa and true of asia next spring india may have a financial crisis but i don t hear anybody in this administration concerning themselves with the problems of india which may be the most serious postwar crisis that this country has faced there is no use offering scholarships to the congo in 1960 it takes years to educate a man or a woman and prepare them for self government there is no use suddenly coming at the point of castro s pistol and offering economic aid to latin america which we did this summer when our relations with castro became soured these people know what is going on where have we been the last 8 years what new original concepts of government what has been associated with american foreign policy to cause people around the world to believe that the communist system and communist countries which 40 years ago in the case of russia the sickest country in europe 10 years ago in the case of china was regarded as a country with no future and now they move and the question is whether they move fast enough i believe that this is a great country but i believe it can be a greater country and i believe it must be if it is going to maintain its freedom and is going to maintain its position as the leader of the free world no one is coming to our assistance if we fail only ourselves and therefore i believe that the unfinished business of this society is to begin this country on the upward go for every citizen to be willing to devote his time and his energy to the service of this country i do not run for the presidency saying life will be easy in the 1960 s but i do run for the presidency with the strong feeling that the united states manifest destiny in 1960 is to serve ourselves and serve the cause of freedom thomas paine in the american revolution said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i believe in 1960 that the cause of all mankind is the cause of america and i believe that once again the democratic party with stretches back in history longer than any active party now in the world stretching all the way back to jefferson i believe that once again it is going to be called upon for great public service and once again it is going to be given the opportunity to lead this country and start this country moving again thank you dem jfk3 10 60f john_f _kennedy senator douglas governor kerner congressman price ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for your generous invitation to come here today i am the democratic candidate for the presidency and i run as a democrat i am glad to be here in this stockyard because this proves an important point i come from massachusetts which is not a great agricultural center but i can tell you that massachusetts will not be prosperous unless the farmers of the united states are prosperous we heard today that international harvester which makes farm machinery has closed down today and john deere plants have closed down and the reason is that agricultural income has dropped in the past few years almost 20 to 25 percent and because when farmers go down the rest of the economy sooner or later goes down the farmers are the no 1 market for the auto industry of the united states and the auto industry is the no 1 market for the steel industry and the steel is 50 percent of capacity that is what we are producing this week the soviet union last week produced more steel than we did because we are only using half of our capacity and only slightly more than half of our people the economy of the united states is tied together if the farmer prospers the city prospers and if the city prospers the farmer prospers and i think the democratic party has understood that from the beginning i think franklin roosevelt and truman and woodrow wilson fought for the people of this country fought to advance their progress and we must fight in 1960 and 1961 and 1962 as long as there are millions of americans who receive less than the 1 minimum wage for an hour of work as long as there are hundreds of thousands of farmers who are being driven off the land in the last few years as long as we are producing one half as many scientist and engineers as the soviet union as long as our economy is moving ahead at a slower rate not only than the soviet union but germany france or italy i think there is need for new leadership i don t say that life will be easy if we are successful but i certainly can assure you that we are going to move this country and move ahead paul douglas said we have been on dead center and i think we have been on dead center long enough there are 5 million american homes in the cities of the united states that lack plumbing of any kind 15 million american homes which are substandard and yet we are not building anywhere near enough homes per year i think a democratic administration under the leadership of vigorous people who look to the future can move this country into the sixties and in strengthening the united states they strengthen the cause of freedom this country will not maintain its freedom this country will not maintain its commitments around the world unless we have a strong and vigorous economy able to maintain our commitments able to build able to move i come here today and ask your support in this campaign i feel that we have in 1960 the same opportunity that we had in 1948 and 1932 and 1912 the chance to move again we have stood still long enough i ask your support in this campaign i ask you to join me in starting this country forward thank you i am going to save this hat and if i get elected i will wear it in the inaugural parade dem jfk3 10 60g john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen needless to say this is not my automobile that i am now standing on i want to introduce to you the democratic candidate for governor of illinois otto kerner i want you to meet your distinguished congressman mel price who you are going to send back and i want you to meet again the present u s senator and the next senator from the state of illinois paul douglas and i am here runninig for the president i come here to the all america city and ask your help in this campaign anybody who says that there is nothing left for us to do has not read the paper doesn t know what is left for the united states to do in its unfinished business here at home as long as this administration refuses to pass a minimum wage of 1 25 an hour as long as this administration vetoes housing bills as long as this administration refuses to pass legislation for medical care for our older citizens as long as there is not equality of opportunity for all americans regardless of their race or their religion there is unfinished business for our generation i stand here where harry truman stood and franklin roosevelt and woodrow wilson in this century the united states is faced with its most severe test but we cannot possibly meet our obligations we cannot possibly maintain a defense second to none unless we are moving here in the united states unless our economy is going ahead unless we have full employment unless we have the best educational system in the world i believe we can do a better job i stand where democratic presidents have stood in difficult times in the life of their country but they have looked to the future the same people who tried to kill social security in 1935 tried to kill our efforts to protect social security in 1960 i believe the united states can have an unparalleled period of growth in the sixties i think we can maintain a defense second to none i see no reason why we should be second to anyone in outer space but we can do none of these things we can meet none of our obligations the tide of history will move against us unless we begin to move here in the united states the reason that franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor in the united states you cannot possibly be successful abroad you cannot possibly convey an image of vitality and energy in your relations with the world around us unless you are moving here at home unless the government is holding out a hand and joining with the people in building a better society with paul douglas in the senate and mel price in the house of representatives and otto kerner in the state of illinois all men who look to the future all who believe that a public interest is a public trust all that believe that this country can do anything this is a strong country but i believe it must be stronger and it is a powerful country but i believe it must be more powerful we had a recession in 1954 a recession in 1948 in the state of illinois we had in the last few days the highest unemployment that we had in any august prior to the three recessions since 1945 i don t want to see us stand still in the winter of 1961 i don t want mr khrushchev and castro to be on the move while we are on the defensive i ask your help in this campaign and i ask that on behalf of our country because i think we can serve the united states last february george gallup took a poll in 10 countries of the world and asked them one question who do you think will be first in science and military power in 1970 the soviet union or the united states nine out of the ten countries with the exception of greece every one of those people a majority thought the soviet union would be first why do they think they are moving faster than we are why do people in africa asia and latin america begin to wonder whether the communist system represents the way of the future instead of our system i think ours but we have to work at it we have to show the same vitality and dedication which we have shown in other great crises in other years mr nixon runs on the slogan you never had it so good i think we can do better not only individually but as a country not only as a country but as a country which personifies the cause of freedom if the united states is on the move the cause of freedom is strong if we stand still freedom loses so i think this is an important election and i think there are real issues in it i think the democratic party can serve in 1960 the people of this country i ask your support in this campaign i ask your support to cross the new frontier of the sixties thank you dem jfk3 10 60h john_f _kennedy first of all i would like to have congressman mel price of this district come up here and wave and then senator paul douglas who i know you are going to send back to the u s senate and then we brought over from missouri to see what a great state you have in illinois senator stuart symington we also have the secretary of state here in illinois and i am running for president ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you all for coming here today i run for the office of the presidency with full recognition of the tremendous responsibilities which the u s constitution and events gives the president of the united states he is not only the commander in chief but he also is the center of our entire constitutional system i have served in the congress for 14 years in the house and in the senate and i am sure that paul douglas and mel price would agree that the office of the president is key we can take action to provide aid to education we can take action to provide medical care for our older citizens we can take action to try to stimulate the american economy but in the final analysis whatever we may do depends on the president of the united states depends on his vigor depends on his concept of what needs to be done to make this a stronger and a better country the presidency is key i can assure you that if i am successful in this campaign i do not run saying life will be easy because i think the difficulties of the sixties will press upon us but i do run for the office of the president with the greatest possible confidence in this country with the greatest possible confidence in its ability to fulfill its historic function of being the chief defender of freedom in a difficult and dangerous time i think one of the chief tasks of the next president of the united states is to set before the american people the things we must do in order to protect ourselves in order to maintain our freedom and in order to meet our commitments to freedom around the world i am not satisfied as an american to be second in space to be turning out one half as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union to have our economic growth increasing one third as much as the soviet union and one half as much as germany france and italy last year the united states had the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world and the result of that is this year only 50 percent of our steel mill capacity is being used we have the highest unemployment in this month of any month except for the two recessions of 1954 and 1958 and the one in 1949 ever since 1945 this country is moving into a serious and difficult time in the life of our country and in our relations around the world we stand on the razoredge of history in the next 10 years africa and asia and latin america will begin to move in one direction or another will begin to decide whether the future belongs to us or whether it belongs to the communists and i think our responsibility is to make this country move with sufficient vigor and sufficient force so the people around the world can decide the future belongs to us to solve our problems to build a better society here to hold out the hand of friendship to those who look to us for leadership i am not satisfied with the drift of events today i am not satisfied to be reading every day that khrushchev and castro and the chinese are on the upward march i want to read that the united states is once again asserting its leadership as a great and free country which offers a ray of hope to all those who wish to follow our example i think this is the most difficult time of our history even more difficult than the 1930 s i think the election of franklin roosevelt insured the maintenance of freedom in this country the great task for the united states is to defend the cause of freedom here and around the world in the sixties by building a strong and vital country by maintaining our defenses by building an educational system second to none by providing full employment for our people and demonstrating that mr khrushchev is wrong when he says the united states is a sick and dying and faltering horse i don t believe it i think we represent the way of the future i think the communist system is as old as egypt but i think it is our function as american citizens at this criticial time in our development to demonstrate our vigor and force again to look to the future to say we are not satisfied with things as they are to say this is a great country that can be greater a powerful country that can be more powerful that is the responsibility of all of us as citizens of the united states as believers in freedom those determined to maintain it one hundred years ago lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice he can see the storm coming and he has his hand in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a grace and a part for us i believe we are ready i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in the journey to the new frontier i ask you to help build a stronger america thank you dem jfk3 10 60i john_f _kennedy otto kerner who is going to be the next governor of the state of illinois and senator douglas who i think has made a singular contribution as senior senator from illinois to the welfare of this state and also to the welfare of the united states senator douglas and your own congressman who speaks for this district and so speaks for the country kenny gray and paul powell who has taken me by the hand and has taken me along the same road that harry truman took in 1948 when he carried this state and carried the country and ladies and gentlemen mr nixon the other night in my own town of boston speaking to his party said i was another truman i regard it as a compliment and i said he was another dewey which he does not regard as a compliment this district which is built on the land and which has been nourished by the land personifies the kind of problems which i think the united states is going to face in the 1960 s this district has depended in the main for its resources its growth its wealth upon the minerals underground and upon the food that is grown on the ground and those are those industries that have faced serious problems in the 1960 s i can imagine nothing that represents a greater opportunity than 9 billion worth of surplus food stored away in barns and in sheds and in mills across the united states at a time when over 4 million of our people look to the government for surplus food to sustain them and when hundreds of millions look to us around the world this is bread i would cast upon the water i am confident it would come back to us many times over mr benson is an honest man but he has not been a successful secretary of agriculture i could not disagree more with the agricultural policy pursued by this administration which has got for its basis a steady drop of support prices as a method of eliminating overproduction mr nixon proposed his plan a week ago and he put in the same basic feature which is that the support price shall be tied to the average of the market price for the preceding 3 years and as the market price goes down so does the support price corn was selling for nearly 1 50 under the support price in 1952 in minnesota on friday in sanborn it sold for 85 cents if this is the market price this year next year under nixon s program the support prices will be tied to 85 cents and as the market price drops the support price will drop until finally there won t be as many farmers in the united states in 1961 1962 and 1963 my own judgment is for our agricultural program that we should tie support price to parity price then the support price is fixed but along with that we should have effective controls on production we are going to have corn coming out of our ears and wheat we are going to have other crops which are being grown in surplus greater than we can consume and 5 percent surplus breaks the price 15 or 20 percent the secretary of agriculture and the administration should make a determination as to how much we can usefully consume of wheat livestock other commodities and then control production with the support of the farmers so that there is a balance between supply and demand with a high support price for that crop which is grown i put much greater confidence in that than in a support price which is steadily going down that is the democratic program i feel we can do better this program of this administration has dropped agricultural prices in this state over 20 percent in the last 8 years and we are going down down down step by step that may have been all right in those times when we had full employment farmers could farm and work in the cities and towns but this year we have the highest unemployment that we have had in any months of august and september the three augusts and septembers preceding the recession of 1949 1954 and 1958 and this district knows this problem well because this district has lost 60 000 people in the last 10 years the failure of this administration to support the area redevelopment bill which has passed the u s senate three times introduced in the senate by senator douglas supported strongly by your congressman i think has made it more difficult for this district and districts in my own state of massachusetts and in west virginia and in pennsylvania and in kentucky to lift themselves off the ground i can assure you that if i am successful in this campaign that we will pass that bill in the house and the senate and i will sign it and if i am not successful in this campaign and i continue in the senate we will try to pass it again in the senate and again in the house and we hope that the next president will sign it our problems are problems which affect the growth of our economy in the next 10 years we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 10 years in order to provide full employment in order to get jobs for your sons and daughters in the next 10 years we are going to have to make our economy grow last week the steel mills of this country were employing 50 percent of capacity and if you don t use steel you don t use coal and when you don t use coal and steel you don t make autos and when you don t make autos and you don t make coal and steel sooner or later the economy of our country begins to slow down and that is at a time when the united states has great responsibilities to meet at home and abroad if we can maintain full employment if we can make our economy move ahead if we can bring a balance between supply and demand in the field of agriculture if we can provide effective education for our children if we can put medical care for the aged under social security which will equalize the burden upon us all then i think we will have met some of the problems that this country faces in the 1960 s because in building a stronger society here we help build a strong society around the world the united states is a great defender of freedom if we are moving a head if we are building our strength here then we help the cause of freedom if we stand still if we fail to meet our problems then we damage not only ourselves but the cause of freedom around the globe i have served this country for 18 years 14 years in the congress of the united states and i have traveled in every state in recent months i have the greatest possible confidence in this country but this is a great country that i believe must be greater and it is a powerful country that must be more powerful i approach the 1960 s with the greatest possible confidence that the united states will meet its obligations both at home and abroad i come here today and ask your support not saying that if i am elected life will be easy but i can assure you that if i am elected and if the democrats control the house and the senate men like paul douglas and your own congressman and governor kerner here in the state of illinois we will try to put before this country its unfinished business we will try to provide leadership and this country will move again thank you dem jfk3 10 60l john_f _kennedy senator douglas congressman gray otto kerner the next governor of the state of illinois the next congressman from this district and the next u s senator ladies and gentlemen somebody told me before i came here that there were a lot of republicans that live in this community is that right are there any republicans here today will they hold up their hands are there any democrats here today hold up your hands well there are a few people that did not hold up their hands on either occasion and we are going to talk to them we want to convince you between now and november 8 that the democratic party can be of service to this state and this district and the country one of the things which we talk about so much in government is waste how can we make our government more efficient how can we bring about a better break in the expenditures of tax dollars and get more results from them i want to talk to you about another kind of waste and that is the waste of our resources and the waste of our talent thirty five pereent of our brighter students in this country in high school do not go to college what happens how is their talent wasted why aren t they given the opportunity to get a good education and contribute to their own welfare and that of their country this district in the last 10 years lost nearly 60 000 people why is that because there has been in this district and in my own state of massachusetts and in west virginia and in pennsylvania technological changes which have left some of this district behind and some of my own state behind that is why i cannot understand how this administration on two separate occasions could veto the area redevelopment bill i can assure you that if i am successful or if i continue in the senate this bill will become law next year i think it must if this district and districts like it are going to move ahead when we consider waste consider 9 billion worth of food stored by our government when our own people in many areas at least 4 million of them depend on surplus food packages from the government which average 5 cents per day per person and when there is a world around us which is hungry that is waste in my opinion i believe in putting our bread on the water and i think it will come back to us many times over i cannot believe that the best use for food is letting it rot in storehouses i think it should serve people i think it should serve the cause of peace i think it should serve us and serve freedom that is what i consider to be an objectionable kind of waste not using our best students not using our food not using our industrial capacity last week in the united states we used 50 percent of our steel capacity the other 50 percent was unused that is waste there is waste in this country fifty percent of our mills are quiet 100 000 steel workers are out of work that is waste if we could use our capacity to the fullest if we provided full employment in this country we would have by 1962 10 billion more in governmental revenue as well as billions of dollars for our economy i am for the end of waste whether it is taxpayers dollars or whether it is the waste of the people or our natural resources or our talent or our machines or our plants or our resources of wealth which can produce so much for our country i think we should consider all of this in making our judgment as to what our country should do we waste our people there are people born in this country that because of their color do not get as good a job do not go to as good a school do not have as good teachers do not get to go to college do not get to be professional men do not get to own their house i consider that waste too there are many kinds of waste and i think it is the function of government to use our resources to the fullest to use our natural and material and human resources to the fullest to educate our children to build a stronger economy to provide medical care for our aged under social security to use to the fullest those areas of the united states where unemployment has been chronic for a great many years to use our brains and our energy to build a stronger and better society here in the united states i think the future is ging to be a difficult one for us but i have the greatest confidence in this country i have served it in the congress now for 14 years and i must say after traveling to 50 states in the last 2 years and nearly every section of the united states from the northwest to the southeast i believe that the united states can fulfill its function as the chief defender of freedom in a time of great danger for us all a strong defense a strong economy a strong society serves not only ourselves but serves freedom we sit on a conspicuous stage the kind of society we build the kind of country we maintain the principles for which we fight identify us with countries around the world the united states was a great revolutionary country as long as we maintain that spirit we are going to hold the imagination of the world i cannot believe that mr krushchev and the communist system given time and given a strong america given a hand of friendship held out to people around the world i cannot believe that the result can be anything but on our side and in our way but i believe we have to go to work i think this country has to move again i ask your help in this campaign and i can assure you that if we are successful we will serve the general welfare thank you dem jfk3 10 60n john_f _kennedy your present congressman and i know your next congressman ken gray your present senator and i know your your next u s senator your next governor ladies and gentlemen in 1948 paul powell carried truman by the hand and led him into southern illinois to the promised land because this is the place in this state at the same time of year that harry truman s campaign began to catch fire and it was in these days that he led to blaze the trail that led to victory in november we have followed the same road after a democratic dinner in st louis last night which president truman attended he said last night and i say this afternoon that when mr nixon last thursday night in boston said i was another truman i regarded it as a compliment and i returned it to him and said he was another dewey and he does not regard it as a compliment i come here today singing the same song that woodrow wilson sang in 1912 and that franklin roosevelt sang in 1932 and that harry truman sang in 1948 and that is that i have confidence in this country i think its capacity is unfilled i think it is a great country to which we owe much and i am confident that in our day and generation in the 1960 s we are going to serve our country because we are going to build a stronger country and we are going to start this country moving ahead i come here today and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us on a journey across the new frontier i ask you to join us in restoring democratic leadership to this state and country i ask you to join us in moving our country ahead thank you for coming to the airport you have treated me as well as i have ever been treated in my life today and i hope that mr nixon is able to get his plane into this airport and others because i want him to come down and see some real democrats this is about the 14th speech i have made today which is too many i know but we are going to springfield because we are on statewide television at 9 o clock but i want you to really know that i appreciate your coming out here and saying goodby to us we will see you again we will come back senator or president we will come back dem jfk3 10 60o john_f _kennedy next governor kerner senator paul douglas congressman mel price i am confident that governor kerner to be senator douglas and mel price will be returned by the people of the state of illinois because they deserve it and i am proud to stand with them on this platform the fight that we are carrying on in the state of illinois and the fight that we are carrying on across the united states is the same fight that in other days harry truman and franklin roosevelt waged for progress for the united states mr nixon has said that parties don t make much difference what counts is the man i agree what counts is the man and i also agree that what counts is the party and his political philosophy the republican party which in 1935 voted almost unanimously against the 25 cent minimum wage voted almost unanimously against the 1 25 in 1960 a republican party which in 1935 voted 95 to 1 in the house of representatives against the social security bill voted 44 to 1 with only one republican for medical care for the aged in the last session of the congress a vice president who was a congressman in 1949 opposed public housing is part of the same administration which in 1959 vetoed two housing bills are the people of illinois and the people of this city and the people of this district to have a change to determine what kind of government they want here in this state and across the country do you feel that everything that has to be done to provide better working conditions for our people and better housing and medical care for the aged which affects us all because we all have someone in our family that needs assistance and under the bill which the congress passed and which was signed by the administration before anyone can get medical aid they have to sign a petition that they are indigent that they are broke that they have expended their money that they are paupers i believe in medical care for the aged nursing care all tied to social security which has served our people so well for 25 years i believe in an expanding america where there is equality of opportunity regardless of religion regardless of race regardless of creed i believe in an america where the housing is second to none there are 15 million american homes in the united states which are sub standard the average unemployment compensation check in the united states the richest country on earth is 31 a week and in some states as little as 8 weeks the average wage for laundrywomen in five large cities of the united states and most of them are negro women is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week anybody who says that we have to do nothing now that all we have to do is realize the opportunities which franklin roosevelt and truman presented is wrong we in our time have our own responsibility we have to build homes we have to get our mills moving again we have to provide employment for our people we have to protect the constitutional rights of all americans we have to build a stronger america and i ask your help in this campaign it is the oldest fight in the world the fight for progress in every generation there are those who say that we should stand still that we have never had it so good and in every generation there are those who say it is time to move forward again it is time to move forward it is time to build a better country it is time to extend the benefits of our society to all of our people i ask your help in this campaign because i believe that in 1960 the democratic party in this state and across the country has a chance to be of service we are going to finish the unfinished business of our generation we need your help i ask your assistance and i can assure you that with the democratic congress and a democratic executive that government will be manned by people who are interested in the future whose program is their product who are identified with the future who believe that this country can move ahead i ask your help and so do we all i can assure you that if we are successful we do not say that all problems will be solved but i can assure you that we will have a government that is moving and a country that goes ahead i hope you will join us in this campaign thank you dem jfk3 11 60a john_f _kennedy congressman udall my friend and colleague from the house of representatives congressman to be dick harless with whom i served in the house in the end of the 1940 s and with whom i will serve again in washington lee ackerman the next governor of the state of arizona my friend and valued colleague a distinguished senator from this state and from the nation senator hayden ladies and gentlemen i come here to arizona this morning to ask your support in this campaign i recognize that the struggle here is not easy i know that barry goldwater sent a wire sent a wire to nelson rockefeller that it was in the bag in arizona it is in the bag for arizona like it was in the bag for the new york yankees there is no election in the united states that is in the bag 2 weeks ahead and our experience this year in arizona a strong democratic state is going to prove that arizona and the nation are going democratic in 1960 there is no state in the union that depends more upon men who look to the future i spent a year in arizona there is no state in the union i repeat that is committed more to progress by the inevitable laws of nature this state would not be here there would not be a single person now living in this community unless men who went before you looked to the future made it possible for you to develop the land and the water do you believe a republican party committed to no new starts committed to the present and the past how can they build arizona how can they build a nation i want to make it clear that anyone here in arizona who is satisfied with things as they are who looks to the world around them and sees our prestige as the highest it has ever been if they accept that view who believe that the balance of power in the world is shifting in our direction who believe that we are meeting our problems here at home in full measure that we are planning our lands and water with vigor anyone who feels that anyone who is that happy and contented mr nixon is your man but anyone who takes the view that i take that our prestige is not as high as it must be that this powerful country of ours must be more powerful that this strong country of ours must be stronger anyone who takes the view that freedom is not secure that this country is not secure unless we are building a strong and vital society i want their help i want them to come with me i represent the only national party in the united states a party stretching from arizona to massachusetts i run with a running mate from the state of texas we stand in the tradition of the oldest political party in the united states i come to a state which has a majority of democrats and ask you what have the republicans done for arizona what have the republicans ever done for the nation compared to the progress to which we are committed the kind of progress which woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt provided in their time which makes it possible now for arizona to prosper barry this election is not in the bag in arizona or in the nation your chances in 1964 may still come because we are going to retire mr nixon to the beauties of california if i am elected president of the united states november 8 i am committed to progress and to a stronger america strengthening this country here at home to providing a vital society here in the united states and a society which speaks with vigor around the world i don t care how many polls taken of our prestige in the world which show that it is dropping which are hidden by the government in the state department all of us citizens of this country who read the papers we know the facts of life we know that this country is not doing what it must do we know that we no longer hold the position in the world as strong as we once did yesterday the papers carried a poll which had been taken out by someone and released to the press which showed that by 1970 a majority of people in the world thought the soviet union would be stronger than we were do you realize 30 years ago or 40 years ago the soviet union was the most backward country in europe what is happening to the united states that people around the world begin to believe that the way of the future is not freedom is not us but is our adversary i don t want that i want mr khrushchev to know that a new generation of americans has taken over in the united states a generation of americans committed to strength and progress and vigor one that will speak for freedom as well as for america and i ask your help you make a choice not merely between mr nixon and myself and not merely between our two parties but you make a choice between two philosophies one that looks to the present and the past and wishes to return in some in some cases to that happy past and one that believes that in the deadly days of 1960 we must look forward as a people individually as states and as a nation this state of arizona depends upon the wise development of your natural resources of the effective use of water we have dams all around the united states built as memorials to the efforts of franklin roosevelt and others we have three words that are the memorials to this republican administration no new starts and how long will arizona last with no new starts how much water are you using than is going back into the ground how long can arizona live off the resources built up over hundreds of thousands of years how long before arizona comes face to face with the reality of the fact that we are not doing enough today this state is going to grow and grow the western united states is going to have four times as many as the united states as a whole by the year 2000 we are going to have twice as many people in this country as we do today where are they going to live we will have three or four times as many in this state and yet this administration in the critical years of the 1950 s carried on a policy which gutted our hopes for developing the orderly resources of the western united states i come from massachusetts but it is a source of pride to me that the two americans in this century who did more to develop the resources of the west both came from new york theodore roosevelt and franklin roosevelt and it is an interesting fact that an administration headed by two westerners one born in texas the other in california did the least now mr nixon we brought him along he is making progress i will agree with that in the last month he has taken more progressive forward looking stands than he has taken in the last 14 years and i am glad of that but the bible tells us by their fruits you shall know them in 1951 mr nixon himself voted to kill the southwestern power administration which supplies power for the rea co ops it was mr nixon himself in 1951 before he saw the bright view of the frontiers of america who voted to kill the central arizona project it was nixon himself in 1952 who voted to eliminate funds for road construction to schools and reservations on the arizona indian reservations this record is clear and i don t think anyone in the state of arizona can go to the polls on tuesday november 8 and come to any conclusion but that the differences are sharp the republican party and mr nixon have opposed progress for 25 years i don t know of a single project in the last 25 years dick see you later in new mexico i don t know of a single project all the people are down here dick we don t want barry to leave yet stay here barry fight it out let me make it clear that the kind of thing in conclusion that i think arizona has to recognize is that we live in the most changing time in the life of our country in the 1952 campaign there was no discussion of two issues which have become important in the fifties one was outer space and one was the development of fresh water from salt water this administration has failed in both of those areas and they may well mean these two areas outer space and the securing of enough water from the ocean to make our lands green may well mean more blessings to our people than anything done in this century this is the kind of change that is coming upon us africa latin america asia all are changing the world is changing around us n 1952 there were very few independent countries in africa today 25 percent of all the countries in the united nations are african there were 16 new nations admitted to the united nations this summer do you know how many voted with us on the admission of red china zero do you know the soviet union has 10 times as many broadcasts in spanish to latin america as we do do you know that the united states now is fourth in radio broadcasts russia first peiping second do you know who is third radio cairo we are fourth do you know we brought more foreign students to the united states 10 years ago by the government than we do today do you know in western germany in 1957 we had more people stationed in our embassies than in all of africa we live in a changing time we cannot sit still we cannot look back we cannot just stay as we are we have to recognize that we are face to face with a dangerous adversary that is determined to destroy us and freedom and unless we are prepared to move unless we are prepared to lead unless we are prepared to build a strong and vital country here in the united states then our hopes for freedom in our generation will begin to fade the balance of power stands like this if india should fall if africa should fall if more castros should develop in latin america what happens to the united states what happens to arizona what happens to our security that is the issue of our times can we demonstrate that a free society can move ahead that it can speak with power that it can develop its resources that it can provide individual employment for its people that it can educate its children that it can provide security for its older citizens these are the things that we must do and i believe they can be best done by the democratic party i ask your help in picking this country up i ask your help in picking this country of ours up and moving it into the sixties thank you dem jfk3 11 60b john_f _kennedy lyndon ralph yarborough mr mayor senator anderson governor edmondson your distinguished congressman who represents this district and the united states with distinction walt rogers ladies and gentlemen frank ikard i come down here to texas in the closing days of this campaign and ask your support for senator johnson and myself in moving this country forward in 1932 that is dick coming in i understand that in the next 24 hours mr nixon is going to visit texas and i want texas to ask him what the republicans or nixon ever did for texas texas has been democratic for 100 years texas is democratic with 21 congressmen and we are going to have texas democratic this year on november 8 i understand that the vice president is arriving in texas with a rescue squad nelson rockefeller the president of the united states henry cabot lodge and now they are adding three new members to the rescue squad who are advising him on how to win this election landon hoover and dewey we can t lose they can t stop the truth anyway i don t care how much that engine warms up during this stop i have been trying to think what the republicans have ever done for texas i have not been able to think of it maybe you have all i know is that this county this congressional district this state of texas depends upon a progressive forward looking national administration whether you work in helium whether you work in oil and gas whether you grow livestock whether you grow wheat or sorghum no matter what your business is you prosper or you decline depending upon the state of the nation s economy this state of texas will move forward in the 1960 s only if the united states moves forward and i do not believe that mr nixon or the republican party can move the united states forward in the 1960 s i come here to texas which has had the speaker of the house who speaks for the united states as well as texas mr rayburn who has had a texan as the majority leader lyndon johnson who speaks for the united states as well as for texas and i ask texas to join the democratic majority this year on november 8 i want texas to lead the way the democratic party is the national party i come from massachusetts lyndon johnson comes from texas we are a team in this effort and i want massachusetts and texas to be in the frontlines on november 8 i think it is far better next january when walt rogers speaks for this district that he speak to a democratic president not to a republican president who calls the standard bearer of the democratic party in this campaign a liar who called another farmer president a traitor i think we want someone who speaks for the united states who raises up a banner for our people not one that attempts to divide us in this election the fact of the matter is that this country is going to have to move in the 1960 s if it is going to survive and texas is going to have to move this country can t stand still it either falls behind or moves ahead nobody stands still in the 1960 s and whatever you may do in the district whatever may be your occupation whether you raise livestock grain oil gas helium small business no matter what you may do you will not prosper unless the united states prospers those of you who are farmers have seen your income drop steadily in the last 8 years what do you think mr nixon offers you he can drop mr benson overboard but the program continues the melody lingers on he promises you just what mr benson gave you a gradual decline in your income until finally you are liquidated that is what the republicans have offered the farmers for 30 years the oil and gas interests of this state how many days are you working out of 30 today i hear these speeches by texas republicans about after all the democratic party doesn t represent texas lyndon johnson is on this ticket with me in 1956 when i was a candidate for the vice presidency i received the votes of texas for the vice presidency texas is part of the nation it is part of the democratic party it has been a part of the democratic party for 100 years it leads in the house it leads in the senate it has an interest in the party one congressman is a republican you have a governor that is a democrat two senators that are democrats 21 congressmen that are democrats and you are going to have a vice president of the united states that is a democrat who speaks for texas who speaks for the united states that is the question and i come down here to texas and ask you to join us i ask texas to raise the banner on november 8 and let the word come out of here with a southeast wind that texas is going democratic in 1960 this is the busiest airport i have ever been in let me just say in conclusion that this is a long campaign it has taken us through all parts of the united states but it ended up right here in the state of texas and i think you ought to decide those of you who are democrats what you want for texas and what you want for the country and what you think of this country and what you think it must do these are not easy times for americans texas has always met its responsibility in time of war now i am asking texas to join us in building this country in times of peace i don t think any texas wants the easy way in the 1960 s every texan is willing to face the facts of life and you know yourself from your own long experience that it is not good enough in the 1960 s for a great country to sit down and look at the past i don t care what speeches you may have heard you know yourselves as individuals as citizens of this country that this country is going to have to do better and i don t think the republican party is capable of leading the united states the way it should be led in 1960 sam rayburn will be speaker of the house lyndon johnson will be the vice president of the united states ralph yarborough will speak for texas in the senate and walt rogers and the rest of them in the house i come here today and ask the state which has been leading the democratic party for the last 8 years i come down here and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in moving this country forward i ask you to join us in retiring mr nixon to the beauties of california i ask you to help the fact of the matter is mr eisenhower carried him in twice you have seen circus elephants their heads full of ivory thick skins no foresight complete memory you know when they go around the ring in a circus they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them well mr nixon he grabbed that tail in 1952 and 1956 but it isn t there any more now he has to face the people and i don t think in 1960 they are going to elect a candidate who runs on a platform of standing up to mr khrushchev who won t engage in a fifth debate who requires a president and a vice president to accompany him through the streets of new york what kind of a candidate and what kind of a party is that is that the party and the candidate for the 1960 s i should say not what they are going to take him piggyback right down here in the heart of texas in amarillo i am asking the support of the people of texas i am asking you democrats to play your part in a great democratic victory which will pick this country up off of dead center and move it forward in the 1960 s thank you dem jfk3 11 60c john_f _kennedy congressman jarman governor edmondson distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i don t believe all those stories that oklahoma is going republican i think oklahoma is going democratic on tuesday i am proud of the generous introduction of the kind tribute which has been paid to me by the senior senator of the state of oklahoma senator kerr he and i have equal devotion to the constitution of the united states i have served this country for 18 years 4 years in the service and 14 years in the congress and whether i am elected president of the united states or continue in the senate i shall join him in defending the constitution and all of its provisions the issue for the people of oklahoma and arkansas and texas is not where i go to church the issue is do you want a republican to lead this country for 4 more years now he has run on a program that he can stand up to mr khrushchev and yet this week in the last days of this vital campaign what does he do to go through new york he gets nelson and cabot and calls on the president and they all drive up broadway together the rescue squad is in full operation they are taking him around the country the four of them and i understand alf landon is joining them this week and dewey they passed under a theater on broadway which said the king and i mr nixon is running for the presidency not the team not the rescue squad but mr nixon and i don t believe the american people are going to select him to lead them in the next 4 years i keep seeing these studies that he puts out these surveys which say we are sure to win oklahoma what has nixon ever done for oklahoma or what have the republicans ever done he is the one that is running we have all seen these elephants with long memory no vision their heads full of ivory thick skins and you know how they move around a circus ring they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them mr nixon grabbed those coattails in 1952 and in 1956 but there are not any this year he is running he is running and i can predict to you that the united states and oklahoma is going democratic on next tuesday the fact of the matter is that the state of oklahoma has put its confidence in the past in the democratic party you have two democratic senators a democratic governor five democratic congressmen men of influence in the house and senate who is going to speak for oklahoma they are and we are lyndon johnson and myself are going to speak for oklahoma and the nation i ask you what in the last 25 years have the republicans ever done for arkansas or oklahoma or texas or louisiana i have flown up the arkansas river to see what senator kerr and john mcclellan and the rest have done to dredge those rivers to put in dams and all the rest do you know what this administration s program is no new starts no new starts for oklahoma or arkansas or the nation no effort made to develop the resources of this country i want them to tell a small farmer in oklahoma who raises livestock or wheat what the benson program has done for him in the last 8 years and mr nixon s program may have new lighting and new makeup but it is the same old benson program that he is going to put forward in the next 4 years and i don t think the farmers of this state can stand it i have served in the congress for 14 years i served the same amount of time as mr nixon and i cannot recall and i have tried and tried and tried and i cannot recall a single piece of progressive legislation of benefit to the people of this country that he has sponsored fought for stood for identified himself with whether it is social security whether it is aid to the farmers whether it is dredging our rivers whether it is providing a better life for our people their monument is high interest rates their monument is all the things that might have been done that were not done their monument is a declining united states in the eyes of the world we stand for progress and i cannot believe in this vital state of oklahoma that any citizen of this state looking at oklahoma and the nation can come to any other conclusion but this country and this state must move forward in the 1960 s this contest is between the comfortable and the concerned those who want the best for their country those who recognize that there is no prosperity for oklahoma no matter where a man or woman may work this state cannot move forward unless the united states is moving forward this state depending on no matter where you go to a small businessman a dirt farmer a man who may work in the oil and gas industry which in 1952 had a 75 barrel minimum and today has 15 or in texas which had 20 days of drilling and now has 8 or a farmer who has seen 4 million farmers move off the land in the last 8 years who has seen the income of farmers drop nearly 30 percent who have seen the highest interest rates in the country since the 1920 s frank church said rip van winkle could go to sleep and wake up and find out whether the republicans or democrats were in control by asking how high the interest rates were if you buy in the united states today an oklahoma citizen or one of arkansas or the other states a 10 000 home on a 30 year mortgage do you know as a result of the interest rate increase of this administration that you pay 3 500 more for that house than you would have 8 years ago do you know you paid 3 billion more in taxes every year just to maintain the debt than you did a decade ago this is the kind of administration we want let me make it clear the people of oklahoma are democrats you have to decide yourself what you want this state and country to do you are going to send bob kerr back to the senate you are going to send these congressmen back to the house now will you tell me why you say to them why you say we want bob kerr and mike monroney in the senate and we want bob carlisle and congressman jarman in the house and the others and then we are going to put in a republican as president and undo it all the soviet union is working night and day they are bent on our destruction can we possibly afford to divide our influence our responsibility do you think the democratic party which will control the house and senate is going to be able to work with a president who goes around the country today saying all is well we have never had such great prosperity i believe the united states is going to have to move in the 1960 s and i believe a responsible forward looking president and vice president working with democratic majorities in the house and senate can move this country forward can provide prosperity for our people education for our children security for our older citizens a better deal for our farmers the development of our natural resources these are the issues of this campaign these are the only issues oklahoma prospers or oklahoma goes down depending upon what the united states does and is there any citizen of this state who feels so secure in his job in his future in his employment in the prospects for his children in his security for his older age in his position in the world in the chances for peace that he can possibly say we want to sit still we don t want to move we don t want to act eight years i think is enough i stand in direct succession i stand as the democratic standard bearer in direct succession to woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman mr nixon the republican leader stands in direct succession to mckinley to coolidge to harding to hoover to landon to dewey where did they get those candidates and now they have richard nixon in 1960 this decision is yours by tuesday night this campaign will be over the candidates have made their arguments and the differences between us are very clear they affect our view of our country and they affect our view of the world mr nixon says our prestige has never been higher and he points to our prosperity here at home he says all is well and i say we are going to have to do better and that is the difference between us and you must decide yourselves what you think what your judgment is is it your judgment that all is well in the great republic is it your judgment looking at the world around us that the balance of power is moving in our direction that our security is greater than it was it is your judgment you know no matter what they may put out that the problems that face our country are as hazardous and as great as they have ever been in the past and that the best we can do will be none too good we need the best we need action and motion and progress in this country and we need security in the world and we need peace in the world and we have security in the world and peace if the united states is strong vital and purposeful not reckless but careful strong meeting our commitments keeping our word keeping the peace and you have to decide whether the experience of mr nixon is the kind of experience which you want to endorse in this hazardous time in the life of our country a candidate who in 1952 endorsed the concept of liberation for eastern europe dropping of air drops and all the rest which led in part to the hungarian revolution and all the rest which still knows the people s disappointment a candidate which in 1954 recommended putting american troops in indochina in a hopeless colonial war in 1958 his good will trip to latin america required the marines to be alerted to extract him from that hitherto friendly continent does mr nixon s experience give you a feeling of confidence as he makes his judgment on the basis of his visit with khrushchev he predicted that the u 2 incident would not break up the summit in 1955 on the basis of his visit to cuba he predicted and praised the stability and competence of the batista regime shortly before it fell on the basis of his trip to russia he predicted that the exchange of visits with mr khrushchev and the president would bring and i quote him deeper respect between our countries it did not do so he tells us now that he is the man to stand up to khrushchev even though i can t persuade him to come into a studio and engage in a fifth debate and stand up to the american people but the best he could do in that debate was put his finger in mr khrushchev s face and say and i quote him accurately you may be ahead of us in rocket thrust but we are ahead of you in color television i will take my television black and white i want to be ahead of them in rocket thrust he says that aid to cuba and latin america 5 years ago would have prevented the rise of castro but he was there 5 years ago why didn t they recommend a program then which might have preserved the peace in latin america he tells us that his trips all around the world were great embassies of good will ghana laos cuba the panama canal where is he going next he is going back to whittier calif third has mr nixon been sufficiently well informed or kept the american people accurately informed about the state of american foreign policy and the state of the world here are the facts he asserted in our fourth debate that official surveys of our falling prestige which the state department has not yet released related to the 1957 postsputnik era and we have now seen in the papers this week that they relate to 1960 he asserted that the communist oriented regime of guatemala was expelled by our quarantine even though every diplomat and every newspaperman knows that is not what happened he asserted that the administration had never attempted to persuade chiang kai shek to move his troops from quemoy and matsu and nevertheless as senator fulbright the chairman of our senate foreign relations committee said last week testimony before the senate foreign relations committee proved mr nixon wholly uninformed a man who indicated on may 15 that the u 2 flights would continue even though they had been canceled by the president on may 12 a man who did not know the difference between the detection and arrest of communist spies between springfield mass and springfield ill is hardly a man to lead the united states in the 1960 s i want the people of oklahoma and arkansas and texas and louisiana to make their own judgment tonight and tuesday i want them to choose not the republicans who have opposed everything significant for those states for 25 years i want them to choose and put their confidence in the only national party that there is the oldest party a party with which those states have been identified for a hundred years i want them to say again we are going forward with the democrats we are going to move our states we are going to move our country i come here tonight as the democratic candidate for the presidency with lyndon johnson as the candidate for vice president of texas speaking for the nation i come here to oklahoma and ask your help on tuesday thank you dem jfk3 11 60d john_f _kennedy mr chairman governor burroughs senator chavez senator anderson congressman montoya congressman morris lieutenant governor national committeewoman fellow democrats our friends from the navajo indian tribe pueblo indian tribe ladies and gentlemen i come here to new mexico in the closing days of this campaign to ask your support in returning this country to progress and the democratic party and i am proud to be on this platform with distinguished democrats from this state who speak for new mexico and speak for the united states your distinguished governor who i am confident will be reelected your two distinguished congressmen who will continue to speak for this state in the house of representatives and the united states my running mate in this state a distinguished spokesman for the united states the chairman of the committee on atomic energy a leading member of the senate senator anderson who is going to be elected by an overwhelming majority next tuesday and who deserves to be and who deserves to be senator chavez of the state of new mexico who is chairman of the subcommittee on military appropriations which handles appropriations for 40 billion new mexico is well represented in the house the senate and in the state massachusetts senators are well down the list but here in a state which is not the largest in the union members of the house and the senate from this state hold some of the most responsible jobs in the congress the security of the united states in defense in the development of atomic energy in the development of its peaceful uses hangs to a great extent on the good judgment of the two senators from new mexico this is a large country we are bound together and it is a source of satisfaction to me that i can come all the way from massachusetts and come to new mexico and be among friends and colleagues who speak the same language that i do those of us who are democrats are bound together by the oldest of ties i carry the standard for the democratic party which is the oldest political party in the united states which is our only national party massachusetts new mexico the state of washington the state of texas i run with lyndon johnson from the state of texas and we are going to win on tuesday and i have become more and more convinced after running in this campaign after observing mr nixon and the programs that he puts forward i think we ought to win i think we must win i think it is in the national interest that we do win i don t care how large the rescue squad gets in new york in pittsburgh or cleveland i don t care if it includes not only the president mr lodge mr rockefeller mr goldwater thruston morton herbert hoover they can throw them all in the car mr nixon does not understand they are not choosing a committee they are choosing a president but we know all about elephants with their heads full of ivory with their long memories and no vision with their thick skins and when they move around the center of the circus ring they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them well that tail is not that long in 1960 mr nixon is on his own and i believe in 1960 on november 8 the people of the united states are going to return this country to a progressive administration two days ago the republican candidate mr nixon quoted me as having said that the republicans had always opposed social security and in that wonderful choice of words which distinguishes him as a great national leader he asserted that this was a barefaced lie having seen him four times close up in this campaign and made up i would not accuse mr nixon of being barefaced but i think the american people next tuesday can determine who is telling the truth mr nixon may tell us to forget the republican party he may tell us that he speaks for all the people but i don t think the people of this state of new mexico and the people of the united states are going to forget the record of the republican party which he so well represents and i now repeat i now repeat that that record is one of consistent opposition to social security in 1935 when franklin roosevelt first asked the congress to pass a social security bill the republicans voted 90 percent against the heart of it in 1936 the republican candidate for the presidency mr alf landon a distinguished predecessor who should be added to the rescue squad he ran on a program of repealing social security as a cruel hoax i want to give mr nixon the whole record before we are finished today in 1949 79 percent of the house republicans voted against any inclusion of disability benefits under social security and richard milhous nixon was among them in 1954 the republican 83d congress defeated a democratic bill to expand our programs for rehabilitating the physically handicapped a program mr nixon now says he is for we have converted him we have brought him along he favors programs he always opposed this is progress in 1956 a democratic congress succeeded in lowering the retirement age for women from 65 to 62 and including disability benefits do you know what the opposition was in the senate of the republicans thirty eight out of forty four voted against it i would not have thought mr nixon would have brought this matter up he should have discussed something else why he would ever discuss social security and try to defend his party s record on this matter i don t understand it in 1958 the republican administration and 33 out of 39 senate republicans voted against an increase in social security to meet the needs in the cost of living and in 1958 a democratic bill sponsored by senator long of louisiana which would have added 5 to the payments for those aged and disabled and blind was divided evenly in the senate mr nixon could have passed the bill he chose not to vote and the benefit did not become law and finally in 1959 we passed a bill to provide housing for the elderly and the administration vetoed it lastly in 1960 and this is the end of a sad sad story when senator anderson and i introduced an amendment to provide medical care for the aged tied to social security do you know how many republican votes we got one 44 democrats and 1 republican and do you know when the vote was announced a great national magazine said mr nixon smiled he is not going to smile on november 9 now all this is not what mr nixon calls a vicious rumor it is not even a rumor this is the record he is stuck with it this is the party that chose him like they chose dewey and landon and hoover and harding and coolidge and taft and mckinley and no amount of personal abuse or makeup can cover the record of this party the fact of the matter is that in every field of needed legislation which serves our people in the last 25 years i cannot recall a single occasion in which a majority of the republicans were committed to progress whether it is minimum wage whether it is social security whether it is housing for the elderly whether it is aid to education all these programs upon which the basis of a society is founded which permits all of our people to participate in the benefits of that society the democrats have stood for progress and the republicans have stood for the past i don t come to you saying forget what party i belong to i come to you saying i am a democrat and i want your support as a democrat there is no state in the union that depends more upon wise national policy than the state of new mexico your strong defense establishments in this state the development of your natural resources the development of peaceful use of atomic energy the education of your people jobs for your people security for your aged all these depend not just on the good judgment of your state officials but in the final analysis it depends upon a progressive national administration to get water to get fresh water from salt and i recall the fight on the floor of the senate waged by senator anderson to increase the appropriation and the nation that is first to get fresh water from salt water at a competitive basis will gain the good will the admiration and the respect not only of the people of this country but all those hundreds of millions who live in deserts on the edge of oceans and this administration has ignored our opportunity in outer space and ignored our opportunity here this administration has ignored all of the thousands of young men and women of spanish ancestry who speak the language who could be working for freedom all over latin america as ambassadors of peace i hope the next administration will use them do you know today the soviet union has 10 times as many broadcasts in spanish to latin america as we do do you know mr nixon said several weeks ago that if we had thought of a program of aid for latin america in 1955 we might have prevented castro well why didn t we why didn t we will you tell me in the last 8 years 8 years of change and revolution in latin america africa asia outer space here in this state the peaceful uses of atomic energy what new program what recognition of the age of change in which we live has this administration shown how have they shown foresight wisdom perseverance and initiative what kind of people have they encouraged to represent our nation abroad to work for it here at home what new programs have they suggested to raise this state and country off dead center space we lost the race peaceful uses of atomic energy you know the story better than anyone how we failed year after year to make the maximum investment in this opportunity for peace and a better life fresh water from salt water ambassadors who could speak the language spanish and the rest hold out the hand of the united states as a vital and progressive society all the efforts that this administration may make to conceal in the state department polls of our decline in world prestige do not fool the american people they know what is happening in the world they know what this country needs you cannot be a citizen of this country concerned about its future and not be aware of the decline in influence and prestige of our country aware of the fact that in 10 countries polled a majority of the people thought by 1970 the soviet union would be first in science and in military power how long are we going to be secure how long do we keep the peace if people around the globe begin to feel that the tide is moving against us i want historians to say a decade from now these were the great years of the great republic these were the years when america began to move again these were the years when the tide came in these were the years when a free society demonstrated its vitality when they brought people to washington and sent them around the world men who were committed to progress men who could identify themselves with the basic aspiration of people everywhere i come to new mexico to ask your help not merely on november 8 but to ask you to join me in the days and months afterward in moving this country forward again i want to reverse a national and international policy of no new starts i want the people of the world to wake up in the morning and not wonder what khrushchev is doing or what castro is doing but wonder what we are doing we in the united states as the leader of the free world this campaign has 5 more days on tuesday november 8 you must decide not merely between mr nixon and myself you must decide what you want what your views are what your hopes are what you feel must be done if you feel it is time this country started on the road forward again on that basis i ask your support for the democratic party i ask you to join us thank you dem jfk3 11 60e john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i just hate to think would you mind getting the signs down a little let me just say that i hate to think of the vice president waking up tomorrow morning looking for those pictures of that rescue operation in new york and seeing this picture instead at 3 in the morning in arizona he has been issuing lists of all the states that he has sure and one of the ones always at the top of the list is old arizona the fact of the matter is that i would not have been nominated without the help of arizona and i think arizona can be with us when we are going to win on november 8 actually i came down here because i thought it was very unfair of dick nixon to take governor rockefeller henry cabot lodge and the president to new york without taking barry goldwater if they can just get barry out of that confederate uniform that he has been traveling in through the south he has been traveling all over the south and get him up north they could see him up there and i think that the people of this country are going to elect one president they are not going to elect a team they want one man to lead the united states the fact is that we have all seen elephants before we know they all have great heads of ivory thick skins and as they go around the circus ring they just grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them well now mr nixon did that in 1952 and 1956 but there is no elephant ahead he is running he is running not mr eisenhower but mr nixon and i don t think the american people are going to take him in 1960 let me just say that i am delighted to be running with lee ackerman with stewart udall who has been in congress with me who speaks for arizona and the nation with men who are forward looking who are committed to moving arizona who are committed to moving the united states i want to say i don t know any state in the union where they are i won t say crazy enough where they are strong enough as democrats to turn out at 3 in the morning nixon has been in bed for 3 hours but we are out here working and we are going to keep working for the next 5 days this state and this country have to move ahead in the 1960 s we are face to face with the most serious test of our ability to make a society work that we have ever had we cannot possibly afford to look to the past or stand still we have to pick ourselves up and move ourselves forward that is what we are going to do and that is why arizona should come with us so i want to present to you stewart udall who is going to be elected to congress come up here stewart where are you he has gone home well i know we are going to elect him back to congress lee ackerman come on up here lee he is coming he is coming lee ackerman is here and dick harless dem jfk3 11 60f john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague in the house whom i am confident will be the next congressman from this district congressman harless congressman stewart udall lee ackerman lee ackerman to be the governor of the great state of arizona there is not any doubt that it is possible to assemble a group of democrats in arizona at any hour of the day or night myself and other candidates are delighted to be here at 3 o clock in the morning or at 9 o clock in the morning because we are here for a good cause i understand that senator goldwater sent a wire to nelson rockefeller a few days ago saying arizona is in the bag well it seems to me it is a mighty thin bag i was not aware that there had been an election here votes are not going to be counted until tuesday november 8 mr nixon has not got any votes yet and neither do i and i believe that in the next 4 or 5 days if we can keep working if we can keep emphasizing how important it is for arizona and the country that the united states look forward and move forward in the sixties we will just take it right out of barry goldwater s bag in any case we will make it easy for him to be a candidate in 1964 that is the least we can do for a favorite son i am informed that time is short let me just say that this has been a long and somewhat arduous campaign but as time has gone on and i have had a chance to listen in more detail to the views expounded by mr nixon as the leader of his party as the leader of the republican party i become more convinced than ever that it is important that we win this one this is an important election it involves the future of this country the presidency is a key office holding great power and influence given to it by the constitution and also given to it by the course of events we cannot possibly afford in these difficult times when the president of the united states must set before the american people the unfinished business of our society we cannot possibly afford to put the chief responsibility upon those who look back i come to arizona which is a state which has gained from looking ahead which has seen its resources prosper by those willing to commit themselves to future investment which has seen its country grow and i come here to arizona which has an overwhelming democratic majority to tell you that on this occasion we led a national democratic party that is moving forward that is moving across the country and i want to see arizona commit itself with the rest of the united states to this kind of democratic party i think it would be wonderful for all concerned if the arizona republic had to print across the front of its pages wednesday morning november 9 kennedy carries arizona dem jfk3 11 60g john_f _kennedy lyndon ralph senator yarborough mrs johnson your fighting congressman frank ikard ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be in this district i am delighted to be in texas and i come down here and ask your help in winning this state for the democratic ticket you have 21 democratic congressmen you have put your confidence in a democratic governor you have put your confidence in two democratic senators can you imagine if this country elects democratic house and a democratic senate and elects dick nixon a republican president of the united states would lyndon johnson and sam rayburn go over to meet with him as the leaders of the congress and sit down with dick nixon who in l952 said acheson had graduated from the college of cowardly communist containment in 1951 called truman a traitor in 1960 called me a liar in 1960 called lyndon an ignoramus lyndon said he called me one i said he called him one he called me rash inexperienced reckless and uninformed but he called lyndon an ignoramus will he sit down and work with him do you think frank ikard is going to go over and tell him about the problems of this district i think when the democratic leaders of the house and senate go over to the white house they ought to sit down with a democratic president why do you elect a democratic congressman why do you elect a democratic senator why do you elect a democratic governor because you believe the democratic party stands for something grover cleveland said 60 years ago what good is a politician unless he stands for something what good is a party unless it stands for something what possible use is it saying that you have confidence in your senators in the speaker of the house in your governor in your congressmen and then saying you go with them there but we want a republican president like dick nixon if you elect frank ikard as your congressman it is because you think he can speak for this district if the house of representatives elects sam rayburn as the speaker they think he speaks not only for his district but the united states four times the senators of the united states democrats all the way from maine to washington have elected lyndon johnson not to just speak for texas but to speak for the united states now lyndon johnson and i are engaged in this effort to move this country forward we have the endorsement of sam rayburn and your governor and your congressmen and i believe on november 8 we are going to have the endorsement of texas i don t care how many rescue squads they send to help dick nixon travel round the united states i don t care if cabot lodge and nelson rockefeller and barry goldwater all prop him up and push him forward and i don t care if they add dewey landon and hoover to advise him how to win the point of the matter is a team does not run for the presidency one man runs for president one man runs for vice president and the country makes its decision the president of the united states mr eisenhower dragged him in twice but they are not going to drag him in a third time i understand one of the high administration officials has come down to texas and is proposing to put limitations on imports under this administration beginning january 1 what three weeks to go before the end of the administration what do they think of the people of the united states we have been trying for 2 years to get the b 70 in california 300 million the congress appropriated the administration opposed it two days ago they decided to endorse it they must think the memories of the people of texas and the united states are pretty short here in this old community sam gray who sells shoes in 1955 to 1960 he sold 60 pairs of oil safety shoes a month do you know how many he sold last month two mr nixon talks about unexampled prosperity i want him to tell me how a man can work 8 days a month and have unexampled prosperity i don t want that example i don t want that prosperity eight days an oil well works in the state of texas eight years ago it worked 20 days who do you think will speak well for texas cabot lodge or lyndon johnson i will speak for massachusetts and he will speak for texas cabot lodge can t speak for massachusetts and texas i come down here and ask your help this is an important election there is not anyone here who is not involved in it you are citizens of this country as well as citizens of the state of texas you rise and fall depending on how the united states rises and falls and i cannot believe that a state which has been noted for its vitality a state which has been noted for its vigor can possibly choose to put dick nixon as president of the united states in these dangerous times we want someone who speaks for our country we want someone who raises a high standard for the united states we want someone who can tell the united states and set before it its unfinished business the things we must do lyndon johnson and i stand in succession lyndon he is on his way to fort worth tonight dick good luck to you lyndon johnson and i stand in succession to franklin roosevelt and john garner and like 1932 we are going to win this election i don t want to be sitting in massachusetts on november 8 and have that phone ringing and saying we are doing fine and lyndon call me and say we just lost texas i want him to call me on the phone and say texas is leading the nation in the democratic camp this party of ours is the oldest political party on earth thomas jefferson founded it from the state of virginia he went to new york on a butterfly expedition up the hudson river he flew down he came down the river met the new york organization and founded the democratic party now i come down the river i come down to texas 165 years later lyndon johnson and i speaking for a united national democratic party come down and ask your help in moving texas and the country forward this is an important election this involves our country this involves texas this involves this district mr nixon may have the president of the united states but we have the people we have seen those elephants in those circuses following each other around grabbing the tail of the elephant in front mr nixon grabbed that tail in 1952 and 1956 but there is no tail out there now there are the people and they are with us i want sam gray to sell more shoes i want the farmers of this district i talked to a newspaperman from a county in this area the average age of a farmer nearby is 52 no young men they can t make a go of it mr benson has liquidated it mr nixon promises more of mr benson s program he pats mr benson and sends him around the world but nevertheless the melody lingers on he promises the farmers of this state and the united states the exact same program he says we are going to use the surplus to use up the surplus whatever that may mean and that is exactly what mr benson said 4 years ago how many feed grain how many ranchers will be around when they pour that surplus into the market they will break every rancher in the state of texas i want mr nixon to go back to whittier and think about his farm program again i understand in the paper that tom dewey has offered him a job in his law office i don t know what he is going to do but all i know is i know what the united states is going to do and they are going to choose to move forward they are going to choose progress and so is texas i am going to last about 5 more days but that is time enough i am going to keep going from now until tuesday night and we are going to travel in the next 4 or 5 days in 13 states and we are going to carry the message that here in the heartland of the united states here where the tall cotton grows right here in the heart of texas lyndon johnson the democratic party frank ikard and the people of texas are going democratic thank you dem jfk3 9 60 john_f _kennedy senator bartlett senator gruening congressman rivers mrs fisher mrs price mr miller ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation for that warm alaskan welcome as bob bartlett said we started out about 9 o clock in the morning from baltimore and it is now 4 o clock in the morning for those of us living on eastern time i have not made a speech that late in the evening since some of the early massachusetts political banquets which i attended when i was first a congressman when they would put the junior members on about this hour this is my second trip to alaska i came here to participate in the election of governor gruening actually i did not do as much for the governor as secretary seaton did there is good news however that the secretary is expected next week and i want you all to be at the airport and give him a warm welcome i am delighted to come back here again because i wanted to start my campaign in alaska first because i told the alaska caucus that if they voted for me i would come up here and campaign but also because i thought that here in alaska this state and the people who live in it typified what i was trying to express in my acceptance speech when i talked about the new frontier i meant that really not in the physical sense this is in a great way a new frontier and in another way it is the last frontier but what i was talking about earlier was a state of mind those people in this country who do not want things done for them but want to do them themselves when i talked about the new frontier i was not talking about the geography of this country or about alaska as a new area of the world i was talking about the spirit which has built this state the kind of spirit which i think has built our country the kind of spirit which can build our country again therefore i am delighted to come to this state to ask your support in this election alaska is small but nevertheless i think that this state has the greatest importance for us in the future it reminds us of what we have been and what we can be again i am delighted to be here tonight with three distinguished members of congress who have spoken for alaska and the country and with your distinguished governor who supported my nomination at the los angeles convention my idea of alaska however i don t think is held by this republican administration they still believe it is an icebox in alaska they see it as an area which represents a drain on the treasury they see it as a colony for commercial interests they see it as a cost to the taxpayer and as far as they are concerned in many cases it is still seward s folly but i see alaska the alaska of the future i see an alaska where there will be more than 1 million people i see a giant electric grid stretching all the way from juneau to anchorage and beyond i see the greatest dam in the free world the rampart dam producing twice the electricity of the tva lighting the homes and mills and cities and farms of the great state of alaska and i see highways linking all sections of this great state i see alaska as the destination of countless americans who come here not searching merely for land and gold but coming for a new life in new cities in new markets i see an alaska that is the storehouse of our nation a great depository for minerals and lumber and fish rich in waterpower and rich in the things that makes life abundant for those of us who live in this great republic i do not say that this is the alaska of 1961 or perhaps even of 1971 i do not say that a democratic administration can magically bring about all of these things by itself overnight the work must be the work of many and the burden must be the burden of many it will take your efforts and your help but i think it is time we got started for the alaska that i see is not the alaska of no new starts it will not come about when forests and fisheries are depleted when highways are neglected and water runs useless to the sea it will not come about as long as alaska faces discrimination under the federal highway act or is saddled with high shipping rates that make it impossible to develop the economy of this state and it will not come about through any administration which governs this state by a system of presidential vetoes i know that alaska has had every reason to be grateful to americans of both political parties to abraham lincoln and to theodore roosevelt in particular among the republicans but there is a special tradition of the democratic administrations in connection with this state woodrow wilson founding the alaskan railroad and the city of anchorage fdr founding the matanuska valley which i flew over today which is as rich a farming section as i have ever seen in the united states harry truman founding the eklultna power project and a host of others i can give you my pledge that if i am elected president this november i will attempt to carry out this great tradition i come here tonight seeking the support of the people of alaska because this is a sovereign state your rights are equal to those of any state you send two u s senators to the u s senate the same number as the state of new york but many nations have learned that political equality and independence are not enough without economic equality and independence and while a democratic congress could grant the state of alaska just the political rights it will take a democratic administration to grant this state its just economic rights i voted for alaska to be a sovereign state not a colony and i find the discrimination now practiced against this state hard to believe i can hardly believe that the largest state in the union receives less money under the federal highway act than the smallest state i can hardly believe that the study of the rampart dam according to the present appropriations and plans of this administration that the study will take 10 years to complete i could hardly believe that the secretary of interior after the commitments which i heard him make in alaska in 1958 in regard to fishtraps should be still fighting the efforts of this state government to abolish them and why has the department of interior refused to resurvey the land of this state in order to stimulate its development these are in a very real sense local issues local to the state of alaska but in a larger sense they symbolize all of the problems here at home which i believe this administration has neglected all of the opportunities it has passed by which in some cases can never be regained the untapped treasures of alaska are only a part of the untapped treasures of the united states water resources mineral resources natural resources of every kind and above all human resources and it is a source of interest and satisfaction that the two americans in this century who did more to develop the natural resources of the united states were both from the eastern united states and the state of new york theodore roosevelt and franklin roosevelt the untapped energies of the american people which are more powerful than the atom itself must once again be committed to great national objectives the alaskan frontier was not won by men who were satisfied and complacent with what they had they were not going to stay where they were and let a great opportunity pass them by and this state is not going to realize its potential as long as it is approached from long range distance by those who are fainthearted since the convention in los angeles i have been asked on many occasions what do i mean by a new frontier but there is no need for that question here in the state of alaska for this is a state and a people who know the meaning of hardship and peril who show spirit and dedication in their daily lives and who know that hard work and great hearts can win again the new frontier this is a great state but it can be a greater state and the united states is a great nation the greatest nation on earth but it can be a greater nation a nation whose strength will be respected by our friends and enemies alike to build this state and nation is not simply a task for the democratic party and this presidential election is not simply a contest between two parties nineteen hundred and sixty whether we wish it or not whether there were an election or not is a turning point in our history either we move with new leadership new programs and a new spirit of education or we stand still and therefore we fall back this is the call of the new frontier it is not what i promise i will do it is what i ask you to join me in doing i come here tonight and ask your support this is a great state and a great country i don t think that there is anyone in it who is satisfied with our program in recent years i know that there is no one in the state of alaska who wants it said that during the years when they held power and influence the balance of power began to turn against the united states and the free world we are committed to the survival of the united states but we are also committed to the survival of freedom all over the globe when the american revolution came about thomas paine wrote that the cause of america is the cause of all mankind but the cause of all mankind in the revolution of 1960 is the cause of america what we do here affects what people will do every place this is a responsibility which i believe we are glad to assume it is a responsibility which i believe can successfully be met but none of us will be satisfied nor will anyone who believes in freedom be satisfied until people all over the world wake up in the morning and wonder what the united states is doing not what khrushchev or china are doing what the president of the united states is going to do not what our adversaries are going to do during the korean war a young american was called out of the ranks by his chinese captors and they said to him what do you think of gen george c marshall he said i think general marshall is a great american he was hit by the butt of a rifle and sent to the ground they picked him up and said what do you think of general marshall now he said i think general marshall is a great american this time there was no rifle butt because in their own hard way they had classified him and determined upon his courage i think in the next decade as individuals and as citizens of the united states we too are going to be called out of the ranks the same hard answers are going to be asked of us the same questions are going to be addressed to americans i am confident that here in this country once again we too shall give the same affirmative answer thank you dem jfk3 9 60a john_f _kennedy senator fisher governor senator bartlett senator gruening congressman rivers ladies and gentlemen yesterday afternoon i campaigned in aroostook county maine which is the potato center at the other end of the united states i am glad to be here in this rich valley on the opposite end of our country but united with maine in a common determination to build a stronger state and a stronger united states i am the first candidate for the presidency to actively campaign in the state of alaska there are three electoral votes in alaska i left washington d c this morning at 8 o clock it is now 11 30 in washington i have come i figure about 3 000 miles per electoral vote and if travel 800 000 miles in the next 2 months we might win this election but i am prepared to do it there is a story that once a traveler from boston mass used to complain that the train stood still at night in the west and the reason of course was that when they woke up in the morning they saw the same mountains and the same rivers that they had seen the previous morning i too come from the other end of the american continent i was born in one of the oldest cities of the united states the city of boston and i find myself tonight in one of the youngest cities of this country i was raised in one of our smaller states and i find myself tonight in our biggest state but i feel at home as an american in the state of alaska and for good reason for alaska is a new state and it typifies the kind of opportunity and determination which we need if we are going to restore our country to a position of second to none around the world for in america too nothing stands still at night this is a changing state here in alaska an it is a changing country the pressures and needs have increased and yet we have stood still i don t thing that that is the kind of action which in the state of alaska they want if this state is going to realize its great potential tomorrow there will be 7 000 more americans living in this country than lived here today by the year 2 000 there will be over 300 million people living in the united states many thousands here in the state of alaska but i don t think that we have begun to prepare for that day either in this state or in this country i don t think we have looked to the future with the same kind of courage and determination which it took to build this valley i come here to alaska because i believe in a very real sense this is the last frontier and in a sense it is a new frontier this state can be one of our great states it needs vigorous action on the federal level and so does our country we have substituted in this state a program of no new starts we have failed to recognize the fact which the soviet union has recognized and that is the necessity of power as the key to their national development on the angara river north of mongolia the russians are building a hydroelectric project which will be twice as large as any project ever built in the united states of america twice as large as the grand coulee and boulder dams combined their one project will be the largest in the world and they are doing more the tragic fact of the matter is that if alaska belonged to the russians today rampart canyon dam would be underway i don t think it is going to take the russians to do it i think we can do it i think this is the kind of project which alaska needs i came here in 1958 and i come back again in 1960 i think here in the largest state of the union we have an unparalleled opportunity to grow by recognizing our great natural resources by harnessing our rivers by building our roads and highways by improving our fishing resources by recognizing that this is an opportunity not merely for the people of alaska but for the people of the united states i come here to alaska with pride as an american in this state and with confidence that this state and this country will be by the year 1970 once again second to none the capital of the free world the hope of men who desire a better life for themselves and their children alaska represents what can be done i am delighted to be here today i am delighted to campaign in this state i hope the vice president comes here after me because here in alaska it is an education for him and for me whoever is president must know this state must recognize its opportunities i can assure you that if i am successful the needs of this state will be recognized because here is the new frontier thank you dem jfk3 9 60b john_f _kennedy governor brown congressman shelley helen lynch mr smith roger kent ladies and gentlemen i think it is appropriate that we begin the 1960 campaign right here in the state of california and i think it is appropriate that we begin it on labor day weekend the republicans are all at the beach but we are out here at this airport last night i spoke in the oldest part of the united states in portland maine today at lunch i speak in san francisco tonight at anchorage alaska we are going to carry this campaign to all parts of the united states in order to show the american people that this country cannot possibly afford 4 more years of republican leadership we are going to take our case to the only forum where it belongs where there is no threat of a presidential veto where there is no parliamentary obstruction where we shall be successful and that is the forum of the american people themselves this last session of the congress for the last 4 weeks is a vivid example of what can happen when the country is divided in its leadership because the republican party opposed the 1 25 minimum wage we didn t get it because the republican party and only one senator voted against them opposed medical care for the aged tied to social security which had the endorsement of governor rockefeller as well as the democratic party and it was beaten by five votes and time magazine this week said that the leader of the republican party smiled when he heard the results this is the kind of thing which has happened in the month of august but we are going to reverse it in november the theme of this campaign is going to be action action here at borne to keep pace with the growing needs of an expanding country and action abroad to meet the challenge of our adversaries i believe the american people will elect a president to act he is the only one who can speak for the people of the united states i speak for the people of massachusetts and clair engle speaks in the senate for the people of california but only the president of the united states can speak for massachusetts and california and if the president does not believe in action the country will not move i don t see how one can say that there are no longer any major issues the pressures of our schools the plight of our aged the necessity of maintaining full employment in spite of the revolutions of automation the necessity of expanding equal rights to all americans wherever they may live these are the things that require action and the old way is changing around the world in 1952 we in this country had never heard of nasser or castro or lumumba or any of the others and now they are household words and their efforts are not dedicated to the well being of the united states in the last 3 years three countries formerly on the side of the west have now passed into the area of communist control in the last 3 weeks the congo newly independent is now dominated by a communist government in the last 3 years the republic of cuba under a dictatorship of batista closely associated with the united states with the american ambassador the second most powerful man in havana now finds itself a communist satellite this is the kind of foreign policy this is the kind of image we have presented to a watching world the united states looks tired it looks like our brightest days have been in the past it looks like the communists are reaching for the future and we sit back and talk about the ideals of the american revolution the way to put the ideals of the american revolution into significance is to act on them not to talk about them my basic belief is that this country is not satisfied to live in a period of relative decline i don t think that there is any american who wants it said that in the days of his generation when he bore responsibility as a citizen the power shifted from the free world to that of the communist i don t want historians in 1970 to say that in the 1950 s and 1960 s the communists made a decisive breakthrough this is the challenge which is before us as americans not merely as americans but as believers in freedom this is not a choice between the vice president of the united states and myself this is really a choice between the two philosophies of government between a party that wishes to act between a party which is not satisfied with things as they are between a party which wishes to move ahead to a new frontier and a party which believes in maintaining the status quo i am a candidate for the office of the president i do not run for that office under any expectation that it is an easy honorary job it is the wellspring of american action only if the president of the united states sets before the american people the same kind of unfinished agenda which franklin roosevelt set before us in the 1930 s and which woodrow wilson set before us in the new freedom and which adlai stevenson set before us in his call for greatness which harry truman stood for in his own administration those are the names of the americans who moved this country therefore today i ask your support this is a weekend which we take off but i can assure you that if i am elected in november this country s vacation will end and this country will begin to move again thank you dem jfk30 10 60 john_f _kennedy mr chairman mayor dilworth senator clark congressman green can anybody hear this ladies and gentleman can you hear that fellow democrats ladies and gentlemen i come here today to this community in the state of pennsylvania to ask your support in this election to ask you to join us in moving this country forward you have to decide on next november 8 a week from tuesday not merely your choice between the two candidates but also your judgment of what kind of leadership this country needs what its position is in the world and what we must do to make ourselves secure and provide peace for our people in my judgment there is a very clear choice offered by mr nixon and myself by the republican and the democratic parties if you hold the view that everything that needs to be clone is being done in its own good measure that our security has never been higher in the world that our prestige is steadily increasing that here in the united states we have full prosperity that you are satisfied with an agricultural program that stores 9 billion worth of food to rot if you are satisfied with all these things then mr nixon is your man but if you take the same view of the future that i do that this great country of ours has to move ahead in the sixties that we face great responsibilities both in our own country and around the world that the republican party and mr nixon have not shown in the past nor do they now show in the present any conception of the needs of our free society here in this state of pennsylvania which has 50 percent of its steel capacity unused here in this state of pennsylvania where we built 30 percent less homes than we did a year ago here in this state of pennsylvania where there are coal miners and steelworkers and those who depend upon them out of work i cannot believe that you are going to select the republican party again can you tell me what in the last 25 years what program the republican leadership ever suggested that served the people housing legislation and social security minimum wage all of the programs that serve our people that advance our country that provide this country with vigor and vitality education security for our aged citizens under medical care under social security all these programs have been initiated by the party which we lead in this campaign and as you look at the sixties and recognize the need for new resolutions to new problems i can t believe that this country will entrust the leadership to a candidate and a party that have opposed progress in the last 25 years i don t make any pretense that the future is easy for this country by the end of the next president s term of office by 1968 by the end of his second term if he is reelected there are going to be 82 million men and women eligible for jobs in this country to find work for them we are going to have to have 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 8 years do you believe that this administration which has moved us into a recession in 1954 and a recession in 1958 and a partial recession in 1960 can find 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 8 years and this is all going to come at a time when automation and machinery is taking the place of men and women i believe that we have to educate our children that we have to provide jobs for those who want to work that we have to provide security for those who have retired particularly for medical care that we must build in this country a strong and vital society which serves as an inspiration and an example to all those who look to us with confidence and hope i come to this community in the closing days of a long campaign i come here after traveling in every state in the union i am more convinced than i ever was and i have served this country for 18 years i am more convinced than i ever was that this country can meet all of its responsibilities all of its challenges if only it will be governed by a concept of progress and energy and drive and efficiency qualities for which the republican party has not been noted in the past so i come here today on a cold and windy sunday and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us to give us your hand your voice your support join us in moving our country forward join us in trying to do for this country what needs to be done if it is going to maintain its position in the world if it is going to move ahead join us in moving america again thank you dem jfk31 10 60a john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague in the congress mrs granahan who speaks for this district in the congress and also speaks for the united states i am sure she is going to be reelected by an overwhelming margin congressman green mayor dilworth committeemen ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for coming today we begin today the last week of this campaign which will come to a conclusion on monday night 7 days from now in the next 7 days i will travel in 17 states to carry this message and the message simply is this this is a choice for the united states not merely between two men mr nixon and myself but i think it is a choice really not just between two parties the republican party and the democratic party it is a choice between two different conceptions of the united states its past history its need for action its position in the world and i take the view that the 1960 s can be the best years of the united states or we can continue to slide and drift i come here to philadelphia and to pennsylvania and ask your help in this campaign i believe that the united states i believe that the united states cannot possibly afford 4 years of republican leadership under mr nixon on all the great issues of the last 25 years the issues of progress of mutual security of national preparedness of national strength the development of our resources the education of our children jobs for men and women of working age security for our older citizens the republican party and the democratic party have differed and we have come down on side of progress the republican party has opposed every action and mr nixon has associated himself with that opposition to every action for the benefit of our people i don t think the united states can be secure in the world i don t think the united states can lead a great free world alliance unless it is leading its own people the people of the world are not so much interested in being allies of the united states as they are in joining a great effort to maintain their freedom to defeat ignorance disease and those enemies of the human race which make life so difficult for people around the globe that is the great struggle in the sixties unless we are prepared to associate with them in their efforts to provide a better life for their own people they will not associate with us in the defense of freedom and we cannot hold out a helping hand we cannot identify ourselves with them in latin america in africa or asia unless we are moving here at home unless we have an administration and a president and a congress which identifies itself with our own people with their needs i have traveled in the last 3 days in pennsylvania through some of the most hard hit areas of the united states where men have been out of work not for just 2 months but 5 6 7 8 9 10 and a year i spoke to three unemployed fellow workers who have been out of work since last april mr nixon may go through the country saying this is the greatest prosperity we have ever had but i don t think it is good enough mr nixon may be satisfied when we build 30 percent less homes this year than last year mr nixon and the republicans may be satisfied to defeat medical care for our older citizens to prevent and fail to support better education for our children to make it possible for every bright boy and girl to see the inside of a college and develop his talents the point of the matter is that the republican party and mr nixon in his 14 years of association with it have not stood for progress have not stood for breaking new ground have not stood for breaking new frontiers and i believe in the 1960 s if the united states is going to fulfill its potential if we are going to fulfill the destiny which is in store for us in the sixties if we are going to be the leader of freedom we are going to have to move here at home i come to philadelphia and ask your help in this campaign this election is the means to an end and the end is a great stronger and growing america i come here to philadelphia and ask your help i can assure you that if we are successful that this state and country will move again thank you dem jfk31 10 60b john_f _kennedy thank you ladies and gentlemen congressmen mr mayor i come here today as the democratic candidate for the presidency of the united states to ask your support on tuesday november 8 on tuesday november 8 a week from tomorrow you have to make your judgment as to which candidate which party which political philosophy you support do you see these houses they are built partly by the public housing program of the government do you know what the republican party and mr nixon have done they voted against it every single year you don t have to look around you you don t have to look very far to see the differences between the candidates in 1949 and most of these housing projects were initiated in the housing act of 1949 mr nixon voted against the housing act of 1949 and so did most of the republicans public housing has been a democratic program every year your congressman and those of us in the senate have tried to increase the program and every year the republicans have voted against it no 2 we talk about civil rights in 1953 and 1954 the republicans controlled the house the senate and the white house there was no civil rights bill that ever saw the light of day in either the house or the senate and why not because the republican party was not for it and neither was mr nixon in the late forties mr nixon and i were both members of the labor committee there were seven votes on fepc fair employment mr nixon voted against it every single time and i voted for it minimum wage i see some signs waved around by great supportcrs of mr nixon i want to ask them three questions they talk about prosperity no 1 mr nixon says 1 25 a hour minimum wage is extreme ninety percent of the republicans voted against it the average wage for laundrywomen in five large cities of this country and most of them are negroes is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week mr nixon says 1 25 an hour is extreme and they wave a sign about prosperity secondly we have fought for medical care for the aged tied to social security mr nixon says it is extreme mr nixon leads the same party that voted 90 percent against the social security in the midthirties and vote 90 percent against the medical care for the aged tied to social security in 1960 anybody who wants that kind of progress anybody who wants that kind of prosperity anybody who wants a pafty that is against housing minimum wage social security equal opportunity civil rights and with martin luther king in jail mr nixon s headquarters issued a statement no comment if that is what you want you can have him but i think you will agree with me that it is time that america moved forward thank you dem jfk31 10 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to introduce to you first the mayor of philadelphia mayor dilworth who is traveling with us and congressman green of philadelphia congressman burns of philadelphia and our driver jack kelly of the united states bismarck once said that one third of the students of german universities broke down from overwork another third broke down from dissipation and the other third ruled germany i do not know which third of the student body of temple is here today but i am confident i am talking to the future rulers of america in the sense that all educated men and women must bear the discipline of self government i come here today to temple university to ask your support in this campaign i cannot believe that any educated man or woman that seeks the truth can possibly accept the campaign which mr nixon is now running on first that domestically he is running on the program that we have never enjoyed such unequaled prosperity at a time when we run through a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 and we are sliding into a slow period now which is going to give us 30 percent less homes in the last month than we had a year ago and more unsold cars in 3 weeks than we have ever had in our history i don t want that kind of prosperity and this country can t possibly afford it we are now instead of growing the last 9 months we had no economic growth we had minus 0 3 percent and when you realize that this country is competing not only to provide a better life for its people but we are also competing in order to demonstrate to the world that freedom and growth and strength and productivity go hand in hand i am not satisfied as an american to drift and to have the republicans continue to let us drift in the next 4 years secondly mr nixon campaigns on a program that our prestige has never been higher he is either misinformed uninformed or misleads and i have to leave you to judge which it is when his own information service in the state department will you get this out of my throat thank you when his own information service in the state department has polls taken in 10 countries from india to indonesia which show for example if mr nixon would read them that only 7 percent of the people of england and france now believe that we are ahead of the soviet union in science a majority of the people in every one of those countries now believe that by 1970 the soviet union will be ahead of us in military power science and economic growth how long can we lead the free world if they are convinced that the balance of power is shifting against us this is a hard struggle it is a close struggle anyone who studies the competitive histories of germany and england in the thirties knows the advantages in a close competition which a totalitarian power has and they certainly have an advantage if those that seek to hold responsible positions will not tell the truth this election will be decided in a week and then this country has to move on mr nixon and i will finish our tasks on november 8 then you have to decide you have to make your own judgment what kind of a country you think we have what we must do in the sixties what responsibilities we must meet what our position should be in latin america and africa and asia what you have to decide is do you think that the republican party and those that they summon to positions of leadership led by mr nixon can lead us in the 1960 s if you are satisfied he is your man i am going to make an offer to mr nixon i have been trying to get him to debate me for 2 weeks he has given me every reason and finally his last excuse was that i should apologize for saying that he was unwilling to debate i may find now the reason why i read in today s paper that mr nixon is unwilling to take a ride through the city of new york to meet the voters but he is going to take president eisenhower with him i now offer him to let president eisenhower come with him on the fifth debate then we can see what mr nixon does not understand is that president eisenhower was running only in 1952 and 1956 president eisenhower is not a candidate mr nixon is mr nixon and i are going to face the voters alone next november 8 no matter what the president of the united states may choose to do this week in new york or any place else it is nixon versus kennedy the republicans versus the democrats and i look to the future with some degree of hope thank you dem jfk31 10 60d john_f _kennedy madam chairwoman mrs harman mayor dilworth congressman green distinguished guests mrs meir ladies and gentlemen ladies rather i want to say it is a pleasure to come to this luncheon as a bondholder in israel myself i think that you serve the united states and the cause of freedom generally around the world in your efforts here today one of the great sources of strength of the united states has been that the people who came to this country to establish their homes all came seeking freedom and opportunity but they have always felt as a country as a national policy we have always been concerned with the spreading of freedom around the world we have benefited from these ties which have been maintained with other countries the great fight for irish freedom was maintained in many years during years of difficulty by irish men and women who had come to this country seeking freedom the great fight for polish freedom is maintained even today as it has been in the past by polish men and women who are strong americans devoted to this country who also wish freedom for their own country of origin for their families origin and who believe with thomas jefferson that the disease of liberty is catching and it is our function to help spread it so your work on behalf of israel serves the united states it serves israel it serves the cause of freedom there is no area of the world that is older than the middle east it is more significant is is more ravaged by time but which presents greater opportunities and greater hazards one of the most inspiring examples of course of the devotion of people to their independence has been the whole story of the birth of israel and the maintenance of its freedom in spite of being surrounded by those who have not unfortunately always wished it well i hope in the coming years regardless of who may be the president of the united states and regardless of which party may be in control of the national administration that we will continue our national policy which has been supported by bipartisan efforts on both sides of extending the hand of friendship to all those nations independent who desire to be free who desire to associate with us in a great international effort to extend freedom to all people israel has devoted itself to that effort it is small living in a hard land living in a land which is tied to them by time and history and religion they have built a strong and dynamic country which now is helping countries of africa and the middle east and asia demonstrate what a new people can do i hope that the united states will hold out the hand of friendship to israel i hope that we will make it clear that we stand by our commitments and by our friends and by the united nations that we will defend those who wish to be free and independent that we will work for peace that we will use our influence through the united nations through the world bank through our own effort to provide for the spreading of peace in the middle east the bible says blessed are the peacemakers we shall pursue peace and that shall be our objective here in the united states in the middle east in the relationship which israel has with the surrounding countries justice and peace is our objective and those who share those objectives in their domestic and foreign policy shall find friendship here in the united states i believe that we have some special obligations through the united nations the victory of 1956 was relinquished by the israel after the sinai campaign with the understanding that the united nations instructions and resolutions would be carried out particularly those providing for free transit of the canal israel met the united nations request and retreated to its own borders and surrendered its success it has a fair right to expect that those members of the united nations who insisted that they should do so should also be just as insistent just as vigorous just as firm in requiring that all other nations meet the commitments of the united nations you have been generous to provide shelter to a candidate of one of our two parties but it is as a member of my party a source of satisfaction to me that those who in other years have led this party as i now try to do in the 1960 campaign have all been identified with the same cause with which you are identified woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman i stand where they stood in other years i emphasize that the policy of the united states in this area i hope is not a party matter but is a national matter and regardless of the outcome of the election i hope that the next administration is committed to the security of small nations to the best of the world to the development of freedom around the globe thank you dem jfk31 10 60e john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen mayor dilworth congressman green ladies and gentlemen i come here to the center of philadelphia in the last period of this long campaign i believe that in the last 2 months the issues of this campaign the differences between mr nixon and myself the differences between our two parties the differences between our political philosophies the differences between what we see in our country and what we see in its future have been well established and those differences are twofold first mr nixon believes that the present rate of economic growth and development in this country is highly satisfactory i do not i think we have to do better i am not satisfied at all to see the economic growth of the united states in the last 9 months go down i am not satisfied at all to have western germany growing twice the rate we are we are going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week every week for the next 10 years and i don t think the republicans can do it the second basic dispute between mr nixon and myself is in our position around the world he states that our prestige has never been higher in spite of the fact that in our own state department there are surveys taken abroad this summer which show a sharp decline in the image of the united states as a strong powerful decisive country if we are going to lead the free world if we are going to meet our obligations to freedom if we are going to keep latin america and africa and asia free if we are going to keep western europe associated with us we have to have a strong vital growing country that speaks with power and force and i don t think mr nixon nor the republican party can provide that leadership now you have to decide on november 8 a week from tuesday the responsibility of mr nixon and myself to present our views of our society and what we should do is over you have to decide what your view is of the united states what your view is of the world around us what you think ought to be done whether you are satisfied in my judgment this is a race between the comfortable the contented and those who are concerned and wish to move forward if you are happy now in what we are now doing in the united states and in the world around us if you are satisfied mr nixon is your man but if you share my view that it is time the united states started moving again then i ask your help thank you dem jfk31 10 60f john_f _kennedy mayor dilworth senator clark congressman green distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen tonight 7 days from now this campaign will be all over and the american people will then make their judgment the next day tuesday november 8 on tuesday november 8 you will be making your judgment and i hope when you make your judgment you will bear the following facts in mind first 1960 and the 1960 s are going to be among the most difficult and hazardous years in our long history we are engaged in a most difficult enterprise that will require the best effort not only of the next president of the united states but also every man and woman who considers himself a responsible citizen of our country and what is that effort that effort is to build a society here which demonstrates such vitality and strength and energy and purpose that serves not only as an example of what freedom can do but also serves as the maintenance and the bulwark of freedom not only here in the united states but all around the globe the question you have to decide is this do you believe that mr nixon and the republican party can provide the kind of leadership which this country needs i must say after campaigning for the last 2 months i have come to the same conclusion i believe that mr nixon after the republican convention had two alternatives one he could run on the facts on a realization that this was a difficult and dangerous and promising time that unless the united states was prepared to make a major effort both at home and abroad we could not hope to maintain our position as the leader of the free world we could not hope to make the balance of power to shift in the direction of freedom that is the campaign mr nixon could have made in my judgment it is the campaign that governor rockefeller would have made and it would have been in accordance with the highest traditions of public service in this country instead mr nixon has chosen to go to the people in these days saying that our prestige has never been higher saying that we enjoy unparalleled prosperity here at home facts which of course cannot be proved which are in complete disagreement with every standard in every record in every survey and which i believe can mean that the united states under his leadership if he is successful would not move with the kind of vigor which will be required i saw another election just like this one in 1935 when stanley baldwin of england when england was engaged in a deadly competition with germany chose to tell the people that everything was being done in good time and that england s security was assured mr baldwin won that election and the british almost lost world war ii now i don t know whether we are going to win this election or not that judgment is yours i don t know whether we are going to win the election or not that is your judgment and the judgment of the people of america but i want to make it clear that they choose between two very different views of our country what needs to be done what must be done as a citizen who is concerned about our country i cannot possibly accept the conclusion which mr nixon has come to if he believes those conclusions he is either misinformed or misleads the public these are not the best of times this is the best of countries but these are not the best of times this is a great country but i downgrade the leadership which mr nixon now offers the american people he knows himself that our influence and prestige is not as high as it once was he knows that the first passengers to outer space were named belka and some other russian dog they were not named checkers or rover as long as 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls graduating from high school never get to college as long as only the children of wealthy or reasonably wealthy parents can hope to get through medical school as long as we are producing far less doctors for our population than we were before as long as we are not developing our resources rebuilding our cities moving our economy ahead as long as we are not giving the same effort to disarmament and nuclear controls that we are to arms and war as long as science and technology and space and the earth are not being used to make men s lives more secure in my judgment we are not meeting our full potential our full capacity i come to this ancient city here in philadelphia many years ago an english journalist wrote come weal or come woe this city s status is quo that is no longer true i don t believe that the status quo is good enough for the united states i don t believe in 1960 any more than in 1932 the people of this country are going to sit still are going to look to the past are going to turn the leadership of this country over to mr nixon and the republican party that he represents that he leads when we need action and progress and to move forward this election may well be decided in pennsylvania and the election in pennsylvania may well be decided in the city of philadelphia this is a judgment which you make which affects this country s security its future your own vision of a shining america which meets its opportunities and its responsibilities which stands once again as the unchallenged leader of freedom a country and a leadership which identifies itself in this country with the needs of people and identifies itself around the world with the needs of the people that does not regard africa or latin america or asia as pawns in the cold war but as people who want to be free and we will associate with them not merely in the struggle against communism but in the struggle against the disease and ignorance and illiteracy and lack of hope i believe the 1960 s can be as charles dickens said the best of years or the worst of years i believe it is going to be the best of years i believe on november 8 the united states is going to choose progress and this country is going to move again thank you dem jfk4 10 60a john_f _kennedy matt welsh senator hartke congressman denton mr mayor national committeewoman and mrs price grover cleveland s strongest supporter and ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to come to this community only 3 or 4 days after mr nixon because i think this community and this state has a very clear decision to make on next november 8 which affects the welfare of this district and affects the welfare of this state and affects the welfare of this nation i consider the judgment which you will render on november 8 to be rendered at a most significant time in the life of our country a year which bears resemblance to 1932 and which bears resemblance to 1912 when the united states elected woodrow wilson this is one of the great turning points in our history the whole world in the next 4 or 8 years will be entirely different than it is today by the end of 1964 or the end of 1968 this country and the world will be in a stronger position or will be weaker and i believe that the decision which you make on november 8 will affect the lives of everyone here today will affect their chances for work will affect their security when they are over 65 will affect the kind of housing you will live in will affect small businessmen in this country who rises or falls depending on the economic prosperity of the united states as a whole i know there are those in this state who say that indiana should cut its ties with the government that indiana should move its own separate way who is going to buy your production who is going to buy what you produce in this state who is going to buy your corn and your hogs and your products unless this united states is moving ahead indiana is not a separate state it is part of the united states and indiana and evansville and the united states will rise or fall depending upon the leadership which is given to this country in 1960 mr nixon has placed the issue very squarely and very frankly he has said and i use his slogan you have never had it so good well anyone who agrees with that ought to vote for mr nixon but anyone who agrees that we can do better anyone who agrees that the unfinished business before this country anyone who believes that the united states has a great and historic destiny to fulfill in the 1960 s to defend its own security and to maintain freedom around the world i want their help i want them to join with us if you agree with a policy of no new starts a policy which does not develop the resources of the wabash or the ohio rivers if you agree that 1 25 minimum wage in a company making more than a million dollars a year is excessive and to use mr nixon s words extreme if you believe that medical care for the aged tied to social security is too extreme if you believe that these programs which i believe are essential to the maintenance of full employment if you believe that they are too extreme then you should vote for mr nixon if you believe that the area redevelopment bill which has been vetoed twice which would mean so much to this community and other communities which are hard hit by chronic unemployment and you want it vetoed a third time you should vote for mr nixon if you believe that thomas e dewey and william mckinley and harding and coolidge and landon are the kind of leaders that the united states needs in the sixties then you should vote for mr nixon but if you stand with woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman then i want your help indiana has not voted democratic in a presidential election since 1936 24 long years and you have had a good opportunity to see the kind of leadership which they have produced here in this state and you have had a good opportunity to make a judgment as to the kind of leadership they would give this country in the 1960 s any candidate who runs in 1960 with 4 million unemployed and 3 million working part time 126 surplus labor areas where people have been out of work for many months anyone who says in that year that you have never had it so good i could not disagree with more this is a great country but i think it can be a greater country and this is a more powerful country this is a more powerful country but it can be stronger i am not impressed by those who say they can stand up to khrushchev when mr castro has successfully defied them from 90 miles away i am confident that this district will send congressman denton back to speak for this district and speak for the country and will send matt welsh to be governor of the state of indiana and give honesty and integrity back to this state and that vance hartke and those of us who serve in washington will be given the opportunity to lead this country as we have in other great occasions and therefore i come today and present to you a clear alternative between the republican party and the democratic party between the party of progress and the party of standing still between the party that looks ahead and the party that says we ought to stay where we are i ask your help in this campaign not merely because it affects our party but because as this is the most dangerous time in the life of our country i don t think we can possibly afford to stand still during the war between the spartans and the persians and after 300 spartans were wiped out at thermopylae they carved a sign in the rock which said passerby tell sparta we fell faithful to her service now in 1960 and in the sixties we are asked to live in the service of this country we are asked to contribute to it we are asked to build a stronger and better society and i come here today to this community to ask you to join us thank you dem jfk4 10 60b john_f _kennedy thank you senator welsh senator hartke governor schricker congressman madden and congressman barr members of the congress national committee men and women mrs price ladies and gentlemen i am grateful for the introduction by matt welsh who i am confident is going to restore to this state honest and progressive government next november and i think as governor he will serve in the tradition established in this state by governor schricker i think he will show what can be done in indiana and just as we hope to show them what can be done in the country i think the test in indiana and the country is just the same whether they want an administration which says no to the sixties whether they want an administration which will stand still or whether they want an administration in this state and in the united states that will move ahead i think we are going to win this election the choice before us was very clearly put and the standard of the democratic party was clearly raised away back in 1936 when franklin roosevelt made his acceptance speech before 100 000 people in philadelphia pa in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference i think that is the test for the sixties where franklin roosevelt set before our country its unfinished business the agenda of our nation the things that we must do if we are going to realize our potential this administration has set ceilings and limitations and we now move from stage to stage in the most difficult time in the history of our country when the challenge is clearly laid upon the united states we move into 1960 not with vigor and energy and foresight but instead being dragged along year after year without any recognition of how serious are the problems that face us at home and abroad i think the issues are clear and i believe that the american people on november 8 faced with the most serious challenges at home and abroad are going to return the leadership of this country to the party which in this 20th century has produced woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman mr nixon has traveled about the united states and said that party labels don t matter what counts are the men i think what counts are tho men that the political parties put up and i think party labels mean a good deal i am not impressed by this leap year progressivism which comes upon the republican party every 4 years when they support and sustain programs which they fight against year after year in the congress the democratic party in this century has produced wilson and roosevelt and truman there is not any doubt that none of those men would have been nominated by the republicans and i don t think there is any chance at all that the democratic party in this century would have nominated mckinley or taft or coolidge or harding or landon or dewey or nixon no democrat ever stood pat with mckinley or kept cool with coolidge or returned to normalcy with harding or ran on a program in 1936 of repealing the social security act which alf landon did or ran like thomas e dewey mr nixon in boston the other day said i was another truman and i returned the compliment and said he was another dewey and he has not said i was another truman since but i wish he would i regard it as a compliment i am reminded of the poem that robert e sherwood wrote in 1933 hailing franklin roosevelt s administration plodding feet tramp tramp the grand oid party s breaking camp blare of bugles din din the new deal is moving today on every major crisis that threatens our country berlin formosa the plight of our cities the plight of our schools the problems of unemployment we hear no blare of bugles din din we see only plodding feet tramp tramp and the grand old party breaking camp i think we can do better i do not say that they have been silent on all these issues in fact i am reminded of the exhortation from king lear that goes i will do such things what they are yet i know not but they shall be the terrors of earth i think the democrats can do better i think they must do better if the united states is going to maintain its position at home and abroad what we are now doing might have been good enough for another day and another time but i believe in the next 10 years the world will begin to move either in the direction that we have set out or in the direction of the communists and during these next 10 years i think it is time the united states began to stir itself again you cannot possibly be satisfied to move from a recession in 1954 to a serious recession in 1958 to a slowdown in 1960 which promises a hard winter in 1961 and feel that the united states is living up to its capacity you cannot be satisfied when there are 15 million american homes which according to the last census are substandard 5 million american homes in the cities of the united states which lack plumbing of any kind you cannot be satisfied as an american when the average wage for laundrywomen in five cities of the united states is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week and most of them are negroes you cannot be satisfied to see our steel capacity at 50 percent to know that last week the soviet union produced more steel than the united states with one half of our capacity because our machines and men are not being used to the fullest i think this is a somber time for us all i have the greatest confidence in the united states mr nixon says i downgrade this country i do not downgrade it after 14 years in the congress and after traveling to every state in the union in the last 2 years i have the greatest confidence in it what i downgrade is its leadership i downgrade the prospect of mr nixon leading the united states in the most difficult and somber time in the life of our country i believe the democratic party has as it has all through our history an opportunity to contribute to the united states to break new ground to move the united states ahead in the 1960 s and those americans who agree with the republican slogan you never had it so good who believe that what we are doing now is as good as we can do who believe that everything that has to be done at home and abroad is being done in full measure then they should support the republicans but any american who has unlimited confidence in this country s capacity to lead who believes that the ouly way that we are going to be a good neighbor abroad is by being a good neighbor at home who believes that the economy of this country must move if we are going to maintain full employment and secure sufficient revenues to maintain our defenses then i hope they will come with us one of the issues that mr nixon has mentioned has been efficiency in government he has stated that he is going to save the taxpayers money i want to describe to you what i consider to be the most wasteful administration in this century the harsh facts of the matter are that in the last 8 years this administration has operated at an 18 billion deficit in 1958 the republicans because of the recession induced in part by fiscal and monetary policies which they follow had the largest peacetime deficit in the history of the united states 1958 12 billion the national debt ceiling has been increased five times in the last 8 years the total federal expenditures have far exceeded any in the history of the united states and in fiscal 1959 we have this high deficit and what have we achieved with all of this most of it has gone for foreign aid and for agriculture and defense our foreign aid programs emphasizing as they do the military in their distribution of surplus military equipment have not secured us friends have not won us allies the united states today is not stronger than it was in relationship to the communist world than it was 8 years ago after all the programs have been carried out and after a the money has been spent as secretary wickard knows our farm budget in the last 3 years has spent more money than in the 20 years before this administration has spent on agriculture more money than all the administrations since tbe department of agriculture was begun nearly a century ago you talk about waste in government and about inefficiency can you imagine an administration which has brought farm income to the lowest point in 20 years which has 9 billion of surplus food stored away and hundreds of millions more coming in crops this year being regarded as an efficient government i was chairman of the subcommittee on government reorganization that put through over 30 hoover commission recommendations and i can tell you that this administration has not mastered the bureaucracy the department of defense has more employees and spends more money than it spent in any peacetime year and yet we do not have a defense second to none and we are not in the lead in missiles and we are not in the lead in outer space these are all important because a free government has only so much resources we have only so much energy that we can devote to the purposes of national security i believe as a democrat in a responsible fiscal and monetary policy but i want to point out what i consider to be the real waste of this administration mr nixon has purported to figure out the cost of the democratic platform his figures are wholly fictitious and untrue but how can anyone figure out the cost of the republican platform how much have they cost the taxpayer for the dams and the highways that cost more now and in the early sixties than they would have 5 years ago how do you measure the cost of a flood which a dam could have protected how can you measure the cost of juvenile delinquency in the slums which have not been torn down by an effective urban renewal program how can you measure the cost to families for medical care for their aged parents because this administration has refused to support medical care for the aged financed under social security and instead they gave their support to a bill which will cost the taxpayers if fully used 1 billion a year from the national treasury and 1 billion from the states and before anyone gets any assistance they must take a pauper s oath that they are medically indigent instead of financing it as governor rockefeller and most of the governors recommended under social security which would have added no burdens on the general revenue of the taxpayers they financed it under the general revenue a program which does not meet the need and which is wasteful and which must in my opinion be changed by a democratic congress and a democratic president how much waste is there in the fact that 35 percent of our brightest students do not go to college how wasteful is that of a great human resource in a country that needs all of the brains that we can get they cannot afford it most of them and this administration has not been willing to stimulate those programs for building our schools and colleges that would permit them to afford it 9 billion worth of food stored away in surpluses and yet i spent a month in west virginia and i saw over 100 000 families waiting every month a family of 4 for a food package of 6 25 of surplus food it includes for each person 5 cents a day of rice corn meal dried eggs skim milk and they are going to add lard at the end of the summer the food and fiber is being wasted in a country which has people who depend upon it and in a world which looks to us for relief last week as i said approximately 50 percent of our steel mill capacity was unused what a waste that is and over 100 000 steelworkers out of work what a waste that is if the soviet union s economy is growing at twice or three times as fast as ours is if they are using their resources to the maximum and we are not then quite obviously this race that we are now engaged in can have only one end these are all difficult and somber questions i don t run for the office of presidency saying if i am elected life will be easy but i do believe that a new administration composed of new people inheriting a great tradition of intellectual vitality can move this country further ahead can you belleve that this administration has shown vigor in its foreign policy when we offer to the congo at the time of the crisis early this summer over 300 scholarships which was more than we had offered to all of africa the year before and only 6 of those students are now in the united states studying how long does this administration think it takes to train a leader to send him through school and college and give him experience it takes 10 15 or 20 years and yet this administration has been totally indifferent to the needs of africa which will control by 1962 one quarter of all the nations of the general assembly what is true of africa is true of latin america no program for aid for latin america of any substantive importance was suggested until we broke off the sugar quota with castro in june and then we went to the bogota conference with an authorization eight years we gave more aid to yugoslavia in the last 15 years than we have given to all of latin america in the same period of time i do not believe that this administration has demonstrated sufficient foresight i don t believe that its experience in foreign policy or its experience in domestic policy jutifies a renewal of its lease i share the view that its experience is like that that oscar wilde described as experience is the name that you give to your mistakes and i must say in the field of foreign and domestic policy i don t believe that this administration has demonstrated its awareness of how swiftly the world is changing around us of how hazardous is our present position lincoln said 100 years ago this nation cannot exist half slave and half free now the question is whether the world will exist half slave and half free and if it does not which way it will go will they come with us or with them i believe that they can come with us but i believe to have an effective policy toward them we have to be moving here in the united states franklin roosevelt and wilson and truman s foreign policy was a direct counterpart of their domestic policy it was because franklin roosevelt was moving this country with progressive and humane legislation that the people of latin america and africa regarded him as a good neighbor if you are solving our problems here at home if we are using our resources if we are providing a more honest and fair life to all of our citizens regardless of the circumstances of their birth if we are making this country a shining example of what freedom can do then i think the world will begin to move in our direction but if they get the idea that our high noon is in the that the brightest future is possessed by those countries in the that our day was years ago and that the secret of organizing their society is to duplicate the chinese and the russian example rather than ours then quite obviously those countries to the south of us will begin to move in the direction of the communists that is why i believe that this is the most difficult of all of our times it is the best of the days and the worst of the days and i think the responsibility upon the next president and upon the citizens of the united states in the next 4 or 5 years will be as heavy as it has been in our long history but i have confidence in this country i really believe that if the leadership sets before us the unfinished business of america if we set before ourselves 0ur goals that we must achieve if we are going to maintain our society free from being vulnerable then i am confident that the power of this country can be unmatched this election is an important one it involves not merely mr nixon and myself it involves us all we are all committed we all participate we are all affected by its result i come here tonight and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in this effort here in this state of indiana it is not an easy job this is a long tough uphill fight even though i am confident that you are going to elect matt welsh as governor but i am under no illusions that this election on my part is easy in the state of indiana it is uphill but i am confident that the tide is moving in our direction i am confident that the people of this state recognize that there are serious issues which affect the two parties that the history of the two parties is entirely different my judgment is that a majority of the citizens of this state are going to choose the democratic party and choose to move again choose to go ahead again rather than standing on dead center one hundred years ago lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk4 11 60 john_f _kennedy mr mayor governor di salle my colleague in the senate senator young your distinguished congressman lud ashley your congressional candidates bill mccray tom ritchey and virgil gates who i am confident you are going to elect to the congress next tuesday mr mayor ladies and gentlemen i am glad to come back to ohio for the sixth time in this campaign to ask your help on tuesday i want to express our regrets at being late in the last 36 hours we have been all the way from california to arizona new mexico texas oklahoma and virginia we are carrying the message from one part to the united states to the other that this country is going to go democratic and i am carrying it myself i do not send representatives of a rescue squad to save me in the last week of this campaign the democrats are not engaged in operation ruboff they are running on their own and how a candidate who is running on a program that he is the man to stand up to khrushchev cannot possibly stand up to the people of the united states without five people bearing him up from nelson rockefeller barry goldwater president eisenhower and cabot lodge we are not electing a committee on tuesday we are electing a president now let me just say all of us have seen elephants all of us have seen that they are not too bright and that the way they get around the circus ring is to grab the tail of the elephant in front of them well dick grabbed that tail in 1952 and in 1956 but now he is running in the last 4 days he has called me everything from a barefaced liar to an economic ignoramus i am calling him a worthy member of his party in 1960 he fits right in with dewey landon coolidge harding mckinley and all the rest of them i understand he has set up a committee on last minute strategy to win this election composed of herbert hoover alf landon and thomas dewey i look with confidence to tuesday this is an important election this election involves ohio and involves the future of this country the decision that you have to make is which party which candidates which view of the present which view of the future do you accept as a citizen of the united states you cannot be a citizen of ohio you cannot be a citizen of the united states without realizing that this state and this country is going to have to do better in the 1960 s we are going to face entirely new problems which come upon us in an entirely new day in the month of october in the state of ohio there were nearly as many men and women out of work as there were in october in the recession year of 1958 mr nixon talks about our unexampled prosperity i don t think it is good enough when we are using only 55 percent of our steel capacity mr nixon says we are producing more cars in the last 6 weeks than ever before in our history how many are being sold we are going to have by the middle of november more unsold cars than we have ever had in the history of the united states this year we are building 30 percent less homes than we did a year ago in the last 3 months of this year 1 billion worth of gold has flowed out of the united states the next president of the united states is going to be faced with serious problems in the winter of 1961 right here in the united states i do not run for the presidency under any expectation that if i am successful on tuesday that that job will be easy but i have the greatest confidence in this country i have the strongest feeling of conviction that we can meet the responsibilities of our time that we can move this country forward and i come and ask your help on that basis you have to decide as citizens of this state and country which party looking ahead over the next 10 years can find 87 million jobs because that is the number of people we are going to have in 10 years looking for jobs 87 million do you think the republican party do you think that they are concerned about the problems that are coming across the horizon thirty five percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college we are going to have twice as many boys and girls applying for admission to college in 1970 as do today do you believe that the republican party and mr nixon look to the future of these problems i must say i have come to the same conclusion all the problems which the next president of the united states is going to face are complicated technical they involve economic growth they involve automation they involve our position in the world of how it is possible for countries around the world and people facing staggering problems of poverty and ignorance and decline how they can maintain freedom and how we can head a world torn by conflict in many cases by poverty fighting against an enemy who is unrelenting in his attacks on freedom and upon the united states the united states in the 1960 s will be meeting its great time of challenge and also its great time of opportunity i have traveled this country from one end to the other i have served in the congress for 14 years and i come to this time in this campaign not merely talking about the problems of this election but attempting to point out that in these times of change which the 1960 s are i believe the democratic party is best equipped to lead our country we are going to have to build a better life for our people as long as there are 15 million american homes which are substandard as long as there are millions of americans who are not even paid a dollar an hour as long as there are hundreds of thousands of americans out of work living on an average unemployment compensation check of 31 a week what do they do when they go out of a job where do they go to work how do they keep their families how do they pay their rent these are the problems that disturb america how do we maintain our position in the world how do we provide fairness and equality of opportunity for all americans i think that on tuesday my job and responsibility and that of mr nixon s is over then you have to decide you have to make your judgment of whether you believe that everything that must be done is being done in good time or whether we can do better i believe we must do better and i ask your help in doing it i ask your help in building in this country a strong and vital society one which uses its facilities one where men and women can find jobs when they seek them one that moves ahead and demonstrates to the world what a free society can really do that is our opportunity in the 1960 s that is the challenge which faces the great republic as this election comes to an end we pick not merely a president but we pick a road we pick a position for the sixties we make a decision each one of us what we want and my judgment is that a majority of the citizens of this country on tuesday will choose to move forward i am not planning a seventh trip to ohio in this campaign we are coming to an end in this trip to toledo but this state is key whoever carries ohio will carry the united states whoever secures the electoral support of you on tuesday night of your collective judgment you in this state will elect the president of the united states i do not recall a decision as significant that carries with it so many responsibilities since 1932 i believe that the united states is at a period in its history facing different problems different challenges in some ways less serious in other ways more serious i feel this is 1932 and 1912 and i come here as a concerned citizen of this country and i ask you not merely for your help on tuesday but i ask you to join me in building this country of ours in moving it forward in showing what we can do so give us your hand your voice your vote and we are going to move forward on tuesday dem jfk4 11 60a john_f _kennedy mayor daley my distinguished colleagues in the congress my friend and colleague in the u s senate and the next senator from illinois senator paul douglas the next governor of the state of illinois otto kerner ladies and gentlemen i come here tonight in the closing days of this campaign and ask your help in 3 days on tuesday november 8 this campaign will come to an end and then the people of the united states must make their judgment not only between the two candidates not only between our two parties but also between the two philosophies of government which we represent the two views we have of our country s future and our message i want to make very clear that contrary to what you may have come to think this week we are not electing a committee for president of the united states i have seen pictures in the paper of the rescue squad nelson rockefeller thomas f dewey cabot lodge and i understand they are adding alf landon to their strategy board this weekend on how to win their campaign i want to make it very clear that they are not all running for the presidency mr nixon is running he is the one the people have you have to choose between mr nixon and the republican party and mr kennedy and the democratic party you have all seen elephants in the circus and you have seen how they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them and they pull themselves around that way mr nixon grabbed that tail in 1952 and 1956 but now he is running not president eisenhower but mr nixon i fly back to the east to finish the last 3 days of this campaign and then i await the results in massachusetts with my wife and my daughter whatever the outcome may be whatever the outcome may be i shall not forget the last few months it has taken me to every section of the united states and i have visited the famous ancient places of valley forge hyde park warm springs springfield ill and the alamo i have seen our nation s last frontier in alaska and this morning i saw our nation s first frontier in virginia i have seen america and i am proud to be an american there are some who say that presidential campaigns are outmoded they last too long they are expensive they are too arduous they test popularity not principle they require endurance not insight how much better it would be they say for the candidates to stay home to keep quiet depend as in the old days on party managers to circulate the party record but i disagree i believe the nature of the campaign tells you something about the nature of the candidate i believe that the level of daily speeches of a candidate tells you something about what kind of a president he would make if a candidate for the presidency cannot stand the pressure of a campaign or of a fifth debate he cannot withstand the pressures of the presidency if he cannot inspire confidence among the american people in the 4 months preceding election he cannot maintain their confidence in the 4 years of office in this campaign i have tried to do the following things first i have tried to tell the truth to the american people whether that truth whether that truth was pleasant or not i sought to serve the american people not to please them i did not reassure the voters that our prestige was at an all time high because that would not have been true and anti american riots in tokyo and caracas american defeats in the u n and the organization of american states and speeches in panama and in havana made those clear long before the usia polls were leaked to the press i did not tell the voters that regardless of what kind of an effort we make in the next 12 months we were bound to remain first militarily because that would not necessarily have been true we are now entering the age of the missile gap when our nuclear striking power backed up by larger more mobile conventional forces may no longer necessarily convince the russians of our capacity to survive a surprise attack and also be able to strike back at their willingness to fight nor did i reassure the voters that we were enjoying unprecedented prosperity because that would not have been true there is no point in telling the more than 5 million unemployed americans the 3 million americans who work part time the farmers with the declining income or the coal miner in southern illinois or in kentucky or west virginia or pennsylvania who has been out of work for months that he never had it so good this country will never get action unless we first face the truth secondly i have tried in this campaign to set before the american people their unfinished agenda the task which franklin roosevelt could not have foreseen in the 1930 s the task which president truman could not complete by 1953 we have for example a minimum wage of 1 an hour and there are millions of americans who do not even receive it i believe 1 25 an hour is necessary we have a social security system but it pays the 16 million americans who live over the age of 65 it pays them an average social security check of less than 72 a month i believe that medical care for the aged tied to social security must be passed by the next congress we have 15 million american homes in the united states that are substandardized 5 million american homes in the cities of the united states that lack plumbing of any kind and yet in spite of the fact that our population is steadily increasing this year in september we built 30 percent less homes than we did a year ago i believe we are going to do better we need legislation to help those americans who live in those areas of chronic depression the congress twice under the leadership of senator douglas has tried to pass a bill to assist them and twice this administration has vetoed it and next year the president will sign it and then we have millions of americans whose full and equal rights under the constitution regardless of their race or their creed or color has been recognized in law but unfulfilled in fact these are some of the items left over for the 1960 s and it is to this agenda that we shall devote ourselves in january of 1961 thirdly i have in this campaign not merely attempted to prolong the present but look forward to the future if we are to educate all of our children in the next 10 years who will be going to our schools and applying to our colleges we will need more teachers than we now have in the service by double and we want to make sure that they are well compensated and well trained by 1970 there will be twice as many of your sons and daughters twice as many applying for admission to colleges as applied this year and we have to make it possible for them to have the education they deserve we are going to have to build as many college dormitories and classrooms in the next 10 years as we built in the last 200 these are some of the problems that these united states of ours faces some of the opportunities i want to make it clear as an american that i am not satisfied to have 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls who graduate from high school never see the inside of a college because they can t afford to go ten years ago we produced twice as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union last year they produced twice as many as we and we lost the talent of 35 percent of our boys and girls of all the waste of our resources there is the greatest and it shall not continue these are new areas of concern the spread of nuclear weapons there is a possibility by 1962 that communist china will have an atomic capacity the conversion of fresh water from salt water can you imagine what that will do for the world the first country that is able to do that will earn far more prestige than we lost by being second in outer space the harnessing of atomic energy for peaceful use the conquest of outer space not merely for military advantage but for the service of all mankind these are some of the opportunities that stretch before our country in the 1960 s fourth i tried in this campaign to emphasize that we must face up to all of our problems and opportunities realistically as long as we have 9 billion worth of food stored and in some cases rotting away while hundreds of millions of people go to bed without a decent diet around the world we should not be satisfied we have to improve our distribution and through local farmer action adjust the supply and demand so that they serve the farmer instead of hurting him the average wage for a dairy farmer his average wage per hour in wisconsin or minnesota is about 55 cents an hour a cotton grower in south carolina who could make a living 20 years ago now lives a thin existence off his land because the policies followed by mr benson and this administration have driven his income steadily downward and as a result the farm implement companies of illinois have let off nearly 11 000 of their employees during the fall of 1960 in the state of illinois the catastrophic arms race more costly than all of our budget put together more costly than all the other things which we pay for cannot be eliminated merely by wishful thinking but isn t it a somber fact that this administration has had less than 100 people working in the entire national government on the subject of disarmament one fifth as many as work for the u s battle monuments commission are working on disarmament in this administration 100 people scattered throughout the international government and we cannot avoid the menace of a communist base on cuba only 90 miles from our shores merely by wishing it had not happened though i wish it had not i wish this administration had been as alert to that as they now say they were but castro is not the only problem and we have to make sure in the 1960 s that other castros do not arise for poverty and despair are equal evils in latin america in northeast brazil where living standards are so miserable that in two villages this year not one baby lived beyond 1 year of age what is the chance for freedom in that country under those conditions if we continue to ignore our neighbors to the south we need a program of concerted effort of attack on these problems in latin america or otherwise castros are going to spring up all over south america in the next 5 years we need an america that is growing freedom will be as secure around the world our foreign policy will be just as vigorous as we are here in the united states if we are not moving forward if we are not developing our economic growth and that is the key to the future this year we have dropped back rather than gone ahead that is the reason that we are using only 50 percent of the capacity of our steel mills because we are not moving our economy forward and all the talk and all the speeches that may be held on fiscal responsibility the whole point the whole question of balancing our budget depends on our moving our economy forward the largest unbalanced budget in the history of the united states was 2 years ago 12 billion because of the recession of 1958 already this administration has predicted a tax lowering of 4 billion worth of receipts not because expenditures have gone up but because of the slowdown in the american economy the key to the future of the united states the key to our foreign policy the key to our national defense depends on our maintaining full employment in the united states depends on our using our facilities and our manpower then we can meet these programs and meet our obligation and move ahead but this administration has permitted a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 and now in 1960 we begin to slide again these are the issues in this campaign a strong america an america that is committed to peace and i know something of war an america that is committed to peace by firmness by resolution by perseverance by holding out the hand of friendship to those who wish to be friends and maintaining our position of comity with those other countries who desire to be free by letting young americans serve the cause of freedom as servants of peace around the world working for freedom as the communists work for their system i want to demonstrate to mr khrushchev and others that a new generation of americans has taken over this country men who are committed to the maintenance of freedom in the 1960 s and with your help we shall do it i believe that as a counter to the flood of well trained and accomplished tacticians now helping nations with their problems that the communists are sending out i believe an american peace corps as a supplement to our selective service that now draws only a fraction of our young men could be trained to help these people live a life of freedom in agriculture in handiwork in roadbuilding in government and other skills young americans who will represent the cause of freedom around the globe this campaign comes to an end and on tuesday you have to make your judgment you make your judgment not merely about the two candidates but you must make your judgment about yourselves what you believe what you stand for what you see as your obligations to this country what you see as your responsibilities as a citizen of this country i believe that the 1960 s can be years of promise for america i believe that this country can move ahead i believe that we can meet the unfinished business of our society i believe it is possible to build in this country an ornament to freedom and i hope on november 8 that all of us working together because that is what this country requires all of us working together can begin a great effort to insure the peace and insure the united states will serve as the defender of peace thank you dem jfk4 11 60b john_f _kennedy governor battle governor almond congressman jennings congressman downing congressman gary your distinguished national committeeman congressman hardy ladies and gentlemen as the democratic standard bearer in 1960 i come to the mother of the democratic party virginia and ask your help i am honored by the generous introduction of your distinguished former governor and i am proud to sit here on this platform with leaders of the democratic party of virginia virginia which began under thomas jefferson the democratic party i cannot believe that in 1960 virginia would vote for a republican of the strip of richard nixon i come here today to this state which has nourished the democratic party in good times and bad which began this party which gave it growth which gave it intellectual conviction and i come here to this state and ask your support in the last 4 days of this campaign i believe that virginia and the nation join in concerning ourselves with the future of our country i do not believe that any citizen of the state of virginia who bears the proud title of democrat can possibly in 1960 determine that the destinies of this country should be placed in the hands of a candidate and in the hands of a party who have opposed progress for the last 15 years mr nixon goodbye dick i don t care how many rescue squad operations are now being organized around the country to save mr nixon i rode through the streets of new york by myself i did not require i did not require henry cabot lodge or nelson rockefeller or president eisenhower to go by my side the point of the matter is that a team is not running for the presidency we have one man who runs one candidate and the people of virginia and the people of the united states must decide whether a candidate who runs on a platform of standing up to khrushchev who will not come into a studio and have a fifth debate who needs an escort guard to take him around the state of new york whether he can lead the american people or not you have all seen these elephants at the circus with their heads full of ivory thick skins long memory no vision and when they move around the circus ring they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them mr nixon grabbed that tail in 1952 and 1956 but he is the lead elephant now and the people of the united states do not want a candidate who needs an escort to meet the american people in the last 5 days of the campaign i come here today and ask your help this party was begun by thomas jefferson this party of the democrats is a national party i run as the presidential candidate lyndon johnson of texas as the vice president we stand as a united party north south east and west the strength of the democratic party is the fact that it is a national party that it speaks for all the people that it represents all interests and most of all represents the public interest i have been reading speeches by mr nixon and others that if we get into office that we are going to spend this country blind i do not know a fiscal record which has been marked by greater imprudence than the record of this administration in fiscal matters in the last 8 years and i am going to prove it do you know in the last 3 months the united states has lost 1 billion in gold one billion dollars in 3 months has flowed out of this country in 1952 the u s gold reserves were 11 billion more than the debts that we owed to foreign debts today our foreign debts are 3 billion more than our gold reserve a dangerous deterioration in our world position of 15 billion in the last 8 years in the past month our estimated tax revenues because of a decline in our economy have gone down from 2 to 3 billion in the last 3 or 4 months in the last few months our gross national product has actually declined by 3 billion the soviet union is moving ahead at 7 percent a year our average growth in the last 8 years is 2 5 percent in the last 9 months it is minus 0 3 percent in the most difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country instead of growing instead of providing opportunity for our people instead of providing the sinew that makes it possible for us to defend our country we are actually falling behind in the last few months the cost of living has reached an alltime high therefore i believe we can do much better i believe we are going to have to do much better i want to make it clear as the leader of the democratic party in this campaign as a member of congress for 14 years if i am elected president of the united states we commit ourselves to a sound monetary and fiscal and responsible monetary policy that will move this country ahead and meet our obligations from fiscal 1954 to fiscal 1960 the last 6 years we increased the national debt by 21 billion in the last 6 years 21 billion we incurred budgetary deficits of more than 18 billion and piled up the largest single peacetime deficit in 1 year in the history of the united states 12 billion never before in the history of the united states did any administration in peacetime have a larger deficit than this administration in 1958 12 billion they would have had an increase in the debt of more than 10 billion except a democratic congress in the last 6 years cut the budget requests of the president of the united states by 10 billion so if we are going to talk about fiscal responsibility if we are going to talk about meeting our obligations if we are to talk about balanced budgets i want to look at the record this administration in 1952 on a commitment to reduce federal spending to 60 billion a year it is 73 billion it has never been close to 60 billion they have spent 46 percent more than harry truman spent they have added 106 000 new federal employees i think it is about time the american people knew i don t believe that any democratic president or any democratic congress could perform the miracles of mr benson do you know that in the last 3 years the department of agriculture has cost more than it cost in the 20 years of the democratic party in the last 8 years they have spent more money in the department of agriculture than they spent in the whole history of the department of agriculture that is the record that mr nixon is running on the interest rate policy of this administration has added 3 billion a year to the tax bill of the american people if you buy a house today 10 000 30 year mortgage you pay 3 200 more for that house on interest rates alone than you would have paid in 1952 who are the spenders i was chairman of the senate subcommittee on governmental reorganization which steered 30 hoover commission recommendations through mr hoover wrote me a letter praising us for the work we had done on government economy i do not intend to become president of the united states in order to liquidate the dollar i become president of the united states because i think we can do a much better job than the republicans can do and i make the following commitments first we democrats do not intend to devalue the dollar from its present rate we will defend its value and its soundness second we will seek a balanced budget over the years of our administration seeking a budget surplus in good years as a brake on inflation third we will place less reliance on a high interest rate policy which discourages investment which i believe is vital to our growing economy and which has been a major contribution to two recessions 1954 and 1958 and which has slowed down business in 1960 so that the rate of unemployment in this area of virginia is higher than the national average and fourth we will begin a large scale effort to assist those communities in the united states communities that are represented by pat jennings by the people of west virginia which have been hard hit chronically which have seen men and machines go idle here in this rich country of ours we are producing steel at about 55 percent of capacity we built this year 30 percent less homes than a year ago by november the middle of november of this year we will have more cars unsold than we have ever had in our history that is the record mr nixon runs on and i believe we can do much better i come to virginia and ask your help every citizen of this state is a citizen of the world you do not need the reassurances of any man about our position in the world you know it well this state would not have survived unless the citizens of this state had had foresight and you know as virginians and as citizens of the united states that the united states has to be stronger we have to do better you cannot possibly place your reliance in a candidate who has chosen in 1960 to run on a platform that we have never had it so good that our prestige has never been higher i ask your support the descendants of those americans who in other days faced the truth this state nourished the great republic its leaders protected this country during our early years and i do not believe the citizens of virginia would choose in 1960 to place their confidence in a leader who is not wholly frank with them who does not tell them the truth the truth with the bark off this state and country is going to have to do better that is the real issue of our times if you are satisfied if you believe that everything that needs to be done is being done in its proper measure if you believe that our power and prestige is increasing around the world if you are satisfied if you are confident mr nixon is your candidate but if you share my view that the republican party is not equipped by its very nature by the interests it represents to lead our country in a changing and vigorous time in the life of our country in a world of change in a world of revolution in a world which sees new countries rising and old countries falling which sees the communists carrying on a steady offense against us i believe that whether the struggle is in outer space or whether it is for the economic survival of this country i believe the democratic party made up of men of commitment made up of men who look to the future i believe you should place your confidence with the democratic party once again and i believe the presence on this platform of governor battle and governor almond and distinguished members of congress i believe that that indicates better than anything their good judgment that virginia should go democratic in 1960 virginia was democratic when massachusetts was federalist virginia was democratic when massachusetts was whig virginia was democratic when massachusetts was republican and i do not want it said that virginia was republican when massachusetts was democratic there are more republicans leaving town today than ever this campaign is just about over and i am sure we are all going to be glad it is 4 more days the issues are joined the differences between us are acute the differences which separate mr nixon in the past and us in the future are sharp you can make your own judgment you can make your own judgment about your community your state your country and the world but i come to this state with its long and ancient history and i come here as one who knows virginia whose two brothers attended the university of virginia who feels at home in virginia who feels at home in virginia who knows as a democrat that he is among friends and i come here and say how could virginia possibly put its confidence in richard milhous nixon and the republican party in 1960 i believe a democratic tide is rising in the nation i believe the people of this country are committed to looking forward i believe that they know in good times and bad regardless of what may be said or read the record of the democratic party is shown to you all it is a responsible and progressive record all those republicans who come down here to worship at the shrine of thomas jefferson and woodrow wilson and andrew jackson fought against them all their political lives the republican party ruined woodrow wilson and his hope for the league of nations the intellectual predecessors of the republican party the whigs censured andrew jackson for trying to prevent the flow of money in this country prevent it from being dominated by a small group in philadelphia john quincy adams who represented my state in the senate was expelled from the senate by the republicans in those days because he supported thomas jefferson and the louisiana purchase they come down here and say we are all for wilson jackson jefferson and the rest they are even beginning to say a few kind words about franklin roosevelt harry truman of course 20 years from now they might even speak a good word for him but he won t about them this is an ancient struggle between those who look to the future between those who share the inheritance of jefferson and what was it it was a willingness to look life in the eye to look to the future to plan to decide what is best for our country and to move ahead to be committed to no faction but to be committed to the truth that is the inheritance of thomas jefferson and on that inheritance i run in 1960 and ask your help thank you dem jfk4 9 60 john_f _kennedy governor williams the next governor john swainson ladies and gentlemen my friend and colleague senator mcnamara friday night we campaigned in portland maine saturday at noon we went to san francisco saturday night we went to alaska tonight we are in detroit we did not make that trip for pleasure we made it because we believe it is vitally important that the democratic party win this election this country cannot afford nor can the whole free world afford 4 more years of a do nothing republican leadership i am delighted to be here to participate in the labor day ceremonies tomorrow it is a great occasion but i can assure you that if we are successful in the election in november that the depression for this country will be over dem jfk5 10 60a john_f _kennedy congressman roush matt welsh who is going to be the next governor of the state of indiana and your present u s senator vance hartke mr mayor ladies and gentlemen i want to express my great appreciation to all of you for your kindness in coming out and giving us a warm hoosier welcome i understand that this town suffered a misfortune this morning when the bank was robbed i am confident that the indianapolis star will say that democrats arrive and bank robbed but we don t believe that we are here on a different mission we are here on a mission to rebuild this state and country i think this is a most important election and i believe the people of indiana should make a careful judgment as to which party and which candidate they should endorse in this state and country it has been 24 years since indiana voted democratic in a national election in franklin roosevelt s second term in 1936 each presidential year since then indiana has voted republican but i must say that i think this year indiana which is participating as a part of the united states must realize that at home and abroad this country is not realizing its full potential here in this state which has lost over 38 000 factory jobs in the last 8 years which has seen its agricultural income go steadily down which sees corn now sell for 93 or 94 or 95 cents and realizes that the bottom has not yet hit i must say that any citizen of indiana and any citizen of the united states should consider carefully this election the kind of leadership which this country has the kind of president which you elect the kind of congress which is dominated by one party or another has a good deal to do with the prosperity of this city of anderson and the prosperity of the state of indiana the kind of schools that you have the kind of assistance which you have for the aged people of this country the kind of agricultural program which stabilizes corn and hog and wheat prices or permits them to go down the kind of national defense the kind of vigor with which the united states speaks in our relations abroad all those are tied up in this presidential election my own judgment is that after 8 years of the republicans that the democrats can begin to move this country ahead i think this is an important election if there is any merchant in this town who thinks his business is good this fall who looks to the future of 1961 with optimism who thinks that agricultural prices are going to go up who thinks that the tide is rising in indiana and the nation who believes that our position is more secure in the world than it was 5 years ago who believes that the balance of power is moving in our direction rather than in the direction of our enemies i believe they should vote for mr nixon but any citizen of this community and any citizen of indiana who believes that the balance of power in the world is not moving in our direction who is concerned about the rise of castro in cuba and the spread of his power through all of latin america who is concerned that the nations of africa are not following our road but one of nentrality and one of increasing friendship with the communists who believes that the economy of this country is moving at a slow rate who sees that we are only using 50 percent of our steel capacity only 50 percent last week the soviet union outproduced us in steel though they have one half of the potential we do because we are only using 54 percent of our capacity corn is down steel mills are at 50 percent a recession in 1958 and already less than 2 years later we find the economy in the fall which should be our best time moving at a slower rate of growth than it should this state and this country is going to have to find 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 10 years to maintain full employment here you have a general motors plant and those of you who work there know that new machinery takes the place of men and unless this country moves its economy at twice the rate it now is you cannot maintain full employment in the united states we have 4 million out of work and 3 million part time and in the winter of 1961 and 1962 unless this country moves again this state won t move i don t care what happens in indiana by itself unless the rest of the country is going ahead who buys the products of general motors not the citizens of indiana but the citizens of the united states therefore in this state which for 24 years has sustained the republicans i think you should give us a chance i think you should give us a chance to lead i think the choice is between standing still and drifting and moving ahead the choice is between our meeting the unfinished business of our country and the cause of freedom around the world or drifting along through the early sixties the most difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country this district is fortunate to have a vigorous spokesman for its interests in the congress and ed roush speaks not only for this district but for the united states and matt welsh i believe can give leadership to this state as governor of indiana in the final analysis what this district does and what this state does depends on what the united states is doing corn sells for the same price in indiana as it does in minnesota automobiles sell in indiana and sell in michigan and sell in massachusetts this country rises or falls based upon its economic growth its economic vitality and i come to indiana facing a hard fight in this state and i come here and ask your help in this campaign i ask your support and i can assure you i can assure you that if we are successful we will begin to give this country the kind of leadership which i think it needs if it is not only to survive but also to prevail we will set before this country as franklin roosevelt did in the early thirties our unfinished business i want those of you who are ready to move and to see this country realize its potential to join us we will give this country i think the chance to meet its historic destiny of being the great example of freedom at a time when freedom is under attack all over the globe the next 10 years will see the balance of power begin to move in the world in one direction or another i want it to move with us lincoln said 100 years ago that this nation cannot exist half slave and half free i don t think the world will exist in the long run half slave and half free whether it moves in the direction of slavery or whether it moves in the direction of freedom depends in the final analysis upon the citizens of the united states it depends upon us to do that i think this country must move this country must go forward again this country must say yes to the sixties this country must move thank you dem jfk5 10 60b john_f _kennedy thank you governor congressman burke keen johnson your next u s senator and ladies and gentlemen i come here today to correct a historical misstatement richard m nixon stood in this very same spot and claimed thomas jefferson as a republican not on his best day i am going to get him back thomas jefferson is a democrat i give you mckinley coolidge harding hoover dewey landon i don t blame him for claiming jefferson they have very few they can claim theodore roosevelt left the republican party abraham lincoln his successor who tried to carry out his policy was assassinated but they cannot take thomas jefferson and they cannot take the united states in 1960 or the state of kentucky richard nixon speaking in boston a few days ago said that i was another truman i returned the compliment and said that he was another dewey and i believe that kentucky which has looked to the future on all occasions which has recognized the national interest which has recognized that without a strong country we cannot be free i believe kentucky is coming back to the democratic party this is an important election and it is for the welfare of this city this state and this country i do not run for the presidency promising that if i am elected life will be easy but i do run for the country warning that this country cannot continue to think that what was good enough before is good enough for the sixties and any party which runs in 1960 with a slogan of you have never had it so good is going to be defeated we believe that this is a great country but we believe this country can be greater and we believe it is a powerful country but this country can be more powerful we want to tell the fire department there is no fire here it is just democrats on fire here in 1960 in this old city i come to you and ask for your help this state must go democratic and so must the country the united states must rebuild its strength and prestige the united states must take a position in this country and in the world that we will not be second to anyone that we want to be first not first but not first if not first when but first and we shall be here in the shadow of thomas jefferson i salute the city of louisville which in 1956 carrying out the supreme court decision set an example to the country and set an example to the world and i am proud to be in this city tonight and salute you for what you have done and what you are doing and what you will do in the future this choice that faces the united states is as old as the country this country has faced it in other years and other occasions they are not going to break up this meeting we are going to go on sirens or not rain or not sunshine or not it is as the bible tells us it rains upon the just and the unjust republicans as well as democrats it rains on richard nixon tonight in philadelphia i heard but the republicans are all at home and we are out here meeting because we believe in our party so i ask you to join in this campaign i ask kentucky to join us kentucky which has supported in 1948 supported in 1932 supported in 1912 great democrats woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman i stand where they stood all those people who want to stand still all those people who believe that things are as good as they can be that the power of the united states is increasing as fast as it must who are satisfied to have this country drift at home and abroad they should join mr nixon but all those who look to the future all those who want this country to move again all those who want this country to get off dead center i want your support i want your support for the democratic party i want you to reelect frank burke and send keen johnson to the senate and join us in a great national effort i ask your help finally let me say that i do not underrate the difficulty of this election it will be hard fought in kentucky and all across the united states but this is not merely a contest between mr nixon and myself it is a contest between two parties and their different philosophies between two outlooks between one party which gives the green light to the sixties and the other party which stands still between a party which moves forward between a party which looks back between a party which produced wilson and roosevelt and truman and a party that produced landon and dewey and now in 1960 mr nixon i ask you to join us in this effort this struggle in the same as the struggle 100 years ago when abraham lincoln wrote to a friend during the election of 1860 he said i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later in the election of 1960 we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk5 10 60c john_f _kennedy matt welsh who i am sure is going to be governor of this state senator vance hartke mr mayor ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to you for coming here today i believe that we have in indiana a tough fight but my judgment is that indiana which has not supported the national ticket of the democratic party since 1936 has had enough i cannot believe that this state which depends upon its farm economy which depends upon its industrial economy i cannot believe that the people of indiana are going to endorse any program which says you never had it so good i believe we can do better and i come here to indiana today and ask your support as a democrat as a democratic candidate for the office of the presidency the united states throughout its history has moved back and forth like a pendulum between the republican and the democratic party it has chosen on some occasions the conservative course and on other occasions it has looked ahead i believe that this year like 1912 when woodrow wilson ran against taft and won and like 1932 when franklin roosevelt ran against herbert hoover and won and 1948 when harry truman ran against dewey and won i believe in 1960 when we run against mr nixon we are going to win mr nixon said the other night in boston that i was another truman i regard it as a compliment and i returned it to him and i suggested that perhaps he was another dewey i believe the issue is very clear and the people of this state should understand them they are between a party which regards 1 25 minimum wage as too extreme a party and a candidate which regards medical care for the aged tied to social security as too extreme between a party which vetoes an area redevelopment bill as too extreme between a party which regards a progressive farm policy which will bring supply and demand into balance as too extreme now if you regard those programs as extreme i believe you should support mr nixon and the republican party but if you believe that you cannot have a prosperous town in this state if your agricultural income continues to drop if you recognize that under the program which mr nixon put forward which is a continuation of the benson program and corn which sold 8 years ago for 1 50 sells in this state at 95 cents today will sell next year at 80 cents and down and down it will go because this administration s farm program provides for a free market price and the free market price for corn in this country with unlimited production will take that down at least 20 percent below what it is selling at today and if any merchant in this state feels he can prosper with corn on the downward trend with unemployment in this state at 6 8 percent to 7 percent any merchant in this country who feels he can move forward when steel production is at 50 percent of capacity which it is in the united states when 7 out of 8 international harvester plants in illinois closed down in the last 2 weeks and they may open some of them in october if that is the kind of country you want and that is the kind of economy you believe in if those are the programs you want i believe you should vote for mr nixon but if you believe it is time this country moved forward if you believe we have stood on dead center long enough if you believe that the balance of power in the world should shift in our direction instead of against us if you believe that the united states should be first not first but if sometimes or perhaps but first period i want your help when the united states is second in space when we turn out one half as many scientists and engineers the soviet union when their economic growth is three times ours now and western germany italy and france twice the growth when we have to find 25 000 new jobs a week for the next 10 years to maintain full employment in indiana and the country i cannot believe that the people of this state and the people of the united states are going to give an endorsement and continue that leadership i ask you to join us in moving ahead i ask you to put your confidence in our party and in our leadership a leadership which in this century has produced mr truman and mr roosevelt and mr wilson i do not ask you to put your confidence in a leadership in this century which has produced mr mckinley and coolidge and harding and hoover and landon and dewey and now in 1960 mr nixon i believe we can do better this is a hard campaign and it is closely fought and it is very close in this state and around the country and it is going to be closely fought until november 8 but in the final analysis you have to make your judgment as to what you want this country to be the kind of leadership which you want whether you want the president of the united states and the congress to place before the american people the unfinished business of our society and then start this country moving again i ask your help in this election and ask you to join us in moving ahead to the new frontier one hundred years ago in the campaign of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later in the most trying period in the life of this country when freedom is undergoing its most severe test we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready i ask your help dem jfk5 10 60d john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen we are here in indiana to ask your help indiana has not gone democratic in a presidential election since 1936 and i think it is time it did nixon speaking in boston the other night said i was another truman and i said he was another dewey and he is any candidate who considers our program extreme any candidate who is opposed to 1 25 minimum wage or medical care for the aged or a decent housing bill any candidate whose party is only able to get our steel mills working 50 percent of capacity who is only able after the recession in 1958 to have this economy drifting along i think we need a change i ask your help in this campaign i think we can win in indiana and i think we can win in the country we are going to have a democratic congress to have a republican president and the congress and the president fighting over the next 4 years without any legislation without this country moving ahead i believe the american people are going to choose to go with the democrats again i come here today and ask your help in a tough fight here in indiana if we can win in this state we can win the election so i would appreciate your helping us dem jfk5 10 60e john_f _kennedy thank you very much ladies and gentlemen my name is kennedy i am here running in indiana and i just wanted to stop here and ask your help in this campaign i think that this is a difflcult and important election i think the fight in this state is going to be close and hard fought i have come here today and asked your help i don t believe that anyone can live in indiana and in the united states and feel that the tide is moving in our favor in this state and around the country the economy now with over 4 million people out of work with corn in these fields selling for 95 and 93 or 92 cents the economy with the steel mills down across the country using only 50 percent of capacity i don t believe we need a diagram to know that the economy of this country is not moving to the fullest i am sure that any merchant in this town would agree with that we had a recession in 1958 and 1954 you cannot possibly afford in the united states at this serious time with all the responsibilities pressing upon us around the world we cannot afford to have our economy moving slowly this economy of the united states on it depends our strength and the strength of the free world and i believe that the fiscal and economic and legislative policies followed by this administration have contributed to this slowdown on the farm in the towns and in the cities i come here today and ask your help in this campaign i think there are very real issues in this campaign that divide the parties though i know that indiana has not gone democratic in any presidential election i think since 1936 i believe that the united states and indiana will move mto the democratic column in november and i come here today and ask your help dem jfk5 10 60f john_f _kennedy mayor tucker judge dutch letzkus senator hartke your next governor matt welsh your distinguished and hard working congressman who has worked for this district and for the united states congressman wampler ladies and gentlemen i understand that today is the opening day of the world series i would hate to think that politics is taking the place of baseball as the national sport but i do think it indicates that the people of this country are concerned about what is happening are anxious about what we are going to do are willing to join with us in building this state and building this country the pirates may win today or the yankees but i think the democrats are going to win on november 8 and i believe that here in this state of indiana in the heartland of the united states along this wabash river i believe all the issues which are as significant to us as indianians and as americans are gathered here in this state this state depends upon agriculture and for the last 8 years farm income has gone steadily down at the beginning of this first administration 8 years ago corn in this state was selling for 1 50 it is selling now for 93 or 94 cents and under the support program put forward by mr nixon 10 days ago where the support price is tied to the market price corn next year will be selling at a lower price and at a lower price and there isn t anyone in this community whose employment is not affected by the decline in agricultural income it is no wonder that in the 1920 s the recession and depression of 1929 was preceded by the sharpest decline in agricultural income that the country had seen up to that date and now here in indiana and in this city of terre haute you have unemployment of nearly 7 percent you see steel mills in gary and elsewhere in this state which are working 55 or 60 percent of capacity and every merchant and every banker in the state of indiana can tell you that this september and this october have been as difficult and hard as the september and october of 1957 and the september and october at the end of 1953 which preceded the recessions of 1954 and 1958 i don t believe this country can afford another recession the demands placed upon us are too great every time that we fail to meet our problems every time that we fail to move our economy forward we fail not only our own people but we fail all those who look to us for leadership my judgment is that there is a very clear choice between the republican and the democratic parties they stand for different things and they have stood for different things all through this century woodrow wilson running in 1912 said that the republican party idea of policy is to sit on the lid franklin roosevelt carried the fight in 1932 and 1936 and harry truman carried the fight in 1948 and on the issues which matter housing social security medical care for the aged minimum wage development of the resources of this country i believe the democratic party looks forward i believe it has presented to this country programs which move the economy of this country indiana does not exist by itself there is no business in indiana that does not sell to the rest of the country and if the rest of the country is standing still if our economy is not moving forward where are all the young men and women going to school in this state going to find jobs we are going to have 25 000 people coming into the labor market every year every week every year for the next 10 years and we are going to have to find them jobs 25 000 new people a week for 10 years looking for jobs and unless this economy of this country moves forward unless the federal government gives leadership we are not going to find jobs for those people or the people now working i believe the issue is very clear and the issue is whether the american people are satisfied with things as they are whether they feel that the 1960 s are a time to really conserve and stand still and gather our energy or whether the 1960 s are a time to move forward again as 1932 was as 1912 was here in this state which has voted republican in every presidential election since 1936 i recognize that this is a tough uphill fight but i believe that indiana and the rest of the united states are going to choose in 1960 to look forward again to put their confidence in the democratic party which in other days in other years in other crises has produced leadership and has moved this country off dead center i want to emphasize that what we do here and the kind of society we build here affects our position around the world the strength of the united states depends on the strength of indiana pittsburgh detroit california if this country is moving forward if we are producing to our maximum there is no country in the world that can catch us the united states produced about one third of the rate of economic growth last year as the soviet union one half that of germany if we were using our steel mills to the fullest if we had an agricultural program that maintained farmers income if small business in this country was prosperous if the monetary and fiscal policies of this administration did not rest on a high interest hard money policy then the economy of this country would move and no one could catch the united states but if we drift if we use our people and our resources at slow speed then at a time when the world is in turmoil and in revolution people to the south of us people in africa people in asia are going to determine that the way of the future belongs to the communists mr nixon says i downgrade america i have served the united states just as long as he has and i have just as much affection for it and just as high an opinion of it i downgrade his leadership i downgrade the republican leadership and anyone who thinks that the prestige of the united states is increasing as fast as it needs to should look around us a gallup poll taken in february in 10 countries scattered around the world showed that a majority of people in 9 of the 10 countries believed that the soviet union would be ahead of us militarily and scientifically by 1970 why forty years ago the soviet union was the sickest country in europe forty years ago the soviet union had no scientists and engineers now suddenly in 40 years they make the people of the world think they are going to be ahead of us and if the people of the world feel they are the way of the future then they turn to them not to us i want leaders in africa and asia and latin america to be quoting american statesmen i don t want them to just quote jefferson and lincoln i want them to be quoting american leaders who stand for freedom who will build a strong country who will extend the benefits of that prosperity to all americans i ask your help in indiana i ask your help in a tough fight but i can tell you that we are going to win in this country and i want indiana to join us thank you dem jfk5 11 60a john_f _kennedy thank you senator johnson mrs johnson i want you to meet senator johnson s daughters who came up here tonight first lynda johnson his oldest daughter and this is lucy johnson and this is mrs johnson and my name is kennedy and i come here tonight and ask your help in this campaign the fact of the matter is the republicans are home in bed and we are standing out here in the rain but the sun is going to shine on us next tuesday i am proud that lyndon johnson has come across the states from texas to be here tonight and he is going to leave here tonight and go back to texas and tell them that new york is going to go democratic and i am going to leave here tonight and speak at 1 in the morning in waterbury conn and tell them the same thing i am going to tell them that new york city new york state and the united states are going democratic on tuesday and it is a source of pride to both of us that we are able to come into new york without escort i understand that tom dewey has just joined dick nixon out on the coast to give him some last minute strategy on how to win this election you have seen these elephants in the circus they have their heads of ivory thick skins no vision long memory and when they moved around that ring in the circus they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them well dick grabbed that tail in 1952 and 1956 but in 1960 he is running not the president he is running and i believe on tuesday november 8 and it is nice that it is coming to an end i believe that on tuesday november 8 new york state will go democratic and so will the country and we come here today and ask your help i stand tonight where woodrow wilson stood and franklin roosevelt stood and harry truman stood dick nixon stands where mckinley stood and taft listen to these candidates harding coolidge landon dewey where do they get those candidates the fact of the matter is the republican party has opposed progress since they drove theodore roosevelt out of the party and i believe on november 8 1960 the people of the united states will make a careful judgment of what this country needs and will pick progress and the democratic ticket thank you dem jfk5 11 60b john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen governor ribicoff the next congressman from this district gene sugarman mayor wagner distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i come to new york city by myself and ask your support i come to the bronx as an old bronx boy i used to live in the bronx i agree it was the riverdale end of the bronx but it was the bronx and therefore i come back here to this part of new york city to new york and ask your support in this campaign this campaign is coming to an end tuesday night then you have to decide you have to make your judgment i made my judgment long ago that the basic issue of this campaign was the question of whether the people of the united states believed it was time they started moving again that they started going forward again and that the greatest contribution that they could make to the cause of freedom was to build a strong and vital society here in the united states mr nixon has chosen a different road he has gone to the american people in the 1960 s in the time of change and revolution saying we re never had it so good saying our prestige in the world has never been higher i recall in 1935 when winston churchill was warning of the dangers of the nazi rise stanley baldwin the leader of the conservative party told the people of england that everything was being done in its own good time he won that election and england almost lost the war in 1960 we tell the truth we stand for the public interest and i believe on tuesday november 8 the american people are going to choose to go forward mr nixon has not presented a program for the future tell them the syracuse game is over ladies and gentlemen this speech will come to an end very quickly i come here today and ask your help i ask you to join us i ask your support on tuesday i ask your help in building a stronger country here providing educational opportunity for our children in providing jobs for our people in providing medical care for our older citizens tied to social security in providing opportunity for all men and women of talent to build their society here in the united states that will serve as an example of freedom this is an important election it involves a high office it is the highest responsibility that a citizen of a free country can have to pick the president and it is the president s responsibility to set before the american people the unfinished business of our society to rally them to a great cause the presidency as franklin roosevelt said is above all a place for moral leadership and i believe in 1960 the people of the great republic as in 1932 are going to choose to go forward and right in the lead will be the bronx county of new york thank you dem jfk5 11 60c john_f _kennedy mayor wagner my longtime friend and colleague and i am happy to say supporter congressman buckley in fact i would not be where i am if it were not for congressman buckley and his generous support my colleagues in the congress who are here today i want you to meet mrs margaret price who is the vice chairman of the national committee in charge of women s functions and coordination ladies and gentlemen i said up the street that i was a former resident of the bronx nobody believes that but it is true i went to school in the bronx now riverdale is part of the bronx and i lived there for 5 or 6 years no other candidate for the presidency can make that statement in fact i do not know the last time that a candidate from the bronx ran for the presidency but i am here to ask your help i don t think we are going to run all right in riverdale but we will be here i think one of the things about being a candidate for the democratic candidate for the presidency is that you can admit you are a democrat mr nixon one of the many difficulties he has been facing is of course the question of running on the republican record he keeps saying that party labels don t mean very much that it is the man i think it is the man that the party puts up and i think the record of the past gives an indication of the future nixon in a high level or high road campaign which emphasizes the issues in the last 7 days has called me an economic ignoramus a pied piper and all the rest i just confine myself to calling him a republican but he says that is really getting low i want to say one word about a proposal which i wanted to put forward today and that was to take this opportunity of announcing my intention if i am successful on tuesday to appoint a consumer counsel in the office of the president of the united states it will be the function of this counsel to represent the interests of consumers in the administrative procedures of government and in the congressional procedures of the government the wage earners who pay the rent the housewives who shop for the families all have a vital interest in governmental policy which affects them and affects their ability to meet their responsibilities and yet all these great interests of which all of us have a part really go unrepresented before the committees of the agencies of our national government the congressional committees and the executive department all have a direct impact on the daily lives and the standard of living of the american consumer and one of the first tasks of the consumer council will be to help formulate economic policies which will keep a general rise in the price level from having a discriminatory effect upon the wage earners of the united states and their families last month the cost of living hit an alltime high in the history of the united states the culmination of a steady rise in the cost of living of over 10 percent the cost of medical care has gone up 32 percent in the last 8 years the cost of rent has gone up 20 percent the cost of household management has gone up 23 percent in short the consumer has had to bear an undue share of the price rises which have lowered the purchasing power of every american family we intend to halt this steady deterioration in their position aside from participation in the formulation of policy the office of the consumer counsel will have four major functions first it will scrutinize the activities of all governmental agencies which have a responsibility of regulating business activities in the public interest while the railroad companies and the airlines the drug companies and all the others are represented before these agencies by high priced attorneys the consumers whose protection is at stake are not represented today second the consumer counsel will represent consumer interests before congressional committees each year dozens of bills are heard before the congressional committees an are acted upon which affect the welfare of the consumers of the united states the consumers have no voice to speak for their interests when i conduct hearings as chairman of the subcommittee on labor we hear from representatives of organized labor we hear from the representatives of business we occasionally hear from public interest groups but we do not have anyone who speaks to us about the effect of any policy that we take upon the consumers of the united states and what is true of labor is true of the banking and currency committee is true of the committee on the judiciary is true in fact of every committee of the congress whose actions affect the cost of living and i believe that it would be useful to have someone who could go before these committees when a bill which is important and controversial is before the congress and discuss some of the effects that this might have upon the cost of living i believe that if the interest is properly represented it will greatly aid the executive department in meeting its responsibilities to the people fourth the consumer counsel will keep the president informed about any deficiencies in administration harmful to the consumer and will participate in the formulation drafting and presentation of new legislation to advance the interest of the american consumer i believe that such a consumer counsel perhaps a woman familiar with consumer problems will be the surest safeguard of the public interest in a government where private interests are well represented president truman used to say that there are 14 million americans who have sufficient resources sufficient knowledge of the workings of government to be able to protect their interests and it is the function of the president of the united states to protect the interest of the other 150 million and that is what we are going to do during a series of congressional investigations into a highly suspicious series of land sales a boston lawyer louis brandeis later justice of the supreme court appeared before the committee as a representative of a group of citizens alarmed at the waste in the public interest when he took the witness stand a congressman challenged his right to be present who sir he asked do you represent i sir replied mr brandeis am the people s counsel it is my hope and belief that this new officer of the government will also be the people s counsel and speak for the people let me say that this campaign happily for us all is coming to an end if somebody told me that it is going to be on november 16 instead of november 8 i might just fade right out but we can last until november 8 i have been in the last 3 days in eight states among them california new mexico arizona ohio illinois virginia and the bronx the ninth state and i come here today and ask your help in this campaign mr george gallup described a week ago our problem as democrats he said that in a poll that he had taken we were leading the democrats 49 to 45 for mr nixon but when he took out the 4 percent who he did not think would vote based upon their previous experience the result was 49 to 49 we lose that 4 percent they are democrats i assume mr gallup was reporting the facts as he saw them they are democrats the republicans vote we all know that suburbia turns out and all the rest of the areas of new york where republicans live riverdale all those other places we know that they turn out they are going to be out to vote 90 percent we can t lose 4 percent in any state four percent is a terrific vote in new york pennsylvania ohio michigan illinois california 4 percent will decide the result in any of those states now we can t get that 4 percent out unless you get them out unless you help get them out unless you are able i have attempted to make the issues sufficiently sharp sufficiently clear and i believe there are great stakes in the issue to try to interest the people to come out to vote but in the final analysis it depends upon your willingness to assume your responsibilities as you have so often in the past your responsibilities on tuesday let us see if we can get that 4 percent and if we do we are going to win last night we had a parade in chicago of 1 million people i said to mayor daley they are all going to be so tired from being in the parade that they won t be able to get up on tuesday he said no they will get up i thought so too i think they will here in the bronx this election is important the presidency is a great office it has unparalleled influence over the lives of all of us every decision the president makes affects the security and well being of every person in the united states as it never has before as it never has before its possibilities its opportunities for service are unlimited in 1960 and i think we don t want the republicans and mr nixon to assume that responsibility we want progress we want a democratic president we want a president that will move this country forward thank you dem jfk5 11 60d john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen mayor wagner harry van arsdale ladies and gentlemen it may be raining on us today in new york and the sun may be shining on mr nixon in california but on tuesday the sun is going to shine on us we hope i am glad to be here i am glad to be here with harry van arsdale the head of local 3 the chairman of the central labor council of new york and see this housing development which shows what responsible progressive labor can do to serve the people this is one of the finest developments of its kind in the country and if i don t win on tuesday i may move in here i come here and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us in moving this country of ours forward again and showing and showing what progressive responsible government can do i hope you will join us let s go dem jfk5 11 60e john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen jim fazio jack english i first of all want to express my regret to all of you for being so late i have not been playing golf we have been covering this county and queens and manhattan and in the last 2 days we have traveled in nine states all the way from california here to nassau county but i must say i don t know any place in the united states where democrats would turn out in the rain on a saturday afternoon and i want to thank you i don t want all of you to be home in bed tuesday sick so i will be quite brief i understand the sun is shining on mr nixon in california but on tuesday on tuesday the sun is coming up for us there are many opportunities and many responsibilities which will be before the people of the united states in the 1960 s one of those that i think is especially important to the whole question of preparing ourselves to be the best educated country in the world i do not want to have 35 percent of our brightest boys and girls fail to get into college after graduating from high school 7 000 officers they will be all right i think 7 000 students in this area of new york in this county did not get into college last year and by 1970 we are going to have twice as many students try to get to college as now we are going to have to do something about it and the republicans never will i see somebody has a nixon sign which they have taken down i don t blame them if you can name me one single problem one single opportunity that has been before this country that the republicans or mr nixon have ever done anything about i will be glad to have you put the sign up again ladies and gentlemen in 48 hours this campaign will be over then you have to decide i come here to nassau and ask your help i ask your support i ask your support in moving this country forward let s go let s have the word come out tuesday night all the way to california that nassau county has gone democratic so anyway thanks for coming today thanks for your help on tuesday and on wednesday this country will begin to move forward again thank you dem jfk5 11 60f john_f _kennedy bill ryan your next democratic congressman from this district we need some good democrats down there in washington i want to present to you with a good deal of pride my running mate on this ticket who is going to run with us on tuesday lyndon johnson who came all the way from texas today to be with us lyndon johnson and i have each been in 40 states that makes a total of 80 and we have said the same thing in every state we stand for progress north south east and west he is here with his wife i want you to meet the most popular lady in washington lady bird johnson and he has also brought his two daughters miss lucy baines johnson and miss lynda bird johnson when we leave here tonight we are going to have a rally at 2 in the morning in waterbury conn and i want to introduce to you the governor of the state of connecticut abe ribicoff i want to apologize for being about 5 hours late we were not playing golf we have been out carrying the message i was traveling alone through new york and no other candidate for the presidency can make that statement i was not accompanied by nelson cabot tom ike barry any of them we come here tonight in the closing days of this campaign to ask your help in turning the republican party out of office and putting the democrats back in and moving this country forward i have been called in the last week by the candidate of the republican party who is waging that high level campaign for which he is justly celebrated a liar an economic ignoramus a pied piper and i just call him one thing a worthy member of his party he stands in a great tradition right out of mckinley harding coolidge dewey landon and all the rest of them he came in here he thinks he is running as a committee they are not electing a committee next tuesday they are electing a president of the united states and in spite of the fact all of you have seen circus elephants with tusks thick skull thick skin no vision and when they move around the circus ring they have to grab the tail of the elephant in front of them that is what he is doing that was all right in 1952 and 1956 but now he is running and i believe that on tuesday november 8 the people of this country face not merely a choice between presidential and vice presidential candidates not merely a choice between parties but between a position which says that we never had it so good that our prestige has never been higher which is right out of the book of stanley baldwin who almost lost england world war ii i believe the people of this country want the truth and they want to move and they want to see us build our strength here and around the world so we are leaving it to all of you to make the right decision we will now move on to waterbury conn and in the next 2 days we are going to cover all the six new england states and i want to tell them that as new york goes and i think it is going democratic so goes the nation i read the new york daily news poll not always their editorials but i think we have a good chance here so i want to express my thanks to all of you for standing in the rain and we are delighted to stand with you the republicans are home in bed but next tuesday night it is going to rain for them and the sun is going to shine for us dem jfk5 11 60g john_f _kennedy mike prendergast governor ribicoff mr mayor harry brandt distinguished officials ladies and gentlemen the devices which are used in the city of new york to separate you from your life savings are numerous when the dinners run out the luncheons begin and when the luncheons run out the breakfasts begin we may all meet next week to get the campaign out of the red with a midnight brunch at 85 a person and i will be there i did not come to new york entirely alone i must reveal before the press reveals it that president truman and i are staying at the same hotel but this campaign fortunately for us all is coming physically and financially to an end in 3 days in the last 48 hours or 56 hours i have been in eight or nine states from california new mexico arizona texas oklahoma virginia ohio and illinois mr nixon keeps saying that the tide is running in his direction well the tide is running in the direction of whittier calif and he is on top of it i don t know what is going to happen on tuesday night but i must say i think we will all feel that we have done everything that could be done and for better or for worse win or lose i believe at least i hope that we have been able to make the issue very sharp in this campaign that is between those who are concerned and those who are comfortable i believe in 1960 the majority of the american people are concerned and therefore i look to tuesday night with at least hope and with some equanimity because i believe that the issues have been sharply enough drawn now what is the question is not just which of the candidates the people want but what their own judgment is of themselves what they want personally what their view is of their country what their view is of the future and of the president the time of analyzing the two candidates and the two parties is coming to an end and now the people of this country have to make their own judgment about themselves and i believe the interest the public interest the conception of the public service the strong support which the majority of the people have had throughout our history for the public service i believe that is on the side of the democrats in 1960 and that we more importantly are on the right side ourselves i want to thank each of you as i look around we have been meeting on many occasions in new york and new york has been very generous i hope that it will be possible for us to meet at some affair after the campaign which will not touch you quite as deeply as this one has but where we all just buy our breakfast or lunch or dinner and have a chance for me to express my appreciation to each of you everyone in this room as i look around has contributed a good deal and while i have the responsibility of being the standard bearer which is far more than a race between mr nixon and myself or really between two parties it is a contest in which all of us are engaged therefore i hope that when tuesday night comes that we will all have a feeling of satisfaction of having done the best job we could and of having an opportunity in the future to do an even better one thank you dem jfk5 11 60h john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you all very much this campaign is coming to an end on tuesday and i hope that queens of all the rest will be with us this is an important campaign ladies and gentlemen i come here at the end of this campaign we have 24 48 72 hours left about 60 hours left fortunately before all of this is over i hope that in the next few days it is possible for us to keep working to keep looking forward to keep progressive to keep bringing the american people the issues in this campaign and the issues are not only the republican and the democratic parties but the issues are between those of us who believe that this country is going to have its best years in the 1960 s is going to meet its responsibilities and between those in the republican party who have opposed progress throughout this century i come here to queens and ask your help this is a district which has been hotly contested in previous presidential elections it can make a great possible difference in carrying the state of new york new york is essential for the success of any president 45 electoral votes there is no other state to compete with in the same way that securing the support of new york made it possible to be nominated securing the support of new york may well make it possible to be elected president of the united states so ladies i come here and ask your help don t keep quiet for the next few days speak up and say a good word for your distinguished congressman your candidate for the assembly your candidates for the various local offices and also a chance to point out that every american regardless of his job regardless of his position his future and that of his family is vitally affected by the good judgment of the president of the united states and i think in the last week we have had a good chance to assay the good judgment of the two candidates how they approach this campaign what their reaction has been to it how they responded to the pressure which goes with a presidential campaign we have discussed the issues we are going to continue to do so and i believe that on tuesday night a majority of the people of this country will decide the same way that we decide and that is that this country if it is going to move ahead if it is going to maintain the peace if it is going to be strong and respected abroad it will be because we are strong and vital and secure here at home i believe the democratic party can do the job best and i come and ask your help in doing it thank you there is an old saying never send a boy to do a man s job send a lady so i am going to send all of you these i understand are presented to me but i will also present them to my wife as we will have need for them in about a month thank you dem jfk5 11 60i john_f _kennedy i want you to meet mayor wagner of the city of new york and governor ribicoff of connecticut is there anyone else who wants to be introduced and here is senator thomas mackell and frank o connor the district attorney assemblyman lou walleck and mr thomas duffy and here is marsha gurstein and my name is kennedy and i am running for the presidency i wanted to come here to queens which has not been known as the strongest democratic county up to this year i wanted to come here and ask your help for this campaign this campaign is coming to an end on tuesday and then the united states selects the next president of the united states about a month ago i had an opportunity to go to independence mo to see the library which president truman has set up and in that library he has a section in which he describes the five different functions the five different responsibilities of a president of the united states commander in chief the party leader the legislative leader the leader in foreign policy the leader in domestic policy he is in short the center of action under the american constitutional system there is no decision that we make as citizens of the united states that reaches a longer shadow over the life of every citizen than who we choose to bear this great responsibility i come not because i believe after 14 years in the congress that the presidency is an easy task i think the next president of the united states will face problems at home and abroad far overwhelming with a greater impact on the lives of every citizen than any president since lincoln but i do believe that it is vitally important that this country start to move forward again and i do not believe that mr nixon or the republican party is committed to progress on their record any party which opposed when it began social security 90 percent who voted 95 percent against the 25 cent minimum wage of the midthirties who voted 90 percent in the house of representatives against l 25 an hour in 1960 any party which has opposed housing legislation medical care for our aged tied to social security any party which goes to the people in 1960 saying we never had it so good that our prestige has never been higher i don t believe that they are the party or the candidates to lead this country in the dangerous sixties this has been a long campaign but we have tried to make two points in it first that this country is as strong abroad it speaks with the kind of vigor abroad depending on how it reflects the vigor of our society here in the united states all our propaganda all the voice of america does not mean anything unless it accurately reflects a strong and vital society here in the united states to be strong abroad we must be strong at home to be respected abroad we must build the kind of society in this country that commands respect that gives every citizen an opportunity to develop his or her talent depending on their skill and their desire to serve i come here today to queens and ask your help in moving this country forward in building our strength in building our influence abroad in identifying our selves once again as the great defender of freedom at a time when freedom is under attack all over the globe in short i come to queens in the state of new york in the united states of america and ask your help thank you i am not going to make another speech but i do want you to know that i am very grateful for all of you to come out it is not a good time to hold a rally at 2 15 in the afternoon it is cold rainy and there are many other things you would want to do but i am grateful to you for being able to stand and say hello i think you are here for the same reason that i am because this is an important election because we are democrats because we believe in progress and because we are going to win dem jfk5 9 60 john_f _kennedy governor williams the next governor john swainson senator mcnamara senator hart walter reuther leaders of organized labor ladies and gentlemen i have come today from alaska america s last frontier to michigan to state the case for america s new frontier i have come here today on a day that belongs to the working men and women of america to ask you for help in translating the democratic platform into reality give me your help give me your men give me men like pat mcnamara and phil hart in the united states senate next january we will have four more votes in the u s senate to give us medical care for the aged under social security and next january there will be no threat of a republican presidential veto give us next january more men like the democratic congressmen from michigan and next january we will get a minimum wage of 1 25 without republican opposition elect john swainson as the governor of michigan to succeed a great governor of michigan and we can tell you that we are going to work to make michigan a stronger state and a stronger nation with john swainson and mennen williams i am taking our case to the american people in the next 2 months because i believe that the american people should decide which direction this country is going to go the issue is before you and i am confident that in november you will make a choice for progress not for standing still i am confident that the american people will make a choice that they want this country to be first in the world and first in the fight for peace i take my case to you as the descendants of immigrants who will welcome other immigrants to this country without fear or favor here a home for the homeless i take my case to you because i am confident that the american people do not want to continue in this country poverty and discrimination and disease and slums they want to move ahead again and we are going to do it beginning january 1961 i take my case to the american people because i am confident that the american people will want to bring an end to racial discrimination everywhere in the schools in the homes in the churches in the lunch counters i want every american free to stand up for his rights even if some times he has to sit down for them and finally i am here because we share a common deep seated belief in the workings of free collective bargaining and in the growth of free responsible unions and unlike our opponents we don t just believe that on labor day i welcome the support of working men and women everywhere and i am proud of the endorsement of the afl cio for the labor movement is people the goals of the labor movement are the goals for all americans and their enemies are the enemies of progress the two cannot be separated the man and party who oppose a decent minimum wage also oppose decent wages for our teachers the man and the party who oppose medical care for the aged have no more compassion for the small farmer or the small businessman or hungry families here in the united states or around the world that kind of man and that kind of party likes things the way they are their slogan is you never had it so good but let them tell that to the 4 million people who are out of work to the 3 million americans who must work part time let them tell that to those who farm our farms in our depressed areas in our deserted textile and coal towns let them try to tell it to the 5 million men and women in the richest country on earth who live on a surplus food diet of 20 a month the facts of the matter are that the republican party for 40 years has opposed all kinds of progressive social legislation they did it in the special session in the last 4 weeks and if they are successful they will oppose legislation for the next 4 years that is not what we want for this country we want america to move again franklin roosevelt said it when he accepted the second presidential nomination before 100 000 people in franklin field in philadelphia and in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference for the last 8 years in this country we have bad a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference where franklin roosevelt set before our country its unfinished tasks the unfinished agenda for america this administration has set ceilings has set goals i think we must recapture the spirit of franklin roosevelt and start moving forward on the unfinished business facing this country this is a great country but it can be greater this is a prosperous country but it can be the most prosperous country in the world where all americans share that prosperity and none live on the marginal edge of existence but we have to grow and under republican leadership this country is standing still here in this country and around the world our workers have seen it in shorter workweeks our steel industry sees it in producing 50 percent of capacity and mr khrushchev sees it when he promises to bury us here are three facts one our economy under the first 6 years of the republican administration grew one half as much as under the last 6 years under the truman administration fact number 2 the russian economy is growing at three times the rate of ours fact number 3 last year the united states had the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world i don t like to see the united states second to any country we are going to make the united states the first here and to all those who look for freedom with an average rate of growth in this country every workingman in the last 8 years would have received 7 000 more than he has received for an education or a new house or a rainy day or his old age with a really healthy rate of growth this country can have full employment for all who want a job with a really healthy rate of growth we can pay for all the defenses that this administration says we can t afford with a really healthy rate of growth we can afford the best schools for our children and the best paid and the best trained teachers finally with a really healthy rate of growth we can talk about an economic crusade for justice but it is time that we stopped talking about it and elected an administration that will do something about it the fact of the matter is that the president of the united states stated on august 10 that we had a fine year in automobile production even though a few years ago we produced 1 500 000 more cars than this year and even though in the city of detroit you know those who work with you who are unemployed in the auto industry i don t take that view of the american economy i think this country s power is unlimited i think if the president of the united states will just merely set before us our national goals that all of us are willing to bear the burden that must come to reach those goals i spent 1 month in west virginia in the primary and i saw all through the coalfields men waiting at 45 years of age for a job they will never get because automation has thrown them out of work and yet this administration has not even recognized the problem which may be the most serious domestic problem which our country will face in the next 10 years we don t want to have machines throwing men out of work we want machines that will help men live a better life and finally if we are going to grow the way we should grow we must adopt fiscal policies that will stimulate growth and not discourage it every american who financed a home who bought a refrigerator who bought an automobile bought a television set has suffered from this high interest rate policy those of you who bought a home for 10 000 with a 30 year mortgage are going to pay out 3 300 more for that house than you would have paid in the truman administration this kind of growth that i am talking about is not antibusiness it is probusiness it is not antiprivate enterprise it is proprivate enterprise and it is pro the american people i run for the office of the presidency not because i think it is an easy job in many ways i think the next years are going to be the most difficult years in our history i don t run for the office of the presidency telling you that if you elect me life is going to be easy because i don t think that life is going to be easy for americans in the next decade but i run for the presidency because i do not want it said that in the years when our generation held political power that those were the years when america began to slip when america began to slide i don t want historians writing in 1970 to say that the balance of power in the 1950 s and the 1960 s began to turn against the united states and against the cause of freedom i don t want it said that when we held office and when we were citizens that the russians and the chinese communists began to expand their power the new frontier is not what i promise i am going to do for you the new frontier is what i ask you to do for our country give me your help your hand your voice and this country can move again this is a great country when the american revolution came tom paine wrote the cause of america is the cause of all mankind now in 1960 in the great world revolution the cause of all mankind is the cause of america if we succeed in this country if we make this a great country to live in if we reflect our vitality and energy and strength around the world then the cause of freedom is strengthened but if we fail all fail if we stand still freedom stands still i ask your help i ask your devoted service again to our country and i can tell you that if we are successful in this election we shall lead and this country will move again thank you dem jfk5 9 60a john_f _kennedy governor williams distinguished guests i don t see how the flint high school football team ever loses any football game with that cheering section if you are not busy for the next 2 months in school we will be glad to take you with us all around the united states senator mcnamara my friend and colleague who sits next to me in the senate and advises me always right lieutenant governor and governor to be john swainson governor church otis smith and all the democrats who are here today who believe that we must win this election ladies and gentlemen i come here today to participate in this labor day and i come here today as the democratic candidate for the presidency of the united states and i come here today and ask your support in that election i have served for 14 years on the labor committees of the house and the senate and year after year in issue after issue issues which are important to the working men and women of this country i have seen liberal democrats fight for progressive legislation and i have seen the republican party vote against them this is an important election because in this election we are going to determine which way this country is going to go whether we are going to move ahead or whether we are going to stand still the record of the democratic party in this century is written in the names and the records of four great men woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt harry truman mennen williams and all the others who carried our banner i divide the issues which face us as a country domestically into two categories first i think it is necessary that we finish the job which wilson and roosevelt began the fight for medical care for the aged for minimum wage of 1 25 for federal aid to education for housing for a better life for all americans under a system of equality for all americans and then i say that there are new problems which woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman never heard of in their generation in my race for the presidency i traveled in many primaries and in many states in the deserted textile towns ot new hampshire in the deserted farms of wisconsin in the deserted coal mines of west virginia in the lumber fields of oregon where men were out of work even though we needed housing i saw within the industrial history of those towns one of the great problems which the united states faces in the 1960 s and i have seen it in michigan and i mean automation in the county of mcdowell in west virginia there is more coal mined than ever before in our history and in that same county more men and women wait every month for a surplus food package from the government composed of a few pounds of rice some grain and this summer the department of agriculture has announced they are going to add lard that is what automation means in west virginia and it could mean the same across the united states unless we recognize that machines should provide a better life for people and not a life of desperation for men who are 45 years and 50 and who can t find a job in the last 5 years in the auto industry in this state you have lost because of automation 10 000 jobs and this has been a matter of indifference to the federal government i do not recall hearing this administration ever discuss it and unless we begin to attack it not as a problem in one plant or in one company but as a national problem which demands our attention then by 1970 the blight of west virginia could spread across this country that is what this election means issues such as this where we need to move ahead again and where we can move ahead if we have vigorous leadership first i think the federal government should convene a conference of union leaders and industrial leaders in the basic industries to discuss with them how they can maintain full employment whether they move in new machines secondly we must make it plain that the installation of new machinery is a proper subject for collective bargaining third the government must offer technical assistance to those companies which want to bring in new machinery but want to do so without undue hardship to the workers four we should expand the activities of the u s employment service so that we can take care of those people who are hard hit fifth we have to provide job retraining and also decent unemployment compensation standards on a federal level for those who are thrown out of work this is an issue which is just beginning but it is the kind of all issue which i think the democratic party recognizes i am talking about something that can affect the lives of every man and woman in this stadium economic growth automation full employment those are the issues of the 1960 s a decent life for all americans and what franklin roosevelt attempted to do in the 1930 s in a different scale facing different problems we are going to do in the 1960 s i ask your help in this ejection this is a great country i think it can be greater i don t think that there is any doubt that there is no one in this stadium who is satisfied to see the united states first but first when we want to be first period we need your help in this election i hope you will get out and register and participate and get your friends out this election is your election i can assure you that if you return these democrats in this state if you send pat mcnamara back to the senate if you elect jerry o rourke to represent you in the congress the house the senate and the presidency will work together these are the days of the new frontier the democratic party is ready to lead and i believe this country is ready to move again thank you dem jfk5 9 60b john_f _kennedy the greatest governor in the history of michigan governor williams with the possible exception of john swainson in the years to come senator mcnamara my seat mate in the u s senate between the two of us we usually vote right don jennings whom i am confident will be elected to the congress from this district walter reuther who could be leonard woodcock senator hart mrs price and i am not running senator church he comes from idaho we won t mention him monsignor ladies and gentlemen i am leaving michigan to go to pocatello tonight you have heard of pocatello there was a famous story of a u s senator from idaho who got defeated as we all do sooner or later and therefore it is always regarded as senators who stay on and on after being defeated that they don t want to go to pocatello i will know tomorrow why that is in any case i am delighted to be in muskegon we really have had a great day i must say i am encouraged i don t know if they just took me in the strong democratic areas but in any case we really had a good day and i am most appreciative to you i am most appreciative to mennen this is governor s day in this district he endorsed me at a crucial time in my race for the nomination back at about the 10th of june when everything looked like it might fall apart he endorsed me and the michigan delegation supported him and i don t think there is any doubt that he played a most significant part in securing my nomination for that reason among others i am anxious to win i don t want him to look bad next november i am very grateful to walter reuther who has been speaking ahead of us i have missed some great speeches today but he went ahead of us spoke for an hour or two got the audience warmed up and i came on about l2 years ago a foreign visitor to michigan came and was talking to a u s senator from this state louis kass and was very impressed by michigan he said if this is what michigan is like in its childhood what will it be like in its old age senator kass said michigan or the united states will never have an old age i think that is what we are going to decide in 1960 the democratic party is the oldest political party on earth we trace our intellectual descent back to thomas jefferson our call this year however is to the young at heart whether they are over 65 or under it all those who believe and have lived through the days of woodrow wilson s new freedom through the new deal of franklin roosevelt through the fair deal of harry truman through the great crusade of the last 8 years they know how important this election is that the democratic party assume control of the executive branch of the government and the democratic party of michigan under john swainson with pat mcnamara and don jennings and all the rest are prepared to offer that kind of leadership in this state this has been true of the democratic party throughout our history when the federalist party was old and tired thomas jefferson began the democratic party his first action early as president was the louisiana purchase against the wishes of all those who came from my own section of new england who wanted the country to remain small secluded belonging to a few instead he took a chance and spread the united states west and even though when he became president the western boundary of america was virginia he sent lewis and clark all the way to the pacific ocean to open up the entire united states that has been the spirit of the democratic party it has been the spirit of jackson and roosevelt and truman and all the rest and that is the spirit we are going to recapture i think this is an important election i know that candidates think every election is important but i think that the election of 1960 is important i think we have an opportunity to make a choice of whether we are going to continue to move forward as i believe we must what is at stake in this election is not only our security within this country but also the position of the united states around the world senator johnson and i are prepared to carry on a great effort to secure a new frontier for the united states a frontier which offers not merely what we are going to promise in this campaign but offers an opportunity to all of us to serve the great republic it is i think a source of concern to us all that the first dogs carried around in outer space were not named rover and fido but instead were named belka and strelka it was not named checkers either in any case we are finishing in michigan for the time being but we are coming back to this state we have to carry this state the law says that you can only vote once on election day but if you will go out and register one person between now and the time of election in november then you can vote twice i think that this is an important time i ask your help in this election we can win this one let us try to work together and make michigan democratic sweep this country in november and then begin to go to work and roll up our sleeves and begin to move thank you dem jfk5 9 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming down to this airport to meet us i am sure after spending the day traveling around michigan that michigan is going democratic in november we want your help i want you to know that this campaign i think is the most important election that we have had in many ways since the election of 1932 i don t think we want to turn this country for 4 more years over to the republicans i think we can win we can send pat mcnamara back to the senate elect a great governor to succeed mennen williams john swainson and give me your help thank you dem jfk5 9 60d john_f _kennedy governor williams senator mcnamara lieutenant governor swainson ladies and gentlemen as a driver of a pontiac car i feel very much at home is there anyone here who makes pontiac cars i want to say that it is a pleasure i understand that the republican county chairman is here with us enjoying himself today and we are delighted to have him we want him next november 8 to be with us and if he stays here and listens to the message maybe he will join us this is a great picnic a beautiful day and we are delighted to be here but 1960 is also a serious time in the life of our country i don t think that there is anyone here today who can possibly be satisfied with what is happening to this country here in this state here in this country and dear to the cause of freedom around the world that is what we are concerned about not as democrats not as a political party but as americans who believe in this country we don t say that there is anything wrong with america but we say that we are not going to be satisfied until america is second to none we are not going to be satisfied until every american who desires a job can find one at decent pay we are not going to be satisfied in this country until every american boy and girl is given a decent education that sign which says welcome senior citizens hangs over every labor picnic in the united states today and it hangs over every democratic party meeting but it does not hang over the republican national headquarters because just the month of august when we attempted to secure the passage of medical assistance for the aged in social security we got the vote of only one republican in the u s senate we are not satisfied we are not satisfied to be second we are not satisfied to have 16 million americans living out their lives as senior citizens with an average social security check of 78 a month i am not satisfied as an american to have the average unemployment compensation check for an american out of work and seeking a job to be 31 a week in the richest country in the world i am not satisfied to have the average for laundrywomen and most of them are negroes in five large cities to be 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week this is a great country and we are confident we can move ahead but we want every american regardless of where he may live to live in a decent home with decent schools and a decent hope for the future that is what we are fighting for in this election three years ago i went to havana cuba and i was told that the american ambassador was the second most powerful man in cuba i am not saying he should have been but he was today the soviet ambassador is the second most powerful man in cuba i am not content to see the vision of the united states as a strong and vital country dimmed around the world i am not satisfied to see people in latin america africa and asia who used to look to president roosevelt woodrow wilson and truman now wonder what has happened to us why we are on the decline and look to khrushchev and peiping this is a great country it can be greater it is a powerful country it can be more powerful i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join me in a great effort to rebuild the country that we all love and in which we all believe thank you very much dem jfk5 9 60e john_f _kennedy governor williams lieutenant governor swainson senator mcnamara distinguished state officials ladies and gentlemen it is a pleasure to have an opportunity at this state fair to address a nonpartisan audience forty eight hours ago i went to another fair in the city of palmer in the state of alaska there i saw in that new city surrounded by the matanuska valley which 25 years ago was a desolate wilderness and which is today one of the richest farm areas in the united states i saw a cabbage which weighed 2 pounds i saw a squash 2 feet long at least they told me it was a squash it indicated in that deserted valley of just a few years ago what americans can do the whole state of alaska and the state of michigan and my own state of massachusetts indicates what america can do this fair tells the story of america it shows our dependence on the farms it shows our dependence on the cities i preach the doctrine of interdependence of the american economy because this country cannot be prosperous unless the farmers and the workers are prosperous together this is a great state michigan but it can be a greater state this is a great country the united states but it can be a greater country all of us regardless of our party regardless of such section of the united states that we live in want the same things for america we want security for our families we want peace in the world and we want to see the cause of freedom strengthened that is our obligation that is the responsibility which we are willing to meet i don t think that there is any american who is satisfied with things as they are i think we recognize that there are unfinished tasks for our generation i call upon all americans to join in the great effort to rebuild our country and strengthen the cause of freedom in the year 1789 in the city of hartford conn the skies at noon turned from blue to gray and by midafternoon the city had darkened over so densely that in that religious age men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came the connecticut house of representatives was in session and many of the members clamored for immediate adjournment the speaker of the house one colonel davenport came to his feet and he silenced the din with these words the day of judgment is either approaching or it is not if it is not there is no cause for adjournment if it is i choose to be found doing my duty i wish therefore that candles may be brought i hope in a difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country that all of us may bring candles to help illuminate our country s way thank you very much dem jfk6 10 60 john_f _kennedy governor disalle john weithe mr garrett ladies and gentlemen i come here in 1960 to this state of ohio seeking the election as president of the united states recognizing that the responsibilities and burdens of the next president will be greater than any since 1860 and 1861 i do not run for the presidency after 14 years in the congress without full recognition that as harry truman used to say on his desk there was a sign the buck stops here in my judgment the great questions of war and peace of full employment of economic growth of a stronger society of equal opportunity for all will depend in the final analysis upon the president of the united states not upon the house and not upon the senate congressmen speak for one district members of the u s senate speak for one state i speak for massachusetts and senator engle speaks for california but only the president of the united states speaks for massachusetts and california and the question which cincinnati and ohio must decide for themselves is which president which party which political philosophy you want to govern in the office of the president of the united states because there are very sharp differences there are very sharp differences between mr nixon and myself they have been written and there are in 1960 as there have been in other periods of our history very sharp differences between the republican party and the democratic party cincinatti has voted it is called cincinnati in boston and i am from boston we are going to explain to you how to pronounce it this city this city has supported the republican candidate for the office of the presidency ever since 1936 i think it is time you changed i think that this country needs a new deal for the democratic party and the united states i don t believe that this city and the state of ohio wants for a president of the united states in 1961 a man who thinks a minimum wage of 1 25 an hour for someone working in interstate commerce is extreme i don t believe that anyone who believes in federal aid to education and to make sure that our teachers are well compensated anyone who believes that that is extreme i don t believe the american people are going to endorse that leadership i don t believe that the american people are going to give their endorsement to the leadership which believes that medical care for our older citizens financed under social security is extreme and i quote mr nixon accurately which he does not always do me i don t believe in an administration whose economic and fiscal policies whose devotion to high interest rates have helped bring the recession of 1954 and a recession of 1958 and bring a leveling off in 1960 that is ominous for 1961 the men and women in this audience who work in our factories the small businessmen who depend on credit and on a moving economy to make his living the children who go to over crowded schools the people who are looking to retirement i think they are going to vote in 1960 as this country has voted in other years in favor of a party of progress and a country of progress and all this in the most dangerous time in the life of our country all this has significance to the position of the united states and the world around us if the united states stands still if it does not show vision and vitality in its policy here at home how does anyone think it is going to show vision and vitality in our policy abroad the united states last june offered 300 scholarships to the congo because of the crisis that was more scholarships than we had offered the 2 preceding years to all of africa when we broke off the sugar quota from cuba last june we offered economic aid to latin america mr nixon on meet the press a month ago said that if we had developed that program 5 years ago perhaps we could have prevented castro from seizing power in cuba well this administration was in power syears ago we ignored latin america we have given more aid to yugoslavia since the end of world war ii than all of latin america combined there is not a present american statesman who is quoted by any african leader today they stand on the razoredge of decision they wonder whether the world and the future belongs to the communists or belongs to us a gallup poll taken in february among 10 countries of the world in which the people were asked a simple question which country the soviet union or the united states will be first in military and scientific power in 1970 the soviet union which 40 years ago was the most backward country of europe was asked and a majority of the citizens of every country but one said the soviet union would be first both militarily and scientifically why do they think so why have we fallen behind why do they believe that they will be stronger than we are we have an economy twice theirs we have a long history of scientific progress why in the short space of 40 years has the soviet union been able to capture the imagination of the peeple why are we second in outer space and second in the minds of many of the people of africa and beginning to be second in the minds of many of the people of latin america why was it necessary for a presidential candidate in brazil in the middle of his campaign to pay a visit to castro why was the united states unable to get an indictment of castro by name at the last meeting of the organization of american states because the power and prestige of the united states relative to that of the communist world has diminished in the last decade because these people wonder whether the future belongs to the castros and the khrushchevs and the neutralists who are turning to hostility they wonder whether the future belongs to freedom that is the great issue of 1961 and 1962 i must say i don t think we can capture the imagination of the world we cannot capture the imagination of our own people unless we have an administration manned by men and women who look to the future who recognize that this is a changing and a revolutionary world and that what was good enough 10 or 15 years ago is no longer good enough i want africans and latin americans not to quote roosevelt or lincoln or jefferson i want them to be quoting the next president of the united states i want us to stand for freedom i want us to demonstrate in this country as we sit on a most conspicuous stage that we are a strong and vital country that we and the cause of freedom are closely identified that we want a better life for our people that we do not in this country practice discrimination of any kind that all we want is the best talent we can get that is the kind of society we can build and what we do here and what we are will speak far louder than what we say over the voice of america franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america because he was a good neighbor in the united states i believe that in the 1960 s the united states can once again capture the imagination of the world we can once again be the wonder of those who seek to follow freedom s road freedom s road begins in washington but it stretches around the globe we want people to join us the future belongs to the united states and those who believe as we do our high noon is yet to come the communist system is as old as egypt and if we do our job if we demonstrate vigor and vitality here we can radiate it around the world until finally all those who wish to be free will finally come with us that is the opportunity that is our chance i ask your support in this campaign not promising a life of ease but promising the u s leadership which leads leadership which sets before us our unfinished business leadership which will get this country moving again thank you dem jfk6 11 60 john_f _kennedy mr chairman your next congressman from this district otis pike ladies and gentlemen i come to this county which is not celebrated as one of the strongest democratic counties north of the mason dixon line and ask your support on november 8 i don t know one reason why the people of this county this county of suffolk in the state of new york should not be as concerned as the citizens of any other county of any other state with the progress of their nation that is the issue in this campaign as citizens of this county you have to make your own responsible judgments on november 8 about what the best thing is for our country about what we must do and you have to analyze what mr nixon and i stand for and what our parties stand for now what does mr nixon stand for in this campaign what great issue what great stream of history has he associated himself with in the changing years of the 1960 s i picked up the newspaper 1 hour ago flying from connecticut to long island and the paper says nixon says america is the strongest nation in the world the point of the matter is that isn t what is important the question is is the balance of power in the world moving in our direction or that of the communists of course we are first now we were more than first 5 years ago there was not even a challenge 10 years ago the question is is our rate of increase is the rate of increase in our strength sufficient to insure that we shall be first in 1965 and 1970 that is the only question in the 1960 campaign i have read mr nixon s speeches in this campaign with some interest and after the personal abuse is separated from the rest of it it is a continuation of what we now have and in my judgment and i state it as a responsible citizen of this country what we now have is not good enough in mr nixon s immediate circle of advisers is mr rogers the present attorney general mr scribner of the treasury department mr seaton of the interior department what possible indication is there in either the personnel or in the speeches that there is going to be a new movement forward in the united states if mr nixon is elected i want to make it very clear because my responsibility finishes on tuesday november 8 and yours begins i warn you that the present rate of economic growth the present rise in the power and prestige of the united states is not enough is not good enough it does not give me any cause for pleasure i don t enjoy saying the united states is not as strong and powerful and influential as it must be but it is my responsibility to say it and i am going to continue to say it until tuesday and then you have to make a judgment of what you think for a candidate for the presidency for a vice president who is privy to all the information which this administration possesses about our real position in the world about the rate of economic growth about the hazards and the opportunities that face us in 1961 for that candidate to run on a program of constant reassurance with no indication of urgency in my judgment does not meet his responsibilities as the candidate of a responsible party i want to make it clear that we are responsible and we are telling it as we see it and you have to decide what you want we have to make a judgment on tuesday with some perspective you sit here in november 1960 but you have to make a judgment of the future what is the world going to look like in 1965 what is it going to look like in 1968 and 1970 are you satisfied based on your observation of the past 8 years are you satisfied that by 1964 or 1965 if we continue to drift that there won t be other castros in latin america that there won t be other congos in africa and there won t be other chinese in asia this country is the only hope of freedom if we are not willing to look life in the eye if we are not willing to measure our needs against our performance then of course we will follow the fate which other free people have followed in the last 2 000 years when they come face to face with hard tests i want to be sure that we meet that test but i want to be sure that we meet it by recognizing it by being willing to meet our responsibilities as citizens of this country and i do not believe that any candidate for office who runs in 1960 on a constant program of reassurance of pallid promises of vague charges and innuendoes and personal abuse is meeting his responsibilities to the great republic this country is a growing country by 1965 and 1970 it will steadily be increasing and the property tax in suffolk county will be overwhelming if the last 10 years gives us any indication of the future and one of the ways where i believe this county this state and the national government can play a cooperative role is in federal aid to education colleges and universities and schools are the basic strength of this society the kind of jobs that your children will get in the next 10 years will depend in great measure as industry and technology changes will depend in great measure on the kind of education that you give them and as an american i am not satisfied when 150 000 men and women who graduate in the top 10 in our high schools in the united states do not go to college because they cannot afford it it costs today and i say this to you who have children it costs today 10 000 for a 4 year college education a rise of 4 000 in the last 2 years by 1970 it will cost 15 000 for a college education for your children that will mean unless we do something about it that many of your sons and daughters will never see the inside of a college our college population is expanding at a fantastic rate in 1946 only 22 percent of the men and women between 16 and 21 were enrolled in our colleges last year 36 percent and by 1970 it is estimated that our colleges will have 7 million students in order to equip them in order to make it possible for them to go to college we will have to build in this country twice as many colleges and dormitories as we now have standing in the united states in the next 10 years this is one of our responsibilities as citizens and i want to make it very clear that one of my basic disagreements with the republican party has been twofold first mr nixon s tie breaking vote against aid to the teacher s salaries and secondly the president of the united states veto of a housing bill which includes loans to colleges for dormitories and classrooms that is the kind of leadership the republican party gives therefore i suggest these three steps first that we provide 15 000 to 25 000 national scholarships for our brightest and most talented boys and girls who will return that investment many times over in their useful life to our country secondly i suggest that the federal government and the state government cooperate to provide a loan program for students who may not be advanced enough to secure scholarships whose parents may not have enough money to send them to college but who if they could borrow the money to be paid back after graduation might be able to get an education and make something of themselves in their lives the federal government guarantees loans on your homes guarantees your bank deposits i believe it can guarantee loans to students in order to use their talents effectively for themselves and for our country this campaign has 2 more days i come to suffolk county and ask your help in it my wife grew up in this county not that that is any reason to vote for me but at least it is a reason i think and i am particularly anxious to be here today this county is a suburban county it is a swing county the kind of support that we get in this county will tell whether we will carry the state of new york or not and if we don t carry the state of new york there is no chance of securing a majority in the electoral college if we can do well in this county and i ask your help in doing well if we can do well in this county we are going to put this speech to music and make a fortune out of it let me just say the three things that we stand for in making up your judgment one i am concerned and if elected president will take action to stimulate the economic growth of the united states in order to find jobs for our people and resources for national action two i do not believe that this administration has attracted to washington men and women of sufficient intellectual curiosity foresight vitality and energy and we will send the best talent we can get to represent us around the world three i believe if the united states is going to speak with vigor and strength abroad it must not only carry on the struggle against the communists but it must also identify itself with the people around the globe against poverty misery disease and ignorance i mentioned last night on tv two villages in brazil where the health standards were so bad that not one baby lived beyond the first year and the communists are working in those areas night and day and so is castro which side will they choose the united states which has been indifferent to their problem or will they decide to move to the communists who raise a banner and identify themselves with them we are going to have to do much better and i believe with a new democratic administration committed to progress committed to justice for our people committed to the development of their talents regardless of their race or their creed or their color we can demonstrate that we are a strong and vital and progressive society and we shall show the people in the world to the south of us that we do care that freedom is the road for them because what we do they can do what we do they will do what we must do they must do that is our opportunity on tuesday i am confident that on tuesday november 8 the american people will not take the old tired wornout road but instead will turn and decide to move forward into the wind and demonstrate what this country can really do i ask your help on tuesday i ask your help in the days after in building this country strong dem jfk6 11 60a john_f _kennedy governor ribicoff mayor tedesco senator dodd thank you first of all mayor mulvihill i want to present to you your congressman who i am sure you are going to reelect by a great margin congressman irwin who has begun a great job in the congress we need all the talent we can get in washington and he is one of the talented progressive members of the congress and i am sure you are going to send him back and frank kowalski who runs at large in the state of connecticut congressman at large i want to express my appreciation to all of you for coming out governor ribicoff and the delegation from this state in 1956 supported my nomination for the vice presidency in fact governor ribicoff nominated me he is also the first public official that ever supported me for the presidency away back 4 years ago and therefore i come here to connecticut to express my thanks and also to ask you for your support on tuesday november 8 for the office of the presidency the presidency and the president has many functions and many responsibilities many given to him by the constitution and others suggested to him by the pressure of events but among the functions he has is to symbolize the national mood and i believe the people of this country on november 8 must make a decision about what their national mood is is your national mood to sit down and rest in the sun or is it to pick ourselves up and move this country forward mr nixon has chosen by his career by the party that he leads and by his speeches by his speeches in this campaign he has chosen to emphasize all of what is bright all that is shiny in american life i have chosen to emphasize not what is easy about life here but what we must do as citizens of this country if we are going to maintain our security if we are going to maintain our obligations to ourselves and to those who look to us it is the function of a public official and a candidate for office not merely to go to the people and give them reassurance it is the function and responsibility of a political candidate for a national office in a free society and it has been since the time of ancient athens to tell the truth the more i see of this administration the more i see of this campaign the more important i think it is that we are successful on tuesday what good is it for a candidate for the presidency to travel around the united states and the world saying that i am downgrading america that the prestige has never been higher when his own state department has polls which inform him differently what good is it what good is it for an administration to release preliminary figures on employment in those years when it will help them politically and then when they are in danger and when the figures show something different they delay them until after election who do they think they fool in this country and how can a society which depends upon the consent of a majority of the governed how can such a society function and meet its responsibilities unless the truth is told and the truth will make us free the fact of the matter is that mr nixon leads a party which has opposed progress for 25 years and he is a representative of it he leads a party which in 1935 voted 90 percent against a 25 cent minimum wage and he leads a party which voted 90 percent in 1960 against 1 25 an hour minimum wage he leads a party which in the 1930 s voted 90 percent against the social security act and he leads a party which voted 99 percent against the medical care for the aged tied to social security in 1960 the elephant never forgets but he never learns mr nixon has chosen this week and i read his headlines and in between calling me an economic ignoramus a liar and a pied piper he has also said we are going to have a depression inflation and all the rest i would like to point out to you the clever fiscal management that this administration has demonstrated with a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 the largest peacetime deficit in the history of the united states 12 billion in 1958 a 4 billion less in revenue this year than they estimated 4 months ago a 1 billion loss of gold in the last 3 months we have 18 billion in this country we have lost nearly 6 to 8 billion in the last 10 years and we have lost 1 billion in 3 months and mr nixon says that i am responsible for speculation on the gold market the only thing i am responsible for is moving him out of office on tuesday november 8 mr nixon goes to michigan and he says that those who talk about an economic slowdown misinform the people we have never built as many cars in our history he says in september and october and he neglects to point out we have never had so many unsold cars in our history in september october and november the choice for you is clear the choice is between those who sit still and look to the past and between those who look to the future between those who recognize that in this deadly age when we are involved in a close and narrow competition for survival for the maintenance of freedom around the globe with our adversaries the communists the best that this country can do is none too good therefore i come here today and ask your help in moving this country forward again this is an important election the office of the presidency is key the presidency is the most important office not only in the united states but in the free world and i cannot believe that in 1960 we are going to select as president of the united states a man who is described by his close friend governor rockefeller as a question mark we are going instead to affirm our conviction that this country has a role to fulfill in the world and it cannot meet its responsibilities to freedom around the world unless it is meeting its responsibilities to its own citizens here in the united states so on tuesday give us your help your hand your voice your vote and we will win dem jfk6 11 60b john_f _kennedy governor meyner mayor kenny members of the city government your two distinguished congressmen congressman gallagher whom i know you are going to elect again congressman daniels who deserves your support at the polls on tuesday thorn lord who will be the next u s senator from the state of new jersey ladies and gentlemen i come here and this campaign is coming to an end this is the last speech that i make outside of new england and i come here tonight to a great democratic city and county and ask your support on tuesday this campaign has taken us to all sections of the united states to every state over a period of many months and in the next 30 hours this campaign will come to a close and then the people of the united states must make their decision i believe that the people of the united states face two very distinct choices between a party and a candidate who have opposed progress throughout their respective careers and a party and a candidate who have supported progress throughout their respective careers i believe in 1960 that this country needs a democratic administration that this country needs the kind of talented men and women to serve in all there is of our national government to represent us across the world to speak with vigor and force i come from a party and i stand proudly as its candidate who initiated all the great pieces of social legislation which means so much in the lives of our citizens and mr nixon comes from a party and he is identified with it that bears the dubious distinction of having opposed every single one of these pieces of social legislation i asked a month ago in cleveland if someone could tell me one progressive thing that the republican party had stood for or done this century and when nobody answered i was criticized the next day by the paper a republican paper who said that i had ignored the accomplishments of president taft in the field of child labor in 1904 all right what have they done since 1904 i asked them and what have they done since 1932 or what have they done since 1953 i must say you must have been here for a while practicing how did you know i was going to ask that question in any case you have been here i understand for about 2 or 3 or 4 hours six hours i want you all to keep your health because we need you on tuesday this campaign is vitally important to the state of new jersey the state of new jersey is vitally important to the country this county may well determine what the state of new jersey does and the 14 electoral votes 16 electoral votes of new jersey this is the only audience that knows how many electoral votes they have this must be a very politically active city is it there is a rumor to that effect so it is 16 votes that is even better those 16 votes may well determine who will be the next president of the united states and the next president of the united states may well determine not only the great issues of war and peace but may also determine what kind of a country we have which direction we are going what kind of economy we have what kind of employment security you have what assurances you have on the education of your children that they can get to change that in your old age or your family s old age there will be medical care tied to social security all these are matters that come across the desk of the president of the united states president truman used to have a sign which says the buck stops here sooner or later every problem which faces us as a people comes before the president of the united states and on that basis and recognizing full well the high responsibilities and burdens of that office which are greater now than they have ever been in the past i still come here and ask your support in order to win that position not because not just because i think it is a major mistake to elect mr nixon and the republican party in 1960 but also because i believe the presidency is the key office not only in this country but in the whole free world and i believe the next president of the united states has to be by conviction and not merely by electioneering commitments has to be committed to progress which mr nixon in his career has not been we stand together in this fight this is a fight that can be won it can be won in this state and i come here in the dying days of this campaign as we leave now for lewiston maine and providence r i tonight i come here to this county and ask you to help us on tuesday by turning out the largest democratic majority that this county has turned out for 20 years we shall not slumber and we shall keep working for the next 36 hours until we know what decision the people of this country are going to make thank you let me just say win or lose good or bad up or down fair wind or bad i believe that the united states has benefited by this campaign i believe that mr nixon and the republican party have learned a lesson that in a dangerous and trying time in the life of this country there is no substitute for action we cannot drift or sleep or lie at anchor this country is about to begin another great march forward and in the lead will be the county of hudson and the city of jersey thank you dem jfk6 11 60c john_f _kennedy senator muskie congressman oliver congressman to be donovan senator to be lucia cormier i hope she will be a wonderful one dave roberts the next congressman from his district ladies and gentlemen i come here tonight with a good deal of regret i am sorry we were late we were not playing golf we have been out carrying the message and i am grateful to all of you more than i can say for having been willing to stay here ed muskie s voice is just about gone but we stay here because we believe it important for maine and the country on tuesday november 8 that a democratic president and vice president be elected to lead this country maine and the country have a very clear choice on tuesday you have to decide between a candidate and his party who opposes progress a candidate and his party who have opposed those measures which make it possible for us to maintain the employment of our people in maine and across the country mr nixon believes that the program which we have recommended of medical care for the aged tied to social security is extreme he believes and has said so that 1 25 an hour minimum wage is extreme he is part of an administration whose administration has seen a recession in 1954 a recession in 1958 and again in 1960 the beginning of a slowdown in our economy maine has a chance and so does the country to choose progress i have been all over this state and i represented massachusetts which shares all of the problems that maine has for the last 14 years in the congress the needs of maine and the needs of massachusetts are very much the same and the needs of the united states are very much the same we need employment in our textile mills we need development of our natural resources we need to provide education for our children jobs for our people medical care for our aged tied to social security we need to do all these things in a country and in a society that is on the move if we are going to be strong abroad if we are going to win the peace if we are going to maintain our prestige it will be not only by speeches and debates and good will missions it will be by building in this country a strong and vital and progressive society committed to finishing the unfinished business building here the kind of country which will serve as an example to freedom all around the globe mr nixon has stated if he is elected president he has stated if he is elected president that he will go to eastern europe i want to make it clear that if i am elected president of the united states i will go to washington d c and begin to work this is where the job must first be done if we are going to negotiate with khrushchev if we are going to help freedom around the globe we first have to build our strength here in the united states i come here to maine not a state which has been overwhelmingly democratic in presidential elections in the past but i come here to maine and ask your support in this campaign to build this state to build our region to build our country and move it forward and i hope maine will send to the u s senate my distinguished friend and colleague who is standing here tonight who will make a great companion in the senate of the united states with ed muskie in representing maine and the country lucia cormier and who will serve with frank coffin as the governor of the state of maine we are engaged in a close and hard fought campaign this state it is not easy everybody who votes every bit of support we can get will be most helpful we are running as the candidates who believe in progress for our country mr nixon is running as part of a team you have seen these elephants in the circus and as they move around that circus ring the only way they can get around is to grab the tail of the elephant in front of them well there is no elephant in front of mr nixon this year he is running and you have to decide as citizens of this state and citizens of this country you have to decide what your view is of maine and the country what you think ought to happen whether you are satisfied with things as they are whether you believe that things are being done in their own good measure whether you are satisfied with our economic growth at home whether you believe our prestige in the world is rising if you are satisfied if you are comfortable mr nixon is your man not really but if you hold my view that the united states as the great defender of freedom in the 1960 s has to move ahead has to provide opportunity for its people has to develop in this country a strong and vigorous society which it cannot possibly do under the administration of a candidate who reassures and comforts the people in a time of hazard and a time of peril i believe this country has a great destiny in the sixties i don t know any assignment it cannot meet any responsibility it cannot bear but it has to first recognize that it needs to move forward that it needs action that it needs direction that it needs to finish the things that are still unfinished i come to maine and ask your help in doing that i ask you to join us in 1789 may i say that as maine goes so goes vermont and i hope so goes the nation we are going to leave it up to you in 1789 in nearby hartford conn the skies at noon turned one day from blue to gray by midafternoon the city had darkened over so densely that in that religious age men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came the connecticut house of representatives was in session and many of the members clamored for an immediate adjournment and the speaker of the house one colonel davenport came to his feet and he silenced the din with these words the day of judgment is either approaching or it is not if it is not there is no cause for adjournment but if it is i choose to be found doing my duty i wish therefore that candles may be brought i hope that all of us in the coming days months and years in a difficult and trying time in the life of our country in the cause of freedom may bring candles to help illuminate our country s way thank you dem jfk6 11 60d john_f _kennedy distinguished guests mr ed mills governor meyner thorn lord who i hope will be the next representative from the state of new jersey who will be a good and responsible and progressive one my colleagues in congress with whom i have served for nearly 14 years pete rodino that aging fullback from brown hugh addonizio both men have stood for the interests of the people of their districts and the people of the united states and i know you are going to return them by overwhelming odds and we have a chance to elect a democratic congressman and they are very important any one of you who followed the session in august knows that we lost vote after vote and we have in the past by 10 or 12 votes in the house of representatives minimum wage the labor bill all the rest we need about 10 new democratic congressmen and one of them can be bob peacock from the state of new jersey mayor carlin and now i want to say a word for kennedy i want you to get out there and show if there is any group in the united states that should know the importance of this election it is the men and women who are here today it is your people it is your people it is your people who are thrown out of work when there is a recession it is your people who retire without medical care when they are older it is your children and the children of your people who do not get to college if we don t pass a loan program or if we don t build enough buildings it is your people who are affected by the problems before this election it is your people who are denied equal opportunity and a fair chance to develop their talents you know the issues of this campaign you have lived with them for 25 years and you know how important it is with a democratic house coming up a democratic senate coming up you know how important it is that we have a president of the united states who believes in progress i don t care what promises commitments position papers or speeches the vice president of the united states makes in this campaign his record is written on the statute books of this country i have served in the congress from the day that he came there and i know that record pretty well he makes a speech in new york three weeks ago saying that he believes in a progressive housing bill and in the course of that position paper states the housing act of 1949 works well he forgets that i remember that he voted against it when he talks though he has not been talking much this way since his trip to south carolina when he talks about civil rights and about equality of opportunity for all americans and how he fought for it in the government contracts committee i happen to remember seven times in the house of representatives in the late forties he voted against the fair employment practices commission that came to the floor of the congress that your congressman voted for i do not believe in leap year progressivism every 4 years at election time i believe that day in and day out the record is written and mr nixon leads a political party that in the midthirties voted 95 percent against a 25 cent minimum wage and he leads that same party that in august of this year voted 90 percent in the house of representatives against 1 25 minimum wage now let me make it clear you addonizio and pete rodino and the others would agree a house and senate which is democratic does not provide any assurance at all any action on any legislation unless you have a president working with that house and senate all the time twice we passed an area depressed bill twice the president vetoed it both parties have been promising aid to education for 8 years and it has not been done if i ever saw assurance for inaction at the time when action is essential in this country s history it is to divide the responsibility of our national government i come here today and ask your support that isn t enough this is a close election it will be decided by 1 or 2 percent very probably in most of the major states now when mr gallup took his poll a week or 10 days ago among all those who answered he gave the democrats 49 to 45 and then he threw out scientifically threw out that 4 percent who he predicted would not vote based on previous history their economic condition and all the rest do you know what the final figures then were 49 49 do you know what the 4 percent came out of us out of the democratic party can you tell me any one of you that we can throw away 4 percent of the vote in new jersey and still carry it we can t we have to go get that 4 percent this year we have to encourage them to vote we have to go and do the work which is necessary on tuesday this state will be won or lost by a narrow margin and so will the country pennsylvania michigan illinois ohio connecticut massachusetts in massachusetts we might do better than that but in the other states if we don t we might as well stay home but 4 percent four out of every hundred they are people that you are in touch with they are people that the members of your union are in touch with we have to get them out to vote there is not 1 day s work that you will do whether you are a citizen or whatever you may be in your occupation that will have as much importance on your life as the selection of a president of the united states in the next 4 years on his judgment on his foresight on his sense of responsibility on his vigor on his willingness to work with the congress depends in great measure the welfare of this country its progress the welfare of its citizens it may be a hard cold winter in 1961 those of you who work in the uaw know that we are building more cars than we have built for 5 or 6 years and we are not selling them and we are going to have a million unsold cars by the middle of november at the present rate and then they will begin to lay off when the election is over steel is 55 percent houses are down 30 percent budget estimates down 4 billion 1 billion of gold flowed out of the country since june we have a lot of problems coming across the horizon and they are bigger than a man s hand tuesday is one day where you can do something about it and i come here tonight and ask not just for your support but i ask you to help us move new jersey and the united states forward again dem jfk6 11 60e john_f _kennedy governor ribicoff mayor lee congressman giaimo i hope you are going to reelect him congressman who is running at large for the state of connecticut frank kowalski john golden ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to come to new haven delighted to come to connecticut this state in 1956 was the first state in the union that was generous enough to support my candidacy for the vice president and was the first in the union and was the first in the union to support my candidacy for the presidency so i am glad to be here this campaign comes to an end in the next 48 hours mr nixon s responsibility and mine will then be over and the voters of this country must then meet their responsibility and i believe that there is a very clear voice a very sharp difference between the views taken by mr nixon and myself in this time of danger and hazard mr nixon has chosen to go to the country arguing that our country has never been better that our prosperity has never been greater and that our prestige in the world has never been higher i do not recall any candidate for office whose speeches have shown less reaction to the actual facts since stanley baldwin ran in 1935 in england i made three points in september first that this country s economy was not moving ahead at a rate which would maintain full employment and permit us to meet our national commitments at home and abroad secondly that the prestige of the united states had dropped in recent months and thirdly that unless we made a greater effort there was a danger in the early years of the 1960 s that there would be a military gap between the western world and the communist world which would serve the advantages of communist foreign policy those three points mr nixon denied all of them and now in the last 2 months in the last 2 weeks one we are according to the figures released yesterday we have more unemployment than we had in the recession at this time since 1958 two we are going to have more cars unsold by the middle of november 1 million of them 1 million unsold cars the largest inventory in the history of the united states three we have lost since june 1 billion of the 18 billion that backs our currency which has moved abroad four in the last 2 months the administration s figures on the amount of income that would be received from tax purposes from our economy has dropped between 3 and 4 billion i don t think there is any doubt mr nixon has been proven wrong about our unexampled prosperity in 1960 the second point that i made in easy september was that the prestige of the united states had dropped in the world mr nixon said it was at the highest in our history and he pointed to the votes at the united nations as evidence one since that time polls which must have been available to him when he made that statement demonstrate very clearly that in 9 out of 10 countries sampled this summer a majority of the people believe that the soviet union is ahead of us now in science and believe by 1970 the soviet union will be ahead of us not only in science but in military power and in the rate of economic growth and how many countries will follow a leader who is not able to maintain the lead the bible tells us who prepares for battle when the bugle blows an uncertain sound so no 2 mr nixon said that the votes in the united nations indicated how high our prestige is the next day on the question of the admission of red china of the 16 new nations admitted to the united nations this summer not one country voted with us we brought more students from abroad 10 years ago than we do today to study under the federal program the second point therefore on our prestige the facts have proven mr nixon wrong the third that a military gap may open between the free world and the communist world in this morning s new york times a study by the rand corp indicated their judgment that at the present rates of military increase in power by 1970 the soviet union would be ahead of us you have to decide on tuesday yourselves which candidate which party which philosophy which judgment now can mr nixon create an urgency in january and february and march of 1961 to try to persuade the congress to act on those pieces of business which require national action and national commitments how can he persuade a democratic congress that it is now time for us to move forward when his entire campaign has been based on the other fact that everything is being done in its own good time i have done the best i could our position is quite clear in my judgment future events will clearly bear out the position which the democratic party in this campaign has taken you have to decide yourselves on tuesday what your judgment is of our present what your judgment is of your responsibilities as citizens of the united states and i believe on tuesday the people of this country are going to choose to go forward they are tired of sitting still and in my judgment i do not recall in 25 years when the republican party has ever been willing to move this country ahead on any great national program mr nixon campaigns on the program that party labels don t mean very much that it is just the man i say it is the man the party nominates the record is there both of our parties are like great rivers moving back into history with different direction different force different power the way they are flowing what they have done in the course of their run i believe indicates very clearly what they will do in the future in this century i stand in succession to three distinguished democratic presidents woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman and in every case their domestic programs had their counterpart in their success in their foreign policy the 14 points of woodrow wilson was the international counterpart of the new freedom the four freedoms of franklin roosevelt and the united nations had their domestic counterpart in the new deal and the marshall plan nato point 4 and technical assistance all were the companion piece to the efforts mr truman made here in the united states to move us ahead mr nixon stands in succession to certain republican presidents mr mckinley stand pat with mckinley return to normalcy with harding keep cool with coolidge two chickens in every pot with herbert hoover these are the great rallying cries of the republican party in the 20th century repeal social security with alf landon had enough with tom dewey and you ve never had it so good with dick nixon i think these slogans tell us something and so do the candidates and so do the records of the party and i believe in the 1960 s when the great question before us and not the usual ones but our ability to maintain a national and international competition with a monolithic power which is able to mobilize all of the resources of the state both human and material for the service of the state we cannot possibly afford to drift or lie at anchor or rest this has to be a time for action for us the last 8 years we do not need the perspective of history to tell us that the relative rate of increase in drive power expansion prestige scientific and economic development the relative rate of increase of the communist world has been at the expense of the free world i want mr khrushchev to know that a new generation of americans who fought in world war ii to maintain our freedom is prepared to build this country as an example of what freedom can do in the 1960 s this is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned and in my judgment on tuesday the people of the united states are going to give us an opportunity to pick this country up and move it forward thank you dem jfk6 11 60f john_f _kennedy governor meyner dan hempstead the next u s senator from the state of new jersey thorn lord and i hope you do support him because he merits your support and we need another democrat senator from this state and our two congressional candidates from this area jim dobbins of the seventh district and vincent mckenna and i hope you support them i want to express my regrets at having been late we have not been playing golf we have been campaigning we have been campaigning in connecticut and new york and after we leave new jersey tonight we go to maine and rhode island we are going to carry the new england states and new york i come here to new jersey tonight to ask your help not only for my own candidacy and that of senator johnson but because i believe the positions we have taken in this campaign as they affect the security of the united states are in the interests of the united states and this country needs a democratic victory every assumption upon which mr nixon has based his campaign away back in august every assumption has begun to crumble first that this country was enjoying unequaled prosperity already that is beginning to have a hollow sound in pittston pa along the ohio river in southern illinois in west virginia and kentucky where we have more people unemployed this month than we had since the october recession of 1958 i cannot this is the only group in the united states that ever got photographers to do anything they were not ready to do so we congratulate you it shows new jersey is going to go democratic on tuesday let me say mr nixon based his campaign on three points first that this country s economy was never so good secondly that our prestige in the world was never higher third that the balance of power in the world was moving in the direction of freedom now it has not been 2 months not 2 years it hasn t been 2 months and already every one of those assumptions is beginning to look hollow and will look far worse next january we are going to have more unsold cars in the middle of november than we have had in our history l million unsold cars at the beginning of a new season we are using our steel capacity 55 percent in the month of september we build 30 percent less homes than a year ago by january or february this country could be face to face with serious economic difficulties particularly if led by an administration which 2 months ago said we had the greatest prosperity in our history it took 2 or 3 years for some of the predictions which governor stevenson made in the 1956 campaign to come true it is taking 2 months to prove that the assumptions and prophecies of richard nixon already are untrue second mr nixon stated that our prestige was never higher even though he must have known his own information service of the state department had taken surveys in 10 countries around the world this summer and these surveys show convincingly that in 9 of 10 countries a majority of the people believe the soviet union is ahead of us militarily and scientifically and will surely be by 1970 he pointed to the votes in the united nations as evidence of our high prestige and the next day on the admission of red china not a single new african nation voted with us third mr nixon has said in today s paper that we are the most powerful nation in the world he does not point out that a study by the rand corp for johns hopkins in this morning s new times pointed out that at the present rate of military power increase by 1970 the united states will be inferior to the soviet union what does this country need to know about a candidate if he misled the people in this campaign on three matters essential to our survival does he indicate he is ready to lead the united states in the 1960 s i do not think so this country cannot survive unless the political leaders those who seek positions of responsibility are willing to tell the people the truth and you cannot hide the truth in all the department agencies in washington the people of this country know what the facts are and that is why i believe on tuesday november 8 they will not choose to place the affairs of this country in the bands of a candidate like mr nixon in the hands of a political party like the republicans who have opposed progress for 25 years if mr nixon were successful tuesday and he has to deal as he will have to deal with a democratic house and a democratic senate how can he suddenly turn around 180 degrees and ask this country to do the very things that he now says are unnecessary i predict that the united states will make a decision on tuesday and that decision will affect its future and its security throughout the entire 1960 s this country is either going to choose to accept the viewpoint that we have put forward that it is time we started moving again that it is time we made a greater national and international effort or it will accept the view of mr nixon and will rest on its oars and will drift and will lie at anchor and will pay the price i ask your support not merely for my candidacy or that of my colleagues but i ask your support in choosing right for this country in moving this country forward in picking it up and sending it into the sixties to meet its responsibilities mr nixon represents a party which has opposed progress for many years he represents a party which voted 90 percent against a 25 cent minimum wage in the midthirties and voted 90 percent against 1 25 minimum wage in 1960 he represents a party which has opposed the strengthening of our educational system which has opposed medical care for our older citizens tied to social security which has brought recession in 1954 again in 1958 and has brought us to an economic slowdown in the vital year of 1960 since june the united states has lost 1 billion worth of gold 1 billion since june we have cut our estimated tax revenues this year 4 billion that is the kind of economy this administration runs that is the kind of a country that this administration now seeks to have its record endorsed from if this is the experience upon which mr nixon runs i want no part of it the decision is yours you have to decide what you want what you believe what your view is my judgment is clear after 14 years in the congress my judgment is that this country if it is going to maintain its security if it is going to meet its commitments to freedom is going to have to do better in the sixties you have to decide what is your view what is your view of your responsibilities as citizens of this country i ask your help in new jersey let us make this state democratic and let us make the united states democratic we are electing on tuesday not a committee not a protg not a rescue squad we are electing a president of the united states you have seen these elephants in the circus with their heads full of ivory thick skins no vision long memory and to move around the circus they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them and that is what mr nixon is now doing with president eisenhower that was all right in 1952 he was led around the ring and in 1956 but this year he is running and he has no elephant out in front of him this year i come here tonight and ask you to join us ask you to make a decision which will permit this country to have the kind of leadership which will enable us to build a strong and vital society a society which will serve as an inspiration to people all over the globe we are the chief defenders of freedom and it is incumbent upon us to get moving again i ask your help in doing it thank you dem jfk6 11 60g john_f _kennedy governor ribicoff congressman monagan the next congressman from this district senator dodd congressman kowalski my name is kennedy and i have come to ask your support back in 1956 when i was a candidate for the vice presidential nomination my name was placed in nomination by your distinguished governor and the first state support that i received was connecticut 4 years ago and the first public official in the united states to support my campaign for the presidency was gov abe ribicoff my debt to connecticut is great and i come here in the last 48 hours of this campaign to the greatest rally that we have had in this entire campaign right here in this city it is now a quarter to 3 dick nixon has been in bed for 4 hours let me make it clear i do not come here with an escort i come by myself we are not electing a committee next tuesday we are electing a president of the united states you have seen these elephants in the circus that go around the ring and they grab the tail of the elephant in front and that is what nixon is doing that was all right in 1952 and 1956 but there is no elephant out in front now now we are moving ahead anyway new england has not had a democratic president since franklin pierce 104 years ago and i think it is about time this campaign really is fought over one issue and it is an issue which i believe importantly affects the welfare of this country mr nixon has chosen to go to the people of this country in the year 1960 saying at home our prosperity has never been greater that we have never had it so good and saying abroad that our prestige has never been higher i run as a candidate for the presidency with a view that this is a great country but it must be greater i want to see us build here in this country a strong and vital and progressive society that will serve as an inspiration to all those people who desire to follow the road that we have followed at the time of the american revolution thomas paine said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind now in 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america we defend freedom if we succeed here if we can build a strong and vital society then the cause of freedom is strengthened if we fail here if we drift if we lie at anchor if we don t provide an example of what freedom can do in the 1960 s then we have betrayed not only ourselves and our destiny but all those who desire to be free and are not free that is why i think this election is important that is why this is an important campaign mr nixon and i disagree completely on the obligations that all of us have and the sense of this country and i think this is a campaign that must be won if we are going to move this country ahead on tuesday night the first state of the union to vote and have its results is the state of connecticut it will be about 3 or 4 30 in california when the results of connecticut are announced this state is important what you do is important you can have an effect here and across the country and i come here tonight and ask your help franklin d roosevelt in 1936 accepting his second presidential nomination said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference we don t want that in connecticut on tuesday our work is finished and your work begins i ask you to support us i promised the mayor that i would have you all in bed by three i want to just say and i mean it no 1 this is the biggest crowd we have had in a city of this size in the united states no 2 it is not 12 o clock it is 3 o clock in the morning and i must say every day i keep reading the vice president says the tide is suddenly going in his direction well i think the tide is rising in connecticut that is just going to wash him all the way out governor maybe you can give it to them for a while and then i will come back and give it to them some more in any case i want to thank you very much staying here 3 or 4 hours i am in your debt and we are going to try to win this election on tuesday and then make this election worth winning by by doing something for our country thank you now i will speak for a while again i will close by telling you of a letter which lincoln wrote in a campaign very much like this 100 years ago when the issues were the same he wrote to a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later when the issue is still freedom or slavery we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice we see the storm coming and we know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk6 9 60a john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen senator church state officers i want to express my appreciation to you for your generous reception at 4 30 in the morning and also 9 30 i must say that i was not surprised that frank church told me this morning that one third pretty near of the people who had gone to alaska had come from the state of idaho when i saw 100 people at the airport at 4 30 in the morning back east the democrats go to bed about 9 o clock regardless of what happens so i was very impressed and my appreciation goes to all i have been traveling around the united states for the last few days since the close of congress really beginning the democratic campaign of 1960 in that campaign i have been discussing some of the problems which the united states faces and also some of the opportunities which i have included under the general heading of the new frontier some of the opportunities which we face as a country i do not take a depressed view of the future of the united states i think our potential is unlimited because the combination of an energetic people of a free society occupying a happy land i think makes us an unbeatable combination for the future i look to the future of the united states with optimism i regard our function as the minority party as members of the democratic party to merely offer the american people alternatives which will increase their strength their prosperity and their security we do not travel in the united states and criticize present action because we feel depressed about the future of our country we travel the united states in this campaign because it is our responsibility to present to the american people alternative courses of action which will make this a stronger and a better place in which to live the more i travel in this country the more i see of it the more optimistic i become i think the future of the united states is unlimited and i say that after traveling to maine on friday to the last frontier of alaska on saturday and to the great industrial frontier of michigan yesterday i come today to the frontier of energy which is symbolized by the vitality which is on the surface in alaska and also the energy which is underground in the state of idaho i recognize that idaho is regarded as the potato capital of the world i was in aroostook county maine which regards itself as the potato capital of the world i do not know enough about the rival claims or i know too much about them to make a judgment on which really is the potato capital of the world except i do believe that it is vitally important for us in this campaign perhaps not to settle that dispute but to settle the question of where the capital of the free world is and that should be washington d c and will be again the great issue which the united states faces in this campaign of course is our relation with the sino soviet bloc how we can live in the same world with them possessing as we both do a hydrogen capacity which could destroy mankind as well as our society and also maintain our security and the security of the free world that is the basic issue which is before us as americans and as believers in freedom and it is the solution to this somewhat parochial situation that we must address our energy but i also think it is true that we cannot possibly hope to be strong and vigorous in foreign policy we cannot hope to assert our will against that of the communists until we are a strong and vigorous country here at home i do not accept the view that we can be influential abroad that we can be a source of leadership abroad unless we also are a source of leadership here at home i think the administrations of wilson roosevelt and truman prove that point it is a fact that in those administrations the vitality of the american system was mostly developed and it has been in those administrations which have stood still at home that we have stood still abroad therefore i address myself to domestic matters here in idaho but i do so with the realization that they involve our future security throughout the world i think that the test of course of a free society is the kind of leadership it has the leadership and the support that that leadership can secure really is essential to the successful working of a free system a democracy is the most difficult kind of government to operate it represents the last flowering really of the human experience the communist system really is as old as egypt and we represent really the most modern and evolutionary development of the human experience therefore what we need is good leadership and i think frank church is the kind of man which this country needs in a position of leadership it was not an accident that he was chosen to keynote the democratic convention as one of the youngest members of the senate as a member of the senate who has not served out his first term and coming from a small state with few electoral votes he nevertheless was chosen to express the vision of the democratic party at the democratic convention that is a testimony not only to idaho but to frank church and i am delighted with it i hope this state will send another senator to stand beside him in the senate and speak for progress for this state and for the country and will send bob mclaughlin to the u s senate in november this last session of the congress did not fulfill our expectations one of the reasons was the parliamentary obstruction which the house rules committee threw in the way of a successful consideration of bills on education and housing both of these are most important issues to the state of idaho this state could well use federal aid for education it could well use federal aid for teachers salaries and this state s lumber industry could well use a go ahead signal in the housing industry but in both of those bills after they had passed the senate members of the house rules committee every republican member of the rules committee joining with a few democrats on that committee in spite of the wishes of the majority of the democrats on the house rules committee voted against even permitting the members of the house to vote on housing and education now you cannot move ahead when a few men block passage therefore i think it is essential if we are going to secure a green light to move ahead that we send ralph harding to speak for this district in the congress of the united states i have been in the congress for 14 years and if there is any lesson that i have learned in that 14 years it is that in spite of the fact that the congress of the united states is one of the three coordinate branches of the federal government equal in all respects to the executive and the judiciary the fact of the matter is that both by the constitution and by the pressure of events a president is necessary who will cooperate with that congress if that congress is going to be effective if we appropriate money the president is not compelled to spend it if we appropriate 600 million for defense the president can impound it if we pass legislation dealing with the minimum wage or medical care for the aged tied to social security if the president vetoes that bill his veto can be sustained by one third of the senate plus one and or one third of the house plus one therefore in order for the congress which is today democratic to fulfill its commitments as supporters of the democratic platform it is also necessary to have a president that can work with the congress and not against it i run for the office of the presidency recognizing that the presidency is the wellspring of action in the american constitutional system only the president speaks for the united states frank church speaks for idaho and i speak for massachusetts and senator jackson speaks for washington but only the president of the united states speaks for washington and idaho and massachusetts and only if a president supports action can this country hope to move ahead you have seen that as it affects the state of idaho in recent weeks the decision of the president of the united states to veto the bill which would have brought relief to the lead and zinc mines of the state of idaho indicated that in spite of the fact that it had passed both the house and the senate the president of the united states was able to kill it because of the powers of that office i do not say that those powers should be limited it should be within the jurisdiction of the president and in his competence to veto bills but i do say that we will move ahead more if a president of the united states shares the views of a democratic congress rather than opposes them another bill which i think is of importance and i was asked about it at the press conference this morning but i did not know what they were talking about was of course the project which deals with the burns creek i had considered the matter and voted for it twice as part of the effort to finish the palisades project let me make it clear that project has come before the u s senate twice it deals with a matter of supporting power and irrigation i supported it on both of those occasions unfortunately in the last days of the last session that bill did not come to the floor of the house of representatives i want to make it perfectly clear that if i am elected president or if i serve in the u s senate that that project will receive my support for the third time i don t want to however dwell on the past i want to stress the future for this election does not really go in the long run to the records of the two parties in past years the only significance of analyzing the past is that it does give us some key to the future i think that here in this particular part of idaho we have one of the keys for the future that is in the national reactor testing station at arco here is the key to our own military mobility but it is also a key to the development of the peaceful use of atomic energy which can make atomic energy not merely a burden for mankind but a blessing this station is an important output and an important outpost to the new frontier of energy this nation can be proud of what is going on at that station but the nation should also be concerned about what is not going on at the arco station that station is doing an excellent job of testing atomic powerplants and reactors but if we are moving ahead if we are going to move ahead with more vision and vigor in this field arco today could be testing on an extensive scale advanced reactor concepts for rocket propulsion space vehicles and civilian atomic power if this nation were moving ahead with more aggressive research and development in this field the benefits would be felt throughout the west for in this region alone are more than three fourths of the free world s known uranium reserves uranium mines which are now plagued with cutbacks and stretchouts could be tapped to their fall potential but even more important that kind of aggressive atomic research and development is needed if this country is going to win the race for peaceful competition the harsh facts of the matter are that this nation today is not moving ahead on the kind of research and development project in atomic energy that we must do if we are going to maintain our position of leadership in this vital field of energy the national science advisory committee on mineral research has also indicated that we are not moving ahead in that field and they have recommended more intensive research into getting at minerals deep under ground to find new ways of locating the vast wealth which is underneath the sediment covering the western states our methods of exploring mineral deposits on or near the surface are no longer sufficient particularly if we are to compete with foreign producers who work rich ranges of ore similarly our research in the peaceful uses of atomic energy has fallen far short of expectation this is a matter of particular interest to the people who live in my own section of new england we have the highest power rates in the united states nearly twice as high as they are in the tennessee valley or in the northwest united states our only hope of maintaining our industry in that old section of the united states for we lack your hydro resources is to secure quickly atomic energy for peaceful uses we will be the first section of the united states to use that atomic energy therefore i want to point out once again the interrelationship between the american economy this is of interest to you because you have the stations and you have the uranium it is of interest to those of us who live in the east because we can use it first this is the kind of partnership which the democratic party preaches and it is under that kind of partnership that this country will move ahead this is an important election because this is a most important time all of us who read this morning s paper about what goes on in the congo or who has read the paper of 2 months ago about what went on in laos or has read the papers of the last 2 years about what has been going on in cuba know that there is no real balance in the power relationship between the united states and the soviet union that balance can be changed by a change in government if the people of those areas of latin america and africa and the middle east and asia come to feel that the future belongs to the communist world that we are on the way out that our system while very nice is a system which has a definite evolutionary limitation then of course the young and aggressive and those who are ambitious and searching for power will begin to make their peace with the communist world they will begin to travel in china and russia they will begin to exchange visits students will want to go to school in czechoslovakia eastern germany moscow and peiping and not be so interested in coming to france or england or the united states once they feel that the sun of the west is setting and that the sun of the east is rising that we are unable to solve our problems that the communists who have moved from a room in switzerland in the days before world war i into dominating great reaches of the globe and great masses of the population are still expanding their power outward then quite obviously the power balance be gins to shift against us it may not require military intervention it may be a long slow process like the rotting of a great tree inside which ultimately blows over from the first small wind that passes and then we all say what happened we never thought that tree would fall that is what we have to be concerned about to make sure that the people of the world feel that this system of ours has endless vitality that we are moving ahead that we are solving our problems that they can look to us for leadership in the future that the balance of power is shifting to us not to the communists that i think is the basic issue of this campaign i mentioned before the fact and some of you may have seen it that a gallup poll was taken in 10 countries scattered around the world asking those people which country they thought would be first in 1970 militarily and scientifically a majority in both categories in the 10 countries felt that by the year 1970 the soviet union would be first militarily and scientifically they have seen the soviet union first in space they have seen it first around the moon and first around the sun they see them turning out more engineers and scientists than we do they see them making gains in cuba and the congo laos in the last years they realize that in january or february india which represents a great hope for freedom may be facing an economic crisis they see uncertainty in other countries they see the soviet union having a foothold in the middle east which has been an object of russian policy for two or three hundred years and they come to the conclusion that the soviet tide is rising and ours is ebbing i think it is up to us to reverse that point i think it is up to us to demonstrate that this is a great country representing the greatest form of government but that freedom and strength go hand in hand and are not contradictory i ask your help in this election i think we can win this election and i think then that this country will begin to move again and that the title of citizen of the united states will once again be the proudest boast of any people this country is a great country i think it can be greater this state is a great state but i think it can be greater it is with that optimism and that confidence that i think we should move again in this state and country i ask your help i am convinced that with it we can win thank you dem jfk6 9 60b john_f _kennedy governor and mrs rosellini senator jackson fellow democrats in the state of washington i am grateful for a generous introduction from a distinguished governor of a great northwestern state who i am confident will be returned as governor in the november election governor rosellini and i am delighted to be in this state with my friend and colleague who has joined me in this great effort in this campaign as chairman of the national democratic party your friend and senator scoop jackson in the last 4 days i have taken this campaign to five states stretching from the oldest part of the united states the state of maine into the newest and the last frontier the state of alaska and in that campaign in those states i have found a common impulse facing the american people in 1960 and that is their desire for action they want this country to begin to move again here at home to meet the tremendous problems that we face here in this state and in the country and they want us moving again abroad in order to stem the communist advance i believe that the american people will elect a president to act i believe that the crises of the 1960 s will compel the next president to act and i believe that if this country is to endure and prevail that it must start moving again i am in this campaign as a candidate for the office of president of the united states that is the greatest office in the free world the congress cannot do the job as a senator i speak for massachusetts and senator jackson speaks for washington but the president of the united states speaks for both washington and massachusetts this election in many ways is the most significant certainly since the election of franklin roosevelt in 1932 and the task of the next president will in many ways be more difficult than any since the election of 1860 of a distinguished american president in a world of danger and trial peace is our deepest aspiration and when peace comes we will gladly convert not our swords into plowshares but our bombs into peaceful reactors and our planes into space vessels pursue peace the bible tells us and we shall pursue it with every effort and every energy that we possess but it is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war winston churchill said in 1949 we arm to parley we can convince mr khrushchev to bargain seriously at the conference table if he respects our strength he will never resort to war and in that way we shall secure peace if he realizes that the balance if power is shifting against him i can imagine no more hazardous course than for the united states to gamble on its defenses to take a chance that the russians and the chinese communists will follow a peaceful role if we disarm here in the united states or if we fail to maintain our strength if we are strong then peace will be our reward and that is the doctrine that we preach in the year 1960 that requires only one kind of defense policy a policy summed up in a single word first i do not mean first if i do not mean first but i do not mean first when but i mean first period the next president of the united states will be compelled to submit to the next congress a whole new set of defense goals it will require a reevaluation of our commitments around the globe a reevaluation of our weapons and a reevaluation of our budgetary policy we must put more of our present b 52 s in the air to guard against a surprise attack while we intensify and concentrate our energy in building the most modern mobile invulnerable missile force on which our ultimate ability to retaliate will finally depend but bigger and better weapons and faster and more effective armies are not enough the needs of modern defense cut across the ancient and traditional service lines missiles are fired from the air and from the land and from under the sea the modern force needs planes for transportation and ships for support specific combat missions and strategic goals are shared by many forces it is essential therefore that we compel the complete reevaluation of our national defense organization that we eliminate the wasteful duplication the service rivalry the competitive overlapping that has consumed our money and prevented us from developing maximum strength that we move forward toward a defense technology to meet the modern demands of the fight for peace that is a difficult subject but it is a difficult world i don t think that there is any doubt that the road for peace ahead can be won if we maintain our own vitality here in the united states and around the world this is a great country but i believe it can be a greater country it is a powerful country but i believe it can be more powerful and i think that if we realize all of our opportunities here in the united states if we move ahead and develop our economic strength here in this country if we maintain our defenses then we can maintain our leadership in the free world maintain our security and protect the peace that is the object of this campaign to serve the american people and suggest a whole course of action in the various areas of the national effort so that we in this country can be secure and so the cause of freedom can be strengthened i have called the challenge of the future the new frontier i do not run for the presidency emphasizing the services that i am going to bring to you i run emphasizing the services which the american people must offer their country my call is not to those who believe they belong to the past my call is to those who believe in the future i want you to join me in this campaign give me your help your heart your voice and i am convinced that in this election and in january 1961 the democratic party will be prepared to lead and this country will move again thank you dem jfk6 9 60c john_f _kennedy governor rosellini senator jackson senator dill ladies and gentlemen i am very grateful to the governor who i am confident will be not only the present governor but the next governor of the state of washington and i am glad to be here with my friend scoop jackson after i was nominated at the democratic convention in los angeles the first thing i did was to ask him if he would take over the leadership of the democratic party because i wanted him at my side representing the progressive clean and responsible government of the north western united states i think it is most appropriate in the election of 1960 that we should meet in the shadow of a distinguished republican abraham lincoln because we believe that his spirit motivates our party in the great election 100 years after he assumed the responsibility of office this is a most important election in 1860 lincoln said this nation cannot exist half slave and half free i don t think in the 1960 s that this world can exist half slave and half free and the basic question of this election is what course of action should we adopt what course of energy should we follow what course of leadership should we practice if the world is going to move not in the direction of slavery but in the direction of freedom that is the issue of this campaign and it is most appropriate therefore that we meet under the statue of lincoln he faced it in his country in 1860 we must face it around the world in 1960 and i am confident that here in the inland empire you are ready to do it i don t think there is anyone in the city of spokane that can say that this election does not matter you cannot live in the center of a great wheat producing section of the united states and be satisfied with things as they are you cannot live in the northwest united states a great mining center and he satisfied with things as they are you cannot live in one of the greatest defensive sections of the united states and be satisfied with things as they are you cannot live in the united states today you cannot be a citizen of the united states and be satisfied with things as they are i don t criticize present actions merely because i enjoy criticizing i criticize them only because i think that there is a better way to do it this is a great country but i think it can be greater this is a great state but i think it can be greater all of those who are satisfied with things as they are who feel that the balance of power in the world is moving with us and not with our adversaries should vote for the republican party but all those who retain a sense of adventure who feel we can do better who want to start moving again i hope they join with us this is the most important election i think certainly since 1932 the record of the democratic party and what it can do is written in the administrations of wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman i think this country is ready to move again i ask your support i talk here in one of the newer sections of the united states even though i come from one of the oldest sections of the united states when i talk about the new frontier i don t mean just a physical reality i mean all of those who believe that they want to serve our government and serve our system who want to join with us not because of what we are going to do for them but for the opportunity that they will have to serve our country i ask your help in this campaign i am confident that if we can be successful if we can assume the responsibility of leadership this country which is ready to move will move again thank you dem jfk7 10 60 john_f _kennedy mr robinson congressman bolling mrs lawson mr reeves ladies and gentlemen i regret that the republican member has not shown up as yet to debate with congressman bolling or mr nixon i would like to present their case for them but i would rather speak for our case i would also rather address myself to the matter which is before you i am confident that congressman bolling has done this effectivdy because i know no one in the congress over a long period of time even before his period in the congress who has shown greater responsibility and vigor in extending the benefits of our constitutional system to all americans therefore i am delighted and honored that he would represent us here tonight a political campaign is an important time because it gives the american people an opportunity to make a judgment as to which course of action they want to follow which leadership which viewpoint which political philosophy and it is also an important time for political parties because it does give the political party an opportunity not merely to live off its past successes but also consider where it is going in the future what contribution it can make that responsibility falls particularly heavily on a minority party a party out of power because it is its function under our system to present alternatives to suggest better ways of accomplishing the goals which all america seeks and i believe this responsibility falls particularly heavily in 1960 because we face many problems here and abroad which i believe transcend any since 1932 since the administration of franklin roosevelt and in many ways transcends any that we have faced since the administration of lincoln 100 years ago the great question of course is can we make freedom work here and around the world can we sustain it can we demonstrate over a long period of time that our system represents the best means of organizing human society the hard tough question for the next decade and indeed for the rest of the century is whether we in this country with our freedom of choice our breadth of opportunity our range of alternatives can we mobilize sufficient strength can we set a sufficient example can we extend the hand of friendship with sufficient warmth that we can mobilize and not only endure but prevail over a communist system in order to maintain our freedom to meet our commitments to the constitution to the great moral principles enunciated by this country s leaders we have to as i say tonight set a high example and i believe it is the function of our party the democratic party in the early days of the l960 s to move this country closer toward that example i said last week on television and gave some statistics which i don t think most americans know or believe strongly enough the prospects percentagewise of a negro child getting through high school of that child getting to college of that child becoming a professional man of that child when it is born owning its house of that child being unemployed or the average income that that child will have or the prospect of whether that child goes to work for the government what his rating will be whether he will be a district judge and now we have only 1 that is a negro out of some 200 the chances of that child getting through high school are about a third the same percent getting through college is one quarter of a white baby being born in the house next door the chance of owning his house is far less of a percentage and the chances of being unemployed are far greater i think we cannot afford in 1960 to waste any talent which we have it is a matter of our natonal survival as well as a matter of national principle and i believe that the president of the united states must take the leadership in setting the moral tone the unfinished business in setting the sights of americans to the goal realizing the talents in an equal way of every american every american s talents are not equal every american will not finish school or college or own a house but that should be on the basis of his contribution to society his energy his vitality his intelligence his motivations not based on the color of his skin that is the goal of the society which i think we should work toward in the 1960 s let me say i think the president of the united states has a great opportunity this is a place preeminently for moral leadership as franklin roosevelt said and i believe if the president of the united states indicates his strong support of the extension of equal constitutional rights to all americans wherever they may live if he stands strongly behind the principle of equality of opportunity of education and employment i believe this country will then recognize the moral imperative behind the laws which the congress has passed or which the constitution promotes secondly i believe the congress has a responsibility title 3 i believe would be important as it would give the attorney general the right as you know to carry out suits as he now has in the case of voting but which i believe he has not carried out with vigor i believe in equality in opportunity of employment which is extremely important and then i believe we have to improve our educational standards for all children regardless of their color all children white and negro we are producing about half as many scientists and engineers as the soviet union we have to improve our educational system as a whole and we have to improve our economics as a whole if we attempt to patch up those areas in our national life where equality of opportunity is not provided if we give force and vigor to the concept of that equality if we sustain it with laws if we sustain it by executive action if we sustain it by moral force and if we lift the economy of the whole and all americans then i believe we will be meeting our responsibility to the 1960 s also we have a clear reminder that we who are white are a minority in this global world and all those over the world who are colored are now reaching greater and greater power the whole course of history for the past 150 years has been toward freedom i have had a basic disagreement not only with the administration s policy in the past 8 years but also on the question of colonialism versus freedom i spoke of this matter when it involved indochina and the democrats and algeria and the republicans i spoke as it involves all of africa latin america and asia we have the desires of these people to be free if there is any experience that should give us courage it is not that one quarter of the nations of africa are neutral we were neutral for 125 years in our own history the fact is they are free and independent they have now won their freedom and they do not choose to lose it provided they are given an opportunity to develop their resources under a system of freedom man s desire to be free is the strongest force not only in this country but around the world we should associate ourselves with it i said tonight when we offered 300 scholarships to the congo we offered only 200 to africa you cannot educate a man in the congo overnight education is a long process that takes years and experience and we should have been looking at latin america and asia years and years ago and not moving into these areas where you think you can pour in money and educate them for leadership overnight finally let me say that i believe that the contribution that the democratic party can best make is not merely in the contest between mr nixon and myself the question is what is the viewpoint of those who sustain us i believe the viewpoint of those who sustain us of the central channel of the party which i represent was carried out at the convention and was carried out on the platform i believe it is carried out on the record of the congress that record is not perfect and there are shortcomings in any two party system but i believe the central movement forward of the democratic party in this century has been full it has been willing to meet new problems in new ways it has been willing to break new ground it has been willing to mobilize the best talent we have got and i think it can do it in the sixties and can do it better than it did it before because the needs are greater let me say your needs are great there is no need for providing the right to vote in some states where negroes are denied the vote unless they vote to the fullest unless in those communities where they are given their rights to participate in the political process they do it as free individuals not part of some great organization or other but speaking as individuals giving their considered judgment on what is best for their country and what is best for themselves and what is best for the cause of freedom so it is i believe that you have a chance to make a singular contribution to the life of this country every educated man or woman who is a negro has not only the opportunity to advance their own private interests and i think this is true of every american but they have the obligation to advance the common cause advance the interests of their own people because in doing that i think they advance the interests of their country i hope it will be possible for more and more of them to serve the united states outside our boundaries in the foreign service in the information services as doctors and nurses not just in africa but in europe asia africa freely in areas and indicating our great contribution our strong belief that we want to use all the talent that we can get actually a far greater responsibility rests upon the negro leadership than it does upon the leadership of almost any other group and i believe that by meetings such as this you are meeting that responsibility we emphasize always the public interest to emphasize the necessity for it in a responsible steady way and i believe in the 1960 s we can move in this area we can provide a better life for our people that we can provide better stronger human rights for all american and i want to make it clear win or lose in this election the is and i regard it as a close hard fought election the issues will probably be down to the end but my own judgment is win or lose i can assure you that the democratic party in the future as it has in its great moments in the past particularly when it has had a president to speak for it i believe the democratic party can in the future be identified with the cause of a better life for all americans of all sections of the united states regardless of any circumstances of their race or religion and that they will hold any office to which they aspire based on their competence and ability and strong feeling for this country dem jfk7 11 60a john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen governor ribicoff my present colleague in the congress and i am confident my future colleague congressman daddario of the city of hartford and my present colleague and i am sure our future colleague in the congress frank kowalski i would like to present to you my three sisters who have been campaigning around the united states and who came with us today for the end of the campaign my sister eunice shriver my sister jean smith and my sister patricia lawford i think mrs lawford got a better hand than the other sisters and congressman to be st onge from the second congressional district i am delighted to be here i am proud to be introduced by your distinguished governor governor ribicoff in 1956 he presented my name to the democratic convention as a candidate for the vice presidency and since that time he was my first supporter for the office of the presidency and has been my constant friend and counsel and i am honored to be in his state with him today this campaign is coming to an end this campaign will be all over in 12 hours and it has been a campaign which has taken in some form or other at least many months stretching all the way back to the first primary in the state of new hampshire in january of this year after 12 hours my responsibility as the standard bearer for the democratic party to present the issues in this campaign ceases and so does that of mr nixon your responsibility as citizens of the great republic then begins and tomorrow november 8 you must make the most sober and responsible judgment that any citizens of any free country are called upon to make to choose the next president of the united states thank you i believe we will do very well in 1964 i believe that the issues which separate mr nixon and myself present a clear choice to any voter he must make a judgment about what his view is of the position of our country what his view is of the needs what his view is of its responsibilities and when he has made that judgment about his own position then he can make a judgment between mr nixon and myself because we hold entirely different views of the position future and responsibility of the united states in 1960 and you have to decide which point of view which party which candidate which philosophy you accept there are three major differences of opinion between mr nixon and myself they have been developed over a period of 2 months they are three things first a different view of the present state of the american economy secondly a different view of our prestige in the world and therefore our ability to lead the free world and thirdly whether the balance of power in the world is shifting in our direction or that of our adversaries mr nixon and i disagreed 2 months ago i did not know before 2 months were past that on each of these three questions the people of the united states would have it possible to make a clear judgment based on their own facts because i believe that within the 2 months of mr nixon taking a position that our prosperity was greater than it ever was before the people of this country have had a chance to see that it is not we are moving into a period of decline in american economy which has cost us 1 billion worth of gold in 3 months which has caused our government to reduce its estimates of its tax revenues by 4 billion in 3 months which is going to see in 2 weeks 1 million unsold cars in the united states twice as many in inventory as ever before in our history which has seen our economic growth instead of increasing decreasing in the last 9 months which has seen us build 30 percent fewer homes i don t know how many clouds on the horizon we need before we realize that this is not in mr nixon s words unexampled prosperity it is not better than we have ever had it before and in my judgment if the united states is going to avoid the rigors of another recession in the winter of 1961 we have to have a new administration in washington secondly mr nixon and i have disagreed on the prestige of the united states abroad he has said it has never been higher and he points to the votes in the united nations even while he said this the u s state department had in its vaults polls taken in 10 countries of the world this summer asking them whether they believed that the united states or the soviet union was first militarily scientifically and in economic growth and which society they thought would be first in 1970 in 9 out of 10 countries stretching all the way from england to indonesia a majority of the citizens believed that the soviet union was now ahead of us in scientific power in military power and would be ahead of us perhaps decisively by 1970 how many countries of the world in latin america africa asia western europe will choose to follow a leader who is not able to maintain his leadership which has seen a country which was the most backward country in western europe 40 years ago now in a position where a majority of the people in the world begin to believe that it is more powerful than us how can mr nixon go to the people of this country and how can the people of this country accept the view that our prestige has never been higher when the very evidence before our eyes indicates that the people of the world believe that a major shift in the balance of power in the world is moving against us and when on our second television debate and mr nixon i understand will be on television for 6 hours today i would have liked to have had him spend just 1 hour with me in a fifth debate but nevertheless when he pointed to the votes at the united nations as evidence of our increased prestige the very next day on the question of the admission of red china not one of the 16 new nations admitted to the united nations this summer not one voted with us only two countries in all of africa voted with us liberia and the union of south africa thirdly i stated that i believe that while the united states was not first militarily that the rate of increase in the soviet union placed us in danger of being in a secondary position by 1963 4 5 or 6 mr nixon denied it the headline in the papers yesterday emphasized his view of our supremacy but on a back page of the new york times there is a report released by the rand corp under the sponsorship of johns hopkins university of a study now in the departments of government hitherto unreleased which shows that these informed experts believe that at the present rate of increase in military power by 1970 and i quote them accurately we will be in a position of inferiority the people of this country have these facts mr nixon has chosen to take a different view of them but i believe that it did not take a year it took 2 months for the people of this country to realize that this country cannot maintain its leadership we cannot maintain our security we cannot maintain our employment we cannot maintain the image of a vigorous society we cannot control and hold the imagination of the world unless this country starts to move forward again and that is the issue and i do not believe that mr nixon or the republican party by their record are committed to progress and we need progress in this country i want to make it clear that all these statements that have been made in the last few days about his proposed visit to eastern europe the proposal to send the president traveling through russia accompanied by herbert hoover and harry truman in my judgment if i am elected president of the united states i am not going to eastern europe i am going to washington d c because the hope of freedom in eastern europe the hope of stalemating the communist advance and turning it depends not upon goodwill missions of which we have had so many in recent years it depends on one thing the power vitality conviction direction and perseverance of the great republic of the united states that is what counts what we do mr khrushchev travels around the world but what gives him his power what gives him his force is the drive of the communist system and the soviet productive power unless we can match it unless we can be superior to it in the next decade the balance of power will shift against us and once we are isolated what chance of security and what chance of peace i ask your help tomorrow not merely as the candidate not merely as the candidate of my party i ask your help in a race tomorrow between the comfortable and the concerned between those who are satisfied and those who want to move ahead two thousand years ago after the battle of thermopylae when 300 spartans held back the mass of persians there was erected in the rocks above their graves these words passerby tell sparta we fell faithful to her service i want it erected on the walls of the world in the 1960 s passerby america is faithful to the service of freedom thank you dem jfk7 11 60b john_f _kennedy mr chairman of the democratic state committee pat lynch distinguished guests congressman mccormack congressman philbin congressman burke senator powers mr mayor mayor hynes distinguished members of the state ticket ladies and gentlemen i first of all want to express my thanks for the warmest welcome in a long campaign i am delighted to be back home in boston i would like to present my two sisters and sister in law who in the last 2 months have been in the campaign in over 40 states and since we started the campaign in january have spent far more time away from home than at home my sister patricia lawford from california and her husband peter lawford my sister eunice shriver from illinois the wife of my brother teddy who is our western manager this is jean kennedy ladies and gentlemen let me say that i am delighted to be here on the platform with my distinguished running mates of this state who i hope you will elect tomorrow tom o connor and we need a democratic senator from massachusetts who will vote for progressive legislation and we have it in senator o connor joe ward who i am hopeful will be elected governor of massachusetts tomorrow and continue a democratic administration edward mclaughlin for lieutenant governor and i are friends we served together in the navy in the pacific and i hope he will be the next lieutenant governor edward mclaughlin the candidate for attorney general has done an outstanding job he is a nephew of our beloved friend john mccormack and in his own right deserves to be reelected attorney general of the state of massachusetts tom buckley who is an orator who of course will go back to office to lead us all the candidate for state treasurer jim driscoll is one of the finest men i have ever met in public life and i am confident he is going to be elected tomorrow and the candidate for secretary of state kevin white also will be elected by a large majority i predict they and the democratic members of congress from this state i am confident will be returned by a large margin tomorrow and i ask your support of them and when you have voted for all of them vote for kennedy i come here to boston to this garden which is located in the 11th congressional district of the state of massachusetts which my grandfather represented 60 years ago and which i had the honor of representing 14 years ago when i was first elected to the house of representatives i have therefore proudly come back to this spot and ask your help tonight to be elected president of the united states i run for the office of the presidency and lyndon johnson my colleague and running mate for the vice presidency we don t run as a committee we haven t sent a rescue squad headed by a president of the united states to bail us out i am not asking anybody to hand me the office i am not running as a protg i am running as a democratic candidate for the office of the presidency and i do not believe in a time of change and revolution of hazard and opportunity of change and progress i do not believe the people of this state or country are going to turn over their government to a party and a candidate who have opposed progress for the last 14 years in the congress of the united i cannot recall a single instance where the republican party in the last 25 years has introduced as original legislation sponsored fought for it and passed a single piece of progressive legislation on behalf of the people a month ago at cleveland i said i could not think of anything in this century that they had done and the next day a republican paper corrected me and reminded me of the work that president taft had done early in this century on child labor i accept the correction but what have they done since then this race is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned between those who believe that we should rest and lie at anchor and drift and between those who want to move this country forward in the 1960 s and i believe that there is no doubt where massachusetts will be found tomorrow as it has been in the past i run against a candidate who reminds me of the symbol of his party the circus elephant with his head full of ivory a long memory and no vision and you have seen elephants being led around the circus ring they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them that was all right in 1952 and 1956 but there is no tail to grab this year it is mr nixon himself and i don t believe he will secure an endorsement of a majority of the citizens of this country in a time of change i come here tonight and ask your help i ask you to join us tomorrow in putting massachusetts in the democratic column this is an important campaign because it involves a high and distinguished office an office which is given great responsibilities and great powers by the constitution and also by the pressure of events the next president of the united states on his shoulders will rest burdens heavier than have rested on the shoulders of any president since the time of lincoln war and peace the progress of this country the security of our people the education of our children jobs for men and women who want to work the development of our resources the symbolic feeling of a nation the image the nation presents to the world its power prestige and direction all ultimately will come to rest on the next president of the united states this is the most responsible time in the life of any citizens of any free country and i do not run for the office of the presidency after 14 years in the congress with any expectation that it is an empty or an easy job i run for the presidency of the united states because it is the center of action and in a free society the chief responsibility of the president is to set before the american people the unfinished public business of our country the world must not sit still the balance of power does not hang it moves in one direction or the other like the tide and i want to make sure in the 1960 s unlike the 1950 s that the tide moves in our favor that people at a late date and with some perspective will make a judgment that while in the 1950 s the tide ran out for the united states in its position around the world in its prestige and in its influence in the 1960 s the tide began to come in again all this talk about prestige of our position in the world goes to the security of the united states it does no good for this administration to lock polls up taken of our position overseas of the judgment other people have of us all of us know the truth and no amount of executive secrecy can hide it we know that we are not as secure as we were a decade ago or even 5 years ago we know that there are great motions at work in the world which have not always reckoned with the position of the united states new leadership new countries new movements more and more in many of the countries whose favor we must seek if we wish to maintain the balance of power on the side of freedom the younger men and women who should be most attracted to us as a dynamic free society are beginning to look in another direction to castro in latin america to congo and to ghana and to guinea and to africa to communist china and asia the question is what will it be by 1970 will the balance of power be in our favor or that of the communists will the people of the world make a judgment that we are the ultimate winners or will they make a cold hard judgment that the ultimate winners of this power struggle will not be the united states and the cause of freedom but will be our adversaries and they will want to get right with them i want them to be convinced that we are at work in this society as a serious determined people building in the united states the kind of society which can serve as an example to all those who wish to be free but may not have determined that freedom represents the opportunity for them that is the opportunity before us in the sixties to he the great defender of freedom in a time when freedom is under attack and under test all over the globe thomas paine said in the american revolution the cause of america is the cause of all mankind and now in the revolution of 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america the communist system gets its power not from mr khrushchev all the speeches and debates and arguments and finger waving to mr khrushchev all the trips proposed to eastern europe by the vice president trip proposed for former presidents to russia spreading the good will this whole struggle is far more serious than that who can be so ill informed that he thinks the tensions of the power struggle disappear by good will missions by debates and by arguments they will disappear or they will be overcome only by what we do here the vice president of the united states says that he will go to eastern europe when he wins this election i will go to washington d c for here is where the job must be done the kind of society we build the kind of power we generate the kind of enthusiasm that we incite all this will tell whether in the long run darkness or light overtakes the world i welcome the opportunity to be engaged in this struggle as the chief arm of freedom it is a proud privilege that we hold as citizens of this country i welcome the opportunity if elected to serve as president of the united states and if unsuccessful to continue to serve in the senate at a time when the role of americans should be one of pride and satisfaction their history and their own choice has made it possible for them to be the defenders of freedom and i want to make it clear that while i may downgrade the leadership we are promised for the future and the leadership which we have had in the past i have traveled this country from one end to another i have spent many days in nearly every state and i come back to boston mass with a stronger feeling of confidence of hope of knowledge of the vitality and energy of this society and our people than i could have ever had before it is the best education for a candidate for the presidency all the criticisms that are leveled at presidential campaigns in my judgment fade away against the knowledge which a potential president may have of the strength of this society of ours and our people so i come here tonight i thank you for your past support i ask you to join us tomorrow and most of all i ask you to join us in all the tomorrows yet to come in building america moving america picking this country of ours up and sending it into the sixties dem jfk7 11 60c john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen will you put those signs down please so others can see i appreciate them all first of all i would like to have you meet my three sisters who are campaigning with me in the last 2 months they have traveled in about 40 states and in the last year they have been in all 55 well it seems like 55 i want you to meet we will go from the oldest to the youngest my sister jean smith my sister she is from new york my sister eunice shriver from illinois my sister patricia lawford from california somebody asked her last week somebody asked my sister patricia when she was in defiance ohio last week if i was her kid brother so she knew it was time this campaign came to an end i am delighted to come to new hampshire for three or four reasons in the first place i am glad to come to new hampshire for three or four reasons first because this campaign for the presidency of the united states started in new hampshire last winter and the success that we had in the primary in this state last march made it possible to go on to be nominated and i therefore think it appropriate to end up this campaign in this city in this state the night before election secondly i am glad to be here because i particularly am proud to be running in company with distinguished democrats from the state of new hampshire there is an old axiom that adversity brings out the best this state has not been overwhelmingly democratic and because the adversity has dealt hard blows to the democrats in this state you have chosen the best possible candidates and i am delighted and proud to be running with them i hope this state will have the good judgment for its own future to elect bernard boutin your next governor of the state of new hampshire i cannot believe that the people of this state given the two very clear choices that they have will do anything but elect him by a large majority secondly we are fortunate in the democratic candidate for the office of u s senator i think professor hill will make a fine senator and i hope it is possible that here in new hampshire they select him to represent them in washington you will bring about several welcome changes thirdly we have a chance to elect as congressman from this district an old and valued friend of mine romeo champagne the next congressman from this district and from the neighboring congressional district we have a chance to elect stuart nims as the next congressman from that district now there are good candidates i don t know any state in the union where the candidates have more nearly met the needs of the time bernard boutin professor hill romeo champagne stuart nims i hope it is possible for you to elect them all i think there are two or three other reasons why i would like to do well in new hampshire i would like to have the union leader print a headline that we carried new hampshire i believe there is probably a more irresponsible newspaper in the united states but i can t think of it i believe that there is a publisher who has less regard for the truth than william loeb but i can t think of his name and when you put that combination together and you put handpicked candidates on the republican ticket being managed and directed the affairs of this state by a man who lives not in new hampshire i think in massachusetts my own state who does not even live in this state and tries to run a political party i think it is time we threw them all out tell them again it seems that every time i come to new hampshire and i read an editorial in the paper i have to again deny that i am a member of the communist party only william loeb and his henchmen and his pet governor would suggest it last winter and others connected with him would suggest it in the fall new hampshire is a great state with a long tradition the last democratic president from new england came from new hampshire franklin pierce in 1852 and i think it is time we elected another one from new england so look what we have at stake tomorrow look at all the chances to enjoy ourselves tomorrow we can elect a good governor a good senator two good congressmen we can defeat a governor and some congressmen and finally we can throw it all in the lap of william loeb and wrap it up we don t get pleasure like that very often you have a chance given to you that not many people in the united states are given with one ballot you can do this and i come here and ask your help in doing it tomorrow i think it would be the best thing i think it would be the best thing i like a country and a state where the politicians are not the bosses where the editors are not the bosses where the publishers are not the bosses but where the people are and i think we have a chance to show it tomorrow i cannot imagine in the long run a more healthy thing for this state than to have a change than to permit responsible progressive and honest democrats to assume responsibility for this state to end this know nothing movement which has dominated too long the affairs of new hampshire and give this state a chance to move ahead in addition i come here and ask your support in this campaign for the presidency i see no reason why we should journey 3 000 miles to whittier calif when there is one living in a state 35 miles from here who comes here and asks your help the point of the matter however i am not coming here as a neighbor asking your vote i am coming here as a democrat who is concerned about the future of our country this state of new hampshire is an old state and so is massachusetts i have traveled in every state in the union in the last few months our area of the country has none of the natural resources which have brought prosperity to other sections of our country we have no oil no gas no minerals we have no great reaches of land we have no great space we have no great waterpower our resources are the skilled people who are devoted to their country and their state who are progressive who want the best educational system for their children who recognize that if new hampshire and massachusetts and maine and vermont and connecticut and rhode island are going to move ahead it will require us to have the best trained people coming out of the best schools using whatever natural resources we have clean water transportation and all the rest and the advantages of atomic energy we have in the future promised as we have in the past but it will require the best that we have we can t afford to waste anything we don t have the resources and the riches that other sections do have but we have people who are determined to make a go of their life in this state and region i believe that new england the oldest section of the united states the first section of our country also can be the first section in the future it can still blaze a trail many opportunities lie before us but new hampshire and new england cannot move ahead unless the nation itself is moving ahead everything that we make here which we sell throughout the country depends upon a rising economy there is an old saying of the new england council a rising tide lifts all the boats and i believe that the boats of new hampshire can only be raised when the boats are being raised in the rest of the country so that markets can be developed for our goods so that ranges and other sections of the united states will equal ours so that the country and us can move together that is the prospect in my judgment which the democratic party offers in 1960 as the only national party committed to progress mr nixon represents a party which has opposed progress for 25 years since franklin d roosevelt in 1933 on television this afternoon he repeated one of the oldest tiredest stories of the republicans that 1 25 minimum wage would cause massive unemployment that is the same old story that they used to tell in the thirties when the democrats and franklin roosevelt first wrote in a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour that was going to ruin business 1 25 an hour 50 a week for a business which does 1 million and it can t be until 1963 and that is going to ruin that is going to cause starvation i want to see mr nixon or any republican in or out of this place we are now live on less than 50 a week he represents a party which totally opposed the social security 25 years ago and only one senator in the entire u s senate this summer voted for medical care for the aged tied to social security do you know the bill that is now written into law if you support your parents or if you are parents who are supporting yourselves before you can get any assistance you have to indicate that you are medically indigent that means your savings those of your family go and then you can get some assistance what we propose is that all who work contribute under social security less than 3 cents a day in their working years and when they retire they will have rights now which is the most responsible which is the most progressive i must say the more i look at that sorry record that the republicans have written in this century the more convinced i am than ever if this country is going to move ahead in education in employment in security in agriculture in developing our natural resources the democratic party represents the hope of the future and we will never be strong in the world we will never be respected unless we are strong here in the united states so i come the full circle to where i began and the weather is beginning to get cold again away back in january i came to manchester seeking your support in the primary and now in the closing hours of this long campaign which has stretched almost over a year i come to manchester and the state of new hampshire and ask your support once again and i can give you my assurance that if we are successful tomorrow we will move new hampshire and the country forward and if i am unsuccessful tomorrow i will continue to labor for the best interests of massachusetts new england and the united states but i believe tomorrow is our opportunity tomorrow i believe the people of this country will choose to meet their obligations as citizens and among them and in the lead will be the great state of new hampshire dem jfk7 11 60d john_f _kennedy claiborne pell my friend and colleague in the senate your distinguished senator john pastore let me say that i am sorry we are late we have not been playing golf we have been out playing the democratic message we have been today in fact we started at waterbury conn at 3 o clock this morning and we have been to connecticut new york new jersey maine and now we come here to ask the people of rhode island to support the democratic party in this election i am delighted to have been introduced by the next senator from the state of rhode island an old friend of mine who will make a great senator to succeed senator green a great colleague of senator pastore who will speak for the nation and rhode island in the senate claiborne pell i know you are going to send him down to represent you and the country and i am confident that you will select as the next governor of the state of rhode island lieutenant governor notte we are running a well balanced ticket in rhode island of kennedy pell notter and st germaine so what do we need i know that you will select as congressman congressman st germaine who will represent and succeed aime forand in the u s congress rhode island has a great democratic tradition and i think the people of this state understand that the united states has to move forward and progress in the 1960 s and the republican party does not know what that word means for 25 years the republican party has opposed every piece of progressive legislation on behalf of the people of this country and for 14 years mr nixon has been associated with that opposition i have yet to hear anyone suggest one single piece of progressive legislation he ever sponsored fought for or passed in the 14 years that he has been around washington and i do not believe in the most changing and revolutionary period in the history of the world that the united states is going to select a party whose symbol is the elephant who has no vision long memory yet is going to sit down in the sun when we ought to be moving i come to rhode island and i ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us i want you to get home and get to bed so you can get up early so i can get up early tuesday morning november 8 we must make a choice in this country to pick ourselves up and move forward and having given that message let s go to bed thank you dem jfk7 11 60e john_f _kennedy john notte the next governor of the state of rhode island mayor reynolds senator green claiborne pell who will be the next senator from rhode island congressman fogarty my distinguished friend and colleague from the senate john pastore my colleague in the house of representatives who has been working all over the country with us aime forand who else and john notte who is going to be the governor of this state and ferdie st germaine who is going to be the next congressman replacing aime forand i would like to have you meet my three sisters jean eunice and pat they have campaigned in this campaign in 40 states just to show you how long we have been engaged in this campaign one of them is married to a citizen of new york one is married to a citizen of illinois one is married to a citizen of california at least she is a citizen now and if we can carry which is their responsibility new york illinois and california we are going to win and if we don t well i want to carry rhode island and i am here to ask your help i think it is appropriate in the last 24 hours of this campaign to come to a great democratic state a great democratic state and ask you to lead the way tomorrow november 8 let me make it clear this campaign is now coming to an end and tomorrow the respective responsibilities of mr nixon and myself cease and yours begin what are the issues in this campaign that any voter should consider before they vote in my judgment they are two first there is the point of view expressed by the vice president that this country has never been stronger that our security is assured that we are experiencing and enjoying unprecedented prosperity from one end of the country to the other and that the way to win the peace is by journeys through eastern europe in order to inform them of the value of freedom i want to make it clear that mr nixon may decide if he is elected to go to eastern europe but i am going to washington d c because that is the place have we not learned in the last 8 years that parades and trips and good will missions are not the way to negotiate are not the way to limit are not the way to expand the cause of freedom around the world mr khrushchev is not impressed by words he is impressed by the power of a free society and the way to get power in a free society is to build the strength of the united states do you think after 40 years of communist experience that the communists are going to change their whole doctrine by visits what kind of a policy will that be for the 1960 s the most dangerous and hazardous in our history to even indicate to people that peace can be won by some overnight gesture peace and security and the survival of the united state can only be won by work perseverance will carried out over a long period of time without cease without fail in order to win the peace in eastern europe in order to extend freedom around the world our country has to go back to work again here in the united states thomas jefferson at the beginning of this country once said the disease of liberty is catching but if it is going to catch if it is going to spread around the world then we here in the united states must meet our responsibilities we must recognize there are no shortcuts no easy way no overnight weekend meetings which will bring a change in the balance of power in the world what gives the communist system its power and force is the productive strength of the soviet union what gives freedom its power and force are not merely words and speeches but the productive power of the united states put to great purposes and that is the issue of this campaign which candidate which party you have to make your judgment tomorrow as to which candidate and which party has associated itself and himself with the great issue of our time on other occasions in other years this country has elected republican presidents and democratic presidents they do it when they make a decision that that party and that candidate will serve a great national purpose in my judgment and the responsibility ultimately is yours in my judgment the united states will be best served by a candidate and a party who recognizes the basic issues of our time and that is that this country has to go back to work again for 8 long years for 8 years we have seen the balance of power in the world change it did not require the polls taken by the u s information service to tell us that the balance of power is not shifting in our direction cuba latin america asia china russia the world is full of hazards and peril and opportunity in the 1960 s and those hazards can be overcome those perils can be met those opportunities seized only if we in the united states are building a strong society committed to progress which the republican party has never been do you believe that when the basic responsibility of our country is to build strength and move ahead that we should entrust the leadership of his society to a candidate and a party who have opposed progress for the last 15 years mr nixon leads a party which in the midthirties voted 95 percent against a 25 cent minimum wage and he leads a party which in 1960 voted 95 percent against 1 25 minimum wage he leads a party which in the midthirties voted 90 percent against social security and he leads a party which in 1960 voted 90 percent against medical care for the aged tied to social security the elephant has not had a new idea in 25 years this choice is your this choice is not merely between two candidates and two candidates and two parties and the record of the past it is between their respective commitments to the future and i come here to providence r i the united states of america and secure your help tomorrow in moving this country forward i ask you to make a decision which will make it possible for us to enlist the best talent we can get in demonstrating what a free society can really do our purpose is clear and the judgment finally must be yours which way do you want to go do you want to drift and sleep and lie at anchor or do you want to start to go forward in the 1960 s and build our strength eighteen hours from now this campaign will be over i want you to know that for 4 years the state of rhode island away back in 1956 was generous enough under your distinguished former governor governor roberts to support me for the vice presidency and in 1960 rhode island was a leading state in making it possible for me to carry on this campaign and now for the third time i come to rhode island and ask your help and support i can assure you that if we are successful all of us in this state who seek office under the banner of the democratic party i can assure you that our party in 1961 will meet its responsibilities not only to the people of this state not only to the people of this country but to all those around the world who look to us with confidence and hope let me say 100 years ago in the campaign of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later 100 years later when the issue is still freedom or slavery we know there is a god we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk7 11 60f john_f _kennedy mayor o connor who i hope will be the next u s senator from the state of massachusetts joe ward the democratic candidate for governor who i hope will be the governor of massachusetts my distinguished running mates on the ticket in massachusetts edward mclaughlin candidate for lieutenant governor the attorney general edward mccormack john driscoll who is candidate for treasurer kevin white who is a candidate for secretary of state and tom buckley state auditor ladies and gentlemen this is the first speech that i have made in this presidential campaign in my own state of massachusetts i saved the best to last i am glad to be in springfield for another reason and that is that this district is represented in congress by a distinguished congressman eddy boland who has spent the entire fall the last 2 months running our campaign in the state of ohio which is the kind of man he is if we carry ohio tomorrow night it will be due to his work more than any other and i am delighted to have a chance to come here and tell you what he has done to this state this district and this campaign i come here to massachusetts which i have represented in the congress for the past 14 years and ask your support tomorrow in the campaign for the presidency but i do not come here merely as a citizen of this state i come here not merely as a fellow democrat i come here as a concerned citizen who wishes to see this country move forward again in the last 7 days mr nixon has suggested that if he is elected president of the united states he will go to eastern europe he has also indicated if he is elected president of the united states president eisenhower will go to russia he has also indicated that if he is elected president of the united states president hoover and president truman will also go behind the iron curtain i want to make it clear that if i am elected president of the united states i am going to washington d c if there is any lesson which this country should have learned in the last 8 years it is that the communist system and the communist leaders are not impressed by good will missions they are impressed by the power strength and determination of the united states and that is what must be built the communists have not risen from a small group of conspirators in a back room to being a powerful country which threatens our survival by being impressed by word they are impressed only if this country is moving ahead with purpose and conviction and my judgment is that the next president of the united states must supply the leadership which will make it possible for us to move ahead mr nixon and i disagree on the position of the united states in the world on what we must do on the unfinished business before our country and you must decide tomorrow yourself as responsible citizens of the greatest free republic in history a country which bears upon its shoulders the burden of maintaining free government not only in the united states but around the world you must decide yourselves whether the view of the world which i have tried to present in this campaign the view of our responsibilities as citizens of this country the things we must do in the 1960 s to maintain our freedom whether you agree with that or whether you agree with mr nixon that we should sit in the sun and let history pass us by this choice is clear i do not believe that any candidate for the presidency can run on a platform that all is well that all is being done in good time that our prestige was never higher and that the tide of history is moving in our favor and then suddenly if elected hope to get the support of the congress and the people on the programs that must be enacted i disagree with mr nixon on the trend what this country must do to maintain the peace and maintain our position in the world and i am very sure if we do not continue to drift and lie at anchor only seeing the beginning of our difficulties but if this country goes back to work again if it moves with purpose if it moves with perseverance there is nothing it cannot do nothing i have traveled in 50 states in the last 12 months every part of the united states and i come back after that long trip from alaska to maine to massachusetts with more confidence that this country can meet its responsibilities in the sixties that the people of the united states want the truth they are prepared to bear the burdens which go with the maintenance of freedom and in my judgment it is the function of the next president of the united states to tap the reservoir of vitality and energy in our great system and our great country so i come here to springfield in the last 12 hours of the presidential campaign of 1960 and i ask your support i ask you to join me not merely in trying to win tomorrow but trying to win all the tomorrows that are going to come across the horizon in good times and bad in fair wind and foul i have confidence that the united states will meet its commitments to itself and will serve in the future as it has in the past as the great defender of freedom around the world thank you dem jfk7 9 60a john_f _kennedy attorney frye mr green my sister pat monroe sweetland jebby davidson democratic candidates ladies and gentlemen the sun shines bright today but i have been here enough times to know that the sun does not always shine in the city of eugene but that is what makes the woods grow and that is what makes this state a rich state i am delighted to be here in this campaign i spent a good many days of my life in the primaries traveling around the state of oregon and i am delighted as a candidate to come back to this state which played a major role in hoping me get nominated at los angeles you may recall the writing of henry thoreau in massachusetts about 100 years ago when he said eastward i go only by force westward i go free i must walk toward oregon and not toward europe i have followed that advice again on this occasion mr cook mentioned the participation of the university at least in rome yesterday they are engaged in a direct competition representing themselves sports and also the united states we are engaged in our own kind of competition we compete not merely with the soviet union but we compete with ourselves to make this a better country to make this a stronger country to make sure that those who come after us enjoy the same benefits that we enjoy this is a great country but i believe it can be a greater country and i think it is our responsibility to join in that great effort there are many areas of our national life where i think we could do better but i am concerned today in this state in this town with one area which i believe to be almost the most important and that is how can we improve our educational system so that we can train our people in those qualities of self discipline and self restraint and personal character which makes it possible for us to maintain a free society a free society is the most difficult of all kinds of government to maintain and it can only be done if we have the best educated and the best trained citizens i am proud of the fact that my own state of massachusetts away back in the early days of the 17th century was the first state in the union to establish the american public schools system and it is a fact that settlers from new england came to this valley and participated in the establishment of the educational system in the state of oregon which i think is so impressive now the job is for us in our own generation to meet our own responsibilities and you in the state have heavy responsibilities to meet i want to make it clear that unfortunately or fortunately we are going to have heavy responsibilities to meet in the future for example here in your state it will be necessary for you to build two classrooms every day if you are going to make up in the next year for the present classroom shortage and yet you are making a greater effort nearly than any state in the union compared to many states this state pays its teachers almost better than any but the top three or four states in the union and yet it is a fact that this country pays a majority of its teachers less than 4 500 a year many of our teachers must take two jobs in order to maintain themselves it is also a regrettable fact that here in the richest country on earth 150 000 of our brightest students are unable to go to college every year because they cannot afford it it is an unfortunate fact and i don t like to keep bringing home these unpleasant facts but that is the only way we improve ourselves that one out of every five men failed the selective service mental test i think we can do a better job than that only one out of three of our high school and college students could identify and write theses on the american bill of rights i think we are going to have to do better in this country i think we are going to have to maintain in a country which is going to double its population we are going to have to maintain the best school system in the united states it was a source of regret to me that this last session of the congress failed to pass a federal aid to education bill that we failed by a single vote to pass in the senate of the united states a bill which would have provided aid for teachers salaries and that we failed after passing a school construction bill in the senate to pass out of the house rules committee and every republican on the house rules committee voted against it to send a federal aid for school construction to the floor of the house of representatives this is the most important subject that we have unless we have a good and increasing educational system we are not going to have a strong democratic society i therefore suggest four proposals first that we launch a program of federal aid to education for school construction and for teachers salaries to help the united states make up for the present classroom shortage second we must recognize that in our colleges and universities in this state and country in the next 10 years to make and take care of our college population we are going to have to build in 10 years as many dormitories and classrooms as have been built in this country since 1775 we are going to have to do that in one decade i think that one of the most effective means are loans for college dormitories at a low rate of interest it is an unfortunate fact that that bill which was passed last year was vetoed by the president of the united states i think we can do this job i think we can move ahead this is only one of the great areas which i think disturbs the american life i run for the office of the presidency realizing that in the next 4 years it is going to be the most difficult years that we have ever had in many ways the most difficult years since the election of 1860 of abraham lincoln in that election what was at stake was the issue which he put before us that this nation cannot exist half slave and half free i don t think in this election we must face i don t think the world can exist in the long run half slave and half free the real issue before us is how we can prevent the balance of power from turning against us how we can begin to move it in our direction in latin america and africa and asia to impress people all over the world that we are a young and strong and vital country mr khrushchev has said that while we are democrats and believe in freedom that our children are going to be communists i don t believe this i think we represent the best system but i think it is up to us to do the best for our system and for our country i don t hold the view that our best day is somewhere in the past and that the future belongs to the communists i think the future belongs to us but if we are going to realize that future if we are going to cross into the new frontiers of the 1960 s then we have to recognize that things in this country now are not as good as they can be that we can do a better job on education on economic growth in developing our economy that we can strengthen our defenses that we can present a better image to the world of vitality and strength that is the issue of this campaign i think anyone who is satisfied with things as they are should continue the present republican leadership but those who share a feeling that we can do better that we must do better that we must move ahead that things are not perfect the way they are i want them to joint with us in this crusade to make this country move again i don t run for the office of the presidency promising that life is going to be easier i think in many ways the 1960 s are going to be the most difficult years of our lives but i can promise you that if i am elected we shall proceed ahead and i think we shall not only endure but prevail thank you dem jfk7 9 60b john_f _kennedy mr brown representative whelan gordon mrs neuberger mrs price mr sweetland scoop jackson ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to george brown and to the members of this organization for your kindness in having this dinner tonight i think this is an important election and i think the state of oregon is heavily involved you have a chance which is not given i think to many states to continue in office a distinguished name borne by two distinguished people i refer of course to your next u s senator senator neuberger and i am confident that the people of this congressional district will send back to the house of representatives with an overwhelming majority mrs green whose perhaps least distinction has been that she has been the chairman of my campaign but whose greatest distinction has been won in the halls of congress on behalf of the interests of this country i am delighted that we have here tonight our friends from brazil they inhabit a beautiful country which i visited and i am delighted that they are coming here tonight and traveling through the united states to see the american labor movement at work i have served on the labor committees of the congress now for 14 years and i serve now as chairman of the subcommittee on labor of the senate during that time i think it can be said that the labor movement has concerned itself not only with the interest of its members but also with the general public interest labor has identified itself with the fight for aid for education with the fight for medical care for the aged under social security with the fight for housing the fight for a better system of social justice in this country and for a stronger foreign policy abroad they have been concerned with what concerns our country therefore i am delighted that i have received the endorsement of the afl cio in this election this is an important election because it comes at a most important time in the life of our country i think the august session of the congress offered in my opinion a very clear example of how unfortunate it would be to have 4 more years of a divided government with neither party bearing responsibility and both parties sharing power after passing in the u s senate a bill providing for l 25 minimum wage we failed in the conference to secure the passage of that bill after passing in the senate of the united states a bill for aid for education and a bill for aid for housing we failed to get both of those bills to the floor of the house of representatives for a vote and every republican member of the rules committee of the house voted against them going to the floor of the house of representatives we failed to secure passage of a bill connected with the forand bill tying medical care for the aged to social security instead of the bill that was finally passed we received the support of one republican senator senator case of new jersey and we were threatened by a presidential veto there is not any doubt in my mind that our system of checks and balances which i strongly support cannot work effectively unless the house the senate and the presidency are working together for the general interest i think that we can elect a democratic president a democratic house and a democratic senate and i think when that is done this country can begin to move again and we will serve not only the interest of your members but also the interest of the public at large i came here tonight because i want your support in this campaign i want the support of the american labor movement and the members of their families and i want to make it very clear that i want the support of all of organized labor i have had my disagreements with mr hoffa and they continue and i have had my disagreements with mr bridges and they continue but i want the support if i can get it of the members of the teamsters union and the longshoremen s union because i believe that the things we can work for in the congress are in the interest of the members of those unions even though i may not agree with those that head it up my quarrel with them may continue but i want to make it very clear that i welcome the support of the members of those two unions now let me say in conclusion that this is going to be a very difficult and intense election i think there are real issues at stake here which affect the welfare of the people of this state as well as the welfare of the people of this country you who work in organized labor are basically concerned with one great question and that is the maintenance of full employment in the united states if your people can find work at decent wages then your interests are protected and that in my opinion must be a basic policy for the government and for the free enterprise system here in this country to make sure that everyone who wants to find a job can find one whether they work in organized labor or whether they are teachers or doctors or nurses whatever they may be the chance to work at decent wages must be a basic fundamental premise upon which our society must be based i think this country is going to have to move ahead last year we had the lowest rates of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world one million five hundred thousand people will come into the labor movement every year in the 1960 s and are going to have to find a job and they come into the labor market at the very same time when automation is revolutionizing employment you have seen it in your own city of portland here therefore to find work for these people to make sure that machines make life easier instead of displacing men and women i think it is going to be a basic domestic problem for the next administration regardless of whether it is republican or democrat this is a serious problem that faces us all it affects you directly you live with it but only by developing economic policies which encourage the growth of the united states can we hope to maintain full employment in the united states we had a recession in 1954 we had a recession in 1948 we have a plateau today which may lead to some difficulties in 1961 unless we can get the economy of the united states moving at the kind of growth which we see not just in the soviet union but which we see in germany and france and england all of those countries pretty nearly doubled the economic growth of the united states last year so these are all matters which i think are extremely complicated in many ways they move beyond the problems which the new deal and the fair deal faced in their days they are new problems that require new solutions and i think that the labor movement has a great role to play so i come here tonight and ask your help i am mmst grateftl tn senatir mobse for his wire he and i worked closely together in the congress in this last session to secure the passage of a bill providing 1 25 minimum wage we failed but i think that we hava a chance in this campaign to discuss these issues to discuss our failures and the reasons for them and go to thd people and ask them to make a decision ask them to give us a mandate to move this country ahead on all of the great fronts which are traditional i think in the democratic party i run for office with the recognition that in this century the great presidents in many cases have been democratic presidentr wilson roosevelt and truman and i think they have demonstrated what can be done and i think we can do it in the 1960 s thank you dem jfk7 9 60c john_f _kennedy mrs neuberger acting governor pearson senator lusk monroe sweetland jebby davidson my friend congresswoman green and ladies and gentlemen first i would like to introduce my sister who is representing my wife who is otherwise committed my sister mrs peter lawford i want to thank mrs neuberger for her generous introduction i am proud to come to her state and be presented by her i served with her husband dick in the senate i was associated with him on many important pieces of public activity and i am delighted that he is going to be succeeded by a distinguished member of his family the next senator of the united states from this state senator neuberger and i am grateful to my friend and colleague from the u s senate senator lusk who has been with us a short time but who has become a beloved member of the senate i come from massachusetts which is a long way from this state one hundred years ago henry thoreau said eastward i go only by force westward i go free i must walk toward oregon and not toward europe this town of salem is named after a town in my own state of massachusetts salem mass and it is an interesting fact that the seal of the city of salem in massachusetts has a palm tree has an indian and the slogan in honor of the great seaport of salem is to the farther side of the indies the east indies are linked with salem mass because the people of salem sailed out to those islands in order to bring the wealth home to massachusetts just as the people of massachusetts just as the people of new england came west and therefore salem oreg and salem mass and the indies are all linked together by people of courage who were not satisfied with things as they were but thought they could do better and came to this state of the northwest i come here today from the oldest section of the united states and in the last 5 days i have traveled from the fairground in maine to a fairground in palmer alaska to a fairground in michigan to a fairground here in this state and in every one of those states i have seen the vitality of the american system i run for the office of the presidency saying that this is a great state and a great country but i also say that it can be a greater country i don t ask the support of anyone in this election who feels that everything that is happening in this country today is as it should be and if there is no need for further progress i don t ask the support of anyone in this election who believes that the security of the united states is insured around the world who feels that the balance of power is moving in our direction instead of in the direction of the communist world i talk of those who came from this state 100 years ago who liked my state but who thought they could do better i come and run for the office of the presidency because i like america but i think it can do better and that is what we should dedicate ourselves to the hard tough question for the next decade for this or any other group of americans regardless of their party is whether we or the communist world can best demonstrate the vitality of our system which system the communist system or the system of freedom is going to be able to convince the watching millions in latin america and africa and asia who stand today on the razor edge of decision and try to make a determination as to which direction the world is moving i think it should move with us i think ours is the best system i do not agree with mr khrushchev when he says he is going to bury us i think we can demonstrate in the next 10 years in the next 40 years that our high noon is in the future that our best days are ahead that our system is in keeping with the basic aspirations of the human people all over the globe and the communist system is doomed to fail but i think we can do it only if we are willing to work for our country i call for the new frontier and when i do so i don t say what i am going to promise to do for you if i am elected i promise that i will give you an opportunity to serve your country to demonstrate that our cause and the cause of freedom all over the world are intertwined together i come to this valley in this fair today asking you to join me in this great national effort to rebuild the strength of america here and around the world i think this country is ready to move again thank you dem jfk7 9 60d john_f _kennedy mrs green mrs neuberger ladies and gentlemen i am extremely indebted for a very generous introduction as i was for a very generous seconding speech at the los angeles convention by your distinguished member of congress and my faithful friend mrs green i am delighted to be here tonight sharing a platform with a distinguished oregon family the wife of a former senator and friend and colleague of mine and the next senator from the state of oregon to the u s senate senator neuberger to be ladies and gentlemen this is an important election as mrs green has suggested i do not run for the office of the presidency promising that if i am elected life will be easy and that all the problems will be solved in many ways i think that the years will be as difficult in the 1960 s as they were after the election 100 years ago of president lincoln in that election lincoln said that this nation cannot exist half slave and half free the question for the 1960 s following this election will be whether the world can exist half slave and half free we are concerned with what happens in this state and we are concerned with what happens in this country we are concerned that we shall have vigorous executive leadership in meeting the problems that the great republic faces here at home but we are also concerned that the united states shall maintain the peace and maintain our security and maintain our strength and our prestige i do not believe that there is any american who can he satisfied with that strength and that prestige as it is reflected in events around us in the southern half of the globe americans wonder why it was that africans who some years ago quoted thomas jefferson and lincoln and franklin roosevelt now quote karl marx in the congo they wonder why the nations of south america who once were engaged in a great enterprise called the good neighbor policy should now stone the vice president of the united states they wonder why america which was once regarded in the 1930 s with so much friendship on the island of cuba should now be reviled and attacked by the erratic leader of that island only 90 miles from our shore it seems to me and this is most dangerous for all of us that we are all danger of losing the respect of the people of the world because we are in danger of losing those very qualities which once caused them to respect us first the people of the world respect strength in former years they were grateful to the united states for the military protection that we guaranteed them but now they are no longer certain that america s lead will continue in the future when they see the missile gap widen and once our atomic monopoly begins to cease and they are uneasy about a military strategy that relies so heavily upon massive retaliation because they are not interested in seeing their house preserved only to see it blown up second the people of the world respect achievement for most of the 20th century they admired american science and american education which was second to none but now they are not at all certain about which way the future lies the first vehicle in outer space was called sputnik not vanguard the first country to place its national emblem on the moon was the soviet union not the united states the first canine passengers to outer space who safely returned were named strelka and belka not rover or fido or even checkers they wonder why the soviet union has an economic growth of two or three times as much as the great productive country of the united states and they wonder why it was last year that the united states had the lowest percentage of economic growth increase of any major industrial society in the world they wonder why russia is turning out twice as many scientists and engineers as we are and they are entitled to an answer third the peoples of the world respect sincerity the reason the good neighbor policy was so successful was because the people of latin america knew that here in the united states the policy of franklin roosevelt was marked by compassion and interest the colored people of africa and asia believed in harry truman s point 4 because they knew that he practiced in his administration those policies without regard to race or creed for all americans but now they are doubtful about a party which has shown no real concern in the executive branch for civil rights no real compassion for the underprivileged and they do not feel that any country and any administration which does not concern itself about the problems at home will be concerned about the problems of africa and asia fourth the people of the world want peace and they sincerely wonder how much the united states wants peace they are afraid of diplomatic policies that teeter on the brink they are dismayed that there are only 100 americans working in the entire federal government on the vital subject of disarmament and they are discouraged by a philosophy that puts its faith in swapping insults with the soviet union for they know it can lead in only one direction and that would be toward mankind s final war fifth and finally the people of the world respect a nation which can see beyond its own image to us the major issue is the fight against communism but to them those who live to the south of us the fighting is against poverty and disease and illiteracy and ignorance each time they feel that we seek to gain their friendship in order to secure a new recruit in a battle against the communism and each time we dismiss anti american agitators as tools of the communists or condemn neutrals out of hand our prestige will suffer and our relations with those with whom we wish to be friends will worsen to rebuild american prestige will not be easy it cannot be done overnight by a new administration but i can assure you that a new administration will make the effort i believe that the people of the world desire to be free and they desire to follow the leadership of a strong and free united states i think that we should move ahead on five fronts we must have an administration that will rebuild our military strength until america is once again first across the board secondly we must have an administration that will revamp its goals in science and education until american science and american education are once again preeminent third we must have an administration that moves rapidly to shape our image here at home until it is clear to all the world that the revolution for equal rights is still an american revolution fourth we must have an administration that moves forward on the road to peace until we demonstrate to a watching world as we sit on a most conspicuous stage that we are willing to devote the same energies to the struggle for peace as we now do on the struggle for arms fifth and finally we must have an administration that holds out a helping hand to all those who desire to be independent that assists them in meeting their own problems assists them on the road to freedom as a friend not as a paternalistic country that desires to use them in a world war struggle once we move again on these new frontiers in foreign and domestic affairs we can regain the trust and confidence of men and women of good will around the world we can more comfortably wear the leadership of the free world and we can win the fight for peace and this country will move again thank you dem jfk8 10 60 john_f _kennedy keen johnson the next u s senator from the state of kentucky congressman watts present and future congressman from this district governor chandler distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen i am grateful for the chance to visit this community and again this state of kentucky about 3 years ago i was appointed chairman of a committee of the senate which was given the responsibility of picking the five most outstanding senators that ever served in the u s senate it was a bipartisan committe composed of three democrats and two republicans after nearly a year that is a proper proportion and after a year and after consulting historians all over the country our first and unanimous choice was a gradute of transylvania college a distinguished citizen of this community of course abraham lincoln s beau ideal henry clay the contribution which i felt and which we all felt and which gives henry clay a place in the senate reception room and his portrait was because though he was a loyal son of kentucky his whole life was devoted to the preservation of the union to the expansion of the power and prestige of the united states for his concern with our relations to the south of us his concern with the development of our natural resources his concern with maintaining american unity and it is a source of satisfaction to me that 110 years ago when henry clay then aging after having been in the congress for nearly 40 years at the twilight of his career presented this third compromise to hold together the american union it was an aging senator from my state then in the twilight of his career after 40 years in the congress a competitor on three separate occasions for the presidency of the united states with henry clay who came and sustained henry clay on march 7 1850 with the greatest speech in the history of the u s senate i refer to the compromise of 1850 and senator daniel webster s support of it ruined his political position in massachusetts clay and webster from different sections of the united states had a common desire to see the power and prestige of the united states built up and they spoke what they thought i come in 1960 as the nominee of the democratic party for the election of the united states and i know no democrat in this century or any other who ever said that party labels don t mean something they believe that party labels do mean something party labels do not tell us anything if the parties don t stand for something but in my judgment in this century party labels have stood for something they have stood for the american program of the 20th century they have stood for the development of american resources in this century they have stood for developing the land and the cities and the towns of this country they have like henry clay more than a century ago looked south to the american hemisphere and they have looked around the world i stand in succession to three great democratic presidents and i believe in this century you can tell the difference between our two parties in the slogans that they have used in their campaigns no democratic president ever ran on a program of stand pat with mckinley or return to normalcy with harding or keep cool with coolidge or repeal social security with alf landon or in 1948 i don t know what dewey ran on and neither did he and no democratic president in 1960 in this dangerous time in the life of our country when all around us is stretching out the possibilities of upheaval and revolt and subterranean changes no democratic president would ever run on the slogan you never had it so good we ran on the new freedom we ran on the new deal we ran on the fair deal and this year we run on the new frontiers in the 1930 s stanley baldwin speaking at a comparable time in the life of england said that english frontiers were on the rhine now in 1960 american frontiers are on the rhine and the mekong and tigres and the euphrates and the amazon there is no place in the world that is not of concern to all of us and any candidate and any voter must think of every action which affects this state and district and the united states must think of that in relationship to the world around us the struggle that we are engaged in is as serious as any that freedom has ever been engaged in for the last 2 000 years we are responsible not only to ourselves we are responsible not only to the state and country we are responsible for the maintenance of freedom all around the globe my chief argument with this administration my chief disagreement is that in a changing time they have not changed in a time that required foresight and innovation they have relied on old policies some of which have been long outdated in a time which has seen in the last decade the emergence of africa from 300 years to a modern continent with one quarter of all the votes in the general assembly this country has been totally indifferent to this revolutionary change only 2 percent of the department of state personnel have been stationed in africa only 200 scholarships were offered last year to all of africa and yet when the crisis came to the congo we suddenly offered 300 no voice of america program was beamed to latin america during the last 8 years in spanish not one except for the 3 months of the hungarian crisis we have rewarded those who have sustained us with indifference we have not recognized that this is an entirely different world in which we live than 10 or 15 years ago when stalin died john foster dulles said the age of stalin is over and the age of eisenhower begins i am not wholly convinced that that will be the verdict of history over the last 7 or 8 years i believe that this has been an entirely new period just as when you stand by the ocean you cannot see the tide come in or go out but if you leave it for a few hours you can see which way it is moving so historians for the perspective of 1970 and 1980 may draw a different conclusion about the last 8 years how much imprint have we left on our times if you read the debates of the united nations if you read the position that the new nations of the world are taking in those discussions you realize that the relative power and influence of the united states is not increasing as mr nixon suggests all is not well in the world we move with danger every day and i believe the choice for the american people is between a party which believes that all is well and a party which rings the alarm bell in my judgment it is our function as members of the minority party in these hazardous days to ring the alarm bell i believe this is a time of danger i do not believe we can drift as usual i don t believe we can waste our natural resources i do not believe we can continue agricultural policies which drive down farm income i do not believe we can use our steel production the great source of natural wealth 50 percent of capacity i am not pleased to see the soviet union equal us by 1975 in hydroelectric capacity i am not pleased to see countries around the world when asked who will be first say the soviet union in outer space in science in military power in the next 10 years i am not satisfied to have the balance of power begin to shift against us that is the alternative that the people of this community must face that is the prospect and that is the decision do you wish to continue that leadership which has not only brought us to our present peril but which also does not recognize the peril mr nixon accuses me of downgrading the united states i make no criticism as serious and severe as governor rockefeller made last june or as general ridgway has made before he began to graze contentedly in richard nixon s pasture his indictments were far greater than mine and the indictments of fact are more serious than any statement i could make this is not a partisan issue all americans share a common devotion to their ry what i downgrade is our leadership and its prospects for the future i come here to this community where the land has been good to the people and where i hope a new administration will be fair to the land where the tobacco program which has served us well and which has been carried on by a democratic congress i hope can be carried into other agricultural commodities so that supply and demand will protect the interests of the farmer i hope the natural resources of this state which has been blessed by resources will be harnessed for the purposes of the state and the country i ask for a national revival of our spirit there is not a student here and it is nice to talk to 18 and 19 year old students who have the right to vote there is not a student here who will not live in the most hazardous time in the life of our country and i hope that they will assume the burdens which go with the great responsibilities of maintaining freedom we do not want it said of them what queen victoria said of lord john russell he was interested in nothing but the revolution of 1688 and himself we want students and graduates to recognize that this college of the university of kentucky and transylvania and all the rest have not been built up have not been developed merely to advance the private economic interest of its graduates they have a greater purpose in mind no college graduate can go out from any college today without being a man of his nation and a man of his time without pursuing in his own life not only his private interest but the welfare of his country in this dangerous and hazardous time i believe the democratic party stretching its roots deeper than any political party in the world today going all the way to the wellsprings of thomas jefferson and madison i believe that once again this old party still the youngest from the point of view of vitality and energy once more will be called upon to serve the great republic and in serving the great republic will serve the cause of liberty thank you dem jfk8 10 60a john_f _kennedy governor combs lt gov wilson wyatt governor clements governor wetherby keen johnson your next u s senator from the state of kentucky congressman natcher who runs like we would all like to run uncontested congressman frank chelf we flew over his district they were down there waving at us ladies and gentlemen i want to give you the best two horse parlay in the state of kentucky today that is western kentucky state college in the winter and the democratic party in november i am delighted to be in this community with two distinguished colleges and universities a center of education and where there is a look to the future prince bismarck once said that one third of the students of german universities broke down from overwork another third broke down from dissipation and the other third ruled germany i do not know which third of the student body of bowling green business university or western kentucky is here today which third of the student body is here today but i am confident that i am talking to the future rulers of america in the sense that all educated citizens participate in the discipline of self government i come today as a candidate for the democratic party the democratic party which is the only national party in the united states and which was founded when thomas jefferson and james madison went up in the early part of the 19th century traveled up the hudson river on a botanical expedition hunting butterflies and catching fish and they came down the hudson river and they stopped in new york and met aaron burr and the knights of tammany and founded the coalition which then developed between the rural south and the industrial north that tradition has been maintained to the present day i come today from massachusetts not hunting butterflies but asking kentucky to rejoin the democratic party here in this state which has been represented by great democratic senators in the past which sent fred vinson to the senate which sent alben barkley to the vice presidency i believe in 1960 kentucky and the country are going to say yes to the future yes to the democratic party the history of this country moves in rhythms back and forth between progress and standing still between liberalism and conservation and i believe in 1960 the choice for the united states is forward i cannot believe that in the most revolutionary age that the world has ever known in science technology in outer space in the minds of men around the globe i cannot believe that the american people are going to give their endorsement to a political party which says you have never had it so good which endorses the status quo which endorses the past which says that everything that is necessary to be done is being done i cannot believe that the american people will not say that in these changing times in these times of revolution in these times of forward motion around the world i believe that the democratic party is best suited to lead in those times i believe the record is clear no democratic candidate for the presidency ever said that party labels are unimportant every republican candidate every 4 years says don t pay any attention to the record of our parties no democratic president ever called tva creeping socialism no democratic president ever ran on a record of repealing social security no democratic president ever vetoed a tobacco bill no democratic president in this century has presided over the temporary liquidation of american agriculture which has seen a drop in corn in the last 8 years of nearly 30 percent which has seen livestock go down 23 percent in the last 8 years and which puts forward an agricultural program a complete repetition of mr benson and why not nixon called mr benson the most remarkable secretary of agriculture in the history of the united states and i must agree he has spent more money than any secretary of agriculture or all of them in the history of the united states he has piled up higher surpluses he has dropped farmers income more sharply and after 8 years in office he still blames it on the democrats he is the most remarkable secretary of agriculture in history but i cannot believe that this country is going to give their endorsement to a program which continues mr benson s policy of tying the support price on agricultural commodities tying the support price to the market price of the last 8 years which will provide a steady drop in agricultural income this is a serious time and i believe that the united states if it is to meet its manifest destiny must build its strength here at home the reason that franklin roosevelt was a good neighbor in latin america was because he was a good neighbor in the united states and i know of no better example of the partnership which can exist between local groups and states and the national government than the development of the tennessee valley and i do not know any project in this long history of ours that has had a more lasting effect all over the globe in eastern persia in the indus river in the country of colombia in south america every country now is trying to duplicate what the tennessee valley did and it is a source of satisfaction to me that the tennessee valley received its greatest impetus in the twenties not from a man who represented the people of this area but from george norris and the state of nebraska 1 000 miles away who recognized the national interest who put the tennessee valley with franklin roosevelt and the rest in over the opposition of the republican party and built this valley until it is now one of the richest in the nation i say that party labels do mean something if the party stands for something no political party is of any use to the people nor is any politician if he does not stand for definite principles and the principles that i stand for in this century are the same principles that woodrow wilson stood for in 1912 and which franklin roosevelt stood for in 1932 and which president truman campaigned on in 1948 and my judgment is that their success abroad the success of the foreign policies of those three presidents were directly tied to the success of their policies here in the united states the 14 points of woodrow wilson were tied to the new freedom of woodrow wilson the good neighbor policy was tied to the new deal and the marshall plan nato and the truman doctrine and point 4 all had their domestic counterpart in the efforts which president truman made to lift our country forward i come in the most somber time in the history of our country when in 1960 our steel production is at 54 of capacity last week the soviet union outproduced the united states in steel capacity with one half of our potential by 1975 the soviet union will be equal to the united states in hydrocapacity and 10 years ago they were about a third of us by 1980 according to allen dulles of the cia if the present rate of economic growth continues and theirs is from two to three times as great as ours by 1980 the lines will cross and unless we begin to move ahead at a faster rate they will begin to outproduce us today they produce about 44 p ercent of what we produce and yet they maintain a communist defensive a great military power and increasing their power in africa asia and latin america i come as a citizen of the united states and say that what we are doing is not good enough it is my responsibility as leader of the opposition party in 1960 to state that the decision which the american people will make in 1960 is between a political party which looking at the world around us and at our country says it is good enough and a political party looking at the world around us and our own country which says it is not good enough our effort is not good enough we are not moving ahead fast enough we are not building our strength in relation to that of the communists with sufficient vigor that is a decision which you as voters of the state of kentucky will have to address yourselves to to which party to which political philosophy to which viewpoint do you believe after making your own careful judgment this is not a view of mine it has been expressed by commission after commission appointed in the last 8 years by distinguished republican after distinguished republican by general after general who has warned that the relative power of the united states and of the free world is not rising as fast as it must if we are to maintain ourselves and the cause of freedom around the globe i take no pleasure in this message whether i win or lose however this message is going to be given that what we are doing now is not good enough that this is a strong country which must be stronger it is a powerful country which must be more powerful and it is on your judgment and your sense of responsibility and your willingness to face the future which is looming in front of us in a crowded and turbulent world it is on the good judgment of the people of kentucky that i rest my case i believe as in other days and other years in other great crises that the democratic party old as it is stretching back in history as it does i believe it is the most vigorous the most modern the most up to date the most vital the most in touch with the changing world around us so i come here today and ask your support i ask your support not only for our candidates but i ask your support and your enlistment in the great cause of building the strength of the great republic thank you dem jfk8 10 60b john_f _kennedy governor combs congressman stubblefield congressman chelf lt gov wilson wyatt governor weatherby your next u s senator keen johnson fellow democrats it is an honor to come to paducah and it is an honor to come to the land of mr barkley what is impressive about senator barkley s career is that he came to the congress of the united states in the administration of woodrow wilson he bore the burdens in the heat of the day in the administration of franklin roosevelt he served harry truman as vice president and i had the honor of serving with him in his last days in the u s senate in 1955 and 1956 his career covered the administration of three great democratic presidents of this century and i must say that alben barkley when he came before the democratic convention in 1948 and they played that song my old kentucky home and he lifted a defeated convention to the heights he spoke for the democratic party like i do today alben barkley nor harry truman nor franklin roosevelt nor woodrow wilson ever said party labels don t matter we know that party labels do matter a party label tells you something about the candidate that that party presents the republican party never would have nominated me and they never would have nominated senator barkley and they never would have nominated franklin roosevelt and they never would have nominated woodrow wilson and they certainly would not have nominated harry truman their candidates were different then as they are now they went to the mckinleys and the landons and the coolidges and the hoovers and the deweys and the nixons they stood in the past still and they stand today still and i cannot believe that paducah living as it does in the tradition of democracy living as it does on a great natural resource living as it does in an area which has been developed by the partnership of the people of this area and by an effective national government can possibly give their endorsement to a republican leadership which has opposed the development of these natural resources which looks to the past which even in the most dangerous days of our time the most dangerous days of our national history still says you have never had it so good mr khrushchev runs on that slogan we can do better we run on the slogan that this is a great people and a great country but we run on the slogan and the view that it is the republicans who downgrade this country it is the republicans who are unwilling to set before us our national agenda it is the republicans who do not have confidence that this country can fulfill a far greater role in our own national life and in the world than it does today i think this is an important election and i think the decision is very clear and i think the issues are very sharp mr nixon and i could not disagree more this is not a contest where there are two candidates in general agreement we disagree on the goals for the united states and we disagree on the means of achieving those goals as we have disagreed in the great crises of our country stretching back to the days of thomas jefferson and andrew jackson mr nixon said in louisville the other day that lyndon johnson and i were not of the tradition of jefferson and jackson thomas jefferson when he made the louisiana purchase almost was impeached by the republicans of those days the federalist party senator john quincy adams from my state of massachusetts who was a federalist who supported thomas jefferson was forced to resign from the senate so bitter was the feeling against jefferson andrew jackson when he seized and broke the power of the second bank of america was the only president of the united states to ever be censured by the u s senate by the whigs of that day the forefathers of the republican party woodrow wilson s aim to bring us into the league of nations which might have averted world war ii was blocked by a republican dominated senate we are not of the tradition they say of wilson and jefferson and jackson well mr nixon is of the tradition of mckinley coolidge and harding we stand where our other great leaders of the democratic party have stood in their day looking forward we do not expect that we can win this election by easy phrases and by presenting vague national goals i don t run for the presidency saying that if i am elected life will be easy but i run for the office of the presidency with the greatest faith in this country with a realization whether mr nixon says so or not whether our national leadership now recognizes it or not that the united states is moving in the sixties through the most difficult and hazardous period of our country s history more hazardous indeed than any that the cause of freedom has ever faced and i do not believe that the tide is going in our direction i do not believe that our prestige and strength is increasing i am not satisfied to have mr castro not only raise the banner of revolt in cuba against us but all over latin america i am not satisfied to have ghana and africa an independent country mr nixon visited it in 1957 gaining experience now a week ago mr herter said it has moved into the communist orbit in foreign policy laos where we poured out the money is now moving sharply in the direction of the communists anyone who says that the power of the united states is increasing fast enough that we are doing everything we should be doing that we are developing our resources and our strength and our military potential and our economic growth as fast as we should do so i believe does not serve his country i think we serve this country and our party serves the country when we tell the truth when we present the facts honest and clearly and give the american people an opportunity to make their judgment the decision is yours not ours you must decide what kind of a country you want your judgment is just as good as anyone else s in the world around us there are no secrets today everyone can make their assessment of our national peril of our national strength whether the tide comes in for us or whether the tide goes out but i don t want anyone to say after this election win or lose that the democratic party did not meet its commitment and i believe its commitment is to present the people of this country with a sober assessment of our national opportunity and our national peril this is as dickens said a century ago the best of times and the worst of times it is the best of times because science and technology and energy can change the life of every person in the world for the better in the next 10 or 20 years we will get fresh water from salt water we will double and triple our production we will harness our rivers the atom will bring a better life all around the globe and it is the worst of times because we and the communists are locked in deadly embrace all around the globe the best of times the worst of times it is our function and our responsibility to make the best of the best times and to meet the worst times with courage and fortitude and perseverance every generation of americans has had to meet the same responsibility in 1900 in 1917 in 1941 and again and again americans have been willing to participate in the maintenance of freedom here and around the world i come here today and ask your support in this campaign i ask your help not merely for our party but for our country here in this community which depends upon the harnessing of the rivers which depends upon the breaking of the atom which depends upon the maintenance of an effective agricultural program i believe that you here in kentucky in the dark and bloody ground of history you in kentucky join me in looking forward out of this wellspring of american vitality and scenes of history i believe that you say now in 1960 that it is time that the united states started moving again it is time that we had in washington once again an administration which will set before us the unfinished business the agenda of our day and which will start this country moving again thank you dem jfk8 5 61 john_f _kennedy governor collins bishop hannan ladies and gentlemen we have with us today the nation s number one television performer who i think on last friday morning secured the largest rating of any morning show in recent history i must say i think all of us as citizens of the free world are extremely proud not only of commander shepard but also of mrs shepard and perhaps with the vice president they would come forward commander shepard how do you get them to stop we only have time for a few words here because i understand we have a rather busy day ahead of us i just want to say thank you very much for such a warm welcome i must say i think the presence of commander shepard and also mrs shepard who i think is i must say when i saw her on television i had great satisfaction as a fellow citizen i must say we are delighted to have them all it s a great source of satisfaction and pride to us i said this morning when i read off the names of some of the other people who have been involved in this flight mr webb who is head of nasa and dr dryden and all the rest i said that they were names which were rather unknown if this flight had not been successful however they would have been among the best known names in the united states so that even i who had nothing to do with the flight would have become very much identified with it so that i do express my commendation to commander shepard and also his fellow astronauts who all involved themselves in the hazards and the discipline of the work but also those who were involved with the program because this is a free society and because we therefore take our chances out in the open of success or failure all those who were part of the program who were involved in the decisions which made the program possible who were involved in the very public decision which made the very public flight possible on friday morning were also in hazard and while their task did not in any manner approach that of the commander nevertheless it is a very real one and it is the kind of risk which members of a free society must take there had been before the flight as you know a good many members of our community who felt that we should not take that chance but i see no way out of it i don t see how it s possible for us to keep these matters private unless we decide on the highest national level that all matters which are risky which carry with them the hazard of defeat which could be detrimental to our society that none of them will be printed in the paper or carried on radio and television the essence of free communication must be that our failures as well as our successes will be broadcast around the world and therefore we take double pride in our successes i am delighted that there are members here of your profession who are not citizens of this country but who come from our hemisphere i hope that they understand that we share a fraternal feeling with them that we are engaged in a common effort to maintain freedom here in this hemisphere and to assist freedom throughout the world and it has been our fortune to be placed in positions of responsibility all of us at a time when freedom is under its greatest attack i know that to those who live in some parts of this country and some parts of the world that the discipline of the totalitarian system has some attraction i called attention at my press conference more than a week ago to a comment made by a student in paris an african student after the extraordinary flight of major gagarin in which the student said the russians don t talk about things they do them and then we hear about them it is difficult for me to believe that any young man or woman or any citizen who understands the real meaning of freedom who recognizes that freedom is at issue around the globe could possibly hold that view i feel as a believer in freedom as well as president of the united states that we want a world in which the good and the bad successes or failures the aspirations of people their desires their disagreements their dissent their agreements whether they serve the interest of the state or not should be made public should be part of the general understanding of all people and that is why i was particularly anxious to come here today there is no means of communication as significant as that in which you are involved to hear to see to listen and you have the opportunity to play a significant role in the defense of freedom all around the globe our adversaries in this struggle against freedom and they are not national adversaries we have no national disagreements what is involved is the great struggle for freedom and our adversaries in that struggle possess many advantages their forces press down upon us on the borders of the middle east southeast asia and western europe they use the secrecy of the totalitarian state and the discipline to mask the effective use of guerrilla forces secretly undermining independent states and to hide a wide international network of agents and activities which threaten the fabric of democratic government everywhere in the world and their single minded effort to destroy freedom is strengthened by the discipline the secrecy and the swiftness with which an efficient despotism can move in addition the ability of a totalitarian state to mobilize all of its resources for the service of the state whatever the human cost has great attraction for those who live on the marginal edge of existence fired with a strong feeling of ancient wrongs and grievances a feeling which is tirelessly exploited by our adversaries the people who live on an income of sixty or seventy or eighty dollars a year the example of the soviet union which in the short space of forty years has transformed itself from being among the most backward countries of europe to being a leader in space has powerful attraction once a state succumbs however to this attraction to the lure of communism to the lure of totalitarianism even for a moment resistance is then crushed opposition is destroyed and despotic power is maintained even when finally the people may realize they have been cruelly misled and the steady stream of refugees out of viet minh in the north out of eastern germany out of cuba all indicate the real nature of their society once it has assumed control on this path thus far there has been no turning back there can be no doubt therefore that this determined and powerful system will subject us to many tests of nerve and will in the coming years in berlin in asia in the middle east in this hemisphere we will face challenge after challenge as the communists armed with all the resources and advantage of the police state attempt to shift the balance of power in their direction but despite this i do not believe that the tide of history is on the side of despotism i do not believe that the tide of history necessarily is on either side it is only what we decide ourselves we will do which direction we will turn the tide of history that we can be successful for we bring to the battle our own resources the particular advantages of a free society advantages which our adversaries cannot match advantages which if vigorously used offer hope for the ultimate triumph of freedom on our side is the simple and all important fact that men want to be free and nations want to be their own masters it is this fact that helps to explain why no nation in the past decade with the possible exception of cuba where a social revolution was betrayed and where the story is not yet finally ended has fallen under communist rule without being subdued by armed force it is this fact that explains the courageous revolution against hopeless odds in poland and east germany and hungary and tibet revolutions that would have succeeded if alien armies had not been present to put them down it is this fact that explains why the poverty stricken nations of this hemisphere and africa filled with discontent in some cases and social tensions bearing the memory of past wrongs have still not succumbed to the lure of communism and it is this fact that is man s best hope for our nation is on the side of man s desire to be free and the desire of nations to be independent and thus we are allied if we are true to ourselves and true to our destiny with the strongest force in the world today the great inner resource of freedom the resource which has kept the world s oldest democracy continually young and vital the resource which has always brought us our greatest exploits in time of our greatest need is the very fact of the open society thus if we are once again to preserve our civilization it will be because of our freedom and not in spite of it that is why i am here with you today for the flow of ideas the capacity to make informed choices the ability to criticise all the assumptions upon which political democracy rests depend largely upon communication and you are the guardians of the most powerful and effective means of communication ever designed in the rest of the world this power can be used to describe the true nature of the struggle and to give a true and responsible picture of a free society and in addition broadcasting has new and untried possibilities for education for helping to end illiteracy which holds back so much of the world and which denies access to the information so vital to a free and informed choice the full development of broadcasting as an instrument of education is one of the most significant challenges which confronts your industry and here in our own country this power can be used as it is being used to tell our people of the perils and the challenges and the opportunities that we face of the effort and painful choices which the coming years will demand for the history of this nation is a tribute to the ability of an informed citizenry to make the right choices in response to danger and if you play your part if the immense powers of broadcasting are used to illuminate the new and subtle problems which our nation faces if your strength is used to reinforce the great strengths which freedom brings then i am confident that our people and our nation and all other people and all other nations will again rise to the great challenges of the sixties no man can hope to prophesy with precision the outcome of the great struggle in which our generation is now engaged yet we do know that the cause of human freedom has been threatened on many occasions since the system of free choice and democracy was developed in sunlit greece more than twenty four hundred years ago and yet from each threat and indeed from each defeat as well as from each success it has ultimately emerged unconquered that is why in the face of an ominous future we can share that faith which winston churchill expressed more than a half century ago humanity will not be cast down we are going along along the same high road and already behind the distant mountains the sun can be seen and will be seen again that is your opportunity and that is a responsibility which all of us who are citizens of the free world must once again meet dem jfk8 9 60a john_f _kennedy thank you very much ladies and gentlemen thank you governor i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming down on this whistle stop tour in this county we are carrying this campaign into the state of california i want to make the point that this really is not merely a contest between the vice president and myself i think this is a contest between two political parties between the histories of those parties and between their promises and the record for the future this is an important election and i think the record of the democratic party and its assurances for the future is written in its record of the past in the new freedom of woodrow wilson in the new deal of franklin roosevelt in the fair deal of harry truman i can assure you that if we are successful in january of 1961 that we are going to move ahead in this country that we are going to bring men and women from all parts of the united states to go to work as they worked in the 1930 s for this country to start it moving again to bring the best we have in talents from all sections in order to work for the country once again i don t run for the office of the presidency promising you that if i am elected that life will be easy and the problems all solved i think the 1960 s are going to be among the most difficult years in our history because we have a responsibility not only to ourselves but we have a responsibility toward all those who look to us for leadership to the people in latin america and africa and asia who stand today on the razor edge of decision who are attempting to make a judgment as to which side represents the leader of the future whether we do or the communists i believe that we do but i believe that if we are going to meet the future it is going to require the best of us all i think we are going to have to meet the problems we face here at home if we are going to successfully convey an image of vitality and strength abroad we are going to have to develop the natural resources of the united states the resources of this valley we are going to have to increase our economic growth we are going to have to put our country and our people back to work this is a great country but i think it can be a greater country i ask your help in this campaign give me your help give me your assistance i think we can not only win this campaign but we can start the united states moving again thank you dem jfk8 9 60b john_f _kennedy governor egan senator bartlett senator gruening congressman rivers and ladies and gentlemen during the democratic convention i said that if i were nominated by that convention i would start my campaign in the state of alaska that was a pledge i meant to keep i am keeping it here now i can assure you that i will keep all the other commitments that we make in this campaign i understand that there has been some discussion about where the state capital of this state should be located let me say to you that i don t know enough about that to comment on it or at least i know too much to comment on it but i will say to you that if the democrats are elected this year we will return the capital of the free world to washington we will once again in that capital send out streams of energy and vitality which can mean so much to the growth of alaska so much to the growth of the united states and so much to those men and women who share our common aspiration to be free this is a great state in a very real sense alaska typifies the new frontier i am delighted to be here today i came in 1958 to participate in the election of a great senator senator gruening he and senator bartlett and congressman rivers speak powerfully for the state of alaska but they know and i know that this state will not begin to realize its potential until we have not only a democratic congress but until we have a democratic president who believes in the future of alaska i was here in the snow i am glad to come here in the summer in any case i know i am among friends you are very nice to come and welcome me to the airport thank you very much dem jfk8 9 60c john_f _kennedy mr mayor governor brown doug page your next congressman senator miller ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for coming down to this station and giving us a great democratic welcome this train isn t just heading for oakland it is heading for washington d c i don t think that there is anyone in this town who thinks that there are no longer any major issues between the two parties we carry on in this campaign the same struggle that woodrow wilson carried on in his fight for the new freedoms that franklin roosevelt carried on in his fight for the new deal that harry truman carried on in his fight for the fair deal and that adlai stevenson carried on in his fight for a new america we are going to demonstrate in this election that this country is ready for a change we are going to show that this country does not want 4 more years of standing still the record of the republican party is written into the bills that have been defeated over the last 25 years defeated in the last 4 weeks of the congressional session i think this is a great state with a great governor i think this is a great country but i think it can be a greater country that is the difference between the republicans and the democrats they think everything is as good as it can be we think it can be better that is what the purpose of this election is every effort that we have made to secure federal aid for education aid for our older citizens a better deal for all americans i think this administration has opposed i don t think this country is ready to see the administration of the country turned over in the most dangerous years of our history to a standstill status quo administration i think we can do better i ask your help in this campaign give me your hands and your voice and i think we can move again and i think the place to win this election is right here in the state of california i want you my wife is having a baby i want you to meet my sister who used to come from massachusetts but saw the wisdom of coming west my sister pat lawford and i would like to have you meet i hope your next congressman doug page thank you dem jfk8 9 60d john_f _kennedy governor brown congressman bizz johnson i think you have all seen him this morning and you know mrs engle she is traveling with us ladies and gentlemen we want to thank you very much for coming down here this morning we got the only good night s rest on this train that we have had in this last 2 weeks we start this campaign in this state this morning and i think it is most appropriate that we fight this campaign in the vice president s own state because this is where we can win this campaign in the state of california so we will be all over it in the next few days we are coming back in october i don t think anyone in this state who has lived here in the last few years who has seen the same problems in california that the whole united states is going to face in the next 10 or 20 years can possibly say that this election makes no difference if we are going to move ahead if this economy of this state and country is going to grow if we are going to do something about education and development of our resources if we are going to meet our problems at home and abroad i think it is time we elected a democratic congress and a democratic president i understand i am going to be presented with something that is more valuable than gold thank you the governor suggests that we take it down to southern california and sell it i will just pour out a cup at a time all the way down the state so they can see what you have up here in any case i thank you very much for coming down this is an important campaign because it is an important country and because all of us are anxious to see the united states move ahead i ask your help in this campaign i think we can benefit and i think the place to win it is in the state of california thank you dem jfk8 9 60e john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen mr mayor congressman moss governor brown i want to express my appreciation to all of you for your kindness in coming down here and welcoming us this train is headed not only south but it is headed toward washington i think in many ways the election of 1960 comes at a time more dangerous for our country more trying for all of us a period of greater responsibility for every citizen than any election since the election of 1860 in that time as you recall the great issue was whether this country could stay united whether it would in the words of lincoln exist half slave and half free the issue in the election of 1960 involves not only the well being of the people of this valley involves not only the development of your natural resources but as citizens of the united states and leaders of the free world we must be concerned about such far off places as the congo india and indonesia the security of those countries as well as the well being of their people i don t suppose that in any election before the second administration of woodrow wilson was there a combination of such great decisions which face the american people which involve their own security as citizens within their own country and also their positions as leaders of the free world but in the administration of wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman this country began to move ahead here at home and began to occupy a position of leadership around the world my chief disagreement with the republican party and its leadership is not because i criticize the country it is because i think they have lost faith in the united states they are the ones who don t think we can do better we say we can do better because we believe that this country has unlimited resources because we believe it has unlimited energy and because we believe it has an unlimited potential we don t criticize the united states because we think there is something wrong with the united states we say we can do better the republicans say this is as good as we can do that is the difference between us anybody who has lived in this valley since 1945 knows what can be done in the united states you have turned since the roosevelt administration you have made this valley green it shows what can be done in this country with energy and leadership i ask your support in this campaign and i can assure you that if we are successful we are going to move again in this country we are going to assume the leadership again of the free world we are going to move in this valley and we are going to move again around the globe thank you very much for coming down dem jfk8 9 60f john_f _kennedy governor brown congressman miller mrs engle attorney general mosk congressman shelley congressman cohelan mrs price distinguished guests my sister pat ladies and gentlemen it just shows what 14 years in the congress can do to a man who is full of zip i appreciate that introduction very much george i am delighted to be here tonight and i am particularly glad to be here in the company of three distinguished members of congress who have spoken powerfully for the interests of the people of northern california and have also spoken for the people of the united states congressman miller congressman cohelan and congressman shelley senator jackson governor brown and i have been working on the railroad all day today we came all the way from oregon to oakland but the truth of the matter is that our train is headed for washington d c the fact of the matter is that the election of 1960 is 2 months from tonight and i think that 2 months from tonight the democratic party is going to regain the chief executive office pat brown since he has been governor has written with the help of a democratic senate and a democratic legislature a whole program of human rights i think if we can get the democrats in control of the congress and of the executive in the next 4 years we can write into the program of this country a program of human rights i ask your help this is not merely a contest between the vice president of the united states and myself this is a contest between two political parties and in spite of the fact that every 4 years the republican party has what adlai stevenson called the liberal hour the record of the republican party is written in the last 4 years in the bills that did not become law in the opposition they have had toward every piece of creative legislation since woodrow wilson s new freedom to the present effort that we made in the month of august in the congress they have opposed they have stood against progress i think their time is coming to an end for the fact of the matter is that the republican party that we oppose is the same old party there is no new republican party there is the same old party stretching back into history from the days of mckinley through coolidge and harding and all the rest and i think that in this great year of 1960 the american people are going to choose progress in 1936 speaking before 100 000 people in franklin field franklin roosevelt accepted the second presidential nomination and in that speech he said governments can err presidents do make mistakes but the immortal dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference the fact of the matter is that where franklin roosevelt set before our country its unfinished business the agenda of the american society this party has only set ceilings and limitations the difference between the democratic party and the republican party is we have faith in this country we don t think what is happening now is good enough we think we have a great country but we think it can be greater and we are going to make it greater away back in 1933 the new president s friend robert sherwood contrasted the spirit of the new deal with the moribund atmosphere of the outgoing republican party in a brief poem plodding feet tramp tramp the grand old party breaking camp blare of bugles din din the new deal is moving in today on every major crisis that faces this country from the plight of our citizens here in the united states to the problems that we face abroad we hear no blare of bugles din din we see only plodding feet tramp tramp and the grand old party breaking camp i don t say that this administration has remained silent on all these issues in fact on occasions they remind me of the exhortation from king lear that goes i will do such things what they are yet i know not but they shall be the terrors of the earth as there are 15 million americans in the richest country on earth who live in substandard housing as long as there are 5 million homes in the cities of the united states that lack plumbing of any kind as long as there are nearly 15 million americans who are not covered by the minimum wage of even a dollar as long as the average wage for laundry women in five large cities of this country is 65 cents an hour for a 48 hour week as long as there are over 100 000 people in the state of west virginia alone who wait every month for a food package from the u s government which includes some grain some rice and this summer they are going to add lard and when the president of the united states was asked about it at his news conference in may he said we distributed 5 million in west virginia last year five million dollars of surplus food to keep more than 100 000 people going for an entire year i think it is time for a change as long as there are 9 million americans over the age of 65 who receive incomes of less than 20 a week 3 million more receiving incomes of less than 40 a week amounts on which they cannot possibly afford to pay for their medical bills and yet in the august session of the congress in our attempt to tie medical care for the aged to social security we received the support of only one member of the minority party senator case of new jersey that is the record of that party and we are going to defeat them in november this country needs the democratic party for so long as there is one child without a decent education so long as there is one family without a decent home so long as there is one able bodied citizen who wants to work and can t find it so long as there is one retired american who lives out his life without dignity or hope so long will we need the democratic party let me make it very clear that if we are successful in january we are going to recommend the following programs first we are going to make sure that those americans who are retired who are on social security who do need medical care shall have it under the social security system second i think this country needs the democratic party because the democratic party intends to use the full legal and moral authority of the federal government including in particular the presidency itself to put an end to racial and religions discrimination in this country of ours for we believe in the right of every american to stand up for his rights even if to do so he has to sit down for them third america needs the democratic party because the democratic party believes in an obligation of the federal government as well as the states to make sure that we have the best educational system in the country well paid and well trained teachers teaching children in decent classrooms that is an object of our political party and under a democratic party lastly we are going to enact into law a bill for housing which was vetoed a year ago by the president of the united states and which was buried in the rules committee of the house of representatives this year without a single republican voting to send it to the floor of the house franklin roosevelt once reminded us that we cannot be content if some fraction of our people whether it be one third or one fifth or one tenth is ill fed ill clothed ill housed and insecure and despite today s vital needs the republican party in this century in fact since the end of teddy roosevelt s administration has been a contented party a satisfied party a believer in maintaining things as they are we think we can do better we think we can strengthen this country we think we can increase its security we think we can make it once again an object of hope around the world only a party which recognizes its obligations to its own citizens only a country which feels that it must move ahead only that kind of a country can present a vivid image to the world at large the reason that woodrow wilson franklin roosevelt and harry truman were so successful in their day the reason that adlai stevenson has had a strong image in spite of his defeats the reason that these men have been great symbols of the american revolution in their time around the world was because they acted here at home woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal adlai stevenson s new america and we are going to put those programs together in the new frontier of the 1960 s i believe this country can meet our challenges i am in this campaign in 1960 remembering the words of a great american a hundred years ago in the election of 1860 in that election abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know that there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready today in 1960 as we see the storm breaking around our shores we know there is a god and that he hates injustice and we believe that he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk8 9 60g john_f _kennedy governor brown ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you having come down and meeting us at the station and i am also delighted to he in the hometown of my friend and colleague with whom i served in the u s congress for 14 years clair engle his successor bizz johnson has been campaigning with us and i am delighted to be accompanied across the face of california by your distinguished governor pat brown i campaign for the office of the presidency in a very difficult and dangerous time in the life of our country and i do not do that if i am elected all of the problems of california and the united states and the free world will be solved but i do believe that it is vitally important if the security of the united states is going to be protected if our position as a leader of the free world is going to be maintained that we recognize the close relationships between the vitality of our own domestic economy and our position around the world if we stand still here at home we stand still around the world the reason that woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman were so successful in their foreign policy was because they were so successful in their domestic policy when franklin roosevelt harnessed the tva and the central valley and bonneville he demonstrated to a watching world that this country was moving and therefore they were prepared to follow his leadership in their great efforts to obtain their freedom and independence this valley is a great natural resource not of the state of california only but of the united states this belongs not to one state but to all the people and therefore i think it appropriate that the united states participate in the development of the resources of the western united states and the resources of the state of california i would like to make it clear that when the people put their shoulders to the development of great dams then i think that power should be distributed in a way that benefits the people i don t think the people should pay for irrigation and have the power distributed by a private company i think the people should benefit i come from a section of the united states that has problems entirely different from california we have too much water you have too little but it is a fact that in this century the two americans who recognized the importance of the development of natural resources to the united states were both from eastern united states one was a republican theodore roosevelt and the other was a democrat franklin roosevelt i can assure you that if we are successful in this campaign we are going to move ahead on all fronts on the development of our national economy on the development of our natural resources rebuilding our country so that by the year 2000 when two people live in this country for every one that lives today this will then be a strong and rich country whose security is assured i run for the office of the presidency in the most difficult time in the life of our country in many ways the most difficult in a hundred years in the election of 1860 as abraham lincoln said the issue was whether this country could exist half slave and half free i think the issue in 1960 is whether this world can exist half slave and half free if it is going to move in the direction of freedom if it is going to move in the direction of the things which we value then the united states has to lead i don t promise you an easy future but i can promise you that if we are successful this country will begin to move again this country will begin to lead again this country will go forward thank you very much dem jfk8 9 60h john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for turning out in this beautiful weather i follow here in 1960 the same trail harry truman took in 1948 when he came down this valley and carried california in the 1948 election and i am delighted to come here in the shadow of mount shasta and follow in the next 2 days the central valley all the way down to southern california because this valley shows what can be done it shows what we must do in the future if we are going to develop the resources of the united states i can assure you that if we are successful in this election we will move ahead in the development of the resources of the central valley and also the resources of the western united states i come from a state massachusetts which has too much water but i know enough about the history of the world to know that water is the key to the development of the united states and it is a source of pride and satisfaction to me that the two americans in this century who recognized this best both came from the state of new york theodore roosevelt and franklin roosevelt the fact is that under franklin roosevelt we launched the great projects which have given us industrial power given us conservation and irrigation given us control of our water resources tva the central valley project bonneville and all the rest today in a closely knit tumultuous world the key to the future lies in water it is the fact of the matter that this administration has failed to recognize that unless this country moves ahead today we will not have in 1970 and 1980 the same resources which have made our own life so productive i want to make it clear that if we are successful in this election we are going to reverse the policy of no new starts and move ahead to make sure that those who follow in our trail have the same advantages that we have therefore i suggest that we embark in january 1960 on the following programs first that we reverse the policy of no new starts and move ahead with development of our natural resources including the extension of the central valley secondly we must reassert the public right to the public domain we must make sure that the so called partnership policy does not prevent the maximum use of our country s natural resources we must defend the integrity of the tennessee valley the central valley and the columbia basin and commence the forest reclamation and antipollution programs begun by the new deal in the 1930 s third we must get on with reclamation and basinwide development across the united states fourth we must appoint a federal power commission that represents the public interest and not the private interest therefore in the 1960 s we need a whole new concept of resource development so vast so complex and so essential are our natural resources that they cannot be parceled out piecemeal nothing less than a comprehensive basin by basin valley by valley development of our natural resources to make sure that not one drop of our water goes from the wellsprings of our water to the sea without being used for a public purpose and i think it would be most useful to establish for the office of the president himself a council of resource and conservation advisers to survey the whole scope of our natural resources so that we can as a country not merely as a basin develop the resources for 1970 and 1980 and lastly we must bring to bear the best minds that this country has on the development of our natural resources we cannot possibly afford not to make a maximum effort to get fresh water from salt water if this state and the country is going to move ahead we have to figure out how long range weather controlling floods managing watersheds and i think we have to recognize that in other centuries in other areas of the world great countries which ignored their natural resources now lie buried under sand i think we can do better the soviet union has set in this regard a warning bell for us all by 1950 they were 28 years behind in the development of their hydro capacity in 28 years from today at their present rate of growth with their present emphasis on power and energy they are going to be ahead of the united states that is how close this is and as khrushchev has said the electrification of their society has been a basic aim of the communist party since its earlier stage this is only one of the many problems that our country faces but i think in this area as in so many others i think it is time we started to move ahead this is a great country but i think it can be a greater country this state of california is a great state but i think it can be a greater state and i am not satisfied as an american to see us stand still while other countries move ahead i think it is up to us to grasp the future to recognize the responsibilities that we have in our own generation to move ahead i can assure you that if i am elected in november if i am successful in this election that this great resource of ours here in this state in the central valley will carry on as it did under franklin roosevelt and harry truman this is an important election i ask your help in this election i can assure you that this is a young and vital country but what we do here in our own country affects the security of the united states around the world if countries in africa and latin america and asia see us standing still and the soviet union and the chinese communists moving ahead then they decide that the future belongs to them and not to us i think the future belongs to us but if it is going to belong to us we have to reach forward so give us your help stand with us in this election and i can assure you that while i do not promise an easy future i can promise you that the united states will move again thank you dem jfk8 9 60i john_f _kennedy thank you mr mayor governor brown senator miller the next congressman doug page ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you all for coming to the station this train is going south but it is also going toward washington and i want your support in this campaign this contest is not merely between the vice president and myself this contest is between the democratic party and the republican party and in that regard there is no contest governor stevenson used to say that for a few months every 4 years the republican program was interrupted by the liberal hour but i think the record of the republican party is written on the bills that never become law on the things we failed to do and the record of the democratic party is written in the programs of woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s fair deal adlai stevenson s new america this contest is between those who think things are fine as they are those who are satisfied with the status quo those who think we can t do any more or do it any better and on the other side there are those of us who know we can do better who believe it is a great country but know that we can do better who believe it is a great country but know it can be a greater one i ask your help in this campaign give me your hand and we will join together and move this country forward if you think we can provide better schools for our children and more help for the older if you think we can develop this state and the resources of the west if you think it is possible to strengthen the image and prestige of the united states around the world then come with us if you are tired and don t want to move then stay with the republicans but i think we are ready to move my wife is home and we are having a baby a boy in november i want you to meet my sister who lives in california pat lawford and then i want you to meet the man who i hope is going to be the next democratic congressman doug page i hope you will all be registered i would really appreciate your help in this campaign i think california is the place to win this election thank you dem jfk8 9 60l john_f _kennedy governor brown mrs brown congressman john moss ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to take this campaign to the capital city of the state of california and ask you to support a democratic president in november this train is heading south but it is also heading toward washington and it is also dedicated to the rebuilding of this state and country this is a most important election in a most important time in the life of our country i think the record of the republican party in this century can be written in the slogan of stay normal with harding and keeping cool with coolidge and the record of the democratic party and the things for which it has stood and the things for which it has fought have been written in the new freedom of woodrow wilson the new deal of franklin roosevelt the fair deal of harry truman and the new america of adlai stevenson and now i ask you to join me on the new frontier of the 1960 s i don t run for the office of the presidency promising you that if i am elected life will be easy and americans can go on vacation i think that life in the 1960 s is going to be more difficult more burdensome than it has ever been in the past i think we face the most difficult years in our history not only in our own country but around the world the great responsibility for us as americans is to demonstrate our vitality here in this country to move ahead here in the united states and in so doing to demonstrate our leadership around the world here in this state under the administration of governor brown working with a democratic assembly and a democratic state senate you have shown what can be done i hope in november you will give us in washington a democratic house and a democratic senate and a democratic chief executive and a democratic administration which can move ahead i think the real issue in this campaign in this state and around the country is the republicans saying that things are good as they can be i don t agree with it i think the real difference is that we believe things can be better we believe this country can move ahead we believe that we can move stronger on the road to peace and in the establishment of our own security i don t take the view that we have never had it so good i take the view that this is a great country but it can be greater this is a great state but it can be a greater state i ask your help in this campaign i think we can win and if we win i think it will be possible for the country to win during the presidential election 100 years ago abraham lincoln said i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i see his hand in it if he has a place and part for me i am ready and i say in this campaign as the storm breaks around the great republic that there is a place for us and we are ready thank you dem jfk9 10 60 john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen first of all i want to present to you a great and distinguished governor of the state of ohio who was one of the first of those who supported my candidacy and has been my constant friend and supporter since gov mike di salle jim griffin mayor franko democratic chairman jim sulligan ladies and gentlemen that is the first time that photographers have ever moved for anybody i don t know what is happening to the united states when we can get this many thousands of people to come to a public meeting at a time when the world series is in effect i think maybe mr nixon is wrong i think maybe the people of this country have been reading the paper and i think they know that this is an important election i don t think they are buying that line you have never had it so good i want mr nixon to come to this square and tell the people of youngstown i want him to tell the people of this valley you never had it so good we will settle the question on november 8 whether we have never had it so good or whether we must do better and i don t think on that question the people of youngstown or the people of ohio or the people of the united states will hesitate to say yes we can do better yes we must do better yes we must move forward it just so happens that 8 years ago this very time governor stevenson carrying his campaign in 1952 came here and spoke in this very spot and he read in the morning newspaper and he mentioned in his speech that the steel capacity and production of youngstown was 104 percent of capacity well i read in this morning s paper and last week s paper and 2 weeks 3 weeks 4 weeks 5 weeks 6 weeks 3 months ago the steel capacity of this community is 44 percent of capacity thousands of steelworkers have been out of work not 8 weeks not 18 weeks but they are going on 26 weeks and after that they go on relief you never had it so good in 1864 abraham lincoln when awaiting the returns in the election of 1864 finally heard that ohio had voted for him and he sent out a word thank god ohio has saved the union i hope on november 8 1960 we can send out the same wire i hope ohio will go democratic the people of ohio need no speeches i believe the issues are crystal clear and they are very sharp and very different they all go to the picture which the two candidates and the two parties see in america mr nixon sees a strong america increasing in vitality and energy spreading its influence throughout the world the tide of freedom rising all men turning to the united states for encouragement and assistance and example i see a strong and great country but i see a country that must he stronger i see a powerful country that must be more powerful i see a people full of vitality and energy but i see a leadership that has been standing still you don t need speeches living in this community here in this community which should be the pulsebeat of the united states which is the american ruhr valley which is the source of energy for the united states along the ohio valley when you go 44 percent of capacity in october at the very time when the automobile industry is tooling up and making its most cars for the year if you are 44 percent of capacity now what will it be in december january february and march if this administration continues its policies that have led us to this position not only here in youngstown but all over the united states not only in the united states but all over the world about 3 weeks ago after a vote in the united nations and indeed on last friday mr nixon said look what has been happening in the united nations if you want to see how our prestige has grown i looked at that vote yesterday on the admission of red china in 1952 there were seven votes for the admission of red china into the united nations yesterday there were 34 how many african nations voted with us yesterday how many of the new nations voted with the united states or voted with the chinese communists how many abstained how long will they abstain mr khrushchev does not stay in new york because he enjoys new york he stays there because he is carrying out his consistent campaign to destroy us i do not believe that the american people in 1960 faced with the most serious challenge in our long history are going to choose to buy the line that we are doing everythmg that must be done that everything is moving forward as it should move that we are moving in national and international strength as never before i don t agree with it and i want it clearly understood that i do not agree with this administration s leadership that i downgrade not the united states but the republican leadership that i do not consider the philosophy which mr nixon is expressing in this campaign to represent the real needs of the united states and i do not believe the republican party will serve the people and the cause of freedom as it must be served if we are not only to endure but to prevail our disagreements are deep i come from a party which believes in 1 25 minimum wage mr nixon leads a party which in 1935 voted 99 percent against the 25 cent minimum wage and mr nixon last week said 1 25 minimum wage is inflationary i would like to see any american get along who lives in political life from the president vice president to the two candidates on 1 25 an hour mr nixon considers medical care for the aged tied to social security to be and i quote him accurately too extreme there are 17 million americans and there is not anyone here who does not have a part of his family or he himself or she herself will be some day in the same position there are 17 million americans over the age of 65 who live on an average social security check of 78 a month there are 9 million of them that have less than 1 000 a year what kind of housing do they live in with less than 1 000 a year what kind of food do they eat beans what kind of clothes do they have and when they get sick when their wife has a heart attack and needs daily nursing care where do they go they come here for public assistance and under the bill which the president signed they must take a pauper s oath they must say that they are medically indigent before they can get help what do we propose we propose putting it under social security which has served our people for 25 years it will cost each working man and woman under social security less than 3 cents a day and when they are 65 if they are men and 62 if they are women and they become ill they will receive back what they put in they will pay their own way they will live in dignity they will be protected and that is what we stand for these are the issues what kind of a country are we going to build how are we going to stimulate the economy of this country what monetary and fiscal policies will we follow which will provide full employment for our people how will we protect their unemployment compensation if they are out of work how will we be sure that they are adequately cared for when they are searching for work how will we take care of our children and make sure that they have the best educational system in the world those of you who work for a living know that your children must be well educated if they are going to work their way in the 1960 s and the 1970 s industry is changing steel and all the rest and only the best educated can be sure of the good jobs sixty to seventy percent of negro children never finish high school what kind of jobs will they get what will their housing be like what are their chances of being unemployed if they are working as laborers unless they finish high school unless they have a chance to go to college if they have the talent to go to college if they have the ability and motivation how are they going to pay for their way through life how are they going to meet their responsibilities thirty five percent of all children our brightest children in the top half of your high school classes do not go to college why because under our society we have not been able to work out a system where the best can be educated and in these changing times when science and automation and technology is changing the face of our country is changing your work is changing your lives i believe we have to recognize the new problems and those new responsibilities i run in the tradition of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman but i recognize also in 1960 that we are going to face problems that they never dreamed of and it is our responsibility as an entirely new generation to bring new solutions to new problems so i come here today and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to help build america i ask you to join in building a stronger country i ask you to join us in caring for the sick in educating our children in providing full employment for those who want to work in building america where there is no discrimination where there is a chance for all who have talent and for all who want to work that is the ancient democratic position in this century and i am proud to be associated with it the division is clear it is between those who stand still and those who move forward between those who look to the past between those who want to protect a special position or special interest and those who work for the people i come here to ohio the center of the united states and ask your help in this campaign we are going to beat the republicans we are going to move ahead we are going to carry this fight to mr nixon and the republican party in the next 3 weeks and come november 8 there should be no undecided voters everyone will have a chance to register his opinion and then it is your decision then it is your decision and i come here today and ask your help thank you dem jfk9 10 60a john_f _kennedy mr mayor governor di salle i hope i really don t sound like this as you all know the score was 3 to 3 in favor of the pirates when that is settled let us settle this election here in the state of ohio here in the united states let me make it very clear that as long as there are children denied a decent education as long as there are old people who live out their lives without hope as long as there are men and women who want to work and can t find a job as long as there are 15 million american homes which in this country are substandard as long as our rivers are polluted as long as we waste our national resources as long as the prestige and power of the united states is not moving forward so long is there need for the democratic party so long is there need for new leadership and so long are we going to make our decision in this country on november 8 in the most difficult and somber time in the long history of the great republic i believe the people of this country who are devoted to the welfare of this country are going to choose the public interest not the private interest they are going to choose to go forward not stand still they are going to choose national dedication rather than mediocrity they are going to choose us and the democratic party rather than the republicans if we can lower the voting age to 9 we are going to sweep the state ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you for coming out on sunday i really appreciate it you have given us a great reception here and i must say that if i am successful on november 8 i will attempt in every way to merit your confidence and we will work at this job 365 days a year we will move this country forward i come here today and ask your help in this campaign i ask you to join us i can assure you that if we win we are going to move thank you dem jfk9 10 60b john_f _kennedy ladies and gentlemen whenever we feel tired and a little down we come to louisville i must say that you have treated me a northerner with more generosity perhaps than he deserves but i am very grateful for it this is the fourth time in this campaign we have come to kentucky that is more separate trips than any other state of the union and kentucky deserves it we will make a promise to you that we will not come back to louisville again if you will promise that on november 8 you will give us a great majority in this city and county there is a month left in this campaign and i believe it is a month in which we can bring home the truth to the american people about the problems that face us the truth about the mr nixon s record in the congress and the truth shall make us free and i believe on november 8 when the people of this country make their judgment what they want their country to be i think they are coming with us thank you very much and now we will all go to bed thank you dem jfk9 10 60c john_f _kennedy congressman hays governor di salle county chairman gosney democratic chairman bill coleman ladies and gentlemen i want to express my regrets to all of you for having kept you i want to express my thanks to all of you for having stayed we did the best we could we were not out walking we were out working here in the state of ohio and i am delighted to be here now salem ohio is 1 000 miles from salem mass but they are sisters under the skin they are part of an america and they stand in a great american tradition which it is our responsibility in these times and in our generation to maintain the motto of the city of salem in massachusetts is a palm tree an indian and the motto is to the farthest islands of the indies because salem mass and the young men who sailed from that port sailed to the east indies to make their fortunes the east indies salem mass and salem ohio are all bound together in 1960 we rise or fall together we rise or fall as freedom is maintained in this ohio valley on the shores of massachusetts and on the farthest island of the indies i come tonight as the standard hearer of the democratic party to tell you that you in ohio and the people of the united states have a very clear choice to make and that is whether in their judgment the leadership of this country its vigor and vitality in the great problems that face us will maintain that freedom whether here or in the far east i want to make it very clear that there are sharp issues which divide mr nixon and myself which divide the republican party and the democratic party and they are in our concept of what is happening to our country he has run on the slogan we have never had it so good and i run on the slogan we must do better i come here to this valley which has seen a steel crisis which has seen one third of the steelworkers in the united states either unemployed or working part time i come to an america that must maintain its strength not only because it must defend the welfare of its people but also because it must defend freedom this is no time for the united states to misjudge the course of events and i disagree wholly with the interpretation which the vice president gives to the course of events in this country and around the world in our friday night debate in talking about whether the power and prestige of the united states has risen or declined mr nixon said look at the voting in the united nations over the past 7 years this is the test of prestige there is the quote now look at that for just one minute you who are here tonight who must live in these years of our days and who must face up to the sober responsibilities that go with being a citizen of the united states yesterday we had a vote the most important vote in the united nations this year and i am ready to rest my case in my issue with the vice president as to what is happening to our country on that vote yesterday the vote as mr nixon said in the united nations the question was on the admission of red china and we have fought it for many years the united states won by the narrowest margin we ever had in yesterday s vote 34 countries voted against us but that was not what was alarming in africa which will constitute by 1963 one quarter of all the nations of the general assembly which is the great center of a struggle today between communism and freedom only two african nations voted with us one was south africa which is disliked cordially on the continent and the other was liberia which has had intimate american ties for 150 years two nations in all of africa voted with us yesterday and the decline has been steady year by year in 1952 85 percent of the general assembly voted with us in 1953 it was 81 in 1954 it was 79 in 1955 it was 77 in 1956 it was 66 in 1957 it was 63 in 1958 it was 61 in 1959 it was 60 percent this year it was 56 percent two nations in all of africa voted with us yesterday on red china how many nations in all of asia voted with us seven the remaining either abstained or voted against us more nations voted against us in africa and asia yesterday than voted with us if mr nixon wants to use that as the test of the united states prestige i will use it last week in the united nations there was another test and that was on the motion of the five neutral countries to force a meeting between khrushchev and president eisenhower against the wishes of president eisenhower and in accordance with the wishes of mr khrushchev we won that vote only because a two thirds vote was necessary actually we got beaten 37 to 41 not a single country in africa on that vote voted with us they either abstained or they voted against us i agree with mr nixon that these votes are a test of our prestige but i can take no satisfaction in them i can take no satisfaction in coming to this valley and seeing pottery mills seeing steel mills working part time seeing rivers that are polluted seeing an administration which has twice vetoed the area redevelopment bill which has vetoed a hill to clean our rivers which has vetoed twice in the last 12 months a housing bill which considers 1 25 minimum wage an extreme which considers medical care for the aged as extreme and i quote mr nixon accurately i stand tonight in this city of salem in the state of ohio where franklin roosevelt stood and woodrow wilson and i come here tonight and ask your help in this campaign i ask your help in building the strength of our country this is a great country but it is our obligation as long as we bear responsibility it is our obligation to make a greater country and this is a powerful country but it is our obligation to make it a more powerful one there are no secrets in this campaign you who live in salem can make your own judgment as to whether you believe that the course of events in the world and the force and vigor of our country is moving us where it should move us or whether history will record that in the last years of the fifties the tide began to go against us the tide began to ebb that is the question which you have to decide what kind of leadership do you want do you want leadership which tells you that all is well that never before have we been so secure two thousand years ago demosthenes in orating to the athenians against the onrushes of philip of macedonia said our peril is from people who tell us what pleases us rather than what causes our peril and i do not come here tonight to say what pleases because i believe that we have 3 weeks to present our case and to make it clear that if you join with us it is because you believe we can do better it is because you believe we must do better and therefore i come here tonight to this city and ask your support in this election i ask you to join us in rebuilding the spirit of this country the sense of national destiny so that african leaders and latin american leaders and asians will once more turn to the great republic for inspiration and example we want them to be quoting the next president of the united states i don t want them only to quote lincoln and jefferson and wilson and roosevelt i want them to look to the future with us i want to prove khrushchev wrong when he says that our society is a sick and dying and faltering horse i stand for the future i believe our opponents stand for the present and they have made it very clear that they consider necessary for our survival i disagree and on that basis the issue is joined i am glad to come to this district which has been ably served in the house of representatives by congressman wayne hays who came to the house in 1948 and who served as a member of the house foreign relations committee who has spoken for the interests of this district but also for the interests of the united states and we stand on the program of the future i come here today from a part of the united states which has close ties with this part but i come here in the spirit of asking your help asking you to join us asking you to get this country moving again asking you to look to the future that is why we are going to win thank you dem jfk9 10 60d john_f _kennedy mr mayor governor di salle who supported my candidacy last january who led this delegation of ohio and supported it in july and who will i hope lead ohio in our support on november 8 congressman cook i used to represent for 6 years in the congress the 11th district of massachusetts but it was never like this i know you are going to return him to congress with a wide majority as he deserves and after you have taken care of these other candidates from top to bottom give kennedy a vote ladies and gentlemen i want to make it very clear that i come to ohio on this occasion as the standard bearer for the democratic party and i say very clearly that there are sharp differences between the republican spokesman and myself in his own way the differences are sharp and important and as significant as they were between roosevelt and hoover and roosevelt and landon and truman and dewey where did they get those candidates the republican party for 25 years has put up candidates and as a party has taken the position against every piece of progressive legislation that serves the people from minimum wage to unemployment compensation to better housing to aid for education to more equal rights for all americans for a stronger defense for a stronger and more vital society the republican party ever since it drove theodore roosevelt into the wilderness 50 years ago has stood still we have dragged them ahead and mr nixon goes through the country making speeches which a democrat might have run on 15 years ago they are always behind they are always waiting for us to take the leadership what is the issue in this campaign what is it that mr nixon and i differ on it is this he believes that the united states is doing everything it should do to maintain its position in the world he believes that our prestige is steadily rising around the world and 3 weeks ago after a vote in the united nations which was 70 to nothing he said that is pretty good score in a ball game and a pretty good score at the united nations well if he wants to make it on that basis i will give him the score yesterday yesterday at the united nations the issue came up which most directly affected the power and prestige and influence of the united states it was on the question of the matter of whether the admission of red china would be brought to the docket of the united nations and here is the vote and if this does not tell the story if this does not demonstrate that our prestige is not increasing if this does not demonstrate that the united states is not growing in power i would like to know what does here they are on the question of whether this matter would be brought to a vote and therefore whether red china would be admitted to the united nations in the case of africa a key area in the world only two countries voted with us liberia and the union of south africa eight voted against us ethiopia ghana guinea mali morocco nigeria senegal and sudan all countries that had gained their independence in this past decade every one of them voted against us liberia has been associated with us for 140 years the union of south africa domestic policy and its treatment of negroes has made it opposed by every african nation and yet liberia and the union of south africa were the only two nations in all of africa who voted with us and eight voted against us not 1 of the 15 new nations admitted to the united nations in the last 2 months voted with us nine countries of asia supported the united states ten countries of asia voted against us and three asian countries abstained voting against the united states were such longtime friends as denmark norway and sweden i just want to make it clear that any american who reads that record who sees our steel mills going at 44 percent of capacity who sees our farm income driven down 20 percent who sees our power and prestige and vigor standing still around the world and at home any american who can make a judgment their own judgment you don t have to be in the pentagon you can stay in warren ohio and read the papers and look at television and you know which way the tide is going you know whether this administration is meeting its responsibilities you know whether we are doing everything that must be done if we are going to survive you know what is happening in latin america you know that a candidate for president of brazil had to make a trip and visit castro during his election so that he would get the castro vote in brazil you know that 8 years ago in 1952 seven countries only seven countries in the world voted for the admission of red china yesterday 34 mr nixon says the tide is riding in our favor if you think this administration has given attention to the problems of the united nations in opposition khrushchev has stayed here for nearly a month the president of the united states visited it for 2 days i believe this country can do better and i don t want anyone on november 8 when you finally come to vote to go into the polls and say they both stand for the same things i don t i don t stand where mr nixon stands i don t take his view about i don t say that 1 25 minimum wage is extreme i don t lead a party that voted nearly unanimously against 25 cents minimum wage i don t go around saying 4 5 million americans unemployed is insignificant is necessary i am not part of an administration which vetoed the depressed area bill twice and then makes promises about it at election time i am not part of an administration which killed a housing bill vetoed it twice last year i am not part of an administration which vetoed a bill to clean our rivers from pollution i am part of a party which in this century stood with woodrow wilson and stood with franklin roosevelt and stood with harry truman for a better life for all of us i don t want african leaders or latin american leaders or asian leaders because that is where this straggle is going to be fought out which system carries with it the most vigor which system do they want to duplicate do they want to follow the hammer and sickle or do they want to follow us on the road to freedom my judgment is that they want to be free that they want to follow us but if the trumpet blows uncertain sounds who will prepare for the battle as the bible tells us and we have been blowing a mighty uncertain sound in recent months and years we have been living off our fat i call upon you for help i call upon you regardless of party i call upon all those who are not contented who are not satisfied who want to move again i call upon all those who have devotion to their country who want to see it fulfill its destiny who want to see us go ahead i call upon all those who regardless of age are young in spirit i call upon all those who want to cross in the sixties the new frontiers i call upon you i ask your help in this election and i can assure you that if we win on november 8 that this country will stand once again for the great symbol of freedom for all people for a better life for all people here in this country for justice for all americans regardless of their race or their creed or their color or their religion and i can assure you i can assure you that the united states that in africa latin america and asia once again they will be reading not merely what mr khrushchev is doing or castro but what the president of the united states and the united states are doing away back nearly 100 years ago in the campaign of 1860 abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and that he hates injustice i see the storm coming and i know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready now 100 years later we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming we know his hand is in it but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you dem jfk9 9 60 john_f _kennedy governor brown attorney general mosk senator jackson mrs engle first i would like to have you meet well my wife is home having a baby i want you to meet my sister patricia lawford who had the somewhat limited judgment in moving from massachusetts and coming to los angeles i think you met my brother in law earlier governor brown and i have been pushing a train all the way down from the oregon border since yesterday morning and picking up olives grapes bananas corn and one thing or another all the way down the rich state of california i am reminded somewhat of an expedition which thomas jefferson and james madison took in the 1790 s when they went on a botanical expedition up the hudson river to find fish and flowers and coming down the river they stopped in new york they met aaron burr and the knights of st tammany and they formed a link between the rural united states and the cities of the united states they formed the democratic party i have come 3 000 miles and i am not chasing butterflies i am here asking for your support i think that this state of california is a good place to settle this election right here in the vice president s own backyard i think that this is an important election in many ways it is more important than any election since 1860 in that election you will recall abraham lincoln said that the great question which faced the united states was whether this country could exist half slave and half free i think the great question in the election of 1960 100 years later is whether the world will exist half slave or half free or whether we will begin to move in the direction of freedom or in the direction of slavery that is the great issue of this campaign therefore the issues in this campaign in a very real sense transcend the traditional issues which have separated our two parties the great question now for all americans regardless of party is whether they can make freedom work whether they can make this system work in a difficult and dangerous period whether they can demonstrate to a watching world that we represent the way to the future and the communist system represents a system as old as egypt i think it does and my chief argument with the republican party has been that they have not had faith in the free system where we would set before the american people the unfinished business of our society this administration has set ceilings and has set limitations i think the record of the two parties and its promise for the future can be told pretty well from its record of the past mr nixon and i and the republican and the democratic parties are not suddenly frozen in ice or collected in amber since the two conventions we are like two rivers which flow back through history and you can judge the force the power and the direction of the rivers by studying where they rose and where they ran throughout their long course you can tell in this country by contrasting the slogans of the two parties what the two parties stand for mckinley stand pat with mckinley retain normalcy with warren g harding keep cool with coolidge had enough time for a change the weakest slogans in the history of american politics contrast the slogans of which we are proud woodrow wilson s new freedom franklin roosevelt s new deal harry truman s harry truman s fair deal and adlai stevenson s new america and i will respectfully contrast the so called slogans of the 1960 campaign the vice president s send a man to do a man s job versus a slogan of a new frontier for the united states the fact of the matter is that all the issues which we discuss in this campaign are issues which we have fought out through this entire century even though we all recognize that the great issue is the struggle for peace the struggle for survival the question of whether we and the soviet union and the chinese communists can inhabit the same globe defend our interests and still live in peace with both sides having a hydrogen capacity that is the great question that we face but everything that we do in the united states every issue which we now discuss every fight held in the last month of the congress all go to this question of our ability to survive in a difficult and dangerous world if the united states is unable to solve its agricultural surpluses if we waste food while people go to bed hungry every night can you say that this is a domestic problem of no importance around the world if the united states increases its economic growth one third that of the soviet union if we last year were the lowest of any major industrialized society in the world can you say that is a matter of just importance to us and not to the people of latin america africa asia and western europe if we turn out one half as many scientists engineers and teachers as the soviet union can we say that that is a domestic matter that it doesn t make any difference in our fight for peace in our fight for survival if the soviet union and the chinese communists bring thousands more students from africa and asia to study in moscow and peiping than we do in this country when we can t even afford to bring over 300 africans to study in our country this summer then can we say truthfully that that is important only to us i think this is an important election i ask your help in this election not just in a contest with mr nixon but in a contest for the future of this country and the third issue which i think has great implications around the world is the whole question of religious and racial freedom here in the united states can we honestly say that it doesn t affect our security and the fight for peace when negroes and others are denied their full constitutional rights when we in this country when we in this country who are a white minority around the world are asking for the friendship of negroes and colored people stretching all around the globe whose good will whose support whose common interest we seek to develop in the coming years can we say that when we deny a child the right to a decent education because of his color that it is of no importance to us in the fight for peace so let us make it very clear that when the democratic party wrote its platform in july it meant it in september and in november and in january in 1961 i intend to see that those commitments are carried out when our next president takes office in january 1961 he must be prepared to move forward in the field of human rights in three general areas as a legislative leader as chief executive and as the center of the moral power of the united states first as a legislative leader the president must give us the legal weapons necessary to carry on and enforce the constitutional rights of every american we must wipe out discriminatory poll taxes we must provide effective antibombing and antilynching legislation and we must continually strengthen the legal framework which permits us all to move forward toward our full constitutional economic and political rights secondly as chief executive the next president must be prepared to put an end to racial and religious discrimination in every field of federal activity by issuing the long delayed executive order to putting an end to racial discrimination in federally subsidized and supported housing by revitalizing and making significant the vice president s commission on contracts so that those who receive contracts from the federal government shall not at the same time practice discrimination in the hiring and in their employing third as a moral leader the next president must play his role in interpreting the great moral issues which are involved in our crusade for human rights he must exert the great moral and educational force of his office to help bring equal access to public facilities from churches to lunch counters and to support the right of every american to stand up for his rights even if on occasion he must sit down for them for only the president not the senate and not the house and not the supreme court in a real sense only the president can create the understanding and tolerance necessary as the spokesman for all the american people as the symbol as the symbol of the moral imperative upon which any free society is based this is a great issue which transcends in many ways many of the issues which we debate in the congress and debate through the states it is the question of whether we believe the precepts upon which this democracy was founded do we honestly believe what the declaration of independence said that all men are created equal that they are endowed not by the constitution and not by the supreme court they are endowed by their creator with these rights the day before he died franklin roosevelt wrote the only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today i must say looking at the power in this great country of ours after having traveled in nearly every state in the last 12 months and spending a great deal of time in some states in the primaries i have come to have the greatest possible confidence not only in our country but in our system of government i think as time goes on that if we play our role if we meet our responsibilities if we measure up not only in the public sense but in the private sense to the opportunities that we have if we recognize that freedom is not licensed and that liberty calls for certain qualities of self restraint and character which go with self government i am confident that the future can belong to those who believe in freedom i think in a very real sense what we have here really is the final flowering of the human experience i don t think the world is moving in the direction of communism i think in time it will move in the direction that we have followed i think that that is particularly true if we are willing to meet our responsibilities if we recognize that what we have now is good but that we can do better if we recognize that our past experience is great but that our future possibilities are even greater if we recognize that in a very serious way all of us hold office that it is just not merely one candidate running for office all of you in a sense will in 1961 hold office in the great republic upon all of you in your own way and in your own life great responsibilities will be placed upon you i don t run for the office of the presidency saying that life in the 1960 s will be easy because i don t think it will be i think it will be a very dangerous time for us all but i do run for the presidency in the 1960 s having the greatest possible confidence in our country in our system in our ability to meet these challenges i think of the office of the presidency in the same way that franklin roosevelt thought of it and woodrow wilson in the sense that they felt the chief task of the president was to set before the american people the things that they must do the responsibilities that they must meet if the president does not set those standards if he does not set our national goals then a senator from massachusetts or a senator from california or the governor of california or a congressman or a newspaper editor or a system cannot do it only the president speaks for the people therefore the president must speak with the people and for the people in setting before them the unfinished agenda upon you to join me in this election on our journey to the new frontier recognizing that what we do here will finally determine the fate of freedom around the world thomas paine said in the revolution of 1775 that the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i say in this revolution that the cause of all mankind is the cause of america you will remember that benjamin franklin said on that occasion that where liberty lives there is my home and thomas paine replied where liberty does not live there is my home i think that together this great country fighting for a great cause standing for great moral principles i think that we can make a contribution to the freedom of the world and to our own security and to the peace of the world that will cause historians at a later date to say there were the great years of the american life the 1960 s give me those years in 1886 abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i know there is a god and he hates injustice he said i see the storm coming if he has a place and a part for me i am ready now in 1960 we know there is a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming we say if he has a place and part for us we are ready thank you dem jfk9 9 60a john_f _kennedy my friend and colleague in the congress of the united states harlan hagen governor brown mayor sullivan senator stern jack casey assemblyman williams ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you very much for coming and sending us off in the airplane from bakersfield to los angles we have been working on the railroad for the last 24 hours we have seen a great state and i think this state is going democratic in november i think that there is one basic issue in this campaign we can see it in this valley we can see it in this country and we can see it around the world that is the long range difference between our two political parties between a party that believes that things are as good as they can be and a party that thinks we can do better in this century the republicans have had three or four campaign slogans stand pat with mckinley return to normalcy with harding keep cool with coolidge the slogans for the democratic party on the other hand have been the new freedom the new deal the fair deal and adlai stevenson s new america i come in 1960 talking about the new frontier the new frontier is not the things that i am promising to do for you if i am elected president the new frontier consists of the things that we are asking all of us to do for this country in the 1960 s this is a great country but it deserves the best that we have i suppose 30 or 40 years ago before the second administration of woodrow wilson people who lived in this valley worried about their farms and their jobs and now we worry about your farms and your jobs but we worry about cuba and the congo and india and indonesia and the security of our families and the chances for peace i ask your help in this campaign i run for the office of the presidency not saying that if i am elected life will be easy but i can promise you that i have a deep conviction and i know that you share it that we can do better than we are doing if we can be stronger than we are we can stand far more around the world than we do today i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the senate foreign relations committee and i can tell you that 20 and 25 years ago african leaders quoted lincoln jefferson and franklin roosevelt they don t quote anybody in america today they look at peking and moscow and wonder which road they should take i think we have to reestablish ourselves as a vital and vigorous society concerned with the needs of our own people and holding out a helping hand to those around the world who look to us for friendship and assistance during the american revolution thomas paine said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i believe in 1960 in the great world revolutions that are sweeping us now that the cause of all mankind is the cause of america i ask your help in this campaign not just because it represents a change in parties but i think it is possible for us to reestablish a different atmosphere in the united states a desire to be first not first but not first when but first on the road to peace and first in the world in the election 100 years ago abraham lincoln wrote to a friend i believe there is a god and i know he hates injustice i see a storm coming and i know his hand is in it if he has a place and a part for me i believe that i am ready we believe there is a god and we believe there is a storm coming but i think in 1960 if he has a place and a part for us i believe we are ready thank you very much dem jfk9 9 60b john_f _kennedy governor brown bill munnell our next congressman lt gov glenn anderson and ladies and gentlemen for the last 24 hours governor brown and i have been working on the railroad in california and we think that here in this state of california is the place to begin the democratic drive in november i think you understand in this state what this election is about this is a chance for the united states to continue to move forward on the road which wilson and roosevelt and truman and stevenson urged this country to take all they can say is what mckinley and taft and coolidge and landon and harding and the others wanted to say this is the choice for the united states in 1960 i think this country is a great country but i think we can do a better job i think we can move ahead in this state and across the united states and around the world i was nominated in the city of los angeles and you cannot possibly stop now i ask your help in this campaign i think the real question is what we can make this country be has it realized its full potential has our day in the sun passed have we set into a decline instead of a growth in the united states mr khrushchev is going to bury us but that is not what is as alarming as the fact that all over the world as in latin america and asia and africa people who used to look to franklin roosevelt for leadership now turn to moscow and peking and wonder if the future belongs to them i think the future belongs to us not to the united states in that sense but to those who believe in the cause of freedom and we are the great hope for freedom if we fail in this country the cause of freedom fails if we succeed if we make this a better country if we make this a better place for everyone to live in if we build more homes and more schools if we protect our people better if we end discrimination in the united states if we move our economic growth forward then we strengthen the united states and we strengthen the cause of freedom that is our chance and that is our opportunity and i ask your help the new frontier is not an easy road but i think it represents our hope for the future i ask your help in this country i think we can win it thank you dem jfk9 9 60c john_f _kennedy thank you governor governor brown my friend and colleague from the congress bernie sisk your assemblyman bert delotto senator burns ladies and gentlemen i am grateful to you all for coming to this station and giving us a great democratic welcome this state can go democratic in november this is the state to win this election i am delighted to be here today this train is headed toward los angeles but it is also headed toward washington d c this valley and this state have many problems we traveled today from sacramento down through the rain if that rain continues there is a chance that the farmers of this valley who grow raisins could lose in 1 day 50 million it indicates as nothing else does why i think it is important that this country concern itself with what i conceive to be the no 1 domestic problem that the united states faces and that is the decline in agricultural income but whether we are farmers or whether we live in the cities or whether we live in massachusetts or whether we live in california there is one problem that faces us all that is the question of whether it is going to be possible in the 1960 s for this country to live at peace whether we can live in the same world as the soviet union and live in peace whether we can both possess a hydrogen capacity and live in peace i want to say that i think there are some things that we can do i don t think that there is a war party and a peace party a party appeasement and a party that desires to be tough with the russians i think all americans whether they are republicans or democrats share a common desire to live at peace and protect the security of the united states there are several things that i think we can do first if we desire to live at peace with the russians and the chinese the united states must be strong not strong if not strong when not strong enough but but strong first first in the fight for survival first in building our defenses secondly i think if we can achieve a level of parity with the communists then we will be able to talk about disarmament winston churchill said 10 years ago we arm to parley it is impossible for us to provide for the disarmament of outer space the disarmament of nuclear weapons unless we are in a position of parity with the soviet union this administration has less than 100 people working in the entire federal government on the subject of disarmament i think we can do a better job than that third i think it is essential on the pathway to peace that the united states associate itself with other countries who also desire to live in peace we cannot protect the security of the free world by ourselves we have to join with others in nato in seato in latin america in africa and asia as leaders of the free world not dominating it but joining it together in a common interest in a desire to be free and independent and live in peace fourth the great struggle in foreign policy in the next decade will not take place in western europe and will not be directly between the soviet union and the united states the great test will be which system travels better which system solves the problems of the people of latin america and africa and asia does our system have freedom or does the communist system it is only if the united states demonstrates that it is ready to hold out a helping hand to the countries of latin america to africa and asia it is only by that means that we can persuade those people to travel the same road that we are traveling they stand today on the razoredge of decision they look to moscow and peking and they look to us i think we must demonstrate sufficient vigor sufficient friendship for them that they will follow the road that we follow the road of peace and finally i want to emphasize and i say this as chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the foreign relations committee that the great hope for peace i think in the 1960 s is going to be not only our own strength but also the united nations this is a great forum which if given the attention and prestige and support that it needs can serve as a great clearinghouse for peace not just summit meetings where the soviet union and the united states sit down but the general assembly of the united nations where all nations sit and will all speak their will where they share a common aspiration to be free and independent this is a great country but i think we can make it a greater country the great struggle of 1960 is not merely between the republicans and democrats the great struggle i think is between those americans who think we can do better than we are doing who desire that the united states shall stand as it stood in other years in the days of roosevelt and wilson as a hope for people around the world and not as a matter of indifference to them a gallup poll taken some months ago in 10 countries around the world when they were asked which country they thought would be first militarily and scientifically in 1970 the united states or the soviet union a majority in all those countries said the soviet union what has happened to this country that we have lost our image they don t quote lincoln or jefferson or roosevelt or stevenson today they look to the east i think they should look to us again i ask your help in this campaign so that here in this country we can move ahead they were successful roosevelt truman and wilson because they were successful here in this country if we are successful here if we are moving ahead here if we are building a better society here then we will stand strongly around the world if we sit still here then we sit still around the world i ask your help and i remind you that 100 years ago in the election of 1860 abraham lincoln said there is a god and he hates injustice i see a storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i am ready now 100 years later we believe in a god and we know he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but if he has a place and a part for us i believe that we are ready thank you my wife is home in massachusetts having a boy in november i would like to have you meet my sister pat lawford who comes from california and i would like to have you meet a senator from washington who is chairman of the national democratic committee the most eligible bachelor in washington senator scoop jackson dem jfk9 9 60d john_f _kennedy governor brown ladies and gentlemen i am not going to make a speech in this rain the only satisfaction you get is that it is raining on the just and unjust republicans and democrats i want to thank you for coming out we are going to win this election and we are going to win it right here in the the state of california i ask your help i don t think that anyone could have lived in this valley for the last years under republican and democratic administrations without realizing there is a great difference between them we believe in going ahead we believe in doing better than we are doing and they believe in standing still i ask your help i think we can start this valley this state and this country on the move again next january thank you very much i want you to meet my sister who lives in california who left massachusetts because she did not like the weather there who is out here my sister pat lawford i would like to have you meet senator scoop jackson chairman of the democratic national committee from washington who will say a word to you dem jfk9 9 60e john_f _kennedy governor brown my former colleague in the navy senator cobey congressman bernie sisk with whom i serve in the congress of the united states assemblyman gordon winton ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for coming down in this valley sunshine and rain to say hello we are campaigning in this state of california because i think this is the place where this election can be won in november this is the 110th anniversary of the admission of california into the u s union this state of california was founded and developed by those who lived in other sections of the united states but were not satisfied with things as they were the democratic party is not satisfied with things as they are now not because we don t feel that this is a great country but because we feel it can be a greater country this is a great country we can do better and i ask your help in this campaign you cannot farm this valley without realizing that there are problems in this valley which can be solved by the united action of all our people in developing the natural resources you cannot be over 65 without realizing that there are many people over 65 who are faced with serious problems without any assistance under social security in paying for their medical bills you cannot have children without realizing that in many parts of the united states they have inadequate classrooms with inadequate teachers with inadequate compensation this is a great country but i think that we have to realize in the 1960 s that it is going to be a difficult and dangerous time for us all i think in many ways that the 1960 s are going to be as difficult as any years we have had since the 1860 s i don t run for the office of the presidency promising that if i am elected life is going to be easy i don t think it is going to be easy in the 1960 s i think we face the most difficult and dangerous and trying times in the life of our country it isn t enough to concern ourselves with what happens in this valley the united states must also be concerned with what happens in colombia and the congo and indonesia one hundred years ago when this state was founded the people who came here worried about their farms now we have to concern ourselves with the whole globe around us the united states is the great defender of freedom if we fail the cause of freedom fails if we succeed the cause of freedom succeeds i ask you to join me not only in maintaining the vitality of this state and country but also in joining in a great effort to protect freedom around the globe in the american revolution thomas paine said the cause of america is the cause of all mankind i think in 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of america in the election of 1860 abraham lincoln said there is a god and he hates injustice i see a storm coming but if he has a place and part for me i am ready there is a god today and he hates injustice and we see the storm coming but i think he has a place and a part for all of us and i think we are ready my wife is at home and she is going to have a boy in november my sister pat who lives in california is campaigning with us my sister pat lawford i would like to have you meet a senator from the state of washington who is chairman of the national democratic committee senator scoop jackson dem jfk9 9 60f john_f _kennedy governor brown congressman mcfall senator short assemblyman darrah ladies and gentlemen first of all i want to thank all for coming down to the station the republicans are all in bed that is why we are working we have campaigned in this state starting up in oregon we are heading down toward los angeles today but we are also heading toward washington i think here in this valley you know what can be done today is the 110th anniversary of california s admission to the union this country and this valley was a desert 100 years ago it shows what this state can do it shows what this country can do our argument with the republicans is not because we do not know that they share a common goal for america they do but our argument with them is that they don t know how to do it we do the record of the democratic party is told in the programs rain we brought it we brought it with us the record of the democratic party is told in the programs of woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and adlai stevenson they wanted this country to move forward and so do we i ask your help in this campaign i think we meet in the most difficult time in the life of our country in many ways this is the most important election since the election of lincoln 100 years ago we have great hopes for our country it is a great country but i think we can do better i hope you will support us i think this country is ready to move again thank you very much dem jfk9 9 60g john_f _kennedy governor brown mayor hammond ladies and gentlemen i want to express my appreciation to all of you for having come down to the station to meet us this is an important election in a very difficult and trying time in the life of our country today we celebrate the 110th anniversary of the admission of the state of california into the union it seems to me that the great story of california has come about because people were not satisfied with things as they were they liked massachusetts and they liked ohio and they liked oklahoma but they thought they could do better and they came to california i don t know why they felt that way about massachusetts i think we are moving in 1960 in a similar time in the life of our country i don t have any disagreements with the desire of our republican party to secure a better life but what i think the basic issue between the two parties is really in a sense the same issue it has been ever since the administration of theodore roosevelt in the time of wilson in the time of coolidge in the time of roosevelt in the time of truman and today and that is that the republicans think that things are as good as they can be we think they can be better here in this valley you have shown what can be done the work that you have done in harnessing the land and water and the power i think shows what can be done with the resources of the entire united states i don t run for the office of the presidency promising that if i am elected that life will be easy but i do run for the office of the presidency with the greatest possible confidence in this country with the great vision of what its role in world leadership can be with a recognition that the cause of the united states in a real sense is the cause of all mankind this is a trying time in the life of our country but i think in a very real sense if we do our job here the future can belong to us we can take care of our people and we can meet our responsibilities to freedom around the world i ask your support in this election i can promise you that if we are successful we shall move not only in the state of california but we shall move across the face of the united states thank you very much my wife is at home she is going to have a boy in november my sister who used to come from massachusetts and who saw the bright light of california who now lives here is with me i would like to have you meet my sister pat lawford there is a question of do i believe all protestants are heretics no and i hope you don t believe all catholics are may i say that it seems to me that the great struggle today is between those who believe in no god and those who believe in god i really don t see why we should engage in close debate over what you may believe and what i may believe that is my privilege and your privilege dem jfk9 9 60h john_f _kennedy governor brown my friend and colleague and a great congressman harlan hagen your next assemblyman i hope bob williams and myron frew ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to you all for coming down in this sun and saying hello we are running in this campaign train not only toward the city of los angeles but we are running this campaign train all the way to washington this is the 110th anniversary of the admission of california to the union this state was constructed by people who lived in other sections of the united states who thought they could do better in this state we feel we can do better in this country i ask your help in this campaign i think the record of difference between our two political parties the republicans and democrats is written in this valley the republicans say we have done as much as we can do to develop our water resources and our agriculture we say we can do more and we are going to do more this valley was built by you in cooperation with your state government and with the policies of franklin roosevelt and harry truman i propose if elected in november to carry on those policies to move this state and country forward as i believe it must be if we are going to maintain our position in the world when this state was built all that we had to worry about was the welfare of the people of california now every farmer and every businessman and every working man and woman worries not only about tulare but they worry about the congo and cuba and the far side of space the united states is the leader of the free world and i run for the office of the presidency with full recognition of those responsibilities which go with that leadership my feeling is that this is a great country but i think it can be a greater country the united states is the hope of the free world but i think the united states can be stronger i think it can stand for more i think we can do a better job i am chairman of the subcommittee on africa of the senate foreign relations committee i can tell you that in africa leaders 20 years ago quoted jefferson and lincoln and woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt today in many cases those leaders look east to peking and moscow they have lost their confidence in us they don t see the united states as a great revolutionary country which is on the move they see us as a country which has had its high noon which is now in a plateau which belongs to the past not the future i ask you to join me in this campaign with a full recognition of all opportunities to rebuild our strength rebuild our prestige maintain our security and maintain ourselves as the leaders of the free world i don t run for the office of the presidency promising that if you elect me life will be easier i think life in the 1960 s for any american is going to be difficult but i can promise you that if i am elected that we are going to lead this country and this country and this state will move ahead and move again this election of 1960 is 100 years after the election of abraham lincoln in 1860 and in that election lincoln wrote a friend there is a god and he hates injustice i see a storm coming but if he has a place and a part for me i am ready in 1960 we believe there is a god and we believe he hates injustice and we see a storm coming but i think if he has a place and a part for us then we are ready i ask your help in this campaign thank you my wife is home and she is going to have a baby in november so she could not come and campaign with us but my sister patricia who left massachusetts a great state left massachusetts and came out here to california and is campaigning with us my sister pat lawford i would like to have you meet senator engle who is over in idaho today but his wife is traveling with us mrs clair engle and last but by no means least we are accompanied by the chairman of the national democratic committee the senator from the state of washington the most eligible bachelor left in washington senator scoop jackson dem jfk9 9 60i john_f _kennedy governor brown speaker brown senator donnelly my friend and colleague in the congress congressman mcfall ladies and gentlemen i want to express my thanks to all of you for coming down here in the rain to greet us we have been campaigning in this state since yesterday morning and i think that california is the place to win this election i ask your help this valley shows what can be done by community effort here in this valley you have harnessed the land and the water for the use of the people i think that today when we celebrate the 110th anniversary of the admission of california to the union we also celebrate this week the 340th anniversary of the journey of the pilgrims from europe to my own state of massachusetts in both cases a single force motivated both groups the feeling that however good life may have been they could do better i think that is our feeling in 1960 however great this state is however great this country is however satisfied we may be i think we can do better and i think we are going to do better after this election i don t think that there is anyone who can live in this rich valley or in this rich state or in this rich country who can be satisfied with doing everything that needs to be done i think the best days of the united states are still ahead i don t promise that if i am elected that life is going to be easy but i do promise that if i am elected this country is going back to work again i don t think that any american citizen can possibly feel that the balance of power in the world vis a vis the soviet union and the chinese communists is moving in the direction of freedom i think in the last few years it has moved against us i can assure you that if we are successful this country will once again be second to none not first if not first but not first when but first period i ask your help in this campaign i ask your help and i can assure you that i think the democratic party is ready for leadership i assure you that if we are successful we are going to move thank you very much indeed thank you my wife is in massachusetts and she is going to have a baby in november so my sister who used to live in massachusetts and saw the wisdom of coming to california living here married i would like to have you meet my sister pat lawford senator engle is doing some business for the nation but mrs engle is traveling with us i would like to have you meet senator engle s wife mrs clair engle dem jfkberliner john_f _kennedy i am proud to come to this city as the guest of your distinguished mayor who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of west berlin and i am proud and i am proud to visit the federal republic with your distinguished chancellor who for so many years has committed germany to democracy and freedom and progress and to come here in the company of my fellow american general clay who who has been in this city during its great moments of crisis and will come again if ever needed two thousand years ago two thousand years ago the proudest boast was civis romanus sum today in the world of freedom the proudest boast is ich bin ein berliner i appreciate my interpreter translating my german there are many people in the world who really don t understand or say they don t what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world let them come to berlin there are some who say there are some who say that communism is the wave of the future let them come to berlin and there are some who say in europe and elsewhere we can work with the communists let them come to berlin and there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system but it permits us to make economic progress lass sie nach berlin kommen let them come to berlin freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in to prevent them from leaving us i want to say on behalf of my countrymen who live many miles away on the other side of the atlantic who are far distant from you that they take the greatest pride that they have been able to share with you even from a distance the story of the last 18 years i know of no town no city that has been besieged for 18 years that still lives with the vitality and the force and the hope and the determination of the city of west berlin while the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the communist system for all the world to see we take no satisfaction in it for it is as your mayor has said an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity separating families dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and dividing a people who wish to be joined together what is what is true of this city is true of germany real lasting peace in europe can never be assured as long as one german out of four is denied the elementary right of free men and that is to make a free choice in 18 years of peace and good faith this generation of germans has earned the right to be free including the right to unite their families and their nation in lasting peace with good will to all people you live in a defended island of freedom but your life is part of the main so let me ask you as i close to lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today to the hopes of tomorrow beyond the freedom merely of this city of berlin or your country of germany to the advance of freedom everywhere beyond the wall to the day of peace with justice beyond yourselves and ourselves to all mankind freedom is indivisible and when one man is enslaved all are not free when all are free then we look can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great continent of europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe when that day finally comes as it will the people of west berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades all all free men wherever they may live are citizens of berlin and therefore as a free man i take pride in the words ich bin ein berliner dem jfkinaugural john_f _kennedy vice president johnson mr speaker mr chief justice president eisenhower vice president nixon president truman reverend clergy fellow citizens we observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom symbolizing an end as well as a beginning signifying renewal as well as change for i have sworn before you and almighty god the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago the world is very different now for man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life and yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of god we dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to a new generation of americans born in this century tempered by war disciplined by a hard and bitter peace proud of our ancient heritage and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed and to which we are committed today at home and around the world let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price bear any burden meet any hardship support any friend oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty this much we pledge and more to those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends united there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures divided there is little we can do for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder to those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny we shall not always expect to find them supporting our view but we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom and to remember that in the past those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside to those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves for whatever period is required not because the communists may be doing it not because we seek their votes but because it is right if a free society cannot help the many who are poor it cannot save the few who are rich to our sister republics south of our border we offer a special pledge to convert our good words into good deeds in a new alliance for progress to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty but this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the americas and let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house to that world assembly of sovereign states the united nations our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace we renew our pledge of support to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run finally to those nations who would make themselves our adversary we offer not a pledge but a request that both sides begin anew the quest for peace before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self destruction we dare not tempt them with weakness for only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed but neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind s final war so let us begin anew remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness and sincerity is always subject to proof let us never negotiate out of fear but let us never fear to negotiate let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us let both sides for the first time formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors together let us explore the stars conquer the deserts eradicate disease tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of isaiah to undo the heavy burdens and to let the oppressed go free and if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion let both sides join in creating a new endeavor not a new balance of power but a new world of law where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved all this will not be finished in the first one hundred days nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days nor in the life of this administration nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet but let us begin in your hands my fellow citizens more than mine will rest the final success or failure of our course since this country was founded each generation of americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty the graves of young americans who answered the call to service surround the globe now the trumpet summons us again not as a call to bear arms though arms we need not as a call to battle though embattled we are but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle year in and year out rejoicing in hope patient in tribulation a struggle against the common enemies of man tyranny poverty disease and war itself can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance north and south east and west that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind will you join in that historic effort in the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger i do not shrink from this responsibility i welcome it i do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation the energy the faith the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it and the glow from that fire can truly light the world and so my fellow americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country my fellow citizens of the world ask not what america will do for you but what together we can do for the freedom of man finally whether you are citizens of america or citizens of the world ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you with a good conscience our only sure reward with history the final judge of our deeds let us go forth to lead the land we love asking his blessing and his help but knowing that here on earth god s work must truly be our own dem jkerry1 6 04 john_kerry we know what al qaida and terrorists long to do they have told us osama bin laden has called obtaining a weapon of mass destruction a sacred duty so take away politics take away the labels the honest questions have to be asked since that dark day in september have we done everything we could to secure these dangerous weapons and bomb making materials have we taken every step that we should to stop north korea and iran s nuclear programs have we reached out to our allies and forged an urgent global effort to ensure that nuclear weapons and materials are in fact secured the honest answer in each of these areas is that we have done too little often too late and we have even cut back our efforts or turned away from the single greatest threat we face in the world today a terrorist armed with nuclear weapons here s what we must do the first step is to safeguard all bomb making material worldwide that means making sure that we know where they are and then locking those materials and securing those materials wherever they are our approach should treat all nuclear materials needed for bombs as if they were bombs the second step is to prevent the creation of new materials that are being produced for nuclear weapons america again has to lead an international coalition to halt and then verifiably ban all production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for use in nuclear weapons and we have to do it permanently capping the world s nuclear weapons stockpiles despite strong international support for such a ban this administration is stalling and endlessly reviewing the very need for such a policy the third step is to reduce the excess stocks of materials and weapons if america is asking the world to join our country in a shared mission to reduce this nuclear threat then why would the world listen to us if our own words don t match our deeds as president i will stop this administration s program to develop a whole new generation of bunker busting nuclear bombs this is a weapon we don t need and it undermines our credibility in persuading other nations our fourth step is to end the nuclear weapons programs in states like north korea and iran this administration has been fixated on iraq while the nuclear dangers from north korea have multiplied we know that north korea has sold ballistic missiles and technology in the past and according to recent reports north korean uranium ended up in libyan hands the north koreans have made it clear to the world and to the terrorists that they are open for business and will sell to the highest bidder for 18 months we ve essentially negotiated over the shape of the table while the north koreans have allegedly made enough new fuel to make six to nine nuclear bombs we should maintain the six party talks that are going on today but ladies and gentlemen we must also be prepared to talk directly with north korea this problem is this problem is too urgent to allow china or others at the table to speak for us and we must be prepared to negotiate a comprehensive agreement that addresses the full range of issues of concern to us and our allies we must also meet the mounting danger on the other side of asia while we have been preoccupied in iraq next door in iran a nuclear program has been reportedly moving ahead let me say it plainly a nuclear armed iran is unacceptable an america whose interest and allies could be on the target list must no longer sit on the sidelines it is critical that we work with our allies to resolve those issues dem jkerry13 6 06 john_kerry thank you very much listening to john powers i ve got to tell you you just are filled with a wonderful sense of the goodness of the folks who are over there the troops who are there are incredible every single one of them and they re doing an amazing job under the most difficult circumstances and john powers is remarkable in even more ways because this young man is working with the 61 percent of the children in iraq who are under the age of 25 50 percent under the age of 18 and 40 percent under the age of 14 and he knows that if there isn t some real effort to give them a future they re going to go out and learn in madrassas how to hate and strap themselves with explosives and this will go on and on and on captain powers has just recalled that day 35 years ago this spring when i testified before the foreign relations committee and demanded an end to the war that i had returned from fighting not so long before let me state again clearly it was right to dissent from a war in 1971 that was wrong and could not be won and now in 2006 it is both a right and an obligation for americans to stand up to a president who is wrong today dissent from policies that are wrong today and end a war in iraq that weakens the nation each and every day we are in it i believe now just as i believed then that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that destroys their lives dishonors their sacrifice and betrays both our interests and our ideals i believe now just as i believed in 1971 that it is profoundly wrong to think that fighting for your country overseas and fighting for your country s values at home are somehow contradictory or even separate calls to service they are in fact two sides of the same very patriotic coin and that s certainly what i felt when i came home from vietnam convinced that our political leaders were waging war simply to cover up their own past mistakes and that the reason to be there was that we were already there that more had to die because many already had my friends war is no excuse for its own perpetuation and a war in iraq founded on a lie can never be true to america s character now always always in american history there have been those who have been alarmed by dissent many who delude themselves into staying a failed course somehow believing that it ll eventually produce success notwithstanding all the tell tale signs or that admitting a mistake and ending it somehow will embolden our enemies around the world well history disproved them in vietnam and the lesson here is not that some of us were right then and some of us were wrong that s not the lesson the lesson is that true patriots must defend the right to question and to criticize americans must hear the voices of dissenters now more than ever when our leaders have committed us to a pre emptive war of choice that does not involve the defense of our territory or resistance to aggressors the patriotic obligation to speak out becomes even more urgent when so called leaders refuse to debate their policies or disclose the full facts and even more urgent when they seek perversely to use their own military blunders to deflect doubts and to answer their own failures with more of the same presidents and politicians may worry about losing votes or losing face or losing legacies i think it s time we worried about young americans and innocent iraqis who are losing their lives now dissenters are obviously not always right i don t claim that they are but it s always a warning sign when we re accused of disloyalty by presidents and their surrogates whose only goal is really to seek a safe harbor from the truth or from debate from accountability it s no accident that the first words of the first declaration of our national existence proclaim we hold these truths to be self evident truth may be a stranger in this white house today but we are here to serve notice that the truth remains the american bottom line and we will honor that remember and i know you do because it s what brings you here today that our greatest advances in this country were driven not by cheering things on as they are not by acquiescence to leadership because it s called leadership but by taking on things that we saw that were wrong and demanding change our values were formed and tempered not in complacency but in the crucibles and confrontations of conscience so our job now is not to claim some arrogant moral high ground of our own without introspection but our job is to again insist that duty and honor and country summon us not to join in a lockstep march of folly but to speak out and stand up against a war that is rooted in deceit sustained by a constantly shifting rationale and paid for in the blood of young americans who are being sent into harm s way to save politicians pride and to obscure mistakes one of the lessons that i ve learned over the 35 years or more of public service is that america is stronger not only when we proclaim free speech but when we listen to it today the dark spirit of intolerance has risen steadily and has been exploited incessantly this is not only wrong but it s dangerous for our nation when our leadership is unwilling to admit real mistakes big mistakes unwilling to engage in the honest discussion and unwilling to hold itself and those who made those failed decisions accountable for the consequences of those decisions made without genuine disclosure without genuine debate as john powers said and i repeat it because it could not be more true or more important to us thomas jefferson had it right when he said that dissent is the highest form of patriotism and you ve seen it with six or seven generals who had the courage to speak out i couldn t believe some of the arguments i heard i think it was former president ford whom i greatly respect and some people in the administration who said how dangerous it was for america to have military leadership speaking out my gosh did they forget that they are retired and that no american whether you re in uniform or out of it gives up their citizenship because they serve this country so with mistake after mistake that s being compounded by the same civilian leadership in the pentagon that ignored expert military advice the invasion and the occupation and all of the advice at the state department those who understand the price that is being paid because they paid it themselves by wearing the uniform for 35 years they deserve and must be heard and let me say it plainly let me say it plainly it s not enough to argue with the logistics or to argue about the details or the manner of the conflict s execution or the failures of competence as great as they are it is essential to acknowledge that the war itself was a mistake to say the simple words to say the simple words that contain more truth than pride we were misled we were given evidence that was not true it was wrong and i was wrong to vote for that iraqi war resolution and i will vote and i will vote we cannot one of the great lessons of life is that you cannot change the future if you re not honest about the past and we cannot have it both ways in the war in iraq the truth is that america is imprisoned in a failed policy and as in vietnam we re being told that admitting mistakes not the mistakes themselves will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory well that too my friends is a lie and history proves it history proves it today the bushes and the cheneys and the armchair warriors whose front line is an air conditioned conference room they are the ones who are leading us down the road to a quagmire they are the true defeatists they tell us that america is so weak that it must sacrifice its principles in order to pursue the illusion of power and the true pessimists are not those among us who know that mission accomplished was a charade and a campaign stop that did not stop but rather fueled the war the true pessimists are those who will not accept that america s strength depends on our credibility at home and around the world the true pessimists are those who do not understand that fidelity to our principles is critical to our national security and it is as critical to our national security as our military power itself and i have to tell you the most dangerous and the most dispiriting pessimists are those who again and again and again resort to using 9 11 to argue that our traditional values are a luxury we can no longer afford we say no america s constitution comes first now i understand fully that iraq is not vietnam after all president bush is even there today you may not know that that the president has made a quick and now not so secret trip to iraq i also know i ll say more about that in a minute i also know that the war on terrorism and it s important for us very important for us to be clear and strong and honest that the war on terrorism is not the cold war it is different and it is a challenge but in one very crucial respect we are now in the same place that we were 35 years ago when i testified in 1971 i spoke out not just against the war itself but against the blindness and the cynicism of political leaders who were sending brave young americans to be killed or maimed for a strategy that the leaders themselves knew at that time would not accomplish the mission for a long time we ve been told that iraq and vietnam were different but in telling and very tragic ways now they are converging they are first and foremost together the two most failed foreign policy choices in the annals of american foreign policies and as in vietnam and as in vietnam we intervened militarily based on official deception as in vietnam we went into iraq ostensibly to fight a larger global war under the misperception that the particular theater was just the latest battleground and we soon learned that the particular aspects of the place where we were fighting mattered more than anything else and as in vietnam we have stayed and fought and died even though it is time for us to go half of those let me remind you and while you re here in washington take a moment to walk down to the vietnam war memorial if you haven t done it as you walk down that path into the center of the v and you stand in the v you can look up one end and you ll see 1960 earlier 1959 all the way through parts of 1968 and then the other side of the all brings us toward the end and half the names on that wall half the names stand in the center of it and look up at tens of thousands of young americans half the names on that wall were lost after america s leaders knew and later acknowledged our strategy would not succeed it was immoral then and it is immoral now to be quiet or equivocal in the face of that kind of delusion now here s the bottom line here s what motivates me here s what brings me to a point after the speech i gave at georgetown last year where i laid out that they had about five or six months to pull this together to say that now is the time to have different policies and the reason is that by the acknowledgement of our own generals no matter how brave our soldiers are no matter how valiant no matter what their caring and it is deep and great and we should be proud of them for it no matter how much our soldiers cannot bring democracy to iraq at the barrel of a gun that cannot happen the iraqis themselves must build democracy and it will never be done if iraqis leaders are unwilling to make the compromises necessary that that requires we know the verdict of our generals we ve heard general casey say this this war cannot be won militarily it has to be won if it can be politically and the only way forward is political and diplomatic and so to achieve that i am convinced that the only way the iraqis have moved at any time thus far is with a deadline and i believe we need a hard and fast deadline not an open ended commitment of u s forces so that we shift responsibility and demand responsibility from the iraqis themselves now why do i say that because it s been proven it took a deadline for the transfer of authority from the provisional government the iraqis said no we don t want this yet we re not ready for this yet we held to our deadline and we made it happen it took a deadline to have the referendum they said no don t do this we re not ready yet we need more time we held to our deadline and we got the constitution flawed as it is nevertheless election after election they said we re not ready we can t do it we did this we set a deadline what s most important is it was only intense 11th hour pressure that pushed aside prime minister jaafari and brought forward a consensus prime minister it was only the most intense 11th hour pressure that forced the iraqis to complete their government and that is why we need a deadline now for the iraqis to understand they must stand up and fight for their own country i believe that it s time to set a schedule for that withdrawal and after all how many times have we been told by this president that our policy is that as the iraqis stand up we will stand down the goal for standing up iraqis is 272 000 combined police and military forces well we have now trained and equipped according to the administration if they are telling the truth 250 000 plus we re only 20 000 shy of the 272 000 and my question is where is the standing down of american forces now they re going to say oh this is cut and run they re going to try to scare americans one more time karl rove was up in new hampshire trying to do that just the other day well let me tell him something they cut and run from the truth they cut and run from common sense they cut and run from planning they cut and run from their obligation to the troops to give them the armor you heard john power and what we need now is not a scare tactic to america we need honest discussion of how you really resolve this and key to my plan to set that date absolutely central to it is long overdue engagement in serious and real diplomacy to give iraq what did president clinton do when faced with a russia that didn t even want to join up in the effort to deal with bosnia we forced the process and at the dayton accords dick holbrooke sat there and face to face with milosevic and others we forced parties to confront ethnic cleansing and the differences we brought people together and i say to give iraq its best hope for a peaceful future the administration must convene a summit that includes the leaders of the country its neighbors including syria and iran the representatives of the arab league nato the united nations and the european union and forge a comprehensive political solution that is the only way to resolve the issues of the middle east it s time for leadership and statesmanship and the time has also come for a congress that shares responsibility for getting us into iraq to take responsibility for helping to get us out of iraq now sure we were misled we understand that and we know the truth now but we have to demand a change in policy we have to talk to our fellow citizens i mean talk reasonably this week on the floor in the senate i will fight for an up or down vote on an amendment to set a date for the withdrawal of u s forces from iraq our soldiers what is important to understand is that when we talk about that whether it s john murtha or myself we allow for the over horizon capacity to deal with al qaida we allow for the over horizon capacity to be able to respond to iran or other threats to our country we re not stupid but we also understand that our soldiers in iraq have done their job and it s time for iraqis to do their job it s time for iraqis to stand up for iraq it is time for iraqis to want for themselves the democracy that we want for them so much now we also have to insist that as in 1971 we are engaged in a fight for the direction the heart and soul if you will of our country this is another moment when american patriotism demands more dissent less complacency in the face of stubborn pride from those in power we have to insist again that patriotism does not belong to those who simply defend a president s policies it belongs to those who defend our country patriotism is not love of power it s not even the love of our land as a piece of geography it is loyalty to the idea of america and sometimes loving your country demands that you speak truth to power this is one of those times in his introduction john power mentioned my testimony of 35 years ago i also at the end of that testimony asked the question where are the leaders of our country and i think it s time to ask that question one more time not just on iraq but on every single issue where this administration has either failed to lead or misled this country in the wrong direction now some critics and i hear this and i m tired of it i don t know if you re tired of it but i m tired of it i m tired of listening to some of these critics who say well democrats don t have any ideas that all we do is oppose the ideas coming from the other side well let me tell you something if by ideas the critics mean running up the debt to more than 9 trillion and losing america s manufacturing base denying children after school programs cutting kids from medicaid privatizing social security if by ideas they mean violating the law ignoring international treaties forgetting diplomacy if by ideas they mean filling the trough of special interest piggery here in washington and giving the credit card companies their bankruptcy bill giving the oil industry their energy bill giving the big pharmaceutical companies their prescription drug bill then they re right we don t have ideas like that and we don t want those ideas those are just plain bad ideas being shoved down the throats of americans by a corrupt government with bankrupt values and i am proud that most of us stood up every moment along the way and said no to each and every one of those policies here s the truth we don t have a selfish powerful special interest agenda masquerading as ideas in fact we ve reached a point in american politics where the administration s agenda and their take no prisoners scorched earth political policies have so reduced the discussion in america that now suddenly little ideas have become big ones so what do we say yes to what is it that we re fighting for what are the ideas that we care about well why don t we just start with a simple one like this tell the truth to the american people and tell it to them all the time and then fire the incompetents and hold government accountable to the spending of americans and long overdue make america secure by making america energy independent that s a big idea and it s worth fighting for how about this how about this i thought this was what america was always about it s pretty simple value work not wealth and have a tax system that s fair for the middle class and for people who are struggling to get into it how about this for a fundamental american idea export products not jobs and since when wasn t it a big idea as 48 million americans almost now have no health insurance 11 million children and we re the only industrial nation in the world that doesn t i still think it s a big idea to have affordable health care for every single american and we need to go out and fight for it while we re at it if this isn t a big idea and a legitimate one i don t know what is let s do something about global warming and while we re at it let s clean up our lakes and our rivers and our streams so that future generations can actually fish and swim in the united states of america now together with what i ve talked about in terms of restoring america s legitimacy and place in the world and our leadership based on truth and real values all of this should be done because our one biggest idea the one that makes us democrats is not to stand for selfishness but to stand for the common good we believe that leading america we believe that leading america requires a commitment to community and a shared commitment that brings every single one of us to a set of ideals that are bigger than each of us individually and based on truly moral values like fairness and tolerance the dignity of each and every one of us and opportunity for all we need a washington that doesn t just talk about family values but that actually values families that s the difference in what we re fighting for so that s why i say repeal the bush tax cut for the top 1 percent instead of passing endless deficits on to our children and i don t know why democrats can t embrace that wholly what are they afraid of we need to invest in renewable and alternative energy and grow the fuels of the future and we need to wage a legitimate war on terror by recognizing that there is a struggle going on for the heart and soul of islam and the united states must lead globally in an effort to try to address that these are real ideas i believe they are as urgent and as legitimate in 2004 as they are today and that is why i believe as we go forward into november of 2006 we are going to change the direction of this country these ideas will become powerful when you go out of here in these next weeks and you give voice to those values and you take each of these issues and you make them the voting issues of this country i remember in 1970 when i first came back actually before i even protested the war i became one of the organizers of earth day in massachusetts in 1970 i remember when it was tough to mention the environment without getting snickers from people in response you could be dismissed as being boring or out of the mainstream but then in 1970 mainstream americans got tired of seeing the cuyahoga river light up on fire because of pollution in it they got tired of living next to toxic waste sites and seeing what was happening to their children and all of a sudden on one single day 20 million americans went out and gave voice to their values 20 million americans marched in the streets 20 million americans said we ve had enough 20 million americans sent a message to politicians and they designated 12 congressman as the dirty dozen the 12 with the worst voting records and you know what they did in the next elections seven out of 12 lost those seats that s the difference now you want the upside you know what happened we unleashed a torrent of legitimate legislative activity all of a sudden we passed the clean air act the clean water act the safe drinking water act the marine mammal protection act the coastal zone management act and richard nixon was brought to sign into law the epa all of that happened because people gave voice to those values so i say to you today this is your decade this is the moment to go out and stand up and speak out this is the time to say we re not going to stand for making a mockery of no child left behind we re not going to stand for watching more children abandoned because we don t give them health care we re not going to allow our elderly to be abused we are going to stand up and fight and i ll tell you if ever you doubt it just remember this when we came back i remember we were marching down the road here and somebody shouted at some of the 5 000 troops and said you guys should support the troops and one of the person looked at him and said lady we are the troops well we are the citizens we are the americans who are going to reclaim this country and as we do just remember something else they used to say back then i used to remember people would come up and say how dare you protest my country right or wrong you know what we say to them yes my country right or wrong when it s right keep it right and when it s wrong make it right that s what we re going to go out and do get off our rear ends and go out and make this country right and get the job done thank you and god bless you dem jkerry17 5 04 excerpt john_kerry continues to inspire freedom lovers and freedom movements here in america and around the globe and it started right here in topeka but that s no surprise to any of you topeka was always the place for making history two hundred years ago lewis and clark mapped out the site of this city in their journey of discovery across the continent one hundred and fifty years ago topeka became the free state capital battling against pro slavery and 50 years this very day the next great battle for freedom was centered right here in topeka topeka s segregated schools summoned brown and brown summoned our country to make real the ideal of one nation and one people a nation where one day all of god s children would live in the light of equality a nation where dr king said later we would be able to transform into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood those of us who have embraced this vision have redeemed the promise of america and every day make our country stronger it s hard to believe that it s been 50 years since brown 50 years since the color of your skin determined where you could get a drink of water where you could sit on the bus whether you could eat at a lunch counter and where you could go to school in 1954 in topeka there were 18 neighborhood schools for white children and just four black only elementary schools oliver brown thought that it was wrong that his 7 year old daughter linda and her friends had to walk a mile through a railroad yard every day just to catch a bus to their segregated elementary school the trip took more than an hour and on the way linda walked right passed the closed doors of a white elementary school just three blocks from her home it was separate but it was not equal and the supreme court agreed and that decision became a turning point in america s long march toward equality and although the journey isn t finished as we ve heard from other speakers this morning and as i will point out myself topeka has been transformed in these 50 years we are joined today as i mentioned earlier by topeka s first african american mayor james mcclinton and isn t it a measure of the progress that we ve made that topeka has a school superintendent who 50 years ago couldn t have walked the halls of many of the schools in this city today tony sawyer is not only walking the halls he is commanding the corridors of power in the topeka school system all of america all of america is at a better place because of brown back then only 4 percent of african americans had college degrees today nearly 20 percent are college graduates but we have more to do in the 1950s there were less than 200 black elected officials in all of america and even fewer hispanic americans now there are more than 14 000 including the 59 members of the congressional black and hispanic caucuses in the congress but we have more to do there were no african americans on the big corporate boards back then today there are more than 40 percent of the fortune 1000 companies with black directors and nearly 15 percent have latino directors but we have more to do and while it wasn t until six years before brown that president truman integrated the military i can tell you from first hand experience that service to our country loyalty to mission and to brother and sister soldiers on the battlefield knows no color line whether we hail from the foothills of appalachia the street corners of topeka the neighborhoods of flushing the barrios of east los angeles or the reservations of arizona whether we are new immigrants to our country or descendants who came over on the mayflower or who were brought here on a slave ship in shackles when we fight side by side in places like vietnam and iraq and kosovo and bosnia and afghanistan we are all americans sacrificing for the same country praying to the same god today more than ever we need to renew our commitment to one america that s the meaning of these children sitting on these steps that s the meaning of these justices of our courts sitting here today that is the meaning of this commemoration we should not delude ourselves into thinking for an instant that because brown represents the law we have achieved our goal that the work of brown is done when there are those who still seek in different ways to see it undone to roll back affirmative action to restrict equal rights to undermine the promise of our constitution yes we have to defend the progress that has been made but make no mistake we also have to move the cause forward that is our responsibility and our mission brown began to tear down the walls of inequality the next great challenge is to put up a ladder of opportunity for all because as far as we have come we still have not met the promise of brown we have not met the promise of brown when one third of all african american children are living in poverty we have not met the promise of brown when only 50 percent of african american men in new york city have a job we have not met the promise of brown when nearly 20 million black and hispanic americans don t have basic health insurance and we certainly have not met the promise of brown when in too many parts of our country our school systems are not separate but equal but too many of them are separate and unequal we haven t met the promise of brown when leaders who fought to help bring us brown leaders of the naacp and the leadership conference on civil rights in 2004 find that the doors of access to the highest places of power in america are closed to them we have not met the promise of brown when a fourth grade hispanic child is only one third as likely to read at the same level as a fourth grade white child when only 50 percent of african americans are finishing high school and only 18 percent are graduating from college our children will never have equal opportunity unless once and for all we close the ever widening gap of achievement we know the answer is both higher educations higher expectations and greater resources it is not a political statement it is a matter of common sense and it is a matter of truth to say to america you cannot promise no child left behind and then pursue policies that leave millions of children behind every single day because that promise that promise is a promissory note to all of america s families and it s a promissory note that must be paid in full we cannot be content to see nearly 4 million students in this nation going to schools that are literally crumbling around them we cannot be content to see those who teach the next generation treated like second class or second rate employees not like the professionals that they are we know from our own lives each and every one of you reach into your heart reach into your memory you know there s a teacher who leaps out who made a difference in your life a teacher who was there despite all of the disbeliefs yet today where the best teachers are needed the most they are too often paid the least and so how do we honor how do we properly come here today to honor the legacy of brown that question was answered some 20 years before the decision by a son of lawrence kansas and one of america s greatest poets langston hughes in one of his most soul wrenching poems hughes challenged the nation to let america be america again he called that generation to fulfill the unmet promise of america oh let my land be land where liberty is crowned with no false patriotic wreath but opportunity is real and life is free equality is in the air we breathe and so we honor the legacy of brown by letting america be america by reaffirming the value of inclusion of equality and diversity in our schools and in our life all across this nation by opening the doors of opportunity so that more of our young people can stay in school and out of prison by lifting more of our people by lifting more of our people out of poverty by expanding the middle class by providing health care to all of our children in america and by bringing jobs hope and opportunity to all of the neighborhoods of the forgotten america we must let america be america again we must work together to turn back the creeping tide of division that thurgood marshall and so many others fought so hard against we must never forget that the brown decision came in the wake of world war ii when african american soldiers helped to save freedom in the world only to return to brutal inequality here at home they didn t ask for special treatment or special extra help they just wanted the fullness of freedom in their own lives they wanted to see the end of the white only signs at the restaurants and the movie theaters at the schoolhouse doors and the department stores they wanted to see an end to the invisible but all too real white only sign that reached from congress into every great corporation and business in small towns and communities across america and when i joined so many other veterans of the vietnam era the vietnam war to return to a nation without a welcome america gave those veterans also a first hand view of how those on the front lines of combat black and brown who had been the casualties in far greater numbers than their representation of our population of how they were shunned even after that service their unemployment numbers were higher their opportunities were less than those with whom they had served and the ravages of postwar trauma were felt even more heavily on their families and in their lives the memory of all of these patriots of all of those periods of service and the decision that we commemorate today tell us again and call us again to the america that we must become our brave men and women who are on the front lines far away in iraq and afghanistan and elsewhere in the world deserve no less today for them and for our country 50 years later 50 years after brown we have only just begun for america to be america for any of us america must be america for all of us thank you and god bless dem jkerry19 1 04 excerpt john_kerry thank you thank you iowa well iowa i love you i love you last night last night the new england patriots won tonight this new englander won and you ve sent me on the way to the super bowl thank you very much thank you thank you thank you iowa for making me the comeback kerry not so long ago not so long ago this campaign was written off but in your homes in iowa in community centers in vfw posts in restaurants where you never let me stop and eat in homes living rooms and barns where we gathered across this great state you listened you stood the ground and on caucus night you stood with me so that together we can take on george bush and the special interests and give so that we can take on george bush and the special interests and literally give america back its future and its soul and i am listening to you and tonight i want to ask there was a woman who came up to me in a barn a few days ago right before the night when the polls started to really switch and she handed me this four leaf clover i don t know her name but i want her to call my campaign tomorrow so i can thank her this worked and i have listened to you and i ve learned from you and i ve learned a lot and from the people of new hampshire and you have made me a better candidate and i thank you for that i also want to say a special word tonight about dick gephardt i have been there before i ve lost i know it is not fun it s hard particularly when you have served your country with as much grace commitment and distinction as he has he is a special public servant ladies and gentlemen and all of us i ve worked with him for 20 years and watched him push and fight and advance the causes of our country and of our party and everyone here will join me in agreeing that he is a man of commitment of principle and he has served his country and all of us with great distinction we thank him and now you send me on to new hampshire and to the other contests ahead in this country and i make you this pledge i have only just begun to fight in the months and years ahead in the months in the months and years ahead i pledge that i will be fighting for you and for all americans across this country whose voices are being stolen by powerful interests we need to join together all across this nation to restore fairness to our country and for those of you who are not yet part of this effort i ask you to go to johnkerry com and join us as we fight to change america and move this country forward now i know that was a shameless advertisement for my web site but it works but this is not this is not this fight is about real people all across our country who wonder whether or not our government is prepared to stand up and fight for them rather than those who have the money and the power it s a fight for people like elizabeth hendricks from des moines who has she s working full time she s raising four boys and she earns 28 000 a year you know what she made clear and all of iowa made clear we should not be raising taxes on the middle class in america in order to pay for george bush s mistakes in america and i ask you to join me in continuing this fight and in new hampshire i ask people to join me in fighting for people like john and mary ann knowles of hudson new hampshire she has cancer and john lost his job during the bush recession she has to continue to work even during her chemotherapy so that they can continue to have health insurance and i say to you it is long since time in the richest country on the face of the planet the only industrial nation not to do so that we recognize for john and mary ann knowles for families like them all across this nation health care is not a privilege for the wealthy and the powerful it is a right for all americans and we will make it available to all americans we came from behind and we came for the fight and now i have a special message for the special interests that have a home in the bush white house we re coming you re going and don t let the door hit you on the way out i m running we re going to do it i ve never seen it like it is today in all the years that i ve been in public service and i am running to free our government from the grip of those powerful interests whether it s a drug lobby or whether it s an oil industry or hmos i m running so you will have a president who is on your side not on the side of those powerful interests who fuel campaigns in america we need to restore i m running to restore a concept called fundamental fairness that is how our parents raised us that s how this country grew strong and i say that it is time to stop having americans just work for the economy and time to have an economy that works for americans we re going to change it this president has an open hand for halliburton and he s turned his back on friends and neighbors across the nation he s turned his back on teachers and on schools across the nation and i will criss cross this country from community to community and together with you and with all those who care about the children of our nation who really care about them not for photo opportunities but for future citizenship we will hold this president accountable for making a mockery of the words leave no child behind we will thank you and when we add up the indifference and the deficit the real deficit of this administration count the costs that working families are paying all across america while others reap the high rewards seniors have seen their retirement either blown away or postponed utterly destroyed by enron by worldcom by mutual fund scandals we ve seen the financial scandals of wall street and a separate creed even as many many ceos and businesses across our nation live by the rules and also want a workplace that is fair we are all cheated by what has been going on and at companies like tyco we have seen a workplace where this president licenses a creed of agreed two million people have seen their health benefits destroyed three million jobs have been lost and when we add it all up as i have here in iowa and as we will together all across this country and in new hampshire next week it will be clear at the end that the one person in the united states of america who deserves to be laid off is george w bush and that s what we re going to do i pledge to you i pledge to you that if i m elected president with your help we i pledge to you that when i am elected president i told you i was learning along the way when i am elected president i will scrub this tax code which has exploded from 14 pages to 17 000 pages of loopholes and special interests give aways and there s not a person in this room who has their own page we are not going to give one benefit or one reward to any benedict arnold company or ceo who take the jobs and money overseas and stick you with the bill that s over and tonight tonight tonight on martin luther king s birthday i pledge to you that we will stop the right wing attack on our rights and our civil liberties in our country i will appoint i will appoint an attorney general who is not john ashcroft because we because we all of us following in the footsteps of martin luther king we still have a dream and it is unfulfilled in this country we will continue the long unfinished march towards civil rights in america and that means for all americans finally my friends finally as i have said many times in the course of our conversations in iowa and in new hampshire we need a nominee of our party and we need a leader of our country who is prepared to stand up for our values and for our relationships in this world we need a nominee who can stand up to george bush vice president cheney karl rove and the others and prove to america that we democrats know how to make this precious nation of ours safer and more secure george bush to put it quite simply has run the most arrogant inept reckless and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of our country and we are going to turn it around by joining the community of nations we will go back to the united nations and we will turn over a new chapter in america s relationship with the world now karl rove and george bush have already announced that they intend to run this election on natural security and you can understand why you can understand why they can t exactly run on jobs they can t exactly run on health care for all americans they can t exactly run on having left no child behind they can t run on the environment and advancing the cause of human kind so they will run on national security and i look forward to reminding them that i know something about aircraft carriers for real ladies and gentlemen if george bush if george bush wants to make national security the central issue of this campaign i have three words for him we know he understands bring it on bring it on bring it on bring it on that s what i m about to do so i say to you with pride i am a lifelong democrat and i have fought for 35 years against powerful interests we stopped newt gingrich s attempt to try and cut medicare in order to give massive tax breaks to the wealthy in this country we stopped george bush from giving the alaska wilderness away to the oil companies and not drill in the arctic wildlife refuge and now and now i will ask my fellow democrats my fellow americans what i asked of the people in iowa again and again over the course of these last months stand with me and together we will put america back to work stand with me and together we will make america energy independent stand with me and together we will make health care affordable and available to all americans stand with me and together we will rejoin the community of nations and make america proud and respected again in this world stand with me and i will fight for you let s make mission accomplished a reality thank you now i would like i would like there is a reason we are here tonight it s because of iowans who listened and who care about our democratic process with an intensity and a love that i have never seen i will say to anybody anywhere in the world when they ask what is america like what is democracy like in america a simple phrase let them come to iowa and see democracy in this great state dem jkerry2 3 04 john_kerry i want to thank thank you but i don t want you to stop the enthusiasm all right thank you thank you all thank you to voters from coast to coast who have truly made this a super tuesday thank you very very much i want to thank i don t know how many of you here had a chance to hear it but we heard it upstairs a remarkably gracious powerful generous statement by john edwards tonight and i want all of us here i want to thank there is no question that john edwards brings a compelling voice to our party great eloquence to the cause of working men and women all across our nation and great promise for leadership for the years to come and we thank him so much for what he has done in the course of this race i believe i believe that in 2004 one united democratic party we can and we will win this election and we will build one america of freedom and of fairness for all for months for months john edwards has been our competitor but first of all and always for teresa and me john and elizabeth are our friends and he is a valiant he is a valiant champion of the values for which our party stands let me also let me also congratulate howard dean again again today we are all reminded of the unprecedented contribution that he has made to our party and to our country and particularly by bringing so many who were disenfranchised into our party and into the political process and i know he will continue to fight to do that tonight the message can now be heard all across our country change is coming to america before us lie long months of effort and of challenge and we understand that we have no illusions about the republican attack machine and what our opponents have done in the past and what they may try to do in the future but i know that together we are equal to this task i am a fighter and for more for more than 30 years i ve been on the battle lines on the frontlines of the struggle for fairness and for mainstream american values and in 2004 i pledge we will tell the truth about what has happened in our country and we will fight and we will fight to give america back its future and its hope there are powerful forces that want america to continue on exactly the path that it s on today and there are also millions of americans who are hurt by the policies that favor the few who doubt whether government once again can work for them millions more live in fear every day that they will lose their jobs or lose their health care or lose their pensions my campaign our campaign is about replacing doubt with hope and replacing fear with security together we are going to build a strong foundation for growth by repealing the bush tax cuts for the wealthy and investing in education and health care and we will cut the deficit in half in four years and we will invest in education and health care and the creation of jobs in this country and i pledge to you with every fiber in my body and every ounce of energy that i can find we will put the tax code of this nation up to the light of democracy and scrutiny of the american people and we will repeal every tax break and every loophole that rewards any corporation for gaming the tax code and going overseas to avoid their responsibilities to people in the united states of america and we will provide new incentives important new incentives for manufacturing that reward the good companies that create the jobs and keep them here in the united states and we will fight as never before for workers protections and for environmental protections in the trade agreements of the united states of america and long overdue waiting to be achieved as a matter of fundamental fairness we will raise the minimum wage so that no one in america works a 40 hour work week and can t get out of poverty and we will meet one of the most historic challenges of our generation we will provide a bold new initiative to guarantee that we have a plan for energy independence for the united states we will invest in the technologies of the future and we will create 500 000 new jobs doing so so that no young american in uniform will ever be held hostage to america s dependence on oil in the middle east and i cannot wait to join with senator kennedy and with others of good conscience in the house and in the senate and all across this country we will complete the mission begun by harry truman to make certain that health care is regarded as a right and not a privilege in the united states of america we will fight for an america where medicare and social security are protected where health care costs are held down and your family s health care is just as important as any politician in washington d c we will achieve that and on behalf of all americans and on behalf of the other 96 percent of human kind waiting for leadership from the united states we will we will rejoin the community of nations and we will we will renew our alliances and we will build new alliances because they are essential to the final victory and success of a war on terror the bush administration has run the most inept reckless arrogant and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of our country and we will reverse that course this president this president has said again and again that he wants to run on national security well if george bush wants to make national security the central issue of the campaign of 2004 i have three words for him that i know he understands bring it on this campaign is about the big issues and the great challenges that we face as a nation it s about our generation s opportunity to step up and to follow in the footsteps of the greatest generation and all of those who have defined the history of our nation our opponents can t campaign on jobs or heath care or fiscal responsibility instead george bush who promised to become a uniter has become the great divider and just last week just last week he proposed to amend the constitution of the united states for political purposes and we say we say that he has no right to misuse the most precious document in our history in an effort to divide this nation and distract us from our goals we resoundingly reject the politics of fear and distortion we will instead all across this nation throughout these next months keep trust with lincoln s idea of america as the last best hope of earth when i first led veterans to the mall here in washington to stop the war in vietnam it was a time of doubt and fear in this land it was a time when millions of americans could not trust or believe what their leaders were telling them and now today americans are once again wondering if they can trust or believe the leadership of our country our campaign is about restoring that faith speaking plainly and honestly to the american people offering real choices about the future about leading america in a new direction guided by the enduring values that this nation has held dear for over 200 years our campaign is about building a fairer safer more prosperous america the nation that is again the great light to all the world that is what this is about there is no way that all of us together would have arrived at this evening unless we had worked together bled together fought together believed together in the possibilities and that is what unites us and i want to thank the most amazing woman the most remarkable partner and wife a man could ask for she has stunned everybody all across this country and everywhere she goes people fall in love with teresa i want to thank her and i want to thank all of our children my stepsons and my daughters i m so grateful to them as anyone will tell you in public life it is hard on families they re thrust into it it s not of their choosing but they have been the most remarkable partners in this effort and i want you to say thank you to them for affecting their lives i want you all to join me in thanking a man who has been a champion and a conscience of the values and the causes of our party and our country for over 40 years my colleague ted kennedy and vicky kennedy who have been such great friends and supporters in this effort and a special friend who has traveled all across this nation with an extraordinary band of brothers max cleland and all those veterans who have given so much to this cause to all of those in public life who took risks joined this campaign early hung in when it was tough and stayed with us today and to all those who ve joined recently this is not a campaign that will measure who and when it is a campaign that will measure what we have to achieve together over the course of these next months i want to thank standing behind me the greatest campaign staff in america and the greatest group of volunteers many of whom and i want to thank the many and there are many who have come over from other campaigns who ve become part of this great effort we are grateful to all of them and i particularly want to say thank you to the people of iowa and new hampshire who gave me a hearing when no one thought we had a chance and they sent us on our way and i thank them and to all of those who have been fighting in our ranks all along the way all of those firefighters of america who have been there from the beginning the ranks of labor the millions of citizens who have now rallied to our cause and for those who want to i invite them to come to johnkerry com and join this effort now so the message rings out across the land tonight get ready a new day is on the way good night god bless all of you and god bless the america that we love so much thank you and take care dem jkerry20 9 04 john_kerry i am really honored to be here at new york university at nyu wagner one of the great urban universities in america not just in new york but in the world you ve set a high standard you always set a high standard for global dialogue as ellen mentioned a moment ago and i intend to live up to that tradition here today this election is about choices the most important choices a president makes are about protecting america at home and around the world a president s first obligation is to make america safer stronger and truer to our ideals only a few blocks from here three years ago the events of september 11th remind every american of that obligation that day brought to our shores the defining struggle of our times the struggle between freedom and radical fundamentalism and it made clear that our most important task is to fight and to win the war on terrorism with us today is a remarkable group of women who lost loved ones on september 11th and whose support i am honored to have not only did they suffer unbearable loss but they helped us as a nation to learn the lessons of that terrible time by insisting on the creation of the 9 11 commission i ask them to stand and i thank them on behalf of our country and i pledge to them and to you that i will implement the 9 11 recommendations thank you in fighting the war on terrorism my principles are straightforward the terrorists are beyond reason we must destroy them as president i will do whatever it takes as long as it takes to defeat our enemies but billions of people around the world yearning for a better life are open to america s ideals we must reach them to win america must be strong and america must be smart the greatest threat that we face is the possibility of al qaida or other terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons to prevent that from happening we have to call on the totality of america s strength strong alliances to help us stop the world s most lethal weapons from falling into the most dangerous hands a powerful military transformed to meet the threats of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction and all of america s power our diplomacy our intelligence system our economic power our appeal to the values the values of americans and to connect them to the values of other people around the world each of which is critical to making america more secure and to preventing a new generation of terrorists from emerging we owe it to the american people to have a real debate about the choices president bush has made and the choices i would make and have made to fight and win the war on terror that means that we must have a great and honest debate on iraq the president claims it is the centerpiece of his war on terror in fact iraq was a profound diversion from that war and the battle against our greatest enemy iraq was a profound diversion from that war and from our greatest enemy osama bin laden and the terrorists invading iraq has created a crisis of historic proportions and if we do not change course there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight this month we passed a cruel milestone more than 1 000 americans lost in iraq their sacrifice reminds us that iraq remains overwhelmingly an american burden nearly 90 percent of the troops and nearly 90 percent of the casualties are american despite the president s claims this is not a grand coalition our troops have served with extraordinary bravery and skill and resolve their service humbles all of us i visited with some of them in the hospitals and i am stunned by their commitment by their sense of duty their patriotism when i speak to them when i look into the eyes of their families i know this we owe them the truth about what we have asked them to do and what is still to be done would you all join me my wife teresa has made it through the traffic and i m delighted that she is here thank you in june the president declared the iraqi people have their country back and just last week he told us this country is headed toward democracy freedom is on the march but the administration s own official intelligence estimate given to the president last july tells a very different story according to press reports the intelligence estimate totally contradicts what the president is saying to the american people and so do the facts on the ground security is deteriorating for us and for the iraqis forty two americans died in iraq in june the month before the handover but 54 died in july 66 in august and already 54 halfway through september and more than 1 100 americans were wounded in august more than in any other month since the invasion we are fighting a growing insurgency in an ever widening war zone in march insurgents attacked our forces 700 times in august they attacked 2 700 times a 400 percent increase fallujah ramadi samarra and parts of iraq are now no go zones breeding grounds for terrorists who are free to plot and to launch attacks against our soldiers the radical shia cleric muqtada al sadr who is accused of complicity in the murder of americans holds more sway in suburbs of baghdad than the prime minister violence against iraqis from bombings to kidnappings to intimidation is on the rise basic living conditions are also deteriorating yes there has been some progress thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our soldiers and civilians in iraq schools shops and hospitals have been opened in certain places in parts of iraq normalcy actually prevails but most iraqis have lost faith in our ability to be able to deliver meaningful improvements to their lives so they re sitting on the fence instead of siding with us against the insurgents that is the truth the truth that the commander in chief owes to our troops and to the american people now i will say to you it is never easy to discuss what has gone wrong while our troops are in constant danger but it is essential if you want to correct the course and do what s right for those troops instead of repeating the same old mistakes over and over again i know this dilemma firsthand i saw firsthand what happens when pride or arrogance take over from rational decision making and after serving in a war i returned home to offer my own personal views of dissent i did so because i believed strongly that we owed it to those risking their lives to speak truth to power and we still do saddam hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell but that was not that was not in and of itself a reason to go to war the satisfaction that we take in his downfall does not hide this fact we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left america less secure now the president has said that he miscalculated in iraq and that it was a catastrophic success more the first and most fundamental mistake was the president s failure to tell the truth to the american people he failed to tell the truth about the rationale for going to war and he failed to tell the truth about the burden this war would impose on our soldiers and our citizens by one count the president offered 23 different rationales for this war if his purpose was to confuse and mislead the american people he succeeded his two main rationales weapons of mass destruction and the al qaida september 11th connection have both been proved false by the president s own weapons inspectors and by the 9 11 commission and just last week secretary of state powell acknowledged those facts only vice president cheney still insists that the earth is flat the president also failed to level with the american people about what it would take to prevail in iraq he didn t tell us that well over 100 000 troops would be needed for years not months he didn t tell us that he wouldn t take the time to assemble a genuine broad strong coalition of allies he didn t tell us that the cost would exceed 200 billion he didn t tell us that even after paying such a heavy price success was far from assured and america will pay an even heavier price for the president s lack of candor at home the american people are less likely to trust this administration if it needs to summon their support to meet real and pressing threats to our security in the dark days of the cuban missile crisis president kennedy sent former secretary of state dean acheson to europe to build support acheson explained the situation to french president de gaulle then he offered to show him highly classified satellite photos as proof de gaulle waved him away saying the word of the president of the united states is good enough for me how many world leaders have that same trust in america s president today this president s failure to tell the truth to us and to the world before the war has been exceeded by fundamental errors of judgment during and after the war the president now admits to miscalculations in iraq miscalculations this is one of the greatest underestimates in recent american history his miscalculations were not the equivalent of accounting errors they were colossal failures of judgment and judgment is what we look for a president and this is all the more stunning because we re not talking about 20 20 hindsight we re not talking about monday morning quarterbacking before the war before he chose to go to war bipartisan congressional hearings major outside studies and even some in his own administration predicted virtually every problem that we face in iraq today the result is a long litany of misjudgments with terrible and real consequences the administration told us we would be greeted as liberators they were wrong they told us not to worry about the looting or the sorry state of iraq s infrastructure they were wrong they told us we had enough troops to provide security and stability defeat the insurgents guard the borders and secure the arms depots they were tragically wrong they told us we could rely on exiles like ahmed chalabi to build political legitimacy they were wrong they told us we would quickly restore an iraqi civil service to run the country and a police force and an army to secure it they were wrong in iraq this administration has consistently overpromised and underperformed and this policy has been plagued by a lack of planning by an absence of candor arrogance and outright incompetence and the president has held no one accountable including himself in fact the only officials the only officials who ve lost their jobs over iraq were the ones who told the truth economic adviser larry lindsey said it would cost as much as 200 billion pretty good calculation he was fired after the successful entry into baghdad george bush was offered help from the u n and he rejected it stiff armed them decided to go it alone he even prohibited nations from participating in reconstruction efforts because they weren t part of the original coalition pushing reluctant countries even further away and as we continue to fight this war almost alone it is hard to estimate how costly that arrogant decision really was can anyone seriously say this president has handled iraq in a way that makes america stronger in the war on terrorism by any measure by any measure the answer is no nuclear dangers have mounted across the globe the international terrorist club has expanded radicalism in the middle east is on the rise we have divided our friends and united our enemies and our standing in the world is at an all time low think about it for a minute consider where we were and where we are after the events of september 11th we had an opportunity to bring our country and the world together in a legitimate struggle against terrorists on september 12th headlines and newspapers abroad declared that we are all americans now but through his policy in iraq the president squandered that moment and rather than isolating the terrorists left america isolated from the world we now know that iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat to our security the president s policy in iraq took our attention and our resources away from other more serious threats to america threats like north korea which actually has weapons of mass destruction including a nuclear arsenal and is building more right now under this president s watch the emerging nuclear danger of iran the tons and kilotons of unsecured chemical and nuclear weapons in russia and the increasing instability in afghanistan today warlords again control much of that country the taliban is regrouping opium production is at an all time high and the al qaida leadership still plots and plans not only there but in 60 other nations instead of using u s forces we relied on warlords who one week earlier had been fighting on the other side to go up in the mountains to capture osama bin laden when he was cornered he slipped away we then diverted our focus and our forces from the hunt for those who were responsible for september 11th in order to invade iraq we know now that iraq played no part we knew then on september 11th and it had no operational ties to al qaida the president s policy in iraq precipitated the very problem that he said he was trying to prevent secretary of state powell admits that iraq was not a magnet for international terrorists before their war now it is and they are operating against our troops iraq is becoming a sanctuary for a new generation of terrorists who could someday hit the united states of america and we know that while iraq was a source of friction it was not previously a source of serious disagreement with our allies in europe and countries in the muslim world the president s policy in iraq divided our oldest alliance and sent our standing in the muslim world into freefall three years after 9 11 even in many moderate muslim countries like jordan morocco and turkey osama bin laden is more popular than the united states of america two years ago congress was right to give the president the authority to use force to hold saddam hussein accountable this president any president would have needed that threat of force to act effectively this president misused that authority the power entrusted to the president purposefully gave him a strong hand to play in the international community the idea was simple we would get the weapons inspectors back in to verify whether or not iraq had weapons of mass destruction and we would convince the world to speak with one voice to saddam disarm or be disarmed a month before the war president bush told the nation if we have to act we will take every precaution that is possible we will plan carefully we will act with the full power of the united states military we will act with allies at our side and we will prevail instead the president rushed to war without letting the weapons inspectors finish their work he went purposefully by choice without a broad and deep coalition of allies he acted by choice without making sure that our troops even had enough body armor and he plunged ahead by choice without understanding or preparing for the consequences of postwar none of which i would have done yet today president bush tells us that he would do everything all over again the same way how can he possibly be serious is he really saying to america that if we know there was no imminent threat no weapons of mass destruction no ties to al qaida the united states should have invaded iraq my answer resoundingly no because a commander in chief s first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep america safe now the president is looking for a reason a new reason to hang his hat on it s the capability to acquire weapons well ladies and gentlemen my fellow americans that was not the reason given to the nation that was not the reason the congress voted on that is not a reason today it is an excuse thirty five to 40 countries have greater capability to build a nuclear bomb than iraq did in 2003 is president bush saying we should invade all of them i would have personally concentrated our power and resources on defeating global terrorism and capturing osama bin laden i would have tightened the noose and continued to pressure and isolate saddam hussein who was weak and getting weaker so that he would pose no threat to the region or to america the president s insistence that he would do the same thing all over again in iraq is a clear warning for the future and it makes the choice in this election clear more of the same with president bush or a new smarter direction with john kerry that makes our troops and america safer that s the choice it is time at long last to ask the questions and insist on the answers from the commander in chief about his serious misjudgments and what they tell us about his administration and the president himself in iraq we have a mess on our hands but we cannot just throw up our hands we cannot afford to see iraq become a permanent source of terror that will endanger america s security for years to come all across this country people ask me and others what we should do now every stop of the way from the first time i spoke about this in the senate i have set out a specific set of recommendations from day one from the first debate until this moment i have set out specific steps of how we should not and how we should proceed but over and over when this administration has been presented with a reasonable alternative they have rejected it and gone their own way this is stubborn incompetence five months ago in fulton missouri i said that the president was close to his last chance to get it right every day this president makes it more difficult to deal with iraq harder than it was five months ago harder than it was a year ago a year and a half ago it s time to recognize what is and what is not happening in iraq today and we must act with urgency just this weekend a leading republican chuck hagel said that we re in deep trouble in iraq it doesn t add up to a pretty picture he said and we re going to have to look at a recalibration of our policy republican leaders like dick lugar and john mccain have offered similar assessments we need to turn the page and make a fresh start in iraq first the president has to get the promised international support so our men and women in uniform don t have to go it alone last spring after too many months of delay after reluctance to take the advice of so many of us the president finally went back to the u n and it passed resolution 1546 it was the right thing to do but it was late that resolution calls on u n members to help in iraq by providing troops trainers for iraq s security forces and a special brigade to protect the u n mission and more financial assistance and real debt relief but guess what three months later not a single country has answered that call and the president acts as if it doesn t matter and of the 13 billion that was previously pledged to iraq by other countries only 1 2 billion has been delivered the president should convene a summit meeting of the world s major powers and of iraq s neighbors this week in new york where many leaders will attend the u n general assembly and he should insist that they make good on the u n resolution he should offer potential troop contributors specific but critical roles in training iraqi security personnel and in securing iraqi borders he should give other countries a stake in iraq s future by encouraging them to help develop iraq s oil resources and by letting them bid on contracts instead of locking them out of the reconstruction process now is this more difficult today you bet it is it s more difficult today because the president hasn t been doing it from the beginning and i and others have repeatedly recommended this from the very beginning delay has only made it harder after insulting allies and shredding alliances this president may not have the trust and the confidence to bring others to our side in iraq but i ll tell you we cannot hope to succeed unless we rebuild and lead strong alliances so that other nations share the burden with us that is the only way to be successful in the end second the president must get serious about training iraqi security forces last february secretary rumsfeld claimed that claimed that more than 210 000 iraqis were in uniform this is the public statement to america well guess what america neither number bears any relationship to the truth for example just 5 000 iraqi soldiers have been fully trained by the administration s own minimal standards and of the 35 000 police now in uniform not one not one has completed a 24 week field training program is it any wonder that iraqi security forces can t stop the insurgency or provide basic law and order the president should urgently expand the security forces training program inside and outside of iraq he should strengthen the vetting of recruits double the classroom training time require the follow on field training he should recruit thousands of qualified trainers from our allies especially those who have no troops in iraq he should press our nato allies to open training centers in their countries and he should stop misleading the american people with phony inflated numbers and start behaving like we really are at war third the president must carry out a reconstruction plan that finally brings tangible benefits to the iraqi people all of which may i say should have been in the plan and immediately launched with such a ferocity that there was no doubt about america s commitment or capacity in the very first moments afterwards but they didn t plan he ignored his own state department s plan he discarded it last week the administration admitted that its plan was a failure when it asked congress for permission to radically revise the spending priorities in iraq it took them 17 months for them to understand that security is a priority 17 months to figure out that boosting oil production is critical 17 months to conclude that an iraqi with a job is less likely to shoot at our soldiers one year ago this administration asked for and received 18 billion to help the iraqis and relieve the conditions that contribute to the insurgency today less than 1 billion of those funds have actually been spent i said at the time that we have to rethink our policies and set standards of accountability and now we re paying the price for not doing that he should use more iraqi contractors and workers instead of big corporations like halliburton in fact he should stop paying companies under fraud investigation or corruption investigation and he should fire the civilians in the pentagon who are responsible for mismanaging the reconstruction effort fourth the president must take immediate urgent essential steps to guarantee that the promised election can be held next year credible elections are key to producing an iraqi government that enjoys the support of the iraqi people and an assembly that could write a constitution and yields a viable power sharing agreement because iraqis have no experience in holding free and fair elections the president agreed six months ago that the u n must play a central role yet today just four months before iraqis are supposed to go to the polls the u n secretary general and administration officials say elections are in grave doubt because the security situation is so bad and because not a single country has yet offered troops to protect the u n elections mission the president needs to tell the truth the president needs to deal with reality and he should recruit troops from our friends and allies for a u n protection force now this is not going to be easy i understand that again i repeat every month that s gone by every offer of help spurned every alternative not taken for these past months has made this more difficult and those were this president s choices but even countries that refused to put boots on the ground in iraq ought to still be prepared to help the united nations hold an election we should also intensify the training of iraqis to manage and guard the polling places that need to be opened otherwise u s forces will end up bearing that burden alone if the president would move in this direction if he would bring in more help from other countries to provide resources and to train the iraqis to provide their own security and to develop a reconstruction plan that brings real benefits to the iraqi people and take the steps necessary to hold elections next year if all of that happened we could begin to withdraw u s forces starting next summer and realistically aim to bring our troops home within the next four years that can achieved this is what has to be done this is what i would do if i were president today but we can t afford to wait until january and i can t tell you what i will find in iraq on january 20th president bush owes it to the american people to tell the truth and put iraq on the right track even more he owes it to our troops and their families whose sacrifice is a testament to the best of america the principles that should guide american policy in iraq now and in the future are clear we must make iraq the world s responsibility because the world has a stake in the outcome and others should have always been bearing the burden that s the right way to get the job done it always was the right way to get the job done to minimize the risk to american troops and the cost to american taxpayers and it is the right way to get our troops home on may 1st of last year president bush stood in front of a now infamous banner that read mission accomplished he declared to the american people that in the battle of iraq the united states and our allies have prevailed in fact the worst part of the war was just beginning with the greatest number of american casualties still to come the president misled miscalculated and mismanaged every aspect of this undertaking and he has made the achievement of our objective a stable iraq secure within its borders with a representative government far harder to achieve than it ever should have been in iraq this administration s record is filled with bad predictions inaccurate cost estimates deceptive statements and errors of judgment presidential judgment of historic proportions at every critical juncture in iraq and in the war on terrorism the president has made the wrong choice i have a plan to make america stronger the president often says that in a post 9 11 world we can t hesitate to act i agree but we should not act just for the sake of acting george bush has no strategy for iraq i do and i have all along george bush has not told the truth to the american people about why we went to war and how the war is going i have and i will continue to do so i believe the invasion of iraq has made us less secure and weaker in the war on terrorism i have a plan to fight a smarter more effective war on terror that actually makes america safer today because of george bush s policy in iraq the world is a more dangerous place for america and americans just ask anyone who travels if you share my conviction that we cannot go on as we are that we can make america stronger and safer than it is then november 2nd is your chance to speak and to be heard it is not a question of staying the course but of changing the course i am convinced that with the right leadership we can create a fresh start move more effectively to accomplish our goals our troops have served with extraordinary courage and commitment for their sake for america s sake we have to get this right we have to do everything in our power to complete the mission and make america stronger at home and respected again in the world thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem jkerry21 1 03 john_kerry reverend al you and i are going to have to have words because you offered me the vice presidency about four months ago ladies and gentlemen good evening the privilege has fallen to me to have more power than i ve ever had as a united states senator because i am all that stands between you and your dinner this this is an extraordinary extraordinary gathering and i m privileged to be her with my friends and colleagues who are running for the presidency and particularly privileged to be here with all of you we gather at an extraordinary time what is at stake as you heard from almost every speaker is not just the right to choose and never in my years in the senate have the rights of women been at such risk never have women been assaulted in their citizenship here at home and in their womanhood around the globe as they have been by this administration naral naral is without question the front line defense and when judgements are made the judgement is inescapable that kate michelman is one of the most effective and important civil rights leaders in our time together with naral and your efforts i think it is fair to say that kate has saved more women s lives liberated more women and taken on more tough fights that anyone else committed to this cause but i think we also must say here tonight because so many other groups have come together and even across lines that all of you here who represent so much of the struggle are to be thanked and i join in doing that i learned a lot about this as any father would from wife and from daughters in the course of my journey and i also learned about it as a prosecutor setting up an early rape counseling and victim s assistance program and i learned about heinous crimes that were all about power about stripping women of dignity and control over thier lives and that is exactly what this struggle is about here it is about power it is about who decides and it is beyond my comprehension how on an issue so personal to women that a bunch of men in the white house and in the congress dare to claim rectitude and make the decision that interferes with the freedom of millions of women across this globe each of us tonight has talked about the difficulty of this decision and i heard kate s comments earlier before we came out about the difficulty of her choice i think anyone who has talked to or knows a woman has faced the dilemma of choice knows how difficult how painful how lonely and how consequential it is we will not go back to the days of back alleys days in which women were shamed and put to all kinds of risks in this country we will not put women in a place where the choice is between criminality or having a child that they don t want nothing we say here tonight diminishes or disrespects anybody s belief or sense of morality on the contrary i think it respects america s fundamental fabric of justice and honors the notion that we don t impose our individual articles of faith on someone else in reflecting on the supreme court s decision when he left harry blackmun said it was a step that we had to take towards the full emancipation of women loose this right and literally more than 50 percent of america will not be free as i said 18 years ago as i said 18 years ago in the first speech i ever gave on the floor of the united states senate my so called maiden speech the right to choose is a fundamental right neither the government nor any person has a right to infringe upon that freedom and if i am fortunate enough to share the stage with our current president and debate him one of the first things i ll tell him is there is a fundamental difference between he and i i trust i trust women to make their own decisions and you don t mr president and that is the difference between us so i think that tonight we have to make it clear we have to make it clear that we are not going to turn back the clock there is no overturning of roe v wade there is no packing of the courts with judges who will be hostile to choice there is no denial of choice to a poor woman in the united states of america there is no outlawing of a procedure necessary to save a woman s life or health and there are no more cutbacks on population control efforts around the world we need we need to take on this president and all of the forces of intolerance on this issue we need to honestly and confidently and candidly take this issue out to the country and we need to speak up and be proud of what we stand for my friends you won the right to choose it didn t just happen people made it happen women most of all and now we need to work just as hard to protect it we need to energize a whole new generation of citizens about freedom people who care about and respect women who will stand up and make it clear that we can t go back we will never go back we will never let this right be taken away thank you dem jkerry22 7 04 excerpt john_kerry vernon has been enormously helpful in my own campaign and i m very grateful as i think you are for his common sense and the experience that he brings to our public lives i m grateful for his leadership as the head of my presidential debate team and the issues that we re grappling with today are as marc morial said especially important so let me make it clear as i have from the beginning i m happy to discuss them anywhere anytime with any american because that s what s important to this country as you all know so well vernon is one of america s most effective movers and shakers he s a man of stature in every sense of the word and i don t have to tell you how he moved and he shook the conscience of america during his tenure as head of this great organization during the 1970s but then anyone who knows vernon knows that he is not the retiring type during my 20 years in the senate he has constantly reached out to offer quiet counsel and gentle persuasion and sometimes tough criticism i think that he is an american treasure and i m proud and happy to be call him my friend my supporter my counsel the urban league has always had great leaders you ve been blessed from george edmund haynes through eugene kinckle jones lester blackwell granger whitney young those who ve succeeded vernon have continued to raise the bar each time john jacobs hugh price and now marc morial have continued to challenge this organization and by doing that to challenge the nation to reach higher to dream bigger and to fight harder for the things that we all believe in empowerment opportunity responsibility economic justice and helping to move people into the mainstream of the american dream just like marc morial did in new orleans mark you ve been an outstanding leader you re a great mayor and you re now infusing wonderful energy right here new life into the urban league and everyone joins you in saying thank you for that leadership let me tell you ladies and gentlemen now more than ever when it comes to empowerment social rights civil rights justice we need to listen to every single voice in this country we need to listen to every voice that stands up and speaks truth to power i want to say that for me this is not a stop that represents just a check the box campaign stop teresa and i we are proud to say are no strangers to the urban league or to the causes that you champion i m proud of the relationships that we ve established and the partnerships that we ve formed particularly with esther bush in pittsburgh with henry thomas in springfield and with darnell williams in boston and we thank them as president president of the united states i will show up not just at national meetings during election season but i want you at the table with me in a full partnership to build a stronger america at home and an america more respected in the world again you know when you come to think of it there really is no other way there s no other way to advance our cause and when i talk about advancing our cause i m not talking about the cause of one group or another in america i m talking about advancing the cause of america advancing the dream climbing to that mountain top that dr king talked about so eloquently to our generation i m talking about advancing the cause of nation and citizenship that s what my campaign is really all about in an address at cadillac square here in detroit in 1960 john kennedy said i am confident that in november you will make a choice for progress not for standing still we want america to move again if we stand still freedom stands still those words ring even more true today when i look around this city and kwame knows what i m talking about it s not for lack of effort it s not for lack of caring it s not lack of passion it s for lack of follow through it s for lack of leadership at the national level when i look around neighborhoods and towns all across america that i visited over the course of these last months i see exactly what so many of you see every single day we see jobs to be created we see families to house we see violence to stop we see children to teach and to lift up and to care for we see too many people without health care and too many people of color suffering and dying from preventable diseases like cancer and aids and diabetes in too many places we see freedom standing still when we look at what is happening in america today you have to ask yourself where are the deeds the bible teaches us it s not enough my brother to say you have faith when there are no deeds faith without deeds is dead fifty years ago thurgood marshall the national urban league and america turned faith into deeds when you brought and won brown versus board of education forty years ago forty years ago lyndon johnson dr king the national urban league and america turned faith into deeds when the nation passed the civil rights act of 1964 and next year the nation will again be reminded that you helped turn faith into deeds 40 years ago to push for the passage of the voting rights act of 1965 today i m sad to say we have an administration in washington that looks at the challenges that we face here and around the world and says this is the best that we can do they say that what we have now is the best economy of our lifetimes they ve even called us pessimists for speaking the truth to power well i say the most pessimistic thing that you can say is that america can t do better than we are doing today don t tell us that 1 8 million jobs lost is the best that we can do when we can create millions of new jobs here in this country that pay more than the jobs that we re losing we can change that and we will don t tell us that unemployment is not a problem when we see that african american unemployment is now above 10 percent double the rate for whites it s unacceptable in the wealthiest nation on earth that we tolerate a vast and growing pocket of poverty from the hills of appalachia to the streets of detroit raising the minimum wage alone and making life better for the working poor is part of our vision for a stronger america we can change what s happening and we will don t tell us that crumbling and overcrowded schools and underpaid teachers are the best that we can do we have the means to give every child in our country a first rate education we don t have to live 50 years after brown versus board of education with a separate and unequal school system as we do today we can change that and we will don t tell us that we have to accept racial profiling hate crimes or an assault by right wing judges on our precious civil rights when we can uphold the constitution of the united states and protect america at the same time we can change that and we will don t tell us in the strongest democracy on earth that a million disenfranchised finish african americans in an election is and the most tainted election in american history is the best that we can do and now we re seeing purges of people from the polls we can change that and be accountable to our own democracy and we will don t tell us that in the richest country in the world we can t do better than 44 million of our fellow citizens who are uninsured nearly 60 percent of hispanics and 43 percent of african americans lack health insurance for all or part of the last two years we can change that we have it in our power to change that and we will w e b dubois talked about the two americas two years ago he called it a nation within a nation franklin roosevelt talked about it others have here we are in 2004 witnessing the gap growing wider the haves have more and there are more working poor more people working harder and the struggle now is to make america fair again our job between now and november is to end the division between the fortunate america and the forgotten america john edwards and i have talked about closing that gap for many years now i think we have to come together to build one america and to give meaning to the words of our politics again during the course of this campaign i ve met young people who want nothing more than to be able to find a job and raise a family and live in the place where they were raised i ve met steel workers oil workers mine workers who ve seen their jobs and their equipment unbolted before their eyes and shipped overseas some have even had to train their own foreign replacements i ve spent time with seniors who ve worked for a lifetime but they can t pay for their medicines or they hardly make ends meet on a social security check when the prescription drug check is larger than the social security every month i ve talked with parents full of hope and full of ambition for their children but they don t know what to do about classrooms that are overcrowded and teachers who are underpaid and they re worried that they re not going to be able to afford to send their kids to college my faith teaches me that where your treasure is there your heart will be also well let me tell you where my heart is let me tell you where my heart is my heart is with the middle class who are the heart of this country it s with the working families who literally built this country it s with the veterans who saved this country it s with the cops and firefighters and the soldiers who protect this country and it s with the children who are the future of this country and that s where we need to put our treasure all of them deserve a president you deserve a president who believes in these things who shares their values and who with every fiber of being is going to fight to uphold them for four years we ve heard a lot of talk about values john edwards and i have the vision and the values to bring our country together again and to literally build stronger communities to do the work that the urban league has invested in and i ask you to go look at my 20 year record in the senate of fighting to do exactly that for us and for you values are more than just words on a page they re about the causes that we champion and the choices we make and i am running for president because i believe that what matters most is not the narrow values that politicians play and use to divide but the shared values that unite all of us in this country and bring us together as a nation let me tell you what values mean to me and john edwards values mean having an opportunity agenda for metropolitan america that means bringing capital small business opportunities and job creation to all of our communities especially our central cities which have such a hard time because they don t have the tax base and the surrounding metropolitan areas and people are moving further and further out having to work farther and farther away having to live farther away from the place they have to work as president i will creation a small business opportunity fund to ensure that small businesses have all of the support that they need to grow and to thrive expanding loans to micro enterprises increasing the federal government s venture capital investments and expanding loan programs for small businesses and when i say these things to you these aren t just new things i ve pulled out of the sky and written on an envelope for the course of this campaign these are things i voted on and fought for for 20 years i ve been chairman of the small business committee and i ve been ranking member as the senior democrat and we fought i wrote the historically underutilized business own bill with kit bond of missouri we fought to create the new markets initiative we fought for micro lending we fought to get rid of paperwork we fought to create the set asides and hold on to them when they were under assault and attack and that s why i tell you i will increase federal contracting opportunities for minority owned small business growth in urban areas of america because that s how you build justice in this country i will maintain support for empowerment zones new markets tax incentives and the community reinvestment act which i fought hard to hold on to when it was under assault by powerful interests in this country and i will make sure the new market venture capital program has the funding that it needs to fulfill the promise of meeting the unmet equity needs of low income communities in our country i will also give states and metropolitan areas the flexibility to use transportation dollars the way you see fit rodney slater knows what i m talking about and i fought together with pat moynihan in order to create the whole new model by which we give those choices to mayors to be able to make the most and leverage their own dreams and vision for what they know best in their own city and i will provide adequate funding for a homeland security and port security so that the people in our metropolitan areas are able to move about freely and get good jobs and live without fear in america values means helping all americans lay the cornerstone of the american dream with the purchase of their own home the urban league has a long track record in counseling people and helping consumers fighting to help make the dream of home ownership real for millions of people yes it is true since the 1990s home ownership has grown up in america as a whole and that s a good thing but it s not that simple while home ownership has risen programs that help hard pressed families put a roof over their head have been cut those are the people we need to help the most this administration s budget would cut section 8 vouchers by more than 1 billion denying 250 000 families housing assistance why so we can have a great big tax cut at the top end at the same time this administration has proposed to entirely eliminate the hope 6 program that s been critical to revitalizing distressed public housing in america john edwards and i understand what you understand programs like section 8 and hope 6 are just the right kind of community based solutions that some people need in order to get on the road to home ownership and when i am president we will strengthen not weaken those bridges to opportunity values also mean building an america with middle class is doing better not being squeezed during the 1990s under president clinton average wage earners in america saw their incomes go up over eight years by about 7 100 over the last four years the income of those same average americans has gone down by 1 600 but while the wages have gone down health care costs went up 50 percent tuitions went up 35 percent gasoline prices went up 41 45 percent everything s gone up but the wages and fairness for the average american and that s why john edwards and i understand that means cutting middle class taxes so middle class incomes go up and that is exactly what we re going to do the wealthiest among us enjoy a nice tax cut but they don t need another tax cut but middle class families do america does because that s the way you begin to put more money into the system pay for health care and be able to move forward that s how we will pay the college tuitions and that s how we ll help hard working americans actually get ahead creating opportunity as michigan understands as well as anywhere means creating good paying jobs more than a million americans who were working three years ago have lost their jobs african american unemployment as i mentioned is at 10 percent which is double the rate for whites and the new jobs that are finally being created pay an average of 9 000 less than the jobs that we re losing overseas we value an america that exports products not jobs and we believe this is extraordinary your tax code today it s supposed to belong to you i don t know if you ve ever taken a look at it it s gone from 14 pages when it started to 17 000 pages any of you have your own page you ought to think about that some time because the fact is that you when you go to work today part of that money you earn is actually going to reward companies that take the jobs overseas they get paid for it they re helped for it and john edwards and i believe american workers should never be called on to subsidize the loss of their own job we will end that subsidy we re going to compete abroad i intend to be a president who understands as i do that america needs to compete and we want to win in the marketplace and yes we want to be able to sell abroad and yes we ll have companies that will do business abroad but we don t need to reward decisions that are against our own interests for creating the jobs right here at home so i intend to fight to close the tax loopholes that actually pay a company to move the job overseas and we re going to reward the companies that create the jobs right here in the good old usa that s smarter now this is something the urban league knows because it s in your blood and it s been in your guts ever since you started values mean doing what adults are supposed to do which is take care of children values mean giving all our children a first rate education with smaller classrooms and better paid teachers today we see two school systems in america one for the well off and one for the left out for us and for you values mean opening the doors of opportunity to all of our children we believe that educating our kids is more important than another tax break to the wealthiest americans this administration falls 27 billion short of its own promise to fully fund no child left behind john edwards and i have a plan to invest in our future to provide the needed funding and to put a good teacher in every classroom so that finally and truly we will give meaning to the words leave no child behind values also mean that parents shouldn t wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worried about whether or not they re going to get sick or they got a sick kid and they don t have the health care and they can t afford it and they don t know what to do about it values dem jkerry24 12 03 john_kerry ladies and gentlemen let me tell you something this campaign is moving and i can feel in the last days that people are beginning to stop and question and they re asking who can be president of the united states of america who s ready to step into those shoes who s got the experience who knows how to make america safer don t look at the polls there you are shaking your head how many times has new hampshire moved 20 or 30 points in three weeks when people start to pay attention this race doesn t begin until people make up their minds and it doesn t end until the votes are counted on jan 27 old george bush thinks he can play dress up on an aircraft carrier and he thinks he can stand in front of a big sign that says mission accomplished and he thinks that people in the united states aren t going to notice what s happening that every minute two people are losing their jobs that every single day we re adding a billion dollars to our deficit of our country and these kids are having debt piled up on them they think that they won t notice that all across america people are feeling the result of outsourcing as jobs are going to india to china and we re not creating the jobs to replace them george bush has the worst jobs record of any president since herbert hoover let s measure mission accomplished measure it for a moment when it comes to the wealthiest people in america who got yet another tax cut when it comes to the polluters who walk into the white house front door back door and have secret meetings with the president of the united states and write the energy policy of america when it comes to all that and more george bush can stand up and say mission accomplished but when it comes to jobs when it comes to health care when it comes to children when it comes to keeping the promise of leave no child behind when it comes to the environment and living up to our generational responsibility it s not only not mission accomplished it s mission not even attempted it s mission abandoned i believe this president doesn t have the experience to be commander in chief he has overextended the troops of our nation he s turned the reserves into active duty he has in fact made the united states of america less safe in the world as a whole because he s creating terrorists where they weren t and because he has left our allies and our relationships in tatters across the planet when i m president of the united states i m going back to the united nations on behalf of you and our country and within weeks of being sworn in i m going to turn over a proud new chapter in america s relationship with the world that opens up our relationships and makes us safer let me ask you a simple question next summer when there s an international crisis what do you think is going to happen if we don t have a nominee who can t stand face to face and toe to toe and eye to eye and point out to this president with credibility how you really make america safe ladies and gentlemen i know something about aircraft carriers for real and i m and if george bush wants national security to be the central issue of this campaign then i have three words for him that he used inappropriately and i use appropriately that i know he understands bring it on that s a fight i want to have that s a fight i m ready to have let me just say to all of you there s an enormous agenda in front of us i am running not just for the presidency of the united states but because of the great role that we play as a nation on this planet we are also the leader of the free world and i believe it is important to elect somebody who has shown the quality of leadership throughout a lifetime that can challenge our nation and the rest of the world to do the things we know we need to do if you were hiring somebody to build your house you wouldn t hire someone who hadn t built a house and if you were hiring somebody to run your school you d find somebody who was an expert in education we re about to elect the leader of the free world and i believe that george bush has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that after sept 11 the presidency is not the place for on the job training for national security and we need to offer answers not just anger we need to offer solutions not just slogans so i say to you in new hampshire on jan 27 when you go to those polls don t just go there to send america a message go there and send america a president of the united states because that s what we need dem jkerry26 3 04 excerpt john_kerry believe jeffrey did just that and we will miss her and we honor her here today this election is about a new direction for our country and a new direction for our economy to restore fiscal responsibility help our workers become competitive and bring back jobs in this campaign as the governor mentioned i ve traveled this nation talking and listening to people to real people who are the backbone of our economy from computer programmers to auto workers from nurses to firefighters to police officers from teachers to small business owners over and over again i have been reminded of the optimistic patriotic and entrepreneurial spirit of americans who passionately believe in the best hopes of america yet talking to them i have also seen and heard a sense of injustice unlike anything that i have heard in all the years that i ve been in public life and that sense of injustice needs to be reversed under this president more and more of our people have begun to lose confidence in our economy that it s moving in the right direction americans who in the 1990s never felt more confident now wonder whether our economy will ever again provide good middle class jobs whether our leaders are more concerned with special interests and the most fortunate among us with insuring that our trading partners play by the rules or that we have education and technology that we need in order to be able to compete and win the future too many of the people that i ve spoken with in town meetings coffee shops malls across this nation have lost confidence that we have a president who wakes up every morning ready to fight for their jobs their families and for our economic future and with your with your help that is the kind of president that i intend to be the americans that i ve met no matter where they come from or whatever their walk of life they live by a basic set of values they work hard they pay their bills they try to do what s right for their children and for their communities but this administration hasn t honored those values and it certainly hasn t lived by them instead of giving us an economy that creates jobs and opportunity our present leadership has given us wedge issues designed to divide americans instead of a real economic plan they ve given us the old politics of negative attacks the truth is this president doesn t have a record to run on but but a record to run from and that s what he s doing a record of negative job growth and stagnant incomes with long term unemployment at its highest levels in 20 years and manufacturing jobs at a 50 year low under president bush 3 million more americans have slipped into poverty and 4 million more have lost their health insurance families struggle to pay the biggest increase in college tuition in history i asked the president a moment ago about that and he said they ve gone up 10 percent a year the last years except for the governors intervention this year to try to hold them at 2 percent which becomes more and more difficult as the pressures increase on the states because of the loss of revenue at the federal level bankruptcies and foreclosures are the highest ever we ve gone from record surpluses to record deficits america cannot afford four more years of a president who is the first president to loose jobs since herbert hoover and the great depression when franklin roosevelt sought the presidency he pledged bold persistent experimentation he said take a method and try it if it fails admit it frankly and try something else but above all try something else but president bush took a method and tried it it failed but he stubbornly refuses to admit it and his only answer to failure is more of the same he tried tax giveaways for the wealthy and the budget went into deficit and the country lost jobs so he tried it again and the budget went deeper into deficit and country lost more jobs he tried it a third time and the country went into record deficit and all those wasted billions still haven t brought back the jobs america lost over the last three years now his major proposal is tax cuts that won t even take effect until seven years from now and in this campaign to defend his discredited policy the president has turned to distorted attacks the real difference between us on taxes could not be more simple i will roll back the tax cuts for those who make over 200 000 a year so that we can invest in health care and education because that s the right thing to do for america and everything that the bush campaign is trying do is designed to distort one clear fact my plan doesn t raise taxes on the middle class my plan cuts taxes for the 98 percent of americans who make under 200 000 a year now honorable people could disagree about the real choice between tax giveaways to the wealthiest americans and health care and education for america s families but this president doesn t want an honest debate about that i m ready for that honest debate i m ready to debate that choice anytime any place anywhere in this country and america deserves that debate now all of you know that economic plans are not just about dollars and decimals they re about choices time after time this administration has put ideology first and jobs last today i m announcing a new economic plan that will put jobs first we will renew america s competitiveness make tough budget choices and invest in our future my pledge and my plan is for 10 million new jobs in the next four years let me make it clear this is a realistic plan i won t tell you that we can bring back every lost industry or every lost job or protect every job but my plan will enable our economy to create jobs and to keep more good jobs here in america it offers a long term strategy to win our economic future we won t do it through government make work but by making our economy work so that businesses put americans back to work i will set out the details of this economic plan in the weeks ahead each plank of it is part of a comprehensive approach which is the only way to restore confidence in job creation and in the marketplace i will focus on raising american competitiveness by spurring the growth of new industries like the broadband technology that will dominate the future by lowering health care costs that put american businesses at a competitive and price disadvantage by lowering energy costs which burdens businesses and consumers and by creating half a million new jobs in renewable fuels to make america energy independent of mid east oil in 10 years and by making sure that our children have the education and our workers have the training and the skills that they need i will outline specific steps to restore economic confidence and fiscal discipline by cutting the budget deficit in half in four years and if we have to forgo some of the most favorite things we d like to do to do it we may have to do that but we will make the federal government smaller but smarter more expensive and less expensive so i m not running just to oppose present failures but to propose new policies for our nation this spring in a series of speeches i will tell the american people in specific terms how we can enable our economy to create those 10 million jobs today i will begin with a proposal for major tax reforms to help our workers compete in the global marketplace our jobs first economic plan will end laws that encourage companies to export jobs and it will and equally importantly it will plow back every dollar that we save into new incentives in order to help companies create and keep jobs in america we now have tax code that does more to reward companies for moving overseas than it does to reward them for create be jobs here in america so if i am elected president i will fight for the most sweeping international tax law reform in 40 years a plan to replace tax incentives to take jobs offshore with new incentives for job creation on our own shores let me explain today in america if a company is trying to choose between locating a factory in michigan or staying in michigan or malaysia our tax code has a feature called deferral that provides major tax savings if they locate abroad so companies are driven to take advantage of a legal tax incentive that s been on the books for too long and doesn t serve the economic interests of our nation for instance a company with 10 million dollars in profits in michigan will pay taxes at the standard corporate tax rate but if that company moves to malaysia and makes the same 10 million in profits they can avoid paying u s taxes perhaps forever as long as they keep the money overseas so we have a special tax incentive to actually keep money overseas send jobs overseas that has nothing to do or little to do with the normal marketplace or economic forces the reform that i am proposing today is based on a simple principle money made by american businesses overseas should be taxed at the same rate as money made by businesses here at home now i understand global competition and how the world works so this will not affect american companies that locate production or services in a foreign country to sell to consumers in that country but it will apply to those who use those foreign locations to export products back to the united states or to other nations if a company is torn between creating jobs here or overseas we now have a tax code that tells you go overseas and that makes no sense and if i am president it will end as soon as possible the fact is that taken together companies that take advantage of this in the current tax laws don t pay a dollar in taxes we actually end up paying them eight billion a year to send their money and ship our jobs overseas my proposal offers american companies a reasonable transition period to adapt to this sweeping change i don t want to punish anyone but i believe it is long past time that we put our jobs first and put tax benefits that discourage jobs in america out of business i also propose to use the money that we save from ending this tax giveaway for outsourcing to finance smart tax cuts that will create jobs here in america last august i proposed a new jobs credit that will give manufacturers a break on the payroll taxes for every new worker that they hire i believe we should expand that to industries outside of manufacturing where jobs are now endangered by outsourcing so that we can help create more jobs whether it comes to cars or computers software or call centers second the savings from ending the tax incentives for outsourcing can also expand the jobs tax credit to cover all small business and their employees for the most part small business owners that means that if they create jobs they will pay a lower tax in a kerry administration than they do under president bush today third the savings can finance a 25 percent tax credit for small businesses when they provide health care for their workers the rise in health care costs under this administration has hit every one hard but no one harder than small business owners and their employees i know this as the chair of the small business committee in the senate i saw again and again how small businesses can be the engine of job creation in our nation and those jobs are the ones that are the most likely the ones to be created here and to stay here fourth if we are willing to close loopholes and abuses in our tax system then we can afford to lower taxes in the right way to spur growth in our jobs here at home with the savings that i ve proposed today we can and we should reduce the corporate tax rates by five percent to improve the competitiveness and then narrow the difference between corporate tax rates here and oversea some maybe surprised to hear a democrat calling for lower corporate tax rates the fact is i don t care about the old debates i care about getting the job done and creating jobs here in the united states of america finally i won t let america wage the fight for economic future one hand behind our back no one should misunderstand me i am not a protectionist but i am a competitor american workers are the most competitive in the world and they deserve a government that s as competitive for them as they are we will demand that our trading partners play by the rules that they ve agreed to and show them that america means business when it comes to enforcing our trade agreements the bush administration has refused to enforce them that not only costs jobs over time it threatens to erode the support for open markets and a growing global economy and it deprives us of one of the most important tools that we have in order to safeguard our own workers and our environment and that is to raise the standards internationally as president will hold countries like china accountable when they manipulate their currency to inflate their export and depress ours four years ago in the senate we fought for and we won a provision to prevent chinese companies from flooding the american market and destroying american jobs three times a bipartisan independent commission recommended to president bush that he used this power to aid american workers but george bush waited until november 2003 to take even a token action and just a few months ago the administration said that they opposed efforts to increase the funds for enforce trade agreements with china they said the money was simply unnecessary i ll tell you what s absolutely necessary a president who understands that open trade is essential for our prosperity but unfair trade practices can undermine it and we deserve a president who stands up and fights for the american worker to have a fair playing field to compete on it is time to insist on and enforce real worker and environmental provisions in the core of every trade agreement so that we don t exploit workers at other countries or sell them out here at home and it s time to break the deadlock in congress and pass real tax breaks for our manufacturing industries for the vast majority of companies in america 99 percent our jobs first plan will cut their taxes and help them create new jobs some companies however that benefit from tax loopholes will fiercely defend the status quo i know how tough their lobbying will be and so do my colleagues in congress but i believe that s why we have elections in america so that the people can set us on a new course and i don t believe the course that they want is to ask the american taxpayer to subsidize the loss of their own jobs i have fought for my country for 35 years and i am ready for this fight my friends with tax reform and tax cuts with real fiscal responsibility with new investments in the industries of the future we can and we will create 10 million new jobs for america and we will lead our economy in a new direction and our country in a new direction together let s give america back its prosperity and its future thank you very very much dem jkerry26 6 04 excerpt john_kerry gasoline prices are up 41 percent so the bills are going up so more and more latinos who find themselves at the lower end of the economic ladder are working 24 7 some of them working two jobs three jobs and they are still not getting ahead and to add insult to injury their hard earned tax dollars your hard earned tax dollars are actually paying corporations to export american jobs overseas now 20 years ago 20 years ago only in america a middle class family with one working parent used to be able to buy a home pay for college but today two incomes barely cover that and if one of those two incomes loses the job with the commitments that you have on the mortgage on the car on the house you re in trouble and that s why personal bankruptcies are higher than they ve ever been in america if anything goes wrong at all an illness or a temporary layoff most families can t pay the bills so they risk losing everything that they ve built and saved for in america my friends a rising tide is supposed to lift all boats but today the middle class boat is taking on water and like most americans i believe that we can do better than 1 9 million lost private sector jobs we can do better than rising costs and shrinking incomes i believe in the american economy and in american workers and i think we deserve a president who believes in them as much as the workers believe in those possibilities we all know that the middle class built this country franklin roosevelt understood that so did bill clinton but for nearly four years now washington has ignored the middle class putting wealth ahead of work something for nothing ahead of responsibility what s right for the few ahead of what s right for america i believe in building up the great middle class and especially the millions of hispanic americans who are fighting to come into the middle class who are coming into the middle class respecting their work honoring their values and lifting them up in the toughest of times i am running for president because i want an economy that strengthens and expands the middle class not squeezes it the way it is today i am running for president and i ll tell you exactly how we re going to do it this isn t rhetoric politics are about choices every day american families make choices can we buy a car can we take a vacation can we pay for this tuition where will i go to college all of these choices these are the choices of responsible life washington is running up the biggest deficits in the history of our nation washington has been fighting over these last years to make tax cuts permanent for the wealthiest people in the country and communities are suffering locally well i m going to give america a choice it s a very simple choice we can either have those tax cuts for the wealthiest americans or we can roll them back and invest in education and health care we can pay attention to the investment of this country and i m going to cut taxes for the middle class and we re going to roll back the bush tax cut for those who make more than 200 000 a year and we re going to lower the cost of health care and pay for the cost of education in america and we will cut the deficit in half i want middle class taxes to go down so your incomes can actually go up let me tell you something we need a president who fights for your jobs as hard as he fights for his own and i think i i have a plan they ve had four years to put a plan in place i have a plan that will put good paying jobs at the heart of our economy and when i m president american taxpayers will never again subsidize the loss of their own job going overseas we re going to close those loopholes and make that 17 000 page tax code fair for all americans that s essential you ought to go look at it one day i mean you can pull it up on the web site but go look at the tax code 17 000 pages and just ask yourself now wait a minute where s my page as you leaf through there look at it and say you know enron has a page exxon has got a few pages i think halliburton has got its own chapter ladies and gentlemen it s time to make this fair for all americans so we re going to close the loopholes dem jkerry27 1 04 john_kerry well i love new hampshire and i love iowa too and i hope with your help to have the blessings and the opportunity to love a lot of other states in the days to come thank you thank you new hampshire for lifting up this campaign and the cause of an america that belongs not to the privileged not to the few that belongs to all americans and i ve and let me tell you this victory belongs to all of you who made the phone calls walked the snowy cold streets gave your hearts your hands and countless sleepless nights you stayed the course here in new hampshire and because of you this has been a successful and a happy campaign and i make this pledge to you tonight i have spent my whole life fighting for what i think is right and against powerful special interests and i have only just begun the fight i intend to i will so i have a message i have a message for the influence peddlers for the polluters the hmos the big drug companies that get in the way the big oil and the special interests who now call the white house their home we re coming you re going and don t let the door hit you on the way out this victory belongs also in a special way to the veterans who marched with us and they helped to lift us up from the lowest points to the point where we are today i know that all of you will join me in saying a special thank you to max cleland and in the hardest moments of the past month i depended on the same band of brothers that i depended on some 30 years ago we re a little older and a little grayer but i ll tell you this we still know how to fight for our country and if i am president i pledge and when i am president i pledge that those who wore the uniform of the united states of america will have a voice and a champion in the oval office now this campaign goes on to places all over this country and i ask democrats everywhere to join us so that we can defeat george w bush and the economy of privilege and so that we can fulfill the ideal of opportunity not just for some but for all americans i ask you i ask those of you who are not yet part of this campaign to go to johnkerry com and i want you to march with us across this land and demand a government that s on your side again that is the mission of this campaign and together we can lift our country up up to the america that all of us know that we can become so stand with me stand with me and together we re going to give america back its future by repealing the bush tax cuts for wealthy americans and investing in health care and education children stand with us stand with us and together we will build a prosperity in this country where americans are not just working for the economy but the economy is working for americans a prosperity where we will reduce the poverty of millions rather than reducing the taxes of millionaires a prosperity where we create jobs here at home and where we shut down every loophole every incentive every reward that goes to some benedict arnold ceo or company that take the jobs overseas and stick americans with the bill stand with us and together we will give america the fundamental decency of health care that is affordable and accessible and a right and not a privilege that is available to all americans and we will make the same plan available to all americans that is available to senators and congressmen because your health care stand with us and we will fight for an america where medicare is protected where health care costs are kept down and where your family s health care is just as important as any politician in washington d c stand with us stand with us and we will give america the security of energy independence because because no young american in uniform should ever be held hostage to america s dependence on oil from the middle east stand with us and we will give america back its truth as a country where freedom really rings a country of equal rights and civil liberties where the attorney general is not named john ashcroft dem jkerry27 5 04 excerpt john_kerry is not the only source of power of our power in the world we must deploy all that is in the american arsenal our diplomacy our intelligence system our economic power and most importantly the appeal the extraordinary appeal that through centuries has made us who we are the appeal of our values and our ideas fourth and finally to secure our full independence our full freedom to be the masters of our own destiny we must free america from its dangerous dependence on mideast oil these four imperatives are an inescapable reality the world and the war itself has changed the challenge and the enemy are different and we have to think and we have to act anew today we re waging a global war against a terrorist movement committed to our destruction terrorists like al qaeda and its copycat killers are unlike any adversary that our nation has ever faced we don t know for certain how they re organized we don t even know for certain how many operatives they have but we know the destruction that they can inflict we saw it in new york and in washington we ve seen it in bali and in madrid in israel and across the middle east and we see it day after day in iraq this threat will only be magnified as the technology to build nuclear and chemical and biological weapons continues to spread and we can only imagine what it would be like what would happen if the deadly forces of terrorism got their hands on the deadliest weapons in history everyone outside of this administration seems to understand that we re in deep trouble in iraq failure there would be a boon to our enemies and it would jeopardize the long term prospects for a peaceful democratic middle east leaving us at war not just with a small radical minority but with increasingly large portions of the entire muslim world there is also the continuing instability of afghanistan where al qaeda has a base osama bin laden is still at large because the bush administration didn t finish him off at the battle of tora bora when they had the chance and in east asia north korea poses a genuine nuclear threat while we have begun to strip american forces from that peninsula to relieve the over burdened forces in iraq in the coming week i will also offer specific plans to build a new military capable of defeating enemies both new and old and to stop the spread of nuclear biological and chemical weapons but first here today i want to set out the overall architecture of a new policy to make america stronger and respected in the world the first new imperative represents a return to the fundamental principle that guided us in peril and victory through the past century alliances matter and the united states must lead them shredding alliances is not the way to win the war on terror or even to make america safer as president my number one security goal will be to prevent the terrorists from gaining weapons of mass murder and our overriding mission will be to disrupt and destroy their terrorist cells because al qaeda is a network with many branches we have to take the fight to the enemy on every continent smartly and we have to enlist other countries in that cause america must always be the world s paramount military power but we can magnify our power through alliances we always have it has always served us it s always saved us money it s always saved us lives it s always made us safer we simply can t go it alone or rely on a coalition of the few the threat of terrorism demands alliances on a global scale to find the extremist groups to guard ports and stadiums to share intelligence and to get the terrorists before they get us in short we need a coalition of the able and in truth no force on earth is more able than the united states and its allies so we must build that force and we can we can be strong without being stubborn indeed that is ultimately the only way that we can succeed but building strong alliances is the only way that we can succeed but building strong alliances dem jkerry28 7 04 excerpt john_kerry and we are going to tell american what we are going to do we can all right we hear you in here you in the garage we can do better we can do better and that s what brings us here today from norfolk going backwards to columbus ohio to sioux city iowa to aurora colorado where we began this journey a few days ago we are traveling across the country highlighting in each place the freedom trail of america the great strength of our nation we celebrated yesterday down in cape canaveral our technology i was there with john glenn and bill nelson both of whom have gone into space thanks to the great technology of the united states of america that represents the future we were in sioux city where we talked with people about the strength of americans the lewis and clark expedition the ability to push the frontiers and to explore the future columbus ohio where we talked about jobs and the industrial base of our nation and the work ethic of america and the way we make ourselves strong and here today we are here to talk today to say thank you to those who serve in our military and to provide for the continued strength of the united states of america military used wisely yes ma am that is my pledge but before i talk to you about some of those issues i d like to say a few words about the 9 11 commission report that was just released the commission has done an extraordinary job important for america of issuing a very clear set of recommendations to protect us from terrorism and to make the united states safe now that the 9 11 commission has done its job we need to do our job we understand the threat we have a blueprint for action we have the strength as a nation to do what has to be done the only thing we don t have is time we need to do it now leadership leadership requires that we act now jane harman talked a moment ago about the things we could have done this is the reason that we created the 9 11 commission in the first place and that is why when the commission released their report i called for immediate action not talk not vague promises not excuses back pedaling and going slow is something that america can t afford it will take real bipartisan leadership and real action to protect this country of ours you can t treat the commission s report as something that you hope will go away you can t treat the commission s report as something that sort of represents a threat to america that will go away because this threat won t go away and the recommendations of the commission make sense and they should be implemented now we need to not only put in place those recommendations we need to do everything possible that we know we can do in order to make america safer that is why i support the 9 11 commission s commitment to continue to push for progress and to make sure that its recommendations are implemented without delay ladies and gentlemen if i were president today if i had been president last week i would have immediately said to the commission yes we re going to implement those recommendations and we want you to stay on the job for at least another 18 months in order to help make sure we do the job here s what i believe i believe that beginning this december this commission should issue a status report every six months and they should address the following questions first are we doing enough fast enough to strengthen our homeland security second are we reorganizing our intelligence agencies to meet the terrorist threat third are we building a true global alliance to fight the terrorists and isolate their extremist ideology fourth are we leading and uniting the world so that we isolate our enemies not ourselves and fifth and finally they should answer the question and help americans answer the question are we doing everything we can do to make america as safe as it can be those are the questions i would put on the table that s the leadership that america needs the president has the authority right now today to implement many of the commission s recommendations by executive order and congress needs to do its part where legislation and or funding are needed we cannot let politics get in the way of protecting the american people this isn t about partisanship it s about patriotism it s not about what was done or wasn t done in the past it s not about pointing fingers but it is about winning a war upon which our future depends so i hope the president will now take the necessary steps implement the commission s recommendations immediately these are common sense ideas from a bipartisan commission and i think we have a responsibility to act and to act now and i m convinced that you believe that too that s how we make america safer we ve come here as i said to norfolk to honor people who serve their country skip parker and i will never forget even this day we were the guys who what we call citizen soldiers we go in for a number of years and then we go back to life in america but you know what you may take the uniform off but you never take it out of your heart or your gut you never take what it means to stand watch or to fight in battle or serve your country and so skip and i and the admiral and others who have seen combat come here not because we re veterans but because we have a sense of what is at stake because those lessons we learned do mean something and they are valuable and they re worth passing on to others and the first and most important lesson of all is that the great united states of america our beloved country never goes to war because it wants to we go to war because we have to that s the standard of our country dem jkerry29 6 04 excerpt john_kerry it is appropriate that jesse jackson should be showing the true face of poverty in america and calling our country to account for what is happening in places like appalachia but let me tell you something it is also appropriate that we have a president of the united states who does so equally and who understands what is at stake i m honored to be here this morning and i m grateful to jesse for his invitation to join you and i m honored to be here with so many others who are part of these great struggles let me first thank a very very special friend my colleague your senator and he is one of the most articulate fighting voices always there and he s been the point person for me accepting responsibilities to help marshal the senate and be a co spokesperson for the democratic national committee along with stephanie tubbs jones i m grateful to dick durbin for his tremendous leadership he s done a great job i know the next senator from the state of illinois was here earlier and i can t wait to hear his voice first at our convention where he s going to have an opportunity to speak in a few weeks and then on the floor of the united states senate when illinois sends him to washington barack obama and i thank barack for his great thank you i know he s not here but and i want to pay tribute to one of the great wise voices of the united states congress a man who i also first became aware of when i came back from vietnam because he s been serving that long and he s been a voice of conscience and of reasonableness for all of that time and you know who i m talking about congressman john conyers what an extraordinary person and to all of the other distinguished guests who are up here at the head table members of congress and martin luther king chairman of rainbow push coalition and cleo field state senator from louisiana and others i m honored to be here with all of you thank you for the privilege of being here with you there are about 1 500 folks here i figure the rest of the democrats here are at a clinton book signing or something and i want you all to know that you know dick cheney s had a little problem in these last few days with his choice of language here in america but i want you to know if you think he s upset and cursing democrats today just wait until november 2nd in a few months we ll give him something to curse about i want to talk common sense and truth with you today and i want to talk about something in particular that is important to opportunity but i want to put it in an historical context if i can forty years ago this week a decade after the supreme court declared separate inherently unequal and after rosa parks refused to give up her seat the congress passed and the president signed the civil rights act of 1964 i remember it well as all of you do i was an undergraduate at yale and we were immersed in the midst of that great struggle some of our classmates had actually mounted the freedom rides i was part of the effort to help raise money in support and recruit and joe lieberman went down and others the bill that was signed at the white house was signed with the normal pomp and circumstance of a major piece of legislation but as dr martin luther king understood and said in truth it was written in the streets of america it was written by the foot soldiers in the sweltering heat of birmingham and in the cities and towns all across the south it was written by freedom fighters who climbed aboard those buses and marched into the blast of a fire hose and the bark of a dog bull connor without ever resorting to violence it was written by men and women like the reverend jesse jackson and dorothy height who put their minds and their bodies into the crucible of hatred so that we would all see a better day the civil rights act was rooted in the fundamental idea that is too often spoken and not lived the idea that all people are created equal no matter what our race sex religion or national origin that we actually really are deserving beyond speeches of an equal shot at the american dream at a good job a good education the right to drink from the same fountain of opportunity i m here this morning to talk about that dream again in the context of 2004 about the opportunity that the reverend jackson called a new vision and new possibilities for a revival of the human spirit those aren t words those are a lifetime of action on the front lines for this man for his family and for so many who follow and work with him because as dr king told us the civil rights act was only the beginning of a new day not the end of a journey our journey for equal opportunity in america as we know better than anybody is far from over the civil rights act is still being written every day by the work that you do and we have to quote lift it up from thin paper and put it into thick action that s exactly what rainbow push does your wall street project invest in new markets in hard pressed communities your work with american labor is helping to build an economy that lifts up all our families and remembers that even that fight as this administration goes backwards on the national labor relations board backwards on the right to organize backwards on safety in the workplace backwards on wages backwards on all the things we fought for for over 100 years that that is what lifts up america and your reinvest in america project is helping to put all of america beginning with appalachia back to work as everyone knows who knows reverend jackson there is no rest for the weary my friends we can t rest until all americans and i mean all americans white and black rich and poor people of all colors and all backgrounds truly have the opportunity they need to make the american dream real i m wary about standing up in front of you because i know there s a cynicism i know you re tired of the words so am i so is dick so is jesse we ve been at this a long time folks i didn t get in this business to just throw words around i didn t get into this in order to drive wedges between people or watch the opportunities of our generation just be washed away by callowness and shallow offerings of partisanship i got in this because we were all touched by those early years by president kennedy by martin luther king by the dream by the possibility of individuals making a difference in the lives of other people and i am determined that we re going to restore to america a dialogue that really makes a difference in the lives of our fellow americans so today we re here to step over that cynicism a little bit i know because i reached out a lot and i listened to people about the feelings in the black community across america that people are there at election time what happens afterwards they sort of feel they disappear and the broken promises have been broken so often that it s hard for people to summon up that inside psychic energy necessary to go out and make a difference let me tell you something people are different in this business there are some of us who keep our word there are people who know the difference i ask you to measure my 35 years of fighting that jesse referred to a moment ago i ask you to measure what is important in our lives today because i believe this is the most important election of our lifetime and we need to mobilize as never before so today we re here in a common purpose and we need to find and hang on to that common purpose we re here to fight for good paying jobs that actually allow an american family to get ahead after a week s work and be able to pay the bills we re here to lift the capacity of people at the entry level of america to actually make it the minimum wage is the lowest it has been in america since harry truman was president in 1949 and we hear the same old arguments we ve heard since 1949 and every time we ve passed an increase in the minimum wage america s done better notwithstanding those arguments when i m president the first thing we re going to do is start to raise that minimum wage to 7 an hour and allow people in america to be able to work and get out of poverty for the work that they do but it s not limited to minimum wage you know you ve got to start talking about a living wage that so many mayors are beginning to talk about you ve got to start talking about fairness and a tax code that allows the wealthiest people in america to walk away to bermuda to even give up their citizenship but get all the benefits while the average person gets whacked at the place that they work our tax codes have gone from 14 pages to 17 000 pages let me ask you any of you got your own page exxon s got its own page enron s got its own page halliburton s probably got its own chapter ladies and gentlemen and i think it s time we gave the average american a break and made it fair again when i m president we re going to make that happen we re also here to make health care something we ve talked about harry truman began that discussion in 1948 we re the only industrial nation in the world that doesn t yet understand health care is not a privilege for the wealthy or the elected or the connected it is a right for all americans and we re going to make it available to all americans and george bush he s had four years as president to offer leadership he doesn t even talk about it he doesn t even have a fake plan ladies and gentlemen which is normally where they are he has no plan and so we ve got 44 million americans who have no care and we have costs going up for everybody in the country well let me tell you something i m going to make certain we put in place the principle that that health care that senators and congressmen give themselves and you pay for it ought to be available to every american and we re going to make certain that health care is not something that s a privilege we re going to make it clear that your family s health care is as important as any politician in washington d c end of issue we re also here to make it clear that no young american in uniform should ever be held hostage to america s dependency and gluttony on fossil fuel oil oil from the middle east we re going to declare energy independence for this country and move us to a future that is clean and healthy and provides the security of this nation and i ll tell you what else we re going to do we re going to build a military yes that s strong and we ll keep faith with america s need to defend itself but we re also going to respect alliances in this world and we re going to make america safer and more respected so that no young american will ever be put in harm s way because we insisted in our arrogance on going it alone rather than working with other people so we re here to ensure that the young men and women who put their lives on the line for us overseas and we are so grateful to them and we come here filled with respect and awe for their sacrifice and contribution and their courage in the name of their country but we re going to make sure that they come home man and woman black white brown yellow all of them when they come home they re coming home to an america that they can be proud of with good paying jobs with good education with affordable health care with the doors of opportunity that are open to them let me just say that during this campaign which has been an extraordinary experience unbelievable experience a gift truly a gift for teresa and me and our family to be able to go out and sit in your homes to go to vfw halls to restaurants to find 15 20 50 people gathered as it was in the early days of iowa and new hampshire listening pleading looking for leadership knowing we can do better and move in a different direction and we ve been to your homes and you have shared your stories with us and now those stories my friends have become the work of my life i am running for president to make america s dreams real again to fight with you in these struggles to do what we need to do to live up to the expectations of a generation that follows us that knows that our obligation is to leave this place to them in better shape than we were given it by our parents the poet langston hughes put it brilliantly and powerfully this way he said let america be america again let it be the dream it used to be for those whose sweat and blood whose faith and pain whose hand at the foundry whose plow in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again that s what this race is about it s not about democrat republican independent libertarian green it s not about partisanship it s not about ideology it s about america it s about those words that define us it s about bringing back our mighty dream again and making america all that it can become this administration says this is the best economy of our lifetime they say this is the best that we can do they have even called us pessimists because we dare to tell the truth about people in appalachia we tell the truth about people who don t have health care we tell the truth about children being left behind we tell the truth about what s happening to seniors who can t afford prescription drugs and live on social security well i say the most pessimistic thing that you can say is that we can t do better in the united states of america don t tell us that 2 million jobs lost is the best that we can do when we know that we can create millions of new jobs and many of them we can create tomorrow if we would invest in our cities and our schools and our communities we could do better and we will don t tell us that overcrowded schools and underpaid teachers are the best that we can do we have the means to give all our children a first rate education and we can do better and we will and don t tell us that 2 00 a gallon at the tank is the best that we can do we have the technology to make us independent of mideast oil we can do better and we will and don t tell us that it s the best we can do in the last election when 2 million votes weren t even counted we live don t tell us that when voters who were duly registered and they turn up to vote and they find out that their names have been purged wrongly from the list or when they show up to vote and they re told we don t have you registered because the registry makes mistakes don t tell us that people who are harassed and intimidated from going to the polls something we thought we resolved in the 1960s and it still happens in the dawn of the 21st century don t tell us that we live in the greatest democracy in the world and we have to make sure not only does every vote count but every vote is counted we can do better and we will do better this time i m running for president for a very straightforward reason i believe in an america that is stronger here at home and you can t be stronger in the world if you re not strong at home and you can t be strong at home if you re not strong in the world so i believe in an america that is also respected and regains its values and its influence in this world it is time to remember a simple truth opportunity begins right here at home more than a million americans who were working three years ago have lost their jobs african american unemployment is now at 10 percent double the rate for whites in new york city 18 up to 30 50 percent the african americans are unemployed we can do better and the new jobs that are finally being created pay 9 000 less on average than the jobs that are being exported overseas people who had a job for 100 000 are working for 50 000 or 60 000 if they re lucky enough to be working america s increasingly being underemployed and while they re being underemployed this administration s fight is not to create the new high value added job that lifts people up this administration s fight unconscionably and wrongly is to try to reduce americans ability to win overtime pay and we re not going to lose a 40 hour work week in the united states of america as the administration runs around and says this is a great economy i think it was don evans the secretary of commerce the other day who said this is the best economy i ve we ve ever lived in folks i don t know where he is where he lives but clearly his flight path and train path and car path is different from most americans because for most americans wages have been going down under bill clinton over eight years wages went up an average of 7 100 under this president the wages of average americans have gone down 1 600 and while they ve gone down guess what health care costs have gone up tuitions have gone up gasoline prices have gone up bills prescription drugs across the board have gone up well i have a plan to put and to keep good paying jobs at the heart of our economy how many of you are aware that your tax dollars right now you re sitting here you re going along daily you think things are on the up and up or maybe you don t but your tax dollars today are actually rewarding a company that decides to leave chicago and go overseas your tax dollars are actually being used to give an incentive to companies to go overseas because if they go overseas they don t pay the standard corporate tax rate they get to defer the tax for all time so you actually reward them and i ll tell you what i m going to do when i m president i m going to make it clear that common sense says it is inexcusable and when i am president no american taxpayer will ever again subsidize the loss of their own job we re going to stop that it s absurd and you know what we re going to do we re going to close the tax loopholes that actually pay companies to move the jobs overseas and with the money that we save from that which is very significant it s about 12 billion plus we re going to turn around and we re going to reward the companies that actually stay here and create the jobs here we re going to give a tax cut to american businesses and reduce the corporate tax rate we re also going to stop other countries from abusing us which is what they re doing i m going to pursue a plan of enforcing our trade agreements in a way that we should have long ago we re going to stop other countries from openly violating those agreements which incidentally are a contract they ought to be enforced and we re going to stop them from walking away with the store we re going to fight for legitimate labor and environment standards that raise the playing field not just here but all over the world because i ll tell you what i ve learned when i talk to workers and i ve talked to them all over whether it s a uaw worker steel worker mine worker or auto worker who are now laid off workers and they look you in the eye and they tell you what it s like to have to unbolt the equipment in the place they work and ship it overseas some of them have even had to train the people who come in from another country to take over their job think of that you re training somebody who s about to take your job away i ll tell you what we deserve a president who understands that if you give the american worker a fair playing field to compete on there is no one in the world that the american worker can t compete against and that s exactly what we re going to do and there s one other thing i want to say about a level playing field let me tell you this i ve met more workers who have told me the stories of trying to organize in order to be able to do better this is the right that was fought for through the years in our nation upheld by the supreme court it s a standard of decency that we ve arrived at in america that people can come together why to get health care to have a decent lunch break i mean remember when kids were lined up at a factory and they weren t even allowed to get up and go to the bathroom people worked 14 18 hours a day week after week seven days a week six days a week how did those things change they changed because people came together and fought for those rights you can go back in american history and see people who died on a picket line outside with others who resisted the rights of decency i ve met too many workers who tell me they ve had people vote to organize and what happens the company goes out and hires people to come in and start breaking it up they try for new election they delay and delay and delay well when i m president we re going to fight for the right that if 51 percent of the people in a company decide to sign off check they have a right to organize and to be protected in this country and if we re going to thrive and if we re going to succeed as a country and if we re going to share you know if you look at the share in america workers shares in america of the national income is at the lowest level in american history that s just stunning i read that the other day and i just scratched my head and i said what is going on workers share of the national income is at the lowest level in american history and the spread between the haves and the have nots is getting bigger there are more working poor in shelters today there are more working poor there are more homeless and you have to ask yourself how can we be the richest country on the face of the planet and be pushing backwards against the right of an american worker to be able to actually do better in life well i ll tell you what and everybody here knows it and i want to really focus on this for a minute we have to look beyond today that s what great generations do we have to create opportunity for tomorrow and we have to invest in the most important thing in america which is our human capital so america has the best trained the best educated workforce in the world and also coincidentally don t ever lose sight of this if you are the best educated and you re the best trained and you ve had those opportunities you re also going to be one of the best citizens capable of exercising the full measure of democracy you ve got to be able to process information you ve got to be able to make decisions and help this work for all of us since our nation was founded the number one engine of america s growth has been the mind and the might of our people that s something that horace mann realized more than 160 years ago when he demanded free and universal education for all of our children he knew that our economy would always grow if our citizens grew with it and by the end of the 19th century every single child in the united states got an elementary school education and then soon universal high school education was the norm and as mann had predicted the economy shot up with the knowledge that they received between 1880 and 1920 the american economy soared growing more than 300 percent ushering in what we know as the american century and then in 1944 franklin roosevelt transformed america once again when he opened the doors of college to millions of veterans who were returning from world war ii and the g i bill prepared america for the great postwar boom training half a million new engineers scientists and physicians in today s global economy more jobs require higher levels of skill and the demand is only getting greater and with advances in technology the world is getting smaller and if we don t want to go backwards back to low tech back to the kinds of jobs that don t pay more we ve got to care more about education today s workers in illinois aren t just competing against workers in michigan and ohio they re competing as you know too well against workers in india and indonesia and they re all competing for high skill jobs and if america wants to win if we want to succeed in the 21st century marketplace our workers our children all across this country of every color race creed and background all deserve a 21st century education there is no higher priority for this nation now here s what makes me mad and it makes me mad we re falling behind and we re falling behind because adults aren t accepting adult responsibility when i was a prosecutor i used to talk to those kids 15 16 17 years old i ve never met a kid in trouble with the court system not one that didn t come out of neglect and abuse and abandonment they were there because adults weren t there and there isn t one person in this room who doesn t know that when you go there out of these doors and out into chicago or anywhere else and you find people like rainbow push or city year or americorps or other efforts that are out there intervening in the lives of children you bring those kids back from the brink almost every time not always but boy what a high percentage i ve seen it i was in new york city in harlem in 1992 and i saw a program where 15 kids were working in a building learning skills all of them out of gangs off the streets out of at risk programs drop outs and every single one of them said to me this is the best thing that ever happened in my life this is the first time in my life i had to organize myself first person in my life ever told me the words i love you and i made that a program across this country and today it s got 67 i went back i was chairman of the housing i just wrote it in the law which is what you can do when you re a chairman which is why we re going to win back the senate this time and make dick durbin a chairman among other things but you know what we did it s now a 65 million program we re in 143 cities we re in 43 states yesterday i visited one of them and i ll tell you something i was in baltimore and the same stories of kids lives saved but for every kid who s in it there are many many more outside for every kid in big brother big sister there are kids outside ymca ywca kids outside you name the program we re not doing the job we are falling behind and nowhere have we fallen behind more than in the egregiously cravenly broken promise of no child left behind this country deserves a president who truly wants to leave no child behind and will fund that education program and give our kids the opportunities they need let me tell you something it is long since time that we stopped being a nation content to spend 50 000 to 70 000 a year to house a young person in prison for the rest of their life rather than invest 10 000 or 11 000 a year in head start early start smart start after school programs and give kids full citizenship for a lifetime at a time when college is more important than ever after you hopefully get out of high school and we ve got many things we can do to help kids get out of high school too many americans can t afford to go and too many of those who are going to college aren t finishing in an era when college graduates will earn 900 000 more than high school graduates over the course of a career less than a third of all americans have a four year college degree and less than a fifth of all african americans do now if that s not an argument for expanding college education i don t know what is on top of that we re falling behind our competitors in math and science the building blocks for the jobs of tomorrow studies show that only a third of american students are proficient in math and science think of that and the figure is even lower for women and minorities in fact our colleges are only graduating 60 000 engineers a year one tenth the number that india and china graduate as andy grove the ceo of intel puts it one of our great pioneers in this country he said our scientific and technical education has reached an emergency level we re not just falling behind in the race for high skilled jobs we re barely making it to the starting line so we have to move forward toward the day when four years of college is as universal and affordable as a high school education is today and to meet the economic challenge of the future we need to make sure that all americans no matter what they do have the skills to adapt and succeed in their careers we need an education revolution a g i bill for the new century and the next economy and here s how we re going to do it first we re going to help young people afford college education that s important to their future my college opportunity tax credit will make four years of college universally accessible with a credit of up to 4 000 of tuition each year for four years of college and will help people be able to afford and unlike most tax credits students will be able to get this one in advance so they can actually pay their tuition when the bill comes we also need to hold down the cost of colleges and universities that are sending out the bill and in the last three years college tuition has shot up 35 percent five times faster than the cost of living so it s no wonder that students are having a harder time affording college and even though some grant programs and other things have gone up when you really look at the real people who need it the people of real need are still having a harder time being able to do it so rising tuition costs are squeezing american families and if you don t think so then you ought to spend some time as i have talking to working families who try to put their kids through school as president i will help keep college costs down by making a new deal with the states we re going to offer states 10 billion to invest in their public colleges and universities but they ll only get their share if they hold tuitions in line with inflation so we don t get a gaming situation going on with the grant process second we re going to make sure that those who go to school stay in school and that they leave with a degree too many young people graduate from high school without the skills they need for college too many colleges focus on getting kids to sign up but they don t stick with them so they can make it through that is especially true with minorities right now almost 50 percent of college freshman don t graduate and more than 60 percent of minorities never wear a cap and gown in college an acceptance letter will not land you a high skilled job but a good education will and that begins that begins in high school where studies show that a rigorous curriculum is the best way to be able to prepare to succeed so as president i will work with the states to strengthen their high school curriculum so that every child leaves high school ready for college and we re also going to create a college completion fund that will reward schools for the number of underprivileged students that they graduate and we re going to fund programs like the pre college academic boot camps and intensive mentoring that helps students from the day that they set foot on campus to the day that they graduate so that no one falls through the cracks third we are going to close the math and science gap that threatens both our standard of living and the future strength of our economy when the soviet union launched the sputnik satellite america invested in a new generation of scientists and engineers and that innovation paved the way for the information economy but in the last 30 years we ve fallen from third in the world to 15th in the number of new scientists and engineers in our workforce and women and minorities in particular are choosing other careers women make up only 10 percent of engineers and only 15 blacks and eight hispanic am dem jkerry29 7 04 john_kerry i m john kerry and i m reporting for duty we are here tonight because we love our country we re proud of what america is and what it can become my fellow americans we re here tonight united in one purpose to make america stronger at home and respected in the world a great american novelist wrote that you can t go home again he could not have imagined this evening tonight i am home home where my public life began and those who made it possible live home where our nation s history was written in blood idealism and hope home where my parents showed me the values of family faith and country thank you all of you for a welcome home i will never forget i wish my parents could share this moment they went to their rest in the last few years but their example their inspiration their gift of open eyes open eyes and open mind and endless heart and world that doesn t have an end are bigger and more lasting than any words at all i was born as some of you saw in the film in fitzsimmons army hospital in colorado when my dad was a pilot in world war ii now i am not one to read into things but guess which wing of the hospital the maternity ward was in i m not kidding i was born in the west wing my mother was the rock of our family as so many mothers are she stayed up late to help me with my homework she sat by my bed when i was sick she answered the questions of a child who like all children found the world full of wonders and mysteries she was my den mother when i was a cub scout and she was so proud of her 50 year pin as a girl scout leader she gave me her passion for the environment she taught me to see trees as the cathedrals of nature and by the power of her example she showed me that we can and must complete the march toward full equality for all women in the united states of america my dad did the things that a boy remembers my dad did the things that a boy remembers he gave me my first model airplane my first baseball mitt my first bicycle he also taught me that we are here for something bigger than ourselves he lived out the responsibilities and the sacrifices of the greatest generation to whom we owe so much and when i was a young man he was in the state department stationed in berlin when it and the world were divided between democracy and communism i have unforgettable memories of being a kid mesmerized by the british french and american troops each of them guarding their own part of the city and russians standing guard on that stark line separating east from west on one occasion i rode my bike into soviet east berlin and when i proudly told my dad he promptly grounded me but what i learned has stayed with me for a lifetime i saw how different life was on different sides of the same city i saw the fear in the eyes of people who were not free i saw the gratitude of people toward the united states for all that we had done i felt goosebumps as i got off a military train and heard the army band strike up stars and stripes forever i learned what it meant to be america at our best i learned the pride of our freedom and i am determined now to restore that pride to all who look to america mine were greatest generation parents and as i thank them we all join together to thank a whole generation for making america strong for winning world war ii winning the cold war and for the great gift of service which brought america 50 years of peace and prosperity my parents inspired me to serve and when i was in high school a junior john kennedy called my generation to service it was the beginning of a great journey a time to march for civil rights for voting rights for the environment for women for peace we believed we could change the world and you know what we did but we re not finished but we re not finished the journey isn t complete the march isn t over the promise isn t perfected tonight we re setting out again and together we re going to write the next great chapter of america s story we have it in our power to change the world but only if we re true to our ideals and that starts by telling the truth to the american people as president that is my first pledge to you tonight as president i will restore trust and credibility to the white house i ask you i ask you to judge me by my record as a young prosecutor i fought for victims rights and made prosecuting violence against women a priority when i came to the senate i broke with many in my own party to vote for a balanced budget because i thought it was the right thing to do i fought to put 100 000 police officers on the streets of america and then i reached out across the aisle with john mccain to work to find the truth about our pows and missing in action and to finally make peace in vietnam i will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war i will have a vice president who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws i will have a secretary of defense who will listen to the best advice of the military leaders and i will appoint an attorney general who will uphold the constitution of the united states my fellow americans this is the most important election of our lifetime the stakes are high we are a nation at war a global war on terror against an enemy unlike we ve ever known before and here at home wages are falling health care costs are rising and our great middle class is shrinking people are working weekends two jobs three jobs and they re still not getting ahead we re told that outsourcing jobs is good for america we re told that jobs that pay 9 000 less than the jobs that have been lost is the best that we can do they say this is the best economy that we ve ever had and they say anyone who thinks otherwise is a pessimist well here is our answer there is nothing more pessimistic than saying that america can t do better we can do better and we will we re the optimists for us this is a country of the future we re the can do people and let s not forget what we did in the 1990s we balanced the budget we paid down the debt we created 23 million new jobs we lifted millions out of poverty and we lifted the standard of living for the middle class we just need to believe in ourselves and we can do it again so tonight in the city where america s freedom began only a few blocks from where the sons and daughters of liberty gave birth to our nation here tonight on behalf of a new birth of freedom on behalf of the middle class who deserve a champion and those struggling to join it who deserve a fair shot for the brave men and women in uniform who risk their lives every day and the families who pray for their return for all those who believe our best days are ahead of us with great faith in the american people i accept your nomination for president of the united states i am proud thank you thank you thank you thank you i am proud that at my side will be a running mate whose life is the story of the american dream and who s worked every day to make that dream real for all americans senator john edwards of north carolina and his wife elizabeth and their family thank you this son of a millworker is ready to lead and next january americans will be proud to have a fighter for the middle class to succeed dick cheney as vice president of the united states and what can i say about teresa she has the strongest moral compass of anyone i know she s down to earth nurturing courageous wise and smart she speaks her mind and she speaks the truth and i love her for that too and that s why america will embrace her as the next first lady of the united states for teresa and me no matter what the future holds or the past has given us nothing will ever mean as much as our children as you can sense listening to them we love them not just for who they are and what they ve become but for being themselves making us laugh holding our feet to the fire and never letting me get away with anything thank you andre alex chris vanessa and john and in this journey i am accompanied by an extraordinary band of brothers led by that american hero a patriot called max cleland our band of brothers our band of brothers doesn t march together because of who we are as veterans but because of what we learned as soldiers we fought for this nation because we loved it and we came back with the deep belief that every day is extra we may be a little older we may be a little grayer but we still know how to fight for our country and standing with us in that fight standing with us in that fight are those who shared with me the long season of the primary campaign carol moseley braun general wesley clark howard dean dick gephardt bob graham dennis kucinich joe lieberman and al sharpton to all of you i say thank you for teaching me and testing me but mostly we say thank you for standing up for our country and for giving us the unity to move america forward my fellow americans the world tonight is very different from the world of four years ago but i believe the american people are more than equal to the challenge remember the hours after september 11th when we came together as one to answer the attack against our homeland we drew strength when our firefighters ran up stairs and risked their lives so that others might live when rescuers rushed into smoke and fire at the pentagon when the men and women of flight 93 sacrificed themselves to save our nation s capitol when flags were hanging from front porches all across america and strangers became friends it was the worst day we have ever seen but it brought out the best in all of us i am proud that after september 11th all our people rallied to president bush s call for unity to meet the danger there were no democrats there were no republicans there were only americans and how we wish it had stayed that way now i know there that are those who criticize me for seeing complexities and i do because some issues just aren t all that simple saying there are weapons of mass destruction in iraq doesn t make it so saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn t make it so and proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn t make it so as president i will ask the hard questions and demand hard evidence i will immediately reform the intelligence system so policy is guided by facts and facts are never distorted by politics and as president i will bring back this nation s time honored tradition the united states of america never goes to war because we want to we only go to war because we have to that is the standard of our nation i know what kids go through when they are carrying i know what kids go through when they re carrying an m 16 in a dangerous place and they can t tell friend from foe i know what they go through when they re out on patrol at night and they don t know what s coming around the next bend i know what it s like to write letters home telling your family that everything s all right when you re not sure that that s true as president i will wage this war with the lessons i learned in war before you go to battle you have to be able to look a parent in the eye and truthfully say i tried everything possible to avoid sending your son or daughter into harm s way but we had no choice we had to protect the american people fundamental american values against a threat that was real and imminent so lesson number one this is the only justification for going to war and on my first day in office i will send a message to every man and woman in our armed forces you will never be asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace i know what we have to do in iraq we need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden reduce the cost to american taxpayers reduce the risk to american soldiers that s the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home here is the reality that won t happen until we have a president who restores america s respect and leadership so we don t have to go it alone in the world and we need to rebuild our alliances so we can get the terrorists before they get us i defended this country as a young man and i will defend it as president let there be no mistake i will never hesitate to use force when it is required any attack will be met with a swift and a certain response i will never give any nation or any institution a veto over our national security and i will build a stronger military we will add 40 000 active duty troops not in iraq but to strengthen american forces that are now overstretched overextended and under pressure we will double our special forces to conduct terrorist operations anti terrorist operations and we will provide our troops with the newest weapons and technology to save their lives and win the battle and we will end the backdoor draft of the national guard and reservists to all who serve in our armed forces today i say help is on the way as president i will fight a smarter more effective war on terror we will deploy every tool in our arsenal our economic as well as our military might our principles as well as our firepower in these dangerous days there is a right way and a wrong way to be strong strength is more than tough words after decades of experience in national security i know the reach of our power and i know the power of our ideals we need to make america once again a beacon in the world we need to be looked up to not just feared we need to lead a global effort against nuclear proliferation to keep the most dangerous weapons in the world out of the most dangerous hands in the world we need a strong military and we need to lead strong alliances and then with confidence and determination we will be able to tell the terrorists you will lose and we will win the future doesn t belong to fear it belongs to freedom and the frontlines of this battle are not just far away they re right here on our shores they re at our airports and potentially in any town or city today our national security begins with homeland security the 9 11 commission has given us a path to follow endorsed by democrats republicans and the 9 11 families as president i will not evade or equivocate i will immediately implement all the recommendations of that commission we shouldn t be letting 95 percent of our container ships come into our ports without ever being physically inspected we shouldn t be leaving nuclear and chemical plants without enough protection and we shouldn t be opening firehouses in baghdad and shutting them in the united states of america and tonight we have an important message for those who question the patriotism of americans who offer a better direction for our country before wrapping themselves in the flag and shutting their eyes to the truth and their ears they should remember what america is really all about they should remember the great idea of freedom for which so many have given their lives our purpose now is to reclaim our democracy itself we are here to affirm that when americans stand up and speak their minds and say america can do better that is not a challenge to patriotism it is the heart and soul of patriotism you see that flag up there we call her old glory the stars and stripes forever i fought under that flag as did so many of those people who were here tonight and all across the country that flag flew from the gun turret right behind my head and it was shot through and through and tattered but it never ceased to wave in the wind it draped the caskets of men that i served with and friends i grew up with for us that flag is the most powerful symbol of who we are and what we believe in our strength our diversity our love of country all that makes america both great and good that flag doesn t belong to any president it doesn t belong to any ideology it doesn t belong to any party it belongs to all the american people my fellow citizens elections are about choices and choices are about values in the end it s not just policies and programs that matter the president who sits at that desk must be guided by principle for four years we ve heard a lot of talk about values but values spoken without actions taken are just slogans values are not just words values are what we live by they re about the causes that we champion and the people we fight for and it is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families you don t value families you don t value families by kicking kids out of after school programs and taking cops off the streets so that enron can get another tax break we believe in the family value of caring for our children and protecting the neighborhoods where they walk and play and that is the choice in this election you don t value families by denying real prescription drug coverage to seniors so big drug companies can get another windfall we believe in the family value expressed in one of the oldest commandments honor thy father and thy mother as president i will not privatize social security i will not cut benefits and together we will make sure that senior citizens never have to cut their pills in half because they can t afford lifesaving medicine and that is the choice in this election you don t value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armor for a son or daughter in the service if you deny veterans health care or if you tell middle class families to wait for a tax cut so that the wealthiest among us can get even more we believe in the value of doing what s right for everyone in the american family and that s the choice in this election we believe that what matters most is not narrow appeals masquerading as values but the shared values that show the true face of america not narrow values that divide us but the shared values that unite us family faith hard work opportunity and responsibility for all so that every child every adult every parent every worker in america has an equal shot at living up to their god given potential that is the american dream and the american value what does it mean in america today when dave mccune a steelworker that i met in canton ohio saw his job sent overseas and the equipment in his factory was literally unbolted crated up and shipped thousands of miles away along with that job what does it mean when workers i ve met have had to train their foreign replacements america can do better and tonight we say help is on the way what does it mean when mary ann knowles a woman with breast cancer i met in new hampshire had to keep working day after day right through her chemotherapy no matter how sick she felt because she was terrified of losing her family s health insurance america can do better and help is on the way what does it mean when deborah kromins from philadelphia pennsylvania works and she saves all her life and finds out that her pension has disappeared into thin air and the executive who looted it has bailed out on a golden parachute america can do better and help is on the way what does it mean when 25 percent of the children in harlem have asthma because of air pollution we can do better america can do better and help is on the way what does it mean when people are huddled in blankets in the cold sleeping in lafayette park on the doorstep of the white house itself and the number of families living in poverty has risen by 3 million in the last four years america can do better and help is on the way so tonight we come here tonight to ask where is the conscience of our country i ll tell you where it is i ll tell you where it is it s in rural and small town america it s in urban neighborhoods and the suburban main streets it s alive in the people that i ve met in every single part of this land it s bursting in the hearts of americans who are determined to give our values and our truth back to our country we value jobs that actually pay you more than the job that you lost we value jobs where when you put in a week s work you can actually pay your bills provide for your children lift up the quality of your life we value an america where the middle class is not being squeezed but doing better so here is our economic plan to build a stronger america first new incentives to revitalize manufacturing second investment in technology and innovation that will create the good paying jobs of the future third close the tax loopholes that reward companies for shipping jobs overseas instead we will reward the companies that create and keep good paying jobs right where they belong in the good old usa we value an america that exports products not jobs and we believe american workers should never have to subsidize the loss of their own job next we will trade and we will compete in the world but our plan calls for a fair playing field because if you give the american worker a fair playing field there s no one in the world that the american worker can t compete against and we re going to return to fiscal responsibility because it is the foundation of our economic strength our plan will cut the deficit in half in four years by ending tax giveaways that are nothing more than corporate welfare and we will make government live by the rule that every family has to live by pay as you go and let me let me tell you what we won t do we won t raise taxes on the middle class you ve heard a lot of false charges about this in recent months so let me say straight out what i will do as president i will cut middle class taxes i will reduce the tax burden on small business and i will roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals who make over 200 000 a year so we can invest in health care education and job creation our education plan for a stronger america sets high standards and it demands accountability from parents teachers and schools it provides for smaller class sizes and it treats teachers like the professionals that they are and it gives a tax credit to families for each and every year of college when i was a prosecutor i met young kids who were in trouble abandoned all of them by adults and as president i am determined that we stop being a nation content to spend 50 000 a year to send a young person to prison for the rest of their life when we could invest 10 000 in head start early start smart start a real start to the lives of our children and we value health care that s affordable and accessible for all americans since 2000 4 million people have lost their health insurance millions more are struggling to afford it you know what s happening your premiums your co payments your deductibles have all gone through the roof our health care plan for a stronger america cracks down on the waste and the greed and the abuse in our health care system and it will save families 1 000 a year in premiums you ll get to pick your own doctor and patients and doctors not insurance company bureaucrats will make medical decisions under our health care plan medicare will negotiate lower drug prices for seniors and all americans will be able to buy less expensive prescription drugs from countries like canada the story of people struggling for health care is the story of so many americans but you know what it s not the story of senators and members of congress because we give ourselves great health care and you get the bill well i m here to say tonight your family s health care is just as important as any politician s in washington d c and when i am president we will stop being the only advanced nation in the world which fails to understand that health care is not a privilege for the wealthy and the connected and the elected it is a right for all americans and we will make it so we value an america that controls its own destiny because it s finally and forever independent of mideast oil what does it mean for our economy and our national security when we have only 3 percent of the world s oil reserves yet we rely on foreign countries for 53 percent of what we consume i want an america that relies on its ingenuity and innovation not the saudi royal family and our energy plan for a stronger america our energy plan will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future so that no young american in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the middle east i ve told you about our plans for the economy for education for health care for energy independence i want you to know more about them so now i m going to say something that franklin roosevelt could never have said in his acceptance speech go to johnkerry com i want to address these next words directly to president george w bush in the weeks ahead let s be optimists not just opponents let s build unity in the american family not angry division let s honor this nation s diversity let s respect one another and let s never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in american history the constitution of the united states my friends the high road may be harder but it leads to a better place and that s why republicans and democrats must make this election a contest of big ideas not small minded attacks this is our time to reject the kind of politics calculated to divide race from race region from region group from group maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states but i see us as one america red white and blue and when i am president the government i lead will enlist people of talent republicans as well as democrats to find the common ground so that no one who has something to contribute to our nation will be left on the sidelines and let me say it plainly in that cause and in this campaign we welcome people of faith america is not us and them i think of what ron reagan said of his father a few weeks ago and i want to say this to you tonight i don t wear my religion on my sleeve but faith has given me values and hope to live by from vietnam to this day from sunday to sunday i don t want to claim that god is on our side as abraham lincoln told us i want to pray humbly that we are on god s side and whatever our faith whatever our faith one belief should bind us all the measure of our character is our willingness to give of ourselves for others and for our country these aren t democratic values these aren t republican values they re american values we believe in them they re who we are and if we honor them if we believe in ourselves we can build an america that is stronger at home and respected in the world so much promise stretches before us americans have always reached for the impossible looked to the next horizon and asked what if two young bicycle mechanics from dayton asked what if this airplane could take off at kitty hawk it did that and it changed the world forever a young president asked what if we could go to the moon in 10 years and now we re exploring the stars and the solar systems themselves a young generation of entrepreneurs asked what if we could take all the information in a library and put it on a chip the size of a fingernail we did and that too changed the world and now it s our time to ask what if what if we find a breakthrough to cure parkinson s diabetes alzheimer s and aids what if we have a president who believes in science so we can unleash the wonders of discovery like stem cell research and treat illness for millions of lives what if we do what adults should do and make sure that all of our children are safe in the afternoons after school what if we have a leadership that s as good as the american dream so that bigotry and hatred never again steal the hope or future of any american i learned a lot about these values on that gunboat patrolling the mekong delta with americans you saw them who come from places as different as iowa and oregon arkansas florida california no one cared where we went to school no one cared about our race or our backgrounds we were literally all in the same boat we looked out one for the other and we still do that is the kind of america that i will lead as president an america where we are all in the same boat never has there been a moment more urgent for americans to step up and define ourselves i will work my heart out but my fellow citizens the outcome is in your hands more than mine it is time to reach for the next dream it is time to look to the next horizon for america the hope is there the sun is rising our best days are still to come thank you good night god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem jkerry3 11 04 john_kerry thank you thank you thank you so much thank you thank you thank you so much thank you so much you just have no idea how warming and how generous that welcome is your love is your affection and i m gratified by it i m sorry that we got here a little bit late and a little bit short earlier today i spoke to president bush and i offered him and laura our congratulations on their victory we had a good conversation and we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need the desperate need for unity for finding the common ground coming together today i hope that we can begin the healing in america in america it is vital that every vote count and that every vote be counted but the outcome should be decided by voters not a protracted legal process i would not give up this fight if there was a chance we would prevail but it is now clear that even when all the provisional ballots are counted which they will be there won t be enough outstanding votes for us to be able to win ohio and therefore we cannot win this election my friends it was here that we began our campaign for the presidency and all we had was hope and a vision for a better america it was a privilege and a gift to spend two years traveling this country coming to know so many of you i wish that i could just wrap you up in my arms and embrace each and every one of you individually all across this nation i thank you from the bottom of my heart thank you thank you thank you thank you man and i m and i assure you you watch i ll still have yours so hang in there i will always be particularly grateful to the colleague that you just heard from who became my partner my very close friend an extraordinary leader john edwards and i thank him for everything he did and i just thank you john john and i would be the first to tell you that we owe so much to our families they re here with us today they were with us every single step of the way they sustained us they went out on their own and they multiplied our campaign all across this country no one did this more with grace and with courage and candor that i love than my wife teresa and i thank her thank you and our children were there every single step of the way it was unbelievable vanessa alex chris andre and john from my family and elizabeth edwards who is so remarkable and so strong and so smart and johnny and cate who went out there on her own just like my daughters did and also emma claire and jack who were up beyond their bedtime last night like a lot of us i want to thank my crewmates and my friends from 35 years ago that great band of brothers who crisscrossed this country on my behalf through 2004 they had the courage to speak the truth back then and they spoke it again this year and for that i will forever be grateful and thanks also as i look around here to friends and family of a lifetime some from college friends made all across the years and then all across the miles of this campaign you are so special you brought the gift of your passion for our country and the possibilities of change and that will stay with us and with this country forever thanks to democrats and republicans and independents who stood with us and everyone who voted no matter who their candidate was and thanks to my absolutely unbelievable dedicated staff led by a wonderful campaign manager mary beth cahill who did an extraordinary job there s so much written about campaigns and there s so much that americans never get to see i wish they could all spend a day on a campaign and see how hard these folks work to make america better it is its own unbelievable contribution to our democracy and it s a gift to everybody but especially to me and i m grateful to each and every one of you and i thank your families and i thank you for the sacrifices you ve made and to all the volunteers all across this country who gave so much of themselves you know thanks to william field a 6 year old who collected 680 a quarter and a dollar at a time selling bracelets during the summer to help change america thanks to michael benson from florida who i spied in a rope line holding a container of money and it turned out he had raided his piggy bank and wanted to contribute and thanks to ilana wexler 11 years old who started kids for kerry all across our country i think of the brigades of students and people young and old who took time to travel time off from work their own vacation time to work in states far and wide they braved the hot days of summer and the cold days of the fall and the winter to knock on doors because they were determined to open the doors of opportunity to all americans they worked their hearts out and i wish you you don t know how much that i could have brought this race home for you for them and i say to them now don t lose faith what you did made a difference and building on itself building on itself we go on to make a difference another day i promise you that time will come the time will come the election will come when your work and your ballots will change the world and it s worth fighting for i want to especially say to the american people in this journey you have given me the honor and the gift of listening and learning from you i have visited your homes i visited your churches i visited your community halls i ve heard your stories i know your struggles i know your hopes they are part of me now and i will never forget you and i ll never stop fighting for you you may not understand completely in what ways but it is true when i say to you that you have taught me and you ve tested me and you ve lifted me up and you ve made me stronger i did my best to express my vision and my hopes for america we worked hard and we fought hard and i wish that things had turned out a little differently but in an american election there are no losers because whether or not our candidates are successful the next morning we all wake up as americans and that that is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on earth with that gift also comes obligation we are required now to work together for the good of our country in the days ahead we must find common cause we must join in common effort without remorse or recrimination without anger or rancor america is in need of unity and longing for a larger measure of compassion i hope president bush will advance those values in the coming years i pledge to do my part to try to bridge the partisan divide i know this is a difficult time for my supporters but i ask them all of you to join me in doing that now more than ever with our soldiers in harm s way we must stand together and succeed in iraq and win the war on terror i will also do everything in my power to ensure that my party a proud democratic party stands true to our best hopes and ideals i believe that what we started in this campaign will not end here our fight goes on to put america back to work and to make our economy a great engine of job growth our fight goes on to make affordable health care a accessible right for all americans not a privilege our fight goes on to protect the environment to achieve equality to push the frontiers of science and discovery and to restore america s reputation in the world i believe that all of this will happen and sooner than we may think because we re america and america always moves forward i ve been honored to represent the citizens of this commonwealth for the in the united states senate now for 20 years and i pledge to them that in the years ahead i m going to fight on for the people and for the principles that i ve learned and lived with here in massachusetts i m proud of what we stood for in this campaign and of what we accomplished when we began no one thought it was possible to even make this a close race but we stood for real change change that would make a real difference in the life of our nation and the lives of our families and we defined that choice to america i ll never forget the wonderful people who came to our rallies who stood in our rope lines who put their hopes in our hands who invested in each and every one of us i saw in them the truth that america is not only great but it is good so with a grateful heart i leave this campaign with a prayer that has even greater meaning to me now that i have come to know our vast country so much better thanks to all of you and what a privilege it has been to do so and that prayer is very simple god bless america thank you dem jkerry3 5 03 john_kerry thank you very much south carolina south carolina is where our victory begins not just in the south but all across the united states of america in 2004 this is the beginning now last night i was at jim clyburn s fish fry we catch fish up north but we don t always fry em the same way i loved it but somebody came up to me and they said what s it like to be running for the most powerful office in the land and i said i don t know because i m not running for secretary of state of florida folks i m running for president of the united states of america because it is unacceptable that we have lost nearly three million jobs in the last two and a half years i m running for president to put our economy back on track and to put america back to work and the one and let me tell you i think everybody in this room knows that the one person in america who does deserve to be laid off is george w bush i m running i m running for president of the united states because it is long since time that in the richest country on the face of this planet we recognize that health care is not a privilege it is a right and i will make it affordable and available to all americans i m running for president of the united states to hold george w bush accountable for making a mockery of the words leave no child behind i will tell you in south carolina we shouldn t be laying off 6 600 teachers in south carolina we should be hiring more teachers in south carolina we shouldn t be cutting first steps in south carolina we should be helping kids to take their next steps and we should take the next steps to give every kid an opportunity in this state i m running for president of the united states because i think if you want a tax cut and you want to be smart rather than spend 50 000 a year on a jail cell for a young person we should invest 10 000 a year for that young person s future with early childhood education smart start head start early start and put those kids into the future of america i m running i m running for president of the united states because america and american soldiers should never be held hostage to middle east oil we can lead the world in the new technologies in the new jobs in the possibilities of the future and it is long since time that we declared the united states of america energy independent and i will be the president who does that when i am president there will be no john ashcroft trampling on the civil rights or the bill of rights in this country i am running for president i am running for president because after september 11th we need a president who has the experience and the vision to make this country stronger safer and more secure and i will do it living up to the highest standards of and ideals of the united states of america because we know that as powerful as we are and as committed as we are and as committed as we are to having a military that is second to nobody even this powerful great nation of ours needs some friends on this planet and some allies and we need to build the relationships to do it my friends we can do these things but it isn t going to happen without people getting out of their seats without people getting out in the streets without our carrying our message with confidence of democrats that we have a vision for the united states of america a vision worth caring about and a vision worth fighting for and a vision worth voting for i ask you to join me in this endeavor let s go out and stand together and campaign together and care together and fight together and take out to the nation a vision that provides a better set of choices and together we will make this great nation of ours stronger safer and more secure i ask you to do that and if we do it we will win in south carolina and we will win all across the united states of america thank you and let s go do it dem jkerry3 9 04 excerpt john_kerry unfit for duty misleading our nation into war in iraq makes you unfit to lead our country doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this country letting 45 million americans go without health care for four years makes you unfit to lead this country letting the saudi royal family control the price of oil for americans makes you unfit to lead this country handing out billions of dollars in contracts without a bid to halliburton while you re still on the payroll makes you unfit to lead this country that my friends is the record of george bush and of dick cheney and that only begins to scratch the surface i think that you believe as john and i do that it s time for us to have a different kind of conversation in this nation of ours this president has misled american works and misled the american people and i think all of you out there you watched our convention four days i want you to just think about what barack obama said to our country as he stood up and spoke about one nation and about the positive vision that we offered four years ago george bush offered america a plan for our economy but once again he misled america because he told you four years that if we had these great big tax cuts he was going to create 5 6 million jobs he told you that he was going to create he was going to create 266 000 jobs right here in ohio ohio lost 230 000 jobs ohio lost 112 000 jobs from the date after the recession ended after he had promised a new round of a million jobs my friends it s too late two months before an election to come leaping into a convention and make a bunch of promises when you haven t even kept the promises that you made before and i ll tell you what john edwards and i know i ve met workers out here in ohio who ve not only lost their jobs and watched them go overseas but who ve actually had to unbolt the equipment that they worked on and put it in a crate and send it to follow the job that went overseas you didn t hear anything about that tonight but let me tell you something when john edwards and i get in there with your help we re going to take that tax code that you re paying for and we re going to change what they re supporting and encouraging which is asking you to actually reward those companies that take the jobs overseas when john edwards and i are in there we re not only not to reward the companies that take the jobs overseas we re going to close that loophole no american worker will ever be asked to subsidize the loss of their own job and you know what else we re going to do we re going to do something that makes common sense which is what we need to restore to the main street of america we re going to actually take the money that now goes to the companies that go overseas and we re going to reward the companies that create the manufacturing jobs right here in the united states of america that makes sense let me tell you what else we re going to do we re going to start to do what america does best every single one of you knows the power of our country comes from our spirit from the american spirit of ingenuity of creativity of exploration of science and john and i are going to recommit america to the discovery and the creation of those new jobs that pay you more than the 9 000 less for the jobs that are going overseas we need a president who fights as hard for your jobs as he fights for his own job and that s exactly what we re going to do over the course of these next years we re going to we ve gone four years you ve gone four years and all across america as john and i travel with elizabeth and teresa we re meeting families who look us in the eye and say i can t afford it anymore we can t get health care there s no way to continue to pay the increasing premiums that have gone up 50 percent tuitions have gone up 35 percent gas prices up 31 percent and wages have gone down i ll tell you this when i m president of the united states that tax code that belongs to you that s 17 000 pages long today and you don t have a page of it we re going to put that back in the scrutiny of all americans and we are going to make america s workplace fair again so it works for the average american and george bush talked about health care four years ago he talked about health care for the last four years talked and talked but the fact is that on the last year 1 4 million americans lost their health care in the last four years 5 million americans have lost their health care we re now up to 45 million americans who go to bed at night worried don t know what to do pray they won t get sick don t know where to turn and only john edwards and john kerry have put before america a plan that says your family s health care is just as important as any politician in washington d c we re going to provide health care to all americans we ve also seen george bush make america more dependent not less on fuel oil that comes from other countries god only gave three percent of the world s oil reserves folks that didn t change during the time george bush has been president and we import 61 percent of our oil yet we re still not moving down the road of discovery which would create millions of new jobs in this country we need to change the president and have a president who understands no young american in uniform should ever be held hostage to america s dependence on oil in the middle east we re going to liberate ourselves we re going to make ourselves energy independent and finally there is this issue of iraq we deserve a president this is the most serious issue we face right now and this is not an issue this is not an issue that ought to be the subject of democrat republican that s not where it comes from this comes from the heart the gut and from the head the common sense of americans this president misled america into this war this president told americans that iraq had reconstituted a nuclear plan but they hadn t he told americans there were those weapons of mass destruction and people believed him there weren t he told americans that this war would cost us 1 billion and the oil from iraq would pay for it 200 billion later and tragically tragically too many lives later iraq is a mess and the world is not at the side of the united states of america i pledge to you i defended this country as a young man and i will defend it as president of the united states of america our soldiers are doing an extraordinary job these are the best and the brightest the most remarkable people in the military that i ve ever seen i visited a hospital the other day and met a couple of young soldiers that d been wounded i ve never seen spirit like that they re amazing but they deserve leadership that helps them to do the job right that helps america to reduce the cost to the american taxpayer that helps america to have allies at our side so we re not carrying 90 percent of the casualties and 90 percent of the cost we need to get this war out of the pocket of the american taxpayer and we need to get the target off of the front and back of the american soldier and i will do that so i don t think the agenda has ever been as clear as it is today and i think that s why so many of you have come out here tonight and wherever we ve gone across this country john and i have met people who just want simple things like the truth they just want people to stand up and talk to them about real things that make a difference like how we raise the wages of workers how we make the workplace fair how we don t go backwards on a 40 hour work week and continue to pay people overtime that they deserve how we create the jobs of the future people just want to know that health care isn t reserved for the wealthy and the connected and the elected it s not a privilege in america it s a right and when john edwards and i are there we ll make it a right that s available to every single american dem jkerry30 3 04 john_kerry 300 separate jurisdictions about additives to gasoline across the country that raises the price of gasoline if we were to simplify those rules and regulations which we could do we can lower the price of gas in the united states of america and finally and finally and most importantly we deserve an administration that doesn t fake it to the american people and pretend that somehow by drilling in the alaska wildlife refuge we can deal with the problems of america we can t provide the supply of oil america needs from the alaska wildlife refuge or from any other source in the united states because we only have 3 percent of the world s oil reserves and so as president i pledge to you i will put in place the principle long since overdue that no young american in uniform ought to ever be held hostage to america s dependence on oil for the middle east we need to liberate ourselves this is a matter of common sense there are a lot of smart people standing out here you re all part of a university that s one of the great research universities in the united states we pour an enormous amount of federal funding into this university and others the state puts money into it we need to use the entrepreneurial and creative scientific skill of this country to begin to embark on a new mission and as president i intend to ask america to go on that journey long since overdue if you only have 3 percent of the world s oil reserves and the middle east has 65 percent and we import more than 58 percent or so and rising of our oil from other countries it is obvious any child in grade school can do the math the united states of america can t drill its way out of this predicament we have to invent our way out of it and the sooner we get about the business of doing it i pledge to you that we will create in the first four years of my administration first four years little slow on the uptake in the first four years we will create 500 000 new jobs by setting a goal for america that by the year 2020 20 percent of our electricity is going to be produced by alternative and renewable sources in this country and we can achieve that and i ll tell you during the late 1970s when president carter and the country suffered the first onslaught of gas surge because of the problems of supply being cut off we started down that road we created an energy institute in colorado tenured professors left their positions and went out there to create the future i just talked about and we were the world s leaders in alternative and renewable energy and then along came the reagan administration and out of ideology out of ideology they dragged the money away they sucked it out they put tenured professors back on the street students are leaving colleges more and more burdened with loans and some people because those loans are so great have to make a life decision about what kind of work to go into rather than what they might like to go into just to be able to pay it down i believe we ought to start to make it possible for no young person in america to ever have to downsize their dreams because of the cost of education and so i have a plan and here it is for those who wonder specifically what i will do i have a different vision from george bush he and i both graduated from a university of privilege on the east coast but we left with very different visions about how you allow every other american to have the same kind of opportunity he has presided over cuts he has presided over cuts in the pell grants cuts in the perkins loans and stafford loans and we have too many students that i have met across the country who have told me senator i couldn t go to the college of my choice because i couldn t afford it even though i was accepted i don t think that should happen and so here s what i will do number one i will provide a 4 000 tuition tax credit to reduce the burden of those tuitions so people can afford to go to school number two we re going to have a pay down program so that young people who want to take advantage of going into teaching in an urban center where there s a low tax base or teaching in a rural community that can t afford to raise the salaries so you can pay down your loans we re going to ask you to come and do that work and child care and other worthy things and we will help pay down the student loans in exchange for taking on those kinds of jobs and finally in keeping with the spirit of service in our country i want young people who graduate from high school who are facing difficult choices about how to pay for college education to be able to give something back to their community and have their community join them in that effort so for any graduate of high school and we ll have to start modestly because of the deficit that this administration has created and our responsibility not to shoulder it on to you we need to do it but we will provide a program that says to any graduate of high school if you ll take two years and stay in your community and work in your community help kids who are at risk help kids who don t have adults at home until late in the evening and provide safety and nurturing and mentoring if you will provide seniors who are shut in with an opportunity to be able to share in the world around them for those kinds of work and so much more we in return are going to pay for your full in state four year college public education and that is a worthwhile effort in this country i ll tell you what else we re going to do we re going to apply common sense to the economy of this country i m tired of hearing from americans of all walks of life who tell me senator i m working two jobs three jobs we still can t get ahead tuitions go up health care goes up gas goes up all the costs around us go up the one thing that doesn t go up that ought to go up are the wages of americans who are working and so what we need to do is make america more competitive with steps of common sense this administration believes that outsourcing is just dandy that it s good for america and fine and acceptable well i will say to you that no american president no president could possibly stop all the outsourcing but i ll tell you what we can do we can make this workplace more fair and more sensible by not asking american workers literally to subsidize the loss of their own jobs today in the tax code of our country if you re a business doing business here in san diego and you earn a profit that profit will be taxed at the standard corporate rate in the united states but if that same company were to go abroad guess what they get to defer that income and then they can defer it the next year and the next year so there s an incentive never to repatriate that money there s an incentive to go offshore i don t think it makes sense george bush does and when i m president we will take away any incentive for americans to pay for the loss of their own jobs i ll tell you what else we need to do we also need to create those jobs here in our country we are the country of science usually this is the worst science administration in the modern history of our nation and i believe we need to recommit america to all of our scientific endeavors and critical technologies and begin to create the high value added jobs of the future we need to do stem cell research and reduce the illnesses and diseases and we need to reduce the cost of health care for individuals and businesses alike dem jkerry30 4 04 excerpt john_kerry rejecting his call for closer ties even with great britain the wall street journal said that the united states wants no alliance or anything that resembles an alliance with any nation well some things never change but what was true in 1946 is still true today america must lead a broad coalition against our adversaries and we must be a beacon of values as well as strength in order to succeed this is our duty it s our obligation to those great leaders of half a century ago who set us on the course to victory in the cold war starting right here at fulton so you don t come to fulton to give a speech you come to fulton to honor a tradition and to give the country and the world the gift of hard truths and a sense of hope both are needed today as we stand on the eve of the anniversary in this country of the day that major combat operations were declared over in iraq and the president declared mission accomplished i don t think there s anyone in this room today or 6000 miles away who doesn t wish that those words had been true but we ve seen the news we ve seen the pictures and we know that we are living through days of great danger what anniversaries give us is the time to reflect not about where we ve been but about what might be possible possible for our men and women in the military the iraqi people and for allies all around the world this anniversary is not a time to shout it s not a time for blame it is a time for a new direction in iraq and for america to work together so that once again this nation it is a time for america to work together so that once again this nation leads in a way that brings the world to us and with us in our efforts in the end and this is common sense understood i think by most americans america is safer and stronger when it is respected around the world not just feared to move to that place of promise and possibility we must all see and share in the hard truths that are all around us we know that there s no harder truth than when an american pays the ultimate sacrifice for our country at this moment 722 men and women have fallen eulogies and rifle salutes and the last lone note of taps have echoed around our towns the sacrifice is profound and grief beyond measure and the country s gratitude is real and eternal i will share with you that it is a grief and a gratitude that lasts for all time because when i arrived here in columbia a big sign was held up over a fence i didn t know these people were going to be there but they were cousins family members of one of my best friends who was killed in vietnam and they came here holding that sign which said don drow s country this is where he came from missouri and the hard truth is that we know now that more lives will be lost until the mission is truly accomplished and our duty is to make sure that parents families and friends who lost loved ones will know that they did not die in vain we also know that for more than 135 000 families the ongoing burden of this mission is something that they feel every day the truth is that there s an empty seat in the church pew on sunday there s an extra car in the driveway and one less friend to phone for a movie on a friday night and the reasons that summoned americans to service vary it might be the story of a young man or woman that was called to duty on the wake of september 11 or by a family tradition of service to our country or it may be a small businessperson who was called to reserve or national guard duty like liza spence we thank liza for her service and for being here today thank you these are people who were called first for a few weeks but now serve indefinitely they answered the call of service they did their duty but we now know that our military was sent into battle without the right equipment helicopter pilots have flown battlefield missions without the best available antimissile systems we now know that roughly one fourth of coalition deaths have occurred as a result of attacks on unarmored vehicles because we don t have enough armored vehicles to go around we didn t send enough we now know that our failure to forge and to lead a true coalition has forced thousands in the national guard and reserves to be away from families and jobs for more than a year with no end in sight and we now know that civilians from half a dozen allied countries have been kidnapped hundreds of iraqi civilians have been murdered in terrorist attacks in addition many of the iraqi military and police whom we trained have refused to fight or fought inefficiently and extremists in major cities are rallying challenging our resolve and vowing to drive us out this is a moment of truth in iraq not just for this administration the country the iraqi people but for the world this may be our last chance to get it right we need to put pride aside to build a stable iraq we must reclaim our country s standing in the world by doing what has kept america safe and made it more secure before leading in a way that brings others to us so that we are respected not just feared around the globe this will not be easy especially now after the decisions of the last year a hard truth that sometimes fails to get through the newspapers and daily reports but we can accomplish the mission and we must because i can tell you from personal experience we owe it to the brave men and women who stand in harm s way at this moment in america dem jkerry4 2 04 john_kerry thank you washington thank you so much i wish the caucuses were right here tonight well for the second time in a few days a new england patriot has won on the road and i hope the seahawk fans will forgive me now we carry this campaign and the cause of a stronger fairer more prosperous america to all parts of the country and we will take nothing for granted we will compete everywhere and in november we will beat george w bush once again tonight let me pay a special to the veterans who have lifted this campaign up all the way from iowa to what we have achieved we all of us together across this country today for months and for miles i have depended on the same band of brothers that i depended on 35 years ago and it is true as i said in new hampshire we are a little older we are a little grayer but we still know how to fight for our country and we re going to win you know this president doesn t even mention veterans in his state of the union message and then he offers a va budget that the vfw calls a sham and a disgrace well i pledge that when i am president i pledge to those who have worn the uniform of our country and to those who wear it today that i will be a champion for them in the oval office and i will never forget that patriotism is defined by never forgetting those who wore the uniform of our country i am humbled and i am honored that so many americans have joined this cause today and in the past weeks today i thank those in delaware and missouri and in north dakota and in mexico and arizona and those who went to vote for me and created an enormously close contest in south carolina and in oklahoma i am proud of those who have joined this cause and to those of you who have not yet joined us i ask you to go to johnkerry com and make yourselves part of this cause enlist with us and if i am president you will continue they were more persistent in new hampshire you know when i am president you will continue to be heard not just in the white house and through our administration but you will continue to be heard because johnkerry com will continue to be online every day of the kerry presidency and as i have traveled our extraordinary nation i ve listened to so many of you from the snows of the heartland and of new england to the sunshine of south carolina and may i say the wonderful sunshine of arizona yesterday and everywhere i ve been the people of our nation are determined to restore hope and to change the direction of our country together we can lift our country up to the america that it can become and at the heart of this campaign at the heart of this campaign is a commitment to an america with a future that is built on fairness for all not on a privilege for few and we will so we will repeal the bush tax cuts for the wealthy and invest in health care and education and we believe in an america where recovery is measured not in the joblessness that we have seen in our economy but in opportunity and in rising incomes for working families and for the middle class and so we will i pledge to you shut down every loophole every incentive every reward for every benedict arnold ceo or company that want to exploit the tax code and take jobs and money overseas at the expense of the american people we will offer rewards to good companies that create jobs and keep jobs here at home and we will raise the minimum wage and we will invest in head start and early head start and give the children of this country a chance to be full citizens for life we will meet the needs of a neglected and a forgotten america because we believe in a prosperity where we cut the poverty of millions not the taxes of millionaires and we believe deeply in the fundamental decency that health care is a right and not a privilege for the powerful and for the wealthy in our nation so i pledge to you that we will complete the mission that was begun by harry truman in 1948 and we will cut the cost of health care in america and make it available to those who cannot afford it today and we will guarantee that every person every family s health care in america is as important as any politician in washington d c that is a principle by which we will live and i know as you do that there are powerful interests arrayed on the other side of this struggle and the obstacles sometimes seem overwhelming to americans but i am ready for this mission from standing up to richard nixon to stop the war in vietnam to stopping to stopping george bush and the big oil companies from drilling in the alaska wildlife refuge i know how to take on those powerful interests i ve done it all my life i ve fought against the polluters against the hmos and the drug companies and i pledge to you tonight i have only just begun to fight we will take this fight to america we believe deeply in the possibility of energy security and energy independence and clean energy for the united states of america we will invest in the technologies of the future so that the cars of the future can be built into detroit built by american workers so that america s sons and daughters will never have to fight and die in the middle east because of our dependency on oil from that region and we believe we believe in an america where the constitution is respected a country a country of equal rights and civil liberties and where the attorney general is no longer john ashcroft george bush who promised to be a uniter has in fact become has in fact become the great divider and we will resume the great march of our history to a country where everyone can hope and strive and move ahead no matter where you come from no matter who you are or no matter what the color of your skin and we believe all of us and we believe in a stronger america george bush who speaks of strength has made america weaker weaker economically weaker in education weaker in health care and the truth is that george bush has made america weaker by overextending the armed forces of the united states overstraining overstraining our reserves driving away our allies and running the most arrogant reckless inept and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of our country our opponents say that they want to run on national security well we will not run from that debate i welcome it if they want that debate i will remind them happily that some of us know something about aircraft carriers for real and i look forward and if george bush wants to make national security the centerpiece of this campaign we have three words for him that we know he understands bring it on when i was flying in here today and shared that extraordinary vista from the air that you see of your mountains of the columbia river i remembered how two centuries ago on the shores of washington lewis and clark completed their epic journey westward and touched the waters of the pacific for the first time their daring and their vision symbolized what was best in america and now i ask all democrats all americans to join now in the journey of our time all across this continent all across our states to define our character and recapture our own spirit with faith in our ideals and in each other we can return america to a road of greatness and of justice before i finish let me just pay tribute if i may to a few people tonight first of all i hope you will join me in expressing our admiration and our respect to two friends of mine and of america s to joe and hadassah lieberman i have had the privilege of knowing joe since we were in college together and i think that together he and hadassah brought a grace a steadfastness of spirit of belief of principle and a civil discourse for our nation that we need in this country and their spirit will be missed from this trail but not from our nation s dialogue as we continue forward and all of us join in saying thank you to them for their contribution to our nation and i also want to congratulate john and elizabeth edwards my friends for their showing in south carolina tonight and for his spirited campaign and for what he has brought to our party and to our efforts and i want all of you to join me in a very special welcome and a very special thank you to a remarkable stunning campaigner a person who is creating her own following across the country you d be amazed how many places i ve gone and people say to me if she were running for president i d vote for her but she isn t let me remind you will you welcome with me someone i hope could be the next first lady of the united states teresa heinz kerry and fighting by my side all the way have been a great group of folks and i want to thank and begin by thanking the first person who joined this great effort out here in washington and he has been absolutely remarkable all along the way and that s my chair adam smith congressman adam smith thank you adam and the dean of your delegation norm dicks and jay inslee brian baird rick larsen congressman rick larsen and i especially want to thank my colleague my friend who has worked with me on so many issues and who yesterday endorsed me here in the state senator maria cantwell i m very appreciative for her and i want to thank governor gary locke and mona for his leadership for his support here and i want the state of washington to return patty murray to the united states senate so that we can do what we need to do and i want to thank a very very special group they ve been with me all across this nation and they re a symbol of the gift of individuals in america who make our nation strong and safe they put themselves on the line every day and they face danger every day they have for centuries but they came more to america s consciousness in the last years because of new york and washington and pennsylvania and i m talking about these people in black and gold and been with me every step of the way the firefighters of the united states of america thank you so much harold schaitberger and the firefighters now my friends the campaign in the state of washington and across this nation continues we will go out of here taking nothing for granted fighting for every vote but i pledge to you that every step of the way i will never forget the trust i will never forget that you are joined together in effort to overcome the cynicism that has gripped our politics and our country we deserve a president of the united states who doesn t look for the lowest common denominator of american politics but one who looks for the highest not one who drives wedges between people but one who brings america together and remembers we are one america one people one spirit let s go out and win let s take back the white house and our democracy in the united states thank you and god bless thank you very much dem jkerry4 4 03 john_kerry thank you all for welcoming me here today and most importantly for giving me the privilege of sharing some thoughts with you this afternoon about our country our future and obviously about our education system it is a great great pleasure for me to be here with a great leader of education and of the labor movement of our country and i m so personally admiring of her on a number of different levels and needless to say obviously also for her personal courage and i m glad to be here with sandy feldman sandy thank you for all that you do tom hobart thank you for your leadership as i m sure everybody here joins me in agreeing it has been outstanding and i don t know where randy weingarten but i pay tribute to her leadership also and thank you all for the privilege of being here to all the teachers the health care professionals the higher education faculty there we go somebody over there is very proud and to all of the school related professionals who are here today everybody s bringing their own cheering section i like that it is a privilege for me to be able to be here and to talk to you we don t come here this afternoon democrats or republicans liberals or conservatives defined by any label we come here as americans concerned deeply about the future of our country and at a moment when our troops are in harm s way having been one of those troops and was remembering what it was like to have a country divided and having lost the legitimacy and the consent of the american people with respect to the war that i fought in i know that every person here joins together in extending to our troops our gratitude our admiration our awe at the courage that they exhibit on behalf of their nation and we wish them all a safe return and all of us whether you were for them going or against them going no matter what position there is only one exit strategy and it is victory as soon as possible and get our troops home as many of you may have followed i had a little bump in the road to the presidency a few weeks ago i m about 6 1 2 weeks out 7 weeks out now from prostate surgery and so i am standing in front of you this afternoon living testimony to the fact that there is really a purpose in life for duct tape and plastic and for all those of you who may be concerned about the health issue you know the question of running around the country the vigor required for a campaign early mornings late nights long days put your minds at ease i saw him the other day and dick cheney looks just fine for the rest of you who are asking yourselves that really pregnant question can a man be president of the united states without a prostate i want you to put your minds at ease again why not we ve had a number of republicans who ve been president without a heart now i am privileged to have a few moments before sandy speaks because i know she needs to get back to new york and i want to share with you from my heart a sense of frustration and also a sense of optimism about the possibilities in our great country it is 35 years ago today this very day that martin luther king was shot on that balcony in memphis i remember that time because i was in the gulf of tonkin on a ship serving my country before i went back in country again to a gunboat in the mekong delta and i remember thinking about the absurdity of violence in our own country and of the kind of divisions that existed in that period of time lo and behold i arrived back off the coast of california to go into training for my next tour and the very night that i arrived was the night that the first radio we picked up from the coast of california was the shooting at the ambassador hotel and the next day we lost robert kennedy so i am part of that generation that comes to you today having felt the losses of that period of time when so many of us committed to the politics of this country with a sense that we as individuals could make a difference and that politics was a noble profession and that we needed to make a difference in the lives of our fellow citizens and the future indeed of our country we need to write a history that we can be proud of out of that energy came the civil rights act the voting rights act the housing act the clean air act the clean water act the safe drinking water act and even richard nixon was forced to sign into existence the epa not because he believed wholeheartedly in it but because citizens like you and others across this country made it a voting issue well i ve come to you today tired as you are tired of the excess of rhetoric in the american political process that talks about education and sells it short that pretends to value teaching but doesn t value it in the way we pay teachers or hire additional teachers for the system presidents who come along and say they want to be the education president but walk away from the commitment to in fact make education america s number one priority and i am here to say to you that we need a president of the united states who understands and has a proven record of commitment to the education system of this nation it is more critical today than it has ever been at any time and all of you know it you know the struggles you re going through and you know also the way in which politicians have made teachers and professionals within the education system the targets of opportunity of their shortsightedness or just their will to put electioneering ahead of substance and ahead of the real choices for the american people i think every single one of you knows the way in which you ve been sold short with respect to that and i say to you today that if we are going to be the kind of country that america talks about if we re going to be the kind of country that fulfills the promise of our constitution if we re going to be the kind of country that can manage all this information that we proudly point to that flows at us from all directions if we re going to be the kind of country that can build consensus among our citizens and make decisions about critical choices about life in america if we re going to be the kind of country that breaks down the barriers of hatred and fear and bigotry that plays out in life in so many different ways if we re going to continue to be the melting pot if we re going to continue to understand the rights that we are afforded under the constitution then we need to address the critical issue of the 1960s in the 1960s the issue was separate but equal remember and thurgood marshall went to the supreme court of the united states to make clear there was no such thing as separate and equal but today in the united states of america we have a problem that is deeper and more dangerous we have separate and unequal institutionalized school systems in america and an administration that thinks it s more important to take money from average americans and give it to the wealthiest we need to change that kind of thinking and restore to this country the capacity to i know something about teaching because my sister is a teacher she s been a teacher for 25 or 30 years now she taught for many years in schools in other countries american schools but she is now teaching in an inner city school in boston middle school and i have listened to her almost in tears talking about the burdens that the lack of commitment of american politicians to the school system places on her and her fellow teachers it is time to stop the shame in the united states of america of asking teachers out of their own less than adequate pay to go out and provide the resources to put into the classroom to teach kids in the united states of america but more so it is time to help those teachers to be able to have the adequate tools to be able to do what they came to the system to do people who chose to be teachers didn t make the choice to go to wall street and get rich they didn t make the choice to pick a profession that made them rich they made a choice to be what america has always talked about as the most valued profession of all and it is long since time that we did more than call it the most valued profession we need to make it the most valued profession by valuing it in the way you re treated and paid i ve listened to my sister tell me about eight or nine kids she has in her class who have been passed on to her essentially dysfunctional and they came probably to the first grade dysfunctional as we all know because we know there are deficiencies in america today that allow children to be less than meeting the law of our land which is that you will come to school prepared to learn in the first grade but like so many kids these kids came with deficiencies from the home from the surroundings from the lack of parent or parents the lack of adult input and it falls on that first grade teacher to try to make up for that differential from the word get go and i ve talked to those first grade teachers who tell me senator i ve got kids who come to class who are so far behind already in the first grade who can t recognize early shapes or sizes or colors or do early numbers and i have to make a choice whether i can bring them all along and hold back the rest of the class or whether on not i can give them the specialized particular attention they need to catch up you know that choice it s a choice made every day in america now we have a bill that many people passed in the united states congress and supported on the notion that there was a great compromise that we were going to try to help schools that weren t performing up to the standard that everybody wanted them to that we were going to try to make up a difference for those kids who needed remedial work or extra classroom time personalized attention we were going to try to help the teachers who needed the help to be able to help those kids and this administration walked away walked away from the promise to put the resources into that to make up the difference of that separate and unequal which comes from the fact that we are dependent on the property tax in communities that have no tax base it is incumbent on the federal government to recognize that helping to redress that imbalance which we tried to do with title i and should be doing with idea we ve only crept back up now to about 17 percent we need to guarantee that we relieve the burden from communities by fully funding idea and by funding title i and other programs to the level that allows people to teach to the highest level possible i admire you because i know your are working laboring under the most extraordinarily difficult circumstances where not only are the conditions of the workplace difficult but because this administration has walked away from its promise to you they ve made the long term outlook difficult i think most of you here would agree that it is fair to try to put fair standards in place it is fair and sensible to try to have accountability you want accountability i ve never met a teacher who didn t care that every teacher in the school was teaching to standards but if we re going to require the kind of accountability that s put on the table we have an obligation to fulfill our promise to make sure that the money is there and i intend to criss cross this country from state to state community to community and hold this president accountable for making a mockery of the words leave no child behind i think all of you know that we need more than simply the commitment of the resources we need to hire some two million additional teachers over the course of the next ten years we need to be able to attract teachers to school districts that don t have sufficient money to be able to attract the teachers that we need we need to guarantee that we have schools that themselves are physically up to capacity i know in my home state of massachusetts i went to visit a high school the other day that may lose its accreditation and it s so far down on the list and now the state is starting to make cuts why because we ve had a downturn in the economy yes but because a huge proportion of the revenues that were coming to the states have been taken back and reduced whether in medicaid or medicare or school assistance or transportation or a host of other front line defender efforts we ve had a federal government with an administration that thinks it is more important to take money from the average income earner of america and social security fund and transfer it to the wealthiest americans that is robin hood in reverse and if we can t get america to rise up and say no to that shame on us we don t deserve to be a majority party on our side in this country we need to reach out to americans and point out what is happening the federal government turns around with the largest tax cut in a time of war in history never in a time of war have we had a tax cut we have about 100 billion plus that we know of in additional costs for war we have deficits going out as far as the eye can see and what does this administration do turns around and gives the people a cheap slogan it s not the government s money it s your money and you deserve a refund the only problem is the slogan is not true it s not your money it s your children s money because we are borrowing from the future and putting america into debt in order to be able to make this transfer i believe that across the board there are a better set of choices for this great nation of ours on a cold winter day in january of 1776 john adams jumped on a horse to ride two and a half weeks in the dead of winter to get down to philadelphia he went to a city where only the year before some 400 people had died of smallpox but he nevertheless went as did the others to debate the great issue of independence for our country and through that winter and spring into the summer they thought about where to go in america they signed ultimately a declaration of independence and they wrote at the time john adams and others about how if they failed in this great enterprise they would hand at the end of a british rope for treason indeed during the first days of the war it was not going well as george washington was pushed back to valley forge that bitter winter when thomas paine wrote about summertime soldiers and sunshine patriots as by the droves soldiers were deserting losing faith but the leaders did not lose faith the leaders knew where our country needed to go and they led the had the capacity to take us in a direction that has put us on this great experiment which is young compared to almost every country on the planet and here we are today inheriting that mantle of the right to define for ourselves the future for our country to follow in their footsteps and they are huge indeed i submit to you that never before in our country has there been so much to do and yet has so little been asked of us in an effort to gather together to try to do it not for ourselves but for us all together as a country and i think back on that night when i came back when i talked to you about robert kennedy i remember that was a lost weekend for me in california as i watched television and i listened to my colleague now of 18 years in the united states senate ted kennedy give an extraordinary eulogy from st patrick s cathedral and he spoke about the words his brother used quoted of george bernard shaw you may remember them some men see things as they are and ask why i dream things that never were and ask why not we need to have leadership that is prepared in this country to get back to asking why not instead of having leadership that is content to not even ask why we need to have leadership that is prepared to say why not in the richest country on the face of this planet stop being the only industrial nation that does not recognize health care for all of its citizens as a right and not as a privilege why not as adults instead of being content to knowingly allow so many of our children to be put on a track to go to prison and spend 70 000 a year to house them in jail for the rest of their lives why not invest 10 000 a year for each of those children in early childhood education in head start in early start smart start and allow them to be full citizens for the rest of their life why not instead of being content to send our young to the middle east to be involved in the politics of an area that is so consumed by the politics of oil why not after our dependency has grown almost double from the time jimmy carter first faced the crisis of the 1970s why not harness the entrepreneurial excitement and energy and capacity and creative skill of our nation just as president kennedy did in the 1960s to say we would go to the moon within ten years why not go to the moon right here on earth by declaring that we will be energy independent by a certain time in the united states of america and create the jobs of the future why not guarantee that we have an attorney general of the united states who fully respects the constitution of our country and the civil rights of our nation why not set out together on a great journey for our nation s soul to redefine again the possibilities of politics the challenge to all of us here is not just to take care of the needs in education but to recognize that the real strength of our great nation is not defined by what drops out of the belly of a b 52 it s not defined by what comes out of the muzzle of and m 4 or an m 16 strong as those things are and as much as we need them it is defined by those things that really make a difference to the quality of life as human beings to the safety and nurturing of our children to the quality of our education to the capacity of our health care system to meet the needs of our fellow citizens it is defined by all these things that ultimately as robert kennedy said make life worth living and define why we are so proud of being americans i think our challenge is to bring back into the political system the 60 percent of our fellow citizens who don t even vote today our challenge is to reach out to disaffected america our challenge is to remember that gotv does not mean go on tv it means get out the vote and we need to give people a reason to get out the vote so i literally ask you to consider with me the choices for our country our economy is hurting as never before if i were to ask you the question are you better off in any sector housing transportation the environment our relationship with the rest of the world the education system the health care system is anybody able to answer the question that we are better off today than we were two and a half years ago in the united states the answer is resoundingly no but we can be we can be if we go back to find the fiscal responsibility we had before and if we put real choices in front of the american people a real choice that says no to a bush tax cut that doesn t make economic sense that isn t stimulative and that is unfair in its structure and yes to education to health care to cleaning up the environment and defining a future of which we can be proud i close by saying to you i am a great fan of the greatest generation my dad signed up in 1939 to be in the army air corps and i volunteered for service much in the tradition of those who went before us because i believe in service to country but i believe today there is a great challenge to all of us we cannot be content to simply quote the words of or talk about the example of those who were in the greatest generation there is a huge question looming before us which is what are they going to write about our generation and i want it to be that we did not expend all our energy once before and walk away and take care of ourselves but rather that we will not be content to be the first generation to pass this country of ours on in worse shape than we found it we need to embark on a new journey of hope of dreaming of believing in the potential of america and if you will join together with us in that effort to make real the words of our politics and to fulfill the promise of our elections we can change the face of this nation and write the history of our generation i hope you ll join in doing that thank you and god bless thank you very much dem jkerry6 5 04 excerpt john_kerry of abuse that are flashing across the television screens of the world the pain and the shame that we feel looking at these images is the understanding that this is not who we are that this is not what we stand for and that we are seeing things that contradict everything that the brave men and women of the armed forces of the united states of america are fighting to defend these despicable action have endangered the live of our soldiers and they have frankly made their mission harder to accomplish america is stronger and our families are safer and they are respected around the world when we take actions that live up to our values and earn that respect around the world we cannot succeed in iraq by abandoning the values that define america when i was in the navy the captain of the boat was in charge and the captain always took responsibility after the bay of pigs invasion john f kennedy told america i am the responsible officer of this government today i have a message for the men and women of our armed forces as commander in chief i will honor your commitment and i will take responsibility for the bad as well as the good as president i will not be the last to know what is going on in my command i will demand accountability from those who serve and i will take responsibility for their actions and i will do everything that i can in my power to repair the damage that this has caused to america to our standing in the world and to the ideals for which we stand this is my promise to our troops and this is my promise to our nation i think you can understand why it is so important to share a few words about this with our troops in danger and the nation s value system held up for all to make judgments about i am happy to be here today this is a special place i am here in the heart of the inland empire and and the home of ken hubbs i think that s pretty good and equally important to colton high school obviously it is the home of the three team undefeated football season of last year the yellow jackets i want to thank my wife theresa for taking time to be here today she s been campaigning her heart out across the country and i think she ll make an absolutely spectacular first lady dem jkerry6 7 04 john_kerry good morning pittsburgh thank you for a wonderful celebration of the fourth of july here teresa and i have enjoyed so much having a day or so to be here with you thank you for coming here this morning to be part of this journey together and thank you for deciding to be part of the future this morning this morning i ve had the privilege of talking with a number of talented and decent americans who have been both courageous enough and patriotic enough to allow themselves to be considered for the vice presidency of the united states of america teresa and i and all citizens are so grateful to them and to their families for caring enough about changing the direction of our country that they decided to go through what is inevitably a very intrusive and even frustrating process each of those individuals and i mean this each of those individuals would make a great vice president and indeed in their own right could lead our country but i can choose only one running mate and this morning i have done so i have chosen a man who understands and defends the values of america a man who has shown courage and conviction as a champion for middle class americans and for those struggling to reach the middle class a man who has shown guts and determination and political skill in his own race for the presidency of the united states a man whose life has prepared him for leadership and whose character brings him to exercise it i am pleased to announce that with your help the next vice president of the united states of america will be senator john edwards from north carolina well i trust that met with your approval this campaign this campaign for the presidency really began this campaign now wait we ve got plenty of those don t worry we ve got four months for you to get a hold of those things we re going to get them around this campaign for the presidency really began two years ago and throughout those two years as well as for four years before that i have worked with john edwards side by side and sometimes head to head i ve seen john edwards think argue advocate legislate and lead for six years now i know his skill i know his passion i know his strength i know his conscience i know his faith he has honored the lessons of home and family that he learned in north carolina and he brings those values to shape a better america together with all of us john edwards is ready for this job he is ready for this job and there is something else about john edwards that is important in this campaign and our country at this critical time as you know i am determined that we reach out across party lines that we speak the heart of america that we speak of hope and of optimism and john edwards will join me in doing that as so many as so many of you know throughout this campaign john talked about the great divide in america the two americas that exists between those who are doing very well and those who are struggling to make ends meet in our country that concern is at the center of this campaign it is what it is all about it is what the 35 years of my struggle have been about and i am so proud that together john edwards and i are now going to fight to build one america for all americans as you know as a member of the senate intelligence committee and also a leader in fighting bioterrorism and understanding the threats we face he shares my unshakable commitment to having a military that is second to nobody in the world but also to restoring old and rebuilding new alliances that make america stronger and there is also a great bonus a great bonus in having john on this ticket he like me is blessed with a remarkable wife a strong brave woman elizabeth edwards and teresa and i will be proud to stand with the edwards family with their daughter kate who just graduated from college this year and with their two little ones emma claire and jack and anyone who knows them and america will get to know them knows that this is a family that loves each other and loves america we we are teresa and i have talked with john and elizabeth this morning we ve invited them to come here to pittsburgh tonight and we re going to spend the evening together have a little chance to break bread get a chance to talk our families will have a chance to meet and get to know each other well and tomorrow morning together we all look forward to coming out and speaking to the nation for the first time as a team that will lead this country in a new and stronger direction in the next 120 days john and i and elizabeth and teresa are going to crisscross this country and fight for the nation that all of us know that we can be this is about fairness it s about fundamental fairness for all americans it s about people being able to go to work and actually getting the ability through a week s work and a month s work and a year s work to pay their bills to live decently to get ahead to be able to be fair this is a fight about creating jobs in america that don t pay less than the jobs that we re losing overseas this is about this is about having a president who fights as hard for your job as he fights for his own job this is about once and for all ending the shame of the united states of america being the only industrial nation on this planet and the richest one at that that doesn t yet understand but it will at the end of this campaign health care is not a privilege for the wealthy and the connected health care is for all americans and we re going to fight for it this is also a fight for common sense and i can pledge you this john edwards and i would never think about sending young america s sons and daughters into harm s way anywhere in the world without telling the american people the truth and part of that common sense is pretty straightforward god only gave us three percent of the world s oil reserves right but the middle east has 65 percent i think it s smart for america to control its own destiny i think it s smart for us to be able to know that our security is in our hands i think it s smart for us to know that no young american in uniform will ever be held hostage to america s dependence on oil in the middle east we re going to liberate ourselves and as john learned in north carolina and as both of us have heard all across this country we ve met too many parents who are forced to send their kids to a school that s overcrowded in its classes that s lost its after school programs parents who feel frustrated that they just can t even get their kids the opportunities that parents live and die for well when i m president and with john edwards as vice president i promise you this we re going to stop being a country that s content to build a prison and spend 70 000 a year or 50 000 a year to house a young person there for the rest of their life rather than invest 10 000 11 000 in head start early start smart start give kids a chance to be full citizens so i ask you over these next days as we build this team and as we go forward in this race we ve got four months four months and i have you you re right you bet we do we have you and that s exactly the point that i want to make every generation in american history think of your parents and your grandparents and go back and read your history books every generation has had a chance to contribute to who we are as americans teresa who came from east africa a dictatorship to become american and know the passion of being an american who saw her father vote only for the first time when he was 71 years old understands as we all do the blessings of this great country of ours but what makes this country great is our ability to come together like this in a square in a city and talk with each other and build a movement that writes our future we have the ability to be able to do these things but we have to go out and make it happen i i learned the great blessing of this great country years ago when i fought for it and i came together on a small boat in the jungles of vietnam with five other guys from places as diverse as south carolina arkansas california iowa massachusetts and you know what when we were on that boat folks nobody worried about bank accounts and schools and backgrounds and religion we covered for each other we worked together we were literally all in the same boat and what we need is a president who understands that there aren t people who are powerful and special interests that you take care of in this country we re all in the same boat and when i m president we re going to have a country that reflects that we re going to have a president who fights for all americans doesn t divide them brings people together to solve problems i pledge to you that while we may be older and grayer now those of us who served we still know how to fight for our country and we re going to fight for our country langston hughes was a poet a black man and a poor man and he wrote in the 1930s powerful words that apply to all of us today he said let america be america again let it be the dream that it used to be for those whose sweat and blood whose faith and pain for those whose hand at the foundry something pittsburgh knows about for those whose plow in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again we ve come here today to put a team together that s going to fight to bring back america s mighty dream we re going out of here today to let america be america again let s go out and make it happen together thank you and god bless thank you very much dem jkerry8 9 04 john_kerry thank you so much thank you for a wonderful cincinnati wonderful ohio warm and generous welcome i appreciate it enormously and like you i m so respectful and so in awe of the courage and the patriotism of robin o brien will you all join me with robin o brien will you all join me in saying thank you to robin o brien for her wonderful thank you thank you ladies and gentlemen please ladies please everybody thank you thank you very very much one of the things that gil and all of our troops are fighting for as they fight in iraq is freedom and i have nothing but the greatest respect for people s right to have their opinions and to express them here in the united states of america that s who we are as americans and i might add it s a terrific tactic of the bush team they love to disrupt they love to interrupt they don t want america to hear the truth but we will talk the truth i think that more than anything i really believe this very deeply i honestly respect the differences of opinion and the emotions that people feel we all respect them you know i once stood up and spoke about what i thought our government was doing that was wrong and so many of our generation believed deeply in that right but i think what we need more than anything today in this great country of ours is a conversation a talk americans to americans not about how we divide each other and we need leadership that doesn t look for the lowest common denominator of america but the highest common denominator bring us together bring us together and these are troubling times they are times of emotion they tug at the emotions of all americans what we need to do is lower our voices and listen to each other about the real choices that we face as a nation yesterday in iraq we marked the most incalculable loss of all yesterday we reached a tragic milestone more than 1 000 of america s sons and daughters gave their lives in service to our country more than 1 000 sons and daughters husbands and wives brothers and sisters who will never come home to live the lives that they dreamed of we honor them we pray for them we pray for their families and we owe it to their memory and to all of our troops to do what s right in iraq and what s right here at home i also want to speak directly to the more than 150 000 troops who are currently serving and risking their lives as far away as in iraq or afghanistan and to the sons and daughters like gil o brien that robin just talked about who have served once who are here now but who are going to go back your country is proud of you you are the most dedicated capable military that we ve ever had in our history we are united as a nation in support for you we pledge to stand with you and with your families as you are standing on the front lines for ours you re the best of america and you perform magnificently every single day we thank you for your service and for your sacrifice twenty three months ago president bush came right here to this great civic and educational institution in this great city to ask the american people for our support and he promised then to make the right choices when it came to sending young americans to iraq here in cincinnati he said that if congress approved the resolution giving him the authority to use force it did not mean that military action would be unavoidable but he chose not to give the weapons inspectors the time they needed not just to get the job done but to give meaning to the words going to war as a last resort here in cincinnati he promised to lead a coalition but he failed to build the kind of broad strong real coalition and he rushed to war without a plan to win the peace here in cincinnati from this hall on that night he spoke to the nation and he promised quote if we have to act we will take every precaution that is possible we will plan carefully we will act with the full power of the united states military we will act with allies at our side and we will prevail but then george w bush made the wrong choices he himself now admits he miscalculated in iraq but in truth his miscalculation was ignoring the advice that he was given including the very best advice of america s own military when he didn t like what he was hearing he even fired the army chief of staff his miscalculation was going to war without taking every precaution without giving the inspectors time his miscalculation was going to war without planning carefully and without the allies that we should have had at our side as a result america has paid nearly 90 percent of the bill in iraq contrast that with the gulf war where our allies paid 95 percent of the costs george w bush s wrong choices have led america in the wrong direction in iraq and they have left america without the resources that we need so desperately here at home the cost of the president s go it alone policy in iraq is now 200 billion and counting 200 billion for iraq but they tell us we can t afford after school programs for our children 200 billion for iraq but they tell us we can t afford health care for our veterans 200 billion dollars for iraq but they tell us we can t afford to keep the 100 000 police officers we put on the streets during the 1990s we re here today to tell them they re wrong it s time to lead america in a new direction when it comes to iraq it s not that i would have done one thing differently from the president i would have done almost everything differently from the president i would have given the inspectors the time they needed before rushing to war i would have built a genuine coalition of allies and made sure that every soldier that was put in harm s way actually had the equipment and the body armor that they needed i would have listened to our senior military leaders in this country and i would have listened to the bipartisan advice that was given by the congress of the united states and if there s one thing that i learned from my own experience in a war i would never have gone to war without a plan to win the peace i would not have made the wrong choices that are now forcing us to pay nearly the entire cost of this war 200 billion that we re not investing in education and health care job creation here at home 200 billion for going it alone in iraq that s the wrong choice that s the wrong direction and that s the wrong leadership for america and while we re spending that 200 billion in iraq that s to this date it will go on 8 million americans are looking for work here in america 2 million more 2 million more than when george w bush took office and we re told that we can t afford to invest in job creation and job training here at home but for the bush administration helping americans find a good job has never been the top priority the first time that we really heard anything much about jobs has been in the last few months of this campaign and i suggest to you that once every few months just before an election is not enough at that convention in new york last week they actually told us that out sourcing jobs was good for america now that should not come as a surprise to you because that s exactly what they ve been doing for the last four years and that s exactly what they intend to do for the next four years that s the wrong choice that s the wrong direction for america that s the wrong leadership for america as president i intend to set a new direction and it s one that s based on just fundamental good old mainstream american values and common sense here s common sense i will close the tax loopholes that actually ask you with your tax money to reward companies that ship the jobs overseas and instead and instead we re going to do something else that leaps out at you in its common sense we re going to take that money from the money that s encouraging people to go overseas and we re going to reward the companies that create and keep the good jobs right here in the united states of america because of this president s wrong choices we re spending 200 billion in iraq while the costs of health care are going through the roof and we re told we don t have the resources to make health care affordable and available to all americans we don t have the resources to reimburse medicare enough we can t help the hospitals hire more nurses we can t help people be able to afford to get it americans now 45 million strong have no health insurance at all 5 million more than the day george w bush took office and after four years of action four years of nothing four years of no action four years of no concern four years of no meetings at which they really pulled people together and say how do we solve this problem together as americans four years of no mention of those who are struggling to afford health care suddenly the president finally told us last week that he actually had a plan well if you were wondering what it was you only had to wait 24 hours to find out because the very next day he raised the medicare premiums by 17 percent the biggest increase in medicare in the history of our country and here s the kicker a lot of that money is nothing more than a windfall transferred payment from your pockets right into the health care companies and the hmos they re charging 17 percent more for medicare while making america pay 200 billion for a go it alone policy in iraq that s the wrong choice that s the wrong direction that s the wrong leadership for america as president i will set a new direction george w bush believes that when it comes to health care the big drug companies come first the insurance companies come second and you come last well i m going to put you first our plan is a real plan i invite anybody listening go to johnkerry com it includes all the ways we re going to deal with children with seniors with health care and it actually contrary to what the president who once again is misleading america running around the country talking about tort reform it also includes a provision of medical malpractice and tort reform so we will take on the waste and the greed in the health care system and you know what we re going to save the average family up to 1 000 a year on their premiums our plan is going to help and we don t just focus on the people who don t have the health insurance we focus on the people who have it and lower their costs and we focus on american business and we do it in a market way in a responsible way we invite business to be part of the solution there s no mandate there s no government program there s no new bureaucracy and we let americans do what americans want to do which is choose their own doctor choose their own plan and have choices as to where to go what to do and one of the things i m proudest of our plan automatically immediately will cover all children in america day one you go to school you re covered you go to day care you re covered you go to child care you re covered i ll tell you i am determined that when i am president america will stop being the only industrial nation on this planet that doesn t yet accept that health care is not a privilege for the elected or the selected or the wealthy or the connected health care is a right for all americans and we re going to make it available to all americans because of george w bush s wrong choices we re spending 200 billion in iraq while we re running up the biggest deficits in american history the biggest deficits announced yesterday and the biggest debt we ve added more debt under george bush more debt to the national debt of our nation than we added from george washington to ronald reagan and that threatens social security and that s what alan greenspan told us the other day in fact they re raiding the social security trust fund in order to pay for their mistakes in iraq and at that convention in new york last week guess what george bush said he actually had a new idea and you know what it is do you know what his new idea is it s actually the bad old idea of privatizing social security and cutting your benefits that s the wrong choice wrong direction wrong leadership for america so as president i will not privatize social security i will not cut benefits and i will not raise the retirement age because when you ve worked for a lifetime in america america owes you what you ve earned and because of this president s wrong choices in iraq we re spending 200 billion there instead of investing in making america energy independent george w bush s energy policy is to trust the big oil companies and the saudis in fact a national news magazine just reported that a senior member of the saudi royal family said that as far as they re concerned in the u s presidential election it s bush all the way well i want an america that relies on its own ingenuity on our own intervention not the saudi royal family and that s what we need now let me tell you what we re going to do we re going to do what we could have been doing four years ago and three years ago and two years ago and all of last year and all of this year we re going to invest in technology and in the vehicles of the future we re going to invest so that no young american in uniform will ever be held hostage to america s dependence on oil from the middle east that s the right choice that s the right direction that s the right leadership for america and because of this president s wrong choices we re spending 200 billion in iraq while we re told that we can t afford to do everything that we should be doing for homeland security i believe it s wrong to be opening fire houses in baghdad and closing them down in the united states of america it s wrong to cut money for our first responders it s wrong to let 95 percent of the cargo that comes into this country get by without ever being physically inspected that s the wrong choice that s the wrong direction that s the wrong leadership for america so my friends we re going to set a new direction for this country we re going to defend this country here at home and we re going to do all we can possibly do in order to protect it from another terrorist attack and we are going to make homeland security the kind of priority that it ought to be not a political slogan my friends today we are bearing the cost of the war in iraq almost alone 200 billion and counting nearly two years after george w bush spoke to the nation from this very place we know how wrong his choices were he says he miscalculated he calls iraq a catastrophic success but a glance at the front pages or a look at the nightly news shows brings home the hard reality rising instability spreading violence growing extremism havens now created that weren t there for terrorists who weren t even in the country before we went there and today even the pentagon has admitted this very reality that entire regions of iraq are controlled by insurgents and terrorists i call this course a catastrophic course that has cost us 200 billion because we went it alone and we ve paid an even more unbearable price in young american lives and the risks our soldiers take we need a new direction we need statesmanship we need leadership we need the ability of a president with a fresh start and new credibility to open up the channels of communication we need to do a whole bunch of things in iraq that this president could have done and hasn t even tried to do we need to really bring our allies to our side because they do have a stake in the outcome of iraq and one of the great failures of this administration is in not convincing the world of that reality we need to share the burdens share the responsibility and the decision making share the reconstruction reduce the cost to the american taxpayer and reduce the risk to the american soldier we need to train iraqi military and police we need to train them more rapidly we need to behave like we really are a nation at war and we need to get other people to behave that way with us we need to get more people in greater numbers ready to take over the job of protecting their own country that s what i ll do as commander in chief because that s the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home you know this president said one thing in his convention speech that s true he said we all need to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations but you know it s george w bush who has set low expectations and he s met them he doesn t believe that american can be strong in the world while we also make progress here at home he believes that we have to choose one or the other and that s a false choice and i reject it i believe we can lead in the world and lead america to greater progress and prosperity than we ve ever known before half a century ago from here in union terminal thousands of soldiers waved one last goodbye to their families before heading off to the second world war in that war their bravery and the leaders made the right choices and they brought victory over tyranny and they brought prosperity here at home when i m president america will once again stand up to our enemies without destroying or denying our best hopes here at home we ll strengthen our military in order to meet new threats but we ll also build and lead strong new alliances around the world we will build a stronger america with good jobs and better wages not paying you less money than the job you had for the job you lost overseas but pushing the curve of technology and creativity doing stem cell research alternative and renewable energy doing the things that begin to open up the avenues and opportunities of the future with the right choices and the right leadership we re going to set a new direction for america we re going to build an america that s stronger at home and respected in the world as franklin roosevelt once said the only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today well i ll tell you i believe there are no limits for tomorrow but we need to make the right choices today and with your help we re going to restore the true greatness of our nation and we are going to set a new direction for the future thank you god bless you and god bless the united states of america dem joebiden1 4 09 joe_biden ladies and gentlemen let me first chief let me start with you and thank you for letting me in your house i was telling the chief back in the other room that this is a place literally a fire station like this i got my career got started every aspect of my life has been touched by the fire service and quite frankly by the volunteer fire service all professionals as we say used to say when i was a senator could you excuse a point of personal privilege chief and to all your members i literally not only owe my career i owe my life i owe my physical life i owe the life of my two sons and i owe you a lot when i was first got elected there was an accident affecting killing my wife and daughter and my two sons were badly injured it was my volunteer fire department the jaws of life saved my two sons when i was diagnosed as having a couple cranial aneurysms where they didn t give me a real great chance of living and they wanted to get me to a hospital in the snow storm at walter reed from delaware they asked how i wanted to get there and i said literally call my volunteer fire department and they got me there when a couple of years ago lightning struck my home in the morning when i was down doing meet the press in wilmington delaware and the seven local departments not only one seven of my buddies showed up and extensive damage they got my wife out of the house and everything worked fine so i really owe you guys i genuinely do it s heart felt it s real and i don t think most people understand just how much you do how much you contribute you re the same guys and women who jump off the back of this apparatus after a fire in time to make sure to get to the little league field so you can line the little league field for the game you re the same folks that you know so i know you know it but this is community for me the definition of community and my state is a rural state little ol delaware everybody thinks is a northeastern state it s rural our largest town is about 150 000 people and the next largest town is around 30 000 people and we only have two paid fire services in our entire state and so this is the place at least where i come from where you get married you get buried this is the place the physical spot in which all this stuff happens this is kind of in georgetown delaware which is not my home and places like that this is the country club this serves as the social center as well as protecting the safety and property of everyone so i just want you to know that when i had a chance when i asked tom governor vilsack now our secretary of agriculture has been a friend for a long time he actually quite frankly knows more about what we re able to do in this recovery act particularly in concert with the department of agriculture and other agencies you work with and anybody in our government and so i went to tom what two weeks ago i said tom look i think it s important we go out and we let people know how this money is being put to work for them what we re actually doing where should i go where should i go and we were about 25 45 minutes from here we went to a community health center first and then we said i want to go to a fire station because that s the best emblem of what it is we re doing to try to help communities fight through this recession and at the same time rebuild something governor that s here to last and mr mayor i d be remiss if i didn t say thank you for the passport to get into town we appreciate it very very much i told the governor i told the mayor as i got of the car a lovely lady next door to the fire station here waved a pamphlet to me and said she had to talk to me so i walked over and took out a pen i thought she wanted an autograph she said no no honey i ve signed it for you she did swear to god she signed it for me because it s a long story but it was about her husband anyway so this is like home man this is coming home so i want to thank you and all the good citizens of pikeville and chief you and your men and women here who you know as the governor was pointing out back stage you know when you build this new fire station it all says the effect of you know people rate insurance companies rate how much they re going to charge for your insurance on your home insurance goes down when you do good things like this people s payments to their on their mortgage to insure their home goes down i don t think people know so but i m not going to get into if i get off on volunteer fire service i ll spend the whole day here but look that old expression all men are created equal and then a few became firemen you know so you re not all created equal you all are the best look i don t have to tell folks in north carolina in this section of north carolina about community i don t have to look any further than down the road at carthage where they just went through a tragedy all the families and the victims in the nursing home shooting but the damage could have been a whole lot worse but not for a local guy named justin garner a 25 year old policeman 25 year old policeman who displayed courage and character that we all need to get through these tough times and he showed us how important it is that the men and women who make up small towns serve their communities with dignity and valor as well as help define our national identity and so tom wasn t exaggerating when he was saying that the president and i think this is more than just doing something about helping this recession it s about going to the places where the roots of where our values come from and it s folks this is community and as i said there s no better place to demonstrate it than right here in a fire hall in a small town and so folks we understand that the health of small towns like pikeville is as essential to the nation s well being as the health of big towns like charlotte we understand that as we write a new chapter in our history the small towns of america and the fire fighters and teachers and farmers and police officers will have to be some of the most prominent of its authors as we rewrite this new contract we re trying to work out and we understand that this administration you should understand we believe will not have done our job if after the recovery occurs and it will occur we will recover we will recover but that s not sufficient for us to recover in terms of our gdp and the growth of our economy we ll only be successful is when we recover if in fact the living standards of middle class americans have raised as we ve moved out of this it s not sufficient just to recover we had a recovery in the housing bubble but guess what middle class folks got left behind productivity increased 20 percent yet the average middle class family lost 2 000 over that eight year period instead of being part of it so this is about more than just recovery it s about making sure that we build a firm foundation for the 21st century where the middle class is raised up and those aspiring to the middle class and you know i don t think we have to look any further than this fire house to understand what we mean by serving families and creating opportunities with 100 000 in recovery funds this department is going to be able to build a new four bay fire house which may be able to house as many as eight vehicles i m told and we know that the fire house serves an important purpose but we also know that it s more than that it s an emblem of what in fact a community is about you all are committed to giving your community everything that they need those folks in this fire service and the communities appreciate it you keep our families safe and you display proudly the sacrifices and selflessness that make this community and thousands like it across the country strong we don t view the money for the fire house as just spending to help us get out of the troubles we re in now oh it will create jobs it will put people to work it will stimulate the economy in this small community it will inject funds into the community we think that it is also an investment in the future and this is only one example how we re investing in all of you it s investing in pikeville we re doing much more as the governor indicated we re investing in places like this all across the country to demonstrate the vital role these towns of your size play in this recovery all told we re going to deliver more than 20 billion 20 billion even in washington that s a lot of money 20 billion in loans and grants to improve economic opportunity and the quality of life in rural america 20 billion set aside for rural america and the money is going to go to improving things which are not high on a lot of people s lists but will make a big difference like improving broadband access so the farmer can sit there and get online and know exactly what his product is being sold for not just the next county over but across the country and so your kids can be brought into the same kind of opportunity that kids all over the world are being brought into we re also going to upgrade as the governor pointed out rural water and waste disposal systems we know mr mayor that s a big ticket item for most small towns it s a gigantic item in terms of cost in dollars to get it done i don t need to tell you about it governor because i m sure you re implored with help in the state capitol for this all the time and we re also seeding new rural business ventures i was as i said just down the road in faison discussing how we re investing in community health centers and by the way you got one of the best people in the country managing that operation down there and so we can continue to provide vital services so many vulnerable families need right now i m also happy to announce today the united states department of agriculture really tom should be doing this announcement are going to be giving 10 4 billion in recovery funds for singe family housing 1 76 billion being released today now in the midst of this housing crisis some of the people getting hit the hardest and the worst are people in rural america and we re doing this because we realize credit is so tight there are few options that exist for low interest loans in rural america even creditworthy people are having trouble going to the bank and deciding they want to borrow the money to buy a home or to refinance their home and today that changes of the 10 4 billion 322 million governor is headed to your state 322 million to invest in 875 loans four of which are just right here in wayne county and families as of today america workers are going to 95 percent of them of all of those of you who have withholding held from your paycheck everyone who is in that position is going to get it s not a lot of money but it makes a difference in a lot of lives 65 a month more on average in your paycheck through the tax cut we put in not for the wealthy but for working people 65 a month more in the paycheck in these hard times 65 can make a difference to a lot of families that i know and because of that credit i think we re going to also have the effect of stimulating the economy all that money is going to go back in people are going to go to the drugstore they re going to go to the corner sandwich shop the grocery store people are going to get the car repaired that they ve been holding off on repairing for a long time that s the stuff that when the money goes into the economy and creates demand and people get hired jobs are created as a consequence of that all in all we recognize how important america s workers are to our recovery and we re acting boldly as we can to make towns like pikeville as strong as possible look folks a lot of you know me and i have a reputation and as the governor knows for being pretty blunt and straightforward well i m going to level with you to state the obvious everybody knows these are really tough times they re tough times in north carolina they re tough times in delaware iowa california california has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation right now we all get that but every single day that i get out of washington and am able to which i strive to do as often as i can every single day i get out in communities it seems to me that you not only witness this enduring struggle people asking questions about themselves as well as they are about their country and can we get through this but every single day every single day i see something new that provides hope that provides hope hope that we re not only going to survive this recession but that the american people and i mean working families like all of yours will come out of this better off than they did before i see it all around me every place i go i see it here at the pikeville fire volunteer fire department but i also see it in communities including urban communities all across the country the president and i really do feel the sense of urgency it s one thing to say well tomorrow tomorrow doesn t work for somebody who can t put food on the table tomorrow doesn t work for somebody who in fact just lost their job tomorrow doesn t work for that mother or father who has to make that longest walk up the short flight of stairs to tell his son or daughter that honey i m sorry we just lost the house you can t stay here we re not going to be able to play in the same baseball team this spring you re not going to be able to do it i mean tomorrow tomorrow is a hundred years away for people and so that s why although we ve been criticized we felt so strongly that we had to be as robust as we possibly could in trying to keep unemployment from plummeting so that we create 3 5 to 4 million jobs or save them at the same time we begin to invest in communities to give people a little hope well guess what i ve observed that whether the people understand the detail of the recovery act or the detail of the budget what they do have is they do have hope they do have hope and the funny thing is my job is supposed to come out and make people in our communities feel this sense of hope and optimism i m the one that goes back i m the one that goes back more filled with hope and optimism when i see all of you how you face what s facing you right now and how you re ready to embrace change as long as you think there s a square deal just let me in on the deal just let me in on the deal and so folks it s a real honor to be here with you it s an honor to be here many of you in recent past have been dealt out of that american dream a little bit everybody think about this you folks who are old enough to have children and young enough to maybe have your parents around remember the days when your mother and father would tell you when you were a kid you can be anything you want to be you can do anything at all in this country as long as you work hard believe in your country and you re honest well there s not as many people today of the generation that our parents were not raising kids who look at their kids and say the same thing with the same conviction our parents said it and meant it my dad said it even after he lost his job my dad really believed it one is we got to do and this is part of this whole recovery is we build this up from the bottom up not from the top down is we got to make sure that there are tens of millions of parents all across the country like our parents used to be be able to look at their kid with confidence and just say honey it s going to be okay it s going to be okay that s what it s all about because if you can t say that mom we let down a generation and so i think we re ready i think this is the beginning of a new deal in terms of how people are dealt into the process i hope that s what it is and you know i was saying i said just a few hours ago that there was a great description of a north carolinian written by a writer who was touring north carolina towns during the great depression and he said of a typical north carolinian facing uncertain times in the 30s here s what he wrote he said he is now less proud of the distance he has gone than aware of the distance he has to go he knows that he s in the greatest state on earth and that he s as good as anybody in it but he is by no means sure this is good enough to get him going the difference between now and then i look in your eyes and i look in everybody else s eyes across this country and i do understand that in fact the pride of how far you ve come is somewhat overshadowed by the distance you have to go right now but what i don t see what i don t see is what this writer saw in the eyes of a north carolinian he was writing about i see the pride in your state but i also see the absolute certitude in your mind that if given a shot there is no reason why no reason why we can t come back stronger and so folks what we re all about today not only in building this priming the pump to be able to build this fire house and that s what it is it s priming the pump you all are doing a lot locally not only in this housing money and all the things some of the things i mentioned what it really is is about getting a new start and so i this is kind of backwards i know but i want to thank you for giving me renewed confidence we re going to get this done we re going to get this done and with the grace of god as my grandfather used to say and the good will of the neighbors and the crick not rising we got a real shot a real shot and it starts right here right here in this fire hall right here in this fire hall so folks keep the faith and go tar heels unless they re playing villanova i got to tell you i know it s politically incorrect to come to north carolina and say you re for another team if villanova is out of it this round no problem i m for north carolina if i had to bet north carolina wins yes but i can t bet against villanova for a simple reason i ll be sleeping alone my wife graduated from villanova so you all are important but i like sleeping with my wife and if she found out i showed up in north carolina and said go heels at the expense of her villanova wildcats i d be in real trouble so good luck unless it is villanova thank you all very very much dem joebiden1 9 10 joe_biden ladies and gentlemen the last several years every time i have been in this old palace am here i can t but help think of the irony that we are here today occupying a palace for a noble reason that was once occupied by saddam hussein secretary gates admiral mullen general mattis general odierno general austin ambassador jeffrey our distinguished and honored iraqi leaders and military it s an honor to be with you today it s an honor to be joined by such a distinguished group of americans and iraqi commanders and civilian leaders bound together i might add as a nation we are now bound together as well by years of shared struggle and significant sacrifice in the predawn hours of march 20 2003 columns of coalition troops set off across the desert and marshlands from kuwait en route to baghdad last week after seven and a half years that tested our mettle like no conflict in recent american history the last of our combat units followed that same dusty highway out of iraq on their way home as president obama declared in the oval office last night the united states has now ended our combat mission in iraq and iraqi troops are taking lead responsibility for their country s security we ve kept a promise a promise made to the american people and to the people of iraq by drawing down our forces to roughly 50 000 and we re on track to remove all of our troops by the end of next year according to the agreement signed by president bush made with the iraqi government operation iraqi freedom is over but american engagement with iraq will continue with the mission that begins today operation new dawn as the name suggests this ceremony not only marks the change of a command but the start of a different chapter in the relationship with iraq our remaining troops i might add as combat ready if need be as any in our military will advise and assist iraqi forces support partnered counterterrorism operations and protect our military and civilian personnel as well as our infrastructure and we are ramping up our civilian and diplomatic effort to strengthen iraq s sovereignty stability and self reliance at the very time we are drawing down combat forces our goal our goal is not just a physically secure iraq but an economically prosperous and stable one as well with our iraqi partners our hope is to be able to enhance the ties of trade and commerce increase our cultural and educational exchanges open consulates in basra and erbil all to ensure that our engagement spans the breadth and length of this country our diplomats our diplomats will support iraq s efforts to build strong ties with their neighbors and the wider world while working through the remaining obligations at the united nations and here in baghdad those efforts will be led by an outstanding ambassador jim jeffrey who may be new to this particular job but is certainly not new to the region nor this country his knowledge and commitment run deep they go back to his earlier service in the bush administration as a deputy national security advisor as well as at one point the dcm right here in baghdad and he is backed by an extraordinary team of foreign service professionals and civilian experts who are moving to the forefront of our effort now they have always been engaged but now they re moving to the forefront people like erin eddy a former peace corps volunteer in ecuador who now serves outside the wire as a public diplomacy officer on a regional provincial reconstruction team in kirkuk or madeline chikko who became an american citizen after her family fled iraq three decades ago and has now chosen to return in 2008 to work with the ministry of justice here in iraq on property rights and rule of law or dave butzer a 27 year veteran of the oregon police force who has since then trained law enforcement officers in kosovo jordan and yemen and who now advises the iraqi interior ministry along with our military and diplomats and the civilians in iraq we have borne they have borne the burden of lengthy deployments like you in the military missing anniversaries and holidays births of children and the loss of loved ones this change of mission to state the obvious would never have been possible without the resolve and tremendous sacrifice and competence of our military the finest if our iraqi friends will forgive us the finest fighting force in the world and i would argue the finest fighting force that ever has existed and i don t believe that is hyperbole and that s a large part because it has been led by such a significant group of men and women over the last three decade and i want to thank my friend secretary gates for his unique willingness to serve two presidents of different parties with differing views a testimony to bob s patriotism his commitment to service and above all his determination to see this effort through he deserves your applause if you excuse the personal reference as we used to say in the senate this is one good man one good man we ve also been blessed by the wisdom and steady hand of admiral mike mullen and the leadership of general david petraeus who i might add is still serving this country in a way that is beyond what we should ask of anyone i shouldn t joke about this but i visited him down in florida and before he headed off bob and he said just as i was getting finally getting to live like the air force you re asking me to move it was a lovely place and by the way we owe his wife and his family as well and also by general jim mattis who is taking his command and on his last day of his command i d like to especially thank general ray odierno this man is not only a warrior but a diplomat in the best american tradition i want to thank him for his exceptional and i m not exaggerating his exceptional service for more than four years leading forces here and working closely with iraqi political leaders many of them sitting here today and i think they would all acknowledge they have absolute complete faith and trust in this man general four years and five months is an extraordinary sacrifice for both you and your family and i can only imagine as a matter of fact i know how joyous your homecoming is going to be and you richly deserve it and by the way you owe linda big really really big and i would be remiss if i did not in mentioning the sacrifices that the general has made like many of you i would be remiss if i did not recognize his son capt tony odierno who made a great sacrifice here in iraq on behalf of his country and was awarded the purple heart and the bronze star with a v for valor and now he works for the new york yankees and i imagine you re going to go home and see a couple of games i imagine i m confident as well that general austin who has already served valiantly in iraq and beyond is going to continue this proud legacy we re extremely fortunate to have you take command general and i look forward to working with you and i know you know many of the iraqi political leaders here and their commanding generals and it s going to be a seamless transition our fighting men and women were given a mission in iraq that was as complicated as any in our history an assignment that proved as clausewitz taught us that war is the realm of uncertainty troops steeped in military doctrine were asked to deal with challenges ranging from electricity to unemployment currency exchange to trash collection a high speed invasion that toppled a tyrant became a grinding struggle against violent extremists empty roads became deathtraps suicide became a devastating weapon requiring split second decisions by young american military women and men that could save the life of a comrade or shed the blood of an innocent and enemies like al qaeda in iraq waged unspeakable violence against iraqi civilians in an attempt to foster hatred in communities that worship the exact same god thus far they have failed the iraqi people to their great credit have rejected the ugly face of violence and cast their lot as well as their ballots for a better future and so today while the threat a tragic reality of further bloodshed remains violence has reached the lowest point since 2003 when we arrived here shortly after we arrived here and a great deal of credit goes to iraq s security forces more than 650 000 strong including highly trained special operations forces who are increasingly ready to defend their fellow citizens in recent months the iraqi military secured an election killed or captured most of al qaeda in iraq and most of their leaders and made significant inroads against other terrorist groups because of their competence we have over the past year and it s been over the past year as the general will tell you and you all know been able to transfer thousands of square miles of territory and hundreds of bases to iraqi control perhaps the most important development of all is that in the aftermath of a second national election iraqi leaders are sitting down to settle their differences through negotiation and not through violence another way of putting it as my staff always kids me for saying politics has broken out in iraq the fact that no single party or coalition got anywhere near a clear majority would make forming a government a parliamentary system difficult under any circumstances a decade after a decade of dictatorship and war it s an even more daunting task here in iraq unlike after the last election however a caretaker government is providing security and basic services and preventing a dangerous power vacuum from erupting but that is not a durable solution to the many challenges and significant opportunities iraq faces the iraqi people voted in large numbers across communities and if you don t mind forgive me for saying so they expect a government that reflects the result of the votes they cast and that s going to require iraqi politicians to place the national interest above their own a difficult thing in any country including ours it is not our place to tell the iraqis who should lead but i strongly urge them to match the courage that their citizens have shown by bringing this process to a close and forming a government and i trust they will do so soon since war is a human endeavor its contours can never be fully drawn with numbers but the sheer scope of our commitment to the iraqi people bears some reflection more than a million american service members have deployed here since the conflict began and i am awed i mean i am in awe of their accomplishments and their significant sacrifices including all of you sitting before me today this is particularly true for more than 30 000 troops wounded in action and over 4 408 fallen angels who have made the ultimate sacrifice along with members of the international coalition it s no secret that this war has divided americans but they have never shrunk or either political party has shrunk from a united support for an extraordinary united states military for extraordinary service of our troops as president obama said last night now is the time to put these differences behind us and come together to meet the many challenges that remain and that we face at home today is also an important acknowledgment it s important to acknowledge the magnitude the magnitude of the iraqi losses in this conflict tens of thousands of security forces and innocent civilians have been killed many times that number have been wounded and displaced i pray that all those scarred by this war in iraq come to know the balm of lasting peace and i believe i truly believe that their darkest days are now behind them they have such a great opportunity as they step up to it after all that iraqis endured we understand their deeply felt desire to control their own lives determine their own fate and maintain their own security that s why we kept president bush s commitment to withdraw our forces from iraqi cities last summer why president obama has now kept his promise made one month after we took office to end our combat mission and draw down to a force of 50 000 and why we will make good on our agreement with the iraqis to remove all our forces by the end of next year we gather today in a capital that once boasted the planet s greatest assemblage of universities hospitals and museums a cultural beacon whose centerpiece was a grand intellectual bazaar known literally as the house of wisdom in modern times iraq has faced hardships most nations cannot fathom but it is blessed with vast national bounty natural resources and the wisdom of the ages lives on in the people here in iraq educated adaptive and above all resilient people this inevitable store of human talent and natural wealth are the tools that can now forge a secure and prosperous future for the people of iraq and god willing you re on the path to fulfill that promise again we re proud to be your partner thank you all may god bless you all and may god protect our troops dem joebiden11 3 09 joe_biden thank you all for being here a lot of familiar faces please sit down i m only the vice president but thank you a lot of i see a lot of familiar faces with whom i ve worked a long time in both the treatment community and the enforcement side of the ledger and i m delighted you re here and i hope you re as delighted about what i m about to announce as i am today i m pleased to announce that president obama has nominated as director of the office of national drug control policy our nation s drug czar gil kerlikowske who is the chief out in seattle and many of you in this room know him well chief the position you re nominated for as you know not only me but a lot of people in this room fought to create back some years ago when we found out we had 32 agencies dealing with the drug problem and not a lot of coordination and i should say note parenthetically i ve been a little disappointed the last eight years it hasn t gotten the attention that it should have gotten but that s about to change i believe that we needed a drug czar someone who could lead at a white house level coordinating all our nation s drug policy and i still believe that today substance abuse is one of our nation s most pervasive problems as all of you in this room know an addiction is a disease as pat moynihan used to say disease of the brain that doesn t discriminate on the basis of age gender socioeconomic standing or status race or creed and as all of you know it wreaks havoc on all of our communities urban rural and suburban and the correlation between crime and substance abuse was established undeniably clearly back in the 70s as you know director and it is something that if we could wave a wand and do anything to deal with violent crime in america if you had said to eliminate drug abuse you would eliminate a significant portion of the violent crime in america so the correlation between violence and drugs is well established and all of this carries a very very heavy price tag both in terms of personal and emotional terms and in terms of cost to the american taxpayer just the health and economic cost alone from drug and alcohol abuse amounts to over 350 billion a year just those costs 350 billion a year an even bigger cost in human suffering the lives lost the lost dreams that result from the pain and destruction that abuse brings to not only the abuser but to the family and everyone surrounding everyone who loves that person and there s no one more qualified to take on this job than the chief i ve worked with him for years he has 36 years of law enforcement experience he s served as the highest ranking law enforcement officer in four of our cities in the united states of america he s been seattle s chief now for nearly nine years i know when i called him the first time it was like he wasn t sure whether to take the call or not but he is also president of the major city chiefs association a group and many are represented here today a group made up of 56 of the largest law enforcement agencies in the united states and he s served as a deputy director of the cops program at the united states department of justice one of the in my view i m mildly prejudiced having written the legislation but in my view one of the most effective crime prevention programs we ve ever established in the nation s history and the chief has been on the front lines in the battle against drugs as well he s been recognized as one of the most innovative minds in law enforcement and he s been called a fierce defender of community policing principles what i find most appealing about the chief is that he says we can t operate in silos with barriers thrown up between the criminal justice system the prevention and treatment community and the recovery components of this problem they can t be separated he knows we need a comprehensive answer and that s exactly what the vision we had in mind when we first many of you in this room who helped when we first created that office that was the idea from the outset we know we needed tough laws and we have tough laws but that wasn t enough we needed a balanced approach in combating drugs one that included prevention treatment and enforcement and that s why when i wrote what used to be called the biden crime bill back in the 90s and quite frankly many of you in this room literally sat and wrote that bill with me it had my name on it but you all wrote it when we wrote that back in 1994 i felt so strongly about the need to create specialized drug courts so we could have an alternative to incarceration and the traditional probation that included treatment and a way forward that s why i fought so hard for the drug free communities support program so we could bring together parents teachers business leaders police medical profession to prevent drug abuse and addiction in local communities and that s why i along with many of you worked so hard for the cops program because quite frankly more cops on the street is one of the best ways to keep drugs off the street the challenges facing the chief are going to be daunting nowhere is that more true than in the southwest border today all you have to do is pick up your paper anywhere in the nation national and local since the beginning of last year there have been nearly 7 000 drug related murders in mexico if we had said that years ago we would have looked at each other like we were crazy but 7 000 drug related murders in mexico violent drug trafficking organizations are threatening both the united states and mexican communities and as drug czar the chief will play a central role in developing and implementing a southwest border strategy one that improves information sharing harnesses the power of new technologies strengthens federal state and local law enforcement efforts against violent criminals and increases the interdiction of both drugs coming into the united states and weapons and cash flowing out of the united states into mexico it s a strategy that we need to bring in order to bring the situation under control to protect our people and to bring about the demise of the mexican drug cartels and by the way we ve done this before we did it in cartagena i mean excuse me not cartagena we did it in colombia in medellin we ve done it before with the help we ve been involved in this so i don t want people throwing up their hands and saying there s nothing we can do about this we can with a coordinated and consistent effort the other challenges are just as tough we know about the nexus between drug abuse and crime and that poses the greatest need for help for those who are likely to enter the criminal justice system in the first place that s why the drug courts i spoke about are so important as are prisoner reentry programs because these can serve as the light at the end of a tunnel a very long long dark tunnel for those who are stuck in the cycle of drug addiction and incarceration i know chief kelly understands that we every year every day when prisoners times is up and we let them out a significant portion walk out through that gate addicted to drugs as they walk out into the community they re addicted to drugs we know we need to help keep kids away from drugs as well and that s obviously not easy they re bombarded kids are bombarded with messages in the media that present inaccurate information and glamorize the use of drugs it only that only makes the national youth drug anti media campaign something that you chief will now lead as part of your organization and which i was believed needed to be created back in 1998 even more important we know the local solutions through local communities precisely the efforts we re looking for with the drug free communities act are the only way to build a kind of support system that can help keep kids off of drugs this is one kid at a time this is local you cannot mandate from washington or anywhere else a policy that s going to do that chief the challenges ahead of you are great but the president and i have total confidence in your ability to handle them both the president and i believe that you will lead our nation s efforts against illegal drugs with unshakable resolve and exceptional skill and the president is honored is honored to send your nomination to the united states senate once again to all my friends out here i thank you for being here he s going to need all the help he can get he s going to need the coordinative capacity that exists in this room i thank you for being here today and for your timeless your timeless commitment and i m including the prevention community that s sitting out here and the treatment community that s sitting out here and on behalf of the president and i to all of you we thank you so please join me in joining the chief who s going to be our new drug czar a man you all know well and a man i m confident is going to be tapping all of you for help chief the floor is yours congratulations dem joebiden11 3 10 joe_biden mr president thank you for that lovely introduction and thank you for hosting me at such a world class center for higher learning it s been a long time since i ve been back on campus i was a mere child a 31 year old senator when i was here the first time but it s a privilege to be back the past few days being back in israel has been wonderful it s it s been an honor to be here and it s been i wanted everyone to know with whom i spoke and all of you to know the deep friendship and kinship i feel as well as president obama feels for this magnificent country i should probably be used to it by now but i m always struck every time i come back by the hospitality of the israeli people no matter how long i ve been away and i imagine you ve experienced this yourself the instant i return i feel like i m at home i feel like i never left i feel like things just picked up where they left off the day that i left being here so please accept my warmest gratitude as well that of president obama who knows as well as i do that the united states has no better friend in the community of nations than israel thank you so much i see some of my u s friends down there in the front row i won t identify them and ruin their reputations but they they know where my love for this country comes it started at my dinner table with my father who you would refer to as a righteous christian my father my dinner table was a place where we gathered to have conversation and incidentally eat as opposed to the other way around and my father my father s support for israel is outrage for what had happened in the 30s and the failure of the world to act his support for the creation of the state of israel it generated a feeling for israel that began in my gut and went to my heart and the older i got matured in my mind during those sessions my other my father often spoke passionately about the special connection between the jewish people and this land like many of my countrymen i experienced the magic of israel at a relatively young age at least it looks young now from my perspective when i first visited here in 1973 on the eve of the yom kippur war your nation was only a quarter century old and i was not much older already israel had a tragic as well as triumphal history behind it and as we all know some very difficult days ahead already there was a sense here that anything was possible my very first meeting in israel was maybe the one that i carry closest to my heart my first meeting in israel i was invited by a woman named golda meir who i admired from afar as millions of americans did we sort of claimed her as our own i know she is israeli but we claimed her we claimed her as our own in america and i remember walking into her office as a young senator being literally in awe as she was so gracious the way she accepted me and gave me a hug more like my mother would sat down behind her desk and while chain smoking she had a series of maps behind her and there were six or seven maps she kept flipping the maps up and down and explaining to me what exactly had happened in the six day war and there was a young man sitting next to me a guy named yitzhak rabin who i met for the first time and as she pulled those maps up and down educating this young senator as to the to the threat that this young nation of israel was facing i guess she could see the sense of apprehension on my face i found myself being the more she talked about 2 million jews and back then by the way there were not that many arabs compared to today the numbers were much smaller but they were still exponentially larger than the jewish population and she went through the threats that were faced and how it had come through the battles of the six day war she spoke so passionately about her country and i was concerned i guess it showed in my face i was concerned that surrounded by the neighbors who denied the very right of the nation to exist how were you going to do this the prime minister caught me off guard after about an hour and a half she looked at me and she said senator would you like a photo opportunity and i thought what the hell is a photo opportunity and i said well yes madam prime minister we opened those double doors and we walked out into the ending room of her office and there was a lot of press there a lot half a dozen photographers and cameras for me that was a lot not like today and they started snapping pictures and while looking straight ahead she talked to me without turning her head she said senator don t look so worried she said i said well i am madam president and because i just had this hour and a half and she said she said we israelis have a secret weapon and i thought she only had said this to me no one else in the whole world she said we have a secret weapon in our struggle with the arabs and i thought she was going to tell me about a new secret weapon and i found myself turning and looking at her and the press because this was all just a stand up photo opportunity and she said we have a secret weapon we have nowhere else to go that trip was almost four decades ago but i remember it as clearly as if it happened yesterday and it drove home all that my father had spoken of randomly occasionally but consistently over the previous 15 years and he told me as a young boy that israel and jews in the world had no place else to go with absolute certitude this place it gets in your blood it never really lets you go i expect that there are several people in the audience today who have had similar experiences who first came here as tourists or religious pilgrims and ended up making aliyah and launching a new life in northern kibbutz or a small town in negev or in the beautiful city by the sea throughout my career israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a united states senator and now as vice president of the united states i have had the privilege of returning many times and to know every one of your prime ministers over these past three and a half decades including your current leader who is a close personal friend of over 33 years bibi netanyahu israel s history is a tale of remarkable accomplishment on a perilous patch of desert with sparse natural resources you have built perhaps the most innovative economy in the world you have more start ups per capita than any nation on the planet more firms on the nasdaq exchange than anyone except the united states and more u s patents per capita than any country including my own you have cultivated the gifts of 11 nobel laureates the great and as well as those of the great itzhak perlman and in recent years you have shai agassi whose path breaking work on electric automobiles began not very far from where i stand israel owes this remarkable and yet improbable success i believe to your democratic traditions to its patriotic and pioneering citizens and as with my own country to its willingness to welcome the persecuted and the downtrodden from far flung corners of the globe all this gives life to theodor herzl s famous slogan which i was reminded of this week while visiting his grave on this 150th anniversary of his birth he said if you will it it is no dream i had said in a speech in the united states some years ago for which i got some criticism i said were i a jew i would be a zionist and it got a lot of national publicity how could i say that until i was reminded by my father you need not be a jew to be a zionist ladies and gentlemen just over 60 years ago israel s founders gave life to herzl s dream by willing israel into being since then this nation has become more than an undeniable fact more than just a legacy of age old ties between a people and a land though it is both of those things your very existence is also a hard won and inviolable right israel s unique relationship with the united states means that you need not bear that heavy burden alone our nations unbreakable bond borne of common values interwoven cultures and mutual interests has spanned the entirety of israel s history and it s it s impervious to any shifts in either country and either country s partisan politics no matter what challenges we face this bond will endure as a result generations of israelis and americans and american israelis have kept a foot in each country enriching both our nations and peoples i met with some of your leading high tech leaders earlier prior to coming to the stage and they have a foot in both countries many of them while these close relationships span the realm of commerce and education medicine and technology culture and the arts at its core is an ironclad commitment to security israel and my own country s every day israel faces bravely threats no country should have to endure no parent should their child to schools equipped with air raid sirens in the year 2010 no government should be expected to turn a blind eye while an enemy calls for its destruction i am here to remind you though i hope you will never forget that america stands with you shoulder to shoulder in facing these threats president obama and i represent an unbroken chain of american leaders who have understood this critical strategic relationship as the president said recently i will never waver from ensuring israel s security and helping them secure themselves in what is a very hostile region president obama has not only stated those words he has translated that vow into action in his first year in ways both known to the public and not known to you as prime minister netanyahu eloquently acknowledged the other day when he and i were meeting and had a short press conference that followed beyond providing israel nearly 3 billion in military aid each and every year we have reinvigorated defense consultations and redoubled our efforts to ensure that israel s that israel s forces will always maintain a qualitative edge we lead the fight in international institutions against the insidious campaign to challenge israel s legitimacy and question its right to self defense since our administration came into office our militaries have expanded cooperation not maintained expanded cooperation on joint exercises and missile defense last fall more than 1 000 american troops participated in juniper cobra ballistic missile defense exercises the largest such drill to date and it should go without saying but i ll say it anyway so there s no doubt the united states stands resolutely beside israel against the scourge of terrorism from which both of our countries have suffered badly no one in this audience needs to be reminded of the fear and devastation caused by suicide bombers or by rockets from southern lebanon or from gaza the band of israeli territory outside the rocket s range grows narrower all the time and i as an american continue to marvel continue to marvel at the residents in the region being able to resolutely get up every morning of the communities other communities that in fact are within the bulls eye the crosshairs how you respond to that with defiance and not fear american support for israel is not just an act of friendship it s an act of fundamental national self interest on the part of the united states a key component to our broader efforts to secure this region and a wider world as well as our own security ladies and gentlemen i ve heard it raised occasionally in editorials in this country and others wondering about our resolve make no mistake about america s resolve make no mistake about america s resolve we have 200 000 young women and men we are spending a quarter of a trillions a year we have had tens of thousands of fallen angels and multiple times more injured in the service of our nation deployed far from home in iraq and afghanistan there and elsewhere we are aggressively confronting violent extremism and radical ideologies that threaten not only you and the united states but our allies as well but our approach consists of more than the awesome military might we possess and are willing to use from the very start president obama has called for a new era of diplomatic engagement with both our friends some of whom we had alienated the previous years as well as as well as those who are not viewed as our friends in cairo last june he launched a new beginning between the united states and the muslim communities around the world later this month the president will continue this engagement by visiting indonesia home of the world s largest muslim population where he lived as a boy we are absolutely convinced that this approach will improve not only our security but as a consequence your security a new generation of muslims is coming to age more numerous than its predecessors more dispersed geographically and because of technology more closely connected with each other and with the forces and events that shape the world we share if we can rollback recent tensions and redirect crude stereotypes theirs and our own it will make america safer and our closest allies like israel safer as well in our view we are returning an ambassador to damascus and elevating our diplomatic contacts we do so with our eyes wide open both to our deep concerns with syrian actions that has threatened your security and the stability of the region and also to the hope of a better relationship and peace between israel and syria and we will continue to help strengthen the institutions in lebanon and work to implement the u n security council resolutions aimed at ending the flow of weapons to hizballah and disarming this threat to israel as well as to the civilian lebanese with other arab and muslim countries we are revitalizing a partnership in education science technology business culture because the best way to counter the lure of extreme ideology is to offer future opportunity in speaking with your prime minister recently he talked about the high birth rates in neighboring poor countries including yemen and the need for us to provide economic outlets and opportunities so there is an option looming over all our efforts in this region is the shadow cast by iran home of a home of a great civilization and proud people who suffer from a leadership that flouts the will of the world by pursuing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorism and terrorists over the past decade iran has become more not less dangerous building thousands of centrifuges that churn out nuclear material funding and arming dangerous proxies like hizballah and hamas intimidating both its neighbors as well as its own citizens from the moment we were elected president obama decided that we needed a new approach he has sought to engage iran s leaders for the purpose of changing their conduct knowing full well how difficult that may be but also knowing that if they fail to respond we would be in a much stronger position to rally the international community to impose consequences for their actions iran thus far has refused to cooperate as the whole world has witnessed instead it has engaged in more violations of international obligations like undeclared enrichment facilities that were recently exposed by the united states and the decision to enrich uranium to 20 percent to build more and to build more enrichment facilities all violations it rejected a good faith offer to exchange its low enriched uranium for fuel that could power a research reactor to produce medical isotopes and it continues to deploy thugs to lock up and beat down those who bravely take to the streets in a quest for basic justice in their own country the iranian leadership s continuing defiance has set the stage for our efforts to mobilize the world to impose meaningful sanctions that clarify for the iranian leadership the stark choice follow international rules or face harsh penalties and further isolation you have to acknowledge that today iran is more isolated with its own people as well as the region and in the world than it has been at any time in the past two decades the united states is determined to prevent iran from acquiring nuclear weapons period i know i know that for israel i know that for israel there is no greater existential strategic threat trust me we get that it s also a threat the acquisition of nuclear weapons by iran is also a threat to the security short term mid term and long term to the united states of america and many other countries in this region and around the world strongly oppose a nuclear armed iran it would threaten them trigger an arms race in this region and undermine the efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons which would be a sorry outcome for such a promising beginning of the 21st century for all those reasons confronting this challenge is and must be a top national priority for the united states of america we are determined to keep the pressure on iran so that it will change its course and as we do we will also be seeking to improve relations between the israelis and palestinians they are connected indirectly but there is a relationship we call on arab states who share a mutual concern about iran we call on arab states to support the effort to bring peace between palestinians and the israelis and to take their own steps forward for peace with israel these are critical goals in their own rights their pursuit also denies tehran the opportunity to exploit the differences between israelis and palestinians and israelis and the arab world and to distract the many countries that stand united against iran s pursuit of nuclear weapons and the support of terrorism building peace and security between a jewish democratic state of israel and a viable independent palestinian state is profoundly in israel s interest if you will forgive me for suggesting that i ve learned never tell another man or another country what s in their own interest but it seems so it s also profoundly in the interest of palestinians and it s fundamentally in the national security interest of the united states of america ladies and gentlemen in my experience one necessary precondition for progress is that the rest of the world knows this there is no space this is what they must know every time progress is made it s made when the rest of the world knows there is absolutely no space between the united states and israel when it comes to security none no space that s the only time when progress has been made and i applaud prime minister netanyahu s recent call for two states for two people lending a vital voice to what the israelis palestinians their arab neighbors all know in their heart to be true ladies and gentlemen the status quo is not sustainable it s no secret the demographic realities make it increasingly difficult for israel to remain both a jewish homeland and a democratic country in the absence of the palestinian state genuine steps toward a two state solution are also required to empower those living to live in peace and security with israel and to undercut their rivals who will never accept that future for israel then this is about both preserving your identity and achieving the security you deserve lasting security for palestinians statehood will not just fulfill a legitimate and long sought aspiration common to all peoples it will restore the fundamental dignity and self respect that their current predicament denies them i understand why both sides are skeptical i ve been doing this for a long time not as long as my friend dennis ross who is with me ross who is with me ross who is with me he is with me he has even more experience in the nitty gritty of this than i do we understand why both sides are skeptical we ve been down this road before and so have you which every time makes it a little harder to go down the road again but i know i know that israel s faith in the prospects for peace have been shaken by the searing experience of withdrawing from lebanon and from gaza only to be rewarded with rocket fire and ambushes across your border i know you ve been frustrated by the unwillingness of some palestinian leaders to curb incitement and take the risk that peace requires just as when the west bank checkpoints proliferate and settlements grow the palestinians experience their own crisis in confidence and come to doubt israeli intentions and we all know what happens when cynicism festers distrust harsh words and eventually violence the cycle of unintended consequences which has happened more times than i can count has led you to build more walls that may offer short term relief but will not bring the sustained security that you seek this is no way to live this cycle must be broken in the middle east in the middle east that i first visited peace between israelis and its neighbors seemed absolutely impossible even to discuss those who suggested a two state solution and no one did that actually but had someone suggested a two state solution they would have been considered either demented or dreamers but then israel egypt and jordan all acted boldly to end decades of conflict over time other contacts have emerged between israelis and arabs and there is now an arab peace initiative that makes an important contribution by envisioning a future in which israel is secure and at peace with its arab neighbors turning these visions into reality is among the hardest challenges we face but we have to face it there is no alternative as prime minister netanyahu said all sides all sides need to take action in good faith if peace is to have a chance but it s hard my words it s hard while it s always easier to point fingers it s time for israeli and palestinian leaders to acknowledge each others steps to heed this call even when more remains to be done and for the world to do the same thing your prime minister is roundly criticized in other parts of the world but your prime minister has endorsed the idea of a palestinian state he has removed roadblocks and checkpoints that choked the west bank these were difficult decisions not all that was asked for on the other side but these were difficult decisions it was also difficult for the palestinian authority to take a step that it has to take to combat incitement and reform the institutions it s reforming of an even greater note it s building an effective for the first time a genuinely effective security force to uphold law and order in my view with the potential to do it throughout the west bank and throughout the palestinian territories president obama and i believe that believe that in president abbas and prime minister fayyad men who i ve known for a long time israeli leaders finally have willing partners who share the goal of peace between two states and have the competence to establish a nation their commitment to peace is an opportunity that must be seized it must be seized who has there been better to date to have the prospect of settling this with but instead two days ago the israeli government announced it would advance planning for new housing units in east jerusalem i realize this is a very touchy subject in israel as well as in my own country but because that decision in my view undermined the trust required for productive negotiations i and at the request of president obama condemned it immediately and unequivocally now some legitimately may have been surprised that such a strong supporter of israel for the last 37 years and beyond but 37 years as an elected official how i can speak out so strongly given the ties that i share as well as my country shares with israel but quite frankly folks sometimes only a friend can deliver the hardest truth and i appreciate by the way the response your prime minister today announced this morning that he is putting in place a process to prevent the recurrence of that sort of that sort of events and who clarified that the beginning of actual construction on this particular project would likely take several years a statement he put out that s significant because it gives negotiations the time to resolve this as well as other outstanding issues because when it was announced i was on the west bank everyone there thought it had meant immediately the resumption of the construction of 1 600 new units look folks as we move forward i promise you this the united states will continue to hold both sides accountable for any statements or any actions that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks the most important thing is for these talks to go forward and go promptly and go forward in good faith we can t delay because when progress is postponed extremists exploit our differences and they sow hate these indirect talks everyone knows are just that indirect talks indirect negotiations the only path though to finally resolving the permanent status issues including borders security refugees and jerusalem are direct talks our administration but you ve got to begin the process has to begin our administration fully supports this effort led by our special envoy senator george mitchell a seasoned negotiator and a proven peacemaker in whom the president the secretary of state hillary clinton and i have complete and utter confidence we believe that through good faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree to an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 67 lines with agreed swaps and israel s goal of a jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet israel s security requirements many challenges remain gilad shalit is still in captivity and we pray every day for the day when he will come home and be reunited with his family ladies and gentlemen incitement against israel continues as do attacks on the legitimacy of jewish ties to this ancient land and the ongoing threat from gaza still in hamas s grip and from hizballah in southern lebanon remind us that your security is far from assured meanwhile though our policy and our concerns about israel s settlements remain unchanged and while hamas has condemned gaza s populace to misery and hopelessness israel too has a responsibility to address their many needs that s why we re working with the israeli government to do just that and address some of legitimate needs without without further endangering israel s security ladies and gentlemen i m a roman catholic and no one and i m no expert on the old testament but i know we re gathered today between purim and passover holidays that teach us about salvation and redemption it was written in the book of isaiah that israel shall be a light unto the nations and yet for more than six decades israelis have often sought but never found the salvation of a lasting peace and it is very hard it is very hard to be a beacon for others when you are constantly at war to end this historic conflict both sides must be historically bold because if each waits stubbornly for the other to act first this will go on and we ll be waiting for an eternity back home i am sometimes called an optimist but i am an optimist about the prospects for peace because i am a realist and to paraphrase golda meir there is nowhere else to go there is nowhere else to go i cannot tell you that peace will come easily you know better in human history it rarely has but i can promise you both israelis and palestinians that the rewards for success will be boundless and that so long as well intentioned people are engaged in this struggle the united states will be your partner thank you and may god protect you and may god protect israel thank you very much dem joebiden11 5 09 joe_biden thank you good to be home chancellor it s good to be it s good to be back frank sinatra one of the few things i remember he ever said not what he sang he said orange is the happiest color he must have been thinking about syracuse and today when he said it dean arterian dean of my law school the good news for you is i m vice president and not one of your students you all think i m kidding don t you hey colin i tell you what you would have loved me i never had to be told that play was important it just came natural to me it came naturally to me all the way through law school oh god thank god thank god dean when syracuse gave me the scholarship they based it on a sense of obligation but it s good to be home and this field which used to be called archibald stadium when i was here this is the place from which i graduated the same ground this field was the scene of two of the happiest moments of my life most exciting moments of my life the first was when i sat in the end zone and watched a man who has become a close personal friend of mine number 44 floyd little outscore gale sayers in a shoot out where they scored a total of eight touchdowns together you can see my value system and the second was the day that i stood here in those days the law school used to graduate with the undergraduate school and i sat here in this field to receive my law degree at some moments an unexpected event and let me just say congratulations to all my fellow recipients of honorary degrees today you all deserve it s great to be back at syracuse it s an honor to have been invited it s an honor to hold a degree from this institution and it s an honor to look at the next generation of syracuse grads i m sure this is said all the time but so much emotion and expectation and confidence has been invested in all of you and today today is mother s day of all the mothers who are here today let me say to you the spotlight may be on your graduates today but just know they would not shine nearly as brightly were it not for you and they know it they know it so i say to all the graduates today there s a line a great line i heard it goes like this if first you don t succeed do it like your mom told you to do and that goes for you jack or mister w but look that may be the best advice i can give you today i m not big in the business of giving advice but i say to all the moms that are here today happy mother s day it s obviously a great day for you you deserve our thanks and our recognition and by the way if any of have forgotten immediately leave here and get flowers look at the turn of the 20th century william allen white a writer a politician a national spokesman for middle class values said and i quote i am not afraid of tomorrow for i have seen yesterday and i love today well right now there s a line of thought out there that your generation views today with anxiety and tomorrow with a sense of despair but as your class speaker pointed out i know better you know better you know that you can control your destiny even in these difficult times let me first tell you about my yesterday i too graduated from this great university into an uncertain world the united states was at war in a faraway place and unlike today america s faith in its leadership was perilously low in january of my senior year when americans thought the war in vietnam may be drawing to a close the viet cong launched what you studied about the tet offensive in an effort to end the war in one single seismic assault two days into the offensive a bullet fired on the streets of saigon by a vietnam police chief went into the skull of a handcuffed viet cong soldier as a photographer captured the mayhem that one bullet not only pierced that soldier s skull but pierced america s consciousness as well that one photograph taken by eddie adams brought home to everyone of my generation and my parent s generation that despite the promises we had been hearing there was really no end in sight there was no light at the end of the tunnel that one image contained within its four corners the terror of the times peaceful anti war demonstrations turned violent in america the chancellor s office on this campus was occupied and the violence in vietnam exploded nearly doubling to over 38 000 dead the number of our classmates we lost in 1968 in combat deaths then in march president lyndon b johnson a man who coveted the presidency his entire career decided he would not seek reelection to a job he had geared his entire career to attain and only four days later after the president s stunning announcement dr martin luther king was gunned down in memphis the cities including my hometown of wilmington delaware went up in flames and a couple of months after that only three days after i walked off this field one of my personal heroes robert f kennedy the hope of my generation was gunned down in a kitchen in los angeles after having been declared the winner of the california primary and our likely nominee two fallen american heroes in a matter of weeks and many more fallen heroes back across the world in vietnam the once prevailing hope for better days ahead was gone shot through with pain and grief of a nation that viewed itself on the brink and all throughout this great country a sense of hopelessness and helplessness began to take hold that was the world i entered when i walked across this stage to receive my law degree that was the history that up to that point had been written for us not by us but in spite of it all as i walked across this stage like you i never doubted for one instant that we could change that history that we could rewrite the outcome we were careening toward and we did four short years later i sat in the cabinet room five years later across from president ford and dr henry kissinger along with colleagues on the foreign relations committee demanded that the war end and it did within a matter of weeks after that that was 1968 and this is 2009 and now it s your turn you are graduating into a world of anxiety and uncertainty you re walking across this stage without knowing exactly what s going to be on the other side but you know that good jobs are hard to find now two wars are being waged on the other side of the globe a global recession a planet in peril a world in flux yes these are the challenges you face but these are the moments you have an opportunity to embrace throughout the span of history only a handful of us have been alive at a time when we can actually not rhetorically actually shape the course of history i call these inflection points remember from your physics class your hands are on the steering wheel of the automobile it s going straight and one slight turn sends the car in a direction fundamentally different and initially unalterable in the direction it s been going in few people few generations get to put their hands on a steering wheel at that moment there s not a single solitary decision confronting us now that doesn t yield change from non action as well as action my favorite poet william butler yeats writing about his ireland in 1960 wrote a poem after the first rising of the 20th century called easter sunday 1916 in it there was a line that s more applicable in my view to today than it was to his ireland in 1916 he said the world has changed it has changed utterly a terrible beauty has been born well it s clear things have changed utterly in the last 12 to 15 years a terrible beauty has been born it s a different world out there but we have an opportunity to make it truly beautiful because we re at an inflection point absent our input and leadership the will continue to careen in the direction the momentum is now taking it that folks is an inflection point do nothing or take history into our own and like few generations that are given the chance bend it bend it in the service of a better day you know how i feel it s probably self evident in the face of the challenges and i view opportunities we have in the face of struggle there is a much greater risk in accepting a situation we know we cannot sustain than in steeling our spine and embracing the promise of change even though the pessimist will point out we cannot guarantee exactly what that change will deliver the truth is individuals don t determine these inflection points it s the cumulative consequence of changed circumstances of our country and the world that delivered us delivers us to these moments but it is individuals who do determine the outcome of these moments i ve done many commencement speeches but i can say with absolute certainty without fear of contradiction since i ve been in public life there has never been a graduating class that is graduating into a moment where they actually have a chance to make more than incremental change ladies and gentlemen that s where we are that s why barack and i ran that s why i believe so passionately we have a shot like hasn t occurred in the lifetime of anyone in this dome and now we re here imagine what we can do imagine a country where within a very short time 20 percent of all our energy comes from renewable clean sources of energy a country that literally is ready to invest in every child from the time they re three years old and guarantee every american who qualifies that they can attend college notwithstanding their income imagine a country where health care is for the first time affordable and available to every american driving down our costs opening up opportunities imagine imagine a country where our carbon footprint shrinks to virtually nothing imagine an america brought together by powerful ideas not torn apart by petty ideologies imagine a country built on innovation and efficiency not on credit default swaps and complex securities ladies and gentlemen just imagine imagine a country that lifts up the windows of opportunities instead of slamming them down that has occurred over the last 15 years imagine a country where creativity and scientific knowledge are valued not shoved aside imagine a country where every single american has a fighting chance just a fighting chance and a country that lives up to our promise of our ideals and leads the world with the power of our example not just the example of our power ladies and gentlemen that s why i stayed in this business that s what you demanded of us in this last election that s what the president and i are seeking to accomplish they tell us we re dreamers they tell us we re doing too much they tell us that this is beyond our scope where in the hell have they been where have they been ladies and gentlemen we desperately need you and i know you re there we need you to help us make this happen this is totally within our power as my brother jimmy would say this is within our wheel house this is the story of america some think as i said i m too optimistic but i challenge that i believe i m being thoroughly realistic my confidence is born out of my own experience and america s experience the american people have never never never ever let their country down when they ve had a leadership willing to support them and to challenge them i was optimistic when i walked off this field into an uncertain world in 1968 i was optimistic when i was sworn in as a when i was elected as a 29 year old kid in delaware to the united states senate but i must admit if anyone had told me then i d be more optimistic and idealistic in year 2009 than i was then i would have told them they were crazy but it s the god honest truth i am more optimistic today than i have ever been in my life because of you because of where we are and there s good reason there s good reason for this optimism it s you it s my daughter it s your generation it s not only what i know you can do it s what was already what you ve already done 1 2 million of a total of 1 9 million combat troops that have been sent to iraq and afghanistan have been under the age of 30 and many many have given there in a war that was a war of choice and one that was one of necessity you you are committing to your communities in larger numbers and volunteering at record numbers the peace corps teach for america americorps the jesuit volunteer corps habitat for humanity the list goes on and on and on and all over the globe you re enriching communities and making life better for people everyone in the world from the north american continent to asia to africa to latin america you re connected with each other like no generation ever has been you re connected to the world in ways that we could have never imagined as i walked off this field and you re using those connections to unite a global community and to deepen our understanding of the world around us that knowledge will help us seed an entire new era in world history your agile your fresh minds you will create for us a bold new reality and we re prepared to ride along with you and fight with you to see that it happens so for those who tell you we re doing too much be smart enough not to listen for those who say what we dream of cannot be done be nave enough to give it a shot and for those that say now is not the time say if not now when when so folks i m not giving you the usual malarkey that everyone of you are going to change the world that everyone of you are going to become the nobel laureates and the presidents and the corporate heads and the leaders of great organizations but i am telling you the cumulative effect of what you ve already demonstrated you have the capacity to do will i guarantee you will change the world because it cannot sustain itself in the direction it s going now just as with every other generation that s found itself at an inflection point in history it is totally within your power to shape history to literally bend it this is not bravado this has been the history of the journey of america from its inception this is a the journey that was brought home to me if you excuse as we used to say in the senate excuse a point of personal privilege it was brought home to me personally 110 days ago when i went to the same railroad station in wilmington delaware that had almost been burned to the ground the year i graduated occupied by national guard men with drawn bayonets in a black section of my city and as i boarded that train 110 days ago it struck me how far we had traveled just in my lifetime i was taking a very short journey on that train to our nation s capital to be sworn in as vice president of the united states of america with the first african american president in american history as we rode down that track that short 123 miles it was the most moving experience of my life thousands upon thousands of people in my city which had been burned to the ground about a fourth of it women and men holding up their babies so close to the track i feared someone would be hit with a sense of hope and expectation that was reflected in the fact that we had turned around so drastically in that short time ladies and gentlemen i thought back to what dr king said he said the arch of history bends towards justice that s what you get a chance to do that no other generation in recent times has had the chance to do not because you re better and you are but because of the moment to which we ve been delivered i knew at that moment that the rhetoric i would repeat of dr king during my career was absolutely positively literally true and i also knew one other thing i would ve never been able to have that great honor to be part of that history were it not chancellor for this great university it would have never occurred because those times when i had to listen to my dad s admonition of getting up at the most difficult times of my life syracuse university was there for me they were reaching down and they said he s our guy it s a big deal it s a big deal the loyalty this university exceeds any institutional loyalty that i have ever encountered in my life and it s come at times that were the bleakest in my life as well as the happiest in my life so let me conclude by saying i m grateful i am truly grateful and i thank you and i congratulate all you graduates happy mother s day and may god bless you all and may god protect our troops go enjoy yourself play dem joebiden12 5 09 joe_biden welcome to the rose garden ladies and gentlemen let me begin by saying they can sit yes you can sit down i just assumed you were going to sit down i apologize thank you mr president tommy you stay standing up though for me i don t want you let me begin by saying congratulations it s an honor to be in the presence of the best of the best here standing behind us you re all been an inspiration to the men and women of not only this country but your fellow officers you ve been an inspiration to the thousands and thousands of people who strap on a sidearm and go out every day to do their job when you strap on that sidearm and you walk outside your home every morning every morning or evening depending on their shift your wives and your husbands that you leave behind know that you are literally putting yourselves in harm s way every time you walk out that door and the president and i recognize the bravery you display simply by putting on that badge every day just putting the badge on the officers honored here today have been singled out for going above and beyond the call of duty and we commend you all but we also know that there are thousands more like you in communities throughout this country large and small doing their part every single day as we speak right now in their communities making them safer but also making the community stronger today is a day for every man and woman in uniform to feel proud of you and to feel proud of themselves today is a day for the entire community of police officers to see how much america appreciates their courage and to let you know that the president and this administration appreciate your courage as well your sacrifices and acts of heroism don t go unnoticed i think sometimes you must feel like they do you do your job every day you don t expect any particular thanks or gratitude you change people s lives for the better and but it s warranted on a day like today to pay special recognition you ve already seen some evidence of the president s commitment beyond his entire career of being committed to law enforcement the president s commitment to the level of support for law enforcement can be seen in the recovery act over 4 billion was placed in that emergency legislation to hire new officers for new equipment such as bulletproof vests and for new technologies to give you the tools to do your jobs more safely and more efficiently you keep us safe we owe you we owe you to put you in a position where you can keep yourselves safe as well and you ve seen the president s commitment to you by bringing this ceremony back to the rose garden mr president in the roosevelt room you said you wanted to let the public know and i was about to say which i ll say here and that s why the president wanted it back here in the rose garden so there s no mistake there s no mistake that this president and this administration appreciates what you ve done we know this commitment i ll conclude by saying you should know this commitment will not stop today or tomorrow or next month or next year we re going to work and continue to work as the president has his entire career for what serves you best so that you can serve us as best and as bravely as you have ladies and gentlemen while we don t say it nearly enough thank you thank you thank you for all what you do so mr president the top cops for 2009 a superior group of real heroes are waiting to hear from you boss it s all yours dem joebiden13 4 09 joe_biden thank you mr secretary mr president i think the secretary perfectly summed up at his confirmation hearing what we re doing here and i want to quote him he said the most compelling reason for infrastructure investment is that economic excuse me it is the listing of not only economic but social benefits that get brought as a consequence of decades for decades and for generations the bottom line is what we re doing here is not just for today it s going to last well beyond this time and that s exactly why we re here the recovery act is being implemented with speed transparency and accountability and don t take my word for it just look at what s happening here today we re creating not only creating new jobs we re saving jobs that were about to be put on hold we re making it easy for folks to get to work those who have a job and we re improving the nation s infrastructure all at the same time just eight weeks into this and we re already seeing beginning to see exactly how the recovery act and the department of transportation are building the economy of the future and making life better for communities everywhere not just in maryland or virginia which we re going to talk about here in virginia the department of transportation is already bidding 176 million for paving bridge and road and bridge projects funded by the recovery act with another 75 million of highway jobs expected later this week in missouri by late march 1 5 million in recovery act funds had already been awarded to missouri construction companies to provide gravel to the forest service roads damaged by extreme weather over the past few years i see stories like this everywhere i go and ray and i have been going around the country pointing this out around this country we re making deep investments in our infrastructure making sure it s sound secure and able to handle the full speed ahead progress that this economy has underway now we re stimulating billions of dollars in economic activity we re creating millions of new jobs and breaking ground on a brighter economic future folks the road to recovery must quite literally be repaved and with the leadership of secretary lahood and president barack obama we re doing just that each and every day we re making that road a little bit smoother and much easier to travel and ladies and gentlemen it s now my pleasure to introduce the president of the united states barack obama dem joebiden14 5 09 joe_biden thank you very much admiral and all you folks up on board i ll tell you what that s a platform for liberty i m sure glad you re manning it thank you very much and excuse my back ladies and gentlemen it s a great great honor to be here on behalf of president barack obama and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff admiral mullen i bring you their greetings but i also have to tell you a little story admiral mullen as chairman of the joint chiefs admiral is supposed to be even handed in terms of all the military services and he is but i got to tell you a story and i asked his permission to tell the story i can t tell you the event because it s classified but i can tell you what happened not long ago we were down in the situation room with the president presiding and members of the joint chiefs as well as the national security advisor secretary of state myself the secretary of defense and there was a particular mission that was incredibly risky and required an immense immense amount of skill to pull off and several of my uniformed brethren who weren t wearing navy colors sat there and said i think that s almost impossible i m not sure that can be done and this is a true story admiral without missing a beat spontaneously not his prejudice but his pride showed through and he said gentlemen they re navy seals that was it it could be done no matter what it was with regard to the navy and you ve all proven him to be right ladies and gentlemen as i look out at all of you and look behind me i see standing here and i think of what a former navy man the former president of the united states john f kennedy said when in fact in how he viewed his service he was asked how he viewed it and he said i can imagine no more rewarding career no more rewarding career any man any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile i think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction i served in the united states navy well ladies and gentlemen it s a new century and this new century faced with immense challenges and bold new goals president kennedy s words are equally appropriate and applicable to you when you are asked what did you do in this century to make your life worthwhile you too can respond without hesitation with pride and satisfaction that you served in the united states navy and knowing that your nation is indebted to you and that it feels an immeasurable amount of respect for all you stand for folks those of you assembled before me in uniform your generation is the most powerful best disciplined best trained group of warriors the united states of america has ever produced and don t you every forget it give yourselves a round of applause because you deserve it this strike group proves my point as you prepare to deploy for your fourth time in four years your ops tempo has been incredibly demanding but you ve handled it with such skill and grace you ve been decorated for your service achievements underway a battle e winner for the most combat efficient carrier in the pacific for 2006 and 2008 i know i know you re looking ahead to this new mission but you should take time to pause and look back at what you ve already done extensive air operations over afghanistan as part of operation enduring freedom humanitarian assistance operations following a devastating typhoon in the philippines a counter piracy operation off the horn of africa you are agile you re capable of a variety of missions and you re brave enough to succeed every time you re deployed and for that i thank you and for that a grateful nation owes you owes you and i want to make it clear when i say owe i am not exaggerating we owe you that s why our administration has focused so much of our nation s resources in such difficult economic times not only on your training your pay and your equipment but on your health your education as well as the quality of life for you and your families and i say families because your families are making significant sacrifices as well the poet john milton wrote they also serve who only stand and wait they also serve who only stand and wait we understand that the sacrifices your families make and continue to make not just your sacrifices the sacrifices they make to allow you to proudly wear that uniform and serve our country in such time of great need that s why we re working so hard to improve the quality of life on bases all across america ladies and gentlemen that s why the recovery act which you read about includes more than 7 billion in addition to the regular yearly budget more than 7 billion for military construction projects new hospitals child care centers better housing at all our defense installations across this entire country and here at coronado that means immediately 138 million for 11 new projects to modernize your facilities and generally improve your quality of life building everything from a new bachelors quarters to a 24 7 child care center replacing roofs and lowering energy costs just as we re doing for civilian workers we re also using the recovery act money as an important means to give you what you need to do your job but our commitment doesn t end with this legislation nor does it end when your time on this base comes to a close that s why we ve dramatically increased health care coverage providing resources to give 5 5 million veterans timely and high quality health care expanding health care eligibility bringing in an additional half a million veterans into the va system that s why we passed the most extensive gi bill since world war ii allowing not only you but your children and your spouses to use those benefits if you choose you do not need them or you are not going to exercise them that s why today i m so proud to announce that the department of defense after strong support from a former senate colleague named jim johnson from south dakota is dedicating over half a billion dollars from this recovery act to extend a program to assist military and defense department military as well as civilian defense department employees who are homeowners when they sell their homes at a loss which many of you are faced with in the middle of a credit and housing crisis we recognize that military families cannot generally choose to put it mildly when they move so we used this half a billion dollars to dramatically expand what was once a fairly small program assisting your families forced to relocate due to base closures and or normal assignment rotations and that s why we give priority access to this program to the survivors of those killed while deployed and those who were wounded or injured while they were deployed president obama and i are extremely proud that in our first budget in these very tough times we ve increased funding for veterans to the tune of 25 billion it s the biggest budget increase in a generation and when we proposed it as you may have read if you are on stateside people said how can we do that in the midst of this great economic crisis and our response is simple how can we not do that while we re waging two wars and relying on you relying on you to protect the united states of america but as parents as mentioned earlier of a son deployed jill and i understand it s not just the big things that make a difference in your quality of life it s a lot of little things jill and the first lady have been using their influence to remind the nation of the incredible sacrifices so many are making while their loved ones are at war jill s comment was she never again wants to see what she saw as a young woman when soldiers and sailors getting off aircraft coming home walking through airports and having people turn their backs on them as they did in my generation we want to guarantee that every american knows the sacrifices you re making so few are serving and so few are giving so much so many should appreciate and ladies and gentlemen jill feels passionately that we have to use all of our power to give both the emotional as well as the physical support of those who as milton said only stand and wait we owe you but we owe as you all would agree an inordinately large debt to the families of the 4 295 fallen angels in iraq and the 679 fallen angels in afghanistan and the 34 084 wounded in both theaters all of them all of them we say to those families we re indebted to you more deeply than we are to any other group of americans under any other circumstance for as jill said we have only one we have only one sacred obligation as a nation an obligation that exceeds all others and that s to care for those we send and care for those who come home if we only have 10 to spend as a nation and it takes 8 to meet the needs of the families who have served then we will spend that 8 before we ll spend a penny on anything else whether it s education health care or all those important items it s the single only obligation that is sacred that we have as a nation so from the bottom of my heart on behalf of every one of those young men and women like you and my son s outfit in iraq serving the nation on the ground in the air at sea i say to all of you i admire you the president admires you and the nation is grateful for what you do and we will make sure that everything you need when you deploy is available and with the grace of god when you come home everything you need is available as well if you sailors will forgive a vice president for quoting an army general on a navy base i would like to quote something general washington said he said it follows then as certain as night succeeds the day that without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive and with it everything honorable and glorious so when you reach these shores after deploying after another successful mission our country as a consequence of your deployment will be even more honorable more glorious than it is today the uss ronald reagan named for a great and patriotic american a man i had the opportunity to serve with eight years and came to know well we were in opposite parties we often were on opposite sides of issues on social issues but he was a man whose personal warmth and generosity my family and i felt in our time of need he said it best when he said peace is the highest aspiration of the american people we will negotiate for it sacrifice for it but we will never surrender for it never ever ever ladies and gentlemen we will never have to surrender for it because of all of you may god bless you and keep you safe and may god protect all of our troops thank you thank you for your service dem joebiden16 4 09a joe_biden thank you all very much it s a genuine honor to be here and where i come from if you speak much more than 10 minutes with an audience standing you re bound to lose them so i m going to try to be brief with you all but let you know that i m genuinely honored to be here and i tell you what seeing that b 2 looking over my shoulder is some sight you know i just want the record to note since there s press here that when ike said the best air force base in america i clapped i don t want anybody back in dover getting angry i just want you to know we re used to those big ol jobs you know those big ol c 5as and bs and i ll tell you what you re all you re all great the first thing i want to do though is congratulate technical sergeant townsend for his service you know 17 000 miles on those roads old buddy as my italian friends say that s a lot of that s a lot of worry man because i tell you we have lost as all of you know and most americans haven t focused on it we have lost literally thousands of americans the 70 percent of all those who have died in iraq and afghanistan have been as a consequence of an ied or projectile the very people riding along in those convoys and the number has exceeded now over 4 000 in iraq and approaching 1 000 in afghanistan so it was no mean feat everyone should know you all know in uniform know but the people listening to this should know it is no mean feat what s going on today in afghanistan and iraq and goes on as speak as we speak so we owe we owe a debt of gratitude but it was a great honor sergeant to be able to pin that bronze star on you you were probably less concerned jumping in the convoy than you were coming up here on stage but you did well and i also want to thank my friend ike skelton for inviting me you know as you all continue and have fought for your country you re all very fortunate to have a man like ike fighting for you i ve never seen anybody as tenacious in fighting for his district but more importantly specifically fighting for the military fighting for the military including this base he s been a long time proponent a long time proponent of making sure that life is better not only for you that you re equipped and you have all you need but that life is better on the base for you as well as your families you know there s an old expression those also serve who stand and wait an awful lot of your families when you saddle up they re left behind worrying about what s going to happen worrying about whether that mission how it s going to take place those of you who are deployed on the ground they re left alone for periods of time and you know ike has supported better military pay better military health care better military education better lives for the men and women in uniform and no less important is their families the families are never left out when ike starts talking about and appropriating the money needed for the united states military and the skelton name is synonymous with a deep commitment to the armed services embodied by the naval reserve building bearing his father s name ike s dad s name and a child development center named for his late wife who i knew well and a wonderful woman susie and his work on your behalf is exactly is exactly what we need the president and me to ensure that we maintain the absolute best equipped military in the world you are you are as the commander and i were talking about you are the premier military not only in the world today but it is not hyperbole to suggest in the history of the world and anybody who tells me some of the older folks start talking about this generation i just say come with me come with me and look come with me into the mountains of afghanistan come with me up to kunar valley come with me into the multiple cities i ve been in to iraq in the middle of this war come to me with me 15 years ago and 10 years ago in bosnia then you ll see that your generation are the most powerful best disciplined best trained warriors america has ever ever produced and for that i thank you and we owe you and that is not an exaggeration folks to the president the secretary of state and to me when i say we owe you these are not idle phrases when we say we owe you we mean it more than just a nice salutation that s why we re working so hard to improve the quality of life on bases all across america here at whiteman that means why we re here with 17 8 million investing to modernizing your facilities and generally improving the quality of life here that s why the recovery act you hear so much about includes more than 7 billion in addition to the regular budget more than 7 billion for military construction projects breaking ground on hospitals child care centers better housing that s why we fought so hard for the most expansive gi bill since the end of world war ii to make college more affordable all in all this administration is wholly devoted to serving the brave women and men in uniform as you sacrifice to serve our country we should do a little sacrifice serving you but our commitment doesn t end when your time at this base ends all of you will one day be veterans and our commitment extends to veterans as well because they have been forgotten a lot the last eight years last 15 years president obama and i are proud that our first budget in these very tough times we ve increased funding for veterans to the tune of 25 billion increased funding for veterans for the department of veterans affairs that s never happened before it s the biggest budget increase in a generation and when we proposed it people said how can you do that in the midst of this economy and our response is how can we not do that how can we not do that over 15 000 of the wounded coming home not to count the fallen angels came home to be buried the life expectancy of 15 000 of those well over 30 000 who ve been wounded is going to be somewhere in the tune of 35 years but of that roughly 15 000 will need the most modern medical health care for the rest of their lives the cost of that will be in the tens of billions of dollars but it s a sacred a sacred commitment the only sacred commitment a nation has is to prepare those we send equip them with all they need and care for whatever their needs are when they come home ladies and gentlemen we dramatically increased health care coverage providing adequate resources to give 5 5 million veterans timely and high quality health care we expand health care eligibility bringing 500 000 new veterans into the va system and just 15 years ago as ike could tell you the talk was are we going to close va hospitals and fold them in you remember that ike well in the end we re providing services to veterans with the efficiency and quality they deserve and keeping that deep debt that we owe that you should and have a right to demand i believe as i said there s only one sacred obligation one that comes before all others we care deeply for every republicans and democrats alike all those of us who serve care deeply for every man and woman who cares deeply enough to serve this country so honorably which includes every one of you in this hangar we owe you a particular obligation today because there s tens of thousands of men and women who have already fought and continue to fight bravely for our country in afghanistan and iraq there are families families back at home i don t have to tell some of the national guardsmen here who wasn t planning on this being your day job but guess what it s become a day job for tens of thousands of guardsmen in addition to all your families all your families and to the families of the 4 275 men and women the fallen angels in iraq the 673 fallen angels in afghanistan to all of them to the more than 35 000 wounded in theater i say to the families thank you thank you and we owe you we owe you as deeply as we owe your kin your blood you know in the more than dozen times i ve flown out of iraq and afghanistan on occasion i ve walked into those c 130s with the fallen angels strapped to the floor and when you see that it turns that cavernous opening into a cathedral because you know there s a family waiting at the other end so folks we know what you do we know what you risk and we know on this base what a remarkable remarkable remarkable capability you have i was saying to the commander i spent a lot of time in bosnia in kosovo and i spent time before we sent troops there helping convince the president we should act and the thing that the french military the british military and others marveled at that you guys and women get up from your dinner table suit up get one of these magnificent birds fly round trip over 30 hours deliver a lethal cargo with precision was beyond anything any other generation ever thought possible saving the lives of your comrades on the ground and clearing the way for america s interest you stunned the rest of the world they knew it on paper but they never saw it commander and the way you executed it with such incredible incredible precision absolutely had a mind altering impact on our allies as well as our enemies we re proud of you you know i read before i came here today about your base s nickname no excuse me namesake second lieutenant george whiteman who i learned was one of the first men killed in pearl harbor i honestly didn t know that before i was scheduled to come here after his death and you may know the story but after his death a reporter went and talked to his mom and his mother gave the reporter a photograph of her son sitting in an aircraft where the lieutenant had inscribed on it lucky lucky me lucky lucky me to me that story speaks volumes about the pride the airmen on this base and all through this nation around the world take in doing their jobs about the sense of honor and duty that surrounds you every time you put on that uniform and step into a cockpit or ready an aircraft to be head off the runway it s about your unyielding commitment to your country it s about everything that makes each and every one of you so special you are lucky it s true but even luckier even truer is we your grateful nation are lucky there are men and women like you ready to serve as you have and you continue to so from the bottom of my heart on behalf of every one of those young men and women on the ground like my son in iraq i say to all of you i admire you the president admires you and we are putting our money where our mouth is in terms of seeing to it that you have everything you need as you deploy when you deploy and when you come home so i say thank you god bless you and may god protect our troops around the globe thank you very much ladies and gentlemen dem joebiden16 4 09b joe_biden thank you i promise these comments will be shorter than the ride a ride mr president i ve taken about a thousand times with rob andrews and frank lautenberg and others in the northeast corridor but what gem we ve had in the northeast corridor it s time it gets extended throughout the country and improved mr secretary thank you you know we often refer to the american recovery and reinvestment act as i ve been going around the country shorthand i call it the recovery act mr president for short but today we re here to talk about the other part of the effort the reinvestment the reinvestment part of the recovery and reinvestment act the commitment to building our nation s future and you see while the vast majority of what we re doing in the recovery act is about short term job creation as it should be and is our top priority we also set aside some funds to build america s long term economic future which you all understand very well assembled in this room and we re making a down payment today a down payment on the economy for tomorrow the economy that s going to drive us in the 21st century in a way that the other the highway system drove us in the mid 20th century and i m happy to be here i m more happy than you can imagine to talk about a commitment that with the president s leadership we re making to achieve the goal through the development of high speed rail projects that will extend eventually all across this nation and most of you know that not only means an awful lot to me but i know a lot of you personally in this audience over the years i know it means equally as much to you with high speed rail system we re going to be able to pull people off the road lowering our dependence on foreign oil lowering the bill for our gas in our gas tanks we re going to loosen the congestion that also has great impact on productivity i might add the people sitting at stop lights right now in overcrowded streets and cities we re also going to deal with the suffocation that s taking place in our major metropolitan areas as a consequence of that congestion and we re going to significantly lessen the damage to our planet this is a giant environmental down payment all in all we re going to make travel in this country leaner and a whole lot cleaner and as we look to the future we re going to ensure that we can travel through the system that is sound secure and able to handle full speed ahead progress for this new economy you know as it s been mentioned often i m not sure it s good or bad but my father referred to my many commutes it exceeded over 7 900 they tell me he said one day before he died he said you know honey he said that is the definition of a misspent adulthood sitting on a train but i ve i have like many in this room devoted most of my career to doing what i can to support america s rail systems so i m really proud to be part of an administration led by a man who has real vision real vision about how to not only transform this country generally but transform our transportation system in a fundamental way it s about time we took those railways and made them the national treasures they should be they re the best way to reconnect and connect communities to each other to move us all forward in the 21st century and many people deserve credit for this the great congressional leaders who ve been introduced today many of you if i started going through the audience the people i ve known who have been working in the vineyards in this we d be here all day mr president but there are so many critical aspects of this so many supporters in state capitals among the cities among the governors but on behalf of those of us who ve been waiting for this day for decades mr president i want to pay particular thanks to three people and the first is secretary lahood for his leadership and vision he jumped right into this job and he didn t miss a step didn t miss a beat and was ready to go from day one and this is very uncharacteristic of me mr president but i want to thank rahm emanuel not only as smart as a devil not only as a former congressman i believe mr president it was rahm s tenacious tenacious persistence that led to getting this high speed rail funding in the recovery act it was at your direction but i m not sure it would have been able to have been done without rahm and third to the man who in this area is as so many others has turned the years of talk in washington into a season of action president barack obama ladies and gentlemen join me in welcoming the man who s making this possible and this will be one of the many parts of a great legacy he s going to leave president barack obama dem joebiden17 2 09 joe_biden governor thank you governor thank you very much it s a genuine honor it s an honor to be here with the president and my name is joe biden i used to work for i used to work for ken salazar in the united states senate and it s good to see you here ken i guess you got you re going to hitch a ride home with me right he rode out on the big plane he s going back on the little one and i also want to acknowledge senator michael bennett who i had an opportunity to meet and congresswoman degette is here as well there she is and mayor hickenlooper i want you to know how much we appreciate the hospitality and also i believe congressman perlmutter was at the there you are congressman i wasn t sure you were he greeted us when we got off the plane mr president it s a slight diversion but i think we got to be nice to him the chairman of the finance committee max baucus is here and so we got to make sure max just remember when we call i call just say yes joe okay all kidding aside thanks for your great help in this max you know you don t need to be an economist to know that jobs are the engine of our economy and without jobs people can t earn and when people can t earn they can t spend and if they don t spend it means more jobs get lost it s a vicious cycle and that s the vicious cycle we re in today and it s one of the reasons that this bill is so desperately needed we have to reverse that cycle but everyone knows that jobs are more than just about a job they re about dignity they re about respect they re about being able to get up in the morning look your child in the eye and say everything is going to be okay everything is going to be okay last year last year our economy lost 3 million jobs 600 000 more just this last month there are an awful lot of mothers and father who had to walk up those stairs to the bedroom of their children and tell them that i m out of work honey we may not be able to stay here you may not be able to stay in this school it s a tough tough conversation and many too many times it s already occurred in this country we re here today we re here today to start to turn that around but folks we re not just going to help the economy recover we re going to start building the economy for the future i m particularly pleased that this bill includes investments in areas i ve worked my whole political career thanks to the recovery act thousands of additional police officers will go on the streets of america and hundreds and hundreds of fire stations will be built making the people of denver and every other city in america safer thanks to this act we re going to see an unprecedented investment in improving america s rail system coast to coast in denver right here in denver your light rail will be affected all the way to the northeast corridor where i come from we should have the best transportation system in the world and we don t but ladies and gentleman it s not only that this will help create jobs in the rail sector it s also good for the environment so there s a double bang for the buck in a number of the investments we re making in this legislation starting today our administration will be working day and night to provide more aid for the unemployed create immediate jobs building our roads and our bridges make long term investments in a smarter energy grid and so much more and as we turn the economy around we ve got to make sure of one more thing last time an economic recovery occurred after a deep recession the middle class got left behind the middle class got left behind and that s why the president has set up a white house council on the task force on the middle class which he s asking me to chair so as we go through this process we re also going to make sure that america is as we recover that american middle class is not left behind but before we start on the way there is much more to be done in the weeks to come i want to say something about what got us to this point i remember having the meetings of the transition team with president elect obama and vice president elect biden in chicago and meeting in those offices knowing we were about to inherit a very very bad economic situation and we started to put together the president s leadership the blueprint for our recovery faced with a swirl of options and uncertainties then president elect obama was as clear and as firm then as he is today about what is needed he said and i quote we have to be bold we have to act fast and we have to think of the future that we wish to build well i believe that s what the president delivered he never lost sight of those goals that he set back in november and december of last year over the weeks that followed i watched him reach out asking senator and congressmen from both parties to put the good of the nation above the disagreement over one particular of this significant package the president showed a willingness to compromise on specifics but he never compromised on the principles he set out in that room in chicago back in november and so folks he showed a willingness to work with others to get things done but he never bent in his determination to put us on a road to recovery and reinvestment so today less than a month think of this less than a month into his presidency the president is about to sign into law what is i believe a landmark achievement because of what he did america can take a first very strong step leading us out of this very difficult road to recovery we find ourselves on so on behalf of our country and its people mr president let me presume to say thank you we owe you a great deal to introduce the president it s my pleasure to introduce blake jones president of now namaste i told him if i didn t say it right he could call me biddin but namaste solar in four years this company has grown from three people to 60 owner employees and have become one of the leading installers of photoelectric panels here in the state of colorado and i expect they have ambitions to go beyond that and i hope they succeed in fact bill ritter isn t just the governor he s a customer namaste installed as he mentioned the solar panels on the governor s mansion and despite namaste s success without the recovery and reinvestment bill that the president is about to sign i think your president would tell you he was a little worried he might have to take other action in spite of all the progress that had been made that may have included layoffs but with this bill with this bill he s going to be looking to hire not fire hire and that s the difference between that this investment is going to make and why we re so happy to be here today dem joebiden17 3 09 joe_biden it s an honor to be here it s an honor to be here with two great leaders to welcome the taoiseach and to celebrate the friendship between between our two great nations two nations that in my case both most define who i am there s an irish proverb that says there is no strength without unity and today we celebrate the strength the rise and the unity the irish and the american people have shared for centuries now actually it was from the very beginning we all know about the importance of st patrick s day in irish history but today is a pretty significant day in america as well it was on march 17 1776 i m sure you all know that british general howe evacuated boston in the revolutionary war paving the way for our ultimate victory and the password literally the password at general washington s encampment that day was st patrick now st patrick s day has been entwined in american history literally since our birth so when america s americans are all done up tonight in kelly green involved in revelry outside and inside the white house i m sure it s likely a result of their keen desire keen desire to more deeply understand the revolutionary war here in america or maybe not maybe not for me of course st patrick s day and the irishness it celebrates are inextricably part of my character and many of you as well as well as the president it s part of my history as it is for many of you here tonight my mother catherine eugenia finnigan biden is the soul spirit and essence of what it means to be an irish american in my view she s spiritual she s romantic she honors tradition and she understands that the thickest of all substances is blood and the greatest of all virtues is courage she taught me and every child who walked through her door that bravery lives in the heart of every one of us and you should fully expect it to be summoned one day she taught me that at some point failure in everyone s life was inevitable but giving up was absolutely unforgivable it s funny i think a little bit later she may have been tutoring president barack obama on the side for he shares precisely that same ethic it s an ethic that is not unique to us irish but it s one we embrace fully it s an ethics of an ethnic of toughness and compassion intellect and humor deep honor and a deeper commitment to those around him that s who he is come to think of it maybe he should put as it was said earlier today an apostrophe after the o in his name as a matter of fact we were kidding in the other room and michelle was recalling how she once introduced jill as jill o biden so i could use an o as well mr president seriously though there s another old irish proverb and it goes like this it says a friend s eye is a good mirror a friend s eye is a good mirror i hope that s true because when i look into the president s eye i sure like what i see reflecting back ladies and gentlemen it s my honor to introduce my friend and yours the president of the united states of america barack obama dem joebiden18 3 10 joe_biden good evening everyone mr president mrs obama the taoiseach mrs cowen welcome to the white house and welcome all of you to the white house you know as i said to some of my friends at the vice president s residence this morning at a breakfast there s an old saying there s an old saying that goes like this if you re lucky enough to be irish well you re lucky enough i was telling the taoiseach earlier today one of my favorite cartoons to explain to the irish irish what we american irish are like was one handed to me mr president by pat moynihan about 15 18 years ago it was the new yorker magazine and it was a picture of pat and mike sitting in a pub in new york and pat looks at mike and says mike don t you wish you were in a pub in dublin wishing you were in a pub in new york you understand that about us you got it all straight taoiseach but the taoiseach knows a lot about it his mom lived in long island for 10 years or so god rest her soul and although wait your mom is still alive it s your dad passed god bless her soul i got to get this straight you know there are nearly 40 million of us who claim to be irish american that s considerably larger than the entire population of the emerald isle but 40 million many of you in this room have made incredible incredible contributions to our country perhaps the greatest contribution collectively we irish have made is that we have the same set of values both in ireland and here family faith pride and courage and these are the values in my view and i mean this sincerely that define the man i work with every day barack obama the president is always kidding me because i m always quoting irish poets he thinks i quote them because i m irish i don t do it for that reason i do it because they re simply the best poets and the best of them in my view is yeats yeats once said in dreams begin responsibility well ladies and gentlemen the dreams that president obama has awakened and have awakened in the american people are generating a new sense of responsibility that i think is going to serve this nation well it s going to be a more peaceful world a more prosperous nation and at the same time an awful lot of people who haven t had hope are going to get it there s an old irish proverb as some of you know that i heard my grandfather use but never really applied to me before he said it goes a silent mouth is sweet to hear well i m going to yield to that proverb and introduce you to the president of the united states of america barack obama dem joebiden18 5 09 joe_biden thank you very much mr president thank you thank you very much i say to all the faculty this will be painless they have felt like i suspect they ve heard a hundred all the commencements since the beginning of the school but i m honored to be here it was a long trip from that end of your mall to this end last time i was here you were kind enough many of you students to listen to the case i was making and i am honored that notwithstanding the fact you ve heard me once you ve invited me back a second time i thank you mr president you were suggesting that you arrived at the same year as this graduating class well if i m not mistaken you rode into the ceremony on the famous demon deacon gold motorcycle and they drew up in vans with their parents moving furniture so i thought i should try to replicate something along the lines that you did when you arrived and i had planned on driving my 67 corvette up the middle of this area here but the secret service said they wouldn t let me do it but notwithstanding the fact that my ride s been slightly different i m delighted to be here and i congratulate all those graduating in the class of 2009 what a great day for you all you deserve a round of applause and being the father of three children all of whom unfortunately listened to me when i said early on when they were in high school any school you can get into i ll help you get there well undergraduate and graduate schools later for three of them you know understand why i was listed as the second poorest man in the congress literally so i say to all you parents today is payday you get a raise today don t encourage them to go to graduate school because it keeps up to all the parents i know your sons and daughters grandsons granddaughters husbands wives i know that your student understands they would not be sitting here today but for your support and it s a real honor for me to be here today but in a sense it s a bittersweet honor tempered by the sadness that i feel about a man who was originally scheduled to be your commencement speaker a friend of mine tim russert you see tim and i came to washington four years apart but from similar backgrounds he came from a blue collar neighborhood in buffalo and i came from a working class neighborhood in scranton pennsylvania but we shared something in common even though we didn t know each other at the time we grew up in neighborhoods where we never had to wonder whether or not we were loved we were both raised by parents who had an absolute conviction an absolute belief in the promise of this country and that even two kids from similar backgrounds could do anything they wanted we grew up in a time when our parents told us and meant it and believed it even though they were of modest means that if we worked hard played by the rules did what we were supposed to loved our country there wasn t a single thing we couldn t do one of the reasons why barack and i set off on this journey was to sort of re instill that confidence in a new generation of parents who played by the rules but it didn t quite work out for them it didn t quite work out i remember leaving for washington as a 29 year old united states senator i was elected before i was eligible to take office and having run and won with an absolute certitude that i was capable of doing the job never doubting because of the way i was raised that i could do this and i remember when i first got there the people who became my friends because my colleagues the average age if i m not mistaken mr president was about 64 years of age and although i had very good relationships with my colleagues i was the kid and so i literally became friends with socialized with the staffs of my colleagues in a literal sense i had just lost my wife and daughter i was single i had very little in common with the men and women with whom i was serving and four years into my time there i had met tim russert and we worked for a man who came four years after me but nonetheless was still my mentor daniel patrick moynihan the senator from new york and we were talking one day in the senate about our backgrounds and how we were so certain that we were raised thinking we could do anything until we each got to washington and i shared a story with him about how when i got here how for the first time in my life i was somewhat intimidated by the depth and scope and the background of the people i was working with people like william j fulbright and jacob javits and former governor averell harriman who was sort of the intellectual dean of the al hunt will remember this katharine graham who was sort of the grand dame of washington and i remember going to these functions early on and thinking i m not sure i belong here and tim related a similar story which has subsequently been told many times that he wrote about in his book he said when he first got to washington working for senator moynihan he thought that things weren t going quite the way he thought he said when i first got to d c and i walked into senator moynihan s office i was completely overwhelmed by the intellectual firepower of the people he had working for him as well as his intellectual firepower rhodes scholars marshall scholars professors people with ivy league degrees people with significant backgrounds and he said one day after attending a staff meeting he walked into senator moynihan s office and he told him he said senator maybe i don t belong here maybe i should leave and you know what the senator said to him according to tim and it sounds like pat he said tim what they know you can learn what you know they can never learn so he stayed and he went on to host meet the press and head up nbc s political coverage he changed the nature of the way major events and major figures were covered his integrity his toughness his fairness was legendary eventually he became a vitally independent nationally respected and universally beloved voice in washington trusted by everyone who went before him you knew you had to be prepared you knew you had to have your a game on but you also knew he d never belittle you he d never take a cheap shot he was completely contrary to some of the culture that prevails and still prevails in the town i work and along the way tim russert enlivened and enriched our debate he gave it meaning he gave it substance along the way he made all of our lives richer and tim s wife maureen is here today at the appropriate moment to accept an honorary degree in tim s stead and i know tim is looking down maureen smiling at you with that pride that his face lit up with every time he talked about you and he s likely sitting on a big gold motorcycle while he s watching so folks i know how proud he d be as well of you both for what you have already accomplished and the expectations we have of all of you as to what you re going to accomplish at the turn of the 20th century william allen white a writer a politician a national spokesman for middle class values summed up perfectly the optimism i feel for the future he said i m not afraid of tomorrow for i ve seen yesterday and i love today well i love today and one of the reasons i do is because of all of you i believe so strongly as you may recall when i was here in october not in you particularly but your generation that i don t have a single doubt in my mind we re on the cusp not only of a new century but a new day for this country and the world i know what you do there s not a single thing you re going to be unable to accomplish your generation is off fighting wars in iraq and afghanistan your generation is volunteering in record numbers your generation voted and turned out in a way that you literally dictated the outcome of this last election your generation gives such strong hope that we ll not only survive today as some pundits argue we may not but that we will thrive tomorrow and i believe you believe as i do that this is all within our grasp i know one other thing for certain as well no graduating class gets to choose the world they graduate into every class has its own unique challenges every class enters a history that up to that point has been written for them and your generation is no different but what is different about your generation is the chance that each of you has to take history into your own hands and write it larger if anyone gets to choose the circumstances in which they graduate i suspect almost all of us would choose your present circumstance your generation s opportunities are greater than any generation in modern history not because you re about to graduate into a nation of ease and luxury but because you re about to graduate into a point in history where everything is going to change no matter what you do but you can affect the change when i graduated in the 60s it was a time of turmoil i graduated from undergraduate school in 65 law school in 68 it was a time of turmoil of change of idealism of war of violence of chaos vietnam civil rights women s rights jfk mlk rfk black power flower power these were our times that was our history but still by the time i graduated my generation s main goal was simply to restore the order and the hope of an earlier part of that decade a part of the decade before john kennedy was assassinated our charge was to try to regain control of a world that seemed to beginning to spin out of control the semester that i graduated from law school johnson stepped down two weeks later martin luther king was assassinated three days before i walked across the stage rfk was assassinated the tet offensive occurred earlier in the year making clear that there was no light at the end of the tunnel but nonetheless we graduated with the expectation that we could restore order but today with all the difficulties you face you graduated into a moment where your opportunities are much greater and your charge is not to restore anything but to make anew you too are graduating in a world of anxiety and uncertainty you re going to walk across this stage without knowing for certain what s on the other side good jobs are hard to find two wars are being waged on the other side of the globe there s a global recession a planet in peril and a world in flux throughout the span of history though only a handful of us have been alive at times when we can truly shape history without question this is one of those times for there s not a single solitary decision confronting your generation now that doesn t yield a change from non action as well as action we re either going to fundamentally revive our economy and lead the way to the 21st century or we re going to fall behind and no longer be the leader of the free world in the 21st century we re either going to fundamentally revamp our education system or remain 17th in the world of graduates from college and in the process lose our competitive edge and find it difficult to have it restored we re either going to fundamentally change our energy policy or remain beholden to those who pose the biggest threats to our security we re either going to revive and reverse climate change or literally drown in our indifference folks we re either going to fundamentally change the course of history or fail the generations that come after us because change will occur non action is action unlike most generations i ve served with eight presidents most presidents are able to say of the four or five issues that are before me i ll put aside three and we ll get to them later knowing the status quo ante will pertain there s not a single issue on this president s plate that will not yield a change just merely by ignoring it it will change i call and others call these moments in history as rare as they are inflection points remember your physics class you re driving along in an automobile and you move the wheel slightly to the left or right and you send the car careening in the direction that absent another change will end up a significant distance from where you were aimed that s an inflection point william butler yeats was right tim used to always kid me about quoting irish poets he thought i quoted them because i was irish that s not the reason i quote irish poets because they re the best poets there s a great line in one of yeats poems about the first rising in ireland it s called easter sunday 1916 and the line is more applicable to your generation than it was to his ireland in 1960 and he said all changed changed utterly a terrible beauty has been born when i graduated all had not changed utterly yet today it has and in the last 12 to 15 years a terrible beauty has been born it s a different world out there than it has been any time in the last millennia but we have an opportunity to make it beautiful because it is in motion we have an opportunity to change it but absent our leadership it will continue to careen down the path we re going now and that could be terrible that folks is an inflection point doing nothing or taking history into our own hands and bending it bending it in service of a better day so embrace the moment don t shy away from it you know how i feel i m confident you must feel the same way for one thing i ve learned is that in the face of struggle there is a greater risk in accepting a situation we cannot sustain does anybody think we can sustain our present energy policy does anybody think we can sustain our present economic policy does anyone think we can sustain our present educational policy does anyone think we can sustain our present environmental policy it is to not sustain we know we cannot sustain the way we re going now so it s time to steel our spines and embrace the promise of change even though we cannot guarantee exactly what that change will bring and the good news is that s exactly what the country did when they voted this last november they voted for change not certain what it would mean but convicted in the assumption that we cannot sustain the path we re on america embraced the promise of change it took a chance the truth is no single individual or circumstance can determine when one of these inflection points will occur what triggers such moments is the accumulation of so many forces over a sustained period of time that it s difficult to identify but individuals willing to steel their spines do determine what moments what such moments will produce and you are those individuals as corny as it sounds this really is your moment history is yours to bend imagine imagine what we can do imagine a country where within a decade 20 percent of our energy is from renewable sources where we re no longer dependent on unstable dictatorships for our energy imagine a country that invests in every child in america where you ve learned we should be investing at age three instead of six where every single qualified young man or woman qualified to go to college is able to go to college regardless of their financial circumstances imagine a country where health care is affordable and available to every single american where american business can compete again because they don t bear all the cost where we can once again gain control of our fiscal future which is being drowned by the cost of health care imagine a country where our carbon footprint shrinks to nothing and we set an example for the whole world to follow just imagine imagine a country brought together by powerful ideas not torn apart by petty ideologies imagine a country built on innovation and efficiency not on credit default swaps and complex securities imagine a country that values science again imagine a country that lifts up windows of opportunity doesn t slam them shut just imagine imagine a country where every single person has a fighting chance a country that once again leads the world by the power of our example and not merely by the example of our power graduates that s all within our power it s all capable of being done some of you may think like your parents i may be too optimistic i say no i m not optimistic i m realistic despite the uncertainty i was optimistic when i graduated in 1965 and again in 68 when i got to the senate when i was 29 as a 29 year old kid but i must admit if anyone had told me back then that my idealism and my optimism would be even greater in the year 2009 i would have told you you re crazy but as god as my witness it is because we re at this moment and there s really good reason for my optimism as a student of history it s the history behind me and the people in front of me that give me such a degree of optimism it s grace johnson graduating today who recently won an award for completing more than 300 hours of americorps service in one year it s nadine minani who s about to walk across the stage after losing her mother in the rwandan genocide when she was only eight years old it s about aaron curry a scrawny freshman linebacker recruited by only two schools who worked his rear end off became a top five pick and is walking off this stage into an opposing nfl backfield aaron i heard you wanted to go to law school you were considering going to graduate school i also heard that your fellow draftees have taken up a collection encouraging you to go so i m sure there s a scholarship there if you want it it s the 17 of you heading out to teach for america and finally it s fred hastings who i got to meet who came to wake forest more than a half a century ago left to join the army before he could finish years ago he saw his son graduate from wake and decided hell if he can do it i can do it and he ll be walking across the stage and on thursday will be his 77th birthday give him a round of applause he deserves it i asked him if his son paid for his education i didn t get an answer in so many ways you re already bending history you re teaching our kids you re saving our planet you re enriching communities the world over you re connecting to each other in ways that most of us could never have dreamed of when we graduated and using those connections to unite our global community to deepen our understanding of the world around us you are emblems of the sense of possibility that s going to define our new age in the past it s always been older generations my generation speaking standing up here at commencements telling the next generation the ways of the world trying to make sure you follow in our footsteps well graduate i ll have to admit it s a lot different today you ve flipped the script as you might say you re quite simply teaching us and i am here to tell you tell you all that even tim would be happy to know what you know we can learn just keep teaching us what you know we can learn and we have to learn just as with each of those rare generations that found itself at an inflection point in history it s within our power to shape our history to bend it in the right direction we can t make a utopia but we sure can make it a lot more beautiful this is not bravado this has been the history of the journey of america never ever ever ever ever ever never have the american people let their country down at rare moments similar moments in our history and it s a journey we re all going to take together so for those who tell you that we re doing too much now in the administration or you re seeking too much be smart enough not to listen and for those who say not to try be nave enough to give it a shot to give it a shot and for those that say it s impossible point them to your professor maya angelou we must confess she writes that we are the possible we are the miraculous the true wonders of the world that is when and only when we come to it well you ve come to it i look out there at the caps and the gowns i look at a university so miraculous in its history a class so electric in its diversity i look at it all and i see so clearly what maya meant you are the possible that is not hyperbole you are the possible we are the possible and we have at once finally come to it so seize it seize it because if you do not it will slip from our grasp and determine the world you live in while you sit idly by thank you all so much congratulations once again and may god bless america and may god protect our troops thank you dem joebiden19 2 09a joe_biden well thank you all for being here today and welcome back to the white house mr mayor my mayor in the city of wilmington jim baker when i got elected he assumed that he got an office in the west wing but he has a telephone number that is accessible hi jim how are you thank you all for being here it s great to be with so many so many leaders who are literally to use that shopworn phrase on the front lines where the economy lives and dies and where people are struggling and you have to deal with it every day you know in a long career in politics there s one overwhelming reason why i never ran for mayor richie it s too hard they have got your phone number and they know where you live and they come and they use it well president obama and i are turning that around we want you to know you can have our phone number and you know where we live and we expect you to use it already we ve met with you and the conference of mayors over half a dozen times too often in the past america s cities have been neglected and our mayors haven t had haven t been able to be heard on the questions of national policy that s a story you all understand and know very well but we know how important cities are 65 percent of our nation s population as you all know live in our cities our cities are the home of seven out of ten american jobs and when you re talking about the knowledge economy jobs the number rises to eight and ten eight out of ten cities are vital to our economy essential to our recovery and haven t been paid much attention to our economy can never reach in our view its full potential if we have people who are living blocks away but worlds away from the bustling downtowns full of opportunity our poor transportation systems don t provide mobility people need to get to the job or they aren t enough police or firefighters in communities to keep the communities safe and that s why the american recovery and reinvestment act president obama signed this week i think includes unprecedented investment in american cities simply stated that s the commitment made in this law now the hard part in one sense is up to us we got to make this work we got to make it work for our people we got to make it work for our cities we got to make work for all our people the american people have trusted their government with an unprecedented unprecedented level of funding to address the economic emergency we face in return we have to prove to them that their dollars are making a difference in their communities we ve already set up a website recovery com which will show where and how the money is being spent the public can actually go on a web site and see how we re spending this money president obama has been insistent during his campaign and from the time we won on accountability and transparency all of you know if we don t meet that minimum threshold the likelihood of the public trusting us to do this kind of thing is going to evaporate very rapidly transparency is vital and effectiveness is paramount these investments are a huge opportunity a huge opportunity to create jobs today and strengthen our economy for tomorrow we ve designed this bill to save and create save or create over 3 million new jobs and we d like to see it do even better than that and that s where your efforts come in you are you re the ones who know the areas that give us the greatest return on our investment you know it better than we do you re the ones who know you re the ones who know which projects will crystallize private investment and even greater growth in your cities and the world is watching the world is watching to see how well this is going to work and we need your help we need your help in making it work and work quickly and effectively as of today we re one month into this administration although i said to the president in the past it feels like a little longer than that but we are one month into this administration and think what the president has already done already signed into laws there s a lilly ledbetter fair pay act we ve expanded state health insurance children s health insurance program to cover an additional 4 million children we put forward excuse me we put forward a plan to reduce preventable home foreclosures we ve won passage of the largest economic recovery effort since world war ii in a month in a month so the results of the president s leadership and your help are already there and clear for everybody to see but it s been a great privilege to also see how much this president has done behind the scenes to make this happen i ve been here for eight presidents for eight presidents you can tell by my look well i want to tell you something the hard choices the president has made the patient outreach he s done the firm resolve he s shown the results of this work i think speak for themselves but i m pleased to speak about the man who made these results happen there is so much more to do so much more but already president obama has put our nation on the path toward greater recovery not only greater recovery but greater decency greater fairness greater opportunity along with economic recovery for years many of us have hoped for such accomplishments and in just one month an incredible new president has made this a reality so please join me in welcoming the president of the united states of america barack obama dem joebiden19 2 09b joe_biden thank you very much director kappes i was a senator for 36 years before this job and i knew the cia always stands they always stand and i appreciate it well thank you steve for your introduction and director panetta or soon to be officially director panetta admiral blair distinguished guests my name is joe biden and i m proud to be one of your leading customers folks many years ago before looking at the faces over there before many of you came to work in the agency i served as one of the original members that was then called the select committee on intelligence and i had the privilege of serving on that committee for 10 years and i m deeply familiar with the workings of this agency and i continue to admire as i did then the dedication and commitment for all of you every one of you here who continue to serve this country it s an honor to be here in the george bush center for intelligence named for a former director of this agency and i believe one of the great public servants of our time and i m proud to swear in another exceptional public servant a man i ve known a long time leon panetta a close friend a former colleague in the congress a man who also served as chief of staff to president clinton and the most important thing for this job in my view as leon knows that the job of chief of staff like the intelligence chief is to give the president of the united states the unvarnished truth not what he thinks the president may want to hear leon the president has absolute confidence that you have the experience the independence and the judgment to lead this agency together with steve kappes who i am literally so thankful and appreciative that he s willing to stay as deputy director with you both and the man i m about to talk about in a second we have a first rate team although the intelligence community is now a broad constellation of 16 agencies this agency remains america s premier national security agency and we deeply appreciate the risks and the sacrifices that so many in the past and in the present continue to take for this country the 89 stars on the wall behind me are a testament to the ultimate sacrifice made by truly courageous patriotic cia officers many of whom are still anonymous after 9 11 thousands thousands of young women and men stepped forward to serve their country inspired many of you to join this agency we were talking upstairs in the director s office about how many of you after 9 11 with a sense of purpose idealism and patriotism joined this great agency you were inspired to join and serve the same kind of inspiration that existed six decades ago six decades ago when this agency was formed leon it s going to be your challenge but great opportunity to harness the energy and idealism and capacity of a whole new generation of intelligence professionals this new generation comes in the intelligence community has experienced considerable change in the last few years a law enacted in 2004 established the office of national director director of national intelligence and requires greater cooperation among all intelligence agencies we all know that bureaucratic conflicts when they occur distract us from the core mission that we have as a nation or as an agency and i m confident i m confident that director panetta and admiral blair will make this work because in those these two men you have me of exceptional capacity and exceptional capability and who are on as i was saying upstairs the same page ladies and gentleman i believe this cooperation that s about to take place with these two newly appointed members of the director of our intelligence community and the director of the cia i hope is going to set a standard of cooperation within the intelligence community that all of the agencies in our government will observe ladies and gentlemen the next four years will be a time of great challenge i need not tell any of you this al qaeda continues to pose a serious threat to the united states and to our friends we remain at war in two faraway countries the global economic situation as the agency has pointed out could make the world considerably more unstable the proliferation of dangerous weapons and technologies threatens our security new challenges to the established order such as climate change and other not yet known to us challenges will emerge in his first few weeks in office the president has begun to meet these challenges head on he ordered the deployment of additional troops to afghanistan he ordered a review of the down of the drawdown options in iraq our strategy in afghanistan and pakistan is also under review and our strategy for a cybersecurity network a cybersecurity capacity all three of which have been recently ordered he named a special envoy to the middle east a special representative for afghanistan and pakistan and an envoy for climate change he issued an executive order to reverse the policies that in my view and the view of many in this agency caused america to fall short of its founding principles and which gave al qaeda a powerful recruiting tool as a result of these orders we will close the detention facility at guantanamo bay we will have a single standard across the government for interrogation in armed conflict and we ll ensure the red cross access to all those who are detained in armed conflict the president has made it clear that he wants to hit the reset button on our relations with russia and will seek diplomatic engagement with iran this administration this administration s national security strategy will use all the elements of our national power our military which is absolutely essential but not sufficient our economic our political and our cultural and diplomatic tools that exist in the toolbox of any president we will use force if necessary but we will engage in aggressive and active diplomacy and we ll be true to our own values because america is more secure when the example of our power is matched by the power of our example this strategy cannot succeed though without timely credible and accurate intelligence it s the foundation of all we re about to do it will remain your paramount duty in my view to provide such intelligence to the president the congress and the military to protect our fighting men and women and our fellow citizens who to inform who are able to make the informed choices about the decisions that we make that s why in my view this agency was established in 1947 and that s why it remains the premier intelligence agency for our government for that matter i believe the premier intelligence agency in the entire world we re going to ask a lot of you and it s only fair to tell you what we expect of you because we re going to ask a lot we expect you to be able to look around corners occasionally to imagine the unexpected we expect you to provide independent analysis and not engage in group think and we expect you to tell us the facts as you know them wherever they may lead not what you think we want to hear and we expect you to give us the your best judgment we will ask no more but we will ask no less on the wall facing me there is a quotation from the new testament put there by at the request of director allen dulles when this building was constructed it has become your motto it reads and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free for the president and me the truth is this your mission is more important than any time in all of our history the country needs you more than we ever ever have and we re profoundly profoundly grateful for your service director panetta are you ready to have me take a crack at administering this oath are you ready well ladies and gentleman if you ll step forward we ll administer the oath dem joebiden2 6 09 joe_biden thank you very much mr secretary gov as the old saying goes you ve forgotten more about new york than i m going to know although i lived awhile in upstate new york i went to syracuse university but i can tell you if there s one group of people who are not intimidated by nobody messes with joe it s new yorkers i want to thank you mr secretary and i want to thank the business leaders that have joined us here today with first hand knowledge of how our economy our policies and how it s affecting them what impact it s having on the areas they re involved in and i want to thank all of you for joining us mr president thanks for the hospitality and the students that are here welcome i m delighted you re able to be here as well as the dean who as of the business school is very interested in what we re about to do and look we came into office a few months ago and the economic climate i think is fair to say was somewhat bleak this is the deepest recession we ve faced since the great depression and it was getting deeper every day cases of credit crisis in credit as well as the crisis in confidence in the imploding housing market job losses that have been averaging about 600 000 or more jobs a month a feeling of general uncertainty and a sinking feeling for average families all over america all across this country from big cities to small rural areas so we acted and quite frankly we had no choice no choice but to act we confronted this crisis head on and we did it by implementing a comprehensive strategy to stabilize the key sectors that are behind the down turn while investing deeply in trying to jump start jobs and investments particularly not only in big cities but also in rural america in small towns and our strategy rested upon a few very important pillars gov the first was a financial rescue plan to get banks back on sound footing so they can start lending again that s a process it s been a difficult process but it s beginning to have an effect and the plan was to stabilize the housing market which isn t we still have foreclosures we know there are going to be more foreclosures but we re trying to keep responsible homeowners in their homes and keeping mortgages affordable for middle class people and first time homebuyers as we re going to hear a little bit from joe the budget we submitted seeks to create a widespread long term long lasting prosperity making historic investments in health care alternative energy and education while cutting the deficit in half how many of you have said or heard people say hey obama biden why don t you just focus on getting us out of this recovery i mean getting us out of the economic mess we re in well folks tell me how we re going to lead the 21st century without a fundamental change in our energy policy tell me how we re going to do it with costs of premiums of health care escalating 54 percent over the last seven years without gaining control of that tell me how we re going to do it without revamping american education we don t have a choice in our view that s why we submitted the robust budget we submitted and of course we also came forward with what we re going to talk about today the american recovery and reinvestment act an initial big jolt to give the economy a real head start but some criticism we ve not gotten enough money out so far well look since i was the guy put in charge of it i want to make sure these first hundred days we do it right the one thing that could undermine this whole effort is if you had read stories the last hundred days about how this money was being wasted and the tens of billions of dollars and you re going to see things start to really change in the second hundred days got a 126 billion out it s now going to take the governors and the county executives and the mayors a little bit of time why particularly infrastructure stuff they re letting in contracts those contracts are now going to come back in people are starting we don t start to pay them until they start to until they actually get things going here you re going to see the next hundred days with some real pace on the ball no pun intended you re going to see this thing begin to move and at least one in the recovery act is as i said the pillar we want to focus on today the act created was created to serve three specific purposes the first and fundamental purpose was kind of goes unnoticed but has a difficult the impact is difficult to measure with precision but it was to provide badly needed relief to individual families who are devastated by this recession as the deputy secretary mentioned our making work pay program gives 95 percent in america an 800 tax break they re getting somewhere between around 60 a month more on their paycheck less withholding now with a lot of people that s not a lot of money but guess what neighborhoods i come from that makes the difference for people we re also out there not only trying to help with their family budgets we re helping those that lost their job during this down turn by dramatically as the governor can tell you expanding unemployment insurance program increasing the actual benefit by 100 expanding eligibility also improving cobra that s the deal you all know what cobra is but the average american may not be aware of all these acronyms it means being able to when you ve lost your job keep your insurance we ve been doing that so that they can keep their health care insurance and so while families are unemployed they re still able at a reduced cost to keep that insurance and to provide for retirees retirees are getting slammed they re particularly vulnerable during the recession and we provided an extra payment of 250 to social security recipients and to veterans to help them weather this economic crisis but guess what that means that s a lot of money out there that s hundreds of billions of dollars over the period of this act that means they re going in and they re buying their groceries they re buying shoes they re getting their hair cut they re actually doing things that put all that money back into the economy while helping themselves the second fundamental goal of the act was to give a boost to the struggling states and by the way states have been hit by this worldwide recession they ve been hit very badly they don t have the options the federal government has in this down turn twenty three states including new york plus puerto rico have qualified for education stabilization funds to help the states meet education costs and give them budget relief you don t have to look too far to see the impact because the recovery act impact right here in the city of new york was able to keep 14 000 new york public school teachers who otherwise would have lost their jobs on the payroll now that s not just helping them keep their job i don t know what the numbers are the school could probably tell me but the numbers are real that means class size is not increasing by 10 or 20 or 30 percent whatever the number is relative to the number of teachers that would have been lost it s a big deal states also are benefiting from an increase in medicaid funding and that s the public health insurance as you all know but a lot of people who are on medicaid are not sure what it is particularly young people it s for low income families which is even more necessary in hard times it s billions of dollars to date the states have received 18 8 billion to help up to 20 million more americans get coverage that they now qualify for because they are poor because they re in trouble to keep the health care that is absolutely necessary for them and the third goal of this recovery act is to make a major investment in projects that are going to create jobs that are going to build a foundation a foundation for the 21st century how many times have you heard the president say and i think it s true and i m here with a bunch of very sophisticated business people this next growth in our economy can t be built on another bubble we ve been through two of those bubbles the dot come bubble and the housing bubble we cannot lead the world in the 21st century unless we build a new foundation to be able to compete and so this will not do it but this makes down payments as secretary wolin said there s 4 5 billion in tax benefits for businesses leveraged to produce jobs already state and local governments have issued over 10 billion in bonds to fix schools roads and transit facilities the sba has made 600 million in loans so far in the first hundred days and here s the important part that s not a lot of money but of those 600 million in loans there are over 600 small town banks who hadn t made a loan since 2007 or 2008 that are making a loan it makes a difference in towns where first federal of maquoketa iowa is actually making a loan to be able to keep that local restaurant open actually make a loan to keep that dress shop around this is a big deal in a lot of places and it s loosening loosening credit because we re guaranteeing up to 90 percent some of those loans in addition we ve approved more than approved so far signed off on more than 3 800 highways roads bridges airport constructions and repair projects in 53 different states you don t see that the effect of that yet that s the stuff that s being contracted out the governor is going to have people out there laying this asphalt pouring this concrete i was up in northern wisconsin at a bus factory an awful lot of folks out there are taking their local money and the state money and they re buying new buses or clean technology because we re focusing on it it s employing an awful lot of people at a living wage a wage they can live a middle class life on this has a ripple effect throughout the country this isn t just about smoother pavement and new bridges it s about state hill constructors a new york construction company who was able to rehire laidoff seasonal employees after winning contracts for some of the road projects the governor mentioned it s about a highway in illinois dotted with potholes being repaved by 120 new workers and guess what they re being paid a decent wage this is about middle class standards we are focusing on as well it s about 1 5 million to 2 million the contractor spent on that project what does that affect he had to go out and buy more earth movers he had to go out and buy more caterpillar pavers profiling machines rollers other equipment that keeps somebody hired at the caterpillar factory or someone not laid off maybe even re hired this is about the thousands literally thousands of stories like this i ve heard all i haven t heard thousands but i ve heard scores of them all around the country shovels going into the ground money going back into the economy workers heading back to their jobs even in the face of rising unemployment we ve also approved 2 9 billion in money as i referenced by obliquely from the sba the administration loans have supported 4 billion in lending to small business it s a leveraging impact it s real and so look where we are now is that we we ve already announced 38 billion in new spending to develop commercialize and renewable energy sources that will be the foundation of our new economy i ve been out there in the midwest there are a new windmill farm were it not for our investment in clean energy they wouldn t be building those 100 new windmills so guess what i did i went to a small factory that was around hired the uaw work there means they get a decent wage and guess what they re the ones out there preparing the transformers for these operations these have over 800 parts 8 000 parts we re trying to bring an industry here to the united states why in god s name when we re and by the way we announced a new windmill farm off the state of delaware new jersey has from none to now four major petitions in new york and a lot of other states up and down this west coast i mean excuse me east coast as well as the west coast we re talking about spurring a new industry of renewable energy that s going to make a fundamental difference not only in our climate not only in our environment but also in providing jobs that can t be exported it sounds fancy but i ve seen what it means for real families and small businesses across the country i saw at abb inc in missouri they re an electrical transformer factory and because of a new wind farm project of a hundred new windmills that couldn t have been funded without this act new orders are up dramatically they are able to keep people hired at a decent wage you re going to hear a little bit about this because an outfit out in chicago i went to see if i don t mind mentioning a competitor here to one of our folks serious windows in chicago where because of increased demand for high energy windows they re able to reopen several shuttered factories re hire some 200 workers that were laid off by the previous manufacturer and hire them into multiple states they went out and bought republic and it s happening here in new york too the new york state veteran s home at st alban s jamaica new york is installing more efficient motors variable speed drive units lighting ballasts lighting sensors daylight sensors and replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs all of these things actually provide a job decent jobs for people they improve energy efficiency reducing the cost of manning and running those facilities they lower cost across the board and they lessen the impact of energy consumption on our environment and here in new york the recovery act is allowing the weatherization of public housing projects as it is all over the country not only are we lowering heating and cooling bills for vulnerable families but in the process we re leaving men and women with jobs from the projects we re spending 500 million on re training jobs so our goal here is to get there are over 1 8 million young men and women in those projects qualified to do these jobs we want to re hire them hire them and train them to do these weatherization jobs and give them a skill they can work with so they end up having a permanent job look we re trying to lay a foundation for a new century not to not make work jobs and on top of all of that i think we re helping the environment everywhere i go i see it with my own eyes like energy efficiency and high speed rail relatively small amounts of recovery dollars will leverage very very large investments in those areas folks in all we re building a secure economic future we re investing heavily today we re going to build an economy for tomorrow it s been a little more than a hundred days since the president signed the act and while this is not the ultimate solution for our problems we also know that it s a historic investment an investment in the american people and an investment in american business we ve obligated in the first 100 days 126 billion 9 1 billion here in new york we ve created more than 150 000 jobs thus far and we ve helped more than a thousand communities and tribes in every state and territory and with some solid hints of stabilization in key markets including housing we may be starting to see some of the fruits of this investment most forecasters believe that gdp will turn positive by the end of this year meaning recovery will soon replace recession and vitally important a recent survey has shown that consumer confidence is rising two thirds of the respondents saying that the recovery act will help the overall economy and half of them saying the act will help their personal financial situation all said our administration understands we have a long long way to go and plenty of work left to do we know the american economy will not fully be up and running until we see robust growth in jobs decent jobs providing working families with a stable and dependable income and here is where we believe the recovery act can have its greatest impact the goal is to save 3 5 million jobs by the end of next year by now only 100 plus days in people are at work in every single state in the nation who would not have been at work but for this act and providing product that is worthwhile in and of itself in the end we know that recovery isn t just a compilation of statistics and whether the gdp is growing it s a broad quilt stretching all across america designed for the sole purpose of making life better for communities and real working families everywhere and the truth is we re just getting started we ve just gotten out of the box we realize this act is only one piece of a major puzzle but it s certainly an important piece and what we ve done so far is a real testament to america s vast capacity to create real progress in just over a hundred days and it gives me great hope that the next hundred days and beyond will even have more speed on it we ll see more impact as we begin to spend out the states spend out these monies oliver wendell holmes said the great thing in the world is not so much where you stand as in what direction you re moving ladies and gentlemen i think we re moving in the right direction i want you to hear from this panel and i want to hear from you thank you all for being here particularly you governor it s a great honor to share this podium with you so why don t we get started thank you all very much dem joebiden2 7 10 joe_biden bishop reverend clergy mona and marjorie the entire byrd family if you didn t already know it it s pretty clear the incredible esteem your father was held in i know you ve known that your whole life to my fellow members of the senate you know i was telling the president when i got elected the last time and had the great honor of running with the president i was elected vice president and united states senator in the same day for my seventh term and in talking to and i got sworn in for that seventh term because we thought we might need a vote there in those first couple weeks and every time i sat with the leader i never called senator byrd senator i always called him leader when i sat with the leader i could see that look in his face and he said joe you sure you re making the right decision giving up the senate for vice president because as the senators know he revered the senate as danny inouye said going into the chamber when we were going in to honor your father yesterday we walked in together he said you know joe had you stayed you d be number two i m still number two danny i m still number two ladies and gentlemen mr president yesterday i had the opportunity to pay my respects to leader byrd as he lay in repose in the senate chamber i met the family then and again today and the last time that happened was 50 years ago the last time that that chamber i revere served as a resting place for anyone was 50 years ago but although i and my colleagues behind me revere the senate robert c byrd elevated the senate other great men and their families would have chosen for them to lay in state in the rotunda but bob byrd and his family chose to lay in state in the senate chamber and to me this is completely appropriate having served with him for 36 plus years for the senate chamber was robert c byrd s cathedral the senate chamber was his cathedral and west virginia was his heaven and there s not a lot of hyperbole in that every person in the senate as my colleagues behind you can tell you brings something special about them i ll never forget having privately criticized a senator when i was there the first year i was sitting with the previous leader senator mansfield who was an incredible guy and he told me that he said why are you upset and i told him about a particular senator railing against something i thought was very worthy the americans with disabilities act and he went on to tell me that every member of the senate represented something in the eyes of their state that was special and represented a piece of their state well if there was ever a senator who was the embodiment of his state if there was ever a senator who in fact reflected his state it was robert c byrd the fact of the matter is the pick of the banjo the sweet sound of the fiddle ramp dinners in the spring country fairs in the summer the beauty of the laurels in the mountains the rush of the rapids through the valleys these things not only describe west virginia but from an outsider s point of view who has been here many times at the invitation of jennings randolph and robert c byrd it seems to me they define a way of life it s more than just a state and robert c byrd was the fierce most fierce defender of not only the state but the way of life i think the most fierce defender that probably this state has ever known in its history you know robert byrd did use the phrase when i die west virginia will be written on my heart and i used to kid him i said you have so many scotch irish down there you don t acknowledge it was an irish catholic named joyce who said that first reverend he quoted everybody else but when he used that phrase he d never acknowledge that it was james joyce who said when i die dublin will be written in my heart and all he would do is laugh the fact of the matter is west virginia was not only written in his heart but he wore it on his sleeve he took such pride in this place he took such pride in all of you i remember he asked me one of the few races he had it was a race whether i d come down because i was the young guy and i d come down and demonstrate to everybody that i could not keep up with robert c byrd which happened to be true and i was i think nick you were at the dinner we had a jefferson jackson day dinner down here and robert c byrd did something never happened before in all the dinners i ve spoken at he stood up and he said we re honored to have senator joe biden from delaware here tonight and joe i d like to introduce you to west virginia then he spent as nick will remember the next probably 10 minutes talking about everyone in the audience by name where they were from what they had done how they had fought through difficulty and then he said kind of like johnny carson here s joe well i thought it was pretty impressive literally robert c byrd asked me to speak but he knew the privilege was mine not the people to whom i was speaking he was devoted to all of you like few senators in the 37 years i was there 36 plus years i was there that i have ever ever known he was fiercely devoted as you ve all heard to his principles even once he became power he always spoke truth to power standing up for the people he proudly was part of and you ve heard it many times today but it bears repeating again in defense of the constitution he revered i always wear a flag pin but i was afraid he d be looking down today because every time i d wear the flag pin on the floor he would grab me take my pin and put on a constitution pin that s the pin i m wearing so boss i m wearing the pin robert c byrd said many things but he once said as long as there is a forum in which questions can be asked by men and women who do not stand in awe of a chief executive and one can speak as long as one s feet will allow one to stand the liberties of the american people will be secure eleven presidents knew robert c byrd he served as he pointed out concurrently with them not under them and 11 presidents were they all here and two are here can attest to the fact that he always showed respect but never deference and he stood in awe of none he had an incredible prodigious memory that i will not take the time to regale you about i just remember one time sitting with the queen of england at a formal dinner and he recited the entire the entire lineage of the tudors and every year each one had served and she sat there and i thought her bonnet was going to flip off her head it was like what did i just hear she learned about relatives she probably forgot she had as also noted robert c byrd was a parliamentary library a keeper of the institution of the senate and he was the institution itself but to me and many people here today like guys i see bill bradley and jim sasser who long left the senate for greener pastures and i hope better remuneration we used to kid about that too but i for a lot of us he was a friend and he was a mentor and he was a guide nick and i were talking a little bit earlier because nick i commuted every day for 36 years in the united states senate 250 miles a day robert c byrd was a stickler about when he d set votes and i d drive down from washington and i d call nick on this old big old car phone i first had it was about that big and i d say nick i can see the dome hold the vote i can see the dome finally nick caught on he said joe senator how far away can you see the dome because he d be the one to go to the leader and say can you hold the vote two more minutes for biden as long as i was behaving he held the vote but when i found myself in disagreement i d stand there to catch a 7 00 train he d set a vote for 7 00 and i d walk up to him and i d say i need seven minutes from the chamber and nick knows this i d walk up to him and i d stand i always stood down in the well and he stood in the first riser and i d say mr leader i know there s no we got an hour i said you set the vote for 7 00 any possibility for setting it at 10 to 7 00 so i could get the train he d go like this he d look at the clock look at me look at the clock and say no no but that s because i misbehaved once i voted with george mitchell on a matter relating to miners and that was a big mistake he literally took the roll call sheet there s these sheets as the staff members know with every senator s name and how they voted he took the roll call sheet had it framed had my name circled in red and literally literally had it screwed to the ornate doorframe in his office then as the chairman of the appropriations committee so every single senator coming to see him would walk out and at eye height they d see biden circled in red and know darn well they better not vote against robert c byrd ever you think i m joking i m not joking and then i got in his good graces i tried to run for president he said i don t want any senators running for president i said why mr leader he said because you never come back and vote when i need you so i made a promise that no matter where i was if he called me and said he needed my vote i d drop whatever i was doing and i d come and i kept the commitment the only one i might add that got me back in his good graces again the point is that this is a man who knew exactly what he was doing after i was elected 1972 as a 29 year old kid i was number 100 out of 100 in senate seniority and leader byrd offered up he was then the whip he offered his office to me to come down from delaware so i could have a place to interview staff members it was in his office and in the connection his secretary put through that i received a call telling me that about an accident which took the life of my wife and my daughter and when they were buried we held a memorial service a couple days later in delaware where thousands of people showed up and it was a bone chilling slate day of rain and people couldn t get in the church and i never knew it initially but robert c byrd and i think you may have driven him up nick drove up on his own with nick to that church he stood outside for the better part of an hour in a driving rainstorm where the temperature was below 32 when my brother saw him and asked him to come in he said no he wouldn t displace anyone he stayed there for the entire service when the service was over he got in his vehicle and he drove back never attempting to be noticed never seeking that to know as my deceased wife used to say the real measure of generosity is would you do it and no one ever knew you did it well robert c byrd did that i was appreciative of what he did but i quite frankly didn t understand till a couple years later i was in his office and behind his desk was a huge boot cast in bronze it was michael s boot it was his grandson s boot and all of a sudden it came so crystal clear to me who this guy was i d known him but i understood immediately what he was about for him it was all about family it was not just erma his beloved wife of 69 years it was not just his daughters his grandchildren great grandchildren all of whom are in our prayers today it was an awful lot of you i ll bet if he were here he could look out and name name you and tell you what your father or mother did for him what your grandmother or grandfather did for him and how you made such and such of yourself clearly in his own life robert byrd suffered a lot of hardships you all know the story losing his mom being raised and adopted by an aunt and uncle growing up in a home without electricity or water having to work at an early age he had an incredible incredible determination one that i don t think any of my colleagues have ever witnessed would be my guess but you know this man was it wasn t just that as president clinton pointed out that at age 47 and as a sitting congressman he or 45 he went and got a law degree i don t know that you know you probably do mr president he got that law degree without having a college degree and at age 77 he went to marshall university and completed his work getting his college degree because to him in my view and i don t know the family would tell you this and to him i think he felt there was something wrong with the fact that he got the law degree without graduating he didn t need that undergraduate degree but it was bob byrd to quote john stennis plow into the hedgerow and to the end of the row the remarkable thing about him is he traveled a hard path he devoted his life though to making that path a little easier for those who followed this is a guy who continued to taste and smell and feel the suffering of the people of his state he tasted it that s why it was so deeply ingrained in him it wasn t just a moral obligation this guy remembered and he unapologetically as has been pointed out did everything to improve the lives of the people of delaware by stealing all the money from delaware tennessee texas california that he could possibly get remember governor there were two campaigns ago he s getting beat up for trying to move was it two campaigns ago to have the fbi moved down to west virginia and the national press was beating him up and i was on the floor with him and he just had gotten ripped in a press conference about that and he you know how he used to grab you by the arm walk you back he walked me back he said joe i hope they keep throwing me in the briar patch but i tell you what you west virginians owe a lot of people in delaware for a lot of money we should have gotten and you got i just want you to know that so be nice to the rest of us and by the way if you doubt any of it you just drive here you cross the robert c byrd drive the robert c byrd appalachian highway the robert c byrd library and learning center the robert c byrd clinic the robert c byrd federal building in charleston and on and on and on but ladies and gentlemen of course it s more than the name we re not going to forget it s his courage he died like he lived he died like he lived his life he never stopped fighting how many people would have hung on as long as he did how many people would have the ability to get back out of that hospital bed and get in a wheelchair and come in and vote vote for this he never stopped thinking about his people and the things he cared about speaking several weeks ago this week actually when robert byrd said like jefferson and adams i m inspired to continue serving the land i love to the very best of my abilities for the whole of my years well he served the land he loved he served the people he loved he served the people who were in his blood and because of that service you had gained greatly and with his loss you re the first who will feel that loss but it s not just west virginia alone it s all of us i said to him i said of him when i learned of his death i was on an errand for the president in cleveland and i said you know to paraphrase the poet we shall not see his like again had he been there he would have said joe that s shakespeare hamlet act i scene ii and the actual quote is i shall not look upon his like again mr leader we re not going to look upon your like again i m not even going to ask god to bless you because he already had and i know where you are and may god bless your family may god bless this state and this country and may god protect our troops thank you dem joebiden20 4 10 joe_biden roger thank you very much and let me thank everyone who participated in the program this morning and for those putting on this program it s an honor to be here were i standing before you one year ago today we d be discussing the first quarter in which the economy had hemorrhaged over 2 million jobs 750 000 per month as we meet here today the economy is clearly on the mend in the first quarter of this year we added 54 000 jobs per month now i know and we all know that that rate of job growth is too slow to bring down the unemployment rate and the continued weakness in the job creation remains a major challenge one the president and the whole administration is committed to meeting and a very difficult challenge but the arrival of net job creation in three out of the last five months represents an important swing in the right direction independent analysts including some of the very people in this room confirmed that our policies thus far have helped the recovery act which was credited widely with creating about two and a half million jobs so far and in the most recent quarter most analysts acknowledge that it lifted the real gdp by as much as 3 percent and with tax day just behind us i should note that nearly 100 billion of recovery act tax cuts are doing double duty they help families make ends meet through their multiplier effects they are also boosting economic activity throughout the economy we all know how important it is to learn from the past in order to step steadily into the future but i want to make it clear i m not here to look backwards i m here today to look toward tomorrow i m well aware that economists are arguing about just where we are in the business cycle but i think it s fair to say that most believe we re generally turning the corner and moving from contraction to expansion i know it s a very important debate but i must say when the president and i talk about the state of the economy recession dating is not what motivates us most the goals that we set when we ran and took office were not fixed dates on a calendar they were instead markers for real progress for real american families most americans at least in the neighborhoods i grew up in don t feel gdp growth they don t sit around the table if they ve lost their jobs and talk about how the nasdaq is climbing we re far more interested we re far more interested in when growth is going to reach which it has not yet the broad middle class and those who aspire to join it in the view of our administration an economic expansion is absolutely necessary but it s not sufficient to meet our economic goals if the next expansion fails to lift the middle class if it bubbles and bursts if it gives a high five to wall street while stiff arming main street then it will be an expansion that we will not be proud of and it will not be the expansion that the president and i believe this nation so badly needs if on the other hand the next expansion is characterized by prosperity that is broadly shared by new economic opportunities for the middle class by finally tearing down the barriers to health care and education by starting us down a path toward energy independence then we ll be building the america we need in order to compete in our view and lead in the 21st century that s the kind of expansion we need and i suspect everyone here would agree with that but how to achieve that expansion is what i d like to talk about with you today let s begin by recognizing that the choices we made at the beginning of the expansion of an expansion are going to determine where we re going to end up assuming the expansion takes place and continues think back to the last time the nation s economy was poised for expansion in the early 2000s consider the choices that we made then and their ultimate consequences tough economic inequity already was highly elevated yet we made it a lot worse by massive unpaid for tax cuts primarily for the wealthy anti regulatory zeal and the belief that markets would self regulate led to an oversight failure in fiscal markets and dire consequences that i would argue are still reverberating today an anti union stance dramatically weakened the ability of rank and file workers to share in the wealth they were helping create as a consequence of increased productivity the belief that deficits don t matter and the death of paygo led to the decisions not to pay for expensive very expensive initiatives including two major wars the aforementioned tax cuts and an expensive and expansive prescription drug program which in turn led to a huge swing from surplus to deficit the decision to continue ignoring the unsustainable path of health care not only had clear negative fiscal implications causing our deficits to soar it also meant an erosion of health coverage for millions not just those who were the least advantaged but for the broad middle class as well and consider the impact of this path on the living standard of working families the 2000s saw the worst job creation of any recovery on record and relatedly the first recovery on record were middle income homes actually incomes actually remained stagnant the economy was moving forward and the middle class was running in place running as hard as it ever had but quite frankly getting nowhere all of this planted the seeds of the deepest recession since the great depression and the terrible cost that had come with that so let me be extremely clear on this point when you re at the beginning of an economic expansion as i believe we are when you re standing and starting from a place where you have to make choices they make a great deal of difference on the ultimate character of that expansion how robust it will be who it reaches whether it truly advances the american standard of living now i know you know there s maybe you don t know this but there s an old irish saying i only quote irish sayings because they re the best that s not because i m irish but there s an old irish saying my grandpop would use he said you ve got to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was you ve got to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was well folks ladies and gentlemen we can t just rely on america s past to build america s future past recoveries can serve as lessons but this recovery ultimately belongs to us and we have an opportunity to do our own growing and we plan on seizing that and so our administration is plotting a very different path than the one plotted the last time this country found itself with such an important set of choices to make about our economic future to us the choices are clear common sense rules and regulations in financial markets that protect consumers taxpayers and i might add the overall economy new forward looking investments that would create new domestic markets here export markets abroad and lasting opportunities for the middle class in areas like clean energy the smart grid high speed rail and high technology changes will take place true health care security which i believe we accomplished by passing the health care reform that expands coverage and equally as important controls costs over the long haul a level playing field for those who would pursue collective bargaining in the workplace a primary education system that meets out and i would add meets the needs of and the aspirations of american families so each child can overcome the barriers that keep them from achieving their potential an aggressive focus on college access which all of you know is the only ticket to the middle class in the 21st century a fiscal plan that meets the short term needs of a troubled economy and then moves quickly toward a path of fiscal sustainability by paying for what we spend folks ultimately we believe that this is the right path the path that will lead us to a robust economic recovery one that fuels broadly shared prosperity driven by hardworking people filling good jobs not by speculators inflating bubbles and financial shell games you might be saying yes it s true i got that we all agree that we have to have a we need a different path but good luck in getting it done so let me talk about some of the specific steps along the path that the president and i think we have to take and discuss how i think we re going to get it done looking forward one of the most important legislative tasks that we face is now before congress the reform of the financial markets our goals are well known an independent consumer agency that is not beholden to the banks new rules for derivatives that bring the light of day into that shadowy risky market leverage requirements to create the necessary capital buffers against destabilizing systemic risk and when such risks do find their way into the system the ability to unwind interconnected banks without dragging down the market for the taxpayers once again the president and i are committed to fully quickly and forcefully taking these steps to reform this system that even as we speak after all that has happened still protects the gains of the privileged while assigning the losses to the rest of us every day we see developments that remind us of the overriding imperative here the need to restore trust and credibility in america s financial markets too many market participants themselves through short sighted greed have squandered that credibility and i would argue to their own detriment long term wall street reform must put a stop to this in order to restore that credibility we have to end the practice of hiding opaque derivatives in invisible accounts antiseptically labeled structured investment vehicles so investors in markets can once again receive clear transparent price signals they need in order to function efficiently it must block banks from steering clients toward a pit of toxic investments with one hand while betting against those very investments with the other hand it must prevent underwriting practices that inflate the housing bubble that ultimately deflated the economy the president and i will not support any reform that fails to address these fundamental problems powerful political lobby the cynical tactics of opponents opponents of reform are not going to stop us from getting this right of course choosing the right path means not only preventing disaster it also means generating opportunity even before we took office the president myself and our economic team planned to use part of what we even knew then was a need for a recovery act to make investments that would both create good jobs today while planning the seeds of great industries for tomorrow with clean energy being at the heart of those investments with around 80 billion in clean energy investments the recovery act doubles america s capacity to generate renewable energy if it were a stand alone bill it would have been the largest energy bill in the history of the united states of america now look i recognize and in my own shop as well there are some folks here who study the issue who may question whether these energy investments create enough jobs to actually make a real difference but we believe they will but let me put it in another way let me ask you this do you any of you believe that we can fully recover and lead the world in the 21st century with the same energy policy that we ve had in the last century do any of you believe we can reduce the dependence on foreign oil without investing in alternative sources of energy renewable energy and do any of you believe we can gain a political consensus for doing that without growing clean energy industries here in america even if you re right about the economic impact let me suggest to you that the entire energy policy will fail for lack of a political consensus the world is already transitioning to a new energy economy and we ve got a long way to go to catch up wouldn t it be ironic if we freed ourselves of the dependence on foreign oil simply to become dependent on foreign sources of clean energy and technologies that s what a lot of my former colleagues up on capitol hill are looking at now almost independent of how many jobs such investments will create we want true energy independence and we need a political consensus to arrive at it that s why i think one of the tax credits from the recovery act is so important and should be expanded i know you heard from senator sherrod brown who spoke earlier who feels just as strongly about this as i do the advanced energy manufacturing tax credit known in the code as 48c supports investments in advanced energy technology from wind turbines and solar panels that create energy from renewable resources to batteries and smart grid systems that store and transmit that energy to technologies like the advanced lighting that helped conserve that energy we need it all historically we ve used incentives to encourage generation and the use of clean energy but we ve never before taken the extra step to incentivize the actual manufacturing of that equipment used to generate energy here in the united states and i know there are barriers sitting in the chairs out there to doing that but you re politically at a minimum mistaken and i think you re mistaken economically with programs like 48c that leverage private capital by a factor of three to one thus far we re going to make sure that we don t just build the same old economy on top of the one that just collapsed instead we want to remake what we do what we build what we manufacture what we design what we produce all with an eye toward bringing the middle class back and moving america forward another step another step we must take one that i know is clear to the brookings institution is moving towards sustainable federal spending when the president and i got here we were immediately confronted with two fiscal realities first a 1 3 trillion deficit and projected deficits of 8 trillion over the next 10 years second we were staring down the barrel of the deepest recession short of a depression this country has seen government spending had to ramp up as you all suggested and we believed had to ramp up to offset the contraction of the private sector spending as well as demand which by the way was a difficult concept to translate and transmit to the american people now you ll all recall that back in 2000 the budget was in surplus to the tune of more than 200 billion i think secretary rubin might remember that but the surplus was squandered as the bills for two wars tax cuts and the drug benefit went unpaid in the short run we had to add to that long term debt figure in order to stimulate the economy and keep us from moving into a depression and one of the first things we did as i ve referenced earlier was pass the recovery act which created or preserved millions of jobs while boosting gdp in ways that also helped generate needed revenue and even as we did that we also began to put in place the mechanisms to take hold once the economy was back on the track to turn our fiscal ship around it wasn t like all of a sudden we realized well now that we did this stimulus we better now go look at what we do about deficits we did it simultaneously but they could not be done at the same time to state the obvious so what we put in place was a modest first proposal including freezing non security discretionary spending then reinstating statutory paygo and then beginning to deal with the long term deficit reduction by dealing with our entitlements most importantly the entitlement that was skyrocketing the most was health care we always talk about particularly democrats we talk about health care in terms of the moral imperative well as a fiscal imperative we deal with health care and lastly over the objection of some in my own party when i suggested when we suggested it was by establishing by executive order a bipartisan commission to gain control of our deficits with the requirement of bringing down the deficit to 3 percent of gdp by 2015 to create some backfire to force these increasingly and still remaining difficult decisions we re serious about this we re serious about it as i said at the outset the one thing about policy choices at the beginning of an economic expansion is that the stakes are really really high if we start down the wrong path we re clearly going to end up at the wrong destination and with this in mind we won t simply be back in recession after the next bubble bursts we ll have failed to take advantage of the precious opportunities that are staring us in the face we ll have confirmed our middle excuse me we ll have confined our middle class to another decade of running faster just to stay in place i know you all know this but history doesn t belong to any political party it belongs to each of us individually and all of us collectively and it s our choice it s our choice right now what kind of economic history we want to begin to write and so the current moment also poses a challenge to folks like you who work so hard to give advice to policymakers especially at times like this and i have one question i have one challenge to you all what policy steps will once again link productivity growth and middle class incomes let me say it again what are the policy objectives we need to put in place that will once again as existed in the 50s link productivity growth and middle class incomes so i do no believe we can politically sustain the path we have been on watching as market outcomes what folks in this room call primary distribution income grow increasingly unequal and hope to address these vast inequities through tax policies and transfer that politically cannot be sustained in my view so i came with a question i hope collectively we can find an answer the middle class needs to get its fair share again it sounds like a trite political slogan but folks the system is not going to work if they do not believe they re getting a fair share commensurate with the effort they put in you know i can think of no greater minds than the ones in this room and i mean that sincerely to address the question one that if answered successfully will shape the expansion we need in an era in american history that follows and that will allow us to lead the world in the 21st century that sounds like hyperbole but i mean it literally it was oliver wendell holmes who said the great thing in the world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we re moving it s our choice now to move us in a direction worthy of our rich history and worthy of the bold new future we seek together and as i say i can t think of a brighter group of people to ask for help in shaping that history so i thank you all may god bless you and may god protect our troops thank you very much dem joebiden21 1 10 joe_biden thank you all for being here and i spend so much time touring the country with the president at his request and with his permission i ve been in almost all your cities and in your states and it s nice to be able to welcome you here as you ve welcomed me into your cities so thank you for the way you have treated us and our staff as we ve wandered through your cities and i look out and see some old and good and very close friends and some new friends i ve made in the last year mr president these men and women have been incredibly cooperative with us in the recovery act and one of the aspects of the job that i like the best is i spend as you all know once a week on the phone with somewhere between 7 and 12 of you and we ve now had you ve had the misfortune of having to listen to me answer your questions at least a hundred and i think 15 of you and it s been really rewarding to me and i always get off the phone with america s mayor david agnew who is the guy that follows up on everything that i ask him to do in those phone calls i m not sure how well david likes the phone calls but all kidding aside you ve been it s been incredible to work with you in implementing the recovery act as i said i ve spoken to well over a hundred of you on the telephone and i ve visited a number of you in your cities and i ve been constantly impressed by the dedication and the common cause of rebuilding not only your cities but this country and i must tell you i ve been impressed by the competence the management skills that so many of you have demonstrated in incredibly difficult financial times and difficult circumstances the leadership of each and every one of you in this room is the basis upon which i think we re going this recovery is going to grow we have plenty of work ahead of us but look at what we ve already managed to accomplish for american cities the estimates range from 2 to 2 4 million jobs saved or created nearly 100 billion in tax relief has been provided to working families and businesses through the recovery act and all that money has poured back into the economy of your cities creating more jobs more than 18 million americans have received unemployment compensation benefits and increased benefits imagine what the impact on your cities would be if in fact we did not have that money flowing in and those people found themselves in a destitute situation more than 3 000 public housing authorities 3 000 authorities have been awarded recovery act funding totally 1 billion helping create jobs retrofitting housing supporting construction projects to improve public housing all across the country the thing that amazed me about these guys mr president and women is they take advantage of this difficult situation to make improvement it s not just you re spending the money you re actually changing the way in which the money is spent more efficiently more than 4 600 law enforcement officers more than 1 000 communities nationwide have benefited from the additional influx of those 4 600 officers we ve sparked innovation in transportation and energy and health care and education all of which you ve absorbed i know you d rather have all come directly to you but the truth of the matter is i know i know constant source of our conversation mr president well look a great many of the recovery act projects can be described in any mayor s favorite six words i think it s six i ve got to make sure i ve got to count my words these days mr president six words ahead of schedule and under budget that has been the real news of the recovery act and thank you all thank you all for the management you have exercised in seeing to it that happens and all in all we re helping working men and women get through some very very tough times today while building an economy of tomorrow and the man making this all possible literally the single engine the piston that s driving this whole operation of making sure that we don t walk away from our cities we don t walk away from this recovery we don t we take the chances we re taking to generate growth here is a man who came from a big city himself i see his mayor mayor daley sitting right here in front and the president understands he understands your distinct needs and he knows that nothing we do around here means anything if men and women don t have jobs not just any job but jobs that you can raise a family on jobs that serve as a foundation for the 21st century economy we re determined to build he also knows that as walt whitman put it a great city is that which has the greatest men and women he knows your cities are full of great men and women and his leadership is going to help give them the ability to overcome this difficulty summon their greatness and put them in a position that they re stronger at the end as we come out of this recession than they were before they went in so ladies and gentlemen it s my great honor to present to you the president of the united states of america barack obama dem joebiden21 4 10 joe_biden secretary salazar carol browner is here secretary ray mabus ben cardin i miss seeing you guys every day ben dennis cardoza i m told emanuel cleaver is here i see marcy is here congresswoman marcy kaptur ed markey who has gained his congressional ph d on this issue i don t know anybody who knows more about it than he does and we also have the mayor michael bell the mayor of toledo here mayor phil gordon the mayor of phoenix and mayor michael mcginn of seattle and you re all welcome and i m sure there s other very distinguished guests here as well that i have overlooked and i apologize let me start off by saying and i mean this sincerely i was a senator a long time as a matter of fact as i left the senate as ben may remember the senate historian came in and said thinking that he was going to make me feel better he pointed out that only 17 senators in american history ever served as long as i did and i could feel my heart sinking into my stomach i said if my father were here he d define that as a misspent adulthood but all kidding aside i have been around awhile i served a long time with gaylord nelson who he and his wife carrie were great friends they were real pioneers back in those early days when i got there talked about the environment i was put on the public works committee when i first got there and the first the first recommendation i made is we change the name the environment and public works committee and mayor jennings randolph or jennings as he liked to be called told me that if i made that recommendation again i was off the committee you think i m joking i m not there s a lot that s changed a lot that s changed and i expected when i took this job i d have some real opportunities to impact on the formation of policy but one of the things i didn t expect i didn t expect to have the opportunity to work with such a tutor and i m not being solicitous to have an opportunity to work with the secretary of energy on something that i cared a great deal about when i was a senator to have a man of secretary chu s caliber and his depth of his knowledge and his commitment has genuinely been sort of an ongoing tutorial for me and i want to publicly thank you mr secretary and as that old joke goes the secretary has forgotten more about this subject than i m ever going to know but i am as passionately committed to this transition he refers to as i think anyone as is the president i hadn t planned on doing what i m about to do today but today s announcement by general motors that it s paid back it s paid back its tarp loan in full in full is a huge accomplishment the president of the united states took a lot of heat for that effort to keep that company alive while it was transitioning and i would just like to point out that i am proud to be associated with the guy who saw the necessity to do this and this has even exceeded our expectations we ve worked hard to help turn around the nation s auto industry and give the car companies a chance to be viable without government assistance and we helped gm we helped out gm so that they could retool so that they could become a leader in the 21st century and we know that building energy efficient cars with better gas mileage and cleaner emissions is going to be a big part of us being able to succeed not only the auto industry but also succeed in our quest for a better environment today gm paid back the loan in full five years ahead of schedule and now gm is in a better position to make them make what the market demands energy efficient vehicles for a cleaner world and that leads me to earth day the reason why we re here today i also want to point out i want to thank by the way lisa jackson our epa administrator she couldn t be here today but we all appreciate the tremendous work that she s doing having once again we now have again an environmental protection agency again and a happy almost earth day to all of you i say that because tomorrow is actually the day that officially marks the occasion but the truth is we re here kicking off an entire earth week and i hope our administration has kicked off an entire earth administration over the next few days officials from across our administration will participate in more than a dozen events to celebrate earth day we re getting everyone in the administration involved and today the day before earth day we kick off a week for an administration that for literally for every day it s earth day for us because this implicates every aspect of our country s self interest from foreign policy to economic policy to environmental policy to health care policy this impacts on every aspect every aspect of what kind of country we re going to leave our kids and 40 years ago when gaylord conceived and celebrated the first earth day the world looked pretty different some of us can remember the public health and environmental catastrophes that propelled earth day the earth day movement in the first place the cuyahoga river literally catching on fire from all the oil and dumped trash that was in it days of heavy smog in new york city so thick that people actually were dying from being unable to breathe the air the list goes on and on and on our planet was sick it s not healthy yet but our planet was sick and in need of desperate help it s still in need of real help because of gaylord nelson and millions of americans like some of you that are here today who joined him we begin to make things a little bit better forty years later the first earth day from the first earth day the people of the first earth day celebration would look around and look out at all of you and they d be very proud of what all of you have done they d see recycling bins in your houses they d see business spending money to make their facilities more energy efficient they d see men and women heading to work to build and install wind turbines and solar panels and other components for the new energy future they d see an administration building on his legacy gaylord s legacy protecting and restoring the great lakes the chesapeake bay the gulf coast designating millions of acres of wilderness saving 1 8 billion barrels of oil by reducing greenhouse gases by raising fuel efficiency and emissions standards on cars and trucks pulling us on the right track and by doubling the renewal energy that will be generated in this country since the beginning of the environmental movement we ve been trying to transform the way we use energy and reduce our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels to tap into the vast untapped renewable energy sources and to use energy more efficiently the fact is we ve been trying for 40 years and we ve made some progress but we re now poised to make significantly greater strides in our view than ever because of the unprecedented investment in the recovery act and the leadership of the president and the secretary of energy even before we took office the president and myself and our economic team planned to use parts of what we knew had to be we didn t name it the recovery act then but we knew we were going to have to have a recovery act there were significant parts of that recovery act to make investments that would create good jobs today but while planting the seeds for great industries of tomorrow with clean energy being at the forefront and the heart of all of it the world already is transforming as the secretary said to a new energy economy and the question is are we going to lead it or are we going to continue to try to catch up we are going to be left behind we need to catch up with around 80 billion in clean energy investments the recovery act is the largest single investment in clean energy in our history if you just took that piece out of the recovery act and passed it as a stand alone bill it s the largest investment ever made in the history of the country in clean energy but we re not just doing this with government funds we re using government to provide the seed money to grow private industries and some of the initiatives that you mayors have going with the private sector in your communities is a model for what we should be doing twenty three billion dollars in renewable energy generation and advanced energy manufacturing which will likely leverage more than 43 billion in additional investment 2 4 billion in battery technology matched by another 2 4 billion in private capital to help build energy efficient cars of the future in january of 09 there were two advanced battery factories in america by 2015 there will be 30 the smart grid 3 4 billion in government investment led to 4 7 billion in private investment to help get us to a stronger more efficient more reliable energy grid 2 3 billion which is likely to leverage 5 4 billion in private capital to put us back on track to double our capacity to manufacture the components of a new green economy in america from wind turbines to solar panels to create energy that s renewable renewable resources to batteries and smart grid systems to store that and transmit that energy to technologies like advanced lighting that help conserve energy we re going to start making that stuff here in america with american workers we re going to be coming up to you guys in the house and the senate and asking for 48c to be bumped up to 5 billion so we could be making this stuff in america and today we re announcing another important recovery act program the retrofit ramp up now i wonder what sometimes our constituents think when we come up with these names the retrofit ramp up we all in this room know what it is we may be the only ones who know exactly what it means but it s a kind of a buzz word retrofits but what we re really talking about here is simple it s about making our homes and our office buildings more efficient and more comfortable and more affordable replacing windows and doors i have visited along with some of the people in the front row new window and door factories making incredibly incredibly energy efficient windows and doors which can save billions of dollars over time putting in new air conditioning or heating units that are much more efficient sealing up cracks and openings where air can leak into and out of your home that s retrofitting small stuff but big big big savings in fact retrofitting existing homes has the potential to cut more than 21 billion a year annually in our energy cost there are more than 100 million homes in america in the last year only 40 000 took advantage of the energy saving retrofits it s not that homeowners don t want to lower their energy bills it s just that they found that the process was too difficult from accessing energy audits to finding skilled retrofit workers to simply being able to afford it now last fall the middle class task force which the president asked me to chair and the council on environmental equality released a report that called the recovery retrofit explaining how we re working to overcome the challenges that got in the way of homeowners taking advantage of this and these grants that we re announcing today are grants to 25 communities nationwide and are a major step in the direction of making this much easier to do much more efficient and much more likely to happen this program is all about developing innovative models that can be expanded throughout the country and there are a couple that are particularly important things about these grants that we should mention first these grants are focused on encouraging entire neighborhoods entire neighborhoods to take advantage of the retrofits all at the same time right now most retrofit work programs are on a house by house basis the construction crew may come into a neighborhood upgrade one home one week and then they have to come back to work in a neighborhood home a few weeks later maybe the same neighborhood well the retrofit ramp up award winners are taking a different approach now that the same construction crew would upgrade all the homes on the same block at the same time that saves contractors time and money they can pass the savings on to their customers and it s just a much more efficient way to operate and these communities aren t just relying on these grants they ll use this as seed money to leverage an additional 2 8 billion over the next three years that s a total of five dollars for every dollar every dollar of grant money and they re doing this by building partnerships between local governments utility companies financial institutions and nonprofits whole communities are coming together to get this going and when we look around you ll see it and you ll see more and more of it as the months go on i know there are some people from the philadelphia mayor s office that are here today this has been one of mayor nutter s hobby horses well their city has a plan to work with private lenders to connect homeowners to easy access affordable loans to pay for retrofit work the mayor of toledo mike bell is here toledo s program will provide career training job placement and mentoring for people actually going to be doing this work the mayor of phoenix phil gordon is here just about just talk about partnerships his city is partnering with arizona state university community colleges local utility companies and five local banks to carry out a comprehensive retrofit program focusing on buildings surrounding phoenix s new light rail line investing in retrofits is a triple win it s a win for consumers who save money on their energy bill it s a win for the environment because we re using less energy which cuts down on harmful emissions from greenhouse gases and finally it s a win for the american economy because it creates green jobs jobs that can t be outsourced now with so many worthy applications not everyone got funds today but the department of energy is still working to find more opportunities to get cities to get involved in programs like this but it s not just cities we also want to encourage millions of americans across the country to retrofit their homes that s why the president has made it a priority to pass legislation creating a new energy efficient rebate program that we call homestar and by the way i was home the last two weekends going to home depot both times one to buy a 30 inch hedge clipper because my wife was very dissatisfied with our hedges you all think i m kidding i am not kidding anyway anyway and the other one was to take my almost four year old grandson hunter who said pop i don t got a tape measurer so he had to get a tape measurer he s stolen four of mine he can t find them but we went to get another tape measurer but all kidding aside they asked about the program the guys working the aisles the women working the aisles they asked about the program under this program homeowners will be eligible for rebates worth up to 1 005 for simple home upgrades like replacing an old water heater putting in those new windows that i talked about if you decide to do a comprehensive retrofit of your whole house you d be eligible for a rebate up to 3 000 homeowners won t have to fill out forms send it in the mail and wait for the check to arrive they ll get rebates up front from the hardware store or the contractor the homestar rebate program is going to create tens of thousands of jobs in industries like construction manufacturing and i might add sales these people there are going to be people in home depot and i shouldn t just be talking about home depot but you know a lot of other places lowes that s the other one in my neighborhood anyway they re jobs and people need jobs jobs in manufacturing in all those areas where people have suffered very badly because of this recession at the same time we re going to reduce our energy consumption and families are going to save hundreds of dollars on the utility bills and that makes a big difference you know in the it s a commonsense idea that has bipartisan support so we re calling on congress to get this bill on the president s desk as soon as possible but of course to really get this right to really free ourselves from the grip of foreign oil to really preserve our planet for generations to come we need a comprehensive energy climate bill that s something that chairman markey has been working on and my good friend john kerry along with lindsay graham and others in the senate side i am hopeful i am hopeful we re grateful to the house for passing the bill last year and i want to thank all the house members because that was not an easy vote at the time to take but you were dead right the bill was a good solid bill you passed a bill and we continue working with both democrats and republicans to get it passed through the senate you know it s a political clich to say we re trying to change the world but you know it s most in it s most literal sense that s what we re trying to begin to do here today we ve got to change the world does anybody think we can lead the world in the 21st century with the energy policy we ve had in the last century does anybody think we can leave a planet to my grandchildren and their grandchildren that is sustainable without a fundamental change in the way we do business but this is a case where as the secretary pointed out not just for the united states but for the world this can become a win win situation you know it used to be when the construction trades and the building trades would support us when we d say green that meant oh god the snail darter we re not going to have a building we re not going to build a dam we re not going to people are beginning to understand green means a cleaner economy and green means jobs green green means economic advancement across the board you know making the world itself better the air we breathe the water we drink the mountains our children will climb the lakes they ll swim in that s why gaylord nelson started earth day 40 years ago and that s why you re all here today and i want to thank you all for helping us literally change the world so thank you all folks and may god bless you all and may god bless protect our troops keep it up thank you dem joebiden21 5 09a joe_biden thank you very much for the privilege and the opportunity to address the kosovo assembly in such a beautiful beautiful setting i congratulate you on your work thus far and i thank you for your very very generous welcome it s a privilege to return to your country and although i am a few months late let me say happy birthday on your one year anniversary and mr president let me thank you for one of the greatest honors of my career of being awarded the medal of freedom i accept it on behalf of the american people i do not deserve it but my country my country appreciates your gratitude for what we have attempted to do i look out and see some familiar faces and i say i had some concern that the day would arrive when i would be able to stand before a free and undivided kosovo and address you all you ve done remarkable things so far i ve traveled this region many times as a united states senator but this is my first trip as vice president of the united states of america in the past two days i ve been to bosnia and to serbia our deputy secretary of state jim steinberg just visited macedonia and montenegro our purpose is straightforward it s to underscore the commitment of the obama biden administration to the stability and progress in the balkans and to reaffirm that the policy of the united states is to seek a europe that is whole free and at peace the road to kosovo s independence was difficult and i need not tell you hard earned your journey included a brutal campaign of fighting through a campaign of ethnic cleansing by slobodan milosevic and nato s intervention to stop it it included nearly a decade of u n administration and determined diplomacy by the united states and our partners in europe that resulted in the plan that you are following to this day we know we know as you do that your task is enormous we also believe you are fully up to the task you have many friends and partners including the united states determined to see you succeed kosovo s independence was and remains today in my view and the view of my government the only viable option for stability in the region and your independence as i ve said in the countries i ve visited your independence is irreversible absolutely irreversible the success of an independent kosovo is a priority for our administration and for my country and a key element in our policy of helping the nations of the western balkans finally and for the first time of all history be fully integrated into europe sixty countries from all parts of the world have now recognized the republic of kosovo we re pleased that saudi arabia recognized kosovo we hope that other countries will soon follow suit we are urging them to do so kosovo s recent admission in the international monetary fund is further evidence of the international community s acceptance of the reality of an independent kosovo and it stands ready we stand ready we all stand ready to support you in building your state and putting the entire region of southeast europe on a stable foundation in your first year of independence your president and prime minister have in my view provided courageous courageous and steadfast leadership i salute the both of you and i mean that sincerely my country my country as well as yours in my view owe you a great debt and i commend the members of the assembly including the members of the opposition for your service all of you play a vital role in the legislative process a key component to any true democracy having been a legislator for 37 years i appreciate how important you are and i congratulate all of you on the steps you ve taken thus far to build a multi ethnic democracy at peace with its neighbors you ve adopted many laws including 50 mandated by the ahtisaari plan you ve built roads and schools established ministries of government from scratch from the very beginning agencies that didn t exist before you ve reached out to your neighbors and strengthened your diplomatic ties all around the world and you continue to do so all in the course of one year it s remarkable your hard earned success has demonstrated to the world that kosovo s democracy and its independence are a force for regional stability and that you are here to stay but there s still so much more to do and your people have high hopes and expectations for you and for all of us i must say my heart was warmed as i came from the landing zone into town with what appeared to be hundreds if not thousands of people lining the street welcoming a united states representative as a friend of kosovo and as a representative of my country that has invested much in your success permit me to express our hopes our hopes and expectations with regard to your future first we urge you we implore you to continue to build strong institutions that embody the values enshrined in your declaration of independence and your constitution the effectiveness and transparency of these institutions will be critical critical to the credibility of your government in the coming months and years press ahead with full implementation of the ahtisaari plan including measures that will give municipal authorities and ethnic communities greater degrees of control of local affairs continue to build on your record of free and fair elections and secondly the economic and financial challenges facing your country are significant these times demand fiscal and budgetary discipline as well as careful stewardship of the assistance provided by the international community to build an economy that can compete in the 21st century all nations including kosovo must create a welcoming and transparent business climate that attracts investment and creates jobs jobs your young people so sorely need third strengthening the rule of law must remain your priority do not let up in your efforts to eliminate corruption and tackle organized crime a problem for all emerging new states and continue continue to streamline and strengthen your judiciary a backbone of every democracy and adopt and enforce effective laws that will help move your country into the european mainstream your government is keeping to its pledge to close and full cooperation with the eu rule of law mission the united states is proud presumptuous of us to say it but we re proud to participate with eulex which is working to foster professional and multi ethnic customs courts police structures in kosovo eulex has responded quickly and effectively to stop violence and provocation as we have seen in recent days in kosovo s north fourth as a leader of a nation born from conflict as mine was and yours is you have a special responsibility to overcome the legacy of division bitterness and fear and mistrust within your country it s essential that the majority continues to reach out to kosovo s serb community to build a dialogue and establish strong protections for that community and for other non majority communities you must also make every effort to improve the conditions for the return of displaced serbs and members of others communities to their property and their homes throughout all of kosovo it s an essential ultimate condition to a free and open society and we urge you we urge you to preserve the rich cultural heritage in your country and in particular to safeguard religious freedom in a very important role on the serbian orthodox church for kosovo s serb community later today i will visit a decani monastery an important symbol of the power of unity during the fighting a decade ago and following the tradition established at its founding eight centuries ago the monks there and this will be my second visit last time during the war the monks there sheltered refugees from the war regardless of their ethnicity they understood they were all bound together by a common humanity for a truly democratic and free kosovo we need that spirit to prevail as it is at this moment throughout your country and we we are hopeful that it will because it is the key in my view to your further recognition and survival kosovo confronts many challenges but you do not stand alone the united states and the international community are committed to your success as you know i ve just come from belgrade i told serbia s leaders that u s support for the independent and sovereign kosovo remains steadfast and i urged them to find ways to cooperate to improve the welfare of all the people of kosovo i discussed the steps they can take to strengthen their cooperation with eulex i asked them to encourage kosovo s serbs to participate in kosovo institutions instead of pursuing parallel governing arrangements that obstruct constructive engagement among kosovo s ethnic communities i urged serbia s leaders to end their trade embargo against kosovo and i told them that kosovo cannot be divided it cannot be divided the united states remains committed to kosovo through nato s kfor mission which continues to play a critically important role in helping secure peace and stability the women and men of the many allied and partner nations serving here in kosovo in my view deserve tremendous praise president obama and i we are grateful for kfor s work and especially proud of the u s contingent commanding a multi national task force under nato s supervision and training kosovo is building security institutions including most importantly kosovo s security force to meet nato standards and opening them to all kosovo ethnic communities i look forward to the day when kosovo can contribute to international peacekeeping missions the european union is playing a critical role in ensuring kosovo s future as a multi ethnic democracy and ultimately its future in europe so i applaud the efforts of the international civilian representative mr feith and the office he leads to help kosovo carry out the commitments made for the protection of minority rights here in kosovo and i salute the united nations in its role over the last decade in helping establish kosovo institutions with kosovo independence it is now appropriate that the united states reconfigure and draw down its mission as recommended by the secretary general as a senator when i first sought to bring the world s attention to this region a diplomat who i will not mention warned me saying don t dream dreams senator when people told you a free and independent kosovo would never happen you did as i did you did not listen to that admonition and you like me continued to dream dreams and so did your people as a public official and as a politician i remain optimistic i have to dream to give people the vision for a better tomorrow you must continue to dream of a nation that is whole free and multi ethnic and strong and finally for the first time in history integrated into the european mainstream i m optimistic about your country and quite frankly in spite of all the difficulties that exist i remain optimistic about the region i think this is one of those points in history where we may be able to shed hundreds of years hundreds of years of past animosities and begin to move into the 21st century i believe in your effort to create a modern state one that can propel all its citizens toward a common european future this is the future for all communities in kosovo this is the future reflected in the thousands of signatures on the newborn monument downtown a monument to hope and to expectations you ve only just begun this is a future that will be determined by each one of you in this chamber today and throughout kosovo your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will look to you look to you as the people who made the final turn after centuries of division ladies and gentlemen take pride in what you ve accomplished keep your patience and persistence and insist that you not give up on what has never fully existed here before a truly multi ethnic democracy take heart take heart for the hard work ahead and take confidence that the united states of america will be with you a free and independent kosovo every step of the way every step you take ladies and gentlemen once again i thank you for the honor i m proud to be associated with you and i am incredibly optimistic about your future thank you so very much dem joebiden21 5 09b joe_biden thank you soldiers i apologize for my back to you i apologize but thank you thank you all for having me general it s an honor it s an honor to be with you and it s an honor to be back at fort bondsteel i spent a fair amount of time back in the days when i was a senator when this god awful war began and milosevic s rampage was underway and this is i ve had multiple visits here but it s always always great to be here at bondsteel i was here before it was built i was here while it was being built and i keep coming back one it s been built because damn i love the food do they still have ice cream in the mess well that s why i came i just want you to know let me say what a privilege it is to be with all of you today you represent and this is not hyperbole you literally represent the greatness of america you re from all across the country active duty national guard reserves including the california national guard the alaska national guard i understand we have some marylanders here that s a suburb of delaware only kidding guys only kidding only kidding and west virginia national guard i m told some here and i m also told you have some texans here is that right all right only takes about three texans to sound like 50 hey those of you from alaska your helicopter unit today gave me a copy of your patch northern exposure you ve all seen it haven t you i just where the hell were you when i was debating sarah palin i could have used this patch when she said can i call you joe i d say sure if you wear your patch by the way she s quite a lady and i mean that sincerely i got to admit though i ve never seen a patch quite like this one i won t ask what you re exposing but at any rate you know you re serving shoulder to shoulder with our nato forces that are here partners from armenia and greece lithuania poland and romania and ukraine you know you show the world and you continue to show the world what happens when nations resolve to stand together to defeat tyranny and to build free societies again that s not hyperbole that s real that s what you ve been doing here you re actually rebuilding the society one that quite frankly never existed before in this part of the world a few years ago as was mentioned i have a son in iraq but a few years ago another biden visited here as a member of the justice department the united states justice department s sole representative here in kosovo right after the war while things were still kind of dicey and they re always dicey trying to help them put together rule of law train their judges and train their prosecutors that was my son beau i made a real serious mistake i came to visit one of the many times i ve been here and i saw him he was a civilian then and because he s always looking for a good meal i was coming up to bondsteel he said come up and spend the night with me and then after his tour was over here he went back home and he went back to practicing law and became the attorney general of delaware and one day he said to me hey dad what are you doing on friday true story i said why what do you have in mind pal whatever you want he said i d like you be at such and such a place i said what for he said to pin my bars on me i said what in the hell have you done your mother is going to kill me he said well dad ever since i d been to bondsteel and i m not joking he came to bondsteel saw your predecessors here and decided he had to be part of it he had to be part of it like all of you he s crazy thank god for america he is and i just want to tell you that i admire what you re doing he was inspired by what he saw then and by the women and men he met here at bondsteel and now as i said he is like you he s serving away from his family like so many thousands and tens of thousands of americans you all didn t sign on this for being your day job but it s become your day job at least for the year or so you re away from your family and he s going to return home like all of you and he ll return home later this year after a 12 month deployment and his determination like yours to serve our nation at a critical time in our history is not at all unlike yours he shares with you the kinship of character and the commitment to our country that your generation has showed in extra measure and together all our guardsmen and women provide just another example of why i have and i m not just saying this why i have so much faith so much faith in the inevitability of america so much faith in the notion that the 21st century we ll lead once again so much faith in the notion that the 21st century will lead once again so much faith in success of your missions here in kosovo and all around the world i just got back from not just several months ago got back from afghanistan similar similar missions the guard reserve and regular forces all together doing the same job long before my son came here i made a trip to this camp when it was first under construction i flew over it coming up from split this was actually a relatively bumpy mountain top and i flew over it in the helicopter general as american bulldozers and earthmovers were literally shaving the top of this mountain off and literally i believe it was less than six weeks later when i came back there was actually occupation on this hill and i had spent the day in pristina meeting with various people and i had a kosovar driver who was driving me around that day and as it came toward evening i was coming up to spend the night here at bondsteel and the main gate you come through now used to be a rutted dirt road literally and it had rained very hard the roads had not been paved yet and it was rutted and bumpy coming up but it seemed like a steeper incline than it looks now and we got to the pike the red and white pike across this rutted dirt road and with great enthusiasm my kosovar driver looked through the window and he said america america and he was pointing at the bulldozers and cranes and all the activity and he was astounded by the fact we were able to do this so quickly and so thoroughly but as i look slightly to my right at the guard shack i looked over and i gazed at what i thought really is america there were four american soldiers standing there there was an african american officer there was a woman colonel there was a hispanic american and a non commissioned black soldier and i tapped my driver literally this is not i m not making this this literally happened i tapped my driver on the shoulder and i said no there s america there s america and until you people begin to understand that this carnage will never end that s the magic of america and just the fact that you are all here representing every hue and color male and female sends such a message throughout this region so loudly that i think you all underestimate the consequences and working together with our nato allies and others is another thing that the people of this region have found almost difficult to understand speaking of female officers they can t quite get it you know they say it s better to see a sermon than hear one preached well you re the sermon and a decade later in front of all of you i see it even more than i saw it then today i look out at all of you and i m humbled and i am proud ladies and gentlemen for just as i ve seen other bases around the world and made dozens of trips into what we call war zones around the world what i see reaffirms my absolute belief and knowledge you are the most powerful you are the most disciplined you are the best trained warriors america has ever produced and that is literally true you re the most visible most vital symbol of our sense of justice and compassion that could possibly be demonstrated to the rest of the world along with your colleagues in the multinational force you re the embodiment of our deep seated ethic of selflessness and sacrifice i ll never forget going into romania early on meeting with the romanian president and him saying you re the only nation that s ever come conquered and left without taking anything ladies and gentlemen that s america that s who we are and that s who you that s who you advertise to the whole world who we are when i look at the progress made since my first visit much of it has been attained first and foremost by american leadership backed up by the courage and hard work of nato military forces like all those standing with you here today i fought long and hard early on somewhat controversially to make the united states do everything it could to prevent and end the ethnic cleansing i am not a warmonger but i worked very very hard to get president clinton to lift the arms embargo and strike forces the jna crossing the drina to stop the ethnic cleansing that was going on not only in bosnia but here in kosovo to protect what has become kosovo s independence you don t sometimes make as much news these days as your buddies in isaf but let me tell you i know what you re doing the president knows what you re doing and what you re doing remains vital remains absolutely vital you have a chance we have a chance your colleagues in the multinational forces have a chance to be able to say to our grandchildren and your great grandchildren that we were present in the moment for the first time in all of history the balkans became part of europe we dreamed of a europe whole free and at peace but the one missing piece of that puzzle remains the balkans and what you re doing here gives for the first time in all of history a chance a chance to change so we know what you re doing and the people of kosovo know what you re doing i spoke to the parliament today every street i traveled the streets were lined from the curb to the storefronts with people cheering and holding up signs thanking america and the multinational force you know this is nato s second largest deployment in all of its history you re making a decisive contribution getting this country on its feet and you also demonstrate every day what we call the new nato in total this opportunity represents 33 countries including 25 nato countries members and eight non nato members this mission brings stability and prosperity to kosovo and it symbolizes the way that nato has reached out beyond its original boundaries and mission to provide security in places that need help like this one and in turn enhance our security in doing so we extended our hand and created a new and enduring partnership to make us safer not only here but all around the world here in kosovo you protect the innocent you protected innocents decade ago and now you re providing kosovars the security they need to and the space they need to build an independent democratic and most importantly multiethnic state that s never existed in this part of the world your primary mission is securing freedom of movement for kosovar citizens kosovo citizens but you re doing so much more than that you re literally building a free vibrant productive society from the ground up you re working with nongovernmental organizations international donor organizations to complete local improvement projects that change the lives of these people you re helping citizens with personal health care needs providing farmers with veterinarian assistance through the monthly advisory meetings you have you re working with doctors and medical students educating and with education projects that are going to help these people treat their own patients more efficiently and effectively when we leave you re even going into schools to interact with this nation s next generation which is our only hope for every little thing you do you do so much to secure a brighter future for those kids you see in the streets for kosovo and you do it for the region and for america america that relies on you to create and maintain the peaceful world that we all desire and for that and so much more we owe you folks to president obama and me when we say we owe you we mean that more than just an idle phrase our administration is doing what we can to repay the debt you started your train up for this deployment at the end of last year before heading to germany for an exercise in mid january a couple of weeks after that on february 17 we passed the historic recovery and reinvestment act to help jumpstart our economy while also building the economy of tomorrow and just as we ve done for civilian workers we wanted to make sure that you have everything you need when you re deployed and able to do your jobs and you have your jobs when you come back home that s why we focus so much of our nation s resources in this incredibly difficult time not only on your training your pay and your equipment but on your health your education and the quality of life for you and your families this effort includes the 7 billion in addition to the regular budget 7 billion for military construction projects new hospitals child care centers better housing at all our defense installations across america we also realize that commitment doesn t end with this legislation nor does it end when your time at this base comes to a close that s why we dramatically increased health care coverage providing resources for 5 5 million additional veterans timely high quality health care extending and expanding health care eligibility bringing in a half a million new veterans into the system that s why we passed the most extensive gi bill since world war ii that includes all of you where you get credit for your deployment and for the first time in history if you decide you don t want to use it you can t use it your spouse or your children can use those very benefits to go to college we re extremely proud that we ve also increased funding for veterans by 25 billion that s not occurred before it s the biggest increase in a generation and when we proposed it people said how can we be doing this at a time of such economic strain with such high deficits my response is simple how can we not for which you and your families are doing how can we not do that we have only one sacred obligation as a nation only one and it trumps all others it s to care for those we send into harm s way and care for them when they come home that is more consequential than any other obligation we have whether it s education or health care anything else it s the single and only sacred obligation we have and we re going to fulfill that obligation passes the congress you know the poet john milton wrote they also serve who only stand and wait like your parents and your spouses my family understands that my daughter in law and my two grandchildren are serving by only standing and waiting ladies and gentlemen your families back home are making incredible sacrifices we know we know what your families are actually engaged in doing and they deserve our help as well some of you some of you like my son s family are missing your children some of you are missing birthdays some of you are missing the birth of your first or second or third or fourth child some of you are missing the funerals of close friends and relatives you know we say america is at war but i say we have a military at war and a country that not because they don t care doesn t fully appreciate the sacrifices you re making we understand the importance of your families and the sacrifice they re making back home and we owe them dearly as well but ladies and gentlemen we also owe an inordinately large debt to the families of the 4 295 fallen angels in iraq the 679 fallen angels in afghanistan the 34 084 wounded in both theaters we owe those families more than we can ever pay and we say to those families that there s no other group of americans we re more indebted to ladies and gentlemen you know you re coming up on an important anniversary here you may really you may not know it forty years ago on may 24 a 21 year old guy in my generation s war a staff sergeant displayed incredible leadership and courage in a four hour battle in an loc province in vietnam for his efforts he won the medal of honor and i d like to read to you from the citation that he received when he received that medal of honor it says by individual acts of bravery he destroyed 10 enemy bunkers accounted for a large toll of the enemy including two enemy commanders his extraordinary heroism at the risk of his life was in the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit on him his unit and the united states army that young soldier was staff sergeant james leroy bondsteel and i know almost exactly 40 years to the day because it was may 23 almost 40 years to the day of his exceptional heroism he d look at all of you soldiers who live on this base that bears his name and be proud of what you re accomplishing already and what you continue to accomplish in the future for this country and for our country so from the bottom of my heart on behalf of the president of the united states our entire administration the united states congress and all the american people if they only knew i say we admire you we genuinely admire you we admire what you re doing and we will do everything in our power to guarantee that you have whatever you need to complete your mission and whatever help you need when we get back home because a lot of your families a lot of your families are stressed a lot of you are dealing with having left situations behind that needs some help many not but many you do and so folks again on behalf of the president of the united states we not only thank you but we thank your families and ladies and gentlemen of the multi national task force you also have our full support and our deep respect the deep respect of a grateful nation and a grateful people here in kosovo so i want to thank you and god bless you and may god protect all our troops in harm s way i m really proud of you thank you so much dem joebiden22 10 09 joe_biden thank you mr ambassador director mr mayor former presidents who i ve had the honor to meet in the past it s good to be back in romania and mr mayor as we say in america thank you for the passport to come into your city i appreciate it very much what a magnificent forum what a magnificent forum and i say to all the students thank you i m honored that you are here ladies and gentlemen it s an honor to be back in romania this is not my first trip nor god willing will it be my last and it s great to be back in central europe to help mark an extraordinary season of change twenty years ago the world watched in awe and admiration as the men and women throughout this region broke the shackles of oppression and emerged a free people it s literally hard to imagine that this beautiful library was the scene of such heavy fighting in 1989 i was reviewing pictures of what it looked like with tanks stationed outside ladies and gentlemen when the firing stopped and the smoke cleared the faade of this building was scarred by shells and bullets five hundred thousand books were burned part of your history and your legacy and just blocks away in university square some of freedom s young defenders were struck down but their courage and conviction prevailed and i hope and know set an example to all of you who followed when the iron curtain was lifted the wall fell in berlin in their places grew democracy a democracy that you ve deserved for a long time across europe a new sense of possibility took hold galvanizing the region uplifting a continent and literally inspiring the world the story of freedom your story is one of the greatest achievements in modern history and it s important that we celebrate that remarkable that remarkable moment it s also important that we remember how far central europe has come in the last 20 years early in my career as a united states senator a young senator then i brought my two now grown sons but then very young sons to central europe as they reached their teenage years i took them immediately to dachau so they would begin to know what men and women are capable of at their worst but also understand what men and women were capable of at their best i took them to the berlin wall i had them walk through checkpoint charlie so that the rest of their lives they d remember they d understand that the freedom we sometimes take for granted was not a birthright for tens of millions of people on this continent and today i come back to central europe and romania not only with an official delegation from the united states government but with my 11 year old granddaughter finnegan biden finnegan stand up i want these people to see you and my daughter kathleen biden would you stand up kathleen i m going to embarrass you i know i brought them along because i want them to understand particularly my granddaughter as my son learned i want them to see and understand first hand the story of this region and of this continent my granddaughter is visiting museums and monuments that chronicle the turmoil of the 20th century in poland here and in the czech republic and she has seen with her own young eyes she has seen in the people she meets and in the vibrancy of your cities and your streets the incredible incredible possibilities of this 21st century she is a witness to a powerful fact that the true validation of 1989 the real story of your country and this region lies less in what you tore down and more in what you have built those of us who know about the bloodshed and the freedom fighters in hungary in 1956 those who felt the chilling end to the warm prague spring of 1968 in wenceslas square those who shut down the shipyards in gdansk in 1980 those here in romania who endured the most ruthless totalitarian dictatorship in the latter half of the 21st century in europe each and every one was struggling not only against something but for something for government a government that responds to the needs of its people for a more tolerant society built on respect and dignity for the freedom to think to believe and to pursue your dreams you have begun to realize those dreams that only the bold imagined 20 years ago a europe whole and free anchored in a european atlantic alliance institutions of nato and the european union we americans are incredibly proud to have been your partners in the peaceful reunification of europe as president obama said on the eve of nato summit last spring and i quote him this shared history gives us hope but it must not give us rest this generation cannot stand still we cannot stand still because we now face another season of change another season of challenge an economic crisis that has hurt too many people and eroded their confidence a war in afghanistan now in its eighth year and new forces shaping this young century those new forces among other things include the spread of weapons of mass destruction and dangerous disease the expanding chasm between the rich and poor ethnic animosities and failed states a rapidly warming planet and an uncertain supply of energy food water the challenge to freedom and security posed by radical fundamentalism i come here today with a straightforward simple message the united states and europe a europe whole and united will meet these challenges together for that s the only way they can be met no amount of idle talk no distortion of the facts can chip away at this unassailable truth the united states of america remains committed to our alliance with europe which we americans believe and continue to believe is the cornerstone of american foreign policy as it has been for the last 60 years we are all the more committed because our european partners have grown broader and stronger we the united states cannot succeed without you and if you will forgive my presumption i do not believe you can fully succeed without us i know that some in central europe look at the problems and responsibilities the united states has assumed around the world and conclude that we have no longer focused we no longer are focused on this region of the world in fact it s precisely because of our global responsibilities and your growing and capacity and willingness to meet them with us that we value our partnership with central europe and europe now more than we ever had it s quite to the contrary together we have responsibilities to shoulder and we have promises to keep those responsibilities are larger now and the promises more significant we see central europeans rising to this moment heeding the call to leadership of major regional and international institutions twenty years ago imagine the presidency of the european parliament head of unesco chair of the council in europe justices on the european court of justice commissioners in the european commission the time for central europe has come you have shown yourselves ready for our common challenges willing to tackle them and able to overcome them that s why in america we no longer think in terms of what we can do for central europe but rather in terms of what we can do with central europe first and foremost we are bound together by shared values and a common commitment to protect those values whenever and wherever they are challenged nato is the bedrock of that commitment one of the high points of my career was leading the effort as a united states senator to expand nato to central europe as a matter of fact mr president you ll remember i suggested that romania should be in the first tranche i was the one who fought until the very end to see it included in the first tranche thank you for making me look so prescient you ve done so well as president obama has said there are no old members there are no new members of nato there are just members under article 5 an attack on one is an attack against all our countries are bound together by america s dedication to european security and by europe s dedication to america s security which you demonstrated quickly and powerfully in the wake of 9 11 the first time article 5 was invoked without us asking today we carry heavy responsibilities we all of us our sons and daughters like my son are serving side by side in afghanistan in iraq and in the balkans for this for the courage of our friends and for their losses the american people are grateful our alliance was built around consultation and collaboration for collective defense that s what it is about but faced with new threats we need a new vision on how to meet them and new capabilities to succeed that s why the decision to develop what we call a new strategic concept for nato is so very important and that s why it is so vital that central european voices make themselves heard in this process one powerful example of how this can work is our partnership on our new approach to missile defense in the 20th century nato successfully prepared to defend allied territory against what was then a very real soviet challenge on what we all used to call the central front that divided europe today a new major threat is growing that could reach all of our european allies well before it reaches the united states it comes from ballistic missiles short range and intermediate range ballistic missiles a technology that has spread to many new countries and less stable countries since the end of the cold war this technology coupled with the spread of nuclear know how poses a great threat to all of us and we are determined we are determined to ensure that our nato allies have the protection they need when they need it because that s our solemn obligation under article 5 taking into account how the threat has evolved and how our technology has improved significantly the united states believes there is a better way to defend against ballistic missiles than the approach we had been pursuing up until several years ago this phased adaptive approach the united states is proposing it has adapted its design to meet the growing threat to europe with a proven technology that will cover more of europe including central europe more effectively than the previous approach it meets the missile threats of today and allows us to improve our defenses against that threat well into the future its flexibility will enable us to adapt if the threat changes its very existence will deter those who might think about coercing or attacking our forces or our allies in europe and it will defend them our friends in europe against that threat should deterrence fail simply put our missile defense plan means greater security for europe and greater security for america some maybe even understandably jump to the conclusion that this new missile defense approach was meant to appease russia at the expense of central europe nothing could be further from the truth that is absolutely wrong missile defense is not about russia our approach is driven by security requirements of the united states and our nato allies period period what is true is that we are working to strengthen our relationship with russia we believe that a more constructive relationship with russia will benefit all but we re not nave the truth is we share some common interests cutting the arsenals of nuclear weapons securing vulnerable nuclear materials stabilizing afghanistan preventing iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and we also continue to have disagreements with russia on matters of basic principle in february in munich germany in the very first major foreign policy speech of our administration i enunciated our administration s outline for foreign policy and i made clear our core principles the united states stands against the 19th century notion of spheres of influence we will not tolerate it nor will we be co opted by it we stand for the right of sovereign democracies to make their own decisions to choose their own alliances without the right of any country to veto those decisions we will never make a deal about anything with anyone above your heads or behind your backs the maxim we live by is clear nothing about you without you nothing about you without you and i would argue look at our track record look at our track record we ve all learned over the past two years that as the globe around us shrinks the bonds between us grow we are partners in today s global economy that s why we worked with our european partners the imf and the world bank to make sure international support for your economies was there when you needed it most that s why it s heartening to see how many of you have successfully braved this worldwide recession and put your nations on the road to recovery and working together we can all learn lessons from this crisis that will help us lay the foundation for a renewed century of growth and to rebuild prosperity one lesson we need to work together toward is a more secure energy future we need sustainable energy security that includes diversification of supplies and transit routes smart investments to deal with climate change the connections between european countries should exist not just through european countries here in this region by history geography and necessity the countries of central europe are well placed to lead all of europe ladies and gentlemen finally let me say a word about leadership in an area that central europeans are uniquely qualified to provide the advocacy of democracy americans i believe are rightly proud that people around the world occasionally look to our example and look for our leadership but the truth of the matter is you are the model for millions not us you romania and other central european countries the example you set 20 years ago inspired the world the leadership you exert over the next 20 years can change that world encouraging supporting and consolidating young democracies in central and eastern europe in eastern europe countries still struggle to fulfill the promise of a strong democracy or a vibrant market economy who to look to better than you who to look to better than central european countries that 20 years ago acted with such courage and resolve and over the last 20 years have made such sustainable progress you can help guide moldova georgia ukraine along the path of lasting stability and prosperity it s your time to lead armenia azerbaijan belarus can benefit from your personal experiences the e u eastern partnership initiative is a good example of how you can energize the effort and we will partner with you in working to fulfill the promise of 1989 but your leadership needs to be bold and your voices loud there s an old romanian proverb the cheapest article is advice the most valuable is a good example you are the good example twenty years ago the people of central europe took the world history that they inherited and willed it in a new direction toward greater freedom justice and fairness the odds were stacked against you we know from history that destroying old oppressive regimes is a great deal easier than building new flourishing democracies but you ve delivered on the promise of your revolution you are now in the position to help others do the same speaking to our congress 20 winters ago vaclav havel pointed to a special sense of empathy and imagination the people of central europe share years of subjugation he said have given us however unintentionally something positive a special capacity to look somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience he went on to say a person who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way he was right now you have the freedom to act on those hopes and you are and i believe together we can turn that hope that we shared into a history we can be proud of this is the moment you students if we are smart brave and lucky will be able to tell your grandchildren you were present at the creation of a new europe a new security a new era of peace because you were bold enough to seize that moment be like those in 89 be bold exercise your leadership you have a history and you have a tradition you can make a gigantic difference and we ll stand with you ladies and gentlemen thank you for listening and may god bless america and all of our allies and may god protect all of our troops who are in harm s way thank you very very much it s been an honor to be here dem joebiden22 2 10 joe_biden good morning everyone well i hope you all had a good time last night and i kept my tradition of not making more of a fool of myself than i usually do by not letting you all see me try to dance there was one reason i used to say to governor markell of delaware why i never ran for governor you have to have an inaugural ball and that s why i stayed in the senate all those years first of all thank you all for being here it seems i ve spent so you guys have spent and ladies have spent so much time with me on the telephone i can t tell you how much i appreciate our almost biweekly conversations but now i ve gotten a chance to speak to all of you but two and most of you twice for a half hour or so about the recovery act and the first message i want to deliver to you is thanks you have we put out a lot of money for a lot of projects a lot of money that isn t projects tax cuts going into your states as well as health care monies and the truth of the matter is the hardest part is accounting for the projects and a lot of those projects weren t directly in your control gov i know that but yet you guys oversaw it and we had in the recovery act there s been 160 000 reports filed they ve been sent out sent in from around the country and anyone can go to our web site recovery gov to find out exactly how those projects how that money was spent out where it was spent and the thing i want to thank you most for and i kid you all when i m on the conversation with you say well why am i being so responsive well if it doesn t work it s my problem with the boss coming in in a minute here and so that s why i try to be we try to be as responsive as we can but what i m here to say to you all is you ve been incredibly responsive to me and to us in terms of getting those reports in and as i said the thing i m quite frankly proudest of is that dog hasn t bitten yet remember at the beginning we were going to have all these massive fraud programs anything this big was going to and you know there s been some mistakes and some of the programs don t really pass the smell test they re legal and they re appropriate but they just don t look right on paper but it s a very small percentage the inspector generals who have been looking at each one of these projects there s a panel of 10 inspector generals that reviews this there s very very few i mean less than a couple dozen that have been referred for further investigation based on all the reports of any fraud coming in as a conduct of the program that s a great tribute to you all but i also know how difficult it is the reporting piece of this it takes a lot of your time a lot of your effort i apologize for being such a pain in the neck about it but you ve been great and the fact is folks that part of the program the recovery act now and by the way i think most people and you all republican and democrat have been great the truth of the matter is that a lot of people thought as my grandpop would say the recovery act was the horse that was going to carry the sleigh the entire economy and pull it it was only one piece of the economic recovery program but almost everyone now agrees that it created somewhere between or saved somewhere between 1 6 million and 2 4 million jobs we re confident it s over 2 million jobs and we also know as the president said last night from the podium when we were sitting right here that a lot of you have a fy 11 budget that s pretty steep as well but last year out a lot of you were able to keep firefighters school teachers police officers on the job and one of the things that everyone even the critics now acknowledge is that the recovery act played a significant part in the growth of the gdp the first quarter of last year the economy shrunk by over 6 percent 6 4 percent last quarter a year later it actually grew almost 6 percent 5 7 percentt but we all know a lot of people are still hurting i mean i ve traveled into now 65 cities i think it is in your states and a lot of people are still hurting employment is lagging and it s going to be it s a real scramble for a lot of people my grandpop used to have an expression a couple of you heard me say when the guy he was from scranton when the guy in oliphant s is out of work it s an economic slowdown that s a little town outside of scranton when your brother in law is out of work it s a recession when you re out of work it s a depression it s a depression for a lot of americans you all are right on the front lines trying to deal with the concerns and problems of those people but the next phase of the act and i ll conclude with this and introduce the president the next phase of the recovery monies and there s a lot of it left is in projects but also in signature projects that we hope are not only going to create we re confident are going to create jobs we hope they re going to begin to lay a new platform for an economic growth cycle in the 21st century they are innovative they range from everything from broadband that a lot of you are working on to high speed rail to a new electric grid and meters and investment in battery technologies a range of things that are designed not just merely which is critical to get the economy moving and keep it moving provide jobs and initiate new jobs but they re also leveraging a lot of private capital a lot of money i was talking to governor christie a moment ago it used to be five years ago when we tried to talk about wind power along the east coast there was delaware and no one else was doing it all of sudden we started to invest in it and now you ve got millions of megawatts of programs that are being suggested same way with solar energy we re making major new investment in the mohave desert a billion dollar commitment so there s some real there s some real hope that we re going to be able to generate significant new projects i know in the far west we re having some trouble about getting some of this off the ground and transmission and the rest but you all have worked with us you ve given us great insight as to where the biggest problems are we re trying to work through them but we can t do it without you and so in this last phase which is this next year of the recovery act i hope you will continue to be willing to be as available to me as you have been and i hope we ve proved to you that we re looking for your ideas we don t think everything is invented here and so let us know how we can best implement the last portions of the most innovative parts of the recovery act with that ladies and gentlemen i d like to introduce the president who is focused on rebuilding our infrastructure and sparking a new clean energy revolution creating the best education system in the world that s what he s undertaking some say we re doing too much but the truth of the matter is is there s no way that we can lead in the 21st century with the same energy policy the same education system and the same effort same infrastructure we have now so we ve got to deal with all this i think we re on the right path i m glad you all are the ones that are leading the effort for us you ve been a great source of ideas and again let us know what you think we re doing right and what you think we re doing wrong with that ladies and gentlemen let me introduce the president of the united states barack obama dem joebiden22 7 09 joe_biden well thank you very much mr president what a great honor we say mr president the greatest honor is to be back in the presence of all of you and under not ideal circumstance but better circumstances than when i was here last mr president friends colleagues particularly to your grandmother and to your mother and your beautiful wife i say thank you for the hospitality you extended to me when i was here last and thank you today i accept this honor bestowed on me quite frankly i accept it not only with a great deal of gratitude but on behalf of my country because my ability to give any consequence any help to you is a direct consequence of the willingness of the american people to stand up and support freedom and as you know mr president that s a bipartisan sentiment in my country let me say that one year ago when i came to georgia it was under very different and difficult circumstances i was proud to stand with you then and the reason i m back and the reason president obama asked me to come back was to send an unequivocal clear simple message to all who will listen and those who even don t want to listen that america stands with you at this moment and will continue to stand with you ladies and gentlemen georgians mikheil i want to be clear why we stand with you we stand with you because we were first and foremost inspired by your quest for independence the rose revolution as it s become referred to from the outset and the voice of the georgian people were a clarion call to freedom loving people around the globe everyone who loves freedom and democracy and even more importantly those who yearn for it those who yearn for it and do not have it in fact i heard that call and they heard it very clearly so what you did what your people did extended well beyond the borders of georgia look today when you see people amassed in squares where their freedom is not at hand but to continue to strive for it the reference to your rose revolution and it continues to be spoken of the rose revolution was a clear signal to the world that we have entered the 21st century and the shackles of the 20th century have been shed and it s our collective responsibility to make sure that they are not once again put upon you or any other freedom loving people we re committed to georgia as well as a vital partner in the progress that we seek in europe and beyond the united states wants to build a multi partner world in which nations make common cause of common concerns with georgia our partnership involves meeting security challenges because we are grateful as well i might add to georgia s soldiers who stand next to ours and are being trained now to stand with ours in afghanistan it includes our commitment to your energy security you re providing for many others we welcome georgia s role literally as a bridge for natural resources flowing from east to west our partnership rests on a foundation of shared democratic ideals and we will continue to support your work and deepen georgia s democracy and our partnership includes a determination to build even stronger bonds not only between our governments but equally as important among our people to welcome georgian students in larger and larger numbers to american universities and to encourage american students to study here in georgia to help american and georgian entrepreneurs forge new paths of economic progress to nurture the life blood of any democracy is civil society that holds all governments including yours and mine accountable georgia may be small as you referenced mr president but i have learned it has a very very big heart and even more the power of your example brings with it responsibilities to continue to inspire others in their quest for democracy and securing an independence against all odds there a famous letter that an american president thomas jefferson wrote to one of his political rivals john adams john adams is our second president and one of our founders and jefferson our third in their aging after they both had no longer been president they had a long long correspondence until each of them died coincidentally on the same day and in one of those letters thomas jefferson said and i m paraphrasing that those who bring about revolutions seldom see them come to fruition seldom see the democracy take root this is going to be different you all know that your declaration of independence and your rose revolution were the beginning of the process in a sense some of the real hard part is now left you mentioned protestors welcome to democracy welcome to democracy we are very accustomed to protestors but you are in the process of building those institutional attributes that a country needs to maintain a democracy and i am not exaggerating when i say many other people in the world are looking to you to see whether or not you can bring the revolution to full fruition and dig those roots plants those roots of democracy very deep every progressive nation has a stake in your success every progressive nation in the world has a stake in your success particularly nations in this region and that makes georgia a very important nation for the future of this region this continent and the world so i would like to if i had a glass in my hand which i m going to get with your permission raise my glass in a toast to georgia s success and to your fierce determination to be independent sovereign democratic and free thank you very much to georgia thank you mr president dem joebiden23 3 10a joe_biden thank you all yes he did thank you all for being here ladies and gentlemen please be seated ladies and gentlemen to state the obvious this is truly a historic day but as all of you know history is not merely what s printed in our textbooks it doesn t begin or end with a stroke of a pen history is made history is made when men and women decide that there s a greater risk in accepting the situation we cannot bear than in steeling our spines and embracing the promise of change history is made when a leader s passion is matched with his principle in service of his country mr president your passion to make the lives of ordinary americans better has been on display and the principles that guided your public service beginning when you were a community organizer have led this nation to this moment mr president 30 minutes ago by the stroke of your pen you began the process of making life better for tens of millions of americans today and for evermore for much too long for much too long americans have been denied what every human being is entitled to decent affordable health care starting with teddy roosevelt straight through to you mr president everyone else tried they were great men they gave it their best but they came up short but you succeeded mr president and we owe you for that as i said just before the president signed the health care bill i quoted virgil the classic greek poet who once said the greatest wealth is health the greatest wealth is health mr president you ve made us a nobler and wealthier nation by providing for the health of your fellow citizens ladies and gentlemen the president of the united states of america barack obama dem joebiden23 3 10b joe_biden thank you all thank you mr president i think we got a happy room here it seems ridiculous to say thank you all for being here ladies and gentlemen to state the obvious this is a historic day in our business you use that phrase a lot but i can t think of a day in the 37 years that i ve been a united states senator and the short time i ve been vice president that it is more appropriately stated this is a historic day and history history is not merely what is printed in textbooks it doesn t begin or end with the stroke of a pen history is made history is made when men and women decide that there is a greater risk in accepting a situation that we cannot bear than in steeling our spine and embracing the promise of change that s when history is made history is made when you all assembled here today members of congress take charge to change the lives of tens of millions of americans through the efforts of those of us lucky enough to serve here in this town that s exactly what you ve done you ve made history history is made when a leader steps up stays true to his values and charts a fundamentally different course for the country history is made when a leader s passion passion is matched with principle to set a new course well ladies and gentlemen mr president you are that leader mr president your fierce advocacy the clarity of purpose that you showed your perseverance these are in fact it is not hyperbole to say these are the reasons why we re assembled in this room together today but for those attributes we would not be here many many men and women are going to feel the pride that i feel in watching you shortly watching you sign this bill knowing that their work their work has helped make this day possible but mr president you re the guy that made it happen and so mr president all of us press and elected officials assembled in this town over the years we ve seen some incredible things happen but you know mr president you ve done what generations of not just ordinary but great men and women have attempted to do republicans as well as democrats they ve tried before everybody knows the story starting with teddy roosevelt they ve tried they were real bold leaders but mr president they fell short you have turned mr president the right of every american to have access to decent health care into reality for the first time in american history mr president i ve gotten to know you well enough you want me to stop because i m embarrassing you but i m not going to stop for another minute mr president because you delivered on a promise a promise you made to all americans when we moved into this building mr president you are to repeat myself literally about to make history our children and our grandchildren they re going to grow up knowing that a man named barack obama put the final girder in the framework for a social network in this country to provide the single most important element of what people need and that is access to good health and that every american from this day forward will be treated with simple fairness and basic justice look the classic poet virgil once said that the greatest wealth is health the greatest wealth is health well today america becomes a whole lot wealthier because tens of millions of americans will be a whole lot healthier from this moment on ladies and gentlemen the president of the united states of america barack obama dem joebiden23 7 09 joe_biden thank you mr speaker ladies and gentlemen of the parliament distinguished leaders friends all i thank you for this great honor i do consider it an honor to be given the floor in your parliament i speak not only on behalf of myself as vice president but i speak for my president president obama as well as my country i come here on behalf of the united states with a simple straightforward message we the united states stand by you on your journey to a secure free and democratic and once again united georgia it s a journey nearly a century in the making in may of 1918 the national council of georgia this very body under a different name declared independence much as my own nation did 150 years before that three years later you adopted a constitution a brave declaration of your freedom and independence even under the imminent threat of an attack one month later the bolshevik occupation was complete and this parliament met for the last time until the end of the century it was a journey halted before it began but the journey renewed in 1989 as the cries for freedom rang throughout georgia once again only to be stopped one more time by the last grasp of a dying empire two years later you declared your independence again and a seed planted generations before became a rose about to bloom georgia s first post soviet experiment with democracy was tainted with civil strife economic hardship growing corruption and a backward drift toward undemocratic rule then just six years ago the rose revolution sounded a clarion call for freedom and democracy that was literally heard around the world i still draw inspiration from that moment and the journey you have taken i remember watching in awe as you stood straight and tall so did millions of people around the world whose quest for freedom is not yet complete one year ago as the speaker referenced i came to georgia under very different circumstances i was advised by many not to come i was told that it wasn t a particularly opportune moment but i wanted to make clear why your independence was so important to my country and the world instead of standing in your parliament i sat on the rooftop of a restaurant with president saakashvili as the sound of artillery fire and fighter aircraft punctuated the night on that rooftop i pledged america s support to georgia in my status as the united states senate and i here today pledge it again as vice president of the united states of america i pledge it not only on my behalf but on behalf of president barack obama this visit tbilisi to tbilisi comes deliberately right after president obama s trip to moscow for as he was planning his trip as he was planning his trip he instructed me to plan my trip to tbilisi ladies and gentlemen and i know that some are concerned and i understand it that our efforts to reset relations with russia will come at the expense of georgia let me be clear they have not they will not and they cannot as i said in munich in the first days after our administration was sworn in and as president obama i might add reasserted two weeks ago in moscow we stand by the principle that sovereign democracies have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own partnerships and their own alliances we stand against the 19th century notion of spheres of influence it has no place in the 21st century we will not we will not recognize abkhazia and south ossetia as independent states and we urge we urge the world not to recognize them as independent states and we call upon russia to honor its international commitments clearly specified in the 12 ceasefire agreement including withdrawal of all forces to their pre conflict positions and ultimately out of georgia and we support the expansion of international monitors throughout georgia to promote peace and stability during my visit last year i was moved by the plight of families displaced from their homes in south ossetia and i was struck by the effort to undermine your economy by targeting critical infrastructure deep within georgia i promised that my country would provide meaningful assistance to georgia to help you recover and today i am pleased to say that the united states has delivered on that commitment i made of 1 billion ladies and gentlemen since august we have provided supplies and shelter to those displaced budgetary support to help your government meet its fiscal responsibilities reconstruction aid to help those who were able to return home and funding for roads and energy security and new resources to strengthen georgia s civil society legal system and independent media all in all georgia today is one of the highest per capita recipients of u s aid in the entire world even where i come from a billion dollars for 5 million people is a lot of money we are also working closely with georgia to modernize your military with a focus on training planning and organization we understand that georgia aspires to join nato we fully support that aspiration and members of parliament we will work to help you meet the standards of nato membership i am pleased that just last month the u s and georgia launched a charter on strategic partnership we set an ambitious agenda across four key areas defense and security economic trade and energy cooperation advancing democracy and the rule of law and strengthening cultural ties between our countries let me be clear about what our strategic partnership with georgia is and what it is not the united states has no desire to create our own sphere of influence in this region or anywhere else in the world our goal is to help build a multi partner world in which nations make common cause of common concerns these partnerships are not being built against anyone they are being built to the benefit of everyone who seeks a more democratic prosperous and secure world with georgia our partnership involves meeting security challenges we are grateful truly grateful that georgian soldiers will stand next to our brave marines in afghanistan it includes a commitment to energy security and we welcome georgia s role as a bridge for natural resources flowing from east to west as it did a thousand years ago it carries with it this cooperation agreement a determination to build stronger bonds not only between our governments but among our people through cultural exchanges entrepreneurial collaboration and civil society cooperation our partnership rests on a foundation of shared democratic ideals that s what you are about and we will continue to support your work to fulfill the democratic promise of six years ago as president saakashvili told parliament earlier this week and we expect that he will keep that commitment that there is much more to be done your rose revolution will only be complete when government is transparent accountable and fully participatory when issues are debated inside this chamber not only out on the streets when you fully address key constitutional issues regarding the balance of power between the parliament and the executive branch and leveling your electoral playing field when the media is totally independent and professional providing people the information to make informed decisions and to hold their government accountable for the decisions it makes when the courts are free from outside influence and the rule of law is firmly established and when the transfer of power occurs through peaceful constitutional and democratic processes not on the street ladies and gentlemen i don t mean to sound instructive never tell another person what their political interest is but i can tell you from experience there is no specific checklist for democracy but there are significant concrete steps that need to be taken to deepen any democracy success requires the involvement of everyone in this room of those who were elected outside this room it requires every georgian citizen regardless of their political affiliation or their ethnicity to take part in their government and i especially today call upon the young people of georgia the next generation of georgian leaders to continue to contribute their ideas their voices and their energy to help create a peaceful stable democratic and economically prosperous georgia only then only then will we see a georgia that is the home to all its rightful citizens as difficult as this may be i encourage you to keep the doors open to the abkhaz and south ossetians so that they know they have other options besides the status quo instability or renewed conflict guarantees in our view a continuation of the unacceptable status quo and it would discourage the foreign investment that is so essential to the economic growth and the economic progress you so badly need it is a sad certainty but it is true there is no military option to reintegration only peaceful and prosperous georgia a peaceful and prosperous georgia that has the prospect of restoring your territorial integrity by showing those in abkhazia and south ossetia a georgia where they can be free and their communities can flourish where they can enjoy autonomy within a federal system of government where life can be so much better for them than it is now show them the real benefits of your nation s motto strength is in unity ladies and gentlemen ladies and gentlemen of the parliament divided georgia will not complete its journey united georgia can achieve the dreams of your forebears and maybe more importantly the hopes of your children i ll end with a phrase a verse from maybe georgia s most famous poet when i was in the president s office i asked who is that portrait of and he then gave me the history lesson on again maybe your most famous poet a poet who inspired the journey of freedom in 1921 and continues to provide his voice today and i want to make sure i get this right he wrote my heart burns with a holy flame that all my strength i may employ to serve my people faithfully in sorrow and in joy o let my people s suffering be branded on my soul i ask and let my heart through good and ill be equal to its task ladies and gentlemen my president and i my country we pray that your hearts are equal to the task i know they are and so do you and thank you so very much for not only inspiring your own people in completing this journey but for the inspiration you ve provided for tens of millions of people seeking what you now have within your grasp and it is yours to guarantee we will stand with you thank you very much dem joebiden25 3 09 joe_biden well your eminence as some of my good friends sitting and standing in front of me here said i m an honorary greek not only today not only today but every day it s great to be with you all and it s great to be commemorating such an important day quite frankly not just for greece but for america as well the great greek fabulist aesop once wrote in union there is strength today both literally and figuratively we stand together a union forged throughout our history and a strength that grows each and every day it s a strength stemming from quite frankly the very core of our existence when i say i m greek every day it s not merely because my first election the greek community elected me but the truth of the matter is that greece in america greece and america share common values common goals a common philosophical tradition going back to the great scholars of ancient greece and it was once said that except the blind forces of nature nothing moves in this world which is not greek in origin nothing moves in this world that is not greek in origin and i for one am very proud to move in this world with those origins as part of our country s tradition and as part of my tradition and the president s and i m even prouder to introduce the archbishop the archbishop and i go back a little bit we ve met a number of times and i was he was kind enough to have me at his residence and the archbishop knows that at a very deep level our countries come from the same historical dna and that he sets out each and every day not just to enrich his history and the history of greek and greek orthodoxy not just to educate but this is a man who impresses me because he is always always always seeking knowledge always seeking to learn something new it always amazes me every time we have a conversation your eminence he came to harvard which as a university of delaware graduate i will not hold against him because there s so many harvard guys in the room but he came to harvard in the 1960s and has contributed greatly to the growth of our two nations for decades now in his archbishop enthronement address 10 years ago he said of america here a remarkably wide field of truly great work is open to us well he has entered that wide world he has entered that field and he has continued to open himself up to the truly great work ever since and he s shared what he s learned with so many of us both personally and publicly i speak in behalf of every american greek or otherwise who cares about the union we share when i say that archbishop we are truly lucky to have you here and i feel and the president feel fortunate to be able to call you a friend as well as a leading leader of one of the great faiths in the world your endless curiosity your thirst for knowledge only serve to make all of us stronger if that old greek saying is true that curiosity is the beginning of wisdom well ladies and gentlemen i m proud to introduce one very wise man his eminence the archbishop demetrios i m not very good at this archbishop it s stuck there hang on just a second here there you go thank you that is an event that is an event dem joebiden25 4 10 joe_biden governor the families of the miners that we lost and the president and i had the pleasure to meet i learned about the courage and valor and gumption of miners sitting around my grandfather s kitchen table in scranton pennsylvania hearing stories stories of men they knew and lives that were lost but i actually learned more from robert c byrd who is here serving with him so many years his incredible pride in his state and his miners is only matched by his loyalty and it is good he was here today the men we remember today went into the darkness so that we could have light they embraced a life of hard work and a career full of peril it was dangerous it was dangerous work and they knew it but they never flinched what amazed me is how they saddled up every day squeezed in side by side for a cramped journey into the heart of darkness many of them loved it some of them dreaded it but all of them all of them approached it with dignity resolve and strength they went into the mines as been referenced earlier not only to provide for themselves and their families but in a very direct way for all of us and though and though this work defined them it did not describe them as nick rahall said they were fathers grandfathers sons nephews husbands and fiancs they loved hunting fishing riding horses and four wheelers they hated the way coach rodriguez left west virginia for michigan they rebuilt cars they loved motorcycles and they practiced random acts of kindness they had their given names but as we all learned today they answered to cuz and peewee and smiley some had some had been mining for decades some for months one was planning a wedding one was planning for retirement as individuals these men were strong they were proud they were providers collectively they represent what i believe is the heart and soul and the spine of this nation and ladies and gentlemen the nation mourns them to every member of every family that has been touched by this tragedy i can say that i know what it s like to lose a spouse and a child and i also know when the tributes are done and the flags are once again flying at full staff once the miners you see today go back to work that s when it will be the hardest for you all when life has moved on around us but is yet to stir within you that s when you re most going to need one another because for other people for the lucky ones life gets to go on but as a community and as a nation we would compound tragedy if we let life go on unchanged certainly nobody should have to sacrifice their life for their livelihood but as the governor and senator rockefeller said we ll have that conversation later but before that the rest of us bear responsibility as well and that responsibility is to be aware of to recognize to respect to honor those who risk their lives so that we can live ours and those who will continue to do this hard and dangerous work so often when we re met with this kind of sorrow and pain we search as the clergy here today can tell you for meaning and purpose where there seems to be none we look for answers to questions that are literally hard to ask and even when answered at this moment they provide little relief to paraphrase a communion hymn in my church i have a wish for all of you all of your families may he raise you up on eagle s wings and bear you on the breadth of dawn and make the sun to shine upon you and until you re reunited with those you lost may god hold you in the palm of his hand for you know this band of 29 roughneck angels watching over you are doing that just now as they sit at the right hand of the lord today and they re wondering is all that fuss about me you know folks there is a famous headstone in an irish cemetery in ireland and it reads this it says death leaves a heartache no one can heal love leaves a memory no one can steal i can tell you from my own personal experience that eventually the painful heartache you feel will be replaced by the joyful memory of the ones you love so dearly my prayer for you is that that day will come sooner than later may god bless you all and may god protect all miners dem joebiden26 5 09 joe_biden hello everybody how are you what a crowd where s gary hart hey gare thank you so much gare thanks for the passport it s good to see you all ladies and gentlemen my name is joe biden and i brought along my special assistant this beautiful redhead child here it looks like she s this many is that right two almost will be three excuse me will be three and her mom said she only knows one thing about you mr vice president you re a friend of barack obama i mean when i was in the senate they used to say there s one thing they know about you senator you re a friend of gary hart nothing has changed nothing has changed what i d like to do i m going to give you a little outline of what we re going to do here i m going to make a statement that s going to take about 10 or 12 minutes and i m going to introduce a lot of people here it s going to take another 22 minutes but i do want you to know who came along with me from washington secretary hilda solis i could hear by the thunderous applause they know hilda is here secretary donovan the secretary of housing former governor and now secretary vilsack from iowa who is the head of the department of agriculture u s trade representative ron kirk former mayor and he said that s the harder job i m only kidding he didn t say that and the secretary of energy dan poneman who is the deputy secretary as well as we have a group of experts who are not on the panel but i ve said backstage that i d like to invite them to participate when we get to questions if they d be willing to do so van jones special advisor for green jobs and enterprise he is with the council of economic advisors i met van who you re going to see later at the first one of these task forces i did in philadelphia and he was so impressive literally i walked off the stage and said to my staff why can t i hire him and we did hire him and also blake jones who was kind enough you have to thank blake for the air conditioning because he put the solar panels on the roof up here we were here when we announced the recovery package and blake was here representing his company and kicked the whole thing off and it s great to see you again blake i m going to be asking him to chime in here because he knows about creating jobs and he knows about a green economy also roby roberts of vestas is here they are investing an awful lot of money in this state they expect to invest over a billion and a half dollars in this state and ultimately create 2 500 good solid green jobs here dr michele haney of red rocks community college is going to train everybody to do this right doc and thank you for being here tom plant director of the governor s energy office and i might add the governor is doing an incredible job i mean this state is that is not a paid political announcement that is truly i mean the way in which you re coordinating your energy efforts here in this state are really very remarkable we re all over the country and you should be very proud and thanks for being here tom mayor hickenlooper is the man who almost caused my wife to want to move to denver there you are mr mayor good to see you terry o sullivan a good friend of mine the president of the international laborers also let me see i got to make sure i got everybody here don elliman is here don is for the state of colorado the office of economic development and international trade he s going to be doing all the training here i understand that oh is guy runco here hey guy how are you of the ibew international brotherhood of electrical workers local 68 who did i leave out i think i have everyone here because when we get to some of the questions about how practically we are attempting to have this middle class task force function in the way that we generate from all the different sources of government and private industry the ability to create an economy for the 21st century where middle class people are actually going to have a shot to have sustainable jobs with a living wage that aren t exportable these are the people actually doing it now i m trying to think if i ve left anybody out i understand that former governor roy romer is here roy is somewhere i introduced gary hart i didn t introduce him but i referenced gary lieutenant governor barbara o brien i believe is here wellington webb former mayor state treasurer cary kennedy state senate president brandon shaffer speaker of the house terrance carroll and state representative beth mccann i hope i got that hey beth how are you and one of the newest members who has become a good friend senator michael bennet is here as well on the stage it s good to be back here as i said we announced our recovery package here and since it tied so closely with the responsibility i ve been given to deal with the middle class task force as well as the president somewhat humorously refers to me as the sheriff making sure that the 787 billion in this recovery package is spent well the two jobs actually mesh so we re going to focus today on jobs for middle class folks in the 21st century in a green economy and green jobs and so as i said it s good to be back here in this museum and it s great to be talking green in a city that has been at the forefront of the movement since before it was fashionable a city that i think will be among the cities that lead this country in this new century a city that displays a fervor and a passion for environmental awareness that rivals the fervor and passion you all feel for the lakers i heard there was a game last night joke joke joke i ll tell you what at two and two carmelo called me asked me for some tips about what to do in l a and i sent him to the president i played football he played basketball but speaking of passion there s a lot of passion for the nuggets but look it s been nearly a hundred days ago that the president signed the recovery and reinvestment act right here and i m proud to be back with you to take a look at how these investments are already in our view making life better for families and communities everywhere this is also the same goal as i said of our middle class task force to make sure that every american who aspires to the middle class can get there and stay there when they get there we have our work cut out for us on this question we need to put everyone back to work to get everyone who s down on the ground back on his feet and there always has been which in the past a basic bargain we had in this country a bargain that has been quite frankly abrogated the last 15 or 20 years and that is that in this country we said back in the 30s and 40s that those who were responsible for the increase in productivity in america would and the prosperity it produces would benefit from that prosperity but between the years just to give you one example between the years 2000 and 2070 productivity that is the amount of effort our workers put in and how we got more bang for the buck with fewer people the productivity in america increased nearly 20 percent yet during that same period middle class incomes actually fell they fell more than 3 percent so the workers did their deal productivity increased but middle class americans actually saw their share of the pie shrink by 3 percent folks that s not acceptable that s not the way this country is supposed to work and we re about setting about to change that the president and i have set a very basic and measurable goal that we ll be held to i m sure we said that our judge us in terms of our economic policy not merely on whether or not the gross domestic product begins to grow that s not sufficient but when middle class incomes begin to grow and when people aspiring to the middle class get a shot to become part of it that s the measure we could grow at 4 percent in a couple years or later even more than that but if you leave a large swath of hard working americans behind that is not an economic policy that is sustainable in our view but in order to do that we need to reinvigorate our flagging manufacturing sector usher in a new era of environmental efficiency support small businesses that help the economy and intensively rebuild our infrastructure gary i don t know whether you remember but remember those breakfasts you used to put together on the hill way back in the early 80s this was the very subject you were talking about back then that you invited us to how we readjust an economy to a changing world well folks we can t ignore what gary was talking about 25 and 30 years ago you see the fruits of ignoring what gary was talking about and others but gary was leading it back then we need to build a secure economic future for the 21st century built on a different foundation than the great progress we made in the 20th century ladies and gentlemen we re on the edge of a very big shift in my view and this administration wants to make sure that our country is leading the way into this new global economy so much of it hinges on our ability to create a new clean energy economy to digress just a second people say to the president and me you re doing too much why don t you just get on with getting the economy moving again and don t try to create a new energy policy a new education policy a new how can we possibly lead in the 21st century without a fundamental change in our energy policy how is that possible we have no choice but to tackle this for we know that when we do the benefits are multifold mainly as it predates to this middle class task force it will create green jobs that will provide a springboard for many of the families that need to get to where they want to be look green jobs are good jobs they pay according to the studies the administration and other have done 10 to 20 percent more depending on the definition of a green job and with the recovery act we re doing everything we can to make these jobs the foundation upon which our efforts to create 3 5 to 4 million jobs occurs and that s a hard case to sell we re going to lose more jobs this year but most economists will point out to you were we not taking this initiative we would have lost somewhere between 4 and 5 million additional jobs over the year so we literally we literally need this to staunch the bleeding begin to rebuild not just jobs but the kind of jobs we re going to be able to keep you know in just about a hundred days of recovery we ve already begun awarding 8 billion in recovery act funds to states for weatherization and energy efficiency programs we announced significant recovery act investments in our energy future including 2 4 billion in recovery act money to produce the next generation plug in hybrid electric vehicles 800 million to accelerate the use of biofuels and bring them to market 300 million to expand the nation s fleet of alternative fuel vehicles we ve offered consumers new and expanded tax credits for installation of energy efficient or renewable energy systems in their homes or for the purchase of alternative fuel vehicles we ve also outlined a strategic plan for developing a nationwide smart energy grid that will someday someday put renewable energy sources within easy reach for homes and businesses all across america it s not available now and the best part building the clean energy economy not only puts us on a path of a green and more sustainable future but it necessitates the jobs that will get us there good paying jobs promoting clean energy while creating incentives for polluters to clean up their act is going to create demand for renewable energy generating jobs for workers at a pay scale they can live a middle class life on scientists lab technicians and assistants blue collar workers building out the smart grid green manufacturers who will build components for the new economy some of whom are here today all told our energy investment will on their own create 450 000 new jobs now some of you might look at me and say look that all sounds good but i ve been working for decades on old school manufacturing my collar isn t green it s a deep shade of blue well when i say these things people come back and say federico i didn t see you there mr secretary how are you federico pena they come back and say look i m not prepared to do these jobs i don t know how to do them this is not going to help me very much at all well look my response is i ll reinforce what we can t forget we re building this together to make these programs possible government will increase funding for workforce education that incorporates green technology training we ve got to change on that score i m thrilled to make a few announcements today first secretary solis and secretary donovan will be joining forces to create pathways to training and employing for residents in low income housing secretary donovan tells me there s about 1 3 secretary donovan by the way is doing a great job and has considerable experience here and is innovative as heck he tells me on the way on the plane there s 1 8 million people living in public housing projects in need of jobs who are relatively young and are ready to work and so what we re trying to do is through this new partnership residents of public housing will be able to more easily find training programs and sustainable employment in the green job sectors as my evangelist will tell you in a minute mr jones we re not just trying to make this is not a make work job like a summer job program this is to equip these people give them a shot to end up with a sustainable job they can carry the rest of their life and not be living in public housing making a sustainable wage and additionally secretary solis with secretary donovan or excuse me secretary duncan over at the department of education and secretary chu at the department of energy are announcing today a partnership that will more seamlessly connect people to green jobs and the training they need to get these jobs to be prepared for them they re going to work together and they re going to connect investments that create green jobs to training programs that give people the skills they need to get the job then direct them to where the jobs are building a workforce that s qualified to install and operate advanced clean energy and energy efficient technologies you re going to be doing a lot of that terry your folks and the ibew a lot of other people are going to be doing it and finally the labor department is announcing plans to release 500 million from the recovery act for grants and hilda will talk about this in a little bit to prepare workers for careers in energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors charting a course out of poverty for underserved communities and also providing 50 million in assistance for communities affected by the auto industry restructuring because they need particular help quite frankly basically basically what we re doing is making a major major investment we re investing heavily in people who are ready to work want to work need to work and are going to be able to provide for their families to ensure that they have the skills and the tools that they need to find and retain high paying jobs that are going to flow from this green economy and this has this is like geometry not arithmetic the more we invest in these areas the more businesses invest the more we create i was saying on the way out we have a lot of money in this recovery act for high speed rail everybody has always talked about high speed rail but mayor it s amazing to know that you and a few others no one really had plans to do it now the money is there and all of a sudden it s like build a better mousetrap you got people out there you got mayors getting together with governors funding corridors that they need they re actually going out and figuring out how to condemn the property move i mean this is generating a whole new enthusiasm for high speed rail i predict to you that that 13 billion over five years will generate well over 100 billion in investment in high the same thing here the same thing look our administration believes fiercely in the willingness and the capacity of american workers to work that s what they want to do and we re going to give them the tools they need to succeed i understand there are a few of you who are in green job training programs here in the audience i d love when we get to the point to hear about what you re learning what you think about the program be straight with us if it s not working we want to know i don t want to own something that fails we don t want to own anything that fails here we want to make it work one question i hear often is are you going to build on the foundation laid by the recovery act to expand opportunities for green jobs well that s why i ve asked the council of economic advisors and the council on environmental quality to report back to this task force which is sort of a it s not a cabinet position but it allows me to bring all the cabinet members together to try to figure out what can they do over the next four years that hadn t been done in each of their departments that focuses on the middle class everything from retirement security to education to creating these kinds of jobs that are sustainable and that task force they re going to report back within 90 days with proposals to expand the opportunities by boosting energy savings for the middle class as i said van jones who is a special advisor on green jobs is going to lead that effort look folks what we re doing with all this is simple we re leaving men and women like you with jobs that cannot be exported jobs that will form the foundation for a 21st century economy that s because this administration the president and i the cabinet secretaries we get it we get that strengthening the middle class means making sure they are the primary builders of this new economy we get it that the future rests on our ability to give middle class folks what they need to make a green economy a reality so the bottom line here is we re here to get to that and to hear from you dem joebiden28 3 09 joe_biden madam president i should start by saying it s humbling for a mere vice president to be in the midst of so many presidents and prime ministers i m flattered and i thank you all very much i will attempt to assignment which was to speak to what our administration is doing to deal with the crisis but if you ll permit me just a few brief introductory comments you know i think when our children and our grandchildren look back at this moment they re going to say why didn t they know this was going to happen in a sense this crisis was predictable and that in hindsight is easy but you know there s a if my if my friend gordon brown will permit me to quote an irishman and by the way i remind our chilean friends that it was an irishman that helped out here i want you to know and president lula i thought it was only we irish who spoke too much i didn t think that was just a latin problem but the poet william butler yates speaking about an incident with great britain in a poem he wrote called easter sunday 1916 he used a line in that poem that i think is particularly appropriate applies to this moment he said the world has changed it has changed utterly a terrible beauty has been born the fact is the world has changed utterly not merely technology and information but the world has changed in every respect it is fundamentally different than it was i ve been a united states senator since i was 28 years 29 years old since 1972 the change that s taken place from roughly 1989 to today both politically economically technologically is staggering to quote an american columnist tom friedman he talks about the world being flat it is flat it s flat like it never was thought of before and it is it seems to me that we should not overreact we should not overreact it s not a choice of markets or governments in my view markets are still a free market still needs to be able to function but if i can steal a phrase from a former president speaking of a crisis in 1932 a worldwide depression it was referenced about him that he saved capital saved capitalism from the capitalists well it seems to me have to in a sense save the markets from free marketeers right now and the essence of that requires transparency and accountability and i think what i know what president obama and i are attempting to do in our administration and i want to make it clear what we re doing domestically i m not suggesting is the answer for any one of you that s for you to decide we are not here and i am not attempting to in any way suggest or dictate what we think the outlines of recovery should be i can just tell you what we think it is for us and what role we think we have an obligation to play in the world and that is that it s time to build a new foundation for a much broader and sustained growth moving into the 21st century and i think to the extent that are we able to is it being translated i think the answer lies less in ideological prescriptions than it does in practical applications of the circumstances we face and so i m going to talk a little bit about how the united states is attempting to respond to this economic crisis and we understand we share a responsibility some of you suggest we are primarily responsible but regardless of your perspective we understand we share a real responsibility some of the approaches that i m suggesting may be applicable elsewhere as i said but i recognize that every country s circumstances are different for the obama biden administration progressive government in a time of economic crisis that we find ourselves in means basically four principles the first is to aggressively pursue the necessary steps to offset this recession and bring about robust economic growth forbearance is not an option some of our colleagues around the world seem to think that forbearance may be the answer well we will not stand down in our country until we reverse the negative trends in jobs and incomes that exist within our country and in many of yours all of yours quite frankly the second is we want to build a policy framework to ensure that a we can achieve lasting prosperity based not upon excessive borrowing supported by speculative bubbles whether they be the dot com bubble or the housing bubble but by investing in the future by and secondly that prosperity has to be broadly shared it has not been in my country and many of yours over the past decade or more we believe it s essential that there be a strong middle class and access to the middle class from those who are striving to join it the third principle of our agenda is that making public investments in health care energy and education are the three areas we believe are the new foundational basis upon which we can build a sustained economic growth that everyone can share in and fourthly doing all this in the context of a fiscal budget that ramps up to meet the crisis we face today and then has mechanisms built into it that allows it to achieve a stable fiscal path by building into that budget that we ve submitted the ability to regain control of these deficits progressive governance must occur with respect to a global economic context within which we all reside we recognize that as well the president and i realize how interconnected our economies are and we are deeply committed to resolving this crisis we all face a strong american economy not out of a sense of chauvinism but out of a sense of necessity a strong american economy is integral to a strong global economy at least for this moment as madam president has pointed out we 25 percent of the world s gdp is the united states so that if we do not prime the pump if we do not get our engine running again we all have a problem particularly particularly less developed countries and so we are aggressively pursuing a domestic policy agenda that i will elaborate on in a second but we re thinking globally as well an important part of the g20 agenda is beginning the discussion about coordinated policies to reduce the systematic risk that we now all understand exists in global markets a global market in the year 2009 is fundamentally different than what a global market was in the year 1980 or 1990 or even 1995 and so i d like to share with you our administration s economic agenda and we re addressing this crisis in four parts first a recovery package now i might add we talk about politics we all understand we re all politicians around this table i think that s a good thing not a bad thing i m proud of it but we re all politicians and we understand how difficult it is to take what are very complicated notions and explain them to even very well educated portions of our public who ever talked about derivatives before how are we explaining to people how complicated the international financial system is and international monetary policy it s a complicated thing to communicate to well educated constituents and so this recovery package was difficult for us to start with because we inherited a deficit of 1 2 trillion even in america that s a lot of money 1 2 trillion so this recovery package already approved by congress was to restore economic demand and in the face of this deficit we went out and said by the way we want the congress to appropriate and we want to spend over the next 18 months another 787 billion adding initially to the deficit in the face of this deep recession we passed the largest stimulus fiscal stimulus package in the history of our country i d suggest maybe in the history of the world and since the great depression of the 30s our country has widely accepted the practice of temporarily pacing the missing private sector demand with public sector demand and we are it s projected that for at least the next two years in our country that public sector demand will be off by at least a trillion dollars per year and so there s nothing ideological about this it s just a practical approach that when a trillion dollar demand is taken out of the economy it need be replaced at least in large part in order to stimulate the economy and that s what we did with this 787 billion package for this year and we hope and believe it will create or save 3 5 million jobs by the end of the year because as our folks understand if people don t have jobs to make the president s point they don t have income if they don t have income they cannot purchase anything if you cannot purchase anything and the list the cycle goes on the recovery act as we call it provides a necessary jolt to our economy to implement what we refer as shovel ready projects meaning projects that were on the books that were needed in the municipalities and the states that would improve the quality of life for our constituents the competitiveness of our businesses but were unable to be funded because we wanted to get the money and we were attempting to get the money it s my personal responsibility i learned something about you presidents don t send you long memorandums suggesting how we should proceed without being ready for the president to turn to you and say okay go do it so i ve been given that responsibility to marshal and account for 787 billion i guess that s easier than trying to raise it but the fact of the matter is it is a herculean task and so we hope it provides a necessary jolt to the economy and we ve done countercyclical measures i won t bore you with the detail of the plan that s not particularly relevant but we re going to use this money to create mostly the vast majority of which create private sector jobs not public sector jobs over 80 percent are private sector jobs and we ll be doing that by rebuilding our infrastructure beginning the process and we re going to construct and at the same time we hope that in this package we have picked those funding of those projects that will lay the foundation for a stronger and sustained economic growth for the 21st century constructing wind turbines solar panels a new energy grid laying broadband and expanding mass transit investing in health information technologies to save health care costs the stimulus makes a real commitment to renewable energy energy efficiency and a stronger energy infrastructure in the name of reducing carbon emissions and reducing our dependence on foreign oil but in addition to that creating jobs immediately good paying sustainable jobs now above all as i said it s about jobs our next element of our plan in this sort of three legged stool here is that we believed that it was necessary although it is the most politically painful part of the process and that is that is restoring our financial institutions now i don t know about your constituency but mine believes that it s all the problem of those financial institutions to use the popular jargon were they not so greedy were they not so this or that we wouldn t be in this problem why are we saving them why are we helping them it s not an easy answer in a political context to provide but we all know it is necessary we need to get credit flowing again and so when our housing bubble burst our banking system took a huge hit and our credit markets froze up and until we start lending again it s going to be very difficult for the u s economy to get the lift it needs and by extension very difficult for us to provide the lift that the international economy is looking for us to provide so when there s no lending creditworthy families can t afford to buy homes or cars i m talking about creditworthy families i m not talking about families who for good or bad reason are not creditworthy but when creditworthy enterprises are not able to move the whole system begins to implode and turn in on itself so our financial rescue plan takes some of the following steps to address this a it gives private investors the incentive to partner with the government to clear bad assets off the balance sheets of these banks it also floods the credit market with liquidity hundreds of billions of dollars from our treasury and federal reserve bank to loosen up credit lines thirdly it recapitalizes our banking system strengthening the balance sheets with direct capital injections and finally and perhaps the most important step is to introduce a set of financial market regulations that will prevent excessive speculation under regulated processes that got us in this mess in the first place and we re actively rolling out these ideas and will do so in advance of the g20 the third element of our plan is housing the housing bubble that inflated over the last decade burst in 2007 and may ultimately mean a loss of 6 to 8 trillion in housing wealth in our country and to address this part of the fallout our housing plan works with mortgage lenders to help homeowners refinance to cheaper loans that s why we reduced interest rates so dramatically it avoids foreclosure to those with high debt to income ratios by modifying the terms of their loans and we believe these plans are going to help a minimum of 9 million homeowners in the united states stay in their homes and the fourth and final piece of our and i want to make it clear now i hope this does not come off as proscriptive that we think we re doing all this right and therefore why doesn t everybody else do the same thing we do believe this is what is necessary to get the engine going again in the states the fourth and final component of our economic budget and is the second most difficult part of our agenda and that is that we set out a budget roundly criticized by the opposition and that s legitimate for them to do but also some skeptics in our own among our own friends in our own parties whatever you said yes i just like the way you said it no they always criticize i like the way you say it though but this component of our economic plan seems to fly in the face of what some of our friends internationally and at home can t understand it in the near term also further raises the deficit and our budget is over 3 7 trillion and the budget has three goals one is to set aside the needed funds to meet the current challenge we face begin to make the long term investments critical to our economic future and ramp down the currently elevated spending levels to get to a sustainable fiscal path the major lesson from the great depression in our view is that forbearance is not an option that s what herbert hoover did for a couple years and franklin roosevelt inherited the depression and he started to change it it s not just a question of having a social safety net to save people from falling we want to lay a foundation for a new economy so that prosperity can be broadly shared and we can build a platform and not just a safety net i would respectfully suggest that with the advent of the social welfare state after world war ii which made sense and was necessary we find out that a safety net that relies upon the largess of the wealthy and wealthy nations in not the best bet always to make it s not always available we d like to go beyond that and actually begin to change access to wealth formation for all people we want to reform our health care system reducing costs and increasing coverage and we invest in the budget of 600 billion in health care over the next decade to do that now we have a meeting of the minds believe it or not we re no longer engaged in the polemic argument at home that we went through and most of you settled years ago about whether or not health care is a right or a privilege and all of that american businesses figured out they re at a serious competitive disadvantage without a rational health care system we also realized that there s no way to gain control of our out budget years and our deficit without controlling the cost of health care health care costs went up 54 percent in the last eight years and wages increased 3 percent it is an unsustainable position purely from a budgetary point so we believe we re generating some consensus we also want to make our country energy sufficient while creating sustainable clean energy for the 21st century as president obama has said the country that harnesses the power of sustainable renewable energy is going to lead the 21st century and like all of you we want to enter the competition to do that to lead by investing in development of clean renewable energy the president s budget is going to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels create millions of good paying jobs in the private sector in a new green economy and at the same time we hope and believe that we will begin finally to meet the threat of climate change and we seek to modernize thirdly our education system to foster economic growth and competitiveness now and into the future among the things that the budget does is build in the recovery act expanding the size of what we call pell grants that provides access to college for the poor we also support funding and support renew initiatives at state and local levels to help low income students and the like and the one thing i can say if i could wave a wand beyond providing food and sustenance for all of those in the world under pressure now it would be to educate the world s public a lot of us have good education systems but quite frankly access to those systems even in some of your countries i respectfully suggest is not as accessible as it should be but that s for you to decide not us we know in our country it has to get better so in conclusion let me say that be assured that we are aggressively attacking a full set of challenges that are facing our economy we expect the recession to end later this year but as president lula pointed out to me last night and all of us and we all know is that employment will lag far behind we re still going to have a very very difficult circumstance in our country and most of our countries even when the gdp begins to grow again as it hasn t in our country we re technically in not technically in fact in recession so unemployment is likely to continue rising however thanks to our recovery package we expect it to rise less than it otherwise would and at the same time the most important thing we can do during this whole process and it s going to begin at the g20 is to reset the rules of the road to have common sense oversight that keeps us from getting back into the same spot we re in 10 years from now and that s an effort that we look forward to joining all of you our global partners in doing so let me conclude by saying that we president obama and i sought these offices because we had a fundamental disagreement with the policies of the last administration we don t question the motive of the last administration we question seriously their policies and it s a little bit like that old metaphor it takes a while to turn around a super tanker we are moving as rapidly as we can to change the direction of our country and our policies but we re going to have to ask and we don t expect to get it but we have to ask for a little bit of patience as we move forward to be able to do all we need to do all at one time is not likely we ve only been in office now a couple months and we ve made some fairly significant changes but the most important one i want you all to keep in mind as we really genuinely we genuinely want to be collaborative we genuinely want to engage in consultation we genuinely want to know what others think we do not look to ourselves as the engine to solve the problems we only look to ourselves in joining you to jointly solve the problems but i will end with where my friend from argentina began that we do need rules of the road we acknowledge that and we will play by the rules but one of the things i would say to all of us is when the rules are broken don t just expect us to enforce the rules let me say that again when the rules are broken as they repeatedly are we are reluctant as an international community to enforce the rules whether they be in iran or whether they be in other countries in the world so we are going to join once the rules are set we will abide by them as part of the effort to draft them but when they re broken there s a need for all of us to step up and so the good news is there s a change the bad news is for you all there s a change as i said to one of you and i will not we were joking i said the very good news is that we re willing to and want to collaborate the bad news is that you don t have the last administration to use as an excuse i use this phrase editorially not you particularly the last administration as an excuse for non action so we look forward to working with you i m delighted to be here and i truly am flattered as vice president to be here and given the same privileges as the presidents of these great countries and prime ministers thank you very much dem joebiden3 12 09 joe_biden thank you secretaries members of the cabinet distinguished guests i welcome you all here today your presence is welcomed but quite frankly it s not nearly as important as your input we re looking to you we re counting on you we need help for we realize that even after all we have done in these last 10 months that to revitalize american communities our capacity the government s capacity is still somewhat limited we can help we can help create the conditions that make for a stronger economy make a stronger economy possible but it s you all of you in this audience here who are in the position to make it a reality to put it another way without you it will not become a reality so our task together is obviously not an easy one we ve not faced this kind of economic dilemma in the lifetime of anyone in this room and so building a new and invigorated platform upon which we can enter this century in a way that we can lead in the 21st century the way we did in the 20th century is at rock bottom what this is all about no more bubbles no more bubbles you cannot sustain your world leadership based upon a housing bubble or a dot com bubble it s got to be based on a really firm foundation i don t have to tell you that s preaching to the choir as they say where i m from i know you all understand that look the recovery act much maligned but worked has worked very well the recovery act has played a vital role in kick starting this process it has not only pulled us back from that abyss that we were looking at remember the remember your college days having to study the essayist samuel johnson and one of the favorite quotes i remember mr secretary was there is nothing like a hanging to focus one s attention well let me tell you your attention has been focused our attention has been focused and we ve been able to pull back from that dark abyss my deceased wife used to have an expression she d say the greatest gift god gave mankind joey is the ability to forget and my mother would quickly add yes if it weren t for that all women would only have one child but all kidding aside it s amazing amazing what we ve forgotten already in 10 months just how dire and bleak things looked 10 months ago and so the recovery act has put us on the path to recovery it pulled us back from the brink before the president and i dropped our right hand on january the 20th of this year already that month 700 000 people had lost their jobs 740 000 by the end of that month lost their job another 640 000 in the short month of february so the fact of the matter is the last job report was not good but a lot better 190 000 jobs lost our economy was shrinking when we took office at a rate of 6 percent actually above 6 percent and now it s growing at a rate at about 3 percent the last quarter and leading economists attribute a large portion of that gdp growth in the last quarter to the recovery act and according to the most cbo report and if you ve noticed the one thing those of you who aren t do not work here every day notice the only thing democrats and republicans agree on is the objectivity of cbo we all quote their numbers and we quote them even when they don t agree with what we wanted to do because they are bipartisan they are responsible and the cbo report the most recent report of several days ago said the act is responsible for creating as many as 1 6 million jobs a couple of my friends on the hill wrote me a note saying joe stop quoting that the act created over 600 000 jobs i wrote back and said i promise i ll do that if you start saying it created 1 6 million jobs but the point is it has created jobs so there s been progress but you know it s not enough that laid off teacher that laid off teacher they don t want to hear about the gdp that out of work autoworker or that teamster they don t want to hear about a cbo report there used to be an expression and i m not joking my grandfather always used it he was from scranton pennsylvania he said when the guy from throop is out of work it s an economic slowdown when your brother in law is out of work it s a recession when you re out of work it s a depression and it is a depression for over 10 million americans which is why i m pleased that the next phase of this recovery act we are only about halfway through it we re entering even at a more rapid rate we re distributing these dollars even quicker projects are getting in the ground faster and we re spending and a particular focus on those aspects that have proven successful in creating jobs putting real paychecks in the pockets of hardworking americans and by design the items in the act which have the biggest impact are yet to come within the next two weeks to a month another roughly 13 billion is going to be announced rolling out in terms of both investments in broadband and high speed rail and competitive education and infrastructure in fact the money spent on clean water renewable energy superfund sites and much more is going to more than double it s going to more than double in this quarter and will maintain a similar pace for the next two quarters so tomorrow for example secretary lahood who is here is going to be making an important announcement about the number of high speed rail manufacturers who are looking to come to the united states build facilities here manufacture components here manufacture train sets here based on our willingness to provide the seed money to invest in high speed rail and many more announcements like that are coming in the months ahead but we re not just looking to bold new programs many of the upcoming investments are expansions of our most successful programs to date and that s where you all come in at today s job summit we re all hearing we ll be hearing about ideas ideas that can do even more than we ve done so far some of you will urge us to invest more in infrastructure roads bridges water projects we ve seen this investment succeed in creating jobs in the recovery act and today we ll hear the case for doing more along those lines others of you today are going to argue that we should invest in green jobs retrofitting weatherizing making homes and offices more energy efficient again we ve seen that these investments can be successful in creating jobs and today we ll hear the case for doing more along those lines i suspect as well and still others of you will talk about the need for more incentives for small businesses and our other ideas to help business through tax incentives and again similar investments in the recovery act are showing some real promise so we should see if there s more we can do in those areas many different participants are going to are here and many different offerings are going to be put forward many different ideas but in the end the grist is the same take the things that we know work and make them work better and make them work faster and all of this can t be done i should put it another way none of it can be done without your full buy in and your leadership in the private sector president obama has focused on this issue with an intensity that it demands and with an intensity it deserves with everything else he has on his plate and i ve been here for eight presidents i think i can say without fear of contradiction no president has ever entered office with as many crises sitting on his desk the day he walked into office and i ve been here for eight presidents as a united states senator but notwithstanding that his laser focus has been and the economic team can tell you every morning we have the meeting relating to the principles on the economy the principals in the economic team coming in it s what we call the presidential daily briefing is jobs jobs jobs jobs and so folks we not only want to create jobs but good jobs jobs you can raise a family on jobs that will service a foundation for a new economic future in this country and no man is more committed to making that happen than president barack obama so ladies and gentlemen please welcome the president of the united states of america barack obama dem joebiden3 9 09 joe_biden thank you it s a pleasure to be back and i told strobe in the anteroom that mr secretary the many many times that i ve been here almost always the subject has been foreign policy and i hope i have an opportunity to come back and discuss some of those areas at a later date but today i want to talk about the economy specifically the recovery act president obama and i when we entered office we were in the midst of what i refer to as the great recession it seemed that every day that we woke up from the day we were sworn in there was a new revelation to be added to the economic parade of horribles that some of which we had anticipated americans were seeing their savings decimated by losses in the stock market watching it tank housing values were collapsing people were losing their savings as well as their homes major banks it s hard to remember this even though it s only been eight months ago major banks were on the verge of failure closure people were talking about shuttering the doors it was actually a serious discussion among economists being brought in from the outside during the interim period between the election and being sworn in there was discussion by some very serious economists about a bank holiday maybe being necessary we were they were on the verge of failure credit was frozen and businesses couldn t borrow for inventory much less expand or hire as a matter of fact even keep the employment force they had credible economists were handicapping the possibility of a true depression as nobel prize winner paul krugman wrote in january 2009 in the new york times he said let s not mince words this looks an awful lot like the beginning of the second great depression a look at some of the headlines of the time is a reminder of just how precarious our situation was eight months ago financial sector can t be relied on to keep u s economy humming headline no one home record one in nine housing units empty vacancies house ripple effect headline economy strains under weight of unsold items headline automakers bankruptcy looms headline credit freeze leaves thousands of student borrowers stuck in default headline governments brace for hard times some have frozen hiring and postponed major projects headline new poor swell lines of food banks in the face of this mounting disaster we along with everyone in this room knew action had to be taken and we took action in three areas first we had to stabilize the financial system we took the unpopular but necessary step of rescuing the banks and now although there s a long way to go eight out of 10 of the largest financial institutions in america including goldman morgan stanley american express as well as 16 smaller banks have repaid the government in full and i might add at a 4 billion profit for the taxpayer second along with the fed we took action stabilizing the housing market allowing responsible homeowners to stay in their homes and we re beginning to see the results of that we just learned that new housing starts rose 10 percent in july for the fourth straight month increase are we there yet no but we re moving two hundred days ago president obama signed into law the third piece of our economic plan the american recovery and reinvestment act and today there s a growing consensus the recovery act is in fact working don t just take my word for it analysts from moody s to ihs global insight to the economic policy institute and others all estimate the recovery act has created or saved between 500 000 to 750 000 jobs as a matter of fact some notable economists suggest the number is as high as a million economists at goldman sachs believe that the package added 2 2 percentage points to real gdp growth in the second quarter of 2009 and estimate that it will add 3 3 percentage current points to the current quarter mark zandi a highly respected economist and former campaign aide for john mccain wrote in a recent analysis and i quote the fiscal stimulus is providing the fodder for better sales lower payroll taxes lower payroll tax withholding checks to social security recipients and more financial help to unemployed workers are buoying household incomes and housing tax credit has boosted home sales it is no coincidence the quote goes on that the recession is ending just when the stimulus is providing maximum economic benefit end of quote as australia s prime minister kevin rudd said a couple of weeks ago and i quote this is a case study in bringing the world back from the brink and it was american leadership from president obama that was the key end of quote you know it all adds up to this in my view at least the recovery act has played a significant role in changing the trajectory of our economy and changing the conversation about the economy in this country instead of talking about the beginning of a depression we re talking about the end of a recession eight months after taking office but the recovery act still has its critics and one of the criticisms is that it s a grab bag of too many different programs but the fact is the recovery act is a multifaceted piece of legislation it doesn t reflect a lack of design that was the design that was its intended design our economy is so complex and so wounded that reinvigorating one segment alone or using one tool alone would never would never do all that needed to be done the recovery act is not a single silver bullet i think of it as silver buckshot as opposed to a single bullet in 200 days the president s recovery and reinvestment act isn t just working toward something excuse me isn t just working it s working towards something it s working toward a more resilient more transformative economy folks this act this act was designed to do three things one and it s never most people when you talk about it and the criticism comes they think it was 787 billion for highway projects this was 787 billion for highway projects my republican friends as my mother would say god love them forget that they insisted on 288 billion in tax cuts in this which is part of it and as a significant factor as well as benefit but people think it to be 787 billion of public works projects but it s made up of three parts one to bring relief to those hardest hit by the recession now i know my republican critics think maybe we shouldn t do that maybe that s the difference between being a democrat and a republican i m not being facetious it s a legitimate disagreement but the first part is bring relief to those who were falling into the abyss the second was to jumpstart the economy by giving assistance to states all of which were in desperate economic circumstances and the third was to reinvest in existing infrastructure and lay a platform for the economic growth and future in energy education and health care that was what it was intended to do in broad terms let me explain how it breaks down approximately one third of the money in the recovery act 288 billion is in the form of tax cuts or tax incentives and thus far we ve delivered more than 62 billion in tax relief to businesses and to 95 percent of the wage earners in america and by design that will fold out over unfold over 18 months it is not all paid out at once there are almost 320 000 new homeowners who took advantage of the first time homebuyers tax credit breathing life back into the housing market in addition we ve encouraged banks to loan to small businesses by putting up front 200 million in loan guarantees we ve been able to leverage for small businesses capital loans private capital of 9 5 billion for many banks who hadn t made a single loan in two and a half years helping small businesses stay and some expand roughly another third of the money in the recovery act went to relief for workers for working americans who were most badly hit by the recession whether it was through the state governments to keep cops firefighters and teachers on the job or allowing states to continue to provide food assistance to people who were in danger of going hungry or medicaid for the swelling rolls of people desperately in need of health care to pell grants for families to keep their kids in college as they fell below that 50 000 mark to extended unemployment benefits extended cobra benefits and over 54 million seniors and veterans have received a one time check for 250 not only does this give relief to the vulnerable americans who are in danger of falling into the abyss it also it also has had the economic effect of injecting nearly 90 billion in the first 200 days into the bloodstream of the american economy stimulating growth i believe this was the right thing to do morally but that s not what we re about today it was also the smart thing to do economically roughly the last third of the recovery act is about rebuilding our communities and infrastructure while laying a platform a platform for growth in the 21st century we ve made major investments in modernizing our infrastructure highways bridges water and sewer systems this has increased the productivity of the nation s capital stock and in the process improved the safety on our highways and the quality of our drinking water for millions of americans we re also investing what everybody knows is necessary to build a 21st century economy i have people sometimes say aren t you guys doing too much you know presidents in the past have been able to and i ve been here for eight of them they ve been able to take the problems that they have and segregate them said we re going to take these two first we ll put these other four or six or five aside and we ll get to them next because they know the status quo ante will pertain but name me one problem that landed on the president s desk that allowed him to say no no we re going to focus on this and then in three years we ll get to this i say to my friends does anybody think we can lead in the 21st century without a radically altered energy policy does anybody think we can sustain our position in the world without a radically altered education system where we re no longer 17th in the world in the number of college graduates we graduate does anybody think we can sustain without radical change in the cost of health care in this country and bending that curve look we knew we had to begin to lay the platform while we were generating economic growth why not begin to lay a platform for the 21st century we know we needed a totally new smart grid health information technologies will modernize the delivery of health care saving saving lives and saving money expanding broadband to parts of the country that were left behind bringing the benefits of technology to everyone everywhere and in the meantime having a significant increase on impact on productivity high speed rail diminishing congestion and increasing efficiency and reducing pollution investing in new battery technology electric motors for the next generation of vehicles when all is said and done we want to emerge into an economy that isn t built on a bubble but to rest on a firm foundation of innovative businesses green energy and a modernized health care system providing good jobs in each of those sectors on the way that s our vision and that s the vision we re determined to fulfill we don t think as my grandpop would say the recovery act is the horse that can carry that sleigh alone but it is in a sense the down payment that s why from the beginning i ve held a cabinet meeting every single week that we ve been in session the joke is you know it s my job to hold cabinet meetings but i ve had the great benefit by the way i d say the added benefit of getting them all together once a week and watching the synergy among them watching them work off of one another i really mean it it s had there have been ancillary benefits to this that have been i think hopefully will be long lasting in terms of competence of government but every week with notable exceptions i hold a cabinet meeting and most of the cabinet secretaries attend and or their deputies for the first 100 days i was very very clear with them i remember when the president by the way never write a memo to the president suggesting that a job be undertaken that you don t want to have don t ever do that after we passed the recovery act i wrote a long memo to the president we had lunch and i said boss i think you should do this he said good do it i did not volunteer for this job but all kidding aside when he announced that biden was going to be the sheriff well the truth of the matter was that from the first 100 days dealing with the cabinet members on a weekly basis i made it clear that our focus had to be in the first 100 days accountability transparency and responsiveness i wanted each of those cabinet secretaries to set up systems where they would have a high degree of confidence that as they implemented implemented what they were in charge of it would be done effectively and efficiently one of i m going to get e j in trouble but he happened to be in the room the day a number of columnists came in to interview me one of his colleagues said well what s going to happen mr vice president when you plant 10 remember this 10 dead trees in central park i said i m going to have to make sure we plant a hundred good trees in fairmont park but look what could have derailed this in the beginning was were those stories millions of dollars wasted on polar bear tanks and millions of all the things you what everybody was predicting but in the first hundred days this was the dog that didn t bite so i wanted to make sure as well that the governors mayors and county executives knew this wasn t business as usual i have now spoken to every single governor except one who s now a former governor and by the way it wasn t by design she was going to be on a couple of times and couldn t for other reasons i ve spoken to most of the governors twice once a week i call and speak with five to seven governors and seven to 12 mayors i m now well over a hundred in the numbers of mayors i ve talked to and i answered their specific questions and i drove ed deseve who s sort of the ceo of this operation behind me been involved in the federal government before crazy when i said ed i want every question they have answered in 24 hours pick up the phone and call any of the governors or the mayors i ve spoken to you will find that we ve given them an answer in 24 hours and if we don t have an answer we call them in 24 hours and tell them why we don t have the answer and when they ll get the answer because again this was all about establishing credibility at the front end of this that this was going to be done well and differently with accountability and transparency otherwise it had no chance in the process the criticism was legitimate of me that we were moving too slowly to distribute taxpayers funds in those first hundred days but i thought we had to set up a system to assure that those taxpayers funds weren t wasted undercutting what i truly believed then believe now and think we are beginning to prove is an incredibly important element for recovery of this economy over the next 18 months and quite frankly i am very proud of the job the agencies have done and the responsiveness of the secretaries in each of the departments for the second hundred days i gathered the cabinet together and i instructed them that i wanted them to be much more aggressive in implementing the program now that they had systems in place and i take responsibility for mistakes that were made but i wanted them to put more pace on the ball this was also the season the season of building this is the time you make you re able to go out there and build highways you re able to go out there and put sewer systems in the ground you re able to lay broadband because of the season in a sense it was the planting season and it was time to get these programs out up and running and be on the backs of governors and mayors to make sure that they have let the contracts and that they had an accounting procedure in place where they d be able to let us know exactly what happened so i asked them to set goals i remember in the meeting i will not mention a non cabinet member s name but someone who had been involved in the government a long time and said you re going to announce these goals you re going to actually ask every cabinet member to tell you precisely what they re going to do in the next 60 days excuse me 100 days and you re going to announce it and i just said yes and the reason wasn t any nobility it was the only way to get credibility and accountability so we publicly announced the goals putting ourselves on the line to deliver meaningful results in the second hundred days and i m here today to report on the progress of achieving those goals we set a goal of having over 1 100 health centers in all 50 states be able to provide expanded care for an additional 300 000 patients not only have we met that goal we ve exceeded it by 200 000 patients 500 000 new patients are being treated we set a goal of funding 135 000 education jobs because i heard from every governor every mayor every county executive about the fear of closing down schools increasing class sizes laying off tens of thousands of teachers you may remember the celebrated case in new york where somewhere like 15 000 roughly got their pink slips they weren t going to be able to teach in the fall so i wanted to make sure this occurred so we set a goal for 135 000 teachers and support staff whose jobs were otherwise at risk we ve met that goal we set a goal of hiring or keeping law enforcement officers on the job in places hard hit and hard pressed to maintain their force structure as crime rates begin to go up we met that goal we set a goal of having construction crews working on 98 airport projects and 1 500 highway projects we exceeded that goal in the second hundred days by 94 airports and 700 highway projects and we set a goal of starting to build 200 water sanitary systems and wastewater treatment facilities in rural america we ve met that goal and now approximately 4 5 million people in the next several months will have clean drinking water that they didn t have before we set a goal of starting or speeding up the cleanup work at 20 superfund sites how many speakers have you heard over the years talk about the superfund sites that exist in america well we met that goal and in some cases we re taking years off the expected completion date of cleaning up these superfund sites we met our goals through the military construction projects and national parks and summer youth jobs and veterans facilities and not only have we met and achieved these goals but contrary to what many have heard and contrary to usual practice we ve achieved them ahead of schedule and under budget so look let me give you an example the faa initially committed 1 1 billion to about 300 airport improvement projects now we re going to finish those projects for 200 million less than originally estimated and that means the faa is in a process of being able to fund an additional 60 airport improvements we re seeing the same thing in the department of defense where construction contracts are coming in at 12 percent under budget on average representing hundreds of millions of dollars in savings and the same can be said of many of our highway projects the reason i don t have a number for you we have so many projects out there i initially in the first 150 days had numbers as to what average they were coming in at but now there s too many we don t have the accounting for all of them the gsa has also seen projects come in ahead of schedule and under budget most bids i m told of the gsa are coming in 8 to 10 percent below estimated cost recovery act dollars are going further and working harder than the vast majority of people anticipated they re the facts one hundred days ago on june the 8th i stated that we had i believed that we had saved or created 150 000 jobs in the first hundred days and i went on to say again over the objection of some of my more cautious advisors i went on to say that we will create another 600 000 jobs in the second hundred days on september the 10th the council of economic advisors plans to report to the nation their projections of jobs created or saved through the development of the recovery act i m optimistic as a matter of fact i m confident that that report will show that we met or exceed our goal that goal as well to state the obvious we will emerge from this great recession and i believe that is only that s necessary but not sufficient we have to emerge better positioned to lead the world in the 21st century as we did in the 20th century where the last cycle generated billions of dollars billions from investments made via high speed trades this cycle needs to make real investments in high speed rail in the last cycle innovation meant bundling and selling subprime mortgages in this one our innovations will bundle and sell technologies to produce clean efficient renewable energy where the benefits of productivity have not grown in the past from 2000 and 2007 productivity grew 20 percent yet the middle income households fell 3 percent their income in this cycle we re determined to make sure that productivity doesn t elude the poor and the middle class and this cycle must be one in which once again american workers get his or her fair share of the wealth they helped produce if you look at the recovery act as a two year marathon we re at the nine mile mark we re just approaching the nine mile mark two hundred days in the recovery act is doing more faster and more efficiently and more effectively than most people expected some of the most exciting and transformative initiatives are now just about to get underway throughout the fall we ll be going to we re going to be ramping up the loan guarantees that will help us generate solar wind and geothermal energy we re ramping them up in a significant way matter of fact i ll have an announcement tomorrow on this score in just 30 days since the department of energy opened their renewable grants program for applications we ve received applications for projects that can produce over a gigawatt of wind energy enough power to power half a million homes and by the way buried in all of this is what i think is not going to be able to be measured what is the leveraging effect of what we are doing that will remain to be seen but i believe it will be consequential this will be energy that s clean renewable and doesn t pollute and begins to wean us off the incredible dependence on foreign oil next month we re going to release our initial payments down payments on the new smart grid a new superhighway of connectivity that will allow reliable transmission of renewable energy allow consumers to have real information in real time about how they re consuming their energy and allow them to adjust the ability to decide to turn their dishwasher on at 11 o clock automatically because what is generating also is new manufacturing initiatives the people building smart toasters smart washers smart dryers this is real stuff that s what i mean by the leveraging effect that s out there i don t know how to measure that it s above my pay grade but i know it s real i know it s real investment in broadband will ramp up in november collecting large parts of the country that have been underserved or unserved by the internet we already have nearly 30 billion in applications over 30 billion in requests seven times the amount of money we have to distribute the result will be that rural hospitals can practice telemedicine and get consults from specialists who are hundreds of miles away adults can go to a virtual classroom and get their college or graduate degrees at home ranchers ranchers can in real time get real time pricing information and sell their cattle online on online auctions earning them more money with less consequence to them it s real these are tangible real things that thus far have been denied significant segments of the population and again our broadband initiative which was 7 billion isn t going to answer it all there ain t enough there there to finish it but once this begins i believe as the recovery increases and gets stronger over the next several years you will see a national commitment that didn t exist before we re going to connect people from the inner cities and rural america to worlds of opportunity that had been previously worlds away from them later this winter we re going to start investing in newer faster and better rail travel now i know i m a bit of a hobbyhorse on that how is it the joke in the administration when rahm and i pushed for money for high speed rail was there goes biden again cops and railroads by the way finally got cops on railroads now but all kidding aside it can be again transformative over time we ve already received pre applications for thousands of miles of new rail for train corridors that would routinely exceed 150 miles an hour and for two that are well planned that would allow travel for new train sets over 240 miles an hour mr secretary i don t have to tell you about transportation we re going to make additional investments in battery and electric excuse me batteries and electric drive train technologies which we ve already made some that will allow detroit to produce vehicles so you can get the equivalent of over 200 miles to the gallon and we re beginning to fund the network needed you need gas stations you need plug in stations to charge up these vehicles we re already beginning to fund them hopefully again having a leveraging effect making people realize that this is the future this fall we re going to continue to invest in modernizing our health care system so that doctors and hospitals will be able to have secure access to individual medical records by the press of a button preventing hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical errors thousands of unnecessary readmissions and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary tests i ll give you an example of my colleague tom carper s driver having chest pains taking him to an event pulls into the delaware hospital down there christiana hospital he happened to have a particular ailment that had they known this they would have gone right to deal with his hypertension that was there instead he had several thousand dollars worth of unnecessary tests done a doctor i met with in chicago at a forum pointed out that he ordered a cat scan but because he had electronic recordkeeping in this particular office that he had set up and the hospital he was dealing with a big orange marker came up saying you sure you need this pointing out that a cat scan had been done at the request of another doctor just two weeks earlier this is real this is not fiction this is not make believe stuff this is real it s consequential are we going to do it all no but we are we are while priming the economy we re investing in new platforms that i believe other people are going to build off of in the first 200 days we were about necessity the next 200 days will be about possibilities at the end of the day these investments are about more than creating jobs they re about creating strong communities and a stronger economy they re about renewing a sense of hope and possibilities you know it s often easy to sit in washington as we do today and opine on what is or isn t happening beyond the capital beltway well like many of you over the past two years i ve had the opportunity to travel the byways and the highways of this entire country i ve crisscrossed it on rural highways and interstate highways in large cities and small towns i ve met with local officials businesspeople union workers community leaders farmers the most oft heard remark and i mean this literally i heard as we d go by and in their towns we d go by and we d go by a lot and they d say well that used to be that used to be this used to be a steel mill this town used to be the ceramic capital of america this factory used to used to employ 1 200 people this company used to have their headquarters here they used to was the most oft heard phrase over the past two years when i was speaking to local officials but because of the investments we re beginning to make and investments that s generating in some confidence that s beginning to build i m now hearing a different refrain literally not figuratively not everywhere but i m beginning to hear the refrain this is going to be this is going to be a factory that makes super efficient windows this is going to be a place where we make batteries and drive trains for electric cars and get 220 miles equivalent to a gallon this is going to be the hub of a new smart grid harvesting energy from the great plains to light up the cities of the midwest this abandoned factory as i just did in cincinnati ohio this abandoned factory is going to house hundreds of families in adequate low cost housing this factory is expanding not closing because we re building transformers for a new wind farm in central missouri this school won t shut down we re going to be adding two classrooms and they re going to be leading the race to the top by taking advantage of the innovative money that s available to us these are real stories the recovery act is helping to write not totally responsible but helping to write it s not nearly enough yet but there will be a lot more of them to come in the days to come remember we re at the nine mile mark of this marathon two hundred days in we know there s a great deal more to do and again to use my grandpop s metaphor the recovery act isn t the horse that s carrying the whole sleigh but it s pulling its weight we also know that thanks to the recovery act where we are today is a much better place than we could have possibly been without it and even more exciting is where i think we re headed the road ahead is going to remain very very bumpy there s going to be positive economic news and there s going to be negative economic news but i believe it s going to be the three steps forward to one step back that s the way recoveries work particularly in the last four decades we know we are absolutely confident we are on the right road to recovery we re on a road to recovery in a way that we ll be able to sustain growth longer and more reliable based on having created the circumstances where real jobs that pay real wages allow people to live middle class lives are growing and not diminishing i thank you all for listening and i yield the floor to the president as i always do dem joebiden4 5 09a joe_biden thank you all thank you mr president i can assure you had i graduated from rutgers we d still be here if you believe that then you don t understand politics look folks it s great to be home it s great to be here at my alma mater and it s great to be in a room i ve spent more serious time in this room today than i did when it was a library which it was here this room when i was here as a student but it is genuinely good to be home and i ve been telling as senator carper has i ve been telling my good friend as my colleagues in the state legislature know you refer to your colleagues as good friends but this guy really is a good and loyal friend for a considerable amount of time as a matter of fact i blame him for my son running for attorney general i advised him no and he went to see ken salazar who was attorney general and so ken is totally responsible but look all kidding aside the fact of the matter is ken has heard me and tom and probably mike and others i remember i remind people governor we had the first solar home here on the university i remember when we started off as you point out mr president as early as the 70s the university sort of began to stake its claim on alternative energy and so this is not this is not new for us we have not been recognized for it necessarily nationally until recently but the truth of the matter is this has been an incredibly environmentally conscious state as well as university and i would not i d be remiss if i didn t again recognize governor peterson who did what probably i think paved the way for us being able to sustain this state in a way that wouldn t have occurred before with the coastal zone act it was a gigantic it was such a departure from business as usual back in 1971 that in the 70s early 70s that i think it set the stage for so much more and i look over here at a man who should have been the director of epa he was the acting director and through pure politics was held up by our friends in the other party from being able to be confirmed as the director of the epa but a guy who has been working in this mike mccabe for longer than many of you and i have been he goes back all the way to the days with when he was working with senator harkin in the establishment of earth day and a lot of other things michael you deserve a great deal of credit mr president i get energized every time i just come on campus the students here at the university of delaware they get it as some of the students you pointed out the graduate students they get that the impact of leading greener lives not only helps us all today but allows it s going to allow their children their children to live a much better tomorrow than we re living today and the good news is we recognize it as well all of us in here the state legislators and the university personnel and the people standing to my left and my right mr president and secretary salazar the entire administration the entire administration sees the everlasting benefits of a clean energy future this is a moment this is a moment that comes seldom in history it s probably occurred five or six times in the history of the united states when we reach an inflection point that is so consequential for the next generations not because of the merit or demerit of those in power but because of the nature of the change that has taken place in the world and the country it s an inflection point and we are determined senator obama president obama we were senators when we started planning this before we got sworn in in chicago in late november and december and january we are absolutely fundamentally committed to the notion that we re going to lay down a new foundation for the economic as well as the environmental future of this country this is the moment we get criticized by many for proposing the recovery act we get criticized for saying we have to deal with energy education and health care all at once we should just worry about getting the economy back we cannot we cannot lead the world in the 21st century let me say it again we cannot without a fundamental shift in our education energy and health care policy so it s not a question of doing too much there is no option it is now now now and for those who say that we could not invest the money in the recovery act let me tell you failure to invest now would put us in a position where we would be behind the curve for the next generation in my humble opinion because much of what the secretary was able to do here much of what we re able to do out of the department of energy and out of the department of housing and urban affairs all of which have energy impacts is being funded on a one time basis with the boldest initiative any administration has every attempted in the midst of an economic recession a 787 billion down payment on the future failure to act would result in 4 to 5 million additional lost jobs so it s a process folks and in this process we really genuinely believe and i know here you at the university you believe we re in the beginning stages of beginning to change the world i know this sounds like hyperbole i m back on campus and i feel as idealistic as i did when i was a 29 year old kid summing up my campaign here for the united states senate on campus i am more certain i am more committed i am more idealistic about our opportunities than i have been the day i got elected to office as a 29 year old kid i genuinely mean it seldom do we get to a point where we have an option an opportunity to literally alter the course of human history and it s like turning around a super tanker folks you change the heading of a super tanker by five degrees 50 miles out you re way off in a different direction than you were before you changed it and that s where we are right now in the most literal sense that s why we re here today that s why we ve chosen such a great university now i m prejudiced i know i m not joking about this i say to the press and the national press that s here i went here it s a great university but it s even a greater university by a long shot we got a guy now at the helm of this university who has visions for this university that are totally completely warranted and with the help of the legislature and the help of the people of the state of delaware and the help of the philanthropies and the fundraising that go on we in fact are going to be able to realize president harker s dream for this university this is a premier institution and no more than in the area of the kind of advancements we re talking about here this really is about making the world better and i m not just i m saying this because i m on the university campus it s about the air we breathe it s about the water we drink it s about the mountains our children are going to be able climb and it s about the lakes we swim in and the oceans that nourish us and literally renew our souls that s the world we intend to change all of us and i m sure you all share my view democrats and republicans we ve already begun it s been just slightly more than a hundred days the recovery act includes 11 billion to bolster state and local governments on one item alone energy efficiency energy efficiency programs to weatherize low income homes that are already being put to work for example jack talked about the state buildings and the federal buildings i need not tell experts like you sir professor that the single biggest bang for the buck we could get is not with these wind turbines that s the future the immediate future it s literally just weatherizing just weatherizing conservation the single biggest bang for the buck we can get we ve been criticized for spending recovery act money to do that today here in delaware we re doing that and we re doing a lot more as the president announced on earth day the department of the interior is releasing the regulations that will govern the development of renewable energy in the offshore waters these final rules are going to enable delaware and enable a nation to tap into our ocean s vast vast sustainable resources to generate clean energy in an environmentally sound and safe manner and with the release of these rules we can much better much better harness the wind here in delaware but also solar wave and ocean current energy along our nation s coast gov the prospects are unlimited the prospects are unlimited and it s time for us to dream really big not small not just in terms of whether or not we can actually provide the electricity for 50 000 or 100 000 or 200 000 homes in delaware it is so much bigger than that and we re trying to do our part to spur investment a significant portion this is not the first this is multiple times that i ve dealt with wind energy projects just out of missouri john and i got to talk to you about what they re doing out there in creating in the steel mills and the turbines they re creating but not only that the transformers that are being built guess what happens this ultimately is about jobs it s jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs i mean we can t in delaware we re losing jobs where people can by a single job live a decent way make a decent wage have a sustainable income that can t be exported the job that allow people to live in a middle class neighborhood like you and i grew up in used to work at general motors or chrysler god willing we ll be able to save some of it we hope the truth of the matter is there s so many spin offs here and so the tax system that we wrote into the legislation provides financial incentives to projects like the one here in delaware it s not just the regulations being issued it s the significant incentives let s not kid ourselves you can write the regulations boss it ain t going no matter what the state does without these tax incentives across the country the recovery act invests about 14 billion in renewables by allowing wind producers not only to access the investment tax credit but also supports production tax credits it also thanks to the recovery act the department of energy is spending 6 billion to underwrite up to 60 billion in loans 60 billion in loans for renewable energy projects in the next 18 months and that s for projects just like the one we have here in delaware basically between all our efforts all of our efforts i mean everyone in this room including the citizens of this state we can finally truly get serious about our commitment to renewable energy of all types not any of these things are enough you need to create the synergy to get this thing moving and we have the combination the intellectual horsepower the ingenuity the policy changes needed that government had to supply to incentivize businesses to move in ways that they want to move in cooperation with the public sector but this is more than just a new source of energy in my view and i go back to the purpose of the recovery act which contains this money these direct and indirect tax expenditures it is a new source of job creation a new place for america to assert international leadership in climate change and most important it s a way to build a platform build a platform for the economy of the future john it s not just the platforms you re going to build for these windmills it goes much more than that it s a fundamentally new approach to creating jobs that are not exportable that pay a decent living union wage and allow people to be able to turn to their kids and say honey it s going to be okay it s going to be okay i want to remind you of what president obama and i have a simple proposition we both independently and when we ran together jointly talked about the measure of whether or not we succeed in economic growth is not whether the gdp increases it s whether or not we increase the ranks of the middle class it s whether or not we raise the living standard of middle class workers i remind you we had great economic growth in the end of the 19th century but guess what they weren t decent paying jobs so if we went out and created another 10 million jobs paying minimum wage we would view that as a failure a failure the middle class has been left behind it will not be left behind on our watch and a green economy is the automobile of the future it is the technology of the future and so folks the economy and the environment for the first time in my 37 years of holding high public office they are the same shade of green we used to have those arguments bob about whether or not by moving to a green economy we were going to cost ourselves jobs cost ourselves economic opportunity well it s the opposite now we ve reached that point as i said earlier that inflection point where jobs economic growth and the environment are the same shade of green gov and so i see firsthand everywhere i go a couple of weeks ago as i said i was at a transformer plant in missouri by the way run by the uaw putting people back to work as a consequence of building new wind farm projects out there in the central part of the state as a consequence of that order because of the tax credits made available they re building another new 100 windmills out there guess what they had to build these turbines i mean they excuse me had to build these transformers and it saved jobs good paying jobs so this in a nutshell is the story of the recovery act this is a story of how a new economy predicated on innovation the environment and efficiency is inspiring the kind of growth we need to build the 21st century to lead the world once again this is a story that stretches across delaware up and down our state and throughout the entire country and it s a story we re writing together we ve heard for years that a greener economy is going to benefit our grandkids and it will it clearly will but guess what it also will jumpstart our economy today that s the whole story the whole story is that building a green economy is for us as well as our children it s going to increase the bottom lines through greater efficiency lower gas prices reducing dependence on foreign oil return america to it s rightful place as the leading edge of progress in the world and those of you who travel the world are saddened when you find out we re not viewed that way in so many other countries we plan on recapturing that as we do all that we re leaving men and women with jobs that cannot be exported jobs that will form the foundation for this new economy and jobs that they can keep forever this right here right here is how we re going to rebuild the economy and this right here is how we ll quite literally begin to change the world so i want to thank the brilliant professors here and the students here at the university for your innovative notions and your willingness to plow into this for so long for so many years finally beginning to be rewarded finally beginning to be listened to i want to thank the governor for his leadership and it s real it s genuine i want to thank the private sector for deciding that this is a place where we should be investing and i want to thank ken salazar and my colleagues in the senate for being so supportive so supportive of this kind of leap but i want to make it clear to you if all we do if all we do is create one wind farm out there if we don t as a consequence of that restore our steel plants if we don t as a consequence of that restore jobs go through the numbers and i will not take the time now if we do what we have at our disposal to do right here in delaware we re going to save tens of millions of dollars we re going to create hundreds of good durable sustaining jobs and we re going to lead the country in renewing our commitment to innovation and transforming this economy and i ve always believed that s what this university had the capacity to be on the ground floor doing and once again you are mr president so to all of you i say thank you god bless you for what you re doing and may god protect our troops thank you dem joebiden4 5 09b joe_biden thank you adrian and i and all of us have been hanging out at this station for a long long time and as ron the station manager and adrian can tell you i still ride this train i ll be riding it today i took it home a couple days ago and the longest stretch i ve ever gone in my adult life since age 32 actually that i haven t been on an amtrak train was the previous three weeks it s the first time ever i have been three weekends in a row i haven t been home see the dog even knows it and he was angry that i didn t come home but it s good to be home it s good to be back senator kaufman said it better than anyone has thus far in my view i just wish he wrote speeches as good for me as he writes for himself where the hell was all this when you were doing this for me i mean that line about breakfast lunch dinner rest et cetera all in one day on the train is a good one but it s true and it s true that all of you this is an amtrak crowd out here first of all let me say to labor thanks thanks for always having our back let me also say that it s always been nice to be home but this is a special day i think it s a little nicer than almost any time that i ve been here at this station look you can imagine today s ceremony is near and dear to my heart and also to all the people standing behind me the people who tend to this station the conductors who have become my personal and longtime and continued friends the more than 7 000 round trips i ve made on this track they re a part of my identity they re a part of who i am whether i like it or not when we were putting together the recovery package and it started back in chicago before we were sworn in i made it as the president tells everyone abundantly clear that if you re going to create jobs with a long lasting platform for the future it s rail rail rail and rail and so i make no apologies because i have been somewhat criticized by some for having so heavily influenced the amount of money more money is being invested in american rail and all the components of rail than any time in modern history we have allocated 8 billion for high speed rail we ve allocated another 5 billion 1 billion for the next five years we re making a commitment that is absolutely unprecedented since the turn of the last century the turn of the 20th century and so for our family and the families of the gentlemen behind me this station has been home and it s going to be a much nicer home this isn t just about making the station look better this is about making it more efficient because what we expect to happen is we expect ridership to continually increase not decrease bob dole who is an old friend and used to be the minority and majority leader and every time there would be a vote on amtrak and before tommy came i d be the guy who was viewed as the guy and bill roth helping amtrak and ever the vote on amtrak there s you see in the senate there s what they call the well of the senate there s two desks down at the bottom level below where the president of the senate sits and each the democratic table and republican table they put a yellow sheet of paper out as tom and ted know and they ll say succinctly what the vote is about and every time we d vote on amtrak bob dole literally would instruct the republican desk to put the following note as to what the vote is vote to keep biden in delaware that was his great sense of humor because he pointed out if amtrak ever stopped running biden would move to washington then that would be hell for everyone well i m now in washington and i am proud to say that the work that the men behind me have done for so many years and i ve been part of it with them i ve been able to be placed in a position if nothing else happened as vice president the mere fact of being able to significantly influence along i might add with rahm emanuel the considerable expenditure and commitment to rail in america has been worth the trip and so not only have we supported amtrak those of you behind you we continue to i still hope that every time i get on this train which is still frequently that people understand why i get on this train it is the single best investment of any traveling dollar you can invest in it is safer it is more reliable it is more certain it is more accurate than any means to get back and forth on this corridor i ve devoted a significant part of my career to doing what i could do along with others to support this notion of getting rail de stigmatized because it was stigmatized for such a long time this idea we only subsidize amtrak we subsidize the airlines more we subsidize the highways more it s the least subsidized form of travel so i m very very proud to be part of an administration that not only was willing to listen to my notions about rail but fully thoroughly totally embrace them from an environmental standpoint from an economic standpoint and from a pure transportation standpoint we ve dedicated 30 million to this project it is true that tom and mike and i worked very hard to set as monies for this station but we would not be spending a penny on it today without the recovery act we have no time to wait we cannot wait that s what the recovery act is about it s not only that you re building vehicles you re building restoring cars down in bear you re restoring vehicles that are needed by the rail companies just to get amtrak just to get to and from locations we re spending a lot of time and money why it s about as ted said jobs jobs jobs jobs that s why we cannot wait this has the added convenience of a job being created today that is a good paying job mostly a union job a job you can raise your family on a job you can live a middle class life on as well as building a platform for the 21st century that s why the tens of millions of dollars that are coming to the state of delaware under this recovery act would be we would be in desperate shape around the country without this legislation the fact of the matter is it goes well beyond rail it goes to the notion that you have over 40 governors who would be laying off scores of teachers scores of policemen scores of firemen as well as not investing in education not investing in the infrastructure not investing in energy like we re doing in this bill without this legislation we would lose another 4 to 5 million jobs in america in the midst of this recession so ladies and gentlemen we re doing this for the people of delaware but we re doing it for the 28 million people who ride amtrak every single week 28 million people we re doing it because it will take care of a critical but long neglected needs of the rail system we ll be putting to work we ll be putting people to work immediately and it s an investment that will yield benefits for this economy in years to come think about it if we shut down the northeast corridors anne canby the former person running the transportation net in this state will tell you and before that nathan hayward if you shut down the corridor it s not just you wouldn t be able to ride into i 95 you would have to create seven seven new lanes of highway on 95 costing an average 30 million a linear mile for one lane for one lane not the seven lanes added for one lane ladies and gentlemen this is the single best investment for my grandchildren and my children i could possibly make as it relates to transportation so by improving our rail system we re going to put even more people off the road lowering the dependence on foreign oil lowering the price of gas we put in our tanks and we re going to loosen the congestion as mike said suffocating our highways the incredible hours of lost productivity that adds up into billions of dollars a year and we re going to significantly significantly lessen the damage to our planet all in all we re going to ensure that we can travel the country throughout a system that is sound that is secure and is able to handle the full speed ahead progress that our new economy so desperately needs and i ve heard the quip if god had meant man to fly he wouldn t have given him rail works well i kind of believe part of that s true it s about the time we took the railroads and we made them the national treasure they used to be and should be railroads and stations like this throughout the country have connected communities to each other and now they re going to move us forward into the 21st century by helping us secure helping us secure and write a new history as for history this station was built as was pointed out a little more than a hundred years ago and it has been the centerpiece of the delaware community ever since but the fact that i ve always loved about the original architect of this place frank furness wasn t just he was an architect he was also a captain and a commander of company f of the 6th pennsylvania volunteer cavalry during the civil war and he received the medal of honor for his bravery at the battle of trevilian which actually trevilian station in virginia in 1884 excuse me 1864 to this day he s the only american architect every to receive the medal of honor it all seems kind of fitting to me a story that meshes perfectly with the ethic and sacrifice and the hard work that has always defined the people of delaware and the people that make this station what it is the people who make the places this place such a wonderful place to come home to day in and day out so i thank you all i thank all the folks at this station who have become my family i thank all of you who ve supported amtrak for so long our day has finally arrived and just in time to provide the work protect the environment and to relieve congestion for the american people we re going to be redoing this not just in wilmington but all over america so let me end by saying may god bless you all and may god protect out troops this is a good day for the state of delaware thank you dem joebiden4 7 10 joe_biden general all the general officers command sergeant major all our military men and women and all the civilians here helping to free and make secure this great country i have to tell you this is the second year in a row i ve gotten to do this and this is among the biggest kicks i ve gotten since i ve been vice president of the united states of america what an incredible honor and i have to say it again what the thing i love so much about today is the irony here we are in the hunting lodge of a dictator who subjugated a people who in fact stood for everything that we don t stand for and we re in the middle of this marble palace making a lie of everything that he stood for i find it delicious that that s happening i can think of no better place to be sworn in we hold these truths self evident that all men all men all men are created equal you re a remarkable bunch of women and men i ve said this in every country and conflict that i ve been in since i ve been a united states senator was elected to the senate 37 years ago the one lesson every country has to learn in my humble opinion particularly as we deal with the resurrection of failed states around the world is what you symbolize here today and that is until people understand that there is strength in diversity and not division it makes it awfully difficult to unite a country our iraqi brethren are learning that right now as they held a free election sunni shia kurd indo european arab ladies and gentlemen their future lies in what you demonstrate and i m confident they ll achieve it general thank you for the introduction and of course for your extraordinary service and i mean extraordinary service to our country and quite frankly to this country iraq and all of you all of you thank you from the bottom of america s heart for your service and i might add for choosing us for choosing america what a sight you are today and what a powerful symbol what a powerful symbol you represent to those who yearn for freedom all across the world i can t think of a more stirring example of patriotism than men and women volunteering as the general pointed out volunteering to fight for their country to put their lives on the line and some of your brethren having lost their lives and limbs to fight on foreign soil for their adopted country you re remarkable on this fourth of july weekend i m reminded that you have carried the torch of our founding fathers the one that they lit 234 years ago you carried it around the world in this case into a nation that s not your own in a uniform representing a nation that until now was not your own you hail from over 60 almost 60 countries different countries from brazil to south korea and many more in between you came to america at different points in your lives you came with parents aching for a better life than the ones they knew others to give a better life to their own children your stories may all be different but today you write a common chapter in american history you ll each raise your right hand in a moment and in one proud moment together you ll recite the oath to be a citizen of the united states of america the general said he lived essentially in the shadow of the statue of liberty all of us up here we spend our time some more laboriously than others tracing our roots as to how we got to this status of citizenship my wife and i we were kidding i may be irish but i was smart enough to marry an italian i married dominique gioccopa s granddaughter but we were going back and looking on my side of the family we are irish we are english we are german we are french we are all a mixture and you re just adding to that rich rich rich culture it s the reason i would argue it s the reason it s the reason why we are who we are because we have a document called the constitution that ensures that that mixture will result in the incredible incredible strain that we have spread all around the world about freedom and for that i congratulate you and i welcome you i know your service here has not been easy and as the general pointed out some of you it s the third fourth fifth time you have served here in iraq not long ago iraq was a country on the brink of civil war this is my 15th 16th 17th trip in and every time i come this is four times or five times since i ve been vice president every time i come because of an awful lot of brave iraqis who gave their lives and tens of thousands of americans who risked and or gave their lives it gets better every single time i m here i was telling the general last trip in we were coming in landing at night coming in the on the helicopter because we were going into the green zone and i looked down i thought what a wonderful thing there was a traffic jam there were traffic jams first time i flew in here right after the war there was nobody nobody nobody on the road this nation once embroiled in sectarian strife and violence is moving toward a lasting security and prosperity with a government that represents the interest of every member of the community in iraq because until they get that straight and they re getting it straight there s no real shot they can become what they re capable of and the united states is committed we re committed to cement that relationship through economic political and diplomatic cooperation not just by the use of arms last year at this ceremony i made what i was criticized for saying a bit of a bold statement but i was confident then as i am now about other things that are going to happen i said last august of this year that we will have achieved two goals we will have helped iraq s leaders set the conditions for a sovereign stable and self reliant nation for future generations of iraqis within a year and we will have ended our combat mission here after more than seven years and i m proud to report that because of you and tens of thousands of our sons and daughters including our son we ve made good on that promise iraq recently held its second national election you know the story guys the first election is not the one that determines is not the most important election in a country s history it s the second election the second election now there s a new parliament that s been seated and when the new government is formed it will mark something absolutely extraordinary a peaceful transition of power encompassing all the people of iraq maybe for the first time in their history we re keeping we re keeping our commitments last year we pulled american combat troops out of all major cities on time and on august 31st the american combat mission in iraq will end we ll go from 140 000 troops the day i was sworn in as vice president with the president of the united states to 50 000 who will remain and of those 50 000 american those forces will train and assist the iraqi national security forces and be prepared to deal with exigencies that they may face but even as we draw down our forces as i ve said before we are ramping up we are ramping up our engagement with the iraqi people and the iraqi government diplomatically politically economically culturally scientifically in the hope of building a long and strong relationship and partnership with iraq in the meantime for those of you who remain your safety and security has been and always will be the number one priority for the president and me and for the general officers of this united states military and we promise we make the commitment that we will keep that everything you need to complete your mission will be available to you and while you re here rest assured that your families at home will be honored and cared for as well and when you return home all of your needs as veterans will be attended to as well i ve often said that the united states has only one and i mean this sincerely only one truly sacred obligation that is to care for those who we send to war by giving them everything they need and making sure that everything that they need when they return home is available to them that s the only sacred we have many obligations quite simply we owe you we owe all of you and we owe your families there s that famous expression they also serve who stand in wait my wife jill was quite jealous of me the last four trips that i was in here our son was here and she didn t understand why she couldn t come then and so she is here with me now because she s going to be meeting with an awful lot of the families here as well but the point is your families we owe them as well because they re making a real genuine sacrifice for the united states of america quite frankly folks without you we wouldn t survive without new blood and without those of you in uniform we would not survive we would not prevail you represent what america has always stood for strength resolve sacrifice and diversity america is that rare place where citizens are not defined by their ethnicity or by their religion not by their nationality but what they are committed to their ideas and ideals as stated in our constitution oh i know everyone doesn t can t refer to the constitution when you ask people what it constitutes to be american try it out literally try it out when you get back home no one no one unlike any country in the world will define it in terms other than ideas they will not define it on what their race or religion is that s our strength that coupled with our diversity creates a way of life that most of the rest of the world aspires to if they haven t already achieved it so what i see in front of me today is people of a different color different stripes of different backgrounds of different beliefs all wearing the same uniform and that uniform you wear is the ultimate symbol of what it means to be an american for me this ceremony is only a formal declaration of what the president and i and your fellow countrymen believe to be true you are already americans but let s go on now and make it official ladies and gentlemen thank you for the service it s an honor to be with you may god bless you and all may god protect our troops thank you very much dem joebiden5 5 09 joe_biden thank you very much please larry thank you for that introduction ladies and gentlemen there s an old there s an old saxon expression and what it says is there s an old expression this is the man who introduced me to aipac and there s an old expression that says an institution is little more than the lengthened shadow of a man this is the man right here this is the man ladies and gentlemen i was backstage and the stage director a lovely young woman was telling me that she was the stage director and i told her how well i take orders and larry was speaking and i said you see that man i said he s been my friend for 38 years and she looked at me like that s not possible not that i don t look that old but that she wasn t born i don t think when she said it but the truth is larry and his magnificent wife have been just wonderful wonderful wonderful supporters of israel and aipac and he really did along with one of my closest friends period not just in politics michael adler michael adler s dad in miami and larry weinberg on the west coast are the two people who gave me my formal education and i thank them both thank you both i say to the board and all of you that are here i m delighted by your warm welcome and it s very good to be among friends i d like to begin by congratulating your president david victor for and the incoming president lee rosenberg rosy we re all pulling for your dad big rosy and we know how proud he must be right now as you re about to take on your new responsibilities i d like to also congratulate aipac s executive director howard kohr and the rest of the staff for another successful conference and i want to congratulate an old friend who i think is probably the most articulate and eloquent speechmaker in the world shimon peres president of the state of israel on the 61st anniversary of israel s independence which we re going to celebrate which we celebrated last week and the president president obama and i look forward to visiting later today with the president i m anxious to see him in the white house a little over a hundred days ago our country started on a new path the citizens of this country made a very fundamental decision and it began with the historic inauguration of the 44th president barack obama but it grew it grew out of the determination of millions of americans who desperately wanted to change not only the direction of our country but quite frankly the trajectory that the world was on that s what the obama biden administration has set out to do a lofty goal but an absolutely minimum required task to change the direction of this country and all the trajectory of the world we not only want to do it here at home we believe our fate is inextricably tied to the direction the world is moving in but in the midst of change with all the change you will hear about there is one enduring essential principle that will not change and that is our commitment to the peace and security of the state of israel that is not negotiable that is not a matter of change that is something to be reinforced and made clear it seems almost unnecessary to state it but i want the word to go forth in here that no one should mistake it that commitment began when the united states of america emerged from world war ii as the preeminent economic political and military power in the world and one of our great presidents harry truman reached out to a tiny struggling state emerging from the ashes of the holocaust and recognized the state of israel it s a commitment that spans generations and administrations of both political parties and our job obviously you know it s yours just so you know we know it s our job to ensure that that endures the bond between israel and the united states was forged by a shared interest in peace and security by shared values and to respect all faiths and for all faiths and for all people by deep ties evidenced here today among our citizens both christian and jew and a common unyielding commitment to democracy indeed we ve both experienced recent elections and the peaceful transition of power i want to congratulate my friend prime minister netanyahu and as they say in the senate he is my friend for his victory bibi and i have been friends for a long long time too long to mention and you know the old clich imitation is the sincerest form of flattery well i looked at likud s website campaign website and on behalf of the obama biden administration i must say i am flattered take a look at the website it looked like we were running co joint campaigns here and we didn t charge bibi a thing for it all kidding aside a lot of you in the audience and a lot of board members here have been my friends for a long long time my commitment though to israel did not begin with the friendships that i share on this stage as the friends on this stage know and some of you have heard me say my commitment began at my father s dinner table my father was what you d refer to as a righteous christian my father we had dinner at my father and mother s home as an occasion to sit down and have conversation and incidentally eat rather than eat and incidentally have conversation and over the years my commitment was nurtured by many of the people in this room starting with larry and many others that are here in 1973 as a 29 year old or just 30 just turned 30 years old elected united states senator from the state of delaware i made my first overseas trip to israel it was on the eve at the time unknown of the yom kippur war i had just come from cairo and visited the suez canal and i then went to visit the prime minister golda meir which was one of the great honors i was asked not long ago what are the two most meaningful meetings i ever had as a senator and they were with the freed later president of south africa and golda meir they both embodied everything i had been taught different races different religions different regions the same tenacity and the same open heart i sat across the desk from the prime minister and she as many of you know is a chain smoker she continually smoked and she had a set of maps behind her the old maps that were on rollers there was a whole big slew of them like eight maps in one set and she was describing to me the six day war and reading letters from the front from young israelis most of whom had died defending their country it was very moving she kept flipping the maps up and down and pointing to different battles i m sure many of you had the experience i m sure you had the experience larry and there was a young man sitting next to me who didn t say a lot his name was rabin and we had a conversation that lasted i won t put a time on it but i m quite confident it was over an hour it was a long time it was a great moment for a young man like me it was meaningful i learned a lot but it also gave me a sense of the degree of how do i say it the pain the history the hope the pragmatism the grit of an entire nation and almost it seemed in mid sentence she looked at me and my good friend michael adler heard me say this before it was kind of startled me she said senator would you like a photo it was like by the way do you want to go to the ball game and i said well of course madam prime minister and the office in those days that she had there were double doors that opened up onto a hallway and we walked out and there were photographers arrayed and we stood next to one another looking straight at the camera at the photographers and the cameras but she was talking to me without looking at me she said the following she said senator looking straight ahead but talking she said senator you seem worried you look like you re worried and i turned to her and i said well madam prime minister i am the picture you just painted in those days 60 million arabs 2 million jews et cetera and she put her hand out still looking at the camera on my arm she said senator don t worry we jews have a secret weapon in our struggle here we have no place else to go and for me i thought at the time some of you know she was so engaging i thought at the time i m probably the only person in the world she ever said that to and it was for me at that moment her comments crystallized for me everything i d learned at my father s table and everything about the basic responsibility of the united states to be a partner in ensuring that there will always always be a place for jews of the world to go and that place always must be israel it s real it s serious it s compelling it s the only certainty the only certainty ladies and gentlemen i m here today to tell you something you already know and i assure you this president barack obama shares that same commitment his support is rooted in his personal connection to the zionist idea to which he spoke about last year at this conference he said last year that when he was a child and i quote i was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual emotional and cultural identity and i deeply understood the zionist idea that there is always a homeland at the center of our story ladies and gentlemen barack obama s commitment was reinforced not that it need to have been by his two relatively recent trips to israel when he met with israeli leaders from across the spectrum and you all know it s a very wide spectrum in israel by the powerful searing experience that he had visiting maybe in a sense the holiest of all places commemorating the holocaust by seeing first hand israel s unique security dilemmas from a helicopter with top generals the sort of experience i had in 73 when i stood on the golan heights and realized if you had a really good arm you could literally throw a grenade down in the territory that could do damage to israelis he also had it reinforced by traveling to the northern border and met with families whose homes had been destroyed by rockets fired by hezbollah and hamas into their villages but the president and i both know that ultimately we ll be judged not by our commitment and our verbal assurances to you or to anyone else or to the state of israel but by the results of the commitment we have made we believe that the results we seek including a secure israel at peace can be best achieved by taking a new direction in our foreign policy by first and foremost reestablish america s preeminent leadership in the world the nation who asserts it leads but has no one following is not leading we must reassert the confidence that we once had and the confidence the world once had in us to lead the world when america has confidence the confidence of our allies and our friends and the broad support we need in the world not only is america stronger but israel will be stronger because america is able to be a more efficient partner and effective partner and our adversaries and israel s adversaries know that as well in the middle east we stand for the premise that the status quo of the last decade has not served the interests of the united states or israel very well it has not enhanced the peace and security of the region no matter how good the intention i went to a catholic grade school when you got in trouble the nuns would make you i d say but sister and they d make you write on the board a hundred times after school the road to hell is paved with good intentions all the good intentions of the last decade have not resulted in a more secure more stable middle east a more secure more stable israel a more secure more stable united states so we are working to change that by responsibly ending the war in iraq by refocusing our efforts on afghanistan and pakistan to defeat al qaeda by engaging all countries in the region including those with whom we have overwhelming disagreements in order to advance our national security interests we are intensely focused on avoiding the grave danger as larry spoke about and others have as well including my good friend john of a nuclear armed iran a nuclear armed iran risks an arms race in the region that would make every country less secure presents an existential threat what we have tried with iran in recent years has obviously not worked what will work remains to be seen since 2000 iran has installed thousands of centrifuges and produced over a thousand kilograms of low enriched uranium not capable of use in a nuclear weapon low enriched but nonetheless they have produced that instead of arresting the danger in the last six years the danger has grown it has not been arrested we re determined to change that that s why we will pursue direct principled diplomacy with iran with the overriding goal of preventing them from acquiring nuclear weapons the united states will approach iran initially in the spirit of mutual respect we want iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations politically and economically that s a path that the islamic republic can take if it so chooses or that government can choose a different future one of international pressure isolation and one which nothing is taken off the table if our efforts to address this problem through engagement are not successful we have greater international support to consider other options and ladies and gentlemen don t kid yourselves international support matters as we ve learned over the last eight years we must sometimes act alone but it s always stronger when we act in unison given the situation we inherited we know we don t have unlimited time to make this assessment iran also has played a dangerous role in the region supporting terrorist organizations like hamas and hezbollah and undermining many of our friends and those who claim to be our friends indeed these proxies are the tools in my view our view that iran uses to exploit conflicts like the israeli palestinian conflict use it to their advantage in this way the continuation of israeli palestinian and israeli arab arab israeli conflicts strengthen iran s strategic position they give iran a playing field upon which to extend its influence sponsor extremist elements inflame public opinion all which are counterintuitive it s counterintuitive if you think about it that iran s shia influence in a sunni arab world would be able to be extended there are many reasons to pursue an end to these conflicts it gives israelis peace and security they deserve to help the palestinians fulfill their aspirations of an independent and better life to ease tension in the regions in this region today one of the most pressing reasons may be to deprive iran of the ability to extend its destabilizing influence again it s counterintuitive if you think about its ability to extend its influence in the region that s why from day one of this administration we began to make a strong sustained effort on behalf of peace the president decided that we must be engaged we must take risk on behalf of peace for israel the president appointed one of our most tenacious diplomats to lead that effort george mitchell and the president is strongly and personally committed to achieving what all have basically said is needed a two state solution with a secure jewish state of israel living side by side in peace and security with a viable and independent palestinian state he and i both believe that it s absolutely necessary to ensure israel s survival as a jewish democratic state that this occur that is also the solution that israel and the palestinians committed to in the road map and reaffirmed in annapolis it can be achieved it must be achieved there s an old expression which larry will get a kick out of and it relates to christianity g k chesterton once said it s not that christianity has been tried and found wanting it s been found difficult and left untried well the truth of the matter is the fact that peace has not occurred does not mean peace cannot occur same time we ll pursue a secure and lasting and comprehensive arab israeli peace the israelis and its arab neighbors have sufficient common interest to bring this goal within reach progress towards peace has only been possible when people when people were willing to think differently to take risks to make a principled compromise that s why we have to pursue every opportunity for progress while standing up for one core principle first israel s security is non negotiable period period our commitment is unshakeable we will continue to provide israel with the assistance that it needs we will continue to defend israel s right to defend itself and make its own judgments about what it needs to do to defend itself secondly all of us have obligations to meet including commitments israel and the palestinians made in the road map the palestinian authority must combat terror and incitement against israel the united states and its partners have provided funding and training for a reformed palestinian security force which has impressed everyone including the israeli security officers with its recent demonstrations of professionalism and effectiveness we are right now seeking funds from congress to expand this program but israel has to work towards a two state solution you re not going to like my saying this but not build more settlements dismantle existing outposts and allow the palestinians freedom of movement based on their first actions its access to economic opportunity and increased security responsibility this is a show me deal not based on faith show me prime minister netanyahu has important ideas about how to achieve some of these objectives and we look forward to working with him to help develop them when he comes to visit the quartet and the arab states also have clear responsibilities one of the most important is to support the palestinian authority with the tools and funds it needs to govern on the west bank develop and reform its institutions help the people of gaza work toward returning to gaza we are doing our part with major assistance packages currently before the congress we expect others to do theirs the arab states should act now not later to build upon to build upon the arab peace initiative a constructive combination that contains the promise of a cooperative and comprehensive peace but now is the time now is the time for arab states to make meaningful gestures to show the israeli leadership and the people that the promise of ending israel s isolation in the region is real and genuine they must take action now show me ladies and gentlemen finally the world must continue to make clear to hamas that the legitimacy it seeks will only come when it renounces violence recognizes israel and abides by past agreements period these are not some say when i repeat that and the president says it that these are unreasonable these are not unreasonable demands they re basic standards of international conduct we re working hard to provide assistance to palestinians in gaza that does not benefit hamas and to coordinate with our allies to end the smuggling of weapons in the gaza which continue and we demand we demand the immediate and unconditional release unconditional release of gilad shalit after nearly three years three years of captivity it is not acceptable and we remain committed we remain committed to seeing him returned safely to his family we will also explore opportunities as the israelis are for progress between israel and syria peace between israel and syria could reshape the region we will ensure that it does not come if it comes at the expense of israel s security or lebanon s sovereignty and independence the search for a secure and just and lasting peace in the middle east has frustrated many and all who have come before us we understand the immensity of the challenge we recognize the hard choices that must be made but we also know this the path we have been on in recent yeas will not result in security and prosperity for israel or the palestinians nor will it produce the stability and progress that s needed in the region to ultimately guarantee israel s security look we know there are different views in this room we know there are different views in this town about how to move forward nowhere are these issues debated more openly and vividly than in the streets of israel and in the knesset which is an overwhelming tribute to its democracy but i believe the critical question is not where we stand today but how we see tomorrow and what we re prepared to do to get there this administration sees and seeks a future of lasting peace and security in which israeli children can leave behind the tyranny of rockets and terror when israeli mothers as they send their children off to school do not have to worry about whether or not they will come home or palestinian children have full opportunities to live out their dreams and the entire middle east does not have to live under the dread of a nuclear cloud delaying the pursuit of these goals is not an option it s easier but it is not an option and the longer we wait the harder it will be now is the time to work together for the promise of a better day and for the success and strength and security of our most treasured ally israel thank you very much god bless you all and may god protect our troops dem joebiden6 5 10 joe_biden mr president thank you for that welcome it was a delight to have you in washington and at the white house and it s a great honor and i might add a privilege to be able to address such an esteemed body i served in a parliament that only had 535 members total this is even a greater honor when president reagan i remember president reagan s speech here in 1985 and to quote an irish poet william butler yeats speaking of his ireland in a poem called easter sunday 1916 he said all has changed changed utterly a terrible beauty has been born much has changed since 1985 much has changed and a terrible beauty has been born as you already know ladies and gentlemen not only am i pleased to be back here in brussels for the second time as vice president as you probably know some american politicians and american journalists refer to washington dc as the capital of the free world but it seems to me that this great city which boasts 1 000 years of history and which serves as the capital of belgium the home of the european union and the headquarters for nato this city has its own legitimate claim to that title as a lawmaker for more than 36 years in our parliament i feel particularly honored to address the european parliament president obama and i were the first running mates in the last 50 years in america to make it to the white house from our legislative bodies so we both come to our executive jobs with a deep appreciation for the work you do here in the bastion of european democracy together with my former colleagues in the united states congress you and i represent more than 800 million people stop and think about that for a moment two elected bodies that shape the laws for almost one eighth of the planet s population that s truly remarkable and now under the lisbon treaty you ve taken on more powers and a broader responsibility that comes with that increased influence and we welcome it we welcome that because we the united states need strong allies and alliances to help us tackle the problems of the 21st century many of which are the same but so many are different than the last century let me state it as plainly as i can the obama biden administration has no doubt about the need for and strongly supports a vibrant european union we believe it s absolutely essential to american prosperity and long term security so have no doubt about that when i chaired the united states senate foreign relations committee for all those years i had the opportunity to meet many european lawmakers from the national legislative bodies including some of you who are in this room today so i appreciate after all those years i appreciate what a consequential step it has been to build the only multinational parliament in the world elected by universal suffrage so much has changed and i m pleased that through the through the transatlantic legislators dialogue you are building a strong relationship with the united states congress and i hope that the office you opened in washington last month is going to enhance those ties folks 65 years ago this week less than 200 kilometers south of here nazi leaders signed an unconditional surrender that brought an end to the second world war in europe the next day celebrations erupted in times square and piccadilly circus cheering crowds danced along the champs elysees and the town squares throughout the allied world and here in brussels a thanksgiving service at a thanksgiving service churchgoers sang the national anthems of britain belgium and the united states on that joyous day may 8 1945 this continent lay in ruins ravaged twice by total wars in less than 30 years at that moment a peaceful and united europe a european parliament must have seemed like a fantasy to anyone alive and yet through the will of your fellow citizens and statesmen like jean henri spaak for whom this great hall is named and robert schuman and jean monnet and the visions that gave birth to a parliament and earned him the presidential medal of freedom from president lyndon johnson here we are assembled in this hall here you are what began as a simple pact among a half a dozen nations to create a common market for coal and steel grew into an economic and political powerhouse a community dedicated to free thought free movement and free enterprise a europe that one historian has called not so much a place but an idea and i m here to reaffirm that president obama and i believe in this idea and in a better world and better europe it has already helped to bring about a europe where all member states benefit by negotiating trade agreements and fighting environmental degradation with one unified voice a europe that bolsters the cultural and political values that my country shares with all of you a europe that is whole a europe that is free and a europe that is at peace as president obama said in prague a little more than a year ago a strong europe makes a stronger partner for the united states and we need strong partners that is why we will do everything we can to support this great endeavor of yours because the past 65 years have shown that when americans and europeans devote their energies to common purpose there is almost nothing we are unable to accomplish together through the marshall plan we rebuilt europe and made perhaps the greatest investment in human history together we built the most the world s most enduring security alliance nato and a military and political force that tied america and europe together and brought us even closer in the ensuing decades together we established the greatest commercial relationship in the world s history comprising about 40 percent of global trade and helping usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity and technological innovation and together we have provided relief and hope to those suffering humanitarian catastrophes in more places than i can mention from the western balkans to the congo to our ongoing work in haiti today to those skeptics who in spite of all these accomplishments continue to question the state of transatlantic relationships or my country s attitude toward a united europe my answer is this even if the united states and the nations all of you represent were not united by shared values and common heritage of many millions of our citizens myself included our global interests alone would inexorably bind us together the relationship between my country and europe is today as strong and as important as all of us to all of us as it has ever been this century has unleashed new challenges no less dangerous than those that came before in the 20th century and together together we are taking them on one by one they are difficult there will be disagreement but we are taking them on jointly climate change one of the greatest threats our planet faces the united states and europe are working to ensure that all countries and especially the major economies are contributing to a global solution we all look we all looked to and we did take a major step forward in copenhagen now we have to carry out those emission cuts the financing and the transparency called for in that accord and we must help the most vulnerable nations from the arctic north to the pacific islands that are the harbingers of this looming crisis across the troubled landscape of afghanistan and pakistan we are working together to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda and the taliban fighters and to train an afghan army and police force so that their government can eventually protect its own people and not be a threat to its neighbors in order to build afghanistan s governing capacity the united states the european union and its member nations are deploying significant financial resources and civilian resources as well while sustaining these important missions has not always been popular you all know as i do it is required as leaders we have an obligation to make the case to our populations that it is necessary for our collective security although believe me as a politician who has stood for office for the last 38 years i understand it is not easy i assure you it is no more popular in my country than it is in any one of yours that is also why the united states and europe are standing side by side to prevent iran from acquiring nuclear weapons a development that would endanger the citizens and menace its neighbors including some of our closest allies together together we embarked on an unprecedented path of engagement with the iranian leaders and ladies and gentlemen despite what some skeptics thought the president meant what he said that we will reach out our hand to any party that will unclench their fist at the outset of this administration president obama stated that we are prepared to deal with iran on the basis of mutual interest and mutual respect with our allies we ve made clear to iran s leaders how they could begin to rebuild confidence within the international community including by granting access to their previously undeclared enrichment facilities and exchanging low enriched uranium for fuel to power a research reactor but as the world has now watched and seen iranian leaders spurned our collective good faith efforts and continue to take actions that threaten regional stability let me be state it flatly iran s nuclear program violates its obligations under the nuclear non proliferation treaty and risks sparking a nuclear arms race in the middle east wouldn t it be ironic wouldn t it be ironic as the iron curtain fell and the mutual threats of nuclear destruction diminished among the superpowers that a new arms race would emerge in some of the most unstable parts in the world that would be an irony that our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren would not forgive us in my view for allowing it to come to pass in addition the iranian leadership supports terrorist organizations and that support continues unabated and it continues unconscionably to persecute those of its citizens who peaceably take to the streets in a quest for justice a betrayal of the duty of all governments in terms of what they owe their citizens tehran faces a stark choice abide by international rules and rejoin the community of responsible nations which we hope for or face further consequences and increasing isolation in the face of the threat iran poses we are committed to the security of our allies that is why we ve deployed the phased adaptive missile defense program to deter and defend against missile attacks on this continent on this continent and ladies and gentlemen we are also working together inside nato to prepare for a range of future security threats including energy security and cyber security and we continue to support close security cooperation between nato and the eu last year the united states and europe acted quickly and decisively when the world was reeling from a financial crisis more dire than any since the great depression and in doing so collectively we helped prevent what people were predicting the total collapse of the world economy and today president obama and i are closely following the economic and financial crisis in greece and the european union s efforts to deal with it we welcome the support package that europe is considering in conjunction the international monetary fund and we will be supportive both directly and through the imf of your efforts as you rescue greece these examples and many others i could have mentioned show why europe continues to be not just america s largest trading partner but our most important ally ladies and gentlemen our predecessors came together more than six decades ago this week to begin building institutions designed to ensure that the 21st century s darkest chapters would not be repeated in the remainder of that century or in the 21st century those institutions this institution have been a great success but now we have to set our sights on the challenges of this new century i referenced in the beginning the world has changed changed utterly a terrible beauty has been born perhaps the most complex threat we face today is that posed by to our own citizens by non state actors and violent extremists particularly if god forbid those violent extremists were able to get their hands on any weapons of mass destruction this scourge has no respect for borders none no single nation no matter how strong or how wealthy how organized or how capable can meet this threat alone it can only be successfully contained if we make common cause and that s precisely what we must do the new powers granted to this parliament in the lisbon treaty give you a greater role in that struggle and a greater imperative to govern responsibly the u s government and this parliament have struggled over how best to protect citizens without yielding the foundational rights on which all of our societies are built i am absolutely confident that we must and can both protect our citizens and preserve our liberties since taking office last year president obama and i have been guided by our constitution s and our constitution s imperative to seek a more perfect union toward that end one of our first official actions was to end the interrogation practices that produced few results and that we could not in good conscience continue we ordered the closure of the detention center at guantanamo bay which had become a symbol of injustice and a rallying cry for terrorists and we appreciate and we appreciate the support difficult it has been for you to take so many of you have provided in that effort we did these things because like you president obama and i reject the false choice between safety and our ideals we believe that upholding our principles only makes us stronger and that compromising them then actually undermines our effort in the broader struggle against violent extremism for what is their purpose their purpose is to change what we value change how we conduct ourselves eight days after the september 11th attack i told a group of thousands of university students in my country that they cannot allow the tragedy of 9 11 to end our way of life because that s exactly what the terrorists sought i also told them that america cannot prevail in this new struggle by acting alone those words have not only fit the tenor of that time but i think they ve proven to be true and they are no less true today i don t need to tell this audience about europe s proud tradition of protecting citizens from government invasion of their privacy a commitment grounded in respect for the inherent dignity of all people we call them inalienable rights we wrote them into our constitution and america s commitment to privacy is also profound as profound as yours our constitution s fourth amendment protects individuals against unreasonable search and seizures by the state which as one of our most famous jurists which one of our most famous jurists once dubbed the right to be let alone the supreme court of the united states has made clear that privacy is a constitutionally protected and fundamental right and like the eu the supreme court has characterized this right as a matter of personal dignity on a personal level i have for 36 years of my career defended privacy rights in the united states senate every year as organizations that rate those most committed to civil liberties and every year i and later president obama were characterized as one of those four people picked the reason i bother to tell you this is not about me but about the commitment of our administration to individual rights to change now would make a lie of everything i have said i stood for in my country for the past 37 years when i led the senate judiciary committee which is responsible for confirming the president s judicial nominees as i said i was consistently ranked among the staunchest advocates for civil liberties and i made it a priority to determine prospective judges views on privacy before deciding whether or not they could go on the court but president obama and i also believe that governments primary and most fundamental and most solemn duty is to protect its citizens the citizens it serves as well as the rights they hold president obama has said that keeping our country safe is the first thing he thinks about when he wakes up in the morning and the last thing he thinks about before he goes to bed at night i suspect that is how every world leader looks at their role indeed no less than privacy physical safety is also an inalienable right physical safety is also an inalienable right and a government that abdicates its duty to ensure the safety of its citizens violates their rights no less than a government that silences dissidents or imprisons accused criminals without trial and so folks even even as we gather here today our enemies are employing every tool they can muster to conduct new and devastating attacks like the ones that struck new york london madrid and many other places around the globe to stop them we must use every legitimate tool available law enforcement military intelligence technology that s consistent with our principles our laws and our values we re fighting on many fronts from the brave men and women serving abroad in our militaries to the patient and tireless law enforcement professionals investigating complex and suspicious financial networks just this week our customs and border protection using passenger information data apprehended a suspect in the attempted bombing of new york s times square as he sought to flee the country it is vital that we maintain every capacity we have under the law to stop such attacks and for that reason we believe that the terrorist finance tracking program is essential to our security as well as to yours presumptive of me to say it has provided critical leads to counterterrorism investigations on both sides of the atlantic disrupting plots and ultimately saving lives it is built it has built in redundancies that ensure personal information is respected and used only for counterterrorism purposes but i don t blame you for questioning it we understand your concerns as a consequence we are working together to address them and i m absolutely confident that we can succeed to both use the tool and guarantee privacy it s important that we do so and it s important that we do so as quickly as possible as a former united states senator i also know how hard it can be to make the hard choices required by global challenges while staying true to local values all of you are going through that every time you vote in this parliament i suspect the longer we are without an agreement on the terrorist finance tracking program the greater the risk of a terrorist attack that could have been prevented as leaders we share a responsibility to do everything we can within the law to protect the 800 million people we collectively serve we have disagreed before we will surely disagree again but i m equally convinced that the united states and europe can meet the challenges of the 21st century as we did in the 20th century if we talk and listen to one another if we are honest with one another ladies and gentlemen courage winston churchill taught us is what it takes to stand up and speak courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen while this afternoon i have done all of the speaking be assured that i my government and my president that we are back in the business of listening listening to our allies ladies and gentlemen it was no accident that europe was my first overseas destination as vice president and also the president s it is no accident that we ve already returned several times since then the united states needs europe and i respectfully submit europe needs the united states we need each other more now than we have ever so i view this week s anniversary as providing a welcome opportunity to reaffirm the bond our peoples forged long ago in the fires of adversity now as then in the pursuit of ideals and in the search of partners europeans and americans look to each other before they look to anyone else now as then we are honored and grateful to be by your side in the struggles yet to come so again i m here to state unequivocally president obama and joe biden strongly support a united a free an open europe we strongly support what you are about here we wish you god speed and may god bless you all and may god protect all of our troops thank you very very much dem joebiden7 2 09 joe_biden mr ambassador thank you very much ladies and gentleman it s an honor to be back in munich i ve attended this conference many times as a united states senator and three of my congressional colleagues are here with me today but i am honored to be back here as well as the vice president of the united states representing a new administration and hopefully a new day today i am especially honored to represent this administration and we ve gone through the oldest of our traditions that is the peaceful transfer of power and now i bring the regrets of two friends who are usually here but because we are still grappling with legislation relating to our so called stimulus package to deal with our economic issues both senators john mccain and john kerry were hoping to join my three house colleagues here today they are usually here but they send their regrets i come to europe on behalf of a new administration and an administration that s determined to set a new tone not only in washington but in america s relations around the world that new tone is rooted in a strong bipartisanship to meet these common challenges and we recognize that these challenges the need to meet them is not an opportunity not a luxury but it s an absolute necessity while every new beginning is a moment of hope this moment for america and the countries represented in this room it is fraught with some considerable concern and peril in this moment our obligation to our fellow citizens is to in our view put aside the petty and political notion that to reject the zero sum mentalities and rigid ideologies and to listen to and learn from one another and to work together for a common prosperity and security of all of us assembled in this room that s what in our view this moment demands and that s what this new administration is determined to do for 45 years this conference has brought together americans and europeans and in recent years leaders from beyond the transatlantic community to think through matters of our physical security but this year more than ever before we know that our physical security and our economic security are indivisible we are all confronting a serious threat to our economic security that could further spread instability and erode the progress we ve made in improving the lives of all our citizens in the united states like many of you we re taking aggressive action to stabilize our financial systems to jumpstart our economy and hopefully lay a new foundation for growth in the 21st century working with the congress we ll make strategic investments that create and save we believe 3 to 4 million jobs and in the process boost our competitiveness in the long run our plan includes doubling the production of alternative energy over the next three years computerizing our citizens medical records to drive down cost equipping tens of thousands of our schools and colleges with 21st century classrooms laboratories and libraries expanding the broadband across america and investing once again in science research technology all the things that spur innovation we re looking we re also working to stabilize our financial institutions by injecting considerable amounts of capital purchasing some assets and guaranteeing others these remedies are going to have an impact as you all know far beyond our shores just as the measures all of you are taking will be felt beyond your borders as well and because of that to the greatest extent possible we re going to have to cooperate to make sure that our actions are complementary and to do our utmost to combat this global crisis the united states is trying to do its part and president obama looks forward to taking our message to the g20 meeting in london in april and even as we grapple with an economic crisis we re also have to contend with a war in afghanistan now in its eighth year and a war in iraq well into its sixth year and we have to recognize as mentioned by both the chancellor and president sarkozy earlier today that there are other forces that are shaping this new century the spread of weapons of mass destruction and dangerous diseases endemic disease a growing gap between the rich and poor ethnic animosity in failed states and a rapidly warming planet and uncertain supplies of energy food water the challenges to freedom and security from radical fundamentalism must be added to that list as well in meeting these challenges the united states will be guided by this principle and the principle is there is no conflict between our security and our ideals we believe they are mutually reinforcing the force of arms won our independence and throughout our history the force of arms has protected our freedom that will not change but the very moment we declared our war of independence at that moment we laid out to the world the values behind our revolution and the conviction that our policies must be informed as we said at the time by a decent respect for the opinions of mankind our founders understood then and the united states believes now that the example of our power must be matched by the power of our example and that is why our administration rejects a false choice between our safety and our ideals america will vigorously defend our security and our values and in doing so we believe we ll all be more secure as hard as we try i know i know that we re likely to fall short of our ideals in the future just as we have in the past but i commit to you this administration will strive every day every day to honor the values that animate american democracy and i might add that bind us to all of you in this room america will not torture we will uphold the rights of those who we bring to justice and we will close the detention facility at guantanamo bay but tough choices lie ahead as we seek a lasting framework for our common struggle against extremism we ll have to work cooperatively with nations around the world and we ll need your help we ll need your help for example we will ask others to take responsibility for some of those now in guantanamo as we determine to close it our security is shared and so too i respectfully suggest is our responsibility to defend it that s the basis upon which we want to build a new approach to the challenges of this century america will do more but america will that s the good news the bad news is america will ask for more from our partners as well here s what we ll do and what we hope our partners will consider first we ll work in a partnership whenever we can and alone only when we must the threats we face have no respect for borders no single country no matter how powerful can best meet these threats alone we believe international alliances and organizations do not diminish america s power we believe they help advance our collective security economic interests and our values so we ll engage we ll listen we ll consult america needs the world just as i believe the world needs america but we say to our friends that the alliances treaties and international organizations we build must be credible and they must be effective that requires a common commitment not only to listen and live by the rules but to enforce the rules when they are in fact clearly violated such a bargain is the bargain we seek such a bargain can be at the heart of our collective efforts to convince iran for example to forego the development of nuclear weapons the iranian people are a great people the persian civilization is a great civilization but iran has acted in ways that are not conducive to peace in the region or to the prosperity of its own people its illicit nuclear program is but one of those manifestations our administration is reviewing our policy toward iran but this much is clear we will be willing to talk we ll be willing to talk to iran and to offer a very clear choice continue down the current course and there will be continued pressure and isolation abandon the illicit nuclear program and your support for terrorism and there will be meaningful incentives second we ll strive to act preventively not preemptively to avoid whenever possible or wherever possible the choice of last resort between the risks of war and the dangers of inaction we ll draw upon all the elements of our power military and diplomatic intelligence and law enforcement economic and cultural to stop crises from occurring before they are in front of us in short we re going to attempt to recapture the totality of america s strength starting with diplomacy on his second full day in office president obama went to our state department where he stressed the centrality of diplomacy in our national security the commitment can be seen in his appointments starting with the secretary of state hillary clinton it can be seen in the president s decision to name two of america s most tenacious diplomats senator george mitchell and ambassador richard holbrooke to contend with two of the world s most urgent and vexing and complex challenges the need for a secure just and lasting peace between israel and the palestinians and the imperative of stopping the mountains between afghanistan and pakistan from providing a haven for terrorists in both these efforts america seeks your partnership senator mitchell just completed his first trip to the middle east above all he went to listen in the near term we must consolidate the cease fire in gaza by working with egypt and others to stop smuggling and developing an international relief and reconstruction effort that strengthens the palestinian authority and not hamas neither of these goals can be accomplished without close collaboration among the united states europe and our arab partners then we must lay the foundation for a broader peacemaking effort in the past well look at it this way it s long time passed for us to secure a just two state solution we will work to achieve it and we ll work to defeat extremists who perpetuate the conflict and in building on positive elements of the arab peace initiative put forward by saudi arabia we ll work toward a broader regional peace between israel and its arab neighbors and we ll responsibly draw down our forces that are in iraq in the process the united states will continue to work for a stable afghanistan that s not a haven for terrorists we look forward we look forward to sharing that commitment with the government and the people of afghanistan and pakistan and with all of our allies and partners because a deteriorating situation in the region poses a security threat not just to the united states but i would suggest somewhat presumptuously to every one of you assembled in this room president obama has ordered a strategic review of our policy in afghanistan and pakistan to make sure that our goals are clear and that they are achievable as we undertake that review we seek ideas and input from you and all of our partners and we genuinely seek those ideas i ve already had bilateral meetings i ll have the opportunity to meet with the president of france and others this afternoon i had an opportunity to meet with the chancellor this morning we are sincere in seeking your counsel as we undertake this review there s a lot at stake the result must be a comprehensive strategy for which we all take responsibility that brings together our civilian and military resources that prevents terrorists a safe haven that helps the afghan people develop the capacity to secure their own future but no strategy for afghanistan in my humble opinion can succeed without pakistan we must all strengthen our cooperation with the people and government of pakistan help them stabilize their tribal areas promote economic development and opportunity throughout their country in the case of my government we feel it s urgent to move from a relationship that was transactional to one that is based upon a long term relationship thirdly america will extend a hand to those who as the president said will unclench their fist the united states of america does not believe our administration does not believe in a clash of civilizations there is nothing inevitable about that we do see a shared struggle against extremism and we ll do everything in our collective power to help the forces of tolerance prevail in the muslim world a small and i believe a very small number of violent extremists are beyond the call of reason we will and we must defeat them but hundreds of millions of hearts and minds in the muslim world share the values we hold dearly we must reach them president obama has made clear that he will seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect it was not an accident that he gave his very first interview as president of the united states to al arabiya that was not an accident to meet the challenges of this new century defense and diplomacy are necessary but quite frankly ladies and gentlemen they are not sufficient we also need to wield development and democracy two of the most powerful weapons in our collective arsenals poor societies and dysfunctional states as you know as well as i do can become breeding grounds for extremism conflict and disease non democratic nations frustrate the rightful aspirations of their citizens and fuel resentment our administration has set an ambitious goal to increase foreign assistance to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015 to help eliminate the global educational deficit and to cancel the debt of the world s poorest countries to launch a new green revolution that produces sustainable supplies of food and to advance democracy not through the imposition of force from the outside but by working with moderates in government and civil society to build those institutions that will protect that freedom quite frankly the only thing that will guarantee that freedom we also are determined to build a sustainable future for our planet we are prepared to once again begin to lead by example america will act aggressively against climate change and in pursuit of energy security with like minded nations our administration s economic stimulus package for example includes long term investments in renewable energy and we believe that s merely a down payment the president has directed our environmental protection agency to review how we regulate emissions start a process to raise fuel efficiency appoint a climate envoy and all in his first week in office to demonstrate his commitment as america renews our emphasis on diplomacy development and democracy and preserving our planet we will ask our allies to rethink some of their own approaches including their willingness to use force when all else fails when it comes to radical groups that use terror as a tool radical states who harbor extremists undermine peace and seek or spread weapons of mass destruction and regimes that systematically kill or ethnically cleanse their own people we must stand united and use every means at our disposal to end the threat that they pose none of us can deny or escape the new threats of the 21st century nor can we escape the responsibility to meet them and we are not unmindful in the united states how difficult it is to communicate these notions to our public who don t want to hear much of what needs to be said two months from now the members of the north atlantic treaty organization will gather to celebrate the 60th year of this alliance this alliance has been the cornerstone of our common security since the end of world war ii it has anchored the united states in europe and helped forge a europe whole and free together we made a pact a pact to safeguard the freedom of our people founded on the principles and the documents referring to democracy individual liberty and the rule of law we made a commitment to cooperate to consult to act with resolve when the principles we defended are challenged there is much to celebrate but we there s much more to be done we must recommit our shared security and renew nato so that its success in the 20th century is matched in the 21st century nato s core purpose remains the collective defense of its members but faced with new threats new realities we need a new resolve to meet them and new capabilities to succeed our alliance must be better equipped to help stop the spread of the world s most dangerous weapons to tackle terrorism and cyber security to expand the writ of energy security and to act in and out of area more effectively we continue to develop we will continue to develop missile defense to counter the growing iranian capability provided the technology is proven and it is cost effective we ll do so in consultation with you our nato allies and with russia as we embark on this renewal project as we like to think of it the united states like other allies would warmly welcome and we do warmly welcome the decision by france to fully cooperate in nato structures that s the main reason the president got our speech you were supposed to say nicer things about me when you got the speech mr president that s a joke in a recent discussion with president sarkozy president obama underscored his strong support for france s full participation in nato should france wish it france is a founding member of nato and a major contributor to its operation we would expect france s new responsibilities to reflect the significance of its contributions throughout nato s history and to strengthen the european role within the alliance we also support the further strengthening of european defense an increased role for the european union in preserving peace and security a fundamentally stronger nato eu partnership and a deeper cooperation with countries outside the alliance who share our common goals and principles the united states rejects the notion that nato s gain is russia s loss or that russia s strength is nato s weakness the last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between russia and the members of our alliance it is time to paraphrase president obama it s time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with russia our russian colleagues long ago warned about the rising threat of the taliban and al qaeda in afghanistan today nato and russia can and should cooperate to defeat this common enemy we can and should cooperate to secure loose nuclear weapons and materials to prevent their spread to renew the verification procedures in the start treaty and then go beyond existing treaties to negotiate deeper cuts in both our arsenals the united states and russia have a special obligation to lead the international effort to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world we will not agree with russia on everything for example the united states will not will not recognize abkhazia and south ossetia as independent states we will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence it will remain our view that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances but the united states and russia can disagree and still work together where our interests coincide and they coincide in many places this conference started in the shadow of the cold war now it takes place in a new century with new threats as one great poet an irish poet once wrote about another circumstance he said all is changed changed utterly a terrible beauty has been born well all changed changed utterly and we must change too while remaining true to the principles upon which this alliance was founded and we must have the common courage and commitment of those who came before us to work together to build together to stand together in sharing ideals and searching for partners in a more complex world america and europeans still look to one another before they look to anyone else our partnership has benefitted us all it s time it s time to renew it and president obama and i look forward to doing just that thank you for your indulgence dem joebiden9 6 10 joe_biden hello my name is joe biden i work for barack obama now i know no one in kenya is familiar with barack obama but i can tell you although for years as a united states senator i had i was on a committee called the foreign relations committee the chairman and did a lot of work relating to africa i hear about kenya all the time from barack obama he sends his love to you not just your love to him and wangari it s an honor to be with you i am very accustomed these days to hanging out with nobel laureates i work for one i get to meet one here our secretary of energy is one i am feeling very very insufficient not having a nobel peace prize but it s an honor to be with you it genuinely is thank you so much you are one of the great treasures not only of your country and of the world but you re the embodiment in my view of what i m going to talk about today that is the human capital that this great country has to offer and you are you are one of the great pieces of that capital it s an honor again to be with you now where is professor freida brown the vice chancellor of united states international freida professor i want you all to know we have caused this beautiful woman a lot of concern she has been the main person in making sure that my ability to speak here was made possible i want to personally thank you for all the cooperation and all you do helping organize us at a speech is a very difficult thing to do and i thank you very much professor ladies and gentlemen students leaders and friends i can t tell you how much i appreciate being invited to speak before you all today and i thank you for the warm welcome and as i said i bring greetings and love from president obama i will relay to him that you said send him you re going to send him love but i want to reiterate again he sends his he is committed he is concerned and he is deeply involved in the formation of our policy and something that and he looks forward to the day that he will be able to come and visit as president of the united states of america i m sure there may not be i doubt whether there s enough room in the country to house everyone who wants to see him when he comes but he is anxious to come it s great to be in your beautiful country and it s great to be in front of all of you i come here as a representative of the united states to say one thing one primary message the united states stands with you stands with you on your journey to a secure free democratic and prosperous kenya it s a journey nearly 50 years in the making on december 12 1963 50 000 kenyans filled the stadium in nairobi and 200 000 200 000 more i can remember as a college student watching 200 000 more pack the hillsides around the stadium an entire nation s eyes watched as at the stroke of midnight the new kenyan flag was unfurled for the first time making kenya the 34th independent state in africa earlier that week american president lyndon baines johnson sent a congratulatory letter to prime minister kenyatta welcoming kenya to the family of nations and comparing kenya s journey toward independence with that of america s and he said and i quote as our own freedom for all our citizens was proclaimed to the world by our declaration of independence so kenya s freedom begins with her declaration of independence today some 50 years later the promise of that day still pulses through this country on the bustling streets of nairobi from up to mount kenya from the coastal shores of mombasa to the plains of the maasai mara once the wealth of a nation was defined by the expanse of its land the size of its population or the strength of its army the abundance of its natural resources but now we know and you know that the true wealth of a nation is found in its human capital in the skill ingenuity and determination of its people and by that measure kenya kenya is a very wealthy nation indeed kenya is a rich nation you have no oil you have no precious minerals but you have built the largest non oil non mineral based economy in sub saharan africa you have become you have become the hub for the transportation for the goods and people that are flow through east africa and you are the financial capital of east africa your diplomats have helped solve some of africa s most intractable problems your military is small in number but large in stature helping to bring stability to sierra leone to east timor you ve produced world renowned scientists geneticists environmentalists writers and a nobel prize winner at the heart of this success is a conviction that education education has the potential to transform a nation seven public universities over 20 private ones among the most of any on the continent of africa a determination to make primary and secondary education available to all although there s a long way to go americans know first hand your commitment to education thousands of our citizens have studied in kenya and kenyans have long been among the largest groups of african students at american universities and today kenyans are the largest group of african students at american universities and that tradition goes back before your independence one of the earliest pioneers was a fellow named barack obama sr the father of a man who is now the president of the united states of america kenya and kenyans have much to be proud of but the full force of your potential as all of you young students know has yet to be released you face daunting obstacles kenya is situated in a very tough neighborhood somalia s decades of instability have generated human tragedy and global threats we recognize the burden it s placed on somalia s neighbors and the terrible human cost that the somali people have borne and i want to thank i want to thank kenya for hosting somali refugees who have come looking for safety and for prosecuting pirates not just in somali waters but increasingly in the vast swathes of east african waters next january the referendum on the future of southern sudan envisioned by the comprehensive peace agreement will occur and it must be credible and it must be peaceful sudan is hurtling toward a monumental decision that demands urgent international attention and preparation and far too many of the people in sudan s darfur region continue to live with unacceptable insecurity these regional issues are all on your doorstep they are felt in your communities they are present real challenges that we must work on together in partnership to address the global financial crisis generated through no fault of kenya s dampened your economy slowing demand for kenyan goods abroad and lessened the flow of tourists eager to see kenya s natural beauty global climate change is not a phenomenon of kenya s making but its consequences affect your forests your harvests and your way of life kenya feels the effects of these problems and should because of your wealth of human capital be a part of a global solution a strong african voice on the international stage but that voice has been muted by internal problems problems that have held you back from making an even greater contribution too many of your resources have been lost to corruption and not a single high level official has ever been held accountable for these crimes too many of your institutions have lost the people s confidence and too many times kenya has been divided against itself torn apart by ethnic tensions manipulated by leaders who place their own interests above the interests of their country too many young people have found nothing but dead ends as they seek opportunity and the path to a better future the crisis that gripped kenya in the wake of the 2007 elections revealed just how dangerous these forces can be they are dangerous but they are not immovable change is within your grasp and that change will be realized when government is transparent accountable and participatory when corrupt officials are called to account in a court of law instead of meeting only the indifferent shrug of impunity when political power changes hands peacefully but the will of the voters and those who did not prevail decide and decide that their efforts should be moved to constructive opposition when kenyans have confidence that the courts and the police are honest and are committed solely to the pursuit of justice when the members of the political leadership represent a range a wide range of viewpoints reflecting and responding to the needs of kenyans everywhere your coalition government has agreed to a reform agenda that would bring about the fundamental change that kenyans are seeking if implemented fully corrupt officials will be finally held accountable the judiciary and the police force will place the pursuit of justice above the pursuit of personal gain land rights and ownership will be governed by the rule of law not by the whims of the powerful kenyan women and girls the most untapped resource of this nation and almost every nation in the world will be ever better positioned to contribute to their communities and their country at every level and a new constitution will put in place a framework to accelerate those reforms including reducing executive power by building up the checks and balances of your parliament and your judiciary folks in my experience of 36 years on the world stage stability ultimately rests on the separation of powers no power no branch of government should go unchecked including presidential power the truth is better governance is not just an end in itself it is your path to a lasting democratic stability and your ultimate stability and i might add presumptuous of me as an outsider to say it s the best route to economic prosperity sparking job creation opening up opportunity and improving the way of life for kenyans everywhere as i said earlier the real strength of kenya is your human capital and you have so much potential with two thirds of your citizens under the age of 25 two thirds under the age of 25 that should be an incredible sense and source of strength that should be mined that should be nurtured but it requires creative and productive outlets for the energy and enthusiasm of the youth in your country putting in place a new constitution and strengthening your institutions and the rule of law will not only unleash the energy of the youth deepen the roots of your democracy and ultimately guarantee your security it will also further open the door to major american development programs like the millennium challenge there s so much more we could do and want to do in partnership with you it could provide millions of dollars in grant assistance to kenya that you would know how to use well to build this great nation reform will also encourage and i have i have been all over the world in my career i promise you foreign investment depends upon stability transparency the rule of law and the crackdown on corruption so if you make these changes i promise you new foreign private investment will come in like you ve never seen and you will have a reinvigorated tourism industry that will exceed the billion dollars it was before the economic crisis as i told your president and prime minister who i met with jointly yesterday americans i can only speak for america americans want to do business here you have everything that they would want to cooperate and participate here they want to travel here and if you provide the right climate they will come and not only they but the rest of the world will come you are the keystone to east africa literally not figuratively you are the keystone fostering the kind of change that is at hand is not up to the political elites it s up to you it s up to the kenyan people it s up to each one of you as president obama said africa s future is up to africans we can t dictate it nor should we but you can you can and it s virtually unlimited don t let others determine for you don t let others determine for kenya what kenyans think determine for yourselves the kenya you actually need democracies are most effective when people not only vote for them but embrace their responsibilities under a democratic system when they commit to be active citizens aware citizens when they participate when they vote today kenya is having a great national debate about a new constitution that debate will culminate in a referendum this august the cooperation of the president and prime minister in support of the constitutional review process is extremely encouraging but the ultimate responsibility the real power does not rest with them it rests with you it rests with the people of kenya by your participation by your vote as cynical as you may have become about the process by your participation by your vote you have before you a singular opportunity to strengthen kenya s democratic institutions none like since the evening at midnight that that flag was unfurled an opportunity to open up to opportunity to give a new generation new power to help kenya realize its immense potential the united states strongly supports the process of constitutional reform including providing assistance for voter registration and civic education so that kenyans are able to familiarize themselves with the draft constitution your parliament passed and allow you to make informed decisions but let me repeat this is your decision your decision alone and the people of kenya must make this choice a choice for kenya by kenyans and as you prepare to write a new history for your nation resist those who try to divide you based on ethnicity or religion or region and above all fear is a tool as old as mankind and it s been used with great effect in this country in the past for too long for too long opportunistic politicians have created an all or nothing system your group is either in or you re out and the resources of the state were treated as spoils for the winner rather than the rightful birthright of the people of kenya when this toxic brand of politics is taken to its logical extreme in kenya s post election violence the results i think shocked even all of you but it clearly shocked the world now kenyans must make a deliberate and difficult choice to reject the divisive politics to reconcile their communities to acknowledge the injustice of the past so you do not harbor deep seated resentment in the future this resolve requires a deep inner strength strength you can and should derive from your diversity turn kenya s youth into a source of innovation and vision dare to reach for transformational change the kind of change that might come around only once in your lifetime i especially call on the young people the backbone of this country the next generation of kenyan leaders your energy is contagious and your enthusiasm is boundless your ideas and your voice can help create a peaceful stable democratic and economically prosperous kenya everyone here wants to see and quite frankly we want to see and you have a steadfast supporter in the united states the united states of america s relationship with kenya is among the most important on the continent for us one that has been strong and uninterrupted since your independence thousands of american peace corps volunteers have taught in your schools and villages hundreds of american businessmen have worked in american companies that have built their regional headquarters in nairobi or mombasa and the u s government has established its largest embassy in sub saharan africa in your capital in crisis and in celebration we have forged a strong and enduring political and economic relationship we have worked together as partners and friends to tackle some of the most difficult problems in the region but true friendship and i hope you will forgive me but true friendship demands honesty so if our words are sometimes blunt it s because our faith in the possibilities of kenya are unlimited now don t get me wrong i know from my personal experience change is never easy and change in circumstances like yours is extremely difficult fundamental change is never easy but i also know from personal experience that it s possible i ve seen it happen around the world as a young senator i ve stood in the capitals of sarajevo and pristina in the balkans from the balkans to the middle east to eastern europe i have seen dark paths transform through the will of the people to bring about brighter futures in the 1990s i stood in sarajevo bosnia and in pristina kosovo and witnessed the god awful carnage and the blood running in the rivers the ethnic cleansing that we thought we d never see again in europe i saw the carnage and the hate i sat in refugee centers i sat in homes and heard about how neighbors who had been friends for years literally hacked one another to death in their backyards once slobodan milosevic s ugly ugly violence took hold the hate it seemed to know no bounds and it seemed like it would never end but the people of those countries they made a choice they ultimately rejected violence they drew a line on the past and today they are looking toward a future and they ve given up their own vile criminals to the international courts which is part of the reconciliation that was needed acknowledging their individual responsibilities it was a choice that not only is changing their future but is changing the future of that entire portion of europe and just one year ago i was in romania celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism and the wall and i said then now we think of central europe when we think of central europe we don t think of what we can do for you but what we can do with you my prayer is that very soon after you make these momentous changes that are needed we ll be talking about not what we can do for you but what we can do with you because you have begun to realize the great potential you possess the change is within your reach the same change that occurred in other parts of the world including iraq can change here ladies and gentlemen nowhere is it written that the winds of change cannot blow through africa nowhere is that written on december 12 1963 a new day dawned on kenya one filled with promise for even better days ahead in the coming days and months you have to the chance to build on that promise in a way you haven t had for over three decades to fulfill the dreams of everyone who watched that flag unfurl in that stadium 47 years ago and i want to close with some words that president johnson used to end his letter to prime minister kenyatta in 1963 here s what he said he said may the responsibilities of freedom wake the best that is in you and may its benefits be known by generations yet unborn well i would say the same thing to you today asante sana may god bless you may god bless the kenyan people and may god bless america thank you very much don t let your country down thank you dem mobama1 3 10 michelle_obama thank you thanks so much everyone please sit thank you it is such a pleasure to be here with all of you thanks so much for that warm welcome and i also want to thank dora for that kind introduction and for your outstanding leadership of the school nutrition association and i want to thank all of you here today for the terrific work that you re doing every day all across this country and i know that you always don t get a lot of credit and recognition for what you do and you deserve it you know there are not a lot of newspaper headlines about how the meals you serve are the only food that many kids may get all day long people on tv don t talk much about how kids who participate in the school meal program perform better in class and they miss fewer days of school and a lot of folks still don t understand how the cafeteria is actually one of the most important classrooms in the entire school because what you all know is that our kids don t stop learning at lunchtime every day with the food you serve you re teaching them these critical lessons about nutrition and healthy eating you re shaping their habits and their preferences and you re affecting the choices that they re going to make for the rest of their lives so now just multiply that by the 31 million kids in the school meal program and it s clear that all of you don t just shape the future of individual students you help to shape the future of this country and that s been the case since the national school lunch program was first started by president truman after world war ii back when one of the most common disqualifiers for military service was malnourishment if you can believe that and that s why president johnson later in 1966 expanded the program to include school breakfasts and meals at preschools because as he put it he said that good nutrition is essential to good learning so whether it s national security education or child hunger for decades we ve looked to you for help in achieving our most urgent national priorities and that s really why i m here today because once again today we re going to need your help with a crisis that we face in our own time and that s the epidemic of childhood obesity in america today and you all know the statistics how nearly one in three kids in this country is overweight or obese and you all see the impact on the kids that you work with you see firsthand kids who are struggling to keep up with their classmates or worse yet they re stuck on the sidelines because they can t participate you see how kids are teased or bullied you see kids who physically don t feel good and they don t feel good about themselves you see kids who are at higher risk of conditions like diabetes and cancer and heart disease conditions that cost billions of dollars a year to treat and by the way today one of the most common disqualifiers for military service is actually obesity now those of you who ve been in this business a while you know that this wasn t always the case things weren t always this way i know you may remember a time when kids in your schools led lives that kept most of them at a healthy weight they walked to and from school they ran around during recess and gym class and they played outside for hours after school many could kids ate home cooked meals and many had actually seen fruits and vegetables before you served them to them so they didn t look at them like foreign objects when they got them at school fast food soda and candy were special treats they weren t part of every meal and at lunchtime in many schools kids just had two choices either what you served them or what their mom or dad packed at home whether they liked it or not but over the past few decades we ve seen these healthy habits falling away replaced by habits of convenience and necessity you know parents want to buy healthy food for their kids but they re sometimes tight on money and can t afford it or they re tight on time because they re juggling extra jobs extra shifts and they just can t swing those home cooked meals anymore those walks to school have been replaced with buses or car rides and as you know gym class and school sports have been cut in so many places replaced by afternoons with the tv video games and the internet and those two reasonably healthy choices at lunchtime they ve become dozens of choices some healthy and some not that occurs as schools struggle to get the revenue that they need from fast food to vending machines packed with chips and candy to a la carte lines we tempt our kids with all kinds of unhealthy choices every day and it s no surprise that they don t always pick the healthy ones and by now i think it s clear that between the pressures of today s economy and the breakneck pace of modern life the well being of our kids has too often gotten lost in the shuffle but we have to be honest our kids didn t do this to themselves you see our kids don t decide what to serve or what is sold at lunch our kids don t decide whether there s time for recess and gym they don t decide whether they ll learn about healthy eating or nutrition at school they don t make these decisions we set those priorities we make those decisions and even if it doesn t always feel like it we are the ones in charge but that s the good news because if we make the decisions then we can decide to solve this problem and that s precisely what many of you are already doing right now in schools all across this country anji baumann the child nutrition director for gooding idaho she has local farmers grow fresh fruits and vegetables specifically for her school district and i hear her staff makes many foods from scratch including spaghetti and baked goods in fact they even came up with a recipe that uses pureed beans as a substitute for some of the oil in chocolate cake and it was so tasty that none of the students even noticed in binghamton new york i hear they held a health fair to celebrate when six of the city s seven elementary schools reached gold status in the healthier us school challenge wonderful and they celebrated with kids proudly displaying the school their nutrition projects and the whole community got involved the local hospital boys and girls clubs the usda office and others they all sponsored booths with information on healthy living and in jackson mississippi thanks to the encouragement of the executive director of food services mary hill the superintendent now requires elementary school teachers to eat meals with their students and as you can imagine with teachers sitting at the table both encouraging kids to eat fruits and vegetables and eating them themselves fruit and vegetable consumption has gone up there and i m going to be visiting jackson on wednesday and i am looking forward i m looking forward to seeing mary and hearing more about what she s doing and i m hoping to come to your areas too every day in communities across this country you all are proving that if we re creative and resourceful if we meet this challenge with determination and commitment then we can take back control and we can turn back the tide and we can give our kids the lives that we know they deserve that s why earlier this month we launched let s move it s a nationwide campaign to help our kids lead active healthy lives right from the beginning and we ve issued a call to action we are telling people let s get going let s move to help families and communities make healthier decisions uh oh not meaning to call you out or anything but leave it to the press they re just we have to move to help parents make healthier choices for their kids and we have to move to get the community together governors mayors doctors nurses everyone to tackle this challenge once and for all and we have to move let s move to rally this country around a single ambitious goal and that is to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that kids born today reach adulthood at a healthy weight and we ve already created the first ever government wide task force on childhood obesity it s composed of cabinet secretaries and senior administration officials and over the next 90 days they re working fast and furious they re going to review every government program relating to child nutrition and fitness and they ll develop a national action plan to not just maximize those resources but make recommendations that the public and private sectors can take to move this ahead they ll also lay out concrete benchmarks to measure our success and to hold us all accountable for meeting our goal but we are not going to wait for 90 days to get to work here we ve already gotten started on a series of wonderful initiatives to achieve our goal the first let s move to offer parents the tools and information they need to make healthy choices for their kids you know so many parents they want to do the right thing but they re bombarded with all this conflicting information and they don t know who or what to believe or where to start so we ve started a web site letsmove gov that s going to provide helpful tips and step by step strategies for parents in addition we re working with our doctors encouraging pediatricians and family doctors to screen kids for obesity and actually work with parents to write out a prescription for the steps they can take to address the problem we re also working with the fda and the food industry to make our food labels more customer friendly so parents won t have to spend hours squinting at words that they can t pronounce to figure out whether the foods that they re buying are healthy or not and that brings me to the second part of this initiative let s move to ensure that all our families actually have access to the foods the healthy foods that they need in their own communities because right now 23 5 million americans including 6 5 million children live in what we call food deserts and these are areas without access to a supermarket and as a result what happens in those communities is that families wind up buying their groceries at a local gas station or a convenience store places that offer few if any healthy options so we ve set an ambitious goal in this area to eliminate food deserts in america within seven years and to achieve this goal we ve created a healthy food financing initiative that s going to invest 400 million a year and leverage hundreds of millions more from the private sector to bring grocery stores to underserved areas and to help places like convenience stores carry healthier food options but we know that healthy eating is only half the battle experts recommend at least 60 minutes of daily activity but we all know that many kids don t even come close to that so let s move and i say that and mean that literally we have to move to find new ways for our kids to be physically active and that s the third piece of this initiative our work here includes expanding and modernizing the president s physical fitness challenge and we ve recruited professional athletes from dozens of different sports leagues like the nfl major league baseball the wnba and many many more and they re going to work with us to encourage kids to get and stay active but here s the thing we can help kids eat better at home and we can help them be more active both in and out of school but the fact remains that kids who participate in school meal programs get roughly half of their calories each day at school so that means that all of you have as much influence on what our kids eat each day as their parents do and think about that for a minute this is an extraordinary responsibility but it s also an opportunity and it s why one of the single most important things we can do to fight childhood obesity is to make those meals at school as healthy and nutritious as possible so let s move to help all of you get healthier food into our school that s the fourth and final part of the initiative and we re going to start by working to dramatically increase the number of schools that meet the healthier us school challenge those are schools that provide healthy meals offer physical education and nutrition education and ensure that children receive the free and reduced price meals that they re eligible for these schools that meet the standard they are the gold standard they re the model of what we want for every school in america now i know that it s not going to be easy to meet this challenge because i know the kind of constraints that all of you are under in this era of budget cuts when you re constantly pushed to do more with less and i think that if the average person if you asked the average person to do what you have to do every day and that is to prepare a meal for hundreds of hungry kids with just 2 68 a child with only 1 00 to 1 25 of that money going to the food itself they would look at you like you were crazy that s sad but that s less than what many folks spend on a cup of coffee in the morning so we re going to have to do everything we can to help you right now we re hard at work updating and strengthening the child nutrition act to give you more of the resources that you need to do your jobs and secretary vilsack the secretary of agriculture is taking the lead he s doing a wonderful job and we ve proposed a historic new investment of an additional 10 billion over the next 10 years and i m pleased that just last week 66 retired generals admirals and other senior military leaders including two former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff sent a letter to congress in support of these efforts and that s amazing our goals here are very simple we want to get rid of the unnecessary paperwork that keeps so many eligible kids from participating in the school meal programs and if we can do that we can increase enrollment in the school breakfast program so that we can serve an additional 1 million kids in the first five years alone but we also want to improve the quality of food in our schools increasing reimbursements so that you can add more fruits and vegetables and whole grains and decrease sugar fat and salt we also want to get healthier food into those vending machines too which by the way has actually meant increased revenues for schools in kentucky and maine and elsewhere we also want to help you purchase the equipment that you need so that you can start phasing out those fryers and phasing in new ovens and salad bars and serving lines and we want you all to have better training and professional development opportunities so that you know all of the latest research and the best techniques now all of this is going to help but while we can pass better legislation and invest more money at the end of the day when it comes to making a school a healthy school you all know that you re where the rubber meets the road because you know better than anyone what our kids will eat and what they ll throw away you know what it takes to make them finally if even only reluctantly try something new and the training and mentoring that you provide the contracts you negotiate the decisions that you make about what to serve that s what really matters here that s what really makes the difference so let me tell you i am just thrilled that you all have agreed to work with us to meet the goals of let s move because we re going to need everything that you ve got we re going to need your best initiatives we re going to need your ideas both big and small because in fact as you know it s often the small things that make the difference here for example switching from 2 percent to 1 percent milk that could mean 20 fewer calories switching from fruit served in heavy syrup to fruit served in light syrup or juice could mean another 13 calories substituting low fat or non fat salad dressing could be nearly 50 more calories and little changes that cut 20 calories here 30 calories there all of that can add up to the hundreds of calories a week for kids and over the course of a year for some kids that can mean the difference between being at a healthy weight or not but fighting childhood obesity isn t just about the food you serve in your lunchrooms it s about the leadership you show in your schools and in your communities it s about your work as advocates and educators in your own right it could mean reaching out to parents posting school menus online or providing family sized recipes so that they can try the foods you serve at home it could mean working with kids having them do taste tests or forming a student nutrition group to advise you on what to do for them it could mean working with teachers and giving them healthy eating tips that they can share with their students or educating administrators about the value of programs like the healthier us schools program and it always means as you know reaching out to the community at large partnering with local farmers and food suppliers to get better food and better deals speaking to community groups like the pta or the chamber of commerce about the work that you re doing and what they can do to help you but let s be clear this isn t your responsibility alone we all have a role to play here and the only way we re going to solve this problem is by working together because you all can give our kids the healthiest school meals imaginable but if there s no supermarket in their community and they re eating unhealthy food at home then they still won t have a healthy diet and we can build all the shiny new supermarkets on every block in this country but if parents don t have the information they need they ll still struggle to make healthy choices for their kids and then if kids aren t active then no matter how well we feed them they still won t be leading healthy lives that s why i ve met with so many people over the course of the past few weeks with mayors and governors asking them to do their part to build healthier cities and states that s why i ve met with parents asking them to do their part to make healthier choices for their families that s why i ll be meeting with the food manufacturers in the grocery manufacturers association calling on them to offer healthier options and that s why we need more folks from the private sector to step up from school food suppliers improving the quality of their food to retailers understanding that what s good for kids and families can actually be good business too and that s why i m here with all of you because you all have a vitally important role to play in this effort see i think president truman put it best i ve said this before nearly 65 years ago in a statement to the first national conference of state school lunch officials that read and this is a quote he said to them to you who carry out the program locally falls the crucial job of seeing to it that we build well for the future that we build well for the future and in the end that s what this is all about ensuring that we build well for the future ensuring that our kids are ready to learn that they re ready to serve their country that they re ready to make healthy decisions for the rest of their lives it s about ensuring that our kids have the energy and the endurance to succeed in school to pursue the careers of their dream and believe it or not to keep up with their own kids if they re blessed and to live to see their grandkids grow up and if they re lucky maybe even their great grandkids too that s why we re doing this so let s act let s move and let s do everything that we can to give our kids the future that we want for them and we know they deserve so i thank you all for your work and for your continued success we are so very proud of you thank you all thanks so much dem mobama1 6 10a michelle_obama thank you thank you so much woohoo oh my goodness i am just delighted to be here this is beautiful and you notice kids how quiet it can be outside we re outside i live in the city it is never this quiet outside it is beautiful this is just a perfect place for the launch of this new initiative but let me begin by thanking doing my thank you first to senator reid not just for his kind introduction but all of the wonderful work he s done to move this country forward he s just been a tremendous asset not just to my husband but to the country and to all of you kids you know everybody hears about what the president does but presidents can t do anything if they don t have a good team and senator reid is a member of that good team so we re just grateful to have him onboard and i have to thank representative titus for her tireless advocacy for the people of nevada in congress she s a member of the team and is doing a terrific job assistant secretary suh for everything that she s doing along with the folks in her agency to really preserve and protect places like this red rock canyon here in nevada and all across the country i also want to thank nevada state nevada state controller kim wallin and state senate majority leader steven horsford as well for their leadership where are they where are you there you are thank you all thank you for being here thank you for your support and your work and i want to particularly acknowledge the young people in the back because we re really here for you guys today all of this is for you just like all these parks are for you today we re here for you and we re going to be doing a little fun stuff together in a little bit a little hiking a little something i ve got cold so you have to bear with me today and i hear we re going to learn a little something about how to do a rock scramble i don t know what that is sounds scary but i m looking forward to it and then all of them are going to be sworn in as official let s move outside junior rangers which i think is pretty exciting so you guys in the back hold the great honor of being the first to launch this program all across the country yes we are here because of you we want every child in this country to have opportunities like this to get outdoors and to get fit and to lead active lives right from the beginning and you guys are lucky to have access to places like these and not every kid does experts as others have said recommend that kids get 60 minutes of physical activity every day to stay healthy that s 60 minutes an hour every day and while today that may seem like a lot if adults here can just think back to when we were growing up back then an hour of just vigorous activity was nothing because we didn t call it activity it wasn t required we called it play we had recess we had gym class at school and when we got home in the afternoons our parents didn t want to be bothered with us so they kicked us outside in fact they told us not to come back inside so we could run around for another hour before dinner they were really just trying to make us sleepy but all of that was really good for us but today at a time of a lot of belt tightening and budget cuts unfortunately it s gym class and recess and after school sports that often are the first things to go and too many of our kids end up spending way too much time inside in front of the tv playing video games can i get do you hear from the parents it s too much it s too much in fact a study just released by the centers for disease control found that and this is amazing only 17 percent of high school students reported meeting the recommended hour a day requirement that s only 17 percent of high school students in our country today so it shouldn t come as a surprise to us that today nearly one third of our children in this country are overweight or obese you know we re just not giving them the chance and that s one in three and that s a lot that s way too many it s more than what it was when all of us were growing up things just weren t like that that means that these kids are at greater risk for obesity related conditions like heart disease and diabetes and cancer i mean this is the fate that we re handing over to our kids and it s not just a health crisis as senator reid said it s an economic crisis we are spending nearly 150 billion a year to treat obesity related illnesses and if we don t act now if these kids now grow up to be adults then that number is just going to continue to go up and none of us wants that kind of future for our kids we don t and we definitely don t want that kind of future for our country so instead of just talking about the problem which we a lot of we can do a lot of talking and worrying and wringing our hands we really need to get moving and that s why about a year or so ago i m losing track of time because we ve been doing this but we launched let s move which is the big nationwide campaign with the single goal of ending childhood obesity in a generation so that kids born today would grow up at a healthy weight it sounds so simple but this goal has to be generational and it has to be big and we ve spent the last year or so working on a number of different fronts we need to get more information to parents so that they can make the right choices for their kids they have to have the information they have to have access to affordable healthy foods we have to work on that we have to work closely with our schools to make sure that there are healthy choices in the classroom because many of our kids are getting most of their calories at school which is why we need to get the child nutrition reauthorization bill passed because that piece of legislation is going to go a long way to changing and improving the quality of foods in our that our kids are getting at school but more importantly and something that we focused on a lot now that it s summer time is that we need to substantially increase the amount of physical activity that our kids are getting not just in school but outside of school as well and that s why i am very excited about the launch of this program let s move outside very clever right let s move outside i love it and it s a collaborative effort with the bureau of land management with national park service forest service fish and wildlife service and others and as you ve heard we just want to encourage kids to use the resources that are available to them i mean that s part of the point of this is that activity doesn t have to cost a thing we have access in this country to some of the greatest parks and recreation facilities in the country and it s all free and as rhea said it s all yours guys this stuff belongs to you and my family and i we ve tried to go every summer to some of the parks we went to yellowstone we went to asheville we did some hiking and i think i m hoping if they treat us right they ll let us go somewhere else this summer but you never know and it s really a lot of fun and it s not just a great way to get exercise it s also a phenomenal way to come together as a family and spend some time together without spending a whole lot of money so in addition to this part of this program we re upgrading the junior ranger program because there s always been junior rangers i ve met several of them all over the country but we re upgrading it to encourage more of our kids to be more physically active our wildlife refuges and conservation areas our national parks and forests and historic sites these are ours and we have to make use of them and our agencies have just been phenomenal rallying around to make this possible i want to thank everyone particularly our not so junior rangers who have played a really important part and my kids have had direct experience with the grown up rangers they are knowledgeable many of them are doing this as their second or third career their stories are phenomenal in so many ways these are people who love this country they love these parks they want to make sure that our kids learn and they pass on these traditions and we re grateful for all of you because we couldn t do this on the ground without your enthusiasm and your knowledge so i want us to give our not so junior rangers a hand as well but in the end our overall goal for let s move outside is to really get our kids active so that they make it a habit of moving around and seeing the activity they need not as a chore but as a fun way to explore our country and to do some things they haven t done so with that i ll stop talking because this program is called let s move right so we need to get moving all right you guys ready you ready to scramble up a rock all right thank you guys thanks so much dem mobama1 6 10b michelle_obama thank you thank you all so much thank you that s so sweet of you all please thank you so much first let me begin by apologizing because i have a cold that i caught from this wonderful husband of mine so forgive my voice and my dryness and all that good stuff and when i come around to shake hands there will be somebody following with purell because you all have a lot of work to do and we can t afford for any of you to be sick but i am so thrilled to be here with all of you today it is an honor to be a part of this summit and to be with so many wonderful women who are doing such amazing things here in nevada and across the country so i am thrilled and it s really pretty nice here too i want to start by thanking a few people first of all attorney general frankie sue del papa as well as state treasurer kate marshall and your speaker of the assembly barbara buckley i want to thank them for their service for their dedication to the people of this state they are terrific i got a chance to see them in the back and of course i have to thank one of my favorite people in the world senator reid that was such a kind introduction and so generous and all i can say is the same thing to him the same thing over the years he has been a tireless advocate on behalf of women from helping pass health care reform to supporting legislation to help prevent domestic violence to helping women get equal pay for equal work this state is and this country is lucky to have harry reid and landra working on our behalf in washington and i want to thank him for everything both of them for their friendship for their hard work for their kindness and let s give him one more round of applause so i have to tell you as much as i love living in washington it is always nice to get out of town every once in a while especially when that means spending time with so many terrific women this summit is about bringing a diverse group of women together from different cities and different towns different generations and backgrounds and walks of life to talk about the issues that impact our lives as women and as americans and i think it s especially fitting that we re here in nevada a state that has always been home to so many strong pioneering women as you all know this state started out as a pretty forbidding place to live it was part of the vast unexplored west a land of sweeping deserts and dense wilderness and mountains so high that they ll just take your breath away the nearest town was sometimes hundreds of miles away but those who were brave enough to venture out here often had to struggle just to survive many of these women worked as prospectors and teachers and nurses and entrepreneurs they ran cattle ranches and they worked long days in the mines and they started their own businesses braving coyotes and rattlesnakes along the way they were fiercely independent many of them with a wonderful stubborn streak a mile wide and a strong sense of their place in the world in fact due to their tireless activism and leadership these women here in nevada gained themselves the right to vote in 1914 a full six years before the 19th amendment was passed and that s pretty incredible so today all of you are really heirs to that legacy of those tough trailblazing visionary women leaders because you know the same thing that they knew that in the end the success of our communities of our country depends on the success of our women now obviously the challenges that we face today are a little different from the ones nevadans faced 150 years ago and i m pretty sure none of you had to deal with an angry rattlesnake on your way here but the maybe you did but the problems are no less daunting today and no less important for the success of our nation you know that they re issues that touch the lives of every single american and health care is a perfect example today as you all know women play a unique and increasingly significant role when it comes to keeping our families healthy eight in 10 mothers report that they re the ones responsible for choosing their children s doctors taking them to the appointments managing follow up care and many women are making the same decisions for their spouses and more than 10 percent of women in this country are currently taking care of a sick or elderly relative often a parent and making critical health care decisions for them as well but women aren t just disproportionately affected because of the role we play in our family we re also affected because the jobs we do are more likely to be part time or in small businesses jobs that are less likely provide health insurance women are more likely to be denied coverage because of so called preexisting conditions like having a c section or a previous pregnancy in some cases insurance plans don t cover basis women s health services like maternity care or preventative care for mammograms and pap smears and a recent study showed that 25 year old women are charged up to 84 percent more than 25 year old men for the same coverage and at age 40 it s 40 percent more for the exact same coverage now we know this is unacceptable it is unacceptable for women it s unacceptable for families and it is unacceptable for our country and that s part of the reason why so many people fought so hard to pass health reform this year under the new law starting this year insurance companies will never again be allowed to deny children coverage because of preexisting conditions and in the coming years no one with a preexisting condition will be banned from coverage insurance companies won t be able to drop your coverage when you get sick deny you the care you need because you ve reached your annual or lifetime limit or charge you more because you re a woman and soon if you don t have insurance or are looking for a more affordable option you ll be able to compare prices and purchase coverage through an insurance exchange which is the same way members of congress will get their insurance so we ve done some great things but as much progress as we ve made health care is really only one of the issues affecting women in this country which brings us to a second challenge that we face and that s securing an equal place in today s economy right now women make up nearly half of our workforce and mothers are the primary or co breadwinners in nearly two thirds of american families the majority of our students in our colleges are female so we play an increasingly important role in setting the family s budget keeping food on the table and across the country women are breaking barriers in every field from science and business to politics and the armed forces so there s no question that we have come a long way but the fact remains that women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn and only 3 percent of fortune 500 ceos are female and inequality as many of you know still exists in small and very stubborn ways in the lives of too many women that s why the first bill that my husband signed into law after taking office was the lilly ledbetter fair pay act as he put it he said here in america there are no second class citizens in our workplaces and there is no reason why women shouldn t get equal pay for equal work but as you all know the success of women in the workplace isn t just about a paycheck it s also about being able to juggle the needs of our families with the demands of our jobs you all know that constant struggle to meet our responsibilities both as employees and breadwinners and as mothers and daughters and wives and everything else we do and as the mother of two beautiful girls and they re not little any more they re getting big malia is here so don t be shocked it s still her this is an issue that is particularly close to my heart as i know it is for so many of you now as i ve said before in our current life in the white house we are incredibly blessed we have more resources and support than i could have ever imagined that i would have including a grandmother who lives upstairs and let me tell you that is priceless but the truth is we didn t always live in the white house and for many years before coming to washington i was a working mom doing my best to juggle soccer and ballet with meetings and conference calls and when i was at work i was feeling like i was shortchanging my kids and when i was with my girls i worried that i was falling behind at work and there was just a lot of stress and a lot of guilt and i was one of the lucky ones i had understanding bosses and accommodating jobs in fact i remember being on maternity leave with sasha she was about four months old and i was still trying to figure out my next career move and i got a call to do an interview for a senior position at the university of chicago hospitals so i frantically called every babysitter i knew and none of them were available so guess what i did i packed her up still nursing put her in the stroller and i took her with me and i prayed that she wouldn t need to do anything while we were there and that would automatically disqualify me but fortunately she slept through the entire interview and it was fortunate because the man i was interviewing with he and his wife had just had a baby so he knew what i was going through and i ended up getting the job but i know most folks are nowhere near as lucky as i was especially in this economy so many people struggle every day to find affordable childcare or to take time off to care for a child or an aging parent often they have to scramble to figure out that backup plan when the usual arrangements fall through and that is the most destabilizing thing that can happen in the course of your day our military families have it even tougher than most with women serving in uniform themselves or struggling to provide a stable home while facing long deployments and loved ones who are stationed in harm s way to me this reflects a larger problem that for too long policies that help people balance work and family responsibilities have been viewed as niceties for women rather than as a necessity that can benefit all of us men and women there is still this perception out there that employees who want more flexible schedules so that they can pick up a child after school or take care of an elderly parent are somehow less committed and that businesses who accommodate them are destined to be less profitable but we all know that that s simply not true we know that these kinds of policies that support family balance can actually make employees more productive because they allow them to focus on work rather than worrying about what s going on at home and that s one of the reasons why my husband has proposed helping states that want to set up paid leave funds and recognized companies that are adopting innovative polices that focus on work output rather than hours and face time and that s why we re working to make the federal government a model for the kind of change that we re talking about things like expanding telework options and providing emergency childcare and affordable day care that s why we ve worked to expand the family and medical leave act to have it go to more of our military families and that s also why jill biden and i are encouraging everyone in this country including employers to do everything in their power to support our men and women in uniform and their loved ones but in the end whether we re talking about health care or the economy or caring for our families we need to remember that while these issues may affect women in particular they aren t just women s issues when insurance companies deny coverage to women for preexisting conditions or refuse to cover treatment it can devastate an entire family when women make less than men for the same work that hurts families who find themselves with less income and have to work harder just to get by and when employers don t allow employees the flexibility to care for their family that hurts children it hurts grandparents it hurts husbands and it puts a strain on an entire household but the good news is that thanks to so many extraordinary women who came before us we ve really come a long way we know that all of us are here today because of all those generations who put in that time who packed up their things and staked their claims in places here and who cracked and shattered those glass ceilings so that we could have opportunities that they never dreamed of and we know that it will be up to all of you the leaders the activists the visionaries the organizers the everyday women to carry that work forward because what we re working towards all of us is to ensure that our daughters and our granddaughters can dream just a little bigger and reach just a little higher than we did that s really why i m here so what i can promise is that if you keep the discussion going and if all of you keep fighting and organizing and standing up for the causes that we all share then i know that together together we will keep moving forward not just as women but as americans so i really truly can t express to you how grateful we are for your leadership we look to you for that energy so don t ever stop keep it up and thank you thank you for all your support and your hard work thank you so much dem mobama10 3 10a michelle_obama well thank you this is indeed a pleasure and an honor to be here with all of you today you all look fabulous this is a wonderful occasion let me thank my dear friend senator secretary clinton i almost said president clinton but let me thank you for that kind introduction and most of all thank you for your friendship thank you for your support and thank you for your indispensable advice in getting me through this first year and helping me figure out how to get my family settled in our new life in d c i think it s fair to say that this woman here set the standard in her last post in a presidential administration and she s once again setting a terrific standard doing outstanding work as the secretary of state for the obama administration i also want to recognize ambassador melanne verveer for her extraordinary work as our ambassador at large for global women s issues melanne and again i have to thank andrea jung and reese witherspoon that s a tremendous contribution on the part of avon thank you for being with us thank you for your commitment and your dedication and your words here today it s just an exciting opportunity it s hard to believe that it s been 15 years since secretary clinton spoke those words that inspired women across the globe to think differently about themselves and about their place in the world and to demand that others think differently as well women s rights are human rights is what she said the five simple words that weren t just a statement of fact but a call to action and we re here today to honor 10 women who have devoted their lives to answering that call in just tremendous ways you ve heard about them but again there s ann njogu who left a comfortable job as chief legal officer at an insurance company because she couldn t bear to stand silent in the face of corruption and violence against women in kenya and even after being arrested and assaulted by the police because of her work she continues to speak out then there s colonel shafiqa quraishi of afghanistan who began her career with the afghan national police and today as an official in the ministry of the interior she s fighting to ensure that women in the police force get the promotions they deserve and that women get the benefits they need to do their jobs and then there s dr lee ae ran who spent eight years of her childhood in a north korean prison camp and after a harrowing escape to south korea she became a tireless advocate for north korean refugees and the first defector to run for korea s national assembly upon receiving an award for her work she replied very simply i was only doing what i was naturally supposed to do these are the kind of battles that women we honor here are fighting all over the world they re educating girls they re getting more women into the workforce they re working to end human trafficking labor abuses discrimination against minorities and they re giving women a voice in the courtrooms and in the parliaments helping to change laws and transform lives in every corner of the globe now there are certainly easier paths these women could have taken much easier they could have chosen to keep their heads down and their mouths shut they could have shrunk their aspirations to fit the expectations of others and accepted the place reserved for them on the sidelines and in the shadows but instead they decided to stand up for what they believed in and for what they hoped they decided to say the things that no one else would say and take risks few others would endure as a result they ve faced hardships that few could bear jestina mukoko of zimbabwe was abducted from her home she was tortured she was interrogated for hours while forced to kneel on gravel all for the simple act of speaking out about the government s human rights abuses yet she emerged unbroken and as she put it i came out of this experience not a bitter person but a better person that is the thread that s the thread that runs through all of our honorees stories that ability to draw strength from suffering the determination to not just advance their own lives but the lives of others as well that s what makes these women so extraordinary that they not only refuse to be victims of injustice and oppression they also refuse to be bystanders and that s one of the reasons why we ve invited some young women to join us today the young women from the white house girls mentoring program along with young women from the bell multicultural school to join us today okay ladies raise your hand let s see where you are you re here for a reason we love you dearly but we also want you to learn from these women and we want you to be inspired by these women s lives so listen carefully listen to their stories we invited them because we wanted to say to these young girls to you young women like so many girls across the country that if these women can become lawyers and journalists and military leaders if they can run their own organizations and run for office then surely you can find a way to follow your own dreams and be the leaders in your own communities right here in america that s what we expect from you listen closely because if these women can endure relentless threats brutal violence and separation from their families as they fight for their causes then surely you all can keep going when you face struggles and obstacles in your own lives if these women can start developing their passion for justice as teenagers if sonia pierre could stand up and protest and demand better conditions for migrant workers at the age of 13 an act for which she was arrested then none of you are too young to start making a difference right and if these women can make so many sacrifices to help so many people then the least we all can do in this room in this country is to shine a light on their work and honor their contributions that is the purpose of these women of courage awards we know the difference this kind of recognition and encouragement can make it really matters i m thinking of a story that i heard of ginetta sagan a human rights activist who was first imprisoned during world war ii for helping jews in italy escape from the nazis and during her time in jail she was brutally beaten raped and tortured with electric shocks and then one day one of the guards threw a loaf of bread into her cell and inside that loaf was a matchbox and on that matchbox was written the word one word in italian corragio and it was courage ginetta spent the rest of her life working to free prisoners of conscience and every time she came across prisoners who had started to lose hope because they feared that no one knew of their plight she thought of that moment in that cell and so today we say to you women our sisters we say corragio courage america stands with you we are so incredibly proud of you and your contributions and know that we are praying for you and we are thinking about you every day and we have young women here who are going to follow in your footsteps right ladies thank you all so much dem mobama10 3 10b michelle_obama thank you thank you all so much thank you please please be seated thanks so much it is a pleasure to be here with all of you today and thank you for the wonderful work that you do every day in schools and communities all across this country and i also want to say thanks to chuck chuck was here where did he go for his outstanding leadership for the national pta i understand for the first time in its 113 year history an organization that began as the national congress of mothers is now led by a father so i commend chuck for his work to get more fathers involved right that s right i also understand chuck got his start with his local pta almost 20 years ago for one simple reason and that was his first son matthew was entering the first grade and that s really the same reason why i know that most of you got started with your own local pta my mom was a pta mom because you had a child yes she was because i know each of you got involved because you had a child in a school that you cared about and that s one of the great things about this organization that anyone can get involved anyone can get engaged all that s required is that you care about our kids and that you care about their well being and their potential to grow up into happy and healthy and successful adults and also that you care about the future of our community and our country and that s really why we re all here today why i m here because we care deeply about our kids and i know this organization shares my conviction that it s finally time to take on one of the most serious threats to our children s future and to ours and that s the epidemic of childhood obesity in america today now as chuck said when you start talking about this issue we often begin with the statistics how over the past three decades childhood obesity rates in america have tripled tripled or how today nearly one in three american children is overweight or obese and these statistics are breathtaking but as far reaching as this epidemic is the truth is it s also deeply personal for our kids and for us so while i travel this country speaking about this issue as a first lady i really come to it first and foremost as a mother as parents we know that this isn t just about how our kids look it has nothing to do with it it s about how they feel and it s about how they feel about themselves it s about the impact this issue has on their health and the impact that it will have on their futures and i know these issues aren t new to any of you i know that in pta meetings around the country you re probably hearing from teachers who see the teasing and the bullying kids endure you re probably hearing from counselors who see the depression and the low self esteem you may even be hearing from coaches who see kids struggling to keep up or pediatricians who see kids coming into their offices with conditions like high cholesterol and blood pressure high blood pressure and type ii diabetes and these are conditions that they used to only see in adults and if you re like me you might be thinking to yourselves how on earth did we get here how did this happen because it wasn t always like this i imagine like many of you in this room we share similar memories of our childhoods which were very active it included walking to and from school every day running around at recess and gym every day and playing in the neighborhood for hours after you got home from school until somebody called you in for dinner and then when you got inside usually sitting around the table as a family you ate what your parents fixed no questions asked and if you didn t what you went to bed hungry right back then vegetables were a given you had them at every meal and dessert was something that happened on sunday if you were lucky i know this may sound like nostalgia because the reality is times have changed you know the world s gotten faster the economy s gotten tougher and parents and kids keep taking on more and more and as a result healthy habits all too easily give way to habits of convenience and necessity for many kids those walks to school have been replaced by car or bus rides and then in schools there are cuts to recess and gym which mean less play time lunchtime may mean a meal heavy with calories and fat and snack time might be no better and afternoons running outside after school have been replaced by afternoons sitting inside with the tv video games and the internet habits that expose our kids to 40 000 advertisements each year many for unhealthy foods and drinks and meanwhile we as parents we re facing our own challenges you know parents might want to buy healthy food and they might want to buy that head of broccoli but let s be honest in so many cases those chips are cheaper you know they may want to go buy fresh produce but sometimes there s no supermarket in their community so they re stuck with a choice between fast food and something off the shelf of the local convenience store every parent i meet wants to do the right thing for their kids but it s easy to feel like the deck is stacked against us and too often we slip into bad habits but we know we re not bad parents but we end up feeling guilty anyway and believe me i know what that feels like because i ve been there and i know there s some people in the room thinking oh sure michelle obama she can t relate she lives in the white house and i ll be the first to say that i know i am blessed today with more help and support than i ever could have dreamed of so don t hate but it really wasn t that long ago that i was a working mom just like many people in this room struggling to balance meetings and deadlines and soccer and ballet and a husband whose work kept him away a lot and there were nights when everybody in my house was tired and hungry and we just went to the nearest drive thru or i popped something into the microwave and like any parent there were times when i made excuses and i told myself that my kids would turn out fine no matter what i did because i loved them they re cute until one day my pediatrician pulled me aside and he said you know you might want to think about doing things a little differently and that was my wakeup call that was when i was reminded that i am the parent and i m the one in charge and let s be honest our kids didn t do this to themselves they don t decide what they re served at meals they don t go shopping they don t decide whether there s time for recess and gym we make those decisions we set those priorities we re the ones in charge but that s the good news because if we helped create this problem then we can solve this problem we can do that but instead of just talking about it instead of worrying and wringing our hands about it we have to do something about it we have to move let s move and that s precisely what people across this country are already doing for example in mississippi which is the state that leads the nation in overweight kids and adults they re not waiting around to tackle this issue they re working to get healthier food into their school cafeterias and more physical education for kids all across the state as i saw this firsthand when i visited the state last week they re bringing together state and local leaders principals and teachers parents students doctors nutritionists and they re proving that even without tons of money and resources which they don t have there are plenty of creative ways to take back control and give our kids the kind of lives they deserve and that s the spirit behind let s move the nationwide campaign that we launched to help kids lead active healthy lives right from the beginning so that we can end childhood obesity within a generation and there s no doubt that this is an ambitious goal and there s no doubt that achieving it is going to take every last one of us doing our part to get our kids healthy and to get them to stay that way that s why i have met with mayors and governors and i ve asked them to do their parts to build healthier cities and states i ve met with food service directors and workers in the school nutrition association and i ve asked them to do their part to offer healthier meals and snacks for kids in our schools i ve even met with kids and i ve asked them i asked them very nicely to do their part to make healthier choices for themselves each day now they were all excited until i told them it meant trying new vegetables and then they got a little quiet but it s okay and next week i ll be meeting with the food manufacturers and i m going to ask them to do their part to improve the quality of the food that they provide to us so that we have healthier options to choose from and of course i ve been meeting with parents because we have to do our part we all know that we play the most important role in this effort because truly healthy habits start at home but how do we encourage those habits how do we sift through all the information on how to help our kids eat better how do we do that how do we know that what we do at home won t be erased when our kids go to school how can we get our kids to think about exercise not as work but as play it s going to take nothing short of a comprehensive and coordinated effort in our homes in our schools in our communities to get this done and that s what the four parts of let s move are all about the first part of this campaign let s move to offer parents the tools and information they need to make healthy choices for their kids so we re encouraging pediatricians and family doctors to regularly measure our children s bmi and then to actually write out a prescription for parents with detailed steps that they can take to keep kids healthy and fit and we re working with the fda and the food industry to make our food labels more customer friendly so that parents don t have to squint at words they can t even pronounce to figure out which foods are healthy and which ones just claim to be and already the nation s largest beverage companies have announced that they re taking steps to provide clearly visible information about calories on the front of their products as well as on vending machines and soda machines we ve also started a one stop shopping web site called letsmove gov so that with a click of a mouse parents can find helpful tips and strategies including recipes and exercise plans now we can also do more to make healthy living fun and exciting for kids believe it or not one way to do that might be with video games now we know our kids spend way too much time with these games and we know we re going to have to fix that but we also know that that s not going to happen overnight so we might as well try to use some of that time to our advantage that s why today i m announcing a wonderful contest called the apps for healthy kids challenge it s going to be run through the usda and we re challenging software and game designers both professionals and amateurs to come up with games that incorporate nutritional information and make healthy living fun and maybe you ve seen those dance video games or those exercise games that families are playing together at home or the ones that kids play using their mobile phones and home computers those are the kinds of games that we re talking about we re also challenging designers to come up with apps and tools for us the parents so if for example you re at the grocery store and you re trying to figure out whether one food is healthier than the other then you can pull up that answer on your iphone to select the winners of this contest we re putting together an all star panel of judges that will include leaders in the fields of gaming and technology and nutrition and even a co founder of apple and we re offering tens of thousands of dollars in cash prizes for the winners but here s the thing no matter how much parents want to instill healthy habits in their kids all the tools and information in the world won t help if they don t have access to healthy food in their neighborhoods and right now 23 5 million americans including 6 5 million kids live in what we call food deserts these are areas without a supermarket and as a result these families wind up buying their groceries at the local gas station or convenience store places that offer few if any healthy options so let s move to ensure that all families have access to healthy affordable foods in their community and that s the second part of the initiative and we ve set an ambitious goal here to eliminate food deserts in america within seven years to do that we re creating a healthy food financing initiative that s going to invest 400 million a year and leverage hundreds of millions more from the private sector to bring grocery stores to underserved areas and help places like convenience stores carry healthier options now we can help families make healthier choices and we can help communities provide healthier food but let s not forget that our kids spend most of the day in school so the third part of the initiative is to make our schools healthier places for our kids to learn and grow we re going to start we re going to start with a priority that i know is important to this organization and that s updating and strengthening the child nutrition act we ve proposed a historic investment of an additional 10 billion over 10 years to fund that legislation allowing us to dramatically improve the quality of food we offer in schools including in school vending machines and here s the thing this is how important this is just a couple of weeks ago 66 retired generals admirals and other senior military leaders sent a letter to congress supporting these efforts because they said this was a matter of national security now when you think about it that s not surprising because the national school lunch program was started after world war ii because the most common disqualifier for military service back then was malnourishment and today if you can believe it one of the most common disqualifiers is obesity so we re also going to work to dramatically increase the number of schools that meet the healthier us school challenge and these are schools that provide healthy meals physical education nutrition education and ensure that kids receive the free and reduced price meals that they re eligible for these healthier schools are going to be the model of what we want for every single school in america to help us meet this goal several major school food suppliers have for the first time come together and made a pledge to help us by decreasing sugar fat and salt and increasing whole grains and doubling the amount of fresh produce big and our food service workers our principals our superintendents school board members all across america are also coming together to support this effort it s been very encouraging but we know that eating right is only half the battle experts recommend that our kids get at least 60 minutes of active play a day and we know that many of them don t even come close so let s move and i mean that literally let s find new ways for our kids to be physically active both in and out of school that s the final part of this initiative we re expanding and modernizing the president s physical fitness challenge and we ve recruited professional athletes from dozens of different sports leagues like the nfl major league baseball they re going to work with us to encourage kids to get and stay active and last friday we worked with soccer players from major league soccer and women s professional soccer they joined us in a fun clinic with kids in the area to teach them about staying active and i played a little soccer myself i was embarrassed by the little people but it was fun but the reason i did that is because we have to admit that as parents we all know that we have to spend more time being active with our kids and the truth is you don t have to be some specialist you don t have to have special skills or equipment to do this sometimes it s as simple as going for a walk with your kids taking the stairs with them instead of the elevator or going up and down them a few times even something as simple as turning on the radio and dancing with them for a while working up a sweat but it s also about making sure our communities have safe places for kids to play and there s this terrific non profit organization i m sure you all know kaboom that s working to do this right now they re working to map every single playground in the country so that parents can find the closest one in their neighborhood and i encourage you all to check it out and add the playgrounds in your own community to their list and just as parents can do more at home in their communities teachers can also do more at school when i was in mississippi last night last week it felt like last night i visited a school where teachers were required now listen to this required to actually eat lunch with their students oh scary proposition right but as a result what they ve seen was fresh fruit and vegetable consumption going up in other schools teachers are educating kids about proper nutrition and they re working to set good examples themselves with their own eating and exercise habits but we have to remember there is no one size fits all approach to solving this problem and what we have to remember is that something that works in one school or family may not work in another the key is to find an approach and keep working until we find and you find what works in your families and communities but to help do that in the coming weeks we re going to be creating an online toolkit with tips and strategies for parents and teachers and students to use to help them find their approach and they re going to be able to go to letsmove gov to check those out these are just some of the things that we re doing to achieve our goal and we know it won t be easy and we know it is not going to happen overnight because what we do know as parents is that in the end we cannot control every single thing our kids eat or every single moment of their time nor should we but what we can do what is fully within our control is to give them the very best start in their journeys to teach them what we ve learned even if we don t do it ourselves in our own lives to live in a way that gives them some kind of model to follow so let s act let s move let s do everything we can for the kids that we were inspired to join causes like the pta in the first place let s do everything we can to ensure that our kids have the energy and the endurance to succeed in school and then to pursue the careers of their dreams and hopefully to build families and lives of their own let s do everything we can to give our kids the future they deserve in this country that we all love i know we can do this i know we re all ready are we ready yes we are so i look forward to working with you all in these efforts in the months to come thank you so much dem mobama11 11 09 michelle_obama thank you so much i am thrilled to be here thrilled and honored we ve had a wonderful day today as jill said and this just tops it off first let me begin by thanking jill for her kind introduction as a blue star mom as she said whose son recently returned from iraq jill has brought her personal experience to our work in the white house and it has been invaluable she s working tirelessly to highlight the extraordinary service of our national guard and reserve members and their families she is a wonderful partner and a dear friend to me and my husband and i lover her dearly please let s give jill another round of applause it is such a privilege to be here with all of you today on this veterans day to help launch service nation s new civilian military initiative mission serve i want to thank senator merkley who s here and major general steven roman abt for joining us today and i d also like to recognize colonel rob gordon mission serve s chair as well as ross cohen the director for civilian military partnerships for service nation and all of the people and partners who have worked so hard to create this effort you all have done just a fabulous job and i also want to thank gw go gw and your president steve knapp for hosting us today as some of you know a couple of months ago i issued a little challenge to this university that if students faculty and staff here did 100 000 hours of community service that i d do what speak at commencement well in just seven weeks just seen weeks you all have done more than 19 000 hours of service that is pretty amazing that s wonderful so if you all keep it up maybe i ll see you here in may right finally i feel particularly privileged to share the stage today with mrs alma powell who knows she knows a thing or two about service and sacrifice she s devoted her life to giving our young people every opportunity to fulfill their dreams and she is a wonderful role model to me just a tremendous asset to this country another round of applause for mrs alma powell one of the greatest privileges that i have as first lady is the chance to meet with veterans and to meet with service members and their families all across america and i have to tell you i always come away from every single visit with this sense of pride and gratitude but also with a sense of awe true awe i m in awe of sacrifices they make if you think about it a tiny fraction of our population bearing the burden of eight years of war serving tour after tour of duty missing out on birthdays and anniversaries and those precious moments with the people that they love most i m in awe of the men and women that i meet who have been wounded and some very seriously who will tell you that all they think about is not their injuries but about the folks that they left behind and all they want to do is to be back in their unit serving this country again i m in awe and i m in awe of the military families that i meet spouses who play the role of both parents trying to juggle getting to baseball games and ballet recitals doing it all grandparents who step in to care for the children when a single mom or dad in uniform is away people who find the strength to carry on after those they love most have made the ultimate sacrifice and we witnessed their courage and grace this past week in the aftermath of the unthinkable tragedy at fort hood and we hold those who lost their lives and those who love them in our thoughts and prayers today all of these men and women they joined our armed forces because they love this country so much that they re willing to give everything they have to protect it and that commitment it doesn t just disappear when they return to civilian life see that s the beauty of it it doesn t go away for many of these folks service is the air they breathe it s the reason they were put here on this earth and they don t just want to serve for a certain number of years of deployment they want to make their entire life a tour of duty and whether it s technical skills in engineering logistics public safety whether it s leadership skills like team building and performing under intense pressure what they ve learned standing watch over the homeland and fighting wars abroad is precisely what we need to meet our biggest challenges here at home and that s whether it s turning around a failing school or managing a big city homeless shelter we need that energy whether it s running a rural health clinic or rescuing a community struck by a natural disaster our veterans have what it takes for success so they have the skills to serve and they have the will to serve and it s up to us to give them the opportunity to serve and that s why the edward m kennedy serve america act that my husband signed into law establishes a veterans corps that s why our united we serve summer of service program engaged veterans groups all across america deploying them to serve their communities right here at home and that s why we re so thrilled about the endeavor you all are launching here today through the partnerships in this new coalition wounded warriors are mentoring young people and combating gang violence through this initiative veterans are building homes in new orleans and working to reduce the dropout rate in boston and philadelphia and helping their fellow veterans reintegrate into communities all across america and ordinary citizens are mobilizing to give something back to our men and women in uniform who ve given us so much like offering free summer camps for military kids or working to expand economic opportunity for military families providing job training educational support and mental health services for veterans it s this kind of work this administration has been doing since my husband took office his budget called for the largest percentage increase in the veterans administration budget in 30 years and that includes pay raises to our troops it includes improvements in health care education and housing and career development for military spouses this administration is providing more on base childcare and expanding the family and medical leave act to help military families and wounded veterans keep their jobs and fulfill their responsibilities as parents spouses and caregivers and just this week my husband signed an executive order that will dramatically step up our efforts to hire veterans throughout our federal government but we all know that in the end supporting our military and military families requires more than just good government i say this all the time it also requires an active citizenship because when our troops go off to war they are protecting every single one of us the freedoms they fight for are ones that every single one of us enjoys so it s up to every single one of us to honor their service with service of our own it s up to us to recognize our veterans not just for all they ve done for this country but for all they will continue to do for this country that s what mission serve is all about it s about honoring the dedication that led a young man named kent park to west point and then ultimately to iraq and it motivated him to continue his service as a mentor to young people when he returned back home and as kent put it he said you have to be an active participant by giving back to your community and doing your part he said that s what being a citizen means it s a lifetime of steady dedication to service it s about honoring the courage that led amber bahr a soldier whom i met at fort hood yesterday see amber rushed to the aid of others during the attack last week as she helped out a number of her fellow soldiers not even realizing she had been shot in the back herself she later explained this is her quote my own personal safety wasn t really what mattered to memaking sure that my battle buddies were safe she said that was my number one priority and it s about honoring the service and sacrifice of our military families too it s about honoring people like daniel decrow who i met at fort hood he lost his son justin he said the last time he spoke to justin he told him how proud he was and he later said that s what i said to him every time i saw him that i loved him and i was proud of what he was doing he said i can carry that around in my heart so may each and every one of us carry that same pride that same gratitude that same love in our hearts not just on this day but every single day thank you so much and god bless you all dem mobama11 2 09 michelle_obama thank you victoria i want to also thank the first lady of this great university dr whetsel ribeau we re both new to this town and to these roles so i look forward to being able to talk to you more about how we adjust to this wonderful responsibility that we both have thank you for having me i also want to thank all of the other university officials all the students the staff everybody who worked to pull this together i want to thank the panelists for letting me open up this wonderful conversation i am here to listen more so than to talk so i am so excited to hear your perspectives but i m happy to be here because this issue is something that i have dealt with my whole life trying to figure out how to juggle work family balance in the process of getting an education there isn t a day that goes by particularly after having kids that i don t wonder or worry about whether i m doing the right thing for myself for my family for my girls so i think this issue is particularly important for us to tackle not just as women but men as well because these conversations are going to help us shape our lives in the years to come and the one thing the one message that i have is for all of you struggling with this issue is just remember there is no right answer it took me a long time to figure that out there is no one right way to do any of this and the choices and the decisions will change given your circumstances the person i was when i was in college is very different than the person that i am today that person is very different than the person who was single and married i was different when i was not but single and not married i was different when i was married i was different when i was married with kids i was different when i was married with kids in certain types of jobs and every step of the way i wondered whether i was doing the right thing so know that in your struggle to figure these things out as women as professionals that you have to do what s right for you at any given time and that s going to change from week to week from month to month from year to year the question that i hate most that we ask of young people is what are you going to be when you grow up and the truth is i still don t know and i m 45 years old all i know is that it s important for you to be true to yourselves not to worry too much about what other people are going to think or make of your choices because everyone will question what you do and tell you you should ve done it the other way so i m honored to be here i m interested in hearing what s going on but more importantly barack and i are just excited to be a part of this community our new community in washington d c and for the first few weeks that i ve been here if you watch any tv i m sure you have seen everything that i do i feel really redundant sharing with people what i do because folks are like yes i know i saw you on tv and i m like that s right i forgot but i have been visiting many of the agencies around town but also trying to get out into the community because we believe that our first job as new members of this community is to listen and to learn and to be thankful and grateful for what people have already done we re looking forward to doing that more and more over the course of the next several months and years to come howard is a great institution in this city and in this country you have produced outstanding people for decades and decades and decades and i know you ll keep doing it and i look forward to being able to have more of these kinds of conversations in even more intimate settings where we can really talk and break it down so i hope that you invite me back often i will be happy to return thank you so much dem mobama11 3 09 michelle_obama thank you first of all good afternoon to everyone and let me thank secretary clinton i love saying that for that kind introduction i have said this before but the woman who is running this department this big huge effort has always been such a committed person friend supporter to me we are honored and thrilled to have her serving in this role she set the bar high in her last post and i m confident that she s going to keep setting the bar high in this post and i just want to give her a round of applause thank you secretary clinton i am honored to be on this stage so thank you for the invitation to participate in international women s day here at the state department as secretary clinton mentioned earlier today at the white house president obama announced the formation of the white house council on women and girls again the goal of this council is to ensure that young girls have no limits on their dreams and no obstacles to their achievements secretary clinton has also made this issue of particular importance right here at the state department by creating a new position and nominating melanne verveer as ambassador at large for global women s issues and i again want to give her a round of applause we are grateful for her participation we thank her for her service in advance she is going to do a phenomenal job the president and i share the belief that communities are only as strong as the health of their women everyday we see what happens to families communities and countries when women don t have access to health and medical care when they don t have the resources to properly care for their children when they are oppressed and struggling with emotional physical sexual and psychological abuse when they have no access to education or fair treatment in the justice system the difference between a struggling family and a healthy one is often the presence of a strong woman or women at the center of that family the difference between a broken community and a thriving one is the presence of women who are valued where relationships among women and between women and men are based on mutual respect the women we honor today teach us three very important lessons one that as women we must stand up for ourselves the second as women we must stand up for each other and finally as women we must stand up for justice for all the women we honor here standing on this stage today risk their lives to fight for themselves and for their mothers daughters sisters grandmothers and friends and in doing so they create a better society not just for them but for their fathers sons brothers grandfathers and husbands the women we honor today are not just changing their own circumstances they re changing the world when 12 year old girls fight for their freedom and win they change the future for millions of girls just like them when advocates are beaten and jailed and still raise their voice they inspire and nourish hope when one woman with a phone in her apartment starts a movement that motivates thousands her cause can no longer be ignored when brave women challenge thousands of years of tradition and history and become leaders in their religious communities they change minds and when women fight to be educated and then reach out to bring their sisters along they change the future for generations to come this is how real change occurs one determined woman at a time and change is coming women have made great strides with regard to equality at all levels of society from families communities to businesses and government but the stories of the women we honor today remind us that we still have work to do and i am so very proud to be here today to celebrate these brave women who have fought for themselves and in the process made the way so much easier for other women and girls again i thank you for the honor to be here i am so proud to be a woman today and every single day thank you so much dem mobama11 5 10 michelle_obama thanks everyone and thanks melody for that kind introduction that wonderful summary i want to thank melody in particular for her work with this administration especially her leadership on this task force as i said when we announced the task force effort this is going to have to be an administration wide effort and i am proud of the way that so many people from so many different areas of the federal government have come together and embraced this challenge stepped up with a level of commitment and passion that s really made a difference if we just take a step back for a moment and think about just how much this group has been able to accomplish in such a short period of time in just a few months the folks behind me have worked together to put forward a comprehensive plan that draws on everything that we ve done up to this point and shows us that clear way forward that cooperation enthusiasm and initiative is really what has made this entire effort so successful and again that s why we re here today to talk about the action plan they ve put together to help reverse the epidemic of childhood obesity in this country we all know that it s possible we know we have the tools we know we have the resources to make this happen and now thanks to the work of the task force we have a road map for implementing our plan across our government and across the country i have talked about the statistics we have all heard about them but they always bear repeating how nearly one in three children in this country are overweight and obese how one in three kids will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime as a result and how we re spending 150 billion a year to treat obesity related conditions like heart disease and cancer that is why three months ago we started let s move and we set a very ambitious goal and that is to end the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation so that children born today grow up at a healthy weight and since we ve made that announcement we ve already begun the work it s revolved around four main pillars we ve been working to give parents the information that they need to make healthy decisions for their families we ve been working to make our schools healthier we ve been working to increase the amount of physical activity that our kids are getting not just during the day at school but also at home and we re working to eliminate food deserts so that folks have easy and affordable access to the foods they need right in their own neighborhoods but all that we ve done over the past few months has really just been the beginning we also want to make sure we re using every resource that we have not just in our federal government but throughout the public and private sector as well we are calling upon mayors and governors and parents and educators business owners and health care providers anyone who has a stake in giving our children the healthy happy future that we all know they deserve and as i ve said before we don t need new discoveries or new inventions to reverse this trend again we have the tools at our disposal to reverse it all we need is the motivation the opportunity and the willpower to do what needs to be done that s why shortly after we started let s move we asked the task force to collect ideas and to put together a road map for what we need to do moving forward but we ve also known as melody pointed out from the very beginning that the solution to this epidemic isn t going to come from just washington alone not a single expert that we ve consulted has said that having the federal government tell people what to do is the way to solve this that s why the task force has done such a great job in reaching out to people all across the country for their ideas as melody has pointed out and we ve got terrific responses and input which has really helped to shape this report today the task force has submitted their report outlining important steps that federal agencies and their partners including businesses and the private sector will take in the months and years ahead to help keep our children healthy for the first time this is the key we re setting really clear goals and benchmarks and measurable outcomes that will help tackle this challenge one step one family and one child at a time the effort starts with using the resources across the federal government in the most effective ways possible not just talking about making a difference but actually doing it and that s why i am so proud of the folks behind me because they ve really taken the lead and stepped up in their agencies at the department of agriculture secretary vilsack who couldn t be here today but kathleen is is leading the way to first reauthorize the child nutrition act to get healthier foods in our schools and to make sure that everyone in this country has access to healthy affordable foods in their neighborhoods at the department of health and human services secretary sebelius is working to provide mothers with better prenatal care and to give parents and caregivers the information they need to make healthy decisions for their families at the department of education secretary duncan is working to expand opportunities for physical activity in schools and helping our children learn how to make healthy choices for themselves and at the white house nancy ann deparle worked with secretary sebelius and so many others to help pass health reform the bill that is a groundbreaking piece of legislation that includes really important provisions like requiring chain restaurants to post the calories in their food and businesses to provide opportunities for working mothers to continue to breastfeed this report also contains these steps but many others more than 70 as melody pointed out including measurable benchmarks for tracking the progress so if we do our jobs and if we meet the goals we ve set we will reverse a 30 year trend and solve the problem of childhood obesity in america in order to make our kids maintain a healthy weight from the very beginning we re going to increase prenatal counseling help pregnant mothers maintain a healthy weight we re also setting a goal to increase breastfeeding rates to help children get a healthy start on life to encourage children to eat healthier we re setting a goal to increase the amount of fruits that children consume to 75 percent of the recommended level by 2015 we want to increase that again to 85 percent by the year 2020 and then by the year 2030 we hope to be at 100 percent we re using a similar scale to increase the percentage of vegetables that our kids are eating as well we re also working to decrease the amount of added sugar that our kids consume from a whole range of products and to make sure that parents and kids are getting the right information that they need to make healthy decisions we re setting a goal that all primary care physicians should be assessing bmi at all well child and adolescent visits by the year 2012 and we re also working to increase the portion of healthy food and beverages that are advertised and targeted to our children so that within three years the majority of food and beverage ads aimed at kids will promote healthy choices we re also setting benchmarks for our schools as well we ll be working as i ve said many times over the months to double the number of schools that meet the healthierus school challenge by the year 2011 and we want to add another thousand schools each year for the following two years we re also aiming to add an additional 2 million children to the national school lunch program by 2015 and to help our kids stay active we re going to increase the number of high school students who participate in daily p e classes by 50 percent by the year 2030 and we ll aim to increase the percentage of elementary schools that offer recess to 95 percent by the year 2015 both these steps are aimed at boosting the number of kids of all ages who meet current physical activity guidelines to make it easier for parents to put healthy food on the table we re going to keep track of the low income areas where residents live more than a mile from a supermarket or large grocery store and for rural areas we re tracking those that are more than 10 miles away and we ll set a goal of eliminating all those food deserts within seven years and to make it easier for kids to walk to school we re aiming to increase the percentage of school age children who take safe walking and biking trips to school by 50 percent in the next five years in the end that s why this report and this task force are so important we all know the dangers of childhood obesity and the toll that it takes on our children our families and our country we know the steps that we need to take to reverse the trend through let s move we ve already started making some progress we ve gotten wonderful support from all sectors of our country and now with this report we have a very solid road map that we need to make these goals real to solve this problem within a generation now we just need to follow through with the plan we just need everyone to do their part and it s going to take everyone no one gets off the hook on this one from governments to schools corporations to nonprofits all the way down to families sitting around their dinner table and the one thing that i can promise is that as first lady i m going to continue to do everything that i can to focus my energy to keep this issue at the forefront of the discussion in this society so that we ensure that our children can have the healthy lives and the bright futures that they deserve so i am grateful to everyone here not just members on stage but people in the media who have really done an outstanding job to continue to keep this issue at the forefront we re going to keep needing to have this conversation our work has just begun this road map is just the beginning but we re going to continue to need your help in monitoring tracking having the important discussions that we need to inform families about what s going on how to make the changes that they need it s not going to be easy but we ll do our part to stick with families and communities and reach our goals so i want to thank you all for the support you ve lended this effort i m very proud of our federal agencies all our secretaries and our agency heads every single one of them has shown a passion they ve seen around the country that we re poised to make a difference in this country that people are ready for this change so with that i ll again thank melody for her work in leading this very efficient and effective effort and then we ll open it up these secretaries will answer questions i will leave but they re very competent to get that done so thank you all thank you guys thank you dem mobama11 6 10a michelle_obama thank you all thank you so much and first of all thank you charity charity did a great job on that introduction love you all too so proud i want to thank the anacostia senior high school choir for their amazing performances and i also want to thank brandon annie and of course your valedictorian jordan for their amazing remarks let s give them a big hand i want to acknowledge a couple of other people malik bazzell donald hense and all of the community leaders who have joined you all today to celebrate this morning let s give them a round of applause i have to tell you that it is a privilege for me to be with you i have been looking forward to this day for a long time and as you know this is the second time that i ve had a chance to come and spend some time with anacostia high school students during my first visit with you all when i got to come to the school i came away just impressed and moved by all of you that s why i wanted to be here i was impressed by the questions you asked by your work ethic by your spirit your attitude i loved hearing about your lives and your hopes and your dreams i ve also enjoyed getting to know my girls the students who are participating in the white house mentorship program that we set up this past year so all these opportunities have given me a very meaningful connection to many of the amazing students who are at this school and has given me a real appreciation for this community and i just couldn t wait to be here in person to say congratulations to the class of 2010 i know this has been a long journey to get here full of warm memories your friendships and teachers and maybe not so warm memories with rules and papers and tests and i know for some of you there may have been times when you weren t quite sure you d make it but you are here so i want you all to soak it up just soak it up you re here you made it to this day i want you all graduates to pat yourselves on the back do a little patting i want you to be proud of what you ve accomplished to get here today because i know your families are proud of you your teachers are proud of you and i am so proud of you all i really am and looking out at all of you i m reminded that many of you have overcome a lot to be here much like the community of anacostia itself founded back in the 1800s for folks who worked at the navy yard across the river anacostia eventually became a place where people worked hard as clerks and civil servants and as teachers and tradesmen where families looked out for one another where strong churches were the heart and soul of the community and yet we also know that this community has had its share of struggles and for a long time anacostia was segregated in its early years it was even illegal for african americans to own land in parts of this community and even after those barriers were torn down others emerged poverty violence inequality but despite these challenges anacostia continues to push forward and that s what i admire about this community and what i admire about all of you all see in the face of incredible struggles you refuse to be defined by the hardships or the adversities instead what defines you is perseverance what defines you is character what defines you is the same commitment to education to hard work to setting high standards for yourselves that has made this country great it s a commitment reflected in anacostia alums like frederick gregory who graduated in 1958 from this school and became the first african american in our history to command a space shuttle it s reflected in the small business owners who ve opened up furniture stores and theaters in the community the artists and leaders who have lived in anacostia throughout the generations who remain committed to the success of this community it s reflected in a man once called the sage of anacostia lived just a few blocks from this school in a home called cedar hill that i had a chance to take my girls to last summer it s a beautiful home as all of you know i m talking about frederick douglass we remember him today as one of america s most eloquent and beloved leaders but i want you all to just think for a moment about what it took for frederick douglass to become that kind of leader just think about it i want you to think about the odds he faced when he was your age this is a man who was born into slavery his mom died when he was a boy he never knew his father because it was illegal to educate slaves he taught himself how to read and write and when he was just a couple of years older than you all are today he escaped from slavery traveled all the way to england and made friends in britain who eventually bought his freedom after he returned to america frederick douglass became a leading abolitionist an advisor to president lincoln and an inspiration to people of every creed and color fighting for equality not just for african americans but for women and others until his final days so i tell you this story because it is one of the best examples in our history of the american spirit it s an example of someone picking themselves up in the face of adversity persevering through thick and thin and proving to the world that nothing can stop a person from pursuing their dream and that s the same perseverance the same character and the spirit that i know we have in so many of you i imagine that for some of you all getting this far hasn t been easy perhaps there were those who wanted to write you off maybe because of assumptions they made about you or your school or your community but every day you re proving them wrong you re proving that it doesn t matter what anyone else thinks about you or what you can achieve the only thing that matters rather is what you think about yourself and what you re willing to do to achieve your goals that s all that matters how hard are you willing to work how big are you willing to dream over this past year so many of you have shown us exactly what you can do i m told that over 100 of you in this class have college plans this year that s 90 percent of this class and that s up from under 30 last year what an achievement i m told that 16 juniors and seniors this year have been awarded gates achievers scholarships to college because of their academic excellence and i understand that student attendance for the entire school is up 20 percent from last year see now that s a tribute to you to everyone here today and yet despite all you ve achieved despite all the obstacles you ve already overcome with regard to your education many of you may still be wrestling with your own personal issues and doubts maybe you re taking care of a younger sibling or maybe you are responsible for an aging grandparent or a child maybe you re worried about your family s financial situation or maybe you re just feeling crushed by the weight of life s responsibilities maybe you feel like no one has your back like you ve been let down by people so many times that you ve stopped believing in yourself maybe you feel like your destiny was written the day you were born and you ought to just rein in your hopes and scale back your dreams but if any of you are thinking that way i m here to tell you stop it don t do that don t ever scale back your dreams and don t ever set limits on what you can achieve and don t think for one single moment that your destiny is out of your hands because no one s in control of your destiny but you and it is never too late you can do anything you put your minds to and i mean absolutely anything it s important for you all to know this but what is true is that building a purposeful life for yourself is never easy no one achieves success overnight you know life doesn t work that way anything worth having takes time and perseverance you re going to have to push yourselves beyond your limits you re going to have to step outside of those comfort zones you re going to have to ask for help when you need it more importantly part of being a mature and functioning adult in this society is realizing that life is a series of tradeoffs if you want a career that pays a good salary then you have to work hard you ve got to be on time you ve got to finish what you start you have to always keep your word if you want a life free from drama then you can t hang out with people who thrive on drama you have to pick your friends wisely pick your friends surround yourself with people who share your values and your goals but i am confident that if you re willing to show that kind of commitment and do what it takes anything is possible for every single one of you and you know why i m so confident because i m looking at you i was watching you all and i see your strength i know what you re capable of i know what kind of young men and women you are and i want the world to know that this class is made up of young women like the remarkable student who introduced me charity whose positive attitude is a model for everyone around her she s beautiful charity she s an editor of the paper mentor for 9th graders and a gates achievers scholar and she ll be following her own role models her sisters to college in the fall this class is made up of young men like your valedictorian jordan smiley who grew up who grew up surrounded by violence confronted by daily pressures and daily temptations to fall in with the wrong crowd but jordan was blessed with amazing parents supportive brothers and sisters and because of that will to overcome he s been captain of the football team the track and field team he s president of student government he s up here running this graduation laughter applause and today jordan becomes the first in his family to go to college and this class is also made up of young men like rudolph eastman where s rudolph rudolph i understand was raised by a single mother along with eight brothers and sisters is that right whew where s rudolph s mother i understand that rudolph s oldest brother was killed in an act of gun violence but in the face of tragedy and hardship rudolph stayed focused he worked hard and today like jordan he becomes the first in his family to go to college a belief in the importance of education perseverance character these are the qualities that charity jordan rudolph and so many of you embody and these are the same qualities you ll need and more when you leave here and begin the next chapter of your lives this is equally true for those of you headed to college as it is for those of you with other plans to those of you who are college bound in the fall i just hope that you make the most of that experience take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way make new friends get to know your classmates take classes that ll challenge the way you think about the world build relationships with professors that inspire you don t sit in your room get involved in activities that spark your passions and service organizations that touch your hearts and the thing that i ve been telling graduates all over this country is study abroad if you can find a way to travel the world above all never stop finding new ways to push yourselves never stop finding new ways to learn and to grow and the same goes for those of you who aren t headed to college because you don t have to be on a college campus to educate yourself or to create new opportunities to grow or to push yourself to think differently about the world there are opportunities all over d c for you to enrich your lives and your minds but we also know that in this difficult economy it s going to be tough to find a job that means you re going to have to be creative with your approach so here s some advice be persistent start with your immediate network of people folks like the folks up here reach out to people you admire in your community teachers pastors business owners talk to them about how they got started in their careers ask them for advice and guidance and most of all stay positive believe in yourselves and in what you have to offer and if there aren t immediate prospects for a paid job then do what you can to make yourself more competitive and more marketable take a class at a community college see what types of training programs are available at a community center explore the option of community service with americorps even consider an unpaid opportunity that might give you a foot in the door and don t forget even if you re not going to college right now you can always apply later it s never too late the point is no matter what you re doing next year you have to be aggressive you have to seize every opportunity that s available to you you can t wait you can t just sit around don t expect anybody to come and hand you anything it doesn t work that way if you want your own destinies and you want to control those destinies tomorrow you ve got to start practicing who you want to be today because if you re afraid to step beyond your comfort zone today and reach for the things you want today you ll always be afraid if you re afraid to speak up and ask for what you need today you will always be afraid don t fear but if you begin to take control of your destiny today graduates if you push yourself today if you practice taking risks today that s what you ll continue to do for the rest of your lives and then once you do that once you grab hold of your future and pull yourselves up there s just one more thing you have to do and that is reach back and pull someone else up after you because the truth is none of us can succeed on our own we all need help along the way even frederick douglass couldn t succeed on his own he needed the help of others to learn how to educate himself he needed the help of others to learn how to educate himself he needed the help of others to gain his freedom he needed support to claim his own destiny and graduates so do you and that support will come from teachers like the ones you have at anacostia it ll come from friends but real friends who have your best interests at heart friends who bring out the best in you friends who have your back and keep you focused on your dreams and it s all going to come from your families and again we got to take a moment again to recognize the family members and to remember that many of you are here because of what they have done so today to all the family members this is your day too so we got to give the family members a round of applause and if you re anything like my parents were when i graduated from high school i can imagine how you must be feeling today i know you re proud i know you re a little relieved but i suspect that some of you may also be feeling a little nervous maybe you re worried about the tough job market and how your child will find a job in this economy maybe you re anxious about how you re going to pay tuition maybe you re hesitant about having your child move away from home to attend college or if your kids are the first in your family to go to college you may be wondering how you re supposed to help them navigate experiences you ve never had i understand those worries because my parents had similar worries see my parents didn t have the money to cover college tuition for me and my brother neither of my parents went to college or had any idea how to support us but family members know this you don t have to have lived the kind of life you want your kids to live to help them excel your kids don t need you to be a doctor or a lawyer your kids don t need you to be rich and famous what they need from you is your wisdom what they need from you is your support what they need from you is love that unconditional love the kind of love that lets them know that you will be there for them no matter what that s all your kids need and trust me i know because when i was in their shoes that s all i needed growing up there were plenty of times that i doubted my capabilities and those doubts were fueled by a lot of people around me kids teasing me when i studied hard teachers telling me not to reach too high because my test scores weren t good enough folks making it clear with what they said or didn t say that success wasn t meant for a little girl like me from the south side of chicago but let me tell you something something else i can remember i remember my mom pushing me and my brother to do things she d never done herself things she d been afraid to do herself what i can remember is my father getting up every day and going to work at the water filtration plant even after he was diagnosed with ms even after it got hard for him to button his shirt and to get up and walk see i remember my parents sacrificing for us pouring everything they had into us being there for us encouraging us to reach for a life they never knew and it s because of them and because of the support i got from teachers and mentors that i am standing here today and if barack were here he d say the same thing was true for him he d tell you it was hard at times growing up without a father he d tell you that his family didn t have a lot of money he d tell you he made plenty of mistakes and wasn t always the best student but he d also tell you he turned things around thanks to his mother his grandparents and people who cared about him and listen graduates the reason that he and i invest so much of our time and energy in young people like you is because we see ourselves in each and every one of you we are living proof for you that with the right support it doesn t matter what circumstances you were born into or how much money you have or what color your skin is if you re committed if you are committed to doing what it takes anything is possible it s up to you so i know the journey you ve traveled may not have been easy i know many of you have faced more than your fair share of hardships and adversities i know you may be worried about what the future holds but you have to understand that there are a lot of people out there who believe in you i believe in you the president of the united states of america believes in you when times are hard for us you inspire us you keep us going and we are expecting big things from you in the years to come big things we are counting on you to be the very best people that you can be we re expecting you to show the same perseverance the same caring the same spirit that made it possible for you to be here today we re expecting you to show the same commitment to a better life that has always made this country great we are expecting you not only to claim your own destiny but to help others across anacostia across d c across america claim theirs and we are confident that what you ll do is exactly that we know that you ll make us proud because you already have congratulations class of 2010 we love you dem mobama11 6 10b michelle_obama thank you all so much the sit sign well good afternoon this is exciting it is a pleasure to be with all of you to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the women s bureau here at the department of labor this is very exciting a wonderful turnout i want to thank our secretary of labor hilda solis she is not only an outstanding secretary and a tremendous asset to this administration but she has become a personal friend of mine she is always there flying around with me showing up to stuff that i ask her to yeah she does all the time she is a gift to all of us and she has been just an amazing supporter of this bureau so let s give hilda a round of applause and i also want to thank representative lynn woolsey for her terrific work and for joining us here today let s give her a round of applause i also have to recognize the current director sara for all that you re doing for this bureau and for representing women across this country in such a tremendous way but in addition to sara we also have the former women s bureau directors who have taken the time to join us today and i want those women to stand if they haven t already done so sara you stand too this is for you as well we have women going back nearly four decades and we re thrilled that you all could be here and grateful for your service it was an honor for me to get a moment to say hello to each of you backstage now as you all know back when this bureau was founded women had yet to earn the right to vote there wasn t a single woman serving in congress or in the cabinet women were less than one fifth of our nation s workforce and they often worked in dangerous and deplorable conditions and back then the establishment of this bureau actually caused a lot of controversy and some people even argued that what you all were trying to do here was somehow un american well for 90 years whether fighting for workplace safety or equal pay child care or family leave the work of this bureau has been driven by a simple truth it s a sentiment that was articulated in an early bulletin from the bulletin from the bureau which read simply and this is a quote america will be as strong as her women america will be as strong as her women something that s true just as true today in 2010 as it was back when this bureau was founded in 1920 today women make up the majority of students in our colleges women make up roughly half of our workforce and mothers are the primary or co breadwinners in nearly two thirds of american families but despite all the progress that we ve seen since this bureau was founded as you all know there are still certain stubborn inequalities that still persist women in this country still earn just 77 cents for every dollar men earn there are still only 3 percent of fortune 500 ceos that are women and to this day too many women still face that daily juggling act to manage the needs of their families with the demands of their jobs they re unable to take sick days to care for ailing children or aging parents they struggle to find affordable child care they feel like they re burning the candle at both ends and in the middle and this reflects a larger problem that for too long policies that help people balance work and family responsibilities have been seen as niceties for women rather than as the necessity that can benefit all of us men and women alike so we still have our work cut out for us we ve got a lot to do that s why i am proud that the very first bill that my husband signed into law when he became president of the united states was the lilly ledbetter fair pay act because as he put it then here in america there are no second class citizens in our workplaces and there is no reason why women shouldn t get equal pay for equal work and i m proud of what we re doing to make the federal government more of a model for the kind of change that we ve talking about whether it s expanding tele work options to providing emergency child care and affordable day care there s a lot that the federal government can do to model what is good and right in the workplace my husband has also proposed helping states that want to set up paid leave funds and we ve worked to expand the family and medical leave act to more of our military families which is something that should have happened a long time ago because the truth is ultimately these issues aren t just women s issues we all know that when women make less than men for the same work that doesn t just hurt women that hurts families who find themselves with less income and have to work harder just to get by when women don t have the flexibility they need to fulfill their responsibilities as both employees and breadwinners and mothers and daughters that doesn t just hurt women that hurts their children and their parents it hurts their spouses and their partners and it puts a strain on the entire household and ultimately on all of our communities ultimately as the proclamation my husband signed honoring this bureau said and this is a quote equal economic opportunity and wage parity are not simply women s issues they are americans issues and even after 90 years of hard work we ve still got a way to go but let s also never lose sight of how far we ve come just imagine what the first members of this bureau would think if they could see us all here today just look at this room look at this country imagine the faces on their the looks on their faces if they could see a madam speaker in the house of representatives and so many brilliant women like secretary solis serving in our cabinet that s amazing imagine what those founding members would think of the prospect of three women serving on our nation s highest court and how proud they would be to see women to see women taking their places at the top of so many fields from science and business to politics and the armed forces so much has happened in these 90 years so many barriers broken so many glass ceilings cracked and shattered so many dreams realized and goals fulfilled and it s really because of people like all of you and the folks who came before you those folks who organized and mobilized and stood up and spoke out determined to give their daughters and granddaughters opportunities they never dreamed of themselves and i stand before you today not just as a woman who has walked through so many of those doors that have been opened but as a mother of two beautiful little women and they are becoming little women who because of their efforts view the world truly as a place with limitless possibilities who believe that nothing is beyond their reach nothing is off limits and there s nothing that girls like them can t do and that is beautiful so i m here today to thank you and to honor this bureau for all it s done over these past years not just for women but for all of us and for this country that we love this is truly a cause for celebration everyone should be proud thank you so much god bless and hilda and i will come down and say hello thank you so much dem mobama11 9 10 michelle_obama thank you so much joanne for that very kind introduction it is a privilege and an honor to be here today as we pay tribute to the men and women of flight 93 i want to acknowledge secretary salazar governor rendell and gordon felt and i want to thank them all for their leadership and for their service i also want to thank reverends britton and way for leading us in prayer and i want to particularly recognize and thank mrs bush not just for her moving words today but for being such a source of love and support for the families of flight 93 and for all her work to help our nation heal in the days and months after the attack thank you so much i come here today not just as first lady on behalf of my husband and a grateful nation i come as an american filled with a sense of awe at the heroism of my fellow citizens i come as a wife a daughter and a sister heartbroken at the loss so many of you have endured and i come as a mother thinking about what my daughters and what all of our sons and daughters can learn from the 40 men and women whose memories we honor today the men and women of flight 93 were college students and grandparents they were businessmen pilots and flight attendants there was a writer an antique dealer a lawyer an engineer they came from all different backgrounds and all walks of life and they all took a different path to that september morning but in that awful moment when the facts became clear and they were called to make an impossible choice they all found the same resolve they agreed to the same bold plan they called the people they loved many of them giving comfort instead of seeking it explaining they were taking action and that everything would be okay and then they rose as one they acted as one and together they changed history s course and in the days that followed when we learned about the heroes of flight 93 and what they had done we were proud we were awed we were inspired but i don t think any of us were really surprised because it was clear that these 40 individuals were no strangers to service and to sacrifice for them putting others before themselves was nothing new because they were veterans and coaches and volunteers of all sorts of causes there was the disability rights advocate who carried a miniature copy of the constitution everywhere she went there was the census director who used to return to the homes she d canvassed to drop off clothing and food for families in need there was the couple who quietly used their wealth to make interest free loans to struggling families and to this day they remind us not just by how they gave their lives but by how they lived their lives that being a hero is not just a matter of fate it s a matter of choice i think that jack grandcolas put it best his wife lauren was one of the passengers on the flight and he said they were ordinary citizens thrown into a combat situation no one was a general or a dictator their first thought was to be selfless they knew there was a 98 percent chance we re not going to make it but let s save others the men and women on that plane had never met the people whose lives they would save yet they willingly made the sacrifice and before september 11th the people of this community didn t know any of the families here today yet they embraced them as their own inviting them into their homes guarding this sacred spot day after day lovingly cataloguing every item memento every photograph every letter left at the temporary memorial and over the past nine years more than 1 million people have come here to pay their respects to express their gratitude and to try in their own small way to ease the burden of these families grief by honoring the people they loved and all of this reminds us that while this memorial begins here in shanksville it doesn t end at the edges of this field it extends to all those they saved whose lives today are possible because they gave theirs it extends to all those they inspired who thought to themselves if they can do something that extraordinary with their lives then maybe just maybe it s time i made something more of mine maybe it s time i wore my country s uniform maybe it s time i gave more to my community maybe it s time for me to be a better friend a better neighbor a better american and most of all this memorial extends to all their families whose lives were shaped by their love and i m thinking especially today of the children toddlers who have grown into young men and women teenagers who ve become adults who will one day bring their own children to this place and tell them about the proud legacy they inherit sonali beaven was just five years old when she lost her father and even in the midst the shock and the heartbreak of first hearing the news she said to her mother i am so sadbut i am not the saddest girl in the whole world because children lost their mommy and daddy muriel borza who s here with us today was just 10 when she lost her sister deora and in a speech on the one year anniversary she called for a worldwide moment of peace and she asked people and this is her quote to make a pledge to do a good deed that will help mankind in some small way even if it s a hug a kiss a smile or wave a prayer or just silent thought of those they love and i know that all the young people here have done their very best to be strong for their families and to hold the memories of their loved ones close and to live their lives in a way that would make them proud and i know it hasn t been easy while grief has its own course for each of us and no one can presume to know what your families have felt i can imagine that there are days when the pain is still raw when the time and distance of those nine years falls away and that loss is still fresh but i can also imagine that as time has passed there have been more good days more moments when you re able to find joy and comfort in happy memories and i can imagine that on those better days maybe sometimes you worry about whether in moving on you may in some way be leaving your loved ones behind but i can t help but think that it s actually just the opposite that in having the courage to move forward you honor their courage that in choosing to live your own lives as fully as you can you re celebrating theirs that in coming together and pushing ahead to build this permanent memorial you re ensuring that their memory will always be a part not just of your own lives but of the life of this nation and know that because you kept going and because you persevered that long after you re gone people will come here continue to come here to shanksville and they will stand at this plaza and listen to the echoes of those chimes and gaze out at this field and they will see how a scar in the earth has healed how it has grown back as a peaceful resting place for 40 of our nation s heroes they will understand that because of all of you a site of devastation and destruction was transformed into a place of reverence and remembrance and it is truly my prayer today that in the years ahead all who come here and all of you may be filled with the hope that is written in the book of psalms though you may have made me see troubles many and bitter you will restore my life again from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up may the memories of those who gave their lives here continue to be a blessing to all of you and an inspiration to all americans thank you all god bless you and god bless america dem mobama12 3 09 michelle_obama thank you so much thank you mayor for that amazing introduction this picture is just moving it says so much and it is going to go up in my office tomorrow got that thank you and thank you to the what s your name sir andrew it s a beautiful photo thank you so much i also want to thank your wife joanne for her leadership in this community as well there s nothing like a wonderful mayor with a good smart wife right by his side i also want to thank senator hagan my dear friend and the fayetteville city council and kirk deviere who is here for joining us i also want to thank dianne campbell who s the wife of general charles campbell as well as charlene austin the wife of lieutenant general lloyd austin who spent the day with me two amazing women i really enjoyed my time with you both and your commitment and dedication and sacrifice speaks volumes of this community this fort thank you for your friendship and i look forward to working with you in the coming months and years i came to fayetteville last year to learn more about the needs of soldiers and their families the people i met then some of whom who are here today i believe and the stories that i heard stayed with me they stayed with me and i wanted to come back i said i would come back and thank you all for sharing your lives with me i m delighted to be back this has been an exciting fabulous day i had a wonderful visit at fort bragg today where i was able to tour some of the marvelous facilities and learn about life on the base although i was here before and spoke to spouses this is my first time actually on the base i sat down with military spouses today i had the best time visiting one of the excellent child care centers read cat in the hat and got lots of hugs and i spoke with some soldiers while they were having lunch that was exciting it was a very meaningful visit for me but what s always powerful for me is that what i notice is that when you meet a soldier it is the pride that they have for the work that they do don t just see it here i see it everywhere i go in the faces in the conduct of every military person that i meet they have respect for their work they have respect for their fellow soldiers and they have respect for the country that they love these soldiers they get up every day and they hold themselves to these extremely high standards the highest standards imaginable they work hard to prepare every day not knowing what tomorrow will bring their dedication isn t just for their own sake but for the sake of their unit and for the sake of this country it s pride high standards selflessness dedication responsibility these are their values and as i speak there are servicemen and women who at their posts across this nation and around the world as i speak they re standing watch and they re providing the security of our daily lives we keep them the wounded who are recovering and those who made the ultimate sacrifice so that we can live in safety and freedom we keep them in our thoughts and our prayers every second of the day but as my husband the president said recently in his address at camp lejeune service doesn t end with the person wearing the uniform the war doesn t end when a soldier returns home military family members have their own special courage and strength i have met husbands and wives who keep the family on track while their wives and husbands are deployed or on duty i ve met grandparents and aunts and uncles sisters and brothers who take care of children while single moms and dads are away i ve met moms and dads who both serve in uniform and leave their children in the care of family when they re both deployed i ve met mothers and fathers who have lost their beloved children to war our soldiers and their families have done their duty they do it without complaint and we as a grateful nation must do ours and do everything in our power to honor them by supporting them the president recently announced plans to improve housing to expand child care to raise military pay to expand job training for spouses to implement the 21st century gi bill and expand counseling and support for families who are dealing with the stress of deployment and war these are the issues that soldiers and their families have discussed with me over the last couple of years and i heard about it again today military families bear a very heavy burden and again they do it without complaint but as a nation we need to find ways to lighten their load fayetteville north carolina is a shining example of how a community can do just that from holding a baby shower for a thousand expectant mothers what a day i imagine to providing tickets to sporting events to scholarship programs to counseling services and support networks designed especially for the children of troops the people of fayetteville and the leadership from numerous community organizations and businesses have gone above and beyond the call of duty you have found ways to help strengthen families under great stress you found ways to make life fun for children who wake up and go to sleep worried about their moms and dads you found ways to celebrate life and provide hope to a new mom who is giving birth all alone you found ways to comfort a parent when the grief is just too much to bear fayetteville clearly does watch over those who watch over us and thank you for your loyalty and your devotion and for those communities out there that don t have a base there s still work to be done national guard and reserve troops come from towns all over this great country and their families often struggle to cope with the deployment of a spouse or a parent or a child so i encourage everyone out there within the sound of my voice to reach out to reach out on your own through schools the pta little leagues churches workplaces and find out if there s a soldier or a soldier s family right there in your own community who needs a little extra support because they are there something as simple as offering help with carpool duty can make the world of difference to a parent who is trying to hold the family together during a very stressful time i d also like to make a special plea that we reach out to the wounded soldiers and their families and that those who have lost a loved one soldiers who return from war and receive care off the base and widows or widowers and their children can become disconnected from the network of support that comes from living close to a base and when they lose a troop all of that is gone so let s take it upon ourselves to reach out to them at these times more than ever they need us and finally it is my hope through these efforts that today s and future generations will honor our men and women in uniform by doing one simple thing by never taking the blessings of freedom for granted and by doing their part to support these families so thank you fayetteville thank you fort bragg thank you to our troops let us keep them in our prayers god bless dem mobama12 5 09 michelle_obama thank you guys thanks so much okay you all can sit down now because you ve been working so hard you need to relax take a load off i am just excited to be here it s like coming home i want to thank nicky for her wonderful introduction and the leadership and dedication that she has provided i mean she talked about you all and the work and the hours that you ve put in through this transition and even before but nicky has really been holding down the fort and i not only want to acknowledge her but since i know her family is here and i know how the only way that people can do this is and i see two young men in suits and i think out of this crowd i think i ve narrowed it down to the two nicky s sons right there so i want to thank you guys and dad for hanging in there with mom and loving her through all of this so let s give you guys a round of applause and i also want to recognize a good friend of ours somebody who i met on the campaign trail who has been a supporter of ours and a supporter of national service for quite some time who s the chair of the board i want to recognize alan solomont and all of the board members who are here today let s give them all a round of applause thank you everybody it is true that through their leadership and commitment we ve helped to shape what national service is and will become i d also like to thank and acknowledge melody barnes who leads the president s domestic policy council and she was instrumental in getting the serve america act passed and she s right over there melody raise your hand melody barnes we are lucky to have melody she is as some person somebody said wicked smart and she s not just working on this piece but so many important pieces of the domestic policy agenda she has been fabulous and we are just so delighted to have her onboard and finally thanks to the men and women here who have been with the corporation since its founding your commitment is an inspiration you know just knowing that there are people who have been here throughout all of these transitions who have dedicated their life to this work and who have seen this corporation through so many transitions this couldn t be possible this day this growth this expansion without all of you and as you know national and community service is near and dear to my heart it is the reason that i breathe and as nicky said it has become my life s work in so many ways like many people when i was coming out of high school and going into college i did what most working class kids did i had to work and i had to work all the time because i had to have enough money for books for the year and i had to help out with tuition i had to chip in so during my college years i had to do work study in order to get through and what i had to do to get through i typed i worked at a bindery i did a whole bunch of babysitting and piano tutoring and dog training i did a little bit of everything and when i was coming up volunteering and doing an internship seemed to be a luxury that a working class kid couldn t afford because ironically you know in order to do some of that service you had to have somebody supporting you for the summer that you weren t working and you were doing something interesting so i could never afford to do that and i didn t realize how much i had missed i had some good experiences but some of these wonderful internships and opportunities to work in community groups i didn t have access to those and more importantly i felt guilty to even ask parents who were already working hard to let me take a summer or a semester off to do something like that so oftentimes i never asked i studied i worked i worked and i d studied and that s how i sort of developed my thinking of career and i went from college to law school to a big ol fancy law firm where i was making more money than both of my parents combined i thought i had arrived i was working on the 47th floor of one of the largest buildings in the city of chicago and i thought well i must be doing okay but then several things happened over the course of my life in a year to make me stop and actually think for the first time about what i wanted i lost my father i lost one of my good friends to cancer suddenly she was in her mid 20s when she died and i thought that for the first time i had to think about life and the life that i was building for myself and i had to ask myself whether if i died tomorrow would i want this to be my legacy working in a corporate firm working for big companies and when i asked myself the question the resounding answer was absolutely not this isn t what i want to leave behind this isn t why i went to princeton and harvard this isn t why i was doing what i was doing i thought i had more to give so people were quite surprised when i told them at the firm that i was going to leave this big lucrative paycheck behind and a promising career and go on to do something more service oriented they all told me to wait and to become a partner first and then leave and i was that was financially the better option but i knew in my heart that i was making the right decision to leave then so i left my job at the firm and started to then think about what i wanted my life to become and when i thought about the things that i cared about the things that i was passionate about service was always somewhere in there i thought about the things that i did for enjoyment they were always mentoring working with other young people trying to help them get to where i had i was to help them think about their lives differently so i knew that service was always going to be a part of that passion so my goal was to figure out how i could not do that in my spare time but how i could make my work service so i started doing a bunch of crazy things working in city government and that s when after city government i left to start this wonderful organization in chicago public allies which many of you know of because it s one of the first model americorps national service programs it was right when president clinton got elected to office and there was an infusion of new resources for wonderful innovative ideas and public allies was an organization that would help 18 to 30 year olds pursue careers in public service and i helped to build that and i had i was never happier in my life than when i was working to build public allies and for those of you who have committed your lives to careers in service you probably know what i m talking about you probably understand that feeling that you get when you help somebody achieve their goals when you help a group of young people learn more about themselves by working with others when you hire young diverse people and you see them grow and develop there is nothing more fulfilling it s an opportunity to put your faith into action in a way that regular jobs don t allow to use your larger talents for the greater good it felt really good and for many americans it may seem impossible to squeeze even more time out of the day and do more because we all have busy lives but i still strongly encourage people to think about volunteering and community service and people are doing it all over the place families are getting involved every day in their communities more and more in ways that are just inspiring serving food at homeless shelters or giving time to their church or their mosque or their temple or participating in walk a thons i mean there are so many ways big and small that people can and are engaging and for parents in particular now that i have my own children service is a great way to demonstrate values and to teach children firsthand what it means to think outside of themselves and we ve relied on service so much as a tool of teaching and education for our kids and when i talk to kids everywhere i remind them that they re never too young to serve that they re never too small to do something big because that s the way that they learn what it means to make a lifelong commitment to service and volunteering as a family has a very lasting impact in many ways this campaign has been a family service initiative for us supporting barack in this post has been just a wonderful way for our family to connect and grow and become stronger because with whatever little sacrifice we give together we re coming together even more as a unit so as we begin to think about what national service can be in this time we ve got to think about all these wonderful components you know what it means to the individual to the family to our children so we re grateful for where we are today i know i am and we wouldn t be here today without the bipartisan support for the serve america act it s just beautiful to see this country and people of all walks of life regardless of party recognizing that this is a really good thing that this is where patriotism begins so it was nice to see this act pass by such an overwhelming amount of support and it happened because of many of you laying that foundation being able to help a set of programs grow to show the impact that these programs can have on young people and on communities that hard core evidence helped us get to where we are and you all know what this bill has done because of this bill we were able to dramatically expand americorps from 75 000 positions a year to 250 000 by 2017 and focusing that service on the issues that are so important today clean energy education health care economic opportunities and caring for our veterans that s how this service is going to be targeted the bill is going to invest in service learning a concept that now is a part of this culture thanks to you when i was coming up no one knew what service learning was and now it s a part of educational experiences throughout this nation so more kids are going to have the opportunity to serve not just those who can afford it and that goes back to my story it is so important that young people regardless of their race or their age or their financial ability that they have a chance to serve that it isn t a luxury just for wealthy kids but it s something that all kids can do and we re seeing that through programs like youthbuild and city year and public allies and teach for america and we could go on and on you go into these programs and you see kids young people of all walks of life serving together and learning together and growing together it s going to help this act tap into the experience and the knowledge of our retired americans as well service isn t just for the young we have so many people who are retired who are at the prime of their lives because now 70 and 80 is like 50 and 60 was let me tell you with my mom we got to keep her moving and this bill will allow us to capture the energy of so many of our older americans and allow them to continue to use their skills and gifts to pass on to the next generation this act is going to also help fund a new social innovation fund which is very cutting edge and thanks to the hard thinking of melody barnes and many other people this fund will invest in ideas that work it ll leverage private sector dollars to encourage further innovation and then expand those innovations to other communities that s how americorps got started model programs that were sort of at the cutting edge of getting more funding and expanding to become national organizations that have gone on to impact thousands and thousands of people in communities across the country the president has asked congress for 50 million in next year s budget for this fund and it ll be housed right here at the corporation and we are so excited about that by creating this infrastructure president obama has sent a clear signal the nation must invest in innovation targeted at the public good this is a new vision of how government can work we know that the next great social innovation won t just come from government programs rather it s likely to come from someone out there that s trying to fix a problem in their own community that s when some of the best ideas happen because they come organically out of real problems we re at a critical time in our nation s history and we need all the hands on deck kind of experience we can get to help solve these big problems and as you know government resources are scarce as you know philanthropic dollars are dwindling so it s imperative that we all use our resources more effectively and the corporation for national community service is the link between the government non profits foundations community organizers and social entrepreneurs you play that important role of bringing them all together and the president is counting on you to take this vision and make it a reality thomas edison once said opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work and for some people that s what service sounds like it sounds like work but for those of us in this room service is a limitless opportunity it is the reason why we breathe so i want to simply thank you all as i ve done on many of my agency visits but this one is a special one for me because national service helped to transform my career i could be some rich lawyer somewhere only slightly writing a check here or there to president obama s campaign but instead i m at the core so this message is personal and i know how hard you have all worked how hard the people on this stage many of whom have been here more than 15 years have worked to get us where we are today and i am personally grateful to all of you all for your belief in this possibility for your dedication but now that we ve got this act passed we re going to need you now more than ever because we ve got a lot to do we ve got to get this money out we ve got to develop strong and impactful programs and you guys know that there s a difference between programs that work and programs that don t yes i hear that groan and not every well meaning idea is worthy of development but that s why you re here so we re going to need you every step of the way feeling just as encouraged just as excited even more so ready to roll up your sleeves put in more time and really push service to the point in this nation where it belongs it should be a part of everyone s life from the moment someone can walk to the day they leave this planet service should be a part of how we give back how we say thank you how we express our gratitude for the lives that we ve been given and i know you all understand that and you can help to spread that message so i want to thank you in advance and i look forward to seeing great things coming out of the corporation you all take care and good luck dem mobama12 5 10 michelle_obama thank you thank you everyone thank you all so much please thank you you know i get embarrassed by too much clapping thank you i am thrilled to be here and i want to start by thanking mary for that very kind introduction and for her life of service more than 30 years as an army spouse proud mother to six children you would never know and all six of whom serve in the armed services and now your leadership as chair of the national military family association we are just grateful for your work and thank you and your entire family for your outstanding service to this country let s give mary a round of applause and to everyone here at nmfa that s a tongue twister for me isn t it for you thank you so much for bringing us all together for this very important summit and i hear things have been going really well i want us to give a big round of applause to the person who i understand put this all together executive director joyce raezer and i know she s out there where is joyce there you are thank you thank you for everything as mary said as first lady i ve had the extraordinary opportunity to help shine a spotlight on the amazing service of our military families all of your families and i m so grateful to be joined in this effort by a truly wonderful partner in this work she s a blue star mom and a champion of our national guard and reserve families my friend dr jill biden as many of you heard jill couldn t be here because her son beau was admitted to the hospital yesterday but he is expected to make a full recovery and our thoughts and prayers are with the entire biden family so together jill and i have tried to help make sure that the voices of military families your voices make sure that they are heard here in washington to help make sure that your priorities are america s priorities and i say that we ve tried to help because of course this is really what all of you do every single day so i d like to thank you all all the organizations joining us today from across the country military families representing military families spouses and leaders in your own right including deborah mullen who is here and to whom jill and i are so grateful for her thoughtful advice and friendship along the way as well as all of the spouses of the joint chiefs and senior enlisted advisors let s give deborah a round of applause i know she s very embarrassed about that but i d also like to thank our partners inside and outside of government who have joined us here including researchers whose pioneering work is guiding this summit and i look forward to seeing your blueprint for action which can help guide our national efforts as we work to serve our military families even better as organizations as individuals each of you has made a profound difference in the lives of so many families but we re here today because we know that like the nmfa says together we re stronger together we re stronger so i couldn t think of a better time and place to come together and discuss a subject that we all know needs to assume its rightful place in america s agenda and that is the state of our military families where we are today where we re going our vision of a nation that truly supports our military families not just now but over the long term and finally how as a country we can turn our vision into reality the first part of our task is to recognize the state of our military families today and i want every american to understand what you all see every day we know that our military families are some of the most patriotic some of the most dedicated the most service oriented americans you will ever meet they are spouses who somehow manage to do it all like the woman from michigan who wrote to me saying she said i wear many hats career woman mother of three daughters and a soldier s wife she described the everyday challenges of holding the family together during her husband s deployment but she added i am proud of my husband and so very proud to be a soldier s wife they are families that even as they serve the nation they still find time to serve their own communities like the gordons who i met during the toys for tots drive at the marine base at quantico they spent so much time collecting toys for other children that they had to bring their family s christmas tree into the collection center so they could actually enjoy it but we also know that after more than eight years of war with just 1 percent of our population our troops doing 100 percent of the fighting that these strong families are being tested like never before they are resilient so they don t always show it and they are proud so they don t always talk about it so a lot of americans don t always see it but these are the hard realities that you know these families have served through multiple deployments year after year like the inspiring mother and daughter that i just got to meet you heard from this morning christian and emryse geye whose husband and father martin is now in iraq on his fourth tour of duty his fourth deployment for these deployed parents they miss out on the birthdays and the anniversaries and special moments that every family treasures like the father who i recently met during my visit to walter reed it was there laying in his bed recovering from his wounds that he finally held his newborn son for the first time and we can never forget our incredible military kids little children who ve spent most of their lives with a parent deployed and older siblings who shoulder more responsibility than even most adults can imagine they re kids like brittany wallace operation homefront s 2009 military child of the year who i got to meet last year when her father was wounded her mother had to leave home to help him recover brittany went from being a teenager to a mom for her siblings she explained in her own words she said my priorities changed my family came first so i want to commend the nmfa and rand for your pioneering research which has highlighted the resilience of our military children but also how today s war can be so very hard for them and how it doesn t get easier with each deployment it actually gets harder and i want to thank you for using this summit to develop actions we can take as a nation to support these amazing children and our military families they re caregivers pulling their own lives together and putting them on hold working every day around the clock to care for our wounded warriors they are families who live every day knowing that a loved one is in harm s way like the mother who wrote to me saying a good day is when a chaplain doesn t knock on my door they are the family and the friends of the fallen who the president and i met in arlington as they spent a few moments among those marble headstones remembering the honor and honoring their loved ones we know that over these past eight years we ve seen an outpouring of support for our troops and their families congress and government have responded with new programs and funding our military is more family friendly than ever before organizations like yours have been a godsend to so many families the american people have volunteered their time they ve contributed money sent care packages they ve lined up at airports to welcome our troops home entire towns and cities have come to a standstill as americans have paid their respects as flag draped caskets carry our fallen heroes to their final resting place and yet we all know something else that even with all this generosity and goodwill many families are still not receiving all the support that they need and that s another hard reality and it s the reason that we re here today because too many families still struggle to access the benefits and the assistance that they need we know that too many spouses still aren t receiving the support to deal with the stress of separation and that includes mental health counseling and we want to thank deborah mullen for bringing this issue to the nation s attention too many spouses still find it hard to pursue their own education and their own careers too many military kids are still struggling with a higher risk of anxiety and depression too many veterans will find it hard to translate their military experience into jobs in the private sector or civilian service to their communities and although i think it would pain most americans to hear this we have to be honest too many of our military families still think a lot of americans don t fully appreciate what they re going through how they sacrifice for us as one military mom appealed to me in a letter she said please don t let americans forget or ignore what we live with she said we are at war and finally we know that the needs of our military families are only going to grow our forces and their families face more deployments that means more veterans needing care especially those with post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury it means more caregivers needing support it means more survivors who can never be forgotten as america asks more of these families they have a right to expect more of us this is our moral obligation it s also a matter of national security the readiness of our armed forces depends on the readiness of our military families so that s the second part of our task ensuring that as a nation we have the capacity to support and engage our military families at every stage of their lives over the long term that requires going forward together with a shared vision of the future that our military families deserve here today we know what that future can look like i know all of you do we see an america where every soldier sailor airman marine and coast guardsman and woman can deploy knowing that their family will be taken care of so instead of worrying about benefits and bureaucracy our troops can focus on their mission which is protecting our country we see an america where every spouse has the support he or she needs including a clear understanding of the programs that are available and how to access them we see an america where every military child is recognized as someone who serves too in their own way and where they receive the support they need to pursue their dreams we see an america where our troops and veterans and their spouses are recognized for what they are and that is skilled and talented leaders who have so much to offer our country not only during their military service but throughout their lives and we see an america where more americans not only understand the service and sacrifices of our troops and their families but where more americans take action to help lighten that load this is the future that our military families deserve so the question is how do we get there and that s the final part of our task turning that vision into reality now there was a time like in world war ii when the whole nation went to war everyone contributed in some way even on the home front planting victory gardens and buying war bonds but the truth is with the amazing capabilities of our all volunteer force and the nature of today s wars most americans haven t really had to sacrifice in the current conflicts well that may be a luxury of our time but it s no excuse not to be engaged and we re fortunate to have organizations like all of yours and the infrastructure in government especially the department of defense and the veterans affairs leading our efforts on behalf of our troops and our families but that s no excuse not to fulfill the responsibility that each of us have as citizens so today i m issuing a national challenge a challenge to every sector of american society to mobilize and take action to support and engage our military families we need a truly national commitment here one percent of americans may be fighting our wars but we need 100 percent of americans to support them and their families this has to be all hands on deck this is a challenge to government as president my husband and his administration have made military families a priority they ve increased pay and benefits and increased funds for military housing and childcare and counseling and career development for spouses and the budget for next year would continue to strengthen military family support programs they ve extended the family and medical leave act to more military families and caregivers and last week my husband signed into law legislation that many of you fought for expanding veterans health care and giving unprecedented support to caretakers at the department of defense which is responsible for so many of our military family programs secretary gates and admiral mullen s leadership has resulted in a great deal of progress but as they will tell you there s still much more we need to know to serve these families better so i want to commend the department for launching the military family life project this is going to be a landmark study of more than 100 000 spouses and servicemembers to assess their quality of life and to better understand how families experience deployments it s starting this month so i want to encourage all the spouses who were selected to fully participate in this project because the more that this nation knows about your priorities the more we can do to meet them this is also a challenge across the federal government where there are so many programs and policies and potential partnerships that could benefit military families for instance at the department of agriculture the 4 h program which can be found in every county in america from cities to rural communities has forged partnerships with the armed services to help military kids when their parents are deployed and today i m proud to announce that my husband has directed a new effort to bring together the resources of the federal government for this mission the president has directed the national security staff to lead a government wide review that will identify new priorities across the federal government including new partnerships to support military families and it s going to urge every department to make supporting these families a very high priority and it will begin to lay the foundation for a more coordinated government approach to supporting and engaging military families for years to come but this is also a challenge to state and local governments whose services touch military families in so many ways for example as you know the interstate compact that makes it easier for military children to transfer to new schools and keep up with their classmates has been adopted by 30 states and we are going to need the other 20 states to help by adopting it too this is a challenge to the private sector last veterans day jill biden and i went to yankee stadium to join an iraq veteran who lost an arm in combat and he threw out the first pitch we were with yogi berra it was very cool it was part of major league baseball s welcome back veterans program to support wounded veterans and to encourage baseball fans to learn how they can help too so every business large or small can play a role maybe it s offering services pro bono to a military family or veteran maybe it s helping a military spouse or a veteran develop their job skills and find a job maybe it s hiring them because you know the discipline and dedication needed to succeed in the military are the same traits that any business would want in their employees or maybe it s speaking out against abusive practices like the predatory lenders who target military families and we know that needs to stop this is a challenge to community based organizations one of the great lessons of recent years is that you don t need to be a military expert to help you don t necessarily need to build something new to help you can keep doing what you re already doing and connect your work to the priorities of military families consider the sierra club which partnered with the nmfa to create operation purple summer camps that have made a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of military kids or my favorite sesame street which has partnered with the uso to reach more than 100 000 military families and helped kids cope with some very challenging situations there are so many organizations with skills and interests that can be shared with military families and we need to get them involved this is a challenge to every community in america yes it s easier when you live near a military base in fayetteville north carolina for example near fort bragg i learned about a baby shower that the community threw for 1 000 expectant military moms now that s a lot of diapers we know but even in communities without a base there are so many ways to reach out after all most military families as you know live off base they re our neighbors the vast majority of military children attend public schools they re our children s classmates and many of our national guardsmen and reservists don t live anywhere near a base they re teachers and doctors and police officers in virtually every community across our country that s why last veteran s day jill and i also helped launch mission serve the national network that brings civilian and military service groups together not only to help support troops and veterans and their families but to encourage communities to tap the talents and skills of our military families and veterans there are just so many partnerships waiting to be forged so ultimately this is a challenge to every american because everyone can do something whether it s reaching out to a local family or supporting an organization serving families or sharing your skills or being a voice in your community or just saying thank you even small things send a big message they send our answer to that military mom who wrote me asking that we never forget or ignore our military families and how can we forget families like the banks and their young son willie a few years ago when willie was just four his father who was a major in the army died of cancer and then just a year later his mom also a soldier deployed to iraq and willie and his baby sister talana went to live with relatives it hasn t been easy but one of the things that helps willie get through the hard times are the gifts his father left for him knowing that he would not be there to raise his son willie s father wrote him a series of letters to be opened on his birthdays as he grew up they include life messages and lessons and words of encouragement like be a man of your word and never break a promise put your family first you can do all the things you set your mind to i m proud of you and you re wonderful going to be a wonderful young man and today willie is 10 and when operation homefront named him this year s military child of the year i was honored to welcome him to the white house and let me tell you his father would be proud willie is such a wonderful little man he helps take care of his sister he loves math and science and he helps other students in his classes he s helped his mom prepare for her next change of station he s a little guy but he s got big dreams and he wants to go to west point and become a general in the army and he also wants to play in the nfl willie s story and all the stories i ve shared today are in the end a challenge to all americans after all their sacrifices after all they ve done for us will we keep faith with these families will we stand by these spouses will we help these children realize their dreams as individuals as a nation i believe we must and i certainly believe that we can and it won t be easy it s going to take many years it s going to require a great deal of patience as you all know but if americans respond to this challenge if we mobilize every segment of society if we work together if we hold ourselves to the same high standard of excellence that our military families live by every day then i know we can succeed i know we can realize our vision of an america that truly supports and engages our military families not just now but for decades to come and i can promise you this today this will remain one of my defining missions as first lady and i thank you all for the work that you do every day to turn our vision into reality thank you all so much dem mobama12 7 10a michelle_obama wow oh my goodness thank you all thank you so so much everyone please please please take your seats thank you so much it is such a pleasure and it is an honor to be here today for the 101st naacp convention yes i want to start by thanking chairman roslyn brock beautiful woman for that very kind introduction and i mentioned to her i said her mother s hot she s gorgeous good genes i also want to thank both her and your president and ceo ben jealous for their inspired leadership of this organization give them a round of applause i want to thank a few other people as well who are here i want to thank governor nixon and the first lady georgeanne nixon who are here i want to thank senator mccaskill who was here who s no longer here but i wanted to say hello to her representatives cleaver moore and scott who are here and mayor funkhouser for all the outstanding work that all of you are doing for the people of this city and for this great state and for taking time to join us today so let s give them all a round of applause and finally i want to thank all of you i want to thank you for a few things first of all thank you for being here today and thank you for the outstanding work that you ve done in making this a great american institution and also i have to thank you for your prayers for your support i cannot tell you how much that means to me and my girls and my mom and then my husband as well thank you all so so much it really keeps us going and i am just thrilled to be here one hundred and one years ago the naacp was established in pursuit of a simple goal and that was to spur this nation to live up to the founding ideals to secure those blessings of liberty to fulfill that promise of equality and since then the work of this organization has been guided by a simple belief that while we might not fully live out that promise or those blessings for ourselves if we worked hard enough and fought long enough and believed strongly enough that we could secure them for our children and for our grandchildren and give them opportunities that we never dreamed of for ourselves so for more than a century the men and women of the naacp have marched and protested you have lobbied presidents and fought unjust laws you ve stood up and sat in and risked life and limb so that african americans could take their rightful places not just at lunch counters and on buses but at universities and on battlefields and in hospitals and boardrooms in congress the supreme court and yes even the white house think about it even the white house so i know that i stand here today and i know that my husband stands where he is today because of this organization and because of the struggles and the sacrifices of all those who came before us but i also know that their legacy isn t an entitlement to be taken for granted and i know it is not simply a gift to be enjoyed instead it is an obligation to be fulfilled and when so many of our children still attend crumbling schools and a black child is still far more likely to go to prison than a white child i think the founders of this organization would agree that our work is not yet done when african american communities are still hit harder than just about anywhere by this economic downturn and so many families are just barely scraping by i think the founders would tell us that now is not the time to rest on our laurels when stubborn inequalities still persist in education and health in income and wealth i think those founders would urge us to increase our intensity and to increase our discipline and our focus and keep fighting for a better future for our children and our grandchildren and that s why i really wanted to come here today because i wanted to talk with you about an issue that i believe cries out for our attention one that is of particular concern to me not just as first lady but as a mother who believes that we owe it to our kids to prepare them for the challenges that we know lie ahead and that issue is the epidemic of childhood obesity in america today now right now in america one in three children is overweight or obese putting them at greater risk of obesity related conditions like diabetes and cancer heart disease asthma and we re already spending billions of dollars in this country a year to treat these conditions and that number is only going to go up when these unhealthy children reach adulthood but it s important to be clear that this issue isn t about how our kids look it s not about that it s about how our kids feel it s about their health and the health of our nation and the health of our economy and there s no doubt that this is a serious problem it s one that is affecting every community across this country but just like with so many other challenges that we face as a nation the african american community is being hit even harder by this issue we are living today in a time where we re decades beyond slavery we are decades beyond jim crow when one of the greatest risks to our children s future is their own health african american children are significantly more likely to be obese than are white children nearly half of african american children will develop diabetes at some point in their lives people that s half of our children and if we don t do something to reverse this trend right now our kids won t be in any shape to continue the work begun by the founders of this great organization they won t be in any condition to confront all those challenges that we know still remain so we need to take this issue seriously as seriously as improving under achieving schools as seriously as eliminating youth violence or stopping the spread of hiv aids or any of the other issues that we know are devastating our communities but in order to address this challenge we also need to be honest with ourselves about how we got here because we know that it wasn t always like this for our kids and our communities the way we live today is very different from even when i was growing up and i like to tell my kids i m not that old they don t agree many of you probably grew up like i did in a community that wasn t rich not even middle class but where people knew their neighbors and they looked out for each other s kids in these kind of strong african american communities we went to neighborhood schools around the corner so many of us had to walk to and from school every day rain or shine i know you ve told that story and in chicago where i was raised we did it in the dead of winter no shoes on our feet it was hard but we walked and in school we had recess twice a day and gym class twice a week like it or not and then when we got home in the afternoon after school or in the summer there was no way we d be allowed to lie around the house watching tv first of all there wasn t that many channels our parents made us get up and play outside had to get up get out didn t have to just couldn t be inside and we would spend hours riding bikes playing softball freeze tag jumping double dutch kids nowadays don t even know how to jump double dutch we were constantly on the move only stopping to eat or what when the streetlights came on right and eating was a totally different experience back then in my house we rarely ate out rarely even when both parents worked outside of the home most families in my neighborhood sat down at the table together as a family for a meal and in my house marian robinson s house we ate what we were served my mother never cared whether me or my brother liked what was on our plates we either ate what was there or we didn t eat it was as simple as that we never ate anything fancy but the portion sizes were reasonable and there were rarely seconds maybe for your father but not for you and there was always a vegetable on the plate and many of our grandparents tended their own gardens or they relied on as my father told me the vegetable man who brought fresh produce that was how people got by back then they had fresh fruits and vegetables in their own backyards and in jars in their cellar during the winter and that wasn t just being thrifty that was healthy too little did we know and unless it was sunday or somebody s birthday there was no expectation of dessert after our meals and we didn t dream of asking for soda or pop that was for special occasions now if you were lucky you might get a quarter or two to take to the corner store and get some penny candy but you did not eat it all at once because you never knew when you d see another piece of candy so you saved it in that little brown bag under your bed that bag would be all worn out and sweaty you d hold on to that bag take out a half a piece of candy every other day back then without any expert advice and without spending too much money we managed to lead pretty healthy lives but things are a little different today and many kids these days aren t so fortunate so many kids can t attend neighborhood schools or don t so instead of walking to school they ride in a car or they re in a bus and in too many schools recess and gym class have been slashed because of budget cuts fears about safety mean that those afternoons outside have been replaced by afternoons inside with tv video games the internet in fact studies have found that african american children spend an average of nearly six hours a day watching tv and that every extra hour of tv they watch is associated with the consumption of an additional 167 calories for many folks those nutritious family meals are a thing of the past because a lot of people today are living in communities without a single grocery store so they have to take two three buses a taxi walk for miles just to buy a head of lettuce for a salad or to get some fresh fruit for their kids most folks don t grow their own food the way many of our parents and grandparents did a lot of folks also just don t have the time to cook at home on a regular basis so instead they wind up grabbing fast food or something from the corner store or the mini mart places that have few if any healthy options and we ve seen how kids in our communities regularly stop by these stores on their way to school buying themselves sodas and pop and chips for breakfast and we ve seen how they come right back to those same stores after school to buy their afternoon snack of candy and sugary drinks according to one study on average a trip to the corner store a child will walk out of that store with more than 350 calories worth of food and beverage this is on average so if they re going two and three times a day that can really add up and taken together all of these things have made for a perfect storm of bad habits and unhealthy choices a lifestyle that s dooming too many of our children to a lifetime of poor health and undermining our best efforts to build them a better future see we can build our kids the best schools on earth but if they don t have the basic nutrition they need to concentrate they re still going to have a challenge learning and we can create the best jobs in the world we must but that won t mean that folks will have the energy and the stamina to actually do those jobs we can offer people the best health care money can buy but if they re still leading unhealthy lives then we ll still just be treating those diseases and conditions once they ve developed rather than keeping people from getting sick in the first place see and the thing is is that none of us wants that kind of future for our kids or for our country and surely the men and women of the naacp haven t spent a century organizing and advocating and working day and night only to raise the first generation in history that might be on track to live shorter lives than their parents and that s why i ve made improving the quality of our children s health one of my top priorities as many of you may know my efforts began with the planting of a garden on the south lawn of the white house but it s important to understand that this garden symbolizes so much more than just watching beautiful things grow it s become a way to spark a broader conversation about the health and well being not just of our kids but of our communities and in an effort to elevate that conversation nationally we launched let s move it s a nationwide campaign to rally this country around a single ambitious goal and that is to solve childhood obesity in a generation so that children born today reach adulthood at a healthy weight and through this initiative we are bringing together governors and mayors businesses and community groups educators parents athletes health professionals you name it because it is going to take all of us working together to help our kids lead healthier lives right from the beginning let s move the campaign has four components the first we re working to give parents the information they need to make healthy decisions for their families for example we re working with the fda and the food industry to provide better labeling something simple so folks don t have to spend hours squinting at labels trying to figure out whether the food they re buying is healthy or not our new health care legislation requires chain restaurants to post the calories in the food they serve so that parents have the information they need to make healthy choices for their kids in restaurants and we re working with doctors and pediatricians to ensure that they routinely screen our children for obesity and i can personally attest to the value of these screenings based on my own personal experiences because it wasn t that long ago when the obamas weren t exactly eating as healthy as we should have been and it was our daughters pediatrician who actually pulled us aside and suggested that i think about making some changes to our family s diet and it made a world of differences but we also know that giving better information to parents is not enough because with 31 million american children participating in federal school meal programs many of our kids are consuming as many as half their daily calories at school that s why the second part of let s move is to get healthier food into our schools and we re working to reauthorize our child nutrition legislation that will make significant new investments to revamp our school meals and improve the food that we offer in those school vending machines so that we re serving our kids less sugar salt and fat and more vegetables fruits and whole grains this is bipartisan legislation and it is critically important for the health and success of our children and we are hoping that congress will act swiftly to get this passed but we also know that healthy eating is only half the battle experts recommend at least 60 minutes a day of activity that s at least the bare minimum and many of our kids aren t even close so the third part of let s move is to help our kids get moving to find new ways for them to get and stay active and fit and we re working to get more kids participating in daily physical education classes and to get more schools offering recess for their students we ve set a goal of increasing the number of kids who walk or ride their bikes to school by 50 percent in the next five years and we ve recruited professional athletes they ve been fantastic from different sports leagues to inspire our kids to get up off that couch and to get moving but we know that even if we offer the most nutritious school meals and we give kids every opportunity to be fit and we give parents the information they need to prepare healthy food for their families all that won t mean much if our families still live in communities where that healthy food simply isn t available in the first place and that brings me to the fourth and final component of the campaign and that is to ensure that all families have access to fresh affordable food in their communities where they live and one of the most shocking statistics for me in all of this is that right now 23 5 million americans including 6 5 million children live in what we call food deserts areas without a single supermarket this is particularly serious in african american communities where folks wind up buying their groceries at places like gas stations and bodegas and corner stores where they often pay higher prices for lower quality food but the good news is that we know that this trend is reversible because when healthier options are available in our community we know that folks will actually take advantage of those options one study found that african americans ate 32 percent more fruits and vegetables for each additional supermarket in their community so we know the kind of difference that we can make with some changes we know that when we provide the right incentives things like grants and tax credits and hlp securing permits and zoning businesses are willing to invest and lay down roots in our communities and many grocers are finding that when they set up shop in high need areas they can actually make a decent profit they re learning that they can do well by doing good so as part of let s move we ve proposed a healthy food financing initiative a 400 million a year fund that we ll use to attract hundreds of millions of more dollars from the private and non profit sectors to bring grocery stores and other healthy food retailers to underserved areas across the country and our goal is ambitious we want to eliminate food deserts in this country within seven years and create jobs and revitalize neighborhoods along the way so i know these goals are ambitious and there are many many more and as first lady i am going to do everything that i can to ensure that we meet them but i also know that at the end of the day government can only do so much i have spoken to so many experts about this issue and not a single one of them said that the solution is to have government tell people what to do it s not going to work instead this is about families taking responsibility and making manageable changes that fit with their budgets and their needs and their tastes that s the only way it s going to work it s about making those little changes that can really add up simple things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator walking instead of riding in a car or bus even something as simple as turning on the radio and dancing with your children in the middle of your living room for hours that will work up a sweat how about replacing all of that soda and those sugary drinks with water kids won t like it at first trust me but they ll grow to like it or deciding that they don t get dessert with every meal as i tell my kids dessert is not a right or they don t get it every day or just being more thoughtful about how we prepare our food baking instead of frying i know don t shoot me and cutting back on those portion sizes look no one wants to give up sunday meal no one wants to say goodbye to mac and cheese and fried chicken and mashed potatoes oh i m getting hungry forever no one wants to do that not even the obamas trust me but chefs across the country are showing us that with a few simple changes and substitutions we can find healthy creative solutions that work for our families and our communities and that s why i am excited about our new let s cook video series which we re launching on our let s move website at letsmove gov this is a great series featuring sam kass who a lot of people think is cute i don t know if that helps but this series features some of the country s top chefs who will be demonstrating how folks can prepare simple affordable nutritious meals for their families the first guest chef is a guy by the names of marvin woods who s known for his cuisine based in north africa the caribbean south america the low country he s demonstrating how to prepare a week of healthy and tasty dinners for a family of four on a tight budget and he provides recipes shopping lists so that folks can do it all themselves at home and finally it s one thing we can think about is working to make sure that our kids get a healthy start from the beginning by promoting breastfeeding in our communities one thing we do know is that babies that are breastfed are less likely to be obese as children but 40 percent of african american babies are never breastfed at all not even during the first weeks of their lives and we know this isn t possible or practical for some moms but we ve got a wic program that s providing new support to low income moms who want to try so that they get the support they need and under the new health care legislation businesses will now have to accommodate mothers who want to continue breastfeeding once they get back to work now the men you may not understand how important that is but trust me it s important to have a place to go but let s be clear this isn t just about changing what our kids are eating and the lifestyles they re leading it s also about changing our own habits as well because believe it or not if you re obese there s a 40 percent chance that your kids will be obese as well and if you both you and the child s other parent are obese that number jumps to 80 percent and this is more than just genetics at work the fact is we all know we are our children s first and best teachers and role models we teach them healthy habits not just by what we say but by how we live shoot i can t tell malia and sasha to eat their vegetables if i m sitting around eating french fries trust me they will not let that happen and i can t tell them to go run around outside if i m spending all my free time on the couch watching tv and this isn t just about the example that we set as individuals and as families but about the lifestyle we re promoting in our communities as well it s about the example we set in our schools it s about schools like the kelly edwards elementary school in williston south carolina it s a bronze award winner in our usda healthier u s school challenge this is a school where students have planted their own garden so that they can taste all kinds of fresh vegetables they can stay active because they ve got their own dance team and it s about establishing strong community partnerships that involve folks from every sector and every background there s a fresh food financing initiative in pennsylvania it s a great example this initiative is a collaboration between business non profit and government that s funded more than 80 supermarket projects bringing nutritious food to hundreds of thousands of people in underserved communities these are just a couple of the thousands of programs and projects that are making a difference in communities across the country already so if there s anybody here after all this talking i ve done who feels a little overwhelmed by this challenge because it can be overwhelming if there is anyone here who might even already be losing hope thinking about how hard it will be to get going or giving up i just want you to take a look around at all the things that are already being accomplished because i want folks to learn from each other and to be inspired by each other because that s what we ve always done that is exactly what happened here in this city half a century ago see because back in 1958 folks right here in kansas city saw what folks down in montgomery had achieved with their bus boycott so they were inspired by all those men and women who walked miles walked miles home each day on aching feet because they knew there was a principle at stake so folks here organized their own boycott of department stores that refused to serve african americans handbills publicizing their meetings stated and this is a quote they stopped riding in montgomery so let s stop buying in kansas city a local music teacher even composed a song that became the anthem for their efforts it was entitled let s take the walk that counts and then as you know a few years later in april of 1964 folks turned out in droves to pass a public accommodations law mandating that all residents regardless of their skin color be served in restaurants hotels and other public places even folks who were too sick to walk showed up to vote one organizer recalled that they used wheelchairs to get people to the polls and even brought one man in on a stretcher so think about that being carried to the ballot box on a stretcher those folks didn t do all that just for themselves they did it because they wanted something better for their children and for their grandchildren that s why they did it and in the end that s what has driven this organization since its founding it is why daisy bates endured hate mail and death threats to guide those nine young men and women who would walk through those schoolhouse doors in little rock it is why thurgood marshall fought so hard to ensure that children like linda brown and children like my daughters and your sons and daughters would never again know the cruel inequality of separate but equal it is why so many men and women legends and icons and ordinary folks have faced down their doubts their cynicism and their fears and they ve taken that walk that counts so we owe it to all those who ve come before us to ensure that all those who come after us our children and our grandchildren that they have the strength and the energy and the enduring good health that they need to continue and complete that journey so i m asking you naacp will you move with me let s move i m going to need you naacp this is not an endeavor that i can do by myself we cannot change the health of our community alone i m going to need each and every single one of you to work together for this campaign for our children s future if we do this together we can change the way our children think about their health forever so i want to thank you all in advance again for your prayers and your thoughts and your support the struggle continues thank you all god bless you god bless this organization and god bless america thank you all so much dem mobama12 7 10b michelle_obama well thank you guys good afternoon i have sand in my shoes which means that i have to come back right i want to thank all of you for the warm and wonderful welcome here to panama city beach it is truly beautiful out here i mean these beaches are gorgeous i want to start by thanking your mayor gayle who has just been a terrific supporter of this community and she has been a wonderful host to me thank you gayle for everything that you re doing for the people of this city let s give her a big round of applause and i want to thank a few other people that i got a chance to meet today commissioner dozier who s here let s give him a round of applause and we have the panama city mayor scott clemons here as well so there s one thing that i ve learned after spending a very short time here but i ve learned it in that quick time is that this is really a friendly place with a lot of warm and open people it s welcoming it s pristine and everybody should come here but it wasn t always this way as i have been told back in 1935 in the heart of the great depression most people came to panama city to focus on growing crops did you all know that i ll give you a little history lesson planting fruit trees and making a living in the soil instead of the sand and then there was this one man a developer named gideon thomas who had a different plan in mind he saw things a little bit differently he built the panama city hotel to attract tourists to the florida coast and many people thought he was crazy for staking the claim on the beaches rather than in the fields but gideon didn t listen thank god he said i m not attempting to grow vegetables here he said i m going to grow people and that s exactly what he did things took a while to get going but pretty soon folks from all over the country were doing what many of you do they re bringing their families down here they staked a claim and they found out that this is one of the most beautiful stretches of land not just in the country but in the world as one newspaper wrote panama city has a destiny as sure as the sun will shine tomorrow but i know that today for a lot of folks here in florida and along the gulf coast that destiny doesn t seem as certain anymore the oil spill in the gulf is the worst environmental disaster in our nation s history and over the last few months oil spewing from the well a mile beneath the surface of the ocean has polluted our beaches it s endangered our wildlife and it s threatened the livelihoods of fishermen and small business owners from biloxi all the way to pensacola i also know that this community is home to many military families as gayle mentioned including the men and women in the coast guard and the national guard who mobilized in response to this crisis and i just want to say to you and your families for the military servicemen and women who are here again you have always made extraordinary sacrifices and i want to thank you all all across the armed forces for everything that you do to serve and protect us we continue to be proud of you all but their families make up this community as well so there s no question that this is a difficult time for anyone who lives or works on the coast and that s why my husband and his administration are doing everything they can to get that cap on that well to clean up the mess and to make sure that bp is held accountable for the damages that they ve caused and the disruption that they ve caused in so many lives but it s also important to remember that there are many places along the gulf coast like right here in panama city beach that as you can still these places are still clean they are safe and they are open for business that s one of the reasons why i m here it s important for the rest of the country to know that these places are just as vibrant and just as beautiful as they ve always been and folks here in florida and across the gulf coast are still depending on visitors and tourist dollars to put food on their tables and to pay their mortgages and to send their kids to college because everybody s going to college right all right today i got the chance to meet some of the business owners and restaurant owners here in panama city beach a wonderful group of determined and dedicated men and women who care deeply about this community and many of them have been a part of this community for generations the stories you hear i ve met grandchildren and sons and daughters who have been building their lives here for a very long time and they hope that their children and grandchildren can stick around for generations to come and carry on these traditions but it s not just the folks who own the businesses who make up this community but it s also folks who come here on vacation the families that have rented that same condo or visited the same stretch of beach for as long as they can remember who falls into that category how many kids just come here and play on the beach every summer yeah yeah don t point to him you look like you could still play the parents who packed up the van with the kids and the dog and headed south for a little slice of paradise which this is these people the residents and the visitors are the lifeblood of the gulf coast and that s why it s so important to spread the word that despite what everyone is seeing on tv and reading in the newspaper that most of the coast is still open for business it is truly important for people to understand that most of these beaches are perfectly clean and there s so many wonderful places all across the coast florida alabama mississippi louisiana texas that are ready to welcome visitors like they have every summer and i know that there have been lots of questions lately about how we can best help people here on the gulf coast who ve been affected by the oil spill and to be honest truly one of the best ways that fellow americans can help is to come on down here and spend some money and that s one of the reasons why i wanted to come this summer i mean my husband has been down here several times we ve got administrative officials but i wanted to shed a light on the terrific people and the great places to come and relax and have fun because that s the time of year that we re in people are looking for that place to go their kids are driving them crazy they want them out of the house and this is a great option right now my husband and so many members of his administration are working tirelessly to help make the gulf coast whole again and part of that means ensuring that the leak is plugged and they re making progress on that front part of it is ensuring that residents are compensated for their losses and that s happening and part of it is ensuring that the beaches are clean and the ecosystem is restored so kids can come back and bring their kids and their kids and remember the beauty that this coast has to offer so that will always be the first priority of this administration making sure that those components continue to happen but it s also our responsibility to help the people of the gulf return to the lives that they love and it s our job to make sure that visitors who have enjoyed this beautiful coastline for generations can keep the tradition alive and it s up to us to let americans everywhere know about the extraordinary hospitality and about all the wonderful places to bring your families and enjoy yourselves right here on the gulf where the future will always be bright and just driving around i saw golf courses i saw that upside down house it s a whole building that s upside down i don t know what s going on there but if i m a kid i want to go in that house water parks beautiful beaches there s so much to do here and i can guarantee you that people will be ready to welcome all of america with open arms so on behalf of my family and the administration know that we are working on your behalf we care deeply about getting things right here and i look forward to coming back down to the coast and getting some more sand in my shoes but for now i m going to come down and shake some hands thank you all so much dem mobama13 10 09 michelle_obama hey thank you thank you all thank you so much what a wonderfully warm welcome i am just happy to be here this is my first agency visit since we took a little break this summer so this is the way to get back started in the fall coming to hhs i want to just thank secretary sebelius for that wonderful introduction i think everyone can see that she hasn t been giving given a very easy portfolio you know when you think about just sort of all that she s had to deal with and the grace and poise and intelligence that she s brought to her position we are all just grateful to have her on our team leading us guiding us and she is indeed a dear dear friend and i want to thank her for all of the work that she s done between health insurance reform preparing for h1n1 and all the other critical issues that she s laid out that hhs is working on that all of you are working on i want to thank her and honor her for her work today let s give her a round of applause but i am also here to thank and to honor all of you it is something that i have enjoyed doing for the last nine and a half months that we ve been in office and that is to come around to the agencies all the departments throughout washington and just to meet all of you and to make sure that you know on behalf of the white house and our family that we are so grateful for the work that you do we re still new here nine and a half months it feels longer but we re new and when i come here i come to listen to ask questions to use the information the insight that i get from these visits and take it back to the white house to the west wing but also to help it inform the kinds of things that i do in my role as first lady because i know that many of you have spent a lifetime here devoting entire careers some of you a few years but many of you for decades have spent your time devoted to the issues that are so important to this nation and in fact i think that there are few people behind us who have been working here at hhs for more than 40 or 50 years and there is one gentleman in particular mr donald abramson where is mr abramson who has been here for more than 60 years and he still looks good man you know i can t imagine doing anything for 60 years but that s why it s so important for us to see all of you and i want us to give everyone on this stage a round of applause for their dedication and commitment so we all know we have something to learn from the folks on this stage right but whether it s fighting disease or promoting wellness keeping our food and our drugs safe protecting children and supporting families or searching for the cures for the future what you all do to help keep us healthy and strong is important every single one of you and in many cases it couldn t be more urgent than now what you re doing and this is particularly true with an issue that i ve taken on pretty vigorously and something that i want to just talk a little bit about today and it s an issue that doesn t affect me just as first lady but as a mother and that is the growing threat of obesity particularly childhood obesity in this nation and i have pointed this out before but right now and i repeat this statistic everywhere i go nearly a third of all children in this country are overweight or obese one in three children in this country and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetimes a third of children and in the african american and hispanic communities that number goes up to one half one half of those children this has profound implications for not just their futures but ours as a nation it is a major public health threat right now so just imagine what we re going to be facing in 20 or 30 years if we don t get on this issue we have to think about what kind of increases we ll be seeing in other obesity related conditions like heart disease and cancer and high blood pressure how much money will we be spending each year on the medical care on the missed days of work the loss of productivity and how much will all of this diminish the quality of life for these children as they reach adulthood and then you know hopefully go on to sit where mr abramson is sitting and what does it mean that medical experts are now warning that for the first time in the history of our nation for the first time in the history of our nation the next generation may be on track to having a shorter life span than this generation than their parents and none of us wants a future like that for our children all parents and i don t care what political party you belong to what race what part of the country you re from we all care about the health of our children and we would do anything to ensure their health everyone wants to make sure their kids eat right everyone wants to make sure that their kids are getting enough activity and everyone is working as hard as they can in their own homes but in many ways what i do know is that many families are starting to feel like the cards are stacked against them it s really hard to make sure that your children are healthy and happy and safe and well fed and maybe it s because some of some folks are working on a tight budget and they feel like they just can t afford the kind of nutritious foods that are being recommended maybe it s because folks are working long hours can i get an amen from hhs and they struggle to find time to make a home cooked meal maybe they live in a community that doesn t have access to a supermarket where there s good fresh produce and maybe the best thing that they have available is a food stand or a gas station or a convenience store to get their food or maybe there aren t any safe places for kids to play so it makes putting your kids in front of that xbox a little more comforting and a little more of a better option those of you who are parents probably if you re anything like me you worry about this every single day and many of you who are grandparents who are in charge of things with your grandkids are thinking about it and i know this feeling you ve had a long day at work you know i remember this two years ago before we got here while i was working and campaigning for my husband and trying to take care of two kids i remember coming home from a meeting or from an event just tired tired and knowing that you re going home to an empty refrigerator and kids who are hungry and fussy and not wanting to eat anything you have in mind all they want is some pizza and some burgers right and you don t want to argue you want a peaceful meal you want everyone to be quiet and just eat and it is in those moments and for me there were many where you just give in and just get that take out get them what they want see drive thru it s like heaven you drive through it s quick it s easy as a mother of two little girls and working mother at one time in a job that gave me benefits i can relate and oftentimes eating out is the cheaper alternative in many cases so there was a time when i was living this life and then i got a little tap on my shoulder from our kids pediatrician who basically said you know you may want to look at changing the way your children are eating because he could see the effects and i was shocked i thought we all had our stuff together but it s a little startling when somebody tells you you need to you know rethink things so you just try to figure out well where do you begin what do you change how can you change things but what i found was that if we start small and not try to bite off too much if we just added a few more fruits and vegetables into every single meal if we cut down on sugary drinks and processed fruit foods that we could see some changes and one of the things we tried not to ever do was be totally rigid you know just make kids so afraid of vegetables that they would never ever want to enjoy a meal but we worked on achieving moderation in our lives teaching our kids about different types of foods and what they do to their bodies and eventually we got into a routine that worked for our family and the biggest challenge was just figuring out where to start and not letting it overwhelm you or me i m talking to myself now and i think a lot of families out there feel that way they d like to do things differently they know there s a problem but when you re already overwhelmed with so much with work and bills and everything on your plate it s really hard to sort through all of the information that s out there to figure out how do you fundamentally change things in a way that s going to benefit your family but here s this thing so much research has been done on these issues and a lot of it has been done by people who work right here all of you have been working on these issues for so long and part of the message that we re trying to impart nationally is that parents families don t have to do this all by themselves you know they have all of you they have all of us we can offer them the tools and the information that they need to help them make the best decisions for their family that s why congress and the president included 1 billion for prevention and wellness programs in the recovery act and that includes funding for initiatives that will give communities the resources they need to address the obesity epidemic in their communities this includes 373 million announced last month that would be available for communities that put together comprehensive plans to reduce obesity 373 million and that would include everything from incentivizing grocery stores to locate in underserved areas it could include improving meals at school to getting more healthy affordable foods into vending machines to creating more safe accessible places for people to exercise and play and a whole lot more but in the end of course our government and our communities as you all know we can only do so much there s only so much policy and even money can do and no grant program can sit at the dinner table with a child right and convince them to eat what they re supposed to eat but we say in my household just eat it you re not going to like it just finish it get on with it no grant program can make sure that the kids step away from the tv and set down those videogames and figure out a way to move their bodies ultimately all of that is up to parents and families ultimately we re the ones who influence our kids but there s good news i ve learned that again little changes can make a big difference little changes can make a big difference simply adjusting how we eat like trying to cook one or two meals at home each week not every week that s crazy but one or two meals switching from soda to water pretty simple adding a vegetable or a fruit to a dinner plate making that more the meal than the meat or the rice and paying a little more attention to what s on the labels again not totally evaporating your way of being as you know it today just little changes and finding a way to get more exercise into all of our lives including our kids walking instead of driving standing in front of the tv instead of sitting small things but all of this truly could have noticeable effects small things all we re saying but it isn t easy to change old habits that s what we know and it doesn t happen all at once it doesn t happen overnight but all of us want to live healthier lives i know we all do you don t get pushback on this issue we all want the best for our children we just need the right information and we need all of you the truth is that s why the work that you do is so important to this nation and don t ever forget that the conversations that you can have not just in your own families and your communities but the communities that you work with the folks that you come in contact through the work that you do all of these little conversations the steady drumbeat of small changes make a difference so we re going to need each and every one of you to stay pumped up to stay healthy yourselves which is why this program that the secretary just mentioned is a tremendous start and i hope that every single one of the employees here takes advantage of it because the best way to change your children s lives is to see them watching you change yours because in the end but this is an issue that we re all going to need to work together on and i am confident that we can begin to turn the tide on obesity we can change the way that we see ourselves our relationship with food and exercise and we can pass on a whole nother set of habits to our children their fate isn t set yet we still have everything in our power because the other beautiful thing is that kids change quickly their habits are easily broken they are so malleable and they re waiting for the right information the right opportunities and once they have it they just go we ve seen it with the children that we work with in the gardens many of the children in the public schools they take this information they understand it they apply it to their lives and they push their parents and their families to be different that s one of the reasons why we start with kids oftentimes they are ready for change sometimes when we re not so i know that working together we can get this done i want to thank you for your passion for your commitment it has been a pleasure to be here i will be back soon and get healthy thank you dem mobama13 11 09 michelle_obama thank you everybody thank you so much first of all forgive me i ve got children and now i have a cold it goes along with the territory let me begin by first thanking tina tchen who s doing an outstanding job as director of the office of public engagement by opening up this white house to the american people and organizing events like this one today she s just been a terrific asset and a dear friend and let s give her a round of applause and i also want to commend nancy ann for her extraordinary leadership on health care health insurance reform i know my husband who is traveling abroad right now would agree with me when i say that without her we wouldn t have come this far and because of her we re going to get the job done so we are grateful to you nancy ann and of course i want to thank all the women who are here today this is a wonderful lively group i heard you all giggling earlier today but i also want to thank the women who spoke today to kelly and fran and judy for sharing their stories what they ve been through isn t easy and i m grateful that they have been brave enough and open enough to share their stories with all of us it takes a lot of courage these stories touch our hearts they spark in us just a fundamental sense of unfairness but the sad truth is none of these stories are unique these kinds of stories are being told in city after city town after town all across america they re being told by women who lost their coverage when their husband lost a job or their husband passed away they re being told by women who aren t getting regular checkups because it s simply too expensive they re being told my women living on fixed incomes who can t afford the prescription drugs that they need all of these stories reflect the fundamental reality and that is women are among those struggling most under the status quo the way things are and women are among those who will benefit most from health insurance reform because the truth is that women we have a special relationship with our health care system in a lot of families that s true because we are the health care system in so many ways eight in 10 mothers say they re the ones responsible for choosing their children s doctors taking them to appointments and managing the follow up care and over 10 percent of all women are now caring for a sick or elderly relative our entire lives as women we are asked to bear much of the responsibility for our family s health and well being and yet we often face special challenges when it comes to our own health insurance part of it has to do with the fact that women are more likely than men to do part time work or to work in a small business in jobs that are less likely to offer the kind of insurance that you really need in fact over half of all women in this country don t have the option of getting insurance through the workplace at all but even women who do have insurance face inequities under the status quo because women make less than 80 cents for every dollar their male coworkers make it s more difficult for them to pay their premiums especially when studies show that they re paying far more than men for the same coverage and i don t think anyone here will be surprised to learn that a recent study found that one third of all women have either used up savings taken on debt or given up basic necessities just to pay their medical bills and as many of you know firsthand these kinds of problems the problems of coverage and cost only grow worse when you get older making quality affordable coverage harder to come by just as we ve seen today and heard today just when you need it the most in the individual market people in their early 60s are more than twice as likely to be denied coverage than people in their late 30s older women are more likely than men to face a chronic illness but they re less likely to be able to afford the cost of treating that illness and in recent years studies have shown that women over the age of 65 spend about 17 percent of their income on health care and that s just not right our mothers and grandmothers they have taken care of us all their lives they ve made the sacrifices that it takes to get us where we need to be and we have an obligation to make sure that we re taking care of them it s as simple as that america has a responsibility to give all seniors the golden years they deserve and the secure dignified retirement that they worked so hard to achieve and that s exactly what health insurance reform is going to help us do in this country now i can tell you i can t tell actually what the bill that will ultimately land across my husband s desk will look like none of us can but i can tell you just a few important ways that the insurance system will be impacted for starters and this is very important your insurance will not change unless you want it to change so if things are great for you you re fine it will however become more stable and more secure no matter what your situation is there will be a cap on how much you can be charged in out of pocket expenses in a year or in a lifetime so there will be a cap it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage for preexisting conditions and that change alone will help us end the discrimination women face in our health care system and also insurance companies will be required to cover at no extra cost routine checkups and preventive care and i d like to speak just a moment about what reform will mean for seniors in particular there s been a lot of misinformation on this topic so i want to be clear nancy ann mentioned this not a dime of the medicare trust fund will be used to pay for reform health insurance reform will not endanger medicare it will make medicare more stable and secure by eliminating wasteful subsidies to private insurance and cracking down on fraud and abuse throughout the system this administration believes that we can bring down premiums for all our seniors and extend the life of the medicare trust fund my husband believes that medicare is a sacred part of america s social safety net and it s a safety net that he will protect he will protect with health insurance reform and i know that many seniors on medicare are also concerned about the cost of prescription drugs we ve heard about it here right now millions of seniors face huge out of pocket costs when their spending on drugs falls within a coverage gap my husband is committed to closing that gap which will save some seniors as you ve heard thousands of dollars on medications and make prescription drugs more affordable for millions of older americans so what we re talking about affordable prescription drugs for americans who need them medicare that s protected today and tomorrow stability and security for americans who have insurance quality affordable coverage for americans who don t that s what reform will mean for older women for seniors and for all americans so that s why i believe in this so strongly that s why i believe in this so strongly but in the end i m not here just as a first lady that s not why i m doing this i am here because i m a daughter i m here because i have an extraordinary mother who is 72 years old young and i know there are countless women in this country who have loved ones who feel the same way about them as i do about my mother and when all is said and done part of why i believe so strongly in reforming our health care system is because of the difference it will make for these women who gave us life so simple these women who raised us these women who supported us through the years they deserve better than the status quo they deserve a health care system that heals them and lifts them up and that s what my husband is committed to doing to building that kind of system in the weeks and months to come so thank you all thank you for sharing your stories thank you all for your hard work and dedication for listening for being a part and let s get to work thank you so much dem mobama13 4 10 michelle_obama well thank you thank you all first let me start by thanking my friend jill jill and her husband that character you know vice president biden for all that they ve done over these past few months especially in support of our wonderful haitian american communities in south florida and across the united states let s give jill and vice president biden another round of applause and also to ed mulet to david harland to nigel fisher general cruz and all the united nations personnel who are here today thank you thank you for hosting us this has been an incredibly warm welcome it s been an incredibly informative visit and i want to thank you all for your remarkable service under truly extraordinary circumstances by any measure the mission to help haiti recover and rebuild is truly as dr biden said an international effort an international effort that is here at the invitation of the haitian government and in support of by the haitian people and we re joined today by representatives from many countries international institutions and ngos who are playing a vital role in this rebuilding effort it is truly an honor to be here with all of you this has been a deeply moving day for jill and i a very emotional day in so many ways and jill and i first and foremost were grateful for the opportunity to be able to sat down with president prval and the first lady we again expressed to them as jill said america s deepest condolences first of all to the haitian people for this terrible and tremendous loss my husband the president asked that we remind president prval and the people of haiti that we are going to keep standing with them that is for sure so i repeated to president prval the pledge that my husband made to him at the white house during his visit last month that is as haiti recovers and rebuilds you will have a steady and reliable partner in the united states of america we had the opportunity also to visit some of the places that reflect the enormous needs of the haitian people but also it reflects their amazing strength and resilience we visited families living in the tent cities in champs de mars families who ve lost everything everything and for whom every day is a struggle to stay dry to feed their children we visited a school more so a classroom in buses donated by the dominican republic where some truly amazing kids were rebuilding and playing and dancing and laughing even under the circumstances we also visited a school that is being rebuilt so that children can realize their dreams of an education and a better life we just had a very moving visit at our u s embassy with ambassador merten our embassy staff americans as well as haitians they have worked so hard for the past three months and some of the civilian and military personnel who ve been part of the americans contribution to this international effort we got to spend some time with them and like so many of you they lost colleagues and friends and loved ones and our purpose for these visits was to mainly say thank you to thank them for their extraordinary service and for delivering on america s enduring commitment to haiti but we wanted to come here today because as i said helping haiti recover and rebuild has been an international effort and those of you here those of you here at the united nations our many partner nations these incredibly incredible ngos have really been at the heart of this huge undertaking and all of you have displayed such a spirit of compassion and partnership that frankly we could use a whole lot more of in the world today you all are showing us all how it s done you ve done this even though so many of you have endured heartbreaking losses yourselves here at the u n you lost hdi annabi and so many leaders and colleagues and members of the stabilization mission for the u n i understand it has been the single largest loss of life in history for each of you it was the loss of a co worker a friend a fellow peacekeeper for those of you in the ngo community i know that the loss was just as devastating friends and partners and neighbors who you worked with every day and as we mark the three month anniversary of this terrible day i d like to ask us all to just take a moment of silence to honor all those that we ve lost we honor every single one of these victims people from dozens of nations and every day that each of you gets up and go back to work and into the communities that you love you should know that you re not only carrying on their work you re also honoring their lives and you re keeping their legacy alive so please don t ever forget that in these times of struggle and despite all your loss you have shown amazing courage and commitment especially in those first hours and those first days one of the first secretary generals of the u n famously said that the u n and this is a quote was not created in order to bring us to heaven but in order to save us from hell and that s just what you did for so many people here you saved them from devastation that was nothing like it on earth you ve worked around the clock day after day clearing rubble and building shelters and delivering food and water and medicine and supplies to millions of people and you ve done this all with a true spirit of partnership yes the united states is proud to play a leading role in this effort but let s never forget that this has been one of the largest and most complex relief operations the world has ever attempted the world and in one way or another more than 140 nations has helped to make this a reality general peixoto and peacekeepers from dozens of nations restored security so the relief effort could proceed and when more peacekeepers were needed nations around the world stepped up especially brazil even though it too lost so many in the quake and because you live and work in the communities that you serve those of you in the ngos were often the first ones on the scene providing food and medical care and shelter under nearly impossible conditions and i want to salute these inspiring organizations especially all the haitian ngos haitians serving haitians and so much of your work would be impossible without the generous support of haitians living abroad including in the united states to all these ngos that you all represent you represent them with the best spirit of service and i commend you for joining forces and working together and pursuing a common vision of reconstruction and as haiti recovers and rebuilds you re going to be indispensable and america is going to be your partner too so this has truly been a global effort an amazing example of what nations and what people can do when they come together to do what s right the road ahead as you know is not going to be easy and it s not going to be quick as you know the rainy season is coming soon it is here the hurricane season is coming too but i heard a wonderful haitian proverb that puts this all in perspective and some of you probably know it it says little by little the bird builds its nest and today the needs of the haitian people are still overwhelming we know that i saw that firsthand but every day and thanks to secretary general ban ki moon s unprecedented humanitarian appeal this international effort is bringing more supplies and more shelter so that little by little daily life will improve president prval and the haitian government have been working under unimaginable difficulties but they have a vision for the future and they have a roadmap to get there so little by little haiti will move forward the destruction is catastrophic but last month the world came together dozens of nations including the united states the u n and other international institutions and ngos and they made an historic commitment to haiti s long term reconstruction so little by little haiti will rebuild now some might ask after so much misery how can we still have faith after so much ruin how can haiti rise again after so much loss how on earth can you still have hope well we have hope because we ve been inspired inspired by the resilience and the faith of the haitian people people who have lost everything except their belief that tomorrow can be a little bit better than today and we have hope because the people of haiti are not alone america is standing with haiti the world is standing with haiti you are all standing with haiti and your commitment and dedication to this country is truly inspiring it s the commitment reflected in an e mail that i received from one of your embassy staff before i came for this visit sonia kim who i just got to meet and i think that her beautiful words speak to the commitment that all of you bring to this work wherever you re from whatever language you speak she wrote we are exhausted traumatized and heart broken but we choose to stay here and work we choose to stay because we love haiti and its people we choose to stay because we believe in our duty to help the people here in their greatest hour of need we choose to stay because we believe in our mission we choose to stay because we still hold out hopefor recovery and renewaland for a haiti built back better than ever before and that s why i came here today that s why we have hope and that s why little by little we re going to keep making tomorrow better than today thank you for your incredible service we are so proud of you the world is proud of you the world is watching and we wish you nothing but the best god bless thank you so much dem mobama13 5 09 michelle_obama good evening and again welcome to the white house we are so pleased to be hosting an evening of poetry music and spoken word so you just want to clap tonight s event is really just another way for us to open up the white house and once again make it the people s house to invite people from all different backgrounds to come and share their stories and speak their minds for all of us to learn about different forms of communication and to be open to hearing other people s voices for it is one thing for people to tell their stories in their own spaces and quite another for those stories to be welcomed in this space barack is president today because many people who thought their voices didn t matter or wouldn t be heard decided to show up on election day and vote anyway and that s the beauty and that is the beauty of our democracy and we have to remember that democracy is really really big it has room for lots of voices which sometimes take us out of our comfort zones but that s what makes it so meaningful and that s one of the reasons why i am so excited about tonight let me tell you i have wanted to do this from day one the notion of standing in this room and hearing some poetry and spoken word but it s important for us to remember that this white house is committed to maintaining this openness and making this place a place where all voices can be heard and the president and i are so proud to welcome this group of talented performers and we re just excited to welcome this audience here tonight so please enjoy have fun be loose and let s start the show thank you dem mobama13 9 10 michelle_obama thanks so much well good morning let me start by thanking michael for his work and for that kind introduction and i want to also thank dawn sweeny and everyone at the national restaurant association for having me here it is a pleasure for me to be with you all so today i m going to talk about food which is something that all of you here today know a little bit about together you represent 40 percent of the nearly one million restaurants in the united states from the biggest chains to the smallest diners you know what americans like to eat and what they don t you ve seen how the ingredients we put in our bodies affect the way we feel and the way we feel about ourselves and you also understand the unique role that food and restaurants especially play in our own lives and in the life of our nation restaurants have always been places to celebrate a special occasion or mark an important milestone to bond with new friends and grow closer as a family they provide a service to our communities unlike any other and even as tastes and customs have changed over time restaurants remain an incredibly dynamic part of our american story and today one out of every two dollars spent on food in this country goes towards meals outside the home and that s double what it was just 50 years ago and one third of all meals today are eaten in restaurants so it s clear that eating out has become part of our american way of life and while restaurants are still places where we go to mark a special occasion to celebrate a good report card an anniversary a job well done restaurants aren t just for those who can afford to splurge anymore instead they ve grown to fit every lifestyle and every budget and our eating habits have evolved over time as well both in restaurants and at home but not always in ways that are good for our health and that s another reason i wanted to talk to you today about an issue that is near and dear to my heart not just as first lady but as a mother and that is the epidemic of childhood obesity in america today now i know you re all familiar with the statistics how one in three children in this country is overweight or obese and you know the consequences for their health from hypertension and diabetes to heart disease and even cancer and i know you re all aware of the economic impact the billions of dollars we spend every year treating obesity related conditions costs that you pay in the form of rising health insurance premiums so it s clear that we re facing a problem that is really big and it s also clear that this problem has a whole range of different causes our kids are spending less time outside and more time on the couch in front of the tv video games the internet at school gym classes recess they ve been eliminated or shortened portion sizes in this country have ballooned in some areas families are having a tougher time getting regular access to fresh produce and kids these days are consuming more calories and eating more fat and sugar than ever before and that s why earlier this year we launched let s move this is a nationwide campaign with a simple but ambitious goal we want to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that kids born today can reach adulthood at a healthy weight and let s move is about attacking this problem from all different angles it s about giving parents the information and the resources they need to make healthy decisions for their families it s about giving grocery stores helping them to locate in underserved areas so that every community has access to fresh and nutritious food it s about getting healthier food into our schools it s about helping our kids become more active not just in school but at home but here s the thing even if we give parents all the information they need and we improve school meals and build brand new supermarkets on every corner none of that matters if when families step into a restaurant they can t make a healthy choice and the truth is that while restaurants are offering more options and families take advantage of them more often they aren t always the healthiest choices research has shown that kids consume more saturated fat and less fiber and calcium when they eat out and the meals they eat at restaurants have twice as many calories as the ones they eat at home now as parents we know that many of our kids aren t as healthy and active as they should be and we desperately want to do things differently but when stores and restaurants don t offer healthy options or when parents don t have the information to make the best choices for their families that s easier said than done and as america s restaurant owners you re responsible for one third of the calories our kids get on a daily basis the choices you make determine what s listed on the menus what s advertised on billboards and what s served on our plates and your decisions about how a dish is prepared what goes into it and where is it placed on the menu that can have a real impact on the way people eat and that s why we need your help and we need your help now because when you see research showing that obese toddlers already display some warning signs for heart disease it s clear that we just don t have the time to waste and that s why i ve been so pleased to hear about what some of you are doing already both in working with us and on your own here at the nra you ve developed the food and healthy living initiative to give restaurants a strong foundation for making healthy changes you ve launched a website healthydiningfinder com to help consumers identify healthy menu options in their area you re keeping your members up to date with the latest information and statistics about efforts to address childhood obesity and you re working with other groups in the industry to meet the goal of doubling the amount of produce used in the food industry over the next 10 years and across the country individual restaurants and chains are also focusing on our children s health not just because it s the right thing to do but because it also makes sense for their bottom line right now many restaurants are making a point to offer fresh produce and healthy choices aimed at kids and adults others are serving more low fat dishes whole grain breads fruit on the side some are even offering kid size portions of the meals they serve on the main menu and chefs across the country are partnering with local schools to help them make healthy choices but as positive as these examples are the reality is it s just not enough together we have to do more we have to go further and we need your help to lead this effort now what i do know is that in the restaurant industry creativity is your lifeblood it s what sets you apart from the competition and it keeps customers coming back for more and today i am asking you to use that creativity to rethink the food you offer especially dishes aimed at young people and to help us make the healthier choice the easier choice first it s important to reduce the number of empty calories that our families are consuming calories that have no nutritional benefit whatsoever and believe me i know this is easier said than done after all we as humans we are programmed to crave sugary fatty salty foods and as people who work to meet those needs i know it s tempting to respond by creating products that are sweeter richer and saltier than ever before but here s the catch see feeding those cravings does just respond to people s natural desires it actually helps shape them the more of these foods people eat the more they re accustomed to that taste and after a while those unhealthy foods become a permanent part of their eating habits but here s the good news it can work the other way around just as easily just as we can shape our children s preferences for high calorie low nutrient foods with a little persistence and creativity we can also turn them on to higher quality healthier foods it starts with offering healthier options designed specifically for kids and today no matter what kind of restaurant you visit whether it s italian french mexican american most kids menus look pretty much the same and trust me we ve seen a lot of them one local survey found that 90 percent of those menus includes mac and cheese our children s favorite 80 percent includes chicken fingers 60 includes burgers or cheeseburgers some options weigh in at over 1 000 calories and that s close to the recommended amount that a child should have for the entire day and i think and i know you all think that our kids deserve better than that that s why i want to challenge every restaurant to offer healthy menu options and then provide them up front so that parents don t have to hunt around and read the small print to find an appropriately sized portion that doesn t contain levels high levels of fat salt and sugar these choices have to be easy to make and they have to give parents the confidence to know that they can go into any restaurant in this country and choose a genuinely healthy meal for their kids now again i know it s easier said than done it s not easy to come up with choices that are both healthy and palatable for kids and it may mean putting in some real effort and creativity to make this happen but what it doesn t mean is providing just one token healthy option on the menu or taking out one problematic ingredient and replacing it with another and it is not about finding creative ways to market unhealthy food products as healthy instead it s about producing products that actually are healthy products that can help our children get into the habits that will last them a lifetime this philosophy also needs to apply to the rest of the food that you offer because just as we eat out as a family we also should be able to eat well as a family and as a mother of two soon to be teenagers i know that many kids especially tweens and teens eat off the same menu that their parents do i m not asking any of you to make drastic changes to every single one of your recipes or to totally change the way you do business but what i am asking is that you consider reformulating your menu in pragmatic and incremental ways to create healthier versions of the foods that we all love that could mean substituting wheat pasta for white pasta in your regular recipes or taking out an existing taking an existing dish and cutting the amount of butter or cream not enough to sacrifice flavor we all like flavor but just enough to make a meaningful difference in the amount of calories and fat it could mean serving 1 percent or skim milk or you could make healthy sides like apple slices or carrots the default choice in a menu and make fries something customers have to request which would hurt me deeply i m a fry lover and no matter what you do it s also important truly important to keep portion sizes in check because we all know that the size of a meal is just as important as the ingredients it s made of but your role in helping address childhood obesity isn t limited to what you put on your menus and how you label them for parents it s also about how you market those products to our kids our kids don t learn about the latest fast food creations on their own they hear about them on tv advertisements in the internet video games and many other places and as any parent knows this marketing is highly effective as a mom i know it is my responsibility and no one else s to raise my kids but we have to ask ourselves what does it mean when so many parents are finding their best efforts undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at our kids a study last year found that only a small percentage of advertising aimed at kids promoted healthy foods while most promoted foods with a low nutritional value and let s be clear it s not enough just to limit ads for foods that aren t healthy it s also going to be critical to increase marketing for foods that are healthy and if there s anyone who can sell healthy food to our kids it s all of you because you know what gets their attention you know what makes a lasting impression you certainly know what gets them to drive their poor parents crazy because they just have to have something so i m here today to ask you to use that knowledge and that power to our kids advantage i m asking you to actively promote healthy foods and healthy habits to our kids again i know many of you have said that you would offer and promote healthy options in a heartbeat if they were as popular as the healthy unhealthy options because that s how business works and i understand that but i ve yet to meet a single parent who doesn t understand the threat of childhood obesity i ve yet to meet a single parent who s not eager to buy healthier products they just need more information they need easier access to those products and i ve heard from more companies over the year that the market is starting to move in a healthier direction folks are beginning to ask for more fruits and vegetables and for smaller portions so when it comes right down to it this is also about protecting your bottom lines and meeting the demands of your customers customers who i know you want to keep coming back again and again that s why we re committed to helping increase that demand and making it easier for you to do what s right and we ve started by requiring chain restaurants to provide calorie counts on their menus and menu boards and i am grateful for the support we ve received from the nra to get this done and i want to encourage restaurants that aren t providing calorie counts to join us in this effort and because so many of the calories our kids consume come from school we re also working to get more nutritious food into our lunchrooms and our vending machines and again the nra has been playing an important role in these efforts as well as part of let s move we re setting a goal of doubling the number of schools that participate in the healthier us schools challenge by next year and we re working with schools and food suppliers to offer more fruits and vegetables and to cut down on that fat sugar and salt and finally we re working with mayors and other local officials to make our cities and towns healthier and to highlight restaurants that agree to serve smaller portions and promote more nutritious options so i hope that all of you will join with us in these efforts together we can help make sure that every family that walks into a restaurant can make an easy healthy choice we can make a commitment to promote vegetables and fruits and whole grains on every part of every menu we can make portion sizes smaller and emphasize quality over quantity and we can help create a culture imagine this where our kids ask for healthy options instead of resisting them see after all that s one of the core ideals this industry was founded on i recently learned that the term restaurant actually comes from the french word for restore and when the idea of the restaurant business spread across the ocean some of the first true restaurants in this country emphasized their ability to make people healthier and to cure what ailed them so today you are all the heirs to that legacy and you face a similar opportunity both as business owners but also as parents not just to fulfill your obligations to shareholders but to fulfill the obligation we all have to the next generation so i hope that each of you will do your part to give our kids the future that we all know they deserve and i want to truly thank you for what you have done because you have done so much and for what you re going to do i look forward to working with you all in the months and years ahead good luck to you all and god bless you and your families take care thank you dem mobama14 1 10 michelle_obama thanks everybody now remember you weren t supposed to get out of your seats until the program was over and you all agreed i heard it but that s okay good morning everyone i am as thrilled to be here as you all seem to be but before we begin i do want to take a moment just to express my profound heartbreak and our nation s deepest support for the people of haiti in the wake of this just devastating disaster that they have suffered the destruction and the suffering that we see the images that are coming out of that country are just overwhelming and it is important for the people of haiti to know that we are keeping the victims of this tragedy and their loved ones in our thoughts and our prayers and that also includes prayers going out to all of the haitian americans who have families and friends there and they re worried about them back home it s difficult to get word people don t know where folks are this is a tough time for haitian american citizens here as well and we also want to send our thoughts and prayers out to the american citizens who are working and living in haiti as well right now my husband and the administration are focused on moving as many resources as possible into haiti as quickly as possible so that we can save as many lives as we can and later today i ll be taping a public service announcement for the red cross which is providing on the ground support food water medicine that s desperately needed right now particularly in this short period of 48 72 hours after the disaster so for those americans who are watching this who are listening who want to help and everyone s help and resources and energy at this time are critically important you can go to the white house web site at www whitehouse gov to see what you can do to support our friends in haiti in this time of urgent need and as you know it s not just in the weeks and months ahead this is going to be something that we re going to have to put our attention to for many years to come so again our thoughts and prayers go out to the country of haiti but i d like to start by first thanking your wonderful secretary secretary solis not just for that very kind introduction but for all of her work that she s doing in this department she is doing a fabulous job in so many areas and all of you know and she s not just working here but she has taken the time to travel with me on my special projects we ve spent a wonderful day in denver participating in a mentorship and leadership program there for young girls and secretary solis was right there the first one to sign up to go as a busy secretary still never too busy to give back to an amazing group of girls and i will be grateful to her for a very long time for her outstanding work and willingness to step up and outside of her role so we are grateful to you i also want to thank all of you here today and all your colleagues here in washington who may not be in this room or across the country for all of your work as you all know i have spent a lot of time in the first year yes it s been a year since we ve arrived in washington visiting agencies and it s been wonderful for me to use these visits it s a way to learn more about the work that you do to listen to observe to hear your concerns and then to bring that information back to the white house so that my husband is getting even more feedback on how things are going so these visits have been so very important to me getting to better understand how this place works and getting to know all of you and i know that some of you have been working in these departments for a very long time for decades and we have some of those long term workers standing behind me we have some of the longest serving employees here at the department right behind me but something that the secretary chose to do uniquely is to also recognize the many folks here who are just beginning their careers and we can t forget those a lot of young people who are stepping into new roles and a lot of not so young people stepping into roles so also on the stage with us today are some of the very newest employees here at the department as well but i know that whether you all have worked here for decades or for days you ve been working very hard for the american people and one of my primary reasons for being here is to express on behalf of not just myself and my family and the president but the entire nation our gratitude for the service that you have put in we often forget about the work that you do to make things happen for this nation and it s important that we shed this light on each and every one of you over the course of this year i am also looking forward to visiting some little people here after i speak here i m going to go down to the childcare center and as you know i m a sucker for kids i told the secretary if i can come to the childcare center i ll be here every week but i m going to get to read one of my favorite books green eggs and ham dr seuss and i m also going to get to meet although i see some of you here some of the culinary students young people who are working in the training program and i ve heard that you have prepared a delicious and hopefully healthy snack for our children but we re grateful for you and i m looking forward to meeting you all i was pleased to hear that there was a childcare center here at the department of labor that not just serves the employees of the department but working families throughout the area and as a parent i know centers like this one create a great deal of peace of mind so that people know that their kids are being taken care of and that means that you can focus on your work and not worry about whether your kids are doing okay and that s actually what i d like to just spend a few brief moments talking about today an issue that i ve talked a lot about and that s the issue of work life balance you know it the constant struggle to meet our responsibilities both as employees but also as breadwinners and mothers and fathers it s one of those issues that we as a society still haven t quite figured out yet we re still working on it and as the mother of two young girls who are doing just fine by the way it s an issue that is particularly near and dear to my heart as i have spoken about in my current life as the first lady of the united states i am incredibly blessed and i know that because i have more support than i could have ever asked for and ever imagined including my mother who has moved here to help us sort through all the challenges but i didn t always live in the white house as you know for many years just a few years ago we came to washington i was a part of that work family struggle to balance that full time job plus being an around the clock role that role you play as mom particularly when you have a spouse who is traveling a lot and i ve said this before but probably like many of you i consider myself one of those 120 percenters which essentially means that if you are not doing everything at 120 percent you think you re failing i suffer from that malady so when i was at work during these times i always felt like i was shortchanging my girls but then when i was at home i was worried that i was letting people at work down and with that kind of anxiety comes a lot of additional stress and a whole lot of guilt so i know all of us are walking around with a whole lot of guilt just carrying it around and i was lucky even back then because i had understanding bosses people like secretary solis who shared my same values for the importance of doing a good job but also raising a good family and i was also fortunate to work in jobs that were reasonably accommodating with people who understood that if you left a little early for to get in the car line that that wasn t some huge definition of your dedication to your job and while there s certainly plenty of employers out there who recognize the value of good work life policies many people in this country just aren t as fortunate to work with those employers and with the job market the way it is right now many folks can t afford to be picky you just can t when you have a job you keep it and you settle for the terms that you have because you know you re blessed to even have a job and many don t have access as a result to good family leave policies or any kind of flexibility in the workplace at all it s just not possible so they struggle to find affordable childcare and emergency childcare when their usual arrangements fall through which they always do right and believe it or not today roughly 40 percent of private sector employees work at companies that don t offer a single day of paid sick leave not a single day and i think that reflects a larger problem that for too long we as a society have viewed policies that help people balance work and family as somehow a special benefit maybe to women who shoulder that rather than an essential part of a workplace that can benefit everyone in the workplace to this day there s still the perception that workers who need time off to care for a sick parent or who want a more flexible schedule so they can go to the potluck or the play or the parent teacher conference are somehow less committed or less desirable there s this idea that workplaces that accommodate these needs are destined to be less profitable less productive somehow but we now know that that s just simply not the case there s a lot of evidence out there from companies who ve implemented really innovative processes to help families we now know that these kind of policies can actually make employees more productive we all know this right because instead of spending all day at work worrying about what s happening at home they have the support that they need to concentrate on their jobs and it makes a huge difference in terms of productivity just mental health comfort and stability helps workers be better we know that and that s why we need to change the way we look at these issues so that our workplaces can catch up to the realities of our lives it s time we viewed family friendly policies as not just niceties for women but as necessities for every single working american men and women because more and more men are shouldering that same kind of burden and that s good but that s new staying home to care for a sick child or taking an elderly parent to a doctor s appointment shouldn t mean risking one s job that shouldn t be the tradeoff people shouldn t have to choose between taking the time they need after giving birth for example or adopting a child and keeping that job that they need to support the child they just had that shouldn t be the choice things like paid family leave and sick days and affordable childcare should be the norm not the exception that s why we think it s important to highlight companies that are embracing these policies ones that are experimenting with things like flex time and telecommuting and focusing on performance and output rather than face time that s why the president and secretary solis have spoken out in favor of the healthy families act which would let millions more working americans earn up to seven days a year of paid sick time to care for themselves and their families that would be innovative and new but we are happy that we have a president and a secretary of the department of labor who had the vision and the foresight to see that this now needs to happen but the administration also knows that we essentially have to put our money where our mouths are so the administration is working to practice what we preach and make the federal government a model of what we re asking others to do from expanding telework options to providing emergency childcare and affordable day care we need to be implementing all of those ideas throughout the federal government i was particularly pleased to learn that the childcare center here at the department of labor actually provides financial aid to help employees afford excellent care regardless of the size of their paychecks and those are the kind of things that we need to be doing all across the government so these are just a few examples of the kind of concrete steps that we can take to restore some semblance of balance and sanity into the lives of people that you all know because it s probably you and this is just the beginning and there s a lot of work to do as we all know as the president has said he said it before he took the oath of office change is important change is hard and change takes time i remember him saying that so we all know that we have a long way to go again and it won t be easy but as one of secretary solis s predecessors president roosevelt s labor secretary frances perkins once pointed out that most of our problems and this is a quote have been met and solved either partially or as a whole by experiment based on common sense and carried out with courage that s what we need today as well we need all of you to take the lead or continue to take the lead in this effort and all of us in both government and the private sector will need to come up with new ideas try out new approaches and rely on our courage and our common sense to guide us along the way but as i say in all my visits we re going to need all of you maintaining some level of energy and optimism through the tough days because we know you all are working hard many people staying late putting in overtime going the extra mile to make sure that the department of labor is strong and it continues to be a source of pride not just for the administration but for the entire country and we are grateful to all of you for that and oftentimes you don t hear it but we are grateful we are a grateful first family and we are a grateful nation for the work that you do we couldn t do it without you so hang in there if we have all of you continuing to work as you do i am confident that we will meet these challenges so thank you all so much and with that i m going to shake some hands and then read green eggs and ham dem mobama14 4 10 michelle_obama thank you thank you good afternoon and thank you so much thank you jaime for that very kind and profound introduction it is such a pleasure and an honor to be in this beautiful country at this great university with so many outstanding young people from all across mexico let me start by thanking your first lady mrs margarita zavala i want to thank her for her tremendous kindness not just to me but to my family she is smart she is tough she is passionate and she is my friend we ve had a wonderful time together both here in mexico and during her visits to the united states and i look forward to welcoming her and her husband president caldern to washington for a state dinner next month and i told her to prepare to have fun i also want to recognize the u s ambassador to mexico ambassador pascual and i want to thank the rector of this school dr jose morales orozco for his leadership and for hosting me here today and finally i want to thank all of the people of this country for your incredible warmth and hospitality during my visit here from the moment i arrived i felt like i was entre amigos which is only natural given the close and enduring friendship between our two nations mexico is home to more u s citizens living abroad than anywhere else in the world and tens of millions of americans trace their roots right here to this country and for generations mexico and the u s have been bound together not just by a shared border but by shared values and aspirations devotion to family and to faith a willingness to work hard and to sacrifice for our children a commitment to democracy rooted in struggles for independence that have defined our nations so when it came time for me to decide where to make my first solo international trip as first lady the choice was clear mexico por supuesto and there s also a reason why i wanted to come here to the ibero and speak with all of you it s the same reason why when my husband travels abroad to talk about the challenges we face from extremism to nuclear weapons from poverty and hunger to climate change and to pandemics he doesn t just meet with presidents and prime ministers he doesn t just visit palaces and parliaments he goes to schools and to universities and he meets with young people just like all of you and this isn t an accident today we re seeing what has come to be called a youth bulge an explosion of the youth population in nations around the world and here in mexico nearly half the population is under the age of 25 in the middle east it s 60 percent and young people between the ages of 15 and 24 alone now make up 20 percent of the world s citizens this is the largest group in history making the transition to adulthood and the fact is is that responsibility for meeting the defining challenges of our time will soon fall to all of you soon the world will be looking to your generation to make the discoveries and to build the industries that will fuel our prosperity and ensure our well being for decades to come we re going to be looking to your generation to seize the promise of clean energy to power our economies and preserve our planet for your children and your grandchildren we re going to be looking to your generation to find the courage and the patience to resolve the conflicts and to heal the divides that plague our world and i m here today because i believe that all of you and your peers around the world are more ready than ever to meet these challenges more than any generation in history you all are able to access information and connect with one another in ways that my generation could never have imagined with the click of a button you can exchange thoughts on any issue with people just about anywhere in the world you have an unprecedented ability to organize and to mobilize to challenge old assumptions and to bridge old divides and to find new solutions to our toughest problems and it is because of this immense promise that i intend to focus my international work as first lady on engaging young people just like you all around the world my husband and i know all too well that meeting the challenges that we will face will depend on whether we effectively tap into your god given potential whether we fully benefit from the industry and the energy and the perspectives of young people from every background and every nation because we know that ambition and ability are found in every corner of the globe the question is how do we ensure that opportunity is too now my husband and president calderon are working hard to rebuild our education systems to revive our economies and to create new opportunities for young people in both of our nations but leaders and governments can t shoulder this responsibility alone ordinary citizens must share the responsibility as well and that includes young people and it s not just enough just to change laws and policies we must also change our perceptions about who can and who can t succeed we have to confront the wrong and outdated ideas and assumptions that only certain young people deserve to be educated or that girls aren t as capable as boys or that some young people are less worthy of opportunities because of their religion or disability or ethnicity or socioeconomic class because we have seen time and again that potential can be found in some of the most unlikely places my husband and i are living proof of that we both came from very modest backgrounds our families were not wealthy my parents never went to college my husband never really knew his father and was raised by a young single mother who struggled to pay the bills and like many kids with backgrounds like ours we faced challenges the sting of low expectation the constant doubts about whether we could succeed and whether we were even worth the effort you see back when we were young no one could have predicted that one day we would become the president and first lady of the united states of america but we were lucky and more importantly we were blessed we had families who believed in us we had teachers who pushed us we had universities that saw our potential and gave us opportunity and we worked as hard as we could we learned as much as we could and as a result we were prepared and we were poised to pursue our dreams and our stories are not unique they re the stories of countless young people in mexico in the united states and around the world who ve worked hard and they ve defied the odds they re the stories of young people throughout history who ve succeeded not because of their trust fund or pedigree or their test scores but because of challenges that tested and motivated them and made them who they are and because someone somewhere believed in them and helped them believe in themselves when he was orphaned at a young age and sought work as a servant no one could have imagined that benito juarez would one day become one of mexico s greatest presidents but thanks to a franciscan friar who helped him join a seminary and get an education he was able to realize his gifts one of my country s greatest presidents abraham lincoln was born in a one room log cabin in the woods but was lucky enough to have a teacher who taught him how to write and debate and then there s joan of arc the daughter of a peasant farmer who tried to persuade anyone who would listen that she could rescue the french army from defeat and when a prince finally believed her that s exactly what she did you see throughout our world history it has so often been that unlikely hero that unusual perspective that improbable journey that has been the key to our progress so when we dismiss any of our young people when we fail to tap into their potential we risk losing their promise and just think of the inventions and the cures that are never discovered the great works of art and literature that are never created the great acts of courage and leadership that never grace this world but this isn t just about discovering those few extraordinary folks who still or will change the course of history it s also about breaking down barriers across the globe so that all our young people can learn and work and be productive members of our societies it s about seeking the perspectives and experiences of young people from every background those new ideas that make our businesses more productive our cultures more vibrant and our governments more open and free but in order to do this in order to open up opportunities for more young people the truth is that those of you who already have a seat at the table must do your part to make room for others who don t young people around the world must reach out to help others realize their talents and make their voices heard now i understand that in these difficult economic times here in mexico the united states and around the world many young people are struggling and nothing is guaranteed and even young people like those of you who have the privilege of attending a university like this may be feeling a bit uncertain about your futures some of you may be worried about whether you ll even be able to build careers of your own and you may be tempted tempted to focus solely on your individual success take your diploma get you the best job you can and never look back but before you do that i hope that you ll just think just for a moment think about the mission statement of this university and that is to prepare students and i quote to engage in service to others and develop and spread knowledge to achieve a free fair united and productive society i hope that you ll think of those words from the bible that to whom much is given much is required and i hope that you ll think of all those who ve shaped our history by heeding these words imagine if mahatma ghandi had led a comfortable existence as a lawyer instead of leading the struggle for the rights of his countrymen and his nation s independence work he started when he was in his twenties imagine if nelson mandela had chosen a life of leisure as the son of a tribal leader instead of joining the anc at the age of 24 and enduring decades behind bars to end apartheid imagine if mother teresa had never answered her calling and ventured into the streets of calcutta to tend to those in desperate need now i m not saying that you have to take a vow of poverty or lead a movement but i am asking you to do something whether through your career or as a volunteer do something to ensure that other young people have the opportunities they deserve as well that s what folks like you are doing every day all across the globe and right here in mexico alberto salvador from guanajuato was born deaf and was at first denied admission to elementary school because of his disability but he completed high school with honors got a degree in the united states and then returned here to mexico where he mentors deaf children and will soon be starting his job as a teacher and then there s mariana vazquez del mercado who s finishing law school at universidad panamericana and she spends hours volunteering in a free legal clinic and she also directs an organization that builds housing for struggling families of her work she says and this is a quote the goal is to show that despite being young we are sufficiently responsible and aware alberto irezabal who graduated from the ibero last year used his service project to help an indigenous community in chiapas better produce and sell their locally grown coffee and of his work he says this is also a quote i believe we have a responsibility to see that our projects succeed not just for ourselves but for our country each and every one of these young people is working to break down barriers and to open doors each of them is giving others the chances they ve had to succeed but also let s be clear i m not just talking to the university students who are here today i am also talking to young people here in mexico and the united states and around the world who feel like they have no place at universities like this and i have met so many young people in so many places who have so much to offer but because of where they re born or the family they re born into or the circumstances of their lives they begin to doubt themselves they begin to feel like they don t belong or they re not prepared or they won t measure up so they shouldn t even try now while i was fortunate to have so many opportunities in my own life i can certainly understand those feelings see when i first went to college i was filled with self doubt i was convinced that everyone else was smarter than i was and i felt like i just didn t fit in but i soon realized that i was just as capable and had just as much to contribute as my classmates all i needed was a little confidence in myself to make that happen now it s true it is so true that some of you might have to work a lot harder to get what you want you might face many more obstacles and setbacks but i want you to know that you belong in places like this just as much as anyone you have just as much to offer as anyone else all you have to do is belief in yourself if you refuse to give up then there is nothing there is nothing you can t accomplish and i hope that all of you all of you here when you encounter hardships and when you start to get discouraged and i guarantee you you will i hope that you ll think about young people like you all around the world who have toiled in laboratories and libraries in factories and fields who have marched and fought and bled to make our world a better place i hope you ll think about the young people two centuries ago who risked everything they had for mexico s independence i hope you ll think about the young people in america who fought to ensure that all citizens no matter their gender or the color of their skin were treated equally under the law you and i we re here today because of them and finally i hope you ll think about young people like sonia kim she was a young woman i met yesterday during my visit in haiti sonia works at the u s embassy in port au prince and like so many people in haiti she has been working around the clock on the earthquake relief efforts i want to read you an e mail that she sent me this e mail inspired my trip there it s inspired my trip here she wrote we are exhausted traumatized and heart broken but we choose to stay here and work we choose to stay because we love haiti and its people we choose to stay because we believe in our duty to help the people here in their greatest hour of need we choose to stay because we believe in our mission we choose to stay because we still hold out hope for recovery and renewal and for a haiti built back better than before and i hope that every single one of you and young people across the globe will take up that work the work of helping others in need the work of building stronger nations and a better world because if we re going to tackle the challenges of our time if we re going to make our world safer and healthier and more prosperous and more free we are going to need the passion and the daring and the creativity of every last one of you we ll need you to work as hard as you can and do as much as you can driven by the belief that has always summed up the spirit of our youth three simple words si se puede yes we can yes we can thank you god bless dem mobama14 9 10 michelle_obama thank you so much truly everyone please thank you so much good morning let me tell you i am as thrilled to be here as you all sound i m really honored and i d like to thank the congressional hispanic caucus and chci for inviting me to come speak at your policy conference today i know you ve had a wonderful discussion and i m honored to be here let me begin by first recognizing secretary sebelius i know she was here but she has just done a tremendous job for the administration i want to recognize and thank all the members of the panel for their work and their contributions today and of course representative nydia velasquez for yes for all that she does for the hispanic caucus and all that she s done on behalf of this president thank you so much and of course chci s executive director esther aguilera let s give her a round of applause for her hard work and finally i d like to thank all of you not just for being here today but for what you do every day for the hispanic community and for america as a whole whether you re a member of congress a local elected official a chci alum policy expert or a community leader i know that because you re here you ve done so much for these communities you care about the future of not just this community but of this country for more than 30 years chci has been fighting for that future with your scholarships and fellowships and career programs you re grooming the next generation of great american leaders i got to meet some of them backstage you re building a brighter future not just for our young people but for all of us because we all benefit from their talent and their promise and the contributions that they re going to make to our nation so let s give them all a round of applause as well truly we are so very proud of you all and now more than ever before we need forward looking individuals and organizations just like all of you here in this room because tomorrow while it brings such great promise it also brings a host of new challenges as well and i m here today because i want to talk about one of those challenges it s an issue that keeps me up at night not just as first lady but as a mother and that is the health of our children in particular the epidemic of childhood obesity in america today now we all know this is a serious problem in every single community in this country but like with so many of the other challenges we face today communities of colors have been hit especially hard nearly two in five hispanic children are overweight or obese and this isn t just teenagers or school age kids that we re talking about believe it or not the obesity rate among hispanic preschoolers is higher than their white or african american peers and we all know what this means for their overall health we all know the links between obesity and cancer diabetes high blood pressure and heart disease but we also know that childhood obesity is not a stand alone problem we know that it is bound up in just about every other issue that we face it is about health care it s about education economic opportunity it s about how our food is processed and how our cities are designed how our children spend each day in school it s about the restaurants where we eat and the grocery stores where we shop and the decisions we make for our children every single day decisions about how much time they spend with tv and video games as opposed to running around outside decisions about what they eat how much of it and how often so we all have a stake in this problem and we all have a role in finding a solution and that s why earlier this year we launched let s move let s move is a nationwide campaign with one ambitious goal and that s to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that kids born today can reach adulthood at a healthy weight and we ve set a series of goals and benchmarks that we need to meet in order to reach our larger goal everything from getting better food into our schools to getting more grocery stores into our communities to getting our kids up and moving both at home and at school but every single one of you here in this room knows that government alone cannot solve this problem see as you know here in washington we can help a bit we can help coordinate efforts we can marshal resources we can help raise awareness and get people engaged but at the end of the day when it comes time to act when it comes time to actually make the changes that will make our kids healthier it s going to take folks like you leaders in our community folks who do the hard work on the ground to actually make the changes that will make a difference in our children s lives so i m here today not just to talk with you about the problem but to ask for your help in solving it and that starts in our own communities because we know that if we want to raise healthy kids we need to build healthy communities first and it means asking ourselves some questions like are there parks and playgrounds where our kids can run around and play are there sidewalks or bike paths that let them walk or ride to school safely are there grocery stores that sell healthy food that is affordable that parents can actually buy we need every single one of you to help answer these questions and that means bringing all the stakeholders to the table not just doctors and educators but restaurant owners and policy makers folks from the park and recreation department anyone who might have some role to play in being part of the solution and that s what folks are doing right now out in san antonio yeah shout out for san antonio you all are doing some good things there the metropolitan health district brought together people from all across the community to form a task force to tackle obesity and this spring their mayor julin castro formed a city wide fitness council that includes everyone from business leaders to a university professor to a former dallas cowboy and they re giving away bikes to families they re changing their physical education curriculum they re encouraging restaurants to include more healthy options on their menu and they are providing free access to fitness facilities now san antonio is doing this with the help of a grant from the recovery act yay but you don t need a grant to take another look at what kids are doing in gym class you don t need a grant to take high calorie soda out of vending machines or to tell families to get kids screened for obesity at their checkups it doesn t cost any money to convince a local chef to join our chefs move to schools program now this is a program we started to bring chefs into our schools and help schools prepare healthier food for our kids in fact when i think about it given this organization s longstanding focus on education schools may very well be a perfect place for you all to focus your energy and i know that many of you have been following the child nutrition legislation that is currently before congress this legislation helps make critical investments to provide better quality meals to more of our children so that they can get the nutrition that they need to succeed now this is a bipartisan effort supported by folks on both sides of the aisle and it s already passed the senate and i hope that the house of representatives will act on this legislation by the end of this month so that we can get this bill signed into law but like always there is plenty to do outside of washington as well now how about working to sign up schools in your community for the healthier us school challenge this program recognizes schools that are doing the very best work to keep kids healthy from providing nutritious school meals to requiring regular physical education classes hollin meadows elementary school is a school right here in alexandria virginia it s a perfect example now this is a school where multiple languages are spoken and almost 50 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced price meals nonetheless they earned a silver award in this challenge and i had a chance to visit this school last fall and the school s principal and the parents told me about how the steps they took to make kids healthier something as simple as extending recess by 10 minutes has improved not just their health but their academic performance as well now we ve set a goal of doubling the number of schools that participate in this challenge by june of next year and now we re trying to sweeten the pot a bit by adding monetary incentives for award winning schools and i ll be inviting representatives from each school to come to the white house for a reception in their honor so hopefully that s something useful but we need your help to get even more schools involved now that might mean raising money to install a salad bar in a lunchroom in your community it might mean planting a school garden and getting out there and getting a little dirty or it might mean promoting other efforts to get kids active like making a commitment to enroll a certain number of kids in the president s active lifestyle awards program now this is fun to earn this award students need to engage in 60 minutes of physical activity five days a week for six weeks you all could help too go out for the awards not just for kids because if you meet the goal you get a certificate from the president now the idea behind this award is pretty straightforward we want to get make physical activity habit forming for kids to show them how good it feels to be active so that they keep it up long after the six weeks are over and that s a good example of the last point that i want to make today and that it s really the small actions it s the changes we all can make in our own families that often make all the difference see the fact is many of the most important decisions about what our kids eat and how active they are are made by all of us not as policy makers or educators or medical professionals but as parents and grandparents now i want to be clear right from the start that this isn t about completely depriving our kids of the foods they love it is not about getting rid of those dishes that mean so much in our families and in our cultures and it is certainly not about parents becoming drill sergeants and demanding that their kids drop and give them 20 or run five miles every day it d be good but you don t have to do that instead it s about families making manageable changes that fit with their budgets and schedules with their needs and with their tastes and that might be something as simple as going for regular walks with your kids or maybe turning off the tv and turning on the radio and dancing a little bit in the living room until you break a sweat that counts small things like cutting back on portion sizes or replacing soda with water or just putting some more fruits and vegetables on the table all of this can add up over time and make a big difference in the lives of our kids and believe me you don t have to throw abuela s cookbook out the window there is a role for those time honored family recipes but it s about moderation it s about doing our best to monitor what our kids are consuming how many snacks are they eating how many sodas are they drinking has dessert become an all the time food instead of just a once in a while treat it s about being proactive about going to the doctor and getting our kids screened for obesity but most of all it s about doing something there are countless ways for us to start making a difference the key is to start now because when it comes to our children s health and happiness when it comes to their future we don t have a moment to waste and if anyone knows what it takes to make real change in this country it s all of you it s what you ve been doing for nearly 35 years now i remember hearing that when you all started the hispanic caucus back in 1976 the speaker of the house joked that the first meeting could be held in a phone booth because back then you had just five members and now you have 23 chci s first class of fellows was all of four strong and today there are more than 5 000 students that have benefited from your educational services and your leadership development programs see now those are results right that s the kind of real impact that you have had and can have on this nation and on our children and that s the core mission of this organization to give our children opportunities that we never dreamed of for ourselves and that s why all of you have organized it s why you ve marched it s why you stood up and spoke out and refused to back down no matter what kind of odds you faced and i don t think any one in this room or any of your parents or grandparents fought so hard for so long only to see a future where the greatest threat to our children is their own health but the good news is is that we can do something about this this is one of those problems that s in our hand the solution to this problem is right within our grasp but only if we reach for it and only if we work for it and fight for it only if we once again summon that urgency that has spurred us forward generation after generation seeking something better for our children so i m here because we need you once again we need you to go back home we need you to drive this conversation in your communities we need you to roll up your sleeves and we need you to get more people involved to understand what s at stake our schools need you our families need you and certainly our country needs you and if we come through on this one which i know we can if we all do our part then i know that we can give our children the bright future they deserve so i want to thank you all i want to thank you for what you ve done i want to thank you for what you continue to do and i truly look forward to partnering with each and every one of you in the months and years to come because we can eliminate this problem for our children and our grandchildren so thank you all so much god bless you and congratulations on a wonderful conference dem mobama15 10 09a michelle_obama goodness wow well this is i m thrilled you know you all have been standing in the heat now that s love but i am just thrilled to be here first let me begin by thanking a few people your general general davis for his kind introduction but also for his leadership i want to thank not just the general but his wife susan because we always have to remember the women behind the men or the spouses behind the leaders in addition to the general and susan i want to thank colonel mcclintock and his wife tammy i want to thank chief master sergeant thomas westermeyer and the commander chief of the air armament center and his wife diane i want to thank colonel bill mcmullen vice commander of the first special operations wing at hurlburt field for their outstanding leadership the president and i are grateful for your service we are grateful and i know that folks at eglin and hurlburt are grateful for your dedication and your commitment and your leadership i have had a wonderful opportunity to sit down with the commanders and with folks leading the family readiness unit and working in child care and i ve learned such a great deal about the community that you all are building here it is a model for the nation and it was an honor for me to be here and to talk with all of you i also want to acknowledge vicki miller the wife of congressman jeff miller who s taken the time to be here to greet me although her husband is voting back in washington she has been a dear friend and supporter vicki where are you give a wave thanks for being here vicki and thanks also to the many elected and community leaders who are here i met many of them earlier today and i want to thank all of them for the support of our men and women in uniform you can do a lot in a base community but the community that a base is in extends far and wide and it takes the mayors the non elected officials the community service leaders the folks embracing you all and the folks here are blessed to have a very strong community and i want to give them a round of applause as well i also want to recognize lieutenant colonel rob lyman who isn t here because he s currently at work in the u s department of transportation he is one of 15 people chosen out of 1 000 applicants to be a white house fellow you should be very proud that s a tough program to get into and he is there representing you well and i want to thank you all for loaning him to us for this short period of time i know firsthand just how extraordinary the people are that come from eglin and i know firsthand because we have somebody who works very closely with our family major jeff keuter who would be very embarrassed that i m even mentioning his name he was here at eglin for three years and he is now our family s physician so major keuter takes excellent care of me and the president and the girls they even chip in when bo needs a hand and i would like to ask him to stand up so he can there he is over there very embarrassed we are very proud of him he keeps us healthy i d also like to say a personal word of thanks to the 728th air control squadron the demons who just returned home last month from iraq and qatar the unit s sixth deployment since 2003 welcome home we re proud of you look i know so many of you these folks the demons and so many people protect my husband and vice president biden when they travel so they have a special place in my heart for sure and i want to give them a thanks on behalf of the obamas and the bidens you guys are terrific and we are grateful to you now as somebody as you know who cares very much about military families i was very pleased to hear that the air force leaders designated this year the year of the air force family and that s very a very important statement to make and i was even more pleased when general schwartz said the year would be devoted both to highlighting what s working for families and also figuring out what isn t working for families so that we can take the steps to fix it because that s actually a pretty good description of what i ve been trying to do for the past few years as i visit our troops and their families all across the country my dear friend dr jill biden the vice president s wife and i have been asking questions we ve been listening trying to get feedback on what s going on what models work what models don t and we re working to make sure that your voices are heard in washington and that we can figure out how to raise up best practices and make sure that our efforts in washington are trickling down to the folks who matter most and that s our servicemen and women and their families and visiting with servicemembers and their families is truly one of the greatest things that i do as first lady it s one of my greatest privileges because i always come away from these visits with a renewed sense of pride and gratitude and a sense of awe truly a sense of awe i stood in a line and heard story after story of your colleagues that s been deployed for most of their time as servicemembers their stories of bravery how they left their families how they dealt with fire how they continued to recover and each and every one of them are ready to do more so i m in awe of the courage the patriotism and the commitment to excellence that our men and women in uniform display every single day it s a commitment i see every time that my family steps aboard air force one or on marine one or interacts with any of the members of our military that oversee operations at the white house my husband and i say this all the time the training that you receive is the best and you come out so whole and ready for so much that you don t even know and it makes us proud of the military i m in awe of the sacrifices that you make a small fraction of our population bearing such a huge burden for eight years of war i m in awe serving tour after tour of duty missing out on birthdays and anniversaries and soccer games moments with people that you love the most i m in awe i m in awe of every single one of you but i m also in awe of the loved ones here the people who have your back i know that service doesn t end with the person wearing the uniform and you all know that and war doesn t end when servicemen and women come home i know that our troops sacrifices are their families sacrifices too i have met spouses who play the roles of both parents trying to keep the household together making their children feel like everything is okay juggling play dates and lessons and soccer games trying to hide fears and worries trying to calm nerves and doing their best to answer all those questions that both the mother and father should answer but they re handling it alone and they re doing it with grace i have met grandparents and aunts and uncles brothers and sisters who step in to care for children when there s a single mom or dad that s in uniform and they re deployed and i have met families who are caring for wounded warriors those whose brave loved ones have given the ultimate sacrifice i ve met all those people and the thing that always strikes me isn t just that there are hardly ever complainers in these groups even when that would be understandable and it isn t just that they re not asking for any kind of special treatment ever even when the most most of them would certainly deserve some special treatment but i m struck by how at a time when they re making the greatest sacrifice of all when they re already stretched so thin in their own lives they somehow find time to reach out a hand and help somebody else that is always the story i am struck by how even with all they ve got going on they somehow find a way to do even more and to give back to the communities that they re in this is the constant message that i get from these visits and that is certainly the case here at eglin and at hurlburt i ve heard those stories you all are involved in everything from relay to life to the boy scouts to toys for tots you re voluntering in your local churches and your schools and even more in fact i m told that one of the youth programs in this community gets about half of its volunteer coaches from troops staffed here at eglin half of their volunteers come from you all and i hear that you ve taken on the challenge the combined federal campaign with a vengeance donating whatever you can to help others so i think it s pretty clear that our men and women in uniform and their families have more than done their duty to this nation so i think it now falls upon us as a grateful nation to do ours in return it s our turn to look out for you so that s why my husband s budget includes a few things like pay raises for men and women in uniform additional permanent forces to reduce the stress of long deployments support for military spouse career development that s something that we hear improved military housing yay and financial assistance to military families who ve had to sell their homes during the housing crisis and are facing losses and we ve heard from military families that there were some additional steps that could be taken so that military families can more fully benefit from the family and medical leave act so congress has been working to extend federal family leave protection to the family members of our regular active duty personnel so that they can take time off from work to be with their servicemember for deployment related activities or to attend important family responsibilities and i am so pleased that senator chris dodd is working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to extend federal family leave protection to the family members of injured veterans if enacted this legislation will help more military families address the unique issues they face in balancing work and family but providing our military and their families with the support they ve earned requires more than just good government it requires an active citizen as well let s never forget that when our troops go off to war they re protecting every single one of us and the freedoms that they fight for are ones that every single one of us as americans enjoy and that s why i ve made it a personal priority to ask all americans to do their part to show our appreciation and the community that you re in right now as i said earlier is a shining example of how that can be done from throwing barbecues and the shrimp boil that i didn t get invited to but that s okay to donating facilities for community events to showing appreciation with gifts at the holidays from a 13 year old girl who started hero hugs to send cards and care packages to servicemembers abroad to an 84 year old woman who s spent 43 years volunteering at eglin hospital you all know how important it is to support our men and women in uniform and we thank you for that but the thing is not every community has a military base as you know not every community is as blessed as eglin is we ve got national guard and reserve families in cities and towns all across the country we ve got wounded warriors working hard to recover and families struggling to cope with the loss of the person that they loved most in the world so i encourage everyone in this country to reach out through your schools to reach out through your churches and your workplaces to find out if there are servicemembers or military families nearby who can use a hand just look around in your own community and it can be something as simple you know what your family readiness support groups do it s something simple as offering babysitting or handling carpool duty or giving a stressed mom a break bringing over a meal it doesn t really take that much if you own a business think about making an effort to hire a military spouse or a veteran with that open position when you get one if you have a professional skill whether you re a lawyer or an accountant or a mental health professional you can offer services to our military families pro bono at the very least each of us can do one simple thing and that is to take the time to say thank you just take the time to say thank you thank you for the sacrifices that you are all making on behalf of this nation and we can thank you all for all that you do to serve our communities every last one of you and today i m thinking of one particular example that i heard about here at eglin the clothing drive a group of airmen started to help children they d met in an orphanage in grenada while they were supporting my husband s trip to the summit of the americas before they knew it so many donations had poured in that they had to end the drive that s because everybody here stepped up it took two entire days just to sort out what they had received it s a perfect illustration of the spirit of our military and our military families it s what makes our armed forces the best in the world and not just because of your courage in the face of adversity or your heroism on the battlefield but your compassion and your decency and your generosity see that is the face of america that the world gets to see they see this country through your eyes as well through your good deeds and in doing so you make us so proud so very proud so i know times get hard i know that there is no way that i can know intimately how hard it can be but i am committed as first lady to spend every ounce of my platform trying to make sure that the country never forgets that they don t forget our servicemembers and they certainly don t forget those that are left here to keep it together so know that you re not alone know that there are so many people who are sending their prayers and their appreciation and their gratitude when i travel around the world people talk about our military they talk about how you represent the world and they talk about how it is a duty of all of us to make sure that we honor the work that you do so thank you and now let s get out of this heat dem mobama15 10 09b michelle_obama thank you everyone please please have a seat thank you so much congressman boyd i want to thank you for that very kind introduction and thank you for your outstanding leadership in washington on behalf of florida s families and for your proud support of florida campus compact and the cause of service here in this state and across the country we are very proud of you and let s give congressman boyd a round of applause i am thrilled to join all of you here today as we recognize the outstanding work you re all doing as part of florida campus compact and i d like to start by just thanking a few people former senator bob graham former congresswoman carrie meek who is here we are honored by your presence and also for your lifetime leadership and your continued service to this state and our nation we are grateful to the both of you i also want to acknowledge mayor bower who is doing terrific work for the people of miami beach and i also want to thank frank brogan who s the chancellor of florida s state university the system here for his commitment to service to the students of this state we are just grateful for his leadership and i also want to thank someone who i got to party with on tuesday and i think you exaggerate by saying we could win any salsa contest i might be able to but i don t know about dr eduardo padron president of miami dade college thank you for us hosting us here today and of course i want to recognize the superwoman at my table dee dee rasmussen your executive director i learned a lot about all her good crazy because in addition to running this organization she is raising three kids on her own she serves on the school board she s nuts but it s the good kind of nuts i want to thank her for her boundless energy her passionate commitment to our young people and her devoted leadership to florida campus compact dee dee thank you so much and finally i want to thank all of you everyone here to the faculty to the students service directors the administrators the college and university presidents who have embraced campus compact s mission of making service and service learning an integral part of higher education in america and i know that what you re doing isn t easy especially now i know that many of you are struggling with budget cuts and layoffs and you re all living in that perfect storm of decreasing donations and increasing demand and many of you have been putting in long hours and late nights to make up that difference work that doesn t exactly come with a lot of overtime pay yes i know and i know that these labors are of love but they don t always get the recognition and the rewards that they deserve so today i want you all to know just how much that the president and i truly appreciate your work that is why i came here today i want you to know how proud we are how grateful we are for what you are doing every day with the challenges that we face today your work to give young people the tools and the inspiration to pursue public service couldn t be more critical and you of all people know that whether the issues are climate change or keeping our communities safe to providing desperately needed health care in underserved communities and desperately needed teachers in underperforming schools these issues are critical believe it or not in the next four years as many as one third of america s 3 2 million teachers could retire and by 2014 just five short years from now the department of education projects that our nation s schools will need to hire as many as 1 million new teachers shortages in high need schools will be particularly acute as you can imagine so today more than ever we really need skilled committed service minded young people young people with the insight into these issues and the experience working with these communities we need them to step forward and to help us meet these challenges but there s also good news in recent years and you all have seen this we have seen more and more young people who are eager to do just that applications are way up for americorps and the peace corps and last year 25 000 young people applied for just 4 000 slots in teach for america so young people are volunteering through their schools and their churches their synagogues and their mosques they are concerned about the environmental implications and the ethical implications of the products they buy and the lifestyle they re lead these young people are thinking about the world and there s a growing sense among this next generation that maybe service is a little cool and that s okay but the question is how do we harness all that energy and all that excitement how do we show these young people that service can be more than just something that you do once in a while that it can be more than just something that you do for a year or two after you graduate but service can be a way of life it can even be a career how do we contend with the traditional definitions of what success should look like those beliefs that still hold sway over so many young people the idea that success means money or power or prestige and that it comes with a nice house and a fancy car how do we counter those voices that tell them well if you don t get paid a lot money for what you do then maybe what you do really isn t that valuable or voices that say well that s awfully nice that you want to do service but when are you going to get a real job and trust me i ve heard those voices before in my own life as many of you know by now if you haven t heard about my background i started my career at a big fancy law firm and it was a wonderful experience working for big companies and making a whole lot of money i think in my first year of working i ve made more than both of my parents combined and when i decided to leave for a public service job let me tell you my family and my friends started to worry about my sanity my mother was concerned that i d taken her advice to follow my heart just a little too far and my friends thought i was throwing away a promising career and a lucrative paycheck they thought i was nuts and while everyone thought that my heart was in the right place a lot of people wondered whether my head was on straight but i knew right away that i had made the right decision when i stepped away from corporate america and into service as the congressman stated i helped start this wonderful new americorps program called public allies i worked with a group of dedicated visionary young people and i helped to found the chicago chapter and in that program we spent years preparing 18 to 30 year olds from all walks of life for careers in public service and after that i then left and went to the university of chicago to start their first campus wide community service program and every day i got to work with extraordinary young people from all different backgrounds every day i saw how each of them had something to contribute and how each of them had the potential to lead it felt really good it didn t matter how much money i was making it didn t matter how prestigious my job seemed to others i knew i was making an impact in the community that raised me i knew i was helping to change people s lives in ways that i couldn t sitting behind a big fancy desk i felt more successful than ever before in my life and that is the chance that all of you in campus compact are giving to young people all across this state every day that is the power of service learning to show that higher education isn t just about producing good students which is important or just successful professionals which is important but it s about producing good citizens and great leaders and engaged members of our democracy it s not just about imparting a body of knowledge and then handing them a degree it s about ensuring that they re going to use that degree to contribute to the communities that they came from and it s about modeling a way of life all of you are helping to redefine the role of universities in our communities replacing the old image of the remote ivory tower with a caring and engaged partner it s simple but maybe revolutionary that universities have an obligation to be good citizens and that students education is about more than just what their what their school and community can give to them it s also about what they can give back to their school and community and we know the difference this kind of learning makes we all know we ve seen it we know that students become more engaged in what they re learning and more aware of the world around them we know that their writing and critical thinking skills improve and so do their gpas and even if your students don t ultimately pursue a career in public service what s important is that they graduate with a public service orientation an understanding of the problems in our communities an awareness of the skills they have to offer and a sense of the difference they can make when they commit their time and their effort they become in a sense volunteers for life and we need these insights and this experience just as much if not more in the private sector as we do in the public sector you all know we need business leaders motivated by both the pursuit of profit and the pursuit of the public good if we want to fight if we want to fight climate change and create green jobs in this economy we re going to need ceos who are committed to preserving our environment if we want to boost student achievement in our schools we are going to need businesswomen and men and lawyers and scientists and others willing to serve as partners and mentors if we want to pursue and promote better wellness in all of our communities we re going to need health care professionals we re going to need hospital executives who understand the needs of underserved populations and most of all we need citizens who believe that volunteering in your community isn t just something that you do once in a while or on a holiday that it s something that s part of your life routine like going to the gym or the grocery store or picking up your kids from school service is forever because ultimately we know that so many of the best solutions to the most difficult problems in our communities don t come from boardrooms or courtrooms or congress or the white house for that matter some of the best solutions come directly from the communities themselves that s what all of you are teaching students every day by partnering with community organizations and that s precisely the idea at the heart of what my husband s administration is doing to promote service all across america it s why he s launched a new community innovation initiative to seek out the best most effective non profits in our communities organizations that could be the next teach for america or harlem children s zone who worked together and then we can replicate those efforts across america it s why he was proud to sign the edward m kennedy serve america act expanding senior corps and americorps and other initiatives to give people to give people of all ages a chance to serve their communities it s why we ve requested more funding for service learning and why we re reaching out to partners in the private sector to find ways to use new media to spark a greater interest in service learning and it s why i m proud that this year s national learn serve challenge a week long effort designed to promote service learning has generated participation from more than 75 000 people doing nearly 200 different projects and it s why way back in june we launched united we serve a nationwide effort calling on all americans to make service part of their daily lives we reached out to hundreds of non profit organizations and corporations and foundations government agencies and we asked ordinary americans to become service leaders to develop their own service projects and post them online so that others could join and while we provided the inspiration and the resources to get things started it s taken off in ways that we never could have ever imagined we partnered with more than 400 organizations and there were more than 250 000 service opportunities available on serve gov big companies like citigroup and wal mart and others they answered the call by devoting thousands and thousands of volunteer hours and millions of dollars the sports and entertainment industries participated too in fact this week and we re excited about that thanks to an unprecedented effort organized by the entertainment industry foundation more than 90 television shows on a wide range of networks and cable channels will include service themes in their programming that s next week the lesson here is pretty clear and that is that each of us has a role to play and all of us have something to offer no matter where you come from or what you do for a living you can make a difference in someone s life and in doing so you can make a difference in your own life as well at least that s what matt flood an alum of the university of central florida learned back when he took a class called creative writing in the community he put it this way he said this world is a lot larger than my experiences and a project like this has the potential of teaching me more than what i can learn in a traditional collegiate classroom environment that s what rebekah reams from valencia community college learned when she volunteered at habitat for humanity she wrote i highly recommend volunteering for everyone who wants to be a part of something great even though it means getting up early on a saturday morning and today i am thinking about what happens when folks like you inspire a student like rebekah and then she decides she wants to spend her life being part of something great maybe she works as a nurse in an underserved area helping to heal hundreds of patients or becomes an architect and designs affordable housing for thousands of people maybe she becomes a teacher in an inner city or rural school inspiring generations of students to serve their own community and then you take that energy and you multiply that by the millions of students across america who have been engaged by campus compact and then you have some idea of the ripple effect of the work that you re doing all of the problems solved all of the communities lifted up all of the lives transformed by the students whose lives you ve transformed if that s not the definition of success then it s hard to figure out what is and today president obama and i we honor you we celebrate you and more than anything we thank you for everything that you do to serve your communities and your nation the only thing i can say is hang in there don t stop keep it going there are young people who are looking to you for who they can be they re looking to you to figure out how do they place themselves in the world the life that they can envision every single day you are moving and changing lives in ways that are unimaginable and if you need any proof look at me i am living proof of the work and the impact of the work that you do so we are grateful to you and it has been a privilege to be here among you good luck and stay strong thank you so much dem mobama15 4 10 michelle_obama thank you everyone thank you so much it is thank you guys all right you all are crazy i am just delighted to be here i can t tell you as much as i love living in washington there is nothing that i love better than getting out of washington particularly when it means coming to such a beautiful community with such energy and passion so i am happy to be here i want to start by thanking rosa for her wonderful introduction for her terrific leadership in community service we are so very proud of you let s give her a big hand thank you rosa and i just want to also acknowledge a few people as well i m honored to be joined by the lieutenant governor it s so good to see you thank you for your work as well as the state controller wonderful to see you thank you so much for taking the time to be here i know that the mayor had to leave but i want to thank he and his wife for being here i know that the one thing i heard over there when i was touring the plots more land more land but he s done a terrific job and i just want to thank all the city officials here for making this visit wonderful to all of the elected officials who are here thank you for your work your leadership your energy i want to thank bob montgomery and amy lint from the new roots community farm yay they re doing a fabulous job and proud of their work and full of the kind of energy that you need to get this thing going and i want to again acknowledge the 14 community leaders who are here the building healthy community partners who are representing all segments of this state don t let dr ross use that picture as any kind of leverage you get the picture and hassle him when you need to right i know they will we are just proud of the work that you re doing and i know that everyone could not be here but i know that you ll send back my excitement my gratitude and just assure them that we re supporting the work that they re doing it is a model for the nation for the world so thank you thank you so much and finally i want to thank my dear friend dr bob ross and yes yes as well as all the folks from the california endowment who have joined us today thank you so much thank you we ve been plotting this for a little bit right he s been such a wonderful partner for more than 30 years as a pediatrician a professor a public health administrator and an advocate dr ross has worked tirelessly to give all of our kids the kind of healthy start that they deserve he has been a tremendous asset not just to the state of california but to this nation and no matter how he s served dr ross has always had a knack for bringing people together that s been his mo hospitals non profits businesses elected officials you name it bringing people together constantly to tackle some of the toughest public health challenges that we face here in our country so i think it s fitting that we re all here today and that he s leading the charge to take on yet another challenge and it is one as you know that i care about deeply not just because i m the first lady but i am a mother of beautiful children when i look at children i see my kids and i know that we have to work now to start to curb the epidemic of childhood obesity in this nation we all know that this phenomenon is relatively recent it is not something that has been a challenge for us all this time this is a new issue because as i said time and time again back when we were growing up we naturally led reasonably healthy lives it s just the way we had to function it kept us healthier than we could imagine most of us lived in communities and went to schools in our communities so we walked to school so if nothing else you were getting exercise just walking to and from school everyone had recess and gym it was not an option it was mandatory no one liked it some of us did it but you had to do it and that also gave us a sense of movement that we d lost and at home we had some pretty simple rules particularly at dinner you ate what was put before you period no choices no options no discussion and if you didn t you just went to bed hungry we all know that my mother pretends like she didn t apply those rules but she did and many kids today aren t so fortunate for many kids those walks to school have been replaced by car or bus rides because it s either not safe or they re going to schools that are far away school budget cuts mean the so called extras like p e and recess are often the first things that go meaning that our kids are doing a lot less running around during the day and they re living and existing in a more sedentary life and the truth is is that parents are busy and struggling and working hard many of them working multiple jobs that is just the truth people are working harder than ever and oftentimes the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables they keep going up so many families can t afford to purchase the foods that they know that they need and it is unfair to look to families and tell them to do something better for their children that they can t afford or don t have access to so today many parents really feel like the deck is stacked against them they want to do the best for their kids all of us do parents grandparents all of us but it just seems like the odds are against us they know their children s health is their responsibility but sometimes they feel like the whole issue is just out of their control they re trying to do the right thing but they re bombarded by contradictory information at every turn and they don t really know who or what to believe labels are tough to work through and sometimes what we prepared when we were young have a different impact physically on our children today so that s why two months ago we launched the let s move campaign and we launched it with the help of so many partners as you know this is a nationwide campaign with one single but very ambitious goal and that s to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that children born today grow up at a healthy weight with a different set of habits and a different set of beliefs about how to live their lives as part of this initiative we ve issued a call to action to get things going all throughout the nations nation and we re working with so many different groups we re working with pediatricians and food manufacturers with the fda to give parents the information they need to make healthy decisions for their kids and we ve created a web site letsmove gov to help provide those helpful tips step by step strategies that parents need to get on the right track to eat well and to stay fit we re working to get healthier food into our schools this is an important initiative most of our kids these days are getting a lot of their calories at school and by strengthening legislation that supports our federal school meal programs we can go a long way to changing the eating habits of our children and we re also working with several major food suppliers to get them to do their part to decrease sugar fat and salt not just in school meals but in all the foods that we eat and to increase fruits vegetables and whole grains and we re getting them to think about how they market to our kids as well one important goal in this initiative is we re working to eliminate food deserts and you all know what food deserts are communities that don t have access to any fresh produce or grocery stores there are so many of them that exist throughout this country millions of children are living in food deserts and our goal is to completely eliminate those by bringing grocery stores and farmers markets into underserved areas so that our families have access to the kind of healthy food the affordable food that they re going to need and there are many examples in communities around this country showing how they re bringing these resources back into communities and finally we cannot forget the whole key to let s move and that s moving we have to get our kids moving again and we re revamping the president s physical fitness challenge that s coming up we re going to be working with professional athletes from dozens of sports leagues to inspire kids to stay physically fit and active so if you see me hula hooping and jumping around like i m crazy i am but it s a lot of fun and you know it just shows that parents taking the lead doing simple things with their kids jumping around dancing sweating turning on music can make a big difference in their lives but we ve also known from the very beginning that the solution to our childhood obesity crisis isn t going to just come from washington i have talked to a lot of experts about this issue and not a single one of them has said that the answer is to have federal government telling people what to do that never works instead as i ve traveled across this country one thing that has become very clear is that we already have many of the solutions to childhood obesity right at our fingertips there are so many communities in this country that are doing some innovative things and our goal is to find those folks in those communities who are already running some of the most innovative and creative and effective programs out there and to do our job to highlight those successes and to share those successes so that they become models for the rest of the country and perhaps even the rest of the world and that s why just last week we hosted a summit at the white house for members of our childhood obesity task force so that they could gather with experts around the country and get some new ideas from all across the country we heard from doctors about the role of prenatal care in determining a child s health we can t underestimate that as an important factor we heard from teachers about the need for schools and suppliers to think about how the food that s that are served are again marketed to kids that s the key how are we talking to our children and our parents about healthy eating and we also heard from community advocates about the creative ways that our cities and towns are transforming urban environments into oases for growing fresh fruits and vegetables just like we re doing here that s why a new foundation the partnership for a healthier america was created to help support these kind of efforts this foundation is really key to this movement it s going to serve as an independent non partisan player that s going to mobilize and continue to coordinate businesses foundations state and local governments community leaders the media and others to help with the key goals that come out of the task force for let s move and it s no surprise that the california endowment signed right on board to be a beginning player in this foundation the partnership is designed to do just what the endowment has been doing for years so it makes sense that they ve been such an important partner the goal is to address problems at their root and help folks around the country turn good ideas into something bigger that s what the california endowment is trying to do that s the mission of this partnership and today i m pleased that the california endowment is once again leading the way with their new plan to create healthier more active communities all across this state with this fabulous new building healthy communities initiative that s based on a simple idea that healthy children come from a place a place that is a healthy community if a family lives in a neighborhood with a grocery store nearby it is simple they re more likely to put fresh fruits and vegetables on the table because they ll have access to it if there s safe inviting parks down the street parents are going to be more likely to let their kids play they re going to be more likely to go to that park with them and enjoy being outdoors and if our environment is clean and pollution free children are less likely to get sick being outside and they re more likely to spend time outside these are not complicated principles but this isn t just about good ideas and good intentions it s about serious investments that make a lasting difference for our kids and that is why the california endowment is investing 1 billion that s billion with a b pretty amazing in these 14 california communities across this state to support people and programs that will help our kids lead active healthy lives right from the beginning so you all have a lot of money and that s good that s really really good it s never enough it isn t and that s the point money alone won t do it but money is an important first start the investments that will be made will go to folks like dennis and michelle mineni did i pronounce that right are they here they re not here but they run the merced flea and farmers market they ve run it for more than 10 years and dennis and michelle i understand are working with the state to ensure that their customers can use food stamps to buy fresh produce at much lower prices than at supermarkets or convenience stores that s something that we ve heard throughout this campaign we have to make sure that everyone has access to farmers markets this initiative that michelle and dennis are promoting is an example of the right thing to do that s already happening the endowment is also investing in people like the students from chula vista who realized that the park that they played in growing up was now too dangerous for other kids to use so what did they do they worked with local leaders to fix up that park and now it s cleaner and busier than ever before and now they re ready to move on to the next park that s what our young people are doing the endowment is also investing in people like the teachers from willard intermediary school in santa ana who turned the school s old wood shop into a fitness center and are now working to combine gym class and science classes which is something that we can do exercise and learning go figure they go hand in hand teaching students about heart rate and exercise science through personalized fitness programs and the endowment is also investing in people like the farmers here today the stories of these farmers are amazing a group of refugees from around the world who founded the new roots community farm right here in city heights it is just a phenomenal initiative and what it shows is that although these farmers come from different corners of the globe they all recognized a common problem right here in america as they have immigrated that for many refugees like themselves tight budgets and the lack of supermarkets often meant that folks were skipping fresh fruits and vegetables in their diets and settling for fast food that s that has been the natural trend transition and that s what s happened to many of us and as a result many recent immigrants were suffering from high cholesterol and high blood pressure diseases that they were not dealing with before migrating here so the folks here today got to work they saw this problem they understood the connection and they got to work and after organizing and speaking out and raising money they broke ground on the garden and along with other farmers from places like somalia and uganda and kenya and cambodia and vietnam mexico and guatemala and many many more places they have come together and at first they weren t sure whether people from so many different backgrounds and cultures would get along farming especially since the garden only had two hoses i understand when it started to share and the farmers often didn t speak the same language but day by day and little by little neighbors started sharing their vegetables they started exchanging recipes they started losing weight and they started recognizing the hopes and dreams they all held in common just through a plot of land and some vegetables these hopes to make a home for themselves here in this country and to keep their families healthy at the same time and to give their kids a better life simple values simple shared values and together what they proved is that food is truly the universal language of this planet and that s what let s move and the building healthy communities initiative is really all about it s about giving people the tools that they need to make healthy choices for themselves and for their families it s about realizing that the best ideas don t come from sacramento or washington dc but they come from communities large and small all across this country and it s about recognizing the simple truth that giving our children a healthy future starts one person one family one community at a time you truly are doing extraordinary work it is a privilege for me to be able to come here with all the press to highlight what is going on in this simple plot of land this is what we need to be doing in communities all across the country and the truth is the world is watching these efforts we re not alone in these struggles this is happening these changes in diets and health are happening in communities across the globe and through your effort and your leadership your coordination your vision your determination we re beginning step by step to find the solutions that are going to make sure that all of these kids behind us have the kind of future that we want for them so thank you we re so proud of you and it is an honor for me to be here thank you so much and thank you to the endowment dem mobama15 6 09 michelle_obama hey good afternoon everyone please be seated we just want to keep you on your toes if you re looking that way and i come in that way then you re completely confused right keep you on your toes well welcome to the white house as we kick off the music series the jazz studio how has it been for you all it s been good well i want to just thank a few people i want to thank jazz at lincoln center the thelonious monk jazz institute and the duke ellington jazz festival for making today possible and for keeping jazz alive so let s give everyone a round of applause today s event exemplifies what i think the white house the people s house should be about this is a place to honor america s past celebrate its present and create its future and that s why all of you all are here today it s about you the future and what better example of this is than jazz america s indigenous art form globally recognized as america s music originating in the great city of new orleans just a century ago through the african american experience today jazz is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicities backgrounds ages and creeds indeed jazz is considered by many to be america s greatest artistic gift to the world the understanding and appreciation of jazz is integral to understanding and appreciating american history and culture it s an outstanding artistic model of individual expression and democratic expression as well and there s probably no better example of democracy than a jazz ensemble individual freedom but with responsibility to the group it s essential that we preserve develop and expand this treasured art form for our future generations by recognizing and elevating the importance of our jazz education programs in every single school across america the budding jazz young jazz musicians from across the country who are with us today all you young talents are the future guardians of the music we salute you and your teachers we are counting on you to keep the music vital and evolving for generations to come and as jazz has been demonstrating every night for more than a hundred years when we work together there s nothing that we can t do so i m through talking now we get to the fun part we can hear some music so i hope you guys enjoy your time here together i hope you get to see some of this white house i heard a few of you were skipping on your way up to the white house i hope you keep skipping and having fun here i brought my own family with me today because i want to keep them alive and aware of all kinds of music other than hip hop so it s so important for me to have you here that i brought them here as well and jazz has been a part of my life since i was a little girl my mother s father who we call south side before there was room to room speakers he had a speaker in every house in every room in his house and he played it 24 hours a day at on the highest volume he could put it on and that s how i grew up in my household at christmas birthdays easter it didn t matter there was jazz playing in our household so it means so much to me to be able to bring that music here to the white house and to have you all celebrating with us so have a good time thanks so much dem mobama15 9 10 michelle_obama how s everybody well good afternoon how s everybody doing very good it is a true pleasure and an honor to be here to kick off this year s legislative conference and i want to thank you so much for having me here today it is truly an honor for me i want to start by thanking congressman donald payne and congresswoman barbara lee for those wonderful introductions but also for their extraordinary work and their support on behalf not just of my husband s administration but of this nation and i d also like to thank dr elsie scott for her outstanding leadership as well so let s dr scott thank you so much and finally i want to thank the congressional black caucus the cbcf all the panelists here today and all of you for being here and for what you do every day to lift up families and communities across this country because time and again you ve taken those tough stands and been that lone dissenting voice time and again you ve asked those hard questions and spoken those inconvenient truths all along refusing to give up on the endlessly difficult task of building that more perfect union for more than four decades you have taken a stand on behalf of folks who ve been forgotten folks who too often feel like they re invisible not just african americans but all americans who need someone on their side again and that s particularly true when it comes to your work on behalf of our nation s children you ve helped more students pursue careers in fields like medicine and engineering you ve worked to groom young leaders and give them the tools to fulfill their god given potential you ve been a voice in congress on every challenge they face from healthcare and education to poverty and crime and so much more and that s one of the reasons why i wanted to be here today because i want to talk with you about another issue that i believe presents an urgent threat to the health and well being of our young people and that is the epidemic of childhood obesity that affects every community in this country but it affects the african american community in particular you just heard the statistics they re all too familiar how nearly 40 percent of african american kids are overweight or obese nearly one in two that is half of our children will develop diabetes in some point in their lives but i also know how easy it is to rattle off those numbers and to shake our heads and move on because in the black community especially these persistent health problems can become so routine that we come to expect it sometimes even tolerate it and it s a lot harder to really feel what those statistics mean because the truth is that in too many of our communities childhood obesity has become that kind of slow quiet everyday threat that doesn t always appear to warrant the headline urgency of some of the other issues that we face the fact is that many of us and many of the folks that we know and love have struggled with our weight and often it becomes the kind of thing that we just sort of accept as part of our daily lives as something we know we should do something about but we always push it off until later it winds up taking a backburner to more pressing issues like crumbling schools and neighborhoods that aren t safe and families that can t pay the bills or even put food on the table but today i just want us to step back for a moment and ask ourselves some hard questions about what childhood obesity really means for the prospects of our next generation we should ask ourselves what does it mean when we hear stories of doctors seeing obesity related conditions like type ii diabetes in children that they only used to see in adults and what does it mean when our kids go through life feeling unwell not having the energy to run around and play and enjoy their childhood today and not having the stamina and the strength they will need to build successful careers and keep up with their own kids and grandkids in the future and what does it mean when study after study shows that regular exercise and proper nutrition significantly improves academic performance but that many of our kids aren t getting enough of either what does it mean when because so many of our kids are struggling with obesity some experts are now saying that our kids might be the first generation in history on track to lead shorter lives than their parents i mean we ve got to think about that i mean think about the fact that we may have reached a point where a future generation will be worse and not better than the one before see i think it means we ve got a pretty big problem on our hands and one that we should be taking just as seriously as all those other hot button front burner issues we ve all been fighting so hard to address i think it means that we as a community and as a nation need to make solving childhood obesity a top priority for our kids future i think we need to make a commitment not just for a few months or a few years but a long term commitment to do what it takes to solve this problem once and for all because the truth is that short term one off efforts simply aren t going to cut it childhood obesity isn t some simple discrete issue there s no one cause we can pinpoint there s no one program we can fund to make it go away rather it s an issue that touches on every aspect of how we live and how we work and we can t just declare that our kids need to get more exercise when they don t have parks to play in or safe streets to walk on we can t just tell folks to put more fruits and vegetables on the dinner table when many a family lives miles from the nearest grocery store and we certainly can t demand healthier school lunches when our schools don t have the money the equipment or the expertise to make that happen and that s really one of the key principles of let s move let s move is a nationwide campaign to address childhood obesity all across this country it s the idea that we need to attack this problem from every single angle and that s why since we launched let s move back in february we ve gotten folks all across the country engaged in solving this problem from educators and doctors to mayors food producers even restaurant owners and as we launch the next phase of let s move there s another key principle that we ll be focused on and that s getting results because the last thing our kids need is lip service or a lot of fancy slogans that aren t backed up with any action see we knew we needed to be ambitious which is why we set a goal of solving the problem within a generation and we knew we needed to be rigorous about meeting these goals which is why we ve laid out a series of benchmarks that we plan to meet each year so that we can stay on track to meeting this goal that includes everything from getting more doctors to screen kids for obesity to eliminating those food deserts by getting more grocery stores in our communities and ensuring that all families have access to fresh healthy food right where they live and because it s important to prevent obesity early we re also working to promote breastfeeding especially in the black community where 40 percent of our babies never get breast fed at all even in the first weeks of life and we know that babies that are breast fed are less likely to be obese as children but while government has a role to play here in raising awareness and securing resources and pushing things forward when it comes down to it no one here in washington knows our communities like we do the folks in washington don t have the kind of personal relationships or know how that it takes to get things done on the ground so i m not just here today to talk to you about the problem i am also here to enlist each and every one of you in our fight to find a solution now those solutions they begin in our own cities in our own towns in our own neighborhoods because we know that if we want healthy kids we have to have healthy communities right we need folks like all of you who are leaders in your communities we need you to start a conversation to get involved with groups who are already making progress and to bring folks to the table to attack this issue together we need all stakeholders involved and we need every resource at our disposal that includes schools and faith organizations businesses non profits you name it and together you can do something as simple as hosting a farmers market in your community or cleaning up a park so that kids have a safe place to play or you can do something as involved as working to redesign your entire city or overhaul your school s lunch program a group of folks in detroit offer a wonderful example of the difference that can be made in communities with one of the highest obesity rates in the nation many detroit residents live at least twice as far from the nearest grocery store as they do to a fast food restaurant or a convenience store and that s why a group of community leaders and local churches got together and started what they call peaches and greens where five days a week they drive a truck like the vegetable man you all heard remember the truck my parents used to talk about it they drive a truck through the city selling fresh affordable produce and they ve set up a small market they ve planted a community garden they ve even convinced some of the local liquor stores to stock more fruits and vegetables now they didn t have to pass any new laws or raise earth shattering amounts of money to get this done they saw a need they filled up a truck and they started driving and there is really no reason why communities across the country can t follow this lead and that s why we re dedicated to doing everything we can to support these kind of efforts and today i m proud that the department of health and human services has announced that they will be investing 31 million in new grants these grants are called they re calling these grants communities putting prevention to work and these grants made possible through the health care reform law will go to 11 communities and states across the country they will help support innovative programs designed to fight childhood obesity and make our communities healthier in pitt county north carolina for example they re going to use their grant towards making corner stores healthier and improving access to healthy produce in santa clara county california they re going to be using their funds to expand the rethink your drink campaign to encourage kids to drink more water and milk and fewer high calorie sodas and fruit drinks but let s also remember that while kids eat plenty of meals and snacks in their homes and in their neighborhoods with 31 million kids participating in the federal school lunch program many of our kids are getting up to half their daily calories right at school and that s the second place where all of you can really make a difference through let s move we re working to get healthier food into those school breakfasts and lunch programs and into vending machines at schools and we ve found that the best way to do that is through the healthier us schools challenge now this program recognizes schools that are making the health of our children a central part of their mission and it s spurring schools all across the country to raise their standards and teach kids healthy habits that will last a lifetime and as an additional incentive when schools do succeed they ll get a cash reward and we ll also be holding a reception at the white house for representatives of the award winning schools so hopefully that will make people want to get involved they can come to my house now we know this program is already having an impact we ve seen it in schools like burnside elementary in columbia south carolina they ve built a partnership with nearby fort jackson army base to pair students with soldiers for a healthy lunch and to discuss the importance of nutrition they ve also started a dance team to help kids stay active in ways that are easy and fun i had the pleasure of visiting another school right here in anacostia river terrace elementary school where they have what they call a jammin minute where every morning the kids and students the teachers as well they get moving and it helps them stay active and fit together at that school they ve also planted a garden where they grow their own fruits and vegetables right on the school grounds and i m proud to say that river terrace is the first school in washington d c to be named a healthier us school so we re very proud of them so we need all of you to help promote this program in your communities encourage your local schools to apply for this challenge ask them what you can do to help maybe that means convincing local chefs in your community to participate in our chefs move to schools program where chefs volunteer in schools across the country teaching schools new techniques and recipes for healthier meals maybe it s raising money for a new salad bar or new kitchen equipment in the cafeteria or maybe it means rounding up volunteers to help kids plant a garden we need your help in so many ways another effort to get better food into our schools that needs your support is passing the child nutrition legislation that s before congress right now now just so you all know this is legislation that makes critical investments to help us provide more children with better quality school meals it s supported by democrats and republicans who agree that here in america no child should start school hungry each day they agree that no child should go without the basic nutrition they need to learn and to grow this bill has already passed the senate and i hope that the house of representatives will act by the end of this month so we can get this bill signed into law that s something we can do but in the end we all know that our childhood obesity crisis will not be solved by a bill in washington or even by the best programs in our communities because ultimately the most important decisions about what our kids eat and how much they exercise are made at home the reality is that we all need to start making some changes to how our families eat now everyone loves a good sunday dinner me included and there s nothing wrong with that the problem is when we eat sunday dinner monday through saturday the problem is when things get out of balance when portion sizes get out of control when dessert is practically a food group or kids are drinking sodas with every meal or having snacks every couple of hours so this doesn t mean going cold turkey and saying goodbye to the foods we love and that mean so much to our families instead it s about common sense and moderation it means thinking hard about the foods we buy and how we prepare them and how much of them we eat and through let s move we re working to provide families with better information to make those decisions easier it means getting our kids screened for obesity and asking our doctors for advice on how to prevent and address the issue it means making a conscious decision to incorporate physical activity into our daily lives that could mean taking longer walks spending more time as a family in the park maybe it s just turning on the radio and dancing in the middle of the living room until you break a sweat doesn t have to take that much and i know it won t always be easy because this kind of stuff never is for anyone it s going to take discipline and commitment and continuous hard work from families and communities across this country but i think all of the folks in this room know a little bit of something about hard work and commitment and discipline and tackling big challenge is nothing new to the cbc and being here today i am reminded of a quote by shirley chisholm the first african american woman elected to congress we all know that and she was one of the founders of the cbc she said and this is her quote i don t measure america by its achievement but by its potential and all of you are here because you believe in that potential some of you have been fighting for that potential longer than i ve been breathing you remember sitting at those lunch counters and marching in those streets you remember raising your voices for justice and equality so you are all very well aware of what it takes to help make the promise of america real for every single one of our children and today it s up to all of us to build on that legacy because you didn t fight so hard for so long for a future where the greatest threat to our children is their own health you didn t take all those risks and make all those sacrifices only to reach a day when our children s prospects would be dimmer than our own you all fought so that our children and grandchildren would have opportunities that you never even imagined and in the end that s what we re fighting for today and that s why we need you all once again we re going to need you to add your energy and your passion to this cause we need you to go back home and start the conversation to roll up your sleeves and get more people involved we need you to once again raise your voices on behalf of our children and the beauty of this issue is that this is with our control we can do this if we all work together if we continue to work together as we ve done then i am confident that together we can give our children the bright future that they deserve thank you all for giving me the time thank you all for your prayers for your hard work for your intelligence and i look forward to working with every single one of you in the months and years to come thank you all so much dem mobama16 3 10 michelle_obama thank you thank you everyone thank you so much and rick thank you for that very kind introduction i enjoyed our meeting as well and thanks to all of you for having me here at this year s science forum it is a true pleasure to with all of you today and i hope you get out and see a little sunshine because we have some i understand you ve gathered here in washington this week to discuss some of the most pressing issues that your industry faces and i m very pleased to see that your agenda today includes sessions about helping customers meet their lifestyle needs and about advancing america s public health because the topic that i d like to discuss with you today the epidemic of childhood obesity falls at the intersection of these two issues now i know you re all familiar with the statistics here how childhood obesity rates have tripled over the past three decades nearly one in three children in this country are now overweight or obese and you all know the health consequences from hypertension to heart disease cancer to diabetes and i know you re well aware of the economic consequences how we re currently spending billions of dollars treating obesity related conditions costs that many of your companies pay in the form of rising health care expenses expenses that will only continue to rise and affect your bottom lines if we fail to act but you also know that this is a relatively new phenomenon because back when many of us were growing up we tended to be able to lead lives that kept us at a pretty healthy weight most of us walked to and from school every day and then we ran around all day at recess in gym class and then for hours after school before dinner we usually ate more sensibly oftentimes we had home cooked meals with reasonable portion sizes and like it or not there was always a vegetable on the plate and fast food was a rare treat snacking between meals was frowned upon i mean we all had our share of soda chips and desserts but certainly not every day and not at every meal but our kids today lead a very different kind of life those walks to and from school have been replaced by car and bus rides gym class and school sports have been cut replaced by afternoons with the tv and video games and the internet and while parents want to provide healthy food for their kids many of them are working longer hours or some of them more than one job so they just can t swing those home cooked meals anymore and today snacking between meals has become more the norm rather than the exception and while kids 30 years ago ate just one snack a day we re now trending toward three so our kids are taking in an additional 200 calories a day just from snacks alone and one in five school age kids has up to six snacks a day and portion sizes have exploded food portions are two to five times bigger than they used to be and beverage portions have grown as well in the mid 1970s the average sweetened drink portions were about 13 6 ounces and today our kids think nothing of drinking 20 ounces of soda at a time as of 2006 folks were spending about 22 percent of their grocery dollars on sweets salty snacks and desserts and that s compared to a little over 12 percent on fruits and vegetables all told we re eating 31 percent more calories than we were just 40 years ago and that s including 56 percent more fats and oil and 14 percent more sugars and sweeteners in fact we now add sweeteners to all kinds of products in amounts unimaginable just a generation ago so sometimes when we buy the foods that our parents bought us we don t realize that they re not always as healthy as they used to be and today the average american is actually eating 15 more pounds of sugar compared to a year than they were back in 1970 so it s just gotten to the point where we as parents know that things have gotten out of balance and we know that many of our kids aren t as healthy and active as they should be and we desperately want to do the right things but we re inundated with conflicting information our kids sometimes are bombarded by ads for unhealthy products and many folks in this country are struggling to find foods that are both healthy for their kids but affordable for their families and i know what that s like because i ve been there now while today i have way more help and support than i could have ever imagined i didn t always live in the white house you remember i didn t have all these resources and it wasn t long ago that i was a working mom dashing from meetings and phone calls ballet and soccer and whatever else i felt like it was a miracle just to get through the day and get everybody where they were supposed to be so the last thing i had time to do was to stand in a grocery store aisle squinting at ingredients that i couldn t pronounce to figure out whether something was healthy or not like many busy parents i was shopping primarily for convenience and cost i bought products that were pre packaged pre cut pre cooked if it was pre i was getting it because i was looking for anything that was quick and easy to prepare and to consume and i was grateful for the time and the effort that i saved with these kinds of products but i was also completely unaware that all that extra convenience sometimes made it just a little too easy for me to eat too much for my kids to eat too much and to eat too often and like so many families my family fell into the habit of living that grab and go lifestyle eating more and more between meals and slowly all of those extra calories really just started to add up now i m not saying by any means that we should try to turn back the clock to how things were when we were kids because those days are long gone and life is far more complicated these days and i also know that we can t solve this problem by passing a bunch of laws in washington i ve talked to a lot of experts about this issue and not a single one has said that the solution is for the federal government to tell people what to do but what we can do is that we can help families make changes that fit with their budgets with their schedules with their needs and with their tastes what we can do is bring together all of us governors mayors doctors nurses businesses non profits educators parents all of us to tackle this challenge once and for all and what we can do is finally make this national public health threat a national priority and that s why we launched let s move a nationwide campaign to rally this country around a single and very ambitious goal to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that kids born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight with let s move we re issuing a call to action we are telling everyone let s move to give parents the information they need to make better decisions for their kids let s move to get healthier food into our schools let s move to get more supermarkets into underserved areas so that all americans have access to fresh nutritious foods and probably most importantly let s move to help our kids be more physically active both in and out of school but here s the thing we can build shiny new supermarkets on every block but we need those supermarkets to actually provide healthy options at prices people can afford and we can insist that our schools serve better food but we need to actually produce that food and we can give parents all the information in the world but they still won t have time to untangle labels filled with 10 syllable words or do long division with these portion sizes and that s really where all of you come in as you know you all produce much of the food that our children eat and have marketed to them each day the decisions you make determine what s in our grocery store shelves what s in our school lunches and what s in the thousands of advertisements our kids are exposed to each year and i know that many of you are undertaking efforts to significantly reformulate your products and i hope that the time will come when all of you are many of you are also working to educate kids about good nutrition and to limit advertisements for certain products to our children and i know that a number of you and i ve met several of the committee have come together to create the healthy weight commitment foundation to help address the issue of childhood obesity so there are so many good examples wonderful examples of folks beginning to move in the right direction it s very exciting but i m here today to urge all of you to move faster and to go farther because the truth is we don t have a moment to waste because a baby born today could be less than a decade away from showing the first signs of high cholesterol high blood pressure type ii diabetes if he or she is obese as a child a recent study even found that three year olds who were obese already had one of the symptoms of heart disease so we need you all to step it up we all need to step up in this country this is a shared responsibility that s why i ve gone to parents and i ve asked them to do their part they have a responsibility to watch what their kids eat and teach good habits i ve asked medical professionals to do their part they have a responsibility to screen kids for obesity and help parents with these issues educators have a responsibility to build healthy schools governors and mayors have a responsibility to build healthy communities and all of you have a responsibility as well and we need you not just to tweak around the edges but to entirely rethink the products that you re offering the information that you provide about these products and how you market those products to our children that starts with revamping or ramping up your efforts to reformulate your products particularly those aimed at kids so that they have less fat salt and sugar and more of the nutrients that our kids need and i understand that this is easier said than done this doesn t happen overnight we all know that human beings i for one know are hard wired to crave sugary fatty salty foods and it is temping to take advantage of that to create products that are sweeter richer and saltier than ever before but doing so doesn t just respond to people s natural inclinations it also actually helps to shape them and this can be particularly dangerous when it comes to our kids because as all of you know as parents the more of these products they have in their diets the more accustomed they become to those tastes and then the more deeply embedded these foods become in their eating habits but here s the good news it can also work the other way around as well just as we can shape our children s preferences for high calorie low nutrient foods with a lot of persistence we can also turn them on to high quality healthier foods as well but the only way we can do this is to work together and this needs to be a serious industry wide commitment to providing the healthier foods parents are looking for at prices they can afford and again i know these changes will not happen overnight it s going to take a lot of tries to come up with products that are both healthy and still palatable for our kids and that may mean some real creativity and effort on your part but what it doesn t mean is taking out one problematic ingredient only to replace it with another while decreasing fat is certainly a good thing replacing it with sugar and salt isn t and it doesn t mean compensating for high amounts of problematic ingredients with small amounts of beneficial ones for example adding a little bit of vitamin c to a product with lots of sugar or a gram of fiber to a product with tons of fat doesn t suddenly make those products good for our kids this isn t about finding creative ways to market products as healthy as you know it s about producing products that actually are healthy products that can help shape the health habits of an entire generation it s also about giving parents the information they need to make good decisions about purchasing those products a recent survey by the fda shows that the vast majority of americans rely on labels to help them decide what foods to buy but we know those labels aren t always as helpful as they could be and it s hard enough to figure out whether any one food item is healthy it s even harder to compare items and folks just don t have the time to line products up side by side and figure out whether these compare or not and they shouldn t have to parents shouldn t need a magnifying glass and a calculator to make healthy choices for their kids that s why as rick said we need clear consistent front of the package labels that give people the information they ve been asking for in a format that they understand and i am so pleased that you all have committed to working with the fda to develop these labels we are so eager to hear your thoughts and ideas of getting this done right and you know there s absolutely no reason why we cannot find common ground on this issue this one s a no brainer because this is the bare minimum we should do for our kids to help their parents make good choices and this fall the fda is going to begin pursuing voluntary agreements from your companies and i hope that all of you will join in on that effort but your role in helping address childhood obesity isn t just limited to what you put in your products and how you label those products for parents it s also about how you market those products to our kids our kids didn t learn about the latest sweets and snack foods on their own they hear about these products from advertisements on tv the internet video games schools many other places and any parent knows this marketing is really effective we ve all had to endure those impassioned pleas in the grocery store for one product or another some of us have been treated to full scale reenactments of tv commercials and jingles word for word right on key i was sharing with somebody i was talking to sasha about who i was speaking to and she said who are these people i said they make the food that we eat oh like honey nut cheerios part of a healthy breakfast like all right kid so this isn t surprising when studies show that even a single commercial can impact a child s brand preferences and that kids who see foods advertised on tv are significantly more likely to ask for them at the store so whatever we believe about personal responsibility and self determination i think we can all agree that it doesn t apply to kids i think we can all agree that parents need more control over the products and messages their kids are exposed to parents are working hard to provide a healthy diet and to teach healthy habits and we d like to know that our efforts won t be undermined every time our children turn on the tv or see a flashy display in a store again i know many of you have voluntarily committed to limit your marketing to children which is a step in the right direction an important step and i hope that those of you who haven t will think about doing so as well but we also have to be honest even with this commitment a study found that last year while there were fewer food ads in children s programming more than 70 percent of foods marketed to kids were still among the least healthy with less than 1 percent being among the most healthy and in the face of these statistics we have to ask ourselves are we really making sufficient progress here are we doing everything that we can to secure the health and future of our kids so today i want to challenge each and every one of you to go back to your companies take a look at your marketing budgets and ask some questions for example when you put money into reformulating a product to make it healthier do you then invest enough in marketing that product to kids and parents or is most of the marketing budget still going to the less healthy versions in other words which products are you really selling and what kinds of messages are your advertisements sending as a mom i know it is my responsibility and no one else s to raise my kids but what does it mean when so many parents are finding that their best efforts are undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at their kids and what are these ads teaching kids about food and nutrition that it s good to have salty sugary food and snacks every day breakfast lunch and dinner that dessert is an everyday food that it s okay to eat unhealthy foods because they re endorsed by the cartoon characters our children love and the celebrities our teenagers look up to so let s be clear it s not enough just to limit ads for foods that aren t healthy it s going to be so critical to increase marketing for foods that are healthy and if there is anyone here who can sell food to our kids it s you you know what gets their attention you know what makes that lasting impression you know what gets them to drive their parents crazy in the grocery store and i m here today to ask you to use that knowledge and that power to our kids advantage i m asking you to actively promote healthy foods and healthy habits to our kids and we know there s a huge and growing market for these kind of foods i have yet to meet a single parent who doesn t understand the threat of childhood obesity i ve yet to meet a single parent who is not eager to buy healthier products and this administration is committed to doing the same as we reauthorize the child nutrition act we re working to ensure that all food served in schools not just through the school meal program but in a la carte lines and vending machines as well meets basic nutritional guidelines and we re proposing a historic investment of 10 billion over the next 10 years to help fund these efforts and your support for this is going to make a huge difference in helping us get this done we re also putting our money where our mouth is with an initiative to provide fresher healthier food in all federal government workplaces and to give you an idea of the scope of that just think there are 2 7 million federal employees working at thousands of sites all across this country this can have a huge impact but in the end as first lady this isn t just a policy issue for me this is a passion this is my mission i am determined to work with folks across this country to change the way a generation of kids thinks about food and nutrition so if you all create the supply we know there will be a demand and if you have any doubt about that just look at what we did for the hula hoop i hula hooped the reality is that with so many people looking for healthier options this isn t just going to be a fad hopefully this is the future of food in this country so i hope all of you will help support our efforts i hope that you ll embrace this future because really that s what this industry has always done just think back to the early part of the last century when food manufacturers helped pass the first major federal law establishing basic standards for our food beverages and drugs back then consumers had little protection against unscrupulous manufacturers who tainted their products with all sorts of chemicals and fillers when these abuses came to light congress responded drafting the 1906 food and drug act and instead of opposing that law and instead of viewing it as a threat many manufacturers decided to embrace it companies like most of you that were already doing the right thing by making safe quality products realized they stood to profit they also realized that increasing public trust and improving products all across the industry as a whole would benefit each of them individually and today with the issue of childhood obesity we all face a similar opportunity and you face it not just as food industry leaders but you face it as parents who love your kids and as citizens who love this nation and in the end i am hopeful that you will choose to make the changes that we need not just because they re good for your company but because they re good for our country i know that you ll do these things not just to fulfill your obligation to shareholders but also because you have a sense of obligation to our children because the truth is all of us are paying the cost of childhood obesity but the truth is also that we all will gain from addressing it once and for all so i hope that all of you will do your part to give our kids the future they deserve i m proud of what s happened through this industry so far the work together that we ve done has been tremendous all of you come to this with the right heart and the right vision and the right passion my only urging is that we move faster we go farther together and i m looking forward to working with you all in the months and years ahead thank you so much dem mobama16 5 09 michelle_obama thank you thank you so much class of 2009 all i can say is wow and good afternoon everyone i am so proud of these graduates we have to just give them one big round of applause before i start this is just an amazing day i want to thank dick for that lovely introduction he makes for a good companion when you have to go to an inauguration so i m glad he could be here with me today i appreciate all that he has done to make this day so very special i want to acknowledge a few other people before i begin congressman jerry mcnerney lieutenant governor john garamendi attorney general jerry brown and assembly speaker karen bass i want to thank you all for your leadership and for being an example of what a life in public service can mean to us all and of course i have to thank chancellor kang for this incredible welcome and as well as president yudof and provost keith alley for all that they ve done to help make this event just such a wonderful day for us all and to the graduates and their families and the entire community of merced i am so pleased so thrilled so honored to be here with all of you today now i know we ve got a lot of national press out there and a few people may be wondering why did i choose the university of california merced to deliver my first commencement speech as first lady well let me tell you something the answer is simple you inspired me you touched me you know there are few things that are more rewarding than to watch young people recognize that they have the power to make their dreams come true and you did just that your perseverance and creativity were on full display in your efforts to bring me here to merced for this wonderful occasion so let me tell you what you did if you don t know parents because some of you were involved my office received thousands of letters and of course valentines cards from students each and every one of them so filled with hope and enthusiasm it moved not just me but my entire staff they came up to me and said michelle you have to do this you have to go here they were all terrific like the one from christopher casuga that read dear mrs obama please come to uc merced s commencement we could really use the publicity that really touched me or then there was one from jim greenwood who wrote not on his behalf but on behalf of his wife and the mother of his two children who is graduating with us today and then there was the one from andrea mercado i think this was one of my favorites andrea said that the role of first lady is and i quote the balance between politics and sanity thank you andrea for that vote of confidence i received letters from everyone connected to this university not just students but they came from parents and grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles and neighbors and friends all of them telling me about how hard you all have worked and how important this day is for you and for the entire merced community and then there s that beautiful video the we believe video well let me tell you it worked because i m here and i want to thank in particular sam fong and yaasha sabba and all of the students who launched the dear michelle campaign i am honored by your efforts and happy to be with you to celebrate this important milestone but i understand that this type of community based letter writing campaign isn t unique to me this community this merced community employed the same strategy to help get the university of california to build the new campus here in merced every school kid in the entire county i understand sent a postcard to the uc board of regents in order to convince them to select merced and i just love the fact that some of the graduates sitting this audience today participating were involved in that campaign as well and then they used the same strategy to get me here that is amazing and what it demonstrates is the power of many voices coming together to make something wonderful happen and i m telling you next year s graduation speaker better watch out because merced students know how to get what they want this type of activism and optimism speaks volumes about the students here the faculty the staff but also about the character and history of merced a town built by laborers and immigrants from all over the world early settlers who came here as pioneers and trailblazers in the late 1800s as part of the gold rush and built the churches and businesses and schools that exist african americans who escaped slavery and the racism of the south to work on the railways as truck drivers up and down route 99 mexican americans who traveled north to find work on the farms and have since become the backbone of our agricultural industry asian americans who arrived in san francisco and have slowly branched out to become a part of the community in the san joaquin valley merced s make up may have changed over the years but its values and character have not long hot days filled with hard work by generations of men and women of all races who wanted an opportunity to build a better life for their children and their grandchildren hardworking folks who believed that access to a good education would be their building blocks to a brighter future you know i grew up in one of those communities with similar values like merced the south side of chicago is a community where people struggled financially but worked hard looked out for each other and rallied around their children my father was a blue collar worker as you all know my mother stayed at home to raise me and my brother we were the first to graduate from college in our immediate family i know that many of you out here are also the first in your families to achieve that distinction as well and as you know being the first is often a big responsibility particularly in a community that like many others around our country at the moment is struggling to cope with record high unemployment and foreclosure rates a community where families are a single paycheck or an emergency room visit away from homelessness and with jobs scarce many of you may be considering leaving town with your diploma in hand and it wouldn t be unreasonable for those of you who come from communities facing similar economic hardships you may also be wondering how you ll build decent lives for yourselves if you choose to return to those communities but i would encourage you to call upon the same hope and hard work that brought you to this day call upon that optimism and tenacity that built the university of california at merced to invest in the future of merced in your own home towns all across this country by using what you have learned here you can shorten the path perhaps for kids who may not see a path at all and i was once one of those kids most of you were once one of those kids i grew up just a few miles from the university of chicago in my hometown the university like most institutions was a major cultural economic institution in my neighborhood my mother even worked as a secretary there for several years yet that university never played a meaningful role in my academic development the institution made no effort to reach out to me a bright and promising student in their midst and i had no reason to believe there was a place for me there therefore when it came time for me to apply to college i never for one second considered the university in my own backyard as a viable option and as fate would have it i ultimately went on and accepted a position in student affairs at the university of chicago more than a decade later what i found was that working within the institution gave me the opportunity to express my concerns about how little role the university plays in the life of its neighbors i wanted desperately to be involved in helping to break down the barriers that existed between the campus and the community and in less than a year through that position i worked with others to build the university s first office of community service and today the office continues to provide students with opportunities to help reshape relationships between the university and its surrounding community students there today are volunteering in local elementary schools serving as mentors at high schools organizing neighborhood watches and worshiping in local churches but you know a little something about working with your community here don t you merced uc merced its faculty and its students seem to already have a handle on this need and it speaks once again to the character of this community as i learned more about what you have done i am so impressed with how the students faculty and the community are collaborating to ensure that every child in this community understands there is a place for them at this big beautiful university if they study hard and stay out of trouble for example there is kevin mitchell a professor in the school of natural science who studies chaos of all things he s coordinating a program to bring physicists into local elementary and high schools to help open the eyes of students to the possibility of careers in science then there is claudia zepeda a junior psychology major who is mentoring students from her high school here the first in her family to attend college claudia works with the westside initiative for leaders an organization that helps prepare disadvantaged students for college and because of her help 10 students from her high school will attend uc merced this coming fall that is amazing and then there are local leaders like police officer nick navarette who coordinates a program that brings about 60 uc merced students to local elementary schools each week to mentor students from poorer neighborhoods nick then brings kids to campus regularly so that they can do something special see what it s like to be on a college campus and begin to dream and then there is my friend and former law school professor charles ogletree a product of the merced public schools now he is an example of how you can bring your skills back his ambitions took him far away from home but he has never forgotten where he came from each year with his help merced s high schools are able to hand out scholarships not just for the best and the brightest students but also for many students who are just stuck in poverty and simply need a hand up to compete so the faculty the students local leaders merced alumni everyone here is doing their part to help the children of merced realize that access to a quality education is available to them as long as they work hard study hard and apply themselves it is this kind of commitment that we re going to need in this nation to put this country back on a path where every child expects to succeed and where every child has the tools that they need to achieve their dreams that s what we re aiming for and we re going to need all of you graduates this generation we need you to lead the way now let me tell you careers focused on lifting up our communities whether it s helping transform troubled schools or creating after school programs or training workers for green jobs these careers are not always obvious but today they are necessary solutions to our nation s most challenging social problems are not going to come from washington alone real innovation often starts with individuals who apply themselves to solve a problem right in their own community that s where the best ideas come from and some pretty incredible social innovations have been launched by young people all across this world teach for america in this country is a great example it was created by wendy kopp as a part of her undergraduate senior thesis in 1989 and now as a result of her work then more than 6 200 corps members are teaching in our country s neediest communities reaching approximately 400 000 students and then there s van jones who recently joined the obama administration a special adviser to the president on green jobs van started out as a grassroots organizer and became an advocate and a creator of green collar jobs jobs that are not only good for the environment but also provide good wages and career advancement for both skilled and unskilled workers jobs similar to the ones being created right here at uc merced as this green campus continues to grow and then one of my heroes geoffrey canada grew up in the south bronx after graduating from bowdoin and getting his masters at harvard he returned to new york city and used his education to ensure that the next generation would have a chance at the same opportunity geoffrey s harlem children s zone is a nationally recognized program that covers 100 blocks and reaches nearly 10 000 children with a variety of social services to ensure that all kids are prepared to get a good education and in an effort to invest in and encourage the future wendy kopps van joneses and geoffrey canadas the obama administration recently launched the office of social innovation at the white house the president has asked congress to provide 50 million in seed capital to fund great ideas like the ones i just described the office is going to identify the most promising results oriented non profit programs and expand their reach throughout the country and this university is blessed with some of the leading researchers and academics who are focusing already their attention on solving some of our nation s most critical issues like the energy crisis global warming climate change and air pollution and you the students the graduates and faculty on this campus you re capable of changing the world that s for sure where you are right now is no different from where wendy and van and geoffrey were when they graduated remember that you too can have this same transformative effect on the community of merced and our entire nation we need your ideas graduates we need your resourcefulness we need your inventiveness and as the students who helped build this school i ask you make your legacy a lasting one dream big think broadly about your life and please make giving back to your community a part of that vision take the same hope and optimism the hard work and tenacity that brought you to this point and carry that with you for the rest of your life in whatever you choose to do each and every single day some young person is out there changing the ways the world in ways both big and small but let me tell you something as you step out into that big open world and you start building your lives the truth is that you will face tough times you will certainly have doubts let me tell you because i know i did when i was your age there will be days when you will worry about whether you re really up for the challenge maybe some of you already feel a little of that right now maybe you re wondering am i smart enough do i really belong can i live up to all those expectations that everyone has of me and you will definitely have your share of setbacks count on it your best laid plans will be consumed by obstacles your excellent ideas will be peppered with flaws you will be confronted with financial strains as your loans become due and salaries fall short of both expectations and expenses you will make mistakes that will shatter your confidence you will make compromises that will test your convictions you will find that there is rarely a clear and direct path to any of your visions and you will find that you ll have to readjust again and again and again and there may be times when you wonder whether it s all worth it and there may be moments when you just want to quit but in those moments those inevitable moments i urge you to think about this day look around you look around you there are thousands and thousands of hardworking people who have helped you get to this point people who are celebrating with you today who are praying for you every single day and others who couldn t be here for whatever reason i want you to think of the people who sacrificed for you you know that family members who worked a third job to get you through who took on the extra shifts to get you through who put off doing something important for themselves to get you to this day and think about the friends who never got the chance to go to college but were still invested in your success friends who talked you out of dropping out friends who kept you out of trouble so that you could graduate on time friends who forced you to study when you wanted to procrastinate most importantly though think of the millions of kids living all over this world who will never come close to having the chance to stand in your shoes kids in new orleans whose schools are still recovering from the ravages of katrina kids who will never go to school at all because they re forced to work in a sweat shop somewhere kids in your very own communities who just can t get a break who don t have anyone in their lives telling them that they re good enough and smart enough to do whatever they can imagine kids who have lost the ability to dream these kids are desperate to find someone or something to cling to they are looking to you for some sign of hope so whenever you get ready to give up think about all of these people and remember that you are blessed remember that you are blessed remember that in exchange for those blessings you must give something back you must reach back and pull someone up you must bend down and let someone else stand on your shoulders so that they can see a brighter future as advocate and activist marian wright edelman says service is the rent we pay for livingit is the true measure the only measure of our success so graduates when times get tough and fear sets in think of those people who paved the way for you and those who are counting on you to pave the way for them never let setbacks or fear dictate the course of your life hold on to the possibility and push beyond the fear hold on to the hope that brought you here today the hope of laborers and immigrants settlers and slaves whose blood and sweat built this community and made it possible for you to sit in these seats there are a lot of people in your lives who know a little something about the power of hope don t we parents and grandparents look i know a little something about the power of hope my husband knows a little something about the power of hope you are the hope of merced and of this nation and be the realization of our dreams and the hope for the next generation we believe in you thank you so much and good luck god bless you all dem mobama16 5 10 michelle_obama wow thank you all thank you so much thank you dr obama i like that i think i ll have everybody at home start calling me that thank you i am so honored to help you celebrate this wonderful day and thank you ally thank you dr knapp for your generous introduction i also want to thank russ ramsey chair of the george washington university board of trustees and congratulations to the extraordinary young men and women of the class of 2010 you guys you should be so proud of yourselves and your incredible accomplishments but let s not forget all the people who also share in that pride again your moms and dads and brothers and sisters your friends grandparents mentors all of whom took this journey with you in ways both seen and unseen so this is their day too so let s give them another round of applause and thank you now i m here today for a reason and not just because it s a quick commute i am here because as you ve seen eight months ago i used you all in great ways i issued a challenge to the students faculty staff and trustees of gw i promised you that if you performed 100 000 hours of service to the greater washington community this school year that i d come and speak at your commencement well i am a woman of my word so congratulations on this remarkable achievement thank you for the incredible contributions that you ve made to the lives of so many people but i will say that if i had known that you d complete more than 3 300 hours on the first day of the challenge i d probably have picked a higher number each month you sent me just wonderful letters updating your progress dear mrs obama we re at 19 000 hours dear mrs obama we re at 46 000 hours dear mrs obama we ve at 73 958 hours yes i got every minute of detail and soon enough i realized uh oh i better start working on that commencement speech but more impressive than the fact that you did it was really how you did it your letters were filled with oh wonderful stories of holding food drives and beautifying parks and making care packages for our troops and writing postcards to their families you helped your neighbors in foggy bottom dig out after snowmageddon an effort spurred by ally and led by junior eden sutley you helped more than 1 000 hey eden yay for eden you helped more than 1 000 world war ii veterans from her home state of louisiana come to see the monuments on this mall and visit their fallen friends at arlington you hosted about 200 local senior citizens for gw s eighth annual senior prom and yes i saw the photos and it looked like they were showing you all how to dance gw law students you showed a greater commitment to community and public service careers than ever before gw medical students they ran their own clinic in anacostia for our neighbors most in need of medical aid and so many students wanted to do it that you had to hold a lottery and more than 500 of you spent martin luther king jr day at roosevelt senior high school here in d c you repainted the classrooms and revamped the athletic facilities you updated the library you all restored an entire school and just think about that what was just a few hours to you is going to make the difference for thousands of young lives for years to come and those are just some of the stories that i ve read in your letters but what you may not know is that the people whose lives you ve touched they also sent me letters one was from a local retirement community for veterans and their spouses on september 11 the day that i issued the challenge to you more than 100 of you hopped on a bus and spent the day there and the letter described in moving detail how you altered your plans to stay an extra hour so you could keep talking with an original tuskegee airman how you decided to set up regular visits with the veterans how you started a monthly intergenerational discussion group i mean the letter went on and on about just how incredible you were and it described just what your efforts meant to those veterans but it also showed me what theirs meant to you and that s what you guys have done simply because this university decided to play a role in the life of its neighbors you have made immeasurable differences in the life of this community and to your country and you should be so proud because we certainly are and for every act of service that you performed for the community here in d c you committed yourselves to serving the greater global community as well i m talking about the more than 200 of you who took your winter breaks abroad building a school in guatemala community center in peru comforting the sick in ecuador the freshman who spent his break in ghana helping prevent blindness and the students who helped sudanese refugees settle in tennessee stepping in one night to teach when the refugees english teacher didn t show up a class that the refugees called their very best so even as you ve buried yourselves in your books becoming thoughtful and educated scholars so parents they did that right you ve also immersed yourselves in your community becoming active and engaged citizens you have fully joined a generation of activists and doers and when you think about how your generation has come of age that s pretty astounding i mean you all have seen so much just since you were in middle school you ve witnessed terrorism touch our soil you ve seen the cost of war reach into our communities you ve watched unimaginable devastation and suffering in the aftermath of a tsunami a hurricane an earthquake you ve felt the wrath of a recession that s changed your towns and even your families now that s a whole lot to bear for any generation so no one would have blamed you had you chosen to hunker down and turn inward if you had simply focused on making sure that your own lives were secure but so many of you have done the exact opposite instead you ve dived in you ve reached out you have volunteered and applied to organizations like teach for america and the peace corps in record numbers in fact this year is the second year in a row that gw led universities of this size in the number of undergraduate alumni serving in the peace corps so for every ill of this interconnected world you ve tried to find a way to make good where there s hate you ve tried to heal it where there s need you ve tried to fill it where there s devastation you ve tried to rebuild it you guys can t be stopped you don t know the meaning of the word can t and every time someone s tried to say to tell you that you ve replied what oh yes we can in fact you remind me of something president wilson once said he said sometimes people call me an idealist well that s the way i know i m an american even so you ve probably also run up against people who love your idealism but warn you to lower your sights to scale back your ambitions a bit to settle for something less and you know their hearts may be in the right place they may be worried that you re in for a letdown once you realize that it can take years and even decades for your best efforts to bear fruit see we live in a culture after all that tells us that our lives should be easy that we can have everything we want without a whole lot of effort but the truth is and you know this creating anything meaningful takes time and sometimes the only thing that happens in an instant is destruction and i say this because during our trip to haiti jill biden and i we got to visit the people there and there amidst so much misery and destruction all of which occurred in a matter of minutes it is so easy to ask after so much ruin how can anything rise again after so much loss how can anyone still have hope but let me tell you that everyone i met during that visit doctors relief workers haitians americans citizens of the world they were focused on the task of answering those questions yeah they were exhausted and they were heartbroken but they were equally unyielding in their determination to help that country heal and fully aware of how many years that would take and by the way i also met with president preval and his wife elisabeth who s a gw graduate herself and she just went on and on about how gw the community has been there at the forefront of the efforts to help haiti from the very beginning but the point is everyone i encountered during my trip embodied a haitian proverb that i learned which says that little by little the bird builds its nest and your generation is doing its best to live by this idea you see as impatient as you may be to get out there and change the world and that s a good thing you re equally patient for that change to come as idealistic as all of you may be what your generation has lived through has also tempered you with a deep realism you understand things that perhaps your parents and i even don t always have to consider when our world was still separated by walls of concrete and communication that we are no longer isolated from what happens on the other side of the world that it s in our best interest to look beyond our immediate self interest and look out for one another globally that so many of today s challenges are borderless from the economy to terrorism to climate change and that solving those problems demands cooperation with others and more than any other generation yours is fully convinced that you re uniquely equipped to solve those challenges you believe that you can change your communities and change the world and you know what i think you re right yes you can so today graduates i have one more request to make of you one more challenge and that is keep going keep giving keep engaging i m asking you to take what you ve learned here and embrace the full responsibilities that a degree from an institution like gw gives you i m asking your generation to be america s face to the world it will make the world safer it will make america stronger and it will make you more competitive now you didn t think i d show up here without another challenge did you i know that some of you may be thinking well hang on michelle i m in debt i ve got to find a job in a tough economy and now you want me to what and i know there are parents out there thinking the same thing hang on michelle i just shelled out six figures to get my kid to this day and now you want her to do what i m just asking you to keep being you to keep doing what you re doing just take it global yes that can mean serving in the world s most broken places or it can simply mean surfing foreign news sources to get an idea of how other young people see things in other parts of the world it can mean continuing your own personal and professional growth by traveling far and wide or it can mean reaching back to convince the students behind you to try study abroad programs especially students from communities and backgrounds who might not normally consider it it can mean seizing that overseas opportunity with a company or it can mean staying here and fixing the world by doing business with the world and at the same time creating opportunity in your own community his class of graduates in particular has a leg up because at gw you ve already been trained to think this way nearly half of undergraduates here study abroad as zoe said you can t walk a block without running into the state department or the world bank or any number of ngos and faith based organizations and all around you every day are classmates and friends from more than 130 different countries so for you it s as easy as falling out of bed even if some of you stay in bed until noon but so many americans either don t have those opportunities or simply don t consider them and as interconnected as we are as quickly as the 21st century global economy moves we have to find ways to extend those opportunities to as many young people as possible and i say this as someone who like perhaps many of your parents didn t always have or consider those opportunities as you heard i grew up in a blue collar neighborhood on the south side of chicago where the idea of spending some time abroad just didn t register my brother and i were the first in our families to go to college so we were way more focused on just getting in getting through and getting on with our lives and after law school my priority was paying off my student debt so i just never considered that i needed to take an additional journey or expand the boundaries of my own life and then i met my husband whose life was yeah yeah his life was somewhat different than mine his had been more informed by experiences abroad and watching him helped me to expand the way i looked at things to consider my life as connected not just to my country but to the world and it s a perspective that we now are trying to instill in our daughters as well and today fortunately my new role it affords me extraordinary opportunities to visit foreign countries and during these trips i try to spend as much time as possible with young people and those experiences are what convince me so fully that it s in this nation s best interest that your generation get out there because it s going to strengthen all of us now there are some things that government can do and things that i ll pursue as first lady to bring these opportunities within reach to more young people for example my husband is committed to substantially increasing the number of volunteer opportunities within the peace corps and by the way joining the peace corps only requires that you be young at heart because the oldest active member is 85 years old we re also expanding exchange programs study abroad opportunities and encouraging universities like gw to create their own because as those of you who have already participated in study abroad know the most lasting lessons sometimes don t always come from books but more important than anything government can do will be a sincere willingness on your part to keep sharing your enthusiasm to keep believing that you can make a difference to keep going to places where there is brokenness and injustice and despair and asking what you can do to lift those places up it is through the simple act of engaging with your counterparts around the world that you can make the world a safer place as you know in times of tension we tend to focus on what makes us different things like color or creed class or country when sometimes that only serves to deepen misunderstanding and harden mistrust in the midst of our struggles we too easily forget about all that we share in common that no matter where or how we live we all have the same dreams a life of dignity a chance at opportunity a better future for our kids it reminds me of a story our secretary of state and friend hillary clinton told during a visit to one of our embassies earlier this year she spoke about a meeting she attended with a state councilor of china who proudly told her that he had just had his first grandchild and secretary clinton responded that she thought everyone should bring pictures of their children and grandchildren to international meetings and set those pictures right in front of them and ask themselves is the decision that we re about to make going to make their lives better and then at the very next meeting together the first thing he did when he had arrived was pull out a picture of his grandchild now perhaps some of you have had similar interactions with your classmates interactions that helped you discover that when we just make that effort to engage with one another when we share our stories we begin to build familiarity that often ultimately softens mistrust we begin to see ourselves in one another we begin to realize that the forces that bind us are so much more powerful than the forces that blind us and because many of you already serve around the world this class knows firsthand that each one of those interactions in the world has the power to start a chain reaction every child that learns to read can teach another every girl taught that she has power inspires dozens of others every school built improves thousands of lives and just as that makes the world safer it also makes america stronger imagine a child whose first memory of an american is a student who helps him see again imagine a community whose first experience with america is a group of youth on winter break standing side by side with them building homes imagine a country shattered by a catastrophic earthquake that they see wave after wave of rescuers and doctors and relief workers all wearing the stars and stripes on their sleeve imagine how powerful that is imagine what impact thousands of stories like that today can have a decade from now now this is not to discourage any american from continuing to serve in their own communities in this country as best they can especially in a time when so many fellow americans need help here at home and thanks to the ingenuity of the american people and a newly strengthened americorps there are more opportunities to serve at home than ever before but just know that when you serve others abroad you re serving our country too you re showing the world the true face of america our generosity our strength the enduring power of our ideals the infinite reservoir of our hope and yes serving abroad will make you stronger more competitive a more valuable asset for a career in the public or private sectors just talk to any of your colleagues who have spent some time abroad and one of the first things they ll tell you for example is that you ll never learn a language or develop self reliance as quickly as you will when you re on your own in a foreign country but they may also tell you that making a difference abroad might just be the thing that inspires you to come back and make a difference here at home they might tell you that engaging with the world doesn t just change the course of other people s lives it may change the course of yours too you may just find that pivot point that you ve been looking for or maybe one that you didn t even expect at all an extraordinary young woman that i met in mexico last month during my visit she told me that in high school she felt as if she were living in a bubble so on a whim she went to vietnam to volunteer with children she described her days there as very unfair and difficult she said there were days there that made us feel meaningless but she also said there were days where i felt i could change the world and that trip made her realize she wanted to be a doctor and when she returned to mexico she enrolled in medical school but her journey led her to an important pivot point in her life she said and these are her words i realized that this is my country this is where i belong and this is my culture where i need to help you see that young woman she went halfway around the world before she found her way home and i suspect that something has like that has happened to many of you i know it did for davina durgana who s a remarkable young woman who s graduating with you today a simple mission trip to el salvador inspired her to take up the cause of human trafficking modern day slavery when she came back she found an internship that allowed her to work on an anti human trafficking campaign and she s going to pursue graduate studies in human rights next year at the sorbonne and by the way davina she also serves as a big sister to a young girl in anacostia she volunteers with wounded warriors at walter reed she helped run a girl scouts troop where she encouraged underprivileged girls to get involved she volunteers as an emt at the busiest fire department in the d c area and convinced other classmates to join her and somehow she found time to graduate that s for your parents davina in the end the simple act of opening your mind and engaging abroad whether it s in the heart of campus or in the most remote villages can change your definition of what s possible and more importantly you can change ours see after all it s your generation that always has often from the very mall where we re sitting right now i mean just look around you it was on this mall where young people marched for women s rights it was on this mall where young people marched for civil rights it was on this mall where young people marched for peace for equality for awareness decade after decade young americans who loved their country and loved its ideals who knew that it stood for something larger in the world came here to this spot to wade into the rushing currents of history because they believed that they could change its course and on a cold january morning last year many of you came here to wade in yourselves it was the day my husband took the oath of office as president of the united states and that day he pledged to seek a new era of american engagement and he asked each of us to embrace anew our duties to ourselves our nation and the world now i m not a president i m just a citizen but as a citizen i m asking you as graduates of this global institution to seize those responsibilities gladly i m asking you to fully embrace your role in the next vital chapter of our history i m asking you to play your part and from what i ve seen from your class i have no doubt that you will look we believe in you so deeply so your new challenge begins now and it s one that doesn t end after 100 000 hours so thank you graduates i wish you god s grace and the greatest luck on the journey ahead congratulations thank you dem mobama16 6 09a michelle_obama thank you thank you so much well that s very please said that is just a very nice welcome it s an example of how the obama family has felt welcomed to this community since january what was that date we got inaugurated but good afternoon and i am delighted and honored to be here to celebrate with you i want to thank mayde for that kind introduction we did get to spend a lovely lunch together and she tasted some of the fruits of the garden they were good i also want to thank as i kindly referred to them as the two matts matt schuyler who s the current chair and the incoming chair matt mitchell for their hard work i got a chance to meet them backstage so i m just delighted to be able to join you all today and i m here simply to say thank you for the work that you ve done and to help celebrate all of your accomplishments the work that you ve done to help make d c a truly wonderful community it has been so nice to call this city our second home as you know the president has said that america is facing some of the greatest challenges it s faced in generations and as a result washington can only do so much i think probably each and every one of you in this room realizes that there s only so much that government can do as has been the case throughout our history communities are built and rebuilt by regular people folks working in businesses philanthropists foundations and volunteers all of them coming together to find solutions to these types of challenges and during this time we are going to need everyone and that everyone to rededicate themselves to this type of community building and we re going to need people to basically take hold of this kind of ethic of service and make a personal commitment to helping get this country back on the right direction and i believe that we re in a unique moment in history maybe you re seeing the same thing i m feeling it as i m traveling not just around d c but around the country but people really want to get involved they really want to they re looking for a way to turn their frustration excitement anxiety into action and the recent passage of the serve america act the federal government is tripling its contribution to volunteerism and people are responding to that investment applications as we re seeing for service opportunities are up by record numbers and that s a very good thing and with the knowledge that as barack said throughout his campaign and throughout his presidency that ordinary people can do some extraordinary things if they re given the proper tools and support my husband is asking us to come together to help lay a new foundation for growth and that s really where all of you come in where you ve been coming in for years and years and years through your work in order to make service a part of every citizen s life we need to ensure that we have the capacity to welcome those volunteers in and that s easier said than done we want to be able to put folks goodwill into good use we need to make sure that every hour of time that they commit is spent doing something that s actually going to make a difference that every dollar contributed is actually going to go to moving some real solutions forward and i realize that that s easier said than done having built an organization myself from the ground up as you heard from my background i ve kind of floated through my career building stuff and then moving on and building something else i know what non profits foundations and social entrepreneurs face i understand it i know how hard it is to get the money to pay for fundraising and accountants and volunteer coordinators to get all the technology that you really need to make the work happen that this just doesn t happen out of goodwill that it takes real resources to move things forward and i know what it s like to worry about making payroll which i know many of you are going through in these tough times i know that you re laying off consultants and staff members because you re seeing dollars dwindle i know what it s like to write need statements and come up with measurable outcomes and yes we all know that segregating funds completing americorps progress reports i ve done all that and it s necessary but at times it can drive you nuts so i know that service doesn t just happen and i know how hard you work behind the scenes to make it happen and a lot of times people take it for granted because if the work is getting done then nobody really cares how and when it stops happening they wonder why but often don t have the resources to step in so i want to congratulate you all on doing what it takes to make these programs work and just knowing what it takes to keep the operations going that you don t even get a chance sometimes to celebrate what you ve done to realize to step back and look at the impact that you re having so i honor all of you for the effort and hope that you can if not today but tomorrow and in the coming weeks pat yourselves on the back for the work that you ve been doing because we re going to need you to do even more when i look over this room i think about my days when i worked at public allies i headed that program in chicago before i moved into the university and that organization allowed me to work with more than 30 chicago organizations every single year placing americorps members with them so that they could expand their services we placed young people with organizations working on education and youth development groups environmental groups neighborhood economic development groups all types of groups all throughout the city of chicago and i saw first hand through that work the variety of neighborhood and community needs that exist out there and how hard it is for these groups to meet that need with the resources that they have so they were excited to get these young people however nave and untrained they were they ate these allies up and we recruited some of the best kids across the city of chicago for every young person that we recruited at a great institution like northwestern depaul or the university of chicago we even recruited kids from harvard law school we also recruited someone from cabrini green or from little village or north lawndale and through my work with public allies i realized that the next generation of leaders was just as likely to come from poor and working class neighborhoods as they were to come from some of the top colleges around the country my time at public allies also gave me the opportunity to work with john mcknight and jody kretzmann who developed the asset based community development approach to neighborhood development and that really influenced how we worked with communities some of you may be familiar with this approach but the approach acknowledges that all of us every single one of us breathing in this community in this planet those of us serving and those of us who are being served that we re all both half full and half empty we all have skills and talents that make us good friends family members workers and leaders and we also have needs and shortcomings that come along with those strengths we can t do well serving these communities i learned with public allies if we believe that we the givers are the only ones that are half full and that everybody we re serving is half empty that has been the theme of my work in community for my entire life that there are assets and gifts out there in communities and that our job as good servants and as good leaders is not only just being humble but it s having the ability to recognize those gifts in others and help them put those gifts into action communities are filled with assets that we need to better recognize and mobilize if we re really going to make a difference and public allies helped me see that at public allies we endeavored to do this also by bringing these young people together from diverse backgrounds we worked with african americans asian americans latinos native americans white gay straight you name it college graduates ex felons we brought them all together every week to work in a group and truly that s where the magic happened when you saw those kids from all those different backgrounds really tussling it out and trying to figure out their philosophies in the world in relationship to their beliefs and stereotypes the law school graduates realized they had a lot to learn about how communities really work and how to engage people there s nothing funnier than to watch a kid who believes they know it all actually come across some real tough problems in communities that test every fiber of what they believe and then you see the young person with a ged realize that they could go to college because they re working with kids who are just as smart or not smart as them who are going and they gain a sense of the possibilities that they have they know that their ideas are just as good sometimes even better that s when those lights go off that s what we think about when we think of asset based community development that a kid from harvard and a kid with a ged are both full of promise everyone learned to build authentic relationships with one another where they could recognize each other s strengths and provide honest feedback on their challenges they gained a blend of confidence and humility that prepared them to be able to lead from the streets to the executive suites you could take any one of those allies and it s not just allies there are kids like this all over the country and you could plop them down in any community and they would know how to build relationships you know that s not just important in non profit that s important in life these are the kind of gifts that we can give people through service and as we move forward to implement the serve america act my hope is that the office of social innovation that s going to do some of this funding will help us identify the wonderful concepts out there like asset based community development there are other wonderful approaches out there that are working in communities all over this country this office hopefully will identify more of them and help them grow and develop the best solutions and replicate those ideas throughout the country i also hope that these efforts will help us encourage philanthropy that is more responsive to the needs of the organizations i was fortunate at public allies chicago to have some pretty significant major investors multi year grants as we called them back then i guess they still exist but when you have that kind of long term investment from foundations and corporations that allowed me to do things like hire a development staff or an office manager to pay for technology that would help support this work and you know again this work doesn t happen by itself you need staff and resources to do it that core of organizational support made it possible for me to meet those measurable outcomes and i hope that more philanthropists in this time will step up and have a longer term investment approach to organizations like yours because effective outcomes come from effective organizations and if we are able to shed some light on the work that you re doing and the need for financial support we can get the foundation community thinking even more critically about building the sustainable kind of support over time we need foundations and philanthropists to provide the integral support for our community organizations but we also need those community organizations to provide support for all these volunteers we re recruiting now we need to harness this amazing amount of goodwill that we re generating through this administration in a way that ensures that we serve all americans to the best of our ability so once again we re going to need you as tired as you may be we re going to need you so that s why i m here to say thank you because we re going to be tapping you more and more now is the time that we have to connect with one another and share good ideas and hold each other up and give each other that private counsel when the dollars are running short and hope is a little harder to find but that s why times like this opportunities to gather and celebrate are important to just get us back on track right now we are going to be channeling hopefully thousands of volunteers in your direction america is looking to engage but as you know with volunteers if they re not connected to something meaningful if their experience isn t organized and makes sense then we lose them forever so we hope to be able to provide some of the resources that you need but we also need you to prepare for the challenge and if we do that and continue to harness this energy we can not only change the way this nation feels about service but we can change the way the world sees us so many people will need a place to funnel their talents and their energies volunteerism is one of those win win situations that makes absolute sense in this point in our nation s history so celebrate today eat up drink that tea and we look forward to working with you in the years to come thank you so much dem mobama16 6 09b michelle_obama hey guys yes yes oh hi hi back well welcome back here we are so what did you guys do at your stations what did you do you cooked some chicken so we have some chicken cookers we had some what what did you do sweetie we have some pea pickers lettuce pickers who did some pea shelling because i shelled some peas i know there were some people shelling peas and somebody made a delicious dressing for the salad i tasted it thanks to the lemons that tafari was going to leave out got some tips and who else did who did salad stuff who helped to peel so we have and who did the rice we had rice makers too good well seasoned brown rice so you guys i want to thank you i m just going to say a few words to our guests in the back who will not get to eat anything you will just sit and drool but we ll describe it to you but i want to just welcome everybody here in the first lady s garden at the white house and i just wanted to say a few words to make sure that we all really understand why we re here and what we ve accomplished because today is really the culmination of a lot of hard work i mean we i m really proud of you all you kids all the bancroft kids for sticking with this process and for joining us here today at the harvest party this is our reward for all that hard work and we and i want the media here to give these kids a round of applause put your pens down we re really proud of you guys for sticking with us the planting of this garden was one of the first things i wanted to do as first lady here at the white house it was something i had talked about a long time ago and with the help of you guys you helped to make this dream a reality and as you could see when we went down to the garden can you imagine how thriving that garden is just how much food grew from a few little seeds and some plantings so this was a big dream of mine for a while and it s been so much fun working with you all but i also thought that this would be a fun and interesting way to talk to kids about healthy eating and nutrition the president and congress are going to begin to address health care reform and these issues of nutrition and wellness and preventative care is going to be the focus of a lot of conversation coming up in the weeks and months to come and these are issues that i care deeply about especially when they affect america s children obesity diabetes heart disease high blood pressure are all diet related health issues that cost this country more than 120 billion each year that s a lot of money while the dollar figure is shocking in and of itself the effect on our children s health is even more profound nearly a third of the children in this country are either overweight or obese and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime in hispanic and african american communities those numbers climb even higher so that nearly half of the children in those communities will suffer the same fate those numbers are unacceptable and for the first time in the history of our nation a nation that is one of the wealthiest on the planet medical experts have warned that our younger generation may be on track to have a shorter life span than their parents as a direct result of the obesity epidemic again that is just unacceptable so how did we get here how did we get in this position where we have become such an unhealthy nation and our children are at risk and the fact is there are a lot of factors but some of the more simple ones are that too many kids are consuming high calorie food with low nutritional value and they re not getting enough exercise it s plain and simple they re not eating right and they re not moving their bodies at all the way we eat has changed substantially since i was a little girl and as i joke i don t think that was that long ago laugh yeah they still think i m old but i m not but when i was growing up fast food was a rarity it wasn t something you did every day it was a special treat and we would beg to get it and it was exciting if we drove into a fast food place and got a hamburger we were thrilled it was like christmas desserts were for special occasions we didn t get dessert every night and we didn t have dessert several times a day eating out was a luxury because at least in my family we couldn t afford it if we got pizza on a friday night that was a treat and sitting around the dinner table as a family was something that we did all the time that was the norm just not in my household but in the households of neighborhoods of kids in my neighborhoods you stopped playing and you went home and you ate dinner with your family and then you could come back out and play and i have to admit that i never really thought about health and nutrition not as a kid really but what made me think about nutrition was when i became a mother because i certainly didn t think about it for myself but as a mother with the help of our kids doctor i became much more aware of the need for my kids to eat healthy like adults kids have a very simple approach to food what do you guys like about food if it tastes good right if it tastes good you ll eat it right you don t care what it is how many people pulled a snap pea off the vine and ate it today and it was pretty good right pretty good well i ve learned that if it s fresh and grown locally it s probably going to taste better that s what i learned and that s how i ve been able to get my children to try different things and in particular fruits and vegetables by making this small change in our family s diet and adding more fresh produce for my family barack the girls me we all started to notice over a very short period of time that we felt much better and we had more energy right and so i wanted to share this little piece of experience that i had with the rest of the nation a wider audience which is what brings us here today this gorgeous and bountiful garden that you saw over there has given us the chance to not just have some fun which we ve had a lot of it but to shed some light on the important on the important food and nutrition issues that we re going to need to address as a nation we have to deal with these issues this garden project what we ve done together guys has given us the opportunity not just to educate children but to hopefully even educate a few parents and adults as we go along the way how many of you have talked to your parents about what you ve been doing how many of you have started talking about fruits and vegetables and eating a bit more so we ve seen some progress even among this small group of kids the students with us today have learned about the seasons right we learned about when you plant what and why where food comes from what it takes for food to grow the process of how food gets from the garden to the plate and how much more delicious fresh fruits and vegetables are when they come straight from the garden and by making this whole process fun and we ve got some advantage because we have the white house right it s fun being here right these students have learned a little bit they ve told us that they re not only making better choices when they re on their own but they re also educating their families about how to eat in a healthier way as well and this is all great news for us for this group of kids but unfortunately for too many families limited access to healthy fruits and vegetables is often a barrier to a healthier diet in so many of our communities particularly in poorer and more isolated communities fresh healthy food is simply out of reach with few grocery stores in their neighborhoods residents are forced to rely on convenience stores fast food restaurants liquor stores drug stores and even gas stations for their groceries these food deserts leave too many families stranded and without enough choices when it comes to nourishing their loved ones and sadly this is the case in many large cities and rural communities all across this nation so we need to do more to address the fact that so many of our citizens live in areas where access to healthy food and thus a healthy future is simply out of reach but i m happy to report as well that many communities are kind of emulating what we ve been doing they ve been leading the way many of them in taking matters into their own hands and tackling this lack of access on their own by growing and caring for a whole lot of community gardens just like the one we planted there are more than 1 million community gardens that are flourishing all around the country and many of them are in under served urban communities that are providing greater access to fresh produce for their neighbors the benefit is not just the availability of fresh produce but also it gives the community an opportunity to come together around gardening and growing their own food and working together towards a healthier community and a better future for their kids but government also has a role to play in this as well for so many kids subsidized breakfasts and lunches are their primary meals of the day it s what they count on it s where they get most of their nutrition and the usda s national school lunch program serves approximately 30 million meals each year to low income children and because these meals are the main source of consistent nourishment for these kids we need to make sure we offer them the healthiest meals possible so to make sure that we give all our kids a good start to their day and to their future we need to improve the quality and nutrition of the food served in schools we re approaching the first big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda with the upcoming reauthorization of the child nutrition programs in doing so we can go a long way towards creating a healthier generation for our kids my hope is that this garden that this garden through it we can continue to make the connection between what we eat and how we feel and how healthy we are and again i want to thank these kids all the students at bancroft elementary for helping us build our garden see it grow and we ve done more than that the point is is that you ve been part of helping to educate the rest of the country and i want you guys to continue to be my little ambassadors in your own homes and in your own communities because there are kids who are going to watch this they re going to watch this on tv they re going to read a report about it or maybe their parents will read a report and they re going to see through you just how easy it is for kids to think differently about food and you re going to help a lot of people and that makes me very proud to be working with you guys on this project you are terrific young people you are all smart i love your hugs i love your smiles i love the reports that you did for me you guys are terrific you re very blessed and you should be very proud of yourselves and continue to work hard there s nothing that you can t do whether it s being a chef in the white house kitchen or a lawyer or the president of the united states or a pea snapper i don t care what it is you all have everything it takes and it has just been such a delight to work with you and i m going to miss you over the summer but this garden will be here and we re going to keep doing more around the garden so by the time you re in 6th grade and 7th grade i never want you to get too old or too cool to come back and see me in this garden you promise all right guys well let s eat dem mobama16 9 09 michelle_obama good afternoon everyone awww we re thrilled to welcome all of you to the white house today as we honor some of america s top olympic and paralympic athletes and express our excitement about the opportunity to host the 2016 summer olympic paralympic games i want to thank mayor daley for that warm and heartfelt introduction but i also want to thank him for his outstanding work to prepare chicago s bid and for his visionary leadership to move a city to great places a city that is so near and dear to my heart to our hearts to the obama family and i want to say a special hello to all these wonderful young people who are here that so politely said hello to me who ve come here from our local schools in our area hey guys hey i think it s safe to say that everyone here is really feeling the olympic spirit today right that s right yeah we can do this and i know that we are pretty eager to see some judo right we re going to see some gymnastics today and what else fencing you should have seen the president in there fencing it was pathetic but he passed the baton really well and i want to recognize the olympians the paralympians and the coaches not just for their extraordinary athletic achievements but also for taking the time to inspire young people today here at the white house and every day in communities across this nation you all make us so very proud of this country as we can see from today s event the olympics isn t just about what happens in one city every two or four years it s not just about those weeks when we watch the greatest athletes in the world push themselves to new heights of achievement it s also about how a nation is transformed during the years leading up to the games and it s also about the legacy that lasts in those cities long after the closing ceremonies are over the olympic charter states that by blending sport with culture and education the olympics aims to create a way of life based on the joy of effort the educational value of good example and that s what i m reminded of today how the olympic games teach important lessons and set an important example for so many young people i m reminded of the commitment to excellence that the games embody the belief that no matter where you re from or what your background is that if you dream big enough and work hard enough there are no limits to what you can achieve i m reminded of the lifestyles that the games promote the commitment to physical activity and nutrition that are so important for a healthy life and that we re working so hard for to reach in this nation i m reminded of the mission of the paralympic games that it fulfills opening the highest levels of athletic competition to anyone with the talent and drive to succeed men and women who refuse to let their disabilities limit their horizons and i m reminded of the example of citizenship and service our olympic and paralympic athletes are setting every day all across the country more than 2 500 of those athletes have already signed up to be athletic ambassadors for chicago 2016 s world sport chicago initiative they re committing to work as coaches and mentors and holding sports clinics to encourage young people to stay active they ve already reached more than 30 000 children in just chicago alone and they re planning to take this initiative across the nation including right here in d c what you guys were doing today you went out to some of our local schools and you talked to young people about what s important about athletics and nutrition and i have to say that i m proud of those efforts but i am also proud of the fact that chicago may be the host i cannot think of a better city to host the 2016 games than my hometown i was born and raised on the south side of chicago you probably already know that so i know a lot about this city we have our home so close to many of the proposed venues we can say that we are so pumped up about this aren t we and i can tell you personally what makes chicago the ideal home for the 2016 games and i m very excited to be able to do that in copenhagen it s not just the infrastructure or the resources of the city and it s not just the beautiful parks because there are many it s not that gorgeous lakefront that so many will see during the olympic games and it s not just the excellent public transportation and the accommodations what makes chicago such a great host is its people it s truly the people nobody loves sports like the people of chicago trust me i have spent endless hours in front of baseball tv games you name it whether it s football or soccer baseball boxing or a good marathon chicagoans know how to enjoy sports you know you have to admit even white sox fans are impressed by the fact that even though the cubs haven t won a world series in centuries cubs games sell out everybody s there it doesn t matter win or lose we are going to watch the cubs and if you want to see a truly international city there s no place like chicago it is home to more than 130 countries speaking more than 100 different languages so even the athletes that are going to be travelling halfway around the world to get to chicago they might find that they have more of a home court advantage than they might even think when they come to this city and mayor daley has been working around the clock on this 2016 bid he has poured his heart and soul into this effort along with everybody else on the olympic committee the chicago city council has voted unanimously to back it nearly 20 000 chicagoans from all walks of life have already volunteered their time and effort to support it and the organizers are working to ensure that each of the city s 77 individual neighborhoods is part of the games in some way shape or form because that city our city believes that everyone has to feel included in this extraordinary moment and i know that barack and i would feel such tremendous pride to see the olympic torch burning brightly in the city that we love so much so i am honored deeply honored to have the opportunity to travel to copenhagen to make the case for my hometown and i am also honored as always and pleased to introduce someone who s going to talk a little bit more about what hosting the 2016 games would mean for america my husband the president of the united states barack obama dem mobama17 3 09 michelle_obama so what is it morning good morning man youthbuild let s hear it again good morning i m so proud of you you all sit down and rest your feet i know you all have been working hard i want to thank dorothy for her introduction for her hard work congratulations on this wonderful day happy anniversary youthbuild i know how proud dorothy must be to be standing here today thirty years of anything is an amazing feat but walking through these displays and talking to some of the most intelligent focused knowledgeable young people you know that makes me proud it should make this country proud and i know you ve made dorothy very proud and i am so excited to be here to share this with you the work you ve done here is quite impressive and the evolution of your work to include green building something that we re talking more and more about as a nation energy saving practices and environmental awareness it demonstrates how youthbuild has endured as a leading non profit organization keeping up with the times making sure that the training and education that you get is current however for me it s your core principle that i am so impressed with of providing opportunities for amazing young people amazing young people giving folks a second and third and fourth chance particularly low income youth sometimes we overlook them we think that they can t be they can t do and it s places like youthbuild that help you to find yourselves and to be reborn in so many ways and to help rebuild communities all across this country but to also complete high school and to graduate and to do some really special things and this message the message of youthbuild is so important participating in national and community service is not just an escape for the wealthy or for those students who can afford it which is something that i couldn t do growing up i didn t come into an understanding of community service until after i had graduated from law school and had to think about what i wanted to do i couldn t afford to take off time to do an internship community service is an integral part of empowering our people and making our communities stronger and service must become a part of each of our lives it has to be an integral part of each of our lives if we re going to create a more unified nation that we all want and that our president talks so much about you may know a little bit about the president barack obama and myself but when dorothy said that we understand i said throughout the campaign barack obama gets it he gets it because he s lived it he started his career as a community organizer on the south side of chicago i was impressed with that and he s very proud of the work that he did to bring the community together there on the south side to help register voters and to bring new jobs to neighborhoods that had lost them and to help people live with a little bit of dignity he s proud of that work he will tell you that s the most important part of his own training and development through this work he came to realize he wasn t just helping other people as you ve learned through service he found a community that embraced him and i know you all understand that you find people who love you and believe in you that s what he found he found a church to belong to through his work in communities and he found his own direction a direction that would bring him to where he is today the president of the united states of america and all of that came through service giving contributing i too found my life enriched when i left my job at a corporate law firm i thought that was the best thing i d ever do making a lot of money in a corporate firm in chicago but it wasn t until i stepped away from the corporate track and worked in city government and eventually helped to found the chicago chapter of public allies an americorps program a national service program that i realized how important public service and community service was to my own development and now that the two of us have moved to washington our new home we both have continued to stress the value of national and community service by honoring the hard work of public servants right here in d c in our federal agencies all across this nation we rely on those workers who work hard here every day and one of the things that i ve tried to do to honor their work is to visit them in their agencies to thank them to also spend time in various community based programs throughout the d c area to highlight that work and to show them our gratitude and appreciation for us that s what it means to be a part of a community that you come in you listen and you learn from those who have been there for the last 16 years the corporation for national and community service which includes americorps has enabled millions of americans to strengthen their neighborhoods and to help tackle some of the nation s most intractable problems and during the campaign barack laid out a plan to expand these programs the plan called upon americans from all walks of life to take part in civic renewal and serve their communities and he made a commitment to promise to build the infrastructure that will enable them to do that and if you remember during the transition we re still transitioning he enlisted colin powell in a bipartisan call to service we also set up a website to link people to service opportunities and the president participated in a nationally televised public service announcement we also teamed up with service organizations and the corporation for national and community service to draw attention to martin luther king day of service that produced record participation more than 13 000 projects took place and that more than doubled last year s record of 5 000 projects this historic turnout is the largest ever in the 14 years since congress encouraged americans to observe the king holiday as a national day of service and that s something we can all be proud of because i know youthbuild was in the middle of that work we were humbled not only by the numbers of people but by their diversity elementary school students serving alongside retirees that s a beautiful site something that we regularly want to see happen perhaps martin luther king said it best he said everybody can be great because anybody can serve you only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love research shows that this generation of young people is one of the most socially conscious and active with 61 percent of 13 to 25 year olds saying they feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world that is you and that s true for all young people those with work experience are also making a difference there are some very poignant stories in the news right now of working americans who have been laid off spending time volunteering not wasting away not bemoaning their fate but instead getting connected to communities through service network bonding sharing their experiences that s what s going on today among young people even those who are struggling to find jobs themselves they re volunteering and as we stand here today congress is taking steps to strengthen and expand national service programs for americans of all ages and all walks of life the serve america and give acts that are up will enable millions of americans to serve their communities and help meet the nation s greatest challenges thanks to the leadership of chairman mitchell and congresswoman mccarthy the house is ready to pass legislation that moves us closer to our goal and chairman kennedy senators hatch mikulski and enzi are championing a similar effort in committee this week in the senate and i want to thank them right here and now for their efforts because without them we wouldn t be at this point this bipartisan group because of their appreciation their willingness to put themselves out there understanding of the value of the work that you ve done and know your part in this is that they ve seen programs like this in action they ve seen young people coming out of programs like this making a better way for themselves and adding value to the community it s because of this work potentially that this legislation will get passed so you should give yourselves a hand at a time in our nation when so many are struggling we have to remember that everyone can make a difference and that we all have something to contribute i want to congratulate you for your anniversary thank you all for what you do to improve our communities to improve yourselves just keep up the good work stay focused stay true to yourselves and know that this is just the beginning this is just the beginning when you leave youthbuild you re going to come across the highs and the lows of life and not everything is going to work out as planned but know that you have this wonderful foundation the things that you ve learned the relationships that you ve built you can fall back on reach out to your mentors your instructors your leaders know that we none of us survive without a community of support and networking so as you step out there and begin to build the lives that you know you can build never get set back by a little bump in the road just stay focused on what you ve learned during your time here at youthbuild and know that it will lead you to the kind of success and happiness you all deserve thank you so much and congratulations dem mobama17 9 09 michelle_obama all right i have to say i have never seen so many people so excited about fruits and vegetables this is a very very good thing and it s raining outside and everybody s pumped up this is good i want to thank tom for that kind introduction and for all that he has done on behalf of our nation s farmers and on behalf of all of our families we couldn t have done this without him we have to give him a big round of applause i also want to thank ann and bernie for all their hard work in making this farmers market a reality and i want to thank mark and clare as well for joining us today and their family all their hard work we re so glad that these programs these markets are really spurring local farmers throughout the nation in particular in our own area and i also want to thank our mayor mayor fenty for all that he is doing for our new hometown d c you know when we decided to plant the white house garden we thought it would be a great way to educate kids about eating more healthy right kids vegetables yay for vegetables but as it turned out the garden has turned into so much more than we could have ever expected and it s a really fun thing to do as well this has been one of the greatest things that i ve done in my life so far it s just been a tremendous honor and working with the kids in the d c community and hearing how they ve learned and how they re growing and how they re sharing the information with their families just warms my heart and makes me hopeful for the future and it s important to know that when i travel around the world no matter where i ve gone so far the first thing world leaders prime ministers kings queens ask me about is the white house garden and then they ask about bo everybody it s the garden and bo or bo and the garden one or the other but seriously as we look at tackling some of the biggest health problems that our nation faces like obesity diabetes heart disease and related issues like access to primary care and preventative health services i ve realized that little things like a garden can actually play a role in all of these larger discussions they make us think about these issues in a way that maybe sometimes the policy conversations don t allow us to think and it has truly inspired me and the white house staff to look for opportunities to put the topic of healthy eating right on the table and at the forefront of health care discussions and this is one of the reasons why we re here today why we re here supporting this effort today i originally came to this issue as many of you know if you ve read anything about me and health really like most people as a parent i ve got these two beautiful girls and before we and before we lived in this beautiful house down the street we lived on the south side of chicago and like most parents i was a working mother trying to put it all together and i gradually learned that what i put the food that i put on my table truly affects the health of my children in some fundamental ways if affects not only what they eat but their habits how they think about food and i ve learned that when my family eats fresh food healthy food that it really affects how we feel how we get through the day and that s whether we re trying to get through math homework or whether there s a cabinet meeting or whether we re just walking the dog the kind of food that we put into our body gives us the energy to get through the day but i also have learned through my experiences that as a working mother that there are times when putting together a healthy meal is harder than you might imagine it is not so easy so like many parents when i was working without the staff and the butlers and all the people who are helping me now i was just like you all takeout food was a primary part of our diet it was quick it was easy we did what was easiest and what kids liked because you didn t want to hear them whining so right we re just trying to end the whining and sometimes it turns out that the food that is least healthy for us can sometimes be the cheapest and even with the best intentions as i know all of us are we all care about our kids doesn t matter what our salaries are or what our positions are we care about our kids and we re doing the best that we can for them and with the best of intentions in this society today sometimes it s hard to make regular meals healthy meals a part of everyone s existence and this is one of the reasons why i m so supportive of farmers markets for those of us who are battling the time crunch and those for us whom access to fresh food is an issue in our neighborhoods farmers markets are a really important valuable resource that we have to support this market in particular will provide access to fresh fruits and vegetables locally raised meats cheeses fresh baked goods to the many busy people who are working and living in this area including many federal employees who i know you are working your fingers to the bones right and we appreciate it so this market is going to be available to many d c federal employees from the white house veterans affairs gsa the export import bank the treasury department oh sorry they will have access to the food too and as an employer i guess we are an employer now out of the white house we are looking for ways to create a healthier workforce because we know that if you all are healthy and happy and moving you ll come to work and you ll work really hard and as many private companies have demonstrated making employee wellness a priority can save health care costs down the road and make for a stronger workplace for everyone in the neighborhood you can now run out for an afternoon yes when you have that break and pick up some good stuff for dinner or stop by as you run to catch the subway home from work farmers markets are a simple but major ingredient in solving access issues in many communities and for those who think that fresh fruits and vegetables are out of their reach financially as the secretary mentioned and i want to reinforce the fact that this market and other farmers markets around the city participate in the wic program the snap program the double dollar program and the seniors benefits program and each snap and wic dollar equals two dollars at a farmers market to purchase fresh produce so that s something and we want to get that word out as well so if you know people who have access to these benefits they should understand that these farmers markets are there for them as well and there is an incentive for them to use and buy their fruits and vegetables here so we want to get that word out and farmers markets do more than just help americans feed their families healthy meals they help america s family farmers as you ve met some of our great farmers here and you ll get to know them that s the good thing about farmers markets you get to know the people who grow your food how they do it you know who they are as people that makes a huge difference these farmers provide a critically important role in feeding this nation small and mid size farmers grow the fruits and vegetables that we find on our supermarket shelves as well and at farmers markets and they are an important part of creating a healthier environment healthier communities and healthier families and we have to support them and i want to thank all of the farmers and all the purveyors who have come out today to make this market such a wonderful wonderful resource for this community events like this one are more than just about the opportunity to provide good food it s also about creating better communities we know that when we start coming out to these markets we re going to start talking to each other we re going to talk about where d you get those peaches and which stand and let me try them and what s fresh we talk to each other in different ways so this market is not just about food it s about our community and this is just the beginning of the discussion so i want to thank everybody on the stage i want to thank all of you for your excitement and your energy in standing in the rain and now it s time to buy some food thank you all so much let s shop dem mobama18 11 09 michelle_obama thank you so much thank you isn t this nice just so very nice let me begin by thanking secretary napolitano for that very kind introduction and for her outstanding work in keeping this country safe she is a true friend and she has been doing an amazing job and we are so proud to have her on our team i d also like to thank to dr jill biden a blue star mom by the way and a dear friend of mine as well she has just been a tireless advocate of highlighting the service of the national guard and reserve members and families it has just been a thrill for me to be able to work with her on this issue and many others jill thank you for everything you ve done and i also would like to acknowledge representatives susan davis gwen moore as well as jan schakowsky who are here for their terrific work and for joining us here today it s good to see you all and i also want to recognize general cartwright vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff along with the members of the joint chiefs of staff who are here and their wonderful wives and this wasn t in the script but please stand so that we can recognize and thank all of you i know you weren t supposed to this but you can do it it s my house you know jill and i are particularly grateful to the wives of the members of the joint chiefs of staff because they have from day one we sat down with them and got advice and guidance on sort of how to develop our initiatives so we re grateful to you and i also want to thank to the senior enlisted advisors who are here today and their wives and i d also like to ask them to stand as well so we can give them a round of applause thank you so much again with the spouses we met with shortly thereafter and we had a terrific conversation the guidance that you have given us has meant a great deal it s really ensured that the efforts that we ve undertaken are substantive and accurate so thank you all thank you for your support and thank you for being here today let me also thank patty shinseki for her tremendous efforts on behalf of our nation s military children her husband secretary of veterans affairs eric shinseki is doing a terrific job and patty has become just one of my dearest friends and just always a spot of courage in a sea of work so where s patty patty where are you thank you patty and if any of you are still wondering why you re here it s not just tea you have to thank general wilma vaught general i had the privilege of meeting this amazing woman at the women in military service memorial that occurred at arlington national cemetery when was that that was a few months ago and as you all know she has just poured her heart and soul into that memorial just to ensure that america s servicewomen receive the recognition that they ve earned and i had a tremendous visit that day and one of the things that she said she turned to me who was there you remember she said eleanor roosevelt did a tea and she said something else and she said we re coming for tea right i said of course we re going to have tea and here we are so this is why you re here it was an excellent idea excellent idea but i also want to honor two very special ladies who are here today and i got to meet them as well earlier this year esther corcoran who was born in 1905 i hope you don t mind me telling on you esther was one of the first women in the army to achieve the rank of lieutenant colonel pretty amazing and she is joining us today with alyce dixon who was born in 1907 alyce and alyce served with the famous 6888th central postal directory battalion during the second world war so let s give them both another round of applause these ladies have contributed a great deal to this country and while their lives may span a century they re both young at heart i ve talked to them they re pretty spunky and we are thrilled to have you both here today thrilled and honored and grateful for your service and finally i want to thank all of you all the women who have served this nation with courage determination and distinction from world war ii to today in iraq and afghanistan you have served in times of war and in times of peace an all volunteer force right from the beginning part of a proud tradition that stretches back more than two centuries long before women had the right to vote long before we even had the right to vote or own property before america even existed women were serving this country facing danger risking their lives even dressing up like men so they d be allowed to serve and it s never been an easy path i can only imagine how challenging it has been and continues to be i know that some of you have faced skepticism and ridicule some of you had to contend not just with the challenge of doing your jobs but with others perceptions that you weren t up to the job simply because of your gender as air force veteran dr donna loraine put it this is a quote to be a success a woman had to be confident self assured persistent and have a great sense of humor at times you had to employ a certain desperate deviousness to get the job done so maybe you had to work a little harder and a little smarter you may have felt a little lonely at times at times you may have gotten downright discouraged but you stuck it out each and every one of you you found colleagues who supported you of all genders and all races and all backgrounds you found superiors who pushed you and encouraged you and then you rose to the challenge you rose and you found opportunities to advance and to build exciting amazing careers and along the way you all broke one brass ceiling after another in this room alone we have the first female four star general we have the first woman in the navy to be promoted to master chief the first woman in the army reserve to be promoted to the general officer rank we have the first woman in the army to receive the expert field medical badge we have the first african american woman to serve as chief nurse at walter reed hospital and so many more firsts and onlys and that s the result of your hard work and your courage and your persistence but we know these achievements aren t yours alone that s something that jill and i have talked about we ve learned more about over the course of this year because we know that service doesn t just end with the person wearing the uniform you all know that we know that our servicemen and women s sacrifices are their families sacrifices as well and many of you have spouses partners children parents who stood by you and encouraged you and prayed for you every step of the way and this day is their day too as far as we re concerned so let s take a moment to recognize those members of our families who supported you in your service as well but i hope you all know that your service that your legacy is more than just your own service i hope that you know that your legacy will be measured in the service of every woman who follows in the trails that you ve blazed every woman who benefits from your daring and determination it will be measured in the inspiration that you provide to our daughters and our granddaughters and to our sons and our grandsons as well because of you when young women wonder how high they can rise in our military they can look at general ann dunwoody and her four hard earned stars that can see that it s real when they ask what kind of jobs they can do they can look to women like all of you who ve played just about every kind of role imaginable and when they ask whether they can cut it whether they have what it takes to succeed all they have to do is to look at your lives to look into your lives and to look at the careers that you ve developed that inspire us all they can look to the example of coast guard commander dorothy stratton who led the spars during world war ii she stated we wanted to serve our country in its time of need she said i m proud to sponsor oh she didn t say this but i am proud to sponsor a new coast guard cutter bearing her name to ensure that her service will be remembered for generations they can look to jennifer grieves who made history by becoming the first woman marine one aircraft commander and by commanding the first ever flight with an all female crew i remember this proudly carrying my husband from the white house to andrews air force base back in july that was a wonderful day they can look to tammy duckworth who flew combat missions in iraq and lost both her legs when her helicopter was hit by a grenade she went on to become a fearless advocate for veterans and wounded warriors and now serves as assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs at the veterans affairs department thank you tammy and they can look to the example of women like amy krueger who lost her life in the unthinkable violence at fort hood two weeks ago amy had enlisted in the army after the september 11th attacks and when her mother told her that she couldn t take on osama bin laden all by herself amy replied simply watch me she said watch me and i think that more than anything that phrase watch me sums up the spirit of our women in uniform throughout our history when others doubted you or dismissed you or questioned whether you could endure the training or complete the mission that was your response watch me right watch me succeed watch me risk everything i have for the country i love watch me do my part to protect this nation and protect this union watch me so we thank you for your courage and your service we re honored to have you in our presence we re thrilled general that you came up with this brilliant idea and we hope that you don t spike the tea until after we leave but we are thrilled to have you here welcome to the white house and thank you so much for your service thank you and god bless dem mobama18 2 09 michelle_obama well hello welcome to the white house how are you guys doing that s good it s good to see you all i ve heard you all have been just quiet as mice have you been behaving in here is it exciting come on it s exciting isn t this a beautiful house well we are so so very proud and happy to have you here first i want to thank the admiral for sharing his story with us i hope you all were listening because this is a very wise man who is a very amazing professional in his own right and he has made our transition to this place just fun and welcoming he is our friend so let s give another round of applause i wanted you to hear from the admiral because he plays a very important role in making the white house a wonderful place for the president and his family and that goes for any president who comes through these doors what the admiral does for us he would do for any family who lived here and he makes this a very special place for people to visit not just here in this country but from around the world like barack and i the admiral didn t rise to his position because of wealth or because he had a lot of material resources see we were all very much kids like you guys we just figured out that one day that our fate was in our own hands we made decisions to listen to our parents and to our teachers and to work very very hard for everything in life and then we worked even harder any time anybody doubted us each and every day the admiral and his staff who run this beautiful house demonstrate the highest level of professionalism it s amazing to watch them they do their jobs with pride and grace and that s one thing i hope that you all pick up is the level of pride and grace that you put into anything you do they work very hard to make the white house a warm family home and a great presidential residence commanding pride and respect throughout this country and around the world as president and first lady barack and i are just the caretakers of this house we re just borrowing it for a little bit but while we live here we re your neighbors okay and we want you to feel welcome here at the white house which really is as the admiral said it s the people s house that belongs to all of us so just remember that okay and as the people s house we believe the white house should be a place for learning and for sharing new and different ideas sharing new forms of art and culture and history and different perspectives we want you to visit and we want you to take advantage of these opportunities and maybe see something for yourselves that maybe you never thought you could do or be so i m happy to welcome you here for our little black history month celebration i m glad you guys are here so many milestones in black history have touched this very house just to name a few did you know that african american slaves helped to build this house you knew that did you know that right upstairs in a bedroom called the lincoln bedroom president lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation that marked an important step forward in ending slavery did you know that happened right here you knew that well did you know that in 1878 rutherford b hayes was president at the time and marie seilka became the first soprano the first african american artist to perform right here in the white house that was in 1878 did you know that because i didn t know that and in the 1960s did you know that dr martin luther king and other civil rights leaders met here with presidents kennedy and johnson to debate and discuss the end of segregation did you know that pretty cool huh yes well you re yawning wake up i m just kidding and of course who lives here now president obama and he s making history every single day why why that s correct would you like to stand you want to say that one more time very good so you guys know your history that s a good thing that means your parents and teachers are doing their jobs but i encourage you not only to focus on the famous names that you read in the history books or that you see on tv but i want you to also think about the extraordinary people who live in your own world the folks in your own lives parents grandparents yes teachers all those folks who play important roles in black history and american history every single day you re living right among them people like admiral rochon who has his grandchildren here today where are alex and olivia where are you guys where are they hello welcome it s good to see you all that s the admiral s grandchildren let s give them a welcome all of these folks who are in your world right now are writing a chapter in history of their own but the truth is is that the next chapter in history will be written by all of you did you realize that the next chapter in history is written by you so you have to ask yourselves what will you do in life to help someone else in need you have to ask yourselves what are you going to do to make your own community stronger what are you going to do to make sure that this nation is even greater and what are you doing right now in school and in your neighborhoods to prepare yourselves to assume a level of responsibility and to be good citizens those are the questions that you can ask yourselves right now even at your age and think about as the admiral says getting up every single day and working hard as hard as you can putting your best foot forward all the time not just when somebody is looking but every single moment and supporting your family the folks in your own households making your beds putting the dishes up cleaning your rooms that s part of the preparation how do you help your neighbor and how are you going to build a better life and a future for yourselves that s not just a story that barack obama is writing or admiral rochon is writing those are the stories that we re all writing together and you re an important part of that so we are so excited about the future that you are going to take hold of in just a few years so i welcome you again to the white house and i hope you enjoy what is going to be a phenomenal performance we ve got some special guests with us today who are also national treasurers a group one of my favorite groups in the whole wide world sweet honey in the rock doesn t that name sound good well their voices sound even better this group was founded in 1973 by bernice johnson reagon sweet honey in the rock has continued the african american tradition of using music and song to advance freedom and social justice so will you guys now help me welcome them give a big round of applause to sweet honey in the rock dem mobama18 5 09a michelle_obama thank you thank you so much well thank you caroline i am thrilled to be here in support of american ballet theatre and to join you in celebrating the opening night of abt s spring season through its leadership role as america s national ballet company abt s education programs reach over 25 000 students in some of the most underserved communities and schools across the nation in many cases a child s first inspiration through the arts can be a life changing experience one creative dance class can open a world of expression and communication learning through the arts reinforces critical academic skills in reading language arts and math and provides students with the skills to creatively solve problems my husband and i believe strongly that arts education is essential for building innovative thinkers who will be our nation s leaders for tomorrow and it is our hope that we can all work together to expose enrich and empower americans of all ages through the arts and now it is my great pleasure to introduce the students of the jacqueline kennedy onassis school for their first appearance on this stage of the met this dance academy is a wonderful legacy for a woman who dedicated so much of her life to making arts and culture accessible for all thank you and enjoy dem mobama18 5 09b michelle_obama thank you thank you so much please rest good afternoon and thank you emily for that introduction and thank you for reminding me you know after 20 some odd years of knowing a guy you forget that your first date was at a museum but it was and it was obviously wonderful it worked so i am delighted to be here with you to celebrate american history through the arts from the beginning of our nation the inspired works of our artists and artisans have reflected the ingenuity creativity independence and beauty of this nation it is the painter the potter the weaver the silver smith the architect the designer whose work continues to create an identity for america that is respected and recognized around the world as distinctive and new the american wing of the metropolitan museum of art captures this spirit in presenting a variety of american art forms and providing a link to history for us to learn from appreciate and be inspired by our future as an innovative country depends on ensuring that everyone has access to the arts and to cultural opportunity nearly 6 million people make their living in the non profit arts industry and arts and cultural activities contribute more than 160 billion to our economy every year and trust me i tried to do my part to add to that number the president included an additional 50 million in funding to the nea in the stimulus package to preserve jobs in state arts agencies and regional arts organizations in order to keep them up and running during the economic downturn but the intersection of creativity and commerce is about more than economic stimulus it s also about who we are as people the president and i want to ensure that all children have access to great works of art at museums like the one here we want them to have access to great poets and musicians in theaters around the country to arts education in their schools and community workshops we want all children who believe in their talent to see a way to create a future for themselves in the arts community be it as a hobby or as a profession the arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it rather paintings and poetry music and fashion design and dialogue they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation the president recently nominated renowned theater producer rocco landesman to chair the national endowment for the arts rocco s entrepreneurial spirit and his commitment to being a bridge between the philanthropic non profit and commercial arts community will ensure that all types of art and creative expression are provided fertile ground to live and to grow and that s what we hope to do at the white house that s what we ve been trying to do at the white house we ve been trying to break down barriers that too often exist between major cultural establishments and the people in their immediate communities to invite kids who are living inches away from the power and prestige and fortune and fame we want to let those kids know that they belong here too i want to applaud the metropolitan museum of art for all the outreach that you do for having kids like these here today to be involved in this and to experience this and to share this with us because this is your place too so we re very proud of the met for the work that they ve done so we are excited thank you for including me and now we can get to the we re going to cut the ribbon now thank you so much dem mobama18 9 09 michelle_obama thank you thank you all please sit rest first of all good morning i am so thrilled to see so many of you here this morning at the white house welcome and that s including my good friend dr dorothy height you know she is always there for the past eight months and before if there was a big event an important event she finds a way to be here she is my inspiration and it is wonderful to see you again today thank you so much thank you all for joining us today for the outstanding work you re doing every day on behalf of women and families all across this country i have to thank our extraordinary secretary of health and human services kathleen sebelius for taking the time to be here and for her tireless efforts to keep our nation healthy and that includes not just pushing for health insurance reform but preparing us for h1n1 pursuing cutting edge research to find treatments and cures for tomorrow clearly this is not the easiest portfolio she could have but she is doing a terrific job and we are grateful for her leadership and i also want to thank tina tchen who you all know for emceeing today she too is doing a fabulous job as director of our office of public engagement and she played a critical role in pulling together today s event not just as an emcee but as a key figurehead making sure that we re all aware of what s going on and finally i want to thank the three women behind me to debi easter and roxi it is not easy to come here and tell your story and these stories aren t new you know these stories are happening all over this country not just for thousands of women for millions of them for two years on the campaign trail this was what i heard from women that they were being crushed crushed by the current structure of our health care crushed but these stories that we ve heard today and all of us if we re not experiencing it we know someone who is these are the stories that remind us about what s at stake in this debate this is really all that matters this is why we are fighting so hard for health insurance reform this is it this is the face of the fight and that s why i d like to talk to you today that s why i m here that s why reform is so critical in this country not tomorrow not in a few years but right now people are hurting in this country right now but there is also a reason why i invited this particular group to talk today there s a reason why we ve invited the leaders not only from family advocacy groups and health care advocacy groups but for so many organizations that have been fighting for decades for empowerment for women and that s because when it comes to health care as the secretary said as we all know women play a unique and increasingly significant role in our families we know the pain because we are usually the ones dealing with it eight in 10 women mothers report that they re the ones responsible for choosing their children s doctor for getting them to their checkups for managing that follow up care women are the ones to do it mothers are the ones that do it and many women find themselves doing the same thing for their spouses and more than 10 percent of women in this country are currently caring for a sick or elderly relative it s often a parent but it could a grandparent or a mother or a relative of some sort but it s often a parent so they re making critical health care decisions for those family members as well in other words being part of the sandwich generation is what we are now finding raising kids while caring for a sick or elderly parent that s not just a work family balance issue anymore it s not just an economic issue anymore more and more it is a health care issue it s something that i have thought a great deal about as a mother i will never forget the time eight years ago when sasha was four months that she would not stop crying and she was not a crier so we knew something was wrong so we fortunately were able to take her to our pediatrician that next morning he examined her and same something s wrong we didn t know what but he told us that she could have meningitis so we were terrified he said get to the emergency room right away and fortunately for us things worked out because she is now the sasha that we all know and love today who is causing me great excitement but it is that moment in our lives that flashes through my head every time we engage in this health insurance conversation it s that moment in my life because i think about what on earth would we have done if we had not had insurance what would have happened to that beautiful little girl if we hadn t been able to get to a pediatrician who was able to get us to an emergency room the consequences i can t even imagine she could have lost her hearing she could have lost her life if we had had to wait because of insurance and it was also fortunate that we happened to have good insurance right because if we hadn t had good insurance like many of the panelists up here we would have been saddled with costs for covering that emergency room visit for her two days in the hospital we would have still been paying off those bills and this issue isn t something that i ve thought about as a mother i think about it as a daughter as many of you know my father had multiple sclerosis he contracted it in his twenties and as you all know my father was a rock he was able to get up and go to work every day even though it got harder for him as he got sicker and more debilitated and i find myself thinking what would we have done as a family on the south side of chicago if my father hadn t had insurance if he hadn t been able to cover his treatments what would it have done to him to think that his illness could have put his entire family into bankruptcy and what if he had lost his job which fortunately he never did what if his company had changed insurance which fortunately never happened and we became one of the millions of americans families who can t get insurance because of a preexisting condition so these are the thoughts that run through my mind as i watch this debate and hope that we get it right but let s be clear women aren t just disproportionately affected by this issue because of the roles that we play in families as tina and kathleen mentioned women are affected because of the jobs that we do in this economy we all know that women are more likely to work part time or to work in small companies or businesses that don t provide any insurance at all women are affected because as we heard in many states insurance companies can still discriminate because of gender and this is still shocking to me these are the kind of facts that still wake me up at night that women in this country have been denied coverage because of preexisting conditions like having a c section or having had a baby in some states it is still legal to deny a woman coverage because she s been the victim of domestic violence and a recent study showed that 25 year old women are charged up to 45 percent more for insurance than 25 year old men for the exact same coverage and as the age goes up you get to 40 that disparity increases to 48 percent 48 percent difference for women for the exact same coverage in this country but it s not just women without insurance as we ve heard as we know who are affected plenty of women have insurance but it doesn t cover basic women s health services like maternity care or preventative care like mammograms or pap smears which we all know we have to have we can t go without these basic services but many insurance policies don t even cover it or policies cap the amount of coverage that you can receive as you ve heard or it drops coverage when people get sick and they really need the care or maybe people have coverage but they re worried about losing it if they lose their jobs or if they change jobs or if the company changes insurance carriers out of pocket costs get higher and higher it s hard to be able to plan your monthly bills when you don t know what your premiums are going to be so a lot of people find they have to drop their insurance because they can no longer afford it just think about it many women are being charged more in health care coverage but as we all know women are earning less we all know that women earn 78 cents on the dollar to every men to a man so it s not exactly surprising when we hear statistics that more than half of women report putting off needed medical care simply because they can t afford it now we have trouble putting ourselves first when we have the resources just making the appointment when you have insurance to get your regular screenings to take care of those illnesses those bumps and lumps and pains that we tend to ignore but then not to be able to do it because you can t have insurance you don t have insurance it s not surprising that so many millions of women around this country are simply going without insurance at all see and the thing that we all know is that the current state this current situation is unacceptable it is unacceptable no one in this country should be treated that way it s not fair it s not right and these are hard working people we re talking about right people who care about their kids care about their lives and these circumstances could happen to any of us this is one of those there but for the grace of god go i kind of situations none of us are exempt ever so i think it s clear that health insurance reform and what it means for our families is very much a women s issue it is very much a women s issue and if we want to achieve true equality for women if that is our goal if we want to ensure that women have opportunities that they deserve if that is our goal if we want women to be able to care for their families and pursue things that they could never imagine then we have to reform the system we have to reform the system the status quo is unacceptable it is holding women and families back and we know it fortunately that is exactly what my husband s plan proposes to do and it s important for us to understand some of the basic principles of that plan under his plan if you don t have insurance now or you lose your insurance at some point in the future you ll be able to purchase affordable coverage through an insurance exchange a marketplace with a variety of options that will let you compare prices and benefits this is exactly the approach that is used to provide members of congress with insurance so the thought is that if it s good enough for members of congress it should be good enough for the people who vote them in and this is also an important part of the plan if you already have insurance and it seems that there are a lot of people who are worried that they ll lose what they have under this plan but under this plan if you already have insurance you re set nothing changes you keep your insurance you keep your doctors and you re blessed this plan just puts in place some basic rules of the road to protect you from the kinds of abuses and unfair practices that we ve heard under this plan insurance companies will never again be allowed to deny people like debi and her son coverage for preexisting conditions sounds like a good thing so whether you have breast cancer diabetes asthma or hypertension or even just had a c section or some mental health treatment that you had in your past none of that will be a reason to refuse you coverage under the plan that my husband is proposing because when you re fighting an illness he believes that you shouldn t also have to be in the process of fighting the insurance companies at the same time it s a basic idea under this plan insurance companies will no longer be able to drop your coverage when you get too sick or refuse to pay for the care that you need or to set a cap on the amount of coverage that you can get and it will limit how much they can charge you for out of pocket expenses because getting sick in this country shouldn t mean that you go bankrupt that s a basic principle of this plan and finally this plan will require insurance companies to cover basic preventative care seems simple from routine checkups to mammograms to pap smears and this would come at no extra charge to the patient so folks like roxi can get the chance to get the kind of screenings that she needs to save her life because we already know that if we catch diseases like cancer early we know this it s much less costly to treat and we might just be able to save some lives we know this so under this plan we can save lives and we can save money it s not just good medicine but it s good economics as well so i think this is a pretty reasonable plan i don t know about you but i know many of you believe it s a good plan as well and i know that many of the groups that you represent believe that what we re doing here this fight is important it s important to this country it s important to women it s important to families that we succeed and now more than ever as tina said as secretary sebelius said we need to act no longer can we sit by and watch the debate take on a life of its own it is up to us to get involved because what we have to remember is that now more than ever we have to channel our passions into change that s nothing that you all haven t done before right you all have been the driving force behind so many of our greatest health care achievements whether it s been children s health insurance to funding breast cancer research stem cell research to passing the family medical leave act the folks in this room you re the ones that made those phone calls right that you wrote those letters you knocked on those doors you re the ones that helped make that happen and that s exactly what we need you to do today for health insurance reform we are going to need you over the next few weeks to mobilize like you ve never mobilized before we need you to educate your members about what the plan really is and what it isn t because education is the key to understanding and it s going to take phone calls to explain to talk things through to make sure that people understand not just what s at stake but what this all means and we know there will be all sorts of myths and misconceptions about what the plan is and isn t so it s so important that you make sure that people know the facts and at least they make their decisions based on the truth of what this plan is and isn t we need you to make your voices heard right here in washington and you all know how to do that and no it won t be easy because there are always folks who are a little afraid of change we all understand that we talked about this all during the campaign change is hard sometimes the status quo even if it isn t right feels comfortable because it s what we know so it is understandable that people are cautious about moving into a new place in this society there will always be folks who will want things to stay just the way they are to settle for the world as it is we talked about that so much this is one of those times but look i am here today standing before you as the first lady of the united states of america because you all didn t settle for the world as it is right you refused to settle and as a result of many of your efforts as a young girl i was able to dream in ways that i could have never imagined that my mother could never have imagined that my grandmother could never have imagined and thanks to so many of you i am raising these beautiful young women you know who are going to be able to think so differently about their place in the world because of the work that you ve done health care reform is part of that movement health insurance reform is the next step so we re going to need you all focused and clear picking up the phones talking calling writing your congressmen and women making this something that is the highest priority for all of us so that we can make sure that every single family in this country can move forward as we hope that they can that they don t have to worry about whether they can insure themselves they don t have to worry about whether their kids are going to break an arm that s what kids do they break stuff so i am grateful for all of you for the work that you ve done and for what i know that we can do together over the next several weeks but we have to be what fired up and what and ready to go a little fired up and ready to go so thank you so much god bless you all and god bless america dem mobama19 2 09 michelle_obama thank you so much thank you you all take a load off your feet first of all i want to thank secretary vilsack for that very moving introduction for me it is an honor for me to serve in this capacity and coming to these departments like i ve been doing is probably one of the next to hanging out with malia and sasha is probably one of the most valuable things that i think that i can do we re so lucky to have secretary vilsack i got to know him on the campaign trail spent a lot of time in iowa he brings to this job a lifetime of public service in one of the greatest states in this country which has become one of my favorite states iowa you get to know iowa when you re running for president you spend a lot of time in iowa and it is a good place with decent hardworking people with some strong values and getting to know the state as i ve done and getting to know secretary vilsack as i have over the past several years i know that we are lucky and you all are blessed to have someone who is so committed and knows so much about so many things regarding agriculture working with family farms and rural communities he s going to bring all of that experience to his work here at the department of agriculture and we are grateful to have him onboard so let s give him a round of applause i was also particularly pleased to hear that he s working on creating these wonderful gardens here at the usda did you know that that s a very good thing and kicking off this effort to build these gardens all over the world in all of the facilities of the usda because i m a big believer in community gardens both because of their beauty and for their access to providing fresh fruits and vegetables to so many communities across this nation and the world so to help kick this effort off i brought a little gift to get this garden going it s right here in this pot it is a seedling it will be beautiful one day but right now it s a seedling and it s a special seedling because it comes from the jackson magnolia tree and the jackson magnolia tree sits on the south portico of the white house and it s a special tree because it was planted by president jackson in honor of his wife rachel who passed right before they moved into the white house so i hope that this seedling brings years of joy and beauty to the garden that will be planted here in the same way it has brought beauty to the white house for 180 years so please accept this gift from the white house so as you probably heard i ve been running around the district visiting departments and as i ve said it s been one of the most fun things that i ve done my purpose is simple it s to say thank you you know that s something that barack and i talked about talked about all the folks who have dedicated their lives as the people on this stage have done for did i hear the youngest worker on here has worked for 38 years see i have staff on the back who gulp every time they hear that because they re like 20 so they can t imagine doing anything for longer than four years but what is true and what america needs to remember is that this nation is built on the backs of you workers who have dedicated their lifetimes to working on behalf of the issues that are so important to this nation and before we do anything here in this town in this country we thought it is important to say thank you for the work that you ve done thank you for the work that you re going to do because we re going to need you working so very hard over the next several years so thank you it s important for people to know what happens here at the department of agriculture as you begin moving the policies and programs of this administration forward i wanted to come by and just remind people of the work that you do from supporting the farmers that produce the food that we eat to managing the school meal programs that give students the energy and the nutrition they need to get through the day to providing greater access to fresh fruits and vegetables to giving struggling families the assistance they need to put food on their table and to protecting our food supply the work of this department touches the lives of all americans on a daily basis in ways that sometimes we can t even imagine and like many parts of this country rural america is hurting economically the president is taking steps to turn our economy around and help struggling families and the expansion of the children s health insurance program will insure more children including those in rural communities so that they get the health care that they need the new investments that will double the nation s renewable energy capacity is going to bring new jobs and economic opportunity to rural communities who will play a central role in creating america s clean energy future and the president s plan to address the home mortgage crisis is going to help rural families refinance their mortgages modify loans and secure loans with more affordable monthly payments and this effort is not going to just help keep families in their homes it s going to help strengthen rural neighborhoods and communities across this country so there s a lot of work to do and we have great leaders in secretary vilsack and president obama that we can count on through the next several years but it s again important to remember that these great leaders are only as great as the people who hold them up and again that s where you all come in they can only do the work that they do because there are thousands and thousands of dedicated federal workers like you who are willing to make the sacrifices in their own lives with their own families to devote the time and energy that is so needed to get the work done so again we are going to need you in the months and years to come the challenges that we face are serious and real and it s going to take quite a long time to get this country back on track so your contributions are more important now than they have ever been so again on behalf of my husband on behalf of the administration and the obama family i want to thank you for your energy for your passion and for your commitment and let s get this thing planted thank you dem mobama19 2 10 michelle_obama thank you all right albalee that applause was just as much for me as it was for your wonderful introduction wasn t she she did a great job great job just know that we re all very proud of you and we re all very proud of every single one of your classmates and every single student here in the city of philadelphia and the state of pennsylvania i am so pleased to be here today so grateful and thank you all for having me ever since july when secretary vilsack stopped visited here he has not stopped talking about his visit here to pennsylvania no really i mean and when i heard about it i couldn t wait to get here as we ve been talking about the garden and talking about this initiative i m like i got to see what s going on in philly what s going on in pennsylvania so i m thrilled to finally have the chance to come here and see for myself and i want to thank secretary vilsack not just for being out front on this issue but for his leadership and work at the u s department of agriculture i also want to thank secretary geithner also for joining us today both of them have just been terrific resources and support not just in the cabinet but just in everything that we re doing and i don t think that many treasury secretaries can claim childhood obesity as part of their portfolio right it is pretty cool to have your husband s treasury secretary enthusiastically a part of this initiative so i salute you for your work i know your wife has a lot to do with it but that s i also want to thank senators casey and carper as well for being here representatives brady and fattah i m trying to make sure i m catching everybody and representative schwartz for joining us today and for their work on behalf of the people of this state and for the people of delaware i want to thank governor rendell mr svelte looking good who s here every time i see him he gets smaller and smaller it s a good thing you re looking good and i also want to thank his wonderful wife judge marjorie rendell i m going to see you all very shortly tomorrow at the national governors association have to thank mayor nutter who still is getting the award for one of the best campaign rallies we had here in philly he just blew out the introduction had everybody crying so thank you for your support and your leadership here representative evans thank you for your outstanding work to ensure that the kids across this state can lead active healthy lives the work that you ve done to get this going has been tremendous yeah stand up and i also have to recognize pat burns who hosted us at the fresh grocer today pat hosted us just as jeff brown hosted secretary vilsack and others at his supermarket last summer it was just wonderful tour a wonderful experience and i commend both of you for your leadership and for doing what s best for the people of this city and i have to finally thank a few others the food trust the reinvestment fund and the greater philadelphia urban affairs coalition you all have done extraordinary and some could say revolutionary work here in this city and as you all have said consistently you couldn t do it without each other that has been the resonating message so you all should be very proud to be highlighted here today for the work that you ve done it s really groundbreaking and hopefully will set the tone for what we can do throughout the country six years ago when this city had fewer supermarkets per person than almost anywhere in america all right that was six years ago when many folks had no access to healthy foods six years ago many neighborhoods had alarming rates of obesity related conditions like heart disease and diabetes the folks in this city you all could have decided that you had an unsolvable problems on your hands right you could have done that you could have decided that these problems were just too big and too complicated and too entrenched and thrown your hands up and walked away but instead you all took a stand a really important collaborative stand you decided first that no family in this city should be spending a fortune on high priced low quality foods because they have no other options you decided that no child should be consigned to a life of poor health because of what neighborhood his or her family lives in and you decided that you weren t going to just talk about the problem or wring your hands about the problems but you were going to act and that s precisely the kind of determination the kind of commitment that we need to address the epidemic of childhood obesity in this country and this issue is an issue of great concern to me and i ve said this before not because i m first lady or not just because i m first lady of this country but because i m a mother and i care about my kids and i care about all of our kids and i know that this issue is a great concern to all of you everyone around this country we all care about our kids that s why last week we enthusiastically and proudly launched let s move let s move is a nationwide campaign to rally this country around one single but ambitious goal and that is to end the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation so that the kids born today grow up with a healthy weight simple but ambitious so this is what we need to do let s move to help families and communities make healthier decisions for their kids let s move to bring together our governors and our mayors our doctors our nurses our businesses our community groups our parents teachers coaches everyone to tackle this challenge once and for all and let s move to get our kids what they need to succeed in life let s move to ensure that they have the energy and the strength to succeed in school and then in the careers that they choose let s move to ensure that they can later live lives where they can keep up with their own kids maybe keep up with their own grandkids and if they re blessed maybe their great grandkids and let s move is a simple initiative with four parts and albalee very well laid them out good job but let me repeat first part let s move to give parents the tools and the information they need to make the healthy choices for their kids so we re working to provide better labeling for our food and encourage our pediatricians to screen kids for obesity during well child visits but then to write a prescription for families when they identify a problem with a step by step sort of process for what they can actually do and we started this wonderful web site called letsmove gov to help provide tips and step by step strategies on eating well and staying active so parents don t feel alone and isolated as they re trying to figure this out second part let s move to get more nutritious food in our schools secretary vilsack that s something he s focused on that s why we re working not just with the department of agriculture but with food suppliers food service workers school officials and investing billions of dollars to revamp our school breakfast and lunch programs so that our kids are eating foods with less sugar fat and salt and eating more foods with fresh vegetables and fruits and whole grains the third part of the initiative is let s move that s literally let s move we got to move we got to find ways for our kids to be more active both in and out of school that s why we re expanding and modernizing the president s physical fitness challenge and we ve recruited professional athletes from all across this country who are just ready and willing to encourage our kids to get and to stay active and then finally one of the reasons why we re here the final component let s move to ensure that all families have access to healthy affordable food in their own communities and the approach on this aspect is very simple we want to replicate your success here in pennsylvania all across america again six years ago this state decided to invest 30 million in fresh food financing which has leveraged 190 million more from the private and non profit sectors and so far these investments have funded 83 supermarket projects in 34 counties bringing nutritious food to more than 400 000 people and more importantly in this economy this investment is projected to create more than 5 000 jobs and these jobs are occurring often in communities that need them the most across this state right now because of these efforts new employees are learning new job skills and i met many of them at the fresh grocer just folks who were proud proud to be in a store that was serving their community and proud to be doing a good job and have a chance to not just support their families but do something good for the rest of their communities but these new stores are also bringing new economic development into these communities because they serve as anchors to attract other businesses to invest and creating even more new jobs so one good deed leads to another and we saw this example today again during our visit to the fresh grocer at progress plaza as you all know the last supermarket that was in that community closed more than 10 years ago more than a decade ago that was the last time that that community had a grocery store so this community went 10 years without a place for folks to buy good food for 10 years folks had to buy their groceries at places like convenience stores and gas stations where usually they don t have a whole lot of fresh food if any to choose from so that means if a mom wanted to buy a head of lettuce to make a salad in this community or have some fresh fruit for their kids lunch that means she would have to get on a bus navigate public transportation with big bags of groceries probably more than one time a week or worse yet pay for a taxicab ride to get to some other supermarket in another community just to feed her kids so let s think about that for 10 years in one community there were kids in that community who couldn t get the nutritious food that they needed during some of the most formative years of their lives and think about the impact that that can have on a child s health not just now but in the future because research shows that children who are overweight as adolescents are 70 to 80 percent more likely to become obese as adults and what happened in the neighborhood that we visited today is happening somewhere in every state all across this country right now there are 23 5 million americans including 6 5 million children who live in what we call food deserts these are places and communities that don t have a supermarket this is true in the inner city and in rural communities this is happening all across the country but fortunately right here in philadelphia you all have this wonderful grocer named pat burns who had already opened successful stores in other neighborhoods and he decided that it was he was interested in opening a grocery store in progress plaza but he could only do it because of a grant from the fresh food financing initiative and today just a few months after it opened and this is important for everybody to understand the fresh grocer is doing a thriving business it s a beautiful store attracting folks from neighboring communities and providing jobs for folks in the area in fact during the big snow the fresh grocer was able to stay open because so many of the employees live nearby so with your success here in pennsylvania what you ve shown us is that when we provide the right support and incentives then business leaders like pat burns and jeff brown they re going to take the chance to invest in our communities and when we bring fresh healthy food to communities what do we learn people will buy it right people will buy it these stores are turning a profit and what s going on is that they re doing well by doing good isn t that something so it s because of this example that part of let s move we created this healthy food financing initiative that s modeled on what s been going on here and as secretary geithner said with a modest initial investment of about 400 million a year we re going to use that money to leverage hundreds of millions more from private and non profit sectors to bring grocery stores and other healthy food retailers to underserved communities all across this country if you can do it here we can do it around the country and our goal is ambitious it s to eliminate food deserts in america completely in seven years again we know this is ambitious but we also know that tackling the issue of accessibility and affordability is key to achieving the overall goal of solving childhood obesity in this generation because we can give our kids the healthiest school breakfasts and lunches imaginable but that won t mean much if they head to the corner store after school and buy candy and chips and soda because that s all they have available right and we can create the best nutrition education and physical education programs in the world but if dinner is something off of the shelf of a local gas station or convenience store because there s no grocery store nearby all our best efforts are going to go to waste we re setting people up for failure if we don t fix this so it s clear that we need a comprehensive coordinated approach but we also have to be clear that that doesn t mean that it requires a bunch of new laws and policies from washington d c i have spoken to many experts on this issue and not a single one of them has said that the solution to this problem is to have government telling people what to do in their own lives it s also not about spending huge sums of money particularly during these times when so many communities are already stretched thin instead it s about doing more with what we already have and as you ve shown us here in philadelphia it s about smart investments that leverage more investments and then have the potential to pay for themselves many times over in the long run what you ve clearly demonstrated here in this city and in this state is that we can do what s good for our businesses and our economy while doing what s good for our kids and our families and our neighborhoods at the same time we can do it all and jeff brown put it best when he talked about his decision to put a grocery store in underserved communities he said we have more than the bottom we have more than one bottom line here that s important he said we have more than one bottom line herethe community s success is important too that s a wonderful spirit and in the end that s what this is all about really not just the kind of food that we want our kids to eat but it s also about the kind of communities that we want our kids to live in and it s about the kind of lives that we want them to lead right all of our kids we know it won t be easy to solve this obesity crisis because these big problems are never easy we re going to need a lot more folks just like all of you to step up to the plate this isn t about the first lady doing it all i can t do it by myself i m going to need all of you we re going to have to work together but if there s anyone out there who doubts that it can be done then i would urge them to come here to philadelphia and to see what you ve done here i would urge them to see the difference that we can make when government and businesses and community groups and ordinary folks come together to tackle a common problem it s a powerful thing i would urge them to imagine what we can achieve if we take programs like this that have lifted up so many communities here in pennsylvania and then we bring those programs and those efforts and those ideas to every part of this country just imagine how many jobs we can create just imagine how many neighborhoods that we could revitalize and how many lives could be transformed you all are seeing that now so let s move that s really the point if we know it can be done let s move let s get it done let s give our kids everything they need and everything they deserve to be the best that they can be thank you all this has been a wonderful day thank you so much dem mobama19 3 09a michelle_obama just let me say first of all thank you this was one of my dreams let me just tell you i couldn t have imagined this a year ago but as we started moving towards this trajectory that it became increasingly clear that barack obama might be the next president of the united states and as i started thinking about the kinds of things that i wanted to see happen this day was one of those things gathering an amazing group of women together and going out and talking to young girls around this country but we re here today hopefully we can do more and more of this but this is part of that dream and i can t thank you enough for taking the time these girls are just going to be wild today and our task is really simple you know just to share our stories with them so many of us will be able to see part of ourselves in these young people because it s not just young girls that we re seeing today we re going to see some young men as well and our job is really to just share our stories to make these kids understand that where we stand today is not an impossibility by any stretch of the imagination even when no one could have predicted it many of us have forged a path to some amazing things and we want to share that with these young people and then we re going to get back together this evening with a whole nother group of young women and bring them back to this great house that is america s house many young people will have never set foot in this place never could have imagined that they d be dining in the east room with so many great people who will be joined by even more women but just imagine what they re going to feel like at the end of this day and then we can do this again and again and again our job is simple just be open be honest be real be clear and have fun well you know we have got a president here so many of you have helped us come to this place and our job now is to give back and to keep giving back and the d c community many of these schools need to see us they need to be reminded because some of these schools are struggling even today even though they ve got this wonderful image of the white house they need to be reminded that we are we re close this isn t a distant relationship that they can imagine the people who live here and what goes on here and that there s a close connection between their lives and ours and there s nothing more powerful than going into their states and having that kind of conversation and that s what today is all about it is national women s history month but again we re not just talking about women we are talking about our young people throughout so i want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming together this quickly and taking the time a whole day out of your lives to share this day with me so thank you all dem mobama19 3 09b michelle_obama well please sit sit enjoy well good evening everyone and welcome to the white house isn t this nice welcome to the white house celebration of women s history month and tonight is a special night this has been a special day for so many of us but for me because i am joined by my mom and my two daughters malia and sasha who never want to do anything with me but tonight they have joined me along with their two friends isabella and jessica who are visiting us but these are women and little people that i admire and i respect and in many cases they are the first in so many ways they re the first daughters today and we re joined by many firsts here all throughout this room are some pretty phenomenal women who have demonstrated what it means to be the first in so many ways we ve got the first woman to dunk a basketball in the wnba we have the first female 4 star general in the military generation dunwoody we have the first african american to earn an individual olympic medal in women s gymnastics we have the first woman of color to go into space we have the first coach to bring three teams to the final four the first african american woman to be the ambassador to the united nations and then there s me the first lady which believe it or not i still find that hard to believe as i look around this room into the faces of the young women who have joined us today i can t help but wonder who among us will we be the next first something to think about because you guys are future leaders of this nation and we re counting on you in so many ways we re counting on you so the question is are you ready are you ready ladies well we certainly think you are and we were only able to invite some of you here but there are millions of you across this country who are ready who we are counting on and tonight is your night this is an evening which we hope you will use as an opportunity to network with each other each other as young women that you network with the great women who are sitting at your table and that you spend some time asking them questions don t be shy poke and prod and figure out how they got to be where they are and what you can do in your lives to get yourselves ready for that next step so you re here tonight also because your teachers and principals believe that you have that extra something special maybe it s because you ve got great grades or maybe because it s because you ve excelled at a sport maybe it s because you re the first person to volunteer to help keep your community on track or maybe it s because they see potential in you and believe that something like this will give you that little bit of extra courage to keep you going whatever the reason you are each extraordinary in your own ways even you four little extraordinary people and tonight we just want to say go for it don t hesitate don t act with fear just go for it because as we sit here tonight so many of us i know i do i see a little bit of myself in all of you many of us here didn t come to these positions with a whole lot of wealth and a whole lot of resources i certainly didn t once day each of us in our own way figured out that our fate was in our own hands the choices that we made about our lives would determine our destiny we listened to our parents simple things we listened to our teachers we worked hard we didn t skip class we stayed out of trouble we made certain choices and then we worked even harder when somebody looked at us and doubted us told us what we couldn t do who we couldn t be instead of treating that as a reason to quit we chose it as a reason to push forward even harder and with every little challenge and every little success what we did was gain more confidence in everything that we did the women here tonight those famous and those not will tell you in their conversations that there is no magic dust that leads to success it is something simple hard work determination and belief in one s self simple and as women what we ve learned along the way is that we ve learned to first of all respect ourselves first and foremost and then we learned to respect each other as women to treat each other with dignity and respect not as competition but with love and admiration each and every one of us as women and then we learned to have respect for others as well and we want you to do the same thing as you move through life last week my husband the president barack obama announced the formation of something special the white house council on women and girls and the council is designed to ensure that young women just like you have no limits on your dreams and no obstacles to your achievements and the women in this room have removed many of those obstacles already they ve opened new doors as the women who came before them did the same so it s now up to you all to write the next chapter whether there s a women council or whether there s a role model or whether there s ever another dinner like this you have everything you need to succeed right within you so we want you to believe in yourselves that s something that we want to do and we want you to remember that when you move on to that next level that your job is to do what you see happening here today that s to reach back and find the person behind you who you can help pull up when you go to college and go on to be the next scientist and the next president of the united states always look back to your schools your neighborhoods your communities your churches your synagogues your mosques your families and figure out how you re going to do the same for somebody else give them a boost give them a pep talk show them values to give them a clue on how to get where you are that s all we ask of you so know that we believe in you know that we love you deeply know that as women here the powerful women in this room who were willing to take the time out of their days to spend with you that means that there s something special there already so just grasp on it keep working hard and make us proud and have fun at dinner thank you dem mobama19 7 10 michelle_obama oh my goodness i m out of breath just watching you all oh my goodness that s great i m tired just looking at you all well done yay well this is just very exciting this is exactly what we envisioned happening when we started this music series opening up this white house to just so many original forms of music and we re going to have broadway right here in the east wing tonight and it is phenomenal and more importantly we get to showcase this young talent to get them mixed with some of the best talent that this country has to offer and that s just a powerful combination because we want these kids it didn t look like you did it didn t look you are working with the best i mean we are bringing together some of the best that this country has to offer and putting them together with you all i am so proud of you all i am always proud of you all always holding it up giving me things to show to the world so this is what we had in mind and i want to thank jerry and george and margo and all the talent who has come together for this i want to thank the parents and the teachers who i know are here you guys thank you so much we re going to have fun tonight the whole white house is just lit up i mean you ve got the ushers running around the butlers all sweating but this is an exciting night and we can t wait grandma s coming malia sasha bo if he wouldn t bark but he s not allowed to come so i just wanted to let you know you did fabulously you re ready for whatever comes and also a lot of you guys are getting your first television credit because thanks to pbs hosting performance at the white house yay to pbs for getting it done so all your family members make sure i think it airs it airs in october so there s time to write letters make sure everybody s watching but this is going to be on pbs so it s so exciting for us we are just proud and i m looking forward to tonight so you guys continue to practice you guys i know you ll do terrific and we ll see you tonight the president will be sitting there don t be intimidated where will he be sitting just so that they know where s his seat you guys help them out it s going to be right around there all right he s harmless just keep moving all right you all thank you thank you jerry dem mobama2 2 09 michelle_obama well this is a good thing to see this department fired up and ready to go right i am i am honored to be here this afternoon first let me tell you that you couldn t be luckier than to have as your leader this guy by the name of arne duncan barack and i my brother my family we ve known arne for a very long time and we ve seen his growth his leadership develop over the years and he is someone who is committed hardworking passionate but he s someone who is fair who is honest who is decent and who knows that getting to any goal means you have to build a team from within from the bottom up and i know he s already beginning to do this this kind of turnout and enthusiasm is sort of for me but you know you re behind but i know you re also excited about your new secretary so i m honored to be here to share the stage with arne as well as all of these public servants who have dedicated a lifetime to education and to public service arne wanted me to talk a little bit about myself but i always sort of feel like after two years of a campaign you know you know everything but i think the most important thing to tell you or to remind you is that i am a product of your work i m a product of people who were investing every day in the education of regular kids who d grown up on the south side of chicago kids on the north side folks in the south in the west young people who oftentimes comes into these systems not knowing their own power and their own potential believing that there s some magic out there to great things but because of the work that you ve put in you ve taught us and helped many of us understand that it is our own hard work and our own belief in self our commitment to pushing ourselves along building great communities and families and reinvesting that energy once we have some successes i am a product of your work i wouldn t be here if it weren t for the public schools that nurtured me and helped me along and i am committed as well as my husband to ensuring that more kids like us and kids around this country regardless of their race their income their status their the property values in their neighborhoods get access to an outstanding education so as arne said this is the first stop in many i m going to be visiting agencies throughout this administration to do just something simple and that s to say thank you thank you before we even begin the work because so many of you have been here struggling and pushing for decades and barack and i want to say thank you for what you ve done and thank you for what you will continue to do but we also know that there are new faces coming into this work and we want to welcome you and thank you for the hard work that you re going to put in and i m going to spend the next several weeks or months however long it takes going from agency to agency just to say hello to learn to listen to take information back where possible but truthfully my task here is to say thank you and roll up your sleeves because we have a lot of work to do but the issues that we re collectively working on affect all of us all of these communities they affect you and your children and your grandchildren and those of your friends and your family we re all in this together so we have a stake in educating every single child regardless as i ve said of background and income so the department of education is going to be at the forefront of many of the things that we have to do in this administration and we re going to need that energy in these times of economic challenge we re going to be making investments and i shouldn t say we but the administration we with these investments we re going to create good jobs as we renovate and modernize more than 10 000 schools and improve the learning environment for about 5 million children across this country we ll be able to increase pell grants and make college more affordable for 7 million students and give nearly 4 million students tax credits for tuition imagine that and with these investments that we hope to make through this stimulus package we ll be able to prevent teacher layoffs and education cuts in hard hit states we need to keep teachers in the classrooms throughout this time we ll be able to preserve early childhood education programs and i know all of you all know here the importance of investing in early childhood education and imagine what we can do with millions of dollars of more investment in this area we can expand opportunities in low income districts for all students and particularly for students with disabilities and then as we look over the longer term these investments will accelerate education reform one of arne s specialties by funding and rewarding innovation innovative approaches to teaching and learning such as teacher quality initiatives school turnaround programs and of course charter schools there s a lot of work to do and we re going to need you i ve said that for two years sometimes i don t ask for much other than prayer and hard work and then a little more prayer and then a little more hard work but we ve got a great leader in arne and a wonderful leader in our president obama and more importantly we have to remember that the children of this country are counting on all of us they re looking to us for direction they re looking to us for that ray of hope they re looking to us to help them figure out how to make it through and we have everything we need right here and now to make that happen so we re counting on you every step of the way so thank you for taking the time to come thank you for your service and let s get to work dem mobama2 4 10 michelle_obama thank you thanks all thanks so much thank you it is really a pleasure to be here this is a nice good small group of real hardworking people i really appreciate you all taking the time to welcome me here today i want to thank ron kirk for not just that kind introduction but for his support to this administration not just him alone but his entire family i ve had the pleasure to meet that magnificent smart beautiful wife of his and he is a lucky man for sure but i think that it s safe to say that ambassador kirk took this job a year ago and he probably knew that it wouldn t be easy he knew that the scope of the economic challenges that we face would be tough he knew that a lot of families and businesses and communities in this country were struggling but he embraced that challenge and he has done a phenomenal job and it s not just him who is embracing this challenge but every single one of you here in this room has done so as well all of you have answered that call and we are incredibly proud of you that s one of the reasons why i m making these visits because so often the people who really do the work behind the scenes do not get thanks or recognition and we know it wouldn t be possible without all of you now i ve heard that when this agency was founded by president kennedy back in 1962 it only had 14 employees so even though you re small in numbers you ve really grown a bit since then but you re still a very tight knit family and i ve heard that and i can tell so i want to take some time to recognize some of the members of this family some of your colleagues who are on stage with me today people who have devoted huge portions of their career to this agency people like charlotte brown who has she has 42 years of government service now that s something but then there s also james murphy who has 40 years under his belt where s james and we also have our longest serving couple and don do i get is it don eiss don where are you don eiss and betsy stillman between them they have devoted 50 years to the ustr and they still seem to like each other but that is very impressive and it gives us all a reason to give them all a round of applause it s important for this country to see people who have dedicated decades of service to working on behalf of this country but whether you ve been here for 40 years or 40 days because we have a lot of wonderful young people who are making that same commitment beginning their careers working for the federal government but no matter how long you ve been here each of you gets up every day and you go to work for the american people that s what s first and foremost on your minds and that s why it has been such a privilege as first lady for me to come and make these visits and get to meet you all and to thank you to thank you for the long hours that you put in everybody talks about the president and how hard he works and believe me he does but everybody knows that people don t realize that you all are making the same sacrifices too that you re missing time with your families to get your job done and you re often doing it without any recognition whatsoever so i just want to let you know how much this administration values everything that you do these visits also help me because i get a chance to listen and to learn more about the work that you re all doing and to help actually spotlight because we always bring with us a wonderful group of cameras but we help to spotlight the difference that you re making in the lives of so many americans and that s especially true here at the ustr people need to know about the work that you do what does it mean the fact is is that folks across this country depend on trade to put food on the table and to pay the mortgage and to send their kids to college and as ambassador kirk likes to point out 95 percent of the world s consumers live outside of the borders of this country and that s a pretty big market and that s why here in america we are the biggest exporters on the planet with about one out of every nine dollars earned in this country coming from exports but what a lot of people don t understand is that your work isn t just about boosting gdp or negotiating billion dollar trade agreements which is what we hear about in the papers but it s about keeping the american dream alive for hardworking folks in every corner of this country who depend on the work that you do even if they don t always realize it because of you our small businesses are able to grow and to thrive a manufacturer in kansas can sell machinery in china and hire more workers in america to make it happen and because of businesses that export tend to grow faster create jobs faster pay higher wages that business owner can afford to expand even further and hire more people in the community because of your hard work communities everywhere are stronger they re more resilient even in the face of these tough economic times what you do is maintaining some kind of stability in this country right now more than 6 million americans in cities and towns all across this country owe their jobs to manufacturing exports alone and i know you all work hard to try to make those numbers even bigger i know that through the ambassador you re working to get those numbers up every time i see him he s talking about job growth and making sure that we re doing everything in our power to expand job creation here because of the agreements you ve reached working families can stretch their budgets even further parents can afford to put food on the table they can buy things like computers and cars and save a little for retirement or for a rainy day and because of your vision the next generation of entrepreneurs hard at work in their garages and basements and college dorm rooms all across this country will be able to market their ideas around the world secure in the knowledge that they will get a fair shake in this international market it s important for everyone to see the human face behind the work that you do that real people who depend on you to protect them to guide them and to give them the opportunity to reach their potential and it s important to recognize that every market that you reach and every agreement that you enforce means that someone somewhere can come home to their family at night with their head held high and a newfound sense of purpose in the end everything that you do here at the ustr is part of our commitment to protect and preserve what is best about this nation the ability of every american to find a decent job to be treated fairly in the marketplace and to follow any idea or dream that they have and take it wherever they think it can and for that reason alone you all deserve our admiration and our thanks again not just because you ve been here for 40 or 50 years or 20 days we are very proud of the work that you do and we re going to need you working hard every step of the way we are seeing some stabilization in the economy but there are still a lot of people hurting out there so the work that you do continues to be important but we are grateful to all of you and we hope that you keep an eye on this man and make sure that he stays out of trouble but i want to thank you for taking the time to come see me today and i m going to shake a few hands say hello to these folks back here and i ll be out there in a second so thank you all thanks for your work dem mobama20 1 10 michelle_obama thank you please sit hello everyone and welcome to the white house i m thrilled to be here with all of you as we celebrate national mentoring month mentors have played an incredibly important role in my life and in the president s life that s why last november the women we started a leadership and mentoring program here at the white house for some of the most promising students in washington d c and that s why today we re so happy to welcome a new group of mentors and mentees here with us today and i hope you re as excited about this program as we are are you can i hear a little excitement i want to start by thanking everyone for joining us today from all across the country both the old folks and the young folks and some of the young people here have been with their mentors for a while now i understand and some of you are meeting your mentors for the first time today for those of you starting out today we are honored to be able to pair you with some incredibly talented people who help run our government and help the president do his job each and every day all of your mentors are taking time out of their busy schedules and they are busy these days because they want to hear from you this is sincere people are doing this because they want to be a part of your lives they want to hear about your hopes and dreams and your passions and your struggles they are here because they believe in your potential and they want to share some of the lessons that they ve learned along the way because even though they might look a little old remember that these men were standing in your shoes not too long ago these are the kind of relationships we ve been building with our young women over the past few months and the leadership mentoring program is one of the most exciting programs and i m so proud of the work that we ve done and with our young girls over these past few months we ve studied the history and protocol that go into hosting a state dinner they were with us during the first state dinner we ve gotten a behind the scenes look at events here at the white house and around d c many of them have accompanied me in my motorcade and they ve spent time with me at events we ve done our own share of service we packed bags of food for folks in need and we ve learned a lot about the dos and don ts of applying for a job and starting a career because we want this experience to be very practical for the young girls as well and we ve had a lot of fun so far and we ve gotten to do much more than we thought it s been just a terrific time but the biggest lesson our girls have learned and the one i hope you all learn as you embark on this program is that each of us has the ability to move beyond the circumstances that we were born into that s really the story of both me and the president that through hard work and perseverance that you can actually choose the life that you want to live it s your choice so i hope that each of you will take full advantage of this opportunity and by taking full advantage that means once you get over the initial shock of being here that you ask questions that you really take time to get to know your mentors don t wait for them to ask you find out every single thing about them their families their education their challenges their struggles get to know them and also in the process realize your own potential the only thing that we ask in return and we said this to the girls is that when this is all over that you give back that you do the same for someone else that s the only thing we ask of you because the beauty of being a mentor is that anyone can do it at any age so that means if there s a sibling in your life a friend a cousin another person down the road you can thank your own mentor for turning around and helping pull someone else up you can do that by doing the same think about that right now not just today but in every aspect of your life that s a commitment that both the president and i have made that no matter how far we climb we re always looking back to figure out who we can pull up along the way and it s never too soon for each of you so thank you all so much for coming we are proud of all of you not just the mentees but the mentors for the work that you re doing and now i have one final honor and that is to introduce one of our star mentees the little brother of the year anthony saldaa let s give him a warm dem mobama20 10 09 michelle_obama thank you first of all you all have to be just as fired up as the overflow crowd that i just talked to they were really pumped up okay all right that s good that s good first of all let me thank secretary shinseki for that warm introduction and for his decades of courageous service to this country i was supposed to come earlier and my husband bumped me which happens all the time but i was determined so i am here today would have been here months ago but i am i m happy to be here and i m happy to be working alongside of all of you on behalf of our veterans it s a thrill i ve enjoyed getting to know the secretary along with his wife who is just a tremendous asset to this administration and to the nation we all appreciate all the work that she s doing on behalf of nation s military children and i know she s not here today because she s just getting back in town from a really tough trip in hawaii but please send her my best she has been just a terrific partner i am honored to be here at the va my neighbors i did not walk it always seems so strange to ride around the block and get out of the car but then i look at all the people who would we have to shut down just for me to walk across the park but it s good to be here as you know my husband and i our children we are happy to be in washington close to nine months if not more which i can t believe and as all of you know i ve been trying to do my best to get to know all of our team going by all the agencies and listening and learning and taking that information back and having it affect the work that i do as well as what goes on in the white house but we re new here we re the new guys on the block and i say that everywhere i go many of you have been devoting your lives to this work you ve spent decades especially the people who are standing behind me people who have been working in the va or working for the federal government for longer than i ve been alive and we are grateful to all of you for your long service and we have to give you a round of applause and one of the reasons why i do this is because so often federal employees feel under appreciated you often get a lot of the blame but sometimes none of the thanks and my simple job is to say thank you because the job that you do is a big one it is it s huge particularly for the men and women in uniform who serve or who have served and i think it s important for people to understand all that happens at these agencies how much people around the country depend on the work that you do here at the va nearly 300 000 of you here and at va facilities around the country serve our nation s veterans and families you re their health care providers you re their life insurers and you re the key to educational opportunity for many of them you help them buy homes which is really truly the very claim to the dream that they defend and while you do all that you re working to transform this very system to be the 21st century organization that s worthy of today s veterans and the veterans of tomorrow so i wanted to say thank you for all of that and thank you for hanging in there when times get tough we are grateful for the men and women who serve in uniform but we re also grateful to all of you for the work that you do so thank you on behalf of me and the president and on behalf of the country over the past few years i ve had the opportunity to visit with families on bases across the country as you know i just last week it was either thursday or friday i was with families at eglin air force base in florida about a thousand men and women in uniform stood in a very hot hangar it was about a hundred degrees but they were so fired up and you know it made the trip just so worthwhile and i really cherish those visits because it gives me a chance to say thank you to them but it gives me a chance to assure our servicemembers and their families that we are committed to their needs that we as a nation not just as the obama administration but we as a nation are really committed to help them meet their needs and it gives me a chance to find out how we re doing what we re falling down on what we can improve and few of our obligations are as important than what we do here what you do here at the va our military families give more than most of us can really fully understand if you haven t been there it s really hard to imagine the amount of sacrifice and the courage and the bravery that not just happens for the men and women in uniforms but the members of their families that they leave behind they hear and answer a call to serve that few of us would be able to do or willing to do when troops are deployed or they re fallen they feel an absence greater than we can even comprehend because their service and their sacrifice aren t limited to the husband wife mother or father wearing the uniform that sacrifice is borne by the entire family the entire community and that s why your work is so critical and we can t underestimate that importance day in and day out the folks here at the va are working to uphold america s sacred trust with those who defend our freedom because it s a commitment that doesn t end when our soldiers sailors airmen marines or coast guards men and women take off the uniform many of them come home with more battles to fight and they don t anticipate these battles and thanks to the leadership of secretary shinseki and the efforts of each and every one of you we re making progress towards giving our veterans the kind of 21st century va that they truly deserve we submitted a budget and by we i mean my husband that includes the largest single year percentage increase in va funding in three decades this administration is expanding va health coverage to 500 000 more veterans who had been previously denied this administration has made progress towards creating one lifetime electronic health record service for members that will stay with them from the day they enlist to the day they no longer need these services and that s something that i hear in all of my visits just simplifying the medical records you re doing that this administration is increasing the number of vet centers and mobile health clinics expanding access to care to rural areas that need it that s another thing that i ve heard if you don t live in the right community by an existing center many of our veterans can t even access the service that s being provided you re working on that as well this administration put new focus on the new care required for today s wars injuries like post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury there have been new commitments to ending the morale outrage or the moral outrage of veterans falling into homelessness that s something that the president talked about on the campaign trail we shouldn t be in a position where our men and women in uniform are ever without a place to live after serving this country and on thursday the president will keep a promise that he made on the campaign by signing into law the veterans health care budget reform and transparency act this legislation guarantees a timely and predictable flow of funding for va medical care because that s what s required to guarantee better care to the men and women who serve this country after all our veterans unwavering belief in this country is what inspired them to serve in the first place they deserve our unwavering support in return it seems so simple they deserve the care that they were promised and they deserve the benefits that they earned and as long as my husband is commander in chief that s what s going to happen and i know that and i know that because of who you all are as well and fortunately now you ll have more resources to make that possible my husband will never forget that his efforts are only as strong as the people on his team no matter what bills he signs into law no matter what legislation he passes or helps to pass it only works because of all of you behind it making it real and i ve been deeply moved by the character and commitment of the federal employees that i ve come in contact with people who devote their lives to serving this country often for a lot less financial stability and emotional rest than you would like but your work is vital it really is and it s worthy of the passion that you show so it s just important for you to know that the president and i are proud of you just as proud as we are of the men and women who serve this country the people that you serve and we just urge you to just keep it up we are at the beginning of a long road of change and we re going to need every single one of you feeling the kind of passion and engagement when times are good and when times get tough president obama can t do this alone our veterans and their families and the men and women in uniform can t do it without you fighting and staying focused and staying engaged they need you we need you and we re just very grateful so with that i will stop come and shake some hands i want to thank you all for everything that you do it s been a pleasure dem mobama20 2 09 michelle_obama okay you all are fired up in here is it because you work in this beautiful new building it is a gorgeous facility i am just honored to be here first let me thank your secretary secretary lahood for that kind introduction i also want to thank vice admiral thomas barrett the deputy secretary for joining us today as you all know secretary lahood came into the administration after serving in the house of representatives in my state illinois for 14 years representing the folks in that state so barack and i can t be more pleased that he s taken on the task here at the department of transportation to work to get that money for the economic recovery plan out there doing good things in the communities as you have heard i have taken on what i think is the fun task of coming to every department in washington because i want to meet my new neighbors learn more about the community get to know our co workers every one who s going to be standing side by side with us over this wonderful journey that we re on but it s important as a reminder to let people know that the nation s business is carried out by all of you dedicated public servants like the folks standing behind me all of you here who have devoted their careers who have been doing this work for decades so my job is simple i m here to say thank you thank you there isn t a day that goes by that the work of the department of transportation doesn t touch the lives of every single person in america you all know that sometimes people forget we get to work we drive our children to school and to basketball or to ballet or to soccer in my instance because of the roads and the highways that are entrusted to your care we rely on the airlines the trains the buses that are under your supervision to reach loved ones and to conduct business in distant places all over this country because of your work we can buy the products that make life comfortable and conduct the commerce that s the engine of our economy because of the highways and waterways and railways that you oversee every day you carry out the business of keeping america moving right and now that president obama has signed the economic recovery plan into law you will also help carry out the business of getting our economy moving again as well that s an important job the economic recovery plan is making the largest investment in our nation s infrastructure since the interstate highways were created in the 1950s it s time it will repair and rebuild highways expand access to public transportation which we all need invest in high speed rail which we all need and improve our nation s airports throughout our history from early railway workers who laid the first tracks to the sleeping car porters whose unions became an organized trailblazer in civil rights my uncles were pullman porters to the men and women today who manage ports who drive trucks and repair roads and bridges our nation s transportation system has been a vital source of well paying jobs and a backbone of america s middle class so that s why your management the work that you re doing here in transportation to manage the investments in the economic recovery plan is so very important there is a lot of work to do and we are fortunate to have great leaders like president obama and secretary lahood we are lucky to have such great leadership at a time such as this but i say this everywhere i go in every agency i ve visited and every agency that i will visit our leaders are only as strong as those who hold them up all of you so that s why i m here people across the country are counting on you to keep them safe to help them live their lives and to put them back to work we are at the beginning of what will be a long and extraordinary journey we re going to need each and every one of you we re going to need one another not just here in washington but across the country and barack and i want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the service that you ve already committed for the years that you ve worked for administrations all throughout the history of this fine nation i want to thank you for your sacrifice because many of you who were public servants have been sacrificing every year sacrificing within your own families coming to work when it s hard and working even harder so just know that we value you that america values you and together we can get this country moving again so thank you thank you so much and let s get to work dem mobama20 2 10 michelle_obama thank you all so much thank you it is a pleasure for me to be here with all of you today and to welcome you all to washington thank you governor douglas for that very kind introduction and thanks to you and governor manchin for your leadership in vermont as well as west virginia and as the chair and the vice chair of the nga and i also want to recognize all the governors who are here today and to thank you for your outstanding leadership and the dedicated service that you provide to states all across this country we are grateful to you now i would be remiss if i didn t thank all the spouses who are here for all the things you have to put up with the long hours absolutely you all are making the same kind of sacrifices putting up with long hours and late night crises and all i can say is been there done that and i know how you feel and we are just grateful to have you all and again we ll give them another round of applause now i know that the focus of this year s meeting is the issue of health care and over the next few days you re going to be talking about spiraling costs that are straining your budgets and running up all of our deficits costs like the nearly 150 billion a year that we spend on obesity related conditions like diabetes heart disease and high blood pressure you re going to talk about the staggering medicaid burdens and how premiums have risen three times faster than wages often bankrupting families in your states sinking businesses in states all across this country but we all know that there s another set of statistics that have to be a part of this discussion like how nearly one in three of our children in this country is now overweight or obese like how one in three kids today will eventually develop diabetes and in the african american and hispanic communities the number is nearly half because if we think our health care costs are high now just wait until 10 years from now think about the many billions we re going to be spending then think about how high those premiums are going to be when our kids are old enough to have families of their own and businesses of their own so we all know that we can t solve our health care problems unless we address our childhood obesity problem too and that s really why i m here today to talk about the issue of childhood obesity that is so important to me and what our states and our nations can do to solve it but we have to begin by understanding how we got here what s caused this crisis in the first place and i have my theories but when you all think about it this is a relatively new phenomenon this wasn t something that we were dealing with when i was growing up back when we were all growing up most of us led lives that naturally kept us at a healthy weight we walked to school and we walked home because we usually lived in communities where our schools were close all of us ran around all day at school doing recess and gym because everybody had to do it and then when we got home we d be sent right back outside and told not to come back home until dinner was served you know your parents didn t let you in the house and back then we ate sensibly we had many more home cooked meals that was the norm and much to our dismay at the time there was always something green on the plate fast food and dessert was a special treat you had it but you didn t have it every day and the portion sizes were reasonable in my family i remember a couple of pints of ice cream this was a big treat we d get three pints of ice cream for a family of four and that would last us a week because you wouldn t eat a pint you d get a scoop and that would be it you d savor that a spoonful at a time and these weren t arbitrary rules that our parents just made up as we know now it was a way of life they imposed to help keep us active and healthy they knew back then that kids couldn t and shouldn t sit still for hours they knew that kids needed to run around and play they knew that keeping us healthy wasn t about saying no to everything but it was about balance and moderation we all had our share of burgers and fries and ice cream growing up we just didn t have it every day and not at every meal but somewhere along the line we kind of lost that sense of perspective and moderation and we all want the very best for our kids just like our parents wanted for us but with the pressures of today s economy and the breakneck pace of modern life many parents feel like the deck is stacked against them they want to prepare healthy foods for their kids but a lot of times they re tight on money and they just can t afford these meals or oftentimes they re tight on time because they re juggling longer hours at work and many of them juggling multiple jobs so they just can t swing coming home and making a home cooked meal around the dinner table it s hard they want their kids to be active but sometimes they live in communities where either it s not practical to walk to school or worse yet it s not safe or they live in communities where gym classes and school sports are considered luxuries and not necessities the first things to go in a budget crunch and those afternoons playing outside they ve been replaced by afternoons sitting inside in front of the tv or video games or the internet and as a result many parents feel like they ve lost that sense of being in charge that their parents had but we have to be honest with ourselves our kids didn t do this to themselves our kids didn t decide whether there s time for recess or gym class or our kids don t decide what s served to them in the school cafeteria our kids don t decide whether to build playgrounds and parks in their neighborhoods or whether to bring supermarkets and farmer s markets to their communities we set those priorities we make those decisions and even if it doesn t feel like we re in charge we are but that s the good news because if we make these decisions here then we can decide to solve this problem and that s precisely what so many of you are doing right now in your states you re experimenting and innovating many of you are ignoring the naysayers and the old partisan divides and focusing solely on what works in pennsylvania for example folks started a fresh food financing initiative to bring grocery stores to underserved areas and i got to visit one of those communities yesterday when i spent some time with governor rendell in philadelphia in that community they started with 30 million and then they leveraged that for an additional 190 million from the private and non profit sectors and with that money they ve funded 83 supermarket projects in 34 counties that are making profits and they re projected to create more than 5 000 jobs in north carolina they ve launched a full scale effort to help kids eat healthier and to exercise more they ve banned snack and soda vending machines from elementary schools they ve given grants to cities and to counties for things like sidewalks and trails and community gardens and they ve trained 41 000 teachers across the state on how to incorporate physical activity into the classroom and arkansas started on the issue of childhood obesity way back in 2003 something former governor huckabee and i discussed yesterday when i appeared on his tv show they screened students bmis which was controversial they got healthier food into their schools and required regular physical education classes and as a result that state was able to halt the rise of childhood obesity completely what you all are doing is proof that if we are creative and committed enough if we meet this challenge with the kind of energy and determination that it requires then we can take back control and we can turn back the tide and we can give our kids the kind of lives they deserve and that s why last week we launched this wonderful initiative called let s move it s a nationwide campaign to rally this country around a single ambitious goal and that is to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that the kids born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight so we ve issued a call to action we ve said let s move let s move to help families and communities make healthier decisions for their kids and let s move to bring together governors and mayors and doctors nurses our business leaders non profit community our educators our athletes our parents to tackle this challenge once and for all because it s going to take every last one of us particularly folks in the private sector from the food industry offering healthier options to retailers who understand that what s good for kids and families can actually be good for businesses too that s why over the next 90 days the first ever government wide task force which includes members of our cabinet will develop a national action plan and they won t just review every government program relating to child nutrition and physical activity and advise us on how to marshal those resources but they re also going to develop benchmarks to measure our progress and recommend actions that can be taken by the private and the non profit sectors but we cannot wait 90 days to get to work here so we ve already gotten started on a series of initiatives to achieve our goal there are four key pillars the first let s move to offer parents the tools and information they need and that many have been asking for to make healthier choices for their kids so many parents want to do the right thing but they are bombarded by conflicting information and they don t know what to believe or where to start that s why many of you have been running public education campaigns and creating healthy living web sites and california is leading the way becoming the first state in the country to require restaurant chains of a certain size to post calorie information on menus and menu boards just one part of an aggressive anti obesity strategy that s making a difference across that state and the health care legislation in congress follows their lead it includes a similar provision to help parents make informed decisions let s move is going to add to these efforts we ve started with a web site called letsmove gov that s going to have helpful tips and step by step strategies for parents we re also working with pediatricians and family doctors to encourage them to screen kids for obesity early and then actually write out a prescription for parents with action steps that they can take to address it so they don t feel like they re dealing with this problem alone and we ve been working with the fda and the food industry to make our food labels more customer friendly so that people don t spend hours squinting at words they can t pronounce to know if the foods they re buying are healthy in fact the nation s beverage companies the largest just announced that they re going to be providing clearly visible information about calories on the front of their products and on their vending machines and soda fountains and this is a step in the right direction it s an important step but it s still only one step and we have so many more ahead we can t forget for example that 31 million of our children participate in federal school meal programs so we don t want to be in the position where we take one step forward with parents making good decisions but then we take two steps back when lunch time rolls around at school and kids are faced with poor choices in the school cafeteria so let s move to get healthier food into our nation s schools and that s the second part of this initiative there s a reason why our governors are such passionate advocates for our school meal programs it s because you all know the impact that these programs have you know that when kids get the nutrition they need they perform better in the classroom and they miss fewer days of school so let s multiply that by 31 million and we are talking about a serious impact on education in this country that s why we ve set a goal of doubling the number of schools in the healthierus school challenge and we ve already gotten several major food suppliers to commit to offering healthier school meals we re also updating and strengthening the child nutrition act secretary vilsack is taking the lead on these efforts and we plan to invest an additional 10 billion over 10 years to fund that legislation this will allow us to serve 1 million more kids in the first five years and dramatically improve the quality of food in our schools decreasing sugar fat and salt and increasing fruits vegetables and whole grains but our success here is up to you it s up to you to get that get the most out of these new investments and maybe that means demanding more from your suppliers in your state or maybe renegotiating your contracts to include healthier options maybe it means starting a farm to school program or insisting on healthier options in school vending machines which by the way has actually meant increased revenues in schools in kentucky and maine and elsewhere but while school meals provide critical nutrition for millions of kids we also can t forget that kids get plenty of their calories at home right in their own neighborhoods and many of our kids live in what we call food deserts and these are areas without access to a grocery store imagine that living in a community without a grocery store so too many of those calories at home come from fast food or processed foods from the local gas station or convenience store so that s why the third component of let s move is let s move to ensure that all our families have access to healthy affordable food in their communities right now there are food deserts in every single state in this country so we ve set an ambitious goal and that is to eliminate every last one of those food deserts within seven years and to achieve this we ve created the healthy food financing initiative that is modeled on what was so successful in pennsylvania we ll start with an initial investment of 400 million a year and we ll use that to leverage hundreds of millions more from the private and non profit sectors to bring grocery stores to underserved areas across the country and once again our success here is going to depend so much on what you do we need you to encourage communities to apply for these grants and provide the right incentives from helpful zoning laws to remapped transit routes that help shoppers access stores to job training to entice grocers with a well prepared workforce but we know that eating right is only part of the battle we all know that in our own lives we know that physical activity is critical too not just for better health but for better academic achievement experts recommend that kids get at least 60 minutes of active play each day and we know that many of our kids aren t anywhere close to that so let s move and i mean that literally we have to move to find new ways for our kids to be physically active both in and out of school and i have to say that many of you have been very creative on this piece already folks in west virginia have taken the lead in bringing ddr that s dance dance revolution it s a new video game that gets kids up and moving many other states use it as well and let me tell you i can attest to dance dance revolution we got it at camp david and it will make you sweat and it is addictive in a very good way the president still can t do it georgia is using a program called hopsports and they re beaming in videos of famous athletes into gym classes so kids can learn skills and techniques from their heroes and their role models and to build on these efforts let s move is going to work to modernize and expand the president s physical fitness challenge and we ve already recruited professional athletes from dozens of different sports leagues they re going to be involved to encourage our kids to get and stay active so that s just some of what we re doing just some of it that s how we re working to attack this problem from every single angle because that s the thing about this issue of childhood obesity it has so many different causes there are so many different culprits and it s not enough to tackle any one of them alone because we can give our kids the healthiest school meals imaginable but if the rest of their calories come from the corner store or drive through then they still won t get adequate nutrition and we can have shiny new supermarkets on every block in every community but if parents don t have the information they need they ll still struggle to make the right choices for their kids so we need a comprehensive coordinated approach to this problem but that doesn t necessarily mean an expensive approach because i know that many of you are stretched thinner than ever in these times and don t actually have money to spare but often it s about doing more with what you already have if you re already paving a new road for example why not add a sidewalk or a bike path too or if you re already building a housing development why not add a playground if you ve got school gyms or playing fields empty after hours why not find a way to open them up to the community at night or on the weekends i also want to be clear that comprehensive and coordinated doesn t mean centralized i ve spoken to so many experts on this issue and not a single one of them has said that the solution is for the federal government to tell people what to do that doesn t work there is no one size fits all answer to this problem because what works in rhode island might not work in arizona what s perfect for hawaii might not be right for minnesota different states as you know have different needs and different priorities and different resources and you all know best what s going to work for the people that you serve you know what s working and you know what isn t that s why the nga s efforts to support this issue and to provide best practice is going to be so valuable it has already been that s why i ve reached out to so many of you to get your ideas and your input and to learn more about how we can help you and i want to hear from every single state of every size from every region i want to work with leaders from both parties because the way i see this there is nothing democratic or republican there is nothing liberal or conservative about wanting our kids to lead active healthy lives there s no place for politics when it comes to fighting childhood obesity and i know all of you agree i know that you know that you know that because with a phone call or the stroke of a pen you can determine whether a child can see a doctor or get a decent education or have a safe place to play because you all are fighting the real battles every day on behalf of our kids and you don t have time for the fake battles you re interested in what works what makes a real difference in people s lives what will make things better for the next generation it s funny because that s what drove president theodore roosevelt to call the very first meeting of this organization a century ago to speak to america s governors about conservation about preserving america s beauty and bounty not just for the current generation but for generations to come working for the next generation is what drives so many americans to do what they do to work that extra shift to take that extra job to go without themselves just so that their kids can have more than they did it s what we ve always done in this country i know my parents have done it for me they measured their success by the success of their children by whether their children were happier and healthier and had a better shot at fulfilling their dreams than they did that s why so many of you got involved in politics in the first place to leave something better for those who are going to come after you and in the end that s what let s move is all about it is simple let s stop wringing our hands and talking about it and citing statistics let s act let s move let s give our kids the future they deserve look i look forward to working with all of you in these efforts over the months and years ahead i m going to need you i m going to need you championing these causes giving me feedback giving me direction and guidance it will not work any other way and our kids can t afford for us to get this wrong and we know it so thank you in advance for your help and i look forward to seeing you all on the dance floor tomorrow night thank you so much dem mobama20 7 10 michelle_obama oh man those were cool pretty cool that s my first like major psa what do you think kids good two thumbs up would you listen yes i thought so okay well good afternoon everybody and thank you tim thank you for that introduction thank you for all your support i want to join the thank yous to the entire baltimore orioles organization to pete angelos and his family for hosting us today this is certainly a beautiful park kids don t you think this is cool you re sitting in the middle of a ballpark okay i also want to thank the tampa bay rays and owner stuart sternberg and his family for their support also thanks to tony clark and the entire mlb players association and all 30 players who agreed to be part of the public service advertising campaign so that s it just means so much to these kids to see you guys joining in this your voice means so much more to them than anything we could say and we re just proud to have you on board so thank you so much i also want to thank the first lady of maryland katie o malley also baltimore s mayor mayor rawlings blake thank you so much for being here today thank you for your support thank you for making this city a strong one and letting us launch this in your city we really appreciate it and i want to thank commissioner selig and his wife sue and their family for being here as sue said they sent the women to do the job today i think we re handling it right sue and last but not least to you guys the kids all the major league baseball rbi program participants and all those supporters from the boys and girls clubs all around the country who ve helped millions of kids lead happier healthier lives because kids i know you re hot out there i know there are cameras but we re here because of you truly this is all about you everything we re doing is about you kids sitting here and it s important for you to know that the truth is that lots of kids just aren t getting enough healthy foods and they re not getting enough exercise and that s going to make it hard for them to pay attention in class it s going to make it hard for them to keep up with their friends on the playground and it s going to make it difficult for young kids to grow up to be the kind of strong athletes that we see here so we needed to do something about it so when i became first lady we started planting a garden and doing some things around healthy eating but it led to the launch of a broader conversation a campaign called let s move and let s move has a simple goal we re trying to end childhood obesity in a generation so that kids born today grow up healthier and able to pursue their dreams we re doing a lot of things we re trying to get parents and teachers and mayors and governors and athletes and doctors we need everyone involved in this effort on behalf of our kids the campaign is going to do four things first we re helping parents to make better choices we re trying to get companies to provide healthier foods for you guys to eat the second thing we re trying to help schools like yours offer healthier meals so that you get good food at school the third thing we re making sure that all families can get healthy affordable food in the communities where they live one of the biggest problems in this country is that lots of children live in neighborhoods that don t have a supermarket at all not a single supermarket that means that healthy fruits and vegetables are harder to find and we re trying to change that and number four which is why we re here today is that we re trying to get you kids moving the whole campaign is about let s move because the truth is guys you are supposed to be getting at least 60 minutes of active play every single day are you guys doing that right now how many kids are getting 60 minutes a whole hour every day just to play let me see some hands all right we got these two i know i m getting mine in but that s what led athletes to be the great players that they are today because they never stop moving if you talk to your mothers right you guys you never stop moving never and that s what you guys need to do and that s why we re here we ve got to get you kids focused and moving and we ve got organizations all across the country ready to help at first when these players were kids they found a sport that they loved and they practiced and practiced and practiced until they were better at it than anybody else so we want you guys to do the same thing so that s why we re here i know you guys are hot but we re going to get you guys moving today and one of the things we want you to think about doing this is a challenge that i have from the president of the united states are you ready he s going to give out some awards an active life award for kids who are committed to doing activity every day of the week or at least five days a week okay and if you can commit to doing that and get your parents involved and your schools involved you ll get one of those awards maybe you ll get to come to the white house but you have to commit to do that do you think you re ready to compete this could be the start of it are you ready to be healthier are you ready to eat more vegetables are you ready to drink more water are you ready to jump up and down throw some balls sweat scream all right let s do it let s move thank you guys i m going to get out there with you i got my shoes on all right let s get going dem mobama21 1 10 michelle_obama hey all right so who would have thought that the department of commerce was so happening you guys are alive there s energy here thank you i am thrilled to be here it is exciting for me to come and see you i ve been planning to come for a little bit but now i m here i want to thank your dear secretary secretary locke for that kind introduction and for his outstanding work for this department and i want to take this moment to wish him a happy birthday yes as a fellow capricorn right that s what you are that s what it is yes and he doesn t look a day over 30 35 right whatever the number my husband and i wish you a happy birthday and we are so proud of the work that you re doing here at the department of commerce you didn t exactly start this job at a quiet time for the agency right from the economic challenges that we face to the challenge of conducting our census which i know many of you are involved in let s hear it for the census people i think that it s fair to say that your secretary has had a pretty busy year but he s risen to the occasion leading by example calling on more than 50 000 employees of this department to give their jobs everything they ve got and it feels like in here that you all are doing just that am i right and all of you and your colleagues all across this city the nation across the world quite frankly and i know some of them are watching you all have answered the call and we re proud of you some of you have been here for decades now as we just heard like these folks on stage who are some of the longest serving employees here i m always excited to meet people who have worked at a place longer than i ve been alive so that s a good thing and they look wonderful and then there are others of you who may have started just this year in this administration so we want to give the newbies a shout out take a look onstage with responsibility dedication focus this could be you don t laugh it s a job right but we welcome you all but i know that all of you are working and working hard every day for the american people and i m here to do what i love doing most and that is to say thank you to all of you for the work that you re doing this is something that i ve been doing for an entire year now as first lady one of the many things is coming to the agencies and thanking you for your work and your service because a lot of times we forget that behind all the news headlines and the reports there are people who are making sacrifices and working long hours and sometimes not feeling appreciated at all and it s been a wonderful part of my job to be a representative from the white house to tell you how much we value your work and your sacrifice over the years but it s been substantively useful for me as well coming here listening learning getting a better understanding of what happens at each agency using the spotlight to share with the rest of the country all that you do so i m pleased to have the chance to be here today at this department to make one more stop because what you all do to spur innovation support america s businesses and keep our economy competitive is so very important it s important at any time but it is particularly critical during the tough economic times that this nation is facing right now and we know that there are a lot of families out there who are struggling some of you are struggling right here you know people in your communities and your families and your churches who are struggling we know that a lot of young people are worried about whether they ll have the opportunities that they need to build their own careers and make a life of their own and to provide for their families and to build their future dreams but we also know this that in difficult times like these we have always as a nation come together always and as my husband says these are not the most difficult times by far in this nation in these times we come together and we overcome and we re able to face these challenges and we have what it takes to do that again today i m sure of it right now there are scientists and innovators who are working around the clock you know them you re supporting them they re chasing the breakthroughs and the discoveries that are going to change the way we live and work from this point forward there are entrepreneurs in garages and basements and college dorm rooms who are brainstorming late into the night about how they re going to turn that good idea into a viable business workers across this country are pouring themselves into their jobs every single day determined to offer the best products and services on the planet that is the nation that we live in and that s where all of you come in all of you here in this department because ceos don t just flip a coin to decide whether to set up shop here in america or overseas you know that products don t just sell themselves and businesses don t succeed by accident these things happen in part when companies have the right conditions for growth and the right markets for their goods and the kind of support they need to get off the ground in the first place and keep growing and expanding and that s the kind of assistance that all of you do to support and provide these businesses with the opportunities they need helping people protect their ideas and to make their businesses more productive opening new markets for their products and connecting them with resources and customers around the world and that s what it s going to take for us to create new jobs and promote new prosperity and it s important for america to know how important this department is in making all of that happen and that is the real human story behind the work that you do again it s important for america to understand that connection how every innovation that you spur here every business you help every dream that you nurture means a livelihood for another family out there somewhere a source of income for another community it means another building block for our economy and you all aren t just helping create jobs today this isn t just about right now your work doesn t just strengthen our economy this year or this decade you are laying the foundation for our economic prosperity for generations to come you re going to be helping my girls by connecting underserved communities to the internet for example driving innovation in everything from nanotechnology to cyber security i hear that you re even fast tracking patents for inventions that promote clean energy something that my husband has talked about since the day he took the oath of office and all of this speaks to the broader mission of this department again something that people don t know that you re here doing it s the mission at the heart of the noaa s work can i hear it from noaa to protect our oceans and our environments it s the mission of the census bureau s work yes again for the census bureau to ensure that everyone is counted so that our government can truly serve all our people and i learned that you have even hit the road with your portrait of america road tour which is really fascinating covering more than 150 000 miles to encourage people across the country to participate in the census what a wonderful idea to encourage people to engage to paint that picture of why the census is so critical in the end everything that you do here at the department of commerce is in service of a common purpose and that is to protect and promote what s best about this nation the industry and the ingenuity of all the people who live in this country the vitality of our national resources the success of our democracy and for all of that we should honor you and thank you we re very proud of you and this year is going to be even more important the focus of this administration has always been but it really will be in this year on job creation because again people are hurting so what you all will be doing over the next year everything you do will mean something to someone in this country so we want to make sure that you feel good as we enter this new year that you feel ready that you feel inspired and you feel passionate and engaged and we look forward to working with you in the years to months to come i m going to be back so thank you all again and i ll come out and shake some hands good luck with the year dem mobama21 10 09 michelle_obama well hello it s good to see everybody perfect weather right thank you so much i am thrilled to have you all here today at the white house and i also want to thank a few people before we start not just the young people here who also some of you brought your parents so let s see the parents give the parents a round of applause but in addition to all of you we ve got a few pretty special guests we ve got some talented chefs and nutritionists here to teach us how to make healthy breakfasts lunches and snacks so i want to first want to introduce koren grieveson who i just got to meet koren where are you there she is over there she s from my hometown chicago yay for chicago and then we have todd gray todd where are you raise your hand todd is from my new hometown right here in washington d c and then we ve got sam kass who a lot of you probably met but sam is in charge of the white house garden so he oversees all of that along with all of our wonderful white house chefs everybody from the white house team raise your hands all of our white house crew and we also have vahista ussery and the rest of the staff from the school nutrition association who are on the frontlines every day in our schools so vahista where are you and all of the nutrition experts and elie krieger one of the nutritionists from the food network she s way in the back with her family thank you elie and i want to thank all the folks from the ymca and playworks they helped us set up all the fun things that we re going to have to do after we get through talking so let s give them a round of applause u s department of agriculture for joining us today and for all of his hard work and leadership on making our food and our schools healthier he s been doing a phenomenal job and it seems like just yesterday that secretary vilsack and i were out here to begin digging for the garden and it seems like just yesterday and one of our goals was to focus on the importance of educating our kids about healthy eating so it wasn t just about planting a garden it was also to begin to talk about nutrition and to highlight the little ways that each of us can add more healthy fruits and vegetables to our diet something that i think about all the time as a mother we felt that this was especially important right now when so many children in this nation are facing health problems that are entirely preventable so we ve got our kids who are struggling with things that we have the power to control right now one in three children in this country are overweight or obese and as i ve said many times before if we think we re dealing with a serious health problem now you know then we project out to five 10 20 years from now when we see these rates increase and all the illnesses that result from obesity whether it s high blood pressure or heart disease cancer and believe it or not which is a very surprising thing medical experts are now warning that for the first time in the history of this nation we re headed for the next generation being on track to have a shorter life span than us that s the way we re going right now and none of us wants that none of us wants that for our children and for our children s futures even if we don t care about ourselves we don t want that for our kids we want our children to eat right not just because it s the right thing to do but because quite frankly healthy good food tastes good and we want them to experience that we don t just want our kids to exercise because we tell them to we want them to exercise because it s fun and they enjoy it and we want them to learn now how to lead good healthy lifestyles so that they re not struggling to figure out how to do that when they re older but as a parent and i know all of you here today we know that sometimes doing all that is easier said than done because we all care but it is becoming so increasingly difficult to provide all that for our kids and you all know that better than anyone here as parents we re all pulled in a million different directions working hard working long hours trying to do everything be perfect parents we love you guys so much we just want everything for you but it s hard to do everything and when you come home from a long day at work and the refrigerator is empty and you know you don t feel like cooking the easiest and sometimes the cheapest thing to do is to get in a fast food drive thru we ve all done it because we are overwhelmed and we don t know what the options are and today life is so different from when i was growing up kids and i know your parents tell you this i tell my kids this when i was growing up fast food was a treat you know we couldn t afford to get fast food every week because my parents couldn t afford it so it was something you did on a special occasion we had pizza about once every school year once every semester when we got good grades that s when we got pizza it was pizza day that s what we got for getting good grades pizza and we didn t have dessert every single night my mother would tell us dessert is not a right it s a treat so we had it on special occasions we didn t have and i have to tell my kids this you don t get dessert every night of the week otherwise it s not a treat it s just something that you do and my mother was also very clear in our household that you ate what she fixed mmm yes you ate what she fixed and if you didn t eat that then you didn t eat and in my household is if you say you re not hungry then you have to eat your vegetables and then you get up and leave and you don t ask for anything else and go to bed right so these are the kind of rules that i grew up with that all of your moms and your dads grew up with and these are the kind of rules and boundaries and guidelines that we want to set for all of you but in my household there were no absolutes right i mean we love good food too that s why i always say there s nothing that the first family loves more than a good burger right and look my favorite food in the whole wide world are french fries i love them dearly deeply i have a good relationship with french fries and i would eat them every single day if i could i really would but i know that if i m eating the right things and i tell my girls this if you re getting the right foods for most of the time then when it s time to have cake and french fries on those special occasions then you balance it out so it s not about any absolute no s it s just about striking a balance and that s what i know your moms are trying to teach you all that s what i m trying to teach my girls but these days even when parents do have the time and the resources to buy healthy foods and make a simple meal at home the reality is that kids are spending a third of their time at school right so we don t have control over what you eat when you re at school so even when we re when we re working hard to give our kids healthy food at home if they go to school and eat a lunch that s loaded with calories and fat then all the efforts that we try to instill at home it gets knocked off a little bit and many kids don t have any access to physical education in the schools and that s also something that s also changed when i grew up and i went to public schools in my neighborhood i don t care what you did you had recess and you had gym on a very regular basis so even though we re encouraging our kids to exercise if they can t go to school and that get the same kind of exercise opportunities then it makes our jobs as parents harder and one of the things that i want to do is to begin focusing on ways that this administration can help parents kids and families in tackling all these challenges we want to make it a little easier on you all not just tell you what to do and what you should look like but help you with some resources so that it doesn t feel so impossible and that s one of the reasons why we re here today because we know that schools can play an important role in the work that we hope to achieve and that s why the department of agriculture has started this wonderful challenge called healthier u s school challenge and the goal of this challenge is to find schools who are going to commit to making fresh healthy food available we want them to pledge that that s part of the challenge but in addition to making healthy foods available getting rid of the junk food in the school making that pledge get rid of it but also to be sure that they re setting aside time for physical activity during the day in the curriculum and teaching kids about healthy food choices during the day and i am pleased to announce that there are about 635 schools from across the country who have met the challenge and we have some of those schools with us today but my goal is to challenge more schools and more communities to take part in this particularly middle and high school students because right now those 635 students are at the elementary school level and we need to take this challenge up to kids in middle schools and high schools so i m looking forward to visiting some of the schools that have joined the healthy school challenge that s a pledge that i have if your school commits to this challenge there s a possibility that i ll come and check it out but i m not coming if you re not a part of the challenge right so we want to get more schools to follow this lead and of course changing old habits is never easy that s why it s going to take a broader team effort with everyone pitching in and it s going to take government doing its part and that s why this administration is going to be working hard to reauthorize our federal child nutrition program because with 30 million kids relying on a school breakfast or a lunch as one of their primary meals of the day we need to make sure that these meals are nutritious and well balanced and that more kids can have access so that they don t have to go hungry in school and the chefs and nutritionists here today are going to show us how we can use the food that the usda provides to schools as a way to prepare really tasty healthy foods that s why they re here today because they re going to take that food that you get in the schools and do some special stuff to show that with the food that we have we can probably do even better than we re doing we ll also need all you kids to be a part of that now i know you re dozing off i see it it s hot i want to play but we re going to need you too and what are we going to need you to do yes sir what stay healthy and how do you stay healthy eating the right things we re going to need you to help your parents with these choices so when vegetables on your plate we don t want to hear i don t want to eat it i don t like it it tastes bad i don t want it we don t want to hear the whining we want you to eat it just eat it right but we re going to need you too and what are we going to need you do be good be healthy and be nice yes and exercise you ve got to play so in order to play you ve got to turn off what turn off the tv in our household no tv during school days and only a couple hours during the weekend i m sorry but because the tv is off my girls get up and they move even if they re pushing each other down they re running so we re going to need you to help your parents turn off the tv on your own get up and throw a ball run around the house don t break anything but move try to go outside if you can that s why we re here at the white house because we re reaching out to schools to families to kids and we re inviting you guys to be a part of our team and think about all of us doing our part and one of the children who came here and helped us with the garden this was a very powerful moment in this whole garden experience was after we planted and we harvested and we ate together the kids talked about this experience some of the kids from bancroft school yay they re a little older than you but they were fifth graders and one of them a few of them wrote that she said she s a pretty regular fifth grader who loves sweets and she said because of her time in the garden she said has made me think about the choices i have with what i put in my mouth so she learned about the power of what choices she makes not what her mom tells her what to do not what her teachers but the choices that she makes and another child wrote he said it was inspired it has inspired us to eat better and work harder and then there was the student who wrote with great excitement about what he learned about tomatoes i remember this because he read this report to me he said not just that they re both a fruit and a vegetable but that they fight diseases like cancer and heart problems and that they have a lot of vitamins in them too and armed with that knowledge he declared so the tomato is a fruit and it is now my best friend that s what we want you all to think that vegetables and fruits are not the enemy it is the power to a good future and in the end that s what we re all trying to do here that s why we ve invited you to the south lawn that s why all these cameras are here that s why secretary vilsack is here because we are now focused on your future and what are you going to feel like and be and part of that has to do with your health and it starts with how you eat and how you exercise so we hope you guys are all game to join the fight we hope that there are schools all across this country that will join the challenge we hope that there are more parents that are going to be focused in thinking about ways that we can help you all but i now want to turn it over to secretary vilsack who has been a phenomenal partner in this effort we couldn t do this without the work of the department of agriculture and he has been steadfast in this fight to ensure that children have healthier options in the schools so he has been a dear friend and i want you all to give him a big round of applause and welcome him to the podium thank you so much dem mobama21 7 10 michelle_obama good afternoon everyone and welcome to the white house it is a pleasure to be here today as we honor some of our country s most talented most visionary most public minded designers folks whose work has literally changed the way we look at the world and how we live our daily lives our honorees today come from a wide variety of disciplines and fields from architecture and landscape to product design interior design and much more but all of you share the same relentless commitment to excellence each of you practices your craft at the intersection of art and science form and function grounding inspiration and innovation in fundamental principles of math and physics and engineering and all of you have spent your lives pushing boundaries we know a little bit about boundary pushing or just outright ignoring them altogether refusing to be confined by the world as it is but instead having the courage even the audacity to pursue your vision of the world as it can and as it should be the great jazz musician miles davis one of my husband s favorites once said don t play what s there play what s not there and i think that s pretty much a good description of what each of you does every day you re really playing what s not there you find solutions that we never thought of you reveal and create beauty we never could have imagined or seen on our own but each of you has also committed yourself to a fundamental principle one best articulated i believe by one of today s honorees tom dair the president and co founder of smart design as he put it and this is a quote design is about people not things what you do impacts just about every moment of our lives from the words we read to the public spaces we enjoy to the devices that help us do our jobs and run our homes and care for our families your work can determine whether a family has shelter or whether a village has clean drinking water it can help fight disease educate a child and ensure we pass on cleaner healthier world planet to all our children and grandchildren and your efforts grace our world with works of beauty that lift our spirits and stir our souls like nothing else can but we honor you here today not just for your creations and your innovations but for the inspiration that all of you are providing to the next generation of creators and innovators and thinkers and i know that just today and i heard just a little bit you guys did something amazing you really raised the bar and that s exactly what we were hoping you d do you took part in a teen design fair it s really fabulous i can t wait to hear more of the details that occurred right here in washington to help introduce what i believe were more than 400 young people to careers in design and i know that many of you are involved in similar efforts like this back at home where you live and work and we know the impact that experiences like this can have on the life of our young people giving them role models for success and exposing them to new possibilities helping give them direction and shape their dreams but we also know that far too few young people in this country have access to programs and opportunities like the one we did today even those who live just minutes from our great museums and cultural centers may feel like these resources are far beyond their reach and one of my goals as first lady is to help bridge that gap and that s why i ve been working to make sure that the white house is a showcase for america s rich cultural life and i want to open up these doors to as many of our young people as possible hosting them right here in these same seats at these same tables for concerts and workshops and mentoring sessions i want all our young people in this nation to know that they have a place in our museums and in our theaters in our design studios in our concert halls and in all halls of their very own white house and i ve got a partner in that effort standing behind me i m pleased to have the honor of introducing dr wayne clough as you know the head of our nation s smithsonian institution someone who shares the same mission and we were just talking about his travels his works his meetings with secretary duncan to do more to make sure that the experiences of the smithsonian are available to kids living in the most remote places right here in this country back when the smithsonian was founded in the mid 1800s it was focused primarily on science and it wasn t until later that it expanded into culture history and then the arts and that s actually a pretty good summary of the trajectory of dr clough s career wayne came to the smithsonian from the georgia institute of technology where he was the president and in one news article he is described as and this is a quote a geotechnical engineer who reads and writes poetry go figure quotes faulkner and likes indie films and the symphony and he has brought to this current role that passion for art and science and that embrace of both that makes our past and future one and during his time at the helm of the smithsonian he s worked tirelessly to ensure that as many people as possible particularly our young people can benefit from everything this national treasure has to offer so it is my pleasure not only to join you for lunch and to sit next to tim gunn how cool but to pass the mic on to my dear friend someone who has been such a huge support to me in this role and has made this day possible along with the work that so many of you do he helps lift it up it is my pleasure to introduce secretary wayne clough dem mobama23 10 09 michelle_obama thank you good afternoon everyone and welcome i am so thrilled you could join us today as we mark national breast cancer awareness month right here at the white house and i want to thank jill so much for that kind introduction as well as her phenomenal work that she s done to educate young women about this disease i think jill is one of those examples of how one passionate advocate can really make a difference and we are grateful to you for your leadership and the successes that you ve had in your work and most of all i am grateful to you for your friendship as always i also want to thank tina tchen who many of you already know for her outstanding work as director of the office of public engagement tina thank you so much and i want to take a moment yes let s give tina i don t want to step on your applause tina and i also want to take a moment to recognize all of the survivors and the advocates who are here today who have worked so hard and for so long to raise money and raise awareness to fight this disease particularly vernal joni and venus for having the courage to share their stories with us today i mean it s hard getting up and speaking about good news right let alone to talk about something that is so personal to a crowd of strangers and a whole lot of cameras so but it s important for them and for us to remind them that it s sharing these stories that really makes a difference it takes the veil off of this disease because it wasn t that long ago that people thought that breast cancer was something to be ashamed of and to keep it a secret something that you didn t discuss in polite company some people even wondered if you can believe it or not whether breast cancer was contagious and at the first fundraising lunch hosted by the komen foundation the description of the event was written in one paper as a women s cancer event because the word breast was considered too risqu to print but then people like you all of you here started speaking out including two of my predecessors first ladies betty ford and nancy reagan they began speaking out survivors and those who love them started organizing and advocating and lobbying for more money for more research and better treatment for this disease and then folks like venus and jill started working to educate and empower people to promote early detection and make sure that people were getting the care that they needed and today because of that work the number of women getting regular mammograms has dramatically increased and the five year survival rate when breast cancer is diagnosed in time is 98 percent and that s compared to 74 percent in the early 80s and today we spend 900 million on breast cancer research which is 30 times more than what we spent in 1982 so we have come a long way and you should all be proud of what you ve achieved to get us this far but what we all know is that we are not finished yet we are not finished yet we know we re not finished when nearly one in eight women is still diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime a total of one woman every three minutes and nearly 2 000 men are diagnosed each year as well and that s something we don t often discuss and we know we re not finished when 40 000 women a year still die from this disease that s one woman every 13 minutes who s dying from this disease today and we know we re not finished especially not when we have a health care system in this country that simply is not working for too many people with breast cancer and too many people who are surviving with breast cancer it s a system that only adds to the fear and stress that already comes with the disease and i m not just talking about women without insurance who face the terrifying prospect as you ve heard of having to pay the full cost of their treatment on their own i am talking about people in this country who have insurance who have breast cancer folks who all too often find themselves also paying outrageous out of pocket costs according to a new report released by the department of health and human services today breast cancer patients with employer sponsored insurance paid an average of more than 6 200 in out of pocket costs over the course of a year and some wound up paying as much as 10 000 or 20 000 and 5 percent with private insurance paid more than 30 000 a year for their treatment this is with insurance these are people who are blessed and then there are those annual lifetime caps that insurance companies set where once you go over that cap as many women do because some forms of breast cancer are so expensive to treat then that cap makes it impossible to pay a penny more for that treatment and one recent survey showed that 10 percent of all cancer patients report hitting a cap on their benefits leaving them scrambling to find alternative insurance to figure out how to pay out of pocket for the rest of their lifetime and then there s what happens when you ve gone through all the treatment and you re finally in remission which should be good news you re finally in remission and you re finally feeling like yourself again you feel whole and happy but then as you ve heard you re stuck as joni said with a target on your back for the rest of your life with a preexisting condition which means that insurance companies can deny you coverage or charge you higher rates for coverage sometimes much higher that s exactly what happened to vernal to joni and to venus these women were denied insurance and now joni and venus are each paying very high premiums for their coverage and as you ve heard venus s insurance won t even cover treatment if she has a reoccurrence so i know that a lot of survivors like them are terrified they are living in fear of losing their jobs or changing jobs or even moving because they worry they won t be able to find affordable insurance and perhaps most heartbreaking of all is the fact that right now today in america there are people in this country who have breast cancer but don t even know it because they can t afford a mammogram according to our new report one in five women age 50 and above haven t gotten a mammogram in the past two years and while that s better than it was a few decades ago it s nowhere near good enough and this is not acceptable this is not acceptable in this country this is something that could happen to any of us and this is a disease as we know that affects not just those diagnosed with it and not just those who ve survived it and those who ve lost their lives to it but it is a disease that also affects those who love and know them which these days seems like almost every single person in this country that s why it is so critically important that we finally reform our health care system that is causing so much heartache for so many people affected by this disease now is the time fortunately that s exactly what the plans being considered by congress right now would do so just to be clear under these plans if you already have insurance that works for you then you re all set you can keep your insurance and you can keep your doctors the plans put in place some basic rules of the road to protect you from abuses and unfair practices by insurance companies that would mean no more denying coverage to people like women we heard from today because of so called preexisting conditions like having survived cancer because there s a belief that if you ve already fought cancer you shouldn t have to also fight with insurance companies to get the coverage that you need at a price that you can afford these plans mean insurance companies will no longer be allowed to cap the amount of coverage that you can get and will limit how much insurance companies can charge you for out of pocket expenses because in this country getting sick shouldn t mean going bankrupt and finally these plans will require insurance companies to cover basic preventative care from routine checkups to mammograms to pap smears at no extra charge to you and though i want to emphasize that in the end as we all know it s our responsibility as women to also talk to our doctors about what screenings that we need and then make the appointments to get those screenings even when it s inconvenient or maybe a little bit uncomfortable it s something that we owe not just to ourselves but to the people that love us because we know the difference that early detection makes we know that if breast cancer is detected early it s far easier to cure and much less costly to treat so we can save money we can save lives and we do right by the people that we love so that s how health insurance reform will work that s how it will help people who have been diagnosed with breast cancer and those who ve survived the disease but first we have to get it passed first we have to get it passed but that s the hard part we know that there are all sorts of myths and misconceptions out there and we know there are folks who will do anything they can to stop reform because for whatever reason they want to keep things the way they are from where we stand now it might seem like an uphill battle but fortunately folks like you know a little something about an uphill battle right you know a thing or two about overcoming long odds and rallying people to an important cause now let s remember that there was a time when those affected by breast cancer never could have imagined all these pink ribbons that would one day grace the white house offices storefronts lapels i don t think they could have imagined some hulking nfl player decked out in pink cleats and pink gloves i don t think they could have imagined a day when so many people would wear jeans to raise money for a cure i don t think they could have imagined how many people would lace up their shoes to take part in walks and runs and races all across america and it is my hope that if we pass health insurance reform then 20 or 30 years from now just imagine our daughters and our granddaughters won t be able to imagine a time when any woman in this country couldn t get a mammogram because she couldn t afford it i hope that our children and grandchildren won t be able to imagine a time when anyone in this country went bankrupt just because they had the misfortune of getting sick and i hope that statistics like one in eight and one every 13 minutes will be incomprehensible to our kids incomprehensible because of all the strides that we ve made and the work that we ve done for this cure and for this reform and in the end that s really what health insurance reform is all about it s not about us it s about them it s about the future that is what we re fighting for that s what we have to remember that s what this fight is about and that s why we re so grateful to all of you for the hard work and commitment and sacrifices that you ve made and we look forward to working with all of you in the weeks and months ahead thank you so much thank you dem mobama23 6 10a michelle_obama hi everybody yay we re here we re doing it it s so exciting i am thrilled i have been waiting for this day for a long long time and it is finally here and i want to thank you all for being here and for hosting us as you know my other partner the president was supposed to be here with us but he had some other stuff going on he sends his regrets he would trust me he would rather be here but this is an important issue and we didn t want to postpone it so hopefully i will be a satisfactory substitution i want to start by first thanking amy for just being a fabulously amazing middle schooler and for her wonderful introduction thank you amy great job and i have to thank our co chairs of the president s council dominique dawes who has just been a terrific support to this white house and to these issues she s just a fabulous woman and just so eloquent and poised we are just thrilled to have her and our other co chair drew brees who you know what do you say about drew brees except we re so lucky to have him as a part of this he regrets that he couldn t be here but we are so grateful to dominique and to drew and also to the executive director of the council shellie pfohl shellie i know you re out here everybody should know shellie she s there in the fuchsia to all the council members who have taken the time not just to participate on this council but to come here today it s going to mean so much to kids across the country to see world class athletes and chefs and trainers and experts just coming together for the entire issue of making sure that our kids are healthy so i am personally grateful for your willingness to be a part of this and thank you so much for your time i also want to recognize our mayor here in washington d c mayor fenty who just got here there he is thank you mr mayor this is an appropriate event for him to be at because he s a jock yeah yeah so he s somebody who lives the message and we re grateful for your support and your role modeling of the issue thank you sir and we also have congressman john sarbanes here as well congressman there you are thank you so much for your support on this issue it is great to be here at the columbia heights educational campus this is a beautiful facility very impressive you drive into a parking lot and it doesn t look like a school i m impressed it looks very very good and i got a chance to meet your outstanding principal maria tukeva where are you principal and i understand she s also the founder of yes yes thank you for creating one of the top high schools in the country right here in washington d c well done well done and of course i want to thank all the students from the lincoln multicultural middle school where are my students thank you all for joining us i sort of tried to get in my gear i m going to try and do a few things with you i got on flat shoes today but i m going to do my best today we re here to talk about an issue that is so close to my heart as first lady but also as a mom and it s an issue that s of importance to all of us eating right staying active and giving our kids the bright future that they deserve and right now we can be doing better by our kids because one in three of our children is either overweight or obese in this country and doctors are seeing more and more children with health problems related to obesity high blood pressure high cholesterol type ii diabetes and these used to be diseases that we would only see in adults but now they re becoming a regular part of a pediatrician s practice and every year as a result of these conditions we re spending billions of dollars on treating obesity related conditions and we can t afford to keep going down this road we can t afford it for our young people and we can t afford it as a nation that s why earlier this year we started this wonderful nationwide initiative that we ve called let s move yay for let s move and it s an initiative that has been designed and worked on by so many partners all across the country people have been fabulous about this issue but our goal is to end the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation we are making this a big huge generational goal with the notion that kids born today are going to have a different idea of what it means to be healthy so that they grow up at a healthy weight with good habits that they can then teach the generations that follow but one key to getting this done and solving this problem is passing a strong child nutrition bill and i can t emphasize this more this bill controls the programs that provide school lunches to kids all across the country and what we do know is that our kids are getting most of their activity most of their nutrition at school so if we can do something to improve the quality of food in our schools we re going to go a long way to affecting the futures of our children and right now that bill is making its way through congress with what i m proud to hear is strong bipartisan support this is an issue that everyone is getting behind because it s not about politics it s about our kids a majority of senators and house members from both parties have publicly called for swift passage of a strong proposal so once again i urge congress to provide the resources that we re going to need to support these important programs that will be able to help change our children s futures and those after that this is an important time so we re looking forward to the congress getting this done but you all know back when we were kids and i m talking to the grown folks here being healthy wasn t that hard it just wasn t that hard parents particularly in the summer could just open up their back door send the kids out give them a little breakfast and tell them go away and don t come back until we re ready to see you again and you might run in for a second if you were a kid and grab a little lunch right but you weren t watching the tv you had to get up and get back out and you usually wouldn t even come home until dinner and you wouldn t even want to come home for dinner because you were having so much fun running around you had to be forced to sit down and eat a meal and the meals that we got were generally pretty healthy because they were usually cooked at home with a whole lot of loving care and fresh products and produce today we ve got so many distractions we ve got video games we ve got computers that are just keeping kids inside after school the whole culture of our society has changed during the summer a lot of times this is what kids are doing and some folks are living in neighborhoods where they can t go outside it s not safe to open up that door and let your kids run forever and we have some communities that don t have access to that fresh produce and those fresh vegetables we are dealing with millions of people living in food deserts and many parents are just overworked they re juggling too much and although they want to do it they just don t have time to cook a home cooked meal every night they re lucky if it happens once a week so things have changed it s gotten a lot tougher and i think that s why we re seeing the outcomes in our kids that we re seeing there s a reason why we re here today but let s move is about trying to help change all that that s really the goal it s not to place blame it s not to point fingers it s really to help parents in communities and business leaders find a way out of this dilemma but efforts to help kids stay healthy and active actually go back much further than what we re trying to do here today way back in 1956 this is a little history lesson students dwight eisenhower was worried that the lack of exercise was causing young people in america to fall behind their peers in europe and around the world and so he established the president s council on youth fitness to get kids moving this was back in 1956 does anybody remember that i don t want to out anybody on age but i m sure we have some people who remember that the council s original mission was simple to encourage young people to get enough exercise and that is still a very important component of what we need to do today but today we know that being healthy is about more than just being physically fit it s also about eating healthy foods and really learning which foods to enjoy in moderation that s one of the reasons i talk about burgers and fries because a life without burgers and fries is really depressing and fried chicken and just fried but it s about learning about all the different ways to eat healthy and to strike those balances and to be active whether that means playing a sport which many kids do but not every kid is an athlete and they don t have to be because you can get the exercise you need from walking your dog vigorously running with your dog doing some push ups at home or just playing you know the work that we re talking about used to be called play and it s about developing healthy habits that kids will have for the rest of their lives because the one thing we know why we start with kids is kids learn they re not like us they re not stuck in time you know they learn something they take it on and it lasts forever so we re talking about developing lifetime skills that kids will then teach to their kids that s why yesterday the president signed an executive order expanding the mission of this historic council and creating the new president s council on fitness sports and nutrition all three components so we re just broadening the scope of what we have to focus on and this group as dominique mentioned will include fitness and nutrition experts who ve agreed to help raise awareness about how we can make our kids and our schools and our communities healthier this council as i said is made up of everyone chefs doctors health experts personal trainers we ve got our olympic gold medalists we ve got a nascar driver we ve got nba all stars tennis legends we ve got it all because we know in the end kids listen to these heroes in so many ways and those are just a few of the 25 men and women who will be donating their time and expertise to this cause it s just more people coming on and making let s move a broader and stronger campaign together they re committed to working with government and the private sector that s businesses schools and nonprofits to help kids everywhere learn about healthy eating and the importance of being active each and every single day and we re broadening the mission of the council so that we can make a bigger difference focusing on what not just what you do with your bodies but what you put in your bodies we all know if we re focused on our fitness it is not enough just to exercise you have to focus on diet i still struggle with that at 46 years old if i want to lose some weight i can work out as much as i want to right mayor but you got to have that balance of food to really cut the fat so we re really excited about this broader mission here right here in columbia heights you re already well ahead of the game that s one of the reasons why we wanted to come here because we wanted to model what s already working because that s another thing about let s move we don t have to recreate the wheel we have to just find the models that are already working and spread those across the country and columbia heights is serving as one of those models i know that you ve made the president s physical fitness test an important part of pe class just kids living up to that test you collect information on the student s weight and their heart rate and the progress that they re making throughout the year and i also hear that at the end of the year the students with the most improvement get to take part in a fitness challenge with teachers and staff which is huge because as we ve been talking with schools what we re finding consistently is that when the teachers and the staff are involved when they re sitting around at the lunch table and they re practicing the same habits that they re trying to instill in kids it just makes kids want to do it even more so i commend you all on what you re doing here that s what the president s council is all about it s about all of us pushing ourselves to meet new challenges even when they re difficult because none of this is easy it only gets easy if you start young that s what that s the gift that we can offer our children if they start out with these habits early on it just makes life easier for them it s about having fun let s not forget that because this isn t all work and calorie counting and all that this is about having some fun and getting more opportunity for kids to be active and to find a way that connects with each of them because not every kid is going to connect to activities in the same way so we ve got to have a broad base of opportunities for kids so again i want to thank you all here at columbia heights for setting such a wonderful model such a great example i want you all to keep doing what you re doing and help spread your message to other schools not just here in the district but around the nation you guys are a true model again i want to thank our council members for their excitement and enthusiasm and i think now is the time that we actually are going to get moving so we re going to do some activities with the kids and as i said i m going to try and hang with you all but this bow might get in the way but i want to thank you all for being here so let s get moving so thank you all so much dem mobama23 6 10b michelle_obama thank you thank you so much thank you everybody thank you such a warm and wonderful welcome i am thrilled to be here i want to start by thanking our outstanding attorney general eric holder your boss for that very kind introduction and also for the wonderful work that he s doing here at the department of justice he is i could say the same accolades as he said about me he s just been a phenomenal support not just to the president but to me personally as he mentioned he joined me along with celebrities and other people from the administration in detroit to do some very important mentoring in detroit and he was just amazing i mean you know how busy he is and my view is that if this man can take the time out to fly and spend a day talking to young people i mean sitting down at a table with kids and talking about how they can pursue their dreams how he can use his own story to show them that they can reach for passions that maybe they thought they never could that he in his own role serves as a role model if he can do that then we all can do that and i know that there s so many of you here who are following that lead and i m grateful to him and i m grateful to all of you for serving in that role so we have to give him an incredible thank you i m told that eric started out as a 25 year old law graduate school graduate working in the public integrity section here at doj you were 25 only five years he s never lost that sense of responsibility that comes from working to uphold our highest legal principles it s a responsibility that all of you share and one that some of you have been shouldering for quite a while i understand that s why i want to take a moment to recognize the folks here on the stage with me these are some of the longest serving employees here at the department of justice i don t know the numbers here but they ve been here for quite some time and i want to take some time to give them a round of applause for their dedication it s just wonderful to see people who have made commitments for decades to government service and it s important for the world to see particularly young people to see how people are building and have built lifetimes here serving the broader community and i know that even though we re here at main justice i also want to recognize the men and women who serve as the faces of this agency in communities all across the country the fbi and the atf agents the u s marshals and the hardworking folks at the u s attorneys offices who are on the ground every day yay yes they re keeping us safe and protecting our most basic rights and when i travel one of the great things i get to do is usually see the u s attorneys on the ground so our congratulations and thanks goes out to everyone one of the privileges of being first lady has been the opportunity to visit so many agencies over the past year or so so that i can thank all of you really for the hard work and dedication that you ve all put in you put in long hours and a lot of people look at the president they look at your boss and they say well you re working hard but the truth is and we all know this you all are putting in that kind of time as well you re making sacrifices you miss time with your families and often you do it without getting any recognition from anyone so i want to let you know how much that we value everything that you re doing here however long you ve been doing it because i know we have a lot of newbies here folks who are just joining the department as well yay all right let s give them a round of applause too so that s one of the reasons i ve been doing these visits to make sure that you all know that even in the heat of change and all the work that goes on here that we haven t forgotten the work that you do and the sacrifices that you make these visits though also help me get a better understanding of what s happening in some of these agencies to listen to learn about your work and to help spotlight the difference that you make in the lives of so many americans because when i show up there are cameras that usually come and i think it s important for the people around the country to know that government is working hard for the american people and that it s made up of everyday americans who are making sacrifices on their behalf and i have to admit that i m especially excited to be here at doj because we have a lot in common many of us here as many of you know long before i lived in the white house i worked in chicago and i did a little law thing i decided to study law for some of the same reasons many of you did number one math was really hard and as my mother said i talked a lot and could write pretty good but it s also because i ve seen the power that law has to change people s lives in a very real and meaningful way and i knew that lawyers had the ability to help turn words on a page into justice in the world to keep a neighborhood safe to keep a family in their home to leave our children a world that is a little more equal and a little more just and i also as eric mentioned i met this guy named barack obama while i was studying law yes he was my mentee a summer associate when i was a first year associate so that was a nice little perk from my law career and here at doj you all represent the ideals that drew us all to this business in the first place those principles of equality fairness and the rule of law your responsibility is not to a particular party and that s important for people to understand or to a particular administration or to a president you work for the american people you do battle every day on behalf of the most vulnerable among us and you touch the lives of virtually every american in ways large and small even if they don t realize it for a department that started out with a single part time employee in 1789 the workload here at doj has really never stopped growing and i know you all are feeling that right now whether it s keeping our nation safe from terrorist attacks or bringing our most hardened criminals to justice protecting consumers or safeguarding our civil rights your work has never been more important that it is today that s especially true in the wake of the worst environmental disaster that we ve ever faced here in this nation and i know that the attorney general and several members of the leadership team have traveled to the gulf and many folks here in this agency are working tirelessly to ensure that accountability is going on that we re protecting taxpayer dollars and that we re helping those affected by the oil spill really get back on their feet and people need to know that the department of justice is at the center of that work but it s not just the work that you do that makes this place so special it s what you all bring to the work that you do it s the passion and the persistence and the energy that you bring to your cases and i know to be here taking pay cuts as many of you do you ve got to be doing it because of passion because all of you all would be at a firm somewhere if it didn t mean something to you but that s true whether you re an attorney a paralegal a librarian a support staffer truly the dedication that you ve all shown is extraordinary and i m proud very proud of the work that you ve done and i m extremely grateful for what you re doing every day and it is not an easy job that i know as well but the fact that so many of you have stuck around for so long really says something about the culture of this agency administrations as you know can come and go but the pride that you put into your work it never fades as attorney general holder likes to say working here isn t just about making a living and that s so important for young people out there to know and to see these jobs it s not about earning the dollar it s about making a difference in someone s life and this group really takes those words to heart i m told that in the first six months of this year your attorneys have taken on 20 pro bono cases from custody battles and landlord tenant disputes to domestic violence and personal injury cases pro bono for those of you who don t know is completely free legal service and 50 of your attorneys i understand have staffed legal clinics right here in d c helping to write wills to file taxes and to do other important work for members right here in this community who couldn t otherwise afford it in the end that s really what the department of justice is all about that s really what the field of law is supposed to be about you all help make the promise of our laws a reality for every single american regardless of their race their standing or their political affiliation from the great hall of the supreme court to a folding table in a legal clinic you help our families secure the protection that they need and the rights that they deserve and you do it with a level of fairness and compassion that stands as an example to us all so for that reason i m here to show you along with the rest of america our gratitude our admiration these are going to be tough times and we re going to need every one of you to buckle up and work even harder but it s easier to have that conversation here because you all know what hard work means you all know what sacrifice means and it s important for us to share those values with the next generation we need to replace you all we need to start working on the next generation of staffers and attorneys and librarians and paralegals who are going to fill these seats in decades to come and they re going to do that because of the work that they see you doing they re going to do that because of the pride that you take in your work we are the role models for the next generation so we are grateful for your work and i just look forward to coming out there and shaking a few hands so thank you thank you so much dem mobama23 7 10 michelle_obama thank you all thank you thanks so much mike thank you for that very kind introduction i think you gave me a few promotions along the way but that s okay i ll take them and to you and all of the shipbuilders and their families who are here today congratulations on this truly magnificent ship it is amazing here in pascagoula you have been building ships for centuries it s in your blood it s a proud tradition passed on from generation to generation your hands have given us some of the greatest ships in the united states navy and coast guard so whether you re a welder or a fitter or a burner whatever your craft today is also a tribute to you and your families and we thank you as a grateful nation secretary napolitano admiral papp and linda and all our outstanding coast guard leaders personnel and their families especially those of you from coast guard station pascagoula members and friends of the stratton family first lady marsha barbour representative taylor distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen it is an incredible privilege to be with you today and i thank you for the great honor of being the first first lady to sponsor a united states coast guard cutter and believe me i am humbled that its namesake is the first woman to serve as a commissioned officer in the united states coast guard one of the true pioneers in american history captain dorothy c stratton the christening of a ship is a tradition that i hear goes back thousands of years and according to some legend one sponsor s aim was so bad that the bottle hit someone in the audience so fortunately these days the bottle is tied tight and we re way over there so all of you in the front row can breathe a sigh of relief today is a wonderful celebration of an extraordinary life and the meaning that it holds for all of us like most of you i wasn t fortunate enough to know captain stratton personally but i have come to know her story and as a woman and as a mother of two daughters as an american i stand in awe of her life of service and after all these years later all of us whether you re a woman or a man coast guard or another service whether you re military or civilian every american can be inspired by her example because captain stratton taught us first about love of country see she didn t come from a military family and she certainly didn t dream of wearing the uniform instead she distinguished herself first in academia but what happened pearl harbor was bombed and our country was at war so she volunteered and when a colleague at purdue university said and this is a quote dorothy you can t afford to do this her reply was simple she said i can t afford not to captain stratton also taught us about perseverance see for all its opportunities the spars were still limited they couldn t give men orders which is an absolute problem they couldn t serve overseas or even go to sea later in life she would say i m sometimes referred to as the commanding officer of the spars actually i had no command authority all i had was the power of persuasion and that s just how captain stratton taught us about the power of a single individual to bring about real change she traveled the country giving speeches recruiting other women including for the first time in the coast guard african american women to so many of those young women she became their mentor she became their champion and their inspiration and she built them into a proud 11 000 strong coast guard women s reserve and captain stratton taught us what s possible when people are given the opportunity to show their potential the spars were designed to free up men for the war but it also freed a new generation of women to believe in themselves as radio operators air traffic controllers parachute riggers and machinists these women were strong independent confident as captain stratton said all we asked was for the coast guard just to give the women a chance they gave the women the chance and the women made good and perhaps perhaps most remarkably captain stratton broke all of these barriers in just four short years yet those four years gave birth to a legacy that lives on even today her legacy lives on first in the love of her family including those who join us today who i m looking forward to meeting her niece barbara her nephew richard and their families and captain stratton s dear friend sally watlington we want to thank you all for being here for keeping her memory alive thank you so much but her legacy lives on in the admiration of her fellow spars these amazing women who marched and drilled and trained and proved themselves more than worthy of america s uniform and as one of them said with pride we were full fledged and we were salty by gosh we were coast guard and while most of those original 11 000 are no longer with us we are truly honored to be joined today by more than 20 surviving spars they have traveled i understand from all across the country to be with us and again i d like to join in a tribute to you all thank you so much you are extraordinary women part of the greatest generation the legacy of captain stratton and her spars lives on in all those who followed in their footsteps after world war ii it would be another 30 years before women started to be fully admitted to the coast guard and other services but ask any of those women including those here today and they ll tell you that it was captain stratton the spars and the women of world war ii who opened the door so that they could walk through and proudly serve this country today women not only serve on ships they command them serve as vice commandant of the coast guard they have proven their courage in battle in iraq and afghanistan i was proud to welcome to the white house some of the women who broke that brass ceiling including army general ann dunwoody the first woman in american history to achieve the rank of four star general so today today it is absolutely clear for all to see that women in uniform are indispensable to american military we see it in today s coast guard men and women officer and enlisted active reserve succeeding together as one team team coast guard and true to their motto they are always ready securing our coasts protecting our ports stopping drugs that would end up on our streets responding to disasters as we saw in haiti and serving in every one of america s wars including iraq and afghanistan we ve seen this same spirit right here in the gulf coast our coast guard men and women were the first on the scene when that rig exploded and they have been here ever since and i had the pleasure of meeting with some of them this morning they make us proud they come from all over the country to help with the largest response of its kind in american history and it s important to know that many of them are reservists so they got their orders they kissed their families good bye they deployed on very little notice and they are making a difference every day and they re keeping even more oil off the beaches so along with all our men and women in uniform who are lending a hand they deserve our thanks we are so proud as a nation of what you all are doing we re all relieved that the leak appears to have been stopped for now and today i can share some more good news about one third of the federal waters in the gulf that were closed to fishing more than 25 000 square miles have been reopened also the seafood from these waters has been tested and it is safe to eat but i want you to know that the president his administration they are doing everything they can to get you all back fishing right here in mississippi too and our coast guard our country we are going to stand with you as long as it takes to clean this up and to help this region recover but of course this is not over in pascagoula and all along the coast i know that you and your families are still hurting so i want the whole country to know what i ve been saying there are beaches down here and they are open and they are beautiful and even though there may be some bad weather in the next few days the best way that this country can help this region is to come down here right come here visit support these communities and yes in fact the president and i we are going to come on down we re happy to announce yesterday that we ll be coming down to the gulf i m not sure where because that s another life they plan my life and they send me off but we re going to come down for a little family vacation next month and we can t wait the point is we are all together in this we have to be here in pascagoula and the gulf coast you guys already know this over the years you ve seen some really tough times and some terrible storms but you have always pulled through because you ve always pulled together we can t do it alone you know that as neighbors as americans we all have a responsibility to each other so too when it comes to one of my defining missions as first lady and that is supporting our incredible men and women in uniform and their families i have issued a national challenge a challenge to every sector of american society to mobilize and take action to support and engage our military families it s a challenge not just to government but to the private sector to communities and most importantly to every single individual citizen see one percent of americans may be fighting in our wars and protecting our country but 100 percent of americans need to be supporting our troops and their families and see the thing is everyone can do something everyone can play a part and captain stratton knew this because it was the story of her life an amazing 107 year life for as long as she could she was still giving back she was still finding ways to serve her country still encouraging and engaging with the coast guard that she loved still inspiring the next generation serving as a role model not just to our daughters and our granddaughters but yes to our sons and our grandsons too and the thing is that may be her greatest legacy of all and if you ve ever been to our nation s capital you can see this for yourself there s right there at the entrance at arlington national cemetery where so many of america s fallen heroes rest stands this beautiful tribute it s the women in military service of america memorial it s beautiful it honors the service of all those brave women who have served to keep us free and if you climb the granite steps and you stroll along the curved walkways you ll come across words etched forever in glass and they are the words of captain dorothy c stratton and they read we wanted to serve our country in times of need the coast guard gave us this opportunity and we did our job well so to the spars who join us today thank you for your job done so very well to the coast guard and to the crew of the stratton thank you thank you for the honor of being associated with you and your families which i will treasure for the rest of my life and thank you to all of you thank you for the job that you all do every day to keep america and its ships so strong and so proud god bless you all god bless america and semper paratus thank you so much dem mobama24 6 10 michelle_obama hank you all so much i don t know if i can top that i wish i could sing and dance or give you something a little bit more but all i have is my thanks what an amazing performance and we ve got to just give this school these students the alumni the staff all a round of applause you all are just amazing amazing i want to thank principal pullens for his leadership for his kind introduction and again i want to give a special thanks to every administrator to all the staff all the teachers the choreographers all of the leadership here at this school that makes it possible we have to give all of our leadership a round of applause it s truly no accident that so many students are thriving here at duke ellington it is no accident that just about every student at this school graduates on time and goes on to college and to do so many other amazing things that is due in a large part to the educators who work here and it has a lot to do with the families and all the support systems yes you all can sit down please rest yourselves so we are just grateful to everyone who makes this school possible you are the pride of this city and of this country and it has just been an honor for me to show you off to our guests i d also like to recognize diana vishneva who is here please stand diana is a prima ballerina for kirov ballet and also the american ballet theater and we thank her for joining us here today it is truly an inspiration for us to have you here and to see these fabulous students who are going to follow in your footsteps and she has done just some outstanding work to expose so many other young people to the arts diana thank you so much and i also want to thank our guest my dear friend the first lady of russia svetlana medvedev we have become friends over the course of this year and she and her husband graciously hosted our family in russia last summer and they treated us so well and one of the many things that we did is we went to a wonderful performance by the world famous moiseyev dance company in moscow and it was truly truly a treat the girls got to come grandma was there it was wonderful so i wanted to treat her to something special so i brought her here to see all of you here to duke ellington today and you did not disappoint you did me proud duke ellington way to go president obama and the president of russia our husbands have worked hard to strengthen the cooperation between the united states and russia they are two amazing men who are building new bonds and changing the world in the course and so much of that effort is rooted in their mutual respect for the people of the united states and of russia that s why i m so pleased to have this opportunity to return the hospitality that my family received and to showcase the extraordinary young people that are here at this school and in this city it s important for the world to see as your principal has so eloquently put it students here and this is a quote have the essence of what made this country great inside of them you all the students the staff the administration here embody everything that we hope for in our young people we know how hard you all work putting in long hours in class it s just amazing to think about the time it takes to practice and to create those kind of performances but then you also have to show up in class right there s still chemistry and math and writing and research and all of that good stuff but it s such a thrill to know that you ve put the work in not just during the year but to make this performance special we know how accomplished you all are producing great works of art because this school isn t just about music and dance and song there are beautiful artists here and i got to see some of the works in some of the studios and there are some fabulous artists here including the performances of the duke ellington choir i think we ve really worn you guys out because we have you at the white house almost all the time i think every time we want some young people there we re like call duke ellington and that includes performing at my husband s inauguration where your show choir brought down the house yet again but we also know how much you give back with many of you going above and beyond your community service requirements that s another thing these young people are doing talented smart and volunteering in their communities spending hundreds of hours working with children and seniors sharing your passion for the arts with folks all across this country so you know how the arts can enrich all of us in this nation as individuals you know how the arts can enrich all of our communities and the country and you know how the arts can connect us to each other like nothing else can you know how people who come from completely different cultures and backgrounds people who might not even speak a single word of the same language they might still be drawn together when their hearts are lifted by the notes of a song or a vision on a canvas or the graceful arc of a dance and i think that should give us all cause for hope all around the world because we know that ultimately relationships between nations aren t just about relationships between presidents and prime ministers or first ladies for that matter the real foundation of these relationships are about the connections between ordinary citizens particularly between young people you all are leading the way in this movement that s why engaging young people across the globe is such a priority for me and i know it is for mrs medvedev as well because her country like ours is a place that cares deeply about culture and about the young people who carry it forward i know her family is a lover of music and jazz and she s a pianist and her son plays the guitar and they have music all throughout their home and as i travel around the world i want young people everywhere to know that the united states believes in them and cares about their future it is so important for us to continue to lift up the next generation not just here in this country but your peers around the world and as i travel across this country i want young people here to understand how important it is for them to learn about other countries and cultures that s so important for you i know there are seniors moving on to college but one of the things that i ve talked about at every commencement speech that i ve given this year is that take the opportunity to explore the world get out of this country because there s just a wonderful opportunity for personal growth and for community growth if you come back and bring back the knowledge that you gain when you re educated in the world so take advantage of opportunities to study abroad to visit friends who live abroad make friends from other countries just never be intimidated by the world it is yours as well and hosting my friend my fellow first lady and sharing your gifts with her is just one small example of how you all right here just in this auditorium have already made a difference just in this performance you have strengthened the bond between two great nations imagine that so i am so very proud of you all of you so grateful to you and i want to keep having you all at the white house i want to see you traveling and singing and dancing all over the country all over the world you are our hope you are our future so you got to work hard so with that it is my pleasure now to ask the first lady svetlana medvedeva to say a few words she wanted so desperately to express her thanks and her passion directly and she s going to have an interpreter as well although her english is better than my russian but i d like us to give her a warm welcome thank you all dem mobama24 7 09 michelle_obama thank you thank you everyone good afternoon and welcome to the white house tonight s house is a little warm in here but it is a pleasure to be here with you today to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the national design awards and to honor some of the country s most compelling innovators and i got to meet them all they are terrific and we are just thrilled to have you with us today congratulations to all of you our honorees and those of you just working hard getting the job done how are you sir it s good to see you you are scientists and artists your work is both practical and poetic educational and inspirational you represent diverse fields of disciplines but you share the common thread of superior design what i love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful a laptop a bridge an outfit a garden all drawn from a thousand wells of inspiration and yet grounded in the basic principles of math or science great designers also pursue a mission great designers design with mankind in mind building on the innovations of the past you help to shape a better future like your lifetime achievement honoree bill moggridge what would we do without our laptops my kids would die they d be they wouldn t make it through the summer i don t know whether to thank you bill for that but that future and our ability to solve the great challenges of our time will depend on how we educate and engage the current generation that s why the president has made such a strong commitment to ensuring access to high quality education for all children particularly in math and science and today the president and secretary duncan are announcing the race to the top which is a competitive grant to spur education reform across the country and encourage educators and leaders to embrace innovative approaches to teaching and to learning as part of the recovery act congress has allotted more than 4 billion for this competition funding that ll be used for competitive grants to states school districts and non profit partners that are most successful at raising standards improving student learning and turning around struggling schools that is very exciting but when it comes to innovation you all know full well that an educational foundation is only part of the equation right that in order for creativity to flourish and imagination to take hold we also need to expose our children to the arts from a very young age even albert einstein knew better right he knew that there is only so much that a good education could do these were his words he said i am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination imagination he said is more important than knowledge knowledge is limited imagination encircles the world that s from einstein so i think he knew what he was talking about we need to ensure that our children have both knowledge and imagination i know i want that for my girls they deserve to have access to a good education and access to ideas and images that will spark their creativity and as first lady i have spent a lot of time trying to break down barriers that too often exist between major cultural establishments and the people in their immediate communities so we ve been sending a lot of role models out there in the far reaches of this city and then inviting kids to come back here to the white house that s been a big part of the messages of every single event that we ve done here at the white house these kids who are living just inches away from power and prestige and fortune and fame we want those kids to know that they belong here too we want them to know that they belong here in the white house and in the museums and in libraries and laboratories all over this country and i want to thank you all today for helping carry that mission out by going out today into the community and making sure that kids know that they belong on the cutting edge of design just the same that they belong in the world of discovery and science reminding them that they belong in the presence of great art and beauty that it is theirs just as much as anyone s in this nation and earlier today you shared your visions your ideas your experiences and expertise by leading workshops at smithsonian locations across washington d c and i am grateful to all of you for taking the time to make that happen from type fonts to technology from silks and satins to sustainability you brought science to life at these seminars and i ve heard glowing reviews about them and i hope you found them fun as well and i want to thank you for inspiring the next generation of artists and scientists architects and engineers innovators and educators and for your contributions to the advancement of design thank you so very very much and as i mentioned the crossroads of science and art innovation and inspiration are what i love about design so i m honored to introduce a man who represents the combination of both wayne clough the man who leads one of our nation s premier cultural institutions as secretary to the smithsonian is a trained civil engineer his years at georgia tech planted him firmly on the science and technology end of the spectrum but here he is ably leading right he s doing a good job he is ably leading the organization famous for housing the treasures of both science and art the wonders of nature and mankind and the marvels of the heavens and the earth he is the perfect example of the symbiotic character of science and art and i am so honored to introduce him to you today our wonderful guest our host someone who make my life easier as we explore the smithsonians with my kids wayne clough thank you all dem mobama25 5 10 michelle_obama well it s good to see you all again you are the first in this series the first nobody has done this yet you re the very first but let me tell you a little bit more about why you re here as shelly said this is about your health and we ve spent a lot of time this year talking about eating right and that started when we planted just behind you our garden in the white house we call it the white house kitchen garden and we planted that last year and we worked with a lot of kids in the d c area they helped us to plant and to harvest and the good thing about the kitchen garden is that it helped us start a conversation about eating right because the kids got so excited about the garden we figured that if we can get this group of kids excited about vegetables and gardening that we might be able to take that nationwide so we started this campaign called let s move and the goal is to make sure that kids grow up healthy eating well and living better and longer and that you learn skills that you can then teach your kids when you grow up and this is a nationwide campaign i mean we ve got everyone in the country helping we ve got your parents helping because we re asking them to do their part in making sure they know what kind of good food to serve you we re asking schools to do your part to do their part as well we re trying to make sure that schools around this country are serving healthy foods in your lunch rooms because a lot of you are eating most of your meals at school so we need to make sure they re giving you what you need and we re asking folks around the country grocery store manufacturers to make sure that everybody has access to good food that they can afford but the most one of the most important things that we re going to need is your effort in this because the truth is is that the whole important word in let s move is move right one of those words is moving because what we re finding is that kids these days aren t moving as much as they should you know there s a report out that says kids should get no less than 60 minutes of exercise every single day and around the country we just got a report that shows that in states across the country a lot of kids aren t coming close they re not getting just what they need and it s hard if your schools don t have p e and gym right if you can t do it at school if you don t live in a community where you have sports teams and things like that if you can t play outside because neighborhoods aren t safe right so your parents want to keep you inside if you re watching too much tv and playing too many computer games sometimes that cuts into your ability to move and this series that we re doing on the south lawn is really to encourage kids because we got this press all behind you and they re going to show you guys on tv and there are going to be a lot of kids going how do i do that you know how do i get moving like that they re at the white house moving maybe i can do this in my own back yard in my own community so you guys are going to be the first example this summer of really encouraging kids to move but we are going to need you not just here today but you re going to have to go home and take some of what you ve learned here and teach your families and folks the other kids in your schools who haven t had a chance to come and figure out how you guys can get other people in your lives moving can you promise me that you ll help me on this you promise well we ve enlisted some help we ve got trainers here from some teams all around the city from the redskins and the capitals you name it there are people around this city who are going to be working with you guys teaching you softball and tennis and some soccer moves and some running moves all things that i enjoy doing as well as the president and our kids so this is supposed to be fun and i think i may get out there and run around with you if you will allow me if i don t get too hot but what i want you guys to do is make a commitment that you will do your best to get that 60 minutes in every single day and that you will find other people in your family and your schools and encourage them to do the same thing will you promise me that all right well let s start talking and let s start moving let s move come on let s see what we got going dem mobama25 6 09 michelle_obama well thank you everybody thank you michael i want to thank colonel laura richardson the ft mcnair base commander for her service and for helping make this day possible it is so good to see all of you here we said we d do it right and we re here a little while ago we did some other service together we were able to work at the food bank and get some bags packed and now we re doing this wonderful work for the children of our servicemen and women who are going to get to go to camp and i think we ve got some great letters good healthy snacks a bo baseball card which is very important and our hope is that we can get 15 000 of these backpacks packed today and it s just a thrill to see you we ve brought our daughters malia and sasha are going to be here helping out and it s just wonderful to see you all here again there s so much that we can do this is a part of one of the efforts we ve launched actually i helped to launch on monday united we serve where we re asking every single american to think about a way that they can serve i joined maria shriver in san francisco when we did helped to build a play lot and today we re continuing the service here with all of you and the hope is that you go back to your home states to your communities and you encourage your family friends constituents to find ways to continue to serve and i am just so delighted to see all of you all here and once we get through with our work today then we ll be able to have a little fun we ve got a great picnic planned a little luau with some great hula dancers and tiki torches and all that good stuff so you guys have a great time and it is my honor to introduce my husband the president of the united states barack obama dem mobama25 9 09 michelle_obama good morning how are you all doing today this has been a great morning for us don t we think my fellow spouses what do we think of these students bravo thank you so much melissa thank you for that wonderful introduction thank you for introducing my fellow spouses and melissa thank you for your tireless work your inspired leadership and your unflagging devotion to the students here at capa you have every reason to be proud it is such a pleasure to be here i mean it is more than a pleasure to be here i have been looking forward to this day the entire week so have my colleagues as well so it is thrill i am thrilled and to welcome our distinguished guests from all around the world you can literally say that the world is watching you all today that s a good thing and we re here as we celebrate some of america s most gifted performers and some of the hottest up and coming young talents in our nation that would be you i want to start by recognizing one of the country s greatest composers and i know as students of the arts and music you ve heard of this gentleman marvin hamlisch who also happens to be one of the few people probably in the history of this country to have won an emmy a tony a grammy and an oscar now that s pretty good and he s been working with the students here today to put on the fabulous show that we re going to see so we want to thank him for his generosity and i want to honor gregory lehane a widely recognized director and a professor at carnegie mellon university for giving his time to help direct today s performances let us give a hand to mr gregory lehane thank you so much and i also want to express my gratitude to the renowned artists who have given their time to come today to be a part of this performance some of my very favorites sara bareilles i have to say she is on my ipod she has gotten me through many a day with gravity and love song i love her yo yo ma you know what more is there to say and another one of my favorites trisha yearwood so i m just excited as you all and finally i want to thank the marvelous young people oh all of you who performed for us today who will be singing and dancing and playing music for us today in this performance and during this morning you brought tears to our eyes it means so much to see such talent on display as my good friend carla sarkozy said you know in america you know here you have people who can sing and they can dance and they can act now she said in france it s not often that you get all of those wrapped in one but she said there s something unique about america s talents where it s just so natural to see all of that talent on display so you all should be so very proud now there are a number of reasons why i personally wanted to come and bring our international visitors here to capa this morning we re here because i wanted to introduce them to some of america s finest most creative most accomplished young people i wanted to come here because i wanted to showcase the value of arts education and you put that on display that fact that it gives the chance to our young people to discover their voices and to develop their talents this should be an opportunity that is available for every single child in this nation and quite frankly around the world and i wanted to come here because this school embodies the belief that president obama and i share and that is the arts aren t just a nice thing to do if you have a little time right it s not just a hobby although it can be a very good hobby it shouldn t be something you do just because you can afford it we believe strongly that the arts aren t somehow an extra part of our national life but instead we feel that the arts are at the heart of our national life it is through our music our literature our art drama and dance that we tell the story of our past and we express our hopes for the future our artists challenge our assumptions in ways that many cannot and do not they expand our understandings and push us to view our world in new and very unexpected ways and most of all the arts have the power to connect us to each other throughout nations it s something that we tend to share with one another as spouses when we go to other countries there s a common theme that we share our music we share our dance we share our culture because it reminds us that our world here in america is not so distant from other cultures and worlds around the globe it s what happens when a country music star like trisha yearwood performs in italy and students here at capa study italian renaissance art or when sara bareilles draws inspiration from an icelandic singer named bjork or a jamaican singer named bob marley or when yo yo ma born in paris to chinese parents promotes the music of kazakhstan and brazil and israel and egypt and more and goes on to become one of the most beloved american artists of all time it s through this constant exchange this process of taking and giving this process of borrowing and creating that we learn from each other and we inspire each other it is a form of diplomacy in which we can all take part i think yo yo ma put it best when he said when you learn something from people or from a culture you accept it as a gift and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve that gift and to build on that gift and that is what we re doing here today we re presenting the gifts of these wonderful american artists to our friends from all around the world and these artists are passing on the gift of their magnificent example to these young people who are here today studying in this school showing them that if they dream big enough and work hard enough and believe in themselves that they can do and achieve some uncommon things in their lifetime that is the core of my mission as first lady to share the gifts that come with life in the white house with many of our young people as i possibly can find that s why i ve worked to make the white house a showcase of america s rich cultural life we have held country music celebrations and jazz performances and i think we held the very first poetry jam that has ever happened in the white house and we ve done a lot more and we ve done it by also inviting young people from around the local community to take part in these activities because the truth is is that even though many of these kids are living in washington d c and in cities across the country just minutes away from the centers of culture and power and prestige many of them feel like these resources are really miles away very far beyond their reach that s something that i felt growing up and my husband and i are determined to help to bridge that distance it is critical that we begin to bridge that distance we want to show these young people that they have a place in our world in our museums our theaters our concert halls and most importantly we want these people to know that they have a place in our white house we want them to experience the richness of our nation s cultural heritage one on one up close and personal not on tv we want to show them that they can have a future in the arts community whether it s a hobby or a profession or simply as an appreciative observer and that s what so many of you here at capa have been doing here in pittsburgh as well playing music for local senior citizens and elementary schools and designing murals to beautify neighborhoods using your talents to lift up others in the end those efforts and the performances we re enjoying today and the work these artists do every day here in america and around the world all of that reminds us of a simple truth that both individually and collectively we all have a stake in the arts every single one of us and you don t need to be rich or powerful to lift your voice in song or get out of your seat and shake your groove thing you don t need to be a van gogh to paint a picture or a maya angelou to write a poem you don t need a grammy or an oscar or an emmy to make your work on the cultural life of your community or your country a valuable one and to people who might not speak a single word of the same language who might not have a single shared experience might still be drawn together when their hearts are lifted by the notes of a song or their souls are stirred by a vision on a canvas that is the power of the arts to remind us of what we each have to offer and what we all have in common to help us understand our history and imagine our future to give us hope in the moments of struggle and to bring us together when nothing else will that is what we celebrate here today and it is now my great pleasure to turn this microphone back over to your principal melissa and let the performances begin so thank you all for having us here good luck to you all work very hard study listen to your parents and your teachers take care dem mobama26 1 10 michelle_obama thank you everyone thank you so much all right everyone take a seat and have a glass of wine all right because i m going to sell you guys out they were passing around a little glass and i was like what s that so please feel free don t wait till i leave when the desserts come out to get the wine i m really thrilled to be here thank you holly for your kind introduction and for your support of our air force families and for all the work that you ve done to put together this luncheon as well as the entire committee i know that it s hard enough to pull off something like this but then you invite the first lady and all my stuff and it becomes a little bit harder but this is absolutely wonderful i ve had a great time and i m just thrilled to be here so again let s give holly and the entire committee a big round of applause for all the work that they ve done and i m going to be especially nice to holly because her husband commands the air force district of washington so he not only keeps the skies of washington safe but he s responsible for when my husband comes back on air force one so holly you and me we ve got to get together and get this thing worked out but it s really an honor to be here with all of you i also want to thank elizabeth biddle for the invocation as well as the beautiful rendition of the national anthem i want to thank all of you at jafowl the committee for this you know just wonderful invitation and for bringing us all together as we saw earlier doing the medley which you all got really fired up about i like that we see that army navy air force marines coast guard active guard and reserve we all are one force and we re all one family and you always feel it when you re in a room full of wonderful spouses and it s also great to see so many familiar faces people that i ve worked with over the course of the year becky deborah mary sandee and others all the wives of the joint chiefs of staff women who do so much for our military families and who i m very proud to call my friends in fact we just had a few of you guys over for dinner last week we had the joint chiefs the combatant commanders and their spouses over for dinner a few weeks ago at the white house and it was a wonderful evening very inspiring because we shared the evening with several wounded warriors so it was wonderful to have you at my home and i m happy that we re switching the tables today now i know this is the joint armed forces officers wives club but today i want to start by thanking you not simply because of who you re married to but because of what you do every day because of the spirit of service that s defined your entire lives you all are truly leaders in your own right and i don t know if you hear that enough but it s real you are the vital link between your husbands and the troops they command making sure their needs and those of their families are heard and met you re often that mom away from home the person that other military wives go to for advice and support and it s always amazing because you do all of this for other families even as your own families serve for that alone you all deserve this nation s unending gratitude but you not only provide support to your husbands and to other families many of you have also watched your own sons and daughters put on the uniform and go into harm s way and you ve experienced all the emotions that come with that all the worries all the anxieties but also that incredible pride so i want to particularly thank all of the blue star moms who are here today and i d like to have you all stand thank you and i also want to salute another remarkable group of women who i know here today the women who for nearly 40 years have made sure that no american is ever buried alone at arlington national cemetery please join me in thanking the arlington ladies please stand ladies and finally some of you not only married someone in uniform but we sometimes don t remember that many of you also wore a uniform yourself you volunteered you served you defended our freedoms so please would all the women who served in the armed forces please stand and be recognized yay to all of you thank you thank you for your service to this country so the president and i as you ve heard and our daughters we ve been in the white house for a year now it s been a year as a mom i often say my priority this year has really been the girls making sure that they make this transition smoothly as smoothly as possible i mean you think about it these little girls they ve had to get adjusted to a new city a new house it s a nice house but it s still a new house to a new school and new friends and so when people ask me what i m most proud of this first year i usually give them two responses i usually say first as a mother i am most proud that our two girls have made that adjustment and they ve built a new life here and are happy and healthy and as i say as normal as they could possibly be under these circumstances i joke that i still recognize them so that s a good thing then the other response is as first lady and i tell people that at the top of the list of priorities that i ve had over this year it s been the time that i have spent highlighting the service of our incredible military families and that s what i want to talk about today with you i want to talk about what you do for america and also what america needs to do for all of you from day one this has been a mission of mine along with the vice president s wife dr jill biden my dear dear friend and a blue star mom herself who has been a tireless advocate in support of our extraordinary national guard and reserve members and their families jill and i have been working hard on this one of the first things that we wanted to do was to first listen and learn so with many of you we had a series of roundtable discussions thank you all with our military spouses we met with deborah and sandee and other wives of the joint chiefs to get their advice and guidance on how to develop our initiatives and that was incredibly helpful we also met with the senior enlisted advisors wives to discuss what s working in the ranks and what also could be improved these conversations gave jill and i just really critical guidance and insight for what would be our subsequent visits to bases and military communities around the country and as i think back on all the incredible experiences of this past year and we have had many i ve met the queen the pope we ve done a lot i have to say that those visits to the military bases have been one of my greatest privileges as first lady truly through these interactions that we ve had i ve gained an even greater level of respect and gratitude for our troops and their amazing families it is a sight to see i remember visiting the soldiers and their families at fort bragg one of my first visits with charlene austin and we were just talking about that she hosted me for my first visits and there i saw firsthand the toll that these wars have taken on these soldiers who have carried so much of the burden of the wars in iraq and afghanistan i will never forget the families that the president and i met at fort hood after suffering such a horrible tragedy they showed us incredible strength the strength that binds army families together i remember the sailors and their families at norfolk and what a thrill it was for me to share their excitement as we welcomed home the crew of the aircraft carrier the uss eisenhower and the hospital ship comfort they were coming back from treating patients and delivering health care and humanitarian assistance across the americas including haiti and as we all know only after a few short months at home the comfort is back in haiti along with many other branches of our military delivering aid with their civilian counterparts helping the haitian people and all the while showing the very best of america and making us all so proud i remember visiting the airmen and women and their families at eglin air force base where some of the pilots and crew had just returned from iraq it was their sixth deployment in as many years i think of the coast guardsmen and women who will serve aboard the new cutter that i am proud to sponsor the stratton which honors commander dorothy stratton who led the spars during world war ii and i can never forget our marines who are a part of our daily lives at the white house in a very special way and we see them display the same professionalism in our home every single day that defines their service around the world they are a joy to have in our lives and then we can never forget our wounded warriors the inspirational men and women that the president and i have welcomed to the white house and those we have met all around the country unfortunately for too many of them the battle continues even after they come home they are the servicemen that i met at a va hospital in the bronx working so hard to get back on their feet and in some cases to get back to their units that s all they cared about they re the patriots like the young navy seal who joined us at the joint chiefs dinner last week at the white house this young man attended the dinner with his little sister i got to sit next to them she was a nurse who moved to washington to care for her brother left her career behind and he explained to me how he stepped on an ied in afghanistan and lost both of his legs then just four months later he finished a half marathon the courage yes the courage and the optimism of both he and his sister was breathtaking their continued love of life and of country was something to behold and i will always remember all of the wives and husbands all the moms and the dads that the president and i have met at arlington on memorial day and veterans day and all around the country spouses who ve lost their best friend in the world parents who have laid their children to rest and as a wife as a mother i simply cannot imagine the depths of their pain and loss yet every time i meet them they show a strength and a resolve that always leaves me in awe their sacrifice reminds us all that our men and women in uniform as well as their families are our nation s greatest military asset so at every one of these visits that i ve had collecting these memories my goal has been simple first to listen listen to those voices listen to those concerns listen to those needs the second goal is to share what i ve heard with a team of dedicated leaders who also care deeply about military families from the president the vice president to secretary gates to admiral mullen to leaders down the chain of command these people care deeply and finally my goal has been to work hard to ensure that the concerns and needs that we hear actually lead to some real change coming out of washington because the quality of the lives of our military and their families means a great deal because in the history of our all volunteer force we have never asked so much of so few we ve seen the huge burden of eight years of war on our troops tour after tour year after year missing out on moments that every parent treasures a baby s first steps the first words the day the training wheel comes off the bike birthdays anniversaries we ve seen the sacrifices of families on the home front spouses back home left to do the parenting of two juggling play dates and ballet recitals and practices keeping the household together all on their own holding down jobs all the while trying to hide their own fear and worries when the kids look up and ask when mommy or daddy are coming home and somehow despite everything that s going on in your lives military families still find the time to serve others coaching little league running the pta making christmas special for kids with toys for tots volunteering at churches and hospitals mentoring young people being role models in your own right you just keep on serving keep on serving your communities keep on serving this country and all of you our troops and families you do your duty and you do it without complaint no complaint here right you give your all and ask very little in return only that we back you up so our troops can do their job that s why my husband and his administration have worked to do right by our armed forces and their families to be there for you like you have been there for us to lighten your load as you have lightened all of ours because of your willingness to advocate for change all of you here some really important progress has been made in just one year deborah deborah mullen has been telling me ever since we met that just like our troops our spouses also need the very best support and counseling many of you share the need to reduce the stress of long deployments and to give our troops more time home between deployments so this is what happened my husband heard you and moved to increase the size of the military that s why his first budget included pay raises and funding for better military housing and more money for child care in addition to more funds for career development counseling and support for spouses last year s budget also included money to improve care and treatment for our wounded warriors especially those with post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury and the budget increased major it made major increases in funding for veterans health care including women veterans plus the largest increase in the va budget in more than 30 years and something that i m especially proud of that we just talked about at the table the president worked with the congress to extend the family and medical leave act to all our military families and to caregivers of our wounded warriors because just like other americans our military spouses need to care for their loved ones without fear of losing their jobs this commitment to our forces and their families continues today and i m happy to announce that the president s 2011 budget that he ll introduce next week will further increase funding for military family support programs by more than 3 percent to a record 8 8 billion and this increase is going to include funds for counseling and support for spouses and families including our guard and reserve families to the tune of 1 9 billion it includes 1 3 billion to reduce shortages in military child care and to keep our military child care among the best this country has to offer that s something that i got to see because we can t forget that military kids also serve in their own special way we can t forget these kids they re just like any other child in this country except for the fact that their lives are turned upside down every time their mom or dad has to go halfway around the country risking their lives so that all our children can enjoy the freedoms of this democracy it is so incredibly hard for these kids as a result they often experience more anxiety they can have a harder time focusing at school they can have a higher risk of depression so we can never forget just how much these wars affect our military kids and we all have an obligation to ensure that these kids have the support they need at home and at school so i m proud to announce that this year s budget will include more money for youth programs for military kids and then at the direction of secretary gates the budget will also include funds to improve and build new dod schools from georgia to germany and this is all part of a major effort this is part of a major effort over the next five years to renovate or replace more than half of our dod schools which will benefit tens of thousands of children from military families in response to one of the top concerns expressed by military spouses this year s budget will also include 84 million for spousal career development including tuition assistance and federal internship programs yay and i want to thank all the coast guard spouses who spoke to me about housing challenges yes as a result the president s budget will include 14 million in new funding for quality coast guard housing and i know that s a big one these are all major investments and they are the result of military families speaking up and being heard and they are part of a larger ongoing commitment to care for our troops and their families even after the fighting ends but in addition to good government and funding supporting our troops and their families requires active citizens that s why i ve made it a priority to keep asking all americans to join the cause of supporting our military families and that s why last veterans day jill and i helped launch mission serve a national network that brings civilian and military service groups together to help support our troops and families but this network also encourages communities to tap that incredible spirit of service of our military families as well as the talents of our veterans we re asking americans to engage and support military families any way they can from business owners helping veterans and military spouses find a job or develop skills to professionals in areas such as mental health and law offering their services pro bono to ordinary folks out there doing simple things like driving a carpool or offering to babysit or making a home cooked meal for a military family in their own community our men and women in uniform and their families sacrifice for us every single one of us so every single one of us can do something in return even if it s something as simple as saying thank you last spring i had the opportunity to thank one of those military families during a visit to the white house staff sergeant robert henline was deployed to baghdad with the 82nd airborne division out of fort bragg when a massive explosion destroyed his humvee and he was the sole survivor and suffered terrible burns over more than a third of his body well back at fort bragg his wife connie had to leave their three kids with family and she made the trip to a hospital in texas to care for her husband so day after day and month after month connie stayed by his bedside she fed him and she tended to his wounds helped him through dozens of painful surgeries and that s one story part of the story because back at home their oldest daughter brittany helped to hold the family together and overnight she went from being a 15 year old teenager to a mom for her younger brother and sister she had to get her driver s license early so she could run errands and do the shopping she made the meals she did the laundry she helped with homework yes a 15 year old and at night her younger siblings would crawl into brittany s bed and seek the security that they would get from their mother so when operation homefront named brittany their military child of the year the president and i were honored to welcome the whole henline family to the white house the father who had endured such horrible injuries the wife who never left his bedside and brittany the daughter who grew up faster than she had ever planned and when a reporter asked brittany how a teenager could take on so much responsibility she did what you all do she didn t speak of herself but she spoke of her younger brother and sister and she said simply they needed me and my priorities changed my family came first so you see that is the strength and the spirit and courage that our military families display every day you put your own priorities aside you take care of one another and you take care of this nation so as first lady i cannot thank you all enough for that sacrifice and i promise you that i will use every ounce of my energy and being to make sure that america always takes care of you so thank you thank you so much thank you for having me here and have some wine dem mobama26 10 09 michelle_obama well hello good afternoon welcome to the white house how s it been going we ve heard you everywhere good music going on so i am i m thrilled that you could join us for this music workshop where you ve had a chance to learn from some of the greatest classical musicians alive today and now we have a chance to hear from all of you the classical music superstars of tomorrow is that who s in the room say yes yes that s me say yes own it it s me with us today are joshua bell on violin alisa weilerstein on cello sharon isbin on guitar and awadagin pratt on piano they are the best in the world and we re incredibly lucky to have them today i also want to thank two of our youngest performers jason yoder jason where are you hey jason jason blew me away in pittsburgh and so much so that when we organized this i said get jason and jason is here yay for jason and also sujari how are you sujari britt who s only eight years old sasha s age but is already performing on a regular basis let s give those two a round of applause we re so proud of you both and finally i want to thank all of you young people who have come from all over the country to play together to learn together and hopefully to make new friends today i love events like this because this is what the white house is all about it s the people s house we say that all of the time it s a place that s steeped in history you can look on the pictures on the walls and there are so many stories that can be told but also it s a place where we like to start new traditions and to bring people together in different ways and that s what we re doing today because nothing mixes old and new quite like classical music many of the beautiful concertos and sonatas you re playing today were written hundreds of years ago long before cds and computers and mp3 players were ever invented the only reason we know what they sound like is because the great composers of history scratched those notes into parchment with quill pens but today you can play these same notes on an electric violin you can write your own variations of these songs online and e mail them around the world and you can mix and blend your instruments in ways that beethoven and mozart never could have imagined that s what makes classical music timeless because even though it s been around for centuries musicians like all of you are always reinterpreting and replaying it in ways that we ve never heard before and that makes it so exciting now i know that what you re doing doesn t always feel easy at times is that true yes yes i can get i hear that and i know how hard you all work and practicing even when you don t feel like it sometimes right and lugging heavy instruments around when you don t feel like it pushing yourselves to learn new pieces or getting that last measure just right many of you are perfectionists and it takes a lot of energy and time and it s not always easy but i can tell you this it s through that kind of struggle whether it s through an instrument or writing or research it s through that struggle that you find what you truly have to offer to your instrument or to anything in life and you won t just learn about rhythm and melody and pitch when you re working with your instruments you re going to learn about discipline and determination and taking risks and i know your instructors and parents have probably told you this time and time again but they were right they re right i m sorry you ll learn that if you believe in yourself and put in your best effort that there s nothing that you can t achieve and those aren t just lessons about music these are really lessons about life so i m here today to tell you to keep up the good work and never lose that passion that you feel about the instruments that you play and that the music that you make that s the passion that drives joshua bell who was just four years old i understand when his parents caught him stringing rubber bands between the knobs of dressers stretching and plucking them to play different notes it s the same passion that drives alisa who i understand her grandmother made her a string quartet out of cereal boxes when she was a little girl and she kept sawing away at the cardboard cello playing along with her musician parents until they finally gave in and signed her up for lessons awadagin started playing piano after his mother bought a dusty upright piano for just a hundred dollars that passion drove him to stick with the piano even when he felt like skipping lessons to play tennis instead and sharon s father promised her that if she practiced guitar for an hour she could go outside and launch her model rockets and after a while the rockets stayed on the ground but then her musical career took off it wasn t that long ago that these great musicians that you celebrate today were sitting in your seats standing in your shoes and that s why they re here to show you that if you follow that passion and never give up you too can claim your place in the world of classical music so thank you all for celebrating with us thank you for learning with us today and i m excited now to see what you all have been working on so let s get this show going thank you dem mobama26 2 09 michelle_obama wow what a crowd no look at you i am delighted to be here in this beautiful room with it s about a thousand of you all here that s a good thing i want to thank administrator jackson for that kind introduction with 16 years working here as one of your colleagues before moving to new jersey and serving in its department of environmental protection administrator jackson is ideally suited to lead this department at this critical time for our nation and our planet so lisa welcome home and to the hardworking men and women of the epa it s a new day it s a new day and the truth is we can t wait one more minute the recently signed recovery package includes billions of dollars for the epa to continue to clean up our communities and improve the health of our fellow americans the time is now i ve often spoken about my most important job being a mom and like mothers and fathers everywhere the health and safety of our children is our top priority this is what it is all about the future and in many ways it starts with all of you you ensure that the water we drink is safe that the air we breathe is clean and that the polluted fields and abandoned factories in our neighborhoods all over this nation are cleaned up and restored having grown up on the south side of chicago and spent a good part of my career working to help families in low income communities where i ve seen brownfields piling up and affecting kids all over this nation i know firsthand the role the epa has in reducing illnesses such as asthma and lead poisoning that can start in childhood but have a long lasting effect in adulthood there are thousands and thousands of children across this country that are affected each and every day this new era also puts the epa at the center of president obama s highest priorities securing america s energy independence and securing the future of our planet by combating climate change we now have a president who is going to put science at the heart of our environmental policies and decisions by doing so the president the epa and other agencies working on energy and the environment are going to start to champion bold policies and make smart investments that are going to do a lot of things first create more energy efficient buildings see now that s exciting you know you re at the epa make our cars and trucks more fuel efficient and double the nation s supply of renewable energy in the next three years your work will not only save our planet and clean up our environment it s going to transform our economy and create millions of well paying jobs you know this better than anyone in the country so there is a lot riding on your shoulders so as lisa said what are you all doing here but i know that you are up to the challenge i can feel it in this room as i have visited the agencies over the past few weeks and it has been a thrill one of the best things i do every day i have been deeply moved by the character and commitment of the people that i meet during these sessions men and women like you who have dedicated their careers like the men and women standing behind me many of whom have been working in this administration for the epa for longer than i ve been alive they don t look it but when you start adding up the time there s some serious work going on back here but what they are is deeply passionate about the work that they do i understand where their desire comes from i began my career as a corporate lawyer and while that was rewarding professionally and personally since that s where barack and i met it s a good thing i wanted to work on something though that i felt passionate about that s when i decided to change careers and begin to work to improve public health in chicago so let me deliver a simple message and a heartfelt message thank you for making the health of our nation all of your passion thank you so much all of our children will grow up in a healthier environment because of the work that you do and the dedication that you bring to the work that you do and while the challenges facing our nation are great and there s a lot of work to be done i am so confident so very confident that we ll succeed because we ve got devoted professionals like all of you in this room ready and eager and willing to make the sacrifices to work on behalf of the american people but know that you are not alone in this effort you have a great administrator in lisa jackson and partners in the white house you have partners in the white house who believe and understand these issues and you also have the unwavering support of a phenomenal president barack obama so barack obama is going to need you michelle obama is going to need you malia and sasha obama are going to need you and millions of children just like them are going to need you rolling up your sleeves and rededicating and recommitting knowing that the work is going to be tough but everything you do every piece of blood sweat and tears that you pour into the work is going to make the difference in our nation in our planet so get to work thank you so much dem mobama26 5 10a michelle_obama it s good to see you you all please sit down so how does it feel pretty good huh are you hungry you anxious well don t be we re excited to be here first of all i want to thank the first gentleman of michigan dan mulhern who is my friend i want us to give him another round of applause because he and the governor they ve been doing such a fantastic job promoting mentoring all around the state but it is a pleasure for me to be here with you all today to bring together some of the most extraordinary men and women in our country with some of the most promising young people in this city so that you all could really get a chance to talk and learn from each other and hopefully inspire one other as you see because everyone was introduced we ve got just some amazing people who have flown here just to be with you many have had to come from all over the place to be here not just me we ve got a cabinet secretary we ve got a governor a mayor we ve got ceos here we ve got members of congress we have one of the great filmmakers of our time we ve got an nba legend and entrepreneur and we have the head of the united states secret service presidential detail and just so you know how important this man is to me he protects my husband he makes sure that everywhere he goes the secret service to us are like family and we love them dearly and we re just honored to have one of them among us today all of these folks have broken barriers in some way or another they ve transformed lives and they ve changed the way that we look at the world and they re all here today for one simple reason and that s to share the lessons that they ve learned from their remarkable lives and experiences with all of you young people all of whom have your own hopes and dreams and ambitions all your own we hope that you do we hope that you re dreaming really big they re here because we re all here because we believe in you it is as simple as that we are believing in you so deeply we believe that you all have something really special to offer and because we all see a little bit of ourselves in you that s why i do this because when i look at you i see me i was the same kid you all were i won t give you numbers or ages or anything but it was a little while ago the important thing to know is that these folks weren t always the leaders that you see today they weren t born this way they didn t always have fame and accomplishments or fancy titles to their name many of them come from pretty humble backgrounds and they ve never imagined that they d be where they are today and again many of them started out just like you and it s important to know that what we all know in our lives and through our experiences is that there s no magic dust that is sprinkled on us that gives us success there s no magic to this there are no shortcuts there are no quick fixes none of us was born with the knowledge that we have today the skills or the talents that we have today some maybe you ve got your special people that were just born crazy talented or crazy smart but it wasn t me or the president for that matter all these folks here developed those things through hard work governor granholm wasn t born knowing how to run a state probably never thought she d be doing it magic johnson didn t know how to always did you always know how to dribble maybe you did maybe you were one of the ones but you didn t always know how to run your own business right so susan taylor s magazine didn t just publish itself essence one of my favorites these achievements took effort and struggle late nights and long hours and all these folks practiced and practiced and then practiced a little more to get those promotions to win those elections and to hit those notes just right when people doubted them or told them they couldn t do something they worked a little harder when they were scared or worried and let me tell you we all have been worried that we just wouldn t measure up they all found a way to keep going when they fell short or failed and failure is a part of success it s a necessary part of success they didn t let that defeat them they let it teach them and all along they found people in their lives to guide them parents and grandparents teachers coaches friends who believed in them who encouraged them and refused to give up on them even when they wanted to give up on themselves cathie black who is the ceo of hearst magazine she told us she had a boss who looked after her every step of the way and gave her the good advice that helped her career take off and then mayor bing your mayor had a basketball coach we understand who was like a second father to him encouraging him to play even when everyone else said he was too small you were serious about that mayor bing have you seen your mayor there s nothing too small about him and there s spike lee who had a film professor in college who pushed his students as hard as he could insisting that they shoot their films in just three days and then edit them in two and he was the one that encouraged spike to make his first movie unfortunately too many young people today don t have that kind of support they ve got big dreams and the talent and the drive to fulfill those dreams but they ve never been given the chance they never find someone to guide their path and the more opportunities they miss out on early in their lives the harder it becomes to catch up later and as first lady one of the things i am determined to do i m determined to do everything in my power to try to bridge that gap and i have to tell you i am incredibly impressed with the work that s going on right here in michigan through the mentor michigan program that your governor and first gentleman have worked so hard to promote by promoting and supporting mentoring organizations and creating partnerships with businesses schools non profits and government this initiative has more than doubled the number of mentors in michigan in just five years that s astounding that s a trend that i d like to see all across this country and that s why i ve reached out to young people in our new hometown in d c one of the initiatives i ve worked on since i ve been first lady that i m most proud of is that we ve created a white house leadership and mentoring initiative matching up white house staffers with young people in washington where they get to come to the white house and do special events and following me around on some of my trips in d c and i m working to host mentoring events just like the one we re doing here today just like the big rally we did at wayne state we want to see this going on around the country where folks like all of you can come together and share a meal and share your stories the idea here is just to isn t just to create a once in a lifetime opportunity for just a few of you who get to be here but it s the big goal is to encourage more caring adults to step up and volunteer their time and to make mentoring a lifelong habit and it s to encourage the mentees all of you all and this is important for me this is what i m asking back from you is to take the initiative in seeking out mentors in your own lives it doesn t always happen automatically because the truth is you can t hang out with famous folks like these every day right this lunch doesn t happen every day it may not happen again in your lifetime but you don t need it to every day of your lives you re surrounded by potential mentors and the best mentors in my life weren t anybody famous they were folks that i knew teachers parents neighbors coaches you name it they re all around and you have to be willing to reach out to them and be brave enough to step up to somebody and say you know what can i come and see you in your office can i call you can i e mail you i know i had to do that i had to find snatch my mentors up and you all need to do the same thing so i want you to remember don t be afraid to ask for help don t think that there s someone too important or too out of reach to ask for help because there are so many of us adults no matter what our titles are whether we re living in the white house or living next door who want to help and that s something that i didn t really know when i was growing up i was lucky enough to have parents who cared about me but i was never strong enough to step up to somebody big and say can i just sit down and meet with you so i want you all to practice that today at your tables your challenge is to speak up all right to talk about yourselves proudly the toughest thing for you to do and one of the things i tell my mentees at the white house is that if you can walk into the state room of the white house and look the first lady in the eye and say hello my name is x and this is who i am then you can do anything because nothing will be more scary than that right so practice it and the more you practice it the more you ll get comfortable with it and it s that first impression that makes a difference if you can talk about yourself with confidence you re going to turn that light off in somebody s head and they re going to say whoa i want to know more about that young person and the last thing i want to ask you all to do is to take this experience and use it to bring somebody else along you know in every phase of my life whether i was in high school or princeton or harvard or working for the city or working at the hospital i was always looking for somebody to mentor i was looking for a way to reach out into my neighborhood and my community and pull somebody else along with me because i thought there but for the grace of god go i i know i could be in a different situation from somebody else so my job is to bring other people along that s your job too it s not enough that you re lucky right you all are mentors today you ve got a cousin a niece a neighbor a nephew you ve got somebody in your lives that are watching you today so start practicing being a mentor because the one thing it ll do is it ll make you act better if you ve got somebody looking at you right so that s my ask for you today i want you all to speak up i want you to make sure you re talking about yourselves today at your tables asking questions don t be shy and when you leave here take this experience with you and find your mentors and find the person that you re going to mentor can you all promise me that and other than that just have fun breathe everyone breathe okay is there breathing going on all the mentors is there breathing at your tables okay let s shake it off and we re ready to have some fun have some conversation all right you all thank you for being here and i am so proud of you all thanks so much dem mobama26 5 10b michelle_obama wow detroit this is pretty amazing oh my goodness thank you so much thank you everybody it is so good to be here at wayne state university thank you to the wayne state family for hosting me on this remarkable campus in the heart of this proud city i m just so honored i want to thank cherry for that kind and amazing introduction let s give her a round of applause and i also have to thank a few other people too i want to thank governor granholm representative kilpatrick mayor bing i want to thank dr jay noren who s the president of wayne state he made all this possible i also have to thank the marching crusaders from mlk senior high school and of course one of my favorite entertainers singers she s powerful she reminds you of what singing really is kimberly locke let s give them all a wonderful hand thank you for their performances and we also have to thank all of the amazing mentors who showed up who flew in from all over the country to be here let s give them another round of applause for our mentors and i also want to acknowledge everyone who s joined us from selfridge air national guard base i want to thank you all for your service to our country we are as always so grateful and proud of the work that you do and last but not least i want to thank all the students all the students for coming here for being here for being out in the heat for standing for sweating some of you i know you re fainting a little bit get some water but we re here together it is beautiful i am thrilled to be here i ve wanted to come here from day one and i am honored to be with all of you the remarkable men and women that you just saw up here a few moments ago that served on the panel who were mentoring they ve all flown here today and we re all here because we care so deeply about your futures listen up we care about your future and the future that we all share that s why we re here and i know that focusing on the future can be hard when times are tough and in detroit in the state of michigan it goes without saying that times here have been tough for the past several years it has been tough everywhere in the country but this city in particular has known its share of hard times in recent years you ve seen jobs disappear neighborhoods divide schools deteriorate more than in any other city in america and even more recently you ve experienced more grieving than any one city should have to bear so let me tell you something the last thing any of you need is someone to come here and tick off statistics to tell you what you already know is going on in your own lives or to have somebody write another story about what s wrong with detroit and let me say that is not why i m here i am here because i know something that i want everyone in america to know and that there is a brighter better future ahead for detroit for michigan for america and let me tell you why i know this because i m looking at our future right now it is all of you i m looking at it and it is a beautiful sight i wanted to come here for the same reason that folks always call and will call this city home because if you ask anyone here why they stay even times are tough they ll say look around look at all we re doing to move detroit forward to reinvent and redefine what it means to live in this great city they ll tell you that the true worth of a community isn t just in what you see when you drive around it s in the goodness of its people and there are so many good people here everyday there are heroes who wake up early they kiss their kids goodbye and they catch the first bus to work everywhere there are young people who are working hard and they re getting good grades and they re helping their families everywhere there are neighbors who are rolling up their sleeves and taking care of their neighborhoods in their spare time there are students everywhere here who stay up late just to earn their degrees thousands and thousands of good people who love this city who are proud of their community and believe there is no action too small or too simple to make a difference so despite what some may think they know about this city what i know is there is plenty of hope here there s plenty of hope because what you all have to know is despite everything that s changed here this is still the city where men clocked in to factories every day and built from scratch the greatest middle class the world has ever known this is still the city where women rolled up their sleeves and clocked in too and they helped build an arsenal of democracy that led this world to freedom and this is still a city of brave bold and determined americans a city where clever and courageous people come up with fresh new ideas to re imagine and revitalize life here each and every day so our next chapter detroit s next chapter michigan s next chapter america s next chapter is waiting to be written and it will be written by each and every one of you because your future your city s future this country s future will look exactly like that each of you wants it to look like and that s what i believe and that s why i am here young people i am asking you to embrace that responsibility to be our future now let me tell you i know that is a lot to ask given all that many of you have been through after all the truth is young folks you didn t do anything to get our economy in the state it s been in you all didn t make the decisions that brought us to this point i know that so you have every right to say in your mind it s not my fault what can i do i ve got enough to worry about no one would blame you for feeling like no one s listening like you ve been given up on no one would blame you for choosing just to look out for yourselves i get that we all get that right but i hope of all hopes that you don t feel that way because there is a real truth out there and that is there are a lot of people listening i am listening my husband is listening the folks who are joining me here today we are all listening there are so many people who haven t given up on you there are so many people here who will always believe that you can do this and there are so many people here who are counting on you all so i hope we re here because we want you to feel energized we need you all to feel energized and i hope you all recognize the possibilities that are out there waiting for you i hope you realize how much potential you have and how capable you are of living up to that potential but the thing i want to tell you is that the simplest and surest way for you to live up to that potential is to do just one thing and that s keep focusing on your education that s right that s it keep focusing on your education that is your job not playing video games not shooting hoops not dropping beats not talking about how you re going to make it big see there s a time and place for all that there really is but if you re looking for the secret of success do you want to know the secret you ve got to realize that there is no secret it is your education plain and simple it s mastering math and science it s learning to write well it is learning to think for yourself and coming up with your own ideas and your arguments and learning how to express that that is what has made the difference for me that s what the made the difference for my husband that s what s made the difference for so many successful people the folks who were on this stage we are only where we are today because of the education we received that s the secret my husband wasn t born a president he didn t grow up with a lot of money he didn t even grow up knowing his father he was no more talented or gifted than any one of you here his life could have taken any turn but what he did have was someone who believed in him and pushed him to work hard and do his best see when barack was young he and his mother lived overseas for a time and she didn t have a lot of money to send him to fancy schools where the other american kids were going she didn t let that stop her from giving him everything she could to succeed so you know what she did she woke barack obama up at 4 30 every morning five days a week just to go over his lessons with him before he went to school and before she went to work so yeah he d complain he didn t like it he tried to find an excuse to keep sleeping sleep is good but she wouldn t let him barack s mother wouldn t give in she d just say you know this is no picnic for me either buddy and it s because she made sure he was getting what he needed for his education it s because she sacrificed day after day week after week that he had every chance every shot to someday become the president of the united states of america look folks it s education my upbringing was a little bit different from his i grew up in the midwest like you grew up on the south side of chicago in a community just like many of yours it was a community where people often struggled to make ends meet but folks worked hard they looked out for each another and they always rallied around their kids i was blessed to have two parents who worked to give me and my brother everything they never had my father all his life was a shift worker at the water plant my mother stayed at home and helped raise me and my brother and it s because they did what they did that we were the first in our immediate family to go to college and that made all the difference in the world and i m sure looking out at all of you that many of you have similar stories as mine stories of parents and grandparents who wanted something more for you so they saved and they sacrificed so that you could have opportunities they never could have imagined for themselves i imagine that right now there are some of you here at wayne state who are the first in your families to make it to college am i right and i m sure there are some high school students here who are going to be the first from their families to attend college right look and i know what a big responsibility that is to shoulder i know it s tough to think about finishing school when the odds say you won t i know it s tough not to feel guilty about earning your education and moving on when maybe your family might have larger issues at home i know it s tough to try and live up to the potential you know you have inside when there is always something to undercut you or someone who s ready to underestimate you but the simple fact that you are all here shows that you re already beating those odds you are already making a way out of no way you ve got to know that all of you are already succeeding so i m just here to tell you to keep going and let me tell you something if you re not doing everything you could be doing to succeed in school today then you all have to push yourselves you have to you have to take responsibility for your education and for your future and let me just say this it s not always going to be easy you won t always get credit for what you do and i know that can be frustrating especially when your generation has grown up in a popular culture that doesn t exactly value all your hard work and commitment but instead it glorifies easy answers and instant gratification and quick celebrity it s a culture that tells us that our lives should be easy that we can have everything we want right now without a lot of effort that struggle and sacrifice aren t necessary for success but that s not how life really works and you all know that you know that businesses don t really succeed without hard work and serious investments to produce quality products we know that our economy doesn t really prosper when folks focus on easy credit and get rich quick schemes or promises that living beyond our means is okay and we know that our leaders don t really become leaders without running into obstacles and setbacks along the way my husband has certainly had his share the truth is few things worth achieving happen in an instant and the greatest value is found in the greatest effort embracing our challenges and not shrinking from them is the surest way to succeed and it is the only way to become what we re truly meant to be so students i want you to keep that in mind your education is the surest way to your success but even though you ve got teachers and principals and families now who believe in you you won t always have someone to push you so that means you ve got to push yourselves and you ve got to push each other even when it s hard some of you may be in schools that aren t the best shape but that can t stop you from hitting the books when you get home that s on you some of you may not have many role models to look up to but that shouldn t keep you from being a role model for somebody else that s on you some of you may feel weighed down by other people s low expectations for you but that cannot stop you from breaking free from setting high expectations for yourselves from exceeding those expectations and proving people wrong that s on you look young folks there is so much in life that you can t control but these are the things you can so please don t ever let anyone tell you your destiny is already decided for you don t do that you tell them that your destiny is for you to decide don t ever let anybody tell you that you can t do something you tell them what yes we can that s what you tell them and as you take responsibility for yourselves i also want you to think about taking responsibility for others and for your own community so yeah pay attention in class throw yourselves into getting your education but nudge your buddy that friend you know make sure that he or she is focused too help them through as well yeah i want you all to take that trip to eastern market get healthy fresh food if you ve got a car but offer to get some for somebody who doesn t for an elderly neighbor who can t get there that s what i want you to do yeah take some pride in keeping your block as clean as safe as you can but help your friends take care of their blocks too fight for every inch of your future but take a little time each week to lift up the families and neighbors and schools that need your help today and one other thing as you push forward with your education both inside and outside of the classroom i want you all to consider this consider the wider world out there too we live in a world and think about how you can engage broadly with other people and other cultures around the world embracing your place as part of a big powerful young global generation now that may sound strange when there s so much to do right here at home but if the opportunity ever arises for any of you to participate in exchange programs a study abroad program maybe even travel abroad volunteer for a short time that is my one regret that i didn t do when i was young i would urge you to try to do that it ll advance your education it will expand your sense of possibilities and it will make you more competitive for the jobs of the future but more importantly it will also show you just how much we all have in common no matter where we live in the world and as first lady i ve made it a point to spend time with young people your age when i visit other countries i make it a point to do that and what is so remarkable is that no matter where i go or who they are they re so much like you young people around the world they share similar worries similar frustrations but you all share similar hopes and dreams and what s most amazing is you are all so eager and willing to make a difference and that is what gives me hope if we hope to solve the most pressing challenges in the world we re going to have to adopt the perspective of young people a perspective that reminds us all that we have more in common than we think because in times of tension it s easy for us to slip into focusing only on what makes us different things like color and class when all that does is deepen mistrust and keep us from working together but we are all in this together that s the truth young old black white hispanic asian arab american city suburb both sides of 8 mile none of us can fully succeed without one another and it s times like these that require us to put our differences aside and focus on what we have in common things like pride in where we live so we re looking to you we re looking to your idealism your optimism your willingness to look at things in a new and fresh way we need you to rebuild those bridges to restore that understanding to renew that trust not just here in america but around the world so one last thing before i go here s what i want you all to remember in life there are two kinds of people those who give up and those who don t and it s the folks who don t who make all the difference and i believe in my heart which is why i m here that you all are those special people you are the ones really that we ve been waiting for so apply yourselves young people listen to me apply yourselves show us how it s done you all have to study hard can you do that can you dream big can you hope deeply never give up because we will never give up on you we have got your backs we re rooting for you and sometimes you need to hear that sometimes you just need to know that big important people out there are rooting for you we believe in you all and we will keep working for you as long as you keep working for us so thank you so much you all take care be strong dem mobama27 7 09 michelle_obama well thank you yes it is a little warm but it was cool in there there s some cool air coming out but i want to thank you so much for having me here today it s a pleasure to be with all of you to cut the ribbon and declare caroline family practice community health center officially open for business that s a good thing so you ve been open for a little bit but this is the official opening i want to thank rod for that wonderful introduction and for everything that he s done and the central virginia health services are doing to keep families and communities healthy across this nation i want to do a few more thank you s i want to thank and acknowledge bettina reed who you just saw the site director here at caroline family practice for her tireless hard work in getting this center up and running in such a short period of time it s a miraculous endeavor even when you do have the money so this is a wonderful thing i also want to recognize mary wakefield who i saw earlier i think she s in the air conditioned room but don t be mad she s the administrator of the health resources and services administration and some of her colleagues are here with us today and i want to recognize them for their work to promote centers like this all throughout the country and we also have the first lady of virginia here a good friend of mine and her lovely daughter anne and annella who are joining us here we re thrilled that they could come i ve gotten to know this lady over the course of the last couple of years and i just love her to death and i am grateful for everything that she and her husband and her family are doing to support places like this and it means so much that you re here because i know this is your thing just as much as anyone s i also want to thank the vice chair of the caroline county board of supervisors max rozell the mayor of bowling green who s here david storke town manager steve manster for all their dedication and leadership because none of this stuff happens without the right leadership so thank you and finally i have to thank all the health care providers who are here and all the health care providers who are listening the doctors and the nurses and all the others who ve chosen to work in underserved communities like this one when you know that many of these folks could have gone to fancy practices and made a lot more money it s just important to know that there are people who are making commitments to places like bowling green and they re making these communities a primary focus of their practice and we have to commend those folks and encourage others to join them in what is a fulfilling and important endeavor so we have to acknowledge all of them for their hard work and that s sort of one of the things i d like to talk a little bit about oh no one more person ms maggie james who i don t know if you know but i know she is the oldest living person in caroline county and she came here to see me she is 109 years young and looking great in that fuchsia it s pink but it s fabulous and i m grateful ms james that you came to see me but i wanted to talk a bit about why the work that everyone is doing here is so critical not just in this community but all across the nation and not just for the health of our families but for the future of our entire health care system so i know many of you have been following the debate that s going on out there in washington where i live now and i know that with all the numbers and the ads and the back and forth on tv news shows it gets easy to lose sight about what it s all about all that discussion but as i ve traveled the country over the past couple years campaigning for my husband and even working in health administration no matter where i ve gone no matter who i ve been talking to they always want to talk about health care i don t care if you re lucky enough to have a good health care system or not you either know someone who has struggled under the current system and it has been the number one issue on the minds of the majority of americans that i ve talked to and i think that there s one fact one statistic that should remind us all exactly what s at stake here and that is that we spend more money on health care than any other nation on earth we do already today yet we are nowhere near the healthiest and that says something we re nowhere near the healthiest in fact people in some of the countries that spend less than we do are actually living longer than we do here in this nation and one of the main that s other than ms james of course and one of the main reasons for this is the reason why we re all here today and it s because that right now today here in america 60 million people in this country don t have adequate access to primary care they don t have any access at all many of them are uninsured and can t afford any kind of health care at all that s a good chunk of them many actually have insurance but live in underserved areas like this one inner cities or small rural towns where there aren t any primary care providers to speak of they have to drive hours so what happens to folks in america in this situation is that they don t get check ups they don t get regular routine screenings that keep us healthy when they get sick their only option is to wait until it gets so bad that they have to visit the emergency room and then they wind up lurching from illness to illness and crisis to crisis getting emergency care instead of health care and we wind up spending billions of dollars each year to treat diseases that for far less money we could prevent in the first place we will spend thousands of dollars for an emergency room visit and hospital stay for a child for example having an acute asthma attack that could have been prevented by a 100 doctor s visit and a 50 inhaler we ll spend tens of thousands to treat complications from diabetes that could have been prevented by a couple hundred dollars worth of counseling on nutrition and blood sugar monitoring and today chronic and preventable illnesses like diabetes and obesity heart disease and high blood pressure consume 85 percent of all health care spending in this country that s what we re spending our money on here and if you think that s bad just wait a few years because right now if we think about our children nearly a third of them in this country are overweight or obese and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetimes in the african american and hispanic communities that number goes up to half half of all those kids will be in that situation it s gotten so bad that this week experts from across the country are meeting in washington for what they re calling a weight of the nation conference sponsored by the cdc to discuss how we can address the rising threat of obesity particularly in our children so we know that something is not quite right with the current system we sort of know that our experiences tell us that we know we need to start focusing on primary care and preventative care on promoting wellness and not just treating sickness that s the mission of this community center and health centers like it across the country that serve 17 million of our fellow citizens not just to make diagnoses and hand out prescriptions but to understand why people are getting sick in the first place and how they can get healthy and stay healthy in the future see when someone goes to the emergency room with a fever or a sore throat chances are they ll get a quick exam they ll get some antibiotics and they ll get a pretty hefty bill but when they come to a place like this the providers here may very well ask them when they had their last blood pressure checked or they ll delve a little deeper they might ask whether they re getting regular mammograms and how often they exercise and if they ve gotten that mole on their arm checked out they just dig a little bit deeper in places like this it s an approach to care that s about curing illness and preventing it at the same time and it s an approach that s about making sure that people can actually take advantage of the care that s provided there s a whole nother level to care making sure that people actually can access what s available in community health centers across the country they don t just give people appointments they help folks find transportation to actually get to those appointments right here folks don t just write prescriptions they make sure that people can actually fill them out that they can connect with programs to ensure that they do and folks here don t just tell someone that they need a specialist but they actually get on the phone and find that specialist even if it means making dozens of calls until they find someone that the patient can afford in places like this care is provided in languages that patients can understand in a way that s respectful of their various cultures and that takes into account the challenges they face in their everyday life ultimately practice here isn t just about diagnosing problems it s about caring for people it s about educating people so that they can better educate themselves and it s about giving people the security of knowing that health care will be there for them and their families whenever they need it and when you get right down to it that s what the debate in washington is all about and if you really think about it that s why my husband and so many folks in congress are fighting so hard for reform that lowers people s costs and ensures that all families have good coverage that they can actually afford what they re doing is critical not just for the work this center is doing here in bowling green but for all people across this country it s critical to all of us and that s one of the key points that i want to make that health insurance reform isn t just about the nearly 46 million americans who don t have insurance it s also about all those folks who do if you think about it for a minute right now for example you might have a good plan that you really like and think our health system is great just the way it is show of hands but the question becomes even if you re in that situation what happens if you lose your job and then your coverage goes away and then you can t find a new job right away those are some of the stories i ve heard or if you want to change jobs but your new employer doesn t offer any insurance at all because more and more employers are finding it difficult to keep up with the cost of health care or what if you decide you want to change insurance plans but your new insurer decides that you have a preexisting condition or your age or your gender or your health status means that they need to charge you a fortune for that insurance what if you get sick and they decide you re too expensive to insure that happens and then they drop your coverage completely see these are the things that happen to hardworking responsible people who ve done exactly what they thought they should do it s happening every single day across this country and of course there are plenty of folks who won t experience any of these misfortunes there really are they re blessed and despite rising costs and declining coverage some of them are convinced that things are just fine right now but even if that were true even if the status quo were acceptable to us then the question becomes what about 10 years from now if we don t pass reform within a decade we ll actually be spending one out of every five dollars we earn on health insurance in 30 years when my kids are ready to come into the world it will be one in every three dollars spent on health care so think about that one in every three dollars by the time our kids get to be where we are and without reform what we spend on medicaid and medicare government programs will eventually be more than what our government spends on anything else anything else that we spend today right now premiums are rising three times faster than wages right now today and if we don t pass reform they re going to keep on rising in this way so think about how much we ll be paying 10 years from now without reform that s what we have to project folks who have insurance they like now could find themselves overwhelmed with sky high premiums and much higher out of pocket costs think about all the businesses that will have to drop their coverage or lay people off if we don t pass reform because they can t afford the cost think about the millions of people who will lose their coverage and many whom will wind up using the emergency room as their primary care provider which will mean higher costs for all of us and then let s go back to the statistics on the childhood obesity and diabetes for a minute if a third of our kids are overweight or obese now what s that going to mean 10 years from now how much will we be spending on obesity related conditions like heart disease and cancer and high blood pressure in 10 20 30 years how much money will our economy lose in missed days of work and decreased productivity and how much will all of this diminish our quality of life here in this nation and what does it mean that for the first time in the history of our nation medical experts today warn that this generation my children our grandchildren may be on track to have a shorter lifespan than their parents you know this isn t who we are as americans if there s one thing that defines what it means to be an american is that we always do better for our kids we always do better for our kids we sacrifice so that we can give them opportunities and advantages that we never had that s what i was taught that is our obligation to the next generation that s why my husband and i think about that s what we think about at night when we tuck our kids in we don t think about the life they have today we think about the life we re going to provide for them when they re older and that s why he ran for president in the first place it s not about us it s not about now he s running because of the world he wants to leave them that s why he s fighting so hard to fix our health care system not just to make it more affordable today not just to ensure that it covers more people but to make sure that it provides better higher quality care that makes us all healthier all of us that s why his plan makes historic investments in prevention and wellness investments to help people quit smoking and to lose weight and get immunizations and screenings that s why he included 2 billion in the american recovery and reinvestment act to upgrade and expand community health centers including the 1 3 million to fund the one that we re here to open today this money is going to allow for the expansion of desperately needed primary care services to more than 2 8 million more people and it s going to create jobs in places that desperately need them as well and that s why he s investing 300 million in the recovery act for the national health service corps something we talked about in our earlier meeting it s an outstanding program that helps doctors dentists nurses and other health care providers repay their student loans in exchange for practicing in places like this it s a great idea and i want to take a moment to recognize all the current and former corps members who are here with us today who shared their stories because we re so proud of you and so grateful for your contributions to these communities all over the nation because you could be doing something else the new investments in this program will more than double its capacity right now there are 38 corps members serving four million americans with the new money there will be 8 000 providers serving 8 5 million americans by the end of next year if we get this passed and many of them will be working in community health centers just like this one doing the kind of work that means so much to so many americans and that s what dr regina benjamin who is my husband s nominee for our next surgeon general this is what she did after graduating from medical school she joined the corps and was sent down to alabama and what does she do she stayed there eventually running the clinic herself and those were stories that we heard here today and what she said she was doing was so meaningful that as she put it she said i don t feel like i m giving to the community i think they re giving to me and i heard those same sentiments echoed by the national health corps members who are here in the end that s what the work in this community center is all about it s about the human connections that people make with the people and the communities that they serve it s about the steps you take above and beyond what s required because you really care about your patients it s about the peace of mind that you give to people with nowhere else to turn and that is the story of community health centers in america it s the story of a man named ed who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at a community health center in oklahoma the center not only got him to the oncology services he needed they came to his house to draw blood when his immune system was too weak for him to go outside that s the kind of work you do it s the story of a man named randy all the way in indiana who went to a community health center because of an allergic reaction to his blood pressure medication the doctor there noticed the lump on his neck and did some tests and diagnosed him with cancer randy had no insurance and no way to pay for treatment but that didn t stop the clinic s medical director and ceo they spent hours making calls until they found a surgeon who would treat him at a reduced fee and today randy is cancer free and then there s the story of a nine year old boy named michael who was brought to a community health center in kansas with a high fever and an abscessed tooth something that you will see here on a regular basis after having been in severe pain for weeks he finally got the treatment that he needed and then when the staff of the center later came to his school to screen the other kids they said randy took their hands and walked into his classroom and announced to his classmates these are my friends and they will help you these are the stories you ll soon be telling here at this center wonderful stories i ve heard some of them already and that s why so many folks in washington are putting in these long hours to pass health insurance reform because all our families deserve this kind of care and all our kids deserve the chance to have a healthy future and i think it s fitting that the town of bowling green used to be called new hope village that s what i was told because that s exactly what this center will be giving to so many folks in this community and we look forward to supporting you in this work in the months and years ahead thank you so much for your work and god bless you all now let s get this opened thank you dem mobama28 1 10 michelle_obama as you know from last night i get embarrassed when people stand up and clap for me i don t really know what to do do i wave do i it s like please just sit down everyone good afternoon i m thrilled to be here on the floor it s a great floor it s kind of a warm floor but it s a good floor let me begin by thanking the new first lady in the room maureen mcdonnell we are going to have a great time working together she is already very engaged and supportive of these initiatives and since she s so close i am counting on her to work alongside on some of these issues we re going to see you in a month at the governors gala whatever they call it so be ready to dance and welcome aboard a little practice absolutely congressman moran again i want to thank you for all your work in this area i look forward to working with you our staffs are already talking about some things that you ve been working on for a very long time so we re grateful for your leadership and concern and focus mayor euille again you have been a host to me in your great city and you ve done wonderful work in this area i had a terrific time addressing the national conference of mayors and i got a very good response from your colleagues i know that the mayors in this country stand ready to work on this issue they are seeing the effects of what everyone on this floor has talked about in terms of childhood obesity and they re ready to make some changes also dr palfrey it is an honor for us to have you with us as i ve shared before it was through our relationship with our pediatrician that we even began as a family to start thinking about these issues and it s our pediatricians and our medical community that are going to work side by side with families throughout the country so we re grateful for your support i know that this is not a new issue for you and i hope that our attention to it makes your job a little bit easier i also want to thank all the folks at the y for all you re doing neil nicoll for your work as the national leader but i know you know as a national leader the real work happens on the ground at these fine facilities all throughout the country the y has been a leader in ensuring that families and communities all over this country have access to places to play your mobile physical unit your phd unit that came to the south lawn helped me debut my hula hooping skills but i think the ys are showing that they are thinking towards the next stage you know the room that we were in is the next generation of what ys can be the mobile unit is something that i didn t grow up with but you re keeping up with the changes in cultures and communities in a way that is going to make a huge impact to the work that we have to do in our nation and finally i want to thank my buddy in crime secretary sebelius for her tremendous leadership and her tremendous friendship we re glad that you moved out of assisted living i know it s hard i know i know i ll work on him but you can come over for dinner or something from your work with the cdc to the fda the department of health and human services is clearly at the forefront of addressing some of our greatest health issues and it s going to take their continued commitment these grants that are coming out we ve been working with your department in getting them done your staff has been tremendous in moving very quickly on getting that money out and i m anxious to see what all that hard work leads to so we are grateful not just to you but all of the thousands of people in your agency who make us all look very good and finally i want to commend our new surgeon general dr benjamin who i finally got to meet three months on the job and we re already making you crazy right but you re doing a terrific job just jumping right in the report is not only timely but it s right on point and your perspective your new way of looking at this issue is refreshing and again it s right on point it s presenting both the dangers of inaction and a vision for health for this country it s an incredible step in a long journey that we ll have to take so we want to thank you for your important work so as we ve seen the surge in obesity in this country is nothing short of a public health crisis and it s threatening our children it s threatening our families and more importantly it s threatening the future of this nation higher rates of obesity are directly linked as you ve heard to higher rates of chronic illnesses like heart disease and cancer and diabetes even though type 2 diabetes is rare among young people more than three quarters of those who have it are obese in fact the health consequences are so severe that as the secretary said medical experts have warned that our children are on track to be less healthy than we are and there s never been a generation of young people who are on track to be healthier than their parents or less healthy than their parents and truly if we re really honest with ourselves it s not hard to understand how this happens i ve tried to track this through my own life in some cases it s access parents have told me i ve seen it myself that they would love nothing more than to feed their kids more healthy foods but if you don t live anywhere near a place that sells fresh produce it s very hard to accomplish that goal in other cases the issue is just convenience at the end of a long day and more and more families are experiencing these long days with two parents working and busy schedules you just get home and you re tired and you pick up the phone and you order a pizza or you go to that drive thru it s just easier our modern day life makes it very difficult for us to sit down and prepare that meal and a lot of times it s affordability in these tough economic times buying healthy foods unfortunately feels like a luxury for too many families they just can t afford it we ve seen stories we ve heard stories of people who know that buying that large gallon of juice is cheaper than buying a gallon of milk they can t afford to make different choices and then at schools and in our communities oftentimes it s budget cuts that make it more difficult recess and pe are gone for many kids in communities all across this country parks and playgrounds and after school sports are few and far between in too many neighborhoods and for most people the cause is really a combination of all of these things it s no one particular thing it s everything cobbled together and let s face it there are really just too many pressures on parents today and i understand those pressures i talk about this all the time it s easy to live healthy when you live in the white house and you have staff and people who are cooking for you and making sure that it s balanced and colorful because i had a hard time doing it before i lived in the white house and that wasn t so long ago barack and i were like any working couple i was a working mom with a husband that was busy so many times i was the one balancing that load and wrestling with many of those challenges and there were plenty of times i tell you that you d come home tired you don t want to hear the kids fuss and popping something in the microwave or picking up a burger was just heaven it was a godsend but we were fortunate enough to have a pediatrician as i ve mentioned that kind of waved the red flag for me as a mother and basically cautioned me that i had to take a look at my own children s bmi now we went to our pediatrician all the time i thought my kids were perfect they are and always will be but he warned that he was concerned that something was getting off balance because fortunately he was a pediatrician that worked predominantly in an african american urban community and he knew these trends existed and he was watching very closely in his client population his patient population so again in my eyes my children were perfect i didn t see the changes and that s also part of the problem or part of the challenge it s often hard to see changes in your own kids when you re living with them day in and day out as parents we all know and will readily acknowledge broadly that kids in general we will say we know they don t eat right right and we know they don t get as much exercise as they should generally but we often simply don t realize that those kids are our kids and our kids could be in danger of becoming obese we always think that only happens to someone else s kid and i was in that position we all want desperately to make the best choices for our kids but in this climate it s hard to know what s the right thing to do anymore so even though i wasn t exactly sure at that time what i was supposed to do with this information about my children s bmi i knew that i had to do something that i had to lead our family to a different way but the beauty was that for me over the course of a few months we started making really minor changes and i share this story because the changes were so minor we did things like you know limit tv time my kids were already fairly active but you know we cut tv time out during the week and that helped increase activity because they were just running up and down the stairs annoying me more we paid more attention to portion size didn t make a big deal out of it but just sort of said listen to when you re hungry and when you re full stop we reduced our intake of sugary drinks and instead encouraged our kids to drink more water i just put water bottles in the lunch during the week or we had low fat milk again didn t make a big deal out of it just made the change we put more fruits and vegetables in our diets again trying to make for a colorful palate but you d slip some grapes in at breakfast time and throw in an apple at lunch and pester them about whether they actually ate the apple and then you try to balance it out with something at dinner time i mean it was really very minor stuff but these small changes resulted in some really significant improvements and i didn t know it would it was so significant that the next time we visited our pediatrician he was amazed he looked over the girls charts and he said what on earth are you doing and i said really not much not much and that s the good news that we want to share with families particularly for kids small changes can lead to big results they re not destined to this fate and they re not really in control what goes into their mouths usually so we know what has led to the obesity epidemic you know we know inside i mean we re still learning but we kind of know and we know what we need to do to solve it we just have to make the commitment to do it we really each and every one of us needs to make that commitment we need to provide parents with better nutritional information so that they can make better choices we need to give our kids healthier options at school where many kids are getting most of their meals we need to make sure they re spending less time in front of the tv and playing videogames and more time exercising and having fun and doing the work of children which is play but we also know that the solution can t come from government alone that s something that we just have to remind ourselves and for many that s a great relief everyone has to be willing to do their part to solve this problem and everyone has to work together to turn this pattern around and that s exactly what we hope to do through an administration wide initiative on child obesity that i m going to be launching in the next couple of weeks along with a number of important partners we re going to be bringing the federal government together those resources in partnerships with business non profit and the foundation communities all of whom are thrilled to be a part of this endeavor it s just been refreshing to see so many people recognizing that this is the time to step up and make some changes we re going to do a number of things again some of them small things we want to create what we re calling more healthy schools and these are schools that are offering more nutritious meal options during the day they re providing nutritional information to children as part of the curriculum and they re ensuring that children are getting the increased exercise that we know that they need but we also have to focus on increasing the amount of exercise outside of school and no place like the y knows that we need to make these changes we need to make healthy food options more affordable and accessible and that s going to be probably one of the toughest things that we need to do and we need to do this in all communities urban rural everywhere people have to have the information they have to have access in order to make healthy choices there is nothing more frustrating that will frustrate a parent more than to say that you ve got to buy more fruits and vegetables but to still see the cost out of kilter and see those goals out of reach so these are just some of the things that we hope to do through this initiative but what we know is that we have to be ambitious that the approach has to be ambitious it can t just be lockstep it s got to be something meaningful and powerful and the other thing that i will say and say again and again and again this won t be easy so let s begin with that this will not be easy and it won t happen overnight and it won t happen simply because the first lady has made it her priority that in and of itself is not going to be enough it s going to take all of us thank god it s not going to be solely up to me but it s going to take all of us parents schools communities working together for a very long time over a sustained period of time over generations of children will need to keep doing this but i have every confidence based on the level of energy that i ve seen based on the willingness of people to deal with this issue across party lines the willingness of the business community to be a part of the solution every sign that we ve seen over the course of moving to this rollout has been nothing but positive and of course parents are ready and willing we all want to make the best choices for our children we just need to know how and if we continue to do that if we work with our physicians if we work with our surgeon general if we ve got the government the federal government working together businesses ready to make the sacrifices then we can tackle this problem and we can do something really important for our kids we can hand them the future that we know they re going to need to be successful so i am excited and i look forward to working with all of you over the next years to make this not just a dream but to make this movement a reality so thank you all for the work that you ve done so far and we have a lot more work to do so thank you so much dem mobama28 10 09 michelle_obama thank you thank you everyone please sit you ve done enough you can sit first i want to thank jill jill my partner in pardon me what was that back there i want to thank jill for her partnership her friendship her support she has been just a phenomenal support to me not just in this particular effort but everything that we ve been through and will have to go through i want us all to give her another round of applause and i want to thank everyone in major league baseball for all that you re doing for our veterans this has just been a phenomenal effort to bring exposure and awareness and we are just all so very grateful that major league baseball has decided to take on this issue at a time that is so important and is such a celebratory time in major league baseball so we thank you all and thanks for everyone here at the va thank you thank you thank you we are so proud and so honored to be here last week i spent some time with secretary shinseki and the staff at the va headquarters in washington to underscore the importance of the va s mission and to thank the va staff there and all across america for their service to our nation s veterans and i ve done that because in addition to thanking veterans it s important to thank the staff who make things possible so often we forget the men and women behind the scenes who make things work and i know that many of you are veterans yourselves the people who work at the va the people who work at facilities like this and your work couldn t be more important it could not be more important so i am happy to be here today i m happy with every minute that i spend time with our men and women in uniform and our veterans each and every day they selflessly and courageously serve this nation they demonstrate their commitment to upholding america s highest ideals and they make an enormous sacrifice for each of us for our country and for the peace and security that we all enjoy today s visit is a vivid reminder that for many of them the battle continues even after they come home but when i talk with these brave men and women they speak less about themselves and more about the stress that their sacrifice puts on their families who live each day without them and hold everything together in their absence that s all these folks think about and worry about as a nation we have a responsibility to honor their service by doing everything we can to support our servicemen and women our veterans and their families that s a duty that we have now for government for government that means living up to our responsibility to guaranteeing our veterans the care that they were promised and the benefits that they have earned in fact in addition yes in addition to an historic increase in va funding which is part of the bill that president obama has signed today or will sign if he hasn t signed it today gives the family members of wounded veterans federal family leave protection so that they can for care for their loved ones without losing their jobs something very simple very basic so those are the types of things that government can do but providing our military and their families with the support they deserve requires far more than government can do as jill pointed out it requires all of us to be very active in this effort and jill and i have obviously made it a personal priority to ask all americans to join the cause by supporting our military and their families and as jill said there are just so many ways that people can help on their own and i ve said this so many times before if you are a business owner big or small you can help a returning soldier or a veteran or a spouse by helping them get or keep a job we have to think about that if you have professional skill of any kind whether you re a lawyer particularly if you re a mental health professional or an accountant you can provide your services pro bono to military families who need assistance that s something to think about or you can do something as jill said as simple as offering to drive a carpool or to offer babysitting or making a meal just so many small things can really make the difference and make sure that our veterans and our men and women in uniform know that we care and that we re thinking about them and above all each of us can simply reach out and do something really small and say thank you each and every one of us is living in a community that has some family who has been touched in some way they re in our schools in our churches they re walking through the streets at the grocery store sometimes they re easily identified sometimes they re not but as jill said part of why we re here is that we want to urge all americans who see watch the game tonight get a chance to see our psa hear the sound of our voices to never forget that these folks have made sacrifices and we owe for what they ve done for us so let s take the time to be more aware of these heroes in our midst and honor them by doing more service not just for them but for all our communities we are so incredibly grateful and proud of all of you and with that we will come down and shake some hands so thank you very much dem mobama28 4 09 michelle_obama thank you thank you so much i m not going to talk long because everybody has said just about everything that can be said but let me tell you something i am proud to be here i want to congratulate everyone who was a part of making this day possible the ncbw all of the elected official c delores tucker her family the family of sojourner truth it is just a sheer delight to have you here witnessing this but let s just think about this day and this gathering it is so good to see this hall filled with so many strong women a few brothers in here a few people but such a diverse group of people crowding this hall and one can only imagine what sojourner truth an outspoken tell it like it is kind of woman and we all know a little something about that right just to imagine what she would have to say about this incredible gathering just looking down on this day and thinking about the legacy she has left all of us because we are all here because as my husband says time and time again we stand on the shoulders of giants like sojourner truth and just as susan b anthony elizabeth cady stanton lucretia mott would be pleased to know that we have a woman serving as the speaker of the house of representatives i hope that sojourner truth would be proud to see me a descendant of slaves serving as the first lady of the united states of america so i am proud to be here i am proud to be able to stand here on this day with this dedication and just as many young boys and girls have walked through this capitol i see them now and they see the bust of suffragists and hear the stories of the struggles of women what they had to endure to gain the right to vote now many young boys and girls like my own daughters will come to emancipation hall and see the face of a woman who looks like them and all the visitors in the u s capitol will hear the story of brave women who endured the greatest of humanities indignities they ll hear the story of sojourner truth who didn t allow those indignities to destroy her spirit who fought for her own freedom and then used her powers young people then she used her power to help others who fought for the right to vote and for the rights of all women the power of this bust will not just be in the metal that delineates sojourner truth s face it will also be in the message that defines her legacy forever more in the halls of one of our country s greatest monuments of liberty and equality justice and freedom sojourner s truth story will be told again and again and again and again so now let s get on with unveiling this statue thank you so much dem mobama29 10 09 michelle_obama so how s everybody doing so we ve got some bancroft students and what other school do we have here yes kimball you guys are a new school so we re happy to have you guys so you know why we re here to garden well more importantly we re going to harvest right because we ve got all this food that is ready to be picked and eaten so just especially for the kimball students because bancroft students you guys are new even though the school isn t new many of you haven t been here before right yes yes so you remember how this all started if you remember that it was in march right we decided we were going to plant this garden so this garden wasn t here before nothing was here this was grass like everything else so we thought well wouldn t it be great if we could use this garden to talk about the importance of healthy eating and what good fresh foods taste like so we had bancroft students who were fifth graders then many of them have gone on to sixth grade a new school but they helped us till the soil get the soil ready so we had to pull up all the grass and make sure that the soil was ready and healthy and then they came back and we actually planted we planted remember planting these all these herbs and some of the lettuces so some of them were seeds but some of them were little plants and then they grew and then in the spring and the summer we harvested so there was food just like this ready to be picked and then we ate together so then the summer went by and now it s fall and there s a whole new crop of food here that s ready to be harvested and actually we ve done a little bit of that my girls and i we got a couple of the sweet potatoes and we re going to do some of those these sweet potatoes are huge they re huge so hopefully you guys will be able to pull up some of these huge sweet potatoes so that s why we ve invited you all here so you re going to help us do our fall winter harvest yes young man you have a question oh you re just fanning your hair that s good that s good but we also have some other guests in addition to our students we ve got somebody very special the first time he s been down with us to help harvest jim adams and jim is the chief horticulturalist here at the white house do you know what a horticulturalist does or what he did for this garden he really was responsible for how productive this garden was because you know we sort of know a little bit of something about gardening but how do you know what to plant where and what s going to grow well here in this soil well jim helped us figure out where to put things how to make it beautiful and to make sure that the food was going to grow and we were going to get the right types of fruits at the right period of the season so jim really we have to give him a big round of applause because thanks to jim we have a very productive garden do you know how much food has come out of this garden so far over 740 pounds of food have come out of this little piece of land and do you know how much it costs to plant all this how much do you all think it would cost to plant this give me a figure what three hundred dollars i have three hundred here eight hundred i ve got eight hundred one thousand six thousand dollars one more guess five hundred all right it costs less than two hundred dollars it was about a hundred and eighty dollars it cost a hundred dollars to get the a hundred and twenty something dollars to get the soil ready and about fifty five dollars for all of these seeds so for less than two hundred dollars we have planted enough food to feed not just the folks at the white house but we ve also given a lot of food to some of our neighbors and we re going to do that today we ve got some of the staff and our friends from miriam s kitchen who are here miriam s you guys raise your hands the miriam s kitchen team you guys know about miriam s kitchen it s a place where folks can go and get help if they need it you know if moms and kids and families are hitting on hard times and they don t have a place to get food they can go to miriam s kitchen and miriam s kitchen specializes in making sure that everyone who comes there has access to really healthy food so everything that you guys pick here today we re donating it to the miriam s kitchen so it makes it even extra special okay so i want to thank you guys for coming and for sharing this with us and i also want to introduce all our chefs at the white house everybody raise your hands all of our chefs at the white house who are who have helped to make sure that this garden grows and that we get good food and they make it and it s good and it s healthy you know it s all that good stuff so are you guys ready to do some work are you ready to work really hard are you ready to get dirty all right let s go let s go let s do it let s do it dem mobama29 4 09 michelle_obama all right we ve got a goal a thousand bags so i m not going to talk long because we need to get to work this is shift number one shift number two is going to come in and they re going to try and beat shift number one which will never happen of course and when shift number two comes in we ll say the same thing but i just want to thank all of you all for being here this is i think this is a very special day because i think this is a very special group of people the spouses of the leadership of congress coming together we re going to have a wonderful lunch tomorrow but we talked about this i ve talked about this with many of you that each of us in our roles in our leadership roles we have an opportunity to shine a bright light on service and the possibility of what service can do today is just an example of how just a few of us and it s not just a few of us this is a really good number of us that have come together over 150 congressional spouses signed up to be involved in this day of service and that s just amazing and one of the things that we can illustrate to the rest of the world is that it doesn t take a lot to do something major we re going to spend a couple of hours of our time packing up food and it s going to feed a thousand children over the weekend here in washington d c and i know that each and every one of us feels that this is so such a small sacrifice to make that we would do it again and again and many of you i know are doing this same type of service and much more in your own districts in your own cities and towns and communities i just think it s important for america to see you all here doing this and for us doing it together not as republicans or democrats or independents there is no ideology these are just all of us people who care about our country and want to make service a core part of the work that we do so i m grateful to all of you for taking the extra time to come many of you have brought your children and that s always a wonderful legacy to pass on we re going to do these kind of events continuously if possible when we come together whether it s for a luncheon or a picnic whatever we do over the course of the year we re going to do our best to organize these types of service opportunities because it gives us a chance to get to know each other outside of sort of the work setting and we can give something back to the d c community that oftentimes don t get to see us and that s important too so i just want to thank you all i want to thank the food bank for making this possible it s not easy to pull together a service project for 160 people and we don t ever give them enough time i also want to thank jill biden you know she says this is all me this is both of us this is all of us quite frankly we couldn t do this if you weren t willing to make it happen so i just want to thank you guys and make sure that we hit our goal a thousand bags let s get going thanks again and we ll see you tomorrow at lunch dem mobama29 4 10 michelle_obama thank you thank you so much look there s not much more i need to say rachel dayo both did just an outstanding job in laying out the organizations that are working with us today the schools these are valuable initiatives we ve already done a great job highlighting them but it s just wonderful to have the opportunity to get my colleagues my friends my peers at the congressional club the spouses here seeing what s going on being able to bring the press and the media to highlight the good work that s being done so i want to thank you all for the work that you did to pull this together in a fairly short period of time we have a relationship but creating a mural and organizing a group of well intentioned but not necessarily artistic people to do to entrust us with your walls is it s a huge risk to take and we re honored to be a part of it i want to thank rachel and rocco for their leadership their commitment they ve been both been true assets to this nation and to the white house they ve provided us with the backbone we need to open up the white house to make it a place for all folks to celebrate culture and arts and all forms of important expression we have a lot more to do but you all have been just terrific so lynsey and ed you guys are doing some phenomenal work it was wonderful to have you at the white house for the coming up taller awards and all my kids who were there as well it s good for me to get out here and see what you re doing but we re very excited to be here we wouldn t be here if it weren t for my folks my fellow folks at the congressional club all the spouses we had an opportunity to spend a wonderful lunch yesterday it was just a truly special afternoon and it s so good that everyone has made a commitment to step out of our tea dresses and away from the crystal and to roll up our sleeves and be ready to paint and to get a little dirty it s important so important not just to me but to the community to have us out here for our kids to see that we not only care about them which we do we are so proud of you all and we want the world to see you all and understand your potential to see grade point averages go from 2 0 to 3 point who knows what we are so proud and we want to keep lifting you up and showing other kids that these opportunities are available but you all also do us a big favor too you give us a real good excuse to get out in beautiful weather to kind of be silly with you all and we get to know one another a lot better through these projects and these initiatives all of the congressional spouses are committed in some way to service many of them are doing something important in some way shape or form in their own states in their own districts the fact that they re willing to take even more time out to come to the district and to learn more about what s going on and to roll up their sleeves is just a testament to their courage to their commitment and to their belief in you all these community organizations and schools and students and a belief in the you know just the beauty of this country and all that we have to offer these walls were blank i saw the pictures you all have been working really hard it looks beautiful and i think the end result is that every wall i understand including the retaining walls are going to be just full of color and this project is not only important for the school but it s also important for the community and so many of these organizations have worked to beautify this area to be a part of the reinvigoration of a neighborhood that needs the support of us all and this is just another project that s going to add a little brightness to a community that is growing and developing every single day so thank you all for taking the time i m ready to get my paintbrush and get started and i ll make sure i get around to everybody to say hello before i go but i got to work first so thank you all thanks again dem mobama29 5 09 michelle_obama well that s hard to follow i mean those were just some amazing presentations carlos cierra tammy david i am so proud of you all i mean because it wasn t just what they said but how you presented it how you structured it you added humor great description just as a teacher that s just a plus work right there and it says it all i mean those presentations are just a great representation of what this little project can do with kids they just eat up information and they take our lead and they drink it up like nothing and then they turn it around and teach us in the process it has been an honor to work with you all it has been an honor each and every time you have come to the white house you have come with graciousness good manners enthusiasm energy your parents should be very proud of you as well as your teachers you have made it just so easy for us to work with you and i am thrilled to be here in your garden and i m going to do some planting too here so i want to thank you all for what you ve done to help us get the garden started and tammy just to answer your questions the garden is beautiful it is blooming it is bursting we ve already used about 80 pounds of lettuce we ve eaten it we served it at a big fancy luncheon that i did for other congressional and senate spouses and they just raved over it and i told everybody about the work that you did to plant it how you came back again and again and how you re working in your own gardens so everything is going well we also shared some of the lettuce and some of the honey with miriam s kitchen as well so already the work that you re doing is not just feeding our family and the staff and our guests at the white house but it s feeding people who may not have anything to eat so you all should know when you come back to harvest in a couple of weeks you will see a totally different garden everything is blooming we even had to replant some more lettuce because we used it up so quickly but the beans are starting to sprout up we put the tomatoes in we ve sent rhubarb we ve had rhubarb pie if you guys have had rhubarb it tastes just sort of like strawberry and maybe sam mr sam maybe we can do something with rhubarb a nice sweet when you guys come back for the harvesting and we used a lot of the herbs seasonings in our salads and in our foods so we are using every single aspect of that garden and the tomatoes hopefully will be starting to come up and some of the berries as well so things are going well at the white house garden thanks to you all and you should be proud of what you ve done but this is exactly why i wanted to be a part of this project what we re seeing here being able to share this with the bancroft school has just been a special treat because as the students indicated in their presentation it s not just about being out in the garden being out in the open air or being at the white house they ve really learned some lessons about nutrition they re making different choices because they re a part of the process of planting and tilling the soil and pulling up the food it makes such a huge difference in the choices that they make so this is an example of why we wanted to do this and i m so happy that today some parents and community members have been able to join us to see just how much these kids have learned and how much they ve embraced these concepts because it s an example of what we can do nationally with kids and nutrition because we have to have these conversations about nutrition in a society where we re seeing growing rates of obesity and diabetes among kids it is really about choices and one of the ways that i got involved in gardening and eating fresh foods is because i was a busy parent when we started this election even before this campaign you find that your schedule is so packed that it becomes difficult to figure out how to quickly and effectively feed your family so what do you resort to i know it was take out it was processed foods it was everything quick and easy and we started to see that taking a toll on our health and our children s pediatrician gave me a little tap on the shoulder and said you might want to make some changes and the changes that we made were very simple we added more fruits and vegetables to our plates we eliminated processed foods we didn t say no to anything we still went out but it was just about moderation and we were able to engage our children in the process of understanding what foods do to their bodies and like the kids at bancroft they ate up that information and they started schooling me and lecturing me about what i should be eating and what a carrot does and what broccoli does and sometimes they look at my plate in disgust now but what that just told me is that kids can lead the way for us because we care about them so much i know i care about these kids as much as i care about my own and i wanted to share some of the lessons that i learned as a parent and the improvement that i saw in our overall family health with the rest of the nation because it is difficult if you don t know about choices and we also know that access and affordability is also an important part of this conversation which is why encouraging people to use farmer s markets community gardens are really critical but we have to figure out how to make this more affordable and bancroft school this partnership has been right on track because you ve seen firsthand how possible it is to develop a community garden there were times my mother reminded me when there were victory gardens all over communities throughout this nation she talked about as we went through this garden project it was like she just remembered that her mother you know they had seven kids would get their fruits and vegetables from a victory garden in their neighborhood on the south side of chicago and that was one of the reasons why during some tough times with a big family and very little resources they always had fruits and vegetables that was always something that was a part of their diet so part of what we need to do is reengage our communities in this kind of dialogue but we also need to think more broadly about the quality of the foods that we give our kids throughout what we re doing in our schools in our school lunch programs because as the economy gets more troubled there are going to be more and more kids who are going to qualify and rely on the meals that they get at schools their breakfasts and their lunches and the next step or one of the next steps in this conversation is figuring out how do we ensure through the help of the government as well as local communities that the foods that our kids are getting in school each and every day is as healthy as it can be so that we re bringing some of these lessons home and we re also expanding them in the classrooms and in the schools so this has been just a wonderful kickoff and as you said you think i ve you ve enjoyed the hugs and the kisses and the hugs and the sharing i ve enjoyed that the most getting to know you guys digging in the dirt you know just being out in the open air and watching your excitement because we did a lot of hard work moving that dirt with those shovels that was harder than i thought it was remember we had to get the soil ready that was hard that stuff was heavy wasn t it but you guys didn t stop and i didn t think that we were going to finish planting everything i told sam i said well we re going to when it was time to plant i said well maybe we ll get through some of this but we re going to run out of time but what did we do you finished everything you guys planted every single thing in the white house kitchen garden you did everything and you didn t stop until it was done and you should be proud of yourselves because i am so proud of you thank you thank you for being you guys okay so let s go out and do some more planting dem mobama29 6 09 michelle_obama thank you thanks so much vincent well i am delighted to be here thank you vincent for that very irish introduction good hearty and we ll talk about our next trip haven t planned it yet but we ll work on it you got that down i got my staff you got it down i also want to commend the center s manager margarita lobo who i got to meet earlier and thank her and everyone all the staff and patients and physicians who i got to meet and who are working here at unity health care and the upper cardozo center for such an incredible warm welcome and such an informative session right before i came in i am incredibly impressed by the people who have committed their lives to caring for the least of these and i d also like to thank administrator mary wakefield who i just got to meet administrator who was able to join me here today mary thank you so much for your work as you all know we re at a critical juncture in the debate about health care in this nation the current system is economically unsustainable and i don t have to tell any of you that and despite having the most expensive health care system in the world we re not necessarily healthier for it as the president and congress begin to tackle health care reform the flag is being raised on the costly effects of preventable diseases that burden our health care system and community health centers like upper cardozo unity health care are a vital component for this discussion from the young to the old from rural to communities to the inner cities both the insured and uninsured 17 million americans rely on community health centers every year to help them stay healthy access to primary care preventative care wellness and nutrition counseling help prevent chronic illnesses like obesity diabetes heart disease and high blood pressure that consume 85 percent of the health care spending in our country but it s more than just an economic issue it s about the quality of life for all of our citizens particularly our kids i have quoted these statistics on numerous occasions over the last few weeks as we ve harvested the garden and i ve done other things but i think it is so important that i keep repeating them because these statistics are shocking and i want people to really remember what s at stake nearly a third of the children in this country today are overweight or obese and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime when we look at the hispanic and african american communities those numbers climb even higher so that nearly half of the children in those communities will suffer this same fate half of those kids and for the first time in the history and this is the statistic that always gets to me as we have such a sophisticated health care system but this generation medical experts have warned that they may be on track to have a shorter life span a shorter life span than their parents as a result of the obesity epidemic and these statistics are unacceptable for any of us for any child in any community so we need to educate kids about the need for healthy eating these are conversations that we can have as i ve learned the programs here at upper cardozo are doing that work each and every day so we know how to have the conversations we know what works and it has done a good thing in promoting healthy living for many families who get services here the fact is these are all manageable and preventable conditions we don t have to suffer from this we can fix this and community health centers are on the front lines of fighting these epidemics but to be effective in this fight you re going to need more help you re going to need more resources and as vincent alluded to that s really one of the main reasons why i m here today i am pleased to announce today the release of 850 million in recovery act grants to upgrade and expand community health centers across the country this money will help community health centers reach more people in need and make all of our communities healthier places to live and to work this is a new investment on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars that have already enabled health centers to expand and improve their services this year so this is more for centers around the country these recovery act grants will mean new diagnostic equipment renovation of facilities that need repair expanding computer centers to help manage electronic medical records adding on new staff expanding programs that work and over the next two years recovery act dollars for community health centers will expand desperately needed services to more than 2 8 million people right here at upper cardozo as vincent as we see in the diagrams 20 new exam rooms will be built with the 2 5 million grant that s going to go to unity health care to reach 24 percent more patients and the thing you all know that s going to have a major impact on the people who use these facilities who live in this community and the upgrades and expanded efforts at community health centers across the country will dramatically improve the immediate and long term health of our people and our nation s health care system the power of well resourced community health centers to change lives can be seen right here in upper cardozo these statistics were good to see fourteen percent of the patients here at unity have hypertension but thanks to the care they receive more than half of them have it under control those are really good numbers six percent of the patients who walk through the door at this facility in unity s facilities have diabetes and many of them are children but because of the pediatric obesity services and the nutrition education programs available here 71 percent of diabetic patients keep their condition in check again preventable manageable you all are doing it all these folks who with your help are able to better manage their chronic conditions do a number of things they stay out of the hospital they stay out of the emergency room which is the most costly way to receive care in this country and they stay on the job and in school instead a win win situation health centers are community catalysts that improve lives and that s why this investment is so critical and there s another part of this equation beyond health when unity builds those 20 new exam rooms they ll be creating jobs and putting people to work in construction and renovation when a health center in rural illinois purchases a new computer center it s going to keep a programmer in the silicon valley on the job so as we provide quality health care to more people there will be this multiplier effect that will also provide more jobs to more workers just think about the impact of all these recovery act grants all over the entire country every single health center that applied for a grant will receive at the very least 200 000 and every dollar of every grant is going to make a difference in the life of someone in need an inner city child with chronic asthma will play after school right because of these services and they ll be able to concentrate on their homework as opposed to spending an afternoon or an evening sitting in the er getting treatments that they don t have to get a single mom with proper care to manage her diabetes will get back to work full time instead of staying out and using up sick days that she may not even have a grandmother in rural america will get regular checkups so she can be active in her neighborhood organizations maybe be my like my mom and help take the kids to school and for those workers in the building trades this money will mean new jobs with these grants we will strengthen our communities we ll strengthen our economy and we ll strengthen our nation and i want to just thank everyone here at unity and upper cardozo for your commitment for your passion because i met many passionate people and for your continued focus on providing health care quality health care to every citizen regardless of their ability to pay we are hopeful that these funds will mean something in your lives directly that you ll keep doing the programs that work so well the literacy programs the nutrition programs the yoga classes the classes with teens i met some kids whose lives have been turned around because of the programs here and by building capacity here by 24 percent we just hope you keep doing more and more so thank you so much for sharing with me good luck in the future and i ll talk about getting back for the ribbon cutting dem mobama3 3 09 michelle_obama all right you re all invited no i think that s an excellent idea jocelyn where are you she s my policy director she ll be working on that i want to thank the general for that kind introduction and to thank her for her lifetime of service to this nation in the united states air force and as the leader of the women in military service for america memorial i just did a tour with the general and this is an amazing asset to this nation it s something that many of us don t even know exists and i could have spent hours there i strongly encourage anyone in this country who hasn t taken the time to see this memorial it goes through the whole progression of women into the military with contributions from family members from around this country pictures uniforms i m going to spend more time here and bring my girls because it is something that i want them to see so i m grateful to have the opportunity to see this and will be working hard to make sure that this memorial continues to be a part of this nation s heritage i also want to thank a few people as well i want to thank general dunwoody the nation s first female four star general which deserves its own round of applause vice admiral vivien cray of the united states coast guard and i know there a few coast guards out there i heard you and to congresswomen mary fallin as well as laura richardson and my hometown congressperson jan schakowsky i also have to recognize someone else from home our good friend dear dear friend tammy duckworth it s good to see you i am honored to be here with you all as the general said of course this is this month is women s history month and it provides an opportunity for americans to discover and reflect on the accomplishments of women throughout our nation s history but it provides an opportunity to celebrate the many contributions women make today in national life as leaders in business government the community the military and of course in everyday life which is how we women live mostly as mothers daughters wives colleagues and friends and i couldn t think of a better way to begin women s history month than by coming here to the women s memorial at arlington national cemetery to honor our nation s servicewomen as i speak servicewomen and men are at their posts all across our nation and around the world they re standing watch and providing the security that allows us to live in peace and to continue on with our daily lives that includes two whom i have just met lieutenant grace thompson and corporal crystal moultrie of the united states marines we keep them the wounded who are recovering and those who gave the ultimate sacrifice so that we may live in safety and freedom we keep them in our thoughts and our prayers throughout our nation s history women have played an important role in the military as well as in organizations supporting the military during times of conflict our foremothers and our sisters today have joined our forefathers and our brothers today in securing our liberty and protecting our country women s military service goes back to america s early beginnings and servicewomen have long navigated the twists and turns of the women s rights struggle to secure a more equal and fuller place in the united states military this history was interesting to me in 1782 deborah sampson disguised herself and enlisted in the fourth massachusetts regiment she was wounded at the battle of tarrytown in new york later she appealed for back pay as a former continental army soldier and was supported by paul revere the measure was passed by the massachusetts legislature and approved by the governor john hancock then there was dr mary edwards walker a military doctor who became the nation s first female medal of honor recipient for her service during the civil war and then we moved to the 20th century where women became full fledged members of the united states military with the creation of the army and navy nurse corps in 1901 and 1908 and we are joined here today by two amazing women they gave me their ages but there s no reason to know because they look about 30 40 to me mary ragland and alice dixon who served in the six triple eight the only unit of african american women in the women s army corps to serve overseas during world war ii please give them a round of applause i know mary is here spring chickens and if you live right you may be sitting right there in a few decades there s also esther corcoran who is also with us enlisted as a private in the women s army auxiliary corps and was later entered into officer candidate school she was eventually promoted to lieutenant colonel one of the first 10 women to achieve this rank currently serving her country is lieutenant commander cindy campbell she began her navy career as an e1 served at sea and on the homeland she put herself through college and graduate school at night and became an officer she now works in the white house military office right outside my office in the east wing cindy serves as a mentor to servicewomen and men in earlier stages of their careers and i and my staff benefit from her expertise and dedication every day cindy where are you she s way in the back these women and thousands of others set a standard for excellence that enables women who serve today to take on even greater responsibilities a recent women s memorial women s history month poster is called voices of valor and spotlights five decorated servicewomen from each of the armed forces who ve served or are serving in the current war one is silver star recipient sergeant lee ann hester she s the first woman to have been decorated for direct actions against an enemy force there s also lieutenant lisa starr a united states navy nurse who volunteered for a nighttime flight in iraq during a sandstorm that had grounded all medical helicopters to save the life of a wounded marine and there s fighter pilot captain kim campbell who displayed extraordinary skill at the controls of her aircraft to support and protect the lives of her fellow soldiers fighting on the ground in iraq there s second class marine science technician sarah vega who served in both iraq and afghanistan and is an example of the bravery that men and women of the united states coast guard are displaying in war zones today and then marine corporal ramona valdez who in addition to her other duties was teamed up with 16 other servicewomen to form an all female search force in iraq as a proactive effort to calm iraqi concerns that male soldiers might search muslim women her convoy was attacked and she was killed four days before her 21st birthday marine major general douglas o dell jr wept as he awarded purple hearts to the survivors from corporal valdez s force he said he was moved i quote not by special sympathy for the women but because of the display of equality born of that horrible day in fallujah the general went on to explain that while military leaders believed women marines could perform as bravely as men under deadly attack there had never been a trial like the one in fallujah to prove it members of the military and their families have a special courage and strength as the president said last week during his address at camp lejeune service doesn t end with the person wearing the uniform you all know that and i have been honored and deeply moved to meet many military families over the past couple of years they are mothers and fathers who have lost their beloved children to war they are husbands and wives keeping the family on track while their wives and husbands are deployed on duty they are grandparents aunts and uncles sisters and brothers who are taking care of children while single moms or dads in uniform are away and there are moms and dads who both serve in uniform like helicopter pilots colonels laura and jim richardson who in 2003 became the first couple to have led their own battalions during a time of combat and during that time they were able to leave their 14 year old daughter in the care of family when they were deployed see military families have done their duty and we as a grateful nation must do ours we must do everything in our power to honor them by supporting them not just by word but by deed and it is my great hope that today s and future generations will honor women and men in uniform by first of all never taking the blessings of freedom for granted and by doing their part to create a more perfect union i know that we will continue to do our parts over the coming years again i want to thank you all for your service for your courage for your dedication for your commitment and may god bless you all and god bless america thank you so much dem mobama3 3 10 michelle_obama thank you guys thank you so much how you all doing you excited you all fired up that s a good thing i m just happy to be here well let me tell you something the white house is a pretty neat place to live but let me let me just say this one of the best things i do is coming out of the white house and coming here to spend time with all of you you all really do you all really help remind us what we re here for and we re just so proud of you and let me start by thanking tiffany for that beautiful introduction i got to meet tiffany backstage and i know that the reason she got to introduce me was because she worked hard and won an essay competition to do it and we are proud of her we re proud of you tiffany proud of the work that you re doing you re a beautiful young lady a sweetheart and i want you to keep up whatever it is you re doing because you re doing good things and we re just so proud of you i also want to thank before we get i want to thank a few people here because there are a lot of people here who care about this state and care about this city people who have done a lot to make this visit possible who ve done a lot of important groundwork to get this state in the limelight and i want to make sure that we recognize those people some of them who couldn t be here like congressman bennie thompson because he s in washington the president has him working hard in washington and we re glad he s there working but who came along is his wife london and their daughter if you all would stand so that we can say hello and also another congressman i don t think he could be here gregg harper he s in washington but his wife sidney is here sidney would you stand please and i have to thank your mayor mayor johnson and his wife kathy got a chance to talk and meet them both and it s not easy having the first lady come to your city but they have just been gracious and they worked very hard and we re just so honored and thrilled to be here i also want to thank the school superintendent dr lonnie edwards dr edwards would you please stand because dr edwards let us visit during a school day so we ve got to give him a round of applause and last but not least i have to thank governor barbour and his beautiful wife the first lady of the state of mississippi they have they ve opened their hearts to me from the very beginning of this initiative i ve said this before there are so many people who have been out on front on this issue long before i showed up at the white house and long before we launched let s move and mrs barbour has been just a big advocate of let s go walkin that initiative is exactly the kind of things we need to replicate all over this country and i am grateful to both the governor and the first lady for their hard work and their commitment and their sincerity so let s give them another round of applause so since i ve been here i went to visit pecan park elementary school did i say that right pecan because where i come from sometimes you say pecaan but it s pecon round here right but we got to visit that school and some of the great kids there and i got to walk with mrs barbour and the governor and the principal there principal quon and a couple of students around the track that they built and the kids were out there exercising and working out it was a beautiful day a beautiful facility and it s just something that we should be highlighting all over the country so they showed us how mississippi how jackson is working to make sure kids stay healthy and active and that s one of the reasons why i m here visiting brinkley middle school can i hear it that s why i m here because we want to continue this conversation that i ve been having around the country starting about a few weeks ago it s an issue that i care deeply about not just because i m a first lady but because i m a mother and i ve said this ever since i came into office i approach this job first as a mother and i m thinking about all of you all as a mother not as a first lady and we have to figure out what we can all do together in this country to help our kids in the country live healthy and active lives and to stay that way throughout your entire lives we care about you deeply because too many kids right now just aren t living that way and we all know that too many kids in this country don t get enough exercise and they aren t as healthy as they need to be and if we re honest with ourselves as all of you know we know that here in mississippi kids struggle with these issues sometimes even more than in other parts of the country and we all know that when our kids don t eat right and they don t get enough exercise what happens is that they re at greater risk of a whole range of preventable diseases things like diabetes and a long time ago diabetes was also only something that happened in adults and now we re seeing it more and more among kids because they re less healthy things like heart disease and cancer all these things should be older folks issues but we re seeing more and more of our children being struggling with these issues and what the governor will tell you is that one of the other problems is that these preventable issues cost the state money here in the state of mississippi i think you re spending about 750 million each year to treat diseases that don t even have to exist so that s the bad news right that s the kind of stuff that we re here to fix but there s a lot of good news good news is that the folks around this country particularly around this state and this city have begun to focus on this issue in a real serious way we know that a lot of this is our fault the grownups right this isn t on you all right and people have gotten an important wakeup call they re looking at the health statistics they re looking at you guys and they re seeing the future in you and we all know that we ve got to do something that s the good news finally we re waking up and we re getting moving right and that s why i wanted to come to mississippi i picked this state because of all the creative things that are already happening here to fix things i m not here to highlight what s wrong i m here to highlight what s right what we can do for our kids lots of good examples like up in hernando mayor chip johnson is working to build more sidewalks and to bring weekly farmer s markets to town so folks in his town can be more active and eat better and mayor johnson was with me when i launched let s move in washington d c that s a good thing here in jackson there s an organization called my brother s keeper that s launched an initiative called jump start jackson and there they re trying to bring more fresh grocers to town and make it safe for kids to walk and bike to school and all across mississippi and this is really key because this is where the whole state can come into play what the governor has done is signed a law to help make sure that schools like brinkley are giving students more time in school to be active and to play and that they re teaching in the curriculum every day about healthy lifestyles and doing better to serve healthier lunches here right because many of the kids here you re eating most of your meals here at school so it s incumbent upon us to make sure that those meals are healthy if you think about it before that law was signed the average school here in this state the lunch had more than 900 calories that s a lot of that s a lot of calories in a lunch for some kids right but today they ve been cutting those calories by reducing fats and sugars that are in the foods you have and increasing more fruits and whole grains have you all noticed that some changes in your lunch yes i know how right there s the kids and the grownups right but these are important things for you to know as you see the changes in the lunchroom they re happening for a reason before that law was passed more than three in four middle schools sold things like candy and salty snacks and soda to the kids and now today because of that law more than three in four schools don t serve those kinds of foods and i know we ve got a few unhappy faces about that but this is a good thing every day folks here in this state prove that if we in this country are creative and we re determined and we re focused that we can meet these challenges because this isn t just happening in mississippi it s happening all across the country that if we really work together we can really reverse these trends and turn back the tide we can help you all live the kind of healthy active lives right from the start the thing is if you learn these habits early right you ll carry them through with you for the rest of your lives so what i have asked people to do is let s act let s get going let s move that s why we call this initiative let s move it s about all of us getting up getting together to make sure that our kids are living the kind of lives that we need them to live there s one important goal to this initiative we are trying to end the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation that s a big goal because we want kids born today to grow up healthy and at a good weight when they reach adulthood so that s the goal and reaching this goal it s an ambitious goal to talk about doing anything in a generation it s a hard thing but that s why we started let s move because this initiative is asking everyone in the country to do their part to reach this goal everyone has got to do their part that s why i ve been traveling around the country and i m going to do this for years to come asking everyone to step up and get involved i ve been meeting with governors and mayors i ve already met with many of them i m asking them to do their part to make cities and states more healthier building more sidewalks turning playgrounds into track fields and opening up abandoned buildings and doing a whole range of creative things to do their part i ve been meeting with parents and i ve been asking parents to do their parts because it doesn t matter what we feed you at school but if you get home and it s hard for parents to make healthy choices then you guys still aren t leading healthy lives so we ve asked parents to step up and do more and i ve been meeting with educators and school nutrition leaders people like mary hill asking them to do their part to make sure you all have options that not only are healthy but they taste good and they look good and it looks like something that you event want to try in a couple of weeks i m going to even meet with the food manufacturers the people who make the food that goes into your lunches and also the people who make food period and i m going to be asking them to do their part right because if the stuff you buy in the grocery stores aren t healthier if the options are limited then it s hard for your families to make healthy choices and today i wanted to be here especially because i m going to ask for help from the most important group of this whole entire effort and who do you think that group is it s you right it s all of you all of you young people you have to do your part too so i m really asking you all to help me have you ever been asked by the first lady or the president of the united states to help them well i am asking you for your help you going to help me all right well let me but before you sign on let me just tell you what i need you to do because we can make all these changes in your communities your parents can do things differently the schools can do things differently but if you re not open to change and ready to do your part then it won t work either right i know your teachers tell you that all the time you have to want to change right and it starts with the choices that you make and this is what i tell my kids make healthy choices right when you have snack time you ve got the choice between grabbing a candy bar or the potato chips or grabbing an apple right and i urge my kids to just balance it out just think about putting a little more fruits and vegetables on that tray and then trying to eat them can you do that come on now a little less enthusiasm there we know you have to be active and move right that means you can t spend hours sitting in front of the tv and video games and the computer you have to get up and move can you help me with that yes they were so excited a few minutes ago but the president and i ask our daughters these same things i mean this is what we talk about at home when we re at dinner we ask them what did you eat for lunch what kind of choices did you make did you try a little salad did you put some carrots on your plate and if you had dessert one day of the week do you think you need to have it every day of the week if you watch tv on saturday all day do you really need to watch it again on sunday if you haven t finished your homework should you really be on the computer now these are things that we need you to start asking yourselves you all are in middle school right you all are large and in charge right so now you ve got to start asking yourselves these questions right and you have to help your parents out because when they ask you to make the change what don t we want you to do parents whine we don t want whining can you help us by not whining about a change can you do that come on brinkley come on well this is the kind of help we re going to need from all of you this is the kind of stuff we want you to think about as we move through this initiative the kind of choices that you re making and we ve been working with kids your age for the entire year at the white house we planted this wonderful garden and we had middle school students just your age working with me every step of the way they helped me pull up the soil and plant the seeds and they ve been at the white house several times a year because we ve just been learning what it looks like to grow your own food and eat your own food and the thing we found out is that when kids play a role in what they do they re much more inclined to try new stuff if they grew it so hopefully many of you can get involved in your community gardens as well but that s what let s move is all about let s move is really about you all it s really about making things better for our kids and that s why we re here today you ve got a community of people around you you all should look in this room because it s not just you up there back there are hundreds of people who care deeply about you and they re all here working hard from the president to the governor on down because we all care about you and it s important for you all to understand that we re here doing this for you so we re doing this because eventually you all are going to be in charge of all this right one day you re going to be the parents and the teachers and the doctors and the principals and the governors and we need you healthy right we need you to be in a good strong body so that you can get these things done so let me tell you a little bit about what let s move is all about just quickly because there are four parts one of the things we re doing is asking your parents to make healthier choices but we have to do a better job of making sure that they have the information that they need so we re working with the fda to make sure that you know those labels that they read that tell you what s in food well it s too complicated we ve got to make that easier so that they know what s healthy and what s not so we re trying to make that easier we ve set up a web site called letsmove gov some of you all may want to go on there walk through that with your parents because it gives helpful tips and strategies on what to eat and how to move the second part of the initiative is that we re asking people to let s move so that parents actually have the foods and vegetables in their own communities do you know that there are a lot of kids who live in communities that don t have access to a grocery store or a farmers market or a place to buy fruits and vegetables there are about 6 5 million kids who can t walk down the street and go to a grocery store because their communities don t have grocery stores well part of let s move is trying to eliminate that because we can t tell people to buy fresh food if there s no place to buy it right you know how hard it is for your parents if they have to get on a bus to go get a head of lettuce and they just came home from work and they have to get in a cab to go to a grocery store that s hard and expensive for them right you all if you ve seen it you know how hard it is so we ve got to make it easier we ve got to eliminate food deserts and make sure that there are more grocery stores and farmers markets in communities so that s something that we re working on the third thing we have to do is make sure that as i said that more schools have healthier lunches right because many of you are eating most of your meals at lunch we can do an applause for that that s a good thing it s important for you to have the nutritious meals that you need at lunch and mississippi and jackson you all are already doing some wonderful things i mentioned mary hill she s your food services director mary you should stand up because these kids should know who you are because you re working hard mary hill is working on what you all eat and one of the things that s happened is that you guys eat lunch with your teachers now right and i know that might be a hassle having them sitting at the table with you but what that does is because the teachers are sitting with you what they ve seen is that you re more inclined to eat more fruits and vegetables and so are your teachers so just because of that one little change having teachers eating with you that changes how you eat and that s something that s happened here in this state because of mary because of the governor because of so many other people here in mississippi another thing that s happened is that they ve taken fryers out of the school and put in more ovens right and just imagine just because of that in starkville two schools in that area they ve cut out about 3 million calories 3 million calories just by not having fried potatoes those are the kind of little things that make a difference but the key one of the real things i m highlighting in this let s move challenge is the fourth thing is that you all have to get moving we all have to get moving because you can eat the best food in the world but if you all aren t active it s going to be a tough thing so we need you all to get moving and be more active this is where you guys come in again putting down the cell phones and thinking of creative things that you care about whether it s getting your parents to do the electric slide or doing dance dance revolution i don t it doesn t matter what it is my kids me and the president and our kids play dance dance revolution how many of you all have done that that s a good game that will make you sweat and we need you all working finding creative ways to stay active and get your parents active and we re going to expand the president s fitness challenge so that more kids can try new things and get awards maybe come to the white house because you re meeting some goals working with some professional athletes from all the leagues because a lot of them have signed on to help people from major league baseball and the nba and the nfl and wnba all of these professional athletes are going to be signing on to do clinics and to encourage you all to stay active so there s a lot of good stuff in let s move but we re going to need you all as i said we re going to need you all to help us get this stuff done but know that we re doing this all for you we care so much about your future we really do we re proud of every single one of you you re like our kids and sometimes it may not feel that way because somebody is lecturing you trying to eat food that you don t want to eat but we want you all to pursue your dreams and we know all of you have big dreams how many people here want to be a doctor how many people here want to be a lawyer how many people here want to be president of the united states and that s the good news right you all obviously have some big dreams right well in order to achieve those dreams you ve got to be healthy and you ve got to feel good physically and you ve got to feel good about yourselves right and you won t do that if you re not eating right and getting good exercise and it s our job as a community as a nation to make sure you have all the resources that you need to make it happen so we re going to start getting moving you all promise that you will help me with this because i m going to be checking in you think i m not going to check in and you have to help each other do you realize that you ve got to help your teachers help you you ve got to check in on your teachers the teachers have to check in on you you all have to check in on your parents you ve got to get your parents working your parents have to check in on the mayor make sure the mayor is doing his job we all have to check in on the governor make sure that because he s promised me he s going to get moving and if we re all working together you all all of you at brinkley and all these other schools we can get this done right and then you will be president of the united states and maybe if you re lucky you ll be the first spouse like me but thank you all we re proud of you and let s get moving thanks so much dem mobama3 5 10 michelle_obama thank you all thank you so much thank you so much well this has been a thrill for me and let me do our winners a favor put those trophies down put them down you ve earned the right not to hold them up but these are the real stars it s just been a pleasure to join you here at the national building museum for the 20th annual national science bowl this has been a real treat i ve been looking forward to this i got to share the stage with secretary chu earlier in this year who is not only one of the world s leading scientists but also as you all know a visionary leader for our department of energy and he may just have an alternate career as a game show host when he s done with this he s really good at it but we re very proud to have secretary chu on our team he s doing a tremendous job and he is an example of the concrete outcomes that come with the work that you re doing today this is why we need to invest in you all so much and we re so very proud of you also to all of the organizers all of the volunteers to the teachers let s give our teachers a round of applause and we can t forget all of the family members who are here i know there are people in the back let s give our parents and family members a round of applause you all are all the true winners here thank you for giving your time your support to this next generation of american innovators scientists and entrepreneurs and finally last but not least congratulations again to the two winning teams and to every single student here who has participated in this year s national science bowl both here in washington and in your hometowns in the months leading up today again we can t tell you how proud we are of the hard work that obviously requires putting into something like this i had to study just to read the questions so i know you all have put in a lot of work but by competing in this event you are sharpening the skills that have consistently moved our country forward this is the profession that has done it in so many ways creativity discipline teamwork problem solving and a whole lot of hard work that s what it takes to make change you ve worked so hard and again the president and i and he is fully aware that i am here i went over some of the questions with him he didn t know many of the answers but that s okay neither did i but we are both so very proud of all of you we believe deeply in the importance of science and math this is an important investment in this generation and beyond for the future of this country and this year we re going to host the first ever white house science fair for students from all across the country as the president has said he says this all the time he says when you win the ncaa championship the winners come to the white house and we think that budding inventors scientists and mathematicians should be at the white house too so we re going to be excited to host you there as many people have already said we re determined to show the world and this country how cool science can really be we want young people energized in the way that you all are because we know that american brainpower in science and math has always driven this country s prosperity helping us make the discoveries and to build the industries that have transformed the way we live and work that s why my husband and his administration want to ensure that every single child in this country gets a good education particularly in math and science next week s national lab day is a great example of what this might look like this kind of investment the president has highlighted his grassroots effort which brings together scientists like secretary chu organizations representing teachers scientists mathematicians engineers and local volunteers to work with young people in fun hands on learning these students are going to be with us they re going to launch rockets construct miniature windmills and learn by doing and not just by listening we want to bring more hands on learning like this to students by also modernizing science labs and supporting project based learning and expanding advanced courses in schools throughout the country we want to create more opportunities for under represented groups as well particularly women and girls we want them to have the confidence we want all our young women to have the confidence and the support to take on the study and to succeed in the study of science math engineering and technology and we want to build communities of support for all the teachers who make these subjects come alive for our students we couldn t do it without you and just a few minutes ago thanks to the participation of the media in this this country has seen what these students are capable of doing in the coming decades our future scientists engineers and leaders are going to help tackle some of our most challenging problems we are going to need you whether it s improving our health harnessing clean energy protecting our security succeeding in the global economy we re going to need you our future depends on a new generation of young americans who can help reaffirm our role as the world s engine of scientific discovery and innovation america is the birthplace of the airplane and the air conditioner and the polio vaccine and the band aid and the light bulb and the internet who knows what this country s next young people can bring to us in the next 50 years or even in the next five years one thing is for sure we never know where science might take us big discoveries haven t always had the most obvious starting points as well for instance one day richard feynman a leading american scientist after world war ii was sitting in his university s cafeteria and across the room he saw a guy throwing a plate up into the air and he noticed how it spun and tilted and he said to himself now you know what i m going to figure out why that plate wobbles like that simple question right he knew it might not be all that important that it was just a silly little problem but he really didn t care because he was like secretary chu he was passionate and he was hungry for the answers and he was very curious he was having fun just figuring it out for no reason at all he was just playing around and you know what that led to the process that started when that guy threw a plate up in the air eventually turned into some new ideas about quantum electrodynamics and feynman won a nobel prize for physics in 1965 for that work as he wrote he said the diagrams and the whole business that i got the nobel prize for came from that piddling around with that wobbling plate so maybe it was just a wobbling plate or maybe it s the way the wind blows through the trees or the way the dust makes you sneeze or how watermelons explode when you drop them from a two story window but to the parents and coaches and teachers here i urge you to continue to let these students just play just play around with these ideas and these possibilities let them get their hands dirty let them experiment to the students i just encourage you don t be afraid to play and to ask questions don t be afraid to step off the beaten plan as you learn to find those new answers and never never i tell my girls this don t be afraid to fail because oftentimes in failure comes the best ideas have fun keep having fun keep poking around and truly always follow your passions no matter what people say our country and our world we need your energy we need your creativity and who knows maybe you ll save thousands of lives with a new vaccine or finding a new way to grow soy beans maybe your life s work will be on display right here at the national building museum some day maybe you ll learn how to meet our country s energy needs using only the sun s warmth and the earth s wind and water maybe you ll change the world in ways none of us can even imagine now what s always been true is that with enough creativity and thinking and a lot of hard work science has shown us that time and time again that that maybe can be the beginning of something truly wonderful so thank you all thank you for your hard work thank you for your passion and we will be supporting you every step of the way we re so very proud thanks again dem mobama3 6 09 michelle_obama yay thank you congratulations class of 2009 all right this is exciting right nothing more exciting right we re so proud of you i m delighted to be here i want to just thank jasmine for that lovely introduction and for her invitation to me to come here i want to thank thank you jasmine i want to thank principal holbrook and the staff the faculty all the trustees all our elected officials i want to thank the grandmas the moms the dads the uncles the aunts the cousins everybody who helped get these graduates where they are today and i want to especially congratulate valedictorian jaren davis and to salutatorian rosmer portillo on their tremendous achievements but you all have achieved so much this is just one of many important milestones that you will hit and i m glad to be here and i m here because jasmine invited me but i got a lot of invitations to speak at commencements this year more than i did last year but i only chose two and i only chose two because as you know i m a working mother and i ve got kids so i try to balance what i do so it was really important to me that i pick schools that i really believed in and i knew i wanted to speak at a d c public high school because i wanted to celebrate the achievements of young people in my new home town and i hadn t chosen one and then my office received this beautiful letter from jasmine and part of what she said was this on june 3rd 2009 we will stop being kids who grew up in the city of washington d c we will become adults who will be faced with some of the hardest challenges since 1932 we will be put to the test to see if we can withstand the challenges of today s world this test has no guidelines or study guides on how to pass we will have to rely on the common sense given to us by our families the toughness we learned growing up in the conditions that we did and the timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people yes we can that s what jasmine wrote so because of those words jasmine i m here today to tell you that you re absolutely right that with common sense hard work confidence and faith you can achieve anything you set your minds to that s for sure and today is just the beginning and while we sit here and we celebrate this is just the beginning and it should be just the beginning your life doesn t end here it starts here and when i look out at you all i get tears in my eyes because i think about sitting in your seats just a few years ago in my cap and gown whitney young was a magnet public school so i was a public school graduate as well and i was excited like you were because i had gotten into princeton university i was excited i was fired up i didn t get the kind of money you all got but i was excited but i was also worried i was worried about whether or not i was ready whether or not i would fit in and i have realized since then that i probably wasn t alone in my fears in my worries and then i read this story of judge sonia sotomayor i don t know if you know about this phenomenal woman but the president she s the president s nominee for the supreme court and she s the first hispanic woman to be considered for the position the first and she went to princeton and in this story she said that when she arrived at princeton as a freshman and this was nine years before i would even think about going she said when she stepped on that campus she said and this is a quote she said she felt like a visitor landing in an alien country and she said she never raised her hand her first year because and this is a quote she was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions so despite all of her success at princeton and then she went on to yale law school where she was at the top of her class in both schools and despite all of her professional accomplishments judge sotomayor says she still looks over her shoulder and wonders if she measures up and when i read her story i understood exactly how she feels and i understood what it must have been like for her to step on that campus despite these nagging voices that sometimes rumble around in your head and for me the voices came from people who at first told me don t bother applying to princeton not a school like that because they said i d never get in then when i got in they told me not to go because i wouldn t be able to compete against students who would be more prepared and then when i decided to attend they told me that i shouldn t go to a school so far away from home because i would have a hard time making friends i would feel out of place and i wouldn t make it through voices of people sowing seeds of doubt in my head and now that i look back i realize that despite my confident exterior because all you all have it right you re confident and i was too there was a part of me that started to believe the doubters i started to believe people they were getting into my head there was a part of me that began to doubt my own abilities and to ignore my own truth what i knew to be true about me so graduates for those of you who may be doubting and questioning yourselves maybe now you all may not be you may be just ready to roll but if you are trust me i know how you feel there are a lot of us who know how you feel and i also know that some of you family members out here might be feeling a little anxiety as well there may be those i can get an amen to that it s okay there may be those of you here today who while you have this immense pride and joy you might also be a little mixed just a little concerned maybe some of you are apprehensive about sending your kids off to a school far away not being able to touch them real quick shake them up when they need to maybe some of you and i know i ll get an amen on this are not quite sure how you ll manage things financially there you go maybe some of you are worried about how to support a child who has chosen a path that might be very different from your own and i can only imagine what my parents working class folks who didn t go to college must have been thinking about when they sent me off to princeton and i had a little head start because i had a brother who went to princeton so that helped but what was true was that unlike many of my classmates at that wonderful institution whose families had attended princeton for generations my parents hadn t gone to college so they couldn t really tell me what to expect or how to prepare and many of you may be in that situation as well but here s the thing in the end the good news is that none of that really mattered it just really didn t matter my parents didn t have to be lawyers or doctors or college graduates to help me succeed i didn t need that from my parents what mattered was their love what mattered was their encouragement and unconditional support that s all that mattered what mattered was that when i called home they picked up the phone every time and told me every single second that they were proud of me no matter what and they reminded me over and over again that no matter what all those nagging voices said that i deserved to be where i was so parents family members i promise you your love and encouragement and unconditional support will be enough as well so don t worry and it helps that these young people are graduating from this outstanding school one of the best in the country they are coming from a school that believes that all children young people can learn that s an important start just hearing the stories of these speakers a school that is welcoming that is open where teachers know and love their kids a school that believes that all students should be able to succeed and should be held to the highest standards a school that challenges stereotypes and proves that african american and latino students can excel in math and science that s amazing so let s be clear these graduates will be just as prepared for anything they do they will be just as prepared as any other student that will arrive at their new schools we have to remember as we send them off and they have to remember that they will not be traveling this journey alone they didn t start it by themselves they didn t get through it by themselves they re not going to end it alone in addition graduates to your families you have friends you ve made here just like everybody has said this small class of you you need to be supporting each other and remember these friendships as you go you have these wonderful teachers and coaches and mentors who supported you these last four years and will be there they will be there they ll be happy to see you they ll be happy to get the call to provide you some guidance and advice over the next four years and beyond that s why they do what they do so don t hesitate to reach out to them when those voices start getting loud because they ve got your back and you have something more the knowledge that so many people look around you so many people are supporting you and so many people have traveled this journey before you this isn t new anymore people who ve worked and struggled just like you people who have defied the odds and defeated low expectations just like you pioneers and trailblazers who have all challenged stereotypes and emerged as leaders just like i know all of you will for example people like administrator charles bolden he grew up in the segregated south and became a fighter pilot in the marines and then an astronaut administrator bolden has orbited the earth more than 400 times each time he broke away from gravity s hold he shattered stereotypes as the new head of nasa the first african american to hold this post administrator bolden is going to lead our nation s exploration of the moon mars and beyond and then there are people like dr lasalle leffall who works right here at howard university college of medicine he s a surgeon an oncologist an educator the first african american to lead the american cancer society dr leffall has dedicated his career to educating people about cancer risks for minorities and for more than 48 years he has trained generations of doctors and surgeons and scientists who have become pioneers and leaders in their own right and then there are people like legendary jazz pianist mr herbie hancock let me tell you about mr hancock maybe i don t know if they know about herbie hancock but he was an engineering major at grinnell college in iowa at just 16 years old and while mr hancock s mind was meant for math his soul was stirred by music so he combined these two loves and created the first wave of hip hop music with the use of synthesizers and scratching and last year at the young age of 67 mr hancock won the grammy for best album of the year so not bad for an old man and then there are people like president barack obama this biracial kid with a funny name from hawaii of all places who was taught by his grandparents and his mother that with a good education and hard work that anything is possible in this country see at some point in all of these lives judge sotomayor administrator bolden dr leffall mr hancock president obama and even me we all felt a little like you might feel right now we all had doubts we all have doubts we all heard nagging voices and sometimes we still do asking us will we be able to compete in this new arena will i fit in am i really ready but in the end we were all more than ready judge sotomayor is more than ready administrator bolden is more than ready dr leffall more than ready mr hancock more than ready i was more than ready and barack obama certainly is more than ready and graduates i am here to tell you that you are more than ready you ve got folks amongst you like graduate alexander allison a junior reserve officer listen to this who will attend kansas state university to major in aviation technology maybe alexander you will join administrator bolden at nasa and one day travel amongst the stars yourself alexander you are more than ready then there is graduate jaren davis a biochemistry major at georgetown maybe jaren you will assume dr leffall s life s work and discover the keys to an anti cancer drug that destroys tumors without damaging healthy cells maybe that will be you jaren because you are more than ready then there is graduate kristin gray simon simon did i get that right kristin who will attend howard this fall as a music major maybe you will combine your love of music with your math and science background and develop new therapies to maybe treat alzheimers autism and other learning disabilities maybe you will use your skills like herbie hancock because kristin you are more than ready and then we ve got graduate lejon vines former deputy youth mayor of washington d c s youth government and future english major at sewanee university of the south maybe you will follow in barack obama s footsteps and provide your generation the change that they can believe in because lejon guess what you re more than ready to all of you graduates you are more than ready to assume the mantle of leadership and become the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs leaders and legends so you know what it s time to step up step up it s time no excuses right no excuses your future today is in your own hands see with this diploma this education the doors of opportunity are so open wide to you nothing is standing in your way so it s up to you to make the most of what you ve been given so here s some advice when you set foot on the soil of whatever campus that has admitted you understand that you are responsible for your own experiences so what i want you to do is own your voice own it don t be intimidated by your new surroundings remember everyone else is in the same position that you re in be an engaged and active participant in all of your classes never ever sit in silence ever that first day raise your hand use your voice ask a question don t be afraid to be wrong don t be afraid to sound unclear because understand this is the only way you ll learn the only way your lecturers your professors will know that they re getting to you is for you to speak up and get to know your professors know every single one of them introduce yourself attend their office hours ask them for follow up questions be in their face make sure they know who you are and ask them to clarify anything that you don t understand that s their job and remember there s more to college than just studying parents i know you don t want to hear that but there is and i want you all to open yourselves up to the entire college experience make new friends learn about other people s cultures and experiences don t just hang out with people who make you feel good get to know some of the people that aren t like you try some different classes that sound a little intimidating learn a language that s one thing both barack and i regret that we don t know another language learn it read lots of books that s one thing barack obama does all the time he reads everything travel spend a semester abroad you ll have those opportunities and challenge your mind to embrace the diversity of the world that we live in because this world is so much smaller than this school than this city than the campus that you ll be on this world is big and don t be guarded let people get to know you don t be afraid understand that your story your experiences have value and people need to hear them and if you struggle a little bit so what so what it doesn t mean that you don t belong there it just means that you have to work a little harder maybe a lot harder and as everyone has said here today remember this day remember this day and remember all the hard work that went in to getting you to this moment don t ever let all that go to waste having made it through tough times and getting to this point having worked hard and fought hard to create something better for yourselves having made the most of every opportunity so far that has come your way given all that just think you should have more confidence not less more confidence not less and no matter what happens i want you to remember that you already have one of the greatest gifts as a young person that you can ever have you have a parent or an adult in your life who believes in you so graduates of 2009 with a solid education foundation and a firm hold of your dreams and with the support of your families and a willingness to work hard i can assure you you re more than ready so get to work and congratulations thank you for having me dem mobama30 4 09 michelle_obama thank you so much i want to thank vicki for that kind and generous introduction i d also like to thank julie and betty ann who have chaired this event and everyone who has made today s event so very special i d also like to acknowledge my escort the handsome and gentle colonel michael colburn who is the director of the united states marine band and i have to say on behalf of my family that the marine band has been just a tremendous resource for us they have such great range they can play everything from jazz to country and they ve made every event at the white house a special one and i want to give them another round of applause it is truly an honor for me to be here with all of you today this is a very special and important occasion over the last couple of months i ve had a chance to meet many of you through the events we ve had at the white house we ve had wednesday night socials and we ve had several luncheons that jill biden and i have hosted at the white house and if i haven t met you yet don t worry your invitation is in the mail we re going to get to everybody and we re going to do it again and again and again we re going to be hosting these luncheons and socials every month because we really believe that this is the way you get to know one another not as agendas not as parties but you learn about one another as individuals and in these settings we can find common ground we have now been at the white house for 101 days and as vicki mentioned i ve been focusing on my personal priorities family first community and service and on the family track just to let you know because everyone always asks that we ve never been better the girls are happy and healthy they love their school they re making friends they re getting good grades they settled in on their typical week i feel like i ve never left chicago soccer on saturday yes i m on a soccer field all day just like many of you slumber parties we had about seven girls over screaming and yelling and we re shuttling kids back and forth to play dates just like usual although now my mom does a little more of the shuttling than i do i m glad to have her here and as we re speaking of the first grandmother mom is also doing well and many of you have been so important to her in reaching out she has a very full social life so much so that sometimes we have to plan our schedule around her schedule and the newest addition to the obama family the most famous member of the family bo obama is also doing well i have to say he is the best puppy in the whole wide world i love him to death he is so sweet but he s still a puppy and i was just telling jane that i what i she said what time did you get ready i said i got up at 5 15 a m in the morning to walk my puppy that s how my day starts even though the kids are supposed to do a lot of the work i m still up at 5 15 a m taking my dog out so for everyone who has a child asking for a puppy you have to want the dog as i do i love my bo and as a result of everything going so well i ve been able to turn my attention to some of the other issues i care about again as vicki said supporting military families work life balance healthy eating planting that wonderful garden we had our first salad out of the garden we re producing and one of my greatest passions national and community service as a nation we re facing unprecedented challenges i don t think that anyone here would doubt that these are there are few times in our nation s history when the phrase we re all in it together really means something and now is one of those times we re all in this together but embedded in our nation s core values is a spirit of community generosity and entrepreneurship i saw all throughout this campaign in every corner of the country a can do attitude that says that no challenge is too great for the people in this nation but service groups and non profits faith based organizations philanthropists corporations government individuals of all ages have had to play a role in moving this country forward the question that we have to ask ourselves now as individuals is what will i do what am i willing to do in these times because these times are tough about 62 million people or a little over a quarter of u s citizens volunteer each year to help improve their community in some way and about 300 billion a year is donated to support the work of religious institutions foundations and non profits to further causes that make people healthier that make neighborhoods safer that make communities stronger many of these beneficiaries have seen contributions dwindle this year and they re trying to do more with less as the needs of this country increase thirty six million americans including 12 million children are living on the brink of hunger in this nation last month the usda announced that the participation in the snap program which was formerly known as food stamps has reached the highest levels ever nearly 32 million americans received snap benefits in december 2008 that s up 700 000 in that month and almost 5 million more than the year before so food banks are experiencing an average increase in demand of more than 30 percent year after year and that s why we chose as one of our first joint service projects to go to a food bank and i want to thank all of you who so generously gave of your time yesterday to join me at the capital area food bank just so that you know and the whole group here knows what we did in those few hours we packed 2 000 weekend food bags which will help ensure that 1 000 students who participate in the capital area food bank s food for kids program have enough to eat for the next two weeks so we have to give ourselves a round of applause and i m happy to report that similar activities like the ones we did yesterday are taking place around the country where people are stepping up in so many unique ways in colorado for example the colorado state university campus has planted a garden of eatin they recently planted raspberries strawberries currants and it will eventually produce everything from herbs and squash to pumpkins tomatoes and peppers and much of that produce is going to be donated to a local food bank which is seeing that 35 percent increase in demand and in des moines iowa there s a hope ministries organization one day they woke up and realized that they had run out of eggs for the five kitchens that they operate and while they knew they could run out and make the purchase it was going to be very expensive and out of the blue a miracle happened which is how the director described it they got a call from a woman who owns a chicken farm about an hour away saying that she would donate it 66 dozen eggs and then the entire america s egg farmers industry stepped up as well across the country they will be donating more than 11 million eggs to food banks just this year and our federal agencies are also responding on saturday may 9th the letter carriers from around the country will lead the charge in the nation s largest single day food drive they re asking everyone to leave nonperishable food donations in a bag next to your mailbox and your postal carrier will pick them up when they deliver your mail the effort is called stamp out hunger and last year over 73 million pounds of food were donated to food banks through this effort these stories prove that participating in national and community service is not just an escape for the wealthy or for kids who can afford to serve it s an integral part of empowering everyone to make our communities stronger and with the recent passage of the edward m kennedy serve america act a bipartisan effort we are now poised to usher in a new era of service in this nation the serve america act will allow more young people to help themselves pay for college by serving their communities and will create more opportunities for older americans to apply their years and decades of experience and wisdom to serve this country as well americorps will expand under the act from 75 000 slots to 250 000 slots in less than a decade and we re going to focus this service towards solving today s most pressing challenges clean energy and health care education and economic opportunity the needs of veterans and families throughout this country so we have a real moment in history to once again come together to help our neighbors our communities and to help our country and this is what i find so inspiring about this position leading this nation as first lady people in this country assume responsibility knowing that each of us has something to contribute and something special to add to leading the way and i hope that yesterday s event will be the first of many projects that we will all work on together as the spouses of the leaders of this great country we are each role models in our neighborhoods people look up to us and by demonstrating that each of us has a role to play in moving this country forward we can have a real impact on how this country responds to these challenges and i know that each of us has a cause that we committed to so many of us are passionate and working hard outside of our homes and dedicating hours and i would like to find ways for us to support one another in our efforts to think about ways that we can link arms within our states and our communities in order to do so one of the things that i m proposing and i m presenting it to you all here now is that we develop a family service project based around the annual congressional picnic which will be held at the white house on june 25th we can bring our husbands and our wives our children and our grandchildren together as we did yesterday and rally around a common cause this would be a powerful message that we could send to people around the country that they saw all of our families come together here in d c whether it s a food bank or a homeless shelter there s so much need out there the projects are endless just imagine what message that would send if we came together so i m asking you now put it on your calendar bring your kids we ll work a little we ll have a little barbeque we ll get a lot of stuff done but i want to thank you all for all of the support that you ve shown me each and every one of you i feel the prayers i feel your encouragement again whether you re a member of the democratic party or not whether you re in politics or not our family feels your encouragement and we greatly appreciate every single kind word every gesture that you ve offered and i look forward to working with you all in the months and years to come thank you so much dem mobama30 9 09 michelle_obama thank you everybody so as my husband would say we are fired up and ready to go in here it s a good thing well first let me begin by thanking my dear friend my chit chat buddy oprah winfrey she talks about me coming here without hesitation this is a woman who s got a pretty busy schedule taping shows traveling across the globe a woman with a full plate i think that folks out there should understand how chicagoans even those who weren t born and raised here feel a passion about the city so much so that we dropped everything dropped everything to be a part of this team so i want to give ms winfrey a round of applause as well one reporter asked me in a press briefing so what do you think oprah adds to the team i said oprah is oprah what more do you have to say i said every single city who s bidding wishes they had oprah on their team and we have her and we are grateful that she is a part of this endeavor it is so nice to see so many familiar faces i mean we really do miss chicago we ve made a wonderful home in d c the girls are great grandma is good bo is no longer a puppy he s a big dog now but it s wonderful to reconnect to my hometown when i looked at the bid initially i was overwhelmed by what a beautiful concept was presented you know everything about this bid speaks to what the city has to offer having the games right along that beautiful glorious lakefront using the existing park structure to ensure that we re making the kinds of investments and we ll have the kind of wonderful leave behinds that will benefit the city over the long run the notion that olympic athletes who visit the city will live centrally they ll be 15 minutes from any competition site that they ll be able to walk ride or bus to some of the greatest cultural offerings that this nation that this world has to offer it will be an athlete s paradise in so many ways and we will have it at a time in the city s climate that will actually be nice the lake won t be frozen over so i am thrilled i am proud of our bid and i am proud of this team and i have to ask you are we ready to go with this right you ready to go this bid also means a lot to me personally because as first lady as many of you know i ve made it a priority to bridge the gap between the white house and communities across d c and across the country i ve spent much of my first nine months trying to open the doors to the white house to kids who might not otherwise see themselves having access to these institutions because that s where i came from communities like that where kids never dreamed that they could set foot in the white house let alone live there so i ve wanted to open the doors of the white house and bring new opportunities to so many young kids kids living in the midst of power and prestige fortune and fame but never really seeing their connections to those institutions and barack and i made a point of doing the same thing when we lived in chicago making the concerns of kids in all sorts of communities our own because we have been on both sides of that bridge in so many ways we have lived full lives on both sides of that bridge and for me this is one of the best reasons i can think of to bring the olympics to our city we need all of our children to be exposed to the olympic ideals that athletes from around the world represent particularly this time in our nation s history where athletics is becoming more of a fleeting opportunity funds dry up so it becomes harder for kids to engage in sports to learn how to swim to even ride a bike when we re seeing rates of childhood obesity increase it is so important for us to raise up the platform of fitness and competition and fair play to teach kids to cheer on the victors and empathize with those in defeat but most importantly to recognize that all the hard work that is required to do something special i remember watching the olympics when i was little i remember it to the t some of those memories and nadia comaneci is here who and so many incredible olympic athletes but i remember i told this story when you scored that perfect 10 you bounced off the balance beam off the parallel bars i thought i could do that i didn t know then that i would be 5 11 but it was it was an activity in our household when it was time for the olympic games all of us gathered around the tv cheering on and being inspired by people who were doing things that were beyond belief and i just think wouldn t it be great if that kind of spirit was happening right down the street in our community just think of that kids and communities across the city in austin kids who grew up in cabrini kids who live so far from the city now just imagine if all of that was happening right in their own backyard that s what i think about it does something to a kid when they can feel that energy and power up close and personal and for some kids in our communities and our city around the nation around the world they can never dream of being that close to such power and opportunity so that s what excites me most about bringing the games to chicago the impact that it can have on the lives of our young people and on our entire community and i know that s what all of you have been working for for these past few months as much of a sacrifice as people say this is for me or oprah or the president to come for these few days so many of you in this room have been working for years to bring this bid home and you have put together a phenomenal set of ideas that no matter what the outcome is we should be proud of as a city so now is the time for us to pull it through you know as barack and i have looked at this this is like a campaign just like iowa you got to and the international community may not understand that but iowa is like a caucus and you can t take any vote for granted nobody makes the decision until they re sitting there so the next few days really provide us with a real opportunity to hold some hands to have some conversations to share our visions to make the world understand that this is an opportunity for the united states to connect to the world in a really important way at a very critical time and for each of us to show them our passion and sincerity to be part of the world in a very special way and to let people know that we understand that sports saves lives that it makes dreams come true that it creates visions in kids heads to make them think they can be the next david robinson the next barack obama the next nadia comaneci the next oprah winfrey those dreams have to start somewhere and for so many they start when they watch the olympics and if we can show people that we understand that power and that possibility then they will have the confidence that not only will we have the city the olympics in a city that works but will execute this thing with the kind of passion and openness and sincerity that the world so greatly wants to see in us so let s get it done thank you so much dem mobama31 3 10 michelle_obama thank you thank you everyone thanks so much everyone please rest you re working hard enough as it is well hello everyone and welcome to the white house sort of we re across the street but it s good to have you all here i want to thank valerie for that very kind introduction for her outstanding work not just on this issue but on so many others her friendship and support and i also want to thank her staff again who have done just a phenomenal job in organizing this conference and bringing us all together this is just a wonderful way to spend an afternoon on an important issue i d also like to thank all of the outstanding members of this administration who are here for taking the time to be here today and i want to thank everyone who has joined us to share their ideas and expertise on this critically important topic thank you for taking the time as valerie said we ve come here today to have a conversation about workplace flexibility an important part of balancing our responsibilities as employees as breadwinners mothers fathers sons daughters husbands and wives it s an issue that many folks have struggled with for so many years and one that we as a society just hasn t really quite figured out yet and as the parents of two beautiful young daughters it is an issue that is particularly important to me and my husband as you know as valerie said i ve talked about this so often and it is true in our current life we are incredibly blessed we have amazing resources and support systems here at the white house that i could have never imagined number one of them is having grandmother living upstairs we all need one of those so can you figure that out but we didn t always live in the white house and for many years before coming to washington i was a working mother doing my best to juggle the demands of my job with the needs of my family with a husband who has crazy ideas and as i ve said before i consider myself as many of us in this room do as a 120 percenter which means that if i m not doing something at 120 percent i feel like i m failing and i know you all can relate to that so while i did the best that i could at work and at home i felt like i wasn t keeping up with either one of them enough and i was lucky i had understanding bosses i had very accommodating jobs in fact in the last job i had before coming to the white house i remember this clearly i was on maternity leave with sasha still trying to figure out what to do with my life and i got a call for an interview for this position a senior position at the hospitals and i thought okay here we go so i had to scramble to look for babysitting and couldn t find one so what did i do i packed up that little infant and i put her in the stroller and i brought her with me and i prayed that her presence wouldn t be an automatic disqualifier and it was fortunate for me that number one she slept through the entire interview and i was still breastfeeding if that s not too much information and i got the job but i know that i was lucky number one i was interviewing with the president that had just had a child himself and was very understanding and open minded but i know that most folks are nowhere near as lucky as i was particularly right now with the job market the way it is many folks can t afford to be picky about the jobs that they take many folks don t have access to any kind of family leave policies whatsoever no flexible working arrangements many people don t even have a paid sick day so they are struggling struggling every day to find affordable childcare or someone to look after an aging parent which is becoming more the issue scrambling to make things work when the usual arrangements fall through all of us have been through that so they spend a lot of time hoping and praying that everything will work out just perfectly i remember those days just the delicate balance of perfection and as all the parents in this room know it s never perfect ever but here s the thing as we all know here today it just doesn t have to be that way doesn t have to be that hard and that s something that i learned for myself not just as an employee but as a manager when i discovered that the more flexibility that i gave to my staff to be good parents and i valued that the happier my staff was likely to be and the greater chance they were to stay and not leave because they knew they might not find the same kind of flexibility somewhere else so it s something that many of the companies here today have discovered very fortunately that flexible policies actually make employees more not less productive because as you all know instead of spending time worrying about what s happening at home your employees have the support and the peace of mind that they desperately need to concentrate on their work you all are pioneering the innovative ideas and the best practices to make balancing work and family life easier for your employees and better for your bottom lines you re doing so much providing discounts on childcare important setting up scholarship programs to help pay for college amazing many of you are offering compressed work weeks you re offering generous leave time and mentoring programs that connect new parents or caregivers with folks who ve been through it before and you re giving employees the right to even approach you and have an open and honest conversation about how to create a more flexible schedule that is critical so here in the federal government we re trying to follow your lead putting our money where our mouth is to adopt more of those best practices from expanding telework access to providing emergency childcare and more affordable day care and that s why this administration supports the healthy families act which would let millions more working americans earn up to seven days a year of paid sick time to care for themselves and their families doesn t seem like a lot but it s important these are just a few of the examples of what we re going to be talking about today and i m looking forward to hearing more of the many ideas the ways that you re figuring out how to make this issue work for your employees we are excited today to learn about your ideas your best practices what many of you have done to support your employees and to boost your bottom line at the same time so with that i want to again thank you all i want to thank you for the work that you ve done in your companies to set the tone i want to thank you for taking the time to share your ideas with us today so now my work is done i can now turn it over to claire and the panel and you guys will figure this all out that s right 45 minutes shorter than health care right thanks so much dem mobama31 7 09 michelle_obama thank you so much good afternoon i am delighted to be here in norfolk today to welcome home so many heroes welcome home thank you admiral tidd and captain negus for your kind words and even more importantly thank you for your service and leadership as commanders of the carrier strike group 8 and the continuing promise 2009 mission i had the pleasure of meeting captain negus s wife afifi just now in the photo line beautiful red dress and i know that she represents all of the military spouses who are thrilled to have their husbands and wives brothers and sisters aunts and uncles and grandchildren back home isn t that right i would also like to thank admiral harvey commander of the u s fleet forces command and vice admiral williams commander of the u s second fleet you are role models for all of us in our commitment to excellence and your dedication to your country and to your sailors and i would like to recognize virginia s first lady and my dear friend anne holton anne and i have become kind of close comrades over the past few years and this is my second trip to the state in little over a week i m hanging out in virginia a lot and one of the perks of coming here is that i get to see anne and it is wonderful to see you again thank you for your commitment to this country and our hugs and blessings go out to your family as well i am honored deeply honored to be here as we welcome home the crew of the united states naval ship comfort and the sailors who deployed with the uss dwight d eisenhower this is a happy day for the community of norfolk and the families of these brave men and women we are standing here among heroes military civilian american and foreign the comfort embodies our values by changing lives around the world the eisenhower defends our values in the world s most dangerous places to the nearly 6 000 sailors who deployed with the eisenhower strike group to afghanistan and the middle east and are returning to their home ports we thank you for your service each of you have courageously served our country and demonstrated your commitment to upholding america s highest ideals your service is emblematic of the values we hold most dear and to the crew of the comfort with the help of the department of defense the state department the usaid the u s public health service and the health ministries of seven different countries you sailed through rough waters and calm seas you met people from all walks of life you healed you helped and gave hope and represented the best of america s humanitarian efforts there s a saying that a ship in harbor is safe but that is not what ships are built for well the comfort may have been built as an oil tanker but as soon as those red crosses were painted on it realized its full potential and that is to bring comfort to those in need to bring hope to the hopeless to bring healing to the sick and security to the insecure the comfort s history is an important part of this nation s story she s always been there when she was needed most and her work was made possible by you the men and women who served the call during those tragic days following september 11th the comfort was moored in new york and was a haven for relief for the workers and the survivors for those who had just suffered unimaginable terror her white tower and red crosses were a beacon of strength and compassion on the changed horizon during the rains and floods of katrina and rita the comfort brought hospital beds and shelter to the homeless the tired and the weary she was the light in the storm a place people could call home after they had lost their own in some of the darkest hours of american history she did not fail to live up to the promise of her name comfort but this ship has done more than just provide help to people here at home it has also offered its services to those who suffer beyond our shores for its most recent mission continuing promise 2009 the comfort brought medical and dental care along with engineering assistance and training programs to countries throughout the caribbean latin america and south america doctors treated patients seabees built schools veterinarians cared for animals and the air force band delighted local audiences the crew formed friendships with each other and with the local residents more than 100 000 patients were treated on this mission 1 600 surgeries were conducted 135 000 prescriptions were filled and more than 300 pallets of aid were delivered but the impact of your efforts didn t end when the comfort left port your legacy continues through the learning that happens in the classrooms that were built it lives on in the young mothers who learned how to properly care for their first child in the town that now has fresh drinking water the things that many of us in the united states take for granted are the things that are most needed in the communities that the comfort visits eyeglasses surgeries for cataracts and people with orthopedic conditions immunizations access to vitamins and prescriptions and basic dental care but for all of the serious needs you met one of my favorite stories is simply about your grace during this mission i was told that during the comfort s sojourn in haiti the air force band performed with the local st pierre chorale of port au prince the band played the stirring hymn amazing grace and the choir sang the lyrics in french this union of instruments and voices of nations and peoples of histories and hopefulness truly represents the mission of continuing promise 2009 and the humanitarian role of our military at the core of the chords floating through the hot haitian air was a message of hope for humanity and of camaraderie with your fellow man and my husband often speaks of the ties that bind all people together in the 21st century at a time when danger and opportunity spreads freely across borders we know that the security and prosperity of all people is shared so when the comfort helps folks meet their basic needs abroad then we advance the cause of security and prosperity everywhere around the world and we re also advancing our values in the most fundamental way that we can by living them through deeds as well as words this is the spirit of service that the crew of the comfort exemplifies and we know that it is a spirit that defines those who were on a different kind of mission on board the eisenhower as well the crew of the eisenhower has served in support of our missions in afghanistan iraq and around the world its planes have flown over 2 000 sorties over afghanistan its ships patrolled the waters for pirates and aided the heroic rescue of cargo ship captain richard phillips off the coast of somalia earlier this year its servicemen and women have demonstrated the courage the competence and commitment of the great president and general whose namesake they carry and they have proven that this generation of american service members is as great as any that has come before we know that the men and women who wear the uniform of the united states have borne an enormous responsibility for their country and for the peace and security of the world now all americans must do more to meet our responsibility to those who serve us and when i talk about those who serve us i don t just mean those who are wearing uniforms when a service member is deployed abroad we know that their entire family makes a tremendous sacrifice that s why this president and this administration have committed to relieving some of that strain that is placed on our troops and their families the president s budget reflects that commitment through pay raises for men and women in uniform it reflects it through additional permanent forces in the army and marine corps to reduce the stress of long deployments it reflects it in support of military spouse career development it reflects it in improved military housing and financial assistance to military families who have to sell their homes during the housing crisis and are facing losses these investments build on the work of commanders and service members military spouses and volunteers professional staff and community leaders who have helped military life become more family friendly and they ve been doing it for decades this year marks the 30th anniversary of the fleet and family support centers centers like hampton roads that serve more than 259 000 active duty and retired military and their family members with everything from counseling to parenting skills from financial management to relocation assistance these are steps that we re taking to make life better for those who serve but providing our military and their families with the support that they deserve requires more than good government it requires active citizens and this is why i ve made it a personal priority to ask all americans to join the cause of supporting our military families we must all remember that when our troops are deployed their families are left behind and faced with an entirely different set of duties mothers who tuck their kids in at night and struggle to answer the question when is daddy coming home fathers who wonder how they ll keep their families together while they juggle ballet recitals and homework and mowing the lawn all while their wives are serving our country abroad children who have to tell their dad about their home run via teleconference because he missed yet another softball season spouses and parents caring for a wounded warrior or struggling to move forward after losing a loved one they have american flags waving on their front porch they have yellow ribbons on their cars and blue and gold stars in their windows these people are our neighbors they live right down the block they re our colleagues who sit right down the hall they re our kids playmates and the people we see every day on the train to work or in the line at the grocery store they are all around us and i have seen the sacrifices of our military families up close they are the quiet heroes who represent the best in our country but yet according to a recent survey by blue star families 94 percent of our military families don t feel like their communities know of their struggles that probably isn t the case in this community a community like norfolk but in communities without a military presence it s easier to lose sight of those who serve and their families so as we welcome home the men and women of the comfort and the eisenhower from deployment and as we celebrate their reunion with their families let us make a pledge right here today to honor their service by doing more to serve them in our own communities let s do simple things like offer to help with a carpool simple things like bringing over dinner simple things like being a shoulder to cry on or a friend to talk to be a neighbor be a friend if you own a business or run a company or help run a business or a company you can help a military spouse get a job or keep a job despite a move across the country so he or she can continue to build a meaningful career as they sacrifice for our nation if you have a professional skill such as being a lawyer a mental health professional or an accountant you can provide pro bono services to military families who need your help if you have the opportunity just reach out and simply say thank you sometimes that goes a long way say thank you to the spouses and the children of our military members and thank them for their sacrifice because it is real and it is powerful let s all take the time to be aware of the heroes right in our midst and by following the examples of the men and women we honor here today we can all be emissaries of comfort to someone right in our own community i want to thank you all so much for allowing me to share in this very special occasion i told some of the admirals and the commanders that i spoke with earlier that one of the most powerful things that i have been able to do in this role is to get to meet our military and every single time i meet someone in uniform i am more proud of my country because people are sacrificing and serving with a level of dignity and honor that we should be proud of so i will use every ounce of my power in this position to highlight the sacrifices that you make and to rally our country around you and it won t stop today we are grateful to you we are proud of you and we are so glad that you re home thank you dem mobama4 11 09 michelle_obama thank you everyone please thank you so much and good afternoon and welcome to the white house i love saying that i m thrilled to be here today as we honor this year s coming up taller award recipients and these are outstanding programs that are expanding horizons changing lives and helping young people fulfill their dream across america and around the world i want to start by thanking the president s committee on arts and humanities and this is the institution that sponsors these awards and i d like to ask all of the committee members to please stand so that we can thank you and honor you for your service this is just an amazing group of people in their own right they ve been here for a few days working hard answering and asking questions and we are so grateful to each and every one of them for their willingness to be involved in such a committed way i also want to recognize all of the artists the teachers the directors and the administrators all of you who are on the ground every single day running the programs that we honor today what you do isn t easy and we know that particularly right now during these days of a lot of belt tightening i know that many of you have been putting in probably longer hours and later nights just to keep things together and sometimes probably paying out of your own pockets to keep everything going but i also know that the difference that you re making in the lives of young people all across this country and around the world because of you teens in arizona are publishing their own magazine and children in central and south los angeles are learning to play instruments and performing in orchestras because of the work that you do students in new york city are mastering shakespeare and in my hometown of chicago there are students learning traditional mexican art forms there are young people in egypt who are learning basket weaving and storytelling calligraphy and photography and you re not just connecting young people with music dance poetry and drama but because of your work you re connecting people these young people to mentoring to tutoring to social services and college counseling you don t just show them the power of their imagination but you show them the power of discipline and hard work and of teamwork as well and these young people don t just become accomplished singers and painters and authors they also become better students they become better leaders and they become better citizens enriching not just themselves but their communities teaching younger children the skills that they ve learned beautifying neighborhoods with murals and lifting their communities with their performances ultimately each of your programs is using achievement in the arts as a bridge to achievement in life and you see all this every day each and every one of you working so hard you see this in your students as they become more confident and more engaged and more willing to take risks and to take responsibility for their futures you see it when their academic performance improves when you see improving attitudes and higher gpas and you see young people who never saw themselves as college material you see them getting those acceptance letters and you see them going on to pursue their degrees so we all know in this room the power of the arts to change young people s lives but we also know that even though so many young people in this country live just minutes from the centers of culture and power and prestige many feel that these resources are miles away and very far beyond their reach that s why we re working to make the white house a showcase for america s rich cultural life and opening the doors of this house to as many of our young people as we can exposing them to classical music exposing them to jazz the spoken word everything we want to show them that they have a place not just in our museums and in our theaters and in our concert halls but they have a place in the halls of this white house as well we want to show them that they can have a future in the arts community whether they do it as a hobby or as a profession or simply as an appreciative observer we want to show them that if they work hard and if they believe in themselves nothing is beyond their reach and i think one of the professional writers who works with young people through the insideout literary arts project in detroit michigan he put it best when he said something very simple if you ask a kid to dream he ll dream that s what this coming up taller awards are all about that s what each and every one of you do every single day you ask our young people to dream and you give them the tools to fulfill those dreams you affirm that their contributions are valuable and their success matters to all of us you help them see beyond the circumstances of their lives to the world of possibility that awaits them and for that we honor you for that we thank you and we pledge to do everything we can to help continue the extraordinary work that you do and it is now my pleasure to introduce the co chairs of the president s committee on arts and humanities two individuals who ve used their extraordinary careers in the arts to render extraordinary service to this country george stevens and margo lion let s give them a round of applause well let s do that again well this is a good way to start the day right well if we didn t know before these awards remind us of what the power of arts and music and dance can do in the lives of our young people we all know the people in this room because we live it every day we work with these kids we know the difference that this can make that s why your work is so important so please keep it up stay strong and to all the young people we are so proud of you so proud of you you re representing everyone from your programs and please it s your job to take back all this energy and to share with the other students and young people in your communities and your programs so please make sure you do that and with that i think the program is ended thank you all for coming and have a good afternoon dem mobama4 6 10 michelle_obama thank you everyone good afternoon so is it hot enough we planned this especially lots of sun no breeze got you in your whites and hats we re going to bring you out scarves and mittens and boots soon to make it really comfortable but i we are just thrilled i mean i don t know if you can see yourselves but i was looking out from the residence and looking down at you all as you were spread over the south lawn and it was just a sight to behold i have to say i wasn t sure when i heard the goal of having nearly a thousand chefs on the south lawn i said right sam sure whatever but you all pulled it off and i am just so proud and honored to have you here at the white house i want to start by thanking todd and norah for sharing their stories for the work that they re doing at the murch school it s just you know a wonderful example of the partnership that can be created this is our hope for all of you to just spread out around the country and replicate what they have done and we are just thrilled with the level of broad thinking and creativity that they ve put into this work and we want to see more of it happen and i also have to thank my partner in crime sam kass who has just been such an important part of promoting healthy eating not just here at the white house but helping to shape this initiative and sam has worked closely with so many staff members on the east wing and in our kitchen but we wouldn t be here and we wouldn t have the knowledge and the passion if it weren t for people like sam who really understand your world they understand and appreciate the value of cooking this has been a long conversation that sam and i have had over the years and i think it s just pretty powerful to see what started out as a few conversations in our kitchen on the south side of chicago turn into a major initiative that hopefully will change the way we think as a country not just about the health of our kids but about our health as a nation well you re all here for the same reason because you appreciate the power that food can have in our lives and who would have thought food having power other than just making us full but it s got a lot of power you all know the enormous amount of care and the sense of pride that our farmers put into growing the food that nourishes the world you have those relationships you ve seen it in action you know the joy of cooking for others that passion that you get the sense of camaraderie the understanding and fulfillment that comes with seeing folks gathering around a dinner table not just enjoying a meal but enjoying fellowship that is power you know the central role that food plays in the moments that make us happiest food is always there whether it s at a birthday party or thanksgiving dinner or quiet moments with friends food is at the core of what makes life wonderful and you all know how the ingredients we put in our bodies can affect the way we feel the way we think and how we grow this is especially true when we re talking about our nation s kids and you all know the statistics when it comes to the health of our kids and they re staggering every time we talk about it how nearly one third of children in this country are now overweight or obese that s one in three just think about that that means that these kids are at greater risk of obesity related diseases you name them cancer heart disease stroke and last year as a nation we spent nearly 150 billion treating conditions like these and if we don t do something now that number is just going to continue to increase as we see these children reach adulthood at an unhealthy weight but what we do know is that none of us wants this kind of future for our kids no one does this is not what we had in mind and we don t want this kind of future for our countries that s why earlier this year we started let s move as you know it s been a national campaign with a very ambitious goal which is to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that kids born today grow up with a totally different approach to eating and their health and they grow up at a healthy weight with a wonderful appreciation for food and how to use it to tap into their power let s move is about making the changes that we need in several key ways number one we re working to get more information to parents so that they can make good choices for their kids that s something that s always confusing as a mom what do you feed your kids how do you do it we need to do a better job at making sure that our parents know what s best for their kids we re working to make sure that families and communities across this country have access to quality affordable foods you all know this millions of americans are living in food deserts they don t have access to the kind of food that they need to live a healthy life and we can t begin to have this conversation about healthier living for our kids if their families don t have access and can t afford the foods that they need and we re also working on the other end of the spectrum there s food and there s movement that s what the let s move piece is about we need to make sure that our kids are getting the physical activity that they need to stay healthy the recommendation is that kids get 60 minutes of active play every single day and when we were growing up that was just hanging out now it s to save their lives but even as parents work to help their kids eat right and exercise at home we also need to make sure that they have access to healthy meals at school for many kids that s where they re getting the vast majority of their calendars calories and i know that sometimes there s a tendency to see money being spent on school nutrition as somehow taking away from what people think are the more important aspects of education like the curriculum or teacher salaries or school supplies and with the average school being allotted about 2 68 for each meal they prepare 2 68 that s it and of that only 1 00 1 25 of that money actually goes to the food itself i mean you can imagine just how creative you have to be to make food interesting in the schools but the truth is that the food that our kids eat does have a direct effect on how they learn that s just the truth so this isn t a luxury this isn t a set aside this isn t a sidebar one recent study showed that kids who ate breakfast were more attentive they had faster response times than kids who don t that s learning and with more than 31 million children participating in the national school lunch and breakfast programs good nutrition at school is more important than ever a major key to giving our children a healthy future will be to pass a strong child nutrition bill and right now the reauthorization bill is moving its way through congress and fortunately it has bipartisan support yay the senate agriculture committee s action on the bill this spring marks historic progress on this bill and it s vitally important that the senate continues this effort and passes a bill in the coming weeks a majority of senators and house members from both parties have publicly called for swift passage of a robust proposal and i urge congress to provide the resources that we need to support these important programs it s important that we keep the momentum going and we pass this bill this year so we need all of your help everyone out there needs to focus on this this is doable it s right there but we ve got to make it happen but if there s one thing that we know for sure and that is that the solution to childhood obesity is not going to come from washington alone there is not one single expert that we ve talked to that said that the solution to this problem is for government to tell people what to do that just doesn t work instead as we ve said all this time it s going to take all of us it s going to take all of us parents and teachers community leaders food manufacturers all of us doing our part to give our children the healthy future they deserve and it s going to take all of you our nation s chefs that s why i am so moved to see you all here you all are at the heart of this initiative because if anyone understands nutrition and food it s the folks sitting here in their whites today i know what they re called whites we tease sam we call them blouses just to make him mad but each of you has so much to offer when it comes to helping our children make healthy choices you know more about food than almost anyone other than the grandmas and you ve got the visibility and the enthusiasm to match that knowledge that s really what s key just watching you guys in action will it excites me let alone my little girls who can t stay out of the kitchen when sam is cooking you can make a salad bar fun now that s something and delicious you can teach kids to cook something that tastes good and is good for them and share your passion for food in a way that s truly contagious let me tell you something my mother didn t know how to cook broccoli it was watery and mushy and that s what we thought broccoli was we thought you could eat it with a spoon and cut it with a knife and i know a lot of parents out there cooking broccoli like that it makes it hard to like broccoli if that s how you re cooking it but you guys can help change that that s why we created the chefs move to schools program to pair chefs like you with interested schools in your local communities and together you ll be helping students learn where food comes from and develop healthy habits you ll be elevating the role of food in our schools and working to create healthy meals on a budget now just like you wouldn t be thrilled if someone came in your restaurant and told you what to do we re not asking you guys to go into school kitchens and take over and that s an important point to make our school food service professionals who are out there they have dedicated their careers to helping our children grow up healthy and happy they work long hours and they stretch budgets to the limit often with no recognition at all and their advice has been so invaluable as we ve tried to identify areas where schools can improve and become more efficient so they deserve our respect and our admiration and i want to take the time now to thank them for their service and for their for their hard work that s why we re asking you when you go into the schools to work closely with our food service professionals to support the work that they do every day in and out long hours they re looking forward to getting some extra help they need it doing everything from teaching basic cooking skills in the cafeteria to encouraging healthy choices in the lunch line so they re going to need your support but it s got to be a collaboration and we strongly encourage you all to go in with that spirit now i know that none of this is going to be easy nothing we do is i think the very nature of living in this house means that the easy button has been taken away forever and it won t happen overnight that s for sure you re going to need to figure out what you re up against you re going to need to take time to learn your communities to understand your schools to figure out how the school kitchen operates to finding out what equipment is available because there are equipment limitations that have been an issue at some many schools and what kind of changes the school and the community can actually sustain so it s going there s going to be a learning curve so you ve got to be patient and help people become patient with you but making our schools healthier isn t just about what happens in the kitchen as norah said it s also about what kids learn in the classroom and that s why we re also encouraging you to do things like put on cooking demonstrations teach kids how to prepare meals at home you can help start a cooking club work with the teacher to integrate food into the lesson plan like they ve done at murch or help students plant a garden if possible all that stuff is a part of it it s not just about the work in the kitchen and with your help our hope is that we ll be able to double the number of schools in the healthier us school challenge this is an innovative program that recognizes schools that are providing healthy foods and opportunities for kids to stay active so there are just so many ways to get involved and i know that many of you are already ahead of the game because you re doing that right now you re here because you re already doing it there are folks like chef toni robertson who for the last three years has helped students from the mott hall school in new york plant a vegetable garden and learn healthy eating habits even throwing salad parties for parents that s a good thing there s also chef seth bixby daugherty from minnesota who has worked with yes let s give him a hand who has worked with several schools across the country to design easy healthy recipes that taste good and can be made with the equipment that schools already have or there s someone like fernando olea from santa fe who teaches popular cooking classes for local students yay fernando showing them how to prepare healthy meals from his native mexico in the end it s all about helping kids build healthy habits that are going to last a lifetime and many of you guys know about the white house kitchen garden we re going to go down there and harvest with our kids in a few minutes but i still remember last year when we started the whole process and we involved kids from local schools from the very beginning they helped us till the soil they helped us plant they helped us weed they helped us harvest they ate it was pretty powerful and several of the schools asked the kids to reflect in writing on their experience and this is what helped us to know that we were onto something here one of the students described herself as a pretty regular fifth grader who loves sweets and afterwards she wrote that her time in the garden and this is a quote has made me think about the choices i have with what i put in my mouth hey winner another child wrote that it has inspired us to eat better and work harder and one young man wrote and this is a direct quote i think about the garden project as a model for being gentle gentle with nature gentle to your body and gentle with each other now we need to remember and follow that model isn t that beautiful so ultimately this is what we re trying to do and as you know kids are so hungry they will take it all in they can change their habits their taste buds their approaches overnight all they need is your encouragement your enthusiasm your passion and your patience and if we do this together and i know you guys are ready because you wouldn t be sitting out here in those hats in the hot sun if you weren t we can change the future for our children and for this nation we are so grateful to you so proud of the work that you ve done and we re asking you to do more to recruit others there are about a thousand of you here we can triple that number and that s also part of your goal we want you to reach out find those who are less hesitant who are a little afraid of kids who are not sure about schools and help bring them in we ve got to make these numbers grow because we want you all in every school in the nation we want every school in the nation to have a chef partner a set of kids who call you theirs who believe that you care about nothing more than how they grow up and how they feel the more grownups who are working on behalf of our kids the stronger they ll be so let s move let s get this done thank you all for the work you ve done and i look forward to seeing you all in the months to come thanks so much dem mobama5 11 09 michelle_obama well hi everybody you all please sit down thank you so much i am thrilled to be here it s a pleasure to be here with all of you at the department of energy now i have to say i told the secretary this the overflow crowd is always a lot more pumped up than the regular crowd i think it s because you re in this formal setting and you think you have to behave yourselves but we can get loud in here we can be fired up there we go let me begin by thanking secretary chu for that warm introduction as you know secretary chu isn t just a brilliant scientist he s also an inspired leader and he s bringing new ideas and perspectives to washington challenging all of you all of us to look at your own work at our own work in a whole new way and we are so incredibly grateful for his leadership my husband loves his cabinet he was extremely excited that he had a real nerd on his team he talked about it for weeks on end so we are delighted to have you on the team and we re grateful for the work that you do i also want to take a moment to thank all of you and to honor all of you this is one of the reasons why i do these visits i ve had the privilege since coming to washington to visit many of the agencies my goal is to get to all of them as you heard i was supposed to be here earlier but this other guy in my life bumped me out of the scene it s okay i try not to take it personally but these visits are helpful to me they re helpful to the administration because i ve said this before the president and i we re the new kids on the block here in washington d c and many of you have been doing this work for longer than i ve been alive and several of our long term employees here at the department of energy are right in the front row and i want us to take some time to give them a round of applause for their decades of service and i have to say i m always amazed when i see folks and i hear how long they ve been working because they look too good to be have been here some people for 30 40 50 years they must have started when they were 10 but we are grateful to you and you deserve this recognition as well as everyone who s working hard in all of the federal agencies you don t often get the thanks that you deserve sometimes you get a lot of the blame and none of the credit for the progress that has gone on in this country for years and you know this is our small way of making sure that you know that this administration appreciates the work that you do but whether it s doing groundbreaking scientific research or ensuring our nuclear security making our homes our offices our cars appliances more efficient or fighting to turn the tide on climate change what you re doing here couldn t be more urgent your work is critical for our economy and our national security and preserving our environment for our kids and our grandkids that s the work that you do and it s not easy everyone knows it s not easy and i know that most of what you re working on right now as hard as you re working probably won t even be finished this year or maybe not even this administration or even during the course of your careers here at the department you may not see the final outcome of the work that you re doing so in the coming decades you all will be passing the torch to the next generation truly you re going to be handing over what you ve begun to a lot of young people who are right now just beginning to develop those future scientists and public servants and it truly will be up to that next generation it s going to be up to them our children our grandchildren the young people that we mentor it s going to be up to them to carry all of this wonderful work forward and it s up to us to ensure that they re prepared to do that that s our job we have to get them ready and developed and mature and focused making sure that they have the knowledge and the skills they need to finish what all of you have started we all know that we can t transform our energy future unless we transform our education system that we know unless we ensure that every child in america gets a good education particularly when it comes to math and science particularly in the areas of math and science that s why we re challenging states to raise their standards to modernize science labs to upgrade their curricular their curricula and to recruit and train qualified teachers who will make these subjects more alive more interesting more engaging for our students that s why we re committed to expanding advanced courses and creating additional opportunities more importantly for underrepresented groups and that also means women and girls we want them to study and succeed in science math engineering and technology like never before we want those numbers up so that s why we re so pleased by what folks here at the department of energy are doing to get young people excited about science that s one of the other reasons why i m here we ve been talking in my staff about this visit for a while because it s unique in what we re doing and what you all are doing the national science bowl you host every year and i think there are a lot of people out here who don t know that the department of energy has really been supporting this type of initiative for so long the national science bowl that you host it draws 20 000 students from 1 800 schools that is amazing that s truly amazing and the young people who participate in this competition they put in late nights and long hours they re pushing themselves and challenging each other to get ready and to get focused on the topic and they don t just learn biology chemistry physics and math in the process you all know that what they re also learning is discipline and teamwork and problem solving and communication skills the middle school students even design build and race their own hydrogen powered cars it s science at its best truly it s hands on and it s very collaborative in a way that really makes young people excited i know my kids there s nothing like a little competition to get them going it fuels kids imaginations and encourages the innovative thinking that we ll need to meet our nation s challenges in the years to come and none of this would be possible without the hard work of folks like all of you who devote so many volunteer hours to making this event happen all of you all have served as coaches as timekeepers as judges and scorekeepers it s my understanding that more than a hundred employees here at the department of energy help run the national competition in washington and more than 6 000 volunteers contribute their time to run regional competitions across america and this includes one individual in particular that i want to just acknowledge who has run the entire operation every year for the past 19 years and who s waited to retire i understand she put off retiring until she can make it an even 20 years she s grown this program from just a handful of schools to an institution that s inspired more than 150 000 students since it began in 1991 so i want us to take a moment to recognize sue ellen walbridge for her terrific work sue ellen where is she there she is way in the back see that s what happens to people who run stuff they re way in the back you can t even seem them i see her she s making her way up all right she s just waving from the back thanks sue ellen today we re going to witness for ourselves here she comes here comes there you come on sue ellen there she is look i think we all know this is something pretty special to start from something so small and grow it into something so big and so meaningful we are grateful to you for your dedication for your hard work for your passion you are touching the lives of thousands and thousands of young people and that should give you some level of peace and satisfaction and pride we are all so very proud of you thank you so much so today we re going to witness for ourselves the excellent work sue ellen and many of you are doing to run this competition isn t it exciting we re joined today by students from kenmoor middle school in landover maryland and longfellow middle school yes yes and longfellow middle school in falls church virginia all right there we go they re going to give us a little preview of the big day next spring that s when the competition actually happens in the spring so we re the dress rehearsal we re going to hold a mini science bowl right here we re all set up i m like alex trebek and secretary chu is like my vanna white now this competition won t this competition won t count because it s sort of just like a practice round but i ll be reporting the results back to the president of the united states so no pressure young people none at all so what are we going to do now i think secretary chu is going to come back up and then we re going to get this competition started dem mobama5 4 10 michelle_obama hey everybody is this not the most perfect day for the easter egg roll let s say thank you to mother nature yeah you guys we are so excited to have you welcome to the 2010 easter egg roll the theme for this year s event is ready set what go and as you guys know this year i launched a nationwide initiative to try to end the epidemic of childhood obesity it s called let s move and today we have transformed the south lawn into a playground and our hope today is that in addition to having fun and doing some of the traditional activities like the egg roll and the easter egg hunt that you can learn about beginning to live a more healthy life we ve got wonderful food stands over in the back we ve got some of the area s and the nation s best chefs you can learn to cook there s a farmers market you can see the garden but we also have some great activities we ve got several athletic centers we ve got football we ve got basketball we ve got tennis we ve got yoga and we have some of the most phenomenal athletes here we ve got our washington redskins here we have olympians apolo ohno we ve got billie jean king in the center we re going to have some dancing some hula hooping we ve got dj tony from the ellen degeneres show who s going to do some stuff and then if that s not enough you can go over to the music stage and just have some fun with justin bieber you guys know justin bieber you ve heard of justin bieber well he s here and we have sara bareilles one of my favorites the cast of glee yay and thank you amber for that wonderful rendition of the national anthem and then we ve got readers there s always reading is important we ve got j k rowling one of our favorite authors here reese witherspoon we ve got tons of people who are here just to have fun with you guys today so the only thing you need to do is get ready set and do what one thing i want to do i want to thank all of the volunteers who helped put this thing together everyone our volunteers working all weekend setting up this amazing event i want to thank our staff ellie schafer ellie and joe reinstein for putting this together they have done just an amazing job we are thrilled to have you here we re going to have 30 000 people in our backyard today and we want every single one of you to have fun to think about living a healthy life and to get moving so with that we re going to go over and we re going to do a little easter egg rolling we re going to do a little reading so we look forward to seeing you all have fun and thank you for being here dem mobama5 5 09 michelle_obama thank you thank you so much i am thrilled to be here thank you susan for that kind introduction i m thrilled to be here but i was just at sesame street i m sorry and i never thought i d be on sesame street with elmo and big bird and i was thrilled i m still thrilled i m on a high i think it s probably the best thing i ve done so far in the white house but we were there talking about nutrition and healthy eating and it s just been a thrill so i m glad i could take the time to be here with you all you know i just want to tell you that susan rice i could take her introduction of me and turn it around and do the same thing for her she is a trusted adviser and friend to the president and to me and i know how appreciative barack was when susan agreed to serve as ambassador to the united nations because of the importance that he places on the work that you all do and having someone that he trusts and expects and respects and admires and who is also wicked smart i like that one just is a sign of how valued this work is to the white house it is a pleasure to be here in new york this is my first trip back to the city since i ve become first lady it seems like i was just here but it s been a hundred and seven eight nine days or something like that but in addition to doing some traveling around the country and around the world a little bit i ve been doing as susan mentioned a lot of traveling around washington and trying to meet our new neighbors that s something that we were taught that when you move into a new place that you learn about your community that you introduce yourself and you not just talk but you listen and i ve been going around to as many federal agencies as i can the goal is to hit all of them and i ve been to about 10 agencies and really trying to shine a bright light on all of the hard work done by our nation s employees you know my task when i go is simple is to say thank you and many people don t hear that many people don t feel that the years that they ve put in sometimes are not appreciated and my visits are just a simple way of saying yes in fact we see you we know who you are we value what you do and we couldn t be here wouldn t be here without you i ve had the chance to meet so many people who ve dedicated their lives their entire careers to strengthening our nation and in fact here today i want to acknowledge 40 of those people who are sitting in the front rows here oh this is the 40 i was trying to figure out while i was standing there which is the 40 it s you it s my understanding that everyone over here has worked for the u s government for more than 20 years and that includes ivan ferber where s ivan he has worked here a remarkable 47 years longer than i ve been alive so let s give ivan and all of them a round of applause i have also been going around to do one of my favorite things and that s meeting with kids in the schools and community centers and encouraging them to study hard my whole model is being smart is really cool so get it together telling them that we re going to need them to be prepared basically to take on the reins and become the future leaders the future public servants really trying to let them know that developing careers in public service and thinking about that now is a really good thing because we re going to need them we re going to have a lot of work to do and i ve learned that i don t need to work too hard sending that message to your kids because the president was sent a letter the other day from the son of scott turner where s scott all right so scott s son jack a first grader okay i know i m going to embarrass you but this is a good one he wrote the following letter to the president dear mr obama can you move to new york because people like you so much in new york i will help you come to new york and people are doing bad stuff in new york i will help you get the bad people and when i catch the bad people i will put them in jail that s why i want you to move to new york from jack so ladies and gentlemen i think we have identified the new future new york police commissioner jack on the case now i know that part of ambassador rice s mission is to strengthen the u n but i also didn t think that nepotism was a part of it but it s sometimes a good thing and i ve got an embarrassing story for her as well a couple of weeks ago susan s 11 year old son jake was here for take your child to work day a day that i know all drove us crazy but the kids liked it we had we enjoyed it at the white house as well but he was apparently embarrassed to be caught eating ice cream when the south african ambassador was approaching his mother s office and not wanting to and this is a quote from jake to make a bad first impression jake dumped his ice cream just so he could introduce himself now see that s diplomacy right there for an 11 year old to sacrifice ice cream to shake the hand appropriately of a fellow ambassador well you know they never they never do that with us but good home training he was able to do it outside so i want to thank jake for taking so seriously his role in creating the best impression of american diplomacy but i think our future is in good hands from what i ve been seeing traveling around and i know that each and every one of you has a child in your life that you are desperately pushing ahead and you know they can do it so i believe we re going to be okay and i believe we re presently in good hands because of all of you from what i m seeing in my agency visits people are ready and willing to sacrifice and roll up their sleeves as the president has said the united states is pursuing a new era of engagement when it comes to advancing america s interests around the world this new policy recognizes the fact that america s future is intricately linked to the rest of the world that the threats facing the global community know no borders and no single country can tackle them alone and we ve learned this again with the recent outbreak of the h1n1 virus we know now that we can not wall ourselves off from issues that are challenging our neighbors it is moments like this when having relationships based on mutual trust and respect will be most beneficial and as the world becomes even smaller and our future more inter connected and the stakes ever higher your work is more important it has never been more important your work links the world to america and american ideals that are beacons of hope for millions of people as i told the young women at the elizabeth garrett anderson school in london during our recent trip i told them there was nothing in my life that would suggest that i would become first lady rather it is the premise of america and the promise kept that brings me here today there are millions of girls and boys in countries near and far who are looking for a way to make the most of their lives there are parents struggling to raise those kids there are teachers working hard to teach them community leaders struggling to give them safe nurturing communities where they can grow and thrive and they re doing this against some pretty incredible odds especially in developing countries and that s why the work that you do here to advance america s interests and to make the u n a more effective and efficient organization is so important there are people around the world counting on the success of your efforts the young boy who is forced to carry a rifle and become a child soldier he s counting on you the girl locked out of the school house or attacked because she had the audacity to want to learn to read or write she s counting on you the mother walking hours each day to find clean water for her children she s counting on you and the father who leaves his family for months or years on end in search of work he s counting on you as well social and economic development programs give millions of people hope and a chance at a brighter future paving the way for a more peaceful and prosperous world for us all and in my role as first lady what i hope to do is to work with you in some way shape or form to help build that mission and i am looking forward to joining you in this endeavor so i want to thank you all for what you ve done what you will continue to do we are rooting for you and we need you so thank you so much dem mobama5 5 10 michelle_obama thank you everyone thanks so much you all take a load off your feet because you work hard enough it is truly a pleasure to be here this is a big agency this is good i think this is one of my largest agency visits this is really wonderful i want to start by thanking raj for that wonderful introduction but more so for everything that he s doing here and i also want to thank his family who are here because they re doing many things working at the department of education they ve got two beautiful young children they re just delicious and you know we are grateful to all of you for the sacrifice that you re making to work for this administration everyone here is supported by loving families that keep them going and my greetings here go not just to you but to the families that make it possible for you to do the work that you do as you all know raj has an extraordinary background he s brought an unbelievable amount of energy and experience to the job here at usaid but of course as you can see raj is still only at the beginning of his career he is young and smart and talented but he s really just getting started and that s why we were so happy that he agreed to follow those passions right here to develop the work here at usaid we are grateful to him and i want us to give raj a round of applause for the work that he s doing the beauty is is that he s the right fit for this agency because he is passionate and committed but he s just a reflection of the passion and commitment that you all bring to this work you all recognize the challenges we re facing are bigger and much more complex than ever before a billion people living in hunger around the world the growing threat of climate change the unpredictable threat of natural disaster that we see playing out all the time an exploding youth population that can either be one of our greatest challenges or one of our greatest opportunities but you all share the courage to face those challenges head on and the determination to help people around the world turn crisis into opportunity and i understand this is a pretty tight knit group because it really takes a special kind of person to do the work that you do so i know that you have to be tight knit and i know firsthand because as you know my mother in law barack s mother spent more than 20 years working on a variety of development projects for usaid in indonesia and i got to see her commitment firsthand i know that many of you like her have lived and worked in conditions that the rest of us could only imagine sometimes risking your own lives and your own safety along the way many people don t realize that you put in incredibly long hours you work sleepless nights you ve got beautiful kids who want to talk to their daddy and she should be able to talk to her daddy don t know why you won t talk to her she doesn t understand why you re standing over there it s very clear but you all do so much you re working weeks and months at a time away from your families and that in and of itself is a hard thing to even imagine and you do it all because you believe in the power of development to make america stronger in the world and improve the lives of those less fortunate that s why it s been really truly a pleasure that as first lady i ve been able to visit so many agencies throughout the federal government over the last year to thank folks like you for all the hard work and service that you provide over the years your work here has touched millions of lives because of your efforts to improve basic health conditions there are children around the world who are alive today who would have died without your help because of your commitment to sustainable agriculture we ve seen the most dramatic increase in food production in history and we ve helped you prevent starvation seen you prevent starvation around the world and because of the partnerships you ve formed with governments other aid groups private ngos we ve seen you help advance democracy and protect human rights from colombia to nepal but as my husband the president and raj have said that the ultimate job the ultimate objective here is to create the condition that you are no longer needed that s ultimately what you re working to do ultimately your goal is to make it possible for the child in el salvador to go to school for the family in the sudan to live free from fear and for the woman in ghana to be able to put food on the table that s why you have always represented what is truly best about america the idea that we have an obligation not just to help those in need but to also help folks beyond our borders build capacity to help themselves and i know that the mission has been difficult over the last decade the work that you do has not been easy you ve often been asked to do more and more with less and that s why the president and secretary clinton who by the way has done a fantastic job representing america around the world that s why together they have made development an important part of foreign policy once again usaid will play a central role in our mission going forward the president and secretary clinton are committed to making development an essential part of our efforts to ensure peace security and progress in the world doing this is about more than simply building good relationships between presidents and prime ministers you all know that it s going to take as my husband said a new era of mutual interest respect and responsibility between real people around the world every person that you empower through your work and every life that you improve through your work gets us one step closer to making that vision a reality and right now we have more resources and we have a greater ability to help than ever before we have the ability to coordinate our work not only with other governments but also with those in the private sector and with ngos and together we re going to continue to make progress on the issues that you work on each and every single day right now progress is being made in places like afghanistan where your colleagues are working with afghan people in an incredibly dangerous environment to lay the foundation for a more stable future there you re making sure resources are being used wisely increasing access to health care rejuvenating the economy and making sure that more children have access to a good education but perhaps nowhere has your work been more visible to the american people over the last year than in haiti in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions without food water and shelter the men and women of usaid you all answered the call and you put service above self and helped to mount a rapid response to one of the most complex disasters that we ve seen your dart teams were some of the first on the ground helping to save lives and assess the damage your work with the haitian government our military the u n and ngos helped feed nearly 3 million haitians and provide water and sanitation services to much of the affected population and through a variety of resources and sources you ve helped treat thousands of victims who urgently needed medical care and as you know three weeks ago jill biden and i visited port au prince to see your work firsthand and to meet the women and men who are working so hard to get that country back on its feet and it was truly an inspiring visit i had the privilege of meeting with many of your colleagues including the usaid country head dr carlene dei while i was there and she was terrific and wherever i went i was amazed and incredibly touched to hear the stories of your sacrifice and your compassion and your amazing partnership with the haitian people and folks around the world in the aftermath of that disaster it was clear from my visit that people valued the work and saw this country in a different way because of the work that you were doing we had a chance to visit families that were living in the tent cities in champs de mars families as you know who ve lost everything and for whom every day is a struggle just to stay dry and to feed their kids we visited a school which was really just a set of buses that were donated by the first lady of the dominican republic but these buses allowed thousands of boys and girls in haiti to continue to focus on their studies and to have a place to go to just settle down from the crisis teachers there were using the art music and dance to provide emotional support for students who were suffering from the trauma and we also visited another school that s being rebuilt so that more children can realize their dreams of an education even in the midst of the devastation and part of our mission in visiting haiti was to shine a light not just on the work that you did but on the work that still needs to be done the destruction as you know there is catastrophic and the needs of the haitian people are still overwhelming as you know but every day usaid and others are working to help haiti recover and to rebuild little by little over the next months and over the years to come and i know that your work in places like haiti and afghanistan represents only a small fraction of the work that you do here at usaid and i know that many of you here and around the world are making a difference in ways that will never show up on the tv it ll never land on the front page of the newspaper much of the work that you do is quiet many people don t know it s happening but i do think that events of the last few months have given the american people just a glimpse of the kind of people who work here the sacrifices you make the exhaustion the tragedy and the risk that you endure all because you believe that it s your duty to help people in their greatest time of need and that s why the men and women of usaid are so special a very different breed of folk that s why development will once again be a central part of our foreign policy in america and that s a very good thing because of the work that you do and that s why we re counting on you to help us strengthen and transform this agency to continue to work with raj to support him in everything he does because we support him there are no words that can express the amount of gratitude that my husband and i feel for the work that you do you are making us proud you re making the country proud and you re making the world see america in a very fundamentally different way so it is my great honor to be here i hope to be back i hope to be able to see many more of you on my trips internationally to support the work that you re doing to help shine a light on the efforts that you re making the progress that s being made and again i m just grateful to all of you and i m going to take some time now just to shake some hands you all can stand back up again i m sure and raj can see his child so thank you all thank you so much dem mobama7 5 09 michelle_obama thank you thank you so much thank you donna and thanks to all of you who are part of the corporate voices for working families i m happy to join you today as you begin this annual meeting this is a very good thing and i am so glad i could be here many of the issues that you ll be discussing are issues that as you know are near and dear to my heart i personally as donna described know the challenges of leading a busy life at work and at home trying to do a good job at both and always feeling like you re not quite living up to either and trying not to pit one against the other really trying to balance it so that if people here are like me i call myself a 120 percenter if i m not doing any job at 120 percent i think i m failing so if you re trying to do that at home and at work you find it very difficult and stressful and frustrating and even though my current life trust me is very different than it was and for most people and i do know that i know that right now i am living as challenging as it may seem in a very blessed situation because i have what most families don t have is tons of support all around not just my mother but staff and administration i have a chief of staff and a personal assistant and everyone needs that that s what we need everyone should have a chief of staff and a set of personal assistants but one thing i know from meeting women and men across the country is that the work life challenges that i ve faced aren t different from the challenges facing other families and undoubtedly many of you things are very different for working families than when many of us were growing up i talked about this a lot on the campaign trail when i look back on my childhood and the life that my parents provided working class folks with not a lot of money my father was a blue collar city worker who worked a shift job but because he earned enough as a shift worker without a college degree he could still support a family of four on that salary and because he could with that salary support us we rented a home we didn t live lavishly my mother was able to stay at home she could afford to make the choice not to go to work while we were growing up that was how families balanced back then but things are very different today one income really doesn t always cut it anymore and that s in my lifetime in most families both parents have to work and even if people want to make the choice to stay home and again there is no subjective analysis or of what is better but people can t make the choice it s even harder for single parents and there are millions of them all across this country who are trying to build a life for themselves and their children and they find in an economy that s tough that they re not just holding down one but they need a couple of jobs just to make ends meet twenty two million working women don t have a single paid sick day that means they lose money any time they have to stay home to take care of their kids you know imagine making that choice and we do it all the time and even when i had sick leave i found myself you know hoping that the kids would stay well just i couldn t afford to take the day off because there was a meeting or something was going on so your whole life is just contingent upon everything working perfectly so imagine families who don t have any sick time so if somebody gets sick they have to take time off and they lose the money that they can t afford so there are a lot of people counting on us to figure this out and one of the reasons i was interested in joining you today is because the research that you do provides a solid foundation for the conversations that we need to have on these issues through your work the private sector government and other key stakeholders can have a real dialogue based on facts find common ground and then develop innovative policies that can help employees manage their work and family obligations without going crazy in promoting best practices some of which i believe we ll hear about today and i m really looking forward to hearing about how some companies are making it work because that s how we re going to figure this out looking at the best practices and figuring out how we can replicate that employers here learn how to implement programs that are beneficial to the bottom line that s something that i learned as a manager is that when you provide programs that enable employees to remain productive in their work which everybody wants to do i know few people who don t want to do their very best at their job but in order for them to do this they have to feel like their home life is stable and manageable so i found that as i ve managed staff the more flexibility and opportunities that i gave them to be good parents the more commitment that they made to working with me the less likely they were to leave because they wouldn t find the same sort of situation somewhere else so this isn t just about family balance this is about making work places stronger and more effective and keeping and attracting the most qualified people this research is critical to empowering employers and is politically particularly important during our current economic climate we need to discuss flexible work hours that give employees greater ability to attend to important family responsibilities like child pick up something as simple as that doctors appointments for those not just with kids but for people with elderly parents we re finding more and more that families are in that crunch as well we need to discuss paid leave for birth or adoption of a child and when there s a serious illness that arises we need to discuss quality on site child care something that keeps many of us up at night as families you re just wondering where are we going to put our children where we feel like that they re being safe that they re safe and being loved that will relieve many of the stresses that parents feel on the job throughout the day these types of policies can be the key to whether a family remains economically viable or slips into financial uncertainty i expect this day to be the first of what will be for me many conversations that i ll get a chance to participate in we need to find ways to encourage other employers to follow your lead and adopt work life policies that afford employees flexibility and much needed support we want to work together to make clear that again investing in these types of policies pays off for employers as well as the employees so i am honored to be here i am looking forward to learning more about what works what doesn t work what s economically feasible what i can do to be of help in furthering some of these agendas so with that i will stop and do what i love to do best which is listen and learn so thank you for having me dem mobama7 5 10a michelle_obama wow well hello thank you all so much please thanks so much it is so good to see you all thank you so much it is a pleasure to be here with all of you today let me begin by thanking jill for that extremely kind introduction jill has been such an extraordinary partner in our work to support military families more importantly she has been just a terrific friend in this journey it s just been truly a thrill for me to have her by my side sometimes in front so let s give jill another round of applause i want to recognize a few more people i want to recognize our dnc chair governor tim kaine tim and on this mother s day he is here with his lovely wife and my dear friend ann and his mom kathy and i also want to thank senators gillibrand and our dnc vice chair representative wasserman schultz also to the outstanding congresswoman carol maloney it s good to see you have you here i don t know where everyone is sitting but they re here and to the founding members and co chairs of the women s leadership forum i get a chance to hug and see all of you you are doing tremendous work we are grateful and proud of everything you re doing so now some of you may remember that the last time we were together as jill said it was back in late october of 2008 you remember that and you were all meeting in my hometown chicago and it was just it was good it was really good it was just a couple of weeks before the election and barack and i had been traveling flying all over the country everywhere every corner talking to folks and doing everything that we could to do to persuade people to get out the vote and to vote for who barack obama but we were very eager to get back to home for the national issues conference because we knew then about the critical work that you all were doing the organizing raising money making sure that people got to the polls on november the 4th do you remember those times because of the tireless efforts of all you and folks like you all throughout the country we saw people getting involved for the very first time remember that we saw folks of all ages and backgrounds knocking on doors they had never done that before making calls waiting hours in line on election day because they wanted to make history and on november the 4th 2008 that s exactly what we did and my husband and i are so incredibly grateful for everything that you all did to make that possible we are truly proud of you for the work that you ve done but i think it s fair to say that since that time a few things have happened to us as you know our family moved from chicago right here to washington our new hometown although will never be not our hometown and we ve spent the last year or so as you know just settling into our new lives here in this city so all of you know the girls are doing great and mom is doing well too she s enjoying a very active life here in washington and by the way bo is adjusting to his newfound celebrity for those of you who care to ask he is probably the most important person in the household for kids who visit and after all that time on the campaign trail i have to say that we re enjoying living above the store so that dad can come home for nights for dinner and that s something that we truly treasure it was something that we didn t have for a long time on the campaign trail so a lot has changed since we last met but there s one thing that hasn t changed back then i talked about the issues that we face from the economy to health care to education and i said that these issues aren t and they still aren t about politics they re personal and they re personal for every single one of us in this room and they re personal for every single one of us in this country and it s easy to lose sight of that fact with all the back and forth that goes on here in washington folks yelling at each other on tv so that little things get blown out of proportion and sometimes big important things don t always get the attention that they deserve but i have to tell you that when barack and i travel the country now and we spend time with ordinary folks they don t have much interest in the scorekeeping that goes on here in washington they really don t they don t care much about anybody s poll numbers and as my husband has pointed out never not even once has someone asked him who won the day the questions they ask have nothing to do with the daily chatter that goes on here and it has everything to do with the struggles the real struggles they re facing in their lives they tell us about insurance companies that refuse to pay for the treatment that they need and they ask us what do i do now or they tell us i ve been out of a job for months and they ask what are you going to do to help folks like me they tell us about factories that are shutting their doors schools that are failing their kids and their struggles to try to afford their mortgages tuition bills a decent retirement and i know that a lot of folks are cynical about whether change is possible i know it s hard a lot of folks think that everything that s said out on the campaign trail is just talk they re skeptical about whether the people they send to washington will actually stand up for their interests and fight for their hopes and dreams but as all of you know that is exactly what barack obama has done every single day since he s been the president of the united states you all know that those folks that he met in iowa and new hampshire and across this country they re the folks that he thinks about when he wakes up every single morning they re the ones that he fights for nearly every waking hour this man is working hard they are the basis for every decision he makes not whether it s good politics not whether it s going to make good headlines but whether it s good for them and for their families during his campaign he said clearly that he d work to get our economy back on track so that businesses could start creating jobs again and families could get ahead and that s exactly what he s doing during his first months in office he worked to pass the recovery act and rescue our financial system from the brink of collapse and while a lot of folks are still hurting and they are and we still have a long way to go we are finally heading in the right direction our economy is growing again instead of shrinking and because of the steps that were taken 2 million americans are working today who otherwise wouldn t be and about 95 percent of working folks in this country have received a tax cut money that they re using to pay off their bills and to pay down their mortgages and to put food on the table for their families throughout this campaign barack promised that he would take on health care reform because as he said it s just plain wrong that so many folks have been dropped from their coverage when they got sick or excluded because of pre existing conditions or crushed by outrageous costs and guess what that s exactly what he did now it wasn t easy and it certainly wasn t quick but because he stuck with it and because you all stuck with him we are finally able to pass a reform that s going to offer families and small businesses the quality affordable care that they deserve and they need this reform doesn t increase our deficits it actually helps shrink them it ends some of the worst abuses of the insurance industry it helps seniors pay for their prescriptions and lets young people stay on their parents insurance until they re 26 and it will give people the peace of mind of no longer having to worry that with just one accident with just one illness they ll lose everything they have that s what health reform is all about my husband said he would fight to ensure that women got equal pay for equal work and as you may all remember the very first bill he signed into law just nine days after taking office i was there was the lilly ledbetter fair pay restoration act because as he put it and i quote there are no second class citizens in our workplaces my husband said that he would appoint judges to our courts who have a record of excellence integrity and independence and who grasp not just the letter of the law but its impact on our daily lives and that is why sonia sotomayor is now making history as justice sotomayor in our nation s highest court my husband said he d fight to give every child in this country the education they need to thrive in today s economy and that s exactly what he s doing he s working to make college more affordable to fix student loan systems so that it helps students and not just banks and his administration has launched a program you may have heard of it race to the top a nationwide challenge where states compete to transform their school and give our kids the chance in life that they deserve my husband said he would set a timetable for ending the war in iraq and step up the fight against terrorism he said he d work to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and lead the way on climate change and begin restoring america s standing in the world and let me tell you something he s done every single one of those things every single one of them and i have seen the results first hand i ve seen it as i ve traveled around the world i ve seen for myself the excitement and the enthusiasm that people are feeling towards our country it s been a truly amazing and humbling experience even with all the challenges that we ve faced over the past year or so and all the obstacles that we ve had to overcome we have achieved all of this and more in just the first 15 months it s 15 months all right so if this is what we can do in 15 months did i say 15 months so just imagine what we can achieve in the next 15 months just imagine what we can do in the next few years see it s that kind of determination that sense of possibility that keeps barack obama going every day and it s why i ve been inspired as well to use my platform as first lady to work on issues that i care about that are near and dear to my heart that s why i started our let s move initiative to address the epidemic of childhood obesity that we re seeing all across our country no matter how many times i talk about the statistics they never fail to take my breath away right now one in three children in this country is overweight or obese and one in three kids will suffer from diabetes at some point in their life so if we re spending 150 billion a year to treat obesity related conditions today just imagine how much we ll be spending in 10 or 20 or 50 years if we don t take action right now imagine the kind of lives our kids will be leading if so many of them are struggling with weight related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease and cancer that s why we ve set such an ambitious goal for let s move to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight we re working with pediatricians and food manufacturers and the fda to give parents the information they need to make healthy decisions for their kids we re making critical investments to get healthier food into our schools we re working to eliminate food deserts by bringing grocery stores into underserved areas so that all our families have access to healthy affordable food right in their own community and to get kids moving we re revamping the president s physical fitness challenge and we re working with professional athletes to inspire kids to stay physically active not just in school but at home i know it s an ambitious agenda but we re already starting to make progress already school food suppliers have agreed to decrease sugar fat and salt in school meals and increase fruits vegetables and whole grains schools across the country are meeting our challenge to help kids eat right and exercise and make healthier decisions for themselves state and local officials are sponsoring farmers markets and working to get more fresh foods into their communities and we re going to keep on working with folks from every part of this society mayors governors parents educators health care professionals you name it because we re going to need every single one of them to help our kids lead active healthy lives right from the beginning young people are also the focus of my international agenda as well and last month i made my first solo international trip jill and i first went to haiti as you know to offer support and encouragement for the ongoing relief efforts there and then i traveled to mexico to urge young people to engage with their communities and help us meet the pressing challenges of our time and i ll never forget about a young woman that i met there named maricela who i met at a roundtable discussion with young leaders in mexico city she was from a tiny town in oaxaca her father had passed away and her mother she told a story of how she worked tirelessly to support her and her four siblings said her mom was always the first one to wake up in the morning and the last one to go to bed at night but she told us about the fact that despite their hardships her mother was determined to build a better life for her daughter she talked about something her mother told her said her mom told her it doesn t matterwhether i sleep or not but you have to be able to go to school that is the only way you have to be able to get an education and the thing is is that this is a story that is told every day all around the world and right here in america a story about the strength and determination of women women who haven t had much in their own lives but who know exactly what they want for their children women who work those extra shifts and make those sacrifices so their daughters and their sons can have opportunities they never imagined for themselves i m talking about women like lilly ledbetter who i love who you know she kept on fighting for equal pay even when she knew that it was too late for herself why because she wanted something more for the women who came after her that s the only reason she did it i m talking about women like dr dorothy height one of my heroes who kept up the fight for civil and economic rights up through the final months of her life she once said and i quote it s a beautiful quote she said i want to be remembered as someone who used herself and anything she could touch to work for justice and freedom i want to be remembered as someone who tried and every day across this country so many women wake up every day and try using everything they have to make life a little better for others and that s what all of you all are doing with your work for our party using what you have to help build a better world for our kids and our grandkids and let me tell you something we desperately need all of you to stay involved in this work you cannot stop because we all know that when you need something done and you ask women to do it it gets done end of story and in the months leading up to this november and beyond we re going to need you to get out there and get it done because we know that change we do know that change doesn t happen overnight we know that progress doesn t happen without struggle and sacrifice this stuff is supposed to be hard it takes folks like you folks who are constantly rejecting the cynicism casting aside the doubts and working day after day to continue what we ve already started and that brings me back to something else that we talked about when we were together back in 2008 back then and all throughout the campaign i talked about my girls and how they re the heart of my heart and the center of my world how they re the first thing i think about when i wake up in the morning and the last thing i think about when i go to bed at night it s still true and because of the work that all of you are doing let me tell you something when i tuck them into bed at night i feel so hopeful about the future we re leaving for them and for kids like them all across this country i feel hopeful i feel like we re on our way to leaving them a safer healthier freer and more just world one where they ll have the opportunities more than ever before to fulfill their dreams so i want to end by just saying thank you thank you for everything you ve done for everything that you re doing and for everything we re going to need you to do in the months and years ahead we are proud of you so let s get it done thank you all so much dem mobama7 5 10b michelle_obama well isn t this lovely and very civilized hello everyone and thank you so much for joining us here at the white house as we gather to celebrate mother s day and honor all of the extraordinary women in our lives today is also military spouses appreciation day and we have some of the spouses and mothers of military members who are here with us so let s give them a round of applause we are forever grateful for your service and inspired by your strength so we as always jill and i remain supportive we will continue to do everything we can to support your efforts and i know jill is here where is jill there you are there she is let s give jill a round of applause too i also want to thank former first lady rosalynn carter for being here mrs carter where are you i can t keep up with everyone mrs carter you have been just a wonderful support and a source of knowledge for me during my time here you have been so generous we try to have lunch together whenever you come into the city and i just have to say that the time that we spend together means a great deal so i cannot tell you how much i appreciate your support as many of you know mrs carter is an advocate for mental health work she s just written a book and we re going to be doing more work together on post traumatic stress disorder and mental health so she hasn t stopped moving yet you can t keep her down mrs carter yes thank you thank you and mrs carter is also joined by her granddaughter sara and we thought we were going to have mrs carter s great granddaughter josephine we were going to have four generations of carter women but she got a little fussy and mom was like she s got to go home but maybe next time i ll get to see her i m also pleased that tricia nixon cox is here president nixon s daughter please stand and susan and anne eisenhower who are president eisenhower s granddaughters they are here as well susan and anne please stand thank you all for being here it means so much we have the girls and i our favorite picture is your wedding picture that is in the colonnade downstairs we all stand and look at that and think about the wedding they re not thinking about marriage by the way don t write that down on a blog they just like the picture and of course there s the photo of president eisenhower meeting with civil rights leaders that in 1958 that is in the oval office so there is much history in this room today and i m so pleased to welcome these generations of women back to the white house it is just an honor to have you all if you look around the room really that s sort of the theme here today we have many generations here this afternoon we ve got teenagers and retirees we ve got family members and friends we ve got cabinet secretaries and students and everything else in between and many of you came with a woman who means a great deal to your life yes oh really so mothers daughters granddaughters mentors mentees sisters best friends it s sort of a wonderful combination of women who are important to us the people here today showcase just how crucial women are in guiding our families and in our neighborhoods and in our country as well they re the shoulder that we lean on as individuals but collectively these are the shoulders that form the foundation of our communities they re our friends our teachers our mentors our bosses they find time to drive community projects and car pools they lead our businesses and our birthday parties our lives and our communities are blessed by everything big and small that mothers and mother figures give us every single day and that s really what mother s day is all about showing our gratitude for all that they do and it s about attempting to give back just some of the love and the care that these women have given us and that s really a big ticket to fill on just a single day i mean when you think about it and try to do the math i mean do 15 or 20 sleepless nights during high school equal a bouquet of flowers maybe some chocolates or a brunch i don t know i don t know see the mothers with teenagers really laughed at that one i don t quite know that yet the answer is really there s no way to quantify just how important these mothers these women are in our lives and there s no way that i could ever fully measure all that my own mommy has done for me this is my mommy this woman who tries to take absolutely no credit for who i am for some reason she is my rock she has pulled me up when i ve stumbled she s pulled me back when i ve run out of line talking a little too much she ll snap me up she really does push me to be the best woman that i can be truly as a professional and as a mother and as a friend and she has always always always been there for me and as our family have grown she s managed to expand her love for all of us and raising our girls in the white house with my mom oh not going to do this is a beautiful experience and the opportunity to have three generations living in the white house it s beautiful and i m pretty sure the president is happy about it too in this world there is so much going on we know that we re blessed the obamas we are even though we live in the white house we know that our day to day family interaction isn t really different from families living in atlanta or sioux falls or tucson because everyone is busy ours is just televised everyone is doing the best job that they can to raise their kids everyone is looking for support and in his mother s day proclamation in 1979 president carter wrote in this time when the family is subjected to many new pressures the job of nurturing future generations is often both more difficult and more important than ever and it s as true today that proclamation as it was 31 years ago really one person cannot do it alone and for any of us who think we can or should we should just get over it we all need the support of someone in our lives for as singularly as important as my mother has been in my life there are so many other women who have also played significant roles in my development the new perspectives that i learned from teachers and co workers has really helped to shape me too so it doesn t always have to be a mother or a grandmother we each have those people in our lives who have given us a sense of ourselves by giving us a piece of themselves and that s one of the reasons why we started the white house leadership and mentoring initiative here even with our busy schedules and the women who work here are busy we believe in the importance of giving our young mentees a piece of ourselves and we ve got some of our mentees here with us today and i want you all to stand i want our mentees to stand you all look so pretty they don t usually get this dressed up when they come regularly so i barely recognize you you all can sit down these promising young women have been with us for the past few months and we ve had our share of fun stuff that we ve done we ve gone to events together a few of them have gotten to ride in my motorcade with me it s kind of cool every now and then right they ve come out to some of my events we ve gotten to eat the desserts from the last state dinner before anybody else remember that we ve done some community service together you guys hustled to get some food packaged i was quite impressed very focused and we met with supreme court justices wasn t that amazing justice ginsburg and sotomayor spent a long time with us and it was pretty powerful but this program isn t just about doing fun stuff together it s also about ensuring that these women really see their possibilities right it s about helping them realize that they can be leaders of tomorrow and that s what we expect and showing them that they can create their own opportunities that s what we talk about right we want them to imagine the possibility that they could one day be a cabinet secretary or an officer in the military who mentors a young girl once a week we want them to imagine being business leaders who balance their kids and their professional lives and there are so many of these stories right here in this room now they may have different characters and soundtracks right but whether you grew up on bing crosby aretha franklin or beyonce each story here is important we share so much as women the advice we ve received from someone who cared the friend who helped us clear hurdles that we thought were too high the way our mother looked at us when we made her proud and when we made her not so proud you all know the look right so today is really a day to enjoy one another i encourage you all to share some of those stories as i always say to my mentees talk ask questions poke prod open your mouth and you know let s just celebrate each other thank you all for taking the time to come thank you mommy i love you and let s have some tea dem mobama7 7 10 michelle_obama thank you everybody thank you all so much you know it is a pleasure for me to be here and those of you with seats please sit because there s a reason you have seats i think you ve worked hard enough they gave you seats so use them use them i am thrilled to be here your neighbor across the way let me tell you every time somebody comes over they re like what s over there money treasury something like that so it was very fun to make the commute i don t get to walk much outside of the gate i walked across the street through the parking lot it was a thrill so it is good to finally come over and see our neighbors i want to start by thanking secretary geithner not just for that kind introduction but the tremendous work that he s been doing here at treasury taking a lot of heat and still getting the job done my husband and i are so grateful for his leadership his friendship and his intelligence throughout so we need to give our secretary a round of applause and i want to join the secretary in recognizing valerie it is an honor to have you here as the secretary said you ve put in your share of years at the irs in austin texas and working in the same building where her husband was killed we are so incredibly sorry for your loss but you should know that we are praying with you and it is just wonderful to see such a strong support system here for you so we are grateful that you re here and i was honored to be able to take a picture with you and show it to if you can believe she s got six kids seven grandkids she doesn t look like she would have all that but thank you so much for being here today i also want to give a special welcome to someone else pauline fenderson where is pauline is that i could have known it was you it was the hat that tipped me off but pauline is from the irs in detroit and pauline started her career as a typist when harry truman was president of the united states so she was a typing prodigy she was probably two when she did that because she looks fantastic but now 60 years later she s still working as an individual taxpayer assistance specialist and even though she says that sometimes just like all of us she s a mere mortal sometimes getting up on mondays is hard she does it because she enjoys giving folks a helping hand so i want to congratulate pauline and thank you for everything that you ve done for so so long for this country let s give pauline a round of applause but whether you ve been here for 60 years or 60 days because we also know there are a lot of new folks who are just joining treasury it s wonderful to see a group of people who work so hard every day and make such a strong commitment to this country and it is a privilege one of my greatest privileges as first lady to be able to travel throughout washington to say hello and to thank you all for the work that you re doing because as my husband always says he gets a lot of the glory and a lot of the sympathy for working long hours but the truth is you all are working hard you re making sacrifices and we couldn t have accomplished the things that we have in this administration so quickly without your dedication so my job here is simply to say thank you for all that you do and all that you ll continue to do we are truly grateful for your service and all of you here at treasury have as we know your plates very full probably even an understatement for the past 18 months since this administration came onboard when my husband took office our nation was in the midst of the worst economic crisis in generations the financial markets were in turmoil the auto companies were on the verge of collapse we don t even talk about that anymore and for millions of americans the dreams that they worked so hard for were just slowly slipping away so there s no question that these were difficult challenges but together you all have come together to help continue to move this country forward and for that you should be proud you ve helped the auto industry get back on its feet you re well on your way to winding down the tarp program i hear with a little cash in hand and now with your help we re on the brink of passing financial regulation historic these reforms are going to prevent another crisis like we just saw and protect all americans particularly our military families from abusive consumer financial practices this is very important work that you all are accomplishing but as you all know the work you do here at treasury is about more than the stories that show up in the headlines and on the news you all do so much more and folks often don t hear about all the work that you do you help families save money to send their kids to college or to buy a car or to pay their mortgage you help small businesses take out loans you make sure they re meeting payroll one thing that my kids are grateful to you is that you print the currency that we use each and every day and i have to tell you our first year here we did a lot of tours we went to all the monuments but we came here to watch money get printed and it s still the highlight sasha loves those little balls of shredded up money you all also do things that may be less obvious but equally important definitely important to me like helping our children and our nation stay healthy as some of you probably know i don t know if many others know i ve been traveling around the country over the last year talking about a program we started called let s move we re trying to work to end the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation so that children born today grow up healthy and one of the pillars of the program is to eliminate what we call food deserts and these are areas throughout the country where people don t have access to fresh produce because they don t have grocery stores and there are millions of americans millions of children living in these food deserts and here at treasury you re playing an incredibly important role in addressing this important challenge in the 2011 budget this department has proposed to devote 250 million in new markets tax credits and 25 million in grants to provide a powerful incentive for investors to take a chance on projects like grocery stores in underserved communities and in february secretary geithner secretary vilsack and i got to visit one of those communities in north philadelphia it was a place where if you can believe it they didn t have a viable grocery store in their area for more than a decade more than 10 years so that meant that families trying to nourish their children had to rely on fast food and convenience stores but today thanks to the tax credits in place the fresh grocer opened its doors in north philadelphia it s a beautiful grocery store and what it s done that one little store not only has made it easier for parents to put healthy food on the table for their kids but it s been a tremendous economic growth opportunity it s created tons of jobs in that area and it is a beautiful store i remember during our visit we were so mesmerized by the produce section that secretary geithner got on the phone called his wife and asked if he could bring something home and he did what did you get you got green onions and it was very healthy it was all healthy and a smoothie but that single grocery store in that community has instilled a great sense of pride in that small philadelphia community providing both stability and sustenance it was even able to operate during the one of the worst snowstorms that the city experienced this winter because all the employees were determined to show up they live in the community and they wanted to make sure that that store was open and available for the community in the end that s really the sense of responsibility that also defines all of you here in the department of treasury from stabilizing our economy and protecting consumers to creating business opportunities that support community development to helping give our children the healthy futures they deserve your work touches the lives of every single american even if they don t always realize it for this you deserve our admiration and our respect and our thanks and we ve got a long way to go there s still a lot of work to do we need you all energized and feeling ready to continue to move that ball forward but please know that the president and i are truly grateful for what you ve done and what you re going to continue to do and this is just my small way of saying thank you to you so i hope to be back if nothing else to get another little bundle of shredded money and i will take some time to come out and shake hands so thank you all for the work that you re doing we re very proud dem mobama7 9 10 michelle_obama thank you everyone please sit relax welcome to my home welcome to the white house and thank you damian for that wonderful introduction damian has made so many outstanding contributions in the arts from his time as a world renowned dancer to the work as artistic director of the vail international dance festival to his service as a member of the president s committee on the arts and humanities today so i thank you for your pirouettes but for all that you ve done for the arts and for all of the hard work that you ve put in to pulling together today s program i d like to just take a few moments and recognize some people first of all the co chairs of the president s committee on the arts and the humanities margo lion and george stevens jr i want to thank them and all of the members of the committee for their work on behalf of the arts and the humanities i want to recognize representative chaka fattah and his wife renee who are here as well it s good to have you both and of course i want to give a warm welcome to all the young dancers who are here today let s give them a round of applause so we could hear you a little bit upstairs did you all have fun this afternoon did you work up a good sweat well good that s a good thing i m also doing let s move so that s good moving dancing all that stuff these young men and women are from michigan and new york philadelphia delaware chicago south side and right here in washington and they just finished as damian mentioned an hour and a half workshop with some of the most distinguished dance companies in our country and i am so thrilled that they could all be here today as we kick off our new white house dance series now this is something that we ve been thinking about and talking about doing for awhile and you probably already heard a little bit about our music series where we showcase a whole range of different genres of music from classical to country to the music of the civil rights movement but we re pivoting off that theme today but instead of hearing the beauty of song we ll witness the glory of movement it s a good thing and we ve got a little something for everyone the alvin ailey american dance theater is here billy elliott the musical they re here the new york city ballet paul taylor dance company super cr3w and the washington ballet they re all here today it s very exciting so from ballet to broadway to hip hop today is a celebration of some of the most beautiful powerful and emotional aspects of american dance but today isn t simply about these performances or the new dance series or even these talented young dancers what brings us together today is the extraordinary career of an amazing phenomenal fly woman the renowned dancer choreographer and artistic director judith jamison so let s embarrass judith a bit would you please stand my dear i know i know it s the lights thank you judith thank you so much this amazing woman born in philadelphia she was onstage in new york with the american ballet theater by her early 20s ten years ago right after just one year she joined the alvin ailey american dance theater where her shooting star connected with alvin s and their artistry continues to shine brightly to this very day judith as we all know was alvin ailey s muse he crafted pieces just for her including cry which we all know is a 15 minute solo work and we re going to see a portion of that piece in just a moment it s a good thing after 15 years as lead dancer she branched off from alvin ailey s company in 1980 to perform and choreograph on her own but in 1989 in failing health alvin named judith as his successor in the years since she has earned the national medal of the arts and an emmy she has become a kennedy center honoree and she has distinguished herself as a true visionary in the world of dance her work has been an inspiration to me personally and to the president let me tell you your picture in cry was the only piece of art we had in our house and the girls remember it they re like is that the lady in the picture that s her so we re thrilled to host her here at the white house in our home after my husband s inauguration our family s very first trip to the kennedy center was for the alvin ailey 50th anniversary performance that was great and for years i have gone to watch judith s company whenever and wherever i can and i always try to bring these two little women with me because i want them to see judith s gifts on display because i want them to witness the grace and the beauty that stirs our souls and connects us to each other like nothing else can and in her biography entitled dancing spirit judith wrote these are her words dancing is bigger than the physical body think bigger than that she said when you extend your arm it doesn t stop at the end of your fingers because you re dancing bigger than that you re dancing spirit in so many ways judith jamison embodies that spirit a spirit that is alive in all the dancers she s inspired in all the pieces she s perfected in all the audiences she has moved and uplifted and today we honor judith for all she has achieved and all she has contributed not just to our country but to the world and now i can think of no better way to begin the white house dance series than with an excerpt from cry by the alvin ailey american dance theater it was a gift from alvin to his mother and judith made it famous now it is a gift from us to her so enjoy and thank you all for being here dem mobama8 3 10 michelle_obama thank you so much so i get to speak first while he stands and watches i love this look at me adoringly with sincerity anyway i m thrilled to see everybody here welcome welcome this is a wonderful event as we celebrate women s history month at the white house it s so exciting and let me start by recognizing all of the amazing leaders who have taken time out of their very busy days and schedules to be here with us today we have our cabinet secretaries congresswomen and other leaders who are serving as such powerful role models for the next generation but we have some of the members of the next generation here as well and i want to take a moment to acknowledge some of them as well we ve got young people here from the girl scouts from mount vernon from mount vernon and hayfield secondary in virginia from high point high school in maryland from eastern high school and georgetown visitation here in d c all of you stand everybody stand i had a chance to meet with each and every one of them to get a hug and a picture and we talked they are beautiful they are inquisitive yes it was a hug it was a good hug and what i told them is that they should make sure they take advantage of this evening by making sure that they take time out to meet all of you extraordinary women right that they come up and introduce themselves with confidence and that you make sure you have a little fun right so you re going to make that promise make sure you get to meet everyone here today because today all of you are joining the long line of incredible women who have graced these halls both as visitors and as residents from admirals and actresses to civil rights pioneers my good friend dorothy height is here nobel prize winners you name it this house has hosted some of the most accomplished women and some of the most accomplished americans in the history of this country but we re here today not just to pay tribute to leaders and icons and household names during women s history month we re also here to honor the quiet heroes who ve shaped this country from the very beginning we honor the women who traveled those lonely roads to be the first ones in those courtrooms to be the first ones in those boardrooms to be the first ones on those playing fields and to be the first ones on those battlefields we honor women who refused to listen to those who would say that you couldn t or shouldn t pursue your dreams and we honor women who may not have had many opportunities in their own lives and we all know women like that women who poured everything they had into making sure that their daughters and their granddaughters could pursue their dreams women who as the poet alice walker once wrote knew what we must know without knowing it themselves all of us are here today because of women like these who came before us and during this women s history month may we recommit ourselves to carrying on their work for our own daughters and granddaughters and also for our sons and our grandsons too now speaking of sons it is my pleasure to introduce one of the few men in the room my husband and the president of the united states barack obama dem mobama8 6 10 michelle_obama hey everybody forgive me i am done with my cold but it s still there it s good to see everybody first let me thank patrick for the kind introduction and the work that he s doing with the corporation he is a fabulous addition to the team and he s hitting the ground running and we are just thrilled to have him so let s give him a round of applause i want to thank all the americorps volunteers who are here today you guys raise your hands you re doing some great work i understand this group has just come back from louisiana and all along the mississippi and the gulf coast so they ve just come back and already they re hitting this project so we are just so appreciative and proud of the work that you all are doing keep it up and recruit more people all the time and i have to thank our congressional families all of you here for bringing your families they re so cute everyone is just looking very spring like and i know you all are busy and it s just wonderful that you take the time from juggling all the many responsibilities that you have to come and do even more for the community many of you already are leading service initiatives back in your home states and in your districts and i think it s great that you show your passion and commitment again by supporting efforts here in washington d c so it s just really terrific this day spending time with you all you all know the difference that a few passionate committed individuals can make in the life of a family a school a neighborhood and a community and we all want to encourage folks to make that kind of difference every day all across the country that s why today i m proud to officially launch our second annual united we serve summer service initiative this is a nationwide effort calling on americans to make service a part of their daily lives and when we say all we truly mean all that s everybody that s grownups that s you little bitty people that s everyone from every background from every corner of every community in this country we re going to be asking individuals and community organizations corporations foundations and the government to come together and devote their time and energy to helping our fellow americans in need united we serve is going to be led by the corporation for national and community service and this year s theme is let s read let s move right let s read let s move the idea this summer is simple and it sort of piggybacks off of the work that i ve been doing with childhood obesity but we want to do everything we can to help our kids stay active and healthy and to keep them learning all throughout the summer and we always have our work cut out for us in these areas as i ve said many times it comes to when it comes to the health of our children the statistics are always staggering one in three kids in this nation are either overweight or obese and a recent study by the centers for disease control found that only 17 percent of high school students reported getting the 60 minutes a day of physical activity that experts recommend that they get only 17 percent we also know that during the summer when our kids take a break from school too many of them experience what they call summer learning loss and i know kids you don t like to hear this but we think about this all the time will you retain anything that you learned during the year see your moms know and a lot of kids sometimes find that they forget some of the things that they learned throughout the school years and as a result if they stop learning through the summer they can fall behind and then they re struggling throughout the year this summer though through united we serve we plan to address these problems head on by getting our kids number one to exercise to move right and not just to exercise their bodies but we want you guys to exercise your minds that s right you re helping me out you know i don t know what your name is i m going to find your name but you know what i m talking about right exercising your mind and to improve what you eat as well that s also part of it but we ll need help from folks all across the country to get this done we re going to need people to step up and volunteer to build and renovate playgrounds and clear walking trails and create community gardens and organize book drives and to take the time to serve as tutors and as mentors and to read to children of all ages even if you have just a few hours i mean that s the thing it doesn t take a lot of time a few hours a week can really make the difference you don t need to be a specialist you don t need to be a math tutor you don t need to be a physical fitness expert you don t even need to really be in shape yourself you can use this to get in shape to get focused so you don t have to come to this with special skills because no matter what you bring to the table or reasons for being involved in the community what this event i think shows is that we can come together as a nation around some really critical issues that affect our kids it doesn t matter whether we agree every day because i know sometimes folks in this room we don t always agree but we all agree that we care about our kids and we care about their health and we care about what s going on in their heads and this new initiative i think is one way this summer that we can all continue to come together to keep moving our communities and our kids forward and as our dear friend senator kennedy used to say all we have to do is ask and he was talking about americans when it comes to service all we have to do is ask and then provide the opportunity because as he said most americans are already willing to give they re willing to be a part they just need the opportunity so we re giving folks that opportunity through this initiative we are asking we are asking in a very big way so i want to thank you all again for the time that you put out for communities in your own home states the fact that you ve taken the time to come here again once again this year before the congressional picnic means a great deal to us we are truly grateful for your leadership and we re looking forward to having a fun picnic when this is all said and done right it s going to be good food so let s get to work and then we can have some fun thank you all so much for coming out dem mobama8 9 10a michelle_obama thank you so much thanks everyone good morning well let s start by thanking mr malik for just being so awesome well done we re very proud of you we re proud of all the students here i can t tell you just how thrilled i am to be here with all of you today at brock elementary school we are kicking off this new school year and we are kicking off the next phase of let s move but before i get into that let me start by thanking a few people i want to thank mayor landrieu who s here with his lovely wife there you guys are right there mayor betty alford olive is here i got to see her earlier it s good to see you and i want to just thank and recognize all the other elected officials who are joining us here today why don t you all stand so that we can see you say hello if you re here thank you all and i also have to acknowledge our host of today principal rose smith and your superintendent superintendent folse thank you all for hosting this for inviting me here welcoming me with such warm greetings and i want to thank you for your leadership and your commitment to our young people it means so much not just to the kids in this community but the kids in this country now as some of you may remember last february when we launched let s move we set a goal for ourselves and that was to solve the problem of childhood obesity so that kids born today reach adulthood at a healthy weight and i think it s fair to say that that s a pretty ambitious goal right a generational goal pretty ambitious but i think you ll also agree that when we are talking about the health and well being of our children when we re talking about our children s futures then i think that s something that we have to be ambitious about we don t have a choice and we re beginning to better understand the magnitude of this crisis we re seeing it all over everyone is talking about it now and we know the threat that it poses to the health of our children so it s simply not enough to solve this problem halfway or to do it incrementally this is a national problem and it s affecting every single child in every single community in this country and that s why over the past year we have been working so hard reaching out to folks all across this country because everybody has to be a part of this solution we re working with the food manufacturers we re trying to get them to put better more clear labels on products we re working with restaurants to post calories so you know what you re eating we re pushing to get better food in our schools we want to get better information into the hands of parents so that they can make better decisions and we re fighting to get more grocery stores providing healthy options right in our communities and i know that that is an issue that s of particular concern to many people here today so over the past year we have worked hard to raise awareness to get folks engaged and to get let s move off the ground and i think we ve done a pretty good job we ve gotten off to a pretty good start but what we ve done so far is just that it s a start so the key now in this next phase of let s move is to get results we have to ensure that our efforts are actually making our kids healthier last spring our white house task force on childhood obesity drafted a plan plan of attack and they laid out a series of benchmarks that we need to hit in order to reach our goal of solving this problem in a generation and the plan includes everything from preventing obesity early on by supporting breastfeeding and prenatal care to getting more doctors to screen our children for obesity to getting kids to be more active both in school and out of school and during this next phase we re going to be focusing on hitting those benchmarks and holding ourselves accountable every step of the way so that brings me to the reason why we re launching this next phase of let s move right here at this school because the truth is when it comes to being accountable and getting results all of you here at this school and in this district are setting the standard for schools and school districts across the country for doing just that you see right here at brock elementary this isn t just a school that demonstrates a commitment to academic success this isn t just a school that s a model of determination and resilience having rebuilt this beautiful school from the ground up after hurricane katrina it is a wonderful facility and congratulations on that success but we re here today because this school is a model of excellence in teaching our children healthy habits right from the beginning your success in the healthier u s schools challenge is a wonderful example through this challenge the u s department of agriculture recognizes schools that are doing the very best work to keep kids healthy and that includes providing everything from healthy school meals to ensuring that kids are getting regular gym classes and as a winner of the gold award of distinction which is the highest honor that the usda awards brock elementary is among the very best of the best and that s a major distinction and i ve heard some pretty interesting ways that you re reaching this goal that you ve reached this goal you ve been very creative i hear that the students here participate in food tasting parties and that they work with the cafeteria manager to teach other children their peers about healthy eating i m also told that you ve even started a jump rope club i might try that i think i m pretty good at jumping rope and brock isn t the only school in this district to win this honor see here in st tammany parish 25 schools that s right 25 schools right here in this parish have earned the gold award of distinction and i understand that we also have some representatives here from another school district your neighbors in shelby county alabama where 20 of their schools have also been awarded gold with distinction so this is an extraordinary accomplishment and you all should be incredibly proud because it s not being done everywhere and this something like this doesn t happen by accident it happens because there are principals and there are food service managers and others who had made a commitment and they put a lot of hard work into getting this done and as educators and community leaders all of you here know better than anyone the impact that childhood obesity has on the lives of our young people you don t need to read all the studies showing that nutrition and physical activity affect our kids academic performance because you see it every day for yourselves right in the classroom and in your communities you know that kids need time and space to run and get all that energy out before they can sit down and concentrate you know they need something more than chips and soda and candy before they can focus on math and reading and science the reality is that our schools are on the frontlines of our efforts to fight childhood obesity you are the ones there are 31 million american children who participate in the federal school lunch program 11 million are part of the school breakfast program so many of these kids consume up to half of their daily calories at school right here and the nutrition education they get at schools like brock elementary sometimes might be the only guidance they get on making healthy decisions about what they eat so every day with the work that you do and the food you serve and the lessons you teach and the example you set you re shaping our children s habits and preferences and affecting the choices they re going to make for the rest of their lives and that s pretty powerful through let s move i want to provide more support for your efforts and help all our kids lead active healthy lives i want all our kids to be like the kids here at brock and there are some ways that i think that we can help first and foremost we re working with all of you to get fresher more nutritious food into our schools that is key and we believe that one of the best ways to do this is through the healthier u s school challenge this program has spurred schools all across the country to raise their standards and transform their classrooms and their cafeterias into essentially healthy eating learning labs for their students that s why we ve set a goal of doubling and that s doubling the number of schools that participate in the healthier u s school challenge by june of 2011 and we want to add an additional 1 000 schools in each of the following two years after that but in order to reach that goal we ve got to make things easier for schools so we re going to do that by making it easier to apply first of all because we re going to be moving our application online and hopefully that will help we re going to be letting districts apply for all their schools with just one application and hopefully that will help we re also going to make it easier for schools to succeed at achieving this standard by providing some better technical assistance and by connecting schools with professional chefs through our chefs move to schools program and already nearly 1 800 professional chefs they met on the south lawn in their white coats have signed up to give nearly 1 300 schools the expert advice they need to meet this challenge and when schools do succeed we want to sweeten the pot a little bit with new cash rewards and i ll be also inviting representatives from each award winning school to come to my house for a reception in their honor hopefully that will be exciting finally we re working to increase participation in our school lunch program by 2 million eligible children and to get another 3 million kids signed up to start receiving school breakfasts by 2015 because i think we can all agree that no child in this country should be starting school hungry each day no child should be going without the basic nutrition they need to learn to grow to succeed not just in school but in life but i want to be clear it s important to be clear that we can t do any of this unless we pass the child nutrition legislation that s before congress right now this bipartisan legislation supports critically needed investments to help millions of children get the nourishment that they need to be healthy and the good news is that the senate has already acted on this legislation and it is my great hope that the house of representatives will do the same by the end of this month so that we can get this bill signed into law and start working on behalf of our kids but of course we all know that healthy eating is only part of the battle experts recommend that children get at least 60 minutes of activity a day and we all know that many of our kids aren t even coming close that s why another key component to let s move is simple it s getting our kids moving we want to find new ways for them to get and stay fit and active and to do it for the rest of their lives one of the key benchmarks that we re working to meet is to double the number of children winning the president s active lifestyle award now to earn this award students need to engage in physical activity five days a week for six weeks sounds pretty good and the idea is to help kids make exercise habit forming we want to show them how good it feels to be active so that they ll stick with it long after those six weeks are over and we re going to be working with after school programs and with wonderful athletes folks like drew brees you know that character right as well as dominique dawes they are co chairs of the president s fitness council and they re going to help promote this program and to show everyone just how much fun it can be i will be working to earn my active lifestyle award i m going to do it and i want kids across the country to join me actually i want all you all to join me don t just leave it on the kids i want you all to join me so in a couple weeks i m not sure when it s going to start starting soon i m going to be recording my progress online so if i start falling behind i want everyone to be checking on me and make sure that i m not slacking send me emails to shame me into staying on track so i m excited about it and i think it s something that s very doable and the thing is is that if your kids see you doing it your grandparents uncles teachers they re going to be engaged so let s make this something that we re all trying to do together so that s just some of what we re doing to support your work in schools and i hope that in the coming months and years all of you and schools all across the country will become even more involved in let s move i hope that more schools will get their kids working toward these active lifestyle awards we re going to make it interesting and exciting for kids all we need you to do is hook them in even if you sign up just one class or one club in your school i guarantee you that if those kids enjoy it which they will they re going to tell their friends and sooner or later there are going to be more who want to join in so it doesn t take a lot it just takes a little spark i also hope that more school districts will set a goal for themselves of having a certain number of their schools become healthier u s schools each year and i also hope that schools will work together to help each other get involved as well because the truth is there s no limit on the number of schools that can become healthier u s schools just like there s no limit on the number of kids who can get an active lifestyle award see the truth is we re in this together everyone can win there are no losers so if you re a school that has already met the healthier u s schools challenge then i hope you ll reach out to some others and help them find a way to meet the challenge as well if you ve found an exciting new activity for gym class that kids are just pumped about or you found a way to get kids to eat new foods in the lunchroom we want you to share that don t keep it a secret so that other schools and their students can benefit from the knowledge and exploration that you ve enjoyed that s what we re trying to do with our website letsmove gov where we posted all kinds of tips and recipes and information that we wanted to share it s a good looking website it s exciting we ve got guest stars on there so hopefully you all connect in and use that as a tool for sharing in the end these are all the kinds of efforts that will make the difference in our kids lives we re in charge here we can do this and all of you here all the folks who are sitting here and listening in around the country who the folks who are going to be a part of solving this problem once and for all and that s pretty good news that this is a problem we can fix right here and right now and there s so many people already doing it i m thinking about folks like amy alter heard about her she s a resource room teacher at p s 105 in the bronx in new york and amy wanted to get her students engaged in let s move so they created a healthy food bulletin board and they kept daily food diaries in a letter that she sent me she wrote and this is a quote it was an eye opener for all of us she said one of her students also sent me a letter where he proudly told me that an eggplant is actually fruit and then letting me know that he now eats apples and pretzels instead of chips and candy which is always good to hear i m also thinking about folks like bill magley who s a physical education teacher at the dream academy charter school in benton harbor michigan he started this great program that he called the 100 mile march where he and his students walk two and a half miles a day four days a week until they hit 100 miles the students who participated not only lost weight but they gained confidence and many found the experience to be pretty memorable there s one student who wrote me and said and this is another quote i might not like it but i ll never forget it and then in bastrop louisiana our mayor who is here with us challenged her young people to improve their eating and exercise habits and as she told us it was a challenge that they accepted with great enthusiasm that s another thing kids are ready for this challenge she said one student reported and this is a quote i was one of those people that didn t think very much about my health and this program enlightened me another wrote this has been a life changing activity i feel better about myself and i feel prettier too you know small things so with these kind of examples i know the difference that all of you are making and can make with just little gestures in the lives of our kids and i know that if we all keep working together and if we keep making progress and holding ourselves accountable we can change our children s future that we can do we ll meet our goal we will give our children the happy healthy future that they deserve and we may make a few friends along the way so i am really looking forward to working with all of you congratulations again to the folks here at brock and to all the schools in the district i can see it on the faces of your children when i got there in the heat and some of them said it was hot but they look healthy they look bright they look energized and there is a difference you can see that different light in their eyes i ve been to schools around the country and there is a difference when kids feel good and they feel invested in not just academically but as a whole child so you all are doing a phenomenal job and i want the country to look and see that this parish has done great things even with great challenges you ve been able to manage to do this as you built a new school and recover from one of the greatest devastations that this country has ever seen so if they can do it here then all the schools out there can do it so thank you all congratulations again and we ll see you soon dem mobama8 9 10b michelle_obama how are you guys doing is it hot enough out here but you can handle it right because we re going to get moving all right first let me thank a few people because i m not going to talk long because i m ready to work i m going to be out there running with you guys all right so don t be too hard on me all right first let s thank commissioner goodell and coach dungy for being here and for giving us those great words and we want to thank all our nfl players right give them a big round of applause and there are a couple of other people who are here who i want to recognize there s representative joseph cao who s here mayor the mayor is here mayor landrieu is here say hey to the mayor and i think his wife cheryl is here too hey first lady you got a what s happening first lady right here and to the other members of the louisiana state legislature who came out today you guys let s give them all a round of applause and there is somebody who couldn t be here today because they re gearing up for a big game tomorrow because it s the start of the nfl season right we re all excited about that but this guy is somebody that you may have heard of he s not only a super bowl mvp but he s been a wonderful help to me and the president because he s the co chair of the president s council on fitness and sports and nutrition and i think you guys kind of like this guy who am i talking about absolutely right mr brees he couldn t be here because he s getting ready but let me tell you with folks like drew back in february we started this program called let s move and let s move is a nationwide initiative where we want to end childhood obesity in a generation so that kids born today grow up at a healthy weight does that make sense we did this because of you all we did all of this because of you can you believe that we re here all these players are here look at all this press they re here because of you is it exciting because we want you guys to grow up strong and we want you guys to grow up healthy because the truth is is that you can be smart you can be funny but if you re not in good health it s going to be a hard road to go and it s tough to hang out there and play with your friends it s hard to keep up in school if you re not healthy and certainly if any of you ever wants to do anything as amazing as be a professional athlete you ve got to be healthy when you re young and we want to make sure that each and every one of the kids in this country has that opportunity that s the kind of future that we want for all of you that s why three years ago the folks here at the nfl started play 60 they were leading the way before anybody before we started talking about this at the white house play 60 was one of the signature programs of the nfl they knew back then the importance of tackling the issue of childhood obesity and all of us at the white house wanted to team up with them so the president invited a bunch of nfl players and a lot of the saints to the white house to support play 60 and i don t know if you saw some of the commercials but drew brees is actually throwing the president a slow motion pass and he catches it anybody see that yeah yeah yeah not very impressive you got a question what s your question young man you are on tv right now turn around get your moment in the sun all right now settle down turn around sit down so that means when you all are playing today when you re catching those passes and we re doing the drills you re going to be on tv the newspapers are here so you re going to be showing kids around the country what it means to keep moving so you all are the model for today but the nfl in addition to working with the white house they re working with a bunch of other people the national dairy council and that s the organization they worked with to work on this program called fuel up to play 60 as the commissioner and coach dungy said it s not just enough that you exercise but you also have to watch what you put in your body you can t live on soda and chips and all that you can t sorry if you could i tell you i would but you can t you ve got to have vegetables and fruits and so this partnership is helping to make sure that as coach dungy said you re building a well rounded body a good mind a good heart that you re good to people you re good to your friends but you also take care of yourself so there s a lot going on and we re doing it all for you so here s one question i ve got one question for you guys before we get started did you know that if you follow play 60 and you keep moving for 60 minutes every day that you can get an award from the president did you know that do you want to hear about the award are you sure you think you might want to compete for an award all right well here s how you do it so listen up everyone listen up this award is called the president s active lifestyle award and what to do to earn it is that all you have to do is go online and log your activity you go to letsmove gov but you ll get all that information this is starting next week and the goal is that you have to stay active every day for six weeks that they get 60 minutes or something good in there for six weeks to get this award what does that sound hard doesn t sound that hard right and to show everyone how not hard it is and how much fun it can be i m going to earn my award yeah me me don t what is the silence what you don t think i can do this i am going to be working towards my award starting in a couple of weeks somewhere soon so you guys can get online and track my progress because i m going to be logging it and if i start slacking off you can email me and tell me to get myself into gear all right so you think this is something that we can work on doing together because guess what the nfl has made an important pledge on this front they have pledged to help 200 000 kids earn an active lifestyle award in this year isn t that great and the other thing now this is news for the press because we just talked about this is that i want to host a big ol celebration at the white house for some of the kids who have won these awards so maybe that s an incentive right so hopefully some of you guys will compete i hope all of you guys will work to get this award because we want every single kid in the country to be working toward this award and if you get it guess who will follow you your parents will follow you if you have younger brothers and sisters they re going to follow you everyone is going to be trying to get one of these awards and you guys can be the first because we re going to start off right this afternoon i bet what we do today will count towards your award so are you ready are you ready to get moving all right let s move let s do it dem mobama9 3 10 michelle_obama thank you everyone thanks so much well clearly it s a pleasure and an honor to be here with all of you today let me begin by thanking secretary clough for that generous introduction i want to thank him and his wife anne for their dedication to the mission of the smithsonian and i want to thank our hosts from the national museum of american history dr brent glass and john rogers thank you for making these museums such wonderful places for people of all ages to learn and to explore and i have to also do my part in recognizing our very special guests the students and the teachers from huntington high school who made the trip all the way from new york to be here you all please stand so we can see you now there s a special reason why i invited these students here they sent me this book of beautifully designed inaugural gowns of their own creations and i had so much fun looking through all the designs you all are obviously a very talented and beautiful and handsome group of people and i am so pleased to be able to share this special day with you you make us proud and thank you for the gifts and finally i also want to thank all the board members the staff the supporters of these museums all of you for the work that you do every day and for being here and sharing this moment with me as well so here we are it s the dress and i have to say to be honest i am very honored and very humbled but i have to say that i m also a little embarrassed by all the fuss being made over my dress like many of you i m not used to people wanting to put things i ve worn on display so all of this is a little odd so forgive me but at the same time i truly recognize the significance of this day this gown and all of the items that we ll see in this wonderful exhibit help us connect with a moment in history in a very real way when we look at the gown that jackie kennedy wore 50 years ago or the one that mary todd lincoln wore more than a hundred years before that it really takes us beyond the history books and the photographs and it helps us understand that history is really made by real live people the detail of each gown the fabric the cut the color tells us something much more about each single first lady it s a visual reminder that we each come from such different backgrounds from different generations and from different walks of life each gown places us right in the moment and makes us wonder about the intimate details of that evening like how did she feel in the dress did her feet hurt in those shoes how many times did her husband step on that train but more importantly these gowns and this exhibit uniquely define a moment in our american history when i look at my gown which i in fact have not seen since the day that i took it off memories of that moment truly come rushing back i remember that it was freezing cold in washington i know we all remember that yet despite the frigid temperatures hundreds of thousands of people flooded the mall nothing was going to stop them from being part of history that day was so hectic for us and i remember the inaugural parade and how the president and i stood and we waved until every last band walked by then we only had less than an hour ladies if you can believe that all of my friends left us in the stands by the way see ya good luck i was like yeah thanks we have to get ready for the ball like yeah so do i so at the time i wasn t really focused on what i was wearing that evening i was really just trying to stay warm but i ll never forget the moment that i slipped on this beautiful gown i remember how just luscious i felt as the president and i were announced onto the stage for the first of many dances and i ll cherish that moment for the rest of my life and now that the crowds are gone and the mall is silent and our family has settled into our new home the white house this gown is one of the most tangible things i have left to remember that day and that s why it will always hold a special place in my heart and today when i look at the dress i remember all of the incredible people that we met along our journey and on that day and how warmly welcome they received us i remember the joy on the faces of so many young people who devoted so much time to getting us to that point i remember the wonderful letters we received from folks who were there and others who watched the event from home people who told us about how much that day meant for them and their families letters from octogenarians who told us how they never thought they d live to see the day i remember all the men and women who worked so hard and so long to make sure that every single detail was just perfect and i remember the time we shared with americans from every corner of this nation and one of the people who made that day possible is the creator of this beautiful gown jason wu a young man who not so long ago was just an aspiring designer like many of you students here when jason was just five years old growing up in taiwan his parents would take him to the bridal shops so that he could sketch the gowns in the windows he started making clothes for dolls when he was 16 and after studying under some of the best designers in the world he opened his own shop four years ago with the money he had saved and jason s dress as you can see this gown is a masterpiece it is simple it s elegant and it comes from this brilliant young mind someone who is living the american dream the countless hours that you can see that he spent sewing this piece made my night even more special and now i am proud that millions of visitors will be able to see just how talented this young man is thank you jason thank you for your vision and for your hard work because in the end of the day today is about much more than this gown it s also about how with enough focus and with enough determination someone in this room could be the next jason wu someone in this room could be the next barack obama it s about how the american story is written by real people not just names on a page and it s about how something you create today whether it s a dress or a painting or a story or a song can help teach the next generation in a way that nothing else can thank you all so much dem mobama9 4 10a michelle_obama thank you everyone thank you all so much it s a pleasure to be here with all of you let me begin by thanking melody for that kind introduction that wonderful story it s happening in kitchens and households all over america kids really moving for the change i also want to thank melody for her work in chairing the task force she has been instrumental and we ve seen such significant movement under her leadership i d also like to thank several members of this administration who are providing invaluable leadership on this issue melody introduced them but let me take time to also thank secretaries duncan and salazar obm director peter orszag surgeon general regina benjamin deputy secretary of agriculture kathleen merrigan and nancy ann deparle is nancy ann here she is the director of the white house office of health reform and she obviously has been incredibly instrumental on this and so many efforts in this administration thank you all for your leadership this has been an administration wide effort and i am so proud of this team everyone in this administration has embraced this issue with a level of fervor and commitment that s why we are able to be standing here today having made so much progress in such a short period of time this gathering has never happened before at the white house it s one where we re bringing together teachers and child advocates doctors and nurses business leaders public servants researchers and health experts to talk about one of the most serious and difficult problems facing our kids today and that is the epidemic of childhood obesity in this country we re here because we all care deeply about the health and well being of america s children and we ve gathered folks from across america and across just about every relevant field because in the end solving this problem is going to take every single one of us and that s really at the heart of the let s move campaign we launched this campaign two months ago but the idea actually was inspired by the planting of the white house kitchen garden last march with the help of local students who have been so incredible we planted the garden on the south lawn of the white house and it allowed us to begin a conversation about the importance not just of healthy eating eating right eating the good food but also about getting exercise into our lives the kids during that whole year of planting and harvesting showed so much enthusiasm so much excitement about that garden and about the potential of the topic that we realized there was an opportunity to do much more because they were so open so we launched let s move the campaign is designed to raise awareness about the problem of childhood obesity and to focus on how we as a nation have to come together to solve it my husband signed a presidential memorandum creating the first ever government wide task force on childhood obesity composed of representatives from key agencies across the government and since then i have spoken to so many people i ve heard from so many people across this country i ve met with mayors and governors and i ve asked them to do their part to build healthier cities and states i ve met with school nutrition association members the folks who decide what s served in schools and i ve asked them to do their part to offer healthier meals and snacks to our kids at school i ve met with the food manufacturers and asked them to do their part to improve the quality of the food that they provide and to do a better job of marketing nutritious food to our kids i ve met with kids met with a bunch of them the other day in my first town hall meeting full of kids and they were wonderful and i asked them to do their part i asked them nicely but i asked them to do their part as well what i told them is that they were the most important players in this piece because it s up to them to make different decisions to try to make it a little easier on their parents to try new things and to incorporate exercise and i ve been meeting with parents too because we all need to do our parts as well because the fact is is that our kids didn t do this to themselves they don t decide the sugar content in soda or the advertising content of a television show kids don t choose what s served to them for lunch at school and shouldn t be deciding what s served to them for dinner at home and they don t decide whether there s time in the day or room in the budget to learn about healthy eating or to spend time playing outside we make those decisions that s all up to us and i know how hard it is i know how hard it is as a parent when you re bombarded by ads for junk food when you re hit with a barrage of conflicting stories about what s healthy and what s not when you always feel like you re failing to meet some impossible standard for working parents or for any parents for that matter we also know how hard it is for schools to provide nutritious lunches with just a few dollars to make that happen we know the budget constraints facing local governments in these tough times and we all know how difficult this problem is when playgrounds and ballparks are competing with video games and social networking sites and when our children are simply surrounded by many more opportunities to eat badly and to sit around than they are to eat well and move but we also know this that over the past three decades childhood obesity rates in america have tripled that is a fact nearly one third of children in america now are overweight or obese that s a reality and unless we act now things are only going to get worse that is a fact let s move recognizes this reality and recognizes that there are a few things that we can do right now that can make a big difference first we have to help parents and empower consumers by encouraging companies to offer healthier options and by providing more customer friendly labels so that people can figure out what s healthy and what isn t and there are tools and resources available right now to parents and kids at our web site letsmove gov second with 31 million children getting lunch through federal lunch programs we can do so much more to provide healthy meals and snacks where our kids spend most of their days and i am pleased that the senate agriculture committee has made a significant contribution towards the president s goal of investing an additional 1 billion per year to ensure that the food provided to our children in schools is nutritious and healthy and that fewer children in this country go hungry third we can do much more to make sure that all families have access to healthy and affordable food in their own communities 23 5 million americans including 6 5 million children live in communities without a supermarket that means far fewer healthier options are available to so many families who are going to be working to try to figure this out they won t have access to the resources they need to do what we re asking them to do so we re working with the private sector to reach a very ambitious goal and that is to completely eliminate food deserts in this country and finally there is much much more that we can do to help kids stay physically active not just in school but outside of school as well and if we can make real progress in these four areas then there s so much more else we can do but these four areas as a country we can reach our ultimate goal and the ultimate goal for let s move is to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation so that children born today grow up at a healthy weight with better notions of what is healthy with better habits who are incorporating exercise into their lives on a more regular basis so there are more kids like the ones that melody described who know what it even means to eat healthy that s our goal and to achieve this goal we are going to need all of you we re going to need all of you your insight your experience your guidance and that s why we are so excited about this gathering here today because you all know this issue better than just about anyone so many of you have dedicated your lives to fighting this battle and many of you have just are just thankful that there s someone else shining the spotlight on what you have known for a long long time this folks in this room all of you working together can do more than just about anyone to help us tackle this issue what we have done is started a national conversation we ve started an important national conversation but we need your help to propel that conversation into a national response so today is very important the work that you do here is really meaningful which is why you have so many heavy hitters here because we need your advice and your input and to make that happen we re going to have you break into smaller sessions led by members of the task force that will focus on these four key components of let s move and the information that we collect here today will be essential to construct the final report that s going to come from the task force a report that will serve as a very important roadmap with goals benchmarks measurable outcomes that will help us collectively tackle this challenge so with that all i have to say is let s move let s get this going thank you all so much thank you for your energy your expertise i thank our administration i am confident because of the stories we hear from kids that they re ready for us to move they are more than ready once again they re waiting for us so let s get this started and thank you so much and have a productive meeting thanks so much dem mobama9 4 10b michelle_obama thank you all so much you re so sweet and there s so many of you first of all let me start by thanking secretary gates first of all for your very kind introduction but more importantly for your outstanding service to this country not just under this president my husband but under seven other presidents his service has spanned more than four decades so he could be standing up there too so on behalf of all of us thank you thank you for your commitment to our country thank you for your devotion to the men and women of this department and i would be remiss if i didn t thank the real hero in that family becky gates let s give becky a round of applause i was told that back in college you and the secretary met on a blind date so maybe you didn t really realize what you were getting into but for more than 40 years becky has shared her husband with our nation and served in her own way as well and we honor her for her commitment to this country and to our men and women in service and though they couldn t all be here today i want to also say thank you to the joint chiefs the combatant commanders the service secretaries and the senior enlisted advisors and to their extraordinary wives i want to thank you all for keeping america safe and all our military families strong it s been a pleasure getting to know all of them they are true heroes and they ve been a wonderful support to me and my husband during our beginning of this term it is truly wonderful for me to be here it is a beautiful day i have been waiting for this visit for a long time the president has been to the pentagon before thank goodness for discussions with the secretary admiral mullen and the joint chiefs and when he first came he told me that he had been in the tank and i wasn t quite sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing and last september the president and i had the honor of joining some of you and your families here at the pentagon memorial outside of the pentagon for a rainy celebration not celebration but to mark the anniversary of 9 11 and to pay tribute to the fallen colleagues who gave their lives here but today this visit is my very time actually being anywhere inside the pentagon although we re not quite inside we re very close but i m going to get in there i know there s a lot going on miles of corridors and all the rings i m hearing about and the six different zip codes so i can see why general eisenhower got lost so i m thrilled that i made it in and secretary gates i m counting on you to make sure i get out safely today is a simple chance for me to do a couple of things first i want to say thank you it s one of the things that i ve done as first lady that s one of the favorite things that i do and it s coming to the different departments to really express my personal appreciation as well as the appreciation of me and my family for all that you do for this country the second reason i m here as the vice president s wife jill biden and i have been doing all across this country this visit is another chance to shine a spotlight on the service and sacrifices of the finest military in the world and your amazing families as secretary gates mentioned the visits that i ve done to bases all across this country have just been inspiring meeting you meeting your spouses your children has been one of the greatest privileges that i ve had as first lady at fort bragg and fort hood i stood in awe of the united states army at norfolk i was truly inspired by the united states navy at eglin air force base i was blown away by our united states air force and at the white house every day i get to witness the amazing commitment of the united states marine corps and we can never forget our partners at dhs the outstanding men and women of the united states coast guard what let s hear it for the coast guard all right next door at arlington and around the nation i ve seen the unbelievable love of spouses wives and husbands sons and daughters who ve lost a loved one at war and today and every single day we all honor america s gold star families i ve been inspired beyond measure by our incredible wounded warriors and their families the one thing that i wish is that the whole country could see what you all did here this morning the thousands of you lining the corridors and clapping and cheering and saluting their service honoring these brave warriors and their families as they passed in this proud procession this is a phenomenal tribute to them but to all of you because it s a reflection of the spirit of this department service before self love of country dedication to duty taking care of each other it s the spirit that so many of you have shown in afghanistan and iraq and all around the world year after year tour after tour our country has never asked so much for so long of our all volunteer force but the beauty is you never complain at least not out loud you always step up and you always come through and it s the same spirit demonstrated by all the defense civilians as well the force behind the force developing the policies purchasing the equipment organizing the logistics ensuring your readiness and taking care of your families our wounded warriors and our military retirees you all may not always get the glory but our troops cannot do their job without you and as secretary gates pointed out standing up here on stage with us are some of the pentagon s largest longest serving civilian servants each of them with more than 40 years that s an amazing thing yes indeed so we thank you a special thank you for your dedication and your commitment now i could say thank you all day long i love to do it but what i want you to know is that these words of thanks are backed up by deeds as well they re backed up by a president by the secretary by secretary gates by admiral mullen by the military commanders all the way down the chain of command because they re working hard every day to make sure that you and your families have what you need to get the job done whether that means increasing the size of the military investing in the equipment that saves lives on the battlefield or working to give you more time home between deployments they ve worked to improve your quality of life including better pay better benefits and better military housing and they ve worked to improve care and treatment for our wounded warriors especially those with post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury this administration understands that we have to take care of these american heroes who take such good care of all of us and secretary gates especially i want to thank you and this department for everything that you ve done to support our military spouses and children because you ve done a lot the family and medical leave act has been extended to military families and to caregivers of our wounded warriors that s never been done there are more funds for child care now for family counseling and support for spouses and to help spouses pursue their careers which is difficult to do when you are moving from base to base to base and since april this month is the month of the military child i want to salute all our military children all of your sons and daughters because the truth is and we cannot forget these are the most mighty of our servants they serve in a very special way trying to stay strong while mom or dad is a world away recovering helping their parents recover from wounds and in some unfortunate cases they ve made the ultimate sacrifice and they ve lost a parent to service and it can be so hard for these kids probably beyond what we could even imagine so they need all the support that we can give them all the love both at school and at home so i want to thank secretary gates for your leadership on these issues it s a leadership that is strengthening youth programs and renovating or replacing more than half of the dod schools it s a leadership that will help tens of thousands of military families and their children but supporting all of you and your families truly takes more than government support it s more than any of us can do it also takes an active and engaged citizen so i want all you to know that as long as i m first lady i m going to keep urging all americans to do their part whether it s something as simple as volunteering time or pro bono services to help our troops and their families or making a home cooked meal for a busy spouse who s struggling to keep it together or whether it s something as simple as just saying thank you when you see one of our troops in your community every american can do something every american can do something in service to this country and in service around the world and you of all people know that right you all know about service it s the code that you live by every day it is the spirit that you showed after the terrible earthquake in haiti the coast guards who were the first on the scene evacuating those in need and repairing the port so that aid could flow through the soldiers who helped distribute so much food water and medicine the sailors who brought fresh drinking water and treated the injured and the sick the airmen who reopened that airport and then operated those relief flights 24 hours a day the marines some of who had just returned home from the middle east who said good bye to their families and immediately shipped out to haiti to help sustain one of the largest relief efforts in recent times and of course every step of the way there were all the dod civilians and folks from other agencies all who worked alongside of you and this international relief and recovery effort continues today there is still so much work to do in haiti with the support from america s military we re going to be able to do so much more but the need continues to be great every american is grateful for the service that you ve shown to that country we re humbled by it we re inspired by it but nothing compares to the appreciation of the haitian people which they have expressed in so many ways the cheering crowds when you arrived the thumbs up they gave you as you passed the grateful mother who named her newborn for the navy ship he was born in the man who said simply without you i would be dead thank you america now i couldn t say it any better myself on behalf of the president on behalf of the american people thank you for the service that you display every single day around the world often in harm s way thank you all military and civilian and to your families you make us so very proud so i m going to come down and say hello dem wjclinton1 11 97a bill_clinton thank you very much you may or may not have already noticed that i don t exactly have all my vocal capacities the good news is you ll get a shorter speech the bad news is you ll have to listen harder to what does come out i want to start by thanking john and peggy for bringing us into their magnificent home and even more for their commitment which was so powerfully expressed in what john said you know i tell people all the time that i have been in public life now almost continuously since 1974 i have been in public office all but two years for the last 20 years most of the people i ve known in politics were good honest people who worked a lot harder than they had to work and fought for what they believed in and tried to make this country a better place and i really appreciated what you said about those members of congress even our friends on the republican side when that pitched battle we had over the contract with america virtually all of them really believed they were doing the right thing but i didn t and mr gephardt didn t and mr frost didn t and the other members of congress who are here congressman deutsch congressman kennedy congressman baldacci we didn t and we won but you don t work like that under those kinds of conditions if you don t feel it and i must tell you john that means a lot just to know it got across to somebody because we re very well aware of the presentation that s given to the american people about people in public life the nature of the political process and then even the nature of fundraising to hear people tell it the very act of getting people to support you is somehow suspect you just described your activities in washington and i must tell you that s consistent with probably more than 80 percent of the people who help us and if the others have something they want to talk to us about well that s democracy too and there is nothing wrong with it so i thank you very much i want to thank dick gephardt and his legion in the house first for the help they gave me in 1993 when we passed the economic plan which was principally responsible for reducing the deficit by 90 percent without a single vote from a republican member in the senate or the house not a single solitary one before this new balanced budget law which i m very proud of but before it takes effect don t forget deficit dropped from 290 billion to 22 6 billion because of what a lot of brave people in our caucus did in 1993 and a lot of them lost their seats because of it because the benefits were not apparent by the 94 election and it made me more proud than ever to be a member of the democratic party there were a lot of other things that were done thanks to the leadership that the democrats here gave us in 1994 we passed a crime bill bitterly opposed by the leadership of the other party they said it was all wrong they went out in rural areas and tried to convince people we were going to take their guns away and again they cost us a few seats we had some members in congress who gave up their seats to vote for 100 000 police to vote for the brady bill to vote for the ban on assault weapons but we ve had five years of steeply dropping crime rates and now we know whether we were right or they were right the voters didn t know in 1994 but we were right and the president gets the credit when the economy is up the president gets the credit john kennedy thought it was fair he said victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan so if it goes down i ll be here folks but that plan could not have been passed without the support of our people in congress the crime bill could not have been passed without the support of our people in congress we wouldn t have the right kind of welfare reform bill without the support of our people in congress because i had to veto two bills first to get the one i wanted we had record 3 million plus people move from welfare to work and i m very proud of what these members of this caucus have done i m also proud that we got caught trying to provide health insurance to people in america who don t have it you know our opponents said when we tried to pass the health insurance program in 1994 they said you know if you support the president s health insurance program the number of people without health insurance will go up and as one democrat said to me the other day i supported your program we got beat but i supported it and they were right the number of uninsured people went up and now we re trying to do something about that in the last budget we got funds to give health insurance coverage to half the children in america who don t have it but i want to make it clear even with a republican majority in congress nothing i do would take place without support of our caucus in the congress do you believe that this balanced budget would have the biggest increase in health care for poor children since 1965 if it weren t for enough democrats who could support my veto do you believe for example that we would have for the first time in the history of the country in this budget opened the doors of college to everybody literally with a 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college tax credits for the other years better loan programs more scholarships more work study funds education iras it happened because we were together and we worked together so i m grateful and you can see i d like it very much if we could win 11 12 20 30 more seats what are the stakes though let s talk about this what are the stakes and what are the chances why is the country working now first of all when i started running for president six years ago i basically was driven by two things the first reason was i didn t really think the country had a plan for the 21st century it s a big complicated country and i thought we were just going to kind of wander in to a new millennium and i didn t believe we were very well prepared the second reason was i thought the debate in washington was downright counterproductive and that our democrats had turned into sort of cardboard cutouts of real people just what you were talking about they said we were weak on defense and weak on welfare and weak on crime and couldn t be trusted with tax money and all that stuff they said about us and as a result it sort of relieved people of the burden of having to think because if they made us unacceptable particularly in races for president well then the voters didn t have to think i think that s why folks in the other party get so mad at me sometimes we ve gotten the american people to thinking again they re not on automatic anymore for example why should we have had this old debate on the budget are we going to explode the deficit with tax cuts or just have a little smaller deficit with spending so i said vote for me and we ll cut the deficit and spend more money on education and people said yeah right but that s exactly what we ve done and it worked because we re democrats take the crime debate every time you read about crime it was to hear the way they had framed it you ve got to be tough on crime well what do you mean by that put everybody in jail longer and the other guys they just want to let them out because they re soft hearted so we said i said i don t know anybody who thinks like that not a single living soul so we said why don t we find the people who really deserve to be in prison longer and keep them and spend more time trying to keep our kids out of prison and take these guns off the street and out of the hands of people who shouldn t have them and it worked we put police on the streets this was not rocket science this was the way people think out here in the real world when they re not being presented in artificial terms from a long way away on welfare the debate was structured as all these people on welfare they don t want to work and we re tough we re going to make them work and the other side our side was well that s probably right but we feel so bad about the kids we don t want to do it i didn t know a single living soul who really thought that way and i d spent a lot of time in welfare offices i never met anybody on welfare who didn t want to go to work so we said okay make people who are able bodied go to work but them the education and training and let s don t hurt their children because their most important job is raising their children provide the child care for the children provide the medical care for the children then you can be tough on work and good to the kids guess what it worked why not because it was rocket science it was common sense mainstream values thinking about tomorrow and getting away from the hot air same thing on the environment i believe in preserving the environment i ve worked hard on the florida everglades we ve got an agreement in this interior bill to save the yellowstone park from gold mining and to save a bunch of the redwood forests that are precious and there are not many of them left in california but i always thought it was crazy you know they said well the environment is nice but we ve got to grow the economy and then we were made to look like sort of blissed out tree huggers who never got over the mccarthy campaign and that wasn t consistent with my experience it looked to me like for example if we had a really sensible economy we could organize it in a way that would promote a clean environment and create more jobs not fewer jobs they said when we tried to take and this was before my time we took cfcs out of the atmosphere to stop the hole in the ozone layer have any of you missed them do you know the name of anybody who has lost a job because of it but the hole over the ozone layer is shrinking and the layer is thickening and it s good for your children and grandchildren we had all these coal fired power plants that were putting out a lot of sulphur dioxide and making acid rain the democrats in congress before my time the democrats in congress authorized a trading system so that the free market could trade permits to allow the most efficient way to take the sulphur dioxide out of the atmosphere we re 40 percent ahead of schedule at less than half the projected cost because the democrats found a way for the free market to clean the environment and grow the economy that s our policy and that s what we intend to do in the future and it s the right thing to do i say this because i think it is terribly important that we look to the future i m glad the economy is in good shape we learned at the last over the last this year this quarter compared to last year we grew at 3 5 percent we ve got the lowest inflation since 1964 that s good but we ve got more to do not everybody who needs a job has one not everybody who is losing jobs in the technological changes and the trade flows is getting the kind of training that he or she needs to move on with their lives we ve got more to do on the economy dick talked about education we need desperately to have national standards in education and we need to measure whether our children are measuring up and we ought to give them more choice in the public schools they attend i want every grade school kid in america to go to a school like the one i visited in jupiter today the one i should have visited a few months ago before i hurt myself we ve got more to do we ve got more to do in so many areas and if you think about it our democrats are not vulnerable anymore to the old cardboard pictures they painted of us not just because of me or the vice president but also because they were with us they can t say you can t trust that crowd anymore they re not good with your money they won t give you a tax cut they can t manage the economy they can t manage crime they re weak on welfare they re no good in foreign policy and defense all that stuff is out we can have a real conversation in 1998 and what is it about what is it about just what you said how are we going to prepare this country for the 21st century what still needs to be done how are we going to preserve social security and medicare for our generation the biggest generation without asking our kids to pay too much to take care of us because we re bigger than our kids are in numbers how are we going to give a world class education to every american how are we going to embrace all this diversity we have and still be bound together as one america how are we going to stop being the biggest polluter in the world when it comes to carbon dioxide which is warming the planet with potentially serious consequences to our people and people around the world and still keep this economy growing so everybody can make a good living how are we going to provide working families with the tools they need to succeed at home and at work still the biggest challenge we ve got i m glad everybody has got a job folks but now you ask our hosts they now have a one year old daughter that little child has become their most important work it dwarfs everything else every day every day there are people in this country hard working lower middle class people who are spending 25 percent of their income on child care and still can t afford child care where their children are stimulated to upper middle class people who feel like they can t hold on to their jobs unless they spend so many hours at work they re not with children when they need to be every day there are people in this country who are making choices between being good parents and good workers and that s why the democrats ought to expand family leave so people can get a little time off from work to go to parent teacher conference or take their kids to the doctor that s why the democrats need to keep working until all the children in working families can be insured with health insurance that s why we need to keep working until we have uniform standards of excellence and lots of local reform in schools that s why we need to keep working on these things we have done so much but believe me maybe it s just because i ve just got three years and a few months left but i think all the time about 2010 and 2015 and 2020 and what this country is going to be like when my child is my age and i m telling you the best days of america are still ahead if we keep on doing what we re doing that s what this election in 98 is about why is it important that you re here because the voters there are a lot of voters out there who are still like you were for a long time they don t think it matters they think everybody is just screaming at each other in washington and what happens usually at the end of these campaigns the party with the most money wins because the airwaves get full of these 30 second ads which either persuade people who are undecided or turn them off so much they stay home and the marginal voters that stay home are the working people who would vote for us if they showed up that s why this dinner is important you ask martin frost to go through the 20 closest congressional races in the last election 1996 when the vice president and i were honored to be returned to office with the electoral votes of the people of florida we were honored we won a nice victory but you go through those races and you will see that in the 20 closest races in the last 10 days we were out spent 4 to 1 so i have to tell you i am unapologetic about being here i am proud of you for being willing to help carry on this debate we can have a discussion an honest discussion about the future in 1998 but we have to make it possible for patrick kennedy and john baldacci and martin frost and dick gephardt and peter deutsch and all those people we ve got running fabulous people who are not in office to be heard because we now are in a position to finish this work of preparing our country to be what our children deserve i m proud of you for being here and very grateful thank you dem wjclinton1 11 97b bill_clinton thank you very much please be seated we re going to reverse the order tonight and i m going to introduce the vice president because you ve all heard me speak before because i need to save my voice to campaign for our candidates in new jersey and new york tomorrow thank you let me once again thank all of you for coming i hope you have enjoyed this i certainly enjoyed it today i was glad to meet with the various panels and i enjoyed governor romer s speech at lunch very very much didn t he do a terrific job ladies and gentlemen six years ago when i began running for president i wanted to win the election to change the country and i felt very strongly that we were not preparing america for the 21st century and that our party needed to break the logjam not only with a set of new policies but with a set of new ideas i thought the political debate had become frankly stale and at least to someone like me governing a state out in the country often completely meaningless i believed we had to move the debate toward what was good for the future not the past what would support positive change not the status quo what would bring us together not divide us and move away from the old left right liberal conservative and frankly outdated name calling and labeling that dominated national politics six years later we ve made a lot of progress not only in moving the country to a better place but in changing the nature of political debate i very much hope that the simplistic antigovernment reactionary approach had its last gasp in the republican congressional victory in 1994 the fact that we beat back the contract with america and signed the right kind of welfare reform got a balanced budget with the biggest investments in education and health care since 1965 and that we re moving forward in a way that brings the country together around the ideas of opportunity responsibility and community that we have espoused now for a long time is deeply encouraging to me the fact that all around the world now people are beginning to talk in the same terms the first lady is in great britain today she s been in ireland i frankly was very flattered that tony blair s campaign was often compared to ours and that the so called new labor movement has a lot in common with what we try to do here i believe all over the world countries that are serious about helping people make the most of their own lives assuming a leadership role in dealing with the challenges of the modern world are going to have to basically adopt similar approaches if you hadn t helped us none of the that would have been possible but what i want to say to you is if i hadn t been smart enough to pick al gore to be my running mate none of it would have been possible let me just give you a few examples sam rayburn used to say it s a lot easier to tear something done even a jackass can kick a barn down but it takes a carpenter to build one now we took the position that the old debate that government could not be a savior but couldn t sit on the sidelines either was a false debate and that we had to have a new kind of government that was smaller that did more with less that could balance the budget but also invest more in our future al gore s reinventing government project was the instrument through which we put that principle into practice and five years after we took office our government is smaller by 300 000 several thousand pages of regulation several hundred government programs that were out of date it has been modernized in many ways but we did not walk away from the problems the challenges and the opportunities of the american people the reinventing government project was often frankly made fun of because it s not the sexiest issue in town but it s what enabled us to cut the government by 300 000 and increase the quality of public service and have money left over after we reduced the deficit passed the balanced budget bill to still invest in our future the american people owe the vice president a great debt of gratitude for that achievement alone second example when i became president i got a very interesting letter shortly after i took office from former president nixon written a month and a day before he passed away and it was about russia the importance of russia to our future and how we had to work with them to make sure we didn t repeat the ugly history of the last 50 years but instead had a partnership for peace and prosperity and cooperation well i struck up a pretty good relationship with president yeltsin and i stuck by him through tough times because he was standing up for democracy and prosperity but we had a huge number of exceedingly difficult issues and frankly we still have some tough issues and we always will because it s in the nature of relationships between two great countries the vice president agreed to head a commission along with the russian prime minister mr chernomyrdin for which there was really no precedent in global affairs and the gore chernomyrdin commission is the instrument through which the good intentions and principles articulated first by me and then by boris yeltsin have made the united states russia partnership the success it is they ve made it possible for us to go together into bosnia they made it possible for us to dramatically reduce the number of nuclear missiles we have they ve made it possible for us to detarget missiles so that none of our missiles are pointed at each other s children they made it possible for us to do a whole range of things the vice president has done a similar thing with the vice president of south africa he has worked out an environmental partnership with top officials in china in other words it s fine for the president to make these statements it s quite another thing if you have to look up four or five or six years from now and nothing has been done it won t happen because al gore was the vice president of the united states with unique responsibilities for helping to build our common future i could give you any number of other examples i remember not long after i became president when i was still reading critical columns someone wrote a column in which they said something like well anyway the import of it was that obviously i was a weak person and that s why i had a wife who was so influential and why i gave my vice president so much power more than any president ever had before and that sort of tickled me because it seemed to me that if i had a partner in the vice president who had knowledge in areas greater than mine who had expertise in areas greater than mine and who had all this energy and ability and a passionate dedication to this country and its future i would be a fool not to use it and i would be disserving you and every other american citizen if i had done anything other than make albert gore the most influential and effective vice president in the history of the united states so i think i did the right thing there we ve had a unique partnership believe it or not we don t always agree our disagreements have been among the most stimulating experiences of my presidency but if i want to disagree with the vice president since i get the last vote i know at least that i have to go to school and i better have my facts straight i will never be able to convey publicly or privately the depth of gratitude i feel for the partnership that we have enjoyed but i just want you to know that every time i see another economic report like the one we saw yesterday that the economy grew another 3 5 percent in the last quarter every time i think about the 13 million people who have jobs the 3 million people who aren t on welfare the more than 12 million people who have taken advantage of family and medical leave and all of the achievements that this administration has played a role in i know i know that one of the most important factors was the unique and unprecedented relationship i have enjoyed with this fine good man ladies and gentlemen the vice president dem wjclinton1 11 98 bill_clinton thank you reverend cummings it s difficult enough to follow one sermon much less two let me say to reverend thomas i never wanted your message to end it was wonderful thank you i too join in wishing mrs thomas a happy birthday i thank all the wonderful staff and parishioners here at new psalmist i have to say that my staff especially appreciated the assistance from dr david blow i thank congressman cummings for his welcome here i tell you i was here about 10 minutes and i realized how elijah got to congress and i thank all of his staff vernon simmons and others i thank mayor schmoke for all the help that your people gave us thank you sir i thank your two wonderful senators senator sarbanes and senator mikulski senator mikulski is running for reelection but she s going to win by acclamation so nobody remembers that she s on the ballot but i think i should tell you that she is and she would like it very much if you remembered that as well i thank governor glendening and lieutenant governor kathleen kennedy townsend for all they have done for maryland and i commend them congressman cardin thank you for being here to secretary of state john willis it s his birthday too today by the way i would like to thank senator blount county executive ruppersberger city council president bell city comptroller joan pratt and i would like to say a special word of appreciation to former congressman and naac president and my wonderful wonderful friend kwesi mfume thank you for being here today thank you now it s been more than 40 years since rosa parks gave up her seat on a bus in montgomery alabama to change america forever dr king said it is better to walk in dignity than to ride in shame and ever since then america has been on a long walk toward dignity some people who are not african americans don t know it yet but we ve all been on that walk not just black americans all americans for none live in dignity when any are oppressed it is a journey this church knows well just think about it 100 years ago starting with five members to come to this congregation of 6 000 men women and children in this magnificent house of worship this is the day the lord has made and we can rejoice in it you have all this high technology and you are very modern but you have not forgotten your mission not only here to hear the word of god but to do it with a food bank with scholarships for college with health care with a boys club with the girl scouts all the things this church is involved in you have helped each other walk in dignity you have fulfilled the admonition of the scripture to be doers of the word and not hearers only and on tuesday you will once again have the chance to be doers now the message today was from matthew so i just kind of rumbled through matthew at the beginning of the service not so as to distract my concentration from the message and there are few things from matthew i d like for us to remember in matthew jesus says to render unto caesar the things which are caesar s now back then that didn t mean too much because caesar was an emperor and all the people had to do to render unto caesar was to pay their taxes and obey the law but thank the lord there is no caesar in this country the good news is there is no caesar the bad news is the people who have to render have more to do because you pick the people who make the decisions you pick the people or not depending on what you do elijah was so kind he said all those nice things to me i m proud of the fact that the american dream is closer to more americans than it was six years ago that more americans can go to college that we have the lowest poverty rate ever recorded among african americans that we have the smallest welfare rolls in 29 years and the lowest unemployment in 28 years i m proud of all that but let me tell you something if you helped me get there then you did that you did that you heard the pastor say today when he preaches the word of god it is god s gift not his you heard that when he said that didn t you that s the way democracy works except you re in the driver s seat you re caesar not me you if you are a doer remember when john glenn went up in space a couple of days ago didn t we all feel good it gave all of us who aren t young anymore something to look forward to i was so proud proud because i know him to be a wonderful good man proud because of what he gave our country 36 years ago but also proud because that was an act of democracy that space program is paid for by you voted for by your congress supported by your president but in the end therefore if you supported me and those who supported that program then you had your hand on john glenn s shoulder when he went up in space that s what this means you had your hand on him in the last several days as i have traveled around america so many people have come up to me and said thank you for working for peace in the middle east thank you for staying up for a week literally 39 hours at the end thank you for doing that and i say to them it is my job and my honor but because you put me there if you felt good about that you should feel good about yourself because you helped to make the peace in the middle east now that s how this works that s how this works this march to dignity a dignity that rosa parks talked about the dignity that martin luther king died for the dignity that nelson mandela spent 10 000 days in jail for we had the president of colombia here this week a country ravaged by civil war ravaged by drug traffickers a man who himself was kidnapped who just by the grace of god was not killed with a wonderful wife who has had people in her whole family killed i have worked with people in colombia for six years now hundreds of law abiding people have been killed simply for trying to uphold the law and we too often take this vote for granted and say oh it doesn t matter what we do if you think the things that congressman cummings said matter don t pat me on the back pat yourselves on the back that s how this system works if you think that the things that senator sarbanes votes for that senator mikulski votes for congressman cardin votes for if you think it s a good thing that lieutenant governor kathleen kennedy townsend made maryland the first state in the country to say young children in school ought to serve their communities it s a part of their education it ll make them better citizens if you think it s a good thing that maryland under governor glendening s leadership has pioneered education reforms and environmental advances if you like all that you did that you did that you should feel that it is yours it is part of your walk to dignity and that is what this is about tuesday there is no caesar your vote counts as much as mine counts as much as speaker gingrich it does it counts as much as anybody it counts as much as people who can contribute vast fortunes to campaigns tuesday everything gets evened up again if you show up now what i want to say to you is that this is not an ordinary time or an ordinary election there is a lot at stake this year because the members of congress here present stood with me we were able to stop a raid on the surplus before we saved social security and we were able to get the funding for a big down payment on our goal of 100 000 more teachers and we did it in the end against the opposition of the members of the other party but there is a lot more to be done we want to pass that patients bill of rights so medical decisions are made by doctors not accountants we want to pass that school construction proposal so all these teachers will have classrooms not trailers to teach our little children in we want to raise the minimum wage because unemployment and inflation are low but you still can t raise a family on 5 15 an hour we want to pass a juvenile justice bill yes that punishes people who have to be but remembers that the only real answer is to keep more of our children out of trouble in the first place and save our children give them a chance to have a brighter future we want not just to save this surplus and save our economy we want to reform the social security system so that it doesn t go broke when the baby boomers retire and our children will be able to continue to raise our grandchildren without having to take us on their backs that s what we want to do now think of what was denied we are fighting hard for the dignity of living wage in the face of partisanship that refused us last time for a patients bill of rights in the face of partisanship that listened to the health insurance companies the last time for the dignity of sending our children to learn with good teachers and small classes in decent modernized schools all hooked up to computers and the internet in the face of those who opposed us the last time and we are fighting for the dignity of a secure retirement in old age way into the future in the face of those who would squander this hard won surplus on election year promises now in this election we ve had a tough time our friends in the other party have raised over 100 million more than we have now you can do that if you take the positions they took killing the patients bill of rights killing campaign finance reform refusing to raise the minimum wage be willing to endanger the rights of mothers and their children and child support in changing the bankruptcy laws refusing to pass legislation to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco which still kills more people every year than any other public health problem now why would this happen why would people who live in a democracy vote against modern schools when most people are for them because they think most people won t vote why would they kill a tobacco reform bill most people support because they think most people won t vote why would they kill a raise in the minimum wage that most americans of all incomes support because they think most americans won t vote just in case of course we got news yesterday that there s actually an effort to keep african american and other minority voters from voting in voter intimidation in maryland and in six or seven other states but you know what on tuesday you re in control of the arithmetic again and you can vote i say that not in an angry spirit you know all over america today there are people in other churches who have a different view who believe that their principles require them to vote only for people at the extreme right wing of the republican party but if you go back through all america what is this about you know i used to think because i was a young boy growing up in the south and i came from people that didn t have a lot of money it used to break my heart when i would see my people poor working people be among the most hostile toward our black brothers and sisters and finally i figured out that they did that instead of joining hands with them to lift everybody together because they thought they needed somebody to look down on and if you look around the whole world today from the middle east to ireland where my people come from to the tribal warfare in africa to the problems in bosnia and kosovo you see all of this turmoil and human misery caused by people who believe that politics is about gaining power over somebody you can look down out it s about dividing the country between us and them that s why elijah said the pledge of allegiance to you that s why he said the pledge of allegiance one nation indivisible but make no mistake about it in the 1950s when i was a kid growing up communism was a big problem and stayed so until the end of the cold war so the dividers in our country would just try to paint their opponents as a little too pink a little too close to the communists then we had race as an issue now immigrants always some way to divide up the electorate so that there is us and them now why don t we have that view partly because you know what it s like to be treated like them partly because you read the whole scripture the corinthian says now we see through a glass darkly what does that mean we just don t know everything we don t have a right to look down on people and sort them out because we don t have the whole truth the whole promise of the scripture is that we will someday have it now we see through a glass darkly but then face to face now we know in part but then we will know even as we are known and now abideth faith hope and love charity and the greatest of these is love why is love the greatest of these because we re all in this boat together that s why yes you know there s some divisions out there but matthew cautions us not to strain to the gnat and swallow a camel and matthew reminds us that a city and a house divided against itself cannot stand what does the bible say what does the bible tell us one thing the bible tells us hundreds of times hundreds and hundreds of times about politics the only thing it tells us hundreds and hundreds of times is to care for the poor the weak the needy in matthew jesus says verily i say unto you even as you have done this unto the least of these my brethren you have also done it unto me and then down the way a little bit down the way a few verses it says and i say to you even as you have not done it unto the least of these my brethren you have not done it unto me so i say to you we believe that our politics should be guided by what our lord said was the first and most important commandment and the second is like unto it first we must try to love the lord our god with all our heart and the second is like unto it thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself so i say tuesday is about whether we ll have a patients bill of rights whether we ll have good schools for all our children whether we will raise the minimum wage whether we will save social security for the 21st century but in a larger sense it s about that march to dignity it s about whether your hand is going to be on the shoulder of every person doing every good thing that will be done it s about whether the people who believe they should divide america can leave you out because you stay home it s about whether you believe that you have to be a doer i appreciate your applause and i am more grateful by far for just having the chance to share this worship service with you to be reminded of the truths that i need to hear too just like you you remember that in this country there are only two places only two only two where we have fulfilled both the admonition of the scriptures and the promise of the founders that all of us are created equal only two one is when you come into your house of worship on sunday and the other is when you show up at the ballot box so i ask you there are thousands here you will see tens of thousands more between now and tuesday be a doer tell them they should show up too take them by the hand and bring them tell them about rosa parks ask them not to forget what dr king died for ask them not to forget what the issues in this election are but ultimately it really is all about what congressman cummings said i have done everything i could to bring this country together to reconcile the american people to one another so we could go forward together but in the end that must be done by all of us together and tuesday it s your turn take it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton1 12 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you belinda thank you for your wonderful remarks i m not going anywhere i m just going to be in a different line of work i ll still be there for you i want you all to know this remarkable woman actually had a minor car accident yesterday and was told not to come here but she showed up anyway and that s the kind of commitment we need from people archbishop ndugane i m delighted to be on the podium with you in this beautiful chapel at howard and as you know i admired your predecessor archbishop tutu my friend and i can see he has a worthy successor your remarks were wise and we thank you sir very much for what you said i thank president swygert for making us welcome at howard and i would like the acknowledge a couple of people first a member of our united states congress from oakland california and the champion of america doing more in the global aids effort representative barbara lee thank you very much thank you i also was honored to ride over here with our former united nations ambassador and congressman and my great friend andrew young i thank him for his part here and belinda i thank you for what you said about sandy thurman i knew she wasn t a barbie doll when i appointed her she had actually spent a lot of her life working in atlanta at the grass roots with people with hiv and aids and i tried to fill a lot of positions in government with people who don t often get to serve because sometimes the best qualified people to serve are the people that are out there on the front lines and if they spend their lives on the front lines they don t have enough time to play up to the politicians so they can get these appointments but somehow i found sandy and she s been wonderful and i thank her and all the members of our advisory council many of whom are here today i want to offer a special word of welcome to the distinguished religious leaders and citizens who have come here from around the world including the first lady of lesotho mrs mathalo mosisili and we have i think 23 others we have 23 others here from africa alone who are here to focus on the hiv aids issue as part of the state department s international visitors program we have religious leaders here from africa from asia from latin america and we thank them all for being here today we have come together people from all over the world from different circumstances to ask ourselves a simple stark question whether we are prepared to do what is necessary to save millions of lives to save the lives of those who are living with hiv and aids and all those who might yet avoid it how we answer will depend upon how well we work together as partners across lines of nationality faith religion color sexual orientation it will depend upon in equal measure our will and our wallet and it will depend upon in some places still sadly going beyond denial i don t know whether this works when translated into french and the other languages that are here but my daughter s generation has a wonderful saying that denial is not just a river in egypt we even have to laugh you know sometimes just to keep going but that also is important and i want to highlight some of the heroes in that struggle later in the united states there are millions of people involved in the struggle against hiv and aids they are in clinics and in community based organizations across the land offering information and testing to those at risk treatment and care to nearly a million people living with hiv dignity to thousands who are dying churches synagogues mosques and temples here are more and more speaking out with a single clear voice about the importance of prevention as well as care for the last few years i have tried to put our government on the side of this fight we ve created an office of aids research at the national institutes of health and the white house office of aids national policy we have the first ever national aids strategy we have the first biomedical research plan and we have expanded health insurance options for people with hiv and aids our overall federal funding has more than doubled over the last eight years and funding for care is up almost 400 percent help to buy drugs in this country up more than 1 000 percent as congress comes back to work i hope that it will ensure that our global and domestic aids programs actually receive the funding increases they are currently slated to receive this year thanks to people like representative barbara lee as belinda dunn s story illustrates marrying our money to our intentions is a formula for real progress here in the united states a formula for delivering more powerful anti hiv drugs to more americans for helping more hiv positive pregnant women avoid passing the virus to their babies for providing better access to health care and housing for those living with hiv it is a formula in other words for people living longer and better lives today the mortality rate for hiv and aids in the united states is down more than 70 percent since 1995 the death rate from infection is at its lowest rate since 1987 for those of you here from our country who have worked on this you can be justifiably proud but we must be humbled by how very far we all have to go especially around the world today s reality is much worse than the worst case scenarios of just 10 years ago at the beginning of the 1990s health experts told us that between 15 million and 20 million people would be living with hiv this year well the real number is 36 million the religious leaders from around the world who are here understand that these numbers mean something quite stark in human terms not only for the individuals and the families but as the archbishop intimated for whole nations when the disease threatens to triple child mortality and to reduce life expectancy by 20 years in some african countries it is time to say that aids is also a moral crisis when south africa s gdp listen to this south africa s gdp is expected to be 17 percent lower in 2010 because of aids it is time to say that aids is an economic crisis when ten times more africans died of aids last year than in all the continent s wars combined and when the fastest growing infection rates are now in eastern europe and the nations of the former soviet union complicated in many countries by a virtual breakdown of the public health systems there when nations are already struggling against great odds to build prosperity and democracy it is time to say that aids is also an international security crisis once we recognize that aids is all these things it becomes crystal clear that we have to use every available tool to fight it and that the united states because we have been blessed at this particular moment in history with exceptional prosperity has an extra responsibility to take a leadership role many developing countries are doing remarkable things to help themselves by focusing its resources on prevention uganda became the first country in sub saharan africa to reverse its own epidemic nearly halving its hiv prevalence but in too many nations resources are simply insufficient and the gap between what people want to do and what they can afford to do is denying millions a chance to survive the onslaught together we must do more to close the gap today our national institutes of health is releasing the first ever strategic plan for international aids research a 100 million blueprint for pursuing new research opportunities with universities in over 50 countries in asia africa europe and latin america our administration has also launched the life initiative that in the last two years will likely triple u s investment in international hiv aids efforts that is why we fought for and won passage of the global hiv aids and tb relief act which authorizes additional funding for prevention care and vaccine development and why i signed an executive order to help make aids drugs more affordable in sub sahara africa and why we are pushing congress to pass to respond to the archbishop s comment a vaccine tax credit and to put more resources behind the world bank s aids trust fund right now it is a problem for our pharmaceutical companies because they know that while there is an enormous need for an aids vaccine the people who need it the worst are the least able to pay for it and we know that research is very expensive so the best way we can help get the research done we get the medicine and then we ll worry about how to get it out there we can do that but we have to get the breakthrough first is in effect gives these companies a tax credit for the research they do so that the taxpayers share a hefty portion of the cost and i hope and pray that the congress will agree to adopt that when they come back in just a few days or early next year at the very latest the peace corps is training every one of its 2 400 volunteers in africa every one of them as prevention counselors and the issue of hiv and aids in developing countries was put on the agenda this year for the annual g 8 summit i also made it an important part of our relationship with the european union and i have worked hard as the archbishop said for debt relief and for mobilizing billions of dollars for the fight against aids and finally that is why the united states placed hiv and aids squarely before both the u n security council and the united nations millennium summit this effort is now on the international agenda we ve got a long way to go but those of you who worked hard to put it on the world s agenda should also know that you have succeeded and we re only going to go forward not backward now now despite these efforts we all know a lot more is needed much much more is needed to make drugs for aids and related infectious diseases more affordable and accessible everywhere i told you just in the united states with all of our wealth we increased funding to help people buy drugs here in this country by a 1 000 percent tenfold in eight years and we didn t get a tenfold increase in drugs because of the increase in the costs so we know that we have to do more to help developing nations in this area we know that more is needed to ensure that countries have the health care infrastructure needed to effectively deliver the drugs and the treatment as i said a moment ago one of the things that really concerns me about the rising rates in some of the nations of the former soviet union is that they are accompanied by a real deterioration in the public health systems systems which once worked under a very different social and political structure and have not yet been replaced by the kind of grass roots community networks that we see in a lot of other developing countries that were not part of a totalitarian system before and it s something we have to work very very hard on but let s not forget as so many of you have proved even limited resources well used can go a long way and let s all remember that for all their differences the fight against aids here in the united states and the fight abroad have much in common to begin we need to understand that patterns of infection in the u s now actually mirror those found elsewhere with the burden falling most heavily on women young people poor people and people of color that makes our challenges more alike than different both practically and morally it means we must be more vigilant both in targeting our resources and in overcoming prejudice last august in nigeria i was honored to meet john ibekwe he was sitting here on the front row but his daughter started crying and he took her out which is a great expression of family values because he knew i was going to introduce him and he took care of his child anyway at an event during my trip he told the story of his great love for his wife whom he married even though she was hiv positive and family and friends disapproved he told how he pleaded with and lobbied with his pastor to persuade him that it was the morally right thing to do he talked about how when he married his wife became pregnant and he became hiv positive and then he struggled to hold a job in the face of great prejudice he told us how he saved enough money somehow for the drugs that allowed his baby to be born without the virus and when he told this story the president of nigeria president obasanjo and his wife stood on the stage and they embraced john and his wife i m told the image had an electrifying impact all over nigeria on how people should think about and deal with people with aids as i said john and his daughter just walked out but his wife is here and i d like to ask her to stand up thank you there they are thank you john with that kind of timing i think you have a future in politics that was well done now let me say something very serious the second thing we have to do is to remember that aids everywhere is still 100 percent preventable prevention is the most effective tool in our arsenal no matter the cultural or religious factors to be overcome families must talk about the facts of life before too many more learn the facts of death meeting both these challenges overcoming stigma and overcoming silence will be impossible without the moral leadership that in so many places only religious leaders like those who are here today can provide in our tradition it has been said that aids is an epidemic of biblical proportions maybe that refers to the sheer geographic scope or perhaps the numbers of people or the enormous scale of suffering but i think it also is an apt phrase because it implies that there is a required moral response in the new testament of the christian bible it says that when we bear one another s burdens we fulfill the law of god so i ask you to go forth here remembering that a happy heart is good medicine too do not grow weary in doing this know that the sequencing of the human genome will dramatically hasten the day when we will find a medical cure but in the meanwhile there are millions indeed tens and tens of millions of people whose lives are riding on our common efforts we can do this if we do it together thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton1 12 97 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much governor i want to thank jeff and andy for hosting this event tonight and i thank all of you for being here i just came in with at least three members of the white house staff i think ginny apuzzo is already here but i came in with sandy thurman craig smith and richard socarides and if anybody else is here from the white house i apologize for making an omission let me say to all of you first i really appreciate your being here tonight and your support for our party five years ago when i became president i felt very strongly that our country needed a common unifying vision to get us into the 21st century that included all americans who were willing to work hard and obey the law that guaranteed opportunity in return for responsibility and that maintained the leadership of our nation in the world five years later i don t think any serious observer could question the fact that our country is in better shape than it was five years ago on virtually every front the economy is in the best shape it has been in in a generation we have made genuine progress in resolving a lot of our deepest social problems the crime rate is dropping in virtually every community in the country the welfare rolls have dropped by more than at any time in history we have begun to try to reconcile the demands of work and family which is in some ways the central dilemma that people with school age children face and with preschool children and we have taken on a lot of issues that had not been taken on before the dangers of tobacco to children something mr tobias has been on me about since long before he ever thought i could become president the issue of having legal guns in the wrong hands and illegal guns getting into the country when they shouldn t and also this issue of what it means to be inclusive on world aids day i think it s worth pointing out that we ve made a lot of dramatic progress in how fast we re moving drugs from the testing stage to approval to market the increases in investment across the board have helped to lengthen and improve the quality of life of people living with hiv and aids and i still believe that we will be able to find a cure within the next few years if we continue to intensify our efforts now one of the things that i would like to say since this is a democratic party fundraiser is that there is a direct chain of events between your support of our efforts and the things which happen in this country and if you go back over the last five years and i won t mention many but i d like to mention just a few and you look at the areas where there has been a partisan fight and then you look at the areas in which there has been bipartisan cooperation in both areas you can see the signal difference it makes to have a strong party representing the values that we represent if you look at the partisan fights i ll just mention two in the 93 budget fight we didn t have a single a single republican vote but before the balanced budget act kicked in we had already reduced the deficit by 92 percent because of the work that we did while increasing investments in medical research in treatment in education in health care and reducing the budget 92 percent it was our kind of budget and reducing income taxes on working families with incomes under 30 000 if you look at the crime bill debate we had in 94 we had a few and i thank god for them we had a few republican votes on a strategy which is now universally accepted as having a dramatic impact on lowering the crime rate putting 100 000 police on the street passing the brady bill passing the assault weapons ban passing preventive programs in the last session we actually got a lot of a substantial amount of money through the congress for after school programs for kids who would otherwise be wandering on the streets or for work programs for kids who are out of school juvenile crime has not dropped as much as regular crime the overwhelming percentage of juvenile crimes are committed between 3 00 in the afternoon and 7 00 at night so that on these issues i think history shows we were right where there was bipartisan cooperation i ll just mention two in the welfare reform bill because i had a party in the congress that would back me i was able to veto the bill twice when they tried to take guaranteed health care and food away from poor children in welfare families and because it lacked an adequate commitment to child care for people who were going to work so when we signed the bill i think it was a much better bill plainly because of the contribution our party made in the balanced budget bill last summer which i am strongly in favor of it is true that some of the more liberal members of our caucus didn t vote for it but over two thirds of the democratic caucus voted for that balanced budget for a very good reason it contained the biggest increase in child health since medicaid passed in 1965 the biggest increase in aid to public education since 1965 the biggest increase in opening the doors of higher education since the g i bill in 1945 and a huge increase in medical research through the nih so again i say the parties make a difference because they bring to bear their views on public decisions and if people didn t help them get elected they wouldn t be able to do that if you look at where we are today i d just like to mention one or two things i believe that we are moving to deal in a more open way with this whole idea of what it means to build one america the white house hate crimes conference could not have come at a better time and if you look at some of the terrible things that governor romer has been going through in denver you see that it is a problem in america in more contexts than one and i think that s very important i hope that the appearance i made at the human rights campaign fund dinner the other night and the continuing strong support by many members in congress some in both parties for enda is again another manifestation of the fact that we are continuing to try to expand the barriers of our american community i think it s very important that we continue to do that if i might just mention three other things that are very much on my mind tonight that you may want to talk about or not as we visit i have done my best to try to put america in a position to continue to lead the world and to deal with the new security threats and seize the new opportunities of the new century i intend therefore to continue to try to get fast track authority from the congress because i think that we have to sell more of our products overseas and i think only by selling more and by becoming more involved with other countries will we have the leverage to try to elevate international economic labor and environmental standards something that i strongly support i think we have to do it in a way that our party favors which is to do more more quickly for people that are displaced here at home i think we have to take a very strong position but a realistic one we can get other countries to sign on to at the climate change meeting in kyoto the vice president is going over there to present our views i think this is a huge huge issue and will be for at least another generation this in some ways is the most difficult of all problems for a democracy to confront except if you live in a place that has had a lot of extreme weather in the last five years you probably don t have any tangible evidence that the climate is warming more rapidly than it has in 10 000 years but by the time we could all get tangible evidence it would be too late to do much about it that s the first problem the second problem is this is not like the balanced budget which will be done in four or five years or six years from the time we started this is something we ll have to work on for 20 or 30 years but we have to begin today democracies are not very well organized for this sort of challenge but it is imperative that we do it and i would implore all of you to do whatever you can to help us build public support for having an aggressive approach to climate change one final issue i wanted to mention is this whole matter involving our dispute with iraq this is not about the united states and iraq per se nor is it about an attempt to rehash the gulf war this is a question of whether we are going to establish in the world a regime that will limit the capacity of rogue nations and illegal groups to manufacture store disseminate sell or use dangerous biological and chemical weapons or small scale nuclear weapons i think it is imperative that we try now you saw from what happened in the tokyo subway with the sarin gas that it s hard to envision a totally risk free world but believe me there are substantial things that can be done to minimize the chance that innocent civilians who travel the world and walk the streets of cities all across the world will be subject to that sort of thing so when you see all this stuff playing out in the press let me assure you that what i am thinking about is whether we can as part of our responsibilities to the future create a regime in which we will actually be able to say not that there may never be an incident of chemical or biological use by a terrorist group or a drug trafficker or something else but that we have done everything that is humanly possible to know where the stockpiles are to limit them and to minimize the chances that they can ever be brought into play against innocent human beings this is a huge issue and it will require enormous discipline by our country and enormous leadership by our country if we re going to prevail and this is a case when you know i care a lot about economics and i think that it s easy to demean it the country is in better shape when everybody has a job that wants one but this is one issue where economic interest in the short run cannot be allowed to override our solemn obligation to the future to try to minimize the chance that we ll have any of this in your future or our children s future now having said that again i say the main point i want you to understand is there is a direct connection between everything i just mentioned and hundreds of things i didn t and your decision to be here supporting our party and this is a better country today than it was five years ago because of the ideas the values and the efforts that you helped to make possible thank you very much dem wjclinton1 12 98a bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen let me first of all say when steve grossman was standing up here bragging on everyone else i thought to myself when he took over our party when we were 18 million in debt it didn t seem like a very sound decision on his part not a sound political decision not a sound business decision because he had to stop doing other things probably not a good thing for his family and we wouldn t be here if he hadn t put in all the long hours and long days and long weeks and long months he never got tired people talk about how i don t i do get tired i plead guilty i get tired steve grossman never got tired and i think we ought to tell him that we know that and we thank him so much thank you let me say tonight is a special night for all of us because we re joined by three of our new senators and i m very proud of all of them hillary and i have known evan and susan bayh for a long time they re both my golfing partners they used to be my jogging partners back when i was young like they still are and we served as governors together we ve done a lot of things together for years and i was absolutely thrilled to see the great success that they enjoy i met john edwards in north carolina when he and elizabeth were down there we went to a very hot rally one night and i went away and erskine bowles went down with me it was the day we had the we celebrated america s heritage rivers and we did the new river in north carolina and then we went to this big event where john was the featured speaker and we walked out and erskine and i had to go back to washington i said erskine i ll swear i believe that guy can be elected this is months beforehand and sure enough he was thanks to a magnificent effort in north carolina and all of you know that hillary and i virtually moved to new york state in the schumer campaign and i saw chuck and iris and their daughters up close on many occasions campaigning i thought i knew new york real well but chuck schumer taught me a few things and showed me a few people and a few places and a few neighborhoods that i had not known before then and i really believe that these people embody not just the future of our party but the future of our country and i am honored to serve with them and i am very much looking forward to it let me be very brief all of you are here this is sort of a year end celebration the last of a long series of efforts i want to tell you also that it may be true as steve said and as many of our friends in the republican party have said since the election in which they outspent us by more than 100 million it may be true that money is trumped by message and it must be true at some level because they did out spend us by more than 100 million but i also think it s important to remember that the message has to get out and if you hadn t been willing to come to so many of these events hear me give the same speech over and over again and be there for us in the bad times as well as the good it wouldn t have been the same on election day i have done this now for quite a long time and i will never do it again on my own behalf so i can tell you from a lifetime of experience that it is quite possible to win an election in which you are outspent but only if you have enough to be heard and so you gave our people a chance to be heard and you gave our people a chance as steve never tires of saying to be organized to show up to be counted and i want you to know i am very grateful the last thing i want to say is we now have a heavier responsibility going into next year and the next year than we would otherwise have had because of the gains that were made because of the elections that were won against all the odds because the american people said so loudly so clearly so unmistakably we like the way we re changing we like the path we re on we want to keep on we want to keep moving economically we want to keep moving toward greater social harmony we want to keep tackling our problems and solving them and getting them out of the way and going on we want to keep reaching out to the rest of the world in a positive way because they said that because they did say we choose progress over partisanship and people over politics and unity over division we have a higher responsibility elections are not simply the choices of people to sit in slots until the next election they are a mandate for certain kinds of action or inaction certain kinds of direction or changes of direction and so i say to you we have a responsibility to lead and to try in good faith to work with the republicans to save social security for the 21st century to give every child in this country an excellent world class education to deal with the challenges of the health care system including the patients bill of rights to do whatever it takes to maintain our leadership for peace and freedom around the world and to stabilize the global financial system so that we can continue to have long term prosperity and opportunity here at home and for our friends and neighbors in other countries and down deep beneath it all we have a responsibility to keep working to reconcile the american people to one another to really stand up for the best kind of unity to stand against the politics of division to prove that we have more in common than what divides us that is what i believe the voters asked us to do a month ago and that is what i intend to spend two years doing and i am profoundly grateful that these three magnificent public servants are going to be in the united states senate to carry their load and then some thank you very much dem wjclinton1 12 98b bill_clinton thank you very much attorney general doyle attorney general reno thank you for joining us here today and for the work you have done with the states attorneys general and local prosecutors on domestic violence and to reduce the crime rate and a whole host of other issues i want to thank fred duval for the work he does on my behalf with you and this association and i d also like to thank the two former attorneys general that are working for me bonnie campbell who heads the attorney general s effort on violence against women and chuck burson who was formerly president of naag now the vice president counsel i ve really been looking forward to coming over here today i have had the opportunity to know and work with most of you personally and i see some former attorneys general out in the audience who were my colleagues and friends i thank them for being here it used to be a staple of all my speeches that the best job i ever had was being an attorney general and to me it was i didn t have to hire or fire anybody except the people on the staff i didn t have to appoint or disappoint anybody every unpopular thing i did i blamed on the constitution now i m just a punching bag from time to time who s grateful to have an attorney general it s a very interesting thing on a more serious note i loved the job that you now hold and i suspect that i ran for it for the same reason you did i wanted to protect families and consumers and enforce the law and you have been very strong allies of our administration and good partners in those endeavors and i thank you for that very much in many ways we are still colleagues whether it s on domestic violence or reducing crime or giving our young people a more positive future now we re working together to bring our country to the verge of one of the greatest public health achievements in the history of our nation a historic triumph in our fight to protect our children from the deadly threat of tobacco together we have waged a great struggle in the courts in the congress across the negotiation tables and in our communities where our children have been the targets of mass marketing schemes and where you have been on the front lines to protect them from this effort to get them involved in addiction to tobacco we ve made a lot of great strides in just a few years and whenever i talk to any of you who are involved in this naturally enough we re always talking about what the present state of play is and what all the various issues are and what s going to happen tomorrow or what happened yesterday and we can talk about that some more too but what i d like to do is take just a few moments to see how far we ve come and then to visualize the outcome that i believe we will achieve first to look back and see why we ever took on the tobacco companies in the first place when when some of you filed your suits it was laughable people said it was a fight that was unwinnable and second to look ahead to the end of the day what we have to do to win the fight to ensure a healthier stronger america for our children in the new century we are poised to enter this new century stronger than we have been in decades this is a great moment for our country full of opportunity we have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years the lowest inflation rate in 30 years the highest home ownership in history smallest welfare rolls in 27 years the lowest crime rate in 24 years it is a great moment of opportunity we have a chance to open vistas of peace and prosperity and freedom that our people have never before known because most of the next century will belong to our children and grandchildren instead of to ourselves we all of us together have worked these last five years to give them a future of safety health and security we ve done a lot of specific things in addition to the economic and crime and welfare statistics that i talked about here in washington we have worked with many of you to implement a zero tolerance policy to keep guns and drugs out of schools the v chip and the television ratings and educational television have helped parents to strengthen the values as well as the minds of our children we ve worked to bring order and discipline to our children s lives by supporting community reform efforts like curfews school uniforms tougher truancy laws and to bring hope into their lives by supporting higher educational standards and keeping schools open after hours because as all of you know most juvenile crime is committed when the school doors close for the day but before the parents get home from work we ve worked to support community service from america reads to americorps to america s challenge and now we re helping to get millions of uninsured children the health insurance they need this is a moment of great opportunity but also of great obligation and we have to build on this powerful momentum to make the future we want for our children to me that s the most important thing that you are doing in the tobacco litigation it is so easy in good times to relax but you and i both know that the world is changing so rapidly that whatever is happening today there will be something different happening tomorrow the sheer volume of knowledge is doubling every five years now we are literally because of human genome research we are literally solving problems in a matter of days that took years to solve not long before i took office the worldwide web is growing by something like 65 000 web sites an hour now when i took office there were 50 50 think about that just a little over five years ago the web was the province of a handful of scientists physicists started by a government research project in the defense department the government quite properly having done the basic research and getting it up and going got out of the way and now it s the fastest growing organ of human interaction ever in all of human history i say that again to hammer home the fact that when people have confidence because times are good but leaders know times are changing there is a heavier than normal responsibility to do the hard things for tomorrow that is why it is so important that you have engaged this tobacco issue i cannot overstate it you know quite well that smoking kills more people every day than aids alcohol auto accidents murders suicides drugs and fires combined and that nearly 90 percent of smokers lit their first cigarette before they turned 18 david kessler the former fda commissioner called smoking a pediatric disease today and every day 3 000 children start smoking illegally and 1 000 will have their lives shortened as a result this is a national epidemic it is a national tragedy we must struggle to end it until we prevail just last month the journal of the american medical association concluded that advertisements and promotions were even more crucial than peer pressure in getting teens to start smoking now the law says that they can t advertise tobacco products on television or radio but you can t escape the ads anywhere else in our magazines our sports centers on billboards tobacco is one of the most heavily advertised products in america in the early 1990s joe camel alone had an advertising budget of 75 million he could have run for president and that s a pretty good investment from the tobacco companies point of view more 3 to 6 year olds can recognize joe camel than mickey mouse the advertisements have taken a deadly toll that s why you began to bring your lawsuits that s why in 1995 i launched a nationwide effort to prevent our tobacco companies from advertising to children to educate children about the dangers of smoking to reduce children s access to tobacco products working with the fda we made it the law of the land essentially what was already the law in your states no sale of products to anyone under 18 required id showings for anyone under 27 to make sure teens don t buy cigarettes and i m very proud that last year the courts upheld this authority without the foresight and courage and determination of the attorneys general the progress would not have occurred you put tobacco companies on the stand in courtrooms across america you brought them to the bargaining table you extracted important concessions you raised awareness of tobacco s tragic cost to our economy and our children you got documents out that needed to be out your work has been essential and the american people owe you an eternal debt of gratitude the worst part of this epidemic is that it isn t the product of deadly natural forces raging out of control but a sophisticated deliberate marketing campaign targeted at our children i don t know how many of you saw it over the weekend but there was a story that i saw on at least two different networks about this deadly virus that gets into small rats in the southwest and because of el nino and the warming the area of influence of this little animal is larger and the couple of hundred people that have gotten this infection from the mice the small mice in the last four years the fatality rate has been 50 percent we spend a lot of time in our administration trying to make sure that the national institutes of health and the cdc has the investment they need both to do the research and then to set up the mechanisms to deal with the spread of disease and as more and more of us travel to faraway places and more and more people from faraway places travel to us and we meet strangers in the airport one of the great challenges of the 21st century will be the spread of disease one of the things that global warming has done is to raise mosquitoes bearing malaria to higher and higher altitudes now so more and more people are exposed to it then they travel and more and more people come in contact with it there is now an actual public health phenomenon called airport malaria i m saying that not to scare you we ll figure out how to handle it we ll deal with it but the point is that this is what we ought to be worried about that is we ought to be worried about those things that are arising out of the natural course of events over which we have no control that require a public health response we should not have to worry about things that are the deliberate result of calculated decisions to make money we shouldn t do that if it hadn t been for your efforts we might have had to wait another 30 years for the documents that have confirmed our worst suspicions you did that for years we ve known cigarette makers study kids habits and tastes preying on them with targeted marketing joe camel t shirts virginia slims rock concerts toy race cars emblazoned with tobacco company logos the free giveaways tell the tale just last year some tobacco companies wanted to market what some called a kiddie pack smaller more affordable packs of cigarettes sort of a starter kit and i was in a community last week in which a person concerned about this told me that more and more cigarettes were being sold to children one by one for a quarter apiece now as the documents are released we begin to learn the whole story in an internal document one company proudly described it s brand as the brand of choice among teenagers another described its plan to flavor cigarettes with apples honey or coca cola because it s a well known fact that teenagers like sweet products another company memorandum put it even more bluntly the 14 to 24 age group it says represent tomorrow s cigarette business and tomorrow s medicare and medicaid bills and hospital wards and premature funerals this avalanche of evidence is bringing down the walls of deceit now we know the facts now you have acted now congress must act congress must pass comprehensive tobacco legislation that gets the industry out of the business of marketing cigarettes to our children thirty years of deception now congress must act to bring it to an end thirty years of manipulation congress must now act to bring it to an end and it must act now most americans have 200 days left in their work calendar this year but the work calendar schedule in washington is only 68 days partly because it s an election year partly because of things that are scheduled for holidays partly because members do have to go home legitimately and work in their home states and districts i say that to say 68 days is not a lot left this year but it s more than enough to get this job done the attorneys general have proved that this is not an issue of party but an issue of principle it s not an issue that divides america but one that can unite us i was in utah the other day not exactly the strongest democratic state in america and i was with senator bennett and governor leavitt and the two house members and i said it s wonderful that i m here in utah with my family just as this tobacco fight is opening it s the only issue i can think of that all of utah is to the left of me on and praise the lord for the mormon church but it s a funny story but it illustrates a very serious and sober point this is an american issue this is not about politics believe me there is a solid majority of congress in both houses comprised of members of both parties who want to do this and do this right now it s a complicated issue there are complicated questions of the jurisdiction in the congress which committees and subcommittees should have this piece or that piece of the legislation a lot of people are having trouble with how you work out the future liability of the tobacco companies and how much to give up in return for the advertising fix that we want which otherwise may not prevail in the courts you know there are all these questions out there but what i want to tell you is that we can do this and you have to help us do this you have to go to the congress and say a thousand kids a day is too high a price to pay for another year s delay thank you thank you very much i think we should say clearly and simply that congress should not go home until it passes comprehensive tobacco legislation this is one thing that has to be done this year now i have said i would support any comprehensive bipartisan legislation if it meets five principles i believe it must raise the price of cigarettes by up to 1 50 a pack over the next decade and impose tough penalties on companies that continue to sell to kids it must reaffirm the fda s authority to regulate tobacco products it must get the tobacco companies out of the business of marketing to our children it must further our other public health goals and it must protect the tobacco farmers and their communities and i take it we re all agreed on that i think that is very important today i m happy to report that senators john chafee bob graham and tom harkin are introducing the first bipartisan bill that meets all five of these principles and i strongly support their effort it is a good tough bill i hope it gets wide support the evidence is clearer than ever that this legislation will save lives we have now a recent study that says if congress acts we can cut teen smoking by almost half in the next five years alone that means we can stop almost 3 million children from beginning that means we can prevent almost 1 million premature deaths again i say sure there will be important issues to be worked out even among allies even among yourselves you have to worry about that i know that but if you decide that you have to act then you figure out a way to work out the issues this 30 year struggle also i will say is not about money there are some budget and spending issues in congress between me and the democrats and the republicans three or four or five different ideas but if we just remember this is not about money it s not about the size of the prize we can extract from the tobacco industry it is about fulfilling our responsibilities to our children as parents as a government as a nation you have shown enormous courage and foresight in helping us get where we are today again i would say in the heat of the moment do not forget how far we have come if someone had told me just a couple of years ago we would be here today hardly a one of you would have believed it be proud of what you have done but bring all your influence to bear on the congress it s not a question of party it s a matter of principle and it will have a very great deal to do with what your country looks like when your children are sitting where you are today thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton1 12 99a bill_clinton thank you very much good afternoon john thank you for your introduction and thank you for your example i want to say a little more in a minute about the points that you made but i thank you for being here thank you very much patricia davis and i d also like to thank the other people from the port here and the american presidents line who gave me a tour earlier of the port and how it works with the rail and the trucking systems of this area i thank you secretary glickman and secretary slater who s also here for your support of trade and senator murray who had to go give another speech congressman mcdermott congressman inslee from here in washington we have a very large delegation from congress i d like to ask all the members of congress who are here to please stand so you ll see what the level of interest is we have representatives from the house and the senate from the republican and the democratic parties here and we re very glad to be in washington state governor locke and in seattle mayor schell we thank you for hosting us i thank all the other farmers who are here and i d like to say a special word of welcome to the children who are here who are part of the wto trade winds program last year seattle sold 34 billion in exports to foreign markets making it the largest exporter among all american cities everything from airplanes to apples the control tower i just climbed therefore offers an interesting vantage point not only of what was once a condemned toxic waste site and is now a wonderful flourish economic asset but in a larger sense a vantage point of the 21st century world that i think we ought to be building for our children it s a perfect place to talk about what we came here to the wto meeting in seattle to do to open markets and expand opportunities not only for our people but for people all around the world from the world s newest business e commerce to the world s oldest business farming we came to talk about trade and to talk about trade in the context of an increasingly globalized society now i want to say just a few words about all the rather interesting hoopla that s been going on here we need to start and ask ourselves some basic questions do you believe that on balance over the last 50 years the united states has benefited from world trade i do there wouldn t be nearly as many family farmers left in america as there are today with all the mechanization and the modernization if we hadn t been able to sell our products around the world because we can produce more at higher quality and lower cost than any other country in the world in so many products today we have about 4 percent of the world s people we enjoy about 22 percent of the world s income it is pretty much elemental math that we can t continue to do that unless we sell something to the other 96 percent of the people that inhabit this increasingly interconnected planet of ours now if you look at where the farmers in our country are today whether they re row crop farmers like most of them in my home state of arkansas growing soybeans and rice and cotton and wheat or people who grow fruit in washington state or vegetables here and on the east coast one of the biggest problems we ve got is low prices because of the asian financial crisis and it s been a terrible burden in addition to low prices many of our farmers have been victimized by terrible terrible weather problems and finally they deal with market after market after market where they could sell even more than they do if the markets were more open i personally believe for the farmers who are in our national farm programs we re going to have to adjust our national laws if we are going to stop having an annual appropriation of the surplus that s as big as what we ve been doing over the last couple of years but over and above that for the farmers like the people that run our apple orchards that aren t in the farm programs we ve got to keep fighting to open these markets now we do that against a background of people who are raising more and more questions about the global trading system and about the process of globalization in general when i see all these people in the streets here i d like to point out that among a lot of people who are peacefully protesting here in the best american tradition are protesting in part because the interests they represent have never been allowed inside the deliberations of the world trading system and i went all the way to geneva last year to talk to the wto to tell them we had to change that we needed to open this system up for most of the last 50 years trading issues when they were finally decided were the private province of ceos trade ministers and the politicians who supported them now we know we have to continue to open markets we re reaching out to places like china we re trying to do more with developing nations we re trying to build more partnerships with governments and industry and labor and management but we can t do any of it unless there is a broader consensus on trade that reaches deep into our country and to other countries so i say that for those who came here to peacefully make their point i welcome them here because i want them to be integrated into the longer term debate to those who came here to break windows and hurt small businesses or stop people from going to meetings or having their say i condemn them and i m sorry that the mayor and the governor and the police officers and others have had to go through this but we need to make a clear distinction between that which we condemn and that which we welcome i m convinced we do have to open the wto and the world trading system to greater public scrutiny and to greater public participation because unless real people like this apple farmer from washington can say this is how i fit in the global economy this is why my family and i are better off than we otherwise would be over the long run we re not going to be able to continue to bring the world together which i think is important to america economically and i think it is very important politically that we continue to work closely with countries and encourage them to follow good rules of law and adopt good economic policies and to be good neighbors and not hostile neighbors there are a lot of opinions being expressed here among a lot of the folks that are out in the streets and representatives of groups that i will meet with later today that i do not agree with but i am glad that there is such intense interest in this meeting because it shows that people really do care about this now and therefore trade decisions like other decisions we make in the congress and in washington and in the state houses around the country have to become part of the democratic process you know every elected official here will tell you that there are some decisions that you really have to consult heavily with the people you represent before you make and other decisions you know they ve just sort of given you a contract on they say oh well the people in north dakota i know congressman pomeroy or senator conrad and i don t understand that issue very much but whatever decision they make is okay with me because i trust them and it s not that way any more here with trade we have to bring people into this tent and we have to do it in an effective way but i think at least for people like me and i haven t even succeeded in bringing harmony i know within my own party about this but i do not see how we can have the country and the future we want unless america continues to be a leading force for expanding trade expanding markets for goods and services expanding the reach of international commerce doing it on fair and decent terms being sensitive to the burdens that the poorest countries have and understanding that while a concern for labor or the environment could be twisted to be an excuse for protectionism it is not wrong for the united states to say we don t believe in child labor or forced labor or the oppression of our brothers and sisters who work for a living around the world and we don t believe that growing the economy requires us to undermine the environment you know you just look at this port here what they re doing with multi modal transportation here is saving huge amounts of energy dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions as it promotes economic growth you re going to see the growth in my opinion in the next several years of alternative fuels much of it coming out of america s farming areas which will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions reduce global warming and accelerate economic growth so i strongly believe that if we want to get everybody together and move forward we are going to have to listen to people who have legitimate economic concerns legitimate environmental concerns legitimate labor concerns but one of the things that i think we ve got to be clear on everybody has to decide do you think we are better off or worse off with an increasingly integrated global economy where productive americans have a chance to sell their goods and services and skills around the world i think we re better off that s the number one core decision we ought to make up our mind as a country we agree about now i want this new trade round at the wto to be about jobs development and broadly shared prosperity and about improving the quality of life and work for ordinary people all around the world it isn t right for me to ask for the good things i want for america s working families without wanting to provide those opportunities for others who are willing to work for them the impact of this round could be quite profound since the first trade round 50 years ago we ve cut major nations tariffs on manufactured goods by 90 percent during the same period global trade has grown fifteen fold nd we ve seen the most rapid sustained economic growth not just in the united states but throughout the world in any period of human history because we re working together are there difficulties are there problems are there disagreements of course and there always will be that s why you have to have some system to resolve them whatever system you adopt will there always be a mistake made by somebody somewhere sometime of course we re all human but we need to keep our eyes on the objective and increasing economic cooperation is in the interest of the ordinary citizens of the united states and the rest of the world if we expand access and we do it on fair terms and we re sensitive to the legitimate difficulties these poor countries face we can also advance the cause of the environment and labor conditions without it becoming a shield for protectionism and trying to take unfair advantage of countries that are poorer than we are i believe that but again let s keep our eyes on the big issue we cannot grow the american economy in the 21st century unless we continue to sell more to a world that is prospering and that is more connected increasingly in information technology and travel not only with us but with everyone else in the world the typical american let s just take apples for example the typical american eats 20 pounds of fresh apples each year and this is a pander to washington state i am not the typical american i eat more this is a pander i admit but the typical european consumes about 46 pounds of apples a year so america exported 353 million worth of apples last year more than a quarter of the total 46 000 metric tons were shipped here from seattle red delicious from the lake chelan region granny smiths from the columbia basin winesaps fujis galas grown in washington state boxed and bound for mexico malaysia and more than 40 other countries around the world i have worked very hard to open these markets we opened the japanese market for the first time to washington state s apples in our administration then we fought to get the barriers down in washington in mexico and elsewhere and we re making some progress but it is very important to recognize go back to john or go back to those of us who come from farming states farmers are the lifeblood of our country they are better at what they do thank goodness than any group of people on earth but we cannot preserve family farms unless we sell more of what we grow to more people around the world because the structure of agriculture we have to make a living has to produce a lot more food than all of us can consume and that is a good thing that can be a gift to the rest of the world it can free other countries to work on what they need to do to develop the capacities of their people to focus on diversifying their own economies and we have to find a way to reach agreements to do that five years ago we joined with our trading partners to put agriculture on the wto agenda we made some progress then we pledged to come back and do more today our agenda here is to fight and win for the family farmers of the united states we want to level the playing field we don t want any special preferences we just want agriculture to be treated as fairly as any other sector in the global economy i know that s long overdue and i believe it is the due of every farm family in america whether an apple farmer in the cascades a banana farmer in the cameroon any farmer deserves a chance to compete it is not just american farmers that would be benefitted from this some of the poorest countries in the world would get the biggest benefits out of this trade round if we continue to tear down barriers to agricultural exports they shouldn t have to compete against state owned enterprises restrictive regulations the size of other countries government grants in the european union for example which accounts for 85 percent of the world s agricultural export subsidies half of the overall budget is spent on agriculture now i appreciate their support for their rural communities we ve always wanted to support our rural communities but we have to work out a system going forward where everybody can do what they do best and then people have to be given time and support and investment to make the transitions into the new economy that s all i m asking for and that s all i would ever ask for for people here in the united states we have to lower tariff barriers they re too high on average official rates abroad are five times as high as they are here in america taking apples as an example it was just mentioned tariff rates are 45 percent in korea and 30 percent in china one of the reasons that our people in our economic team charlene barshefsky and her group and gene sperling when they went to china they negotiated a steep cut in the tariff in china to 10 percent by the year 2004 that s more apple sales from washington it will help more family farmers we will also work to reduce domestic supports that don t support trade so much as distort it by paying farmers to overproduce and drive prices down and we see that in a lot of places in the world that should not be the case we know that our farms can produce a vast and varied supply of food at affordable prices in a way that helps to reduce hunger and malnutrition around the world we also should see that the promise of biotechnology is realized by consumers as well as producers in the environment ensuring that the safety of our food is guaranteed by science based and absolutely open domestic regulations and we should maintain market access based on sound science i want to say to the people of europe and all around the world i would never knowingly permit a single pound of any american food product to leave this country if i had a shred of evidence that it was unsafe and neither would any farmer in the united states of america i say to people around the world we eat this food too and we eat more of it than you do now if there s something wrong with anything we do we want to know about it first but we need to handle this in an open honest way it shouldn t be just about politics and emotionalism and short term advantage we need an open system there is a reason we have confidence in the federal bodies that analyze the safety of our food they may not be perfect but nobody believes they are in anybody s hip pocket they are the world s best experts we have an orderly disciplined system here for evaluating the safety of not only our food but our medicine and we ask all of our trading partners to do the same and to deal with us in a straightforward manner about this but everybody must understand we have nothing to hide and we are eating this food too nobody is trying to do anything under the table in secret in an inappropriate way but neither should our farmers be subject to unrealistic delays and unfair discrimination based on suspicion unsupported by the latest scientific examination let s handle this in an open fair scientific way that s the right way to do this now after i leave you i am going to go meet with the trade ministers that are here from more than 100 countries it s a great honor for seattle for the state of washington and for the united states to have these people come here and to try to come to terms with a lot of these very difficult issues i want to talk about how we can make sure that ordinary working people all across the world feel that they have a stake in an improving global economic system i want to assure them that we have to do what is necessary to make sure that economic competition lifts people up everywhere now there are people again i say who honestly believe that open trade stacks the deck against ordinary people thirty percent of the growth we ve gotten in this country 30 percent between 1993 and the time of the asian financial crisis came because of expanding trade we had some pretty good farm years in there too folks it s hard to remember it s been so bad the last year or so but we had some pretty good years and we have got to figure out a way not only to sell the idea but to make it real that we can continue to pursue these objectives in a way that lifts people s quality of life up and lifts the ordinary living standards for people throughout the world we can do that now let me finally say that i know these questions won t be easy one of the things i ve learned in all trade cases is that it once again reaffirms the wisdom of the italian renaissance political philosopher machiavelli who said i m paraphrasing here but this is almost exactly right he said there is nothing so difficult in all of human affairs as to change the established order of things because the people that are going to win will always be somewhat uncertain of their gain whereas the people who will lose are absolutely sure of what they are going to lose so this will require some amount of imagination and trust and humility and flexibility but if we re going to have a world rule based trading system then we have got to make it work for ordinary folks but we in america we have to take the lead in continuing to make the main point the world is a better place today after 50 years of more open trade than it would have been if we hadn t had it americans are better off today after 50 years of open trade than they would have been if we hadn t had it and what has helped us will help the poorest countries in the world the wealthy countries and the countries in between if we find a way to continue to draw together and to deal with the legitimate concerns of the legitimate protestors in the streets of seattle and you know to me it is a very exciting time this is a high class problem and we ought to treat it as a 21st century challenge worth our best efforts if we do i think we ll get a good result thank you very much dem wjclinton1 12 99b bill_clinton thank you very much ambassador barshefsky thank you for your remarks and your work ladies and gentlemen we have a very large delegation from our administration here today and i hope it s evidence to you of our seriousness of purpose i thank the commerce secretary bill daley the agriculture secretary dan glickman our sba administrator aida alvarez my national economic councilor gene sperling ambassador esserman and my chief of staff john podesta all of whom are here and i thank them i want to say that i agree that mike moore is the ideal person to head the wto because he has a sense of humor and boy do we need it right now did you see the gentleman holding up the big white napkin here before we started he was doing that to get the light for the television cameras but he was standing here hold the napkin and mike whispered to me he said well after yesterday that could be the flag of the wto we ll have rolling laughter as the translation gets through here let me begin by saying welcome to the united states and to one of our most wonderful cities we are honored to have you here on a very important mission today i want to talk a little bit about the work that we re all here to do launching a new wto round for a new century a new type of round that i hope will be about jobs development and broadly shared prosperity and about improving the quality of life as well as the quality of work around the world an expanded system of rule based trade that keeps pace with the changing global economy and the changing global society let me begin by saying that seven years ago when i had the honor to become president of the united states i sat down alone and sort of made a list of the things that i hoped could be done to create the kind of world that i wanted our children to live in in the new century a world where the interests of the united states i thought were quite clear in peace and stability in democracy and prosperity to achieve that kind of world i thought it was very important that the united states support the increasing unity of europe and the expansion of the european union that we support the expansion of nato and its partnership with what are now more than two dozen countries including russia and ukraine that we support the integration of china russia and the indian subcontinent in particular into the large political and economic flows of our time that we stand against the ethnic and religious conflicts that were still consuming the middle east and northern ireland then bosnia and later kosovo that we do what we could to help people all over the world to deal with such things including the tribal wars in africa and i thought it was important that we give people mechanisms by which they could work toward a shared prosperity which is why we wanted to finish the last wto round why we are working hard with our friends in europe on a stability pact for the balkans why we know economics must be a big part of the middle east peace process why we have an asian pacific economic forum where the leaders meet why we ve had two summits of the americas with our friends in latin america why we re trying to pass the africa and caribbean basin trade initiatives and why i believe it is imperative that we here succeed in launching a new trade round that can command broad support among ordinary citizens in all our countries and take us where we want to go there are negative forces i have tried to combat in addition to the forces of hatred based on ethnic or religious difference the terrorists the problems of disease and poverty which i hope that the large debt relief initiative that we are pushing will help to alleviate but in the end all of these changes in my view will only give us the world we want where the poorest countries have children that can at least live through childhood and where the boys as well as the girls can go to school and then have a chance to make a decent living where countries with governance problems can work through them where wealthy countries can continue to prosper but do so in a way that is more responsible to helping those who still have a long way to go economically and where together we can meet our common responsibilities to human needs to the environment to the cause of world peace we will not get that done unless we can prove for all of our domestic political difficulties and all of our honest differences we still believe that we can have an interdependent global economy that runs alongside our interdependent international information society and we are called upon here to meet against a background of a lot of people coming here to protest some of them i think have a short memory or maybe no memory of what life was like in most of your countries not so very long ago so let me say again i condemn the small number who were violent and who tried to prevent you from meeting but i m glad the others showed up because they represent millions of people who are now asking questions about whether this enterprise in fact will take us all where we want to go and we ought to welcome their questions and be prepared to give an answer because if we cannot create an interconnected global economy that is increasing prosperity and genuine opportunity for people everywhere then all of our political initiatives are going to be less successful so i ask you to think about that when i hear the voices outside the meeting rooms i disagree with a lot of what they say but i m still glad they re here why because their voices now count in this debate for 50 years one of the reasons i said we needed a leader like mr moore with a sense of humor because for 50 years global trade even though there were always conflicts you know the united states and japan they re our great friends and allies we re always arguing about something but to be fair it was a conflict that operated within a fairly narrow band for 50 years trade decisions were largely the province of trade ministers heads of government and business interests but now what all those people in the street tell us is that they would also like to be heard and they re not so sure that this deal is working for them some of them say well and by the way they re kind of like we are a lot of them are in conflict with each other right because a lot of them say well this is not a good thing for the developing countries they haven t benefited as much as they should have while the wealthy countries have grown wealthier in this information society others say well even if you re growing the economy you re hurting the environment and still others say well companies may be getting rich in some of these poorer countries but actual working laboring people are not doing so well and others have other various and sundry criticisms of what we have done i would like to say first of all i think we need to do a better job of making the basic case no one in this room can seriously argue that the world would have been a better place today if our forebears over the last 50 years had not done their work to bring us closer together whatever the problems that exist in whatever countries represented here whatever the legitimacy of any of the criticism against us this is a stronger more prosperous world because we have worked to expand the frontiers of cooperation and reduce the barriers to trade among people and we need to reiterate our conviction that that is true if we were all out here going on our own we would not be as well off in the world as we are secondly at the end of the cold war i am sure everyone in this room has been struck by the cruel irony that in this most modern of ages when the internet tells us everything as mr moore said when we are solving all the problems of the human gene and we will soon know what s in the black holes in the universe it is truly ironic when the biggest problems of human societies are the oldest ones those rooted in our fear of those who are different from us different races different ethnic groups different tribes different religions all over the world people consumed by differences when people are working together for common prosperity in a rule based system they have big incentives to lay the differences down and join hands to work together so if we just make those two points to our critics i think it s very important number one the world is a better place than it would have been had we not had the last 50 years of increasing economic cooperation for trade and investment and number two the world of the future will be a safer place if we continue to work together in a rule based system that offers enormous incentives for people to find ways to cooperate and to give up their old hatreds and their impulses to violence and war now having said that we now have to say what next i think we have to acknowledge a responsibility particularly those of us in the wealthier countries to make sure that we are working harder to see that the benefits of the global economy are more widely shared among and within countries that it truly works for ordinary people who are doing the work for the rest of us i think we also have to make sure that the rules make sense and that we re continuing to make progress notwithstanding the domestic political difficulties that every country will face we all benefit when the rules are clear and fair i think that means we have to cut tariffs further on manufactured goods and set equally ambitious goals for services i think we should extend our moratorium on e commerce i think we should treat agriculture as we treat other sectors of the economy but we all have domestic political constraints everybody knows that i think we have to leave this luncheon saying in spite of that we re going to find some way to keep moving forward because the world will be a better place and the world will be a safer place now let me offer a few observations of what i hope will be done first i think we have to do more to ensure that the least developed countries have greater access to global markets and the technical assistance to make the most of it director general moore has dedicated himself and this organization to extending the benefits of trade to the least developed countries and i thank you for that sir here in seattle 32 developing nations are moving toward admission to the wto eu president prodi and i have discussed this whole issue and i have assured him and i assure you that the united states is committed to a comprehensive program to help the poorest nations become full partners in the world trading system this initiative which we are working on with the eu japan and canada would enhance market access for products from the least developed countries consistent with our gsp preference access program and our africa and caribbean basin initiatives which i am glad to report are making good progress through the united states congress building on our recent collaboration with senegal lesotho zambia bangladesh and nigeria we would also intensify our efforts to help developing countries build the domestic institutions they need to make the most of trade opportunities and to implement wto obligations this afternoon i will meet with heads of international organizations that provide trade related technical assistance and ask them to help in this effort and i will say this i do believe after the uruguay round when we set up this system that we did not pay enough attention to the internal capacity building in the developing nations that is necessary to really play a part in the global economy and i am prepared to do my part to rectify that omission we also must help these countries avert the health and pollution costs of the industrial age we have to help them use clean technologies that improve the economy the environment and health care at the same time and i will just give one example today is world aids day and today the ustr our trade representative and the department of health and human services are announcing that they are committed to working together to make sure that our intellectual property policy is flexible enough to respond to legitimate public health crises intellectual property protections are very important to a modern economy but when hiv and aids epidemics are involved and like serious health care crises the united states will henceforward implement its health care and trade policies in a manner that ensures that people in the poorest countries won t have to go without medicine they so desperately need i hope this will help south africa and many other countries that we are committed to support in this regard more generally this new round should promote sustainable development in places where hunger and poverty still stoke despair we know counties that have opened their economies to the world have also opened the doors to opportunity and hope for their own people where barriers have fallen by and large living standards have risen and democratic institutions have become stronger we have to spread that more broadly so secondly i want to say what i said at the wto in geneva last year i think it is imperative that the wto become more open and accessible while other international organizations have sought and not shied from public participation when that has happened public support has grown if the wto expects to have public support grow for our endeavors the public must see and hear and in a very real sense actually join in the deliberations that s the only way they can know the process is fair and know their concerns were at least considered we ve made progress since i issued this challenge in geneva last year but i believe there s more work to be done from opening the hearing room doors to inviting in a more formal fashion public comment on trade disputes now look let me just say i know there s a lot of controversy about this and as all of you know i m about to enter the last year of my presidency i will not be around to deal with the aftermath but i m telling you i ve been in this business a long time and in the end we all serve and function at the sufferance of the people either with their active support or their silent acquiescence what they are telling us in the streets here is this was an issue we used to be silent on we re not going to be silent on it anymore we haven t necessarily given up on trade but we want to be heard the sooner the wto opens up the process and lets people representing those who are outside in the sooner we will see fewer demonstrations more constructive debate and a broader level of support in every country for the direction that every single person in this room knows that we ought to be taking into the 21st century so we can do it a little bit now and a little bit later we can drag our feet or we can run through an open door but my preference is to open the meetings open the records and let people file their opinions no one no sensible person expects to win every argument and no one ever does but in a free society people want to be heard and human dignity and political reality demand it today third as i have said repeatedly i believe the wto must make sure that open trade does indeed lift living standards respects core labor standards that are essential not only to worker rights but to human rights that s why this year the united states has proposed that the wto create a working group on trade and labor to deny the importance of these issues in a global economy is to deny the dignity of work the belief that honest labor fairly compensated gives meaning and structure to our lives i hope we can affirm these values at this meeting i am pleased that tomorrow i will sign the ilo convention to eliminate the worst forms of child labor and i thank the united states senate on a bipartisan basis for supporting us in this i believe the wto should collaborate more closely with the ilo which has worked hard to protect human rights to ban child labor i hope you will do this let me say in all candor i am well aware that a lot of the nations that we most hope to support the developing nations of the world have reservations when the united states says we support bringing labor concerns into our trade debate and i freely acknowledge that if we had a certain kind of rule then protectionists in wealthy countries could use things like wage differentials to keep poorer countries down to say okay you opened your markets to us now we ll sell to you but you re selling to us and we want to keep you down so we ll say you re not paying your people enough the answer to that is not to avoid this labor issue not when there s still child labor all over the world not when there are still oppressive labor practices all over the world not when there is still evidence in countries that ordinary people are not benefiting from this the answer is not to just throw away the issue the answer is to write the rules in such a way that people in our position the wealthier countries can t do that can t use this as an instrument of protectionism we can find a way to do this but there is a sense of solidarity all over the world among ordinary people who get up every day will never be able to come to a luncheon like this do their work raise their children pay their taxes form the backbone of every nation represented here they deserve basic fundamental decency and the progress of global trade should reflect also in their own lives i do not want the united states or any other country now or later to be able to use this as a shield for protectionism but to pretend that it is not a legitimate issue in many countries is another form of denial which i believe will keep the global trading system from building the public support it deserves finally we must work to protect and to improve the environment as we expand trade two weeks ago i signed an executive order requiring careful environmental review of our major trading agreements early enough to make a difference including the input of the public and outside experts and considering genuinely held concerns we stand ready to cooperate as you develop similar systems and to integrate the environment more fully into trade policy we are committed to finding solutions which are win win that benefit both the economy and the environment open trade and cutting edge clean technologies which i believe will be the next industrial revolution we will continue to support wto rules that recognize a nation s right to take science based health safety and environmental measures even when they re higher than international standards now i want to say something about this again i know there are some people who believe my concern and the concern of the united states about the environment is another way that somehow we can keep the developing countries down that is not true there are basically two great clusters of environmental issues facing the world today first there are the local issues faced primarily by the developing nations healthy water systems and sewer systems systems to restrict soil erosion and to otherwise promote the public health it is in everyone s interest to help those things to be installed as quickly and efficiently as possible but the real issue that affects us all that prompts my insistence that we put this issue on the agenda is global warming and the related issue of the loss of species in the world as a consequence of global warming and the difference in this issue and previous environmental issues is this once the greenhouse gases get in the atmosphere they take a long time 100 years or more to dispel therefore one nation s policy including ours and we are now the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the united states we won t be long but we are now but we have to do something about this and i want to say to you what i said to the people at our table there is now clear and compelling scientific technological evidence that it is no longer necessary for a poor country growing rich to do so by emitting more greenhouse gas emissions or in plainer language a nation can develop a middle class and develop wealth without burning more oil and coal in traditional manners this is a sea change in the reality that existed just a few years ago and let s be candid most people don t believe it a lot of people in our country don t believe it but in everything from transportation to manufacturing to the generation of electricity to the construction of buildings it is now possible to grow an economy with much less injury to the atmosphere with available technologies and within five years breathtaking changes in the way automobile engines work and in the way fuel is made especially from biomass will make these trends even more clear i do not believe the united states has the right to ask india or pakistan or china or any other country to give up economic growth but i do believe that all of us can responsibly say if you can grow at the same rate without doing what we did that is fouling the environment and then cleaning it up mr kono remembers i remember the first time i went to tokyo over 20 years ago people wore masks riding their bicycles around and now the air there is cleaner than it is in my home town in arkansas what is the difference now it is not just a national issue if you foul the atmosphere and then you later clean it up the greenhouse gases are still up there and they ll be there for 100 years warming the climate now we do not have a right to ask anybody to give up economic growth but we do have a right to say if we re prepared to help you finance a different path to growth and we can prove to you and you accept on the evidence that your growth will be faster not smaller that you ll have more good jobs more new technology a broader base for your economy then i do believe we ought to have those kind of environmental standards and we ought to do it in a voluntary way with available technologies but we ought to put environment at the core of our trade concerns now i don t know if i ve persuaded any of you about any of this but i know one thing this is a better world than it would have been if our forebears hadn t done this for the last 50 years if we re going to go into the next 50 years we have to recognize that we re in a very different environment we re in a total information society where information has already been globalized and citizens all over the world have been empowered and they are knocking on the door here saying let us in and listen to us this is not an elite process anymore this is a process we want to be heard in so i implore you let s continue to make progress on all the issues where clearly we can let s open the process and listen to people even when we don t agree with them we might learn something and they ll feel that they ve been part of a legitimate process and let s continue to find ways to prove that the quality of life of ordinary citizens in every country can be lifted including basic labor standards and an advance on the environmental front if we do this then 50 years from now the people who will be sitting in all these chairs will be able to have the same feelings about you that mr moore articulated our feelings for the world war ii generation thank you very much and welcome again dem wjclinton1 3 95 bill_clinton to tricia and john taylor and all the people from the nixon center our distinguished guests from germany and from russia of course to henry kissinger i was thinking when he said we both spoke with accents judging from the results of the last election his native country is still claiming him more than mine is claiming me but i m a big one for reconciliation and there s plenty of time to achieve it i am honored to be here tonight just a month before he passed away president nixon wrote me the last letter i received from him about his last trip to russia i told some people at the time that it was the best piece of foreign policy writing i had received which angered my staff but happened to be the truth and as with all of our correspondence and conversations i was struck by the rigor of his analysis the energy of his convictions and the wisdom of the practical suggestions that he made to me but more than the specifics of the letter which basically argued for the imperative of the united states continuing to support political and economic reform in russia i was moved by the letter s larger message a message that ran throughout richard nixon s entire public life and all of his prolific writings president nixon believed deeply that the united states simply could not be strong at home unless we were strong and prepared to lead abroad and that made a big impression on me when i was running for president in 1992 even though there was this little sticker up on the wall of my campaign headquarters that said it s the economy stupid i always said in every speech that we had to have two objectives we had to restore the american dream for all of our people but we also had to make sure that we move into the next century still the strongest nation in the world and the world s greatest force for peace and freedom and democracy tonight i want to talk about the vital tradition of american leadership and our responsibilities those which henry kissinger mentioned and those which president nixon recognized so well our mission especially i want to discuss to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons today if we are going to be strong at home and lead abroad we have to overcome what we all recognize i think is a dangerous and growing temptation here in our own land to focus solely on the problems we face here in america i want to focus on the problems we face here in america i ve tried to do it for the last two years i look forward to working with this new republican led congress in the next two but not solely there is a struggle now going on between those of us who want to carry on the tradition of american leadership and those who would advocate a new form of american isolationism a struggle which cuts curiously across both party and ideological lines if we re going to continue to improve the security and prosperity of all our people then the tradition of american leadership must prevail we live in a moment of hope we all know that the implosion of communism and the explosion of the global economy have brought new freedoms to countries on every continent free markets are on the rise democracy is ascendant the slogan says after victory today more than ever before people across the globe do have the opportunity to reach their god given potential and because they do americans have new opportunities to reach theirs as well at the same time the post cold war world has revealed a whole web of problems that defy quick or painless solutions aggression of rogue states transnational threats like overpopulation and environmental degradation terrible ethnic conflicts and economic dislocation but at the heart of all these complex challenges i believe lies an age old battle for power over human lives the battle between the forces of freedom and tyranny tolerance and repression hope and fear the same idea that was under attack by fascism and then by communism remains under attack today in different ways all across the world the idea of the open society of free people american leadership is necessary for the tide of history to keep running our way and for our children to have the future they deserve yet there are some who would choose escapism over engagement the new isolationists oppose our efforts to expand free trade through gatt or nafta through apec and the summit of the americas they reject our conviction that democracy must be nurtured with investment and support a conviction that we are acting on from the former soviet union to south africa and some of them being hypocritical saying that we must trumpet the rhetoric of american strength and then at the same time they argue against the resources we need to bring stability to the persian gulf or to restore democracy to haiti or to control the spread of drugs and organized crime around the world or even to meet our most elemental obligations to the united nations and its peacekeeping work the new isolationists both on the left and the right would radically revise the fundamentals of our foreign policy that have earned bipartisan support since the end of world war ii they would eliminate any meaningful role for the united nations which has achieved for all of its problems real progress around the world from the middle east to africa they would deny resources to our peacekeepers and even to our troops and instead squander them on star wars and they would refuse aid to the fledgling democracies and to all those fighting poverty and environmental problems that can literally destroy hopes for a more democratic more prosperous more safe world the new isolationists are wrong they would have us face the future alone their approach would weaken this country and we must not let the ripple of isolationism that has been generated build into a tidal wave if we withdraw from the world today mark my words we ll have to contend with the consequences of our neglect tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow this is a moment of decision for all of us without regard to our party our background or our accent this is a moment of decision the extraordinary trend toward democracy and free markets is not inevitable and as we have seen recently it will not proceed easily in an even uninterrupted course this is hard work and at the very time when more and more countries than ever before are working to establish or shore up their own freedom in their fragile democracies they look to us for support at this time the new isolationists must not be allowed to pull america out of the game after just a few hours of debate because there is a modest price attached to our leadership we know now as president nixon recognized that there must also be limits to america s involvement in the world s problems limits imposed by clear headed evaluation of our fundamental interests we cannot be the world s policemen we cannot become involved in every problem we really care about but the choice we make must be rooted in the conviction that america cannot walk away from its interests or its responsibilities that s why from our first day in office this administration has chosen to reach out not retreat from our efforts to open markets for america to support democracy around the world to reduce the threat posed by devastating weapons and terrorists to maintaining the most effective fighting force in the world we have worked to seize the opportunities and meet the obligations of this moment none of this could have happened without a coalition of realists people in both houses of congress and importantly people from both parties people from coast to coast in our towns and cities and communities who know that the wealth and well being of the united states depends upon our leadership abroad even the early leaders of our republic who went to great pains to avoid involvement in great power conflicts recognize not only the potential benefits but the absolute necessity of engaging with the world before abraham lincoln was elected president our farmers were selling their crops overseas we had dispatched the trade mission all the way to japan trying to open new markets some problems don t go away and our navy had already sailed every ocean by the dawn of this century our growing political and economic power already imposed a special duty on america to lead a duty that was crystallized in our involvement in world war i but after that war we and the other great powers abandoned our responsibilities and the forces of tyranny and hatred filled the vacuum as is well known after the second world war our wise leaders did not repeat that mistake with the dawn of the nuclear age and the cold war and with the economies of europe and japan in shambles president truman persuaded an uncertain and weary nation yearning to shift its energies from the front lines to the home front to lead the world again a remarkable generation of americans created and sustained alliances and institutions the marshall plan nato the united nations the world bank the imf the things that brought half a century of security and prosperity to america to europe to japan and to other countries all around the world those efforts and the special resolve and military strength of our own nation held tyranny in check until the power of democracy the failures of communism and the heroic determination of people to be free consigned the cold war to history those successes would not have been possible without a strong bipartisan commitment to american s leadership senator arthur vandenburg s call to unite our official voice at the water s edge joined republicans to truman s doctrine his impact was all the more powerful for his own past as an isolationist but as vandenburg himself said pearl harbor ended isolationism for any realist today it is vandenburg s spirit that should drive our foreign policy and our politics the practical determination of senators nunn and lugar to help russia reduce its nuclear arsenal safely and securely the support from speaker gingrich and leader gephardt from chairman livingston and representative obey for aid to russia and the newly independent states the work of senators hatfield leahy and mcconnell and chairman gilman and representative hamilton for peace in the middle east the efforts of senator warner to restructure our intelligence all these provide strong evidence of the continuing benefits and vitality of leadership with bipartisanship if we continue to lead abroad and work together at home we can take advantage of these turbulent times but if we retreat we risk squandering all these opportunity and abandoning our obligations which others have entrusted to us and paid a very dear price to bring to us in this moment in history i know that the choice to go forward in a lot of these areas is not easy in democracies at this time many of the decisions that america s leaders have to make are not popular when they re made but imagine the alternative imagine for example the tariffs and barriers that would still cripple the world trading system for years into the future if internationalists coming together across party lines had not passed gatt and nafta imagine what the persian gulf region would look like today if the united states had not stepped up with its allies to stop iraqi aggression imagine the ongoing reign of terror and the flood of refugees at our borders had we not helped to give democracy a second chance in haiti imagine the chaos that might have ensued if we had not moved to help stabilize mexico s economy in each case there was substantial and sometimes overwhelming majority opinion against what needed to be done at the moment but because we did it the world has a better chance at peace and freedom but above all now i ask you to imagine the dangers that our children and grandchildren even after the cold war is over still can face if we do not do everything we can to reduce the threat of nuclear arms to curb the terrible chemical and biological weapons spreading around the world to counter the terrorists and criminals who would put these weapons into the service of evil as arthur vandenburg asked at the dawn of the nuclear age after a german v 1 attack had left london in flames and its people in fear how can there be isolation when men can devise weapons like that president nixon understood the wisdom of those words his life spanned an era of stunning increases in humankind s destructive capacity from the biplane to ballistic missiles from mustard gas to mushroom clouds he knew that the atomic age could never be won but could be lost on any list of his foreign policy accomplishments the giant steps he took toward reducing the nuclear threat must stand among his greatest achievement as president i have acted on that same imperative over the past two years the united states has made real progress in lifting the threat of nuclear weapons now in 1995 we face a year of particular decision in this era a year in which the united states will pursue the most ambitious agenda to dismantle and fight the spread of weapons of mass destruction since the atom was split we know that ours is an enormously complex and difficult challenge there is no single policy no silver bullet that will prevent or reverse the spread of weapons of mass destruction but we have no more important task arms control makes us not only safer it makes us stronger it is a source of strength it is one of the most effective insurance policies we can write for the future of our children our administration has focused on two distinct but closely connected areas decreasing and dismantling existing weapons and preventing nations or groups from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them we ve made progress on both fronts as the result of an agreement president yeltsin and i reached for the first time in a generation russian missiles are not pointed at our cities or our citizens we ve greatly reduced the lingering fear of an accidental nuclear launch we put into force the start i treaty with russia that will eliminate from both our countries delivery systems that carry more than 9 000 nuclear warheads each with the capacity to incinerate a city the size of atlanta start i negotiated by two republican administrations and put into force by this democratic administration is the first treaty that requires the nuclear powers actually to reduce their strategic arsenal both our countries are dismantling the weapons as fast as we can and thanks to a far reaching verification system including on site inspections which began in russia and the united states today each of us knows exactly what the other is doing and again through the far sighted program devised by senators nunn and lugar we are helping russia and the other newlyindependent states to eliminate nuclear forces in transport safeguard and destroy nuclear weapons and materiel ironically some of the changes that have allowed us to reduce the world s stockpile of nuclear weapons have made our nonproliferation efforts harder the breakup of the soviet union left nuclear materials dispersed throughout the newly independent states the potential for theft of nuclear materials therefore increased we face the prospect of organized criminals entering the nuclear smuggling business add to this the volatile mix the fact that a lump of plutonium the size of a soda can is enough to build a bomb and the urgency of the effort to stop the spread of nuclear materials should be clear to all of us that s why from our first day in office we have launched an aggressive coordinated campaign against international terrorism and nuclear smuggling we are cooperating closely with our allies working with russia and the other newly independent states improving security at nuclear facilities and strengthening multilateral export controls one striking example of our success is operation sapphire the airlift of nearly 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium enough to make dozens of bombs from kazakhstan to the united states for disposal we ve also secured agreements with russia to reduce the uranium and plutonium available for nuclear weapons and we re seeking a global treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons our patient determined diplomacy also succeeded in convincing belarus kazakhstan and ukraine to sign the nonproliferation treaty and give up the nuclear weapons left on their territory when the soviet union dissolved one of our administration s top priorities was to assure that these new countries would become non nuclear nations and now we are also achieving that goal because of these efforts four potential suppliers of ballistic missiles russia ukraine china and south africa have all agreed to control the transfer of these missiles and related technology pulling back from the nuclear precipice has allowed us to cut united states defense expenditures for strategic weapons by almost two thirds a savings of about 20 billion a year savings which can be shifted to vital needs such as boosting the readiness of our armed forces reducing the deficit putting more police on our own streets by spending millions to keep or take weapons out of the hands of our potential adversaries we are saving billions in arms costs and putting it to better use now in this year of decision our ambition for the future must be even more ambitious if our people are to know real lasting security we have to redouble our arms control nonproliferation and antiterrorism efforts we have to do everything we can to avoid living with the 21st century version of fallout shelters and duck and cover exercises to prevent another world trade center tragedy in just four days we mark the 25th anniversary of the non proliferation treaty nothing is more important to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons than extending the treaty indefinitely and unconditionally and that s why i ve asked the vice president to lead our delegation to the npt conference this april and to work as hard as we can to make sure we succeed in getting that indefinite extension the npt is the principal reason why scores of nations do not now possess nuclear weapons why the doomsayers were wrong one hundred and seventy two nations have made npt the most widely subscribed arms limitation treaty in history for one overriding reason it s in their self interest to do so non nuclear weapon states that sign on to the treaty pledge never to acquire them nuclear weapons states vow not to help others obtain nuclear weapons to facilitate the peaceful uses of atomic energy and to pursue nuclear arms control and disarmament commitments i strongly reaffirm along with our determination to attain universal membership in the treaty failure to extend npt indefinitely could open the door to a world of nuclear trouble pariah nations with rigid idealogies and expansionist ambitions would have an easier time acquiring terrible weapons and countries that have chosen to forego the nuclear option would then rethink their position they would certainly be tempted to reconsider that decision to further demonstrate our commitment to the goals of the treaty today i have ordered that 200 tons of fissile material enough for thousands of nuclear weapons be permanently withdrawn from the united states nuclear stockpile two hundred tons of fissile material that will never again be used to build a nuclear weapon a second key goal of ours is ratifying start ii once in effect that treaty will eliminate delivery systems from russian and american arsenals that carry more than 5 000 weapons the major reductions under start i together with start ii will enable us to reduce by two thirds the number of strategic warheads deployed at the height of the cold war at my urging the senate has already begun hearings on start ii and i am encouraged by the interest of the senators from both parties in seeking quick action i commend the senate for the action taken so far and i urge again the approval of the treaty as soon as possible president yeltsin and i have already instructed our experts to begin considering the possibility after start ii is ratified of additional reductions and limitations on remaining nuclear forces we have a chance to further lift the nuclear cloud and we dare not miss it to stop the development of new generations of nuclear weapons we must also quickly complete negotiations on a comprehensive test ban treaty last month i extended a nuclear testing moratorium that i put into effect when i took office and we revised our negotiating position to speed the conclusion of the treaty while reaffirming our determination to maintain a safe and reliable nuclear stockpile we will also continue to work with our allies to fully implement the agreement we reached with north korea first to freeze then do dismantle its nuclear program all under international monitoring the critics of this agreement i believe are wrong the deal does stop north korea s nuclear program and it does commit pyongyang to roll it back in the years to come i have not heard another alternative proposal that isn t either unworkable or foolhardy or one that our allies in the republic of korea and japan the nation s most directly affected would fail to support if north korea fulfills its commitment the korean peninsula and the entire world will clearly be less threatened and more secure the npt start ii the comprehensive test ban treaty the north korean agreement they top our agenda for the year ahead there are other critical tasks we also face if we want to make every american more secure including winning senate ratification of the chemical weapons convention negotiating legally binding measures to strengthen the biological and toxin weapons convention clarifying the abm treaty so as to secure its viability while permitting highly effective defenses against theater missile attacks continuing to support regional arms control efforts in the middle east and elsewhere and pushing for the ratification of conventional weapons which among other things would help us to reduce the suffering caused by the tens of millions of anti personnel mines which are plaguing millions of people all across this world my friends this is a full and challenging agenda there are many obstacles ahead we cannot achieve it if we give in to a new isolationism but i believe we can do no less than make every effort to complete it tonight let us remember what president nixon told the joint session of congress when he returned from his historic trip to moscow in 1972 he said we have begun to check the wasteful and dangerous spiral of nuclear arms let us seize the moment so that our children and the world s children can live free of the fears and free of the hatreds that have been the lot of mankind through the centuries now it is within our power to realize the dream that richard nixon described over 20 years ago we cannot let history record that our generation of americans refused to rise to this challenge that we withdrew from the world and abandoned our responsibilities when we knew better than to do it that we lacked the energy the vision and the will to carry this struggle forward the age old struggle between hope and fear so let us find inspiration in the great tradition of harry truman and arthur vandenburg a tradition that builds bridges of cooperation not walls of isolation that opens the arms of americans to change instead of throwing up our hands in despair that casts aside partisanship and brings together republicans and democrats for the good of the american people and the world that is the tradition that made the most of this land won the great battles of this century against tyranny and secured our freedom and our prosperity above all let s not forget that these efforts begin and end with the american people every time we reduce the threat that has hung over our heads since the dawn of the nuclear age we help to ensure that from the far stretches of the aleutians to the tip of the florida keys the american people are more secure that is our most serious task and our most solemn obligation the challenge of this moment is matched only by its possibility so let us do our duty thank you very much dem wjclinton1 4 00 bill_clinton we couldn t have done what has been done without you and i ll never forget you i would also like to thank dennis and the new york afl cio they supported and me and supported and hillary i thought she made a really good talk today i just want to make three points very briefly first of all when i showed up here in january of 93 thanks to the efforts of many of you and millions and millions of people like you all across america and the economy was in a shambles the deficit was huge and the debt had been quadrupled in 12 years and the social problems were getting worse and washington was like a political blood fight i had basically some very simple ideas about the economy and how it related to the rest of our lives and i just want to reiterate that because that s where the differences are between us and our friends in the republican party that s where the differences between al gore and george bush are and the differences between hillary and her opponent number one i believe you could be pro business and pro labor and as a matter of fact i didn t think you could successfully have an economic policy unless you help both labor and business number two i believe you could be pro work and pro family so that i thought we ought to have things like annual leave and health insurance and if people were going to be required to move from welfare to work we ought to give them child care and food and medicine for their kids and transportation to get to work and training to know what they were doing instead of just talking about welfare cheats and all of that i thought you could be pro work and pro family number three i thought you could be for economic growth and for environmental protection i thought working families could be able to take their children to parks and that we could generally still grow the economy i believed all those things and essentially our friends in the other party believe that they can only help business by sticking it to labor that every family protection is bad for the economy and the work ethic and that the environment s a nice thing as long as you don t have to take too much trouble to protect it now that s what they believe and so we ve had this donnybrook for seven and a half years but i think the evidence is in and you need to think about that in terms of hillary s race the vice president s race every other race this year it s not as if there is a debate here based on the evidence we have the longest economic expansion in history we have these 21 million jobs we have the lowest unemployment and welfare rates in 30 years we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest poverty rate in 20 years the lowest income tax burden on average families in four years the lowest female unemployment rate in four years this is not some sort of fluke friends you re on the right side of history so when you fight for the presidential campaign and you fight in the senatorial race tell people that this is not a debate and they are making a deliberate decision if they vote for the other candidates to go back to a failed economic theory a failed social theory a failed environmental policy and you ve got to be serious and blunt here and i m not running for anything and you know most days i m okay about it what is at stake here is bigger than me or the vice president or hillary or all of you it is the direction of our country and you need to go out and say you re not anti business you ve proved you could be pro labor and pro business you ve proved you could be pro family and pro work you ve proved you could clean out the environment and grow the economy that s where you are and they are making a deliberate decision to reject policies that have worked for america if they don t support the vice president hillary and our whole other crowd the second thing i want to tell you is as you can see my wife is an enormously talented and passionate person but what i want you to know is that particularly for a state like new york which has always had high quality people in the united states senate i think she would be a worthy successor to robert kennedy and pat moynihan i think it s important for people to understand that she s not just somebody who lived in the white house for eight years and would now like to be a senator for 30 years she has been a leading advocate for the cause of families and children for 20 years now for specific provable advances in the quality of education for our children there is hardly anybody who runs as a private citizen for the united states senate in my lifetime i can t think of anybody who ran as a private citizen for the senate who had as much knowledge as she has or as much experience as she has on the things that will really count in the terms of the shape of america and the children who are the third thing i want to say is is this the most important point hillary made about me and us and our politics is that we believe that we should try to bring together not drive them apart they believe you have to drive people apart in order to win elections and since they re wrong on the issues they re right in other words people won t agree with them on the issues so the only way they could win is to convince them that we re the first cousins of space aliens now this is not a complicated deal and so that s why hillary s opponent can raise a double ton of money besides being mayor and having special relations with a lot of those people that new york you ve got this right wing machine geared up against here again you know when he wanted to be mayor of new york he said i m a moderate when he wants to be senator from new york he wants all those right wingers that helped governor bush in the nomination and are represented by the bob jones university flap you all heard about he gets richard viguerie to write letters that raise the hair on the back of your head now there s a reason they ve got to do that because they like political power and the majority of the people do not agree with them they ve got this figured out now we re right and they re wrong on these big issues so the only way they can win is to convince people that we re space aliens but that s not good for america far better for them to modernize their party and their ideas and then engage in a debate and let the people move back and forth depending on who they think is right on the specific issues that s the way america is supposed to work but i want you to understand what s at stake in this election in new york and in america because we ve got a chance now finally to reject the politics of division if you do this one more time you ve got a real chance to elevate the politics of america and let me tell you why it s so important i want to close with this point in february we celebrated the longest economic expansion in the history of this country and that s the good news the bad news is it might put people to sleep and think they can afford to just go through or indulgences or on a whim or not vote at all in this election because they think things are going along real well and let me tell you why what hillary said the most important point she made is about the politics of division when we celebrated this economic expansion i asked my economic advisors i said well when was the last longest expansion in american history do you know when it was 1961 to 1969 now let me take you on a little walk down memory lane in 1964 i was a senior in high school a graduate the country was heartbroken about president kennedy s assassination but were heartened by president johnson s leadership strongly united behind him we had low unemployment low inflation high growth we had a civil rights crisis but everybody thought it was going to be handled in the context of the courts not in the streets we had a few people in vietnam but nobody thought it was going to tear the country up everybody thought america would win the cold war just in the course of events because freedom was clearly superior to communism and we were happy as clams and totally relaxed about it now four years later i graduated from college here in washington two days after robert kennedy was killed two months after martin luther king was killed nine weeks after lyndon johnson said he couldn t run for president because the country was so divided over vietnam a few weeks later richard nixon was elected president based on a campaign that he represented the silent majority now what were the necessary of that those of us who weren t for him were the loud minority that was the first of these great us versus them campaigns divide not unite and we ve been using and theming now for 30 years and when i ran for president i said i wanted to put people first and have opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community of all americans that was the united not divisive campaign when we ran for reelection we said we wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century that everybody could walk across that s the united not a divisive campaign and one of the reasons hillary decided to enter this raise is that she knew how important it was not only to be right on the specific issues but to keep trying to pull the country together as we grow more diverse not tear it apart and i like the way things are now but they could be a whole lot better if we just focus and keep working and remember to be for business and labor work and family the environment and the economy unite not divide that s really what her race represents that s what al gore s race represents that s what the referendum on what kind of future we re going to have represents and what i want to tell you is i ve been waiting since i was a boy of 17 for 35 years and more now to see my country in the position we were in in 1964 to build a future of our dreams for our children and this election will determine whether we move to that level it took me years just to try to turn this country around and get it going in the right direction and to stop people from trying to take things away from you now we ve got a chance to do something good that s what this senate race is about that s what this presidential race is about that s what this whole election is about and you just keep in mind people know they know we re right on the issues so they ve got to beat us some other way and you ve got to stand up for unity and progress and the right kind of change i am grateful to you for what you ve done for me but what you can do for hillary what you can do for the vice president and most important what you can do for america and your children s future will matter even more thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton1 4 98 bill_clinton president diouf distinguished leaders of senegal and the united states members of the senegalese and american armed forces ladies and gentlemen we have just seen a training exercise involving dedicated soldiers from our two nations part of the african crisis response initiative i d like to thank the senegalese soldiers and the united states armed forces i d like to especially thank the distinguished officers who briefed us lt colonel diallo and major erchenbrack and i d also like to express my appreciation to the other senegalese soldiers and gendarmes who were standing there who have served with multinational peacekeeping forces in haiti and bosnia africa and the middle east senegal is respected around the world for its tradition of peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts you are a leader among the more than 15 african countries that regularly contribute troops to united nations peacekeeping missions i thank senegalese troops for their commitment to peace and i thank our american troops for your work here africa and america have a great stake in the success of the soldiers like those president diouf and i have seen here today where bullets and bombs prevent children from going to school and parents from going to work amid chaos and ruin these soldiers and other like them can bring security hope and a future terrible violence continues to plague our world and africa has seen some of the worst in some cases children often against their will have stood on the front lines of armies as cannon fodder for the ambitions of others a few days ago i met in rwanda with some of the survivors of the 1994 genocide there as i said to them let me say again we must find better ways to prevent such horrors from occurring while peace has started to take hold in many nations that once knew only violence ethiopia mozambique angola liberia and elsewhere tensions linger in some of these nations and violence continues in others like burundi somalia and sudan buried land mines prevent children from walking in safety in too many african countries millions of refugees still remain driven from their homes in the debris of war poverty and disease thrive the international community needs new tools to keep the peace in volatile areas and cope with humanitarian crises the african crisis response initiative program which president diouf and i have seen in action here today provides peacekeeping training and non lethal equipment to african soldiers with the goal of helping african nations to prepare their military units led by african commanders to respond quickly and effectively to humanitarian and peacekeeping challenges in africa and around the world senegal was one of the first nations to support the african crisis response initiative and along with uganda the first to participate in its training exercises mali and malawi participated soon after we are about to begin an exercise with ghanian troops along with belgian soldiers later this year we will conduct exercises with ethiopia and we look forward to other countries participating soon our purpose is not to dominate security matters in africa or to abandon america s role in africa s security but instead to build on existing efforts including those of african nations the organization for african unity the united nations france britain and others to strengthen the capacity for preserving peace here with our african partners we will also establish a center for security studies in africa modeled on the marshall center in germany to provide programs for civilian and military leaders on defense policy planning and the role of militaries in democratic societies america will continue to be involved on this continent as long as african nations desire our assistance and our partnership in building a safer future mr president i want to thank you and your military leaders for being such partners and i would like to thank the members of the american military and one in particular general jamerson for his efforts relentless over the past couple of years to build closer ties between african militaries and our own to meet the threats to peace and freedom we will face in the 21st century we must strengthen our resolve in the face of hatred and violence we must tell the aggressors and those who tear societies apart you will not prevail we must prove that the peacemakers are getting stronger and above all we must demonstrate that the peacemakers are working together thank you very much dem wjclinton1 5 95 bill_clinton that may be the best introduction i ever received and if i had really good judgment i d just sit down thank you ellen malcolm senator mikulski and congresswoman sheila jackson lee and members of congress who are out in the audience my longtime friend ann richards i met ann richards over 20 years ago and i think she was living in a place called lacy lake view and it was easy for me to see even then and even by texas standards she was a little bit larger than life humor and empathy grit and grace courage and decency i respect her and i envy her her jokes are always better than mine and you ll all remember that she delivered one of the best political lines ever it perfectly captured the mood of america do you remember pass the doritos mario didn t you always want to do one of those commercials i did i m also indebted to ann richards for another reason she and hillary went out to dinner last night and by apparent happenstance julia child was eating at the same restaurant so the people who were running the show decided that they should have everything julia was having plus whatever they ordered according to my wife anyway they had a 10 course four hour meal after which they were wheeled out on gurneys the good news is i got home from new york last night about 1 30 a m and it was perfectly easy to get hillary up to talk with me i want to say a special word of appreciation to ellen malcolm for her vision and her work her phenomenal energy have played an immeasurable role in electing more women to high public office in this country than would have been conceivable before she began her important work i thank her for her recitation of the work that our administration has done we have tried to involve women at an unprecedented level i notice when i started this administration people were even some of the great establishment newspapers they were always criticizing me for trying to have a diverse administration as if there were something wrong with it well i never had any quotas and evidence of that is we still only have only 44 percent of my appointees are women but that s about twice as good as anybody else ever did and i m proud of that but i have always believed we could achieve excellence with outreach and effort without quotas and i always thought we had kind of a stupid quota system before it was just never stated there were just some things that weren t women s work now that s a quota system and we paid for it and our country s better off now that we re scrapping it in the beginning they used to criticize the judicial appointments process but after two years mercy they looked up and we d named more judges in that time period than previous administrations and more women and minorities than the three previous presidents democratic and republican combined but the thing that was interesting and important to me is we had the highest percentage of people rated well qualified by the american bar association of any administration since they d been keeping the records so under the leadership of erskine bowles who is now my deputy chief of staff the small business administration increased loans to women businesses by over 80 percent in one year and they did it without reducing the number of loans to white males and they did it without making a single unqualified loan we can do this folks the old system was the quota system we need a system where everybody in america has a chance to serve and live up to the fullest of their god given abilities women s health is a terribly important issue to me ellen talked about it my grandmother and my mother were working women and nurses and this morning hillary kicked off a new chapter in our campaign against breast cancer the most important issue in women s health this week is the need to raise our voices in support of dr henry foster to be our surgeon general he is a good man he is a good doctor he has spent his entire life delivering babies bringing health care to people who wouldn t otherwise have it training doctors to go out and help give health care to people who otherwise wouldn t have it and spearheading a nationally televised nationally recognized program to reduce teenage pregnancy it received one of president bush s point of light awards henry foster is a pro life pro choice doctor who deserves to be confirmed as surgeon general henry foster s record should be seen in the lives of thousands of babies that he has helped come into this world in a health way and the people he has tried to educate and the people he has tried to help and he deserves to be more than a political football in the emerging politics of this season we are on the verge of a new century and a difficult and different time where everything is changing and everything including our politics is somewhat unpredictable as we look into the next century we have a lot to be happy about the end of the cold war the receding of the conventional nuclear threat the emergence of the information age and all the exciting possibilities of a global economy but the great challenge of this age and the great challenge i predict to you of the next 50 is that all the forces that are lifting us up and opening unlimited possibilities to our children and our grandchildren all the forces that are driving us toward a more integrated and cooperative world have a dark underside of disintegration because of so many of the things that are happening we are lifting people up and seeing people beat down at the same time there is great economic division in all the advanced countries why because more than ever before education determines income and future prospects so there is a great fault line in the great american middle class today which is responsible for a lot of the anxiety and a lot of the political issues and a lot of the divisiveness in our country those that have a good education are being lifted up those that don t are being left behind more than half more than half of the male workers in this country are working a longer work week for a lower wage than they were making 10 years ago that is a phenomenally important fact not just economically but psychologically all over america men come home from work at night and sit down across the table with their families and know they re working as hard as they can and they feel less secure and they wonder if they ve let their families down we have to do things that will change that we have to bridge the economic divide and unleash the potential of all of our people and the key issue there is education constant unrelenting dedication to excellence in education for a lifetime it is necessary if we re going to bring this country back together we have these profound social divisions in our country we have so much diversity now it is really a it s a gold mine for us ann richards took the lead in trying to get the congress to ratify the nafta agreement because she knew that we had to be more closely connected with other countries in the world and that our ethnic and racial diversity is a gold mine but when people are frightened it s easy to focus that fright on people who look different than we do or who think differently than we do about certain things so there is this great social division will our diversity become a source of unity and strength or will it be a source of our undoing and then there are deeper moral divisions that i want to talk about today which are most clearly manifested in the varying attitudes in this country toward violence and it s something we re all living with in a very personal and human way because of the way we have shared the grief and outrage of oklahoma city the condition of women in all three of these areas is profoundly important and the response of women to all of these changes is important as ellen said we ve made a good beginning to try to help deal with these problems to strengthen families and support incomes with the family and medical leave act the earned income credit this year will give the average family of four with an income under 25 000 an average tax cut of 1 000 we have set in motion a plan under the leadership of secretary shalala to immunize all the kids in this country under the age of two by 1996 those are important things this congress of the last two years voted virtually to fully fund the women infants and children program to make sure that child nutrition and care for pregnant women was on the front burner we have had dramatic expansion in our education efforts from head start to apprenticeships for young people who don t go to college but want good jobs to more affordable college loans for millions of people to the national service program which has enabled young people to serve their communities and earn money to go to college all these things are terribly important we have a future economic agenda and a families agenda that involves raising the minimum wage which i hope you will all support two thirds of all the beneficiaries of an increase in the minimum wage will be working women working women there was a remarkable show on one of our television stations up here the other night a news program on a little town south of here that had a lot of minimum wage workers and they went and interviewed a woman working in a factory and the news reporter said now you know your employer says that if the minimum wage goes up that they ll either have to put more money in machines or they ll lose business in any case you might lose your job if the minimum wage is raised and she looked at him and said honey i ll take my chances which i thought was the best one line response i ve seen on the news in a long time if we don t raise the minimum wage next year it will be at a 40 year low that is not my idea of what america should look like as we move into the global economy we ought to have welfare reform but it ought to be the right kind of welfare reform we shouldn t be punishing people for mistakes in the past we should be giving them opportunity and imposing responsibility as they move into the future so people can succeed as successful workers and successful parents it ought to be work based parent based strong program that lifts people not puts them down basically just as a guise to save money that is very important you should be involved in the welfare reform effort and we should continue to invest more in education not less i say to the congress over and over we have two deficits not one yes we ve got a budget deficit but we ve also got an education deficit and if we try to solve the budget deficit at the expense of the education deficit we will be cutting off our nose to spite our face because we will lower the incomes of america and their capacity to pay taxes so there are things we can do to deal with the economic divide where the fault line is education and we are working to do things that will bring us together and to lessen these social tensions by lifting up everybody in their work and in their family life but we have to say that america has special problems which we have all begun to think more about because of the heartbreak of oklahoma city and that is violence it has many forms we live with it in our streets and our schools and our homes where we work where we live where we play yes we see it visibly if there is an action against a clinic where legal abortions are performed but we also see it in some of our churches and synagogues i never will forget being in brooklyn one day with congressman schumer and driving by a synagogue with a big swastika on it in the united states in 1992 we also see it unfortunately in our families violence can do a lot of damage in a country and it certainly has here in oklahoma city we suffered a terrible wound because it was an act of terrorism and as we mourn the dead and heal the injured console the grieving and begin the rebuilding we must also spare no effort to bring to justice those responsible we must also understand that even punishing the guilty will not be enough if we cannot protect the innocent and the future so i say to you my fellow americans i take a back seat to no one in my devotion to the constitution but we can protect the constitution and our freedoms and be tougher on terrorism in america and we must i have sent to congress a large number of suggestions that will strengthen our hand in dealing with this issue and again i urged them to act on it and act on it without delay the stories you do not read in the newspaper are those that are most important the bombs that don t go off the schemes that are thwarted before they succeed and we must be better and better and better at that whether terrorism is hatched abroad or within our borders we must to better but we must also stand up against those who say that somehow this is all right this is somehow a political act people who say i love my country but i hate my government these people who do they think they are saying that their government has stamped out human freedom do you think i don t now if there s another country in the world that would by law protect the right of a lot of these groups to say what they want to say to each other over the short wave radio or however else they want to say it to assemble over the weekend and do whatever they want to do and to bear arms which today means more than the right to keep and bear arms it may mean the right to keep and bear an arsenal of artillery is there a who are they to say they have no freedom in this country other countries do not permit that i plead with you do not lose your concentration on this issue this is a big issue remember what i said earlier the forces that are lifting up the world have a dark underside what makes the global society work what makes the information age work openness free movement low barriers to the transfer of people ideas and information what does that mean you can have a terrorist network on the internet exchanging information about building bombs what does that mean you can build a bomb in one state and get in your truck and drive somewhere freely and without being interrupted what does it mean it s easier to get into the countries other countries where you want to make mischief the open society is at more risk to the forces of organized evil don t forget about the people in oklahoma city don t forget about their families don t forget about what they need to rebuild and don t forget about what we need to try to prevent future incidents of this kind do not lose your interest in this issue as it fades into the past we have a lot of work to do let me also say that i hope that this incident will focus us a little more on the general problem of the extraordinary level of violence in our society to find its common roots as well as to understand the differences in the different kinds of violence we have i have to say this and maybe it s an old fashioned view but i believe that it is innate in human nature that there is the capacity to do wrong and to harm others and we are all balanced in different ways subject to different forces there are always excuses or reasons that can be given i m sorry for whatever terrible thing happened to the suspect in the oklahoma city bombing case but we have to stop making excuses and start thinking about what we can do to build a responsible nonviolent society there is a lot of good news out there i was in new york yesterday where the crime rate has been going down for several years and where this year the murder rate is so far knock on wood more than a third below what it was last year and this is happening all over the country but violent crime is much higher today than it was a generation ago there s been rising incidents of sexual assaults muggings homicides some of it caused by street gangs which themselves systematically terrorize law abiding citizens in their area of operation first in our inner cities and now spreading more and more to suburbs and to small towns increasingly the victims of crime and the culprits alike are young people even children today believe it or not there are thousands of children who stay home from school every day in america because they re afraid that violence will await them there and even more children go and learn about fear in their classrooms and hallways sometimes the sole motivation for crime is hate or racial prejudice or extreme ideology we ve seen people killed and others wounded only because they were working at clinics in the last decade we ve been forced to acknowledge the full extent of reality about which we had long remained in denial which may not be able to be explained in terms of hate racial prejudice or extremist ideology and that is the epidemic violence visited on women and children often in the home i have known about this problem for a long time i understand how it rips up families hillary and i were regular visitors at a shelter for battered women and their children when we lived at home i have talked with abused children i know that this problem of domestic violence is a difficult one we have begun to be aggressive with it america must be aggressive with it we see how much of crime among our young people is still due to drugs and it s shocking to me that for reasons that are not entirely understandable as the economy has gotten better but some places have been left behind casual drug use among some of our young people is going up again this is a bad thing we must speak against it it will lead to more violence if you look at the profile of every penitentiary in the country every governor in america including ann richards and bill clinton every governor in the country in the last 15 years has given speech after speech after speech about how tough we were on crime and how many prison cells we ve built if you go behind those bars you ll see them just full of people who basically had two problems they had no education and they were either addicted to drugs or alcohol now and so we continue to pay the price in violence and wrecked lives all of you have cared a great deal about making democracy work for all americans and you ve done a good thing and when we change our economic policy when we broaden the doors of opportunities for people and permit more women and others who have been traditionally denied a chance to live up to their fullest capacities a chance to do it we re all better off and we re all strengthened but when this country has the plague of violence we endure in so many ways we are all weakened the most tragic thing outside the human loss in oklahoma city itself to me was seeing the absolute terror that inflicted the lives of millions of american children who felt vulnerable who felt that they somehow no longer understood what the rules were didn t know if their parents could protect them didn t know if right and wrong would reign in america so i say to you we need to take a serious look at this whole issue of violence we tried to address it in the crime bill last year with more police on the street because we know that that prevents crime with the assault weapons ban and the brady bill with stronger sentences and prevention programs for our young people and programs for drug education and prevention and treatment we also understand that poverty breeds crime that s why i worked so hard on the earned income tax credit to say that if you do work you shouldn t be still in poverty we ought to reward work all those the real heroes in this country today are people who are being pounded by this global economy who are living in neighborhoods that are difficult and still get up every day and go to work and raise their children the best they can obey the law pay their taxes and try to make things work they deserve economic policies and security policies that give them a chance to be honored for their work i do want to say again though we have to try look deeper at the cause of the violence ellen mentioned that i recently appointed bonnie campbell of iowa to direct our office of violence against women and one of her most important jobs will be simply to educate the american people about the scope of this problem and what should be done and how to root it out but our goal must be not just to punish people who do this but to stop it from happening in the first place to change the spirit and the culture of america yesterday or excuse me late last week i met with eileen adams another distinguished appointee at the justice department who runs our office of victims rights and we honored people who spend all their time working with victims of crime i met mothers who d lost their children i met a woman who had been victimized by a repeat sex offender who was released on parole who molested her poured gasoline over her body set her afire and left her to die and this young girl having literally had her body burned beyond recognition and her brave mother have worked for more than a decade after this child was maimed and wounded and burned almost beyond recognition put her life back together physically and spiritually and now the mother and the daughter spend all their time trying to help victims of crime we must address what is causing the united states to commit the whole range of violence that we see and none of us can escape our responsibility we have to say what do we expect from individuals and we re not going to tolerate the defense that somebody else made me do it what will families have to do what will community organizations have to do what must the churches do what must the government do where have we been wrong what must the media do and what must the culture do the influence centers in our culture the entertainment industry the sport industry there have now been the vice president told me this morning before i left to come over here there have now been 3 000 studies on the relationship between violent behavior and exposure to violence through entertainment in ways that desensitize people to it and they all show that there is a connection now that doesn t mean that we should have all movies and books without violence this is a violent country it s a part of real life it doesn t mean they can t be exciting but it does mean when we desensitize and deaden people to the reality of violence we cannot be surprised when our children who do not know right from wrong and are not as well developed as those of us who are older have a desensitized reaction to their own conduct so we must all say what is our responsibility we must all accept the fact that our words do have consequences we must accept that we must ask without pointing the finger of blame necessarily we say do you say things or do things that either reinforce violent behavior encourage violent behavior act as it at least it doesn t matter to you or numb people to what it s really like and what could we do to deal with this in a comprehensive way we don t need to make this a political issue we must not make it a partisan issue but neither can anybody run and hide under the sheet and say well i didn t do this that or the other thing therefore what i did do was fine this horrible thing that has happened to us in oklahoma at least imposes on us a responsibility to all examine the roots of violence in this country we need not be more violent than other countries we need not abuse our freedom so cavalierly we need not snuff out more lives but above all if we do this we can t be selective we can t condemn one act of violence and condone another that would be like trying to put out a fire by just watering one room and leaving the others to burn for too long people i think have taken the easy way out and blamed violence only on the environment in which a person grows up well that s doubtless true but if that s true why do most people who grow up in horrible environments turn out to be lawabiding citizens why do some people succeed against all the odds other people because it lets them off the hook just want to blame the individual and ignore the root causes well if that s true why are some groups of people so much more law abiding than others and so much less violent than others we ve got to set aside our preconceptions and our ideological baggage and i say again we don t need partisanship here we need to look at violence with new and fresh eyes my administration has worked to make our country safer it s worked to give more people the liberation of education it s worked to make the economy stronger and we can do more on all these fronts but the thing that is driving violence in america is deeper than that deeper than all these things so i ask you to work on this to work on this with me yes continue your passion for the cause of violence against women and children yes continue your passion for the proposition that people who only perform legally under the law should not have their places of business bombed but be concerned about the political violence that makes people believe that they can literally claim to be political prisoners when they murder innocent children and be concerned about the violence that grows out of our total insensitivity to the welfare of all these children who are growing up on the meanest streets in america be concerned about the violence that may at least be legitimized by the cultural forces and the daily words that all of us endure and sometimes enjoy we all have a role in this this is a big issue it will not be solved overnight but it will be hard enough i will tell you again it will be hard enough for us to combat the forces of disintegration and organized evil into the 21st century if we are at our best if we are at our best it will be hard enough if we continue to be insensitive to the role all the forces in our society play to the environment in which we operate it may be a battle we can t win i honestly believe that the years ahead of us will be the most exciting most productive most rewarding years in all of human history especially for people who historically have not been able to live up to the fullest of their capacity but to do that we must we must root out this scourge of darkness within our country and we can do it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton1 6 93 bill_clinton thank you very much i want to thank gerry kleczka and everybody else but i especially want to thank the langer family for bringing me to bayview i m glad to be here when i was on the way out here today the mayor said that he was the mayor of milwaukee and bayview and that i needed to know that if i was going to come here so i m glad to be here i also want to introduce to you wisconsin s newest member of congress mr peter barca who just showed up i m sorry you all are in there behind that fence and i look forward to getting out and shaking hands with you i just wanted to say one or two things before i do i was just in downtown milwaukee speaking with several thousand people about the economic plan that i have presented to congress and there are two or three things that i want to say to you about it so you ll all know because there are a lot of things that have not been brought out that i think you re entitled to hear first of all this plan has over 200 spending cuts i see all these signs saying cut spending where were you when we cut them it has a lot of spending cuts in it over 240 billion secondly the tax increases in this plan all go to reduce the deficit and over 74 percent of the money comes from people with incomes above 100 000 families with incomes below 30 000 pay nothing the other thing i want to tell you is if your income is above 30 000 and below 100 000 depending on the size of your family the energy tax that the house approved costs you a dollar a month next year 7 a month the year after that and for a family of four 17 a month the year after that all of it goes to reduce the debt i think it s worth doing it s brought interest rates down to a 20 year low we have interest rates at a 20 year low that means americans are going to refinance their homes get lower car loans refinance their business loans get lower consumer loans lower college loans it will save 100 billion for american businesses and individuals this year if we can keep those interest rates down so i want you to support that the second thing i want to say about it is this we have put forward a program which will open the doors of college education to all americans just like i promised in the campaign lower interest loans better repayment terms and giving tens of thousands of americans a chance to pay their college loans by serving their communities here at home by working to make their communities a better place the next point i want to make is that as soon as this budget is over just like i said in the campaign we re coming forward with a plan to provide health care security affordable health care to the working families of this country who have been savaged by high costs insufficient coverage and the inability to change jobs because somebody in their family has been sick this administration is about jobs incomes health care education and training and bringing this deficit down now i want to say one last thing i heard all this talk in the country about how this is a tax program i just want to make this point it is not just a tax program it s an economic program it is over 240 billion in budget cuts we re going to reduce the size of the federal government by 150 000 we are we are cutting first that s what the budget resolution is all about you can t raise taxes without the budget cuts it s illegal now that s the whole point they can t we won t have the tax increases without the budget cuts it s all going to be put in a trust fund and unlike all previous years if we don t make our reduction targets and reduce that debt the president by law is now required to come in and fix it something previous presidents did not have to do we have changed the law and what you ve got to decide is whether you want more hot air more rhetoric more politicians up there telling you what you want to hear or somebody who will tell you the truth turn the country around and get the economy going again i think that s what you want and i hope you ll support your members of congress and me as we try to do that let me say one final thing i think that a lot of you before i came here today had no earthly idea that we d cut all that spending because the congress didn t fight it they just did it i think you did not know also that families with incomes under 30 000 were being held harmless because we had support for that and you may not know that small businesses like langer s pharmacy are going to have tax incentives to reinvest in their businesses that were not there before if this plan passes this is a good plan for the economy it s a fair plan for the middle class it asks the wealthiest americans to pay their fair share and unlike previous plans it s not a lot of hot air it will do what it s supposed to do i think we ve had enough hot air for the last 12 years let s do something real and strong and move this country forward thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton1 6 95 bill_clinton thank you very much i want to mostly just listen to you but i thought that it might be helpful for me to talk for a minute or two about the kinds of decisions that are coming before our country in the next year on the farm bill and other things i want to thank senator baucus and i want to thank congressman williams for always making sure that the white house and the president know about the concerns and the interests of the people of this state they have never been bashful about doing that and they ve done a pretty good job of it and i thank them for that i have been concerned about the interest and welfare of agriculture and rural america generally for a long time and a long time before i became president a lot of you know that the state where i lived arkansas where i was governor for 12 years is a big agricultural state and it s a different kind of agriculture by and large i had les take me out in the field and explain how you bring in the wheat crop when you do it and how you decide what land to lay out but my state is principally rice soybeans and then wheat and chicken and also a lot of there s a big hog growing operation and a sizable cattle operation there and i ve been through a lot of things with farmer friends of mine i was governor all during the 1980s when we lost a lot of our farmers and a lot of my friends went down and we were struggling even to keep our rural banks alive and keep them in a position where they could finance farms we changed all of our state laws to try to do that so i ve seen the worst times of agriculture i think the 90 farm bill in many ways has worked reasonably well although i think there are some problems with it since i have been president i have worked very hard on an overall economic strategy for our country which kept in mind the important role of agriculture we have fought like crazy to have more trade and fairer trade for american agriculture we were able to get the gatt world trade agreement because after years and years of fighting we were able to persuade the europeans to agree to reduce their agriculture subsidies so that they wouldn t be pushing us out of markets because they were subsidizing to a greater extent than we were we were able to begin to export some things to japan and china and the far east that we d never been able to export before principally rice apples and other fruit products we negotiated as max said this one year agreement with canada and set up this commission to try to resolve this problem that they have and as you know they you understand this far better than i do but there were some things which happened in the original trade negotiations with canada and there are some things that are basically endemic to the way they organize their agriculture which make it almost impossible for us to get a fair deal unless we have a specific bilateral agreement on it so we ve been working very hard on that a few weeks ago i went to ames iowa to iowa state university and had a national rural conference and talked to farmers from all over the country about some other problems we ve got specific problems like the beef problem with korea and we also talked about the need to continue in this new farm bill a decent level of support for agricultural research a decent level of effort and a greater effort for the development of alternative products out of the farming now done in america we had farmers from the middle west bring some very impressive things that they had made from their sort of side businesses in agriculture including windshield wiper fluid and they even gave me some golf tees which i used they re biodegradable and that s important because i break one every time i swing a club i think it s very important that as we look ahead that we deal with not only the question of how much we re going to spend on agricultural supports but what these programs are going to look like are we going to have for example a greater effort to help young farmers get into farming when the average age of farmers keeps going up and up and up are we if we want to get the prices up and have a long term responsible program for the environment shouldn t we preserve the conservation reserve program or something awful much like it no matter what we do to the rest of the farm supports and then there s this larger question of what the overall role of agriculture is to america yes we do spend a substantial amount of money on farm supports but as all of you know we spend dramatically less than we did 10 years ago the supports were cut a lot in 85 they were cut a lot in 90 and 93 and then again in this 96 we proposed some modest cuts mostly to tighten up the income eligibility but my belief is that since agriculture is producing this year over 50 billion worth of farm exports the largest dollar value of exports in our history we re going to have more than a 20 billion trade surplus in agriculture and to give you some ideas of the figure roughly we ll have a trade deficit maybe of something over 100 billion and 60 percent of it is in automobiles from japan and auto parts and the rest of it s in oil and otherwise we re pretty much in balance thanks almost entirely to the massive surplus we enjoy in agriculture and in the sale of airplane and airplane parts and otherwise we re more or less in balance so to me this is a very big thing and i know i imagine people in montana are pretty much like people in arkansas everybody wants to see the budget brought into balance everybody knows that things got haywire in the last 12 years you need to know that the budgets that max and pat voted for would have the federal government in balance today we would have a balanced budget today but for the interest we have to pay on the debt run up between 1981 and the day i became president so we turned this deficit thing around we need to keep bringing it down but we need to look at the agricultural issue in light of how you live here and the importance to the united states of this massive economic strength we have in american agriculture which means every person in the country has benefitted by what you do by having the cheapest best food in the world and also by having an enormous economic weapon in a global economy so that s kind of the perspective i m looking for we re going to have to make some changes in the farm program but i want to get your feedback on your lives your work your experiences and what you think we should be thinking about as we number one we re coming up to the end of the one year deal on the canadian agreement as max said but we re also going to have to rewrite the farm bill we do it every five years and this year it coincides with this effort that is being made to balance the budget so we need to really think this through and that s why i wanted to be here and i m not going to say anymore i want to listen to you now dem wjclinton1 7 93a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you please be seated and welcome to the rose garden i want to acknowledge the presence in our audience of lee brown s children the attorney general the secretary of transportation the secretary of agriculture general powell the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff numerous other distinguished americans and members of congress including senator hatch senator dodd senator cohen senator pressler and congressmen rangel conyers gilman and congresswoman waters i may have left someone out and senator kennedy just called to say he was on the way i think that s all a great tribute to lee brown we are here today to install a uniquely qualified person to lead our nation s effort in the fight against illegal drugs and what they do to our children to our streets and to our communities and to do it for the first time from a position sitting in the president s cabinet when i named lee brown to head the office of national drug control policy many called that an inspired choice i would say that is an accurate characterization because lee brown brings three decades of experience in highest law enforcement offices in some of the toughest cities in our country new york and houston and atlanta i know if mayor dinkins were here today he would want me to say a special word of thanks for the unique partnership they enjoyed in a safe streets program which clearly lowered the crime rate in many neighborhoods and many categories of crime in new york city lee brown s leadership in the cause of keeping our communities and citizens safe is unsurpassed and now he must bring those skills and all that experience to deal with the destructive lure of illegal drugs we know that successful drug control does not take place in a vacuum this is a many headed monster drugs violate our borders when smugglers bring them in as illegal cargo our jails are crowded and our court system is overloaded with users and dealers crime and violence are brought to communities large and small and random drive by shootings and deliberate killings as well too many young americans are robbed of their future and many many of their very lives for all those reasons fighting drugs requires a multifaceted offensive and the maximum use of the resources we have as a people that s what we ve been trying to do in this administration with all the budget cuts and with a fiveyear hard freeze on overall domestic spending there s a 10 percent increase in the funds in our budget for demand reduction and a dramatic increase in the funds available for community policing as well as a clear commitment to include drug treatment in the national health care program that our administration will be advancing in the near future but most important we now will have an effort that is coordinated as one pulled together and anchored by lee brown no longer will the office of the director of drug policy operate separately from the rest of the government consigned just to being a bully pulpit now it will work hand in hand with the other cabinet agencies and in doing so our effectiveness will be increased our aim is to cut off the demand for drugs at the knees through prevention that means more and better education more treatment more rehabilitation at the same time we want to strangle supplies by putting more officers on the streets by enforcing the law in our communities at our nation s borders and by helping our friends and allies to do the same thing beyond our borders we pledge to work with other nations who have shown the courage and the political will to take on their own drug traffickers who destabilize their own societies and their economies our commitment to all these things is personified in lee brown a tough guy might say he s a drug trafficker s nightmare a cop with a doctorate or a doctor of criminology with a badge but the most important thing to me is he s got a track record of results how many law enforcement officers in this country would be proud to look on the record he has amassed of actually reducing the rate of crime in the streets where he has worked you know the insecurity most americans feel without regard to income or race is a truly appalling thing and anything we can do not only to give lives back to children who might otherwise become involved in drugs but to give the streets and the safety of the streets back to ordinary american families of all kinds is a service well done nd it might mean more to them than anything else this government could produce during my tenure in office and for the foreseeable future the work that lee brown did in pioneering community policing in houston and new york is now legendary with officers on foot patrol knowing their neighbors working to prevent crime as well as to catch criminals this is a fight that surely can unite us all across the boundaries of party and race and region and income we are fighting for our families our children our communities and our future each and every american make no mistake about it also bears a personal responsibility to play a role in this battle anyone who thinks that lee brown or anyone else can solve this problem for the american people instead of with the american people has another thing coming there are people in this audience today whom i know have worked for decades to try to help come to grips with this issue parents educating their children teachers working hard to prevent crime law enforcement officers going into the schools working in programs like the dare program people who have worked in drug treatment and know as i do from our own family s experience that it works all these things are an important part of what we have to do make no mistake about it we ve got to try to get the streets back for our kids too we ought to have a time in this country when children don t have to be afraid to go down to the neighborhood swimming pool in the summertime i am thankful that lee brown has taken on this challenge he s made the decision to do so at a time in his life when he might have reasonably been expected for personal and professional reasons to take a different course he could clearly be making more money doing something else he could have far fewer headaches doing something else he would not have all of us investing so much of our hopes in him if he were doing something else the simple fact that at this point in his life he resolved to do this says a great deal about him and his character i would like now to ask judge james watson of the u s court of international trade to join his friend dr brown up here to administer the oath of office and i would like to invite james watson i m sorry and i d like to invite dr brown s eldest daughter torri clark up here to hold the bible for her father judge watson i understand he s a relative of yours general powell is that right that s good please come up here so you ll be on the microphone dem wjclinton1 7 94 bill_clinton thank you thank you please be seated secretary riley and barbara holt members of the commission on presidential scholars most important to all of you who have won these awards and to your family members your teachers who are here to your friends i look forward to this event very much every year and i am delighted to be here with you today and to look out at your faces and to imagine your futures i don t see how anybody could be too concerned about the future of this great country looking at you reading your records knowing what you have achieved today i also think we should reflect upon the god given potential of all of our young people in this country and the importance that the rest of us must attach to providing the greatest education we possibly can not only to those of you who have been outstanding always and who have won this extraordinary recognition but to all of the people in this society on whom the rest of us will depend to maintain america s leadership this administration has worked very hard to try to do everything we could to give the american people the tools they will need to go confidently into the 21st century i have spoken a great deal since i have been president about the importance of family and community of work and responsibility these things have a great deal to do with your future and the future of america when i sought this office i did it because i was concerned about the direction of our country both economically and in terms of our community i was afraid we were coming apart when we ought to be coming together we seem to be going in so many ways in the wrong direction i had a strategy that was clear in my own mind for what we ought to do for the economy i ve been thinking a lot about it because as some of you know perhaps i will be leaving on july 5th to go to europe for a meeting of the g 7 the world s largest industrial countries and as i think back over the last year and a half i can go to this meeting with a great deal of pride we have forty percent of the income of the world s largest industrial countries but we ve had 75 percent of the growth created 100 percent of the new jobs by cutting spending by bringing our deficit down by reducing the size of our federal work force by providing incentives for small business and working families we ve been able to create 3 million new jobs reduce unemployment by 1 7 percent have three years of deficit reduction for the first time since harry truman was president none of you were born then the last time america brought its deficit down three years in a row but if we do all those things it still won t be enough unless we empower our people to make the most of their lives as we move toward the 21st century a time when information will double rapidly every few years a time when the average person will change jobs seven or eight times in a lifetime the whole question is whether all these changes will be friendly to most americans or terribly terribly threatening indeed one of the main reasons i have fought as hard as i have for guaranteed health coverage for all americans is that that will make our families more secure in the face of all these changes but in the end how well we do will be determined by how well we educate our people and in the end how well our people are capable of reeducating themselves that s what goals 2000 is all about that s what the school to work transition bill is all about and now today it has been announced what the consequences and the mechanisms will be for reordering the student loan program something that was very important to me when i ran for president i d like to talk a little bit about that i became very concerned when i was a governor about the number of young people in my state who would go to school and drop out not for academic reasons but for financial reasons and the number of young people who said that they could no longer go to college because believe it or not in the 1980s the cost of a college education was just about the only really important thing that increased even more rapidly than the cost of health care and so we began to look at what options were available for opening the doors of college to all americans and one of the things that became clear to me is that the student loan program cost too much and the repayment terms were too stiff for a lot of our younger people particularly if they wanted to go into work which might be immensely rewarding terribly valuable to our society but not particularly rich in terms of the salaries that were paid so we decided to change the way the college loan program worked and to go to something called direct lending the secretary of education had primary responsibility for figuring out how we would do that our new program means lower interest rates for college loans lower fees and much better repayment terms with the option for young people to string out their repayment over several years and to pay loans back based on a percentage of what they earn after they get out of college not simply based on how much they had to borrow to afford the education that they got it also means 4 3 billion in savings for taxpayers during this first year we re going to make 1 billion in direct loans at over 100 institutions of higher education we ve also designed the program so that 20 million young americans who took out 50 billion in loans under the old system can switch to the new system that is if they want to pay back their loans at a lower interest rate over a longer period of time based on how much money they re making rather than how much they borrowed they ll be able to do that well we re going to lay out the details of how this will work in the next couple of weeks but the point i want to make is this it s a great thing when gifted young people can have ample scholarships to go to college but we now know that we need 100 percent to finish high school and to get at least two years of further education of they re going to have a good chance to land a productive job with growing income prospects not shrinking income prospects and we also know that in every wealthy country in the world this is something you ll have to worry more about than i have when you re my age there is a diversion in income in other words there is a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor within the wealthy countries we know of no other way at this time to turn that around other than to dramatically increase the education and skill levels of all of our people education is the great equalizer it will change the job mix in america so i congratulate you here i ask you to maintain your personal commitment to giving this country the kind of education system it needs to guarantee that every young american will be able to live up to the fullest of his or her god given capacities and be able to have the tools needed to guarantee the security and the strength of our middle class way of life well into the next century i also want to say one last thing in closing this is a celebration not only of academic achievement but of creative ability and concern for others perhaps the signature program of this administration when the history of our time here is written will be the americorps program the national service program sort of a domestic peace corps that this year will involve 20 000 young americans working in community service and earning money against their further education and the year after next if we can just keep the funding up we ll have 100 000 young americans doing that revolutionizing life at the grass roots level to give you an idea the equivalent of that in my time was the peace corps which president kennedy launched and which captured the imagination of every american but there were never more than 16 000 young americans in the peace corps in any given year and we ll have 100 000 year after next why because learning is important but giving is important as well i want to recognize if i might just one of the scholars who s here we could recognize many but i wanted to mention one not because she deserves to be mentioned over the rest of you but because everybody here and everyone within the sound of my voice needs to get the flavor of the extraordinary quality and character of the young men and women we honor today jessica luterman of staples high school in westport connecticut organized a portable art therapy program for geriatric patients called art on wheels which is now permanent she did this while being an all state athlete a member of the all usa academic first team serving on the boards of her ywca and the united way that s what we need more of in america stand up jessica where are you stand up like i said if you all would just remember what got you here today and commit yourselves to trying to communicate that to the rest of this country our future is in good hands congratulations and god bless you all dem wjclinton1 7 97 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president for those of you who did not know what he was talking about we went to a broadway show last night and there were three guys in the show who did the macarena in the show so after it was over i thought it only fair when the vice president spoke they come up and do the macarena while it was sort of background music you know lou gerstner thank you for being here that was a remarkable statement and the vice president gave you a remarkable introduction i never before thought of you as a gazelle but i always will now thank you macdara maccoll for the work you do and for the fine words you spoke to the members of the cabinet and the administration and people here from industry and consumer groups i thank all of you i especially want to thank for this remarkable report all the agencies who worked on it and in particular ira magaziner who did a brilliant job in bringing everybody together and working this out over a very long period of time and we thank you for what you did on that thank you all i thank the members of congress for being here congressmen gejdenson gordon markey and flake and for their interest in these issues i had two disparate experiences in the last few days that would convince a person of limited technological proficiency like myself that the world is changing rather dramatically you have to remember now the vice president coined the term information superhighway 20 years ago back when i didn t even have an electric typewriter but anyway i had these two experiences which were very interesting to me it s sort of a mark of how our world is changing as you may have seen in the press the oldest living member of my family my great uncle passed away a few days ago and so i went back to this little town in arkansas where i was born and when i got there late at night i drove out in the country for a few miles to my cousin s house where the family was gathering and she has a son who is in his mid 30s now who lives in another small town in arkansas who after we talked for five minutes proceeded to tell me that he played golf on the internet several times a month from his small town in arkansas with an elderly man in australia who unfailingly beat him an unheard of experience just a few years ago he knows this guy he s explaining to me how he finds this man then he says my brother likes to play backgammon on the internet and it got so i couldn t talk to him but now i know how i can go get him out of his game and he can go find a place to come have a visit with me and they can hold the game while we have an emergency talk i mean these whole conversations the way people it was just totally unthinkable a few years ago and then sunday the new york times crossword puzzle i don t know if you saw it but it was for people like me it was entitled technophobes and i m really trying to overcome my limitations i m technologically challenged and i m learning how to do all kinds of things on the computer because chelsea is going off to school and i need to be more literate but you ought to go back and pull this all of you who are now into cyperspace and see if you can work your way back to another world because they had high tech clues with common answers like floppy disk was a clue the answer was frisbee hard drive was a clue the answer was tiger s tee shot digital monitor was the clue the answer was manicurist so anyway we ve come a long way and i d like to give you some sense of history about this because interestingly enough this gathering at the white house which i think is truly historic is in a line of such developments in this house that has shaped our country s history of communications and networking one hundred and thirty nine years ago here at the white house america celebrated our first technological revolution here in communications that was the year queen victoria sent the very first transatlantic telegraph transmission to president buchanan right here and later the first telephone in washington d c was located in a room upstairs the same room in which woodrow wilson managed the conduct of america s involvement in world war i so we ve seen a lot of interesting technological developments over time in the white house now we celebrate the incredible potential of the internet and the world wide web when i first became president which wasn t so long ago only physicists were using the world wide web today as lou said there are about 50 million people in 150 countries connected to the information superhighway there will be five times as many by the year 2000 perhaps more doing everything conceivable we cannot imagine exactly what the 21st century will look like but we know that its science and technology and its unprecedented fusions of cultures and economies will be shaped in large measure by the internet we are very fortunate to have with us today together for the very first time at the white house the four individuals who gave birth to the internet vincent cerf and bob kahn who critical to the development of the internet in the 1970s tim berners lee who invented the world wide web which brought the internet into our homes offices and schools and david duke who headed the team that invented the fiber optic cable which made high speed internet connections possible their ground breaking work has done more to shape and create the world our children will inherit than virtually any invention since the printing press and i would like to ask all four of them to stand and be recognized now the report which is being released on work that has been done is our effort to meet the challenge to make the internet work for all of our people within a generation we can make it so that every book ever written every symphony ever composed every movie ever made every painting ever painted is within reach of all of our children within seconds with the click of a mouse which was black eye in the crossword puzzle yesterday now this potential is nothing short of revolutionary the vice president and i are working to connect every classroom and school library to the internet by the year 2000 so that for the first time all the children without regard to their personal circumstances economic or geographical can have access to the same knowledge in the same time at the same level of quality it could revolutionize education in america and many of you are helping on that and we are grateful we ve also included 300 million in our new balanced budget plan to help build the next generation internet so that leading universities and national labs can communicate in speeds 1 000 times faster than today to develop new medical treatments new sources of energy new ways of working together but as has already been said one of the most revolutionary uses of the internet is in the world of commerce already we can buy books and clothing obtain business advice purchase everything from garden tools to hot sauce to high tech communications equipment over the internet but we know it is just the beginning trade on the internet is doubling or tripling every single year in just a few years it will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in goods and services if we establish an environment in which electronic commerce can grow and flourish then every computer will be a window open to every business large and small everywhere in the world not only will industry leaders such as ibm be able to tap in to new markets but the smallest start up company will have an unlimited network of sales and distribution at its fingertips it will literally be possible to start a company tomorrow and next week do business in japan and germany and chile all without leaving your home something that used to take years and years and years to do in this way the internet can be and should be a truly empowering force for large and small business people alike but today we know electronic commerce carries also a number of significant risks that could block the extraordinary growth and progress from taking place there are almost no international agreements or understanding about electronic commerce many of the most basic consumer and copyright protections are missing from cyberspace in many ways electronic commerce is like the wild west of the global economy our task is to make sure that it s safe and stable terrain for those who wish to trade on it and we must do so by working with other nations now while electronic commerce is still in its infancy to meet this challenge i m pleased to announce the release of our new framework for global electronic commerce a report that lays out principles we will advocate as we seek to establish basic rules for international electronic commerce with minimal regulations and no new discriminatory taxes because the internet has such explosive potential for prosperity it should be a global free trade zone it should be a place where government makes every effort first as the vice president said not to stand in the way to do no harm we want to encourage the private sector to regulate itself as much as possible we want to encourage all nations to refrain from imposing discriminatory taxes tariffs unnecessary regulations cumbersome bureaucracies on electronic commerce where government involvement is necessary its aim should be to support a predictable consistent legal environment for trade and commerce to flourish on fair and understandable terms and we should do our best to revise any existing laws or rules that could inhibit electronic commerce we want to put these principles into practice by january 1st of the year 2000 today i am taking three specific actions toward that goal and asking the vice president to oversee our progress in meeting it first i m directing all federal department and agency heads to review their policies that affect global electronic commerce and to make sure that they are consistent with the five core principles of this report second i m directing members of my cabinet to work to achieve some of our key objectives within the next year i m directing the treasury secretary bob rubin to negotiate agreements where necessary to prevent new discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce i m directing our ambassador of trade charlene barshefsky to work within the wto the world trade organization to turn the internet into a free trade zone within the next 12 months building on the progress of our landmark information technology agreement and our global telecommunications agreement which eliminated tariffs and reduced trade barriers on more than 1 trillion in products and services i m directing commerce secretary daley to work to establish basic consumer and copyright protections for the internet to help to create the predictable legal environment for electronic commerce that we need and to coordinate our outreach to the private sector on a strategy to achieve this i m also directing the relevant agencies to work with commerce industry and law enforcement to make sure americans can conduct their affairs in a secure electronic environment that will maintain their full trust and confidence next week secretary daley and ira magaziner will lead a delegation to europe to present our vision for electronic commerce to our european trading partners third i call on the private sector to help us meet one of the greatest challenges of electronic commerce ensuring that we develop effective methods of protecting the privacy of every american especially children who use the internet many of you have already begun working with chairman pitofsky and commissioner varney at the federal trade commission on this issue i urge you to continue that work and to find new ways to safeguard our most basic rights and liberties so that we can trade and learn and communicate in safety and security finally it is especially important as i said last week to give parents and teachers the tools they need to make the internet safe for children a hands off approach to electronic commerce must not mean indifference when it comes to raising and protecting children i ask the industry leaders here today to join with us in developing a solution for the internet as powerful for the computer as the v chip will be for television to protect children in ways that are consistent with the first amendment later this month i will convene a meeting with industry leaders and groups representing internet users teachers parents and librarians to help parents protect their children from objectionable content in cyberspace today we act to ensure that international trade on the internet remains free of new discriminatory taxes free of tariffs free from burdens and regulations and safe from piracy in the 21st century we can build much of our prosperity on innovations in cyberspace in ways that most of us cannot even imagine this vision contemplates an america in which every american consumers small business people corporate ceos will be able to extend our trade to the farthest reaches of the planet if we do the right things now in the right way we can lead our economy into an area where our innovation our flexibility and our creativity yield tremendous benefits for all of our people in which we can keep opportunity alive bring our people closer to each other and bring america closer to the world i feel very hopeful about this and i assure you that we will do our part to implement the principles we advocate today thank you very much dem wjclinton1 7 99 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen as you might imagine this is a very special day for hillary and for me in a signal honor for us to have the chance to serve at this moment i want to thank john carlin for his faithful stewardship of these great documents thank my friend mike armstrong for his generosity and for calling on others in the business community to help in this endeavor thank secretary riley and nasa and the department of commerce for working with the national archives in designing and developing the new encasement that will house our charters i thank the center for civic education for their efforts to teach our children the importance of history i d like to thank these young people who are here who read first they helped us recite the pledge of allegiance and then they read from our founding documents and i thought that young man did a remarkable job introducing hillary i thought they were all great let s give them a hand and i would like to say a special word of appreciation to congressman ralph regula for his leadership and for proving that this is one issue which is not a partisan issue this is an american issue and i m very grateful to him for his leadership in the united states congress on this on july 4 1776 king george of england wrote in his diary nothing of importance happened today now even making allowances for the absence of world news and the internet his majesty s diary entry stands as one of the most inaccurate statements ever written we all know that those who put their names to the declaration of independence changed the world forever before then liberty had been a rare and fleeting thing in the course of human history citizens of ancient democracies enjoyed it but let it slip from their grasp so the founders labored mightily to craft a declaration of independence then a constitution and a bill of rights that they hoped would help america to beat the odds and keep liberty alive two hundred and twenty three years later we can safely say they succeeded not only in keeping the liberty they created in fact alive but in moving ever closer generation after generation to the pure ideals embodied in the words they wrote today our liberty extends not just to white men with property but to all americans our concept of freedom no longer includes the so called freedom to keep slaves or extract profit from the labor of children and our constitution is the inspiration behind scores of democratic governments around the world from japan to poland to guatemala to south africa each generation of americans is called upon not only to preserve that liberty but to enhance it not only to protect the institutions that secure our liberty but to renew and reform them to meet the challenges of the present with an eye for the future the renewal of our generation in our economy our social fabric our world leadership for peace and freedom is well symbolized by the project we celebrate today employing the finest minds and latest technologies to preserve these charters of freedom for generations yet unborn when hillary and i first realized that the turn of the millennium would occur while we were in the white house we knew we had an obligation to mark it in ways that would be good for the country in her words by honoring the past and imagining the future what we do with these hallowed pieces of parchment all americans can do with the important historical treasures that exist all around them in their attics their parks their town halls saving america s treasures is not about living in the past it is about conveying to future generations the american story in all its texture and richness and detail about fulfilling our duty to be good ancestors about catching the spirit thomas jefferson had in his later years when he became devoted to preserving desks and chairs and other ordinary things from his extraordinary times these small things he wrote may perhaps like the relics of saints help to nourish our devotion to this holy bond of union and keep it longer alive and warm in our affections i want to thank first and foremost hillary for leading this effort which has already accomplished so much from restoring the star spangled banner to honoring our great artists thinkers and scientists i look forward to walking on some of those 2 000 millennium trails we ll build together and to naming more and more millennium communities we can all take pride in our efforts to renew our national treasures for in a larger sense the story of our nation is the story of constant renewal the realization that we preserve the ideals embodied in these documents not simply by revering them but by reaffirming our commitment to them each generation must widen the circle of opportunity deepen the meaning of freedom and strengthen the bonds of our community we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal we fought a war of revolution to make those words real in 1776 we rededicated ourselves to that proposition in 1863 recognizing that the bright words of the declaration could not abide the stain of slavery or endure the breaking of our union we rededicated ourselves at the coming of the industrial age when we recognized that new measures were required to protect and advance equal opportunity and freedom we rededicated ourselves again in 1920 when we ratified the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote we saved those ideals in world war ii and for millions upon millions of people in the cold war we rededicated ourselves again in 1963 hearing and heeding dr king s dream that one day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners would one day sit down together at the table of brotherhood today at the coming of the information age we rededicate ourselves yet again thank god our challenges are not those of depression or war but those brought on by this hopeful and remarkable explosion in technology by the globalization of our economy by all the changes in the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world to keep our ideals alive we must embrace new ideas and follow a new course because we believe equal opportunity in 1999 is just as important as it was in 1776 we must rededicate ourselves to the truest guarantor of that opportunity a world class educational system that benefits every single child because we believe the federal government must promote the general welfare as our founders instructed we are dedicated to using its resources to pay squarely our single greatest challenge as a nation today the aging of america and to do so in a way that pays off our national debt for the first time since 1835 because we believe every human being has the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and no one should be discriminated against uprooted abused or killed because of his or her race or ethnic background or religion we are proud to stand with our allies in defense of these ideals in kosovo it is natural for any american contemplating the documents behind me to look upon those who crafted them as almost super human in their wisdom and the times that they lived as a golden age but the more you read about them the more you respect their achievement because the founders were not gods on earth they were farmers and lawyers printers and merchants surveyors and soldiers chosen by their constituents to hash out divergent interests and make difficult decisions about the future to engage in other words in politics i said at my alma mater georgetown last week that at its best politics is about values ideas and action that s what they were about they turned politics into public service and made it a noble endeavor and left us a framework to keep it going the declaration and the constitution emerged only after fierce debate and difficult compromise today these documents enjoy universal acclaim and at the time they were written believe it or not many americans though thank goodness not a majority actually did not agree with them yet the framers refused to let serious differences of opinion become excuses to put off action they overcame their differences and completed their tasks and stayed true to an idea that jefferson would later express in his first inaugural that every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle we have to keep that idea in mind today the greatest threat to our democracy today and certainly to freedom and democracy around the world is the poisonous idea that what divides us is far more important than what we have in common that as long as we have differences of opinion we must have personal animosities and we cannot have positive action this is a dubious political strategy a dangerous governing strategy wrong as a matter of historical fact and an affront to the sacred documents we gather here to save despite their many differences the framers drafted debated and signed the declaration of independence in less than a month they drafted debated and approved the constitution in less than five months if they could produce those enduring charters of freedom in a matter of months surely there is no reason why we here in our time cannot make major progress in the remaining months of this millennium to prepare our nation for the new millennium and a 21st century which i am convinced will be america s best days we owe it to these children to honor their past to imagine their future and to build a bridge to that future every single one of them can cross so as we preserve the documents that launched this the greatest journey in freedom and opportunity in all of history let us resolve to do all we can to keep alive the spirit that got us to this point these children will do the rest thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton1 8 98 bill_clinton thank you this is one clever man i want you to watch this you see this he took the watch again thank you jonathan thank you christopher i want to thank andy and jeff elizabeth and all the others who are co chairs tonight i want to thank sandy thurman and richard socarides and marsha scott who have done a lot of great work for me and on my behalf with so many of you and i want to thank brian rich for serving as a white house volunteer the whole place runs on volunteers believe it or not to an astonishing extent i want to thank steve and len and all fine people here from the dnc and all of you for being here last night we were with some people and a person who lived here for many years said you know the last sitting president to visit long island was william mckinley the eastern end of long island william mckinley and everybody laughed they didn t exactly see me as a natural successor to william mckinley we don t think of him in the same terms that i m frequently painted these days but i ll tell you an interesting thing about william mckinley he was the last of a line of either four or five generals union generals from ohio to be elected president between 1868 and 1896 that included ulysses grant his successor rutherford hayes james garfield who unfortunately was assassinated and lived only a few months mr mckinley mr harrison might have been from ohio i m not sure but the point is if you were a union general from ohio you had about a 50 percent chance of being elected president between the end of the civil war and 1900 now what has that got to do with all this today there s a reason they won they won because ohio was the heartland of america at the time and because they embodied the idea of the nation for which abraham lincoln gave his life that slavery was wrong that discrimination based on race was wrong and that we needed a strong united country for america and for all americans to fulfill their god given capacity throughout american history one of our two parties has always been essentially the party of the nation and even though the democrats i regret to say after the civil war were just kind of coming to that they were the party of immigrants and that was good and they stood against discrimination against immigrants but for all kinds of reasons we didn t become the party of the nation until the election of woodrow wilson and then our fate was sealed when franklin roosevelt was elected and harry truman succeeded him we haven t always been right on every issue in the 20th century but i think it s clear that we have been on the right side of history and i think that s why you re here today and a lot of you said a lot of very kind things to me as i worked my way through the crowd and i appreciate them more than you know when i ran for president in 1992 i did it because i thought our country was divided that we hadn t taken care of the business before us and we certainly weren t planning for the future very well it seemed to me that we needed to be trying to create an america in which there was genuine opportunity for every responsible citizen in which we were continuing to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity and in which we were coming closer together as one community or if you put it in another way if you go back and read the declaration of independence it basically lays out the things that our country has been for all along we just never perfectly lived up to them we ve always been for deepening the meaning of freedom keep in mind when all those people said all people are created equal if you weren t a white male property owner you couldn t even vote but jefferson said when i think of slavery i tremble to think that god is just so we set out an ideal and then we knew we d have to be working toward it for a long time constantly redefining it deepening the meaning of freedom we ve always tried to widen the circle of opportunity and we have been on a permanent mission in the founders words to form a more perfect union now on all fronts i believe our party is on the right side of history on the edge of this new millennium hillary is running this great millennial project called imagining the past and imagine the future excuse me honor the past and imagine the future it s been a long day anyway the thing i like about it is i don t think you can imagine the future unless you do it in terms of the values and the history of the past and i don t think you can just live in the past so everything i ve done the last six years i ve tried to make america first of all work again i ve tried to develop a working definition of what the role of the federal government in our national life should be and i ve tried to get out of the old debate about government is the problem government is the solution toward seeing government as an empowering agent to enable the rest of us to live our lives and to create the conditions and give people the tools to do what needs to be done and i think that the ideas we brought to the economic and social debate to the foreign policy debate have contributed measurably to the remarkable conditions in our country today most of you know that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the lowest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years we re about to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years the highest home ownership in history with the smallest government in 35 years but we also have advanced the cause of peace and freedom around the world advanced the cause of interdependence around the world through economic cooperation and advanced the cause of unity at home with things like citizen service and the opportunities i ve had to work with many of you to remind the american people that we re all one country and that everybody is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect and equality and i would just like to say if you looked ahead at the big challenges facing the country how are we are going to prepare for the retirement of the baby boom generation we have to reform social security and medicare so that it will do what it needs to do to hold our society together and provide for dignity in old age without bankrupting our children and grandchildren those of us who are baby boomers we have to provide for the first time in history a genuine world class elementary and secondary education for all of our kids not just those who are middle class or better we have to prove that we can grow the economy and improve the environment not just preserve it but improve it because i believe that the global warming phenomenon is real i know the oceans are being slowly undermined and we had a fabulous conference on that recently in california we have to prove that america can still be a force for peace and freedom and security around the world standing up against all this racial and ethnic and religious hatred around the world and the spread of dangerous weapons and taking advantage of the opportunities that are there and finally i don t think we can do good around the world unless we are good at home and that s why i have always said i belong to a party that puts progress over partisanship that puts people over politics that puts unity over division and you know sometimes when you try to affect that kind of transformation you know you re going to provoke a reaction i didn t dream it would be quite as profound as it has been this reaction but i must say if i had it to do over again i would gladly assume the challenge because it s been a wonderful thing and if it weren t for the 22nd amendment i d give the people one more chance to elect or defeat me because i believe in what we re doing and i ve been blessed to have not only a wife but also a wonderful vice president who believes in what we re doing and i just want to say to all of you what hillary said is right we can do very well in this election if you go all the way back to the civil war the party of the president when the president s in his second term always has lost seats at mid term it may not happen this time which is one reason the heat the incoming fire is so intense now because they know it may not happen this time why because we have an agenda out there we have a patients bill of rights we ve got an education agenda we ve got an environmental agenda we ve got a foreign policy agenda we got an economic agenda for the inner cities the debate the substantive debate is out there and i still believe that the biggest problem with the american people not feeling the sense of unity and mutual harmony and respect that affects among other things among others people in the gay community all the time is a lack of genuine open unthreatening contact debate discussion and so i just want to say to you i thank you for your contributions i thank you for being here we ll try to make good use of the investments you ve given us but i hope between now and november you will go out and tell people that it s not an accident that america is better off today than it was six years ago that there are ideas behind the changes that took place in this country and they re good ideas and the ideas we have for the future are good ideas and the american people ought to go out there in this election and be heard on those ideas and if they are i think that our democrats will do very well indeed because we know that given a reasoned chance to make a judgment we win two to one on almost every critical issue facing the country but given organized and well financed disinformation campaigns we sometimes have trouble as we did recently when much to andy s grief we lost the fight with the big tobacco interests in congress i m not done with that and we re going to come back to it but you can help us prevail and the last thing i d like to say is the other thing hillary said is right a part of this strategy that we re up against is designed to depress the vote in 1994 we had a very depressed vote now i personally don t think it s going to work this time because the country is in better shape and the consequences of the policies of the administration are more evident and the strategy against us is a little more bald i d say i think that s a delicate way of saying it and so i don t think it will work but you ve got to think about that go out there and tell people that you re doing this because throughout history america was always at its best by trying to perfect what we started with in the declaration of independence to widen the circle of opportunity deepen the meaning of freedom strengthen the bonds of our union and because we re on the edge of a whole new millennium a whole new way of thinking and living and working and relating to each other and the rest of the world and the party of the future is the party that s on the right side of history and that you re proud to be a part of it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton1 9 96 bill_clinton thank you i m hoarse folks i can t shout over you you ve got to help me tonight i m a little hoarse oh i m so glad to see you thank you for coming thank you i want to thank all of those who made this night possible thank my longtime friend joe purvis for bringing little joe and the bks here the magnificent philander smith choir thank you very much mayor dailey mayor hays judge villines thank you i want to thank the young children from gibbs magnate school and from clinton elementary school for these signs thank you hold up your signs kids the children made all these signs let s give them a hand they did a great job thank you i thank congressman ray thorton for being here tonight for his service to our state i think he s the only person in the history of arkansas who represented two entirely different regions of our state in the congress president of our two largest universities a very distinguished american citizen and a great future judge on the arkansas supreme court thank you ray and good luck to you and betty jo i thank my dear friend judy collins for being here tonight wasn t she magnificent thirty two years ago this month i went to hear judy collins sing at the george washington university auditorium when i was a freshman at georgetown and i thought that i had never heard a voice like that never would again i talked about it for days and if anybody told me then 32 years ago we d both be here tonight i wouldn t have believed it but i like it and i m glad to see her i should tell you that she was eight years old at the time of that concert i want to thank my good friends mack mclarty and rodney slater for being here they are representing all the arkansans who are serving you in washington with great distinction as have they finally let me say i see so many other folks here just my friends my supporters legislators county officials city officials personal friends i m delighted to see all of you here i was looking at david pryor he said i met him when i was 19 i did 30 years ago and a few odd months in the hot summer arkansas campaign of 1966 on the street of a small county seat in south arkansas and i thought that guy s the best politician i ve ever seen he had more moves than magic johnson working that street and he still does and let me say to you david and to barbara i remember when you were in the snows of new hampshire many of you were also there i remember when you stood with me when we were dropping in the polls and people said the campaign was over and i remember how you stood by me in the first two years of our presidency under all matter of assault to stand up for what was right for america you have done a lot of things for all of us to love you david pryor but i will never forget that when it wasn t at all clear that i would be here on this night doing this in this way you were always there because you thought it was right and i will love you until the day i die thank you and god bless you ladies and gentlemen 20 years ago this year when the people of our state elected me attorney general i had my first reception in january of 1977 nearly 20 years ago hillary and i did right here in the old statehouse and i remember what a cold and icy january it was do you remember mack all of my friends from north arkansas just sort of slid down here on the ice and came to the reception over the years i have been back here many times because i love this building in 1979 in my first term i asked the legislature to give us some money to restore it to its original condition so it would be ready by the time we turned 150 years old as a state in june of 1986 and they did this is a treasure for me because here on this wonderful lawn under these grand trees in front of this great building we can live again all of us the history of our state and a big part of the history of our nation that s why i came here almost five years ago five years ago last month to declare my candidacy and i used to be able to do this from memory but you know in spite of all david said about me being young i m 50 now i ve got an aarp card and that means you all have to cut me some slack so i brought a few notes here five years ago when i was here i said when we started this campaign for the presidency all of you in different ways have brought me here today to step beyond a life and a job i love to make a commitment to a larger cause preserving the american dream restoring the hopes of the forgotten middle class reclaiming the future for our children in november of 1992 when i was declared the president elect i was right here again in the spot that embodies for me all that is best in our state and public service so i wanted to come here just as quick as i could get here as i begin the last campaign of my life unless i decide to run for the school board some day and i want to say to all of you you made possible something extraordinary in these last four years and i came here to give you an accounting and ask you to rear back one more time and go with me through november and into the next four years will you do that folks four years ago we had to weather all those snide charges about small southern state we had to listen to all those people trying to rain on our parade and i had to look at all those people who kind of looked at me askance when i said it seemed to me that if we took the philosophy of governing that we had embraced here not who s to blame but what are we going to do about it it would work in washington too four years ago we had high unemployment stagnant wages crime and welfare rolls rising cynicism on the rise problems unmet middle class dreams of america in danger four years later after four years of getting rid of who s to blame and asking what are we going to do about it look where we are with a simple but profound strategy opportunity for everybody responsibility from everybody and everybody that believes in the constitution the declaration of independence and the bill of rights is part of our american community and entitled to go with us into the future with that simple strategy we have over 10 million new jobs almost 4 5 million new homeowners wages are rising again for the first time in a decade four years of declining crime 1 8 million fewer people on welfare 10 million americans are about to get an increase because of the rise in the minimum wage on october 1st twelve million americans have gotten to take a little time off for the birth of a child or a sick parent without losing their job because of the family and medical leave act fifteen million of our hardest pressed americans have gotten a tax cut to help raise their children and every single small business in america has been made eligible for a substantial reduction in taxes if they invest more in their business to grow the business more and help grow our economy forty million americans have had their retirement savings made more secure after the terrible damaging years of the 1980s fifty million americans are breathing cleaner air and yes senator pryor said it all we fought a long hard battle for health care and paid a big price for it but when i signed the kennedy kassebaum bill 25 million americans were told you cannot lose your health insurance because somebody in your family s been sick or because you have to change jobs so i say to you my friends here at home what i said on that train trip and on that bus trip which i loved because i got to see all those folks that look just like you who are just like you that made this country go the kind of people the president doesn t often see if he just gets in air force one and then jumps in the limo and goes to the event you get on a train you get on a bus and you see the people that make this country go and i m telling you we re better off than we were four years ago and we are on the right track to the 21st century now i want to say sounds good thank you but let me say what i said at the convention one more time you all taught me something when i had to run for reelection as governor all the time i remember one time i was at a rally in 1984 trying to get reelected and i gave a great speech about what a good job i ve done an old boy came up to me after it was over and said well so what bill that s what we paid you for what are you going to do next time and so i say i realize that that s what you paid me for and that s why when i spoke to the country and to our democratic party in chicago on thursday night i tried to lay out what i thought the stakes were in this election my record is relevant and so is senator dole s but only insofar as it gives you some guidance about what we ll do in the next four years because we can t undo the past if it s bad and we can t relive it no matter how good it is we have to think about tomorrow but i will say this with all respect that s what this choice is the choice is whether we re going to build a bridge to the past or build a bridge to the future i want you to help me build a bridge to the 21st century will you do that now folks you know what kind of bridge i want to build to the future and i don t have to tell you about the details i want to build a bridge to the future that everybody has a chance to be a part of and that means we have to do a lot more than we have done as a people to make sure every single person in this country not only the children but the adults as well have access to lifetime education and that it s the best in the world we have to do that you think what it would mean to arkansas and to arkansans if we passed a tax cut that said you can have the equivalent of a community college tuition for two years in your pocket as a tax credit so that everybody in this country can have two years of education after high school make it just as universal as a high school education is today think what it would mean to arkansans if we said every family in this state except those like me who don t need it can have a deduction for the cost of college tuition any tuition after high school up to 10 000 a year think what it would mean to the people of this state if we could say to every unemployed person and every underemployed person we want you to have access to a new kind of g i bill a g i bill for america s workers because this economy changes a lot and even when we re creating jobs some people are always being left behind so we re going to give you 2 600 a year to spend as you see fit getting an education and finding a new job so you can get a better job with higher skills and a brighter future think what the would mean if we could do that here for our people think what it would mean when we hook up every classroom and every library and every school in this state not only with computers and trained teachers but hook them up to the information superhighway so that for the first time in the history of america in the poorest school district in arkansas they can get the same information in the same time with the same quality as people in the richest schools in this country do think what that will mean to the people of arkansas and to our children and i want to build a bridge to the 21st century that keeps this economy going that means we have to keep trading more that means we have to keep investing more in technology and research you heard christopher reeve talk at the democratic convention about that it s not just a matter of humanity it s a matter of our future we are generating enormous opportunities economic opportunities as we search for the solution to medical mysteries we ve doubled the life expectancy for people with hiv in four years we now have seen for the first time in laboratory animals animals that had their spines severed and were paralyzed getting movement back in their lower limbs it won t be long before we can do that for people but we have to keep investing if we want to do that the internet a lot of the kids in this audience just routinely hook into the internet the internet got started as a government research project we figured out how to do it then we got out of the way and let the private sector take it over but we have to keep investing and i want you to support that kind of future that will grow the economy and let me say this i want you to support us in our effort to balance the budget in the right way in the right way now when they sent me a budget they said here s our balanced budget we re going to have this huge tax cut and give it some people that don t need it and you re going to have to take it or we re going to shut the government down and oh by the way we re going to change medicare into a two class system so that the oldest the poorest and the sickest seniors in this country get the shaft and oh by the way we re going to remove medicaid s guarantee of health care to pregnant women and little children and the elderly in nursing homes and families with people with a disability in them and oh by the way even though we re moving into the 21st century we re going to cut back on education everything from head start to college loans and we re going to cut back on protecting the environment and if you don t do it we ll shut the government down i said let her rip i m not going to put that on the american people now but i did say also i m not going to talk about who s to blame you all won the congress fair and square you want to balance the budget that s the right thing to do for america let s just balance that budget in the right way now let me remind all of you here what that means i hear people all the time all these political consultants tell you don t talk to people about balancing the budget if things are going good they re bored with it here s why you ought to care about it because if we don t balance the budget and we do something that increases the deficit what does that mean we have to go borrow money while you re trying to borrow money what does that mean your home mortgage your car payment your credit card payments go up what else does it mean it means businesses have to pay more to borrow money so they don t borrow as much they don t invest as much they don t create as many new jobs arkansas has got a low unemployment now but i want to see that unemployment rate spread to every county and every community that doesn t have a low unemployment rate yet and we can do it but we ve got to keep it coming down now along comes our opponents who said for two years all they wanted to do was balance the budget and they say no no no forget about that vote for us we re going to give you a bigger tax cut that s what they say five times as big here s the problem number one if you hated the budget i vetoed last time wait until you see this one this one will take bigger cuts out of medicare medicaid education the environment and worker pension funds it s wrong and you don t want me to do that do you even then they won t pay for it and the deficit will go up again and that means higher interest rates and all those bad things now let me ask you a question just a little old question we might ask at a country crossroads at home would you go to the bank and borrow money to give yourself a tax cut well why would you hire somebody to do that for you you wouldn t do that you wouldn t do that now there s another alternative but let me get down to that i know i learned a long time i remember one time president reagan came right here to this spot and gave a speech for the republicans and tried to tell them they needed a different governor 1984 and i m glad you all didn t listen and i know that even a president from arkansas can t tell people from here how to vote so i don t want you to do this for me i want you to do it for you but you ve got winston bryant and vic snyder over here trying to get into the senate and the house with boyce davis and marion berry and i want to tell you something if you want this done right if you want me to do more than say no if you want me to be able to say yes to the right kind of balanced budget and the kind of programs that i advocated when i spoke to the country in chicago on thursday night then send vic snyder to the house and send winston bryant to the senate and give us a chance to grow this country in the right way this is terribly important let me say just something else real briefly it s not enough to create opportunity we also have to have more responsibility the other guys they talked a lot about welfare reform and hating the government but we reduced the government to its smallest size in 30 years and we reduced the welfare rolls by 1 8 million but i signed that welfare reform bill and i was proud to do it because here s the new deal there s a lot of legislators here so you all listen to this here s the new deal this deal says for people who are poor and their children eligible for welfare you still get guaranteed health care guaranteed food stamps and guaranteed child care if you go to work but the income check can now be given to the states and the states can decide whether to continue the income check or whether to develop a job program that will put more people into jobs and they have to do that now here s what i want to say to you folks now this is not a political issue anymore welfare is no longer an issue that conservatives can condemn liberals over that politicians can condemn poor people over we have gotten rid of the system people say they don t like but if you want to require somebody with kids to feed to go to work and require them to do it they better have some work there to go to that is the issue now we have a responsibility to create these jobs and we have to build a bridge to the 21st century that puts people to work who have never had a chance to go to work before it brings me to the other person over here i want to talk about the biggest new job states will have to perform is figuring out a humane and decent and honorable way to create work for people on welfare who are able bodied it is not simple it is not easy and every time you vote for the governor a lieutenant governor a state official a legislator you ought to ask yourself what kind of person am i electing and who is most likely to be able to be most energetic in growing the economy overall and trying to figure out specifically how to do these new deals these new jobs especially welfare reform i ll tell you what the answer to that is the answer to that is charlie cole chaffin and you ought to make her the lieutenant governor of arkansas i want to just say one other thing about this responsibility business i never believed for a minute what so many americans did that we couldn t do anything about crime and when i went around the country started running for president i went to town after town where the crime rate was going down and i asked them why did the crime rate go down and i talked to the police officers they said well we put more police on the streets we got them out of the cars we ve got them working in the neighborhoods we ve got them working with the kids and it s working and i said what else do you need and they said well we could use a little help with these assault weapons because we don t have them and we could use a little other help so here s what we did we passed a crime bill that s putting 100 000 police on the street the other guys voted against it think about this in this race for congress think about this in the race for congress and senators the other party led the fight against it then they tried to repeal the 100 000 police even after the crime rate had gone down for three years they still tried to stop us from doing it and we re halfway home now and we need to finish that we ve got four years of declining crime rates if we had four more years of declining crime rates they might be down where we could all live with it and i want you to stay with a strategy that s working again send winston bryant and vic snyder to congress and let s keep the 100 000 police coming now the last thing i want to say is you taught me not the other way around that when we work together we never lose when we treat each other with respect we always win when we behave with dignity and honor we re always ahead that s still a big problem you have no idea how much time i spend as president dealing with foreign policy problems caused because people in other countries insist on killing each other because they re different from one another you have no idea what is bosnia about what is the crisis in northern ireland about what is the middle east about what are all these tribal wars in africa about just something about people if you let them go unrestrained that makes them think that their lives mean more when they can look down on their neighbors and they ll even go to the point of killing them and pretty soon they get to killing one another and they forget why they started fighting they just can t quit anymore now that s why i react so strongly when churches burn in our country and in our state it s wrong that s why i got so upset the other day when those african american special forces personnel when home to their barracks in fort bragg north carolina and saw those swastikas on their doors now folks you read every week about some foreign policy crisis i m dealing with and i bet a lot of you think you know i wonder what bill s thinking about that he didn t learn much about that when he was governor i tell you one thing i know if at midnight tonight i call those special forces and i tell them to be halfway around the world by noon tomorrow and put their lives on the line for you they will do it they do not deserve to have swastikas on their doors this is not right this is not right so i guess what i d like to say is we talked about this it takes a village business but it really is important you ve got to really decide and the people of this country have to decide do you think we have to go forward together and that the role of the government is to be a part of our national village to give people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives or do you think we d be better off with a sort of you re on your own philosophy that s also a big part of this election i know that if we go forward together if we get more opportunity for everybody and more responsibility from everybody our best days are still ahead but i know one thing you have got to be committed every single one of you to building that kind of a bridge so think about this all of you have been with me all of these years this is our last go round with the highest stakes for the largest number of people the kind of country we ll be at the dawn of a new century and a new millennium will be determined by this election what this country looks like when our children and our grandchildren are our age will be determined by the decisions we make in this election i have no right to ask you for anything for me you have already given me more than i can ever repay but for the sake of our children our state and our beloved country one more time will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century thank you god bless you let s go get it dem wjclinton10 1 01a bill_clinton i d like to thank representative sheila jackson lee and donald payne from new jersey and our neighbor elijah cummings thank you for being here i ve actually known dorothy height for several years before i became president i knew her thanks to my wife they were on the board of the children s defense fund 25 years ago when i was still a child and i was just looking at her speak today as she was just up here speaking and how fluid and eloquent she was and i thought she has more energy at 88 than most people have at 22 i wanted to come here to help you with your dorothy height s legacy initiative to pay off the mortgage of this magnificent old building it s an extra added treat to see the chair where mr lincoln posed for mathew brady i love those old photographs and i have two myself dorothy that i ve collected over the years two that abraham lincoln sat for in 1861 and 1862 as well as a copy from the original plate of the photograph he took in june of 1860 two weeks before he became the nominee of the republican party for president so i m honored to be here with that memory and that legacy but mostly with your legacy and i think you belong in this building and you belong midway between the capitol and the white house so you can keep an eye on both parties you know dorothy said that the national council of negro women has been in business since 1935 you just think about what america was like in 1935 and think about all the hills we ve climbed since then and as generous as you were to me frankly all i did was what was self evident what i believed in my heart what you have had to do was to change the laws and the heart of america and you did it in a magnificent fashion and i thank you you mentioned our efforts to build one america ben johnson has done a great job heading our one america effort in our offices there i hope that in the future this will be a nonpartisan effort because america is growing so much more racially and ethnically and religiously diverse i was in a grade school in chicago yesterday where half the kids were asian 18 percent were african american 17 5 percent were hispanic the rest were white ethnic mostly croatian and that s where we re going and it s going to be a great ride if we get it right but whatever is still there we need to give up we re going to have to shed it because we don t have a lot of time to waste now and i think that if you look all over the world all the trouble spots of the world most countries and most people get in trouble when they try to organize folks around hatred or disdain or disregard for people or groups who are different from them they either look different than they do they worship god in a different way or they re just different and it s hard to get to the point in life where you can have an honest disagreement with somebody and still acknowledge that their humanity is just as valid as yours and that life s a lot more interesting because they re not just like you are if everybody were just like us then life wouldn t be nearly as interesting as it is sometimes life in america is a little too interesting to suit me but but still it s good you know it keeps us flourishing and it keeps the country forever young i honestly believe that dorothy is so young after all these years of effort because she has given herself to a larger and higher calling if you get up every day and do good it eventually will show on your face it will be heard in your voice it just is unavoidable and her beauty and youth is a testament of the timelessness of her cause and i m just glad to be one of her foot soldiers here today thank you very much dem wjclinton10 1 01b bill_clinton calm down you still have to do what i ask for nine more days calm down secretary herman thank you for your eloquence and your passion on this issue i thank all the members of the administration who are here secretary babbitt thank you secretary shalala secretary slater sba director alvarez janice lachance i thank the other members who are here who supported this in every way thank you max cleland for the power of your example and the largeness of your heart thank you tom harkin every day you redeem the promise of your brother s life and your love for him in what you have done thank you senator levin and congressman levin congressman eliot engel i like your beard i had a note that said eliot engel was here and i thought instead it was fidel castro for a moment but you look very good thank you jim langevin for running for congress and for winning ken apfel our social security administrator is here thank you thank you justin dart for seeding the crowd with signs i think you must have something to do i want to thank all the donors and a special word of appreciation to two folks who did a lot of our work one who has been acknowledged thank you jonathan young thank you bill white thank you very much you guys have been great and i too want to thank larry halperin and bob graham this whole memorial has exceeded my wildest dreams for it it gives you a feel that is completely different from any other memorial it is grand and beautiful all right but it is so accessible in a way that i think would have pleased president roosevelt and mrs roosevelt and of course this last addition is even more than the icing on the cake i know that for larry and for bob this has been a labor of love and honor and we honor them for what they have done thank you very much i would like to also say to all of you that as a person who has loved the history of my country and tried to learn more about it every day it would have been under any circumstances an honor in my life to become friends with jim roosevelt and his wife anne but what i want you to know is they are the true heirs of their ancestors because they are exceptional and wonderful people and i m very glad to be here with them last saturday marked the 60th anniversary of president roosevelt s speech on the four freedoms it is fitting to remember it here today for this is the story of freedom in this memorial freedom s steady advance across the land from the school room to the voting booth to the corridors of power freedom s open arms embracing the tired the poor the huddled masses from every shore freedom s rising tide across the globe as more people and more places secure the blessings of liberty and freedom s march for people with disabilities here at home and around the world this is a monument to freedom the power of every man and woman to transcend circumstance to laugh in the face of fate to make the most of what god has given this is a statue of freedom i too am glad that the statue is built at a scale not larger than life but lifelike not raised on a pedestal but available touchable for people who are in wheelchairs and people who cannot see the power of the statue is in its immediacy and in its reminder to all who touch all who see all who walk or wheel around that they too are free but every person must claim freedom in april of 1997 when i asked for a depiction of fdr s disability here at the memorial i like every other american who had paid attention knew that he went to some length to hide his disability on almost all occasions but he lived in a different time when people thought being disabled was being unable though he proved them wrong every day he was a canny fellow and he didn t want to risk any vote loss by letting people see him in a wheelchair of the more than 10 000 photos in his archives only four show him as he is depicted in this magnificent statue today he knew the impact of the image and he knew seen wrong in those days it could have ended his political life but he also knew he had an obligation to use it when appropriate on rare occasion he did so to great effect his speech writer sam rosenman said he could never forget as he put it the look of courage and faith and self reliance and affection in the faces of disabled americans who were given the privilege of seeing fdr struggle with his own disability and the joy of watching him overcome it for example in the summer of 1944 president roosevelt spent an afternoon at a naval hospital in hawaii the men there had been seriously wounded and many had lost limbs in the war he insisted on wheeling himself into their wards he wanted to show them that he the president of the united states could not walk any better than they but he could still show courage and hope and inner strength he said that returning americans with disabilities to active and productive lives was a great objective for the nation one of the greatest causes of humanity it s hard to believe that that was a very unusual statement to make back then it was one of the basic tenants of the new deal the inherent worth of all americans our shared responsibility to empower them that is what we have sought to do here for eight years to avoid any barrier that would keep the potential of any american from being fully tapped we have tried to reward work and give people the support they need to live their lives in freedom even in the last days of the administration we are still working on efforts to increase employment of americans with disabilities to provide alternatives to institutions and we re going out with a report on the progress we ve made and what we still have to do we must always remember that in the end the story of america is the story of freedom and interdependence the crowd that started us off pledged their lives their fortunes their sacred honor to forming a more perfect union that s what they said what does that mean it means that people can never fulfill their own lives completely unless they re working with their neighbors to help them fulfill theirs and so we have to constantly work to push back the frontiers of our imagination to advance the cause of both freedom and community that interdependence which makes life richer that means we have to encourage each other along the way as well president roosevelt once told a little girl who like him had been stricken with polio that she must keep up the splendid fight for someone else who has not suffered in that way to say it is splendid for max cleland to labor all those years against his horrible war injuries to become a great member of the united states senate seems almost out of place but the truth is we have to learn to talk to each other that way one thing i like about the disability movement today is it has moved beyond trying to get the rest of us to do the right thing out of compassion doing the right thing because it s the right thing and the only sensible thing to do i want you all to go out when you leave here not just to look at the statue but to read in letters or braille the quote behind the statue by eleanor roosevelt who pointed out that before he was stricken with polio president roosevelt had never been forced to become a truly great man had never been forced to develop those habits of infinite patience and persistence without which life cannot be fully lived and i want you to think about that the reason this is a story of freedom is that what matters most in life is the spirit and the journey of the spirit and we lug along that journey whatever body god gives us and whatever happens to it along the way and whatever mind we were born with but a clever mind and a beautiful body can themselves be disabilities on the spirit journey and so we celebrate freedom and dignity for incredibly brave people whose lives were all embodied by that incredibly brave man whose disability made him more free for his spirit to soar and his nation to survive and prosper thank you very much dem wjclinton10 1 01c bill_clinton well max i thank you for what you said but you were entirely to generous to a person who can t run for anything anymore i thought wow i wish i had that on tape four years ago and in terms of going to meetings without cue cards look when you re dealing with a guy from montana who knows who sisyphus was you can t carry your cue cards right i want to say first of all how honored i am to be here i like max baucus a lot and i respect him and i want to say just a few words about that but i also want to join in what you said because this is maybe one of the last public occasions i ll have to say it in washington d c i don t think there s any way for me to explain the to rest of you what having tom daschle as a leader of our crowd in the senate has meant to me and to the united states of america and i do agree that his leadership had a lot to do with the fact that we were able to pick up five seats and i was honored to work with him and he s been great and i also think you were right about my good friend harry reid you know harry reid never lifts his voice he talks real soft and pretty soon you re looking for your billfold he is such a good man and so effective and i am very grateful to him mary landrieu and i have been friends for many many years as she s from my neighboring state of louisiana which has been very good to me and whom i m very grateful and i m thrilled that she got elected to the senate and has done so well and i am especially proud of maria cantwell because maria cantwell is one of the people who gave up her seat in 1994 that turned the miserable economic condition of this country and that terrible deficit around and she got beat because of it and she did whine around she went out and made a bunch of money and went on with her life and then she ran for the senate and they have this unusual system in washington state they actually count all the votes and when they were counted she was a senator for washington and we are thrilled and i m very proud of her and you mark my words she s going to have a big impact on this country and she has i think a well deserved chance to serve i kind of am partial to this new crowd of senators it got me in the senate spouses club that s true where i intend to be a very vigorous member i may run for president of the senate spouses club some of you may have seen this in the paper but i can t help mentioning it again since max said something about deregulation of the airlines hillary and chelsea and i for eight years have gone to foundry methodist church here in washington and the minister there is a great guy so he says i want you to come give a little talk on sunday i said what do you want me to say he said just talk about whatever you want so i said well i m going to stand up and thank the church for everything they ve done and i had this whole long list of things they ve done it s a wonderful place so i had this list of things and i walked into church and they gave me a program and i see that i am giving the sermon and the sermon has a title and the title of the sermon is reflections and anticipation so i get up and give my little talk and i thank them all for everything i want to thank them for all and i said i didn t know what i was talking about until i got here and read it in the program but do you want to know what my anticipations are i anticipate my christian spirit will be sorely tested by a return to commercial air travel i anticipate being disoriented in large rooms for several months because when i walk in nobody will play a song anymore so anyway i gave them a few anticipations i anticipate that terry mcauliffe will still ask me to help raise money for the democratic party and i hope he will thank you but to get back to the main event here i m here for a lot of reasons first i love montana i was a governor for a dozen years and former governor of montana ted schwindler was one of the best friends i ever had in the governors conference and in 1985 hillary and chelsea and i went to montana before the governors met in idaho and had what maybe was the best family vacation we ever had it is the most spectacularly beautiful place i believe i have ever seen anywhere in the world in 1992 we actually carried montana maybe because ross perot got so many votes but anyway for whatever reason i was proud to have those votes in the column secondly i believe that montana is first of all as you saw in these last elections we lost both the congress and the governor s race it was a pretty closely divided state and we have a real chance there i think to bring the democrats back but the key to that is senator baucus winning reelection now the people of montana know he s done a good job but i m not sure they know just how good a job he has done and i want to talk about that because i m interested in the country and i m not running for anything anymore but the reason i always liked max baucus is he cared about ideas he cares about things and he also cares about how things are going to work he s not just a talker he cares about whether something will work or not he had last summer i think it was he had an economic development conference in montana and then set up an action group to implement the ideas that they came up with that s not something senators normally do but a lot of rural parts of this country and a lot of people that have depended on natural resource based economies have not done all that well in this economy and the farmers have been having a terrible time in the last two or three years and the ones that get a lot of payments based on the way the old farm bill dolls the money out when we come out with the emergency appropriations they re getting by but it s really been tough out there so max actually decided to do something about it and i think that makes him a better legislator because if you think about how something s going to work you re more likely to vote for the right kind of bills and draft them in the right way and i am particularly interested in that i also am interested in the fact that he wants to bring the benefits of high technology to people in rural america to small communities to the native american reservations to the schools this is a big deal i really believe we can skip a whole generation of economic development in places that have been badly left behind in this country if we get the technology out there in the right way and train the people to use it and the third thing that i want to say is even after the 20th he ll be the ranking member on the senate finance committee they re going to write tax legislation that will have an impact on this economy they re going to deal with medicare reform and the question of whether and in what form the seniors of this country will get a prescription drug benefit under medicare they re going to continue to deal with trade and you heard him say it so i ll just say thank you back i did my best at least to create a consensus within the democratic party on all the big issues and then to work with the republicans wherever we could and this year we actually had the best year in some ways we ve ever had we passed the china trade bill the africa caribbean trade bill we passed the most massive debt relief for poor countries in the world if they ll put the money if but only if they ll put the money back into education health care and development in their own countries we lifted the earnings limit on social security we passed the largest bill in history thank you mary landrieu and others to buy land and preserve it for all time to come permanent funding has never been done before like this and we passed the best education bill we ve ever passed when i four years ago we weren t funding any kids in after school programs this year the federal government will fund 1 3 million children in after school programs to learn and stay off the street and out of trouble and i was yesterday in chicago in a school that s getting some of that money so we had a great great year but there s a lot of big questions that have to be faced about the whole issue of globalization and i ve talked ad nauseam about this i went to england and gave a speech with tony blair about it and i don t want to bore you with all of it again but let me just say that the growing interdependence of people on this increasingly shrinking planet and the explosion of population almost a hundred percent of which is supposed to be in the poorest countries of the world and the phenomenal explosion of wealth in this country which has helped everybody yes we ve got more billionaires and more millionaires but we also have people in the lower 20 percent of the population the last three years had the biggest percentage increase in their income if you look at all that good and all those storm clouds we ve got to work out a new agreement with other wealthy countries about how we re going to continue to expand trade and how it s going to work in a way that lifts the lives of people everywhere and if we don t then you re going to see a lot of these countries democracies themselves under stress how are we going to do it in a way that helps everybody and when a country has a non economic problem and they re a big trading partner of ours what are we supposed to do about it that s another thing this congress did for which i m very grateful the plan colombia program you know it may or may not work but if we lose the oldest democracy in south america because the narco traffickers and the guerrillas have teamed up that s not a good omen for the 21st century these are big questions do you want somebody to go back to max s term who doesn t have to look at his note cards this guy thinks about these kinds of things all the time and he understands how these big sort of trade issues affect people in montana he understands why it s important to have sustainable economies in other parts of the world so they can buy the products that people in his state want to sell and he can connect it all to what he s trying to do to help empower people at the grass roots level to make a decent living get a good education and hook into the technology of the 21st century we need people like this in the senate we need people who read things and think about things i tell people all the time the main reason i m for campaign finance reform is so people like max and harry and mary and maria and tom won t have to spend quite so much time at fundraisers like this because if you re from a little state and it costs you a lot of money to run by the time you run all over the country especially if you re on a crowded airplane you re too tired to read a book or call the guy that wrote an article that struck you as interesting or meet with a bunch of people who have got a new idea that s why max baucus and from my honest opinion now this is all the montana specific issues but when i think about america to have somebody like him in the most important position our party can have on the senate finance committee who has read and thought about these issues and tried to make some sense out of them and who thinks about how the big things translate into the practical daily lives of ordinary citizens that s a big deal for a democracy and the more complicated the world gets and the more we ll have to process all this information and make decisions in a hurry without knowing everything the more you re going to need people like max baucus in positions of responsibility so i thank you for helping him today and i hope you ll help him all the way through to the election next year thank you very much dem wjclinton10 1 95 bill_clinton thank you wow thank you thank you very much i don t know where everybody else in galesburg is today but i m glad you re here i m glad to see you all thank you thank you thank you so much i would like to begin by paying my compliments to the band didn t they do a good job i thought they were terrific i also want to thank i understand that you all heard the speech i gave is that right no yes no somebody is saying yes somebody is saying no anyway i was over at the community college as you know and i met there with about 20 people who had either been students there or are now students there or who taught there or who hired people who graduated from there and i went there to talk about education with the secretary of labor who is not here with me and the secretary of education dick riley the former governor of south carolina who is here with me and your fine congressman lane evans i m glad to see him give him a hand i would like to say first of all on behalf of myself and all of those who came with me from washington today we have had a wonderful welcome in this terrific community and we re very grateful to all of you for that i must say when i landed at the airport and they told me that i couldn t take the helicopter to galesburg i d have to drive i was actually kind of happy because i got to drive across the farmland and i looked at all the land and it kind of made me feel no i liked it it made me feel right at home that s where i grew up i would like i want to say a couple things about what i came here to talk about today since some of you heard what i said and some of you didn t i ll be brief but i want to talk about it because i think it s important when i ran for president in 1992 and i came here to illinois and i went up and down the state yes to peoria and other places i always knew it was a very big state but when i visited southern illinois university in the southern part of the state i looked at a map and i realized i was south of richmond virginia and i said this is a very big state and a very beautiful one and of course my wife s home so i like it a lot i believed then and i believe now that we are going through a time of great change which if we do the right thing will lead us to america s greatest days i think the young people here in this school can live in the most peaceful most exciting most prosperous most exhilarating times this country has ever known if we do the right thing and if you look at what s going on in america today it just reinforces in my mind the things i have always wanted to do i worked as a governor for 12 years and i knew what my mission was in this global economy i had to improve the schools improve education for people of all ages and get more jobs into my state if you look at where we are as a country now i ran for president committed to doing three things i wanted a new economic policy so that the government would be working with ordinary working people and with business so that we would be able to compete and win in a global economy we d be able to get good jobs and keep them i wanted to change the way the federal government works i wanted the government to be smaller but more effective i wanted it to be able to solve people s problems but to be flexible and creative and not waste money and i thought we could do that and i ve come back to that i think we ve done a good job of making those changes and the third thing i wanted to do was to institute what was my version of the contract with america i called it the new covenant i believe that we need a new sense in this country that the government s job is to do what it can to provide more opportunity but we need more responsibility from our citizens as well if we re going to rebuild the american community we have to have more rights and responsibility and you can t have one without the other if people go around being responsible and no opportunities ever come their way they get tired and quit but if you just give people things and they never act like responsible citizens the whole country comes apart at the seams what we need is more of both more opportunity and more responsibility and if we have it we can rebuild america now after two years i can make this progress report to you we had to first work on the economy we had to bring the deficit down we had to open some markets around the world to our goods and services because we were seeing people selling things to america who worked for wages we couldn t live on we saw people losing jobs here and losing incomes we had to open those markets around the world well after two years we ve reduced the deficit by 700 billion that s 11 000 a family in less debt for you and your future 11 000 a family and we ve had more opening of markets to american products and services than in any period in our history so we re moving what have we got to show for it 5 6 million new jobs the lowest unemployment rate in illinois in two years we are moving in the right direction now we ve changed the way the government works there are 100 000 fewer people working for the federal government today than there were working for the federal government on the day i became president we are going to reduce the government now by over 300 000 it will be the smallest it s been since john kennedy was president but it s doing things it s doing things when you had the terrible floods here the federal emergency management agency which had been condemned for years as an ineffective agency showed up here and was ready to serve the people in the middle of the worst emergency you ve had in a long time it delivered it worked that s the kind of government we need smaller but effective and strong and there third and maybe most important we tried to expand opportunities for communities and individuals in a way that would enable people to take responsibility for their own lives that s what our crime bill is all about the crime bill that lane voted for will reduce the size of the federal government by 270 000 over five years and take every penny of that money and give it back to you and your local community to hire more police to have drug treatment and drug education programs to do things that will lower the crime rate and everywhere i go in america law enforcement officers or mayors come up to me and say we re going to lower the crime rate because of that crime bill thank you very much that s the kind of thing we ought to be doing and i hope let me say i hope when the new congress gets around to debating welfare reform that s what i hope they ll do with welfare reform the problem with welfare is not that it is so costly it s only about 3 percent of our national budget the problem is that it encourages dependence instead of independence encourages welfare instead of work what we want is not a program that punishes poor people but that requires poor people to take those steps that will enable them to move from welfare to work to be responsible parents and responsible workers not punishment but reward so we did that for two years but there s still a real problem in america why are a lot of people not very happy because most americans still have not felt any personal benefit from this economic recovery this is a new thing in our history and all the young people here should listen to this we created all these new jobs in america with these productive american industries why aren t people happy because their wages aren t going up right and because a lot of people still feel uncertain about their jobs and because another million americans lost their health insurance last year who are in working families and because millions of americans are worried about their pensions all these changes are going on and people don t feel secure even when we create more jobs now how do you raise wages there are only three ways to raise wages you have to get more high wage jobs in the economy you can take less out of the pocketbooks of middleclass wage earners and let them keep more of the money they do earn or you can increase the education and skill level of people now let me say we re getting more high wage jobs into the economy and i want to support a middle class tax cut like the one i have outlined in the middle class bill of rights that will that will give people more take home pay but the most important thing of all is to do it in a way that will support the mission of education and training not only for our school children but for the adults i met at that community college today because we know now that for the first time in history we re going to have economic recovery and job creation that don t benefit ordinary people unless we can raise the education levels of all the people in the united states in the work force the adults that means we ve got to get more people to the colleges more people back to the community colleges we ve got to help people work and train and raise their kids at the same time that s what i talked about today whether you are a democrat or a republican i hope you will support these ideas because they re american ideas let s give a tax deduction for the educational expenses that people have after high school whether they re in a college or a community college let s let working people invest in an ira an individual retirement account but be able to withdraw money from that tax fee for education for health care for caring for their folks let s give tax relief to working people for their children in their homes so they can help be successful parents and successful workers and finally i propose to take all these government programs that are paid to train people and consolidate the money and if you qualify because you re unemployed or because you re a low income person if you want to go to school i propose in effect letting you send a check to the local community college and not having to go through all these government programs and red tape just go to school get the education go forward just do it now folks these are good ideas they re american ideas i don t care who gets credit for it but i want us to do them there is no party label that will change the reality that the most important thing we can do for americans is to give everybody a good education give people the skills to compete and win in this global economy and give not only our school children but their parents and their grandparents if they need it the ability to give people the skills to compete and win in the global economy and give not only our schoolchildren but their parents and their grandparents if they need it the ability to go back to these community colleges and get the skills to have a better life and a stronger life and do a better job for themselves and the rest of this country that is the most important thing we can do to lift the income of the american people so that s what i said over there but i took about five minutes longer to say it i care about you and your future my job is to make sure that when all these young people get out of this high school the american dream is alive and well this is still the strongest country in the world we are still a force for peace and freedom and opportunity but in order to do it you every single one of you has got to make a commitment that we are going to develop the capacity of our people that s how we re going to win that s how we re going to get wages up that s how we re going to bring security back that s how we re going to bring this country together again that s how we re going to do it and we can with your help thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton10 10 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you very much secretary albright mr speaker senator roth senator moynihan chairman archer representative rangel i thank you all so much for your steadfast leadership in this important cause i also want to thank senator lott and senator daschle in their absence and indeed all the members who are here and if you would just indulge me in one personal remark this is probably the largest gathering of members of congress anywhere in washington today except in the chambers of the house and senate and i would like to take a moment to pay my respects to the memory of our friend congressman bruce vento who passed away earlier today a great teacher a great representative a wonderful human being i also want to join the previous speakers in thanking all those who worked so hard on it charlene barshefsky and gene sperling who accompanied her to china and they worked on this deal until the 11th hour we knew it would take until the 11th hour we only hoped by then they wouldn t be too tired to tell time so we would be able to finish i thank secretaries glickman summers and mineta and secretary slater secretary shalala who are here john podesta and sandy berger i can t thank bill daley and steve richetti enough for the extraordinary job they did to lead our efforts to secure passage of this initiative along with chuck brain and mary beth cahill i want to thank all the state and local officials the retired officials and business leaders who helped us and i would like to acknowledge two great champions of trade who i just saw in the audience just because i m glad to see them former congressman sam gibbons and former congressman and agriculture secretary mike espy thank you both for being here this is a great day for the united states and a hopeful day for the 21st century world this signing ceremony marks the culmination of efforts begun almost 30 years ago by president nixon built on by president carter who normalized our relations with china pursued firmly by presidents of both parties to normalize ties with china in ways that preserve our interests and advance our values during that time china has grown more prosperous and more open as the world economy becomes vastly more complex and interconnected china s participation in it according to the rules of international trade has only become more important for america for asia and the world today we take a major step toward china s entry into the world trade organization and a major step toward answering some of the central challenges of this new century for trade with china will not only extend our nation s unprecedented economic growth it offers us a chance to help to shape the future of the world s most populous nation and to reaffirm our own global leadership for peace and prosperity i guess i ought to point out that our work s not over when i sign the bill for china must still complete its wto accession negotiations and live up to the agreements it has negotiated with us and our partners before it can join but when it happens china will open its markets to american products from wheat to cars to consulting services and our companies will be far more able to sell goods without moving factories or investments there beyond the economy however america has a profound stake in what happens in china how it chooses to relate to the rest of the world and whether it is open to the world respectful of human rights upholding the rule of law at home and its dealings with other nations of course opening trade with china will not in and of itself lead china to make all the choices we believe it should but clearly the more china opens it markets the more it unleashes the power of economic freedom the more likely it will be to more fully liberate the human potential of its people as tariffs fall competition will rise speeding the demise of huge state enterprises private firms will take their place and reduce the role of government in people s daily lives open markets will accelerate the information revolution in china giving more people more access to more sources of knowledge that will strengthen those in china who fight for decent labor standards a cleaner environment human rights and the rule of law we also will continue to press china to meet its commitments on stopping the transfer of dangerous technology and deadly weapons we will continue to be a force for security in asia maintaining our military presence and our strong alliances we will continue to support from the outside those who struggle within china for human rights and religious freedom i want to say a special word of thanks to congressman levin and bereuter because of them we will have both normal trade relations and a good new policy tool to monitor our human rights concern they made this a better bill and all americans are in their debt thank you there are so many members here today i can t introduce them all but some who had no institutional mandate to do so also joined us in fighting hard for this bill among them senator baucus congressman matsui congressman dooley congressman dreier congressman kolbe and congressman crane i in particular thank those of you who worked so closely with me in this regard and all the rest of you who fought hard for this let me say in case you ve all forgotten this thing was hard to pass this was a lot of trouble and i would just like to close in reiterating something that i often said in these endless meetings we had in that room right up there on the third floor where ironically president franklin roosevelt had his office during world war ii i do think this is a good economic deal for america i think it will increase our exports and over the long run will strengthen our economic position in the world but i think by far the most important reason to ratify this agreement is the potential it gives us to build a safer more integrated world you heard senator moynihan talking about the day he joined the navy in the last 60 years of the 20th century we fought three major wars in asia we can build a whole different future there now we concluded a trade agreement with vietnam today a very high official from north korea came into the oval office to bring a message from the leader of north korea but nothing nothing can enhance the prospects of peace and the prospects of a very different 21st century like having china take the right path into the future like all people in the united states the chinese people ultimately will have to pick their own path and they will make their own decisions we can t control what they do but we can control what we do we overcame fears misgivings honest disagreements to come together in a stunning bipartisan coalition one republican house member shook hands with me today and the first thing he said is well he said i m glad to see you mr president this is the first time i ve ever come here since you ve been here and i thought well if there had to be just one time this is the time because we did something together here that gives our children and our grandchildren the chance the live in a world that is coming together not coming apart it gives all of us the chance to meet the common threats of the future together as free and interdependent people our children will live in a world in which the information technology revolution the biotechnology revolution and the increasing globalization of the economy will force them to find ways to meet our common challenges and seize our common opportunities together it s hard to imagine how that future will work if china is not a part of it so to every one of you from every part of america those in congress and those who lobbied the congress i hope for a long time to come you will remember this day and be proud of what you did to bring it about and i hope and believe that our children and grandchildren will be the beneficiaries of your labors thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton10 10 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you so much for that wonderful reception it s nice for me to be in knoxville sort of riding along on al gore s coattails i enjoy being here i want to thank everyone who has been a part of the program today dr parker thank you and mildred buffler thank you and i want to thank our great secretary of education dick riley my former colleague when we were governors together and i think unquestionably history will record him as the most effective secretary of education our country has had to this point i thank the students who are behind this i thank dr clinard for her fine remarks and her fine work dr al trivelpiece from the oak ridge labs is here i thank you for being here sir i want to say a special word of thanks to sumner redstone and to lynn forester thank you lynn and to all the other business leaders who have agreed to help us on this truly monumental but terribly important project i m very very glad to be here the vice president last night i called to congratulate him on his debate and i said that mr kemp found out something that i found out a long time ago it s just as well not to be on the other side of an argument with al gore although i did think it was rather ungracious of him to mention our annual bet on the arkansas tennessee football game here in the backyard of the university of tennessee actually we have a lot to be grateful to the university of tennessee for one of the most important members of our administration nancy anmen i believe was the first female president of the student body here the band came out to the airport to play for us which was a wonderful thing it woke us both up this morning got us off to a good start but anyway we always come back around to this football game you know and the last few years have been pretty good for tennessee and not so good for arkansas and so i figured that al s hubris would get the better of him and since we were in knoxville i could get more points on the game today and i m lobbying so you re proud of your football team aren t you so what am i entitled to twenty eight points on the spread i mean what do you think we got to talking about tennessee football players and i pointed out that one of the greatest football players tennessee ever produced still has ties here in knoxville is still playing very well reggie white of the green bay packers he s a good man i visited reggie and the packers not very long ago and they are truly impressive but as good as reggie is last night it was al gore who sacked the quarterback let me say to all of you that the vice president and i have worked very closely together we ve been a good team we ve worked hard for four years to basically change not only the way the national government works but the way our country is thinking about the future we want everyone in america to have a vision of what america should be like in the 21st century and i ask all of you to think about it when you leave here and you go about your business today just think about it if you had to sit down in a paragraph sort of say what you think your country ought to be like as we start a new century and a new millennium in a time where we have radical breathtaking changes in the nature of work and communications and how we relate to each other in the rest of the world what would that vision be for you if you were writing it down i encourage you to do it tonight when you get home it would be a good exercise talk to your spouses your kids your parents about it and think about what do you want for your country when we start this new century for me it s this i want us to take advantage of these changes so that the american dream will be alive and well for everyone who is willing to work for it i want us to be a country that is coming together respecting our diversity and clinging to our shared values instead of being torn apart by our differences as so many countries all around the world are now who would have thought 15 or 20 years ago at the height of the cold war we could ever see the threat of communism fade from the world that we would see the ugly rise of old racial and ethnic and religious hatreds consuming people all around the globe we can beat that rap here and we re determined to do it and i think we will do it the third thing i want is for the united states to continue to be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and progress and prosperity in the entire world i think that is important for other people in the world who have their aspirations and who need to have the chance to grow up strong and free the chance to develop the minds that god gave them and the spirits of their children to do that we have followed a simple strategy we have tried to create as much opportunity as possible we have tried to demand responsibility from all of our citizens and do things that would encourage more of that and we ve tried to build this american community and stand against those forces that would undermine it we have tried to change the fundamental way the government works and al gore has been our leader in that regard we have downsized the government now by 240 000 people or so it s the smallest it s been since president kennedy was in office but we have also tried to change the way it works to make it less bureaucratic and more oriented toward working in partnerships with citizens to give people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives that is the context in which i ask you to see what i believe we should be doing with science and technology and basic research it has to do with what i want america to look like when we start this new century what i want it to look like when people like me when our children are our age and indeed when our grandchildren are our age if you have that vision there is no better way to make it real than by continuing to preserve america s leadership in research and technology and science of course as al said there could be a great digital divide if we don t broadly share the knowledge and the technology that is developing it could work to promote inequality frictions anxieties among people but if we do it right it can be a great force to help us meet our challenges and protect our values together continuing to push back on the frontiers of knowledge has always been one of the measures of america s greatness for the last half century this state of tennessee has been a living map of how those kinds of investments can produce growth and opportunity sixty years ago the tva lifted an entire region out of poverty today it is still shining its light illuminating homes and communities during the cold war the oak ridge laboratory harnessed the power of the atom in the service of our nation s defense today it s nuclear science is yielding the isotopes that help doctors trace heart disease our interstate highway system built with the leadership of senator al gore sr literally remade the landscape of america and connected us all more closely and today it is still bringing americans together technology is clearly transforming our world and it is creating a range of possibilities for the young people behind me and the young people in this audience that are literally unimaginable many of you people who are students at the university of tennessee who are here and the younger students from high schools and the middle schools and the elementary schools you will be doing work that has not been invented yet some of you will be doing things that have not even been imagined yet and it is up to us to see that every one of you has the best possible chance to develop your talents and to live out your dreams that is what has been happening change at a rapid rate again even if you look back on it it s almost unimaginable consider this there is today more computer power in a ford taurus you drive to the supermarket than there was in apollo 11 when neal armstrong took it all the way to the moon isn t that amazing cell phone faxes laptop computers pagers they were the stuff of science fiction a few years ago they re now everywhere and if you don t have one don t know how to work one you re sort of out of step these days you can take notes on a computer pad which converts it into a typed text and sends it to the internet and transmits to a computer all across the world the young people today will live out their lives in short in a century that will change like this constantly and that s why i say they will do work that not only has not been invented yet but some of it has not been imagined yet our cutting edge industries like microchips biotechnology and aerospace once again lead the world i m proud of that and that s good news for americans when it comes to these new technologies our nation is on the right track and that s one of the reasons we re the world s leading exporting country again one of the reasons we have as many jobs as we do one of the reasons that more than half of our new jobs are in higher wage categories because we are on the cutting edge of positive change so let me say again we must stay on the cutting edge of positive change i am determined that we will continue to invest in science and technology more research in america most research is conducted by businesses and universities but we all know that government has an important role to play of the 12 americans who won the nobel prize last year all 12 had received government support for their research this year the nobel prize winners have just been announced in physics and chemistry of the three who won this year in physics and two who won in chemistry all five received federal funding from the national science foundation cutting back on research at the dawn of a new century where research is more important than it has been even for the last 50 years would be like cutting our defense budget at the height of the cold war we must not do it and we will not do it we must protect the future of the young people here in the audience one of the marvelous things we have learned about research is that it s not necessarily going to benefit just a particular category in which it was undertaken that ideas don t stay in boxes anymore that they all become more interrelated the more you know and the more you learn for example the department of defense has a dual applications program that makes military research available for commercial use the commerce department has an advanced technology program that works with hundreds of high tech firms to create jobs and new technologies and let me just give you one example of this the research we ve done in defense and intelligence and in our space program on imaging which is very very important knowing exactly where you are and what you re seeing is playing enormous benefits in the medical research area and it may help us to identify incipient cancers before they develop to a problem stage in a way that may drastically improve the cure rate for cancer and almost get the identification down to the point where cure and prevention become merely indistinguishable in the moment this is the sort of thing we have to be thinking about all of the time i tell this story all the time but i think it s important we just formed a partnership with ibm to produce a supercomputer over the next couple of years that will do more calculations in one second than you can do at home on your hand held calculator in 30 000 years now that should give you some indication of how quickly things are changing and how we will be rewarded if we stay on the cutting edge and how we can be punished if we don t i just talked a little bit about health care but technology is really making enormous strides there and research is during the time the vice president and i have been in office we ve increased research on breast cancer at the national institutes of health by almost 80 percent and just last year an nih scientist discovered two of the genes that cause breast cancer giving hope for treating and preventing the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women we ve increased nih research on aids by 39 percent and i m convinced we re in the process of helping to turn a relentlessly fatal disease into a chronic manageable illness the life expectancy of those with hiv and aids has nearly doubled since i took office because of medical advances in research we ve come up with the first ever treatment for strokes the third biggest killer in america something no one ever thought we would ever be able to do very much on and just the other day well a lot of you were moved i know by christopher reeves speech at the democratic national convention and he called for a recommitment to research at almost the same time either a couple of days before or a couple of days after christopher reeve gave that speech for the first time ever laboratory animals whose spine had been severed had movement in their lower limbs because of nerve transplants to the spine from other parts of the body we can do things that we have never imagined if we continue to work and go forward last week i signed budget legislation increasing the nih budget 2 4 billion over what it was the day i took office these investments will make possible further advances they will lead to sophisticated computer imaging systems to help us treat cancer to help us deal with alzheimer s they will enable us to continue certain extraordinary initiatives going on there one of my favorites is the human genome project which is literally on the verge of mapping out a genetic code of life it think it won t be too many years before parents will be able to go home from the hospital with their newborn babies with a genetic map in their hands that will tell them here s what your child s future will likely be like therefore if you want your child to live as long and as well as possible here is the diet you should follow here is the exercise program you should follow here is the medical treatment you should follow it will be an incredible thing i know that all of you believe in this but i think it s important that we have that ordinary citizens have at their fingertips three or four examples that people can identify with of why these investments of your money because after all this is all your money these are just things that we do together as a people because we couldn t do them individually and i think it s important that you have these at your fingertips so that you can talk to your friends and neighbors about why this matters i know you can make a good speech about it here because you ve got oak ridge up the road and it s a lot of good jobs but it s important to understand why it matters to everyone wherever they live and how it can change our common future for the better we all know that changes in technology are transforming the way we work too for a long time people were worried about that we all were everybody wondered well there s so much computer technology all of the big organizations the big bureaucracies can downsize will there be more people dislocated than we can create new jobs even if we create new jobs will the new jobs not be as good a jobs as the ones we re losing these are legitimate worries that have plagued people in the past and it still troubles individuals in our country but we now know that we are creating jobs that on average are in the higher wage categories we know we can do it right but there is another thing that we ought to look at which is how we can use technology to help people who have children at home succeed at home and at work when i became president i think it s still true we don t have any updated figures but when i became president there was a study that came out that said that people were working harder in 1994 the second year i was in office than they had been 25 years earlier in 1969 the average working person was actually spending more hours a week at work and yet there were a higher percentage of parents in the workforce in 1994 than there were in 1969 that means that nearly every family whether it s a family working for a very modest wage a family with a solid middle class existence even a lot of upper middle class better off families are dealing with these competing pressures of trying to do a good job raising their children which is our most important job and trying to succeed in the workplace that s why the vice president and i worked so hard for the family and medical leave act why we believe it ought to be expanded why we think there ought to be more flex time in the workplace but again i think technology if we keep working on it we ll bring it back around to us and a lot of people will be able to benefit from it the number of americans who are now working from their home at least part of the week and telecommuting has doubled over the last five years to 12 1 million the small business job protection act that i signed this summer included an increase in the minimum wage for 10 million working americans but it also did something else it completed a job the vice president and i started in 1993 we have since 1993 increased the amount of capital a small business can expense from 10 000 a year now to 25 000 a year and i believe more and more companies should use this expense to buy computers and other equipment for their employees to use at home especially if the employees have young children we have to work harder to make our businesses work well our employees succeed and people be able to be good parents finally let me say the explosion of information has changed everyone s life nowhere more than on the internet now think about the internet how rapidly it s become part of our lives in 1969 the government invested in a small computer network that eventually became the internet when i took office only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the worldwide web when i took office january of 1993 only high energy physicists had heard of it now even my cat has its own web page the number of people on the web has been doubling every eight months think about that the number of people on the web has been doubling every eight months today there are at least 25 million people on the internet by 1998 that number will reach 100 million the day is coming when every home will be connected to it and it will be just as normal a part of our life as a telephone and a television it is becoming our new town square changing the way we relate to one another the way we send mail the way we hear news the way we play every citizen can now read the congressional record if you have insomnia i recommend it every citizen can get the text of what s in a new law the very day it passes art lovers can go to the louvre baseball fans can pay an on line visit to cooperstown everyone can find a passage in the bible or in shakespeare with the click of a mouse most of all the internet will be the most profoundly revolutionary tool for educating our children in generations i want to see the day when computers are as much a part of a classroom as blackboards and we put the future at the fingertips of every american child that sounds great but think about the implications for our american democracy if you want to go into the 21st century with the american dream alive and well for everyone everybody has a chance to live up to the fullest of their abilities and i might add to be less shackled by whatever disabilities they have if you believe we can create a community where everybody has a role to play think about the implications for this what does this mean hooking up every classroom it means if you have the right computers and the right education equipment software the right educational software and properly trained teachers and then all of these connections are made to the internet and the world wide web and all of the other networks that will be exploding out there think what this means this means for the first time ever in history children in the most rural schools children in the poorest inner city school districts children in standard middle class communities children in the wealthiest schools public or private up and down the line will have access in real time to the same unlimited store of information it will revolutionize and democratize education in a way that nothing ever has in the history of this country think about what it means in the state of the union address i challenged the american people to make sure that all of the libraries and classrooms in the country were hooked up to the information superhighway by the year 2000 i am very very grateful for the work that has already been done businesses communities governments schools have worked all across this country thousands of schools have been hooked up on net days from california to florida and today we are taking three more steps to make sure we achieve that critical goal first the announcement that has been made by mr redstone the business community is committed to taking the lead in putting educational technology into our classrooms ceos from our top telecommunications firms are joining together to help us achieve that vision sumner redstone lynn forester also robert allen of at t larry ellison of oracle gerry levin of time warner brian roberts of comcast steven case of america online and there will be many more they re going to make sure that we have the computers in the classrooms that the teachers are properly trained that the educational software is the best available and that all these connections are made to democratize education they will help to raise private sector contributions to match the technology literacy challenge fund that we have created and let me say again to sumner to lynn to all the others we owe them our thanks and we need more to follow their lead this is the only way we can get this done in a short time thank you the second thing we have to do is to make sure that all of the schools and the libraries in the country can afford to hook up to the internet today the cost of using the internet can price some schools out of cyberspace fees can be inconsistent with the highest rates often hitting places with the fewest resources soon all this will change under the new telecommunications law i signed a few months ago the federal communications commission will require the telecommunications service providers give to schools and libraries affordable rates for internet access the fcc will vote on how to do this on november 8th how to provide what we call an e rate an education rate today i call on the fcc when it votes to give every elementary middle and high school and every library in the country the lowest possible e rate free basic service to the internet more sophisticated services like teleconferencing the fcc should require discounted rates with the deepest discounts going to the poorest schools and areas i urge the fcc and the state regulators who have a say in this to make the e rate a reality for our schools and again i want to thank the vice president and secretary riley assistant secretary of commerce larry irving who has worked with us on this and there are a number of members of congress the senators that i would like to mention are dorgan exon kerry rockefeller and senator snow and congressman markey they have all helped us on this this is a big deal wouldn t it be a shame if we did all this work and there were schools that literally could not access the internet if there were libraries in little rural communities that couldn t do it it is not necessary this will pay for itself over and over again by increasing the users the knowledge it will explode and we have to do this finally let me say to keep going we have to keep the internet itself up to speed i know it s hard to imagine that the internet could be getting too old i find that about myself from time to time but believe it or not everything ages and the internet is straining under its growing popularity like any other piece of critical infrastructure it has to be repaired and upgraded to meet all our education medical and national security needs it is now time to invest in the next generation of internet today i am pleased to announce our commitment to a new 100 million initiative in fiscal year 1998 to improve and expand the internet paid for under out balanced budget plan line by line dime by dime america must have an internet that keeps pace with our future so let s give america internet ii the next generation internet we have to keep it big enough and fast enough to connect all of our people now this initiative will help universities and research institutions expand the amount of information that internets can carry through ultra fast fiber optic networks it will develop software to eliminate bottlenecks it will expand the number of addresses on the internet it will create powerful new switching computers to create power to enable universities to communicate with each other 100 to 1 000 times faster than they can today it will develop the software to carry sound and video from one end of the world to another in real time it will be capable of transmitting the entire encyclopedia britannica in less than a second these improvements will make the internet a more important and remarkable part of our own lives they will enable our defense department to send intelligence instantly to our troops on the ground anywhere in the world they will let doctors in rural areas scan their patients for cancer by tapping into supercomputers at university hospitals a long way away they will allow americans to take any class anytime anywhere in any subject they will expand the reach of education programs right here like the oak ridge education network and adventures in supercomputing so let us reach for a goal in the 21st century of every home connected to the internet and let us be brought closer together as a community through that connection let me close with a word of caution that i know i don t need for anybody in this audience in east tennessee we cannot idealize technology technology is only and always the reflection of our own imagination and its uses must be conditioned by our own values technology can help cure diseases but we can prevent a lot of diseases by old fashioned changes in behavior and we know that as well technology can give us a lot of information about why we should act rationally in certain cases but continuing to hate our friends and neighbors because of their religious racial tribal or ethnic differences that is an affair of the human heart and we know that as well so today let us resolve to keep faith with our future by passing on to our children an information superhighway that will help them to live out their dreams but let us also resolve to make sure that their dreams are the right dreams so that when we get to this great brand new century and this remarkable age of possibility the vision we all share for our future can become real thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton10 11 04 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much well i d like to begin by thanking marcia pecker and for inviting me here i d like to thank michael carbone for that remarkable introduction i told all the young people out there with me that you know i d forgotten half those things myself i thank your school superintendent dr sherman and mayor platt thank you it s great to be back in this community again where i was on the weekend before my election as president in 1992 and i remember it very clearly i also want to compliment the choir i sneaked behind the curtain and shook hands with them all after they sang i thought they were wonderful and i thank them tonight it s my understanding that after i finish speaking we re going to have some time for questions so i will try to compress what i have to say without oversimplifying it so we have more time for your questions i think community meetings like this are very very important they give us a chance to have conversations that go beyond the kind of things you see in political campaigns the 30 second ads or people trying to score debating points and i think that s important i want to say just a few words about the election only to put it in the context of where we are as a country and where the world is going if you want to ask me more questions about it we can do that later the first thing i want to say is regardless of your party affiliation our country can be proud of the fact that there was a dramatic increase in voter turnout for the election that we had something like 10 million new voters and a lot of them were young i supported senator kerry because i agree with his policies and the direction in which he wanted to take the country but as a political leader i could appreciate the brilliant campaign that i believe was run by the president and his supporters it s too early to draw definitive conclusions but it appears that the election came out about 51 1 2 to 48 1 2 one way instead of the other way because about 4 of the voters changed their mind or didn t change their mind but made up their minds in the last 24 hours and they decided mostly to vote for the president because they felt that it was not wise to change leaders while we re fighting terror and dealing with the problems in iraq how we got to there however dealt with a whole lot of other things which you ve all doubtless seen and talked about including the rise of evangelical voters voting on what they call the moral issues in staggering numbers in small towns in rural america all across the country now what i want to say to you is two things tonight like i said if you want to talk about the election you can ask questions about that later but i want to say two things that i want you to think about in spite of all the television ads all the campaign appearances and all the debates the election probably raised as many questions as it answered on important issues that will actually affect your lives and that actually affect the decision making that a president does and i ll just mentioned a few i don t really think the election results told us where we should go with regard to our budget it really bothered me that we have quadrupled the debt of america in the 12 years before i became president i thought it was a tax on the middle class and a deterrent to the poor moving into the middle class it meant we spent more and more money every year your tax money paying interest on the debt and i was determined to do something about it so we cut the deficit dramatically with a bill in 1993 then we had the balanced budget act of 1997 we had three surpluses before i left office paid down almost 600 billion dollars of the national debt we were on track to have instead of the debt a 5 trillion dollar surplus over the coming decade which i hoped would allow us to deal with the retirement of the baby boomers and the stresses on social security and medicare the recession that came briefly to our country and the economic sluggishness of the last four years was partly the cause of the collapse in the computer stocks and the telecommunication stocks partly the shock aftermath of 9 11 and we re crawling our way out of it but we passed not one but two big tax cuts for the first time in history while we were carrying on major military operations and half the money went to people in the top 1 most of us did not ask for it and frankly resented being the only group of people in america not being asked to contribute to our country s war against terror or the rebuilding of the american economy or securing a better future for our children it has left us with a huge deficit hole how is this deficit being financed it s 400 billion dollars this year it s actually 150 billion dollars more than that because the first thing we do is take all the social security surplus that you pay in social security taxes over and above what s necessary to pay current retirees and we buy government bonds to cover part of our deficit so if they tell you we have a 400 billion dollar deficit it s actually about 550 billion because social security sopped up 150 billion of it now we went out how did we pay for the rest of it we borrowed the money and an inordinate percentage of it comes from almost daily borrowings from the governments of china and japan think of it a lot of americans are worried about the outsourcing of our jobs to china and elsewhere so here s a country with a per capita income of about 1 300 a year loaning us money every day to cover my tax cut did the american people really ratify that economic policy in the last election did they even understand it if not why not and what are we going to do about it we also have about a 500 billion dollar a year trade deficit we have to cover that so we have to get all this money into our country every year just to cover our deficit spending before we get any money to invest in the future sooner or later people get tired of loaning us money at low interest rates just to keep the value of our dollar up so we ll have enough money to buy their products that s why they loan us money they loan us money at low interest rates the dollar stays strong and you can afford to go to the mall and buy products made in china japan and elsewhere but you don t have to be a genius to figure out that sooner or later this system could quickly come to an end people get tired of loaning us money at interest which we then turn around and use to buy their products because we the wealthiest country on earth didn t have enough self discipline to avoid throwing tax cuts at people like me who didn t need it at the same time we had to spend more money on fighting terror the operations in iraq homeland security and a whole lot of other things now that s my opinion you don t have to agree with me but somebody needs an answer to that we didn t resolve that in the election we didn t resolve how we re going to provide affordable healthcare for people who don t have it how we re going to deal with the crying need for more affordable medicine for seniors and others which the current law does not do i think the most important domestic issue that was almost completely undiscussed is we didn t decide how we re going to make america less dependent on foreign oil and more committed to a clean energy future which will help us economically environmentally politically and in terms of our national security and yet there was almost no discussion of it we re with the economy down for four years we were still importing more foreign oil than we were on the day i left office and there is a 1 trillion let me use that number again 1 trillion dollar untapped market right now for clean energy technology that could be used to create an unlimited number of high paying jobs in america i ll just give you an example from my own experience next week i will have the honor of going home to arkansas with president bush former president bush former president carter and a large number of people from around the world to do what we do when we retire presidents after a while i m going to dedicate my presidential library and it s a very it s a large structure that i designed basically to be the first major museum to chronicle america s transition into the 21st century how we moved into an interdependent world away from the cold war how it changed the way we worked the way we lived the way we relate to each other and people beyond our borders and all of you will be able to visit it in three dimensional technology on the internet if you can t come down and see it it s going to be really really interesting what i m proud of is that i believe the building designs will win an international environmental award because there are two buildings there s a big open museum building that s full of light and then there s a building behind it that stores the millions and millions of documents the 2 million pictures all the artifacts that i accumulated in 8 years that building is covered on the roof with solar reflectors made in america good jobs for americans that building is then the museum building because i wanted it to be light and airy all the time is glass and steel but in order to display any of my records under the law i have to keep the ultraviolet light off of it so we got special grainy glass that looks a little grainy from the outside but when you re in it looks clear looking out then in the floors which are very hard bamboo we have underneath piping running tubes running miles and miles and miles of them that carry hot water in the winter and cold water in the summer to have natural cooling and heating the combined impact of all of this will to be cut the traditional energy usage of that building which is mammoth by 30 a year in a way that created jobs for americans put less stress on the environment required less foreign oil and therefore made us more secure more environmentally responsible and economically better off and that s one tiny example there was almost no discussion of this in the election but it will have a huge impact on your future particularly the young people in this audience i ll give you another example the future of social security and i won t talk in great deal about this unless you want to but when i left office i had a plan which i asked the congress to adopt and they declined because they wanted a crisis in social security so they could privatize it but i wanted them to take the surplus that i had planned to build up over the next decade and every time you run a surplus you reduce the debt therefore you pay less money less tax money on interest on the debt this year then you did last year and then less money next year and less money the year after that because your interest payments go down so i wanted to take the interest savings and put it all into social security and it s totally justified because we ve been using social security to cover our deficit for 20 years before that that would have made social security good till the year 2053 i think that s beyond the life of all but the most fortunate baby boomers i m the oldest of the baby boomers i hate it but i am and if i live that long i ll be 107 it seems unlikely given the life i ve had you know after i ve just went through this heart surgery i m just glad to be standing here tonight but look let s be serious that s with no changes now i know there s a lot of support in the republican caucus in congress for prioritizing part of social security i looked at this very seriously the argument is the social security investment you make doesn t earn a very high rate of return it s somewhat misleading because one third of the social security expenditures go to cover disability payments that we make to young people and their families for people who have unfortunate disabilities before they reach retirement age but still the funds aren t they re government guaranteed bonds so they don t pay high interest rates because it s 100 certain return and the more certain the return the lower the interest rate the more risk the higher the interest rate you have to pay now over any 30 year period the stock market has had a greater return than government bonds and that s the argument that the president and his party will make to partially prioritize social security for the younger people in the audience you take let s say 2 of your payroll tax instead of paying 7 1 2 you keep 2 and invest it as you see fit or if we adopt a more conservative course we might say something i entertain invest it the way federal employees can invest their retirement funds that is here are three mutual funds and government bonds if you wanted 100 certainty if you want to stay where you were now it all sounds so good the problem is that for many many years we ve been paying current retirees out of current receipts so if all of you under 40 let s say took 2 of your payroll and started putting it into a stock fund either a safer one like one of the federal retirement funds or investing it however you wished it would immediately blow a hole of somewhere between a trillion and a trillion and a half dollars into the obligation we have to pay current retirees that was never really talked about or explained when i asked my republic friends how they were going to cover it they say we re going to borrow it so i said we re going to borrow another trillion and a half on top of this money you re already borrowing to cover my tax cut and worry about it tomorrow no country is big and strong enough to avoid paying the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility but if you ve been in trouble here lately you get about a nanosecond before the global markets bust you that s why brazil and mexico have to be careful if people trade in your currency like dollars and you ve got a big old healthy complicated economy it may be four years it may be six it may be eight but sooner or later the hammer comes down no one can escape the discipline of the fiscal markets and sooner or later 2 plus 2 has to equal four even for governments so that s the problem there s another problem you need to consider which is that if all of you all the young people i see out here if you took the 2 out and you invested it and you earned a high rate of return we would still have to have an enormous amount of money now coming from the social security fund to cover our debt right somebody s got to buy our debt so because we don t have an automatic claim on social security every month we ll have to raise interest rates to get other sources of funds to cover the debt when we do some of that money might come out of the stock market and your stock returns will go down and our payments interest payments will go up leaving less money for education health and other things there s no magic solution that s the point i want to make to you anybody that ll tell you this is easy is crazy the easiest thing to do would have been to keep running the surplus and save the money and fix social security and medicare the way we did we added 27 years to the life of medicare and we added another 20 years to the life of social secure and we could have just kept doing that as long as we had savings now we re back to deficit spending to cover the tax cuts of people like me we precipitated an illusory or an unnecessary financial crisis which will now require us to do something more significant for social security and medicare the point i want to make is there doesn t need to be a republican or a democratic solution here this is about arithmetic and options and none of them are simple and none of them are free of consequences so i just want my country to deal with them let me just give you two more things very briefly there was a lot of discussion in general about homeland security in the campaign but we don t know what that means we know it s a good thing and we want it but what does it mean think about what homeland security meant to you before 9 11 what did domestic security mean to you before 9 11 right did it mean that there would never be another robbery in cherry hill did it mean that there would never be another drunk driver being irresponsible did it mean there would never be another shooting on the streets of any new jersey city no of course it didn t i wasn t trying to be funny or cute you felt secure if you thought there was a reasonable chance that we could stop big bad things from happening that is there might be one robbery in cherry hill but not everybody s house would be burglarized there might be one drunk driver but we d have enough discipline to control having a whole spade of terrible accidents there might be one shooting but we didn t think a gang could take over trenton or newark or any other city in new jersey in other words security in a crime sense is keeping big bad things from happening and that s what it means in homeland security too the president has said repeatedly and he s absolutely right about this no one can promise you that there will never be another terrorist incident what you want is to try to keep big bad things from happening you want no more 9 11 s so what does that mean in the context of homeland security surely it means more than just reorganizing a bunch of government departments into one and one of the things that i was really really sorry about is that all these panelists in the debate never asked either the president or senator kerry the hard questions about the debates that occurred in the last four years why did the administration oppose doubling cargo container checks at ports and airports paid for by a 5 000 reduction in the size of the tax cut of the 200 000 millionaires in the country from 88 000 to 83 000 a year why had we not done more to build up the capacity of first responders why were we taking 88 000 police off the street and ending the cops program at the very time when we need more first responders if there s a more traditional terrorist attack in america the only point i want to make is everybody s for homeland security but you need to give it content and as concerned american citizens you need to know what you mean by it and if you mean stopping big bad things from happening then you should be able to define in your own mind which policies are more likely than not to secure that goal one of the biggest problems in america is today we don t have adequate protection for our ports our bridges reinforcements for our tunnels the subway under madison square garden had to be shut down when the republican convention met there because there was a 600 million dollar plan to reinforce all those tunnels which meant that if they had been reinforced and somebody set off a bomb in the tunnel it wouldn t shatter the ceiling overhead and cause madison square garden to collapse and the plans had been on the books and been developed for some time but they weren t implemented should that or should that not be a priority i think clearly we should be checking more than 5 of the cargo containers at ports and airports because they re just open invitations to terrorists to put in small scale chemical biological or nuclear materials i say this again whether you are a republican or a democrat this campaign was largely carried out on the broad brush grounds of security the management of iraq the economic issue the healthcare plans that senator kerry outlined which he did do pretty well and so did the president outline his and where you stood on things like gay marriage which wasn t a big part of the debate but was a big part of the undercurrent of what was going on in much of america but these things i just mentioned to you these are the things that members of the congress the white house staff the cabinet the president himself have to deal with and things that as citizens you should know what you think about and they will shape the future that we have together now i want to make a couple of other points we ve had two elections now with the country sharply divided we won one popular vote by a little bit and not enough to stay out of the supreme court and then they won the popular vote if those 4 of the people that changed that made up their mind on the last day had all decided that they didn t have to stay with the same president to have security and therefore they wanted to give into their yearnings for a different economic and healthcare policy it would have been 51 to 48 the other way so we re closely divided i still think there will be great opportunities for the parties and the leaders to work together i had a republican congress in 6 of the 8 years i was president we worked together across party lines to reform welfare to put more police on the street to balance the budget and run surpluses to give 5 million more children health insurance to relieve the debt of the poorest countries in the world get more incentives to invest in the poorest parts of america the fight for freedom and against ethnic cleansing in kosovo and bosnia in northern ireland and in the middle east to improve the environment and to strengthen our capacity to deal with terror you can get a lot done if you work at it and if we treat each other like people and listen to each other the second thing i want to say is no matter how this election had come out and i voted for john kerry and i believed in the direction he wanted but no matter how the election had come out and how it did come out the fundamental big sweeping currents shaping america and the world have not will not and could not be changed by any election and must be dealt with by our existing political structure what are those fundamental realities number one that the world gets more interdependent every day and number two that america grows more diverse every day it is ironic that we re told that a certain kind of evangelical religious vote with a political program had such a decisive impact on an election at the time when america is growing more diverse religiously racially culturally politically and the world is growing more interdependence but interdependence may be good or bad interdependence means we cannot escape each other interdependence means we trade all over the world we travel all over the world we get entertainment from all over the world interdependence means open borders easy travel and easy immigration that helped make 9 11 possible so it is clear that we have to try to move this interdependent world of ours in a direction that lifts the positive forces of interdependence and restrains the negative ones that we move toward an integrated global community and at the same time we try to manage america s diversity in a way that gets the benefit of our differences and still brings us together now how do we do that first of all we do need a security policy to fight the terror networks to limit the production of nuclear chemical and biological weapons to define confine secure and possibly destroy the materials out of which those weapons are made and to continue to try to make this enterprise in iraq a success because whether you agree with going there or not in the first place if we left now it would become the terrorist cesspool we were told it was before we went in so whether you were for it or not we need to try to make this thing work and i think we can i actually believe we can get more help from other countries in doing it if we do it right a security strategy alone is not enough why because in an interdependent world you cannot possibly kill jail or occupy all your adversaries does anybody think we can that we could possibly kill jail or occupy all of our present or potential future adversaries therefore in addition to security we need a policy to try to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists how do we do that first we need more institutional and international cooperation i believe that our policy should be we may have to act alone from time to time we re going to cooperate whenever we can and act alone only when we have to people ask me all the time why are other people in the world mad at us is it just over iraq no it s over iraq and our withdrawal from the antiballistic missile treaty our withdrawal from the kyoto climate change treaty our withdrawal from the international criminal court our refusal to strengthen the biological weapons treaty it s over our telling iran and north korea they ve got to give up their nuclear weapons and at the same time we re trying to develop two new nuclear weapons that for the first time in the history of america since the atomic bomb was first dropped in japan and world war ii in the last four years we have said we might use nuclear weapons first and yet we re telling other people they ve got to give them up the signal we re giving is you better go get you some because we re getting some and we might use them on you so you have to understand i know america might have to act alone i did it from time to time on my own but it was never my first choice we should cooperate whenever we can and act alone only when we have to and built up these institutions of cooperation and if there s something wrong with them improve them don t walk away from them the third thing we have to do is to keep making america better that s why i talked about the issues i did earlier and we have to find some unity across all these lines that divide us we ve got red states and blue states red people and blue people the truth of us the truth is nearly everybody on earth is a little red and a little blue depending on how you read that and this is crazy for us to be treating each other this way how can we find unity at home and how can we build a world that is more of an integrated community i believe with a simple strategy of sharing we have to share the responsibilities we have to share the benefits and we have to have a certain set of shared values that will encompass everyone s religious faith or non religious search for the truth simple values everyone counts everyone deserves a chance everyone has a role to play we all do better when we work together our differences do matter and they re worth arguing over and defending but in the end our common humanity matters more now i want to just close with this thought to the young people who agree with my politics who may be discouraged i say to you that when i was your age i never thought my party would ever elect a president again and i got to do it twice so you need to keep you need to be of good heart we got beat a lot worse than this in the 80 s this is we re going to be all right here if we just keep our heads on straight and keep figuring out why we didn t make the sale this time and how to do it next time and start thinking about what s good for america and what we can do to contribute to that to those of you who are in the other party and who voted for president bush i say to you i ve been in politics a long time and i ve been beat as well as elected and it s a long road that doesn t turn so don t take this too seriously i mean this in this way you may believe as some of them said that you represented only that you were the only choice for morality and strength and all that stuff but in your heart of hearts you know that can t quite be right we can t quite be as bad as we were painted it can t quite be right to do what was done in 2002 to the democratic senator from georgia max cleland who who is a friend of mine and who gave up both his legs just below the hip and his arm one of his arms in vietnam and because he wouldn t vote for the homeland security bill that the president put before the congress which he the president himself had opposed for 8 months before then he decided he was for it then they tried to use it to strip the civil service protections of 170 000 federal workers who had nothing to do with homeland security so max said hey i didn t leave half my body in vietnam to come home and pretend to make people secure by taking their job rights away and they ran an ad in georgia when people were still scared about september the 11th with just his face not his body comparing him to saddam hussein and the man that beat him was like me he had a deferment so i say to you you got away with it in 2002 and there was a lot of that sort of component in some of the elections this year but you should be humble power is a fleeting thing nobody lives forever nobody has it forever in the end the constitution and the circumstances of life bring us back to a dynamic center we have got to find a way forward together and to all of you i say this after all i went through in the 8 years i was president on the day i walked out of the white house for the last time i was more idealistic about this country and the prospects of america and the world for the 21st century than i was on the day i walked in i believe essentially there s nothing that free people of good will can t figure out how to deal with i know some of this stuff is scary but look there s way more good than bad in the modern world way more good than bad you ve just got to figure out how to beat down the bad and lift up the good and i ll just close with this story more for my side i guess than the other but it ll keep you in a good humor at the beginning of world war ii when adolph hitler attacked poland in 1939 and britain was alone in europe because france was overrun and at the time russia was still neutral the war had not really broken out in asia and the whole future of western civilization seemed to hang on the grittiness and will of the british people held together by winston churchill and he desperately needed america to come and help him and roosevelt desperately wanted to go in and help him but he knew that the american people still were not prepared to go to war against the nazis and he knew he had to find a way to get enough help to churchill to keep him alive and keep him going until some defining event in our case pearl harbor catapulted us into the stream of history you can just imagine that all this was cold comfort for churchill who literally didn t know from one month to the next whether the british were going to survive but he was a jolly old rascal and they asked him whether he was impatient with america and with roosevelt and keep in mind they were getting killed in all these battles and hitler s acting like he s going to take over the whole world churchill looked at the press and smiled and he said no i do not worry he said the united states of america invariably does the right thing after exhausting every other alternative so whether you re in the crowd that thinks we re doing the right thing or you re in the crowd that thinks we re still exhausting alternatives just remember this you have your voice you have your heart you have your mind and i hope i got you to think about some things tonight that need to be thought about but don t worry about the future just work on it thank you dem wjclinton10 11 97a bill_clinton thank you i don t see that i need to say much do you thank you chuenee we have the first amendment even here but i think the hate is coming from your way not mine president trachtenberg and members of the administration senator kennedy members of the house and let me also say that in addition to all of you who are here there are thousands of people at satellite link conferences all over the country we have heard today two moving personal testimonies from a person who gave his life in law enforcement and from a young person just beginning her adult life but having already lived a lifetime of experiences that we wish she had never endured they both teach us in different ways that our families and our country can only thrive if they re free from the fear of crime and violence and we have to do everything we can to give them that security that s the main reason we decided to hold this white house conference on hate crimes as i said this morning to those of you who were at the breakfast all over the world we see what happens when racial or ethnic or religious animosity joins with lawlessness we ve see countries and people and families torn apart we ve seen countries go from peace to wholesale internecine slaughter in a matter of months we ve seen people rise up and fight each other over issues that they thought had been dormant for centuries but even in america we hear too many stories like the one chuenee told us too many stories like the 13 year old african american boy nearly beaten to death when he rode his bicycle through the wrong neighborhood the gay american murdered as he walked home from work the asian american who lost her store to a firebomb hurled by a racist the jewish american whose house of worship was desecrated by swastikas we hear too many of these stories stories of violent acts which are not just despicable acts of bias and bigotry they are crimes they strike at the heart of what it means to be an american they are the antithesis of the values that define us as a nation they have nothing to do with freedom or equality or respect for the law and most importantly they prevent us from respecting one another last year i asked the american people to begin a great national conversation on race to come together across all the lines that divide us into one america we know we can only fight prejudice by fighting the misunderstanding and the ignorance and the fear that produce it one of the things that i hope will come out of this year is a national affirmation that violence motivated by prejudice and hatred as chuenee said hurts us all anybody who thinks that in the world of today and tomorrow that he or she can hide from the kind of poison that we see in various places in our country is living in a dream world whether we like it or not our futures are bound together and it is time we acted like it the first thing we have to do is to make sure our nation s laws fully protect all of its citizens our laws already punish some crimes committed against people on the basis of race or religion or national origin but we should do more we should make our current laws tougher to include all hate crimes that cause physical harm we must prohibit crimes committed because of a victim s sexual orientation gender or disability all americans deserve protection from hate i want to thank senator kennedy and senator specter who will soon introduce legislation to achieve these goals and i want to tell you that i will do my best to help them see this legislation become the law of our land thank you senators the second thing we have to do is to make sure our civil rights laws are consistently and vigorously enforced under attorney general reno s leadership the justice department has taken aim at hate crimes with more prosecutions and tougher punishments starting today every united states attorney in our country will establish or expand working groups to develop enforcement strategies share best practices and educate the public about hate crimes this national hate crimes network will marshal the resources of federal state and local enforcement community groups educators antiviolence advocates to give us another powerful tool in the struggle against hate crimes i m also pleased to announce that we will assign over 50 more fbi agents and prosecutors to work on hate crimes enforcement and the justice department will make its own hate crimes training curriculum available to state and local law enforcement training centers all around america finally the department of housing and urban development and the justice department are launching an important new initiative that will help victims of housing related hate crimes bring action against their attackers and get money damages for the harm they suffer when it comes to enforcing civil rights law let me also remind you that we need strong leadership i have nominated bill lann lee to head the civil rights division of the department of justice because i m convinced he ll provide that leadership he is a son of chinese immigrants who has seen the damaging force of discrimination he has dedicated his career to fighting for equal rights without regard to ideology or political party everyone who heard him in the senate was impressed with his background his record his demeanor his capacity and yet we are being told that the senate will not be allowed to vote on him because he supports his own president s position on affirmative action now with all respect if we have to wait until we get a head of the civil rights division who is opposed to affirmative action that job will be vacant for a very long time we had an election about that on the other hand let s not forget this is but a tiny slice of what the civil rights division does we have laws on the books against discrimination that 90 percent of the american people support and they need to be enforced vigorously by somebody who embodies the american ideal it is wrong to deny this man that job because he agrees with the policies of his president on that issue it is wrong all i ask the senate committee to do is just to send his name out they don t even have to make a recommendation just let the senate vote let all 100 senators stand up and be counted in the full view of the american people and let them know their stand let me also say that in addition to enforcement in addition to pushing for new laws in addition to training our own people and others better let s also admit one thing we have a lot of law enforcement officials who have worked on this a lot of hate crimes still go unreported i see a lot of you nodding your head up and down if a crime is unreported that gives people an excuse to ignore it i m pleased to announce that today for the first time the national crime victimization survey used by the justice department will finally include questions about hate crimes so we can report them on a national basis along with others it may seem like a small addition but it will yield large results it will give us a better measure of the number of hate crimes and it will increase what we know about how they occur let me say lastly all of us have to do more in our communities through organizations like the one that chuenee was part of in putting into brooklyn high school and in our own homes and places of worship to teach all of our children about the dignity of every person i m very pleased that the education and the justice departments will distribute to every school district in the country a hate crimes resource guide the guide will direct educators to the materials they can use to teach tolerance and mutual respect and also the justice department is launching a web site where younger students can learn about prejudice and the harm it causes children have to be taught to hate and as they come more and more of age and they get into more and more environments where they can be taught that we need to make sure that somebody is teaching them not to do so i wouldn t be surprised if today some of the skinheads that threw rocks and bottles at chuenee when she was a little girl have grown out of it and are frankly ashamed of what they did i wouldn t be surprised if some of them weren t ashamed of it the day they did it but they just wanted to go along to get along to be part of the group but some of the people who were subject to that some of the people who were on the bus with her on the street with her are not here today to make the speech she gave i ll bet you some of the people were scarred in ways that they never got over so as important as it is to enforce the law to punish people to do all this all this is very important the most important thing we can do is to reach these kids while they re young enough to learn somebody is going to be trying to teach them to hate we want to teach them a different way and in the end if we all do our part for that we can make america one nation under god thank you dem wjclinton10 11 97b bill_clinton thank you very much please be seated welcome to the white house to ken and to his daughters dayton duncan and his family harry pierce the vice chair of gm elizabeth campbell founder of weta michael jandreau the chairman of the lower brule sioux tribe and of course a special word of welcome to stephen ambrose whose magnificent book inspired this great film that ken has done to all the historians and actors who brought this story to life you re all welcome here i have looked forward to this night since february when ken burns came to screen his great film on thomas jefferson that night i asked him to come back when the new film was done so we could set up lewis and clark artifacts in the foyer the way jefferson did they re out there actually he had them here in the east room at one point but i hope you ve had a chance to go out and see them and if you haven t i hope you will see them they are the actual real mccoy and i wasn t sure at the time i said we would produce them whether we could or not how many there were and what they would look like but i m well pleased and i hope that you will be when you get to see them i also thought we ought to watch the film here in the east room where the expedition really began meriwether lewis lived and worked in the east room when he was jefferson s personal aide mr jefferson s office was just down the hall and he actually had carpenters create two rooms for lewis on the south side of the east room here where abigail adams used to hang her wash there over dinner jefferson tutored his protege in geography and the natural sciences broadening his horizons so that lewis and clark eventually could broaden the nation s it s not hard to see why ken burns embraced the lewis and clark story the journey of learning he embarks on with each new subject is really quite like lewis journey of discovery and if ken burns is the film making meriwether lewis then perhaps dayton duncan is the wise william clark of this project like lewis and clark ken and dayton had been good friends for a decade before they started this recent journey and became even better friends along the way looking back with new perspective on the story of lewis and clark exemplifies what hillary and i had in mind when we announced the white house millennium program in august celebrating our new millennium will be an international event but we ll also mark it in a uniquely american way by highlighting american creativity and innovation and our insatiable desire to explore as we re doing here tonight lewis and clark were america s foremost explorers not only mapping out the contours of a continent but also in profound ways the frontiers of our imagination in that way they are the forebears of those who have given us the recent mars expedition those who are building the international space station those who are hunting for the mysteries of the human g gnome those who are looking for answers to the challenge of global climate change we are grateful that ken and dayton that stephen ambrose gerald baker james ronda gary moulton and others have helped to enrich our appreciation of lewis and clark that is a very precious gift to future generations over the next three years we hope to inspire many others to offer similar gifts in celebration of a new century and a new millennium we want to encourage all americans to participate in the millennium celebration in ways that help us to honor our past and imagine the future and we ll launch a cultural showcase here at the white house to highlight our artists our scholars our visionaries but i don t want to get ahead of ourselves tonight we re here to see lewis and clark and for that i turn to the incomparable ken burns dem wjclinton10 11 99a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you whew this is a pretty rowdy crowd tonight we may have to sing that song before we re done chairman garrett when you were sort of introducing weldon and you kept reading all those quotes about his influence and this that and the other thing and i thought this can all be distilled in one sentence bill clinton does what he asked him to i want to thank weldon and mel for having me here and i want to thank you chairman garrett and the board and all of you who made this dinner possible tonight i want to thank the members of the administration who are here secretary slater do you know what i thought about when secretary slater got up to read reverend jackson s letter if jesse had known rodney was going to read for him he probably would have come back for fear that rodney would read it better than he would i ll pay for that later i want to tell you i think reverend jackson is where he ought to be tonight and you should know that he s been with me every step of the two new markets tours we have taken and it s been a great joy we ve been friends for many years i can still remember when we ate french fries in the kitchen of the arkansas governor s mansion more than a decade ago and talked about how foolish it was that we weren t trying to include all americans in the economic mainstream of our life and he was on this road before i was and i m glad that we re walking it together now i want to thank secretary alexis herman and aida alvarez for their leadership there are others here in this administration alvin brown does a wonderful job for the vice president and for me leading our empowerment zones and enterprise community initiative and one of the things i want to compliment him on is that we just got among the victories in this last minute budget process is we ve now fully funded the second round of empowerment zones to give more poor communities opportunities thank you alvin i told aida alvarez that if weldon really had the guts to tell erskine bowles that she was the best administrator of the sba we could all enjoy his misery tonight because you have done a wonderful job and there are others who are here bill lann lee the head of the civil rights division thank you sir for your leadership and i see dave barram the government s landlord gsa thank you for what you have done here and fred hochberg at the sba out there and a person who used to be a part of this administration who had a lot to do with mend it don t end it and a lot of other good things deval patrick thank you for being here tonight bless you sir and thank you for acknowledging minyon moore my political director and ben johnson who runs our one america office and my good friend ernie green i tell you i wish every one of you had been in the white house yesterday for that gold medal celebration for the little rock nine it was one of the most moving things that i have ever had the opportunity to be involved in thank you i want to also acknowledge the members of congress here tonight that i believe are here congresswoman lucille roybal allard congressman ruben hinojosa my good friend from south texas congressman john conyers is here obviously and i want to pay special recognition to one other person who is here because he s up for reelection next year he needs your help and he is one of the most courageous members of the united states congress if ever we had a friend who deserves to be reelected it s senator chuck robb from virginia and i want to ask him to stand up thank you he may well be the greatest virginia greatest governor virginia had since thomas jefferson in his record in education and in so many other ways we served together and i have seen him cast vote after vote in the senate knowing that it might cost him his seat and he just gets up every day and does what he thinks is right he deserves the support of every thinking person in america who cares about the direction of the united states senate he s got a hard fight i believe he s going to win but he has to have all kinds of help financial vote and otherwise to win and i want to urge you to support him in every way you can thank you i m told that mayor david dinkin from new york is here tonight if he s here or was here anyway and if you re not here i still think you re great you ve heard this speech before i thank you for this award you know i always feel generally that presidents shouldn t receive awards that having the job is award enough but i confess i kind of like this one and i m going to put it on my desk in the oval office tomorrow so you ll begin to see it on television and you ll know how much i like it you told that joke about lift every voice and sing i remember one time vernon jordan and i sang that song to a group of unbelieving people on martha s vineyard you know this is all beginning to cause me some difficulty last night i spoke to a hispanic democratic dinner and i was introduced by my friend miguel lausell from puerto rico and he stood up and said this president has a latino soul and not long ago tony morrison said that i was tony morrison the pulitzer prize winning african american writer said that i was the first black president america had ever had so i thought to myself now i ll never be able to go home to ireland what am i going to do all of this that we re laughing about really stems from something i deeply believe i believe it about america but i believe it about every person s journey through life we all struggle and we all fail but we all struggle to live a life of integrity which means literally that we are integrated that our mind and our body and our spirit are in the same place at the same time centered and connected to other human beings and i ve always believed that in so many ways the purpose of politics is to find a unifying vision that will allow people to release the barriers that keep them from one another so they can join hands and enhance our common destiny it s been a privilege to serve i don t really deserve any awards i got to be president and it s the greatest honor that any american could ever have your success is the greatest award i could get because the mission of our country the eternal mission of our country is to deepen the meaning of our freedom and widen the circle of opportunity and strengthen the bonds of our community and it turns out that trying to make sure that everybody shares in our prosperity is not only the morally right thing to do it s good for all the rest of america too which is why all these businesses are here tonight so we have come a long way by following the admonition of the scriptures to be doers of the word and not hearers only twelve years ago or in the 12 years before the vice president and i came here we had a very different view i think of ourselves as a country which dominated washington and a very different economic philosophy but in the end by 1992 it had brought us to a place where we had economic distress and social division with a government that had been discredited by the people who were running it who said the government was the problem and even though along the way i thought they did some quite good things standing up against communism signing the americans with disabilities act but all the time telling us that the government was the problem and also defying the basic laws of arithmetic when it came to doing our budget so in 1992 vice president gore and i asked the american people to give us a chance to put people first to be driven by a vision of opportunity for all but responsibility from all americans i always thought contrary to the prevailing political rhetoric that most people wanted to be responsible and would respond to a challenge to do that and to build a community of increasingly diverse americans we had some new ideas about the economy about welfare about crime about the environment about national service about america s role in the world and with the help of a lot of you here the american people gave us a chance to try our ideas and after seven years the results are in and i am very grateful that we have the longest peacetime expansion in our history by february it will be the longest economic expansion in american history including the second world war and world war i and the times we were fully mobilized nearly 20 million new jobs a 30 year low in unemployment a 32 year low in the welfare rolls a 25 year low in the crime rate 20 year low in the poverty rates the first time we ve had back to back budget surpluses in 42 years with the smallest federal government in 37 years you ve been a part of that that s the america you have made because you have been given a chance to make it and you should be very proud of yourselves for the role you played in it along the way we tried to make sure that people who worked 40 hours a week and had kids in their homes should not be poor so we doubled the earned income tax credit and cut taxes for 15 million working americans waged the minimum wage and i hope we re about to raise it again we passed the brady bill which has now kept 400 000 people with criminal or other problem histories from getting handguns giving us the lowest murder rate in 30 years we fought for and won an increase in children s health coverage that will enable us i hope and believe over the next year or so to cover 5 million more children with health insurance ninety percent of our kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the very first time in our history we ve expanded head start and the family and medical leave law has now enabled over 15 million americans to take a little time off from work without losing their jobs when a baby is born or a parent is sick we ve opened the doors of higher education with the hope scholarship and other tax credits and more pell grant fundings and tax deductibility for interest on student loans the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we set aside more land in protected areas than any administration in the history of this country except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt one hundred and fifty thousand young americans and some not so young have entered the americorps program and served in their communities all across america solving problems and working with people helping children dealing with natural disasters rebuilding dilapidated housing doing any number of things to make our country a better place and we have made a clear commitment to building one america in the 21st century we ve tried to reach out i might add in ways that are not always apparent you know and you ve made i like that joke about how my administration doesn t look like the one on west wing i don t recognize that white house you know it s a cute show but it ought to be more diverse because america is and our administration is you know that you know the record of our appointments to the federal bench and the efforts to increase the effectiveness of the equal employment opportunity commission we ve also i might add tried to make sure that people who have different political views than mine had their rights respected that all federal employees were citizens and could be citizens that the religious convictions of federal employees and children in our schools could have the widest possible protection so i haven t tried just to bring into this tent of one america people who will vote for me at the next election but all people who should feel that they have a place at america s table but we have made a special effort on the economic front to help people who have traditionally been left behind we ve increased by two and a half times the number of small business loans to african american entrepreneurs and by two and a half times the number of sba loans to hispanic entrepreneurs since 1992 and beneath those economic statistics that i just ran off the 30 years 30 years 20 years i wish you all could remember that and just tell everybody between now and the next election we have the lowest levels ever recorded of african american poverty and child poverty the lowest hispanic poverty rate in a generation the lowest female unemployment rate listen to this lowest female unemployment rate in 46 years and the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded since we started separate statistics in the 1970s now i think the important question is what do we intend to do with this you know i worked as hard as i could and i will continue to every day for the next 430 some odd days i have to be president to keep this country going in the right direction to build that bridge to the 21st century we talked about in 1996 a nation is almost like a vast ocean liner out in the pacific somewhere to turn it around you can t do it on a dime it takes time and we ve worked hard for seven years and the country is moving in the right direction the question is what are we going to do with it this is the only time in my lifetime that we have had this level of economic strength free of any pressing domestic crisis or foreign threat so that we literally can look ahead into this new millennium and say what would we like america to be for our children and our grandchildren because as good as things are we know two things we know number one nothing stays the same forever good or bad so like all moments this one will pass something will happen sometime down the road nothing stays the same forever the second thing we know is we know right now that we have some big challenges still out there i ll mention some i won t talk about tonight in any detail but just you ought to think about them we know right now that the number of people over 65 is going to double in the next 30 years and we ll only have two people working for every one person drawing social security we have to decide right now whether we re going to deal with that we know right now that medicare is supposed to run out of money in 15 years and that 75 percent of the elderly people in this country can t afford prescription drugs we know right now children bigger than the baby boom generation and they re much much more diverse in senator robb s home state just across the river from the white house the alexandria school district has children from 180 different racial and ethnic groups whose parents speak 100 different languages one school district and we know that while we have the best system of higher education in the world and this administration has succeeded literally in opening the doors of college to everybody who is willing to work for it now no one can seriously assert that every one of our children is getting a world class education kindergarten through 12th grade and we know if we really want to have one america we have to deal with that we know right now that people who are connected to the internet and are computer literate and understand that have big economic advantages even poor people get big economic advantages i learned in northern california last week that this company e bay i bet a lot of you have bought things from e bay you know e bay you know there are now over 20 000 people making a living off e bay not working for the company trading through the site many of them i learned from the company people used to be on welfare so we know that it makes a huge difference and yet we know there s a digital divide out there the vice president and i have worked hard to close it in the schools four years ago we had only 4 percent of our schools and classrooms connected to the internet now 51 percent are and we re trying to make sure 100 percent are by the end of next year we re getting close but there are kids out there in schools that cannot be wired because they are so old and in such disrepair forty percent of the schools in new york are over 70 years old some of them are still heated by coal the average age of school buildings in philadelphia is 65 years and i could go on and on i was in a little town in florida not very long ago a little town where there were 12 trailers out behind the grade school so this is a challenge we know about this i know and i hope that you believe that there is really an environmental challenge that the whole world faces in this climate change business and that if we continue to warm the climate at this rate at some time in the next century the water levels will rise as the polar ice caps melt the sugarcane fields in louisiana will be flooded much of the florida everglades will be flooded some island nations could disappear and the whole quality of life in america could be changed the distribution of agricultural opportunity could be irrevocably altered but we also know that you don t have to burn more greenhouse gases to get rich anymore as a nation it s not necessary there are technological advances that are now available and those that will soon be available which will enable us to totally change that congressman conyers and i went to the detroit auto show together and we looked at automobiles that use mixed gasoline and electrical engines that will soon become commercially available that get 70 miles a gallon and that can be economical even at presently relatively low gasoline prices but we have to we know that we know that in the future we ll have to deal with the challenges from terrorists and drug runners and organized criminals around the world and they ll increasingly work together and they will use the very things that we re using the internet and technology and the openness of borders against us we know that what are we going to do about it i say all these things not to alarm anyone but to say that we know right now what most of the large challenges of the next 30 years will be and right now for the first time in my lifetime we have the prosperity and the confidence and the coherence to deal with them but they require decisions i said yesterday when we were celebrating ernie and the other members of the little rock nine that the things that those kids did when they walked up the steps and into the schools and they were abused and they were run off and they went through this trial is they forced everybody else to make a decision before that i was like everybody else i thought segregation was a terrible thing but i never had to really speak about it i was 11 years old what the heck did it matter to me i was more worried about when recess was or something you know it was just the way things were but sometimes when people act they change everything and everybody had to make a decision then because there it was well that s where we are now except there is no crisis so we don t have to make a decision we can just wander on and not deal with this now how many times in your personal life in your family life or in your business life have you made a mistake because you thought things were going so well you could afford to be distracted diverted or indulgent how many times it happens to everybody there s not a person in this room it hasn t happened to it is human nature and so i say to you the greatest honor i could have is to know that you will work with me for the next 430 some odd days and that you will continue to work to make sure that we do not blow this precious moment this is an incredible opportunity and an enormous responsibility and it s never happened in my lifetime ever not once have we ever had this much prosperity this much confidence and the absence of a pressing convulsing domestic crisis or foreign threat and we will never forgive ourselves if we let our children and our grandchildren down by not looking into the future and saying here are the big challenges facing this country and we intend to meet them and i just want to mention two more number one is there are people in places which still have not participated in this prosperity that s what the vice president s employment zones and enterprise community initiative has been all about that s why we worked hard to establish these community development financial institutions that some of you have participated in that s why we worked so hard to enforce the community reinvestment act and then to save it in this last banking legislation because 95 percent of all the lending every made under that 22 year old law has happened since this administration has been in office and that s what this new markets initiative is all about we will never have every single neighborhood in an employment zone we can only pick those that have their act together and have the biggest problems and try to make the fairest judgments we can but what i have sought to do by going around the country is to say look there are all these other places and shouldn t we at least give investors in america the same incentives to invest in poor areas in america we give them to invest in poor areas in latin america or africa or asia i support american investment around the world i am trying to pass right now the africa trade bill and the caribbean basin initiative before this congress goes home but i believe that the most important markets we have are the untapped markets still in this country that need to be developed so i ask you to think about that you d be amazed again this is another example where doing what the right thing to do is also good for the rest of america you would be amazed how much time we have spent over the last year and a half figuring out how can we keep this economic expansion going all previous economic expansions have come to an end either because the economy gets so heated up that we get inflation and then when you break the inflation the medicine to break the inflation is so strong it breaks the recovery or because the recovery just runs out of steam now we ve kept this one going largely thanks to you and people like you thirty percent of it has been powered by technology 30 percent of it until this asian financial collapse was powered by exports traditional economic theory dramatically underestimated the impact of technology to increase productivity and underestimated the impact of open markets in holding down inflation so we can keep it going but to keep it going with unemployment at 4 1 percent what have we got to do if you go into a neighborhood in an inner city if you go into an abandoned small town that lost its factory and has nothing left if you go into a native american reservation pine ridge reservation in south dakota there are plenty of smart people up there i walked up and down the street with a 17 year old girl that is as intelligent as any high school child i ve talked to since i ve been president but they have 73 percent unemployment that is wasted human potential and if you invest there you create new businesses new jobs and new consumers and new taxpayers and you grow the economy without inflation by definition because you are getting both new producers and new consumers this is the right thing to do for the people that are there it s the right thing to do for the rest of us because we want this ride to go on just as long as it can the other thing i want to say is if i could leave america with one legacy and somebody said to me tonight well you re going to have to go now and we ll give you one wish you know the genie deal but you don t get three wishes you just get one i d still pick one america why because i think when we re getting along and when we re not just tolerating each other but when we respect and like each other when we ve got a framework for dealing with our honest differences that enables them to be worked out without everybody falling out the american people nearly always get it right i mean why do you think we re around here after over 220 years look at all the stuff we ve weathered i mean we had these founding fathers who said we re all created equal and they were slaveholders and even white guys couldn t vote if they didn t own property never mind the women right we worked it out so now we just kept on working at it and we worked it out but what is the signal measure of our progress we kept finding ways to bring more and more and more people into the circle of freedom and opportunity and then their minds figured out how to maximize the benefits of the industrial revolution how to provide mass education how to integrate immigrants from all over the world into the mainstream of american life this one america deal is much bigger than just sort of feel good let s all be nice don t anybody be prejudiced or say anything at a dinner party you d be embarrassed by and to be serious it s much more than being tough on people who commit hate crimes although i badly want that hate crimes legislation to pass it is an understanding about the way we should live if we all want to do well it is in the nature of the american idea and the core of what it means to be a human being isn t it interesting to you i mean do you ever think about this we continue to have these horrible hate crime incidents in america and then we see these other countries convulsed by the tribal slaughter in rwanda the awful terrible treatment of the kosovar albanian muslims in kosovo the treatment of the bosnian muslims in bosnia the continuing conflict among the catholics and the protestants in ireland which we re trying to bring to an end the continuing conflict in the middle east what is the common element in that and the hate crimes it is that for all of the wonders of the modern world we re most bedeviled as societies by the oldest problem of folks living together we still have a hard time with people who aren t like us you know have a hard time with people that aren t like us and yet the truth is when we get over it and let it go we find that life is a lot more interesting than it used to be i told somebody last night the first time i went to a cinco de mayo celebration in san francisco i thought where has this been all my life man i like this where has this been i like this so we re laughing but there s a grain of truth here why do american christians buy books by the dalai lama in record numbers about the ethics of the new millennium because he has a very important piece of the truth and he has very important peace inside so i say to you look for the unifying vision and continue to work for it and be clear and focused on the magic moment in which we live be humble enough to know it will not last forever it is not in the nature of human affairs and if you really want to honor what you have done and the spirit of this award which you have so kindly given me make the most of this moment it is the chance of a lifetime to build a future of our dreams thank you dem wjclinton10 11 99b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you it s nice to be in a restrained laid back crowd like this the truth is it s wonderful to be in a place where people are happy and they re not ashamed to be excited and they re proud to go to work every day thank you very much for thank you jeff bleustein thank you bobby ramsey old bobby kind of hurt my feelings you know i went up to him and he said well you re not nearly as tall as i thought you were he said when i saw you playing saxophone on arsenio hall i thought you were a lot taller guy and i said that s where i got elected president i was 6 8 back then but i still think you did a good job bobby and i thank you i want to thank bill denell thank you harry schmidt i enjoyed meeting willie davidson today and i thank tom buffenbarger the president of the international association of machinists for being here and joining us today i want to thank mayor robertson for welcoming me to york and all the county commissioners and legislators and others who are here and i want to say a special word of appreciation again jeffrey to you for making me feel so welcome here and for the nice things you said about bill daley behind his back usually when you talk behind somebody s back you re not saying nice things so daley is up here talking and jeff is telling me what a good secretary of commerce he is and i will say secretary daley you have been superb and we re grateful for what you do for the united states now you may remember this some of you but after i was nominated for president way back in the summer of 1992 al and tipper gore and hillary and i got on a bus and we started this bus tour our very first overnight stop was in york pennsylvania and i m sure none of you were there when we got in we got in about a quarter to one but the crowd was about the size that it is today and i looked at that crowd it was in the middle of the night you know we d been stopped everywhere along the way and i decided i d take a bus tour so i could go see normal people we went out to all these little towns and then we got to york it was the middle of the night and there was this huge throng there and i popped out and i looked at hillary i said you know we might win this election and we d better not mess it up when i was here before i didn t get to come and visit harley davidson and i wish i had because since then i had a beautiful harley jacket before i came here that i got in milwaukee but i gave it to a guy who worked for me because he thought he was going to ride to heaven on a harley davidson motorcycle so when he retired the only thing i could think of to give him that really reflected the service he had given to our country and to me was my jacket which i hated to part with but the only gifts that really count are the ones that you d like to keep yourself i think sometimes so today i got another one and i thank you i love it you know bill daley was talking about being over in the united arab emirates and how they were dying to have more motorcycles and other paraphernalia to sell and i told jeff when he mentioned it one of the great treasures of being the president is having the opportunity to meet people around the world you would never meet and make friends with them a person who became a particular personal friend of mine and of my wife s was the late king hussein of jordan and some of you may know he was a very satisfied harley customer when hussein and his wife queen noor came to stay with us a few years ago and we became very good friends he gave me a gift that i treasure that s still up in the white house today it s a picture of himself and his wife in very casual clothes in the jordanian desert astride a harley my best harley story i was just recently in paris on my way to sarajevo and bosnia to try to settle the outstanding issues of all the balkan wars in bosnia and kosovo so i stopped in france to have a meeting with the president of france and i went to the american ambassador s residence in paris now if you ever saw that house you d want to be ambassador to france too it s a beautiful place built in the 1700s just takes your breath away to walk in these grand gardens and this beautiful marble foyer when you walk in in the beautiful marble foyer when you walk in now replete with all the proper lighting is a stunning 1944 harley davidson and the way it got there is that when your predecessors were making motorcycles for the war effort some of them were sent in packages to be assembled to our allies in europe and some of them went to yugoslavia where mr tito was fighting the nazis two of them were never opened and the son of the american ambassador actually came upon these 54 year old boxes of unassembled 1944 harleys last year and he gave one to his daddy and now if you ever go to france it s now the main tourist attraction of the american embassy is a 1944 harley it is so beautiful and i know you d be proud of it i came here today not just because i wanted to see you and not just because i wanted to come back to york to thank the people of this community and this state for being so good for the last seven years and through two elections to me and my wife and vice president and mrs gore i came here because i want america to know exactly what you have done and how the recovery of this company since the 1980s has been truly remarkable when you were down in the dumps people were saying american industry was finished that we couldn t compete in the global economy that the next century would belong to other countries and other places today you re not just surviving you re flourishing with record sales and earnings and one of the best managed companies in america according to industry week according to management and labor one of the reasons you re the best managed company in america is that you have a genuine partnership between labor and management where all employees are valuable and expected to make good decisions on their own for the benefit of the common enterprise and i thank you for setting that example i wish every manufacturer in america would model it i came here because i knew before i got here although i had never quite experienced the full force of it until you were shouting and screaming and having such a good time i knew that this was about more than making bikes for profit more than selling attractive leather jackets what we see here today is how people feel when they have got a job that they do well that gives them not only a decent income but a full measure of dignity and pride i used to tell people all the time that politics is about a lot more than economics but if you get the economics right people figure out how to live and shape good lives and raise their children and build strong communities and if you don t get the economics right then you have to deal with a lot of the other values issues extraordinary welfare rates and higher crime rates and all those other problems i want people to see that you have yes turned a company around yes you make an exciting product and you sell it all around the world but that you do it in the right way a way that makes you proud to come to work every day it puts a spring in your step and a shout in your voice and a light in your eyes that is what i want for every american working family and i hope that more people will follow your lead so that more people can stand up and shout every day just for the joy of going to work and being part of a common enterprise and doing something they can be profoundly proud of thank you thank you thank you for that example the second point i want to make is the point that secretary daley has already mentioned to really do as well as you can you have to sell these wonderful products not only around the country but around the world and i think that s very important in 1973 when the first harley rolled off the assembly line here america exported only 6 300 motorcycles by last year that number had increased to 66 000 today you re selling about a quarter of your bikes around the world from costa rica to korea from central europe to the middle east the global market for motorcycles and for harleys is exploding it s a big part of your future and in order for it to be a part of your future and our future america has to continue to support expanding trade on fair terms to all including americans now this is a big issue and i want you to just give me a couple minutes of serious time here to talk about it when i got elected in 1992 i don t think there s any way in the world a governor of a small southern state in the affectionate terms that president bush used then to describe me would have been elected president if we hadn t had economic distress social division political drift and a government discredited you all remember that it was tough in this country it was tough in this state and i had spent 12 years at that time not quite 12 a little over 10 working as governor of my state trying to figure out how this economy works how the education system plays into the economy how i could actually get up and go to work every day and create the conditions and give people the tools to make the life of their dreams and i asked the american people i said look give me a chance to put people back at the center of our politics to create opportunity for every responsible citizen to create a community that every american has a chance to be a part of and give me a chance to put in some new ideas i believe we can grow the economy and protect the environment i believe we can move people from welfare to work and still allow them to take care of their children i believe we can be tough on crime and still do more to keep kids out of trouble in the first place i believe we can do more to help people succeed at home and at work i believe we can have a trading system that expands trade and still protects legitimate labor rights and our responsibilities to the environment i believe we can have a community where all of us serve more and help one another reach our common dreams anyway i said the center of this has to be an economic strategy and mine is very simple i want to get rid of the deficit but i want to find a way to invest more money in education in technology in training and in research and i want to expand trade to me it was simple math we have 4 percent of the world s people with 22 percent of the world s income you don t have to be a genius to figure out if you want to keep 22 percent of the world s income with 4 percent of the world s people you ve got to sell something to the other 96 percent and yet i knew people were afraid of that they were afraid that if we opened our borders here a lot of our lower wage workers would be put out of business by people who worked for even less money abroad and they might not ever get another chance they were afraid a lot of our well paid workers would not do well because we d have markets opened to our competitors in those areas but they wouldn t open their markets to ours a lot of people were afraid we would see a big transfer of wealth to poor countries but the money would stay in a few hands and it wouldn t flow down to the workers there and it would lead to a degradation of the environment in ways that could hurt us that was especially an issue along the rio grande river when we were working out the trade agreement with mexico so there was all this fight about it well the results of the last seven years are in and it s not an argument anymore we have the longest peacetime expansion in history the highest homeownership in history 19 8 million new jobs the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years and the federal government is the smallest it s been in 37 years the record is in now i might add there s a lot of women in this plant last month the female unemployment rate was the same as the overall unemployment rate 4 1 percent that was the lowest unemployment rate for women in 46 years and from 1993 until the end of 1997 when the asian economy collapsed and the russian economy had such great difficulty until that point 30 percent of this growth came from exports and an enormous amount of it came because of improvements and advances in technology not just computers in silicon valley but the computer programs running all these machines i saw on the plant floor here today a lot of them taking the most dangerous jobs some of the jobs that caused people to have long term injuries away so that you can work and make a contribution and make these motorcycles at some less risk and wear and tear to yourselves thirty percent of our growth came from exports until we had the asian collapse and they re coming back now we ve worked hard to help them they re coming back now now in spite of these economic statistics i mean here s why we re here apart from the fact that bill daley and i wanted to come here and we re glad we got our jackets and we really wish we were leaving with motorcycles but i have to wait a year and a half you know i ve got to wait a year and a half i couldn t bear all the stories out here if i rode around on a motorcycle for a while but let me tell you the reason we re here to be fair is that ironically in spite of all those economic numbers i just recited there s actually more division and controversy over whether trade is or isn t good for us today in washington than there was in 1993 and in 1994 when we joined the world trade organization and set off this explosion of economic activity and again i say i think it s because people are afraid that americans always get a raw deal they see we have a big trade deficit that s because we ve got even more money than we produce for we buy things from other countries but we also sell a lot abroad we keep setting records for our exports and a lot of what we sell abroad supports higher wages in america the average trade related job pays almost 20 percent more than a job unrelated to trade like yours do you know that so we have to find a way not just for big business leaders and people like me who live in washington who you know get a job that lasts for a term of years regardless we have to find ways for people like you that get up and go to work every day and will have a lot of job security when you re doing well and people who aren t in unionized plants and who may be working for low wages and who feel more vulnerable we have to find a way to build a consensus in america so that all americans understand that if we want to keep growing this economy raising wages creating jobs we ve got to stick with what has brought us this far we ve got to keep paying down this debt we can make america debt free in 15 years for the first time since 1835 if we stay on the budget plan that i ve laid out and that will be great for you why should you care if we re debt free because if the government is out of debt this business can borrow money at lower cost and you will have lower home mortgage rates you will have lower car payment rates if you send your kids to college the college loans will be lower just because of the amount we ve reduced the deficit already the average home mortgage costs the average american working family 2 000 a year less and the average car payment is 200 a year less and the average college loan is 200 a year less we ought to keep going until we get america out of debt for the first time since 1835 so the money will be there at the lowest possible costs for the american enterprise system to create jobs and improve lives that s important the second thing we ought to do is to find a way to continue to expand trade you know we just had a meeting and i was told well just what you heard here in the speech thank you very much for helping us get into the japanese market and we re doing well there but there are still some barriers there i hear that everywhere so next month in seattle we re going to have a chance to make the global trading system stronger to tear down more tariffs to deal with more non tariff barriers to make it clear that if countries want access to our markets we have to have access to theirs but basically to commit to expanding trade now that is what is in the interest of harley davidson and that is what is in the interest of the 21st century american economy so i came here to say we can have more companies like yours we can have more success stories like yours this company can have more employees like you but if we re going to do it we have to find a way to expand trade there s 4 percent of us we ve got 22 percent of the income we ve got to sell something to the other 96 percent it s just as simple as that but we will never be able to do it unless working people believe that trade benefits ordinary american families you know the politicians and the ceos can talk until they re blue in the face but we still have elections in this country and in the end you guys run the show and it s a good thing that s why we re still around here after 200 years but if we can t convince people like you that we re right about this trade issue then we are going to shrink america s future prospects it s as simple as that you know i want you all to watch seattle when it rolls around every group in the world with an axe to grind is going to seattle to demonstrate i ll have more demonstrators against me than i ve had in the whole seven years i ve been president i m kind of looking forward to it i ll tell you why i told them all i wanted them to come i want all the consumer groups to come i want all the environmental groups to come i want everybody who thinks this is a bad deal to come i want everybody to get all this out of their system and say their peace of mind and i want us to have a huge debate about this but i m telling you i ve worked really hard for you the last seven years to turn this economy around and to get it going in the right direction i ve worked hard to make sure other people play by the rules not just in york pennsylvania but in york england and in york western australia and now as i look ahead to the last year and a couple of months of my term i try to think of what things i can still do that will allow this prosperity to go on and on and that will embrace people who haven t yet been affected by it we still have people in places who haven t been picked up by this recovery and i want this to go on it s already the longest peacetime expansion in history in february it ll be the longest economic expansion including those that embraced our world wars but we can keep it going but only if we find more customers and more investment in a non inflationary way and there s only two places to find it you ve got to go to the places in america which have had no recovery and to the people who are still on welfare or otherwise left out or you ve got to sell more stuff overseas therefore i say to you i don t think the trading system is perfect by the way i have argued until i m blue in the face and i will continue to argue that when we make these trade rules we need to take the concerns of ordinary citizens into account we should be growing the economy not just in america but everywhere and still improving the environment let me tell you compared to seven years ago with all these jobs in america the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we ve set aside more land to protect it for sports people and for tourists and people that just want to be out in nature than any administration in the history of this country except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt you can improve the economy and improve the environment at the same time people ought to have that everywhere they ought to have that security everywhere working people everywhere even if they can t enjoy the same income you do ought to have access to basic labor rights we shouldn t be having child labor in some of these countries producing products to compete in our markets and exploit children when they ought to be in school we ought to have basic decent labor standards for people everywhere and i believe that s why i m glad the demonstrators are coming i want us to try to find a way to build a consensus where we can expand trade and respect the rights of labor and the environment but let me tell you something you know this you think about your own life if we have more trade and it s good for you and it s good for those countries don t you think it s more likely that working people will be better off and their environment will be cleaner i mean the more money you ve got the more you can afford to give workers wages that are increased and the more you can afford to clean up the environment so i think all these things work together in seattle i m going to ask the trade organization for the very first time to establish a working group on trade and labor so we get working people and their concerns involved in the trade process before all the decisions are made i have worked hard to make environment a part of this i think it s important but i came here for this simple reason this is a great company you ve got a great union you ve found a successful way to compete in the world you represent the future of the american economy but if i cannot convince the decision makers in washington and ordinary people like you all across america that a key part of the economic success we ve enjoyed in the last seven years and the economic success america can enjoy in the years ahead requires us to continue to break down barriers to trade then in the future when i m not around anymore you won t have the economic prosperity that i think you deserve so i ask you to think about this i thank you for being so quiet and listening to this i wouldn t be for this if i didn t think it was right for you if i didn t think it was good for ordinary americans but i ll leave you with this thought we live in a world that is smaller and smaller and that is either going to make us more prosperous and more secure or more vulnerable and more insecure if we don t trade with other people and help them to get involved in a cycle of growth with us and you have more and more people that are poor with open borders you re going to have more drug trafficking more organized crime more political terrorism and more headaches and everybody everywhere will be more vulnerable to it on the other hand if we make a living by selling more of our things overseas and the price of that is to let people sell more of their things to us and they do better and their children do better you will have more cooperation and a far more interesting world for your children to live in i believe the best days of this country are still ahead i believe the life our kids and grandkids are going to have will be truly amazing within 10 years children might actually be born with a life expectancy of 100 years their mothers will take home with them from the hospital a map of the children s genetic system which will say your child has the following strengths and the following problems but if you do these 10 things in the child s upbringing you will dramatically reduce the fact that your little girl will get breast cancer or your little boy will develop colon cancer it will be an amazing future but we have to do the big things right that s what you do here you do the big things right and you know a lot of little mistakes will be made you know even you aren t perfect you know mistakes will be made but if you get the big things right you know it s going to come out all right what i m trying to do with this new trade round in seattle washington and with these speeches across the country is to make sure as americans we get the big things right should we fight for fair trade you bet did we get a lot of steel dumped on us when the asian and the russian economies went down and was it unfair and did i have to push hard to get it out you bet did you deserve trade protection several years ago when you got it absolutely you did do we have to make the system work right yes that s true you ve got to make the system work right but let s not lose the big point if we want to continue to grow have high incomes low unemployment the lowest minority unemployment in the history of the country lowest women s unemployment in 46 years the lowest overall unemployment in 30 years if we want that if we want a country growing together a part of our strategy has got to be to sell more not just harleys but everything we can possibly sell around the world so i ask you don t let this trade debate be the province of politicians and ceos you embrace it it s your future and your children s future and every company can be like harley but we have to embrace the world and say we are not afraid we can get the big things right thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton10 12 95 bill_clinton thank you thank you for that warm and rousing welcome i ve enjoyed listening through my earphone here to what s going on down there i see that senator dodd has almost lost his voice in the enthusiasm and so has your state party chair terry brady but i want to thank both of them for their leadership and for what they have done and for stirring everybody up and getting you excited over the election we re about to have and the stakes there i want to say hello to attorney general bob butterworth i d also like to send kind greetings to all of my friends down there especially to governor chiles lieutenant governor mckay senator bob graham i am very pleased to be able to speak with you today at this very important convention as we move into the presidential campaign season you know i can t help but recall that it was almost four years ago to the day that florida and the florida democrats at this meeting put our campaign on the map when you helped me to win a decisive straw poll victory on december 15th 1991 i remember that day so well for that victory convinced me that the american people were serious about wanting new leadership in washington and a new direction for our country you know i have many things i want to say but the most important thing i can do is to say a simple thank you thank you for helping me and al gore to the white house to give us a chance to advance the economy and to honor the values that are critical to moving our country forward into the 21st century so even though we have to talk a lot today about the future let me say one more time thank you for your faith in me and in vice president gore thank you for your support for these past three years today my fellow americans i come to you with a simple and straightforward message we live in a great country in a time of very great change we are moving forward from the industrial age to an age of technology we are moving away from the cold war era into the era of the global village we know that i ran for president to change things in this country to take advantage of this time of absolutely enormous enormous possibility so that we could make the most of the lives of every american and give all americans back their future and so that we would make sure that our country would still be able to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity we have done that our country is in better shape today than it was three years ago our economy is stronger we are coming back to our basic values and we are leading the world toward peace but to continue to be true to those values we have to have a clear vision of the future and we have to stick with it you know that when i ran for president in 1992 i was committed to restoring the american dream for all our people and to make absolutely sure that america would go into the next century still the most powerful country in the world the greatest force for peace and freedom and prosperity the world had ever known i said we would do it by having an economic policy that produced jobs and growth that expanded the middle class and shrinks the underclass by giving us a modern government that is smaller and less bureaucratic and more entrepreneurial and most important of all by being true to old fashioned american values at a new time responsibility from all and opportunity for all the value of work the understanding that we have to help families stay strong and stick together and a sense of community that we re all stronger when we work together and we re all in this fight to the future together also the strong sense that we do have obligations to our parents to our children to one another and to those who through no fault of their own need some help to make the most of their own lives let me say again this country is in better shape than it was three years ago we still have challenges and we have to keep going in the right direction but america is on the move we ve reduced the deficit in three consecutive years of this administration it s now been cut in half over seven years that works out to about 15 000 of reduced federal debt for every family of four in florida in the past three years we ve also seen more than 7 5 million new jobs created more than 590 000 of them right there in florida we ve got a record number of new businesses 2 5 million more homeowners home building in the state of florida has increased six percent a year after dropping four percent a year during the previous 12 years and america is safer and stronger today than we were three years ago for the very first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there is not a single russian missile pointed at an american child and american leadership is opening the door to peace and reconciliation all over the world from northern ireland to the middle east to haiti and to bosnia the united states is leading the world toward a more peaceful future we ve got a chance to end the misery in bosnia for good it was our diplomacy backed by nato s resolve that brought the leaders of the balkans to the peace table in dayton ohio and now they have made a commitment to peace our responsibility truly begins now if we walk away from their request to us to help them preserve their faith peace our allies will do the same and the peace will fail the slaughter will begin again and that conflict could spread like poison throughout the region drawing us in in much greater risk to our own soldiers nato the alliance of democracies that has preserved our security for half a century by working with our strong european allies would be shaken to its core if we walked away from their request to help preserve the peace in bosnia and american leadership not only in europe but all around this world will pay a terrible terrible price for all of those reasons we must help to preserve the peace this bosnian peace mission is clearly defined it has realistic goals to be reached in a definite period of time our force will be strong and they will have strong rules of engagement so that they can protect themselves and pursue the mission i am convinced that the risks to our troops have been minimized to the maximum extent possible after all we re not going to fight a war but to wage a peace we do it for the people of bosnia for the stability of europe for american leadership and for the values we hold dear we also have a special interest in promoting peace and democracy in two nations just off your shore in haiti and in cuba just over one year ago our diplomacy backed by military muscle forced a brutal military regime in haiti to surrender its power we gave democracy there another chance you know better than people in any other state that this has been good for america and good for haiti the tide of refugees from haiti which stood at about 16 000 in the month prior to the intervention has been dramatically reduced the people of haiti with help from the international community are slowly building a democracy and a working economy and president aristide as he said he would has been a force for reconciliation now all of this takes time and there may be setbacks along the way but just a week from now haiti will hold presidential elections which will freely transfer power from one democratically elected president to another for the very first time in the nation s history this is an extraordinary achievement america and particularly floridians where so many haitians live should be proud that we helped to restore democracy to haiti cuba of course is still a different story it s now the only country in our hemisphere which continues to resist the powerful trend toward democracy our administration is working to encourage its peaceful transition to a free and open society we will continue to do everything we can to promote peaceful change protect human rights and move cuba into the camp of democracy with all of the progress we ve made both here at home and abroad the thing that i am most proud of i think is the tangible evidence that our country is coming back together around our core values because we not only have economic progress we not only have the lowest rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 years but in almost every state in america and almost every major community the crime rate is down the murder rate is down the food stamp rolls are down the welfare rolls are down for two years the teen pregnancy rate has dropped and the poverty rate is down we are coming back together and we re moving forward together and as you know i believe we can only move forward if we do it together we re moving in the right direction but now we have to make some decisions that will keep us on that track that really is what this big budget debate in washington is all about it isn t just about dollars and cents it goes to the heart of who we are as a people what we believe what we stand for what kind of america we want our children and grandchildren to inherit in the 21st century last wednesday using the pen that was used to sign medicare and medicaid into law in 1965 i vetoed the republican budget i did it to preserve our commitment to our parents to protect opportunity for our children to defend our public health and environment and to stop a tax increase that undercuts the value of work for the hardest pressed working families and their children in this country the very next day i gave congress a budget that does balance in seven years without their devastating cuts in medicare and medicaid in education and the environment and one that does not raise taxes on working families let me tell you again why i vetoed their budget americans have always believed we owe a duty to our parents the republican budget that i vetoed would turn medicare into a second class system the medicare system that has served older americans so well for 30 years would be over and i m not going to let that happen my seven year balanced budget secures the medicare trust fund into the future without imposing new costs on hard pressed seniors and it preserves medicaid s guarantee of quality health care for poor children pregnant women disabled americans and older americans there are many differences between the republican budget that i vetoed and the one i presented last week but perhaps the starkest one of all is the different treatment of medicaid as i told governor chiles in a white house meeting with governors on friday the republican budget would be a disaster for states like florida that depend on medicaid medicaid is a guarantee not only to seniors who might need nursing home care it s also a guarantee to their families against having their financial security threatened if an older parent falls seriously ill this republican plan would change all that families tomorrow could find themselves forced to pay large sums for quality nursing home care that medicaid guarantees today it would force those working families to choose between quality nursing home care for their parents and quality education and health care for their own children we shouldn t force our working families to have to make that type of choice now i want to work with the republican congress i want to work to get a balanced budget but i will not i will not permit the repeal of guaranteed medical coverage for senior citizens for disabled people for poor children for pregnant women for people with aids that would violate our values it would undermine our families and therefore even weaken our economy and what s more it s not necessary so if they continue to make this a part of their budget i ll veto it again and again and again my fellow democrats we re going to win this battle we have to nothing less than the heart and soul of our nation are at stake that s why i m asking for your continued support now more than ever all of us who share the same values whether we re democrats republicans or independents all of us who share the same vision for our country and our future we have got to stand together now for the american people we need to stand together on behalf of the elderly the disabled the pregnant women and poor children to protect medicare and medicaid we need to stand together on behalf of the millions and millions of young people in this country who would be denied the chance for a better education if the republicans are successful in slashing head start slashing the college loan options slashing the college scholarships we need to stand together to reward hard working families by providing the child care mothers need to move from welfare to work and by refusing to raise taxes on 8 million working families we have to build on the successes of the last three years but we must not turn back the clock some republicans in congress have made clear their strategy by trying to force through harmful health care education and environmental cuts that would be very damaging to florida by threatening to shut our government down once again they did it a month ago but the threat failed now as the holidays approach i sincerely hope that there will be a spirit in the congress that will make it possible for us to bring good faith to our negotiations we are now engaged in negotiations on how best to balance the budget consistent with our values and i proposed the seven year balanced budget and even proposed a specific compromise so that we could finish our work on this year s budget and keep the government open we have serious differences on medicare medicaid education and the environment on tax fairness and also on research and technology that i know are critical to our future but we ought to be able to agree on this nobody nobody should threaten to shut the government down right before christmas let me close by reminding all of you how far we ve come and what i hope you will do in the year ahead remind your fellow citizens in florida that america is in better shape than we were three years ago and florida is in better shape than it was three years ago we do have a 27 year low in the combined rates of unemployment and inflation we do have progress in crime and welfare reform in reducing many of the social problems that still continue to plague us we do have progress in making the world a more peaceful place and florida has received the attention it deserved from our administration the southern command is moving to florida the summit of the americas was held in florida the defense budgets of the country have been kept strong in the way it has preserved the military presence in florida that will help us to be secure in the future our trade policies our technology policies have helped florida but if you look to the future and you think of america and what you want it to be like 10 20 30 years from now you know we still have a long way to go the answer is to redouble our efforts in the direction we are heading not to derail this train of america s progress we have to have a vision and we have to have policies that prepare our children for the vast challenges and opportunities of the 21st century vision and policy that promote life long learning so our workers can meet the demands of change a vision and a policy that empowers communities to solve their own problems that ensures the safety of our citizens on our streets in our schools and in our homes that helped us to come together as a country and as one big american community that s the vision we all share for america america is now in the best position to lead the world into the 21st century as well and you know with our common security threats of the proliferation of dangerous nuclear chemical and biological weapons with the problems we have with terrorism and drug trafficking and organized crime you know we have to put our values into action around the world and come together in that same spirit i want you to promise yourself that when you walk out of this room today and for the next year you are going to walk up to your fellow american in every possible venue and talk about these fundamental values these fundamental issues this shared vision that you and i have for our future and for our children if we will do that if we will bring the same enthusiasm i heard from you today into our daily lives into our daily contacts with the kind of people who never have the opportunity to be in a convention hall we will prevail but far far more important america will have the future that our children deserve thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton10 12 96 bill_clinton this may be one of those cases where the introduction was better than the speech thank you julie and thank all of you for being here i m honored to be with this distinguished group on human rights day i want to thank all of you in attendance i think congresswoman connie morella is here where are you connie there you are right in front of me our aid administrator brian atwood assistant secretary john shattuck assistant secretary phyllis oakley and all of you who represent organizations who have done so much to advance the cause of freedom around the world i want to say a special word of welcome to my good friend gerry ferraro thank you for being here before i begin what i want to say about human rights i think it is appropriate on human rights day that i have just gotten a report from the secretary of state warren christopher who is meeting with our nato foreign ministers in brussels that together they agreed to hold an historic nato summit in july in madrid to carry forward our goal of building a europe that is undivided democratic and at peace for the first time in history one in which we will work to forge a partnership with russia adapt nato to the demands of a new era and invite the first aspiring members from among europe s new democracies into nato my goal is to see them become full members of the alliance for nato s 50th birthday in 1999 it s fitting that this step comes on human rights day and on bill of rights day and in human rights week the prospect of nato membership and integration into the west has been a very strong incentive for europe s new democracies to expand their political freedoms and to promote universal human rights working together with our allies and our partners we re building a world where as judge learned hand once said rights know no boundaries and justice no frontiers for the first time in history more than half the world s people now live under governments of their own choosing today we dedicate ourselves to the unfinished task of extending freedom s reach promoting democracy and human rights reflects our ideals and reinforces our interests it s a fundamental pillar of our foreign policy history shows that nations where rights are respected and governments are freely chosen are more likely to be partners in peace and prosperity that is why we ve worked hard over the last four years to help equality and freedom take root in south africa to stop the reign of terror in haiti to promote reform in bosnia and russia to bring freedom back to bosnia and peace and to enable millions of suffering people all around the world to reclaim their simple human dignity that is why we must continue to support the world s newest democracies and to keep the pressure on its remaining repressive regimes the first lady and i have just had a remarkable meeting with these six women they are courageous in promoting human rights in different ways they are courageous in promoting democracy and empowerment by helping women to live up to their potential you can just look at them and see that they ve put the lie to the notion that human rights is some western cultural idea that has no place in other societies julie su who spoke so eloquently has played a crucial role in stopping the exploitation of thai women immigrants in sweat shops and i am proud of the work that secretary reich and the labor department has done in that regard and we intend to continue to do that for the next four years for the last 20 years dawn calabia has fought to protect women refugees and children nahid toubia is a doctor from sudan whose organization has played a pioneering role in women s health issues barbara fry has promoted corporate responsibility for human rights around the world and has also promoted education of children in her native minnesota in human rights wanjiru muigai from kenya has helped women in her country to secure their legal rights and she made a passionate appeal to me to focus on targeted united states aid in a way that will promote the empowerment of women in nation after nation and since coming here from el salvador lillian perdomo has worked to protect women from domestic violence right here in the district of columbia each of these women tells a story for many others together their experiences underscore a shared truth as the first lady said in beijing and as julie repeated human rights are women s rights and women s rights are human rights i want to tell you that i am very proud of the role that hillary ambassador albright and all the members of the united states delegation and thank you marge mezvinsky back there who played in issuing beijing s call to action that was a great moment for the united states and a great moment for women around the world beijing s message was as clear as it was compelling we cannot advance our ideals and interests unless we focus more attention on the fundamental human rights and basic needs of women and girls we must recognize that it is a violation of human rights when girls and women are sold into prostitution when rape becomes a weapon of war when women are denied the right to plan their own families including through forced abortions when young girls are brutalized by genital mutilation when women around the world are unsafe even in their own homes if women are free from violence if they re healthy and educated if they can live and work as full and equal partners in any society then families will flourish and when they do communities and nations will thrive we are putting our efforts to protect and advance women s rights where they belong in the mainstream of american foreign policy during the last four years we have worked to steer more of our assistance to women and girls to help protect their legal rights and to give them a greater voice in their political and economic futures these programs are making a real difference whether by raising female voter turnout in bangladesh promoting equality for women in nepal enabling women in bosnia to participate fully in the rebuilding of their country but we must do more today i call upon the senate again to ratify the united nations convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women as you know many many many other nations have done this in our country where we have worked so hard against domestic violence where we have worked so hard to empower women it is to say the least an embarrassment that the united states has not done this and there is no excuse for this situation to continue i m also pleased to announce several initiatives totalling 4 million to protect and advance women s rights including new efforts to help rwandan women who have been torn from their homes and to provide women refugees around the world with access to reproductive health services they ve built on the commitment i made at last year s g 7 summit to help women in bosnia start new businesses and will help women across africa to do the same they strengthen our commitment to stop the trafficking of women and children for prostitution and child labor and they will help women s groups in asia fight violence and discrimination in short these efforts will reinforce america s global leadership on behalf of human rights and democracy in perhaps the most fundamental areas at which they are at risk they reflect our nation s enduring commitment to the freedoms of our bill of rights that safeguard our own citizens they support the values in the universal declaration of human rights that promote freedom justice and peace all around the world we live at a time when our most deeply held ideals are ascendant but this hopeful trend toward freedom and democracy is neither inevitable nor irreversible nor has it extended to the real lives of hundreds of millions of people all across the globe while we seek to engage all nations on terms of goodwill we must continue to stand up for the proposition that all people without regard to their gender their nationality their race their ethnic group or their religion should have a chance to live up to their potential i want to say again how gratified i am that there are people like these six women alive and well and at work in the world people like so many of you it is a constant source of inspiration to me i want to say again how grateful i am to the first lady for going across the world to raise our concerns about this and bringing back to me the knowledge of the work that has been done and what still can be done on behalf of women and girls as i sign this proclamation marking international human rights day i ask you all to remember not just that women s rights or human rights but that the defense and the promotion of human rights are the responsibilities of all of us thank you thank you all very much dem wjclinton10 12 97 bill_clinton thank you carmen was great wasn t she let s give her another hand i thought she was great thank you thank you jenny brooks for your vision and for your persistence thank you paul grogan for your vision and your persistence the whole approach of lisc was years and years and years ahead of government and what we have essentially tried to do is to get all of our government policies to follow the model that lisc was based on all along and we thank you i d also like to acknowledge the presence here of three people from the city of new york who are very important now to the future of america our brilliant hud secretary andrew cuomo the administrator of the small business administration from brooklyn aida alvarez and the assistant to the president for public liaison i don t know where she is but she s from the bronx maria echaveste where are you maria thank you i also want to join in congratulating my good friend your borough president freddie ferrer on the bronx being an all american city stand up thank you i want to thank the deputy mayor for being here and senator rossatto and assemblyman dias and the other members of the assembly and city council who are here i d like to thank the boys and girls club the boys and girls of clara barton school i think they made this for me and it s quite beautiful isn t it and i thank the madison square boys and girls club for hosting us i want to thank all the financial institutions who have helped who were mentioned earlier i understand that frank duma the chairman of bankers trust and walter shipley the chairman and ceo of chase manhattan are here i d also like to say you know i got my little tour of charlotte street on the way up here and it was to show you what a small world it is it was given to me by the current president of the mid bronx desperadoes ralph porter and i want you to know that to show you what a small place this is he will probably have to testify about this now we grew up in the same town in arkansas and his wife worked with my mother for many years in the hospital there and when he came here he decided to pitch in instead of walk away like the rest of you and i appreciate that what all of you have done let me say more than anything else i want to begin by thanking the people of the bronx not only for the example you have set here but for the support that you have given to me and to the first lady and to the vice president so that we can continue to work to try to make this example real in the lives of people all over this city all over this country because my one message here is look at where the bronx was when president carter came here in despair look at where the bronx was when president reagan came here and compared it to london in the blitz and look at the bronx today if you can do it everybody else can do it and we are determined to see that it be done what we have got to do is to take what you have shown us works and help more neighborhoods all across america do it and we have seen that this did not happen by accident it happened first and foremost because of visionary committed determined leadership at the local level people who just wanted a good life citizen leaders like jenny citizens like carmen said this is not complicated why shouldn t i be able to get married and have children in my hometown why shouldn t people be able to work there why shouldn t people be able to live in decent housing there why shouldn t our children be able to walk the streets there why shouldn t our children be able to go to decent schools there why there is no reason why they started by asking the right questions and over time they got the right answers this didn t happen in a year or two no single person can claim credit for it but over time you got it right now we have to take what you have done here show the before and after if i could have any wish out of this it is not that my speech would be reported tonight on the evening news or in the press tomorrow i would just like one thing i would like for every single american to see before and after and they would know and then i would like for them to say how did this happen and tell your story because what i have tried to do relentlessly for five years is to reorganize the national government to reinvent and reinvigorate it so that we would be organized in a way that would support what you have done when i became president i had been a governor for 12 years in a state that had a lot of the same problems that the south bronx had we never had an unemployment rate under the national average the whole time i was governor for 10 years until i started running for president and a lot of things we had been working on began to manifest themselves but i know what it does to people good people if they think they can t live in decent housing in strong neighborhoods and grownups can t get up and go to a job that makes them proud in the daytime and the kids can t get up and go to a school that makes them proud in the daytime and they re scared going to and from work and school anyway i know what that does to people and it doesn t have to be that way and the debate that was going on in 1992 when i first came to the bronx and president ferrar and i were reminiscing about it today the debate that was going on in the country was a crazy debate the debate was one side said the federal government should do more just like we re doing it give people money but we know how in washington they should live and what they ought to do and put a lot of strings on it have a lot of rules and regulations set up a bureaucracy and just pat people on the head and tell them we would take care of it that didn t work very well then there were other people who said the government has messed it up so much the government is the problem if we would just get out of the way and go home everything would be hunky dory no money this is really not a money problem at all one of my rules of politics over more than 20 years has been if you ever hear a politician say it s not a money problem he s talking about somebody else s problem then when you see a politician interested in an issue all of a sudden it becomes a money problem when he s interested in it or she is i say that because that was a phoney debate you can t have government in washington dictating the solution you can t have government in washington sitting on the sidelines government has to be a partner and has to get it right and what is getting it right getting it right is saying there is nothing we can do for you you won t do for yourselves but if you re willing to do for yourselves we will give you the tools and help to create the conditions so that you can have the power to change your own lives that is the right message and that is what we are trying to do and we ve worked at it hard for five years that s what we ve tried to do with hud under secretary cuomo that s what we ve tried to do with the sba under aida alvarez that s what we ve tried to do with our whole approach to law enforcement and it is producing results not by creating programs that foster dependency and not by looking the other way but by giving people the tools to create their own lives through empowerment and investment now that s what charlotte gardens represents to me that s the picture i want america to see that s the message i want america to get there is an urban renaissance occurring all across america today but we know we need to do more unemployment is still higher in many inner city neighborhoods than it is in the country as a whole only a small percentage of the new jobs which have been created in this last boom nearly 14 million now only a small percentage of them have come in the inner city neighborhoods that s why we want more empowerment zones like the one we have in manhattan and the south bronx and why we want more of them around the country that s why we want more enterprise communities where if people will do what you done here we will give them more help and we re trying to do our part we have reformed the community reinvestment act which basically says what guidelines there ought to be for reinvesting in areas that have been under invested in that brought 270 billion in commitments from financial institutions to help people in distressed areas improve their communities this is a little known action of the federal government the way we ve changed the community reinvestment act that act has been on the books for 20 years seventy percent of all the money loaned under the community reinvestment act in 20 years has been loaned in the last five years seven times as much on an annual basis as before i am very proud of that and that s just as important in fact it is more important than the public tax dollars coming in we have got to get the private sector to look at people like you all over america and say this is an opportunity if people are underemployed if they re under housed if we are under investing in them that s where america s growth can come that s where america s future is we don t have a person to waste we don t have a community to waste we re trying to get the unemployment down more and the growth up higher go look for the people who have growth potential that s what happened here and that s what we have to do everywhere else in america we re helping to fund community development financial institutions that s a fancy term for community banks that loan money to people that otherwise might not be able to get loans but are good risks and honorable people and have good ideas for businesses your country has spent lots of money setting up these kinds of banks all over the world all over the world we spent money to try to help poor village women in places like bangladesh get loans hundreds of thousands of them and yet there have only been a few communities in america that have aggressively adopted this philosophy if it s helping to revive people in countries that are a lot poorer than the south bronx then we ought to make those same kinds of institutions and that same kind of capital available to the american people to give them a chance to revive their fortunes secretary cuomo is modernizing hud s federal housing administration to make homeownership a reality we now have two thirds of the american people in their own homes for the first time in the history of the country and we want to do better and we can we did as jenny said one of the things that has helped here is the low income housing tax credit it gets people to invest for a tax credit to make housing more affordable and more available than it would otherwise be finally in this last budget we made it permanent you don t have to worry about whether congress is going to do it now year in and year out it is now a permanent part of the tax code so that investors can know if they stake their future in neighborhoods like this one that will be there they know what the economic rules are and they don t have to worry about someone changing the rules in the middle of the game and that has made a big difference as well one other thing i want to say we also have to recognize that our country is going through a period of economic transition that every wealthy country in the world is facing where there are relatively fewer low skilled good wage jobs relatively more low skilled low wage jobs but many more higher skilled high wage jobs now the most important thing we can do is to set up a system of lifetime training to give every body access to continually improving their skills i live in washington d c it breaks my heart when i drive around what is now my hometown and i see people who don t have work and then i pick up the newspaper and read that in every county around washington d c there is a vast shortage of technical workers and businesses are constrained in their growth because they can t hire people because there is not anybody available that knows what they need so we need to do that and in the meanwhile we need to do what we can to improve the incomes of people who are working hard every day and doing their best that s why we raised the minimum wage that s why we lowered income taxes on working families with incomes below 30 000 and we doubled the earned income tax credit it amounts to about 1 000 a year a family for a family with two kids with an income of under 30 000 that s why we are doing what we can to expand health insurance to 5 million uninsured children in the last balanced budget bill and why we provided a 500 a year tax credit per child to help working families on modest incomes actually raise their incomes by having the government take less and provide more help to them for their children s health care these things are important in the welfare reform bill now we had the welfare rolls go down by 3 8 million but we left people with the guarantee of health care and nutrition for their kids more money for child care and now we ve provided 3 billion to cities like new york to try to make sure that there are public funds available for work for people if they re required to go to work and there are no private sector jobs all this is to help people through a transition but the goal is to have everybody living in a place like this place with a job and a neighborhood and a house and a school you can be proud of finally let me say i was so glad to hear it mentioned earlier by mr grogan we can t get investments in the places that people don t think are safe you cannot get people to invest money if people don t think it s safe i m trying to get people i m trying to make peace in the middle east you know i ve spent a lot of time on it and you can t make in the end there won t be any peace if those people don t have something to do and five years ago or over four years ago i assembled 600 arab american and jewish american business people that said we will invest there when it s safe because there is no point in putting money in if it won t produce any result everyone understands that in the context of foreign policy we must understand that here at home that s why we have again our whole law enforcement policy is a community empowerment policy the crime bill we passed in 1994 in effect was written by police officers and community leaders and prosecutors and others who said this is what we can do to lower the crime rate put 100 000 police more police on the street give the kids something to do after school give them something to do to stay out of trouble take assault weapons off the street don t sell guns to people with a criminal record and we ve had five years of declining crime in the country as a whole the lowest crime rate in 24 years in the united states it has to be that way in every neighborhood the lower you get the crime rate the higher the investment will be the more jobs there will be the more opportunity there will be i say that because we still have work to do there are still too many of our kids getting in trouble and i won t rest until we know that every single child has someplace to go and something positive to do when they get out of school most of the juvenile crime occurs after school now we have more to do let me just say a few things that i can say today that will affect the people in this room and throughout this city we are going to release 96 million to help create affordable housing here in new york through the innovative home program the same hud program that helped to stimulate the revitalization we re celebrating today second administrator alvarez and the sba have approved the bronx overall economic development corporation as the first certified development company in new york here s what that means it means that over the next five years the bronx overall economic development company or boedc i guess is the way you say it will make 50 million worth of fixed rate loans to small businesses in the bronx to help them make the investments in building the machinery they need to succeed most of the new jobs in this country and being created by small business 50 million coming into the bronx to help these folks stay in business hire more people and grow the economy right here in your backyard the third thing i am doing is to put 45 million more in my next budget to expand the community development financial bank so we can make more loans to individuals who can start their own businesses or hire people to create an economy where very often there isn t one and finally let me say i am very pleased that lisc and the enterprise foundation have gotten another 250 million in corporate investments to help build affordable housing in new york city over the next three years thank you all very much now what does all this mean i ll say it one more time there is nothing that can be done for any neighborhood that people will not do for themselves but people who are willing to do for themselves deserve a hand up they deserve a partner they deserve a government committed to giving them the tools they need to succeed that s what empowerment is a lot of people think it s a buzzword it is not a buzzword come to the south bronx if you want to see empowerment go down these streets if you want to see empowerment look at the mid bronx desperados if you want to see empowerment that is what it means it is not some funny word it s about people taking control of their lives and building a better future for their children that s what we re going to do together thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton10 2 00 bill_clinton thank you very much let me say how delighted and profoundly honored i am to be here with senator daschle and leader gephardt with their colleagues in the senate and the house who are here in large numbers and all those who aren t here who are with us in spirit today how much i appreciate bob hatcher and thelma and ginny may for being here to remind us of why we re all here in the first place their testimony makes clear that our agenda is america s agenda and our presence here makes clear that we are united in our support of that agenda i know some of our friends on the other side of the aisle have suggested that because this is an election year we really shouldn t do much well i don t think that the two people who just spoke could take a year off from their jobs and since everybody here is still drawing a salary i don t think we could take a year off from our jobs either i want to join with what senator daschle and leader gephardt have said in thanking the members of this caucus for your role in this long boom and so much of the social progress we have enjoyed beginning with the courageous vote for the economic plan in 1993 your commitment constant over the years to opportunity for every responsible american and for a community of all americans to a government that gives americans the tools to live their own dreams has been absolutely critical to anything that our administration has achieved i know that we ve had a lot of different policies but more important than all of the specifics was our common commitment we wanted bob and thelma to be here today because we believe that every american counts we believe every american should have a chance and we believe we all do better when we help each other that is what we believe today i received the annual economic report from my council of economic advisors it provides further evidence that americans have built a new economy and that what we believe actually works the report makes clear that this is the strongest economic expansion in history not just the longest that unlike previous economic expansions which in the end and somewhere in the middle normally bring you higher deficits slower productivity and higher inflation this one has turned it around unlike the 1980s when income inequality increased and many hard pressed working families saw their incomes fall while we were told that the expansion was going on we now see solid income growth across all groups of american workers since 1993 all groups are sharing in the prosperity by income by region by race now as my leaders said so eloquently it is for us here in washington and for the american people to decide what we were going to do with what is truly a magic moment i argued in the state of the union address that we ought to be thinking about people like bob and thelma and ginny may that we ought to ask ourselves what are the great challenges before us we ought to clearly state what we believe america s goals ought to be and what steps we intend to take toward them this year that is what we are united in doing and let me say we have a lot of young people here i want to say something now and something to you at the end anybody over 30 in this audience can recall at least one time in your life and probably more than one time when you made a big mistake not because you were under the gun but because things were going so well you thought there were no consequences you thought you could relax you thought you really didn t have to think about what you knew was out there plainly before you so you didn t really have to take those tough decisions just sort of sit back relax enjoy the things that were going on that is a message that some people suddenly are sending america today and that is dead wrong we will never in all probability have another time in our lifetime with so much prosperity so much progress so much confidence and so little trouble at home and abroad to define the future of our dreams for the next generation of americans and we had better take this chance and make the most of it i must say i have been quite amused by a lot of the commentators on both sides of our policy of paying the debt off some have said i sound like calvin coolidge and others say that i m using it as an excuse to spend money on americans all i know is it works if we get this country out of debt it means the american people can borrow money at lower interest rates to invest in new businesses to pay their home loans to pay their college loans to pay their car loans it means that all the young people here for a generation will have a healthier economy and a more affordable life than otherwise would have been the case and it will be more possible for us to meet the great challenges of this country that is our united commitment and we ought to do it we are united in meeting the challenge of the aging of america and believe me this is not an option i know things are going well so we can sort of say well we ll let this slide a while the people in this country the number of people over 65 are going to double in the next 30 years now if we start to prepare for it now to reform and modernize and strengthen medicare and to take social security out beyond the life expectancy of the baby boom generation we can do it relatively painlessly but make no mistake this country will do it and if we just fool around and ignore this for 10 years who knows what the economy will be like 10 years from now who knows what the demands on the american people will be like 10 years from now now is the time to add a prescription drug benefit to medicare and to take social security out to 2050 and take medicare out for 25 years now do it now save social security and medicare for the baby boomers retirement we know that we live in a marvelous world where the kids with a good education are going to be able to do things their parents could not even have imagined and yet we know that the penalty of not having an education is even greater than ever we know that it s more challenging than ever before because we have a more diverse group of students from different racial cultural religious even linguistic backgrounds we know that right now and we know that s only going to become a more pronounced trend within a decade our largest state california will have no majority race now we know that we also know that there s nowhere near equal educational opportunity in the country and we know what the challenges are so we say now not later now is the time for high standards smaller classes well trained teachers now is the time for all the kids who need it to have the preschool and the after school programs they need now is the time not later now we know that more and more families will have the parents working whether they re single parent families or two parent families and we know right now that for all of our success america gets less support to help people balance the demands of child rearing and work than any other advanced country we can be proud of what we did with family and medical leave we can be proud with what we did with the children s health insurance program we can be proud with what we did with the kennedy kassebaum bill to let people take their health insurance from job to job but we know that we do not do enough to help people balance the demands of work and child rearing and raising children like that beautiful little girl is still america s most important work it always will be and we know we have to do more so we believe now is the time to increase the child care tax credit and make it refundable to help parents do more to pay for college tuition so that we can go beyond where we were with the hope scholarship which opens the doors of community college to all americans with the college tax deduction at 28 percent for all income groups we can open the doors of four years of college to all americans we know we should increase the earned income tax credit for lower income working people we know we should genuinely ease the marriage penalty for both middle and lower middle income groups we know we should do this we don t know whether 10 years from now we will be able to do this and we don t know what the consequences to countless families will be if we don t do it now we are united in saying let s do it now we don t have to wait now is the time to help families to balance the demands of home and work you heard thelma s story so you know that the one area where the social indicators have not gone in the right direction since 1993 is in the number of people who are covered with health insurance one of the wits in our democratic caucus said to me the other day you know all those insurance companies told me back in 1993 or 94 if i voted for your health care plan the number of uninsured americans would go up i voted for it and sure enough that s what happened we know we need a strong enforceable patients bill of rights and the congress has fooled around with it long enough the time is now to pass it we know we should do more to help enroll more children in the children s health insurance program two million children are enrolled this congress provided enough money for somewhere between 4 and 5 million children to be enrolled and we know and that s why it s so important you remember thelma s story i was four years old like this little girl once with a mother who was working and then a single mother there are people like her all over the country one of the most important things we have proposed in this congress is to let the parents of children who are in this chip program also get insurance they need it they re working out there and we ought to do it and we ought to do it now not later we know the crime rate has gone down to a 30 year low and it s still too high and we believe not later now is the time to learn the lessons of columbine and all the other things we ve seen and pass common sense legislation to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and away from kids we can do that and honor every constitutional provision in our founding document and every fundamental value in our society we know we ve got to keep putting more police on the street in high crime areas who knows five years from now what kind of condition this country will be why should any more children die we can save why should any more crimes be committed we can prevent now is the time to take strong action to make america the safest big country in the world we know there are still too many people and places that haven t participated in this prosperity we know that that s why we favor increasing the number of empowerment zones increasing the incentives to invest in them and giving americans all over this country people like bob hatcher we know there are inner city neighborhoods where he might be able to put people to work i think we ought to give him the same tax incentives to invest in those neighborhoods we give him today to invest in latin america africa or asia and we ought to do it now not later now we are united in that and as i look at senator feingold i think i should say one other thing unlike the other party we are united united down to the last vote in both houses in saying now is the time to pass meaningful campaign finance reform legislation in this congress we are also united in believing we have to build one america that s why we want to pass the hate crimes prevention act that s why we want to end all discrimination in employment we don t i ll say again we think everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance we all do better when we help each other i want to make this last point i see all these young people here the last time america had a chance like this was when i was about your age i finished high school in 1964 the nation was heartbroken when president kennedy was killed but president johnson lifted our spirits united the country began to deal with the challenges of civil rights and we believed that our economy would grow on forever we believed we would meet the challenges of civil rights in a lawful peaceful way we believed we could win the cold war without what ultimately happened in the dividing of our country in vietnam and we thought it would go on forever and everything was hunky dory four years later when i was graduating from college it was two days after robert kennedy had been killed a couple of months after martin luther king had been killed and lyndon johnson said he wouldn t run for reelection we had riots in the street the economy came a cropper on the burdens of paying for a war and inflation and all that we thought would happen was lost and the presidential election in that year was decided on the politics of division something called the silent majority which means the world and america is divided between us and them i m with us and they re with them and i have lived with that as a citizen for 30 years now i m not running for anything i am not on the ballot i am telling you this as an american i have waited for 30 long years to see my country in a position to pull together and move forward together and build the future of our dreams for our children we dare not blow that chance thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton10 3 00 bill_clinton thank you very much i want to thank secretary slater and jane garvey and the airline executives who are here the representatives of the airline pilots the air traffic controllers and the other aviation leaders who have made a truly remarkable team for this announcement before i talk about the air travel issue because this is my only opportunity to meet with the press today and because i had the unusual good fortune of letting them parade in ahead of us here i actually tried to get mark knoller to do this announcement but he refused i want to say a few words about a very down to earth issue the proposal to raise the minimum wage i have called for a simple one dollar increase in the minimum wage to help millions of families last night dozens of republicans joined us in forming a majority to raise the minimum wage by a dollar over two years but unfortunately the leadership turned that common sense act into a dead letter by insisting they would only have a minimum wage increase if we turn back overtime protections for over a million workers and use the bill to give a large tax cut which both disproportionately benefits the wealthiest americans and would put our prosperity at risk by making it impossible for us to continue to pay down the debt and to save social security and medicare now i think the american people question why congress can t do something as simple as raising the minimum wage without loading it up with special favors and i think it s a good question the right answer is to send me a clean bill a bill simple and clear that could fit on one side of one piece of paper in fact if you look at it that s exactly what our minimum wage bill does it s not very big not very complicated and i hope that we can pass it i m looking forward to working with the congress i have not given up on this and i have been given some encouraging signals that we might yet be able to reach an agreement so i will keep working on it now let me again welcome all the representatives of the transportation industry here and let me say a special word of appreciation to senator jay rockefeller for his long standing leadership in this area and his interest i think it s quite important that we have airline efficiency because it s almost impossible for someone as tall as senator rockefeller to be comfortable on an airline and we want to make sure he can at least always be on time he has worked on this for a long time you mentioned secretary slater mentioned the meeting we had in everett washington when i took office the airline industry was in trouble we ve all worked very hard for the successes of the last seven years and all the actors in the industry have i d also like to say a special word of appreciation to someone who is not here vice president gore who headed our commission on airline safety and security it was part of our reinventing government effort and i thank him for his efforts and all the people who worked on that endeavor we know that delays pile up as flights increase and thunderstorms snarl the skies we know with springtime coming that we don t want to forget as rodney said that last year s summer storms were the worst or some of the worst on record the air traffic control system couldn t respond fast enough more than 1 200 aircraft were late every day last summer delays rose by 22 percent last year overall it s not good for travelers it s not good for the airline industry and it s not good for the overall economy of course when it comes to air travel safety is the most important thing in severe weather flights will be cancelled or delayed for safety reasons and passengers wouldn t have it any other way but as we work to keep the travel as safe as it can be we should also do everything we can to make it as efficient as it can be after last summer s record delays the federal aviation administration put together an extraordinary partnership with the airline industry the pilots the workers who keep the planes in the air the air traffic controllers who bring them home safe together they developed a faster more efficient response to storms and they came here today to brief me on the improvements we can all expect this summer first better communications will let pilots and passengers know promptly whether they can expect a delay measured in minutes or in hours second centralized air traffic decision making will let us respond better to the really big storms that can stretch the length of the east coast or from houston to the great lakes third new technology will help faa and airline experts use airspace more efficiently detect storms sooner and keep runways working even in bad weather fourth faa and airline representatives will share information several times a day working off the same state of the art weather forecast and finally next month the faa will open a web site with up to the minute weather information for consumers i want to thank all the organizations represented here for working together and i thank all the members of congress who have supported these reforms let me also mention that congress is close to finalizing the faa reauthorization bill i know it s important to secretary slater because he sent me a memo about it yesterday this will provide ample funding to upgrade facilities and equipment at airports and air traffic control centers if we want to minimize delays and maximize safety we need this faa reauthorization and this funding i think everybody here who s done a lot of air travel knows that we need to upgrade the facilities and the equipment and the air traffic control centers but i am concerned that too little funding will be available for air traffic control operations that s the bedrock of efficiency and safety and although the bill contains some first steps forward it doesn t go far enough toward the system wide reform we need we must bring the air traffic control system and the way it s managed into the 21st century we have the safest air travel in the world but as more and more americans take to the air we need to make our system as efficient as it is safe the faa expects passenger traffic to rise by more than 50 percent in the next 10 years freight traffic will almost double in the same period busier skies means we have to work harder to keep our skies safe and to keep planes flying on time so today i m directing the faa to develop a plan for broader reform of the air traffic control system and to report back to me in 45 days building from fundamental principles america s 21st century air traffic control system should provide 21st century high tech service the system must work better with its customers the commercial airlines and others who pay for the system it must be able to look beyond next year s budget cycle and fund new technology we need over a multi year period we must meet these challenges in a way that helps not harms everyone who is a part of the air traffic control system and we must always keep safety at the top of our agenda with other government agencies and the private sector i ask the faa to look ahead to our ultimate goal putting together a seamless state of the art system from coast to coast now until we work out a way to get mother nature to cooperate storms delays and cancellations will always be with us and the american people understand that but they also understand that if we can photograph and analyze weather patterns from space we ought to be able to tell passengers why they re delayed and for how long if we can guide the space shuttle into orbit and back we ought to be able to guide planes around thunderstorms safely we can do a better job starting next summer with the help of everyone here today we will again let me say secretary slater and to jane garvey and to all the people standing with me and all of you sitting out in the audience who had anything to do with this this is the way our country ought to work in a lot of other contexts i thank you for what you have done i think we have to do more but this summer a lot of people will benefit from the enormous efforts you have made and i am very very grateful thank you very much dem wjclinton10 3 94 bill_clinton thank you very much i want to begin by expressing my appreciation for being able to join the honorees here tonight and all the distinguished americans who are here the presidents of the 41 uncf colleges given my roots i couldn t help noticing of the 41 uncf colleges all but wilberforce are located in the south and sometimes i m not so sure about ohio and where it is for any of you who are from there that was a compliment from me you know bill gray once came to arkansas to give a speech for me and i thanked him profusely he was then the chairman of the house budget committee perhaps the most powerful member of the house at that time except the speaker and he was exhausted and he came down there i said i cannot tell you how much i appreciate it and he said well one of these days i ll give you a chance to demonstrate it at the time he knew more about my future than i did i assure you i ve been terribly impressed with the people who have been recognized here tonight stephen wright and arthur fletcher my longtime friend vernon jordan you could chronicle his demise up there his hair s going gray and he s relegated to playing golf with me i want to say a special word of recognition to christopher edley sr because he has not only rendered great service to this organization but he has given me his son to be the associate director of the office of management and budget now the younger mr edley was not so fortunate in his education he was consigned to swarthmore and harvard but he got over it and he s doing quite nicely now in the federal government i enjoyed the presentation to your distinguished alumni pearline cox and cheer again that s all right don t be shy go ahead and i was very impressed with mrs trent not only for representing her husband s work but for setting the record straight on the way out if it s all the same to you ma am if you don t think you re too old to undertake a new challenge i d like to have you come to the white house and help me set the record straight starting monday morning i d also like to say that every president since franklin roosevelt has supported this fine work but it was an especially important cause for my predecessor george bush and i d like to thank him in his absence for the support he gave to the uncf and thank his brother for the leadership he has given thank you mr bush for your leadership sir you know when bill gray resigned from the congress to take this job i had an extended conversation with him and i virtually cried when he told me he was leaving but i now can look at him and his wonderful wife and see that there is life after politics which is quite a wonderful thing because i can assure you there is less and less life in politics now than there used to be i never will forget the lesson bill gray gave all of us as chairman of the house budget committee when he believed that you actually could bring the deficit down and increase our investment in our people at the same time that is what we are trying to do and that is the path that he blazed he also educated a reluctant national government on the meaning of freedom when he got congress to pass sanctions against south africa and helped to put america on the right side of the struggle for freedom and democracy six weeks from now south africa will hold the first free elections in its history and one of the great beautiful and painful ironies in history the jailed nelson mandela and the jailer mr de klerk who set him free in an election where people will freely choose the course of their future and you had something to do with that quite a bit bill gray and america thanks you and the world thanks you i think we all ought to know that that election will not be the end of south africa s struggles it will just be the beginning of a new phase a phase in which free people will be called upon to overcome the legacy of their own past a struggle in which we are still engaged in this country one thing that the uncf has always known is that the more free you are the more you need to know one of our administration s principal initiatives will be to try to support higher education in south africa and to try to foster stronger linkages between your institutions and the institutions of higher education in south africa so that together we can march into the future today bill gray was notified by the director of the agency for international development brian atwood in our administration that the uncf and the hispanic association of higher education are now going to work together to try to guarantee more participation in international aid programs for historically black colleges and universities throughout our country we have made a lot of progress since dr patterson started his work and franklin roosevelt was president a lot of progress since benjamin davis led soldiers in world war ii simply to fight for their basic rights as citizens to defend this country all the way along those of you have been part of the heart and soul of this administration have known that learning was the key to liberation i have been blessed in my administration with people who have graduated from the member schools of this distinguished group the energy secretary hazel o leary graduate of fisk my wonderful presidential assistant for public liaison alexis herman who graduated from xavier and is here with me tonight the chief of staff to the first lady maggie williams and the presidential assistant for personnel veronica biggins both graduated from spelman dr cole and my dear friend from arkansas our nation s distinguished surgeon general joycelyn elders graduated from philander smith my state s contribution to this distinguished organization we have named the most distinguished and the most diverse group of federal judges of any group in our history and many of those who are african americans started their educational lives at uncf schools today 17 of the 40 members of congress who are african americans and members of the congressional black caucuses came from your schools in november i signed an executive order on historically black colleges and universities and committed our administration to their collective progress under the leadership of catherine leblanc who is here tonight with me since then we have proposed putting more money into programs like upward bound increasing funding for pell grants guaranteeing a new 375 million historically black colleges and universities capital financing program and creating a whole new system of college loans so that our young people can borrow money to go to college at lower interest rates and pay it back on better terms so that young people will never be discouraged from borrowing money to go to college because of the burden of repaying it and never be discouraged from taking a more public service oriented job when they get out because their salaries will be insufficient to cover the cost of the loan now they can elect to pay it back as a percentage of their income over a long period of time and finally we have i hope and believe at long last lifted the cloud that had been hanging over scholarship for minorities and said we will support them and we believe in them because learning is the key to liberation what i want to say to you in closing is this my friends if learning is the key to full freedom in america it must necessarily be true also that people must be free to learn and too many of our young people are no longer truly free to learn i had an astonishing experience today in brooklyn before i came here where i met at brooklyn college with several hundred young students there and young volunteers in community service programs all across the country and we heard presentations from nine people who painted a stark portrait of america as it is a wonderful woman from detroit whose two sons had been shot down in a gang fight one of them dying who channeled her heartbreak into building a program the acronym of which is sosad to try to give young people the chance to avoid the fate that her son met we met there today a young teenager from oakland california who had been caught in a cross fire and had his body shattered he lost an eye he was paralyzed from the waist down one of his legs had been amputated he was confined to a wheelchair and do you know he is spending his life telling people who are the victims of violence of gunshot wounds and knife wounds not to be full of vengeance and bitterness and trying to convince them and their families not to shoot back not to stab back not to fight back but instead to build back their lives this young man riveted that crowd there were many others who came there a young man from new jersey who left a corporate career in new york and instead took his necktie off and put on a t shirt and decided to devote the rest of his life to building one on one relationships with kids in trouble to give them a chance to get to the point where they would be free to learn these are the kinds of people that i met but what i find is even though there are hundreds indeed thousands of these stories all across america you and i know that we re still losing an awful lot of our children when the uncf started you think about this when the uncf started just about everybody associated with its creation believed two things number one if you could make everybody free of discrimination and number two if you could give everybody the chance to get a good education we could have real freedom and real opportunity and real community in america we assume that if anybody had told anyone 50 years ago that after 50 years there would be 2 000 people a year killed by gunshot wounds in new york city alone no one would have believed that if anybody had told the founders of this organization 50 years ago that the out of wedlock birthrate in many of our cities would be in excess of 50 percent and that it gets worse and worse and worse as people are driven more and more and more into poverty no one would have believed that if anyone had said 50 years ago what we re going to do with all this freedom in 50 years is have a flowering african american middle class an enormous explosion of entrepreneurs unparalleled achievement by hoards of young professionals and a dark flip side in which people are killing each other with reckless abandon and people s lives are being lost and more and more young people are living in chaos and gangs which people have feared have been created i am convinced to do nothing more than fill the vacuum which has been created by the absence of family and community of effective schooling and strong community organizations and hope no one would have believed it and so i say to you as we celebrate all the achievements that we see around this room tonight as we celebrate all the achievements we know that are to come we must recognize the inherent limits on the programs i just outlined and the support i just mentioned and the work that you are doing unless we can also go back and pick up the rest of our brothers and sisters who are beyond the reach of these efforts and so i ask you to honor your past by creating a new freedom for those who have been left behind in this brave new world in which there is so much good and so much bad existing side by side all these other kids count too the ones that will never get to your doors unless you and all of your schools participate in this national service program and have your kids out there tutoring these kids turning these kids away from violence teaching people in our schools that there are nonviolent ways to resolve your angers your frustrations your disappointments the thwarting we all feel every day in our lives you can do that you can teach the illiterate to read you can teach the frustrated to be peaceful you can raise the children up when they are very young you can help to implant values into children who aren t getting them in other places you have a larger a different a more profound mission than ever before i want to support you in that mission too because i know i know if we can get back to the point where the promise of all those ads we saw tonight from the very first to maya angelou s magnificent poem if we can do that then this country s going to be all right but if you want to hear somebody singing that poem over and over in their head and still i rise and still i rise and still i rise it has to be true not just for the best of us but for all the rest of us that is our challenge let us do our best to meet it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton10 5 02 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you and good morning when i got my little notes on this event they said i was supposed to wear business attire and i think for southern california you did so if you don t mind at least i ll loosen my tie because i drove down here through the traffic today i am delighted to be here and i guess i should start by congratulating you pete on the victory in the hockey game last night pete said when mccain scored in overtime and won the game he was told there was a deathly silence in the mulson center in montreal i don t know how many of you have ever seen a hockey game in canada but it s right up there with religion to them so this is good the prime minister of canada is a very close friend of mine i don t know if i can resist the temptation to call him today or not i want to thank all of you for the work you do and for giving me a chance to come to this beautiful place today this company has been involved with the information technology revolution for nearly 30 years now your mission is to help people do more and do it better but you have been at the center of one of the most remarkable developments in all human history a handheld computer now has more power than the system that took neil armstrong to the moon in 1969 when i became president believe it or not there were only this is january of 93 that s hardly in the dark ages even for you young people who are here when i became president there were only 50 50 sites on the world wide web the internet in january of 93 was still largely the private province of information scientists the first email was sent about 20 years ago by vince serf to his then profoundly deaf wife in 1999 we had my wife sponsored an event at the white house in early 2000 as a part of the millennia lecture series on the intersection of the biological sciences and information technology vince serf showed up again and talked about the computer side of the equation with dr lander from harvard who talked about genomics and he introduced his wife and explained that he thought about doing email because she was profoundly deaf they didn t have those new phones that work or people who can t hear and he worried about her being at home while he was at work she then got up and gave a talk and explained that she had just had a digital chip implanted deep in her canal and she could hear for the first time in 50 years she had just come from a james taylor concert and said she was quite certain she was the only person on the face of the earth who had not heard him sing fire and rain until the year 2000 in the near future the development of nanotechnology will have a radical effect on diagnostic healthcare enabling us to identify cancerous tumors when they re only a few cells in size raising the prospect that almost all cancers will be curable not very long ago a man in arizona who was paralyzed walked 1 000 feet with the aid of a digital chip planted in his spinal cord giving regular beats which reduced the effort to walk by something like 8 times just beyond the near future who knows ray kurtzweil in his book the age of spiritual machines says in a couple of decades computers will be thinking better than we do which will either relieve us of an enormous burden or impose a whole new set probably some of both now i want to thank you for what you have done in effecting your part of this revolution and specifically i want to thank this company for the work you did when i was president to help us meet the y2k challenge everyone thought the sky would fall and it didn t i want to thank you for the work you do for the library of congress the library of congress is a very special place to me from the time since i was a young man and i tried to do my part to take care of it when i was president when we signed the telecommunications act in 1996 we actually did it at the library of congress it began when thomas jefferson sold his personal library of just under 6 500 books to the library after the british troops had burned all the books in the war of 1812 today there are 17 million books and 111 million other documents there back then when thomas jefferson gave his books to the library every single one of them was meticulously recorded in pen in ink today thanks to compuwear they somehow keep track of all 17 million books and 111 million documents i also want to thank you pete for the work you and your company have done for the city of detroit a place i love very much mayor archer i know is a member of your board along with another former colleague of mine lowell weicker we re a long way from detroit and you ve got people here from all around the world but we all know the world is becoming increasingly urbanized in cities that work and make a huge difference compared to the cities that don t in the 1990 s the unemployment rate in detroit was cut by more than 50 thanks i hope to some of the things that i did with the mayor the empowerment zone the cops program the education and housing initiatives but thanks also to a lot of what you did the world has been dominated lately by mostly bad news i think it is worth starting with some of the good things that have happened since the fall of the berlin wall in 1989 you mentioned the economic progress that america enjoyed but in the last 20 years as the economy has become more globalized all across the world more people have been lifted out of poverty than at any comparable time in all human history for the first time in history in the 1990 s the majority of the world s people lived under governments that they voted in themselves relationships between the united states and our two great adversaries of the cold war russia and china turned from confrontation to cooperation the world joined together to end ethnic cleansing in the balkans we saw peace in northern ireland resolving 600 years of conflict 30 years of it marking terrorism in our lifetime and in spite of the trouble there today it s worth remembering that we had 7 years of progress and peace in the middle east we brought into being the world trade organization and made china a part of it latin american and north american leaders committed to build a free trade area of the americas the leaders of the major countries in the asia pacific region on both sides of the pacific began to meet every year for the first time and committed themselves to a free trade area there america opened its markets to countries from africa and the caribbean poor countries that chose openness through trade and investment as opposed to closed economic development grew at 5 a year those that stayed away from the global economy grew at 1 we began to cooperate in interesting ways with our former adversaries expanding nato to include former communist countries having partnerships with russia we spent over half the money the world spent in america to clean up landmines a terrible problem passed the chemical weapons convention to try to reduce the chances that your children will ever be subject to chemical warfare america agreed in that time to a comprehensive test band treaty on nuclear weapons to do its part to stop global warming to try to build an international criminal justice system with a criminal court in spite of all the problems in the world infant mortality was down and life expectancy was up and as i already said there were breathtaking biomedical discoveries the most important of which was the sequencing of the human genome parenthetically another advance that would have been completely impossible had it not been for the digital chip and the revolution in information technology there are a lot of younger women here those of you still in your childbearing years in all probability within 5 years maybe as long as 10 but i think 5 is closer to it in all countries with good health systems young women will begin to come home from the hospital with their babies with a little gene card and it will say here s the good news here s the bad news but if you do the following 10 things you can minimize the bad news when that happens children s life expectancy will soon shoot well above 90 years so a lot of good things have happened in the world then came september the 11th and then the horrible resumption of violence in the middle east which is the home of the world s three great monotheistic religions so here s what i want to ask you today to think about what does the success of compuwear as compared with what happened here on september the 11th tell us about the modern world what does the peace in northern ireland as compared with the resumption of war and terror in the middle east tell us about the modern world i believe it tells us that we live in a world that is completely interdependent but far from integrated on september the 11th the al qaeda terrorists used our interdependence we had built a world without walls we ve torn down barriers collapsed distances spread information and technology so what did they do they used open borders free travel access to information and technology to murder 3 100 people in the middle east in the first intifada in the late 1980 s when the violence resumed again the casualty ratio of palestinians to israelis was about 10 to 1 that s about deaths and serious injuries now the numbers are 1 500 to 400 under 4 to 1 why because the terrorists are able both to find unusual instruments like that gorgeous 18 year old girl that blew herself and all those other people apart and because their weapons are more powerful technology is making it possible to kill more people in old fashioned ways in northern ireland and i have a special pride in this because my mother s people come from county fermona from a little village called roslee which is on the border of the irish republic in northern ireland they decided they would have a shared future they agreed on certain rules of the game knowing full well that the rules now slightly benefit the protestants because they re the majority but 30 years from now because of birth rates the catholics will be in the majority or the plurality because they re also like every place else having more immigration which also comes with economic success in the middle east instead of a shared future they decided to reassert exclusive claims the compromise once again began it was viewed as weak and corrupt so instead of a shared future they have shared destruction but the middle east is every bit as interdependent as northern ireland what happened on september the 11th is just as much a reflection of the interdependence of the modern world and the importance of technology it s what you do everyday so we have a world that is interdependent but not integrated the great challenge of your generation of citizens not just the united states but the world and particularly people who are in the positive side of the world s movement it to move our world from interdependence to integration at the end of the cold war the great conflict is between the forces of integration and harmony and the forces of disintegration and chaos we have to strengthen the positive forces and weaken the negative ones there s something obviously that has to be done by governments and some things that have to be done in the private sector and even those things that have to be done by governance are important to you because now more half the world s people live under democracies so what citizens know and what they support and what they insist that their leaders do is more important now than at any time in human history most of these problems these conflicts are rooted in the paradoxes of the modern world many of which were pointed out by the village portrait pete painted in his introduction but let me just run through them quickly take the economic paradox of the modern world it is true that the global economy has lifted more people out of poverty than any time in history there s never been anything like it it applies to poor countries as well as wealthier ones on the other hand the birth rates in the world have been so high and so many countries are left out of this that notwithstanding the success of the global economy half the world s people live on less than 2 00 a day a billion people live on less than 1 00 a day and a billion people go to bed seriously hungry every night consider the social paradox the benefits of education are greater than ever before even in poor countries one extra year of schooling adds 10 15 to annual income for life and therefore more people are going to school than ever before on the other hand there are about 130 million kids who never go to school at all half the children in sub sahara in africa a quarter of the kids in the subcontinent a quarter of the kids in the poorest countries in east asia many of us after september the 11th learned a lot about the madrassahs the religious schools in pakistan along the afghan border where children are more likely to be indoctrinated than educated but most people don t know why they have so many and why so many children go the reason is pakistan went broke in the early 80 s and they were our ally in the early cold war so we continued to give them nice airplanes and other weapons but we didn t give them any money for their schools so the people running the madrassahs moved into a vacuum because poor people had to spend money to send their kids to public schools from 1981 forward often to get an education and then not be able to find a job or look at the healthcare as i said infant mortality is down life expectancy s up but 10 million kids are going to die this year from completely preventable infectious diseases and of all the people who die on earth this year from anything from strokes heart attacks cancers natural disasters accidents crimes war 1 in 4 people will perish from aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them little children who never got a single clean glass of water in their entire lives or consider the environmental paradox in some ways the most interesting of all and the one that i think information technology will have a great role in resolving prosperity normally brings a cleaner environment i can remember the first time i went to japan the air was not clean in tokyo now it s clean and it s cleaner than it is in little rock where i grew up in america we had the best economy we ever had in the years i served as president we also had cleaner air cleaner water safer food and preserved more land in the lower 48 states than at any time since the presidency of theodore roosevelt however and it is true that really poor countries have terrible environmental problems but the aggregate impact of economic activity as we are still moving from an industrial economy into an information one is negative so that we have a severe water shortage in the world the quality of our oceans are deteriorating and we get most of our oxygen from them and now virtually everyone on earth has finally given up denying the phenomenon of global warming if the climate warms for the next 50 years at the rate of the last 10 here are some of the things that will happen whole island nations in the pacific will be flooded in the united states we will lose the florida everglades i did so much to try to restore in new york where i live we will lose 50 feet of manhattan island but far more important than all of that there will be a terrific disruption of agricultural production throughout the world places where you used to be able to grow food you won t be able to grow it anymore and that will create tens of millions of food refugees and make a lot more young men willing to be terrorists and mercenaries and cause trouble throughout the world if you ve been to the middle east lately you know one of the biggest problems they have is water you never read about that in the questions about why we can t resolve some of the problems there but the dead sea is drying up at an alarming rate one of things i m trying to do with my foundation is to work with people around the world to figure out how to save it finally let s look at the security and the political paradoxes of the world what we used to worry about was nuclear war between great powers or the resumption of some major conventional war supported by the great powers now we have this constructive relationship with a lot of disagreements but a basically positive relationship between the united states and russia and china we see unprecedented international cooperation to try to stop slaughter in the balkans where we did it i went to burundi a place where no american president had ever been actually i went to tanzania to the peace conference there with president nelson mandela and we worked to try to stop a big tribal slaughter in burundi something you never think about america as doing before we worked with our friends in australia to stop the killing in east timor now it s about to become the first new nation of the 21st century a big thing for asia to stop that and we were actually roundly criticized because we did not go in and stop the killing in rwanda where 700 000 people were cut to death mostly by machetes in only 90 days so there s this expectation that we should all work together those of us that are fortunate to try to stop things like that on the other hand the greatest threat to our security comes out of our interdependence our vulnerability everywhere to enemies from within to people who use sophisticated weapons in an open society to advance exclusive claims rooted in ancient hatreds the most ancient difficulties of people based on our racial ethnic tribal and religious differences so in every major aspect of life we have these sort of paradoxical situation and that s why both the work you do and what happened on september the 11th are both reflective of the interdependent world we live in and those of us that are getting all the benefits of it simply cannot claim those benefits without being exposed to the risks so if you don t want to put yourselves out of business and reelect the laws of the world which you couldn t do anyway we have no choice but to move from an interdependent world to an integrated world i believe that will require us essentially to do three things first of all we need to have the security approach a sort of prevent and punish approach to people who break the rules that the interdependent world requires that means from my point of view that we should support the president and our allies and our troops in staying in afghanistan until they finally get mr bin laden and all of his senior aides i m glad we got rid of the taliban they were the most repressive government on earth especially to women and little girls but they didn t murder the 3 100 people in america people from 70 nations by the way on september the 11th bin laden did so we should stay there and finish that job the second thing we have to do is to make a vigorous effort to restrain the production and distribution of smaller scale nuclear chemical and biological weapons we began a very serious effort to restrain nuclear materials in 1991 before i became president a bipartisan effort sponsored by senator nunn and senator luger we spent a lot of your tax money if you re americans in my time trying to make sure we secured russia s nuclear stocks not just destroyed weapons and destroyed american weapons right before i left office we agreed to destroy 50 tons of plutonium between us then in 1999 we began an aggressive effort to try to do the same thing with biological stocks russia still has the largest stock of biological agents in the world and there are a lot of other countries trying to develop them in 1995 the federal law enforcement officials broke up kind of a right wing kook s laboratory in a garage outside minneapolis but he was trying to make biological weapons and we had this anthrax scare here the good news about biological weapons is while they re the scariest it s also harder to do than you think you see in theory there was enough anthrax in all those letters to kill tens of thousands of people in practice 5 people died if they hadn t died i would almost be glad it happened because it gave us a great run through with all that money we ve been spending since 1999 the cities and the states had to really think about whether our defenses were adequate but this is the issue by the way that you should be focused on when there s discussion arises about what the world should or shouldn t do with iraq saddam hussein the american government has acknowledged had nothing to do with september the 11th he could not possibly have fielded that network he doesn t have that competence his military strength is about 40 of what it was when he was waxed in about 100 hours in the gulf war that s not what the problem is the problem is that he won t let the u n inspectors in and he s got all these little labs around the country where guys are trying to figure out how to make chemical and biological weapons and in the future the delivery systems for them more likely than a missile will be some terrorist as you have seen in what s going on in the middle east so it s important that we try to restrain that the third thing we ve got to do is to get back to work with north korea to end north korea s missile program the only short term threat we face that would require the erection of a missile defense is if north korea gives the missiles it can already make to people who could put bad warheads on them and lob them at us or europe or some other civilized place it s ironic because north korea is in many ways a totally failed state they can t feed their people when their soldiers defect they weigh less than 100 pounds quite often but they re world class missile builders it sounds bizarre that you can t grow food but you can build missiles but that s what they do so we ended their nuclear weapons program in 94 we stopped their missile tests in 98 the government has announced our government has and their government has that they re willing to talk again this is a huge deal not something you read a lot about in the press it is a huge deal if they end their missile program and we give them some energy and some food and help them a little bit it means that your kids won t have to worry about somebody lobbing a missile at you if you live in any developed country for another 5 or 6 years while we work on all these other problems so this is important it s important that we help our friends to fight terror from the philippines to africa where we started a program to train africans to restrain their own tribal slaughters and most importantly today in columbia the oldest democracy in the americas except for ours where today more than a third of the land is in the hands of this motley collection of these people who call themselves guerrillas but they re basically terrorists who thrive on narco trafficking they get a cut of all the drugs that are grown and sold when i was president i got the congress to give some money to columbia to try to fight the narco traffickers and by in direction the terrorists president bush has asked the congress to broaden the law to let them exclusively spend the money to fight them both in the same way that is absolutely the right position and i hope that the members in my party will support that we can t afford to lose the oldest democracy in south america to a collection of terrorists and narco traffickers so these things are important then there s the question of our domestic defenses and i won t go through all that but there are a lot of things that need to be done the most important thing though is one that was completely overlooked after we had the terrorist incident in oklahoma city in 1995 i asked congress to triple funding for counter terrorism mostly on domestic defenses and a lot has been done but a lot more needs to be done we re stockpiling vaccines for example against smallpox and things of that kind that s good but amazing you will find this amazing and this is where you and companies like you can have a big role there was almost nothing done to modernize the information technology of the federal law enforcement to integrate the fbi the cia and other information systems and to use information that is available on all people who come into this country as all of you know quite well somebody s got all of us on computers if we live here somebody knows you know where we pay our light bill and our water bill and our telephone bill and what our aggregate credit card debt is all of this stuff is available before we think about whether we need to infringe further on the civil liberties of americans and immigrants in this country we ought to at least make sure first that law enforcement simply has what everybody else has for example the largest mass mailing companies in the country have information that if the fbi had had it i believe it could have prevented september the 11th a friend of mine in arkansas works for axion which is the biggest one he called me after the thing was over he said you won t believe this but we ve got a lot of these people in our computers you say so what you couldn t know they were terrorists that s not quite true the cia had identified two of these people who came in america with a visa to go with a visa that said they were going to x place and they went to y place so you could keep up with that also mohammed atta the ringleader has more than half a dozen addresses two places where he lived all the rest were safehouses well you know if a person comes into this country and they have 8 or 10 addresses they re either filthy rich or up to no good it would be easy to do a check on that and you wouldn t have to herd people around just because they were muslims or because they had arab surnames or because they came from indonesia or something you just do the same thing you use the information that s available on all of us one of the men who died on september the 11th had listen to this 30 credit cards and an outstanding debt of over a quarter of a million dollars on which he was making a consolidated debt payment of 9 800 a month well you know if a guy just comes to this country 6 months or a year ago and he s got 30 credit cards and he s a quarter of million dollars in debt he s either filthy rich or up to no good so there are ways in which and i urge you i mention this because the government has actually contracted with some companies to try to get this capacity in the near term while we develop it over the long run but this is something i ask all of you to think about now america has been largely successful in maintaining a sense of freedom an and openness and there hasn t been a big rise in anti immigration feeling i give president bush a lot of credit for this because he went to a mosque and met with muslim leaders right after september the 11th and said our enemy is not islam our enemy is terror we know in america that the lifeblood of our country consists of our being able to accommodate people of every country every faith every racial and ethnic background so we haven t yet had the kind of anti immigration votes you see in the french election in austria in denmark and norway and maybe now coming in the netherlands we have to keep that that s important so all this is a big deal the most important thing however of all these things that we could do to prevent further terrorist actions i think is to stay involved now that we re back involved in the middle east peace process until we get a resolution of it if you want to talk about it more later we can but the bottom line is they can t make peace if we don t help nobody else can do it the europeans can t do it the u n can t do it for one simple reason the israelis believe right across the political spectrum that america s the only great nation that in the end cares whether they live or die and would stop them from going out of existence that means that we then become the only nation that has the power to advocate to them a just and decent resolution of the palestinians plight and which we should also do then we have to have help from the europeans from russia from the u n in the end there ll probably have to be troops going to the middle east to try to accelerate any peace process that exists because there will be people who oppose it no matter what it is but the continuing difficulties in the middle east provide a pretest for a lot of the terrorist activity that goes on around the world now here s what i want to say about that that s good i m all for prevent and punish but it s not enough i m the oldest of the baby boomers i hate it every time i think about it but i am i was born in 1946 and i grew up in a world where i had a chance to become the first person in my family to graduate from college i had the life of my dreams my wife and i were able to raise a daughter and give her a good education and we had a good life because at the end of world war ii harry truman and george marshall and douglas macarthur out in the pacific told us that we had world war ii and the depression before it because after world war i the winners walked away from the mess and went back to their business you know marshall was very eloquent about this he was a five star general he spent his whole life making war and he said we need to take just a little money here to make a world with more friends and fewer enemies to strengthen the forces of freedom and free markets that s what the marshall plan was all about and macarthur said japan should be a part of it truman who was only the only guy running for anything said okay now you can well imagine what we might have said at the end of world war ii american taxpayers would say are you out of your mind we should spend money on germany after what they did we should spend money on japan after the pow camps they ran and all the people who died you want us to spend the taxpayer s money after all we ve been through to do this you must be nuts even our european allies they were old successful societies we want to get back to our knitting that s exactly what happened after world war i but after world war ii harry truman said you re absolutely right and we spent a little bit of money to make the world that i grew up in a world where we had an unparalleled economic growth we built the great middle class there was never a third world war and eventually freedom and free markets won out over communism and the berlin wall fell in 1989 so the most important thing i want to say to you today is america is at a unique moment in history it can t last forever where we are the dominant political economic and military power of the world the european union is still becoming but it will become it will become more unified politically and economically china is rising japan will recover the world will become more multi polar and we will be judged based on how we use this moment in history to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists now what does that mean it means we should continue in my judgment to expand trade and resist protectionism and strengthen the world trade organization because when people can make a living they re normally more interested than that then blowing up bombs secondly it means that we should give more aid for good purposes let me just say the big problem here is that most americans think that we give more than we do a dem wjclinton10 5 94a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you ladies and gentlemen for that warm welcome and distinguished head table guests i don t know about being america s fire chief but i do know whenever i ring the bell steny hoyer shows up so today he rang the bell and i showed up and i am honored to be in your presence tonight i want to recognize not only steny but the other members of congress who are here i m sure they ve been introduced already but congressman curt weldon and congressman sherry boehlert senator william roth congressman howard coble i think you will find that support for fire and emergency services is a bipartisan affair in the united states congress and i think you will find that i have tried to be a good partner to them i also want to recognize some people who are not here including congressman dick durbin and congressman bill emerson who are the co chairs of the house task force on natural disasters and to acknowledge the legislators of the year you identified chairman norm mineta and senator dan inouye i also want to thank for their work in the administration and their work to come our fire administratordesignate carrye brown and i d like to say with a special word of pride how very much i appreciate the extraordinary work of one of my fellow arkansans james lee witt the administrator of the federal emergency management agency you know when i became president there were many jobs but there were two or three jobs that i thought had suffered under previous administrations without regard to party because they had not been filled with people who had actually experience doing what they were hired to do one was the small business administration and i put someone in the small business administration not who had been a long time political associate of mine although he is a friend of mine but someone who had spent 20 years financing and starting and expanding small businesses it occurred to me that a person that did that job since that s where most of the job growth is in america would be better off if he or she had known something about it before they showed up at the door and when it came time to pick a fema director as a governor in the state that had the highest death rate per capita from tornadoes in the country i knew a little something about what it was like to deal with fema over a very long period of time under administrations of both parties in washington and that s why i asked the person who had done the emergency services work in our state and had gone through fires and floods and tornadoes and seen whole towns blown away to do that job most people think that our administration has done pretty well in responding to earthquakes in california floods in the middle west hurricanes in the south severe winter weather that hit so many of our states last year but we know that all the federal responses in the world only work when it is matched with and really supports the courage that you show on a daily basis in all of your states and communities i used to tell people that when i was the governor of my state i had a real life and back when i had a real life one of the things i did was to work on trying to extend fire service to our rural areas with a direct funding stream every year that went to volunteer fire departments and with a number of other training and other legislative initiatives that made it possible during my 12 years of service to create over 700 volunteer fire departments in our state i m very very proud of that and i m proud of the work that all of them did and what it did for people s fire insurance rates and how many homes and lives were saved as a result of that effort on monday yesterday i went to engine 24 and ladder 5 in new york city in greenwich village to honor three fireman who 40 days ago paid the ultimate tribute john drennan of staten island who hung on for 40 days with massive injuries over most of his body his funeral mass will be said at st patrick s cathedral tomorrow a captain 49 years old with a wonderful wife a schoolteacher and four children and two young firemen james young of queens and christopher siedenburg of staten island who was only 25 years old when he died sometimes i think that we forget how dangerous it can be to put yourself in the line of natural disasters and sometimes manmade disasters for your fellow human beings i was deeply moved when i met the partners of those three firemen who died and i will always remember them especially will i think of them when i have the privilege and the honor of signing the arson prevention act i am going to be proud to sign this law not just to make your lives easier but to reduce the number of wasted lives and wasted dollars we lose to arson every day needless and senseless tragedies that might otherwise be prevented i want to thank all of you who worked so hard on that law all of you at the grass roots all of you in the congress and the chief sponsors senator dick bryan and representative rick boucher i can t wait to have the chance to sign that and i m sure that congressman hoyer and congressman weldon and some of the others here will have some idea about exactly how we ought to sign that and once again when they ring the bell i will show up i noticed that the title of your annual report was protecting a nation at risk i thought you were describing my job i ll say this there will always be risks involved in the work of freedom and the work of holding a civilized society together the great tension we face today all around the world in some ways can be seen in the work you re doing against arson there is today no cold war no imminent threat of nuclear annihilation although nuclear dangers remain it is wonderful to think that in just the last 15 months that three of the four countries in the former soviet union that had nuclear weapons have committed to getting rid of them and russia which stills has nuclear weapons and the united states no longer point their warheads at one another that is a wonderful thing to consider but it s also true that we are fighting a constant battle all around the world between order and chaos and between those who wish to live in harmony and freedom and those who would abuse that very freedom you see it whether it s in the ethnic brutality and the civil war in bosnia or the rise the lamentable rise of organized crime in russia where organized criminal thugs murder bankers at will who are trying to see free enterprise take root there or in the work of the gangs and some of the horrible tragedies within our own cities and communities those of you who are willing to literally put your lives on the line for other people s interests for people who are in trouble are the ultimate rebuttal to the cynics who believe we cannot create a world of justice and freedom where people live together in peace and honor but we will all of us for the rest of our lives be fighting and working to make sure that our nation is not put at risk and that our world can become safer by making sure the forces of order win over the forces of chaos and that the people who wish to have freedom are also willing to exercise it with responsibility every day your lives symbolize that the first and most enduring lesson of our democracy and i thank you for it thank you very much i promise when i was invited to come i had no idea i was going to receive any of these things and you probably don t know this congressman hoyer but i have sometime been a collector of eagles i love them very much and in our state mr witt and i we did a lot of work trying to preserve the american eagle and by the time i left office we had the second largest number of eagles of any state in the country they do symbolize what is best about our country and i will treasure this of all the ones i have collected i think i have none that is as beautiful as this and i m very very grateful thank you so much dem wjclinton10 5 94b bill_clinton thank you so much thank you for your warm welcome and thank you ginna for that award i arrived a few moments ago and i remember the first time i ever heard your president speak i knew that she had worked for vice president gore and i thought it was so interesting to hear the head of a national association who was speaking without an accent i want to say a special word of appreciation to your first vice president ellen sanders who s participated in white house and congressional meetings on health reform and to diane weaver the president of the association of nurse executives who cosponsored this breakfast i am very proud to share the stage today with all the fine nurses in the executive and the legislative branches whom you have honored and i thank you for doing that and i thank them for their service i also want to say a special word of thanks to all of you and to the ana for the courage and the vision you have demonstrated by fighting for health care reform and the right kind of health care reform long before it was a hot issue as you know the position paper you put out on national health reform probably more closely parallels the recommendations that our administration has made than that of any other professional health care group in the country and i thank you for that very much i want to thank you too for recognizing my mother who worked for 30 years and then some as a nurse and was deeply proud of what she did i remember when i was little boy watching her get up in the middle of the night always starting work by 7 00 a m or 7 30 a m in the morning always telling me stories that indicated that there was literally nothing in the world more important to her than dealing with a person frightened in pain with a caring and effective manner this award will help to expand the frontiers of nursing in the areas of women s health something that she would have been very proud to be a part of my mother as all of you now know completed her memoirs which became her autobiography shortly before she died she went over about half of it and was able to do the final editing and it was my privilege after she passed away to work with the author and just try to make sure all the facts were right i got very stern instructions from her she said now if you have to do this do not change one word i said about you especially the part about your manners not always being great and make sure you get the facts straight otherwise leave it alone but i was very pleased with the two book reviews that her book got yesterday one by the great american author joyce carol oaks in the new york times and then another one here in the washington post but it tickled me the one in the washington post said that if you read this book you would understand why i perplexed people in washington i was actually brought up by real people and occasionally i still acted like one i didn t know what that i m trying to get over it but it s hard even here anyway here s something my mother said about her work which would apply to all of you and those whom you represent but it meant a lot to me it was just her words nurse anesthetist work is all consuming you don t do it halfway you don t daydream you don t let your emotions wander you re the person responsible for putting another human being into a state of unconsciousness somewhere between life and death for 30 years from the minute that i would walk into the operating room and start talking to the patient and begin putting him to sleep until i got him safely back to the recovery room nothing in the world could have crossed my mind i don t care what problems were on the outside i don t care what problems i might have been having at home i never thought of my life beyond the moment i remember when i was also a child things were somewhat more informal my mother used to take me to the hospital and let me meet the other nurses and the doctors and watch the emergency room and watch people go into the operating room it was utterly fascinating and the work you do has always sort of captured my imagination my own wife had never been in a hospital before in her entire life until our daughter was born never been in a hospital for any kind of sickness and learned only a few moments before the happy event that she was going to have to have a c section and we had gone through lamaze and we had done all this stuff and i was supposed to be in the operating room and our hospital at that time had never before let a father into the delivery room if it wasn t a natural birth it was a big deal so i said look i ve been watching people get cut on and bleed since i was a little boy i ll do fine but she had never been here before and she may not you better let me come in so they did and actually change the policy so that if fathers had been through the lamaze course and then the mothers eventually had to have a csection they got to go so i felt that s my one contribution to medical advances but i owe all that to my mother who was a remarkably determined woman in the face of often excruciating adversity i think one of the reasons that the nurses association has been so forthright about this health care reform issue is that you see it from the grass roots up in human terms and you don t get so hung up as some people do on all the political rhetoric and the positioning and the characterizations that have frankly put a lot of members of congress at a severe disadvantage because they haven t had the chance to spend the time and make the effort to deal with this issue that you have it is after all a mind bendingly complex problem it s 14 5 percent of our income and for people who don t live in it every day it can be a very difficult thing but i just wanted to thank you because i believe that the personal experiences you have shared so many of you common to the ones that my own mother shared really animated the nurses association to take the position that you have taken i want to emphasize today that what i seek contrary to the attacks and what you have sought is not a government run health system it s a private insurance health system that covers everybody where the health care professionals run it and not the insurance companies that s what we seek we seek private insurance that can never be taken away it s wrong to treat seriously ill children in an emergency room who could have been treated more easily and more inexpensively if their parents had just had the coverage with our reforms every family will have that kind of quality insurance we ought to reform the insurance system that today often only covers the healthiest people and even then will deny them coverage for anything they ve been sick with before when you go to a patient s bedside you ask why does it hurt where does it hurt how can i help you don t ask whether this is a pre existing condition you re looking at it s a very important issue if you think about all this preexisting condition business there are 81 million americans who live in families where there s been a child with diabetes or a mother that had cancer prematurely or a father that had an early heart attack or some other problem i see these people everywhere this is no small number now we get action lickety split up here all the time when a million people or 2 million people are adversely affected by something if they are well organized but these 81 million people they re professionals and blue collar workers they re old folks and young folks they re all different kinds of people and they are by definition disorganized there is no national association of people with preexisting conditions you think about it if there were and 10 million of them showed up here we d have health care reform so fast you couldn t blink you must be their voice in an organized way and you can be so we ought to cover everybody with private insurance and we ought to have insurance reforms that deal with preexisting conditions and don t discriminate people based on age this is somewhat controversial i know that but i believe if we went back to health insurance the way it originally was when blue cross first started writing it where everybody was put in a large group risk was broadly spread and people paid a fee against the day when they would be sick it would be fairer for all americans and our economy would work better our society would have a stronger sense of community our families would function better people would be free of a lot of the anxiety that comes hillary and i have receive about a million letters and whenever i go somewhere now they arrange for some of the letterwriters to come see me and it s just it s just gripping to see people just over and over and over and stunning to see how they do come from all walks of life and how they have been broken by the things which have happened the third thing i think we should do is to preserve the medicare program it s interesting the people who criticize our program say this is government run health care which of course it isn t and if you tried to take away medicare which is a government funded health care well they would be up in a tree somewhere screaming about it but we don t want to do anything to the medicare program except to make it better i do believe we should add a prescription drug benefit and phase in long term care that is community based or home based for two simple reasons one is there are an awful lot of elderly people who aren t poor enough to be on medicaid but aren t well off who have significant medical bills we know the elderly use four times the prescription drugs that the nonelderly do and we know from study after study after study that a proper medication regime can keep people out of the hospital and can save money and that we now have any number of elderly people every month i was in a grocery store in new york yesterday called pathmark which also operates as many do now a drugstore and it was gripping the ceo was saying my workers tell me that every day they watch older come in this store and go from the drugstore down the food isle and try to make up their mind what food they re going to give up to get their medicine or whether they re going to give up their medicine to buy their food gripping so i do believe we should do that but the medicare program works it has low administrative overhead we think it should be secured the fourth thing we want to do is to bring greater choice to our people i guess the thing that has made me the maddest in the relentless campaign against this plan are all those bogus ads where they say you re going to have to call some government office to figure out where you go to the doctor there are two realities of modern life that you have to drive home to every member of congress without regard to party or philosophy number one americans are rapidly losing their choices today already of people who are insured at work fewer than half have more than one choice of a health plan that s a fact today and they re rapidly losing their choices number two medical professionals are increasingly losing their right to decide unilaterally may have to have somebody get on the phone to an insurance company executive a long way away to ask for permission to do what anybody knows ought to be done under the circumstances now most americans believe it or not don t know either one of those things even though they may be caught up in it and i think it s very important our plan is designed number one to increase the choices that consumers have we re moving to more managed care there can be a lot of good things in it but under our plan every year every person would have a choice between at least three plans or among at least three plans but in all probability many more and number two under our plan medical professionals would also be given more choices and would have to do less checking in with the insurance company in advance now being treated by doctors and nurses you know is an american tradition every time i do one of these town meetings like i did in rhode island last night i talk to somebody that s just been forced to give up their doctor and just move away from the choices they made we believe when all americans can choose among several health plans many americans many more americans will choose to stay with their own providers and many more of these plans will be organized in such a way that all providers can participate if they ll do it for the agreed upon fee that s what we believe will happen and if we don t do this if we don t have some legal action to reorganize this you re going to have less choice by consumers less choice by providers time and again we ve also seen that the quality of care is directly related to the quality and the quantity of the nursing staff one of the things that amazes me is how many nurses have been laid off in recent months and been told well this is because health care reform is coming i ll tell you what one of clinton s unbending laws of politics is whenever somebody who s got a tough decision to make can shift the heat from the themselves to you they ll do it every time they will do it every time that law never varies now what is really going on what s really going on is a lot of these health care providers are under the gun right more managed care people bargaining tougher for prices more and more people who are uncovered where there s uncompensated care that has to be provided less and less ability to pass on the cost of uncompensated care to other people because they re in these managed care networks they re in all this stuff is going to happen if we don t do anything all of us could go on vacation for a year and this same thing would go on you know that and don t let your members fall for it what s going to happen is we ll continue to see these trends occur unless we find a way to give health care providers reimbursement for all the people for whom they care at an appropriate level in an appropriate way more than a decade of research now shows that more and better trained nurses result in shorter hospital stays better survival rates fewer complications whether you re dealing with low birth rate babies or older people you do not have to work for the congressional budget office to understand that healthier patients and shorter stays means lower health care costs sometimes i think if you do work for the congressional budget office you will never get that but we re working pretty well on the whole this is a big deal this choice issue and maintaining an array of qualified people doing the things for which they are best qualified is terribly important finally let me say and this i guess is except for this whole issue of whether this is a government program which is isn t is the most controversial part of it our reform is based on providing guaranteed benefits at work now the reason for that is simple for the people in this country that have health insurance nine out of ten of them have it at work where there is some shared responsibility between the employer and the employee for the people who don t have insurance eight out of 10 of them have someone in their family who is working it seems to me that the fairest and simplest and if you will the most conservative way to achieve universal coverage to have health care security for everybody is to ask employers and employees who aren t doing anything or barely doing anything to do more so that they can fulfill their own responsibilities and then use tax funds to cover the unemployed uninsured people for whom you could say well there s a general responsibility just like medicare and medicaid and then organize the market so that smaller businesses and self employed people a get discounts if they need it and b are able to buy good insurance on the same terms that those of us who are insured by government or larger businesses can now it seems to me that is a fair and simple and obvious way to do this i think that any other way will sooner or later involve either a radical change that is getting rid of the whole health insurance market and substituting taxes for it or involve people who are already paying too much for their own health care having to pay something for people who won t do anything for themselves because they say they should be exempt now i think that this is a very important issue you know again we lose sight of the fact that most small businesses are making an effort to cover their employees we have brought hundreds and hundreds of small businesses to washington to talk to the congress but they are not organized there is no association called small businesses who cover their employees and are mad they re competitors don t and mad they can t get better insurance rates and wish somebody would help them so an association that may have a lot of folks in the insurance industry along with other small businesses says don t do this the whole small business economy will break says this and there s no association on the other side you have to be their voice had a car dealer from a town of 7 000 people in arkansas up staying with me the other night he and his wife long time friends of mine she s a college teacher he s a car dealer he said to me the other night it was funny he said you know for 20 years i have been feeling sorry for myself because i ve provided a good health plan for my employees and none of my competitors did so he said i was so happy when you proposed this just because i thought i was going to get even and then he said but you know then i remembered that in the last 20 years i put three of my competitors out of business and i m making more money than i ever have and the reason is i still got the same folks working for me i had 20 years ago because i gave them health benefits and yesterday i went to new york and i visited this pathmark store they have 175 stores 28 000 employees the 10th biggest supermarket chain in the country we re all told oh if you do this the retailing business will go to pieces these people have put new stores in inner city areas that other chains would not touch fine new stores they are making money and they have always provided comprehensive health benefits to their employees and they are now sacking their groceries in a bag that says they favor health care benefits to all americans guaranteed through the workplace i say this to you because as you know there are a lot of nurses that don t have any health care coverage and a lot of nurses who are single parents who don t have health care coverage and this is the other point i want to make that i did to all those young people working in that grocery store yesterday everybody now in washington is for welfare reform and i guess it means different things to different people but i have basically a three point strategy to achieve what i think would end the welfare system as we know it one was embodied in last year s economic plan lower income taxes for working people who are hovering just above the poverty line with children this year one in six american working families will be eligible for lower income taxes so they can succeed at work and can succeed as parents strategy number two give people education and training and then give them a certain amount of time to find a job and if they don t require them to take it and if they can t provide some public subsidy in the private sector or some publicly funded job so that work is preferable to welfare strategy number three has got to be cover the people with health insurance consider this all these people on welfare in this country who are dying to get off and by the way that s most of them who are dying to get off most of them have limited education suppose they go through a little training program and they get a job that pays a modest wage but is still more than the welfare benefits but they go to work for an employer who does not provide for health care think about this you are a mother with two children you give up being on welfare to take a job that pays more than the welfare check but you lose health care coverage for your kids what are you going to do if your kid has to go to the dentist what are you going to do if your child is desperately ill how are you going to feel every week every two weeks or every month when you get your paycheck and you see what s taken out of it in taxes and you realize those taxes are going to pay for the health care benefits of people who decided to stay on welfare instead of going to work you don t have to be as bright as a treeful of owls to figure out that this doesn t make a lot of sense now a lot of american nurses are in this situation today getting up every day slaving away trying to take care of people have children without insurance caring for people who come into their office who are on public assistance who have children with insurance because of the medicaid program it is not fair it is not right it is not smart and you could say well if this were all this inability to cover everybody if this were fueling some enormous american economic expansion because we were saving so much money on health care maybe you could deal with that but the truth is we re spending over 40 percent more of our income on health care than any other country in the world oh yes some of it because we re more violent and that s something we pay for some of it because we have better medical research and technology and that s worth paying for but a whole lot of it as you well know because of the way we have financed health care which has employed hundreds of thousands of people in doctor s offices in clinics in hospitals and in insurance companies to read the fine print on thousands and thousands of policies to see who and what is not covered and it has rifled inefficiencies through this system that we are all paying for we can fix this we can fix it by having a law which fixes what s wrong keeps what s right provides health care security to everybody through a private system increases the choices consumers have and increases the decisions that doctors and nurses and other qualified providers make without oversight by others we can do it in order to do it we have to recognize we have to go through a fog of misinformation a torrent of labels which aren t right and recognize too that you have to lobby and stand up for in an organized and very personal way that great association that doesn t exist the association of 81 million americans and families with preexisting conditions the association of hundreds of thousands of small businesses who are doing the right thing and being punished for it the association of all the poor women in this country who are out there working their hearts out and their fingers to the bone to do right by their kids without health insurance and paying taxes for people on public assistance who have it for their children all of those associations are disorganized you have devoted your lives to providing health care to all americans you have honored my favorite nurse today you have given me a chance to hope that my mother and my grandmother are looking down on me thinking i m i was the first generation in three that didn t produce anybody that was caring for other people in health care so they think at least i walked off with the award today it means more to me than i can say but the determination that my mother showed in getting up off the pavement many times in her life is the same sort of determination you have to show for us to get health care reform this year and remember most of these members of congress want to do the right thing but they don t know what you know they haven t spent the time that you ve spent they haven t had the experiences you have had you have to help them and the people in their districts that really need their help are not in those great national associations you keep them in your mind and keep that example in your mind don t let this year go by we can do this this year with your help and your leadership thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton10 5 96a bill_clinton as my wife says in her book i really believe it takes a village of all of our people working together to make the most of our lives to build that kind of america we have to be able to honestly meet our challenges and protect our values we have to find ways to create these opportunities for all americans we have to find ways to build strong communities and we have got to find ways to get more personal responsibility from all of our citizens opportunity responsibility community these are values that have made our country strong that have built great institutions like penn state that guide my actions as president i believe they must guide our nation as we prepare for the tomorrows of the 21st century and so what i d ask you today is to think about that what is the role of the individual citizen in making the america of our dreams in the 21st century what is the role of the individual citizen in making sure that we will move into this global society with everyone having a chance to live up to his or her dreams it is clear to me that government alone cannot solve this problem if you look at any society s most fundamental requirements strong families and safe streets and you ask yourselves what are all the causes for the stresses on those things in our country you may come up with a whole laundry list of things that government can do about them i know i have but in your heart of hearts you know that many many of the things from which we suffer are caused by the lack of personal responsibility on the part of millions of american citizens the teen mother who leaves school for a life on welfare a father who walks away from or abuses a family a criminal who preys upon the rest of us the neighbors who turn their backs upon the children in need i say to you we cannot tolerate this anymore if you really want your vision of the 21st century to become real we have to be willing to give people a chance to escape lives that are destructive for them and costly for the rest of us that is our responsibility but we must also insist that people help themselves and assume responsibility for making their own lives and the life of this great nation better nearly a third of our babies today are born out of wedlock a whole lot of em end up on welfare a few days ago we took an action which should force more responsibility every state will have to require teen mothers to stay in school unless and to sign a personal responsibility contract and to stay at home unless the environment is abusive so that they must work to turn their lives around if they want to keep those benefits i m still working with members of congress and both parties to pass legislation to overhaul the entire welfare system and i hope we can do it even though this is an election year there is really no call for a work stoppage and by the time november comes around you ll have more politics than you can stand meanwhile we ought to be working to give those people what we want for ourselves independence work and responsible parenting the harsh truth is too many of our young people don t have the kind of discipline or love guidance or support that it takes to grow up into responsible adults church groups and neighbors and parents all need to send a clear message to all children not just their own we care about you but you have to take care of yourself don t get pregnant or father a child until you re ready to take responsibility but if you do we ll help you as long as you are responsible there and you can t walk away from that responsibility if you do we ll make you assume it helping children on welfare to move off of welfare helping communities to reduce the crime rate these are not the only areas in which we desperately need more citizen involvement to make america the place it ought to be let me just suggest three other things that we could do to get more young people involved first i ve asked congress to increase funding for work study programs for students so that we can have a million students earning their way through college by the year 2000 today i d like to ask penn state and every other institution of higher education in the country to consider using more of this money to promote service to put thousands of college students to work in community service if it s good for students to earn money by putting books back in library shelves or working in the dean s office surely it makes sense for them to earn money helping teen mothers handle their responsibilities helping older people get around helping young people to look to a brighter future second i challenge every high school in america to make service a part of its basic ethic every high school student who can do so should do some community service there are some schools both public and private that require community service as a part of their curriculum i say good for them commitment to community should be a ethic we learn as soon as possible so we carry it throughout our lives and third i challenge every community to help those high school students answer the call of service today i m prepared to make an offer and challenge any school district or civic organization in the country to match it if you will raise 500 to reward a high school student who has done significant work to help your community the federal government will match your 500 and help that student go on to college that would cost us by the way about 10 million if every high school in the country did it it would be the best 10 million we ever spent we d get hundreds of millions of dollars in improved quality of life in service to people as a result of it we should make service to the community a part of every high school in america and a part of the life of every dedicated citizen in the united states dem wjclinton10 5 96b bill_clinton good morning secretary widnall to our distinguished military leaders general shalikashvili general moorman general stein other distinguished military leaders here members of the board of visitors of the air force academy coach deberry and the seniors from the falcons football team we gather together for another happy occasion but for the united states and especially for members of our military family this is a sad day for early this morning two marine helicopters crashed at a massive training exercise at camp lejeune in north carolina at this time we know that 16 service members were killed and two others very seriously injured our hearts go out to the families the friends and the loved ones of those who lost their lives our prayers are with those who were injured for a speedy recovery day in and day out our servicemen and women put themselves on the line so that our country can remain free and secure we ask so much of them to travel far from home to be apart from their loved ones to do difficult and often dangerous work one of the things i confess i did not fully appreciate until i became president was how dangerous the day in and day out year in and year out work of our military just training just doing the defense of our country is and our citizens should know that the seniors here behind me will soon become the guardians of our liberty just like those fine people who lost their lives last night and though you have been very well prepared for the job you will do you still must assume the risks of defending that liberty every american owes every one of you who will become an officer or a member of the united states military a tremendous debt of gratitude i m happy to see all of you here today i m beginning to wonder if i can make it interesting if you ever needed proof that we had a joint planning and operation and we re really building a joint culture in the united states military we re going to give it today with general shali congratulating the air force for another victory over the army the friendly but fierce inter service rivalries should mean that almost anything can happen in competition but at least lately only one thing happens the air force always wins this is the seventh year in a row the falcons have come to the white house to collect this prize i hope the thrill isn t gone i understand this past november you actually lost the commander in chief s trophy for a short time when there was a sneak attack masterminded by army pranksters invading your field house before the game well that didn t work either you played a great game this year against army i was especially impressed that you came back from a 14 point deficit to win decisively i ve learned a little something about what it takes to overcome large deficits and i was mightily impressed i know there were other outstanding highlights of this year s season beating brigham young s cougars for the first time in a dozen tries being co champions of the western athletic conference going to the copper bowl the falcons had a very good year if the way you played is any indication of what is to come coach we expect to see the air force back here this time next year i hope i ll be here to greet you and i should note that to the best of my knowledge unlike me you are not term limited finally let me just say that i was most impressed by something that coach deberry said earlier in the season he said that through football the players on his team are helped to become better people that is what we need more of in college athletics and indeed in all of our endeavors it s so important that young people be taught not only to take responsibility for becoming the best they can be in every endeavor but also doing that in working with a team that s what makes our military work that s what makes our country work and i think sometimes we forget that is the ultimate object of all of our human endeavors winning is wonderful but everybody who does his or her best and who tries to do it with a genuine spirit of cooperation with others is a winner in that sense the air force will always be a winner but today for the seventh year in a row you are still the possessor of the commander in chief s trophy coach deberry let s give him a hand dem wjclinton10 5 97 bill_clinton to our host prime minister if i had known earlier in my life that george washington came here as a young man i would have been here before i thank you for the warm welcome that you have given to me and to my wife to secretary albright and our delegation i wanted to make the important point last night and i would like to make it again that while we have gathered as a group before in the white house and in port au prince this is the first time an american president has actually held a summit with the caribbean heads of government in the region itself but the point i wish to make is that this is not a meeting between caribbean nations and the united states but rather a meeting among caribbean nations including the united states puerto rico and the american virgin islands lie at the heart of this region we are joined today by the governor of the virgin islands governor roy schneider the congressional delegate from puerto rico and former governor carlos romero barcello last night the delegate from the virgin islands donna christian green was here with us and we also have congresswoman maxine waters from california here the united states is very much aware that millions of our fellow citizens trace their heritage to these islands and that we have benefitted immeasurably from them more than ever before we are linked economically and politically every nation but one in the caribbean has chosen free elections and free markets i am proud that the united states has long been a beacon for freedom in this hemisphere but i am proud that so many of the other nations represented around this table have also been long beacons for freedom and like all the rest of you we are especially gratified to be joined by the second democratically elected president of haiti and president preval we re glad you re here and we wish you well and we re with you all the way we have a lot of work to do today and i will try to be brief we have to work on means to expand the quality of our lives by expanding trade by helping small economies compete in a global economy by strengthening the education of our children and deepening our cooperation against crime and drugs if we work together we can bring the benefits of change to our citizens and beat back the darker aspects of it we can meet the new threats to our security and enhance our prosperity i want this summit to be the start of an ongoing and deeper process of caribbean cooperation we have worked very hard all of us have to make this summit productive we have a rich and full document to which we are all going to commit ourselves but still we must be committed to working over the months and years ahead for our people and our caribbean community and that is my commitment to you this summit should be the beginning not the end of this process thank you dem wjclinton10 6 00a bill_clinton thank you wow i started off today at 5 00 a m this morning in washington that s 4 00 a m your time and i came out to carleton to give the commencement address and i came here and i went to another event it s just getting rowdier as i go on i would like to thank my friend and partner mayor rendell from philadelphia the chairman of our party for coming out here with us and i want to thank mike you and mary and all the people have done a great job with this party all the sponsors this is just fabulous and i m delighted to be here and i want to thank the fine line music cafe folks and all the people who provided the music and i want to thank senator paul wellstone and sheila and their kids and grandkids the whole wellstone family is here today and representative martin sabo who s daughter is also a candidate here today your state auditor judy dutcher i want to thank her for being here look this is a good way to spend saturday afternoon and i realize i in a way don t need to give a speech because i m sort of preaching to the saved here but i would like to say a couple of things anyway if it s all the same to you i mean since i m the only one in my administration or in my house who is not running for anything this year i m afraid i ll get out of practice if i don t get to kind of work out a little so you all just relax i want to give you a little bit first of all i want to thank the state of minnesota for voting for bill clinton and al gore twice and giving secondly i want to thank you for fielding competitive candidates for the house and the senate to help us win back the majority in the united states congress which we we could do you know i think minnesota is a place where people know ideas matter i was here on my education tour not very long ago and i went to st paul to the first charter school in the history of the country and you know since then since we got in there was one when i became president and there are now over 1 700 because we have worked so hard to get the point out across the country and get the word out that our public schools can succeed and they can educate our kids even the kids from the most difficult circumstances can learn if we had the right kind of educational opportunities for them and that to me sort of symbolizes what minnesota is all about high ideals high ideals high standards tactical approaches to problems involving everybody and i just want to say to all of you that i think the election we re about to have is every bit as important as the two we just had now in 1992 the country was in trouble and everybody knew it the economy was in bad shape the society was growing more divided the political rhetoric in washington was paralyzed and seemed irrelevant to the way most of us live and we ve tried to turn that around we ve tried to create a society in which there was opportunity for every responsible person and in which we were coming together in a more closely knit community in which we were looking outward to the rest of the world and trying to be a force for peace and freedom and prosperity and decency and we thank you what i wanted to say is and there s been a lot of success we ve got the strongest economy in history and we ve got a society that s coming together crime rate s down poverty is down the welfare rolls have been cut in half we have the highest rate of minority business ownership in history and the lowest minority unemployment in history in america we have a lot of things that are moving in the right direction so you say well how can the 2000 elections possibly be as important as the 92 election was when we were in the tank or the 96 election was when people were trying to decide whether to ratify the direction we were taking i ll tell you why because once in a lifetime do you find a situation like this in america where the economy is strong where the society is coming together where we ve got a lot of self confidence we re not paralyzed by a crisis at home we don t feel immediately threatened by a crisis overseas even though there are dangers out there this has never happened before in my lifetime and i m older than nearly everybody in this room now and i can tell you this how a country deals with its good moments is just as stern a test of its character as how it deals with its crises so what do you think we ought to do i ll tell you what i think we ought to do i think we ought to bring jobs to all the people and places that have been left behind i think we ought to get rid of child poverty i think we ought to give every working family the time and the tools they need to take care of their kids as well as work i think we ought to deal with the fact that when the baby boomers retire it s going to impose new burdens on our society we ought to figure out how to save social security and medicare provide prescription drug benefits to seniors that need it i think this i think we ought to prove that we can have excellence in every school building in america i think we ought to open the doors of college to every american that s what i talked about at carleton today i think we ought to roll back the tide of climate change and prove we can create jobs and clean up the environment at the same time i think we ought to prove we can create a global economy where there s more trade and there s higher labor standards and environmental standards and we put a more human face on it i think we ought to keep working to get rid of all the hatred that still exists in this country based on race or sexual orientation or religion or ethnic background and i think we ought to maintain our involvement with the rest of the world for peace and freedom this is the one year anniversary today of our formal victory in the conflict in kosovo where we stood up against ethnic and religious cleansing and let a million people go home but this is way more than military it s mostly not military i was ridiculed the other day by one of the leaders of the other party because we said that aids was an international security crisis for the united states seventy percent of those cases are in sub saharan africa now you tell me we ve got a lot of allies there for freedom and democracy and you have people actually hiring two people for every job opening because they assume one of them will die in a few months we have armies where the infection rate is 30 to 40 percent where a country can collapse on us people that we believe in that we re trying to help so i m proud of the fact that i think we ought to be investing some of your money to find vaccines for aids for tb for malaria for people overseas that need these things i think that s right so here s the deal i m not running but i know a little something about this election it s just as important as the other two were if somebody asks you why you re here and why you re doing this you tell them that it s a big election it s a big test of a country how you deal with all these good times and we ve finally got the chance a chance that we have not had maybe in my lifetime to deal with the big problems out there facing america to deal with the big opportunities out there and there s a huge difference between what our party believes and what our nominee for president believes and what they believe you know whether it is a big issue like maintaining our present economic policy or going for a tax cut so big that we ll go back to deficits or a more discrete issue like raising the minimum wage by a dollar over the next few years there s a huge difference and i m telling you everything from the appointment of justices to the supreme court to our economic and environmental and health care and educational policies there is a profound difference and it s not like it was in 1992 in 1992 we made an argument and you gave us a chance now you ve got running for president in the democratic party the most experienced effective vice president in history who cast a tie breaking vote on the economic plan in 93 that got us to where we are today who cast a tie breaking vote the other day to close a gun show loophole that requires child trigger locks who has run our empowerment program which has gotten thousands of jobs to some of the poorest communities in america who has managed a big part of our relations with russia with south africa with egypt with other countries who ran our reinventing government program and helped to reduce the size of government without putting anybody in the streets to its smallest size in 40 years so we could double education funding while we were cutting the deficit now there has never been anybody that had that kind of impact in that job who understands the future better along the way he continued with his wife to hold every single year a family conference in nashville tennessee that dealt with things like family leave health care for poor children mental health parity in health insurance policies the kinds of things that families come to grips with all the time al and tipper gore have been working on for eight years on their own in a way that has changed the future of america and what we ve been able to do now here s the thing about elections somebody besides those of us in this room today get to vote and most people who get to vote don t ever come to an event like this and most people who get to vote may never hear me make this case for vice president gore or for our candidates for the senate and the house or for the fact that we have honest differences then you get these elections where everybody is trying to convince you that anybody that s not in their party there s something wrong with them there s something bad that s not true we just have honest differences most people do what they say they re going to do when they get elected and i m just telling you there are huge differences in economics in health care policy in environmental policy in the constitution of the courts i could go through every issue and it s not like 92 when we had an argument you have evidence we have tested what we believe against what they believe in ways large and small none of them support our economic policy they said it was going to drive the country in a ditch we now know it drove the country to 22 million jobs and the longest economic expansion most of them were against our crime policy the brady bill and putting 100 000 police on the streets they said it wouldn t do any good they said that all the criminals bought guns at gun shows now that we re trying to do a background check at gun shows they say they don t buy them there but back then they said they did so we tested it and 500 000 guns later not in the hands of felons fugitives and stalkers 100 000 more police on the street more after school programs for our kids we ve got the lowest crime rate in over 30 years this is the right thing to do so go out there and tell people you re supporting the vice president and the democratic party number one because they believe in opportunity for everybody and a community of all americans they ve got good ideas and they work number two because he had a pivotal role in it and number three because looking to the future you agree with us whether it s the patients bill of rights or getting working families access to health care or raising the minimum wage or reversing global warming or just continuing to grow the economy in a responsible way and reaching out to all kinds of americans to make them part of our family you agree with us and you tell those people that haven t made up their mind look there is not an argument now you ve got eight years of evidence go with the evidence go with the future stick with us and america will be in a good place thank you very much dem wjclinton10 6 00b bill_clinton thank you very much vance thank you darren and thanks for being my friend for such a long time and thank you for giving us a little walk through memory lane i m still proud i was a child of the 60s i never have known what i was supposed to be embarrassed about i remember president bush used to refer to me as the governor of a small southern state i was so dumb i thought it was a compliment i still feel that way i want to thank my friend of more than two decades joan mondale for being here and for all the years that we ve shared together i d also like to thank your former secretary of state joan growe for being here thank you joan sandy novak thank you and i d like to thank the people here from the minnesota teachers group for their leadership in this event and for sticking with the democratic party and for their support of education reform let me say first of all i am glad to be standing here because in the last week i have been to portugal germany russia ukraine i came back to the united states to meet with the king of jordan and then i flew to japan to the funeral of prime minister obuchi then came back to meet with the president of mexico and now i m here i feel like a character in that h g wells novel the time machine but if by some chance i should slip a word or two here you ll just have to make some allowances for me i would also like to thank mayor rendell he didn t really plan on leaving the mayoralty of philadelphia and taking this little part time job that i talked him into one other just thing i want to say preliminarily i ve been to minnesota three times in the last five weeks and it s really funny because i was screaming to the point of irritability at my scheduling staff for months before that i said look here s three places that i have not been in two years and i m really upset and one of them was minnesota i said i really want to go so then they said all right you know so fritz mondale and i went to a farm in david minge s district to talk about the china vote and then i went to st paul on my education tour to the first charter school in the united states there are now over 1 700 thanks to our administration pushing that and they re working well and today i got to speak at carleton about the importance of opening the doors of college to everyone it s been a really rewarding thing the people of minnesota have been so good to me and to al gore and to hillary you know i still remember when we rolled into minneapolis on the bus tour in 92 we were about an hour and a half or two hours late and there were over 25 000 people in the streets and i think vice president mondale kept the crowd there by hook or crook so i m very grateful to you i just want to say a couple of things briefly one other thing i want to thank vance for helping hillary too she s doing well you d be proud of her i think she s going to win that race and i m very very proud of her when we took office seven and a half years ago al gore and i and our whole team we were animated by some fairly basic ideas one is that we could have good economics and good social policy but to do it we d have to get rid of the deficit and have to go through the fire of doing that the second was that we could grow the economy and improve the environment the third was that we had to stop the politics of personal destruction and the kind of old rhetoric that had paralyzed washington and try to find some way to bring the american people together as a community and the fourth was that we had to abolish the distinction between domestic and foreign policy that in the 21st century in a globalized society it really wasn t going to be as there are some things that are clearly discretely foreign policy oriented like what we did this is the one year anniversary of our victory in kosovo over ethnic cleansing something i m very proud of but by and large we needed to begin to look at the world more in terms of how it affected us here at home and look at how we were what we were doing at home in terms of its impact around the world so for example i think that it helps america that we re trying to relieve the debts of the poorest people in the world that we now treat aids as a national security problem i know senator lott made fun of me the other day when our administration announced that we considered the aids problem to be a national security problem but i think it is seventy percent of the aids cases are in sub saharan africa there are countries there that are now routinely hiring two people when there is a job vacancy because they expect one of them to die within a few months and this could wreck whole societies wreak havoc on the continent just at the very time when africa offers the promise of new partnership to so many of us anyway we had these ideas and so we set about trying to make them work and lo and behold they did and i m grateful for that and i thank you but i just want to make a couple of points very briefly because somebody might ask you why you were here and you say well i wanted to shake hands with bill clinton that s a good answer but that won t get any votes for us the first thing i would like to say is that ideas matter in politics and they have consequences and while we have had our fair share of good fortune it flowed from a set of ideas and policies that we implemented the second thing i want to say is there was eight years ago there was four years ago and there is today a significant and honest difference between the two parties it is not necessary for us to do to them what they worked so hard to do to us to convince the american people they re bad people and they re no good and we should tar and feather them and run them out of town there are differences the previous administration vetoed the family and medical leave law as being bad for the small business economy i signed it and said it would be good for the small business economy if parents weren t all agitated all day every day about whether their kids were sick at home and now in each of the last seven years we ve set new records for small business formation the debate s over but the american people may not know it the previous administration vetoed the brady bill on the grounds that it was an infringement on the constitutional right to keep and bear arms and wouldn t do any good because crooks didn t buy guns at gun stores they bought them at gun shows that s what they said now they say they don t buy them at gun shows but anyway back then they said they did and that it was an incredibly burdensome thing and so they vetoed it we passed it and signed it and it turned out 500 000 people who were felons fugitives and stalkers did buy guns in gun stores and we stopped them and gun crime is down 35 percent homicide is at a 30 year low overall crime is at a 25 year low and not a single hunter has missed a day in the deer woods so the debate is over we won that debate we were right and they weren t and we raised the standards for air quality for water quality for land conservation we set aside more land permanently in protected areas than any administration except those of the two roosevelts and i think we ve proved you can grow the economy and improve the environment at the same time i say that not to be self serving but to say that they were ideas they have consequences we need to tell people this and if you look at the debate today you see the same sort of debate unfold that s the first thing i want to say so what are the issues today well first of all there s a big issue huge issue what do you think we ought to do with this situation we ve got in america today now in my lifetime we have never had at the same time an economy this strong so much progress on the social issues and the absence of domestic crisis or external threat the last time we had an economy this strong and a lot of the social indicators were beginning to look good with the 1960s and it came apart because of the civil rights challenge at home and the vietnam war abroad so i m not sure it s ever happened in the history of america but in our lifetimes it had never happened before the last longest economic expansion in history the one that consumed the 1960s from 61 to 69 and it ended because we couldn t reconcile our external problems over vietnam our internal problems over civil rights the economics associated with it and the social fabric came apart and i remember how it ended i graduated from high school nine weeks after martin luther king was killed two days after bobby kennedy was killed nine weeks after lyndon johnson said he couldn t run for president anymore because the country was too divided a few months after i graduated from college the last longest economic expansion in history ended so these things don t last forever this is highly unusual so the big question in this election year is overshadowing everything else what do you propose to do with this i have done everything i could do to turn this country around to prepare this country for a new century a new millennium and it s your turn now you get to decide that s what this election is about what are we going to do with all this prosperity ideas have consequences it matters what i think we should be doing is taking on the big challenges and the big opportunities i think we ought to say if we could create the future of our dreams for our kids what will we do i can only tell you what i think i think we ought to extend opportunity to the people and places that aren t part of the recovery i think we ought to make a commitment to ending child poverty and giving every family the time and tools it needs to succeed at home and at work i think we ought to make a commitment to giving every kid a world class education in the public schools and opening the doors of college to all americans i think we ought to have a commitment to roll back the tide of climate change and the environment and to deal with the challenge of the aging of america so we baby boomers don t burden our children and our grandchildren i think we ought to commit to stay on the cutting edge of science and technology not only to reap the benefits but to deal with the most troubling potential burdens that are coming up including the invasion of our privacy by the explosion of information technology i think we ought to commit to continuing to work for one america across all the lines that divide us and i think we ought to be more involved not less involved in all kinds of nonmilitary ways with the rest of the world i think the trade agreements we made with africa with the caribbean basin with china trying to alleviate the debt of poor countries the money we re trying to raise to develop vaccines for aids tb and malaria these things are all good and they would directly benefit the united states by giving us a more peaceful more free more decent world to live in that s what i think we ought to be doing now how do you tell what to do in an election if you ve decided that so you ve got to decide what you think of that s what i think because i don t know if this will ever happen again in my lifetime and i d like to see america not relax not lay down but say this is an unbelievable gift and we re going to make the most of it so what does that mean that means that you ve got to decide who s going to be the president who s going to get elected to these senate seats who s going to get elected to the house seats what are you going to do if you decide that that s what you want now there are the following almost certain consequences to the election based on the differences and ideas and you don t have to believe that the two candidates for president are anything other than good people yes i think you should believe they re both going to do what they say they re going to do but you have to believe they re going to do what they said they would do in the primary as well as the general election but there s a lot of studies on this by the way which show that by and large even though our friends in the press try to convince you that we re all a bunch of slugs in politics that presidents historically have a pretty good record of doing what they say they re going to do and when they don t we re usually glad they didn t i mean aren t we glad franklin roosevelt didn t balance the budget in the depression aren t we glad abraham lincoln didn t keep his promise not to free the slaves i mean once in a while it doesn t happen but mostly people do an historian did an analysis that said i d kept a higher percentage of my commitments than the last five presidents i was proud of that but people do that okay so what will happen what is the difference in the economic policy well there will be a difference al gore will be for a tax cut that still enables us to invest in education and health care and science and technology and keep paying the debt down to take care of the aging of america and if you both have a big tax cut and privatize a part of social security and guarantee the benefits to all the people that are older you spend all the surplus and then some right there before you spend a nickel on anything else so we re going to have a different economic policy we re going to go back to see if we can do without these surpluses and balanced budgets and if you believe both candidates are honorable that s what s going to happen and i do there will be a dramatic difference in environmental policy if you believe that both candidates will do what they ve been doing in the primary the nominee of the other party promised to reverse my designation of over 40 million acres of roadless areas in the national forests which the audubon society says is the most significant conservation move in the last 50 years so there will be a real difference there in their attitudes in clean air clean water how do you reconcile these conflicts there will be a huge difference in the crime policy you saw what mr lapierre at the nra convention said that if they could just get us out of the white house and the republicans won they d have an office in the white house now i don t know if literally he will they would probably be a little too red faced to do that but that s what will happen you can book it that will happen and it s not like we don t have any evidence here you ve got evidence you put more police on the street you do things to keep kids off the street you keep the economy strong you try to keep going into these neighborhoods that are in trouble trying to change the texture of them and do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and kids the crime rate goes down and more people live this is not complicated and they keep talking to me about gun control i get tickled i was at a debate the other day i said you know there was a constitutional right to keep and bear arms i said i don t think you interpreted it right but let s just assume you did i said there s also a constitutional right to travel and i ve exercised it i said now when i travel around i look and i see there s speed limit laws seatbelt laws child safety restraint laws i never hear anybody talking about car control do you now if i go get your car and put it in my garage that s car control but otherwise it s highway safety there s a huge consequence here you ve got to think about this there are consequences in health care there are consequences we re for the patients bill of rights and they re not and i ve been for managed care my record on this is pretty clear i ve said that we couldn t sustain what we were doing in the health care system we d have to manage the system better but i still think the critical decisions ought to be made by the professionals and the patients and the court system will change dramatically because there will be somewhere between two and four appointments to the supreme court and if you think roe against wade should be repealed and that s an important issue for you then you should vote for them because that s what s going to happen and if you don t and that s an important issue for you then you should vote for us so there are consequences the last thing i want to say is this to follow up on what vance said i know al gore better than anybody but his wife i believe maybe his mother who will chide me if i claim to know him better than her she is an astonishing woman once practiced law in arkansas 70 years ago an amazing woman here are some facts you need to know he supported me on every hard decision i had to make whether it was going into bosnia or kosovo or haiti or helping mexico when they were about to go bankrupt and we had a poll that morning that said by 81 to 15 of the american people didn t want me to do it there was a real winner but i knew it was the right thing to do we had to do it he cast the deciding vote on the economic program without which we wouldn t all be standing around here today then he cast the tie breaking vote on the to close the gun show loophole and put child safety locks and ban large capacity ammunition clips when the senate voted on that and in between he s done a lot of other things he ran our reinventing government program giving us the smallest federal establishment since 1958 the democrats did that not the republicans eliminated more positions and more programs and i ll give anybody here 5 who can name three of the programs i eliminated there are hundreds of them we put the money and we doubled investment in education with the money he s managed our environmental programs including our partnership for a new generation of vehicles he ran our very successful program to establish empowerment zones in poor areas which have created thousands and thousands of jobs ask mayor rendell one of them is in philadelphia he managed a big part of our foreign relations with russia with south africa with egypt with a number of other countries and you heard what ed said about the vice presidency i ve actually done a study of this jimmy carter and walter mondale were the first two people that ever took the office systematically seriously in the whole history of america i love franklin roosevelt but as sick as he was it s unbelievable he didn t take any more time picking harry truman and didn t tell him anything harry truman didn t even know about the bomb when he became president jimmy carter and walter mondale were the first two people who ever took the job systematically seriously if you look at the whole history of the office vice president nixon and vice president johnson had more influence than their predecessors and then here s mondale up here and to president reagan s credit he gave vice president bush a lot to do and they had more of a systematic relationship and then when and al gore and i actually made a study of this what had happened throughout history and i decided that this was crazy that first of all this guy might be president any day now especially with the kind of mail i ve been getting the last and secondly why have a person with a lot of energy and intelligence just hanging around waiting to go cut ribbons and so i put him to work and i nearly broke him a couple times i never saw anybody work any harder he s the only guy i ever met who worked harder than me but you need to know that there has never been anybody in that job who had more of an impact on more issues across a broader range of areas and that a lot of the success we enjoy today would not have been possible if it hadn t been for him so there s nobody that s any better prepared not only by virtue of past service but by virtue of future orientation so i realize this is not a big campaign speech but you need to think about this if somebody says tomorrow why did you go there say well but first i m really concerned about what we re going to do with this prosperity it s just as stern a test for the country s character what you do with good times as what you do with bad times it s not as if you ve got a lot of options second ideas matter and there are honest differences between the candidates and the parties third i think based on the evidence and the argument i agree with the democrats and here are some examples now i hope you can all do that because this is going to be a close election and part of it in a funny way we re almost disadvantaged by how well things have gone there are young people who are voting in this election who can never remember a bad stock market never remember high unemployment never remember the kind of social discord and rising crime and those kinds of things they just think it happened it didn t just happen and i don t mean by any stretch that i am solely responsible that s not what i mean america changed in the 90s we became more community oriented we became more civically responsible we became more interested in opportunity for other people as well as for ourselves and we began to think about tomorrow as well as today it wasn t just me i was just a part of it but you need to really keep that in your mind between now and november this is a big election it s about what we re going to do with our prosperity it s a stern test ideas matter and you think we re right if you can sell that i ll feel pretty good about the outcome thank you very much dem wjclinton10 6 93 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen i want to welcome all those of you who are here today for the signing of s 1 the national institutes of health revitalization act of 1993 and to especially recognize the bipartisan coalition which made this bill possible led by the senators and the members of the house of representatives who are here i also want to thank the representatives of the groups who are here including the women s health network the juvenile diabetes foundation the american association of medical colleges the allen guttmacher institute the alzheimer s association the human rights campaign fund the breast cancer coalition and the national health council and perhaps others if i ve left anyone out forgive me this legislation highlights the importance of programs administered by the national institute of health programs vital to our science and biomedical research base the research carried out at nih has already led to a healthier and far more productive america however there are many challenges still ahead and this legislation provides the hope that someday we can prevent or cure diseases such as diabetes cancer coronary heart disease aids and alzheimer s i m particularly supportive of those provisions of s 1 aimed at improving the health of women and minorities it s important that we ensure that resources are devoted to increasing our knowledge about conditions which uniquely affect these populations it s equally important that we expand opportunities and support for the inclusion of women and minorities in research activities in the 12 years since aids was first reported in the united states much progress has been made through nih supported research gains have been made in making available treatment for aids and aids related conditions and clinical trials are underway to test possible vaccines for prevention or treatment of hiv infection someday we re going to have a treatment for all those beepers that go off they have to go to a vote that s why we re hurrying this up we still face however an immense undertaking to address the needs of the nearly 300 or our fellow citizens who become infected with hiv each and every day we must improve the effectiveness of our prevention activity increase access to early treatment for already infected individuals and strengthen our research programs i am pleased to say that s 1 provides a framework for the increased coordination and direction of aids research finally s 1 reenforces my action of january 22nd to lift the moratorium on federal funding of transplantation research involving human subjects using fetal tissue from induced abortions this research has promising application for the treatment of lifethreatening conditions including parkinson s disease spinal cord injuries huntington s and diabetes at the same time s 1 puts in place important safeguards to ensure against possible abuses by providing a clear separation between research and abortion in signing the legislation i underscore our commitment to address the immeasurable cost to our society and the suffering of our citizens from illness and disability by strengthening and enhancing biomedical and behavioral research this national institute of health revitalization act is an important step in fulfilling our commitment to promote the health and well being of all americans and again let me say a profound thanks on behalf of our nation to the senators and members of congress who are here and to those not here who provided important leadership in this effort that s the will of the congress that s part of the law i don t think in any way it undermines the overall importance of this law we have to learn to deal with aids better for all of our people and for those who are here within our borders who are not citizens we ve got all we can do to do that and i think we could benefit people all around if we can make progress in dealing with aids i think everybody who played a part in the developing of this legislation think that it s on balance still a dramatic step forward let me just say on the fetal tissue issue alone i can t tell you how many people i met all over this country in 1992 from both political parties who came to my campaign and supported me simply because i wanted to put a scientific basis back in our decisions on fetal tissue i mean people with parents with parkinson s with children with diabetes one person who became a very close friend of mine and is now in our administration as the director of the small business administration in part came to my campaign because he had a child with diabetes this is a very very important bill and i thank all of you for what you did dem wjclinton10 6 98 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen we gather here to recognize and reaffirm the historic commitment of this nation to equal opportunity before i get into my remarks i hope you will understand if i don t let the moment pass without making a brief comment about the shocking and outrageous murder of james byrd jr in jasper texas federal law enforcement officials are on the ground there assisting local law enforcement officials because it s an ongoing investigation can t comment on the facts of the case but i can tell you this we are determined that the investigation will be thorough will be fair and that the guilty will be brought to justice i ask for your thoughts and your prayers to be with the family of mr byrd today and with the people of that community because in the face of this tragedy they must join together across racial lines to demonstrate that an act of evil like this is not what this country is all about i think we ve all been touched by it i can only imagine that virtually everyone who lives there is in agony at this moment but they must reaffirm and so must we that we will not tolerate this now let me just say i ve had a wonderful time here today and everything that needs to be said has been said i thank hillary and al and tipper we care a lot about these issues we spent hours in 1992 hours talking about how we had to change the framework of american life so that people could succeed at work and at home how we had to make it possible for everyone who was able bodied to work but how the most important work of any society was taking good care of our children and we went through this whole long litany of things of which unequal pay is clearly a big one that are barriers to building strong families strong communities and the strongest possible economy i thank senator kennedy senator boxer and congresswoman delauro and delegate norton and all the members of the house who are here and my special friend dorothy height for a lifetime of commitment to all this i m here because like rosa delauro i m the son of a working mother i had a working grandmother i have a hard working wife and we have done everything we could to make sure that our daughter never faced any barriers to her dreams that s what i want for every american young person although i must say you remember when senator kennedy said that he talked about how much we d closed the inequality gap in the last three or four years and if that pace of progress had been kept for the last 35 years then women would be earning 1 71 for every dollar of men and that s about the ratio of my earnings and hillary s before i became president and i liked it quite well first thing you know the people that don t agree with us on anything will be accusing me of some strategy to make men lazy we have indeed come a long way since dorothy height and congresswoman edna kelly and others were here 35 years ago president kennedy said that the equal pay act was basic to democracy giving women the same rights in the workplace they have enjoyed at the polling place you ve already heard that we have moved in that 35 years from a period when on average women earned 58 cents for every dollar men earned to a report released by the council of economic advisors and dr yellen is here saying that women now earn more than 75 cents on the dollar but that s just three quarters of the way home and to people who think it isn t very much i ask you if you had the choice would you rather have 100 cents on the dollar or 75 you would think it was quite a lot after you had taken a few of those 75 cent dollars here s something that s interesting that no one else has pointed out the cea study shows that the gender gap is persistent though narrowing despite women s gains in education and experience and even accounting for the difficulties of balancing family and work so that there are more women in part time jobs when you take account of every conceivable variable explainable by something other than plain old discrimination in equal pay for equal work there is still this 25 percent gap and the labor department today and i thank deputy secretary higgins for being here is releasing a report which shows a history of women s employment it shows what the obstacles were which ones have faded away which ones still remain to those of you who have been involved in this for a long time i urge you to look at the council of economic advisors report and the labor department report and i think you will be persuaded that there is no explanation for the gap that is complete without acknowledging the continued existence of discrimination now this should not be a partisan political issue in a funny way is shouldn t even be a gender issue more fundamentally it is a civil rights issue more fundamentally than that it is a family issue or i can testify that young boys eat at the table where the bread is earned by their mothers as well and it is a matter of american principle it s a question of what kind of america we want our children and our grandchildren to live in in the 21st century that s why i strongly support the equal pay act that senator daschle and congresswoman delauro introduced wage discrimination based on gender is just as wrong as wage discrimination based on race or any other artificial category this legislation will help us to close the last part of the gap it will strengthen enforcement of the equal pay act it will toughen penalties for violations and it will boost compensation for working women it is tough it is fair congress should pass it and i join congresswoman delauro in asking that it be scheduled for a vote let s give everybody in congress the chance to vote on something good and the chance to do something good for the people back home we re coming up on the first anniversary of the president s initiative on race so i ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have a society with equal opportunity where people are bound together celebrating their differences but understanding there are things we have in common that are more fundamental there have been a lot of people who have written some interesting books and some that i didn t quite agree with over the last several years talking about the inherent differences between men and women venus mars uranus pluto whatever and others on a more with a more political overtone but i believe that whatever your views on that are surely all of us believe that the citizenship we share is unitary and that the guarantees of the constitution are sweeping enough to embrace us all without regard to our gender therefore it is ludicrous to say that 75 percent equality is enough you wouldn t tolerate getting to vote in three out of every four elections you wouldn t like it if someone said you could only pick up three out of every four paychecks but that is in effect what we have said to the women of america show up every month show up every day show up every day but only three out of four paydays it s not good enough the 21st century as i have been pounding the podium about for the last five and a half years will be the time of greatest opportunity in all human history especially for our country we cannot let it be known also for the opportunities that were lost and the people who were left behind with your help we will prevail thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton10 7 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you for the wonderful welcome i want to thank you mayor rendell for agreeing to take this little part time job i offered you as head of the party and for doing it so well and thank you mayor street for proving beyond doubt that i was right when i came up here and campaigned for you i told them you were going to be a great mayor and you have been thank you i thank chaka fattah for being here for ron and for always being there for me and for the people of philadelphia and for his truly exemplary leadership in the congress one of the things that chaka fattah will always be known for is getting us to adopt a problem to put mentors into schools with poor kids to tell them early that if they learn their lessons and took the right courses they would be able to go to college and we would be able to have the money for them and we owe him a lot for that and i thank him for that i want to thank ron klink for running you know he started running and everybody said well nobody can win the senate race they don t have enough money they re going to have a primary blah blah blah it reminded me when i ran for president in 1991 only my mother and my wife thought i had a chance to win and on the bad days they weren t sure so i want to thank him for running and i would like to thank his wife linda for being here and for supporting him and for being great thank you these races are tough for everybody i ll tell you now that i m struggling to become a member of the senate spouses club i m a lot more nervous about hillary s campaign than i ever was about mine i mean you re running you just sort of suit up and go out and play the game but otherwise you just sit home and claw the walls and hope it s working out all right so i want to thank them for undertaking this he has been a superb congressman we ve worked together for almost eight years now every time the interest of working families the long term interests of the ordinary citizen of this country were at stake he was always there with me and i m grateful and he could have stayed in the house and never been touched you know they told him well you represent this sort of heartland old fashioned district you won t play in philadelphia well one of the reasons i came here tonight is there is nobody in the whole wide world philadelphia has ever been better to than bill clinton and i came to ask you to help ron klink play in philadelphia because we ve got to have you to win this race i must tell you this is somewhat awkward for me tonight to be here because you know tomorrow morning i m going up to camp david to start the middle east peace talks and we re going to try to agree on a resolution of these big thorny issues that the parties agreed on the white house lawn in september of 1993 they would come to terms with a good while before now and it isn t easy i just got back from penn state i went over to penn state to speak to the governors conference they re meeting over there and to go to the creamery and get my ice cream cone anyway i just got back from there and all these people were saying that i ve known forever saying gosh you look tired i said i am tired i ve been up studying give me a test on some piece of land anywhere in jerusalem or israel i know the answer ask me to draw a map of the west bank in my sleep i can do it but i say that to make this point what really matters in our common life when you strip it all away are things like what ron said quoting hubert humphrey i m glad these children are here tonight what will this election mean for those who have most of their lives in front of them did you ever think of that a lot of people who have the most influence in elections are those who have lived most of their lives but the people that will be the most impacted by the decisions are those that have most of their lives in front of them what will this election mean for the people who couldn t afford to come to this fundraiser tonight but get up every day and work their hearts out with dignity and do their very best to raise their children and do everything else they re supposed to do people like the folks that served all of you your drinks and helped you come in tonight what about them what about them in a larger sense i m here not just because i like ron klink and i m grateful for the support he s given to everything we ve done for the last eight years but because i think that this election is just as important as the two in which i was elected and reelected president and to which the vice president was elected and reelected vice president i think it s just as important and i d just like to tell you three things you only have to remember three things about this election and a few odd details number one it really is a big election for president for senator for congressman why because how a nation deals with its prosperity is just as stern a test of its judgment its values and its character as how a nation deals with adversity i mean when i ran for president in 92 the economy was in the dumps the deficit was exploding crime was going up welfare was going up social divisions and political paralysis were getting worse you didn t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out we ought to change something but now everything is going in the right direction we ve got over 22 million new jobs the lowest unemployment rate in more than three decades the lowest crime rate in three decades the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years half the size they were when i took office the longest economic expansion in history the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded highest home ownerships ever so what are we going to do with this here s the point think about these kids there s not a person in this room tonight not one over 30 who cannot remember one time in your life when you made a mistake not because things were going so poorly but because things were going so well you thought there was no penalty for your failure to concentrate that is what this election is all about this is a huge deal we may never in our lifetime ever get the chance we have today to build the future of our dreams for our children that s the first point the second point i want you to know is there are real and honest differences and i hope and pray for my country s sake that we can have an old fashioned election i wish it could be like the old lincoln douglas debates i wish governor bush and vice president gore could get in a caravan and just go around the country and have debates have 8 or 10 or 20 or 30 i wish that we could have it in the senate races and this is an election where we don t have to have the kind of things coming out of the candidates and unfortunately out of other quarters in our society we ve had too much the last 20 years where people are afraid the only way they can win is to convince the voters that their opponent is just one notch above a car thief we d just talk about where the differences are and let the folks decide and we don t have to assume there s something wrong with our opponents we say they re good people they really do believe this and i really do believe that and you decide so there are real differences important election real differences here s the third thing you need to know only the democrats want you to know what the differences are what does that tell you about who you ought to vote for now i see it all over the country in campaign after campaign after campaign where our guys just want to talk about here s where i stand here s where my opponent stands here s how he voted here s how i would have voted here s what the position is on the issues current here s what their position is on the issues and the other guys they complain about a negative campaign and then they go out and say bad things about our side personally something wrong with our people personally but if you just tell the voters if you give them information about how they voted is that a negative campaign beats anything i ever saw but i m just telling you that s why it s so important for you to be here you are giving ron klink the ammunition he needs to get the evidence out there and look we don t disagree on everything i m working with the speaker of the house and i hope we can pass it in the senate pass this new markets legislation that i think will have overwhelming bipartisan support to bring more economic opportunity to poor areas we voted virtually unanimously to lift the earnings limit on social security so there are lots of things that we still can do that we don t disagree but let me just tell you that the areas of disagreement that are real and honest are profoundly important i ll just give you a couple of examples and ron alluded to them let s talk about people in the twilight of life first we believe now that we ve got this big surplus that one thing we ought to do is to give a medicare prescription drug benefit voluntary for all seniors who need it make it affordable that s what we believe and when we say that we re for it and they re not they have now all been conditioned there was a survey the other day that said they had hired a pollster to give them words and phrases to convince you that they re for something they re against in fact they actually owned up they didn t even deny it it was in the press the other day and they act very wounded they said oh how could they say that about me i am for a medicare prescription drug benefit or i m for a prescription drug benefit for seniors that s what they say well they are but their plan is a private insurance plan that even the health insurance companies say nobody will buy because it won t be affordable a couple of days ago the press reported that nevada had actually adopted a plan exactly like the one the republicans are advocating and now it s been several months and there is not a single insurance company offering this drug insurance because they know they can t offer it to the people who need it at a price they can afford to pay now look we ve never had a surplus like this before and if we were starting medicare today instead of 35 years ago we d never think about having a program for seniors if it didn t cover drugs in it the average person who lives to be 65 has got a life expectancy of 82 years the prescription drugs keep people out of the hospital they lengthen their lives they make them richer this is a big deal you have people every single week choosing between food and medicine so i say to you this is a profound difference and i believe we re right and they say it s not worth it we re worried about the cost i ll come to this later they say we re worried about the cost of this we don t want to spend all this money here so that s why we just want to help a few people we want to help people up to 150 percent of the poverty line that sounds reasonable doesn t it you know what that is that s an income of 12 600 for a senior citizen and 16 600 for a couple there are lots of seniors in this country who spend that much every year on drugs this is a big deal this is not rhetoric or hot air they have differences of opinion the truth is that s not one of their big priorities they d rather spend the money on something else and they ought to just say that and let you decide or take the patients bill of rights we re for a patients bill of rights and we do have some republicans who are for it and we appreciate that the bill that passed the house of representatives says everybody in an hmo anywhere in the country has got a right to see a specialist when they need to see the specialist that you cannot be forced to give up your doctor in the middle of a treatment even if you change employers for example if you have cancer and you re taking chemo or if you re a young pregnant woman and you re about to have a baby just because you change employers you can t be forced to give up your doctor and if you get in an accident in philadelphia you don t have to go all the way across town you can stop at the nearest hospital emergency room without a financial penalty and if you get hurt by a bad decision you have a right to redress in other words to enforce the patients bill of rights that s our position now this is a big deal i don t know how many people i ve talked to in the last two years in the health care system who told me horror story after horror story after horror story i was with a man just the other day in the state of missouri who introduced me a male emergency room nurse this guy was amazing he was about 6 tall weighed about 230 looks like he could bench press me on a cold day i could just imagine him just yanking the doors off cars to rescue people and stuff and he told a story about losing a patient that he had to go by two hospital emergency rooms to get to the one that was covered by the plan this is a big deal now in the senate the patients bill of rights failed by one vote 51 49 if it had been 50 50 the vice president could have voted and as he says whenever he votes we always win thank you now this is a big deal folks think about how you d feel if it was somebody that you loved how would you feel if you walked out of this hotel and god forbid got hit by a car would you want the ambulance chasing around looking for the approved hospital or would you want them to go to the quickest one how would you like to know that you could be docked because you didn t call for permission how are these people supposed to call when they get hit what if they get knocked unconscious did you ever make a phone call with three broken ribs i know you re laughing but i m very serious this happens every day so their side has a bill which leaves out 100 million americans and doesn t give you a right to redress and actually weakens some states patients bill of rights and we have the one that a couple of hundred medical professionals have endorsed all of these groups health care groups so when we say we re for the patients bill of rights and our opponents aren t they look very wounded and they say but we re for a patients bill of rights the operative word is a and there is a lot of difference between a and the more than two letters let me tell you so what you have to do to help ron klink and all you have to do is to say we don t have anything bad to say about the person of his opponent they honestly differ he s for the patients bill of rights and his opponent isn t and if he changed his vote we d have it today today that one vote 100 million americans their livelihood and maybe their very lives riding on a vote just cast in the united states senate one vote if he had been there we d have the patients bill of rights like i said i ll give you just one more example because i know i m preaching to the saved here but you ve got to think of things you re going to say to other people i ll give you one more example it seems to me that one of the most important things the next administration and the next congress have to deal with is how to keep what is already the longest economic expansion in the history of the country going and how to extend it to people in places that still aren t fully participating in this prosperity how are we going to keep this thing going well i believe that what we ought to do is invest in what we know works in education in science and technology and the energy future of the country you ought to take care of the baby boom generation that is we ought to make sure that when all of us retire social security and medicare are safe so we don t bankrupt our kids and our grandkids we ought to have a tax cut but it ought to be one we can afford it ought to be targeted toward long term care child care retirement savings savings for a college education giving people incentives to invest in these poor areas of our country that s what i think but we ve got to save back enough money to keep paying the debt down now why should the progressive party the democratic party be for getting the country out of debt under our plan you get out of debt in 12 years the first time since 1835 why should we be for that well why are we all standing here how could you afford a ticket tonight because we ve got the longest economic expansion in history and when you drive interest rates down and people can borrow money they buy more cars they buy more homes they finance more college educations they start more businesses they expand more businesses they create more jobs and they raise more wages that s why the most progressive thing we can do for ordinary people is to keep this economy going and that s why we are for doing this whole thing in a way that enables us to keep paying down the debt let me just give you one little statistic if we pay down the debt and we keep interest rates just 1 percent lower than they otherwise would have been just 1 percent that amounts to 250 billion in lower mortgage payments for the american people over the next 10 years it s the same thing as a 250 billion tax cut now that s what i think that s where we are that s one reason why i want ron klink to be there because the progressive party has become the fiscally conservative party and i don t think that s bad i think that s progressive in a global economy where people put there money anywhere they want we ve got to get the money here at prices people can afford now what is their policy their policy is to say we ve got this huge surplus it s your money we re going to give it back to you now that sounds better than what i just said and i could say it in three seconds right it s got to be a political winner here s the problem by the time you take their proposed tax cut which includes 100 percent doing away with the estate tax and i think it ought to be changed by the way i think it s too onerous on people but they want to get rid of 100 percent of it and that s 100 billion over 10 years and 50 billion goes to one tenth of 1 percent of the population a friend of mine who is now a billionaire called me last week and said what are you guys doing in washington i don t need why are you doing this he said raise the minimum wage give people a child care tax credit why are you cutting my taxes it was very interesting but look that s just part of it it does need to be changed for small businesses and farms we ought to change it some but it doesn t have to be done away with but here s the main point i want you to know when you pay for all their tax cuts and their privatization of social security it costs a lot of money that is if you let people keep their own payroll taxes and invest it and you ve still got to pay for all the retirees and you ve got to get the money from somewhere right so when you just pay for all their tax cuts and the privatization of social security before they keep any of their other spending promises you ve already spent the entire projected surplus now let me just say that projected all the people that talk about how big the surplus is the only surplus you really know about is this year s 211 billion and when i leave office we ll have had three years in a row and we ll have paid off 400 billion of the national debt everything else is projected that s the important word projected now i want to ask you all a question don t answer it just think think what is your the people working here and the people that showed up for the fundraiser everybody think what is your projected income over the next 10 years that is what do you think it will be and i want you to think just for 20 seconds and i want you to arrive at a figure that you have 80 percent confidence in i mean you re just sure over the next 10 years you ll make at least this much now you think about it okay now if i asked you to come up here right now and sign a contract spending every last penny of your projected income for the next 10 years would you do it now if you would you should vote for the incumbent senator but if you wouldn t you better vote for ron klink and keep this economy going i could go on and on but you get the picture the patients bill of rights the medicare drugs the paying down the debt and there are lots and lots of other issues senators cast a lot of votes or they decide not to cast votes just in the last year the republican majority on the party line vote defeated an african american judge from missouri i nominated for the federal court they said he wasn t qualified he was too liberal he was the only african american ever to serve on the state supreme court of missouri he had the highest recommendations from the american bar association but the way they figured it he wasn t qualified if ron klink had been in the senate there would have been one less vote against that african american judge and one more vote for one america i appointed a hispanic man from texas who grew up in a poor community in el paso a poor neighborhood went to harvard graduated summa cum laude the judges in west texas said he s one of the best three best lawyers in west texas he got the highest recommendation from the american bar association the republican senators from texas they won t even give him a hearing they say he s not qualified and when they say not qualified what they mean is he s not right wing enough for me not part of my america and the leader of the republican party in texas and you all know who he is total silence while this man is denied even the dignity of a hearing now why did they not want to give him a hearing because they don t want him on the court but they don t want you to know they don t want him on the court and they want it to just go away it s a big deal a vote in the senate it s a big deal i ll say something else you all clapped when i mentioned the people the people that work in this hotel their kids ought to have a chance to go out and be federal judges or senators or presidents so i came here because philadelphia has been good to me you ve never been better to anybody than you ve been to me and the vice president we re grateful but these senate seats are real important and you ve got a guy that comes out of a part of this state and has ties to people that give him a chance to win this race it s very difficult to beat a well funded incumbent he s got a chance to win it and he s worth fighting for if you want to keep the prosperity going if you want to extend it to people left behind if you want to take more children out of poverty and give more children a world class education if you want our seniors to have a medicare drug program if you want people in managed care programs to be protected if you want to know that everybody will get fair consideration and everybody can be represented on our courts and other parts of our national life we really can build one america it s a big deal who you send to the senate and i hope you ll send ron klink thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton10 7 96a bill_clinton for much of the last four years the african american unemployment rate has been in single digits for the first time in twenty years a hundred thousand there are a hundred thousand new african american owned businesses after falling by 2 000 in the previous four years median income for african american families has increased by 2400 or 11 percent in just the first two years of this administration average wages are going up now for the first time in a decade homeownership is the highest in 15 years there are 3 7 million new american homeowners the growth of homeownership among african americans is higher than the national average and one reason is we have a secretary of housing urban development henry cisneros that has worked to cut the closing cost on those homes by 1 000 for first time home buyers so we re moving in the right direction but we have to keep working until all of our people can reap the rewards of this time of change four years ago we had a lot of rhetoric on crime but not a lot of action and the crime rate was at unbelievably high levels but there was a quiet change going on in many of our communities who recognized that we had to have more police on the street trying to prevent crime not just catch criminals relating to people in the communities working with the parents working with the children they recognized that in addition to tougher punishment for serious offenders we needed more prevention programs for community activists who wanted to help save these kids and when i became president and i asked the congress to pass that kind of crime bill and they did and now we re putting 100 000 police back on the street we re taking guns off the street with the assault weapons ban and the brady bill we re increasing penalties for people who should be punished more but also giving our young people something to say yes to and we are now seeing the fourth year in a row where the crime rate is going down and that s something to be proud of now having said that you d be cheering from the rafters but for two things instead of polite applause we d get a roaring cheer but there s two things that keep you from giving a roaring cheer what are they no 1 the crime rate is still too high right i mean it s so what if it s lower it s still way too high and that means it s important we dare not turn back on a strategy that s working we ve got to keep strengthening our community efforts putting more of these people out on the street who can be community police officers i won t be satisfied with this crime problem until we can meet this test we will never purge the country completely of crime because you can t at least the president doesn t have the power to alter human nature the preachers here can all on a higher power but i can t so we ll always have some crime what will be the test for you when you know that the crime rate is at a manageable acceptable level in a civilized country when you go home at night after a long day at work and you flip on the evening news and the lead story is not a crime story or if it is you re surprised instead of deadened by it you re really surprised then you ll know that we ve got the crime rate going in the right direction for good the other thing that bothers people is that even though the crime rate is going down in the country as a whole the rate of crime and violence by people under 18 is going up we ve still got too many innocent kids being killed in cross fires by drive by shootings we still have too many kids that are out there raising themselves on the street so they wind up in gangs because everybody wants to be part of something most people can t just live wandering around as hermits all alone so if you put people out there on the street and they have to raise themselves they wind up in gangs because people don t want to be alone and there s not another compelling alternative we have to fill that gap and we have to do the things that are responsible those of us who are responsible for the future we cannot lose another generation to gangs and guns and drugs we cannot waiver on that we cannot show weakness and we dare not cater to special interest groups on this we are determined to stand by the ban on 19 deadly assault weapons it was the right thing to do you know it s hard to think of anything an american could do that didn t kill a lot of people that would offend our sense of decency more than burning a house of worship this whole country got started in part by people coming here so they could build their own churches and worship god in any way they pleased and they wouldn t be oppressed here that s how we got started in the darkest hours of our country when we lived with the awful curse of slavery and then later with the problems associated with the attempt to escape if it had not been for the african american church if it had not been for the african american church what would have happened we might have plunged this country into an orgy of violence and killing and lost tens of thousands more people and hardened our hearts against one another in ways that it would have taken a century or more to overcome so we are going to do everything we can to stop these fires to catch who s doing to rebuild but i say again this work we re doing here is dealing with a flaw in the human spirit that all of us have to fight always we cannot we cannot let significant numbers of the american people turn into cowards acting in the dark of night on racial ethnic or religious bigotry we cannot do that dem wjclinton10 7 96b bill_clinton thank you thank you very much president mfume i hope you do get your four more years and i hope i get to hang around to work with you madam chair bishop graves hazel and other distinguished members hey she met me outside and kissed me brother williams thank you for singing for us reverend hooks you re looking young and handsome i m glad to see ladies and gentlemen last year i know the first lady came to visit with you and she had a wonderful time and she is completing a trip that she made on behalf of our country after the meeting of the g 7 industrial countries in france she went to a lot of the nations that used to be part of the soviet empire that were once communist and are now free and she s had a wonderful trip last night i talked to her she was in finland and so far north the sun never really goes down at this time of year so i knew she wouldn t be mad when i woke her up at two o clock in the morning to talk and she asked me to give you her best i also want you to know what i did the last thing i did before i got on the helicopter at the white house to come here today was to meet with mickey kantor our secretary of commerce and michael brown ron brown s son and the delegation who are leaving today to finish the mission ron brown started in bosnia and croatia and i was especially proud that almost all the companies who lost executives on that terrible day sent replacements to go on this mission to finish the work of advancing the cause of peace and i want to thank you mr president and all of you for the tribute that you gave to secretary brown yesterday i am honored to be here today because of what the naacp has meant to america as a young boy growing up in the segregated south it was the naacp that gave all of us hope that there could be a better day i told myrlie i don t think she quite believed it that in early 1974 when i started my political career i actually purchased a membership at the malaloo ame church in fort smith arkansas i came to a meeting one sunday afternoon and bought myself a membership card i hate to say that because i ll get a letter from kweisi next week pointing out that i have not kept up my renewals over the last 20 years what a difference a year makes last year you announced your new leadership a new sense of partnership a new spirit of commitment to go into the 21st century you elected myrlie evers as your chairman you elected this great former member of congress that s right give her a hand you elected this great member of congress as your new president and ceo kweisi mfume as you might imagine given the way things are around here in washington i miss him more than ever i was riding in with congressman mel watt from charlotte today from the airport and we were talking about where s mel he s here somewhere i think congressman watt and we were talking about what a great voice kweisi was in the congress but i think we gained a greater leader in the struggle for equality and progress in america when he changed jobs i want to thank you for making your voice heard again for economic justice for the empowerment of all voters for educational excellence for our children and i want to thank you especially for your effort to bring young people back into this organization and into the spirit of citizenship in america we need these young people after all they have more tomorrows than yesterdays there are some days when i resent that but it s true and we can t remake our yesterdays we can only make tomorrows and we can t afford to have young people saying well oh this doesn t matter it doesn t matter whether i am involved in the naacp it doesn t matter whether i vote it doesn t matter whether i m in a community group to try to help save my peers from drugs and gangs and give them a bright future and a better life it does matter it matters and because of the dedication of mr mfume to the young people of his congressional district and to the young men in his own family he brought that conviction that he could inspire young people to his work here and in a way it may be the lasting legacy of this period of reform of the naacp that you brought the young blood of america back into this organization fighting for the future and working together and i hope he will stay with us i m glad that us gray haired people still have a role in it however my fellow americans our nation as you all know is at a crossroads we are only four years away now from a new century in a new millennium anytime you change the calendar in that way people start to think in bigger ways they start to imagine the great significance of the moment but it happens to be true now for we are undergoing a sweeping change in the way we work the way we live the way we relate to the rest of the world we are leaving the cold war that dominated most of our lives behind and moving into a new global village if i can use my wife s term with lots of opportunity and a lot of troubles some of them new and some of them very old we are moving away from the industrial age into a new era dominated by information and technology where more people will have more opportunities ever before but unless they have the capacity to seize those opportunities they ll be left behind faster than ever before so when i sought this office i did so because i wanted to get our country ready for the 21st century because i thought there were three simple things that we had to do one is to make sure we enter the next century with the american dream alive for everybody who is willing to work for it without regard to their race their gender their region or where they start out in life high low or somewhere in the middle secondly i thought we had to find a way to resist these destructive winds that are blowing in so many other countries to divide people by race and religion and ethnicity and instead come together in a greater sense of community to bridge our divisions respect our diversity extol our shared values and make america stronger because of our diversity not weaker because of it and the third thing i wanted to do is to make sure that in this new world our country continues to be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity it matters in haiti it matters in south africa it matters in northern ireland it matters in the middle east it matters in all these countries but it matters to us here at home when we can work with the russians to reduce our nuclear arsenals when we can work with other countries to stop the proliferation of dangerous weapons when we can cooperate with other countries to prevent terrorist incidents before they occur it matters that america is a force for peace and freedom and prosperity it matters to every single one of you my strategy to achieve that vision was remarkably simple i thought we had to reassert the basic bargain in american citizenship more opportunity for everyone and responsibility from all and the understanding that that responsibility includes our common responsibility not just to make the most of our own lives and our family s lives but to be good citizens for our communities and for our country at this time of decision that s what i hope the discussion will be about in this election year we ve come a long way in the last four years but we ve got a long way to go when i four years ago when i became president the economy was stagnant we had the slowest job growth since the great depression the deficit was spiraling we had quadrupled our national debt in only 12 years from what we d done in the previous 200 we put in place an economic plan designed to cut the deficit expand trade for american products on free and fair terms and invest more in the people of this country wherever they lived and wherever they were starting out in life and four years later it s made a difference i said four years ago that if the congress would adopt my plan i thought it would cut the deficit in half and produce 8 million jobs well in three and a half years we know it s cut the deficit by more than half and produced over 10 million jobs that is a good beginning for the american people for much of the last four years the african american unemployment rate has been in single digits for the first time in 20 years there are 100 000 new african american owned businesses after falling by 2 000 in the previous four years median income for african american families has increased by 2 400 or 11 percent in just the first two years of this administration average wages are going up now for the first time in a decade home ownership is the highest in 15 years there are 3 7 million new american home owners the growth of home ownership among african americans is higher than the national average and one reason is we have a secretary of housing and urban development in henry cisneros that has worked to cut the closing costs on those homes by 1 000 for first time home buyers so we re moving in the right direction but we have to keep working until all of our people can reap the rewards of this time for change including those that have not been reached by the recovery those that have been downsized in competition those that are stuck in place because they don t have the education and the skills to move up so we have to keep working on balancing this budget because that keeps the interest rates down the investments coming and takes the burden off these young people you re trying to get interested in their own future but we have to do it in a way that recognizes our obligations to each other that keeps the community together yes reform medicare but don t create a two class system and make the oldest the poorest and the sickest seniors more vulnerable yes slow the inflation rate in medicaid but don t give up the guarantee that we have a national responsibility to take care of poor pregnant women poor infant children people with disabilities in families all over this country and elderly people who have to go into nursing homes i think that s our common responsibility we don t have to give that up neither should we reduce our commitment to excellence in education and to the environment in the name of balancing the budget because that s not necessary to be done we have to go on with the cause of health care reform there s still too many people in this country that don t have health insurance or that lose it that s what the kennedy kassebaum bill is all about it simply says you don t lose your health insurance if you lose your job you re moving from job to job or if someone in your family has been sick a simple little guarantee that could immediately benefit over 8 million americans who are working in this country trying to support their kids and hold their families together and i hope the congress will pass it without delay i was very happy that yesterday the senate voted to pass a 90 cent increase in the minimum wage something we need very much ten million of our hardest pressed workers will get a raise and i urge congress to go on and pass it now it s passed the house and passed the senate let s go on and pass it just as soon as possible get it on up here so i can sign that bill and we can give people a raise in addition to the minimum wage there s some other provisions in that bill that i m very proud of that have to be fair bipartisan support one is and for all of you in small businesses it will matter a lot we re going to increase the expensing provision of small businesses their write off capacity from 17 500 to 25 000 a year that s important for a lot of you here in this room it was only 10 000 when i took office and the small business community said it ought to be 25 000 if that bill gets to my desk it will be 25 000 the other thing that i think is very important is that this bill contains a package of pension reforms which will make it easier for people who work for small businesses and people who are self employed and especially for people who have to change jobs a lot people who are out there selling computer software or otherwise have to move from job to job to take out a pension to keep it when they re unemployed and to keep it when they move from job to job without being interrupted people ought to be able to save for their family and save for their own retirement even if they re working in little businesses even if they re self employed even if they have to move across the country even if they have to change jobs that is in there with the minimum wage bill too four years ago we had a lot of rhetoric on crime but not a lot of action and the crime rate was at unbelievably high levels but there was a quiet change going on in many of our communities who recognized that we had to have more police on the street trying to prevent crime not just catch criminals relating to people in the communities working with the parents working with the children they recognized that in addition to tougher punishment for serious offenders we needed more prevention programs for community activists who wanted to help save these kids and when i became president i asked the congress to pass that kind of crime bill and they did and now we re putting 100 000 police back on the street we re taking guns off the street with the assault weapons ban and the brady bill we re increasing penalties for people who should be punished more but also giving our young people something to say yes to under the direction of general mccaffrey who this week is chairing a conference in el paso texas on how to stop drugs at the border we are targeting a drug strategy to help young people we cannot let another generation of our young people fall into the trap of drugs and gangs and crime we re working with communities all over this country with innovative strategies not telling people what to do but saying if you want to do this we ll help you school uniform policies in places like long beach california or las cruces new mexico we re working on enforcing the truancy laws kids ought to be in school not on the street during school hours i think and helping people do that we re working on community based curfews and i m holding up to this country especially the example of new orleans where they had a huge drop in juvenile crime not only because they imposed a curfew system but because when they caught a young person out after curfew instead of just punishing the person they took these young people to a curfew center and said tell me about your life what s going on in your life what are your problems what can we do to help it was a positive as well as a disciplinary move and the juvenile crime rate is going down dramatically these things are working all across america we set up a framework in washington but all we re really trying to do is help people at the community level come together and take responsibility for their own kids and their own future and we are now seeing the forth year in a row where the crime rate is going down and that s something to be proud of now having said that you d be cheering from the rafters but for two things instead of polite applause we d get a roaring cheer but there s two things that keep you from giving a roaring cheer what are they number one the crime rate s still too high so what if it s lower it s still way too high and that means it s important we dare not turn back on a strategy that s working we ve got to keep strengthening our community efforts putting more of these people out on the street who can be community police officers i won t be satisfied with this crime problem until we can meet this test e will never purge the country completely of crime because you can t at least the president doesn t have the power to alter human nature the preachers here can call on a higher power but i can t so we ll always have some crime what will be the test for you when you know that the crime rate is at a manageable acceptable level in a civilized country when you go home at night after a long day at work and you flip on the evening news and the lead story is not a crime story or if it is you re surprised instead of deadened by it you re really surprised then you will know that we got the crime rate going in the right direction for good the other thing that bothers people is that even though the crime rate s going down in the country as a whole the rate of crime and violence by people under 18 is going up we ve still got too many innocent kids being killed in crossfires by drive by shootings we still have too many kids that are out there raising themselves in the streets so they wind up in gangs because everybody wants to be part of something most people can t just live wandering around as hermits all alone so if you put people out there on the street and they have to raise themselves they wind up in gangs because people don t want to be alone there s not another compelling alternative we have to fill that gap and we have to the things that are responsible those of us who are responsible for the future we cannot lose another generation to gangs and guns and drugs we cannot waiver on it we cannot show weakness and we dare not cater to special interest groups on this we are determined to stand by the ban on 19 deadly assault weapons it was the right thing to do we are determined to stand by the brady bill s requirement of waiting periods let me just tell you i know when we passed the brady bill and when we passed the assault weapons ban in 1994 and mr mfume will tell you this we lost some members of congress who actually lost their seats in congress because they voted for these bills people went into their districts called voters on the telephone sent them letters ran ads saying these people are trying to take your guns away from you they re trying to end your ability to go out in the country and hunt that s what they said and you know most people who work hard don t have time to keep up with what s going on every day a lot of people didn t know and they went right in and dutifully voted against these members of congress and some of them gave up their seats but you know what it s been two years now two deer seasons two ducks seasons two turkey seasons two quail seasons two squirrel seasons and everybody in this whole country that likes to do that is still shooting at those animals with the same gun they had before we passed the brady bill and the assault weapons ban every single soul so they didn t tell the truth but i ll tell you who doesn t have guns because of that brady bill 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers have not been able to get handguns and pull the trigger on innocent american citizens we were right and they were wrong about that and we ve got to stand tough on it now this year we ve gone through a great debate about whether or not to repeal the assault weapons ban i couldn t believe it just four months ago the house of representatives actually voted to repeal the assault weapons ban they want to take uzis out there and shoot at the deer wild turkey fly fast you need lots of bullets i m kind of laughing to keep from crying about this and let me say there s now a lot of talk about you know where the major candidates will stand on this repeal of the assault weapons ban who will push for it and won t and whatever but i will say one thing that the republican candidate for president has not said and probably will not and cannot say i will veto any attempt to repeal the assault weapons ban or the brady bill i will veto it we should stand with law enforcement we should stand with the victims of crime you can t tell me it doesn t make any difference i ll never forget a handsome young businessman from northern california i met a couple of years ago when we were fighting this battle he had a beautiful young daughter but his beautiful young daughter no longer had her beautiful young mother because the beautiful young mother just happened to be in a high risk one day when a madman happened to walk in and cut loose with an assault weapon now people go crazy these things happen but if he d had a revolver instead of an assault weapon there wouldn t be so many people dead in that building and this is important this is an important issue so i ask you all to think about this and talk about this and let me just tell you something that makes again kweisi s attempt to bring all the young people in here so important just starting in grade school now we have the largest group of young americans more diverse than ever before in terms of their racial and ethnic backgrounds the largest group of young americans entering our school system since the baby boomers entered right after world war ii it was thought for a long time we would never have a group of youngsters that large again this group is larger they are more likely to be people of color they are quite likely to come from families with difficult situations or at least difficult economic situations we must turn this problem of juvenile violence and gangs around before they reach their adolescent years if we don t want to reap the whirlwind of this one way we have to do it is with the right kind of welfare reform three quarters of the people in america on welfare are already under welfare reform experiments because of the action our government has taken to encourage strategies to move people from welfare to work my criteria is simple i don t mind being tough on requiring people to work but we ought to want for people on welfare what we want for ourselves what do we want we want to succeed at home and at work we want to be good parents and we want to be good from 9 00 a m to 5 00 p m we want to feel good about ourselves when we come home from work but we want to feel good about ourselves when we leave home with our kids behind that is the simple test so i say tough on work yes tough on kids no way be good to the kids invest in child care and we ve had time enough now to see who is right we have 1 3 million people less on the welfare rolls today than the day i took the oath of office as president of the united states that s the way to move people from welfare to work support them with child care and then require those work requirements and the most important thing we can do is make a wholesale commitment to educational excellence and educational opportunity in this country we have got to do more people say we ve done a lot on that in the last 15 years not nearly enough we ve expanded head start but not enough we ve worked to shrink class sizes and help teachers be retrained we ve worked to encourage states to set high standards and to give them the flexibility they need to meet the standards we ve worked to open the doors of college wider than ever increasing the pell grants changing the student loan program so that people could borrow the money at lower costs with less hassle and then have the option to pay it back as a percentage of their income so that no young person should ever drop out of school because of the burden of a student loan but we have to do more i am determined to see every classroom and every library in every school in the united states of america hooked up to the internet by the year 2000 so the poorest kids can get the richest education and have access to all the information that any student anywhere in the world had i believe that the best tax cut we could give the american people is a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition up to 10 000 a year i believe that we ought to make at least two years of college after high school just as universal as a high school education is today i think everybody out to have access to it that s why i have proposed a 1 500 refundable tax credit enough to pay the entire tuition cost at the typical community college in the united states so that everybody of any age can at least go back and get two years of college so they can do well in the world toward which we re going if you want to inspire young people of the future you at least ought to be able to tell them you at least ought to be able to tell them you ought to be able to look them right in the eye and say you will go to college if you do this that s the least that we can do in washington to help those of you who are out there in our neighborhoods help to rescue this generation of young people and give them something to say yes to and a bright future to embrace so these are the things that i think we ought to be focusing on things that help people make the most of their own lives not a guarantee but an opportunity things that help build strong families things that help build strong communities they ll build a strong country and it s one thing to preach to people that they ought to be responsible and i m for that but if they are responsible they ought to be rewarded with opportunity the two things should go together as a bargain let me say one other thing now that the cold war is over we have unfortunately not a world free of danger we ve got a lot of security problems you know it as well as i do we just dealt with it with a terrible terrible loss of our air force personnel in saudi arabia what is leading to all this terrorism around the world what does it have in common when the hutus and the tutsis just slaughter each other in rwanda or burundi what does that have to do with people rioting in northern ireland what does it have to do with the bosnians the muslims the croats and the serbs and what they did to each other for four years after living together in peace for decades what does it have to do with the continuing tensions in the middle east well i think it has to do with human nature being vulnerable every day to taking the easy way of defining ourselves in terms of who we re not instead of who we are defining ourselves in terms of who we can look down on instead of what we can look up to what leads to an oklahoma city bombing what were those people thinking in that group in arizona where our federal officials broke it up the other day before when they had that massive weapons cache and all those at least they have been charged with plans to blow up all kinds of federal facilities what are they thinking about when they burn all those churches and synagogues or in a few cases mosques and islamic centers what are they thinking about i m telling you it s something endemic to human nature something you have to teach your kids about all the time something we all have to fight it s almost like every day you wake up and the scales are going inside you you know hope and fear hatred and reconciliation but there are people all over the world that look like they just can t exist unless they go out and kill somebody who is different from them or at least keep them at arm s length and nobody has ever perfectly solved this problem there are no perfect answers because again it deals with the human spirit and the things that are endemic to human nature but that s why i know that even though we desegregated our schools and threw racism out of public facilities and elected african americans and hispanics and asian americans to congress passed civil rights laws this job is a never ending job here and around the world it s a never ending job that s why notwithstanding the political movement of the moment after i studied it for several months i thought we could and should make some changes in the affirmative action laws but that we should mend them and not end them i thought it would be a mistake to end them and walk away i think it s a mistake not to try to keep working for voting rights and greater impact of voting rights and notwithstanding the recent supreme court decisions which of course we will all honor we still have to be on a mission of making sure that the congress of the united states represents the american people in a fair way and it s why we have to keep standing against this rash of church burnings you know it s hard to think of anything an american could do that didn t kill a lot of people that would offend our sense of decency more than burning a house of worship this whole country got started in part by people coming here so they could build their own churches and worship god in any way they pleased and they wouldn t be oppressed here that s how we got started in the darkest hours of our country when we lived with the awful curse of slavery and then later with the problems associated with the attempt to escape it if it had not been for the african american church if it had not been for the african american church what would have happened we might have plunged this country into an orgy of violence and killing and lost tens of thousands more people and hardened our hearts against one another in ways that it would have taken a century or more to overcome an attack on a house of worship whether it s a big old southern baptist church or a big old black baptist church or a tiny synagogue or a muslim mosque that only a few people ever frequent is an attack on the whole idea of america and it represents our problem in dealing with this curse of hatred based on race and religion and ethnicity that is sweeping the world and fueling so much of this terrorism i want to thank you for what you have done the naacp has worked with law enforcement and government and business and religious leaders to help us catch and prosecute people and to help us rebuild and to help us prevent these burnings you know that my administration stands behind you we created a national task force on these church burnings headed i might add very ably by two of the finest african americans in our administration deval patrick the assistant attorney general for civil rights and jim johnson the assistant secretary of treasury for enforcement we ve got over 200 fbi and atf agents working to solve these crimes going through the evidence doing the investigations and we re making arrests in just the last three weeks arrests have been made in connection with fires in missouri north and south carolina texas virginia and washington and just this past monday while you were here two members of the kkk were charged with the burning of the mt zion ame church in greeleyville south carolina where i visited just last month this morning before i left the white house i met with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders to thank them for quickly and unanimously passing bipartisan legislation to make it easier to prosecute arson attacks against houses of worship also that legislation authorizes a 10 million department of housing and urban development loan guarantee program to be used for church rebuilding to work with the money that s been raised by the national council of churches the guarantees of volunteers that have been given by habitat for humanity and others but we must do more two weeks ago i began to convene religious leaders and governors and others in the white house to talk about what else we can do i asked the head of the federal emergency management agency james lee witt who s used to working with local community groups when we have natural disasters to work with the justice and treasury departments with the governors to frame a national prevention initiative one of the big problems here in preventing these crimes is that you ve got so many of these little churches that a dem wjclinton10 7 97 bill_clinton thank you mr president mr mayor major kuklelka lt blazeusz to the people of warsaw and the people of poland i am proud to speak to you and to welcome you along with the people of hungary and the czech republic as the next members of nato and the next allies of the united states of america if my interpreter will forgive me i want to depart from the text to say that our american delegation are all proud to be here but there are two here for whom this day has special meaning and i would like to ask them to stand the first is our secretary of state who was born in the czech republic and driven out by the troubles that so grieved the poles in the last 50 years madeleine albright the second is one of the most distinguished members of the united states congress both of her grandfathers were polish immigrants senator barbara mikulski from maryland we gather to celebrate this moment of promises kept and of promise redeemed here in the twilight of the 20th century we set our sights on a new century a century in which finally we fulfill poland s destiny as a free nation at the heart of a free europe a new europe undivided democratic and at peace three years ago this week i came to this great city and made this pledge nothing about you without you nic o was bez was now poland is joining nato poland is taking its place in the community of democracies never again will your fate be decided by others never again will the birthright of freedom be denied you poland is coming home freedom burned brightly in poland 200 years ago then you gave europe its first written constitution and the world s second written constitution after america s own that solemn pact gave strength and hope to your ancestors even as poland fell victim again and again to tyranny but this week its words and those who revered them speak to us across the centuries we do solemnly establish this constitution willing to profit by the present circumstances of europe and by the favorable moment which has restored us to ourselves people of poland this favorable moment has restored you to yourselves it is a moment that you have made just as freedom was born here 200 years ago it was reborn here eight years ago when you changed the course of history and now together we have restored poland to europe and to the destiny you deserve from this day forward what poland builds in peace poland will keep in security to the citizens of my own country i say this land where i speak has known the worst wars of the 20th century by expanding nato we will help to prevent another war involving poland another war in europe another war that also claims the lives of americans we come to this moment grateful for its blessings but conscious of the grave responsibility it carries through the power of its example and the example of its power our nato alliance has kept western europe canada and the united states secure for nearly half a century not once has a nato member been attacked not once has nato ever lashed out in aggression now we must adapt our alliance to a new time our common enemy of communist oppression has vanished but common dangers have not too many people still fear change because they have not yet felt its benefits they remain vulnerable to the poisoned appeal of extreme nationalism to ethnic racial and religious hatreds rogue states seek to undermine the community of democracies terrorists international criminals drug traffickers show no regard for borders these are our common dangers and we must defeat them together nato is doing its part taking in new members taking on new missions working with new partners like poland we have reached out to ukraine to help forge stability in europe and we are working with a new russia as our partner in building a europe in which every nation is free and every free nation joins in securing peace and stability for all now as your president has said you must continue to do your part poland hungary and the czech republic will now become full members of our alliance with the full responsibilities of membership the responsibility to nurture and strengthen and defend your democracies because as we in america know after more than 200 years the struggle for democracy is never over it must be fought every day the responsibility to continue the remarkable transformation of your economies because having known poverty you know the true value of the prosperity you have only begun to achieve the responsibility to reach out to all your neighbors to the east as well as the west including the people of russia you must continue to build in tolerance what others destroyed in hate the responsibility to meet nato s high military standards and to help to bear its cost because true security requires strength and readiness we know you are ready to share the burdens of defending freedom because you know the price of losing freedom other nations are counting on you to show the contributions new members can make you did not walk through nato s door to see it shut behind you that door will stay open eight years ago you led the way to freedom now we ask you to be pathfinders again people of warsaw people of poland the american people know from the hard lessons of this century that your fate and our future are joined after world war i america turned away from the world and freedom s flickering torch was engulfed by europe s darkened night after world war ii we and our allies continued to hold liberty s beacon high but it could only light half the continent now we come here to celebrate history s most precious gift a second chance a second chance to redeem the sacrifice of those who fought for our liberty from the beaches of normandy to the streets of warsaw a second chance finally to unite europe not by the force of arms but by the power of peace one week ago was the 4th of july america s independence day more than 200 years ago you sent your sons to help to secure our future america has never forgotten now together we will work to secure the future of an undivided europe for your freedom and ours that is the promise that brings us together today that is the promise that will keep us together in a new europe for a new century that is our promise to all the young people here today and to generations yet to come security for 100 years sto lat democracy for 100 years freedom for 100 years god bless america and god bless poland thank you dem wjclinton10 8 00 bill_clinton thank you very much ken ladies and gentlemen thank you for this warm welcome i didn t know if we could stir up so many students in the middle of the summer but i m delighted to see you all here i want to thank representative rob blagojevich for joining me and also behind me representative bobby rush and john stroger and tom hines and there are a lot of other of my friends here but i want to thank them all for coming and i want to recognize that i have one special young man who works for me in the department of cabinet affairs in the white house sean o shea who is here with me he s an alumnus of depaul there s been a lot of talk in the press lately about this whole issue of legacy and that means when you ve got one leg in the political grave that s what they start talking to you about but i think i should note that depaul educated two generations of daley mayors now that s a real legacy and i congratulate you on that i also i saw that princeton review survey saying that your students were the happiest and i thought to myself they re not happy because there are no academic standards here that would be bad they must be happy because of the atmosphere the culture the way people relate to each other across all their differences and that is an enormous tribute and you should be very proud of that and maybe it has something to do with the basketball team too let me say to all of you we are here because all of us know that when we open the doors of college we open the doors of opportunity we give people the chance to live out their own dreams and in the process we strengthen our nation and our ability to contribute to the progress of the entire world i got to go to college because i had in college and law school scholarships loans and lots of jobs and if i hadn t had all three of those things i wouldn t have had a chance to go and if i hadn t had a chance to go i wouldn t be here today i think it is important to recognize that while a college education has always been profoundly significant for certain jobs like the one that you ve made it possible for me to hold over the last seven and half years it s more important than it has ever been for all kinds of people in all kinds of ways the number of new jobs in the years just ahead requiring a bachelor s degree will grow twice as fast as those which don t the three fastest growing occupations require at least a bachelor s degree and all three pay much better than average wages twenty years ago college graduates earned about 40 percent more than high school graduates in the new information economy the gap has almost doubled if we value opportunity for all as we say we do here in america we have to provide all americans access to opportunity and that means access to college from the very start our administration has worked hard on this i was telling our panelists on the way out here i got interested in this whole issue when i was governor and we basically got rid of state tuition for everybody in our state that had a certain grade average or above and we increased scholarships and loan aids but i got into it because in the 1980s i kept running into young people who told me that they had started college and dropped out because they had become convinced they would never be able to repay all their loans especially those ironically that we needed the most the ones that wanted to be police officers teachers nurses that wanted to be serving helping socially strengthening professions and we can t allow that to happen i just talked to your president father minogue on the telephone over in thailand and he told me that 25 percent of the entering freshman class at depaul will come from families with incomes of under 40 000 now we have got to do something about it i want to talk today about what we have done what we re doing now and what i think we ought to do i agree with what the congressman said to me it is one of the proudest achievements of the last seven years that we ve done so much to open the doors of college to everyone we have more than doubled student aid in seven years we ve increased pell grants by more than 40 percent we rewrote the student loan program to make it easier and cheaper to get student loans and to pay back those loans as a percentage of your disposable income after you get out of school by doing this people don t have to choose between paying their loans and choosing a career that may not be right for them just because it gives them a big enough income to pay their loans back the direct loan program that we started in 1993 and the competition that it has fostered have already saved students over 8 billion in loan repayment costs it s made a big difference we expanded work study slots by over 40 percent we now have a million of them in colleges and universities throughout the country we created americorps which has now given 150 000 actually more than 150 000 young people the chance to earn money for college while they serve in communities all across america in remarkable ways we gave american families a chance to save for college in education iras which meant the income wasn t subject to taxation while they were saving it and then if the money is taken out of the ira for the purpose of college education it s never subject to taxation and of course in 1997 we created the 1 500 hope scholarship tax credit which effectively made two years of high school post high school education free in every community college in the country but was obviously available to people who went to four year universities as well we supplemented that with a lifetime learning tax credit that applied to the junior and senior years of college graduate schools and adult education efforts for people to upgrade their skills to try to create a seamless thread of lifetime learning in our country since 1997 over 5 million families have already benefited from the hope scholarship tax credit now this is the biggest increase in college access and college opportunity since the passage of the g i bill right after world war ii as a result we now have for the first time over two thirds of our high school graduates enrolling in college that s a substantial increase from 1993 but even with all the new forms of financial aid and even though the rise in tuition cost has slowed over the last few years the vast majority of families with people in college still feel stretched after all over the past 20 years the cost of college has quadrupled many parents still take second mortgages or second jobs to pay tuition bills that s why to build on the success of the hope scholarship and the lifetime learning credits i have proposed a landmark 36 billion college opportunity tax cut that will benefit millions of middle class families it essentially will allow them to deduct up to 10 000 a year in college tuition costs at a 28 percent rate whether they re in the 15 percent income tax bracket or the 28 percent income tax bracket it can be worth in other words up to 2 800 a year if the students are in school at a place that has tuition of 10 000 or more today i came here to do two things to talk to these folks and to announce two other steps to make college more affordable first beginning today the federal direct student loan program will reduce interest rates for students who meet their responsibilities and repay their loans on time this could save more than 2 million students more than and their parents 150 through an interest rebate on new loans and 500 on refinancing existing loans right now i m very proud of this right now the student loan default rate is 9 percent when i became president when the interest rates were high and the system was not user friendly the default rate was 22 percent so it s gone from 22 down to 9 by rewarding responsibility from borrowers who pay back on time we can bring that default rate down even more at the same time these two proposals i just mentioned will save students and parents more than 600 million in the next five years alone when you add it up that will save college students since 1993 an average of 1 300 on their college loans and lower interest rates and the premiums for paying on time you don t have to be a math teacher to know that s pretty good arithmetic second i am pleased to announce a new loan forgiveness program to reward those who teach in our most hard pressed communities the students in these communities need the most help from the best teachers we know that one of the most important things in education no matter what else we discover is has been and always will be a trained dedicated talented teacher and through schools like depaul we re adding more and more but we have to add more and more we have the largest student population in our history the most diverse student population in our history we have all these schools that are bursting to the gills over crowded either in old facilities that can t be modernized or in trailers out back the largest number of trailers i ve seen at any one school was a dozen i was at a grade school in florida where the school building had a dozen trailers out back and we know that 2 million teachers are going to retire over the next five or six years this is a very important issue in chicago where you have worked so hard to turn your schools around and the whole country is impressed by the efforts you re making but it doesn t matter what steps you take if the young people who are dedicated to teaching aren t there the rest of the changes won t work now because of the teacher shortage we already have too many people going into the classroom who haven t been properly certified to teach the classes that they re supposed to teach a quarter listen to this a quarter of all our secondary school teachers don t have majors or minors in the subjects they teach mostly in math and science students at schools with the highest minority enrollment have less than a 50 50 chance of having a math or science teacher with a license or a degree in the field that the teacher is teaching many of those who are qualified end up leaving their classrooms before they can really make a difference because of the financial problems listen to this one fifth of all of our new teachers leave the classroom within the first three years of teaching now what we want to do is to put better teachers in the schools that need them most and help them stay there this program would propose to forgive up to 5 000 in loans for teachers who stay in the classroom for five years they ll be paying it back by teaching our kids it builds on our billion dollar budget proposal to improve teacher quality help retrain and recruit teachers and put 100 000 new teachers in the early grades to lower class size there this is an assignment we cannot afford to fail and i hope that this loan forgiveness program will encourage more young people to get into teaching and to stay in more than one or two or three years taken together these proposals will help to provide more families with the support they need and help to provide our economy with the work force it needs there are lots of other things we need to do in education there are lots of other things we need to do in terms of tax relief but i think helping people to go to college is number one and i ve also proposed tax relief that we can afford for long term care for elderly and disabled family members for child care to help older workers who lose their health insurance on the job to buy into the medicare program to help lower income workers with lots of kids to get more tax relief so they don t pay any income tax and what i propose would bring a lot of benefit to americans and still allow us to invest in education and health care and the environment and science and technology and get this country out of debt i have some real hope that this proposal on college tuition can pass this year when the congress comes back but in a larger sense the american people will have to decide whether this is the way they want to go on tax cuts or whether they want big sweeping tax cuts that take up all of our projected surplus i think that is a bad idea because first of all the money hasn t materialized yet and most of us can t spend money we don t have and i don t think we ought to do it as a nation and secondly we still need to keep investing in education and other things that will make us strong so i wanted to come here and say this we have got to keep working until there is not a single solitary soul in america who stays out of higher education or drops out of higher education because of the cost anybody who is able to go willing to work willing to learn and make the grade ought to be able to go stay and succeed afterward without being unduly burdened these steps we re taking today they re a good step in the right direction and if we can just get this tuition deductibility program passed we can really say we have actually opened the doors of college to every american family thank you very much now what i want to do for most of you you won t be surprised those of you who are part of the depaul community perhaps by any of the stories that are told but i think it s important to illustrate what we re trying to do in terms of real people s lives and so we had four folks come here today and they re going to talk and i m just going to start here and go around but i want to start with pam mcneil who is a dance instructor at columbia college and she has three children ages 3 through 10 you heard that said before her husband is and advertising art director and when their children enter college she could be eligible to save with her family s total income up to 1 500 for each freshman and sophomore through the hope scholarship up to 2 000 a year for each junior and senior and if the college opportunity tax cut is enacted 2 800 a year for each one in all four years if they go to colleges where the tuition is that high which all will be by the time she gets there so tell us about what you re doing to get your kids thinking about your kids college education even though they re quite young so you re going to benefit from the education ira because the money at least you can put aside not subject to taxation and take it out not subject to taxation but if you could deduct 2 800 a year from your taxes keep in mind this is a tax credit not a deduction you get the effect of it would be a 2 800 a year reduction in your tax bill for every student in college it would make a difference in your ability to send your kids i want to put in another plug for something else we re trying to do no one in my family had ever been to college before and of course in my generation that was not all that uncommon but my family started talking to me about it when i was a little kid there was never it wasn t a question it wasn t an option if i had ever suggested anything to the contrary i would have been denied dinner or something the reason i make that point is there s still millions of kids who grow up in this country who don t get that message from their parents and that s another thing that i hope will come out of these programs i want people who think they can t send their kids to college to hear this message today so they ll start telling their kids what you tell yours we started a program a couple of years ago that was developed originally in philadelphia that congressman chaka fattah from philadelphia sponsored but the consortium of universities there were going out and mentoring kids in the schools and trying to convince kids in very low income areas from very difficult family situations that they could all go to college if they learned their lessons and what they did was they had a combination of mentoring the kids and actually showing them what the pell grant was a lot of kids think they can t go to college because they don t even know what s on the books now so the congress was good enough to pass this program on a nationwide basis it s called the gear up program we now have college students all over america going into middle schools mentoring kids they re also educated on what the whole range of student loan options are so they can actually sit down with a 12 or a 13 year old student and say here s what your family income is if you go to college here s what you can get right now we can tell you right now it will probably be more by the time you get ready but you ve got to make your grades and we re here to help you and the message is very very important so i think in a funny way what you re telling your kids is just as important as the money you re setting aside for them i d like to now ask john schoultz who is the financial aid director here to talk a little about how things have changed financial aid and access to college he s been in this business for 30 years so he has seen a lot of changes that s almost as long ago as i started needing financial aid so what would you like to tell us about this i want to turn to alicia buie who is exhibit a of the announcement i made today on loan forgiveness this is the sort of person we need more of in america right now she took a big pay cut and a big loan out to become a teacher in a high need area with kids who need people like her who are willing to do things for less money and more social return but she s got a husband and two kids she s got a family she still has to pay bills i mean when the electric bill comes it doesn t say here s your discount for being a good person so i want her to talk about the decision she made what she s doing and keep in mind and how she would be affected by these proposals so will you tell us a little so under the present system she would be any out of pocket costs she has on the college would be subject to tax deductions the loans under the direct loan program are less costly for the reasons i just mentioned but she ll actually get now to write off almost a third of her loan for being a teacher and i think it is a tiny investment for the rest of us as a nation to make to reward and encourage people who make the kind of decision she did i hope we can we started doing things like this we have a little pilot program actually for younger people who just start their bachelor s degree where they could teach off all their undergraduate loans but it s not as big as i want it to be and i want to keep i hope when i m gone that this thing will have enough life that other people will keep doing it we got the idea to do this because when i was governor of arkansas we had all these rural places where no doctors would go and there was a bill passed by the congress back i think in the early 70s maybe even in the late 60s where doctors could in effect work off their very expensive medical school tuitions if they would go to isolated rural areas or inner cities where there were no doctors and now we have the equivalent shortage of teachers especially in the areas of highest need especially for the young kids because that s where the classes are biggest what you re doing and in the area where it s hard to get certified people in science and math so i hope one of the things that will happen after i am no longer president is that somebody will come along and say let s let them get rid of all the loans if they serve for five years or six years or whatever and do other things to try to get now i want to call on heather ely she is a junior here majoring in computer information systems now there is a guaranteed future she has borrowed a good deal of money from the student loan program and private sources to go to college i want her to talk about it and i want to illustrate how she could save some money just under the proposal i announced today you actually got hurt by the prosperity of the economy in that because what happened was when the economy started growing so fast interest rates went up because there was a lot of competition for money and because the federal reserve got worried about inflation and that s why i ve worked so hard to pay the government s debt down to keep interest rates as low as possible because it s a good thing to have growth without inflation but if you have to get it by raising the interest rates you have all these unintended consequences when people raise interest rates they think i m going to do this to try to slow down the economy so i ll stop people from buying optional things or i ll defer the business loan for expansion but they don t think about people on flexible interest rates home mortgages college loans and things like that or credit cards even so let me just sort of to use you as an example the direct loan program as i told you before we came in here will cut the cost of repayment rather dramatically on the part that you get from the government then if you pay it off on time you ll save another several hundred dollars one thing though i must say that you presented me today that i don t know the answer to is if you did pay out of pocket right now for any of this money that you have borrowed for example if you paid up to 1 500 a year or since you re a junior or senior it would be up to 2 000 a year you would literally if you had income tax liability or your family did you get it right off the government that is you could deduct up to 2 000 in cash i don t know whether the subsequent repayment of private loans gets the same tax treatment but it ought to logically it ought to so you ve actually given me something to go back and look into it will be something positive to occupy myself with since i m not a candidate this year i need something good to do in september and october and i ll do that but if you think about it all these cases you ask yourself don t we have a national interest that we should address as a nation together through the tax code and through investments like the pell grants in seeing that he doesn t have to say no to any qualified student that she doesn t have to worry about whether her third child will have the same opportunities her first child did because of the accumulated costs that if she wants to make a decision to give up probably half or more of her income that we don t make it harder by the cost of the transition which is basically what her education was and that if this young woman is willing to go out essentially and finance her own education all by herself that she ought to be rewarded for it and not punished i mean these are just four examples and all around here you look at all these students a lot of them have been nodding their heads through this there has got to be a story like this inside the life of every student sitting here so if you think about what you want america to look like in 10 years and you think about how wonderfully diverse we are racially ethnically religiously all kinds of ways and how well suited we are to this global society we re in here your president is over in thailand have a partnership today right that s a good thing before you know it some of you will be taking a semester off to go to thailand to study it s a good thing and the rest of you won t have to go because by the time we get all these internet connections worked out and simultaneous transmissions with good screens you just flip them up on the screen and you ll be there in class anyway in thailand and they ll be here now as good a shape as america is in today all the real benefits of the work we ve done together as a nation over the last few years are now out there to be reaped but the absolute precondition is our ability to give all of our kids a globally competitive education from pre school through high school and opening the doors of college to everyone no one contests that we have the best system of higher education in the world my daughter s friends and then the children of my friends all of them they go through this college application process and they re all so nervous and i tell them all that this is the highest class problem you can have because believe it or not there are at least 400 places in america right there are at least 400 places in america maybe more where you can literally get a world class undergraduate education it s an astonishing thing but if we don t get all of our kids ready to go which means we ve got to have more people like her and if we don t open the doors of college to everybody which means he doesn t have to say no then we re never going to reach our full potential on the other hand if we do however good you think things are in america today believe me it s just the beginning and the best days are still ahead and we ve got to allow all these folks and everyone like them in america to succeed thank you very much dem wjclinton10 8 98a bill_clinton thank you thank you dr peeno thank you dr peters i must say after they have spoken there hardly needs to be much else said i was profoundly moved as i know all of you were by what both these fine doctors said and i thank them for giving their time and their lives to the work that they have discussed with us today yes let s give them another hand i thought they were great thank you thank you mr mayor for your warm welcome and your leadership thank you my good friend senator ford for all the years of wise counsel and advice for your work for kentucky for its communities its farmers its people thank you governor patton for your friendship and for working for the education and health of your children thank you congressman baesler for voting with us and supporting the patients bill of rights along with senator ford for both of them i d like to thank your lt governor and dr stephen henry for being here today and state auditor edward hatchett secretary of state john brown my good friend judge dave armstrong from the same little patch of ground that i m from in arkansas i d like to thank our director of personnel management janice lachance for coming down with me here today and i d like to thank all of the health care professions who are here ladies and gentlemen before we begin i would like to just ask you to permit me to say a few words about the terrible tragedy that occurred at our embassies in tanzania and kenya our hearts are heavy with the news that now 12 americans brave people who are working to build a better world and represent all of us abroad have lost their lives somewhere around 200 africans have died in those bombs now we mourn their loss we extend our sympathies to their loved ones to the nations of kenya and tanzania we thank them for their friendship to us we grieve for the lost of their citizens i would just like to ask all of you to take just a few seconds of silence in their honor amen we go forward now you should all know that our teams are on the ground in africa they re tending to the wounded they re providing security they are searching and finding evidence we will do whatever we can to bring the murderers to justice i must have said this 100 times or more since i ve been president but i want to say it again because it bears special meaning today the world we are living in and the world we are moving toward will allow us to move around the world more rapidly and more freely than ever before and to move information ideas and money around the world more rapidly more freely than ever before it will be a global society that i am convinced will bring all americans our nation s best years but there has never been a time in human history when we have been free of the organized forces of destruction and the more open the world becomes the more vulnerable people become to those who are organized and have weapons information technology and the ability to move we must be strong in dealing with this we must not be deterred by the threat of other action there is no way out if we start running away from this kind of conduct we have to build a civilized open world for the 21st century now back to the important business at hand for five and a half years now i have had the great honor of serving you and working with others to strengthen america for a new century a global information age we have tried to look ahead with new ideas relevant to the times but based on our oldest values of opportunity for all citizens responsibility from all citizens and a community of all our citizens thanks to the hard work ingenuity and civic spirit of the american people and to this new direction in policy this is a time of great prosperity and profound national strength for america we have a lowest unemployment in 28 years the lowest crime rate in 25 years the smallest percentage of our people on welfare in 29 years the smallest federal government in 35 years the highest home ownership rate in history wages are rising at twice the rate of inflation we have as the governor said provided for the opportunity for health insurance for 5 million uninsured children we have provide hope scholarships worth about 1 500 in tax credits a year for the first two years of college tax credits for other years of college interest deduction on tax deductions on the interest on student loans more pell grants more work study positions to open the doors of college to everyone compared to five and a half years ago our air and water are cleaner our food is safer there are fewer toxic waste dumps and soon soon we will have the first balanced budget since neal armstrong walked on the moon in 1969 now here s the problem with that usually in our personal lives our family lives our work live and a nation s life after a series of difficult years when times get good you want to say thank goodness i m tired i need a rest i want to sit back and enjoy this i ve been working like crazy for years and now things are good give me a break let me have a break and you agree see that is the natural human tendency that would be a mistake why the world is changing very rapidly as we see every day in the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world if someone had told you five or six years ago that today japan would be having the problems it s having would you have believed that i say that not critically it is a great country full of brilliant people and they will come back but it is a reminder that things change in a hurry and we must always be ready i think you can overdo sports analogies but i can t resist one since i m in kentucky the way the world works today is like the last 10 minutes of a basketball game between two really talented teams now you think about last season and what the kentucky wildcats did to people who sat on the lead now think about it how many games were you behind in that you won you can t afford to do it the world is changing so we should take the confidence the resources the good fortune that we gratefully have now and use it to meet the big challenges still facing the country that is very important we ve got to continue to work on economic growth to stay with the strategy of fiscal discipline and open trade and investment in our people that has brought us this far and we have to prove we can extend the benefits of this recovery to people who haven t felt it yet from the inner cities to appalachia we have to continue to lead the world toward peace and freedom we can t withdraw from the world witness the events of the last few days we have to stand against the spread of chemical biological and nuclear weapons we have to stand against the reach of international organizations of crime and terror and narco trafficking we have to stand against the destruction of racial and ethnic and religious hatred against the threat of global environmental and health challenges here at home we have to honor our obligations to future generations and the most important thing we should do is to set aside every penny of the surplus we re going to have on october 1st until we have saved the social security system for the 21st century when the baby boomers require it we have to make sure all of our people have a chance in tomorrow s world by making our elementary and secondary schools the best in the world we need smaller classes more highly trained teachers we need modernized schools connected to the internet we need schools where there is discipline and good behavior and no gangs guns and drugs we need high standards and accountability and great flexibility in meeting them we need to prove we can protect our environment and still grow our economy we have to continue to prove we can reach across the lines that divide us in this increasingly diverse country and be one america a good way to view this moment in history i believe is through the lens of the first lady s theme that she came up with for our millennium project as we look toward how we will mark the changing of the centuries and the changing of a thousand years honor the past imagine the future that s what we should be doing we have come here today to talk about a very important part of one other big challenge we face how we can put progress over partisanship people over politics to expand access to quality health care to every american nothing is more critical to the securities of our families the strength of our communities health is something we take for granted until we or our loved ones don t have it anymore but people like the two fine doctors who talked to us deal with folks like that every day it isn t a partisan issue and i appreciated the fact that they made that clear you know when someone gets sick and comes into see one of these two doctors and fills out a form there is no box that says republican democrat or independent health care is being revolutionized in america most of the changes are good stunning biomedical breakthroughs pose the possibilities of vaccines or cures for our deadliest enemies from diabetes to aids to alzheimer s before you know it this genome project will be finished and we ll be able to decode the genetic structure of every person mothers will know when they bring their babies home from the hospital what the potential problems are that those babies have and some of it will be troubling to know but most of it will be good because they ll be able to avoid all kinds of problems that might otherwise have come to their children it will be unbelievable what s going to happen to health care in the 21st century there have already been examples of nerve transplantations in laboratory animals where their spines have been severed and now their lower limbs are moving again it will be an amazing time the trick is how to extend affordable coverage of all these miracles and basic preventive health care to all americans that s really how the managed care revolution began you know when i became president for the last 10 years health care costs had been going up at three times the rate of inflation we were spending approximately 4 percent more of our national income and at the time that was about 240 billion a year than any other country on earth on health care even though we were one of the few industrialized countries that still had a significant percentage of our people without any health insurance that was an unsustainable trend since 1990 the number of people in managed care has nearly doubled today most americans 160 million of us are in managed care plans and as has already been said i think on balance there have been a lot of good things to come out of managed care to make it more affordable more accessible to make the resources go further but you ve heard these doctors say that some very very costly errors have been made by putting the dollar over the person i ll never forget the people that i have met and the stories they ve told me i met a women named mary kuhl from kansas city whose husband died he needed specialized urgent heart surgery by the time he got the clearance to get it it was too late i met mick fleming whose sister died of breast and lung cancer after she was denied treatment that she was later determined to have been entitled to i met a billings manager that the doctor referred to who herself bears the scars of having to turn away patients i think in some ways of all the people that have talked to me she was the most moving of all because she had to deliver the no face to face now when the bottom line is more important than patients lives when families have nowhere to turn when their loved ones are harmed by bad decisions when specialist care is denied when emergency care is not covered we have to act that s why you heard at the grass roots level in america republicans and democrats conservatives and liberals even people who think normally the government should not do anything that can fairly be done by the private sector have developed this overwhelming grass roots consensus that we need the a patients bill of rights in america i ve done what i could administratively and some of you are probably covered by decisions that i and my administration have made i acted to extend the protections of the patients bill of rights to 85 million americans who get health care through federal plans in june we extended it to 40 million people who receive medicare last month we put in place new rapid appeals for the 3 million veterans who receive health care through the department of veterans affairs last week the department of defense issued a directive to all military bases throughout the world extending protections to 8 million service men and women and their families at nearly 600 hospitals and clinics all around the globe we are already extending many patient protections such as the right to a specialist and continuity of care to federal workers and that s why janice lachance is here with me today because we are announcing that we are now requiring that 350 health plans that serve federal employees to repeal the gag rules that keep doctors from telling patients all their health care options not just the cheapest ones now a lot of states are acting in this area too kentucky has a patients bill of rights but i can tell you because of the way the laws work there is no substitute for a national law we cannot provide protection for all americans we will leave many many tens of millions behind unless we have strong bipartisan legislation that covers every american now for nine months i ve worked in good faith with lawmakers of both parties to pass a strong enforceable bipartisan bill of rights we are fighting for a bill supported by both democrats and republicans and again i thank wendell ford and scotty baesler for their support now for nine months the leadership of the majority party in congress has resisted taking any action at all they have listened to those with an interest in preserving the status quo rather than the clear call of the public interest we have heard echoing across this hall today now public demand is rising and the republican leadership has discovered the need to act so the house passed a plan last month and the senate republicans have offered a similar bill but these bills would give patients and their families a false sense of security you ve already heard some of the comments but this is very important that when everybody is calling for a patients bill of rights and both parties pushing proposals how can the american people know what a real one is well that s what this chart is about over here and maybe jerry would you hand me the chart i ll hold it he said he s the vanna white of louisville here i m not going to discuss that i want you to look at this because that s what this is all about a real patients bill of rights at least continues and should strengthen the medical privacy provisions in place today in the age of computer databases and the internet we should strengthen the privacy of medical records don t you want yours private don t you i have a proposal that would do this the house republican bill would dramatically increase the number of people who can see your medical records without your knowledge or consent it overturns privacy protections already on the books in 20 states including kentucky the bill would just wipe them from the books and that is wrong so here s the first test protecting medical privacy laws the republican plan no our bipartisan proposal and i should say we do have republican support including a fine doctor from iowa dr ganske in the congress for the bipartisan bill second a real patients bill of rights will guarantee the right to see specialists that you need to reap the full rewards of modern medicine you must have the ability to see for example a neurologist or a cardiologist if that is what is medically indicated the congressional bills don t give you that right ours does that s the second no yes the third issue a real patients bill of rights guarantees you won t lose your doctor in the middle of a medical treatment even if your employer switches health plans this is a big deal this is a big deal now the gop leadership bills don t do that an insurance company could switch obstetricians in the sixth month of pregnancy or drop your oncologist in the middle of chemotherapy just because your employer switches plans a real patients bill of rights makes sure that health plans don t secretly give incentives to doctors to limit medical care now the republican leadership plan would permit that our s would not a real patients bill of rights guarantees you the right to emergency room care when and where you need it when you are wheeled into an emergency room you shouldn t have to start negotiating with your health plan this is the financial incentive this is keeping your doctor through critical treatments no yes no yes emergency room their s no our s yes a real patients bill of rights holds health care plans accountable for the harm patients face if they are denied critical care now that s important if a doctor denies you the health care you need you can get help to pay for lost wages or medical costs today if an hmo denies you the care you need under the congressional leadership bill you won t get any help at all now if you have rights with no remedies are they rights how would you feel what would you say to me what they re saying is oh this bipartisan bill they have all these remedies and it s just going to be a mess with a bunch of lawyers isn t that awful and a lot of people say well i don t like lawyers i don t like lawsuits who wants to be in court sounds pretty good let me ask you this how would you react if i gave a speech tomorrow that said my fellow americans i love the bill of rights i love the freedom of speech the freedom of assembly the freedom of religion the right to travel i love all those bill of rights but i don t like all these lawsuits we got too many of them in america therefore i have proposed to amend the constitution so that no one can ever sue to enforce the right to free speech free assembly free practice of religion or any other of the rights that have kept our country strong for 220 years you would say so when you talk about remedies do you have rights without remedies i think we ve seen enough there that s a big issue a real patients bill of rights should apply to every plant every single one the republican plan leaves out listen to this as many as 100 million people many of them working for small businesses 100 million people would still be under the present system 100 million people who need our help it is wrong if we re going to do this i don t want to leave 100 million americans behind and i don t think you do either even if you would be covered that s not right so you need to remember here it isn t the title patients bill of rights it is the specifics what are the specifics medical privacy yes on our bill no on theirs access to specialists yes on our bill no on theirs assuring that accountants don t make arbitrary medical decisions yes on our bill no on theirs a big deal to doctors because they know what happens to patients providing real emergency room protections yes on our bill no on theirs holding health plans accountable if patients are harmed yes on our bill no on theirs protecting patients from secret financial incentives yes on our bill no on theirs keeping your doctor through critical treatments huge issue i saw a lot of you nodding your heads when i said that you d lose your doctor in the middle of your treatment yes on our bill no on theirs and then covering all health plans that is all americans yes on our bill no on theirs that s what s at issue this is not about politics this is not about party this is about a crying need for the american people and it s time we did the right thing we ought to do it now in september when congress comes back i want to thank the american medical association the american nurses association the american college of emergency room physicians and so many others i have to tell you we need a bill of rights not a bill of goods we need a law not another loophole if i get that other bill of rights i will be forced to veto it and i will now i will say again this is not a partisan issue anyplace in the country but washington d c i believe republicans and independents are just as much for this bill out here in the real world as democrats are nothing should be less partisan than the quality of health care our people receive we re a little more than 500 days from that new millennium but there s only a handful of days left in this session of congress we cannot let this moment of opportunity be remembered as a time of missed opportunity think of what i said about the basketball game think about how fast things are changing think about how fast things can change in your life in your family s life in your business s life and in the life of our nation now is the time to say we thank god for the good fortune we have but we are using it to look forward to the future to make a better future to meet the big challenges of this country and we ought to begin next month when congress returns with the patients bill of rights thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton10 8 98b bill_clinton thank you thank you very much ladies and gentlemen you know unfortunately i don t get to run for office anymore and therefore i m supposed to appear above the fray and unpolitical but i have some experience in this area and i would say if i asked you if i gave everybody here a piece of paper and a pencil and i said i want you to write down why scotty baesler believes he should be the senator i believe you could all write something down now couldn t you that is the definition of a good political speech let s give him a hand that was a great great thing to do thank you thank you you know i love this state and the mayor almost made fun of me and the governor for coming here so much to kentucky i don t want to apologize but i have been coming here a long time now and a lot of times since i ve been president and this state has been very good to the vice president and to me and i want to say a special word of thanks for that for the support and the electoral votes we received from the people of kentucky in both our runs on behalf of the first lady and al and tipper all of us we re very grateful to kentucky for that i want to thank the governor for being my friend and for doing such a wonderful job i want to say to steve henry and charlie owen i think you both have bright futures and you ve shown a lot of character by the way you ve rallied behind scotty baesler and the idea of the democratic party and the principles for which you made your race and i appreciate it very very much i want to thank all the other officials who are here including my longtime friend and fellow arkansan your country judge executive david armstrong your state party chair ron mccloud and we ve got a congressional candidate here chris gorman chris stand up there good for you for running where s fred cowen fred stand up stand up there when i was a young man starting out in politics 20 plus years ago fred cowen was then an arkansan and on october the 3rd 1991 when i ran announced my candidacy for president there were only two elected officials from outside arkansas who were on the steps of the old statehouse with me and one of them was fred cowen so i want you to help him get elected here it would mean a lot to me personally to do that senator ford i m going to miss you and you do look good we ve all had that experience i knew i was sort of on the other side of the divide when an 80 year old woman came up to me that i d known many years and looked up at me and said bill you look so good for a man your age i d also like to thank one other person who is here i was a governor you know forever and a day i was a governor for 12 years and then i got beat once so i was out for two years so over a 14 year span i had the privilege of working with five kentucky governors you know you had that one term deal then so all i had to do was hold on to my job and i d always know somebody new from kentucky if i d just wait around but one of them who was a particular friend of mine is john y brown and he s here today and i thank him very much for coming thank you governor thank you now look scotty has given the speech but let me tell you the stakes are very high the issue he mentioned many others i could mention they depend upon having people in the congress who will do the right thing now just ask yourself just take the three things he mentioned that are in the past and one in the future and think about the issues we ll be facing think about the minimum wage the family and medical leave law the crime bill and the patients bill of rights what do all those things have in common the real beneficiaries of that legislation are the ordinary folks in this country the people who work here at this place not those of us who are sitting here at these tables the real beneficiaries are the people who are not organized who could never afford to a luncheon like this but who are the heart and soul of this country who get up every day and do the best they can at their job they do the best they can to raise their children and take care of their parents they pay their taxes they fight our wars they do all the work in this country and all they want is a fair deal and when things change as much as they ve been changing in how we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world the job of the government is to take our oldest values and hook them to new ideas so that we can move into the future and make it a better time than the past you go back through the whole history of this country and you see that the country has always been about certain basic things it s been about freedom for responsible citizens and widening the circle of freedom we redefine it quite a lot when we started out you had to be a white male property owner to vote we didn t even let all the white men vote when we started we said all people are created equal and then we said oh by the way here s our definition so we ve had to do a lot of work on freedom it s about opportunity i m grateful for the fact that there are 16 million new jobs and that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years but as congressman baesler said there are still a lot of people who are working hard and don t have enough to get by there are still some places in this country inner city neighborhoods places like appalachia and places in south texas native american reservations where they don t know there s been an economic recovery it s about widening the circle of opportunity and it s about deepening the bonds of our community the idea that we want to live in a country where not only we are treated fairly but everyone else is too where not only we have a chance to raise our children and build our families and our communities but everyone else does too so you think about the crime bill the crime bill is about freedom and community because if you re scared to death when your child goes to school if you don t feel secure on your own street you re not really free you think about the minimum wage it s about opportunity and community and by the way it s always turned out to be good economics because if working people are making enough money then they ll be spending it with other people who are in business if you take the patients bill of rights and it s the most important thing now because it s something we still have to do 160 million americans are in managed care now i don t think that s a bad thing because before managed care inflation and health care costs had gone up at three times the rate of inflation that was unsustainable it was going to bankrupt businesses it was going to bankrupt families it was going to take too much of our money away but any device for saving money should be hooked to the values of the mission the mission of the health care system is to take care of people and the problem with managed care is that there are no limits that express the values of the country now this patients bill of rights here s what it does let me just tell you what it does because it says a lot i could go through all these other issues but i m going to take my cue from the congressman because here s an issue every single issue keep in mind every single issue he s on one side his opponent is on the other this patients bill of rights says you ought to have a right to a specialist if you ve got a medical condition which requires a specialist we had a lot of breast cancer survivors at our former event why well one reason is they know that it makes a big difference if you re a woman with breast cancer and you have to have a mastectomy whether you have a specialist or a general surgeon just one example we say yes they say no two you ought to have a right to emergency room care in emergency conditions where the nearest emergency room is and you just think about it if one of your kids gets in a car wreck and they get hauled into a hospital and your children are on life supports do you want the doctors to have to wait to call an insurance company to get approval before they start taking care of them i don t think so just ask yourself what you want most of us wouldn t have to worry about it millions of americans do should we change that we say yes they say no here s another thing that happens suppose you ve got an hmo and your employer as he or she ought to have the right to do has to change insurers at a certain time should they be able to make you change your doctor if you re in the middle of treatment if you re a woman who is seven months pregnant or six months pregnant and you ve been going to the same doctor all the time should they be able to force you to change obstetricians what if you re in the process what if you ve got some sort of lymphoma or cancer you re taking chemotherapy and you re in the middle of treatment should they be able to make you change your oncologist or should there be protections against that we say yes there should be protections and you ought to be able to complete your treatment before you can be required to change doctors they say no should you have real protections of privacy for your medical records that are even stricter than the ones we ve got now or should we make your records available to more people they say make them available to more people we say not without your permission we think in this computerized age where everything about us is on a computer we need more privacy protections not fewer see all this is about the world we re moving into and interestingly enough there are 43 managed care firms supporting our bill why because they re out there doing the right thing already and they re being subject to unfair competition because they re determined to take care of people and they don t think it s right to have somebody else get a financial advantage with them just because they ve got enough power to kill a bill in congress so this is about the future man i m telling you most of the medical stories you re going to be hearing in the next 10 years are going to be good medical stories unbelievable advances in medical research last year how many people do you know how many friends or family members have you had in your life who were confined to wheelchairs because of spinal cord injuries last year for the first time ever a laboratory animal got movement back in its lower limbs after its spine had been shattered because of a nerve transplant how many people do you know whose child had some sort of predisposition to a medical condition that if the parents had known when the baby went home from the hospital they wouldn t have suffered as much as they did within five or 10 years every mother will get a genetic code map of their children s bodies how it works what the pluses and minuses are most of the medical stories are going to be good stories and there s going to have to be business management brought to the medicine like everything else but you have to put people first you know scotty is independent we don t agree on everything when he doesn t agree with me he votes the other way and most of the time i imagine his constituents agreed more with him than me that s what representatives are for but i ll tell you something i never had any doubt that he was the same person in washington that he was in kentucky and that he wasn t up there doing rhetoric to try to inflame people for no good reason this election is about whether we re going to put the progress of the country over the partisanship of washington whether we re going to put the people s interest over the interest of politics whether we re going to try to make america more unified as we go into the future or more divided and you really can see this patients bill of rights as a metaphor for every other issue i could give you a speech about education about how to preserve the environment and grow the economy about how we re going to deal with the problems so horribly manifested in what we went through with our embassies in africa and all the losses of life but every issue for the future you just remember the right answer is new ideas old values take care of most people and those of us that are doing pretty well are going to do fine anyway we ll figure out how to do fine if we ve got a system that takes care of most ordinary americans that s what this guy will do he ll be a great senator for the 21st century i hope you will help him i hope you will help chris gorman we need every person we can in the congress who believes in what scotty stood up here and talked about today and i thank you for being here to help him god bless you thank you dem wjclinton10 8 99 bill_clinton well hello everyone i have a few remarks but i want to be brief so we can get on to the business at hand but first i d like to thank james powell for making us feel welcome in his place of business and his family and his coworkers and the instruction that he gave me on making a mop i m always looking for new skills since i have to acquire some pretty soon and the vice president appreciates the fact that he buys the cord from tennessee and i want to thank the mayor and the two councilpersons and congresswoman eleanor holmes norton for making us feel welcome up here we re always glad to be out in d c but this is a special opportunity and i know that the mayor and councilwoman charlene drew jarvis and kevin chavous councilman chavous are excited about what s going on here i want to thank dana mead the president and ceo of tenneco the gentleman to my right who is the chair of the business roundtable and peter bijur the president and ceo of texaco who is going to chair our businesslinc national coalition for their willingness to undertake this project with gusto and all the others around here who are proving that this kind of things works and who will be introduced as we go through including the members of the administration who are here secretary summers gene sperling my national economic council who has done so much to develop the new markets initiative aida alvarez of the sba and jack lew director of the office of management and budget we all know why we re here we have a record expansion in america the longest peacetime expansion in history it has finally in the last three years given us substantial increases in wages for ordinary workers after 20 years of stagnation and the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded yet we know that there are still people in places that have not been touched by this recovery and it s very interesting to me that what many of us in the business community as well as in the public sector believe is a moral obligation we have to try to give all our people a chance to participate in this great economy is also an economic opportunity and perhaps an economic imperative every day i promise you the people here who run these big companies have got people scouring the press every day trying to divine the intention of the markets have we reached the limits of this expansion can we continue to grow the economy without inflation how can we do it well obviously if we expand economic opportunity and create businesses employees and consumers in areas where they didn t exist before that is an inflation free way to expand the economy so we have reached a point in our country s economic development where i think we finally have a chance to do something for the places that have been left behind from appalachia to the mississippi delta to the native american reservations to the inner city neighborhoods in ways that will benefit all americans that s the idea behind the new markets initiative and the tour i took of areas that have been left behind a few weeks ago with a lot of ceos and other people and the idea is simple that we want a partnership between business and government to make investments more attractive in areas where they haven t been made in the past but only on the basis of profit that this has to be a profitable decision this is not a social program this is free enterprise economics we are trying to create the conditions in which the economic expansion which has so benefited so many millions of americans can reach people who have been left behind for decades mr powell s exhibit a he introduced me to someone who moved from welfare to work in his company he introduced me to a man who has eight children that he feels he can now support he introduced me to a man who immigrated to this country 10 years ago from central america who s proud to be working here and this is a very very important moment for our country because for at least 30 years americans have wanted to do this not just politicians people in business have wished there was some way to bring free enterprise to the people and the places that have been left behind and we believe we have found some ways to do it now i said we have to do this in partnership and just this last week legislation based on our new markets initiative was introduced in both the house and senate it s pretty simple it s basically designed to give american investors like those around this table the same incentive to invest in developing markets in america that we give you to invest in developing markets in central america or the caribbean or asia or africa i support those incentives for those countries but they ought to exist in this country as well it builds on the successful approach that the vice president and i have developed over the last six and a half years and that he has so very ably headed of our empowerment zones our enterprise communities a stronger community reinvestment act community financial institutions this approach is working where we have applied it what we want is a nationwide framework what we re here today to talk about is what i think is perhaps the single most important thing the business community can do to make this work businesslinc let me tell you how businesslinc got started nearly two years ago vice president gore met tom lazo down there in dallas in south dallas he had a small company that built telecommunications equipment it was doing well but he told the vice president that his company couldn t grow and thrive without technical assistance and better training without tools and skills his larger competitors already had he needed a corporate mentor that s why we launched businesslinc last summer under the leadership of the vice president and with the support of secretary summers administrator alvarez and former secretary rubin tom lazo s idea has a lot of power large companies helping small companies get access to capital learn the best technology and the best management techniques as many of you can attest and will attest this morning partnerships like this are good for investment good for consumers good for the bottom line you see that at businesses like powell s and mr powell and his big supporter will have a chance to talk here in just a moment today i am very pleased that the business roundtable a coalition of fortune 500 companies is stepping up to lead businesslinc this means that we ll be able to go national with this idea this means we ll be able to do it in a big way and this means people who know what they re doing will have a stake and a commitment to its success i cannot thank dana enough i cannot thank peter enough this is a very very impressive commitment and i m very grateful to both of you especially i want to thank texaco s peter bijur because since he s going to lead the effort dana can look at him and ask for results i ve been on both ends of that i d rather be asking than answering but this will help the corporate community to meet the challenge the vice president issued a year ago to mentor more businesses especially in the distressed communities now i know the vice president has more to say about businesslinc so i d like to ask him to say a few things and then we ll just start calling on the people around the table and i think the press and those who read about this or see about it on the media will quickly understand the great power of this idea dem wjclinton10 9 96 bill_clinton the thing i loved most about being a governor was that the job was a lot more about what are we going to do than who are we going to blame and in washington i think in part because it s so far from where people live and you have to pierce through all the layers between you and the folks back home that too often it becomes more about who to blame than what to do i do believe that this business about what to do and not who to blame is going to be brought into play more powerfully on the issue of welfare reform than any other issue in recent history and i d like to ask you all just to stop a few minutes and think with me about what it means first let me say the states should be very proud of themselves our administration has now given 77 waivers to 43 states who have moved 1 8 million people from welfare to work that s a pretty good record the new welfare reform law dramatically increases the possibilities of moving people from welfare to work and the requirements to do so and just to basically review what the law does it says essentially this there will continue to be a national guarantee funded by the federal and state governments of health care nutrition and now more child care for people who move from welfare to work but that portion of our welfare expenditures that used to go in monthly entitlement checks to welfare recipients will now go to the states in a big block of money and they in turn will have to move people who are able bodied from welfare to work within two years and in no case can able bodied people have more than five years total of welfare benefits unless there are extenuating circumstances in which case the states can keep a little money back aside to deal with the odd case that always comes up that doesn t quite fit anybody s formula now this law isn t perfect and i ve said what i think is wrong with it and i want to say a special thanks to at least two members of the southern governors gov george bush and gov lawton chiles for agreeing with my position on the ill advised nature of cutting off all benefits to all legal immigrants no matter what happens to them and i hope we can change that but i signed this bill because it gives us an historic opportunity and therefore an historic responsibility to really change the culture of welfare and i think we cannot minimize that and so i come here today to say to the governors you asked for this and now you got it and you know i know i know that tennessee is one of the states of the southern governors conference and that very famous philosopher from tennessee ted atkins who occasionally plays guitar as well and i think is a good republican governors i once heard him say you know you got to be careful what you ask for in this old life you might get it and uh so we asked for it and i wanted it and now we have it and so it s no longer a political issue it s no longer occasions for finger pointing and none of our one liners amount to a hill of beans anymore we need to all throw away our welfare speech the only thing that matters now is whether we are going to give the opportunity not the guarantee but the opportunity for dignity and purpose and meaning in life to help more people live up to their god given potential as parents and as workers and nobody who s thinking about the 21st century wants america to have a big permanent underclass nobody wants us to continue to split apart in terms of income anybody that can visualize the future wants us to be coming together and celebrating our diversity and having it be a source of strength and seeing every child have a real chance and believe that he or she has a chance to live up to the fullest of their god given abilities that s what this is all about and this is the best chance we ve had to do that in a long time that s all this bill does it gives us a chance if we fail it will exact a higher price from us than the old system did but the old system would never have given us a chance to succeed and that s why i took the gamble i did i m glad i did and i believe if we work together and learn from those who have done it in about four or five years we re all going to be very proud of what each of us did to make real welfare reform a reality because there will be more people like these fine women sitting here on this front row who can stand up and say i m earning a living i m supporting my child i live in a crime free neighborhood my child goes to a good school where the parents participate and our country is coming together because our communities are coming together around people who are given a chance to succeed if they re responsible that s my dream and i think we can make it happen thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton10 9 96a bill_clinton thank you so very much thank you jeff for that wonderful statement and for the way that you have handled this terribly difficult and painful situation and for the way that you have led your very great company thank you mr mayor for giving me a great time in st louis for getting those 18 000 people there today at that absolutely wonderful educational complex that i think would be the envy of any community in the entire nation st louis can be very very proud of that it was extremely beautiful and obviously extremely effective thank you thank you mr gephardt i want to say a little more about him later thank you governor for your friendship we were sitting at the table tonight reminiscing about how mel carnahan when he was trying to become governor of missouri in 1992 and should have been paying attention to his own business and the primary endorsed me for president at a time when only my mother thought i could win i was worried about his political health but he seems to have weathered that burden quite nicely and i thank him for it mel and jean and their children have been a real credit to the people of missouri and we were over in kansas city earlier today with mayor cleaver and with alan wheat who used to represent them in congress but is now my deputy campaign manager and congresswoman mccarthy and we had a wonderful meeting there at a welfare reform center which i think will prove to be the model for the entire country as we come to grips with our new responsibilities to move people from welfare to work and not leave people behind and on that account alone i think he has earned the confidence and the support of the people of missouri for a second term and i thank you for everything you ve done i d like to thank joan kelly horn for being here and for presenting herself as a candidate for congress again and i hope she s successful thank you joan i thank becky cook and bob holden for being here and for being with me all day today and i d like to thank a man who s here who i believe is responsible for the first speech i ever gave in the state of missouri as a public official about 10 years ago senator tom eagleton who s here thank you tom for being here thank you very much ladies and gentlemen i appreciate what all the previous speakers have said and i very much appreciate your support here at this fundraiser for the democratic party and for what we are trying to do in the next eight weeks i d like to go back to something that mr gephardt said it is true that i think probably more than any other single action his courageous leadership as the majority leader for the economic program that we put through the house and the senate in 1993 by only one vote in each house made him the minority leader of the house we also passed the crime bill that was intensely controversial because it came on the heels of passing the brady bill and it contained a ban on 19 kinds of assault weapons and a lot of our rural members were defeated by people telling them that telling their voters they had gone to congress and voted to take their weapons away the truth was something far different in fact that bill contained the first legislative protection ever for 650 different kinds of hunting and sporting weapons but it did ban assault weapons and in the moment of 94 for those and for other reasons the democrats became the minority in the congress and we are attempting not only to win a presidential election but to change that i would just like to point out something when you make a judgment about that sometimes people say oh well maybe we should have a divided government and we did get a few things done here at the end of this last session we certainly did i ll say more about that in a minute but you think about where this country would be if those members of congress who gave up their seats had not voted on those two bills that cost them their seats in 1993 when we voted to bring the deficit down it was projected to go over 300 billion the latest projections are that it will be 117 billion that economic plan brought the deficit down four years in a row for the first time in a president s administration since the 1840s that s how long it had been since that happened the crime bill putting 100 000 police on the street banning assault weapons stiffening penalties giving communities things for the young people to say yes to to keep them out of trouble in the first place played a major role in the fact that we have also had four years of declining crime rates in america including big drops in the murder rates in many major american cities including st louis and so i would say to you that if the purpose of politics is and the 21st century will be as i believe it is to create the conditions and to give people the tools to make the most of their own lives because governments can t deliver guarantees anymore in a global society and those two bills showed that the leadership of dick gephardt and those who followed him and our friends in the senate did an enormous amount to create the conditions and to give people the tools to improve their own lives in the state of missouri in st louis in the neighborhoods of this community and i just think that that ought to be taken into account in 1996 because there was bitter bitter partisan opposition to both of those things the leaders who now want to stay in the majority and capture the white house claim that our economic plan would lead to a recession they claimed it would increase the deficit they claimed the crime bill would be ineffective they told people they were going to take their weapons away from them well four years later we ve got 10 5 million jobs we have seen an enormous recovery because of lower interest rates we ve got four years of declining crime rates dick gephardt was right and they were wrong and i think that ought to be part of everybody s calculation when they go to the polls and vote eight weeks from today now let me say in a more positive sense we did those things hoping that we wouldn t be punished for them politically but basically because we thought we were in a tight we had a terrible crime problem we had a terrible economic problem we had to do something about it i d like to talk tonight a little bit about the economy and about the economic strategy we have followed and the one we propose to follow it is true that dick and tom foley who was then the speaker george mitchell who was then the democratic majority leader in the senate came to me and said this deficit has just been revised upward again and unless we do something about it we re never going to be able to grow the economy it was absolutely clear so i went to washington with a simple straightforward economic strategy as i said to create the conditions and give people the tools to succeed in the global economy that we have today and the one we re certainly going to have in the 21st century i wanted to first of all get the deficit down to decrease interest rates and increase investment in the private sector secondly i wanted to increase investment in education and technology and research in the areas that would grow the economy which meant that if we re going to do that while reducing the size of the government we had to rather dramatically reform the way the federal government works and the way it delivered services the third thing i wanted to do was to expand the ability of the united states to sell our products and services around the world on terms that were not just free in the traditional sense but also fair in the global trading system and that s what governor carnahan among other things was referring to when he talked about the airline route which is one of the areas where we are consistently shut out because american airline companies are by far the most productive and efficient in the world and the airline routes are one of the few areas that are still protected and not covered by a lot of our trade agreements so it s a continuing battle for us to open those routes but if you look at where we are now bringing the deficit down has paid big dividends but the investments are also paying dividends and they make an enormous difference when we invest more money in education from head start to smaller classes to experimental schools like these charter schools which teachers can form within public school systems to meet the special needs of special groups of people when we make college loans more available at lower costs these investments are well made when we refined our space mission these investments are well made when we invested in technology to help companies that were reducing their defense expenditures diversify into nondefense areas this is very very important let me just give you a couple examples of what our investment has produced a lot of you i m sure watched the democratic convention when christopher reeve made his very emotional speech about investment in medical research and you know just in the last few weeks that kind of investment has produced for the first time ever lower leg movement in laboratory animals that had been paralyzed through nerve transplants in the last four years because of our investment in medical research and because of our reforms of the drug approval process at the fda we have more than doubled the life expectancy of people with hiv and aids in only four years way more than doubled we are about to build a supercomputer in partnership with ibm that will in one second do more calculations than you can go home and do on a hand held calculator in 30 000 years our space program is about to have two unmanned missions to mars at the end of this year coincidentally right after we had this stunning apparent discovery of a microorganism coming from the planet of mars millions of years ago it s ironic that the second of these unmanned space missions will land on mars on july 4 1997 independence day that was not planned in coordination with the producers of the movie but it may give them a sequel after all but these things matter there are some areas where public investment is important to the health of the private sector we reduced the size of the government our friends in the republican party often attack government but i found they hadn t done much reforming in the last several years so we did the government is now smaller by about 250 000 than it was the day i took office it will be down by about 270 000 by the end of this year the last time it was this size was when john kennedy was president as a percentage of our workforce your federal government is now the same size it was in 1933 when franklin roosevelt took the oath of office before the new deal we are spending less on in other words transfer and mechanisms and bureaucracies and more on investing in the american people and their future and it s good policy we ve negotiated 200 and something trade agreements 21 with japan and the areas where we ve negotiated trade agreements with japan our exports are up 85 percent the united states auto industry a big deal in the state of missouri is now number one in the world again for the first time since the 1970s and we can be very proud of that that s what our people did but i also believe an important part of the right kind of economic strategy for the 21st century is recognizing that more and more businesses will have to be constantly changing more and more entrepreneurial and we have to find ways for people to compose their lives so that they can work hard keep up with the changes and raise their kids and we have to emphasize small business more i m very proud of the fact that our small business administration we cut the budget and doubled the loan volume i m proud of the fact that we increased by 250 percent the tax cuts small businesses can get when they invest more money in their business these things will make a difference and all of this is contributing we now have had four years in a row where we ve had more new businesses started in america than every before each year breaking the successive record the previous record so this economic strategy is working and the democrats didn t try to create our jobs in the government 93 percent of the 10 5 million new jobs we have were created in the private sector this is a partnership strategy and i say this because one of the reasons that we want to win this election is to keep going on the right track and to build on this we have to continue to balance the budget a dick gephardt says but it s very important that we balance the budget consistent with our values and our interests if we balance the budget by cutting our educational investments or cutting back on our investments on technology and research or cutting back on our commitment to cleaning up the environment while we grow the economy we would pay a terrible price for that one of the ways that the st louis economy will grow faster and the economy of every city in this country is if we invest more money in environmental cleanup our brownfields initiative so called a lot of people don t know what a brownfield is a brownfield is a place in a city that used to have jobs and now has pollution that s what a brownfield is and what we want to do is get rid of the pollution so the jobs can come back all the major economic analyses are that we ll become economically advantageous for people to reinvest in cities again for new jobs in the future if we can take away the environmental problem so yes balance the budget but be careful how we do it do it in a way that brings us together doesn t drive us apart in the last day or two we ve had another debate between senator dole and myself over this question of family and medical leave he says and i think he honest believes because he led the fight against it repeatedly that it was an antibusiness initiative because it was a government requirement on companies of 50 or more employees that you couldn t fire somebody if they had to take a little time off when a baby was born to them or their spouse or when there was a sick parent or when there was some other medical emergency in the family but we now had three years of the family and medical leave law almost four twelve million people have taken advantage of it and i believe we are stronger not a weaker economy because of it surely one of the objectives of the american enterprise system ought to be for people to succeed at work and at home surely all of us ought to want to create an environment in which we have productive workers who are also effective parents surely that has got to be this 10 5 million jobs that the american economy has produced in the last 3 5 years represents one of the most rapid periods of job growth in the last 100 years one of the very best periods so it couldn t have been too damaging to the american economy to say to people you know you can take care of your family and still work and do well so as we look ahead i would like to ask you just to think about these things what do you believe the role of your government should be i believe we should be in the business of creating opportunity rewarding and even demanding responsibility when we can do that and building a stronger sense of community so we go forward together and having the right kind of economic growth strategy is critical to that yes we need to balance the budget but we ve got to do it in the right way can we afford a tax cut yes but we ought to only have the tax cut we can afford even if it means that most of us in this room don t get it or don t get all of it we ought to only have that we can afford we ought i believe it would be good for the economy over the long run to give people some help with their child rearing expenses and with education expenses to let many more people people with incomes up to 100 000 in family income take out an ira and then withdraw without penalty for education costs or medical emergencies or buying a first home i don t believe people should pay capital gains when they sell their homes i think we ought to foster homebuilding by families and homeownership by families and a lot of people are lucky enough to have appreciation in their homes but that s the only investment they ve got that amounts to anything for a lot of people so i think we can have that but we should only have a tax cut we can afford consistent with our other interests and we need to continue to pursue aggressively as the late ron brown did at the commerce department as mickey kantor did as our trade ambassador now he is doing it our commerce secretary a strategy that says you have got to give america a fair deal in the global economy you have got to do it we re entitled to do it and we can t win all of these fights jeff but we re fighting them hard as you know and i think it s fair to say that our administration has had the most aggressive comprehensive strategy of any recent administration of either party in trying to break down the barriers to selling america s goods and services around the world and i think it s important so i ask you to think about that the other thing i would like to say is that the greatest market for america that s untapped is the market of americans who haven t fulfilled their own economic potential that s why if we want to speed the growth rate of the american economy we have to continue to save and invest and improve productivity but we have to have more customers to have more customers in america we ve got to have more people that can make a living and can be our customers that s why i want to triple the number of our empowerment zones i want to dramatically increase the number of these community development banks that are in the business of loaning money to people to set up small businesses in communities that the economy and its recovery have passed by that s why i want to give special tax credits to people who will move people from welfare to work and invest in communities that have been overlooked the biggest untapped market for america are all of the americans who aren t fulfilling their economic potential and if they have jobs and incomes they will be our biggest consumers they will pay taxes they will help us to balance the budget they will be happier the crime rate will go down and we will be better off so i believe it is imperative when we look at this welfare reform bill that i signed i believe in what i did but let me tell you what i told them in kansas city today i ve worked on welfare reform for 16 years what this new bill says is we will continue to guarantee to the poor health care child care and nutrition but the income check now goes to the states and every state has to work with the community to figure out a way to move able bodied people from welfare to work if we do it wrong the present system will be better for the poor than the new system but the problem is the old system would never let people be liberated if we do it right we can liberate people who have been isolated and downtrodden and ignored and turned away from and we could ease our conscience by saying well at least they re getting a welfare check and what i saw in kansas city today is what i want to see everywhere states can take the welfare check and give it to employers and say take this as an income supplement train these people we ll help you pay for them keep it for three or four years but every single person in the united states that ever said a bad word about the welfare system now has a personal responsibility to look at what he or she can do to hire people off welfare and put them to work and give them a chance to get a better life the last thing i want to say is i hope you will help me achieve our educational objectives that s a big part of building the right bridge to the 21st century and let me just say there are 1 000 things i could talk about but i want you to think about two things because a lot of you can help this happen yes we need to get the computers in the classrooms and we have to do that a lot of you can help and a lot of you are helping yes we have to have the right educational software for the computers and we have to have teachers trained to at least keep up with the kids which is more than i can do this summer we began a terrific program with 100 000 teacher volunteers to train another half a million teachers so they could go in the classrooms this fall prepared to work with computer technology but think of this we propose in the next four years if we get our contract renewed to hook up every classroom and every library and every school in america to the internet to the worldwide web to that information superhighway that will make it possible for the first time in the entire history of america for the kids in the poorest classrooms of america to get the same information in the same way in the same time at the same level of quality as children in the wealthiest classrooms it has never happened before it will revolutionize educational opportunity and performance if we do it right and we need to make that commitment as a country to do that in the next four years that will also help the american economy and the last thing i d like to say is that a lot of us in this room have been saving for our children s college education a long time we re facing that decision at home you know and we have this conversation three times a week and i have my broken record answer which is go wherever you want to go that s what i ve been saving for 16 years for i make enough decisions at work this is your decision and i will honor it but not every person can do that and we know if you just look at the census figures we know that one of the reasons that incomes have been splitting apart in america after coming together for so long is that you cannot continue to have a job that grows in earnings unless you have appropriate levels of skill we ought to set as a national goal that by the year 2000 in four years we will make two years of education after high school at least a community college degree as universal in four years as a high school degree is today that would revolutionize the american economy and opportunity for america and this requires no bureaucracy no program no nothing almost every american is within a driving distance of a community college almost every community college performs at a very high level of effectiveness or it wouldn t be in business all we have to do is to give a tax credit to the american people that will cover roughly the cost of tuition at community colleges in all the states of the country that s paid for in our balanced budget bill then i think we ought to give a tax deduction for any kind of college education for up to 10 000 a year this will be good investment for america s future now all these things it seems to me are good economics but they ll also bring us together and that s the last point i want to make you look around this room tonight we have african americans hispanic americans asian americans arab americans jewish americans it looks like the olympics team here tonight a few years later when i saw our olympics team i couldn t help thinking we had people from 197 different countries in the olympics our largest county in america los angeles county has people from 150 of those places in one american county this is an enormous opportunity for us the rest of the world marvels at it you have no idea how much of your time i have to spend as president trying to get other people to behave themselves because they d rather kill each other because of their racial their religious their ethnic or their tribal differences we joined the french and went to rwanda to save people from starvation because the hutus and the tutsis didn t have enough to get along with in the first place they should have been working together to put their countries together instead chose to slaughter each other in record numbers including their children in rwanda and burundi because they were of different tribes one day they re all living together they re big friends the next day they re killing each other we re going to have the first elections in bosnia in about a week and we ve been a year without violence but for four years after living together for decades people set upon each other and slaughtered each other and even killed children ravaged families and the muslims the croats and the serbs are biologically indistinguishable they are muslims croats and serbs because of accidents of history and where empires ended in bosnia in northern ireland they still fight over what happened 600 years ago when the young people have forgotten what all the fighting is about and they just want to get along and have a good life and build a future i saw the prime minister of israel yesterday and we practically had a celebration because he spoke with mr arafat but the truth is the palestinians and the israelis need each other and if they were getting along there would be no end to the good they could do for themselves and for their children and the future in the middle east now here we have that because our founding fathers said if you believe in the constitution the bill of rights and the declaration of independence you can have a home here we were hypocritical we had to work through our racial bigotry and then we had to work through the fact that women didn t even have the vote but we had the ideal from the beginning and if we hadn t had the ideal we would have had nothing to measure ourselves against and we never would have made the progress that has been made the civil rights movement was made with reference to the american constitution so i say again look around this room at all of you and that s the last thing i want to say that s why i was so angry about the church burnings and every time a synagogue is defaced or an islamic center is burned why i am outraged because we have to stamp that stuff out here before it gets started we have to prove that we are happy to be a country of many different races many different creeds many different beliefs because it is our meal ticket to the future it is in our self interest to do what is morally right and we have to do that i m a little more sober than i meant to be here i don t mean sober as opposed to drunk i mean sober as opposed to upbeat because i got started thinking when jeff gave me the introduction he was talking about meeting with those victims families but let me tell you one of the great honors even though it s sometimes a burden of being president is to see people in their hour of greatest pain because it has a wonderful way of crystallizing what really matters in a life and when i was there with all those twa families including the people from the airlines including people who were from italy and france and britain and america i could tell you a lot of stories but i ll just tell you one tell you why i sort of changed my tone when i was listening to him talk this woman came up to me and she showed me a picture of her perfectly beautiful daughter who was on this plane it was one of your flight attendants she was a beautiful woman and her perfectly beautiful grandson who was also on the plane and she told me a story about how this beautiful 10 year old boy had walked away from a big opportunity that he had because the people wanted him to say something bad about me he was a kind of a model and they wanted him to be in some sort of an ad or something and she started telling me about her grandson and then she said i want you to have this and she gave me a picture of this blonde headed 10 year old kid standing by a fireplace and i looked at that child and i thought to myself i can t do anything to bring him back but what my job is is to remember this boy and to make sure that everyone like him that s still around has a great country and a greater country to live in when we start a new century in a new millennium in a completely new world changing the way we work and live but holding fast to the things that have made this country great for over 200 years and that s what i want all americans to think about for eight weeks most of the stuff comes and goes in elections it s gone like a shaft in the wind it doesn t amount to a hill of beans but i m telling you we re going to make some big decisions in this election consciously or unconsciously i want you to be aware of them i want you to be happy you re making them and i want you to make the right ones we are still where we are today because almost all the time when the chips are down we do the right thing and if we stay on the right track if we really believe in opportunity for all and responsibility from all and if we really relish the fact that we have all this diversity in this country the best days of this country are clearly ahead of us and not behind us and that s what it is our obligation to do because that little boy i ll keep that picture with me until the day i die of that kid standing by the fireplace and i ll remember that our obligation is to all those little boys that can still stand in front of the fireplace on holidays and have those pictures taken and if we do that this country is going to be just fine thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton10 9 96b bill_clinton thank you thank you very much ladies and gentlemen it is wonderful to be here thank you for this vast sea of people thank you for all these wonderful signs students for clinton teachers for clinton cardinals and clinton seniors for clinton there s one that says i m from haynes arkansas i m from hope arkansas good for you my favorite one is that one back there that said i d vote for anyone smart enough to marry hillary thank you very much thank you very much ladies and gentlemen first of all i want to thank all these people who are here with me i want to thank my friend al green for singing the national anthem wasn t he great i want to thank those who preceded us on the program your comptroller darlene green your president of the board of alderman francis slay representative shelton our democratic chair the county prosecutor bob mcculloch dr hammonds the superintendent all the principals who are here the people from the school board the state treasurer bob holden the secretary of state becky cook joe carmichael our state democratic chair senator banks thank you for being here thank you gateway elementary and middle schools for welcoming us here i love this place i also want to introduce just one person i brought with me my deputy campaign manger the former congressman from missouri and former nominee to the united states senate alan wheat is here with me today a great american i thank him i want to thank your mayor for his aggressive leadership in education and housing and fighting crime in proving that this city can be given back to its people and that just as the motto of this school says if you empower people and give them a chance to make the most of their own lives they will do it that s his philosophy and that s what we re doing together i want to thank governor mel carnahan for being one of the most enlightened and progressive governors in the entire united states for a person who believes that welfare reform means putting people to work not putting them on the street and giving our children and our families a better chance at a better future i want to say a thank you to joan kelly horn for being willing to put herself on the line and run for the congress again against the well financed members of the other party knowing that they are wrong and she is right and you need to prove her right on election day i want to thank congressman dick gephardt for being a great majority leader a courageous minority leader a man who is the best prepared person in the country to be the next speaker of the house of representatives and i hope you will help him to do that and when i heard your own congressman bill clay up here talking what i want you to know is that when he s in a room alone with me in washington he sounds just like he does when he s up here talking to you over a microphone he s the same person everyplace and every time and he loves he loves the children of this district and of this country he believes in education and if you make dick gephardt the speaker you will make him the chairman of the house education committee and that will be a good thing for america ladies and gentlemen i m honored to be back in st louis we had one of the most memorable rallies ever here in 1992 i know we re a little late today and i want to tell you the main reason we are and i hope you ll understand and be glad i had to take a little time in kansas city to make a statement about a very momentous event that occurred today in new york city the united nations has begun to meet again and today by an overwhelming vote with only three nations in the entire world dissenting the nations of the world voted to end nuclear testing once and for all in the entire world i came into office determined to lift the cloud of nuclear threats from our children and our future we got the countries of the world to agree not to sell or develop nuclear weapons and give them to other people we ended a nuclear program in north korea we finally succeeded in removing most of the nuclear weapons from any place within the old soviet union there are no nuclear missiles pointed at the children of the united states tonight for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age and now if we can see this all the way through with the vote of these nations today it means that we will be able to take another giant step toward ensuring the safety of our planet and our children and the children of the world if we can ban forever nuclear testing a dream first born by president eisenhower and president kennedy so long ago it s a great day for america and a great day for the world just a few days ago after the democratic convention in chicago we started a trip on the bus hillary and i and al and tipper gore in cape girardeau missouri we had a huge crowd there on a hot day once again demonstrating that our country is on the right track to the 21st century do you believe that we are we have compared to four years ago we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 7 5 years 10 5 million new jobs wages going up again for the first time in a decade four years of record record starts of new small businesses record numbers of women and minorities owning businesses in this country we have a 15 year high in homeownership i am proud of these things we re moving in the right direction fifteen million hard working american families got a tax cut so they would always want to stay off welfare and keep working 12 million families got to take a little time off from work without losing their jobs for the birth of a baby or the illness of a parent forty million americans got their pensions protected 10 million americans on october the 1st are going to get an increase in their minimum wage every small businessperson in the country will be eligible for a tax cut if they put more money into their business to improve their productivity so they can hire more people or give their employees a raise this country is moving in the right direction i m telling you we are moving in the right direction and we don t need to turn back now here in st louis i was talking to the mayor about something called the brownfields initiative that doesn t mean anything to most of you but it will before long a brownfield is a place where there used to be jobs in a city where there s now nothing but pollution and what we aim to do is to clean up those brownfields so we can get rid of the pollution and bring back the jobs and we re going to do it all over america and we re going to do it right here in st louis we cleaned up more toxic waste sites in the last three years than were cleaned up in the previous 12 years we brought the deficit down in each of the four years i ve been president for the first time since before the civil war to take the debt off our children and keep the interest rates down on their parents there are 1 8 million fewer people on welfare and child support collections are up 40 percent this country is moving in the right direction i came into this job that you gave me and missouri sure played a big role in giving me this job for four years and i thank you with a simple vision for these little children here i wanted us to go into the next century with the american dream alive and real for every person who is willing to work for it i wanted us to be one strong community coming together not drifting apart made stronger by our differences not made weaker by them i wanted us to continue to lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and we are on the right track and let me say that i have tried to practice the politics of what to do instead of who is to blame i don t care much about who is to blame but in elections you do have to make choices and it s important to know what decisions are being made and when you think about bill clay and dick gephardt or joan kelly horn when you think about the races for congress and the race for president there are some things that are important to know in 1993 and 1994 we said yes to reducing the deficit in a way that was fair to all americans and continued to increase our investment in education in protecting the environment in protecting medicare and medicaid and the folks on the other side they said no we said yes to a crime bill that put 100 000 police on the street and banned assault weapons and they said no we said yes to a less expensive student loan program that gave young people the option to repay it as a percentage of their income and all of them said no we said yes to the americorps program that gives people a chance to solve problems in their communities and earn money for college and the leaders of their party said no we said yes to the family leave law and the leaders of their party said no we said yes to a tax cut for the 15 million americans with children in their homes that are working the hardest for the most modest wages and they all said no we said yes to the minimum wage increase and most of them said no we said yes to more funds for head start for smaller classes for safe and drug free schools and they said no and then when they had their turn they said we ll balance the budget by giving people like the president who didn t need it a tax cut and cutting medicare destroying medicaid s guarantee of 30 years to poor children and pregnant women and middle class families with members with disabilities and the elderly in nursing homes by cutting back on education when we need to be investing more by weakening our environmental protection when we need to be doing more that s what they said yes to and then we had our chance and we said no we said no and that s really what this election is all about it s a clear unambiguous choice about build a bridge to the future or going back to a past that didn t work the first time that is the choice it s a choice between building a bridge that s wide and strong enough for all of us to walk across arm in arm or trying to recover a past that is not recoverable my fellow americans that s what this election is about i want to build a bridge to the future that keeps our economy growing strong so that every single person who is willing to work has a chance to work and to be a part of the american dream will you help me build that bridge now that means we do have to balance the budget every time i say this in washington all the experts say now mr president don t go into a city where most of the voters are democrats anyway and talk about balancing the budget because it bores people people don t care about it unless the economy s in bad shape and then they think it will fix it let me tell you why you ought to care about it our republican friends said something last year i agree with they said if we had no plan to balance the budget interest rates would be two percent higher because the government would be borrowing money the same money you re trying to borrow you know what that means you figure it out when you go home tonight what would two percent mean on your home mortgage your car payment your credit card payments it s a lot of money what would two percent mean to all these business people you want to borrow money in st louis and start new businesses or extend their businesses so they can hire more people that s a lot of money it would be bad for the economy so we say yes let s balance the budget but let s do it without gutting medicare medicaid education and the environment yes let s have a tax cut but let s have a tax cut to people who need it to help them raise their children and educate their children and save for a home and save for a college education and save for health care and let s pay for that tax cut let s don t go back let s don t go back and adopt an unwise tax program that sounds so great oh i ll give you more money they say what they don t say is i ll give you more money and then we ll have to cut medicare medicaid education the environment even more than we tried to cut it before and the deficit will go up so you ll have higher interest rates i say let s build that bridge to the future we don t want to go back to that past we tried it the first time and we didn t like it let s keep going will you help me build that bridge to the future ten million american children 10 million of them are still living within four miles of a toxic waste dump if you will stick with us we ll clean up two thirds of those the worst ones in the next four years so that all of our children will be growing up next to parks not poison will you help me build that bridge to the future we want to finish the job of putting 100 000 police on the street we ve got the law on the books but they ve tried twice to stop it i don t know why the crime rate is down dramatically the murder rate in st louis has dropped dramatically it is not complicated we ve got police on the street working with the friends and neighbors of people who care about their neighborhoods and their children we can bring the crime rate down we ve got it down for four years in a row if we bring it down for four more years in a row we may finally get to where we like living in this country and we feel secure in all of our neighborhoods in all of our cities will you help me build that kind of bridge to america s future my opponent said just the other day that he still thought mr clay and mr gephardt and i were wrong in passing the family and medical leave law said it was antibusiness all the bill says is if you work in a business with 50 or more employees and your spouse is about to have a baby or you are or your mama or your daddy s real sick or your baby s real sick you can take just a little time off from work without losing their job now you tell me is that antibusiness if it s antibusiness how did this economy produce 10 5 million new jobs that s more jobs more job growth faster rate than any republican administration in 70 years it s not antibusiness it s good for america when people can raise their families and be good to their kids and succeed at work will you help me build that kind of bridge to the 21st century most important of all i look at this beautiful beautiful educational complex and i look at the even more beautiful children out here i know and you know that the only way that the world we re living in and certainly in the world we re moving to that we can protect all of our children and give them a chance to live up to their god given abilities is to have education that is world class quality for every child in america will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century i was told that this is the first new school construction in st louis in 25 years we ve got the largest number of young people in school today in american history i was in a school the other day in tampa florida a beautiful old school where there were five or six trailers outside prefab buildings that had to be brought in just to house the students one of the things i want to do is to have the national government help those cities and those school districts that are willing to make an extra effort at school construction to rehabilitate old buildings or build new ones so that we can help them bring the interest rates down and lower the cost of school construction if they will make the extra effort will you help me do that let me tell you something else i think we ought to do forty percent of the 8 year olds in this country 40 percent of the 8 year olds in this country are still not able to read a book on their own but we know we know you said not in gateway that s the idea what i want them to say is not anywhere not in gateway not anywhere we know if our young people can t read they can t learn other more complex subjects they won t be able to write use the language learn another language master computers we know this is important i want to mobilize an army of reading tutors starting with the americorps volunteers the young people on work study specially trained teachers and volunteers so that we can go into the schools of this country and help the teachers and help the parents and say by the year 2000 every 8 year old boy and girl in america will be able to pick up a book and look at it and say i can read it by myself will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century let me say one other thing we have got the chance now for the first time in the history of our country to give every child no matter where that child lives no matter how poor their neighborhoods the same access to the same information in the same way at the same time as the children of the wealthiest school districts in america because of technology it requires computers in every classroom it requires trained teachers on those computers and it requires us in the next four years to hook up every one of those classrooms in every school in america to the information superhighway to the internet the worldwide web once we do it education will truly be democratic and open to all americans will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century and finally let me say we have got to put a college education within reach of every single american who wants to go and is willing to work the scholarships the americorps program the improved student loan program all this has helped but we want to do more i want us in the next four years to make at least two years of community college education as universal for every american of any age who wants to do it as a high school education is today will you help us do that i want to do it in the following way i want us to say to everybody we will give you a tax credit a refundable tax credit for up to 1 500 a year that will cover the typical community college tuition in any state at any community college nearly every american lives within driving distance of community college and every american needs at least that much education that s the right kind of tax cut for america to send the american people to school i want to give the american families a tax deduction for the cost of any tuition after high school undergraduate postgraduate you name it at any age up to 10 000 a year will you help me do that that s the kind of bridge i want to build to the 21st century i believe that we owe it to the children and to their parents to build a country in which people can succeed at home raising their kids and at work where everyone who wants to get another education or more education has the chance to do it where we say you do not have to wreck the fabric of america s community to balance the budget if you do it in the right way it will make america a stronger community that is the kind of america i want to build and let me tell you folks this election as you just heard is 56 days from today eight weeks from today in the next eight weeks you think about how many people you re going to speak with think about all your friends and family members everybody you might talk to on the telephone living inside or beyond the borders of the state of missouri and i want to just ask you to remember this this is a wonderful rally you ve made me very happy today but i want you to remember what i said these are big choices and the choices you make in the races for congress and the choice you make in the presidential race is a choice that has more to do with you than us it has more to do with these children they have all their tomorrows in front of them and we owe it to them to make sure that our best days are still ahead we owe it to them to make sure that the future is brighter than any of our glorious past and we can do it we have it within our means if we have the vision and the will and if we make up our mind each and every one of us to be good citizens yes we have done a lot in the last four years but the last four years is just an indication of what we can do in the next four and the years beyond if we will build that bridge together will you help me do that thank you god bless you let s go get it dem wjclinton10 9 98 bill_clinton thank you it s rare for me to feel that i am at a loss for words i can only hope you know what i m feeling for you and for my wife and for my country i think you do and i thank you more than you can possibly know hillary has mentioned all the people who are responsible for this evening i would just echo my strong note of gratitude to all of you congressman markey was here there he is thank you very much for being here and for your support there are many distinguished citizens here but i would like to acknowledge one because he embodies to me everything that is best about america i think he is one of the bravest human beings i ve ever known and without him americans with disabilities would not be where they are today a man i had the great honor to award the presidential medal of freedom mr justin dart thank you for being here and god bless you sir in addition to roy and len and carol and all the dnc officers who are here and tom and mike and john and chris you know steve grossman is not here tonight but i just want to acknowledge how hard he has worked for all of us to make our party strong there is one other person i want to mention i m glad steve grossman is not here tonight because he went home to massachusetts to kirk o donnell s funeral and a lot of you in this room knew kirk o donnell he was a magnificent human being a great democrat a proud irish american a passionate citizen and patriot and this town is much the poorer for his passing when i called his wife the other night i said i m not really a washington insider i think we ve established that beyond any doubt i said but washington has a lot of great qualities and maybe some that aren t so great more than anybody i ever knew around here i think kirk o donnell had all the good and none of the bad i m proud he was a member of my party and i just want to say to his wife and his two wonderful children on behalf of a grateful nation i thank them for his life and i thank god for his life and i thank steve grossman for representing all of us at his funeral today in massachusetts thank you yesterday i was in florida and i went to this school in orlando and i wish all of you had been with me it was an elementary school that was basically a multilingual international school where all the kids that were there had to take at least two languages english and something else and there were a lot of hispanic kids there there were a lot of asian kids there there were kids from south asia there were african american kids there there was every conceivable ethnic group in this little grade school in florida and there was a wonderful hispanic principal american whose mother the principal s mother spoke to me in spanish and had to have it translated because i m not as fluent as i should be hardly in english but anyway these kids they had a school uniform policy which i love they had a pta president who was more charismatic than 90 percent of the politicians i ve met in my life they had a sense of community that required them to go out to every mother of a newborn in the jurisdiction of the elementary school and give the mothers classical music and other support for the newborns as a part of the elementary school s mission and they had the genuine commitment that everybody that was within their embrace mattered that every child could learn that every child mattered and that they were creating not just a school but a community in which they were prepared to accept responsibility for all these children s well being and i m telling you it was an overwhelming experience being there i say that because that school is a metaphor for what i have tried to do with america and tonight all of you in this business council you re pretty sophisticated about what s going on in this economy and you understand that for all of our great good fortune today this is an uncertain world a lot of changes in it the stock market goes up and down in no small measure because of perceived risk in america as a result of events far from our shores in economies much smaller than ours reminding us that if we want the benefits of this global society we must be able and willing to assume its responsibilities of leadership and so i want to just say two things that aren t particularly sophisticated first of all i am profoundly grateful for every single day even the worst day i have had to serve as your president because of where we are today secondly when i was a young man i don t believe i ve ever said this in public except at my daughter s high school graduation but when i was a young man i was complaining about something once some perceived unfairness and a much older man who sort of mentored me looked at me and he said let me tell you something bill he said what you re saying is probably right but just remember this most of us get out of this world ahead of where we would be if we only got what we deserved he said no matter what happens most of us get out of this world ahead and we need to develop what hillary later taught me is the discipline of gratitude so that s the first thing i want you to know i am grateful that we have had this chance to do these things the second thing i want to say is usually when i come to a group like this i say isn t it wonderful that we have the lowest unemployment in 27 years the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the first balanced budget in 29 years and the lowest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years and you know the whole rest of it and it is great but you understand a simple truth this is a dynamic world what really matters is not so much what we ve had but what we intend to do with what we have and a lot of times when things are going well people think that they can indulge themselves either in idleness or things that are irrelevant to the mission at hand i believe that in a dynamic world our blessings confer special responsibilities to deal with the long term challenges of the country we ve got to really think about what we have learned about this global economy in the last two years we learned a lot you know we learned a lot with nafta with gatt with our trade rules with all the things we benefited 30 percent of our growth coming from trade we learned a lot what have we learned from the problems of the countries in asia what have we learned from the difficulties of the russians what have we learned from the difficulties of a great vast powerful country like japan going five years without any real economic growth and what should we as americans do to inject stability and growth into this system because if we don t as chairman greenspan said last week we can t be an island of prosperity in a sea of distress big issue we ve got to start by paying our way to the international monetary fund but there is more and it s big we know that we have to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers therefore i say let s don t spend this surplus until we save social security let s don t do that maybe the democrats feel more strongly about it because there were only democrats voting for that economic plan in 93 we lost seats in the congress on account of it people bled over that plan but when we passed the balanced budget act 92 percent of the deficit was already gone because of what our party did now we ve been waiting 29 years 29 years you know i like tax cuts and spending programs as well as the next person we ve got both in our balanced budget both targeted tax cuts for child care and education and the environment and new investments in education and health care and other things but i would like to see that ink change from red to black and just sort of savor it for a minute or two before we throw it all away again and i think you would too now everybody in this room who is between the ages of 34 and 52 in the baby boom generation you ve got to face the fact that if we do not meet our responsibilities to reform social security in a way that preserves its essential characteristics to give stability in old age to people who need it without imposing undo financial burdens if we don t do it and do it now when it s least painful then one of two things is going to happen either we ll all get to retirement and we ll have to take a much lower standard of living or we ll try to maintain the same system which will cost our kids and grandkids so much money that they will have a lower standard of living and that is a very foolish thing to do we don t need to do it so let s fix social security and then see how much money is left and we can decide what to do with it then that s what i think we ought to do we have just a few weeks left in this legislative session i think it s important to make the right decisions look at the education bills we ve got up there 100 000 teachers in the early grades to lower average class size to 18 a program that will enable us to build or rehabilitate 5 000 schools to deal with school overcrowding and substandard condition programs for safe schools programs to hook all our classrooms and libraries up to the internet by the year 2000 programs to create education opportunity zones summer school and after school programs and mentoring programs and guaranteed scholarship programs for schools that aren t doing well that will agree to end social promotion but only if they help the kid not stigmatize him all of that s there the america reads program we had 1 000 colleges last year sending young people into schools to make sure that every eight year old could read by the end of the third grade it s all out there riding on what congress does you won t read anything about it but it may be the most important set of decisions still to be made in this congress will they embrace an education agenda that we never asked to be a partisan agenda we never asked for it to be a partisan agenda it is an agenda for america s children or the health care bill of rights 43 hmos have now endorsed our health care bill of rights that says in an accident you ought not have to drive across town to get to an emergency room you ought to go to the nearest one if you need a specialist you ought to be able to get one if you re getting care and your employer changes hmos during the time of your pregnancy or your chemotherapy they ought not to be able to change your doctor in the middle of the stream and if you have privacy concerns you ought to know your records will be kept private those are just some of the things in our bill i think that s a big deal there are 160 million americans in managed care and i have never been an opponent of it because i don t think we could be where we are today with the economy where it is unless we had broken the inflation in health care costs but quality comes first now 43 hmos have supported our bill why because they re doing the right thing anyway and they re at an unconscionable disadvantage by treating their people right unless everybody else follows the same rules this is a big deal for america it s going to be decided between now and the next three weeks the same thing is true on the environment 40 percent of our lakes and streams still not fit to swim in even though the air and the water are cleaner and the food is safer and we ve cleaned up more toxic waste dumps and we ve also set aside more land than any administration except the two roosevelts we ve still got 40 percent of the rivers and lakes in this country not fit to swim in we ve got a lot of challenges to face and man i m telling you you ought to be attuned to this there is a device in washington i had to learn about this we didn t have these where i used to be involved in lawmaking called a rider that is not a person in a cowboy hat with spurs on a rider is something you put on a bill that doesn t have much to do with the bill and normally you put it on the bill because it couldn t stand on its own two feet so it s got to ride along on something that s got feet and legs and if you stick the rider on it you know that the rider wouldn t be standing so it s got to ride to get across the finish line of the law and my job is to stop as many of those riders as i can it s a big deal so i say to you all of you if you go back to the beginning we re blessed i am grateful it imposes responsibilities and the first and foremost of those is to say what are the big challenges facing us on the brink of a new century and a new millennium how are we going to be one america across all the lines that divide us how are we going to keep growing how are we going to fight the security threats like terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and seize the opportunities of this new world i ll tell you if we do what we re trying to do we ll be doing our job so i say to you we need more business support we ve got a lot more business democrats than we had six years ago because we believe you can grow the economy and let people make good profits and still do right by the ordinary citizens of this country and lift the people up who deserve a fair chance that s what we believe that s what we believe so again i say thank you for tonight but remember those two things we should be grateful but we should be determined not to let america her children and her future down thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton11 1 00a bill_clinton you know when debbie got into that how we were probably related to each other i did not know where she was going with it i thought she was going to do some hillbilly shtick about how our eyes were too close set or i could offer to play you that banjo song from deliverance i didn t know what was going on there for a while and after i became president i found that i had all these relatives i didn t know existed they just kept cropping up all over and most of them had more limited resources than i did i ll tell you one real quick story i did get one letter from a woman way up in her 80s in northeast louisiana who showed me how john grisham and i were like tenth cousins and i wrote him a letter and said praise god you re the first one that has any money come to the white house tomorrow and it was really funny it turned out it was true she wrote him identical letters we checked our lineage and we turned out to be kin and one of us is still claiming it i want to thank john eddie and sheridan for having us here in their home their modest little home it makes the white house look like public housing and i also want to thank them if you ll indulge me for having hillary here just a few weeks ago she had a wonderful time and was jealous that i was going back today i want to thank debbie and frank for being such wonderful friends to us and for all of you for being here tonight you know my interest in this legislative endeavor obviously relates in part to reapportionment i have worked as hard as i could and we ve had some terrific fights in washington to preserve the integrity of the census i just want everybody counted who s entitled to be counted and in the most effective and complete and honest way i also very much hope that members of my party will win the house of representatives and they have actually an outside chance to at least split the united states senate this year if we can pick up two or three more candidates we maybe could do better but then the census comes along and it will be done in 2000 and the whole thing could be undone again and so i think it s very important that you know when debbie was saying what she was saying i wanted to just stand up and say there is a real meaning here you could work your hearts out and have a great 2000 and then have it undone in 2002 and you wouldn t like that so i do want to thank you for being here and i want to urge you to redouble your efforts the only other thing i d like to say is this one other thing debbie said made me think of a point i wanted to make she said that i believe that you could have a country in which we protect the individual rights of our citizens including their access to the courts and still grow the economy i do believe that and when i was pondering whether i should run for president it seems like a hundred years ago now way back in 1991 one of the things that just drove me crazy about the way washington worked at the time and i obviously felt that the other party was more responsible but i didn t think our crowd was blameless either because when you get into a you know how it is you get into any kind of relationship and you just frozen and then if you re not careful you just keep making the same mistakes over and over again and we all have to work on that in our families and our businesses and everything we do but the thing that really bothered me was that in order to sort of break through on the news or in the media or whatever that it seemed to me that the people in washington beginning at the white house kept posing false choices to the american people you d have to are you going to be for business or are you going to be for labor are you going to be for a strong economy or are you going to be for all those trial lawyers having the right to bring suit are you going to be for a strong economy or are you going to be for those chokingly burdensome environmental regulations are you going to be for american jobs or all that trade business i could give you 30 examples it made a nice debate and once you decided which side you were on of the either or questions it relieved you of all responsibility to think which gives you a lot of free time to do other things but it s ultimately a very unsatisfying way to live and it s one of the big reasons our country got in the ditch we were in in 1992 because you just had to get on one side or the other and they were bogus choices by and large there are real choices to be made and they re hard enough in life but you completely paralyze yourself if you spend all your time organizing your mind and your activities around false choices and one of the things that we have tried to do in the last seven years is to at least put real choices before the american people and to try to make the right ones and i think the results have been pretty good some of you commented that you saw the television coverage today of how i was fortunate enough to start this day i woke up on the edge of the grand canyon and watched the sun rise not only over but in the grand canyon it was an amazing experience and i used authority established under president theodore roosevelt to set up national monuments to set aside another million acres of land around the grand canyon to protect it a very important part of the watershed there for the colorado river and a number of other places and i was looking at some of the things that theodore roosevelt said i admired him very much and he actually served as president at a time very much like the time in which i have served when we not only changed centuries but we changed the paradigm of the economy from a rural economy to an industrial economy just as in my time we ve moved from an industrial economy to a global information based economy with all the attendant upheaval and changes but he said that if you were part of a growing young country you had a special responsibility to take the long look ahead that successful enterprises always took the long look ahead and that s the last thing i ll leave you with in my lifetime anyway our country has never had this much economic prosperity social progress you know what the economic numbers are but let me also tell you we had the welfare rolls have been cut in half they re the lowest they ve been in 32 years the unemployment rate among african americans and hispanics is the lowest ever measured the poverty rate among hispanics is the lowest in 25 years among african americans the lowest ever measured among women the unemployment rate is the lowest in 40 years and keep in mind 40 years ago there was a far smaller percentage of women seeking jobs in the work force so the society is beginning to grow together we have the lowest crime rate in over 25 years now so we ve never had in my lifetime this kind of economic progress social progress national self confidence with the absence of a crisis at home or a threat from abroad you just think about it in your lifetime i ve often i m glad to see since i m in texas i want to say this i ve been telling this to folks at the white house i m glad to see a lot of people reassessing and revising upward their estimation of the performance of lyndon johnson as president because of the work he did in civil rights and education and health care and against poverty but basically his presidency was weakened in its potential impact because he not only had to deal with he had enormously successful economy in the beginning but he had to deal with the civil rights issue at home and the vietnam war abroad and the competing demands eventually undermined the economy instead of opening the economy more so he could move ahead on the social problems so we never had this happen before in my lifetime that s the last thing i d like to tell you whatever you do in politics this year this issue the presidential race and everything in between you just remember that and i say that as a citizen i ll be a citizen after this next election for the first time in a long time and what i want what i tried to do is to turn this country around and to bring it together so that we would be in a position to paint the picture of the 21st century we want to and i think we have turned it around and brought it together but very often when things are going well people get distracted or do what seems easiest and most at hand and what we really ought to be doing is dealing with the aging of our society make sure we ve got social security and medicare fixed before we double the number of people over 65 we ve got all these kids out there who come from all different racial ethnic religious groups they all need a world class education if our retirement is going to be secure we ve got all these people and places that haven t participated in this recovery they need to be empowered to be part of the free enterprise system if we don t do that now if we can t prove now that we can something about poverty in terms of community and individual empowerment we will never get around to doing it because we will never have these conditions any better we need to work with our friends around the world to build a truly inter dependent world where we can lead but not dominate where we can share responsibilities and be good neighbors and ask others to be good neighbors in return we need to prove that just as we tried to get the irish and the people in the middle east and the people in the balkans and the people in africa to lay aside their racial and tribal and ethnic and religious hatreds that we can do that here at home we need to think about the big things and we don t need to get into false choices one of the reasons i went to the grand canyon today was to say that it is no longer necessary for a country to go rich to burn out the environment you can now improve the environment and get even richer that s a fundamental difference in the last 20 years it was not true in the industrial age it is no longer true the detroit auto show right now they ve got cars getting 70 miles a gallon demonstration cars they ll be on the market in no time and it s just the beginning so i think we re going into the most interesting exciting time in human history i m proud that my country is in good shape and i m not running for anything i came here today because you were good to me both those of you who are having me here john eddie and debbie and the others who brought me but also because this country has been good to me and we re in good shape now and i don t want to see us squander this opportunity i don t know when we ll ever get it again i just know it has never been here before in my lifetime so you think about that every day between now and election day ask your friends and your neighbors without regard to their party not to make any bogus choices not to divide people in artificial ways and take the long look ahead if we do that i m pretty confident how it will all come out thank you very much dem wjclinton11 1 00b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you good morning i know we re doing the right thing because look at the day we ve got we ve got the good lord s stamp of approval on this great day ann thank you for your words and for you life and your example superintendent arnberger thank you and all the staff at grand canyon national park and through you i d like to thank all the people who work for all of our national parks i have spent quite a good deal of time as president in the national parks of america and i grew up in one i am i suppose therefore more personally indebted to the people who give their lives to the park service than perhaps any of my predecessors but i want to thank you i also want to thank all the people here from the bureau of land management for the work they do and for the remarkable partnership that will be launched here we have worked very hard these last seven years to try to get these two agencies to work together to support each other to believe in each other and to have common objectives and i think we ve made a lot of progress so i want to thank the blm people who are here as well give them all a hand thank you i want to thank the environmental groups who are here i want to welcome the children who are here we have children from grand canyon middle school and st mary s middle school and we welcome them they are a lot about what today is all about i want to thank congressman ed pastor of arizona congressman sam farr from california for joining me and former congresswoman karen english from arizona for being here thank you and i want to thank all the people from the white house who supported me in this decision my chief of staff john podesta who is here and the head of our council of environmental quality george frampton i want to thank someone i want to acknowledge particularly who worked with secretary babbitt on this his counselor molly mcusik who played a big role in what we celebrate today she s not here because she s celebrating an even bigger production yesterday she gave birth to her son benjamin so she couldn t be here but i want to acknowledge her and her service and finally i want to say this is as you can see a special day for bruce babbitt not only because he has been a devoted champion of the antiquities act and of protecting land but also because he is former governor of arizona and when we served together as governors we made it a habit hillary and i did at least once a year at these governors meetings to have dinner with bruce and hattie babbitt and he was giving me the speech that he gave here today 15 or 20 years ago i ve heard bruce s speech a lot now but it gets better every time he gives it our country has been blessed by some outstanding secretaries of the interior gifford pinchot harold ickes but i ll make a prediction i believe when our time here is done and a fair analysis of the record is made there will be no secretary of the interior in the history of the united states who has done as much to preserve our natural heritage as bruce babbitt and i thank him for that secretary babbitt talked about theodore roosevelt s role you might be interested to know that it was exactly 92 years ago today on january 11 1908 that he designated the grand canyon as one of our nation s first national monuments now the first light falls on the 21st century and this breathtaking landscape he helped to protect none of you who can see what is behind me can doubt the wisdom of that decision and so it is altogether fitting that on this day and in this place we continue that great journey this morning on the north rim of the grand canyon i designated three new national monuments and the expansion of a fourth to make sure more of the land that belongs to the american people will always be enjoyed by them what a remarkable place this canyon is it is in so many ways the symbol of our great natural expanse our beauty and our spirit thirty years ago for the first time i watched the sun set over the grand canyon for over two hours this morning i got up and for about an hour i watched the sun rise over the canyon for the first time in both cases watching the interplay of the changing light against the different layers and colors of the canyon left me with a lifetime memory i will always cherish millions and millions of americans share those memories and a love of our natural treasure in fact i believe maybe if there s one thing that unites our fractious argumentative country across generations and parties and across time it is the love we have for our land we know as president roosevelt said we cannot improve upon this landscape so the only thing we can add to it is our protection president roosevelt challenged us to live up to that ideal to see beyond today or next month or next year he said the one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight it should be the growing nation with a future which takes the long look ahead i am very grateful for the opportunities that vice president gore and i have had to build on president roosevelt s legacy to take that long look ahead to chart a new conservation vision for a new century from our inner cities to our pristine wild lands we have worked hard to ensure that every american has a clean and healthy environment we ve rid hundreds of neighborhoods of toxic waste dumps taken the most dramatic steps in a generation to clean the air we breathe to control emissions that endanger the health of our children and the stability of our climate we have made record investments in science and technology to protect future generations from the threat of global warming we ve worked to protect and restore our most glorious natural resources from the florida everglades to california s redwoods and mojave desert to escalante to yellowstone and we have i hope finally put to rest the false choice between the economy and the environment for we have the strongest economy perhaps in our history with a cleaner environment cleaner air cleaner water more land set aside safer food i hope finally we have broken the hold of an old and now wrong idea the ta nation can only grow rich and stay rich if it continues to despoil its environment and burn up the atmosphere with new conservation technologies and alternative energy sources that is simply no longer true it has not been true for quite some years now but it is only know coming to be recognized and i can tell you that in the next few years no one will be able to deny the fact that we will actually have more stable more widespread more long term economic growth if we improve the environment we are on the verge the detroit auto show this year is going to showcase cars that get 70 and 80 miles a gallon with fuel injection and dual fuel sources before you know it we will crack the chemical barriers to truly efficient production of bio mass fuels which will enable us to produce eight or nine gallons of bio mass fuels with only one gallon of oil that will be the equivalent of getting cars that use get 160 miles to a gallon of gasoline and this is just the beginning we built a low income working family housing project in the inland empire out in california in cooperation with the national home builders with glass in the windows that lets in four or five times as much light and keeps out four or five times as much heat and cold and we promised the people on modest incomes that if they moved into these homes their energy bills would be on average 40 percent lower than they would have been in a home of comparable size i can tell you that after two years they re averaging 65 percent below that so therefore their usage is much lower we are just beginning so i ask all of you not only to celebrate this happy day but to see it in the larger context of our common responsibility and our opportunity to preserve this planet now to the matter at hand we began this unforgettable morning on the edge of this magnificent park the deep canyons rugged mountains and isolated buttes of the north rim of the grand canyon tell a story written over the course of billions of years illustrated in colorful vistas and spectacular detail it is a lonely landscape a vast and vital area of open space which as secretary babbitt said includes a critical watershed for the colorado river and the grand canyon today we protect more than a million acres of this land that is an area larger than yosemite park for america s families we designated as the grand canyon parashant national monument this effectively doubles the size of protected land around the grand canyon second we act to promote some of the most significant late prehistoric sites in the american southwest in the shadow of phoenix there lies a rough landscape of mesas and deep canyons rich in archaeological treasures distinctive art etched into boulders and cliff faces and stone masonry pueblos once inhabited by several thousand people centuries ago as the suburbs of phoenix creep ever closer to this space we act to protect history and heritage for america s families we designate this land the agua fria national monument third we are protecting thousands of small islands rock outcroppings and exposed reefs along california s splendid coastline these are natural wonders and they re also the habitat and nesting ground for sea mammals and hundreds of thousands of sea birds forced from the shore because of development today we act to protect all the coastal islands reefs and rocks off california now owned by the federal government designating them the california coastal national monument help congressman farr there clap fourth and finally we will expand california s pinnacles national monument created by president roosevelt in 1908 pinnacle is about two hours from silicon valley but it s a world away it includes soaring spires from the ancient volcano it s mountain caves desert and wilderness are home to abundant wildlife and a haven for campers climbers and hikers for one and all pinnacles is a sanctuary from sprawl and for one and all we act to keep it that way now let me say again all these areas are now owned by the federal government secretary babbitt s recommendation that they be protected came as a result of careful analysis and close consultation with local citizens state and local officials members of congress clearly these lands represent many things to many people in managing the new monuments we will continue to work closely with the local communities to ensure that their views are heard and their interests are respected this is not about locking lands up it is about freeing them up from the pressures of development and the threat of sprawl for all americans for all time i have said many times that the new century finds america with an unprecedented opportunity and therefore an unprecedented responsibility for the future an opportunity and a responsibility rooted in the fact that never before in my lifetime anyway has our country enjoyed at one time so much economic prosperity social progress with the absence of internal crisis or external threat to our existence can you imagine the sacrifices laid down by our ancestors generation after generation after generation in the fond hope that one day our country would be in the shape we are now in now when we re in this sort of position we have a heavier responsibility even than our forebears did a century ago to take that long look ahead to ask ourselves what the next century holds what are the big challenges what are the big opportunities to dream of the future we want for our children and then to move aggressively to build that future so i say again there are these big challenges in the long look ahead the aging of america we ll double the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years i hope to be one of them the children of america the largest and most diverse group ever they all have to have a world class education whether they live in remote areas in arizona or the poorest inner city neighborhoods across america the families of america most of them are working they need more help to balance work and parenting and they all need access to affordable health care and child care the poor of america it is well to remember that there are people in places that have been left behind by this recovery we have a strategy of economic empowerment that should be brought to every person willing to work if we don t do it now when will we ever get around to doing it the world we live in is ever more interdependent not just on the environmental front but in many other ways we have to build a more cooperative world america is in a unique position now with our economy our military strength our political influence it won t last forever and it s almost impossible for us to avoid having people resent us but we have done our best to be responsible partners for peace and prosperity and for bridging the racial religious and ethnic gaps that tear apart so much of the world it is time for us to work with others against the dangers of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism and the other threats and to build a better world together and to build one america here at home across the lines that have divided us too deeply for too long but a big part of all of this in my opinion the long look ahead is making an absolute firm commitment that going forward here at home in america and with friends and partners throughout the world we will build a 21st century economy that is in harmony with the environment that we will continue to improve and protect even as we grow and we have to keep working until we convince people all over the world in countries that long for the level of prosperity we take for granted that they do not have to grow rich the way countries did in the 19th and the 20th century that the fastest way to grow the economy today is the most environmentally responsible way we owe that to the future taking the long look ahead as manifest in the protections we give today to the land around the grand canyon and in these other monuments is fundamentally an act of humanity and i might add also an act of humility i think it s interesting that i ll close with this i had two rather interesting experiences today only proliferally related to what we re doing one is the press asked me whether i saw this as a legacy item as if that was the reason for doing it i said well i ve been working on this stuff for seven years now and i grew up in a national park i believe in what i m doing today but i ll say again this is an act of humility for all of us when we were flying today over to the north rim when we got further west along the canyon bruce looked at me and he said see there s some dormant volcanoes and you can see the residue of the ash and i said when did that volcano erupt he said oh not very long ago 10 000 or 20 000 years and if you look out here you see 10 000 or 20 000 years from now if the good lord lets us all survive as a human race no one will remember who set aside this land on this day but the children will still enjoy it so i say to all of you i hope you will go forth from this place today with a renewed dedication to the long look ahead with a renewed sense of pride and gratitude with a sense that we have reaffirmed our humanity as well as our devotion to our natural home and a sense of humility that we are grateful we are fortunate and we are obligated to take the long look ahead thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton11 1 00c bill_clinton thank you very much well first of all let me say i am delighted to be here and delighted to see such a large crowd i keep reading in the washington press that i am a lame duck whatever that is but i think what it means is that someday you show up and no one else does so it s delightful to see you here let me say i am also profoundly grateful to jenard and gail for opening their magnificent home to us tonight and i did try to come once before and wasn t able to do so so gail i m glad your mother came twice thank you ida and i m glad you hugged me and kissed me i feel much better now thank you i want to thank mayor brown for being here he has done a superb job for houston i m very proud of lee brown you know he was our drug czar in the national administration before he got elected mayor he proved that there was life after washington and i hope it s catching i m very proud of him i want to thank lloyd and ba bentsen for being here and i don t want anybody to forget that this great economic recovery started on lloyd bentsen s watch and started before i ever took the oath of office when lloyd bentsen announced we were going to cut the deficit by 500 billion the stock market boomed interest rates went down one of us needs to show respect for the other you know the other night they had this big dinner honoring lloyd and i called in and i lathered all over him and said all these incredible things and then i got off the phone and he said now who was that guy again i want to thank my friend billy carr who taught me a lot of what i know about politics i love you and will always love you all my life thank you and thank you kathy for singing and i d also i ve got something special i want to say about sheila jackson lee but i will introduce it by saying i m glad goldie hawn came all the way from california to be with us tonight and here s what the relevance of this evening is to me i was nominated for president effectively on june 2 1992 because i won the california ohio and new jersey primaries and numerically had enough votes to win the nomination on the first ballot now some of you may remember there was a guy from texas named perot who was also running who was the rage of the moment and the next day this was supposed to be a happy night in my life but that night on television and the next day all the news stories were clinton wins the nomination but he s dead meat he can t be elected president he s running third everybody really wants to vote for perot so it was not the happiest election evening headquarters we had in los angeles at the biltmore hotel the old biltmore downtown and everybody i knew was around there feeling sorry for themselves i thought it was pretty good after all i had gotten nominated and i figured we had a few months to fix it and goldie hawn and chevy chase showed up to tell me that they didn t think we were going to finish third i have never forgotten it i never will i thank you for being here tonight thank you now what s that got to do with sheila jackson lee a lot because sheila jackson lee also sticks i hate to tell you this sometimes we make jokes about you behind your back why because you have one pace fast and one pressure level hard but let me tell you this representative from congress and i know a little something about the burdens that are imposed on members of congress so let me say i m delighted that elwin and jason are here tonight and i want to thank them for the contribution they have made to the welfare of the people of this congressional district and the people of this country because it is very difficult to have a family and serve in congress much harder than most people know it is very hard and i thank you sir thank you jason thank you but a lot of people think i came down here because they also went to yale law school that had nothing to do with it your member of congress is immensely well educated she is very attractive and she is very articulate but the best thing about her is she fights she works and she doesn t give up there are a lot of smart people in the world there are a lot of attractive people in the world the people who make a difference are the people who take whatever the opportunities and the burdens life gives them and they fight for their dreams and for the welfare of other people and that s the kind of member of congress sheila jackson lee is now all of you know that but no longer than she has been in congress that she really has established a truly astonishing record across a very wide range of issues i can t think of any member from any district that s been there the length of time she has that s done so much in so many different areas and i appreciate that in housing in mental health services especially in mental health services for children something that i think is profoundly important she s the leader of the congressional children s caucus and a great leader doing the things that we think need to be done to reduce violence against children to have sensible measures to keep guns out of the hands of criminals after school programs for children have mental health services in our schools for the children who need them and in all of these areas she has actually had an impact it s not just because she doesn t just give a speech and then go away she understands that words just drift into air and disappear unless they re backed up by deeds and not just one day s worth but consistent systematic determined effort fast and hard i loved it on the way over here tonight my chief of staff and i john podesta were sitting in the car saying i wonder what old sheila is going to ask us for tonight then we pull up in the driveway and there s mayor brown and sheila and i said my god they want me to move the capitol to houston if she decided that was the right thing to do i wouldn t bet everything i own against it getting done i say this with respect you see i think and i know i can say this for lloyd bentsen who is one of the finest public servants i ve ever known public service is an honor and most people who do it are honorable people but the special people who do it are not only honorable and passionate they stick and they work and they get things done the reason i asked him to be my first secretary of the treasury is i thought he was the best senate finance chairman i could ever imagine and i knew if i named him to be secretary of state treasury people would be serious they d say this guy really is putting the economy first this president really is going to turn the economy around serious people are people that are not only smart and articulate they get things done that s what sheila jackson lee does i could give you a lot of other examples she s been so active in africa and the fight against aids in africa in the africa trade bill and trying to pass the caribbean basin initiative trade bill and just on and on and on she is the ranking member of the subcommittee of the judicial committee on immigration a big deal for texas and to the united states yes we should enforce our immigration laws and people who wait their turn should not be discriminated against by people who don t but we should never forget looking around this room that we are a nation of immigrants except for the native americans we all came here from somewhere else and even they did but it was across a landmass that no longer exists many millennia ago and we should never forget this all of us one way or the other got here by the grace of god from somewhere else and so what we ve tried to make it clear that america is stronger because we re a nation of immigrants that our freedom to practice our faith is stronger because we welcome people of all faiths to our country and offer them the protections of our constitution for their religious and cultural practices and their right to free speech and she carries the banner of protecting those values in the united states congress like i said she just got there another thing i said to my chief of staff i said you know if sheila had been in congress for 20 years it would take me three hours to introduce her she will have done so much by then we ll just have to forego the introduction this is very important we need people like this you know i read as a lot of you know i read a lot of american history and i spent a lot of time i was asked by one of the major magazines to write an essay on the person i thought should be considered the person of the century and time magazine selected mr einstein which i think is a good selection they could have selected gandhi that would have been a good selection they could have selected franklin roosevelt or winston churchill i argued for roosevelt i spent a lot of time i went back and i re read a lot of the things i d read about roosevelt i ll tell you an interesting story shortly after roosevelt contracted polio keep in mind he was almost 40 years old when he got it he had run for vice president of the united states at the tender age of 38 he was a dashing handsome thin man he cut a great figure on the campaign trail in 1920 and he seemed to have the world at his finger tips and there he was just a couple of years later hobbled by polio and he nourished the dream for many years that he would in fact walk again and he also knew that whatever happened he had to keep fighting so at length he decided he would take an office in new york in a high rise and he would actually try to go to work there but because he wanted to leave open the possibility of walking again he would not be seen in his wheelchair so he had these big braces and at the time they were heavy and awkward and impossible to navigate and he walked into this new york high rise the first day and he got up and he fell flat on his face and there was no one there to pick him up and everyone was starring at him now keep in mind just a year or so he had run for vice president and even though the democrats had lost no one thought it was his fault and he was alone lying on his face in new york and he pushed himself up and threw his head back and laughed and smiled and drug himself across the floor to the wall straightened the braces out and pulled himself up what is the lesson in that life is 50 percent what happens to you and 50 percent in how you respond to what happens to you you can lose a lot of options in life but as long as you re breathing and thinking you ve still got some left a large number the thing is to make the most of the moment with heart i think that your member of congress has done that i admire her and i m honored to be here for her tonight thank you very much dem wjclinton11 1 01a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you all so much governor thank you very much for being here and for your leadership and your friendship and i agree that four more years sounded good to me too for you i want to thank my good friend ron machos and his wonderful wife rhonda and my buddy ronnie and his brothers for being here don t cry ronnie i m just not going to be president i m still going to be around for being to me the symbol of what my efforts in 1992 we re all about i want to thank the mayor for welcoming me to dover and giving me the key to the city i told him he said you don t have to carry this if it s too bulky he gave me a little ribbon i said i might wear it around my neck i want to thank the green wave band weren t they great i thought they were terrific and they did a great job on the way in george maglares was reminding me of all the times i ve been to dover and he said now when you get up here you re going to have my mother and my first grade teacher i met her in the bingo center in dover in 1992 and i would say ma am i ve aged a lot more than you have in the last eight years i can t tell you what a great trip this is some of my friends in new hampshire actually came up here from washington with me and a lot of the all the people who worked in the campaign wanted to come nick baldick is here of course he s practically been here since i left and david neslin came with me who worked in that campaign and every day for eight years by the way every single day i have been reminded of new hampshire because i had in my private office off the oval office a painting done by my friend cindy sexton lewis she and her husband john helped me so much of portsmouth new hampshire right before the primary with david neslin and me we re walking across the street together and cindy gave me the painting but right before i was inaugurated because it was 10 days before the primary and everybody said i was dead as a door nail and she said i looked at your expression in the paper and you had your fist clenched and your jaw clenched and i thought you would win anyway so i painted this and i decided i would wait and if you won i would give it to you so i thought that was a pretty good reminder and all the tough days i d go back and look at that picture and i would remind myself of why i ran for president and what we were doing it was a tough time eight years ago for our country when i came here you just heard a little bit about it it was also a fairly tough time for me i was taking a whipping in the press and i was dropping in the polls but i said then and i would like to say again that was nothing compared to the punishment that the people of this state and this nation were enduring as i said to you heard ron talking about it i remember walking down elm street in manchester with now judge broderick i m glad i m not here on a political trip so you can come to my meetings for a change it s nice to see you john patty thank you half the stores were vacant nobody could find a job i remember a man in merrimack who told me he had lost his job 30 days 30 days before his pension vested i remember a little girl telling me that she could hardly bear to go to dinner anymore when i was in a high school in manchester because her father had lost his job and he wept at the dinner table because he felt he had let his family down these and so many other new hampshire stories became the lifeblood of my campaign across america 10 million of our fellow citizens were out of work most with jobs were working harder for less interest rates were high the government deficit was 290 billion a year and rising our debt had quadrupled in the previous 12 years there was a crushing burden on our economy and on our kids we were also in trouble as a society welfare rolls crime drug abuse teen pregnancy income inequality all of these things were rising and some people said they didn t think we could do anything about it but i didn t believe that for a minute because as i traveled around this state as i traveled around my own home state where i had been governor for a dozen years i went across this country i saw a lot of determination and hope good people with good ideas for solving problems i knew the american people could turn the country around if we had some good ideas and we acted on them that means to me that meant that we had to have first a government that was on the side of the people that put the american people first changed to meet the challenges of a new era and so i set out as governor shaheen said nine years ago in new hampshire with this simple conviction that the american people were hungry for ideas and sick of the politics of personal destruction and paralysis i put out this little book which i bet some of you still have copies of called the plan for america s future and people made fun of me they said what s this guy doing running for president with all this look at this single spaced type who s going to read that stuff and we went to keene one night early in the primary and the people helping me up there said now look here s the way new hampshire works if we get 50 people at this town meeting i was running fifth in the polls here by the way at the time if we get 50 people at this town meeting you won t be embarrassed they won t write in the newspaper that you re an abject failure if we get 150 it will be a triumph four hundred people showed up when i was running fifth in the polls and they had the fire marshal wouldn t let them all in and i said holy moses something s going on here it turns out people really do care and i remember talking to hillary and saying you know we actually have a chance here when 400 people showed up in keene i knew we had a chance and by the way my wife said to tell you hello and thank you and when you really need it you might have a third united states senator now so we were getting toward the end of the primary and i came to dover and as i was reminded on the way in we were at the elks club i think there were tons of people there the place was packed and i didn t have any notes and all the experts said i was dead but i said what we really needed was to think about what we were going to do as a people that we needed a new government less bureaucratic but more active a new kind of politics that treated issues not as a way of dividing people but as a way of solving problems together a new set of common sense ideas for the economy for education for crime for welfare for the environment tied together by a simple philosophy opportunity for every responsible american i said you know if you elected me president we might not solve all the problems but at least you would know if you supported me when you got up in the morning you wouldn t have to worry about whether your president cared if your business is failing if you were losing your home if you couldn t get an education for your kids and i promised in that now famous line that i would work my heart out for you until the last dog dies after eight years and with almost exactly nine days to go the last dog is still barking i ve worked hard for eight years to make good on the commitments i made to you here in dover the unemployment rate then was nearly 8 percent today it is 1 7 percent across the nation the unemployment rate has dropped from 7 5 percent to 4 percent the lowest in 40 years we have the longest economic expansion in history the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest hispanic and african american unemployment rate ever recorded the highest home ownership in history we ve gone from record deficits to record surpluses at the end of this budget year which is the last one for which i am responsible we will have paid off over 500 billion of the national debt since 1993 after inflation the yearly income of the typical family is up 6 300 hourly wages up by more than 9 percent this economy has created i m proud to say yes more billionaires and more millionaires but unlike some previous recoveries this rising tide has lifted all votes all income groups have had their income increase and in the last three years the biggest percentage increase has come in the 20 percent of our workers that are earning the lowest wages we are moving forward together but i want to talk today about some of the other issues too because one of the things that really touched me in new hampshire was if people were not just interested in the economy as miserable as it was people cared about health care here they cared about the environment they cared about education they cared about crime policy they cared about welfare policy in the closing weeks of my administration i ve been trying to give a few speeches recapping where we were how we ve gotten where we are and where i hope we will go i went to the university of nebraska at kearney the only state i had not visited as president i told them just because they never voted for me didn t mean they weren t better off and i thought i ought to come and say i was glad and i talked about the world challenges we faced the foreign policy challenges i was in chicago talking about the education record and where i hope we ll go there and so i want to try to talk about these social issues today where we re going as a people because we re not just better off we re a stronger more united country crime is down welfare down nearly 60 percent teen pregnancy is the lowest rate it s been in decades we are growing more diverse but we re also growing more united and so i came here one last time as president to new hampshire to thank you for making me the comeback kid but more and far more important to thank you for making america the comeback country through all the ups and downs of the last eight years i never forgot the lesson i learned from you here in those amazing weeks in the winter of 1991 and 1992 what s important is not who is up or down in washington what s important is who is up or down in dover so let s talk a little bit about that booklet i had and what it s meant we abandoned a lot of the false choices that had paralyzed washington you had to be liberal or conservative you had to be left or right you had to be this or that and we replaced them with a new set of ideas that have now come to be called the third way because they ve been embraced not just here in america but increasingly all across the world by people who were trying to break out of outmoded political and economic and social arrangements to deal with the real challenges of the 21st century let s just go through a few of them number one in the past people believed you either had to cut the deficit or increase investment but nobody thought you could do it at the same time i thought that was a false choice i thought we had to do both if we were going to move forward as a nation which meant we had to get rid of a lot of inessential spending eliminate a lot of government programs that weren t necessary anymore get the deficit down and we even asked the people who had been most fortunate in the 1980s to pay more taxes but we promised to use it to get their interest rates down and we said they d be better off so we cut the deficit and we got lower interest rates that meant more business investment lower home mortgage rates lower car loans lower college loans it meant more jobs higher incomes and a rising stock market at the same time we doubled our investment more than doubled our investment in education and increased our commitments in health care the environment research and technology the things that are necessary to build the capacity of america for this new age and all these young people who are in this audience on welfare in the past all the debate was our compassionate obligation to help the poor on the one hand or other people saying no everybody ought to just go to work we thought that was a false choice and we replaced yesterday s welfare system with one in which work is both required of those who can work but rewarded and one in which the children are not punished for the challenges facing the parents so we cut the welfare rolls by 60 percent nationwide millions of people have moved from welfare to work we insisted however that if people are required to work they should have job training and child care and transportation and that the parents should not lose their children s rights if they re low income workers to medicaid and to food support so that you can succeed at home and at work even if you re a poor worker i think that s very very important and we raised the minimum wage and we doubled the earned income tax credit that earned income tax credit goes to the lowest earning workers in our society especially those with children because i don t believe anybody who works 40 hours a week ought to raise a kid in poverty i don t think that s right if somebody s out there doing what they re supposed to do they ought to do that now what is the result we have the lowest poverty rate we ve had in 20 years and last year we had the biggest drop in child poverty in 34 years this is working you can reward work we also tried to do some important things in health care we made sure people with disabilities could go to work without losing their health care coverage we provided coverage in medicare for screenings for breast and prostate cancer we provided health care coverage for women with breast cancer or cervical cancer we did dramatic things in diabetes research and health care coverage and sped the delivery of drugs to people who needed it with hiv and aids which has changed the entire landscape from 1992 and the length and quality of life and we made sure that people who lose their jobs or who switch jobs can do so without losing their health insurance and we limited the ability of people to be dropped for preexisting conditions we created the children s health insurance program which has enabled states to insure the children of lower income working families so that now 3 3 million more kids have health insurance and for the first time in a dozen years the number of people without health insurance is going down in america now i remember at these town meetings we ve talked a lot about crime and i had been attorney general of my state and governor and i spent a lot of time on this and one thing a politician knows running for office you will never get in trouble as long as you sound like you re the toughest person on the block about crime so nobody has to think you just say somebody commits a crime put them in jail and throw the key away but if you look at the facts where crime is going up and crime is going down it is more complicated yes serious offenders should be punished and punished severely but it was clear that we had to do more to change the environment we had had a tripling of violent crime in america in the previous 30 years the number of police on the beat had only gone up by 10 percent and so he said we need to do more to put more police on the beat we need to do more to help keep kids off the street and out of trouble we need to do more with common sense measures to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children and we can do that without interfering with the legitimate rights of hunters and sportsmen and that s exactly what we did we put 100 000 plus we re now to about 130 000 police on the street we passed a lot of measures to keep kids out of trouble and give them positive things to do six hundred thousand people who were felons fugitives or stalkers were not able to get handguns because of the brady law and notwithstanding all the recent election season rhetoric not a single missed an hour in the deer woods not a single sports person missed a sporting event but we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years one of the things that really impressed me about being in new hampshire in 92 and late 91 as terrible as the economy was there were still people who cared passionately about the environment and who understood the beauty that you have been graced with in this gorgeous state and who did not believe that we had to sacrifice a clean environment for a strong economy but that was the prevailing view not only in america but in a lot of the world that you couldn t have if you wanted to continue to have economic growth you just had to put up with a certain amount of environmental degradation it just was inevitable but the truth is in the new economy of the 21st century which is based more on ideas and information and technology than on using more energy in ways that are destructive to the environment that is not true anymore so what do we do we had new standards to clean the air and the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the drinking water is safer we ve cleaned up more toxic waste dumps twice as many in our eight years as in the previous 12 years we ve set aside more land than any administration since theodore roosevelt it includes not only the big famous places like protecting yellowstone the california redwoods the florida everglades the great roadless tracks of our national forests but green spaces in communities all across america and it turned out it worked it hasn t hurt the economy one bit and we should do more of it not less now in education the debate in the past was i thought a horribly false choice raise standards or spend money the people that wanted to raise standards said if you just throw more money into the education system it won t improve the schools people that wanted to spend more money said if you raise standards without spending more money you re just going to punish innocent children i thought to myself having spent enormous amounts of time in schools that that was the nuttiest debate i ever heard so we said look here s a simple strategy based on what principals teachers and parents say based on the fact that we had schools even then all across america including in new hampshire that were succeeding against enormous odds that we needed a strategy which said higher standards more accountability more investment and equal opportunity and we set about doing that i asked dick riley the governor of south carolina who had a superb record in education to be the education secretary he is the longest serving and the finest one in our history i believe and here s what happened in 1992 there were only 14 states that had core academic standards for what all kids should learn today there are 49 we more than doubled our investment in schools we ve expanded and improved head start the last budget had the biggest head start increase in history we re now providing federal support for the very first time for summer school and after school programs this year we ll cover 1 3 million children we ve helped schools across america to hire 37 000 new teachers to lower class size in the early grades well on our way to meeting our goal of 100 000 new teachers which will give us an average class size of 18 throughout america up to grade 3 this year for the very first time we got federal support since world war ii the very first time since right after world war ii when my generation was in school the baby boomers we got federal support to help to repair the most severely distressed schools over a billion dollars it s a huge problem we ve got schools that are so old and so overcrowded they literally i ve been in school buildings where all the power went out when they tried to hook up to the internet they literally can t do it the vice president supervised a program that we did an event in a school here in new hampshire to highlight this to try to hook up all of our schools and classrooms to the internet in 1994 when we started 3 percent of the classrooms and 35 percent of the schools had an internet connection then we passed the telecommunications act of 1996 that had the e rate to make sure that even the poorest schools could afford to hook up we got the private sector involved today 2000 we ve gone from 3 percent of the classrooms to 65 percent from 35 percent of the schools to 95 percent of the schools connected to the internet and sat scores are at a 30 year high in no small measure because there s been a 50 percent increase in the number of kids taking advanced placement courses we ve got more people then ever going on to college thanks in large measure to the biggest increase in college aid since the g i bill passed 50 years ago we passed the hope scholarship tax credit to make the first two years of college affordable to all americans we passed the lifetime tax credit for junior senior years for adults going back to school for graduate schools 13 million american families are taking advantage of this we raised the maximum pell grant it will be about 3 700 a little more actually this year and with the direct student loan program we cut the cost of college loans by 9 billion over the last seven years to our students it s worth about a 1 300 savings on every 10 000 a student borrows to go to college we ve opened the doors of college to all americans and i m very proud of that and i think you should be in the past there was this big debate about the cities some people thought if we just poured a lot more money into the cities we could solve all those problems other people thought they were a lost cause and more money wouldn t help i thought both sides were wrong so what we said is we need to drive crime out empower people to take responsibility for their own lives and get more private sector investment in because we know that government programs alone can t do the job so we brought in more money through the vice president s empowerment zone program through community development banks through strengthening a law called the community reinvestment act which had been on the books for over 20 years but had never really been enforced over 95 percent of the investment by private banks in poor areas in america has occurred since we ve been in office and it s worked it s paid off bank profits are up there are jobs up businesses are up that street in manchester i mentioned where half the store fronts were vacant in 1993 is filled with businesses today from banks to internet cafes and that kind of turnaround is going on all over the country poverty in the inner cities down 23 percent since 1993 and late last year our bipartisan new markets initiative passed which will get even more money into the inner cities into small rural communities into native american reservations across america that have been left out and left behind by this recovery now one other thing i would like to mention because in some ways it s the most important of all to me in this whole litany of social issues is embodied by ron machos up there talking about his family in the past every time there was an initiative to make the workplace more family friendly to do more child care to pass family leave legislation and things like that the other said well we would like to do that that seems like a very nice thing but it would be too burdensome to the business economy and so we can t but one thing i learned traveling here and then going across the country is that i hardly met any people who were working and had children even people with very good incomes who hadn t had experiences in their work life where they felt they were letting their kids down i hardly met anybody who hadn t had moments of tension where they were afraid that they couldn t do right by their kids or by their job they were having to choose and it seemed to me to be a terrible dilemma n ot only for families but for the society because the most important work of any society is raising children anybody who has ever had kids can tell you that if things aren t going right for your kids it doesn t matter what else is going right in your life you know it just doesn t it doesn t matter how much money you ve got it doesn t matter nothing else matters and so we set about trying to change that i am very proud of the fact the first bill i signed as president was the family and medical leave law it had previously been rejected it had previously been rejected on the grounds that it was a perfectly nice idea but if we gave some people time off from work when their kids were sick or their babies were born or the parents were sick it would be so burdensome to the economy well 22 5 million jobs later 35 million people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law we have to be pro work and pro family the work we ve done in child care all this work has been good for america the last point i want to make is this when i spoke here in dover back in 92 i said that throughout our country s history we ve always gotten in trouble when we were divided and when we were united there was nothing we couldn t do that we were becoming a much more diverse country racially religiously i was in a school in chicago a couple of days ago where half the the grade school half the student body was asian 18 percent african american 17 5 percent hispanic the rest were white ethnics almost all of them croatian americans and that s the future toward which we re moving and i said i would do what i could to build one america to have us not tolerate each other but celebrate our differences life s more interesting when you can argue around a coffee table or in a school or at a civic club or something about your differences and celebrate them but you know that you are bound together by shared values and common humanity and that those things are more fundamental one of the things i always tell people is that when it comes to anything that s social whether it s your family your school your community your business or your country winning is a team sport it s like basketball you can take michael jordan may be the greatest basketball player that ever lived but if he d gone out alone against five guys he d have lost every game and this is a team sport and i m so glad these young people from cityyear are back here because the embodiment to me i first visited cityyear in boston in 1991 and it became the basis for my proposal for national service for the creation of americorps which is the embodiment of my idea of one america americorps since we established it in 93 and it came into effect in 94 has given 150 000 young people a chance to serve in communities all across this country and earn a little money for college in six years more people have served in americorps than served in the peace corps in the first 30 years of its existence we are building one america together that s my report to you the stuff that was in this little book people made fun of me about is now real in the lives of the american people the ideas have taken hold and america is at the top of its game and i just hope that we will continue the progress and prosperity of the last eight years if we continue our policy of fiscal responsibility and investing in our people we can keep the prosperity going and be debt free for the first time since 1835 when andrew jackson was president if we continue to put more police on the street keep guns out of the hands of criminals and gives our kids something to say yes to as well as something to say no to we can make this country the safest big nation on earth if we continue to support important environmental initiatives and a strong economy we can meet the challenge of climate change and any other thing that comes down the pike if we continue to add people to the rolls of health insurance and we ought to start by including the parents of all the kids we re insuring with the children s health insurance program and the federal government has the money to help the states do that now we can achieve that cherished goal that we talked so much about in new hampshire in 1992 in providing health insurance to all american families if we keep investing more in our schools and demanding more from them we can make sure every child gets a 21st century education if we continue to require work reward work and support working families we can expand the circle of prosperity and still strengthen the fabric of our society we ve got eight years of evidence to know that these ideas were good for america and this direction is the right path the american people chose a vital common sense center eight years ago it seemed very foreign back then to washington i can remember political writers who spent the previous umpty dump years in washington saying i don t know what this guy believes does he believe anything i mean you ve either got to be a conservative or a liberal you can t be for i mean you know you ve got to be in these little boxes we ve been thinking in all these years in washington and they were so good for america these little boxes right guess what that s now the new consensus in washington people now believe that this is the right direction it s even basically the landscape against whence the last election was fought in such a close fashion there is a consensus that we have to find ways to continue to change consistent with our basic values and our common community and humanity now as you look ahead let me just say because conflict is always more interesting than consensus i expect most of the press coverage will continue to be about the politics and the division but let s just look at what happened last year in congress an election year for congress and for the presidency that was very closely fought in the senate the house and for the white house last year while all this was going on and you d have thought nobody ever agreed on anything here s what happened we had the biggest and best education budget in history we passed for the very first time in history a lands legacy initiative to give a stable source of funding to continue to set aside public lands from big tracts to local greenspaces never happened before we lifted the earnings limit on social security we provided health care coverage for people suffering from breast and cervical cancer that couldn t get it elsewhere we passed this new markets initiative which is the biggest thing we ve ever done to try to get private investment into poor areas we had truly historic trade agreements with africa the caribbean nations our neighbors with china with vietnam and one with jordan which has groundbreaking language that i ve always wanted in all our trade agreement to include basic labor and environmental standards and we passed something that i think is profoundly important that everybody from the pope to international entertainers have asked us to pass a debt relief package for the poorest nations in the world that they can get but only if they invest 100 percent of the money in education health care and economic development for their people now that s what happened last year when everybody told you how divided we were there is a new consensus here in this country for moving forward and i just want to ask you you re going to continue to be first in the nation you re going to continue to be in some ways the guardians of america s politics don t you e dem wjclinton11 1 01b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you those are the americorps rowdies over there thank you very much well president freeland let me begin by saying i m delighted to be back at northeastern i remember so well when i spoke here to your commencement early in my term i remember the honorary degree i got now that i have to make a living maybe i can put it to some use i remember the young man who spoke there representing the students all the students whose hands i shook and whose stories i heard this is a great american urban institution of opportunity and i am honored to be back i thank you for that mayor menino mr mayor i thank you for being my friend and for proving that the ideas that al gore and i brought to the american people in 1992 and 1996 would work anywhere because you made them work in boston whether it was the economy crime welfare education you did it you might be interested to know mr mayor we re still borrowing from boston just last week we announced that we re going to give federal employees the same benefit you have given to boston city workers time off for medical screenings to catch cancer and other problems early on thank you again mr mayor and to your representative mr capuano i have never heard you give such a vigorous public speech in my life and you even talked about things i d forgotten i d done but your congressional district and this state have been wonderful to me and you have been great and i thank you and i thank you for what you ve done for them in congress and i want to thank bill delahunt who has been so great on many issues but who s been particularly helpful in pushing our criminal justice agenda in the united states congress giving us the lowest crime rate in america in 25 years and i want to thank jim mcgovern for many things but i think everyone in massachusetts should know that congressman mcgovern was the number one advocate in congress for one of the most recent initiatives we announced which is that the united states of america is going to provide a free hot nutritious meal to 9 million children in poor countries throughout the world if they will come to school in their countries thank you jim mcgovern now finally let me say i don t know what to say about senator kennedy i met ted kennedy i met in 1978 in memphis tennessee at the midterm convention of the democratic party i was the governor elect of my state 32 years old looked like i was about 20 you all in the last eight years have taken care of that and they said to me that president carter s administration called and they said governor we want you to moderate this panel in memphis on health care and i had been a big supporter of president carter you know they said we think that you can keep everything in a good humor and on our side we re going to have joe califano who was the secretary of health education and welfare he was a very great fellow by the way and the number one advocate in america for doing something about the dangers of tobacco and a lot of other things he had done a lot of great things and on the other side we re going to have senator kennedy who thinks that we re too weak on health care i said you want me to bridle ted kennedy and i m 32 years old and i so i said okay i ll do it i just wanted to be on the program and see if i could keep up you know so we had this incredible meeting on health care and i don t even know if i ve ever said this to him but he got up and he talked about his beloved son and the health problems he had had how he had managed to survive and survives to this day had a magnificent life and how wrong it was that his son had done well because of the good fortunes of his family but that other families didn t and he made an impression on me that day that had lasted over these 22 plus years and i promised myself that day that if i ever got a chance to give health care to more americans and keep more young children like his son alive i would do it i owe him that for 22 years and i have not had a better friend or stronger advocate in the united states senate these last eight years and i can tell you that no member of the senate is more respected even by the republicans they hate to admit it in public but you get them in private and they ll tell you the same thing he is the best and most effective member of the united states senate now in these last eight years ted and vicki and our families have become we ve become much closer and he s taken a lot of risks for his friendship with me i know what you re thinking but that s not the risk you took he let me sail his boat into the menemsha harbor i come from a landlocked state and he still let me sail his boat into menemsha harbor i will never forget that and all i could do in return was help send hillary to the senate to give him a little support and i ve done the best i could thank you three former presidents have spoken in this hall three presidents in whose tradition and footsteps i have tried to follow theodore roosevelt the last great progressive republican president franklin roosevelt and your john kennedy when franklin roosevelt spoke here in 1932 in the campaign his first he said we are through with delay we are through with despair we are ready for better things that s exactly how i felt when i came here in 1992 and massachusetts and the city of boston as you have heard more than any other state in the union gave me a chance to work hard to bring better things to the united states thank you thank you thank you i am here more than anything else just to say thank you there are a few places i felt i had to go in the closing days of my term just to thank people a couple of days ago i went back to chicago which is my wife s home town and to east lansing michigan where they have a basketball team you may have noticed they come over here sometimes i went there because those two states voted for me on st patrick s day in 1992 and sealed my nomination i went back to new hampshire today because anybody here from new hampshire because that s where it all started and because i was pronounced dead by all the pundits and the people of new hampshire decided they would lift me up and since they raised me up i wanted to go back and thank them but as you have heard repeatedly in election after election and in good times and bad the one place that i knew would always be there to stick with bill clinton al gore and the direction we were taking america was boston and the state of massachusetts and i could not leave office without coming here to say thank you thank you now i mostly want you to think about the future because most of the people in this audience are young and because america is always about the future but i want to take a minute to walk down memory lane eight years ago when i came here 10 million americans were out of work the deficit was 290 billion and rising the debt of the country had quadrupled in the previous 12 years imposing a crushing burden on our children welfare rolls crime rates drug abuse teen pregnancy income inequality all were going up what a difference eight years can make the one thing that hasn t been said tonight that i want to say again is i believe politics should be about uniting people not dividing them should be about ideas not insults we had ideas in 1992 that we believed could put the american people first and build our bridge to a new century and a whole new aspect of human affairs all of you who are students here will live in a time where people look work live and relate to one another in ways that are profoundly different than the america in which i grew up and it is important that we hold fast to the basic values of this country opportunity for every responsible citizen a community of all americans and that we didn t have the courage to implement ideas that will meet the challenges of this era that s what i tried to do i tried to make politics in washington about you not about the politicians and the pundits in washington about ideas not about insults about how you were doing not how we were doing in boston when i took the oath of office unemployment was 6 9 percent today it s 1 9 percent poverty is down average income is up nearly 20 percent crime has dropped as the mayor said by more than a third and we ve been there to help the same thing has happened in the nation unemployment is at a 30 year low we have 22 5 million new jobs the longest economic expansion in history the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded the lowest female unemployment in 40 years now because we turned those record deficits into record surpluses in this last budget year it s the last one for which i am responsible when it s over we will have paid down 500 billion on the national debt meaning lower interest rates for college loans home mortgages car payments business loans more jobs higher incomes a brighter future for all americans but there were ideas behind this there were ideas behind getting the crime rate down ideas practiced in boston you know before i became president i noticed out there in the country looking at washington that most politicians thought the only way to be safe on crime was just to talk tough and if you were just for catching whoever you could catch and putting them in jail and throwing the key away you would never get in trouble on crime on the other hand you d never lower the crime rate either so we said no let s put 100 000 police on the street let s do more to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals the brady bill kept 600 000 felons fugitives and stalkers from getting hand guns we put 130 000 police on the street on welfare the democrats defended the programs that supported the poor as we should many in the other party said oh they don t want to work we ought to cut them off i thought that was nuts i had spent enough time in welfare offices to know that people did want to work but you couldn t expect people to go to work if they were going to have to hurt their kids so we said okay require able bodied people to work but train them give them child care give them transportation and don t take the food and the medicine away from the kids and the parents if they go to work and it worked there were people who said well the cities are economic basket cases and nobody wants to put their money there i thought that was not true and we revitalized the community reinvestment act a law that basically says banks have to put money back into their communities it seems reasonable but it had been on the books since the 1970s and hardly any money had been put back into poor communities in the eight years we ve been in now this law s been on the books for over 22 years 95 percent of all the money 15 billion or more have been put back into communities under the community reinvestment act we created this empowerment zone program that the vice president ran we created community development banks solely to loan money to people who couldn t get money otherwise we did a lot of other things to put more housing in to let poor people who were working have houses in different kinds of neighborhoods the economic justice issue that your congressman mentioned was very important the environmental justice because we found that we couldn t get people to invest unless we cleaned up urban brownfields for example and we stopped people from being exposed to various kinds of pollution just because they happened to be poor all over the country poverty in the inner cities has fallen by 23 percent and wages have grown even faster than in the country as a whole in education with the leadership of senator kennedy we have reduced the size of the federal government to its smallest size since his brother was president we got rid of the deficit and turned surpluses but we more than doubled our investment in education in these last eight years thank you ted kennedy for that just this year when we took office only 3 percent of the classrooms and 35 percent of the schools in this country had an internet connection today 65 percent of the classrooms and 95 percent of the schools are connected to the internet and thanks to the vice president s e rate program they can afford to log on and to use it for their students we never gave any money to cities for after school and summer school programs thanks to the leadership of senator kennedy this year in the budget we just signed there s money to keep 1 3 million kids in the united states of america in after school programs so they don t get in trouble and they do learn their lessons president freeland talked about the college aid program the pell grant this year will be 3 750 a huge increase thirteen million families are taking advantage of the hope scholarship tax credit and the lifetime learning tax credit the direct loan program has saved students 9 billion in college loan costs if your school is in it anywhere in america the average 10 000 loan is 1 300 cheaper for an american student to pay off than it was when we took office we are moving this country toward a more educated society and a more united one the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the drinking water is safer the food is safer we ve cleaned up twice as many toxic waste dumps in eight years as the previous two administrations did in 12 and we ve set aside more land in perpetuity than any administration since theodore roosevelt 100 years ago and all the way people said this is bad for the economy it turned out not to be so we also have tried to help people balance work and family raising the minimum wage raising the earned income tax credit for lower wage workers one of the things i m proudest of about this economic recovery is that yes we made more billionaires and millionaires and that s good but we also had everybody doing better and in the last three years working families in the lowest 20 percent of the income group had the highest percentage increase in income this program is raising all of them i remember when senator kennedy and senator dodd and some others were pushing the family medical leave law it had already been vetoed once before i became president because everybody said this is bad for business you know it s a nice idea letting somebody off for work when a baby s born or a baby s sick or the parent s sick or the wheels have totally run off in the family but it just is something we can t possibly afford i thought that was crazy because i can tell you once you become a parent everything else in life can be going right for you and if your kid s having trouble nothing works nothing else matters nothing in the world matters if something s wrong with your family all the success in the world all the wealth in the world nothing matters and i don t know anybody my age or younger that hasn t had some conflict between work and patenting even upper income people this is a big challenge for all of you by the way in the future so the first law i signed was the family and medical leave law and i heard all that going on about how terrible it was going to be well let me tell you something we ve had the law on the books now for 7 5 years you know what s happened thirty five million people have taken advantage of it and 22 5 million new jobs have been created we were right and they were wrong about that you have to balance work and family the most important thing i worked on is embodied by the kids in americorps our national service program senator kennedy and i were together when we signed the bill on the south lawn and i signed it with the same pen john kennedy used to sign the bill creating the peace corps in the last 6 5 years we ve had over 150 000 young people working in community service and earning some money to go to college it s not all we did we also fought for stronger civil rights enforcement we sought to reduce discrimination against gays in the federal workplace and throughout the country and i hope by the way senator now that we ve got a little bit better congress i hope we will pass the hate crimes bill and the employment non discrimination bill and the equal pay laws in this session of congress but in just the last year of my service at a time when most people say we couldn t get anything done because it was my last year and besides they were having a presidential race and the congressional races and everything seemed so divided in congress thanks to the support of the people on this platform and people like them throughout the country we ve passed the biggest and best education budget ever the biggest increase in head start ever we set aside for the first time in the lands legacy program a permanent fund to buy precious lands and greenspaces in cities from now on all over america to protect land never happened before we got the first money ever from the federal government since world war ii to help repair schools that are in trouble because we ve got so many kids in schools that are so old they re falling down or so overcrowded half the kids are in trailers we passed legislation designed to get new investment in the cities the new markets initiative a completely bipartisan initiative we did what i said with congressman mcgovern s plan we re going to provide over the next several years if we keep working at it we ll be able to offer every poor child in every poor country in the world a good nutritious meal if they come to school sixty percent of the kids in this world who are not in school are girls this is a huge problem all over the world and just by feeding them we ll be able to get them to school that will change the whole future of the world the young people will be able to live in and that s just part of what we did what s the point of all this here s the point i want to make for you for you young people here eight and a half days from now when i walk out of the white house at high noon on january 20th i want you to know something i will leave more optimistic than i entered i will be more idealistic than i was the day i first took the oath of office as president this country can do whatever we have to do we can meet any challenge we can seize any opportunity but we have to remember basic things we really do have to put people first and you really do have to believe that we all are part of one community politics is about addition and multiplication not subtraction and division it s about teamwork it s about working together and there are so many things out there for you the best days in this country are still out there but there are some big challenges out there and i hope you will never forget these eight years i hope you will always be proud of the support you gave to me and to al gore and what we did but believe me the greatest gift you could ever give me is to never lose the fervor i sense in this room tonight never lose your belief in your country never lose your belief in your capacity to change it for the better and never get tired when you don t win every election bear down look forward the best is still out there i will always love massachusetts thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton11 1 94 bill_clinton thank you so much can you hear me in the back well i m doing the best i can but if you ll be a little more quiet i ll be a little louder and maybe you can hear can you hear now i will do the best i can and you do the best you can mayor archer county executive ed mcnamara congressman carr folks bob carr gave a good speech and you ought to give him a good vote on november the 8th and send him to the united states senate and i hope you will support howard wolpe and debbie stabenow i thank senator riegle senator levin congressman conyers congressman ford congressman kildee congressman dingell congressman bonior and two people you ought to send to congress bob mitchell and lynn rivers i thank them all for being here i m glad to see your secretary of state dick austin and i want to ask you to support judge conrad mallett who is not here today i thank the straight gate gospel choir the murray wright high school band the mason drummer corps and jennifer holiday was she great or what ladies and gentlemen we re a week before election there have been some clouds in this election but they re starting to clear the sun is coming out the choice is becoming stark and clear and unambiguous do we want to go forward or turn back do we want to support people who vote for ordinary americans or people who just vote for organized interest groups you know 21 months ago let them talk wait they couldn t get a crowd like this they had to come to ours and we welcome a little free speech and debate if we had more of it we d be doing even better in this election let me ask you something folks when we came here 21 months ago you elected me president to change this country and to move this country forward to face up to 30 years of social problems 20 years of economic stagnation 12 years of their trickle down economics and four years of the worst job growth since the great depression we said we could change that and we ve been working at it steadily to make this government work for ordinary people to get this economy going again to empower people so that they can compete in this global economy and to make this world safer and more secure and i tell you folks there are still a lot of problems in america but we have made a very good start this country is in better shape and we don t need to go back now if you look at michigan alone because of the work of our administration with the help of these members of congress behind us 1 5 million workers are now protected by the family and medical leave law so they can take a little time off when a baby is born or a parent is sick 400 000 working families with children in their homes got a tax cut so they won t fall into poverty if they re working full time and raising their kids you heard the mayor talking about the crime bill more police more prisons tougher punishment and prevention to give our children something to say yes to as well as something to say no to we brought down the deficit that the other party only talked about we slashed the bureaucracy they only complained about we cut the regulations that they only gagged over but never did anything about when we put this economic strategy forward the republicans said if it passed the economy would collapse well they were wrong in 21 months we have cut the deficit three years in a row for the first time since truman was president we have shrunk the federal government but we have invested more in your jobs your future and we have 4 6 million new jobs in america in michigan we ve seen a 1 5 percent plus drop in the unemployment rate is there more to do you bet there is yes there is but if there s more to do we ought to keep on doing what we ve been doing for 21 months not go back to what worked so poorly for 12 years before it was in the last 21 months that we expanded the head start program that we passed a law to immunize all the kids in this country under the age of two by 1996 that we passed laws to have apprenticeship programs all over this country to help people who don t want to go to college move from school to work into good jobs not dead end jobs we passed the reform in the student loan laws to provide for lower cost longer repayment student loans so that every middle class student in this country and every poor kid in this country can afford to go to college and get a good education and not drop out and not turn back in michigan alone 580 000 people will be eligible for better terms on their college loans because of this administration and its partners in the congress and let me just say this i noticed that mr carr s opponent ran a television ad using my voice against him saying if it hadn t been for him we wouldn t have passed the economic program well that s why your unemployment rate is down that s why your jobs are up that s why this country is moving forward but i want to give you another one and i bet you won t see this in his television ad if it hadn t been for bob carr we would never have had the votes to reform the student loan program we wouldn t be having 20 million more americans eligible for lower interest rates lower costs better repayment terms if the other fellow had been there it never would have happened and that s the kind of choice we re facing in this election what have they done they said no to student loan reform they said no to the crime bill they said no to family leave they said no to the reduction of the deficit they said no to economic recovery that s what they did they killed campaign finance reform and lobby reform and the superfund bill to clean up the toxic waste dumps and now they have told us what they will do if you put them in office they want to take us back back to trickle down economics back to massive tax cuts on the wealthy they have made you a trillion dollars worth of promises elect us they say and all will be easy tax cuts spending increases a balanced budget does it sound familiar their contract on america doesn t say much about how they re going to pay for this but they do say that if you give them power they will cut 9 billion worth of college loans for over three million students we ought to be sending more people to college not less people vote for the democrats and keep this country moving forward listen to this this is their argument this is their argument they say well this is a tough election for republicans the democrats took our issues away we were always for jobs against crime against big government we were active in foreign policy now the democrats have given us three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since truman the smallest federal government since kennedy the toughest crime bill ever a growing economy in a safer and more secure world we would be saying if we did it that we should build a statue to the republicans if we d done it but my goodness the democrats did it how are we going to run this race i know they say we will deny that it happened we will take the cynicism of the public and build on it we will take the skepticism of the public and feed it we will take the unbelievable reluctance of people to believe in this country again and we will stoke it we will divide the people we will throw a smokescreen over the election we will attack them for big government and taxes even though they cut taxes on working people and gave us less government and moved the economy forward and made the country safer that s what their program is their program my fellow americans is to keep everybody shouting keep the country in a turmoil keep the people upset let me tell you something this country has problems there are still too many people who are worried about losing their jobs who haven t gotten a raise who are afraid they ll lose their health care who are looking for work and don t have it but the country is in better shape than it was 21 months ago don t let them sucker you keep going where we re going show up on election day stand up for what is right don t turn back we can do better i just got back from an incredible trip i saw our fine soldiers in the persian gulf standing up for freedom there i saw the peace in the middle east i saw the faces of millions of people looking at america looking to america for support let me tell you something folks from northern ireland to haiti to the persian gulf to the middle east to korea people say we like the united states it s a country of energy a country of freedom a country of growth a country of tomorrow they are not cynical about us i wish you could have seen the faces of our young men and women in uniform in the persian gulf there in the desert and all those soldiers from other countries looking at them i wish you could see the faces of the haitians holding up their little thank you america sign when president aristide went home and democracy came back to those people they aren t cynical about america folks 90 percent of the cynics about america are in america they listen to people who are screaming all the time who are shouting all the time who are trying to divide this country all the time let me tell you something this is a very great country and its best days are ahead of it our best days are ahead of us we have challenges ahead of us we do not need the easy promises and the failed policies of the past we need to say this is america we re getting this economy going we re educating our people we re making this government work for average americans again this world is going to be safer and more prosperous we are going into the future say no to the failed policies of the past say yes to going to the future say no to fear and yes to hope say no to the people who are always trying to denigrate everything we do to move this country forward and say yes to bob carr and the other democrats who are running for you and your future thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton11 10 95 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen i want to begin by again welcoming president and mrs zedillo and the members of the mexican delegation to all of our distinguished guests hillary and i are pleased to welcome you back to the white house i have known president zedillo less than a year now but i feel as if i have known him for a very long time because of the remarkable similarities in our lives some of which will surprise you perhaps some of which will amuse you both of us were lucky enough to come from families where everyone worked hard his mother was a nurse and so was mine we both had the chance to do graduate work in england and both continued our studies at yale on scholarships we both married up like her husband mrs zedillo is a trained economist and a quite good one and i thought i would be a pretty good lawyer until i met hillary most important of all and most unbelievably to me we both went to acapulco on our honeymoons and we both went on our honeymoons not only with our wives but with our in laws what that says about our judgment character and vision i leave for you to determine but mr president we clearly have a lot in common we are also privileged to lead two great nations whose histories and destinies are intertwined our strides are longer and our burdens are lighter because we advance together in partnership president zedillo you took office at a time of great challenge for your country you held up a vision of mexico for the future a mexico united in democracy and in prosperity you also knew that mexico would have to change to succeed and you called on the mexican people to join in your campaign for progress only three short weeks later financial crisis struck and pessimists predicted collapse but while those people were wringing their hands mr president you and i were ringing each other on the telephone i knew that you were determined to lead mexico forward and we both knew that we were in the fight for the future together the united states rallied the international community to mexico s cause and you mr president made the courageous and difficult choices that opened the door to recovery without closing the door to reform because of your faith in the people of mexico because of your love for your homeland because of your willingness to lead by example putting long term good ahead of short term gain mexico s economy is back on track and its democracy is stronger than ever and mr president the united states is proud to be your partner in your inaugural address you offered the following challenge let it be said of us that we have dared have high aspirations and we knew how to make our dreams come true with respect to your achievements let us raise a glass to your dreams and honor the president and the people of mexico the ties that bind us and the friendship between us and our common vision and destiny in the future viva mexico dem wjclinton11 11 95 bill_clinton thank you secretary brown for your introduction and for your remarkable service on behalf of the veterans of the united states general foley commander liwak distinguished leaders of all our veterans organizations secretary brown secretary perry general shalikashvili attorney general reno senator simpson especially to my friend congressman montgomery i want to join the remarks that were earlier made and thank you sir for your lifetime of service to the united states and for your unparalleled service to the veterans of the united states we will all miss you and we thank you to our men and women in uniform and their families here today and most of all of course to all of our veterans and their families and to the gold star mothers and wives their survivors who are here today my fellow americans on this day that marked the end of world war i we close the 50 year commemoration of the end of world war ii together on this day we offer a prayer for peace and a tribute to those who defend it all across this land a symphony of 50 bells will soar together on this day we say thank you to those who stepped forward to safeguard our security and our ideals today this day our grateful nation is united to honor america s veterans this year we have paid special homage to the world war ii generation from the windswept beaches of normandy to the craggy rocks of corregidor meeting the americans who fought in that struggle has been one of the great privileges i have had as your president later today we will honor all of them in dedicating the site of the world war ii memorial ensuring that we will never never forget those who suffered and sacrificed so that future generations of americans might be free they followed in the footsteps of others who came before them from those who battled for our independence to those who braved the trenches in the war to end all wars and clearly they inspired successive generations of heroes men and women who fought in korea vietnam and the persian gulf who steadily won the cold war who served with such skill and compassion in haiti who saved so many lives in more than one place in africa who halted the bosnia serb attacks against innocent civilians and the men and women who even as we gather here safeguard the frontiers of freedom with their courage their commitment and their confidence our nation has obligations to all those who wear our uniform ensuring that our military remains the strongest in the world leaving no stone unturned in the search for the fullest possible accounting for americans who never came home supporting our citizen soldiers the guard and the reserves whom we call on increasingly to serve overseas and ensuring that when our men and women in uniform leave the service we do not leave them from education to employment from buying a home to getting quality medical care our veterans deserve and must have their nation s unfaltering support for our peace our freedom our prosperity is surely the legacy of their service much of this responsibility still falls upon our federal government we must uphold the commitment established first by president franklin roosevelt to give veterans preference for federal jobs and we are even as we shrink the work force of the national government to its lowest level since president kennedy served here the percentage of permanent jobs in the government going to our veterans has grown over the last three years we must rally the resources for veterans benefits and we are even as we cut government spending and my fellow americans our annual deficit as a percentage of our income is now lower than that of any other industrial country in the entire world except for norway even as we do that i have sought more than a 1 billion increase in health funding for the va so that we can provide better care for even more veterans and even as we enjoy a 15 year high in homeownership among americans we must not forget that there are too many homeless americans and an extraordinary percentage of them are veterans later today a group of distinguished american entertainers will attempt to make america laugh to raise funds and increase awareness of the problems of the homeless and they do it on this veterans day to remind us that it is a national disgrace that people who are willing to lay down their lives for this country do not have a roof over which they will lay down their heads tonight and we must continue to fight that we are committed to active communication with our veterans we have to do more to bring the men in on the decisions that affect their lives we will continue to pursue answers and provide relief for gulf war veterans with unexplained illnesses just three days ago we launched a major study to help address the concerns of persian gulf veterans about their health and that of their spouses and their children and we are working hard to meet the special concerns of women veterans the needs of disabled veterans and the precious debt we owe to veterans families but government cannot and should not do this job alone supporting our veterans is not the government s job it s america s job over the last three years i have visited our troops all around the world i have stood in the desert of kuwait with our vigilant warriors who stopped iraqi aggression this time before it could start i have met our fliers in ramstein germany who delivered supplies and hope to bosnia in the largest humanitarian airlift of all time i have visited the men and women of operation uphold democracy who ended the terror and turned on the lights for the freedom loving people in haiti i have been to korea where the steady presence of our americans in uniform has been indispensable to our successful efforts to end the nuclear threat and maintain the peace there wherever i go i see firsthand the dedication the skill the ingenuity of our men and women in uniform i see the legacy of world war i world war ii korea vietnam the cold war desert storm all of our other encounters in these young people who get better and better and better at what they do every year more than 275 000 of these talented americans finish their military service and return to civilian life the strength they bring to our armed forces can and indeed must fortify our nation s civilian economy and fiber of civic life so on this veterans day let me urge every employer in america in the public and the private sector to tap the invaluable source of america s veterans to recognize their loyalty and their commitment after all they volunteered sometimes for jobs of great danger and risk to recognize their skill their creativity their dedication there are so many ways in which we can now say nobody does it better america s veterans are leaders and winners and they can help america to compete and win but they must be given the opportunity to serve and to work as we reflect on the challenges that these veterans have met so successfully in the recent and in the distant past my fellow americans let us today rededicate ourselves to meet the new challenges we face today because of the work of our veterans our nation remains the world s strongest force for peace and freedom for democracy and prosperity and the world is moving in our direction we can be very thankful that on this veterans day for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear era there are no russian missiles pointed at the children of the united states we can be thankful for that but as the painful events of recent days have reminded us the forces of darkness and division have not been destroyed threats like the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction violence rooted in ethnic religious and racial hatred organized crime and drug trafficking and especially terrorism call upon us to respond just as our veterans faced down the threats of a previous era so now we must confront these challenges of this time just as congress and the president join in bipartisan spirit over the last 50 years to protect our nation s security so we must join today i am proud of the work our military is doing in the fight to keep illegal drugs out of america and the fight to break the terrible drug cartels of the world i am proud of the work our law enforcement people have done here at home and abroad to combat terrorism from bringing terrorists to justice from all across the world to actually stopping terrorists plots in the united states before they succeed but as we saw in the world trade center and at oklahoma city and as we saw so recently in the tragic tragic murder of israel s great leader and military hero prime minister rabin there is more to be done giving our officials the tools they need to defeat terrorism is now a part of our national security mission just as maintaining a strong national defense is this matter must be beyond party all of us must rise to the challenge to meet it as we close this commemoration of world war ii let me thank again general licklighter and all those who helped to make it possible and let me urge all of us to summon the spirit that joined that generation that stood together and cared for one another the ideas they fought for are now ours to sustain the dreams they defended are now ours to guarantee in war they crossed racial and religious sectional and social divisions to become one force for freedom now in a world where lives are literally being torn apart all over the globe by those very divisions let us again lead by the power of example let us remember their example let us live our motto e pluribus unum from many one let us grow strong together not be divided and weakened let us find that common ground for which so many have fought and died on this hillside of honor and respects let us once again humbly thank our veterans for answering the call to duty for what they did in times of crisis and war and what they did to preserve the peace let us remain ever grateful for all they have done and for what we owe them let us never be forgetful we must and we will meet our obligations and secure our future if we remember all of that my fellow americans that is our mission and we must fulfill it thank you god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton11 11 98 bill_clinton thank you very much secretary west for those extraordinary remarks and your equally extraordinary service to our nation commander tanguma general ivany superintendent metzler chaplain maddry lee thornton thank you for being with us again this year to the distinguished leaders of our veterans organizations general ivany members of congress members of the cabinet secretary cohen and the joint chiefs the clergy the veterans and their families the members of the armed services here we thank especially the marine band my fellow americans if you will let me begin on a point of personal privilege i was especially proud to listen to commander tanguma s speech today it was about 10 months almost to the day from this day that he and i were together in mission texas his hometown he brought with him a distinguished group of catholic war veterans including a number from texas including a member of his post the former chairman of the house agriculture committee congressman kika de la garza we re glad to see you here sir what i want you to know is that in spite of all the incredible valor of hispanic soldiers in our country s war he is the very first hispanic veteran ever to host this event it is a great honor for all americans that this has finally come to pass and we thank you sir for being here today as a free nation we come together to honor the men and women to whom we owe our freedom to pay our own tribute here at this most sacred memorial to our nation s past not only today but every day some of us have the privilege to glance across the potomac to see these silent white rows inscribed with their crosses and crescents and stars of david to remind us that our achievements in peace are built on the sacrifices of our veterans in war and that we owe the most solemn debt to these brave americans who knew their duty and did it so very well we come together today to acknowledge that duty to them a duty to provide for our veterans and their families to give them every possible opportunity to improve their education to find a job to buy a home to protect their health just this morning i was proud to sign in the presence of some of the veterans leaders here the veterans programs enhancement act which will increase compensation payments to veterans with disabilities as well as benefits to the survivors of americans who died serving our country i have also directed the secretaries of defense veterans administration and health and human services to establish a military and veterans health coordinating board to improve health care for our armed forces our veterans and our families and to make sure we know what the health risks are to our soldiers when we send them into harm s way we have a duty as well to remember the history that our veterans lived and to appreciate and honor the history they made we cannot expect future generations to understand fully what those who came before saw experienced and felt in battle but we can make sure that our children know enough to say thank you those two simple words that can mean as much or even more than a medal we can preserve their diaries and documents their letters home their stories of sorrow and pride neither the passage of time nor the comforts of peace should drive the memory and meaning of their sacrifice from the consciousness of our nation we owe this to every american who fought in this century s wars we owe it as well to the millions of americans who served in our armed forces during the cold war because they stood ready we live in a very different world no longer is there a single over riding threat to our existence former adversaries are becoming our partners still this remains a dangerous world and peace can never be a time for rest for maintaining it requires constant vigilance we can be proud that the united states has been a force for peace in northern ireland in the middle east in haiti in bosnia in kosovo we have been able to secure peace because we have been willing to back up our diplomacy where necessary with military strength nowhere is our vigilance more urgent than in the persian gulf where saddam hussein s regime threatens the stability of one of the most vital regions of the world following the gulf war and as a condition for the cease fire the united nations demanded and iraq agreed to disclose and destroy its chemical biological and nuclear weapons capabilities this was no abstract concern saddam has fired scuds at his neighbors attacked kuwait and used chemical weapons in the war with iran and even on his own people to ensure that iraq made good on its commitments the united nations kept in place tough economic sanctions while exempting food medicine and other humanitarian supplies to alleviate the suffering of the iraqi people the u n also established a group of highly professional weapons inspectors from dozens of countries a group called unscom to oversee the destruction of iraq s weapons capability and to monitor its ongoing compliance for seven years now iraq has had within its power the ability to put itself on the path to ending the sanctions and its isolation simply by complying with obligations it agreed to undertake instead it has worked to shirk those obligations withholding evidence about its weapons capability threatening harassing blocking the inspectors massing troops on the kuwaiti border in the south attacking the kurds in the north our steadfast determination in maintaining sanctions supporting the inspections system enforcing a no fly zone and responding firmly to iraqi provocations has stopped iraq from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction arsenal or from threatening its neighbors seriously now over the past year iraq has intensified its efforts to end the weapons inspection system last fall threatening to overthrow to throw american inspectors off the unscom teams then in january denying unscom unfettered access to all the suspect weapon sites both times we built diplomatic pressure on iraq backed by overwhelming force and baghdad reversed course indeed in march again it gave a solemn commitment this time to u n secretary general kofi annan that it would reopen all of iraq to international weapons inspectors without conditions or restrictions in august for the third time in only a year again iraq severely restricted the activities of the weapons inspectors again we have gone the extra mile to obtain compliance by peaceful means working through the u n security council and with our friends and allies to secure a unanimous security council resolution condemning iraq s action we also supported along with all the members of the security council what iraq says it wants a comprehensive review of iraq s compliance record provided saddam resumes full cooperation with the unscom inspectors now if saddam hussein is really serious about wanting sanctions lifted there is an easy way to demonstrate that let unscom do its job without interference fully comply the international community is united that saddam must not have it both ways by keeping his weapons of mass destruction capability and still getting rid of the sanctions all of us agree that we prefer to resolve this crisis peacefully for two reasons first because accomplishing goals through diplomacy is always preferable to using force second because reversing iraq s decision and getting unscom back on the job remains the most effective way to uncover destroy and prevent iraq from reconstituting weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them but if the inspectors are not permitted to visit suspect sites or monitor compliance at known production facilities they may as well be in baltimore not baghdad that would open a window of opportunity for iraq to rebuild its arsenal of weapons and delivery systems in months i say again in months not years a failure to respond could embolden saddam to act recklessly signalling to him that he can with impunity develop these weapons of mass destruction or threaten his neighbors and this is very important in an age when we look forward to weapons of mass destruction being a significant threat to civilized people everywhere and it would permanently damage the credibility of the united nations security council to act as a force for promoting international peace and security we continue to hope indeed pray that saddam will comply but we must be prepared to act if he does not many american service men and women are serving in the persian gulf today many others serving elsewhere around the world keeping the peace in bosnia watching over the dmz in korea working with our friends and allies to stop terror and drugs and deadly weapons too often we forget that even in peacetime their work is hard and often very dangerous just three days ago four brave dedicated american flyers lieutenant commander kirk barich lieutenant brendan duffy lieutenant meredith carol loughran and lieutenant charles woodard all four were lost in a crash aboard the uss enterprise today our prayers are with their families when we give our armed forces a mission there is a principle we must keep in mind we should never ask them to do what they are not equipped to do but always equip them to do what we ask them to do the more we ask the greater our responsibility to give our troops the support and training they require and the tools they need from basic spare parts to the newest technology as commander in chief i have no higher duty than this to make certain our troops can do their job while maintaining their readiness to defend our country and defeat any adversary to ensure they can deploy far from home knowing their loved ones have the quality of life they deserve for as one sergeant recently said we enlist soldiers but we reenlist families while our current state of readiness is sound there are real concerns about the future for that reason i made a commitment to add resources to this year s budget to keep our readiness razor sharp and to improve recruitment we asked the congress to approve 1 1 billion in new funds for readiness and it did today i am happy to announce that we are releasing those funds we have also obtained almost 2 billion in emergency funds to cover unanticipated operations in bosnia and shifted another 1 billion in our defense budget to meet readiness needs we have approved pay raises that will significantly reduce the discrepancy between military and civilian pay in addition i have ordered my administration to conduct a thorough review of our long term readiness and have met with all of our service chiefs to discuss that the process is now under way i anticipate it will result in a set of budget and policy proposals for our year 2000 budget requests and for future years my fellow americans this is a challenge we can and must meet for while we certainly cannot solve all the world s problems when our values and interests are at stake we must be ready to act let us always remember that our most profound duty to our nation s veterans is to keep standing for the ideals for which they fought and for which too many died to keep strengthening the alliances they forged as we will next spring at nato s 50th anniversary summit in washington to keep taking risks for peace to keep faith with those who struggle for human rights the rule of law a better life we have a duty to seize not shirk the responsibilities of leadership and we have an opportunity to create a world more peaceful more free more prosperous than any people have ever known therefore we should look on leadership not as a burden but as a chance a responsibility to give our children a world that reflects the hopes and enthusiasm that have inspired generation after generation of americans to serve our country in uniform from world war i hero alvin york to world war ii hero waverly wray from general george marshall to general colin powell from john glenn to john glenn i think we ought to give senator glenn a hand today don t you think of it he s given us a whole new field of endeavor to look forward to in our old age we dedicate this day to all our veterans to the retired school teacher who in his time helped liberate a death camp to the hospital medic who learned to save lives in vietnam to the legionnaire who pins on his medals with pride to the heroes buried in the tomb of the unknowns to all of them and all they represent we dedicate each and every day spent in service to our country and its ideals may god bless them and their families may god bless the united states of america thank you dem wjclinton11 11 99 bill_clinton thank you very much secretary west for your eloquent remarks and your leadership and your many years of devotion to our country commander smart thank you for your leadership this year chaplain cook lee thornton thank you for always being here for our veterans the leaders of our veterans organizations members of congress here deputy secretary gober and members of the cabinet general ross and members of the joint chiefs general davis and other medal of honor recipients to the former pows the families of those still missing in action to our veterans and their families let me begin by offering a special word of appreciation to the army band and chorus for their magnificent music today and for making us feel so important and i want to say a special welcome today to a person you may have read about in the morning papers captain earl fox is the senior medical officer at the coast guard personnel command here in washington he also happens to be the last world war ii veteran still on active military duty now next week he will retire at the tender young age of 80 i think he has earned his retirement but captain on behalf of a grateful nation we say thank you for your service thank you my fellow americans as we all know we celebrate veterans day on the anniversary of the armistice ending world war i on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month eighty years ago today president woodrow wilson proclaimed this a day of solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country s service for two full minutes in the middle of that day all traffic in business across our nation stopped as americans took time to remember family and friends who fought and those who never came home from the war to end all wars i don t believe those men and women who were our forebears could ever have imagined that so many other times in this century young americans would be asked again and again to fight and die for freedom in foreign lands when the 20th century began the headstones that stand in silent formation on these beautiful hills covered fewer than 200 acres today at century s end they cover more than 600 acres hundreds of millions of people in the united states and around the world sleep in peace because more than a million americans rest in peace here and in graves marked and unmarked all across the world today we come again to say owe them a debt we can never repay in a way the young men and women who have died in defense of our country gave up not only the life they were living but also the life they would have lived their chance to be parents their chance to grow old with their grandchildren too often when we speak of sacrifice we speak in generalities about the larger sweep of history and the sum total of our nation s experience but it is very important to remember that every single veteran s life we honor today was just that a life just like yours and mine a life with family and friends and love and hopes and dreams and ups and downs a life that should have been able to play its full course fifty seven years ago this week the eyes of america were focused on a small sweltering island in the south pacific pearl harbor had been bombed the year before and japanese forces in the pacific were capturing one island after another the task of stopping them fell to a group of young marines in an operation called project watchtower in a place called guadalcanal the battle was expected to last six weeks it took six months the jungle was so thick soldiers could hardly walk fighting so fierce and rations so thin that the average marine lost 25 pounds every night shells fell from the sky and enemy soldiers charged up the hills the only weapons marines had to defend themselves were springfield rifles left over from world war i but with the strength forged in factories and fields back home they turned back wave after wave of hand to hand fighting until at last the navy was able to help the marines turn the tide in the naval battle that began 57 years ago tomorrow that turned the tide of battle in the whole pacific and with it the tide of american history on that small island in the battle of guadalcanal americans proved that our nation would never again be an island but rather allied with freedom and peace loving people everywhere as the greatest force for peace and freedom the world has ever known in the days and years that have followed men and women forged from the same mettle in every branch of our military have built on those sacrifices and stood for the cause of freedom from world war ii to korea to vietnam to kuwait city to kosovo on the beach at guadalcanal is a monument to those who fought on the island in the hills that surround us some of the 1 500 marines and sailors who lost their lives in that battle are laid to rest they are some of the greatest of the greatest generation one of those who served at guadalcanal was a 19 year old marine lieutenant named john chafee he went on to fight in okinawa to lead troops in korea to serve as governor of rhode island and secretary of the navy and then for more than 20 years as a united states senator he helped write the law that keeps our air clean his fights for health care helped millions of veterans live better lives yet he was so humble that when he received a distinguished award from the marine corps foundation last year he hardly spoke about his wartime service two weeks ago this remarkable man passed away at the age of 77 at his funeral hillary and i spent time with his five children and his 12 grandchildren and i was proud to announce on that day that the navy will be naming one of its most modern and capable destroyers after john chafee now that was the measure of one man s life who fought in guadalcanal and survived today in our imaginations we must try to imagine the measure of all the lives that might have been had they not been laid down in service to our nation what about the more than 1 million men and women who have given their lives so that we could be free what would have been the measure of their lives what else would they have accomplished for their families and their country if only they had had the chance of course we don t have any of those answers but because we have the question we clearly have a responsibility to stand in the breach for them we are not just the beneficiaries of their bravery we are the stewards of their sacrifice thanks to their valor today for the very first time in all of human history more than half of the nations of the world live under governments of their own choosing our prosperity and power are greater than they have ever been it is therefore our solemn obligation to preserve the peace and to make the most of this moment for our children and the children of the world so that those who sacrificed so much to bring us to this moment will be redeemed in the lives they could have lived by the lives that we do live how shall we do this it means at least that we must continue to be the world s leading force for peace and freedom against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction it means we must keep the commitment i have had since the moment i took the oath of office that our men and women in uniform will remain the best trained best equipped best prepared in the world in kosovo we had zero combat fatalities and only two planes shot down though our pilots took heavy enemy fire every single day and put their lives repeatedly at greater risks to avoid hitting civilians on the ground that is a tribute to the professionalism we see every day from our military forces all around the world last month i was proud to sign a bill that will keep us moving in that direction with the start of the first sustained increase in military spending in a decade and the biggest pay increase for our troops in a generation it means we must also do more to be faithful to our veterans when their service is over president theodore roosevelt once said anyone good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterward over the past seven years we have opened more than 600 veterans out patient clinics across america this year we expect to treat 400 000 more veterans than last year including more disabled veterans than ever before we will continue to make sure that all veterans receive the care they deserve and we must continue to make a special effort to end something that must be intolerable to all of us the tragedy of homeless veterans i want to commend the reigning miss america heather renee french who is with us today along with her family her father a disabled vietnam veteran her mother her brother and her sister for all the work she is doing in her position finally to bring proper national attention to the plight of homeless veterans we thank you for what you re doing thank you we must not rest until we have done everything we possibly can to bring them back into the society they so willingly defended and we must bear in mind the special sacrifice of the more than 140 000 veterans who were held in prison camps or interned during this century i want to commend the vietnam veterans memorial fund for completing a project they launched a year ago today to create a special curriculum on the vietnam war and send a copy to every single high school across america part of that curriculum focuses on the men and women who never came home we must not forget them i am very proud to announce today that we have successfully recovered the remains of three more united states servicemen lost during the korean war they re coming home tonight but we must not waver in our common efforts to make the fullest possible accounting for all our mias for all their families to have their questions answered finally fulfilling our responsibility to lead for peace and freedom and to be faithful not only to our service personnel but our veterans requires us to do more than prepare people to fight wars and take care of them when they come home we must work with greater determination to prevent wars every american who gave his or her life for our country was in one way or another a victim of a peace that faltered of diplomacy that failed of the absence of adequate preventive strength we know that if diplomacy is not backed by real and credible threats of force it can be empty and even dangerous but if we don t use diplomacy first then our military will become our only line of defense of course it also costs money to help struggling young democracies to stand on their feet as friends and partners of the united states as we ve tried to do from poland to russia to nigeria to indonesia it costs money to make sure nuclear weapons in the former soviet union are secure for the terrorists and leaders who wish us harm do not acquire the means to kill on a more massive scale it costs money to support the peacemakers in places like the middle east and the balkans and africa so that regional conflicts do not explode and spread but all of you know better than most that freedom is not free and all of you know far better than most that the costliest peace is far cheaper than the cheapest war i am pleased to report to you today that the democrats and republicans in congress are working together on a strong compromise that will allow us to meet some of our most urgent needs in foreign affairs to prevent wars we re not finished yet but there is a bipartisan center like that which has carried america for 50 years at this hopeful moment now at work in the congress i am grateful for it and our children will be safer for it in less than two months we ll be able to say the conflict and bloodshed that took so many american lives came from another century so we gather today for the last time in this century to dedicate ourselves to being good stewards of the sacrifice of the veterans of our country as we look ahead to the large challenges and the grand opportunities of the new century and a new millennium when our country has more prosperity than ever before and for the first time in my lifetime has the ability to meet those challenges and to dream dreams and live them because we are unthreatened by serious crises at home and security threats abroad let us resolve to honor those veterans to redeem their sacrifice to be stewards of the lives they never got to live by doing all we can to see that the horrors of the 20th century s wars are not visited upon 21st century americans that is the true way to honor the people we come here today to thank god for thank you very much and god bless america dem wjclinton11 12 00a bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen first i d like to thank peter nostrand and all the people who work on the pageant of peace every year they give us a wonderful night and i think we ought to give them all a big hand thank you very much i d love to thank these people who have come out in the cold to perform for us i thank kathy mattea charlotte church billy gilman the cast of fosse the west tennessee youth chorus al santa claus roker i also want to thank anastasia wroblewski and kwami dennis our camp fire boy and camp fire girl they did a great job up here it s not so easy to remember those speeches i thought they were terrific and i d like to thank thomas kinkade for his beautiful portrait that s on the cover of our program and the united states navy band thank you very much on christmas eve more than 75 years ago president calvin coolidge lit the first national christmas tree he later said christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind to cherish peace and goodwill to be plenteous in mercy every president since president coolidge has been part of that tradition gathering around the colorado spruce to rejoice in the spirit of christmas and to celebrate a new season of peace and goodwill hillary chelsea and i always look forward to celebrating the pageant of peace with you and the many traditions of the holiday season tonight as we enjoy our last christmas season in the white house and the last time i ll have a chance to be here at the lighting of the christmas tree we are profoundly grateful for the gift you and all the american people have given us the privilege to serve these last eight years to live in this marvelous old house and to participate in wonderful ceremonies like this for americans of many faiths this is a season of renewal of light returned from darkness despair transformed to hope a time to reflect on our lives rejoice in our blessings and give thanks tonight on this first christmas of the new millennium we celebrate an america blessed with unprecedented peace and prosperity and a nation that through more than 220 years and even the toughest times has held together by the enduring values enshrined in our constitution this is a time for us to reflect too on that good fortune and a time to rededicate ourselves to the lessons of love and reconciliation taught by a child born in bethlehem 2000 years ago as we gather to decorate our trees and light our menorahs let us remember the true meaning of the holidays by taking some time to give to those who need it most and let us be thankful for the sacrifices of all those who serve us especially those who serve us in the military who won t be home this year for christmas let me say that when i leave you tonight i m going to northern ireland to a small island where people were born that eventually came to america and gave us over 40 million of our citizens a place where st patrick brought the spirit of christmas almost 1 500 years ago i hope that we can finish the business of peace there and help again america to give a gift to the rest of the world to all of you again i say this has been a humbling and wondrous gift we thank you all of us in our family for the chance to serve yours god bless you and merry christmas and let s light the tree thank you very much dem wjclinton11 12 00b bill_clinton thank you very much and let me say i took a lot of pride just listening to mrs carter speak here she seemed right at home when hillary and i moved into the arkansas governor s mansion in 1979 betty bumpers began her lifelong campaign to wear me out about immunizations and i reminded rosalynn that it was in 1979 or 1980 that we actually did an immunization event in the backyard of the arkansas governor s mansion i can t remember whether it was 79 or 80 now but it was anyway a year or two ago so i can t thank these two women enough for what they have done and i was marveling when mrs carter was going through all those issues at just how well she knows and understands this issue so i m very grateful to both of them because we wouldn t be here today if it weren t for them i also want to thank secretary shalala and secretary glickman and in her absence hillary they have worked very hard on this for the last eight years and we have made some remarkable progress i want to recognize also dr walter ornstein of the cdc and shirley watkins of the department of agriculture who will be very active in the steps that i m going to announce today i think it s worth noting that we re meeting in the roosevelt room which was named for our two presidents and eleanor roosevelt and franklin roosevelt spent almost half his life in a wheelchair as a result of polio and i was part of the first generation of americans to be immunized against polio and i remember as a child seeing other children in iron lungs and i remember what an enormous elation it was for me and my classmates when we first got our polio vaccines to think that that s one thing we didn t have to worry about anymore it s hard for people now who weren t alive then and weren t part of it to even imagine what that meant to a whole generation of children but it was profoundly important we now know that vaccines save lives and agony they also save money they re a good investment and we have done what we could over the last eight years to make sure that our children get the best shot in life by getting their shots and we have as rosalynn said made progress in 1993 almost two out of five children under the age of three had not been fully vaccinated and secretary shalala and hillary and the rest of our team went to work with the childhood immunization initiative to improve immunization services make the vaccines safer and more affordable and increase the immunization rates we enacted the vaccines for children program to provide free vaccines to uninsured and underinsured children and thanks to the work of people in this room and people like you all across america these rates as mrs carter said are at an all time high and the incidence of diseases such as measles mumps and rubella are at an all time low in recent years we ve been able to say that for the first time in our nation s history 90 percent of our children have been immunized against serious childhood diseases and just as important vaccine levels are almost the same for preschool kids across racial and ethnic lines so our children are safer and healthier but as has already been said today there is still a lot to do at least a million infants and toddlers are not fully immunized too many children continue to fall victim to diseases that a simple immunization could have prevented low income children are far less likely to be immunized in some urban areas for example immunization rates are 20 percent below the national average in houston just 63 percent of low income kids are vaccinated in detroit and newark it s 66 percent and we know areas with below average immunization rates are at greater risk of potentially deadly outbreaks such as what we saw with the measles epidemic in the early 80s the late 80s so today we are here to announce three new steps that we hope will build on the record and meet the outstanding challenges first we have to go where the children are as mrs carter said over 45 percent of infants and toddlers nationwide are being served by the women infants and children program it s the single largest point of access to health care for low income preschool children who are at highest risk of low vaccination coverage the immunization rates for children in wic in some cases is 20 percent lower than the rates for other children so wic is clearly the place to start on the outstanding challenge today i am directing wic to conduct an immunization assessment of every child participating in the program all five million of them each time a child comes in their immunization status would be evaluated children who are behind schedule or who don t have records will be referred to a local health care provider i am asking the cdc to provide wic s staff with the information they need to conduct immunization assessments accurately and efficiently we know this will work wic centers that have experimented with this type of approach have seen vaccination coverage increase by up to 40 percent in just one year second i am directing secretary shalala and secretary glickman to develop a national strategic plan to further improve immunization for children at risk so they ll have something to do in this last 40 days this would include steps to utilize new technology share best practices and examine how we can enlist other federal programs serving children in the effort to improve immunization rates but it isn t a job just for government alone we need to work with other caring organizations to succeed so third and finally i m announcing that the american academy of pediatrics is launching a new campaign to urge all 55 000 of its members to remind wic eligible parents to bring their immunization records with them when they visit wic sites i want to thank the members of the aap for their initiative as well we need to keep working until every child in every community is safe from vaccine preventable disease dr jonas salk the father of the polio vaccine once said the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more we ve done a lot together and we have more to do thank you very much dem wjclinton11 12 94b bill_clinton your excellencies distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen let me begin by thanking the members of the host committee and the people of the city of miami and the state of florida i am very very pleased that we made the decision to come to miami i thank governor chiles and lieutenant governor mackay and all those who made the case that we should be here our hosts have done a tremendous job of hosting this historic event at this extraordinary moment of opportunity and responsibility they have made our work easier and especially last evening much more enjoyable the summit of the americas has more than fulfilled our expectations future generations will look back on the miami summit as a moment when the course of history in the americas changed for the better we worked hard to arrive at this point yesterday we achieved agreement on the many issues before us our talks were lively open and wide ranging they were filled with the spirit of democracy and mutual respect and a deep determination to increase the jobs and incomes of our people improve the quality of their lives and protect their freedoms meanwhile the first lady s summit on children all of our spouses working together looking toward the future of our children in this hemisphere in many ways captured what the spirit of this meeting is all about for all of our efforts will fall more to the benefit of our children than to our generation now i would like to ask the representatives of each of the major geographical regions of the americas the caribbean north america central america and south america to report on the agreements we have forged in addition we will hear from the leaders of two dynamic and vital institutions that are serving our hemisphere and that will loom large in our plans for the future the inter american development bank and the organization of american states then president aristide of haiti who embodies our hemisphere s determination to uphold the sovereign rule of the people will speak let us begin the plenary first let me thank all those who have spoken before i thank the prime minister and the presidents distinguished president of the inter american development bank secretary general of the organization of american states i thank especially president aristide for his moving remarks and i thank all of you here present who have supported the multinational effort to restore democracy to haiti we come here to begin a new era an era of real promise when vice president gore and i asked the american people to give us a chance to serve we relied upon two phrases that we said over and over again one was put people first the other was don t stop thinking about tomorrow in this meeting for these days we have put our people first and we have thought about tomorrow we are bound together by geography by history by culture but most important now by shared values a ferocious devotion to freedom democracy social justice a determination to improve the lives of all our people a determination to preserve the natural world we have inherited and that we must pass on we have tried to give life to these values at this summit by agreeing to create a free trade area throughout our hemisphere to bring together our nations to improve the quality of life for our people and to strengthen and make permanent the march of democracy these achievements have been given concrete expression by our commitment to negotiate with specific steps of free trade agreement for a free trade area of the americas by 2005 this is more than words this is a commitment to deeds free trade in our hemisphere has been talked about for years but because of this process we ve launched this weekend it will now become a reality free trade will yield dramatic benefits in terms of growth and jobs and higher incomes it will permit us to pursue economic opportunities and at the same time to reaffirm our commitment to promote the rights and interests of our workers so that all our people have the chance to benefit from free trade i couldn t help thinking when president figueres was talking about the gross national product measuring everything but what is important to us that that is true but that unless we attend to the health of our economy the thing that are most important to us are more difficult to achieve if you think about how many millions of people in this hemisphere including in our country are working harder today than they were just a few years ago for lower income if you think about how many millions of people have less security in the face of the bewildering changes in the world we live in what it means is they have less time for their families for raising their children less time for leisure less time for citizenship less time for learning in a calm and open atmosphere what the major issues of the day are and there is not so much room in their spirit for the clear head and the generosity it takes to be an effective citizen in a strong democracy so all these things we care about that we want for our people require us to do our best to make sure that they can be victors in this great cauldron of change that is bringing on the next century we also vowed to do our best to make our governments work better to protect our democracies by making sure we could do the job we re supposed to do well and that we stop doing things we shouldn t be doing to protecting human rights to fighting illicit drugs and international crime to rooting out corruption and we agreed to pursue vigorously sustainable development in a way sustainable development is an unfortunate phrase because it has so little poetry about it but the meaning is very profound it means to me that we must pursue short term goals consistent with our enduring values it means we must pursue individual opportunity consistent with our responsibility to our larger communities it means we must share in the earth s bounty without breaking our bonds with mother nature it means we must take for ourselves in ways that leave more for our children it means we must expand the circle of those who are able to live up to their god given capacities the women the indigenous people the minorities the poor children of this hemisphere for all these commitments i thank you all of you who have come here representing all these nations the agenda we have embraced is ambitious and worthy we have actually committed ourselves to 23 separate and specific initiatives and more than 100 action steps protecting the diversity of plant and animal species phasing out lead and gasoline reducing infant immortality improving education and health care our goal is to create a whole new architecture for the relationship of the nations and the peoples of the americas to ensure that dichos become echos that words are turned into deeds so as we come to the end of this historic summit of the americas as we proclaim the dawn of this new partnership as we say we have done this to put our people first and we have kept our eye on tomorrow let us remember that the road ahead will be full of challenges and difficulties and that beyond all of the specifics of what we have done perhaps most enduring is the friendship the spirit of trust that has been built here there is truly a spirit of miami and in future years when the difficulties mount up when it is difficult to sustain the hope about which president aristide spoke so beautifully may future leaders remember the spirit of miami o espirito de miami l esprit de miami el espiritu de miami the spirit of miami thank you all and god bless you now we will sign the declaration if they will bring it to us dem wjclinton11 12 99a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you gene thank you ladies and gentlemen i hope you ll forgive me if i m a little hoarse i ve been battling a big cold today i ve had an amazing few days a couple of days ago we announced that we were going to start the peace talks again after four years of hiatus between israel and syria and it s been a wonderful thing and then i had a very sad duty to go up to worcester massachusetts to the funeral of those firemen you may have seen and then i went home to arkansas yesterday so somewhere along the way i caught a cold and my voice is not the best and i thank you for indulging me i m always glad to be back here i love this hotel i love the golf course i love the people and gene prescott has been very good to me and to many members of my family and i thank him for that and i thank all of you for coming i know there were members of the senate and the house who were here earlier and they ve gone to the next event i do want to recognize state representative elaine bloom who is running for congress and who is going to be a member of congress if she gets adequate financial support to help her win and so thank you very much for coming let me say to all of you this has been a pretty emotional day for me in florida because it was eight years ago this week that i came to florida to the democratic convention when they were having a straw poll and this straw poll had been mightily hyped because it was going to be the first vote of any kind in the 1992 presidential season at the time as i remember i was running fifth in new hampshire in the polls and i had been to the florida democratic convention already by 1991 three previous times in the 80s thanks to bob graham and lawton chiles i had been in 81 83 and 87 and had a wonderful time but on this special day we had worked very hard and the florida democrats worked me very hard they made me go to all of these little caucuses and answer all these questions i must have answered a thousand questions i was so exhausted by the time i finished visiting more than a dozen of these caucuses answering hundreds of questions i got to where i wondered what i was doing in this business but we won over 50 percent of the vote in the straw poll at a time when we were running fifth in the national polls and a lot of you in this room were a part of that endeavor i thank you for that and i came back today to go up to orlando to the democratic convention just to thank those people who gave me my start on the road to the presidency and also to thank florida for voting for me and for al gore in 1996 which is the first time in 20 years this state had voted for a democratic ticket gene has already said a lot of what he might say about the record i just wanted to make a couple of points in 1991 when i decided to run for president i did so not because i had anything personal against president bush i actually liked him quite well and i had often worked as the representative of the governors both the republicans and the democrats with the white house for years and years i did it because our country was at a time of economic distress social decline political division and the whole enterprise of government was discredited and i had worked for more than a decade as a governor to try to bring people together instead of driving them apart and to try to figure out what makes the economy tick in the modern world and so i asked the american people to give me a chance to create a society where there was opportunity for every responsible citizen and where we had a community of all people where everybody could participate and gene mentioned a little of this but you know i think the interesting thing is it is true that in february we will have the longest economic expansion in history we already have the longest peacetime expansion in history but you know in wartime you re fully mobilized so they tend to last longer we re going to outdo all the wartime expansions if we keep on plugging until february and that s a great tribute to the american people but it also happened because we made some tough decisions we got rid of this deficit we turned it into a surplus we got the interest rates down we stopped taking money away from you that you might need to borrow to expand a business or to start a new one or to make a home loan payment or a car payment or a college loan payment and the strategy has worked but i think it s important to point out that we don t just have the lowest unemployment rate the actual figure is 30 years the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years but our society is coming together we have the lowest single parent household poverty rate in 46 years the lowest hispanic poverty rate in 25 years and the lowest african american poverty rate ever recorded and the lowest hispanic and african american unemployment rates ever recorded we ve been keeping statistics for about 30 years now so we re coming together as a society and we re also beginning to look at things that have been long ignored we have 90 percent of our little children immunized against serious diseases for the first time in the history of the country two million more kids have health insurance now than they did in 1997 seven million young people have gone to college under the hope scholarship a 1 500 a year tax credit that in effect opens the first two years of college to all americans ten million got an increase in the minimum wage more than 20 million took advantage of the family and medical leave act these things are important in the last legislative session of congress we got 100 000 teachers to get the class size down in the early grades we got 50 000 more police to keep driving the crime rate down we got 60 000 vouchers to give to people on welfare so they can move from welfare to work and find a place to live where they work we are moving this country in the right direction but i want to tell you why i m glad you re here tonight because i m not much on looking back except as it s evidence of where we re going all elections are about tomorrow i never will forget when i ran for governor for the fifth time i went out to the state fair before i d announced and i used to have governor s day at the state fair and i d just sit there at this little booth you know a fair booth and anybody that wanted to come up and talk could this old boy in overalls who was about 70 years old came up to me and he said bill are you going to run again i said i don t know if i do will you vote for me he said yeah i guess so i always have i said well aren t you sick of me he said no but everybody else i know is and i got kind of puffed up and i said well don t you think i ve done a good job he said well sure you ve done a good job but you drew a paycheck every two weeks didn t you it s very interesting that s what we hired you to do we hired you to do a good job so what i want to say to you is i hope you will go out and share this record these statistics are stunning but they are evidence of the direction we need to take it s been an honor to serve and nobody s entitled none of us not even the vice president none of us are entitled to a vote because we did a good job and i m not running for anything but it is evidence of the job that will be done if we stay going in this direction it is not about whether we will change but what kind of change we ll have and i want you to know i could not have done anything if i hadn t had the support of like minded democrats in congress people who wanted to change the democratic party and change the country elaine bloom is one of those people she was out here for me in 1991 i d like to see her have a chance to serve i think she could make a big difference and that s why you re here this is important this is the last thing i m going to say tomorrow morning or next week or next month somebody might ask you why you ponied up the money and came to this thing and i hope you ll be able to give an answer and i hope your answer is number one there s not much argument about whether these people delivered they ve had seven great years for our country the ideas they brought the direction they changed was right number two the next election should be about america meeting the big new challenges of the 21st century not about short term divisive narrow minded politics and let me just say in my lifetime i had a bunch of kids up to the house at camp david thanksgiving weekend and this little six year old girl who is the daughter of a friend of mine said now how old are you again and i said i m 53 and this six year old girl her eyes got big and she said oh that s a lot and i have to admit she was right but what i want to tell you is in these lot of years that i ve had the privilege of being on this earth never before in my lifetime has our country had this combination of economic success social solidarity national self confidence with the absence of an internal crisis or an external threat it had never happened to me before in my lifetime and what i have learned in these 53 years is that no set of conditions last forever this is a time of rapid change we will never forgive ourselves if we do not use this moment to shape the future of our dreams for our children we ve got to deal with social security and medicare the aging of america take social security out beyond the baby boomers lives lengthen medicare add a prescription drug benefit so the 75 percent of the seniors who can t afford the medicine they need can get it we ve got to deal with the education of the largest and most diverse group of schoolchildren in history and we ve got to do it in a very serious and disciplined way we have to help people do more to balance work and family nearly every parent is working now we need more investments in child care and health care for children and equal pay for women we need to broaden the reach of the family and medical leave act we need to do these things we need to continue to protect the environment while we grow the economy i m convinced folks that this i m not running for anything and i m convinced this climate change problem is real and you could have in five or six decades a substantial part of the everglades under water if we don t aggressively move to try to reverse this and what i want to tell you is we can grow the economy even quicker if we do the right things environmentally than if we don t you don t have to give it up anymore just two other things that i hope you will say there are still people in places that this economy has left behind appalachia the mississippi delta the indian reservations a lot of inner city neighborhoods but we have a strategy to try to bring free enterprise not government jobs free enterprise to those places and keep in mind that s one way to keep growing this economy and keep this expansion going without inflation if you invest in a new area you create new businesses new jobs and new consumers you re not adding to inflationary pressures and i will over simplify essentially what we want to do is to give people who can come to political fundraisers the same incentive to invest in poor areas in america we give them today to invest in poor areas in latin america or asia or africa i m for that too by the way but i think if we can t give people the incentives to put free enterprise in america in places that are left behind if we can t do this now we re never going to get around to it you know the national unemployment rate is 4 1 percent do you know what the unemployment rate on the pine ridge indian reservation is in south dakota the home of the lakota sioux the tribe of crazy horse seventy three percent i ve been there now there are plenty of intelligent people there there are a lot of yearning young children who want a good education there s plenty of things we could do there and there s 120 years of history that explains why this is so and i won t bore you with it but i m just telling you i hope that you will say i came there and i m still i m glad i went and i m glad i wrote the check because they ve got a good record and because they want to take on the big questions of the 21st century the aging of america the most diverse group of kids we ve ever had the balancing of work and family the balancing of the environment and the economy bringing economic opportunity to poor people and the last thing i d say is creating truly one america we had a fascinating time the other night hillary had these two guys come to the white house for one of these millennium evenings she has that we put out on the internet all over the world so this one man ben cerf was one of the men who created the architecture of the internet and he mailed the first e mail 18 years ago to his profoundly deaf wife who was so deaf she could not hear with the age of even the most powerful hearing aides and he wanted to talk to her when he was at work that s how the e mail started and the other guy was professor lander from harvard who s one of the scholars of the human genome this rapid thing we re doing to you may have seen we found 33 million components of one of the chromosomes did you see that last week i mean we re basically trying to map the whole genetic structure of the human body so dr lander knows about this well a lot of what they were talking about was how you couldn t do the science without the computer technology and how the computer s technology was going to amplify the science for example last year i was really happy that we transplanted nerves from the legs to the spine of a laboratory animal for the first time and got movement in the lower limbs they now believe that a quicker answer to the problems of people who have spinal cord injuries that maybe the development of microchips that are programmed to reflect an individual mapping of every person s injury and to send out electrical impulses that replicate what the nerves do they believe that in three or four years every young mother will come home with a baby and a genetic map that ll be kind of scary they ll tell you all the things that might happen to your baby but they ll also tell you all the things you can do to minimize the chances that they ll happen and most of my friends in the field believe that some time fairly early in the next century the average child will live to be 100 years old have a 100 year life expectancy a lot of my friends who are interested in space say that we may find out what s in those black holes in the universe and everybody knows that we re going to start having a lot more e commerce and internet connections in ways we couldn t have imagined i ll give you just one little example you know did you all every buy anything on ebay it s a trading site on the web there are now over 20 000 people that make a living on ebay they don t work for ebay they make a living buying and selling on ebay and a number of them used to be on welfare so if you can get internet access to be as dense in america as telephone access a lot of these poor people that worked their way out of poverty they ll figure out how to do it so this is anyway to put it mildly a very exciting time to be alive and i think it is quite interesting that with all this modern stuff going on the biggest problem we ve got is the oldest problem of human society with all this racial and religious and ethnic hatred and hatred of gays you know it s just like okay so we re living in a modern world but we can t let any of this stuff go there are people and groups that don t think they count unless they ve got somebody to look down on and if you look at what s taking my time as your president around the world the middle east northern ireland kosovo bosnia tribal wars in africa and a lot of things that are indirectly related to that it s the biggest problem in the world one of the worst things you read about crime rate keeps going down in america but you ve got all these hate crimes black basketball coach in illinois korean christian coming out of his church both killed by a guy who belonged to a church that said they don t believe in god they believe in white supremacy an angry guy up in l a shoots all these jewish kids going to their synagogue schools and then goes and kills a filipino postman matthew shepard james byrd did you see the pictures in the paper yesterday of the two soldiers one 18 and one 21 the 18 year old beat the one that was 21 to death with a baseball bat because he was gay i ve said this a lot but my heart broke for both of them people have to be taught this kind of stuff and i m very proud of the fact that i belong to a political party that believes everybody has a place at the table everybody ought to have a chance and we ought to take a little extra trouble to help bring people in that need a helping hand i believe that and i think now you ve had seven years and i hope you ll think about this when mr connerly comes down here and puts his anti affirmative action initiative on the ballot we ve now had seven years to prove that our way works better america s better off when you help everybody to participate not worse off and if i could have one wish it would be just one if somebody came you know one of those little angels came to me at night and said i m sorry mr president you have to check out tomorrow morning you can t stay 14 months but we ll give you one wish what would you like as much as i want to do something about the aging challenge and the children and all these other things i would say i d like to leave america united across the lines that divide us not just tolerating our differences but celebrating them and reaffirming the fact that our common humanity is more important than all these interesting differences there s no country in the world as well positioned as we are for the next 50 years of what s going to happen but we have to be willing to deal with these long term challenges if this election is about that question what are we going to do with this unique moment in our history then our side will win and i hope that when people ask you why are you doing this you ll tell them about the last seven years but you ll also talk about your dreams for the next 20 thank you very much dem wjclinton11 12 99b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you now folks you all sit down now can you sit down i m a little hoarse so i can t shout you down and you won t be able to hear unless you sit down and relax here first of all i want to thank my good friend charlie whitehead for inviting me here and for being willing to take the reins of this party again i came here in 1981 1983 1987 1991 only arkansas have i visited the democratic convention more than i have in the state of florida and i thank you very much i want to thank representatives hastings brown meeks former congressman smith the wonderful lt governor of maryland and i think the finest lt governor in the united states kathleen kennedy townsend who spoke to you earlier today and i want to say how proud i am that a person who has been a friend of mine a long time is going to be your next united states senator bill nelson and grace nelson thank you very much for your interest i also asked if rhea chiles was still here it was almost exactly a year ago that lawton chiles passed away and like his family and his friends and his beloved floridians i want you to know i still miss him he was my friend he was my mentor he was my ally his legacy is alive and well in the good things he did in florida and the good things that we re doing in the united states and i m honored to be here now let me tell you i know you probably noticed we re about to get into an election season here and you may have noticed that i can t run for anything this year so i want to tell you how come i came down here first of all it was almost eight years ago exactly when the democratic convention in florida in december of 1991 put my campaign on the map and i came to say thank you with your help when i was running fifth in the polls nationally we won a decisive victory over a majority in the straw poll here in 1991 it was the first evidence that democrats were ready to take america in a new direction and i got to thinking about that last night and this morning you were very wonderful to me but i also want you to know you were a hard sell i don t know how many times i ve talked to jeff eller and craig smith who were among those who worked this convention for me and hillary and i remembered how dog tired we were when we got back to our hotel room after the speech and then we had to go and visit all these caucuses we must have gone to a dozen caucuses and we were asked the most detailed questions over the most wide array of issues and i just hope you re putting this crowd this year through this that s all i want to say it was unbelievable but i must say you know i had been coming here i remember when then governor now senator bob graham invited me in 81 and 83 and 87 i loved this convention and i loved that experience in 91 i love your energy your intensity your commitment your caring about the issues and the future of this state and this nation and if you can keep this energy don t forget we won in 92 and in 96 we won again and in 96 we carried florida for the first time in 20 years you can win again here and you can do it every time i try to take a walk down memory lane some of the political press says oh well he s thinking about his term being over well i m not either i ve got 14 months left and i m going to give it to them every day until i go but since this is an election year i think it s worth taking a little walk down memory lane in the 12 years before al gore and i took office irresponsible policies in washington piled up deficit after deficit we quadrupled the national debt in 12 years we had high interest rates high unemployment stagnant wages growing inequality by 1991 when i entered the race for president we had economic distress social decline political division and government was entirely discredited and don t let anybody forget it now what a difference seven years of working for opportunity responsibility and community with all americans make we are ending the century on a high note and you can take great pride in it because you had a not insignificant amount to do with it just last week we crossed a truly remarkable threshold 20 million new jobs since january of 1993 and more and more they re good paying jobs on which you can support a family buy a home take a vacation save for college and retirement so i just want to take a minute here and i m going to give you a capsule of the last seven years i want you to know it i want you to take pride in it because you were a part of it and i want you to share it with your fellow citizens the republicans can have all the rhetoric they want let people choose between their rhetoric and our record number one economically we have the longest peacetime expansion in our history in february it will be the longest economic expansion in the history of our country including that in world war ii we have a 30 year low in unemployment a 32 year low in welfare a 20 year low in poverty rates we have the highest home ownership ever the largest surplus ever the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years with the smallest federal government in 37 years there s more we have the lowest hispanic and african american unemployment rates ever recorded the lowest hispanic poverty rates in 25 years the lowest african american poverty rates ever recorded the highest rate of small business starts in history the highest rate of minority business ownership in history the lowest female poverty unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest single parent household poverty in 46 years we re going forward together now i might say i was going to save this for later in my speech but i think we ought to insert it here and we ve done it with the most diverse administration in history the most diverse appointments to the judgeships to the cabinet to the administration and i think that the record not me the record america has established in the last seven years proves that mr connerly is wrong in wanting to end affirmative action look it s interesting you know affirmative action actually began under a republican administration back when both parties were really committed to civil rights and like any system that went on for years unexamined there were some problems with it and it needed to be fixed and we worked very very hard on amend it don t end it policy that i m proud of but you cannot look at the record the american people have established in the last seven years where we made an effort to include everybody and we made an effort to make sure our economic policies benefit everybody our political policies benefitted everybody our social policies benefitted everybody and make a serious case that we d be better off if we were growing more divided by walking away from one of the tools that has helped to bring us together as a nation don t give up on affirmative action and go out there and defend it wait a minute we re not done with the record yet you all just relax i want you to remember this i ll send a copy of this to mr whitehead and he can send it out we have listen to this we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years 470 000 felons fugitives and stalkers have not been able to get a handgun because of the brady bill all the things the nra let me tell you but the nra was wrong there s not a hunter in florida that s missed a day of the hunting season because of the brady bill but there are a lot of little kids in the inner city alive because of the brady bill today it was the right thing to do wait a minute over 20 million people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law a bill which was vetoed by my predecessor and it hasn t hurt the economy over 10 million people benefitted from the minimum wage increase it hasn t hurt the economy over 7 million people right now have claimed their hope scholarship tax cut to pay for community college or the first two years of college so that we can open the doors of college to everyone in the united states of america over 2 million more kids have been insured since the balanced budget act passed in 1997 under the child health insurance partnership between states and the federal government two million more kids over 90 percent of our children are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of the united states over 150 000 young people have served their communities in florida and throughout the country in americorps our national community service program it took the peace corps 25 years to get the number of volunteers we ve achieved in five years in americorps now these are just some of the facts let s talk about the environment the air is cleaner the water s cleaner the food is safer we have the lowest production of waste materials in our country in 20 years and 20 years ago we had 50 million fewer people we ve cleaned up three times as many toxic waste dumps as the republicans did in the 12 years before we took office three times as many and we have protected more land from the florida everglades to the california redwoods to the 40 million roadless acres in the national forests more land than any administration in the history of this country except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt along the way we made a contribution to peace and humanity and democracy in northern ireland in the middle east in bosnia in kosovo in haiti we expanded trade with latin america we re trying to do so with the caribbean we re trying to be a good neighbor to our friends in the caribbean and to our friends in africa we have reached out to reduce the nuclear threat from russia to north korea to establish a decent relationship with china which is important to our future and the world is a safer stronger place than it was seven years ago now i say this to you to say not how great we were but that we had good ideas focused on giving the american people the conditions and the tools to make the most of their own lives focused on creating opportunity for every responsibility citizen focusing on creating a community of all people in this country who are willing to work hard and be good citizens and the american people did it and i am very grateful hillary is very grateful we are all very grateful but i want to say to you i could not have done it not any of it without the democrats in the congress and we need more of them not fewer of them send bill nelson up there and i want you to know that it would not have happened without the vice president again i want you to listen to this and you can see i m a little hoarse so i can t this is from the heart now these are facts from his vote to break the tie on the 93 budget which is what gave us the ability to balance the budget got interest rates down got the economy going to his vote to break the tie on the senate s consideration of common sense gun legislation to close the loophole in the brady bill so we could also cover the gun shows something you voted to do in florida from leading our efforts to connect every classroom to the internet let me tell you what we ve done five years ago when al gore and i started working on this and i asked him to take it on only 4 percent of the classrooms in the country were connected and they were in 14 percent of the schools five years ago today over 50 percent of the classrooms are connected to the internet in over 80 percent of the schools i think he s done a good job in helping this to happen from running our empowerment zone program to bring economic opportunity to poor areas to supporting our policies and developing so many of our policies to strengthen the american family to leading our reinventing government effort which has given us i will say again the smallest federal government in 37 years with a higher level of support for the american people to supporting every tough decision i have had to make as president from guns and tobacco to bosnia and kosovo i can tell you that in the history of the country he is the most effective and influential vice president who has ever served now he s got a lot of good ideas for the future too and now i want to talk about that i just signed the first budget of the 21st century charlie said we had a do nothing congress well that s not quite true they tried to do something they tried to pass a tax cut so big that it would have kept us from ever paying down the debt and fixing social security and contributing to our children s education and i vetoed that and the democrats stayed with me that was a major achievement of the last congress and then when they got ready to go home that s when the president and the democrats acquired a little influence in the debate so when we came out of the budget even this year we had a continuing commitment to 100 000 teachers to 50 000 more police to 60 000 housing vouchers to help poor people move from welfare to work we doubled the funds for after school programs we got the first money the federal government has ever appropriated for states to turn around or shut down failing schools so that we can help all our kids get a good education and still support the public schools and public school reform we had major advances on the environment and we beat back major assaults on the environment and we ve paid our united nations dues and agreed to help alleviate the debt of the poorest countries in the world and we fixed some of the too severe cuts in the medicare law from the 1997 balanced budget restoring funding to hospitals to nursing homes to other medical providers needed to help the 39 million elderly and disabled medicare beneficiaries we also passed a landmark bill i am immensely proud of which allows people with disabilities to keep their medicaid if they move into the work force so people can go to work because they can t get private insurance now there s a lot of things we didn t do and i m going to be working to get it done we didn t pass the patients bill of rights and we should it s wrong everybody should be guaranteed quality care we didn t raise the minimum wage again and we should we didn t close the gun show loophole and require child trigger locks and we should we didn t pass the hate crimes legislation or the employment non discrimination act and i believe we should we didn t pass my new markets initiative which would give americans the same tax incentives and loan guarantees to invest in poor areas in america they get to invest in poor areas in latin america or asia or africa and i think they should i hope that they will agree to let china join the wto and give them normal trading status why because you already know we ve got a big trade deficit with china this bill this agreement i made gives more options for american farmers american manufacturers american investors all they get out of it and it s not insignificant they get to be in the world trade organization where we ll all have to live by the same rules but we get dramatically greater access to their markets it means big big jobs and incomes for farmers and workers in america and i hope it will pass most importantly i hope we will find a way next year to protect social security and medicare in the face of the baby boomers retirements now i want to talk a little more about that and this is what i want to tell you about the election we ve got a great record we you and me all of us we ve got good ideas we ought to be winning every poll by 20 or 25 points in every race why aren t we well they always have more money than we do and they ve been talking to a certain sector of our electorate for so long and telling them how terrible we are some people probably believe it and forget to think before they vote but you can change that so i just want to leave you with this this i want to be my gift to you i will do everything i can for the next 14 months but you have to be good citizens in this election season and the future of america now is riding on how the congressional races and the governors races and the presidential race and these other things come out let me begin with a story over thanksgiving i got my whole family my extended family and gathered them up and took them to camp david then after we stuffed ourselves on thanksgiving we had some more of our friends come up and they had some little kids too to play with my two little nephews and on the saturday after thanksgiving this beautiful little six year old girl looked up at me and she said now mr president how old are you anyway so i said well i m 53 and she said that s a lot that s a lot so i said yes it is a lot and let me tell you from the perspective of those years in my lifetime in my whole lifetime there has never been a time when america had this much prosperity this much social progress this much national confidence with the absence of a crisis at home or a threat abroad now what does that mean wait wait wait wait we re done with the record i want you to think about this what that means is that for the first time in my lifetime on the edge of this new millennium we actually have a chance to shape the future of our dreams for our children in a way no previous group of americans in our whole lifetime has had and that imposes on us a terrific responsibility you know anybody can concentrate when their backs are against the wall the great british essayist samuel johnson said nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of one s own destruction your back s against the wall you can focus when things are rocking along hunky dory it s easy to get distracted i was so proud of the american people for sticking with me when i vetoed that tax cut i said you know you can understand it if people said hey man we ve been working hard out here the 80s were tough the 90s were tough cut us some slack here but they said uh uh no we don t want to go back to those old bad days we ll stay on the path we re on that was good so i ask you here s what will determine whether we win this election or not from the white house to the senate to all the other elections what will determine whether we win is what is it about and if it is about our common responsibility as a people to meet the big challenges of the 21st century because we ought to and because we can now for the first time in our lifetimes then we will win what are they we ve got to deal with the aging of america the number of people over 65 will double in 30 years i hope to be one of them it is unconscionable that the baby boom generation will walk away again from the opportunity to take social security out beyond the life expectancy of the baby boomers and to push the life of medicare out there and to add a prescription drug benefit for the people who cannot afford their medicine today second you look around florida we ve got the largest and most diverse student population in our history we cannot walk away from our obligation to give all of these children a world class education we ought to pass my initiative to help people build or repair thousands of schools we ought to keep on going until we connect them all to the internet we ought to give every child access to an after school program we ought to make sure the teachers are certified and well trained and well compensated we owe that to these kids nothing is more important third we ought to do more to help people balance work and family more child care insure all the kids with health insurance equal pay for equal work for women we ought to do that fourth we ought to make sure that we can grow the economy and still improve the environment the world is in a grip still of a very bad idea that s wrong all over the world including in washington d c people believe you can t get rich unless you put more coal and oil into furnaces or machines and burn them and pollute the atmosphere it s not true anymore it s not true anymore the farmers in florida i predict to you within 15 years will be saving all their waste products for biomass fuel and you ll be able to use a gallon of gasoline to make eight or 10 gallons of biomass fuel with no greenhouse gas emissions when that happens the whole future of that will change you can buy windows right now that let in five times as much light and keep out five times as much heat and cold we have undertaken to green the white house and we have saved the equivalent of almost 700 cars on the highway by energy conservation at the white house and it s working just fine we re all warm in the winter and cool in the summer it s a big deal it will be a bigger deal to the future you mark my words if you don t want the everglades to flood because of global warming we better deal now with this and we can do it so let me just mention one or two other things we ve got the crime rate down to a 25 year low good murder rate down to a 31 year low good does anybody think america is as safe as it ought to be no of course not now when i took office most people didn t believe you could drive the crime rate down we all thought the crime rate just went in one direction up so now we know it can be brought down so i say to you the reason i fight hard for this these common sense gun measures and the 50 000 more police in the high crime areas and more programs to keep kids out of trouble in the first place is i don t think it s good enough to say we ve had crime go down seven years i think the democrats ought to say okay now we know we can do it we have a new goal we want america to be the safest big country in the entire world and we re going to keep working until we do it now i want to say something about the economy i think it is terribly important that we keep our party front and center on keeping this economy going how are we going to keep it going number one is don t forget what brought us to the dance we need to keep paying down this debt you know that we can be out of debt in 15 years if we stay on my budget path for the first time since 1835 america will be debt free and we ought to do it second we ve got to keep working within our party within our country with labor environmentalists and businesspeople until we finally get it right on trade because i am telling you the world is better off today because there is 50 years of increasing trade we are only 4 percent of the world s people we ve got 22 percent of the world s income it just stands to reason that you can t hold that unless you sell something to the other 96 percent furthermore let me say something about imports they are unpopular in general and popular in particular we don t like imports in general but we all have them we wear them we drive them you know what do they do for you they keep inflation down with competition that s why we ve got the longest peacetime expansion in our history because inflation didn t destroy it so we ve got to keep working until we get this right the third thing we ve got to do and this is something i feel so strongly about if we can t bring economic opportunity to the poor areas of america that have not participated in this recovery now we will never get around to doing it never to appalachia to the mississippi delta to the poor rural areas of america to the inner cities to the native american reservations we ve got to do it and with economic opportunity we also have to keep our focus on doing everything we can at home and around the world to get people together to get people over these conflicts they have over race and ethnicity and religion and sexual orientation it s crazy you know let me just ask you to think about this don t you think it s interesting that whenever you read something about the new millennium they talk about the wonders of the human computer the wonders of the human genome hillary had some people at the white house the other night one of the guys that founded the internet and one of the principal scientists working on the human gene and the internet guy actually sent the first e mail 18 years ago because he had a profoundly deaf wife and he wanted to talk to her at work and she couldn t take hearing aids and he said the intersection of the study of the gene and the study of computers means we can do things that we never could do before and he had his wife stand up and she started speaking and because she has a minor little computer chip stuck way down in her ear she can hear for the first time in 50 years now last year we transplanted nerves from the legs to the spine of a laboratory animal for the first time and got movement in the lower legs some people think we ll be able to take a picture of spinal cord injuries and just design a computer chip to go in and replace the electronic impulses that the spine used to provide this is the kind of stuff we re talking about in a couple of years young mothers will come home from the hospital with their babies and they ll have a little genetic map and it will be a little scary it will say you know your daughter has one of these genes that are predictors for breast cancer that s the bad news the good news is you know it now and here are 10 things you can do that will cut her risk by 80 percent a lot of my friends who are experts in the field really believe that sometime early in the next century american newborns will have a life expectancy of nearly 100 years now a lot of my other friends in the space program think we ll find out what s in the black holes in the universe a lot of other people believe we ll continue to fight against war because we ll be more connected to the internet around the world let me ask you something don t you think it s interesting that in this most modern of times the biggest problem in the world today is the oldest problem of human society we don t trust people who are different from us we fear them it s easy to go from fear to dislike from dislike to hatred from hatred to dehumanization and then to violence there was a picture yesterday morning in one of the big newspapers of a young gay soldier that was beaten to death with a baseball bat and right next to him the young soldier that beat him to death one 21 one 18 i was looking at these two kids thinking you know they re young enough that they could be my children and both these young men put on the uniform of our country and i could have sent them someplace to die they both swore to go wherever i told them to go and do whatever i told them to do and i was aching for the young man who had died and for the young man whose life is now destroyed who wasn t born hating that way somebody had to teach him to do that and so i say to you you want to know what makes us different the best politics in 2000 is doing right by the big challenges of the country if people believe the election is about who s got the best record and who s got the best vision for the big challenges lifting us up and pulling us together listen our crowd s going to do fine if we talk about the aging of america and social security and medicare if we talk about the education of our children if we talk about growing our economy and helping our agricultural and manufacturing sectors while improving the environment if we talk about balancing work and family if we talk about bringing economic opportunity to poor people and getting this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 and if we talk about the most important thing of all which is manifested in the hate crimes in america and in the continuing conflicts from the balkans to the middle east and thank god in the peace agreement in northern ireland and we hope there will be one between israel and syria soon because they re coming to meet next week people have to find a way not just to tolerate but to celebrate their differences and to be secure in doing it because they believe down to the core of their being that what we have in common is even more important we ve got to let a lot of this stuff go our party can take the lead in doing that so go out there and talk to people about what s happened in this country in the last seven years even more important go out there and say do you really believe in our lifetime we ve ever been in this kind of shape before and if you don t what are we going to do with it go up to total strangers on the street and say you re a citizen what do you think we ought to do with this time i think we ought to make the most of it and ask them about the aging of america ask them about the children of america ask them about their parents struggling to balance work and family ask them about the economy and the environment ask them about bringing economic opportunity to poor places and ask them about building one america you make this election season about that and we ll have another celebration next year thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton11 2 97 bill_clinton thank you very much first of all i know i speak for all us when i thank ken burns and all of those who made this magnificent film possible thank you especially jack smith for your work in making it possible and sponsoring it if you think about what ken burns has given to america with the civil war the west baseball and thomas jefferson i think mr jefferson would be very proud of you mr burns and i know we all are and we thank you so much i think every american president has been inspired by jefferson s ideals affected by his decisions fascinated by his character two of my most prized personal possessions are an original printing of the notes on virginia and a printing of daniel webster s marvelous eulogy to john adams and thomas jefferson delivered in faneuil hall in august of 1826 and from time to time when i feel some sense of despair just for the heck of it i take them down and open the pages and start reading i always thought that the fact that both of them died on the 50th anniversary of the declaration of independence was the best evidence the modern world has on the question of whether god is it is impossible to believe this happened by accident and so i ask all of you to leave here tonight with a sense of gratitude to thomas jefferson but also with the firm conviction that the thing he was most right about was in leaving us a system that would always be in the act of becoming that his unshakable belief that the future could be better than the present extended even to himself and to his contemporaries to their failures and to their successes and that is what we must always believe you make a better present if you think about the future being brighter and if you really believe in the potential of every single human spirit thomas jefferson did and so should we i hope you ll now join us in the state dining room and you ll all be able to talk about what you liked most about the movie but let me say again we re gratified to have you all here hillary and i have looked forward to this evening for a long time and we are especially grateful for all of you who had any part in this magnificent gift to the people of the united states thank you dem wjclinton11 3 94 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president ladies and gentlemen today s announcement is good for our nation and good for our hemisphere this has been a very important year and a couple of months for this hemisphere late last year in an historic choice the american people and the congress embraced nafta which will establish the world s largest free trade zone create jobs and bolster the growth of democracy in market economies in december right after the nafta vote the vice president went to mexico city as he said and announced my intention to host a meeting of democratically elected heads of state and government in this hemisphere today i am pleased to announce that the summit of the americas will be held in early december in the city of miami thank you the diversity the dynamism the applause meter all make miami an ideal site for this meeting miami s economy is fully integrated with the economies of latin america and the caribbean in so many ways it represents the promise of hemispheric integration the summit of the americas will be an historic event will be the first meeting of hemispheric leaders in over a generation and it will be the first ever hemispheric meeting of democratically elected leaders let me say a word about why this summit matters so much to us here at home in the united states our nation has a major stake in the prosperity and freedom of the entire hemisphere our exports to latin america and the caribbean have more than doubled in just seven years rising to nearly 80 billion in 1993 that has generated hundreds of thousands of new jobs for american workers if we can continue to bring down hemispheric trade barriers we can create a million new jobs by the turn of the century at the same time the rising tide of democracy in this hemisphere helps make us more secure democracies tend not to fight one another they make better partners in trade and diplomacy and as we work with our neighbors to build more free prosperous and secure relations throughout this hemisphere this summit will advance our common efforts and our shared interests when the summit of the americas convenes in miami we will crown a process of intensive consultation that will begin next week when the vice president travels to bolivia argentina and brazil to meet with the leaders of those nations in the coming months i will be working with my hemispheric counterparts to develop a full and productive agenda for this summit we want to consider two broad themes first how to strengthen our democracies defend them collectively and improve our governance second how to promote economic growth while advancing a strategy of sustainable development that protects the environment and alleviates poverty to help to define our agenda we will also encourage business labor and nongovernmental organizations all across the hemisphere to exchange ideas and propose initiatives that can enrich the summit deliberations we ve arrived at a moment of very great promise and great hope for the western hemisphere democratic values are ascendant our economies are growing and becoming more intertwined every day through trade and investment now we have a unique opportunity to build a community of free nations diverse in culture and history but bound together by a commitment to responsive and free government vibrant civil societies open economies and rising living standards for all our people so as we prepare for this summit of the americas let us think boldly and set forth a vision of progress for all our people let us begin the work of building a genuine new community for all of us in this hemisphere thank you very much i d like to just say in closing a couple of things first of all i don t think anyone who is not aware of this process can possibly understand the energy and the persistence and the thought that went into the application that governor chiles pressed for miami to host this conference i compliment him and my long time friend buddy mckay for the work that they did and the way they did it they did not make me witness grown men crying but all short of that was tried i d also like to say a special word of thanks to my former colleague as a governor and a senator bob graham and to the other members of the congressional delegation for the work that they did in pressing this cause but most of all i have to tell you that i have been deeply moved over the last few years when i ve had the opportunity to go to miami and to south florida and see the heroic efforts that people have made to deal not only with the aftermath of the hurricane but to build a genuine multicultural multiracial society that would be at the crossroads of the americas and therefore at the forefront of the future in the end i think that this decision was made on the merits because our best hopes to do things that democracies find difficult to do get people together across racial and economic and ethnic lines lies in the efforts that are being made there now and i believe that in december we will have a great gathering in a place that can symbolize the future toward which we are all tending thank you very much we re adjourned dem wjclinton11 3 97a bill_clinton thank you thank you very much mr vice president representative norton representative moran members of the administration mr mayor chairman bremer mr evans and especially all the citizens of the district of columbia who are here today you know every year millions of visitors come here but even those who don t come know a good deal about our capital america s eyes and the eyes of the world constantly focus on washington they see the good and there is much good there is history here everywhere tremendous resources and talent from all over the world but there is more as well there are the people of the district some of whose families have lived here for generations they are hardworking and they are committed to making the community and their neighborhoods better there are businesses which strive to make it sometimes under very difficult conditions there is much dedication and much heart in my state of the union address i said that we have to renew our capital city to make it the finest place to learn to work and to live because people here deserve no less and because the district matters beyond the city limits the city is every american s home and it should be every american s pride our capital city must reflect the best of who we are what we hope to become and where we are going washington started as a planned city george washington thomas jefferson and a soldier and architect named pierre l enfant shared a vision of order and beauty the boulevards the museums the monuments reflect their vision but this is a different time and our city needs a new and different vision one that reaches where the magnificent vistas end one that touches our schools where too often books and teachers are in short supply our streets where too often children are robbed of their futures their freedom and law abiding citizens too often live in fear of the few who break the law one that touches the lives of those who want to be responsible in work but lack the opportunity to do so one that makes businesses want to locate here to create jobs here to give the community new economic life and spirit and vitality our strategy must begin to reset the course for a better life for all who call the district home our challenge is to revitalize the city as the nation s capital to improve the prospects of self government to succeed and to make it a place where people really want to live to work to do business we can clearly do this from new york to chicago to san francisco we have seen new life brought to urban areas unemployment is down crime is down things are looking up we know that if we empower people and we help them within the economic framework they will do the rest and that is the heart of our strategy of course our capital city faces enormous challenges of course these challenges are to some extent unique to d c and have been a long time in the making but at least now we have a plan and we are committed more of you in more ways than i have ever seen before are committed we at the federal level must help our capital city to lift itself to the point where it can be a model for the nation for revitalization working together we can and we must make washington once again the proud face america shows to the world as the vice president said there are steps which have been taken already but now it s time for the next step our economic plan for the district of columbia an important piece of a larger strategy to build on the work begun and on what we have learned from success stories in other cities about what actually is working there it reflects our agenda to revitalize urban america it addresses the unique needs of the district it recognizes that only the people of the district can lift it up in the end so it gives people the tools to do the job our 300 million plan has two parts first it will provide 250 million in federal tax incentives for jobs and capital to strengthen the economic base in our capital city second it will provide 50 million in federal commitment to help capitalize a new non federal public private partnership the d c economic development corporation the corporation will develop an economic development strategy coordinate large scale development projects support efforts to create jobs and business opportunities it will have broad powers to facilitate many existing plans such as the monumental corps the downtown interactive and the new york avenue plans the economic development corporation will be authorized to allocate a new d c capital credit which will provide 95 million in tax credits for investors in and lenders to d c businesses these credits will be worth up to 25 percent of the amount invested or borrowed this will help to bring and keep businesses where jobs are needed and they will be given on a competitive basis to investors and lenders who can do the most for the district and its people the corporation will also have authority to issue tax exempt private activity bonds to finance businesses in hard hit areas and it will be able to receive transfers of land or development rights from the federal government and from others it will work with the national capital infrastructure commission we re creating to make certain that infrastructure and economic development build on each other the corporation will be a driving force for our capital s renewal for it to take its rightful place in the fast growing economy of this region and in our nation the federal government s investment of 50 million in the corporation is just a start our goal is to involve all sectors of the economy in helping the district our plan also includes a new d c jobs credit available to businesses in the district that hire low or moderate income residents living in economically distressed areas it would provide a 40 percent tax credit on the first 10 000 of eligible wages in the first year of employment this jobs credit builds on the work opportunity tax credit passed last year and my proposed welfare to work tax credit our plan will also allow small businesses in distressed area to deduct up to 20 000 in additional expenses for certain equipment costs just as we are committed to seeing that self government works as it should we have a commitment from the district government to cooperate fully in the economic development corporation this is important but we need more i challenge business and community leaders to give their unqualified support to bringing back the district if you re a business or an association in the district don t give up on it i commend the members of the national association of homebuilders who decided to keep their headquarters here because that s important for a truly national organization and it s important for a truly international organization as well i thank mci for its decision to keep their offices in the district if you re a business making money in the district then invest here follow the lead of ford motor company which is providing a line of credit to repair emergency police fire and other vehicles and ford to set up an automotive program with three district schools i want to mention another example of good citizenship as well and good business tomorrow secretary cuomo will be on hand as safeway opens a large supermarket in southeast d c it sounds so basic to have access to a grocery store but that area has not had one in 20 years safeway will create 200 new jobs and we thank you sir thank you very much i want to thank all the businesses who are here today for everything you do to support the district i hope you will work with director raines and secretary rubin to develop concrete ways to participate with the economic development corporation and the district and report back to me within 60 days the government will honor its commitment to the district we know the federal presence here is critical to the local economy we know that we must do more and that is why i have issued a directive to ensure that agencies do all they can to stay here and to contribute here we want to build on our presence wherever possible for example the navy will boost employment at the southeast navy yard by doubling its current levels by 2001 adding 5 000 jobs here in the district as district residents the first lady the vice president tipper and i will continue to do our part recently the first lady presented a check for 18 million to repair our city schools coming from the privatization of connie lee the institution that insures college and university bonds and our public private partnership will now benefit district school children the first lady also challenged law firms i thought that was good we don t have any shortage of law firms in d c to expand their efforts to adopt d c schools to visit with students to develop relationships with them and mentor them i m proud of all the departments and agencies in the federal government that have adopted d c schools and i would like to say a special word of thanks to my secret service detail who gave that to the first lady and me as a christmas present not very long ago i couldn t imagine a better gift and the work they do at the kramer school is something that i am particularly proud of as the vice president said our administration has worked hard to be a good neighbor but i ve asked the cabinet to do more you will hear and see a lot of our cabinet secretaries in the district you will see them doing things in the next two weeks for example secretary albright and ambassador richardson will adopt local schools to teach children about diplomacy and geography secretary glickman will announce a renewed effort to glean surplus food from cafeterias at federal buildings to feed the hungry here in the district and i m asking all the secretaries to report back to me within 90 days with a targeted plan of action for each department to do all it possibly can to help the district it has been said that americans didn t think much of their capital until they had to defend it during attack in the war of 1812 when as all of you know in 1814 the white house was burned in a way history is repeating itself because for too long americans have not thought enough about our capital city but washington is still worth fighting for in fact it s more worth fighting for than ever the people i have seen who live in this city who do miraculous things every day to try to help people make more of their own lives to try to help kids in trouble to try to turn things around and see people live up to their potential deserve more than the rest of us have done and i am determined that even though the solutions will not come overnight we will provide our part of the effort and together with local government and business with the involvement of every citizen we can have a strategy and implement a strategy that makes washington the city we all know it ought to be and that we must believe it will be thank you very much dem wjclinton11 3 97b bill_clinton thank you what a gift thank you walter cronkite thank you paul taylor for your passion and your commitment thank you senator mccain chairman hundt ann mcbride becky cain and thank you barry diller for what you have said about this important issue i am delighted to have the chance to come here today and i thank the sponsors of this event again let me say that i participated in the last election in the free television offered by the networks thanks to the efforts of paul taylor and walter cronkite and the members of the straight talk coalition senator dole and i were given a unique opportunity to talk directly to the voters no gimmicks no flashy graphics a full minute or two at a time and i really enjoyed it i put a lot of effort into those opportunities and i m sure that senator dole did as well i felt that they were a great gift and walter and i had a talk backstage before we came out about how it might even be done better in the next round of elections maybe my opinions will carry more weight on such matters since i never expect to run again for anything and i do believe that the free television was a very important thing i think if it could be done as we were discussing at the same time every evening on a given network and back to back so that the candidates can be seen in a comparative context i think it would be even more valuable we have to do some things to improve the way our political system works at election time and the way it communicates or its leaders communicate to people all year round this should not be surprising to anyone the founding fathers understood that we were an experiment we re still around after all of these years because we have relished the idea that we are an experiment that america is a work in progress that we re constantly in the making we always have to change a lot of good things have happened to expand participation in the political system from the time we were a new nation when only white male property owners could vote and we have to make some more changes now but if you look at the changes which have been made in the last 200 years we should be hopeful television has the power to expand the franchise or to shrink the franchise indeed that is true of all means of communications and all media we know that television is a profound and powerful force we know that we don t fully understand all of its implications even what you said walter we don t really know what the connection is between television and a diminished voter turnout it could be because there is a poll on television every night that tells people about the election so some people think that there s no point in their voting because the person they re for is going to win anyway or the person they re for can t win anyway we need to think about that and that s not the subject of this meeting but we need to we really need all of us need more information more research about why people vote and why they don t vote there was a very i ve only seen one survey done i believe for the democratic leadership council of the nonvoters it s a poll that doesn t pay off you know it was done after the election of the nonvoters but it was very interesting and some of the findings were quite counterintuitive about why people did or didn t vote but i would urge those of you who are interested in it to get that look at it and think about what new work could be done to look into that today we want to talk about whether the medium of free television could be used to diminish the impact of excessive money in politics and about whether it could still be used therefore to reform our system in a way that makes it better and ultimately that leads to better decisions for the american people it is now commonplace everybody will tell you that campaigns cost too much and it takes too much time to raise the money and the more money you raise from a larger number of people the more questions will be raised about that major party committees spent over three times as much in this last election cycle as four years before and that doesn t count the third party expenditures both the genuinely independent third party committees and those that weren t really independent although they claim to be spending in congressional campaigns has risen six fold in the last two decades that s over three times the rate of inflation the biggest reason for this is the rise in the cost of television but of course there is also now more money being spent on mail on telephoning on radio and other print advertising as well in 1972 candidates spent 25 million for political ads in 1996 400 million presidential campaigns now routinely spend two thirds or more of their money on paid ads senate candidates 42 percent of their money on television house races about a third interestingly enough that s often because there is no single television market which just overlaps a house district and often the cost is prohibitive particularly in the urban districts but you get the drift it s the same everywhere we are the only major democracy in the world where candidates have to raise larger and larger sums of money simply to communicate with voters through the medium that matters most every other major democracy offers candidates or parties free air time to speak to voters and we can plainly do better building on the big first step urged by this group in 1996 we have an obligation to restore our campaign finance system to a system that has the broad confidence of the american people but also of the american press that comments on it in order to do that television has to be part of the solution i have said before and i will say again everybody who has been involved in this system has to take responsibility for it and for changing it those of us in public life know better than anybody else what the demands of prevailing in the present system are and those who control the airwaves understand it well also first and most fundamentally i came here to support senator mccain we have to take advantage of this year to pass campaign finance reform the campaign finance laws are two decades out of date they have been overtaken by events by dramatic changes in the nature and cost of campaigns and the flood of money that has followed them the money has been raised and spent in ways that simply could not have been imagined when the people who fashioned the last campaign finance law in congress did it they did the best they could and i will say again i believe that they did a good thing and that that law did improve the financing of our campaigns and restored a level of confidence to our politics and made things better it is simply that time has changed and we need new changes to reflect the things that have happened in the last 20 years it will not be easy to do this but the situation is far from hopeless after all the first thing i want to say is the american people do care about this and our politics i think in terms of traditional honesty is getting better not worse i have asked over a dozen people just in the last two years who have been living in washington for the last 30 years who have been in politics the most recent person i asked was senator dole whether politics was more or less honest today than it was 30 years ago and all 12 or 15 however many i asked all gave the same answer they said it s more honest today than it was 30 years ago i think that s where we have to start it is important to put this in the proper perspective if you want people in congress to vote to change it they cannot be asked to admit that they are doing something that they re not or that they are participating in dragging the country down the drain because anybody who knows what went on 30 years ago and what goes on today would have to say that the system is still better than it was then on the other hand anybody who denied that at an exponential pace changes are occurring which imperil the integrity of the electoral process and the financing of campaigns would also be badly amiss the second thing i d like to say is we should be hopeful because we have seen over the last four years in other contexts real bipartisan processes to improve the way politics works not in campaign finance reform but there was bipartisan support for the motor voter law for the lobby disclosure overhaul that was the first one in 50 years in which congress banned meals and gifts from lobbyists to lawmakers but also required much more disclosure and that s the most important thing when you get 100 percent disclosure of an area where there hasn t been any before then that offers all of you in the press the opportunity to communicate to the american people what the activities of lobbyists are and to let them and you draw your own conclusions in terms of the results produced by decision makers we ve required congress to live under the same that they impose upon the private sector every single one of these things has happened in the last four years with broad bipartisan support so i think it is very very important that we recognize this will not happen unless there is bipartisan support but there is evidence that if the environment is right if the support is deep enough if the calls are strong enough and positive enough we can get this kind of change now let me also say that i think it s important to make this point because i see all these surveys that say that campaign finance reform is important to people but if you rank it on a list of 10 things it will always rank 10th behind balancing the budget education and all this that can be used by politicians as an excuse if you will not to deal with it they say well look at all these surveys campaign finance reform sure people like it but it s not as important to them as whether we ll have national standards for reading and math for example one of my passions what we have to do is to make a connection between the two for the american people what we have to argue is yes we really need to be up here doing the public s business we need to be balancing the budget improving education reforming welfare expanding health care coverage to children who don t have it passing a juvenile justice reform the kinds of things that i m passionately interested in but having the right kind of campaign finance reform system and having the right kind of straight talk on television and having issues be more elections be more issue oriented and having the debates of both sides heard clearly by all people and increasing voter interest and voter turnout all these things will increase the likelihood that this laundry list of good things will be done and will be done in better fashion than would otherwise be the case i think it is very important that those of you who care about this make this connection because that s how to build broad and deep support for this endeavor it seems to me that we do have an historic opportunity to pass campaign finance reform and i think the public owes a lot of gratitude to senator mccain and senator feingold and congressman shays and congressman meehan and all of their supporters for the legislation they have offered it is real and tough it would level the playing field and reduce the role of big money in politics it would set voluntary limits on campaign spending and ban soft money all corporate contributions and the very large individual ones it would restrict the role of political action committees and lobbyists and make needed reforms within the confines of the constitution as defined by existing supreme court case law in all these ways it would set ceilings on money in politics and just as important it would also provide a floor and i think that is very important it would also provide a floor you actually have some members in congress who come from districts where there s a very low per capita income for example who are very afraid of campaign finance reform because they re afraid among their own constituents they ll never be able to raise enough money in their district to compete the first time a multi millionaire runs against them so the law has to give a floor and mccain feingold does that by giving candidates free air time to talk directly to the voters if they observe the spending limits of the law and we need to emphasize that any ceiling law should have a floor to guarantee that people have their say and are heard it gives candidates deeply discounted rates for the purchase of time if they observe the limits of the law in all these ways it will level the playing field giving new voices a chance to be heard and being fair to both parties i have supported the idea of free tv time for many years when the vice president was in congress he actually introduced legislation to require it it was first proposed by president kennedy in 1962 it has been around long enough we now tried it in the last election more than ever before and we know that it advances the public interest in my state of the union address i asked congress to pass the mccain feingold bill by july the 4th the day we celebrate the birth of our democracy i pledge to you that i will continue to work with members of both parties to do this i will be mustering more support out in the country and that will be announced over the next few weeks for this endeavor we have to use the present intense interest in this as well as the controversy over fundraising in the last election and all the publicity on it as a spur to action we cannot let it become what it is in danger of becoming which is an excuse for inaction and that again is something that i challenge all of you on do not let the controversies become an excuse to do nothing and to wallow around in it use it as a spur to changing the system because until you change the system you will continue to have controversies over the amount the sheer amount of money that is raised in these elections the second thing i d like to discuss is what walter talked about in some detail and that is how broadcasters can meet their public interest obligations in this era ever since the fcc was created broadcasters have had a compact with the public in return for the public airwaves they must meet public interest obligations the bargain has been good for the industry and good for the public now startling new technologies are shaking and remaking the world of telecommunications they ve opened wider opportunities for broadcasters than ever before but they also offer us the chance to open wider vistas for our democracy as well the move from analog signals to digital ones will give each broadcaster much more signal capacity than they have today the broadcasters asked congress to be given this new access to the public airwaves without charge i believe therefore it is time to update the broadcasters public interest obligations to meet the demands of the new times and the new technological realities i believe broadcasters who receive digital licenses should provide free air time for candidates and i believe the fcc should act to require free air time for candidates the telecommunications revolution can help to transform our system so that once again voters have the loudest voice in our democracy free time for candidates can help free our democracy from the grip of big money i hope all of you will support that there are many ways that this could be done many of you here have put forward innovative plans i believe the free time should be available to all qualified federal candidates i believe it should give candidates a chance to talk directly to the voters without gimmicks or intermediaries because campaign finance reform is so important i believe it should be available especially to candidates who limit their own spending it is clear under the supreme court decision that this can be done and i believe that is how it should be done candidates should be able to talk to voters based on the strength of their ideas not the size of their pocketbooks and all voters should know that no candidate is kept from running simply because he or she cannot raise enormous amounts of funds last month the vice president announced that we would create an independent advisory committee of experts industry representatives public interest advocates and others to recommend what steps to take before i came over here today i signed an executive order creating that committee the balanced panel i will appoint will advise me on ways we can move forward and make a judgment as to what the new public interest obligations of broadcasters might be but today let us simply agree on the basic premise in 1997 for broadcasters serving the public should mean enhancing our democracy finally let me challenge the broadcasters as well broadcasters are not the problem but broadcasting must be the solution the step the broadcasters took in this last election as i have said over and over again in other forums with the encouragement of straight talk for tv was a real breakthrough now i ask broadcasters to follow up on this experiment in democracy and i m especially pleased that a leader in the industry barry diller has challenged his colleagues to open up the airwaves to candidates he has made clear forcefully and very publicly that he and all of his colleagues have an obligation to society and his presence here today makes it clear that he is willing to assume the mantle of leadership but surely there are others i know there are who will gladly join in and take up this cause as well there are many questions about political reform many skeptics will look at all proposed reform measures and ask whether they ll work and whether there will be unintended consequences the truth is that they will work and there will be unintended consequences but if we use that for an excuse not to change no good change in this country would ever have come about there will always be something we cannot foresee that s what makes life interesting and keeps us all humble but that must not be an excuse for our refusing to act in this area we know we know when we work to expand our democracy when you give people a greater voice and advocates of all political views a firm platform upon which to stand we are moving forward as a nation by passing campaign finance reform by renewing the compact between broadcasters and the public to better serve in this new era we can do that again and i will say again i will do all i can on both these fronts on campaign finance reform legislation and on requiring free availability of the airwaves to public candidates we need your support for both and we need broader and more intense public support and again i say that has to be built by demonstrating to the public that this is not an inside the beltway exercise and both parties trying to find ways to undermine each other but a necessary way of opening our democracy so that we can better more quickly and more profoundly address the real challenges facing the american people in their everyday lives these two steps will help and together i hope we can make them this year thank you very much hello sarah i think probably i might have been because i m the president and a president has unusual access to the public and you have the presidential debates which are unique in terms of their viewership and their potential impact but i believe that if you just look at the races for congress and the number of votes that changed just in the last five days and how the votes were counted when the votes changed and the movement changed there is no question that the amount of money deployed in an intelligent way can have a profound impact on the outcome of these elections and what you want to do is to make sure that everybody has the same fair chance at the voters and nobody has an excessive chance and given the supreme court cases the way the mccain feingold bill is drawn up plus the effort to get more free air time are the best responses to overcome the undue influence of excessive money thank you very much dem wjclinton11 5 00 bill_clinton let me welcome you all here today and before i acknowledge the members of congress and our participants i need to say just a few words about the terrible fire that has surrounded and engulfed part of los alamos new mexico i have been briefed on the situation the fire is continuing to blaze the residents have been evacuated we have taken steps to protect our lab and the assets there and most important i just want to give my sympathies to the people who have lost their homes yesterday i declared an emergency for the area making them eligible for disaster assistance and today our fema administrator james lee witt secretary richardson our forest service chief mike dombeck and the director of the national park service bob stanton are all there or will be shortly to assess the situation and to monitor our efforts this is a very very difficult situation and i know that the prayers and support of all americans will be with the people out there i d like to welcome senator harkin senator finestein representative delauro representative eleanor holmes norton representative mink woolsey moore jackson lee and eddie bernice johnson all of whom are here today with secretary herman and martin baily the chair of our council of economic advisors janice lachance our eeoc chair ida castro and all the other people who are here representing working families in just a few moments i ll introduce the woman to my left who will speak after me and is really what this day is all about the first mother s day of the 21st century is shaping up to be a time of commitment and action led by women in america on sunday mothers from around the nation will march for safer communities free of gun violence today women and men are coming together to uphold core american values of equality dignity and justice this has been designated equal pay day it marks the fact that the average woman had to work more than four months into this year just to earn what the average man earned last year but equal pay is about more than dollars and cents it s about right and wrong because it s wrong when women still earn about 75 cents for every dollar earned by a man in the same line of work it s wrong that average female workers have to work an extra 17 weeks to catch up to the wages of average male workers it s true of course that some of these differences can be explained by education age and occupation but even after adjusting for these factors there remains a sizable pay gap as women grow older the gap grows wider it is widest for women of color african american women earn 64 cents for every dollar earned by white men in other words they d have to work all of last year and into july of this year before they earned as much as the average white male earned in 1999 for hispanic women listen to this equal pay day won t come until late october equal pay is about all our mothers and sisters our wives and daughters it s about fathers and brothers and sons and husbands it s a family issue when women aren t paid equally the entire family pays the price we also know the cost extends far beyond one s work life if you re making less you ll get less social security you ll have less to put aside for retirement the average woman who s about to retire if she even gets a pension can expect about half the pension benefits of the average man who retires now is the time to close the wage gap you have often heard me ask this question in the context of other national challenges but if we have the lowest unemployment in over 30 years and the longest economic expansion in history and over 21 million new jobs with the lowest poverty rate in 20 years and the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years and the lowest female household poverty rate on the record if we can t solve this problem now when in the world will we ever get around to it now is the time to deal with this wages for women are up and the pay gap has narrowed since the passage of the equal pay act but the gap is still far far too wide and women and their families are paying a terrible price today i received a report from the council of economic advisors on opportunities for women in the new economy particularly in information technology fields jobs such as computer scientists and programmers information technology now accounts for about a third of our growth although only 8 percent of direct employment but these are high wage jobs that pay about 80 percent above the national average the cea study shows that overall employment in information technology has grown by more than 80 percent since 1993 that s amazing overall employment has nearly doubled since 1983 but fewer than one of three of these high tech high wage jobs are filled by women moreover women are most under represented in new economy jobs where the pay is highest for example electrical engineering is just 10 percent female today that is another digital divide the report also found that after accounting for education and age and occupation the pay gap in information technology jobs is unfortunately about the same as it is in other occupations if we re going to make the most of the new economy we have to close the door on discrimination wherever it exists and open the door for higher opportunities for all women who wish to work and are qualified to do so today i m announcing a number of steps to do just that first our budget for the coming year includes a new 20 million initiative for the national science foundation for grants to universities to remove barriers to career advancement for women scientists and engineers and encourage more women to pursue these fields this is especially important because we know the pay gap narrows sharply for women who have higher levels of education when only one out of 10 engineers is a woman and only 30 percent of those in math and computer science jobs are women we simply have to do more it s important for reasons of fairness and justice it s also important for our leadership in the global economy second i m establishing an equal pay task force at the equal employment opportunity commission to ensure that our eeoc field staff have the full range of support they need to effectively investigate charges of pay discrimination third and perhaps most important again today i renew my call to congress to send the clear message that wage discrimination against women is just as unacceptable as discrimination based on race or ethnicity the best way to do that is by acting this year support legislation to strengthen existing wage discrimination laws support our equal pay initiative in next year s budget to provide 10 million for eeoc efforts to help in wage discrimination and 17 million for secretary herman s efforts to train women in non traditional jobs including those in high tech fields thirty five years ago when president kennedy signed the equal pay act now more than 35 years ago he said i quote it adds to our laws another structure basic to democracy for over seven years now the vice president and i have tried to build on that basic idea to include more women in every aspect of our administration s life and to create more opportunities for all americans women and men equally we have not succeeded in closing the pay gap we need the help of congress to do it it is very very important we all say we want to support work and family we all say we want to open new doors of opportunity now s our chance and we ought to take it i d like to introduce now someone who knows about the equal pay challenge because she has lived with wage discrimination she has fought against wage discrimination and thankfully she has won she came here from baltimore today to tell her story ladies and gentlemen karen simmons beathea i just wanted to say one final thing some of the members have alluded to it but because of the way we introduced each other seriatim i don t think we adequately expressed our appreciation to karen simmons beathea who really represents what this is all about and i think we ought to give her another hand and i will just leave you with this thought there are a few issues that we re working on today that unfortunately tend to get cast in washington d c in terms of a partisan divide but out in the country there isn t one you know when i was a young boy i lived with a working grandfather and a working grandmother i was raised by a working mother nobody has lived in one of these families for any period of time without having at least one encounter with some kind of problem we re talking about and if it ever happens to you especially when you are a child you never get over it if you go out and talk to americans around this country republicans and independents and democrats will all tell you more or less the same thing about this issue this is not a political or a partisan issue anywhere else now you heard eleanor holmes norton saying if somebody doesn t like our bills or they want to talk about the practical impact well we can talk about how to word the language and deal with the practical consequences but whether we do something or not and whether what we do is meaningful or not is not a political or a partisan issue in america and it shouldn t be here and if all of the people who have ever experienced anything like what karen talked about today they ll talk to all of the members of congress about it we would get something done something meaningful this year thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton11 6 02 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you very much your highness president de masi it s nice to meet a president who s not term limited elias thank you for your wonderful introduction to the ministers and dignitaries here to the american ambassador to dubai most importantly to the graduates in this place tonight and to their family members and friends who are in this audience i am delighted to be back in this marvelous place i was honored to be invited to give this address i was so excited i was coming back i actually persuaded my daughter to come with me and we have had a grand day in dubai i thank the crown prince for his support for education for economic development for information technology for the it project the university s new school of engineering for dubai internet city which i toured today i liked it so much i almost applied for a job then i realized that in my advanced age i was not qualified for most of them but i enjoyed it very much because of the crown prince s efforts dubai is well on its way to becoming the technological center of the entire middle east and this university would have central role to play universities are interesting institutions elias in his introduction mentioned the famous speech president kennedy gave in 1962 at yale it was also the site of one of his best jokes i just thought of it because you mentioned it but president kennedy went to harvard and whenever you give a speech in america at an event like this they give you an honorary degree and harvard and yale are great rivals and so kennedy said at long last he had gotten the best of both worlds a yale degree and a harvard education well today it is clear to me that you have gotten a good education you ve learned a lot about business you doubtless have absorbed all the possibilities of modern technology but what i would like to say in the beginning is that beyond its commitment to education technology and the global economy dubai is blazing another trail that may be even more important for the world of the 21st century dubai is proving that you can be faithful to your religion to your culture to your traditions and still embrace diversity this university has students from more than 60 countries about 80 of the people in dubai tonight were born in other lands by coming here and learning together you have reflected the potential of higher education not only to increase knowledge but also to create new communities of shared values rooted in our common humanity it is that community of shared values that i want to talk about a little tonight the global information age is marked by a remarkable level of interdependence more trade more travel more immigration more widely shared technology and information a common culture the last building i passed on my way into the university was dubai s hard rock caf but whether the forces of interdependence are used to build as they clearly are here in dubai and at this university or to destroy as they were in the united states on september the 11th or as they are in every close combat in the world from the middle east to the line of control between india and pakistan in all the places good and bad in the world you see there is clearly interdependence the real question is not whether we re bound up together in our future but whether it s going to be a good future or a bad one will our interdependence be positive or negative none of us have the option to go back in a hole to put back up the fence to rebuild the berlin wall so the question of how interdependence will work out in our lives depends upon the values we embrace and the kinds of communities we build for all of you young people fresh with your education full of your dreams i think that you would probably live in the most peaceful prosperous impressive time the world has ever known but it really depends upon what we do with the technology with the interdependence with the access we all have to each other the central conflict of the late 20th century is that between communism and democracy between controlled economies and free market economies the central conflict of the early 21st century will be between those who think about yesterday and those who focus on tomorrow between those who seek a separate future and those who want a shared future between those who believe communities must be exclusive and those who believe their community can be part of a larger global community the challenge that you face more than any other is how to move the world your region and maybe even your own mind from interdependence to integration to the idea that what we see around us in dubai everyday can reflect the future of the entire world that there can be a global community one that does not erase our differences but instead allows them to flourish now there are two obstacles it seems to me to achieving this kind of community and both of them you can have an impact on the first is that not everybody is part of the future that you are about to enter the world is full of paradoxes the global economy has moved more people out of poverty in the last 20 years than ever before countries that are developing who have chosen openness through trade and investment have grown at 5 a year poor countries that have stayed closed have grown at only 1 a year a good advertisement for the economy and the policies we see in dubai on the other hand half of the world s people are still living on less than 2 00 a day a billion people live on less than 1 00 a day a billion people go to bed hungry tonight we see the same thing in education more people are getting more education than ever before with benefits widely spread you are exhibit a of that i need say no more on the other hand there are 130 million children in the world who never go to school at all we see the same thing in healthcare where infant mortality is down infant mortality is up even in the poorest nations soon the sequencing of the human genome and the development of super micro technology nano technology diagnostics will lead people to life expectancies well in excess of 90 years everywhere there s a good health system on the other hand 10 million children will die this year from largely preventable childhood diseases and 1 in 4 of all the people who perish on earth will die from aids tb malaria and infections related to the fact that they don t get any clean water so we have these problems we see them manifest both clearly in this neighborhood in the conditions the miserable conditions in which many palestinians live it s clearly a contributing factors to the middle east conflict which leads me to the last paradox consider the political paradox of our time we have for the first time in history more than half the world s people living under governments they voted for we have more and more diversity everywhere look around this stage tonight all of the people who were adversaries in the cold war are actually getting along pretty well the united states europe russia china and yet the biggest threat to our stability comes from the marriage of modern weapons and high technology to our oldest differences of religion and race and tribe and ethnicity now there is an answer to these problems we know what to do we know that there are security strategies that will make us safer we know that we need to have a world where we have more friends and fewer terrorists so that wealthy countries like the united states need more trade and aid and debt relief and investments in education and healthcare we know we need to do more to help more countries do what dubai can do which is to have the internal capacity for positive change but beyond all this there is the second great obstacle that goes way beyond the money differences and the health differences and the education differences and that is the persistence in the modern world of old ideas about the meaning of life fundamentalism can be found everywhere on every planet and it is not the exclusive providence of islam everywhere people who are what i call fundamentalists exist they make exclusive claims to the truth to the future to membership in community in other words they say we have the truth if you don t share it then your life doesn t have value this is the future we re going to have you couldn t possibly be part of it here is our community we think alike we look alike we act alike if you don t you re not part of our deal now i think it s quite important to recognize not simply that you have rejected that just by your presence at this university but that you are the exception to history s rule for most of human history ever since people first came out of caves in clans we have joined together as human beings not only to help each other within our group but to protect ourselves against those who are not in the group for most of human history we have defined the meaning of our lives in both positive and negative terms i am glad to be a muslim i am glad to be a baptist and i m thank god i m not one of them whoever they are for most of human history people have had to join together to protect themselves and so it s almost built into all of us genetically that the meaning of our lives is derived not only from the positive reinforcement we get from our families our faith our community but from the fact that we are not part of somebody else s for all the progress humanity made we nearly destroyed the planet in the first half of the 20th century tens of millions of people killed in two world wars and vast purges in totalitarian countries the united nations did not even exist until 1945 the promise of the united nations could not be fulfilled because of the cold war which did not end until 1989 a mere 13 years ago now let me remind you civilized societies with writing arose here in the middle east a little over 6 000 years ago and we have only had the prospect of building a global community modeled on the kind of activity you see all around you here in dubai for 13 years so i say first of all don t be too frustrated and disturbed by all the terrible things you see in the world by the inability to resolve the problems in the middle east between the israelis and the palestinians by the continuing troubles between the indians and the pakistanis but on the other hand don t be complacent in the face of them i think it s quite interesting that india has a per capita income of 500 more or less pakistan about 450 and yet they have nuclear weapons and massive defense budgets in the united states where we have about 180 different ethnic groups indians and pakistanis are both in the top ten in per capita education and income why because they look to the future not the past you can clap but i hope you re clapping for the other guys as well as your crowd because of the point i m trying to make my point is what happened they were released sure they get the advantages of coming to america but they were released from the imprisonment of the past palestinians are only poor in palestine they have the highest per capita income of any ethnic group in ecuador they dominate the flower trade in chili they do wonderfully well in the united states we have got to find a way to help people think anew across all the troubled regions of the world in the way you have thought anew here there s still arabic on all the signs no one had to give up his or her faith when i walked through the hotel some ladies shake hands with me and some don t according to what they believe is right as it should be but everyone here has something to look forward tomorrow morning when the sun comes up a reason to build not tear down a reason to unite not divide in the middle east sooner or later they will all have to decide there is no military solution to this problem the israeli defense forces cannot kill all the palestinians who want their state suicide bombers but suicide bombers cannot kill all the israelis who are determined to hang onto a nation which is also recognized by the united nations there is no military solution here there is no terrorist solution we can just keep on killing people from now until the end of time but in the end in the end there will have to be a palestinian state and a state of israel they will have to share the land and share the future they will have to recognize each other s right to exist and right to normal relations and the rest of us will have to help deal with the palestinian refugee problem one which should have been dealt with long ago and help the new state to become a modern and prosperous state but if you look at how the palestinian people do everywhere else in the world we should be able to do this now there s been so much killing there may have to be a multinational force there and there may have to be international effort to raise far greater levels of aid than ever before and i would support the united states participating in both things but do not minimize how important it is for dubai to be a part of whatever happens because you are living proof that a modern muslim arab state can accommodate diversity and be faithful to the faith of your ancestors and the culture that you cherish this is very important because the palestinians have lived in their way so long sometimes i feel that their acts of violence just out of rage and shame and anger not because they have any strategic purpose whatever sometimes people feel so trapped they can no longer imagine a different future young people sometimes come up to me and they say in america i want to be president when i grow up i want to be president how can i do it the first thing i tell them is there is a big different between wanting to do something and believing you can when i was a young man once on one magical summer night i was playing basketball and i dunked a basketball i want to do it again but i don t believe i can the palestinians must believe they can build a different future and you can help them because you proved that it can be done i say this to all of you young graduates wherever you re from you have been given a gift you have been given a chance to come here at an important moment in history you know things that you may take for granted that other people have never seen in this region share what you know and remind people of the most important quality of a truly educated person it gives you the distance from whatever happens to you to know that whatever is going on that you have a choice about how to react i will close with this remembering what i said the conflict of your early adulthood will be between those who favor tomorrow and those who favor yesterday those who want a shared future and those who demand a separate future those who believe in only exclusive communities and those who believe that communities can include those who are different who share such basic common commitments to cooperation and common human humanity i leave you with this nelson mandela is a friend of mine he was in prison for 27 years he was beaten and abused he never got to see his children grow up he was separated from his wife and it destroyed his marriage about every bad thing that could happen happened to him so i asked him one day i said you know when you were walking to freedom for the last time after 27 years you said you had forgiven your oppressors you invited your jailers to your inauguration you put people who had jailed you in your government but tell me the truth mandela didn t you hate them he said i did for a moment then i realized that they had already had me for 27 years and that if i continued to hate them i would still be their prisoner and he said i wanted to be free and so i let it go someone must give that speech in the middle east in the mid 90 s i went to rwanda where 700 000 tootsies and their sympathizers were hacked to death with machetes in 3 months in 1995 and 4 3 months and i asked to meet with the victims my wife and i were sitting there at a little round table with 6 victims and they all talked they were all very moving the last woman appeared to have no scars on her she was a magnificent african woman very serene in a beautiful dress and her time came to speak and she said you know my family and i were betrayed by our neighbors when the tribal slaughter started we have lived next to these people for 10 years our children played together we celebrated occasions together and then they came for me and my family and they hacked me on the back and thought i had died she said i awoke in a pool of my own blood to see my husband and six children lying dead around me and i asked god why i had not been permitted to die and then i realized i must have been permitted to live for some reason and it could be nothing so mean as vengeance and so i spend my life trying to help us begin again you have a choice the palestinians have a choice the israelis have a choice the indians have a choice the pakistanis have a choice every single day people behave in destructive ways pretending they do not have a choice they do but because you have been blessed with the opportunity to come to dubai and this great university and to deal with all kinds of different people and hear these different perspectives you know that we ve got to make peace in the middle east we have to keep india and pakistan from tearing each other apart and find a way for them to build a common future we have to find a way to lift up all the world s religious traditions and give the people who ve been left behind a chance to share our future to do it you will have to build a community like the one you ve just been a part of one that believes in tomorrow not yesterday one that wants to share the future not separate it one that wants the community rooted in our common humanity not one that s exclusive to our own kind we can do this if mandela can do it if that woman that lost her husband and six children can do it you can do it but you will have to do it and it is not enough to want to do it you must believe you can thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton11 6 93 bill_clinton good morning please be seated i want to thank all of you for coming here today for the announcement of my nomination of walter mondale to be our next ambassador to japan former vice president mondale will succeed ambassador michael armacost whose service was very valuable and i want to thank him for it and acknowledge that here today this nomination has produced a lot of happiness not only for me and for our administration but for the people of state of minnesota and the people of the united states who have admired walter mondale for a very long time fritz mondale is not only someone i consider a friend but also someone that i and millions of americans consider a leader of enormous wisdom courage compassion and stature like his mentor hubert humphrey fritz mondale is a hero to the people of minnesota because he embodies the virtues of the midwest because he fought so boldly for those things in the united states senate and because he never lost the basic values of his childhood and his adulthood after he became a leader on the national and world stage we have a lot in common we both began our careers as state attorneys general in our home states at a relatively young age and just as i am the first president from hope i am reliably informed that i can assert today that fritz mondale is our nation s first ambassador to japan from elmore fritz mondale has devoted his entire life to serving our nation and to building bonds of understanding around the world he has served our country in the military as a state attorney general as an outstanding senator and of course as vice president and our party s nominee for president in all these public roles as well as in the experience he has gained in the private sector since he has earned the right to be considered extraordinarily well qualified to assume the task of enhancing our relationship with japan and projecting american leadership in asia and the pacific region i also want to say a special word of acknowledgement and appreciation to joan mondale who is here with us today and who i believe will also be an outstanding ambassador for the united states in japan thank you very much fritz mondale is no stranger to japan and her people he has traveled there often both in public and private roles it is moving to recall that as vice president fritz mondale swore in another ambasasdor to japan who came from the united states senate and who also served with tremendous distinction ambassador mike mansfield and who is here today and who i might add at his young age is probably one of the few people in this audience today who has already walked five or six miles i chose someone of what did he say six he said six he said we never were able to short him i chose someone of fritz mondale s stature to be my ambassador to japan because there is no more important bilateral relationship in the world than that which exists between the united states and japan this alliance has supported 50 years of peace and stability in asia and the pacific and the course of economic political and security dynamics in the pacific and throughout asia will be determined by how well our relationship functions the challenges and changes facing both japan and the united states as we move toward the 21st century require us to take a fresh look at our relationships and to take new actions to strengthen the foundations of our alliance when prime minister miyazawa and i met here at the white house in april we agreed to forge a new partnership between our nations aimed at restoring world economic growth advancing democratic values and creating the basis for regional peace which can endure well into the next century to fulfill our shared vision of a new japan u s partnership we must sustain our security commitment work on global problems and address forthrightly and urgently our often troubled economic relationship the economic pillar of our relationship needs some repair and i think we all know that and prime minister miyazawa and i agreed to give it our personal attention it is particularly appropriate that this announcement occurs today for today we are beginning negotiations with the japanese to craft the details of an economic framework intended to spur global growth open markets and deal with trade and investment issues affecting america s economy and america s workers this framework which the prime minister and i hope to unveil at our meeting in tokyo will get our economic problems out of the headlines and onto the negotiating table where we can best resolve them i will look to fritz mondale statesman negotiator counselor and representative of our people to make the bonds that already exist between our two nations even stronger fritz mondale s skills give me great hope and confidence that my goals with japan can be achieved in a way that benefits both of our nations and the prospects for worldwide democracy peace and global growth i don t think our nation could ask for a more capable representative abroad and i appreciate the willingness of fritz mondale and joan to accept this challenging assignment i wish them well and i know that the people of america and i believe the people of japan are very happy today about this development mr mondale dem wjclinton11 6 96a bill_clinton one way to think about how we re all going to live five ten twenty years from now in this exciting global economy with all the opportunities that are open to you one way to think about it is to think about how we can create a country in which people can succeed at work and at home that is what i want the first thing we have to do obviously is go give people economic opportunity i m proud of the fact that in the last three and a half years we cut the deficit by more than 50 percent it s wrong to leave you with a legacy of debt we got interest rates down so we can grow the economy i m i m proud of the fact that we are now seeing an all time record in the products and services we re exporting more than ever before to the asian pacific region here out of the west coast i m proud of the fact that in each of the last three years we ve had a record number of new small businesses and that there have been 3 7 million more americans move into their own homes in the last three and a half years i am very proud of that and i m proud of the fact that when we passed our economic program by one vote in both houses the vice president had to break the tie and some of the people who were against it said it would bring on a recession and crash the economy we said it would bring 8 million jobs in four years well they were wrong but so were we it brought 9 7 million jobs in three and a half years and 600 000 of them in california and a lot more to come after four years of losing jobs and so we re moving in the right direction but it s not enough we also have to think about what about all those working people how are they going to succeed at home we passed the family and medical leave law to say that if you have to take a little time off you won t lose your job because your child is sick and i think that s important we strengthened child support enforcement 40 percent increase in three years in child support enforcement we worked with states all over america to help people who were on welfare move into school move into work there are 1 3 million fewer families on welfare today than there were the day i became president i m proud of that we ve worked hard to reduce the welfare rolls we also recognize what you recognize every day when you come to this community college that we simply cannot create the kind of america we re working for until every single american has access to a higher level of education and we cannot allow this country to become a more divided society one of the most disturbing things that has happened in america in the last 15 years is that after spending almost 40 years after world war ii in which we were growing together in which the poorest americans who were working were increasing their incomes at roughly the same rate as the wealthiest americans for the last 15 years we ve become a more divided society and about half of our people are working harder and harder without getting raises almost entirely the division is due to the lack of skills that are marketable in the global economy this community college and community colleges like it all around america can turn that around that s why i said it is time to guarantee every single american not twelve but fourteen years of education we should guarantee it for every american i also think there are some more things that washington has to do this was not very popular when i started it and it s still unpopular in some places when we became the first administration ever to ask the tobacco industry to accept to undergo regulation in terms of the advertising targeted at children we should not be spending hundreds of millions maybe billions of dollars a year to advertise to children to do something that s illegal that s going to take a third of them out of this life sooner than they ought to leave it is wrong it is not right one other thing i want to mention that i think affects a lot of parents who are particularly busy is that more and more of our children are spending more and more of their time in front of the television instead of with their parents or in other places we got the congress to pass something called the v chip which will go into television sets which will enable parents to control that and i think that s a positive thing but there s one other issue that i want to mention which is that i have been trying now for some time to get a few hours a week and keep in mind kids watch about four hours a day of television on average i ve been trying to get the federal communications commission for a year to just say that three hours a week ought to be devoted to children s educational programming by every network in the country i believe that i think it would be a good thing and today i want to formally re issue an invitation to the people from the entertainment industry involved in television to come back to the white house before the end of july to discuss that the best days of this country are still ahead of us if we can figure out how to make opportunity available to every person who will exercise the responsibility to seize it and if we can figure out how to come together with all of our diversity if we can respect each other and share the basic values of america we re going to do fine you re going to have a great great future dem wjclinton11 6 96b bill_clinton thank you so much thank you let me say first of all tomas did a terrific job let s give him another hand i thought he was wonderful let me also say i am delighted to be back in new mexico and delighted to be here to celebrate the commitment of your people across party lines ethnic lines and income lines to secure the future of the children of this state and i thank you for that i thank our principal here mary lou anderson for welcoming me at grover cleveland i thank superintendent gonzalez for what he said about las cruces and i ll say more about that in a minute i thank mayor chavez for doing a wonderful job as your mayor and for all the things that he talked about here i thank senator bingaman and congressman schiff for being here with me and i thank governor and mrs johnson and the leaders of the legislature and former governor and mrs king i want to thank the law enforcement officials who are here i want to say a little more about them in a moment and i see some leaders in the native american community from new mexico here i thank them for coming i m glad to see all of you here as one people today you know as i have said many times to the american people i believe that the best days of this country are ahead of us i believe we are moving into a period of possibility for people all across this country to live out their dreams unlike anything we have ever known but we have to find a way to meet the challenges of this new era and to preserve the basic values that made america great now there are some things that we can do in washington and a lot of things that you have to do out here if you think about what you want your children s future to be like what you want your grandchildren s future to be like you have to think of these programs and these efforts that were discussed today you have to think you want every child to have the same chances that young mr sanchez talked about today now when i think about that i think well and i ve given this a great deal of thought indeed i think of little else as president i want everybody to have a chance to have gainful work i want all people to have a chance to get a good education i want the american people to be able to raise their children on safe streets in safe neighborhoods and those things we can make a contribution to when we invest for example in your laboratories here in new mexico as they move from the cold war to the new global economy to try to preserve new technologies to create new high wage jobs that s a way of creating a new economy when we cut the deficit by more than 50 percent and get interest rates down and expand exports so that our economy produces 9 7 million new jobs in three and a half years those things help to create a structure of opportunity for children in the future and that s very very important if you look at education we have tried to expand educational opportunities everything from providing more funds for more kids to be in head start programs to helping states to set higher standards for their schools to a commitment to connect every single classroom and library in every school in america to the internet by the year 2000 which will help all the children here to giving every family in this country on a modest income a deduction for the cost of college education and a tax credit for the first two years of community college after high school these things are important but safety is also important let me tell you what plagues me in this country in the last three and a half years the crime rate is down but violence among young people under 18 is up that is a very troubling thing you heard this fine student talk about the gang problem let me tell you the young people who are coming into our schools today are coming in in record numbers there will soon be classes in the elementary schools of america that are larger in numbers than any of the classes of the baby boom years and if we don t do something to turn this problem of gang violence and youth violence around it can threaten to wreck all the progress we have made together in strengthening the economy and expanding educational opportunity and helping america to grow and go forward together we cannot create opportunity in this country unless the american people are willing to take responsibility for giving our children safe childhoods and a safe future and you are doing that in new mexico that s what i came here today you heard the mayor talk about some of the things the national government can do more police officers the brady bill the other initiatives they re important but it s also important to try to help local communities seize control of their destiny i don t know how many times i ve heard my daughter s friends tell hillary or me how they ll never forget the d a r e officer that came to them when they were in grade school to talk to them about the importance of staying away from drugs and living a drug free life i don t know how many school teachers i ve had come up to me and talk to me about the importance of the safe and drug free schools program and the zero tolerance for guns and violence that we re trying to enforce all across america if kids cannot be safe in school so they can learn and feel secure where can they be safe these things are all important but the most important thing perhaps we can do here is to do what i m trying to do today and that s to find ways to support you in taking local initiatives and again i say that this is something that ought to transcend politics when i heard the mayor up here talking about the middle school cluster initiative when i heard your principal when i heard young tomas talking about the program that he lauded and he thanked all the people who were involved in it i realized that that is really the magic of what we have to do somehow all these kids that we re losing have to know that someone cares about them have to know that there are not only things they have to say no to in life but things that they can say yes to have to realize that they can have a future even if they come from difficult family backgrounds even if they live on tough streets even if they live in a tough neighborhood they have to know that there s something they can say yes to the community curfew program you have instituted here i know it s controversial when you start it i know a lot of young people think well why should i go in but i can tell you i have been in communities that have had these curfews for a couple of years crime goes down kids are safer on the street they re better off at home 99 times out of 100 and after they ve been there a couple of years they become popular with young people as well as with the parents because everybody wants a safer community to live in and a better and brighter future in which to live it and so i want to applaud you for doing that and let me say that i heard some of you expressing your reservations when superintendent gonzalez talked about the school uniform program in las cruces but let me tell you no one says that you should do it what we say is that you should have the right to do it but let me tell you a story about the biggest school district in the country to adopt a school uniform policy long beach california it s the third biggest school district in california now their problems are not the problems of every school district in america but they had some terrible problems they had kids that had to walk to school through neighborhoods that were invested by gangs and they had to wonder every day whether the clothes they had were going to get them rolled either because the jackets or the shoes were too nice or inadvertently they d worn the wrong colors they had to really worry about that they had to worry about people coming on the school grounds during recess during lunch time and rolling the students and not even being identified as non students until it was too late and so they permitted every school to make up their own mind about what kind of uniform they were going to have they let the students design what they would wear and pick the colors and it just had to be inexpensive enough for everybody to afford and then they raised a little money for the people whose families were too poor to afford the uniforms so that the uniforms since they weren t the same for the whole district they were different for every school sometimes the teachers wore them too and sometimes they didn t it was all about the school s identity it was almost like being on one big team being in one good gang and guess what the crime rate went down the violence went down attendance went up school learning went up and even upper income students said this is a better deal because they were no longer identified by what they wore but by what kind of people they were what kind of values they had and what kind of so i say to you we don t say that you should do this we say if you have a problem with young people and gangs it s one thing you should consider and you sure ought to be free to do it free of any worries about lawsuits or hassles if you decide to do it there are all kinds of other things that schools are doing a lot of schools are doing more work in character education and we ve tried to help schools deal with that there are all kinds of initiatives that will work only if people at the local level believe it so i say to you i came here today to say i want america to look at new mexico and say well maybe we should consider a curfew policy maybe we ought to consider a middle school initiative like the one they have in albuquerque maybe we ought to consider a uniform policy like the one they have in las cruces i m dry i can t do this today and some of the times the best thing the government can do in washington is just to help you do this the only thing we have done on all these issues is to make sure that the justice department and the department of education can give every school district in america guidance if they want to do these things so there are no legal problems no legal hassles and people are free to put our children first and their future first so i say to all of you again i thank the people of new mexico for being here today i thank the political leaders for being here today two members of your congressional delegation called me before i came because they couldn t come senator domenici and my good friend congressman bill richardson and i thank them for calling expressing their support for these endeavors this is something we have to do together and when you go home tonight if you have any friends in other states or other communities in new mexico the next time they get in touch with you i want you to talk to them about this because we don t have any more important responsibility than to give every child in this country no matter where they are where they grow up how tough their circumstances are the opportunity to live out their dreams we are going to be able to construct an economy that will permit them to live out their dreams we know we know that we can expand educational opportunity so that every single child who s willing to work for it will have access to go beyond high school to two years of community college and on to college if they want to do every child we know we can do that but we will never ever seize the promise of the 21st century in new mexico or anywhere else in the united states until every child can live in a safe neighborhood and go to a safe school and belong to good positive constructive groups that reinforce the kind of values and the kind of imagination and the kind of character that our young speaker who introduced me evidenced today that is a dream that you have to our young speaker who introduced me evidenced today that is a dream that you have to pursue and that every american family every american community and every american school has to pursue child by child by child we ll do what we can to support you but you need to do what you can to make sure every person you know is committed to that goal thank you and god bless you and i hope you get rain tonight thank you dem wjclinton11 6 97a bill_clinton thank you very much attorney general reno ray kelly father o donovan let me say to my good friend father o donovan i never know when i come to georgetown whether being introduced as the university s most well known alumnus will be a liability or an asset it just depends on what month i come i think when ray kelly said he considered the jesuits the marine corps of the catholic church i never really thought of that and then he went through that litany you know the few the proud and all that i was thinking about the ones who taught me in class i was thinking the few the proud the brutal but brilliantly brutal i love this place and i thank father o donovan for having us here at the conference i also want to thank the attorney general and ray kelly for the truly unprecedented partnership that they have established with local law enforcement officials and others who are interested in the safety of our streets and our children throughout the united states we have here representatives of the fraternal order of police of the major cities chiefs association the law enforcement community a lot of other people who just work with young people and try to help give them something to say yes to i m glad to see our friend jim brady here the country owes a lot of thanks to jim and to sarah for with courage and persistence and good humor they have saved a lot of lives with the brady bill the assault weapons ban and others we are here today to talk about what we can do together to build safer neighborhoods and stronger neighborhoods as part of the preparation of america for a new century today i want to talk about violent youth gangs and the illegal guns they use the biggest problem perhaps we still face in that ongoing struggle but as ray kelly said this is a good time to be involved in law enforcement because the good guys are winning and the tide of crime is being rolled back four and a half years ago i can honestly say when i went around the country in 1992 seeking the presidency and began to talk about the importance of more police and effective prevention programs along with tougher punishment and actually i said i was confident that we could bring the crime rate way down over a sustained period of time most people did not believe me you might be interested to know that every national survey i ve seen says that most people still don t believe it even though those of you who are involved in this endeavor know that crime is now down for several years in a row and we had the largest drop in 35 years last year most people still don t believe it it may be because a crime story still leads the evening news it may be the accumulation of personal experiences nearly everybody has someone in their family who has been victimized it may be an instinctive feeling that whether the crime rate has gone down or not it s still too high and there are still to many of our children at risk but nonetheless it has gone down and a lot of you in this room have helped to make it so and we tried to work with you and also to learn from you what actually works not what sounds good in a television ad not what sounds good in a political campaign but what actually works putting more police on the street taking gangs and guns off the streets having proven effective prevention programs that keep our children out of trouble and prevent crimes from occurring in the first place that s what we tried to do with the crime bill and the brady bill with the assault weapons ban with the violence against women act and the other things that the attorney general spoke about it s what we ve tried to do with our strongest effort ever to make our schools drug free and gun free to have zero tolerance for guns in schools to make it illegal for minors to possess handguns and for adults to transfer handguns to minors it s what general mccaffrey is working so hard on in his position as our nation s drug czar and thanks to all of you the strategy is working even the juvenile crime rate showed some decline in 1995 and the juvenile crime arrest rate has begun to go down as a result of your unceasing efforts but we know that juvenile violence is still a huge problem we know violent youth gangs still terrorize our streets we know innocent children are still being swept up in them and may soon be innocent no longer according to a report released by the justice department unless we act and do more now the number of juveniles arrested for violent crimes will more than double by the year 2010 we have got to show the same progress with young people with juvenile crime with violence that we have seen in the overall crime rate with adults in the last five years keep in mind this year when school started we had the largest class of children starting school and the largest number of people in school in the history of america this year is the first year that the number of school children exceeded the high water mark of the baby boom which means that demographically we have just a few years to deal with our young people and give them a future and something to say yes to and to deal with this gang and drug and gun problem before the sheer change in population will begin to overwhelm our efforts so i think we know enough and a lot of you have shown us enough to be just as optimistic about this as we now can be about the general problem of crime but we also have seen enough and we know enough to know that we have to move and move now in february i sent juvenile justice legislation that i felt was very smart and very tough to congress to declare war on gangs and guns but to do things that you say and that you have shown will work it was largely modeled on boston s famous operation ceasefire it guarantees new anti gang prosecutors that are desperately needed to pursue and prosecute violent juveniles it gives prosecutors the right to seek tougher penalties it supports initiatives like operation night light in boston where police and probation officers actually make housecalls to young probationers and their families to make sure that they live up to the rules of their probation and when i was in boston not very long ago we spent over a half a day there the people said that their compliance rate was around 70 percent which i m quite confident is the highest in the country but these things will work because about 40 percent of juvenile crime occurs after schools closes and before parents come home so much for the argument that parents don t make any difference the youth violence strategy we presented would help to launch 1 000 after school initiatives all over the country again modeled on what is working today not rocket science just following the leader to save lives we know now that children should be allowed to stay in school or involved in other activities rather than left on street corners until their parents come home from work we know now that it would be better if our children had teachers or community leaders or team leaders as role models not gang leaders we know that our children should be supervised by caring adults not young people who have entered a gang culture the bill that i presented dealt with all this it also is just as tough on guns as on gangs i don t care what anybody says guns are still at the heart of the gangs that strike at the hearts of our communities and families every year thousands of children and young people are killed by them even more wounded and maimed listen to this teenage homicides by firearms tripled in the 10 years between 1984 and 1994 and the number of juveniles actually killing with guns quadrupled during the same period when the national center for health statistics tells us that teenage boys are more likely to die from gunshot wounds than from any other cause we know that we have more than a duty we have a moral obligation to keep fighting against this terrible scourge of gun violence to build on the path breaking work done by jim brady and others and to go beyond what we have done so far that s why the juvenile crime bill i presented to congress extends the brady bill to prevent juvenile criminals from purchasing guns when they reach legal age you shouldn t be able to commit a violent crime at 16 or 17 then buy a handgun for your 21st birthday this bill would make that illegal and i hope all of you will help us pass it the bill also requires that child safety locks be sold with guns to keep children from hurting themselves or each other unbelievably a third of all privately owned hand guns in our country are left both unlocked and loaded every one of them has the power and the potential to make the life of one of our children lost by accident or design child safety locks are simple and inexpensive but they do have the power to prevent tragedy i feel so strongly about them that in march i ordered federal agencies to give them to our agents today every fbi and atf agent has such a child safety device and by the 15th of october every federal agent from the dea to the u s marshal to the border patrol to the park police will have one as well if a child safety lock is good enough for law enforcement it ought to be good enough for the general public these commonsense measures will help to cut off young people s access to guns that can cut short their lives today we are taking comprehensive action to protect our children and our communities from juvenile crime and gun violence in boston where many of these efforts are already in place youth murders have dropped 80 percent in five years and not a single solitary child has been killed with a handgun in a year and a half in a year and a half we can do that again i say this is not rocket science this is replication you know when i was in houston a couple years ago and i saw the juvenile crime rate going down there when it was going up everywhere else the mayor said it s not very complicated i ve got 3 000 kids in a soccer league and 2 500 in a golf league and most of them didn t know anything about either sport before we started this is not rocket science it is replication we know what works there is no excuse for not doing what works and there is no excuse for the congress not giving you the tools to do what works now i believe the approach embodied in the legislation i presented gives us the best chance to prevent more of this violence and to actually break its back that s what i believe i believe it because i have seen so many of you do it now the bill that passed the house of representatives i think falls far short of the goals of the bill that i presented and far short of reflecting what you have proved works a juvenile crime bill that doesn t crack down on guns and gangs that doesn t guarantee more prosecutors more probation officers and more prevention programs after school is a juvenile crime bill in name only i understand you can pass a bill and make it very popular if all it does is seem to penalize people and i am not against tougher penalties we have toughened a lot of penalties since i have been president but to pretend that you can do that and not guarantee the police the prosecutors the probation officers and the prevention programs and expect to have results is simply wrong you work in this area and you know it so let s go back to the congress and get a bill that will give you the tools to give our children their futures back and our people their neighborhoods and their streets back we can do it together let me just say something about one specific problem the illegal guns that youth gangs use do not just come out of thin air they are bought and sold traded and given in trade just like any other guns and all too often it is adults who are making the transfer so today i m directing the secretary of the treasury bob rubin to require all federally licensed gun dealers to post signs in their stores and issue written warnings with each gun they sell to put adult gun purchasers on clear and unambiguous notice that selling or giving a handgun to a minor is dangerous it is wrong but it is also against the law and it is a felony so serious that it can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison i want every adult who buys a gun to see that sign and think about it before they give a child a gun that could wind up in gang violence in the last four years we have proven that if we work together and learn from each other we can begin to turn the tide and win the war as ray kelly said now we have an opportunity that is real and genuine to build on that progress your presence here your enthusiasm and what i know about the work you have done back home give me great hope that we can give our children a safe and orderly environment where they can make the most of their lives we know that a lot of this will have to be done at the community level when we did the summit of service that the presidents sponsored in philadelphia one of the five things we said we wanted for our children was a safe environment for every child in america to grow up in and we know that a lot of that has to be done by you but we also know that we at the national level have our responsibility too and our responsibility now is to continue to implement the crime bill and put the community police officers out there to be faithful in our enforcement of all the federal laws that we can and to deal with the special problems of guns and to pass a smart balanced juvenile justice crime bill that does more than talk tough i pledge to work with congress of both parties to pass such a bill i look forward to working with all of you to get the job done but i say again the most powerful argument for doing it is the experience you have already had the successes you have already achieved the lives you have already saved when you know what works and you do it and you see children s lives reclaimed it becomes unconscionable not to do more i am determined that we will do more and that we will win this incredibly important struggle thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton11 6 97b bill_clinton thank you very much let me say to all of you how very grateful i am for your presence and for your support i appreciate what the vice president has said and i associate myself with his remarks i think that s what they say in the congress i would just like to make two very brief points first of all the country is in better shape than it was four and a half years ago it is a direct consequence in my view of the hard work of the american people combined with the policies and the changes which have been instituted here i want you to know that my plan is to keep working on this until the last day i m in office and as far as i m concerned all these good things that have happened are not constant unless they can be sustained so that we still have to put the meat on the bones of the balanced budget agreement in the abstract it is a very good agreement because it contains an investment strategy for education for science and technology for the environment we can be proud of and it will balance the budget with conservative estimates but we have to put the meat on the bones i m proud of the fact that we ve had the biggest drop in crime in 36 years but juvenile violence is still way too high and we have to put the meat on the bones we have a lot more to do there i m proud of the fact that we ve had the biggest drop in welfare in history by far but we ve still got to make sure when all those people run out of their welfare checks they can go to work and we ve got to meat on the bones i m proud of the fact that this budget agreement restores what i thought were unconscionable cuts and benefits to legal immigrants but we ve still got to put the meat on the bones in terms of the details of the legislation so there s a lot to be done here in the world i m gratified by the agreements we ve reached with russia on the nato russian partnership and reducing the nuclear tensions between us and the meeting that will occur in a few weeks in madrid to expand nato but i m troubled that we have not completed the bosnian peace process we ve got a long way to go there i m troubled at the stagnation of the peace process in the middle east there s a lot of things that this administration has done that cannot be sustained unless we all keep working and moving forward and the second point i would like to make to you is a more abstract one but i hope you can take some pleasure in it i really believed in 1991 and 1992 when i went around and asked so many of you to help me run for president that we had to modernize the approach of the democratic party consistent with our values that we had to take a new approach but it had to be rooted in our values there was nothing wrong with our values but we had to be relevant and effective in the modern world we had to prove that we were capable of producing a strong defense a credible foreign policy a disciplined management of the economy particularly on fiscal matters and we had to prove that you could cut the deficit and invest in america s future at the same time we had to prove that we could be for high standards of personal responsibility in the criminal justice and welfare system and still believe that we should be an inclusive nation where everybody should have a fair chance we had to prove you could grow the economy and preserve the environment we had to take a different position and when i was in europe recently and i was doing this press conference with the new prime minister of great britain tony blair who as you know has been subject to almost savage criticism from time to time for having adopted ideas similar to mine but the only people that like it seem to be the people over there the voters thought it was all right i had the feeling for the very first time that the people in the press who were asking us questions really believed that we might have changed the country and our political party and that there was some organized principled direction to this and i ve been working on this long before i even thought i would run for president for a good 10 years or more now and i think that once we believed that we had we not only have good results but we know we re on a course that will work and we can expect it to keep working with sustained effort that is the beginning of real hope because then you don t have to see the gains evaporate when elections change things or when term limits come up or when momentary difficulties come up in the economy or other problems so i would ask you to keep that in mind i believe you have helped to contribute to a profound almost revolutionary positive change in the direction of our country because you helped to revitalize the party that we re all proud to be a part of and i hope you will never forget that and i had the feeling for the very first time that a lot of those who interpret us for the rest of the country and the world were coming to that understanding because i was standing there with the new prime minister of great britain and we were saying the same things and we had just left the prime minister of the netherlands and he said the same things and because they came along after the 92 election and had also seemed to get quite satisfactory results in their own country so you were also part of changing the world and for that i am very very grateful thank you dem wjclinton11 6 99 bill_clinton thank you very very much general lyles thank you for your introduction and your service i d like to thank general barnidge for making me feel right at home you can tell he s pretty proud of you and he makes a good speech doesn t he i didn t know whether he was a politician or a general the first time i met him i ve got the coin general i think i know the rules you got yours actually ladies and gentlemen when i discovered these coins i decided one way i could always remember the men and women of our military is to keep every coin i receive visible and for as long as i have been president i have done that and if you saw the speech i gave last night on kosovo when the camera zooms in i have three racks of these coins behind me i now have nearly 300 of these from every unit every enlisted person every officer every commander that has given me one of these i still have the coins and every one who comes into the oval office sees them all to remember you and what you do for our country and this will be on that desk tonight when i get home and i thank you for it very much i want to thank my good friend congressman ike skelton for representing you so well and representing all of america s military families and military interests so well i d like to thank my national security advisor sandy berger who did a lot of work in planning and executing our efforts in kosovo and others who have come here with me today there are a large number of congressmen here and i want to acknowledge all of them because i think it s important that you know you have broad support we have four members from missouri here in addition to congressman skelton congresswoman pat danner congresswoman karen mccarthy and congressman kenny hulshof from missouri they are all here i d like to ask them to stand and be recognized we have congressman norm dicks from washington and congressman steny hoyer from maryland as you heard two big supporters of the b 2 program we have congressman leonard boswell from iowa and congressman dennis moore from kansas two of your neighbors here and we have two congressmen who came all the way from new york state congressman eliot engel and congressman peter king i d like to as the rest of the members of the national delegation to stand i thank them for being here we all came down from washington today on behalf of your fellow americans to salute the men and women of whiteman air force base to thank you for a job well done to honor you for the way you honor america over the past few months our nation has faced an extraordinary challenge a decade of brutal policies in the former yugoslavia and in particular in kosovo exploded into a humanitarian catastrophe when serbian troops evicted over 1 million people from homes they had lived in with their families for generations it was the culmination of a long campaign by the serbian president mr milosevic to exploit ethnic and religious differences to strengthen his power over the people of the former yugoslavia now in nearly every country at some point or another there are demagogues who have tried to exploit people s ethnic racial and religious differences the difference here is that he wasn t just calling people names this exploitation involved mass murder mass rape mass burning mass destruction of religious and cultural institutions and personal property records an attempt to erase the very presence of a people from their land and to get rid of them dead or alive we have come to call it ethnic cleansing the international war crimes tribunal prosecutor indicted mr milosevic and the leaders who worked with him for war crimes and crimes against humanity it is that which the b 2s from whiteman flew to reverse i asked you our armed forces and our nato allies to act when all of our diplomatic efforts failed after mr milosevic had already put 40 000 troops and 300 tanks in and around kosovo i asked you to act early because the world community took four long years to mobilize itself to stop the aggression in bosnia and by the time it happened there were a quarter of a million people dead and 2 5 million refugees and the great dream that we all had after world war ii and after the cold war that finally europe would be free and undivided and at peace and americans would never have to go there in large numbers to fight and die again was threatened by the oldest demon of human society our fear and hatred of people who are different from us that is what he exploited in a systematic way to threaten the future stability and peace of europe and the security of the united states and to do unspeakable humanitarian horrors to innocent civilians so when diplomacy failed we and our nato allies acted we attacked the serb forces with air power for 79 days with three goals first to return the refugees with security and self government second to get the serb forces out of kosovo and finally to have an international security force with nato at its core to deploy to protect all the people of that troubled land the ethnic albanians and the ethnic serbs today the three objectives have been achieved the serbian forces are withdrawing an international force with nato at its core is preparing to enter and very soon the refugees will go home mr milosevic accepted these conditions for one reason you made him do it thanks to you and the others who flew and supported our air mission and those of our nato allies he ran out of room and he ran out of time and thanks to you the century is ending not with helpless indignation over such unspeakable cruelty but with its opposite a ringing affirmation by a free people of human dignity it was not an easy campaign kosovo is a long way from whiteman even in a b 2 we had to coordinate all the details with 18 nato allies the serbs had sophisticated air defenses they placed innocent civilians around military targets the weather was often downright atrocious especially when we began the operation yet day after day with remarkable precision our forces pounded every element of mr milosevic s military machine from tanks to fuel supply to anti aircraft weapons to the military and political support most americans will never know how hard this was or how hard our forces worked the pilots the crews the people who make it happen on the ground but i want you to know that we are very proud of you i d like to single out a few groups for special thanks today the pilots the crews the weaponeers the maintenance personnel who are part of the b 2 team stationed here at whiteman should take special pride in proving what a truly remarkable aircraft can do flying 30 hour sorties dropping ordnance returning to base night after night and as our commander said as far as we know they still don t know you were there listen to this the b 2s from whiteman flew less than one percent of the total missions but dropped 11 percent of the bombs we honor the pilots and the crews but we should never forget that for every two man mission about 60 people from the mission planning cell work two or three days to make sure nothing went wrong that s what i call teamwork you put real meaning into the 509th s motto follow us a lot of good people are about to follow you back home to kosovo and i thank you for it i would also like to thank the reservists of the 442nd for all you do i know how badly some of you wanted to take your warthogs over to serbia i assure you you re doing a fine job protecting us just by being ready to drop everything at a moment s notice and i want to thank the people who make whiteman such a fine place to live and work including the missouri national guard and lastly i want to pay special tribute to the families who give strength and support to our airmen and women who do such a difficult job the wives the husbands the children of our military personnel are a part of our military team and they serve our country in a very special way the statistics of operation allied force tell the story better than i can there were 30 000 sorties two planes were lost but every single crew member returned safely an extraordinary testament to your courage and skill of course we cannot forget the two army airmen we lost while training in albania and i hope you will remember them and their families in your prayers chief warrant officer david gibbs and chief warrant officer kevin reichert let me say one other thing that i hope will try to illustrate what this is really about i m proud to be in whiteman today for many reasons for over half a century the brave airmen of this base have been crucial to our efforts to build peace and support freedom we may be far from europe here in the heartland and i suppose it s unlikely that knob noster will ever be invaded by a foreign power but you have always been close to the front lines and the people in that small community have supported you in being close to the front lines the 442nd fighter wing supported the d day landings 55 years ago last sunday the 509th bomber wing distinguished itself in the pacific theater whiteman was a bastion of strength throughout the cold war ten years ago for example who would have thought that a former leader of the soviet union mikhail gorbachev would come here to have you sing happy birthday to him or that he would have the gall to accuse general barnidge of singing off key in this decade in the wake of the cold war our men and women and uniform have played a crucial role and so have you and with the b 2 you have been even closer to the front lines from iraq to haiti to bosnia to kosovo our men and women in uniform have shown dictators they can t shatter their people and threaten their neighbors with impunity but this is the point i want you to think about you helped to put the lie to mr milosevic s campaign of ethnic cleansing and killing in two ways not one first and most obviously you did it with the power of the bombing campaign but second you did it with the power of your example what do i mean by that his whole justification for power has been to tell the serbian people that they cannot and should not have to live with the bosnian muslims with the kosovar albanian muslims with the croatian catholics that the only pure and great people worthy to be part of greater serbia are those who share their ethnic background and their faith that their country can only be great when everybody s just like everybody else well look around here you put the lie to that by the power of your example and make no mistake about it it is even more powerful than the power of our bombs i invite the people of this world today who say that people cannot get along across racial and ethnic and religious lines to have a good look at the united states military to have a good look at the members of the united states air force in this hangar today we have proved that when people are bound together by shared values their differences make them stronger and make our community stronger that everyone has a contribution to make and everyone is a child of god worthy to be developed to the fullest of his or her own capacity and that our differences make our lives more interesting even more fun as long as we recognize that fundamentally what is most important is our common humanity make no mistake about it every day you get up and go to work every day you work through a difference you re having with somebody who comes from a different part of the country or a different background than you do every day you learn to live by performing your mission better working together you put the lie to the idea that has driven mr milosevic s power and that of every other dictator in this century who tried to get people to hate others because they had a different color skin because they had a different ethnic background because they worshiped god in a different way and make no mistake about it in a world that is smaller and smaller and smaller where we are growing closer through the internet through links of trade through shared culture where people will become more vulnerable to one another through open borders it is a very important thing for the safety and security of the united states for us to be able to hold up for the whole world the example of our men and women in uniform and say this is the future we should all seek in the 21st century yes i am very proud of the b 2s i am proud of the cooperation across the services i know the air force is grateful for the radar jamming provided by navy and marine aircraft the navy tlams fired from ships in the mediterranean that made the flights safer the army and marine units taking care of the refugees i m grateful for all of that cooperation but fundamentally i am most grateful for the power of your example in our military we have asian americans african americans latino americans european americans of every stripe including albanian americans and serbian americans i don t want anybody to get the idea that we have a grudge or bad feelings about the people of serbia they were our allies in world war ii they fill many neighborhoods in some of our largest cities we cheer for them on professional sports teams many of us know them as our friends this is not about a people this is about a rotten idea that needs to be wiped from the pages of history that you have helped to do and i say to you we have to keep working on it if we want to be a force for good around the world we ve got to keep working to be good at home we ve got to keep working to live up to the ideas of our founders that we are all created equal that we have a constant obligation throughout our lives to broaden the circle of opportunity and deepen the meaning of freedom and draw closer together as a national community these past months were a defining moment for the forces of freedom in our alliance this was the longest and most difficult military campaign nato ever engaged in in its entire 50 years mr milosevic who believed that strength comes from everything being the same thought that his campaign for a greater serbia would break the unity of the incredible diversity of the nato alliance he thought open societies with free dissent where as you know everybody in america was free to tell me i was wrong about this from the get go he thought that made us weak but he turned out to be wrong he turned out to be wrong yes because the b 2 is a great aircraft and the people flying the fighters out of germany and italy did a brilliant job and the ships firing the tlams were great and because the leaders were strong and tough and they hung together that s fine and that had a lot to do with it but what made all that possible how did we get to that moment in the first place because we had made a decision as a free people to respect the inherent dignity of every person to give everybody a chance to learn from people who are different to be on the same team let me tell you that is something money can t buy and propaganda can t erase and it is an example that i hope the world will see all the more clearly in the aftermath of your success in kosovo think what would have happened if we hadn t done this mr milosevic s victory would have been a license for despots around the world to deal with ethnic minority simply by murdering or expelling them from their land whenever people had trouble with people who were different they said well just get rid of them kill as many as you want nobody will do anything and if you run them out of your country the rich countries will take care of them anyway just ethnically cleanse everyplace so you will never have to think about or look at or consider the interest of anybody that s the slightest bit different from you but instead we end the 20th century and begin a new one with a respect for human rights and human dignity and international law this is not america s first victory over tyranny and unfortunately it probably will not be our last but it is a moment for all of you to thank god for the opportunity we have had to live in our country and serve our country at this moment in history to reap the benefits of its opportunities and to have a chance to move it a little closer to its ideals as we celebrate the victory i also ask you to remember this there are challenges ahead we still have to win the peace those folks have to go home and they ve got to have a roof over their head before it gets too cold to be outside we ve got land mines to take up and businesses to rebuild and a future to make that work too can be dangerous for those who follow in your footsteps in the peacekeeping missions but it is very much in our interest to help them rebuild and to draw together to teach them what we already know that if they have something to look forward to and something to work for and something to get up in the morning and smile about it s a lot easier for people with superficial differences to find common interests and so we have to be a part of that as well whenever i come to missouri a state i ve always loved since i grew up to the south in arkansas i think of president truman who was the president when i was born and whom my family idolized congressman skelton knew harry truman and i think that we would all admit that harry truman knew something about standing up for what he believed in president truman would be very very proud of the whiteman family today in the final days of world war ii harry truman said it is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than it is to kill the ideas which gave them birth and strength victory on the battlefield was essential but it was not enough for a good peace a lasting peace decent people of the earth must remain determined to strike down the evil spirit which has hung over the world for the last decade well the decent people of the world are determined to rebuild kosovo and the balkans think about the spirit if you don t remember anything else i said today remember this your victory was achieved for two reasons one the power and skill and courage of our pilots and our crews and the awesome capacity of our planes and our bombs but two the power of the example that you set in our military a stern rebuke on a daily basis to ethnic cleansing and a reaffirmation of the moral worth and the sheer joy of working together as equal human beings for a good cause thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton11 7 93 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you general abrams thank you sergeant corley for the tomahawk he looks to me like he could use it i want to say how glad i am to be here today i want to introduce a couple of the people who came with me the secretary of state warren christopher your secretary of defense i think you know general luch and i thank you already for the welcome to me and to my wife the first lady i see some of the young women soldiers jumping up and down here in the back we ll do that better that s good i want to say to all of you it is a great privilege for me to be here on the frontier of freedom with the warriors of the 2nd infantry division you are a very critical part of the finest armed forces the world has ever seen i m sorry to be a little late but i think you all know that because of the rains we couldn t take the helicopters today and we drove to the dmz it was the first opportunity i had ever had to be along the dmz and i understand that i was in a more forward position than any president had been before when i stood on the bridge of no return and looked over with my binoculars at those young north korean soldiers i thought to myself i wish they were free to walk across this bridge and be with us in peace and freedom and because of you someday they will be because of you for 40 years american soldiers like you have stood shoulder to shoulder with our korean allies providing south korea with security against attack and the opportunity to flourish first as a great economy and now as a great democracy i want every one of you to know whatever you do here if you carry a rifle or drive a truck or repair a helicopter whatever you do whatever you do your work is vital and i admire your service and believe it or not so do millions of americans you will never see or meet who do not know your names and may not even know exactly what you do all of them know they live a little freer and a little better because of you and your sacrifice and your service all of you know that this is a challenging time to be in the military because the cold war has ended some people think the threats to our country have ended but you know better you know that there is a reduced need for certain missions and forces around the world but many threats continue just a few weeks ago i ordered an attack on baghdad because we concluded and you know why because we concluded that iraq had staged a plot to assassinate former president bush while he was in kuwait and they were under the illusion that we treat our political leaders like they treat theirs this is america we honor everybody who has served this country and we stick together but when i gave that order i did it with the confidence that we had the best military in the world equipped with the finest technology in history and after that action was over i felt more strongly than ever before that we must continue to have the best military in the world and the finest technology in the world for six years now force levels have been lowered budgets have been reduced bases have been closed these changes are unsettling and difficult but i tell you that still we must maintain our readiness and we must make these cutbacks gradually and with a real feeling for the men and women who have won the cold war and deserve their country s best efforts to help them maintain successful lives and even in this time of transition we must remember that we have to show foresight and caution in reducing our defenses north korea s stubborn refusal in recent months to fully comply with the requirements of the nuclear nonproliferation agreement is the most urgent example of this and in this new round of military cuts i know that you all noticed no cuts were made in troop levels in korea or japan and we beefed up our naval presence in the pacific because that is what the national security requires you know too many times in the past in the absence of an overpowering threat our country has forgotten just how badly we need people like you with the morale and energy and vigor and determination that you re all demonstrating today in 1945 before any of you were born we won the second world war and just five short years later we were involved in another conflict here in korea but by then we had diminished our strength so much that we entered the conflict inadequately prepared without enough equipment or training without enough strength we must not ever make that mistake again and so i say to you that while over the next few years we will continue to reduce defense expenditures where appropriate and acknowledge that in many cases that may be desirable there is clearly a line below which we cannot go our armed forces must still be able to fight and win on a moment s notice and let me make this last point to do that of course we have to provide you with the most sophisticated precision guided weapons we can to do that of course we have to provide you with all the support we can but in the end you will make the difference your discipline your character your will to win your love for your country your ability to get up day in and day out and feel the way you are manifesting your feelings for your country and your duty today that is america s winning edge and that is what we must never lose let me say in closing i know that what you do is difficult and sometimes dangerous and often very lonely you re a long way from home when i was up on the dmz i met three people from my home state a long way from home you too and i want all of you to know that your demonstration of your professionalism and your dedication means that you and america really are second to none what i want you also to know is that i can see from my perspective sometimes something you may not be able to see and that is these pictures of you here saying what you re saying doing what you re doing being who you are give great pause to the enemies of freedom and great heart to our allies and to all the american people thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton11 7 94 bill_clinton thank you first let me thank the air force band they were great thank you very much thank you chief bailey general joulwan general oak minister president sharping thank you for joining us tonight colonel caine it is an honor for me to be here with the men the women and the families of the magnificent 86th wing and the klm community thank you for coming out thank you for serving america thank you for making us proud i m also proud to be here visiting the largest american community outside of the united states of america i want to thank the crews who just showed me the c 130 and the f 16 and all of you who serve in any way last month i came to europe for the 50th anniversary of the italian and normandy campaigns of world war ii to honor the brave airmen soldiers and sailors who rescued freedom in its darkest hour in this century tonight i come here to honor you who keep the torch of freedom alive we are in your debt you know perhaps better than any other group of americans that though the cold war is over the world still has its dangers and challenges america still has its responsibilities you do america s work and freedom s work and the families who support you who often are separated from you for long periods of time also do america s work and we thank you all you have done so much in somalia in turkey in macedonia over the skies of bosnia and other places in the former yugoslavia from 1991 through 1993 during operation provide comfort you flew nearly 5 000 combat sorties over northern iraq since 1993 as part of operation deny flight ramstein f 16s flying out of aviano air base have flown almost 2 000 missions over the former yugoslavia and last february when six bosnian serb air force fighters violated the no fly zone to bomb a munitions factory ramstein pilots including captain bob wright who i just met got the call to respond and all america showed what america s pilots could do and america s planes could do in the cause of freedom you at ramstein and at rhein main are involved in one of the great humanitarian missions of our time as well delivering supplies and hope to people under siege in bosnia i have just seen an impressive demonstration of how you ge that job done as well you ve done so much that the airlift in bosnia has now surpassed the great berlin airlift of 45 years ago both in time and missions flown in the greatest humanitarian airlift in history you have brought relief to the vulnerable pride to the people back home and you have made history i salute you america salutes you our world is very different now the walls between nations are coming down and bridges are coming up last week i had the honor to represent all of you as the first american president ever to set foot on free baltic soil when i spoke in riga latvia to over 40 000 people tomorrow i will have the honor to represent you as the first american president to walk into what we used to call east berlin there i will join the troops of the berlin brigade as they case the colors and begin heading home knowing their mission has been accomplished berlin is free germany is united but make no mistake about it our commitment to the security and future to the democracy and freedom of europe remains our security and our prosperity depend upon it the entire transatlantic alliance knows that the united states is still critical to its success and to its future that s why we intend to keep our forces here in europe some 100 000 strong i think you know we need to stay our european friends want us to stay and i believe a majority of the american people support our continued mission here thanks to the work you have done and the example you have set at the end of world war ii our country did not make the same mistake it had made in the past we didn t let our guard down and we didn t walk away from our friends and allies with the cold war over and freedom on the march throughout europe it is important that we recognize our mission has changed but we still have a mission we can t let our guard down and we can t walk away from our friends we actually have the opportunity those of us who live now to work with our friends in europe to achieve for the first time in all of human history a europe that is united for democracy for peace and for progress not divided in ways that help some people at the expense of others in order to do that america must stay here america must work here america must stand for peace and freedom and progress it has already been said but i want to say again how hard it has been for the members of our armed services to continue to do these incredible things in the face of the dramatic reductions in military spending and manpower that we have sustained i believe that when the history of this era is written one of the untold stories that will emerge clearly in the light of time is the absolutely brilliant job done by the united states military in downsizing the military still treating members of the military like human beings and citizens and patriots and maintaining the strongest best equipped best prepared and highest morale military force in the entire world it is a tribute to you and someday the whole story will be known when i leave tomorrow i will go back to the united states and to our continued effort at renewal at home you should know that your country s coming back at home as well in the last year and a half about 3 8 million new jobs have come into our economy the unemployment rate has dropped about a point and a half there is a serious effort underway at rebuilding our communities our neighborhoods our families a serious attempt to address the crime problem the serious attempt to address the welfare problem and i also want to say that since i have been here in europe i have met many american service families already and the one issue that they have asked me about dwarfing everything else has been health care and i promise you we re going to try to address that as well and i think we ll be successful but let me also say this part of the reason our economy has recovered a big part of it is that after years of talking about it we began to do something about our budget deficit which was imposing an unconscionable burden on the children who are here and on their children running up our debt year in and year out next year we will have had three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since harry truman was president of the united states and america s troops first came to defend germany most of the military reductions have gone to fuel reductions in the debt but i want to say this as well we must have enough money in the military budget to fulfill our mission and to support the people who do it in a humane and decent and pro family way and i will resist further cuts that would undermine our ability to have you do your job for the united states of america not a day goes by that i do not express my thanks in my heart and to our god for the service you render in many ways you and i are in exactly the same business doing the same work i will do my best to support you as your commander in chief and what you have done here is a credit to every american back home they know it they are proud of you we honor your service we thank you for it and i am very glad that we all had the chance to be together this evening thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton11 7 95 bill_clinton thank you very much i welcome you all here those of you have been introduced and distinguished members of congress and military leaders veterans others who are in the audience today i am announcing the normalization of diplomatic relationships with vietnam from the beginning of this administration any improvement in relationships between america and vietnam has depended upon making progress on the issue of americans who were missing in action or held as prisoners of war last year i lifted the trade embargo on vietnam in response to their cooperation and to enhance our efforts to secure the remains of lost americans and to determine the fate of those whose remains have not been found it has worked in seventeen months hanoi has taken important steps to help us resolve many cases twenty nine families have received the remains of their loved ones and at last have been able to give them a proper burial hanoi has delivered to us hundreds of pages of documents shedding light on what happened to americans in vietnam and hanoi has stepped up its cooperation with laos where many americans were lost we have reduced the number of so called discrepancy cases in which we have had reason to believe that americans were still alive after they were lost to 55 and we will continue to work to resolve more cases hundreds of dedicated men and women are working on all these cases often under extreme hardship and real dangers in the mountains and jungles of indochina on behalf of all americans i want to thank them and i want to pay a special tribute to general john vessey who has worked so tirelessly on this issue for presidents reagan and bush and for our administration he has made a great difference to a great many families and we as a nation are grateful for his dedication and for his service thank you sir i also want to thank the presidential delegation led by deputy secretary of veterans affairs hershel gober winston lord james wold who have helped us to make so much progress on this issue and i am especially grateful to the leaders of the families and the veterans organizations who have worked with the delegation and maintained their extraordinary commitment to finding the answers we seek never before in the history of warfare has such an extensive effort been made to resolve the fate of soldiers who did not return let me emphasize normalization of our relations with vietnam is not the end of our effort from the early days of this administration i have said to the families and veterans groups what i say again here we will keep working until we get all the answers we can our strategy is working normalization of relations is the next appropriate step with this new relationship we will be able to make more progress to that end i will send another delegation to vietnam this year and vietnam has pledged it will continue to help us find answers we will hold them to that pledge by helping to bring vietnam into the community of nations normalization also serves our interest in working for a free and peaceful vietnam in a stable and peaceful asia we will begin to normalize our trade relations with vietnam whose economy is now liberalizing and integrating into the economy of the asia pacific region our policy will be to implement the appropriate united states government programs to develop trade with vietnam consistent with u s law as you know many of these programs require certifications regarding human rights and labor rights before they can proceed we have already begun discussing human rights issues with vietnam especially issues regarding religious freedom now we can expand and strengthen that dialogue the secretary of state will go to vietnam in august where he will discuss all of these issues beginning with our pow and mia concerns i believe normalization and increased contact between americans and vietnamese will advance the cause of freedom in vietnam just as it did in eastern europe and the former soviet union i strongly believe that engaging the vietnamese on the broad economic front of economic reform and the broad front of democratic reform will help to honor the sacrifice of those who fought for freedom s sake in vietnam i am proud to be joined in this view by distinguished veterans of the vietnam war they served their country bravely they are of different parties a generation ago they had different judgments about the war which divided us so deeply but today they are of a single mind they agree that the time has come for america to move forward on vietnam all americans should be grateful especially that senators john mccain john kerry bob kerrey chuck robb and representative pete peterson along with other vietnam veterans in the congress including senator harkin congressman colby and congressman gilchrist who just left and others who are out here in the audience have kept up their passionate interest in vietnam but were able to move beyond the haunting and painful past toward finding common ground for the future today they and many other veterans support the normalization of relations giving the opportunity to vietnam to fully join the community of nations and being true to what they fought for so many years ago whatever we may think about the political decisions of the vietnam era the brave americans who fought and died there had noble motives they fought for the freedom and the independence of the vietnamese people today the vietnamese are independent and we believe this step will help to extend the reach of freedom in vietnam and in so doing to enable these fine veterans of vietnam to keep working for that freedom this step will also help our own country to move forward on an issue that has separated americans from one another for too long now let the future be our destination we have so much work ahead of us this moment offers us the opportunity to bind up our own wounds they have resisted time for too long we can now move on to common ground whatever divided us before let us consign to the past let this moment in the words of the scripture be a time to heal and a time to build thank you all and god bless america dem wjclinton11 9 00a bill_clinton well thank you very much first thank you mayor eriquez for your wonderful speech and for outlining some of the things that we ve been able to do together to help the people of danbury i want to thank all of you for coming and president roache thank you for making us feel welcome at your wonderful school and i want to say to all of you i may be the first president to come and spend this much time in danbury but this is not the first time i ve been to danbury i first came here in 1970 30 years ago that was when i met joe lieberman who was running for the state senate then i came back to connecticut as a governor in 1980 when i met chris dodd and then i had to become president before i met jim maloney but i will say this it has not been a disappointment he is one of the best members of the united states house of representatives and you need to send him back down there in november and reelect him you know jim made a very good case for himself and for our side and you ve been out here waiting a long time and the last thing you need is another political speech so i m not going to repeat what he said i m just going to make a few very brief points that i want you to think about this election is profoundly important because we re doing so well what do i mean by that well because we re doing so well we have a chance to meet some really big goals for this country we could get this country out of debt over the next decade for the first time since 1835 america debt free low interest rates we could take every child in a working family in america out of poverty by making sure we had a tax system that was fair to the working poor we could provide health care to every single child and every working family in america that don t have it today we can make sure that every child who needs it has preschool and after school programs and mentors we can make sure that every child in america when he or she comes of age could afford to go to all four years of college we ve already opened the doors universally to the first two years we can do it for all four years we can meet the big environmental challenges of the 21st century like climate change and do it in a way that would create millions of new jobs here in america with the new technology of alternative energies and more efficient use of energy it could mean a fortune of new jobs and wealth to connecticut just by doing the right thing to preserve the environment for our children our grandchildren and their grandchildren jim talked about breast cancer we now have identified the two genes which when they are slightly bent in their structure make it more likely for women to get breast cancer we have now seen the first sequencing of the human genome within a matter of just a few years young girls who are in this audience now when they grow up a little get married and begin to have babies when they come home from the hospital they ll come home with a gene map of their children and it will tell you everything that s good about their structure and all the problems and when that happens americans will have a life expectancy of about 90 years just in a few years all this is going to happen now what s that got to do with this election we have to make the right decisions now about what to do with our prosperity if we want to make the big goals for america for the 21st century come true one i didn t mention is dealing with the aging of america i m the oldest of the baby boomers everybody between the ages of 36 and 54 was the biggest generation of americans ever born until this group that is in our schools right now and when we retire for a period of about 18 years there will only be about two people working for every one person eligible for social security and i can tell you that everybody i know in my generation is determined that when we retire our retirement will not bankrupt our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren it doesn t have to happen we can save social security and save medicare and add this prescription drug benefit and take the burden off of our children and our grandchildren but it all depends on what the american people decide today in a moment of great good fortune great national optimism all the mean and stinging rhetoric we used to hear from the other side for 20 years life s gone away and butter wouldn t melt in their and i appreciate that it s a good thing i never liked the politics of personal destruction but there are real differences here which cannot be obscured and i would argue to you that it may be harder for a free people to make the right decision in good times than it is in bad times after all back in 1992 when you took a chance on me it wasn t much of a chance the country was in a ditch and you knew we had to change we were in terrible shape and you knew we had to change now things are going along so well there seem to be options and often the debate is blurred about what the options is are i need to come back to college about what the options are we say we re for the patients bill of rights that 200 health organizations are for and they say we re for a patients bill of rights the difference in a and the is a huge difference we say we re for a medicare prescription drug program through medicare that all of our seniors who need it can afford to buy into they say we don t know how much that s going to cost we want to give the neediest of our seniors a prescription drug benefit and let the others buy insurance they don t say that there s never been an insurance plan designed to sell drugs that will work it s already failed in one state and their program would leave half the people out who need it they say we want to give you a tax cut it s your money and we ve got this big surplus they don t say that if they give it all to you in a tax cut what are you going to do if the money doesn t come in and we re back into deficits what are you going to do for investments in education what are you going to do when we get rid of the surplus and we stop paying down the debt and interest rates start going up again do you know how much jim maloney s position on giving you a modest tax cut so you get a deduction for college tuition a credit for long term care for elderly or disabled members in your family some means of saving for retirement income and more for child care an abatement of the marriage penalty but at an affordable cost do you know how much money that will save you in interest rates as opposed to the plan of their nominee and all their crowd for congress it will save you about 1 percent a year for a decade do you know how much that s worth that s worth 390 billion in home mortgages 30 billion in car payments 15 billion in college loans payments a 435 billion tax cut to ordinary americans for car payments college loan payments and home mortgage payments if we ll just keep paying off the debt keeping the interest rates down keeping the american economy strong and going that s another reason you ought to be for him and al gore and joe lieberman now let me say i m going to do my best when the congress comes back in to work closely with them i m going to do everything i can to get as much done as i can for you in the next five weeks but however much we get done you remember this there are real differences here differences in economic policy differences in education policy differences in health care policy differences in environmental policy differences in criminal justice policy differences in arms control and world peace policy and differences about how we re going to live together across all the diverse cultures and races and genders and all the differences in this society that make us up there are big differences and what i think you have to do is to ask yourself what do i want this election to be about if you want the biggest check at the earliest point and never mind the consequences you ought to be for them if you re an upper income person actually our tax cut gives two thirds of you more money even though it just costs a third as much what does that tell you about it but if you would like a tax cut that helps you pay for the education of your children the long term care of your elderly or disabled family members helps you to save more for retirement helps with child care helps with the marriage penalty but saves enough money to keep paying this debt down and investing in education and health care and science and technology so that we can keep going forward together if you believe that we ought to make a future in which the most important thing is our common belief that everybody matters everybody deserves a chance and we all do better when we help each other then you need al gore joe lieberman and jim maloney thank you and god bless you and thank you for the hillary sign back there if you vote in new york help her thank you dem wjclinton11 9 00b bill_clinton thank you very much first i want to thank richard and maureen for their warm welcome here for opening their home this is a beautiful place and a beautiful gathering and the reason we re all so warm is that you came out here to support anthony in record numbers and i m grateful to you so you should enjoy the temperature you generated it by your commitment and your support i want to thank you for reminding me that you were in little rock on election night in 92 hard to believe it was almost eight years ago it s been a good eight years and i thank you for being there i have a particular interest in this congressional district because in 1992 i came to chuck schumer s home in brooklyn and i drove around this congressional district with him i mean i know we re not in it now but i drove around the congressional district i drove to the synagogue where a swastika had been painted on the wall and we began to see the evidence of the kind of intolerance and bigotry that we still see manifested from time to time in these terrible hate crimes around our country and i thought then that you know we could turn the country around if we had the right ideas if we literally changed the economic policy the education policy the health care policy the crime policy the environmental policy and the foreign policy of america and i believe that the results have been pretty good now what i want to say today is i m here because number one i m very grateful for the support that anthony has given me over the last two years and i appreciate it very much secondly and far more important i think he has enormous capacity to serve this district well and to continue to grow in stature and leadership and impact for the people of this district this city and this state in the united states congress and that s very important you know i ve reached a point now where i was looking at him and thinking how young he was and trying not to resent it i realize you know i spent most of my life as the youngest person who ever did anything and now i m the second youngest person ever to leave the office of the president the youngest ever to leave after two full terms theodore roosevelt was a couple of years younger than me also of new york so i decided i d come to new york to see if it was in the water and catch it but my concern now this is the first time since 1974 i haven t been on the ballot and most days i m okay about it my party has a new leader whom i admire and support strongly and his vice presidential candidate has been a friend of mine for 30 years i was thrilled about senator lieberman s pick and my family has a new candidate so i have become the cheerleader in chief of america and i m very happy to do that i want to say one thing very very seriously a great people are more vulnerable to making a mistake when times are good than when they re difficult the american people and the people of new york took a chance on me and al gore in 1992 but it wasn t much of a chance because the country was in the ditch we were in trouble we had a bad economy worsening social problems an increasingly divisive political climate now we have a good economy all the social indicators are going in the right direction we are without severe internal crisis or external threat and there is a new sense of harmony in the country at least among the strong majority of american people as evidenced by the different rhetoric that they have adopted in running this campaign except in their mass mails that s the good news the bad news is it may be harder for people to tell the difference this year i think it s quite important just to make it clear anthony mentioned a few things this is what you can do with what we have done in the last eight years and how these elections whether he is successful whether hillary wins whether al and joe win depend in large measure on what the american people and the people of new york believe this election is about and i think you should believe it is about making the most of a truly magic moment in the history of america we can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 we can take social security and medicare out beyond the life of the baby boom generation so that when those of us in the baby boom generation retire and there are only two people working for every one person eligible for social security we won t bankrupt our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren we can get rid of child poverty in this country we can now afford to give working people a subsidy to buy health insurance and get rid of most of the uninsured people in america who are working for a living and their little kids we can grow the economy and improve the environment we can continue to see improvements in our education system and there have been some substantial turnarounds in the last four years nationwide we can open the doors of four years of college to all americans by adopting the bill that senator schumer and hillary have so strongly endorsed to let people deduct up to 10 000 a year in their college tuition we can do big great things yes the college students clap we can pass hate crimes legislation and continue to grow together at home and we can continue to be a force for peace and reconciliation around the world but it won t happen by accident as anthony said i get tickled you know when the other crowd were in they took credit when the sun rose in the morning and everything bad that happened was someone else s fault now they say it s just all an accident we just stumbled through the last eight years i only stumbled when i was tired so i want you to think about this i m glad you came here i m glad you gave him your money i appreciate that but it s not enough almost all of you have more friends who are less interested in politics than you are than you have friends who are as interested or more interested than you are almost all of you have a lot of friends who would never come to an event like this or who at least have never been and i just want to urge you in the next 60 days to try to take a little time everyday for citizenship tell people we may never get another chance like this when there s so much progress at home and the absence of so many threats to us abroad and so much opportunity to do good for our children and our grandchildren to build the future of our dreams for them and tell them we can t blow it tell them there are real and significant differences between the two parties and the candidates in every race in the u s senate race in new york and the house race here and certainly in the race for president and vice president and there is evidence here we ve tried it their way we ve tried it our way you have a track record here and i think it s really worth some of your time and effort if you went to the trouble to come here and stand in this hot room because you believe you ought to be here and you believe you ought to support this fine young congressman then it is worth some time in the next 60 days to talk to your friends and neighbors who don t come to things like this who don t normally take the same position you do or activity you do in politics and try to convince them that you came here for a reason and they ought to vote with you in november i m telling you if people believe this election is about building the future of our dreams for our children he will win hillary will win al gore and joe lieberman will win and we will have a great celebration on election night thank you dem wjclinton11 9 96 bill_clinton good morning it s great to be back in pueblo again i want to say first dr martinez thank you for welcoming us here to the courthouse and all of you who live here must be so proud of this magnificent building i love it i think we should give josh rael another hand for doing such a good job on the national anthem i want to thank all of those who spoke before me mike beatty al gurule lt governor gail shoettler and tom strickland i hope you will send tom strickland to the united states senate i have a lot of confidence in him and as i ll say in a moment when these people present themselves for congress and the senate there are real consequences to your lives ladies and gentlemen i m glad to be back here today because this is an election season but elections should not be divorced from our lives the choices we make as citizens for those who represent us affect the way we live after the elections are over as i was sitting here looking at mayor webb making his remarks and my longtime friend and former colleague governor romer making his remarks and i couldn t help thinking how lucky colorado is to be served by public officials like this who can make a positive difference in people s lives i also have to tell that i was talking with patricia heine before she got up here to speak she told me that she had become a police officer seven years ago after working on raising her sons and i thought to myself it s a pretty great country when a mother who loves her children and cares for other people s children has the willingness the ability and is given the opportunity to go back to work in public safety to make this community and this state and our country a better place and we thank you today i want to talk as governor romer said and mayor webb said about the issue of crime about the link between crime and drugs and about what we have to do to make our streets safer if we re going to realize our vision for the 21st century as your president i have worked hard on a simple straightforward vision for the next century and especially for the children in this audience we re only four years away from a brand new century and a brand new millennium we re undergoing enormous changes as all of you know in the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world i want us to go into that next century as the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity i want us to go into that century with all the american people in our mosaic from all different ethnic groups all different walks of life growing together and being stronger together in a close knit community that help each other to make the most of their own lives and i want to make sure the american dream is alive and well for every single man or woman boy or girl who is willing to work for it and that is my vision opportunity for all responsibility from all and everybody has a place in our american community i hope you ll help me to realize that we ve worked very hard in the last four years to create economic opportunity and this country is better off than it was four years ago we have the lowest unemployment rate in 7 5 years 10 5 million new jobs we have 4 5 million new homeowners the deficit has gone down for four years in a row for the first time since the 1840s before the civil war wages are rising again for average working people for the first time in a decade there are 1 8 million fewer people on welfare today than there were the day i took the oath of office child support collections are up 40 percent 40 million people have had their pensions protected 12 million americans have taken some time off in the family leave law keeping their jobs while their babies were born or they had a sick parent they needed to take care of the air is cleaner for 50 million americans and we have cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than were cleaned up in the 12 years previous we are moving in the right direction on october the 1st 10 million hard working americans will get a pay raise when the minimum wage law goes into effect and that s a good thing for america twenty five million americans will be helped by the kennedy kassebaum health care reform bill which says you can t lose your health insurance anymore just because someone in your family gets sick or you have to change jobs this country is on the right track for the 21st century i have worked hard to make these things possible by working with all people of goodwill who were willing to move our country forward to change the politics of washington from who s to blame to what are we going to do about it and what can we do together i have asked the american people to join with me in building a bridge to the 21st century a bridge that we can all walk across together a bridge that will be strong enough to realize our dreams for the future to give every child the chance to live up to his or her god given potential and i want you to help me build that bridge will you do that we have to make educational opportunity available for all that means we have to create the most excellent system of education in the world for all of our children without regard to their racial or ethnic background or whether they re poor rich or middle class whether they live in poor rural communities or big cities or some place in between i have a plan to make sure that every eight year old child in america will be able to read on his or her own by the year 2000 and we need to do that if we keep to our commitment to make sure that every classroom and library in every school in the united states is hooked up to the information superhighway by the year 2000 every child for the first time in the history of this country every child will have access to the same information at the same level of quality in the same time as every other child rich poor or middle class that will revolutionize education and we have to do that and finally let me say in this great community which has among other things a perfectly wonderful community college where i was the last time i came here i want to ask you to help me make sure that in the next four years we make two years of education after high school the equivalent of a community college degree just as universal in america as a high school diploma is today by giving people a tax credit for the tuition there by giving people a tax credit for the tuition cost of a typical community college by giving our american people a 10 000 tax deduction per year for any tuition cost at any institution of higher education undergraduate graduate community college you name it by letting the american people and letting more americans take out more savings in an ira save that money and then withdraw it tax free to pay for college education health care or to buy a first time home that will build a bridge to the 21st century to build that bridge we have to keep this economy growing steady and strong until every american has a chance to benefit from it that means we have to balance the budget but we have to do it in the right way we must balance the budget to keep the interest rates coming down so that you can afford house payments car payments credit car payments so that small business people can afford to borrow money to build their businesses we have made every small business in america eligible for a tax cut if they invest more money in their business we are growing small businesses at a record rate but we have to continue to balance the budget but we can do it and we must do it without wrecking medicare medicaid cutting back on our investments in education and protecting our environment we have to do that we have to build a bridge to the 21st century where families can succeed at home and at work most parents whether the family is a one parent or a two parent household most parents are working today and most parents have to work i hardly ever meet a family that doesn t tell me there has been some time in their lives when they ve really faced a dilemma in the conflict between their obligations at work and their obligations at home that s why we worked hard to pass the family leave law that s why we worked hard to increase childhood immunizations to increase head start to pass the v chip law to give parents the ability to control inappropriate programming and its access through television to the young children that s why we ve worked hard to protect our young people from the dangers of marketing and selling tobacco which is illegal in every state but prevalent in every state and that s why i believe we should expand the family and medical leave law to say in a very limited way people also ought to be able to take their children to doctor s appointments and to the local parent teacher conference without losing their jobs in this country and i hope you ll help me do that we have a lot of environment work to do to build our bridge to the 21st century there are still 10 million american children listen to this 10 million american children living within four miles of a toxic waste dump i want to clean up two thirds of those dumps the worst ones in just the next four years by far the most rapid pace in history but it s important to us our children should be growing up next to parks not poison and i want you to help me build that bridge to the 21st century but let me tell you we cannot we cannot build the right bridge to the 21st century unless our children and their families are safe in their homes on their streets in their schools in their communities four years ago i came to this wonderful community just two weeks before election day i said i wanted to prove and i quote this is what i said then that you could be tough on crime and smart at the same time well four years later i can tell you that that approach is possible and it s working just two years ago this friday in one of the proudest moments of my presidency i signed the 1994 crime bill we began to put 100 000 police on our streets we re about halfway home now we have about 500 already funded in colorado five right here in pueblo we made three strikes and you re out the law of the land we began helping states to build 100 000 new prison cells we began to expand prevention programs so our young people would have something to say yes to not just no and let me say not a single sportsman or hunter in colorado notwithstanding what they were told in 1994 has lost their hunting or sporting weapon not a single solitary one not one but you know what sixty thousand felons fugitives and stalkers could not get a handgun because of the brady bill it was the right thing to do we are safer because of it now this strategy is working for four years in a row the crime rate has come down but no matter how tough our penalties no matter how many new prisons we build we will never break this problem until we break the cycle of crime and drugs and stop the revolving door between prisons and drug use on the streets let me clear the best antidrug program is still parents teaching their children right from wrong it s still those dare officers in the schools standing up there in front of those classes and letting those children with their wide eyes look at people in uniforms and say that s the kind of person i want to be and that s the kind of behavior i want to have that s why i fought for the safe and drug free schools program which puts antidrug counselors like officer heine in the classroom the first bill i vetoed as president the very first one was a bill passed by this congress that would have gutted the safe and drug free schools program i don t know about you but i think we need more people like her not fewer in front of our children in the schools of america last year congress gave me about 700 million less than i sought to fight drugs and that s wrong and i hope we can correct it before they go home i appointed a four star general an american military hero general barry mccaffrey to lead our attack on drugs and he has developed a strategy for us that we will follow with great discipline over the next five years targeted at keeping drugs away from our children and he deserves the support that he needs illegal drugs are a significant force behind the vast majority of violent crimes in this country and a big part of the problem with juvenile crime drug dealers with guns criminals on drugs they contribute a lot to the misery that the rest of america has to endure listen to this two thirds of the men in state prisons have substance abuse problems i have signed an executive order to require drug testing of anyone brought into the federal system but i have not been able to effect that listen to this when criminals on parole go back on drugs the chances are enormously high they will commit new crimes sixty percent listen 60 percent of all the heroin and cocaine sold in the entire united states goes to people on bail on probation or on parole seventy five percent of the prisoners with a history of heroin or cocaine use who are released without treatment go back to drugs within three months and return to crime we have to stop this cycle or we ll never get on top of the problem in spite of this problem states often don t do much to test parolees or prisoners or provide adequate treatment that has to be changed drugs don t belong in prisons or in the hands of parolees parole is not a license to break the law use drugs and slip back into crime it is a chance to go straight and live a better life so today i propose to offer legislation that will say to every state in the country we are prepared to continue to use funds from our crime bill to help you build your prisons but if you want that money you now must start drug testing prisoners and parolees to break the cycle of crime and drugs it s time to say to inmates if you stay on drugs you ll stay in jail if you want out of jail you have to get off drugs it s time to say to parolees if you go back on drugs you ll go back to jail if you want to stay on the street stay off drugs and i want you to help me send that message to america we know the states are hard pressed and we intend to do our part today the department of justice announced 27 million in grants to states for testing and intervention with prisoners to help them break this cycle states can start using this money right now for drug testing and for intervention to help prisoners and parolees and let me tell you something folks this is not an election year pledge this will work a new report shows that in delaware prisoners who got treatment in prison and during work release were 75 percent drug free and 70 percent arrest free after 18 months but 80 percent of the prisoners who did not receive treatment went back on drugs and two out of three were arrested again it is simple we know what to do now let s go do it let s build a bridge to the 21st century that breaks the cycle of crime and drugs i want to say to all of you i am more optimistic than i was when i came here four years ago about our future i am more idealistic about the possibilities of americans to do good things together but we must make a commitment to work together to create opportunity for all to get responsibility from all of our citizens and to reach out to one another across the lines that divide us so that we can go forward together that is the bridge that i seek to build to the 21st century and i hope you will help to build it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton11 9 98a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you well i have loved this but you must be exhausted i want to say hillary and i have been over there just lapping this up we don t want this to ever end but i m afraid you re going to get dizzy if you keep getting up and down let me say to brian o dwyer and the o dwyer family i am profoundly grateful senator kennedy thank you so much for what you said and for more what you have done when the history of this century is written i doubt very seriously that there will be a single other united states senator who will have done so much for so long for the american people as edward kennedy of massachusetts i also like to borrow a lot of senator kennedy s lines when i can get away with it and i might say i will never let st george live it down i want to thank all of you who are here the members of my cabinet secretary daley and administrator aida alvarez and kitty higgins and others who are here in the administration thank you john sweeney for your championing irish american and every american worker s rights for what you have done i thank the members of congress who are here who have supported our policy both republicans and democrats who have stood up for the initiative the united states has made and made it possible for me to continue to do whatever it is that we have been able to do to advance the cause of peace this is an honor that really belongs to all of you and many who are not even here today but mostly whenever i look at it i will think of paul o dwyer for his devotion to civil rights and human rights and social justice and the cause of the irish people and peace in the irish heart he was beloved by many people including me i will never forget when i first met him in 1991 i will never forget all that happened from that day to this and the wonderful journey that that began with irish americans and the people of ireland there are many people that i would like to thank and i d like to save senator mitchell until last i want to thank tony blair who called me this afternoon again to continue to push the irish peace process and the great prime minister of ireland the taoiseach bertie ahern and thank you mr ambassador for being here as well and for your service i want to thank their predecessors i want to thank all the members of congress those that are here and those who aren t i too want to say a good word for jean kennedy smith who from time to time rivaled her brother in their pushy insistence that i should do more and more and more there are some people in the white house i d like to thank i want you to know the vice president first of all he had his priorities in order going to parents night and that ought to speak volumes but he only has one more to go you know so he doesn t want to miss another parents night but i want you to know all those things that he litanized there in his little speech more than any other vice president in the history of this country he was involved in every difficult controversial and bold decision this administration made always pushing for it including the work we did in the irish peace process and i m grateful to him very much for that i want to thank sandy berger and jim steinberg with the national security council and their predecessors in my first term tony lake and i thank nancy soderberg now at the united nations for what they did for the irish peace process i want to thank hillary for reaching out to the women of ireland for going to the vital voices conference there last week and building real genuine partnerships with people who are reaching across the lines that have divided people for so long to raise children and start businesses and build peace block by block i personally believe that it was a sort of an unprecedented effort by an american public figure to deal at a human level that i can only wish i had had the opportunity to do but i thank her for that because i think it s been very important there s one other person i d like to thank who s not here but i was sitting here thinking when i saw congressman manton out there and i remembered the first time i came to the queen s democratic committee and he was chairing the committee and i was thinking about that first meeting we had in new york with paul o dwyer and i think my good friend bruce morrison a former congressmen from connecticut was there and who hillary and i have known for 30 years but i would like to thank the person who introduced me to them who started this whole journey the man who ran my campaign in new york in 1991 and 92 harold ickes without him none of this might have happened because he brought me to them now george mitchell was unconscionable in the praise that he heaped on me tonight but when i was in northern ireland with him i felt like ray lankford anybody here know who ray lankford is he s the guy that bats behind mark mcgwire and he s a good baseball player by the way i was standing up there and i had the feeling half of the crowd was saying who s that big fellow up there with george mitchell he can say whatever he wants about my phone calls and my meetings and my endless somebody had to run that deal when he started running that peace process the people on opposite sides literally did not sit in the same room and listen to each other while the other one was talking george s first big deal was to make sure that people stayed in the same room while their counterparts were talking and actually listened that s how far we have come that was the distance that was traveled between the beginning and the good friday agreement i cannot imagine another person who could have done it i would never have had the patience to sit there and do it i cannot imagine and for years george would hardly speak to me he said i got out of public life i left the senate i wanted to have a private life i wanted to have a family and then you stuck me with this i told him one time he mentioned this in ireland i said george you know the title of that old country song about the guy that makes a bad divorce settlement she got the goldmine and i got the shaft you got the shaft we go everywhere people clap for me and george just has to go back and sit in the meeting where people didn t talk to each other you know he d have to wait for days on end to see if people would sneeze in the right way it was unbelievable finally on this last trip to ireland george mitchell finally said thank you i m glad i got to do it after three years and i appreciate it i tell you that to make a serious and large point all over the world there are people who ought to get along together who can t stand each other all over the world there are people who have a great deal in common but they will never find out because they won t even sit down and talk to each other and listen respectfully all over the world there are people who spend day after day after day after day in abject misery because they are in the grip of a destructive obsession where they define the merit of their life by their ability to hopefully in their minds repress somebody who is of a different racial religious ethnic or tribal group piercing through to the heart and engaging the human mind and opening human ears and getting it all done at once and then going through a rigorous system of work through complex real issues where real interests are at stake is about the most difficult exhausting demanding work and i personally hope i live to see george mitchell get a nobel prize for what he did for the people of ireland i know it will grieve you but i m not going to give this speech that my wonderful staff wrote for me because we ve been here too long but i want to make a couple of points this is not a done deal number one it s wonderful and even on our last trip it was great secretary daley was there and people were actually talking about business instead of fighting we went to stormont and i got to meet at least all the different parties stood in the same room together even mr paisley s crowd was in the same room with everybody else and we had a visit it was kind of nice i liked it and then i went to waterfront hall and tried to be as honest as i could be about what still has to be done we ve got to constitute a government over there consistent with the agreement we have to continue with the decommissioning we have to complete every last step of this process but the good news is the people really want it you know we went to armagh to this beautiful beautiful city we had thousands of people there young and old in the seat of st patrick s mission to ireland the last popular englishman in ireland until tony blair came along i think but it was so wonderful to see all those young people there and then i can t add anything to what hillary told you about omagh except that through all their heartbreak they wanted us to go on and they wanted this to go on and in the republic we had 50 000 people in the streets in limerick 50 000 people including congressman king and his mother and half of his relatives and then every little irish village i went through in the west of ireland on the way to ballybunion where everybody was in the streets and the stores had all been repainted and it was just unbelievable they weren t there for me so much as they were there for the united states and for the idea that the united states is a genuine friend to the irish people and to the reconciliation of the irish people and so i say to you when you leave here today we ve had a great time and hillary and i will never forget what you ve done for us today and i suspect you know but we ve got a lot of work to do over there we cannot have come all this way not to finish the job and we must commit to that it s also very much in our interest ireland s got the fastest growing economy in europe about 500 companies there already we visited one gateway 2000 had an amazing experience there the congressional delegation here that was with us our partnership means a lot to the world no nation has done as much as long as consistently for peacekeeping as ireland has over the last 40 years i don t believe there s been a single day there hasn t been an irish peacekeeper somewhere in the world 75 have perished but today they re still there from africa to the middle east to bosnia shoulder to shoulder with american troops so we have a common agenda in terms of our economic interests but a common agenda in terms of our deep commitment to peace all of this is important but maybe the most important thing from my point of view is this if after 30 years of the troubles and roughly 800 as nearly as i can figure going back and forth and fighting the irish can be reconciled to themselves and ireland can come home to itself then the united states can look every other warring faction in the world dead in the eye and say don t tell me this can t be done from the middle east to kosovo to kashmir to the tribal conflicts in africa i would like to tell them the story of the hundreds of years of irish history i would like to tell them about the potato famines and the civil war and the conflicts with the british and the deeply embedded hatreds and how in our time it all went away because one of the problems we have in so many places is that people literally cannot imagine a future different from the present and the past and if we finish this job then we can go anywhere in the world and say look i know you ve got a lot of problems and i know you can t stand your neighbor over there but let me tell you about northern ireland and every one of you knows every one of you knows that you have played a role in that a hundred years ago this year william butler yeats gave a speech evaluating ireland s past and predicting a new day it s quite a deal for him to be optimistic you know he said we are building up a nation which shall be moved by noble purposes to noble ends well it s taken some time to realize that vision almost 20 years after he wrote that he was saying that things fall apart the center cannot hold i think he would be greatly pleased to know that things have come together and the center seems to be holding very well thank you so again let me say i thank you all this award belongs to all of you but we have work to do and when we do when ireland finally does completely come home to itself it will be a gift not only to the irish and not only to those of us who are irish americans it will be a gift for the whole world a gift the world sorely needs and all of you will have played a role in giving it god bless you and thank you very much dem wjclinton11 9 98b bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen welcome to the white house and to this day to which hillary and the vice president and i look forward so much every year this is always an important day for our country for the reasons that the vice president said it is an unusual and i think unusually important day today i may not be quite as easy with my words today as i have been in years past and i was up rather late last night thinking about and praying about what i ought to say today and rather unusual for me i actually tried to write it down so if you will forgive me i will do my best to say what it is i want to say to you and i may have to take my glasses out to read my own writing first i want to say to all of you that as you might imagine i have been on quite a journey these last few weeks to get to the end of this to the rock bottom truth of where i am and where we all are i agree with those who have said that in my first statement after i testified i was not contrite enough i don t think there is a fancy way to say that i have sinned it is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow i feel is genuine first and most important my family also my friends my staff my cabinet monica lewinsky and her family and the american people i have asked all for their forgiveness but i believe that to be forgiven more than sorrow is required at least two more things first genuine repentance a determination to change and to repair breaches of my own making i have repented second what my bible calls a broken spirit an understanding that i must have god s help to be the person that i want to be a willingness to give the very forgiveness i seek a renunciation of the pride and the anger which cloud judgment lead people to excuse and compare and to blame and complain now what does all this mean for me and for us first i will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defense using all available appropriate arguments but legal language must not obscure the fact that i have done wrong second i will continue on the path of repentance seeking pastoral support and that of other caring people so that they can hold me accountable for my own commitment third i will intensify my efforts to lead our country and the world toward peace and freedom prosperity and harmony in the hope that with a broken spirit and a still strong heart i can be used for greater good for we have many blessings and many challenges and so much work to do in this i ask for your prayers and for your help in healing our nation and though i cannot move beyond or forget this indeed i must always keep it as a caution light in my life it is very important that our nation move forward i am very grateful for the many many people clergy and ordinary citizens alike who have written me with wise counsel i am profoundly grateful for the support of so many americans who somehow through it all seem to still know that i care about them a great deal that i care about their problems and their dreams i am grateful for those who have stood by me and who say that in this case and many others the bounds of presidency have been excessively and unwisely invaded that may be nevertheless in this case it may be a blessing because i still sinned and if my repentance is genuine and sustained and if i can maintain both a broken spirit and a strong heart then good can come of this for our country as well as for me and my family the children of this country can learn in a profound way that integrity is important and selfishness is wrong but god can change us and make us strong at the broken places i want to embody those lessons for the children of this country for that little boy in florida who came up to me and said that he wanted to grow up and be president and to be just like me i want the parents of all the children in america to be able to say that to their children a couple of days ago when i was in florida a jewish friend of mine gave me this liturgy book called gates of repentance and there was this incredible passage from the yom kippur liturgy i would like to read it to you now is the time for turning the leaves are beginning to turn from green to red to orange the birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the south the animals are beginning to turn to storing their food for the winter for leaves birds and animals turning comes instinctively but for us turning does not come so easily it takes an act of will for us to make a turn it means breaking old habits it means admitting that we have been wrong and this is never easy it means losing face it means starting all over again and this is always painful it means saying i am sorry it means recognizing that we have the ability to change these things are terribly hard to do but unless we turn we will be trapped forever in yesterday s ways lord help us to turn from callousness to sensitivity from hostility to love from pettiness to purpose from envy to contentment from carelessness to discipline from fear to faith turn us around o lord and bring us back toward you revive our lives as at the beginning and turn us toward each other lord for in isolation there is no life i thank my friend for that i thank you for being here i ask you to share my prayer that god will search me and know my heart try me and know my anxious thoughts see if there is any hurtfulness in me and lead me toward the life everlasting i ask that god give me a clean heart let me walk by faith and not sight i ask once again to be able to love my neighbor all my neighbors as my self to be an instrument of god s peace to let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart and in the end the work of my hands be pleasing this is what i wanted to say to you today thank you god bless you dem wjclinton12 1 96a bill_clinton thank you boy i m glad to be here i need this sort of a fix from home i want to thank the vice president for his wonderful statement this morning but more important i want everyone of you to know that whether it s working on downsizing our government in a way that gives the american people a government that works better for less or working on finding ways to protect our environment in ways that grow jobs instead of undermining the economy or working on our relationships with russia in a way that makes sure we are never never never again threatened with the specter of nuclear war al gore from carthage tennessee is the most influential and effective vice president in the history of the united states of america i ve got a lot of friends here today i want to thank the mayor for coming and congressman clement and gordon and tanner and my dear friend your former governor ned ray mcwherter who actually purchases your trucks at least that s what he tells me the first time i met ned mcwherter i talked to him for 30 seconds and i wanted to reach in my back pocket and make sure my billfold was still there but they re not making many like him anymore and i m glad to see him looking so think and fit looks like a new morning i want to thank joe scattergood and wayne wooten for going through the plant with me and thank you bobby lee for what you said and for being here and thank you tom plimpton for the wonderful tour and let me say also i want to thank these retirees who are back here and i want to mention i met two people today who work here and this is their last day on the job and i want to acknowledge them because i think al gore and i should have shown up for their retirement party the first person has been here 25 years mr bill douglas he s over there and i met a lady on the line i don t know where she is but she s been here 19 years and she s leaving today her name is doris scaggs doris where are you give her a hand i want to say one word before i talk about where we are with the big budget fight in washington and the economy i want to say a word about one other issue that involves three people from this plant as the vice president said as soon as i leave you here in nashville today i am going to bosnia to visit the men and women who are helping to secure the peace agreement there with our help the people of bosnia who for four long years were denied the simple chance to go to work and raise their children in peace now have an opportunity to rebuild their lives and their country bosnia is the country where world war i began bosnia is the country that s so closely tied to others that if that war were to spread it could cause many americans and many other people from freedom loving countries around the world to lose their lives trying to stop it so we have worked hard not to try to fight a war but to bring a peace for the humanitarian reasons that involved the people there and to keep that war from spreading in ways that could hurt the united states and our friends and allies in europe this is a very good thing the american people and our friends from around the world are doing and all americans should be proud of what they are doing in bosnia three of your own co workers are in germany right now with their national guard units supporting that mission a lot of americans don t know this but you can t just send soldiers to bosnia we have people in hungary supporting them people in croatia supporting them and people in germany supporting them and people that you have are emmett northington who puts these world class trucks together charles hobson who paints them and richard lightning maxwell who actually gets to test drive these machines give them a hand let s give them a hand most of the time these people work right beside you today they are a long way away working for a better safer world i know they and their families will remain in your prayers until the day when they all come back here to work again what they are doing to me symbolizes what the great issue of our time is all about the united states if you just look at the rest of the world with the cold war over it is tempting for us to say boy we ought to just shut down our defense and come home and hope nothing bad happens but the truth is that as nashville as this area perhaps more than any other area the south knows we are tied in with the rest of the world today whether we like it or not and we have a profound interest in seeing the united states be the world s leading source of energy for peace and freedom and democracy it helps us economically and it helps us to be more secure i am proud of what our country has been able to do in the last couple of years in bosnia and the middle east in haiti and northern ireland and southern africa i am proud of the fact that with the leadership of the vice president for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there is not a single nuclear missile pointed at an american child today i am proud of that with terrorism threatening people all around the world both homegrown terrorism we ve seen that and terrorists coming into our country to make mischief and kill people we ve seen that i am proud of the fact that because we re cooperating with other countries we have actually seen them help us arrest apprehend and send back to this country people who came into our country and killed innocent people for illegitimate political ends i am proud of that because we do cooperate because we cooperate with other countries i am proud of the fact that our military and our civilian law enforcement officials helped to capture seven of the biggest drug leaders in colombia in the last two years because we re cooperating with other countries and i am proud of the fact that in the last three years our exports of american products have increased by one third in only three years to an all time high so we are involved in the rest of the world people are making decisions about dope in other countries that are going to kill american kids on the streets here we need to be involved with them their governments are having to take more risks than we do to try to stop it they have to put their lives on the line we need to be their partners if we want people to buy our products we need to be their partners if we want people to dismantle their nuclear weapons and not to build these awful biological and chemical weapons we have to be their partners if we want people to stand up to terrorism we know no country can do it alone so you have to see what we re doing in bosnia and what your three co workers are doing as part of america s efforts to create a world where people like you everywhere can build strong families and have decent jobs and relate to one another in an atmosphere of peace that is what those people are doing in bosnia and i am very very proud of them now here at home all the headlines are dominated by the budget debate and every day sounds like a long horse race well are they going to get a deal or aren t they going to get a deal i want you to see that in kind of a big picture too one of my favorite presidents is andrew jackson and one of the things andrew jackson did was to get rid of the national debt now it was easier back then but it was still hard and he got it done because he was determined when i showed up in washington i could not believe that we had quadrupled the debt of this country in only 12 years until 1981 we never we never had a policy in all of our history of consistently spending more money than we were taking in debts had been used to try to spark the economy when there was a recession or if we were at war we had to sell bonds and borrow more money because we had to gear up in a hurry but until the 12 years before i became president there had never been a policy in our country to just run a big debt all the time in good years and bad years just because it was too much trouble to be disciplined so i don t like what has happened and when we showed up we had a different idea we said the people who think you don t have to be concerned about the deficit are wrong but the people who think that it doesn t matter how you spend your money and therefore you don t have to invest in anything they re wrong too we have to cut the deficit and invest in our future it s worth investing in education it s worth protecting medicare and medicaid it s worth investing in the environment to protect the environment for the future we have to invest in some things but we ve got to get rid of this deficit it is eating us alive i want you to know that in the last three years we ve cut that deficit in half in only three years from nearly 300 billion a year down to 160 billion i want you to know i want you to know that your federal budget would be balanced today if it weren t for the interest we have to pay on the debt that was run up between 1981 and the end of 1992 before we took office just that interest rate this budget would be balanced today if it weren t for the interest we re paying on the 12 years when we departed from the historical practice of this country of paying our way and running the deficit only in recessions or wartime now those are the facts so you need to know there is no party in washington trying to expand the deficit we now have a consensus on that this debate is over how to balance the budget not whether to balance the budget you heard the vice president talk you know i m proud of the fact that the economy has rebounded since we took office it s rebounded because we invested in our country and cut the deficit it s rebounded because we changed the way the government works under his leadership i bet you nobody in this room knows this under his leadership there are now 205 000 fewer people working for the federal government than there were the day we took office 205 000 now how come nobody knows that for two good reasons one is we just didn t throw those people in the street i don t believe in that if you ve got to downsize the government you need to treat the workers with dignity and we gave them good early retirement packages we gave them good severance pay we gave them extra time to find other jobs we gave them time to go on and find a different life where they could be even more productive the second reason is the folks that are left are working harder and smarter and they re doing a better job just like you their productivity has gone up but all these people that talk about big government your government is the smallest it s been since 1965 as a percentage of the work force because the population has been growing your government is the smallest it s been since 1933 so don t let people tell you that we re the big government crowd in washington but maybe more important we ve tried to do things that would reinforce our values we passed a tough and a smart crime bill do you know in america read the cover one of our national news magazines this week the crime rate is down in america the welfare rolls are down in america the food stamp rolls are down in america the poverty rolls are down in america for two years the teen pregnancy rate has come down in america the american people are rallying around their basic values and if we can keep this economy growing and keep people moving from welfare to work so that we stand up for our values and grow the economy that s what will take this country into the next century as the world s strongest force for freedom and opportunity that s what we ve got to do so what i want you that s how i want you to see this budget debate that s the background this country is moving toward the right kind of future we do have to finish the job and balance the budget the question is how the vice president framed it in one way he said we try to think about what s best for people like you we want to grow the middle class and strengthen the under class we think the best way to make more millionaires is to have more successful working people buying the things that they re putting out whether they re products or services that s one way to say it let me say it in another way i think what works in this plant is what works in america what works is teamwork we believe in individualism we believe in individual rights we believe in individual decision making but the truth is we are not in this alone and another big line a way to think about this debate we re having in washington is whether you think we re working toward a society where we ve either got winner take all or a society where everybody has got a chance to win i think we ought to have a society where everybody s got a chance to win if you re willing to work hard and play by the rules everybody ought to have a chance to win and if you look at the teamwork you know everybody cheered here everybody cheered here when you said that peterbilt was the world s best plant making trucks everybody cheered i didn t know who was management and who was labor i didn t know who was working on the chassis or the cabs right what works is when you work together yes we have created a good economic climate but if you folks weren t doing a good job you still wouldn t have these extra 650 workers you did that we didn t do that we didn t have anything to do with that our job in washington is to create a framework in which you can succeed but we can t guarantee that that s all your doing you deserve all the credit but you didn t do it by first one person running this way and another running the other way and pulling everything apart you did it by pulling together that s what i m trying to do for this country and that s what this budget debate is about now i introduced a budget and balance the budget in nine years then the republicans said let s do it in seven i said okay then they said we think that you re too hopeful about the economy i said well i think the economy will get better if we balance the budget but if you don t think it will we ll do it on your numbers so then i gave them a seven year balanced budget on their numbers and then we began to try to work out our differences now all the press is about the differences but i want you to know that we have resolved a lot of those differences and the differences that remain i think are quite important my plan protects medicare so we can honor our duty to our parents by seeing to it that they re able to lead lives of dignity but it is not just for them because if you weaken medicare too much then people like you will have to spend more money on your parents and you ll have less money to send your kids to college this is an intergenerational thing this is not about pandering to senior citizens this is about helping families stay together our plan also leaves more funds to invest in education from head start to helping our schools meet higher standards not by telling them what to do but by saying here are the standards and you figure out how to meet them and we ll give you some money so you can do it by providing more affordable college loans and more college scholarships not just because we re trying to help the young but because we re trying to provide for the future and that s what we have to do our plan leaves more money to invest in the environment because we know we ve got to find a way to grow the economy and preserve the environment just last week there was a big story about something the vice president s been saying for years and years and years last year was the hottest year on record and we have got to find a way to keep growing the economy without burning up the atmospheric layer that protects us all we ve got to find a way to do it and still preserve the clean rivers that we fish in and the woods that we hunt in and the parks that we take our children to it s a big issue you ve got to set aside something for that and that s what we do the medicaid program is the program that pays for middle class folks to send their parents to nursing homes so that they don t have to go totally bankrupt and their kids don t have to go totally bankrupt it also pays for health care for poor children including some children of working people who make very modest wages we can make some savings there but we ve got to be careful how far we go it also pays for care for middle class people who have disabled children i bet there are people that work in this plant who have children with some sort of physical disability who get a little help through that program that is an honorable and a decent thing to do yes we need to control medical inflation but we have to do it in a way that leaves that intact why because we are stronger when we are working together than we are when we just cut everybody loose that is the issue are we going up or down together do we want a society where all can win or are we satisfied with winner take all america is best when everybody s winning as a team that is what we are for we are not for big government in washington we re for a government in washington that plays its part as your partner to see that everybody has a chance to win that s what this whole budget debate is about as i said to be fair to the republican and the democratic congressional leaders we have sat together for 50 hours and i thought the other day you know sometimes we fight with one another in these 50 hours and they think i m wrong and i think they re wrong and here we are in nashville it reminds me of that old country song it s hard to soar like an eagle when i m stuck with a turkey like you sometimes they think that about me sometimes i think that about them but we ve tried to resolve our differences and we ve made a lot of progress and here s where we are they still want levels of reductions in medicare and medicaid and education and the environment that are not necessary to balance the budget they admit they re not necessary to balance the budget they sent me a letter saying that my plan balanced the budget so there s no question that they re not necessary to balance the budget my plan strengthens the medicare trust fund and gives more choice and more preventive benefits to older americans and added help for families that are caring for loved ones with problems like alzheimer s disease but it will save money from the present system we agree on that but they want to go beyond that their plan cuts medicare more than it needs to be cut to balance the budget and they would favor wealthier and healthier senior citizens at the expense of everybody else by giving them many more opportunities just to get out of the medicare system well the reason medicare works is that everybody s in it the sick and the healthy alike you ve got a great big pool that s low risk and we can afford to run it and you can afford to pay for it so i just disagree with that under their plan older couples would pay 400 more a year well if you re making a good living 400 may not be very much but there s a lot of retired people in the hills of tennessee and rural arkansas that 400 is a whole bunch of money and i simply don t think it s right for me to get a tax cut in my income break and then to charge them 400 more a year i just don t think it s right if it were necessary to balance the budget it would be all right but it s not it is not necessary to balance the budget you know where i come from 400 is still a whole lot of money to a lot of those old folks it really matters now if we had to have it to balance the budget or save medicare i d be happy to ask for it but since we know we don t we shouldn t take it the real problem is this some of the republicans honestly just want to balance the budget and they re also honestly concerned with the cost of medicare and medicaid some of the republicans are using the balanced budget and the very large tax cut they want to say well if we balance the budget we have a big tax cut then we just don t have any money for this what they want to do is to end the ability of your nation s government to say america can protect all our seniors through medicare can protect the poor children the handicapped children the people in nursing homes through medicaid can make a major contribution to education to educational technology to reviving this country they don t believe we ought to do that any more they think we should put that back to the market alone the problem is if the market alone does that then we re not working as a team anymore then we re not saying everybody has a chance to win anymore then we re not being your partner anymore that is the whole issue here it s not about big government we have given you the smallest government the american people have had as a percentage of our civilian work force since 33 it s not about regulation we re getting rid of 16 000 pages of federal regulation it s not about the deficit the deficit has been cut in half would be balanced today if it weren t for the debt run up in the 12 years before we showed up but it s nothing about that it s about philosophy now here s the argument i m making to them now they ve got a lot of compelling points if they were here today they could make their speeches and you d think they d make some good points too my argument is we re going to have an election here in november and we can argue about how the medicare program should be structured beyond where we can agree we can argue what our environmental policy should be beyond where we can agree we could argue whether it s a good or a bad thing for the federal government to give lower cost college loans to students and give them better terms to repay it so nobody will be discouraged from going to college by the debt we can argue all that but we have already agreed on enough savings to balance the budget and since we agree on that and we ve already agreed on how to save the money to do it let s go on and balance the budget and get that out of the way we owe that to the american people it is wrong not to do it let us balance the budget and do it now i will say today i watched that cab being set down on the chassis today right before i came up here and i thought now that s a picture of what america s all about we work well when we work together i got tickled you know the vice president talked for six minutes before he mentioned the tennessee football team i didn t dream it would take him that long now tennessee s got a great quarterback but if it weren t for the other 10 people on the offense and the other 11 on the defense you wouldn t have the ranking you enjoy you watched that ohio state game it was a balanced team that won that game if you look at what happens when the american military goes someplace and you re proud of them there are a lot of heroes out there but it s the team that wins and that s what this is all about it s also about recognizing that in life you do what you can today and you put off the rest tomorrow so i say again to my republican and my democratic friends in the congress we can balance the budget today we have already agreed on how to do that we can give a modest tax relief geared to child rearing and education for the working families of america we have agreed on that we can do some things for small business we ve agreed on that let us take what we can agree on and balance the budget while we protect medicare and medicaid and education and the environment and give modest tax relief let us be honest with the american people what we disagree on and let the american people make their decision in november but we are hired to show up for work every day just like you are we can t just go on a work stoppage from now until november and not deal with this so we should balance the budget now and put the differences off and let you decide in november who you think is right whatever you say it will probably be right it s been right most of the time for the last 200 years but meanwhile we should do our job thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton12 1 96b bill_clinton thank you so much mr vice president governor mcwherter senator and mrs gore senator and mrs sasser they ll do a great job for our country in china senator and mrs matthews and to congressman gordon congressman clement and congressman tanner and former congressman jim cooper is here with us i m glad to see all of you here to the mayors who are here my good friend wayne glen and to other people who are here from all over tennessee and from all walks of life and marilyn lloyd i think is here somewhere where is she former congresswoman and let me say to all of you that i sure like that speech al gore gave i want all of you from tennessee to know that when the record of this administration has been written the consequences of our actions may be only apparent to the american people in their positive aspects years from now but one thing is already clear in the entire history of our republic the most effective the most important vice president in american history is al gore he has overseen our efforts to reform our environmental laws so that we could be better at growing the economy and preserving the environment at the same time he is developing a plan that will have our country work in partnership with the private sector to hook up every student in america to the internet with good software good computers good training just in the next few years he has managed a permanent relationship with the prime minister of russia which has reinforced the positive direction in which we are going and which has helped us to lift the cloud of nuclear threat from the american people since we ve been here for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there is not a single solitary nuclear missile pointed at an american child and i am proud of that while our friends on the other side talked about not liking big government wanting to give more power to states and localities in the private sector in a very quiet and straightforward and effective way the vice president has helped us to reduce the size of the federal government by over 200 000 and when you hear your republican friends back in your neighborhood saying that the democrats are the party of big government ask them well if that s so why is the government now the smallest it s been since 1965 if that s so why is the government as a percentage of the civilian work force the smallest it s been since 1933 if that s so why are they dismantling 16 000 pages of unnecessary government regulations put in by republican executives who were there before we were if all that is so how did this happen it happened because it s not so because a big part of what we came to do was to give you a smaller more effective government but we did not go to washington to walk away from the american people and their future and we have no intention of doing that let me say i know that all the publicity in washington that s coming down here to you is all this debate over the budget and it s being kind of is it a horse race and who s giving up what and are they going to get a deal or not and all that sort of thing i understand that i just want to take a couple of minutes to try to put that into a larger picture you know when i leave you i m going to bosnia i will see soldiers there from all over america including soldiers from tennessee i will go to hungary to see the basing that we re doing there in hungary and then i will stop in zagreb yugoslavia croatia in the former yugoslavia where we have a military hospital some other actions and i will see the president of that country to try to make sure that we continue to work to maintain the peace and a lot of people wonder well why did the united states send soldiers there i mean the cold war is over they re doing well with russia why did they do that well it s part of my view at least of where we ought to go as a country i d like it if we could just lay down all our arms and lay down all our responsibilities but if you think about what the world is going to look like in the years ahead for all these children that are here it really matters if america is the strongest force for peace and freedom world war i started in bosnia so many troubles are just right there around it if this war was not contained it could spread and cause many of our people to go and lose their lives down the road meanwhile hundreds of innocent people tens of thousands of innocent people have been slaughtered over a million turned into refugees from their own country so we went there to help other countries make the peace we didn t have to go alone we re only a third of the total force but it would not have happened if it hadn t been for the united states what i want you to think about is by our being involved with other people we can make a difference in the world for our own people let me give you another example we want to fight terrorism we ve had terrorism right here in the united states whether it was homegrown terrorism or people coming from other countries to our shores because we re involved with other countries we ve been able to get some of those terrorists arrested in other countries and brought back here to stand trial for killing innocent americans because we work with them we know that every day americans die because of the scourge of drugs because we work with other countries just this last year we were instrumental with our military and our civilian law enforcement in seeing seven members of the infamous cali drug cartel in columbia arrested seven it was unheard of because we work with other countries because we worked with other countries to have not only more free trade but more fair trade the exports of american products have increased by one third in the last three years to an all time high because we work with other countries people in nashville and in tennessee have jobs and a better future and we know if we re going to have a free trading system it has to also be a fair trading system because we work with other countries we can get that done and that s how you need to see this fight over the budget and all the accomplishments the vice president talked about our theory is that america is a team that we re going forward together we re going up or down together if you look at the whole history of our country you go back and read how we got started we believed in liberty we believed in progress and we struggled to find common ground to get together in spite of our differences those three things are constant in every important period in our history and what we know is unless we get together and work together our liberties can be threatened and we know unless we get together and work together we can t make progress i just came from the peterbilt truck factory here i m sure it s a source of pride to everyone in tennessee they ve got backlog orders for seven or eight months they ve added 600 people to the payroll since we came into office i m proud of that i m proud for them but we didn t do anything directly for them our job is to give them a framework within which they can do well why are they doing well because they work together now that s what this budget fight is all about should we have a country in which our hatred of government says the market should control everything everybody for themselves winner take all or should we have a country that says we love the market system we love the free enterprise system but we know that winners work together and we want a country where everybody has a chance to win that s what this is about the congressional leaders now agree that i have submitted to them a budget which would be balanced in seven years by their score keeping they sent me a little letter which i hold up all the time they agree the issue is not will we balance the budget the issue how should we do it look folks i hate this deficit our country never had a permanent deficit until the 12 years before i became president we never had that never it was in those 12 years when the debt was quadrupled and our friends on the republican side say well the democrats controlled the congress that s not true in the first six years when most of the damage was done they controlled the senate and the white house and they had effective control of the house of representatives and they put us in the hole we re still digging out of now when we came in we cut the deficit in half in three years they said you need to know when you talk to your friends about this budget debate the federal budget would be balanced today with a surplus today with a surplus but for the interest payments we pay on the debt run up between 1981 and the end of 1992 only in those 12 years now i want to be fair we have really worked hard together we spent 50 hours together the vice president and i the republican and the democratic congressional leaders we found we did agree on a lot of things one of the things we ve agreed on is over 600 billion way over 600 billion in savings over the next seven years more than enough to bring our budget into balance and enough to still have a modest tax cut we don t have an agreement because of the things we disagree on they think we should cut medicare more than i think we should cut it i think 400 a couple for elderly people living in rural tennessee or rural arkansas is still a lot of money if you don t need it if we don t need it to balance the budget i don t think we ought to take it we don t know how much can be taken out of these rural hospitals and rural nursing homes without doing damage to them we have to save some money but we ve got to be careful the medicaid program is not so widely known as medicare but there are millions millions of children poor children many of them in poor working families who depend upon it our middle class families have their parents in nursing homes depending on it a lot of middle class families have disabled children who get a little help from medicaid it keeps them from going broke while they care for their children and people say oh you know the democrats they re pandering to the elderly bull if the savings that the vice president and i have proposed are enacted into law they will represent the biggest savings ever achieved in the medicare and medicaid programs we know we ve got to do better we know we can t keep letting health care costs go up three times the rate of inflation we know we have to support these health care providers that are giving folks more choices if they want to go into managed care networks we re all for that but i say we should not do more than we know the system can take we should not hurt any seniors that we know we can avoid hurting and keep in mind this is not just an issue of elderly people if you make it more difficult for people to have their parents in nursing homes and they have to spend more money on that where will the money come from to send their children to college if you make college loans more expensive or you have fewer scholarships where will the strength in our economy come from 10 years from now when we know we need more young people going to college look we re all in this together that is the central issue and i will say again my plea to the leaders of congress just as i pleaded with the democrats to bend over backwards to meet the republicans halfway just as we have worked hard to do that is we need to pass a plan to balance the budget because it will drive interest rates down it ll make it easier for business people to go get a loan easier to expand payrolls easier to keep economic growth going we need to do this but we are going to have some disagreements what we need to do is to agree on everything we can identify the disagreements and tell the american people that it s their business it s their future and they should resolve those disagreements in the election but to put off balancing the budget because we have some disagreements over the size and shape of a tax cut over changes at the margins in the medicare program that can make huge impacts but aren t necessary to save the money we ve talked about over big cuts in education and the environment that s wrong we should not put this other business off you know we have a system this is not a parliamentary system if we were having this kind of fight in great britain for example we d just call an election five weeks from now and you all would decide what you want and i d either go home or they d do it our way or vice versa that s the way we d do it this is not a parliamentary system we can t have a work stoppage in washington until november it is inexcusable it is unacceptable we ought to go back there and say look we ve agreed on enough money to balance the budget we ve agreed we can provide at least a modest tax cut to people for child rearing and education we can help small business some with their pensions and with some other things let s get after it and do it and get it behind us and then go on and do politics but again i will say the reason we have to balance the budget is because we misplayed this for 12 years this was misplayed by our country and the politicians to be fair to them were more or less just doing what the people wanted nobody was ready to take any tough decisions we have obligations to each other we owe these kids a better future just like we owe our parents a decent health care system now that s the difference i do not want to see america become a country full of possibility with record numbers of new successful people every year but more and more people falling behind i think we re better when we re a team i m going to go see those military folks why are you so proud of them you may not know the name of a single person over there but you know they re going to do a good job don t you why because they re a team because they work together you know they re going to do a good job let me tell you the only thing that surprised me about the vice president s speech it took him about seven minutes to get around to rubbing it in about tennessee winning a bowl game now tennessee has a great quarterback but they didn t beat ohio state with their quarterback they beat them with the quarterback the other 10 people on offense the other 11 people on the defense right if ohio state scores three touchdowns instead of two your great quarterback loses a game right teamwork why do we forget it when it comes to our public decisions that s what this whole issue is about folks we can balance the budget we can keep this economy going we can keep the good trends in our life going keep the crime rate and the welfare rolls and the food stamp rolls and the poverty rolls coming down which is what is happening now and i m proud of that but we can only do it if we remember that this country got here because at our most important moment we came together that s what we re fighting for god bless you dem wjclinton12 10 93 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you very much president spangler president friday chancellor hardin my good friend governor hunt and other distinguished platform guests ladies and gentlemen i must say i have thought for a long time about what it might feel to be in a vast crowd of north carolinians and have them do something besides root against one of my athletic teams from arkansas i began to think of this moment in august when i was on vacation and i spent an evening with a person who used to be one of your great sons james taylor and i asked him to sing carolina in my mind so that i could begin to think about what this day might mean to all of us five other presidents have come to this great university to speak none has every had the opportunity to speak to a crowd like this on this occasion of your 200th birthday as a university i d like to begin by thanking the students whom i have met and especially those who gave me this beautiful leather bound book of essays three of them about the theme for this bicentennial celebration that the students chose community for it is in many ways what ought to be america s theme today how we can be more together than we are apart this university has produced enough excellence to fill a library or lead a nation and novelists like thomas wolfe and walker percy in great defenders of the constitution like senator sam ervin and julius chambers now one of your chancellors and katherine everett a pioneer among women lawyers and francis collins a scientist who discovered the gene for cystic fibrosis and journalists like charles kuralt and tom wicker and deborah potter and my pulitzer prize winning friend taylor branch and leading business men and women like the head of the small business administration in our administration erskine bowles who s here with me tonight and who i dare say is the ablest person ever to hold his position probably because of the education he got here at the university of north carolina these are just a few of the many thousands of lives who have been brightened by what mr kuralt so warmly referred to as the light and liberty this great university offers there are few certainties in this life but i ve also learned that when march madness rolls around i ll be hoping my razorbacks are there but i know that dean smith s tar heels will always be there as one who grew up in the south i have long admired this university for understanding that our best traditions call on us to offer that light and liberty to all chapel hill has always been filled with a progressive spirit long before history caught up with him as mr kuralt just said your legendary president frank porter graham spoke this simple but powerful truth in the south two great races have fundamentally a common destiny in building a nobler civilization and if we go up we go up together what a better life we might have had if more had listened to that at a single time your great state has also understood that education goes hand in hand with the expansion of democracy and the advancement of our own economy under the leadership of men like luther hodges and terry sanford and bill friday this university joined with your other state s great universities the state government and the corporate community to begin building an advanced research center to attract new businesses and jobs now the research triangle has more than 60 companies more than 34 000 employees it is the envy of the entire nation of what we can do if we strive to make change our friend tonight we celebrate the day this university began the laying of a cornerstone that marks a milestone in the entire american journey because on this day near this place 200 years ago the cornerstone was laid for the first building in the first university in a nation that had only recently been born it was to be sure a time of hopeful and historic change when the future was clear to those who had the vision to see it and the courage to seize it it was a time of heros such as william r davie a fighter in the revolution a framer of the constitution a princeton graduate who wanted a state university here to make education accessible to more than a privileged few on october 12th in 1793 when general davie laid the foundation for this university he laid a foundation for two centuries of progress in american education historians tell us now that there was then a joyous ceremony that the maple leaves flamed red in the eager air great joy there was but remember now it was in the face of great uncertainty the ruins of the revolutionary war had yet to heal the debts had yet to be repaid and a new democracy seemed still untested and unstable yet in spite of all these problems the americans of that time had the courage to build what had never before existed a great new republic and a public university in spite of the obstacles they decided to bet on the future not cling to the past that is the test for us today my fellow americans alexis de tocqueville carried this uniquely american optimism this faith in education this commitment to change when he wrote in his wondrous democracy in america the americans have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous and the consequences of ignorance fatal they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement humanity as a changing scene in which nothing is or ought to be permanent and they admit that what appears to them today to be good may be superseded by something better tomorrow for two centuries now we ve held fast to that faith in the future for two centuries we ve kept the courage to change and for two centuries we ve believed with frank porter graham that we must go up together our founders pledged their lives their fortunes their sacred honor to a common cause we fought a vast and bloody civil war to preserve that common cause every battle to expand civil rights has been to deepen and strengthen that common cause our ability to go up together now after 200 years and after 200 years of this university we find ourselves a people of more than 150 different racial and ethnic groups confronting a challenge in this new era which tests our belief in the future tests our courage to change and tests our commitment to community to going up together tonight we can best honor this great university s historic builders and believers a dozen generations after our nation and this university began by meeting those tests the cold war is over the threat of nuclear annihilation is receding democracy and free markets are on the march mandela and de klerk rabin and arafat have given people hope that peace can come out of any conflict a global economy is taking shape in which information and investment move across national borders at stunning speed and competition for jobs and incomes is intense expanding trade is critical to every nation s growth and our greatest asset is no longer natural resources or material structures it is the strength the skills the mind and the spirit of our people this is a world america has done a very great deal to make through two world wars the civil war the cold war the establishment of global economic and trading missions through the attempts to build a united nations and other instruments of peace and harmony of progress and democracy it is full of hope but as we all know it is not without its heartbreak there is less danger of a nuclear war between two nations but more danger of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of people irresponsibly prepared to use them the oppression of communist control has disappeared but that disappearance has opened ugly ethnic and religious divisions the united nations can do more good than ever before but clearly there are limits to what outside forces can do to solve severe internal problems in some nations we cannot withdrawal from this world we have done so much to make and we must face its difficulties and challenges through great trials we have stood with president yeltsin for democracy peace and economic reform in russia in so doing we have helped the russians but we ve made ourselves safer and better too we have sponsored and supported the peace process in the middle east for which you just clapped and so doing of course we have contributed to a better life for the arabs and the jews but we have enhanced our own security as well we have helped to save nearly one million somalis from death starvation anarchy and strengthened our argument that the world s poor and deprived need not turn to terrorism and violence for regress in so doing we have advanced our interests but some of our finest young soldiers have perished tonight before going on i want to express here in north carolina my profound gratitude and deep personal sympathy to the families of the six servicemen from fort bragg who were killed in somalia sergeant daniel busch first class earl fillmore master sergeant gary gordon master sergeant timothy martin sergeant first class matthew rierson and sergeant first class randall schugan may god bless their souls and their families and may we all thank them our nation is grateful to them so are most of the people of somalia i have ordered strong new steps to protect our troops to ensure the return of our missing or captive americans to complete our mission in that nation in no more than six months to finish that job quickly but to finish that job right just as we know we cannot withdraw from the world we know here at this great university that we cannot lead the world unless we are first strong at home after all in the beginning it was our values our ideals our strength our willingness to work to make the most of what was here on this continent that made us the envy of the world and here at home this new economy of ours offers much hope and opportunity yet every positive development seems to bring with it some jarring dislocation the global economy not only rewards the educated it punishes the those without education between 1972 and 1992 while the work year got longer for most americans our wages stagnated the 75 percent our people who don t have college degrees felt it profoundly those who began but didn t finish college saw their wages fall by 9 percent just since 1979 for those who didn t go on to college wages fell 17 percent for those who left high school wages dropped 20 percent we got a lot of new jobs out of international trade but we know we also lose some every year to competition from countries with lower wages or higher quality or sometimes unfair practices we know that our health care is the finest in the world but millions of us are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance or one illness away from losing a life savings most of our people are law abiding citizens who love their families more than their own lives but america leads the world in violent crime has the highest percentage of its people behind bars has 90 000 murders in the last four years and more and more of our children are born into and grow up in family situations so difficult that it is hard even to make the arguments that the rest of us have taken for granted all of our lives more and more of our children are growing up in a world in which the future is not what happens when they graduate from the university of north carolina but what happens 15 minutes from now we cannot long survive in a nation with young people for whom the people has no allure and on whom the future has no claim all of us who come here in gratitude to this great university and others like it are here because we believe in tomorrow and that must be our urgent task to restore that tomorrow for our young people what is the point of all this for today it is simply this we are living in a time of profound change no one can fully see the shape of the change or imagine with great precision the end of it but we know a lot about what works and what doesn t and we know that if we do not embrace this change and make it our friend if we do not follow what de tocqueville said we were about 150 years ago if we do not follow the traditions on which this university was founded then change will become our enemy and yet all around our great country today i see people resisting change i see them turning inward and away from change and i ask myself why at a time when we know it s a matter of fact that every rich country in the world gains many new jobs through expanding trade i see people saying well even though my industry will get more jobs we shouldn t have a new trade arrangement with canada and mexico which could one day engulf all of latin america and when i listen when i listen to the arguments i hear instead of arguments against this agreement i hear the grievances of the 1980s the grievances of times when workers were fired without thought when investments were not made when people were abused instead of a reasoning argument about what will build america tomorrow i hear a longing for yesterday but i tell you my friends as certainly as it was true 200 years ago today yesterday is yesterday if we try to recapture it we will only lose tomorrow but i think we can say we know some things about why we are resisting these changes and what we might do to make ourselves more like the founders of this great university more like the founders of our great nation more like most of the students here on any given day at this university when do people most resist change when they are most insecure think of any child you ever raised think of any personal experience you ever had why is it that great universities provide wonderful libraries and beautiful lawns and space and time to study and to learn and to grow so people can feel personally at peace and secure it is that which enables us to learn and to grow and to change and i say to you tonight my fellow americans the mission of this university the mission of every university must be to be in the vanguard of helping the american people to recover enough personal security to be able to lead the changes that we are so urgently called on to make what does that mean what does that mean i would argue among all things it means at least three first we must make americans more secure in their families and at work in a world transformed by trade and technology it is no longer possible for a young person to go to work and keep a job until retirement or even often to stay with the same company the economy is creating and losing millions of jobs constantly most people now who are laid off from their jobs never get the same old job back young people beginning their careers on average will change work seven times in a lifetime the best jobs those young people here in the audience may ever have may be jobs yet to be created in companies yet to be founded based on technologies yet to be discovered economic security therefore can no longer be found in a particular job it must be rooted in a continuing capacity to learn new things that means we must have a system of life long learning beginning with higher standards in our schools almost two decades ago your governor jim hunt began an education reform program that included higher standards in these schools those efforts inspired other governors around the country including the then governor of south carolina now our education secretary dick riley and me and i thank him for that now we are trying to adopt a whole new approach in our national effort to raise standards in education we believe the right standard for america isn t whether we are better than we were but whether we re the best in the world this cannot be a democratic or a republican concern it must be an american imperative we know we have to expect more of our students and our schools we have to regulate their details less but hold them to higher standards and measure whether our kids are really learning enough to compete and win in the global economy then we have to insure that every young person in this country has the opportunity to get a college education every last one who wants it we have already this year reorganized the student loan programs to lower interest rates and ease the repayment terms and open the doors of college education to thousands of young people by giving them a chance to be in the national service program to rebuild their communities from the grass roots up and earn a part of their college education for the three quarters of our young people who do not get four year college degrees we must merge the world of learning and the world of work to offer young people classroom training and on the job training and for those who lose their jobs the unemployment system is no longer good enough we must create a continuous reemployment system so that people are always learning even into their 50s and 60s and 70s as long as they are willing to be productive citizens and to keep going and growing another big part of job security that is often missed is that most workers are now parents or at least most parents are now workers and we can no longer force people to chose between being a good parent and a good worker they must be able to be both that is why people who work hard for marginal wages should not be taxed into poverty but lifted out of it by the tax system and it is what this government has done for the first time ever we can say now if you work 40 hours a week and you have children in your home you can be lifted out of poverty and that is why we have said you ought not to lose your job if you have a sick child or a sick parent you ought to be able to take a little time off without losing your job because it is important to the fabric of america to stick up for the american family a couple of sundays ago when i came into the white house from my early morning run i saw a father a mother and three daughters there taking a tour on sunday morning an unusual time and i went over and said hello to them and learned that the family was there with the make a wish foundation because one of the daughters was desperately ill and she wanted to see the president and see the white house i talked to that family for a while and then i came down and had my picture taken with them and as i was walking away the father said mr president don t you ever think it doesn t matter what goes on up here if it hadn t been for the family leave law coming in this year i would have had to chose between spending this time with my precious daughter who may not make it or working to support my family so that the rest of us could go on no parent should ever make that choice and i don t have to now that is what i mean by providing the american people the personal security they need to proceed to change in this world the second element after education and training of our personal security must be health care this is the only advanced nation in which people can lose their health care where we don t have health care that is always there and that can never be taken away even though we spend 40 percent more than any place else in the world what does that mean lost productivity in small businesses people really insecure about changing jobs because they ve had someone in their family sick and they know if they change jobs that pre existing condition will keep them from getting new health insurance so people walk around like this millions of us all the time 37 4 million americans without any health insurance but many millions more knowing they could lose it like that how can you be secure enough to change to take on new challenges to start new businesses to take new risks if you think that you may have to let your family go without basic health care my fellow americans it does not happen in any other advanced nation and it is time for us to say as a people it will no longer happen here no more and this last point i would make to you if we are to be personally secure enough to make the changes and meet the tests of this time we must protect our people better against the ravages of violence our people have the right to feel safe where they live where they go to school and where they work my fellow americans i was in california the other night and i talked to people all across the state in a hooked up town hall meeting and this young african american boy a junior high school student said mr president my brother and i we don t want to be in gangs we don t want to have guns we don t want to cause any trouble we want to learn we want a future and we thought our school was too unsafe so we decided to go to another school and enroll in it because it was safer and on the day we showed up to register for school my brother was standing right in front of me and he was shot because he got in a crossfire of one of these mindless arbitrary endless shootings that occur among children on our streets and in our schools today we have to stop this we cannot let those children be robbed of their future i know this state grieved recently when your native son michael jordan s father was killed and i know we all wish him well as michael embarks on a new journey in his life but let us not forget that 22 other men and women were killed in that same county in your state this year ten foreign toursists were killed in florida this year and the state grieved over it but in our nation s capital in one week this summer more than twice that many people were killed they were not famous but they were the president s neighbors it is heartbreaking what can we do about it we can put more police on our street not to catch criminals just alone but also to prevent crime it works thirty years ago there were three police for every violent crime today there are three crimes for every police officer we have to give these people the help they need and when they work the same neighborhoods and walk the same streets and talk to the same kids they help to prevent crime we also and i say this in north carolina coming from a state where in my home state half the people have a hunting license or a fishing license or both and we have to shut down factories and schools and towns on the opening day of deer season because nobody shows up anyway but we still ought to pass the brady bill so we don t sell guns to people with a criminal or a mental health history and we should not allow in city after city after city our police officers to go to work everyday knowing they will walk the mean streets of our cities with people who are better armed than they are because this is the only country in the world where teenagers can have assault weapons designed only to kill other people and use them with abandon on the streets of our cities we can do better than that do you know my fellow americans that i learned just last week that someone shot today with a bullet is three times more likely to perish because they are likely to have three times as many bullets in them as they did just 15 years ago it is time for us to stop talking about law and order and thinking about how we can organize ourselves to protect our culture to protect our heritage to keep our rights as sportsmen and women but to protect our kids lives and their future the time has come to face this problem what has all that got to do with this because this is what the founders did they faced the problems of their time and gave the rest of us a chance to live in the most successful democracy ever known the idea of the public university born here in north carolina played a major role in revolutionizing opportunity for millions and millions and millions of americans who never even came into this state but got that opportunity in other states because of the example set here this is the challenge of our time and we must meet it so that we can change economic security health care security personal security none of us can be secure until we are prepared to take personal responsibility for making these changes and of building a new sense of community each in our own way our jobs won t be responsible unless we are willing to learn new skills for a lifetime and until we all treat each other like indispensable partners not disposable parts our health care won t be secure even if we pass our health care bill until all of us practice more preventive care our families won t be secure until fathers and mothers begin to realize that they have to put their children first our communities won t be secure until people who disagree on everything else stop shouting at each other long enough to reali ze that we have to save the kids who are in trouble the same way we lost them one child at a time and it imposes a responsibility on each and every one of us but i tell you my fellow americans i honestly believe that as you start the third century of this university s life we could be looking at the most exciting time america has ever known if we have the security and the courage to change we want to revitalize the american spirit of enterprise and adventure we want to give our people new confidence to dream those great dreams again to take those great risks to achieve those great things the security i seek for america is like a rope for a rock climber to lift those who will take responsibility for their own lives to greater and greater pinnacles the security i seek is not government doing more for people but americans doing more for ourselves and for our families for our communities and for our country it is not the absence of risk it is the presence of opportunity it is not a world without change but a world in which change is our friend and not our enemy we honor today the men and women who had the courage to create a new university in a new nation we must like them be builders and believers the architects of a new security to empower and embolden america and the university of north carolina on the eve of a new century the only difference between america two centuries ago and america today is the difference between dawn and high noon of a very beautiful day in the words of your great alumnus thomas wolfe the true discovery of america is still before us the true fulfillment of our spirit of our people of our mighty and immortal land is yet to come let us believe in those words and let us act on them so that 200 years from now our children 12 generations removed will still celebrate this glorious day thank you and god speed dem wjclinton12 10 96 bill_clinton thank you mr vice president this new law reflects our commitment to manage wisely our nation s water resources and preserve the environment even as we balance the budget but our work is not done today i am also announcing my intention to sign the parks bill which congress has approved this bill will create or improve almost 120 national parks trails rivers or historical sites in 41 of our states it will preserve the historic presidio a former army post in san francisco by creating a non profit trust to run it as a national park this bill will save the sterling forest on the new york and new jersey border just 40 miles from midtown manhattan where families go for recreation and which millions of people depend upon for clean water this forest was denuded a century ago by industry but it grew back and we must protect it this bill will help to restore 11 000 acres of the tall grass prairie in kansas an ecosystem of grass as tall as nine feet trees flowers birds and other wildlife this bill will bring back other overlooked natural sites all around our nation these are our national treasures when we maintain our national parks nourish our wildlife refuges protect our water and preserve places like the everglades we are standing up for our values and our future and that is something all americans can be proud of god created these places but it is up to us to care for them now we are and we re doing it the right way by working together i m pleased that congress turned aside confrontation to enact these laws in a bipartisan manner and in the public interest five hundred years ago no one could have imagined the greatness that would bloom between our shores nor foreseen that the nation born here would become the model for people of all kinds working together for the common good preserving our environment and restoring its wonders are for our common good let us truly celebrate this day as a day of rediscovery a day in which we pledge to keep working across the lines that divide us to make america more beautiful and better than ever thanks for listening now i will sign the water resources development act dem wjclinton12 10 99 bill_clinton we have had many wonderful nights here but i don t think i ve ever been more stimulated by two talks in my life thank you dr cerf thank you dr lander i would like to also say a word of appreciation to hillary i think that as our time here draws toward its close it s clear that she has been i believe the most active and innovative first lady since eleanor roosevelt for perhaps these millennium evenings will last longer in the imagination of america than virtually anything any of us have done and i thank her for that also being term limited does have its compensations normally at this time of year i d be doing something else tonight yesterday i called the vice president to rub it in and describe what i would be doing tonight and i was having a very good time turning the screw about how fascinating this was going to be finally he said that s okay you need to be there more than i do the jokes about my technological and scientific limitations are legion around the white house so i have been thinking of all these questions do i really want a mouse smart enough to go to princeton won t it be sad to have an internet connection with mars if there are no martians to write to or e mail us i am glad to know that the total connection of the internet to the nervous system of human beings is a little ways out there in the future i had been under the impression that that had already occurred among all children under 15 in america this is an amazing set of topics let me say just one other thing i really loved seeing on a slightly sad note i loved seeing that wonderful famous picture of wilt chamberlain and willie shoemaker some of you may know the great wilt chamberlain passed away today one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century so i hope you will have him and his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers tonight this is a fitting thing for us to do in the white house because innovations in communication and technology are a very important part of the history of this old place in 1858 the first transatlantic telegraph transmission was received here in a message that queen victoria sent to president buchanan later the first telephone in washington d c was located in a room upstairs and we now have a replica of that telephone in the same room upstairs the first mobile phone call to the moon was made here by president nixon 30 years ago even these millennium evenings have made their own history this is where we held the first ever cybercast at the white house so i want to thank the speakers for building on all of this and telling us what we can look forward to in the future and for reminding us that as we unlock age old mysteries and make what we can think more possible to do there are ways to do it that bring us together as a society so i would like to begin the questioning if i might with a question to dr lander because it bears on a great deal of the work we ve done you talked about how we were 99 9 percent the same but how if you looked at how many permutations there were in the one tenth of a percent left we could still be very different i think it s very interesting and i talk about this all the time that as we re on the age of this new millennium and we have these evenings and we imagine this future that you have sketched out to us this is what we all like to think about how exciting how wonderful how unbelievable it can be the biggest threat to that future is how many of us on this globe are still in the grip of the most primitive of human limitations the fear of the other people who are different from us and we see all over the world from bosnia and kosovo to the middle east to northern ireland to the tribal wars in africa how easily the focus on our differences that one tenth of one percent as what matters can lead first to fear and then to hatred and then ultimately to dehumanizing people who are different and it s very interesting as someone who grew up in the segregated south and lived with the whole terrible and yet beautiful struggle of the civil rights years to think that there were in my hometown people who were dehumanizing other people because of the one tenth of one percent difference between them is quite an awesome thing to contemplate dem wjclinton12 11 97 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you loretta thank you katie thank all of you who had anything to do with this fundraiser this is an exercise of true affection because howard dean would probably win next year if none of us gave him a penny but i am delighted to be here senator leahy and i were standing back there when howard was giving his remarks and he said he suffered through 16 years of republican leadership the deficit was going up before i came in and i said you know pat it was really only 12 years it just seemed like 16 i d like to say a special word of thanks too to senator pat leahy who is truly one of the finest people in the entire united states congress and one of the most effective whether the issue is economic policy agriculture policy social policy foreign policy his passion to remove the scourge of land mines from the earth pat leahy is always there and we can be proud that he represents not only the state of vermont but all of america very well i d also like to say that whatever it is that howard dean knows or whatever it is that he eats for breakfast every morning if i could give it to every other democratic office holder and would be office holder we would immediately become the majority in the congress and we would have about 35 governors i have to tell you i think a big part of it is just producing for people actually doing what you say you re going to do at election time and i very much appreciate what he said about what we ve tried to do here in washington one of the i m delighted i love to do fundraisers and events for democratic governors or the democratic governors association in washington because one of the things that i learned when i moved to washington and what i feared was that people don t think that those of us who have been governors exist out there and we might as well be in a zoo somewhere when i came to washington i would read editorials from the prominent newspapers saying that if you cared about the deficit and crime and welfare you were stealing republican issues and i said now wait a minute the last time i checked the debt of this country quadrupled under a republican president crime was going up when i took office and the welfare rolls were expanding and since i ve been in office we ve cut the deficit by 92 percent crime has gone down every year and the welfare rolls have dropped by three million i think those are american issues the democratic party has done very well on and i don t understand all this out in the country you know democrats care about the deficits and welfare reform and safe streets and you know what democrats care about them in washington too we passed a crime bill in 1994 overwhelmingly with democratic support with a little republican support we passed the economic program in 1993 only with democrats and we began the welfare reform effort through the executive branch as howard dean said then i vetoed two bills first because i refused to take away the guarantee of health care and nutrition from children and i wanted to have enough money for child care if we were going to require people to go to work so we got it right and the results were good for america and i m proud of that but one last point i want to make this has been a very good year for the united states in washington we had an enormous effort to pass the balanced budget that has things that i think every democrat in this country and every american ought to be proud of it s the biggest investment in health care for poor children since 1965 howard talked about that biggest investment in education since 1965 biggest investment in helping open the doors of college to all americans since the g i bill 50 years ago substantial reforms of medicare including efforts to improve what we re doing in diabetes that the diabetes foundation says are the most important advances in the care of diabetes since insulin was developed 70 years ago we have added 12 years to the medicare trust fund and given our seniors more choices this was a big deal we also are working on expanding nato to ensure our partnership in security in europe we ve passed the chemical weapons convention a big issue one of the big disputes we re having with saddam hussein now and these inspectors is that these inspectors in iraq have found enough potential chemical biological and incipient nuclear technology more than was destroyed in the gulf war we want to wipe the prospect of chemical warfare off the face of the earth we don t want a bunch of terrorists with laboratories in briefcases going from airport to airport wreaking havoc in the world of the 21st century that our children will live in we took a big step toward that so this has been a good year but in addition to my affection for governor dean and my gratitude to the people of vermont for voting for bill clinton and al gore twice by big margins and my desire to help members of my party i want i think it s very important that you understand that even though sometimes i get the feeling around here many people don t remember that the governors or the mayors or the county officials for that matter are really out there doing a lot of things the governors are especially important for the strategy that i m pursuing for america to succeed we got 24 billion for children s health that s good what s step two the governors have to design a program that works and i promise you every governor with any sense in this country without regard to party is going to wonder what howard dean is going to do with the money because they know that vermont has done the best job of expanding health care coverage for children so it matters who the governor is you can put more money into education but the governors have to decide how it s going to be spent we won a huge battle which we re going to be really highlighting in the next couple of days when we sign the appropriations bills to get the congress after months and months of contentious fighting to embrace the notion that we ought to have national standards of academic excellence and national exams in reading and math for elementary students and 8th graders but what happens afterwards education is the primary province of the states the federal government can facilitate national excellence in education the governors have to ensure it in the environment we re trying to clean up 500 toxic waste dumps and prove we can have clean air clean water and safe food and grow the environment we can provide funds we can have federal standards but in the end the specific work is largely done in the states and as we move into this new era where we have to have more flexibility more partnerships and more common sense in which we want to reject the kind of ideological false choices we re often confronted with in the political debates here the partnership that exists and the quality of it and the quality of the people that do the work at the state level the partnership with the federal government will be critical in terms of how americans actually get to live and what kind of world our children actually grow up in that s what this is about so in so many ways the governorship is more important than ever before we have tried to give more responsibility to the states we ve also tried to give them more things to do and it has succeeded in places like vermont which have had visionary leadership i can only hope and pray that every governor will do the job that i know that he will do in health care in education in the environment in building a solid future for our children you re going to help him to do it by your presence here tonight and i m very grateful to you thank you dem wjclinton12 12 02 bill_clinton thank you well thank you very much for that introduction i must say i ought to have better sense than the becoming a better speaker than me last year we were together in los angeles at the natural resources defense council and he got up and spoke before i d ever i just wanted to leave town i want to thank you for everything you ve done to save america s environment and the environment of the world and i m very grateful to you for that and i want to thank every member of this great family i thank andrew and kerry for being part of my administration and joe for serving in congress with me and helping me and thank you lori for the work you do and kathleen who s not here whom i was honored to help in this last campaign thank you ethyl for being my valentine and i know i m not the only one i m happy to be just one of your legion of admiring lap dogs as far as you all are from you know every time someone gives a speech at an event like this they want to quote robert kennedy who was so wonderfully eloquent i m going to do something highly unusual but in light of the events of the last two days it seems to me appropriate i want to paraphrase paraphrase one of america s most prominent republican leaders when robert kennedy ran for president we supported him we re proud of it and if he had been elected we wouldn t have had all of these problems over all these years i believe it i don t have to apologize for it and i will not have to explain it in the morning i had the honor to speak at arlington cemetery on the 25th anniversary of robert kennedy s death and i re read the speech this morning it was the heartfelt yearning of a young president for someone i had admired more than i had the words to say and when he died it was my mother s birthday two days before i graduated from college at georgetown on the 30th anniversary of senator kennedy s death we all gathered at joe s home in boston and i did a radio show there my weekly radio address was on robert kennedy and i re read that i thought you know i was a little older and more seasoned and i was thinking about the application of the life of senator kennedy to the moment in which we were moving now i m just a guy i don t have any power any more but i m just as idealistic as i was when i was a boy we were talking about martin luther king s dream of the poor person s campaign on the mall to honor dr king and senator kennedy on the day after i graduated from georgetown i went down there and tried to be of some use and it was the muddiest the mall has ever been i don t know if any of you remember if you were there then the whole place was just covered in mud and they had to keep putting down these wooden slats so that everybody who wanted to do anything could at least kind of navigate and i thought well this was really appropriate and now you say that carrying on the legacy of robert kennedy requires us to define a new age in terms of what we are and what we re for not in terms of what we re against and who we re not and i think that is more profound than most people know i spent most of my time trying to put things together and overcome people who were trying to take things apart because it occurs to me that at the end of the cold war for the first time in all of human history we had the chance to build a truly global community committed to peace and prosperity and freedom and security it also strikes me that since we are inter dependant the alternative to creating such a community is at best a more confined and insecure life and at worse a very dangerous one for what we saw here on september the 11th was nothing but the flip side of our interdependence the interdependence we love when we get on the cell phone and call people halfway around the world the interdependence we love i ve got a country cousin who lives in the mountains of north arkansas who plays chess with a guy from australia every week over the internet the interdependence we love at 30 of our growth in those wonderful 90s came from global trade those guys used interdependence too on september the 11th they used open doors easy travel easy immigration access to the information and technology to kill 3100 interdependent people from 70 countries including over 200 muslims so the world we should wish to make is not just interdependent but is an integrated community of people with shared values and benefits and responsibilities and if robert kennedy were alive today he would be working for that kind of world and since he wore the uniform of our country and was our top law enforcement official he would have some very tough positions to deal with a terrorist threat but he would remind us that no country in history has ever been defeated by terrorism and no serious person thinks we will be if tin were a bomb for a planet in new york city we would not be defeated by terrorism we would only be steeled in our determination to overcome it so the only that this issue of terror we re dealing with now our saddam hussein our north koreas little bomb indulgence the only way those things can ever really gnarl and warp our future is if we are provoked to respond in a way that compromises the character of our country or the future of our children or the nature of our responsibilities to those who are less fortunate than we are at home and around the world that s the only way so yes we should have a security policy i have a lot of views on that which should wait for another day but today s interdependent environment a security policy isn t enough to have the life you want unless you can kill or jail everybody who doesn t share your values your benefits and your responsibilities a security policy alone will never be enough we also have to do more to make a world where we have more partners and friends and fewer terrorists than enemies we spend less on that than anybody in the world that the development conference that was recently held in south africa they want the world to go from 50 to 100 billion dollars a year in three or four years and assistance our share of that will be about 12 billion dollars we d have to double our aid to give you some idea of what that involves i think that combined increases for domestic homeland defense and the defense department this year in one year was something on the order of 65 billion dollars so we could do what the u n and the world has asked us to do for one fifth of what we coughed up in one year for defense and homeland defense it d be the best money we ever spent those of us who are baby boomers grew up in a world darkened by the cold war but a world where we never had to fight world war iii never had to see another nuclear weapon drop never really had to worry about the security of our youth and when we married our children because at the end of world war ii harry truman and george marshall and douglas macarthur didn t want to fight a third world war and so we had the marshall plan for europe including germany our enemy who did worse things to us and everyone else and especially to the jews of the world than anything that these terrorists have done and we helped japan that a country that ran the worst pow camps in human history and degraded and demeaned people in ways that had never been before seen in modern warfare and macarthur said no but we should make them a modern democracy we should make them friends so today 50 years later when we found out north korea s working on a nuclear weapon in a lab the president of the united states can say and be taken seriously well we have to work with japan on this and russia and china our former adversaries and south korea and without regard to party we ll say yeah that s what we ought to do a miracle born of decades of commitment to build a world with more friends and fewer enemies today that means that we cannot be arrogant enough to claim for ourselves forever what we would deny to others with this money that we should spend we know now how to alleviate poverty though debt relief and the right sort of forum assistance and trade we know how to put the 130 million children of the world who aren t in school in school we know how because we have lots of examples to build health systems in countries that will reverse the aids epidemic before it becomes the worse plague since the bubonic plague killed a third of europe in the 14th century we know how to do all this it s just a question of whether we will and here at home i only have in jest paraphrase senator lott at the beginning of my remarks so maybe that was exuberance but the fact that elections were decided and my native south and georgia and south carolina in part based on the confederate flag in 2002 is not something i imagined the fact that senator john mccain lost the republican primary in one state in 2000 in part because the opponents were on the phone reminding people that he had adopted a black baby and they shouldn t forget that before he they went to vote is something i didn t imagine and it was not a slip of the tongue in fact god bless him he d adopted a child from india who was particularly dark skinned something i thought commended him to the electorate i say that to remind you that when you see things around the world you wonder well how could the tribal wars in africa occur why don t they get their act together in the middle east dear god i feel terrible about what happened in bosnia how could they make peace and still riot in belfast don t forget there s a heart of darkness that potentially lurks within us all and i will just close with this you know one of the kennedy kids did a great favor by putting out a book of all his father s favorite sayings in poetry and lines from speeches and from plays and if you don t have it you ought to go get it but one of the things you learn if you read ancient literature or ancient history anthropology is that people have always struggled to find meaning in life in ways that are both positive and negative ever since the first people came out of caves and clans we unless you re a hermit or a saint you have to find some meaning in your life that is relational i m irish i m a catholic i m a protestant i m an american i m from some other country i m a man i m a woman i m a liberal i m a conservative i m a democrat i m a republican i m a whatever you know we got all these boxes and when we add all our boxes up that s part of our identity and we draw some personal positive meaning from it but usually we also have defined ourselves throughout history by what we were not often with disastrous consequences well first of all we ve all done it there s not a person here of a certain age who hasn t committed the following offense said to yourself well i may not be perfect but for god s sakes at least i m not him i may have done this terrible thing but goodness gracious at least i didn t do that terrible thing which is worse right we all do this but when we do it as a matter of social and political policy it becomes potentially disastrous and i don t know if human history can be seen but basically as people widening the circle of their contacts and interdependence taking in people who are different and then struggling to recognize that they re not so different after all before their means to destroy them overtakes them because human history has seen increasing interdependence and increasing power of the weapons of destruction and a whole race of the human consciousness to catch up throughout time we ve all been called on to expand the definition of who is us and to shrink the definition of who is them and when we don t don t do it then we can t share and you have the disaster that we have in the middle east today they are completely interdependent they cannot escape each other and they cannot kill or jail each other completely they cannot do it and so they labor on in this purgatory as more children kill and die because they haven t decided to share the future they will someday and when they do they ll have to share it on more or less the same terms we all know now i say this because it seemed to me in 1968 when i so desperately wanted robert kennedy to be elected president i wanted him for the very reason that his son said he had all these southern rednecks and all these white liberals and all these black people and all these latinos who were for him and very often they couldn t pass a test with rational answers about why they were in the same count with other people but somehow he brought them together they could see in him that what we had in common was more important than these things that were driving a stake through the heart of america and that s what the world needs today you ve got all these people today that are full of courage they re more than willing to die blowing some people up you know it we don t want to say it but it took some guts to run a plane into the world trade center there are people plenty of people with enough guts to have nihilistic murder written behind their name in human history and not so many people with the courage to risk their lives this dr king and president kennedy and robert kennedy and gandhi and sadat and rabin and mandela did that is the courage the world needs today the courage to stand up and say you know our differences still are very interesting but our common humanity matters more since we cannot escape each other we must go forward together we need people like robert kennedy who don t even have to say it who just embody it whose words embrace people in a way that made rednecks want to give up defining themselves by whether they had the confederate flag for god s sakes running on the state capitol you know when people care about that in 2002 they don t have enough to think about somebody hasn t been talking to them i ll give you another just totally trivial this deal about whether women are going to be allowed to be members at augusta president bush wants this guy to be secretary of the treasury so he has to dump his augusta membership why because there s a bunch of guys sitting in there in that clubhouse tonight thinking that they re davey crockett and jim bowie at the alamo you know they re holding back they got to keep those women out of that golf club nowwe re laughing but it s a big deal to them why how how did they ever any of us get to the point where we define the importance of our lives by what we can keep somebody else from doing or being and that s the way that s the way those guys are behaving down there in that clubhouse is the way most people have behaved throughout most of human history most of those people are perfectly fine people if you met them one on one you d be happy to have dinner with them most of them have lived exemplary lives and honorable lives but they ve got themselves in a fix now for the meaning of their lives depends on keeping the women from being members of a golf club but they re not bad people this happens and what the world needs today is people who have the courage even to risk their lives to bring people together don t forget gandhi was killed by a hindu not a muslim sadat was killed by an egyptian not an israeli commando and my friend itzhak rabin was killed by an angry young israeli not a plo terrorist that is the courage we leave today the courage to lead your own people to a farther shore in the words of my great friend shane wassini to believe in miracles and cures and healing wells to believe that hope in history can rhyme they must rhyme and therefore the legacy of robert kennedy is more important today than it was on the day after he died even more important than the day that he ran for president and tried to bring america together because today that is really the challenge facing the whole world we are all in the future together now we cannot escape each other we saw it on september the 11th we live with it every day in the middle east we either will share the future or we will continue to rob our children of it we will not be defeated by terrorism the only thing that can defeat the idea of america and the progress of the human spirit is if we respond in a way i will say again that compromises the character of our country the future of our children or the nature of our obligation to people who don t have enough to be part of this world at home and around the world therefore every day get up and think of robert kennedy and as yourself what could i do to bring things together no matter how hard others try to take them apart thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton12 12 95 bill_clinton well first of all let me say that i know i speak for everyone here in thanking the people who have spoken and thanking them more importantly for their remarkable efforts i want to express my appreciation to two of their representatives who joined us congressman ehlers from michigan and congressman moran from virginia to franklin graham thank you sir for the remarkable work that you are doing and for giving people like mary the chance to be remarkable in their own right what you have just heard is a series of astonishing human testaments i don t know that i ve ever felt more proud to be an american than i did in the last few minutes just listening to these people talk and i know all of you feel that way as well the purpose of our mission is to take advantage of this remarkable opportunity we have when all of the parties have agreed to make peace when they have agreed that the madness you have just heard recounted ought to stop we saw further evidence of their good faith intention to do their part this morning when the french pilots were released and i just by pure coincidence had the french ambassador in this morning and i told him to convey to president chirac the joy of all americans that these pilots are free because the mission that we all undertook together through nato had a lot to do with bringing about this peace agreement since i became president i have said that i thought the united states had an obligation to participate in the enforcement of a peace agreement because we have a peace agreement which is enforceable which can be protected which can be enhanced by the nato force the work that you have just heard about will be able to be multiplied hundreds of times over and that s the thing i want to emphasize to all of you the nato mission in which the united states will play a leading role by separating the forces by making sure the territory is the way the people agreement agreed by maintaining a secure environment will permit more of these things to be done will permit the reconstruction effort to proceed not only the physical reconstruction effort but the human reconstruction effort and i have just told all of the folks whom you heard speak that it is very important that these efforts continue in bosnia and in fact be intensified because there are a lot of lives that have to be put together there are a lot of communities that have to be rebuilt but this kind of energy by the american people and by others throughout the world who will join now in helping them can help to turn the worst nightmare in europe since the end of the second world war into a story of reconciliation and peace and progress and again let me say there is nothing i can say to add to what these fine people have said but when americans like these folks are willing to do what they have done i think it is incumbent on the united states the other nato powers the others who are joining with us to make sure that this peace takes hold and is preserved so that they can do it in an atmosphere free of fear for themselves and help that country come back and help all these little children regain their childhood i hope we all live to see the day when the only bombs in the world are peace bombs thank you very much well let me say i m quite encouraged by two things number one a very large number of members of congress especially house members have actually gone to the region in the last few days and i applaud them for doing it and some of those with deep reservations about the missions have gone i have no exact vote count for you but i can tell you that it s clear to me that there s been a real shift among those who have gone those who have gone have come back more favorable than they left america and so i can t believe that when the time for the counting comes that congress won t support our troops in this mission i believe they will thank you dem wjclinton12 2 98 bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen the minute i get back to the white house i am going to sign an executive order mandating the widest possible dissemination for free of whatever it is the vice president had for breakfast thank you mr vice president for what you said and for all the work you have done over these last five plus years to help make our country a better place i want to thank dick gephardt and tom daschle members of the senate and the house who are here members of our time mr bowles and others i want to thank barbara turner and judith lee and kate casey for reminding us why we re all here you know i as we have established in painful and sometimes happy ways over the last five years i m not exactly a washington person you know i just sort of showed up here a few years ago for work and sometimes i really get lonesome for why i came here you can go for days weeks here and hardly ever spot a real citizen i mean somebody that s just out there living trying to do the right thing showing up every day trying to make this country a better place by making their lives and their families and their workplaces and their communities better places these women reminded us today of why we are all here what our charge is why we are here and we should draw two lessons from what they all said number one we should never ever believe that what we re doing here does not make a difference and is just some personal power trip or some political party s power trip that is not true what we do here makes a difference and you ve just heard it the second lesson we should draw is that we shouldn t spend too much time patting ourselves on the back because we still have a lot more to do to make this country what it ought to be in this new century and they gave us that and for me it was a real jolt of adrenalin and it touched my heart and engaged my mind and i know you all felt the same way and i think we should give them another hand thank you very much let me just say to all of you i am very proud to be a member of the oldest political party in this country and maybe in any free democracy i am proud to work with all of you not only to strengthen that party but more importantly to make our country a better place i want to say a little bit more about the democratic party at the end of my remarks but i d like to say a couple of words about our leaders dick gephardt and tom daschle and i could say many things about both of them but two things strike me because they in different ways reflect them at their moment of greatest challenge in 1993 and 1994 we were in the majority all right but dick gephardt knew that we were risking that majority by having to pass a democrats only budget and passing a crime bill which along with the brady bill not only put more police on the street but took more guns off the street and out of the hands of people who shouldn t have them and he was well aware that if we did those things the problem for the house was they had to run every two years and that we would be doing the right thing but people would not be able to feel the right thing by the next election but they could hear all the fears the democrats are taking your guns away the democrats are taxing you all things that were wrong but he did it anyway and by the narrowest of margins we prevailed on the budget by a very narrow margin we prevailed on the crime bill the crime bill was written in effect by police officers and community anticrime activists and five years later we re going to have a balanced budget and we ve got safer streets and there are all kinds of people like the three women who talked here today who have different stories to tell because dick gephardt did the right think when it was required and i appreciate that consider tom daschle s plight he becomes the senate democratic leader when we re in the minority and he has to deal with the almost unbelievable roll of bad luck because you know a third of the senate comes up every year that even though we re now in the majority we have two more elections where we have more people running than they do you couldn t no mathematical statistician could sit down and figure out a bigger nightmare for a party now you go into the minority for the first time in a while and by the way you ve got two more elections where you have to put more people up to bat than they do they ll have more money but you ve got to have more candidates and oh by the way you have to show up for work tomorrow and figure out how to get something done for the american people consistent with what your members believe in and consistent with what you know is in the interest of the american people but he did it i defy you to find a time in the last 20 years when more democratic ideas have made their way into the life blood of america than they have through the balanced budget raising the minimum wage and the other things that were done many of them came right out of senate democratic ideas in no small measure because tom daschle proved that he could stand up for our party and reach out a constructive hand to the other party and get something done for the american people and i thank him for that we have taken our party in a new direction for the 21st century to help our country go in a new direction a new direction rooted in the future not the past bound by fiscal discipline but unlimited in imagination and dreams and hopes for our people determined to invest in their future grounded in our traditional values we ve shaped a new kind of government as the vice president said it is leaner it s more flexible it s a catalyst for new ideas it s determined to give the american people the tools they need to solve their problems and make the most of their own lives it may be the smallest government in 35 years but in many ways it is more progressive because of all the things we are trying to do and it is giving us a stronger nation you know of course that we have the lowest unemployment in 24 years and i think it s important to say because of what we care about we have rising incomes again and we have diminishing inequality child poverty is now lower than it was in 1989 at the top of the last recovery why because of the earned income tax credit that these democratic caucuses insisted on saying we are not going to tax hard working people who do go out there and work full time we re not going to use the tax system to put them into poverty we re going to use the tax system to lift them out of poverty so their children can have a dignified and successful childhood and i thank you for that so what we re doing is working but what the american people want us to do is to keep showing up for work to spend precious little time celebrating what has been done that s what we got hired to do i remember one time when i was thinking about running for a fifth term as governor and i went out to the state fair i used to have governor s day at the state fair and this old boy showed up in overalls to the booth where i was sitting there talking to people and he said well bill you going to run a again and i said i don t know i might i said if i do will you vote for me he said yeah i will i always have but he said i don t know if you can win he said you ve been in an awful long time but he said i ll vote for you and i said well don t you think i ve done a good job he said well of course but that s what we hired you to do he said you picked up a paycheck every two weeks didn t you we should all remember that our citizens are focused on the future in their own lives and in our own lives and we re here today not to talk about the past but to talk about that future we re here today not to talk about the positions our party seeks to take against the republicans in congress but the positions our party seeks to advance in the debate with the hope that we can write them into law and change the lives and the futures of the american people so we can have more stories like the three we heard from these distinguished americans today now most of this has been talked about but let me say the things that i think are most important and what i hope will be our common agenda first of all we ve got to stay the path of fiscal discipline we ve got to stay the path because the reason this economy is booming is that it s clear that we are serious about running a disciplined shop here and we ve got interest rates down investment up it s creating jobs almost 15 million new jobs we can t back off of that if i had told anybody any economist five years ago look five years from now we ll have 14 7 million new jobs an unemployment rate for months on end under 5 percent and the lowest inflation in 30 years and the highest homeownership rate in 30 years the lowest hispanic unemployment rate on record the lowest black unemployment rate in nearly three decades they would have said that i needed to see someone for my sense of reality that has all happened because we began first with discipline and we dare not abandon it now that means among other things we have to recognize that this balanced budget which is about to happen will maintain itself for many years but only because of the high receipts we re getting from social security taxes and yet social security is not all right for the long run that s why we have to say as a party before we spend any of this surplus even a penny of it we ought to have a commitment and a plan that we will implement to save social security first the baby boom generation when we retire there will be less than three people working for every one person drawing sometime in the middle of the next century in about the oh fourth decade of the next century there will be only two people working for one person drawing if present retirement rates and work force participation rates continue i am the oldest of the baby boomers i can tell you all of my friends at home i m talking about my middle class friends people that even people that didn t have a college degree or anything they re all worried about number one will they have a retirement and number two if they have one will it be so costly to our children that their ability to raise our grandchildren will be compromised none of us want that none of us need that that would be a wrong result and we must save social security in a way that binds us together across the generations and across our income differences instead of tearing us apart so we must say as a party we want to save social security first now judith pointed out she had a 401 k plan i m really proud of the work we ve done in this congress going back to 94 to stabilize and save private pensions and to make it easier for people to take out their own private retirement that must be a part of this whatever we do with social security most people won t be able to maintain their living standard on it and that s good because they ve got a higher living standard but that means we have to do more to enable people to save for their own retirement we have to make it easier we have to make it more secure we have to make them more options we have to tailor the plans for the economy that they re living in not the one that existed 10 or 20 years ago the second thing we have to do is to do more to preserve the quality of health care this has already been mentioned by the previous leaders but i want to say i think it s imperative that the democratic party work in this congress to actually pass and there are members of the republican party who want to do this with us this need not be a partisan issue we ought to pass a consumer bill of rights that establishes baseline protection for people we have 160 million americans in managed care plans now they ought to be entitled to the benefits of those plans without giving up quality health care and the right to have a doctor make the best prescription for them we ought to pass it and we ought to work and work and work until it becomes the law of the land we are now working we in the administration to implement that you passed that you generated out of this caucus to extend health care coverage to 5 million more children and that will be very important child poverty is down in the last five years visits to the doctor are up in the last five years that is good but we also have to recognize there are a lot of other populations that still don t have health insurance and people between the ages of 55 and 65 people who lost their jobs and can t get hired again people who retired early and were promised health coverage but their companies broke the promise people who have a spouse that s old enough for medicare and they re not and they re ill those people all we want to do is let them buy into the medicare program now there are some who say well they can t afford it 300 a month i ll tell you what that s a lot of money it s a lot less than one trip to the hospital one trip to the hospital will cost them three times as much as the annual premium would secondly we cannot afford to do anything that undermines the stability of the medicare fund we ve got a medicare commission thank you senator breaux that s going to try to figure out what to do about the long term financial problems of medicare so we have to let people buy in in a way that doesn t affect the stability of the fund a lot of these people have children who will help them pay these premiums they may have brothers and sisters who will help them pay these premiums what have we got to lose by trying it is wrong to leave all these people out there between 55 and 65 at a vulnerable time when we can simply give them the option to pay into the fund at the real cost in a way that will not upset the stability of the medicare trust fund i implore you to get behind that and let s pass it for the benefit of the people we have a great agenda we have to finish hooking up every classroom a great agenda for education we have to finish hooking up every classroom to the information superhighway we have to finish our work to raise standards and have these basic exams in the basics we are offering now i seek at least to offer new options for schools to follow the chicago model not just to end social promotion but to give all these kids that are being left behind an actual chance to learn and the tools with which they can learn but perhaps the two most important things we have proposed that i hope all of us will be united behind are the idea of putting 100 000 teachers out there to lower our average class sizes in the first three kids to 18 kids a class and then helping either build or repair classrooms in 5 000 more schools so we can actually lower class size improve the physical conditions and improve education in those early grades it will make a dramatic difference to american education and i hope that we will be out there fighting for that lastly let me say i want to join the chorus of those who believe we should raise the minimum wage now every time we have raised the minimum wage in my lifetime there have been those who say if you do this it will cost jobs the last time we did it it didn t cost jobs we continued to create jobs at a very brisk pace but we know that the real value of the minimum wage today is actually less than it was 20 years ago we know that we know that there is a limit to how much we can do with the earned income tax credit in terms of giving people back money to the tax system to lift working people and their kids out of poverty without running a risk of having the system abused and having people take advantage of it but we know if people just get a fair wage for the work they do they re not going to get paid if they don t do the work so i believe it s time to raise it again and again i say with our economy the strongest in a generation our prospects bright but with our efforts to overcome 20 years of increasing inequality among working people just beginning to take hold i think we should raise it again by a dollar in two equal steps by the turn of the century that will raise the living standards of 12 million hard working americans i thank senator kennedy i thank you congressman bonior for your leadership on this i think we ought to reach out a hand just like we did before we raised the minimum wage once in this congress we can do it again and the economy will support it we just have to look at the statistic of what s happened to these working families over the last 20 years and let s just simply say we say we favor work over welfare we ve set up a system to promote that now if people are going to show up for work they ought to be able to raise their children in dignity and we ought to say this save social security first establish the patients bill of rights let people buy into medicare reduce average class size and build more schools and schoolrooms raise the minimum wage i also want to associate myself with what has already been said and with the proposals i ve already made on child care on campaign finance on the tobacco legislation on environmental protection and medical and other research on making our streets safer by passing the funds i ve asked for through the justice department and the education department to keep these schools open late hours all these kids that are getting in trouble a bunch of them will never get in trouble in the first place if you give them something positive to do after school and before the parents get home from work i hope you will pass the community empowerment initiative to bring free enterprise and jobs and investment to poor neighborhoods in urban areas and rural areas where it still hasn t reached we have a lot of other things to do and let me just say this you know the american people agree with this agenda because you saw the response to the state of the union i urge all of us to resist the temptation to have the whole agenda to take to them next november let s pass every bit of it we can into law let s make every bit of it we can real in the lives of our people believe me we have enough honest disagreements with our friends in the republican party that some of this agenda is going to be left for us to take to the american people in november and debate about it you know that if they make their best efforts to honestly work with us based on what they really believe and we make our best efforts to honestly work with them based on what we really believe there will be some things left on the table next november that we can probably go to electorate with and we don t have to be ashamed of that but we owe it to our people to make sure that if any of these things that could become law and could change their lives and could make more stories like these three we ve heard that if it doesn t happen this year we owe it to the american people to make sure that it is not our fault that we showed up and we did the work here we owe it to them what is the purpose of a political party i spent a lot of time last year reading about the 19th century and about places in the 1800s periods of time that most americans don t know much about anymore i ve spent a lot of time studying the history of our party i believe the purpose of our government and therefore the purpose of any political party at every important period in our history if you look back through it has been threefold to widen the circle of opportunity to deepen the meaning of freedom and to unify the nation now that s what thomas jefferson did with the declaration of independence the bill of rights the constitution and then became president and he bought louisiana thank you very much it put arkansas in the union and sent lewis and clark out west right widened opportunity deepened freedom unified the country now any honest democrat will say that the republicans did more of that than we did from abraham lincoln through theodore roosevelt and frankly i m sure we had a lot of nice people in our party during a lot of that period but they were asleep at the switch but from woodrow wilson to franklin roosevelt to harry truman to john kennedy to lyndon johnson to jimmy carter to the present day through all of our leadership in congress in the 20th century forward our party we haven t always been right we haven t always been up to date but we have always been for widening the circle of opportunity deepening the meaning of liberty and freedom and uniting and strengthening the united states of america that is what we ought to be about that is what we ought to be about and if we do it the american people will respond thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton12 3 97 bill_clinton thank you very much secretary slater mr vice president members of the administration department of transportation senator moynihan thank you for being here mayor schwartz thank you for being here i spent a lot of time in the last few years talking about the need to build a bridge to the 21st century and usually i m talking in metaphorical terms that involve balancing the budget improving education for our children preserving the environment as we grow the economy today we re talking about building bridges and roads and transit systems and highways in more literal terms but i think it s important also to point out that as we invest in these bridges and roads and transit systems we are also building a bridge to a cleaner environment we re building a bridge from welfare to work we re building a bridge to sustainable communities that can last and grow and bring people together over the long run and that is the importance of the legislation that we submit to congress today it does the old fashioned work of investing in america s infrastructure in a very important way but it also ties those investments to the challenges we face today and tomorrow i am proud that even as we have moved toward a balanced budget and cut our deficit by 63 percent in the last four years we have still increased our federal investment in transportation infrastructure and i thank the members of congress who have supported that i feel compelled to disclose that i did not plant the person in the middle of the audience who started the applause but if he s a federal employee he will immediately get a raise compared to four years ago our highways and bridges are stronger 100 miles of new transit lines are under construction and that is just part of the story but it is a big part of why our economy has produced almost 12 million jobs in the last four years and one month including over 1 million new jobs in construction today we re taking the next big step to maintain and modernize our transportation system and to make sure it is the best in the world the national economic crossroads transportation efficiency act as secretary slater said known as nextea authorizes 174 billion over the next six years to improve our bridges highways and transit systems it will create tens of thousands of jobs for our people help move people from welfare to work protect our air and water and improve our highway safety i m especially proud that as we build our infrastructure we are going to help build better lives for people who are moving off welfare one of the biggest barriers facing people who move from welfare to work is finding transportation to get to their jobs their training programs their children s day care center there was recently a study of atlanta georgia employment and the community surrounding atlanta pointing out that in entry level jobs an overwhelming percentage of those jobs for example in fast food restaurants were held full time by inner city adults who were low income people if they were in atlanta if they were in the surrounding communities it was just a little over 50 percent why because the people who wanted the full time jobs had no way to get there and you see that repeated over and over and over throughout the country this bill provides 600 million over six years to help provide and pay for transportation so that those who have been told by the congress in the last session that they have to go to work are in fact able to reach the jobs that are out there and i ask for the support of everyone for that for too long too many people have believed that strong transportation and a clean environment could not go hand in hand this bill proves that that is not true nextea provides more than 1 3 billion a year to reduce air pollution and millions more to preserve wetlands and open space by helping communities to invest in cleaner methods of transportation by supporting recreational trails bike paths and pedestrian walkways by investing in scenic byways and landscaping this bill strengthens our infrastructure while protecting and enhancing our precious natural resources make no mistake about it this is one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation that will be considered by the congress in the next two years and i think it should be thought of in that way this legislation also builds on our progress in making roads safer increasing highway traffic safety funds by 25 percent expanding our aggressive campaign to crack down on drunk and drugged driving at its heart therefore as you can see and as secretary slater said this bill is about more than our roads and our bridges it s about cutting edge jobs in commerce it s about the infrastructure we need to prepare for them it s about the responsibility of those moving from welfare to work and our responsibility to help them get there it s about the community we share and the steps we have to take to make it both safer and cleaner for our children the chance to reshape america s infrastructure comes along only once every six years that means that this transportation bill literally will be our bridge into the 21st century that s why we must work together to pass this legislation to build on a long bipartisan position of cooperation in transportation policy to move our nation forward together we can keep our economy on the right track and ensure that the track itself is strong enough for the enormous challenges and opportunities that lie ahead i am excited about this legislation i applaud all the people in the department who put it together and i m very much looking forward to working with the congress to make it a reality thank you very much dem wjclinton12 3 99 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you you know i told leslie i said max is doing so well i don t need to say anything if i say anything now it s going to be an anticlimax he had me halfway believing that stuff by the time he got through let me say to all of you i am delighted to see such a large crowd i m sorry apparently some people had to be turned away i wish i could have seen them as well i thank you for coming i thank you for coming to see me and for coming to support your congressman i want to thank mr mayor thank you for making me feel so welcome and i thank the whole committee that was involved in this my longtime friend judge ed miller thank you judge molly beth malcolm and willie ray and all the others who are here on the host committee i want to thank my friend of many years once my law student john rafaelli who has got a lot more money than i do and is putting us up in this beautiful hotel now i thank him for that let me say just a couple of words you know i came today for two reasons i came here to help max and i also went home to hope to dedicate the birthplace that the local foundation there set up they restored the old home that i lived in from the time i was born until i was four years old and it was an interesting day you know it was cold and rainy and the wind was blowing i said you know i always got humbled when i came home but this was the worst i mean for five years i ve been trying to convince the american people that this global warming was for real and we have the coldest march day in 100 years in hope i don t know how much ground i lost today on that but as you might imagine it was a very emotional day my brother and his wife and my wonderful young nephew came in from california my step father was there a lot of my kinfolks from all over southwest arkansas and from texas came in on my mother s and my father s side of the family and last night when i was coming back from a remarkable trip i had to central america to see the victims of the hurricanes there and the associated disasters and to reaffirm the partnership that we have for the future i sat and tried to write down a few things that i wanted to say and i had surprisingly since i was four when i moved out of that place a lot of memories still of that wonderful old house and it occurred to me that in that little town where i was born and where i spent so much time in the intervening years when i was a kid nearly 50 years ago there were two things that we were raised to believe in that town that i have tried to bring to this country and that i have tried to get every child in this country to believe one is to be optimistic to believe that you can create a life for yourself and live out your dreams the other is to have a sense of belonging to believe that we are part of one community in our towns in our states in our country and increasingly with like minded people all around the world that we belong and that because we belong we have a responsibility not only the ourselves and our loved ones but to others and that the better our neighbors do the better we ll do i ve tried to convince every child in this country that both those things are true and the evidence is i may have done better out in the country than i have in washington d c but making the effort has been a joy for me i can say without any hesitation that much of the good things that have happened i was a part of but certainly not solely responsible for many of the things which max talked about could not have been achieved if i hadn t had strong allies in the united states congress and i came here for him today not simply because he is a member of my party but because we share the same values the same convictions the same vision for the future of the country because he fights for you up there because he and he does it i think in three ways number one on issues that are specific to this district he speaks to me about them number two he believes in things that are good for america that will have a special impact here our efforts to lower class sizes in the early grades our efforts to open the doors of college to all people with tax credits and student loans and the other initiatives of the administration he believes that we ought to have a patients bill of rights to protect the quality of health care for people in managed care programs throughout this country and i do too he believes in the proposal i made to save social security and medicare before we spend the surplus and i want to talk about that a little in a minute and finally in this last year even though he is a very junior member of the united states house of representatives he was one of the most serious substantive thoughtful and effective advocates asking all the members of the congress to read the constitution read the history and uphold their oath to protect the kind of government that we have preserved in this country for more than 220 years for all those reasons you should be very very proud of your congressman who is a remarkable person now i m having a great time you know i can now go around and i can go to fundraisers like this and none of them are for me and i love that i love the idea that if i can stay healthy i can spend quite a few years trying to give back to this political system and to candidates and to people i believe in who have given me so much i want you to know that in the two years i have left what i m going to try to do is to take advantage of the good times we have now and the optimism and the self confidence we have to ask the american people to look at the big unmet challenges this country still has ahead of us when we start this new century you know when i ran for president in 1991 and 1992 we had to get the country working again literally working the unemployment rate was too high real wages for working people hadn t gone up in 20 years the crime rate was going up the welfare rolls were exploding we had increasing social tensions between people of different racial and religious groups manifested in civil disturbances in some of our cities and it seemed to me that we clearly had to stop doing the same things we ve been doing for the last dozen years and take a different course and we did and the results have been good and max talked about them but now we have to say well so now what should we just sort of like being at school should we call a recess and just say gee we feel good we re going to go out and play a while i think that would be a big mistake i think it would be a big mistake for several reasons number one we ve still got some unaddressed problems number two there are big challenges looming ahead of us that are not right in front of us now number three the world is changing very very fast and people get punished for sitting on their laurels you don t hire people to be presidents senators members of congress governors mayors hold other positions of responsibility to go around and smile and say how great things are i never will forget one time in 1990 i was trying to decide whether to run for governor again in arkansas and i had been governor four times and i had served 10 years and i used to have governor s day at the state fair and i d just sit out there in a little booth and anybody that wanted to come by could come by and talk and this old boy in overalls came up to me looked to be about 70 years old and he said bill are you going to run for governor again and i said i don t know if i do will you vote for me he said i guess so i always have well i said aren t you sick of me after all these years he said no but everybody else i know is and i said it s a true story and i said well and i was sort of hurt you know i said well don t you think i ve done a good job he said yes but you also drew a paycheck every two weeks didn t you he said that s what we hired you to do what i want to know is what you re going to do tomorrow interesting point smart guy smart man and so while it s important to take our time to do what i did today to honor our past to water our roots to cherish the ties that bind it s also important to realize that the fundamental obligation of life is to make the most of today and tomorrow and to always be thinking ahead now let me tell you about this social security issue for example here are the big challenges i think we face and there are more but i ll just say a few number one we ve got to figure out how to keep this economy going because it s beginning to work for people i mean average people are finally beginning to get pay raises with inflation under control and we re beginning to get jobs to people who haven t been able to get jobs so we ve got to keep the economy going and we ve got to bring opportunity to people who haven t had it there are still urban areas there are still small towns there are still rural areas there are still indian reservations where you couldn t prove it by the people who live there that we ve got 18 million new jobs and we ve got to figure out one of the reasons i went to central america one of the reasons i travel around all over the world is a bunch of our growth comes from our ability to sell what we make to other people and if half the world is in a recession as they are today it s hard i m telling you we ve got a lot of farmers in terrible shape terrible shape record low prices for commodities but partly because we ve been selling a ton of stuff to asia and a lot of stuff to latin america and they can t buy in the case of latin america as much as they did and in some cases in asia they can t buy anything they were buying before because of the economic problems so i want to deal with that now the second problem we ve got is the aging of america now the older i get the more i see that as a high class problem but the truth is the average age in america is over 76 years if you re in this audience tonight and you re over 60 years old if you re still in pretty good shape you have a life expectancy of 80 or more yeah so it s a high class problem this is the kind of problem every society wants wouldn t it be terrible if our friends and i say that in a serious way our friends in russia who are struggling to make their democracy stay alive and get their economy going again because they ve had such terrible economic problems because their health care system has been in terrible disrepair their life expectancy is going down they don t have a social security problem you wouldn t like it this is a high class problem okay so let s just we have a challenge to social security and medicare because we re going to have twice as many people over 65 in 30 years as we ve got today but it is as a result of the hard work of the american people of our economic success of better health care habits by ordinary citizens and of stunning advances in medical science nonetheless we ve got to deal with it in about 30 years there will only be about two people working for every one person drawing social security in 10 years if we don t do something medicare is going to run out of money and there are a lot of people who wouldn t have the life they have today if medicare weren t in good shape so the aging of america is a big challenge we ve got the economy we ve got the aging of america the third thing we have to realize is that for the future more and more people are going to work and have children and we have a big stake in seeing them do well at both jobs if we have to choose if parents have to choose between succeeding at home and succeeding at work we re in trouble because the most important job of any society is raising children well ever and because if people are sick at heart worrying about their kids when they re at work they re not going to be very effective on the job so we have to do more in that regard to help people with quality child care to get them some time off without losing their job if the kids are sick or they ve got sick parents or other problems we have to do to make sure we do continue to raise the minimum wage where it s appropriate so people who work 40 hours a week and are doing the right thing and paying their taxes they re not still living in poverty these things are important the fourth thing we have to do is to make sure we give all our kids a world class education we now have the most diverse student population in history at this little grade school in hope arkansas just up the road named for me there are 27 immigrant children in that little school twenty seven in hope arkansas in the school district across the potomac river from washington d c we now have people listen to this from 180 different national racial and ethnic groups i went out to a school the other day not very far from washington where the principal was elated to have me there talking to the students and all their parents and the only thing that made her sad was we weren t able to arrange for a consecutive translation of my remarks first in spanish and second in arabic now this is a good deal in a global society if but only if you can educate every child to world class standards i m not trying to tell the texarkana school district how to run their business but i know we need more teachers i know we need after school and summer school programs so kids can learn instead of just passing them whether they learn or not i know that so the education of our children is important and the fifth thing we have to do is we ve got to commit ourselves to live in the world of the 21st century which means we have to deal with environmental challenges like climate change it means that we can t run away from our responsibilities to try to be a force for peace whether it s in europe or latin america or northern ireland or you name it the efforts i ve made in the middle east it s all in our interest it means that we have to stand up against terrorism and chemical and biological weapons and all these things that most people would rather not think about my first national security advisor tony lake used to tell me that the most important thing a president could do to protect the security of the country was to have a lot of dogs that don t bark in other words for me to be able to go to texarkana and tell you i m working on a biological weapons issue and you re not quite sure what i m talking about because the dog has never barked but the president needs to keep those dogs at bay so what i ve tried to do and what i tried to do in the state of the union address what i try to do in my conversations with members of congress like max is to say look we ve got these big issues out there and if we can take care of them we re going to be all right i just want you to think about one i ll just give you one example though we do have a surplus that is very strong now you know when the economy is good you have more surplus because you ve got more people working and fewer people spending government money and more people paying taxes and then if the economy goes down then you may run a little deficit because you ve got fewer people paying taxes and more people on welfare and taking government assistance but what happened to us for the first time in the 1980s was we made a decision to run a big deficit every year and for 12 years we quadrupled the debt of the country and we had high interest rates and wages wouldn t go up you all remember and then when the economy went down we couldn t spend our way out of it we just got stuck in high unemployment so i wanted to balance the budget so we wouldn t have to worry about that so we could keep interest rates down now i m asking the american people to help me do something that may be hard for a lot of people to do i think we ought to take about three quarters of this surplus we ve got and save it to do two things we should save it in the next few years and save it in the following way we should be buying back the public debt in other words pay our debt down and as we do it in effect give a certificate of obligation for that money to social security and medicare for 15 years after which the congress can do whatever they want to about it but let me tell you what will happen if you do that we can help to solve the social security problem we can make social security solvent until 2050 or beyond we can make medicare solvent until 2020 we still ought to make some other changes in it but we can do those things we can keep interest rates down that means more business loans more jobs lower car payments lower mortgage payments lower credit card payments lower college loan interest rates paying the debt down it means that you know what max has to do every year when he votes on a budget the first thing he s got to do this year is to take over 13 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes and put it to the side to pay interest on the debt we ve run up so when you think about what we re spending money on and you say well max i want more for education or max i want a tax cut or max i want you to spend more money on building us some more highways here just keep in mind you re thinking well i m giving him 100 in taxes well you re not you re giving him 87 in taxes because you ve got to take 13 off the top just to pay interest on the debt we ve run up now if we do what i m suggesting not only can we deal with the financial crisis in social security and medicare 15 years from now and again it won t be me i won t be there but 15 years from now the members of congress will only be taking 2 cents on the dollar for interest on the debt they ll be spending the money on social security medicare education investing in a peaceful world giving you tax cuts whatever but don t you think it makes sense for us to take care of the social security and medicare problems and to pay the debt down and to secure our economic strength i mean i think it makes a lot of sense so i came here today to help a man i admire i came here to thank you for sticking with me and for giving me the chance to serve and giving the country the chance to have these good things happen and i d like to make just a whoop de do speech but i owe it to you to tell you that this new century will present us with unparalleled new opportunities and unforeseen new challenges and our predecessors the people that were here five years ago and 10 years ago and 15 years ago were up to their ears in alligators they did not have the opportunity that we have to take the confidence the economic success the things we ve got now and think about the long term welfare of the country and if you believe what i said when i started and you clapped 50 years ago i was raised to believe that everybody could live out their dreams but we had responsibilities to one another to live in one community then let s act like that now and give those gifts to our children thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton12 4 00 bill_clinton thank you thank you so very much for making me feel welcome and i thank you for reminding me again what this is all about i want to thank my long time friend wellington webb for his leadership in this fight and his leadership of denver i thank tom mauser for having the courage not to be broken by his loss but to give his son the legacy he deserves i thank john head and arnie grossman for reminding us that this is not about party politics it s about saving people s lives and i also want to thank my longtime friend your former governor dick lamm who s here and former governor john love who s not here for also reminding us this is not about party politics i thank attorney general ken salazar and governor bill owens who is also not here but i want to thank them both for what they tried to do in the legislature and for what they re trying to do to help you pass this referendum i want to thank the other safe board members who are here on stage and i want to acknowledge it s already been mentioned by arnie but i want to tell you that i had the privilege of meeting with the safe students david winkler ben gelt and their other colleagues in washington they told me today they ve now been to 30 states and they have 10 000 young people across america enlisted in this cause so i want to thank them i think we ought to give them a big hand finally i will say more about this in a moment but as you know i m trying to pass some legislation on this subject in washington and there are three people i want to acknowledge first of all a former congressman from maryland mike barnes who s the president of handgun control who came with me and he s up here today mike thank you for coming secondly representative diana degette from colorado who is supporting our legislation in washington thank you diana for what you re doing thank you thank you and someone who s not on the platform i don t think today but who came all the way from washington with me because he believes so strongly in this and he wanted to express his solidarity with you the democratic leader in the house of representatives dick gephardt from missouri came all the way from washington to be here today and i want to thank him for doing that let me say that not only denver but the whole state of colorado is a mile high in the eyes of your fellow americans today you come from all backgrounds different communities and surely different political parties to speak with a single voice for common sense and safety and the future of our children i want to tell you first you are not alone and second america is listening all across america people like you are speaking up here where you re taking the lead working to close the gun show loophole because the legislature wouldn t do it for you in spite of the leadership of governor owens and attorney general salazar in maryland another state with a lot of hunters and sports shooters which yesterday became the first state to require built in safety locks for all new handguns in california which banned junk guns a new generation of assault weapons and limited handgun sales to one a month in massachusetts now enforcing consumer product safety rules for guns banning junk guns requiring child trigger locks and other devices to prevent children from firing guns all these steps have helped to protect more of our children but every child in america deserves these protections reducing gun violence is a national challenge i came here first to say i support what you re doing and in spite of all the attempts to put roadblocks in your way you must not be deterred your leaders told me you need 62 000 signatures to put this initiative on the ballot the purpose of all these delaying tactics is to put off the day when you can start gathering the signatures i want every one of you who is here today to sign up with these folks when you leave because you ought to be able to get 62 000 signatures in two hours if everybody who is for this will sign up and go get the signatures the second thing i wanted to do is to say that you deserve a national government that follows your lead and congress is the only body that can provide the kind of national approach we need to protect all the children in every state that s why i asked that s why i asked sir this meeting is not about you and not about me so would you please let me give the speech i ll be glad to speak to him out there but you came here to talk about something else now let me say to all of you the thing i m very proud of the fact that you ve made this a bipartisan effort and as john said when he spoke it is true that even in washington not every democrat is for this legislation and not every republican is against it this is largely a matter of political organization and power among the opponents of this legislation here too and a matter of culture one of the reasons i wanted to come here is that i grew up in a state not all that different from colorado i was 12 years old when i first shot a can off a fencepost with a 22 unlike most elected officials in washington i ve actually been to gun shows i understand what is going on here but i will say this the message you are sending the country is not that this is the only answer but it s an important answer the message you are sending the country is not that we shouldn t have stronger enforcement of the laws we should not that we shouldn t teach firearms safety we should not that we shouldn t have community efforts like our national campaign against youth violence is promoting to strengthen the role of parents and families and schools and community groups we should but that is not an excuse for saying that guns are the only area of our national life where there will be no prevention that is their position and that is wrong we punish reckless drivers but we still have seatbelts in our car and child safety seats for our kids we punish people who hijack airplanes and terrorists who blow them up but we still thank god have got airport metal detectors every one of us just about at least my age were raised by usually our mothers telling us that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure gun safety cannot be the only area of our national life where we say no to prevention colorado is here to say we have lost enough of our children it s time to have prevention too in this important area of our national life when i signed the brady bill into law in 1993 a law which had been vetoed by the previous president the same people who are fighting you said the brady bill would do no good because all the criminals bought their guns at gun shows and urban flea markets and out of the back of trunks from one another and therefore this prevention would do no good it would just be a terrible burden for hunters and sportspeople well six years later and a few months over half a million felons fugitives and stalkers have been unable to get handguns gun crime down more than 35 percent homicide down to a 31 year low it worked but no one believes this country is safe enough i don t want any future president to have to go to columbine or to springfield oregon or to jonesboro arkansas or to all the other places i have been it s tough enough to comfort the families of our servicemen and women who die in the line of duty children have no duties except to their studies and their families our duty is to protect their lives and give them futures i know i m talking to the converted here but i want the evidence to get out this gun show loophole is now a serious problem last year a study by the departments of justice and treasury of 314 gun show investigations showed the following 34 percent of the sales investigated involved guns later used in serious crimes a total of 54 000 gun crimes this is a serious problem now should we have i will say again should we have a comprehensive strategy of course we should does the media have a responsibility do communities have a responsibility schools parents absolutely is teaching people gun safety an important part of this responsibility of course it is when the nra was focusing on teaching young people gun safety in my home state i supported them in every way i could but it is no excuse not to have prevention let me tell you something i come from a state where factories in small towns shut down on the first day of deer season every year and when we were debating the brady bill and the assault weapons ban i heard all this stuff and i told them i said if you miss a day even an hour in the deer woods i ll be against this bill of course they haven t that s not what this is about so i say to you you have to go out and say this now people say the same people who said six years ago that all these criminals were getting their guns at gun shows and urban flea markets and therefore the brady bill wouldn t work now say you can t have background checks at gun shows because it would be so burdensome well let me tell you what the burden is more than 70 percent of these checks can be done within minutes 95 percent can be done within a day the 5 percent that can t be done within a day should still be done why because they are 20 times more likely to be rejected because of a criminal background or another problem those are the facts now i don t know about you but i think it s worth a little bit of inconvenience to save a few thousand lives over the next few years now should we enforce the law yes we should gun crime prosecutions are up by 16 percent since i ve been president the average person convicted is serving two years longer gun crime down as i said by 35 percent here in colorado your u s attorney tom strickland is working with local officials on colorado s project exile they re enforcing the laws more vigorously including against those who violate the brady bill but i will say again the real question is with the children s lives at stake with the accidental gun rate of kids under 15 in this country the accidental gun rate 9 times higher than that of the next 25 biggest economies combined how can we say prevention has no role you all believe this but i want you to have these facts to argue and i want you to understand that the country is looking very closely at colorado we know it s a state that has republicans and democrats we know it s a state that has a strong culture that favors hunting and sport shooting we know it s a state with a broken heart over columbine we know it s a state where people can put aside their partisan differences and maybe even their lifetime culture to look at the facts now other states will follow your lead i hope and pray congress will follow your lead as well but you must not get tired or frustrated you must not even get angry you ve got to go talk to these people believe me not every member of the national rifle association is dead set against you they get this stuff in the mail they hear this stuff over the airwaves but they love their children too i wouldn t give up on anybody but the main thing you have got to do is win here so i will say again if you haven t signed up to be with safe sign up on your way out and find out when those petitions get circulated and do your part look how many people are here if everybody in this room everybody in this room there s about 3 000 people here right if you got 20 signatures it would be a done deal in the end change is always difficult but you must understand how important it is for your children and people all over the country if you do this you will give so much energy to people who have been sitting around in other states like yours thinking it was a hopeless battle thinking they couldn t win if you do this you will give enormous impetus to our efforts in congress to try to provide national protections and most important if you do this you will say we re going to treat this area of our life like every other area of our national life america is the country that respects the rights of people but we ve still got our rights over 200 years later since we started because we also exercise our responsibility especially for our children and their future i admire you i support you don t quit until you win thank you very much dem wjclinton12 4 94 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen secretary shalala secretary cisneros and the many other people in our administration who are here and who have long supported the non profit sector of this country and worked in it i suppose no one qualifies in that regard more than the first lady since i first met her i ve seen hillary serve on children s advocacy boards legal services boards hospital boards foundation boards i was counting outside i haven t checked with her but i know she s helped to form three non profit organizations and been associated with at least a dozen others i appreciate the fact that she found a little time for me over the years i say that because i have learned not only as a governor and a public official and now as president but also in my own family the incredible importance of the work that all of you do and those who you represent when i ran for president i said as clearly as i could that i thought the national government had a responsibility to do many things that we were not then doing but that there were many things we could not do and that in the absence of a partnership with people in community organizations all across this country we would surely never become the nation we ought to be i d like to make a few remarks about that but i think it is appropriate since we re talking about citizenship in its best form that i also make a couple of comments at the outset about a subject very much in the press today since justice blackmun announced his retirement last week i have been working to find an able replacement last night senator george mitchell who was my leading candidate for the court came to see me and asked me what i wanted him to do and i said well i want to talk to you about it i d like to appoint you to the supreme court if you think we can do our work here for the country this year in pursuing health care reform and the other things we have to do and he looked at me and said you know i ve always wanted to be on the supreme court and no one can predict what it would be like if i were nominated and then confirmed while sitting in the senate and leading this fight what the impact would be i have thought of all the ways we could do it and all the various scenarios and i m only sure of one thing i cannot imagine that the impact would be good in terms of our ability to pass health care welfare reform or any of the other things we want to do but his special concern was with regard to health care reform and so he said i believe i should stay in the senate and serve my term out and try to lead this country to health care reform that s after all the job i was given and it s my job until next january and i m sorry that the timing is not good but i think it s the right thing to do i said well why don t we sleep on it and see if we can think of a way to do it this morning early i called him on the phone and he said i still see it the same way and i said well i haven t had any thunderbolts of insight about how your analysis is wrong so he said i still think i ought to do not what i want to do but what i should do and he seemed as comfortable with decision as anyone that i ve ever seen him make i say that because this country needs more people who devote themselves not only to what they would like to do but what they think the country needs he has dedicated himself to doing something that if successful this health care reform would be the work of a generation in america his leadership role is crucial i value it and i m grateful for it and so i would like to begin by thanking him on behalf of his country for his willingness to forego a great personal opportunity in anticipation of an enormous struggle with an uncertain result for a goal that is worth the careers of many us i thank him very much the interesting thing as i look out at this crowd of you and i see so many of you whom i ve known for so many years i think of all the struggles that you have been in with an uncertain result determined to make life better for people in any number of ways in 1840 alexis de tocqueville said if americans want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of an example they form an association well today at the dawn of a new century we re full of associations every now and then i hear from one i don t like all that much sometimes i hear from those i like very much things that i wish i didn t have to hear that is a part of what makes america a special place every item as i said earlier of the national agenda i have sought to pursue so vigorously ultimately depends upon people in their private capacities doing things differently much of what i try to do here is designed to empower people to live up to the fullest of their own capacities and to face their problems in their own ways most effectively whether that s true in health care reform or education reform or crime prevention or using national service through the sterling work that eli segal has done to permit people to solve their problems at the grass roots level you can see it in every initiative the whole notion that the government has to empower people to take control of their own lives depends upon the ability of people to organize effectively to lobby their government to influence our policies and also to tell us what they know is the truth just today we received what i have seen year after year is one of the best examples of that kind of action with the release of yet another report from the carnegie corporation and this one i think one of the best that i have ever read on how we can better meet the needs of our youngest children this report is nearly three years in the making and i think now it s fair to say is the most comprehensive analysis of the condition of american children aged zero to three it awakens us to the fact that millions of our infants and toddlers are living in shameful conditions but also and even more importantly offers a coherent set of solutions about what we ought to do about it in an attempt to be a better partner with all of you in what you are doing we are establishing today a non profit liaison network of 26 different liaisons in every important government department and agency to work with all of you to emphasize in an organized way how much we value your good work your input into our policies your advocacies of things that still need to be done one of the most important things in this complicated age of zillions of problems is that i identify what it is as president i can do and what it is i need someone else s help to do of all the things we can spend our time on here in the white house and this government which things are most important and which things will spark the largest release of energy in a positive and constructive way around the country you have to help us make that decision for in truth that s a decision that we make anew here constantly as we deal with the difficulties as well as the opportunities that come to this place i hope this is the beginning of an even better partnership i thank you very very much for what you do and i want to say again i cannot succeed as president unless you succeed and unless you succeed in mobilizing millions of our countrymen and women for the important tasks that face us i honestly believe that we may be at the dawn of a new american renaissance a period when we are able to face with greater energy and greater hope and a greater sense of community and common purpose the challenges before us than has been the case in a generation if we do it we will make the beginning of the 21st century the most exciting in american history to be young to grow to come to maturity and to make a life if we don t we will have squandered a great legacy the only way we can do it is if somehow there is a role for all of us not just those of us in high office you provide that role for all of us and i will do my best to help you play it thank you very much dem wjclinton12 5 99a bill_clinton thank you so much thank you ladies and gentlemen i want to join those who have spoken before and thank everyone from our entertainers to the caterers to the servers everyone who made this wonderful evening possible i want to thank senator torricelli for taking on the leadership of the democratic senate campaign committee it is often a thankless task but we have to recruit good candidates and then they have to be able to get their message out if it weren t for you the second part couldn t occur i want to thank senator murray who won a heroic battle for reelection in the last election season when many people thought it would not happen and she won and won big and she deserved to and i want to thank our leader tom daschle it is in no small measure because of the way he held our democrats together and the way he spoke for and to ordinary americans from his position in the senate that we did so well in the last election and we ll do even better in 2000 i am honored every day i get to work with him in our leadership effort now you ve all had a good time tonight and the last thing you need is another long speech but i would like to try to emphasize something senator torricelli said and make a real point that i hope you can leave with tomorrow morning when you re doing whatever else you re doing if someone asks you why you were here tonight you could say well i wanted to hear the band or i wanted to taste the food or i work for somebody that made me go or whatever else i would hope you could give a better answer and i would hope you could tell people why you believe it s important that our party continue to do well and that we win more seats in the senate until we win the majority back you know i m gratified by what senator torricelli said about our record i m gratified that we ve got the longest peacetime expansion in history and over 18 million new jobs and that millions of children are getting health insurance and 90 percent of our kids are immunized against serious diseases for the first time and we ve set aside more land in permanent protection than any administration except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt i m gratified by all that but what you must understand is that even when we have been in the minority in the congress most of what has been achieved in this administration would not have been possible without the support of the democrats in the senate and the house of representatives they deserve a full measure of credit for every good thing that has happened in the last six and a half years the second thing i want to say is it s very flattering now that i can t run for reelection anymore for senator torricelli or someone else to say that i did a pretty good job leading our country but what we did in 1993 as a result of the vote in 1992 was to bring back old values and to bring new ideas to the american people and it was the combination of reaffirming our devotion to opportunity for all for responsibility from all citizens for the idea of an american community in which every good person could be a part and the new ideas to prove we could reduce the deficit and balance the budget and still double spending on education and the environment to prove that we could improve the economy and improve the environment at the same time to prove that we could value the individual and still say what brings us together across all the lines that divide us is more important our community is what makes us great to give entrepreneurs a chance to make a lot money and the stock market a chance to grow and still say that we can t rest until we ve given every american community a chance to be a part of the american dream it was those ideas that brought america back and that s why in the year 2000 when i will not be on the ballot it will be as important as it has ever been for the democrats to do better and better and better so that those ideas can be made real in the lives of every american citizen we ve got a lot on our plate this year and next year saving social security and medicare paying our debt down so we can keep interest rates down continuing to strive for educational excellence and education opportunity many other things but because of the traumas that we have been through in america in the last few weeks and because of the conflict in kosovo i would like to ask you to think about one thing as i close and that is this it is supremely ironic particularly for all these young people here that when we dream about the 21st century we dream about a time when people of all ethnic and racial and religious configurations will be working together in our country and around the world we dream about capitalizing on this fabulous explosion of technology you can have pen pals in mongolia in cameroon and wherever else we think the world will be stronger and smaller and at our fingertips and how wonderful it will be and yet the only real cloud looming over the world today is the oldest demon of human society the weakness of people when together to fear and hate and harm those who are different from us by race or ethnicity or religion or in some other way now what we have to do is to say to ourselves we will be purged of that that s why it s important that we pass this hate crimes legislation that s why it s important that we pass the employment and nondiscrimination act that s why it s important that we move in washington to take sensible steps to protect all our children from the dangers of guns i m very disappointed that the senate today did not vote to have background checks at these gun shows like the people of florida voted to do it that s part of our community in a world in which america is so blessed with so much wealth and so much power it is very easy for others to resent us and to mistake our motives as we have seen in recent days if we want to be in a position to stand up against ethnic cleansing against genocide against bigotry abroad we must be good at home we must reaffirm the fundamental value of community to the democratic party and the american people and we must acknowledge that our own history has given us plenty of humility because of our history of slavery and because we too are guilty of cleansing when the american people pushed the native american tribes off their lands without adequate compensation and without any concern for how they would govern themselves and make their way in life so long ago and we are still living with the consequences of that but i will close with this story to make this point if this doesn t make you proud to be an american nothing will today at the request of senator daschle and his colleague senator johnson and senator conrad and senator dorgan from north dakota and senator baucus from montana and representative pomeroy from north dakota i met with 19 tribal leaders from native american tribes from the high plains of america even more than most other native american tribes they have struggled economically they have not felt the wonderful rush of all this economic opportunity and this very low unemployment rate their educational system still needs improvement their health care needs advances and i met with them and listened to them but at the end of the presentations the person who was their spokesperson stood up and he said mr president we have seen america s long journey and we have been a part of it from the unfortunate beginnings of our relationship to where we are today meeting with the president and today we signed a proclamation all of us tribal leaders supporting the united states stand against ethnic cleansing and the murder of innocents in kosovo and i want you to know that it gets better and then another man stood up and he said mr president another tribal leader he said i have two uncles one was on the beach at normandy in world war ii the other was the first native american fighter pilot in american military history my great great grandfather was slaughtered by the 7th calvary at wounded knee and i only have one son but i have seen america s journey and i would gladly have my son go fight to protect the kosovar albanian muslims from the fate that we should never see any people endure again remember look around the room tonight it s the america we want and the world we will work for and i think you should have no doubt about which party is more likely to give you that future thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton12 5 99b bill_clinton please be seated i d like to welcome all of you here today especially the families of the people who are at the center of this announcement and members of the cabinet members of the congress mr greenspan ladies and gentlemen for six and a half years now i have worked hard to build an economy that gives all of our people a chance to prosper and to live out their dreams when i took office in 1993 it was a time of record deficits high unemployment decades of stagnant wages it was clear then that we needed to make difficult and too long deferred choices so we put in place a new economic strategy rooted in the realities of the emerging information age by now the elements of that strategy are tiresomely familiar to those of you who have been a part of this fiscal discipline investment in our people expanded trade but the results are plain over 18 million new jobs the lowest unemployment and inflation in three decades the strongest economy in a generation perhaps ever ushered in by new technologies the productive energies of the american people and sensible policies in 1992 i told the american people i would focus on the economy like a laser beam the first step was to establish within the white house a national economic council modeled on the national security council and then to pick bob rubin to lead it as the first chair of the national economic council bob forged a true team and built an enduring and vital institution now ably led by his successor gene sperling four years ago when secretary bentsen resigned i appointed bob to be secretary of the treasury alexander hamilton our first treasury secretary insisted that the united states pay its debts and practice fiscal prudence that then controversial proposal gave the new nation a chance to grow into the powerhouse it is today bob has been acclaimed as the most effective treasury secretary since alexander hamilton and i believe that acclaim is well deserved i thank again the members of congress who have come here both republicans and democrats in testament to that he has upheld the highest traditions of the office he has merged old fashioned fiscal conservatism with new ideas to help all americans benefit from the new economy and to maintain and enhance america s leadership in the world economy he understood the importance of fiscal discipline and the accountability and the impact that it would bring not only low interest rates but also intangible economic confidence both of which have brought us more jobs more businesses higher wages lower mortgage rates and a rising standard of living for all americans he cares very deeply about the impact of abstract economics on ordinary people i can tell you that for all these years he has always been one of the administration s most powerful advocate for the poor and for our cities for the investments that we put into the empowerment zones for the earned income tax credit for the community development banks and the community reinvestment act and for the new markets initiative that i was out promoting in atlanta yesterday he has also tried to help our friends abroad when they needed it knowing that our friends and trading partners need to do well if america is to do well we were reminiscing in the oval office just a moment ago about the night just before he was appointed secretary of the treasury when we decided we had to give assistance to mexico at the time i think 11 percent of the american people thought we were doing the right thing but since then i think almost always the american people have concluded that bob rubin s recommendations have been the right thing for our country it s no secret to all of you who know him that bob has been pining for private life for a long time now and i have been pleading for all that long time for him not to pine too much but two weeks ago he told me that he was ready to go i will miss his cool head and steady hand his sharp mind and his warm heart i also want to put him on notice that i expect him to show up here regularly for the next two years until we re done for lots of free advice i used to joke the bob rubin came to washington to help me save the middle class and he d stayed so long that by the time he left he d be one of them he just wants a little time to prove me wrong but i thank him from the bottom of my heart for being a true patriot and a true friend to carry forward our economic strategy i will nominate larry summers to be the next secretary of the treasury he is brilliant able a critical part of our economic team during the entire life of this administration therefore deeply knowledgeable and more than ready to help steer our nation through the strong and sometimes turbulent currents of the new economy rarely has any individual been so well prepared to become secretary of the treasury for the past six years he has been a senior official at treasury first under secretary of the treasury for international affairs and then for four years as deputy secretary he has always been bob rubin s partner in many many ways working with him to balance the budget to strengthen social security the reform the irs to build a stronger economy at home and abroad he has a close working relationship not only with chairman greenspan but with key finance ministers and central bankers around the world he has the rare ability to see the world that is taking shape and the skill to help to bring it into being i will also nominate stu eizenstat to be deputy secretary of the treasury i have known him now for well over 20 years since he was president carter s domestic policy advisor he has served our administration very well in several positions ambassador to the european union under secretary of commerce for international trade and most recently under secretary of state for economic affairs of all the people on this platform today the person making the greatest sacrifice for the national interest is secretary madeleine albright and i appreciate her presence here and the absence of tears in losing the man as able as stu eizenstat stu has handled many of our nations most difficult missions over the last six years from our successful efforts to lift food and medicine sanctions on trading partners or non trading partners to the struggle for justice and compensation on behalf of the victims of the holocaust an endeavor he will continue i would like to say a special word of thanks to him for all the many missions he has undertaken but especially for the work he s done in the holocaust area he has done it better more energetically more completely and with greater sensitivity for all the elements involved than i think any other american could have and not just jewish americans and other survivors and family members of survivors of the holocaust around the world but all americans should be grateful for this unique contribution he has made to making the american dream real with his legendary grasp of policy and the art of practical government his long experience his stamina and his steady judgment he will be a vital full member of our economic team our economy continues on its remarkable path but we must press forward with the strategy that has brought us thus far we have a lot to do to strengthen social security and medicare in the months ahead to maintain our fiscal discipline and begin to pay down this debt to renew our public schools so that they can play the role that they must play in preparing all of our people to succeed in the economy we are working to build and to bring economic opportunity where it is still not in sufficient supply in under invested and rural areas in america with a steady strategy and now a strong economic team i am confident we can enter the 21st century stronger than ever but i would like to say that more than any other single citizen bob rubin deserves the credit for building all the teams we ve had with all the members because he started with his national economic council no one had ever made it work before no one had ever made it really a priority to bring together all the strands and all the economic actors to bring together the state department and the treasury department and the commerce department and the export import bank and the overseas private investment corporation and a lot of other things most americans had never heard of he brought it all together he got us to work as a team he worked for a consensus he was always honest with me in presenting disagreements and he built a spirit and a belief that we could actually make this economy what it ought to be for our people that will be his enduring achievement along with the fact that everybody believed as long as he was secretary of the treasury nothing bad could happen ladies and gentlemen bob rubin you re not used to this dem wjclinton12 6 00 bill_clinton thank you very much rosa i want to thank you and stan for your friendship and i want to thank you for being graceful enough not to say that in 1980 when chris dodd got elected i became the youngest ex governor in the history of america i want to thank chris and jackie for trusting me to get up here at the podium tonight and senator daschle and senator lieberman thank you for what you said and for your friendship boy old bob dole was great wasn t he he owes me a lot bob dole does i mean if it weren t for me he d be just like all us gray haired 50 year olds he d have to pay for his viagra we ve had a lot of fun senator dole and i have in the last three and a half years and we had a little fun before but i appreciate his coming tonight and i want to thank father fluet for his prayer and his remarks quoting that wonderful chapter from matthew it so captures the political philosophy of chris dodd he did ask me he said you know mr president they say i only have three minutes and i need more than three minutes can i have more than three minutes i said you re chris dodd s priest if i could do it i d make you a cardinal take whatever you want it s an amazing crowd of people here tonight and not all of them want to be vice president but a lot do i just want to say this really says something about chris dodd in addition to senator lieberman and senator daschle and representative delauro here we either have now or we have had because some of them had to leave and go vote listen to this senator lautenberg from new jersey senator reed from rhode island senator reid from nevada senator akaka from hawaii senator wellstone from minnesota representatives larson maloney and gejdenson obviously from connecticut representative pelosi from california who just came in representative chet edwards from texas representative sherrod brown from ohio those are just the ones i saw now what does that tell you they want chris dodd s contributor list i want to say a couple of things very briefly first i would like to associate myself with every good thing that s been said about chris dodd tonight i want to thank on behalf of myself and hillary chris and jackie for being such good friends for the private time we ve spent together time playing golf time just having dinner time talking about our family our friends our dreams i want to thank chris dodd for making it possible for the first bill i signed as president over seven years ago now to be the family and medical leave law he introduced me tonight to the woman who with her child inspired that law in his mind and heart i like a person who believes politics is about flesh and blood people and how they live their hopes their dreams what they try to make of themselves and their children and you may remember that the democrats had passed that law in the previous administration and it had been vetoed and i promised and made it an issue in the 92 campaign i said i want to sign this bill i want it to be the first bill i sign and i listened to all that whining about how you know this is going to be a terrible burden on small business and we were going to bankrupt the economy and how awful it would be and seven and a half years later and 22 plus million jobs later we ve set records for small business formation in every year and over 20 million of our fellow citizens over 20 million have been able to take a little time off when a baby was born or a parent was sick thanks to the fact that chris dodd didn t give up in the face of a veto an opposition and all that rhetoric it changed america and i believe that one of the things we ought to be doing with our prosperity now is building on the work he did with the child care tax credit and the family and medical leave law because the idea behind it is a very simple but powerful one which is that we ought not to ever ask an american to choose between succeeding at work and succeeding at the most important work of all in life raising your children thank you chris for giving us that i want to thank secretary daley and secretary richardson for coming i don t know if they want to be vice president or if they just want chris to take care of them after the next election but they love you too i want to thank you for agreeing to become chairman of the democratic party after the republicans won the congress in 94 and everyone said we were dead that we generically and me specifically and you didn t believe it and you went around and gave hope and cheer and energy and fight and courage to people when all the pundits said we were history i thank you for that a lot of good things have happened in this country in the last four years because of what you did and lastly i think someone ought to remark more explicitly on one of the reasons for your remarkable blend of quality you are to the very core of your being and notwithstanding the fact that you know more about latin america than anybody in the congress completely irrevocably irish now as an apostate irish protestant whose people come from fermanagh just across the republic s border into northern ireland it has been my great good fortune to involve the united states in the irish peace process thank you you will never know how many times along the way including sometimes calling me from the west of ireland where he has a place at all hours of the day or night chris dodd and i have talked about ireland all the things we have said in good times and sometimes the unprintable things we said in the difficult times how many times i ve called him just to sort of check just to make sure i had it right that i wasn t misreading the tea leaves and the incredible emotional complexity of irish politics i say that because any irish person with any sense knows that the only things that count in life are affairs of the heart and that if you re blessed by god with a pretty good mind it s only supposed to be used to have a better understanding of the human heart and what counts so for all your gifts my friend for all the things you ve learned in life with its ups and downs the thing which brings you to this night with your optimism intact with your energy still high with your wonderful wife and this legion of friends is that in the very best sense you were faithful to the idea of the irish you have followed your heart and the world is a better place and your friends are all richer we love you very much and we thank you dem wjclinton12 6 98a bill_clinton thank you very much first let me say that i m not sure that evidence is good judgment to try to follow barbara and hillary to the microphone but they certainly did a good job and i enjoyed listening to them let me also thank before i go too far the san raphael high school advanced jazz band they did a great job and thank you all for playing i thank our state democratic chair arturos for being here and all the candidates and officeholders who have come to support barbara when i was listening to senator boxer and to the first lady talk and i was watching you listen to them talk i said to myself well all these people are for her anyway so what should i say that would help them get other people to be for her and that s what hillary was trying to do why should a farmer in the san joaquin valley vote for this not very tall sparkplug from northern california who is supposed to be so liberal why should a businessman in the silicon valley why should a woman running a small tourist inn in the redwood forest why should someone struggling to make ends meet in los angeles why should someone in san diego worried about there s too much pollution or illegal immigration or whatever on the border why should everybody else vote for her people that aren t here today that s the case you d have to make you know and if you think about the nature of our political debates and the nature of the way the political parties behave in washington and what our administration has tried to do i think it really comes down to whether you want progress or politics to dominate the national arena barbara said some of this and at the risk of being self serving i don t want to be but i want to read this to you because when i came to you in california in 1991 and 92 i said look you guys are having a tough time out here and i know this is the biggest state in the country and my distinguished opponent says i m just a governor from a small southern state but i ve got a few ideas about how we ought to do things differently moving towards the 21st century and we ve got to break out of this crazy highly partisan divisive debate we ve got and start putting people first and start thinking about the future to create a 21st century america where there s opportunity for everybody for everybody who s responsible enough to work for it where we re coming together as a community respecting our diversity and still valuing our unity instead of being divided and weakened by it and where we re committed to preserving america s leadership in the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and i have some ideas about how to do that well five and half years later unemployment in california has dropped by almost 50 percent senator boxer said some of this but i want to say it again not for me but for her listen now this country has the lowest crime rate in 25 years it has the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and 16 million new jobs it has the lowest welfare role as a percentage of the population in 29 years we re about to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years and it will be in dollar terms the biggest one we ve ever had we re going to have we ve got the lowest inflation in 32 years the smallest federal government in 35 years and the highest rate of homeownership in the history of the united states of america that is the reality now in addition to that i m very proud of the fact that we have the lowest rate of african american unemployment recorded the highest rate of hispanic business ownership ever recorded dramatic increases in the number of asian owned and other minority owned businesses a tripling of federal government assistance to women owned businesses a big decrease in inequality among working people for the first time in over 20 years 2 2 million children taken out of poverty 5 million kids getting health insurance who wouldn t have otherwise have gotten it we ve opened the doors of college to virtually all americans now with the tax credits the scholarships the work study programs we have done a lot of good things together because we put old time politics aside and put people first now we had to take on a lot of interests groups we made a lot of people mad when we said tobacco is the number one public health problem in america we re going to try to do something to keep kids alive and they re still trying to stop us from doing it and putting out a lot of interesting misinformation in ad campaigns all across america but every year more people die from tobacco related illnesses than accidents murder aids cancer combined and a bunch of other stuff too we said look if we re ever going to get the crime rate down in this country we have to quit talking tough on crime and do something that is both smart and tough so we put 100 000 police on the street we took assault weapons off the street insofar as we could legally we passed the brady bill and kept hundreds of thousands of people who had criminal records from getting guns and basically the other side opposed us the house of representatives just put out a budget which would terminate the 100 000 police program one of the most successful programs in the history of the united states of america in lowering the crime rate so here s what i want to say to you you have to go out and say look whether you re a republican or independent or a democrat whether you want to vote for a 7 2 tall man or a 4 10 woman eleven whatever your ethnic background whatever you bring to this race california is beginning to work america is beginning to work and this is not unrelated to the ideas never mind the charisma or whether i give a good speech or barbara looks beautiful up here and makes you feel good about all the energy and conviction she has the country is moving forward because it is on a course that makes sense and we should not change that course we should speed that course up i was glad to make the announcement that barbara has been beating up on me for over two years today we not only extended the moratorium on off shore drilling for another decade we made it permanent in certain precious sanctuary areas so there can never be any drilling there but what we want to do we need to do more than that we need to do more to try to make sure we can continue fishing without catching so many other unrelated fish in the nets that we re destroying the ecostructure we need to do more research to see how we can reverse some of this pollution we need to do a lot more to stop the pollution of the ocean from the land because a lot of it is occurring from the land we need to do more exploration we now know more about the moon than we do the ocean depths and it s only seven miles down to the ocean depths long way under water isn t it we ve got a lot of things that directly affect how our children and grandchildren will live you heard barbara talking about some of them we now have dramatically expanded pre school education we ve made access to college virtually universal but no one believes that our public schools k 12 are as good as they ought to be california is doing a very good job i think now the people of california and the grass roots movement with things like the charter school movement there was one charter school in america when i became president when i started talking about them most people thought that it had something to do with teaching people how to draw maps and our budget would take us up to over 3 000 over the next four years our budget would make sure we finish the work of connecting every school classroom and library to the internet by the year 2000 our budget would give communities enough funds to build or rehabilitate 5 000 schools so we can have smaller classes when we put the 100 000 teachers in that work our budget attempts to fund an initiative along with some of the other legislation we have to make our schools even safer to deal with these horrible instances we ve all had our hearts broken about in the last few months in our schools and other things that aren t so severe but are still very troubling by not only dealing harshly with people who do wrong but by trying to prevent these things from happening in the first place and we know that there are certain early warning that come out in a lot of these instances that our schools are not organized to deal with that our parents sometimes are not even attuned to we also know that if we had children who are from difficult backgrounds who live in difficult neighborhoods in and around the school more hours a day they would get in less trouble our budget provides as barbara boxer said for a huge increase in after school programs and summer school programs let me just tell you one story hillary is from chicago and she will tell you that when we were serving in arkansas most people thought that chicago schools were the worst big city schools in america and they had a strike there every year whether they needed to or not they re not known for their teacher strikes anymore they re known for their parent councils in every school they re known for the fact that they have tens of thousands of children who now get three meals a day in the school they re known for the fact that their summer school they have mandatory summer school for people who don t score at a certain level from grade to grade their summer school is now the sixth biggest school district in the entire united states of america and guess what juvenile crime has dropped through the floor because they re taking care of kids and giving them something positive to live for and building them up and that s what we want to do we have a lot of other things to do in the environmental area we have a lot of other things to do in the health care area this health care bill of rights i heard you cheering for barbara when she talked about that i m telling you every hour in america and i say that as somebody who has not been opposed to the managed care movement in principle we couldn t have continued the way we were going where inflation in health care was going up at three times the rate of inflation and income in america that was unsustainable but we can t continue the direction we re going now where the only thing that controls health care decisions for people in hmos is too often the bottom line that is crazy we cannot allow it and we need a health care bill of rights to protect patients to protect people to make sure they get the care they need you can have good management and still put quality health care first so there s a huge agenda out there what i want you to go out there and say to your friends and neighbors and fellow californians who have been so good to me and the first lady and the vice president is look where we are now look where we were in 1992 don t just look even at the budget surplus or the economy look at all these things ideas drive action and get results good or bad now we all have things happen that are beyond our control and i don t claim full credit for every good thing that s happened in america you and the other american people deserve most of the credit you get up and lead your lives every day and you ve done things that make sense and do good but you know as well as i do that we wouldn t have elections and give people authority to make decisions if the decisions didn t amount to anything it matters so the first thing i want you to say to somebody who says well i m too conservative to vote for barbara boxer or i m a republican or i m this say look you re a californian you re an american look where you are now look where you were then their ideas were right they put them in they had good consequences and they ve got good ideas for the future this is about progress over politics then you ought to talk about these things that barbara talked about for the future and ask people to vote as american citizens in this election for their children and their grandchildren and if you do that she will have a great victory california will have a great victory and it will certainly be the right thing for america thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton12 6 98b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you for the wonderful welcome let me begin by saying how great it was to see and hear the watsonville marching band again and my good friends there you re always welcome back at the white house and i like those uniforms i liked them then and i like them now i want to thank secretary daley and secretary dalton for sponsoring this conference i thank secretary slater and secretary babbitt who was here administrator browner dr baker katie mcginty and i d also like to say a special word of appreciation to the commandant of the coast guard and all the coast guard personnel and the vice chief of naval operations and all the navy personnel for what they have done to help this be a success i thank all the members of congress the vice president has introduced them but i am delighted to see them here and i m very proud of them i thank the mayor of monterey and all the state and city and county officials who are here and i also want to say it s good to see our old friend citizen panetta here leon and sylvia have earned the right to come home and after spending the day here i don t know why they ever left but i m very grateful that they did he made us a better administration let me say a special word of appreciation to the award winners here today my good friend ted danson the president of american oceans campaign thank you he has to go to a middle school graduation but i think he may still be here dr sylvia earle of national geographic jean michel cousteau bob talbot and moss landing marine lab thank you all for your wonderful work and congratulations on your awards i owe a lot of whatever good we have been able to do in this position on the environment to my wife who has always cared about this and expanded my horizons and to the vice president i was sitting there listening to him talk and my mind wandered back no offense mr vice president i was gripped by your speech but my mind wandered back to the conversation we had when i asked him if he would join me on the ticket in 1992 and i was remembering that fittingly enough when i called him to ask if he would come talk to me he was at rio at the wonderful conference there on climate change and biodiversity and i was thinking how influenced i had been already by his writings and his speeches even though we were neighbors we didn t know each other particularly well i knew him more through his work and the stands that he had taken and i have to tell you i was thinking again today as he stood up here today that s one of the two or three best decisions i ever made in my life sometimes i think presidents like to pretend their jobs are more special and unique and their insights more impenetrable by others than they may be but i ll tell you there is one subject on which i think perhaps only presidents can really know the truth and i can tell you that the scope the depth and the quality of the influence in a positive way that al gore has exercised on this country in the last five and half years literally dwarfs that of any other vice president in the history of the united states and i am very proud of what he has done now i thought sylvia earle made a very interesting presentation and now i understand that why when she was the chief scientist at noaa her friends called her the united states sturgeon general i had never thought about the idea that there are more fish than people in my domain now that i know it i m trying to figure out some way they can be represented in the congress that s no offense to those folks over there they just need a little more help i also want to say hello to tony coehlo and all the people watching us from the united states pavilion and expo 98 in portugal it is a remarkable coincidence and a wonderful thing that the world s fair this year is dedicated to the preservation of the oceans i first came to monterey in 1971 in the summertime and again i owe my introduction to monterey indirectly to my wife because she was then working in northern california and i was home in arkansas and i drove out here to see her and i drove across the desert and it was hot and believe me when i got here i was happy but i had always been entranced by this community ever since i first saw it monterey s favorite son john steinbeck as all of you know was a serious student of the seas in his masterful account of the 4 000 mile marine expedition he launched just about a half mile from here he summed up what for me is at the root of the work done at this conference the understanding that man is related to the whole inextricably related to all reality our abiding links to the world to nature and the oceans our mystic and mysterious seas has led us to this historic conference we come to monterey all of us with an appreciation for the divine beauty of this patch of coast which al and i had a chance to see a little more of today with two bright young people who showed us the harbor seals and the sea otters and some of the smaller life there that s good but we have to leave with a renewed determination to maintain the living thriving seas beyond not only for americans but for the whole world when astronomers study the heavens for life what do they look for water the single non negotiable ingredient our planet is blessed with enormous sources of water our oceans are the key to the life support system for all creatures on this planet from the giant tube worms in deep sea vents to cactuses in the most arid deserts in our daily lives the oceans play a crucial role they can drive our climate and our weather el nino taught us all about that and made people in northern california wonder if the sun would ever come back for a while they allow us global mobility for our armed forces the fish from the sea are among the most important staples in our diet and as the vice president has just said through fishing shipping and tourism the oceans sustain one in six american jobs these oceans are so vast and powerful that i think most people still blithely assume that nothing we do can affect them very much indeed that assumption has made its way into our common vernacular how many times have you said in your life that something you did was a mere drop in the ocean well now we know and as many of you have highlighted over the last day and half something you do may be a mere drop in the ocean but millions even billions of those drops in the oceans can have a profound effect on them and on us two thirds of the world s people live within 50 miles of a coast too much pollution from the land runs straight to the sea one large city can spew more than nine million gallons of petroleum products into the ocean every year that s roughly the amount spilled by the exxon valdez polluted run off from watersheds has led to deadly red tides brown tides and pfiesteria run off from thousands of miles up the mississippi river has been so severe that now there is a dead zone the size of the state of new jersey in the gulf of mexico ten percent of the world s coral reefs have been destroyed another 30 percent will all but disappear within 20 years we have not learned everywhere the lessons of cannery row for more than two thirds of the world s fisheries are over exploited more than a third in a state of decline as the vice president highlighted at the white house earlier this week we are also changing the temperature of the seas something else the young people told me they had measured here we ve just learned that our oceans are the warmest they ve been in 104 years that s as long as we ve been taking their temperature it must be longer since we now know that the five hottest years since 1400 have all occurred in the 1990s and if the first five months are any indication this will be the hottest year ever measured we know that greenhouse gases are heating our planet and our oceans fortunately we have learned that along with the ability to harm we also have the ability to heal through innovation and prudence we ve proved we can clean the water the air protect marine sanctuaries and wildlife refuges phase out deadly pesticides and ozone eating chemicals and do it while still producing the world s strongest most competitive economy with partnerships and persistence we must extend this record of success to our oceans if we want our children to inherit the gift of living oceans we must make the 21st century a great century of stewardship of our seas today i propose to intensify our efforts with a 224 million initiative to enhance the health of our oceans while expanding ocean opportunities in responsible ways for the environment first it is clear we must save these shores from oil drilling here in california you know all too well how oil spills from off shore drilling can spoil our coasts causing not just the death of marine life but the destruction of fragile ecosystems also economic devastation in tourism recreation and fishing even under the best of circumstances is it really worth the risk in a few moments i will sign a directive to extend the nation s moratorium on off shore leasing for an additional 10 years while protecting our marine sanctuaries from drilling forever thank you as i do this i want to say a special word of thanks to senator barbara boxer who has lobbied me relentlessly for years who tracks me down every chance she gets who has even used her grandson who is my nephew as an emotional wedge to make sure i do the right thing on this issue and i thank her for it i d also like to thank sam farr for his leadership in this conference and on this issue congresswoman capps and all the other members of the california delegation who have expressed their opinion so clearly and my good friend lt governor davis who has talked to me about this personally now by standing firm against off shore oil drilling here in california and around the nation these people have helped to protect the most beautiful shores anywhere in the world and we can continue to do that second we must do more to restore precious marine resources to help create sustainable fisheries we will help to rebuild fish stocks within 10 years work with industry to develop new technologies to net only targeted species of fish ban the sale and import of under sized atlantic swordfish and protect essential fish habitats to protect and restore coral reefs i have signed an executive order to speed our efforts to map and monitor our reefs research causes of their degradation revive damaged reefs and promote worldwide efforts to do the same to reduce land based pollution that threatens marine life which is a horrible problem i have got to have some help from the congress so again i ask the congress to fund my 2 3 billion clean water action plan to reduce the diffused pollution that has been running into our streams and oceans unchecked third we must deepen our understanding of the seas as the vice president announced yesterday and mentioned again today the united states military will release previously classified data to help researchers track marine mammals predict deadly storms detect illegal fishing and gain new insights into the complexities of climate change by the year 2000 we will complete an advanced ocean monitoring system that will also provide data for climate change studies and as doctor earle said we must do more to explore the ocean depths we propose to provide new submersibles and other advanced tools for mapping and exploring the world s last great frontier i d kind of like to go down there myself someday fourth we must create sustainable ports for the 21st century international trade will nearly triple over the next two decades and more than 90 percent of this trade will move by ocean i propose a new harbor services fund to help our ports and harbors remain competitive in the new century by deepening them for the newest and largest ships and by providing state of the art navigation tools for preventing marine accidents we must do both just last week i released or pledged some extra money to the new york new jersey harbor project in the face of clear evidence that if we do not do it the harbor will not remain competitive and thousands of american jobs could be lost we can do this and make those harbors environmentally safer at the same time fifth we must join the rest of the world in ratifying at long last the convention on the law of the sea the character of our country and frankly the nature of a lot of the economic and political success we have enjoyed around the world has rested in no small part on our continuous championing of the rule of law at home and abroad the historic convention on the law of the sea extends the rule of law to the world s oceans there is not a scientist here in any discipline who seriously believes that we will ever turn the tide on these dangerous trends until we have a uniform legal system that can provide a framework necessary to give us a global approach to this problem this convention assures the open seaways that our armed forces and our fishing telecommunications and shipping industries require but it also i will say again gives us the framework to save the oceans while we grow as a people and while we grow economically this year during this legislative session the united states senate should and must confirm its leadership role by making america a part of the community of nations already party to the convention on the law of the sea finally we must continue the critical dialogue that has begun at this conference and build together across party regional economic and other interests a comprehensive oceans agenda for the 21st century like every other great leap forward in environmentalism in the last 35 years if we re going to do this right we re going to have to do it together we have to make this an american issue that transcends party and other philosophical differences that is at the core of our own humanity and our obligation to our children and our grandchildren today i am directing my cabinet to report back to me one year from today with recommendations for a coordinated disciplined long term federal oceans policy and i want to work with the congress to create an oceans commission so that all the interests that have been represented here will have a voice on a permanent ongoing basis as we forge a new strategy to preserve the incomparable natural resources of our oceans and seas and i hope you will help me get that done during the marine expedition in the gulf of mexico which i mentioned at the beginning of my remarks john steinbeck called hope the idea that tomorrow can be better than today the defining human trait now just about every american knows that i believe that and i ve been reading steinbeck for most of my life i didn t know about that until i began to prepare for this conference in spite of the fact that i agree with that i think it s important to point out that we are also blessed as a species with two other crucial traits which make hope possible creativity and imagination all of these traits hope creativity imagination will be required to meet the challenges that we face with our oceans but they are after all the traits that first enabled and inspired explorers to take to the sea they are traits that allowed us to look at our inextricable ties to our environment and invent new ways to protect our natural wonders from harm in the last three decades in the 21st century these traits hope creativity imagination they must lead us to preserve our living oceans as a sacred legacy for all time to come you can make it happen thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton12 6 98c bill_clinton thank you thank you very very much stand up here darlene you know on my body clock it is 1 35 a m and alexis and darlene are hard acts to follow i must say i m sorry that alexis had to miss the shania twain concert but if shania twain had heard her sing she might have thought it was the other way around she was great you have a great gift young lady and i wish you well with it i thank the row city brass quartet for playing hail to the chief it sounded great thought the marine band had come across the country thank you i want to thank governor kitzhaber and senator wyden and congressman blumenauer for being here and my old friend and classmate john platt and the candidates for the house david wu and kevin campbell i admire your public officials here they are visionary and practical principled and pragmatic they get things done and they re a joy to work with and i especially am proud to be here with darlene hooley my only regret is that as president i do not have her courage in footwear i got to thinking the other day that if speaker gingrich wore shoes like that he might be in a better humor we might change the whole psychology of the republican caucus in the congress if they just had comfortable shoes every day maybe that s what the matter is maybe their shoes hurt them all the time i also want to say how profoundly indebted i feel to the people of oregon who have been so good to me and to my wife and to the vice president and mrs gore to our whole administration you ve given me your electoral votes twice and have unfailingly supported the policies to move this country forward and i just thank you from the bottom of my heart i m very grateful more than you know i wanted to come out here for darlene tonight for a number of reasons not the least of which is on occasion she has stood up with me and for our country when it was not easy to do so and she s the sort of independent thinking person who also has a heart i believe we need more of in politics she does a great credit to all of you because we have a number of important races in oregon this year i d just like to say a few things briefly i know the hour is late but every day i get up and no matter what the challenges of the day are and we ve had a number lately the financial challenges in asia the difficulties of the nuclear testing between india and pakistan the new trouble in the balkan region in kosovo a number of things but i just i give thanks for the fact that compared to the day i was inaugurated and darlene said something about this but i just want to read this off to you because you can take a lot of credit for this but your country now has the lowest crime rate in 25 years it has 16 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years it has the lowest percentage of its people on welfare in 29 years we are about to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years we have the lowest inflation in 32 years with the smallest federal government in 35 years and the highest rate of homeownership in the history of the united states that s pretty good for america and when i ran for president in 1992 and came and asked the people of oregon to support me i was deeply disturbed because our country was not moving forward and because our political leadership seemed trapped in a debate that had very little relevance to ordinary people in places like oregon or in my home state of arkansas and i thought to myself if we would think more about the future if we would imagine what we wanted america to look like for our children in the 21st century and work back from that we d make more sense in what we said and what we do would be better and i know that sounds sort of simplistic but that s actually what i tried to do and before i ever ran for president i sat down and asked myself what do you want your country to look like when we cross that bridge to the 21st century what do you want your country to look like when your daughter is your age and my answers are fairly straightforward i want the american dream to be alive and well for every person who is willing to work for it i want america to still be the leading force in the smaller and smaller world for peace and freedom and prosperity and for meeting the challenges that we face together whether it s from terrorists or weapons of mass destruction or from global environmental destruction and i want america to be able to enjoy this dramatically increasing racial and ethnic and other diversity in our country and still be able to live together as one community with shared values where we respect our differences but we have some core things in common that are most important of all that s what i want and that s what i ve worked for that s what i ve asked people to join me in doing and the first point i d like to make is that i certainly can t claim full credit for all those statistics i just read off but i do believe that our administration and those in congress who have helped us have contributed to those good results the lion s share of which belong to the american people ideas matter and actions based on ideas have consequences that s why it s important to keep people like darlene hooley in the congress that s why it s important to give us a few more people who are more interested in progress than politics more interested in unity and moving forward than being divided for short term political power advantage that s why it s important because ideas and policies matter they make a difference and it is very important that in this election season the american people say we want an honest debate about where we are where we ve come from and where we re going because ideas and actions matter we are not going to be diverted we are not going to be divided and we are not going to be little we are going to be large and we are going to look to tomorrow to our children s future if we do we ll have more people like darlene in congress that s the other thing i want to say the temptation is to say well i ought to just vote for a bunch of people who tell me what i want to hear and hope they won t do anything because things are going well and i don t want to mess it up and we have often done that societies everywhere often do that that would be a mistake it would be a mistake for two reasons number one we have big long term challenges ahead of us big long term challenges ahead of us that s why i say don t spend any of that surplus that we re going to accumulate this year until we know that we have fixed social security for the 21st century we have to reform medicare for the 21st century we ve opened the doors to colleges to virtually all americans now with our tax credits our scholarships our student loan program improvements our work study increases our national service scholarships but nobody thinks that we have the best system of public education uniformly in the world yet and we ve got things to do we ve got and agenda there of smaller classes better trained teachers more charter schools technology in every single classroom no matter how remotely rural or how poorly urban in america and i want to see that implemented we still have to many kids in trouble darlene talked about that the after school program we have offered to the congress a program to hugely increase after school programs and summer school programs to give not only not only say well we re going to find these kids that do bad things and punish them but to keep more kids out of trouble in the first place let me just tell you one story a lot of you know that hillary comes from chicago and we spent a lot of time there when i was a governor the governor of illinois the then governor of illinois was a friend of mine and he and i both have one daughter and i knew that there was one picture i could see in the newspaper once a year when his daughter was with him in the governor s office on the day that the teachers went on strike in chicago every year it happened whether they needed to or not and there was this great estrangement and everybody thought the schools were dysfunctional today in chicago there has been unbelievable harmony between the teachers and administration every school has a parent council no child can be promoted that doesn t perform to a certain level they have mandatory summer school and a massive after school program there are literally tens of thousands of children now in the inner city neighborhoods of chicago who get three hot meals a day at school because their parents work and their summer school the chicago summer school is now the sixth largest school district in america now what is the consequence the juvenile crime rate has plummeted even better more kids are learning more more kids are having the opportunity to work more children are going to have the chance to live the american dream that s what we have to be mindful of you know we will never reach a time when we can solve every problem for every child when there will never be any tragedy when there will never be any kind of thing that goes wrong in any family in this state or this country but there s not a soul here that doesn t know we can do a lot better we can do better with our schools and we can do better with our children we have huge environmental challenges i just flew up here from monterey california where we had the first ever national conference on the state of the oceans today and particularly ours the oceans that embrace our coasts all over america and i announced a number of steps to try to improve our capacity to protect and recover the environmental quality of our oceans the fishing stocks and to preserve them into the future this is a huge deal that most people don t ever even think about you know one of the most common phrases in our vernacular is oh what i did was nothing it s just a drop in the ocean nearly all of you have used it if you ve lived any number of years and that s another way of saying i m getting older and it may have been true at one time but once there are millions and billions of drops in the ocean we run the risk of changing the entire ecostructure of the planet even in monterey which is a pretty pristine place i met with young graduate students at stanford today and we walked out into the ocean we looked at the sea otters and the harbor seals and the pelicans and a lot of the small ocean life there and these young people told me that they were studying it and they concluded two things number one that even there was a demonstrable warming of the ocean and number two that a lot of the small examples of life in the sea there were things that had moved from the south and that all the life was moving north anybody that is involved with salmon in oregon or washington or canada knows that they re moving north this is a huge issue we must come to grips with it it is also closely related to the issue of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change which is in the near term an even bigger issue but they feed on each other because the more greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere the more the polluted particles dripped over the ocean find their way into the ocean and compromise the ocean s ecostructure now this may not be a burning issue in the election but it s really important that you vote for somebody who will make some mental and emotional space to think about what your grandchildren are going to be facing if we don t deal with climate change what your children and grandchildren are going to be facing if we don t deal with the deterioration of the oceans so i just give you those things as an example ideas matter in the other party they just passed a budget in the house which has as nearly as i can tell not very much money at all for our climate change policy would eliminate our policy of putting 100 000 community police on the street before its finished when it has been the most successful anti crime strategy in modern american history and would cut back on our investments generally in education and the environment at a time when we ought to do more ideas matter there are consequences to this and there are big issues out there lot of others i could talk about but the second point i want to make is this we feel good about our country now you all clapped when i gave you all those numbers the question is what do you do when you feel good you can go sit in the sun and wait for something to go wrong and enjoy it while it s good or you can say boy when we have all this confidence now when we finally have got some resources when we finally have got the literally the space to breathe to think about the long term that is the time to act you don t wait to repair the roof until there s a rainstorm we have a chance to build the right kind of house for america and yes it s important who s president and because of the 22nd amendment you ll get a chance to make another decision next time about that but it really matters who s in the congress who the governor is what kind of decisions are made what values they reflect and whether you honestly believe that we ought to be doing everything we can to create opportunity for everybody responsible enough to work for it to maintain our leadership in the world and to live together as one people i m going to talk at portland state tomorrow about immigration and this new wave of immigrants and how they re changing america and i m going to say that they all now are more likely to be different colors and different races but they re not much different than when the irish came over when my people came over here i got a letter the other day i mean a book the other day from a friend of mine who s got a terrific sense of humor that talked about how unfortunate it was that a lot of my forebears turned reactionary because when we first came here we were treated just like the recently freed slaves and the title of this book is how the irish became white tongue and cheek you may have seen it it s in the book stores but the point i want to make is this is important you look at the whole rest of the world look at what i m worrying about the struggles between india and pakistan between the hindus and the muslims in kosovo the struggle between the albanians and the serbs what was the bosnian war about people that were biologically indistinguishable who were serbs and orthodox christians croats and roman catholics bosnians and muslims 800 000 people killed in rwanda in a matter of weeks because they were two different tribes and they had lived for 500 years on the same land they weren t part of some artificial construct of colonialists that was a distinct country and if you want your kids to live in a world that is moving beyond that america has got to set an example if you want me to be able to say you know it wasn t the only reason perhaps not even the principal reason but i can tell you it was a significant factor when the irish people voted for peace recently that so many irish americans were involved and committed and they were protestant and they were catholic and after a time of going over there and working year in and year out and trying to get people together it became indistinguishable what the faith of the irish americans were committed to ireland we have to build one america for these children if we expect america to be able to lead to a safer more peaceful more prosperous more responsible sustainable planet that is very important so i say to you i m honored to be here with darlene i m honored to be here with your other leaders i respect them more than i can say i respect senator wyden congressman blumenauer i respect governor kitzhaber i respect congresswoman furst and i regret that s she s leaving and i hope you ll replace her with a good democrat who will help us keep going forward but not because of party but because our party has embraced these ideas our party has embraced the future our party has resisted the politics of division and getting in office for the sake of holding power and we re more interested in what we re going to do with it if we get it and we want to build that kind of future for our country so i m glad you re here i m glad so many young people are here but you remember what i m telling you there s a long time between now and november and i want you to go out of here committed to talking to your friends and neighbors about the nature of american citizenship at the close of the 20th century and about this incredible opportunity we have yes we ve done a lot of good things and yes the country is in good shape but i want you to be grateful for that pocket it and ask yourself now what am i supposed to do for my country and my children s future thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton12 6 99 bill_clinton thank you very much general keistlier general rizak general austin ladies and gentlemen it s a great honor for me to be here today with the men and women of the 126th air refueling wing and its supporting units the 217th engineering and installation squadron the 264th combat communications squadron the 566th air force band with all the families and friends i know this is an emotional day for you this has been a very important installation to the people of chicago and when i told hillary what i was doing today she was very jealous that she couldn t be here with me but she s in california bringing our daughter home from school those of you who ve had your children go off to school know that s a pretty big day but i am profoundly honored to be here at your final coming together before the wing goes to scott air force base and others go to peoria and to springfield i wanted to come here more than anything else to thank you for your many years of service i know the people of chicago will miss you and that they too are especially grateful for their chicago air guard you have been a very important part of the life of this city as well as the defense of your country i know many of you must be relieved that the transition is almost over not to have to make the umpteenth trip between here and belleville but i wanted to say that as difficult as it might be this move i believe will work out well for all concerned it will clearly be good for the economy of the city of chicago for the air national guard and for our military because as all of you know in order to maintain the quality of life of our service personnel and to have adequate funds for modernization to keep our forces ready to defend freedom we have to streamline our infrastructure i wanted to come here to help mark this turning point for you again mostly to say thanks but especially to do so now when you and other air guard members all across america have done so much to help our operation in kosovo succeed thank you so much for a job very well done there you should be proud of yourselves i sometimes think the american people don t understand as much as they should about the role the air guard and our reserve forces play in the defense of our country you are an essential component in our total force and in this case once again america called on you and you delivered no one should be surprised i think it is fitting to recall a little history at this last meeting the 126th has risen to security challenges for generatons your predecessor unit went to france in world war i and served with the american expeditiary force there you provided vital air defense in world war ii you were the first air guard unit in america to take up the challenge of air refueling you took to the skies in desert shield and desert storm you supported our efforts for peace in bosnia and contributed to humanitarian relief operations for more than two decades you have had aircraft on full alert ready to go anytime anywhere to provide refueling and air lift support in operation allied force you did the job once again readying these kc 135 strato tankers flying sortie after sortie fueling nato s efforts some of you may know that yesterday i went to whiteman air force base in missouri to thank our b 2 pilots there and all the b 2 pilots and their crews said repeatedly we could never have done this if it hadn t been for the people who ran the refueling operations so again i say thank you thank you thank you we prevailed in operation allied force because of units like yours and the others in the united states military and those of our allies but i would like to say today to you what i said yesterday in whiteman in addition to your power i appreciate the power of your example troops from all across our nato nations speak different languages from different ethnic and religious backgrounds they come they stand side by side for a world of justice and tolerance but especially the american mililtary reflects the kaleidescope of peoples the races the tribes the ethnic groups the religious convictions that are increasingly being brought into closer and closer contact in this world here in chicago it is very important for me to say again we have no quarrel with the serbian people they were our allies in world war ii and they fought bravely and this country has been immensly enriched by the contributions of serbian americans i know and am very proud of the fact that in this very wing you have ethnic serbs and ethnic albanians some with relatives in kosovo you have people of serbian and albanian descent flying together proving that we do find strength in our diversity and we come together for the common good that should not only make us proud to be americans it should convince us that the same thing can and should happen in the balkans in the middle east in northern ireland in south asia wherever today people still find themselves bedeviled by their hatred of one another because of their different races because in the case of africa their different tribes because of their different ethnic groups because of the different ways in which they worship god i want you to think about that tonight and be especially proud we want we want the people who live in the balkans to be able to work together the way the people in this unit who come from the balkans work together we are all children of god endowed with certain inaliable rights and entitled to mutual respect and you do that and i thank you for that thanks to you and others today our nato troops entered kosovo the british the french and the americans beginning eventually there will be troops from nearly 30 nations there we are working now with the russians to ensure that we can work together with a unified command structure as we have done so well in bosnia i think this is important because if we can work there with the russians as we have in bosnia we will demonstrate clearly our commitment as americans to protect all the civilians of kosovo the serbs and the albanians alike that is what we have pledged to do that is what we intend to do but today in the camps in albania and macedonia in the villages and in the hills of kosovo where so many innocent people have had to hide and forage for food among the kosovar albanians who have taken refuge elsewhere including here in the united states people are getting ready to go home they will go back to their homes and their lives with safety and self government and the united states will have stood for the proposition that we can t expect everyone to get along we can t expect people never to fight but we do expect that when we can stop it innocent civilians will not be slaughtered burned out of their homes have their houses of worship blown up have their personal records destroyed have their children abused we will not tolerate ethnic cleansing and killing it should not be a part of the 21st century world thanks to you and so let me say just one last time as you prepare to leave o hare to retire or head for your new homes and duty the whole world is grateful to you you have ended this chapter in the history of your wing and your units on a truly triumphant note you have helped to end this century which has seen so much bloodshed and hatred not with a feeling of helpless indignation at yet another travesty but instead with a ringing reaffirmation of the dignity of all human beings you did it it s quite a way to close out your stay here thank you god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton12 7 95 bill_clinton thank you secretary riley for the introduction but more for your outstanding leadership of the department of education and the work you have done not only to increase the investment of our country in education but also to lift the quality and the standards of education and to deal forthrightly with some of the more difficult but important issues in education that go to the heart of the character of the young people we build in our country superintendent spillane congratulations on your award and the work you are doing here in this district dr clark ms lubetkin to danny murphy i thought he gave such a good speech i could imagine him on a lot of platforms in the years ahead he did a very fine job mayor robinson and to the board of supervisors chair katherine hanley and to all the religious leaders parents students who are here the teachers and especially to the james madison teachers thank you for coming today last week at my alma mater georgetown i had a chance to do something that i hope to do more often as president to have a genuine conversation with the american people about the best way for us to move forward as a nation and to resolve some of the great questions that are nagging at us today i believe as i have said repeatedly that our nation faces two great challenges first of all to restore the american dream of opportunity and the american tradition or responsibility and second to bring our country together amidst all of our diversity in a stronger community so that we can find common ground and move forward together in my first two years as president i worked harder on the first question how to get the economy going how to deal with the specific problems of the country how to inspire more responsibility through things like welfare reform and child support enforcement but i have come to believe that unless we can solve the second problem we ll never really solve the first one unless we can find a way to honestly and openly debate our differences and find common ground to celebrate all the diversity of america and still give people a chance to live in the way they think is right so that we are stronger for our differences not weaker we won t be able to meet the economic and other challenges before us and therefore i have decided that i should spend some more time in some conversations about things americans care a lot about and that they re deeply divided over today i want to talk about a conversation about a subject that can provoke a fight in nearly any country town or on any city street corner in america religion it s a subject that should not drive us apart and we have a mechanism as old as our constitution for bringing us together this country after all was founded by people of profound faith who mentioned divine providence and the guidance of god twice in the declaration of independence they were searching for a place to express their faith freely without persecution we take it for granted today that that s so in this country but it was not always so and it certainly has not always been so across the world many of the people who were our first settlers came here primarily because they were looking for a place where they could practice their faith without being persecuted by the government here in virginia s soil as the secretary of education has said the oldest and deepest roots of religious liberty can be found the first amendment was modeled on thomas jefferson s statutes of religious liberty for virginia he thought so much of it that he asked that on his gravestone it be said not that he was president not that he had been vice president or secretary of state but that he was the founder of the university of virginia the author of the declaration of independence and the author of the statues of religious liberty for the state of virginia and of course no one did more than james madison to put the entire bill of rights in our constitution and especially the first amendment religious freedom is literally our first freedom it is the first thing mentioned in the declaration of independence and as it opens it says congress cannot make a law that either establishes a religion or restricts the free exercise of religion now as with every provision of our constitution that law has had to be interpreted over the years and it has in various ways that some of us agree with and some of us disagree with but one thing is indisputable the first amendment has protected our freedom to be religious or not religious as we choose with the consequence that in this highly secular age the united states is clearly the most conventionally religious country in the entire world at least the entire industrialized world we have more than 250 000 places of worship more people go to church here every week or to synagogue or to a mosque or other place of worship than in any other country in the world more people believe religion is directly important to their lives than in any other advanced industrialized country in the world and it is not an accident it is something that has always been a part of our life i grew up in arkansas which is except for west virginia probably the state that s most heavily southern baptist protestant in the country but we had two synagogues and a greek orthodox church in my hometown not so long ago in the heart of our agricultural country in eastern arkansas one of our universities did a big outreach to students in the middle east and before you know it out there on this flat land where there was no building more than two stories high there rose a great mosque and all the farmers from miles around drove in to see what the mosque was like and try to figure out what was going on there this is a remarkable country and i have tried to be faithful to that tradition that we have of the first amendment it s something that s very important to me secretary riley mentioned when i was at georgetown georgetown is a jesuit school a catholic school all the catholics were required to teach theology and those of us who weren t catholic took a course in world s religion which we called buddhism for baptists and i began a sort of love affair with the religions that i did not know anything about before that time it s a personal thing to me because of my own religious faith and the faith of my family and i ve always felt that in order for me to be free to practice my faith in this country i had to let other people be as free as possible to practice theirs and that the government had an extraordinary obligation to bend over backwards not to do anything to impose any set of views on any group of people or to allow others to do it under the cover of law that s why i was very proud one of the proudest things i ve been able to do as president was to sign into law the religious freedom restoration act in 1993 and it was designed to reverse the decision of the supreme court that essentially made it pretty easy for government in the pursuit of its legitimate objectives to restrict the exercise of people s religious liberties this law basically said i won t use the legalese the bottom line was that if the government is going to restrict anybody s legitimate exercise of religion they have to have an extraordinarily good reason and no other way to achieve their compelling objective other than to do this you have to bend over backwards to avoid getting in the way of people s legitimate exercise of their religious convictions that s what that law said this is something i ve tried to do throughout my career when i was governor for example we were having of arkansas in the 80s you may remember this there were religious leaders going to jail in america because they ran child care centers that they refused to have certified by the state because they said it undermined their ministry we solved that problem in our state there were people who were prepared to go to jail over the home schooling issue in the 80s because they said it was part of their religious ministry we solved that problem in our state with the religious freedom restoration act we made it possible clearly in areas that were previously ambiguous for native americans for american jews for muslims to practice the full range of their religious practices when they might have otherwise come in contact with some governmental regulation and in a case that was quite important to the evangelicals in our country i instructed the justice department to change our position after the law passed on a tithing case where a family had been tithing to their church and the man declared bankruptcy and the government took the position they could go get the money away from the church because he knew he was bankrupt at the time he gave it and i realized in some ways that was a close question but i thought we had to stand up for the proposition that people should be able to practice their religious convictions secretary riley and i in another context have also learned as we have gone along in this work that all the religions obviously share a certain devotion to a certain set of values which make a big difference in the schools i want to commend secretary riley for his relentless support of the so called character education movement in our schools which is clearly led in many schools that had great troubles to reduce drop out rates increased performance in schools better citizenship in ways that didn t promote any particular religious views but at least unapologetically advocated values shared by all major religions in this school one of the reasons i wanted to come here is because i recognize that this work has been done here there s a course in this school called combatting intolerance which deals not only with racial issues but also with religious differences and studies times in the past when people have been killed in mass numbers and persecuted because of their religious convictions you can make a compelling argument that the tragic war in bosnia today is more of a religious war than an ethnic war the truth is biologically there is no difference in the serbs the croats and the muslims they are catholics orthodox christians and muslims and they are so for historic reasons but it s really more of a religious war than an ethnic war when properly viewed and i think it s very important that the people in this school are learning that and in the process will come back to that every great religion teaches honesty and trustworthiness and responsibility and devotion to family and charity and compassion toward others our sense of our own religion and our respect for others has really helped us to work together for two centuries it s made a big difference in the way we live and the way we function and our ability to overcome adversity the constitution wouldn t be what it is without james madison s religious values but it s also frankly given us a lot of elbow room i remember for example that abraham lincoln was derided by his opponents because he belonged to no organized church but if you read his writings and you study what happened to him especially after he came to the white house he might have had more spiritual depth than any person ever to hold the office that i now have the privilege to occupy so we have followed this balance and it has served us well now what i want to talk to you about for a minute is that our founders understood that religious freedom basically was a coin with two sides the constitution protected the free exercise of religion but prohibited the establishment of religion it s a careful balance that s uniquely american it is the genius of the first amendment it does not as some people have implied make us a religion free country it has made us the most religious country in the world it does not convert let s just take the areas of greatest controversy now all the fights have come over 200 years over what those two things mean what does it mean for the government to establish a religion and what does it mean for a government to interfere with the free exercise of religion the religious freedom restoration act was designed to clarify the second provision government interfering with the free exercise of religion and to say you can do that almost never you can do that almost never we have had a lot more fights in the last 30 years over what the government establishment of religion means and that s what the whole debate is now over the issue of school prayer religious practices in the schools and things of that kind and i want to talk about it because our schools are the places where so much of our hearts are in america and all of our futures are and i d like to begin by just sort of pointing out what s going on today and then discussing it if i could and again this is always kind of inflammatory i want to have a noninflammatory talk about it first of all let me tell you a little about my personal history before the supreme court s decision in engel against vitale which said that the state of new york could not write a prayer that had to be said in every school in new york every day school prayer was as common as apple pie in my hometown and when i was in junior high school it was my responsibility either to start every day by reading the bible or get somebody else to do it needless to say i exerted a lot of energy in finding someone else to do it from time to time being a normal 13 year old boy now you could say well it certainly didn t do any harm it might have done a little good but remember what i told you we had two synagogues in my hometown we also had pretended to be deeply religious and there were no blacks in my school they were in a segregated school and i can tell you that all of us who were in there doing it never gave a second thought most of the time to the fact that we didn t have blacks in our schools and that there were jews in the classroom who were probably deeply offended by half the stuff we were saying or doing or maybe made to feel inferior i say that to make the point that we have not become less religious over the last 30 years by saying that schools cannot impose a particular religion even if it s a christian religion and 98 percent of the kids in the schools are christian and protestant i m not sure the catholics were always comfortable with what we did either we had a big catholic population in my school and in my hometown but i did that i have been a part of this debate we are talking about this is a part of my personal life experience so i have seen a lot of progress made and i agreed with the supreme court s original decision in engel v vitale now since then i ve not always agreed with every decision the supreme court made in the area of the first amendment i said the other day i didn t think the decision on the prayer at the commencement where the rabbi was asked to give the nonsectarian prayer at the commencement i didn t agree with that because i didn t think it any coercion at all and i thought that people were not interfered with and i didn t think it amounted to the establishment of a religious practice by the government so i have not always agreed but i do believe that on balance the direction of the first amendment has been very good for america and has made us the most religious country in the world by keeping the government out of creating religion supporting particular religions interfering and interfering with other people s religious practices what is giving rise to so much of this debate today i think is two things one is the feeling that the schools are special and a lot of kids are in trouble and a lot of kids are in trouble for nonacademic reasons and we want our kids to have good values and have a good future let me give you just one example there is today being released a new study of drug use among young people by the group that joe califano was associated with council for a drug free america massive poll of young people themselves it s a fascinating study and i urge all of you to get it joe came in a couple of days ago and briefed my on it it shows disturbingly that even though serious drug use is down overall in groups in america casual drug use is coming back up among some of our young people who no longer believe that it s dangerous and have forgotten that s it s wrong and are basically living in a world that i think is very destructive and i see it all the time it s coming back up even though we re investing money and trying to combat it in education and treatment programs and supporting things like the dare program and we re breaking more drug rings than every before around the world it s almost it s very disturbing because it s fundamentally something that is kind of creeping back in but the study shows that there are three major causes for young people not using drugs one is they believe that their future depends upon their not doing it they re optimistic about the future the more optimistic kids are about the future the less likely they are to use drugs second is having a strong positive relationship with their parents the closer kids are to their parents and the more tuned in to them they are and the more their parents are good role models the less likely kids are to use drugs you know what the third is how religious the children are the more religious the children are the less likely they are to use drugs so what s the big fight over religion in the schools and what does it mean to us and why are people so upset about it i think there are basically three reasons one is people believe that most americans believe that if you re religious personally religious you ought to be able to manifest that anywhere at any time in a public or private place second i think that most americans are disturbed if they think that our government is becoming anti religious instead of adhering to the firm spirit of the first amendment don t establish don t interfere with but respect and the third thing is people worry about our national character as manifest in the lives of our children the crime rate is going down in almost every major area in america today but the rate of violent random crime among very young people is still going up so these questions take on a certain urgency today for personal reasons and for larger social reasons and this old debate that madison and jefferson started over 200 years ago is still being spun out today basically as it relates to what can and cannot be done in our schools and the whole question specific question of school prayer although i would argue it goes way beyond that so let me tell you what i think the law is and what we re trying to do about it since i like the first amendment and i think we re better off because of it and i think that if you have two great pillars the government can t establish and the government can t interfere with obviously there are going to be a thousand different factual cases that will arise at any given time and the courts from time to time will make decisions that we don t all agree with but the question is are the pillars the right pillars and do we more or less come out in the right place over the long run the supreme court is like everybody else it s imperfect and so are we maybe they re right and we re wrong but we are going to have these differences the fundamental balance that has been struck it seems to me has been very good for america but what is not good today is that people assume that there is a positive antireligious bias in the cumulative impact of these court decisions with which our administration the justice department and the secretary of education and the president strongly disagree so let me tell you what i think the law is today and what i have instructed the department of education and the department of justice to do about it the first amendment does not i will say again does not convert our schools into religion free zones if a student is told he can t wear a yarmulke for example we have an obligation to tell the school the law says the student can most definitely wear a yarmulke to school if a student is told she cannot bring a bible to school we have to tell the school no the law guarantees her the right to bring the bible to school there are those who do believe our schools should be value neutral and that religion has no place inside the schools but i think that wrongly interprets the idea of the wall between church and state they are not the walls of the school there are those who say that values and morals and religions have no place in public education i think that is wrong first of all the consequences of having no values are not neutral the violence in our streets not value neutral the movies we see aren t value neutral television is not value neutral too often we see expressions of human degradation immorality violence and debasement of the human soul that have more influence and take more time and occupy more space in the minds of our young people than any of the influences that are felt at school anyway our schools therefore must be a barricade against this kind of degradation and we can do it without violating the first amendment i am deeply troubled that so many americans feel that their faith is threatened by the mechanisms that are designed to protect their faith over the past decade we have seen a real rise in these kind of cultural tensions in america some people even say we have a culture war there have been books written about culture war the culture of disbelief all these sort of trends arguing that many americans genuinely feel that a lot of our social problems today have arisen in large measure because the country led by the government has made an assault on religious convictions that is fueling a lot of this debate today over what can and cannot be done in the schools much of the tension stems from the idea that religion is simply not welcome at all in what professor carter at yale has called the public square americans feel that instead of celebrating their love for god in public they re being forced to hide their faith behind closed doors that s wrong americans should never have to hide their faith but some americans have been denied the right to express their religion and that has to stop that has happened and it has to stop it is crucial that government does not dictate or demand specific religious views but equally crucial that government doesn t prevent the expression of specific religious views when the first amendment is invoked as an obstacle to private expression of religion it is being misused religion has a proper place in private and a proper place in public because the public square belongs to all americans it s especially important that parents feel confident that their children can practice religion that s why some families have been frustrated to see their children denied even the most private forms of religious expression in public schools it is rare but these things have actually happened i know that most schools do a very good job of protecting students religious rights but some students in america have been prohibited from reading the bible silently in study hall some student religious groups haven t been allowed to publicize their meetings in the same way that nonreligious groups can some students have been prevented even from saying grace before lunch that is rare but it has happened and it is wrong wherever and whenever the religious rights of children are threatened or suppressed we must move quickly to correct it we want to make it easier and more acceptable for people to express and to celebrate their faith now just because the first amendment sometimes gets the balance a little bit wrong in specific decisions by specific people doesn t mean there s anything wrong with the first amendment i still believe the first amendment as it is presently written permits the american people to do what they need to do that s what i believe let me give you some examples and you see if you agree first of all the first amendment does not require students to leave their religion at the schoolhouse door we wouldn t want students to leave the values they learn from religion like honesty and sharing and kindness behind the schoolhouse door behind at the schoolhouse door and reinforcing those values is an important part of every school s mission some school officials and teachers and parents believe that the constitution forbids any religious expression at all in public schools that is wrong our courts have made it clear that that is wrong it is also not a good idea religion is too important to our history and our heritage for us to keep it out of our schools once again it shouldn t be demanded but as long as it is not sponsored by school officials and doesn t interfere with other children s rights it mustn t be denied for example students can pray privately and individually whenever they want they can say grace themselves before lunch there are times when they can pray out loud together student religious clubs in high schools can and should be treated just like any other extracurricular club they can advertise their meetings meet on school grounds use school facilities just as other clubs can when students can choose to read a book to themselves they have every right to read the bible or any other religious text they want teachers can and certainly should teach about religion and the contributions it has made to our history our values our knowledge to our music and our art in our country and around the world and to the development of the kind of people we are students can also pray to themselves preferably before tests as i used to do students should feel free to express their religion and their beliefs in homework through art work during class presentations as long as it s relevant to the assignment if students can distribute flyers or pamphlets that have nothing to do with the school they can distribute religious flyers and pamphlets on the same basis if students can wear t shirts advertising sports teams rock groups or politicians they can also wear t shirts that promote religion if certain subjects or activities are objectionable to their students or their parents because of their religious beliefs then schools may and sometimes they must excuse the students from those activities finally even though the schools can t advocate religious beliefs as i said earlier they should teach mainstream values and virtues the fact that some of these values happen to be religious values does not mean that they cannot be taught in our schools all these forms of religious expression and worship are permitted and protected by the first amendment that doesn t change the fact that some students haven t been allowed to express their beliefs in these ways what we have to do is to work together to help all americans understand exactly what the first amendment does it protects freedom of religion by allowing students to pray and it protects freedom of religion by preventing schools from telling them how and when and what to pray the first amendment keeps us all on common ground we are allowed to believe and worship as we choose without the government telling any of us what we can and cannot do it is in that spirit that i am today directing the secretary of education and the attorney general to provide every school district in america before school starts this fall with a detailed explanation of the religious expression permitted in schools including all the things that i ve talked about today i hope parents students educators and religious leaders can use this directive as a starting point i hope it helps them to understand their differences to protect student s religious rights and to find common ground i believe we can find that common ground this past april a broad coalition of religious and legal groups christian and jewish conservative and liberal supreme court advocates and supreme court critics put themselves on the solution side of this debate they produced a remarkable document called religion in public schools a joint statement of current law they put aside their deep differences and said we all agree on what kind of religious expression the law permits in our schools my directive borrows heavily and gratefully from their wise and thoughtful statement this is a subject that could have easily divided the men and women that came together to discuss it but they moved beyond their differences and that may be as important as the specific document they produced i also want to mention over 200 religious and civic leaders who signed the williamsburg charter in virginia in 1988 that charter reaffirms the core principles of the first amendment we can live together with our deepest differences and all be stronger for it the charter signers are impressive in their own right and all the more impressive for their differences of opinion including presidents ford and carter chief justice rehnquist and the late chief justice burger senator dole and former governor dukakis bill bennett and lane kirkland the president of the afl cio norman lear and phyllis schlafly signed it together coretta scott king and reverend james dobson these people were able to stand up publicly because religion is a personal and private thing for americans which has to have some public expression that s how it is for me i m pretty old fashioned about these things i really do believe in the constancy of sin and the constant possibility of forgiveness the reality of redemption and the promise of a future life but i m also a baptist who believe that salvation is primarily personal and private that my relationship is directly with god and not through any intermediary people other people can have different views and i ve spent a good part of my life trying to understand different religious views celebrate them and figure out what brings us together i will say again the first amendment is a gift to us and the founding fathers wrote the constitution in broad ways so that it could grow and change but hold fast to certain principles they knew they knew that all people were fallible and would make mistakes from time to time and i have as i said there are times when the supreme court makes a decision if i disagree with it one of us is wrong there s another possibility both of us could be wrong that s the way it is in human affairs but what i want to say to the american people and what i want to say to you is that james madison and thomas jefferson did not intend to drive a stake in the heart of religion and to drive it out of our public life what they intended to do was to set up a system so that we could bring religion into our public life and into our private life without any of us telling the other what to do this is a big deal today one county in america los angeles county has over 150 different racial and ethnic groups in it over 150 different how many religious views do you suppose are in those groups how many every significant religion in the world is represented in significant numbers in one american county and many smaller religious groups in one american county we have got to get this right we have got to get this right and we have to keep this balance this country needs to be a place where religion grows and flourishes don t you believe that if every kid in every difficult neighborhood in america were in a religious institution on the weekends the synagogue on saturday a church on sunday a mosque on friday don t you really believe that the drug rate the crime rate the violence rate th dem wjclinton12 9 96 bill_clinton wow thank you very much thank you all thank you for coming thank you for standing out here on this hot fine day thank you for your enthusiasm thank you thank you thank you thank you dr jerry young for making me feel so welcome at chaffey college and for the work you do here thank you congressman george brown ladies and gentlemen there is not a member of the entire congress who knows more about the role of technology in your future in california s future in america s future than george brown and i hope you will send him back to the united states congress so that he can continue to serve you thank you carrie matthews thank you for your wonderful speech thank you for bringing your wonderful children and thank you for the power of your example you in your efforts to be a good parent a good learner and a successful worker in the future you re what this country is all about and i m proud to be on the platform with you i would like to thank the folks who were here before lieutenant governor gray davis state comptroller kathleen connell assemblyman joe baca mayor bill alexander art torres the san bernardino county supervisors who were here the other officials who were here and i would like to thank the olympians who were here mike powell and evelyn ashford thank you where are they they re over here somewhere thank you hi evelyn hi mike thank you i d like to thank karen kraft who sang the national anthem the rancho cucamonga high school marching cougar band thank you very much thank you the loveland church choir thank you for singing i ll tell you i have had a good time already and i thank you for that thank you for these great signs out here you know so many times in the last four years when i have come to california i have come to help the people of california with a problem they had whether it was an earthquake a fire a flood a base closing trying to protect our borders in the south always a problem i come today to tell you we ve also been working hard to create opportunities for the people of california and we re on the right track to the 21st century in this election season you have to ask first of all where are we now compared to where we were four years ago when we had high unemployment stagnant wages rising crime a dividing society and rising cynicism look at where we are today the lowest unemployment in seven and a half years 10 5 million new jobs nearly 4 5 million new homeowners the deficit s gone down for four years in a row by 60 percent the first time that s happened since before the civil war in the 1840s we re in better shape than we were four years ago fifteen million of the hardest pressed working americans got a tax cut so they could raise their children and work and not be tempted to fall back into welfare the welfare rolls are down by 1 8 million and child support collections are up by 3 billion 40 percent for four years the crime rate has gone down 12 million americans got to take a little time off from work when a baby was born or a parent was sick without losing their jobs because of the family and medical leave law on october the 1st the new minimum wage law will become effective and 10 million americans will get a raise that law will also make every small business in america eligible for a tax cut when they buy health insurance when they they ll make it easier for small businesses to invest in their businesses to hire more people and they will be eligible for more tax relief and we made it easier for people who work for small businesses to take our retirement plans and to keep them when they change jobs and so many people change jobs today that s very important and finally that bill gave parents who adopt children a 5 000 tax credit to promote adoptive families there s a lot of children out there who need it and i hope it helps we passed the health care reform bill that made 25 million americans eligible to get or keep health insurance by saying simply you cannot lose your health insurance or be denied it now just because somebody in your family has been sick or you moved from job to job it can revolutionize health care security for millions of americans and you may have noticed that at the democratic convention i said that i thought we ought to do more in health care and two things i mentioned one i don t think it s right to throw a new mother and her newborn child out of the hospital before at least 48 hours go by and i believe we ought to make a beginning at providing some insurance for people there are millions and millions and millions of families who need some health care in the mental health area and i think we ought to make a beginning of that and i m here to tell you that this week the congress in both houses has voted to do both those things we are moving in the right direction we are on the right track to the 21st century now folks i have tried in the last four years to move our country toward the america i want for the 21st century a country in which every person without regard to color gender or any other difference can live out their dreams and live up to their god given capacity a country where look out at this sea of people where all of us with all of our diversity will be able to come together and not be divided a country that will still be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity and our formula is simple we have to meet our challenges we have to protect our values opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community in which every single person who works hard and plays by the rules no matter whatever else you want to say about them has got a role to play a place at the table and we ll be walking across that bridge to the 21st century together i want you to help me build that bridge will you do it so now we have to ask ourselves are we going to build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past are we going to build a bridge where everybody can walk across because we recognize our obligations to help each other make the most of their own lives or are we going to say you re on your own frankly folks i think america ought to work the way our community colleges work look at this place it is democratic small d that is it s open to all it s flexible it s oriented toward results the programs have to be good and relevant otherwise people don t profit from them when they leave they re changing all of the time and they represent partnerships between people in business and people in education and no one asks you what your political party is or what your position is on this that or the other issue is you re just given a chance to make the most of your own life nobody gives you a guarantee but everybody gets a chance that s the kind of america i want to build for everybody all the time since i became president i ve worked as hard as i could to change the way politics works in washington to get away from the old who are we going to blame politics and instead say what are we going to do about it how are we going to make america better no more who to blame let s ask what to do no more insults let s have a campaign and a life in america of ideas and change positive change toward a better future we still have a lot to do if we re going to build the right kind of bridge to the 21st century we have to provide the best educational opportunity in the world to everybody and let me just mention two or three things number one i have proposed a program to mobilize 30 000 mentors including college students on work study americorps volunteers other trained teachers to mobilize a million volunteers to go into all of our schools where there are reading problems so that every 8 year old in america will be able to read on his or her own by the year 2000 i want to have a country where every classroom in america every single classroom and library in america is hooked up to the information superhighway with good computers good teachers and the internet and the world wide web for everybody what that means what that means is if we do that for the first time in history every student in every classroom in the poorest urban areas and the most remote rural areas will have access to the same learning in the same way at the same quality in the same time as the people in the wealthiest institutions in america it will revolutionize opportunity in education and we have to do it i want to help our public schools to meet their challenges to stay open later for the kids that need a place to go a positive place to go to have more flexibility to get greater results to be judged by their standards but to be given freedom from rules that stifle them i ve done a lot i m very proud of in this area because i spent a lot of time in public schools as well as community colleges one of the things that california has led the way in is in the creation of new schools in public school districts called charter schools where a group of teachers gets together and says here s who we re going to serve here s what we re going to produce give us a charter and if we don t produce it take it away from us hold us accountable we ll educate our children better there are about 350 of these schools in america today 90 of them in california today we released another 1 25 million to put 12 more in california and if you will give me four more years we ll build 3 000 more in america and all across this country finally let me say that we have to make college education available to every single solitary person in america within four years if we do the right things we can make a degree from a community college just as universal in america as a high school diploma is today will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century here s how we re going to do it i propose to give families a tax credit a dollar for dollar reduction in their taxes for the cost of the average community college tuition for two years so that everybody can afford to go to community college we ll make it free all you have to do is show up do a good job make your grades learn and go on to build a better life it ll make america stronger and i want to make it easier for people to go on to four year schools to postgraduate education for older people to go back to college so we also propose a 10 000 tax deduction for the cost of any college tuition after high school for people of any age we will do this and when we do america will be stronger finally let me say that i think families ought to be able to save and save more through an ira an individual retirement account and then withdraw from it without any tax penalty for education or buying a first home or taking care of their health care needs now we can revolutionize educational opportunity if we do those things and you keep doing your job here we will be able to say in four years we ve opened the doors of college to every person in america and a college education at least at a community college is just as universal in the year 2000 as a high school diploma was four years ago will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century we have to keep working to keep this economy growing california s suffered too much and too long and there are still people here who want jobs who don t have them that means we have to keep interest rates down and investment going that means we have to balance the budget yes but we have to do it in a way that continues to invest in the technologies of the future and the education of our people in the protection of the environment and providing the protection that medicare and medicaid give to children to families with disabilities and to the elderly we don t want to divide this country and we don t have to balance the budget will you help me do it in the right way that s an important part of our bridge to the 21st century we have to build a bridge to the 21st century that keeps the crime rate coming down we ve got four years of declining crime the leaders of our friends in the other party they fought us on the crime bill they re still against putting 100 000 police on the street although for the life of me i can t figure out why they were against the brady bill they were against the assault weapons ban they told people they would lose their weapons well it s four years later not a single hunter not a single sportsman has lost a single weapon but 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers did not get handguns to terrorize the american people because of the brady bill and we are safer because of it we ought to go further we ought to ban the cop killer bullets and we ought to extend the brady bill and say if you have brutalized your spouse or your child you ought not to be eligible to get a handgun either will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century we passed welfare reform but all it does is give us a chance to reform welfare it says now people on welfare will still get health care for their kids and nutrition and child care if they take a job more than ever before but the income must now be used to move people to work so i have a plan to create a million jobs i don t want to see children and their parents in the street i want everybody working and succeeding at home and at work will you help me create those million jobs to put people to work who have never had it before i want us to build a stronger american community and a stronger and safer world that means we have to build strong families i m proud of the fact that the first bill i signed was the family and medical leave law and i d like to see it expanded a little to say you can also keep your job and still have a little time off to take your child to the doctor or to that parent teacher conference at the school it ll make america stronger we ve had 10 5 million new jobs since i signed the family leave law it s been good for business because when families are happy when they re succeeding at raising their children they re more productive at work and they make america stronger let it be our goal to say success at home and success at work go hand in hand will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century let me say in california you know we have to build a bridge that protects our environment i m proud that we ve destroyed more toxic waste dumps in three years than were destroyed in the 12 years before i took office proud that our air is cleaner that our food is safer very very proud that we created the country s largest national park south of alaska here in california in the mojave desert very proud that we saved yellowstone from a gold mine and that we are moving forward on a whole broad range of fronts but we still have problems ten million american children 10 million live within four miles of a toxic waste dump and that s wrong in four more years if you will give them to us we ll close 500 of those dumps the worst ones because our children should grow up next to parks not poison will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century finally let me say that we have to build a bridge to the 21st century that is safe for our children i am so proud of the fact that just a couple of days ago almost every country in the world only three voting no voted to ban the testing of nuclear weapons forever we are making this a safer world i m proud of the fact that there are no nuclear missiles pointed at america s children for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age proud that your country is leading the way to peace and prosperity but we have more to do we have more to do you saw it in iraq we cannot allow anybody anywhere to believe they are not bound by the rules of civilized behavior so i say again i don t want to get in a word war with saddam hussein but we re going to do whatever it takes to keep him from threatening his neighbors threatening our pilots and we re going to enforce the no fly zone let me make this last point i believe that all of you particularly those of you who are young who have more tomorrows than yesterdays to look forward to i believe you will grow up in a more peaceful world than any we ve known in a long long time but we know it s not a world free of threats we know we have to deal with terrorism we know we have to deal with all the ethnic and racial and religious wars that still engulf the world we know we have to deal with organized crime and drug smuggling we know we have to deal with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that s why i have worked so hard to rally the nations of the world to say we re going to have zero tolerance for terrorism and why we re working so hard to make airline travel and airports safer in america and i want you to support what we re trying to do but today in the united states senate there s a big decision being made that most people have never talked about they re debating something called the chemical weapons convention it is a treaty that will increase the safety of our soldiers and our citizens by reducing the dangers posed by poison gas that seems a long way away but remember it wasn t so very long ago that a lot of innocent citizens were killed in japan by a fanatic terrorist who exposed them to poison gas in a subway we ve got to do everything we possibly can to minimize the exposure of our people to this gas now this treaty was negotiated by president bush then i submitted it to the senate three years ago for ratification this has been a bipartisan effort all along the way general colin powell supports it president bush is working for it his national security advisor is working for it the joint chiefs of staff are working for it but bitter partisan debate has broken out in the last few days and has threatened to derail this treaty i want you to be protected from the dangers of poison gas insofar as we can humanly do it and i ask you to join with me in asking the senate to resolve the remaining questions put partisanship aside and put america on the side of a safer world without poison gas being exposed to our citizens or our soldiers will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century now before i go let me just ask you to remember what i said about the community colleges don t you want a country in which we re coming together instead of being divided don t you want a country in which we all roll up our sleeves and say we re going to work together to give each other the chance to make the most of our lives don t you think my wife was right when she said it takes a village to raise a child don t you think that we re far better off building a bridge to the future than a bridge to the past i want you to think about this just look around this crowd today look around this crowd when i represented the united states at the opening of the olympics and i watched all the teams come in it was thrilling to me that there were people from 197 different nations there and then i remembered i was looking at our own team when hillary and chelsea and i went to visit with them and i thought you know if the people from america if they didn t have the american outfits on you wouldn t have a clue where they were from if you heard that the american team was up you could say well that one s from africa that one s from scandinavia that one s from the middle east this one s from asia this one s from india they were from everywhere they were from everywhere there were 197 nations represented at the olympics in los angeles county there are people from 150 of those 197 places and i want you to think about that not only today not only for the next eight weeks but for the rest of your life this is a country founded 220 years ago by people who said we believe all people are created equal we didn t behave that way then we don t behave that way perfectly today but that s what we believe and we have to stand up and say to everybody if you believe in the constitution the bill of rights the declaration of independence if you re willing to show up tomorrow and be a good citizen and work hard you re our kind of american we don t need to know anything else about you you re part of our american community will you help me build a bridge that all americans can walk across to the 21st century keep your spirits up keep your determination up and keep your eye on the future thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton13 1 99 bill_clinton wow wasn t she great let s give her another hand she was great thank you on behalf of all of us in our administration many of whom are here i want to thank all the advocates for persons with disabilities in our audience i thank especially tony coelho becky ogle paul marchand my great friend justin dart paul miller and others i want to thank all the people in the administration those in the cabinet who are here with me and the agency heads and the others in the white house who have done so much to help to sensitize me and the vice president and others to the challenges and our obligations i say a special word of thanks to tom harkin who has personally taught me a lot about the issues we discuss today to senator ted kennedy and to senator jeffords i knew if i listened long enough that republican rhetoric would finally sound good around one issue and you did it today and i thank you you were just great it was great i d also like to thank two great friends of this cause who are in the audience senator jack reed from rhode island and congressman ben cardin from maryland we thank them for being here you know a lot of things have already been said and i would like to say something not in my notes i hope nobody will take this the wrong way because everybody knows what a great enthusiast i am of athletics most of the cameras at this hour are somewhere else and i want to say on behalf of my wife from chicago and myself that we wish michael jordan well we admire him we like him very much and we thank him for years of thrilling exploits in my life i don t know that i ever saw another athlete with such a remarkable set of qualities of mind body and spirit not only somebody who had a body that would do things no one else s would do but who always expected to do whatever it was he tried to do and i think it s appropriate that the sports fans around america take a day or two to ooh and aah and hold their breath again and be glad again but the courage of karen moore and all the people like her is greater still by far i remember once many years ago after i lost an election and became the youngest former governor in american history with very dim future prospects a wise old country lawyer wrote me a letter and he said bill you know it takes a little bit of strength to sustain a terrible setback but the real courage in life is living through the grind of day to day existence with dignity and nobility and charity how much more true is that for people with disabilities for whom daily existence can be a greater grind for whom charity is harder to muster of the spirit because so many of the rest of us have been so blindly insensitive to things which would enable all of us to get through that daily life better a lot of good things have happened since the 70s senator kennedy talked about it since these gentlemen and others passed the americans with disabilities act we did have a great renewal of the idea a year or so ago but 75 percent of americans with disabilities are still unemployed you just heard why millions are forced to make the impossible choice between going to work and keeping their health insurance millions more lack the tools and services that could make the difference between dependence and independence we all know working is a fundamental part of what we say is the american dream maya angelou once said that work is something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater you heard karen you heard what she said how i m working how i love being at work oh by the way my family life is better and i don t get sick as much that is not an accident every single one of us we want to be fully engaged in life and we ought to have the chance to do so i like what senator jeffords said about how the congressional budget office might or might not estimate this initiative and i had that argument before and lost it so i m not going to get into that but let me ask you this when we ve got the largest surplus in our history the longest peacetime expansion in our history perhaps the strongest economy we ve ever had if we cannot address this issue now then when will we ever address it now is the time so here is what we propose to do first you ve already heard about the landmark legislation by senators jeffords kennedy roth and moynihan to assist millions of americans with disabilities who want to work today i am pleased to announce that the balanced budget i will present to congress fully funds this vitally important initiative americans should never have to choose between the dignity of work and the health care they need with this legislation they ll have a ticket to work not an impossible choice i will also continue to work with congress to pass legislation i know is very important to the disability community a strong enforceable patients bill of rights and to strengthen social security for the 21st century not just for retirees but also for people with disabilities and we ought to do it this year with no excuses second we must make it easier for people with disabilities to get to work as anyone with a disability can tell you it takes more than a job to enter the work force often it takes successful transportation specialized technology or personal assistance and the cost can be prohibitively high today i am pleased to announce a new 1 000 tax credit so hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities will be helped to meet these critically important expenses finally we have to give people with disabilities the tools they need to succeed we all need that i hope all of you had a chance to experience and see the amazing displays out there in the grand foyer from a portable computer kiosk that helps people with disabilities vote or find a job to the latest voice recognition software that lets you use a computer without touching a keyboard to a new generation of mobile telephones that connect directly to hearing aids to a device to immediately translate music into braille this kind of assistive technology as it is called will empower people as never before today i am pleased to announce that my budget will double our investment in this sort of technology to make it more available to people with disabilities we also will help states to expand low income loan programs to help more people afford these promising products the federal government will become a model user of assistive technology we will increase our commitment to research and development to continue our progress increased access to health care more assistance at home and in the workplace remarkable new technologies made more available this is how we can make sure that all americans can take their rightful place in our 21st century workplaces last summer the vice president announced our plan to build at the fdr memorial a new statue of president roosevelt in the wheelchair from which he led our nation the wheelchair he then felt compelled to hide because of the negative attitudes of his time well we ve come a long way since those days and even though we in public life get to make the speeches i think it s clear to all of us that you deserve the credit all of the work you have done people with disabilities are increasingly a powerful presence in america from our schools to our businesses to the halls of government but maybe equally important increasingly a welcome comfortable normal presence president roosevelt said no country no matter how rich can afford to waste its human resources this is really all about living up to that objective thank you karen thank you ladies and gentlemen let s go out and pass this legislation thank you dem wjclinton13 10 06b bill_clinton i think he just answered the question every day when you get up you have a choice about how you view whatever the facts are life is always imperfect and there will always be problems it s part of the human condition so you have to choose are you going to see the glass as half empty or half full it may be that we re a little more optimistic because we have lived a little longer for example he talked about the commie bastards that was funny i think it s highly unlikely with all the problems we ve got we re worried about north korea and iran it is tragic that the peace process between the israelis and the palestinians has not been restarted it s a good time to do it too because all the arab states now are worried more about iran than israel there s lots of problems we re worried about climate change and we should be because if we continue to stick our heads in the sand sometime over the next 50 years we ll have a pretty calamitous situation but there is an economically viable way out of it and one that would improve our national security if i were running for president this year i would almost run on nothing but energy here s what i want to say we all feel more vulnerable because of 9 11 because it means we can be hit here it used to be that was something that happened to somebody that we were supposed to go save now it could happen to us and it could happen to us but our country and the future of freedom and free enterprise and human aspiration looks brighter to me in the 21st century than it did in the 20th don t forget you had 9 million people killed in world war i 12 million people killed in world war ii 20 million people killed in the soviet union in the purges between the war and immediately afterward god only knows how many million people killed in the chinese purge 2 million people killed in cambodia you forget what happened in the 20th century how many people still live in slavery and we know more about problems elsewhere than we used to know because of the globalization of information technology which means our conscience is now moved by darfur for example but you should see it as a positive thing that you are interconnected with people all over the world and that you can make some difference but the fact that the world has problems should not be a cause for cynicism or despondence or despair that s what makes it fun to go hit them think how much more boring life would be if there were no challenges we would all just sit around blissed out all the time i think this is a choice he makes a choice don t you think it s interesting how he sees the world different from you he said that yellow pages thing i bet none of you ever thought that so how could you not be optimistic if you ve met enough people if you ve known enough things and if you know enough about human potential i think people ought to be asking this question of the wild eyed cynics and the wild eyed pessimists not the wild eyed optimists i think human history is on our side dem wjclinton13 10 06c bill_clinton actually you know that point he made that s what the movie independence day was all about right remember that what is the premise of it you re laughing this is a very serious point what is the premise of it that we need an outside threat to remind us of the self evident truth that our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences i completely agree that climate change is going to do that look it up there was a full page ad in the new york times not very long ago signed by 18 or however many leaders of christian evangelical organizations that had previously been identified as religious political activists in a way that was divisive not united we do think jesus wants us to save the world is basically what the ad said but it was a beautiful ad really it was a beautiful idea so i think he s right but on a more mundane and practical level here s the problem between religious politics and secular politics no person of faith can possibly participate in any endeavor a family parenthood a business politics without his or her actions being informed by their faith that s good and we should honor that minnesota is about to elect the first muslim congressman in american history he looks like an impressive man to me i think it s a good thing why has religion been so divisive in politics because of a religious heresy common to all faiths no christian no jew no muslim no hindu no buddhist can fail to acknowledge the existence of this religious heresy somewhere around the world and what is that heresy if you believe in any faith you believe it represents the truth capital t right it s a long stretch from saying your faith represents the truth to saying that you can be in full possession of the truth and that you can turn it into a political program that s fully true and anybody that rejects your program is less human than you are and deserves to die that is the heresy that is what is wrong with the fundamentalist terrorists who are muslims but that is what is wrong in the fight in sri lanka between the hindu tamils and the sinhalese buddhists that is what is wrong in the fight between the hindus and the muslims in western india over what should happen to the beautiful old mosque that was torn down and they want to build a hindu temple where they believe the blue skinned god rama died over 1 500 years ago that s what s wrong in all these fights in america when people are demonized when they don t agree with people who are part of the christian right who say we do have possession of absolute truth and you re not a good human being if you don t agree with us it s a religious heresy it s a heresy why the most important christian writer st paul said everybody at these christian weddings they always read the provision the verse from paul s letter to the corinthians now abideth faith hope and love these three and the greatest of these is love actually doesn t belong at a wedding because the love that he is talking about is love for humanity not romantic love why in the world would a christian writer say that love is greater than religious faith read this go home all of you that are christians you go home and read this tonight first corinthians 13 two verses above it it says for now on this earth i see through a glass darkly but then i e in life after death face to face now i know in part but then in life after death i will know even as i am known the reason love is more important than faith is because you see through a glass darkly and you know in part all other faiths have some of the same things the torah says he who turns aside a stranger might as well turn aside from the most god the koran says that allah put different people on the earth not that they might despise one another but that they might come to know one another the dharmapada the buddha says that you re not fully human unless you feel the pain of another as an arrow stuck in your own body and the human genome researchers found out that all human beings are 99 9 percent the same so the problem is not that people in politics bring their religion not that there s an honest debate about abortion or gay marriage or whatever you want to do the problem comes when someone says i have the absolute truth i have turned it into an absolutely true political program and if you don t like it you are less human than i am that s the problem dem wjclinton13 10 99a bill_clinton thank you very much peter pinchot secretary glickman under secretary lyons i also want to acknowledge mike dombeck the chief of the forest service and george frampton the chair of the council on environmental quality there are many many things i d like to say today but before i begin there has been there was a development in the news today that i need to make a comment on because i believe this is my only opportunity to see the press and through them speak to the american people so i would like to just take a moment to note that after years of denial and deception the philip morris company has admitted that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases this formal acknowledgement comes far too late but still we must all welcome it it can be the beginning of clearing the air it certainly makes clear as i ve said for years that the tobacco companies should answer for their actions in court they should stop marketing their products to children and certainly they should do much more to reduce youth smoking so this is a good day for the cause of public health and our children in america now peter talked about his grandfather and theodore roosevelt one of my proudest possessions some of you know i collect old books about america i just finished reading a fascinating account by frances perkins the first woman to serve in the cabinet who was president franklin roosevelt s labor secretary during his entire tenure about her 35 year relationship with roosevelt one of my proudest old american books is a first printing of the proceedings of the very first governors conference held at the invitation of theodore roosevelt in 1908 the subject was the conservation of america s natural resources in my private dining room at the white house i have a picture of theodore roosevelt and all those governors signed by all the governors with whom i served in 1992 when i was elected president that first governor s conference remains one of the most important ever held in the white house so much of what we ve done as a nation to conserve our natural resources extends from that day peter s grandfather was a guiding spirit behind that conference theodore roosevelt himself said of gifford pinchot if it hadn t been for him this conference neither would have nor could have been called gifford pinchot used to say that we must prefer results to routine i like that a lot and let me say that in my view no one illustrates that principle in our public life today better than mike dombeck who has done such a remarkable job of returning the forest service to the vision of stewardship on which it was founded and i thank you sir thank you a century ago when mr pinchot was first dreaming up his plan to protect our forests this vista looked very different than what we see today in fact it was more wasteland than forest according to one eyewitness and i quote weather white ghosts of trees stood on the desolate slopes as a pitiful battle scared fragment of the glory that was once a virgin forest not only were the slopes nearly bare tanneries and dye plants had poisoned the lakes and the mountain streams the deer and black bear and turkey nearly were wiped out the land and water were so thoroughly abused that most people thought the area had no value at all i know that they don t agree with that now because we have so many of the fine local officials from this area show up here today i thank them for their presence and they can be proud of what they represent visionaries like theodore roosevelt and gifford pinchot the other men and women of the forest service who have cared for this land since 1917 made those dark descriptions a part of history nowadays hundreds of thousands of visitors come here every year to hike swim bike hunt fish or just to breathe the fresh air and take in the beautiful sights the land that once no one wanted is now a thriving forest everyone can enjoy this kind of land has been important to me since i was a boy where i learned by walking the ozark and quachita national forests of my home state that national forests are more than a source of timber they are places of renewal of the human spirit and our natural environment at the dawn of the new century we have the opportunity to act on behalf of these forests in a way that honors the vision of our forbears roosevelt and pinchot within our national forests there are large parcels of land that don t contain roads of any kind and in most cases never have from the beautiful stretch of the alleghenys that we see here to the old growth canyonlands of tahoe national forest these areas represent some of the last best unprotected wildland anywhere in our nation they offer unparalleled opportunities for hikers hunters and anglers they re absolutely critical to the survival of many endangered species as you have just heard and i think it s worth pointing out they are also very often a source of clean and fresh water for countless communities they are therefore our treasured inheritance today we launch one of the largest land preservation efforts in america s history to protect these priceless back country lands the forest service will prepare a detailed analysis of how best to preserve our forests large roadless areas and then present a formal proposal to do just that the forest service will also determine whether similar protection is warranted for smaller roadless areas that have not yet been surveyed through this action we will protect more than 40 million acres 20 percent of the total forest land in america in the national forests from activities such as new road construction which would degrade the land we will ensure that our grandchildren will be able to hike up to this peak that others like it across the country will also offer the same opportunities we will assure that when they get to the top they ll be able to look out on valleys like this just as beautiful then as they are now we will live up to the challenge theodore roosevelt laid down a century ago to leave this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us it is very important to point out that we are not trying to turn the national forests into museums even as we strengthen protections the majority of our forests will continue to be responsibly managed for sustainable timber production and other activities we are once again determined to prove that environmental protection and economic growth can and must go hand in hand let me give you an example because i ve seen a lot of people already saying a lot of terrible things about what i m doing today and how it is going to end the world as we know it this initiative should have almost no effect on timber supply only five percent of our country s timber comes from the national forests less than five percent of the national forests timber is now being cut in roadless areas we can easily adjust our federal timber program to replace five percent of five percent but we can never replace what we might destroy if we don t protect these 40 million acres as the previous speaker said today s action is the latest step taken under the administration of vice president gore and me to expand our children s natural treasures over the past six and a half years we ve protected millions of acres from the yellowstone to the everglades from the ancient redwoods of headwaters to the red rock canyons of utah we re working now to save new mexico s spectacular baca ranch as secretary babbitt has said many times our administration has now protected more land than any in the history of the country except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt i have also proposed an unprecedented 1 billion lands legacy initiative with permanent funding over the years to guarantee for the first time ever a continuing fund for protecting and restoring precious lands across america this initiative represents the largest investment in protecting our green and open spaces since president theodore roosevelt set our nation on this path nearly a century ago it would allow us to save civil war battlefields remote stretches of the historic lewis and clark trail nearly half a million acres in california desert parks and wilderness areas it will also allow us to meet the stewardship challenges of the new century by helping communities save small but sacred spaces closer to home unfortunately this congress seems intent on walking away from this opportunity they re trying to slash lands legacy funding by a full two thirds this year alone with no action at all to ensure permanent funding in the years ahead this is not an isolated case unfortunately once again the leaders of the republican majority are polluting our spending bills with special interest riders that would promote overcutting in our forests allow mining companies to dump more toxic waste on public land and give a huge windfall to companies producing oil on federal lands i have vetoed such bills before because they were loaded up with anti environmental riders if necessary i will do so again so as congress completes its work on the interior bill again i ask the leadership to send me a clean bill that adequately funds the lands legacy initiative and other priorities but let me be clear if the interior bill lands on my desk looking like it does now i will give it a good environmental response i will send it straight back to the recycling bin ever since that first governors conference back in 1908 conservation has been a cause important enough to americans to transcend party lines i hope somehow we can make it a bipartisan even a nonpartisan issue again theodore roosevelt was a great republican president franklin roosevelt was a great democratic president president nixon signed a bill creating the environmental protection agency over and over again in the last seven years in which i have had the honor to serve as president i have worked with people who were both democrats and republicans on conservation issues again i have the feeling that this is not a partisan issue anywhere but washington d c and perhaps in a few other places throughout the country we can t afford that when i was a boy growing up in my hometown it was in a national park and i could never be in the downtown of my hometown which was a big city by arkansas standards 35 000 people that even if you were anywhere downtown you weren t more than five minutes walk from the woods i know what this can mean to our children and our future when i was governor i was proud that after leaving office after 12 years we had a higher percentage of our land in arkansas was timberland than it was on the day that i took office for the first time and we always did this across party lines no state was more active in using the nature conservancy to buy land and set it aside and we always did it across party lines when people walk through these woods and run into one another they may talk a lot of things but i ll bet you very few of them say are you a republican or a democrat i ll bet you ve never asked anybody that on a mountain trail we want this for our children forever and it is important that we set a good example earlier mr pinchot talked about the deterioration of the rain forests and the loss of biodiversity around the globe if we want to help other people meet those challenges and the even larger challenge of climate change we have to set a good example we have the wealth and security to do it we also have no excuse because now we have the scientific knowledge and the technical means to grow the economy while we improve the environment it is no longer necessary to grow a modern economy by destroying natural resources and putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in fact we can create more jobs by following a responsible path to sustainable development so i hope this day will be important not only for our forestland but the preservation of fresh water and biodiversity and recreational opportunities i hope it will be the first step in america resuming a path of responsible leadership toward the environmental future we will increasingly share with our neighbors all across the globe and i hope all of you will always be very proud of the role you have played in this special day thank you very much dem wjclinton13 10 99b bill_clinton thank you let me say first it s good to be back i want to thank al from and senator joe lieberman and i have seen senator robb and senator breaux i understand senator landrieu is here i saw cal dooley and i know there are some other members of the house here my former chief of staff and envoy to latin america mack mclarty is here i saw harris wofford who has done a magnificent job with our national service program and i know there are a lot of others here but i want to say something about sam fried the gentleman who introduced me first of all he gave a good speech didn t he i mean he s got a great gift in capturing our vision and he also did the nicest thing imaginable he said how much he liked my phrase about putting a human face on the global economy which i use three times a day he didn t tell you the truth he gave me that phrase sam fried so he could either be a speechwriter or a senate candidate from ohio or anyplace else he wants to run but i think we need to recruit people from the private sector to run for office with the dlc message and thank you my longtime friend this conference is designed to talk about trade in the global economy in the information society and i want to talk about that tonight but i want to try to put it into some sort of context i began a conversation with many of you and led by and prodded by al from 15 years ago now tonight we know some things about the third way and about our credo of opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community of all americans we know some things tonight about that that we only believed 15 years ago we know that if this credo is translated into meaningful ideas and real policies that it s not only good politics it s very good for america in 1992 when al gore and i went before the american people we made an argument and that s all it was it was an argument we said we want to put people first we want a country that s run by opportunity responsibility and community we want a new economic policy we want a new crime policy we want a new welfare policy we want a new environmental policy we want a new foreign policy we want to make america strong america united america a responsible partner and leader for peace and prosperity and security in the world and it was just an argument thank goodness it was a good enough argument under the circumstances to win the election thanks to an awful lot of you tonight it is not an argument anymore we took those ideas we took the specific commitments of policy we implemented them we did what we said we would do in our very specific campaign and i ve got to say something parenthetically because i owe this to a lot of you in the dlc i ve always believed ideas matter but when i ran for president i violated all the conventional wisdom we made more specific commitments on more issues than any candidate ever had who was a nominee of a major party and a scholar of the presidency thomas patterson said that we had kept a higher percentage of those commitments even though we made a larger number of them than any of the previous five presidents and what really mattered to me is when i went back to new hampshire in february of this year on the seventh anniversary of the new hampshire primary people there who pay attention to what you say because you have to ask every individual 14 times for his or her vote or you can t play there and i love the place you know it was like running back home but person after person after person came up to me on the street that day not at the democratic party event at night on the street and said mr president it s a good thing we ve got an they had an unemployment rate of below 2 5 percent they said things are good here but the thing we really appreciate is you did what you said you would do it would not have been possible if i had not been part of the dlc it would not have been possible if we hadn t thought through in advance what it was we wanted to do if we hadn t gone from an identification of our guiding values to an analysis of the situation to a description of what we wanted to achieve to a strategy to specific tactics this organization made that possible so let me say first of all it s not an argument anymore the results are in we have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest crime rates in 26 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years the highest home ownership in history the longest peacetime expansion in history it is not an argument any more it works and you should be proud of that the other thing i want to say is a lot of our specific ideas have worked the vice president s leadership in reinventing government has given us the smallest federal establishment since 1962 even though the most active executive initiatives in memory we have proved you could grow the economy and protect the environment i went down to virginia today to a national forest and announced that we were going to close 40 million acres of the nearly 200 million acres of national forest to roadbuilding to preserve water quality and biodiversity and recreational quality we have proved that you can empower poor people to make the most of their own lives with the earned income tax credit the empowerment zone program the community development financial institutions and now the new markets initiative americorps which was a dlc idea national service has now enlisted over 100 000 young people in the service of our country at the community level in five years a goal that took the peace corps 20 years to reach we also supported the brady bill we supported the family and medical leave law two bills vetoed in the previous administration and all of the objections to them turned out to be wrong so i say to you you can be proud of that we pursued an aggressive policy to become engaged in the rest of the world to recognize that we live in an interdependent world in which we ought to lead and whether it has been pursuing peace from the balkans to the middle east to northern ireland to building self capacity to prevent hardship through the africa crisis response initiative to give the african nations the capacity to prevent future rwandas to developing economic capacities in poor countries to our efforts to combat terrorism and the spread of the weapons of mass destruction we have made progress and i thank you all for that now by contrast it is interesting to me to watch the debate in the present election which i m not a part of and to see how people try to say well maybe there can be a new republican party like there is a new democratic party remember this they re like we were in 92 it s just an argument the democratic party a heavy majority of the democratic party has come together to move forward but their party still is overwhelmingly including all those people they ve got running for president they supported that tax cut which would have completely undermined our ability to save social security and medicare and get this country out of debt over the next 15 years and which they said they could pay for even though now they admit they can t even pay for the money they ve already spent this year they all stuck with the nra and the republican congressional leadership when we tried to close the gun show loophole after we proved that background checks do not undermine people s legitimate hunting and sporting interests they re over there opposing the hate crimes legislation in the face of painful evidence that we are still in the grip of bigotry they re not for the employment non discrimination act we see that on so many other issues on education we re for high standards no social promotion making failing schools turn around or close down and thousands of charter schools they re still hawking vouchers even though we know the federal government only provides 7 percent of the total educational expenditures in the first place on health care they re out there all against the patients bill of rights even though they re own members who were doctors in the house of representatives couldn t bear the position that the party had taken so i would say to you i m proud of where we are i m proud of where the democrats are i m proud of where our party has gone and i still believe that when it comes to defining the future the american public will be with the new democratic party instead of the right wing of the republican party which is driving their agenda and we saw it again tonight when they rejected on a party line vote the comprehensive test ban treaty after it had been ratified by 11 of our nato allies including britain and france nuclear powers endorsed by the president and four former chiefs of staff of the joint chiefs of staff 32 nobel laureate physicists the heads of our own nuclear weapons labs they basically said don t bother me with that i just don t think it s good and it now has come out of course that there was a partisan commitment to vote against the treaty by more than enough to defeat it before it was ever brought up and anybody ever heard the first argument we are trying to work with republicans independents and democrats to move this country forward that is the difference in the new democratic party and we are still confronting a level of extremism and partisanship which is truly chilling for the long term interests of america but tonight i ask you not to think about our differences with the republicans but to think about the one remaining issue on which we have not forged a consensus within our party and that is how we re going to respond to globalization to the global economy the information age and the whole nature of how we relate to other countries in terms of economics the environment and trade for all of our changes we had overwhelming majorities of both parties in both houses voted for the balanced budget act overwhelming majorities of our party in both houses voted for welfare reform we are still not of one mind and we do not have a consensus on the way forward with trade so tonight i would like to talk to you about what i think we should do and where i think we should be not only because i think we have serious responsibilities to the rest of the world but because we know that until the asian financial crisis 30 percent of our growth in this marvelous expansion came from the expansion of trade and the opportunities that we found there i believe a strong properly constructed global trading system is good for all the nations of the world i know it s good for america because of the evidence of what has happened here today the worst of the global financial crisis is behind us and i think the time has come to take an important step forward i believe we can make our economy even stronger and make open trade an even greater force for peace and prosperity in the new century i know some believe that isolating ourselves from the world will shield us from the forces of change that are causing so much disruption so much instability and so much inequality i understand why they fear it but i disagree that they can hide from it america can only seize the problems of the new century if we shoulder our responsibility to lead to a responsible system of worldwide trade if we fulfill that responsibility if we lead boldly and resolutely pairing solid principles with concrete proposals we can fulfill our promise in the global economy and help other people as well we can create for billions of people the conditions that allow them to work and live and raise their families in dignity and i might add we can give those nations the kind of greater prosperity necessary to have more responsible environmental and public health policies we can expand the circle of opportunity share the promise of prosperity more widely than ever and in so doing also help to bring down walls of oppression in other countries we can in short put a human face on the global economy how are we going to do it and how are we going to begin in a little more than a month s time in seattle washington our nation will host a gathering of leaders from government business labor and civil society that meeting of the world trade organization will launch a new round of global trade talks that i called for in my state of the union address last january we ve had eight such rounds in the last 50 years helping trade to grow 15 fold worldwide it s no coincidence that this period has seen the most rapid sustained economic growth ever recorded every trade round in this half century has served to expand frontiers of opportunity to expand the circle of prosperity and the rule of law and the spread of peace i want the round we launch in seattle to do the same but i also want it to be a new kind of trade round for a new century a round that is about jobs and development a round about broadly shared prosperity about improving the quality of life and work around the world i want to ensure that the global trading system of the 21st century honors our values and meets our goals of course different nations will bring different perspectives and different interests to reach a truly global agreement of course we ve got to work together in good faith america will do its part tonight i want to set out our agenda for seattle and the ways we intend to expand opportunity from the world s oldest business farming to its newest electronic commerce first we want to ensure that in this round agriculture is treated as fairly as other sectors in the global economy that s long overdue in america farmers are the lifeblood of our land as they are in so many other places they help to fuel our unprecedented prosperity unfortunately too few of our farmers are reaping the bounty they themselves have sown flood and drought and crop disease as well as the financial crisis in asia have threatened the livelihoods not only of many farmers but of some entire farm communities every american has a stake in the strength of agriculture so let s be clear one way we can revive the rural economy in america is to open markets abroad the family farmer in america finds trade not an abstraction it is vital to the bottom line and to their survival america is the largest exporter of agricultural products in the world one in every three acres planted here is growing food for abroad five years ago during the last trade round we joined with our trading partners to put agriculture on the wto s agenda in seattle we should move forward fairly but aggressively to expand our opportunities for farmers and ranchers we must eliminate export subsidies all farmers deserve a chance to compete on the quality of their goods not against the size of other countries government grants in the european union fully half of the overall budget is spent on agricultural subsidies the eu accounts for 85 percent of the world s farm export subsidies 85 percent this stacks the deck against farmers from arkansas to argentina to africa in seattle we ll work to end this unfair advantage and level the playing field at the same time we have to lower tariff barriers tariffs remain much too high and on average they re five times higher abroad than they are in america and we must work to reduce the domestic supports that distort trade by paying farmers to overproduce and drive prices down these steps will help farmers to produce the vast and varied variety of food for the best possible prices the benefits will accrue not just to them but to the global fight against hunger and malnutrition we should also see that the promise of biotechnology is realized by consumers as well as producers and the environment ensuring that the safety of our food will be guaranteed with science based and transparent domestic regulation and maintaining market access based on that sound science second we can lift living standards worldwide if we level the playing field for goods and services manufacturing remains a powerful engine of our own economic growth it generates nearly a fifth of our gdp and two thirds of our exports it employs more than 18 million americans in good jobs this sector has grown since 1992 accelerated greatly by expanded trade boosted by agreements made at previous trade rounds if the asian crisis has hurt our manufacturers and it certainly has it s because expanded trade is vital to their economic health and it will remain so since 1948 we have cut major industrial nations tariffs on manufactured goods by 90 percent where they remain too high we can do better beginning in seattle where we ll join other nations in pressing to lower barriers even further some entirely and immediately eight key industries from environmental technology to medical instruments to chemicals to toys stand ready to take this step now they account for nearly a third of our exports so let s take that step at seattle and set ambitious goals for other manufacturing sectors and there s one special aim we should achieve at seattle we should follow the lead of korea and hungary and work together on an agreement to promote transparent procedures and discourage corruption in the 3 1 trillion government procurement market worldwide we should set equally ambitious goals for services trade is no longer just agricultural and manufactured goods it s construction and distribution and entertainment america is the world s largest exporter of services in quantity and quality and though we ve made really important advances in agreements on financial and communication services too many markets remain closed to us in seattle i want to open those markets more fully and unlock the full creative and entrepreneurial potential of our people third we have to have a trading system that taps the full potential of the information age the revolution in information technology can be the greatest global force for prosperity in this century last year in the u s alone electronic commerce totaled about 50 billion that number may reach 1 4 trillion in three years three years later almost half our work force will either be employed by the new information industries or rely on their services and products around the world the number of internet users may reach 1 billion in five years now currently no country charges customs duties on telephone calls fax transmissions e mail or computer links when they cross borders that s the way it should be the lines of communication should not crackle with interference last year the world s nations joined the u s in placing a moratorium on tariffs on e commerce in seattle we should pledge to extend that ban and reach a second agreement to eliminate remaining tariffs on the tools of the high tech revolution fourth as i have often said in the immortal words of sam fried we must put a human face on the global economy we re democrats we ve got to make sure this deal works for ordinary people we need to ensure working people everywhere feel they have a stake in global trade that it gives them a chance for a better life that they know that spirited economic competition will not become a race to the bottom and labor standards and environmental pollution i know to people in some nations open trade seems at odds with these basic human goals but i think the opposite is true a strong system of trade and a dialogue like the one we ll begin in seattle are our best means to achieve those goals for those of us who believe the global economy can be a force for good our defining mission must be to spread its benefits more broadly and to make rules for trade that support our values it is nothing more than an international commitment to doing what we re trying to do here with the new markets agenda and with the empowerment zones i really believe if we work it right we can bring the benefits of enterprise to the people and the places in america that have not yet felt it from appalachia to the mississippi delta to the indian reservations to the inner cities and i feel that way about the rest of the world so i ask you to support our efforts to have international organizations work to protect and enhance the environment while expanding trade and to have a decent regard for the need to have basic labor standards so that people who work receive the dignity and reward of work the american agenda in seattle includes a thorough review of the round s environmental impact as well as win win opportunities that benefit both the economy and the environment we will continue to ensure that wto rules recognize our right to take science based health safety and environmental measures even when they are higher than international standards in seattle the wto should also create a working group on trade and labor and i know you re going to have some labor people here tomorrow and i congratulate you on that we have got to keep working on this and banging our heads together until we reach a consensus that is consistent with the reality of the modern world and its opportunities and consistent with the values that we both share how can we deny the legitimacy or the linking of these issues trade and labor in a global economy i think the wto should commit to collaborate more closely with the international labor organization which has worked so hard to protect human rights and to ban child labor and with the international environmental organization to facilitate this process in the last year or so i have gone to geneva twice once to talk about new trade rules for the global economy and once to meet with the ilo to talk about the necessity of banning child labor everywhere in the world this organization needs to be on the forefront of integrating our objectives and trying to build a global economy that will promote open trade and open prosperity and lift the standards of living and the quality of life for people throughout the world they should be reenforcing efforts not efforts in conflict i also believe that the wto itself has got to become more open and accessible you know every ngo just about with an environmental or a labor ax to grind is going to be outside the meeting room in seattle demonstrating against us telling us what a terrible thing world trade is now i think they re dead wrong about that but all over the world when issues come up a lot of people representing these groups have some legitimate question or legitimate interest in being heard in the debate and the wto has been treated for too long like some private priesthood for experts where we know what s right and we pat you on the head and tell you to just go right along and play by the rules that we reach the world doesn t work that way anymore this open world we re trying to build where anybody can get on the internet and say anything is a rowdy raucous place and if we want the world trading system to have legitimacy we have got to allow every legitimate group with any kind of beef whether they re right or wrong to have some access to the deliberative process of the wto and i hope you will support that finally let me say we have got to expand the family of nations that benefit from trade and play by the rules in seattle and beyond we have to be guided by franklin roosevelt s vision a basic essential to a permanent peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in the world freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want it was this understanding that led the generation of postwar leaders to embrace what was still a revolutionary idea that freedom not just of commerce but of governments and ideas and human transit was the surest route to prosperity for the greatest number of people this new round should promote development in places where poverty and hunger still stoke despair we just went over i think in the last 24 hours 6 billion people on the face of the earth half of them live on 2 a day or less 1 3 billion live on 1 a day or less one of the reasons that i want to expand the reach of global trade is because i want more people to be able to lift themselves up one of the reasons i want to expand the reach of global technology is that i believe if we work to bridge the digital divide here at home and around the world we can help poor people in poor countries skip 20 or 30 or 40 years in the ordinary pace of development because of the explosion of technology and i believe we can prove to them that they can grow a middle class and grow a wealthy country without having to pollute the atmosphere as their forebears did in the industrial era i believe that but for those who share our views and our party we must make clear there is no easy way to this we can t get this done if we re not willing to build a global economic system and tear down these trade barriers and trade with people more and give them access to our markets and try to get our technology and our investments into their markets and build the right kind of partnership we can t just say we want all these things and then always find some reason to be against whatever trade agreement is worked out we have got to have a global trading system and we re either going to keep pushing it forward or we re going to fall behind let me just say to kind of amplify this there are some specific things that i hope we will do to show that we re acting in good faith i hope we will get congressional approval in this session of congress to expand our trade with africa and the caribbean basin i have proposed two initiatives there there is broad bipartisan support for it i hope and pray we will get that out of this session of congress i hope we will bring more countries into the wto in seattle thirty three nations are applying for wto membership today two thirds once had communist command and control economies it is remarkable and hopeful to all the listen to this albania estonia georgia kyrgyzstan and mongolia wanting to enter the world trading system this is not charity this is an economic and political imperative it is good for us because we want more trading partners never forget your country has 4 percent of the world s people and 22 percent of its wealth we ve got to sell something to the other 96 percent if we want to hold on to our standard of living and the more people we bring into our network of possibility the better they do the better we ll do it is very very important to remember this it s also important to remember that as these countries that are new to the experience of freedom and the rule of law and cooperation with other nations that has no element of coercion in it they are new to all this the more they have chance to be a part of it the more they will like it and the more they will become a part of an international system of democracy and law that is so important to the future of our children in that same spirit i am still determined to pursue an agreement for china to join the wto on viable commercial terms again not as a favor but to reinforce china s efforts to open to reform its markets to subscribe to the rules of the global trading system and inevitably as more and more people have access to more information more and more contacts to feel that stability comes from openness and not repression of thought or religion or political views what is at stake here is more than the spread of free markets or the strength of the global economy even more than the chance to lift billions of people into a worldwide middle class it is a chance to move the world closer towards genuine interdependence rooted in shared commitments to peace and reconciliation this is a moment of great promise a moment where we have to lead a lot of things happen in this country that send mixed signals to people around the world that i regret and most of them come out of the initiative of the other party in congress the failure to pay our u n dues the failure to embrace the comprehensive test ban treaty the abysmal budget for foreign affairs when we can spend a little money in helping our neighbors and get untold benefit and the zeroing out of our market oriented initiative to meet our responsibilities to reduce global warming but one thing is still on our plate we have not granted renewed fast track authority we are not pursuing the free trade area of the americas we haven t yet passed the africa trade initiative and the caribbean basin one although i think we might get that done because in our party we have not been able to resolve these conflicts they ve got a lot more work to do in their party than we do in ours as i explained at the outset we have worked through where we are on budget discipline on economic management on foreign policy on environmental policy on crime policy on education policy on health care policy there has been an enormous modernization of the thinking and direction of the democratic party and we can be proud of it but we can t go to the american people and say we have a whole vision for the future that will be a unifying vision until we get over this one last big hump this is an exciting issue and it is a difficult issue and the labor people who will come here tomorrow have real interests at stake which ought to be heard the environmental community people have real interests at stake which ought to be heard but we re going to globalize one way or the other and we ll be at the front of the line or the back or somewhere in the middle and i believe it is profoundly in our interest and in the interests of the world for america to be leading the pack and i promise you if we take initiative it will lead to a cleaner environment and higher labor standards and more values that are consistent with ours including letting more people be part of the process so what you are doing here is real real important it s our last big challenge to be the party that reflects the values the heart and the dreams of 21st century america good luck and god bless you thank you dem wjclinton13 11 98 bill_clinton thank you very much and good morning ladies and gentlemen because this is the only time i m going to be before the press today at the outset of my remarks i d like to say a few things about the situation in iraq for more than three months the united states and the international community have very patiently sought a diplomatic solution to iraq s decision to end all its cooperation with the u n weapons inspectors iraq s continued refusal to embrace a diplomatic peaceful solution its continued defiance of even more united nations resolutions makes it plainer than ever that its real goal is to end the sanctions without giving up its weapons of mass destruction program the security council and the world have made it crystal clear now that this is unacceptable that none of us can tolerate an iraq free to develop weapons of mass destruction with impunity still saddam hussein has it within his hands to end this crisis now by resuming full cooperation with unscom just yesterday his own neighbors in the arab world made it clear that this choice is his alone and the consequences if he fails to comply his alone in terms of responsibility now let me say to all of you this is a very good day for the united states i want to thank officer sandra grace from new bedford massachusetts and detective gary mclhinney from baltimore for their service for sharing their stories for representing their organizations so well for reminding us why all of those here have worked so hard to pass the laws that in a few moments i will sign laws to help us honor the memory of law enforcement officers by helping to prevent the kind of gun related crimes that took their lives and by supporting the families they leave behind i d also like to thank secretary rubin attorney general reno director magaw the atf assistant secretary johnson and the others who are here from the treasury and justice departments attorney general curran from maryland who joined us today and a special word of thanks to my good friend senator biden who had to leave and to congressman stupak congressman king who spoke so well and did so much and thank you congressman fox for joining us here today in celebration of the work you did that i hope you ll be proud of all your life sir thank you very much this is a special day for me personally because i was attorney general of my own state i was governor for a dozen years i have spent a lot of hours riding around in state police cars with officers i have been to altogether too many funerals of law enforcement officials killed in the line of duty and because i come from a small state very often i knew these people well i knew their families their children their circumstances just last weekend i went home to dedicate an airport and the first people that came running up to me were the three state police officers who were assigned to work the event and we stood there and relived a lot of old times so this issue is very very vivid and i think again we should thank especially the members of congress who are here the police officers gill gallegos and the fop thomas nee and the national association of police officers jerry flynn the international brotherhood of police officers rich gallo the federal law enforcement officers association sam cabral the international union of police and debbie geary from the concerns of police survivors i d like to ask you all just to give them all another hand six years ago when i became president one of my most urgent priorities was to put the federal government on the side of supporting our police officers and reducing the crime rate at the time the crime rate was on the rise gangs guns and drugs were sweeping through our neighborhoods terrorizing our families cutting off the future of too many of our children the thing that bothered me most when i was out around the country seeking the presidency was that there were so many people who were full of hope and optimism for our country but when it came to crime they seemed almost to have given up to have simply accepted the fact that a rising crime rate was a part of the price of the modern world we were able to galvanize all of us together the energies of the american people to fight back i never met a law enforcement officer who believed that a rising crime rate was inevitable every law enforcement officer i met believed that if we did the right things if we were tough yes but tough was not enough we had to be smart too that if we both punished people who should be punished and did the intelligent things to prevent crime from happening in the first place that the crime rate could go down and we passed in 1994 an historic crime bill along with the brady law which among other things focused on community policing aggressive prevention and tougher penalties for violent repeat offenders now we re ahead of schedule and under budget in putting those 100 000 police on the street we ve gone after gangs and drugs with the full authority of federal law the brady law has prevented about a quarter of a million felons fugitives and stalkers from buying firearms in the first place crime rates have fallen to a 25 year low all across america robbery is down assault is down murder is down respect for the law is on the rise you can see it in little ways fewer broken windows less graffiti cleaner streets in city after city after city we must never forget that this victory was won however at a very high price for some of our law enforcement officials we must never forget that police officers put on their uniforms their badges go to work every day knowing that that day could be their last just by doing their jobs officer bradley arn served on the police force of st joseph missouri for the last seven years he was a cop s cop he patrolled the streets by day and worked his way through college by night at 28 more than anything else he wanted a better life for his wife and his two year old twin daughters on tuesday just a couple of days ago he answered a distress call a career criminal with a semi automatic gun was terrorizing pedestrians he responded to the call and was brutally gunned down according to the police the murderer had a deadly goal he wanted to hurt people in black and white cars wearing dark blue uniforms only the bravery of a fellow officer stopped the shooting spree every year there are too many police officers like bradley arn who make the ultimate sacrifice to keep us safe not very long ago i went up to the capitol to honor the two police officers who were killed there but we have to do more than build monuments to honor these people we have to take action to prevent more needless tragic deaths to work for those who have given their lives and we have to take action to help the families they leave behind two years ago we acted to provide college scholarships to the families of slain federal law enforcement officers last year i pledged to make those same scholarships available to the families of state and local law enforcement officers and all public safety personnel today the legislation i sign honors that pledge from now on children and spouses of public safety officials who lose their lives in the line of duty will be able to apply for nearly 5 000 a year to pay for college tuition i should point out that because virtually 100 percent of these families will be people on very modest incomes they will be eligible also for the 1 500 a year hope tax credit in the first two years of college tax credits for the junior and senior year expanded work study programs student loan programs a student loan program which in most places allows them to pay the loan back as a percentage of the income that they earn and the ira that can be withdrawn from without penalty if the money s used to educate children most of that was the product of the bipartisan balanced budget act of 1997 so we believe that if you look at this scholarship amount with the other things that have been passed in the last couple of years as peter king said with overwhelming bipartisan support democrats and republicans working together on these issues we will be able to protect the families and the children in their education and in so doing to honor the families and the law enforcement officers it s the least we can do and we have to do it the bill i m about to sign was enacted in memory of u s deputy marshal william degan the most decorated deputy marshal in our history who lost his life in a brutal shootout his son billy degan was the first young person to benefit from this program he recently graduated from boston college and he s here with us today i d like to ask him to stand and be recognized now let me say just a brief word about the other legislation that i m going to sign mr mclhinney talked about it i m very proud that we re announcing these scholarships but i can t wait for the day when there is not a single person eligible for one and i think that all of us should think about that we know from painful experience that the most serious threat to the safety of police officers is a criminal armed with a weapon most police officers who lose their lives die from gunshot wounds that s why we fought hard to keep guns off the streets out of the hands of criminals brady background checks as i said earlier have prevented nearly a quarter of a million felons fugitives and stalkers from buying guns last week i announced a new step to close a loophole in the law that makes it easier for gun traffickers and criminals to avoid those checks at private gun shows make no mistake the insidious practice of sidestepping our guns laws is not an idle threat the city of chicago recently concluded an undercover investigation of gun dealing and as you saw i hope in the morning press it has just filed suit alleging widespread practices by gun dealers in the chicago area of selling guns illegally counseling purchasers on how to evade firearms regulations even selling guns to purchasers who say they intend to violate the law we know legitimate gun dealers make every effort to comply with the law but these charges in chicago if proven true would demonstrate that at least some parts of the gun industry are helping to promote an illegal market in firearms such disrespect of our law endangers our people and we will be watching the progress of this lawsuit closely the atf already vigorously investigates gun dealers and other gun traffickers who violate federal laws we will continue to work closely with state and local police to trace the crime guns back to their source and prevent illegal gun sales especially to criminals and juveniles but there is more we can do to protect our communities and police officers you ve heard a little bit of it from detective mclhinney but let me just say again for several years now criminals who have used guns to commit their crimes have been subject to stiff mandatory penalties under federal law and virtually every state law in the country today we go a step further to protect our families and police officers the bill i sign today will add five years of hard time to sentences of criminals who even possess firearms when they commit drug related or violent crimes brandishing the firearm will draw an extra seven years firing it another 10 a second conviction means a quarter century in jail this is very important to try to reduce the threat of violent crime just a couple of days ago on veterans day as i have every year since i ve been president i laid a wreath on the tomb of the unknown servicemen who gave their lives in service to our country today it is with great pride that i stand here with many of our law enforcement officers who every day are prepared to make the same sacrifice together we are working to make america stronger in the 21st century and again let me thank you all now i d like to ask the members of congress and officers grace and mclhinney and mr degan if you would come up here i d like for you to stand with us as we sign the bill please dem wjclinton13 12 00 bill_clinton thank you very much let me first of all thank prime minister blair first minister trimble deputy first minister mallon for their strong leadership and their kind and generous remarks today i am delighted to be with them cherie mrs trimble my longtime friend john hume senator george mitchell who is here the members of the parliament in northern ireland the members of the united states congress and the american delegation over here to my right i thank chris gibson of the civic forum and many others who helped to make this day possible hillary chelsea and i are delighted to be back in northern ireland and here i also can t help noting that this magnificent new arena is new since i was last here in 98 a new team a new sport a new facility a new northern ireland i want to thank the belfast giants for letting us use the arena tonight i understand they don t treat their opponents as kindly as me and i thank them for that thank you believe it or not i actually read in the press this reference that said that since i ll be out of work soon that if i can skate and shoot and i m not very expensive the giants would consider offering me a position well i m used to absorbing blows but that s about the only qualification i have senator mitchell however comes from maine where they play hockey all the time and i think you should consider offering him a position he is very well suited for it let me say to all of you i have been honored to be involved in the quest for peace here for almost eight years now it has been not a passing interest but a passion for me and my administration and as many as you know for my family as well and i want to say a special word of thanks to my wife and to the women here in northern ireland who have worked with her through the vital voices program and other things to try to make a contribution to the peace i came here five years ago for the first time now i am back on my third visit no other american president can say that i want you to know that i m here not just because i have irish roots like millions of americans and not simply because i love the land and the people i believe in the peace you are building i believe there can be no turning back i believe you are committed to that and i think it s very important that people the world over see what you are doing and support you along the way some of you may know i left dublin yesterday and i had to drive to dundalk for this rally we had last night and there were one or two people there we had this vast crowd of enthusiastic supporters of the peace and because the weather was too bad for me to helicopter there and i drove apparently some people thought i was going to drive from there to belfast so i want to give a special word of thanks to the thousands of people in armagh who waited along the road i m sorry i wasn t there if i d known you were there i would have been there but thank you for supporting the peace process let me say to the leaders who are here and the others who were involved with the development of the good friday accord back in 1998 i remember it very well i remember how hard prime ministers blair and ahern and george mitchell and all the leaders here worked on the good friday accord i remember time and time again being called saying that this or that problem had arisen and maybe the agreement couldn t be reached and just before dawn on good friday when the final momentum was building one of your leaders said to me in a very tired voice i ll never forget it this is a life and death meeting and then he added but we ll make it happen when they did i remember saying to that person go and claim your moment that is what i have to say today after the good friday accord was reached the people of northern ireland sealed it in an overwhelming vote for peace and so i say it is still for you to claim your moment look what has happened a local government representing all the people everyday problems addressed by local ministers who answer to local citizens across party lines i might add as i have personally witnessed an executive that has adopted a budget and a program of government and along the way all the sort of messy squabbles and fights that you expect in a democracy i mean look at us we ve been doing it in america for 224 years and as you might have noticed we still have these minor disagreements from time to time i ask you to remember this the difficulties of sharing power in a free peaceful democratic system are nothing compared to the difficulties of not having any power at all or of living with constant insecurity and violence it s easy to overlook that when people are in war they measure the progress by counting victims when people are involved in peaceful endeavors it s easy to forget to measure because the measurement is in pain avoided how many children are alive today in northern ireland because deaths from sectarian violence are now a small fraction of what they were before the good friday accords how many precious days of normality have been tell you what i ll make you a deal i ll listen to you if you let me finish thank you thank you i think he rejected the deal i ll tell you what i ll make you a deal i ll ignore him if you will thank you how many days of normality have you gained because the checkpoints on the border aren t there anymore because honest people can go to a pub or a school or a church without the burden of a search or the threat of a bomb you have spent so many years mourning your losses i hope you will now celebrate with pride and defend with passion the progress you have made just look at this arena here ten years ago i m not sure you could have gotten the investment necessary to build this arena or to revitalize the entire laganside area but over the five years just passed as hopes for peace have grown the economy has grown manufacturing up 27 percent foreign investment almost 70 percent the number of american firms growing from 40 to 100 22 000 new jobs there alone more people coming in than moving out once president kennedy said that happiness is i quote the full use of your powers along lines of excellence today more and more young people have a chance to fully use their powers along lines of excellence here at home of course there are still challenges to spread opportunity to the most disadvantaged to integrate into the mainstream those who have turned their backs on violence but bitter old divisions are falling away a few months ago students from st joseph s college and knockbreda high school who study a half mile apart met for the very first time and toured the sights of belfast one of them said i always just saw their school badge but never talked to them but when we met we got on brilliant students from both schools are working with their counterparts from mullingar community college in the republic to promote local recycling efforts they re all taking part in civic link an initiative supported by the department of education in the united states give them a hand there this initiative we have supported through the department of education and under your good friend secretary dick riley it has already brought together some 2 000 students and over 70 schools to break down barriers build goodwill and live lives based on tolerance and mutual respect so i thank the ones the students who are here and i hope more will participate now amidst all this momentum why are we having this meeting and why are all you showing up here because we ve still got problems and headaches and i just went through a whole lot of meetings about it two years ago george mitchell said that implementing the good friday agreement would be harder than negotiating it why well first because the devil is always in the details and second because human nature being what it is it s always easier to talk about high minded change than it is to pull it off or even to feel it inside in spite of the overwhelming support for the good friday agreement and the evident progress already brought opponents of peace still try to exploit the implementation controversies to rub salt in old wounds and serve their own ends and others for their own purposes still stand on the sidelines watching and just waiting for something to go wrong well i wanted you all to come together first to show the world that the great majority of the people of northern ireland are still on the side of peace and want it to prevail second to say again to the proponents of violence that their way is finished and third to reaffirm even in this great arena that peace unlike hockey is not a spectator sport no one can afford to sit on the sidelines the progress that the leaders have made has only been possible because they knew when they took risks for peace they were acting on the yearning of the people for peace for years you have made your view clear violence is not the answer peace is the path to justice the good friday accords define that path last week s tragic killings are a brutal reminder of a past we all wish to leave behind that is not completely gone and a sober reminder that failing to move forward risks slipping backward as the promises of the good friday accords are fulfilled or deferred trust between the parties will rise or fall we have seen that when trust rises and people work together peace grows stronger and when trust unravels peace is made more vulnerable the people of northern ireland must be clear and unequivocal about your support for peace remember the enemies of peace don t really need your approval all they need is your apathy i do not believe you want northern ireland ever again to be a place where tomorrow s dreams are clouded by yesterday s nightmares the genius of the good friday agreement still remains its core principles of consent equality justice respect for each other and for law and order these ideas are big enough to embody the aspirations hopes and needs of all the people of northern ireland as i said before your progress in putting these principles into practice has truly been remarkable but again we all know there is still much to do before the agreement s vision is fully and finally realized we know for example there must be a full and irrevocable commitment to effecting change only through peaceful means through ballots not bullets that means putting all arms fully finally and forever beyond use last week s ira statement on this topic was a welcome development the follow through will be even more so we welcome the contribution of those paramilitaries observing a cease fire those who reject peace should know there is no place for them to hide based on my conversations with prime minister ahern in dublin yesterday and with prime minister blair today i want to say that the united states will intensify its cooperation with british and irish authorities on counterterrorism to combat groups seeking to undermine the good friday accords through violence we are going to get experts from the three nations together in the near future and the united states will continue to work in a systematic way to do whatever we can to help to root out terrorism and to make this peace agreement take hold now we also know that real respect for human rights must be woven into the fabric of all your institutions the light this will cast is the best guarantee that political violence will disappear that s why it is so important to have a police force that inspires pride and confidence in all the people just before our gathering here i met with victims of the violence quite a large number of them who lost their children their husbands their wives their limbs their livelihood among them was the widow of an ruc officer and the sister of a slain defense attorney together they offer the best testimony to the need to honor those who unjustifiably sacrificed their lives their health or their loved ones we should honor those who have done their duty in the past while making a fresh start toward a police service that will protect serve and involve everyone equally in the years to come finally and maybe most important of all for the vision of the good friday agreement to be fully realized all sides must be fully engaged with each other understanding that they must move forward together or not at all that for one community to succeed the whole community must succeed over the last several hours today i have talked to the parties i m convinced they do all genuinely want this peace process to work they know how far it has come they know how irresponsible it would be to permit it to fail on the basis of our discussion it is clear to me that s what must happen to move the process forward first the patton report must be implemented and on that basis leaders from every part of the community must commit to make the new police service work there must be security normalization and arms must be put beyond use this will lead to a reduction of fear and mistrust on all sides and somehow these processes must take place together giving practical effect on the ground to the rhetorical promise of peace i think we can do this of course it will be difficult but i urge the parties the political parties here the british and irish governments the communities themselves to work out the way forward in the coming days and weeks and we will do all we can to help i have said before to all of you i did two years ago when i was here how profoundly important peace in northern ireland is to the rest of the world this morning when i got up i saw the prime minister of ethiopia on television discussing the agreement the united states helped to broker there between ethiopia and eritrea i have been heavily involved in the middle east for eight years now and in many of the tribal conflicts in africa in a little understood border conflict in the andes and many other places and let me tell you you cannot imagine the impact of the good friday agreement in northern ireland on troubled regions of the world in africa and the middle east in latin america and of course in the balkans where the united states has been heavily involved in my time peace continues to be challenged all around the world it is more important than ever to say but look what they did in northern ireland and look what they are doing in northern ireland in the end there has to be a belief that you can only go forward together that you cannot be lifted up by putting your neighbor down you know i think and i talk in the united states about this a lot our children will live in a completely different world than the one we have known just for example because of the human genome project which is going to give us cures for many kinds of cancers parkinson s alzheimer s and more important will give mothers bringing little babies home from the hospital road maps of their children s genetic make up and future very soon life expectancy in places with decent health systems will be over 90 years and the lives of the young people in this audience i am convinced average life expectancy will rise to 100 years you will seen new sources of energy tapped and new conservation technologies developed that will enable human beings for the first time both to increase wealth and to reduce energy use and global warming ensuring a longer future on this planet for the great grandchildren of the youngest people in this audience today you will be able to you young people travel farther and faster through outer space and cyberspace even than people can today the world will be so different for you now i think the children of northern ireland deserve their fair chance to be a full part of that future i believe the people of northern ireland want that for their children and that means the leaders of northern ireland must find a way to do what is necessary to give that future to your children you know this is the last chance i will have as president to speak to the people of northern ireland let me say to all of you that i have tried to be pretty straightforward today in my remarks and not nearly as emotional as i feel i think you know that i have loved this land and love the work i have tried to do for peace but the issue is not how i feel it s how your kids are going to live i say to all of you it has been a great honor for me it has been an honor for the united states to be involved in the cause of peace in a land that produced the forbearers of so many of present day america s citizens i believe that the united states will be with you in the future i know i will be with you in the future in whatever way i can but in the end i will say again what really matters is not what america does and what really matters is not even all the encouragement you give to people around the world what really matters is what you do and whether you decide to give your children not your own yesterdays but their own tomorrows thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton13 12 93 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen it s a pleasure for me to be here i have looked forward to this conference with great anticipation for some time i want to thank congresswoman margolies mezvinsky for getting this together and for inviting me here i thank president mcpherson and this wonderful institution for hosting us i m delighted that speaker foley and congressman penny are here for the congress and senator kerrey and senator walker your own senator are here to talk about these important issues i want to also thank all the people who helped to put this conference together and to all the people in our administration who were invited and are here participating we pretty much shut the town down in washington today and just sort of came up here to pennsylvania to talk about entitlements this is a very serious subject worthy of the kind of thoughtful attention that it will be given today i hope there will be a great national discussion of the issues that we discuss today and i hope that this will be the beginning of a debate that will carry through for the next several years i ran for president because i thought our nation was going in the wrong direction economically and that our society was coming apart when it ought to be coming together i wanted to work hard to create jobs and raise incomes for the vast mass of americans and to try to bring our country back together by restoring the bonds of family and civility and community without which we cannot hope to pass the american dream on to the students who are here at bryn mawr or the students who will come behind to do this we must all without regard to party or philosophy at least agree to face the real problems of this country 20 years of stagnant wages 30 years of family decline concentrated heavily among the poor 12 years in which our debt has quadrupled but investment in our future has lagged leaving us with twin deficits a massive budget deficit and a less publicized investment deficit the gap between what we need to invest to compete and win and what we are receiving in terms of new skills and new opportunities these things are linked creating jobs in growth requires that we bring down both the budget deficit and the investment deficit high government deficits keep invest interest rates high they crowd out private demands for capital they take more government money to service the debt all this tends to reduce investment productivity jobs and ultimately living standards the deficit increased so dramatically over the last 12 years because of things that happened on the spending side and on the revenue side defense increased dramatically until 1987 but it s been coming down since then quite sharply however the place of defense as we ll see later has been more than overtaken by an explosion in health care cost going up for the government at roughly three times the rate of inflation interest on the debt is obviously increased more when interest rates were high than now but always when the accumulated national debt goes up and the larger number of poor people in our country has inevitably led to greater spending on programs that are targeted to the poor on the revenue side the tax cut of 1981 wound up being roughly twice the percentage of our income that was originally proposed by president reagan as the president and the congress entered into a bidding war and then in 1986 we adopted indexing a principle that is clearly fair but reduced the rate of growth of federal revenues by adjusting people s taxes downward as inflation pushed their incomes upward and finally a prolonged period of very slow growth has clearly reduced government revenues and added to the deficit if you look at this chart you will see that we inherited a deficit that was projected to be actually when i took office for the fiscal year that ended at the end of september above 300 billion it was obvious that and it was headed upward this was the line the blue line here is what i found when i became president it was clear that something had to be done i asked the congress to pass the largest deficit reduction package in history it had 255 billion in real enforceable spending reductions from hundreds of programs now let s make it clear what you mean when you hear the word spending reductions or cuts in washington terms it can mean two things one is a reduction in the rate of increase in government spending from the previous five year budget which is still an increase in spending but not as much as it would have been had the new reduction not taken place the second thing it might mean is what you mean when you say cut which is you spend less than you did before you used the word and it is important to know which one you re talking about however both are good in terms of reducing the deficit over a five year period we not only reduced the rate of increase but actually adopted hundreds of cuts this year the budget year that started on october 1st has less spending than the previous year in 342 separate accounts of the federal budget adjusted for inflation this means a discretionary spending cut of 12 percent over the next five years more than was done under the previous two administrations if this continues according to the wall street journal then by 1998 discretionary spending that is the non entitlement spending and discounting interest on the debt the things that we make decisions on every year will be less than 7 percent of our annual income about half the level it was in the 1960s in addition to the discretionary spending cuts our budget did reduce entitlements making reductions in agricultural subsidies asking upper income recipients of social security to pay more tax on their income lowering reimbursements to medicare providers making other adjustments in medicaid and in veterans benefits now all these cuts are already on the books we are also cutting with the help of the vice president s national performance review over 250 000 positions from the federal payrolls largely by attrition and early retirement over the next five years we re finally attempting to reform the system in ways that will permit us to save billions of more dollars in discretionary spending through reform of personnel budgeting and most importantly procurement systems if the congress will authorize all three of those systematic reforms we also passed some taxes a modest 4 3 cents a gallon gas tax which so far has been barely felt because we have the lowest price in oil in many many years so the price of gasoline has actually dropped since the gas tax was put on we also asked the top 1 2 percent of americans to pay higher income taxes because their incomes went up the most and their taxes dropped the most in the previous 12 years the corporate income tax on corporations with incomes above 10 million a year was raised middle class families will pay slightly less taxes because again of the adjustments for inflation and taxes were cut for 15 million families who worked for very modest wages as a dramatic incentive to get them to continue to chose work over welfare when congresswoman mezvinsky and her colleagues voted for this economic plan they voted for your economic future for lower deficits higher growth and for better jobs they did vote to cut spending they did not vote to raise taxes on the middle class and frankly the kinds of radio ads that have been this is the only political thing i m going to say today but the kind of radio ads that have been run against here in this district do not serve the public interest because they do not tell the truth if somebody wants to say that we should not have raised income taxes on the top 1 2 percent of the american people let them advertise that on the radio if someone wants to say that the corporate income taxes above 10 million a year in income should not have been raised let them advertise that on the radio if someone wants to say that the gas tax was unfair let them advertise that on the radio but do not try to tell the american people there were no budget cuts and they paid all the tax increases because that is simply not true and we have a lot of work to do in this country and a lot of honest disagreements to have we need not expend our energy on other things and if you don t believe that read the front page of the wall street journal this morning that is hardly the house organ of my administration read the front page of the wall street journal this morning talking about the unprecedented cuts that this budget made it does not do anybody any good to continue to assert things about that economic plan that are not true the markets had it figured out that s why interest rates are down and investment is up that s why inflation is down and more jobs have come into this economy in the last 10 months than in the previous four years the markets figured it out all the smoke and mirrors and radio ads in the world couldn t confuse the people that had to make investment decisions and read the fine print that s the good news now let s talk about the continuing problems the real problems the economic plan which the congress adopted represents the red line that s how much less the deficit will be and the aggregate amount between these two lines is how much less our total debt will be by 1998 the yellow line represents where we can go by conservative estimates if the health care plan is adopted you still have an operating deficit and the national debt will still increase by this amount but not by that amount so we are clearly better off with the economic plan we will have to make further cuts by the way to meet this red line we re not done with that we will be better off still if we do something about health care i ll say more about that in a minute but there is still more to be done the debt of this country now is over 4 billion that means our accumulated debt is more than two thirds our annual income it is important that the debt as a percentage of our annual income go down it is way too high much higher than it has been outside of war time it is important that the annual deficit as a percentage of our income go down it will go down under this plan but we can do more to try to reduce the aggregate debt and the deficit as a percentage of our income both of them are too high now let s look at the next chart here i think you all have it out in the audience this chart just basically shows where you money goes when you pay federal taxes or when the government on your behalf borrows money in debt we spend 47 4 percent in entitlements that is what we re here to talk about today about 21 percent on defense it s going down as you ll see in a minute about 18 percent on non defense discretionary which is being held constant and about 14 percent in interest on the national debt let s look at the next chart now this chart gives you an idea of which spending categories are headed in which direction average annual real growth now i want to tell you what this means i haven t lived in washington very long so i still use ordinary meanings for words when you see real on a government chart that means adjusted for inflation you ll never find that in a dictionary but that is what it means in other words these are the numbers adjusted for inflation at a projected inflation growth of more or less three and a half percent a year if you look at that you see defense is going down frankly we re reducing it as much as i think we responsibly can and in fact more than we responsibly can unless congress will pass the procurement reform so the defense department can buy what it needs for our national defense at more efficient prices but i hope that will happen other entitlements we ll come to that in a minute what those other entitlements are they re also going down relative to inflation that is basically the entitlements for the poor and the veterans benefits and agriculture benefits non defense discretionary is a little under zero as you see that s all the investments for education for training for technology for defense conversion for you name it anything for infrastructure for roads anything we spend money on that we have an option not to spend money on that we ll come back to that is going down relative to inflation if there were no inflation numbers here it would actually be just a tiny bit above the line but it is functionally zero for all practical purposes if i want to increase the amount of money for example we spend on head start in pennsylvania by a million dollars we have to cut something else by a million dollars we are not increasing the aggregate amount of this kind of discretionary spending net interests will go up and again this is adjusted for inflation so it is continuing to rise because the amount of the debt is continuing to rise social security will go up again adjusted for inflation this is about this is the population increase effectively in social security there aren t new benefits being added so there will be a couple of percent growth in population between now and 1998 so it will go up by the amount of increasing numbers of people on social security and look what happens to health entitlement it s going up more than twice as much as social security more than three times as much as net interest and everything else is going down now that s what s happening let s go on to the next chart as the chart shows here this is the new revenues we re getting in this year now the new revenues include the tax increases that we just talked about they re about 40 percent of that revenue growth the rest of it s just ordinary increases in tax revenues to the government coming from increasing employment or increasing incomes so it s every year and inflation so every year we get some revenue growth this revenue chart is about 60 percent ordinary revenue growth 40 percent new taxes as you can see the whole thing goes to deficit reduction interest increases and entitlement increases that s where the money went eighty percent of the new revenues including taxes and revenue growth went to deficit reduction and interest increases 20 percent of it went to entitlement increases as you can see that does not leave a great deal of room for any kind of future investments this is something that presumably both senator kerrey and congressman penny will talk about today but there is i think it s fair to say a broad consensus in the congress among republicans and democrats among liberals and conservatives that there are some things on which we are not spending enough money to get us to the 21st century we have put ourselves in a box after the last trying to work our way out of this deficit business so that we do not have the flexibility to make those kind of growth oriented investments in the public sector that is a dilemma so we have two continuing dilemmas if you will one we still got a deficit and a debt problem two there are things which literally over 80 percent of the congress both parties would agree we should invest more in that we simply cannot invest more in because of the problem we have with the budget could we go on now into the next chart let s go into the next chart now this gives you a picture of entitlement spending and i know alice rivlin talked about this a little before and she knows a lot more about it than i ever will but i think it s worth going back over because this is an entitlements conference so it s worth focusing on what an entitlement is and when you hear people use that term what they are so look at this these entitlement programs are programs that provide benefits for people that have certain characteristics people who meet the test of eligibility for the program get it notwithstanding some previously budgeted amount for that program that s why they re called entitlements for example someone who has paid into the social security trust fund along with his or her employer who is 65 becomes entitled to social security you just go to the social security office with the documents that prove you re eligible and you re going to get the check no matter how many other people qualify for social security since it s hard to know in advance exactly how many people will apply for benefits congress doesn t set aside a specific amount of money as it does for the discretionary spending programs instead it simply directs to treasury to make payments to everybody who applies and qualifies for the benefits under the laws there are two main kinds of entitlements and you can just see by looking up here what they are they are the contributory entitlements that is you re entitled to something because you paid into it it s contract oriented social security is a contributory entitlement medicare is a contributory entitlement federal retirement is a contributory entitlement you did the work you put the money aside you get it back then there are the entitlements for those in need or entitlements that are in a special category because you can t predict how much is going to be needed every year the entitlements for those in need would include afdc supplemental security income the medicaid program medical care for the poor agriculture is in a separate category it has been treated as an entitlement partly because it s so caught up in the global economy it s impossible to predict from year to year how much of the support subsidies will be needed now the contributory retirements are sometimes called middle class entitlements because they benefit everybody the middle class or mr peterson will tell you in a few minutes the upper middle class or the wealthy if you pay in you get it back plus a cost of living increase now the poor people s entitlement i said are mostly in the category of like afdc and food stamps and medicaid but let me show you something about these entitlements because most people i think don t know this social security is 43 percent of the total medicare is 18 percent medicaid is 11 percent federal retirement is 8 percent unemployment is 5 percent obviously it goes up or down depending on what the unemployment rate is and how long people are unemployed food stamps are 4 percent other is 11 percent in the other you have agriculture veterans supplemental security income which is for lower income elderly people and afdc the welfare program of this 11 percent is 2 percent the average monthly welfare benefit in america is actually lower today adjusted for inflation than it was 20 years ago the program is more expensive because there are more poor people but i think it s quite interesting to point that out most people are surprised to know that the welfare budget is about two percent of the entitlements or about one percent of the overall federal budget now the entitlement programs for the needy as you can see make up about 12 percent of the whole budget or about a quarter of the entitlement spending the biggest entitlements are social security and medicare they are about 61 percent of the total when you add federal civilian retirement and military retirement you ve got over two thirds of the retirements there of the entitlements there now i think it s important to point out just in passing that behind every one of these entitlements there s a person that s why it s so controversial when they re debated in congress it s not just organized interest groups there are people who believe they are literally entitled to receive something back that they paid into it is the middle class entitlements that have united us and brought us together that also have the strongest constituencies and provoke the biggest controversies when we get into dealing with this and these programs are also very important in human terms and i just might mention too the if you look at medicare before medicare there was a good chance that americans when they got older would need charity care would simply do without health care today nearly 34 million people go to see a doctor or get medical care because of the medicare program social security has changed literally what it means to be old in the beginning of 1985 for the first time in our history the percentage of our elderly people who were above the poverty line was better than the percentage of the population as a whole in other words the poverty rate for the elderly was lower than the poverty rate of the general population it is very difficult to say that this was a bad thing that was i argue a good thing we should not view this whole program in other words as welfare it is not a welfare program does that mean that there should be no changes in it no it just means that we should be very sensitive about the fact that this is something that has worked because of these programs we are a healthier people we are a more unified country we treat out elderly with greater dignity by having allowed them to earn a decent retirement and to maintain a middle class standard of living independent of whatever their children are required to do and to make them more independent over the long run this is a huge deal in a country where the fastest growing group of people in percentage terms are people over 80 years of age this is a big deal now i recommended exposing more of the incomes of the top 10 or 12 percent of social security recipients somewhere in that range to taxation and congress adopted a modified version of that plan that was an entitlements move i thought it was an appropriate thing to do because a lot of people in upper income levels by definition have other sources of income too and will get back what they paid into social security plus reasonable interest growth in a reasonably short period of time so i thought it was fair to do that we recommended upper income people pay more for medicare benefits i think that is reasonable to do because the medicare payment itself only covers a small percentage of the total cost of medicare where i think we should draw the line however is in trying to have happen to the elderly middle class what is happening to the non elderly middle class all over the world today and certainly in all the advanced countries of the world the middle class is under assault earnings inequality has increased in the last 12 years it is becoming very difficult for working people to sustain a middle class way of life we are going to have to all change we ve got to change our government policies people are going to have to acquire much higher levels of skill and be committed to training for a lifetime there are a lot of things that have to be done but the general policy point i think is valid we do not want to deal with a problem like the deficit which is aggravated because middle class people s incomes have stagnated by having the same sort of income stagnation for the middle class elderly so i think there are things we can do to deal with this they will be discussed later we did some things to deal with the entitlements in the last budget but let us not say that it was a bad thing to dramatically reduce poverty among elderly people or that it is a bad thing for our consumer economy to maintain a large number of middle class people in their retirement years that means that we have to have honest specific and clear discussions of this as unencumbered as possible by these sort of rhetorical bombs flying in the air from the left and the right just talking it through and listening to each other and asking ourselves what will be the practical impact of proposed change a b or c and will we all be more secure will our children and our grandchildren be better off will this help to stabilize and increase the middle class ballast of our society and i think we are on the verge perhaps of having that discussion in no small measure because of this kind of conference now let s go on and let s look at what i think the real problem in the entitlements is is clearly the danger signal for the long run let s look at the next chart as you can see 20 years ago health spending and entitlements medicare and medicaid 13 percent of the total 1983 19 percent of the total 1993 30 percent of the total 2003 43 percent of the total keep in mind and this is with the number of elderly people going up like crazy so the population of people drawing social security is going way up right and still look at that so clearly that is the portion of government spending that is out of control that is the portion of entitlement spending that is out of control now let me just illustrate it by a couple more charts real quickly let s go to the next one non defense discretionary outlays are going down as a percent of our income social security outlays as a percentage of our income is solid stable here it could go up some in the next century is projected to when all the baby boomers go in i heard ms rivlin refer to that as the president s generation i am the oldest of the baby boomers but still you see it s a stable as a percentage of the gross national product and the congress in 1983 after the bipartisan commission on social security made recommendations for fixing social security attempted to keep this number stable by gradually raising the retirement from 65 yo 67 by about a month a year over a prolonged period of time starting just in the next century now let s go on to the last one this chart shows you that unlike social security and discretionary spending medical spending is going up like a rocket medicare and medicaid have tripled since 1982 medicare and medicaid will soon cost more than social security and next year for the first time in large measure because medicaid is a state federal matching program so that every state has to put in money along with the federal government next year for the first time states will spend more money on health care than education and since we and since i supported this i see other present and former governors around this table in the 1980s we said to the national government you ve got a problem with the deficit we ll spend more on education you do what you have to do to deal with your other problems this is a very serious danger signal if you want the states to spend more educating people getting children to the point where they can compete training the work force to have the states all of the sudden spending more on health care than education is a very serious danger signal for the distribution of responsibilities between the state and the federal government now we have some options if we want to control medicare and medicaid spending basically we have some options and to be fair again i want to say during the 1980s under the reagan and bush administration the two administrations and the united states congress did try to cooperate on several things to control medicare and medicaid spending they took total pricing controls away from hospitals and doctors they tried to do a number of things but what happened if you control the price of a given product in this environment what happens providers can provide more products i mean more of the same product right you increase the volume if you lower the price and the money still goes up that s one problem secondly poverty increased in the 80s and is continuing to increase among the poor and the both the idle and the working poor and that drives the medicaid budget up so controlling unit prices didn t work the other thing you could argue that we could do is to try to control the categories within medicare and medicaid basically just spend less in other words even though they re entitlements just say we are going to spend less on certain categories by both controlling volume and price is there a problem with that yes there is what is it any doctor or hospital will tell you that there has been a lot of cost shifting in this health care system and it s one of the causes of rising prices and inefficiency cost shifting largely occurs in two ways when hospitals have to care for people who don t have any insurance or when they provide government funded health care at less than their cost of providing the service they shift the cost onto the private sector so we could bring this deficit down we could do this i want to let s fess up we could do this we could just cut how much we re going to spend on medicare and medicaid even though it s an entitlement in terms of price per unit and volume we can just take er down but if we do that what will happen those costs will be shifted by the health care providers to the people who already are providing insurance with the impact that it will be a hidden tax increase on businesses and on employees employees will probably see it in not getting pay raises they otherwise would have gotten businesses will see it in spending more on health insurance premiums and having less to reinvest in the business or to take in profits i don t think it is fair thing to do that is why our administration has argued that if you really want to solve this problem you have to go back and have comprehensive health care reform this is the only country in the world that doesn t find a way to solve that issue that doesn t give the only advanced nation that is that doesn t give basic health care to all its citizens within a framework that controls costs in the public and private sector we re spending 14 5 percent of our income on health care nobody else is over ten germany and japan are at nine the health outcomes of other countries are roughly similar to ours we can t get down to where they are because we spend more on technology and more on basically costly treatments than other countries do and more on medical research and that s fine and we can t get down to where they do because we have more violence and higher rates of aids and other very expensive diseases than other countries but we could do better and unless we do better in an overall way in my judgement we are going to be in trouble now we had a nonpartisan analysis by the respected firm of lewin vhi last week about our health care plan this company does research on the economics of health care for businesses unions consumer groups it includes people who served in the reagan and bush administrations as budget and health officials they say that our plan will reduce the deficit we think it will reduce it even more than they will i won t get into the details of that today we re here to talk about entitlements the point i want to make is i believe you don t entitlement control you don t get ultimate deficit control unless you do something about medicare and medicaid i believe you don t get that done just by cutting medicare and medicaid unless you want to hurt the private sector therefore i think we have to have some sort of health reform that s what i believe you have to decide if you believe that but i think it s important let me just close with this this is the lead editorial in this morning s washington post it says on the entitlements mess and it says as follows nor have all the entitlements been badly behaved in recent years in terms of costs the health care programs are the budget busters by contrast social security costs have risen in stately fashion with population and inflation and the costs of all the other entitlements taken together including those that support the poor has declined in real terms remember what real means in wa dem wjclinton13 12 96 bill_clinton good afternoon please be seated as president i have worked to keep the american dream alive for all those who are willing to work for it to restore economic growth and to put our nation on the path to long term prosperity one of the accomplishments i m proudest of since 1992 is the way our economic advisors have worked as a team to advance america s interests at home and abroad working together this team has helped to cut our deficit by 60 percent increase our investments in education the environment and technology expand america s exports to record levels and to help our economy create nearly 11 million new jobs today we see new results of that kind of teamwork american negotiators have agreed with the other members of the world trade organization on a landmark information technology agreement the pact that i worked so hard on at the apec meeting in manila recently i am pleased that it will eliminate by the year 2000 all tariffs on computers semiconductors and telecommunications equipment that s a 5 billion cut in tariffs on the american products exported to other nations america leads the world in these industries and this agreement means that there will be extraordinary new opportunities for american businesses and workers so the american people can reap the rewards of the global economy as we move into the 21st century today i m pleased to introduce most of the members of the team that will build on our work the treasury department has never been in better hands bob rubin has been the captain of our economic team for four years first as director of the national economic council and now as secretary of the treasury and i am pleased that he will stay on larry summers will continue as deputy secretary of the treasury and we ll be calling upon his unique policy and analytic skills in an enhanced capacity today i am also naming him as a principal on the national economic council which will benefit greatly from his expertise in domestic and international economic policy as we work toward a balanced budget the office of management and budget will play a critical role because we have to do it in a way that reflects our values and the other policy objectives of this administration frank raines has been on the job there for several months now working hard to reach a bipartisan agreement on a balanced budget plan i am happy to say that after four months he has agreed to stay on the job in a job that is often the biggest headache in town to prepare america for the 21st century we must maintain a strong commerce department in the last four years two exceptionally gifted leaders my friends the late ron brown and mickey kantor have headed that department and turned it into an economic powerhouse for the american people it has promoted american business created american jobs through exports and innovative technologies i understand mickey kantor s desire to return to private life after four grueling years but i regret it very much he is a great talent a great citizen and i will miss him today i am pleased to nominate bill daley of chicago as the new secretary of commerce a man of rare effectiveness a long time civic leader a prominent attorney and business leader as special counsel to the president for the north american free trade agreement he coordinated our administration s efforts to forge a broad bipartisan coalition to pass that landmark trade agreement he embodies the values of hard work and fair play faith and family that will serve him in very good stead as the secretary of commerce second i am pleased to announce my intention to nominate charlene barshefsky to be our united states trade representative a job she has held on an acting basis for eight months she s a tough and determined representative for our country fighting to open markets to the goods and services produced by american workers and businesses her skill is demonstrated by the information technology agreement i just announced she has been negotiating it around the clock in singapore for the last week indeed i m not sure she s had any sleep in the last week but this is a remarkable achievement i m sorry she could not be here but her husband ed cohen and her daughters are with us i spoke to her last night in singapore to congratulate her on this remarkable achievement i know she wishes she could be here and i m very glad she ll be on the job for america finally when i took office four years ago i established for the first time a national economic council to coordinate economic policy to make sure we get the best advice and a range of options as well as new ideas today i am pleased to appoint gene sperling to be the assistant to the president for economic policy and director of the national economic council gene was my chief economic policy advisor in the 1992 campaign he s been deputy director of the nec since its creation he has been central to the development of our budget our tax our education our training policies i rely on him heavily on his knowledge and skill his mind and his heart as all of you know he certainly shows that the work ethic is still alive and well in america indeed i made him promise as a condition of getting this appointment that he would adopt a dramatic new idea in the next few years sleep i suppose if we were giving mvp awards for our economic team gene would have been there in each one of the last four years and i m very proud of his service and excited about his promotion we know that our economic future is increasingly dependent upon mastering the challenges of the global economy today i am pleased to announce that i am appointing dan tarullo to be assistant to the president for international economic policy in his job dan will report to the heads of both the nec and the nsc bringing thus even closer coordination between our foreign and our economic teams he s represented the united states around the world as we have negotiated trade agreements as assistant secretary of state and deputy director of the nec i m also pleased to announce the completion of our foreign policy team our ambassador to the united nations must be someone who can give voice to america s interests and ideals around the world someone who can work to reform the united nations so that it costs less and is prepared to meet its new challenges someone who can not only talk but who can also act effectively all americans have watched admiringly as bill richardson has undertaken the toughest and most delicate diplomatic efforts around the world from north korea to iraq just this week congressman richardson was huddled in a rebel chieftain s hut in sudan eating barbecued goat and negotiating the freedom of three hostages today i am proud to nominate him to be our next ambassador to the united nations to serve in my cabinet and as a principal on our foreign policy team in addition to his already long list of foreign policy achievements he has represented the people of northern new mexico for 14 years now as a member of the house democratic leadership and as one of our nation s most prominent and proud hispanic leaders he told me last night how much he loved the people of his district he and al gore used to compete for who held the most town meetings in the entire congress i know he will serve those constituents and all the american people exceedingly well as the united nations ambassador i m very proud of this team we re making good progress in putting our new people in place and in resolving all the other outstanding questions i hope the senate now will move as quickly as possible to confirm them i was very pleased that in 1993 with only one exception all the members of my cabinet were confirmed the day after the inauguration and i hope we can continue to push through that process finally before our new appointees have a chance to say a few words i know you re all interested in a couple of other matters i have been having talks with a number of other cabinet members as all of you know i have not yet finished my conversations but in the last several days i have spoken with secretary of health and human services donna shalala attorney general janet reno and just this morning our epa administrator carol browner i have asked all of them to stay on in their current jobs we will make those and some other announcements formally soon when i finish my round of interviews so that we can announce the rest of our domestic economic team and the last matter i want to mention is as all of you know jack quinn has announced that he will have to leave the white house as white house counsel because of family obligations jack and i have known each other a long time he and the vice president have known each other a long time i just want to say a word of thanks for the integral and invaluable work he has done as a white house staff member the fine job he has done as counsel to the president he has really been a superb counsel i will miss him very much we had a long talk about the reasons i think the good reasons indeed the best reasons anyone can ever have for leaving public service i will regret that but i wish him well and i look forward to making an expeditious appointment of a replacement now i would like to ask bill daley bill richardson gene sperling and dan tarullo to make brief statements and we will proceed to questions dem wjclinton13 12 97 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you maurice not only for chairing this dinner but for never saying no for six years or more now in good times and bad thank you alan solomont for your leadership and for those wonderful thoughtful and highly perceptive remarks i think these other folks are about to get us don t you i think he s finally figured it out i d like to thank all the non arkansans who are here tonight particularly those who have positions in our party tom and jill hendrickson from north carolina and i d like to thank jack and phyllis rosen for being here jack s been involved with our financial efforts for a long time at the dnc and this is his very last event he wanted to go out with a home touch so thank you especially jack for doing that i probably shouldn t do this but i m going to try to acknowledge the arkansans in the administration who are here if i omit you and you quit i will never speak to you again i am doing my best normally presidents don t have to remember this stuff but i think it s important i just want you to get a feel for how many people are here mack and donna mclarty of course bruce lindsey nancy hernreich marsha scott bob nash and janis kearney stephanie streett mary streett catherine grundin patsy thomasson anne and grady mccoy ben johnson told me he was from arkansas tonight that he was born in marion and his wife jacqueline said she was born in joiner and i d say that qualifies steve and jennifer ronnel darren and vivian peters and in the administration of course secretary slater and cassandra james lee and lea ellen witt hershel gober and mary lou keener harold and arlee gist wilbur peer gloria cabe has done great work for us and in the dnc carol and joyce willis lottie shackleford mary anne salmon i m so glad they re here there are others i wish were here tonight i wish maurice smith and betsy wright and bill clark and david matthews and linda dixon and a host of other people could be here but i want to thank you all of you those of you in the administration those of you who have been in the administration and most of all those of you without whom there never would have been an administration i thank you very much i don t want to embarrass him but about two hours before i came over here tonight i was finishing up some paper work in my office and nancy always collects interesting letters that come from people from home and puts them in a little folder for me and i get them at least once a week and at the top of the folder was a letter that richard mason just wrote to the wall street journal and it said i got about as much chance of getting this letter printed as dan quayle does of getting elected president but he went on to say he was a businessman he had read the journal faithfully for years he said for five years i ve watched you bad mouth my president and my state and say things that weren t true and if your advice on business is as bad as your understanding of politics i ll be in deep trouble if i keep reading this newspaper please cancel my subscription i did what i always do you know i was saying but richard you know you can t blame the editorial page they have good articles all that kind of stuff i was making my good government argument he said look the economy is better the world is at peace the crime rate is down the country is in great shape sooner or later some of those people that are trying to tear your guts out and lying about our state are going to have to fess up and admit it get over it the country is in better shape this is working since under our new policy all these are covered by the press they may have to run your letter now richard we ll see let me say to all of you when i was getting ready to come over here tonight and i m sorry hillary is not here but she is to put it mildly under the weather and she said to send you her love but when i was getting ready to come over here i was reliving many of the things that have happened since october the 3rd of 1991 when i declared for president i remember how people sneeringly referred to me as the governor of a small southern state i remember how people talked about how we had failed to do all these things i remember when i was pronounced dead before arrival in new hampshire and the arkansas travelers who had been traveling all around the country anyway and then all of a sudden 150 people just dropped everything they were doing at home and came to new hampshire and went around knocking on people s doors total strangers introducing themselves saying this is my governor you cannot do this don t let them stamped you into this don t one more time let the kind of negative hateful personality destroying politics that has kept our country back don t do it one more time one hundred fifty people up there in colder weather some of them than they had ever been in their lives knocking on doors in new hampshire i remember when that great ad appeared in the manchester union leader with hundreds of arkansans names and their phone numbers saying instead of believing what they re saying about him if you want to know about this guy call me i will never forget that i remember how surprised the people that ran against me in 92 by and large are good friends of mine now and i remember how surprised they were that we kept doing well in odd places and it took them a long time to figure out that 25 percent of the voters in chicago were from arkansas that there was something to be said for being poor throughout the 30s 40s 50s and 60s i keep waiting any day now for all of them to be subpoenaed by mr starr you know a 50 year old conspiracy to take over the white house which started with our running people out of arkansas back in the 30s and 40s in a dark and devious way i came upon a little town outside flint michigan one day full of auto workers and literally 90 percent of them had roots in arkansas and i thought to myself today those people are going to be called to testify any minute now there s a presumption there s something wrong with them it was some dark plot i was in the bronx did you see the pictures where i went back to the bronx to the place where president reagan said it looked like london during the blitz and now it looks a neighborhood any american would be proud to live in to celebrate what this community organization had done they re called the mid bronx desperados because they were so desperate to turn their community around years and years ago half the housing this particular group has built has been built since i have been president because of our approach which is to basically support community groups and people that are working together and let them define their own future so i get out i shake hands with ralph porter he s the current president of the mid bronx desperados and we are walking down the street in the bronx he looked at me and he said you know my wife worked with your mother at washita hospital for 15 years and i graduated from langston high school in hot springs i said no they ll never believe this i hope ralph doesn t get a subpoena and he went on to tell me that his mother was living in the bronx and was ill and he d been living in he grew up in hot springs and his wife worked in the hospital with mother and that he went to see about his mother and he decided the bronx is in terrible shape and that god wanted him to be in the bronx and help turn it around and i m telling you it will take your breath away if you could walk down some of these streets not just nice houses but safe streets clean streets going to remodeled schools that are working where communities that were given up for dead are working and sometimes i think what our adversaries that are almost pathologically obsessed with personal destruction don t get is that that s what politics is about that s what you taught me that s why we re all here after five years and that s why the country is in better shape politics is about real people and their hopes and their dreams so to me all this stuff you all always say gosh i don t know how you put up with it how do you put up with mosquitoes in summertime in arkansas you just swat them and go on it s a part of living that s what you do if rice farmers thought farming rice was about mosquitoes we d all starve it s about planting rice and bringing it in when harvest comes politics is about people and their dreams and building a better future and that s what you taught me all the stories i saw a great little special on one of the television networks the other night that the state of tennessee is now sponsoring a story telling contest every year and there was a very very large african american woman telling stories and all these east tennessee hill people were sitting around the circle listening to her and their eyes were big as dollars and they were all and they were taking turns telling stories and then they d pick a winner and i thought to myself it would do this town a lot of good if we had a story telling contest every year to remind people about what life is all about so they were telling their story you want to know why we survived up here because i still remember the stories i got to telling some of the young people that work for me the other day in the white house stories about my first two or three campaigns in arkansas they were laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes when david pryor and i started you had to know that kind of stuff i mean you were expected to know people and you cared about their parents and their children and their brothers and their sisters you knew that misfortune happened it wasn t a denigrating thing to say you felt someone s pain that just meant you were a real live human being with blood flowing in your veins and you had some imagination about what life was all about and i just want you to know that that s what we ve tried to do here if i hadn t been governor of arkansas in the time i was and keep in mind until the year i ran for president every single month i was governor but one the unemployment rate in our state was higher than the national average every single month and i stood on those factory lines when people came off the line for the very last time before they shut down in the recession of the 80s i knew farmers that had gone broke i understood what things happened to people when older people couldn t buy medicine and younger people couldn t afford to send their children to the dentist i understood those things because you taught me them and i knew what politics was about and i ran for a very clear reason i thought our country was divided and drifting that we were not succeeding that we were clearly the greatest country in human history and that we were too dominated completely paralyzed and in the grip of the mosquitoes instead of the planting that s what i thought then and so we decided that we would endure the mosquitoes so that we could plant and reap and i think it s been worth the effort when you go home tonight i want you to think about this you were standing and freezing your feet off in new hampshire in 92 or you had to do some other kind of service above and beyond the call since then you gave us the chance to serve and your country has the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years that s the statistic the story is there s 14 million people out there with jobs who didn t have them before and every one of them has got a story there s 3 8 million people who were on welfare when i became president who are now living in homes with paychecks and they ve got a different story there are over 13 million people who got to claim the benefits of the family and medical leave law when a baby was born or a parent was sick there are 8 5 million people whose pensions were gone that were rescued in one of senator pryor s last legislative acts great legislative acts when we reformed the pension system and we saved 40 million other people s pensions from having to worry about it 8 million people who saved their retirement that s a story there s 250 000 people with criminal records or mental health histories who couldn t buy handguns because we passed the brady bill and we don t know how many people are alive because of that and they re out telling stories tonight of their lives because we did that we set aside more land i d forgotten this until i read richard s letter we set aside more land in national trusts in one form or another than any administration in the history of america except the two roosevelts and there will be millions and millions of people just before the end of this decade that will be someplace or another having an experience with nature and god and their families because of that that they would not have had and that will become part of their story the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer there are fewer little children living next to toxic waste dumps and every one of them will have a different story now we re about to pass another christmas in bosnia where we no longer have the bloodiest conflict since the end of world war ii we ve made another year in haiti we re on the verge of seeing a profound and permanent peace i hope in ireland this coming year we ve made real steps in making the world less likely to be subject to chemical warfare last year this year when we ratified the chemical weapons treaty this race initiative a lot of people say it s just talk i d rather see people talking than fighting it s not just talk it s a lot more than that but there s something to be said for that the more complicated and different this country gets and the more contentious and conflict oriented the larger means of communication get the more important it is for people who are different to sit down and talk to one another and understand their stories and understand that we have things that bind us together that are even more important than the very interesting things about us which are different one from another and that s what this whole race initiative is all about we ve got a lot of challenges in the world the challenge in iraq the general challenge of weapons of mass destruction the chemical and biological weapons they could bother our kids a lot and we re going to work hard to see that they don t we ve got financial upheavals in asia now and since thanksgiving secretary rubin and i have been talking at all kinds of odd hours because of the time difference in asia and here i was on the phone last night at 11 00 p m to asia but we re managing the best we can and there are lots of other things we have to deal with the challenge of the entitlement the challenge of educational excellence in our public schools the challenge of extending health care further but you just look at this balanced budget all the other politicians i heard them all talk about balancing the budget up here for years it just got worse the deficit has been cut by 92 percent before we passed the balanced budget act now we ve got a balanced budget bill that gives a tax credit or a scholarship to virtually every person who needs to go to college in america we can literally say we ve opened the doors of college to everyone the balanced budget has the biggest increase in aid to go to college since the g i bill passed in 1945 that will make a lot of different stories it has the biggest increase in health care for children since medicaid was enacted in 1965 five million more kids in working families with modest incomes will be able to get health insurance who knows how many of them will live to be adults because of it who knows how many of them will be healthier intellectually and physically and emotionally because of it they ll all have a slightly different story and it will be better that s what i want you to think about the reason it s important for you to be here is that part of the counter battle the mosquito biting this year was a calculated determined effort to use the hearing process and the legal process to force all the democrats and especially people associated with the party to hire a lawyer every 15 seconds in the hope that we d never have another penny to spend on campaigns somebody pointed out i d been to so many fundraisers in the last year that i d gotten tired a time or two and i plead guilty to that it s okay to get tired you just can t give in so when you go home and people ask you why you did this say because they tried to end the two party system in america by forcing the democrats to spend all their money hiring lawyers and you think the two party system is a pretty good idea especially since one party the one you belong to was right about the deficit was right about the economy was right about crime was right about welfare was right about so many things and that s why this country is in better shape today and you think that s a pretty good indication about which party ought to be able to lead us into the new century that s why you re here and that s why i m very proud of you let me just say lastly i want you to go back home and tell the people who aren t here what i said tonight and remind them because they re a long way away never to get confused between the mosquitoes and the planting because as soon as you do you won t be able to bring in the crop we have brought in the crop and you made it possible and i m very very proud of you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton13 12 98 bill_clinton thank you very much let me begin by thanking the prime minister for his leadership for peace and his leadership of israel mrs netanyahu members of the israeli government to the distinguished american delegation here i want to say a special word of appreciation to the young man who spoke first ben mayoft didn t he do a good job this is my third trip to jerusalem as president my third time in this magnificent hall and the young woman who was with me here last time on the stage liad mudrick is also here thank you i m really glad to see you i d like to also thank this magnificent choir the ankor choir didn t they do a good job they left but they were great i understand we have students from jerusalem tel aviv haifa beersheva akko and other cities welcome to you all we come here today to speak about the future of israel and the middle east your future six weeks ago prime minister netanyahu came to the united states to seek a new understanding with the palestinian authority on the best way to achieve peace with security today i come to israel to fulfill a pledge i made to the prime minister and to chairman arafat at wye river to speak to israelis and palestinians about the benefits of peace and to reaffirm america s determination to stand with you as you take risks for peace the united states will always stand with israel always remember that only a strong israel can make peace that is why we were after all your partners in security before we were partners for peace our commitment to your security is ironclad it will not ever change the united states stood with israel at the birth of your nation at your darkest hour in 1973 through the long battle against terror against saddam hussein s scuds in 1991 and today american marines and patriot missiles are here in israel exercising with the idf we have also stood with you as you reached out to your neighbors always recognizing that only israelis can make final decisions about your own future and as the prime minister said in his remarks about education for peace we agree that peace must begin with a genuine transformation in attitudes despite all the difficulties i believe that transformation has begun palestinians are recognizing that rejection of israel will not bring them freedom just as israelis recognize that control over palestinians will not bring you security as a result in just the last few years you have achieved peace with jordan and the arab world has accepted the idea of peace with israel the boycotts of the past are giving way to a future in which goods move across frontiers while soldiers are able to stay at home the pursuit of peace has withstood the gravest doubts it has survived terrorist bombs and assassins bullets just a short while ago this afternoon hillary and i visited the gravesite of prime minister rabin with mrs rabin her daughter and granddaughter he was killed by one who hoped to kill the peace he worked so hard to advance but the wye memorandum is proof that peace is still alive and it will live as long as the parties believe in it and work for it of course there have been setbacks more misunderstandings more disagreements more provocations more acts of violence you feel palestinians should prove in word and deed that their intentions have actually changed as you redeploy from land on which tears and blood have been shed and you are right to feel that palestinians feel you should acknowledge they too have suffered and they too have legitimate expectations that should be met and like israel internal political pressure that must be overcome and they are right too because of all that has happened and the mountain of memories that has not yet been washed away the road ahead will be hard already every step forward has been tempered with pain each time the forces of reconciliation on each side have reached out the forces of destruction have lashed out the leaders at wye knew that the people of israel know that israel is full of good people today who do not hate but who have experienced too much sorrow and too much loss to embrace with joy each new agreement the peace process brings as always we must approach the task ahead without illusions but not without hope for hope is not an illusion every advance in human history every victory for the human spirit every victory in your own individual lives begins with hope the capacity to imagine a better future and the conviction that it can be achieved the people of israel after all have beaten the most impossible odds overcome the most terrible evils on the way to the promised land the idea of the promised land kept hope alive in the remaining work to be done the idea of peace and security in the promised land must keep hope alive for all you young people today under all the complexities and frustrations of this moment there lies a simple question what is your vision for your future there can be only two ways to answer that question you could say that the only possible future for israel is one of permanent siege in which the ramparts hold and people stay alive but the nation remains preoccupied with its very survival subject to gnawing anxiety limited in future achievement by the absence of real partnerships with your neighbors perhaps you can live with that kind of future but you should not accept it unless you are willing to say and i will try to say properly ein breirah there is no alternative but if you are not willing to say that not willing to give up on hope with no real gain in security you must say yesh breirah there is an alternative if you are to build a future together hard realities cannot be ignored reconciliation after all this trouble is not natural the differences among you are not trivial there is a history of heartbreak and loss but the violent past and the difficult present do not have to be repeated forever in the historical relationship between israelis and palestinians one thing and only one thing is predestined you are bound to be neighbors the question is not whether you will live side by side but how you will live side by side will both sides recognize there can be no security for either until both have security that there will be no peace for either until both have peace will both sides seize this opportunity to build a future in which preoccupation with security struggle and survival can finally give way to a common commitment to keep all our young minds strong and unleash all your human potential surely the answer must be yes israelis and palestinians can reach that conclusion sooner reducing the pain and violence they endure or they can wait until later more and more victims suffer more loss and ultimately the conclusion must be the same your leaders came to an agreement at wye because a majority of people on both sides have already said now is the time to change i want to talk just a little bit about this agreement at wye it does not by itself resolve the fundamental problems that divide israelis and palestinians it is a means to an end not the end itself but it does restore life to a process that was stalled for 18 months and it will bring benefits that meet the requirements of both sides if both sides meet their obligations wye is an opportunity for both that must not be lost let me try to explain why prime minister netanyahu went to wye rightly determined to ensure that the security of israeli citizens is protected as the peace process moves forward he fought hard not to kill the peace but to make it real for all those israelis who only want to live normal lives in their own country and he succeeded in obtaining a set of systematic palestinian security commitments and a structure for carrying them out the palestinian authority agreed to a comprehensive and continuous battle against terror it pledged to combat terrorist organizations to crack down on unlicensed weapons to take action against incitement to terror u s palestinian committees will be set up to review specific actions the palestinians are taking in each of these areas and to recommend further steps we also will submit to our congress a 1 2 billion package to help israel meet its future security needs including those growing out of the redeployments agreed to at wye the agreement can benefit israel in another way it offers the prospect of continuing a process that is changing how most palestinians define their interests and their relationship with you more and more palestinians have begun to see that they have done more to realize their aspirations in five years of making peace than in 45 years of making war they are beginning to see that israel s mortal enemies are in fact their enemies too and that it is in their interests to help to defeat the forces of terror this transformation however is clearly unfinished it will not happen overnight there will be bumps in the road and there have been some already the palestinian leaders must work harder to keep the agreement and avoid the impression that unilateral actions can replace agreed upon negotiations but it is vital that you too recognize the validity of this agreement and work to sustain it and all other aspects of the peace process tomorrow i go to gaza to address the members of the palestinian national council and other palestinian organizations i will witness the reaffirmation of their commitment to foreswear fully finally and forever all the provisions in their charter that called for the destruction of israel i will also make it clear that with rights come responsibilities reminding people there that violence never was and never can be a legitimate tool that it would be wrong and utterly self defeating to resume a struggle that has taken palestinians from one tragedy to another i will ask the palestinian leaders to join me in reaffirming what the vast majority of muslims the world over believed that tolerance is an article of faith and terrorism a travesty of faith and i will emphasize that this conviction should echo from every palestinian schoolhouse and mosque and television tower i will point out of course all the ways in which this wye agreement benefits palestinians it provides for the transfer of more territory the redeployment of more israeli troops safe passage between gaza and the west bank the opening of the airport in gaza other initiatives to lift their economic condition and new commitments of international assistance to improve the lives of the palestinian people in doing these things this agreement benefits israelis as well for it is in israelis interest to give the palestine economy space to breathe and the palestinian people a chance to defeat the hopelessness that extremists exploit to unleash their terror and it is surely in israel s interest to deal with palestinians in a way that permits them to feel a sense of dignity instead of despair the peace process will succeed if it comes with a recognition that the fulfillment of one side s aspirations must come with not at the expense of the fulfillment of the other side s dreams it will succeed when we understand that it is not just about mutual obligations but mutual interest mutual recognition mutual respect when all agree there is no sense in a tug of war over common ground it will succeed when we all recognize as prime minister netanyahu and chairman arafat did at wye that ultimately this can and must be a partnership between israelis and palestinians it will succeed if both sides continue the work that wye makes possible if they face the hard decisions ahead so that the future continues to be shaped at the negotiating table rather than by unilateral acts or declarations we cannot of course expect everyone to see that there are still people in this region indeed in every region who believe that their unique cultures can thrive only behind walls that keep out those who are different even if the price is mutual mistrust and hatred there are some who still talk openly about the threat of peace because peacemaking requires making contact with the other side recognizing the legitimacy of different faiths and different points of view and openness to a world of competing ideas and values but i don t think that s the majority view in the middle east any longer what once was a conflict among mainstreams is evolving into a mainstream seeking peace we must not let the conflict invade the mainstream of israel or of the palestinians or of any other group in this region again i believe you can not only imagine you young people but actually shape the kind of partnership that will give you the future you want i think you can do it while protecting israel s fundamental interests to anyone who thinks that is impossible i would ask you this how many people thought israel was possible when your grandparents were just people searching for a land who would have imagined the marvel israel has become for decades you lived in a neighborhood which rejected you yet you not only survived and thrived but held fast to the traditions of tolerance and openness upon which this nation was founded you were forced to become warriors yet you never lost the thirst to make peace you turned weakness into strength and along the way you built a partnership with the united states that is enduring and unassailable now israel enters its second half century you have nourished an ancient culture you have built from the desert a modern nation you stand on the edge of a new century prepared to make the very most of it you have given your children a chance to grow up and learn who they are not just from stories of wandering and martyrdom but from the happy memories of people living good lives in a natural way you have proven again and again that you are powerful enough to defeat those who would destroy you but strong and wise enough to make peace with those who are ready to accept you you have given us every reason to believe that you can build a future on hope that is different from the past this morning the prime minister and mrs netanyahu and hillary and i had breakfast together and he said something to me i d like to repeat to you to make this point to all of you young people he said you know there are three great ancient civilizations in the world the chinese civilization the indian civilization and the jewish civilization all going back 4 000 years or more the chinese are 1 2 billion people the indians are nearly a billion people to be sure they have suffered invasion loss in war in the indian case colonization but they have always had their land and they have grown there are 12 million jews in the world driven from their homeland subject to holocaust subject to centuries of prejudice and yet here you are here you are if you can do this after 4000 years you can make this peace believe me you can do this years ago before the foundation of israel golda meir said of her people and i quote we only want that which is given naturally to all people of the world to be masters of our own fate only our fate not the destiny of others to live as a right and not on sufferance to have the chance to bring the surviving jewish children of whom not so many are left in the world now to this country so that they may grow up like our youngsters who were born here free of fear with heads high this hope that all of us can live a life of dignity when respecting the dignity of others is part of the heritage of values israel shares with the united states on this the first day of hanukkah may this hope be the candle that lights israel s path into the new century into a century of peace and security with america always at your side thank you and god bless dem wjclinton13 3 00a bill_clinton thank you so much i want to say first how honored i am to be here with our leader dick gephardt and how much i look forward to his becoming the speaker of the house he is a truly remarkable human being and a really wonderful leader i want to thank stephanie tubbs jones for welcoming me here and for doing such a good job for you i m delighted to be here with marcy kaptur and dennis kucinich and i m glad to see sherrod brown up and around i told him he looked like a roman soldier in one of those 1960s extravaganza with that brace on i want to thank congressman jim barcia for coming to cleveland to be with us today and congressman patrick kennedy who had to leave and mayor white thank you for making us feel so welcome mary ellen o shaughnessy thank you for running for congress i certainly do hope you win and i m going to do what i can to help you i m glad to see you out here and i want to thank our senate candidate ted celeste also for running in this race and for being here today and my good friend lou stokes i told some people a story when i was coming out when i was here with lou stokes i wanted to come to cleveland with lou before he left the congress i was here in his district many times when he was in congress but the last time we visited an elementary school in this district where there was an americorps project and the kids were tutoring these grade school kids our young americorps people were and so we went to this assembly and i gave a little talk and then i was shaking hands with all these six and seven year old kids and i got to the very end of the line and this six year old looked at me and he said are you really the president so help me this happened i said yes i am he said but you re not dead yet and it was clear to me that he had learned in school his presidents were george washington and abraham lincoln and a part of the job description was that you had to be deceased there s been a day or two in washington in the last seven years when i thought the kid might have been right but i will always remember that i also am glad to be here today just to say a profound word of thanks to the people of cleveland and the state of ohio for being so good to me and to the vice president for giving us your electoral votes in 1992 and by a much wider margin in 1996 and i hope the trend continues in 2000 i m here primarily as all of you know to support these members of the house and the candidates and the drive to restore a democratic majority in the house and i m here for three reasons basically one they deserve it because they took the tough decisions that turned this country around and paid the price for it we had no votes from the other side when we passed the economic plan in 1993 which drove interest rates down investment up and got this economy going again and they deserve it they also put their lives on the line to vote for the brady bill and the assault weapons ban and the efforts to put 100 000 police on the streets which has given us a 25 year low in crime and a 30 year low in the gun death rate in america half a million felons fugitives and stalkers were denied weapons because of the brady bill so they have earned it they provided large margins for the balanced budget act in 1997 and for every other piece of progressive legislation that has passed from the family and medical leave law to increasing the earned income tax credit to tax relief for working families and i could just go right on down the line achieving 90 percent of our children with basic childhood immunizations for the first time cleaner air cleaner water and a growing economy so they ve earned it two there are huge differences between the parties still on a lot of very fundamental issues and dick mentioned a few of them but i just want to tick off three or four number one if you want this economy to keep growing we have to remember to dance with what brought us we ve got to keep paying down the debt we ve got to save social security and medicare in a way that doesn t cause the baby boomers retirement to bankrupt our children and we ve got to save enough money to invest in education and health care we can still have a modest tax cut that will do an awful lot of good for a lot of people to help people pay for health care costs to help people pay for child care costs to help defer the cost of tuition for sending your kid to college for doing a lot o other things but we have got to first keep the economy strong we ve got a chance to get this country out of debt over the next 12 or 13 years for the first time since 1835 and if we do it we ll have low interest rates for a generation and the highest economic growth we ve ever had we ll continue this expansion the democrats will support that our friends in the other party will support a tax cut so large that we d either have to cut education not save social security or medicare cut defense or go back to running deficits so it s a clear choice second is education our agenda is clear we want smaller classes more teachers better trained teachers we want to modernize and repair schools which is profoundly important we want to hook every classroom up to the internet we want high standards which support the kids more after school and summer school programs and we want more efforts to give people the excellence that they need and every single year we have to wait until the very end of the legislative session and have a huge fight to get our education agenda through and we normally get about 70 percent of it but only because all of us stay together this will become more and more and more important third it is important to continue to give more people the chance to be a part of this economic prosperity who haven t done it yet that s what our new markets initiative is all about give you who can afford it the same incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods in cleveland in indian reservations in the mississippi delta in south texas and places like that that we now give you to invest in latin america asia and africa if we can t give the poor areas in america today the opportunity to have free enterprise when will we ever get around to it and i think that s very important the fourth thing i want to mention is health care it s very important we believe that people between the ages of 55 and 65 that lose their health insurance ought to be able to buy into medicare and ought to be given a little health to do it we believe that people who are taking care of aged parents or disabled family members ought to get a 3 000 tax credit to help them do it we believe that the children s health insurance program which we passed in 1997 should also include the parents of those children and if we did those things 25 percent of the uninsured population in america would have health insurance and the health care providers in this country many of whom have difficulties would have a lot more cash flowing to them to keep a healthy health care system these are just some of the issues there are big differences and dick mentioned the final one i want to mention i have been involved for way over 20 years now in law enforcement the first elected job i ever had was as attorney general of my state i have always believed that we could drive crime down and diminish racial and other tensions between the police and the community i have always believed that we had to have both smart punishment and smart prevention i have always believed that and for seven years we have worked to put more police on the streets to give our children something to say yes to as well as something to say no to and to keep guns away from criminals and kids without undermining the legitimate interests of hunters and sports people now what i ve tried to do since the columbine tragedy in particular and in the aftermath of the terrible deaths in the last couple of days is to say okay let s do some more things that make sense let s require child trigger locks on all new handguns that are sold let s require background checks at these gun shows and urban flea markets as well as at gun stores let s hold parents who are flagrantly irresponsible or other adults custodial adults and let 6 year olds get guns let s hold them responsible for what they do and let s ban the importation of these large ammunition clips we banned assault weapons in america and then people get around it by importing them this is all very sensible it doesn t affect anybody s hunting doesn t affect any sports shooting it s no big problem and all the practical problems can be worked out well we had a lot of energy after columbine for doing that the senate passed a strong bill because al gore broke a tie vote the house passed a much weaker bill but then they were supposed to get together pass a compromise agree on provisions and send it to me eight months later they still haven t met the committees haven t met so i ask them to meet now in the aftermath of the terrible losses in michigan and tennessee little kayla rolland i thought we could have some more energy for doing this and what happened the nra started running all these ads attacking me personally which i didn t take personally i frankly was honored by it but they were and so i agreed to go on abc sam donaldson s program sunday and answer questions about this and all i did was to say why i was for closing the assault weapons why i was for banning these large capacity ammunition clips the import of them why i was for closing the gun show loophole why i was for child trigger locks and why i thought adults who were knowing or reckless in letting little kids get a hold of guns ought to be held responsible and then the head of the nra came on after me and he said i want to read you what he said just so you ll know that there is a difference here between the two parties and america has to choose he says that i am willing to accept a certain level of killings to further my political agenda and vice president gore s i believe i have come to believe that clinton needs a certain level of violence in this country he s willing to accept a certain level of killings to further his political agenda and his vice president s too now it s quite one thing to say that when you re on national television it s another thing to look into the eyes of a parent who s lost a six year old and say that to visit as i did the parents of the columbine kids or in springfield oregon or jonesboro arkansas and say that i want you to know that because i m not trying to put you in a depressed mood i m trying to fire your energy for the coming combat maybe he really believes this but if he does we ve got even more trouble than just a horrible political mistake we ve got to make up our mind as a country i m glad the crime rate is at a 25 year low i m glad the gun death rate is at a 30 year low i don t know a single living american that believes this country is safe enough the nra says we ought to prosecute gun crimes more i agree with that and we have they re for holding adults accountable when they recklessly give kids access to guns good for them but they re not for anything that is a preventive measure that might require the slightest effort on the part of the people they propose to represent even if making that effort lets everybody else live in a safer america they were against banning cop killer bullets and there weren t any deer in the deer words wearing kevlar vests so i regret this and i m not going to get in a shouting match about it but i want you to know that there are big stakes here so i want to help these people because they ve earned it and they ve given you a good country to live in and a stronger america because they re right on the issues and the third reason that i want to be for them is the point dick made about wanting to run the house in a bipartisan manner and to set a good example one of the reasons i ran for president is that i was completely turned off as a governor of what my predecessor called a small southern state at the way that washington was so much in the grip of name calling and an attempt to systematically undermine other people personally i thought it was wrong and now that i ve had some passing experience with it i feel more strongly about it i m not running for anything but i m telling you this is a great country and you deserve a better climate than you have been getting in washington d c and you ve got to have people who will stand up and say that i ve worked as hard as i could to build one america out here in the grass roots to get people to come together across racial lines and religious lines and the other lines that divide us and to be a force for that kind of harmony around the world but it is difficult for america to do that if what they see in the national political leadership is this sort of slash and burn well the kind of stuff i just read you and i think we can do better than that and i know he ll be better than that and these members will be better than that look we ve got a lot of honest differences of opinion and maybe they re right some times and we re not always right but i know one thing we are right to believe that elections ought to be fought about what s good for you and what s good for your life and not whether we can decimate our adversaries and that s the kind of speaker dick gephardt will be so when people ask you why you came here today say well they ve done a good job and they deserve our support they ve got better ideas for the future and that s what matters and not only that i like the way they will run our nation s government i will feel better when they re having arguments up there over policy instead of personalities and when they re trying to put people first and actually get something done those are three good reasons for you to be here today and i hope you will share those with all your friends and neighbors in this area if you do you ll dramatically increase the chances of their success in november thank you very much dem wjclinton13 3 00b bill_clinton thank you very much and thank you all for being here i m sure the fire marshal is nervous you re all packed in here and i m very glad to see you i want to thank jan thank you for that wonderful wonderful introduction and for your commitment to handgun safety and to keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and children thank you senator durbin thank you congressman blagojevich thank you mayor rendell and janice griffin and joe kerry i want to thank i asked phil and karen stefani to come up here because we re in their wonderful place this is the 20th anniversary of the opening of their restaurant so let s give them a big hand the stefanis thank you very much they have been wonderful friends to me and to hillary and i m very grateful to them and i thank them again i will be brief but i want to first of all thank you so much for being here and for your contributions i want to thank the people of illinois for being so wonderful to me and hillary and the vice president and tipper for voting for me overwhelmingly in the 92 primary and giving us your electoral votes in 92 and 96 i thank you for that you know i had a lot of advantages running for president in illinois i had hillary i had wonderful friends here in chicago i had david wilhelm as my campaign chairman i had served as the chairman of the lower mississippi delta commission which included all the counties in southern illinois and i d spent a lot of time there i was from arkansas and there s an enormous number of african americans in chicago from arkansas and that was a big help something which stunned my opponents in 92 and they found out only too late so i ve had a lot of advantages here and illinois has been so good to me chicago has been so good to me and i have now bill daley who is making a wonderful secretary of commerce and doing you proud every day but i want to talk to you tonight about where we go from here and why you came here i m grateful that i ve had the chance to serve as president and i m grateful for those of you who said tonight going through the line you wish i could serve a little more this is the first election in decades i haven t been a candidate most days i m okay with it so i come tonight to say to you as your president as a fellow citizen as somebody who is profoundly grateful for how good you ve been to me we have worked a long time to turn this country around to get the economy growing to get the poverty rate down to get the welfare rolls down and the crime rate down to get people coming together and moving forward to make america a respected force for peace and freedom around the world several of you talked about my upcoming trip to india and pakistan tonight and this election gives us a chance to build the future of our dreams for our children it is very important we have a chance now because the unemployment rate s at a 30 year low because we ve got back to back surpluses for the first time in 42 years to give all our children the education they deserve to provide health insurance for low income working children and their parents to provide the kind of tax relief that would enable every family to be able to tell their children when they re young if you stay in school and do your lessons no matter how poor we are you can still go on to college to prove that we can grow the economy and improve the environment at the same time to meet the big challenges we can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 we can save social security before the baby boomers retire i m the oldest of the baby boomers and i can tell you that everybody in my generation the people who i grew up with at home most of whom have very modest incomes they re very worried that when we all retire and there are only two people working for every one person on social security that we ll impose a burden on our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren we can get rid of that burden right now we can take social security out beyond the lifespan of the baby boom generation we can lengthen medicare we can add a prescription drug benefit which should have been there all along so that our seniors who can t afford their medicine will be able to afford it we can do these things and we can make america a safer place you know it s amazing to me that i get in these tussles with the nra they ve been after me for a decade now you know i once got a lifetime membership to the nra i think it s been revoked now because i worked with them when they were trying to educate children to go hunting without hurting themselves when they were trying to help me solve a lot of other problems but now their main mission in life seems to be to stop any kind of collective action that will help us to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children you know we do this in all kinds of other ways most of us are safe drivers but we still don t object to getting a driver s license or having to wear our seatbelts most of us are not terrorists but we don t object to going through those metal detectors at airports in fact we kind of like them now because we think they keep us alive but at some inconvenience especially if you ve got something that jangles in your pants and you keep you know your money clip keeps setting it off and you go through four or five but we do it right because it makes us a safer country now their position is that guns are the only thing that we should impose no inconvenience on the law abiding majority to protect us from the law breaking minority or the dangerous people they said when we passed the brady bill we d just interfere with hunters rights and wouldn t get any criminals there hasn t been a hunter missed a day in the deer woods but we kept 500 000 felons fugitives and stalkers from getting handguns and a lot of people are alive in this country because of that and the same with the assault weapons ban i really regret that the nra leader i guess he was frustrated and sometimes when you don t have a defense for your position the best thing to do is just attack your opponent and that s what he did but you know it s pretty hard for me to take somebody saying i really want a certain level of killing in america so i can beat up on the nra you can say that on television but i sat with the mother and the stepfather of that beautiful little six year old girl that was killed in michigan and i didn t like that i went and met with the families that lost their children at columbine out in springfield oregon and jonesboro arkansas i m didn t like that i ve met with a lot of people who died from violence or whose loved ones died from violence i m just trying to keep more people alive and i m not interested in fighting with anybody but i m interested in fighting for this young man s future with his no guns sign here and i was thinking today coming into chicago one of the most meaningful days i ever had here was out in one of your neighborhoods near a rehab unit where we had i don t know a half dozen maybe a dozen people who were wounded severely by gun violence and that day there was a chicago police officer who had done two tours in vietnam and survived them without a scratch and had 11 bullets in his body because he d been assaulted doing his job as a law enforcement officer and the police and the gun safety groups gave me a beautiful plaque a very heavy plaque with a model of abraham lincoln that was the same used for the penny and it s still in my office in the white house if you came there you could see it today and i keep it to remember all those young people i saw in wheelchairs paralyzed for life who shouldn t have been there and i say that because there are big stakes here and there are big differences between what the house and senate democrats would do and what their republican counterparts would do there are big differences between what vice president gore and governor bush would do and i don t feel the need to attack them the way they attack us i think they actually believe what they say i just think they re wrong and i think that you know if we gave the kind of tax cut that the republicans have embraced starting with their nominee we couldn t save social security we couldn t save medicare we couldn t invest in education and we d start running deficits again and i think you like it when we pay down the debt and these interest rates are low and you can buy cars and homes and keep borrowing money and keep this economy going and we still have the money to invest in schools and education and trying to help people work their way out of poverty there are real differences on these gun safety issues i don t think that anybody ought to sell a handgun without a child safety lock on it i don t think that we ought to import these big ammunition clips that allow you to convert weapons into assault weapons when we ve banned them here at home and i don t think that we ought to require background checks if you go buy a handgun in a gun store and then if you show up at a gun show or an urban flea market you can get out of the background checks and i think americans ought to be willing to undergo a certain amount of inconvenience if they re law abiding people buying a gun at a gun show or an urban flea market to wait a day or so until this background check is done and if it has to be three days because the records aren t there it s over the weekend i think that s okay too and i don t think people ought to be belly aching about that if it saves the life of one child it is worth it it is worth it so what i want you to do is to tell people these things if they ask you why did you go last night tell them that i went because this country is in better shape than it was seven years ago they had good ideas and they turned out to be right i went because more important because they ve got a better plan for the future and the last thing i want to say is this a week ago yesterday i had one of the great days in my life i got to go to selma alabama for the 35th anniversary of the voting rights march across the edmund pettus bridge and i was thinking i see all these young people here i was thinking when i was a young man in college people were still being killed for the right to vote whites and blacks marching together in the south lost their lives so that everybody could vote in my adult lifetime and i thought about what a long way we have come since 1965 in 1964 when i finished high school we were sad because president kennedy had been killed but the country united behind lyndon johnson we thought we would have an economy that would go on forever we thought we would solve the civil rights problems through the congress we thought we would win the cold war without dividing the country we thought things would be just hunky dory within a year people were getting killed at selma within two years we had riots in the street within four years martin luther king and bobby kennedy were dead and lyndon johnson couldn t run for reelection and the country was spit right down the middle over the war and within a few months we had elected a president on a campaign of us against them called the silent majority do you remember that if you weren t in the silent majority you were by definition in the loud minority that s what i was in and we ve been us ing and them ing ourselves to death for 30 some years now and by the way that s when we had the longest economic expansion in history until this one and soon after that election expansion disappeared and i say that because it is important that you not let the american people the people of illinois the people of chicago be casual about this election because 35 years ago when we had the same sort of economy by those terms in those years we thought it would just go on forever and we thought everything was going to be hunky dory and the wheels ran off and i have waited as an american citizen for 35 years to give our people the chance to build one america and to build the future of our dreams that s what i ve been working for these whole seven years i knew we could never get it all done in my term of service but i knew if we could turn america around if we could point america in the right direction if we could keep going and unleash the energies of all of our people we could actually build one country and deal with these big challenges now that s what this election is about it is very important you cannot assume any good thing that is happening today is on automatic martin luther king said progress does not roll along on the wheels of inevitability it is brought by people who are willing to work hard to be co workers with god you have to work you have to work you ve got a presidential nominee you can be proud of you ve got a senator you ve got members of congress you can be proud of this is worth fighting for when people ask you tomorrow why you were here don t even wait for them to ask tell them why you came tell them the country s better off than it was seven years ago tell them we ve got better ideas for the future tell them you have got the chance of a lifetime to build the future of our dreams for our children and you are determined to do it and you know that the best way to do it is to support the democrats in november thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton13 3 00c bill_clinton thank you very much thank you first i think wanda did a pretty good job don t you let s give her another hand i am delighted to be here in cleveland i want to thank all the people who are up her with me alice katchianes thank you for being here and mr venable thank you for your welcome if i could sing like that i d be in a different line of work i thought that was great i want to thank congressman sherrod brown and congressman dennis kucinich congresswoman stephanie tubbs jones my great friend lou stokes all the other officials who are here today state representative jack ford county commissioner jimmy dimora state senate candidate donna macnamee a woman i met at the dedication of the fdr memorial at president roosevelt s wheelchair i m glad to see her here i want to say a special word of appreciation to congressman dick gephardt for his leadership and his passionate commitment to this and so many other good causes without him and these other members of our caucus we wouldn t have a prayer of passing this proposal today and i thank him and i want to say obviously how pleased i am to be here with donna shalala who is as dick gephardt suggested not only the longest serving but by a good long stretch the ablest and best secretary of health and human services this country has ever ever had and i love to see her mother and i m glad she made room for me at tax time i told her i said you know when i get out of this job i hope i need the services of a tax lawyer right now it s all pretty straightforward but that was without a doubt the shortest speech i ever heard a lawyer give what she said to me you probably doubled your business just by being here today i do love coming to cleveland and you heard donna say that we have a lot of people in this administration from cleveland including my deputy chief of staff steve ricchetti who is here today but clevelanders they may go anywhere but they never get it cleveland out of their soul if you go into steve s office there is a great photograph from the opening day of baseball at jacobs field in 1994 now i remember that because i threw out the first pitch but steve s got the picture on the wall because when i threw the pitch everyone was absolutely stunned that it didn t hit the dirt and sandy alomar caught it so he really got i m incidental to the picture he s got sandy alomar catching a ball which he was convinced would go into the dirt i thought i did pretty well for a guy who played in the band myself let me say this is a great time for this city and a great time for our nation as i said in the state of the union address i hope this time will be used by our people to take on the big challenges facing america one of those big challenges is what to do about the aging of america which is a high class problem that is we re living longer we re living better and the older i get the more i see that as an opportunity not a problem but it does impose certain challenges on us there is also a challenge to modernize our health care systems and to do other things to increase the health care of the american people and that s what we re here to talk about today but because this is my only formal opportunity to be before thanks to you before the press and therefore the american people i would like to just refer to another issue that relates to the health and safety of the american people just briefly i have been fortunate enough to have the support of the members of congress on this stage in our efforts to drive the crime rate down to make our streets safer in cleveland and every other major city in america is a safer place than it was seven years ago we have a 25 year low in crime a 33 year low in the gun death rate and i am grateful for the support i have received to put more police on the street to have more summer school and after school programs for young people and to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals banning the cop killer bullets the assault weapons ban the brady bill which has kept half a million felons fugitives and stalkers from getting handguns now all of you know we had some tragic deaths last week we had that six year old girl killed in michigan by a six year old boy who was a schoolmate of hers we had terrible shootings in memphis and just in the last year we had the horrible incident at columbine high school almost a year ago and in the year before that lots and lots of school shootings now after columbine i suggested that what we ought to do is to number one make sure there were child safety locks on these guns number two which would have made a big difference in the case of children getting the guns number two make sure we ban the importation of large ammunition clips which make a mockery of the assault weapons ban because they can t be made or sold here in america but they can be imported number three close the loophole in the background check law the brady law which says people can buy handguns at gun shows or urban flea markets and not have to do a background check it s a serious problem and fourth i think when adults intentionally or recklessly let little kids get a hold of guns they should have some sort of responsibility for that and so i asked the congress to do that eight months ago vice president gore broke a tie in the senate and passed a pretty strong bill and then a bill passed in the house that was weaker and i asked them to get together and pass a final bill and they never even met until last week when we got them together after this last round of horrible shootings and i ask all americans to join me because i think these things are reasonable this won t affect anybody s right to hunt or sport shoot or anything but it will save kids lives the response we got from the national rifle association was to run a bunch of television ads attacking me and yesterday morning i went on television again to talk about these measures i m not trying to pick a fight with anybody i m trying to fight for the lives of our kids but i want you to see what we re up against whenever we try to change here the head of the nra said yesterday i want to quote he said that my support of these measures was all political and he said this i have come to believe that clinton needs a certain level of violence in this country he s willing to accept a certain level of killing to further his political agenda and his vice president too well he could say that on television i guess i d like to see him look into the eyes of little kayla rolland s mother and say that or the parents at columbine or springfield oregon or jonesboro arkansas or the families of those people who were shot in memphis i say that again to emphasize change is hard but sooner or later if you know you ve got a problem you either deal with it or you live with the consequences and the older you get the more you understand that we do not have i m grateful that our country is a safer place than it was seven years ago i don t think it s safe enough i don t think you think it s safe enough i don t think you think it s safe enough for seniors i don t think you think it s safe enough for little kids and if we can do more things to keep guns away from criminals and children that don t have anything to do with the legitimate right of people to go hunting or engage in sports shooting we ought to do it and we ought not to engage in this kind of political smear tactics now i feel the same way about this issue and i want to try to explain to you what is going on now with this issue because most people in america you heard dick gephardt talk about it most people in america think well why are we even arguing about this well all health care issues are fraught with debate today i know you re having a big debate here about hospital closures in cleveland and i don t know enough about the facts to get involved with it but i ll tell you this one of the problems we have is there s too much uncompensated care in america and we re trying to we re trying hard the people you see on this stage we re trying hard to make sure every child that s eligible is enrolled in the children health insurance program that was created in 1997 we want congress to let their parents be insured under the same program we want people over 55 but under 65 who aren t old enough for medicare but have lost their insurance on the job to be able to buy into medicare and we want to give them a little tax credit to do it if we do things like this then whatever happens in cleveland or anyplace else will have to be determined based on the merits of the case but at least the people who need health care will be able to know that the people who give it to them whether it s hospitals or doctors or nurses or whoever will be able to get reimbursed for it and that s a very important thing i hope you ll support us in that and then we come to the issue at hand now what s this about this prescription you all know what it s about if we were starting suppose i came here today as president and i were in my first year as president and i proposed medicare just like president johnson did in 1965 in the first full year after he was elected and i told you in 1965 what he said it would be fine but in 2000 if i said okay i m going to set up this health care program for senior citizens and you can see a doctor and we ll pay for your hospital care but even though we could save billions of dollars a year keeping people out of hospitals and out of emergency rooms by covering the medicine we re not going to cover medicine if we were starting today given all the advances in prescription drugs in the last 35 years you would think i was nuts wouldn t you the only reason that prescription drugs aren t covered by medicare is that it was started 35 years ago when medicine was in a totally different place that s the first thing the second thing i want to say is that it has really cost us a lot not to cover these seniors and you see american seniors for example who live in new york or vermont going to take a bus trip to canada because they can buy drugs made in america for 30 percent less because very often the seniors the people that are least able to pay for these drugs are paying the highest prices for them now that s why our budget has this plan and i want to tell you exactly what we propose and what we re all up here on this stage supporting today we want to provide with medicare a prescription drug benefit that is optional that is voluntary that is accessible for all anybody who wants to buy into it can a plan that is based on price competition not price controls that is we don t want to control the price but we want to use the fact that if we re buying a lot of medicine seniors ought to be able to get it as cheap as anybody else and we also want it to be part of an overall plan to continue to modernize medicare and make it more competitive because i can tell you i m the oldest of the baby boomers and people in my generation we re plagued by the notion that our retirement could cause such a burden on our children it would undermine their ability to raise our grandchildren we don t want that now medically speaking this is not just the right thing to do it is the smart thing to do as i said we already pay for doctor and hospital benefits but an awful lot of seniors go without prescription drugs and preventive screenings i might add that ought to be a part of their health care we ve worked hard to put preventive screenings back into medicare for breast cancer for osteoporosis for prostate cancer these are very very important but not having any prescription drug coverage is like paying a mechanic 4 000 to fix your engine because you wouldn t spend 25 to change the oil and get the filter replaced in recent months i have been really encouraged because a number of republicans have expressed an interest in joining us to do this and we can t pass it unless some of them join us because we don t have enough votes on our own but so far the proposals they re making i think are not adequate and i ll explain why there are two different proposals basically coming out of the republicans some of them propose giving a block grant to the states to help only the poorest seniors those below the poverty line that would leave the middle income seniors including those that are lower middle income just above the poverty line to fend for themselves and here in ohio 53 percent of all the seniors are middle income seniors none of them would be covered by this plan in 1965 when medicare was created some in congress used these very same arguments they said we should only pay for hospital and medical care for the poorest seniors they were wrong then and they re wrong now more than half the seniors today without any prescription drugs at all are middle class seniors i want to say that again more than half the seniors without any prescription drug at all are middle class seniors on average middle class seniors without coverage buy 20 percent less drugs than those who have coverage not because they re healthier but because they can t afford it and even though they buy 20 percent less medication listen to this because they have no insurance their out of pocket burden is 75 percent higher without insurance 75 percent higher so i say let s do this right this is voluntary we re not making anybody do it but we ought to offer it to everybody who needs it it doesn t take much if you re a 75 year old widow to be above the so called federal poverty line you can have a tiny little pension tacked on your social security and you can be there but if you ve got as you ve just heard 2 300 worth of drug bills a year and a lot of people have much higher it s a terrible problem now some other members of congress are proposing a tax deduction to help subsidize the cost of private medigap insurance if any of you own medigap you know what s the matter with that proposal this proposal would benefit the wealthiest seniors without providing any help to the low and middle income seniors and the medigap marketplace is already flawed today listen to this in washington the general accounting office is releasing a report that shows that medigap drug coverage starts out expensive and then goes through the roof as seniors get older on average it costs about 164 a month for a 65 year old to buy a medigap plan with drug coverage and premiums rise sharply from there for example in ohio an 80 year old person would pay 50 percent more than a 65 year old person for the same coverage under medigap this is not a good deal folks we don t want to put more money into this program it is not a good deal even those who offer medigap plans say the approach wouldn t work because it would force medigap insurers to charge excessively high premiums for the drugs or to refuse to participate at all now there s another problem that we have in the congress which is that the congressional majority just last week voted on budget resolutions that together allocate nearly half a trillion dollars to tax cuts and if we cut taxes that much we won t be able to afford this and we may not be able to save social security and medicare and pay down the debt and have money left over to invest in the education of our children i m for a tax cut but we ve got to be able to afford it and we first of all have got to keep this economy going we need to pay down the debt we can get out of debt for the first time since 1835 within a little more than 10 years if we just keep on this road a lot of you never thought you d ever see that we can lengthen social security out beyond the life of the baby boom generation we can put 25 years on the medicare program which is longer than it s had in blows and blows a long time and we can add this prescription drug coverage but we can t do it if the tax cut s too big and we shouldn t do it in the wrong way and say you can only get it if you re really poor or you can only get it if you buy into medigap now let me tell you why this is such a big deal the average 65 year old in america today has a life expectancy of 82 to 83 years the average 65 year old woman has a life expectancy higher than that the fastest growing group of american seniors are those over 85 so to knowingly lock ourselves into a program that would get 50 percent more expensive as you got older and older and needed more and more medicine and had less and less money does not make much sense we have given them a good program it is the right thing to do and so i would like to ask all of you to help all of these members of congress on the stage and to tell the people in washington look this is not a partisan issue you know a lot of people say we don t want to do this this is an election year look they can name this prescription drug program after herbert hoover calvin coolidge and warren harding it s fine with me i don t put some republican s name on it i don t care just do it because it s the right thing to do for the seniors of this country so i would just implore you help us pass this write to your united states senators tell them it s not a partisan issue tell them what life is like tell them it s not right for seniors in ohio to pay 30 to 50 percent more for medicine than seniors in canada pay for the same medicine that s made in america in the first place tell them it s not right for you to need something you can t have so you get sick but then when you show up at the emergency room it gets paid for we can afford this everybody in america has worked hard for it we ve got this budget in good shape we can make a commitment to our future if you think is necessary now imagine what it s going to be like when the number of seniors doubles in 30 years that s the last point i want to leave you with look how many seniors there are in cleveland today in 30 years the number of people over 65 will double and donna shalala and i hope to be among them and you think about it and then the average age in america will be well over 80 now if we have to take care of all these people by waiting until they get sick and they go to the hospital instead of worried about hospitals closing 30 years from now you ll worry about the city going bankrupt because everybody will be in the hospital we ve got to be healthier we ve got to keep people healthy we need to keep them playing tennis like lawyer shalala there but we also need to be able to give people medication to keep them out of the hospital and to manage people in a way that will maximize their health this will be a huge issue so i implore you this country this is the first time we ve been in shape to do this in 35 years we can do this now and we can do it now and take care of the future we can help the seniors of today and take a great burden off of tomorrow but we need your help to do it again i implore you talk to your members of congress talk to your senators tell them it s not a partisan issue it s an american issue it s a human issue and it s a smart thing to do thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton13 4 05 bill_clinton i thank you for that wonderful welcome i m honored by the presence of governor cody here thank you very much for being here and i thank the members of the drew faculty who are here but especially our long time friends don and karen jones and all of the others who have contributed into making this such a great school i am really honored to be the inaugural speaker at the tom kean visiting lecturer history and political science program you know that s kean s a better politician than i am usually to have something like that named after you that takes so long to say you ve got to be dead first he also got a job where he could keep the title mr president for more than eight years which i was profoundly impressed by you know i was talking to tom on the way out here and i was looking at him and i he s older than i am and looks younger which i resent but anyway i thinking that we may be two dinosaurs a republican and a democrat who actually like each other and admire each other and work together tom became famous obviously when he served as co chair with my old friend lee hamilton of the 9 11 commission and i spent four hours answering their questions so i can promise you they did a thorough job but long before that i knew that he was a leader that reached across party lines to try to solve problems and move our country forward when we were governors together he mentioned this i succeeded him as chairman of the education commission of the states and i ll never forget i came up here to new jersey for a meeting one time he hosted on education we worked together on welfare reform in 1987 we co chaired a commission we both served on the commission for the carnegie council on middle school education and i m proud to say that we were the first group tom and i and the others who served to recommended that community service be made a part of the regular school curriculum of all schools in the united states which i strongly believed in then and i still do in 1995 he agreed to be the vice chairman of the american delegation of world conference on women in beijing and he talked about race he agreed to serve on the president s initiative on race advisory board they did a marvelous job he gave me lots of wonderful suggestions and in spite of the confidence he gave me there were lots of things still to be done when i left office my last message to congress on the day before i left the oval office was on closing the remaining racial divides in america and the message came right out of the work and recommendations of the board on which tom served with such distinction and he told me the other day i mean tonight before we came in i got him to chair our national campaign to reduce teen pregnancy and told him it was going to be a year long job and he s about to celebrate his 10 year anniversary in that post so i m surprised that he let me come at all i say that because as i ve said many times in many places if tom kean were to call me in the middle of the night tonight and told me to empty my bank account and bring it over tomorrow morning i d do it without asking any questions and i think i think that it s a good thing to have healthy honest open political debates i don t care how sharp it is or how pronounced it is particularly if the differences are deep but we wouldn t still be here as a great nation if people who differed with each other politically had been bad people when i wrote my autobiography all of a sudden i remembered a story that i had forgotten i guess somewhere in the dim recesses i ran across a note about it but when i was in the 8th grade i had a science teacher named vernon dolke who was an ex coach and mr dolke s wife was my history teacher and his sister in law was my geometry teacher i was 13 years old and his and to put it mildly his wife and his sister in law were very attractive women and no one ever made the mistake of saying vernon dolke was a handsome man he wore very thick glasses he by then had gained a lot of weight he had kind of a hawk nose and he smoked very cheap cigars with a cigar holder that he kept in his mouth that gave him a real pinched look he thought it was funny that he was no hollywood movie star so one day we were sitting in class and he looked at us and he said kids most of you will never remember a thing you learn in this science class keep in mind this was 45 years ago and i remember this verbatim he said most of you will never remember anything you learn in this science class but if you don t remember anything else remember this he said every morning i get up and i go into my bathroom and i throw water on my face i put the shaving cream on i shave i look in the mirror and i say vernon you re beautiful he said you just remember that everybody wants to think they re beautiful and i think we have made a mistake in this country over the last 20 years and nobody s entirely blameless for it by thinking that we should demonize with whom we occasionally disagree and i think that some of the proudest moment in the long and rich life i had in public service were the moments both personal and public that i shared with tom kean and that s why i m here tonight i m honored to be here and i hope that those of you young people who are here who care about public service whether you are a republican or a democratic consider yourself a liberal or conservative will remember that the founding fathers knew that no one could be trusted with absolute power and no one had the complete truth they gave us a commission which is timeless to form a more perfect union they said a more perfect union because they both were progressive and that they believed in the idea of progress but they were conservative in that they did not believe in the perfectibility of human nature on this earth in this lifetime so they never said you can form a perfect union and they never said we should junk the government because we can t do any better they said our common mission from our different perspectives was to find a way to form a more perfect union so i think about that now from a very different perspective the politician in my family is not me anymore i was at the un today talking about tsunami relief and one of the reporters asked me whether i thought mr bolton should be confirmed as the ambassador to the united nations and i said well one person in my family actually has a vote on that and it s not me and she doesn t tell me how to run tsunami relief and i m not about to tell her how to vote on that nomination so for the sake of my domestic tranquility i take a pass it s wonderful not be in anymore i can take a dive whenever i want i can say whatever i want here s what i would like to do tonight i would like to take you on a little intellectual and emotional trip i want you to think about this and you may get lost in your own thoughts and stop paying attention to me and that s okay too if you ll just think about the subject because what i want you to think about tonight is what is the nature of the 21st century world in which we find ourselves what are its opportunities what are its challenges what are its immutable characteristics what is the role of the united states in dealing with the challenges and opportunities what is the role of government and what is your role and responsibility whether you re in public life or you re a private citizen i think in some ways the most important kind of intelligence a public leader can have is sort of a synthesizing one that is the ability to see disparate elements and put them in a pattern that gives people a way to understand the life that we re living and a way to decide how he or she should act on it from their perspective or their values with their own ideas most people describe this as the age of globalization it s a word i nearly never use not because i dislike it but because i think it has an almost exclusively economic connotation and to be sure we have a highly globalized economy but if you go back and read the history of the early 20th century a hundred years ago there were several countries including the united states that were nearly as trade dependent then as europe and the us are now and then we messed it all up in world war i and afterward but the difference is that the amount of interconnections today are not only greater but they go far beyond economics so i like to refer to this as the age of interdependence we are bound together by trade and travel by immigration by culture by technology we know things about each other we didn t used to know and we cannot escape each other now this interdependence can be very good and i ll just give you a couple of examples when i was president and we had all that good economic growth about 30 of our new jobs came from the expansion of trade and those jobs paid on average 30 more than comparable jobs in non trade affiliated enterprises another example when i became president there were only 50 sites on the internet when i left there were 50 000 000 on something called the worldwide web and when i became president the average cell phone weighed five pounds today i m just hoping that i can figure out a way to hit the keys on the phone they re so small when the tsunami hit southeast asia the miracle of technology contributed to the most unprecedented outpouring in the united states and around the world from ordinary citizens to help their fellow human beings across the globe usa today reported that not only had at that time americans pledged or given over 700 000 000 now probably around a billion dollars but that about a third of american households had contributed to tsunami relief through their religious organizations or charities and over half of them had given over the internet in this last presidential campaign for the first time since money became important really important because it costs so much money to buy advertising for the first time the small donors swamped the big donors in the collective impact of their gifts because both parties raised unprecedented amounts of money over the internet through high technology at the end of my tenure as president in the second term an international independent coalition of scientists succeeded in sequencing the human genome for the first time something which will revolutionize life already the two main genetic markers for that are high predictors of breast cancer have been identified we re closer to parkinson s and alzheimer s soon young mothers the young women students in this audience when you bring your babies home from the hospital you ll soon have little gene cards which will literally give you a roadmap to the strengths and weaknesses of your child s makeup some of it will be scary but even with the problems you will have a dramatically increased chance to give your child a long and healthy and happy life all that is really good and really exciting but there are negatives to this age of interdependence the best one i can think of is the one tom became famous for analyzing and that s 9 11 9 11 arguably was made possible by the independent world where 19 people who were not from the united states used the forces of interdependence they used open borders easy access to information easy access to technology to turn jet airplanes into massive chemical weapons to kill almost 3 000 people from 70 countries who were here grasping for the positive interdependence that is represented in the united states and particularly in this part of our country therefore what i would say to you is that this age of interdependence like every age that is preceded before in human history has good and bad points the one thing that is immutable is the interdependence we cannot escape each other the microcosm i often cite is the middle east when i was president for about seven of the eight years that i was there we had determined progress towards peace in the middle east in 1998 was the only time in the history of the state of israel in 1998 there was not a single person killed by a terrorist attack and they had a change of government there and a big election and massive land transfers all kinds of things were going on but they were working together there was a sense of positive interdependence then the intifada started after the now prime minster went upon the temple mount and then it intensified when mr arafat foolishly i believe turned down the peace proposal that i put on the table so then we had four years of pure hell in the eight years i was president fewer than 260 israelis were killed by terrorist attacks in the next four years over 1 000 were over 4 000 palestinians died the average age of the israelis was 24 the average of the palestinians was 18 but in the last four years they were not a bit less interdependent than they were in the previous seven when we were moving toward peace now we have a new chance we have a new government among the palestinians that express disavow of terrorism and new hope for progress so you see positive interdependence whether you agree with the wall that s being built or not in israel if it s good it s good because it will minimize violence to save lives on both sides while the thing s being worked out but you can build all the walls you want they still won t be able to escape each other whether you like the wall or not it certainly won t end the sense of interdependence which exists now if you believe that if you believe we live in an age that is interdependent that has lots of good things and new dangers then that leads you i think logically to what the mission of the united states should be and what our mission as citizens of our country and the world should be we should attempt to build up the forces of positive interdependence to reduce the forces of negative interdependence to move from a relatively unstable situation with good and bad to more of an integrated community both within the united states and beyond our borders which i defined as a place where there are shared responsibilities shared benefits and shared basic values everybody counts deserves a chance has a responsibility to play a role the competition is good but we all do better when we work together the differences are important and make life more interesting but our common humanity matters more now it seems to me that that s the way the world should go so whenever anybody asks a question how do you feel about any domestic proposal before the congress any item in a budget any issue being debated anywhere in the state government throughout america some subject before the united nations the first question i ask myself whatever the subject is is will this help to move us from interdependence to an integrated global community will this advance the cause of either shared responsibilities or shared benefits does it reflect our shared values and it makes life at least manageable for me in a bewildering complicated world that s the prism through which i view things now you don t have to agree with my analysis but you need one of your own if you don t agree with that you need to ask yourself what do you think the immutable characteristics of the modern world are how will you analyze all of the things that are flying at you from an apparently disparate position and all the complicated issues that are constantly on display in our lives one of the big challenges of this exciting time is that we live in a world with so much inequality no matter how pretty you paint the picture of the modern world about half the people simply aren t part of it and the statistics tell the tale half the world there s over 6 000 000 000 people on earth today half the world still lives on less than 2 00 a day a billion people live on less than 1 00 a day a billion people will go to bed hungry tonight a billion and a half people have no access to clean water when i started working on this tsunami relief one of the biggest things we worried about was dysentery cholera and other diseases spreading because even more people millions more would have no access to clean water ten million children will die this year of completely preventable childhood diseases because the inequality in the healthcare system 130 000 000 children this year of school age kids will darken a schoolhouse door tom and i worry about how to raise standards how to improve the equality of education 130 000 000 kids never see a school book never see a school teacher in many of the poorest places of the world in africa parents still have to pay to send their kids to the public school because there are no revenues to pay for them otherwise and i could give you lots of other examples the one that i care a lot about in aids is the most maddening problem of all here we have a disease that s completely preventable where there s medicine that is almost 100 effective in blocking the transmission from infected mothers to their children other medicine that works way over half the time to give healthy people with their hiv viruses that develop aids a chance to live a normal life span and if you look at the poor countries of the world you have 6 000 000 people at death s door and when i started this project on aids a couple of years ago only 300 000 were getting medicine 130 000 of them were in one country brazil because the government gave it to them today our foundation in two years is getting medicine to 110 000 others in africa asia and the caribbean we re about to go to work in ukraine and northwest russia but the fact remains that all over the world there are people who are trying to build their future being hobbled by a disease that shouldn t be killing all the people that are being killed we made an announcement this week that we re going to give pediatric medicine to 10 000 children this year last year 500 000 preteens died of aids 500 000 in the world only 25 000 get pediatric medicine in the whole world over half of them are in two countries brazil and thailand because the government gives it to them so by committing to get the medicine to 10 000 people we have virtually doubled the number of children getting medicine next year we ll do 60 000 it s a maddening problem but it is a representative of the drastic inequality of the modern world i was meeting with the ambassadors to the un of the tsunami effected countries today and i was laughing with the indian ambassador because they recently had an election in india and no one predicted that the incumbent government would be voted out and that the congress party would be returned to power in india why because the economy was booming and it s interesting it s the only election i know of where an incumbent was defeated because the economy was doing so well and let me explain by what i mean by that the indian election was a microcosm of the challenge of global interdependence india has about a billion people it has the largest middle class in the world bigger even than china s about 350 000 000 people in the middle class by international definition standards the problem is 650 000 000 people aren t in the middle class and they get the same media everybody else does and they want in they don t live in the ambit of one of those seven big high tech centers or the government center in delhi or in one of the big coastal trading cities that s making money out of trade so they put a new government in because the party that won said we ll spread the prosperity we ll have shared benefits and i was arguing today that the tsunami the devastation of it actually gave the new government a chance to prove their theory in the areas that had been affected by improving the economy beyond where it had been before the tsunami hit i m sort of giving you this sketch of the world so you ll kind of see the formidable challenges it sounds so great we re going to share responsibilities share benefits but it s easier said than done now i think what should be done is the following for the united states we need a security policy we need to fight terror and reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction we need more institutionalized cooperation this is the place where i ve often been at odds with the incumbent government because i favored putting america in the international criminal court system once our soldiers were protected i favored the i favored the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty i favored the international treaty on global warming the kyoto accord i favored those things and not because there wasn t something wrong with every one of then not because i thought i would agree with every decision we established the world trade organization and america went in when i was president and they made a couple of decisions that i thought were nutty that i didn t like and didn t think were fair to america but i joined for the same reason you join and stay in any larger group i thought it was better for us to be in than out i thought we got more benefits than burdens if you think about any voluntary unions starting with the smallest one a marriage a business a civic club any organization which you join and stay in that you could leave you stay in not because you agree with every decision that s made but because you think it s better to stay in than to leave your life is enriched you re better off that s why you do it not because you agree with all the decisions so i will say again i was gratified when president bush encouraged me to take this tsunami job with the un and said he wanted the united states to continue to support the un and hoped that we d be closer in his second term because i think that it s very important for the united states to set a good example we can t ask other people to abide by international rule and join international organizations unless we also do that so think that s important the third thing i think we need is a wholesale assault on the inequalities of the world to share the benefits and we know how to do it now we used to be able to say well we shouldn t our foreign aid programs are for just throwing money at the problems they don t work and frankly that was often true particularly when i was growing up and coming of age in politics and a lot of our aids programs were designed to farther our political interests in fighting communism during the cold war but that s simply not true anymore we do know how to do this in 2000 for example in my last year as president we had unprecedented completely bipartisan effort to relieve the debt of the poorest countries in the world if and only if they put all the benefits from debt relief into education healthcare and economic development and the benefits to these countries have been absolutely stunning we know how to do this and i am gratified that there seems to be more and more of a bipartisan consensus and a liberal conservative consensus that i think we should do more in aids and other things which i appreciate it is far cheaper for us to pay america s fair share of putting 130 000 000 kids in school helping the kids live who are now dying of preventable childhood diseases finding an appropriate global response to the aids crisis and other healthcare crises it s far cheaper to do all that than to go to war anywhere now i say that because walk through this with me whether you agree with what we did in iraq or not you should all hope that it works now because they had an election they had a bigger turnout than we had a higher percentage of their eligible voters voted under very adverse circumstances so whether you think we did the right thing or not or it was all done right or not or whatever reservations we all had those folks showed up and they were glad to be shed of saddam hussein and they want to have a chance to build a future so we should hope it works but it s cost over 200 000 000 000 it will soon cost us more than world war i did in inflation adjusted dollars and what that means is whether it was the right thing to do or not the right thing to do it s an example of the first adage we all learned in law school those of us who went to law school that is which is hard cases make bad law that is you can t make a rule of it this is not something we can do every day everywhere whether it was right or wrong we have in new jersey in arkansas where i come from in new york hillary represents on the armed services committee of the senate hears story after story after story of the military overstretch the strains on the traditional military the economic and personal burdens on the national guard members and reservists so we have to have a strategy not only that fights our enemies but also makes a world with more friends and fewer enemies and it s far less expensive you get more hang for the buck it doesn t mean we won t have to go to war again it doesn t mean we won t have to have a security policy it doesn t mean we don t need a smart defense and especially a smarter homeland defense system but it means that setting aside a significant but a much smaller amount of money to pay our fair share of building a world with more shared benefits will have enormous enormous positive repercussions and i will just give you one example but it s a stunner on march the 8th the former president bush and i went to the white house to report to the president on our trip to the tsunami affected areas and what we found and how we thought the contributions of america the private contributions as well as the government contributions should be invested and right before i went in a man who had worked with us with the u s aid program gave me a poll which had just been released in indonesia the largest muslim country in the world 200 000 000 people if you all remember the gripping pictures in aichi of the american military helicopters going to those remote areas giving lifesaving supplies you may not have seen but i did personally the american aid workers and the people from the religious organizations and the other non governmental organizations they are serving just helping people because it s the right thing to do there was heavy publicity in the indonesian media about overwhelming number of ordinary americans sending aid to the tsunami so this was the first survey and it was a very large one done before the tsunami the positive opinion of the united states was 36 afterward it was about 60 the only reason cited was what the american people and their representatives had done in the tsunami before the tsunami the postiive opinions of osama bin laden in indonesia was 58 after the tsunami in the poll his positive rating was 28 the only reason cited was our response to the tsunami it s easier to kick down a barn than to build one he didn t do anything to try to help these people after the tsunami but a lot of ordinary people in new jersey did and they got it and they knew they knew we had no political agenda indonesia became the only majority muslim country in this poll where at least the plurality said that america should now lead the war against terror all across the world why not because of military victories in afghanistan and iraq but because of our tsunami aid so the point i m trying to make is if you live in an interdependent world if you can t slay imprison or occupy all your adversaries you have to take some money and some time to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries and when you do you reduce the number of obligations you ll have to use force and the times you ll be forced to do it you will increase the impact when you do have to use force and more people will think that it wasn t your first choice this is very very important you have no idea if anybody in this room today gave 5 00 to any organization for tsunami relief you have no idea what you did to help the image of your country around the world it s just because you didn t have a political agenda you did the right thing because you wanted to help people so we have to have a security policy we have to have a policy of institutional cooperation we have to have a policy to make more friends and fewer terrorists we have to keep working to make america better and to realize that the decisions that we make in this country do have impacts around the world this is about the only the closest i want to come to politics tonight unless you ask me about it you know i never had a nickle to my name till i got out of the white house when tom and i were serving as govenor every year but the last year i was govenor i made 35 000 a year i was the lowest paid governor in america and most of my constituents thought i was getting too much so then i get out and i start making all this money and low and behold in 2001 they throw this big tax cut at me before our country knows what our income our expenses or our emergencies are going to be it turns out the economy goes down so our income s lower we have a huge emergency in 9 11 which further depressed our income and necessitated greater expenditures for homeland security and for military and we go from a projected surplus of 5 8 trillion dollars over the next decade to a big projected deficit and then in 2002 they do it all over again and give me another tax cut and in 2003 they do it again in 2004 they did it again and in 2005 they re debating a budget resolution for another 100 000 000 000 in tax cuts it sounds so great but what it means is here we are the biggest strongest richest country in the world telling the world we expect you to loan us the money to pay for our government because our people are too selfish to pay for it that s what it says and you have to loan us the money just lest you think i m kidding let me tell you how we pay for it when you see that we ve got a 400 000 000 000 a year defict that s not true the real operating deficit is about 550 000 000 000 if it s 450 because we take 150 000 000 000 off the top that we re paying in social security taxes every year that are not being paid out in benefits then we put a certificate now in the social security trust fund and the government has to pay that back some day but when we have to pay it back we ll either have to devastate whole the rest of the government or have a huge tax increase and all those bonds have to be paid back we stopped doing that in the second term we finally got rid of the deficit then we got rid of the social security deficit and we paid down about 600 000 000 000 of the national debt and i think my own view is that i knew we couldn t keep doing that forever something would happen to the economy some emergency would arise but if we kept that fundamental structure we still had the lowest tax burden federal state and local of any rich country in the world except japan which is about the same as ours and we would have been out of debt in this country by somewhere between 2011 and 2015 depending on how the economy developed and we would have had the money from savings since we wouldn t have to pay interest on the debt that could have been used to completely alleviate the social security crisis so that s what i had hoped would happen now i don t really believe that you re better off because somebody like me got four tax cuts and apparently is about to get a fifth you should know that then we ve got to go get that 400 000 000 000 dem wjclinton13 4 93 bill_clinton thank you very much colonel mccarty general streeter my fellow americans i want to begin by offering my compliments to the united states marine band and the virginia glee club who have entertained us so well today i think we should give them another hand today we observe the birthday of perhaps the most brilliant of our founding fathers in a setting thomas jefferson would have very much approved one that joins the beauty of human architecture with the rapturous side of nature with the cherry blossoms bursting all around us in a wreath mr jefferson used to say with some pride that the sun never found him in bed that he always rose early and he was very proud of the fact that well into his 70s he could ride a horse several miles a day without tiring well in honor of his birthday i rose early this morning and finding no horses around the white house i ran over here and jogged around this magnificent tidal basin seeing many of my fellow citizens who were here even before me at the dawn to see this magnificent sight today we have come to lay our wreath in honor of thomas jefferson as his likeness towers behind us and yet no amount of bronze can capture the measure of the man who helped to cut a path for our nation who personally forged the principles that continue to guide us as americans and as lovers of freedom as has already been said this monument was dedicated a half a century ago on the 200th anniversary of jefferson s birthday by president franklin roosevelt a worthy heir to the spirit of jefferson were jefferson here today i think he would not want very much to talk about america of his time instead he would be talking about the america of our time he would certainly not be at a loss for ideas about what we ought to be doing for he was a man blessed with an eye for invention an ear for music the hands of a farmer the mind of a philosopher the voice of a statesman and the soul of a searcher for truth the genius of thomas jefferson was his ability to get the most out of today while never taking his eye off tomorrow to think big while enjoying the little things of daily life perhaps most important he understood that in order for us to preserve our timeless values people have to change and free people need to devise means by which they can change profoundly and still peacefully if you go back to this monument after the ceremony you will see on the wall in part the following quotation laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind as that becomes more developed more enlightened as new discoveries are made and new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times a very modern statement from our third president in his own time the pace of change was enormous just think back during jefferson s presidency the steamboat made its debut revolutionizing travel the importing of slaves was banned paving the way toward emancipation and the realignment of society and he acquired the louisiana purchase for the then massive sum 15 million turns out it was an awfully sound investment it doubled the size of our nation it opened up a new frontier and it enabled me to be born in the united states of america and many of you as well i suspect but believe it or not every step along the way thomas jefferson was opposed there were people who opposed the louisiana purchase people who opposed his then radical conception of human liberty and both the power of individuals and the limitations of the government he fought and he prevailed i wonder what he would say about our time in which the pace of change is even greater i think he would take great pride in the fact that we have now found ways to literally double the volume of knowledge every few years but i think he would terribly disappointed that our understanding in this country of the science and mathematics that he loved so much is still so limited and so inadequate when compared to that of many other nations i think he would be delighted that the principles of freedom for which he stood all his life finally resulted in the end of the cold war and the demise of communism but i think he would be deeply disappointed that ethnic and racial and other hatreds had kept this world such a dangerous and unstable place in ways that are blatantly unreasonable as he defined reason i think he would be proud of the technological and economic advances of this time of the increasing interconnection of peoples across national borders in a global economy but i think he would be profoundly disturbed that even the richest countries are now having enormous difficulty in finding enough jobs for their people including his own beloved united states and that so much technological advance seems to bring the destruction of much of the environment about which he cared so deeply i think jefferson would be impressed at the enormous advances in health care he cared a lot about his health and he lived to be 83 largely by taking good care of himself and i think he would be a little disappointed that more of us don t take better care of ourselves and appalled to think that the united states is the only advanced country where every person doesn t have access to affordable health care something i hope we can change before long if you go up there and read what s on those walls there is an incredibly moving statement where jefferson said he trembles to think that god is just when he considers the real meaning of the institution of slavery so i think he would be delighted at the progress we have made in human rights and living together across racial lines because he had such a passionate belief in individual liberty i think he would be delighted by the range of personal choices and freedom of speech that the american people enjoy today even to say things that he would find offensive for he understood the clear meaning of the first amendment but i think he would be appalled at the lack of selfrespect and self control and respect for others which manifest itself in the kind of mindless violence to which this city and others have been subject for the last several years and appalled at the millions of young people who will never know the full measure of their freedom because they have been raised without order without love without family without even the basic safety which people need to be able almost to take for granted in order to be citizens of a real democracy in short i think thomas jefferson would tell us that this is one of those times when we need to change clearly the call for change that jefferson made he intended to be echoed generation after generation after generation he believed if we set up the constitution in the way that it was set up that americans of courage and good sense would always always find themselves in the majority for change when they needed to be there he believed in government constantly being reformed by reason and popular will that is what this administration is trying to do now we know that we have an economy that even in growth does not produce new jobs we know that we have increased by four times the debt of this nation over the last 12 years and we don t have much to show for it we know that the people have now courageously asked us to take on the problems of jobs and the deficit the environment and education and health care to try to put our people first again and make government work for them the american people deep in their bones without even thinking about it are the agents of change that thomas jefferson sought to write in perpetuity into our constitution for in the end thomas jefferson understood that no politician no government no piece of paper could do for the american people what they would have to do for themselves he understood better perhaps than any of his colleagues that the people of this country would always have to be not only the protectors of their own liberty but the agents of their own transformation and change but he also knew that government must be willing to supply the tools of that change and that very simply is our task today after all what is a good education but a tool to a better life what is a job but a tool to build self sufficiency selfesteem and dignity for a worker and a family as i look around this nation i know that thomas jefferson would be very proud and pleased by much of what has happened here i suspect it would amuse and surprise him and make him very proud to think that for most americans on most days people from 150 and more racial and ethnic groups live together in not only peace and law abidingness but also mutual respect and reinforcing strength i think that would make him proud i think he would be proud of the generosity of spirit that characterizes our people and manifests itself most clearly at a time of national crisis and national tragedy after all in jefferson s time people gave food and shelter to travelers who came to their doors at night even when they were total strangers jefferson himself at monticello often offered his home over the years to bone weary travelers today many of our people would do the same thing but together together we have not faced the problems of the boneweary travelers in our own land nor have we faced the problems that we all share in common we cannot turn the problems away it is time for reasonable change it is time for the americans in our time to live up to the principles etched in stone in this magnificent memorial just look at the beauty around us today do you know that in mr jefferson s time almost all of this was a swamp people avoided this place like the plague because they were afraid of the plague but with a plan with investments with effort with vision americans transformed it and from this inhospitable terrain rose the city before us one of the most magnificent capitals in the history of the world but the structures around us are simply buildings they come to life only when they shake from the will of the people that is what thomas jefferson knew we are the inheritors of jefferson s rich legacy on this the 200th anniversary of his birth we can honor him best by remembering our own role in governing ourselves and our nation to speak to move to change for it is only in change that we preserve the timeless values for which thomas jefferson gave his life over two centuries ago thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton13 5 94 bill_clinton thank you thank you so much for the warm reception and for the honorary degree i must tell you at the beginning that i have been deeply moved by the wonderful statements of your students jeanette and andre i think they have already said everything i could hope to say as well or better and i wish only that i could say it to you in their language as well i m delighted to be here with dr jordan whom i have admired so much and dr anderson a native of my home state with my great friend and your champion senator tom harkin with many members of congress including major owens who will receive an honorary degree congressman david bonior congressman steve gunderson and your own representative in congress eleanor holmes norton i honor too here the presence of those in the disability rights community the members of our own administration but most of all you the class of 1994 your families and your friends you have come to this extraordinary moment in your own life at a very special moment in the life of your country and what it stands for everywhere nations and peoples are struggling to move toward the freedom and democracy that we take for granted here our example is now over 200 years old but it continues to be a powerful magnet pulling people toward those noble goals this week we all watched and wondered as a former prisoner stood shoulder to shoulder with his former guards to become a president of a free and democratic south africa yet each day across the from bosnia to rwanda and burundi and here in america in neighborhood after neighborhood we wonder whether peace and progress will win out over the divisions of race and ethnicity of region and religion over the impulse of violence to conquer virtue each day we are barraged in the news as mutual respect and the bonds of civility are broken down a little more here at home and around the world it is not difficult to find in literature today many who suggest that there are large numbers of your generation who feel a sense of pessimism about the future people in my generation worry about that they worry whether young people will continue to try to change what is wrong continue to take responsibility for the hard work of renewing the american community i wish everyone who is worried about america could see your faces today and could have heard your class speakers today our whole history and our own experience in this lifetime contradict the impulse to pessimism for those who believe that nothing can change i say look at the experience of rabin and arafat as the police representing the palestinians begin to move into gaza and to jericho for those who proclaim there is no future for racial harmony and no hope in our common humanity i say look at the experience of mandela and de klerk for those who believe that in the end people are so vulnerable to their own weakness they will not have the courage to preserve democracy and freedom i say look to the south of our borders where today of almost three dozen nations in latin america all but two are ruled by democratically elected leaders here at home with all of our terrible problems for every act of craven violence there are 100 more acts of kindness and courage to be sure the work of building opportunity and community of maintaining freedom and renewing america s hope in each and every generation is hard and it requires of each generation a real commitment to our values to our institutions and to our common destiny the students of gallaudet university who have struggled so mightily first for simple dignity and then for equal opportunity you have built yourselves and in the process you have built for the rest of us your fellow citizens of this country and the world a much better world you have re given to all of us our hope gallaudet is a national treasure it is fitting as dr anderson said that president lincoln granted your charter because he understood better than others the sacrifices required to preserve a democracy under diversity and ultimately lincoln gave his life to the cause of renewing our national rights he signed your first charter in the midst of the civil war where he had the vision to see not just farmland and a tiny school but the fact that we could use education to tear down the walls between us to touch and improve lives and lift the spirits of those who for too long had been kept down over the years pioneers have built gallaudet sustained by generations of students and faculty committed to the richness and possibility of the deaf community and the fullness of the american dream this school stands for the renewal that all america needs today lincoln s charter was an important law but let me refer to another great president to make an equally important point that just as important as laws are the attitudes that animate our approach to one another the president that i m referring to is your president king jordan when the americans with disabilities act passed he said and i quote we now stand at the threshold of a new era for all americans those of us with disabilities and those of us without he went on to say that in this pursuit as in every pursuit of democracy our task is to reach out and to educate each other about our possibilities our capabilities and who we are i ran for president because i thought we were standing on the threshold of a new era just as president jordan says i felt we were in danger of coming apart when we ought to be coming together of arguing too much about going left or right when we ought to be holding hands and going forward into the future together i grew weary of hearing people predict that my own daughter s generation would be the first generation of americans to do less well than their parents i was tired of hearing people say that our country s best days were behind us i didn t believe it in 1992 and i sure don t believe it after being here with you today my responsibilities to you and your generation are significant that s why all of us have worked hard to restore the economy to reward work to bring down the deficit to increase our trade with other nations to create more jobs why we ve worked to empower all americans to compete and win in a global economy through early education and lifetime training and learning through reforming the college loan program to open the doors of college to all americans why we have worked to strengthen the family through the family and medical leave act why we have worked to create a safer america with the brady bill and the ban on assault weapons and putting more police on the street and punishing and preventing more crime as well but i say to you that in the end america is a country that has always been carried by its citizens not its government the government is a partner but the people the people realize the possibility of this country and ensure its continuation from generation to generation i think there is no better symbol of this than the program which i hope will be the enduring legacy of our efforts to rebuild the american community the national service program six gallaudet students including four members of this class will be part of our national service program americorps very first class of 20 000 volunteers i am very proud of you for giving something back to your country by joining the conversation corps and committing yourselves to rebuild our nation by exercising your freedom and your responsibility to give something back to your country and earning something for education in return you have embodied the renewal that america must seek as king jordan reminded us government can make good laws and we need them but it can t make good people in the end it s our values and our attitudes that make the difference having those values and attitudes and living by them is everyone s responsibility and our great opportunity look at the changes which have occurred through that kind of effort because previous generations refused to be denied a place at the table simply because others thought they were different the world is now open to those of you who graduate today most of you came here knowing you could be doctors entrepreneurs software engineers lawyers or cheerleaders because over the years others spoke up for you and gave you a chance to move up and you have clearly done your part you have made a difference you have believed in broadening the unique world you share with each other by joining it to the community at large and letting the rest of us in on your richness your hearts your minds and your possibilities for that we are all in your debt perhaps the greatest moment in the history of this university occurred in 1988 when the community came together and said we will no longer accept the judgment of others about our lives and leadership in this university these are our responsibilities and we accept the challenge in days what was known as the deaf president now movement changed the way our entire country looks at deaf people the nation watched as you organized and built a movement of conscience unlike any other you removed barriers of limited expectations and our nation saw that deaf people can do anything hearing people can but hear that people s movement was a part of the american disability rights movement just two months after king jordan took office the americans with disabilities act was introduced with the leadership of many including my friend tom harkin in two years it became law and proved once again that the right cause can unite us over partisanship and prejudice we can still come together for the now more than 49 million americans who are deaf or disabled the signing of the ada was the most important legal event in history for almost a billion persons with disabilities around the world it stands as a symbol of simple justice and inalienable human rights i believe that being deaf or having any disability is not tragic but the stereotypes attached to it are tragic discrimination is tragic not getting a job or having the chance to reach your godgiven potential because someone else is handicapped by prejudice or fear is tragic it must not be tolerated because none of us can afford it we need each other and we do not have a person to waste the ada is part of the seamless web of civil rights that so many have worked for so long to build in america a constant fabric wrapped in the hopes and aspirations of all right thinking americans as your president i pledge to see that it is fully implemented and aggressively enforced in schools in the work place in government in public places it is time to move from exclusion to inclusion from dependance to independence from paternalism to empowerment i mention briefly now only two of the many tasks still before me as you president and you as citizens our health care system today denies or discriminates in coverage against 81 million americans who are part of families with what we call preexisting conditions including americans with disabilities it must be changed if we want to open up the workplace and if we are serious about giving every american the chance to live up to his or her potential then we cannot discriminate against which workers get health care and how much it costs if you can do the job you ought to be able to get covered it s as simple as that and that simple message is one i implore you to communicate to the congress we have fooled around for 60 years your time has come you are ready you are leaving this university you want a full good life and you do not wish to be discriminated against on health care grounds pass health care reform in 1994 the last thing i wish to say that faces us today also affects your future the vice president has worked very hard on what is called the information superhighway we know that america is working hard to be the technological leader of the information age the technologies in which we are now investing will open up vast new opportunities to all of our people but information which will be education which will be employment which will be income which will be possibility must flow to all americans on terms of equal accessibility without regard to physical condition and we are committed to doing that finally let me just say today a personal word a few days ago when we celebrated mother s day it was my first mother s day without my mother and so i have been thinking about what i should say to all of you those of you who are lucky enough still to have your parents and perhaps some of you who do not on graduations it is important for us to remember that none of us ever achieves anything alone i dare say as difficult as your lives have been you are here today not only because of your own courage and your own effort but because someone loved you and believed in you and helped you along the way i hope today that you will thank them and love them and in so doing remember that all across this country perhaps our biggest problem is that there are too many children most of who can hear just fine who never hear the kind of love and support that every person needs to do well and we must commit ourselves to giving that to those children so i say there may be those who are pessimistic about our future and all of us should be realistic about our challenges i used to say that i still believed in a place called hope the little town in which i was born today i say i know the future of this country will be in good hands because of a place called gallaudet for 125 years young people have believed in themselves their families their country and their future with the courage to dream and the willingness to work to realize those dreams you have inspired your president today and a generation and i say to you good luck and godspeed dem wjclinton13 5 98 bill_clinton thank you very much mr president chancellor kohl to the leaders and members of the bundestag and bundesrat members of the cabinet members of the diplomatic corps professor schneider and all the people who have made us feel so welcome here at the beautiful schauspielhaus let me begin by thanking the german symphony orchestra for playing one of my favorite pieces eroica thank you very much mr mayor thank you for your remarks and chancellor thank you for all that you said i am delighted to join all of you in the historic heart of free and unified berlin fifty years ago the united states and its allies made a commitment to the people of berlin it began with the heroic airlift of 1948 continued through the showdown with soviet tanks at checkpoint charlie in 1961 and includes nearly 100 000 american soldiers who defended this city over the course of 40 years and grew to love its people it lasted until east germans bravely reached out across the wall and tore it down thus freeing all of us to make real a europe we had only dreamed of an undivided continent of thriving democracies where states deal with each other not through domination but dialogue where societies are governed not by repression but by the rule of law where the only barriers people face are the limits of their own dreams today berlin is the symbol of what all europe is striving to become former chancellor willy brandt who was mayor of west berlin on the day the wall went up declared on that magical november night as the wall was coming down es waechst zusammen was zusammengehoert what belongs together is growing together you have shown citizens of berlin that he was correct from the construction on the spree turning berlin into germany s capital for the future to the renewal of potsdammer platz as a dynamic center of business berlin s rebirth embodies all our hopes for the future and from munich to potsdam from hamburg to dresden people throughout germany s old and new states have struggled and sacrificed to make the larger dream of german unity come true now barely 600 days before the beginning of a new century and a new millennium we must make unity our mission for the continent as a whole and for a new transatlantic community for more than 1 000 years from the time of charlemagne to the founding of the european community a unified europe has captured this continent s imagination now for the first time the dream is within reach and not through conquest but through the decision of free people in 1994 i came to europe to support your unity and to set forth a vision of partnership between america and a new europe rooted in security cooperation free markets and vibrant democracies i asked all our countries to adapt our institutions for the new time to help the new market economies of europe s eastern half to thrive to support the growth of freedom and the spread of peace to bring the peoples of the euro atlantic community more closely together on all fronts we have made remarkable progress nato is taking on new missions and new members building practical ties with russia and ukraine deepening cooperation among the 44 nations of the partnership council the european union is growing and america and the eu are working together to tear down more trade barriers and strengthen new democracies the osce europe s standard bearer for human rights and freedoms is now helping to make those standards real from supervising elections in albania to monitoring arms reduction in bosnia with support from america and the european union and especially with chancellor kohl and germany s farsighted leadership new market economies are taking root all across this continent russia has privatized more property than any nation in this century poland and estonia are among europe s fastest growing economies since 1991 u s and eu investment in central and eastern europe has quadrupled and trade has doubled we ve encouraged europe s newly freed nations from helping citizens groups in the new independent states to monitor their elections to strengthening the independence of their judicial systems in russia alone thousands of civic groups are beginning to take a role in shaping the destiny of this century president yeltsin has a new government of young reformers fully capable of leading russia decisively into the future we have helped to take the peace take hold from bosnia to northern ireland every day our ordinary citizens work to link our nations together from sister cities such as leipzig and houston to american students flocking to all european countries to young romanians and bulgarians now enrolled in our military academies with all of this progress as the chancellor noted many challenges still remain to our common vision the ongoing struggles of newly free nations to consolidate their reforms the unfinished work of bring europe s eastern half fully into our transatlantic community the fear of those who lack the skills to succeed in the fast changing global economy the voices of hatred intolerance and division on both sides of the atlantic whether masked in patriotism cloaked in religious fervor or posing as ethnic pride bosnia s fragile peace kosovo s volatility cyprus stalemate the dangers that all our nations face and cannot defeat alone the spread of weapons of mass destruction organized crime environmental degradation and so my friends 1998 no less than 1989 demands our boldness our will and our unity today i call on our nations to summon the energy and the will to finish the work we have started to keep at it until every nation on the continent enjoys the security and democracy we do and all men and women from seattle to paris to istanbul to st petersburg are able to pursue their dreams in peace and build an even better life for their children this is the opportunity of generations together we must seize it we must build a europe like germany itself whole and free prosperous and peaceful increasingly integrated and always globally engaged if you will forgive me a personal observation based on my service in the last five and a half years i must note that this magic moment in history did not simply arrive it was made and made largely by the vision and determined leadership of germany and its chancellor for nine years consider the historic changes you have wrought you committed germany again to lead in a united europe this time through cooperation not conquest you took the risk of pushing for the european monetary union knowing there would be bumps along the way especially with the strength of the deutsche mark and the power of your own economy you shouldered the enormous cost of your own reunification to make sure the east is not left behind and to ease as much as possible the unavoidable dislocation and pain that goes along with this process and you have done this while also taking on the challenge that west germany must face in making a difficult transition to a global economy in which preserving opportunity for all and preserving the social contract is a challenge even for the wealthiest nations as we see in america every day all this you have attempted to do and largely achieved in nine short years though many german citizens may be uncertain of the outcome and may not yet feel the benefits of your farsighted courageous course you are clearly on the right side of history america honors your vision and your achievements and we are proud to march with you shoulder to shoulder into the new millennium we thank you we begin our common journey with one basic premise america stands with europe today no less than 50 years ago our destinies are joined if europe is at peace america is more secure if europe prospers america does as well we share a common destiny because we move to a logic of mutually beneficial interdependence where each nation can grow stronger and more prosperous because of the success of its neighbors and friends therefore we welcome europe s march toward greater unity we seek a transatlantic partnership that is broad and open in scope where the benefits and burdens are shared where we seek a stable and peaceful future not only for ourselves but for all the world we begin with our common security of which nato is the bedrock next year the leaders of countries across europe will gather in washington to celebrate nato s 50 years of success to welcome the first new democracies from eastern europe as members to keep nato s door open to others as they are ready to assume the responsibilities of membership to chart a course for the century ahead with threats more diffuse but no less dangerous than those our founders faced yesterday s nato guarded our borders against direct military invasion tomorrow s alliance must continue to defend enlarged borders and defend against threats to our security from beyond them the spread of weapons of mass destruction ethnic violence regional conflict nato must have the means to perform these tasks and we must maintain and strengthen our partnership with russia with ukraine with other nations across the continent who share our interests our values and our dreams advancing security also requires us to work for peace whether in northern ireland nagorno karabakh kosovo bosnia or cyprus to stand against intolerance and injustice as much as military aggression for racism and inequality have no place in the future we are building together we must fight them at home and abroad second we must do more to promote prosperity throughout our community transatlantic commerce as the chancellor said is already the largest economic relationship in the world encompassing more than half a trillion u s dollars each year supporting millions of jobs in both america and europe consider this america s investment in europe roughly equals that in all the rest of the world put together and europe s investment in america has now created so many jobs that one of 12 u s factory workers is employed by a european owned firm still we must face the stark fact that prosperity is not yet everyone s partner europe s new democracies confront the daunting challenge of transition to market economies in an age of globalization which as i have already said makes it more difficult to preserve equality of opportunity a strong social safety net and a general sense of fairness we must continue to help these struggling countries even as those of us in wealthier nations confront our own challenges on these fronts america will continue to support europe s march toward integration we admire the determination that has made your economic and monetary union possible and we will work with you to make it a success we will continue to encourage your steps to enlarge the eu as well eventually to embrace all central europe and turkey our third task is to strengthen the hand and extend the reach of democracy one important tool is the osce its broad membership projects a unity and moral authority unparalleled on the continent today the osce is taking action on the ground from advancing human rights in the balkans to supporting democratic institutions in belarus at next year s osce summit we should encourage even greater engagement in the areas where democracy s roots are still fragile in the balkans in central asia and the caucasus and we must develop practical new tools for the osce such as training police to support peacekeeping missions and dispatching democracy teams to build more open societies only in this way can we deter and diffuse crises that threaten our values and our securities before they get out of hand now the secure the free the prosperous atlantic community we envision must include a successful democratic russia for most of this century fear tyranny and isolation kept russia from the european mainstream but look at the future russians are now building and we have an enormous stake in their success russia is literally recreating itself using the tools of openness and reform to strengthen new freedom and restrain those who abuse them to ensure more competition to collect taxes fight crime restructure the military prevent the spread of sensitive technologies we must support this russian revolution we will redouble our efforts with russia to reduce our nuclear arsenals to lower the limits on conventional forces in europe to fight the spread of materials and technology for weapons of mass destruction to build a partnership with nato in practical ways that benefit all of us to develop the ties between our people that are the best antidote to mistrust and we must not forget ukraine for it too has the opportunity to reach both east and west and be a great force for europe s peace prosperity and stability we should encourage reform and support it the moment in ukraine is historic and it is not a moment to lose our fourth and final task is strengthening our global cooperation let us make common cause of our common concerns standing together against threats to our security from states that flout international norms to the conflict brewing in kosovo from deterring terrorists and organized criminals to helping asia restore financial stability from helping africa to join the global economy to combatting global warming in a world grown smaller what happens beyond our borders touches our daily lives at home america and europe must work together to shape this world now as we pursue this agenda there will be times when we disagree but occasional lack of consensus must never result in lasting cracks in our cohesion nor should the quest for consensus lure us into the easiest lowest common denominator solution to difficult high urgency problems when the world needs principled effective strong leadership we must rise to the responsibility these are our challenges they are ambitious but attainable they demand of nations constant unity of purpose and commitment and they require the support and the courage of our citizens for without the courage of ordinary people the wall would not have come down and the new europe would not be unfolding now it falls to each of us to write the next chapter of this story to build up from what has been taken down to cement together what is no longer walled apart to repair the breaches that still exist among our peoples to build a europe that belongs together and grows together in freedom our success in this endeavor will make the new century the greatest that germany america europe and the world have ever known this is an effort worthy of the rich legacy of berlin the visionary leadership of modern germany and the enormous obligation we share for our children s future let us embrace it with gratitude joy and determination thank you very much dem wjclinton13 6 00a bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you for being here thank you for your support for the congressional hispanic caucus i want to thank patrick kennedy for his heroic work in raising money for all our congressional candidates thank you lucille for your leadership unlike congressman kennedy i am going to introduce the members of the hispanic caucus here because unlike congressman kennedy i need them to vote for me several more times this year so since we re all standing up already i d like to ask them to raise their hands as i call their names if i miss anyone don t be bashful solomon ortiz from texas there he is xavier becerra from los angeles up there ed pastor from arizona nydia velazquez from new york bob menendez from new jersey bob carlos romero barcelo from puerto rico ruben hinojosa from south texas there he is silvestre reyes from el paso there he is ciro rodriguez from texas ciro where are you charlie gonzalez from san antonio grace napolitano from california there she is back there and for me at this particular moment most important of all because day before yesterday he had his first hole in one representative joe baca from california and he is so shameless about it that if you doubt it he is carrying the authentic certificate proving that he is ladies and gentlemen i will be brief members have to go to a vote in a few minutes i want to first of all thank all of them because without them nothing that we have accomplished the vice president and i in our administration would have been possible we carried an economic plan in 1993 by one vote which set off this economic explosion we ve enjoyed in the last eight years it would not have been possible without the hispanic caucus and whether it was on our welfare policy where we said we are for work but we re also for family require people to work who can work but don t take the food stamps and the medical care away from the poor children the hispanic caucus made it possible for us to hammer out that compromise on crime on education on every single issue they were there and we do we have the lowest hispanic unemployment every recorded the lowest poverty rate among hispanics in a generation a 250 percent increase in sba loans to hispanic owned businesses and as it s already been said the largest number of hispanics in high positions in our administration and in our courts in history now what i want to say to you is elections are always about tomorrow not about yesterday if we did a good job after all it s just what you hired us to do i remember once i was asking a guy to vote for me for reelection as governor of arkansas and i said well don t you think i ve done a good job he said sure you have but you got a paycheck every two weeks too didn t you he said that s what i hired you to do what i want to say to you is that i think the outcome of these elections for congress and the outcome of the election for the president are every bit as important as the elections of 1992 and 1996 i worked very hard when this country was in trouble to turn it around to put the economy to put the people in this country first to in the words of my 96 campaign build a bridge to the 21st century now the great test the american people face is what is it we intend to do with our good fortune with this moment of possibility i think we ought to use it to meet the big challenges of the country i think we ought to use it to keep paying down the debt to keep the prosperity going but to extend the prosperity to people and places who have been left behind i think we ought to give tax incentives to investors who invest in the poor areas of america the same incentives we give them to invest in poor areas in africa and asia and latin america i think that s important i think we ought to make after school care and preschool universal for all of our children who need it i think we ought to have i think we ought to modernize our schools and ensure they re all hooked up to the internet i think we ought to provide more options for working families to get health care we ought to pass the patients bill of rights we ought to allow working families whose children are in our children s health insurance program to buy into it themselves we ought to have middle class tax relief for long term care for child care and to help all families pay for a college education i think we ought to take on these big challenges and while it is now fashionable for both parties to court the hispanic vote indeed both candidates speak spanish and love to do it i hope very much that i am the last president in american history who can t speak spanish i think from now on everyone will have to speak spanish and within a year or two when i get a little private time i may be able to speak spanish too i m going to work on it but what i want to say to you is that there is a difference there is a difference in the congress and there is a difference in the race for the white house one party supports the patients bill of rights and the other opposes it one party is for raising the minimum wage and the other is not one party is trying to expand health insurance coverage to poor working families and the other has not endorsed it one party wants a big tax cut that will keep us from paying down the debt the other party ours we want an affordable middle class tax cut that will enable us to continue to pay down the debt and invest in the education and health care and future of our children we all say that we favor broad participation but i ll just give you one example i named an hispanic lawyer from el paso named enrique moreno to the federal court of appeals he graduated summa cum laude from his university he graduated near the top of his class in law school a panel of state judges in texas said he was one of the three best lawyers in his part of the state he got the highest rating from the american bar association but the two republican judges from texas senators from texas said he wasn t qualified to sit on the court of appeals and i haven t heard a peep i might add out of any of the other elected republicans in texas about this so i say to you there s a difference there is a difference and sometimes it can be as stern a test of a country s character and judgment how it handles its prosperity as how it handles its adversity after all when the american people took a chance on me in 1992 we had our backs to the wall we were in trouble and people were willing to let us make a few changes now the danger is that people will think oh well this economy has been so good so long nobody can mess it up or that everybody seems so nice nobody can do anything too bad there is a difference these people should be in the majority in the house we should hold the white house we should win the senate and you can go and tell people look it s not as if they re taking a big chance you ve got evidence now we were divided all the way along on economic policy on crime policy on welfare policy on education policy on environmental policy and the evidence is in and the ideas are out there the best days of this country are still ahead the best days for hispanic america are still ahead but we have got to make the right choices you made a good investment coming here tonight and i want you now to make your investment good by taking every opportunity every day between now and november to make the same arguments in your own way i made to you tonight thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton13 6 00b bill_clinton thank you well if i had any sense i wouldn t say a word thank you let me say first of all i want to thank vernon and anne for once again proving one of their most endearing and enduring virtues they stuck with their friends and eleanor is their friend we have all been friends a long time and hillary and i have known vernon for a long time when i was a 32 year old governor i went to vernon jordan s urban league banquet speech in little rock stayed up half the night talking to him hillary had already known him for years in fact she never lets me forget and i would be less charitable however than eleanor was i think anne actually saved vernon s life i was delighted when they got married because i needed him around for the rest of my life and they have been so wonderful to all of us who are their friends and i thank them for doing this mr mayor i m glad to see you and councilwoman i m glad to see you and secretary herman i m glad to see you secretary herman and eleanor and i we sort of in our different ways tried to help the administration of jimmy carter so we go back a long long time i just want to say a few words tonight about washington first of all i m very proud of our mayor who was in his previous life a member of my administration i have always loved washington you know i ve had a lot of homes in my life i grew up in arkansas and i went to law school in connecticut everybody knows now i ve got a home in new york which i m very proud of it s getting better every day fixing a 111 year old farmhouse is almost as challenging as winning a senate seat but i hope and pray we ll be successful at both but when i was a young man i went to college in washington and i worked on the hill every day i lived in the district all four years i was in college i love this city i saw it burn after dr king was killed i used to drive up and down those avenues and i saw those empty storefronts you know i didn t know then obviously i would ever be president eleanor says she knew a long time ago i really think when i announced for president my mother was the only person who thought i could win but i always promised myself if i could ever do anything for this city i would because it was plainly in some ways the most beautiful capital in the entire world it was full of people from all over the world it had a rich and textured history that deserved to be nourished a lot of things people don t even know about do you know we that have a national historic site here in anacostia that is frederick douglass s home that he lived in from after the civil war until he died that i urge all of you to go see if you haven t i ll flak for the national park service a little so when i became president before i was inaugurated i took a walk down georgia avenue and i talked to the merchants there and i talked to the people on the street i was always looking for things i could do eleanor and i were joking today she went jogging in a campaign event for me in 1992 in the pouring rain we were running up pennsylvania avenue together i never will forget that and because she s been where she s been it s been possible for me i think to be a pretty good friend and a pretty good citizen of washington d c but if she hadn t been there if she didn t have the enormous credibility she has in the congress among both republicans and democrats and if she didn t have an idea a minute then all these things that i have been able to do i could not have done someone could write a whole chapter on my service as president to washington d c in two words yes eleanor and if it were to be four words it would have to be yes eleanor yes eleanor we had a great time together and it s been a joy now we ve got this great mayor who is inspiring so much confidence and broadening the base of support for the city and there s so much more to be done but i would hope that every american would want the united states congress and the private sector and everybody else to do whatever we can for washington it ought to be the greatest city in america it ought to be the greatest capital in the world it s full of wonderful people and wonderful neighborhoods and wonderful possibilities and we have really just begun to do what we ought to do i hope some day that she ll actually have a real vote in the congress too and that we ll have representation in the other house of the congress i hope that will happen but i just want all of you to know that i m grateful to you for helping her but i know i think i know that your presence here means you re also committed to helping make d c an even greater city an even better place to live an even more admiral national capital and believe me for those of you who were here like me in the early and mid 60s it s stunning the difference but if you know the city if it you know all its neighborhoods if you know all its schools if you know every little nook and cranny of it you know we ve only scratched the surface of what we can do to make this the city it ought to be i keep telling the american people as i travel around the country now that in so many ways the election of 2000 is as important as the elections of 92 and 96 and in some ways a sterner test of our judgment and character because when i got elected the country was against a wall and it didn t take too much for them to take a chance on me you remember me president bush referred to me as the governor of a small southern state and i was so dumb i thought it was a compliment and i still do anyway we knew we had to do some things that were different we knew we had to take a chance we knew we had to kind of break out of the mold of the way business was conducted in the city but now the test is what is it that we propose as a nation to do with this prosperity of ours anybody that s over 30 years old has got sense enough to know that nothing goes on forever and anybody over 30 years old can remember at least one time in your life when you made a mistake not because things were so bad but because things were so good you thought there were no consequences to the failure to concentrate so i hope one of the things that we will think about those of us in this room at least in this election season is how important it is to use this moment to finish the job for washington d c and to make it the greatest city of any national capital in the world we can do this we have the local leadership now we have the idea machine beloved of all members of congress if as many republicans liked me as liked her they would repeal the 22nd amendment we can do this but remember you don t want to be sitting around in somebody s living room 10 years from now and thinking gosh i wish i had done this that or the other thing for washington so let s make sure we truly honor eleanor by having no regrets about how we use this magic moment thank you very much dem wjclinton13 6 05 bill_clinton i always knew bud was a trailblazer but that s the first time i ve been introduced as the next first lady of the united states actually i like this i like you know being hillary s husband now that s what i am i told hillary whatever she s going to do in politics she better hurry up because pretty soon we d be only known as chelsea s parents i m in that stage of my life the great thing about not being in politics anymore and not being in the white house is that i can say exactly what i think and the bad thing is nobody gives a rip i m going to have a good time anyway i want to thank you for having me here and for having my guest and my great friend the former football coach at south carolina and notre dame minnesota arkansas north carolina state the new york jets my great friend lou holtz thank you for coming lou i want to thank you i tried to get him to give the speech because he s so much funnier than i am but he declined i also want to thank goldman sachs for being so good to me when i was president and lending me so much talent beginning but not ending with bob ruben what i d like to do tonight is to speak maybe almost a little in shorthand about where i think we are in the world today and what i think we should be doing and where i think we should be going but the first thing i want to say is i think it s important that every citizen and we have mostly but not exclusively americans here today we have people from all over the world every person who is as active as you are in the global economy should have a theory about how the world works and a theory about how we should respond to it as citizens that includes what you think government policy ought to be but is not limited to what government policy ought to be and that may seem self evident to you but it isn t really i m reading now i m reading books that are written about the time i was president reviews of books that were written about the time i was president whether they re favorable or unfavorable the one great shortcoming they all have except for mine how s that for a little plug is they undersell the importance of ideas and yet you all have an idea about what you do don t you i mean you have theory about what you do all day every day about how the markets work why you pursue the strategies you do what s ethical and unethical what s effective and ineffective and yet when you read about politics or current events it s either totally dominated by gossip like we spent three holes talking about the jackson verdict today or it s inside gossip or the inching whether it s social security reform or whatever tend to be discussed in an almost atomized fashion as if they re just things out there independent standing on their own i don t think that s helpful so if you don t remember anything else i say tonight you need to ask yourself in a sentence how would you describe the modern world and what would you like the 21st century to be like for your children and how do you think we should go about getting there because otherwise every time you turn on the news at night it will seem like the political equivalent of kaos theory in physics a bunch of totally unconnected things in the three decades or so i spent in public life there were a lot of people who knew more about various things than i did but i always tried to synthesize the information to take apparently disparate facts and organize them into a pattern that made sense so i could figure out how to get from where we are to where i wanted to go in a sentence i believe we are living in by far the most interdependent world in human history a term i prefer to globalization because it goes way beyond economics and it goes way beyond international relations that is country to country interdependence we all know we have a globalized economy but we have globalized information technology globalized culture tribal technology the whole nine years furthermore we are more interdependent across lines that used to divide us not just among nations but within nations and within communities wherever you live chances are that the country you live in and the community you live in is more racially and religiously diverse than it was 20 years ago and that you re dealing with all different kinds of people than you were 20 years ago now for most of us this interdependence has been very positive that s why you can afford to be here and goldman sachs can afford to pay me to be here we did well in this modern world but interdependence is not by definition positive it can also be negative in the united states 9 11 is the triumph of negative interdependence it s a brilliant example of an interdependent world where these guys most of whom were from saudi arabia all of whom were in al qaeda used easy access to information and technology easy travel easy immigration to turn four jet airplanes into giant chemical weapons that s what they were 9 11 was a major chemical weapons attack on the united states and three of the weapons hit home and one died a fortunate death in the woodlands of pennsylvania thanks to the incredible courage of people who gave up their lives so more americans wouldn t die and where other people who were victims of 9 11 were a testament of interdependence they came from 70 countries including over 200 other muslims i say that not to get this night started off on a downer but just to make the point that how you see this interdependent world depends very much on the way you see yourself in it and how you see others the interdependent world that we like is not so good for the 50 of the world that lives on 2 00 a day or less a billion people living on 1 00 a day or less a billion people who go to bed hungry tonight after we had this great meal a billion and a half people will never get a clean glass of water one in four people who die this year from everything the tsunamis the wars the diseases the heart attacks the strokes one in four of all the people who die will die from aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them will be little kids that never got a clean glass of water so for them global interdependence means something very different so when you see all those bolivian miners striking and raising hell and getting down to the third person in line to be president of bolivia it s because they think they re on the downside of an interdependent world they don t feel the same way about it you do and if you lived the way they did and you worked as hard as they were working for as little as they re making you may not feel that way either now it seems to me if you accept that then the plain mission of people of goodwill all across the world and especially in america with our prosperity and our political and military resources our mission ought to be to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of interdependence to try to move our communities our country and the world toward a more stable balanced set of integrated communities from interdependence to integration requires three things shared responsibility shared benefits and shared values if you think about all the rebellions just in the last few days why did france reject the eu constitution why did the dutch reject it because they didn t think it was consistent with their interests or their values and in some cases their identities you know the people that were campaigning against the french constitution kept talking about they would be faced with an invasion of polish plumbers and what they were really worried about was an invasion of turkish workers in every area if you look at northern ireland today where they haven t been able to stand up a government in two years because the catholics and protestants can t get along they have a mixed situation they have embraced their interdependence enough to get rid of violence forever but they haven t gone far enough to take control of their destiny if they have to do it together if you look at the middle east we went through seven years of progress toward peace four years of pure hell and now we re making progress again but on the bad days and the good days the palestinians and the israelis were equally interdependent because it just simply meant they couldn t escape each other now i could give you lots of other examples but you get the point if you believe that we should be moving from interdependence to integrated communities if you believe in shared responsibilities and benefits and values how do we go about doing that and i will try to speak in more shorthand now because i want to leave most of the time for questions one we ve got to have a security plan the first responsibility of every community is to protect its members and in a national and international sense the two biggest security threats are terror and weapons of mass destruction actually in the united states we re doing reasonably well now in taking down terrorist networks there were about 20 al qaeda cells taken down before 9 11 when i was still in office and we prevented the attempts to take over bosnia albania blow up targets in the united states and the middle east around the millennium and many other things they wanted to do since 9 11 hundreds of people you don t know and will never meet in the united states and around the world have worked on this and have taken down about 30 other al qaeda cells they ve dramatically weakened the network and they re still capable of killing a lot of people and they still recruited some new people coming out of the conflict of iraq but they re weaker than they were and the ability of your government and governments throughout the world using military intelligence and law enforcement officials to break up and contain terrorist networks is greater than it was we re doing a pretty good job of that with regard to homeland security the record is more mixed partly because in my view we haven t spent the money in the right ways i used to sit around in the white house and ask myself if i were osama bin laden and i wanted to hurt americans and kill a bunch of them what would i do and one thing i would try to do is to launch a chemical biological or nuclear small weapon in one of these hundreds of thousands of containers that comes into america every day in our ports only 5 of which are checked two years ago there was a security report given to the congress which said you don t have to check them all but there s no detriment effect if you don t check 10 20 of them and you actually have quite a significant deterrent effect if you do that there was a bill on the floor of the congress that suggested that the 200 000 it costs a billion dollars to go from 5 10 by the way and the bill on the floor of the congress suggested that we go from 5 10 spend a billion dollars and pay for it by asking me and the 200 000 other people who paid income taxes on over a million dollars that year to give up 5 of our tax cut which averages 88 000 so it would have taken us down to 83 and it was defeated the leadership of the house and the administration opposed it because they thought it was i guess a slippery slope on the tax cut but most of us whether we were conservative or liberal or republican or democrat would have gladly given up our five grand to make 300 000 000 americans and all the others who come to our country more secure but we need anyway to give a lot of thought to this homeland security because while we re spending a lot of money my view is it s not being spent as effective as it could be with regard to weapons of mass destruction the record is more mixed we re doing quite a good job of working with the russians to contain not only the nuclear stockpiles in the area and destroy nuclear weapons but also biological and chemical stocks the russians still have the largest stocks of biological materials that can be made into weapons in the world for example a huge stash of anthrax was buried on an island off the east coast of russia about 12 years ago a couple of years ago it was dug up half the spores were still alive that s how dangerous it is on the other hand it s not easy to carry off a biological attack as you remember remember the anthrax scare where five americans were killed and all that anthrax was sent around in theory there was enough anthrax there to kill 5 000 people i mean 100 000 people but only five people died so the biological attacks are the most frightening but they re also the most difficult to pull off the most troubling involve weapons that we haven t seen yet very small nuclear weapons if you look at one of the glasses on your table if you have enough fissile material the size of a cookie about the size of the top of the glass on your table you could put it into the fertilizer bomb that timothy mcveigh used 10 years ago to blow up the muir building in oklahoma city and just that little bit if you know how to detonate it which you can alas learn how to do on the internet in our interdependent world it would make a bomb that would blow up 25 of washington d c so it is very important that we have efforts to control these materials all across the world the united states has a very vigorous presence we ve led the world in this we ve done it since the first bush administration one of the last major pieces of legislation the former president bush signed was something called the nunn luger bill a totally bipartisan effort for american to spend money working in the beginning only with russia and in the beginning anyone with nuclear weapons to bring all the nuclear weapons from the other soviet republics into russia control them and then slowly dismantle them and destroy the material but since then we also when i was president we began to work with biological weapons and chemical weapons and there were some used when i served when your tax dollars if you re americans paid the salaries of one half 20 000 of the 40 000 russian scientists and technology workers in the weapons of mass destruction field we did it so they wouldn t go to work for the bad guys of the world and it was money very well spent it wasn t like they didn t do good work and if you questioned their competence for example boeing is using 40 something russian aerospace scientists to design their newest airplane and that in the computer programming competition among the universities in the world this year shanghai university finished first but second and third went to st petersburg and moscow so that s a good thing for us not to let those people starve they ought to be able to make a living we should be doing more of that and if the president proposes that or someone in congress does you should be for it it s one thing that we should spend more money you cannot spend enough money to help the indians the pakistanis anybody else that has nuclear chemical or biological stocks control and if possible destroy them but a security policy is not enough why because if you believe we live in an interdependent world as the israelis and palestinians find out every single day you cannot possibly kill jail or occupy all your enemies so you have to have a security policy but if you can t kill jail or occupy all of them you ve got to also have a policy to make more partners and fewer terrorists which is prime minister s blair initiative coming up this summer at the g 8 meeting to increase development assistance to the world s poorest countries and to eliminate the debt of the african nations that have responsible governments is a good thing we did i ll just give you two examples to make the point in 2000 in the millennium year we had a big bipartisan initiative to forgive the debt of the world s poorest countries hundreds of billions of dollars of it 27 countries qualified 23 were african in addition to that we in america forgave all our bilateral debt to these countries as long as they did the following things they had to observe basic human rights and put all of the savings into education healthcare or economic development okay so here are the two stories to make the point i was making after i left the white house i went to ghana where have an economic project now and when i was leaving i was in the airport walking back to my little plane and this lady starts screaming at me on the tarmac mr president don t go don t go she s waving some package so she comes running up to me and she says you know you have debt relief and the africa trade bill and because of those two things i am one of 400 women working in my factory making shirts we have jobs our children are in school we have dignity and here s your shirt i figured what the heck i m not in office anymore i took the shirt and i took that shirt and i put it in my closet in a place where i look at it i literally look at this shirt every single day to remind myself that woman is not mad at you she knows you ve got more money than she does but she thinks you want her to be a part of your future and she doesn t want her to kid to be a terrorist or fight in one of those tribal wars in africa the second example when former president bush and i got back from our tsunami tour the president invited us to the white house to make a report and we had quite a report to make about all the heroic work of the american military and the american aid workers and the military and aid workers from other places and the thousands and thousands of people from the non governmental organizations that went religious and non religious just to help people so on the way in one of our aid workers gave me a poll to take to the president that was completed the day before in indonesia the world s largest muslim country 200 000 000 people 95 plus are muslims before this tsunami the same research firm had done a poll saying that the positive approval of america was 36 after the tsunami 60 before the tsunami the positive approval rating of osama bin laden 58 after the tsunami 28 he didn t do anything to them but he didn t do anything for them and when you watch your loved ones washed out to sea and you lose everything you had and you have to start all over again in a stunning moment of insight a whole country realized that it means a lot more to build a house than to tear one down it completely changed the view of america and by the way all other countries that came to help because we came not with a political agenda but as human beings to help other human beings with no thought of any immediate gain and i cannot tell you how proud every one of you would have been of the marines the navy personnel the u s government personnel and then all these people from all these groups that showed up i m going to say more about that in a minute the point is that aids our security it makes a better stronger country the third thing we have to do security more friends and fewer enemies the third thing we have to do is build habits and institutions of cooperation there s a headline story in the new york times today about a commission headed by george mitchell and newt gingrich recommending changes in the un it s a good report they made good recommendations but they did it because they know we need a strong un and they actually made recommendations to make it stronger they do a lot of good now that i m working for the un on tsunami relief i can tell you for example just there we re feeding 700 000 people a day we re feeding all those people in those refugee camps in darfor and the un is going a lot to keep children all over the world alive there was no epidemic outbreak in any of the countries affected by the tsunami in large measure because of international organizations that went there and prevented outbreaks of cholera and dysentery and all the other terrible things that could have happened this is one anyway where i ve really been in a lot of disagreement with president bush whom i as the whole world knows now i like very much but we have these differences he and i both agree that we need a world trade organization we should have a free trade area of the americas he supported the expansion of nato which i cheered but he believes the united states shouldn t be in the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty or the international criminal court or the kyoto climate change accord and i disagree if there was somebody here from the administration let s say don rumsfeld they could get up here and make a good argument and probably convince you that they were right and i was wrong because they could come up with an example where there those people could make a decision that you would think is bad but if you only joined organizations because you agreed with every decision made you wouldn t join better the world trade organization made decisions i thought were nuts when i was president on occasion but i never regretted either that we were in it or that i had worked to get china in it because i think we were in a rules based organization that tries to resolve things fairly that over the long run we re better off and it becomes harder to go to war harder to fight and easier to cooperate if you only were in organizations that we agree with every decision goldman sachs wouldn t exist lou holtz never could have kept a football team together there would be no marriages there would be let s think about it so the test has to be something more than i won t join unless i agree with every decision they re going to make and it s something all of you should debate so i told some people before i came out today i understand why the french and the dutch voted against the eu constitution but i hope the europeans will continue to grow together economically and politically though they will be bigger and richer than america when they do it ll be a good thing for the world i want a world of shared responsibilities and benefits and values it ll be a safer better world for my daughter and the grandchildren i hope to have and that s the same reason that i want us to be in these groups the third thing we ve got to do is to keep making america better if you want to talk about this in detail i will but i think internally our biggest challenges are the following we need a dramatic change in energy policy we need to move away from an imported oil greenhouse gas based energy economy to a clean energy energy conservation future that s where the next generation of high paying jobs could come from there could millions of them if we did it right i am delighted that there are some executives who see it that way most of them are europeans sir john brown the head of british petroleum the head of royal dutch shell but recently jeff immelt the new leader of general electric said he was going to spend a billion and a half dollars researching new products for a clean energy future there is a trillion dollar unmet market today with existing technology that we are not filling because the old energy economy is well organized powerful and well financed and the new energy economy is entrepreneurial disorganized and undercapitalized but we could change that we ought to do something about health care i d be glad to talk about that if you want to but the most encouraging thing there for the first time since we had a serious debate in 1993 you have business people in the health insurance companies and consumer advocates all talking about trying to do something about it the fundamental fact is we re spending 15 of our income on health care nobody else is spending more than 11 most of our competitors are under that general motors just announced they were laying off 25 000 people in america and nobody in canada because we re spending 1 800 a car more on health care in america than in canada we re spending 4 of our gdp that s over 400 billion dollars a year more than any other country on earth about 4 000 a family half of it is because of the way we finance health care through all these different health insurance policies giving us 34 administrative costs 34 nobody else is over 19 compounded with the fact that we don t computerize our records the other half can be explained by the fact that we pay more for drugs than anybody else we have doctors that have to practice defensive medicine because they re afraid they re going to sued and they won t be able to afford their malpractice or can t get it we spent more money on the last two months of life than anybody else by far it s interesting america s the most religious big country in the world but we have more people who are reluctant to go to heaven than anybody else on earth and the fifth thing is we have bad lifestyles we basically are too fat and too slow obesity s going through the roof and it s one reason i m working on childhood obesity initiative with the american heart association we have for the first time in the history of america significant numbers of our children with adult onset diabetes at a time when diabetes and its related complications already costs you 25 of the medicaid budget for poor people in america it s a serious problem and you can t blame the doctors you can t blame the health insurance companies you can t blame anybody except all the rest of us for that we have to deal with it we have an education crisis which i can summarize in two sentences from about the 5th grade to the 12th grade there are public schools in america that have solved every problem but we have totally failed to replicate excellence we have followed neither the military model of top down uniform standards leadership training and accountability or a total competitive model like we have in our colleges and universities we ve been neither fish nor fowl and we ve never found a way to replicate excellence and in our universities we don t have enough people going and those who do go we don t have enough studying of math and science and the things that will show up our future and we have an economic crisis that i believe is directly the product of deciding to go back to trickle down economics which i did my best to get the country off of which is more about theology than economics and it s a greedy theology because it basically says that all tax cuts are good no matter what level you re spending out i m an old fashioned fiscal conservative i just don t believe that john maynard keynes said we should run deficits in recessions the president proposed tax cuts in 2001 and 2002 i would have supported even larger temporary tax cuts to stimulate the economy it turned out most of the stimulus we got out of the iraq war and the homeland security spending most of the tax cut costs were coming later we have built in large structural permanent deficits again which we got rid of i think it s a terrible mistake we re financing bill clinton s tax cut by going into markets every single day and borrowing money from the chinese now how dumb is that and we will point the finger and them and say you hypocrites why don t you raise the value of your currency and be fair in our trading but please keep loaning me money at low interest rates so i can cover bill clinton s tax cut i just don t think it s right i don t think it s good ethnically i don t think it s good theology and i know it s bad economics and it s going to lower the standards of living of americans dramatically in the future if we persist in running chronic deficits when our people already have individually quite low savings rates finally we have to try to find a way to construct a world where we have shared values across all these blizzard of divisions what in the world could we do how would you ever do that and i ll just tell you in a sentence what i think i think the world s shared values if you want to have communities have to be the following every person counts deserves a chance has a responsible role to play competition is good but it has to occur within the framework of fairness and cooperation our differences are very important but our common humanity matters more now the only thing you have to do to get those values accepted is to reject fundamentalism in all its forms in all its religious and political forms you ll find that the ability of one person or one group to be in possession of the absolute truth you don t have to deny that there is an absolute truth you just have to deny that anybody s smart enough to have it all and to turn it into a political program and impose it on everybody else that is the only prerequisite for building a world that we can all live in on balance i am quite optimistic for three reasons in the 1990 s these three things happened and i didn t have anything to do with any of them so i can brag on them except to push them along a little bit in the 1990 s for the first time in history more people lived under democracies than dictatorships making change more possible in the 1990 s the internet exploded and became an independent force for the public good potentially for all the bad things on it now a classic example is the sars epidemic we all remember the horrible things that happened to the chinese young people that took to the streets in tiananmen square but when the sars epidemic exploded early in this decade the chinese government denied that it was happening then the cases spread from rural china to hong kong and it got out and then all of a sudden they were in toronto and there was an explosive revolt of chinese young people not in tiananmen square but by the tens of thousands on the internet they jammed all sites they demanded the government to tell the truth they turned around and cooperation ensued and what could have killed hundreds of thousands of people was shut down almost overnight because of the internet americans gave 1 4 billion dollars to tsunami relief half the households in america i mean 30 of the households in america contributed 30 over half of them over the internet the third thing that happened is the growth of the non governmental organizations lloyd was kind enough to tell you about some of the things i do i started two years ago with nothing three years ago and i wanted to something about aids because it made me mad there were over 6 000 000 people at death s door in the poor countries not getting this medicine and we get it automatically in america whether we re rich or poor at about 10 000 a person a year and then with generic medicine developed at about 500 a persona year so i went to work on it and 2 1 2 years later we re serving 110 000 people and we now only pay 180 a year for the medicine and the testing just in my little foundation bill gates has spent a billion dollars in india and africa on health care and 250 000 000 on education in america he s the biggest non governmental organization but i just came from tamil nadu in india where widows of fishermen and women who fished who lost their boats have been taught by a small non governmental organization how to do crafts work and they re selling their crafts and they re going to make twice as money as they ever did fishing all over the world there are thousands of these group and that s changed life for you and me people like us used to go to meetings like this and we would all sit around talk about what the government should do and that s a very important thing and it s still a legitimate question but you can t ever come to a meeting like this again and ask that without also asking what can i do about something i care about when the un opens in dem wjclinton13 7 00 bill_clinton well let me say it s good to see you thank you for making me feel so welcome thank you julian thank you kweisi thank you myrlie evers williams ben hooks elaine jones the whole board thank you wendell anthony for letting me come to detroit to the biggest dinner in the history of the world i know i had dinner with wendell in detroit with over 10 000 people because he told me so but i couldn t even see the people at the other head table it was so big thank you mayor o malley for welcoming us to baltimore and for being such a great leader thank you representative elijah cummings for representing baltimore so well and thank you mayor john street for representing philadelphia so well and making it true to the founders dreams i have i know oh a dozen or more members of the white house staff here but i would like to mention a few thurgood marshall jr whose father was a native of baltimore my chief speechwriter terry edmonds a baltimore native i thank mark lindsey mary beth cahill ben johnson who runs our one america office my political director minyon moore janis kearney broderick johnson a baltimore native orson porter and we have at least another half a dozen folks who are here because they wanted to be here with you today this has been a remarkable week for african americans venus williams became the first african american woman since althea gibson to win the wimbledon perhaps even more remarkable for those who know the mysteries of the church baltimore s own dr vashti mckenzie became the first woman bishop in the history of the a m e church and you have had an amazing conference i m really glad governor bush came i am but i thought the other fellow gave a better speech and i liked especially the speech that that senate candidate from new york gave i caught that one on tuesday i want to tell you i m very proud as we look back on the last seven and a half years of all the work that my wife has done not just for those but for 30 years for children for families for education for health care but as first lady she has done so much to increase adoption and improve foster care to increase the access to children to health care and to early education and one thing that ought to be of particular importance to the african american community for the celebration of the millennium she started she had this theme we were going to honor the past and imagine the future and part of honoring the past was setting aside millennial treasures a lot of which are important landmarks of the civil rights movement abraham lincoln s summer home at the old soldiers home harriet tubman s cottage up in new york a lot of other places and the head of the national historic preservation trust came up to me the other day when we were protecting mr lincoln s home and he said mr president i want you to know that your wife came up with this idea of the millennial treasures it has now raised 100 million in public private money it s the biggest historic preservation movement in the history of the united states of america so i m very proud of her for that now as all of you know i came here from camp david this morning where we are meeting with the israelis and the palestinians in an effort to resolve the profound differences that have kept the people of the middle east apart for a very long time i know that in our quest for a full fair and final peace which dr king reminded us is more than the absence of war but the presence of justice and brotherhood and genuine reconciliation i know we will have your prayers and your best wishes but i had to come to baltimore today because you embody the spirit of freedom and reconciliation we re trying to capture there that we need so badly in our talks a spirit that is woven into the fabric of american life because of the contributions of african americans from w e b dubois to rosa to thurgood to martin to daisy bates coretta medgar malcolm to jesse and john lewis and julian and kweisi one of the greatest days of my presidency was last march on the 35th anniversary of bloody sunday when i was honored to walk with many people in this room across the pettus bridge in selma i said then something i d like to repeat today that as a son of the south the brave souls who marched across that bridge 35 years ago set me free too it is important to know that every movement for human rights in this country is about even more than gaining equal opportunity and equal rights and decent justice for the oppressed it is also about forgiveness and healing about letting go and moving on about giving our children a better tomorrow so i wanted to be here especially during these peace talks to draw strength from you and take the spirit of the naacp back to camp david i wanted to come here one last time to say thank you a simple but deep thank you for your support your prayers your friendship over all these years for all that we have done to turn america around and bring america closer together eight years ago this week i can t believe it eight years ago this week at your national conference in nashville i was the governor of arkansas the apparent nominee of the democratic party and i brought my choice for vice president senator al gore to the naacp convention rather i accepted ben hooks mandatory invitation to appear and i pledged then and i want to quote it exactly i don t want to miss a word i pledged you an administration that looks like america one that knows the promise and the pain of this country one that will rebuild reunite and renew the american spirit i think together we have honored that pledge thank you the american dream is real to more americans than it was seven and a half years ago and we are more nearly one america than we were seven and a half years ago with 22 million new jobs the lowest unemployment and welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest crime rates in 25 years the lowest child poverty in 20 years the lowest minority unemployment rates ever recorded the lowest female unemployment rates in 40 years the highest home ownership in history the longest economic expansion in history we have more opportunity than we did seven and a half years ago and perhaps equally important our social fabric is on the mend the family and medical leave law the first bill i signed vetoed in the previous administration has allowed over 20 million americans to take a little time off when a baby was born or a parent was sick without losing their jobs and it s been good for the economy not bad for the economy for the first time ever 90 percent of our children are immunized against serious childhood diseases our food is safer our air is cleaner our water is purer more land has been protected for all time to come for americans to enjoy 150 000 young americans have served in communities in every state in this country in americorps the high school graduation rate of african americans is virtually equal with that of the white majority for the first time in the history of the united states of america and all over the country i have seen schools that once were failing turning around in harlem i was in a school the other day where two years ago 80 percent of the children were reading and doing mathematics below grade level two years later 74 percent of the children reading and doing mathematics at or above grade level in just two years this is happening all over america today we re releasing an annual report on the status of our children according to the study the teen birth rate for 15 to 17 year olds has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded the birth rate for african american adolescents has dropped by nearly one third since 1991 the report also found that child poverty continues its decline and the rate of serious violent crime committed by young people has dropped by more than half since 1993 to the lowest level recorded since statistics has been kept on this subject this is very good news and i hope you will trumpet it not because we re as safe as we need to be but we need to destroy stereotypes so we can start making real progress on the issues still remaining now so that s my report thank you for giving me a chance to serve that s my report now here s my question what do you intend to do with all this you know i m going to treasure this award for the rest of my life but what really matters is what all of us do tomorrow with what our yesterdays have piled up so before you leave here when you go home and people say what did you do in baltimore if you don t answer any other thing you ought to be able to say well i figured out what i was going to do with all the prosperity and progress my country has made in the last eight years that is the issue and i guess i can say this now because my hair is a lot grayer and i ve got a few more wrinkles than i had eight years ago but one thing i know how a nation deals with its prosperity is just as stern a test of its judgment its vision and its values as how a nation deals with adversity after all when you elected me eight years ago and the other side kind of referred to me as a governor of a small southern state and i was so naive i thought it was a compliment you know what i still do but when you elected me it didn t require rocket science to know that if we had quadrupled the debt in 12 years and all the social indicators were going in the wrong direction and the country was coming apart at the seams and unemployment was going up and crime was going up and opportunity for our children was going down we had to change i mean this was not i don t want to deprive myself of any credit but it wasn t rocket science we had to do something so you said well i ll take a chance on that fellow now every person in this room we ve got a lot of young people here and i m grateful for that and i m grateful for the role that you ve done to bring all the young people back into the naacp but listen everybody over 30 in this room listen to me if you re over 30 you can remember at least one time in your life when you have made a mistake not because times were so bad but because times were good so good you thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate am i right about that listen to this in the scripture ecclesiastes 11 25 says in the day of prosperity there is forgetfulness of affliction everybody over 30 has had that kind of forgetfulness at one time or another am i right about that so here is my point to you you look at these kids before you leave here we cannot do that now i have done everything i knew to do to turn this country around to move this country forward to lift people up to lift people together but man the best stuff is still out there and the big challenges are still on the horizon and we will never forgive ourselves if we don t say we are going to use this moment of prosperity to build the future of our dreams for all god s children that s what this is for that s what this millennial election is all about i want to commend the naacp for your campaign to register new voters i want to join you in mourning the passing of the chairman of your voter empowerment campaign earl shinhope but you need to finish his job and then you have to get people to actually go to the polls to choose and choose wisely we must make it clear again that every election is a choice this is a big election there are big differences honest differences between the parties the candidates for president the candidates for the senate and the house of representatives big and honest differences i m determined to make as much bipartisan progress with the congress as i can in the last six months i think we ll get a lot done but no matter how much we do there will still be a lot that remains on america s future agenda and there will be differences and the thing i like about this election is if we ve got the right attitude about it it can be an old fashioned election the kind the civics books say you ought to have where we don t have people swinging mud at each other and repeating what we ve seen in too many elections in the past where people basically say you ought to vote for me not because i m so great because my opponent is just one step above a car thief i mean how many elections have you seen run like that well we don t have to do that we can assume everybody is honorable and good got their merit badges in the boy scouts and girl scouts but they re different there s a choice to be made and there are consequences so when you leave you say what i learned was we ve got to use this year to decide what to do with this moment of prosperity it may never come around again in our lifetime i want to build a future of my dreams for my children this is a big election that s the main arena right now and there are big differences now let me just mention a few of them on economic policy the vice president and most people on our side of the political aisle we believe that we ought to keep the prosperity going and do our dead level best to extend it to people and to places that have been left behind so far but we think to keep the prosperity going the right thing to do is to take the taxes you pay for medicare and take them off the books like we do with social security keep paying the debt down use the interest savings to put into medicare and social security to lengthen our life so us baby boomers don t bankrupt the rest of you when we retire invest in education and science and technology the health care and the environment and then have a tax cut we can afford that helps families with the basic things they re dealing with and still leaves us the money to meet our responsibilities around the world to help fight aids in africa and asia to help relieve the debt of the poorest countries of the world to help promote freedom and stand against ethnic cleansing fight against terrorism that allows us to do these basic things and still get this country out of debt over the next 12 years why because that will keep interest rates lower and if interest rates stay a percent lower over the next 10 years than they otherwise would be that saves families listen to this african american homeownership at an all time high that will save families 250 billion in home mortgage rates in a decade now they say something different and it s easier for me to give you their pitch and it sounds better the first time you hear it they say we have a projected surplus of 1 9 trillion and it s your money so we re going to give more than half of it back to you in a tax cut and then we re going to spend the rest of it to partially privatize social security and when we take money out of the social security trust fund we ll put money in it from this surplus and by the time you do that they ve spent the whole projected surplus and then some now here s the problem with that if i ask you i want to ask all of you right now you just think about this real quiet now you don t have to say anything out loud but everybody think about this what is your projected income over the next 10 years now think how much money do you think you re going to make over the next 10 years how confident are you that you re right about your projected income now get it on up there to where you re about 80 percent confident now if i sat here at a desk with a pen and a notary public and i said i want every one of you to come up here right now and sign a contract that commits you to spend every penny of your projected income would you do it well if you would you should support them if not you should support us and keep this economy going that s what this is about then there are the issues of economic justice how can we assure a fair share we believe that we should strengthen efforts to require equal pay for equal work for women and they don t agree with us we think we should raise the minimum wage 1 over two years because we think the people that serve our food at restaurants and help us do things we think they ought to be able to raise their kids too and send their kids to college and make a decent living and they re not our top tax cut priorities are for working families with low incomes and a lot of kids for increasing child care assistance for a long term care tax credit when you ve got an elderly or disabled loved one for retirement savings and to allow you to deduct college tuition for up to 10 000 a year that s our top and we can do all that and still pay the country out of debt over the next 12 years and have money to invest their top tax cut priority rolling through congress like a hot knife through butter is a complete repeal of the estate tax which costs 100 billion over 10 years and half of the benefits half the benefits go to one tenth of 1 percent of the population there s a difference here in education we know that every child can learn i just told you about the school i visited in harlem i was in rural western kentucky the other day in this little old school that four years ago 12 percent of the kids over half the kids on school lunches four years ago 12 percent of the kids could read at or above grade level today 57 percent five percent of the kids could do math at or above grade level today 70 percent zero percent of the kids could do science at or above grade level today 63 percent in four years it s amazing it s happening everywhere now intelligence is equally distributed it s opportunity that s not equally distributed so our education policy is to invest more and demand more higher standards greater accountability but empower people to develop the capacities of all of our children and it s working but we have a very definite set of ideas about that based on what we have seen and what educators have told us we want to modernize or build 6 000 schools and repair another 25 000 over the next five years and the other side doesn t agree with us they think that s wrong we want to keep our commitment to hire 100 000 teachers for smaller classes in the early grades because we know that s important to long time learning capacity and the other side doesn t agree with us they don t think we should require that somehow of the states we want universal access to pre school summer school after school for all kids who need it you can t say end social promotion and then blame the kids for the failure system you have to have a system that says okay no social promotion but here is how the children are going to meet the standards and go on and learn and do what they re supposed to do so there are differences here in the economy in economic justice in education and there are differences in health care and the vice president talked a lot about this yesterday so i won t beat it to death but this is very important we believe that because we have the money to do it we should have a true medicare prescription drug benefit that s available and affordable to all seniors and disabled people who need it we think we should do this they say it might be too costly i ll give you their honest and i think they really believe this no i do i think they really do believe this they say it could cost more money than we think it would and so we ought to have this more limited private benefit funded through insurance companies the problem is let me just this the problem is i fought with the health insurance companies quite a bit you may have noticed that but i ve got to give it to them they ve been real upfront about this the health insurance companies have said no this won t work we cannot offer these poor people an insurance policy to buy drugs that they can afford to buy that will be worth having the insurance companies have been really honest about it and you know what nevada adopted a plan just like the republican plan and you know how many insurance companies have offered coverage under it zero not one so we ve got this interesting debate going on now in washington we said we re for medicare prescription drug coverage and they say so are we so the so are we is designed i learned from reading the newspaper that they hired a political consultant to tell them what language to use so you would think they were for something they were not and i d rather them say look we re not for this because we think it will cost too much money but if they took that position then they would have to explain how come they want to spend 100 billion on repealing the estate tax and give 50 percent of it to the top one tenth of 1 percent of the population and not spend money on drugs for our seniors there are choices to be made here we don t have to be hateful they really believe this they don t think it s a good idea but instead of trying to convince us that they are really for our plan they should fess up that they re not and explain why they re against it and then you decide whether we are right or they are and the same thing on the patients bill of rights the patients bill of rights we re for covers all americans and all health care plans and gives you a right to see a specialist a right not to be bumped from your doctor if you change employment and you re in the middle of having a baby or a chemotherapy treatment or any other kind of treatment it gives you a right to go to the nearest emergency room if you get hit god forbid when you walk out of the convention center here today and if you get hurt and you re wrongly treated it gives you the right to sue their plan doesn t cover 100 million people and it doesn t give you a right to sue now we say we re for the patients bill of rights they say what they should say is we don t agree with this we think it will cost too much but that s not what they say what they say they try to figure out how to convince you they re for what we re for so they say we re for a patients bill of rights if you ever hear that if you hear a instead of the big alarm bells ought to go off in your head you ought to say ding dong hello what is going on here but this is a huge deal you heard the vice president talking about this yesterday i was down the other day in missouri with the governor and we were with an emergency room nurse a male who was 6 1 weighed 230 looked like he could bench press me on a cold day and this big old husky guy spends his life trying to save people s lives and he almost couldn t get through his talk talking about somebody who died because they couldn t take him to the nearest emergency room this happens every single day we re one vote away from passing it i want to compliment the republicans in the house who voted for the patients bill of rights and the four in the senate who did we are one vote away i m telling you there are big issues here this affects 100 million of your fellow citizens we re for expanding the children s health insurance program that hillary did so much to create we think the parents of the kids ought to be able to buy in too we think people who are over 55 and not old enough to be on medicare but lost their insurance at work ought to be able to buy into the medicare program and we should give them a little help of they need it and we want to do more to close the gaps and do something about the fact that people of color suffer far higher rates of heart disease cancer aids and diabetes let me just give you one example diabetes is 70 percent higher among african americans than white americans hispanics are twice as likely to suffer from it type 1 diabetes commonly known as juvenile diabetes affects a million americans alone half of them children but research has taken us to the threshold of a potential new breakthrough recently researchers successfully transplanted insulin producing cells into seven individuals with juvenile diabetes and apparently every single one of them was cured now if we can repeat these preliminary findings it could put a cure for juvenile diabetes within our reach a true miracle for anyone who has ever had this in your family you know this but we have to do more to get there that s why today i want to tell you a couple of things we re doing first of all the national institutes of health is investing in 10 research centers immediately to try to replicate the results of the first study so we can prove it wasn t an accident this is part of a larger partnership between the nih and the juvenile diabetes foundation we have some of their leaders here with us today with a commitment of over 300 million over five years for research and the prevention of diabetes now i ve been pretty tough on my friends on the republican side today so i want to say something nice about them this is one we all agree on that there is no partisan position on whether we would like to see our children lifted from the burden and the fear and the terrors and the agony that can come with juvenile diabetes but we actually have some research here that may allow us to close one of the big racial gaps and help disparities in our country and i just want you to know we re going to do everything we can about it and i hope we ll have some of your prayers and your support it s worth some of your money to spend on that the last thing i want to talk about in terms of your decision this year is civil rights and equal justice i don t have to come here and say nobody should be denied a job a home access to school or a loan because of their race or any other condition that no one should have to fear being a target of violence because of the way they worship god or their sexual orientation and i don t have to come here for you to know that those indignities are still all to real to too many americans i have proposed the largest investment in civil rights enforcement ever so that the eeoc the departments of health and human services agriculture and others can enforce our civil rights law and we re fighting for passage of a strong hate crimes bill and i am so grateful that our unanimous caucus was joined the other day by enough republicans who are willing to break from the leadership to pass the hate crimes bill in the senate i am grateful for that and i hope that we can pass it in the house but the hate crimes legislation if it does not become law should be an issue in this election the employment non discrimination legislation if it doesn t become law should be an issue in this election this is not negative politics we should talk about what side we re on and why and let people decide it s important you look all around the world at all these places that are bedeviled by the hatreds of the groups of people within their countries for one another from kosovo to northern ireland to the middle east to the tribal wars in africa to the balkans i mean look at what the world has been dealing with just for the last few years we have to keep hammering away at this it s not over and you look at all the hate crimes that have occurred in america in the last few years in spite of all of our improving attitudes and greater contact across racial and religious lines we ve still got problems here this deals with the biggest problems of the human heart we ve got to keep at it and we ought to debate our different approaches to it in an open way we may never have this chance again where we are secure and confident and we know we can go forward if we make the right decisions one other thing i want to say about this one of the most important responsibilities of the next president is appointing judges and one of the most important duties of a senator is deciding whether to confirm the people the president appoints now i believe the next president will be called upon to appoint in the next four years between two and four supreme court judges more than a score much more court of appeals judges and perhaps over 100 federal district court judges the record here is instructive the quality of justice suffers when highly qualified women and minority candidates fully vetted fully supported by the american bar association are denied the opportunity to serve for partisan political reasons now just last year the republican majority in the senate on a party line vote defeated my nominee for the federal court in missouri ronnie white the first african american state supreme court judge in the history of the state of missouri plainly well qualified defeated on a party line political vote in an attempt to give the incumbent senator a death penalty issue against the incumbent governor in the race for the u s senate in missouri never mind that throw this guy s career away act like he s not qualified distort his position on the death penalty ignore what it will make the african american community in missouri feel like it was awful as we speak today there are four african american appellate court nominees poised to make history if the senate would just stop standing in their way judge james wynn roger gregory kathleen mccree lewis judge johnnie rawlinson that s just the ones i ve got up there now but let me to put that in perspective in the 12 years that they served the two previous presidents appointed just three african americans to the circuit courts of our country in 12 years of course we all want justice to be blind but we also know that when we have diversity in our courts as in all aspects of society it sharpens our vision and makes us a stronger nation i have nominated two highly qualified candidates for the 4th circuit that includes where we are now the state of maryland the 4th circuit has the largest african american population of any of our circuits and remarkably there has never been an african american jurist on the 4th circuit we ve got a chance to right that wrong two weeks ago i nominated roger gregory of virginia he is a richmond lawyer of immense talent and experience almost a year ago i nominated judge wynn for a north carolina seat on the circuit and he s not the first african american from north carolina i nominated now senator helms won t let these people get confirmed he says we don t need any more judges on the 4th circuit maybe that s what he thinks but i think it s interesting that for over seven years now he has stopped my attempts to integrate the 4th circuit court of appeals and the republican majority has made no move to change the tide that turned the policies this is outrageous the circuit court with the highest percentage of african americans in the country not one single judge on the court of appeals now a lot of women don t do much better we have excellent nominees elena kagan helene white bonnie campbell former attorney general of iowa up there no movement another travesty of justice is taking place in texas and i want to talk about this i nominated a man named enrique moreno to the 5th circuit court of appeals he grew up in el paso and graduated from harvard law school the state judges in texas said he was one of the three best trial lawyers out there in far west texas the aba the american bar association unanimously gave him its top rating but the two republican senators from texas they say he s not qualified and the leader of the republican party in texas who i think talked here a couple days ago stone cold silence n dem wjclinton13 7 05 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you very much stephanie not only for that wonderful introduction but for your work i am just about to go back to rwanda friday night i m on my way back to africa to see the places where we re working and i will see john podesta s daughter who is working with our foundation against aids in the lesotho so i am delighted to be here with them i want to tell you that john podesta did a magnificent job as white house chief of staff we had been friends since 1970 we both looked a lot well different anyway 35 years ago i was laughing you know for most of my life i was the youngest person doing whatever i was doing one day i woke up and i was the oldest person in every room i entered and i see that that has not changed today so i am delighted to be here and very grateful for the work john is doing here and the work that he is doing on environmental causes another passion that we both share you ve had a lot people who i have been associated with already appear here paul begala dee dee myers susan rice carole browner my great friend congressman john lewis you had thomas frank who wrote that wonderful book what s the matter with kansas i loved his analysis of the republicans i didn t agree with what he said about my trade policy and if you want me to discuss that i ll do it but it s still a book very much worth reading i would like to sort of shorten the remarks that i had intended to give and give more time for questions so we can speak more about what you re interested in but there are two or three things that i would like to say by way of introduction the first relates to what stephanie said about the work that i am now doing on tsunami relief for the un and with my aids project and it is this you don t have to wait till your party s in power to have an impact on life at home and around the world since the fall of the berlin wall in 1989 three sweeping historical developments have occurred which have changed forever the potential of your generation the first is that for the first time in history more than half the people of the world live under governments they voted in and that s quiet a statement when you consider the fact that china is not yet a democracy even though they have genuine elections in over 900 000 small villages and only the mayors of the biggest cities are appointed that doesn t guarantee you good government but it does guarantee that you can get rid of bad government and that is an important thing the second significant development is the explosive power of the internet when i became president believe it or not in 1993 january when the average cell phone still weighed 5 pounds there were only 50 sites on the internet 50 when i left there were 50 million in eight years and now there s of course many multiples of that it s almost as if you don t have your own web page you don t have an identity anymore that also has changed things do you remember when the sars epidemic came out in hong kong and then in tokyo in the beginning the chinese government was sort of in denial and you can t handle an epidemic unless all hands on deck are cooperating aggressively sars has the potential to kills hundreds of thousands of people in a hurry there was a citizen revolt in china led by young people this time not in tiananmen square but over the internet a flood of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of messages were hammering into the chinese websites and all of a sudden the chinese government changed its position began to cooperate including with the american center for disease control the canadian authorities and the sars epidemic will shut down in one of the classic examples of how a potential tragedy ought to be handled all generated by ordinary chinese people over the internet and the third thing that has happened is the growth of the nongovernmental organizations the ngos people who were standing in the gaps between ordinary citizens lives and unfettered behavior of the free market and whatever the government policy is in whatever country you re talking about the biggest ngo in the world is the bill melinda gates foundation they have spend a billion and a half dollars in india and africa alone on healthcare they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on education in america trying to modernize our high schools and make them more globally competitive very important but there are a lot of ngos that you never hear about that are also changing the lives of every person they touch one with which i ve had the privilege of working as well as hillary is the self employed women s association sewa in india which has literally revolutionized the lives of not only a lot of poor women in indian villages but the villages themselves by providing microcredit and other supports to diversify and lift the economies among poor people and i remember one day two or three years ago i was shaving in the morning and i looked in the mirror and i thought my god i have become an ngo and somehow i never thought about it before but i realized you know when i left the white house i was too young to retire and not good enough to either play my saxophone or take my golf clubs around on a professional basis so i had to keep working and i tried to define what i could do that would be of some enduring value whether or not i agreed with the policies of my government or any other one so i began to work on providing economic opportunity in america and around the world on trying to deal with the aids crisis and working in a private capacity for religious racial and ethnic reconciliation and also trying to help countries with their governance issues trying because there is a lot of talk in the papers today about corruption in poor countries and it is a big source of discussion you know around the g8 meeting in gleneagles you know will this aid do any good if these countries are corrupt i would say based on my experience which is fairly substantial that lack of capacity is a bigger problem than corruption in most new democracies and that the lack of capacity leads to corruption if people think that a government can t function anyway and their problems can t be solved anyway it s easy to sort of slip into the path of least resistance so i work on these things and you can too that s the first thing i want to tell you do not have to wait to be satisfied with the results of any election to have an impact on the future you heard stephanie talking about darfur that is a classic example the second thing i would like to say is a little something about politics there are a lot of problems which cannot be solved without appropriate government policy we have been engaged in this country in a huge debate that has become increasingly polarized it really began in the 1960s the country had more or less a consensus about how we ought to be governed all during the new deal and world war ii it began to break apart in harry truman s presidency when he lost the congress in part for trying to give the american people healthcare the same reason i lost it that ought to tell you something about what s the matter with our politics it happened twice in 50 years but we built up another consensus after john kennedy was assassinated and it came apart again over our differences over the vietnam war civil rights the rise of women roe v wade and a lot of other cultural issues and then in the late 70s the so called religious right rose and merged with the ideological conservatives and main street republicans to bring president reagan to office in the 1980 elections and we had the first round of supply side economics which is that arithmetic doesn t matter anymore economics is theology taxes are evil and bad there is no such thing as a bad tax no matter how much money you spend as a good tax and we ve been fighting this ever since in fits and starts this has worked dramatically to the advantage of the republicans because they started realizing they were in an intellectual hole in the 1960s and they have been working for 40 years to shape the debate and one of the things they ve done is to shape the way that our friends in the mainstream media write stories so for example if you are a democrat and you have sort of normal impulses you re a sell out like when hillary said abortion is a tragedy for virtually everybody who undergoes it and we ought to do what we can to reduce abortions because the republicans have hammered the debate and divided the country in the minds in the mind not in reality in the minds of the people who write about it all of a sudden is she selling out is she abandoning her principles but if john mccain who is pro life works with hillary on global warming he is a man of principle moving to the middle if president bush appoints a moderate to the supreme court we won t say he sold out the right we ll say oh how grand it is right but if you are a democrat and you talk to somebody in the middle oh my god you have no convictions you have no backbone and you never believed anything that is a tribute to the relentless power of 40 years of intellectual argument and bifurcating the thought process of virtually everybody who writes and thinks about politics in america and it violates human nature it violates the facts before us and its nuts which is why it s a good thing you re here when hillary made this speech well there was one great article in the new republic by peter beinart who actually went to the trouble to go back and look at what she had said and done for the last 25 or 30 years and he said whoa there s a remarkable consistency here a young man named andrew churney did the same thing on my records he said how can you say clinton had no consistency in conviction you may not agree with him but he s basically said and done the same thing for 30 years and that is a profoundly important thing if you win the battle of ideas it may have the unintended consequence of changing the sort of framework within which people view the other guys too so it s is really important you have to ask yourself and you don t have to agree with me but first the beginning of an effective progressive politics is the ability to answer for yourselves and to achieve some rough consensus on four questions one what is the status of the modern world where am i what is the fundamental nature of the world i live in two what do i want it to look like when my children and grandchildren are older three what are the values that underlie this vision and four what is the strategy for getting there including the role of government you ve got to be able to answer that when president reagan got elected he said the world is divided between good and evil i m for good how do we get it low taxes and big defense spending and moving the country to a more socially conservative position and essentially president bush had a modernized version of that wrapped in the most brilliant political slogan in my lifetime compassionate conservatism which is the only way he could win since we had a 65 percent approval rating it was i ll give you everything they did with a smaller government and a bigger tax cut wouldn t you like that but the point is they understand these they understand you have to ask and answer big questions and you have to understand what is the fundamental nature of the modern world interdependence we cannot escape each other everybody knows what it means economically everybody knows what it means on the internet but there are a lot of negative interdependence examples i mean on 9 11 you had people from 70 countries including over 200 other muslims murdered in new york city hillary and i visited an elementary school where the kids had to move their school there were 600 kids from 80 different national and ethnic groups apparently the people who did the london bombing were british citizens who were muslims from pakistan at least that is what today s stories are but the point is that this interdependence can be positive or negative and i would argue that it is inherently unstable because it s both positive and negative that s what i would argue you don t have to agree with me but you have to have in your mind what is the fundamental character of the modern world second question where do you want it to go what do you want it to look like when your kids and your grandchildren are alive i answer that i want us to move from interdependence to more integrated communities locally nationally and globally what s the definition of an integrated community shared responsibilities shared benefits and opportunities and shared values that s my answer to the second question what are those shared values how in the world can you have shared values in a world as diverse as ours well the answer to the first question is you can t if you believe you are in possession of the absolute truth and if you believe that that truth can be translated into a political program then all possibility of shared values vanishes because somebody that doesn t agree with you on something is by definition outside the family of humanity then it s okay to kill them if you are a terrorist or just malign them if you are an extremist in america but all you got to do is say i am a human being i am subject to error i might be wrong every now and then then you can have shared values every person matters every person deserves a chance every person has a responsible role to play competition is good but it only works within a community of established shared rules our differences are important they do matter they make life more interesting but in the end our common humanity matters more that s my answer that brings you the last question what is the role of government how do we get from here to there my argument is that we get from here to there with the government that establishes the conditions and gives people the tools to fulfill those values that has a security policy that deals with terror and weapons of mass destruction that has a policy to make a world with more friends and fewer terrorists because we cannot kill jail or occupy all our adversaries and if you can t do that you got to make a deal that s where politics comes in that has a policy that builds international cooperation institutional cooperation the big difference between us and the republicans is not so much what we want to do but how we want to do it in the world and madeleine albright i can t claim credit for this she had best one line description of it she said we favor a world where we cooperate when we can and act alone when we must they favor a world where they act alone when then can and cooperate when they must very important distinction it s why i signed kyoto and they got out of it i signed the comprehensive test ban treaty and they got out of it i was for the international criminal court against war crimes and they weren t these are honestly held convictions why i wanted trade agreements with labor and environmental standards and the same enforcement and this dominican republic central american trade agreement seemed to have labor and environmental standards but took the enforcement out of it it s a whole different attitude deeply held honestly held on both sides but fundamentally we believe that government is essential to creating the vision we want and enacting the values we want in our lives and that you have to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most with their own lives that s the way i think about everything if you ask me any question today on any issue my answer will be dictated by a course of action that i believe will give us more shared responsibility shared benefits and opportunities and a shared community of values because we re having more diversity not just in the world but in every community in america and across the globe final question how do the democrats win again jim fallows has got a great article in the i think the atlantic monthly or one of those magazines which is an alleged memo to the president in 2012 and he said you know the first 12 years of this century have been a disaster the republicans couldn t govern and the democrats couldn t get elected so here is the mess we are in the truth is that we are in better shape than it appears we are the congress is more evenly divided and because the republicans have done the last reapportionment or two it s harder for us to win back and because smaller states are more likely to be red states they have a big advantage in the senate which is not a democratic institution by the founders design but if you look at the national preferences we are in way better shape than we were in the 1980s president carter won by two points in 1976 when he was a southern governor a born again christian a graduate of the naval academy and a peanut farmer after watergate he won by two points he should have won by 20 points but the cultural aversion of white protestants especially married white protestants to voting for a democrat was so deep he was actually it was a triumph then in 80 84 and 88 we never won more than ten states in one of those elections we won one state and the district of columbia as i remember in 72 we won one state and the district of columbia in 68 we would have been beaten badly if wallace had not been in the race so we won in 92 we won in 96 the myth that we would not have won if ross perot hadn t been in there is simply not true all the exit polls show just the reverse al gore didn t win by enough votes to stay out of the supreme court in 2000 that s what happened there and you can argue what we should or shouldn t have done but the truth is we had a plurality of 500 000 votes and when john kerry was defeated 51 to 48 in 2004 it was the smallest re election margin for a president who got reelected since woodrow wilson in 1916 before world war i so the idea that progressive politics is dead is wrong now what do we have to do to win and i know there is some debate about whether it is about economics or security the truth is it s about both don t think about how politicians or journalists write and talk about politics think about how people live politics think about how people experience reality if we want to win again i think we have to do four things number one we got to be credible on security number two we ve got to have good ideas on economic and social policy not just to be against the republicans but say what we would be for you can win congressional races by just saying no as newt gingrich proved in 1994 they just said no to me for two years but when you win the white house you have to be for something because you are the leader of the band number three you have to have better tactics it is impossible to describe to someone who has never been a part of it what it is like to have the right wing go after you and tell the world that you are just no good your values are no good you won t stand up for america you won t fight for anything you don t believe in the family and all that sort of stuff but i don t blame them anymore for doing that because it just keeps working ask yourself this if you had a business that you were running and it brought you a 100 million a year and you never had to change your business plan both the public and worse your opponents reacted like pavlov s dog totally predictably every time and said oh how mean they are all you have to do is upgrade your would you ever change your business plan of course you wouldn t people come up to me all the time and say when is this mean partisanship going to come to an end and i say when it doesn t work anymore it will end when it doesn t work anymore you can t ask them to stop being mean with us because it works they will stop being mean to us on a human personal level when it doesn t work anymore and not until then and with their base they never pay any price and it doesn t matter whether what they say is true or not and you had two catholic bishops campaigning against tom daschle in 2004 telling people you couldn t be a good catholic and vote against him because he was a pro choice catholic democrat when in fact for seven years tom daschle had tried to pass a bill imposing roe v wade s ban on third trimester abortions except for the life or health of the mother was in danger on all 50 states it doesn t apply in about 10 states today where about 40 percent of the abortions are performed it would have eliminated far more abortions than the so called partial birth abortion bill which as another court just said is manifestly unconstitutional and we never got a vote on it in seven years why because the republicans did not want the democrats to be able to vote on anything that looked like it was a pro life bill but if the voters of south dakota didn t know that they can t be blamed you have to advertise that you can t blame your opponents for applying a strategy that beats your brains out with regularity they are in business to beat us we believe in shared opportunity they believe that if you concentrate enough wealth and power in the hands of the right people you will have economic success national strength and a culturally conservative country that will be good for everybody that s what they believe so they want to concentrate that and if you want to beat it you ve got to be tough enough to beat it and that means you can t let people maul you i will never forget saturday before the election i had one of these guys who was on the swift boat with senator kerry at a rally with me in little rock and he was a fine looking man boy he looked like he could serve in the navy today i mean no fat erect crew cut and he got tears in his eyes talking with me he said mr president he said what kind of country do i live in where people who never served in vietnam can be behind a campaign to malign john kerry he said he saved my life not once but twice he said how do they get away with these lies and you know it was saturday before the election it was too late i didn t have the heart to tell him that most a lot of what do you don t remember anything about vietnam and you have no way of knowing whether those charges are true or not you ve got to answer this stuff not only that people really don t care if politicians attack each other with untrue stories they figure if you don t want to get hurt you shouldn t have filed for office they figure whatever happens to us our lives will be better than theirs half the time they like to see somebody hit us between the eyes with a two by four just to see how we react in other words to use one of my wife s phrases the trick in politics is to take criticism seriously but not personally and if you take it personally and you get feelings hurt and you act like a deer caught in headlights then you can t take it seriously again always see these things from how it looks out there to real people and real voters never launch a personal attack but if one gets lobbed at you knock it out of the park most of these personal attacks are brer rabbit things don t throw me in that brier patch if you know how to answer it you can hurt them worse than they intended to hurt you but you have got to have good tactics and the fourth thing i want to say is we have to talk to so called red america this is the nuttiest thing i ever saw to believe that sometimes we have the political consultants say okay here are ten issues in the election and people agree with us on healthcare education the deficit whether the tax cuts on wealthy people like bill clinton should be repealed and they don t agree with us on taxes on middle class people they think the republicans are better on that and they think they are stronger on defense and we get a draw on crime and abortion is just explosive and while we have a slight advantage there is great intensity on the other side so for god s sake don t talk about it so you analyze this and say now according to this poll we should talk about what they agree with us on and we will have some sort of answer on what we are losing on and we just try not to touch anything else and we go where the votes are and dig them up nobody with any sense does that because that s not how people are we are all a little red and a little blue as barack obama said in his speech i even saw a decision in the supreme court the other day the first time in my life i think since they ve been on there where i agreed with the dissent filed by scalia and thomas i never thought it would happen i wouldn t make that old lady in norwalk sell her house she d been in it since she was 76 or 80 years old i thought it was wrong maybe i m wrong but the point is we are complicated life is complicated and we re the progressives we don t believe we have a monopoly on the truth so it s nuts for us not to talk to so called red america and besides that there are too many of them out there if you look at ohio a place where we won in 92 and 96 no republican has ever been elected president without winning ohio ever senator kerry ran way better than i did in cleveland but towns that i lost six to four we lost four to one this time i went after them at my library dedication which was very wet if you saw it the last event was a woman singing the battle hymn of the republic and wet as it was she had a beautiful voice we had been friends that lady and i for almost 30 years she is the daughter of the man who ran the pentecostal church in my home state he is a great friend of mine i just talked to him the other day when his wife passed away her husband is one of the best friends i have got he runs the biggest pentecostal church in louisiana now you wouldn t think that a democrat who had been derided as liberal defamed as having no conviction and is the world s most famous sinner would have a friendship like that this guy is my friend and we met on a very human level our children grew up at the same time we ve talked to one another about it it never occurred to me that we shouldn t be friends because of our politics so after the ceremony we all went back we were dripping wet and we went back to the apartment at the library and i had all the participants from the event plus all the presidents and former presidents and their spouses and everybody up there so the pastor comes up to me he is from north louisiana he said i have got a confession to make i said this is great i ll live on this for the rest of my life you confessing to me i said what is it he said i voted for bush i said anthony do you believe he was a good president he said i have very mixed feelings he said i have got mixed feelings about this iraq thing i hate those tax cuts i don t like the deficits i think kicking all these poor kids out of after school programs is outrageous this guy had a very sophisticated understanding of what had happened i said well did you vote for him over the cultural issues social issues he said no he said you know i m a pentecostal preacher i m pro life and anti gay marriage but he said i voted for you twice i d vote for hillary i love her and he said i think i m the only pentecostal minister in the south ever to stand up and endorse the employment nondiscrimination act i said you did that he said i did i said why did you do that and he smiled and he said because you ve been talking to me about this for 20 years and i finally realized i couldn t treat gay people as subhuman anymore that they re if somebody is a good person and they obey the law they ve got to make the right to make a living and be treated decently in this society i said well anthony why did you vote for president bush and he said listen to this every one of you listen to this he said because ever since you left nobody in your party talks to us anymore he said bill you can t vote for somebody who doesn t talk to you now you think about that and he said a really smart thing he said look you can t get james dobson and jerry falwell and pat robertson and he said you shouldn t because they are not for you you know you shouldn t you guys don t see the world the same way and they are not for you but he said most of us evangelicals we re just trying to raise our children and hold our families and our community together in a hostile and very difficult environment and he smiled and he said this guy s a good politician he said you don t need many of us to win so i went back and checked in 96 among white evangelical protestants senator dole beat me 63 to 37 in 2000 president bush beat vice president gore 74 to 26 in 2004 president bush beat john kerry 78 to 21 now kerry meanwhile thanks to a lot of you was doing much better in other places the demographics of america have continued to move our way we ve had more young people organized and more people registered and more people are involved but you know we can t pretend that people don t agree with us on most things aren t americans and don t have a stake in our future and that they are so different from us that none of them would have any interest in talking about that s just not true when stephanie was introducing me i learned something you know i did it s true i did go to rwanda and apologize it s the biggest regret of my administration we couldn t have save most of the people because it happened so fast but we could have saved some and at the time we were reeling from somalia and trying to get into bosnia which had gotten a lot of publicity and we were trying to get in there and the world just missed it most countries including the united states never even had high level meetings considering whether to send people so we have come a long way in bosnia and kosovo even in darfur there is an effort being made now and i have some thoughts about that if you want to talk about it but i thought about that when i went to rwanda i met all these survivors of the genocide who were working to help the country get put back together and i met a lady a beautiful women who said that she awoke in a pool of her own blood to find her husband and six children lying dead around her and she first was angry at god for letting her survive and then she said i realized i must have been spared for a purpose and it could not be something as mean as vengeance so i do what i can to help us start again they have reconciliation villages in rwanda where the hutus and the tutsis get free land but only if they agree to live next door to one another i went to a village called ndera where there were two women neighbors holding hands one of them lost her brother and husband in the genocide the other s husband was in prison awaiting trial for a war crimes tribunal and you ve got to have done something really horrible to be called before the war crimes tribunal they were neighbors i met a hutu women caring for two dying tutsi boys who had a congenital disease all living together now if they can do that we can talk to red america give me a break here and there is nothing wrong with that and there is no absence of conviction in the hills of north central africa there are tribes who when they see each other walking on the paths and they greet each other they have an important greeting i want you all to remember this if you don t remember anything else i say dem wjclinton13 7 98 bill_clinton thank you very much i would like to thank all the members who are here all the candidates who are here the sponsors of this event and those of you who have contributed because this group is going to give the american people a chance to finally and fully ratify the ideas that we have been pursuing the last six years i want to thank simon i did tell senator lieberman i thought simon had given a good talk one of the things that i always think that all of us should be doing is trying to recruit good young people and lift them up simon self selected we didn t have to recruit him at all after surviving the war room in 92 he understands that all you have to do is just sort of stand there and keep going and it will be all right i m delighted to see so many of you here so many old friends and some people who are getting involved in this and i will be brief tonight i rewrote my talk here it is even i can t read it so it will be less but i d like to just kind of recap how this all began i ll never forget the first time or two i talked to al from and the first encounter i had with many of you through the dlc and how strongly we felt that our party which we had no intention of leaving was being rendered irrelevant in national elections partly by being caricatured successfully by the very adroit tactics of our friends in the republican party and partly because we seemed unable to break out of the conventional wisdom which had worked for us in the past but which seemed inadequate to the dynamic present and that had been the case for some years if you look around the world today and i don t want to make any untoward foreign policy comments but if you look around the world today you see that there is always quite a high price to pay if you stay with a strategy that once worked for you or with ideas and policies that once worked for you when circumstances change and they no longer fit we find that in business we find that in our personal lives in virtually every form of human endeavor and so more than a decade ago those of us that loved and believed in the democratic party as the instrument of progressive government lifting people up giving them a chance building the american community and expecting responsibility from every citizen started through the democratic leadership council to try to come up with the ideas that would carry america forward it is true that we built it on the old bedrock values of our party and i think of our country of opportunity responsibility and community it s also true that we said some things which made everybody angry and often confused our friends in the press and they sometimes said well if you don t fit into those old categories you must not have any principles i mean whoever it s obviously stupid to believe you could reduce the deficit and balance the budget and still keep investing more in education and science and technology for example hard to believe that on crime the only thing that would ever work would be to be tough on people who should be properly punished but to do smart things to prevent crime in the first place on welfare to say that if you re able bodied you ought to go to work but we don t expect you to give up your most important job which is raising your child or on the environment to say that it s crazy to believe that we can ever have long term economic growth without preserving the environment but we think we can do it and still grow the economy and when we said these things for years people said well those people they don t have any principles because after all we know what a principle is a principle is an old liberal idea or a new conservative idea that s what a principle is and that way we don t have to think anymore we were relieved of all the burden of thinking about the complexities of the modern world if we just put you in some box and if you guys don t fit it must mean that there is no core there but we sort of pressed ahead and when i started running in 92 a lot of you helped me even though you honestly didn t believe i had a chance to win only my mother thought i could win that s not true hillary did and the american people gave us a chance and we set about the business of doing this and along the way we found that as all people do it wasn t always so easy to take your general principles and turn them into specific bills and specific policies from time to time we had disagreements but it s clear the path we have followed and it was clear to us very often even when it wasn t so clear to people who were commenting i remember when we had the debate on welfare reform for example and i vetoed the first two bills and i signed the third one so people said well obviously the president just didn t want the democrats to be exposed to another veto in an election year i never read a single article which analyzed the difference in the bill i signed and the two that i vetoed the two i vetoed said we re going to make you go to work if you re able bodied and if you have to give up being a good parent that s fine with us we re not going to give your kids medicaid we re not going to give your kids food stamps we re not going to provide adequate child care for you the most important thing is work and if you can t be a good parent that s tough i still believe that s the most important job in america so when they fixed the bill i signed it so fast forward to the present if you look back on the last six years if somebody told you on the day of inauguration in 1993 that after six years we d have the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and 16 million new jobs the lowest welfare rolls in 29 years the first balanced budget in 29 years the lowest inflation in 32 years the smallest federal government in 35 years the highest rate of home ownership in history a quarter of a million people who couldn t buy guns because they had mental health histories or criminal records cleaner air cleaner water safer food fewer toxic waste dumps 90 percent of our kids immunized and a foreign policy that s helped to advance the cause of freedom from bosnia to the middle east to northern ireland to haiti that s expanded trade and stood up for human rights in places like china and other places around the world you would have said it will never happen in five and a half years the american people did it we had something to do with it because we gave them the ability to do it because we said the role of government should be to give people the power the tools to make the most of their own lives and then to provide the conditions within which they can accomplish that but always to remind people that one of the big differences between ourselves and the other party historically and still is that we believe that we are fundamentally interdependent and that our personal independence can only really be manifested when we re working together for the greater good and those who say that s a flaky idea and inappropriate to the moment need only go back and read our founding documents our founders pledged their lives and fortunes and sacred honor to the proposition that we should all be able to pursue life liberty and happiness within the context of a free government of limited power but unlimited potential and that our eternal mission as a country was to form a more perfect union not to form a more perfect collection of swarming individuals but to form a more perfect union and i m very grateful that i was given the chance to serve and it s a good thing we got that constitutional amendment or i d try to get another chance but i want to tell you i am absolutely convinced that we have not finished the job of convincing the american people that the prospects for the future depend upon the continued embrace and development of the ideas which have produced the results of the last six years that s what this election is all about they say oh well you know i hear a lot of my republican friends say well you know you go all the way back to the civil war and the party of the president always loses seats in the mid term election especially in the second term of the president and i said well that s because they think they re sort of retiring i m not sitting in the sun here we ve got an agenda we don t believe america should be sitting on its laurels we believe first of all that we hadn t had a balanced budget and a surplus for 29 years and we don t want the majority in congress to spend it before we save social security we want to reform medicare in a way that is relevant to the 21st century that protects the health care of seniors and we don t want social security and medicare to bankrupt the children and grandchildren of the baby boomers and we believe we can do both things and we think as democrats we re better suited to that path we want to continue to reform education even as they try to eviscerate our agenda as i speak in the house of representatives we want to continue to advance the environmental agenda with market technology and research to prove that we can improve the environment while we grow the economy we want to continue to prove that we can be one america across all the lines that divide us because what we have in common is more important we have a lot of big things to do we want to prove that we can go into inner city neighborhoods and isolated rural areas and native american reservations and bring the principles of market economy and the right kind of support and prove that even in the poorest parts of america we can create a system of opportunity that will work for people and that they ought to have a chance to be a part of we have a lot to do this country still has responsibilities in the world that we are not fully meeting if we re going to create the kind of world trading system we want if we re going to continue to be a force for human rights and democracy if we re going to organize ourselves against the security threats of the 21st century including biological and chemical warfare small scale nuclear warfare terrorism narco trafficking we have other things to do and if we keep these ideas up front i think that the people we have seen here tonight the members of congress and the candidates have an excellent chance of winning and i think we have an excellent chance to genuinely build a majority party not based on the success of one person from as one of my adversaries once said a small southern state i am very grateful for the chance i had to serve and run i m grateful for the chance that i ve had to win elections i ve loved every day every month every year of my life in politics but the success america enjoys today is fundamentally due first to the character and effort and ingenuity of the american people and secondly to the fact that we have done the right thing ideas matter there are consequences that flow from actions taken or forgone and you know and i know and i can tell you agree with me because you re quiet and you re listening that two presidential elections in good times the second one in good times do not necessarily ratify what we re doing we have worked like crazy to hammer these ideas into policies and we ve had honest debates and arguments and sometimes we still disagree but we know we re moving the country in a certain direction and we know it works and we ve got to go out there in this election season and tell the american people that hey you know i like the president too but this is not a personality contest this is the struggle for the ideas that should properly dominate the public policy of this country that should guide this country where we re going and should lift us up and give us a chance to do even better in the 21st century what you re doing is very very important and if you re undertaking one of these congressional races out there in an open seat maybe it s held by a republican maybe it was held by a republican and it gets tough and you get discouraged just remember you know in the very marrow of your being that two thirds of the american people if they could get rid of all the cardboard cut out superficial negative images that our friends in the republican party have laid on us for 20 years relentlessly cleverly and often effectively and strip all that away and just look at what they stand for and what we stand for and have an honest choice of the ideas before them they would say i think i like that new democrat way i think that s right so don t get discouraged when you re still shedding the shackles of history don t get discouraged when you re still scrubbing the barnacles off the tarnished image that we had for too long don t get discouraged when you re still moving against the preconceptions that people have imbedded over 20 years the hardest thing in the world to change is a mind but ideas move people they drive countries they change destinies in people s individual lives and family lives and work lives and in the course of a country s life and this country has had a good six years because of the ideas that all of you worked hard for years and years and years before i had the extreme good fortune to serve as president in 1993 so don t give up on that and don t get discouraged and don t think that just because every election since the civil war in an off year has turned out a certain way that this one will because there s something different about now the country is doing well we ve got the ideas and we ve got youth and if you keep your spirits up and you understand the historic mission you re on and you think about what your country ought to look like when you re children are your age i think you ll be very pleased by how it turns out thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton13 8 00 bill_clinton thank you very much let me begin by thanking tim and joel tauber and tod morgan and bill dotcher and all the leaders of the organizations that brought you all here together thank you for giving hillary such a good reception i am grateful for that i want to say more than anything else how profoundly grateful i am for the support i have received from the american jewish community since 1991 when i first began running for president when hillary and i were discussing whether i should make this race way back in 91 well over eight years ago now one of the things that i hoped i could do was to bring whatever powers of persuasion and understanding of history as well as human psychology that i ve acquired over the years to the process of peace in the world it seemed to me that the end of the cold war had imposed upon the united states a very special responsibility to reach out and build bridges to countries and regions that we had too often overlooked or seen through a limited lens during the period of the cold war and to try to be a special force for peace from the northern ireland problem to the balkans to haiti and our own region but especially in the middle east and for nearly eight years now we have worked to be faithful to the commitment i made to the american people when i began that we would make the united states the world s leader for peace and freedom for human rights and security wherever we possibly could this has been the most rewarding thing i think in many ways i ve been able to do as president but it s a work that is and by the very nature of the way we human beings are it s a work that will always be to some extent in progress hillary has done a lot especially with her vital voices program in northern ireland going to israel and working with mrs barak on the violence issue and before that working with others who were in the israeli government i think i should tell you that the last person i talked to before my plane landed in los angeles was leah rabin she s back here in the united states seeing her doctor she said she got a reasonably good report and i told her i was going to see you and she asked me to say hello so i m doing it and i want to get my brownie points with her for doing it tim already mentioned the nomination of joe lieberman but i want to say just a few words about it i was at a dinner last night that a few of you attended which honored the last eight years of our administration and one of the people who performed was the comedian red buttons who must be i don t know how old he is now but he s not a kid and he can say things the rest of us can t say and the first thing he got up and said do you know that in los angeles the democrats are changing their theme songs from happy days are here again to hava nagila he also gave me a lot of other jokes but i don t think i should use any of them hillary and i have known joe lieberman she may have said this but we met him in 1970 when i was a first year law student she was a second year law student and he was a 28 year old candidate for the state senate and i was especially impressed by the fact that he had been a freedom rider in mississippi or somewhere in the south and was down there registering voters at a time when it wasn t easy to do and frankly anybody who tried to do it was in some measure of physical danger in all the years since we ve kept in touch and about 15 years ago we were among those who started the democratic leadership council he s a brilliant man a little bit of an iconoclast and always willing to think new thoughts and i think we need more of that in politics the world is changing very rapidly and we need people who can think and most important of all he will be a living embodiment along with hadassah who as all of you know is the child of holocaust survivors they will be a living embodiment of america s continuing commitment to build one national community to embrace people across all the lines that divide us it s still the most important thing we can do i want to say just a few words if i might about the peace process in the middle east you ll hear enough of the election rhetoric elsewhere and maybe a little from me tomorrow night but i want to talk about that for a moment in the last seven years we ve seen the signing of the declaration of principles on the south lawn which reflected the direct engagement of the parties at oslo the israeli palestinian interim agreement a treaty leading to genuine peace between israel and jordan the rallying of the world s leaders including the leaders of the arab world at sharm el sheik to condemn terrorist attacks against israel the hebron and wye accords which put the implementation of the interim agreement back on track in these years both sides have recognized that whether they like it sometimes or don t like it sometimes the israelis and palestinians are bound to live side by side throughout the process however the ultimate question of how they would live side by side has been continually deferred i always thought that was part of the genius of the oslo accord some people didn t like it i thought it was a smart thing to do everyone knew how hard these final status issues were and everyone knew there was absolutely no chance of resolving them unless the people particularly those in responsible positions lived together and worked together over a period of years and gradually began to implement other parts of the agreement so they could get a feel for each other however they agreed that they would resolve all this by september and we were coming up on the deadline and they had never really had a formal face to face set of official conversations about these final status issues and i can understand why it s kind of like going to the dentist without anybody to deaden your gums i mean if this were easy somebody would have done it years ago but that is the context in which i brought them together at camp david not because i thought that there was a guarantee of success far from it but because they needed a setting in which they could speak openly think freely protected from the competing pressures and constant scrutiny that is a part of political life in israel and throughout the middle east perhaps even more than it is in the united states now i don t want to sugarcoat it i wanted an agreement we didn t get one but i can tell you significant progress was made at camp david one of the palestinian negotiators said that these were truly revolutionary talks because on their side they entertained publicly or not publicly but in front of others positions they had never before considered it s almost as if we cracked open a sealed container and took out a set of problems that had been festering in a dark place for 52 years they re now out on the table the parties are talking about them issues never before confronted in an official setting how would a new palestinian state be defined what would its borders be what should be done about refugees from 1948 not just palestinian refugees but jewish refugees as well and you might be interested in knowing that the palestinians felt that their families should be entitled to compensation as well how do you protect israel s security if it withdraws from the west bank what in the world do you do about jerusalem it is a holy city but it has caused a hellish lot of problems and we have to think it through in a very serious and sober way the process is not over and therefore it is inappropriate for me to discuss the specifics i don t want to make a hard problem more difficult but i can say one or two things first of all everybody affected by the peace process is faced with a choice we are now at a crossroads because of the calendar to which the parties themselves have agreed down one path lies more confrontation and conflict more bloodshed and tears down the other is an agreement however difficult by definition agreements require compromise which means no one gets 100 percent and neither side can be in a position to say that it has completely vanquished the other that means that given the positions taken and i talked about this at the end of the camp david process this is an excruciatingly difficult negotiation the choices are painful and agonizing but they have to be made otherwise we will repeat the pattern of the past and then sometime in the future another group of leaders will come back to the same set of choices with the same history after more bloodshed and tears more grievances to redress more bitterness to overcome we may or may not be able to get an agreement but we ought to keep trying and i will keep trying every single day i want to emphasize some things i have said for seven and a half years now and i haven t changed my mind we can come up with ideas we can offer alternatives but we must not indeed we will not attempt to impose any of our ideas these choices must be freely made by people who must live with them in the meanwhile we must continue to stand by israel as we have during my entire tenure as president and for the last 52 years we will help israel to maintain its strength we will minimize the courageous risks the prime minister is taking for peace we will improve our security relationship we will do everything we possibly can to make this work one of the things i think you should know that struck me most at camp david and says something for the people who launched the oslo process seven years ago is the difference in the way the negotiators relate to each other even when they were fighting when i brought the parties together at dayton after we and our nato allies ended the bosnian war they could barely stand to be in the same room together when i went to kosovo to see our soldiers and to meet with all the parties there the wounds of ethnic cleansing and the battle we waged to reverse it were so fresh and raw that people could hardly bear to come into the same room and came only because i invited them and insisted that they come when i went first to northern ireland and walked down the shankel and the falls the catholic and the protestant streets in belfast it was difficult for the most controversial of the political leaders who had to be involved in any resolution to even be seen talking to each other much less for anyone to know they had shaken hands the israelis and palestinians after these years know each other by their first names they know their spouses names they know how many children they have they know how many grandchildren they have they tell jokes to each other sometimes about their own leaders they laugh and they talk and they have a feel for the humanity and the difficulty of the situation this is not to say that they are soft headed indeed i never saw anyone more resolute about the fundamental security interests of the state of israel than the prime minister was in these negotiations and for whatever it s worth the security questions were the ones on which we made the most progress which is something that should be encouraging to all of you i don t know what s going to happen but i know this the most heartbreaking moments of the last eight years for me and for hillary for al and for our whole team have been those moments when people were blinded by acts of hatred against others because they fit in some sort of category or another that poor twisted boy that blew up the federal building in oklahoma city his mind and soul polluted by this anti government venom that was out there at the time the school children who were killed by terrorist attack in israel the man who belonged to a church that he said didn t believe in god but did believe in white supremacy murdering an african american basketball coach in chicago and killing a korean christian as he walked out of his church people who shot the the man who shot the jewish children here going to their school and then killed a filipino postal worker and thought he had had a double success he killed an asian and a federal employee we see it within our country and beyond our borders i have seen people who were literally ethnically indistinguishable in the balkans killing each other because history made them orthodox christians or muslims or catholics it is ironic that at a time when we celebrate the triumph of the human genome and where the internet is the fastest growing communications vehicle in human history and by the way al gore did sponsor the legislation part of my job since i m not running you know is to correct the record here the internet was in the beginning the private province of a few physicists al gore saw virtually before anybody else certainly in congress that it could be transformed into a medium of communication and could hold information that could benefit all of human kind that the whole library of congress would one day be on the internet that was the metaphor he said well over a decade ago now the whole encyclopedia britanica is on the internet pretty soon my whole presidential library will be on the internet there were only 50 sites on the worldwide web when i became president 5 0 today there are i m not sure how many but way way over 10 million the fastest growing mechanism in human history but anyway so you ve got all this stuff happening all this wonderful modern stuff and here we are bedeviled by the oldest problems of human society the fear of the other people that are different from us that s why it s a good thing that al gore put joe lieberman on the ticket and other americans will see that he is a brilliant person that he is a good person that he has a contribution to make and i think more and more people will respect the fact that he gives up his entire sabbath away from all work and politics on a day that coincidentally happens to be the best politicking day in the american political system i think this will be a good thing for america and what i would ask you to do as we see the events of the coming weeks unfold is to never lose your passion for peace and for reconciliation to remember that america cannot do good works abroad unless we are a good country first here at home that we have to purge ourselves of all traces of bigotry and hatred and that we have to go forward together as one community and that we have to do it not just with our words and our pictures but with our deeds it is one thing to say we want to build one america and another thing to do it whether it s passing hate crimes legislation employment nondiscrimination legislation raising the minimum wage or doing the other kinds of things that show that we really believe that we re all in this together and we all do better when we help each other the overwhelming fact of modern life is not the growth of the internet the growth of the global economy the explosion of biotechnology but what they all mean in a larger sense which is that every single day in breathtaking ways many of which we cannot see we are growing more interdependent we need each other more so we have to find a way not just to tolerate one another but to celebrate our diversity and take comfort from the fact that what we have in common is even more fundamental and more important yes compassion is important but enlightened self interest is even better we need to know we actually need each other and we need to do the right thing by each other so for me it s a great comfort to know that the vice president and joe lieberman are running that hillary is running and that we re moving in the right direction i just want to ask you this spend every day you can between now and november reminding people that it matters and that there are differences and if you do that we ll all win and america will be fine thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton13 9 00 bill_clinton mr holder thank you for your leadership commander o malley thank you for coming back and for being the embodiment of someone who has changed his position on this and been courageous enough to say so and mrs byrdsong i cannot even imagine the courage it must take for you to have made this journey from your home to stand up in front of us to say what you have said i thank your pastor for joining you here and i think i speak for all of us and for all americans we thank you for trying to turn your pain into a positive gain for america thank you i d like to thank justin dart and mary frances berry and so many other advocates of human rights and civil rights for being in this room today i would like to thank the members of the interfaith alliance who are here and of course the members of our d c city council many members of congress wanted to be here but they are actually voting now and in the house they re voting on this on amendments to this very proposal so we re here at a very important time the first ever vote on comprehensive hate crimes legislation is scheduled in the house of representatives for later today after the amendments have been dealt with that would enable us to clear the last legislative hurdle to final passage of hate crimes in june with the vice president standing watch in case a tie had to be broken the senate passed a strong bipartisan hate crimes bill i was very moved by many of the things that were said there but i want to say a special words of thanks publicly to senator gordon smith from oregon an evangelical christian republican for the speech that he gave on that occasion reminding us that this is not a partisan issue i hope the house will follow suit as i have said many times over the last couple of years it is for me a sad and painful irony that at the beginning of a new century i have done so much to try to fill with opportunity for the american people and to bring full of hope to the rest of the world with all the modern gadgets we enjoy we are still bedeviled by mankind s oldest failing the fear of the other which so quickly can lead to distrust then to dehumanization then to the kind of violence that ended the lives of matthew shepard and ricky byrdsong far far before their time we may not ever fully conquer the disease that seems to afflict human hearts everywhere the compelling need to define ourselves up by defining someone else down but at least we can do more to make sure that no one in our country is violated simply because of who they are that s why we re here today i would also like to point out that there is a connection between the two ways that throughout history and if you just look at the last century hate crimes have manifested themselves here we talk about sad people twisted inside who somehow felt they could fill a hole in their own lives by taking the lives of other people away people who had somehow been convinced that they were so superior to other people they could shoot at them kill them what possessed that person in california to shoot at all those little kids walking into the jewish community school i saw one person said that when he killed a filipino postal worker he thought he had a double success he d killed an asian and a federal employee what makes people think that way there are all kinds of explanations but we know that it s profoundly wrong to believe that you can ever lift yourself up by putting someone else down the point i want to make just briefly is that it s not very far from there to the awful examples we ve seen in our time of political leaders who try to get one group of people in the majority in the country to blame all their problems on another group of people in the minority and then you have a holocaust or you have a kosovo where a whole country is just flushed out so this is very important it is just not true that hate crimes are like other crimes it is not even true that every crime is a hate crime and that is fundamentally at the heart of this debate we had the first ever conference at the white house on this three years ago since then we ve increased the number of federal agents working on these cases prosecuted successfully a number of quite serious ones formed local hate crimes groups with local u s attorney s offices around the nation and worked with more and more police officers to identify the signs of hate crimes this coming year one of the things in our budget i hope the congress will adopt involves funds for extensive training for local law enforcement officials in this area but we have to do more the deputy attorney general told you quite eloquently precisely and clearly why we need a federal hate crimes law that allows the justice department to do so much more than it can now commander o malley told you the devastating financial consequences that can come to local law enforcement from simply trying to do the right thing without the necessary federal support but underneath it all and far more important than everything else are the stories the life young matthew shepard had and the one he might have had the wonderful life ricky byrdsong had and the one he might have had last year or in 1998 that s the last year we have figures there were listen to this 7 755 reported hate crimes nearly one every hour every day more importantly we know this is only the tip of the iceberg today we have new evidence that confirms what many have long suspected and that is that hate crimes are under reported a survey conducted by northeastern university found that as many as 6 000 law enforcement agencies may have encountered hate crimes over the past year but failed to report them to the fbi we also learned that 85 percent of law enforcement officers responding to the survey agree with commander o malley s belief that hate crimes hate motivated crimes are more serious than similar crimes not motivated by bias that s why i m directing the justice department today to work with local authorities to develop a plan within 120 days to make sure we report all hate crimes so we ll know what the scope of the challenge is it will examine a number of strategies from pilot programs in states suspected of under reporting to increasing training to help local officials identify such crimes this is all very important but only congress can do what really should be done here that s why the house must vote yes on the hate crimes legislation offered by congressman conyers today and yes on sending me the final hate crimes legislation before the adjourn for the year both yeses are important thank you i also ask congress to reauthorize the violence against women act before it s too late so that we can continue to build on its success you know over the last several decades over and over again when it came down to protecting the lives of innocent americans congress has been willing to take bipartisan action to do the right thing i hope and believe it will do nothing less with hate crimes legislation and the violence against women act let me just close with this one of the cruelest aspects of the systematic hate crimes that were perpetrated by the nazis is their attempt to prove that somehow it was justified by science by some sort of innate superiority one of the happiest aspects of most recent scientific developments in biology is that we can now scientifically confirm what faiths have always taught that the most important fact of our common existence on this earth is our common humanity the human genome research project has documented that we are genetically 99 9 percent the same furthermore that the differences among people within the same ethnic or racial groups are greater than the genetic differences between profiles of different racial groups now this is a stunning thing in other words this is not an affair of the body it is an affair of the heart of the spirit it is therefore an even more dangerous kind of infection i don t think any of us believe we can ever root it out just by punishing people but the most important thing is that we do have the tools we need to take a strong stand before these things spread even wider that s what sherialyn said and that s why she came we ve got a chance here to reaffirm america at its best and i hope we can do it because the most important thing if we want to make the most of all this modern wondrous economy we have is to get rid of our oldest demons and build one america thank you very much dem wjclinton13 9 93a bill_clinton prime minister rabin chairman arafat foreign minister peres mr abbas president carter president bush distinguished guests on behalf of the united states and russia cosponsors of the middle east peace process welcome to this great occasion of history and hope today we bear witness to an extraordinary act in one of history s defining dramas a drama that began in the time of our ancestors when the word went forth from a sliver of land between the river jordan and the mediterranean sea that hallowed piece of earth that land of light and revelation is the home to the memories and dreams of jews muslims and christians throughout the world as we all know devotion to that land has also been the source of conflict and bloodshed for too long throughout this century bitterness between the palestinian and jewish people has robbed the entire region of its resources its potential and too many of its sons and daughters the land has been so drenched in warfare and hatred the conflicting claims of history etched so deeply in the souls of the combatants there that many believe the past would always have the upper hand then 14 years ago the past began to give way when at this place and upon this desk three men of great vision signed their names to the camp david accords today we honor the memories of menachem begin and anwar sadat and we salute the wise leadership of president jimmy carter then as now we heard from those who said that conflict would come again soon but the peace between egypt and israel has endured just so this bold new venture today this brave gamble that the future can be better than the past must endure two years ago in madrid another president took a major step on the road to peace by bringing israel and all her neighbors together to launch direct negotiations and today we also express our deep thanks for the skillful leadership of president george bush ever since harry truman first recognized israel every american president democrat and republican has worked for peace between israel and her neighbors now the efforts of all who have labored before us bring us to this moment a moment when we dare to pledge what for so long seemed difficult even to imagine that the security of the israeli people will be reconciled with the hopes of the palestinian people and there will be more security and more hope for all today the leadership of israel and the palestine liberation organization will sign a declaration of principles on interim palestinian self government it charts a course toward reconciliation between two peoples who have both known the bitterness of exile now both pledge to put old sorrows and antagonisms behind them and to work for a shared future shaped by the values of the torah the koran and the bible let us salute also today the government of norway for its remarkable role in nurturing this agreement but of all above all let us today pay tribute to the leaders who had the courage to lead their people toward peace away from the scars of battle the wounds and the losses of the past toward a brighter tomorrow the world today thanks prime minister rabin foreign minister peres and chairman arafat their tenacity and vision has given us the promise of a new beginning what these leaders have done now must be done by others their achievement must be a catalyst for progress in all aspects of the peace process and those of us who support them must be there to help in all aspects for the peace must render the people who make it more secure a peace of the brave is within our reach throughout the middle east there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life we know a difficult road lies ahead every peace has its enemies those who still prefer the easy habits of hatred to the hard labors of reconciliation but prime minister rabin has reminded us that you do not have to make peace with your friends and the koran teaches that if the enemy inclines toward peace do thou also incline toward peace therefore let us resolve that this new mutual recognition will be a continuing process in which the parties transform the very way they see and understand each other let the skeptics of this peace recall what once existed among these people there was a time when the traffic of ideas in commerce and pilgrims flowed uninterrupted among the cities of the fertile crescent in spain and the middle east muslims and jews once worked together to write brilliant chapters in the history of literature and science all this can come to pass again mr prime minister mr chairman i pledge the active support of the united states of america to the difficult work that lies ahead the united states is committed to ensuring that the people who are affected by this agreement will be made more secure by it and to leading the world in marshalling the sources necessary to implement the difficult details that will make real the principles to which you commit yourselves today together let us imagine what can be accomplished if all the energy and ability the israelis and the palestinians have invested into your struggle can now be can now be channelled into cultivating the land and freshening the waters into ending the boycotts and creating new industry into building a land as bountiful and peaceful as it is holy above all let us dedicate ourselves today to your region s next generation in this entire assembly no one is more important than the group of israeli and arab children who are seated here with us today mr prime minister mr chairman this day belongs to you and because of what you have done tomorrow belongs to them we must not leave them prey to the politics of extremism and despair to those who would derail this process because they cannot overcome the fears and hatreds of the past we must not betray their future for too long the young of the middle east have been caught in a web of hatred not of their own making for too long they have been taught from the chronicles of war now we can give them the chance to know the season of peace for them we must realize the prophecy of isaiah that the cry of violence shall no more be heard in your land nor wrack nor ruin within your borders the children of abraham the descendants of isaac and ishmael have embarked together on a bold journey together today with all our hearts and all our souls we bid them shalom salaam peace dem wjclinton13 9 95 bill_clinton thank you very much terrell did a great job didn t he let s give him another hand didn t he do a great job when terrell was going up to speak the governor said he seems so calm and i said well after all it s his crowd i am honored to be here with your governor with the attorney general janet reno and with our nation s drug czar dr lee brown with the national family partnership chair carol reeves with the members of the family who did a lot to inspire what we re doing here today myrna cammerena who is enrique cammerena s sister and a dea agent dora cammerena enrique s mother and rick evans the executive director of the national family partnership and of course along with the governor and all the other state officials who are here congressman cardin and to your principal your superintendent the school board members and all the others who are here i m delighted to be in this wonderful school and i thank all of you who work here and who send your children here for making this such a successful place i d also like to thank all the law enforcement officers who come here from all around the country let me tell you while we re here we re here to do two things first of all as the attorney general has said to observe the first anniversary of the enactment of the crime bill into law and to celebrate its accomplishments and secondly to reaffirm the elemental proposition that if we don t do something to keep our young people drug free we will never solve the crime problem and that that begins first and foremost with an act of personal responsibility on the part of every american first a responsibility on the part of the students on the part of parents and educators and others for self for family for community and for country lee brown has done an outstanding job in working with our high schools to reduce drugs and violence yesterday he kicked off our national back to school stay drug free public service announcement campaign enlisting the involvement of prominent sports figures and other entertainers to tape radio and tv spots urging young people to stay drug free and urging parents to stay involved he s also passing out this wonderful little bumper sticker that i think could go very well with your red ribbon campaign it says stay drug free you have the power you have the power a year ago when the crime bill was enacted those of us who supported it i believe exercised our responsible our personal responsibility to the young people of america to do everything we could to ensure their safety and to provide alternatives to crime and violence it was one of the proudest accomplishments of my tenure as your president we broke six long years of partisan rhetorical political gridlock to put in place a crime bill that was both tough and smart that actually holds out the promise of saving lives and increasing the quality of life and the safety of the american people we put 100 000 more police on the street made three strikes and your out the law of the land banned assault weapons from our neighborhoods our streets and our schools finally elected to do something about the terrible problem of violence against women much of it unfortunately domestic violence and we gave our young people some things to say yes to as well as to say no to because these police officers said we had to have more prevention in education programs in our schools if we wanted a safe america for the next generation today there are those who in the name of a balanced budget would go back on all this progress they are the same people who said we would never put 100 000 police officers on the street they said we couldn t even put 20 000 on in six years over 25 000 in one year we re going to we re on time we re ahead of schedule we re below cost we are keeping our commitments to the american people so those who want to turn away from measures that have lowered the crime rate in almost every major urban and rural area in this country i say not over not if i can stop it not if i can stop it let me be clear the governor mentioned it this is not about balancing the budget i am for balancing the budget when i became the president we had quadrupled the debt in 12 years and a bipartisan agreement to make out like it didn t matter we had a 290 billion a year deficit that deficit today is 160 billion dollars we ve cut it nearly in half in only three years i am for balancing the budget but the purpose of balancing the budget is to lift the burden of debt from these young people in this audience to free up money in america to be borrowed by private businesspeople to invest to create jobs to strengthen our economy to improve the quality of life in the future we cannot do that if we decide to balance the budget in ways that will undermine our economy or our quality of life and that is why i have said repeatedly we do not have to cut education and we must not cut our efforts to reduce the crime rate to reduce violence and to give our children a safer more secure future it is not necessary to balance the budget and it undermines the very purpose of doing it we must not take that course i just want to say one other thing what we have done on the crime bill has worked because of the exercise of personal responsibility by other people in the criminal justice system in washington we can give these fine police chiefs here and the people with whom they work the tools but they have to use the tools and citizens have to help them therefore everyone in america who is a good citizen can justifiably claim some responsibility for the fact that the crime rate for all serious offenses including murder rape robbery and aggravated assault is down in almost every area in the united states that is an american achievement and we need to keep working until we bring it down to an acceptable level where it ought to be but just as we have made progress in certain areas there are clouds still hanging over our future and i want to talk about two of them today because they affect these young people in this audience last week the justice department issued a report which showed that while overall crime is down violent crime committed by juveniles people under the age of 18 is still at an all time high juvenile violence has now become the number one crime problem in the united states of america we cannot rest we cannot rest in our official position we cannot rest as citizens we cannot rest as parents until we do something to change that i am so sick and tired of picking up the newspaper and reading stories about honor students standing at bus stops being shot down by careless drive by shooters i am so tired of reading stories about a 16 year old boy shooting a 12 year old boy and killing him because he thought he was treated with disrespect whatever happened to sticks and stones can break my bones what ever happened to count to 10 before you talk much less act i couldn t believe it the other day there was a survey of teenage gang members in which two thirds of them said they felt justified in shooting someone who treated them with disrespect if the president took that position we d be out of bullets in the country who ever heard of this kind of behavior it s funny but it s not it s not funny we have to take responsibility for the way the young people of this country look at the world how they define right and wrong how they define their dignity the greatest human beings who have every lived in the whole history of humanity were consistently abused by others and they were great because they did not lash out what is this madness that our children are being taught that it is all right to take violent action against other people if they say something you don t like we must do something about it the second thing that bothers me besides juvenile violence was revealed in a report yesterday released by our government through the department of health and human services which showed that while drug use is down among people between the ages of 18 and 34 and cocaine use is down marijuana use is going up again among young people between the ages of 12 and 17 nearly doubling in just three and a half years from four percent to seven percent who say they ve used marijuana in the last month that s because apparently more and more young people don t think it s bad for you well it s wrong it s illegal it s dangerous it s a horrible first step and we have got to turn that number around and that s one big reason i am here today with young people who know it and who are prepared to say it i have believed in and participated in the national family partnership s red ribbon campaign for a long time when i was the governor of my state hillary and i were always actively involved every year about this time we were always proud to do it and i believe every year i was governor we ranked in the top three states in america in the number of our young people participating and since we only had 2 4 million people i was pretty proud of that what you are doing is important because the red ribbon chairs the red ribbon parents and most important the red ribbon students are doing what no law no government can do they are assuming responsibility for their behavior the behavior of their children and in so doing for their own futures the red ribbon is the symbol now in america of our children s pledge to lead drug free lives the young people here are doing the right thing saying no to drugs is saying yes to life in addition to the pledge by the students and the display of red ribbon the red ribbon campaign also focuses on educating our young people about the dangers of drug use and mobilizing every community to develop its own solution and i was to emphasize that every community in america needs its own plan based on its own resources and its own problems to deal with this issue there is no cookie cutter plan coming out of washington that will solve all these problems every community needs people like you to chart the future and to hold up these young people as models that s why i want to thank those of you in the national family partnership for choosing this day to kick off your red ribbon campaign it s a wonderful day we re celebrating the first anniversary of the crime bill its results and a declining crime rate the exercise of responsibility by adults in positions of authority but more importantly we re celebrating the future by the exercise of responsibility by these young people we have to do something to make their future less violent as the attorney general said the justice department in its youth violence initiative is going to help 10 communities establish partnerships between police departments and courts and schools hospitals and civic leaders to reduce violence in maryland in baltimore 24 community police officers will form curfew enforcements and juvenile violence crime teams to work with the schools to lower violence against young people not to punish children but to demand responsibility from them and their parents in inglewood california the police department has made street terrorism a crime and intensified their community efforts to increase penalties for gang members who practice it we cannot tolerate terrorism of any kind in our country why should we go to all the trouble to keep these terrorists from coming into the country if we re going to let home grown kinds terrorize our children on their own streets in birmingham police officers are working with schools to make sure that they get rid of guns in schools no one should ever fear being shot in or around their schools similar efforts will be supported in bridgeport connecticut cleveland milwaukee richmond san antonio seattle and salinas california but nothing we will do will work unless all of us who are adults take the time to teach our children what it means to be a good person and a good citizen our secretary of education has called this character education trying to encourage our schools to teach basic values that make for a good life like honesty and trustworthiness and respect for self others property and our environment these values make a difference and that is what this red ribbon campaign is all about i d like now to ask the young people who are up here on the stage with me and all the young people in the audience who want to do it to stand up and repeat the red ribbon pledge for the united states of america so everybody in the country can hear it today stand up and i will say it and you repeat after me i pledge to lead a healthy drug free lifestyle i will say no to alcohol i will help my friends say no i pledge to stand up for what i know is right and remain drug free and proud thank you very much now i want to invite the students starting here as i finish to come up here and sign this pledge with me but as i do i want every adult in this audience to think about this we re proud of these children who made this pledge most of us who know something about this problem are sitting here thinking gosh i wish every child in america would make this pledge we expect these children to keep their word well if we do why don t we set an example by keeping our word to them to make this the safest possible country with the healthiest possible future for them by doing what we know works to reduce crime and to give them a chance to keep the pledge they just made thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton13 9 97 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much congresswoman waters every time you get up to speak i m always all ears when you introduce me i m certainly all ears i m never quite sure what you re going to say but i m absolutely sure you will say what you think maxine waters is my kind of public official i ve been to her district several times with her she knows the people in the street the people on the corners she cares about the people that other people forget her district is the first one where i met young men who had been in gangs who were walking the streets with her to save the lives of other young people that s the kind of thing she s done and america owes maxine waters a debt of gratitude and i thank her i want to congratulate congressman clyburn and lebaron taylor and all of you who are responsible for this event tonight i was glad to be here too with congressman gephardt and with all the distinguished members of the audience i see kweisi mfume there and mrs king and mayor barry dr height reverend jackson i m always glad to see you and i think i speak for many of us here when we say that you and your family and your mother are in our prayers sir god bless you and thank you for the magnificent job you did leading along with secretary slater the american delegation to the african economic summit in zimbabwe let me also congratulate the award winners major owens and eva clayton bill lucy and danny bakewell laura murphy and william brooks myrlie evers williams coretta scott king the late dr betty shabazz and my good friend the chairman of our racial reconciliation advisory board dr john hope franklin and finally let me say one other word of introduction one of your members is not here tonight because he had to go home to dedicate his new cathedral but i want to wish congressman floyd flake well as he leaves the united states congress and goes home to his mission where his heart is floyd flake in his church has helped to start 11 businesses employing hundreds of people in inner city neighborhoods who would not have jobs otherwise that s the sort of partnership i d like to see us make with african american churches all across the united states of america so everybody who wants a job has one so even though he s going home i want him to be a model that all of us here in washington can continue to follow i want to say one serious thing if you don t remember anything else tonight remember this one sentence i am profoundly grateful to the congressional black caucus for making a dream of a lifetime come true i am the opening act for james brown in one of james brown s songs he says i don t want nobody to give me nothing just open up the door i ll get it myself i think that s the motto of the cbc and for four and half years we ve been working together to open up those doors today we see the results unemployment below 5 percent lowest african american unemployment in 24 years 13 million new jobs family incomes up african american family income is up 3 000 in three years the lowest poverty rate among african americans ever recorded violent crime down five years in a row record drops in welfare that is the progress that i could not have possibly made if it had not been for the support of the congressional black caucus and i thank you very much for that and let me say that progress should spur us on for there is still too much poverty still too much lack of economic and educational opportunity there is still too much discrimination there is too much to do and i come here today to say that down to the last day of my presidency i will be there with you working with you fighting for a tomorrow that we can all share together i also want to thank the members of my administration who are here many have been noticed but i d like to say a special word of thanks to all the african americans who work in the white house and to bob nash goody marshall ben johnson minyon moore terry edmonds ann walker tracy thornton and andy blocker i know they re here there may be more but i want to thank them for helping me to be a better president i also want to thank the cbc for its strong support of the man who will be the next assistant attorney general for civil rights bill lee he s here tonight and i thank you for sticking by him for much of his career bill lee s been a civil rights lawyer with the naacp legal defense fund he was not born into a position of leadership instead he s a chinese american who worked his way out of poverty in harlem to become a national leader in the fight for social justice we need your support to ensure his confirmation he will do a magnificent job i also want to ask your support for the man whom i nominated this week to be the next surgeon general and assistant secretary of health dr david satcher finally let me say as the congress comes back after its recess i ask for your support to get from this congress the money that was promised for the priorities we fought so hard for in the balanced budget agreement the largest increase in aid to education since 1965 the biggest increase opening the doors of college to all and aid to college since 1945 and the biggest increase in health care for poor people and children since 1965 now we ve got to make good on the promises of that agreement and i need your help to do that finally let me say that as we approach a new millennium we must decide that we can never be what we ought to be unless we get there together i was just the other day at american university in washington there are students from 140 different national and ethnic groups at american university we don t have time for or room for discrimination and we can no longer ignore the unfinished business of our past we cannot continue to grow economically as long as there s a single soul in this country who needs a good quality education who can t get it and who is denied access to a job for which he or she is plainly qualified we cannot do that and we have to decide as a country that we can t afford our past baggage or our present blinders we ve got to embrace a future in which we re all going forward together look around this room tonight you are the future of america your children and grandchildren are the future of america and we are going to have the most exciting future that this country has ever had if we just make up our mind to make sure everybody has a chance to walk through that door together i ask for your support for dr john hope franklin and judy winston i thank you for the national town hall meeting on race relations in the new millennium that you held i ask you to remember this everybody who gets to serve in congress certainly someone who gets to serve as president has had a chance all those folks we ve had our chance to live our dreams but there s still a lot of people our age that were denied that chance there are huge numbers of people our parents age who never had that chance we should promise that there will be no one our children s age who will be denied that chance to walk through the door of their dreams that is our mission and i promise to pursue it with you hand in hand until my last day as your president thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton14 1 03 bill_clinton thank you very much and good afternoon let me again thank all of our panelist and moderators from the morning sessions and the ones who will come up here as soon as i finish speaking and i thank again john sexton and the whole nyu family and especially my former staff and cabinet members jack lew and cheryl mills john mentioned this morning when i ask old jack the other day how he liked working at nyu he said well i just kind of lop three zeros off every number and say it still matters the thing i loved about jack lew as a budget director is that he actually had a heart and as well as a mind so he helped me to do things that were fiscally responsible and socially progressive i thank him very much i enjoyed the morning s panels and i look forward to the one after i speak with mr soros and other members i would like to add a couple of points to our discussion first of all most of us have talked from different perspectives about how to make the process of globalization work better for the people who have been left out and left behind most of us think this globalization of the economy of culture of information technology is actually a good thing we haven t had anybody here representing the people who were in the streets in seattle or demonstrating against the other international economic meetings but i think we shouldn t forget that they re out there what i would like to do is to try to explain what specific things i think the united states and the other rich countries should be doing to deal with the promise the perils the inequalities and paradoxes created by the current state of affairs to put it in a phrase i think that this globalized world this interdependent world is not sustainable even though it s enormously beneficial to a lot of us it s not sustainable environmentally it s not sustainable politically because more than half the world is left out of it as hernando desoto said earlier and i don t think it s a sustainable from a security point of view because if you live in a completely interdependent world with the level of adversity and danger that we see whether in a small place like the middle east or a smaller place like east timor or a big country with open borders like america if you live in a world where all you have is globalization and interdependence then that world today is going to be at the very least more insecure and confined and at the very worst miserable and deadly therefore my paradigm for the 21st century is that we have to move from interdependence to integration to an integrated global community to do that we must have a critical mass of the world with shared benefits shared responsibilities and shared values how do you know if you re there yet well there are a lot of very personal ways in which the positive and negatives of the moment are manifest a lot of us feel more insecure every time we get on an airplane now why because on september the 11th 2001 members of the al qaeda used the forces of globalization open borders easy immigration easy travel easy access to information and technology to kill thirty one hundred people from seventy countries in three cities in the united states or i ll give you the flip side of it mr de soto and i were in ghana not very long ago to announce with the president of ghana mr kufuor a foundation on building capital for the poor to implement hernando s ideas there as i was walking towards the airplane to leave this ghanaian woman was waving something at me and screaming president clinton president clinton wait wait i turned around and she came running up to me and she said i work in a shirt factory that was made possible because you signed the african growth and opportunity act keep in mind the backdrop of what else is going on in africa the problems of sierra leone the continuing religious strife within nigeria the madness the congo has had in the last few years so this woman comes running up to me waving this package and says i got a job in a shirt factory with four hundred other people because you pushed and you signed this trade bill then she said so we re happy we have these jobs and here s your shirt and so i said to myself well you re not in office anymore you don t have any ethical obligations i took the shirt i took the shirt home to the little town about thirty five miles north of here where i live then i put it in a place where i look at it every single day why because it represents a positive consequence of globalization that woman and the 400 people she works with they re not mad at us though they don t have nearly as much money as most americans they re not mad at us why because they think we want them to have a part of our future that lady and the other people who work with her they don t want their kids to fight in african tribal wars they want them to go to school get an education and do better why because they re part of a shared future but when you don t have that when you have interdependence without shared benefits shared responsibilities and shared values well all you have to do is look at the middle east since the peace process was abandoned and the intifada started you ve had a hundred and twenty suicide bombing attempts many more thwarted then the retaliation over 1800 dead palestinians over 600 dead israelis but they re still just as interdependent as they were the day before the first rock was thrown or bomb was set off it s just negative interdependence so again i will say if you accept this analysis that we cannot escape each other and you can t be secure unless you can kill or jail all your adversaries then the question is how do you move from a world of interdependence to integration to a global community where a critical mass of people actually live with shared benefits shared responsibilities shared values first of all there does have to be a security strategy because there are people who want to derail the whole thing to prevent and punish those who believe that they can find their redemption in our destruction and unless we re serious about that it s hard to get to the next steps now i don t want to talk in any great detail about it that s my friend sandy berger s bailiwick today anyway but we should be committed to eradicating the leadership of al qaeda even if it means sending more troops to afghanistan and we have to be committed to helping our friends do a better job of fighting terror narco trafficking and organized crime this is almost my six month anniversary wearing this little bracelet around i got this from colombian children when i went down there in june to try to continue the work that i m proud to say president bush has also strongly supported to help preserve the oldest democracy in our hemisphere thirty five percent of which is now in the hands of the narco traffickers and their guerilla terrorist supporters the more we can do to help people deal with their own problems from the philippines to indonesia to colombia the better we also must do more to restrict the production and the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their stocks i think the president did the right thing to go the un on iraq i don t think iraq should be allowed to keep whatever chemical biological and nuclear stocks or missile stocks it has the world community decided in 1991 that saddam hussein should not have weapons of mass destruction or the missiles to deliver them in 1991 after the gulf war the u s and the u n decided that rather than having another war and deposing him the appropriate thing to do would be to have inspections and keep sanctions on iraq until he could prove that he didn t have anything else then when he threw the inspectors out we moved to a policy of saying that we ought to replace him that our preference would be for a new leader in iraq who would be less of a murderer less of a thug and more of a truthful partner in the world we bombed all the known suspected weapons sites and other military targets for four days but we didn t call for invading him now after four years the inspections have started again with all these problems we had you should know those inspections in the 90s destroyed far more weapons weapon stocks missiles and component parts than the gulf war did the inspection system can work meanwhile if saddam hussein does have something he has maximum incentive now not to use or give it away so we ought to let the inspection process go forward and follow the lead of the un inspectors now let me say this there is a part of the inspection requirement on which there has been very little comment at least in the united states every one of the un resolutions going back to 1991 has had two parts not one they require unrestricted inspections and iraq s declaration of what they still have the inspectors shouldn t have to look for a needle in a haystack since 1991 even when the inspections were more or less unrestricted he s never told the truth in a declaration that s what prime minister blair was talking about yesterday in his press conference in london which some of you may have seen i do not know what the facts are now i just think we ought to let the inspection process play out to maximize the support of the global community for whatever is done next but for the first time the u s and the u k are saying the failure to honestly declare and not just the failure to allow inspections could be justification for an attack on saddam i don t agree with those that think that this doesn t matter that we shouldn t get rid of these weapons of mass destruction neither do i agree with those that think that it matters so much we should put all of our other security problems on the back burner to go after saddam hussein i think we re right about where we need to be now and i think we need to let this process play out in the international forum we have no reason to believe these inspectors are not doing a good job and not trying to find the truth that brings me to north korea i think it would be a terrible mistake for us to fail to do everything we can to stop them from producing nuclear weapons i think you know we have been moving for several years to get them out of the weapons business and out of the missiles business north korea is a perplexing country they cannot grow enough food to feed themselves but they re world class missile builders and bomb builders missiles and bombs are their cash crops we can laugh about it but it s heart breaking really and disorienting even china now does ten times as much business with south korea as north korea the country feels more isolated convinced it can bargain to get a better deal from the rest of the world whether it s for energy or food or some sort of political future only by presenting a threat nobody wants anything good we have so we have to threaten to do something bad or they won t take any account of us we went through a tense period in early in my first term where we went to the un and prepared to do other things to get north korea to agree to end its attempt to use plutonium to make nuclear weapons and they would have been able to make eight or more nuclear weapons a year if we hadn t ended it that program worked though north korea is threatening to abandon it and resume plutonium production we also tried to end their missile program and got them to end their missile testing program we now know that sometime in 98 they began a much smaller effort to make fewer nuclear weapons with highly enriched uranium in a laboratory i think what should be done now is that there should be really tough talk in private firm but non provocative talk in public and a cooperative effort with the south koreans the japanese the russians and the chinese to achieve a comprehensive deal to end all nuclear programs and missile sales so it doesn t look like we re in effect trying to buy them off only to go through this all over again in a few years paying them again and again for the same good conduct they ve already promised there should be an omnibus deal where they agree to give up their uranium nuclear programs not go back to the layer plutonium program and stop their missile sales that also buys us another five years before we have to worry about putting up an expensive missile defense whether it works or not it will make the world a safer place and enable south korea to continue its outreach to north korea if it costs a little bit of oil and a little bit of food and a non aggression pact which would be voided anyway if they did something terrible that provoked us to attack them then i say do it but let s get the thing on the road i think that the posture we ve seen just in the last twenty four to forty eight hours from the administration sounds about right to me again if anybody thinks it doesn t matter whether the north koreans have nuclear weapons i think you re wrong about that it does matter because they don t have any other money makers just one other thing on security we spent a lot of your money on a program that actually began before i became president the nunn lugar program designed to safeguard russian nuclear stocks and weapons provide money to destroy some of these weapons and in some cases to employ some of the scientists who had worked in weapons mass destruction fields primarily nuclear it began shortly before i became president and we tried to make maximum use of it there were some years when we employed over half the whole russian force of scientists and technology people from chemical biological and nuclear areas we took down thousands of weapons destroyed hundreds of them agreed to destroy fifty tons of plutonium with the russians and did a lot of other useful things the russians didn t have any money during a lot of this time so we spent the money to engage the russian scientific community in positive ways that made the world a safer place we should spend more money in this area with a greater emphasis on biological and chemical weapons and personnel as well and the inclusions of other countries that are known repositories of nuclear weapons and materials and chemical and biological weapons and stocks whatever we spend on this is money well spent last year the effort to expand the program to other countries failed in congress i hope and pray it will succeed this time the main point i want to evoke is if you re an american and you want to do something to alleviate world poverty if you want to be heard you have to be credible on security too i don t think we have to chuck our civil liberties or the civil liberties of our immigrants we only have to make sure we have the same information available for law enforcement in america that s already available all the rest of us and the computers of mass mailing companies anyway mohammed ata had twelve addresses in the computers of mass mailing companies if our government simply had the same data processing capacity these private companies do they would have a tickler system every week or so they d check and see who s been here less than two years who s got more than two addresses they re either rich or up to no good let s go see which that s a lot better than just profiling people because of their religion or their ethnic heritage or whatever else one of the men who flew into the world trade center had two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt on thirty credit cards paying out a consolidated payment of ninety eight hundred dollars a month now if you ve been here less than two years and you owe over fifty thousand dollars and you ve got more than three or four credit cards you re either rich or up to no good that information is available on all of us already so we ought to be able to figure that out instead of giving up our civil liberties now having said that if you live in an interdependent environment whether it s a small piece of land like the middle east and the west bank and gaza and israel or the whole wide world unless you can kill all your opponents or put them all in jail sooner or later you have to make a deal the omnibus deal on globalization has to be to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists more friends and fewer enemies and that s nothing more than what was done by harry truman george marshall and in japan douglas macarthur after world war ii they got it after world war i the treaty of versailles was a disaster the repudiation of the league of nations was a disaster the rise of protectionism was a disaster and you put all those three things together and you ve got world war ii and tens of millions of people lying slaughtered so after world war ii those leaders who had spent their lives in the first half of the 20th century said hey suppose we take a little money and try to not have world war iii and have more friends and fewer enemies we need a 21st century version of that that s basically what all of us have been talking about here today this is not rocket science but this is probably the last and greatest stage of this movement toward global integration we need an economic strategy a health and education strategy and an environmental strategy to do all these things i won t go all through the details we gave hernando de soto s program a little money when i was president and i wish we d given more we should do more of that we funded two million micro credit loans a year i got a letter yesterday from muhammed yannis by the way who said he was sorry he couldn t be here we should have funded twenty million i ve seen whole villages in latin america and east asia and africa transformed by this we know how to do aid and trade and debt relief the global debt relief initiative cries out for expansion it covers twenty five countries now it will soon cover thirty two you get debt relief if you re poor but only if you put the money into education health or development we re almost into our third year since the debt relief passed honduras went from six to nine years of mandatory schooling with our savings keep in mind every year of schooling for every boy and girl means ten to fifteen percent a year in extra income uganda doubled primary school enrollment and reduced class size something many american politicians would like to do we know how to do this mexico and brazil pay the parents of the poorest families to send their kids to school ninety eight percent of the primary school kids in brazil are in school we spent three hundred million dollars of american tax money in my last year as president to give children in poor countries a nutritious meal but only if they d come to school to get the meal enrollments soared there are a hundred thirty million kids out there who don t go to school at least at the elementary level we can afford our fair share of putting them in school the same thing is true of health care kofi annan asked the rich world for ten billion a year to fight aids t b malaria and other infectious diseases which kill one in four people of all those who die every year ten billion bucks what s our share two and a half it s peanuts ands we know how to spend the money uganda cut the hiv infection rate in half in five years with no medicine brazil cut it in half in three years with medicine and prevention you also can look at thailand senegal cambodia we know what to do here this is one of the things my foundation works on we re helping to build systems for comprehensive prevention care and drug treatment in the caribbean rwanda and mozambique so that we can drive down the aids rate it s not all that expensive for the benefits you get and the cost of not doing it is going to be enormous whenever america does something like this we create another several thousand people like that little lady from ghana waving her shirt it s important so let me just talk about the numbers here one of the reasons america is so unpopular around the world is people think we re so selfish they don t resent wealth they resent the fact that we don t know enough care enough or do enough about the other people s problems the real problem is that no matter how many times i give this speech and no matter how many cameras there are in the back thank you very much for coming today the american people still think ten years or so after i started talking about this that we spent ten to fifteen percent of their budget on foreign aid that we should only spend three to five percent of the budget on foreign aid and that we don t really know how to spend the money now it may be true that at one time we didn t know how to spend the money but we do know how to spend the money now the debt relief initiative is working micro credit is working the money we gave to hernando de soto is working we do know how to spend the money we know how to get kids in school we know how to combat healthcare problems we do know how to spend the money also the american people spend less than one percent of their budget on foreign assistance the lowest of any country in the world with an advanced economy and no matter how many times people like me say this and no matter how loud the volume is it never seems to kind of get into the collective consciousness it s the most maddening thing on earth but to give you an example we could double america s foreign assistance for about ten billion dollars double it now last year to give you some notion of what we re talking about we spent about sixty billion dollars in increases in defense and home land defense in last year s budget this new round of proposed tax cuts is six hundred billion dollars over a decade and nine hundred billion with interest costs i don t personally think i should get a tax cut but that s another issue but the point i want to make is we re talking about peanuts here to double our foreign assistance yet the psychological benefit and the lives that would be changed would be enormous on the other hand if we spend all of our money on defense and none of our money on building the world with more partners and fewer terrorists we will pay a terrible price because we will not move from interdependence to integration and we cannot kill or jail every one of our actual or potential opponents the third thing we need is more institutions within which people can develop the habits of cooperation i did a lot of work on this we expanded nato we supported un action in bosnia and kosovo we committed to the free trade area of the americas and started the regular enacting of the summit of the americas we helped create the world trade organization joined nafta and started the annual asia pacific leaders meeting my whole premise was that the more you create frameworks within which people have an interest in working together and finding non violent rules based solutions the more likely you are to move from interdependence to integration of course whenever you join anything you ve got to agree to give up some of your autonomy to play by the rules of the organization you do it when the benefits outweigh the costs so i also signed the kyoto protocol on global warming which vice president gore had a large hand in crafting we were the first country to sign the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty i supported the international criminal court after appropriate changes to protect our military and i think i should have done more to strengthen the bio weapons convention i think our industry people were a little wrong about that the current administration is backed away from all of those four things because in every case there is some worst case nightmare they can come up with well if none of us joined anything unless we got our way all the time nobody would ever get married there would be no families there would be no bowling teams there would be no business partnerships there would be no labor unions there would be no corporations look once in a while the wto made a decision that made my hair stand on end when i was president but i was still glad i helped to bring it into being because i thought that it gave us a place to have a rules based forum that would keep the world coming together when other people were trying to take it apart of course we can t meet the kyoto protocol deadline now because we ve been fooling around for all these years when we should have been passing laws and doing things to meet the deadlines but we still should get back into the regime you can t have the climate warming like it is and the biodiversity going away like it is and all the clear consequences that will follow without doing something i could give you lots of other examples but the point i want to make is that all the intense institution building we did including our efforts to modernize the international financial institutions to work better in the 21st century for me at least there was a larger purpose that went beyond the specific function of whatever they were doing at the wto the summit of the americas beyond the detail of whether we re going to expand nato by three or ten members we were trying to put things together and minimize the ability of other people to take things apart when i was a kid we used to play with something called lincoln logs most of you are way too young to know what lincoln logs were they were way before lego toys i and three or four friends would build these log cabins then i had one friend who d come along and kick em down and we were in a constant race between whether we d build them up faster or he d kick em down faster that s what s going on today the forces of integration against the forces of dis integration that s why these institutions are so important the last point i would like to make is this this is why i asked you to come here today i think that all of us who get this whether we differ on this trade bill or that policy or whatever have a very heavy obligation to take this general message out across our country and across the world because we have to keep working to develop the habits of mind and heart necessary to build a global community this may be the last step in a process that began when people first came out caves in clans as i said earlier robert wright in his book non zero says that that increasing interdependence and community in a positive sense always come from greater interaction because it s so self evidently in interdependent people s interest to cooperate a more cynical view is found in robert kaplan s warrior politics he says nobody ever cooperates unless you make them so america should make them because we can now in matt ridley s book the origins of virtue he says people cooperate when there s no other reasonable alternative but eventually they get to it because their interests cry out for it the first gap of the 20th century raised the question what happens when people don t get it what happens when there s a whole new level of interdependence and a whole new level of capacity to destroy ourselves and our adversaries and the capacity to destroy outpaces the habits of mind and heart to cooperate throughout human history people have always found self definition by positive reference to their crowd and negative reference to the other everybody s done it you ve done it you ve all done that you ve all said sometime in your life well i may not be perfect but thank god i didn t do that i ve been in politics for thirty years and i met a lot of people who were absolutely miserable except on those days when they had somebody to hate and then they were happy oh god they were happy haters we had people in the congress like that i felt bad for them i thought they d never have a happy day but then they d really get their hatred built up and they d be happy as a clam hatred and division is also often good politics there s a fabulous book about africa called the graves are not yet full by bill berkeley about the tribal ethnic and religious slaughters in africa over the last thirty years he says there are natural tensions between groups but they do not turn murderous until some politician wants money or power by dividing people against one another this is an old story i m glad my friend dahlia rabin from israel is here her father was killed not by a palestinian terrorist but by a young israeli who thought he was a bad jew and a bad israeli because he wanted a homeland for the palestinians and a future for their children a shared future with israel sadat was killed by another egyptian gandhi was killed by a hindu who thought he was a bad hindu because he wanted india for the muslims and the sikhs and the jains and the christians and the jews and the buddhists so this conflict about what makes us important and how we derive meaning in our lives is very significant that s really the purpose of this conference most of us don t have any power except the power of ideas from the dawn of time to the present day humans have been stumbling forward to constantly expand the definition of who is us and shrink the definition of who is them we have to get to where we define them not by race or religion or gender or whether they re gay or straight but by what they do and whether what they do is consistent with building a world of shared benefits shared responsibilities and shared values i think that at least all of you who like me are not kids anymore should just accept that we re going to have spend the rest of our lives trying to get this paradigm to be the dominant one in the world if everybody accepts that sort of broad outline they ll still be room in america for a republican position and a democratic one for a more liberal response and a more conservative one but we won t be out here saying we shouldn t give any foreign aid and acting like we re giving the shirt off our backs when we re not giving a nickels worth of what we ought to be we won t be out here pretending that we have no obligation to the rest of the world so we can have another huge tax cut and run big deficits so that when our economy grows our interest rates will go up and we ll be ripping money out of the global economy that s desperately needed in latin america east asia africa and we re going to take it out four five six or seven years from now if we pass a bigger deficit onto our successors we must begin to think in terms of an integrated community to see our responsibilities and question ourselves in terms of the world we wish to build for our children this is an interesting time america is the dominant political economic and military power in the world i think fifty years from now we ll be a leading economic political and military power i think it inconceivable that there will not be economies as big as ours the chinese will be if the indians will quit fighting with the pakistanis and wasting money on defense they can make the indian subcontinent grow faster than china if the eu keeps becoming more u more united they re already bigger than we are they just have to formalize what exists under the surface therefore the american people ought to be asked to think about how we would like to be treated when we re no longer the biggest dog on the street and whether we shouldn t behave now with that future in mind because i think we ll be judged in part then by what we do now by how we handle this magic moment the great philosopher john rawls who just passed away a few weeks ago wrote a book thirty something years ago that had a great great influence on the young people of my generation called a theory of justice he said every good society ought to be organized by people who ask and answer the question how would i feel dem wjclinton14 10 00 bill_clinton thank you very much first of all i m delighted to be here and i think i should begin by thanking jay inslee for explaining why it is impossible for me at this moment in my life s history to root for seattle in this baseball conference i think it s the only issue i ve ever been on the opposite side of washington state in eight years and i thank you for the dispensation i want to thank governor locke and mona for their friendship to hillary and me and i thank him for his extraordinary leadership i can see by your presence here and the enthusiasm of the crowd we were before just a few moments ago that he s going to be reelected and it s very very important i want you to stay with him and help him and make sure he deserves to be reelected maybe it s just because i was a governor a dozen years and i don t think i ever would have gotten tired of it but i know that nothing that we do in washington even if we make the right decisions fully hits home in the lives of the american people in education in health care in the environment in many other areas unless there is a good strong governor and he is a good strong governor and he is a good man and i thank you for your support of him i want to thank mayor schell for being here and pam i was laughing you know we re kind of enjoying being here tonight he and i the last time i was here we had a little more trouble when we were here but i want to say to you i still think it was important for seattle to host that meeting and in the future since there is no turning back from tomorrow s world people will look back on that meeting and what was said there in reaffirming that our belief that it is possible to build a global economy with a human face and they will say they were right and seattle will be credited with the difficult but profoundly important moment in the history of global relations and so i hope you will always keep that in mind i want to thank rick larson for running for congress i want to thank your state party chair and i want to thank my good buddy ed rendell for coming all the way from philadelphia to be with us tonight and for his extraordinary leadership for the democratic national committee i thank all your state officials for being here and debra sen thank you especially for being here and it s good to see you oh i m supposed to make an important announcement tomorrow is the lockes sixth wedding anniversary i can tell you it s not as expensive your sixth as your 25th but you still need to come up with something we had a great week last we had to actually schedule our 25th wedding anniversary now that my wife s running for the senate and i m running around here trying to help other folks let me say too i want to say to jay and trudi i thank you for the service that you jay rendered in congress then when you lost your seat i thank you for the service you rendered to the administration i thank you for having the courage to run again and i thank you maria cantwell for having the courage to run again you know this is a time of a difficult time for me personally as you might imagine because we lost those fine young sailors a couple of days ago on the ship in yemen and most of them were just good young people who wanted to make their way in life by serving their country and they were just doing their duty they bore no aggressive intentions toward anyone and they were killed by someone who thought he could hurt america or break our desire to advance peace and freedom or thought somehow it s morally okay to kill people who disagree with you no matter how defenseless they are and how unfair the fight we started bringing those kids home today and we re going to have a big memorial for them wednesday so i d like to begin by just asking you tonight when you go home to say a prayer for their families and those that are wounded and those that are back there still on that ship they saved the ship and they re pretty traumatized too but it s a humbling reminder that even in times of peace freedom is not free you will never know i m not even sure i know how many conflicts have been prevented and how many lives have been saved how many profound troubles avoided just because people like those young men and women that were on the uss cole show up for duty every day and i m very grateful for them and of course several of you mentioned to me tonight a couple of people here at dinner and the people i ve seen earlier in washington about the middle east and i m going to leave tomorrow afternoon and fly to egypt and attempt to get the parties together and try to get rid of the violence and get back to the path of peace it was ironic when i was out at the airport earlier today a man whom i had known years ago came up to me with a printed copy of a september 19th 1993 of the speech i gave with yitzhak rabin and chairman arafat when we signed the israeli palestinian accords and he wanted me to sign it i think it may have just been it was pure coincidence i think it was the only thing he had that i had given him that he could ask me to sign but i said do you mind if i stop and read this i was standing in the airport and so he gave it to me and i read it again and i thought about that beautiful late summer day and how we felt then and all the good things that have happened since then and how sad it all is now and i was praying that somehow we might be able to recover in the spirit of the leaders and the people what was felt then in that happy moment i say that to make this point in public life there are issues and there are issues there are things that are important for votes and then there are things that are important for life and for who we are as a people maria mentioned one earlier when she talked about jay inslee voting for the assault weapons ban and having to endure the wrath of people saying he was trying to take the guns away from the hunters and all that stuff the biggest problem the world has today is basically the oldest problem of human society i know i m here in the city of the future this place that s most connected to the rest of the world and maybe the most wired city in the country but you think about it you think about what i spend my time doing northern ireland the balkans the work we did to try to end the north korean nuclear program and get them to deal with each other again which has borne such great success and gotten president kim his much deserved nobel prize all these things the tribal wars in africa nelson mandela asked me to fly the other day to tanzania to try to help to secure the burundi peace accord because they killed a couple hundred thousand people in burundi right before the rwandan slaughter at the beginning of the last decade and they re trying to get out of it and not repeat it again and of course the heartbreaking events of the last few days in the middle east no matter how modern we get we re still bedeviled by this old problem that we are we don t understand people who are different than us and it s easy when you don t fully understand people not to trust them and then when you stop trusting them it s easy to fear them and to misjudge them and then it s easy for fear to turn into animosity and animosity to outright hatred and outright hatred to the legitimization of violence and then because you have to live with the violence you almost dehumanize the people just because they re different from you now not so very long ago we had hillary sponsoring an event at the white house on the role of the digital chip in the computer information technology revolution in the human genome project and we had vin cerf there and we had a guy representing the it folks and we had a guy named eric ladner who is a scientist from harvard talking about who is an expert in the whole development of the human genome and ladner was saying if it hadn t been for the digital chip we never could have uncovered the we could never have mapped the genome and so we started asking questions we said well what was the most surprising thing that you found and he said well we re more than 99 9 percent the same and he said what was even more interesting to him was that if you took like five different racial and ethnic groups you know 100 irish americans 100 african americans 100 chinese americans and so forth that the genetic differences among individuals within the group would be greater than the differences in the profile from group to group now why am i saying all this besides the fact that i ve got to get my head in the right place for tomorrow because all of life i m old enough now to know this all of life is like a continuing struggle first of all to understand some fundamental things about life and second what you ve figured out to live by we all have to organize life you know in a certain way i can t not see gary locke as a chinese american in fact i think it s a good thing that i see him that way it makes it more interesting he s different from me his roots are different but when you organize reality into categories you have to know where the validity of the categories stop and we have to understand that nobody has perfect wisdom and it s when we get to believing that we re absolutely sure about those who are different from us and our certainty takes on a negative turn we can get in a world of hurt in a very short time and so i say that to make this point what happens in the middle east ultimately depends upon what they decide to do all i can do is try to find the words and the moral and the physical support to help the path of peace and to make sure that we stand up for the right values and reaffirm our historic ties to israel but over the long run if we want to do good things around the world we first have to be good at home that s why i think the most important issues even more important than the economic issues are the issues that strengthen the ties that bind us even as we respect our increasing diversity i was telling the other crowd i gave more of a political speech at the early two events but you know it s 11 00 a m on my body clock maybe i m just too old to do it now but what i was trying to say at these earlier meetings i want to reiterate today i don t i never liked all this personal attack business very much but i love a good debate because where there are honest differences they ought to be stated clearly and argued out and in this election season whether we re talking about the presidency or the governorship or this profoundly important senate seat or the house seats that you have at stake here there are these huge differences basically we democrats believe in a unifying vision of our public life we believe first of all that everybody who is a responsible citizen ought to be part of our public life so we re for hate crimes legislation and the employment nondiscrimination act and their side isn t basically we believe in stronger enforcement of the equal pay laws for women we believe in things that bring us together secondly we believe that everybody that works hard ought to have a shot at the american dream we think the people that served this dinner tonight ought to have the same chance to send their kids to college that those of us who could pay to eat here do that s basically what we believe and thirdly we don t mind fighting but we don t think that we ought to be fighting over false choices we think you can be pro business and pro labor pro growth and pro environment and we think that we ve got to get this business about our racial religious gender disability sexual orientation all these differences we ve got to figure out what they mean respect our differences and reaffirm the primacy of our common humanity now that s what we believe i think you know the evidence is that it s worked out pretty well for america in the last eight years and so and i feel a special debt to maria cantwell and to jay inslee because they literally risked their whole political careers to do the right thing for america on turning the economy around and getting the crime rate down they did i understand that maria has now been attacked by a highly selective description of her vote for our economic plan the truth is almost all the tax increases in the economic plan were paid by 1 5 percent of the american people and it was impossible to put together a package that would satisfy everybody we also cut hundreds and hundreds of programs and we cut taxes for 15 million americans who were lower income working people with children but the main thing we had to do was to get a hold of the thing we had to get the deficit down when i took office the deficit was 290 billion interest rates were high growth was low do you know what the projected deficit for this year was when i took office 455 billion the debt of the country had quadrupled in the previous 12 years so we had to do something about it and we didn t have a vote to spare not one because the other side wouldn t give us a vote not one so maria s opponent was giving speeches like all the others said this is the end of the world this will end civilization as we know it if bill clinton s economic plan passes it will lead to a recession it will deepen the deficits it will cost american jobs time has not been kind to their predictions and i don t so now they have a 230 billion surplus and they want you to believe it just happened i thought the best line in al gore s first debate was when his opponent said i think the economy s done a lot more for clinton gore than clinton gore did for the economy that s what i think and that was a good line you know it was a pretty good line i mean you know you ve got to appreciate it when they hit you a good look so i said and al gore said yes you know the american people deserve most of the credit but you know something i think they were working pretty hard before we came in too and the results were very different so here s the first thing i want to tell you this country has a chance that comes along once every 50 years or so to build the future of our dreams for our kids and our grandchildren in my lifetime we ve never had at the same time so much economic prosperity social progress national self confidence with the absence of paralyzing domestic crisis or external threat do we have problems you bet we do could they get out of hand there s no such thing as a life without danger there s none of it is totally predictable but this is the best shape we ve been in in 50 years and those of us that are that know better will never forgive ourselves if we don t use this opportunity and make the most of it so what i would like to say to you is there are huge differences between our candidates for president vice president senate congress governor the whole nine yards if the people understand clearly what the differences are and what the consequences to them and their families and communities are we win which is why if you watch these debates you will see that only one side wants you to know what the differences are the other side wants to blur the differences they tried clarity in the early gingrich years and it didn t work out too well but i say that with all respect actually because their policies haven t changed all that much so let me just mention two or three things because here s what i m asking you to do thank you for your money for these candidates thank you very much they need it they ve got to be able to answer the other guy s attacks they ve got to be able to put their positive message on thank you but there are a lot of undecided voters that basically don t know how to make heads or tails of these ads that are running and will never come to an event like this that are your friends every one of you have got a lot of friends that have never been to an event like this never will come to an event like this can t imagine why you paid the money to come to an event like this is that right can t imagine why you paid the money to come to an event like this but they will show up and vote they will be there on election day sure as the world because they re good citizens and they want to be patriots and if they ask you why you came and why they ought to vote for al gore and joe lieberman or maria cantwell or gary locke or jay inslee what are you going to say that goes to this very point you ve got the chance to build the future of your dreams for your children here s what i hope you will say very briefly number one on the economy you want to keep the prosperity going by building on the direction of the last eight years or would you prefer to go back to the policy that was in place before now here s my argument al gore says vote for me and i ll get us out of debt in 12 years and we ll still have enough money to invest in education health care and the environment and defense and i ll give you the tax cut i can afford not the one that sounds the best but the one we can afford that the most people need the most for educating their kids for long term care for child care for retirement savings but i won t give you so much that we can t pay the debt down because you all benefit from that because when we pay the debt down it keeps interest rates lower and that s the best tax cut we can give you low interest rates means lower home mortgages lower business loans lower car payments lower college loan payments and a better stock market now that s our shtick their guys say this is your money and the democrats think government knows best we re going to give you three times as much back and we re going to partially privatize social security so you can make some more money and oh by the way yes it does cost a trillion dollars to do that now you need to know why does it cost a trillion dollars to do it because social security gore s program takes social security to 2054 the republican program it goes broke right now in 2037 the republican program makes it go broke sooner unless they put money into it why because if you re under 45 they re going to give you 2 percent of your payroll back but if you re 55 or over that includes me next year though i hate it they guarantee what you re going to get anyway so if you young people take money out and i get guaranteed what i m supposed to get anyway where is the money going to come from to give me what i ve been guaranteed this is their program and they admitted in the first debate to me that was the story of the first debate and i looked in vain for somebody to say this was significant finally they admitted the nominee of the republican party admitted yes we ll take a trillion dollars out of the surplus so if you take 1 5 trillion for a tax cut and 1 trillion to privatize social security and hundreds of billions of dollars of spending they promise you re back in the deficit now most of you in this room would get a better deal under them but a lot of you wouldn t it s not true that al gore s plan doesn t help 50 million people the basic math is that 32 million people wouldn t get a break under his plan and 27 million wouldn t get a break under the bush plan but it also is true that people in upper income groups and some others very few would get more under the bush plan most people get more under the gore plan but the main thing is everybody gets more if their interest rates are lower one plan pays off the debt and the other one continues the debt now this is a big choice people ask me all the time now that i m almost a has been they come to me and say they say you know you had such a brilliant economic team you know bob rubin and lloyd bentsen and all those people they re so brilliant what great new idea did you bring to washington and i always say arithmetic arithmetic to washington and lo and behold it worked as well there as it did in my first grade class now look there s a lot of fancy we decided to bail out mexico we were for the right telecommunications law and it was pro competition and a lot of you were benefitted from that because we did the right thing for america but we started with arithmetic now so you ve got one crowd that says okay let s stick with arithmetic but keep changing that s gore lieberman maria jay gary then you ve got the other crowd that says they ve built up such a big surplus let us try it our way again and see if it works better the second time and i kind of admire them you know because evidence never fazes them you ve got to kind of admire that you know i mean they know what they believe and they just go right with it but we re all having a good time here but i don t think everybody in washington state understands this difference do you but this is clear if you can come to this dinner tonight you can sure explain to people how lower interest rates are good for them and paying off the debt s good for them and not giving away tax money before it s there is good for them there s something else when you read all these skeptical press analyses saying well maybe gore s plan s too much just like bush s maybe there are pox on both their houses let me tell you something people that write that have never practiced politics what do i mean by that you can say i would like to spend this amount of money on education over the next 10 years but if the money doesn t come in i won t spend it but if you cut taxes today it s gone that s the difference and if you privatize the social security system you ve got to spend the trillion to make the guarantees to the people that you promised are going to get their benefits that s a breathtaking practical difference so you need to tell people this if you like where you are now compared to where you were eight years ago and you want to keep it going in the same direction you ve got to vote for al gore joe lieberman maria cantwell jay inslee and gary locke period that s the economic deal that s clear now the same thing is true in health care we re for a real patients bill of rights and they re not and they re not because the health insurers don t want it because they don t want to ever be sued and they think it will raise the cost of health care well that s a serious concern it s a legitimate concern the problem is if you re stuck in an hmo and your doctor wants you to see a specialist and you don t have a lot of time to fool around with it you need to be able to do it if you work for some company and your company changes providers and you re in the middle of a chemotherapy treatment or you re six months pregnant you don t want to have to change your doctor before you have your baby or you finish your treatment if you get hit in the middle of a big city by a car you don t want to have to pass three hospitals before you find an emergency room that s covered by your plan you want to go to the nearest emergency room now i did all this for people under federal insurance you know what it cost us a buck a premium a month do you know what the republicans say it would cost to do it nationally even them and keep in mind they re going with the other crowd even they admit it s less than 2 a month now i d spend 23 a year to know that you could go to the nearest emergency room if you get hit coming out here and i think most americans would it s a big difference we re for a medicare prescription drug plan that covers all seniors that need it they say that we re trying to force have you seen these ads saying they re trying to force people into a government hmo that s the biggest load of hooey i ever heard in my life medicare is not an hmo medicare is a fee for service plan with a 1 5 percent administrative overhead less than any hmo in the world and if you want to go into an hmo because they give you more benefits you can do it but you don t have to it s totally your choice now did you ever wonder what the real deal is on this prescription drug fight we re having in washington i mean don t you think it s funny that the drug companies who the republicans can t be for our plan because the drug companies won t let them but don t you think it s funny that they won t let them did you ever meet any business that didn t want more customers did you ever meet a politician that didn t want more votes this is a serious issue i just want to tell you but it shows you what our values are this is very important the drug companies have a legitimate issue but they re going about it in the wrong way we re fortunate to have these pharmaceutical companies in our country they develop life saving drugs they lengthen life they improve the quality of life and parenthetically they give employment to tens of thousands of people and they re darn good jobs and it s good they re here but it costs a lot of money to develop the drugs and they spend a lot of money advertising it and they want to sell the drugs worldwide and every other country they want to sell them in has price controls so they ve got to get 100 percent of the money for their worldwide sales for developing the drugs and advertising them from americans then once they get the money from us they can sell the drugs everywhere else under price controls and do just fine because it s just the extra cost to make another pill or something now what they re worried about is if we let all the seniors in the country that need medicine they can t afford buy into our plan they re afraid that medicare will have such market power not price controls market power we can get americans drugs made in america almost as cheap as they can buy them made in canada i mean if they were in canada made in america that s what they re worried about now look you never hear this in the debate everybody always acts like black and white and they use slogans and they don t explain to you this is a legitimate problem if their profit margins get squeezed too much then they won t have the money to develop the drugs and advertise them that they want it s a legitimate problem but their answer to the problem is to leave half the seniors who can t afford medicine without the medicine that s not america look this is a big industry they ve got lots of money they ve got a lot of influence in washington i say the democrats say let s take care of the people who need the medicine then we ll find a way to take care of their problem we won t run off and leave them we re not going to let the drug companies go broke we re glad they re here we love what they do but the answer to their problem surely to goodness is not saying to half the seniors in the country you can t have the medicine that you need now look it s like we could go through this the same thing is true on education both candidates for president say they re for accountability and standards and that s true you know i ve worked on this for over 20 years i think our accountability system is better than theirs we could argue that out but i won t let s just posit they re both for accountability and that s good they say they re for accountability block grants and vouchers and we re trying to micromanage education that s what they say here s my answer we re for accountability plus plus at least 100 000 teachers that are well trained to make classes smaller in the early grades plus the funds to help districts build or modernize 6 000 schools and repair another 5 000 a year for five years so you ve got a massive massive school facilities crisis in america we re for preschool and after school and summer school for all the kids who need it and we think people ought to get a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition we think in other words we should give people the tools they need to succeed in an accountability environment and our major accountability is identify failing schools turn them around shut them down or put them under new management that s what works best i can tell you i ve been fooling with this for 20 years that s what works best now they say we re trying to micromanage the schools why not trust the states don t you trust gary locke they say and i say yeah i do but there is now indisputable research about what works and the teachers and the educators have been telling us about this for years we only have 7 percent of the total school budget coming from the federal government we have got to put this money where it will have the biggest impact and when they tell you we re micromanaging the schools that s just not true under this administration we have cut regulations on states and school districts by two thirds below what they were under the previous republican administration all we re doing is sending the money where it will do the most good so if you want accountability plus instead of accountability minus you ve got to be for us so let s go over it so if somebody asks you tomorrow why were you here can you give them the economic answer can you give them the health care answer can you give them the education answer can you say the democrats are for hate crimes they re for employment nondiscrimination they re for stronger enforcement of the equal pay laws for women gore is for the right to choose and his opponent s not and that could have a big impact can you tell them that the environment this is one area where by the way there has been surprising clarity just not publicity somehow the people writing about it don t think it s important i think it s real important the vice president has pledged to build on the environmental record of this administration they say that if you vote for them they will repeal my order setting aside 43 million roadless acres in the national forest that was on the debate last time i can t believe nobody apparently people didn t think it was very important i keep reading for something meaningful somebody to say something about that the audubon society said that was the most important conservation move in the last 40 years and they re going to undo it they re going to undo it they say they want to reexamine all the national monuments i ve set aside they said that the air pollution standards we ve set are too tough they re hurting business i ll tell you what if i tried to hurt business with my environmental policy i did a poor job i did a poor job but this is a huge difference and of course there are massive differences on crime and it s not just on guns let s talk about the non gun issues in the crime bill of 94 that we were talking about that did ban assault weapons a ban by the way that will be reauthorized or not in the next president s term we put 100 000 police on the street we got more than 100 000 under budget ahead of time so we re now getting funding for another 50 000 and they re keeping crimes from happening it s not just catching criminals quicker they re keeping crimes from happening they re doing all this community policing now their nominee has a commitment public commitment to abolish that program on the theory that the federal government has got no business working on dem wjclinton14 10 94 bill_clinton president aristide distinguished haitian guests to the distinguished members of congress who are here senator dodd congressman rangel congressman conyers congressman oberstar congressman combest to the members of the united states military and their families who are here to the friends of haiti and the process of peace and reconciliation three years ago the international community led by the united states set out to restore haiti s democratically elected government today on the eve of president aristide s return to his beloved nation we mark the end of one stage of the long and difficult journey and the beginning of a new era of hope for the people of haiti halfway around the world america s armed forces are also bringing a message of hope and confidence to the people of kuwait our troops have responded rapidly to the threat from iraq and i have ordered that the deployment of personnel and equipment to the area continue let there be no mistake the united states will not allow iraq to threaten its neighbors in haiti the men and women of our armed forces have protected our national interests and advanced the democratic values we americans hold so dear we ve helped to curb the violence that threatened tens of thousands of haitians to secure our own borders to bring democratically elected government to the 34th of our hemisphere s 35 nations to uphold the reliability of our own commitments and the commitments others make to us in so doing we have helped to give the people of haiti a chance to remake the democracy they earned they deserve and they so plainly wish president aristide s return to haiti is a victory for freedom throughout the world more than three years have passed since a bloody coup stole the haitian people s first elected government but the road back to democracy as we all know has been strewn with obstacles and dangers despite exhaustive efforts diplomatic condemnation economic sanctions united nations resolutions the brutality of the military regime and its hired guns increased day by day haiti sank deeper into poverty and chaos only the combination of the imminent american led invasion and the skillful diplomacy by president carter general powell and senator nunn brought this terrible chapter in haitian history to a close general powell is here today and on behalf of the american people sir i thank you for your mission and for what you did thank you just one month later today the generals have stepped down from power and left haiti the haitian people have begun to move from fear to freedom american troops and those of our coalition partners are restoring basic security and civil order they have helped more than 3 700 refugees to go home from guantanamo the haitian parliament has once again has opened its doors the mayor of port au prince is back in office and the lights are on in more ways than one in a few short weeks these things have paved the way for president aristide s return haiti s voyage back to reclaim its democratically elected government is surely a cause for celebration but the days and weeks ahead will be full of arduous work and they will not be free of danger now more than ever i urge the haitian people to come together in a spirit of reconciliation and peace the spirit so eloquently advanced by president aristide himself as he has said there should be no vengeance no violence no retribution this is a time for peace that is what the united states and its coalition partners are working for and i am certain that that spirit will continue to prevail when the multinational force turns its responsibilities over to the united nations president aristide s return to port au prince sets the stage for the haitian people to take control of their future the task is large to strengthen and young and fragile democracy to build a new economy based on opportunity small enterprise and steady development the international community has pledged to do all it can to help starting with a one year 550 million reconstruction and recovery program to fund humanitarian relief provide economic assistance support the institutions that must become a permanent foundation for haitian democracy to help launch the economic recovery more immediately i am pleased to announce that today i will sign an executive order lifting all economic sanctions against haiti after president aristide returns now that the coup leaders have departed democracy is being restored the sanctions have clearly served their purpose by lifting banking trade and travel restrictions we can help to give back to the haitian people the opportunities they need to grow and to prosper and to preserve their freedom ultimately the task of rebuilding haiti belongs to the people of haiti themselves theirs will be a long and hard road each and every citizen must make a contribution it will take a lot of patience but it will be a joyous effort if it is done in the right spirit and if the rest of us do our part to help the progress will begin with reconciliation as the president has said he will go home in that spirit vowing to oppose all who seek revenge and retribution tomorrow when he resumes his duties as he has said it will be just the beginning but what a beginning it is president aristide has also vowed to step down at the end of his term leaving his office to the next democraticallyelected president in one of the most insightful comments about democratic government i have ever heard he has said that when you start a democracy the most important election is the second one this is the kind of insight that will serve haiti so well in the years ahead let me conclude by expressing my gratitude to all those who have done their part to give haiti a second chance something we need more for not only countries but people in this old world i thank the 30 countries whose troops are in haiti as part of the multinational coalition and all the nations who joined our multilateral efforts in the caribbean community the organization of american states and united nations your efforts have made our hemisphere safer and sent a message of resolve around the world i thank the men and women of our armed forces who have answered the call and performed a difficult job with skill devotion and humanity you are the steel and the sword of america s diplomacy thanks to your efforts the world knows that we will stand for democracy honor our commitments and expect others to honor theirs i thank especially the families of our service members here at home those who make such great sacrifices some of them including the children are here today and i would like to ask them to stand and be recognized the families of the service people serving in haiti and finally to the american people i say that although we are not we cannot and we should not be the policemen of the world we have proved once again that american will stand up for others when the cause is clear the mission is achievable and our interests are at stake the american people have done the right thing in haiti they have stood for what is best about america and because of the support of the american people democracy will be stronger tomorrow than it is today all around the world finally to president aristide and the people of haiti for three years you have kept faith against all odds that one day a government of the people would be restored to your native land tomorrow will be that day you have survived decades of violence terror poverty with dignity pride and hope now you and your people will have the opportunity to make democracy work for yourselves to let all the children we are tired of seeing in turmoil on our newscasts become a part of that vast mass of humanity in free societies seeking their god given potential i say to you bonne chance ayete toma good luck and long live haiti dem wjclinton14 12 00a bill_clinton thank you senator trying to get in practice guys i want to thank victor and katy and barry and all the special olympics global messengers let s give them all a big hand again actually i don t know whether i want to thank victor or not i understand that the very first time you played golf you hit a ball 250 yards and i want to know the secret before we go any further with this friendship of ours i also want to thank our friend jamie lee curtis who has been a great master of ceremonies and has walked us all through this tonight let s give her a big hand and all the wonderful performers who have graced this stage tonight because they believe in special olympics hillary and i have been proud supporters of special olympics for many many years and we re proud to be part of this very special evening special olympics is a program of sports training and competition but ultimately it s a strong statement of optimism about human life it says that every human being can learn and grow and contribute to the society we all share it casts a spotlight on the dignity of human life and the beauty of the human soul special olympics teaches us that when people with disabilities gain skill and confidence we all win from their abilities when special olympic athletes from america meet their counterparts from places like china and botswana people all over the world are enriched and in this century we have just begun if we help special olympics establish global networks for families create new health programs for athletes and open new opportunity for 2 million athletes around the world every one of us will be better off special olympics began as a small flicker in the heart of one remarkable women eunice kennedy shriver we miss her tonight and we thank sarge and her whole family for being here special olympics enters a new century not a small flicker but a bursting flame of pride and a beacon of inspiration for every one of us so tonight we celebrate what has been accomplished and even more we look forward to the future with determination and confidence and now i want all of our artists to get a big hand they re back on the stage and they re going to sing us you know i only have just a few days left so i m going to take every opportunity i can to ask for everything i can i want one more song merry christmas everybody dem wjclinton14 12 00b bill_clinton thank you very much vice chancellor follett and lady follett chancellor ramphal lord skidelsky thank you for your biography of keynes i wonder what mr keynes would think of us paying down the national debt in america today i would like to thank the president of the student union caitlin mckenzie for welcoming me and i am delighted to be here with all of you but i d like to specifically if i might acknowledge one more person in the audience a good friend to hillary and me the renowned physicist stephen hawking thank you stephen for being here we re delighted to tony and cherie blair and hillary and chelsea and i are pleased to be here i thank the prime minister for his kind remarks it is true that we have all enjoyed an unusual friendship between the two of us and our families but it is also true that we have honored the deeper and more important friendship between the united states and great britain one that i believe will endure through the ages and be strengthened through changes of party and from election to election i wanted to have a moment before i left this country for the last time as president just to say a few words about a subject which as the prime minister said we have discussed a lot that i believe will shape the lives of the young people in this audience perhaps more than any other and that is the phenomenon of globalization we have worked hard in our respective nations and in our multinational memberships to try to develop a response to globalization that we all call by the shorthand term the third way sometimes i think that term tends to be viewed as more of a political term than one that has actual policy substance but for us it s a very serious attempt to put a human face on the global economy and to direct the process of globalization in a way that benefits all people the intensifying process of economic integration and political interdependence that we know as globalization is clearly tearing down barriers and building new networks among nations peoples and cultures at an astonishing and historically unprecedented rate it has been fueled by an explosion of technology that enables information ideas and money people products and services to move within and across the national borders at increasingly greater speeds and volumes a particularly significant element of this process is the emergence of a global media village in which what happens anywhere is felt in a flash everywhere from coventry to kansas to cambodia this process i believe is irreversible in a single hour today more people and goods move from continent to continent than moved in the entire 19th century for most people in countries like ours the united states and britain this is helping to create an almost unprecedented prosperity and along with it the change to meet some of the long term challenges we face within our nations i am profoundly grateful that when i leave office we will still be in the longest economic expansion in our history that all income levels have benefitted and that we are able to deal with some of our long term challenges and i have enjoyed immensely the progress of the united kingdom the economic progress the low unemployment rate the high growth rate the increasing numbers of people moving off public assistance and young people moving into universities but i think it s important to point out that globalization need not benefit only the advanced nations indeed in developing countries too it brings the promise but not the guarantee of a better future more people have been lifted out of poverty the last few decades than at any time i history life expectancy in developing countries is up infant mortality is down and according to the united nations human development index which measures a decent standard of living a good education and a long and healthy life the gap between rich and poor countries actually has declined since 1970 and yet that is by far not the whole story for if you took another starting point or just one region of the world or a set of governments that have had particular vulnerability to developments like the asian financial crisis for example you could make a compelling case that from time to time people in developing countries and whole countries themselves if they get caught on the wrong side of a development like the asian financial crisis are actually worse off for quite a good while and we begin the new century and a new millennium with half the world s people struggling to survive on less than 2 a day nearly 1 billion living in chronic hunger almost a billion of the world s adults cannot read half the children in the poorest countries still are not in school so while some of us walk on the cutting edge of the new global economy still amazing numbers of people live on the bare razor s edge of survival and these trends and other troubling ones are likely to be exacerbated by a rapidly growing population expected to increase by 50 percent by the middle of this century with the increase concentrated almost entirely in nations that today at least are the least capable of coping with it so the great question before us is not whether globalization will proceed but how and what is our responsibility in the developed world to try to shape this process so that it lifts people in all nations first let me say i think we have both the ability and the responsibility to make a great deal of difference by promoting development and economic empowerment among the world s poor by bringing solid public health systems the latest medical advances and good educational opportunities to them by achieving sustainable development and breaking the iron link between economic growth resource destruction and greater pollution which is driving global warming today and by closing the digital divide i might say parenthetically i believe there are national security and common security aspects to the whole globalization challenge that i really don t have time to go into today so i ll just steer off the text and say what i think briefly which is that as we open borders and we increase the freedom of movement of people information and ideas this open society becomes more vulnerable to cross national multinational organized forces of destruction terrorists weapons of mass destruction the marriage of technology in these weapons small scale chemical and biological and maybe even nuclear weapons narco traffickers and organized criminals and increasingly all these people sort of working together in lines that are quite blurred and so that s a whole separate set of questions but today i prefer to focus on what we have to do to see that this process benefits people in all countries and at all levels of society at the core of the national character of the british and the american people is the belief in the inherent dignity and equality of all humans we know perfectly well today how children live and die in the poorest countries and how little it would take to make a difference in their lives in a global information age we can no longer have the excuse of ignorance we can choose not to act of course but we can no longer choose not to know with the cold war over no overriding struggle for survival diverts us from aiding the survival of the hundreds of millions of people in the developing world struggling just to get by from day to day moreover it is not only the right thing to do it is plainly in our interest to do so we have seen how abject poverty accelerates turmoil and conflict how it creates recruits for terrorists and those who incite ethnic and religious hatred how it fuels a violent rejection of the open economic and social order upon which our future depends global poverty is a powder keg ignitable by our indifference prime minister blair made the same point in introducing his government s white paper on international development thankfully he remains among the world s leaders in pressing the common sense notion that the more we help the rest of the world the better it will be for us every penny we spend on reducing worldwide poverty improving literacy wiping out disease will come back to us and our children a hundredfold with the global third way approach that he and i and others have worked on of more open markets public investments by wealthy nations in education health care and the environment in developing countries and improved governance in those countries themselves we can develop a future in which prosperity is shared more widely and potential realized more fully in every corner of the globe today i want to briefly discuss our shared responsibility to meet these challenges and the role of all of us from the richest to the poorest nations to the multilateral institutions to the business and ngo and religious and civil society communities within and across our borders first let me say i think it s quite important that we unapologetically reaffirm a conviction that open markets and rule based trade are necessary proven engines of economic growth i have just come from ireland where the openness of the economy has made that small country the fastest growing economy in europe indeed for the last few years in the entire industrialized world from the early 1970s to the early 1990s developing countries that chose growth through trade grew at least twice as fast as those who kept their doors closed and their tariffs high now what if the wealthiest countries ended our agricultural subsidies leveling the playing field for the world s farmers that alone could increase the income of developing countries by 20 billion a year not as simple as it sounds i come from a farming state and i live in a country that basically has very low tariffs and protections on agriculture but i see these beautiful fields in great britain i have driven down the highways of france i know there is a cultural social value to the fabric that has developed here over the centuries but we cannot avoid the fact that if we say we want these people to have a decent life and we know this is something they could do for the global economy more cheaply than we we have to ask ourselves what our relative responsibilities are and if there is some other way we can preserve the fabric of rural life here the beauty of the fields and the sustainability of the balanced society that is important for great britain the united states france and every other country the point i wanted to make is a larger one this is just one thing we could do that would put 20 billion a year in income into developing countries that s why i disagree with the anti globalization protestors who suggest that poor countries should somehow be saved from development by keeping their doors closed to trade i think that is a recipe for continuing their poverty not erasing it more open markets would give the world s poorest nations more chances to grow and prosper now i know that many people don t believe that and i know that inequality as i said in the last few years has increased in many nations but the answer is not to abandon the path of expanded trade but instead to do whatever is necessary to build a new consensus on trade that s easy for me to say you can see how successful i was in seattle in doing that but let me say to all of you in the last two years we not only had this wto ministerial in seattle i went to switzerland three times to speak to the wto the international labor organization and the world economic forum at davos all in an attempt to hammer out what the basic elements of a new consensus on trade and in a larger sense on putting a human face on the global economy would be we do have to answer those who fear that the burden of open markets will fall mainly on them whether they re farmers in europe or textile workers in america these concerns fuel powerful political resistance to the idea of open trade in the developed countries we have to do better in making the case not just on how exports create jobs but on how imports are good because of the competition they provide because they increase innovation and they provide savings for hard pressed working families throughout the world and we must do more to improve education and job training so that more people have the skills to compete in a world that is changing very rapidly we must also ask developing countries to be less resistant to concerns for human rights labor and the environment so that spirited economic competition does not become a race to the bottom at the same time we must make sure that when we say we re concerned about labor and the environment and human rights in the context of trade it is not a pretext for protectionism both the united states and europe must do more to build a consensus for trade in america for example we devote far far too little of our wealth to development assistance but on a per capita basis we also spend nearly 40 percent more than europeans on imports from developing countries recently we passed landmark trade agreements with africa and the caribbean basin that will make a real difference to those regions if america matched europe s generosity in development assistance and europe matched our openness in buying products from the developing nations think how much growth and opportunity we could spur at the same time i think it s important that we acknowledge that trade alone cannot lift nations from poverty many of the poorest developing countries are crippled by the burden of crushing debt draining resources that could be used to meet the most basic human needs from clean water to schools to shelter for too long the developed world was divided between those who felt any debt forgiveness would hurt the credit worthiness of developing nations and those who demanded outright cancellation of the debt with no conditions last year at the g 7 summit in cologne we prime minister blair and i and our colleagues began to build a new consensus responding to a remarkable coalition asking for debt relief for the poorest nations in this millennial year we have embraced the global social contract debt relief for reform we pledged enhanced debt relief to poor countries that put forward plans to spend their savings where they ought to be spent on reducing poverty developing health systems improving educational access and quality this can make a dramatic difference for example uganda has used its savings already to double primary school enrollment a direct consequence of debt relief bolivia will now use 77 million on health and education honduras will offer its children nine years of schooling instead of six a 50 percent increase the developed world must build on these efforts as we did in the united states when we asked for 100 percent bilateral debt relief for the least developed nations and we must include more and more nations in this initiative but we should not do it by lowering our standards instead we should help more nations to qualify for the list that is to come forward with plans to spend the savings on their people and their future this starts with good governance something that i think has been overlooked no matter how much we wish to do for the developing world they need to have the capacity to absorb aid to absorb assistance and to do more for themselves democracy is not just about elections even when they seem to go on forever democracy is also about what happens after the election it s about the capacity to run clean government and root out corruption to open the budget process to show people an honest accounting of where their resources are being spent and to give potential investors an honest accounting of what the risks and rewards might be we have a moral obligation both to provide debt relief and to make sure these resources reach people who need them most the poorer these people are of course the less healthy they re likely to be that brings me to the next point the obstacles to good health in the developing world are many and of great magnitude there is the obvious fact of malnutrition the fact that so many women still lack access to family planning and basic health services around the world today one woman dies every minute from complications due to childbirth there is the fact that 1 5 billion people lack access to safe clean drinking water and the growing danger of a changing climate about which i will say more in a moment but let me just mention the health aspects if temperatures keep rising developing countries in tropical regions will be hurt the most as disease spreads and crops are devastated already we see in some african countries malaria occurring at higher altitudes than ever before because of climate change today infectious diseases are responsible for one in four deaths around the world diseases like malaria tb and aids diarrheal diseases just malaria tuberculosis and diarrhea kill 8 million people a year under the age of 15 already in south africa botswana and zimbabwe half of all the 15 year olds are expected to die of aids in just a few years there will be three to six african countries where there will be more people in their 60s than in their 30s this is a staggering human cost parenthetically the economic toll is also breathtaking aids is predicted to cut the gdp of some african countries by 20 percent within 10 years it is an epidemic with no natural boundary indeed the fastest growing rate of infection today is in russia and the nations of the former soviet union why makes the point of what we should do in no small measure because those nations in the aftermath of the end of communism and actually beginning a few years before have seen a steady erosion in the capacity of their public health systems to do the basic work that must be done we must attack aids of course within our countries in the united states and britain but we must also do all we can to stop the disease from spreading in places like russia and india where the rates of growth are large but the overall numbers of infected people are still relatively small but we must not also forget that the number one health crisis in the world today remains aids in africa we must do more in prevention care medications and the earliest possible development of an affordable vaccine the developing countries themselves hold a critical part of the answer however limited their resources they must make treatment and prevention a priority whatever their cultural beliefs they must be honest about the ways aids spreads and how it can be prevented talking about aids may be difficult in some cultures but its far easier to tell children the facts of life in any culture than to watch them learn the fact of death in china a country with enough resources to teach all its children to read only 4 percent of the adults know how aids is transmitted uganda on the other hand has cut the rate of infection by half so there are a lot of things that the developing world will have to do for itself this too is in no small measure an issue of governance and leadership but the bulk of the new investment will have to come from the developed world in the last few years our two nations have gotten off to a very good start and yet the difference between what the world provides and what the world needs for treatment and prevention of aids malaria and tb is 6 billion a year now that may seem like a great deal of money but think about this take america s fair share of closing that gap 1 5 billion that is about the same as our government spends every year on office supplies or about what the people of britain spend every year on blue jeans so i hope that some way will be found for the united states and its allies to close that 6 billion gap it will be a very good investment indeed and the economic and social consequences to our friends in africa and to other places where the rates of growth is even greater will be quite profound unless we do the government alone cannot meet the health needs but thus far neither has the market what is the problem there is a huge demand for an aids vaccine but the problem is as all the economists here will readily understand the demand is among people who have no money to pay for it therefore the companies that could be developing the vaccines have virtually no incentive to put in the massive amounts of research money necessary to do the job only 10 percent listen to this 10 percent of all biomedical research is devoted to diseases that overwhelmingly affect the poorest countries now we have sharply increased our investment in vaccine research boosted funding for buying vaccines so that companies know there will be a guaranteed market not just for aids but for other infectious diseases proposed a tax credit to help provide for future vaccines to encourage more companies to invest in trying to find vaccines where there are none presently i think we should expand that approach to the development of drugs and keep pressing pharmaceutical companies to make lifesaving treatments affordable to all but we can t ask them to go broke we re going to have to pay them to do it directly or indirectly through tax credits one of the best health programs the best economic development programs and the best anti poverty strategies as the vice chancellor said very early on today is a good education each additional year spent in school increases wages by 10 to 20 percent in the developing world a primary education boosts the farmers output by about 8 percent and the education of girls is especially critical studies show that literate girls have significantly smaller and healthier families i want to say just parenthetically here i m very grateful for the work that my wife has done over the last eight years around the world to try to help protect young women and girls get them in school keep them in school and i hope that we will do more on that that can make a huge difference and there are still cultures where there is dramatically disparate treatment between girls and boys and whether they go to school and whether they can stay if all children on every continent had the tools to fulfill their god given potential the prospect for peace prosperity and freedom in the developing world would be far greater we are making progress in the past decade primary enrollments have increased at twice the rate twice the rate of the 1980s still more than 100 million kids get no schooling at all 60 percent of them are girls almost half of all african children and a quarter of those in south and west asia are being denied this fundamental right just this year 181 nations joined to set a goal of providing basic education to every child girls and boys alike in every country by 2015 few of our other efforts will be successful if we fail to reach this goal what it will take is now known to us all it s going to take a commitment by the developing countries to propose specific strategies and realistic budgets to get their kids out of the fields and factories to remove the fees and other obstacles that keep them out of the classroom and it s going to take an effort by the wealthier countries to invest in things that are working i hope a promising example is something that we in the united states started in the last year a 300 million global school lunch initiative using a nutritious meal as an incentive for parents to send their children to school i am very hopeful that this will increase enrollment and i believe it will and i want to thank the u k and other countries that are willing to contribute to and support this but the main point i want to make is we can t expect to get all these children in the developing world into schools unless we re willing to help pay i ve been to schools in africa that have maps that don t have 70 countries that exist today on them and yet we know that if they just had one good computer with one good printer and someone paid for the proper connections they could get all the information they need in the poorest places in the world to provide good primary education should we pay for it i think it would be a good investment let me say just a few words about the digital divide today south asia is 700 times less likely to have access to the internet than america it s estimated that in 2010 in the asian pacific region the top eight economies will have 72 percent of their people on line but the bottom 11 will have less than 4 percent if that happens the global economy really will resemble a world wide web a bunch of interlocking strands with huge holes in between it s fair to ask i suppose are computers really an answer for people who are starving or can t yet read is e commerce an answer for villages that don t even have electricity of course i wouldn t say that we have to begin with the basics but there should not be a choice between pentium and penicillin that s another one of those false choices prime minister blair and i have been trying to throw into the waste bin of history we should not patronize poor people by saying they don t need 21st century tools and skills micro credit loans in bangladesh by the grameen bank to poor village women to buy cell phones has proved out to be one of the most important economic initiatives in one of the poorest countries in the world i went to a village co op in nayla rajastan india last year last march and i was astonished to see the women s milk co op doing all of its billing on computers and marketing on computers and i saw another computer there that had all the information from the federal and state government with wonderful printers so that all the village women no matter how poor could come in and one woman came in with a two week old baby and printed out all the information about what she ought to do with the baby for the next six months so i think it s a cop out to say that technology cannot be of immense help to very poor people in remote places if it s done right it may be of more help to them than to people who are nearer centers of more traditional economic and educational and health opportunity so from my point of view we have to begin to have more places like those poor villages in india like the cell phone businesses in bangladesh like the city of hyderabad in india now being called cyberabad developing countries have to do their part here too they have to have laws and regulations that permit the greatest possible access at the lowest possible cost and in the developed world governments have to work with corporations and ngos to provide equipment and expertise that s the goal of the digital opportunity task force which the g 8 has embraced and i hope we will continue to do that let me just say one word about climate change if you follow this issue you know we had a fairly contentious meeting recently about climate change with no resolution about how to implement the kyoto agreement which calls for the advanced nations to set targets and for some mechanisms to be devised for the developing nations to participate there are lots of controversies about to what extent countries should be able to get credit for sinks trees do the trees have to be planted can they already be up to what extent the developing countries should agree to follow a path of development that is different from the one that we followed in the united states and the united kingdom i don t want to get into all that now except to say there will be domestic and regional politics everywhere but let s look at the facts the facts are that the last decade was the hottest decade in a thousand years if the temperature of the earth continues to warm at this rate it is unsustainable within something like 50 years in the united states the florida everglades and the sugar cane fields in louisiana will be under water agricultural production will have to be moved north in many places and the world will be a very different place there will be more extreme weather events there will be more people displaced it will become virtually impossible in some places to have a sustainable economy this is a big deal and the only thing i would like to say is i do not believe that we will ever succeed unless we convince people the interest groups in places like the united states which have been resistant and the driving political forces in countries like india and china who don t want to think that we re using targets in climate change to keep them poor we have to convince them that you can break the link between growing wealth and putting more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere there is ample evidence that this is true and new discoveries just on the horizon which will make it more true but it is shocking to me how few people in responsible positions in the public and private sector even know what the present realities are in terms of the relationship in energy use and economic growth so i think one of the most important things that the developed world ought to be doing is not only making sure we re doing a better job on our own business which is something the united states has to do not only doing more in the missions trading so that we can get more technology out of the developed world but making sure people know that this actually works an enormous majority of the decision makers in the developed and the developing world still don t believe that a country can grow rich and stay rich unless it puts more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every year it is not true and so this is one area where we can make a big contribution to sustainable development and to creating economic opportunities in developing countries if we can just get people in positions of influence to get rid of a big idea that is no longer true as victor hugo said there s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come the reverse is also true there s no bigger curse than a big idea that hangs on after its time has gone and so i hope all of you will think about that finally let me just say that no generation has ever had the opportunity that all of us now have to build a global economy that leaves no one behind and in the process to create a new century of peace and prosperity in a world that is more constructively and truly interdependent it is a wonderful opportunity it is also a profound responsibility for eight years i have done what i could to lead my country down that path i think for the rest of our lives we had all better stay on it thank you very much dem wjclinton14 2 95 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you juliet and thank you ladies and gentlemen your welcome was worth the five hour plane ride i want to congratulate you all on this meeting and i want to thank juliet for her leadership and also say to frank jenifer whom i know will carry on the council s outstanding work and strong leadership in higher education i wish you well and i m delighted to see you again i want to thank the entire american council on education board of directors for endorsing our middle class bill of rights it will build education and training across america and i want to say a little more about it in a few moments you will have to play an important role in making it a reality and i know that you ll be interested in what i think you have to do along with what i have to do let me say at the outset what an honor it is for me to be here with my longtime friend our secretary of education dick riley he has really done a wonderful job and i am very very proud of him and he is responsible for the fact that we had the most successful year last year in promoting advances in education in the congress in at least 30 years in the united states and i thank him for that i m also glad to be here for the second straight year and to have juliet s suggestion that maybe i should thing about becoming a college president when i am once again unemployed now before we came out here she gave a slightly earthier description of why i should think about that she reminded me that president kennedy when asked why he wanted to be president said that the pay was pretty good a nice house came along with the job and you work close to home and that was like a lot of college president s jobs over new year s i met a college president who told me that we had a lot in common with people who run cemeteries he said you know if you run a cemetery you ve got a whole lot of people under you but nobody s listening on the hard days when you re about to cry you can think of that and laugh a little bit about it we have more in common than that you are the keepers of a great trust of this nation the most diverse network of learning in the entire world it s a spur for our economy and a magnet for our people and for people and ideas from all around the globe i come today as someone who spent some of the happiest years of his life teaching in colleges and universities as someone who worked as a governor tirelessly to advance the cause of education and now in this job as your partner in a very important mission at a very important time in our country s history our job yours and mine together is to redefine the partnership to empower our people through education and through training to face the demands of this age that s really why i ran for president i believe it is the responsibility of our generation to work together to preserve the american dream for all americans and to ensure that we move into the next century still the strongest country in the world and i think the best way for us to do that is by building a new partnership in our country between americans and their government and between one another i ve called that partnership the new covenant more opportunity in return for more responsibility and a renewed sense of citizenship and community in that new covenant government s responsibility is to expand opportunity while shrinking bureaucracy to empower people to make the most of their own lives and to enhance our security abroad but here at home as well at the same time we have to demand more responsibility from every citizen in return more responsibility for our country for our communities for our families and for ourselves as we end this century we are facing dramatic changes in our economy our government and our daily lives as we move away from the cold war into the information age we face a world that is both exciting and very challenging a world where knowledge is the basis of wealth creation and power and where technology accelerates the pace of change in a world like that those who have the skills to prosper will do far better than any generation of americans has ever done but those who lack the ability to learn and to adapt may be left behind no matter how hard they work that is part of the frustration of america today that there are so many of our fellow americans who are working harder and harder and harder and never feeling that they re rewarded feeling that they re falling further behind having less time for their children having less time for their spouses having less time for the things that we know as the quality of life and just plowing ahead it leads to people having too much anxiety and too little hope and it leads to special responsibilities for all of us at the heart of all three of the responsibilities that i said the federal government has expanding opportunity empowering people enhancing security is your work education it is indeed the essence of the new covenant now more than ever education and training are the keys to opportunity for every american and the future will only make that more true they will only work of course if individuals also assume the responsibility for themselves to get themselves educated and to impart the value of education to their children to their families and throughout their communities but it is clear that the key to opening the american dream for all americans as we move into the next century is our ability to broadly spread the benefits of education for more than two decades i have not budged from this conviction i had as it turns out for this job the good fortune of growing up in a state which itself was burdened in america s greatest explosion after world war ii for lack of education and i have worked now for about 20 years relentlessly to constantly change the role of government so that it wastes less money and does fewer things it shouldn t but so that at the same time it serves people better it insists on accountability it promotes excellence but it especially emphasizes educating people america now must do that if we have any hope of preserving the american dream in terms of all of our people in terms of an expanding middle class instead of one that is shrinking and constantly being divided between the haves and have nots not in terms of money but in terms of education as a governor i invested more in education and in higher standards for our students for our teachers and for our schools and in trying to make it easier for our young people in my state to go to college the nation at risk report back in 1983 confirmed the crying need for changes in our public schools and i was glad to work on trying to change the conditions in ours at the end of the decade i was proud to be one of the governors who reached out across party lines to work with the governors association and with president bush and his white house to craft a new national education goals goals which we then wrote into law in the goals 2000 program and which we are doing our best to help schools all across america to achieve on their own from the first day i became president we have been committed in this administration to reinventing government in all areas but especially in education our approach is not and i repeat is not to micromanage anything we have deregulated the federal government s role in education in the public schools and elsewhere we have worked to inspire reform at the grass roots level we have recognized that our job is to define a road map clear standards of excellence and then to work to empower every one in this society to reach those standards through education to support the educational institutions all across this country to support the students and the families to help them to reach those standards of excellence instead of defending the status quo we have worked to change it we ve abolished 13 of the eduction programs we inherited we have cut another 38 programs that we thought were less than essential we have consolidated 70 more programs in the budget i have just sent to congress and all of this is designed to empower students and working people not educational bureaucrats to help teachers to do their job not to help the federal government to regulate more others have talked about such things but our administration has actually cut over a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal spending we have reduced more than 300 domestic programs we have eliminated more than 100 000 people from the federal payroll and we have used the savings from the payroll reduction to put 100 000 more police officers on our streets in community policing settings not run by the federal government but people who work at the grass roots level on the problems they confront every day we are on our way if no other law passes to cutting more than a quarter of a million people from the federal payroll and putting all those resources back into making our communities more secure and the budget i have just sent to congress proposes another 144 billion in spending cuts but my strategy is eliminating yesterday s government to meet the demands of today and tomorrow to give us a leaner but not a meaner government to cut government to reduce the deficit and to increase our investments in the future in education in technology in research things like head start and goals 2000 and the defense conversion programs we supported and the medical research programs we supported these things make us stronger as a people they build opportunity and they demand responsibility and they are good for america we should be discriminating in this work we are doing we should move beyond rhetoric to reality let others talk about cutting spending we have done it and we d like some more help but we have to realize why we re doing it we re doing it to lift the country up and bring the country together and move the country forward not to find some way to divide us in a new and different way so we have more rhetoric more hot air and less progress let that be our commitment to do better you know now i admit that some in the new republican congress see education in another way they think education at the national level is just another area to cut and gut their proposals will cut investments in our future and increase the cost of student loans to our neediest students to fund tax cuts for the wealthy they will limit the availability of lower cost direct loans to middle class students to increase profits for the middleman in the student loans even though that means a higher deficit indeed the only thing they have proposed spending more money in education on are funds going to middlemen by limiting the amount of the direct loan program by cutting it off just as it s becoming more and more successful and some of them don t want to reinvent the department of education as i have done to make it stronger and leaner and more effective they want to abolish it altogether well i think dick riley s worth the money and so i want you to know that to all of this i will say no i will fight these proposals every step of the way and i want you to join me in fighting them too the fight for education is the fight for the american dream it is the fight for america s middle class it is the fight for the 21st century it should therefore and i emphasize it should therefore be a bipartisan fight when we passed the elementary and secondary education act last year drastically reducing regulation emphasizing more help to poor children in need giving teachers and school principals more flexibility it had bipartisan support look i want to work with this new republican congress to help america we support many of the same initiatives i supported them when they passed the bill to apply to congress all the laws they put on private employers i have supported our common efforts to reduce the burden of unfunded mandates on state and local governments i have supported giving more flexibility to the states in pursuing welfare reform and health care reform i ve supported the line item veto but we clearly have our differences look at the student loan reforms we eliminated the middlemen and got the funds directly to the schools and the borrowers which meant unbelievably lower fees lower interest rates easier repayment choices for students it meant less paperwork less red tape less bureaucracy to administer the programs for colleges and universities and it meant much much lower costs to the taxpayers our proposal when fully implemented will save the taxpayers 12 billion over a six year period while lowering the cost of college loans to the student and reducing the hassles to you that is reinventing government at its best that is the new democrat approach it ought to be the new republican approach but instead they want to cap these loans i want to expand them i want to include all the schools and all the students who want to be a part of this program by 1997 your choice but i ll be darned if i want to cut it off from you when i know that it will help you they want to pay for the tax cuts in their contract for america by eliminating the student loan subsidy so that we start charging interest on the loans to our poorest students while they re in college that costs 2 billion a year that adds 20 percent on the average to the cost of going to college for some of our neediest students to pay for tax cuts it is not right that would be the biggest cut in student financial aid in the history of the united states our approach is to help students and their hard working parents to cut bureaucracy to reduce the deficit by not subsidizing noncompetitive middlemen i might add that those who wish to compete for student loans are now doing it in many places for lower costs than they were providing when the government was giving them a locked down guarantee because of the competition from the direct loan program now that is our approach the other approach would increase the cost of education would keep the bureaucracy and the red tape and would increase the deficit by guaranteeing billions and billions more in no risk funds to middlemen in the student loan system it is wrong it is wrong and we should not stand for it and i hope you won t stand for it i hope you ll stand up and fight for it now as you well know and i want to emphasize we are not talking about a give away this department of education has gotten tougher on enforcing laws against default and the default rate has dropped by one third the net annual cost to the taxpayers has fallen by almost two thirds since we have been in office from 2 8 billion to 1 billion because we re enforcing the laws against default i think it is wrong to default on your student loan this department of education has gotten tough with scam operators masquerading as higher education and every one of you wanted us to do that now with this progress i hope we can continue to remove the regulatory burdens from many of the strong institutions with proven records of responsibility that s what you want us to do that s his valentine present to you but that s the way we ought to be doing this secretary riley will work with you to find a better way of balancing the flexibility you want with our obligations to the taxpayers but the point is other people talk about this stuff but when i showed up in town two years ago i found a student loan program that was too costly helping too few people gave too few options to the borrowers with a red tape headache to you and the taxpayers were being ripped off and we ve tried to change it now when we proposed these direct student loans our opponents and those who wanted to protect the status quo said that the federal government was completely incapable of administering a loan program well they weren t right they were wrong i got a letter that was sent to terry hartle by jerome supple the president of southwest texas state in san marcos it s a big school now it has 21 000 students it distributes grants and loans in excess of 23 million president supple wrote about what direct lending has meant to his school he also wrote to me but dick riley gave me this copy of his letter to terry hartle and i like it better than what the speechwriters put in so i m going to write what he actually said this is what he said we are aware of the concern of some members of the financial community about the shift to direct lending and can understand the concern for a loss of revenue however the savings to the government and the improved service to other students offered by direct lending are of greater importance the other argument that the federal government cannot effectively administer such a program and much rely on the expertise of the private sector is counter to our experience listen to this the results have more than met our expectations we have gone from an institution that was scrambling to meet our students need often after classes have started to an institution that was one of the first in the state to get awards out last fall so early in fact that it had a positive effect on our admissions program while the direct lending program has shared some of the some of the credit for the improvement of our financial aid services with our hard working and talented staff there s a good politician also true there is no doubt that direct lending allows us to serve our students better and finally he says it is legitimate to express concern about the ability of the department of education to manage the direct lending program and full capacity but the experience to date suggests they can do this very well it is rare that the federal government creates a program that both saves money and improves service to its constituents listen to what the students say i got a letter from marie lyons a 40 year old student rather more typical these days she wrote to me to say that she had given up hope on going to college but with our loan reforms she s been able to go to murray state university in kentucky studying criminal justice she ll be the first person in her family to graduate from college you know we can t take hope away from people like marie lyons and all the other people now that are flooding back into your institutions into the community colleges into the four year institutions because they know they re way ahead of the politicians they know what they need to do to make good lives for themselves and they re coming to you they re coming to you in record numbers but people like that deserve the best opportunity we can give them they are very responsible they are working hard they are people from all races and income groups and backgrounds with a million different life stories but they are chasing a common dream because of people like that we should not abolish the department of education either we should not do that you know everybody talks about this being the information age the white house and now the house of representatives are in this little friendly contest to see who can do the most high techy stuff on internet and call us on the computer and see what we have to offer read the administration s budget but if this is true if the new economy really is based more than ever before on knowledge and skills we have to do more of education and undercutting education at this time saying that this is not a national concern that would be like undercutting the department of defense during the cold war we won the cold war because we stayed strong and we will win the fight for our own future and a place in the 21st century if we stay strong with education that is what we should do you know our future depends upon it as president as has already been said i ve worked pretty hard for us to do well in this new war for the minds and hearts of our people and for the future and i do think one of the smartest things i ever did was to appoint dick riley as the secretary of education one of the reasons is i find that once you become president sometimes people even people you think know you very well all of a sudden don t really tell you what s on their minds it drives me nuts since i don t mind hearing what s on people s minds sometimes they don t want to hear what s on mine in return when they tell me but it s okay but one of the things you need to know about the secretary of education is we ve been friends since i was barely old enough to shave he always tells me what s on his mind and what s on his mind is you and your students and the future of this country so i ll say again we re cutting inessential education programs we ve saved more money by going to the direct student loans than they can save by cutting out the people who work at the department of education who are we trying to kid here he is worth the investment the other people who work there are worth the investment we are not running education but we are trying to energize it and create opportunity and shine a light to the future this is a classic battle and we ought to fight it and win it together not just the battle to save the department of education not just a battle for the direct loan program not just a battle against increasing the cost of student loans but the larger issue and i will say again this ought to be a bipartisan battle that we fight so that we can meet our responsibility to prepare our children for the 21st century and so that we can make the most of our own lives for two years we have done everything we could do to prepare our people for the new economy last year when i came before you i presented a comprehensive agenda for lifelong learning i m proud to report that with the last congress we did produce a tremendously successful record in achieving that agenda we reformed head start and expanded it by 30 000 more children and next year i want to expand it again by at least that many that s why we re cutting inessential programs not only to reduce the deficit but to put the money where the people need it i think the taxpayers want the head start program expanded we passed the goals 2000 program and for the first time we spell out a national understanding of what our young people must learn to compete in the world this goes right to the heart of the whole approach of the national role in education not trying to tell people how to teach or regulate how they spend every day and every hour or control them through a blizzard of paperwork but to set national standards and then give state and local governments the control the power the opportunity and where we can the resources to get the job done to give them the flexibility through waivers of complex federal rules and reforms like charter schools and public school choice and to do it with no new federal regulations to diminish state and local control i m proud of that the way we re running that program is the way the federal government ought to relate to the states in the area of public education we are raising the bar for everyone all of our young people are going to have to do better i think we all know that all of our parents and grandparents are going to have to help our young people to do better all of you in this room now accept as a truism that we have the best higher education system in the world but that we have to do better in our school systems k 12 and we are all going to have to teach the higher standards to work the higher standards to learn the higher standards our communities our businesses they re going to have to pitch in and do more and our young people we know and let me say this with all sincerity and convictions we know that too many of them are still trying to learn in atmospheres that are too dominated by violence and drugs they can t walk down the halls or learn in the classrooms because they re afraid for their safety then all the reforms will not be successful that s why our making our school environment safe and disciplined and drug free are important to all the other standards being achieved and why we have worked so hard in this administration and in this department of education to make sure that all of our legislative efforts included the safe schools initiatives you know some young people i ought to emphasize too because i know who all is out here don t plan to go on to four year colleges and that s fine if they don t plan to do that we also have to make sure that they have the academic strength and skills they need to compete that s what our school to work opportunities act was all about to reinvent the relationship of high school to the world of work and the work of post high school education with high standards that enable our students to learn in class and to begin to reach out into the real world along with their classroom learnings they are learning real jobs dealing with real people and we expect them to go on to some post high school education as well we re not doing this with a big national bureaucracy we re doing it with grants and advice and help and support to let every state set up a flexible network working with employers and schools and the post secondary educational institutions to make sure that we fill this enormous gap in the american system there are too many of our young people still who neither get a four year college degree or at least have a good school to work transition they way many of our competitors do these reforms every one of them will make sure that more capable students are coming into your institutions which means you ll have to spend less time bringing them up to speed i know that would be a relief to all of you a lot of us have been working on it for years and years but i believe it will make a difference something else we did last year that i m very proud of that two or three of you have already mentioned to me today is our national service program americorps it already has 20 000 americans taking responsibility for improving their country at the grass roots level and earning some money to go to school it is a very very important thing for this country and i am very proud of it americans like the 16 members at the university of california at berkeley who have 750 of their classmates tutoring middle school students and helping four local police departments set up neighborhood watch programs now that s just one example of hundreds i could give you of what a modest federal investment can do to get a big result eighty nine members of americorps in texas immunized listen to this 104 000 infants in texas two summers ago in simpson county kentucky americorps members are teaching second graders to read and they ve already raised the reading levels there from two years behind the official standard to one year ahead of it now again some people in the new republican congress say that americorps is a waste of money bribing people to do service an expensive way to send people to college i say it s about the best thing that s happened to this country in a long time i m going to fight to keep it and i hope you ll fight for that too and for all of you that have had americorps projects on your campuses and with your students i thank you and i hope more of you will ask to do it we ve got a lot more work to do we have to protect the pell grants and as juliet said my budget raises the maximum grant by 12 percent we all know the pell grant program got in trouble and we had to make it solvent again and it hasn t kept up with the economy but this is a good step in the right direction we ve got to preserve the work study program the other campus based programs that we all know are important to the students on your campuses and we ve got to keep moving forward on university based research with expanded investments and less red tape i do not believe that it is the right thing to do to take universities out of the partnerships we now see forming in defense conversion for example where we are doing remarkable things with the decline of the defense budget taking some of that decline and putting it into partnerships between universities and private companies with some federal investment and a whole lot of private investment again there are some in the new congress who say let s get rid of all that that s our competitive edge research development mind work making connections moving forward all of this is an agenda that works in his state of american education address earlier this month to which secretary riley alluded he said that america is turning the corner from being a nation at risk in education to being a nation on the move well you ve got my word i will fight for the education and training reforms that will keep us on the move and i want you to fight for them too and we will win because the american people are for us now that s why i have proposed this middle class bill of rights because i want to emphasize what we still have to do we can t just preserve what we ve got we ve got to keep going forward all over this country there are people who are saying well i read about this recovery and i know we ve got 6 million new jobs but it s not affecting me i still feel insecure and uncertain and i haven t gotten a raise the middle class bill of rights i think should be called the bill of rights and responsibilities because like all the other things we ve been talking about today you can t take advantage of it unless you act responsibly it does offer a tax cut for people but only if they re behaving responsibly raising their children educating themselves or their children from your point of view the most important parts of it are a tax deduction for the cost of education after high school an ira that you can withdraw from tax free for education and for other purposes like buying a health insurance policy and the collapse of 70 of the government s training programs into a program which a person who s eligible for federal training help because he or she is unemployed or working for a very low wage can draw on and just take the money up to 2 600 a year to an institution of his or her choice getting around the federal bureaucracy getting around all the programs and going direct to a lot of you now this is a good thing and i thank you for endorsing it but i need your help to make it happen why is it a good thing it s a good thing first of all because it will lower the cost of living for hard working people who have gotten no benefit out of this recovery yet but instead of just giving them a quick fix it lowers their cost of living because it increases their standard of living over the long run by putting the money into education it is the right way to give tax relief to the middle class it is consistent with long term control of the deficit it is consistent with a commitment to long term economic growth and i ask each of you to do what you do best now to help teach people about this to talk about it because this resolution is really nice but what we really need is for every member of congress to hear from every college president every dean of students every member of every board of trustees every student body president every student organization in the country hey don t take the interest subsidy away hey don t stop us from getting the direct loans hey pass the middle class bill of rights education is the key to our future it ought not to be a partisan issue if there is one thing in the wide world that ought to unite us on the way to the next century it should be our common commitment t dem wjclinton14 2 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much jim mckune for your fine words and even more for your fine work i want to say on behalf of all americans having had the opportunity now to fly over the areas of oregon and washington which were damaged by the flood and many of which are still under water our country has been watching you and pulling for you and praying for you we have a lot of admiration for the incredible work that has been done and we re proud of the contributions made by all the groups and all the individuals who have worked so hard i want to thank especially on behalf of the federal government the federal emergency management agency and its director james lee witt who is here with me today the corps of engineers who used their night scopes to make sure the dikes along the columbia were holding strong the secretary of transportation federico pena who is also here today i want to thank the national guard which has done about everything it could to help and i understand they even air dropped hay to cattle cut off by water on sauvie island i want to congratulate and thank bill long and steve barrett for the tour i just got of the wall and the work they did to build it and all those who did it so well and let me say a special word of appreciation also to governor kitzhaber and my good friend mayor katz senator hatfield and senator wyden and congressman defazio and congressman bunn we re going to need them all in the next few weeks because we don t have enough money right now in the treasury to meet all the demands for the problems that oregon and washington and your neighbors in idaho have gone through and we re going to have to go back to congress and ask for a little help but i m sure it will be there and i thank them for their support i want to say a special word of thanks too to the united states marine corps members who worked on this wall i understand some of them worked all night long i won t keep you here long i just wanted to come here and listen and in a few moments we ll be going to kind of a roundtable where i ll be hearing about where you are now in the flood recovery efforts and getting some suggestions about what else needs to be done but i do want to point out something if you look at this wall behind us it seems to me that it is a symbol of what our country does when everybody pulls together and works together and forgets about their differences and focuses their attention and their hearts and their minds i understand it was exactly a week ago when mayor katz learned that the sea walls might be no match for the river and that you would have to get an emergency wall up before the river was expected to crest on thursday night crews worked overnight but there were too few of them for such a big job and without outside help clearly the wall couldn t have been ready so the mayor called on the people of portland i ve had enough experience with the mayor to know that she s hard to turn down but with the aid of the river coming down i suppose that focused the attention of the citizens within minutes 1 000 men and women from all over the area cast aside what they were doing to come to build the wall to hammer the boards to wrap them with plastic to pile the rock to pass sandbags hand to hand restaurants donated food carpenters lent equipment americorps volunteers young people learning construction skills put their education to work and as i said there were even 60 marines who pitched in and finished the wall on time when the river finally crested it was about where you built the wall i have seen similar stories of courage and teamwork all around this state we know that a lot of the places hit by this flood were in very small towns and rural areas places that often get overlooked but places that are really the backbone of our nation places from tillamook county where dairy farmers sought to save their cows to sherman county where wheat farmers saved the battle of their fields to marion county where kids volunteered around the clock to help in shelters there are individual heroes everywhere a tugboat crew rescuing a man stranded on top of his house a police officer jumping into a debris filled river to save a life rescue workers evacuating people from their flooded homes neighbors helping neighbors move cattle to higher ground but i also think we know that all of these individuals together really is what made this such an extraordinary remarkable experience this wall will never obscure the triumph that the people who lost their homes and their lives in the pacific northwest there were four lives lost dozens of people injured thousands more evacuated a lot of farmland was ruined a lot of livestock was destroyed that is a tragedy it can never be obscured the roads the homes the businesses the power lines that were swept away in the mudslides the avalanches and the wash outs they are many and let me say to all of you the people who experienced these losses a lot of you have rallied to their side in the last couple of days and i applaud you for that but i can tell you from years of experience long before i became president as a governor with whole communities flooded out whole towns leveled by tornadoes the going will get tough again for these people in a week or two weeks or three weeks many of them are almost in shock now but they will have to come to grips with the dimensions of their losses and so i ask you all everybody who put a shoulder to build this wall and everybody who has done anything else in the last few days be on the lookout for your friends and neighbors for the next few weeks because a lot of them will have to come to grips with enormous personal loss and anxiety and pain and they will need you then as well i want to thank you for doing your part for pulling together you will have our help i assure you of that in the job of cleaning up and rebuilding and we will help you until it is finished today i m going to survey the damage as i said talk with members of your congressional delegation with your state and local officials with the citizens who are dealing with this we want to know what more we at the national level can do to help i want you to understand that i know that this is not just an emergency for a few days or a week we have been committed we are still working on the hurricanes that hit florida years ago we have continued to work on the terrible floods that hit the middle west a couple of years ago we are trying to finish the work of dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake and the fires that hit california we know that we have to be your partners until the complete work of rebuilding the lives the economy and the communities that were damaged by this flood is over and i look forward to that when i became president one of the things i promised myself i would do is to at least see that the federal government did a good job when disaster struck i have lived in a state which had the highest per capita incidents of tornadoes in america and i know what it s like when you need help and it s not there i am proud of the fact that where it used to take a month or more for families who were hurt in disasters to get checks now you can call an 800 number and get it within days already more than 3 500 oregonians have registered for help and the first checks were mailed to them today the small business administration will do everything in its power to get oregon s small business communities up and running again and i am pleased to announce today emergency grants from other government agencies the department of transportation is today committing 10 million to help repair highways damaged by the flood the department of housing and urban development is speeding 10 3 million for community development and housing assistance the department of labor is providing 2 million in emergency funds for dislocated workers and today we are opening two disaster recovery centers in tillamook and clackamus counties residents can go to the center and meet with representatives of all the federal and state agencies that are taking part in the recovery so those who can t get everything they want or need over the 800 number will be able to go in and deal with someone face to face i know that it takes time to get this done but let me say again we can do it i hope you will never forget this wall behind me and goodness knows i hope you never need it again but i hope you will always remember for as long as you live what the people of portland did in one remarkable day and i hope that all of us will find in our minds and hearts the wisdom and strength to be a little more like the people of portland were on that one day every day of the year if we had that kind of cohesion that kind of common commitment we d really be in pretty good shape when i was up in washington a couple of hours ago i went to the home of a man 70 years old hard of hearing lost everything he had in his home including his hearing aid and all he did the whole time i saw him he and his wife were there and their two daughters had come in their granddaughter trying to help them deal with the aftermath of losing everything in a home they had lived in for decades and all he did was crack jokes the whole time i was there trying to keep everybody else in a good humor and he said you know it s amazing how all these total strangers showed up to help me he said people were going down into my basement which i turned in to an indoor swimming pool and really risking getting hurt pretty seriously trying to help me save the few little things i ve accumulated in my life and he said i m real grateful but i just wish we could all be that way every day and that s a pretty good pearl of wisdom from a man who at the age of 70 is looking at a future without anything that he had just a couple of days ago let me close by asking you to remember that today is your state s birthday on february 14 1857 the people of the oregon territory decided their bond to each other was strong enough to sustain a state the spirit that brought statehood was alive and well again here last week may that spirit heal the wounds of recent days and may it continue to grow and flourish for another 139 years and beyond thank you happy birthday and god bless you dem wjclinton14 2 96a bill_clinton what needs to be done not only now in the next few days but for as long as it takes until the people there are back on their feet and back to normal let me also say that as i m sure all of you know this has been a long day for me but it s been a very rewarding one even though i ve seen a lot of sad and heartbreaking things and not only in my conversations here but in my trip to oregon and to washington i ve seen a lot of loss but i ve also seen what happens when the american people work together in a spirit of genuine community and when people exhibit individual acts of courage and kindness that seem to overwhelm the dimensions of even the worst tragedy and i have seen that as well i think the lesson that i have learned more than any other in three years and a few days as president is that when this country works together we never lose and when we permit ourselves to be divided we often wind up being less than we ought to be i thank again everybody here in the northwestern part of our country for what i have seen today for the work that they have done and i want to say again specifically to the people of idaho i will follow up on the suggestions that we have gotten i look forward to working with you and i hope as the members of your congressional delegation suggested to me in there senator kempthorne in particular that maybe the model of cooperation that we ve seen in dealing with this flood can become a model for other kinds of cooperation in the future so that americans everywhere feel that their government is a partner in a common endeavor to help individuals and families and communities make the most of their god given capacities thank you good luck and we ll be at work on this immediately thank you dem wjclinton14 2 96b bill_clinton the director of fema and my chief of staff mr panetta and i came in this morning to and we flew over the flooded area and we ve been walking down the streets talking with some of the folks i was on the other side of the street where the houses were built higher and they now have lakefront property i see that s what the gleasons told me and of course i was with doug and delois jungnickel down there in their home and i saw how much they ve lost let me say to all of you i know there s nothing that anyone including the president can say that will make these losses go away i can tell you that in my life in my former life when i was a governor i have been in whole communities that were wiped out by floods i ve been in whole communities that were torn apart by tornadoes and i have been very impressed with what the people here have done the way you ve rallied together the way you ve worked to help save as much as you could the work the corps of engineers has done to try to get the water down as much as possible as quickly as possible and i want to begin just by thanking all of you who worked hard to minimize the damage of this flood when i leave here we re going to kind of a roundtable discussion and we ll talk about what the federal government can do to try to help you rebuild the only thing i can do to you is to pledge to you that i will do everything i can to see that we move as quickly as possible to do as much as we can everything we re allowed to do within the law to help you rebuild and to go on with your lives i can see just from talking to the mayor he told me he had lived here all of his life that this is a wonderful community with good strong families and good strong values and i loved seeing the children at the school today we will do what we can to help you put it back together and get going in the right direction just as quickly as we can and meanwhile i hope you will keep your spirits up this will pass and it will get better and we ll do everything we can do help god bless you and thank you dem wjclinton14 3 94a bill_clinton thank you thank you mayor for your strong and supportive words and your good leadership and for the wonderful wonderful entry into boston today when you had the boat out there spewing water and all those thousands of people and all those young people from city year out there cheering i began to feel like a real president i thank you lea salonga for traveling thousands of miles to sing for me tonight and i m glad i got to shake your hand you re a great talent and we were graced by your music thank you so much i want to thank alan and fred and elaine and my good friend paul matrone in his absence and all the rest of you who made this dinner possible tonight i want to thank david wilhelm for the hard work that he s given to the democratic committee and for that fine film that makes my speech irrelevant it was wonderful wasn t it it was a good movie it reminded us of i thank senator kerry for his remarks and for his leadership for his defense of the spirit and the objectives of this administration on the floor of the senate and his leadership in so many areas but especially now in trying to enact a crime bill that is both tough and intelligent and his belief that we could enact a major piece of anticrime legislation that would really begin to attack some of the root causes of crime and to adopt some things that actually work to reduce the crime rate instead of just to raise the decibel level of the rhetoric that is in the air john kerry was the first member of the congress who convinced me we might actually be able to persuade people of both parties to approve a bill in the range of 22 billion and that we might actually be able to put 100 000 more police officers on the street and take these assault weapons off the street and give our young people some things to say yes to and have adequate drug treatment and do some things that really make sense the whole country is in his debt as am i and are you i want to thank too as strongly as i can say your senior senator ted kennedy i m glad that he seems to be well on his way to a strong reelection you know long before i had ever really thought about the obligations of this country in the area of health care and i was the youngest elected governor in america but not yet in office in 1978 the democratic party had a mid year convention in memphis and i received a call from the white house when president carter was in office asking me if i would moderate a discussion of this issue featuring joe califano the then secretary of health education and welfare and senator kennedy neither of them being shrinking violets i was 32 years old at the time and mortified so of course i said i would do it and people were there from all over the country i only had to cross the mississippi river from home to be there but i remember it s been 16 years ago now as vividly as if it happened yesterday when ted kennedy stood on that stage and said for the first time i think to a truly national audience that the health care that had been given his son when he was desperately ill should be available to every american he said it then and we re going to make it happen now the film was about what we did last year only a little about what we re trying to do this year i can say that in a couple of minutes and then make the one central point i wish to make to all of you tonight last year we had a very good year this year we have to keep working on the economy if we can keep the growth growing we ll have a very good year indeed we ve had 2 1 million new jobs in 13 months 90 percent of them in the private sector most job growth was in state and local government in some years of the 1980s or at least a huge percentage of it was and we want to keep that going we want to pass health care health security that is always there in a way that keeps what is best about health care which you can appreciate in this shining tribute to the american health care triumph and fix what is wrong we want to pass a comprehensive welfare reform bill that will liberate people from the dependence of a system that has aggravated some of the worst pressures in the breakdown of the family in this country we want to pass this crime bill we want to pass as john kerry said a campaign finance reform bill a lobby reform bill we want to pass a comprehensive overhaul in the unemployment system which is designed for a time which no longer exists it used to be when people went on unemployment they needed a little money to get by on until the economy picked up again and they were called back to their old jobs now the huge majority of people who are unemployed don t get called back to their old jobs they have to find new ones it s wrong to tax employers to pay for an income system that s inadequate that is leading nowhere we need to change the whole system and begin immediately to prepare people when they lose their jobs for another a different job one in which they can succeed and win in the global economy these are all things we need to do and we mean to do them this year in spite of the fact or maybe because of the fact that it is an election year now this is a democratic party dinner and it occurred to me that those of you who are here have supported this administration and me personally and the fine people who are associated with our efforts in spite of the fact that on april 15th almost all of you will get a higher tax bill because you know all the money is going to reduce the deficit and you know it s meant lower interest rates record high markets new investment and a growing economy as has already been said our trading partners around the world beat on us for a decade to get the deficit down if my new budget passes the congress and it s well on its way already we ll have three years of deficit reduction for the first time since harry truman was president and we will have laid the foundation for a strong private recovery these things are terribly important but that s not the point i want to make tonight the point i want to make tonight is that there have always been differences between democrats and republicans and these differences have taken different forms at different times on occasion the republican party has been the party of true and progressive change the best example was of course the first and greatest republican president abraham lincoln another example was teddy roosevelt who helped to usher in the modern era of new presidents of activist presidents a man who wanted to save much of our natural resources a man without whom there would be no buffalo in america today just for example and many of our national parks would not be there a man who understood the dangers of great concentrations of power whether in government or in the private sector people like president eisenhower who really tried to build a bipartisan foreign policy to help to move us away from the military industrial complex but leave us strong enough to win the cold war even richard nixon though he s been much maligned signed a bill to create the environmental protection agency and first proposed that all employers should contribute to their employees health insurance so that everyone could be covered i say that to point out that there have been good and bad ideas embraced i guess by both parties at different times i m a democrat by heritage instinct and conviction because i believe most of the time in american history we ve been on the side of ordinary people on the side of bringing people together and on the side of the future we have been the party of change in a constructive and profound way i thought when i ran for president i would have the chance to enter one of these great debates and we would see what would happen whether i was right and wrong or my ideas were right and wrong almost from the beginning i saw a very different edge to the republican party in this time not the party of lincoln and roosevelt or eisenhower but the party dedicated just to being against whatever we were for and committed to the politics of personal destruction they were so busy with it they even tried to look in my passport file in the campaign in 92 something that didn t bother me i was happy to have them rummaging around in my passport file instead of coming up with a good idea that might sound better than one of my ideas let them go now as you pointed out they are at it again they are at it they have a little health retreat and they can t agree on a health care plan so they come back and get at it again i just want you to know something you look at the people that are in our administration they get up every day and try to make something good happen for america senator kennedy mentioned my wife well known to many of you here because she went to wellesley and spent a lot of time in massachusetts has just committed herself in a passionate way to try to figure out how to solve this health problem to give ordinary people the chance to get health care let them come and debate her do they want to do that no they would rather take out after her it saves them the trouble of having to come up with an alternative health care plan the vice president of the united states i think the ablest and most influential person ever to hold that office and someone who has been a credit to this country who cares passionately about what he is doing eli segal we passed a national service bill it will stand as the symbol of what this administration tried to do did you see those kids holding that sign when we came in the harbor today thank you for believing in the youth of america this is a big deal this is a very important time in our history sweeping changes going through our economy and society terrible problems that beg for honest debate from people of different perspectives even if we get the economy going even if we provide health care to all even if we revise the unemployment system if we do all the things i said how can we survive as a country if within a few years over half of our kids are born into families where there was never a marriage how will we transmit the kinds of coherent values to our people how can we expect the young people if they are born into fairly chaotic circumstances where they re not isolated so someone can come in and help them to behave in 15 years from now these are profound problems they beg for debate we need to think about new and different things in totally different ways than we have in the past no one even our party let s be honest about it we don t have all the answers we need an honest debate about the future of family in america about how we re going to rebuild our communities in america people say they re concerned about crime and violence they ought to be but you tell me how you can avoid it if you have people living in square block after square block after square block where the family the community and the work base is broken down and where vacuums are created into which drugs and crimes gangs and weapons move we need a serious debate about that we need a serious debate about the fact that wage earning hourly wage earners have been working in this country for 20 years now with virtually no increase in their income and that every country i just came from detroit from out g 7 jobs summit every wealthy country in the world is now having trouble creating new jobs even when their economy is growing we have always known in the past that productivity was good for jobs and incomes i came from a part of the country where everybody used to work on the farm you can t go back more than one generation older than me without finding somebody in your family that was on the farm the farm jobs went away people went to detroit and chicago and got jobs in the plants those economic changes have always happened and every time technology and productivity took away jobs in one sector more were created in another sector now we find that these wealthy countries are really having trouble with the explosion of technology the explosion of productivity and the globalization of the economy creating new jobs is something new happening in world history i don t think so i just think there are different lags but the point is no one knows for sure this begs for honest political debate and genuine conflicts of ideas why then are we confronted in this administration with an opposition party that just stands up and says no no no no no no no no no when i was a democratic governor and they had the white house i constantly sought them out engaged them in debate offered to work with them on issues from education to welfare reform to crime to you name it i never did them the way they are doing us in washington d c today it is wrong and it is not good for the united states of america i ll tell you something else the mayor talked about me being a marathon runner the marathon comes from a certain place inside me i am an old fashioned really oldfashioned american i believe more than half the time in the contest between good and bad good wins in the contest between truth and falsehood the truth wins out i believe that most people want something that will elevate them and bring them together with different people instead of something that will demean them and divide them from others that s what i believe i believe fundamentally in the common sense and the essential core goodness of the american people don t forget that alexis de tocqueville said a long time ago that america is great because america is good and if america ever ceases to be good she will no longer be great we have to appeal to what is good in this country and we have to ask people to face hard truths and debate hard issues and come together and think new thoughts about problems that we are frankly not solving today that is what i wanted to do when i became president and what i am doing my best to do and i am only sorry that too often in too many ways on too many days it is a debate which engages only members of my party i will say this senator kennedy has had some good success in getting a substantial number of republican senators to talk seriously about health care we are having some help in dealing with the issues of crime but this overriding negative intensely personal totally political devoid of principle attack is not good for the country and it is inconsistent with the tradition of abraham lincoln and teddy roosevelt if i ask you to go home tonight and make a list of the greatest presidents who ever served here and the greatest things that were ever done in washington for the american people you would have members of both parties on your list but every one of them would have done something good for the american people would have tried to elevate the dignity and the human potential of the men and women of this country tried to give the children of this country a better future than their parents had i got into this work because that s what i wanted to do and i am old fashioned enough to believe that in every age and time the central purpose of our common political life will be to find new and important ways to get people together and to get things done so that we can elevate the meaning and content and direction of people s lives and do right by our children and by our future that is what i think and i ll tell you something in 1994 in 1996 if there is only one party that believes that the american people in droves will come to us thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton14 3 94b bill_clinton thank you so much thank you for this wonderful warm welcome to this magnificent old city that is forever young i am so happy to be back here i m thrilled by this enormous crowd honored by your enthusiasm and support your concern and your commitment for your country i thank all those who are here with me your state attorney general your state auditor the state chair of our democratic party your wonderful new mayor mayor menino it s nice to see you congressman moakley who said that you can tell how much i love massachusetts by how many times i come to his congressional district that s a good political remark if i ever heard it congressman markey congressman meehan who are here i want to say a special word of thanks to your two united states senators first to john kerry for his steadfast leadership to try to help us pass a crime bill in the united states congress that is both tough and smart that gives our young people something to say yes to while we re being tougher on crime that takes assault weapons off the street and puts policemen on the beat and gives our kids a better future i thank him for that and so should you i also thank him for the work that he has done in putting the credibility he justly earned as a valiant veteran in the war in vietnam on the line to help us reconcile with vietnam and move forward to a new chapter in our relationship with that country and get a full and fair accounting of all of our mias and pows and i want to thank senator ted kennedy not only for his warm personal support but for being the lion the champion the stalwart of the elemental principle that health care is a fundamental right and every american ought to have it he s been fighting for that for almost two decades now and he has the president by his side and we re going to get it done this year my fellow americans i have just come from detroit a city which was racked during the 1980s with massive job losses in the automobile industry a city which is rebuilding itself even as our car industry comes back with increasing productivity and quality taking back market share all across our country and in other countries we have there going on now a conference of the world s great industrial nations where the finance ministers and the commerce ministers and others have come together to discuss this vexing question why is it that all the wealthy countries in the world are having trouble either creating new jobs or rewarding their workers with higher incomes this is not just an american issue but i can tell you i was proud to go there today and say to them you said to us for years we should bring down our budget deficit well we have the other guys talked about it and we did it and if the congress passes our budget this year for the first time since harry truman was president the deficit will go down for three years in a row and what has happened low inflation low interest rates high investment over two million new jobs in the first 13 months of this administration 90 percent of them not in government but in the private sector i know that there is more to do but we are making a beginning i also want to say that we are doing what we can to give our young people access to the education and training they need with the leadership of senator kennedy and others last year we completely rewrote the student loan law a very important issue in this bastion of higher education so that when this law becomes fully effective our young people will be able to borrow money to go to college whether they are middle class or poor at lower interest rates and pay it back on easier terms not based on how much they borrowed or loaned but also based on how much they make when they go to school so they will never be discouraged from borrowing the money to go to college and get the education they need finally last year we did something that i was inspired to do by all these wonderful young people from city year we passed a national service program this year there will be 20 000 more like them all across the country and year after next 100 000 more earning credit against college solving the problems of this country building up america instead of tearing it down and now and let me say the most important sign i saw of all the wonderful signs you held up today was the sign the young people from city year had on that boat they said thank you for believing in the youth of america i do and i think you do too my fellow americans this year we have much work to do in the congress we are working on totally revamping the unemployment system of our country so people can begin to get new training from the moment they lose their jobs we are working on reforming the welfare system so that more people can move from dependence to independence can be successful parents and successful workers we are working on a dramatic change in our criminal justice initiatives as senator kerry said to put another 100 000 police officers on the street take assault weapons off the street stiffen our ability to get guns out of the hands of people who should not have them the brady bill is already beginning to work in that regard and provide alternatives for first time youthful offenders so they will have a better future those are the kinds of things that we are doing and finally as senator kennedy said we are going to do our dead level best this year and i believe we are going to make it to finally finally finally join the ranks of every other advanced nation in the world and give our american families health care security that is always there that can never be taken away from them i know there will always be problems that we have to address with all of the changes that are coming on into our economy on the way over here i spoke with your congressional delegation about the difficulties that the fishermen in massachusetts and new england are facing let me tell you something we are going to make sure that you do not become an endangered species you have earned the right to go forward and we will work on that we have defense workers from connecticut to california who are threatened and we are working on that but what i want to tell you is we are going in the right direction and we can keep going in the right direction if we remember to keep our eyes on those things which really matter and if we do not become diverted just before i got on the plane to come here i visited a fascinating plant in detroit owned by a man named roger penske you may know him because his teams have won eight indianapolis 500 races but let me tell you what he did this plant was about to be closed several years go he went in and bailed it out made an agreement with the union that they would solve all their problems together grievances on the plant floor dropped to virtually zero a new spirit of partnership took over they began to sell their diesel engines all around the world they began to increase production and sales they hired more people and today this plant that was on the verge of being closed with 3 000 people losing their jobs have doubled their sales added employment they have the best labormanagement cooperation anyone can imagine do you know how they did it they did it because fundamentally they were interested in building up one another they recognized the dignity of every man and woman in that plant they understood that people wanted to be able to be successful as workers and as parents building their families and their future and by doing that and focusing on that everything else worked out all right i tell you today my friends if we can go back to washington and wipe away all of the forces that seek to demean to divide to downgrade and just focus on the spirit and the hope and the dignity that we see in the faces of these young people here we could solve the problems of this country and do it in short order that is what we ought to be about and i pledge to you that i will honor the support the people of massachusetts gave me in 1992 i will honor the signs that greeted me here today i will never forget the spirit the drive the imagination and the talent that the people of this state have and when i go back to washington i will be there working with your friends here to make sure that we restore the kind of spirit and dignity and possibility to our national government that will make it possible for us to keep this economy on the move to pass health care and a crime bill and welfare reform and redo the unemployment system and do all those things that in the end will just allow all of us to live up to the fullest of our god given potential as one united nation moving into the 21st century with the kind of pride and success that you deserve thank you very much and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton14 4 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you ladies and gentlemen for that wonderful welcome i want you to know what i ve been thinking sitting over here i m sitting here thinking to myself now that reverend lewis has preached and sister battle has sung there s nothing left for me to do but pass the plate and that s already been done the invitation was issued in advance i m just preaching to the saved let me say to all of you how profoundly grateful i am to be here to be joined by john and lillian and john miles and the whole lewis family governor and mrs barnes mayor and mrs campbell congressman bishop former congressman buddy darden and lillian and i want to thank ralph peters he s been a great master of ceremonies and reverend belin also sang us a pretty good prayer didn t he i thought he was great i want to congratulate ray strather on that beautiful beautiful film he did a wonderful job and i thank him you know john was up here talking about being 60 years old and i was thinking about the first time i met him when i was just a young man back in the 70s held no office wanted to get elected to something in my state and was interested in helping a fellow from georgia named carter get elected president and i remember john talking to me about all these stories we saw in the movie twenty five years ago my eyes were big i thought one of the reasons i liked politics and one of the reasons i m a democrat is i can sit here a 29 year old kid and talk to john lewis about his life if anybody had ever told me 25 years later i d be back here talking about a distinguished 60 year old congressman and i d be president i d have thought they were nuts but i m honored to be here it s amazing how quickly time passes i was looking at john miles lewis talking about his daddy didn t you think he did a good job by the way i thought he was great but lillian and john and john miles and i were standing up there getting our picture taken and john was playing his daddy role and he said i don t know about that hair i said john let s don t act like we re old i said if i was 23 and i could have hair like that i d do it in a bird dog minute i thought it was great that s true when john lewis introduced me a few weeks ago in selma and we were standing at the edmond pettus bridge he gave a beautiful statement like he did tonight and then when he introduced me i said john the only thing you said i d disagree with is you said the president didn t have to be in selma today because i did have to be there because it was my story too because what was done at selma before and after freed me too and what i want to say i had to be here tonight too i have loved john lewis from the first day i met him i would feel that way if he had never gone to congress and certainly if i had never become president i love lillian she and i were over here crying at the gospel singing tonight john lewis and two of his colleagues then colleagues congressman mike espy from mississippi and bill jefferson from new orleans met with me in 1991 when i wanted to run for president and they pledged their friendship and support to me when only my mother and my wife thought i could be elected and then he went out trying to validate me to these very skeptical northern democrats they sort of agreed with president bush who used to refer to me as the governor of a small southern state and i was so dumb i thought that was a good thing i was kind of proud of that and then through all the dark days of the campaign john was there and georgia was there so i had to be here tonight for that reason i had to be here tonight because without john and the many people in our congress that he influenced the prosperity and peace and social progress we enjoy could not have been achieved over this last seven years and i had to be here tonight most of all because just as much today as 40 years ago john lewis life reflects what i think is the central lesson we all have to learn about life and that is that we find more meaning in compassion than in judgment and we find more meaning in unity than division john has somehow incorporated into himself the spirit that elevated gandhi and dr king that freed nelson mandela of his hate and bitterness in spite of 27 long years in prison he always says that one of his favorite hymns is this little light of mine well his little light has certainly shined and i ve tried to make it mine and i say that because for all the good that s happened in the last 40 years we still have a lot of bridges to cross there are still a lot of people who are just as smart and hard working as we are who couldn t afford to be here tonight because they haven t participated in our recovery then there are a lot of people who are here tonight but they re serving our food their kids deserve a chance to go to college too they ought to be paid a decent wage too they ought to have access to health care too and for all the bridges we have crossed even in the last two years there are people in this country who have been shot because they were black or asian or jewish people who have been falsely accused of terrorism because they were muslims a young boy stretched out on a rack to die in wyoming because he was gay so we ve still got a few bridges to cross but i close with this thought so you know why i came here for someone i truly love people ask me all the time you know well what do you think your greatest achievement was what do you think your biggest disappointment was if you had one wish for america what would it be and if i had one wish god came down to me tonight and said it s time to pack it up and go you can t finish your term but i m going to give you one wish i m no genie no three wishes just one i would pray that somehow america could be infected every single one of us with the spirit that has animated john lewis s life because you know all of us we get so puffed up with the importance of what we re doing and our positions and i finally got so frustrated trying to reach people who were fighting with each other that i i had a gift that was given to me last year and i just put it smack dab on the table that you see when the oval office is on television you know and i m there meeting with a world leader and there s two chairs and two couches and there s a little table in between on that table i have a gift a moon rock that neil armstrong took off the moon in 1969 he brought it to me for safekeeping only during the period of my service i might add it belongs to you to nasa but it is this vacuum packed moon rock and it is 3 6 billion years old so when people get to fighting each other and they are just about to call each other names and they are just about to go over the top and we re sitting there in the oval office including me i get angry you know i call a time out and i say here everybody see that rock there it s 3 6 billion years old chill out we re all just passing through here ultimately the lesson of the civil rights movement what freed us is that the people who were oppressed not that they got legal rights it s that they got legal rights and we overcame past problems and then they let it go and they forgave us and they were able to go on so many problems in the world today are still caused by the fact that we are a afraid of those who are different from us and once we fear people it is easy to dehumanize them and once you dehumanize them it is easy to justify hurting them or not helping them when they deserve a hand up and then it is a short step from there to violence the next big problem is that almost all of us at some point in our lives find it impossible to define our importance our meaning unless it is with negative reference to another human being or group and there s not a soul in here who hasn t done that you make some big mistake and you say well at least i m not them i m not like that i didn t do that we re not there and i have spent so much time as your president just trying to get the democrats and republicans together to get over years of accumulated frustration and hurts and angers and perceived slights and the deep need that both of us sometimes have to at least feel we re better than them i ve had to send young americans into risk their lives for the freedom of muslims in bosnia and kosovo so that europe has a chance to be free and at peace and we don t drift back into a world war situation to try to stop the conflict in northern ireland or try to stop the conflicts and make peace in the middle east or try to help the tribal differences in africa get sorted out every one of them is rooted in the fundamental fact that people have a natural tendency to define the pluses in their life in terms of the negative in someone else s and all those beautiful things john says about the beloved community what it basically means is you d rather hold hands than clench your fist you don t mind being different from other people you celebrate it you enjoy it you laugh about it it makes life more interesting but in the end you know somehow when you strip it all away our common humanity is the most important fact of life on this earth now that s what john lewis life in public service represent to me so if i could do one thing for america i would move us closer to being one america so we could hold our trembling house down but to do it we ll have to be more like him we ll have to forgive all those people that beat us up at least with words we ll have to get over all of our not just our perceived but our real beefs everybody here has got a real beef against somebody everybody here has been the subject of some unfairness some piece of bad luck some people s mean spiritedness when you strip it all away the thing that makes us want to be here for john tonight is not just that he got his brains beat out nearly 35 years ago for all our freedom but that he let it go he s not mad at anybody he treats people right doesn t think he s better than the rest of us he believes we can get more out of holding hands than clenching fists i wanted to come here tonight because america and the world need more of what is in john lewis s heart and for that i am eternally grateful and full of love thank you very much dem wjclinton14 4 03 bill_clinton thank you very much well first thanks for the warm welcome you ve kind of spoiled me i almost felt like i was president again president terry o sullivan thanks for the introduction for the great and energetic leadership you have provided to this union over the last three years thank you general secretary treasurer armond sabatoni the entire general executive board and all of you who supported al gore and me through those eight good years for america in my new role as a senate spouse i want to thank you for the support you give to hillary in the united states senate as well you heard from terry s introduction that the work that we did together made a big differenceand nothing i did in the white house would have been possible if it hadn t been for you and the other men and women of the labor movement throughout our country i am deeply indebted to you i d also like to say a special word of thanks to the president of the afl cio john sweeney who is here and who has done a magnificent job in leading the american labor movement i d also like to thank you for something else today i want to thank you mr president for letting me speak before jesse jackson one of the things that i do not miss about being president is the honor that was always accorded to the president to speak last usually it was a good thing when i had to speak behind jesse it was awful everything had already been said he would say keep hope alive today you kept a man from hope alive by letting me speak first i thank you for that and i thank you jesse jackson for a lifetime of dedication to the men and women of the labor movement in america when i ran for president i said i wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century i m still trying to do that but for a hundred years you have been building america s bridges and america s highways providing the human power that fuels state local and national government feeding america and keeping us healthy maintaining our buildings and keeping our mail flowing your hard work has made america the envy of the world and your commitment to working families to diversity and to our security both at home and abroad have made us the most successful multiracial democracy in human history for that every american should be grateful to you the news and the eyes of many americans today are still on iraq whatever our views of what happened leading up to this conflict or whatever opinions we have about what should be done there once it s over i think that i speak for all of us in saying that our prayers are still with the troops their commanders and the commander in chief we hope they come home safe with as little loss of life as possible and i and i know you are elated that all of our pow s have been released unharmed at a time like this when we have troops abroad when we ve lost a hundred of our fine young men and women in a conflict there is always a question about what the rest of us as citizens are supposed to do your father samuel gompers at the beginning of our involvement in world war i said these words it evolves upon liberty loving citizens and particularly the workers of this country to see to it that the spirit and the methods of democracy are maintained within our country while we are engaged in a war to establish them for all the nations of the world now that is the great question how do we keep the spirits and methods of democracy in the post 9 11 world how do we fight a war against tyranny and terror abroad and still stay focused on the need to make america a more perfect union for all its people here at home how do we balance the needs of national security with our highest democratic values how do we keep celebrating our growing diversity and come together around our common humanity while we take prudent measures to prevent future terror attacks from fundamentalist fanatics the way we answer those questions will determine the quality and strength of the bridges america builds in this new century there are really honest differences of opinion between republicans and democrats especially in washington d c differences that require us to choose and to act sometimes the real substantive differences tend to get obscured in washington where personal attacks often dominate over policy debates where asking prudent questions about national policy gets your patriotism questioned on right wing talk shows and where evidence is often put off in a little dark closet somewhere i ll never forget what hillary said to me early in our second term when some bizarre thing or another was going on in the nation s capitol she said you know washington has become an evidence free zone i thought that was one of the smartest things she ever said i wish she d been wrong about it but she wasn t what she meant was that most of us democrats believe we have to win our struggles through evidence and argument we think we ought to make political decisions based on plain evidence of what s best for most of the american people and we expect to have to argue and defend our positions against those who disagree with us most of our friends in this new very conservative republican party believe in their cultural entitlement to rule therefore they govern by ideology and attack they know how they want it to come out and since they are entitled to have it come out that way they just sort of make up the evidence as they go along for example there is nothing irrational in their minds about the argument that they make about the eight years that i served as your president the argument they make is that i am responsible for every single bad thing that s happened since i left office and not a single good thing that happened when i was in office now that makes perfect sense to them because it s the argument they have to make to justify a sense of entitlement to rule and to pursue a given ideology the problem is that doesn t work very well for america let s take just one case in point your president mentioned the family and medical leave law now that bill was vetoed in the previous republican administration before i became president it s the first bill i signed most republicans voted against it they said it would be terrible terrible for the economy never mind that 170 other countries already had family leave laws never mind that most of these countries actually provided paid family leave when a parent was sick or a baby was being born it was against their ideology i thought it only made good sense that if people were happy and succeeding at home as parents or children or brothers and sisters they would be more productive at work it turned out that after 35 million people had taken advantage of the family leave law we had the most rapid economic growth in our history but that didn t stop them once they got into power from eliminating the option i left for states to provide paid family leave from surpluses in other accounts they just got rid of it why because their ideology dictated that they do it notwithstanding the evidence the family leave is one of the best things that s been done for this country in the last twenty years i ll never forget when we passed that economic plan in 1993 and every single member of the other party voted for it senator gramm and the others said this was the worst piece of legislation that ever passed that it would bring a terrible recession and it would be the end of our free economic system and that it would explode the deficit well we created 50 more jobs in the 90s than they did in the 80s we got rid of the deficit and ran a surplus for four years in a row for the first time in 70 years we were on our way to being debt free by the time the baby boomers retired we took 100 times as many people out of poverty in our recovery as they did in the recovery of 1980s100 times after all that happened well they just made up another argument they said oh he didn t have anything to do with that that s because of some tax cut we passed way back in 1981 that quadrupled the national debt you have to believe in evidence and argument if you want policies to work for the american people so they got back in office and what s the first thing they did they passed this massive tax cut in 2001 40 of the benefits went to people like mei love saying this because i never had a nickel before i left the white house i pay taxes in new york so i pay more than anybody and my attitude is if you ve got money and you don t want to pay taxes to make america better then move someplace where you don t have to pay any taxes but you ought to pay your fair share of taxes if you live here so what did they do in 2001 they adopted this humongous tax cut that s heavily weighted to upper income people and they did it because they said well we have a 5 8 trillion projected surplus when we took office they decided to get rid of it as quick as they could and they ve done a brilliant job of that you know that s real money to go from a 5 8 trillion projected surplus to a 2 trillion projected deficit over the next ten years that takes some doing it s a massive accomplishment but what happened they passed this tax cut before they knew what our income was going to be before they knew what our expenses were going to be before they knew what emergencies we would have so the economy turned down and that caused our income to drop and our expenses to go up and then on september 11th we had one whale of an emergency of course we had to deal with all that but we d already given away the store if you ran your business that way if you ran your household finances that way you would all be broke and you wouldn t be able to afford to come to las vegas to this convention that s the way your country is run because ideology dictates it not evidence and argument we are living with the consequences so i say to you that one of your big jobs todayand for the next 100 yearsis to get america back on the path of evidence and argument and away from the politics of ideology anger and attack now the 2000 election was fought to a virtual dead heat we won by a half million popular votes and they won florida by 5 to 4 in the supreme court so under our constitutional system they got to take over but that was hardly a mandate to blow the whole surplus and turn it into a deficit by giving people in my income group tax cuts we didn t need that are bad for the economy there was no mandate for the assault on clean air on the california redwoods on the national forests i tried to protect there was no mandate for an assault on the labor movement but that is the consequence of governance by ideology attack and anger over government by evidence and argument when i came to washington i wanted to lead america into a new century that is obviously characterized by global interdependence a world where we can t escape each other so i thought the first thing i had to do was to get america going again to create opportunity for every responsible american to build a community of all americans and then to make us the leading force for peace freedom prosperity and security around the world i thought i had to be pro business and pro labor pro growth and pro environment pro work and pro family i think it worked out pretty well for the american people since i left office i ve tried to keep working on the things that i can still have an impact on that i cared about as president i ve worked on bringing economic opportunity to poor communities at home and around the world on bridging the divides between race and religion around the world on fighting the scourge of aids in the caribbean and africa on increasing educational opportunities and opportunities for citizen service for young people in the united states and around the world it s all immensely rewarding and reminds me that we don t ever have to wait for our government to do a lot of goodall of us can do a lot of good on our own but neither can we ignore the fact that the decisions of our government will shape the world we live in in profound ways if you look at what happened on september 11th that was the down side of an interdependent globalized world we got the benefits the up side in the 1990s i knew the downside was out there we worked hard to fight the terrorists we broke up twenty of the al qaeda cells we stopped a lot of terrorist attacks we limited the spread and increased the destruction of weapons of mass destruction but what happened on september 11th 2001 is that al qaeda used the forces of global interdependence against us they used open borders easy travel easy immigration easy access to information and technology and they turned a plane full of jet fuel into a weapon of mass destruction why did they do that they did that because they don t want to live in our world they don t recognize its benefits they define their responsibilities differently and their values are different like fanatics everywhere they thought they were in possession of the sole truth we have to substitute for that a whole different view we have to build a world of shared values shared benefits and shared responsibilities the values have to be pretty simple our differences are importantthey make life interestingbut our common humanity matters more every person counts every person deserves a chance every person has a responsible role to play but we all do better when we work together with those values we can construct a world where we maximize our opportunities and minimize the horrible dangers of terror and mass destruction in order to do it we do have to have a security policy to fight terrorism and weapons of mass destruction we also have to have a policy like harry truman did after world war ii where we take a little money to make a world with more friends and fewer terrorists helping people to make a living and put their kids in school and fight the scourge of aids tb malaria and other diseases we have to have a policy that keeps trying to build international cooperation i know it s fashionable today to bash the un and to make jokes about the french and the germans but i ll tell you one thing it s important not to forget that the whole un was with us on 9 11 and today there are still german and french soldiers serving with us in afghanistan trying to get the guys who really caused all the death on 9 11 osama bin laden and his crowd so we can t afford to walk away from all that but today what i want to say to you is this we cannot hope to remain strong abroad unless we keep getting stronger at home the military force which has done so well in iraq with relatively small loss of life on both sides was reorganized and funded largely in the second term of my administration while we continued to run a surplus because all of you had jobs and america was working when i ran in 1992 i had to go around trying to convince a lot of my democratic supporters that we had to be more involved in the world that we couldn t be strong at home unless we were strong abroad we couldn t forget about our responsibilities in the world just because we had problems at home now we ve got the reverse problem washington acts like we can be strong around the world and we can just forget what is happening to america and to our future here at home that s not right either the power of our example is always as important as the force of our arms i don t think we re stronger over the long run to go from a 5 8 trillion surplus to a 2 trillion deficit i don t think it was a good idea to adopt that big tax cut and go into deficits you know how that first tax cut s being paid for by depleting the social security and medicare trust funds when i left office we had enough money in surplus to make social security good without any changes till 2052 almost the end of the life expectancy of all but the most fortunate baby boomers medicare was good till 2030halfway through the life expectancy of the baby boomers with plenty of time to figure out what to do how to protect our country and how to hold it together we threw it all away to give me a tax cut this last budget is even worse it gave another big tax cut heavily tilted to upper income people the budget also pays for school repairs for iraqi schools health care for iraqi kids and modernizing the transportation of iraq now i m not against thatwe just blew a lot of it up but i think it s interesting that we re funding what they needwhich i m forand giving me another tax cut with a budget that has already eliminated all the funds to repair america s schools and to hire 100 000 more teachers when we have the biggest student body in our history now in this budget proposing another tax cut for me and help for the kids of iraq the administration proposes to kick 500 000 poor american children out of their after school programs when we know that keeps them in school and out of trouble and improves their learning this budget gets rid of the entire cops program which put 110 000 police on the street when i was president and gave you a 26 year low crime rate we re now getting rid of our help to local governments to hire police at a time when they re so broke they re already laying police off and the crime rate is going up i thought this was a tough on crime administration this budget provides no new money to fund the very good bill president bush signed in 2001 to improve our public schoolsthe leave no child behind act now we just leave the funding behind now maybe you think that s okay but if you don t you ve got to talk to somebody if you govern by evidence and argument the first rule is when you find yourself in a hole quit digging if you govern by ideology and attack the first rule when you find yourself in a hole isapparentlygive me a bigger shovel please look we re all laughing but this is serious we ve got 100 young people who lost their lives because they were asked to defend freedom halfway around the world we ve got poor people being asked to sacrifice we ve got middle class people being asked to give up the certainty of social security and medicare in this ideology driven atmosphere where we re all being told we have to sacrifice to fight terror what is my sacrifice they re asking me to exert the energy necessary to open the envelope to give myself another tax cut while a half million poor american schoolchildren are going to be thrown out of their after school programs it is horrible economics it is bad ethics it is wrong and it will not stand the test of evidence you ought to fight it with everything you ve got i can t do that i want to say something about that though we have these elections that roll around every four years in 2002 my party our party lost a few seats in the senate and the house we were outspent badly but the election was also fought on a false argument it was more our fault than the public s because we let them get away with it they couldn t win the national security argument on afghanistan and osama bin laden because we were all for what they were doing there and they couldn t win the national security argument on iraq because more than half the democrats had voted to give the president the authority to use force if the united nations inspection process failed so they decided they d be for the homeland security bill that they had opposed for seven months they were stomp down against it and all of a sudden they were for it 24 hours later if you weren t for it you were no longer a patriot and you had put america s security at risk did that mean they put our security at risk for the seven months they were against it talk about a bogus argument but we let them get away with it so it s our fault and i m not whining just pointing it out meanwhile we tried to do things to increase our security that we should have made into issues we worry about whether saddam hussein has weapons of mass destruction and they ll probably find some but let me tell you the biggest stocks of chemical and biological weapons are still in the former soviet union they are also in other places and there s fissionable material out of which nuclear bombs can be made all over the world the democrats led by chet edwards from texas had a bill last year to increase funding to go in and secure and destroy those stocks our friends in the republican party opposed it we ought to come back and do it and say that would really make us safer we wanted to do more than they do to protect the roads the bridges the water systems the tunnels the airports of this country that s real homeland security i just want to say something about the presidential campaign i m not going to endorse any of them because they ve all done a lot for me and i like them all but i am going to say this every time a bunch of people like the crowd we ve got now start running a lot of the pundits say oh they re all small they re all pygmies they re all this and all that that s a bunch of bull if you look at what these people have done for our country in the positions they have already had they have arguably done more for america than any other group of people we ve had running for president in over forty years they re just not famous yet but they are good and they are able there are plenty of people in that crowd capable of being good presidents i think you ought to give them a respectful hearing and you ought to know that i know these people and i have confidence in their capacity to grow in this presidential process and to serve you don t have the option not to choose based on the evidence and the arguments let me close with this i m not young anymore and i liked the eight years we had but for most of my life my side lost because most of the time when things are going well in america it s easy for the people with money and power to spin some story and squeeze by i m not against money and power my administration made more millionaires and billionaires than the republicans ever did but a lot of them didn t feel good about it because we made them pay their fair share of taxes and moved a lot of folks out of poverty too it s more ideologically comforting to think that you re whipping the government and taking the money away but our deal works all we have to do is to be willing to stand up for what we know is right i m going to tell you something ten years from now we re going to look back and shake our heads we had a surplus declining poverty the number of children without health insurance going down for the first time in years the welfare rolls cut in half the economy growing and environment getting better with cleaner air cleaner water safer foodand we decided that we would squander all that and our ability to deal with the retirement of the baby boomers by giving ourselves huge tax cuts before we knew what our income expenses and emergencies were and then we had to spend more money to deal with a crisis abroad and with domestic safety at home we will look back on this period and say what in the wide world happened to us it doesn t have to be that way but this union has not been here for 100 years because you were quiet in the face of challenge or because you wimped out when the going got tough now i m telling you most americans still want a country that works for them most americans know that we can t be strong abroad unless we re strong at home most americans know that there ought to be opportunity for every responsible citizen and that those of us who have been most blessed in this country should make the largest contribution to future generations most people know that but if you don t stand up for evidence and argument and american values and the future of our children and grandchildren who will do it if you want to be here 100 years from now then you make sure we reverse this wrong course thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton14 5 94 bill_clinton thank you for that wonderful rousing welcome thank you for your support of the democratic governors and thank you you folks here in indiana for your support of my good friends evan and susan bayh you know like evan bayh when i was elected governor of arkansas i was the youngest governor in the country indeed i was the youngest person elected in 40 years now 40 years before me the person who was elected slightly younger than me was harold stasson who later ran for president eight times which shows you that there may or may not be significance to being the youngest governor in the country but nonetheless when i met evan bayh i really resented him i mean he was so young and handsome and i realized i d never be that young again i d never look that good again come to think of it i still sort of resent him for that when we play golf he hits the ball longer than i do when we come in he graciously fabricates the truth and tells people that i won when i didn t then he puts the burden on me to try to correct it occasionally i do i really admire governor bayh and his wife and his whole administration and all the people who have done so much to change indiana i d also like to thank your members of congress who came with me today the chairman of the house committee on foreign affairs lee hamilton congressman phil sharp who s retiring against my will but who is going to be replaced by another good democrat joe hogsett congressman frank mccloskey congressman tim roemer and i want to say as special word of thanks to congressman andy jacobs who did so much to put over our assault weapons ban last week i want to acknowledge your former congressman and your nominee for the senate jim jontz wish him well and say a word of thanks to the other democratic governors who are here who have all been recognized but who were colleagues of mine in my former life when i was a governor or as my wife says back when we had a life governor mel carnahan governor ben nelson governor bruce sundlun and governor joan finney i thank them for their personal friendship and for their leadership i want to thank katie whelan of the democratic governors association and ann delaney the chair of the democratic party her husband ed sally kirkpatrick diane simon and all of you who did this today this wonderful wonderful lunch thank you i feel almost like i don t have to say anything i mean i saw the movie and i heard everybody else s speech it reminds me of the first time i got up to give a speech this is a true story in 1977 the first speech i ever gave as an elected official i was an attorney general i was 30 years old i was sort of scared i spoke to 500 people at the annual rotary club dinner in pine bluff arkansas and it was one of these deals where they installed officers and gave out awards and all but three people were there got introduced and they went home mad the dinner started at 6 30 p m and i got up to speak at a quarter to 10 00 p m and the guy who introduced me was more nervous than i was he later became a great friend of mine but here is how the introduction to my first public address as an elected official started he said you know we could stop here and have had a very good evening now he didn t mean it the way it came out but i feel that way today you could stop here and have had a wonderful meal a wonderful celebration of our party and our prospects and our future i was glad to see the tribute paid to evan bayh and his leadership in indiana he proved some things about democrats that the republicans keep trying to deny in all their rhetoric and with all their media barrages he proved that democrats can govern in an austere fiscal climate by cutting spending and without raising taxes he proved that democrats understand the importance of jobs in the free enterprise system and he has worked relentlessly to bring more jobs to this state he understands the link between economic growth and education indiana s step ahead program is a real model for this country the new gateway education standards mirror what we re trying to do at the national level in 1988 he ended 20 years of republican governance of the statehouse the democrats have come a long way since that election when he was elected secretary of state he was the only democrat in statewide office republicans controlled both houses of the legislature half the seats in congress today you ve got five statewide elected officials including your distinguished attorney general the first african american woman elected to statewide office in the history of this state you have seven of the ten seats in congress and i hope after this next election mayor mike harmless will give us eight of the ten seats in indiana i owe a lot to the years i spent as a governor basically i ran for president because i was tired of what i thought was the stale rhetoric in washington the incredible partisan gridlock and the politics of division and diversion and often personal destruction everybody arguing over left and right and liberal and conservative and how this process was and who was up and down and who was in and out and people in this country were being lost in the whole process and we were at risk of losing the american dream as we moved toward the 21st century i saw hard working people business people and laboring people work hard in the 1980s to improve their productivity and to try to come to grips with the realities of the 80s and the economic competition of the world i saw all these wonderful teachers and other people trying to revitalize education i saw community leaders standing against the tide of rising violence and declining family structure to make good things happen i knew a lot of members of congress who were honest good honorable people who wanted to make a difference and yet always always always what we seem to be getting out of our national government was more politics and less performance i ran for a very simple reason because i wanted to get this country moving again and i wanted to see the american people pull together again i wanted us to go into the 21st century a strong united wonderful place living up to our promise our potential our past and our own ideals and i was tired of reading all these prognostications that my daughter was going to grow up to be part of the first generation of americans to do worse than their parents and i believed we could do better i thought we could do it by organizing ourselves around three little words opportunity for all americans responsibility from all americans and a believe that we are one community that we really believe in our national motto e pluribus unum that we are one from many and that we are all in this together and that ultimately we will go up or down together i believed that if we followed those three little words in all of our policies and we looked at the real world that we could find new ways to rebuild our families and our communities to honor the american people who elect us all i believed we could go beyond partisan gridlock it s been frankly a little tougher than i thought it would be and it s been even tougher to get the message to the american people that we are doing what we said we would do last year congress had the courage to pass last year the congress had the courage to pass an economic program which went beyond rhetoric to reality it drove down the deficits it drove down interest rates it increased investment in critical areas the congress had the courage to take on a lot of tough trade issues we did more to foster the expansion of global trade last year than in any single year in a generation the congress was willing to work with me to invest in new technologies and take the controls off exporting many of them in the aftermath of the cold war and what has happened three million jobs in the first 15 months of this administration a million in the first four months of this year i ll tell you my fellow americans the other party talked a lot in washington about delivering for the free enterprise system they talked but we delivered this week the congress passed our budget for this year a budget that without new taxes will increase funding for education for training for new technologies for medical research and still for the first time since 1969 reduce overall domestic discretionary spending along with defense reductions for the first time since 69 by eliminating 100 government programs and reducing 200 others this will give us for the first time since harry truman was president and with all respect when it had to happen at the end of world war ii three years of declining deficits in a row for the first time since the truman presidency they talked about it we delivered it the vice president has led a path breaking effort that we call reinventing government to try to examine how we do things and how we can serve you better how we can make government less bureaucratic and act more quickly and push decisions down to the grass roots level i ll just give you one example that you can find now if you need to apply for an sba loan we ve got it down to a one sheet form and it takes two days to process and i could give you 50 other examples like that if time permitted perhaps the most graphic example is this under our budget we will reduce the size of the federal government not by firing people but by attrition by 252 000 over a five year period so that at the end of the period the national government will be below two million employees for the first time since 1960 and all of the savings will be put into a trust fund to pay for the crime bill 100 000 more police officers on the street the other party always talked about reducing the size of government and empowering people at the local level but we have delivered and that is our job we are breaking new ground in education developing a system of lifetime learning helping the young people who don t go on to college but do need further training lowering the cost of college loans and stringing out the repayments but toughening the collection procedures so that we can open the doors of college education to every one you heard a little talk the other day a few moments ago about our national service program i think in so many ways that embodies what this administration is about opportunity responsibility and community twenty thousand young people this year will be working in their communities in national service to revolutionize places where they live to solve problems and earning money for their education and year after next we will have 100 000 young americans doing that i m proud of the work we have done to stand up for the american family you heard on the film that wonderful woman talking in the rose garden about the problems they had been through because that family that you saw speaking at the signing of the family and medical leave act had been wrenched by a childhood illness and being forced to deal with the question of whether the parents would be with the children and lose their jobs or keep their jobs and not be with the children i think the most moving personal encounter i ve had actually in the white house since i have been president occurred on an early sunday morning when i came in from my run and i noticed a family taking a tour which is very on a sunday morning at about 9 00 a m and i went over and shook hands with them there was a father a mother three children all girls and it turned out that the child that was in a wheelchair was one of these make a wish children a child with a very serious illness and i asked them to excuse me and i went up and changed clothes came down with my uniform on so we could take a picture and i was walking away and all of a sudden this father grabbed me by the arm and i turned around and he said let me tell you something mr president he said i imagine that a lot of days you think that the work you do up here really doesn t matter and doesn t affect people s lives but he said my little girl is desperately ill and she s probably not going to make it because of the family leave law i have been able to take some time off from my job to be with my child without thinking that i am disadvantaging my wife and other two children by losing my job and he said to me it s the most important experience of my life and it would not have happened if it hadn t been for the family leave law don t ever think what you do here doesn t make a difference folks the family leave law was tied up in gridlock for seven years the brady bill was tied up in gridlock for seven years the gatt treaty took seven years to pass the crime bill that the congress is now in conference on has been tied up for five years it is too long for americans to wait while partisan differences get resolved and people s lives hang in the balance we are trying to deliver for you up there let me say we have had some support from the other party on some important initiatives on national service and i m grateful for it on the education bills and i am grateful for it on the crime bill and i am grateful for it thirtyeight brave republicans stood up with the democrats the other day and voted on the assault weapons ban and i am grateful for it but the point i want to make to you is this you probably a lot of you probably didn t even know some of the things i have said because our national debate is so shrouded in this shrill uncivil diversionary rhetoric we are moving to break gridlock but we also have to break the gridlock that is in people s minds because no matter what we do in the government very few of our specific actions will affect a majority of the american people if you just take the welfare reform issue for example something i care deeply about we re going to propose a remarkable welfare reform bill which will go with the other things we re doing to try to help people move from dependence to independence lowering taxes for working people with modest incomes this year one in six working families will be eligible for a tax break so they can be successful workers and successful parents and there will be no incentive to leave work and go to welfare providing for health care for all americans will mean that no one will want to stay on welfare just to get health coverage for their kids one of the reasons that people don t leave welfare has nothing to do with the welfare check it s because if you stay on welfare the government will pay for your children s health care if you get off welfare and you take a low wage job with an employer that in today s market can t afford health insurance you then pay taxes to pay for health care for people who didn t make the decision you did that is not pro family it is not pro work it is not good policy we need a tax structure a health care structure a tough child support enforcement system and an education and training system and ultimately a requirement that people work so that we can change this system as we know it but to do it we have to know that we share values and we re trying to get this done because it s the right thing for our country not because it will affect most of us because most of us aren t on welfare that is the problem i face all the time how rhetoric sometimes gets in the way of reality when we re up there trying to do things that i know embody the values of the people of this country and i know will give us a chance to move ahead but i know ultimately we cannot prevail unless there is a new spirit among the american people a new determination to change the way we evaluate politics and politicians and to change the way we live at the grass roots level and let me just mention two issues the first is health care my fellow americans we cannot ever and you can book this we cannot ever get control of the federal deficit as long as the government s health care programs medicare and medicaid are going up at two and three times the rate of inflation we cannot hope to be fully competitive in a global economy as long as we spend 45 percent more of our national income on health care than any other country does some of it is money well spent on medicare research and new technologies and new drugs and the things that make us special some of it is money we have to spend because we re more violent than other countries but a lot of it is money we spend because we are the only country that employs hundreds of thousands of people literally in doctors offices hospitals insurance offices all across america to see who and what is not covered on the insurance policy no one else does that that adds tens of billions of dollars to our system now if this were easy to fix somebody would have done it long ago for 60 years presidents have tried our system is based on i mean my plan is based on some simple ideas and i don t ask everybody to agree with every detail but it s based on some simple ideas if nine out of 10 people with insurance get it in the workplace and eight out of 10 people without health insurance have somebody in their family that works and you want the system to be as private as possible wouldn t the best thing be to say that people who haven t assumed responsibility for themselves and their workers should assume some responsibility and should do their part as well because any student of the health care system will tell you until you cover everybody you re going to have massive cost shiftings you re going to have uncontrollable elements and costs in the system and you re going to have abject unfairness that s why i propose to extend the requirement of covering health care for everybody through employers and employees not a government mandate it s a private system the second thing what has been the objection to the health care thing this is what i want to get at what s happening to our national debate because i want to talk about your responsibilities as citizens one in the national debate and second inaction in the grass roots level what s happened to the national debate they say support for my plan has gone down it has under the weight of tens of millions of dollars of adverse efforts to try to convince you that it is a government run system that it is horrible for small business that it is a mindless bureaucracy where crazy people will be making decisions for you i ve seen all these ads now the truth is and i ve read some of the letters that have the truth is quite different the truth is it s private insurance private providers the government does the following things the government says everybody has to be covered the government establishes a pool to give discounts to small business people who would be otherwise in real trouble if they had to pay the full value of a health care policy to try to protect the small business economy and the government organizes buying groups so that small businesses and self employed people can buy insurance on the same terms as government employees and big business people now that s what we do with all respect the other last sunday i saw on television a man i very much admire and like president ford giving a speech attacking our health care program that was prepared for him by the other party and one of the lines in this speech it was devastating i mean it was a hum dinger it said they want to set up a national health care board where there are seven people in washington to decide what is necessary and appropriate for your health care i don t think we ought to let seven bureaucrats in washington make decisions that you and your doctors ought to make do you and i said goodness no shoot the guy that put that plan out there right so i go to the office the next day and i said you know that was not a fair characterization of our plan but he wouldn t knowingly misstate that let s do a little research because i remembered something i remembered that president ford and president carter in a nonpolitical atmosphere were the honorary co chairs of a bipartisan effort to reform the health care system they had a detailed health care plan very much like ours in which they and they wrote an op ed piece about it signed by president ford proposing two national boards not to be fair to them not to regulate the health system or make decisions for your doctors but to do exactly what our little board was going to do which was to evaluate claims by people that there ought to be new benefits added to health care packages and funded and somebody needed to evaluate it in a nonpolitical professional atmosphere to see how much these things were costing now how are you supposed to be active citizens if that s the way the debate s going so i m going to write a funny little letter to president ford and send a copy of his article and underline the board deal you know but the point is he didn t know that i mean he just was given a speech and he is a good man but don t you see how this kind of debate obscures what really matters what matters what matters is 39 million americans don t have any health insurance at any given time during the year 58 million americans don t have any health insurance now keep in mind there s 255 million people in this country so you add up the statistics eighty one million of us live in families with preexisting conditions a child with diabetes a find mother who has had premature cancer a father who had a heart attack at an early age people who under the present system can t ever change jobs because they can t get insurance or they d have to pay more than they could ever afford three quarters of us who have insurance in the workplace have lifetime limits which means if we should happen to have a baby with a terrible health problem that doesn t take the child s life away we could run out of insurance before the child is old enough to get out of the house at the very time we need it now those are the real problems and i say to you you should demand not as democrats but as americans that we face this problem this year not with smoke and hot air and rhetoric but sitting down across the table as compassionate americans and resolving it this year not later let me mention one last issue before i came here today i was honored to go with mrs ethel kennedy who is here with us out to that wonderful site where robert kennedy spoke here in indianapolis the night martin luther king was killed to break ground for a memorial which will be made to both those men and what they have meant to our country and to the lives of so many of us and we know that at least some of what will be used in the sculpture will be metal that comes from weapons which were turned in in the weapons buy back program here and melted down the thing i liked about that more than anything else was that this was something that i could go and celebrate as president but that i didn t have a thing in the world to do with the citizens of this community your basketball team your prosecutor your local officials church leaders they re going to make this work and in the process they will change the attitudes and the behavior of people all across this community without regard to race or income or political party they are going to give around this project thousands of people around here the chance to be americans in the best sense again now we re going to pass this crime bill there will be 100 000 police in it and if they re deployed properly they ll make a real difference on your streets they can drive the crime rate down and we are going to have some tougher punishment in the bill and we re going to have a lot of prevention money to give these kids something to say yes to before they get in trouble as well as just telling them to say no and we re going to have this ban on the 19 assault weapons but let me ask you what is it you wish to discuss about this and what are your responsibilities yesterday in greenbelt maryland right outside washington there was a 13 year old boy from a poor family standing minding his own business just won a scholarship to one of the most distinguished private schools in washington standing there on the street minding his own business these nine kids got in a fight started shooting and that boy s dead today there s a poor neighborhood in your nation s capital that got sick and tired of this kind of stuff so they just built a fence around their neighborhood and hired guards just like they were rich people in private developments and they had the same results now old folks are sitting on park benches talking and the kids are playing because they ve constructed a wall between themselves and the rest of america when this assault weapons ban was voted on it should not have been as difficult as it was it shouldn t have been as painful as it was but a lot of good honest people in indiana and in other places were told that it was a threat to their right to keep and bear arms and i understand that i grew up in a state where more than half the folks have a hunting or a fishing license or both and most of us grew up shooting 22s and 410s long before we were old enough to drive a car i understand that but very few of those americans were told that that bill contained explicit i mean written protection for more than 650 sporting weapons even as we were trying to make our streets safe for the police and the people in the face of the awful bloody assaults we see on our children every day why because of the rhetoric and i say to you i will do my best as your president to fight these things i will do my best to work with the congress i ll do my best to stick up for the democrats when we re leading the way but to also give the republicans credit when they help just like i have today but you have got to change the dimensions of the debate in every community in this country and you have got to take some personal responsibility for how this happens the president and the congress cannot save all those 13 year old kids that are standing in front of bus stops today but you can and your police officers can and your churches can and maybe the best we can do in the short run is to put those walls up i say hallelujah to those poor folks why should you have to be rich to have a wall behind which your children and your grandparents are safe that s fine but consider the irony of that in a few months i will go to europe to celebrate dday the victory of freedom i will go to germany to celebrate our victory in the cold war do you remember what president kennedy said when he gave that wonderful ich bin ein berliner speech at the berlin wall he said this he said freedom has many difficulties and our democracy is far from perfect but we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in no we never did but now millions of us have to put up walls to keep our people out is that what martin luther king and robert kennedy gave their lives for i don t think so and i tell you it doesn t matter who the president it doesn t matter how hard the congress labors unless we can change the dimensions of our conversation away from all this division destructive the shouting this uncivil this often outright dishonest talk to a calm and more hospitable and more respectful tone and unless people at the grass roots level take personal responsibility for all these kids whose lives are at risk then the political system cannot produce the results you want of those little words opportunity responsibility and community i believe with all my heart by far the most important is community we re still around after two centuries folks yes because we had good leaders but most of all because we had good people with good hearts and good values and good minds and more than half the time they did what was right it is now required of all of us that we do what is right thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton14 5 98a bill_clinton chancellor kohl members of the german government mr mayor members of the diplomatic corps the veterans of the luftbruecke and to the people of germany fifty years ago this air strip was a pivotal battlefield in a war that had not yet been named in 1948 the world could not yet speak of another war world war ii had left europe devastated and divided nowhere was the crisis more acute than here in berlin people were hungry and homeless a hundred years earlier karl marx had declared that a specter is haunting europe the specter of communism in 1948 the specter s shadow fell across half the continent the edge of that shadow was the runway here at tempelhof airport the last european battlefield of world war ii became the first battlefield of the cold war on june 24 1948 stalin threw down a gauntlet refusing to allow supplies to be sent to berlin it was war by starvation with more than 2 million lives hanging in the balance the blockade stymied the british the french the american allies some saw no solution and reluctantly advised evacuation the fate of free berlin hung by a thread the thread of air support no one really thought it was possible to supply a city by air a few visionaries however were convinced it could be done they had no precedent just the simple rules of conscience and ingenuity that determine all our best actions and they had a president on june 28 in a small meeting at the white house harry truman said there is no discussion on that point we stay in berlin period from the moment the largest airlift in history began the western allies became protectors instead of occupiers of germany there are so many stories from that proud period the leadership of general clay and general thomas the american british and german casualties we must never forget the countless acts of individual kindness like gail halvorsen the famous rosinenbomber who dropped tiny parachutes of candy to berlin s children she is here with us today and i d like to ask her to stand thank you very much thank you sir thank you he s here thank you sir if the communists could fight with fear then we would fight back with friendship and faith today i salute along with the chancellor all the american veterans who came back to celebrate today i would like to ask any of them who are here to please stand and i salute the people of berlin thousands of berliners from doctors to housewives rolled up their sleeves to help americans expand this airfield building tegel airport from scratch unloading and maintaining the planes your fearless mayor ernst reuter inspired americans and germans alike when he stood before a rally and said we cannot be bordered we cannot be negotiated we cannot be sold and finally i salute the 75 000 people from all around europe who helped the airlift in some capacity and made it a triumph for people who love freedom everywhere between june of 1948 and may of 1949 over a quarter million sorties were flown around the clock day and night in weather good and bad roughly a plane every 90 seconds at its height but the most precious cargo did not come in the well named care packages it was instead the hope created by the constant roar of the planes overhead berliners called this noise a symphony of freedom reminding you that berlin was not alone and that freedom was no flight of imagination today a new generation must relearn the lessons of the airlift and bring them to bear on the challenges of this new era for the cold war is history a democratic russia is our partner and we have for the first time a chance to build a new europe undivided democratic and at peace yet we know that today s possibilities are not tomorrow s guarantees for all the promise of our time we are not free from peril that is why i hope both americans and germans will always remember the lesson of what happened here 50 years ago we cannot relinquish the responsibilities of leadership for the struggle for freedom never ends in the heat of the berlin crisis general clay wrote i believe the future of democracy requires us to stay well that was the best investment we could have made in germany s future it would be difficult to imagine a better friend or ally than modern germany how proud those who participated in the airlift must have been when germany reunified when germany led the effort to unify europe and when the modern equivalent of care packages were sent to bosnia afghanistan and other places ravished by war when the people of germany were among the first to send them it was a good investment in democracy to stay now we must continue to build bridges between our two peoples the fulbright program between germany and the united states is the largest in the world this fall the american academy in berlin will open bringing our leading cultural figures here we will be working hard to expand our support for the congress bundestag youth exchange which has already given more than 10 000 german and american students the chance to visit each other s countries the next century of our cooperation for freedom has already begun in our classrooms let us give our young people the chance to build even stronger bridges for the future in his song of the spirits over the waters gunther wrote man s soul is like the water from heaven it descends to heaven it rises and down again to earth it returns ever repeating to me these lines express the heroism of the airlift for more than food and supplies were dropped from the skies as the planes came and went and came and went again the airlift became a sharing of the soul a story that tells people never to give up never to lose faith adversity can be conquered prayers can be answered hopes realized freedom is worth standing up for my friends today and 100 years from today the citizens of this great city and all friends of freedom everywhere will know that because a few stood up for freedom now and forever berlin lack talk berlin berlin is still berlin thank you very much dem wjclinton14 5 98b bill_clinton well the short answer to your question is yes one of the reasons that i was so excited about coming here is that i felt that if the chancellor and i were to come here together and there would be widespread news coverage of our trip then back in america and indeed in other places there would be people who say well maybe we should look at investing there investors are like all other people you assume they know everything but no one knows everything no one has ever possible option for activity in his or her head all the time and so i think that one of the great challenges that germany faces obviously is to bring the easternlander up to the employment levels and the income levels generally of the western part of the country one of the great challenges europe faces is to bring all the countries that were part of the warsaw pact up to the level of employment and income of the rest of europe and the only way this can be done is by people who believe in your counterparts who believe in you and your potential investing their money and putting people to work because of your geographical location i would imagine that any kind of manufacturing operation would be a good operation here because there are good transportation networks in and out of here to the rest of europe and because frankly the continent is not that large i don t think there is any kind of thing you can t do i think that chancellor kohl has already said that you would have greater advantage probably in the areas where you already have a proven track record but most manufacturers in america are prepared to go anywhere there is a work force that can be trained where people will work hard and work in the kind of teamwork spirit that you have demonstrated here at this plant so i hope that our coming here will help more of your fellow citizens to get good jobs and that s one of the reasons we wanted to come well first let me say i suppose our most important achievement is turning the american economy around in ways that benefit ordinary americans so that we not only have high growth and low unemployment but it s working in a way that most people feel more secure and they have the freedom to make more good decisions for themselves there are many other things that i have done specific things that i am very proud of but i think generally doing that has made a big difference and in the world i hope that putting america in the center of the future after the cold war will be a lasting achievement future trading relationships with europe and latin america and asia our future efforts to combat the problems of terrorism and the weapons spread our future efforts to save the environment of the world our future efforts to work with countries to help solve problems like the problems in bosnia and helmut reminded me the work we re doing now on nuclear weapons because we re a little concerned that india had a test about that in the last couple of days so at home making the economy work for all our people abroad involving the united states in the challenges of the 21st century and not letting america withdraw from the world now what would i still like to do what problems are we still trying to solve there are many things i could mention at home but i would just say two things first of all after world war ii in almost every country there was a huge increase in the birth rate people came home from the war and they wanted to have babies and they did in record numbers in the united states when these so called baby boomers and i m the oldest one i was born in 1946 when all of them retire in all the advanced countries of the world they will put enormous pressure on the retirement and health care systems and if we don t make some changes in them in our country we will put unfair burdens on our children and on our children s ability to raise our grandchildren on the other hand if we throw them out the door then our people will be divided we won t be preserving our obligations and our social contract so i would still like to reform those things in a way that protects our people but allows our children to go forward and build a good life the other thing i would say is that in our country where we have so many people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds not everyone particularly a lot of people in our inner cities has participated in this economic recovery yet we still have some neighborhoods in our cities where the unemployment rate is too high the education level is too low the crime rate is too high and i would like to find a way before i leave office to bring the spirit of enterprise to all those people the opportunities around the world i hope before i leave office that we will have secured a peace agreement in the middle east that will last for a long time dem wjclinton14 7 05 bill_clinton mr president mr vice president officers and members of ecosoc mr under secretary general ladies and gentlemen i am honored to be given the opportunity to address you today and i have been honored to serve as the secretary general s special envoy for tsunami recovery a job i intend to continue for at least two years and perhaps longer depending upon how long the work takes i look forward to our dialogue today and will try to abbreviate my remarks so we can spend more time in conversation for the last five months i have worked on trying to do what the secretary general asked me to do to make sure we had a more coordinated well organized more transparent process in the recovery phase in the long term reconstruction phase to make sure we have a uniform system of reporting and monitoring our progress to try to make sure we came up with a prevention and risk reduction strategy and better emergency management procedures and that we left this endeavor with a set of best practices which could be used by other countries facing similar problems in the future of course we all use the mantra build back better we wanted to build back better i want to say a few words about that about where it is obvious and easy and where it is difficult and uncertain i have met both in the region and here in ny and in europe with affected government officials ngos un agencies corporate leaders and ordinary citizens who care about these issues recently we convened here in ny a global consortium consisting of the largest multilateral and ngo contributors to tsunami relief and representatives of the affected countries with a common commitment to improve our coordination or financial tracking and communications and to have a uniform system to measure progress about which i will say more in a minute i have very much enjoyed the opportunity i have had to listen to the representatives of the countries ngos and others about the ongoing operational challenges these five months have confirmed my belief in the inherent value of the united nations the glue that makes international cooperation possible and i want to thank as i have on previous occasions jan egeland and margareta wahlstrom for the marvelous job they have done in coordinating work you should know in my opinion at least that in each country the un teams bringing together all the agencies are doing a good job and working hard to support the work of the governments and implementing their own plans but i believe we need to move forward quickly on a global risk reduction agenda and to improve the systems and policies for disasters before they hit as well as to help accelerate the pace of the recovery in the affected countries let me just try to be as specific as i can first of all on the need for disaster prevention and mitigation while much of the physical destruction in this massive tsunami was unavoidable clearly the human toll would have been lower if there had been adequate early warning and other prevention strategies had been in place from banda aceh we have evidence of building codes for example as many reinforced concrete buildings remained intact while others were swept away vegetation buffers appear to have made a significant difference in both indonesia and in sri lanka where mangroves in particular seem to have diluted the impact of waves on the coastline preparedness is likely to have been a key factor in contrasting human tolls in the coastal indian communities in the cuddalore district of tamil nadu between some villages that had recently undertaken training exercises under un development program sponsored efforts and others that had not and of course most of us have now heard about the enterprising british school girl tilly smith who had learned about tsunamis in her class a few weeks before going on holiday in thailand recognized the warning signs and saved reportedly a hundred people who were on the beach if early warning had made a difference in thailand 310 miles from the epicenter it is also clear that we could have done better in somalia almost 3 000 miles from the epicenter less than a month after the tsunami struck 168 countries gathered to draw up the hyogo framework for action continuing the work started in 1994 at the yokohama disaster reduction conference this hyogo framework sets out strategic goals priorities for action and agreed steps for implementation for governments and other stakeholders i have only one point to make about this we cannot let this year pass without some real progress on disaster risk reduction so i owe it the members of this council to systematically implement the hyogo plan of action and specifically to include disaster risk reduction policies and practices in the recovery efforts so as not to reinstate the old vulnerabilities to institute disaster risk awareness education in school curricula to support local programs to assess risk raise awareness of vulnerability and to close the gaps in capacity necessary to address those risks and to complete the early warning systems on a sound and sustainable technical footing well integrated with other warning systems such as those for tropical cyclones 2005 is a key year for the risk reduction agenda i have complete confidence that we will never have the tourist economies that were devastated in the maldives and the coast of thailand fully recovered until not only each country has a early warning system but there is an integrated south asian coordinated early warning system that encompasses all these nations i actually believe that because of the visibility they acquired there is an enormous potential for increased tourism in sri lanka and indonesia for example as a result of what has happened none of it will happen unless we have a good early warning system and it all works together the countries have been quite good about agreeing to work together and set up compatible technologies but we need to finish everybody has said the right things but it is very very important to get this done and to do it now i would like to say a couple of words about emergency response the immediate and unprecedented humanitarian response was wonderful politics and bureaucracy were sidelined everybody worked together but now we are in the most difficult part the recovery is much much more complex and frustrating everybody wants to be in a decent temporary shelter lot of people are still living in tents some people are living in temporary shelter in very hot temperatures that have tin roofs or sidings it is a major problem in aceh and sri lanka some 170 000 people are still living in tents the governments are moving quickly but we know it takes a long time to build permanent shelters for everyone we have in the united states people from our last hurricane who haven t been permanently sheltered yet so this is a big issue there are sufficient resources available to build satisfactory semi permanent shelters so i urge all of you to do whatever you can to ensure that whatever continuing lack of coordination and politics disputes exist on this issue don t hamper the efforts of people to have decent shelter now on my last trip to the region the number one frustration i found was in people who felt that they were living under more or less unbearable conditions finally i am concerned that we are not applying our knowledge and expertise of emergency response during the recovery phase and let me say what i mean by that there aren t established protocols in many places for example for deploying vocational trainers or putting in place project and financial tracking systems just for this phase covering the medium to longer term work we know these needs will arise so again i urge the council to support institutional agreements and pre positioning in preparedness for the recovery dimension of what we are doing now let me talk a little bit about where things stand in the early months of this recovery there is as i said impatience there is some understandable exhaustion there are some growing pains where new agencies have been created but i believe we are making a good beginning even though it may not be apparent to people who are still frustrated with their living conditions or whose livelihoods have not been restored we are beginning to get a good institutional coordinating and financing framework in place we have to worry about losing momentum but let s start with the good news i applaud indonesia and sri lanka s decisions to create dedicated recovery institutions empowered to make the right decisions and the leaders selected are able and off to a good start they have direct reporting lines to their chief executives which is good and we can already see the benefits in some of these areas for example when i was last in aceh the brr director mr kuntoro had just let out for bid some 700 million dollars in construction projects 500 million of it to be funded by ngo contributions by ordinary people all around the world the countries have completed comprehensive needs assessments which give us a guide post of what needs to be done and with the single exception of the maldives sufficient funds have been promised or secured to meet the needs in the countries that were hardest hit some of the affected countries are making substantial investments on their own india and indonesia will provide more than a billion dollars toward their recovery and we know that other nations are contributing as well we do need a concerted effort to assist the maldives in closing its funding gap it s the only one where we have a real shortfall now it s 100 to 200 million dollars and i believe there is one step that this council can take which i would like to ask to consider the maldives was recently graduated from least developed country status a process initiated by a general assembly decision two days before the tsunami hit then the tsunami hit and they lost 62 percent of their annual gdp which is heavily concentrated in fishing and tourism i would like to see their graduation delayed only until i think you made the right decision to graduate them we have to have a graduation process but i think that their graduation should be delayed until their income recovers to where it was when that was the basis for their graduation in other words the basis for their graduation no longer exists and i have already told you and i have done a lot work on this we are having real difficulties getting the tourists back to thailand to the maldives all these places and every time i go over there i d make a big plea to people to please go back but we don t have the early warning systems up people are still scared we ve got to hammer this home thailand has its up but we don t have the regions up so i would like to ask your consideration for delaying their graduation only for the period of time necessary for them to be restored to the per capita income they had which caused them to be graduated in the first place and i think that is something very specific that you could do now let me say i am quite excited and this is something i urge you all to check on yourselves to see if my excitement is justified but we set up a global consortium mechanism to establish a simple common tracking system for the funds it is now in place for the maldives sri lanka and thailand it s anchored in the un s donor assistance database model and we have just made a presentation of it to mr kuntoro in indonsia and i think they will be participating this is a great system you can get on the system now and we get it all set up and published and you can find out you can go to any country to any part of the country to any topic area that needs to be addressed and you can see what the plan is how much it costs what the timeline is and whether someone has pledged funds for this particular project or not it is a very good common way of us to be able to monitor what is happening in tsunami relief and i hope it will work as a model for what can used in similar projects in the future i also think there has been real progress in the effort to make the recovery for of a bottom up process india s district level ngo resource center the aceh reconstruction agency community facilitators now working in 2000 of the 4000 communities affected sri lanka s brave agreement this month to establish a joint implementation mechanism i must say you know i make it a practice to stay out of the politics of other countries actually i make it a practice to stay out of the politics of my own country now but the president of sri lanka lost her father and her husband to political violence was herself shot and blinded and it grieves to see her criticized for her willingness to set aside her personal losses in search of reconciliation and a successful shared future for the people of sri lanka i think we should all support that you know sooner or later i have learned in life that if you cannot kill jail or occupy all of your adversaries you have to make a deal that is where politics comes in that is why we are all sitting here in this room look at all the differences we have all had so i ask you for your support for her you think about it it s always amazing to me in country after country after country rwanda south africa now in colombia the victims of political violence are often the ones most willing to reach out the hand of reconciliation having paid so much this is important so anyways i think we are doing pretty well with that i think that anti corruption measures are being vigorously embraced i cannot tell you there has been no corruption i cannot tell you none of this money has been wasted i can tell you that this is the most serious effort i have ever seen the affected countries to be fully accountable for this money and we have been blessed to get pro bono services from deloitte and price waterhouse coopers to do forensic auditing the countries involved have separate and independent auditing systems the aceh reconstruction agency has an integrity pact with each of their partners there are lots of things being done here to try to track this money and again the very reporting system we have when we get it up and going will enable any member of the press anywhere in the world to get on the internet on any day and see what is happening with this money and then check on it so i would say that of all the things that i have ever been involved in like this this is the best effort that i have ever seen to try and be accountable but we ll have to continue to work on it what do we need to do now first we need to execute the plan of action in every country and that requires a continuing effort to clarify who is going to what where and when and to resolve whatever local disputes still exist the sri lankans for example have resolved some of the disputes but not all about how far back from the coastline construction then be held in aceh they have a terrible dilemma where the government of indonesia is committed to try to preserve their forest resources and to harvest them in a sustainable manner the cutting is already about three times what the government says is fully sustainable and they need a lot of wood so the rest of us are going to have to help them to import the wood at an affordable price where they are not gauged and they don t have to tear down their rainforest we have to support that this is i think quite important and there are lots and lots of issues like that secondly there are significant capacity constraints beyond the environmental ones and i think donor will respond positively from requests on this but we have to be sensitive about it in aceh for example 70 percent of the government buildings were destroyed 2500 teachers and assistants were lost sri lanka needs enough skills and labor to rebuild 100 000 houses when before the tsunami struck it never built more than 5 000 a year now all these things are opportunities i want to see when this is over sri lanka and aceh have a sustainable home building industry with people trained in business to have a sector of the economy that didn t exist before but still it is challenging to do we have to build this capacity up quickly there are still some unresolved government policies that will slow recovery i mentioned the coastal zoning question in sri lanka and the timber resource issue in aceh there are also land issues in india identifying and paying for alternative settlement sites and the question of which ngos are where doing what the brr in indonesia has a new one stop shop for ngo visa s but i think that s very important and the other issue that has been raised repeatedly to me is the application of import duties and taxes in sri lanka to foreign remittances and equipment being brought in by ngos so these are things that have to be worked through but we are trying let me just say a couple of words about building back better it s obvious that we at least know how to build back better houses schools and health facilities we know how to build back better disaster prevention and mitigation it is just a question of doing it the real challenge is building back a better capacity for economic diversification and growth a lot of the places that were destroyed were relatively isolated small fishing villages where it is not self evident how you would diversify and upgrade the economy now the best thing we need to do is to realize that we don t want the un to have a five year plan like the old soviet union here we have got to let people decide how they are going to build their economy back but the most impressive work really quick work i saw being done was in india in tamil nadu where local ngos went in and established production cooperatives with women who were widows of fishermen or who themselves had been fishing and had lost their boats and they were in the process of producing products which were being sold locally which i am now trying to help them sell here in the united states as well but people at home will figure out how to diversify and build their economy better if there is enough micro credit and other systematic support and the most exciting thing being done in this regard is in indonesia in aceh where the world bank has come up with 30 million dollars to do a land titling project because a lot of the records that did exist in the cities were destroyed and a lot of the people in the villages never had titles to their land those of you familiar with the work of mr de soto around the world and similar projects know that the world s poor people have roughly 5 trillion dollars in assets that are totally unusable for economic growth because they don t have title to them so they can t get credit using what they own as collateral this is going to be done through the world bank grant in aceh it is very forward thinking on both the part of the world bank and indonesia but i hope that the other countries affected will do that and in its pursuit of the millennium development goals i hope that you mr president and ecosoc can have an influence in urging this sort of project to be done in other countries outside the tsunami affected areas when it was done in peru when mr de soto was finance minister they had three years in a row of double digit growth before the political problems of the fujimori government took over so it s big deal it s going to happen in aceh and i want it to be done everywhere else in the region and i d like to see it done every country in the world where it would be helpful finally let me say that i am well aware that the job i took i think i originally got because the secretary general assumed that this would be like every other disaster where governments would promise 90 percent of the money and only deliver about half of what they promised and kofi annan is a very busy person so he looked around the world and he said who is the best person i know at making people feel guilty if they don t give money how about bill clinton he doesn t have a job anymore that s really what happened i think and this turned out to be a very different job the ngos still have over two billion dollars in the bank dedicated gifts from ordinary people all across the globe to spend on tsunami relief it turned out that the problem was not it may when we get to long term reconstruction we may need some more government money and i may have to do what the secretary general once thought i would do but right now what we are trying to do is to spend the money we have and to do it in an honest open effective coordinated way in a way that enables the areas and the human beings involved to recover and it s been immensely rewarding i don t control any money and i have a hearty band of little detainees i call them from the other un agencies i have detained them in my office to work with me and i m grateful to them and i m very grateful to my former chief of staff at the white house erskine bowles who is leaving me today but who has been working with me for the first six months of this endeavor we don t really have any power but i feel like my job is what harry truman once described the presidency to be he said being president of the united states was largely a matter of trying to convince people to do what they should have done without you asking them in the first place that s about all i can do here but i think we re making some real progress and these people deserve our support my last stop on the last tour was in aceh in a displaced persons camp and in every one of these little camps they have to select someone to be the leader of the camp to represent them you know they escort people like me around to hear the complaints of the citizens so i met the first man and he introduced me to his wife and he introduced me to his son and i told the young indonesian woman who was my interpreter i said i believe that boy is the most beautiful child i have ever seen in my life and the young girl smiled at me and she said yes he is very beautiful and before the tsunami he had nine brothers and sisters and they re all gone the point of that is this man and his wife had a smile on their face that day they took me through the camp and at the last stop at the maternal health clinic the woman who had lost nine of her own children brought me the youngest resident of the camp a two day old baby and asked me to name the child she said in our culture the mother cannot get out of bed for 40 days now every time i say that i think it s going to spread to america and shut down the economy but she said she said in our culture the woman cannot get out of bed for 40 days and then she gets up and we name the child so she asked me to bring you the child and ask you to name him and i said is there an indonesian word for new beginning and she said yes it s dawn the beginning of a new day and she said in our language it s a boy s name not a girl s name so we re going to name this boy dawn but the point i want to make is that this woman had smile on her face as she was holding this baby after having lost nine of her ten children these people deserve our best efforts and i m very impressed with what their governments are doing it s been truly heroic very impressed with the ngos very impressed with the level of coordination but if you can have a big role in coordination you can do that specific thing for the maldives and i hope you will stay with us all the way through they are very worthy people out there just like you and me they just didn t get a chance to get a good education and wind up working with the un so they because were fishing along the coastal village when all the furry of hell broke loose on them one day we need to help them begin again thank you very much dem wjclinton14 7 95 bill_clinton thank you so much director deutch and mrs deutch deputy director and mrs tenant members of congress members of the aspin commission who are here men and women of the intelligence community i can t help thinking here at the central intelligence agency that if we were giving intelligence awards today they would go to the people back there under the trees congratulations to all of you for your adaptation of the natural environment to the task at hand before i begin my remarks today i d like to take care of an important piece of business just a month ago it was with regret but great gratitude for his 32 years of service to our country that i accepted the resignation of admiral bill studeman as the deputy director of central intelligence today it is with great pleasure that i award him the president s national security medal admiral studeman mrs studeman please come up this is the highest award a member of our intelligence community military or civilian can receive and no one deserves it more and the honor it represents most of you are well aware of bill s extraordinary and exemplary career in the navy at the national security agency and then here at the cia let me say that as deputy director of central intelligence he served two presidents and three dcis for two extended periods he took on the responsibilities of acting director he provided continuity and leadership to this community at a time of change and great challenge here in congress and throughout the executive branch he earned a reputation for integrity competence and reliability of the highest order he has dedicated his professional life to making the american people safer and more secure and today it is only fitting among those who know best the contributions he has made to our country to award him this medal as a small measure of thanks for a job well done and a life well lived thank you admiral you know as the studemans make their way back to their chairs i have to tell you that even though i have a lot of important things to say i am loathe to make this speech in this heat once in the middle of a campaign for governor i went up to a place in northeast arkansas to make a speech for a county judge who was determined that i had to come to celebrate this road that he had built with funds that i gave him he neglected to tell me that the road ended in the middle of a rice field the only people that are laughing are the people that understand what this means in the summertime in a rice field there is nothing but heat and mosquitos and a swarm of mosquitos came up in the middle of his introduction literally hundreds of thousands of mosquitos it was so bad that people were slapping at their cheeks and their legs and blood was streaming down people s faces and cheeks and this judge was one of the rare people that mosquitoes would never bite i had been governor for 10 years these people knew me better than he did he took six minutes to introduce me it seemed like it was six years and i finally was introduced and i gave the following speech folks i have a good speech if you want to hear it come to the air conditioned building down there if we don t get out of here we ll all die if you reelect me i ll kill every mosquito in the county i have to tell you that after that i never received less than two thirds of the vote in that county so i m loathed to give this speech but i will cut it down and say what i have to say to you because it s very important that i say these things and very important that america know that you re here and what you re doing fifty four years ago in the weeks that led up to pearl harbor there was a wide range of intelligence suggesting a japanese attack that made its way to washington but there was no clear clearinghouse to collect the information and to get it to the decision makers that is what led president truman to establish a central intelligence organization in the years since the men and women of the cia and its sister agencies have done more than most americans will or can ever know to keep our nation strong and secure and to advance the cause of democracy and freedom around the world today because the cold war is over some say that we should and can step back from the world and that we don t need intelligence as much as we used to that we ought to severely cut the intelligence budget a few have even urged us to scrap the central intelligence service i think these views are profoundly wrong i believe making deep cuts in intelligence during peacetime is comparable to cancelling your health insurance when you re feeling fine we are living at a moment of hope our nation is at peace our economy is growing all right all around the world democracy and free markets are on the march but none of these developments are inevitable or irreversible and every single study of human psychology or the human spirit every single religious track tells us that there will be troubles wars and rumors of war until the end of time now instead of a single enemy we face a host of scattered and dangerous challenges but they are quite profound and difficult to understand there are ethnic and regional tensions that threaten to flare into full scale war in more than 30 nations two dozen countries are trying to get their hands on nuclear chemical and biological weapons as these terrible tools of destruction spread so too spreads the potential for terrorism and for criminals to acquire them and drug trafficking organized crime and environmental decay threaten the stability of new and emerging democracies and threaten our well being here at home in the struggle against these forces you the men and women of our intelligence community serve on the front lines by necessity a lot of your work is hidden from the headlines but in recent months alone you warned us when iraq massed its troops against the kuwaiti border you provided vital support to our peacekeeping and humanitarian missions in haiti and rwanda you helped to strike a blow at a colombian drug cartel you uncovered bribes that would have cheated american countries out of billions of dollars your work has saved lives and promoted america s prosperity i am here today first and foremost to thank you and your families for the work and sacrifices you have made for the security of the united states of america i want to work with you to maintain the information and the intelligence advantage we have and to meet the demands of a new era today our government is deluged with more and more information from more and more sources what once was secret can now be available to anybody with cable tv or access to the internet it moves around the world at record speed and in order to justify spending billions of dollars in this kind of environment on intelligence and to maintain our edge you have to deliver timely unique information that focuses on real threats to the security of our people on the basis of information not otherwise available that means we have to rethink what we collect and how we organize the intelligence community to collect it we must be selective we can t possibly have in a world with so many diverse threats and tight budgets the resources to collect everything you need and deserve clear priorities from me and our national security team earlier this year i set out in a presidential decision directive what we most want you to focus on priorities that will remain under constant review but still are clear enough at the present time first the intelligence needs of our military during an operation if we have to stand down iraqi aggression in the gulf or stand for democracy in haiti our military commanders must have prompt thorough intelligence to fully inform their decisions and maximize the security of our troops second political economic and military intelligence about countries hostile to the united states we must also compile all source information on major political and economic powers with weapons of mass destruction who are potentially hostile to us third intelligence about specific trans national threats to our security such as weapons proliferation terrorism drug trafficking organized crime illicit trade practices and environmental issues of great gravity this work must be done today and it is vital to our security but it cannot be immune to the tough budget climate in which we are all living that s why i m pleased that more than every before our intelligence agencies are cooperating to work efficiently and to eliminate duplication you are already implementing on or ahead of schedule 33 streamlining recommendations set out by vice president gore and former dci woolsey as well as changes proposed by director deutch acting apart our agencies waste resources and squander opportunities to make our country more secure but acting together they bring a powerful force to bear on threats to our security let me also say that i believe there is no zero sum choice to be made between the technological and human dimensions of intelligence we need both and we will have both we ve used satellites and signals to identify troop movements to point agents in the right direction to tap into secret important conversations today some of your extraordinary in house innovations are available for broader use and i am interested in learning more about them imagery technology developed for the cold war now being used in aid to natural disaster relief imagery technology with great hope for the fight against breast cancer we have to keep moving on this kind of technological frontier but no matter how good our technology we ll always rely on human intelligence to tell us what an adversary has in mind we ll always need gifted motivated case officers at the heart of the clandestine service we ll always need good analysts to make a clean and clear picture out of the fragments of what our spies and satellites put on the table and if we re going to continue to attract and keep the best people we have to do a better job of rewarding work i think the best way to do that is for the communities leadership to demonstrate to you that excellence of performance equal opportunity and personal accountability are the only standards that will count when it comes to promotion and that is what director deutch has pledged to do let me say that i know the ames scandal has colored a lot of what is the current debate over the future of the cia i imagine most of you who work here think that the ames scandal has colored what the average american thinks about the cia although my guess is that you re probably overestimating that and underestimating the common sense and balance of an average american citizen it s important that we don t minimize the damage that ames did or the charges that need to be made the changes that need to be made to prevent future scandals but aldridge ames was a terrible exception to a proud tradition of service a tradition that is reflected in the 59 stars that shine on the cia s memorial wall in honor of those who gave our lives their lives to serve our country so we owe it to all of you in the intelligence community and to the american people to make sure we act on the lessons of his treason but also to remind the american people that the people who work for the central intelligence agency are patriotic americans who have made a decision that they are going to devote their careers to keeping this country safe and strong and i thank you for that as soon as ames was brought to justice i ordered a comprehensive reexamination in both internal and external studies of our counterintelligence operations as a result we changed the way intelligence community does its business each agency now requires more attention and continuous training in counterintelligence and evaluates its employees more thoroughly and frequently above all we are insisting that those involved in an operation take responsibility for its integrity that requires careful advanced planning that integrates counterintelligence into everything you do from day one this isn t just about safes and locks it s about designing operations that minimize the possibility of a security breakdown director deutch and i want to ensure that these new policies are carried out carefully so that we can avoid creating a climate of suspicion that embitters rather than empowers you as we guard against a repeat of the ames episode we have to be careful not to produce a culture so risk averse that case officers refuse to take chances and analysts are afraid to speak their minds you must not be paralyzed by the fear of failure this administration will continue to support bold and aggressive actions by the intelligence community consistent with the laws of the land consistent with our interests and consistent with our values i applaud director deutch s plan for example to issue new rules on dealing with foreign agents suspected of human rights abuses we owe you clear guidance on this issue and as a country we have to resolve it in the right way finally we owe the american public and congress a full role in the debate over the future of intelligence for over 40 years bipartisan support for the work you perform has been central to your success that support and the confidence of the american people were built on the unique oversight and consultative role congress plays in intelligence that s why director deutch and i will take with the utmost seriousness the concerns and suggestions of both the congress and the aspin commission every morning i start my day with an intelligence report the intelligence i receive informs just about every foreign policy decision we make it s easy to take it for granted but we couldn t do without it unique intelligence makes it less likely that our forces will be sent into battle less likely that american lives will have to put at risk it gives us a chance to prevent crisis instead of forcing us to manage them so let me say to all the men and women of our intelligence community i know and you know the challenges we face today will not be easy but we know that you are already working every day to increase the security of every american you are making a difference now we have to work together and i have to support you so that we can meet the challenge of doing this work even better with even more public support and confidence in its integrity and long term impact that is my commitment to you as you renew your commitment to america in a world fraught with danger but filled with promise that you will help us to seize thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton14 7 97 bill_clinton thank you very much you know very often when i come into this room for an event like this to stand up for a cause i believe in by the time it s my turn to speak there is nothing else to say but that has never been more true than it is at this moment mary jo you were terrific and we thank you thank you very much secretary shalala congresswoman slaughter dr collins the head of our genome project susan blumenthal the head of the women s health office at hhs ladies and gentlemen thank you for being here i want to say a special word of thanks too to congresswoman louise slaughter both our families have known losses and hers very recently and we appreciate her being here i love to hear louise slaughter talk with her beautiful southern accent the first time i heard she was a congresswoman from new york i thought it was a misstatement and from my point of view she s the only member of congress from new york who speaks without an accent and i like that the remarkable strides that we have seen in genetic research and testing are so important to every american family chances are every family represented in this room in our lifetime will have a child a grandchild a cousin a niece a nephew somehow benefited from the work of the human genome project which seemed nothing more than an intellectual dream just a few years ago and one of the things that we have to do is to make sure that every american family has a chance to benefit from it secretary shalala s report which she has issued it s a remarkable report i commend it to all of you makes it clear that the scope of this era of discovery is truly astonishing we are literally unlocking the mysteries of the human body finding new and unprecedented ways of discovering not only the propensity for it to break down in certain ways or lead to certain forms of disease or human behavior but also ways to prevent the worst consequences of our genetic structure and as with every kind of decision like this there is always the possibility that what we learn can not only be used but can be misused and in all of this era of scientific discovery there is probably no greater promise for use or for misuse than in the area of genetic testing used in the right way obviously it has the chances to save millions of lives and revolutionize health care and i am proud of our aggressive support for the human genome project but it s also clear that it is wrong for insurance companies to use genetic information to deny coverage it s happened before it happened in the 1970s with some african americans who carried sickle cell anemia and it can happen in many other ways an enormous number percentage of american woman get breast cancer at some time during their lives an enormous percentage of american men get prostate cancer at some time during their lives there are other kinds of medical problems that occur with increasing frequency and that we ll see more and more as we grow older as a population and now we see the consequences already of this kind of discrimination it s wrong when someone avoids taking a test that could save a life just because they re so afraid that the genetic information will be used against them and too many women today fear that that will happen when they decide to test or to not be tested to see if they carry the gene for breast cancer now this kind of discrimination is really it s more than wrong it s a life threatening abuse of a potentially life saving discovery and i can t help commenting that in the united states it is a direct consequence of the fact that we are the only advanced country in the world that has chosen to finance the health care of our citizens through a private insurance system that is completely optional and does not cover every one so that to be fair the insurance companies themselves face some dilemmas that can only be fixed by the law by a restatement of the public interest so that none are treated differently from others if they make the decision to do what is morally right and i think that s important to point out i tried to fix it once and took a lot of criticism but i m not i m not ashamed that i did if i could fix it tomorrow i would fix it tomorrow because this is not right but we have done what we could to try to step by step change this structure a year ago we took the first step when congress passed and i signed the kennedy kassebaum bill which prohibits group health plans from using genetic information to deny coverage and today my administration is sending legislation to congress that will ban all health plans group and individual from denying coverage or from raising premiums on the basis of genetic tests it will prohibit all health plans from disclosing genetic information that could be misused by other insurers but it will protect researchers ability to make the best use of this vitally important tool it builds on the solid foundation of congresswoman slaughter and senator olympia snowe s bill and i m pleased to say that senator frist from tennessee and senator jeffords from vermont have announced that they will share our commitment and they will work with us to pass bipartisan legislation to ban discrimination based on genetic tests this is an example of the step by step approach we are now taking that i will not be satisfied with until we have made sure that every american family has the health care they need to thrive we ve already ensured that a job change or an illness in the family doesn t mean automatically losing your health insurance we ve made it easier for self employed people to buy health insurance for their families the balanced budget agreement i have reached with the leaders of congress that was voted for in its outline by overwhelming majorities in both parties and both houses will extend care to millions and millions of uninsured children it will ensure as secretary shalala said that more older women can have mammograms it will protect medicare and medicaid but what we re here today to say is something very simple and yet profound we cannot afford to let our progress either in science or in extending health care to the american people to be undermined by the misuse of what is a miracle of genetic testing americans should never have to choose between saving their health insurance and taking tests that could save their lives with these efforts we will ensure at least that no american ever has to make that choice again thank you very much dem wjclinton14 7 98 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president dr alberts to all of our platform guests senator bennett senator dodd congressmen horn kucinich lafalce and turner and members of the administration who are here and all the rest of you who are committed to dealing with this challenge this is one of those days that i never thought would ever arrive where al gore has to listen to me give a speech about computers being president has its moments i have to ask your indulgence because this is my only opportunity to appear before the press today and i need to make a brief comment about something that is also of importance to all of you and that is the agreement that was reached yesterday between russia and the international monetary fund to stabilize the russian economy i think all of us understand that a stable and democratic and prosperous russia is critical to our long term national interests ever since the fall of communism there there has been a strong bipartisan consensus in our national government and i believe in our country to working toward that end the commitments that russia made in connection with yesterday s agreement will substantially advance economic reform and stability there now it is critical that those commitments be implemented to strengthen confidence in their economy it is clear i think to all of us now that our prosperity here at home in america is deeply affected by the economic conditions elsewhere in the world about a third of our economic expansion that the vice president referred to which has given us 16 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years with the lowest inflation rate in 32 years has come from our exports and our economic relations with the rest of the world we therefore have a clear interest in playing a leading role to advance freedom and prosperity and stability one of the most cost effective ways of doing that is through the international monetary fund the world s financial firefighter for the first time in 20 years now the imf has had to draw on special emergency reserve to underwrite this russian financial package because its resources were stretched dangerously thin due to the financial difficulties throughout asia principally to protect our economic strength therefore it is imperative that congress act now to promote global economic stability by paying in america s share to the imf earlier this year the senate in an overwhelming bipartisan vote endorsed legislation to strengthen the imf and to pay our fair share into it since then the legislation has languished in the house if we fail to act responsibly at a time when there is so much financial uncertainty in the world we will be putting our farmers our workers and our businesses at risk this is a time to put progress ahead of partisanship and i ask congress to proceed to do so thank you let me also say at the outset i want to say a special word of thanks as the vice president did to john koskinen and his whole team for the work they are doing and to all the people that are working with them we have just on this platform representative people from utilities from transportation from finance from telecommunications and from small business and this really is a joint effort we are all making but i thank you john you know before i became president john koskinen was a personal friend of mine i doubt if he still is now that i got him to do this but what s a friendship to save the country s wires so i thank him i asked bruce alberts this i remembered that richard berks magnificent statue of albert einstein is right outside here and i wish we could bring him to life for this moment but i ll drive by it on the way out for inspiration it seems unbelievable that it s only 535 days from now at the stroke of midnight when we will usher in a new year a new century a new millennium it will be to be sure an astonishing age of possibility of remarkable advances in science and technology a time when information clearly will widen the circle of opportunity to more people in the world than ever before and when technology will continue to shrink our small planet and require us to deal with challenges together including that climate change challenge that dr alberts referred to it is fitting if more than a little ironic that this same stroke of midnight will pose a sharp and signal test of whether we have prepared ourselves for the challenges of the information age the vice president discussed the design flaw in millions of the world s computers that will mean they will be unable to recognize the year 2000 and if they can t then we will see a series of shutdowns inaccurate data faulty calculations because the difficulty is as far flung as the billions of microchips that run everything from farm equipment to vcrs this is not a challenge that is susceptible to a single government program or an easy fix it is a complex test that requires us all to work together every government agency every university every hospital every business large and small i came here today because i wanted to stress the urgency of the challenge to people who are not in this room so often one of the wry and amusing aspects of the nature of my work is that when i give a speech like this i am typically preaching to the choir as we say back home but hopefully the sermon is heard beyond the four walls of this room because clearly we must set forth what the government is doing what business is doing but also what all of us have yet to do to meet this challenge together and there is still a pressing need for action the consequences of the millennium bug if not addressed could simply be a rash of annoyances like being unable to use a credit card at the supermarket or the video store losing track of the tape you have already returned has that ever happened to you it really is aggravating it could affect electric power i just want to remind you that i used to have a life and i know about things like that it could affect electric power phone service air travel major governmental service as the vice president said we re not just talking about computer networks but billions of imbedded chips built into everyday products and it s worth remembering that the typical family home today has more computer power in it than the entire mit campus had 20 years ago an oil drilling rig alone may include 10 000 separate chips the solution unfortunately is massive painstaking and labor intensive it will take a lot of time to rewrite lines of computer code in existing systems to buy new ones or put in place backup plans so that essential business and government services are not interrupted with millions of hours needed to rewrite billions of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of interdependent organization this is clearly one of the most complex management challenges in history consider just one major bank chase manhattan it must work through 200 million lines of code check 70 000 desktop computers check 1 000 software packages from 600 separate software vendors the government s health care financing administration known affectionately by the governors and others as hcfa which runs medicare processes almost 1 billion transactions a year it s computer vendors must painstakingly renovate 42 million lines of computer code all told the worldwide cost will run into the tens perhaps the hundreds of billions of dollars and that s the cost of fixing the problem not the cost if something actually goes wrong already extraordinary efforts are underway by the people on the platform many of you out here and others but more must be done we know first we have to put our own house in order to make certain that government will be able to continue to guard our borders guide air traffic send out social security and medicare checks and fulfill our other duties we ve worked hard to be ready i set a government wide goal of full compliance by march of 1999 john koskinen is heading our council on the y2k problem i ve met with the cabinet and charged them personally to produce results and report quarterly to omb on progress we re working with state and local governments to do the same thing we have made progress as has already been said the social security administration has more than 90 percent of its critical systems ready other agencies like epa fema and the va are well on their way to meeting our goal but not every agency is as far along as it should be i have made it clear to every member of my cabinet that the american people have a right to expect uninterrupted service from government and i expect them to deliver i want to thank the thousands of individuals who are working to prepare our government and to make sure we can stay open for business i especially want to thank the vice president and john koskinen and the people who are working with them at omb and elsewhere and i very much appreciate these members of congress who are here and the extraordinary bipartisan interest and support meeting this challenge has engendered in my proposed balanced budget for 1999 i asked congress to fund this initiative on a one time basis because it is literally a once in a lifetime challenge i urge the congress to fully fund it and to provide contingency funding so that we can respond the unforseen difficulties that are sure to arise as we near january of 2000 we have worked closely with senators bennett and dodd and congressman horn and congressman kucinich and the other members who are here congressmen lafalce and turner and others in the congress as i said there has been a heartening amount of interest in this by people who actually know quite a lot about it in the congress and that s a very good thing i think we all understand that this is a case where we cannot allow even in this election season any shred of partisanship to impinge on the national interest we after all only have 17 months to go i believe we also have a role to play in helping to meet this challenge around the world surely we can t be responsible for the preparedness of other countries but i can make the same argument i just made about the imf and russia if increasingly our prosperity is tied to the well being of other nations it would obviously have adverse consequences for us here at home if a number of our trading partners had major malfunctions when i was meeting with the world s major industrial organizations in birmingham england a few months ago i brought this up and i found that we had become far more invested in this and involved in this than some other major nations when i was in santiago chile at the summit of the americas i brought it up in our private meeting and a number of countries had literally only begun just to think about the problem so i think it is important that the united states recognize that the more we can do to help other countries meet this challenge in a timely fashion the better off our own economy is going to be and the more smoothly our own businesses will be able to function as we pass over into the new millennium the united states to try to help will provide 12 million to support the world bank year 2000 fund for developing countries i also want to say what we all know and what you can see from the platform which is this is not a government problem alone by far the most significant potential risks fall in the private sector large firms already have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure their systems are ready many have spearheaded remarkable efforts to make sure their firms and their whole industries are ready we re encouraged that dozens of firms and thousands of people on wall street last night began a simulation to test whether they are ready and the telecommunication banking electric power and airline industries all deserve praise for the seriousness with which they are taking the challenge i want to compliment one person back here in particular steve wolf came all the way back from africa got here at 3 00 a m in the morning to show up to manifest his understanding of the importance of this challenge to the airline industry and he is still breathing the rarefied era of kilimanjaro so we thank him especially for doing that but let me say in spite of all this progress in the business sector just as in the government sector there are still gaping holes far too many businesses especially small and medium sized firms will not be ready unless they begin to act a recent walls fargo bank survey shows that of the small businesses that even know about the problem roughly half intend to do nothing about it now this is not one of the summer movies where you can close your eyes during the scary parts every business of every size with eyes wide open must face the future and act so today i would issue three challenges to our business community first every business must take responsibility for making sure it is ready any business that approaches the new year armed only with a bottle of champagne and a noisemaker is likely to have a very big hangover on new year s morning every business should assess its exposure asks vendors and suppliers to be ready as well and develop contingency plans as we are in case critical systems or systems of vendors fail as we move into the year 2000 i want to especially thank aida alvarez and the small business administration and its supporters in congress and i thank you mr lafalce in particular for the work that has been done to spread the message in the small business community and i d like to salute one firm represented here the torrington research company which makes fans for cars and computers it has only 55 employees but they ve taken the time to check their system and by the end of this year they will be ready by the end of this year i want every small business in america to follow their lead as the vice president said we need literally an army of programmers and information technology experts to finish the task many of the computers involved are decades old some of them use programming language no longer used or even taught there is a wealth of knowledge in america s tens of thousands of retirees who once worked in the computer industry or government as programmers or information technology managers i m pleased to announce that the department of labor will expand its jobs bank and talent bank to help to meet this challenge and i thank secretary herman and deputy secretary higgins for that the aarp has also agreed to help out and we re reaching out to civilian and military retirees who did this work for government before i will ask these older americans to set aside their well earned rest and help our nation to meet this challenge second businesses should exchange and pool information among themselves it makes no sense for every firm to have to reinvent the digital wheel businesses should be able to benefit from the experiences of other firms in the same situation that have found solutions or identified new obstacles today too many businesses are understandably reluctant to share information fearing legal complication we have to take prudent steps to clear away any legal barriers to effective action earlier this month the justice department stated that competitors who merely share information on how to solve this problem are not in violation of the nation s anti trust laws we need to get that message out there loud and clear no one should be afraid to help another company to deal with this challenge there is more we can do this week i will propose good samaritan legislation to guarantee that businesses which share information about their readiness with the public or with each other and do it honestly and carefully cannot be held liable for the exchange of that information if it turns out to be inaccurate and here too time is of the essence our third challenge to business is that you should take responsibility to accurately and fully tell your customers how you re doing and what you re doing by letting customers know they are on top of the problem businesses can help to maintain confidence and override overreaction this is very important it is important that we act and not be in denial it is also very important that we avoid overreaction from people who hear oh my goodness this problem is out there and so we have to do both things the proposed good samaritan law will give companies the confidence they need to ensure that they keep their customers informed if ordinary citizens believe they re being told the full story they ll be far less likely to act in ways that could themselves hurt our economy we can do more to help businesses reach these goals later this month our council on the year 2000 conversion will launch a national campaign for year 2000 solutions to promote partnerships between industry groups and government agencies with the goal of sharing information about what actually works and to prod organizations at every level to get ready making certain government services are not interrupted minimizing disruption to commerce encouraging businesses to share with each other and report honestly to customers and above all every business in america taking responsibility for being a part of the solution in the year 2000 conversion these are the ways we the american people can be prepared to meet this challenge now no one will ever find every imbedded microchip every line of code that needs to be rewritten but if companies agencies and organizations are ready if they understand the threat and have backup plans then we will meet this challenge the millennium bug is a vivid and powerful reminder of the ways that we are growing ever more independent as we rise to the challenges of this new era when our founding fathers urged us to form a more perfect union i don t think they had this in mind but they might be quite pleased the powerful forces of change that have created unimagined abundance also bear within them as is consistent with human nature the possibilities of new and unexpected challenges but if we act properly we won t look back on this as a headache sort of the last failed challenge of the 20th century it will be the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met that is the american way and together we can do it thank you very much dem wjclinton14 8 00a bill_clinton first of all thank you let me say on behalf of my family we re honored to have this oscar i want to thank the governor and sharon for welcoming us to california for the wonderful reception that we ve had for the great convention we ve had and i want to say to all of you i don t know if any of you saw my home alone video that i did do you remember that well in this home alone video i was talking to myself in the mirror and i had kevin spacey s oscar and he was ungracious enough to come take it away from me just because he won it and i didn t so now that i have one of my very own i ll be able to lord it over him we have had a wonderful time i want to thank the delegates who are here from every single state from the places where we started to the places where we ended it s been a great ride i want to thank you for being so good to hillary tonight and you just remember what i told you we had a good run tonight because we ve had a good eight years but the best way to validate all the work we ve done is to win again and keep it going god bless you thank you dem wjclinton14 8 00b bill_clinton thank you thank you ladies and gentlemen isn t it great to be here in california together forty years ago the great city of los angeles launched john kennedy and the new frontier now los angeles is launching the first president of the new century al gore i come here tonight above all to say a heartfelt thank you thank you thank you for giving me the chance to serve thank you for being so good to hillary and chelsea i am so proud of them and didn t she give a good talk i thought it was great i thank you for supporting the new democratic agenda that has taken our country to new heights of prosperity peace and progress as always of course the lion s share of credit goes to the american people who do the work raise the kids and dream the dreams now at this moment of unprecedented good fortune our people face a fundamental choice are we going to keep this progress and prosperity going yes we are but my friends we can t take our future for granted we cannot take it for granted so let s just remember how we got here eight years ago when our party met in new york it was a far different time for america our economy was in trouble our society was divided our political system was paralyzed ten million of our fellow citizens were out of work interest rates were high the deficit was 290 billion and rising after 12 years of republican rule the federal debt had quadrupled imposing a crushing burden on our economy and on our children welfare rolls crime teen pregnancy income inequality all had been skyrocketing and our government was part of the problem not part of the solution i saw all this in a very personal way in 1992 out there in the real america with many of you i remember a child telling me her father broke down at the dinner table because he lost his job i remember an older couple crying in front of me because they had to choose between filling their shopping carts and filling their prescriptions i remember a hardworking immigrant in a hotel kitchen who said his son was not really free because it wasn t safe for him to play in the neighborhood park i ran for president to change the future for those people and i asked you to embrace new ideas rooted in enduring values opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community of all americans you gave me the chance to turn those ideas and values into action after i made one of the very best decisions of my entire life asking al gore to be my partner now first we proposed a new economic strategy get rid of the deficit to reduce interest rates invest more in our people sell more american products abroad we sent our plan to congress it passed by a single vote in both houses in a deadlocked senate al gore cast the tie breaking vote not a single republican supported it here s what their leaders said their leaders said our plan would increase the deficit kill jobs and give us a one way ticket to recession time has not been kind to their predictions remember our republican friends said then they would absolutely not be held responsible for our economic policies i hope the american people take them at their word thank you today after seven and a half years of hard effort we re in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history more than 22 million new jobs the lowest unemployment in 30 years the lowest female unemployment in 40 years the lowest hispanic and african american unemployment ever recorded and the highest home ownership in history now along the way in 1995 we turned back the largest cuts in history in medicare medicaid education and the environment and just two years later we proved that we could find a way to balance the budget and protect our values today we have gone from the largest deficits in history to the largest surpluses in history and if but only if we stay on course we can make america debt free for the first time since andy jackson was president in 1835 for the first time in decades wages are rising at all income levels we have the lowest child poverty in 20 years the lowest poverty rate for single mothers ever recorded the average family s income has gone up more than 5 000 and for african american families even more the number of families who own stock has grown by 40 percent you know harry truman s old saying has never been more true if you want to live like a republican you better vote for the democrats thank you but our progress is about far more than economics america is also more hopeful more secure and more free we re more hopeful because we re turning our schools around with higher standards more accountability more investment we have doubled funding for head start and provided after school and mentoring to more than a million more young people we re putting 100 000 well trained teachers in the early grades to lower class size ninety five percent of our schools are connected to the internet reading math and sat scores are up and more students than ever are going on to college thanks to the biggest expansion of college aid since the gi bill 50 years ago now don t let anybody tell you that all children can t learn or that our public schools can t make the grade yes they can yes they can we re also more hopeful because we ended welfare as we knew it now those who can work must work on that we and the republicans agreed but we democrats also insisted on support for good parenting so that poor children don t go hungry or lose their health care unmarried teens stay in school and people get the job training child care and transportation they need it has worked today there are 7 5 million people who have moved from welfare to work and the welfare rolls in our administration have been cut in half we re more hopeful because of the way we cut taxes to help americans meet the challenges of work and child rearing this year alone our hope scholarship and lifelong learning tax credits will help 10 million families pay for college our earned income tax credit will help 15 million families work their way into the middle class twenty five million families will get a 500 child tax credit our empowerment zone tax credits are bringing new business and new jobs to our hardest pressed communities from the inner cities to appalachia to the mississippi delta to our native american reservations and the typical american family today is paying a lower share of its income in federal income taxes than at any time during the past 35 years we are more hopeful because of the family and medical leave act a bill that the previous administration vetoed they said it would cost jobs it s the first bill i signed and we now have a test twenty two million new jobs later over 20 million americans have been able to take a little time off to care for a newborn child or sick relative that s what it means that s what it really means to be pro family thank you we are more secure country because we cut crime with tougher enforcement more than 100 000 new community police officers a ban on assault weapons and the brady law which has kept guns out of the hands of half a million felons fugitives and stalkers today crime is at a 25 year low and we re more secure because of advances in health care we ve extended the life of the medicare trust fund by 26 years adding coverage for cancer screening and cutting edge clinical trials we re coming closer to cures for dreaded diseases we made sure that people with disabilities could go to work without losing their health care and that people who switch jobs without losing their coverage we dramatically improved diabetes care we provided health coverage under the children s health insurance program to 2 million previously uninsured children and for the first time in our history more than 90 percent of our kids have been immunized against serious childhood diseases you can be proud of that democratic record we are more secure because our environment is cleaner we ve set aside more land in the lower 48 states than any administration since teddy roosevelt saving national treasures like yellowstone the great california redwoods the florida everglades moreover our air is cleaner our water is cleaner our food is safer and our economy is stronger you can grow the economy and protect the environment at the same time now we re more free because we are closer today to the one america of our dreams celebrating our diversity affirming our common humanity opposing all forms of bigotry from church burnings to racial profiling to murderous hate crimes we re fighting for employment nondiscrimination legislation and for equal pay for women thank you we found ways to mend not end affirmative action we have given america the most diverse administration in history it really looks like america you know if i could just get my administration up here it would be just as good a picture as anything you saw a couple of weeks ago in philadelphia the real people loving it and we created americorps which already has given more than 150 000 of our young people a chance to earn some money for college by serving our communities we are more secure and we re more free because of our leadership in the world for peace freedom and prosperity helping to end a generation of conflict in northern ireland stopping the brutal ethnic cleansing in bosnia and kosovo and bringing the middle east closer than ever to a comprehensive peace we built stronger ties to africa asia and our latin american and caribbean neighbors we brought poland hungary and the czech republic into nato we are working with russia to destroy nuclear weapons and materials we are fighting head on the new threats and injustices of the global age terrorism narco trafficking biological and chemical warfare the trafficking in women and young girls and the deadly spread of aids and in the great tradition of jimmy carter who is here tonight we are still the world s leading force for human rights around the world thank you president carter the american military is the best trained best equipped most effective fighting force in the world our men and women have shown that time and again in bosnia in kosovo in haiti and iraq i can tell you that their strength their spirit their courage and their commitment to freedom have never been greater any adversary who believes those who say otherwise is making a grave mistake now my fellow americans that s the record or as that very famous los angeles detective sergeant joe friday used to say just the facts ma am i ask you let s remember the standard our republican friends used to have for whether a party should continue in office my fellow americans are we better off today than we were eight years ago you bet we are you bet we are thank you yes we are yes we are yes we are but we re not just better off we re also a better country we are today more tolerant more decent more humane and more united now that s the purpose of prosperity since 1992 america has grown not just economically but as a community yes jobs are up but so are adoptions yes the debt is down but so is teen pregnancy we are becoming both more diverse and more united my fellow americans tonight we can say with gratitude and humility we built our bridge to the 21st century we crossed that bridge together and we re not going back thank you to those who say and i m sure you heard this somewhere in the last few days to those who say the progress of these last eight years was just some sort of accident that we just kind of coasted along let me be clear america s success was not a matter of chance it was a matter of choice and today america faces another choice it s every bit as momentous as the one we faced eight years ago for what a nation does with its good fortune is just as stern a test of its character values and judgment as how it deals with adversity my fellow americans this is a big election with great consequences for every american because the differences the honest differences between our candidates and their visions are so profound we can a have good old fashioned election here we should posit that our opponents are good honorable patriotic people and that we have honest differences but the differences are there consider this just this we in america would already have this year a real patients bill of rights a minimum wage increase stronger equal pay laws for women and middle class tax cuts for college tuition and long term care if the democratic party were in the majority in congress with dick gephardt as speaker and tom daschle as majority leader and come november they will be that has to be clear to people and that s why every house and every senate seat is important but if you ll give me one moment of personal privilege i d like to say a word about hillary when i first met her 30 years ago she already had an abiding passion to help children and she s pursued it ever since her very first job out of law school was with the children s defense fund every year i was governor she took lots of time away from her law practice to work for better schools or better children s health or jobs for parents who lived in poor areas then when i became president she became a full time advocate for her lifetime cause and what a job she has done she championed the family leave law children s health insurance increased support for foster children and adoptions she wrote a best selling book about caring for our children and then she took care of them by giving all the profits to children s charities for thirty years 30 years from the first day i met her she has always been there for all our kids she s been a great first lady she s always been there for our family and she ll always be there for the families of new york and america thank you of course we all know that the biggest choice that the american people have to make this year is in the presidential race now you all know how i feel but it s not my decision to make that belongs to the american people i just want to tell all of you here in this great arena and all of the folks watching and listening at home a few things that i know about al gore we ve worked closely together for eight years now in the most challenging moments when we faced the most difficult issues of war and peace of whether to take on some powerful interests he was always there and he always told me exactly what he thought was right everybody knows he is thoughtful and hard working but i can tell you personally he is one strong leader in 1993 there was nobody around the table more willing to make the tough choices to balance the budget the right way and take this tough stance against balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and working people of america i have seen this kind of positioning and this kind of strength time and again whether it was in how we reform welfare or in protecting the environment or in closing the digital divide or bringing jobs to rural and urban america through the empowerment zone program the greatest champion of ordinary americans has always been al gore i ll tell you something else about him more than anybody else i ve known in public life al gore understands the future and how sweeping changes and scientific breakthroughs will affect ordinary americans lives and i think we need somebody in the white house at the dawn of the 21st century who really understands the future finally i want to say something more personal virtually every week for the last seven and a half years until he became occupied with more important matters al gore and i had lunch and we talked about the business between us and the business of america but we d also often talk about our families what our kids were doing how school was going what was going on in their lives i know him he is a profoundly good man he loves his children more than life and he has a perfectly wonderful wife who has fought against homelessness and who has done something for me and all americans in bringing the cause of mental health into the broad sunlight of our national public life we owe tipper gore our thanks al has picked a great partner in joe lieberman there s the connecticut crowd hillary and i have known joe for 30 years since we were in connecticut in law school i supported him in his first race for public office in 1970 when i learned he had been a freedom rider going into danger to register black voters in the then segregated south it should not be a surprise to anyone that al gore picked the leader of the new democrats to be his vice president because joe lieberman has supported all our efforts to reform welfare reduce crime protect the environment protect civil rights and a woman s right to choose and to keep this economy going all of them and he has shown time and time again that he will work with president gore to keep putting people and progress over partisanship now it s up frankly to the presidential nominee and the vice presidential nominee to engage in this debate and to point out the differences but there are two issues i care a lot about and i want to make brief comments on them and i hope i ve earned the right to make comments on them one is the economy i know a little something about that and the other is our efforts to build one america first on the economy al gore and joe lieberman will keep our prosperity going by paying down the debt investing in education and health care moving more people from welfare to work and providing family tax cuts we can afford that stands in stark contrast to the position of our republican friends here is their position they say we have a big projected 10 year surplus and they want to spend every dime of it and then some on tax cuts right now that would leave nothing for education or medicare prescription drugs nothing to extend the life of medicare and social security for the baby boomers nothing in case the projected surpluses don t come in now think about your own family s budget for a minute or your own business budget would you sign a binding contract today to spend all your projected income for a decade leaving nothing for your families basic needs nothing for emergencies nothing for a cushion in case you didn t get the raise you thought you were going to get of course you wouldn t do that and america shouldn t do it either we should stick with what works let me say something to you that s even more important than the economy to me when al gore picked joe lieberman the first jewish american to join a national ticket to be his partner and he joined with our presidential nominee who has along with his great mother and late father a lifetime commitment to civil rights and equal opportunity for all even when it was not popular down home in the south when they did that we had a ticket that embodies the democratic commitment to one america they believe in civil rights and equal opportunity for everybody they believe in a woman s right to choose and this may be the most important of all they believe the folks that you re buying your soft drinks and popcorn from here at the staples center should have the exact same chance they do to send their kids to college and give them a good life and a good future my fellow americans i am very proud of our leaders and i want you to know that the opportunity i have had to serve as president at the dawn of a new era in human history has been an honor a privilege and a joy i have done everything i knew how to do to empower the american people to unleash their amazing optimism and imagination and hard work to turn our country around from where it was in 1992 and to get us moving forward together now what i want you to understand tonight is that the best is still out there the best is yet to come if we make the right choices in this election year but the choices will make all the difference in february the american people achieved the longest economic expansion in our history when that happened i asked our folks at the white house when the previous longest economic expansion was you know when it was it was from 1961 through 1969 now i want the young people especially to listen to this i remember this well i graduated from high school in 1964 our country was still very sad because of president kennedy s death but full of hope under the leadership of president johnson and i assumed then like most americans that our economy was on absolutely on automatic that nothing could derail it i also believe then that our civil rights problems would all be solved in congress and the courts and in 1964 when we were enjoying the longest economic expansion in history we never dreamed that vietnam would so divide and wound our america so we took it for granted and then before we knew it there were riots in the streets even here the leaders that i adored as a young man martin luther king and robert kennedy were killed lyndon johnson a president from my part of the country i admired so much for all he did for civil rights for the elderly and the poor said he would not run again because our nation was so divided and then we had an election in 1968 that took america on a far different and more divisive course and you know within months after that election the last longest economic expansion in history was itself history why am i telling you this tonight not to take you down but to keep you looking up i have waited not as president but as your fellow citizen for over 30 years to see my country once again in the position to build the future of our dreams for our children we are a great and good people and we have an even better chance this time than we did then with no great internal crisis and no great external threat still i have lived long enough to know that opportunities must be seized or they will be lost my friends fifty four years ago this week i was born in a summer storm to a young widow in a small southern town america gave me the chance to live my dreams and i have tried as hard as i knew how to give you a better chance to live yours now my hair is a little grayer my wrinkles are a little deeper but with the same optimism and hope i brought to the work i loved so eight years ago i want you to know my heart is filled with gratitude my fellow americans the future of our country is now in your hands you must think hard feel deeply and choose wisely and remember whenever you think about me keep putting people first keep building those bridges and don t stop thinking about tomorrow dem wjclinton14 8 94 bill_clinton thank you so much if you ve been listening to the news the last few days you know that the president has had his annual loss of voice but when i heard the choir today i kind of got my voice back first pastor and mrs cherry on behalf of my wife my daughter and all of our company here thank you so much for making us feel at home today this was a beautiful wonderful day for us we ve brought some old friends of ours that we ve known for many years and several members of our white house staff our good friend congressman albert winn joined us we re glad to see you thank you so much sir i came here today of two minds usually on summer sundays like this hillary and chelsea and i go up to camp david and we go to the beautiful little chapel in the woods there and instead of being in a vast church we worship at 9 00 a m on sunday morning with about 50 people and about six or seven people singing in the choir including the president who gets to sight read the music when he can talk i wanted to come here today for two reasons first of all because as it turned out i needed to hear the sermon next week pastor i ll try to be a little more like jehoshaphat maybe i won t have to ask you to face all our enemies all at once the second reason i wanted to be here is that this church to me symbolizes what american should be all about right now and it also i believe came about because of all the things that america should not be about right now i mean let me ask you how is it that a church in 1981 could start with 24 members and in 1994 could have 16 000 members how could an african american church with all of the cliches people say about the black community in america have 16 000 members and over 40 percent of them be males god has worked through this pastor and his wife and his family and all of you but why did you have to come into being because of this great hole that s in our country now because of the breakdown of the families and the communities and the loss of the things which hold people together inside and out not just the spiritual problems but the jobs too and the opportunities and the things which make people believe in the future on this earth and in that great vacuum look what has usually happened when people lose hope and lose their families and lose their communities and lose their sense of right and wrong what has so often happened seventy percent increase in america in 10 years in the number of children being born out of wedlock and let s get the whole record on today the fastest growth is among young white women giving birth out of wedlock soon if we don t do something about it we ll all be equal too high in 10 years a doubling of the rate of murder among teenage young people sixty five people in america get killed every day while we ve been in church another teenager has been murdered every two hours a teenager gets murdered in america and in this great vacuum you have teen pregnancy and drugs and crime and worst of all violence i wanted to come here because you are filling that void from the ground up and from the inside out and i believe that this church could never have come into existence and exploded the way it has if everybody had been in a church in a family in a community in a job and had hope and direction inside and outside and structure you ve filled a vacuum with something good and pure and wonderful and i thank you for it it s beyond the reach of any president to do it is god s work through a religious ministry but the bible says that the rest of us has ministries too do you remember when martin luther king said if you re just a street sweeper just sweep the streets as if you were michelangelo painting the sistine chapel everybody has a job to do and today i don t think we have a bigger job in trying to keep our children alive and rebuild our families and rebuild our communities and to try to communicate some sense of right and wrong and to give our kids something to say yes to as well as something to say no to it s two sides of the same coin and i ll tell you before i got here i ve been pretty down the last two or three days because the congress voted that crime bill down not because it s the answer to all life s problems here is the answer to all life s problems but because this country is literally coming apart at the seams for millions of our young people and because there are too many streets where old folks are afraid to sit and talk and children are afraid to play because we re not really free anymore and people aren t free to pursue the american dream anymore as long as we feel like we can just tear each other apart because our police officers go out on the streets where the gangs are supposed to are better armed than they are and things are all mixed up now in our country and so often it seems that petty political things or superficial divisions keep us from doing what in our heart we know is right and i have been so troubled at the thought that at least those of us who have been given this authority by you the president the congress the least we can do is to help you to save the lives of your children there are children in this church who have been gunned down i know it the least we can do is to help you to be protected the least we can do is to put people on the streets who can not only catch criminals but prevent crime as good law enforcement officers the least we can do if people are totally hopeless is to get them out of your hair so they won t be bothering you and the least we can do is to yes give your children more things they can say yes to not just things they can say no to that s what all that debate was about in the crime bill it really wasn t about whether if you had written the crime bill or i had or anybody else it would have been just the way it turned out to be what is a democracy after all but people getting together and putting their different ideas and then arguing it out and having a bunch of votes and a majority rules alexis de toqueville said many years ago this was a good country and as long as it was a good country it could be a great country we re around after 218 years because more than half the time more than half the people have been right and god has permitted us to stay and go and flourish i believe that do you well that s what this is all about we don t have a bigger problem than the violence which is eating the heart out of this country and the breakdown of the basic fabric of values that says it is wrong to hurt other people it is wrong to act in an instant for some momentary advantage in ways that will devastate other people s lives it is wrong to take this kind of advantage and we have to find a way out of this that punishes wrongdoers yes but that also offers the hand of hope that rebuilds our people from the grass roots up and in a political moment the congress walked away from that last week there are people in my part of the country good people they are in their churches today just like we re here who say we don t break the law and we go hunting every time they open the season and we don t want any weapons being banned these 19 assault weapons folks i had a 22 when i was 12 you don t need an assault weapon to shoot a deer or to kill quail if you re that bad a shot you ought to be doing something else you shouldn t be hunting but their fears are all welled up in them and they scare some of their members of congress then there are people who represent places where all the children can go to the ballpark where they ve got a place to go swimming in the summertime where they re in church two or three times a week and they literally cannot imagine what it is like for some of our children and so they say oh these programs to let these kids play basketball at midnight instead of walk the streets are pork i tell you folks i will have to like all the rest of you answer to god for everything i have done right or wrong we all will i have been a governor i have presided over the execution of criminals i have built prison cells i believe in punishing wrongdoing i think when people go out and deliberately hurt each other somebody ought to do something to them and stop it i believe that and that s what this bill does but i also know that there are countless little children out there and they could go one way or the other you know what the best thing about this day to me was when everybody was asked to come up here there were all those beautiful young people standing here they ve got a chance now and we have to give more of them a chance now i came here because i needed to hear the sermon i came here because your church stands for what our country ought to be and where it ought to go i came here because the bible says that good christians are also supposed to be good citizens and i ask you this whole week to pray for me and pray for the members of congress ask us not to turn away from our ministry our ministry is to do the work of god here on earth and that starts with giving our children and our families a place in which at least they can be safe and secure it starts with standing up against this mindless violence which has torn the hearts out of people who are this church and nearly every church in the united states it starts with trying to put families back together and it is not the province of any one race it is increasingly not the province of any region or any economic group but it savages the poor the worst because that is where the families are most broken and i ask you to pray and to speak to your friends and neighbors and to hope somehow we will all find the wisdom and the judgment to come back and do the will of god in our ministries which is to make you as safe as we possibly can thank you so much for giving us this wonderful day with you god bless you all dem wjclinton14 9 00a bill_clinton thank you very much well first of all i want to thank all of you for supporting this endeavor and i want to thank as david did ken thank you i have you have come a long way since we had that dinner i think it was what we ate that night that did it i want to thank martin for all the work that he s done and as your predecessor and also as patrick kennedy s predecessor he was seven feet tall when he started this job and thank you vic fazio my longtime friend i want to say a special word of appreciation to david bonior i did not know him very well when i got elected president and one of the things that i will always treasure about these last eight years is the relationship that he and i developed i like him and i admire his wife so much and i feel about him a little bit the way i do about nancy pelosi i love them when they are with me and i love them when they are not because you know both of them are so convicted and they believe things and they care about things and they stick their necks out and it s especially hard for him because he s in a district where he has to pay a price for every vote of conscience he casts and he does it anyway i want to thank you probably more than anyone in america i know how important this endeavor is that s why i showed up tonight besides the fact that i told ken i would when we had a majority in the congress we passed the economic plan that started this whole roll we ve been on the crime bill that played a major role in getting us the lowest violent crime rate in 27 years the brady bill which has kept guns out of the hands of half a million felons fugitives and stalkers the americorps bill which has now given way over 150 000 young people a chance to serve in their community and earn money to go to college the family medical leave act which has helped about 25 million americans to take some time off when a newborn baby was in the family or a parent was sick without losing their job and the beginning of one of the lesser known achievements that we ve made together which is a systematic attempt to reform federal education policy to concentrate on standards and results and effective investment in reform and i know what a difference it makes this is an unusual and in effect a really kind of a wonderful time in my life earlier this year i got to cast what well may be my last vote as a citizen of my native state for al gore for president in the democratic primary and tuesday i got to vote for my wife for the first time which was an immense thrill and last night when i watched the debate i realize now what she went through all those years watching me is he going to fall over is he going to smile should he slug back should he just keep smiling it s amazing it s really been so now my family has a new candidate my party has a new leader and i have become the cheerleader in chief and i like it but i just want to say all of you know how important this is or you wouldn t be here but what ken said is really worth remembering i think we re going to do well in these elections if we can continue to clarify the choices because the american people want this prosperity to continue but they don t want us to be in idle they want us to take on the big challenges out there i think we have an excellent chance and i ve worked as hard as i could for the senate candidates for the house candidates for the two committees as well as to help our party and our nominees but what i can tell you is that in spite of all the good things that have happened the challenges that are out there are really big and they cannot and no american should expect president gore vice president lieberman and a democratic house and senate to deal with them all in a year you know when all the baby boomers retire which will start in about eight years for the ones that take early social security and go on for 18 to 20 more years there will only be two people working for every one person on social security although the congress thank you very much took the earnings limit off social security and now more people will be able to work in their later years and that s good we have to and with all these advances in health care we re going to have huge challenges to figure out how do we redefine aging in america yes how do we save social security how do we save medicare how do we add a prescription drug benefit it s unconscionable that it doesn t exist already we would have it now if we had a democratic congress but how are we going to deal with a country that is in terms of age distribution radically different from anything we ve ever known and will be for 20 years maybe 30 years and then it will all start to get back to a normal distribution we ve got the most diverse student population we ve ever had it s a wonder and we have actually learned how to turn around failing schools we know how to do it now and it took probably 15 years of serious effort but i was in a school in new york the other day a grade school where two years ago listen to this two years ago 80 percent of the kids were doing reading and math below grade level in harlem two years later 76 percent of the kids are doing reading and math at or above grade level in just two years we know how to do this but america has never succeeded ever in guaranteeing quality education for all of our kids and now we ve got the most diverse group of kids we ve ever had just across the river in alexandria there are children from 180 different national and ethnic groups whose parents speak over 100 different languages as their first language this is great for us in this global economy if but only if we can figure out how to give all these kids a world class education we ve had more millionaires and more billionaires in the last eight years than in any time in history and i like that and i hope the next administration can keep it going maybe i can become one of them but we still have too many people working hard for too little and having a really hard time making ends meet what kind of tax policy should we have for them what kind of laws should we have to make sure that as more and more parents are working they can work and still have time for their kids and save enough to make sure their kids can go to college these are big questions and this just scratches the iceberg i didn t get into all the global questions the point i m trying to make is it would be tragic if we have a very good election this time and just because of the distribution of the governorships which we can t get a majority of back until 2002 just because there aren t many up this year and because we didn t do a good job in the legislative races and because we weren t legally prepared we lost what we won notwithstanding the fact that a plain majority of the american people agree with the direction in which we want to take the country now if they disagree with us and they want to vote us out that s their perfect right but we shouldn t loose the congress if a majority of the people are still with us that s the important thing we democrats would never say we should stay if office whether they re for us or not because we want to jiggle the lines around but we should have an honest open legal constitutional redistricting process so that if we can win this time and if we can maintain the confidence of the country we can stay in the saddle because that s what the people want so this is profoundly important and i spend a lot of time i try to spend a significant amount of time every single week i was president thinking about what america would be like not just a month or a year from now but five and 10 and 20 years from now and that s very very important so i just want you to know these members here i believe in them nothing good i achieved including when they were in the minority would have been possible if it hadn t been for them in spite of all the good things that have happened in this country i really believe that the next eight years can be even more exciting even more interesting even more productive if we just stick with the philosophy that says we want to make sure everybody has a chance that everybody matters and we all do better when we work together that s basically what we democrats believe and you ve made it possible if the american people stick with us to make sure that they can continue to do their job that is very very important thank you very much dem wjclinton14 9 00c bill_clinton thank you very much vernon has got this microphone here it s not on it s feeding to the press and if i know vernon he s already fed the press which may mean that i will get a little bit of slack from them if i say anything i shouldn t let me begin by saying this is my second home usually when i m a surrogate for hillary and i try to do this as much as i can because that way she can be out getting votes i m glad to do it but tonight i really got the better end of the deal vernon and ann have been so wonderful to us and we have had these seven soon to be eight christmas eves together with dwight and toni and the rest of their family and he s always letting me bring all my family here and sometimes that s a pretty large and rowdy bunch i have two young impish nephews who from time to time grandchildren and i m very grateful for their friendship and i want to thank dwight toni and ann and vernon one more time for being there for our family tonight we ve had an interesting talk around the table tonight about everything in the wide world but i d just like to say a couple of things this is a rather interesting time in my life i m not running for anything for the first time in 26 years my party has a new leader my family has a new candidate i cast what may well be the last vote of a long and rich life in my native state of arkansas for al gore for president and tuesday i got to vote for my wife for the first time in a little school in chappaqua new york and it was the most extraordinary experience you know i was happy as a kid on christmas morning it was amazing we got to go in and shake hands with all the election officials and i go into this little voting booth and i realized what i was doing and it was just an unbelievable feeling so for me personally this is a source of great pride and i was very proud of her last night because i thought she gave a good account of herself in a difficult and challenging format it should have been difficult and challenging these jobs are not being given away candidates ought to be tested but i was very very proud of her and apparently the people who saw the debate liked her pretty well too and i always believe you can trust the people people almost always get it right if they have enough information and enough time to digest it so i felt good about that but what i would like to say to all of you relates more to you than to her and to this campaign i appreciate what vernon said i thought when i ran for president in 1991 and 1992 we needed to change not only the content of our policy but the way we did our politics and the way we related to each other as citizens we needed to adopt a more unifying language and rhetoric and attitude toward one another because we re growing more diverse in a world that s growing more complicated and more interconnected and we can t get much done if all we want to do is to figure out how to segment the election in every political season in a way that divides the american people against one another so that hopefully we have at least one more vote than the other side that s not the way the world works its best it s not the way the best companies are run not the way the best nonprofits are run it s not the way people want to run their families or their communities it s not to say that we shouldn t have vigorous debates but i thought that the country had been disadvantaged by a harsh and exceedingly personal political style that i thought needed to go away for good so we set about trying to turn the country around and change the policy and change the politics and the result proves that a lot of sunshine and a lot of storms have been pretty good for the american people we ll leave it to the historians to judge how good and what role we had in it but i feel very grateful i have a heart full of gratitude but the point i want to make tonight and we discussed this at our table is that i think this is the an election that s at least as important as the election of 1992 and in some ways it presents as big if not a bigger challenge to people because what you do when times are good is sometimes harder to judge than what you do when times are tough the people took a chance on me in 1992 and we were laughing outside i have no idea how many people were in that polling place can i really vote for this guy he s only 46 years old a little state i ve never been there i m not quite sure you know they say all these bad things about him aw heck times are tough i m going to give him a chance people felt well it s not that big a risk i mean after all we re in tough shape here now the country s in good shape people have a sense of well being that they have earned current trends are going in the right direction the important thing in this election i think is for people to be quite clear about what they want out of this and what they want for their country i ve always believed that if we could all of us who feel as i do if we could just bring clarity to this election to get the american people sitting down and take a little time to think what would i like my country to look like in 10 years what is it that i should do with this truly magic moment what are the big challenges what are the big problems what are the big obstacles what are the big changes and who can manage them best i ve always thought we could all come out okay in this election because very often the person for whom you decide to vote depends in large measure on what you think the election is about in the first place so i think the vice president and senator lieberman are doing very well i think hillary s doing very well but i don t think any of these elections are over yet because i think the debate is still stewing out there people are trying to come to grips with what it all means i d just like to say a couple of things first about hillary one of the things that not much gets me mad anymore i m feeling pretty mellow but one of the things that still kind of steams me is when i hear somebody say well why is she doing this she wouldn t be doing this is she wanted to be his wife and the first lady you can ask vernon the truth is if she hadn t decided to spend the last 30 years helping me helping other people being a public servant as well as a private lawyer she could have been doing this 25 years ago she chose to be a citizen rather than a candidate she chose to do things like be on the board of the children s defense fund and found the arkansas advocates for children and families and started our neonatal nursery down there and be the chairman of the board of a legal services corporation before she was 30 and did other things where she could serve and not ask for anything this is the first time in 30 years she s ever asked anybody to do anything for her so when people say to me well they don t say it to me to my face but i hear it all the time it s sort of that s just not true i ve never known anybody that i thought was more qualified to serve as a senator who wasn t one already than her because she knows how to organize things she knows how to get things done she knows how to work with people who disagree with her she s worked for 30 years on issues that are central to this country not just children and families and health care and education but also some of the big issues in new york how do you bring economic opportunity to economically distressed places we had to make a living doing that in arkansas for a dozen years so i think she s superbly well qualified she s been to all 62 counties in the state she s the only person running i think for the senate in new york this year that s done that if you saw the debate last night you know she s thought a lot about these issues but the second thing i want to say in a larger sense is that there are big things we know that we re all going to have to deal with as people that our elected officials will be at the center of we know right now we ve got to deal with the aging of america all us baby boomers retire two people working and one person retired we know right now that in the world economy we live in education is more important than ever and we have the most diverse and largest student body we ve ever had a little picture of the changes in america i ll just give you just a sample there s a new movie out starring denzel washington i don t even know if its premiered yet and it s about the integration of t c williams high school and the football over the river there in alexandria t c williams high school today just three or four decades later is a magnificent school still it has one of the best antiviolence programs in america by the way but it is part of the most diverse school district in america where there are people from 180 different racial and ethnic groups whose families speak over 100 different native languages in one school district it s a whole different world out there how are we going to give all these kids a world class education the truth is we know how to turn around failing schools so we re going to do it i was at a school in harlem in new york a couple weeks ago that two years ago had 80 percent of the kids reading and doing math below grade level two years later it has 76 percent of the kids doing reading and math at or above their grade this can be done everywhere in america the question is whether we re going to do it how are we going to do that what should the federal government s role be what should we focus on so there are things we know then there are all these things that are imponderable when will global warming change our lives think the polar ice caps are melting what does that have to do with you if you re from illinois what s it going to do to agriculture why will it bury the sugar cane fields in louisiana now that we ve saved the florida everglades will they be overrun with water how could we deal with that in ways that grow the economy and create jobs for working people instead of take jobs away don t you want somebody in the senate and somebody in the white house that s curious and thinks about that kind of stuff the world is growing closer together what are our responsibilities to deal with the aids epidemic in africa growing even more rapidly in india now and soon to have the most rapid growth of all in the states of the former soviet union what are our responsibilities for that when you all when new mothers can bring home their babies with a little gene card that tells them what their genetic makeup is likely to be what their life expectancy is likely to be and what the probability of a girl getting breast cancer in her thirties is a little baby girl coming home from the hospital or a man having a debilitating stroke in his 40s because he s got a little genetic crook what are our responsibilities there how are we going to protect the privacy of that information and still get them the kind of on the kind of regime that will be drastically minimize the chances that those bad things will happen and increase their life expectancy how are we going to bridge the digital divide that exists in the world so that poor kids not just in america but all around the world get the same chance that others do what are you going to do if somebody decides figures out how to get a terrorist group a biological weapon that can be carried in a plastic case that can be not that won t be detected in airports something like this could all happen this is just some of the questions if we had all night i could give you a thousand questions i think about this all the time so quite apart from the fact that i think we re right and they re wrong on how big the tax cut should be whether we should pay down the debt what s our obligation to the poor areas in america whether we should raise the minimum wage whether we should have the patient s bill of rights whether we should have a medicare drug benefit we need to elect people this year who are curious and think about the future and who have the capacity to deal with these things and imagine how it s going to effect our little children and grandchildren because i m convinced that for all the good things that have happened in the last eight years all the best stuff s still out there but i m also convinced that the future is not about to stand still and therefore it will be more important than ever to have people who not only have very clear and unambiguous political values and common commitments that are clear to all of us at elections but people who are really curious in the best sense and learning and flexible and care about this i have never known anybody that i thought had a better combination of mind and heart and of constancy and ability to work with other people than hillary ever not anybody i ve never known anybody that i thought has thought about the future with a greater capacity to predict than al gore not anybody these are not the things that you necessarily think about in political campaigns you know they may not it s hard to make a 30 second ad on those two things but i m telling you that s the kind of stuff we need to be thinking about because all the best stuff s still out there but there are a lot of profound challenges out there i went down to colombia last week and we re trying to help colombia and also bolivia and ecuador and the countries around there you know root out the scourge of cocaine get the farmers to do something else for a living fourteen thousand kids die in america every year directly from drug overdoses as a consequence of their drug habits they can loose their democracy down there nobody really knows exactly how to save it all but i can tell you one thing we won t get it done by just shouting at each other we re going to have to work with people and think about it just the last thought i ll leave you with the most important thing about the human genome project to me is that the people who did it figured out with the most sophisticated computer technology available that we re genetically 99 9 percent the same and that the genetic differences between different racial and ethnic groups within the group among individuals are greater than the genetic differences between any two racial groups as a profile there is a book that s out that i ve been kind of touting lately that i m very interested in it s called nonzero written by a rob a man named robert wright i don t know if any of you have seen it but he wrote a book a few years ago called the moral animal which got a lost of interest essentially the argument of nonzero is this the world is it is a scientific and historical argument when martin luther king propositioned that the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice and essentially what the argument is that we have to become more just as a society if we want to survive as we grow more complex and more interdependent he s not naive i mean he understands that science was abused by nazi germany modern organizational techniques and military capacity was abused by communists totalitarians dictatorships but be basically argues that if you look at it over the whole sweep of history it is a good thing that we are growing a more complex and b more interdependent because it forces us to try to find solutions in which we all win instead of solutions in which some of us win at everybody else s expense as i said he s not naive if you have a race for president one of these guys is going to lose and one of them s going to win you know somebody s going to win somebody s going to loose the race for senate but he argues that the leadership style that is required for this time is that we work together to try to find principled compromises but not say you ll split the difference things that are always on the edge of change so that we can all win and what i ve tried to do is to modernize the democratic party but rooted on very simple ideas everybody counts everybody deserves a chance people that need help ought to get it to be empowered to make the most of their lives and we all do better when we work together very simple ideas but you have to have people who can take those simple principles in a very complicated world and make it work for ordinary people i don t know anybody i think can do that better than hillary and i know i m biased because i know we spent 30 years together i m just telling you i ve seen hundreds and hundreds of people in public life in both parties and most of them were better than most folks thought they were most people in public life i ve known have been honest hard working and did what they actually thought was right 95 percent of the time but i ve never known anybody i thought could do it that well so i think that she would do a great job for new york and i think she will win only if she can continue to bring clarity to the message and your presence here tonight and your support for her guarantees that she ll be able to be heard in her own voice rather than somebody s clever transfiguration of it and you should be very proud of that i hope you ll always be proud you came to this dinner tonight but the stakes are far bigger than another senate race even far bigger than another president s race and they are just as important if not more important then what we did in 92 because we now have the future to run ourselves and we ve got to do a good job of it thank you very much dem wjclinton14 9 00d bill_clinton good morning everyone i m delighted to welcome you to the white house this is the eighth and final for me white house prayer breakfast that we have at this time every year i want to thank secretary glickman for joining us he s sort of a symbol of our broad based and ecumenical approach in this administration he s the first jewish secretary of agriculture and he s helping people to understand that jewish farmer is not an oxymoron so that s good i want to say i bring you greetings on behalf of hillary who called me early this morning to ask what i was going to say and the vice president and mrs gore as you know the three of them are otherwise occupied but they need your prayers maybe even more than i do i want to thank you particularly those of you who have been here in past years each one of these breakfasts has been quite meaningful to me often for different reasons we ve talked about personal journeys and the journey of our nation and often talked about particular challenges within our borders very often due to problems of the spirit in our efforts to create one america we ve talked about that a lot today because of the enormous good fortune that we as americans have enjoyed i would like to talk just for a few moments about what our responsibilities are to the rest of the world there is a huge debate going on today all over the world about whether the two central revolutions of our time the globalization of human societies and the explosion of information technology which are quite related whether these things are on balance positive or on balance negative when we had the world trade organization meeting in seattle the streets were full of thousands of people who were saying in a very loud voice this whole deal is on balance negative interestingly enough they were marching in solidarity although often they had positions that directly contradicted one another there were those who said this is on balance negative because it will make the rich countries richer and the poor countries poorer and then there were those who said that this in on balance negative because it will weaken the middle class in the developed countries because we don t require poor countries to lift their labor and environmental standards and there were other various conflicts among them but the point is there s a lot of ferment here and a lot of people who are at the very least highly ambivalent about whether the coming together of the world in the new century is going to be a good or a bad thing then there s the whole question of how the coming together of the world and the way we make a living and particularly the way we produce energy to make a living is contributing to changing the climate which it is there s more and more evidence that the world is warming at an unsustainable rate and the polar ice cap if you ve seen the latest stories there about how much it s melting it s incontestable that sometime in the next 50 years we re going to begin to sustain severe adverse common consequences to the warming of the climate if we don t do something to turn that around and some people believe that there s no way to fix this if we keep trying to get richer and more global with our economy i don t happen to agree with that and i m not going to talk about it today but there s a big issue and very few people are in denial on climate change any more virtually all the major oil companies now concede for example that it is a serious problem and that they have a responsibility to deal with it and if they don t it could shape the way we are all or our grandchildren are living in ways that are quite different and on balance negative then there is the whole question of whether technology will offer more benefits to the organized forces of destruction than it does to the forces of good over the next 30 years i just came back from a remarkable trip to colombia i went to cartagena with the speaker of the house we only get publicity around here for the partisan fights we have but in an astonishing display of bipartisanship we passed something called plan colombia which is designed to help primarily the colombians but also all the nations on the borders reduce drug narcotics production coca production primarily steer farmers into alternative ways of making a living and develop an increase in the capacity of the colombian government to fight the narco traffickers and to keep drugs from coming into this country which are directly responsible for the deaths of about 14 000 kids a year in america and it was this really beautiful effort and then we got criticized the republicans and democrats together those of us that supported this because people said oh clinton is going down there to make another vietnam or we re trying to interfere in colombia s politics or be an imperialist country and i told everybody there that i didn t want anything out of colombia except a decent life for the people there with a way to make a living on honorable circumstances that didn t put drugs into the bodies of american children and children in europe and asia and throughout the world but the point i want to make is there are a lot of people who believe that with more open borders greater access smaller and smaller technology you know you now get a little hand held computer with a keyboard that s plastic that fits inside of your hand that has a screen that hooks you up to the internet and we know that for example terrorist networks in the world very often have some of the most sophisticated uses of the internet we know that if we get more and more open we may become more vulnerable to people who develop small scale means of delivering chemical and biological weapons and all these scenarios are real by the way we ve spent a lot of money in the defense department trying to prepare for the adverse consequences of terrorism using chemical and biological weapons so you ve got that on one side you ve got the people that say that globalization of the economy is going to lead to increasing inequality and oppression and whatever happens is going to destroy the environment and if it doesn t the organized forces of destruction will cross national borders and wreck everything anyway that s sort of what you might call the modest dark side and then you ve got people like me that don t buy it that basically i think if you look at over the last 50 years that over a 50 year period the countries that were poor that organized themselves properly and rewarded work and had lawful systems and related well to the rest of the world and traded more grew much more rapidly if you just look at the last 10 years with the explosion of the internet countries that are highly wired even though they re poor had growth rates that were 6 7 percent a year higher than they otherwise would have been and so finally there is no alternative it s not like we re all going to go back to huts and quit talking to each other so if we believe that every person is a child of god that everyone counts that everyone should have a certain level of decency in their lives and a certain fair chance to make something what are our obligations and i just want to mention three things that are before us today that i think are quite important and a lot of you in this room have been involved in one or all three the most important thing i d like to talk about is debt relief there are many countries that either because of internal problems or abject misgovernment piled up a lot of debt that can t be repaid and now every year they have to spend huge amounts of their national treasure just making interest payments on the debt money they can t spend on the education of their children on the development of public health systems which by the way are under huge stress around the world and on other things that will give them a chance to take advantage of the new global economy in society now there are people who don t favor this sweeping debt relief they say that it rewards misconduct that it creates what is known not in your business but in the economics business as a moral hazard in economic terms moral hazard is created the idea is if you don t hold people liable for every penny of the mistakes they made or their predecessors made then somehow you ve created a mess in which everybody will go around until the end of time borrowing money they have no intention of paying back and there s something to that by the way it s not a trivial concern to be dismissed the problem you have is that a lot of these countries were grievously misgoverned often by people who looted the national treasury and when they get a good government a new government a clean government when they agree to new rules when they hook themselves into the international monetary fund to the world bank on the condition that they ll change everything they ve done they still can never get out of debt and can never educate their kids and make their people healthy and create a country that is attractive to investors to give people opportunity which is why the pope and so many other people urge that we use the year 2000 as jubilee year to have a sweeping debt relief initiative and there s a whole thing in the judeo christian religion about how the jubilee is supposed to be used every 50 years to forgive debts to aid the poor to proclaim liberty to all and there are trends there are similar traditions in other faiths of the world represented in this room so for those of you who have been working on this i want to thank you what i would like to tell you is i think that it is very much in the interest of america to have big large scale debt relief if the countries that get the relief are committed to and held accountable to good governance and using the money not to build up military power but to invest in the human needs of their people we worked very hard to develop a plan and a lot of you are involved in other in developing countries throughout the world there are a lot of people here i know that are involved in africa for example where a lot of the where many of the countries most in need are but you also see this in asia and latin america which is a very important thing we developed a plan with other creditor nations to triple the debt relief available to the world s poorest nations provided they agreed to take the savings from the debt payments and put it into health and education the united states i announced last year that we would completely write off the bilateral debt owed to us by countries that qualify for this plan that is they ve got to be too poor to pay the money back and well enough governed to assure that they ll take the savings and put it into health and education that s as many as 33 nations right now i ll just tell you in the last year bolivia an amazing story by the way the poorest country in the andes has done the most to get rid of drug production the poorest country has done the most to get rid of drug production astonishing story that ought to be worth it to us to give them debt relief complete debt relief but they saved 77 million that they spent entirely on health education and other social needs uganda one of the two countries in africa that has dramatically reduced the aids rate has used its savings to double primary school enrollment honduras has qualified but not received their money yet they intend to offer every one of the children in the country nine years of education instead of six mozambique a country which last year until the floods had the first or second highest growth rate in the world after having been devastated by internal conflict just a few years ago because of the flood is going to use a lot of their money to buy medicine for government fundings because they ve got a lot of serious health problems that are attendant on the fact that the country was practically washed away ten nations so far have qualified for the debt relief 10 more i think will do so by the end of this year we ve got to make sure the money is there for them last year i got the congress was supported on a bipartisan basis the money for america to forgive our bilateral debt relief and we have to come up with money that for example if somebody owes a billion dollars even though we know they won t pay because they can t it gets budgeted at some figure and we actually have to put that money in the budget before we can forgive it but the congress did not appropriate the funds for the highly indebted poor countries initiative to forgive their multilateral debt relief most countries owe more money to the international monetary fund than they do to america or france or germany or britain or japan or anybody else so if we want this to work we have got to pass legislation this year to pay our fair share of this international debt relief initiative now we have members of both parties from dramatically different backgrounds supporting this it s really quite moving to see because a lot of times this is the only thing these people have ever agreed on it s really touching you know we have a lot of democrats who represent inner city districts with people who have roots in these countries allied for the first time in their entire career with conservative republican evangelical christians who believe they have a moral responsibility to do this because it s ordained and then all kinds of other people in the congress but it s given us a coalition that i would give anything to see formed around other issues and issues here at home anything and it could really if we can actually pull it off it can change the nature of the whole political debate in america because of something they did together that they all believe so deeply in what s the problem the problem is there is competition for this money and some people would rather spend it on something else where there are more immediate political benefits none of these people have any votes we re helping and some people do buy the moral hazard argument but i m just telling you i ve been in these countries and i know what many of their governments were like five years ago 10 years ago and i just don t think it washes if you want people to organize themselves well run themselves well and build a future we ve got to do this and i think it is a moral issue how can we sit here on the biggest mountain of wealth we have ever accumulated that any nation in all of human history has ever accumulated and we re not just throwing money away we re only giving this money to people who not only promise to but prove they are able to take all the savings and invest it in the human needs of their people so i would just say anything that any of you can do bolivia is waiting for more money that they haven t gotten honduras is waiting for money that they haven t gotten they re going to spend this money to send kids to school for nine years instead of six this is not a complicated thing and i would just implore you anything you can do to urge members of both parties to make this a high priority let me remind you we ve got a budget worth nearly 2 trillion and this money is for two years so we re talking about 210 million in one year and 225 million in the second year to lift the burden off poor people around the world only if they earn it in effect so i would just ask you all please help us with that and let me just mention two other things very briefly the public health crisis in a lot of these countries is threatening to take out all the gains of good government and even debt relief there are african countries with aids infection rates in the military of 30 percent or more a quarter of all the world s people every year who die die from aids malaria and tb those three things a phenomenal number of people die from malaria in part because there are no public health infrastructures in a lot of these places so the second thing i want to ask for your help on is we want to double or increase by 100 million it s about a 50 percent increase our efforts to help countries fight aids we want to increase dramatically our contributions to the global alliance for vaccines that helps countries who are poor afford the medicine there i just got back from nigeria and the president of nigeria who was a military leader in prison because he stood up for democracy and against a corrupt government that was there before dealt with all these taboos that have gripped africa and kept africa from dealing with aids in an astonishing way we went into an auditorium and he and i stood on a stage with a 16 year old girl who was an aids peer educator and a young man in his mid 20s this is an amazing story or maybe he s in his early 30s now he and his wife are both hiv positive he fell in love with a young woman who is hiv positive her parents didn t want them to get married his parents didn t want them to get married they were devout christians their minister didn t want them to get married and he finally convinced the pastor that he would never love anyone else and the pastor gave his ascent to their getting married within four months of their getting married he was hiv positive she got pregnant he had to quit his job to go around and scrounge up because his job didn t give him enough money to buy the drugs that would free their child of being hiv positive so he finally was let go of his job excuse me because he was hiv positive and they were still afraid and prejudice so with no money he found a way to get the drugs to his wife and they had a child who was born free of the virus so we were sitting there with hundreds of people in nigeria and the president is talking about this so this guy comes up and he tells this story and about what a blessing god has been in his life and how much he appreciates his pastor for marrying them and how much he appreciates their families for sticking with them and then the president of the country called his wife up out of the stands and he embraced her in front of hundreds of people now this is a big deal on a continent where most people have acted like you know you might as well have small pox and you were giving it out by talking to people this is a huge deal and the president got up and said we have to fight the disease not the people who have it our enemy are not the people with it we have to fight the disease it was an amazing thing now i think these people ought to be helped so we but it s 100 million i want to come up with for that and i forget how much we re given to the vaccine alliance and in addition to that i have asked the congress after meeting with a lot of our big drug research companies not just the big pharmaceutical companies but a lot of them that do biomedical research to give us a billion dollar tax credit to encourage companies to develop vaccines for aids malaria and tb because we have to do that because they don t see any front end benefit in it and they have to they can t justify the massive amounts of money that are needed to develop these vaccines because they know that most of the people that need them can t afford to buy them so if they develop them we ll figure out how to get the money to get them out there but first we ve got to have them developed so i ve proposed a tax credit more money to help buy the medicines that are out there now and a hundred million more dollars directly to help these countries to fight aids i want to ask you to help me get that money it ought to be an american obligation this is a serious global problem the last thing i want to say is that there was a remarkable meeting in senegal not very long ago where essentially an alliance of the world s developing and developed countries made a commitment to try to make basic education available to every child in the world within 15 years and one of the reasons that kids don t go is they re not sure it makes sense or their parents there are even countries in the poorest countries where the parents no matter how poor they are have to pay some money for their kids to go to school lots of problems so senator george mcgovern who is our ambassador to the world food organization in rome and senator bob dole came to me with congressman jim mcgovern no relation from massachusetts and these three people from different worlds asked me to support an initiative to try to get to the point where the wealthier countries in the world could offer every poor child in the world a nutritious meal in school if they d show up to school and they reasoned that even though there are lots of other issues and by the way i won t go into all that we ve got to do a lot more to help these schools in these developing countries but they reasoned that if we could do that there would be a dramatic enrollment especially among young girls who are often kept at home because their parents see no economic benefit and in fact a burden to having their daughters go to school but there are a lot of young boys that aren t in school in countries too so we thanks to dan glickman got 300 million up and we are doing a test run and we re going around to countries that want to do this and with 300 million listen to this we can feed 9 million school children for a year in school but you don t get fed unless you come to school now for somewhere between 3 billion and 4 billion we could give a if we can get the rest of the world to help us do this we could give a nutritious meal either breakfast or lunch to every school aged child in every really poor country in the entire world for a year now you don t have to do anything about that now i just want you to know about it because we have to go figure out how to do this and let me tell you why dan has got to figure out how is this stuff going to be delivered to remote areas or is it going to be in dried packages then hydrated and heated how are we going to do this without messing up the local farm economies the last thing we want to do is destabilize already fragile farmers there are practical things but we have many countries that are interested in this when i was in colombia on the drug thing the president s wife asked me about this program she said can we be part of that or are we too well off you know she said we re not really all that rich with all these narco traffickers taking the money we were talking about it but the point i want to say is we have reaped great benefits from the information revolution and the globalization of the economy we therefore have great responsibilities we have responsibilities to put a human face on the global economy that s why i think we re right to advocate higher environmental and labor standards try to make sure everybody benefits we have a responsibility to lead the way on climate change not be stuck in denial because we re still the number one producer of greenhouse gases although shortly unless we help them find a different way to get rich china and india will be just because they ve got more folks and in the short run we have a very heavy responsibility i believe to broaden and simplify this debt relief initiative to lead the assault on the global diseases of aids tb and malaria that take out a quarter of the people who die most of them very prematurely before their time every year and to do more to universalize education so that everybody everywhere will be able to take advantage of what we re coming to take for granted now we ve had a lot of wonderful talks over the last eight years but i think that i do not believe that a nation any more than a church a synagogue a mosque a particular religious faith can confine its compassion and concern and commitment only within its borders especially if you happen to be in the most fortunate country in the world and i can t figure out for you what you think about whether these sweeping historical trends are on balance good or bad but it seems to me if you believe that people are on balance good or bad or capable of good we can make these trends work for good and i ll just close with this there is a fascinating book out that i just read by a man named robert wright called nonzero he wrote an earlier book called he moral animal which some of you may have read this whole book is about is all this stuff that is happening in science and technology on balance good or bad and are the dark scenarios going to prevail or is there some other way the argument of the book from which it gets its title is basically an attempt to historically validate something martin luther kind once said the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice it s pretty hard to make that case arguably when you look at what happened with world war i with nazi germany and world war ii with the highly sophisticated oppressive systems of communism but that s the argument of this book that the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice the argument is that the more complex societies grow and the more interconnected we all get the more interdependent we become the more we have to look for nonzero sum solutions that is solutions in which we all win instead of solutions in which i win at your expense it s not a naive book he says hey look there s still going to be an election for president one person wins one person looses there s still going to be choices for who wins the company or who gets the pulpit there will be choices it s not a naive book but he says that on balance great organizations and great societies will have to increasingly look for ways for everyone to win in an atmosphere of principle compromise based on shared values maximizing the tools at hand otherwise you can t continue societies cannot continue to grow both more complex and more interdependent so i leave you with that thought and whatever it might mean for you in trying to reconcile your faith with the realities of modern life and again i say as americans we have i think a truly unique opportunity and a very profound responsibility to do something now on debt relief disease and education beyond our borders thank you very much dem wjclinton14 9 94 bill_clinton thank you you know when the vice president opened this occasion by saying that he would have to wear his full body suit for two years and that the speaker of the house had been restored to full powers after his surgery came out all right i couldn t help thinking it took reinventing government to get him on david letterman and now this terrible accident but he s actually become the funniest person in the administration as a result of these two projects there is no effort that he has spared to promote this project you remember he even went on the letterman show to smash an ashtray and he has now been invited as part of our follow up to show we re making progress to go on the show again where he will read a top five list showing that we can do more with less he will make each one of them twice as funny as any top 10 list that was there i want to thank dr mendoza mr torno ms holstein for traveling here to tell your stories for all the facts and figures and charts about the success of reinventing government the thing that really counts is that the benefits are being felt the way they ought to be by the american people in a very personal and immediate way and of course we hope as a result of this occasion today and the follow up report that the rest of the american people will see that we are changing the way the federal government works i want to thank the successful teams who made these particular stories possible erskine bowles and the low doc team from the small business administration who cut a 100 page application down to one page customs commissioner george weise the assistant commissioner samuel banks and lynn gordon for their team in the miami office who realized that becoming partners with airlines and shippers is a win win situation my old friend james lee witt and bea gonzalez and the team that completely reorganized fema so that all its resources are available to respond to any emergency when i took office the national academy of public administration said this about fema fema is like a patient in triage the president and congress must decide whether to treat it or let it die there was even a bill pending in congress to abolish fema and in 1992 as i traveled the country i never went a place that somebody didn t say something disparaging about it well the bill is gone and it may be the most popular agency in the entire federal government there s nothing that makes an ordinary taxpayer madder than to feel that those of us who work for the government don t value their hard earned dollars one single simple example of the waste of taxpayers money can erase in the public mind thousands and thousands and thousands of examples of devoted service to the same taxpayers that s especially true in these perplexing times when people have such conflicting feelings we re going through a period of profound change and by large margins americans say they want government to address our great national problems but by equally large margins they say they don t trust our ability to do it right or as we say down home most of our folks think that the government would mess up a two car parade now this reinventing government effort grew out of several sources first out of my experience as a governor where we tried to begin this effort second out of the encounters that the vice president and i had with each other and with citizens all during the campaign with the literature we read and the things we learned that were going on in the private sector thirdly with the enormous energy and desire we got out of federal employees themselves next with the leadership that was already coming out of the congress senator glenn and congressman conyers have already been acknowledged and there were others who really thought that we ought to do it but finally we did it because it was necessary because without it we could not fulfill the mission of the administration the mission of this administration from day one has been to increase economic opportunity and maintain national security to empower the individuals of this country to assume personal responsibility for their own futures to strengthen the sense of community in america to make our diversity a cause of celebration and unity not division and to change the way government works for ordinary citizens unless we can do the last thing we cannot achieve the other three why is that well one of the reasons we have so much economic opportunity today is that we reduced the budget deficit you couldn t reduce the budget deficit and not hurt the public interest unless you re reinventing government we want to empower individuals one of the things that we did with our empowerment program is through the department of education to completely reform the college loan program so that 20 million americans now with outstanding loans are eligible to refinance them with longer repayment schedules at lower interest rates and starting this year large numbers of new students will be able to do the same thing we couldn t afford to do that except we actually save money by doing it by converting the old expensive cumbersome student loan program into at least largely a direct loan program and increasing our ability to recover delinquent loans which is dramatically increasing if you want to strengthen the american community people have to feel like we care about each other if every place there is a disaster people think that fema has failed them it s hard to say they re part of an american community but from the people in california who suffered from the earthquakes and the fires the people all up and down the mississippi river that were flooded out last summer to the people in the southeast that suffered drought last year and floods this year i think they will tell you that fema is on the job yesterday the vice president mentioned national service it is not a government bureaucracy it is a movement that the government has made possible none of this would have happened if we hadn t had a serious approach to reinventing government and none of that would have happened if we hadn t reinvented the relationship between the president and the vice president dome people take it as a sign of weakness that i try to get the most out of everybody that lives around here or works around here and that i try to find people who do things better than i do i thought that was my job the vice president whether it is leading our efforts in the environment to develop a clean car or performing with such superb leadership to get a compromise at the very important cairo conference dealing with reinventing government or difficult foreign policy issues is plainly the most active productive constructive vice president in the history of this republic and that is a very important thing historically this argument about government that politicians had was something designed to play into that feeling i just gave you when you all chuckled when i said most folks think government would mess up a one car parade for example when we had meetings on our health care reform initiative people would come in opposition and they would say i don t want government getting into this i m afraid government will mess up my medicare we actually had people say this sort of visceral thing so any politician worth a flip can figure out how to develop four or five one liners that will make 90 percent of the voters shout hallelujah the problem is that this debate has normally stopped at the rhetorical level politicians garner the votes government grows in a sort of piecemeal fashion government employees and the citizens get more frustrated every year and real problems aren t solved we had an idea that we could make government smaller but also different that we could do more and cost less that we could have more responsibility with less bureaucracy if we empowered the people who work for this government and paid attention to the people who pay for it we didn t see government as the savior of america but we knew our government couldn t sit on the sidelines in a period of such profound change so we tried to develop a partnership that makes sense this vision is at the heart of everything we re trying to do it s at the heart of the national service program it s at the heart of the crime bill that we signed yesterday where we made a pretty good swap we would take all the savings from reducing the size of the federal government and just give it to the american people to make themselves safer on their streets in their homes in their schools this has been a very important endeavor a lot of people were very skeptical when we began but if you just look at what s happened in the time we ve been in office as evidenced by those charts over there since i became president the size of the federal work force has been reduced by 71 000 positions in three years we ll have the smallest federal work force since president kennedy was here to go with three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since president truman was here the savings already enacted by congress or undertaken by the executive branch will amount to 47 billion in this budget cycle and we re on the way to saving 108 billion most of these savings will pay for the crime bill and help to put 100 000 more police officers on the street 100 000 serious criminals behind bars there were those who said that these things would never pass through the congress but congress has already enacted more than 20 bills that will save money and improve services by reinventing government and 50 percent of the items needing congressional action are already pending in congress many with real bipartisan support i m proud to announce some more good news today at the general services administration administrator johnson saved 1 2 billion by carefully reviewing construction projects that had been approved and not yet built in other words buildings we really didn t need and just today the gsa is announcing it saved 23 million simply by managing the government s motor pools more efficiently today the secretary of defense set a goal to cut in half the time it takes to complete internal business processes from hiring workers to building new weapons systems this is very important senator glenn has worked for years on procurement reform if we are going to maintain the national security at a time when we have to impose budget discipline we must find ways to make these dollars go further we can t simply abandon our technological lead our readiness our preparedness all the things that have been so carefully built up over the last 16 or 17 years at the office of management and budget directordesignate rivlin tells me the federal government will offer buyouts to another 40 000 employees at the beginning of the new fiscal year next month and next tuesday the vice president and i will release a report on the first ever consumer service standards for the federal government over 100 agencies have prepared more than 1 700 specific pledges to the taxpayers of this country to improve the services that they provide i am more convinced now than ever that we have to keep doing this that we have to make this reinventing government a permanent process and that there are serious structural issues which still have to be addressed washington needs to work for ordinary middle class americans and in order to do that we have got to find a way to open this process up so that the public interest can always overwhelm particular interest in matters of great importance that s why congress must also finish the job it has begun passing a tough campaign finance reform bill a lobbying reform bill and the bill that requires congress to live under the laws it imposes on the rest of americans before the end of this session all three of these actions have broad bipartisan support in both houses two of the bills have passed both houses and await conference resolution the house of representatives has overwhelmingly passed the third one we need to move forward these are actions that americans deserve and demand and they will help them to believe that the rest of these things are also occurring as well meanwhile i assure you that we will be unrelenting in our efforts to continue reinventing government to give you a government that costs less does more empowers employees and listens to the people who pay for it we will measure our progress not only in terms of bills passed and money saved but in terms of people better served you met some of those satisfied citizens today we re committed to making a lot more satisfied citizens in the months and years to come thank you very much thank you all for coming dem wjclinton14 9 96 bill_clinton thank you congressman payne he was up here talking about me and our administration and laying it on so thick it sounded so good i wasn t quite sure he was talking who he was talking about and alexis herman sitting over there with me and he got down to the end she said he s talking about you this is your introduction stand up stand up thank you so very much thank you congressman don payne for your leadership of the congressional black caucus and for your passion for the people of america and indeed for people around the world thank you congressman bill jefferson for chairing this dinner for two years in a row that is worth more than applause folks thank you for being my friend for so long and way back in the beginning when only you and my mother thought i could be elected president thank you labaron taylor for chairing the congressional black caucus foundation to all the members of the congressional black caucus senator carol moseley braun honored guests i d also like to recognize and thank for their service the retiring members of the cbc kweisi mfume cardiss collins cleo fields barbara rose collins and my neighbor harold ford from tennessee please give them all a big hand they have served our country well we have a lot of members of our administration here tonight our energy secretary hazel o leary the commerce secretary mickey kantor assistant attorney general deval patrick thank you for sticking up for the civil rights of all americans deval federal highway administrator rodney slater assistant to the president for appointments bob nash if you get one credit me if you don t blame him i m glad to see my friend mayor dinkins here tonight the director of the office of drug policy control in the white house general barry mccaffrey former deputy chairman of the african national congress walter susulu is here thank you walter and the future speaker of the house of representatives is here and we re glad to see him this is my fourth cbc dinner i enjoy each one better than the last i thank all of you for coming up here to shake my hand and i apologize for everyone i didn t get to see let me begin by recognizing your outstanding awardees tonight thank you first of all for honoring alma brown and for what you have done also to honor the memory of ron brown who was clearly the greatest commerce secretary in my lifetime perhaps in the history of the united states i congratulate mary frances barry ingrid saunders jones tony fay elaine jones congressman john conyers congressman donald payne labaron taylor wade henderson and my good friend andy young all of you in your own way have moved our country toward greater justice equality and opportunity not only the members of this foundation and the people at this dinner but all americans are in your debt and we congratulate you ladies and gentlemen last monday i had the privilege of awarding the highest honor our nation can bestow on any citizen the medal of freedom one of the honorees john johnson is clearly a legend in the african american community a man who started with nothing in my home state moved to illinois and made a pretty good career for himself i enjoyed seeing him there and i was glad to honor him but unfortunately because of hurricane fran one awardee did not make it to the white house to receive her award in person so earlier this evening in a ceremony in the oval office i presented the congressional medal of freedom to a woman whose quiet dignity ignited the most significant social movement in the history of the united states rosa parks at this time i d like to ask congressman bill jefferson and congressman don payne to escort rosa parks to the stage so that we can present her to you on this great night of her recognition i would like to read the citation which i presented to rosa just a couple of hours ago along with this magnificent medal please be seated it says on december 1 1955 going home from work rosa parks boarded a city bus in montgomery alabama and with one modest act of defiance changed the course of history by refusing to give up her seat she sparked the montgomery bus boycott and helped launch the civil rights movement in the years since she has remained committed to the cause of freedom speaking out against injustice here and abroad called the first lady of civil rights rosa parks has demonstrated in the words of robert kennedy that each time a person strikes out against injustice she sends forth the tiny ripple of hope which crossing millions of others can sweep down the walls of oppression presented at the white house in washington september 9 1996 to you rosa parks thank you and god bless you even one of the photographers said you re lovely ms parks you guys never say anything like that to me ladies and gentlemen in the last couple of weeks as you may have noticed i have been out in the country meeting with our fellow americans i took a train to the convention in chicago and by the way to all of you who are here from chicago thank you for a magnificent convention for all you did we started in west virginia and went into kentucky all through ohio through michigan ending up in indiana then afterward hillary and i and al and tipper gore took a bus trip from missouri back into southern illinois across into kentucky down through tennessee and i went up to wisconsin for labor day i have just been in arizona and california everywhere i go the crowds are large and enthusiastic full of hope and conviction it is so different from four years ago when we had high unemployment the slowest job growth since the depression stagnant wages rising crime a country that was becoming even more cynical about the political system with rising division i said then that i wanted to create a country in which we had opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community that includes all americans i said that i thought that washington had become too caught up in the politics of who is to blame and we d forgotten that what the main purpose of our work here which is not to say who is to blame but to ask what are we going to do about it thanks to a lot of the people who are in this room we have been trying to do something about it for four years now and after four years as don payne said we ve got 10 5 million new jobs 4 5 million new homeowners a record number of new small businesses including in every year record numbers of new businesses owned by women and minorities we have for the first time since before the civil war cut the deficit in each one of the four years of my presidency and we did it without gutting medicare medicaid education the environment and our commitment to the proposition that everybody in this country is entitled to be treated fairly and justly last year the african american unemployment rate was in single digits for the first time in two decades crime has gone down for four years in a row twelve million americans can take some time off when their babies are born or when their parents are sick without losing their jobs because of the family and medical leave law fifteen million american families got a tax cut to stay off welfare because they were working hard with children under the earned income tax increase that was passed by the members of congress in this room today forty million americans have had their pensions we shut down more toxic waste dumps in three years than were shut down in the 12 years before fifty million americans are breathing cleaner air we have standards for safer food we ve increased the immunization of children we ve increased the number of children with head start our health care reform the kennedy kassebaum bill now says to 25 million americans you can t lose your health insurance anymore just because somebody in your family got sick that s what insurance is for even though i was roundly criticized for it in the most amazing quarters to me in the so called progressive quarters of this community when i became president saying that i wanted to prove we could have diversity and excellence and that i thought we had an obligation to try to construct a government that would look like america could relate to america and could work with america i think it s worked out pretty well 42 african americans have been nominated to the federal court since i became president we ve nominated more women and minorities to the federal bench by far than any president in history and they have the highest ratings collectively from the american bar association of any nominees in history don t let anybody tell you you can t have excellence and diversity it is not true i m grateful for the service of people like hazel o leary jesse brown frank raines our new director of the office of management and budget the first african american ever to hold that position i m grateful for those who went before them in our cabinet of course ron brown but also lee brown and mike espy i m grateful for the difference of people like deval patrick and jim joseph and rodney slater make i m grateful that for the first time ever there are three top assistants to the president in the white house who are african american alexis herman maggie williams and bob nash i m proud to announce tonight that the clinton gore campaign has appointed to serve as honorary campaign chairs alma brown and congressman john lewis along with terry mcauliffe senator david pryor governor roy romer the former governor of texas ann richards and linda chavez thompson they will lead our effort to spread the message and organize our reelection efforts around the country thank you john and thank you alma now that is a pretty good start i guess i should also mention what don payne said that we had to say no to some things we couldn t just say yes to we said no to the attempts to balance the budget by raising taxes on poor working people raiding workers pension funds breaking our commitments to education breaking our commitment to poor little children seniors in nursing homes families with disabilities by essentially ending medicaid s guarantee no to the effort to create a two tier system of medicare which would have hurt the oldest and the poorest and the sickest of our seniors no to the attempts to undermine 25 years of bipartisan support for environmental protection but that is not enough we have to do more we have come a long way if you look at where we are now compared to where we were four years ago then wages were dropping now they re rising there are lots of things that are better but every one of you knows that we are not yet prepared for the enormous transition to the 21st century that we re all facing and we will not be prepared until we can honestly say with a clear head and a clear conscience that every single person in this country who is willing to work for it can achieve the american dream until we can say that until we can say we know we re still going to be the strongest force for peace freedom and prosperity in the world until we can say and we know that our american community is not going to go the way of all these other countries where people spend all their time fighting each other because of their racial their ethnic their religious their tribal differences in this country all you ve got to do is believe in the constitution the bill of rights and the declaration of independence and show up and we re for you you re a part of our america and you re walking on our bridge into the 21st century until we can say that we have work to do so i ask you to support our efforts to balance the budget and keep the economy growing and keep those interest rates down but to do it in a way that continues to invest in the people and the places that still don t fully participate in the promise of america and i ask you to support a tax cut but it ought to be the right kind focused on child rearing and education and health care and buying that first home and it ought to be paid for and people like me who don t need it shouldn t get it blow up the deficit and turn right around and go back to the past and what we did before which caused our wreckage in the economy and drove the unemployment rate up and left too many of our people behind so i want you to help me to build the right kind of bridge to that 21st century i want to build a bridge where every 8 year old can read a book on his or her own where every 12 year old in every classroom in america can log in on the internet and for the first time i want the kids in the poorest urban classroom and the most isolated rural classrooms to have the same educational opportunity at the same level of quality in the same time as the children in the richest classes in america can and we will do it in the next four years if we can build the right bridge to the 21st century i want you to help me build a bridge where we make two years of college just as universal in four years from now as a high school education is today now that s a tax cut worth giving give people a tax cut for the cost of community college tuition let them have those two years of education we will see the incomes go up we will see people getting good jobs and it will make a difference if we build the right kind of bridge to the 21st century and i hope you ll help me do that i also want you to help me in this election period to remind america that for all of our 10 5 million new jobs there are still people in places that have been left behind i want you to remind america that you can t require people on welfare to go to work unless they have work i want you to help me to spark a vast new round of investments in our isolated inner city areas which have been left behind help me give the mayors and the others the power to create those jobs and create those opportunities by cleaning up the environment creating investment incentives and putting people to work we cannot ever forget that there are still too many americans who could no more come to this dinner than a man in the moon because they re still looking for a job and they need one tomorrow and we need to do our best to make sure that they have their part of 21st century america as well let me just say for those of you who don t think we can do that look at what s been done in the empowerment zones that have been created look at what s happened in detroit where when they became one of our empowerment zone cities they raised 2 billion in private investment to go with our tax incentives and cash grants and the unemployment rate in three years in detroit detroit a city i used to hear was gone had dropped from 8 5 percent to less than 4 percent in detroit michigan we can do this folks we can turn this around if you are committed and i am committed and i might say if we get the kind of congress that will support the kind of policies that will enable us to move this country forward and let me say one last thing i just was with a group of people right before i came over here this is an interesting story i was with a small group of americans who are from india and it s very interesting of all the groups in america they re relatively small only a half a million of them but they have the highest average educational attainment the highest average income and the highest average incidence of two parent families of any group of americans including wasps like me but they were supporting what we were trying to do and they were glad i was coming here to be with you because they understand that we have to build a bridge we can all walk across and they understand unlike some that in order for them to be really successful it does take a village where we all work together to lift all of our children up and give all of our kids a better opportunity and that s the last thing i would like to say to you yes i refused to end affirmative action even though it was a popular thing at the moment i think the popularity has sort of faded now because the few incidents of things that didn t work didn t prove that we should throw away something that had plainly worked overwhelmingly for so many people over the last 25 years and because there is still evidence that we have a ways to go i feel the same way about any form of discrimination and i think if we re going to stay on the right track we need to make sure we have less discrimination not more of it just imagine what the future is going to be like ten years from now those of you who are eating here tonight have children who will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet just 10 years from now some of our children will be doing jobs that have not been imagined yet your government is now doing a research project with ibm to build a supercomputer that will do more calculations in one second that you can do tonight if you go home and pick up a hand held calculator in listen to this 30 000 years that is how fast things are changing that is the magnitude of change we are facing and yet there is no nation in the world so well positioned for the 21st century as the united states in no small measure because of you and because of the hard often bitter lessons we have learned in coming to grips with the problems rooted in the division of the races from the beginning of our country why because now we are the most diverse big country in the world and if we can maintain our commitment to staying on the cutting edge of change and making sure everybody gets a chance to go there no one will do as well as american children will in the 21st century if we can just remember that we are blessed by our diversity just as much as other countries have been cursed by theirs today the world is looking at the elections in bosnia the first halting step to moving from the absence of war which is what they have had since we went in there to the beginning of peace again but how tragic it is that that little country where the muslims and croats and the serbs are actually biologically indistinguishable and happen to be in separate groups because of the developments of history how sad it is that in that little country for four years after decades of getting along they just set on each other and started killing each other even killing the children why because the darker side of human nature was put on a pedestal because they were told the most important thing about them is that they weren t the other guys and you look around the world and see where all that s happening now we re worried about burundi breaking out again and having what happened in rwanda happen in burundi why because the hutus and the tutsis think the most important thing about them is they re not the other guy i went to ireland a year ago and the streets were lined with the catholics and protestants the young children cheering and yelling because they didn t want any more war over there but the grown ups didn t have as much sense as the kids did and they started fighting again over things that happened 300 400 500 600 years ago telling the most important thing about them was they weren t catholic or they weren t protestant how long did south africa suffer for the same reason and we have to remember that s why i act so strongly when i see things like the church burnings or synagogues or islamic centers being defaced any of this is wrong we can never define ourselves as americans by saying we are so good because we are not the other guy the other guys are us too we are all americans and i saw where one of our friends in the other party the other day was saying boy we really need to jump on this affirmative action out in california we can take the president down on this this is one of those wedge issues well let me tell you something folks those wedge issues nearly did us in we have had about all the wedge issues we need and i d like them to take their wedges and go someplace else and let those of us who believe in unity get on with the business of making america a great place for every american to live in and i want you to help me build that kind of bridge to the 21st century thank you and god bless you thank you dem wjclinton14 9 98a bill_clinton thank you very much let me begin by saying for hillary and for me just your presence here your enthusiasm and your personal support mean more than you can possibly know i d like to thank senator torricelli and representative pelosi for doing a magnificent job i thank congresswoman nita lowey and congressman rangel for being here i thank all three of the candidates for the united states senate in new york tomorrow on our ticket have come here tonight i don t know if they re all still here but i know congressman schumer and mark green and geraldine ferraro were all here and however that race comes out tomorrow we have a lot of work to do and won t it be fun i know that we can depend on all of you to help make this night a part of a springboard to doing well in the senate and the congressional elections beginning here in new york since i m in new york and you ve been so wonderful to me since 1992 i d like to tell you that there is no more effective member of our cabinet than andrew cuomo the secretary of housing and urban development i m very very grateful to him for his support i d also like to say again how very grateful i am to tipper for all the work she s done for families for children for those who need mental health care and the advances we ve made that would not have occurred if it hadn t been for her i would like to say what i said at lunch today all of you just need to remember that every single hard decision i had to make in the last six years that turned out right that everybody said was wrong whether it was bringing the deficit down standing for the brady bill and the assault weapons ban doing the things that really hurt our people in congress but helped america taking the steps necessary to bring peace in bosnia and helping to end the mexican financial crisis so the world could go on and grow and we could benefit every single hard decision that was unpopular al gore was there every step of the way and you should never forget that whether it s in technology policy or the environment or dealing with russia or south africa or giving us the smallest federal government in 35 years with the best output i could go through issue after issue after issue and i think it s very important that you understand you may argue about many things about this administration but one thing is absolutely unarguable he has had more influence over more decisions and done more good by far than any vice president in the history of the united states of america i d also like to thank hillary for a lot of things but i just had one thing in particular on my mind we just got back from russia and ireland and when i was in ireland i went to the new parliament at stormont where all the parties are represented we ve got a chance to keep the peace process going in ireland and it s a big deal in new york there are a lot of irish people in new york so i can talk about this with some confidence they ve had these 30 years of trouble but they ve been really fighting the catholics and protestants for 800 years and my heart just swelled with pride when i was going through there and every woman member came up to me and said your wife was the first person that took us seriously that believed we could make peace and basically said when the men were still out there fighting with each other and acting like children we knew we could make peace in ireland and we thank her for what she s done and i thank her for representing the best of america all over the world and giving people hope that the world can be full of peace and opportunity we ve got to go to the lion king i want you to think about three things number one we re trying to beat history here since the civil war in every midterm election when the president was in his second term the party of the president has lost seats in the congress since the civil war now i believe we re going to beat history here for one simple reason we have a vision of the future and our ideas are supported by more americans than our adversaries are you are here to make sure that we can get our message out and you have succeeded magnificently we ve exceeded our goal tonight by more than 25 percent and i m very grateful to you for that but i want you to leave here with a clear understanding that what we have to do is to go out to the american people and say look most elections in times like this are sort of stand pat elections where the electorate is rather complacent the turnout is rather low that always benefits the republicans because people who are older and wealthier and more likely to be republicans vote but basically they re stand pat elections because we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years and the highest home ownership in history and things are doing pretty well october 1st we ll have the first balanced budget in 29 years now that s good but that is not the message of the election if the message is we have done a good job people will relax and stay home that is not the message the message is we re grateful for the chance to serve we re grateful that america is better off but this country has huge challenges i just spoke this morning as hillary said to the council on foreign relations about all this global economic and financial turmoil and what things america must do right now to try to turn it around and limit it and what long term steps we have to take so i think you need to go out and say to your friends and neighbors look we re glad things are doing well we re on the edge of a new century and a new time and things are changing we have big challenges and because we re doing well we have the obligation to our children to think big to think about the people of this country who aren t doing so well and to think how we can bring this whole country together as one community in the 21st century that means we have to do our part to straighten the global economy out because we can never be an island of prosperity and a sea of misery it means we have to do the big things like saving social security before we do the popular things like spending this surplus it s only now beginning to materialize for a tax cut we ve been waiting 29 years to see the red ink turn black and before we ve seen it even a day some people want to spend it i know it s election year but i m telling you what i want is for the baby boomers like me when we retire i don t want us to bankrupt our children so they can t raise our grandchildren i say save social security first before you do anything else with the surplus it s a big issue as senator torricelli said we ve still got to extend health opportunities to people but there s 160 million people in managed care plans i think they ought to have a right to an emergency room to a specialist to the protection of privacy of their records that s what the health care bill of rights is all about the patient s bill of rights we re for it they re not that s a big issue the american people need to know that it will shape the way millions of families live the environment s a big issue we believe you can grow the economy and improve the environment they disagree that s a huge issue it will shape the way millions of people live we re for campaign finance reform and they aren t it s a big issue so i ask you go out there and talk about the big issues talk about the people issues and remember in the end the reason we re democrats is because we believe on the edge of a new century that what we re doing will help to expand opportunity and deepen freedom and bring us closer together and promote peace and harmony in the world that s what we believe go talk big go tell people not to be complacent tell them not to worry about the adversity adversity makes people come out and show up witness your presence here tonight what we ve got to worry about is that people know what this election is about go out and tell them and make sure your investment tonight has a big big payoff on election night in november thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton14 9 98b bill_clinton thank you very much pete hillary and i are delighted to be here with you and joan and i m glad to be joined by secretary rubin and jim harmon gene sperling other members of our team i m glad to see dick holbrooke over here i hope if we can overcome the inertia of congress he will soon be a member of the team again and i thank david rockefeller and les gelb and others who welcomed us here today the subject that i want to discuss let me just say one thing in advance i m going to give you my best thoughts we have been working on this for three years at some level of intensity or another going back to the naples g 7 meeting in the aftermath of the mexican financial crisis i have done everything i could do personally to reach out across the country and indeed across the world for any new ideas from any source i m going to give you my best thinking today about what we can do but i want you to know that i m here and if i had my druthers this would be about a three hour session where i d give this talk and then i would listen for the rest of the time so i want to encourage you if you think we re right to support us but if you have any ideas for goodness sake share them because i agree with what pete said this is the biggest financial challenge facing the world in a half century and the united states has an absolutely inescapable obligation to lead and to lead in a way that s consistent with our values and our obligation to see that what we re doing helps lift the lives of ordinary people here at home and all around the world the council on foreign relations has always stood for political and economic freedom since right after world war i and i think one of the things that has impacted all of us and it was implicit in what pete said is that for the last decade the growth of freedom around the world with more than half the people in the world living under governments of their own choosing more than half the villages the one million villages in china now even electing their own governments and this sweeping replacement of command and control economies by market economies i think it seems to have happened so easily so effortlessly so inexorably that i think we think the trend is inevitable and irreversible but if you consider today s economic difficulties disruptions and the plain old deep personal disappointments of now tens of millions of people around the world it is clear to me that there is now a stark challenge not only to economic freedom but if unaddressed a challenge that could stem the rising tide of political liberty as well obviously we have profound interests here it is a great irony that we are at a moment of unsurpassed economic strength at a time of such turmoil in the world economy we i think all of us in this room know that our future prosperity depends upon whether we can work with others to restore confidence manage change stabilize the financial system and spur robust global growth for most of the last 30 years the united states and the rest of the world has been preoccupied by inflation for reasons that all of you here know all too well and it was a good thing to be preoccupied with today the low and stable inflation we enjoy has been critical to our economic health and low inflation has also contributed to that of many other nations as well but clearly the balance of risks has now shifted with a full quarter of the world s population living in countries with declining economic growth or negative economic growth therefore i believe the industrial world s chief priority today plainly is to spur growth it seems to me there are six immediate steps we should take to help contain the current financial turmoil around the world and then two longer term projects in which we must be involved to take the immediate first we must work with japan europe and other nations to spur growth second we will expand our efforts to enable viable businesses in asia to emerge from crippling debt burdens so they can once again contribute to growth and job creation third we ve asked the world bank to double its support for the social safety net in asia to help people who are innocent victims of financial turmoil fourth we ll urge the major industrial economies to stand ready to use the 15 billion in imf emergency funds to help stop the financial contagion from spreading to latin america and elsewhere fifth our ex im bank under the leadership of jim harmon will intensify its efforts to generate economic activity in the developing world immediately in the next three months and sixth congress must live up to its responsibility for continued prosperity by meeting our obligations to the international monetary fund secretary rubin has been working with his counterparts in the g 7 to get cooperative support for several of these measures i understand chairman greenspan is also consulting with his counterparts on these items as well as we take these immediate steps we also must intensify our efforts to reform our trade and financial institutions so that they can respond better to the challenges we now face and those we are likely to face in the future we must build a stronger and more accountable global trading system pressing forward with market opening initiatives but also advancing the protection of labor and environmental interests and doing more to ensure that trade helps the lives of ordinary citizens across the globe above all we must accelerate our efforts to reform the international financial system today i have asked secretary rubin and federal reserve board chairman greenspan to convene a major meeting of their counterparts within the next 30 days to recommend ways to adapt the international financial architecture to the 21st century over the past six years our strategy at home of fiscal discipline investment in the skills of our people and open trade has worked for all americans unemployment at a 28 year low inflation a 32 year low wages rising at twice the rate of inflation after decades of stagnation and on october 1st we ll have the first balanced budget in 29 years but the global economy brought a lot of that prosperity to us and now fast moving currents have brought or aggravated problems in russia and asia they threaten emerging economies from latin america to south africa with a quarter of the world s population in declining growth we must recognize what chairman greenspan said the other day we cannot forever be an oasis of prosperity growth at home depends upon growth abroad a full 30 percent of our growth just since i became president has been due to our expanding positive involvement in the global economy that s why ordinary americans should care if asia or russia or south america is on solid economic footing these people are our customers with one third of the growth of our economy coming from exports much of it from emerging markets we know that those markets will falter as their economies flatten when the problem is widespread and perceived to be moving in the wrong direction we have seen that our stock market can react having a direct and immediate impact on the wealth of the american people these nations are also our competitors and under conditions of decent equilibrium that is a very good thing indeed but when their currencies drop precipitously the prices of their goods fall they could undercut the sales of our own goods here at home that are otherwise profitable dramatically increasing our trade deficit under circumstances that could cause the american people to turn away from open trade toward protectionism in a way that has terrific negative consequences long term for our global growth objectives finally these nations are our friends our allies and our security partners where economic turmoil plunges millions into sudden poverty and disrupts and disorients the lives of ordinary people the risks of political and social instability and of a turn from democracy clearly rise just look at russia russia is facing an economic crisis that threatens the extraordinary progress the russian people have made in just seven years building a new society from the ground up the ruble and the stock market have plummeted banks are weak tax collections have slowed the government has trouble paying its debts and its salaries some russians have become wealthy but many many more are struggling to provide for their families i talked to some of them when i was in russia just a few days ago amid such political uncertainty and economic difficulty some now talk of abandoning the path of reform and returning to policies of the past even policies that have already failed at worst adversity in russia could affect not only the russian economy and prospects for our economic cooperation at worst it could have an impact on our cooperation with russia on nuclear disarmament on fighting terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction on standing together for peace from the balkans to the middle east now russia has a new prime minister mr primakov who s been in office a grand total of four days he and president yeltsin face one of the great challenges of their time never has there been a more important moment to set a clear direction for the future to affirm the commitment of russia to democracy and to free markets and to take decisive steps to stabilize the economy and restore investor confidence but if russia is willing to take these steps we must do everything we can to provide support to them because again i say as long as ordinary people don t feel any benefits from this in the end it s going to be difficult to sustain the direction we think the world should take on the other hand we need to be honest with russia and everyone else no nation rich or poor democratic or authoritarian can escape the fundamental economic imperatives of the global market no nation can escape its discipline no nation can avoid its responsibility to do its part but since all economies are increasingly interdependent fear and uncertainty about the economy of one country can prompt investors to pull money out of other countries thousands of miles away markets work best when they are driven neither by excessive inflows or outflows of capital based on indiscriminate optimism or pessimism regardless of what changes in policies or institutions may be warranted we have to say we ll only be able to help those countries who are willing to help themselves if a nation chooses to print money indiscriminately to wink at cronyism or corruption to hide bad loans and protect corrupt or inefficient banks then investors foreign and domestic sooner or later will withdraw their investments with consequences both swift and severe that is why we support the fundamental approach of the international monetary fund to extend assistance only when nations have taken responsibility strengthening their banking systems introducing honest accounting and open markets awarding credit on merit instead of connections still what has been done is clearly not enough to reverse the decline in particular countries to douse the flames of the international financial crisis to support steady and sustainable growth in the future in the face of this new challenge america can and must continue to act and to lead to take the urgent steps needed today to calm the financial crisis restart the engine of growth in asia and minimize the impact of financial turmoil on other nations and to make certain that for tomorrow the institutions and rules of international finance and international trade are prepared to support steady and sustainable growth over the long term first and foremost the leading economic nations must act together to spur global growth our strong and growing economy here has made a major contribution to global growth just as our weak economy was holding the world back six years ago when i attended my first g 7 meeting in tokyo and every other country said the first thing they needed was for america to put its economic house in order we did that now i believe strongly we must maintain our fiscal discipline it has led to lower interest rates and a huge investment and job growth maintaining economic growth is the best thing we can do right now not only for the united states but for the global economy i would also remember that back in 1993 we had a general agreement that what was needed was america should get rid of its deficit europe should lower its interest rates and japan should open its markets there was this general agreement that if we did all those things we would have a remarkable resumption of growth europe did moderate its interest rates and the then prime minister now the finance minister mr miyazawa oversaw a significant market opening trade agreement between the united states and japan which also benefited others not just us and of course we got rid of our deficit the results were quite satisfactory for several years for us now europe has to continue to pursue policies that will spur growth and keep their markets open because they too must be able to provide markets for asian goods as those nations seek to find their footing but the key here is japan for the second largest economy in the world by far the biggest economy in asia has now gone several years without any economic growth thank goodness a lot of their ordinary citizens have been able to maintain a decent life because of the wealth of their country and probably because of the enormous personal savings rate they have enjoyed for many many years now but it is difficult to see how any actions of the world community can be successful in restoring growth in asia in the absence of the restoration of growth in japan which would enable japan to lead the region out of its present condition therefore we must support japan and do everything we can to help create the conditions in which together we can all lead again just as we did in 1993 their challenges are quite formidable they have to spur domestic demand revive a banking system restore confidence deregulate the economy and open markets and we all know all the forces that seem to be working against these developments in japan but i would remind you that this is a very strong sophisticated nation full of people of knowledge and enormous achievement it is fully capable of playing its world leadership role i believe its business leaders right now know what needs to be done and would support it next week i m going to meet with prime minister obuchi here in new york to discuss how america can support japan s efforts to restore economic growth and investor confidence and i will do everything i can to try to make sure that as we go forward we have america europe and japan all doing our part to get beyond this present moment just as we did back in 1993 the second step we should take is to intensify our efforts to speed economic recovery in asia when countries like south korea and thailand have taken strong and responsible steps the freefall has ended progress is being made but the human cost of asia s collapse is only now being fully felt recent press reports have described an entire generation working its way into the middle class over 25 years then being plummeted into poverty within a matter of months the stories are heartbreaking doctors and nurses forced to live in the lobby of a closed hospital middle class families who own their own homes sent their children to college traveled abroad now living by selling their possessions it is in our interest to help these nations and these people recover they will become once again our great markets and our great partners it is also the right thing to do we ve worked with international lenders like the imf to help these nations to adopt pro growth budget tax and monetary policies but clearly we re going to have to do more to restore asian growth we must work to lift the weight of private sector debt that has frozen the asian economies today i m asking secretary rubin to work with other financial authorities and international economic institutions to enhance efforts to explore comprehensive plans to help asian corporations emerge from massive debt where individual firms have been swept under by systemic national economic problems rather than their own errors we need to get credit flowing again we need to get business back to making products producing services creating jobs third asian businesses need assistance but so do millions of asian families we must do more to establish an adequate social safety net in recovering nations wrenching economic transition without an adequate social safety net can sacrifice lives in the name of economic theory and i might add can generate thereby so much resistance that reform grinds to a halt if we want these countries to do tough things we have to protect the most defenseless people in the society and we have to protect people who get hurt when they didn t do anything wrong i think that is terribly important with our support the world bank and the asian development bank have started to deal with these challenges but they have to expand their efforts there is simply not enough being done i asked them to double their aid through an expanded social compact initiative focusing on job assistance basic needs and economic transition on children and the elderly on groups most vulnerable to economic change and i want to commend jim wolfensohn for his efforts and his willingness to lead this expanded initiative we have to be ready to respond immediately with financial force if necessary to the currency crisis if it spreads especially if it threatens the economies of latin america where nations have struggled to make progress to do the right thing only to find themselves buffeted by economic storms outside their control therefore the major economies should stand ready to activate the 15 billion now in the emergency funds of the imf the general agreement to borrow to ensure that the imf continues to support reform and fight economic contagion fifth our export import bank will increase its commitments to specific economic development projects over the next three years three months projects which will have concrete benefits for ordinary citizens in other countries projects which will increase our own exports and thereby help our economy and ones which can help to restore confidence in countries that they are not alone and that actual specific positive developments can occur sixth for the effort of the international community to succeed america simply must meet its own obligations to the international monetary fund after a year of financial firefighting the imf s resources are badly strained every day we don t act we undermine the confidence the world badly needs that we are trying to restore congress simply must assume its responsibility for our leadership in the economy in my state of the union address i said it was better to prepare for a storm when the skies were clear than when the clouds were overhead well eight months later the clouds are closer and you can nearly hear the thunder now the senate by an overwhelming bipartisan majority has thankfully approved our obligation to fund our part of the international monetary fund but with only five weeks left in this congressional session there is still no action from the house of representatives let me put this as plainly as i can failure by this congress to pay our dues to the imf will put our own prosperity at risk failure to act will send a sharp signal that at a time of economic challenge our lawmakers were unwilling to protect our workers our businesses our farmers from the risks of global economic change and unwilling to maintain our leadership in building a global economy system that has benefited us more than any other nation concerted action to spur growth helping asia through private sector debt restructuring and a strengthened social safety net helping to protect the rest of the world through the use of the imf s emergency fund increasing the activity of the ex im bank and meeting our own obligations to the imf these are the six immediate steps we want to take but we must also be willing to take action for the long run to modify the financial and trading institutions of the world to match the realities of the new economy they serve by creating the wto the world trading organization in 1994 we began to build a modern trading system we must redouble our efforts to tear down barriers around the world but as i said in geneva last may we must do more to ensure that spirited economic competition among nations never becomes a race to the bottom in environmental protection consumer protection or labor standards we are working to open the procedures of the wto to participation by the public and the full range of affected interests so that people will know and see and be able to do for themselves things which will ensure that the trading system makes the world better for all the people in all the countries we ve already completed 260 trade agreements opening markets in areas from autos to telecommunications next year we will host the meeting of the world s trade ministers to set the agenda for expanded trade in the first decade in the new century history teaches us that at a time of worldwide difficulty it would be folly to retreat into a protectionist shell we must keep trade flowing among nations but i will say again if we want to do that we have got to give ordinary citizens and the groups that represent them in countries all over the world the sense that it is going to be done in a fair way consistent with nations obligations to advance the interests of their working people and protect not only their national but the global environment this november when i meet with the leaders of the asian economies at the apec meeting we will move forward to further open markets in asia and when congress returns next year i will work to pass legislation to open markets further from trade negotiating powers to the african trade initiative i will do so in a way that i believe will win broad support from a majority of both parties from the g 7 meeting in halifax in 1995 in the wake of the mexican financial crisis to the birmingham meeting this year we have been working also with our major economic partners to plan for new financial architecture for the 21st century for the first time this year we included key emerging markets in the process in a new group of 22 recognizing their important stake in the global economy this group has been working together for nearly a year now to improve the global financial assistance with a special focus on improving financial sectors on transparency and on private sector burden sharing i just want to emphasize again that even as we respond to the urgent alarms of the moment we must speed the pace of this systemic work as well that is why i have asked secretary rubin and chairman greenspan to convene the finance ministers and central bankers of the g 7 and key emerging economies in washington within 30 days to develop a preliminary report to the heads of state by the beginning of next year on strengthening the world financial system we must develop policies so that countries can reap the benefits of free flowing capital in a way that is safe and sustainable we must adapt the imf so that it can more effectively confront the new types of financial crises minimizing their frequency severity and human cost we need to consider ways to extend emergency financing when countries are battling crises of confidence due to world financial distress as distinct from their own errors in policy we must find ways to tap the energy of global markets without sentencing the world to a cycle of continued extreme crises for half a century now in our national economy we have learned not to eliminate but to tame and limit the swings of boom and bust in the 21st century we have to find a way to do that in the global economy as well i ve discussed this in recent days with prime minister blair of great britain who is now the chair of the g 7 he shares my belief that this is an urgent task it is critical to the mission that he and i and prime minister prodi of italy will be discussing next week at the new york university law school in a very interesting meeting that the first lady and others in our administration helped to organize on how to extend the benefits of the world economy to all and how to strengthen democracy in a time of such sweeping economic change now let me just say it all again very briefly in short we must improve our ability to address the current financial emergency and we must build a system to prevent such future emergencies whenever possible and to blunt their impact when they do occur there is no mission more critical to our own strength and security and let me say this again what is at stake is more than the spread of free markets and their integration into the global economy the forces behind the global economy are also those that deepen democratic liberties the free flow of ideas and information open borders and easy travel the rule of law fair and even handed enforcement protection for consumers a skilled and educated work force each of these things matters not only to the wealth of nations but to the health of freedom if citizens tire of waiting for democracy and free markets to deliver a better life for them there is a real risk that democracy and free markets instead of continuing to thrive together will begin to shrivel together this would pose great risks not only for our economic interests but for our security we see around the world the international aggressors the harborers of terrorists the drug lords who are these countries they re authoritarian nations without democracy and without open markets nations that give their people freedom are good neighbors when nations turn away from freedom they turn inward toward tension hatred and hostility we now have a chance to create opportunity on a worldwide scale the difficulties of the moment should not obscure us to the advances of the last several years we clearly have it within our means if we do the right things to lift billions and billions of people around the world into a global middle class and into participation in global democracy and genuine efforts toward peace and reconciliation that is a possibility but recent events show it is not a certainty at this moment therefore the united states is called upon once again to lead to organize the forces of a committed world to channel the unruly energies of the global economy into positive avenues to advance our interests reinforce our values enhance our security in this room i think it is not too simple to say we know what to do the world war ii generation did it for us 50 years ago now it is time for us to rise to our responsibility as america has called upon to do so often so many times in the past we can if we do that redeem the promise of the global economy and strengthen our own nation for a new century thank you very much dem wjclinton15 1 01 bill_clinton thank you very much normally i don t think presidents should get awards but i believe i ll accept these if it s all the same to you i want to begin by saying that i m delighted to be here at this university in this great hall with all the people who are here on the stage i brought something to mayor williams and to representative eleanor holmes norton he mentioned that we signed the that we passed the southeast federal center bill to spur community development with a public private partnership on federal property at the time it passed we weren t able to do a formal signing ceremony so i brought mayor williams and eleanor holmes norton a copy of the bill and the pens i used to sign it and i d like to give it to them now i want to thank the d c city council chair linda cropp kathy patterson and the other council members who are here who helped to make my stay in washington along with my family s so wonderful i want to thank robi beatty and shirley rivens smith from the king holiday commission i d like to thank the people who are here from my administration present and former i want to thank frank raines former director of omb and jack lew or present director for all the work they did along with the indomitable alice rivlin to make sure that the federal government became a better partner for the district of columbia in the allocation of our money on this martin luther king holiday i want to thank my friend of almost 20 years the secretary of transportation rodney slater who is always serving and i want to thank the present head of the corporation of national service and the person who started our national service program first senator harris wofford then eli segal thank you for bring americorps to life and i know we have americorps award winners and their families here and members and alumni thank you for your service and thank you nancy rubin for your support i also am proud to announce on eli segal s birthday that under the leadership of nancy rubin a group of people are creating a new eli segal americorps award for entrepreneurial leadership and i thank you for that and i want to thank the members of the new d c commission on national and community service i just came from the kick off and i swore in the first community service volunteers swore in not swore at the first community service volunteers and we did some painting and i can prove it because i ve got paint on my pants and shoes to show it not the ones i m wearing now i want to thank mayor williams for this award and for what he said about our common efforts to make this great city even greater it has been a real honor for me to live and work in washington these last eight years i went to college here and i worked here when i was a young man and i love this city i loved all of its neighborhoods even when i was in college i spent a lot of time in all the neighborhoods i was a community service volunteer in northeast washington when i was a student at georgetown and one of the first things i did after i got elected was to take a walk down georgia avenue it looks better today than it did eight years ago i might add and i m very proud of the work that we have done i m also you might be interested to know that when hillary was elected to the senate and we had to find a place for her to live she absolutely insisted on living in the district of columbia she wanted to be here so i ll be back from time to time don t say that i want you to know that while i think we have done a reasonably good job these last few years of relocating government functions and getting more funds to the district of columbia and getting some of the burdens off your back that should be lifted i believe that you should still have your votes in congress and the senate i think that maybe even more important you should have the rights and powers and responsibilities that statehood carries we practiced that for an hour yesterday how did we do we did great it s okay it s all right it was good i mean it you know look i ve only got five days left it s hard to hold your interest so we did the best we could and i want you to know that the secret service delivered to me this morning so i get to ride around in it for five days the newest presidential limousine which i might add is an enormous improvement in terms of the workability of the inner space but we still have the license plates on it that calls for d c statehood so i hope you ll keep working on that and keep making the case meanwhile we have worked together to use federal resources to help spark economic growth housing development and job creation over a billion dollars in new tax incentives for businesses and home owners 25 million to build the new york avenue metro station 110 million for new and better public housing in anacostia 17 million for the d c college access act 3 000 young people now taking advantage of that in its very first year congratulations i want to thank all of you who worked in the vineyards to make all these things happen this is a day we celebrate not only the life but the service of martin luther king and not only the service of the famous but the service of those who are not known embodied in the famous statement of dr king that everybody can be great because everybody can serve you forget the rest of it you only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love in 1992 when i ran for president and eleanor and i actually jogged up pennsylvania avenue in the rain together some people thought that america had become so divided and cynical that somehow the spirit of service was gone especially among our young people i never believed that then i read all these articles about young people this so called generation x group and how self absorbed and selfish they were i never believed that i saw people serving together everywhere and yearning to be part of a higher calling in 1993 in my inaugural address i challenged the american people to a new season of service and i proposed national service legislation to give young people in america the chance to serve in their own communities or other communities across the country and earn some money for college while doing it well i think that what these young people have done in the last seven years since we had the first americorps class of 1994 has proved that what i saw eight years ago was right i ll say more about that in a moment in 1994 i signed the king holiday and service act sponsored by then senator harris wofford and congressman john lewis of atlanta who worked with dr king they wanted to make this holiday a day on not a day off today as a result of what they did hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens are serving in their communities today including over a thousand here in washington i ve just come from the greenleaf senior center with some very dedicated young people from four americorps projects including city year a program that i found in boston in 1991 that helped to inspire the creation of the national service program we have today today i swore in the first new members of city year here in washington d c when i became president there were 100 of them around the country 100 members today there are over 1 000 in 13 cities but listen to this when we created the americorps program in 1994 we wanted to give young people the chance to serve obviously we didn t know how many people would do it the pay is modest the scholarship benefits are not inconsiderable but they re not enormous but listen to this since the first class of volunteers in 1994 almost 200 000 men and women have participated more than have served in the peace corps in the 40 years since it was created i say that not to diminish the peace corps i m a huge supporter of the peace corps we ve dramatically increased enrollment there and i d like to see the congress continue to do so but i just want to make a point that people do want to serve in our communities they do want to make a difference and today the young people that i painted the columns with over at the greenleaf community center three of them were from the d c area but one was a young woman from seattle and the other young americorps volunteers i swore in they were from all over america and that s the great thing about it you get all kinds of people all different races and ethnic groups and backgrounds and income groups coming together in all kinds of communities dealing with all kinds of other people and pretty soon before you know it you ve got america at its best just happening there at the grass roots level this is a big deal and these 200 000 people have not only changed their own lives but the lives of millions and millions of other americans we must continue to do this so far there have been 677 d c residents in americorps they ve earned a total listen to this of 2 5 million for college education and i want to thank by the way since we re here the university of the district of columbia along with seven other of washington s colleges and universities for their participation in the americorps heads up program americorps volunteers who are students here work as reading and math tutors at davis elementary school in benning heights gaining valuable teaching experience and the young people they are tutoring are gaining a head start on learning that will last a lifetime citizen service changes people for the better i don t know how many times i ve heard volunteers in the classroom say they have learned more than their students have and that makes every one of our young volunteers a winner but today i want to congratulate some very special ones those who won this year s all americorps award 10 men and women selected for outstanding service to americorps and i want to talk about it a little bit to try to illustrate that this is not just about numbers yes we ve got 200 000 people in americorps in seven years of classes more than 40 years in the peace corps yes they ve gone all across this country and had a transforming effect but that s the key it s not the numbers it s the impact the adult literacy programs the community learning centers the volunteer programs that these award winners are getting today are still going strong in some cases years after their service has ended one young woman is a former migrant worker who used the skills she learned in americorps to teach 2 400 farm workers about pesticide safety one man has been elected mayor of the community in which he served shoot i wish we would have had this around when i was a kid right here in washington carey hartin started a diversity club to help the many cultures at roosevelt high school understand one another better the kids in that club were so inspired they went out and got a grant to expand carey s program to other d c schools carey is now studying for her masters in education and student teaching at cardozo high school where are you carey stand up there give her a hand good for you she also has with her today another success story the young woman who was the first president of roosevelt high s diversity club and is now in college studying music education stand up where are you give her a hand now i want all the award winners to stand up let s give them all a big hand thank you all and bless you let me say when you see their numbers you should multiply in your head times 12 because studies show that every full time americorps volunteer generates on average a dozen more volunteers now all across america you should also know that 1 million students are doing public service as a part of their school curriculum and i might say i would like to see every state in america follow the lead of the state of maryland under lieutenant governor kathleen kennedy townsend and require as a course community service as a condition of graduation from high school i think it would be a very good thing the united nations has named 2001 the international year of volunteers americans have a lot to be proud of on that score our citizens are volunteering more and giving more to charitable causes than ever before and the most generous donors by percentage are families with incomes of less than 10 000 a year i came here today on martin luther king s holiday to talk about citizen service and americorps because it is the embodiment of my dreams of one america an america in which we not only tolerate but respect and even celebrate our differences but in which we work together and live together knowing that our common humanity is even more important part of martin luther king s dream was that somehow we would learn to work together pray together struggle together go to jail together stand up for freedom together if i could leave america with one wish as i depart office it would be that we become more the one america that we know we ought to be today i m sending a message to congress you can read about it in the papers i won t go through it all but it follows up on the work i have done on this one america initiative over the last several years and i wanted to basically inform the congress and the incoming administration about where we are in dealing with our racial issues our opportunities and our continuing difficulties about what progress we have made in the last eight years and what still needs to be done to build one america i advocated some things that will doubtless be somewhat controversial but i have been working on them improvements in the criminal justice system restoring voting rights to people when they complete their sentences so they don t have to get a presidential pardon a national election commission headed by president ford and carter to look into why some americans have so much difficulty voting and how we can ever avoid always avoid having another election like the last one with all the controversies that we had there and new steps forward in closing the disparities in health and education and economic development but what i want to say to you is that building one america is like life it s a journey not a destination and the main thing will always be whether we re still making the trip did any of you see the jazz series on tv this week it was fabulous wasn t it my favorite line in the whole thing my favorite line was uttered by that great washington d c native duke ellington when he was asked what s your favorite jazz tune he said the one coming up well believe me that s what i believe about our country i see these young people i see these volunteers and it s been an honor for me to serve it s been an honor for me to help make washington stronger and better but when somebody asks you what the best day is think about these young folks and say the one coming up thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton15 1 96 bill_clinton i know that we have been here a long time but aren t you glad you came dexter king thank you for that fine introduction and for your leadership coretta king thank you for your kind remarks and for the visits we ve had today and all the ones we ve had in the past the other members of the king family who are here and especially to our co presiders i m glad they don t keep women out of the pulpit anymore aren t you to senator coverdell and my dear friend governor miller mayor campbell you can get back in the pulpit i think anytime you want my longtime friend congressman john lewis and congresswoman cynthia mckinney congressman mfume my dear friend we wish you well on your new mission to all the ministers who are here and all others who spoke dr roberts thank you for letting us come to this church i want to thank all those who came with me today many from the white house starting with the white house chief of staff and most of those who were referenced and my good friend ernest green bob johnson of the black entertainment network and others who came i want to say so many things and yet i think i should say so little because i have already heard so much wisdom and humor and passion and music i m going to do a test when i get back on the airplane when i go back to the back of the airplane i m going to ask weldon latham and bob johnson and ernie green and all my staff members what they remembered about this long ceremony every one will remember you young man because you remind us of what all this is all about and you are a stern rebuke to the cynics who say we cannot do better i will remember something that the rest of you couldn t know and that is that coretta scott king still has a beautiful voice and can hit all the high notes i will remember this is the first time in my life i ever got to sing lift every voice and sing two days in a row because we sang it in church yesterday i will remember that the mayor wants to be buried by a southern preacher so he can stay on earth one more hour i remember that it was so cold in washington dick gregory was willing to go to hell to get away from it i will remember all this incredible music and david arnold whom i had never heard before and my friend and brother wintley phipps who can still bring tears to my eyes for purely personal reasons i will never forget the way you all stood when the mayor mentioned my wife s name and i thank you for that i will never forget my friend governor miller quoting kris kristofferson s song and thinking there s still a place for all us southern rednecks in this church i am glad to see my good friends i see edwin moses and sonny walker out there and those of us who are your fans mr fishburne are glad to see you here thank you thank you very much i was sitting here thinking as everyone else spoke and i kept marking things through my remarks what might i say here what would dr king say if he sort of showed up sidled down the aisle i think he would have enjoyed this don t you all the laughing all the singing all the wisdom all the passion i think he would have said amen when congressman mfume reminded us of that magnificent passage from genesis you can kill the dreamer but not the dream i think he d be pretty proud of how far his hometown has come the king center is keeping the dream alive atlanta has more foreign corporations than any other american city headquartered here with this mayor and that police chief and that sheriff over there less than 200 days from today the whole world will be looking at atlanta when the olympics come the city too busy to hate will be the city the world will see i think he would like that you know only three americans have ever had a holiday named for them by the congress two were presidents george washington helped to create our union abraham lincoln laid down his life to preserve it martin luther king never held any elected office but he is the third because he redeemed the moral purpose of the united states he reminded us that since all of us are created equal and that s what the constitution says all of us are equally entitled to the full benefits of american citizenship in this holiday we celebrate the life of a man who challenged us to face our flaws and to become a better nation to use our great power in the service of peace and justice that was his dream and that is the spirit of this holiday and that is why it is a good thing that all over america this is a legal national holiday it is altogether fitting that if we can lay down our labors for a little while once a year to think about how we started and we lay down our labors a little while once a year to think about how we might have been torn apart but we stayed together that we take one day a year to remember that we have to live by the spirit and letter of the constitution of the united states when we were coming in here rodney slater who is now the federal highway administrator but was with me when i was governor reminded me mrs king that 10 years ago today i sent on an early morning 30 young children from arkansas to atlanta to march in the parade and those children thought they had died and gone to heaven they knew they were part of something that matters so if dr king were here today how would he tell us that it matters i just returned as all of you know from a visit to our brave men and women serving as peacekeepers in bosnia i think he d be pleased by that don t you our troops come from all parts of our country from all racial and religious and ethnic groups they comprise a diversity unmatched anywhere in the world and unfortunately unmatched in any other organization in this country they are all committed to equal opportunity equal responsibility and excellence i wish all of you could have been with me walking down the lines reviewing the troops first there s a little unit with a big captain who is 6 4 comes from an industrial city in the middle west from an eastern european ethnic group next there s a unit captained by a young slip of a woman barely 5 feet tall an african american woman bossing around all these big hulking guys why because she was judged by her merits yes they have an affirmative action program but no one gets a job for which they are not competent it was a beautiful thing to see but more important than the composition of the military is the mission on which they went a mission we can all identify with bosnia is a land that in the past has found strength in its diversity the muslims the croats who are catholic and the serbs who are orthodox they have flourished side by side in the past even though they prayed apart they lived and worked together they ve been neighbors and friends and even family members in giving in to appeals to primitive and blind hatred those who started that awful war there were stepping back into an imagined unreal past in which they say life has greater integrity and meaning when we define ourselves in terms of who we are not instead of who we are does that sound familiar to you when we define ourselves by whom we can denigrate and debase instead of those whom we can reach out to and embrace we american understand the challenges they re facing in bosnia we know it s hard to forge a community from many different groups it s hard to lay down old hatreds and ancient biases we also know as that old broadway song says children have to be taught to hate i was thinking you all were making all those jokes about the bus and the airplane you know what i was thinking about when i was a kid growing up in my hometown in arkansas i rode the city bus to school every day it cost a nickel i can still remember one day when i got on the bus i had four cents and there was a bus stop in front of my house and one about a block behind my house and i asked the bus driver if he d let me off behind with four cents and let me run up and get another penny and run down the front and give it to him and he did that was the old days but i was a kid i didn t i was so stupid i thought the best place to sit was the back of the bus they had to run me out of the back so other people could sit down who were supposed to be there i thought i was supposed to be in the back of the bus children have to be taught to hate we know about what they re going through in bosnia though our founding fathers celebrated in our documents the universal rights of man as being inherent in human nature we actually started out with a constitution that stated that slaves were not fully citizens and by the language of the constitution therefore not fully human we fought a civil war over race and slavery we lived through bitter days of lynchings and riots still today we struggle to overcome but over time dr king and reverend abernathy others that helped us to see that history need not be our destiny we can define ourselves by our hopes and not our fears most of all we can understand that we are stronger when we live and work together as a community not as a swarm of isolated individuals or antagonistic groups that is still the decision for america today in the great budget debate i believe some disagree i believe we ought to balance the budget we never had a permanent deficit until the 12 years before i became president deficits were things that we ran when we had recessions or great wars that required us to mobilize the energies of the country so we have to do it but we have to balance the budget in a balanced way that recognizes that we are all in this together that is the struggle of america s whole history that is the mission in bosnia we know that we have to be liberated not bound by the lessons of the past dr king said that men hate each other because they fear each other they fear each other because they don t know each other they don t know each other because they can t communicate with each other they can t communicate with each other because they re separated from each other the sad lesson of our experience is that sometimes we can be standing next to one another and still be separated from each other miles and miles away in our minds now even if we seek to help others bridge their differences we have to say today and he would say to us you ve still got a ways to go yourselves we must be the world s drum major for peace that s the role our troops and their allies from over 20 other countries including countries that we were enemies with in the cold war are playing in bosnia that s what we re trying to do in helping the catholics and protestants get together in northern ireland that s what we re trying to do in working with the arabs and the jews in the middle east and i thank president king for his mention of my friend prime minister rabin like dr king he gave his life in the struggle for peace and like so many of you who took up dr king s torch shimon peres and others have taken his torch up i m glad that the united states is working with them i m proud that the united states has supported the reconciliation of the peoples of south africa and the triumph of president mandela and all of you who work with him it has been an honor for us not a burden if that is our role to be drum majors for peace and justice around the world surely surely that must be our responsibility here at home we have much to be thankful for dexter king mentioned some things i m glad that in the last three years the crime rate and the welfare rolls and the food stamp rolls and the poverty rate and the teen pregnancy rate are all down i m proud of that but here s what i think dr king would say if he were giving this sermon in far more powerful and eloquent ways you re doing better but that s not nearly good enough and don t do anything which will make it worse keep going in the right direction there needs to be more peace and freedom on our streets it is true that the murder rate had its biggest decline in 35 years last year hallelujah it s also true a lot of innocent kids will get killed this year we have to do better there s still too much crime and violence and drugs in america especially among our young people he would say ask yourselves this question as you walk out of this church today how can it be that the crime rate in america is down but the crime rate among young people between the ages of 12 and 17 is up are they still out there raising themselves what are you going to do about that what are you going to do about that we have to continue to heal the racial divisions that still tear at our nation we can t rest until there are no more hate crimes no more racial violence and until we have moved beyond those far more subtle but still pervasive racial divisions that keep us from becoming one nation under god we have to be honest about where we are in this struggle the job of ending discrimination in this country is not over that s why i still believe we need the right kind of affirmative action we can mend it and some day we can end it but we can t end it until everybody with a straight face can say there is no more discrimination on the basis of race we must bring more peace to our public discourse even when we passionately disagree we did a lot of laughing today to some extent at the expense of those who disagree with us and that s okay they laughed at me too and sometimes more but let s remember no matter how passionately martin luther king spoke about the wrongs he saw and the changes he advocated he always always spoke in the language of love and nonviolence and peace i remember when one of our clergy read that well known but never tired passage from corinthians in the old king james version it used to say now we see through a glass darkly but then face to face now we know in part but then we shall know even as we are known and there abides faith hope and charity and the greatest of these is charity charity and love in that sense are the same thing charitable love the understanding that even those who are totally different from us share a common human nature and we all see through the glass darkly nobody has to whole truth we should remember that and we should ask them to and finally let me say i think he would say that this is going to be a great age of possibility the 21st century and many will do very well the great issue is whether we will go into that age of possibility together or divided whether america will be a society a great society where winners can take everything or whether it will be an even greater society in which everyone has a chance to win if you think about the characteristics of this time people care more about their racial and their ethnic identities if that builds pride and self esteem and gets people back to good values that we all share it is a good thing if it leads people to the bosnian war or killing in northern ireland or a lack of resolution in south africa or continued carnage in the middle east or on our own streets it is a bad thing if you look at this global marketplace if it means that a poor child in inner city atlanta or in rural arkansas in the hills of the ozarks can hook into a computer and get himself or herself into a research library in australia and learn what s going on in the world if people in the inner cities can use technology to learn things that they couldn t learn and to build businesses and hope and opportunity that is a very good thing but if the global economy means that everywhere we have to have more inequality more people thrown out of work more people living without hope because those of us who are doing well won t set up the conditions in which everyone can win it is not a good thing so the challenge of this time is to go forward together to go forward together and every single one of us has a role to play let me remind you that in 1994 i signed legislation which transformed martin luther king s birthday into a national day of service to reflect the life and legacy of dr king i recently appointed a friend of dr king s and an advisor former senator harris wofford to head our corporation for national service he said the king holiday should be a day on not a day off a day of action not a day of apathy a day of responding to the community not a day of rest and recreation that s what we have tried to do today all across america members of americorps our national service organization are working with grass roots community volunteers to pull this country together not to let it be divided in philadelphia as we meet here thousands of young people and their teachers are renovating homes for habitat for humanity a project that started here in georgia and has swept the whole world in california 2 300 young people are going to clean parks remove graffiti collect food and clothing for people who need it and as we stand here and sit here right here in atlanta members of the national service corps are joining forces with a coalition of citizens to honor the memory of martin luther king by painting classrooms working at their food bank renovating a homeless shelter every american can be a drum major for peace every american can be a voice for justice every american can be a servant in the never ending work of building our american community and building a stronger and more united and more decent world as he said everybody can be great because everybody can serve you only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love because of all of you today i leave with a heart more full of grace a soul more generated by love i thank you for that and hope you feel the same way god bless you all dem wjclinton15 1 99 bill_clinton thank you i m not sure i know what to say first i was thinking here i have to go follow jesse again you know the story about the guy that went to heaven and st peter said well we ve got a lot of new entrants today and we want everybody to stand up and tell them about what the best thing they ever did in their life was how would you like to participate the guy said i d like to do that i did a great thing once he said well what did you do he said i saved a bunch of people in a flood he said fine you go on right after noah i will say one thing reverend this marriage of jesse jackson and wall street so full of promise has already produced one incredibly vivid concrete result it has done wonders for your wardrobe i see your sons out there thinking no we did that i want to say first of all to all of you who are here i m grateful for the wonderful reception to the previous speakers i had actually no idea that they were going to say what they did and i was very moved and i thank you for that that s the sort of thing you normally hear or you normally don t hear because it s said it s the sort of thing people say for your funeral and i don t think we re there yet what you re here to do and what you said about what i tried to do is what i d like to ask you to think about just for a few minutes just about everybody in our administration who s here has been introduced they do come from all over from all walks of life and all backgrounds i m proud of them i m proud of the work that congressman rangel and congressman bishop and congresswoman meeks and congressman jackson and others have done to help us i m proud that you have people like jack kemp and some republican business leaders who are here i m proud of the fact that you have john sweeney and percy sutton and my friend ron burkle and others here i m proud of the fact that you have tried to reach across all the lines that divide i m very very proud especially reverend that you have made this initiative to appalachia you know 20 years ago this year i became the youngest governor in america and when i became governor of my home state five of the 25 poorest counties in america were in arkansas two were in the mississippi delta three were in the arkansas ozarks our appalachia twenty years ago that was a very sobering thing to me it s all the more sobering that it hasn t changed all that much in a lot of rural america fifteen years ago this year i worked with other governors to establish the lower mississippi delta development commission it went from the mouth of the mississippi up through the mississippi delta all the way up into all white areas of east tennessee and southern illinois who had by the time i ran for president in 1992 in southern illinois there were still counties with 20 percent unemployment twenty five years ago when i came home wet behind the ears from law school among my first clients were old coal miners whose lungs were rotted out with black lung disease and whose families barely had enough to live on i have never understood from the time i was a child in my grandfather s store he had a 6th grade education and an african american clientele why in the wide world people with common needs common dreams and common capacities would spend their time fighting over a shrinking pie instead of building a bigger one and this is a good thing for america previous speakers have talked about the economy i am proud of this visionary effort to build a bridge between wall street and our greatest untapped markets and because the economy is so good now is the time to build that bridge if we can t do it now when in the wide world will we ever get around to it if there was ever a time when none of us have an excuse this is that time but the world changes very fast and we have to seize the moment you know tuesday night when i give the state of the union address i want to talk about the great long term still unmet challenges of the 21st century the aging of america the fact that we have the largest and most diverse population of children in our schools in history and a big part of it is the need to build strong economically successful communities in the places where prosperity has not reached in the inner cities in rural america and don t forget on our native american reservations as well jesse jackson came to wall street the same reason willie sutton robbed banks that s where the money is and i don t mean that in a pejorative way how could any american of any station in life not be proud of the financial markets we have built and as mr grasso said of the fact that now 200 million of our 260 million people actually benefit from it we are beginning to share the wealth we need to do more of that and i ll have some more to say about that later but that s why jack kemp is here and why i always liked him although when reverend jackson said he was the ultimate republican i thought would that it were so i probably just destroyed his future prospects i ll be glad to announce that anytime you want but i ask you to think about this wall street has done a great thing in spreading the wealth across america because now 200 million people directly or indirectly benefit from the stock market because a lot of the stock market are pension funds retirement funds now mutual funds things that get all kinds of people into the stock market it is only natural that only is this where the money is but they have found ways to involve large numbers of people and yet we know there are still pockets that are relatively untouched now some of them are just down the street treasurer mccall over there he manages new york s money he d have more to manage if the unemployment rate in new york weren t twice the national average he d have more money to rebuild these old schools more money to give all these kids in troubled neighborhoods after school programs and summer school programs and opportunities they need to develop their full abilities you know i always say one of clinton s 10 rules of politics is whenever somebody tells you looks you straight in the eye and says this is not a money problem you can bet everything you ve got they re talking about somebody else s problem not theirs it is partly a money problem now before we so we have to find ways for you to do this i think the government has a role to play here i think we have to do our part and i thank the members of congress who are here the first thing we have to do is to stay with the strategy that s gotten us this far you know there are a lot of things that i wish i could be announcing more investment in in the state of the union but we ve got to keep the budget balanced to keep the interest rates low and the confidence high we ve got to keep investing in our people and target the money we do have to education to training to technology to things that will develop their abilities and we ve got to show leadership and continue to expand trade and deal with this financial crisis around the world because the global economy is either going to work for us or against us thirty percent of our growth has come from our relationships with other countries the second thing we have to do is to keep working to do what we can to revitalize communities not by ignoring them or by trying to impose kind of one size fits all programs but by doing what we ve been trying to do being a partner with people who live in each community and being a catalyst to bring the spark of private enterprise these partnerships work in interesting ways we put 100 000 police out there in the crime bill and we ve got the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest murder rate in 30 years and we don t tell people who they must hire or how to train them or where to deploy them but it makes a difference in 1993 when i took office the crime rate the violent crime rate had tripled in 30 years and the number of police had only gone up 10 percent it wasn t rocket science people needed help local governments the economy was down they didn t have the money to hire the police and train them and deploy them properly when we offered tax cuts to clean up brownfields all kinds of inner city neighborhoods were able to be revitalized we ve got cities now that hadn t had a new factory in a month of sundays getting actually new manufacturing facilities in their backyard and providing good jobs that s what we try to do with the empowerment zones and the community development banks just to give people tools to do what they want to do and i appreciated what weldon said about affirmative action i hope we can end it some day but if you see what s happened in the examples where people have cut it out altogether it seems to me the rest of us are disadvantaged my daughter is in college i want her to go to college with a bunch of students that look like americans because that s the america she s going to live in so i ask you to think about that i want to thank secretary slater who s here the department of transportation will issue its new rules on disadvantaged business enterprises in the next few days and extend more opportunity to more people in the past five years i d like to say one thing about the banking community that i think is important we ve worked very hard to both streamline and strengthen the community reinvestment act it was also under fire has been under fire still is under fire by some that community reinvestment act has been on the books for more than 20 years but 95 percent of all the financial commitments made under the law in the last 20 years have been made in the last five years that s more than 1 trillion in long term commitment to invest in people and i might say our banks are more profitable than they were 10 years ago this is not bad for business this is good for business i guess the presence of the business leaders and the wall street people here among the previous speakers ought to make that general point this is not a welfare program it is not a charity program we are not asking anybody to do anything we do not think they will make money out of and if they can t make money out of it we can t ask them to do it what we re trying to do is to create an environment and create the conditions in which it is more likely that more people will take a chance we believe they will be rewarded by the chances they take now again i say we know that we ve got this booming economy but we also know the overwhelming majority of the capital is bypassing our underserved areas we know that in boardrooms all across america today people are laying plans for new investments in emerging markets and not all of them are in trouble today we know that venture capitalists are planning new ventures from silicon valley to the suburbs of washington d c but especially with especially with the problems in asia and the uncertainties abroad we need to ask ourselves how are we going to keep growing the economy keep the unemployment rate low with inflation down how are we going to do that the answer is we ve got to find more places to invest and more customers and the largest pool of untapped investment opportunities and new customers are not beyond our shores they re in our backyard they re up the street in harlem or the bronx or across the river in brooklyn or in any other countless number of cities around the country where every morning huge numbers of working mothers and fathers have to get up and find some way to get transportation sometimes in cities that don t have public transportation get all the way out to the suburbs to get a job and then come home at night dead tired leave your kids an hour sometimes an hour and a half earlier and lower their income dramatically by the cost of transportation why because no one is investing and there s a lot of other people that are still looking for work i told you you think about the fact that we have a 4 3 percent unemployment rate it s the lowest peacetime rate in 41 years and still within this city there are several neighborhoods where the unemployment rate is in double digits now anybody who has ever spent any time on the streets who has ever had to struggle to get by knows that most people there are not stupid it takes some amount of skill to survive in the environment a lot of american have to survive in so to me this is a self evident case the question is how are we going to do it listen to this recently a harvard business school professor found that families living in our most distressed communities still control more than 85 billion a year in purchasing power more than the entire retail market in mexico one of the most distressed communities still more than 25 percent of that market is going unmet in harlem the number is more like 60 percent how many places are there in america where a kid has to walk for blocks and blocks past abandoned storefronts just to buy a book for school or milk for the family now that is what we re talking about and businesses that have recognized this potential have been rewarded two of pathmark s most productive grocery stores are in bed stuy and newark central ward these two stores do double the business of a typical grocery store of rite aid s 148 stores in new york city the harlem branch ranks second in the number of prescriptions filled people appreciate it if you make it easy for them to spend their money when they need it in a meeting with the vice president this summer by the way both these companies announced that they would expand their investment in these areas and that is good but we ve got a lot more to do and we need help from the people who are here from congressman rangel and the other members of congress here from maxine waters and others who are trying to bring together stakeholders for capital formation for new growth in their areas for all the people from the rural communities from the congressional black caucus and the congressional hispanic caucus we need help from everybody we need help from republicans and democrats this ought to be an american issue we all have an interest in this i want to thank again reverend jackson and sandy weill who couldn t be here this afternoon and all of you who have been part of the wall street project and what i d like to do today and i worked hard on this so i m not going to do what jim harman said i did before i m actually going to read some of this talk because i have been working with development experts with business people with the members of congress i mentioned and others to try to say okay if our role is to be a catalyst if our role is to be a partner what else can the federal government do to help get this jump started to provide a vehicle through which we can channel and attract more money and here are the things that i want to announce first in the balanced budget this year we ll support a new market venture capital program to bring capital and technical assistance to small businesses in distressed areas thousands of entrepreneurs who only need a little capital and expert guidance to expand their businesses and create new jobs these funds will give it to them second we ll expand our investment in the community development banks that provide inner city and rural residents small amounts of credit to transform good business ideas into reality and emma has been great on this and i thank you for your support of this when i was governor i heard about this guy named muhammad yunus in bangladesh one of the poorest countries in the world who had set up these banks to make very small loans to rural village women to start small businesses at the time i met him in the mid 80s they made 400 000 loans at market interest rates to groups of people you had to get a group together everybody got a loan but the second person couldn t get the loan until the first person started to pay back and so forth they had a higher repayment rate than the commercial banks did at commercial interest rates now the grameen bank has made about 2 million loans and the same thing is true last year your united states government under our administration funded 2 million of those loans in poor countries from africa to asia to latin america our community development banks are designed to do the same thing at an america scale with american financial cost for people who need it and i thank the members of congress who are supporting it we are now establishing them all over america and we have to expand them next our sba aida s sba has helped to transform companies such as america on line from small start ups to household names that s right aol started with an sba loan last summer the vice president challenged the sba to do the same for businesses in underserved areas in response the sba will strengthen its outreach efforts offer new financing terms such as delayed payment of interest on loans and waive regulatory requirements to promote investments in targeted communities we re also going to expand the tax incentives for the sba license specialized small business investment companies their job is to channel capital to small businesses owned by economically disadvantaged citizens so we re going to give people more tax incentives to invest in them i want to say a special word of thanks to congressman bill jefferson from louisiana who first brought this to my attention this wouldn t have happened without him because i wouldn t have known about it and i thank him fourth in the next balanced budget i will ask congress to support the creation of new this is when you can get some of these big guys to give you some money so listen to this american private investment companies to encourage even bigger businesses to enter these underserved markets for years we ve supported in america the overseas private investment corporations opic what it does is provide financing to promote growth abroad we ought to have an apic an american private investment company to support private investment at home now here s how it will work apic will be administered jointly by hud and the small business administration it will offer loan guarantees to investors who help businesses expand or relocate in inner cities and rural areas if one group of private investors puts up at least 100 million then the government will guarantee another 200 million in loans now if five groups of investors do the same thing that s 1 5 billion in equity for investment in underserved america finally to encourage as many individuals and companies to put together more funds to invest in underserved areas we will propose new tax credits worth 25 percent of the amount of equity placed in investment funds community development banks and a host of other investment vehicles targeted for these untapped markets now this is a good beginning this will provide incentives and a vehicle but we can t do this alone and congressman rangel and the other members of congress here the cbc the chc the groups in congress who will care about this they need your help we cannot pass this without bipartisan support and people who see that this is bringing free enterprise to places that haven t felt it in ways that will help the whole american economy now you think about it if our exports drop this year because of continuing low growth in latin america in asia in other places how are we going to keep the american economy growing how is everybody else going to get a pay raise how are we going to do this we should do this not just for those folks but because they can help us build a better america and better lives for everybody and so i say to you we have got to pass these laws and we have to make it an american issue it can t be a democratic issue or a republican issue it shouldn t be the black caucus the hispanic caucus or bill clinton s idea i don t care i would gladly put any label on this you want if i thought it would pass it i would be glad to call it the herbert hoover warren harding calvin coolidge economic development act i will do anything to pass it there is plenty of credit to go around and i ask you to do everything you can to make this an american issue and i ask all my friends in the business community to go down to washington call your members of congress without regard to party and say hey you know the president made a pretty good point there if our markets are going to keep dropping next year we ve got problems we need some new markets we need someplace to put the money that has been made so it can make some more money so i implore you to do that let me just say one final thing i don t want to make another point and make a whole other speech but don t ever forget that we re not going to be able to get business to go into or to stay in areas where people don t have the education and skills to do the jobs that are needed and we need the business community to keep supporting our schools to help people who need help with adult literacy or to go back and finish high school to mentor those kids in middle school so they will go on to college we can t forget that because if we do there will be a limit to how successful we can be now a lot of things have been said about dr king today nearly everybody has committed some portion of his i have a dream speech to memory but i found a sentence in there that applies uniquely to us here that i don t ever hear anybody quote but it s very important he said in 1963 on the steps of the lincoln memorial that he challenged america to refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation now today those vaults of opportunity are richer and fuller than they ever have been wall street has helped to make that so now what we need to do is to open those vaults up so they ll fill up even more for all of you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton15 10 94 bill_clinton thank you so much governor curry that has a good sound doesn t it i am delighted to be here with bill curry and joe ganim and all these fine people your state officials behind me attorney general blumenthal and others and especially with my good friends and allies rosa delauro and barbara kennelly hillary and i were very pleased to be asked to come to connecticut today to campaign for bill curry and in a larger sense to campaign for the change we re trying to bring to our country if you will permit me though i d like to begin with a few comments about what this day means for us as americans setting an example around the world today is a day of celebration for americans as our leadership has helped to bring peace and democracy and the restoration of the democratic president of haiti as president aristide goes home there and i have to tell you that one person who wanted to be here today with us is on that plane going back because he has played a major role in the liberation of haiti senator chris dodd is back there today today is a day of sorrow for america in our efforts around the world to bring peace because just yesterday as prime minister rabin and foreign minister peres and chairman arafat were awarded the nobel peace prize for their progress in peace in the middle east a young corporal named nachshon waxman was murdered by terrorists who are the enemies of peace in the middle east he was a son of israel but many of you may know he was also a citizen of the united states and our prayers and our hearts go out to the people of israel and to the waxman family as we say to them the united states will stand with you in the cause of peace in the middle east we have come too far to turn back and we must not let the wreckers and the killers turn us back today and this is a day of determination for america and the world as our men and women in uniform stand up again in the middle east and the gulf and say that iraq will not be allowed to threaten its neighbors or to intimidate the united nations in its work to make sure they never again have weapons of mass destruction we will stay there until we are sure that the threat is gone what i want you to do today my fellow americans as you must be filled with pride for the incredible work the skill the discipline the bravery of our men and women in uniform from haiti to the gulf is to understand that our overall strategy to increase our security a strategy that sikorsky has played a major role in involves not just the effort to bring peace and democracy to northern ireland the middle east to south africa not just our efforts to become more secure from weapons of mass destruction as for the first time the missiles of russia are no longer pointed at the american people not just an effort to expand international economics although all that is important i came here today because i know and you know we can never be strong abroad unless we are first strong in the united states of america in every state every community every neighborhood you know as i flew over the beautiful connecticut countryside coming down here in the helicopter and i saw those fall leaves i came to love over 20 years ago and i thought about how proud i was to be coming down here to campaign for somebody like bill curry who was outspent and counted out but never gave up because he wanted to be an agent of change to make life better for ordinary citizens to have sensible programs to develop the economy to have programs to reform the government and make it work again for average people to give a tax break to people who deserved it i liked the way he won the primary and i have to say i also really admire the way his principal opponent john larsen came over and endorsed him and is trying to help him get elected and i hope the rest of you will too i want to talk to you today a little as a political rally and a little just as an old fashioned visit about why this race here fits into what i m trying to do as president and why we need your help i went to washington 20 months ago to try to change this country to do some very basic things to bring the economy back to make the government work for ordinary citizens and to empower individual americans to take responsibility for their own future i offered the american people not so much a set of promises as a real challenge that we could compete and win in the 21st century we could keep the american dream alive if we had the courage to change i asked people of all parties and persuasions to work with me to fight for the future it s been an interesting 20 months and what i want to talk to you about is this as we come out of these elections i want you to think about the problems we found when we got there the opposition we got from the leadership of the other party on every issue the progress we made and the stakes in the future after all we confronted 30 years of serious social problems developing they didn t happen overnight the loss of jobs in our inner cities and rural areas the terrible problems of the breakdown of families and communities and the rise of crime and violence and drugs and gangs this has been happening for three decades we confronted 20 years in which working people have been working harder and harder just to hang on and wages have been stagnant and we confronted 12 years of trickle down reaganomics the economic theory that if you cut taxes on the wealthiest americans loaded them up on the middle class exploded the deficit you could somehow spend your way into somebody s prosperity now that s what we found the last four years before i took office had the slowest job growth since the great depression in the city of bridgeport alone the average job loss was about 6 000 a year and so we set to work to try to make the government work for ordinary people to try to turn the economy around and i think it s fair to say that we ve got a long way to go but we made a very good start you be the judge you be the judge after seven years we passed the family and medical leave law to give people some time off when their babies are born or their parents are sick the congress voted at long last to put america at the front not in the rear of taking care of its children by immunizing all the kids in this country under the age of two by 1996 to put 200 000 more children in head start programs to provide apprenticeship programs for young people who get out of high school and don t go to college but want to get good jobs most important of all to provide longerterm lower interest rate college loans to middle class americans so that everybody could afford to go to college already 20 million americans are eligible to refinance their college loans including about 540 000 people right here in connecticut we sent genuine welfare reform legislation to congress that would invest in education and training and make welfare a second chance not a way of life and we gave 18 states a chance to find ways to put people to work and get them off the welfare rolls we gave nine states a chance to try to find ways to cover all people with health insurance and i want to tell you we didn t win that battle but just remember this it took seven years to pass family leave seven years to pass the brady bill six years to pass the crime bill and we just started another million americans lost their health insurance last year we can find a way to give people their choice of doctors to keep the cost coming down and still cover all americans and we re going to keep going until we do it we passed the first serious assault on crime in a generation the brady bill the assault weapons ban the ban on handgun ownership by children 100 000 more jail cells for serious offenders three strikes and you re out and other things to strengthen laws against the victims of domestic abuse women and children and to protect the rights of victims in the criminal justice process and we ve provided prevention funds to give these kids who can still live a good life something to say yes to as well as something to say no to and the police officers asked us to do it it was the right thing to do and just this week for all those naysayers who said that the money would never get out there to make a difference this week only two weeks after the crime bill was signed we have already given funds to bridgeport bristol east hartford and norwich to hire more police officers this week when barbara kennelly and rosa delauro and senator lieberman and senator dodd voted for the economic program every republican in the congress voted against it and they said that if we asked the wealthiest americans to pay a little more and if we cut taxes on 15 million working families who were working 40 hours a week and had kids in the home and were still fighting to stay above the poverty line and if we cut 255 billion worth of spending they said the republicans that the economy would fall and the deficit would explode that the world would come to an end if we reversed trickle down economics they said if 84 000 working people in connecticut who are barely above the poverty line even though they re working 40 hours a week and trying to raise their kids in a decent way got a tax cut and we still cut spending we brought the deficit down the world would come to an end well we have now been here 20 months and we have seen whether they are right and what has happened you heard barbara kennelly the deficit s going down three years in a row for the first time since truman we have 4 6 million new jobs the unemployment rate in connecticut is a point and a half below what it was on the day i was elected president of the united states now believe you me this is the beginning we have a long way to go there are a lot of people in the bridgeports of america who have not felt this economic recovery but what you have to decide is what is the best way to feel it we have to bring investment back into our cities i just signed a bill to set up banks in all the cities of this country to make loans to poor people who couldn t get them otherwise to put people in business and bring free enterprise into the cities it has worked around the world it will work in america and we are going to do that we are designating cities around the country giving them extra incentives for people to invest in these cities to put people back to work the answer is to do more of what we are doing not to turn around and go back the way we came from if you want to bring bridgeport back let s keep doing what we re doing and we will do that now my message to you is this we re trying to change things folks and it s hard to do in washington but we ve made a good beginning now what are our opponents trying to do look what they did every one of them voted against reversing reaganomics every one of them voted against college loans to the middle class most of them voted against the brady bill the crime bill and family leave now at the end of this last congressional session what did they do in the united states senate the republican senators gained up and killed campaign finance reform they killed lobby reform they killed all the environmental measures that were there except the desert bill for california we had a bill to clean up toxic waste dumps the superfund legislation and everybody in the country was for the bill made you kind of wonder about it we had the chemical companies the labor unions and the sierra club they were all for it they have never been for the same thing ever the only people in america who were against the superfund bill were the republican senators and why were they against it because they didn t want rosa and barbara and joe lieberman and chris dodd to be able to come back to connecticut and say that they helped to clean up toxic waste dumps there was no other reason it was politics now we know why they killed campaign finance reform and lobby reform this week in the washington post it was reported that they killed campaign finance reform and lobbying reform on the weekend and on monday the leaders of the republican party in the house and the senate got all the lobbyists together and they said it s quoted in the washington post we killed campaign finance reform for you we killed lobby reform for you we share your values so you give us money and don t you give the democrats money or else that s what they did now what will they do if we give them power have you seen their contract for america they promise everybody a tax cut mostly the wealthiest americans they promise huge increases in defense spending they promise everybody everything a trillion dollars and you say well how are you going to pay for this and they say we ll tell you later well you know it s election year folks i d like to make you a trillion dollars worth of promises too i could show you a good time with a trillion dollars we could have a lot of fun that s real money but what happened when they did it before they quadrupled the debt of the country they sent our jobs overseas we re going to have to cut medicare veterans benefits the crime bill for police in the cities and we re going to run this economy in the ditch if they get their promises this is not a contract with america it s a contract on america you have been there turn away from it you know better than that so they have told us what they are going to do they are going to give us their trickle down economics of the 1980s they are going to give their politics of the enemies list of the 1970s they are going to gang up with the washington lobbyists whose values they share and run this country any way they please and try to tell you what you want to hear and give you a bunch of idle promises we tried it before it did not work we are moving this country forward the economy s coming back we re making the government work for ordinary citizens and the congress is looking for a message from the american people i say to you what is this election about it s about all those kids in the uniforms over there that provided the music it s about what kind of future they re going to have that s what this election s about are we going forward or are we going back are we going to be united or are we going to be divided are we going to vote for our hopes or are we going to vote for our fears that is what bill curry represents here everything we are trying to do you have got to elect him governor and you have got to say to america we have tried what they are offering and it failed we heard them say what the president was doing was failing and it has succeeded so let s keep on going into the future with our heads held high i m telling you something folks we are just a few years from the next century and what will really count is whether every man and woman can live up to the fullest of their god given capacities that s what we offer the promise of challenge the promise of succession because we are doing what we can to make sure every one of you can be what god meant you to be don t fall for the republican promises one more time we don t need to go back we need to go forward thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton15 10 95a bill_clinton thank you very much president hartley governor rowland senator lieberman members of congress and distinguished united states senators and former senators who have come today chairman rome members of the diplomatic corps to all of you who have done anything to make this great day come to pass to my friend and former colleague governor o neill and most of all to senator dodd ambassador dodd and the dodd family i am delighted to be here i have so many thoughts now i can t help mentioning one since president hartley mentioned the day we had your magnificent women s basketball team there we also had the ucla men s team there you may not remember who ucla defeated for the national championship but i do remember that uconn defeated the university of tennessee and that made my life with al gore much more bearable so i was doubly pleased when uconn won the national championship i also did not know until it was stated here at the outset of this ceremony that no sitting president had the privilege of coming to the university of connecticut before but they don t know what they missed i m glad to be the first and i know i won t be the last i also want to pay a special public tribute to the dodd family for their work on this enterprise and for their devotion to each other and the memory of senator thomas dodd if as so many of us believe this country rests in the end upon its devotion to freedom and liberty and democracy and upon the strength of its families you could hardly find a better example than the dodd family not only for their devotion to liberty and democracy but also for their devotion to family and to the memory of senator tom dodd it has deeply moved all of us and we thank you for your example tom dodd spent his life serving america he demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to the rule of law beginning with his early days as an fbi agent then federal attorney he was equally passionate in his opposition to tyranny in all its forms he fought the tyranny of racism prosecuting civil rights cases in the south in the 1930s long before it was popular anywhere in the united states and helping to shepherd the landmark civil rights of 1964 into law he fought the tyranny of communism throughout his years in elected office and while he bowed to none in his devotion to freedom he also stood bravely against those who wrapped themselves in the flag and turned anti communism into demagoguery tom dodd was in so many ways a man ahead of his time he was passionate about civil rights three decades before the civil rights movement changed the face of our nation in the senate he pioneered programs to fight delinquency and to give the young people of our country a chance at a good education and a good job and that is a task my fellow americans we have not yet finished doing he saw the dangers of guns and drugs on our streets and he acted to do something about that had we done it in his time we would not have so much work to do in this time tom dodd s passion for justice and his hatred of oppression came together as all of you know most powerfully when he served as america s executive trial counsel at the nuremburg war crimes tribunal it was the pivotal event of his life he helped to bring justice to bear against those responsible for the holocaust for the acts that redefined our understanding of man s capacity for evil through that path breaking work he and his fellow jurists pushed one step forward the historic effort to bring the crimes of war under the sanction of law senator dodd left many good works and reminders of his achievement some bear his name the children who have followed in his steps and served the public who carried forward his ardent support for an american foreign policy that stands for democracy and freedom who maintain his commitment to social justice to strong communities and strong families they have also upheld their father s tradition of loyalty and as one of the chief beneficiaries of that lesson let me say that i am grateful for it and again grateful for its expression in this remarkable project which will help the people of connecticut and the united states to understand their history i am delighted that this center will bear the dodd name because it is fitting that a library a place that keeps and honors books and records will honor tom dodd s service his passion for justice and his hatred of tyranny where books are preserved studied and revered human beings will also be treated with respect and dignity and liberty will be strengthened dedicating this research center today we remember that when the nazis came to power one of the very first things they did was burn books they deemed subversive the road to tyranny we must never forget begins with the destruction of the truth in the darkest days of the war president roosevelt with those awful bonfires fresh in his memory reflected upon how the free pursuit of knowledge protects our liberty and he put it well when he called books the weapons for man s freedom i am glad that tom dodd will be remembered here in this place in this building with this center in the state he loved with the very best arsenal for the freedom he fought to defend his entire life thank you very much dem wjclinton15 10 95b bill_clinton thank you very much first senator dodd for your dedication and your service your friendship and your wonderful wonderful introduction it s worth three more strokes the next time we play golf chairman rome president hartley governor rowland senator lieberman members of the congressional delegation and especially your congressman representative gedjenson thank you for your fine remarks here today to the state officials who are here and the senators and former members of the united states senate to my friend governor o neill and all others who have served this great state the faculty students and friends of the university of connecticut and to the remarkable american treasure morton gould who composed that awesome piece of music we heard just before we started the program ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be here as an old musician i d like to begin by congratulating the wind ensemble they were quite wonderful in every way i thought as a near fanatic basketball fan i am glad to be in a place where it can truly be said there is no other place in america where both men and women play basketball so well under the same roof and at the risk of offending the dodd family and all the other irish who are here i want to say that your new football coach with his remarkable record learned at his father s knee not at notre dame but when he spent nine years in my home state as a football coach but congratulations on that great start for the university of connecticut football team that is a remarkable thing when governor rowland made his fine remarks and talked about the special olympians turning their cameras around and turning their camera sighting into the telescope i thought it was a remarkable story and i was wondering if he could identify them and arrange to send them to washington for a few weeks so that we might clear vision down there as we make these decisions let me also say just one other thing by way of introduction the state of connecticut is really fortunate to have two such remarkable united states senators and i am very fortunate to have known both of them a long long time before i became the president and a long long time before either one of them thought that was even a remote possibility for the united states i was a student at yale law school and a sometime volunteer when joe lieberman first ran for the state senate back in 1970 he still barely looks old enough to be a state senator and i thank him for the remarkable blend of new ideas and common sense and old fashioned values he brings to the senate and in many many ways i have enjoyed a long and rich personal friendship with chris dodd i can t add anything to what senator lieberman said but i will say this at a time when every person in public life talks about family values it is quite one thing to talk and another thing to do and i have been very moved by the family values of the dodd family and what they have done together that has brought this magnificent day to pass and i honor them all and especially my friend senator chris dodd i have been asked today to inaugurate the first dodd center symposium on the topic of 50 years after nuremberg i am honored to do that i was born just after world war ii and i grew up as a part of a generation of young students who were literally fascinated by every aspect of the nuremberg trials and what their ramifications were and were not for every unfolding event in the world that was disturbing to human conscience i wish that tom dodd could be here today to see this center take life not only because of what his family and friends and this state have done but because now for all time we will be able to study this great question as we strive to overcome human evil and human failing to be better senator dodd as we know was a man of extraordinary breadth and depth who was passionate about civil rights three decades before the civil rights movement changed the face of our nation who fought to provide the young people of america with an education and a decent job a fight that is never ending who understood then the menace of violence and guns and drugs on the streets of our city and if only others had joined him firmly then think what we might have avoided today but most important we look today at his experience at nuremberg as a prosecutor an experience that compelled him for the rest of his life to stand up for freedom and human dignity all around the world he made a great deal of difference and now because his spirit lives on in the dodd center he will be able to make a difference forever a few moments ago in the powerful documentary we watched on nuremberg our chief prosecutor mr justice jackson s words spoke to us across three decades the wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated at nuremberg the international community declared that those responsible for crimes against humanity will be held accountable without the usual defenses afforded to people in time of war the very existence of the tribunal was a triumph for justice and for humanity and for the proposition that there must be limits even in wartime flush with victory outraged by the evil of the nazi death camps the allied easily could have simply lashed out in revenge but the terrible struggle of world war ii was a struggle for the very soul of humankind to deny its oppressors the rights they had stripped from their victims would have been to win the war but to lose the larger struggle the allies understood that the only answer to inhumanity is justice and as senator dodd said three of the defendants were actually acquitted even in that tumultuous passionate environment in the years since nuremberg the hope of convicting those guilty of making aggressive war would deter future wars and prevent future crimes against humanity including genocide frankly has gone unfulfilled too often from 1945 until the present day wars between and within nations including practices which were found to be illegal at nuremberg have cost more than 20 million lives the wrongs justice jackson hoped nuremberg would end have not been repeated on the scale of nazi germany in the way that they did it but they have been repeated and repeated on a scale that still staggers the imagination still nuremberg was a crucial first step it rendered a clear verdict on atrocities it placed human rights on a higher ground it set a timeless precedent by stripping away convenient excuses for abominable conduct now it falls to our generation to make good on its promise to put into practice the principle that those who violate universal human rights must be called to account for those actions this mission demands the abiding commitment of all people and like many of the other challenges of our time it requires the power of our nation s example and the strength of our leadership first because america was founded on the proposition that all god s children have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness these are values that define us as a nation but they are not unique to our experience all over the world from russia to south africa from poland to cambodia people have been willing to fight and to die for them second we have to do it because while fascism and communism are dead or discredited the forces of hatred and intolerance live on as they will for as long as human beings are permitted to exist on this planet earth today it is ethnic violence religious strife terrorism these threats confront our generation in a way that still would spread darkness over light disintegration over integration chaos over community our purpose is to fight them to defeat them to support and sustain the powerful global aspirations of democracy dignity and freedom and finally we must do it because in the aftermath of the cold war we are the world s only superpower we have to do it because while we seek to do everything we possibly can in the world in cooperation with other nations they find it difficult to proceed in cooperation if we are not there as a partner and very often as a leader with our purpose and with our position comes the responsibility to help shine the light of justice on those who would deny to others their most basic human rights we have an obligation to carry forward the lessons of nuremberg that is why we strongly support the united nations war crimes tribunals for the former yugoslavia and for rwanda the goals of these tribunals are straightforward to punish those responsible for genocide war crimes and crimes against humanity to deter future such crimes and to help nations that were torn apart by violence begin the process of healing and reconciliation the tribunal for the former yugoslavia has made excellent progress it has collected volumes of evidence of atrocities including the establishment of death camps mass executions and systematic campaigns of rape and terror this evidence is the basis for the indictments the tribunal already has issued against 43 separate individuals and this week 10 witnesses gave dramatic compelling testimony against one of the indictees in a public proceeding these indictments are not negotiable those accused of war crimes crimes against humanity and genocide must be brought to justice they must be tried and if found guilty they must be held accountable some people are concerned that pursuing peace in bosnia and prosecuting war criminals are incompatible goals but i believe they are wrong there must be peace for justice to prevail but there must be justice when peace prevails in recent weeks the combination of american leadership nato s resolve the international community s diplomatic determination these elements have brought us closer to a settlement in bosnia than at any time since the war began there four years ago so let me repeat again what i have said consistently for over two years if and when the parties do make peace the united states through nato must help to secure it only nato can strongly and effectively implement a settlement and the united states as nato s leader must do its part and join our troops to those of our allies in such an operation if you were moved by the film you saw and you believe that it carries lessons for the present day and you accept the fact that not only our values but our position as the world s only superpower impose upon us an obligation to carry through then the conclusion is inevitable we must help to secure a peace if a peace can be reached in bosnia we will not send our troops into combat we will not ask them to keep a peace that cannot be maintained but we must use our power to secure a peace and to implement the agreement we have an opportunity and a responsibility to help resolve this the most difficult security challenge in the heart of europe since world war ii when his holiness the pope was here just a few days ago we spent a little over a half an hour alone and we talked of many things but in the end he said mr president i am not a young man i have a long memory this century began with a war in sarajevo we must not let this century end with a war in sarajevo even if a peace agreement is reached and i hope that we can do that no peace will endure for long without justice for only justice can break finally the cycle of violence and retribution that fuels war and crimes against humanity only justice can lift the burden of collective guilt it weighs upon a society where unspeakable acts of destruction have occurred only justice can assign responsibility to the guilty and allow everyone else to get on with the hard work of rebuilding and reconciliation so as the united states leads the international effort to forge a lasting peace in bosnia the war crimes tribunal must carry on its work to find justice the united states is contributing more than 16 million in funds and services to that tribunal and to the one regarding rwanda we have 20 prosecutors investigators and other personnel on the staffs and at the united nations we have led the effort to secure adequate funding for these tribunals and we continue to press others to make voluntary contributions we do this because we believe doing it is part of acting on the lessons that senator dodd and others taught us at nuremberg by successfully prosecuting war criminals in the former yugoslavia and rwanda we can send a strong signal to those who would use the cover of war to commit terrible atrocities that they cannot escape the consequences of such actions and a signal will come across even more loudly and clearly if nations all around the world who value freedom and tolerance establish a permanent international court to prosecute with the support of the united nations security council serious violations of humanitarian law this it seems to me would be the ultimate tribute to the people who did such important work at nuremberg a permanent international court to prosecute such violations and we are working today at the united nations to see whether it can be done but my fellow americans and my fellow citizens of the world let me also say that our commitment to punish these crimes against humanity must be matched by our commitment to prevent them in the first place as we work to support these tribunals let s not forget what our ultimate goal is our ultimate goal must be to render them completely obsolete because such things no longer occur accountability is a powerful deterrent but it isn t enough it doesn t get to the root cause of such atrocities only a profound change in the nature of societies can begin to reach the heart of the matter and i believe the basis of that profound change is democracy democracy is the best guarantor of human rights not a perfect one to be sure you can see that in the history of the united states but it is still the system that demands respect for the individual and it requires responsibility from the individual to thrive democracy cannot eliminate all violations of human rights or outlaw human frailty nor does promoting democracy relieve us of the obligation to press others who do not operate democracies to respect human rights but more than any other system of government we know democracy protects those rights defends the victims of their abuse punishes the perpetrators and prevents a downward spiral of revenge so promoting democracy does more than advance our ideals it reinforces our interests where the rule of law prevails where governments are held accountable where ideas and information flow freely economic development and political stability are more likely to take hold and human rights are more likely to thrive history teaches us that democracies are less likely to go to war less likely to traffic in terrorism and more likely to stand against the forces of hatred and destruction more likely to become good partners in diplomacy and trade so promoting democracy and defending human rights is good for the world and good for america these aims have always had a powerful advocate in senator chris dodd who has defended the vulnerable and championed democracy especially in our home hemisphere as has his brother tom first as a distinguished academic at our common alma mater georgetown and then as america s ambassador to uruguay as a peace corps volunteer in the dominican republic senator dodd helped some of our poorest neighbors to build homes for their families twenty five years later when a brutal dictatorship overthrew the legitimate government of haiti murdering mutilating and raping thousands and causing tens of thousands more to flee in fear chris dodd was the conscience of the senate on haiti he urged america and the world to take action on this very day one year ago an american led multinational force returned the duly elected president of haiti jean bertrand aristide to his country the anniversary we celebrate today was the culmination of a three year effort by the united states and the international community to remove the dictators and restore democracy because we backed diplomacy with the force of our military the dictators finally did step down and haiti s democrats stepped back to their rightful place our actions ended a reign of terror that did violence not only to innocent haitians but to the values and the principles of the civilized world we renewed hope in haiti s future where once there was only despair we upheld the reliability of our own commitments and the commitments that others make to us we sent a powerful message to the would be despots in the region democracy in the americas cannot be overthrown with impunity we have seen extraordinary progress in this year the democratic government has been restored human rights are its purpose not its disgrace violence has subsided though not ended altogether peaceful elections have occurred reform is underway a new civilian police force has already more than 1 000 officers on the street a growing private sector is beginning to generate jobs and opportunity after so much blood and terror the people of haiti have resumed their long journey to security and prosperity with dignity there is a lot of work to do haiti is still the poorest nation in our hemisphere and that is a breeding ground for the things we all come here to condemn today its democratic institutions are fragile and all those years of vicious oppression have left scars and some still thirsting for revenge for reform to take root and to endure trust must be fully established not only between the government and the people but among the people of haiti themselves president aristide understands that when he says no to violence yes to justice no to vengeance yes to reconciliation this is very important assigning individual responsibilities for crimes of the past is also important there haiti now has a national commission for truth and justice launching investigations of past human rights abuses and with our support haiti is improving the effectiveness accessibility and accountability of its own justice system again to prevent future violations as well as to punish those which occur the people of haiti know it s up to them to safeguard their freedom but we know as president kennedy said that democracy is never a final achievement and just as the american people after 200 years are continually struggling to perfect our own democracy we must and we will stand with the people of haiti as they struggle to build their own indeed the vice president is just today in haiti celebrating the one year anniversary and let me say one final thing about this i thank senator dodd and ambassador dodd for their concern with freedom democracy and getting rid of the horrible human rights abuses that have occurred in the past throughout the americas the first lady is in south america today or she would be here with me partly because of the path that has been blazed by the dodd family in this generation to stand up for democracy so that every single country of the americas save one now has a democratically elected leader and human rights abuses and the kinds of crimes that senator thomas dodd set up against at nuremberg are dramatically dramatically reduced because of that process and this family s leadership in closing let me say that for all of the work we might do through tribunals to bring the guilty to account it is our daily commitment to the ideals of human dignity democracy and peace that has been and will continue to be the source of our strength in the world and our capacity to work with others to prevent such terrible things from occurring in the first place we will continue to defend the values we believe make life worth living we will continue to defend the proposition that all people without regard to their nationality their race their ethnic group their religion their gender should have a chance to live free should have a chance to make the most of their god given potential for too long all across the globe women and their children in particular were denied these human rights those were the rights for which the first lady spoke so forcefully in china at the women s conference and for which the united states will work hard in the years ahead ladies and gentlemen we are living in a moment of great hope and possibility the capacity of the united states to lead has been energized by our ability to succeed economically in the global economy and by the efforts we are making to come to grips with our own problems here at home but i leave you with this thought that was referred to by the governor in his fine remarks and that the president of this university has emphasized in his comments today it is important that we be able to act upon our values and what enables us to do it is our success as a nation our strength as a people the fact that people can see that if you live as we say we should live that people can work together across racial and ethnic and other divides to create one from many as our motto says and to do well therefore we should in the weeks ahead in washington find a way to come together across our political divide to balance the budget after the deficit has taken such a toll on our economy over the last dozen years but i ask you to remember this we must do it in a way that is consistent with our values and with our ability to live by and implement and support those values here at home and all around the world therefore if our goal is to preserve our ideals and our dreams and our leadership and to extend them to all americans when we balance the budget we must not turn our backs on our obligation to give all americans a chance to get an education including a college education to honor our fathers and our mothers in terms of how we treat their legitimate needs which they have earned the right to have addressed including their health care needs and not to forget the poor children even though it is unfashionable to talk about poverty in this world today they will be the adults of this country someday we are strong because we honor each other across the generations we are strong when we reach across the racial and ethnic divides we are strong when we continue to invest in education and the technology which opens all the mysterious doors of the future we are strong when we preserve the environment that god gave us here at home and around our increasingly interconnected planet we are strong when we continue to determine to lead the world these are things which make is possible for us to meet here in connecticut today and advocate the responsibility of the united states to lead in the protection of human rights around the world and the prevention of future horrendous circumstances such as those that senator dodd had to address at nuremberg so i ask you to remember those lessons as well if we have an obligation to stand up for what is right to advance what is right to lift up human potential we must be able to fulfill that obligation if there is one last lesson of this day i believe it should be that prosperity for the united states is not the most important thing and not an end in itself we should seek it only only as a means to enhance the human spirit to enhance human dignity to enhance the ability of every person in our country and those whom we have the means to help around the world to become the people god meant for them to be if we can remember that then we can be faithful to the generation that won world war ii to the outstanding leaders which established the important precedence at nuremberg and to the mission and the spirit of the dodd center thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton15 12 95 bill_clinton good afternoon congressman davis secretary perry general shalikashvili deputy secretary talbott distinguished friends let me say it is a great honor to welcome the frasure family the kruzel family the drew family here today yesterday in paris i watched the presidents of bosnia croatia and serbia sign an agreement that turns their troubled region from war to peace then on behalf of our nation i witnessed the agreement i witnessed it also in a more personal sense on behalf of three great americans who could not be there bob frasure joe kruzel and nelson drew for without their efforts there would have been no agreement in dayton and no signing in paris the shells would still be falling in sarajevo when bob joe and nelson died on mount igman on august the 19th they were serving in the greatest of all missions working for peace and freedom how i wish they could know that their efforts were destined to be crowned with success i think they do they knew their mission was dangerous they talked about the risks the night before they set out for sarajevo just a few days earlier they had tried to get in by helicopter but were forced back by bad weather but because of who they were they never hesitated and the next morning they set out again to the family and friends of these three good and brave men let me say again as i have said before we will never forget them their sacrifice reminds us of the tragedy they sought to relieve and reinforces the urgency of the search for a solution they worked together as a team but each had unique strengths bob frasure was a career diplomat who found the most difficult assignments or perhaps it would be better to say they found him from angola to ethiopia to estonia and of course to bosnia they found him from angola to ethiopia to estonia and of course to bosnia he helped to write some of the most dramatic chapters in the history of modern american foreign policy yet he never sought the limelight for himself as secretary christopher has said he was a man of great accomplishment but little visible ego his ingenuity and skill were matched by exceptional wit his telegrams were so well written and compelling that they instantly became the talk of the state department his warmth touched countless colleagues and his judgment and resourcefulness countless lives joe kruzel was also a man with an apparently endless sense of humor over a three decade career of service to our nation he retained also his idealism about our goals while leavening it with a healthy dose of realism about the foibles of any large bureaucratic effort one of his colleagues remarked that while others were focused on day to day events joe s eyes were always on the horizon he saw than an undivided democratic europe was within reach and he led the pentagon s efforts in reaching out to the east to make that dream a reality all of us including myself and bill perry value his sage and firm advice he did not mince words and we all listened nelson drew who served on my own staff was a rare combination of remarkable soldier respected scholar profound strategic thinker and a fine human being born to a military family achieving an exceptional military career but he made peace his calling i remember meeting him for the very first time in my office this past july just after i had finished a call with prime minister major i asked those in the room a question about bosnia and nelson stepped forward to answer it with his usual succinct and clear wisdom he was always ready to step forward for peace in bosnia bob joe and nelson devoted their lives and they gave their lives to achieve that goal now we must follow the example they set to make sure this peace takes hold nothing we can say or do can bring our friends back again but by striving to seal the peace in bosnia for good we can shape a future worthy of their noble sacrifice we honor their memory today and forever with the president s citizens medal commander post the orders let me just say in closing that all americans whether or not they knew bob joe and nelson have been touched by their service to our country yesterday i saw it myself in paris and just last month in my trip to the united kingdom to ireland to germany and spain from people on the streets to presidents and prime ministers the world is looking for our leadership for peace because they know america can be trusted the world places that faith in our nation because of the work of individual american citizens like bob and joe and nelson they embodied the spirit of service that sets our nation apart they stood for something larger than themselves like so many of their colleagues they accepted hardship and the risks that go along with the job they embraced often they were rewarded for their efforts only by more difficult assignments for our country needs its best people precisely where the challenges are greatest they answered that call to duty with courage and conviction and grace they understood that our leadership requires our involvement and our commitment not from the sidelines but on the ground at the heart of events these three exemplify the qualities that make our country strong a faith that one person can touch the lives of many a willingness to work hard for something they believed in a generous heart and spirit their wonderful families that you have applauded so warmly today are perhaps the best and finest testament to the lives that they lived without pause or complaint they took it upon themselves to bring the gift of peace and freedom to others around the world not for personal ambition but solely because it was the right thing to do ralph waldo emerson once wrote let him be great and love shall follow him looking at the faces of katharina frasure and sarah and virginia gail kruzel and john and sarah sandy drew and samantha and philip and all the other family members here we can say that love has truly followed these three great americans we have honored may god bless and protect their memories their families and the country they gave everything to serve thank you very much dem wjclinton15 2 96a bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president thank you for that introduction and for your leadership to advance the technological revolution in america and especially to bring its benefits to all of our children thank you mr mayor superintendent highton senator lautenberg congressman menendez secretary of education klagholz bob fazio the principal of this fine high school i m glad he s not running for president this year jim cullen the vice chairman of bell atlantic thank you so much for everything you have done to make this school district a success and the work you have done throughout this state and throughout your area of service to the folks at bergen academy and secretary riley and to others joining us on the information superhighway including students from 65 schools in three counties and i believe congressman torricelli is out there in cyberspace somewhere it s nice to have all of you with us and let me say a special word of thanks to the parents the teachers and the students of this school and the bergen academy who joined us today to talk about what all this means to our children and our future and let me ask us all to give a special word of recognition to the two students who just spoke who must have been somewhat nervous but did not betray it marlon grenados and tonya nagahwatte they did a great job i ve very glad to be back in new jersey and in union city all of you know that the vice president and i came here today because this school system is undergoing a remarkable transformation i want the rest of the country to know about it and i want everybody in the country to be able to emulate it let me begin by acknowledging the contributions of congressman bob menendez who was formerly mayor here a true native son of union city a sponsor of the new jersey telecommunications act in 1991 that set the stage for the remarkable events we are celebrating today the rebirth of union city and your schools reminds us that we do live in an age of great possibility if people are willing to work together to make the most of it more americans from all walks of life will have more chances to live up to their dreams than at any time in our nation s history new technologies are opening prospects for vast new areas of human activity that will bring prosperity a growing global marketplace is putting a premium on the kind of ingenuity and skills americans can contribute to the present and the future but let s face it we also know that this new era is a time of great new challenges putting new pressures on families that are not particularly well equipped to deal with it more and more of our citizens are living better but more and more of our families are working harder and harder just to keep up they justifiably wonder if they and their children will be winners in this new age or if they will be left behind in some downsizing or in some job in which they never get a raise after what i have seen today i believe more strongly than ever before the answer to the problems of those who are not yet benefitting from the information age is not to try to put walls up or turn around and go back it is to keep going forward until every child and every family in every home in every workplace can see what we are seeing here today you know in the state of the union address i talked about the importance of the budget discussions we have been having in washington for the last year the need to finish the work of balancing the budget but to do it in a way that recognizes our obligations to our future through investments in education and environmental protection and that recognized our obligations to our families and to our larger american family including those who through no fault of their own need help from all of us and that s why we ought to preserve the medicare and medicaid programs but i also said there and i would like to reiterate here i believe there is a broad bipartisan consensus in this country to continue the work until we have eliminated this permanent deficit until we are living within our means until we are committed all of us in living on a balanced budget so what we have to do now is look to the future in that address i outlined what i believe are the seven great challenges facing america if we want all americans to have a chance at the american dream and if we want to grow together not be driven apart we must build stronger families and better childhoods we must have better education we must make sure all of our children every single one of them has access to the educational opportunities of the present and the future we must build economic security for every single working family genuinely willing to work for it to hook into that future so that they will not be left behind we must continue the fight to make our streets safer until crime in america is once again the exception not the rule we must work to clean up our environment while we grow our economy and forever dispose of the myth that you cannot have a strong economy unless you are destroying your environment we cannot afford any more of the luxury of pretending that that is true we must continue to work to lead the world toward a direction that is more peaceful and free and finally our government must be one that serves and works and earns your trust instead of your distrust i think it is fair to say that none of those goals can be achieved unless we are successful in improving the quality of education for all americans we will do this through a partnership not through big government the high tech information age means that all large bureaucracies will be restructured that more decisions will be pushed down to the grass roots that people will be able to make more decisions for themselves but we dare not go back to an era when all of our people were left to fend for themselves we have to go forward together with teamwork just the way union city has gone forward together with teamwork to have this remarkable educational achievement we celebrate today i thank congressman menendez for what he said and echoing the title of the first lady s book which i m pretty proud of he is right it does take a whole village to raise and educate our children and it takes all of us to meet all these common challenges that s what union city is an example of that s why we wanted to come here today i loved looking into the eyes of young people in the meeting which we just came from and hearing one of them say you know the thing about this technology is we can all achieve it doesn t matter whether we re the richest family in the state or not it doesn t matter what our background is it doesn t matter if our parents came here just a few years ago this is the great equalizer we can have high standards and high expectations and we can all make it if we work together that is the message america needs to heed today for three years working with our distinguished education secretary dick riley who may not be a cheerleader in his next life but has been a terrific cheerleader for america s children for the last three years and indeed even before we have worked on a simple strategy for education we believe in high standards we believe in high expectations we believe in high levels of opportunity we believe in high technology and we believe the doors of college should be open to every single american citizen we have worked hard to expand head start to implement the goals 2000 program which gives to states and school districts the ability to advance toward high national standards through grass roots reform like public school choice or even letting teachers start their own public schools or doing things like you have done here that can t be done everywhere in the beginning we have worked to create a network of school to work programs to help young people who don t go on to college immediately to at least find good jobs and to continue their education when they leave high school we have set challenges to schools to recognize that they must impart the basic values that keep our society together through character education and teaching good values and good citizenship all these things we have done we have expanded pell grants and created a new direct lending program that makes it easier for young people to borrow money for college and easier for them to repay it our americorps program is now giving 25 000 young americans a chance to work in their communities to solve problems at the grass roots and earn money for college but we have to do more in the state of the union i proposed giving 1 000 merit scholarship to the top five percent of every high school graduating class to expand work study to include a million students so more people can work their way through college and if we are going to cut taxes what better way to do it than to give a tax deduction of up to 10 000 to every american family for the cost of college tuition that would be a good way to cut taxes but we know that none of these things will work until we bring the information and technology revolution into every school and through the schools into the homes of every school student in the united states of america you heard the vice president say he was in philadelphia yesterday to celebrate the birthday of eniac the first computer he was too delicate to say it s 50 years old this year and it was born in the same year i was the computer and i this year will become eligible to join the american association of retired persons i don t know about the computer but i hope i don t quite qualify this year let me just say when i was the age of the students here let me just give you some examples of what has happened in this 50 years when i was the age of the students that we met with today the big technological breakthroughs were technicolor movies and stereo music i can remember when 3 d movies came out and you got to wear little glasses to look at the movies and we really thought that was hot stuff that we had to put glasses on to see movies that looked like real people i remember when color televisions and cellular telephones and computers that could fit on somebody s desk were science fiction nobody could even imagine it for our young people today that all seems like ancient history not science fiction they interact with computers at the supermarket at the check out counter in video arcades in their homes you know to them it s all second nature i d venture to say that at least half the adults in this room have learned more about computers from their kids than from any other source but it s a real misfortune that not every schoolroom in america has the computers we celebrate today here and at the bergen academy that is wrong and that s why i have issued this challenge to our nation to form a national partnership to make sure every young american has access to the future through the information superhighway when i was young i thought the future was there for every american who would work for it it turned out to be true for my generation it will be true for this generation too and it will be a bigger brighter broader future but only if we bring the benefits of the information revolution to every single one of them bob menendez talked about the achievements of this school district but think about it not so long ago the school system was on the brink of a state takeover under new jersey s law that actually has a lot to recommend it saying that if students aren t learning the state should have a right to move in but you rescued it and you did it the way we have to meet our challenges everybody working together everyone doing their part the board of education voting to modernize bell atlantic making all the contributions it made linking up the schools the state of new jersey helping with its resources teachers and experts writing a new curriculum parents actually coming here for weekend training taught by a teacher and her students parents who now can work with their children at home on the computer and the students have taken this opportunity and this responsibility they feel empowered and they know it makes learning more fun you know that with the computers in the classroom and at home linked together homework is being done in a new way classrooms lessons take on a new life parents and teachers can keep in touch by e mail test scores have gone up and truancy and dropout rates have gone down in the words of the vice president that he coined four years ago everything that should be up is up and everything that should be down is down and that s the way it ought to be all over america we re not just talking about an option that it would be nice for schools to have over 130 recent academic studies have shown clearly that the use of technology and support of instruction has led to higher achievement and language and art and math and social studies and of course in science we have dramatic proof of the power of technology to expand opportunity for our young people we have to harness that power and spread it throughout this country in the state of the union i called on americans to join in this national mission to make every child technologically literate to connect every classroom and library in our country by the dawn of the 21st century which is just a few years away to connect them with quality computers trained teachers creative software we must do everywhere what you have done here we are making real progress we are bringing companies and volunteers together in california to wire 20 percent of those schools this year alone and the vice president and i are going out there in a few days to celebrate that and in the telecommunications bill which i signed last week there is a requirement for companies to provide a discount for connecting all of our classrooms and libraries to the information superhighway and i thank the people in congress who unanimously almost unanimously passed that bill and the industries that supported it we must all continue to do our part but our national government must do its part too consistent with the recommendations of the national information infrastructure advisory committee which i appointed and which recently issued its last reports full of communications executives and others expert in communication around our country i am today announcing a major initiative to energize our people to work to fulfill that mission even more quickly i am proposing in my present budget paid for in the balanced budget a 2 billion technology literacy challenge that will put the future at the fingertips of every child in every classroom in america the two members of congress here present are in a unique position to support this endeavor senator lautenberg because before he became a senator he was in the information business and he saw the possibilities of computers and he knows it should be used to do more than make successful businesses it should make successful students and congressman menendez because of what he has done with you here together working with like minded democrats and republicans we can make this america s cause we can do this we can have computers in every classroom we can have all students eager to learn we can have the face of every single child light up and we can know that down deep inside every child can believe again that he or she no matter what their background no matter what their economic challenges can fulfill the mission that they have the capacity to fulfill we can do this we can do it together and i believe we will thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton15 2 96b bill_clinton thank you so very much i told the vice president when we were outside and james earl jones was speaking that we ought to go out here and smile and quit while we re ahead and i did tell him i confess that i thought it was kind of a bad deal that he got to be introduced by james earl jones and he introduces me all the time but james earl jones fails the first test of presidential introductions tha the vice president passes with flying colors which is whenever possible always always be introduced by someone you have appointed to high office don t you think it s wonderful what a sense of humor the vice president has developed i think i actually resent it myself i used to have a sense of humor but they told me it wasn t presidential so like everything else that s really enjoyable the vice president gets to do it let me say to all of you who are here to the people who cochaired this dinner and all those who sold tickets and all of you who have come out on this third time s the charm to the leaders of the democratic party who are here to james earl jones who i admire very much i thank you for being here and for your wonderful words and for your support to leslie gore and to the orchestra all the musicians i thought they were terrific and i think it s okay if leslie gore tells people she s kin to al after i became president i found out i had all kind of relatives i didn t know that i had and it makes for interesting reading i want to thank mayor dinkins and the members of the new york city government the members of congress who are here the borough presidents who are here and all of you who have come to be a part of this evening i guess that because this is in all probability my last campaign unless someday i run for the school board i m a little bit nostalgic and i was in this hotel at a fundraiser almost four years ago to this week some of you were here that night and i m thinking to night and i ask all of you to give your prayers to our wonderful friend paul carey who is battling an illness but is doing better and he can t be here but i want to think about him because he was here with me in that campaign and so i m kind of counting my blessings tonight and remembering that the vice president has graciously bragged on me because it s unseemly to do it for yourself even in an election year what i would like to talk about tonight is the kind of the time in which we re living and why the things that we have done commend us for reelection but why we don t deserve to be reelected just based on our record because there is so much more to be done what are the fundamental facts of this time a democratic system can only work if it preserves the freedom and liberty of all citizens and is flexible enough to adjust to the challenges of every time it is no accident that we re the longest lasting democracy in human history it isn t easy to keep meeting the challenges it s no accident that haiti which the vice president mentioned after being a nation an independent nation for almost 200 years just had its very first transfer of power from democratically elected president to another this is a wonderful system of government but it s not always easy to get a majority of the people first to zealously guard their own freedoms and those of their neighbors and to respect those who are different from them and secondly to make the decisions necessary or to let their leaders make the decisions necessary to keep meeting the challenges of each moment i believe as i have said on many occasions that we are living through the period of greatest change in the way we work and live and relate to each other in a hundred years that this moment represents the most fundamental change since we moved from being primarily a rural people to being primarily a people who lived in towns and cities since we moved from being primarily an agricultural economy to an economy primarily based on industry this information age represents dramatic changes in the nature of work there s more muscle excuse me more mind and less muscle than work and as people in new york read every week it represents dramatic changes in the nature of work organizations and more small businesses and big businesses keep getting smaller there are fewer levels between the people at the top and the people actually implementing decisions there has been an enormous growth in small business as the vice president said but an enormous downsizing of bigger companies this era represents an enormous dramatic change in the way information is communicated bill gates in his recent book said that the information age based on the digital chip represents the most profound revolution in communications since guttenberg printed the first bible 500 years ago and obviously when you re dealing with changes this profound which also include the change in markets money markets markets in goods and markets in services to global markets it is clear that there must be changes in government it is also clear that there will be changes in the patterns of people s lives and whenever in our history and i believe whenever in any society in human history there has been a great uprooting you always see enormous opportunity for the gifted the clever the understanding the lucky and the well prepared but you also see a lot of people feeling insecure and disoriented because they feel that they re working hard and playing by the rules and their future seems to be drifting away and that represents the remarkable paradox of the present moment overwhelmingly this is an age of possibility the vice president recited the economic statistics i need not repeat them but what we know is that this is an unusual time because in these three years we ve seen our economy produce 8 million jobs a record number of new small businesses a record number of self made millionaires a remarkable and very good thing not people who inherited their wealth but people who went out and made it with the opportunities that this country provided and yet still about half our people have not gotten a raise in terms of real purchasing power in a decade or more we know that these entrepreneurs are exploding we know for example that businesses owned by women alone just businesses owned by women have created more new jobs than the fortune 500 have laid off in the last three years but that s not very helpful if you re one of the people my age who is you know 49 or 50 years old and your kids are ready to go to college and you re one of the ones that got laid off and all you ve ever been is a middle manager in a very big company and you can t imagine how you can ever find another job making what you made doing roughly what you used to do what are you to do now so that is the paradox we re trying to come to grips with if you look at the other great challenge i think we face which is to live up to our values and to come together as a country instead of being drive apart by this change you see the same sort of thing we should be ecstatic the crime rate is down the welfare rolls are down the food stamp rolls are down the poverty rolls are done the teen pregnancy rate is down this country is coming together the commissioner of police of the city of the new york was on the front page the cover of one of our major news magazines with a serious question implying we may have turned the corner in our efforts to whip violent crime that is something to be celebrating about and yet we all know that all those things that are going down are still too high so our work is not yet done if you look at the role america has played in the world we should be rejoicing for the reasons the vice president has said and for others there are no more nuclear missiles pointed at any children in the united states i m proud of that if the russians follow the lead of the united states senate and adopt a start ii treaty we will reduce by two thirds the nuclear arsenals of both countries we have gotten almost 180 countries to agree to join the nonproliferation treaty and promise never never to develop nuclear missiles this year i believe we will get a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty for the whole world this is a remarkable thing and i am profoundly grateful for what this nation has been able to do to work with other countries to fight terrorism and to fight organized crime and to fight drugs i am profoundly grateful for the role we played in the liberation of south africa and the role we played in haiti in the middle east in northern ireland and bosnia but you know as well as i do that this work is ongoing that even though the nuclear cloud is not hanging over us as it once did we still face serious serious obstacles to doing everything we need to do there s a lot out there to do when one fanatic can break open a vial of sarin gas in a subway station in tokyo and kill hundreds of people when one fanatic in the united states can get on the internet and find through high tech means the very low tech way of making a bomb like the bomb that destroyed the federal building in oklahoma city when our open borders can lead terrorists into our country and allow them to come here and they do their mischief and then leave and go to countries from which we cannot have them return we still have security challenges now i would say to you on balance you should be pleased with where this country is and where we re going the economic direction is right the social direction is right the national security direction is right we are opening the american dream to more people we are coming together around our basic values we are still the world s leading force for peace and freedom but we have a very challenging agenda for the future and it is that agenda on which i hope this election campaign will be waged not the cheap silly divisive distractive issues that will undermine our ability to unleash the potential of every american and do right by this great country in my state of the union i said there were seven great challenges facing this country i don t want to talk about all of them tonight i want to emphasize one or two but i want to talk about one or two and remind you of all of them we must we must continue to fight for stronger families and better childhoods for all of our children we must open up the opportunities of the 21st century to every american by giving everybody a world class educational opportunity based on high standards and high expectations and high technology and high opportunity we must find a way to capture and maintain and even accelerate the dynamism of this wonderful new economy and at the same time provide a higher measure of economic security for every american family willing to work for it we must continue the fight against crime until we meet the real test of any civilized society which is not a zero crime rate there will never be a time when we won t have crime and violence but there is a test that you can apply in your own home to your own personal experience we will have done what we should do in crime when you feel in your bones that it is the exception not the rule when you turn on the evening news and you read about the latest murder the latest rape the latest madness you think it s the exception and you re surprised not numb to it and until we reach that point we have to keep working on it as one of our highest national priorities we must continue the fight to preserve maintain and even enhance our natural environment we must reject once and for all the totally destructive notion that we can only grow this economy if we continue to destroy the environment that is a terrible idea it won t work it will undermine our economy it will destroy our quality of life and it s nice to have the vice president at work every day reminding me of that ultimate truth we must maintain our leadership for peace and freedom in new york we have a lot of people who deal with the rest of the world you have a lot of wonderful jewish americans and americans of arabic descent who want me to continue to fight for peace in the middle east you have a lot of people involved in world trade who want me to continue to reach out to latin america and to asia but many of our fellow americans are so burdened by the moment that i get the feeling when they see me on television talking about ireland or bosnia or whatever they look and they say well you re doing all right and as long as you don t mess up i ll let you do that but i really kind of wish we didn t have to fool with that but let me remind you we do have to fool with that if you want those countries in latin america to cooperate with us in breaking the drug gangs and remember in the last three years seven of the eight leaders of the cali drug cartel have been put behind bars thanks to that kind of cooperation if you want that to happen we have to be good neighbors with the latin americans they after all are risking their lives at least we have to become good trade partnerships and other partnerships if you want europe to grow as an open community instead of a closed community if you want americans to have a fair shake at selling our goods our services and growing our economy in partnership with the europeans we have to be partners in the common security of democracy and freedom there and that s part of what bosnia is all about apart from the fact that it is the right thing to do so i ask you all to support that to support your country when we stand up for peace and freedom and finally our last challenge is we have got to give the american people again a government tha does more costs less and most important is worthy of their trust but we also have to have a group of americans who understand what their responsibilities are at this time people can t be looking down their nose at the government if they don t do their part to raise their kids if they don t do their part to educate their kids if they re not willing to do their part to work with their local police officers or their part to demand grass roots environmental reform or their part to show up and vote so we have to have this kind of balance in this new era we will change the way the government works you heard the vice president say it i heard our friends in the other party for years lambast and rail against big government all i know is it was still pretty big when we showed up and now it s the smallest it s been since 1965 i heard them rail against government regulation all i know is when showed up there were 86 000 pages of government regulations and we re getting rid of 16 000 pages of it i heard these things but i never saw anything done we are trying to give the american people a government that s not so big that s not antiquated that s not some dinosaur of the age we used to live in instead of the one we re moving toward but that does not mean we need a weak government it does not mean we can go back to the time when people were left to fend for themselves if you were to ask me what is the one lesson you have learned in the last three years mr president i would say to you i have learned that when this country is together america never loses and we have to solve our problems together that means the government has a role that means citizens that means families that means community institutions that means the private sector that means the churches and synagogues that means all of us have to do something together and we all have a role to play and to pretend otherwise is ridiculous and let me just give you a couple of examples of what i think we ought to be doing and one example that affects new york that shows you what is still wrong with things in washington and i believe there are laws we ought to change i still i can t understand why congress won t pass a campaign finance reform bill they all say they re for it but they won t do it and actually most of you in this room should be clapping louder it would save you a lot of money if we passed it i can t understand why they won t pass the line item veto they said they thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread since they took over the congress i d like to have it i ll use it and it will help to bring the deficit down but the way we operate is fundamentally important let me just give you one example this telecommunications bill reflects the way our country ought to work it will create tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of high wage jobs it will dramatically increase americans access to information to education to entertainment and it will be done in a way that brings us together because it protects the ability of all the players in telecommunications to have their fair chance to compete the small as well as the large it protects the ability of people to know that there will be a diversity of opinions still available to them and it gives a preference to our schools and to our libraries and to our hospitals so they can be on the information superhighway no matter where they are and all our children have a chance to go into the 21st century let me say this we did an event in union city new jersey today which the vice president talked about which is the antithesis of what everybody worries about in the economy all this anxiety in the economy really is rooted in the fact that people are afraid that there s something about this technological revolution that mandates inequality in wages and stagnant wages and people being permanently dislocated but if you saw these kids today kids that came from immigrant families kids that were poor kids that never would have been able to dream of this before all of them fluent in the use of their computers all of them being able to go home and have access to computers at home all of them having taught their parents how to use computers so that their parents are e mailing the principal and finding out back and forth how the kids are doing you would see that the answer is not to go back or put up walls around this country the answer is to see this technological revolution through until it benefits every single american and gives us the future that we need and that is an example of how we ought to do it we fought very hard for those public interest provisions of the telecommunications bill but in the end the bill passed almost unanimously and it is a good thing for america and it hooks us into the future now that s an example of what should be done an example of what should not be done that most people in this room are familiar with was the outrageous political treatment of my intention to nominate felix rohatyn to be the vice chairman of the federal reserve and he is here tonight i think we all ought to give him a hand felix where are you stand up there let s give him a hand if you believe that we should give everybody a raise when the economy does better and you don t want to engage in class welfare if you believe all these people that are inevitably downsized when big corporations become smaller should have the opportunity to go on with their lives and you don t want to engage in class warfare if you are perplexed by how we can generate 8 million new jobs and record numbers of new businesses and still have half the americans not get a raise one clear area where we ought to debate is whether the conventional wisdom about how fast this economy can grow is right that ought to be debated it ought to be debated within the commitment to deficit reduction and a balanced budget i think we ve established our commitment to that it ought to be debated within a commitment not to let inflation get out of hand but the truth is nobody but nobody knows for sure that this economy can t grow any faster in the information age than it did between 1970 and 1995 the truth is if you want to get jobs into brooklyn into the bronx into the mississippi delta into the rural areas of america if you want to see people who work hard and work harder today than they did 25 years ago on the average get the rewards one of the most obvious things you have to do is to see whether or not this economy can grow a little faster i m telling you if this economy grew at an average of 2 7 percent instead of 2 5 percent all the arguments we are now having in washington over balancing the budget would be gone like that two tenths of a percent over history out i believe based on repeated conversations i have had with business leaders both republicans and democrats in this country over the last three years talking about the very rapid growth and productivity in our manufacturing sector the increasing growth in productivity in our service sector and the fact that we have such an open economy that competition is an incredible pressure against inflation far more than ever before and i ll just give you one example when we put out our deficit reduction plan in 93 and the interest rates dropped there was a housing boom and what always happens when there s a housing boom happened lumber prices went up because they got tight except lumber prices this time did not lead to a new inflation why because we got flooded with lumber from other countries because we have an open economy so we had our housing boom and no inflation now it seems to me a good thing for the president to do to say wouldn t it be nice to have a debate within a controlled framework with serious people with a lifetime of achievement to see if we can t give americans a raise who are working hard to see if we can t minimize inequality as we move to this new economy and to see if we can t do it the old fashioned american way with opportunity and not class warfare that s what i wanted to see done and that s why i wanted to put felix rohatyn on the federal reserve but the politics of washington said no we insist on the conventional wisdom we insist on holding people down we don t even think it s worth debating over and out that is wrong and we must end that kind of thinking if we want this country to grow and prosper and become what it ought to be the last thing i want to say is this the most important thing about this election is that you and everybody like you in this whole country remembers that it s not about me or whoever the republicans decide to nominate when they get through with their business this election is about you and people like you it s about all those people that served your food tonight it s about everybody in between and this country is still here after all this time still doing well still the envy of the world because most of the time most of us do the right thing and one of the things that i have a hard time dealing with is this alleged cynicism and skepticism among our people now skepticism is a healthy thing at one level but you tell me why the american people should be cynical when we have the lowest unemployment rate the highest growth rate the lowest deficit and the brightest prospects of any advanced country in the world people from other countries ask me all the time they would give anything to have our problems of course we ve got problems problems are endemic to the human condition but we see them as challenges and opportunities and cynicism is a cheap bogus inadequate excuse for the inaction of our fellow citizens and we ve got to get rid of it the other thing we have got to stop doing as a people and i want you to pledge to me that as our supporters you will carry through this whole year doing this we have got to stop using these elections to divide the american people in ways that benefit some politician at election time but cripple the ability of the united states to come together as one country we have got to stop doing that tonight i looked up at my table and when the gentleman came to ask if we wanted any wine and i saw a man serving me that i met in this kitchen four years ago last week and some of you may remember the circumstances i faced four years ago last week we were dropping like a rock in new hampshire my obituary had been written by every elated editorial writer in the country who always wanted one hide in every election everybody said we were going to single digits in new hampshire and the whole thing was over and alan and susan patricof and i were laughing around the table we had 700 people here i thought we d be lucky to have 70 people here after what i had been through the last few days and i walked through the kitchen coming here and i was feeling pretty sorry for myself i m ashamed to say i was feeling pretty sorry for myself and the man that came to my table tonight to serve us stopped me and some of you heard this story but i want to tell you he s still here he s still working for his family and for this hotel and he said governor my 10 year old son is studying the presidential elections he has studied all the candidates and he says i should vote for you well that made me feel better i didn t know there was a 10 year old in all the state of new york who knew who i was he said but let me tell you something he said i m an immigrant and where i came from we were very poor and we re much better off here economically but where we lived before we were free he said here we have a park across the street from our apartment but my boy can t play in that park unless i go with him we have a school down the street from our apartment my boy can t walk to school unless i go with him so if i do what my boy wants me to do and i vote for you will you make my boy free and i thought to myself what have you been thinking about this election is not about you it s about him and people like him and let me tell you something when we passed that crime bill and we put another 100 000 police on the street and i see the crime rate going down in city after city after city in this country because we did that when we passed the brady bill and the assault weapons ban and the democrats lost the house of representatives probably because so many of them sat up and voted for that one bill but i could go to new hampshire and say we just had a great deer season in new hampshire and the air was full of ducks in arkansas and every hunter i know shot them with the same gun they had last year so the people who told you we were going to take your gun away were not telling you the truth but i ll tell you something there s over 40 000 crooks that couldn t get a gun because we passed the brady bill and i saw him tonight i saw demitrius standing there and i said your son is about 14 now yes how s he doing fine and i said you got a message for me he said yes keep fighting for the working people it s still pretty tough out here this election is about you it s about him it s about our country and yes we have some challenges but i m telling you these are high class problems because this country is moving in the right direction and don t let anybody tell you that your government is inherently bad james carville s new book which i commend to all of you points out in the last 30 years we spent half of your tax money on three things defense social security and medicare what did you get for it we won the cold war we cut the poverty rate among elderly citizens in half and if you get to be old enough to be on medicare seniors in the united states have the highest life expectancy of any group of elderly people in the world this is a very great country if you do your part and we do ours we re going to be just fine let s do that in 1996 thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton15 3 94 bill_clinton thank you very much first thank you jan she did a it like a real pro didn t she just as if she d been there her whole life give her a hand i want to thank jim putnam for that fine tour and for his remarks i also want to recognize your congressman dick swett who is with me who s made the tour with me and he s been a real friend to this company he s been telling me about markem for a long time and telling me that i should come here and i m very glad i took the suggestion i had a great time today and i thank you for that i want to thank jim for the tour and all of you who welcomed me along the way and showed me the work you re doing it s very very impressive i appreciate the message that was read from tom putnam and the fact that he s opening new markets for you in another part of the world i know there are other leaders of this company jim baute who i met today and dave putnam who s not here and i thank all of you for giving me a chance to see something that is very important for america to think about today which is how people work together in partnership and win in a tough global economy mayor lynch i want to say i m very glad to be back in keene today and with you senator and all the other people that are here this community and this county have been very good to me chesser county gave me more votes than anybody else on the ballot in the primary here in 1992 and in the general election and so i m indebted to the people of this community and this county yesterday i was in detroit the center of our country s automobile industry a place that is full of change where first thousands and thousands of jobs were lost in the car industry and now automobiles are coming back and other industries are coming back in and around there we had leaders of the world s seven large industrial nations meeting there canada france germany great britain italy japan and the united states talking about an interesting phenomenon which is the difficulty all the wealthy countries are having creating jobs in a tough global economy even when their economies are growing it s not a problem confined to america and i asked for this meeting last summer so that we could begin to plan together what we could do to reward the work of our people and to try to cooperate more with one another even as we compete one of the things that we know is that there are some things that work and you live it here every day this is an old company that as jim said to me on the tour keeps young by looking always to the future being always willing to change a company that s had as i understand it no layoffs in four decades and that goes through a long recession in the 1980s that s something you can be proud of would that every company would do that and it s obvious that you have a combination here of good management strong workers good partnership between the people who work here and the folks in management you re keeping on the cutting edge of technology i saw the computer change the two different labels for my visit here today not with any plates or anything but with simple software and a real commitment to open markets i thank jim and his company for their support of our attempts to open more markets to american products through the north american free trade agreement with mexico through the new worldwide trade agreement through the outreach we re conducting to asia one of the things we know is that a rich country can t grow richer unless it finds more customers for its goods and its services and i am committed to finding more customers and to making sure that we have a chance to sell in every market in the world i was encouraged at the japanese that after years of conversation and controversy you ve finally worked out an arrangement to give our cellular telephone companies and motorola specifically access to the entire japanese market we don t want any favors we just want a chance to sell american wherever people are willing to buy american i think that s what we ought to want and what we ought to insist on if we let other countries have access to our markets we should ask for the same thing in return and give you a chance to compete in the global economy since i became president i have worked on a coordinated economic strategy designed to give you a chance to do well by opening more markets to exports because exportrelated jobs pay 22 percent more on average than jobs that have no connection to the global economy by trying to improve the economic climate in this country bringing interest rates down and increasing investment by bringing our deficit down last year the congress approved a deficit reduction plan to reduce our deficit by 500 billion this year s plan has just been approved in its outlines by the house of representatives and if it passes and i believe it will we ll have three years of constant reduction in our government deficit for the first time since harry truman was the president of the united states and it s paying rich dividends for the economy of america and new hampshire the unemployment rate in this state has dropped 1 5 percentage points since the election of 1992 30 000 more jobs in new hampshire but there is a lot more to do and i ask you to work with me to make sure we do these things properly and i just would mention three things if i might first of all we have to continue to harness technology to the future and make the best technologies available to all of our people one of the ways we re doing that which has benefitted some in new hampshire already is by taking some of the money that we re reducing defense spending by and putting into domestic technology development so that a lot of the defense companies can find ways to hold onto their jobs by making nondefense products another thing we re trying to do that jim putnam has been an expert about in fact he s closer to vice president gore than i am in what he knows about it and that is the information superhighway we want to hook in companies like this one but also every library and every public school and every hospital in the united states of america into a vast information network fueled by high technology to make information readily quickly inexpensively accessible to all the american people this can explode our economic opportunities and improve our quality of life and your company and your leader are on the cutting edge of that we intend to continue to push it second thing we want to do is try to improve the continuous training opportunities for america s workers unfortunately as you know very few companies have no layoff policies and a lot of companies in a dynamic economy simply don t make it at all most of the new jobs being created in america are being created by smaller employers but they have a record of not only coming into business in a hurry but often going out of business that means that we need to change the whole unemployment system because frankly companies pay unemployment taxes into a fund designed for an economy that doesn t exist anymore most people who lose their jobs today don t get their old jobs back the way they used to they have to find new jobs which means instead of maintaining people in idleness for a protracted period on unemployment payments that are inadequate anyway we should use that money immediately as soon as people lose their jobs to begin to immediately retrain them so that they can get jobs in companies that are growing with a better future that require higher skill levels we should turn the unemployment system into a reemployment system that will be a heavy priority for the congress this year the last thing i d like to talk about briefly is health care for a couple of reasons first of all i know this company has a good health care package and therefore that you all feel secure in your health care and i honor you for that and i m glad you do but you should know that every major company in america like this one that provides good health care to its employees is paying more for that health care than it should because so many americans don t have any health insurance and when they show up at the hospital at the emergency room their health care gets absorbed by the hospitals and they pass the cost on to the companies that do have health insurance that adds to the cost of doing business it also means that a lot of americans are at risk of losing their health insurance all the time so what we re committed to doing this year is to preserving the plans that are good like yours preserving what works in the american health care system but fixing the system of finance which has led a lot of people into very difficult circumstances i just left a town hall meeting in nashua where i talked to a woman who lost her health insurance because she had a sick child and because she lost her job and now nobody will hire her because they don t want to take her son s insurance on because the child is sick in any other country they would have a broad big pool in which people like that could be insured so no company would be unduly burdened by hiring an employee with people changing jobs seven or eight times in a lifetime we have to make it possible for all american families to work and to have access to health care and we can t stop people from moving in the job market just because they had a child or a parent who was sick and furthermore it is not right when we are trying to export our products all over the world to punish good companies that provide good health insurance benefits by making them pay more than they should just because some people don t pay anything so we re going to try to provide health security for all americans in a way that preserves what is right about our system but fixes what is wrong it will be good for the economy and i can also tell you it ll be very good for this budget deficit because every year now the only thing that s really growing in the entire federal budget are health care costs going up and two and three times the rate of inflation for reasons directly related to the fact that we re the only advanced industrial country that doesn t provide health care to everyone so we have to do that and i hope you will support that finally let me say that one of the things that i m trying to do as your president with mixed results i guess is to bring the same sort of values and method of operation that made this company great into the operation of the national government so many of the problems that we have today are people problems they don t fit neatly within the partisan political categories of the past so much of what we have to do today is to get people to work together in teams to develop human potential and to exalt human dignity and give people a chance to live up to the fullest of their god given ability that is our job to get people together to get things done to help people make the most of their lives and i think that we do very well in washington d c to remember the model that we see here the model that puts people first no layoff policy heavy emphasis on productivity use technology but never forget people are the most important thing sell to the whole world keep the competition in mind those are things i wish we could be driven by in washington and i promise you every day i m trying to bring washington a little closer to that way of doing business your way thank you very much dem wjclinton15 3 95a bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen your majesty your royal highnesses members of the moroccan delegation distinguished guests hillary and i are delighted to welcome you to america s home i have been grateful for this opportunity to get to know your majesty and to appreciate the wise counsel you have given to every american president since john kennedy in fact your relationship with our country s leaders i have learned goes back even further than that in january of 1943 at the height of world war ii you were present when your father mohammed v hosted the casablanca summit between president roosevelt and prime minister churchill history does not record what advice you gave president roosevelt and the prime minister but i did note that thereafter the war turned decisively to the allies advantage so clearly you gave good advice i also noted that when president roosevelt and prime minister churchill were in casablanca mr roosevelt thought he had to come home and go to work and prime minister churchill made him stay in morocco for three more days to see the beautiful sights my staff never lets me do that so we have not made progress in every respect since the 1940s your majesty you have written that in the joyous following the declaration of morocco s independence your father pulled you aside and said we have passed through a difficult trial but the road ahead will be long and hard we do not have the right to disappoint the faithful and courageous people who have placed their trust in us for the past 34 years you have lived by your father s admonition and by pursuing progress for the moroccan people and peace for all the peoples of your region you have truly fulfilled his legacy the american people especially admire your steadfast devotion to securing a comprehensive peace among all the peoples of the middle east in a region where passion and hatred have so often overwhelmed cooler heads and clearer minds yours has always been a voice of reason and tolerance quoting from the koran you have said if two groups of believers fight each other endeavor to reconcile them you have been tireless in your pursuit of reconciliation you have helped the countries of the middle east turn on the past and start a new chapter of peaceful coexistence your majesty you have spoken of your beloved morocco as a bridge between east and west between islam and the judeo christian faiths between respect for tradition and openness to the future under your leadership that bridge which runs from the tip of europe to the sands of the sahara and joins the atlantic to the mediterranean that bridge has risen high as a beacon of hope and for all those reasons ladies and gentlemen honored guests please join me in raising a glass to his majesty king hassan ii to the prince and the princess who are here and to the people of morocco who have done so much to build the bridges of understanding and peace dem wjclinton15 3 95b bill_clinton your majesty your royal highnesses members of the moroccan delegation distinguished guests on behalf of the united states it is my honor to welcome back to washington a good friend of america and one of the islamic world s most respected leaders king hassan ii your majesty the ties that link our two nations go back to the dawn of our independence before the cornerstone of this white house was laid president george washington and your ancestor sultan mohammad iii signed a treaty of peace and friendship in the decades since our two nations have sought to live up to that treaty s ideals by building on our friendship and working for peace and prosperity in your region and throughout the world now much of what we have labored for and dreamed of is closer than ever to becoming reality thanks in good measure to your wisdom and to your vision your majesty you have worked tirelessly to secure a lasting and comprehensive peace in the middle east from helping to arrange president sadat s historic journey to jerusalem to building trust through quiet diplomacy from establishing ties with israel to hosting the casa blanca economic summit now we must accelerate the momentum for peace in the middle east the momentum which you have done so much to nurture and sustain as morocco and the united states work for peace we are also forging stronger bonds of commerce between our peoples morocco has embraced free markets and today your economy stands poised to reap the benefits of this wise decision your majesty i look forward to discussing new opportunities for trade and investment which will support good jobs and create wealth in both our nations your majesty under your leadership morocco has served as a force for tolerance and progress rooted in islamic values at a time when cooperation and moderation are taking hold in more countries than ever before but when violence and extremism still threaten all that we are working for your example and your commitment to peace are more important than ever before your majesty the united states is glad to have you as a friend honored to have you as a partner as we work to shape the world for the better welcome to the white house welcome to america dem wjclinton15 4 97 bill_clinton thank you very much congressman rangel said i guess i can t say break a leg can i actually you could they told me if i had broken my leg i would have healed quicker ladies and gentlemen i want to thank all of you for being here i want to thank martin frost for his tireless work on behalf of the democratic congressional campaign committee i thank dick gephardt for the wonderful work that he has done with me over the last four years and few odd months as majority leader as minority leader and i hope in january of 1999 as the speaker of the house of representatives with your help to give you an idea of what this democratic congressional campaign committee did and what our candidates did in 1996 it is worth noting that even though they were out spent often by breathtaking margins in the last 10 days unimaginable amounts in some of the seats with only 9 759 votes spread across 10 congressional districts the democrats could be in the majority today that s how close that election was and therefore your presence here today and your support for them is very important i am proud of the things that mr gephardt mentioned i m proud of the fact that in 1992 we said we would turn this country around and change the direction of the country and we did i m proud of the fact that we changed the economic philosophy that dominated washington for a long time that we reversed trickle down economics and instead said we re going to reduce the deficit and invest in our future we re going to expand trade and make it more fair and the results i think are pretty impressive we ve got an unemployment rate today that s the lowest it s been in many many years and the unemployment rate today is a full percent and a half below the average the average of the two decades before i took office so we re working together we re moving forward i am proud of the fact that with the leadership of a lot of the members of the congress in this room we ve taken a serious step instead of just hot air talk in trying to make our streets safer and our futures brighter for our young people we had the biggest drop in crime the year before last that we ve had in over two decades we haven t gotten the 1996 statistics yet but all the indications are that they continue to go down we are moving in the right direction on that and i am very proud of the fact that again with the leadership with a lot of new yorkers in this room we have put education first on america s domestic agenda again and i m very proud of that i m going to do my best to keep doing the public s business and i will do my best to do it in a fair and open way with the members of both parties in the congress but i can tell you if you look around the room at the people who are here and you ask yourself what are the great challenges of the 21st century for america can we keep the american dream of opportunity for all who are willing to work for it alive can we give our children a world class education can we deal with the health care and the safety needs of all the poor children who come from different cultures who are in our country and give them a chance to make their full contribution can we preserve an american community that s one america and still have an enormous amount of respect for the racial and ethnic and religious differences we have among ourselves because if we can then we are clearly the best positioned country in the world for the new century you have to ask yourselves who would i like to take the lead in answering those questions and in fashioning the answer and i know what that answer is for me i know what that answer is for you and your presence here today will help the american people make a good decision in 1998 i d also like to thank the members of congress from brooklyn and the people of brooklyn for hosting us here today i have consistently done very well in brooklyn as the members never forget to tell me and i am very grateful for that and i am honored to be in this beautiful beautiful place and i hope to stay and look around a little bit i m going to queens tonight to shea stadium to watch the mets and the dodgers play and to commemorate the 50th anniversary of jackie robinson s breaking the color line in baseball and i d just like to say one final word about that it s all the more appropriate i think coming as it does right after tiger woods record shattering performance in the masters but it s important to remember that you had i think the two great ingredients of a good society at work in both places in the case of jackie robinson you had people who were willing to end discrimination and an owner who was willing to give him a chance but you also had a highly disciplined profoundly dignified greatly talented ball player who was prepared not only physically but also emotionally and mentally to do what had to be done the same thing happened in the masters last week and i often believe have said this and i will say it again because i believe it i think that the elections that really matter in this country are genuinely determined by questions people ask not only about us but about themselves and how they view themselves in the world in the future we re going into and i will say this in closing i believe that the efforts of martin frost and leader gephardt and all the members of the new york delegation in 1998 will be successful if we can get the right kind of balanced budget passed in the congress if we can continue to stand up for what s right for america and if we can make sure the american people are asking the right questions in 1998 of our society and of themselves if that happens i am not worried about the outcome of the elections and more importantly i m not worried about the future for our country again let me say i m profoundly grateful to new york and grateful to brooklyn and glad to be here and thank you for helping the dccc thank you very much dem wjclinton15 5 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you gil gallegos for your kind remarks and your leadership and all these years we have spent working together i want to say to you and all the other leaders of this organization and the auxiliary lmae tull steve young jim pasco and others how much i appreciate what you have done in working with me and attorney general reno secretary summers and the other members of our administration i also want to thank the members of congress who support us every year i see congressman gilman and senator kennedy over there there may be others from congress here but i thank them for coming i thank the law enforcement executives chiefs and the rank and file members across america who are here today and most of all i thank the many family members of our fallen officers who have come here to observe this event in the midst of all their pain and loss i appreciate the support of our fellow americans for your endeavors today they were embodied by the wonderful song my long time friend tony bennett sang i thought he was terrific and they are embodied by the prayers and actions of so many of your fellow citizens i would like to mention just one today on a personal note law enforcement doesn t have a better friend in the congress than the former state policeman from michigan named bart stupak bart and his wife laurie lost their son over the weekend and i hope you will remember them in your prayers because he has been as good a friend as the people in blue have ever had in the united states congress the event we commemmorate today has a long history not just 19 years in 1789 211 years ago just a year after our constitution was ratified a united states marshal named robert forsyth was shot and killed in the line of duty since then over 14 000 law enforcement officers have given their lives to protect the liberties upon which america was founded we owe these brave men and women a debt of gratitude that is immeasurable and unending every year we come here to honor them carve their names in stone so that future generations will know who they are and know that they died as they lived as heroes i could talk about all of them represented here today and their families time doesn t permit so let me just tell you two stories that i found to be representative corporal steven levy of the washington township new jersey police department always believed in being out front on public safety whether saving a drowning man from icy waters or teaching self defense classes to women and children during off duty hours last october he was out front again when he led his swat team into a house where a domestic dispute had escalated into gunfire when there he was shot through a closed bedroom door leaving behind a wife and two young children and a legacy of service never to be forgotten officer james henry camp was a community police officer walking the beat in some of chicago s toughest public housing developments a big ex marine he won the respect of young men whom he counseled away from gangs and drugs and the love of little children for whom he always had a piece of candy one day last march he and his partner stopped two men driving a stolen car while making the arrest officer camp was shot and killed he was a newlywed today we recall the service and all the stories of the courageous law enforcement officers 139 of them whose names will be added to the roll of honor this year their purpose and passion was the safety of the people we can never repay them or their families but we can hnor them and not just with word but with action you heard gil gallegos talk about the role of law enforcement in the declining crime rate i always try to make sure the american people know how it happned men and women in uniform did not give up when year in and year out the crime rate went up we decided seven years ago to try to give you some support because it was obvious already that there were strategies in many of our communities that would work to bring down the crime rate more police more prevention tougher penalties you told us that assault weapons and illegal guns were undermining your ability to fight crime and drugs so we passed the assault wepons ban the brady law which has stopped over a half million felons fugitives and stalkers from buying handguns banned the cop killer bullet provided 100 000 more police for our neighborhoods ahead of schedule and under budget last week we learned that thanks to you crime is now down for eight years in a row every officer here and every family here who has lost a loved one should be very proud of the lives you have saved in the united states of america in bringing that crime rate down yet no one here believes we are safe enough and the very fact that we now know what works imposes on all of us an even higher responsibility to do more of what works to put more police on the street in the toughest neighborhoods to hire more prosecutors and atf agents and inspectors to go after gun crimes to invest in gun tracing systems until we can trace every bullet in every gun used in a crime anywhere in america i also believe we must pass more common sense gun safety legislation the child trigger locks banning the importation of large ammunition clips closing the gun show loophole we passed it last year in the senate when the vice president cast the tie breaking vote but it s been stalled here for 10 months and yesterday on this mall there were somewhere between a half a million and 750 000 mothers gathered and over a million in 70 sites across america to say that we shouldn t wait any longer for this kind of legislation i hope we will listen to what they had to say it will also save a lot of police officers lives last friday the chairman of the house judiciary committee henry hyde and his democratic counterpart john conyers made some real progress to resolve the impasse we re having over this legislation and the gun show loophole i thank them for their efforts this should not be a political issue it should not be and it is not about taking guns away from law abiding citizens it s about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and keeping more of our citizens especially our children and our police officers alive i hope the conferees will meet and pass legislation so that i can sign it i also think we have to do more to protect law enforcement officers men and women who risk their lives every day sixteen years ago now when i was governor of my home state of arkansas a friend of mine a state trooper by the name of louis bryant made what he thought was a routine traffic stop he stopped a man in an rv who was a political radical with an arsenal in the vehicle and he was shot to death then i was told that if only he had a bulletproof vest on he probably would have survived i remember that day as if it were yesterday i knew his wife his brother in law was one of my state troopers on my security detail i lived through their agony and so i began to try to make sure every police officer in our state could have a vest every police officer in america should have one two years ago i was proud to sign the bulletproof vest partnership grant act now the federal government pays up to 50 percent of the cost of vests that state and local officers buy or agencies buy for their officers to date we ve purchased over 92 000 of these vests there s enough money in this year s budget to increase that number to 180 000 but i asked gil today and the attorney general how many law enforcement officers needed them how many are in the line of fire we figure there are at least twice that many twice that 180 000 but the program is set to expire next year so today i intend to ask congress to support new legislation offered by the orginal sponsors of the bill senator leahy senator campbell congressman visclosky to extend the program for three more years and double the funding if we do it we ll be able to protect every single police officer in the united states with a bullet proof vest i also want to thank gil gallegos and your organization for the work you are doing to see that a medal of valor is awarded to honor the courage of officers who move above and beyond the call of duty there is legislation to do this in congress but it is now stalled today i have directed the attorney general to develop a plan to create an award through executive action of the president to recognize public safety officers who have exhibited extraordinary valor you should not have to wait any longer and there are many reasons bills get caught up in congress not all of them the fault of the members who are supporting them or those who have the committee but we should not wait this country every year should issue a medal to honor extraordinary acts of valor by police officers shortly before he himself was killed in 1968 robert kennedy said that the fight agaisnt crime is a fight to preserve that quality of community which is at the root of our greatness the fallen officers we honor today put themselves at the forefront of that fight and they do exemplify america s greatness nothing we say or do will bring them back perhaps nothing we can say or do can ease the pain of their families or the sorrow in your hearts only god and time and family and friends can do that but we do want you to know every one of you we honor them and we honor you the best way for us to continue to do that is to press on with the struggle for a safer america a struggle they thought was worth their lives and it s certainly worth everything we can possibly do thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton15 5 97 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much president gallegos auxiliary president lippe to all the distinguished law enforcement representatives who are here senator thurmond senator biden senator leahy congressman stupak members of our cabinet administration i d like to thank all of those who support this endeavor every year and especially this year tommy motolla and gloria estefan and most importantly to the family members of those who have lost their lives in the service of our country in just two weeks on memorial day the american people will pause to pay tribute to the fallen military heroes who died to preserve the liberties upon which our nation was founded and which have enabled it to endure for more than 200 years today we stand here on peace officers memorial day to pay tribute to a sacrifice no less great and no less critical to our liberties the police officers whose names are carved on the memorial are also our fallen heroes and in the hearts of their families and the people whose lives they touched their heroism will always shine officer lauretha vaird was a nine year veteran on the philadelphia police department a single working mother she often said that her two greatest loves were her boys and her badge and she dedicated her life to them both she was a community police officer who walked the streets of her beat with pride one day she responded to a silent alarm at a local bank and as she tried to prevent an armed robbery a gunman s bullet took her life and left her children with only the memory of their heroic mother officer brian gibson was a community police officer who grew up on streets he would later patrol a native of this city he served our country as a united states marine in the persian gulf before joining the d c police force a decorated officer who pounded the pavement to fight drugs and the people who sell them one night he was killed at point blank range by a raging gang member as he simply sat in the police car just a short ride from that memorial where his name will be carved he too left behind a grieving family and friends and a legacy of courage today we honor the service and take pride in all the stories of the 116 men and women who gave their lives to protect our safety our safety was their purpose and passion and while we can never repay them for their ultimate sacrifice we can and we must honor their memory not only in words but in actions that do justice to their lives and to the great loss their families and loved one have suffered for too many years in our country crime seemed destined to keep rising regardless of citizen outrage or law enforcement frustration then slowly you in law enforcement began to turn the tide building bridges to concerned citizens and needy children and troubled neighborhoods but losing brothers and sisters along the way four years ago we joined you as a nation to reclaim our streets our schools and our society with a commitment to a comprehensive approach to crime based on what you told us what you told us would work you told us we needed more police on the street tougher penalties and better prevention you told us especially we needed more community police officers today we re putting 100 000 more of them on the street to join with you you told us illegal handguns and deadly assault weapons were undermining your efforts to fight gangs and drugs so we banned them with the brady bill and the assault weapons ban just since the brady bill was enacted in 1993 186 000 felons fugitives and stalkers have been denied the right to buy handguns today we take another step to protect our communities from gun violence by dangerous drifters who threaten our safety two months ago after the terrible tragedy at the empire state building i directed the atf to require people who buy guns from federally licensed dealers simply to prove they were not just passing through today we re releasing a new application to make sure that certification of residency is an unavoidable step for gun purchases those who can t prove it can t purchase and thanks to you these efforts are working crime is dropping and all over america neighborhood by neighborhood hope for a safer future is slowly but surely being restored it is all the more bittersweet that as crime has dropped in this country five years in a row for the first time in more than two decades we must still gather to carve new names into the hard stone of the national law enforcement officers memorial in 1996 we added 116 names while the loss of even one of those officers lives is even one too many that is the smallest number of police officers to lose their lives in the line of duty since 1959 today in honor of those 116 officers let us pledge to redouble our efforts so that every year there will be fewer and fewer names until one year we will gather with not a single name to add to that roll of heroes let the be our goal and our solemn obligation i ask you all now to move with us to our most pressing priority to take back our streets from violent gangs once again we know what to do because you have told us what to do you have proven in place after place that it can be done in cities like boston where youth murders have dropped by 80 percent in five years and not a single child has been killed with a gun in a year in a half if we can do it in one community in this country we must be able to do it in every community in america in february i sent legislation to the congress that follows law enforcement s advice and boston s lead to declare war on gangs and youth violence with more prosecutors tougher penalties and better prevention programs for at risk young people for as tough as we must be on violent juvenile crime we also must ensure a safer environment and positive opportunities and role models for our children in the most vulnerable communities statistics show that half of juvenile crime at least occurs in the three hours after school is closed and before the parents come home my bill will help to launch 1 000 after school initiatives who can be against allowing a child to stay in school instead of on a street corner who can be against teachers as children s role models instead of thugs who can be against adults to supervise children instead of a lawless world of gangs to guide them finally we know we must cut off young people s access to guns that can cut off their lives and i believe someone who commits a violent crime at 17 should not be able to turn around and buy a gun for a birthday present at 21 i want a juvenile crime bill to extend the brady bill to violent juvenile offenders i also believe that these guns should be sold with child safety locks we protect aspirin bottles in this country better than we protect guns from accidents by children in march i directed federal agencies to provide their agents with such child safety devices and i m pleased to say that today every fbi and atf agent has a child safety lock by october 15th every agent from the dea to the u s marshal to the border patrol to the park police will have one as well if a child safety lock is good enough for law enforcement it ought to be even better for the general public in the last four years we have proved that we can work together and learn from each other and that when we do we can restore hope and improve safety in our communities now we have a chance to build on that progress by passing a smart balanced juvenile justice bill that does more than talk tough the american people deserve that a juvenile crime bill that doesn t crack down on guns and gangs that doesn t guarantee more prosecutors probation officers and after school hours is a crime bill in name only today i ask the members of the congress to work with me without regard to party to pass a juvenile crime bill that will help us to work toward year in and year out fewer and fewer people to honor here until there is no one new to add to the wall to the family members of the victims who are here i know and i must say again that nothing we can do or say can bring them back or ease your sorrow only god and the time and comfort you give to each other can do that but i ask you this to know that the cause in which your loved ones died right against wrong law against lawlessness hope against fear is a worthy and noble cause and because of their efforts and the efforts of others who wear our uniforms it has now become a winning cause it is our job those of us who remain to make sure that we press on and on and on until such tragedies are a stunning exception not a numbing statistic as we go forward into that future that is our most solemn obligation to you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton15 6 99 bill_clinton thank you so much mr speaker mr gephardt senator daschle representative carson senator abraham representative clyburn representative watts to all the members of the house and the senate here and those not here who supported this resolution i thank you for what you have done dr ogilvie dr ford reverend jackson members of the cabinet and the civil rights community who are here dr height i d like to say a special word of welcome to two members of the little rock nine who came here to honor rosa parks minnie jean brown trickey and robert jefferson welcome to you i want to thank the howard university gospel choir and the incomparable jessye norman for their wonderful wonderful music the previous speakers have spoken with great power eloquence and truth in less than 200 days now we will mark the end of another century they have told you the story of one brave woman and the ripples of impact she had upon all the millions of people who lived in the united states it is in many ways the quintessential story of the 20th century a time with trials and tribulations which still fundamentally is the story of the triumph of freedom of democracy over dictatorship free enterprise over state socialism of tolerance over bigotry it was a fight waged on the beaches of normandy on the islands of the south pacific at checkpoint charlie behind the iron curtain and countless known and unknown large and small villages across the globe here at home a fight waged in classrooms lunch counters and on public buses in the segregated south for us what has always been at stake is whether we could keep moving on that stony road closer to the ideals of our founders whether we really could be a country where we are all equal not only endowed by our creator with but in fact living with the rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness forty four years ago rosa parks reminded us all that we were a long way from those ideals that for millions of americans our history was full of weary years our sweet land of liberty bearing only bitter fruit and silent tears and so she sat anchored to that seat as dr king said by the accumulated indignities of days gone by and the countless aspirations of generations yet unborn rosa parks said i didn t get on that bus to get arrested i got on that bus to go home in so many ways rosa parks brought america home to our founders dream you know when we look across the history of the civil rights movement we celebrate president lincoln and the congress of that era for constitutional amendments we celebrate william lloyd garrison and frederick douglass in our own period we celebrate president eisenhower and sending the troops to little rock the commitment of john and robert kennedy the magnificent legislative achievements of president johnson and that congress reaching across party lines but we know that in a funny way people who have no position or money and have only the power of their courage and character are always there before the political leaders we know that when rosa parks got on that bus in alabama i was a nine year old boy living in arkansas going to segregated schools riding public buses every single day where all the colored people sat in the back my family got a television when i was nine years old just a few months before it became worldwide news that mrs parks had gotten on the bus i thought it was a pretty good deal and so did my friends and we couldn t figure out anything we could do since we couldn t even vote so we began to sit on the back of the bus when we got on it seems like i say this now this is a little thing i say it only to say we must never ever when this ceremony is over forget about the power of ordinary people that stand in the fire for the cause of human dignity and to touch the hearts of people that have almost turned to stone i thank the congress for honoring rosa parks i was honored rosa to give you the medal of freedom and i was thrilled during the state of the union address when you got that enormous bipartisan ovation here but remember my fellow americans freedom s work is never done there are still people who are discriminated against there are still people there are still people that because of their human condition are looked down on derided degraded demeaned and we should all remember the powerful example of this one citizen and those of us with greater authority and power should attempt every day in every way to follow her lead god bless you mrs parks and god bless america now thank you now i would like to again this is my errand for congresswoman carson and senator abraham and the speaker and mr gephardt and the other leaders here i understand the actual medal has not been struck yet but a gold line copy of the resolution that authorizes the medal has been struck or prepared for mrs parks and i d like to ask all of you to look to my left to your right for a glimpse of the proposed design for the medal could we julia why don t you go down there and you and spence can wow it s beautiful really beautiful let s give a big hand to ardith lane who was the artist who prepared this didn t she do a wonderful job thank you dem wjclinton15 7 93 bill_clinton thank you very much i want to say to joe and beverly and tim they have stated more eloquently the case than i ever could for the work we are here to begin today i thank them for their presence here and for their fine presentations i want to acknowledge too the presence in the audience of so many people who have been involved in community development financing for a long time i thank all of you for coming from all over america we have a remarkable group of people here from the united states government from the executive branch today secretary bentsen and under secretary newman from the treasury department secretary espy and under secretary bob nash from the agriculture department under secretary terry duvernay and assistant secretary cuomo from hud the sba administrator erskine bowles the comptroller of the currency gene ludwig the federal reserve board governor george lindsay the acting director of the office of thrift supervision jonathan fiechter the fdic acting chair andrew hove and many many others showing that this administration has worked together to try to come up with this proposal i d also like to say that we have some specific members of congress who are here today whom i will acknowledge but just for the rest of you who have been working in this field for a long time and who have felt left out i m going to do something i don t think i ve ever done before i m going to ask every member of congress who is here to stand so you can see what support you have in the united states congress would you all please stand by my quick count there are 41 or 42 members of the congress here a very significant representation of people who have asked me actually to they felt so strongly about coming here to delay the start of our ceremony this morning for a few moments so that they could complete their votes and still come up here i m particularly pleased that the house and senate banking committee chairs have agreed to sponsor this legislation and shepherd its package through congress representative henry gonzalez and senator don riegle have both long been champions of reinvesting in our communities the senate banking committee will hold its hearing on this bill this afternoon at 2 00 p m the subcommittee chairs of the house congressman neal kanjorski kennedy frank and flake have all joined to make sure this bill will receive consideration by the full house banking committee within the next few weeks there are four members of the house i would like to pay some special recognition to first representative joe kennedy of massachusetts who has worked to make the community reinvestment act a reality for all americans in all communities and i thank you for that representative floyd flake of new york who has worked to provide innovative ways to spur reinvestment by major financial institutions and communities and has actually tried to do something with his ideas in the private sector as well as with his work in congress i thank him very much for his efforts next representative maxine waters of california who had been the conscience that has kept community development banking and strengthening the cra on the nation s legislative agenda thank you very much maxine and finally congressman bobby rush of illinois who has forged a coalition of more than 70 co sponsors for a community development financing institution s bill that shares common ground with my initiative i look forward to working with him in congress and across the country to champion reinvesting in all of our communities and i thank him for mobilizing 70 members of the house of representatives in this cause thank you bobby i d also like to pay some recognition to a person here who has for many years more than i can remember pointed out to the american people that most poor folks in this country and most people who have been left outside of the mainstream want a hand up not a hand out reverend jesse jackson thank you for being here ladies and gentlemen as you know i have just returned from the summit of the world s seven industrial nations in tokyo what i saw there indicated to me that from harlem to the south side of chicago to south central los angeles there is a feeling shared from tokyo to toronto people want more control over their lives their families their communities and their countries the movement for political reform is running in high gear in all these countries because there is such a demand for economic opportunity so that people can live up to their god given abilities this administration has tried to pursue this demand in two ways first of all to have a good overall economic policy a policy for bringing the deficit down a policy for increasing investment in our country a policy for broadening the rules of trade in ways that help americans who are working for a living but secondly we have to recognize that there are certain specific problems that are unique to our country unique to our states unique to our communities and they require a specific response and so we have developed a technology policy a policy for defense conversion for communities and people who have been hurt by cutbacks in defense spending we have sent to the congress a proposal to create empowerment zones which will complement this effort to encourage people to invest in distressed rural and urban communities in this nation and today we take up the community financing issue a few days ago when i was in japan working to build a new global economy my hand was strengthened because of the progress that has been made in congress in dealing with these larger issues reducing the deficit and investing more in education and training it enabled me to ask our friendly competitors to lower their trade barriers so that we can increase american jobs and american exports to work with us to increase economic growth keep interest rates down and make common cause to battle high unemployment which is a problem in every advanced nation in the world today today i will report to a bipartisan leadership meeting of the congress on the achievements of this summit but i will also have to tell them that the challenge remains we can only enjoy the fruits of the opportunities created at the tokyo meeting if we follow through on the commitment to pass the economic plan now before the congress and if we take the initiatives like the one we re here to celebrate today to those who would do nothing or let us slide back into the status quo i would say that we must go forward we must adopt the largest deficit reduction plan in our history look how low the long term interest rates are now because of the efforts that are being made we must adopt these strategies to bring jobs to america we must maintain our nation s leadership in the global economy on the issue of whether there must be economic change in a nation desperate for jobs and growth there can be no doubt of the answer today i am sending to congress an innovative proposal that will bring new life and new opportunity and new directions to communities all over america that lack capital and credit the kinds of basic banking services that these three fine people needed so badly and had to look so long for this proposal creates a fund to provide grants to new and existing community based lenders the fund will provide about 400 million over five years and will employ a number of measures to increase significantly the total money provided to communities through these community institutions under this plan every dollar the fund provides to a community development bank must be matched at least by another dollar of private capital other community development financial institutions will also be required to match assistance as well the treasury department predicts that this matching requirement and the leverage provided by the institutions will produce at least 2 billion in additional investment if you look at the size of the average loan in these kinds of institutions leading to the number of jobs created that are represented by the three fine people on this platform today the potential for creating new jobs in america through this initiative is absolutely enormous and they can be created in places where people have long given up on the free enterprise system simply by making the free enterprise system work for a change for those people these institutions come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes they are banks with a special commitment to community development they are community development banks set up for that purpose only they are credit unions they are micro enterprise loan funds i can tell you this most of the enterprises that we are talking about helping that were in existence in the 1980s that made loans to poor people who lived in their community or to struggling small business people had a lot lower failure rate than some of the high flown financial schemes that were subsidized by other government policies in the last decade because of the commitment and understanding of people in all different kinds of financial institutions every type of community development financial institution will be eligible for assistance under our program the existing network of community lenders have demonstrated that when there is a constant commitment to this kind of development you can produce growth and jobs many of you with us today from chicago s shorebank to north carolina s self help credit union to arkansas elkhorn bank which mack mclarty and the first lady served on the board of and which i helped to raise funds for when i was in a previous position understand how economic growth is built from the grass roots it works in urban areas it works in rural areas we were wondering when we set up this bank in arkansas whether small towns and rural areas really could benefit from the kind of strategy that had worked so brilliantly for the south shorebank in chicago and the answer turned out to be a resounding yes the government s role in this is crucial but limited the real solutions must come from the community from the people who live there who know their neighbors it is our job to empower those communities with the tools they need to generate growth and jobs and then let the hard work and the determination of the people pay off at the same time i recognize that without the involvement and investment of major banks low and moderate income communities will still be deprived of a full range of economic opportunity the community reinvestment act of 1977 requires that banks and thrifts meet the credit needs of the entire community in which they do business and while the cra has played an important role in making credit available to underserved urban and rural communities i think we would all admit that it hasn t lived up to its potential the current enforcement system relies too much on public relations documentation and not enough on real lending performance this has been a pain for everybody involved too much paperwork for the banks and not enough investment for the communities that s why i am sending a memorandum to the four federal banking regulators that requires them to implement a series of reforms around cra designed to increase investment in communities that need it while simultaneously streamlining and clarifying the regulatory process the policy will be good for banks good for communities good for borrowers and it represents real change these actions today fulfill a commitment i made during the last campaign when i promised that we would work hard to unlock the energy and the entrepreneurship that lies latent in the hearts and souls of men and women in this country in every community this proposal will enable them to take a small loan and start a business to turn their dreams into storefronts and then expand those storefronts into chains creating jobs for their neighbors and bringing opportunities to their neighborhoods it will make them a part of the movement for democratic capitalism and growth that is reshaping the entire world but has left too many americans behind now i d like to introduce three people who are going to help us carry out these commitments hugh mccoll the ceo nationsbank irving henderson the chair of the national community reinvestment corporation coalition and ron grzywinski the chairman of shore bank in chicago i d like to conclude this morning s ceremony just by saying again as i did when i opened that i know that every one of you who s worked in this field for any length of time has a story or personal stories that you could tell and i just want you to know that i am grateful for the work that you have done and the role that each of you have played in bringing this bill to its present point i got on this issue as governor when i saw so many needs that were unmet and when the now under secretary of agriculture for community development bob nash and i worked hard to use our existing authorities to help people who couldn t have access to credit i learned about the south shore development bank and through them i met a remarkable man named mohammed yunis who told me how he through the grameen bank had made market rate interest loans to poor village women in bangladesh and over 95 percent of them had actually paid the loans back and then this became part of our reinventing government initiative of the democratic leadership council and then an idea that the vice president championed in his efforts to examine what we re doing here a lot of you have helped me in my understanding of this floyd flake showed me the businesses around his church hugh mccoll stayed up half the night one night talking with me about the community reinvestment act and how we could make it work my friend charles stith there from boston has spent years on this to all of you who have played any role on this i thank you very much and i ask you now to work with this wonderful representation from congress to make sure we get the job done and do it in a hurry thank you we re adjourned dem wjclinton15 8 00 bill_clinton thank you are you ready to win this election for al gore and joe lieberman let me begin by thanking mayor cappuccilli and his whole family for meeting me and hillary and al and tipper i thank you for coming out here today when we were riding in here hillary and chelsea and i came in in a separate car from al and tipper but we were looking at all the fields along the way and then we looked at this really beautiful community that you live in and it reminded us so much of all the places we visited on our bus tour in 1992 when we all got on the bus together and rode across america the people who live here are the kind of people we ran to change the future for the kind of people that work in our auto plants and i thank steve yogich and the uaw for being here the kind of people represented in congress by john dingell who is recovering from surgery but his wife debbie is here and marcy kaptur over in ohio and miraculously for us the people of michigan and the people of ohio twice gave us a chance to serve al gore and i have worked for nearly eight years now to put you first never to forget about you to get the economy going again and to get our society moving in the right direction to make us a more united nation a stronger a better nation i got to talk about that a little last night and say i imagine there were some people out there in the country that didn t like it because when they met a couple of weeks before they didn t follow that old joe friday maxim i just gave you the facts last night and one of the facts that i want to reiterate is that every good thing that has happened that came out of our administration in the last eight years al gore was at the heart of it he has been a leader for the new economy a leader for welfare reform a leader for education a leader for lowering the crime rates the mayor talked about the brownfield program that s a program that al gore took the lead in initiating that helped this community you ve got a community college here we have 10 million americans taking advantage of the hope scholarship tax credit which makes community college virtually free in every state in the country you got it right he got it right there exhibit a when we took office in january of 1993 the unemployment in this community was 8 8 percent today it is 2 2 percent one quarter of what it was before now i want to make just a couple of points and bring on the vice president number one this wasn t a matter of chance it was a matter of choice not just us nothing we did in washington would have amounted to anything if you weren t doing your part out here the working people the business people the local leaders of all kinds i know that but our job was to create the conditions and give you the tools to live your own dreams and make your own future and i think the record is clear this country is better off than it was eight years ago here s the second thing and i hope you ll take my word for this because i spent most of my adult life studying economics and the development of our country the things that have happened in the last eight years the good things are nothing compared to the good things that can happen in the next eight years nothing but we ve got to make the right choice and you all of you who came out here today what you owe yourselves and your family and your future is to make sure that every single citizen you know in this country all your friends and neighbors here understand exactly what the choice is what are the differences in the leaders and the parties on the economy on crime on welfare on civil rights on choice on all the issues that will shape our future i can tell you that as we move into the future the nominee of the democratic party my partner and friend for the last eight years understands where we are where we re going and how it will affect ordinary citizens more than any other public figure in this country over the last 20 years he is the right person to be the first president of the 21st century al gore dem wjclinton15 8 94 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you senator moynihan chairman gibbons secretary shalala to all the distinguished members of congress who are here especially senators mitchell and dole and the speaker and to one who is not here andy jacobs who worked so hard on this endeavor let me thank you all let me especially thank senator moynihan who identified the need to reestablish the social security administration as an independent agency 11 years ago i was sitting here thinking when i saw him up here so full of pride that this day had finally come to pass of two things first of all about 8 months ago senator moynihan said to me we have a lot of important business to do this year and we ll have to fight like crazy on all of it but if you will just come out and say you re for an independent social security agency i think we can do this unanimously and that would be a very good thing for congress to do and then i was wondering whether if we waited 11 years we could be unanimous about every issue that comes before us i want to thank senator moynihan for his persistence and guidance and all the others who have worked so hard on this legislation when franklin roosevelt made a speech to the new york legislature in 1931 he said this the success or failure of any government must be measured by the well being of its citizens that was the goal that moved him 59 years ago yesterday on that day in a ceremony in the cabinet room just behind us he signed the social security act into law and that is what guides us today with an independent social security administration we are reinventing our government to streamline our operations so that we can serve the american people better we are strengthening those things which social security ought to do and taking precautions to make sure it does not do things which it ought not to do it is proving that government can still work to improve people s lives and now social security we know will work even better for millions of americans that signature 59 years ago transformed old age from a time of fear and want to a period of rest and reward it empowered many american families as well freeing them to put their children through college to enrich their own lives knowing that their parents would not grow old in poverty nine years ago thanks to that effort for the first time in the history of the united states the elderly had a lower poverty rate than the rest of the population in fighting for social security and for so much else president roosevelt knew that the american people always would have a personal stake in overcoming the status quo when the need was great enough that is something we should all remember as we go into the next few weeks as we delay the august recess as we struggle to come to grips with the challenges of this age the challenge of crime the challenge of health care these kinds of changes are difficult but they always have been in 1935 even social security as we know it nearly died in a congressional committee as senators considered stripping away the old age pension congress almost left town with this and other critical work unfinished but they found the grit to work on through the summer of 1935 when they didn t have as much air conditioning as we have today and they accomplished so much in that period now known as the second hundred days president roosevelt said then that that session of congress would be regarded as historic for all time what we do here today maintains that historic commitment if we keep focus on the work we are sent here to do what we do here today can be but the precursor of things that we also can do to benefit the american people that will be historic for all time now i d like to ask the folks here to join me as i sign this bill in the beginning i will for a letter or two at least use the pen that president roosevelt used 59 years ago yesterday thank you very much dem wjclinton15 9 93 bill_clinton thank you i m glad you didn t let a little rain and a change of venue dampen your spirits you may all still be excited after the saints game last week but i m glad to be here i want to thank mr brinson and senator breaux and congressman jefferson for what they have said i m glad to be here again with your governor your lieutenant governor your state treasurer and others and mayor barthelemy and i want to thank the members of congress who came here from other states took time out of their busy schedules in washington just to travel down to express their support on a bipartisan basis and from states all across this country for the north american free trade agreement it really is i think not only a job winner for the united states but the opportunity for us to get off the defensive in our economic policies and go on offense and try to build a world in which there are more opportunities for americans not only for good jobs but for growing incomes for 20 years we have been buffeted by the fortunes of global competition and mechanization and all the things that you know about and more and more working people have been pressured in their daily lives finding it harder and harder to make ends meet it is obvious that what we have been doing has not worked very well we know what makes more jobs in a wealthy country expanding trade makes more jobs educating your people better makes more jobs providing more investment makes more jobs these are the things that i am committed to there have been a lot of things said about the north american free trade agreement we came down here to new orleans today to listen to people who know how the trade with mexico works and who will be affected by it talk about it but i want to just say one or two general things to all of you today three decades ago this port was dedicated by president kennedy a person who had a vision of america that knew no limits who believed that we ought to face our challenges that we ought to look outward to the world that we shouldn t hunker down that we could compete and win with any people anywhere on earth it is time that we reestablish that belief that conviction that commitment today we come to new orleans because i believe you face the rest of the world with confidence we heard senator breaux and congressman jefferson talk about the port of new orleans we heard mr brinson say it s the most important thing in strategic planning for the future of this port to pass this new trade agreement with mexico well yesterday i signed a couple of side agreements that strengthen that agreements that do the following things number one that commit the government of mexico as well as the government of the united states to invest more money in environmental cleanup now that means two things number one more opportunities for american companies who do that kind of work number two it means that there will be less difference in the cost of production on either side of the border because of different environmental regulations the second agreement commits the mexican government to enforce it s own labor laws and you should know what that really means it means that for the first time in history a government has committed itself to raise the minimum wage as its economy grows thereby raising the wage structure throughout the country because the president of mexico has made a personal commitment to me to the united states and to this process that mexico from now on will raise its minimum wage every time its economy grows on a regular basis which means that more rapidly than before and much more rapidly than if we don t pass this trade agreement the wage gap between their workers and ours will close and there will be less incentive to move our plants to mexico but more ability by the mexicans to buy american products that we ship from places like the port of new orleans why do i believe this will work well for a couple of reasons first of all because in the last few years mexico has begun to lower its tariffs and to open their markets to more american products you know that because you ve been shipping more out of here in 1986 these boxes basically represent where we are but in 1986 our exports to mexico were a little over 12 billion represented by this first crate here at that time we had about a 5 7 billion trade deficit with mexico because they ve lower tariffs already we ve got a 5 6 billion trade surplus with them now and we estimate that by 1995 just a couple of years after the pact goes into effect we ll have about 60 billion in trade with mexico represented by this big crate you don t have to be einstein to figure out if you re an american it s better to have four crates than one that s what this is all about let me just say a couple of other things it s not just mexico especially for the port of new orleans if we can make this trade pact work and we will because keep in mind i want to make one other point to all those people that say this is a job loser that tariffs in mexico in spite of our trade surplus are still four times as high as the tariffs in america against mexican products the average mexican spends 450 a year buying american products more than anybody in the world except the canadians more than the japanese more than the germans more than a lot of countries where the people are much wealthier this will work because their tariffs are still higher than ours if you lower the tariffs down to where they re as low as ours and then we eventually eliminate them again it just stands to reason that we re going to have more sales and more products and more opportunities what i want to say finally is that this is the beginning of this process because i can tell you that i have heard from the leaders of countries all over latin america they are looking at the congress they are looking about whether we re going to adopt this trade agreement and if we do then chile then venezuela then argentina then many other countries that are becoming more democratic and more free market freeenterprise oriented are going to want to have more trade with the united states and have more of our products and that means still more more trade going out of the port of new orleans because there are hundreds of millions of people in latin america committed to democracy now committed to free markets and hungering for the benefits of a free economy we can help them to get it and put the american people to work as well and we know that trade related jobs pay on the average higher wages than jobs not related to trade so i ask all of you to support this now let me just say that thanks there was a time when all the working people in america were for more trade when people realized that if you didn t expand trade you couldn t keep expanding jobs i want to say as a word of respect and partial regret there is as we re here there s a funeral going on in new orleans for a labor leader named lindsey williams who helped to build this port and lindy boggs your former congresswoman wrote me a note about because i think she is there today but she was reminding me in this note about how new orleans had always been a place that pushed for more trade and a place where labor and management and republicans and democrats african americans and whites and hispanics and everybody got together because they looked outward to the world i m telling you folks we cannot afford to look inward we cannot repeal the force that is driving the world economy together we can run away from it and get beat b y it or we can embrace it do what we have to do and win with it to create more jobs more incomes and more opportunity that s what i think we want to do and as i sit down i want to thank these men and women who are behind us they work for and run companies that benefit from trade with mexico today and who would flourish even more if we pass nafta they ship their products through this port every day and i thank them for coming here they re not professional politicians or seasoned speakers but they re the people that really count they re the people that really count they re the people who represent the future of this economy and all the people who are arguing around this thing in politics a lot of them won t be affected one way or the other you need to assess who is going to be affected are they going to win or lose the answer is this is a good deal it s a winner we ought to take it and these folks are about to tell us why thank you very much dem wjclinton15 9 96 bill_clinton thank you very much it s good to be back how many of you were here four years ago how many of you weren t here four years ago four years from now we re going to have to rent the next farm to have this let s keep going let me say to all of you how very happy i am to be here i m sorry i wasn t here from the beginning i m sorry i missed tom arnold and my buddy jerry jeff walker maybe they ll play a little on the way out while i m shaking hands but i m glad they came here and thank them both for being here i want to thank those who are here to support us attorney general tom miller agriculture secretary dale cochran mike peterson gave a heck of a speech up here a few minutes ago he ll be a good candidate someday i want to that mayor kelly of indianola mayor davis of des moines i want to that tom and ruth and ginny and amy for serving the state of iowa i want you to know that ruth harkin has played a major role in the efforts that our administration have made to sell more american products around the world and get more american investment and have fair as well as free trade and i thank her you should all be very proud of her for the work she did as head of the overseas private investment corporation i thank senator harkin for what he said but more importantly for what he has done and been to the people of iowa to the people of the united states and to the president he has been nothing short of magnificent in his service to our country and to this state in the last four years since i ve been in washington i can t tell you all the times that i have turned to tom harkin in the last four years when things were on the line for america when we had to pass an economic plan to get the deficit down to get the interest rates down to get the economy going again and iowa is a strong two party state we re going to try to change that a little this time and our friends in the other party were saying oh the president s economic plan is just awful it will increase the deficit it will bankrupt the economy it will hurt people every single one of them to a person lined up and said no it s unfortunate for them because four years later we go 10 5 million new jobs lower interest rates record numbers of small businesses american exports at an all time high businesses owned by women and minorities at an all time high they all said no but tom harkin said yes we got a seven and a half year low in our unemployment rate thank you tom harkin for making the difference and for fighting for us then there was the family and medical leave law they all said their nominee is still saying it was a terrible mistake that law bad for business glad he led the fight against it we just had a bipartisan survey about the family and medical leave law and the 12 million american families that got to take a little time off from work when a baby was born or a parent was sick without losing their jobs they said it didn t hurt and i say one of the biggest challenges you have today every one of you is to create a country in which families can succeed at home and at work it s good for the economy to help people be good parents good children good family members thank goodness we had tom harkin to fight the good fight we said the crime rate was too high in america and we needed to do something to bring it down we ought to put 100 000 police on the street they didn t like that idea very much and i might add in the last two years for reasons that totally escape me they ve tried to stop us from continuing to finish the job but for the first time in who knows how long the crime rate has gone down in america for four years and if you leave tom harkin on the job and give us a little help we ll take it down for four more years so the american people can feel safe on their street i thank you for what you said tom about the flood when i was a governor in a state that had a lot of natural disasters i learned that the federal response was too often disorganized and inadequate driven by appointees who got the job because of their politics instead of their knowledge about the issue so i put a person in charge of our emergency management who had done it for me at home and before that had been a county judge dealing with disasters and didn t care anything about the politics of it he just wanted the american people in their time of need to be well served taken care of and thought somebody in washington ought to understand what it takes to get the job done that s why we were able to serve iowa and the rest of the middle west well in that 500 year flood and i thank you for what you said but when i ran for president i wanted to make good things happen and when i look at the farm prices when i look at farm assets when i look at the direction of the economy here i d say we re a lot better off than we were four years ago and we ought to keep going in the same direction let me say to you to echo what senator harkin said this is a huge election this is the last election of the 20th century to elect the first president of the 21st century i am if you keep that same attitude for the next 51 days but i want all of you to think about this you have to understand what is at stake that s why this senate race is so important that s why these five fine people behind me who are running as our candidates for the house are so important if you look at the challenges facing our country in spite of everything we clearly had the ability to balance the budget in the last two years and they said we re going to shut the government down if you don t do it our way we re going to give you a tax cut mr president and people in your income group whether you want it or not and we re going to cut medicare we re going to walk away from the guarantee medicaid has given for 30 years to middle class families whose parents were in nursing homes and had children with disabilities and if you don t like it we re going to increase the cost of student loans we re going to cut head start we re going to cut the safe and drug free schools program we re going to wreck 25 years of bipartisan commitment to preserving our environment we re going to raise taxes on the 9 million americans with the lowest incomes with children in their house that s our balanced budget plan if you don t like it we re going to shut the government down and i said the democratic party does not love the government it loves the people the government should serve them shut her down shut her down and yes after you and the people of this country all over the country got their attention with repeated public opinion polls and strong disapproval of what was going on they said oh well maybe we ll allow some good things to happen so we got the minimum wage increase and we got the kennedy kassebaum bill and we made it easier for small business people to take out retirement plans and we did a lot of good things but don t forget what is really hanging in the balance don t forget what the budget battle said i m telling you folks there is a new democratic party we have proved that we are the party of responsibility when handling people s money we did lower the deficit four years in a row for the first time since before the civil war i m proud of that but we did it in a way that kept faith with the children of america and the parents of america and the disabled of america and the people who deserve to go forward with us together we need more help in that way we proved that we would bring the crime rate down they tried to convince every hunter in my state that they were going to lose their guns if we banned assault weapons and passed the brady bill and by the votes in 94 they did a good job of their efforts they ve got a real problem now we ve had two hunting seasons there hasn t been a hunter in america lose their rifle it s inconvenient for their rhetoric but you know what 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers did lose the right to get a gun to keep brutalizing the american people we were right and they were wrong they talked a lot about welfare finally they passed a bill i could sign but while they were talking we were working on it there are nearly two million fewer people on welfare today than there were when i was here four years ago two million people moving into jobs working supporting their families so i say to you we need people who believe in work and family who believe in opportunity and responsibility who believe in community and the congress and therefore i want you to send tom harkin back to the senate with the largest margin he has ever received and send these folks to the house of representatives to help us do the job there are at times like this when countries have to make big decisions that will affect the lives of people far into that future and when things are changing greatly and believe me things are changing greatly these students in the crowd in 10 years they will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet some of them will be doing jobs that have not even been imagined yet we have to make the right decisions and there are some big decisions being made and i have to say with all respect i agreed with one thing my opponent said in his speech in san diego and what i said this really is an election where you have to choose whether you want a leader who says you re on your own or one that says my wife is right it does take a village to raise a child and build a community and build a country you have to choose you have to choose you have to choose whether you believe as senator harkin said in those politicians who are always looking for what they call wedge issues oh this is a great wedge issue we can divide the american people get them all torn up and upset and we can get in power or whether you believe like me that we ve had enough of that who s to blame business and it works better and we ve proved it works better if you say forget about who s to blame what are we going to do to make a greater country for all the american people and pull the american people together we have to choose most important of all we have to choose whether you believe this election is about trying to build a bridge to the past which nobody has ever done or ever will succeed in doing or whether you re willing to join with me to build a bridge to the future we can all walk into the 21st century across proudly together i want to build a bridge to the 21st century with a strong and growing economy that means balance the budget all right to keep these interest rates coming down but it means do it in a way that continues to invest in education and the environment in medical research and technology and protects our obligations to those who need our help through medicare and medicaid will you help me build that bridge to america s future i want to build a bridge to the future that will help our economy to go through the right kind of tax cut it is in this administration that we have increased by 250 percent the tax cuts available to small businesses who invest more in their business to grow the business to hire more people to become more productive but it has to be the right kind i want a tax cut that s targeted to people who will use it for education for raising their children for buying that first home for dealing with medical emergencies an ira that you can withdraw from without any tax penalty for education or medical cost or buying a first home a 500 a child tax credit an education credit things that we can do that will grow this country but i ll tell you something folks mine are paid for and we ve got to pay for them we don t want to go back to that old time when we promised you a tax cut on the one hand and wrecked the economy on the other now last year the leaders of the other party said something that i agreed with and i want to tell you what they said last year before the election started they said if we get off of this balanced budget plan if we don t have a plan to keep bringing this deficit down interest rates will be two percent higher now i want every farmer in this crowd every business person in this crowd every student in this crowd every family in this crowd to think what that means think what it would mean to have two more percent on your credit card payment your car payment your home payment your farm loan or your business loan i don t think we want that let s have a tax cut we can afford let s help the folks that need it that are building this country let s create opportunity and strengthen families with our tax cut but let s keep on the work of balancing the budget until we get the job done and we keep the interest rates down and we keep the economy going and i want to build a bridge to the 21st century where america continues to sell its products around the world i m proud of the fact that our exports and yes our agricultural exports are at an all time high if you ll give us four more years we ll add pork to those exports we ll be selling them all over the world and iowa will be better will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century but let s face it you and i know the most important thing we could do to build the right kind of bridge to the 21st century is to give every single child in america the opportunity to have a world class education and i just want to mention iowa for years and years and years had led the way in proving that a good education builds good citizens strong families strong communities successful careers and a greater country iowa has led the way every child in america deserves the education that the people of iowa have given their children for decades and i m going to do my best to give it to them if you ll give us four more years and i just want to mention two things that i think are important parts of building that bridge we have the opportunity right now because of technology because of the internet because of the worldwide web because of all these things that all these young folks know a lot more about than i do we have a chance to do something that this country has never done if we will do what al gore and i have been calling for and connect every school and every library every classroom to the information superhighway by the year 2000 for the first time in the history of america children in the most isolated rural districts children in the poorest urban districts will have access to the same learning at the same quality at the same time in the same way that the richest classes in america have will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century and i want to build a bridge to the 21st century that says to every person in america of any age who needs to do it we will make a college education available to you our plan is pretty simple first of all we say do no harm continue to resist the efforts of the other party to make it harder to get student loans and to raise the cost of the student loans we want to keep the direct loan program i pledged to you four years ago when i came here if you voted for me i would pass a student loan program that would reduce the cost of student loans and let people pay it back as a percentage of their income so no matter how much they had to borrow they would always be able to afford to go to college we kept that commitment and i want to keep it going now what i want to do is two simple things first of all let s make a commitment that in the next four years we ll make at least a two year community college education as universal in america as a high school diploma is today and here s how to do it we can do that simply by giving the american people a 1 500 tax credit so they can reduce the cost of tuition at the typical community college dollar for dollar from their tax bill for two years if we do that we can say and we can afford that it requires no bureaucracy no nothing almost every american is within driving distance of a good two year education we can say we re going to make this as universal in four years as a high school education has been for the last 20 will you help me do that and finally we ought to say we believe that people should be able to deduct the cost of tuition up to 10 000 a year for any education after high school four years postgraduate medical school you name it whatever it takes let s pay and let people go to college and get the education they need will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century will you do that for your children and your grandchildren that is the kind of opportunity agenda that will get us into the next century able to say with a clear conscience and absolute certainty the american dream is alive and well for everyone who s willing to work for it the second thing i want to say about that is we ve got to have more responsibility we ve got to continue to work to drive the crime rate down as i said we passed the welfare reform bill i want to tell you about it because i want all of you to support what we have to do the new bill says we ll still give poor families medical care nutrition if they go to work guaranteed child care because they need that but the check is now going to go to the states and the local communities and they have to use that check to create jobs for able bodied people now here s what it s going to take we can use that money i was in kansas city last week and they re using that money they say will you hire somebody on welfare and create a new job if you will we ll give you the check as a wage supplement we ll guarantee their health care but you cannot tell people folks with little kids they have got to work unless there is work for them to do will you help me create jobs so that we can prove that welfare reform is a second chance not a way of life a way to dignity and work and integrity that is important if we re going to build a bridge to the 21st century perhaps the deepest and longest and most intense fights of the last two years have been over the environment i grew up in a farming state like iowa i governed one i know that we can find ways to preserve the environment and grow the economy whether it s a farm economy or an industrial economy or a small business economy but that s exactly what we ve got to do i signed a bill the other day the pesticide protection act which will improve the quality of our food supported by every farm group in america because it also gives more reasonable regulations to farmers across a broader range of activities we can do this right we have worked hard we ve worked hard with the auto industry to produce a clean car that will get triple the mileage of the present car we re making progress but we also worked with them to bring back the auto industry so that today the united states auto industry is number one in sales around the world for the first time in nearly 20 years we can do both things only they believe only they believe you have to hurt the environment to grow the economy that is not true and let me just give you one example we closed more toxic waste sites in the last three years than they did in 12 but it s not enough there are still 10 million think of this look at these kids here there are still 10 million american children living within four miles of a toxic waste dump so if you give us four more years we ll close 500 more the two thirds worst and our kids will be growing up next to parks not poison will you help us build that kind of bridge to the 21st century well that s it we re in better shape than we were four years ago 10 5 million more jobs 12 million people using family leave 15 million families with a tax cut that need it the most every small business in the country eligible for one if they invest more in their business 40 million more americans with their pensions protected 50 million more americans breathing cleaner air 10 million americans on october 1st will get an increase in the minimum wage and that s a good good thing this country is moving in the right direction but there is so much more to do before we can say we have preserved the american dream for everybody who is willing to work for it we have maintained the leadership of our country for peace and freedom and prosperity and we are doing it by building the american community you know one of the biggest problems in this old world today you look at bosnia we had these elections in bosnia yesterday thank goodness we ve had nine months of peace and we had these elections and they did pretty well considering what they ve been through the last four years and i thank all of you who supported what i tried to do there but you think about the world that we re living in look at bosnia look at northern ireland look at the middle east look at what south africa went through look at what happened in burundi for goodness sakes over tribal differences why all over the world there are people who make a living getting political power getting military power staying in power by inflaming the passions of people by trying to get them to look down on their neighbors you really matter because you re not them you re not them that s what they say in the middle east you re not them that s what they said in bosnia they were slaughtering each other s children because they weren t croatian or serbian or muslim and they were biologically completely indistinguishable it was an accident of history that got them into different so called ethnic or religious groups and you look around this crowd today i see asian americans i see african americans i see nordic americans i see irish americans i see german americans i see americans of central european descent i see indian americans and pakistani americans and native americans and you name it you know why because we are trying to beat that curse that is bedeviling the rest of the world and threatens the 21st century and so when you see that s the last thing i want to leave you with i don t want to build a bridge that you only get to walk across because you re better than somebody else because of an accident of birth i want to build a bridge that anybody can walk across if they say i believe in the constitution the declaration of independence the bill of rights i believe in the fundamental dignity of all people and if you re willing to show up for work tomorrow play by the rules and love this country the way i do i ll hold your hand and we ll build a bridge we can walk across together and if you ll do that we ll have a great victory in november thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 1 01a bill_clinton mayor coles thank you very much thank you ladies and gentlemen i want to thank secretary cuomo and mickey ibarra for the wonderful job they have done and i thank secretary herman and director aida alvarez secretary riley thank you for being here we have the acting director of our office of national drug control policy ed jurith zina pierre and others here who have worked with you i thank lynn cutler i see out there and i thank ellen lovell the head of the first lady s millennial effort who brought a lot of projects to a lot of communities across this country and all the others who have worked with you i also want to say a special word of thanks to mayor coles we always hear a lot of talk in washington about bipartisanship but if we look to america s mayors we actually see it maybe because fiorella laguardia was right when he said there was no republican or democratic way to pick up the garbage you either pick it up or you don t i thank you mayor coles i also want to thank some of the other officials of the various organizations who are here mayor morial thank you mayor menino thank you executive director tom cochran thank you thank you wellington webb for the award for all the good times we had in denver over the last several years it s been a real joy for me to welcome the u s conference of mayors here and i am very proud of the partnership that we have formed the record has already been established in terms of the rebound of america s cities i would like to make today a different point one that i rarely read in the retrospectives now being written about the last eight years whether they re favorable or critical even the favorable ones sometimes i rarely read it they say oh this was let s take the best case ones you know clinton got rid of the deficit and he s paying the debt down and we ve got a healthy economy again there was one big idea america would be connected to the world through networks of trade in an interdependent world and we would stay ahead of the curve or the critical ones they just read the polls that came out for little things like school uniforms i might say parenthetically that school districts that have them don t think they re little things but they missed the whole point which is that for eight years we have had a partnership that focused on working together and that took policy seriously that is the thing that made all this work was beyond party and beyond the vast gulf between the white house and your house is we actually believed there is a real connection in people s lives between the ideas you adopt how you put them into practice and then how people wind up living and one of the things that really has always bothered me about washington and i must say i live without i mean i leave without having changed that very much is that i think the public enterprise matters i m proud to have been in public life for over 25 years and i believe that people of goodwill who are more interested in the impact of their actions on other people s lives then whether they are increasing their own power and position whether they re republicans or democrats liberals or conservatives those people can work together if what drives you is what is the impact of what you do on other people for the better everybody that s motivated by that without regard to party or philosophy can work together but to get that done we have to first of all expect the fact that ideas matter and that how you turn ideas into policies matter and then you ve got to keep score people are either better off or they re not and the reason i loved working with the mayors apart from the fact that i thought it was fun to visit your communities and i always liked getting out there where i got to see so called real people is that i knew you felt that i knew you were out there thinking ideas matter i knew you were out there keeping score on yourselves and there s hardly a mayor here who s community i haven t visited at one time or another and i just want to tell you how profoundly grateful i am for what you do because i think if we hadn t had the partnership we had it is quite doubtful that we would have the 22 5 million more jobs 35 million people now taking advantage of the family leave law interestingly enough it didn t hurt the economy like the people who were against it said it would the other thing i m quite proud of is that the poverty rate has gone down to a 20 year low in the last three years the lowest 20 percent of working people have had the highest percentage increase in their income i figured if we could get the economy going again that we d create more millionaires it turned out the economy created a lot more billionaires too but the real test it seems to me is whether all the people that are working get a fair reward for their efforts and while i think a lot more needs to be done in that regard it is good to see for the first time in 30 years the rising tide lifting all boats again i think it s worth pointing out here that the cities did lead the way incomes have risen faster in the cities than in the suburbs nationally poverty is down 20 percent since 1993 it s down 23 percent in america s cities so all of you can be very proud of what you have done and i want to thank you for what you have done i want to thank you for the work you did in crime and urge you to try to maintain that partnership you know we wrote a crime bill in 1994 based on what mayors police chiefs police on the street and prosecutors at the local level told us would work they said do this this will work and we put 100 000 police on the street did those other things passed the brady law and 611 000 felons fugitives and stalkers have not been able to get handguns and the crime rate is at a 25 year low in many urban areas it s even lower than that and now we re in the process of putting the second group of 50 000 more police on the street concentrated in the areas of highest crime and greatest difficulty so it worked you proved it worked you worked with the vice president to make sure the empowerment zone program worked the program to clean up brownfields in urban areas and i thank you for that and i thank you for the input you had on the new markets initiative and how we expanded the empowerment zones more and then had some general tax incentives to invest in urban areas so that you didn t have to compete to get an empowerment zone or an enterprise community to get some of the benefits that i think ought to flow to anybody in the country not fully participating in our nation s economic recovery now so i thank you for all that i thank you for the work you did with us on welfare and housing i thank you for the work you have done with us on health care we had the number of people without health insurance going down in our country for the first time in a dozen years thanks to the children s health insurance program which is flowing money into a lot of urban areas in a way that is absolutely critical to your hospitals and your public health clinics i thank you for the work you have done with us on education for the support you ve given us to try to hire 100 000 more teachers to lower the classes in early grades and for the support you ve given many of you very vocally for funds to repair or modernize schools for the first time since world war ii this congress gave us over a billion dollars to provide emergency repairs in schools all across the country and in many many of our cities the average school building is over 50 years old so this is something that you re going to be able to take advantage of and i urge you to keep going with that and keep pushing it until we have more money because believe me a billion dollars i remember when i was a boy everett dirksen said you can take a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there and pretty soon you re talking about real money and it is real money but it s nowhere nearly enough for what we should do for our schools i thank you and mayor webb mentioned this earlier today for the support you gave us to continue federal funding for the arts one of the things that i was totally mystified by when we had five years ago this sort of war on federal funding for the arts that came out is that it seemed to me that the people that were conducting the war may have had some poster project or another that they thought they could inflame public opinion about but they had no idea how many community art centers out there were running educational programs for kids in their own schools that the cities could not possibly afford to run on their own without this supporting help you helped us put the real face of nea and our funding in the minds of the people doing it and this year of course we actually got an increase so i feel that two of our major initiatives here were validated i felt that what the vice president did and thank you alvin brown on the empowerment zones and the enterprise communities was also ratified when we adopted this big new markets initiative so i thank you for that and thank you for what you ve done now let s just look ahead for a minute here one of the things that i think is most important about our cities and i see it everywhere is the way people who come into vibrant cities basically naturally incline toward an attitude of interdependence and they have a high comfort level much higher comfort level living with people who are different from them and since i believe that s the biggest challenge facing people all over the world today i think that the cities that succeed actually have something profoundly important to show the rest of our nation and the world and i think when you just live close to one another and you have to share a lot of things like whether it s a subway ride or waiting at a bus stop or some other more basic facility you just naturally develop a different attitude toward your fellow human beings and politics becomes a matter of practical cooperation and i think that s what we need to continue to work on so i think the cities are very very important in that regard and on the martin luther king holiday yesterday i released a report to the congress the last report i will issue on race under our one america initiative and i had some very specific recommendations in there that i hope the next administration and the next congress will embrace this congress now they re already meeting and i would urge you to look at that and if you agree i hope you will help to get it done because i really believe we ve got a lot more work to do in education particularly in modernizing these facilities and making sure all these urban schools are hooked up to the internet i think we ve got a lot more work to do in terms of economic empowerment of people and places that are left behind and it offers an enormous opportunity for the cities of our nation to have an alliance with rural areas and native american communities so that you can t be pitted one against another i think there are still a lot of things that have to be done in the way of dealing fairly with immigrant populations coming to our country so that we have the capacity to have laws and enforce them so that we don t wind up rewarding one group of immigrants over another and the people that get the shaft are those that loyally waited in line for their time to be able to come to the united states and do what should be done but on the other hand i don t think we can afford to be treating some groups of immigrants different than others under the law either that s why i ve supported the latino fairness act in the congress last time i m real sorry we didn t pass it it s about the only thing we wanted to pass we didn t so i hope you will help with that i think we ve got a real we need to really give a lot more thought than we have to our imprisonment policies how long people are in jail what are they going to jail for and what do they do when they get out nearly everybody that goes to jail gets out i think it is time that we change as a matter of national policy the idea that you have to have a presidential pardon or a governor s pardon before you can get your vote back i think if you pay a price you go to jail you get out then you re on probation a while then your sentence is discharged why shouldn t you get your vote back you think about it one of the big controversies in the recent election in florida was the review of people to see if they had criminal records which disabled them from voting and then you had a lot of other people agitated because they were apparently maybe not intentionally just accidentally purged from the rolls because they had the same names or similar names as those people who did but if look i ve been doing this for 25 years now since i was attorney general in my home state nearly everybody that goes to prison gets out and when they get out all the rest of us want them to do well go to work pay taxes and not commit another crime right why should we make them go through the incredible gyration of trying to figure out how to get a pardon and all the systems are different and i can tell you i m sitting here i ve got just a few days left and i m trying to go over all these request for clemency and it s almost impossible to deal with them all in a fair way to give due concern to the attention of law enforcement as well as the people who are pleading their case and i just don t see what that s got to do with this it seems to me we changed the law in arkansas 24 years ago if you finish your sentence you go sign up to vote nobody has to get a pardon anymore but i dare say most people in arkansas don t know that because in most states they haven t done it and we haven t done it at the national level these are just things i want you to think about because i think the cities have got to continue to be the focus of building one america and we ve got to try to figure out how we re going to deal with the outstanding issues we ve got let me just mention finally that i am very grateful for the environmental support i ve had from the mayors and the funding that we got last time for the first time in history under this lands legacy initiative to have a permanent source of funding to set aside precious lands and i just want to reemphasize to all of you it is not just to protect the watershed around the grand canyon it may be to protect the little square block park in some neighborhood where that s the only greenspace your kids will ever see so i urge you as i leave office to make full use of this legislation that was passed last year to provide a permanent funding screen to help you set aside greenspaces in your communities and understand it is not just about the big open spaces or the big places or some big project like the everglades it s about what s in your neighborhoods we want this bill this whole bill the whole idea of this was to balance our concern for the big chunks of land and resources that had to be preserved and the need to provide some environmental balance and access to nature to all of our kids and families in urban america as well so i urge you when you work in this coming year to make sure that your cities are a part of that initiative well i ve already said more than i meant to i thank you for the award i thank you for the work we ve done to put this country in good shape the eight years passed in a flash but i enjoyed it very much and i particularly enjoyed working with the mayors all of you who have welcomed me to your communities i thank you for that and i hope that you will do what you can to keep america on a positive track together we proved that good economics was good social policy that you could be fiscally responsible and reduce poverty that you could have an urban policy that actually helped the rest of the country too you did that you should be very proud but i think that the biggest rewards of our efforts of the last eight years are still out there and if ever i can help any of you to do what s right by your people in the future i will certainly do it i thank you and i feel better about my country knowing that you re staying behind to keep up the fight god bless you dem wjclinton16 1 01b bill_clinton good morning and please be seated i would like to first thank chaplain general hicks for his invocation and welcome the distinguished delegation from the pentagon who are here secretary cohen general shelton deputy secretary deleon i thank the members of congress who are here senator dorgan senator durbin representatives king skelton weller and whitfield former representatives lazio and mchale members of the smith and roosevelt families in 1782 george washington created the badge of military merit it was the first medal awarded by our nation s armed forces but soon it fell into oblivion and for decades no new medals were established it was thought that a medal was too much like a european aristocratic title while to fight for one s country in america was simply doing your democratic duty so when the medal of honor was instituted during the civil war it was agreed it would be given only for gallantry at the risk of one s life above and beyond the call of duty that s an extraordinarily high standard one that precious few ever meet the medal of honor is our highest military decoration and we are here today to honor two american heroes who met that mark the first is andrew jackson smith united states army then corporal smith served as a part of the 55th massachusetts voluntary infantry a black regiment that fought in the civil war in late 1864 they were part of a union effort to cut off the savannah charleston railroad link and keep confederate forces from interfering with sherman s march to the sea on november 30th the 55th was one of several units that tried to take a 25 foot rise called honey hill close to boyd s landing in south carolina the confederate troops had an elevated position the advantage of surprise and fortified entrenchments so as the 5 000 union troops advanced through the 300 yards of swamp to get to the road leading up honey hill they found themselves walking into a slaughter the commanding officer colonel alfred hartwell wrote the leading brigade had been driven back when i was ordered in with mine i was hit first in the hand just before making a charge then my horse was killed under me and i was hit afterward several times one of my aides was killed and another was blown from his horse during the furious fight the color bearer was shot and killed and it was corporal andrew jackson smith who would retrieve and save both the state and federal flags now to understand what corporal smith did that day you have to know that in the civil war the color bearer was kept in front of advancing troops and was a known conspicuous target for the other side the enemy fought hard for your colors and units that lost them suffered serious loss of morale having them held high gave a unit the courage to carry on eighty medals of honor have been awarded to soldiers who saved their unit s colors during the civil war local legend says that the sandy soil of honey hill was literally soaked in union blood on november 30 1864 that one could walk on the dead for over a mile without touching the road in one five minute span the 55th alone is said to have lost over 100 men but they never lost their colors because corporal smith carried them through the battle exposing himself as the lead target like so many african americans who served in the civil war the soldiers of the 55th were only reluctantly accepted by their own union army their units were segregated they were paid less than white soldiers they were commanded by white officers who mostly wanted to use them as garrison and labor battalions so their first battle was the fight just to see battle but given the opportunity they fought with intensity that only high purpose and conviction can sustain and they did it knowing they risked almost certain death or enslavement if captured by confederate forces after the war andrew jackson smith lived out the rest of his days near grand rivers kentucky where he was a leader in the community until his death in 1932 he was first nominated for the medal of honor listen to this in 1916 but the army claimed erroneously that there were no official records to prove his story and his extraordinary acts of courage it s taken america 137 years to honor his heroism we are immensely honored to have with us today eight of his family members including andrew bowman here to receive the medal of honor on behalf of his grandfather and mrs caruth smith washington andrew jackson smith s daughter and a very young 93 i want to say to all the members of the smith family sometimes it takes this country a while but we nearly always get it right in the end i am proud that we finally got the facts and that for you and your brave forebear we re finally making things right major please read the citation the second medal of honor i award today is for the bravery of lt colonel theodore roosevelt on july 1 1898 that was the day he led his volunteer troops the rough riders in taking san juan hill which changed the course of the battle and the spanish american war we are greatly honored to be joined today by members of the roosevelt family including tweed roosevelt here to accept the medal of honor on behalf of his great grandfather this is the 37th medal of honor i have presented but the first i presented in the recipient s old office in front of a portrait of him in full battle gear it is a tradition in the roosevelt room that when a democrat is in the white house a portrait of franklin roosevelt hangs above the mantle and when a republican is here teddy roosevelt occupies the hallowed spot i chose to break with the tradition these last eight years because i figured if we could have even half the luck and skill leading america into the 21st century that theodore roosevelt did in leading america into the 20th century our nation would do just fine tr was a larger than life figure who gave our nation a larger than life vision of our place in the world part of that vision was formed on san juan hill his rough riders were made up of all kinds of americans from all walks of life they were considered unpolished and undisciplined but they were true citizen soldiers by taking san juan hill eventually they forced the enemy fleet into the battle of santiago bay where it was routed this led to the spanish surrender and opened the era of america as a global power twenty two people won the medal of honor for actions that day two high ranking military officers who had won the medal of honor in earlier wars and who saw theodore roosevelt s bravery recommended him for the medal too for some reason the war department never acted on the recommendation some say he didn t get it because of the bias the war department had against volunteers others say it was because he ran afoul of the secretary of war who after the war was reluctant to allow the return of a number of american servicemen afflicted with yellow fever roosevelt publicly called for america to bring its heroes home where they had a far better chance to recover the administration had to reverse course and it proved embarrassing to the secretary but while opinions about why he didn t receive the medal are mixed opinion that he should have received it long ago is unanimous so here in this room will stand two great bookends to his wide ranging life the medal of honor america s highest honor for warriors and the nobel peace prize the world s highest honor for peacemakers which he won for his role in settling the russo japanese war of 1905 this is a remarkable day and i can t help but noting that for historical buffs theodore roosevelt s son was the oldest man who landed on the beaches at normandy on d day where he also won the medal of honor tragically he died shortly after that in his uniform doing his duty we are profoundly grateful as americans for this remarkable family and i am honored that i had the chance before i left office to correct what i think is a significant historical error i d also like to thank all these people from new york who are in the congress and other people from other states who did their part to see that it was done and i thank all of you too nearly a hundred years ago standing in this place i suppose i should also say this the reason this was theodore roosevelt s office is that all the offices of the president were in the old white house until teddy roosevelt became president but the country was bustling and growing and so was his family he had five kids and no place to work over there his children were rambunctious like him they even let goats and other animals run through the white house during regular time and so they built the west wing in 1902 believe it or not as a temporary structure but no one ever had the courage to go back to congress again and ask for money to do it right so it s held up pretty well for the last 99 years and that s why this was president theodore roosevelt s office here s what he said way back then we know there are dangers ahead as we know there are evils to fight and overcome but stout of heart we see across the dangers the great future that lies beyond and we rejoice let these words continue to guide as as we go forth into a new century may we continue to live up to the ideals for which both andrew jackson smith and theodore roosevelt risked their lives major please read the citation well thank you all very much for being here today this has been a very moving ceremony again i want to thank the large delegation from the congress and former members who have come and families and folks in the pentagon who worked hard to get this done this is a good day for america i ll just leave you with this one thought i said this yesterday but i may say it every day in the last week of my presidency in the case of a black soldier in the long ago civil war it sometimes takes a long time to get things right but theodore roosevelt reminded us that the only way we do that is by constantly focusing on the future and that s really what we re celebrating here today two people who changed america in more ways than one by their personal courage from very different vantage points pbs has been showing jeffrey ward s magnificent series on jazz i don t know if any of you have seen it but there s a great section on duke ellington who was a native of washington d c and he was asked what his favorite jazz tune was and he said the one coming up there s always a new one coming up that s why we re all still here after more than 200 years thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton16 1 95 bill_clinton thank you it is wonderful to be back in colorado to be back in denver and to be in this great spot which holds such a warm memory for me the last time i came here we had a vast crowd i was asking for the opportunity to serve as your president and i must say when i came before i had sinbad with me as the warmup act and i thought that was responsible for the crowd today i am honored to be here with all these fine people on the platform and with all of you i thank my friend governor romer for what he said and for his leadership and for his long friendship i thank senator campbell and congresswoman schroeder for coming all the way back from washington to be here with me and most important to be here with you today i thank secretary pena for his outstanding service as our transportation secretary working to make this country a safer place and of course i am grateful to the mayor and to mrs webb for their leadership in this stunning event and for allowing me to be a small part of this we come here today to celebrate the life of martin luther king we know that he would have been 66 years old today to me it seems only yesterday when he was 39 and laying down his life for what he believed mayor webb said that the life of martin luther king had special relevance for african americans because of what he meant let me tell you that his life should have special impact for every american for he freed the rest of us too of our hatred our bigotry of the illusion of the illusion which still crops up from time to time that we can somehow lift ourselves up by putting others down that somehow if we can just find someone to look down on we can feel like we re being looked up too martin luther king knew better than that i ask you today my fellow americans to think about why he lived and what he laid his life down for to think about what ought to be driving our lives our individual lives and our lives as citizens you heard earlier dr king s famous i have a dream speech i saw a sign held up earlier when i came in saying that they had a dream for america did i have a dream for america the people holding the sign up there remember what martin luther king said he said my dream is deeply rooted in the american dream what did he mean by that the founders said we hold these truths to be self evident that all are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness today my fellow americans i want to talk to you about our common rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness i ask you to think today of government but to think beyond government to people i ask you to think today of the programs and the work of government but to think beyond that to the lives of people i ask you to remember today that more than anything else martin luther king s life was a life of service even as he marched all across this land and took that vast throng to washington d c and asked the government to act he knew that in the end what was in the heart and the spirit and the mind of the average american citizen was even more important and that is why he always said that all of us had a responsibility to do our part and to serve martin luther king said everybody can be great because everybody can serve he said if all you do is sweep the streets then sweep them just as well as michelangelo painted the sistine chapel be the best streetsweeper that ever lived serve and serve i was asked the other day of all the things that had happened in the last two years was there one achievement i could say i was most proud of and i said i think it was the creation of the national service program and some of them are here today why because these young people are committed to service and if we all are committed to the idea that we are bound up with one another then we can all be great and our country will be great when i came here in 1992 i was worried about the direction of this country i was concerned about the economic problems of america more importantly i was concerned that we seemed to be drifting and divided and that we had no clear role for how we might work together to build a better future to reclaim that dream for which martin luther king gave his life and i told you that i would seek for my part to do three things one to give this country a new economic policy that would bring down the deficit and bring up employment and bring us forward toward the next century two a different way of governing that i would reduce the size of the federal government and increase its creativity its effectiveness its relevance to your life and we have done both those things we have restored a sense of economic direction and opportunity to this country and the government is smaller and yet still more effective no one exemplifies that any better than denver s transportation secretary federico pena but i knew then and i say again now that that would be fine but not enough that we literally had to change our relationship in america as citizens to our government and most importantly to each other it was what i called then and what i say now is a new covenant the idea that you have a right to certain opportunities but in return you must exercise personal responsibility in return for those opportunities to make the most of your own life the life of your family the life of your community and the life of your country that is what this is all about that s why when people talk about something like welfare reform i don t think about punishing poor people i think about ending welfare so poor people can work and be good parents and have a better life and look to a better future that s why when we passed the crime bill i thought it was a good thing just to give money to local communities to hire more police officers and also to have opportunities to give our children something to say yes to as well as something to say no to so that we could show responsibility even as we seized opportunities if you think about it that is the great debate we should be having today what is our responsibility to ourselves and what is our responsibility to each other if you have rights without responsibility pretty soon people lose their rights because they don t behave responsibly if you go around telling people to be responsible all the time and there never is an opportunity coming forward pretty soon they get tired of being responsible what we have to do today if we want hope if we want the dream to live again is to say to each other we will have a new commitment to creating opportunity and to being responsible we will say no to violence and yes to hope we will say no no to the idea that we can get anywhere by being divided against one another and yes to the idea that our diversity is a strength i am telling you we can have all the economic growth in the world but until we face the fact that we are going up or down together and we d better get after the business of working together to make the most of all our potential we will never be what we ought to be as a country now i know we have more to do in washington i know that a lot of people are working harder and still not having a raise i know as the pastor prayed that another million americans in working families lost their health insurance last year i know there are problems there that s why i have said that in this coming session of congress i will devote myself to what i call the middle class bill of rights which could be called the bill of rights and responsibilities because it offers you the right to pursue happiness not the guarantee of happiness i believe with all my heart that if we re going to worry about lowering taxes we ought to lower taxes to help people educate themselves and their children and strengthen their families so we can move forward together and grow together and so i have said let s do four things that the government can do to help people exercise more responsibility and take control of their own lives tax deductions for all the cost of education after high school lower the tax burden for parents with young children so they have more money to spend on raising the kids let people save money in an individual retirement account but let them withdraw it without a penalty for education or health care or taking care of their parents when they re sick when people are unemployed or working hard for low wages and they re willing to get new skills give them the funds they need to get education and training so they can grow into what god meant them to be but i say to you again we can pass that program we can have the crime bill work perfectly but unless in denver colorado you do what the governor challenged you to do we will not be what we ought to be this country cannot go on with children shooting children this country cannot go on with so many kids just giving up on their lives this country cannot go on with more and more little babies being born into unstable situations where the mothers are children too and the future looks bleak we can turn this around but we have got to turn it around and we have got to do it together by lifting each other up you know the reason i said what i did about the service corps and all the young people in the denver national service corps raise their hands i want to tell you why i did that i did that because to me that represents everything i wanted to do these young people are building the new economy because when they work on solving problems in denver they earn some money to go to college and they re changing the way the government works because there is no bureaucracy at all they just have a project here and apply for the opportunity for young people to work in it this is not a government bureaucracy but most important of all most important of all this is creating that new relationship of opportunity and responsibility building up a community by people giving and getting and giving and getting and giving and getting until pretty soon lives are changed and futures are changed today to celebrate martin luther king s birthday there are young people like this all over america they re rebuilding schools in atlanta as we talk today they re rebuilding homes in memphis they re helping people work their way out of the flood in california and they re here today in denver building this country doing what we ought to do i was told a day or so ago that in this new congress there may be a move to abolish the national service corps to save money to pay for tax cuts well let me say i know about cutting government spending we ve taken 11 000 in debt off of every family in america by reducing the deficit we have reduced the size of the federal government to its smallest size since martin luther king visited john kennedy in the white house i know about that but the purpose of all this is not to wreck the government not to give us a mean spirited government it is to give us a lean government that will help us to work together to solve our own problems that s what we should be committed to do in washington and in denver and in every community throughout this great land so let me ask you to think about this look at all the young people in this audience look at the fine young people in their band uniforms look at the young people around the choir and the young kids here look at all the children here all different colors and backgrounds what is the american dream it is the right to pursue happiness it requires a certain equality and a certain respect it requires us to listen as well as to talk i know the american people are often angry and frustrated today but let me tell you something folks this is a very great country and there is nothing that cannot be fixed if we will rely on our hearts and our spirits and what we know to be true i have traveled this whole world on your behalf i have seen many different places i have dealt with many opportunities and problems i am more convinced today than i was on the day i took the oath of office that the greatest days of america lie in front of us if we have the courage to live the dream of martin luther king but remember what he lived and died for was for every one of you to have the right to do good and to be good and to make the most of your own life it was no living and dying for the freedom to shoot people no living and dying for the freedom to shoot up no living and dying for the freedom to hate people no living and dying for the freedom to ignore the responsibilities of parenthood and the obligations of our children that is not what this was about and there was no living and dying to advance the proposition that we are all just isolated individuals out here we don t need anybody helping anybody else and everything we do as a government is intrinsically bad that idea is wrong too so i say to you as you look to the next century let s make denver and the west the frontier of the next century by proving that you can be a rugged individual you can do everything you want in your individual aspirations but only if you build a new community where everybody has a chance to rise up and everybody has a chance to be respected and every child has a chance to be loved and to be important that is what this is all about and let us look for ways let us look for ways every day every day to say the dream of martin luther king depends upon what i do inside and how i relate to my fellow men and women and to all the little boys and girls twenty seven years ago april 4th martin luther king was killed only such a young man but he gave his life willingly so that we might become all god meant for us to be we can still do it we will have more opportunities than ever before but you look at this sea of people and you think about what the founding fathers said over 200 years ago life liberty the pursuit of happiness together thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton16 10 94 bill_clinton good afternoon secretary christopher mr gray distinguished members of congress and members of the delegation who went to haiti let me welcome you back to the united states from your historic trip we are here today to continue this remarkable celebration of freedom over fear that all of you witnessed yesterday in port au prince and here to look ahead to the hard work the people of haiti now have to do in order to rebuild their nation but first let me say a few words about the situation this morning in persian gulf i was pleased that the united nations security council yesterday passed a very strong resolution and unanimously condemned the recent provocative actions by iraq near its border with kuwait the security council resolution makes clear that the international community will not allow iraq to threaten its neighbors or to intimidate the united nations as it ensures that iraq does not again possess weapons of mass destruction the message is clear iraq must complete its withdrawal it must not threaten its neighbors in the future it must comply with all relevant security council resolutions the troops ships and attack aircraft i have ordered to the gulf area will continue to remain there until the crisis passes as our troops in the gulf are helping to enforce the will of the international community our young men and women in uniform in haiti are doing so as well and as all of you saw yesterday they re doing so in a brilliant fashion when we sent our armed forces to haiti just four weeks ago their mission was to pave the way for president aristide s return yesterday that mission was completed as the president returned home in joyous atmosphere that we all watched so happily from here now haiti is a nation where violence is down and the parliament is back a nation where men and women freely chosen by the haitian people are once again leading their country where a long night of fear is giving way to a new day of promise a few moments ago i was briefed by secretary christopher and bill gray on yesterday s events i asked a lot of questions about what happened and what would happen in the future but let me just say yesterday i was moved as i know all of you were even more moved being there on the ground by the incredible sight of president aristide addressing the people from the presidential palace in saying again and again no to violence no to retribution yes to peace yes to reconciliation we know there is a long road ahead that dangers still remain now that the democratic government has been restored it must be nourished and the country must be rebuilt many nations around the world are already pledging to do their part starting with a 550 million reconstruction and recovery fund to provide humanitarian relief development assistance and support for democratic institutions the united states will work with these countries with the international financial institutions with private organizations all together over the next several months to make sure this work succeeds in the end of course only the people of haiti can rebuild their country they have waited a long time for the chance to do so now thanks to the efforts of the men and women of our armed forces those of our coalition partners and the supporters of freedom they are being given the chance to do it several of you have commented on the freshly painted signs you noticed in port au prince i understand that the most popular one had three words thank you america so let me conclude by saying a few thank yous thank you to all of you who worked so long and hard to help to put haiti back on the track to democracy as he ends his mission let me say a special word of thanks to bill gray who at a critical time brought energy focus credibility and great skill to this task thank you sir thank you to the men and women of our armed forces and their families from general shelton to every last enlisted man and woman who are there all of them are the power behind our diplomacy thank you to the nations from our hemisphere who have worked with us and those beyond our hemisphere who have worked with us on this project thank you to the people of our country who time and again have been willing to stand up for others because it is the right thing to do and finally thank you to president aristide and the freedom loving people of haiti who never gave into despair and who today stand in the warm bright sunshine of freedom thank you all thank you dem wjclinton16 10 96 bill_clinton thank you san diego thank you for being here tonight thank you for your support and your concern for our country you had a pretty good seat at the debate didn t you the first thing i want to say is i hope you were proud of your fellow californians who were the citizens on that debate they did a good job they asked good questions and it made me feel good about it i want to thank the people who are here with us tonight thank you deputy mayor valerie stallings for your comments and for being here thank you lieutenant governor gray davis thank you congressman bob filner the best advocate this county ever had if you had any idea how much time bob filner spends burning my ear about something for this area you would double his pay and cut his hours it s amazing what he does i also want to say a special word of appreciation to peter navarro who is also running for congress and i want you to help him get elected stand up peter we have some other congressional candidates in the audience i know dan farrell rita tamarius gary westley are they here still good for you thank you for running thank you howard wayne for running for the assembly i know you re here thank you representative richard katz for being here and susan davis thank you for being here thank you state senator and the leader of the state senate senator lockyer thank you for being here and thank you kathleen connell for your leadership in the state controller s office ladies and gentlemen i want you to join me in thanking the people who provided our music the lincoln high school gospel choir where are they the scripps ranch high school marching band that s how we build a crowd you know you bring a band and all their relatives come and their friends it s great and little feat weren t they great give little feat a hand they were terrific folks i m so glad to see you here tonight i m so glad to see so many young people here tonight it s your future we re fighting for you know i have had a lot of good and some very moving days in california since i have been president i ve had a lot of great days in this county since i first started coming here as a candidate and i was thinking tonight hoping that i would get some questions about it but i want to say to you the people of this county have worked with our administration and that s why we ve been able to double the border guards here why we ve been able to invest in cleaning up the environment here why we ve been able to help put more police on the street here why we ve been able to guarantee that there will be more contracts with that shipyard here so that those folks who asked me not to forget them will have jobs into the 21st century and i thank all of you who had anything to do with that you know tonight you heard two very different visions of our future and what you also heard was what i think is the last debate i ll ever be in as a candidate unless i run for the school board some day but while it was my last debate i hope it was the beginning of a lot of conversations that all of you will have about what our country is going to be like in the 21st century there are enormous tactical consequences to the ideas that we have whether you really believe that we re better off on or own or whether we re better off when we work together to give each other the tools to make the most of our lives and our families and our communities there s a lot of significance to whether you believe we should build a bridge to the future we can all walk across or just show people the valley and say i hope you can find some way to get over it whether you believe that we re out there on our own because the government is intrinsically our enemy or whether you think that the government is just another part of this great partnership we call america and hillary was right it does take a village to raise a child and build a community and build a future i want all of you to know especially the young people that i want you to know that as someone who is not so young anymore i am more idealistic today about the promise of this country than i was the day i took the oath of office as president i have more confidence today in our ability to work together to make good things happen for america than i did the day i took the oath of office i have more conviction today that our best days are still ahead and i know that 20 days from now if we decide that together we re going to build that bridge that our best days are still ahead and your best days are still ahead and america will still be the greatest country in human history in the 21st century will you help me build that bridge will you help me do it for 20 more days thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton16 10 99 bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen first of all let me thank you for your warm welcome to hillary and me thank you frank guarini for being my friend for all these years thank you president joe cerrell to all the distinguished guests here and the honorees the members of congress gerry ferrarro ambassador foglietta ambassador rosepepe to our distinguished italian guests maria bartomoli ambassador salleo and especially foreign minister dini i would like to say a special word of appreciation at this point to the prime minister and the government of italy for standing with us and working with us for the cause of our common humanity in kosovo and before that in bosnia we could not have done it without italy and i am grateful justice scalia and cardinal hickey and all the others here you stole my line about 50 percent of my four chiefs of staff being italian the other two wish they were i thank you for all the gifts from campania including the beautiful flowers for hillary we visited there when the 1994 conference of the g 7 nations was held in naples and we have been very blessed by our times there i understand my friend dick grasso and the barnes and noble ceo leonard riggio are both from that region of italy i m about to go back to florence and i m only supposed to stay a day so if i play hookey and stay an extra day i want 3 000 of you to write an excuse for me just like i used to get when i missed a day of school i guess i ought to say since this is baseball season that i m sure of one person who would like to be here tonight who can t be is joe torre now i m not taking sides in the baseball series but the yankees do have two italian americans on their team joe and the catcher joe girardi and no city in america has been better to me than boston but the red sox haven t had an italian since their pitcher frank viola retired so i think we ought to get the red sox an italian baseball player to balance out our equal opportunity agenda throughout the country you know from the beginning of our country italian americans have made invaluable contributions and i want to say a special word of thanks not for all those which i could litanize and you know them but for the national italian american foundation s leadership for our efforts to build one america i m very grateful that this is a country in better shape than it was seven years ago when i first came here i am very grateful for the chance that i have had to serve i m grateful for the italian americans who have helped to ensure the success of our administration i m glad that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years and the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the lowest crime rates in 26 years and the first back to back surpluses in 42 years but i have to tell you that the most important thing we have to do to get ready for the 21st century even more important than our efforts to continue to grow our economy is to build one country out of our diversity if we do if the american people really can come to have that wonderful balance which enables us to celebrate our diversity and our unique ethnic and religious tradition which makes america a very interesting place to live and still say our common humanity is even more important we ll figure out how to deal with all the other things last year one of only two years i ve missed since i first came here seven years ago i was up for nine days and nights at the wye plantation trying to keep the middle east peace process on track if you look around the world at how i have spent my time as your president working for peace in the balkans among muslims and croats and serbs among albanian muslim and serbian orthodox christians for peace in the middle east among arabs and jews among israelis palestinians syrians jordanians and lebanese for peace in northern ireland among catholics and protestants to set up protections against that kind of tribal slaughter we ve seen in africa among people who shared the same land in one case in rwanda for 500 years it is truly interesting that at the dawn of this new millennium when we re exhilarated by all these technological and scientific advance that are being made one man told me that when i have grandchildren they may be born with a life expectancy of 100 years we know that our kids are using the internet and talking to people all over the world and knowing things we couldn t know isn t it interesting that in this quintessentially modern era our biggest problem is the most primitive and ancient of human failings the fear of the other people who are different from us and what a short step it is from fearing people to hating them to dehumanizing them which legitimizes doing away with them and isn t it interesting that at a time when the crime rate in america is at a 26 year low we still have these vicious examples of a man shooting children at a jewish community school and then going out and murdering a filipino postman another man saying he belonged to a church that didn t believe in god but did believe in white supremacy killing an african american basketball coach in illinois and then murdering a young korean christian as he walked out of his church and all these other examples the young gay man matthew shepard a year ago this week being stretched out literally upon a rack james byrd being pulled apart in texas because he was an african american not because all americans are like that almost all of us aren t but because in each of us there is this fragile scale like the scale of justice mr scalia must try to balance in his work and in this scale we wake up every morning with some curious balance of light and dark of hope and fear and when the scale gets badly enough out of whack the easiest thing to do is to strike out against the other so i say again to you italian americans have been subject to discrimination and bigotry in times past in america you still are subject to stereotypes that i think are unfair and unrepresentative to be kind about it but it is because of the values you share with other americans that we have a prosperous economy and a healing society and we just have to remember that overall yes i hope a lot of your children make hundreds of millions of dollars by starting internet companies yes i hope that my plans to take care of the aging of america and save social security and medicare will prevail i hope our plans to elevate the quality of all of our schools will prevail i hope i can convince both parties in congress to resist temptation and save enough of this surplus to get us out of debt for the first time since 1835 over the next 15 years i hope all of that but remember this the most important thing is to build one america out of this crazy quilt of all of us who live here last week hillary and i had the 8th of her millennial evenings at the white house and we had an expert in the internet who helped to design the architecture of the internet and an expert in genomics who talked to us about the human genome project and the miracles it will bring he says one day the intersection of computers and gene studies will enable us to put digital microscopic digital pieces in all parts of the human body to do even the repair work on shattered nerves to the spine and we talked about all the miracles out there and the genomics experts said but what i want you to understand is that of all the possible permutations among people with all many many parts of every gene 99 9 percent of us is identical to that of every other human being and the genetic differences among groups that is individuals among the italian community for example are more significant and greater than the aggregate average genetic differences between italians and irish and africans and latins it s important to remember for people of faith it reflects the wisdom of our creator so i say again i m indebted to you for many things your work ethic your family ethic your creativity your energy your passion it made america a much more interesting place and it fueled this remarkable run we have had but your commitment the thing that neither italians nor any other human being are subject to degradation and prejudice because of who they are that we will learn to honestly and openly express our differences and enjoy our differences but reaffirm our common humanity make no mistake about it just pick up the paper any day look at the perils of the present day we are in a conflict between modern possibility and primitive hatred one america is the only answer and you re leading the way thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 11 93 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you mr vice president and thank you to all the governors who are here and to the many governors who are not here who have helped us in this battle to pass nafta i think i should say by way of sort of a parenthesis at the outside of my remarks in reaction to governor thompson s eloquent comments about the rose bowl that in view of the wisdom of the voters in michigan ohio and wisconsin in the last election this administration has no position on that football game you know i looked at the governors who are here with me and i had to think i actually counted we are about equally divided back here between democrats and republicans and i think it is an interesting statement that these who have come here and those who are not here who have also endorsed this agreement are more or less equally divided and about the ratio the parties hold of gubernatorial offices and the reason for that is that if you re a governor today a big part of your job is keeping the job base you have trying to find more jobs and when you lose jobs trying to replace them as quickly as possible it s not unusual to see a governor who actually knows huge numbers of employers by name who s been in in my case literally hundreds of manufacturing facilities and different small businesses and who understands how businesses rise and fall and how they fit within the economy of the state the nation and the globe the job of governors is to create jobs to keep jobs to enhance the economic base and the economic security of our people any of these governors will tell you that it is difficult to hold on to this job if your voters don t believe you have a clear economic program and that your state is moving in the right direction against all the odds many of us have served in very difficult economic times with high unemployment rates caused by all kinds of factors but we always found that the people of our state wanted us to have a theory about how the economy works and how we were going to get more jobs that is what these folks do for a living so i am especially honored to have these governors here and to have their support because they understand on a bipartisan basis that a big part of america s national security involves the ability to create economic security for our people they further understand that the only way to have economic security is to compete and win in the global economy as i have said many times and i want to say here on the eve of this great vote every wealthy country in the world today is having trouble creating new jobs productivity increases which are necessary to compete in the global economy in the short run sometimes cause difficulty in creating jobs because a more productive worker means fewer people can produce more products and services therefore if you want more jobs at higher wages in this world you have to have more customers there is no way around that no one has seriously advanced the proposition that the united states can grow jobs and raise incomes our most urgent economic priority without having more customers for our products and services the governors understand that that is why they do not seek to run away from change or to shield their people from change but instead to embrace it to compete and win that is the great message that must be carried to the congress over the next 24 hours as the members prepare for this vote this really is a vote about whether we re going to try to hold on to yesterday s economy or embrace tomorrow s economy it s about the past and the future if i could wave a magic wand and return every american to absolute job security with no competition at all i might do that although i m not sure our country would be better off at least more and more people think that that is a possibility as you hear this nafta vote and i m telling you folks these governors understand that is not a possibility governors have stood at the doors of plants when they closed i have stood by plants and shaken hands with workers hundreds of them when they walked off the job for the last time if i thought that this was going to cost the american people jobs i would not be for this agreement and neither would these governors our work is putting americans to work now in the last 10 months with the deficit down with inflation down with interest rates down this economy has produced more jobs in the private sector than in the previous four years and every american can tell you that s very fine but it s no where near enough we cannot get more jobs in this economy until we have more customers for our products and our services tomorrow the congress has simply got to vote for hope over fear for the future over the past has got to vote for confidence in the ability of the american people to compete and win these governors are closer to their workers than any other public officials in the country they know we can compete and win so do i and tomorrow i think the house of representatives will say the same thing thank you very much dem wjclinton16 11 94 bill_clinton thank you so much it s good to be home thank you admiral macke general kealoha senator akaka congresswoman mink congressman abercrombie governor and mrs waihee to governor elect cayetano and lieutenant governor elect hirono and mayor harris hillary and i and our distinguished secretary of commerce ron brown we re all very glad to be here with all of you i want to say a special word of thanks and appreciation to the service members and the spouses the families of the army the navy the air force the marine corps the coast guard all of you stationed here in hawaii and i d like to say a special word of thanks to the marine corps band for making me feel so very at home when i got off the airplane thank you i m glad to be back at hickam i want all of you to know that while you re a long way from the mainland you re never far from the hearts of every american who understands what you re doing here to keep our country safe and strong i thank all of you for that as you know i have just returned from a trip to asia a trip that began on veterans day at arlington national cemetery where on behalf of the american people i was able to express our gratitude for those who paid the ultimate sacrifice to keep our nation free i then stopped at our air base in alaska it was rather different than here it was about 23 degrees the snow was already knee deep and coming down but it was very warm and the men and women there in uniform are also doing a very important job for america and i went to manila in the philippines to honor those who fought in world war ii it has been an immensely rewarding time for me to serve as the president and commander in chief just a few days ago i was in the persian gulf with our forces there who got there so quickly and stopped the aggression of saddam hussein before it ever got started thanks to the united states so to all of you here and all of your counterparts around the world i say the world knows that the skills of our fighting men and women have never been higher your capacity to carry out our missions has never been greater your commitment to liberty has never been stronger the world is more peaceful and secure because of you and the most important thing i came here to say tonight is thank you you know the world is changing profoundly there are still threats out there and they are significant threats of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction threats of terrorism the growing international drug trade and the rise of international organized crime in the wake of communism s fall but if you really look around the world you d have to say that security peace and freedom are on the march that all these children here today holding their american flags will in all probability grow up in a world where they will have less fear than their parents and their grandparents faced because of you if you look at what s happened from the persian gulf and the middle east to north africa and northern ireland and south africa to haiti if you look at the fact that in north korea with north korea we just concluded an agreement to make certain that that nation becomes a nonnuclear nation not selling nuclear materials to others if you look at the agreement we reached with china to stop the proliferation of missiles and if you look at the fact that in russia for the first time since nuclear weapons came on the face of the earth there are no russian missiles pointed at american children you d have to say we re on the move our forces in the pacific are at this moment undertaking critical missions from haiti to the sinai from joint exercises with japan to your role in deterring iraq i appreciate all of that i know well that the success of our diplomatic efforts depends in large measure on our military strength it is imperative that you remain the best fighting force in the world and we are determined to do everything we can to make sure that that is exactly what happens let me say too that all of you know even though your role as workers might be in our national defense that the world of america at home is changing too in ways that are both good and troubling we ve had problems in our system that are profound 60 percent of american wage earners are earning the same or less today that they were earning 15 years ago when you adjust for inflation we know that this has been especially hard on working men with limited educations we know that our country still has rates of crime violence and family and community breakdown that are too high and unacceptable we know that a lot of people have a deep sense that our government except for you in which they have confidence only works for organized special interests and is too often unable to protect the interests or the values of the ordinary americans the deep concern and frustration of our people about these conditions led to the changes they voted for in both 1992 and in 1994 but just because the congress changed hands i think i can say for these members of congress here behind me we don t think the message of the american people is we want more gridlock we want an enhanced role for organized interests over ordinary citizens which is what always happens when we have gridlock i think what the american people said is you ve got to keep working together until you change this enough to make it right until you turn the difficult trends around until america is going in the right direction at home as well as abroad and i can tell you that i am committed to doing that if you look at what makes a strong country it s a lot of what makes a strong military strong families good schools safe streets good paying jobs the kind of things that allows people to live up to the fullest of their god given potential we ve made a beginning on that and we ve got to keep going we ve got more jobs a smaller deficit a smaller national government doing more for the american people than we had two years ago thanks to senator akaka and senator inouye congressman abercrombie and congresswoman mink and a lot of other people who helped we ve taken some stands for strong families the family and medical leave law will help about 200 000 people in this state to keep their jobs if they have to take a little time off when there s a baby born or a sick parent that s something good the government did to stand up for strong families and we ought to proud of that they worked for better education when we reorganized the student loan law so that now all over america middle class working families can have their children borrow money to go to college at lower interest rates and better repayment terms so that no one need ever walk away from a college education because of the cost again and even though there was great controversy about it in the election i know that lee will be able to make our streets safer because we passed the brady bill and the crime bill and we re putting more police officers on the street and in getting military assault weapons off the street you should have them not people walking up and down the streets of our cities and we now have in this economy over the last 22 months more than 5 million new jobs our industries are operating at the highest capacity in 14 years we have the lowest inflation in 29 years and finally slowly slowly we are beginning to see trends which may indicate that people will begin to get wage increases again this year there have been more high wage jobs come into the american economy than in the last five years combined we have to build on these changes not tear them down there is still a lot of change that needs to be done to reward people who get up every day care for their families obey the law do the best they can to be good citizens we have to keep that momentum going you know let me just say one other thing in hawaii a lot of the problems we face today are because of big sweeping trends in the world a lot of the reasons a lot of americans have trouble getting pay increases is because of the pressure of the global economy and competition from people who work for wages that americans couldn t live on that s been developing for 20 years now we have to make a choice whether we re going to embrace these changes and make them work for us or try to run away from them one thing i want to say in hawaii that is on the frontier of america militarily and economically is that you know that global change can be our friend the reason i went to asia is because whether we like it or not the asian economies are going to be a big part of the world s future they are the fastest growing economies in the world a third of our exports already go to asia supporting 2 million american jobs today now we have to decide i believe as strongly as i can say that just as your military strength permits america to have diplomatic strength so that national security is both military and diplomatic national security is also being strong at home as well as being strong abroad and there is no longer a clear dividing line between what is foreign policy and what is domestic policy not when everybody s job depends on whether we can compete in a global economy if we educate our people well that s good foreign policy if we raise our kids well that s strong national security and if we can sell more american products abroad then that means betters jobs at home that s good domestic policy if we do not accept any other lesson in this calendar year let us say there is no easy dividing line between our role in the world and our role at home we must be strong at home and strong abroad they are two sides of the same coin and so let me say that i went to indonesia a long way from america because i thought it was good for americans because we made an agreement in indonesia that we would by a date certain take down all the barriers to trade and investment in all the countries of the asian pacific region that were there and that is a big deal because we already have the most open markets in the world so if others lower their markets it means more sales for americans more jobs and higher incomes the united states this year at the world economic forum in switzerland was voted the most productive economy in the world for the very first time in nine long years nine years we are coming back we need a fair chance to sell america s products and services around the world just as we can promote america s ideals and values around the world and that s what this trip was all about that s what my work is all about and without regard to our party let us agree there s no easy line between our role in the world and our role at home we can t be strong abroad if we re not strong at home we ll never be strong at home if we withdraw from our responsibilities around the world what really makes us strong is strong families good education safe streets good jobs and national security you as much as any group in america today embody all those and all americans are in your gratitude thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton16 12 97 bill_clinton good afternoon it is only fitting that we gather today in the dean acheson auditorium for as acheson was in his time we truly are present at the creation the creation of an era after the cold war that might be unrecognizable for the wise men of acheson s time a new era of promise and peril being defined by men and women determined that the 21st century be known as the new american century i briefly want to review the progress we ve made in the last year and our mission to prepare america for that new century even as we reap the hard earned profits of the strongest economy in a generation our nation refused to be complacent we confronted big issues in 1997 we passed a plan to balance the budget we made college affordable and community college virtually free to every american we cut taxes for middle class families with children we saved medicare for another decade we extended health insurance to 5 million children in lower income working families we cut crime reduced welfare strengthened our schools we made the world safer by ratifying the chemical weapons convention and at kyoto with the vice president s leadership we took an important step toward protecting the environment even as we promote global economy growth we renewed the consensus for honest engagement with china we stood strong against a rogue regime in iraq we made real progress toward lasting peace in bosnia next week i will personally thank our troops there and talk to the bosnian people about their responsibilities for the future of course even as we reflect on how far we ve come in our mandate to carry our enduring american values into a new century we realize we have far to go nineteen ninety eight will be a year of vigorous action on vital issues that will shape the century to come from education to the environment from health care to child care from expanding trade to improving skills from fighting new security threats to promoting peace we have much to do both here at home and abroad earlier today with the simple stroke of a pen we helped to make european history secretary albright and her nato counterparts signed protocols of accession for poland hungary and the czech republic formalizing our intent to welcome these nations as nato s newest members and a grand effort to defend our shared values and advance our common destiny this is a milestone in the enterprise i launched four years ago to adapt our alliance to the challenges of a new era and to open nato to europe s new democracies the entry of poland hungary and the czech republic into the alliance will make america safer nato stronger and europe more stable and united the decision to add new members to nato must be ratified by all 16 allies i m gratified that congress has already taken an active positive role in a bipartisan manner through the senate nato observer group that joined us at the madrid summit and the extensive hearings and resolutions this fall i will promptly seek the senate s advice and consent on nato expansion when congress returns in january the united states has led the way in transforming our alliance now we should be among the first to vote yes for nato s historic engagement we are well on the way to the goal i set last year of welcoming the first new members to nato by nato s 50th anniversary today i am pleased to announce the that nato alliance has accepted my invitation to come to washington for that special summit in the spring of 1999 together we will strengthen nato for the next 50 years and i hope we will be welcoming its newest members now before i take your questions in this room where president kennedy held so many memorable press conferences let me remind you that he once praised these exercises with tongue only somewhat in cheek saying and i quote it is highly beneficial to have 20 million americans regularly observe the incisive the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by their washington correspondents precedence has its place dem wjclinton16 2 05 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you please be seated i want to begin by thanking you for that wonderful welcome i have flown across the country today we we actually believe it or not left when the scheduler said we were supposed to into a 130 something mile an hour headwind so i flew into a wall all the way to california and i apologize for being late so we re going to do question and answer at the end and then we ll do pictures and if you ve got a question you want to ask and didn t turn it in i told audrey i don t care just ask whatever you want the great thing about not being in the white house anymore is that i can say whatever i think although i pretty much did when i was there the only bad thing is it doesn t matter anymore nobody has to listen let me begin by thanking you for the work that you do i ll end my semi prepared remarks tonight by coming back to why it is an example of what i think is very important across the 21st century world but it means a lot to me that you help people in need here in the united states and israel and throughout the world in a whole range of areas it s an example of the kind of philosophy that i believe should dominate the world that we re living in essentially it seems to me that the primary characteristics of the world today is it s complete interdependence if you ask most people if i d given you all a test and we start out giving everybody a little card and i said you d have to describe the world in one word what would your word be most people would write down globalization and i don t use that word very much because it implies at least to me an economic relationship that is only part of what we are experiencing interdependence simply means you can t escape each other for good or ill and we see every single day good and ill from interdependence in the 1990 s when i was president america got a lot of good out of interdependence we had an enormous amount of economic growth and a third of it came from trade when we began this is unbelievable when i began my presidency in january of 93 there were fifty sites on the worldwide web fifty and it was the providence still of research physicists the whole idea of the internet was created by these people who were being funded by the defense advance research agency within the department of defense to share common scientific findings when i left office there were 50 million sites on the web in only eight years it s the fastest growing communications network in the history of the world when i took off when i was elected in november of 92 the average cell phone still weighed five pounds i just bought one in here with me and it s so small my fingers keep punching the wrong numbers we saw the sequencing of the human genome by an international consortium of scientists i remember the day we announced that the genome sequencing had been completed in my second term i did it with tony blair via satellite television in london and we had representatives with japan and germany and all the other countries that were a part of the scientific consortium we did this together we put up the international space station with five or six different countries contributing so we had a lot of positive interdependence america became much more diverse because of positive interdependence we have all these immigrants and i know you one of your interests is in providing job training to new immigrants in this area on the other hand september 11th 2001 was about interdependence the people of al qaeda used the forces of interdependence they used open borders easy immigration easy travel to kill 3 000 people from 70 countries including over 200 other muslims in new york i ll never forget i was in australia and president bush kindly gave me a plane i flew back and hillary was down in washington working in the senate already to try and get some legislation through to help the families so my daughter and i went down to the crisis center where people were still hoping against hope that their relatives might have lived and there was this long line outside the building so i was just going up and down doing all i could do shaking hands talking to people you know and this huge guy comes up to me i ll never forget this as long as i live he was a head taller than me and he had big tears in his eyes and i said did you lose someone and he said no he said i am an egyptian muslim american and i hate what they did more than you do and i m afraid my fellow countrymen will never trust me again i ll never forget that as long as i live if you look at the situation with israel and the palestinians and its neighbors it s a perfect exam it s like a perfect storm interdependence from the time we signed the peace agreement in 93 until near the end of my second term for over seven years almost exactly to the day seven years before the second intifada started we had seven years of more or less positive interdependence there were problems of course but there were there was always progress toward peace in the eight years i was president 254 israeli citizens died of terrorist related violence in the next four years over 1 000 did as we moved from positive to negative interdependence and over three times that many palestinians but when they started fighting after mr arafat walked away from the peace proposal that i made they were no less interdependent they just went from positive to negative interdependence now what i want you to think about is what does all that mean for us as americans for what our government should do and for what we should do as citizens because i really believe that this is the great question of the next 50 years if you accept the premise that we live in an interdependent world that s it s full of positive and negative forces that s it i mean that s all this terror is after 9 11 we had a horrible terrorist incident in bali and indonesia the place where you probably know i m leaving tomorrow with former president bush to go to all these countries where we ve trying to raise money to help with the tsunami relief and then next month i m going to try to help coordinate this effort over the next two years for the un it s utterly fascinating because the banda aceh in indonesia is the center of the sparatist movement now that east timor has become a separate country so they re fighting and all a sudden the tsunami blows everything away destroys the biggest city in the area and everybody forgets about it and just starts working together i remember when i was in a refugee camp in turkey after their terrible earthquake all they were doing was bragging about how the nice greeks were to come help them and then the greeks had an earthquake and the turks went and helped them then there were no more earthquakes so they started fighting on over islands in the aegean again but they were no less interdependent nothing changed in the closeness of their lives and the impact they had on one another except whether it was positive or negative now we re at a moment of new hope in the middle east we have mahmoud abbas whom i know very well declaring that in effect as far as he s concerned for the plo the terrorism is a thing of the past he wants to make peace with israel and no matter how long it takes and whatever problems there are he s determined not to allow any terrorist violence to come back and he s made a pretty good effort at it and it s obvious that the current national unity government of the prime minister sharon and shamon peres believe that because of the restraint they ve shown in the face of the violence that has occurred they always know whether they re making their best efforts to stop it i know this can be done in 1998 we had the wye river peace accord and a change of government from mr netanyahu to mr barak it s only the year in the entire history of the state of history where not a single israeli citizen was killed by a terrorist attack they got lucky but they also worked at it together and so this is a moment of hope so we re now back to positive interdependence but if it turns sour again they ll be no less dependent on one another it ll just be negative rather than positive interdependence so the great mission for all of us as citizens and for the governments that represent us is how to beat down the negative forces build up the positive forces and move from a state of disequilibrium because that s what interdependence is you wake up in the morning not knowing whether you re going to get the good or bad and we just had another horrible example in the middle east when mr herari was murdered and all those other people in lebanon he was a good friend of mine but less than two weeks before he died we spent an hour and a half together it was a devastating tragedy for lebanon he wanted the syrians out of there he wanted to them to quit letting the terrorists train in the baca valley and he basically rebuilt beirut after the horrible long civil war and it s been a very sad thing for me for me personally because we worked together and i knew him well but what we the model we need to be thinking about is how to do we go from the state of disequilibrium from an interdependence to a community where we have shared responsibilities and shared benefits based on shared values simple shared values everybody counts deserves a chance competition s good but we do better when we work together our differences are really important our religious and other differences they are important but our common humanity matters more now i see every single issue through that prism now somebody asked me what i think about the president s latest announcement in area x you know social security economics whatever everything i ask myself would this bring us closer to a state of community moving from negative to positive interdependence or will it move us further away from it and that s how i decide whether i m for it or against it because that s what i think our great obligations are so what does that mean in practical terms how might be go from a state of interdependence to a stronger community within america and a more communal atmosphere throughout the world well first we can t be nave we have to have a security strategy and we don t have to go around looking for enemies but when we have them we have to confront them so we have to continue to work against terror and terror networks wherever they exist and as i was saying a moment ago they can exist everything we ve had these the horrible thing that happened in lebanon the attack in bali the attack on the train in spain it doesn t matter where you are now now you know terrorism is a equal opportunity striker throughout the world people can get around and if you re mad about something you can get on the internet and figure out how to make a big bomb the technology of the bomb that destroyed so much of beirut shattered all those new hotels and probably wrecked their tourism industry for another year or two was not much different from the one timothy mcveigh used in oklahoma city it was just even bigger lots bigger and they probably had to reinforce the vehicle that brought it in so it could carry the weight but otherwise it was really simple anybody in this room could figure out how to make a bomb like that so here we are we have to have a security strategy we have to keep going after these terrorist networks and we have to confront the fact that it would be a disaster if they got a hold of chemical biological and nuclear materials which could be used in a weapon i can now say this because it s been so much in the press but if you have if you look at your glasses on the table if you had just enough fissile material and not all nuclear material is fissile it s not all capable of using being used in an explosive but if you had enough to be about the size of a large cookie about the size of that glass and you put it into timothy mcveigh s bomb a pickup truck full of fertilizer and you figured out how to detonate it which as i said you can literally learn to do it on websites it would be strong enough to take out 25 of washington d c just that little bit so any money that your government spends trying to identify contain and where possible destroy chemical biological and nuclear materials is money well spent not long before i took office the bipartisan majority of congress passed a program called the nunn luger program which was designed to help the russians get all the nuclear missiles in other republics of the former soviet union back into russia and then put all the material from the missiles in secure sites and eventually destroy the missiles and neutralize the materials when i was president we spent a lot of your money doing that we also at various periods were employing up to half the people in russia who were scientists and technologists in chemical nuclear and biological weapons because i didn t want them to go to work for iran or somebody else the government was broke at the time and they couldn t afford to pay them and i wished we d have been able to keep them all working we did a lot of good positive things together this north korea issue that is now back in the press where the north koreans claim they have a bomb i m not particularly worried about the north koreans dropping a bomb on anybody because if they did they d be toast in other words if deterrents work between the united states and if deterrents work between the united states and the soviet union it certainly works between the united states and north korea or iran or anybody else that s not what the worry is the worry is if you get into the bomb making business you re going to have a lot of this material lying around where it can be stolen or sold and north korea is the most bizarre country in the world they can t grow enough food to feed themselves but they re world class bomb and missile makers and they had a huge nuclear program underway when i became president and we put an end to that in 94 then we stopped them from testing their long range missiles in 98 and we nearly made a deal to stop the whole thing but they still had unbeknownst to us at the time a small nuclear program going on in the laboratory that produced enough fissile material to make maybe a bomb or two a year the program we ended would have given them 50 60 70 missiles by now nuclear warheads so this is much smaller but it s still troubling because of the potency of the material as i just described to you every time i look at the top of a glass i think about it now now the good news is i still think we can make a deal there the north koreans do not want to become like east germany they don t want to disappear from the scene they want to eat and stay warm and they want to be and they can t grow their own food and produce their own energy and they want to be recognized as a major player in the region and that s basically what the south koreans have been trying to do but it s a very difficult balancing act that the president and all of our allies have to follow now because it s not easy to get at them a lot of their materials are buried in deep underground mountain cave laboratories it s not like when the israelis took out the osirak reactor in iraq in 1981 for example so the military actions are not so self evident we can probably work it out diplomatically but the thing has reached the stage now where we need to really kind of gear up and try to resolve it in the next year or so because not because i think they ll use it because i think if you can t eat and stay warm and you can t grow your own food and you can t make anything else anybody else wants to buy temptation is overwhelming to sell what you can sell that s the danger in north korea with iran it s a slightly different problem and all the more perplexing they claim they don t want to make a bomb but they keep making material that could be used into a bomb in their nuclear program there are nuclear options that produce material that can never be made into a bomb in other words you can have nuclear power plants so called white water power plants that don t produce fissile material most countries that see themselves on the rise have populations that overwhelmingly favor their becoming a nuclear power because they think if other people have it why shouldn t they the indians are a classic example we ve ended over the last six years or so a long standoff we had with india we re on warm terms with them again but 90 of the people in india favor india being a nuclear power because pakistan is the danger is if the indians and pakistanis could go to war by accident or somebody could get at one of their respective supplies it costs a lot of money to build and maintain and secure a nuclear arsenal and all these arguments apply with equal force but not with the same level of terror to chemical stocks which we re doing a pretty good job of managing and to biological agents which are the most frightening of all because they re sort of like invisible killers and they can spread before you know what s going on but it s harder to do than it seems remember when we had the anthrax scare right after 9 11 and those five people died there was enough anthrax in those all those letters enough live anthrax spores that if it had all been perfectly applied it could have killed 100 000 people but only five people died so it s the point i m making is biological warfare is scary to contemplate dangerous in theory can be dangerous in fact but it s harder to do than it seems anything your government does to spend money to try to contain and destroy these materials is money well spent the last thing i ll say is that i am strongly strongly opposed to this research program that we had a bipartisan i m proud of this a bipartisan majority to shut down last year in congress but now the administration is tempting to revive it to develop two new nuclear weapons one is a sort of so called small scale battlefield nuclear weapon and the other the one that s being more urgently pushed is designed to break deep underground concrete bunkers now we already have a very powerful conventional bunker buster weapon that will pierce bunkers probably 20 feet below the ground under a lot of concrete they want another one if such a weapon had been dropped in downtown baghdad during the recent conflict it could have taken out 25 of the city to get one or two people below the ground we are in a very weak position to go around lecturing the iranians about not developing nuclear weapons if we re trying to develop new ones and we do not need them for our security i think this is a terrible mistake one of the things that people don t like it if you say one thing and do another and if you say well we can be trusted with it but no one else can so my own view is that we ought to bag this thing once and for all diane feinstein has been the most consistent vocal opponent of this program since we all found out about it a couple of years ago and i hope it will discontinued permanently okay so we do have to have a security strategy here s the second point i want to make you can t have a security only strategy because in an interdependent world by definition you cannot possibly kill jail or occupy all your adversaries or all your potential adversaries you might be able to beat them all in a conventional fight but there is the fact of terror we live with it the israelis live with it the indonesians the spaniards and the lebanese have been broken by it so if you can t kill jail or occupy all your adversaries sooner or later you have to have some politics you have to try to build somebody s got a great song on their cell phone there you have to try to build a world with more friends and fewer adversaries and that s not being pollyanna it s not being weak it s just simply recognizing the fact that you cannot possibly kill jail or occupy everybody that might do something bad to you in the world we re living in so you have to make a deal or a series of them and that brings me to the next point i want to make how would we go about doing positive things that would share the responsibilities and the benefits of the modern world and i ll just mention them very briefly if you want to ask any questions we can follow up we know now how to help poor people in poor countries grow their economy more rapidly and how to give aid through trade and investment and give debt relief in an efficient effective way it used to be americans didn t want to do that because we said you d throw money at the problem and it s all wasted and it s no good that s not true we know how to do that now in 2000 my last year as president we gave debt relief we made 35 countries eligible for debt relief they were the poorest countries in the world if they had democracies recognized human rights and promised to put all the debt relief into education healthcare or economic development uganda qualified and immediately doubled primary school enrollment bolivia qualified and immediately started giving comprehensive health services to 77 000 poor families that never got it before and i could give you lots of other examples we know how to do this the so called millennium development goals that you read about in the paper should be pursued that s what tony blair s trying to do for africa this year he s trying to get all the rich countries in the world to promise to at least give enough money to see that these goals can be pursued in africa i m just telling you we know how to do this and i ll give you a few more example in addition to the economy there are a lot of other problems you ve got but the economy s a big deal half of the world s people still live on less than 2 00 a day and a billion people live on less than 1 00 a day so when we talk about the glories of the global economy they don t know what we are talking about even though the system that we have lifted more people out of poverty in the last 20 years that never rose out before in a comparable amount of time in the places where the population is growing are the poorest places of the world and they think we re nuts when we talk about how the great global economy is half the world s people are living on less than two bucks a day that s why we had a big unforeseen change in the indian government you remember the recent indian election it s amazing the country has a per capita income of 500 a person 550 million people voted and their system s better than ours they vote on with electronic voting and they have two different paper trails separate recordings in different places you know we still have the federal government doesn t want to spend any money to modernize our election system it s crazy i just don t want to get off the subject here but it s crazy anyway the reason the indians voted for a new government is not that they don t have economic success they were having they were having stunning economic success but it s basically confined to seven big high tech areas so india now has the biggest middle class in the world 300 million people but that leaves 650 million other people that aren t part of it in addition to that you ve got 130 million kids that never go to school 10 million children who die every year from preventable childhood diseases completely preventable one in four of all deaths on earth including things like the tsunami and terrorist attacks and heart attacks strokes and cancers and ordinary shootings one in four of all the deaths on earth this year will come from aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them will be little children who never got a clean glass of water now one in four people on earth now don t have access to clean water my biggest worry for the next 30 45 days in the tsunami related areas is that all the wells were destroyed and there s a lot of fetid water pools out there and we ve got to just keep working to make sure that we ve got adequate water and sanitation facilities out there so you don t have cholera dysentery and diarrhea killing a lot of kids but the point i want to make to you is this stuff is very inexpensive to deal with we spent 275 billion dollars fighting terror since 9 11 200 billion of it in iraq for 10 of that 10 of that we could double our a year 10 a year we could double our assistance to the poor countries of the world to deal with these problems and we know how to do this brazil has 98 of its kids in school do you know why if you re in the poorest third of the families in brazil and you send your kid to school 85 of the time you get a little credit card that says bolsa escola and you take it to the local lottery office once a month and they give 15 bucks a kid it s the cheapest money they ever spent they have 98 enrollment in kenya the new president abolished school fees the poorest countries of the world in africa they charge the parents to send their kids to school because they have no tax base he got rid of it almost overnight a million kids showed up we spent 300 million dollars in 2000 in my last year in office to offer children over 6 million of them a decent meal once a day in school but they had to show up to school to get the meal enrollments went up by 6 million around the world in these poor countries we know how to do this we know how to do what needs to be done with aids we could cut the malaria you ve got 2 3 million people a year dying of malaria if we just gave them all bed nets a lot of them most of them would live this is not rocket science most of this stuff it s very straightforward good things but it s we can do it the other area i think we should be much more responsible in is energy policy i think it is really sad that the kyoto climate change accord went into affect without america participating now i know that i have a certain ownership there because i helped to draft it i know it s imperfect it doesn t mandate that the emerging economies of china and india do anything it doesn t mandate it and they should have been included but i ll explain in a minute why they weren t i know that after the congress fought me on it and then continued to drag their feet after i left office the timetables cannot be met but by not going into that system we basically said to the whole rest of the world okay you can go be responsible about climate change and we ll do whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it now that s no way to make a world with more partners and fewer adversaries particularly when america has 4 of the world s population and 20 of the world s economic output but puts 25 of the world s greenhouse gases into the atmosphere we are the worst offenders now it is true that if the chinese and the indians continue to do what they re doing and grow they re like growing within 30 years they ll be bigger offenders than we are but that should give greater urgency to our efforts one reason they didn t go into it is they are convinced that the only way they can get rich like we did is to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in the industrial age it was true that you couldn t get rich stay rich and get richer without doing that that s not true anymore after the first oil price shock the young people in the audience are too young to remember this but in the 1970 s when we had the opec oil price shock within 20 years america had doubled doubled it s energy efficiency and we could double it again with relatively small efforts and i won t bore you with all the details we did a lot of things to work on that when i was president furthermore there is 1 trillion let me say that again that s real money a 1 trillion dollar untapped market today for clean energy technology it s already developed never mind those that are just over the horizon we could create hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of high wage jobs in america if we did it the old energy economy of oil and coal is very well organized very well financed and very well connected politically the new energy economy of solar power hydrogen power blended fuel vehicles is basically entrepreneurial technological under funded and without much influence politically for example for three years in my second term i offered the congress a tax cut for the production or the purchase of clean energy technologies or energy conservation technologies a 25 tax credit and i once told newt gingrich i thought it was one of the most important achievements of my second term that i had finally discovered a tax cut that he would be against because it proved threatening to the old energy economy they have massive subsidies you know the oil depletion allowance and all this all i was trying to do was kind of level the playing field and get some capital in there but it s important that you recognize that if the united states were to go out into the world and really try to help this would make a big difference let me just give you one other example and that is good government i don t necessarily subscribe to the views of a lot of people even in my own party that we need to have a date certain for getting out of iraq and we need to go whatever the consequences are i do think we need to make it clear every single day we re not an occupying power and we have no intention of staying permanently but i have seen this over and over and over again go in and win some military battle and then wind up losing the political struggle afterward because we think okay we got rid of the bad guys and they had an election goodbye well that s just where the the work is just beginning first of all a democracy is more than an election in which a majority rules you also have to have minority rights and minority participation and honest open government and enough of a bureaucracy to be effective every day when i was president there were thousands and thousands of people making decisions in the federal government that made me look like a genius i have no clue who they were you know they were improving new life saving drugs you know doing thousands of other things many of these countries literally are electing bright gifted people who have nothing under them to shore them up so that they can make a decision and nothing happens we take very sophisticated levels of organization for granted in america in the private and public sector we just take it for granted you do you ll think about it tomorrow as you go about your day tomorrow and you read the paper and you do you just think about how many times you read something and somebody says something s going to happen and you know it s going to happen and it s going to happen not because the person talking said it but because there s a whole organized effort of component honest people and a system that works there are these new democracies don t have that and we can give them that we should do more than that it s cheaper than going to war and it has a lot more impact so these are the kinds of things that i think ought to be done now what s that got to do with you and me one of the most remarkable developments there were two great developments when i was president that were never in the headlines and they were decades in coming so i m not claiming any credit for either one i supported them both but i dem wjclinton16 3 00 bill_clinton thank you very much please be seated i want to welcome thomas hicks and his family gary bettman and his daughter to the white house robert gainey the manager and to all the stars including the captain derian hatcher i might say the first american born captain of a stanley cup team and i welcome representative eddie bernice johnson here who is very proud of this team we re glad to have you back in the white house there are a lot of people from texas here today including many members of our administration and former members of our administration i want to welcome you here i often i miss it when you don t come by and now i know how to get you back so thank you as all of you know we re here to congratulate the 1999 stanley cup winners the dallas stars ice hockey is a fascinating game but for those of us who grew up in the south we know it s normally dominated by people north of the mason dixon line there was not a skating rink in my hometown until i was over 40 years old but the dallas stars changed the perception of hockey they were the first sun belt team to win hockey s holy grail in the 107 year history of the contest so now dallas will be known not just for the cowboys and super bowls but for the stars and the stanley cup it occurred to me when i was getting ready for this that hockey is a lot like washington politics it s a rough game with a lot of lead changes and usually you never know who s going to win until the final moment and that is of course literally what happened last june in game 6 when the stars clinched their first cup three overtimes 111 minutes all of us even people like me who don t skate very well on the edge of our seats we watched ed belfour block shot after shot mvp joe nieuwendyk leading the charge on offense and i still remember when brett hull shoveled the last puck past dominik hasek a man i once met in buffalo to capture the win i would be afraid to try to put anything past the guy this was a very impressive game to those who are initiated and those who are becoming initiated into the thrills of professional hockey opening and closing the year with a win over the sabres that final game was a perfect ending to a nearly perfect season the dallas stars not only took home the cup but also the president s award with the best record in the league for the second year in a row and i want to also acknowledge someone who is not here today the coach every good coach i know and i ve been privileged to know quite a few great ones always say that the players make great coaches but great coaches also help the players bring out the best and play as a team the stanley cup is the oldest athletic trophy in north america so it s about more than winning it embodies our fascination with athletics with determination with teamwork all the dallas stars earned this cup and after seeing wednesday night s victory over the devils i see you re not going to give it up without a fight i like people who don t give it up without a fight congratulations to all of you and now i d like to ask the commissioner of the national hockey league gary bettman to say a few words you may have noticed today that i had this tie on we had the annual speaker s st patrick s day lunch today a day early up on capitol hill so maybe i should just wear this tomorrow this is great thank you very much thank you dem wjclinton16 3 98a bill_clinton thank you tom steve lynn terry ladies and gentlemen thank you all for being here tonight for your support for the democratic party and especially for the business council the two things that i really like that have kind of flowered in the last five years since i ve been here for our party are this democratic business council and the women s leadership forum and hillary is in georgia tonight at a wlf meeting we really believe in what they have done to broaden the base of the democratic party not just the financial base but also the political base of the party bringing people in and giving them a voice and giving them a chance to be heard and bringing in new areas of expertise that have made a real difference to us and so i thank you for that i was sitting here tonight wondering what i ought to say one of you gave me this little cup of coffee with my name on it a little cup if this is the case we won t have any small coffees at the white house i thought that was pretty funny another one of you in the line said that your 96 year old grandmother said to tell the president that he and that young man are doing a good job i said who s the young man and she said al gore that really hurt today i did two things that embody what i hope the next three years will be about namely taking advantage of these good times the first balanced budget in a generation the lowest unemployment and the lowest crime rate in 24 years the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years the highest homeownership in history the lowest inflation in 30 years these good times taking advantage of them and preparing for the long term prosperity and success of the american people and trying to advance the cause of peace and freedom and prosperity throughout the world i started the day by going out to a high school in suburban maryland and meeting with two dozen other people including the superintendent of schools in new york city the mayor of los angeles the governors of west virginia and maryland and any number of other experts who came together to sit and talk with me educational experts about a big part of one of our country s most profound challenges and that is the low level of performance of our high school seniors on international math and science tests one example of the general problem which is as follows everybody in this country and everybody in the world with an informed opinion would tell you that the united states is fortunate enough to have the best system of higher education in the world no one with an informed opinion would assert that we have the best system of elementary and secondary education in the world and yet we have a lot of wonderful people out there giving their careers to teaching and we have example after example after example of schools that are succeeding against all the odds now this school that i visited in maryland today had white and african american and hispanic and indian and pakistani students and arab american students it was an amazing a lot of asian american students it was an amazing myriad of our country just up the road in maryland and they have quite high levels of performance in math and science so i went there to talk about it and two of the people on the panel were the teacher a japanese american a physics teacher and a student a hispanic a young woman who was a student there and we talked about what we could do to improve math and science education and i talked about our plans to hook up every classroom and library in every school in america to the internet by the year 2000 when we started in 94 only 34 percent of the schools were hooked up today 75 percent of the schools are hooked up that s not every classroom in every school but at least we ve got some hookups to the internet in 75 percent of the schools in america now so we re moving we talked about the plan to certify 100 000 master teachers to make absolutely sure that they are academically well qualified to the highest degree and then to get those people paid more so we can put one master teacher in every school building in america to try to change the culture of learning and the standards of learning we talked about the need to give teachers who are in the work force the ability to go back and train get higher levels of training this is the only country in the world where you have large numbers of people teaching math and science courses that they did not major in or minor in in college simply because of the shortage that exists and if we don t do something it s likely to get worse there are over 350 000 vacancies in information technology today in america with an average starting salary of 48 000 a year the average salary of all teachers including the most senior in america in the wealthiest school district the average salary is not close to 48 000 a year so this is a formidable challenge but the good news is i had two dozen really smart americans from all walks of life there in this wonderful american school and we were working on it and we believe we can do something about it we know we have to have more courses offered we know we have to train the teachers better we know we have to find more funds for these shortage areas but i also told the students with whom i spoke later and i actually didn t get booed when i said it that i thought they should be required to take chemistry and physics and calculus and trigonometry and that they would all need it and that we had opened the doors to college to everyone with the balanced budget plan with the hope scholarships and all the other incentives they needed to have to do this and once i assured the seniors that didn t mean they had to stay another year in high school i got a pretty high level of support for this proposition i think part of it is sibling malice they liked the idea that their younger brothers and sisters might have a bigger burden than they did but seriously it was a very good thing and i thought this is what we ought to be doing while we have the national self confidence and the emotional room we ought to be thinking about these big problems down the road and we ought to be moving on them and tonight before i came over here i began true to my dear ancestors i began what will be about a 30 hour marathon effort to close as many gaps as i can in the irish peace process because all the major players in the irish peace process are coming to america for st patrick s day which will be tomorrow and it s very good my cassidy relatives in ireland sent my daughter an irish cross my wife an irish pin sent me green cufflinks to wear tomorrow and two green ties i have to chide them the two green ties were made in italy but they re beautiful nonetheless and i thought to myself this is what we ought to be doing because the united states is fortunate that at the end of the cold war we don t feel our security immediately threatened we need to be able to stand up for the long term we need to imagine what europe can be like if the irish are at peace what europe can be like if the bosnian peace process works what europe can be like if the difficulties in kosovo are not allowed to engulf the balkans in a new controversy and we have the capacity to effect this hillary and i are leaving on sunday to go to africa it will be the first time an american president a serving american president has ever made a tour of sub saharan africa president carter and president reagan made brief stops in one country no american president has been to these five countries where i m going in the way i m going the house of representatives in a bipartisan fashion passed the africa trade initiative a few days ago and i hope the senate will pass it soon a big part of our future will be caught up in what happens in africa if africa succeeds in developing stable market oriented democracies then it s a big market opportunity for the united states if africa should become convulsed again in a whole round of political turmoil civil war economic degradation there will be consequences that we will feel here so i thought to myself as we were preparing for that today this is what we ought to be doing i met last week late last week with the medicare commission we are now meeting for a year we ve got a commission that i ve appointed along with congressional leaders to try to look at the long run health and viability of the medicare program tomorrow senator moynihan and i and others are going to announce his support for our medicare legislation to let people between the ages of 55 and 65 who don t have health insurance buy into medicare if they can do it without burdening the trust fund these are the kinds of things we ought to be doing i say this just to tell you that there is a direct connection between your support through this business council of our party and what we are doing that will change the lives of the future of the american people that s what you have to understand lois capps just won this great race in california an unbelievable victory now in washington people tend to see every victory or defeat in great national terms i basically spent enough time out there in the country to know that that s almost always wrong it s against my self interest to say it probably but it s wrong she won because she s a magnificent person because her late husband was a wonderful man because she ran a great grass roots campaign but the important thing is that the issues she ran on and won on are the issues that were embodied in the state of the union are the issues that are embodied in the message of our party and the future we re trying to build for america don t squander the surplus until you save social security first pass the patient s bill of rights focus on education focus on the environment focus on the long run challenges of the country that s what we are doing here that s what you are a part of that s what we want you to be a part of so when you go home tonight you ought to ask yourself and make sure you can give an answer why did i go to that dinner tonight why did i write that check you should know that because of your support your country is stronger we re moving in the right direction and we re thinking about tomorrow thank you very much god bless you dem wjclinton16 3 98b bill_clinton thank you very much mr durso thank you for welcoming me here to springbrook secretary riley thank you for bringing me along i want to introduce the secretary of education dick riley the secretary of energy federico pena i thank governor glendening and senator sarbanes and congressman wynn and the maryland state superintendent nancy grasmick your president of the school board nancy king and all the other people from maryland who have made us feel so welcome the governor of west virginia governor underwood and the mayor of los angeles mayor riordan and other people who were on our panel over there i d like for all the people who came from all over america to be with us to stand up rudy crew the superintendent of new york many other leaders there thank you all very much those people came from all over america today to your school to discuss one very important thing for your future how can we improve the learning of american students in math and science on the edge of a new century and a new millennium where so much of the public welfare and so much of people s individual lives will be determined by whether they understand and can use and apply math and science and i think you ought to give them a hand for doing that now you may know all this but i want to give you a few facts to try to demonstrate to you why whether you know anything about math and science no matter what you do with your life is likely to make a big difference for example in 1993 when i became president and all of you were in an earlier grade in 1993 now just five years ago there were only 50 50 sites on the web on the world wide web 50 total today millions of americans and millions of organizations have web pages up from 50 in 1993 the white house has one your school newspaper has one my cat has won 1 5 million new pages are created every day 65 000 every hour today every one of you is just a click of a mouse away from some of the finest libraries in the world and someday before long you ll be able to reach every book every symphony every painting ever created through the web i know that bill nye talked to you about science in ways that were probably infinitely more entertaining than anything i could say but i d like to say a couple of serious things to you our scientists are on the verge of making dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer spinal cord injury other serious diseases we have just had a rover on mars we re about to put an international space station in the sky the size of three football fields for in effect permanent human residence in space in the 1980s it took nine years for scientists to identify the gene that causes cystic fibrosis last year because of improvements in genetic research it took nine days to identify the gene that causes parkinson s disease we re on our way to developing gene chips that will help us prevent illnesses in people even before they happen a lot of you young people here today by the time you have your first child and you bring your baby home from the hospital you will actually be able to have a genetic map which will tell you what your child s genetic strengths are and weaknesses what the likely problems your child could have are what kind of diet your child should follow what kind of regime you should follow to guarantee your child has the healthiest possible future now i guess what i m trying to say is something you doubtless already know but science and technology and mathematics are profoundly important to the way we live but they will be even more important to the way you live you work you relate to other people you relate to people all the way around the world now i know here that preparing for that kind of future is a priority you have more computers more students taking computer science than any other school in the county congratulations i hope more students around the country will follow your lead i hope more of you will go on to college and you haven t thought of it i hope you will decide to do it i have worked very hard to make sure that when we start this new century the first two years of college will be as universal as a high school education has been in the latter half of the 20th century why because we know from all of our census data that young people who have at least two years of college education are likely to get a good job with a growing income young people who don t are likely not to get a good job with a growing income and we know that more and more people have to be able not just to know facts but to understand how to use them how to solve problems how to think creatively that s why we ve provided now a hope scholarship a 1 500 tax credit a reduction to help pay for tuition for the first two years of college and tax credits for the junior year and senior year in graduate school as well this is important we ve also simplified the student loan program made interest tax deductible on student loans if you re families or you can save money in an ira and withdraw it to pay for a college education without having to pay any tax on it we ve increased the number of pell grants and the number of work study slots and provided for more positions in americorps for people to earn money to go to college by doing community service all of this is designed not only to help you individually but to make your country stronger because we will need higher levels of education among all our young people in the new century every one of you and i wanted to be able to look at every young person in america dead in the eye and say i don t care what your family s income is i don t care what your racial or ethnic background is i don t care how many struggles you ve had to overcome you will be able to afford to go to college because we have created a system which makes it possible for you now here s the problem that we face today here s why all of these people came here not everybody in america has access to the same level of science and math and technology opportunities you do and not everybody in america and i ll bet you not even everybody in this school who should be taking these courses is taking them and that has given us a huge national headache earlier this month we learned that in the third international math and science test which compares performance of american students with students around the world that our seniors ranked near the bottom ahead of only two other countries out of 21 in math and science performance now by contrast we ranked right at the top in math and science performance at the 4th grade right at the top we ranked second in math and tied for second in science by the 8th grade we drop to about the middle of the pack by the 12 grade we re ahead of only two other countries this country is still the science and mathematics and technology and research capital of the world but how long can we go on doing that when we need this knowledge to be more widely shared and we know that only a few people have it that is the challenge so i say to you it s not just important for you to know more math and science personally it s important for your country and your future that people like you all over this country know more as well so what are we going to do about it listen to this half of all college bound seniors in america forget about the people not going to college half of all the people that are going to college have not taken physics or trigonometry three quarters have not taken calculus students around the world have to take these courses to get out of high school in country after country after country so i say to you whether you have to or not you should take trig you should take calculus and you should take physics no matter what you do for the rest of your life it will help you and you should take them now let me also say that we have some things to do we have to make sure that all of our teachers have the chance to be properly trained let s face it you know there are almost 400 000 openings right now in america in computer science the average entry level salary is 48 000 a year that ought to get you interested in taking them in college the average teacher s salary in america for all teachers including those that have been teaching 30 years the average salary is well below 48 000 a year what a 22 year old or a 23 year old person can earn coming out of college with this kind of background so i want to say something else to you you ve got a good teacher and you know your teacher is doing this i ve just told you that your teacher could leave walk out tomorrow and go make 50 000 doing something else you ought to thank your teachers for being here and educating you and supporting you and i ll tell you what we re going to try to do we are going to do our best to make sure that schools and school districts and states have the resources to train teachers properly we re going to challenge all the states to require that the teachers who are teaching courses have real adequate academic preparation in the courses they re teaching i m going to urge more and more states and school districts to require you to take more math and science just to get out of high school in the first place but before all that happens well you re seniors it s too late i don t mean we re going to impose something on you i don t mean you have to stay but you think about this you think about this if you have a little brother or a little sister in the 9th grade or the 8th grade or the 7th grade or the 6th grade wouldn t you like to know that when your brother or sister gets out of high school if they want to go to college they can and wouldn t you like to know that everybody who gets out of high school six years from now will be able to compete with everybody else in the world when they get out of high school six years from now isn t this something we owe each other to make every succeeding year better and better and better so i say this even though if you re a senior and you think oh my goodness i m so glad that bill clinton didn t come to my school and give this speech five years ago because they might have changed the rules and made me take all these courses even if you think that you should want your brothers and sisters coming up behind you to take all these courses because it will be better for our country and for your future if we do it i ve been told that the motto of this school is we expect we believe we achieve well when i look at you and i think of where we re going in math and science i expect america to lead the way i believe in you to be on the forefront of that it s up to you to achieve thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 4 98b bill_clinton mr president mrs frei members of the chilean government citizens of this great nation on behalf of my wife our administration the members of congress and our entire party i thank you for the warm welcome we have received and i understand that i should thank you in advance for your patience because the great gathering of this coming week will probably create the biggest taco in your history for those in our delegation who don t know that means traffic jam mr president it was just over a year ago that hillary and i hosted you and martita for a state visit in washington on that trip you delivered a powerful address to a joint session of our congress now i will have the opportunity and the honor of addressing your parliament tomorrow the short time between our visits reflects the growing strength and the growing importance of our relations chile is admired in the united states and around the world for its natural beauty its writers and artists its athletes its leadership in seeking peace in volatile regions its remarkable economic growth and stability and the bravery of your people in restoring longstanding democracy after two turbulent decades that chile is host to the second summit of the americas shows the esteem in which your country is held in this hemisphere it also demonstrates mr president the great respect you have earned among your fellow leaders who are proud to be coming here for this meeting some see you mr president as a man of calm reserve a civil engineer who as you just said expertly builds bridges to improve the lives of your fellow citizens but it seems to me there may be another side to you it is said that you love opera and the tango hardly the stuff of dry engineering and when you addressed our congress last year the first person you quoted was not some grey suited economist but that great political leader don quixote de la mancha the words of the noble don you selected go to the core of our shared values so let me repeat them tonight freedom is one of the most precious gifts heaven bestows on man all the treasure of earth cannot equal it mr president we have seen that like your father before you you care passionately about the freedom of your people and about the least fortunate in your society i m sure your father was in your thoughts when in your very first address as chile s president you pledged to bring hope and dignity to the poorest of your fellow citizens you ve worked hard to ensure that your growing prosperity will benefit not just the few but everyone and mrs frei deserves great credit for her active work on behalf of the poor women and children and chilean artisans the united states wants to deepen our partnership with chile across the whole range of challenges and opportunities we share strengthening democracy improving education protecting the environment preserving the peace and yet expanding trade our meeting today furthered all these goals i know we will continue to do the same so much is at stake working with the chilean people and with you mr president is a great honor for me my government and our citizens in the darkest days of the past year when dissent was suppressed when people were denied a meaningful vote and true leaders denied the chance to lead the chilean people never abandoned hope that one day things would get better now because of your hope the courage the vision of your leadership and your people things are indeed better much better better in a way that is a beacon of hope to people throughout this hemisphere and indeed perhaps more than you know throughout the world now the united states and chile celebrate together the precious gifts of freedom and prosperity and our determination to support democracy and to advance prosperity all across the americas and throughout the world for all that you have done and the reception we have received and for all that we must do together for tomorrow i am honored to invite all of you to join me in a toast to the president the first lady and the people of chile dem wjclinton16 4 99 bill_clinton well first of all i would like to thank senator kennedy and senator daschle for their introductions i don t want senator kennedy to be upset at senator daschle i told senator daschle i did not want kennedy to introduce me and he drew the wrong conclusion i just didn t want patrick up here making those gestures introducing me i tell you patrick i have never heard you so funny you ve got a second career like everyone else i want to thank alan and susan and all of the others who helped to raise the funds tonight i d also like to thank the people who provided our meal and those who served it and i want to thank our wonderful wonderful musicians gary burton and his pianist they were terrific thank you very much you guys were great thank you as senator kennedy said i am profoundly indebted to the people of massachusetts massachusetts has been wonderful to me and to hillary to al and to tipper gore to give our administration the support that we need and to send such remarkable people to the congress a majority of all of the congress people from massachusetts all democrats are here tonight and i thank congressman moakley congressman delahunt and congressman meehan congressman markey and congressman tierney along with congressman kennedy we re also glad to be joined tonight by congressman earl blumenauer who is from oregon he s a long way from home and we re glad he s here thank you very much and our wonderful democratic whip dave bonior who took me to his district in michigan today to meet with the albanian americans and to hear their stories along with congressman gephardt i too want to say how profoundly grateful i am for what senator kerry said how much it means and for what he does for you and for senator kennedy and as others have said we could not have better leaders in the united states congress than senator daschle and congressman gephardt i could give you 1 000 examples but suffice it to say that i do not believe that we would be here tonight in the position we re in with the country in the position it is in had it not been for their leadership and their support for me and their always willingness to come in and have these fascinating discussions and even when they think i m wrong to tell me they think i m wrong and we try to work it out work together and go forward together and it s been a remarkable partnership i also would say to echo something dick gephardt said and i want all of you to know you know most of you have been to enough of these political fundraisers that you re used to politicians getting up and blowing smoke over one another you know and saying that they think this one is the greatest person since the redwoods began to grow in california and all of that the other one was born in a log cabin he built himself all of those you re used to hearing all that sort of stuff i know that and you think that we all leave we go back to telling bad stories on one another and cutting each other down i m telling you the team of leaders we have now and the people that represent you in massachusetts there is a profound mutual respect borne of shared goals and shared dreams for the american people i told all my folks when i became president i said i didn t work in washington before and i m going to make my fair share of mistakes but one of the great advantages that i have is that i lived in a little state where i was expected to show up for work every day and where i didn t have to spend half my time worrying about what was in the newspaper that day and who was up and who was down and who was leaking and who was not and my theory is if we stay together and work together and we re loyal to each other and we air our differences honestly and we show up for work every day eventually something good will happen for the american people now i think the evidence is that that happened but what you need to know is that s the sort of leadership we have in our party dick and david and tom and the rest of our crowd they re like what you expect from the massachusetts delegation they show up for work every day they do not get paralyzed by this story or that story or spending all their time trying to manipulate who s up and who s down in washington today they have an agenda rooted in their concerns for you and our children s future and they show up and it s just like any other job i know we d like for you to believe that you ve got to be just one step short of albert einstein to do all these jobs we do but a lot of it is deciding what the right thing to do is clearly laying it out and going at it day and day out year in and year out so i want to thank you for investing in the future of the democratic majority in the congress because they have proved for six long years that they have good ideas good values and great work habits and they will deliver for the united states of america thanks to your help and i thank you very much i also want to say alan thank you very much for collecting the money for the relief effort in kosovo let me just briefly say the camps in albania are teeming tiny macedonia with its own ethnic difficulties to deal with trying to preserve its democracy it s deeply strained we need all the help we can get and frankly the relief agencies are very very good they are very efficient they don t waste the money and cash is better than in kind contributions because the needs shift daily and anything you can do to help that i hope you will now i m not going to put you through another speech of any length but i want to take five minutes and ask you to think about why you should want these people in the majority in 2000 and when it happens i m going to miss it but i just want to tell you for five minutes i want you to think about this yes our economy is going well and i m grateful for it and welfare rolls are about half what they were and i m grateful for it and the crime rate is at a 30 year low and i m grateful for it america is working again and we ve been a force for peace from northern ireland to the middle east and to bosnia and i m grateful for it we ve asked the world to join with us in fighting the more modern threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and global warming and we ve got a direction that we re on that s good and i m grateful for it but i want to ask you to just take a couple of minutes and think about why you should want these people in the majority because in the year 2000 when the voters are asked to vote there will be those who come forward and say well things are rocking along and i ll tell you what you want to hear and i ll give you what you want to get and let s just go back to business as usual the worst thing we could do is to forget what got us here over the last six years what got us here was taking on the hard problems and working like crazy day in and day out week in and week out and challenging the american people and challenging the elite leaders of all the major sectors of our society to think about unmet problems and unseized opportunities and as i look ahead to the 21st century i am grateful america is working again i m grateful that the economy is benefitting ordinary people more than ever before we have the lowest unemployment rate we ve ever recorded among minorities in this country since we started keeping separate statistics almost 30 years ago i m grateful for that but we have some big unmet challenges and i won t go through our whole agenda but we ve got an agenda to deal with every one the aging of america is a huge challenge and if we don t deal with social security and medicare and long term care and do it in a responsible way then when all of us baby boomers retire we will put an unconscionable burden on our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren we have a strategy that will deal with it we have more and more families who work and raise children at the same time both single parent and two parent households we have not done enough in the united states to help people balance work and family we are better than any other major country at creating jobs we have many strengths that other countries would give anything to have but we have not done as well as we should and as well as we can without in any way hurting economic growth and helping our families to balance their child rearing responsibilities and their work responsibilities we have to do more in health care more in child care more in providing leave time from work without losing jobs we must do it there is no more important work than raising our children and we can do better the third thing we have to do is to make sure we re democrats this is our job we have to make sure everybody gets a chance to be a part of the new economy as low as unemployment is there are still places where it s high there are places where there has been no new investment we have a strategy to keep the economy growing and to spread the benefits of it for one thing if our plan prevails over the republican plan we re going to pay the debt of this country down to its lowest point since before world war i over the next 15 years that means low interest rates high investment and more jobs everywhere and we re going to give the same incentives for people to invest in poor parts of america we give them today to invest in poor countries in the rest of the world i think that is nothing but right don t take it away from the rest of the world just give the poor parts of america a chance to get their piece of the american dream as well and i think that is terribly important and democrats ought to be for that we have to keep working to prove we can clean up the environment and grow the economy and we have an agenda to do that the most important thing i want to say to you tonight is that we have a job to do at home that mirrors the job we are trying to do in kosovo today isn t it ironic that on the verge of a new century and a new millennium where most of us most of the people in this room have this great dream of a 21st century world that is more peaceful more prosperous and more free than any time in all of human history where people work together across national lines to lift each other up and solve problems together whether they re the spread of disease or climate change or the threat of terrorism or narco trafficking or weapons of mass destruction we re working together to make good things happen and to press bad things down and this whole vision with this explosion of modern technology and science is threatened by the prospect that we will marry modern technology with the most ancient hatreds known to human society rooted in the fear of people who are different from us now we are in kosovo i think dick referred to this to the e mails we were reading coming out of albania we re in kosovo first of all because innocent people are being driven from their homes having their villages burned down having their family records destroyed with their children being raped and people being murdered because we think we can help to stop it and because we have learned the hard way in the 20th century if something like that s going on and you think you can help to stop it and you don t and that part of the world is just going to get worse so it s a humanitarian thing but it s also a part of what we want the 21st century to be like doesn t it seem bizarre to you that on the one hand we talk about the internet being the fastest growing human communication system in all of human history we talk about having our kids study halfway around the world we relish in the ethnic and racial and religious diversity of boston detroit we used to think of detroit as being diverse because and i can say this because i m from the south because southern blacks and southern whites couldn t make a living in the south after the second world war so they went to detroit to get a job in the auto plant that was our definition of diversity wayne county now has people from 150 different national ethnic groups not chicago not new york not los angeles detroit and we re sitting here worried about people who still want to kill each other over 600 year old grievances they want to fight over smaller and smaller and smaller pieces of land instead of thinking bigger and bigger and bigger about how if they all got together what a future they could make for their children and so i tell you that we re there for humanitarian reasons we re there for strategic reasons and we re there because we do not want our children to live in a 21st century world where very smart people filled with very narrow hatreds can access technology weaponry missile technology and torment the world because they re growing smaller in spirit when they should be growing larger in vision especially in the heart of europe which is so critical to our security and we have to keep working against it here which is why the democrats are for stronger hate crimes legislation and for the employment and nondiscrimination act and why we have supported national service alan kash is here he founded city year i m the biggest flak he s got i go all over the world talking about city year i knew when i ran for president in 1991 and 1992 that one of the things that we needed to do was to build a stronger sense of community in america across racial and cultural and religious and economic lines and i had this vision that we could get young people involved in service and help them go to college and i went to city year in boston and i knew what it was i wanted america to do i m very proud of the fact that in its first four years the national service program americorps has had as many volunteers as the peace corps did in its first 20 years and you owe that to them now i want to close with this thought one of my favorite lines that president kennedy ever spoke was the speech he made about germany and the cold war in berlin most people remember ich bin ein berliner and all that but he said this i want you to think about this in terms of kosovo in the middle of the cold war john kennedy said freedom has many difficulties and our democracy is far from perfect but we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in now the berlin wall is down the barriers of communism have fallen but all over the world today there are places where people are building walls in their hearts because they feel that they only count if they can look down on somebody who is different from them and those walls are every bit as powerful as the berlin wall was and in a profound way harder to tear down america must both do good and be good on this issue of community and our common humanity it is our great challenge and perhaps the most compelling reason that the democratic party should be america s majority party in the 21st century thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton16 5 00 bill_clinton first of all i want you to know how i came to be here tonight but before we knew exactly when hillary was going to give her speech i agreed to appear tonight at the mexican american legal defense fund and to a campaign event for the democratic senate campaign committee so i told all that group i said i ve been with you folks a long time and if you ll let me go hear my wife give a speech i ll do any event you want anywhere in america any time and i told the democratic senate campaign committee that the senate campaign i was most interested in was otherwise occupied tonight and i was going there so i m delighted to see you and i want to thank judith hope for doing a wonderful job as the chair a lot of you don t know this but judith hope grew up in warren arkansas in a community that i never failed to carry as governor proof positive that people from arkansas can do very well in new york i want to thank all the leaders of congress and the state legislature and your state officials who are here with me tonight and my good friend andrew cuomo for the wonderful job he s done as our hud secretary i want to ask you one question did hillary give a great speech tonight i was sitting next to senator moynihan and she kept going over all these issues and senator moynihan looked at me and he said good speech now that would be like the rest of us who into the gettysburg address and i knew that she was on a roll i want to say three things very quickly first of all i do not have the words to express to the people of new york my gratitude for the primary victory in 92 for the magnificent convention in 92 for the overwhelming margin of victory in 92 and the even bigger margin of victory you gave to me and to al gore in 1996 i will never forget it the second thing i want to say is that i am profoundly grateful to you for the way you have embraced hillary and the way you supported her tonight and the way you have been helping her and i thank you for that but i can tell you this that she will not disappoint you she ll be one of the great senators this country has ever and the last thing i want to say is this on this night we ve had a lot of fun and big tests facing new york and america is what are we going to do with this magic moment of prosperity we have all worked so hard for and a moment like this imposes a test on people just as severe as great adversity does when we were flat on our back in the depression and we elected franklin roosevelt president we did in part out of desperation we knew we had to have somebody who was upbeat and strong and who would try new things when i was elected president in 1992 the american people took a huge chance i was just as president bush used to say the governor of a small southern state and i was so dumb and inexperienced i thought he was complimenting me i was kind of proud of it but we were feeling rather desperate and now we feel good but i was so proud by the response you gave hillary tonight because this is a great test for us and make no mistake about it this election in 2000 is every bit as important as the election in 96 was every bit as important as the election in 92 was i worked so hard for eight years with clearly the finest and most effective vice president in the history of the united states to turn this country around now we ve got a campaign and the people have to choose and the republicans are telling us they re compassionate and they re saying i m for all the same things that they re for we re just doing it a little different and we want to give you a whole lot bigger tax cut we ll give you everything else you ever dreamed of and it s all sort of being blurred what i want to tell you is if you believe the things that hillary said that you clapped for tonight if you believe that she s worth fighting for then you have to believe me i m not running for anything but i know a little something about american history it may be 30 it may be 50 it may be 80 or 100 years before our country ever has so much prosperity so much social progress so little internal crisis and external threat as we have today we are being tested as surely as if we were in the middle of war or a depression and we are being tested it s easy for us to be distracted and i m telling you if you want this to go on if you want to continue to change in this direction you ve got to elect al gore you ve got to elect hillary you ve got to elect these democrats who have supported this direction i will do my best to be a supporting part in that the next senator of new york my wife dem wjclinton16 5 97 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen on sunday mr shaw will celebrate his 95th birthday i would like to recognize the other survivors who are here today and their families mr charlie pollard is here mr carter howard mr fred simmons mr simmons just took his first airplane ride and he reckons he s about 110 years old so i think it s time for him to take a chance or two i m glad he did and mr frederick moss thank you sir i would also like to ask three family representatives who are here sam doner is represented by his daughter gwendolyn cox thank you gwendolyn ernest hendon who is watching in tuskegee is represented by his brother north hendon thank you sir for being here and george key is represented by his grandson christopher monroe thank you chris i also acknowledge the families community leaders teachers and students watching today by satellite from tuskegee the white house is the people s house we are glad to have all of you here today i thank dr david satcher for his role in this i thank congresswoman waters and congressman hilliard congressman stokes the entire congressional black caucus dr satcher members of the cabinet who are here secretary herman secretary slater members of the cabinet who are here secretary herman secretary slater a great friend of freedom fred gray thank you for fighting this long battle all these long years the eight men who are survivors of the syphilis study at tuskegee are a living link to a time not so very long ago that many americans would prefer not to remember but we dare not forget it was a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideals when our nation broke the trust with our people that is the very foundation of our democracy it is not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future and without remembering it we cannot make amends and we cannot go forward so today america does remember the hundreds of men used in research without their knowledge and consent we remember them and their family members men who were poor and african american without resources and with few alternatives they believed they had found hope when they were offered free medical care by the united states public health service they were betrayed medical people are supposed to help when we need care but even once a cure was discovered they were denied help and they were lied to by their government our government is supposed to protect the rights of its citizens their rights were trampled upon forty years hundreds of men betrayed along with their wives and children along with the community in macon county alabama the city of tuskegee the fine university there and the larger african american community the united states government did something that was wrong deeply profoundly morally wrong it was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens to the survivors to the wives and family members the children and the grandchildren i say what you know no power on earth can give you back the lives lost the pain suffered the years of internal torment and anguish what was done cannot be undone but we can end the silence we can stop turning our heads away we can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the american people what the united states government did was shameful and i am sorry the american people are sorry for the loss for the years of hurt you did nothing wrong but you were grievously wronged i apologize and i am sorry that this apology has been so long in coming to macon county to tuskegee to the doctors who have been wrongly associated with the events there you have our apology as well to our african american citizens i am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist that can never be allowed to happen again it is against everything our country stands for and what we must stand against is what it was so let us resolve to hold forever in our hearts and minds the memory of a time not long ago in macon county alabama so that we can always see how adrift we can become when the rights of any citizens are neglected ignored and betrayed and let us resolve here and now to move forward together the legacy of the study at tuskegee has reached far and deep in ways that hurt our progress and divide our nation we cannot be one america when a whole segment of our nation has no trust in america an apology is the first step and we take it with a commitment to rebuild that broken trust we can begin by making sure there is never again another episode like this one we need to do more to ensure that medical research practices are sound and ethical and that researchers work more closely with communities today i would like to announce several steps to help us achieve these goals first we will help to build that lasting memorial at tuskegee the school founded by booker t washington distinguished by the renowned scientist george washington carver and so many others who advanced the health and well being of african americans and all americans is a fitting site the department of health and human services will award a planning grant so the school can pursue establishing a center for bioethics in research and health care the center will serve as a museum of the study and support efforts to address its legacy and strengthen bioethics training second we commit to increase our community involvement so that we may begin restoring lost trust the study at tuskegee served to sow distrust of our medical institutions especially where research is involved since the study was halted abuses have been checked by making informed consent and local review mandatory in federally funded and mandated research still 25 years later many medical studies have little african american participation and african american organ donors are few this impedes efforts to conduct promising research and to provide the best health care to all our people including african americans so today i m directing the secretary of health and human services donna shalala to issue a report in 180 days about how we can best involve communities especially minority communities in research and health care you must every american group must be involved in medical research in ways that are positive we have put the curse behind us now we must bring the benefits to all americans third we commit to strengthen researchers training in bioethics we are constantly working on making breakthroughs in protecting the health of our people and in vanquishing diseases but all our people must be assured that their rights and dignity will be respected as new drugs treatments and therapies are tested and used so i am directing secretary shalala to work in partnership with higher education to prepare training materials for medical researchers they will be available in a year they will help researchers build on core ethical principles of respect for individuals justice and informed consent and advise them on how to use these principles effectively in diverse populations fourth to increase and broaden our understanding of ethical issues and clinical research we commit to providing postgraduate fellowships to train bioethicists especially among african americans and other minority groups hhs will offer these fellowships beginning in september of 1998 to promising students enrolled in bioethics graduate programs and finally by executive order i am also today extending the charter of the national bioethics advisory commission to october of 1999 the need for this commission is clear we must be able to call on the thoughtful collective wisdom of experts and community representatives to find ways to further strengthen our protections for subjects in human research we face a challenge in our time science and technology are rapidly changing our lives with the promise of making us much healthier much more productive and more prosperous but with these changes we must work harder to see that as we advance we don t leave behind our conscience no ground is gained and indeed much is lost if we lose our moral bearings in the name of progress the people who ran the study at tuskegee diminished the stature of man by abandoning the most basic ethical precepts they forgot their pledge to heal and repair they had the power to heal the survivors and all the others and they did not today all we can do is apologize but you have the power for only you mr shaw the others who are here the family members who are with us in tuskegee only you have the power to forgive your presence here shows us that you have chosen a better path than your government did so long ago you have not withheld the power to forgive i hope today and tomorrow every american will remember your lesson and live by it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 5 99 bill_clinton thank you very much first i would like to say to elias and jodi we re grateful to be here and thank you for turning the muzak off and all the televisions i couldn t compete with them and i thank you for being my friend for so many years when i was up and when i was down and for being my mother s friend something i will never forget and for having me into your home for the second time i thank senators reid and landrieu and senator bryan and bonnie for being here and representative berkeley newly married glad that larry came and your attorney general frankie sue del papa mayor jones and former governor miller and his wife who as of this morning is dr miller so we have to be appropriately respectful there former congressman bill bray my good friend and chairman andrew and beth dozoretz our national finance chair and her husband ron and to all of you my old friends in las vegas and some of you i have not met before i m delighted to be here i was sitting here thinking you know i ve had a rather rigorous schedule last week i went to europe to germany to see our forces who are involved in the operation in kosovo and then to meet with the refugees and then i had to go right down to texas and then to oklahoma to see the aftermath of the worst the most powerful tornado ever measured in the history of the united states down there and then i came back to washington and then i came right back out here a couple of days later and i was in seattle northern california los angeles san diego and now i m here so i m slightly disoriented and i was wondering if maybe rich little would come and give the speech for me we would never know the difference and if you got tired of me then you could hear president carter president reagan president nixon you know sort of a little walk through of american history thank you for coming i won t take a lot of time today i enjoyed having a chance to visit with all of you in the line i would like to begin with what is to me the most obvious thing about this day i want to thank all of you who brought your children here i m delighted to see all these young people here when i ran for president in 1991 when i made the decision it was believe it or not a rather difficult one for me to make because our daughter was in the 8th grade or then finishing the 7th grade she was happy as a clam and doing well and hillary and i were doing well we had our friends and i had been governor for at that time i was in my 11th year and believe it or not i was still having a great time i loved my state i loved my job and i decided to run because i was convinced that our country was sort of stumbling toward the 21st century with no governing vision that would create an america where every person who would be responsible enough to work for it would have opportunity where all the diversity that you see so glittering in this room all the differences among us would be respected even celebrated but where our common sense of humanity would give us a stronger american community as we grow more diverse and where our country would still be the world s most important force for peace and freedom and prosperity i knew i believed and now i believe more strongly that to have that kind of vision come alive in the 21st century we had to be able to deal with what was going on here that is different and what is going on here that is different we re in the middle of the biggest explosion of technology in the history of the country in the history of the world we also are seeing the shattering of all kinds of barriers making people ever more interdependent and drawing us closer and closer together across all national lines most of that is quite good but we know there are some serious problems the global economy and the information revolution has made untold numbers of new millionaires but it threatens to leave people without an education behind drawing closer together has given greater mobility greater knowledge greater access to things through the internet and through travel than ever before but the open borders and the internet technology mean that people who want to use it for bad ends can learn how to make bombs on the internet and that the possibilities for collision of terrorism and organized crime and weapons of mass destruction are greater and we have to deal with that and so what i have tried to do for the last six and a half years is to lead first the democratic party and then the nation to a whole different approach to politics nationally to say that we have enough tough decisions to make but we re going to put behind the false ones we believe for example we can grow the economy and reward entrepreneurs and still expand the middle class and give poor people a chance to work their way up we believe that working people should be able to succeed at work but also at home because the most important job of any society is to raise its children well we believe we can improve the economy and actually improve not just protect but improve the environment because we no longer have to use the same energy patterns of the industrial age to grow the economy we believe we can reduce crime by not only prosecuting it more vigorously but by doing a better job of preventing it in the first place we believe we can reduce the welfare rolls without hurting the children on welfare these are things we believe we can do we believe we can be a force for peace from the middle east to northern ireland and still stand up against ethnic cleansing and terrorists and in large measure the work that hillary and i and the vice president and our cabinet our administration and our allies in congress have done the last six years has been a vigorous effort to take these ideas and turn them into policies so they could be made real in the lives of the american people we also have tried to change our notion of the primary role of government i have downsized the government dramatically most people have a hard time believing this but the federal establishment is now almost exactly the size it was when john kennedy was president in 1962 smallest federal government in 37 years now but it is more active and we focus on two things one creating the conditions for prosperity and for security and two giving people the tools to solve their own problems and to make the most of their own lives i am very grateful for all the good things that have happened in america and for whatever force for good we ve been in the world in the last six years and i m grateful for the people who have expressed their support for me through thick and thin but i am here today for the democratic party because what i want you to understand is that while i am grateful i had a chance to serve and i hope that my leadership had something to do with the good things that have happened the most important thing is we had the right vision and the right ideas we had a sense of teamwork and we got up and went to work every day doing the right things and that s why it s important that your congresswoman be reelected that we elect a new democratic senator from this state that we win the presidential election and that we keep the country on the direction it is going i am very grateful to the citizens of this state for voting for me and al gore twice when most people didn t think any democrat would ever win here again and i m very grateful to governor miller and your two senators for making sure that i never made a mistake on a local issue so that at least i wouldn t fall off the knife edge we were on and we could hold on to our victory but what i want you to know when you leave here today is it s important that people who have supported me all these years understand that no person not even the president can have a good impact unless you have a good vision good ideas a good team and you re doing the right things and all of that will be here when i am gone i won t be on the ballot in 2000 but all these issues really matter it matters where we stand on these issues if i could just mention two or three things today in the next two years i m going to do a lot to try to keep this going we were talking the senators and i were on the way in we want to have our version of saving social security and medicare helping people deal with long term care helping people to save more for their own retirement we want to see this debt paid down would have ever though we d be paying the debt down first you thought you d be grateful to see the budget balance we now have the biggest surplus ever i want to pay the debt down i want to pay it down i ll tell you why i ll tell you why i want to pay it down because i know the more we pay it down the more we ll have low interest rates high investment more jobs and better incomes and the less we need to borrow money around the world the more our friends who are in trouble who are our trading partners and our neighbors will be able to borrow money the japanese are in trouble today we want to help them when they do well we do well if they need to borrow money they can borrow it at less cost if we re paying our debt down this is a good thing i want to do some more things in education i m going to spend an enormous amount of time both trying to raise educational standards to bring technology and good facilities and good teachers to all of our kids and continuing to open the doors of college to all americans i want to do that and there are lots of other things but what i want to say today i want to think about one thing we look at these kids and look at this audience look how different we all are look at elias s background the story of the american dream coming out of the middle east coming here without a nickel to his name struggling through college doing all the things that he has done and then marrying way above himself having all these wonderful children look at all these kids here i want you to listen this is the most important thing you know tonight i woke up in the middle of the night and the good lord appeared to me and he said i m sorry but you ve already had a heck of a good life and i m not going to let you do all these things but i will let you do one thing for the next 18 months you only get to do one thing and then here s what my answer would be i would think about littleton colorado and i would think about kosovo and i would say it seems to me supremely ironic and very humbling that here we are on the edge of the 21st century where we have all these wonderful high tech dreams for our kids right i mean these kids can have pen pals in mongolia and botswana and singapore they can look forward to going everywhere doing everything maybe we ll all be living to be 125 years old within 20 years we ll unlock the mysteries of the human gene and all that isn t it ironic that on the verge of such an incredible era of discovery and potential that what we are bedeviled by at home and abroad are the oldest demons of human society these children talking in littleton about how they were disrespected by the athletes so they hated them and then they had to look for someone they could disrespect so they looked down on the minority kids i was in texas the other day with the very pregnant young daughter of james bird the african american man who was dragged to death not very long ago there trying to help them pass the hate crimes legislation the texas legislation the leadership conference on civil rights had its annual dinner last week in washington and i went by and acknowledged the presence of matthew shepard s mother the young man who was murdered in wyoming because he was gay don t you think it s interesting that here we are celebrating all this wonderful high tech modern future and what bedevils us most is the darkness of the heart the fear of the other it is as old as when people first had to join into tribes to stay alive in the cold and to kill game and to live in caves before there was language before there was writing before there was anything and maybe at some point there was some rational reason for it and then as people developed their religious fates very often they fought more over their religious faith than the fact that the color of their skin or the nature of their history was different but when you strip it all away it starts with you re different from me i m afraid of you therefore i don t like you no i take it back i hate you therefore i will dehumanize you therefore it s okay for me to kill you it is a very short step and it is easy for us to demonize others but the truth is every one of us gets up every day with a little light and a little darkness inside and it s almost like they re on scales and we fight this lifelong battle to make sure that the light always outweighs the darkness on the scales so if i were given one wish i would say i would like to build a stronger sense of community in america and i would like to do something to advance a sense of common humanity around the world because if we could do that you and people like you all over our country would take care of the other problems that s why i m for the hate crimes legislation that s why i m for the non discrimination employment bill that s why i m for all these sensible gun control measures that s why i ve asked the whole country to join with hillary and me and al and tipper gore in a national campaign to reduce violence against children that s why i ve spent all my life trying to advance the cause of civil rights that s why i ve worked for peace in the middle east and northern ireland and why i m proud that we stopped the war in bosnia and why i m trying to stop it in kosovo we can t stop every war people have a right even to fight sometimes that s how we after all created our country but on the eve of the 21st century we should say you know you don t have to like each other around the world but we won t tolerate mass killing based on religious and racial and ethnic differences i know that in a world where we re used to seeing the news be different every day it is frustrating to some people that this difficulty in kosovo is not yet done and i know there are many questions about it i wish i had time to spend three or four hours here and answer your questions but i can tell you this i would far rather be here today where we are standing up against ethnic cleansing standing for the rights of a different people not to be exterminated because they happen to be muslims and they happen to have albanian heritage and they happen to have no guns than if i were here asking you to give money to me and to our party and we were sitting on our hands enjoying the sunshine and i had not lifted a finger to stop it and so i leave you with that thought i have tried to make our party a party where all people of goodwill could feel at home and more importantly our country life is infinitely more interesting because it s more different more various look around this room this is an incredible group of people from all over everywhere and if we can respect and celebrate our differences our lives are literally more fun and almost always more profitable but if there are no limits on the importance to which we give our differences life can quickly become unbearable so i ask you to think about that and help us i thank you for your contributions i thank you for your support i thank you for your friendship to elias and jodi i thank you for helping me be president but remember what has made these last six and a half years and what will keep america going for the next 220 years is not any one leader but it s having the right vision and the right ideas and working together and we need more of that thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 6 00a bill_clinton well thank you very much i too want to thank ladane and ed bergassi and the mcgoverns for making this possible and bronx borough president freddy ferrer i m delighted to see you in here we ve been friends a long time now and i m very glad to be here for ed and gwen you know he was asking for that empowerment zone i started to tell him ed that s what fundraisers are empowerment zones for politicians we also have jim mcmanus here who is the president of the manhattan democratic club thank you for coming and a lot of other people who have been active in public affairs in new york a long time let me just say i m honored to be here for ed i like this guy and he has been with me for a very long time i just reminded him that in january of 1992 when i had been a candidate for president for about three months 90 days at a time when only my mother felt i could be elected i spent martin luther king s birthday in his district going to thomas jefferson high school and i remember what it was like there was the sense that these kids really weren t sure anybody cared about them a young person had just been shot in the school a week before the circumstances were heartbreaking and tragic he took me there he wanted me to see those kids he wanted me to hear their stories he wanted me to talk to the people he thought it would be good for me and he thought i needed to represent his people if i intend to be president and i thought i needed to go do you remember at the time i was terribly naive president bush was still referring to me as the governor of a small southern state and i was so naive i thought it was a compliment truth is i still do and what do you know now i m a new yorker and i like that i want to thank you ed for what you said about the empowerment zones it s one of the things we did in our economic plan in 1993 it passed by one vote vice president gore says whenever he votes we win so we had a tie vote he broke the tie we passed the economic plan the deficit came down interest rates came down the economy took off the rest is history but one of the things that was in that economic plan that i might add got no votes from the other party was the provision for empowerment zones to give incentives for people to invest in poor areas and neighborhoods that weren t participating in the mainstream economy i want to say more about that in a moment but tonight i want you to think about this election just for a minute let s be serious just for a minute i won t talk long but i want you to think about it because somebody might ask you why you came here and you ought to have an answer i think the election of 2000 is just as important as the elections of 96 and 92 it s hard for me to say since it s the first time i won t be on the ballot in over 25 years why is that why do i believe that because i think what a country does with its great times can be as stern a test of its judgment and character as what a country does in the face of adversity you know in 92 i m very grateful the state of new york gave me and hillary and al and tipper gore an enormous vote in 92 an even bigger one in 96 and i m very gratified but after all the country was in trouble in 92 so people said well you know maybe this kid is a governor of a small southern state but we re in trouble let s take a chance now i ve done everything i could for seven and a half years to turn this country around to move it in the right direction to get the economy going to build one america to reach across the racial and other lines that divide us to deal with the crime issue the welfare issue the environmental issue the health care issue to do these things seriously to make america a good friend and neighbor to the rest of the world so what are we going to do with the longest expansion in history what are we going to do with the first three years of back to back surpluses in anybody s memory what are we going to do with the virtual certainty that we ll have surpluses for another 10 or 15 years now what do you want to do with that that s really what this election is all about and the person who wins the presidency and the party that wins the house and makes progress in the senate races will depend upon what the american people think the election is about very often the answer to a question depends on what the question is now what i think we ought to be doing is saying hey this won t last forever and we re not going to blow it we re going to make the most of it to build the future of our dreams for our children we re going to take on the big problems that are still out there we re going to seize the biggest opportunity that is there before us we re going to do big important things that s what i think we ought to do i think we ought to make a commitment to keep the economy going to keep paying down the debt and to give economic opportunity to all the neighborhoods that have been left behind that s what my new markets initiative is all about i want to give people like you who can afford to come to this fundraiser the same financial incentives to invest in poor areas in america we give you to invest in poor areas in latin america and africa and asia today i think we ought to make a commitment to eliminate poverty among children in working families and to do more to help families balance work and family with child care and with health care initiatives that working people can afford for their families i think we ought to do more to guarantee excellence in education to all of our kids and access to college to everybody who gets out of high school that s what i think you may not agree with any of this you have to decide i think we ought to do more to roll back the tide of climate change it s going the change life for new yorkers dramatically in the next 30 years if we don t do it for all america and to prove that you can keep cleaning up the environment and growing the economy i think we ought to do more to build one america across all the lines that divide us i think we ought to pass hate crimes legislation i think we ought to pass employment and nondiscrimination legislation i think that we ought to do these things i think we ought to do more to be a force for peace and freedom and decency around the world i don t think we ought to make the u n practically beg us just to pay our dues that we owe we re honored to have the u n it s headquartered in new york we get a lot out of it it s a great source of prestige for our country every time the u n sends a peace keeping mission somewhere it s a place we don t have to send american soldiers and i think it s awful that some in our congress act like they re doing the world a favor when they pay what we owe to the united nations that s what i think and i think we ought to be a better partner and look for more opportunities to work with and through other people in the years ahead but you ve got to decide what you think i think we ought to do more to meet the challenge of the aging of america i m the oldest baby boomer when all of us baby boomers retire there will only be two people working for every one person on social security now there will be more than two people working but there will only be two people working for every one person on social security so what are we going to do well we can have more people on social security working that s why we lifted the earnings limit on social security this year a good thing we all did together with the republicans and the democrats i think we ought to preserve medicare and add a prescription drug benefit if we started a medicare program today for seniors we would never have one without drugs ever but in 1965 when medicare was established being old was a very different thing first of all everybody who lives to be 65 in america today has got a life expectancy of 83 some of you younger people here who are still having children will give birth to children whose life expectancy once we decode the human gene will be nearly 100 and i think when we know that pharmaceutical more and more will keep us alive let us live longer and let us live better to have a medicare program without a program that is affordable for all of our seniors i think is crazy so i think it s a big deal now that s what i think it s about the other point i want to make to you is there are big differences between the parties legitimate second point all the republicans opposed my economic plan in 93 they said it would be bad well 22 million jobs later and we ve got the longest economic expansion in history this is not an argument we were right and they were wrong now their argument is okay we ve got a good economy let s go give all this money away and a big tax cut again you have to decide it s very appealing you might think this thing is so strong nobody can mess it up and you d like to have the extra cash our position is harder to take our position is we want a tax cut but not as big as theirs because we think we still need money to educate our kids and we think we need our money to meet our other commitments and we think we ought to keep paying this debt down we re for a minimum wage they re against it we think we ought to have a more aggressive environmental program they think we ought to relax our environmental efforts there are real differences we think we ought to do more to help the cities by and large they disagree the only area where we ve got just a chance to have a bipartisan agreement is to give incentives for people who invest in the poor areas of urban and rural america and i m hoping and praying we get it there are big differences so number one mistakes are high number two there are big differences here is the third most important point they hope you won t think there are very big differences on election day so there s a lot of nice talk and kind of bumping and hugging going along here in these elections for example there was a big story in the press today about how the republicans had hired pollsters to teach them how to talk about the importance of providing prescription drugs to teach them the words say you know we could lose the congress over this because we re not really for giving all these seniors prescription drugs so they hired pollsters to tell them the words to say to convince you that they are for it and they re nice words i would like to say some of those words i have said some of those words but there is a big difference they don t believe that all seniors should get the help they believe that we should subsidize with tax money insurance policies that even the insurance companies i ve got to give them this i fought with them for seven years but even the health insurance companies say they cannot offer policies at affordable prices that real people will buy so the republican plan does not offer our seniors a chance to get prescription drug coverage like he wants ed towns badly now you need to think about this i mean you re here for him and we couldn t beat him with a stick of dynamite with this one but it s important that you understand that every one of these elections matters and i m not on the ballot i ve done everything i could do to turn this country around i talked to a gentleman the other day who said for a lame duck i was still quacking pretty loudly i m doing all i know to do but i want you to think about this i want you to remember number one we ve got the chance of a lifetime what are we going to do with it i think we ought to be dealing with the big issues big opportunities big challenges number two there are real differences between the two parties honest we don t have to say anything bad about the republicans i don t like all this they re just differences but number three they hope you won t understand how deep those differences are because most folks agree with us now those are the things i want you to remember so if somebody asks you how come you came say i like ed towns he s been a good congressman he s fighting to deal with the things that we ought to deal with and i m determined not to blow the greatest chance america has ever had to build the future of our dreams for our children and i know there are differences and i m going to vote based on what i think is right thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 6 00b bill_clinton thank you very much i think we ought to give mary minnick another hand she did a great job and i want to thank her the other faculty members the staff members of p s 131 and their families and your principal walter o brien thank you for making us feel welcome today and i want to thank zahra mohamed and andrew wood the co valedictorians of the 6th grade they remind us of what this is all about and you can see from the student cheers who has the votes here chancellor levy thank you very much representative lowey representative meeks representative crowley thank you all for your leadership for this worthy cause to all the local officials who are out there but especially my long time friend the queens borough president claire schulman superintendent michael johnson school board president bill johnson and i d like to recognize randi weingarten again the president of the united federation of teachers the teachers are helping us so much here along with ed malloy the president of new york building and trades union and dennis hughes the president of the new york afl cio they re also trying to help us get our kids in world class buildings let me say to all of you as so often happens when i get up to speak everything that needs to be said has already been said but i want to say a couple of things to put this in perspective from my point of view first of all i want to thank you thank you new york thank you new york city thank you queens for being so good to me and to al gore to hillary and tipper for these last eight years thank you for giving us the chance to serve for seven and a half years now we ve worked hard to turn the economy around to get the crime rate down to help people move from welfare to work to help people balance work and family to clean up the environment as we grow the economy to make this country one america across all these incredible racial and ethnic and religious and other lines that divide us to make our country a force for peace and freedom around the world and we re in good shape today we re having the longest economic expansion in our history we have the lowest minority unemployment in our history we re going to have three years of back to back surpluses for the first time in anybody s memory and here s the point i want to make what are we going to do with these good times i ve got a simple question what is it that you as citizens propose to do i ve done everything i could do to turn our country around to build that bridge to the 21st century that all of us can walk across together to leave our country in good shape so that you the american people could decide what are you going to do for the future and i think the answer is simple look at these kids here just look at them look at all the different ethnic groups they come from look at their different heritages look at the different countries their parents come from this is america s future this is america s future now if i had come to you eight years ago and said in five years we re going to have the largest number of kids in our schools in history and we ve got a lot of them in old buildings a lot of them in overcrowded buildings a lot of them in downright unsafe buildings a lot of them in buildings that can t be hooked up to the internet and i want to do something about it you might have said then well mr president that s very nice but the country is in too much trouble and the government is broke but that s not true anymore we have the money to give all our kids a world class education the only issue is do we have the vision do we have the will do we have the compassion to give our children a world class education randi was telling me right before we came up here and chancellor levy confirmed it we ve got a program now to put 100 000 more teachers out there for smaller classes in the early grades we ve only finished a third of it and new york can t take any more queens certainly can t take any more because you don t have any more because you don t have any classrooms to put the teachers in in the smaller classes we ve got a program now that would provide after school programs for every kid who needs it in america but if you don t have the facilities where are they going to go to the programs the vice president persuaded congress to enact something called the e rate which allows you to have discounts at schools with a lot of poor kids in it so every child in america can afford to be in a classroom that s hooked up to the internet but if you don t have the space and some schools can t even be wired for the internet so what good is the program now i am proud of the progress that s been made in education in this city in this state and in this nation but if we think that we re going to build the future of our dreams making these kids go to school in places where they don t have computer labs they don t have music rooms they re suffocating their buildings are being heated with coal and their teachers are trying to teach 40 kids when they ought to be teaching 20 we re living in a dream world and we need to do something about it to give them a better future now here s what i ve tried to do for two years this is the third year i ve proposed this i want the congress to pass a bill that would provide tax breaks so that we could help communities build from scratch 6 000 schools i want the congress to pass money every year for the next five years so that every year we can do major repairs on 5 000 more schools every year it s not very complicated but what you have to understand is we can afford it we can afford it it s just a question of whether we think it s important enough to do now nita is for it greg is for it joe crowley is for it charlie rangel is for it we even have a few republicans for it representative nancy johnson from connecticut is for it and i thank nancy johnson this ought to be a bipartisan issue when the kids show up there at school they don t have to put their party affiliation down we just know they need an education we don t care whether they re republicans or democrats or greens or reforms or no affiliation so i want to tell you that we have a bipartisan majority actually ready to pass the bill in the house of representatives so you might wonder well this is a democracy if a majority of the people want it and a majority of their elected representatives want it where is the bill and show me the money well unfortunately the people who control the rules and when bills come up don t want it that s what this is about we have not been able to persuade the leadership in the house and the senate the other party to bring this up in a way that will enable us to pass it what i want you to know that s not a bad idea thank you what i want you to know is that the leadership of the house is trying to keep these good people from having a vote on school construction they don t want their members to have to vote against it for the obvious reasons that you might notice but they don t want it to pass we have too many bills where we ve got a majority for it like the patients bill of rights that we can t get up so i am asking you by your voices today over the media to the american people and every day from now on as long as the congress is here by your support for your representatives to say hey we love this school but it s not enough and we love our kids and you have our money spend it on their future spend it on their future again i say this is not complicated it s about political will and vision and i want you to know folks i get really frustrated when washington plays politics just because they think times are good and there are no consequences but these kids will grow up before you know it my little girl just got home from college going to be a senior next year i remember when she was that size it doesn t take long for a child to live a childhood and we don t have a child to waste and you ve got all these dedicated teachers and all these dedicated parents and all these dedicated school people out there and we keep trying to put them in smaller and smaller and smaller boxes this is wrong now we have genuine philosophical differences over some things in washington but this shouldn t be a philosophical issue are we going to build these buildings or not we ve got the money some people say let them do it at the local level well you know as well as i do that we ve got more kids in schools than ever before but we ve got a smaller percentage of property taxpayers with kids in schools than ever before and it s hard if not impossible to raise the money to build and repair the schools only at the local level the national government has the resources this is a limited program these children deserve it so i implore you all by your voices today and every day say thank you nita lowey thank you greg meeks thank you joe crowley thank you charlie rangel congress give our kids the future they deserve the whole country s riding on it we can afford it and we owe it to them and we ll be awful glad we did thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton16 6 98 bill_clinton good afternoon thank you very much commissioner tagliabue mr bowlen coach shanahan friends of the broncos i m delighted to see all of you here i want to especially acknowledge the presence here of governor romer and senators allard and campbell and hatch representatives degette schaefer and schaffer and mayor webb ms martinez and i d like to say a special word of appreciation to secretary federico pena and his wife ellen he has been mayor of denver the secretary of transportation and now the secretary of energy and this is his last public event before going into the private sector and he is going out on a high so thank you very much mr secretary let me say to all of you i think every football fan loved the last super bowl denver had one of the toughest roads to the super bowl in history winning as a wild card team and a 12 point underdog and won a magnificent game i learned that where s terrell where are you i asked him if he thought i would look good in that five button coat and he said it wasn t presidential he was i learned in doing a little research for this event that he s the only person to ever win the mvp award in his hometown and the only person ever to score three rushing touchdowns and not only that he sat out a quarter as you remember with a migraine so that s a pretty impressive performance running behind the lightest but maybe the best offensive line in pro football as you can look up here light is a relative term there are a lot of things about this team i like three of the players actually have connections to my home state which made me feel very happy but i can tell you that maybe the most remarkable thing is loyalty of the community the steadfastness of john elway we re sorry he couldn t be here and we re glad he s okay fifteen seasons over 48 000 yards and he s the oldest person ever to score a touchdown in the super bowl that s like being light old is a relative term and coach shanahan you ve only been there three years which is a remarkable tribute to your ability and also to the teamwork of this team i m sure that every 1 000 yard receiver or 1 500 yard rusher or star quarterback who s ever been part of a super bowl team would say that it s teams that win championships and a great team won this championship we re honored to have them in the white house today thank you very much dem wjclinton16 7 96 bill_clinton thank you very much mr secretary ladies and gentlemen thank you for that warm welcome and i was listening to dan glickman say all those outrageously positive things and it reminded me that that was a living example of clinton s third law of politics which is whenever possible be introduced by someone you appointed to high position steve and i were talking up here he said you know the last time i was on a platform with you you fell through a hole in it and it s really true it was what was it a soybean meeting in arkansas when i was governor and he and i were on the platform together and there was a crack in the platform my chair fell through it it really did a lot for my confidence right before i got up here to speak that he reminded me of that as far as i know we re all right i m delighted to be here i want to begin by thanking all of you for the work that you do every day to keep in touch with people in rural america i want to thank secretary glickman who i believe has done a magnificent job as secretary of agriculture and i thank him for that it is true that both the vice president and i come out of small towns and have some more than passing acquaintance with agriculture and one of the most enjoyable days of my presidency was the national rural conference we had in ames iowa not very long ago that secretary glickman did such a fine job on and it is also true that i always believed that we could not bring the american economic back unless we brought rural america back one of the things that was most disturbing to me about the economic recovery of the 1980s was that it seemed to sweep the coast and leave the heartland behind and we ve worked very very hard in this administration to fashion an economic policy that would not only make the overall economic numbers look hopeful but would actually benefit every region and every state in our country and i think that is very very important even if a small percentage of our people live in rural america and i m happy that more and more people are going back there a lot of what makes america special is alive and well there and is embodied in our farming communities i m glad to see some population movement back and i m glad to see family farming once again become a career choice for young people if we are going to meet the challenges of the 21st century we all have to meet them together and there has to be a role a vital role for people living in rural america when i sought the presidency i did it because i was concerned that our country was drifting into the next century instead of charging toward it and that we were coming apart instead of growing together it seemed to me that there were three straightforward things that we had to do at least from my point of view to have the vision of america in the 21st century become real one is to guarantee opportunity to every american without regard to his or her station in life who is willing to work for it the second is to receive more responsibility from all of our citizens taking more initiative for their own lives and their families and their communities and the third was to see that we come together as a community so that and this is very important this is the most diverse big country in the world most racially and ethnically diverse most religiously diverse now and yet we are bound together by a written constitution that s 220 years old going back to the declaration of independence the constitution was ratified a little more than 10 years after that and those ideas are just as vital today and just as relevant today as they were over 200 years ago they are the framework which enables us to come together and share this land with people who are very different than we are as long as we all play by the same rules i say that it seems so simple maybe but when you look at how the world s being torn apart because of the differences that we take for granted that we can live with it s very important to understand how much we have to be grateful for with our whole history of constitutional government a government of laws a bill of rights which gives everybody some elbow room and yet requires all of us not to abuse one another i mean look at bosnia a tiny country where you d think the people would want to be pulling together to try to make the most of their very very ancient heritage and it took an international effort of herculean proportions to stop people who were biologically indistinguishable from one another but had different religions and had grown into different ethnic categories look at this heartbreaking development in northern ireland where people were getting along they had the lowest unemployment rate the highest growth rate they d had in 15 years when i went there last year people lined the streets the catholic and the protestant together to say we don t want any more war we want our peace a lot of the younger people could but just the failure of leadership by people in a position to abuse their positions in a moment can drive people back into that kind of division so when you think about the spirit of cooperation and hard work and family that pervades rural america let me tell you that it s something we take for granted but when you look at our largest county los angeles county and you realize we have 150 different racial and ethnic groups in one county and yet they re still basically getting along reasonably well yes we have problems from time to time there but if you look at the schools that have people from 70 different linguistic backgrounds in some of our public schools it s astonishing to see that we ve done as well as we have and it s a great tribute to the endurance of our fundamental values and if we re going to keep this whole world together and get these countries to working together to fight our common problems like terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and diseases that cross national lines we re going to have to remember these basic values and so i wanted to say that at the very outset of my remarks because i think in some ways it s more important than anything else i d be perfectly content as somebody from arkansas to talk about the fact that soybeans are over 8 and i wasn t sure i d see that again in my lifetime but i think it s important to note that sometime in our lifetime they will probably be less than 7 again or 6 or i hope not lower than that it s liable but these things endure and we need to hang on to them and as we look ahead and we try to imagine what the world s going to look like 20 30 40 years from now for our children and our grandchildren it s very important to know that america has something that has kept us together and strong for over 200 years that will take us into this new world the other thing i d like to say is that it s very important that we meet our challenges at home and abroad and that we see them together i think farmers in a funny way because we ve exported farm products for so long may have a little more of a global perspective than a lot of other citizens do but when people say well what s your vision for america in the 21st century i say i want the america dream alive for everybody i want us coming together not drifting apart and i want to still be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity which means we have to be involved in the world as well as here at home i think you understand that instinctively but i think it s very important that all of our citizens understand that it requires me from time to time to do things that i know are wildly unpopular i realize that what i did in haiti wasn t popular but i think it s the right thing to do and we ve got a democracy restored there and we don t have to worry about large numbers of illegal immigrants risking their lives to come from haiti to the united states i think trying to help a new and responsible government in mexico avoid bankruptcy was the responsible thing to do it reduced illegal immigration and kept mexico as a responsible trade partner instead of having it collapse on us i think we did what we had to do in bosnia but the most important thing is i think we also put that into a context of 200 more trade agreements including a lot of things that specifically affected agriculture so if i could ask you do to do something when you go home i hope that you will take every opportunity to talk to people that you live and work with who don t know anything about farming about how it s very hard in the world we re living in it would be impossible in the world we re moving to to have a clear dividing line between our domestic economic affairs and our international economic affairs that to be an american in the 21st century will mean to be a citizen of the world even if you live in a completely landlocked state like arkansas or iowa or missouri if you re a farmer you know that instinctively and all of our people have to embrace that four years ago i embarked upon an economic strategy that i thought would work i wanted to cut the deficit expand trade and continue to invest in people in technology and in research and in infrastructure the things that would cause our economy to grow now three and a half years later the results are beginning to come in i said in 1993 that if congress adopted our economic plan i thought we would cut the deficit in half in four years and that 8 million jobs would be produced for the american people well in three and a half years the american people have produced over 10 million jobs 3 7 million new homeowners three years in a row of record new small business starts the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 years and we learned today that the deficit which was 290 billion when i took office will fall this year to 117 billion as a percentage of our income it s the smallest its been since 1974 and the only debt we have in america today comes from the interest payments we pay on the only deficit we have comes from the interest payments we have on the 12 years before i became president in those 12 years we quadrupled the debt we ve now cut the deficit from 290 billion to 117 billion we would be running a substantial surplus this year in the government budget but for the interest payments on that debt so this whole thing is turned around and that s kept interest rates down and that s permitted this economy to grow i think it is very important that we keep on until we balance the budget in a responsible way but it s important that you know that that s a huge drop there is no other country in the world with an advanced economy where the government deficit is so small a percentage of its income every year so we re moving in the right direction and it s some evidence too i might add that if we work together we can continue to make progress let me mention just one other word on the trade issue i was convinced when i came here that we could not afford to take a protectionist approach but that we had to be more aggressive and open markets to american products and services around the world we have concluded now over 200 specific trade agreements as well as the big sweeping agreements like nafta and gatt we ve opened foreign markets to american beef and rice and apples and other agricultural products we ve got a long way to go but it s important to point out that our exports including our agricultural exports are at all time highs our exports this year will be about 60 billion and our surplus in agriculture will be 30 billion this year we believe and that will obviously make it number one among american export industries so when you people talk to you about the trade deficit remind them that it s there is not trade deficit in agriculture there s a huge surplus and we re going to keep working to open more markets and keep pushing in the right direction there we ve got farm income up and farm asset values up and the value of assets are growing faster than the debt which means that the equity positions of farmers are improving we ve got prices on average that are 20 percent higher than a year ago i wish i could promise you that we d have 5 corn and 5 50 wheat and 8 soybeans forever but i can t do that but it is encouraging that a lot of farmers are able to finally earn some money do some improvements that are needed on the farm save some money for the years that may not be so good and improve the overall economic position of family farmers throughout this country i am very encouraged by it and what we can do in this administration is to continue to work to open those export markets and we will we ve also tried to help deal with some serious problems the most serious one recently obviously aggravated by the drought has been the low cattle prices with the high feed prices we opened a conservation reserve for emergency grazing we accelerated the purchase of beef by the school lunch program we worked to remove some more export barriers and the prices are up modestly about 10 percent they re still in trouble but at least there s been some movement in the last few weeks for which i am very grateful i also want to thank the secretary of agriculture for the work that he and all of us did on the farm bill to be perfectly candid and i ve said this in public so there s no point in not saying it again but i had and still have some reservations about whether this new farm bill is going to work structurally over the long term as we go through the ups and downs it looks great right now because we ve got high prices and i hope that the theory of it will work over a period of years but i did work in good faith with the leadership of the new congress to try to pass a farm bill and i was pleased that we passed some excuse me we kept some provisions in the farm bill especially relating to rural development and to the conservation programs that i thought was quite important and i was pleased that we were able to preserve them and i hope we can continue to preserve them in the future i d just like to mention a couple of other issues if i might i have been very pleased on balance by the response in the country to the administration s efforts to update the meat and poultry inspection i know this was somewhat controversial we worked through a lot of difficult issues but we had to stop using 70 and 80 year old method of testing meat when we knew that we had kids out there getting sick when there were no bad people involved nobody was out there trying to be negligent we just were simply not using the best available technology and i know it will cause some economic difficulties for some people but we simply had to do it and i never will forget as long as i live dealing with those families of those kids that ate the contaminated meat with the e coli from pacific northwest or the agony that the people felt who sold them the hamburgers their pain was also very real and they felt desperate about it they never meant to do any such thing and that was just a case where we d simply walked away from available technology so we had to do it and i hope that you all support the steps we ve taken we ve tried to listen as well as we could to everybody we tried to make the fairest decisions we could but i think that decision had to be made there s one other thing that we re doing that i want to mention that you may know about already but this week secretary glickman is announcing that we re devoting 70 million to several communities in a total of 35 states to help them get safe running water for their people by the year 2000 interestingly enough the number one health problem in the developing world is still the absence of clean safe water if we could just get clean water to everybody in these poor countries we could save more children s lives in less time than any other single thing we could do and yet there are still places in the united states of america in rural areas where people do not have access to safe drinking water and we are determined to correct that problem so we will keep working on that as well and now there s a lot more to do and i guess i could keep you here all day but i d like to mention one or two things that i think would affect farm families especially number one this kassebaum kennedy health care reform bill would make several million people a year eligible to either get or keep health insurance who can t now by simply saying that people don t automatically lose their health insurance when they change jobs and their health insurance can t be taken away from them because somebody in their family gets sick that s why you have insurance in the first place now this is very important for people who are not insured in large units if you re insured in a large unit the size of the unit which insures you often protects you from these sorts of problems but it is terribly important to pass this legislation secondly in the minimum wage legislation in the same bill there are provisions which could be very important to farmers including an increase in the expensing provision it was 10 000 when i became president in 93 we kicked it up to 17 000 or 17 500 this takes it up to 25 000 which is quite important and secondly the package of retirement reforms that came out of the white house conference on small business which would help a lot farmers is they re making it easier for people to access 401k plans making it easier for people to move the plans making it easier for people to maintain them if they hit a rough spot and they can t continue the contributions there are several other things which strengthen the ability of people who do not work for large employment units to get and keep retirement plans over a lifetime and through the ups and downs that could happen to them so these are two things that there s been almost no i don t know why exactly but there s been almost no publicity about the other things that are in that minimum wage bill but those are two things that are in there now there are two other provisions that are of interest to you that are not in there but that were part of our discussions when we were talking about how we get a final balanced budget agreement one was a modification of the state laws which have not been changed in a long time which affects farmers in particular with high asset values and low cash income and not a lot of money in the bank to pay estate taxes which we had reached agreement on in our budget negotiations about how to change and the other was an increase in the deductions of health care premiums for self employed people including farmers which has been kicked up to about a 50 percent we were going to take it higher and we reached agreement on that so in the event i still think there is some chance we will get an agreement in the congress on a budget bill this year no one else believes this but i m always but i would remind you for all of the fights we ve had we have this year passed a very tough antiterrorism bill we ve passed a telecommunications bill that i believe will create hundreds of thousands of high wage jobs in america within the very near future by getting both the benefits of more competition and the requirement to adequately serve schools and hospitals and places in rural america as well as urban america all that s in that telecom bill that we passed we passed lobby reform legislation that i ve tried for three years to pass we finally passed that so we have done some quite important things in this year in the congress and if we pass this minimum wage small business bill that i just mentioned and we might pass a welfare reform bill because we re getting closer on that then who knows we might get lucky and pass the kassebaum kennedy bill which we re getting close to then we might be able to pass this balanced budget it will be a great thing for america to do it but if we do it those other provisions when we stopped our budget negotiations when the presidential primary season started did contain those two things that i know were of great interest in rural america so anyway that s kind of where we are with the issues in washington let me just mention one other thing before i close it doesn t apply just to rural america it applies to all americans if you look at what s happened in the last four years i think you can make a compelling case that america has gotten its economic house in order that we ve walked away from these permanent big deficits forever we ve reduced the size of the federal government it s about 240 000 people smaller than it was the day i took office we ve abolished a couple hundred government programs outright we have taken 16 000 pages of regulation out of the federal rule books we tried to improve the quality of government services and keep interest rates down and let the economy grow but there s still a big challenge out there which is that not everybody is benefitting from this new economy it s not like it was in the 80s where whole states were left behind my state didn t have an unemployment rate below the national average until 1992 a lot of rural areas were that way this is different this is in every state what you see is a division of opportunity based more than anything else on the level of education and it is a function of the fact that this modern economy is being driven by information and technology and rewards people who not only know a lot but can absorb a lot of new things and learn new things and are very flexible so we have got to take a hard look at what it s going to take to get america growing together again we can change the job mix as we are but that takes some time for example two thirds of the new jobs that have been created in america since january of 93 have been in higher wage occupations and more trade has a lot to do with that because it tends to create higher wage jobs and that s good but that s only a small percentage of the total jobs americans hold and if you look at it what we still have in america is we have some people who are downsized and have a hard time getting themselves repositioned we have some people who never feel the recovery because they re in isolated rural areas or isolated inner city areas and the largest group of people that are still having a tough time are people who just can t ever get a raise because they have to work harder for less in a competitive economy with low skill levels so the best thing we can do there are lots of things we can do but the best thing we can do is to raise the level of education and training of every american including making more educational opportunities available to adult americans right now and i have three proposals there that i just want to mention in closing that i think are very important first of all i proposed a g i bill for american workers i want to take there are 70 different government programs for training people who are unemployed or underemployed and i would give 5 to everybody in this audience that could name more than five of them how about four there are 70 of them so what i propose to do is to take the 70 programs and get rid of all of them put the money in the bank and give a skill grant to every adult in america who is unemployed or underemployed to take to the local community college or some other institution of your choice but nearly every american is within driving distance of a community college and nearly every community college has almost 100 percent placement for people who get educated there into jobs in their community we do not need yesterday s split up training system we ought to just give people a skill grant and say you ve got enough sense to figure out where to get the training go get it so that s the first proposal the second proposal is to make college education more affordable by letting people deduct up to 10 000 of the cost of tuition for the cost of all post high school education the third proposal building on that is to make at least two years of college after high school just as universal as high school is today if you look at the last census you will see how people s incomes start to split apart based on whether they stopped at high school or whether they got at least two years more people that have at least a community college diploma tend to have jobs which are stable which pay decent incomes and where they can get a raise over time people that don t depending on where they live and what they do obviously they re exceptions to this but the odds are that you re likely to have a job where you can t get a raise and therefore you lose ground over time so my objective will be to make two more years of education just as universal as a high school education is today so what i propose to do there is to give families who choose this instead of the tax deduction a credit a credit of 1 500 for the first year of a community college and a credit of 1 500 for the second year for everybody that keeps a b average in the first year that would literally open community college to virtually everyone in america that 1 500 or less is the tuition cost for community colleges in almost every state there s a few where they re a little bit higher but still the 1 500 credit would have a bit impact and if we can do those things then we can work with the private sector to try to raise the skill levels of the adults that are already out there and get the young people that are coming out of high school into college and at least to two more years of education so their prospects will be better that will enable the american economy to grow but also to grow together and that s what keeps the american dream alive the idea that if you re working hard and you re doing your part you ve got your chance at the brass ring and that s what i believe we need to really focus on now and i might say in closing that every advanced country is dealing with this challenge the united states has done a much better job than most of our competitors in creating new jobs but no country has solved the increasing inequality problem and it is clearly related to the breathtaking degree to which change has overtaken the world and rewarded education knowledge and skills so anything you can do to make this a nonpolitical nonpartisan issue the idea that we re going to lift up opportunities for all of our people i think would very much advance the united states as well as obviously life in rural america well i ve talked a little more than i meant to but i had a lot of things i wanted to talk about besides that i don t see you very often and i might fall through a crack on the way off the stand thank you very much it s good to be with you dem wjclinton16 7 99 bill_clinton thank you very much first of all i m delighted to be in a true iowa museum the place where tom harkin went to his high school prom i ll tell you he is a silver tongued devil but when he started talking about bringing the love of his life to the high school prom old ruth said i don t know how he is going to get out of this one sure enough there he was on his feet again before you know it i want to thank many of you for many things i want to thank my good friend secretary dick riley for coming with me today and going to the school in iowa and talking about the need to build or modernize thousands of new schools for america s children for the 21st century i thank him i want to thank my great friend and hillary s great friend congressman leonard boswell for going around with us today and for representing iowa s farmers and workers and educators and children so well in the house of representatives and dodie thank you for your 31 years of teaching thank you very much thank you rob tully for your role in making it fun to be a democrat again in iowa thank you thank you lt governor sally pederson for your leadership and thank you jim autry and i m glad you got a better office because you deserve it sally thank you and i want to say to governor vilsack and to christy this has been a very impressive administration to watch from afar we were everybody in the white house hillary and al and tipper and i and all of us who work there we were thrilled when tom was elected and we have been and we have been so impressed by his intelligence and his energy and his direction and his leadership and it s just quite amazing to watch unfold you know you could elect him for 32 years if you like and still be just trying to get even with the republicans i want to thank ruth harkin for her service in our administration which she left for more lucrative fields but i hope not more rewarding one she did a wonderful job yes give her a hand i m here basically for three reasons tonight first i want to thank the people of iowa for being very very good to me to hillary to al and tipper gore to our whole crowd for voting for us twice in 92 and 96 for making us always welcome for always telling us what was going on here and in the heartland of america i will never forget that i have been here a lot and i have loved every trip we had several hundred people at the school we visited earlier today and i told them all they should actually be quite glad to see me because i was the first person who had been here in weeks and weeks who wasn t running for everything i just wanted to come see you and say hello and see how you were getting along the second thing i want to do is to thank tom harkin you know i didn t say this at the other place governor vilsack asked me to repeat my speech since i didn t write it down i have hardly any idea what i said it s going to be hard to do i want to tell you something when tom harkin and i entered the primaries in 92 my mother was really the only person who thought i was going to win and you know we had this sort of spirited race and i didn t come to iowa because i didn t think i should because you all were for him and you should have been and i had sort of admired tom harkin from afar but you really get to know a person and he in iowa you get to know a person but you get to know a person if you just kind of travel around and you re out there you re bone tired and you re still trying to make one more speech shake one more hand go to one more forum and then i was fortunate enough to be elected he didn t have to do anything for me i want you to know that on every bright and dark day of the last six and a half years my wife and i have not had a better friend in the united states senate than tom harkin and i will never forget it i want you to know i also want you to know even more important for everything that we have fought for that has made this a better stronger country that has given children a better future that has helped to bring us together as one community there is nobody in the congress that has a better combination of intelligence and experience and heart and sheer ability to get things done than tom harkin he is a precious asset for iowa and the united states and i am glad you are here to support him tonight he was very generous he talked about me going to switzerland to speak for the children all over the world who are the subject of abusive child labor it s the sort of thing a president is supposed to do but a person could be elected and reelected senator from iowa and never say anything about abusive child labor around the world tom harkin was out for that issue a long long time before i was i was there because of tom harkin and his leadership and today the governor and leonard and tom and i we sat around and we met with some farmers and i want to say more about that in a minute but we know we ve got a terrible problem in farm country all over america and you can be sure that when something is done to help america s farmers tom harkin will be in the forefront of that he won t be in the forefront of that he won t be dragging up the rear he ll be there pushing everybody to do more to do better to think through it and he ll be every time somebody wants to do something that doesn t make a lick of sense based on decades of history on the farm he will be there to remind people to do the right thing by america s farmers you know he says i ve been a good president for the disabled of america i hope i have been but if i have been half of it is because of what i learned from tom harkin let me just close with this because i hope you will think about this as caucus goers but also as american citizens you have to ask yourself why are you here tonight why do you have the political views you have what really matters to you what do you think politics is about is it about money and power primarily and the kicks you get if you get invited to the white house or the statehouse or whatever or is it about what i think it s about i ll tell you what i think it s about i think politics is about ideas and action and people and i believe that the reason the country is in the shape it s in today is in no small measure because we had a different set of ideas we really believe that we could create an america in the 21st century with opportunity for every person responsible enough to work for it an america that was a community of people who were very different but had a common citizenship and a common humanity an america that was leading the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity we believe that and we believe that we could go beyond the paralyzing debates that had put this country in a terrible hole in 1992 when we were out there running we thought you could improve the economy and improve the environment we thought you could make it so people would succeed at work without being able and still be able to succeed at home in the most important job any american has raising children we thought that you could be tough on crime without giving up personal liberty we thought that you could have sensible gun control without interfering with people s right to hunting and fishing and sporting season these are things we thought now we thought we could balance the budget and increase our investment in education we thought we could cut the size of government and increase its effectiveness and its impact in ordinary people s lives and every step of the way we were opposed by people who believe differently and what i want to say to today is that yes i m glad that we ve got 19 million new jobs the longest peacetime expansion in history a 30 year low in unemployment a 30 year low in the welfare rolls a 26 year low in the crime rolls the highest home ownership in history the lowest minority unemployment in history i m glad for all that i m glad but at this moment i tell you that the people hire us to win for them tomorrow and if we did a good job yesterday most taxpayers think that s what they were paying us to do and the reason i say that is i am very grateful that i ve had the chance to be your president and grateful that i have had a chance to be the instrument of this but what we need to think about is what are we going to do tomorrow what are we going to do tomorrow and in particular what is our obligation at this moment of enormous prosperity when we went from having the biggest deficit in history in 1992 to the biggest surplus we ve ever had what are we going to do with it what are we going to do with this opportunity and there are big decisions to be made here tom harkin and i are on one side and most of our friends in the other party are on the other side but let me just mention three things because you want to have fun tonight and you don t want to have a serious talk but i want you to think about three things number one i m the oldest of the baby boomers and when we retire there s going to be a whole bunch of us retired and there will be more people retired and fewer people working than ever before and we had better use this surplus now to save social security and modernize medicare for the 21st century number two as everybody who knows a farmer knows not everybody who is a part of this country has participated in this recovery from appalachia to the mississippi delta to the indian reservation to the inner city to the farm to the disabled and welfare populations who still want to go to work we can t quit until we put everybody on a track to opportunity in this country and if we set aside most of the surplus for social security and medicare we can in 15 years be debt free for the first time since 1835 that s what we ought to do and finally we ought to give our children a better future we ought not we ought not to squander this surplus in a way that has not enabled us to invest in world class schools connecting the classrooms to the internet world class teachers and enough of them to do the job education save social security and medicare first pay down the debt take care of education then give the country a tax cut that s what we believe that s good for the future now what i said was what i said over there at the other place that i just want to say is i noticed in the debate over the patients bill of rights where the republicans won the battle in defeating our attempts to give every american the right to see a specialist go to the nearest emergency room stay with the doctor through treatment but we will win the war you work but in this thing during this debate the republicans were actually making fun of the democrats for talking about stories human stories of people who had been hurt because we don t have a patients bill of rights and they acted like there was something wrong because a lot of them think politics is about power and position but we think it s about ideas action and people i saw a little girl today at that school that i first met in iowa in 1992 an african american girl being held by a white woman in a rally in cedar rapids and i asked this mother i said whose child is this and she says this is my baby and i said where did you find this baby she said this baby was born in miami with aids and no one would take it so i did and i came to find out this woman was divorced her husband had left her she was raising her own two children with modest income but she cared enough about a child she had never known of another race afflicted with aids to take this child into her home today at that school that child was in the audience she is tall she is beautiful she got up in my arms and she said mr president i can give myself my own shots now i m doing well in school and i m doing well and she has gone the reason she is still alive is in these six and a half years since i first saw her mother holding her seven years now she s been able to come to the national institutes of health and get good health care even though she comes from a family of modest needs why because of the leadership that tom harkin has exercised over the years for health research and other research now this is a story am i trying to affect your emotions you bet i am is that wrong no this is what politics is about to us when i see nurses weeping weeping because the insurance company tells them that the doctor they worked for can t send a patient that is in sitting there in front of them to a specialist to save their lives is that somehow illegitimate to make laws based on those stories no that s what counts in life what we care about is our relationships with each other whether we ve all got a chance to live out our dreams and live up to our god given potential i told another story when i was here in the flood in 93 i met a little girl when i was putting those sandbags up that wasn t even five feet tall but she was already 13 years old and her forehead was real big and bony and her elbows and knees were prominent and her knuckles were because she lived with brittle bone disease and had already had more than a dozen operations in her life and could have broken all the bones in her body sitting there working with the people stacking sandbags and she came all the way from wisconsin to do it because she wanted to be a good citizen and she told her parents she couldn t hide in her life she had to do something there was a flood people needed her help and even though she had bone after bone after bone after bone broken in her body she showed up like everybody else to be a good a citizen in iowa when the flood came now just a few months ago i had a rally at american university in washington d c the same girl was there a freshman in college with all of her roommates up there still be a good citizen showing up now why do i tell you that and that child made several trips to the national institutes of health in the last six and a half years becoming stronger now did tom harkin have anything to do with the character of this child no did he have anything to do with the heart of the other little girl with aids no did he affect the mother with her generosity and her love no but did he do things as an elected representative of you that gave those kids a chance to have better lives and make this a better country you bet he did you bet he did so i tell you people ask why you came here why you support tom harkin why you re a member of our party tell them you believe that politics and citizenship is about ideas action and people power and money are incidental incidental to the ability to advance ideas take action based on those ideas and help people if your actions turn out to be right now all of you young people i can tell you i just celebrated sally was talking about her 30th high school reunion in a couple of weeks i m going to have my 35th and i want you to know by the way i don t know if i can go to this one because of the efforts we re making in the balkans in kosovo but if i miss it it will be the first one i ve ever missed and i want to encourage you not to miss yours why because i ll tell you something the older you get and the closer you get to the end of your life s journey the more you know that when it s all over what you really care about is who you liked who was your friend in good times and bad who you loved how your children were how you felt in the iowa springtime and in the fall and the winter and the summer all the things that make you alive politics the purpose of politics is to allow free people to be more fully alive and to help each other have better lives that s what we believe and so i say let them make fun of us for telling our stories that is all that matters in the end there is nothing abstract about america it s a bunch of people who believe in liberty and who believe in each other and who believe that they can make life better for their children it is the story of people even george washington was a person so you remember that you remember that i m going to tell you one thing and i ll let you go last week i went to the pine ridge indian reservation where the oglala sioux live the most famous oglala sioux was crazy horse and they re building a great monument to him there even bigger than mount rushmore but the unemployment there today is 73 percent before i went out there the chief of the oglala sioux and a number of others came to see me at the white house from the high plains from montana and the dakotas and they had a meeting and they told me about the problems the problems in their states on the farm they told me the problems of the indians with education and health care and all of that but we had just come out of this conflict in kosovo we weren t actually quite out of it yet and the chief of the oglalas stood up in a very dignified manner and he said mr president he said we have a proclamation supporting your action in kosovo against killing people because of their religion and their ethnic background and he smiled in a very dignified way and he said you see we know something about ethnic cleansing but listen he said but this is america now listen to this story he said my great grandfather was massacred at wounded knee he said i have two uncles one was on the beach at normandy the other was the first native american fighter pilot in the entire united states military he said now their nephew me i am in the white house talking to the president i have one son i later met the boy i have one son he said he is more important to me than anything in the world but i would be honored to have him go and fight for my country against ethnic cleansing in kosovo america has come a long way and we should stop this wherever we can why do i tell you that that is a story about liberty and freedom and the absence of oppression passing down through the generations that is the story of america it is the unending effort to form a more perfect union to widen the circle of opportunity to deepen the meaning of freedom to strengthen the bonds of community that s what this guy represents to me that s what my party represents to me that s the promise of the governor s administration to me that is everything that i have tried to do in these six and a half years and i am telling you when you walk out of here tonight and somebody asks you why you were here you ought to be able to tell them that kind of answer and you keep fighting for it and if you do america s best days will be in the new century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 9 00 bill_clinton thank you very much chairman clyburn dinner chair eddie bernice johnson my friend of 28 years and didn t she give a great introduction to the vice president you better go on the road girl our foundation chair eva clayton and all the members and former members of the cbc especially to my friend bill clay we wish you well and godspeed on your retirement and i thank you for eight years of our good partnership to mrs coretta scott king and all the distinguished citizens in the audience but especially to the two whom i had the great honor to award the presidential medal of freedom marian wright edelman and reverend jesse jackson thank you for being here with us tonight i thank lou stokes and phylicia rashad and want to join in congratulating the award winners my friend arthur eve whose son did such a good job working for the clinton gore administration kenneth hill rodney carroll who has been great on our welfare to work program tom joyner who lets me jaw on his radio program from time to time even i never got an eight page spread in ebony i don t know about that to tavis smiley and to the family of our friend lebaron taylor bill kennard and ambassador sisulu thank you for what you said about our friend nelson mandela i thank general reno and secretary slater and secretary herman and deputy attorney general holder and our sba director aida alvarez and all the people from our white house team who are here and from the entire administration i thought the vice president gave a great speech and i m looking forward to getting rid of that trouble adjective at the beginning of his title in just a couple of months now now there was nothing subliminal about that we democrats don t have subliminal advertising i also want to thank senator lieberman who has been a friend since hillary and i met him 30 years ago when he wa running for the state senate in new haven and i can tell you that if he is the vice president of this country you will be very very proud of him he has done a great job and he has been a great friend of mine i want to bring you a warm welcome from hillary she wishes she could be here tonight but she s otherwise occupied they sent the one in our family who is not running for office this year to speak to you tonight i ve been honored to be at every one of these dinners since i became president tonight i came mostly to listen and to clap and to say thanks thank you for your friendship your leadership and your support thank you for giving me the chance john lewis to walk with you in selma this year thank you for those of you who went back to africa with me when we went to nigeria and tanzania thank you for working with me to reach out to the people of africa and the caribbean to try to build their countries through trade thank you for those of you who helped me to relieve the debt of the poor countries and to increase our fight against aids and tb and malaria around the world the vice president said that there are so many people who could say that the cbc covered their back covered their back when they took a torch to me and lit the fire you brought the buckets and poured the water on it and i thank you thank you but mostly i want to thank you for taking our nation to higher ground for standing with al gore and me in our simple but profound mission to make sure that everyone counts and everyone has a chance to make sure that we act as if we all to better when we help each other i can t thank you enough for your role in all the good things that have happened in the last eight years it s all been recited i guess what i would like for you to know is that there are a lot of days when i just felt like the troubadour but other people had to play in the orchestra and even write the songs and nothing nothing good that i have achieved would have been possible without the congressional black caucus our other friends in congress and especially vice president al gore and i thank you all for that i just want to say two serious things about the future tonight the first is that when al gore says you ain t seen nothin yet i agree with him we ve spent a lot of time in the last eight years trying to turn this country around and get it together and get it moving in the right direction and now for the first time in our lifetime we have both prosperity and the absence of serious internal crisis and external threat we actually can build the future of our dreams for our kids we could get rid of child poverty we could give every child in america the chance at a world class education for the first time we could open the doors of college to all we could take social security and medicare out there beyond the life of the baby boomers and add that prescription drug benefit we could do a lot of things with these unbelievable discoveries in science and technology but we have to make a decision and so the second point i want to make is sometimes it s harder to make a good decision in good times than bad times i know the people took a chance on me in 1992 but give me a break the country was in a ditch it wasn t that much of a chance i mean you know they i don t know how many voters went into the polling place and thought you know i don t know if i want to vote for that guy he s a governor president bush said he was the governor of a small southern state and i don t even know where that place is on the map and he looks too young and everybody says he s terrible but we had to change now things are going well and people are comfortable and confident and we have options so it s up to you to make sure that people ask the right question and answer it in this election season that we say we cannot afford to pass up the chance of a lifetime maybe the chance of a half a century to build the future of our dreams for our children and there is a lot at stake you ve heard it all tonight just about how we re fighting for strong schools and modern classrooms and a higher minimum wage and all the other things i would like to mention one other thing that hasn t been talked about we ought to be fighting for an end to delay and discrimination against highly qualified minority candidates for the federal courts this administration has named 62 african american judges three times the number of the previous two administrations combined with the highest ratings from the aba in 40 years yet we know in spite of that that women and minority candidates are still much more likely to be delayed or denied so even though this is a non profit organization i can ask you to remember judge ronnie white the first african american on the missouri supreme court denied on the party line vote the fourth circuit with the largest african american population in the country never had an african american judge last year i told you i nominated james wynn a distinguished judge from north carolina after 400 days with his senior senator still standing in the courthouse door the senate hasn t found one day to give judge wynn even a hearing this year i nominated roger gregory of virginia the first man in his family to finish high school a teacher at virginia state university where his mother once worked as a maid a highly respected litigator with the support of his republican and his democratic senator from virginia but so far we re still waiting for him to get a hearing and then there s kathleen mccree lewis in michigan and others all across this country so once again i ask the senate to do the right thing and quit closing the door on people who are qualified to serve now they say i can t ask you to vote for anybody but i will say this if you want no more delay and denial of justice it would help if you had al gore and joe lieberman and senators like the first lady if you want a tax code that helps working families with child care long term care and access to college education it would help if you had al gore and joe lieberman and charlie rangel as the chairman of the house ways and means committee if you want strong civil rights and equal rights laws and you want them enforced it would really help if you had al gore and joe lieberman and you made john conyers the chairman of the judiciary committee if you want the intelligence policy of this country to reflect genuine intelligence it would help if you had al gore and joe lieberman and julian dixon as the chairman of the intelligence committee but i will say again sometimes it is harder to make good decisions in good times than bad times sometimes it s easier to think of some little thing you ve got to quibble about remember the african proverb smooth seas do not make skillful sailors my friends we ve got to be skillful sailors i thank you from the bottom of my heart toni morrison once said i was the first black president this country ever had and i would rather have that than a nobel prize and i ll tell you why because somewhere in the deep and lost threads of my own memory are the roots of understanding of what you have known somewhere there was a deep longing to share the fate of the people who had been left out and left behind sometimes brutalized and too often ignored or forgotten i don t exactly know who all i have to thank for that but i m quite sure i don t deserve any credit for it because whatever i did i would have felt i had no other choice i want you to remember that i had a partner that felt the same way that i believe he will be one of the great presidents this country ever had and that for the rest of my days no matter what no matter what i will always be there for you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 9 93 bill_clinton hello thank you very much thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you very much please be seated everybody except you i want to say first of all whenever i am with a group from our nation s small towns and cities i always feel at home i ve just come from a number of meetings mayor cisneros you should have been with me we just had a health care briefing with leaders from cities and counties and states around the country and then i met with the association of black mayors but i m especially glad to be here because one of the cities represented here is from my previous hometown of little rock and i m glad to see mayor sharon priest here and lottie shackleford from the city of little rock congressman thornton and a lot of my other friends are here along with all the other cities who won in 1992 and who are being recognized in 1993 before he became the chairman of the housing and urban development or the secretary of the housing and urban development department henry cisneros was the chairman of the national civic league and as we recognize that league for this program today i d also like to thank the group for generously surrendering mr cisneros to the administration last week in cleveland with mayor mike white who s also here to be recognized the vice president and i announced how we want to change the way our national government works and how we work with state and local government to encourage more of the kinds of successes we salute today we believe if we can streamline federal grant programs so that mayors can worry more about what works for their community rather than what works for grant administrators in the federal bureaucracy our country will work better and we ll get more for our tax dollars we believe that by cutting paperwork we ll get the money to the local level more quickly and save the taxpayers money at the same time i also want to commend our mayors for the struggle to provide health care to the citizens of our cities in spite of the barriers to access in spite of the skyrocketing costs in spite of underfunded public health clinics and overtaxed institutions and not very much leadership from this capitol for quite a long time with the mayors help we can bring about comprehensive affordable health care for all americans and free up more of our strapped state and local budgets to invest in jobs and growth and opportunity for our people i want to now congratulate the mayors and the delegations from each of our all american cities this prestigious award recognizes america s heroes who have taken responsibility for their communities who form partnerships among citizens local government and private business to ensure that we meet the urgent needs of our people and open new opportunities for our neighbors the 1992 winners are here along with the 1993 winners because there was no ceremony last year so very briefly i am going to recognize all the 1992 winners and i think they are to my right is that right so i d like to ask that i will acknowledge the mayor and the city and then if anybody is here from the city i call out i want you to stand up too first of all mayor john williams from kenai alaska anybody else here how many people live there mayor seven thousand that s a lot bigger than the town i was born in mayor sharon priest from little rock arkansas would the group from arkansas please stand thank you mayor gerald roberts from delta colorado would the group from colorado please stand mayor charles box from rockford illinois mayor joseph steineger from wyandotte county kansas city kansas mr charles tooley is that right from billings montana anybody else here from billings thank you beautiful place mayor george jones from jacksonville north carolina mayor george christensen from minot north dakota mayor gregory lashutka is that right from columbus ohio great city mayor bill card from harlingen texas i ve been there now i want to recognize this year s winning communities in alphabetical order cleveland ohio wins this award for the fifth time for fostering cooperation between police and citizens for addressing cleveland s school system and the cleveland summit on education and for its innovative efforts which i have personally observed to direct investments to needy neighborhoods as i said last week when we kicked off our reinventing government campaign the vice president and i went to cleveland because of the astonishing success mayor white is having in moving property that has been abandoned or where the taxes haven t been paid into the hands of his citizens and into the hands of developers and putting jobs back into the inner city congratulations to you sir believe it or not inadvertently somebody let me come out here without all the names of all the winners so we re going to have have you got the list of the names of the people who are here who else is here from cleveland anybody else stand up there the next winner is dawson county nebraska mr ed cook and who else is here from dawson county an allamerican county for countywide cooperation among seven separate communities on regional economic development solid waste disposal and recycling and for improving the awareness of the diverse cultural backgrounds of the people of his county next is delray beach florida mayor thomas lynch anybody else here for community policing thank you increased public involvement in the local schools and for turning an under used former high school into a useful community cultural center for all the people of delray beach fort worth texas mayor kay granger who else is here from fort worth anyone else that s good a big delegation welcome for its crime fighting program code blue for neighborhood planning efforts and for the vision coalitions town hall meeting that must have been some gathering i ve been conducting town hall meetings for two years and i never won an award for one yet i guess i won an election for one maybe that s just as well thank you one thing i will say they work they tell you what people think and it gives people a chance to reestablish connections with their political leaders laredo texas for community wide efforts for better health care for the poncho de la garza housing development program and a new branch library to serve community needs who s here from laredo who else is here there they are i ve been there i was with the mayor over a year ago in laredo it s also a good place to jog in the early morning oakland california mayor ellihu harris congressman ron dellums and others please stand up all of you from oakland these residents came together across the lines of race and class to rebuild after the fire of 1991 its safe streets now program has brought 3500 people together to get tough with landlords responsible for 250 properties used to traffic drugs they have also established a health center to meet the special needs of oakland s american indian population and i can say based on recent knowledge it s a very good place to spend the night thank you very much congratulations pulaski tennessee mr daniel speer who else is here from pulaski tennessee please stand up for industrial development that attracts new jobs for the rehabilitation of public housing for pulaski s annual brotherhood observance which shows how people can take their city back and send a moving message of hope all across our nation washington north carolina mayor floyd brothers how are you mayor good to see you thank you anyone else here from washington thank you for coming for efforts to revitalize the west fourth street neighborhood for addressing the quality of drinking water for waste water treatment and protection of surrounding rivers and for bringing more of the community together through increased cultural outreach programs wichita kansas mayor elma broadfoot anybody else here from wichita thank you for its summer youth academy to get young people more involved in learning and less involved in gangs for a partnership that encourages troubled youths to seek treatment for their problems and rewards them with improved self esteem and for a project to restore the quality of life within a wichita neighborhood wray colorado ms roberta helling how are you anybody else here from wray colorado for the town s first rehabilitation center a family counseling center and a new hospital the only multiple physician facility in a 100 mile radius all this done by a town with a population of just about 2 000 people if we had the people from this colorado town here in the nation s capital we d probably lick our problems in no time while i have mentioned these places by name the awards really belong to the people in the communities even those who weren t able to come here today to be an all american city it doesn t matter how big you are or how much money you have it s not the racial composition or the region in which the community is located what matters is the commitment of the people the innovation of the leaders and the cooperation of people across all the lines that too often divide us in america now to say a few words on behalf of the all american city program is mr wayne hedien come on up here chairman and ceo of all state insurance representing the all state foundations whose generosity has made these awards possible a generation ago robert kennedy spoke of america s cities and towns and said the time has come to bring the engines of government of technology of the economy fully under the control of our citizens to recapture and reenforce the values of a more human time and place we honor leaders who have done that but i hope also we look at the challenges still facing all of us i asked henry cisneros to join this cabinet because i thought he was not only a brilliant ad committed person but because i thought he understood how we could help instead of hinder the energies of people who live at the grass roots level we re trying to reform a lot of our housing programs to help you do that i asked bob reich to come into the labor department because i thought he understood that cities and local groups committed to training our work force and helping unemployed people go back to work weren t doing very well with 150 separate education and training programs we want to allow you to consolidate them and spend the money in ways that will best put your own people back to work i have done everything i could to support the brilliant work done by the vice president to try to reconceive the whole relationship between the federal and the state and local government we have a lot of work to do and i just wanted to say one thing in closing one of the things that we have to do is to impress upon the people who live here in washington and not just the united states congress but also the people who run all these departments that we don t have a day to waste you see every day where you live what can happen if you do something right you also see the enormous consequences of continued neglect of continuing to do things the way they are and let me just say there are a lot of things that i want to do as president that will just help you to do what i know you ll do anyway if we can find a way to give you the power to do it i hope you will help us to pass the kind of health care reform that will liberate you and make your citizens healthier i hope you will help us to pass this reinventing government program i hope you will support the innovations of henry cisneros and bob reich and the other members of the cabinet i hope you will come up to this city and demand that we finally do something to help you get guns out of the hands of people who are behaving irresponsible with them we do not we need to pass the brady bill and we don t need to have a situation that we have in many of our cities where the average person committing a murder is under the age of 16 and has access to semi automatic weapons there s no reason children should have those in the cities of this country we have work to do we need your help bring your ideas your innovation your energy back to washington and give use a chance to do it thank you very much dem wjclinton16 9 94 bill_clinton thank you very much congressman rangel secretary brown chairman mfume other members of the congressional black caucus and to all of the veterans of our armed forces who are here to your family members and friends my fellow americans i am proud to be here to honor the african american veterans of world war ii this is a distinguished generation in the history of african american military service but you belong to a legacy older than the declaration of independence one that includes the legendary service of the massachusetts 54th in our civil war the buffalo soldiers in the west the 92nd division in world war i congressman rangel i m sure most of you know is a decorated veteran of the korean war and he had a son who served in the united states marine corps i want to recognize his service and that of the other veterans of the congressional black caucus congressmen blackwell bishop clay conyers dellums dixon jefferson rush stokes scott and towns i also want to acknowledge our secretary of veterans affairs jesse brown i m grateful to have him in my cabinet not only because he is the first african american secretary of veterans affairs but because he is a genuine hero of our military service and someone as congressman rangel said who has been a secretary of veterans affairs and a secretary for america s veterans i was telling him on the way over here i had just gotten another one of his letters reminding me that there was something else i should have done that i had not yet done for the veterans of this country i told him when we had our little interview before i became president that i expected him not only to be loyal to me but loyal to you and that as long as he were honest and straightforward with me he could fulfill both loyalties i can honestly say he is doing his best to follow my admonition i want to note that today is also pow mia recognition day a day to recognize those americans who were held prisoner of war or those who remain unaccounted for the missing who never received their proper welcome home they are not forgotten the united states stands firmly resolved to help their young loved ones find the answers they deserve and even today we are working hard in investing a significant amount of money in that endeavor in southeast asia for decades african american veterans were missing in our nation s memories of world war ii for too long you were soldiers in the shadows forgotten heroes today it should be clear to you all of you you are forgotten no more i m very proud of your service to our country you ve protected and expanded the freedoms that all the rest of us enjoy today our nation s debt to you can never be fully repaid but we can certainly honor your service as we do today americans endured much during world war ii the terrible loss of lives the separation of families and loved ones the interruptions of life on the homefront all our people felt some of that but no group of americans endured what african americans endured in uniform you had to win the right to fight the enemy we faced in common you endured the indignities of double standards for black troops the put downs the segregated units and bases some of which gave you less freedom to move than german prisoners of war you defended america with no guarantees that your own freedom would be defended in return i m just reading the new book by doris kearns goodwin about world war ii and the president and mrs roosevelt s war on the homefront war abroad she was constantly urging her husband to try to do something about the double standard accorded to africanamerican people in the military and demanded among other things that people who wanted to enlist in the navy ought to be able to do something besides work in the mess we ve come a long way since then largely because of you and many tens of thousands like you who disproved the false stereotypes who showed that american troops were are and always will be the best trained the best prepared fighting force in history regardless of the color of their skin in fact units comprised entirely or mostly of african americans performed remarkably groups honored today such as the famed tuskeegee airmen this is something to the tuskeegee airmen stand up there when i was in europe recently to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of italy and rome and d day i was escorted on part of my journey by a tuskeegee airman from my home state who told me what is now in my notes here that tuskeegee airmen flew 1 578 combat missions and they were the only fighter group in the mediterranean black or white never to lose a single solitary bomber under escort the red ball express they landed at normandy in the wake of d day and rushed material to supply the rapid allied advance the u s army s 761st tank battalion the first black armored unit to see combat in world war ii they fought bravely at the battle of the bulge and did so while in combat for 183 days in a row in europe north africa the pacific or stateside in the army the navy the air force the marines the coast guard more than a million african american men and women helped to win this century s greatest fight for freedom in helping to show the world what america was against you helped to show america what america is for you helped to liberate all of us from segregation the civil rights marches were already underway every time you marched in a uniform and today at the end of the cold war we should do everything we can to pay back the debt we owe to move forward as a nation as you helped america to move forward after world war ii most of you were born in the years after world war i a time when america came home from victory and retreated from the world a time in which insecurity arose as hitler s hate spread overseas the red scare and the ku klux klan grew up here at home but after world war ii we avoided a lot of those mistakes we turned our old adversaries into new allies we brought prosperity into our own economy even as we built the global economy we educated our people for new work and propelled a movement for civil rights that lifted millions of americans into equal dignity and gave all americans at least some chance to join the middle class now we have to do what your generation did for us to guide new democracies into an era of security and prosperity to renew our own economy to give hope to our communities to give every individual the tools they need to assume personal responsibility for themselves and their families to prepare our young people for life in the 21st century and per haps the most difficult of all we have got to find a way to work together in this country to make a strength out of our diversity to prove that in a global economy where the earth is smaller and smaller the fact that we are nations of many races and faiths and many backgrounds is a great source of strength if we will tap it with open minds and open hearts here in the government the president and the congress we have some power to bring more jobs and lower the deficit we have the power to pass laws that will help people to combat crime and will help to open trading opportunities all around the world we have the power to pass laws that will give communities the tools they need to rebuild and give families the breaks they need to succeed at work and at home like the family leave act but one thing i ve learned here now in nearly two years as president no matter how much progress we make in passing the laws what goes on in the hearts of our countrymen is still the most important thing and there is still too much in our country that divides us too many that see the glass as half empty instead of half full we can win the battles before us there is no problem we face today that america cannot overcome but we have to have the spirit and the character and the sheer endurance and faith that so many of you demonstrated by the dignity and courage of your service in the second world war before i turn the microphone over to congressman sanford bishop of georgia who will read the awards as secretary brown and i congratulate the honorees let me say just a word about haiti since congressman rangel was kind enough to mention it as all of you know now it is a place where terrible atrocities have occurred after a democratic leader was thrown out dictators took over people were murdered slashed raped anything to intimidate them into submission it is a place where democracy has been taken away the only place in our entire hemisphere where an elected government was supplanted with a dictatorship because of the oppression and the difficulties it is a place where we have had many immigrants streaming out of it looking for freedom and relief and unless we act there will be more i hope you also know that we have bent over backwards now for three years to avoid this confrontation we have sought a peaceful solution repeatedly last year we made an agreement here in the united states the dictator general cedras came here and signed an agreement in which he promised to leave power in return for a spirit of a reconciliation and humanity putting the country back together and then when the day came to keep the deal he broke it turned the united nations away and now they re even refusing to talk to representatives of the united nations well here in our neighborhood that level of human rights abuse the loss of democracy through robbery the continued threat of the instability of immigration and breaking your word to the united states united nations and all your neighbors those things are things which cannot stand i also want to say as all of you know our military is as good as it s ever been perhaps better than it s ever been it s more united more flexible more modern and yet more skilled in the old fashioned virtues and abilities perhaps than ever before our leaders have prepared well for this moment while hoping that it would not be necessary but as all of you know as well as any american there is no such thing as a risk free journey in this area we have done everything we can to be deliberate and fair even at this hour just a few minutes ago we had all the members of our coalition including the prime ministers of several of the caribbean countries into the white house president aristide made a speech in which he said no violence reconciliation let s don t do this let s don t take retribution on each other anymore this is a right cause with a country that is near in our own neighborhood where the mission is plain and limited and achievable and i just want to say to all of you that i honor your contributions and i know you honor the contributions of all those young men and women in uniform who now are able to achieve their god given abilities in the service of their country without regard to their race because of what you did thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton16 9 96 bill_clinton the crime rate has come down from four years in a row for the first time in a long time i m proud of that but it s still too high and we all know it the hundred thousand new police officers supporting people in the community working together they re making a difference we have since 1994 we ve already funded about half of those we have to finish the job it s a major point of contention in this election and it s very important we have put tougher penalties on the books for repeat offenders especially and violent offenders so the police don t do their work and then see it undone by the laws that are on the books we don t believe that police should be easily out gunned by gangs in the street that s why we took the assault weapons off the street and passed the brady bill and while we re against the cop killer bullets we passed the three strikes and you re out law for people who commit three serious crimes no more parole it s working it s working we re indicting people convicting people under it and it s working we expanded the death penalty to include drug kingpins and police killers because i thought it was important and justified in those circumstances the 19 assault weapons we took off the street had only one person one purpose to kill other people but a lot of criminals don t have assault weapons and 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers could not get a handgun because of the brady bill we did the right thing they were right they re safer and we need to stay after it we passed the violence against women act to try to help deal especially with problems of domestic violence we ve also supported zero tolerance for guns and drugs in schools we supported things like school uniforms and tough truancy laws and curfews we ve supported an effort to mobilize another million americans to work in citizens groups to work with local police departments we got the cellular telephone industry to donate thousands and thousands of cellular phones to help these community neighborhood watch groups support the police i don t know how many little kids have told me what an impression their dare officer made on them at the school we know now that one of the reasons we ve got a real problem with youth drug abuse is that going way back to 1990 young people began to get the idea again that this was not dangerous well that s wrong it s not just illegal it is dangerous they can kill children they can destroy their ability to concentrate for young women they can undermine their ability to bear healthy children and we need everyone in the community supporting law enforcement officers getting that message out to our children to every child no matter where he or she lives it is important we have gen barry mccaffrey a four star general was appointed to lead our war on drugs after he led our troops south of the border and did so much to keep drugs from coming into america his strategy is targeted at doing those things which will keep drugs away from our children we ve proposed the largest anti drug effort in history and i hope congress will give us the extra 700 million we asked for so that we can do everything possible to really effectively turn these trends around and make sure that we have drug use going down not just among adults which it is it s dropped cocaine use has dropped by a third among adults in the last four years we have got to get drug use going down among our children we can t have these kids out there believing they are not in danger when they are and you have to help let me say that in the next four years one thing we have to focus more on is the violence caused by gangs which is also often related to drug dealing you over and over and over again we hear stories of totally innocent children who just happened to be standing on the wrong street corner happened to be walking in the wrong neighborhood happened to be going home from school at a bad time totally innocent children killed because of gang wars we see kids going into gangs just to protect themselves because they re afraid if they don t they won t be safe on the street and in their neighborhood and we have got to break this last week in colorado i announced a program i d like to reiterate i believe it is very important that we get more states to test prisoners and parolees for drug use and to provide more drug treatment in prisons and revoke parole if people violate it by using drugs we have a law on the books which says we will help states build prisons if they promise not to let violent criminals out too soon i propose to amend it to say you also have to give drug testing to parolees that will keep em straight and keep em from returning 60 percent of all the heroine and cocaine used in this country 60 percent of all of it is used by people who are involved with the criminal justice process right now we need to help them but more important we need to protect the rest of our kids and our communities by saying parole is a privilege and you can t have it if you go back to drugs the final point i want to leave with you is this these people up here are doing everything they can and unlike a lot of folks we have shown we have shown or rather they have shown we know how to bring the crime rate down but they can t do it all by themselves they need us to support them i am honored by their support today and all i can say is to go back to what sen glenn said if you ll give us fifty more days we ll give you four more years of making our streets our homes our schools safer thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton16 9 98 bill_clinton good evening ladies and gentlemen president havel mrs havlova friends from the czech republic my fellow americans welcome to the white house mr president as a playwright you could hardly have written a more dramatic scenario than the one you have in fact lived over the last 10 years your presidency has reminded people around the world that words do matter that creativity has a place in politics that a nation s strength is measured not by its ability to control people but rather by the opposite its success in moving and empowering them as you showed us in the press conference today you have never lost the honesty spontaneity the contagious friendliness of your writing i feel quite certain no other head of state would have appointed frank zappa as a cultural ambassador or taken our favorite czech american madeleine albright out on the town in new york to hear some good music or given the president of the united states a personally inscribed tenor saxophone and forced him to play it since you became president you have brought back democracy and civil society you have led the czech republic to a place of prominence in the new europe and we look forward to your becoming a member of nato together we have been partners in bosnia and in other balkan trouble spots working to repair the ravages of intolerance and injustice and together we will be partners to build a peaceful prosperous and free europe in the 21st century we value our ties to the czech people the first czechs arrived in the new world in the 17th century and many more came in the wake of the revolution of 1848 dvorak composed his magnificent new world symphony borrowing the rhythms he heard during his travels across the united states especially from african american folk music the flag of the czech republic was designed and first flown in new york to honor a visit by the great patriot tomas masaryk from athletes to artists from actors to astronauts from secretaries to secretaries of state czech americans many of whom are here tonight have lent their gifts to our grateful nation we shared the world s sadness when czechoslovakia lost its freedom 50 years ago we felt a similar sense of loss when the prague spring was followed by soviet invasion in 1968 but you and your comrades mr president taught us again that all seasons are cyclical that spring always returns in 1989 your velvet revolution rejuvenated the entire world there is an old czech american saying that too much wisdom does not produce courage that s a nice way of saying i think that too much time spent in books may keep people too much away from the active world mr president you have lived a life of the mind and a life of action you have shown us wisdom and courage you have made us believe that we can not only dream our dreams but redeem them ladies and gentlemen i ask you to join me in a toast to the president of the czech republic to mrs havlova and to the people of the czech republic dem wjclinton17 1 00 bill_clinton thank you very much good morning first of all i want to take my notes out because the older i get the worse my memory is i want to begin by thanking alex and all the people of d c cares the executive director susan linsky and all the others who are here with d c cares i want to thank the washington ceo of the boys and girls clubs pat shannon thank you and i want to say charles mann it s good to see you wish you had been on the field next year we ll get it next year let me also say how honored i am to be here with your mayor and your representative in congress the mayor used to be a member of our administration actually a lot of people don t know that i always think that s why he s such a successful mayor he got good preparation and everything he said about eleanor holmes norton is absolutely true when she asks you for something there is only one question are you going to do it now or are you going to do it later because in the end she always gets what she wants she s been a brilliant representative when hillary and i moved here to washington we wanted to be good citizens of the district of columbia some of you may remember one of the first things i did after i moved to washington was to go to georgia avenue and walk up and down it talk to business people there and ever since then we ve tried to be involved in the life of the city and it s a source of immense pride to me to see the success that washington is having and to have had the opportunity to work with so many of your local officials i see also my good friend charlene drew jarvis back there welcome and sharon ambrose who is the council person for this ward i think is here thank you very much where are you there you go so this is to me a source of immense pride to see d c really coming back and doing well but it won t happen we cannot realize the full potential of this city without greater d c cares without other volunteers without people companies like at amp t doing their part to help everybody become what they ought to be and to make all these neighborhoods come alive again and let me also say a special word of appreciation to the head of our national service program who has already been mentioned several times senator harris wofford it was actually harris wofford and another good friend of martin luther king congressman john lewis who had the idea for making the king holiday a day on not a day off and americorps volunteers when we started i signed this bill six years ago to make the king holiday a national holiday and a day of service and i think we had 10 000 volunteers that day now we have hundreds of thousands of volunteers all across america doing things like what we did today thanks in no small measure to you sir and we thank you very much for your leadership and now i just want to do one other thing i want to acknowledge the young people who worked with me today we were in there staining the bookcases in the computer room because they made sure i didn t mess up too bad so thank you dietrich marcus dedra artille and shawnese thank you raise your hands all that people who worked with me thank you all very much they re here somewhere there they are back there i just want to say one final thing that i hope will go across america today you look at all these young people here with your tee shirts on doing good things dr king once gave a sermon at the national cathedral here in washington in which he said we are all caught up in and he had a wonderful phrase he said in an inescapable web of mutuality which is an elegant way of saying that i can never be fully what i want to be unless you have a chance to be fully what you want to be and you can never be fully what you want to be unless i have a chance to be what i want to be that we are in this together that we are members of the community of this city the community of this nation and the community of humanity and frankly we all know that in the last 30 plus years since martin luther king left this earth we have forgotten that too much and i have done my best to remind the american people of the truth of that at every single opportunity for seven years now and it is a source of immense pride and joy to me every time i see people reaching across the lines that divide them to do things that lift us all up this holiday embodies that all these children embody that in my lifetime and perhaps in the lifetime of our country we have never ever ever before had at the same time so much economic prosperity and social progress with the absence of internal crisis or external threat and that means that we have an enormous obligation those of us who are grown now to make the most of this magic moment to bring to all the people the neighborhoods and the children who haven t been a part of this economic prosperity a chance to live their dreams too to bring to bear yes you can clap for that that s all right to bring to bear our best efforts to meet the long term challenges of this country and not to forget that more than a billion people in this old world of ours still live on less than a dollar a day and that there are people not only at home but around the world that the united states ought to be lifting up and if you believe martin luther king was right every time we give a child in america a chance every time we give a child in africa latin america or asia a chance all the rest of us are better off too every time you give a little you always get more back let s remember that as dr king s enduring legacy thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton17 1 01 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you i want to that s what i want to say i want to thank you for coming and i want to thank you for waiting we had a wonderful moment in the arkansas legislature i got to speak to the legislature and see a lot of my old friends and you know with term limits there s been a lot of turnover and about a third of the legislature as nearly as i can tell got their start working in one of my campaigns so i had a wonderful time thank you mayor i want to thank rodney slater and hershel gober for doing a great job in the president s cabinet and being part of this vast array of arkansans who came down here with me today thank you vic snyder for your friendship and support thank you mike ross for making the campaign and going to congress we re proud of you thank you senator pryor for coming home today so we could be together on my last trip to arkansas maybe by the time i get around to writing a book i ll be able to do some justice to the absolutely essential personal and political role david pryor played in the success of this administration in the last eight years and i m very grateful to him i want to thank all the state officials who came out thank you sharon priest thank you jimmie lou and charlie gus mark pryor i want to thank little joe and the bks it s just like being home and i want to thank the trumpet and zion church choir you know jim dailey said about everything i could think of to say and he gave a terrific speech and i hope somebody for me still got it on tape i m going to play that some day when i m feeling down you know i want to thank him for his friendship chelsea and i are delighted to be here today i wish hillary could be here but you know she s otherwise occupied and i could tell you one thing she won that thing because she worked harder and she learned to do that here and i was very proud of her i think the day she was sworn into the united states senate i honestly believe was the happiest day of my life since chelsea was born it was an amazing thing and a real tribute to her and to all of you who have helped her along life s way i was thinking that it was about eight years ago that i had my farewell rally to arkansas when i left to become president in this very place and i was looking out across this sea of faces thinking how many of you were there then and how many of you were there 10 years ago and 20 years ago and in some cases 27 years ago when i first started i got tickled when i was walking out of the legislature tonight i ran into a guy named red milligan from marion county and in 1974 early 74 i went up and hunted him up because somebody told me he could get me some votes and i asked him to be for me and he got a guy named kearney carlton and he said well we re going to drive you out in the country he said you need to know our county has more dirt roads than any other county in arkansas and we re going down to leon swaford s store i still remember this 1974 which is just about at the four corners of marion and circe and boone and newton counties you can t get there from here even today i got in the truck we re driving down the road he drives me about 20 minutes we hadn t seen another living soul they stomp on the brakes the cab of the truck fills with dust he whips out this bag of redman it s a true story he said son i don t know if you can make it or not you know you re a university teacher and all that he said i ll tell you what if you ll chew this redman i ll be for you and if you don t i m going to kick you out and see if you can find your way back home and i looked at him and i said open the door true story and he told it again today and he started laughing he said well if that s the way you feel about it i guess i ll be for you anyway it was those kind of encounters that helped me learn a little bit about human nature and public life and politics the kind of thing that s hard to learn if you start out in a big place where you don t have time to listen to people and see how they live and go down every little back road i made a lot of back roads with a lot of you in this audience today and i just want to thank you i also want to say that if anybody had told me when i left here eight years ago that i could come home with my country having the longest economic expansion in history and the largest number of new jobs in this period of time where we d actually be paying down 600 billion of the national debt in the last three budgets of my administration that we d have all time high home ownership minority business ownership college going rate welfare rolls cut by 60 percent the lowest crime rate in 25 years i could go on if anybody told me that all these ideas that i talked so passionately about in the campaign of 92 that i thought would work because they were beginning to work in arkansas i would have said i ll take that right now for my country and our future i ll take it right now i never would have dreamed that it would have worked out as well as it has and i just want you to know that i know perfectly well i never would have been president if it hadn t been for the people of arkansas i told somebody yesterday that i know a little bit about american history and a lot about how a lot of people got to be president and of all the ones that i know at least i m the only one that i can honestly say got to be president because he had personal friends who stood up traveled the country fought spoke up and determined to make the campaign go and because of you i was able to make some other friends and see some other people and learn some things about this country of ours it s quite an interesting place america growing more diverse every day we re growing more independent every day we re growing more connected to the rest of the world every day and i did my best to prepare this country for this new century and this whole new way of living and working and relating to each other and when i leave office at noon on saturday i will leave with a heart filled with gratitude happy and pleased that all the options are open for the american people that choices still have to be made but we actually have it within our grasp to make america debt free this decade for the first time since 1835 to give every child in this country a world class education to bring free enterprise and opportunity to people and places that have been left behind something that s very important to us here in arkansas because we have people and we still today have people who haven t been part of this prosperity to give the working families of this country that don t have health insurance access to health coverage for the first time in our country s history to secure medicare and social security for the baby boomers retirement and to continue to be a huge force for peace and freedom throughout the world i couldn t have asked for more i d also like to say that i m well aware that i ve just been the captain of this team and without a team you don t win in public life it really is a team sport public service jim dailey mentioned some of the arkansans that have served with me and i mentioned some more when i was over at the legislature because the number came down today but i want you to know that over 460 of your fellow citizens from this state have worked in our administration in these last eight years and america is better because of what they did and finally let me say i m looking forward to being here and building my library and center i believe it will be the most important educational institution as a library a museum a tourist destination a learning site of any that have been built just because i have the benefit of coming into my own as a former president and building this library when all this wonderful technology is out there i hope you like the building design i worked hard on it myself for a year it will be like a bridge out into the arkansas river and i think it will be a real beacon for people all around the country and i expect people from all around the world to come here i ll get it up quick as i can we ll have an educational program and offer a graduate degree in public service which i hope will inspire other young people to spend at least some of their life in public service which has been so good to me and which i have found so richly rewarding so i ll be around quite a bit i want to say too when i came in from the airport we passed two of chelsea s schools mann and the booker arts magnet school and i d like to thank since she came home with me all the people here in little rock and throughout the state who were so good to her during her growing up and her teachers and all the others it means a lot to me i ve got a daughter about to graduate from college and a wife going into the senate it seems to me that one of the things i ll have to do is go to work which won t do me any harm but between my larger public service and doing what i can to support my senator and my daughter i will be here a lot and we ll have a chance to do a lot of things together to reminisce over old times but the main thing i want to say to all of you is i want you to be proud that we proved that national politics and national government and the direction of this nation is not the private province of some elite somewhere in some big distant place that people with common sense with basic american roots anywhere in the country who have the right vision and the right ideas and are willing to work in good faith with all different kinds of people can move this country forward and i want you to know too for all the storms and all the sunshine i said this to the legislature and i want to say it again because it s absolutely true there has never been a day and tonight will be the same way when i get home that i haven t landed on that helicopter on the back of the white house lawn and not felt a thrill not felt like a 17 year old boy looking at the white house for the first time and when i walk out of the white house for the last time and i sit at the inauguration of my successor and i leave this office i will leave more idealistic and more hopeful about my country than the day i took the oath of office eight years ago and that s the way you ought to feel that s the way you ought to feel and none of it would have been possible without you i love you thank you thank you thank you dem wjclinton17 1 01a bill_clinton thank you very much and good morning i want to welcome you all here but especially i would like to acknowledge secretary mineta senator conrad burns of montana all the descendants of lewis and clark representatives of sacagawea and york stephen ambrose from whom you will hear in a moment and i also want to recognize my friends ken burns and dayton duncan who did such a wonderful job on the lewis and clark film and members of the millennium council who have supported this project with the lewis and clark bicentennial and trails groups i thank you all for coming here and i would like to especially acknowledge and thank our administration s environmental team including secretary babbitt epa administrator carol browner who is here chief of staff john podesta george frampton the head of the council for environmental quality and bob stanton who has led our park service so ably thank you all for your good work i am especially grateful to these people today obviously but every day because thanks to their work our air and water are cleaner our food is safer we ve cleaned up twice as many waste sites in these eight years as in the previous 12 we ve protected more land in the lower 48 states than any administration since that of theodore roosevelt and have supported research development and deployment of energy conservation technologies and clean energy sources demonstrating i believe convincingly that we can have environmental protection and economic growth hand in hand we believe that our future and our land air and water are one that we must preserve not only our historical treasures but our natural treasures as well today s ceremony is the last i will host as president here in the historic east room where first lady abigail adams hung up the laundry to dry where union soldiers lived during the early days of the civil war and where a young idealist named meriwether lewis summoned by president jefferson to serve as his secretary first unpacked his traveler s trunk and set up quarters in 1801 the room looked quite different back then no chandeliers no parquet floors no silk drapes just the rough siding of walls awaiting plaster and two stone hearths to ward off the winter chill but what the east room then lacked in grandeur was more than atoned for by the ideas that filled it for it was here that jefferson and lewis first unfurled an unfinished map of a great continent and planned a bold expedition of discovery so it is fitting that we meet once more in this room at the dawn of a new century and a new age of discovery where a few months ago we announced the very first complete mapping of the human genome we gather here to honor pathfinders of our past and protect their precious legacy most of the landscape lewis and clark traversed nearly two centuries ago is changed beyond recognition forests cut prairies plowed rivers dammed cities built that is the march of time but still there are a few wild places left rugged reminders of our rich history and nature s enduring majesty because they are more important than ever after careful review and extensive public input we protect them today by establishing them as national monuments the first of these monuments covers a remote stretch of the missouri river and central montana now known as the upper missouri river breaks if you canoe these magical waters or hike their weathered cliffs you may still encounter elk or bear wolves mountain lions even big horn sheep just as lewis and clark did in 1805 the second monument we designate is also in montana it is pompeys pillar the sandstone outcrop named after the newborn son of sacagawea the expedition s shoshone guide archeologists say this monolith has been a religious site and natural lookout for nearly 12 000 years it bears the markings of many ancient travelers clark himself carved his name into the rock and it s still there today some years ago wallace stegner observed that america has a fundamental interest in preserving wilderness because the challenge of wilderness forged our national character he wrote that the wild places give us a geography of hope that sustains us in our busy lives even in the largest cities today we protect this geography of hope not just along the lewis and clark trail but across our nation and six other national monuments which secretary babbitt will discuss shortly we have another purpose here today as well righting some wrongs that have lingered about lewis and clark for 200 years now the first concerns william clark when lewis recruited clark to help lead the corps of discovery he promised him the rank of captain unfortunately issues of budget and bureaucracy intervened some things never change and clark never received his commission a natural leader great frontiersman lt clark risked his life across a continent and back all for the good of this nation today we honor his service by presenting his great great great grandsons bud and john clark with the late william clark certificate of appointment to the rank of captain in the united states army we also have descendants of meriwether lewis here today jane henley and elizabeth henley label i d like to ask them to stand as well thank you and welcome the journals of lewis and clark record that the expedition s success also hinged on the courage and commitment of sacagawea an extraordinary 15 year old shoshone guide who made most of the trip with a baby on her back time and again her language skills geographic knowledge and tribal connections saved lewis and clark from disaster even death despite her quite heroics sacagawea received no formal recognition after the expedition ended last year we put her likeness on our new dollar coin today i am proud to announce her honorary promotion to the rank of sergeant in the united states army so that all americans might recognize her critical role in lewis and clark s journey to the sea accepting her citation is amy mossett a leader of the mandan hidatsa arikara nation and rose anne abrahamson a leader of the shoshone nation i d like to ask them to come up finally i want to recognize york the slave who accompanied lewis and clark to the pacific and back like sacagawea he shared all the risks but none of the reward and while the rigors of the wilderness fostered a certain equality camaraderie and respect among york and his fellow explorers that did not translate into freedom upon his return only years later did he finally gain his liberty before fading into history today in recognition of york s selfless contributions to the corps of discovery and to his service to our country he also receives an honorary promotion to the rank of sergeant in the united states army accepting the citation on his behalf are york scholar jim holmberg and york sculptor ed hamilton i d like to ask them to come up and receive the citation as we finally right these wrongs and celebrate the legacy of lewis and clark we recognize the irony inherent in their expedition their historic journey of discovery opened up the american west a mythic frontier that even today endures in the american mind as a symbol of freedom but york was anything but free and sacagawea s people like her neighbors would eventually be swept away by a flood of american settlers determined to claim the great plains and the land beyond these hard truths do not fit comfortably within the narrow rhetorical boundaries of manifest destiny or square with modern notions of democracy and diversity but as our nation has grown physically so we have grown as a people and i believe the capacity for growth as a people for deepening the bonds of community and broadening our vision of liberty and equality has been just as important a voyage of discovery as the physical one lewis and clark took so long ago nearly two centuries ago lewis and clark used this compass this very one to navigate a continent of possibility now america is setting out to navigate a century of possibility determined to explore the far frontiers of space the ocean depths the tiniest of genetic structures but we must not forget our obligations to live in harmony with the earth in the years to come more areas will doubtless require our common protection i d like to mention just two for example first the owyhee canyonlands in idaho this fractured maze of ancient canyons is a rugged paradise of leaping big horn sheep and soaring birds of prey second we must continue i believe to safeguard the arctic national wildlife refuge one of the last truly wild places on earth the serengeti of the americas some of you and others around the country have urged that i declare this a monument as well i have declined because current law actually provides legislative protection for this refuge identical to that which an executive order would provide but i still believe that those who propose and who would now have to get legislative authorization to do so to drill in the refuge are in error in 1995 i vetoed a bill that would have permitted such drilling and i believe we should continue to work together to meet the nation s energy needs while we protect this environmental eden i hope in the years ahead we can reach agreement on a policy of environmental protection and sustainable development appropriate to this new age in which we live and to the real condition of our natural resources i hope it will unite republicans and democrats even more difficult perhaps i hope it will unite westerners and easterners people who live in the north and the south people who make a living from the land and those who feel more alive when they re on it senator burns i m glad to see you here today in support of this we are making some progress after years of squabbles this year by a huge bipartisan majority the congress for the first time set aside a committed dedicated stream of funding year in and year out to preserve the natural legacy of america from vast open spaces to small urban greenspaces it is a very hopeful beginning and perhaps the most important congressional conservation move in many decades so i hope as i leave that we will be able to continue to build on this and return to the point where the environment is not a point of either partisan or geographic explosion but a point of shared values and shared vision for eight years i have done my best to prepare america for the 21st century i have been critics and supporters alike have acknowledged virtually obsessed with all things modern with trying to make sure america was at the center of all new trading networks trying to modernize our economic and social policies trying to alter the framework of global financial institutions so that everyone had a chance to participate in the best of what the future holds trying to make sure that we stayed on the cutting edge in all areas of science and technology this has occupied much of my time and attention but i grew up in a national park and i have never forgotten that progress uprooted from harmony with nature is a fool s errand the more perfect union of our founders dreams will always include the earth that sustains us in body and spirit today we have honored three who made it so thank you very much now i would like to ask stephen ambrose to come to the podium but as i do i would like to thank him for many things for teaching america about world war ii for most recently making sure we know how the railroad was built across the country and for all the works in between but i rather suspect having heard him talk about it that nothing has quite captured his personal passion and the story of his family life like the odyssey of lewis and clark and the beauties that they found that he and his family later discovered for themselves steve dem wjclinton17 1 01b bill_clinton thank you very very much and good afternoon this is the first time in over 20 years i ve been here when i don t have to get asked for a racing pass and i heard somebody utter that hated phrase and i understand that for a variety of reasons you ve all gotten rid of that burden so progress continues governor huckabee lieutenant governor rockefeller senator beebe speaker broadway general pryor secretary priest jimmie lou charlie gus my friends i m delighted to be joined by senator pryor about whom i would like to say more in a moment congressman snyder congressman ross and a large number of people who came here with me from washington i want to say that i am honored that the last trip of my presidency is to come home to arkansas and home to the legislature where i spent so many happy days thank you thank you there are a lot of people in this body who got their start in politics working with me a few who got their start in politics working against me and some who got their start doing both depending on the issue and the time i brought with me a large number of people from arkansas today and i would like to mention them and a few others because i would like to begin by telling you that in these last eight years over 460 people from our home state worked in this administration and helped to make america a stronger country and i am very grateful to all of them mack mclarty my first chief of staff my first envoy to the americas is here today when he led the white house we made four of the most important decisions we made during the entire eight years the historic balanced budget agreement where senator pryor cast the tie breaking vote and so did everybody else it passed by one vote in both houses the nafta agreement which joined us with mexico and canada the family and medical leave bill the brady law and many others he did a superb job i want to thank the three arkansans who have served in my cabinet rodney slater who is here today our secretary of transportation hirshel gober who is secretary of veterans affairs and started out helping me with veterans in arkansas and in new hampshire and has been absolutely superb and james lee witt who could not be here today because disasters don t only occur in arkansas there are other places as well although i know you ve been through a doozy lately i want to thank buddy young who worked with him as our regional official in texas who is here today two other former legislators in addition to mack have been part of this administration gloria cabe who served with many if not most of you here her daughter also works in the white house in the white house counsel s office and she s here today and carl whillock who after he was a legislator became the president of arkansas state university head of the co ops but he s most important to me because the first trip i took out of fayetteville in the first race i ever made in 1974 was across the hills of north arkansas with carl whillock when only my mother thought i had any business in that race and i thank them for being here i d also like to just acknowledge a few people as i said some of them are here and some of them aren t bob nash who s been with me for 21 years and his wonderful wife janis kearney my diarist who s here nancy hernreich who s not here who s been with me since i first ran for attorney general and has worked for me for 15 years just got married to the brother of montine mcnulty from pine bluff and is about to move with him to hong kong stephanie street my wonderful scheduler who s going to be working with me here in arkansas craig smith who did a great job in handling appointments here and was my political director came home to actually work this trip to go out at the grass roots where he began i want to thank mike gaines who ran the parole commission still is ken smith mike dalton and janet prewitt jim bob baker who s done a great job in the agriculture department maria haley robin dickey young debra wood who s been with me the whole eight years just working like a beaver in the white house mel french our protocol chief and for many years her deputy david pryor jr and marsha scott who has kept in touch with so many of you for me over these last eight years i want to thank wilbur peer and harold gist i want to thank carol willis who s been at the democratic committee this whole time who s been wonderful beyond my words to say and lottie shackelford thank you debbie willhite and ada hollingsworth came home and they helped us in a lot of ways even though they weren t strictly on the payroll there are also tons of young people who have come to washington and worked just out of college or just out of law school and i used to see them around and be so grateful that could have an opportunity to have this experience and i thank all of them for their work three of my high school classmates are here today who live in the washington area and flew home with me dr jim french who is a surgeon in washington carolyn staley who runs the adult literacy foundation and my good friend phil jamison who was the president of our class in high school who retired from the navy and stayed on to work in the pentagon on nuclear weapons issues and did a lot of the pivotal work we have done with russia over the last eight years which gave me an enormous amount of pride to know that a guy from my home town knew all about that and made me look like i knew what i was talking about from time to time i remember the first time i spoke here it was in 1974 when i was permitted to come in here and ask for house members to help me in my very first race i lost the election if i hadn t i probably never would have become president every time i see congressman hamemrschmidt i thank him for beating me i didn t lose my passion for public service and it s been with me ever since in the last 25 years i have stood in the well of this chamber many times i have lobbied in the halls and the committee room back there as attorney general when david pryor was my governor i stood here five times to take the oath of office as governor of my state two months out of every two years with the help of a number of my legislative aides who are here today bill clark and hal honeycutt and bill bowen who was briefly my chief of staff when even i was intimidated we would argue and argue and work and work until we hammered into law our dreams for the future of this state i d like to thank some people who aren t here some of whom are no longer living the late judge frank holtz who gave me my first chance to work in a campaign in 1966 my great friend senator bill fulbright who lived long enough to see me become president and to receive the medal of freedom who gave me a job when i was flat broke just so i could finish college and i ll never forget it i would like to thank the members of the congressional delegation present and past who stood with me in these last eight years in the tough times and the good times especially david pryor and dale bumpers without whom i can t imagine how this last eight years would have been possible i thank you my friends i d like to thank hillary if she hadn t moved to arkansas and married me i doubt the rest of this trip would have happened she was a great first lady for this state she did an amazing job in washington and did things that no one has ever done that will benefit this country for decades to come and i am so proud of her i could pop today i want you to remember when she does great things in the united states senate she learned all of her politics wrestling with you i am delighted that my mother in law is here dorothy rodham is here and my step father dick kelley i thank them for being here linda dixon who was my secretary as governor and has run our office here in little rock along with representative mary ann salmon and i am delighted that chelsea could come home with me as it happens on the way home on the way here from the airport we passed two of her schools mann and booker arts magnet school where she spent so many happy years and learned a great deal about her lessons and about life and the friends the schools the churches the associations she had here had a lot to do with the person she is today and i m very grateful for that finally i would like to thank the people of this state who elected me five times for sending me to washington to carry the lessons that i learned from you and the progress that we tried to make here to the rest of the country everything that i have been able to do as president is in no small measure a result of the life i lived and the jobs i had in arkansas my conviction that politics requires a vision and a strategy based on sound ideas and a belief that you can make a difference from education reform to economic policy to welfare and health care to building one america those things were formed here i know that when a person gets ready to check out of an office there s always a lot of retrospectives and i have followed them in the local press did this administration make a difference for arkansas did it make a difference for america so i am going to do an unconventional thing i think i will start with the facts first of all when i came in i think a lot of people thought well you know we d just move the whole federal government down here but the problem is we had a 290 billion deficit and then the price of getting rid of the deficit turned out to be losing the congress for our party so then the people that were in control had other ideas about where the money ought to go from time to time when we finally had a little notwithstanding that look what happened this year we funded the delta regional authority 20 million the first year we got funds for the great river bridge and for the highway 82 bridge we had 500 rodney said rodney said in this year s transportation budget there s 592 million for arkansas that s more than your per capita share we worked very hard especially with senator lincoln and congressman snyder to save the mission of the little rock air force base and to get the c 130j there there is 25 million in the budget this year for a simulator and millions more for an operations and maintenance center i think you re okay we got 18 million for a quality evaluation center at the pine bluff arsenal and as we try to reduce the dangers of chemical and biological warfare i think that arsenal can have a very important mission in america s future i ve talked to representative ross about it and i hope after i come down here i can work with you to think about what it should be doing in the 21st century there were 38 million for seven water projects an expansion of the forrest city prisons 5 million for research for the arkansas children s hospital we funded the dale bumpers rice research center and the agriculture research center the little rock va got some money for a research annex i am very happy that we got 2 5 million for the diane blair center at the university of arkansas and we finally got the upper payment limit for the medical center okayed and that s worth 35 million and i think it saves the medical center at least that s what dale bumpers tells me earlier of course there was over 40 million for the airport in northwest arkansas and when my library and center get built here i expect it will be a project on the order of 200 million something that i believe will make a big difference not only to central arkansas but to the whole state but what s really important it seems to me is that arkansas shared in what happened to the country so when people ask you if it made a difference here are a few numbers you might want to keep in mind 35 million people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law which i signed after it was vetoed by people who said that it would hurt the economy if i was trying to hurt the economy i did a poor job we have 22 5 million new jobs a 30 year low in unemployment a 40 year low in women s unemployment the lowest hispanic and african american unemployment ever recorded thirteen million more people get some form of college aid thanks to the hope scholarship the lifetime learning tax credit the pell grant which will go to 3 750 this year seven million people have moved off welfare a 60 percent drop in the welfare rolls 3 3 million children now have health insurance under the children s health insurance program and governor i want to thank you for your interest and mrs huckabee in getting our kids health insurance it s the first time in a dozen years the number of people without health insurance is going down two million children have moved out of poverty 1 3 million children are in after school programs or summer school programs as the result of federal funds that did not exist on the day i became president in four years we ve gone from an experimental program at 1 million to one of over 1 5 billion serving 1 3 million children there are 4 million latch key kids in this country a lot of them in arkansas and i think we ought to keep working until every child has a wholesome school to stay in after school rather than going back on the street something to say yes to rather than getting in trouble and 611 000 felons fugitives and stalkers were unable to buy handguns because of the brady law and yet not a single arkansas hunter missed an hour in the deer woods no sports shooter missed a single contest two hundred thousand young americans have served in americorps a lot of them right here in arkansas when the tornado hit the capital neighborhoods and i saw all the trees blown down in the backyard of the governor s mansion and i went over to the grocery store that was flattened i saw young americorps kids from all over this country working here in arkansas to try to help fix things and clean things up and i am grateful for that and i might say i learned a couple of days ago that those 200 000 people in six years are more people than have served in the peace corps in the entire 40 years of its existence thank you one hundred and twenty five thousand community police officers on the street crime at a 25 year low 37 000 teachers hired all over america in the early grades on our way to 100 000 and a class size average of 18 in the first three grades 90 percent of our kids immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of the country we had betty bumpers and roslynn carter over at the white house the other day to celebrate that the largest increase in head start in history the highest homeownership in history the first time we ve ever had more than two thirds of the american people in their own homes we have a 500 a child tax credit we have 200 000 more people getting child care assistance the student loan program costs 9 billion less than it did when i started to people who are borrowing the direct loan program saves the average college student 1 300 on a 10 000 loan interest rates long term are lower today than they were when i took office even though we ve had an eight year expansion average interest rates because of turning deficits to surplus saves people 2 000 a year on 100 000 home mortgage we ve had over 300 trade agreements in the last year along agreements with china with africa and the caribbean basin with vietnam and with jordan we have the smallest government in 40 years since dwight eisenhower was president of the united states since 1960 two thirds of the regulations under the elementary and secondary education act have been eliminated hundreds of programs are gone and i ll give anybody 5 that can mention five of them i take it back i ll give you 100 if you can mention five of them when we started the deficit was 290 billion now we have a 240 billion surplus in our last three budgets we will pay down pay down about 600 billion of the nation s debt putting us on track if we stay there to be out of debt by the end of the decade for the first time since andrew jackson was president in 1835 this has allowed us among other things to pass pension protection legislation that has strengthened the pension protection for 40 million americans to put 25 years on the life of medicare for the first time in 25 years and if the interest savings from paying down the debt as a result of social security taxes are put against social security which is something i ve been trying to do for two years if they do that next year it will extend the life of social security 54 years to 2054 almost long enough to get us beyond the life span of all the baby boomers when the demographics of america will begin to right themselves again we have cleaner air cleaner water cleaner drinking water safer food twice as many toxic waste dumps cleaned up as in the previous 12 years and today we announced that we were setting aside eight more national monuments which means this administration has now protected more land than any administration in the history of the country except that of theodore roosevelt per capita income after inflation is up an average of 6 300 median income is over 40 000 for the first time in the history of the country and wages have gone up 9 percent as poverty has dropped 20 percent so for the first time in decades this was an economic recovery that i m proud to say did produce more billionaires and millionaires but also helped people in the lowest 20 percent of the wage earning bracket with the highest percentage gains in the last three years so that s what happened and what i want to say to you is one of the things that i tried to remember every day was that being president is a job like being governor was a job and it matters how hard you work but it also matters whether you ve got the right ideas and a lot of the ideas that i had came out of the experiences we shared together during the 1980s when times were tough in arkansas we did not have an unemployment rate before the national average in the last 10 years i was governor a single time until 1992 when we ranked second in the country in job growth but i learned a lot as we worked day in and day out together across party lines across regional lines to try to actually do the people s business and i ve said before and i ll say again one of the biggest hazards of any national capital is america is no different from others i followed this pretty closely in other countries is when you set up a government so far away from the people it is easy when you realize maybe you get your 15 seconds on the evening news to believe that politics is all about rhetoric and positioning but it s not it s a job it really matters what you do whether your ideas work and whether you have a team of people who can translate those ideas into reality i tell everybody who listens to me that it s a team sport that i may be the captain of the team but if you don t have a team you re going to lose every time and so just once more i would like to ask all the people who came here with me today from arkansas who have been part of this last eight years to stand because they were a big part of our team you all stand up now i d like to just mention three or four specific areas where i think your relationship to the national government is important and where i hope our country will continue to move forward the strategy we followed in education which is still key to everything else was very very important basically higher standards more accountability greater investment and equal opportunity a simple strategy but it s working we provided for the first time funds for states to identify failing schools and help local districts to turn them around or put them under new management or start charter schools there was one in the country when we started there are over 2 000 now reading and math scores are up in the country sat scores are at a 30 year high even though more people from more disadvantaged backgrounds are taking them a 50 percent increase in the number of kids in america taking advance placement tests 300 percent increase in hispanic students over the last seven years 500 percent increase in african american students the african american high school graduation rate is virtually equal to the white high school graduation rate in the country for the first time in the history of america and more and more people are going on to college but we have some significant challenges out there we have the largest and most diverse group of students in our schools in history arkansas is now in the top 3 states in the percentage growth of its hispanic population as all of you doubtless know better than i i just hope that you will continue to work and to urge the federal government to work with you in making progress in these areas we ve got a billion dollars plus a little more than a billion dollars this year for the first time to try to just give funds to states and school districts to help repair old schools or grievously overcrowded schools and i think that s very important there is a limit to how much we can ever expect local property taxpayers to pay and very often you have two things going on now very often the places where the need is the greatest the property tax base is the smallest which we know a lot about in arkansas and secondly ironically even though we ve got the biggest school population in history we have a smaller percentage of those students excuse me a smaller percentage of property tax owners with kids in the schools property taxpayers with kids in the schools so we ve got to work this out now when we started this there were a lot of people who had genuine reservations and this is not a political deal in the traditional sense in washington there were a lot of people who honestly thought that the federal government should not be giving money to states and the local school districts to help with school construction or repair because it wasn t something we did and i agree that normally we shouldn t do that normally we should either give you the money to spend as you need it or target it on the poorest people or the areas of greatest need like the need to hook up all our classrooms to the internet but this is an unusual time this is the first time the last three years the first time that we ve ever had more school students than we had in the baby boom years right after world war ii and the student population is much more diverse and after world war ii the national government did help states and school districts to deal with the school facilities problem so i hope that you will help us with that because i think the unmet need is somewhere over 100 billion for adequate school facilities for our kids we also are putting more funds than ever before with total bipartisan agreement in congress into teacher training continuing development and funding the master teacher program to try to certify board certified master teachers all across the country until we get up to 100 000 of them which will be enough for one in every school in the country i think that s very very important but i would urge you to continue to do that the second thing i d like to say is i think it very important that we keep trying to refine the partnership between the national government and the states in the area of economic development except for education i guess i worked harder on just trying to get and keep jobs when i was here than anything else and a lot of you worked very closely with me i m very grateful for the progress that has been made and i m especially grateful that we have got a focus now on the people and places that have been left behind because in spite of this long recovery there are still places in mountain counties in appalachia in north arkansas there are places in the mississippi delta and other rural areas there are inner city neighborhoods and worst of all a lot of our native american reservations where you can t tell there has been an eight year recovery i was on the pine ridge reservation a little over a year ago in south dakota which is near mount rushmore and one of the most historic places in all american indian culture the unemployment rate there is 72 percent and as a result all the social indicators are terrible there are a lot of problems there but intelligence is evenly distributed i was taken around there by a young girl who had to move out of her home was taken in by friends living in the back of a trailer where there were like 11 people living she was one of the most intelligent young people i met in the whole eight years i was president she deserves the same future everybody else does that s why we passed the empowerment zone program that vice president gore ran for eight years and did a brilliant job i think where we had these zones but i thought we ought to do something to try to essentially make every area in america that was insufficiently developed eligible for the same investment incentives that we presently give american investors to invest in poor communities in africa or latin america or poor countries in asia that s essentially what this new markets legislation is all about we did it in partnership with the speaker of the house dennis hastert a republican from illinois and i m very grateful to him for the work we did together and any number of other legislators who are active in it j c watts from oklahoma a lot you know danny davis from illinois who is from arkansas the congressman from chicago so i hope that you and governor the economic development agencies of the state will look for ways to maximize the usage of this new markets legislation because essentially we ve got one more piece that i think will pass early in this new session of congress but what we re trying to do is to give people the incentives to put money into places of high unemployment where people are willing to work and to spread the risk so essentially what it does it sets up the system where you can get about a 25 percent tax credit for investing in areas with very high unemployment which means your risk is only 75 percent of what it would otherwise be and if you have to borrow money that up to two thirds of an investment could be guaranteed by a government mechanism which would give you about 2 percent lower interest rates which would further reduce the risk which is essentially what we do when we try to set up trade and investment agreements all around the world in developing countries where we have an interest in building the trading partners for the future and helping democracy i could never understand why we wouldn t do it for people here in america and i believe we have a unique opportunity here to bring free enterprise to people who have been left behind i know arkansas is small enough you all know each other well enough you ve had enough experience with this we went through all that nightmare of the 80s that it seems to me that this state is in a position maybe to take more advantage of that and also to identify what still needs to be done what the national government can do than any place else i should also tell you that we re now going to have 40 of the empowerment zones that we had not that many but we had 20 to 30 and we re going to have 40 other communities enterprise communities designed by the republican members of congress we said look why don t we just test this you guys design 40 communities that will get the special tax treatment the way you want it we ll have 40 that work the way we think would work best we ll identify 80 places that will get extra help and then we ll just see what works and then we ll do what works if your idea works better than ours we ll do yours if ours works better we ll do ours and if some of each works best we ll do that so there will be approximately 50 or more new community designations coming out next year and i would like to see some of those come to arkansas as well and you know you ll have to go through the application process and all of that but i really would urge you to make sure that arkansas gets a substantial share of those new community opportunities because they get extra help to get investment there and i think that will work a third thing i would like to say a little something about is welfare reform we had a huge debate you remember back in 96 on welfare but we passed a bipartisan bill that had a majority of both parties in both houses and you know how it works and it has worked very well arkansas s rolls are down 60 percent and i applaud you for that now what i would like to suggest is that we won t know how well this really works until the economy slows down which is bound to happen someday but i don t think it s imminent i don t believe we ve repealed the laws of the business cycle but the truth is because our markets are open it s a great great hedge against inflation and because of the technology sector we continue to increase productivity and if we keep driving down interest rates by paying the debt down which is the main thing the government can do the aggregate economy will continue i think to do very well but it seems to me that we need to really kind of it s time now this will be the fifth year since the welfare reform bill was passed and we need to look and see where it s working and what the problems are and what about people that are hard to place are we doing enough on job training have we done enough on transportation are people so concentrated that are still on the rolls or people that keep dropping out and go back in a hurry that those are the places that need the new markets designation and help these are the kinds of things that i think ought to be done but one of the great stories of the last eight years is that all of us who thought poor people would rather work than draw a government check for not working were right but that people still have to be able even on modest wages to succeed at work and at home which is one of the reasons i m disappointed we didn t raise the minimum wage again last year i think it will go up fairly soon in this new session of congress but we ve got to make sure that people who are working particularly if they re single parents can do a good job with their kids because raising children is still the most important job of any society so again our state is ironically it s small enough but also diverse enough that you can really kind of do a mid course check here see what s working what s not what should the congress do what should the new administration do to help you make this work but this is an enormous story to see these rolls cut 60 percent and people just like we always knew preferring work to idleness as long as they can take care of their kids now one other thing i d like to mention and i alluded to it earlier i know you ve had some vigorous debates here in the legislature about how best to cover children and what should be done on health care but let me just get to the bottom line i ll state it again this children s health insurance program which is the biggest expansion of health care since medicaid was passed in 65 was a part of the balanced budget act in 97 then it took about a year for the states to get their programs up so essentially in two years 3 3 million kids have gotten health insur dem wjclinton17 1 01c bill_clinton thank you very much thank you i want to that s what i want to say i want to thank you for coming and i want to thank you for waiting we had a wonderful moment in the arkansas legislature i got to speak to the legislature and see a lot of my old friends and you know with term limits there s been a lot of turnover and about a third of the legislature as nearly as i can tell got their start working in one of my campaigns so i had a wonderful time thank you mayor i want to thank rodney slater and hershel gober for doing a great job in the president s cabinet and being part of this vast array of arkansans who came down here with me today thank you vic snyder for your friendship and support thank you mike ross for making the campaign and going to congress we re proud of you thank you senator pryor for coming home today so we could be together on my last trip to arkansas maybe by the time i get around to writing a book i ll be able to do some justice to the absolutely essential personal and political role david pryor played in the success of this administration in the last eight years and i m very grateful to him i want to thank all the state officials who came out thank you sharon priest thank you jimmie lou and charlie gus mark pryor i want to thank little joe and the bks it s just like being home and i want to thank the trumpet and zion church choir you know jim dailey said about everything i could think of to say and he gave a terrific speech and i hope somebody for me still got it on tape i m going to play that some day when i m feeling down you know i want to thank him for his friendship chelsea and i are delighted to be here today i wish hillary could be here but you know she s otherwise occupied and i could tell you one thing she won that thing because she worked harder and she learned to do that here and i was very proud of her i think the day she was sworn into the united states senate i honestly believe was the happiest day of my life since chelsea was born it was an amazing thing and a real tribute to her and to all of you who have helped her along life s way i was thinking that it was about eight years ago that i had my farewell rally to arkansas when i left to become president in this very place and i was looking out across this sea of faces thinking how many of you were there then and how many of you were there 10 years ago and 20 years ago and in some cases 27 years ago when i first started i got tickled when i was walking out of the legislature tonight i ran into a guy named red milligan from marion county and in 1974 early 74 i went up and hunted him up because somebody told me he could get me some votes and i asked him to be for me and he got a guy named kearney carlton and he said well we re going to drive you out in the country he said you need to know our county has more dirt roads than any other county in arkansas and we re going down to leon swaford s store i still remember this 1974 which is just about at the four corners of marion and circe and boone and newton counties you can t get there from here even today i got in the truck we re driving down the road he drives me about 20 minutes we hadn t seen another living soul they stomp on the brakes the cab of the truck fills with dust he whips out this bag of redman it s a true story he said son i don t know if you can make it or not you know you re a university teacher and all that he said i ll tell you what if you ll chew this redman i ll be for you and if you don t i m going to kick you out and see if you can find your way back home and i looked at him and i said open the door true story and he told it again today and he started laughing he said well if that s the way you feel about it i guess i ll be for you anyway it was those kind of encounters that helped me learn a little bit about human nature and public life and politics the kind of thing that s hard to learn if you start out in a big place where you don t have time to listen to people and see how they live and go down every little back road i made a lot of back roads with a lot of you in this audience today and i just want to thank you i also want to say that if anybody had told me when i left here eight years ago that i could come home with my country having the longest economic expansion in history and the largest number of new jobs in this period of time where we d actually be paying down 600 billion of the national debt in the last three budgets of my administration that we d have all time high home ownership minority business ownership college going rate welfare rolls cut by 60 percent the lowest crime rate in 25 years i could go on if anybody told me that all these ideas that i talked so passionately about in the campaign of 92 that i thought would work because they were beginning to work in arkansas i would have said i ll take that right now for my country and our future i ll take it right now i never would have dreamed that it would have worked out as well as it has and i just want you to know that i know perfectly well i never would have been president if it hadn t been for the people of arkansas i told somebody yesterday that i know a little bit about american history and a lot about how a lot of people got to be president and of all the ones that i know at least i m the only one that i can honestly say got to be president because he had personal friends who stood up traveled the country fought spoke up and determined to make the campaign go and because of you i was able to make some other friends and see some other people and learn some things about this country of ours it s quite an interesting place america growing more diverse every day we re growing more independent every day we re growing more connected to the rest of the world every day and i did my best to prepare this country for this new century and this whole new way of living and working and relating to each other and when i leave office at noon on saturday i will leave with a heart filled with gratitude happy and pleased that all the options are open for the american people that choices still have to be made but we actually have it within our grasp to make america debt free this decade for the first time since 1835 to give every child in this country a world class education to bring free enterprise and opportunity to people and places that have been left behind something that s very important to us here in arkansas because we have people and we still today have people who haven t been part of this prosperity to give the working families of this country that don t have health insurance access to health coverage for the first time in our country s history to secure medicare and social security for the baby boomers retirement and to continue to be a huge force for peace and freedom throughout the world i couldn t have asked for more i d also like to say that i m well aware that i ve just been the captain of this team and without a team you don t win in public life it really is a team sport public service jim dailey mentioned some of the arkansans that have served with me and i mentioned some more when i was over at the legislature because the number came down today but i want you to know that over 460 of your fellow citizens from this state have worked in our administration in these last eight years and america is better because of what they did and finally let me say i m looking forward to being here and building my library and center i believe it will be the most important educational institution as a library a museum a tourist destination a learning site of any that have been built just because i have the benefit of coming into my own as a former president and building this library when all this wonderful technology is out there i hope you like the building design i worked hard on it myself for a year it will be like a bridge out into the arkansas river and i think it will be a real beacon for people all around the country and i expect people from all around the world to come here i ll get it up quick as i can we ll have an educational program and offer a graduate degree in public service which i hope will inspire other young people to spend at least some of their life in public service which has been so good to me and which i have found so richly rewarding so i ll be around quite a bit i want to say too when i came in from the airport we passed two of chelsea s schools mann and the booker arts magnet school and i d like to thank since she came home with me all the people here in little rock and throughout the state who were so good to her during her growing up and her teachers and all the others it means a lot to me i ve got a daughter about to graduate from college and a wife going into the senate it seems to me that one of the things i ll have to do is go to work which won t do me any harm but between my larger public service and doing what i can to support my senator and my daughter i will be here a lot and we ll have a chance to do a lot of things together to reminisce over old times but the main thing i want to say to all of you is i want you to be proud that we proved that national politics and national government and the direction of this nation is not the private province of some elite somewhere in some big distant place that people with common sense with basic american roots anywhere in the country who have the right vision and the right ideas and are willing to work in good faith with all different kinds of people can move this country forward and i want you to know too for all the storms and all the sunshine i said this to the legislature and i want to say it again because it s absolutely true there has never been a day and tonight will be the same way when i get home that i haven t landed on that helicopter on the back of the white house lawn and not felt a thrill not felt like a 17 year old boy looking at the white house for the first time and when i walk out of the white house for the last time and i sit at the inauguration of my successor and i leave this office i will leave more idealistic and more hopeful about my country than the day i took the oath of office eight years ago and that s the way you ought to feel that s the way you ought to feel and none of it would have been possible without you i love you thank you thank you thank you dem wjclinton17 1 94 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you charles debose for that fine introduction and for even more important for the example that you have set by your service i can think of no more significant tribute to the life and memory of dr king than what you are doing and what all the other young people who are involved in community and national service are doing throughout this country i know a number of them are behind me here on the stage and i want to thank them all dr jenifer and mrs jenifer to joyce ladner and all the distinguished people here at howard i m delighted to be back here again i thank and honor the presence of all the civil rights leaders who are in the audience three members of the little rock nine who helped to integrate little central high school and my home state so many years ago my good friend and the distinguished journalist charlayne hunter gault and members of my cabinet here presidents of other universities here and other distinguished american citizens all of whom have labored in the vineyard that produced martin luther king i want to say a special word too if i might at the outset of appreciation for the fact that howard provided the moment for me to remember again that in all great debates there should be some discord when the president of the student body got up here i thought to myself well we do have a responsibility to seek justice as we see it and i was glad she was here doing that it was a year ago on this day that i last spoke at howard and i m glad to be back on this day only three american citizens one from each century of our history are honored with a holiday of national scope two were presidents but the other never occupied any office except the most important in our democracy he was a citizen george washington helped to create our union abraham lincoln gave his life to preserve it and martin luther king redeemed the moral purpose of our united states each in his own way each in his own time each three of these great americans defined what it means to be an american what citizenship requires and what our nation must become dr king his family and those who join in his cause set in motion changes that will forever reverberate across america across the lines of geography class and race the people who are here today those whom i ve mentioned and those whom i did not all of them reflect that stunning fact they endured beatings they risked death they put their lives on the line they marched when they were tired they went to bed often without a place to sleep they made the word american mean something unique because they all of them in a way were trying to get us to live by what we said we believed for all of you who are very young here today many of you who were not even born when martin luther king died it may seem to you that the struggle was a very long time ago but if you look around you you can see that the history of that struggle is still alive today still being written and still being made still waiting to be fully redeemed i m glad to be here at howard today and i m glad that howard and other historically black institutions of higher education are represented here by satellite and that all of them are working still to do what martin luther king knew must first be done to give an education to all of our citizens without regard to their race howard s alumni alone include a justice of the united states supreme court a united states senator a nobel laureate the mayor of our nation s capital and at least by my last count at least 17 people who occupy important positions in my administration including the secretary of agriculture mike espy who is here for that i say thank you it s also fitting that howard s school of international study is expanding ready to educate a new generation of students about a rapidly changing and ever more integrated world dr king would have been very pleased by that his last speech delivered the night before he was slain in memphis on april the 3rd 1968 contained a prophetic message of hope about the world he saw evolving he said he imagined himself standing at the beginning of time with a panoramic view of the whole of human history with god almighty saying to him martin luther king which age would you like to live in he then considered all the momentous history that would beckon someone of his enormous intellect and understanding from the earliest civilizations to the renaissance to the emancipation proclamation but he said he would have said to the lord if you allow me just to live a few years in the second half of the 20th century i will be happy he said that s a strange statement to make because the world is all messed up but something is happening in the world the masses are rising up and wherever they are assembled today the cry is always the same we want to be free i think dr king would be gratified to see freedom s march today gladdened to see what happened last september 13th when prime minister rabin and yassir arafat shook hands and signed the israel plo accord overflowing with joy to see nelson mandela walk out of his jail cell after 27 years working with a white south african president to set in motion genuine elections and then in good humor and with good spirit campaigning against him to be the leader of the country this is an astonishing development freedom is moving in the world this past week as all of you know i traveled to europe to help support freedom s rebirth there i want to tell you a little bit about that because it relates to what i want to say to you about what we must do here at home my highest duty as our president is to keep our nation secure and the heart of our security abroad lies in our ties with europe in its past turmoils its future promise for decades our security depended upon protecting a divided europe europe was the center of two world wars which took more lives from the face of the earth in less time than any two events in history after the second world war europe was divided but war did not come again in part because we protected the people on our side of the dividing line but then the berlin wall came crashing down people rose up and demanded their own freedom now we have seen the collapse of the berlin wall the end of communism in eastern europe the collapse of the soviet system itself new elections being held all over what was the soviet union now that is an astonishing thing but these new democracies remain fragile they offer us the hope of a peaceful future and new trading partners new prosperity new opportunities to enrich our own lives by learning from different cultures and ethnic groups but they are still threatened by the explosive mix of old ethnic tensions and new economic hardships russia has adopted a new democratic constitution and elected a parliament freely for the first time to go with their popularly elected president but the reformers are embattled there as ordinary citizens struggle to understand how they can come out ahead in an economy which is still very hard for them and as they listen at election times to people who are calling them to an idyllic past that never existed one based on division instead of unity the nuclear weapons of the former soviet union too many of them are still there remaining a source of instability of potential for accident an invitation to terrorist diversion we re working as hard as we can to dismantle them and we re making remarkable progress but they re still there we can t ignore these dangers to democracy the best way to keep europe from ever falling apart again from dragging the young people of this country to that continent to fight and die again is to try to build for the first time in all of history a europe that is integrated integrated in a devotion to democracy to free economies and to the proposition that all these countries should respect one another s borders that was the goal of my trip we made great strides we offered we in the nato alliance that kept the world safe after world war ii we offered all these countries all of them the chance to be part of a new partnership for peace that does not divide europe but unites it we said let s turn our swords into plowshares by planting together for our common security let s have a military exercise in germany with an american general with poles and czechs and russians standing side by side and working together let s say we re going to write a whole new future for the world different from its past that is our great hope and we made a good beginning we also sought to go country by country to bolster the new democracies to tell people look there are always going to be problems in democracy and always going to be conflict we just got a little of it today i told i said we ve been at this for 200 years now 200 years and we didn t even give all of our citizens the right to vote until a generation ago you ve got to work at this you ve got to work at this and you can not be discouraged and you can not give up and so i pledge to help the people who believe in democracy and democracy means more than one thing it means majority rule it also means respect for minority and individual human rights and we worked hard to try to build better economic ties because america cannot prosper unless the world economy grows we cannot we cannot meet our obligations to the young people in this audience today unless we say to them if you work hard you get an education and you do what is right you will have a job and an opportunity and a better life we cannot do that and to do that we have to live in a world where all of us are working together to grow the economy no rich country and with all of our poverty we are still a very rich country none has succeeded in guaranteeing jobs and incomes to its people unless you always are finding more people to buy what you produce your goods and your services so i went to europe because i think the trip will help to create jobs for the young people in this audience and unless we can do that our efforts are doomed to failure and so we had a remarkable trip to build a more secure world to build a more democratic world to build a more economically prosperous world to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons and yesterday with my meeting with the syrian president in switzerland to try to keep moving the most historically troubled area of the world the middle east toward a comprehensive peace but as i come home on this martin luther king day from a trip that fought for democracy and economic progress and security i have to ask myself how are we doing on these things here at home how are we doing on these things at home if democracy is the involvement of all of our people and if it is making strength out of our diversity if we want to say to the people in the troubled areas in europe put your ethnic hatreds behind you take the differences the religious differences the racial differences the ethnic differences of your people and make them a strength in a global economy surely we must do the same here in the last year we ve worked hard on that five of the members of my cabinet are african americans sixty one percent of the federal judges i have appointed are either women or members of different racial minority groups and they have also i might add been accounted the most highly qualified group of federal judges ever nominated by a president of the united states in the last year our economy has created more jobs in the private sector than in the previous four years combined unemployment is down interest rates are down investment is up millions of middle class americans have refinanced their homes and started new businesses all this is helping us to move in the right direction we are working hard to protect rights fought for and won american workers should not fear for their jobs because of discrimination under the labor secretary bob reich the department of labor s office of federal contract compliance has collected more than 34 5 million in back pay and other financial remedies for the victims of racial discrimination that is a big increase over the previous year we have filed a record number of housing discrimination cases a 35 percent increase over the previous year we are working to fight against discrimination and lending because if people can t borrow money they can t start businesses and hire people and create jobs just last week in a coordinated effort strongly led by the hud secretary henry cisneros who would have been here today but is on his way to los angeles to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake we ended an ugly chapter in discrimination in vidor texas under the protection of federal marshals fbi agents and the police and with the support of the decent people who live there a group of brave and determined african americans integrated at last vidor s public housing today i pledge to you continued and aggressive enforcement of the fair housing act in a few moments i will sign an executive order that for the very first time puts the full weight of the federal government behind efforts to guarantee fair housing for everyone we will tolerate no violations of every american s right for that housing opportunity but my fellow americans the absence of discrimination is not the same thing as the presence of opportunity it is not the same thing as having the security you need to build your lives your families and your communities so i say to you it is our duty to continue the struggle that is not yet finished to fight discrimination we will and we must but it is not the same thing as the presence of opportunity that is the struggle they re dealing with in russia today in the other former communist economies they have the vote it s exhilarating but how will it how long will it take for the vote to produce the results that democratic citizens everywhere want so that people will be rewarded for their work and can raise their families to live up to the fullest of their god given abilities that is our job here that s why this national service program is so important and why i was elated that mr debose was going to introduce me today because national service is a part of our effort to create opportunity by building communities from the grass roots up and at the same time to give young people the opportunity to pay some of their costs of college education and it is a part of the work that the secretary of education who is here has done to try to revolutionize the whole way we finance college education we know right now that 100 percent of the people need not only to graduate from high school but to have at least two years of education after high school in the global economy we know it but we re not organized for it and so under the leadership of the education secretary and the labor secretary our administration is working to set up a system to move all young people from high school to two years of further training while they re in the workplace in the service or in school and we are doing our dead level best and we re doing our dead level best to make sure that the cost of a college education is never a deterrent to seizing it by reorganizing the whole student loan program last year the congress adopted our plan to reorganize the college loan program to lower the interest rates string out the repayments require people to pay back as a percentage of the income they are earning when they get out not just based on how much they borrow when they re in school no one should ever refuse to go to college because of its cost and earlier today to give one more example of what we mean by the presence of opportunity on this martin luther king day i met with a group of business leaders and urged them to become active partners in communities where the need is greatest we have learned time and again now ever since martin luther king lived and died that even when we have times of great economic growth there are areas in the inner cities and in rural america that are totally left out of the economic progress that occurs we have learned that unless we can rebuild our communities from the grass roots up unless we can rebuild the institutions of a community in ways that support work and family and children that millions and millions of americans will be left out of the american dream and so today we announced our creation of 104 empowerment zones and enterprise communities that can make a difference that will give people at the grass roots level the power to educate and employ people who otherwise will be lost to themselves and to the rest of us for a generation that is the sort of thing that martin luther king would want us to do not just to let discrimination go away but to create opportunity and finally let me say that we will never do this unless we create the ways and means for people to choose a peaceful and wholesome life the most important experience i have had as your president here at home i think in the last several months was having the opportunity to go to memphis and to stand in the pulpit where dr king gave his last address and speak to 5 000 ministers of the church of god and christ many of whom are longtime personal friends of mine and say that martin luther king did not live and die to give young people the right to shoot each other on the street i come home i come home thinking to myself i am so proud of the fact that i had the chance to be president at a time when the united states was leading an agreement with russia in ukraine in belarus in kazakhstan to dismantle weapons of mass destruction but we can t get guns out of our own schools i m proud of the fact that we are pursuing an aggressive high technology policy under the leadership of the vice president that will help to turn this whole nation into a giant high tech neighborhood so we can learn from one another and relate to each other but we can t even make it safe for kids to walk the streets of our own neighborhoods we would be asked i think by martin luther king how come this is so when mr debose stood up and said everybody can be great because everybody can serve martin luther king s greatest quote i say to you today we have to ask ourselves what our personal responsibility is to serve in this time and when we cannot explain these contradictions then we have to work through them we may not have all of the answers none of us do i cannot expect you to have them as president i don t have them but i know what the problems are and so do you and we know there are some things that will make a difference and we have an obligation to try in our time to make that difference there are too many questions we cannot answer today dr king said men hate each other because they fear each other they fear each other because they don t know each other they don t know each other because they can t communicate with each other they can t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other we all need to think about this we ve got a lot of walls still to tear down in this country a lot of divisions to overcome and we need to start with honest conversation honest outreach and a clear understanding that none of us has any place to hide this is not a problem of race it is a problem of the american family and we had better get about solving it as a family laws can help that s why i wanted to pass the brady bill that s why i want to take these assault weapons off the street that s why i want to do a lot of other things that will help to regulate how we deal with this craziness of violence on our streets that s why i want more police officers not to catch criminals even as much as to prevent crime we know that community policing prevents crime if it s done right laws can help but martin luther king reminded us too that laws can regulate behavior but not the heart and so i say to you we must also seek what abraham lincoln called the better angels of our nature and we all have a responsibility there when he spoke here at howard martin luther king said the following things and i thought about it today when i was looking at mr debose up here introducing me expressing the pride in the service he rendered and how it changed the minds and the hearts of the people with whom and for whom he worked dr king said human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability it comes through the tireless effort and persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be coworkers with god and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of stagnation and so we must help time and we must realize that the time is always right for one to do right time is neutral he said time can either be used constructively or destructively all he asked from each of the rest of us was to put in a tiny little minute so will we make martin luther king glad or sad about the way we use our tiny little minutes in any one minute in america today two aggravated assaults take place six burglaries occur three violent crimes are committed and three times an hour that violent act is a murder but think about it within the stand of the same minute two men from different worlds like arafat and rabin can shake hands and set off on a new road to peace a leader can agree that his country must give up the world s third largest nuclear arsenal and in one minute people can make an enormous positive difference they decide to keep a seat on a bus instead of move to the back they decide to show up for school instead of be shunted away they decide to sit at a lunch counter even if they won t get to eat that day they decide to pursue an education even if they re not sure there s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow they work to keep their neighborhoods safe just to create a tiny little park where children can play without fear again they keep their families together when it s so each to let them fall apart and they work to give a child the sense that he or she is important and loved and worthy with a future when i think about it i m often sad that martin luther king had so few precious minutes on this earth two days ago he would have celebrated his 65th birthday and the older i get the younger i realize 65 is but you know he did a lot with the time he had and i think we should try to do the same thank you dem wjclinton17 10 95 bill_clinton well secretary bentsen that was such a wonderful introduction i almost forgive you for leaving the operative word is almost i thank lloyd and b a for their friendship and the gifts they ve given our country and i tell you that when the history of the last 50 years of the 20th century is written in the united states the work that lloyd bentsen did to not only help to get hold of this terrible out of control deficit but to do it in a way that would permit us to invest in our people and our future and to connect the united states to the rest of the world through nafta through the gatt world trade agreement and in so many other ways will mark him as one of the greatest secretaries of the treasury in the history of the united states of america i want to thank two other texans who are here who made immeasurable contributions in our administration the secretary of housing and urban development henry cisneros if you ask anybody who has followed the work of that department in the few decades that it has existed they will tell you that without question he is the best secretary of housing and urban development ever to serve in that position and we re very proud of him and my good friend bill white who just came home to houston after being deputy secretary of energy thank you sir i will say again that between bill white and hazel o leary and ron brown the secretary of commerce they did more to further the energy interest of the united states and to create jobs in the united states by getting investment abroad than any previous administration has ever done thank you sir for what you did in that and i appreciate that very much my heart is full of gratitude tonight and so many wonderful things have been said that if i had any sense i d just sit down i m afraid if i talk on now i ll disqualify myself for reelection but i m going to talk anyway i want to thank the statewide chairs of these galas we ve had i have had two wonderful days in texas i thank arthur schecter who made a wonderful statement earlier and joyce lee and sandra godfrey and stan mcclellan lou congillan sheldon and sunny smith and george bristol and frank and debi branson who did such a wonderful job for us in dallas yesterday thank you very much thank you all of you my good friend of nearly 25 years who is only a year younger than me and looks 15 years younger than me i resent it bitterly but i still love gary morrow thank you my friend and judith his wife i m really glad to see ann richards and mark white here i used to be a governor you know back when i had a real life and we served together and we enjoyed it immensely i appreciate attorney general morales and former attorney general maddox being here i told somebody the other day he said what s the best job you ever had and i said i was attorney general that was the best job i ever had and they said why and i said well i didn t have to hire or fire or appoint or disappoint raise taxes or cut spending and every time i did something unpopular i blamed it on the constitution so remember that i want to say a special word of thanks to congresswoman sheila jackson lee and congressman jim chapman for their work for our country and for your state in the congress and let me say a great word of thanks too to bob bullock for what he said and for the private things that he has said to me in the last two days it s been a great inspiration to me and i was sitting there thinking that i could play that talk he was giving in several states and it would help us i wish i could patent it and send it around like that ozark water you talked about and finally let me a special word of thanks too to mayor bob lanier and his wife elise we came in and we got out of the car i spend a lot of time with a lot of mayors and i have many many very close friends who are mayors but i m not sure there is any mayor in america who has the particular combination of compassion and intellect and old fashioned practical insight it s really quite a genius to not just talk about problems but to actually do something about them and in so many ways bob lanier has done that and i guess that s why he got 91 percent last time he has promised that if you beat it this time that he will give me a few that he has to spare in 96 so i hope that you will do that i want to thank reverend caldwell for praying over us tonight and for his mission and his ministry and for bringing his wonderful wife who is a native of my state his mother in law was a supporter and a woman i got to know a remarkable woman i m delighted to see you here sir thank you both for coming i d like to thank terry mcauliffe and laura hardigan and meredith jones our texas finance director for the work they did and all those who helped them for this fine night i thank you i also want to say a word on behalf of two people who are not here tonight the vice president had meant to come with me when we were going to do this last night but i thanks to the sponsors here in houston we were able to defer this until this evening so that i could go out to california last night and participate in a national benefit for the center on alcohol and substance abuse prevention something that is very important to me because i ve dealt with both those issues in my family and because our administration is committed to making progress on that and i thank you for your indulgence but that kept the vice president from coming i just want to say that even my severest detractors when our administration s history is written will say that al gore was the most influential vice president in 219 years of the american republic and i thank him for his work on the environment on reinventing government on technology on helping us with russia but most of all i thank him just for being there when we work together i wonder what all of those other presidents did and why they didn t do more with this incredibly flexible office the only thing the vice president really has to do is to sort of show up in the senate when there is a tie vote and hang around waiting for something to happen to me every day i think about that i do a few more sit ups and you know do what i can to avoid that so you know you ve got a fellow with a high iq and a reasonable amount of energy it seems like a shame just to let him hang around and i really think he s done a magnificent job i m so proud of him and we have a genuine partnership i d also like to say that i know that the first lady would like to be here with us tonight but as some of you doubtless know she has been on a very very successful trip to latin america she went to nicaragua to chile to brazil and to paraguay and since the people of texas understand better than any other people in the united states how important our partnership with latin america is i hope you will excuse her absence i ve been trying to think of what i ought to talk about tonight you saw a movie about the accomplishments of the administration and then secretary bentsen was kind enough to get up and talk about it and others did what i d like to do is to give you some arguments for the next year i ve heard all this talk about how the democratic party is dead because we don t have any new ideas or we re too liberal or we re slaves to government and i have concluded that since they keep winning elections with those arguments we re better at doing and they re better at talking so i want to give you some talking tonight if i could i have learned a few things about the limits of liberalism i heard a story the other day my senior senator dale bumpers called me and told me a story i want to share with you about the limits of liberalism involving huey long the famous populist governor and senator of kentucky one day you know when we were in the middle of the depression i mean louisiana i ve got a kentucky story i wanted to tell but i decided upon reflection i shouldn t tell it so my conscience is clicking in on me anyway when do you remember huey long those of you who are old enough to remember when he was governor and then later senator he campaigned around the state and then around the country on this share the wealth platform he came up north to arkansas actually and helped a woman named patty carroway get elected to the senate the first woman in history ever elected to the senate in her own right was hattie carroway from arkansas and the only time anybody ever came into our state as an outsider and helped anybody win an election was huey long he was a great politician and unemployment was 25 percent in america and the per capita income of arkansas louisiana and mississippi was only about half the national average so you could say whatever you want to about sharing the wealth and you had a pretty willing audience and he was out on a country crossroads one day talking about how we ought to share the wealth and there were all these farmers standing around he saw this old boy in overalls and he said farmer jones he said let me ask you something he said now if you had three cadillacs wouldn t you give us one so we could go around here on these country roads and pick up these kids and take them to school during the week and take them to church on sunday he said of course i would he said if you had 3 million wouldn t you give us a million dollars so we could put a roof over every family s head and give them a good meal at night and breakfast in the morning he said you bet i would he said if you had three hogs and he said wait a minute governor i ve got three hogs so the democrats to be fair have learned a few things about the limits of liberalism here s what i think is going on this is a time of extraordinary change but very great promise for this country we re moving from an industrial age to an information and a technology age we re moving out of the cold war era into a global village where we re all closer together than ever before and where there are vast new opportunities for cooperation existing alongside the new security threats of terrorism biological and chemical warfare organized crime and global drug trafficking what we have to do is to harness all this change to make america a better place i ran for president with a clear mission in my own mind to try to take good care of this country to achieve two objectives in the 21st century one was to make sure that the american dream was alive and well for all people without regard to their race their income or their region and the second was to make sure that america continued to be the strongest country in the world so that someone could lead the world after the cold war toward greater freedom and greater democracy and greater security and greater prosperity that s what i wanted to do i said at the time that i thought we would have to move beyond the old political debate that parties had been having for many years toward what i called a new democratic philosophy and i d just like to go over what those elements were that i told you i would try to bring to the presidency i said i thought our economic policy ought to be based on growth not dividing the pie but growing the economy more that we ought to do whatever it took to maintain our world leadership but that we couldn t be involved in everybody s problem everywhere that we needed a new form of government that would be smaller and less bureaucratic would be more entrepreneurial would give more responsibility to state and local governments and to the private sector would embrace all kinds of new ideas but would still fulfill our fundamental obligations that can only be done by the national government and that all of this ought to be done based on a reassertion of old fashioned mainstream values that i think got lost over the last 10 or 20 years that we needed both responsibility and opportunity in our country that people had to be able to succeed both at work and in their family lives that we had to have both growth and fairness in our country and that in the end we had to decide as mayor lanier said to be a community we had to decide that we had certain obligations to one another that s what people in a community feel if we have no obligations to one another then we re not a community we re just a crowd we occupy the same piece of land but we re just going to elbow each other until whoever is strongest winds up at the front of the line and we never will turn over our shoulder to see what happened to the others being a community means you have obligations to our parents to our children to those who need help through no fault of their own it also means that we revel in and cherish and build up our diversity we don t use it as a cheap political trick to divide the american people that s what it means now what i want to say to you tonight is that i believe i ve been faithful to that and i believe this country is moving in the right direction thanks mostly to the american people but i believe that our administration has made its contributions you heard what was said about the economy about the growth of the economy the misery index that the other party used to talk about so much the combined rates of unemployment and inflation you never hear them mention it anymore because it s at the lowest level it s been in 25 years and beyond the new jobs i m really proud of the fact that we ve had the largest number of new small businesses incorporated in the last two and a half years of any comparable period in american history that we ve got thanks in no small measure to the remarkable partnership henry cisneros has established with the housing industry in america we have two and a half million new homeowners a record number for such a short time and if he keeps going we re going to have two thirds of the american people in their own homes by the end of the decade something that has never been done before most of the credit goes to the american people but the fact that we drove down the deficit while increasing our investment in technology in research in the education of our people and that we expanded trade dramatically up four percent in 93 10 percent in 94 16 percent in 95 those things have made a contribution to that economic picture because we broke the mold we brought down the deficit and invested in our people we went for free trade with nafta and gatt in 80 agreements with other countries including 15 with japan but we also went for fair trade that looked after labor standards and the environment and that finally finally got an agreement with japan that we can enforce on automobile related issues these are important things that will make a difference over the long run and i think they re worthy of support you heard what mr schecter said about the role the united states has played in world peace i won t belabor that i will tell you that this is also a safer country than it was two and half years ago there are no russian missiles pointed at anyone in america for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age we are moving toward a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty next year we have extended indefinitely the agreement of over 170 nations not to be proliferators of nuclear weapons we are making progress in working with other countries in fighting terrorism in fighting the spread of biological and chemical weapons in trying to make the american people safer i am proud of that and we have to continue to do it this bosnia issue has been difficult but we must lead here and if we can get a peace agreement as the leader of nato we have to help implement it otherwise we will have a terrible problem in the middle of europe that can engulf us in the future do we have problems yes of course we do we still have too much income inequality you always have that when you change from one economic arrangement to another and everything gets shaken up the people that are best positioned to do well do very well those that aren t positioned to do well get hurt worse and we have to do something about that and i ve put forward a program to do that to offer more educational opportunities to raise the minimum wage to give middle income families a tax deduction for the cost of a college education so that more people can get that education we have to deal with that but let s see it in the context of what s happening this country is generating jobs and growth and opportunity there will always be problems as long as the world exists we need to focus on the problems but keep doing what is working in america if you look at the issue of government lloyd bentsen said the government s 165 000 smaller than it was when i took office let me tell you what that means next year the federal government will be the smallest it s been since kennedy was president but more importantly as a percentage of the work force the federal government today is the smallest it s been since 1933 i hardly think that qualifies us to be the party of big government we ve done more to give authority to states to get out from under federal rules on welfare and health care experiments than the last two administrations combined did in 12 years we have done more to get rid of thousands and thousands of pages of regulations we are trying to make this government work does it still do dumb things of course do we make mistakes you bet we do is the answer to abolish the federal government no no the answer is to have it be smaller but make it so it can still protect people this is a fundamental decision that s at issue in this election season that s an issue in this budget fight do you really believe that the market will solve all problems and we d be better off without any government are you willing to tolerate the occasional mistake of a government that is transforming itself radically in order to know that somebody is there looking out for the public interest and our obligations to one another as a community do we need to do more of course we do i still want the line item veto lobby reform campaign finance reform there s lots of things we can do but the point is we re going in the right direction the answer is to reform the national government not to dismantle it that is the answer that s what will work for america that is the right approach if you look at whether we ve furthered our values or not let me tell you that i want to give you some statistics that will support what you saw yesterday in that march forget about all of the speeches and all of the politics about it and everything just remember the faces of the people that were at that march yesterday listen to what they said that march was about them and their desire to reassert responsibility for themselves their families their communities their understanding that until everybody in america is willing to do their part then the government can t fix the problems no one else can that is a beautiful and awesome thing and no one should denigrate it and no one should underestimate it what i tried to do at the university of texas yesterday was to give a clear voice to what i believe was in the hearts and minds of most of the people who showed up there yesterday but i believe it s in the hearts and minds of most americans and i think it is a great tragedy that people who basically share the same values and frankly have a lot of the same problems often cannot reach across the divide at one another but what i want to tell you is this country even more than what you saw at the march yesterday across racial and gender and age and regional lines there is a reawakening in this country a sort of a coming back to common sense and shared values and a determination to go into the future with greater strength and character and devotion to the things that make life worth living and i ll just give you a few examples of that in the last two and a half years the crime rate is down the murder rate is down the welfare roles are down the food stamp roles are down the poverty rate is down the teen pregnancy rate is down a lot of people don t know that now no government program did that that s the folks that live in this country getting themselves together and sort of you know we re a great big complicated country and we change slowly but that s an awesome thing when you think about that now i think our policies helped i think we helped when we cut taxes on 15 million working families who were making modest incomes so that we d be able to say if you work 40 hours a week and you ve got kids in your house you won t be in poverty anymore i think that was a good think to do i think that was an honorable think to do i think the family and medical leave law helped i don t think people ought to lose their jobs if their parents get sick or their baby s born and they need to be there i think the 35 states who we gave permission to experiment with welfare reform i think that helped i ll give you an example one thing that they re doing in texas that i agree with is that they have asked for permission to get out from under federal rules so that they can say if you want a welfare check and you ve got a child you have to prove your child has been immunized against serious diseases we have one of the lowest immunization rates in the country i think it s a great idea it s a great idea and i hope i think the crime bill helped i appreciate what mayor lanier said i was very moved by what i saw that he was trying to do in houston when i ran for president and that crime bill by putting 100 000 police on the street and community policing is helping america to lower the crime rate but also by emphasizing the prevention and giving these kids something to say yes to that s also helping to lower the crime rate and i want to say more about that in a minute i just want you to remember this little moment from yesterday s speech in texas at the university of texas i mean i tried to say that a lot of what has to be done to bridge the racial divide requires first the assumption of personal responsibility by all americans without regard to race second the ability to talk honestly and listen carefully to one another we don t do enough of that we still haven t even scratched the surface of that but thirdly there are responsibilities of things we have to do one of the big fights i m in now with congress is whether we ought to just get rid of all this money for prevention now they say they like this giving the states and localities the right to spend the money that s what we did we said here s the prevention money i don t know what works in houston and whether it would work in hartford connecticut i know one thing you get enough kids in these programs playing soccer after school or learning to play golf or doing whatever else these kids are doing you get all of them in there and your crime rate is going to go down you re going to save a lot of kids lives you won t have to spend all that money building jails and putting them in prison you can spend less money and educate them and have them do well i believe that i have always believed we should be very tough on crime i have always believed that in some crimes you just have to give up and be unforgiving but i am often reminded of one of my favorite lines of poetry that was written in the context of the turmoil in ireland but applies to the children growing up alone on these mean streets today william butler yeats once said too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart and we shouldn t forget that our biggest problem today is in spite of all those good numbers i told you in spite of the fact one thing i didn t say is that drug usage among young adults is down in spite of all that the violent crime rate among juveniles in most cities is up casual drug use especially marijuana among young teenagers not young adults among teenagers is up why because there s too many of those kids out there raising themselves and nobody s looking after them and making sure they have something to do something to say yes to the mayor told me that the juvenile crime rate is not going up in houston because those kids are being engaged so i say to you we re moving in the right direction the answer is to do more of this to do more things consistent with our basic values not to do less not to do less this is a great country we are getting our act together culturally and socially and our economy is going great what we have to do is to figure out how to spread the benefits of the economy to people who don t have it and how to deal with the social and cultural problems that need some help from the outside that can t be totally solved by individuals and families on their own this is what i want you to think about that means that a great deal of the rhetoric in washington today is irrelevant to what we have to do to the future and that s what bothers me about it now you want to deal with yesterday s rhetoric and the republicans say well clinton s liberal the democrats are liberal they love big government you got a few questions you can ask them you say well if that s true of the last three presidents who cut the deficit more who was the only one to present a balanced budget who reduced regulation more who gave more authority to state and local governments to get out from under the federal government more of the last three presidents who cut the size of government more who cut taxes more for small businesses believe it or not we did in 1993 thanks to lloyd bentsen those are all facts who had the most pro family welfare and child support and tax policies we did but that is not the argument we need to make i want you to say that maybe that will open some people s ears and eyes but that s not what this is about this is not about policies this is about the people of the united states about our future about how we re going to get into the 21st century remember with the american dream alive for everybody with america the strongest country in the world that is the mission the mission is what happens to the people not what happens to the politicians not what happens to the political parties what happens to the people of the united states of america and i ask you to consider just two things as i move out of this and leave you here and go back to work first is in a time of change the president has to do what is right for the long run which means inevitably he will do things that will be unpopular in the short run now that is absolutely true i d bet everything i ve got in the bank which isn t all that much that i ve done four or five things that made everybody in this room mad in the last two and half years and sometimes i ve been wrong but i show up every day but the point i want to make here what i want to say is you have to understand that when things are changing so quickly and the moment is there you cannot even imagine what will be popular in a month or a year in time of change like this you have to think about what it would look like in 10 or 20 years when lloyd bentsen and i he didn t tell you the whole story i ll tell you the whole story about that budget probably there are people in this room still mad at me at that budget because you think i raised your taxes too much it might surprise you to know that i think i raised them too much too but you know why we did it because we had been in washington you ask we had been in washington one week when the then minority leaders of the house and senate now the senate majority leader and the speaker of the house informed us that we would not get one single solitary vote from the other party for our budget no matter what we did and were very candid they said we want to be in a position to blame you if the economy continues to go down and if it goes up we want to be in a position to attack you for raising taxes whether you raise taxes on people or not you re going to raise taxes on some and that s the attack we want so we re not going to vote for it not a one of us well needless to say we had information as you heard secretary bentsen say that if we could get the deficit down 500 billion in five years we could lower interest rates and boom the economy and so we decided even with only democrats voting it we would have to make whatever decisions would be necessary to do that even though it meant a little more tax and a little less spending cut than we wanted and we reasoned and i remember him telling me this he said i m going to pay more but most people will make a whole lot money if we get this economy going than they ll pay in extra taxes and that s exactly what happened it was the right thing for america for the long run even though it was difficult politics in the short run it was the right thing to do you know and i know they cut us a new one in texas over the assault weapons ban and the brady bill but let me tell you something since we adopted the brady bill last year 1994 there were 40 000 felons who did not get handguns and didn t have a chance to shoot innocent americans because of it i know when we had to decide whether we should move the administration through the fda to try to crack down on teenage smoking and restrain advertising directed at teenagers all the political advice was don t do that don t do that because if you do that everybody that s against you will vote against you and everybody that s for you can find some other reason to vote against you that s why things often don t get done by the way in national politics because organized intense minority interest will all vote against you and will terrify whoever they can terrify if you do such and such a thing and then everybody that agrees with you will find some other reason to be against you so it paralyzes the political system but we studied this problem for 14 months three thousand kids a day start smoking 1 000 of them are going to die earlier because of it how much political hit is 1 000 lives a day worth i think it s worth a whole lot it s the right thing to do twenty years from now there will be a lot more kids alive because of the initiatives of the administration it is the right thing to do most of you liked it when i helped mexico but the day i did it there s a poll in the washington post came out the poll was 81 15 against what i did i thought it just another day at the office but the american people could not possibly see ahead 10 20 years to what would happen to the united states if the economy of mexico failed and the financial markets in argentina and brazil collapsed and our whole strategy for growing the american in the 21st century in a world economy but starting in our back yard with mexico and the rest of latin america and then moving to asia europe and other places would be wrecked and our ability to cooperate in fighting drugs and in dealing with illegal immigration and all these things would have been undermined so i said to myself yes it s unpopular but this is a good country people are fair minded maybe it will work out in the next year or two but whether it does or not 20 years from now it will look like a very good decision that is the way we all have to begin to think and when we do we can begin to dismiss out of hand these trivial wedge issues that are designed to divide us and drive a dem wjclinton17 11 97 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you jay thank you for running thank you for being a good attorney general thanks for inviting me to dinner maybe i will come back next monday i d also like to thank the owners of this magnificent theater for allowing us to be here tonight and for doing such a wonderful job of restoring it i think that when we come here and you see all this beauty and sort of your eyes normally just sort of go up don t they and you feel elevated that s the way you ought to feel about your country that s the way you ought to feel about your political system that s the way you ought to feel about your choices as citizens to support people in campaigns so the first thing i want to do is just to thank you for being here tonight and for being proud to have the freedom to come here to contribute to this man s campaign and to what he s trying to do for our country to take a stand and to be a part i hope that when you think about it over the next year you will be constant in trying to help him get elected and that you will go beyond financial support to talking to your friends and neighbors and doing whatever you can to help prevail and i hope you will always try to remember how you felt when you walked into this theater tonight if you can create that kind of spirit among the people of missouri i think you ll win the election and i think you can do it let me say that all of you know just from reading the press this is a rather challenging time for our country and i don t have anything else to add about what i m trying to deal with in iraq to what i ve already said but it has made me a little more reflective even than normal and i d like to try to put this race for the senate in some sort of larger context for you so you can see how i see it and why i came here when i ran for president when i decided to run for president about six years ago and i was the governor of your neighboring state to the south i was really concern about the country not because i was worried about americans or i didn t think that we could deal with any problem but because we were going through this period of sweeping change with no unifying vision about how we were going to go into the 21st century together and because we had been dealing with the impacts of the global economy and increasing technology and changes in the way we work and live for 20 years even by the time i ran for president it had been nearly 20 years since it had become apparent to everyone that there were big changes going on the average wages of americans had been stagnant for 20 years unemployment was going up and we were beginning to see tensions racial tension rekindled in america the economic anxieties i m convinced were the primary driving force in the movements that i faced that we all faced as americans to try to restrict opportunity to minorities and to immigrants and it seemed to me that washington was making it worse by having the same old debates over and over and over again and what i wanted to do was to take the values that i was raised with which i think are the values of the democratic party and i hope are the values of america and tie them to new ideas and new policies for new times so that we could not just reclaim the white house but reclaim the future for our children so that we could challenge every american to be responsible and give opportunity to every responsible american so that we could bring this country together across all the lines that divide us into one community and so that we could continue to lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity now when i went to washington thanks to the votes of the people in missouri and a number of other places i encountered an atmosphere very different than any i had ever seen as a governor i had always had opposition and we had fought hard and i welcomed my opposition to the debate we fought hard over issues i had never been to a place where they said no before they heard what you were for a place so dominated by partisanship and old categories and old thoughts and old behavior that i could see that breaking the paralysis was not going to be easy but i ask you to consider the decisions that we have made in the last five years and the consequences of those decisions and the decisions that still have to be made and think about how it s going to affect you and your children and your grandchildren and then you can decide how hard you want to work on this senate race the first thing we had to do was to scrap trickle down economics it was a failure it quadrupled the debt of the country in 12 years the country was drifting apart and we put in a new economic policy that i called invest and grow i said give me a shot i believe i can reduce the deficit and still have more money to invest in education and technology and our future and we got our shot by one vote in both houses it was the vice president s incentive as al gore never tires of saying whenever he votes i win by the narrowest of margins why not because the democrats didn t support me i received more support from my party than my previous democratic predecessors because every single member of the other party voted against my economic program and railed to high heaven and talked about how it was going to bring a recession how it was going to be a total failure told all the american people we were putting these huge tax burdens on them when they knew that 98 5 percent of the american people were not going to have an increase in their income tax they knew that we were cutting taxes for more people than we were raising taxes for mostly hard working people now a family of four with an income of under 30 000 is paying 1 000 less income tax than they would have paid under the system that existed before our economic plan passed they knew all that but they hoped that the people couldn t figure it out by 1994 s election and that they wouldn t feel a better economic climate and they were right about that and they won a lot of seats in congress over it but now it s five years later and we re in a position to make a judgment every single one of them including mr nixon s opponent voted no on our 93 economic plan what did it do well before one dollar kicks in from this balanced budget amendment we reduced the deficit by 92 percent produced 13 5 million jobs a record for this period of time and we now have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years so you have a clear choice there and you should bring that choice to bear on this race on the area of crime jay nixon as attorney general supported our efforts to put 100 000 police on the street to have gun free school zones to ban assault weapons now consider what happened in 1994 i brought the crime bill up i was an attorney general i have been working on criminal justice matters for 20 years now that crime bill was not written by me or by bureaucrats in washington it was written by police officers and prosecutors and community workers who work with young people in trouble all across this country and all i did was reflect what was already working in many communities to bring the crime rate down so i said you know violent crime has tripled but we only have 10 percent more police officers let s put 100 000 police on the street our friends on the other side said oh if you do that it won t make a lick of difference it s just a waste of federal money i suggested that it was time to pass the brady bill and not let people who had criminal histories buy hand guns they said oh it s unenforceable and it won t do any good i said you know i come from a big hunting state but i just don t think the nra is right on these assault weapons i never saw a single deer killed with an assault weapon and they said when we passed that we were going to go out and take everybody s guns away we had this bitter fight over this crime bill pure politics law enforcement community in the country was on our side but they were good politicians and they did everything they could do in the senate to beat it everything they could do a bitter bitter bitter filibuster the awfulest things said you ever heard and we broke the filibuster finally because there were five brave republicans who stood up and said enough is enough we re going to go out and vote with the democrats and try to give our kids a better safer life and so we put 100 000 police on the street that s what we re doing we re three years ahead we re three years into it we re two thirds of the way done we re ahead of schedule and under budget and we banned the assault weapons and we kept over a quarter of a million people with criminal histories or mental health histories or people who were stalkers from buying handguns who shouldn t have done it and the crime rate is the lowest it s been in 24 years now he took one position his opponent took another position you have evidence you know make a judgment and tell the people who live in missouri to make a judgment but don t pretend that there are no consequences to this vote there are consequences and we could have used another vote or two in 1994 when we were trying to save the lives of the children in this country this is a safer better country today because we won that fight and they lost it and i d like to have some more help when we deal with the issues that are still ahead of us juvenile crime hasn t dropped as much as crime among adults most juveniles commit crime between 3 00 p m and 7 00 p m in the afternoon we have to do some creative things to keep those kids out of trouble in the first place and we don t need any more speeches on the floor of the congress about how its a waste of money to try to keep kids out of trouble in the first place i d rather keep a kid out of trouble than send another kid to jail if we can do that and i think we ought to do it so we were right and they were wrong in 1994 they picked up a lot of seats in the congress they went out there and told people in rural areas and all over america you know president clinton and the democrats are coming to get your guns i told the group earlier i said i went back to new hampshire where i won in 92 unusual for a democrat and i went to this crowd of people and every one of them had a hunting license and they were looking at me kind of funny and i said you know in 1994 you people beat a congressman up here because he voted to ban assault weapons and they told you that you were going to lose your gun and now it s 1996 if you lost your gun i want you to vote against me too but if you didn t lose your gun they didn t tell you the truth and you need to get even my vote in new hampshire in 1996 was 12 percent higher than it was in 1992 and they got even i say that not for personal reasons but because there are consequences to this there are a lot of voters out there that think oh it s all politics it doesn t make any difference that s bull it does it make a difference and it makes a huge difference if we had lost that economic fight in 1993 the deficit would not have gone down by over 90 percent and the economy wouldn t have produced 13 5 million jobs and interest rates wouldn t have gone down if we had lost that crime bill in 1994 we would not have as much success with crime as we ve had today the lowest crime rate in 24 years or look at an area where we ve worked together on we got a big bipartisan majority for welfare reform finally and i m grateful for that and i appreciate the fact that the members of the other party worked with us on it i tried every time i could to get a bipartisan resolution but i had to veto two bills first because they said if you want to require people on welfare to work we also want you to take away from their children the guarantee that you want to leave them with of nutrition and health care and we don t want to give you a lot more money for child care even though these women are going to get minimum wage jobs and they can t afford child care and we re not going to give you very much money to help people in big cities where there aren t any private sector jobs find jobs so i vetoed the bill twice finally we got it but it would have been a tragedy if we hadn t passed the right kind of welfare reform we ve now seen the welfare rolls drop by 3 8 million in america the biggest drop in american history but i think our side was right on that the democratic position was yes require able bodied people to work but do not require them to abandon their children the most important job anybody ever has is being a good parent and if everybody did a better job of that we wouldn t have half the problems we ve got in this country you can t ask people to go to work and forget about their responsibilities at home the trick is to allow people to fulfill both those responsibilities and the parties had different positions on that there are huge differences in our attitude toward the environment look we have gotten rid of more regulations than the two previous republican presidents have we have given more authority to the states and local governments we ve even privatized more government operations i do not like federal bureaucracies the federal government is 300 000 people smaller than it was the day i took the oath of office it s the size it was when john kennedy was president but the air is cleaner the water is purer the food is safer there are fewer toxic waste dumps and i think we have established the fact that on the environment our philosophy is right and theirs is wrong their philosophy is we hope somebody will clean up the environment but nothing should be allowed to get in the way of short term economic gain my philosophy is we owe it to our children and our grandchildren to keep the environment and improve it and we have proved that you can grow the economy faster with new technologies if you re committed to cleaning up the environment it s a clear choice and let s not pretend that there is no choice there there is a choice there so i ve enjoyed these fights enormously i like to debate i like to argue but i am impatient with those who think it doesn t make a difference it makes a difference and when i think about how far this country has come in the last five years and what we still have to do to build our bridge to the 21st century when i think about the honest differences i don t want to get into condemnation here i m talking about the honest differences in the parties i know that a person like jay nixon could make a positive contribution to the people of missouri and the people of this country and i know that it would help in the fights we ve still got ahead of us we finally finally succeeded against intense opposition in convincing a bipartisan majority of the congress to embrace the elemental notions that it s high time in america we had some national standards of academic excellence and we quit putting kids out of school that can t read write and count and instead we give the schools of our country the trained teachers the technology the support they need but there has to be first high expectations high standards and high measurements to see if they re being met every child in this country is capable of learning but i ll guarantee you a child in difficult circumstances with low expectations won t and it s to the poorest children that we have the highest obligation to give a world class education now i m not trying to have the federal government take over education their argument was that the federal government should keep its mouth shut about education maybe write a check my argument is we put more money into education in this last budget than any presidency and any administration in 35 years but it s not a question of money it s money plus standards it s a big issue and i could give you if we had all night i could talk to you all night about the differences between our parties it makes a difference a senator s vote makes a difference last year they held all these judges hostage in election year hoping against hope i d get beat and they wouldn t have to appoint them at all this year i had a four year term they still only confirmed 35 judges slow walk and everything it s like pulling teeth one of the finest people you ever met this man bill lee that i ve nominated to head the civil rights division of the justice department a chinese immigrant raised in harlem devoted his entire life to the civil rights of people of all colors in this country the senate judiciary committee says they don t really think they should confirm it even though he has sworn to uphold the letter of the law even though he is unquestionably qualified intellectually in terms of experience and moral character because he agrees with me that we shouldn t just throw out all affirmative action this is an unusual position they re taking the president must appoint someone to the civil rights division who is not committed to civil rights in the way the president is now if the democrats had felt that way you wouldn t have half the people on the supreme court that are on there today if the democratic majority in the senate had done a republican president that way you wouldn t have that there are differences in terms of what we do and how we do it that s why i m here tonight i m telling you the next 50 years can be the best years this country ever had if i told you five years ago come back in five years and we ll have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years the lowest crime rate in 24 years the biggest drop in welfare in history and the environment will be improving even though the economy is growing you would have said i ll take that bet and you d be darn proud of it and if i said oh and by the way we ll have passed the family and medical leave law we ll give families tax cuts for their children and for their children s education and if they ll adopt other children that need a home we ll cut their taxes you would like that all that has happened because of choices that have been made and i believe the direction that our party has taken has led the way toward building an american future where we can go forward together that s the last thing i ll say just look around the theatre on your way out how do you want to feel about america how do you want to feel about american politics do you want to make it lift your eyes and you feel big and you want to take a deep breath or do you want it to be a mean spirited divisive demeaning diminishing experience i have tried to give this country a unifying vision i have tried to heal the divisions of the country i have tried minimize the sharpness of the partisan debate but i am prouder tonight to be a democrat than i was five years ago and i am prouder tonight because i know things i could never have known before i became president about the importance of every single solitary vote in the united states senate he is a good man and if you will work for a year you ll make him a senator thank you dem wjclinton17 12 93 bill_clinton thank you very much secretary riley and secretary and mrs bentsen deputy secretary of education madeleine kunin i want to mention some of the people who are here i m glad to see senator kennedy senator pell and congressman reed here and my former colleagues and friends governor romer and governor edgar dr gregorian and david kearns and ted sizer and frank newman and so many people that i ve worked with over the years when walter annenberg was giving his very brief statement it reminded me of a comment that the president with the best developed mind thomas jefferson once said he said you know if i had more time i could write shorter letters so i think he said all that needed to be said walter and leonore annenberg have done a remarkable and truly wonderful thing on this day in giving the largest private gift in american history to the future of america s children it could not have come at a better time in a moment all of you will repair to another place and discuss in greater detail exactly what this gift will do and how it will be done but since i spent the better part of my life in public service laboring to improve public education i want the press and the american people to know that there are two things that are important about this gift its size and the way the money is going to be spent it could not come at a better time 10 years after the issuance of a nation at risk report and on the eve we all earnestly hope of the passage of our goals 2000 act which attempts to put into law a mechanism by which the united states can achieve the national education goals adopted by the governors and by the bush administration jointly in 1989 in our legislation we attempt to set high academic standards to give our country world class schools to give our children a way to fulfill their dreams instead of their nightmares along with the other things we ve tried to do reforming the student loan program opening the doors of college to everyone trying to develop a national system of moving from school to work for those who don t go to college pushing a safe schools act so that we don t have 160 000 kids stay home every day because they re afraid to go to school establishing a system of lifetime learning these things make a real difference but if i have learned one thing in all the years in all the countless hours that hillary and i have spent in public schools all across this country it is that the true magic of education in the end occurs between teachers and students and principals and parents and those who care about what happens in the classroom and outside the classroom and one of the things that has plagued me all these years is seeing all the successes because i tell you i have tried to focus the american people in the last several weeks on the crime and violence that is consuming so many millions of our young people but what is important for america to know is that there is another reality out there there are two realities that are at war one with the other there is the reality that we all see too many guns and too much violence in schools that don t function there is another reality in the most difficult circumstances you can find anywhere in this country there are children and parents who obey the law who love their country who believe in the future and who are in schools working with teachers who are succeeding by any standard of international excellence against all the odds therefore it is clear that the most pressing need in this country today the most pressing need is to have a standard of excellence by which all of us can judge our collective efforts down to the smallest schoolroom in the smallest community in america and then to have a system to somehow take what is working against all the odds and make it work everywhere all these people who are in this room who have devoted their lives to education are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere and yet we can t see to replicate it everywhere else anybody who has spent a serious amount of time thinking and looking about this knows that that is the central challenge of this age in education that s why ted sizer has devoted his career to establishing a system which can be recreated and adapted to the facts of every school that s why david kearns left a brilliantly successful career in business and wrote a book about what works in reinventing schools that s why my friend frank newman stopped being a university president and went to the education commission of the states and every year hounded governors like me to help him because we knew that there are examples that work and nobody has unraveled this mystery that s why people often run for governor and stay governors of states believing that we can somehow have the alternative reality that is out there prevail in the end and the way this money is going to be allocated is just as important as how much money is being offered because walter annenberg has challenged the rest of us to match his efforts today and in a way is challenging america to realize that there are millions of good kids and good teachers and good efforts being made out there and the time has come for us to say here are the national standards here is a way of measuring whether we re meeting them and here s a way of recognizing that in reality all these things have to happen school by school neighborhood by neighborhood student by student and what is our excuse when we can give you a hundred examples of where it s working for not having thousands and thousands and thousands examples of where it s working that is the magic of what is being done this is a very very important day for american education and for america s future and the people in the united states will forever be in the debt of these two fine people thank you very much dem wjclinton17 2 96a bill_clinton thank you very much please relax i have had a wonderful day today the second wonderful day in just two weeks in new hampshire and to all of you who had anything to do with that day or the one before to all of you who helped me in 1992 in the primary and then to win this state in the general election which surprised everybody in the world i want to thank you i thank chairman joe keefe and your vice chair mary chambers and my dear friend anita freedman and keith regli and the other officers of the democratic party and your dnc members terry shumaker and stephanie powers and ambassador bruno it has a nice ring to it don t you think for their service to our party and i want to say a special word of thanks to congressman dick swett and john rauh for being willing to fight and struggle to guarantee that we win that united states senate seat for the democrats in november somebody asked me this morning when i was coming up here what in the world i was doing going to new hampshire they said you don t have an opponent i said well for once i d like to win the new hampshire primary and it seems that this might be a good opportunity so i thought i would go up and try when i was a young fellow when i ran for governor the first time i had my sort of unfortunate thing that happens to anyone in public life where you plan something and you think it s going to be so wonderful and it doesn t make any news because something else happens on that day and that happened to me i had helped all these tomato farmers in my hometown my home state in a little town in south arkansas to who were working legal migrant workers to improve their conditions to give them decent places to live and in the process to be sure they could get a permit to get these people to help them and it saved this little town that was going to otherwise dry up and blow away so they invited me to town one day when i was campaigning for governor and unbeknownst to me they had decided to have a parade in my honor and they had a banner over the street there are about 400 people in this town it was hardly a metropolis it was sort of your standard arkansas or new hampshire town but i was blown away i mean you know i was 32 years old i thought it was pretty hot stuff to have a parade down the street and the whole the high school band the schools let out the high school band led me down the street everybody was laughing and screaming and crying for joy and the next day there was not a single word about it in the newspaper because something else happened in the governor s race so i spent the next umpty dump months until the election saying you should have seen the crowd in hermitage people made of fun of me they d say every time you know just punch him and he ll automatically say you should have seen like one of those toy dolls you should have seen the so for the rest of my life i ll be saying you should have seen the crowd in keene today in new hampshire at first when i arrived there you know because i waited so long this morning i got up at a quarter to six and i was ready to go at seven and they said we couldn t leave until 8 00 a m and then we got to airport and said we couldn t leave and we stayed there for two hours while the winds whipped across the runway and they wouldn t let me take off and we were very late to rochester but at least they were warm and i call in and say i m coming please wait and they did and it was quite wonderful but when i got to keene they d been standing out in the cold for an hour and a half and at first i thought they ll have to leave they won t be able to take it and then when i saw the crowd and i thought my god they re frozen there they can t leave if they wanted to go then i realized that sure enough they actually believed in what we were all doing and they were there to stand up for what they believed in and to fight for a better future and it was very let me say to all of you one thing i said four years ago that everyone needs reminding of now these elections are not about the candidates they re about the people the presidential election is nothing more or less than the most important hiring decision the american people can make and ultimately the hiring decision must therefore turn on whether the employers show up to make the decision first of all and secondly on what their vision is for where they want our common enterprise to go when i came here four years ago i was concerned that our country was not changing as fast as we should change or moving in the right direction given what i thought the future was going to present that we were neither going to seize the opportunities or meet the challenges of the 21st century and i had a very simple message which i still share and think about every day i believe it is wrong for any person to be deprived of the opportunity to live up to the fullest of their god given abilities i believe everybody should have a chance to work for the american dream i believe it is wrong for this country to be divided in artificial ways in ways that make us all less than we ought to be and i believe it would be a tragedy if we were to walk away from the responsibilities that we have now having won the cold war to lead the world toward greater peace and prosperity and freedom i believed then and i believe now that we have to pursue a simple strategy in which we work together to create more opportunity in which we work together and demand more responsibility from ourselves and from each other and in which we create in this country a genuine spirit of community i do not believe as i told you four years ago that the answers to all of our challenges can be found in government nor do i believe government is at all points even the most important player in our great national drama but neither do i believe we can go back to the time when the american people were told they should just fend for themselves that would be a terrible mistake and down deep inside almost every american knows that would be a terrible mistake a couple of days ago i flew out to washington and oregon and i m sure you ve seen on the television the absolutely horrible floods they have been enduring and i went into one of the little towns in washington state just across the oregon border that had been badly flooded out and i road around town with the mayor who had been the police chief for 20 years or something before he got elected mayor there s 3 300 people in this town and these folks were just you know like most folks here and he took me to a block that had been wiped out and we went into a home of a 70 year old couple who had been married for i don t know nearly 50 years they had lost every single thing they had except a few pictures and a couple piece of furniture the man was hard of hearing and he had even lost his hearing aid in the flood the water just rushed it away but when i showed up to meet this fellow he said you know i m 70 and i ve never met a president it was nearly worth losing my home to do it and he besides that you know it s fitting because now i can show you to my indoor swimming pool i was unbelievable how can this man laugh he s lost everything i saw another man well up into his 60s a retired employee of a utility company who was a norwegian immigrant naturalized citizen who worked in that flood for eight hours with a jackhammer with a cracked rib now i don t know if any of you have every tried to hold a jackhammer where it was supposed to go but it s not easy on a good day if you re big strapping strong and know what you re doing and i thought about that and he did it without a second thought it was just his duty and i saw all these stories that you always hear whenever there s a natural disaster but the most important point i want to make to you is on the way out this 70 year old man said to me he said boy i m glad you came and i ve enjoyed talking to you but he said don t you think it s too bad that we don t behave this way toward each other all the time and that s what i want to say to you this is a very great country i know we get down we get frustrated but when i talk to other world leaders they often ask me they say oh we see these opinion polls about how americans say the country is going in the wrong direction or they re pessimistic or they don t believe in their political system and they say after all you have the highest job growth rate the highest rate of new business creation the greatest amount of opportunity for individuals the lowest deficit as a percentage of your income and the strongest sense of security and defense of any country in the world how could your people be down i know this is a perplexing time when i was here four years ago if i had told you for example that three years from now i ll come back and in only three years i will have kept my commitment to cut the deficit in half and i ll be almost there on our commitment to provide 8 million new jobs we re at 7 7 million and credit will be more readily available than it used to be and the small business administration will cut its budget by 40 percent and double its loan volume and we will start selling more products abroad than we are importing from abroad so at least the growth rate in exports will be greater than growth rate in imports we re closing the gap and the unemployment rate in new hampshire will under 3 5 percent it will be less than half of what it was at election time last year but there will still be uncertainty out there about our economy because of the downsizing of big companies and because there s still a lot of people who are working hard and never get a raise and because there s still people who can t afford to have health insurance for their families you would have found that hard to believe i think it is happening because we re living in a very different world that is absolutely exploding with opportunities and still full of challenges that s why i talked as i did in the state of the union and you could say that the answer is to run away from the world we ll just pretend the modern world s not happening we ll put a wall up around america and we ll just run away from it but that won t work the answer is to run through the barriers until everybody can have the opportunity now that most people do but a lot of people don t that s the answer technology for example is a mixed blessing for people who can t access it but it s an unmixed blessing for all of our students when i was in concord the other day a couple days after they d connected all the classrooms in the city to the internet and i saw in i think the school with the lowest per capita income in the city all these kids that were taking computer equipment home and night and working on it i realized that technology for them was a great equalizer when i was in union city new jersey a couple of days ago a school district that was almost closed down by the state a district with low per capita income a lot of immigrants and i saw that a partnership between the government the school district bell atlantic had put a computer not only in every school and classroom but in every home so that immigrant parents were e mailing the principal to find out how their kids were doing all of a sudden this desperately poor school had a higher attendance rate a lower dropout rate a higher graduation rate and higher test scores than the state average in one of the wealthiest states in the united states of america we can make this new world work for all americans and that s what i am trying to do there s no point in my reiterating here for all of you because you keep up what i said in the state of the union i outlined what i believe are the challenges for the future and how i want to balance the budget i m not against balancing the budget we our administration the democrats the democratic party cut the deficit in half alone and don t you ever forget it alone and we took a lot of other tough decisions but we have to do this in a way that is consistent with our values with our obligations to our parents and to our children with our obligations to the environment and to our future that s what we have to do and we have to face the challenges of the future and we have to be willing to take tough decisions but when we and we turn out to be right we shouldn t be ashamed to go tell people we did the right thing it was unpopular i ll just give you one example because one of your congressmen paid a terrible price for it we got beat up pretty bad for the brady bill and for the assault weapons ban and a lot of good rural people who work hard and are honest citizens were driven away from our party in the november 1994 elections because they were convinced that we were out to take away their right to have their weapons to go hunting well as i have said all over new hampshire we had a great duck season in arkansas and you had a good deer season in new hampshire and everybody that wanted to went out and shot their ducks and their deer with the same gun they did last year so the people that told those folks that we were messing with them were not telling them the truth they did not lose any guns but i ll tell you who did lose guns there were over 40 000 criminals who could not get guns because the brady bill is the law of the land so it makes a difference it makes a difference if the family and medical leave law passed it makes a differences that we doubled the tax break for lower income working families so nobody works full time and is still in poverty if they have children in the home these things make a difference it makes a difference that we improved the student loan program extended it to more people made it easier to repay and still cut the default rate in half it makes a difference that the welfare rolls are down and we re giving states a lot more permission to move people from welfare to work but we re also collecting record amounts of child support payments for parents and their children these things make a difference it makes a difference to your children s future that there are no nuclear weapons pointed at the children of the united states for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age and i thank chairman keefe for what he said about the efforts of the united states in the middle east to haiti to south africa to northern ireland and now in this cold winter the men and women of our armed forces are in bosnia helping to stop a war of madness and to bring peace and decency and honor back to that war torn land and i m proud of them what i want to say to you is that we know what we have to do and we know what we believe in and now the american people know that all the old cliches tax and spend soft on crime weak on welfare that it s all a bunch of bull and that weak on defense no concern about foreign policy all that s a bunch of bull but what is not a bunch of bull is that this country has enormous opportunities and enormous challenges and we can only meet them together and we need our government not to be a big bureaucratic obstacle to progress we need it to be an entrepreneurial creative vigorous but strong supporter and partner of progress that s what we need and you know i ve been telling this ever since i read it in james carville s book but and it s not funny even but i had never thought about it until i read it in the book that people always bad mouth government you know we ve been doing it since we started i mean it s as old as the founders after all half our people came here to our shores to get away from oppressive government and the constitution the bill of rights the whole thing is set up to keep government from treading on us too much so if were not careful we just uncritically act like every governmental action is messing up a one car parade but the truth is in the last 30 years half of your tax money has been spent on just three things social security medicare and national defense did you get your money s worth we won the cold war the elderly poverty rate was cut in half and if you live to be 65 our seniors have the longest life expectancy of any country in the world i think we did what was required of us and we got our money s worth where would we be today without the head start program i was just where would we be today without the student loan program without the college aid program i was just at new hampshire college and the chairman of the board there told me that 90 percent of the students at that school are getting federal aid to help them go to college that s a good investment we re going to get our money back they re going to make us stronger and so i ask you to do what you can to get a surprising vote out on tuesday just to stand up for what is good and decent and positive and right about this country and for what is necessary to be done so that we can become all we ought to become i ask you to go out there because we do have a big opponent it is cynicism it is the willingness to believe that public life is always the lowest common denominator that nothing matters really in the end it is the vulnerabilities of those strategies that would divide us when we desperately need to be united those are our enemies and frankly that s not a government problem cynicism in any form in human endeavor is a cheap lousy excuse for inaction by the person who has the luxury of being cynical in portland oregon the other day when they told them that the city of portland was going to be flooded because the flood wall would not hold in one day 1 000 people showed up and built the flood wall another foot and a half higher they had not luxury no time no effort no opportunity to be cynical and i go back to what that old man said it s just too bad we can t act like that all the time and that s what i want you to do tuesday that s what i want you to do between now and november i want you to recover the spirit the genius of the new hampshire town hall meeting of all those visits we had in 1992 i want you to make people believe again that they can make a difference because if we re going to be partners it all begins with the citizens harry truman said when he went home to independence that he was going to now have the most exalted title you could have in the united states the title of citizen this is a state where citizenship has a reputation of being honed to a fine art it s a state now where people are being given an opportunity to see that there are now alternative visions of change for the future very different road maps for the future if 1992 was about change versus no change 1996 is about two very different visions of change i have done my best to be there for you as my old saying goes til the last dog dies but now you have got to be there for your friends and for your neighbors i am telling you i know i have seen the world as it is and i believe i understand where it is going we are on the verge of the era of greatest possibility our country has ever known but we have very serious challenges that we have to meet to get there if everybody is going to have their shot at the american dream and if we re going to go there together i believe we will i know i am an optimist but when i look at you when i looked at the faces that i saw today in those three stops i made before i got here when i know what is really in the heart of the american people and when i understand that we ve been around for nearly 220 years because most of the time we do the right time if you will go out there and do what you can yes it will advance the cause of our party but far far more important it will advance the future of our country and these children that are here do it do it for me and one time let me win the new hampshire primary god bless you and thank you dem wjclinton17 2 96b bill_clinton thank you thank you for waiting in the cold i waited on the runway for two hours this morning in washington for the weather to clear so that i could come and i was hoping you would wait for me mayor russell thank you for those wonderful remarks about your beloved city senator blaisdell thank you for your support and your statement and your service and jennifer durling thank you for reminding us all what this election is all about you and people like you your future and your country s future thank you for doing such a good job let s give her another hand i am delighted to be back in keene i thank the high school band and the choir for doing so well today i was in the band in high school i can tell you they are freezing to death over there it s not easy to play the national anthem on a warm day and they did it on a cold day let s give them another hand they were great you know i know the movie jumanji was filmed here and i know one of the biggest scenes was an elephant stampede right up this street and i decided i d better get up here before it s too late and we had another elephant stampede i have such wonderful memories of this community i was last here in 1994 at the markham company but all of you know i came many times in 1992 and the first time i had an inkling that we might actually go on to victory was the night i had one of my town meetings in keene before they were the thing to do and we rented a hall or got one anyway that was supposed to be big enough for 150 people and everybody was hoping we make the room look almost full and over 400 people showed up that night some of you were there and i thank you you gave me heart then to go on and i thank you for being here now i also want to say a special word of thanks to the people of keene for being so good to hillary when she was here recently at her rally on my desk at the white house i ve got one of those buttons that says i m keene on hillary and since i am it s only appropriate for me to have it there my fellow americans you all know that new hampshire gave me the chance to become president of the united states and even more important in all the many visits i had here in 1992 and i just counted before i came up there were 75 separate scheduled events in new hampshire between january 1st and election day in 1992 you taught me a lot about america about america s dreams and challenges america s hopes and america s concerns and because you did in this town square in those rooms and the town meetings you helped me to do my job better so before i say anything else i want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the opportunity i ve had these last three years to work for you i thank you in 1992 i came here with a straightforward vision for our country i wanted us to go into the 21st century with every america who was willing to work having a chance to live the american dream i wanted us to go into the 21st century together not divided and the leader of the world for peace and freedom i believed then and i believe now there is a simple strategy we have to create opportunity we have to insist on responsibility and we have to believe in our common destiny we have to go forward together i am tired of seeing this country divided for short term political gain we are strong when we are together we are never defeated when we are together when i came here to new hampshire i said i had an economic strategy for america if you would vote for me we would cut the deficit in half institute and investment plan would create 8 million new jobs open the doors of trade to american goods and services in the last three years we have cut the deficit in half i have another year but we have almost 8 million jobs already the unemployment rate today in new hampshire is less than half what it was in 1992 and for the first time in a long time our exports to other countries are growing faster than their imports here america is on the move i said if you will elect me i will try my best to reassert the values that made this country great to strengthen our families to be tougher on crime to reform welfare to value family and work and to try to bring us together and in the last three years the crime rate is down the welfare rolls are down the food stamp rolls are down the poverty rate is down the teen pregnancy rate is down america is on the move and i am so grateful that our country has been able to be a force for peace and freedom around the world more than anything else i am grateful that now there is not a single nuclear weapon pointed at any american citizen i am grateful for the role we have played for peace from the middle east to northern ireland to haiti and yes i am grateful for the brave americans who are defending peace in bosnia today and i know you re all proud of them as well but what i have to say today is you re entitled to a complete report because you know in your bones this is an unusual time how can we have 8 million new jobs how can we have in new hampshire an unemployment rate below 4 percent and people still feel uncertain about their present and their future because half or more of our people are still working harder without a raise because a lot of companies are downsizing and laying people off their stock prices go down but their people go out what happens to them we all know that there are still profound social problems in our country that must be addressed and we know this is still a dangerous world as we have been visited in the last three years with terrorism in our own country and we ve seen it in japan and in other countries as well we ve seen that there are enemies to peace everywhere when the great israeli prime minister is murdered and madness returned when the building was blown up in england trying to shatter the peace in northern ireland everywhere in the world we are safer than we were but we are not free of difficulty why is this i want you to understand that very clearly i believe that we are having these changes and these perplexing times with all the good things happening but challenges remaining because this is the time of the most profound change our country has experienced in 100 years not since we moved from being primarily a rural people to people who live mostly in towns and cities when we moved from being primarily a people who made our living on farms to being a people who made a living mostly on factories and the activity that created have we been through such change we are now going into an economy dominated by information and technology where work is ever more mind and less muscle we are going into a world where global markets for goods and services and money forced us all to compete in ways we never had to compete before and wherever there is a great uprooting there are lots of opportunities that we can celebrate just for example in the last three years there have been more new jobs created by businesses owned by women alone than have been laid off by the fortune 500 but there are those who do well and those who are not doing so well who are not positioned yet to win in this new age of possibility i believe with all my heart that the young people in this audience today will have an era of greater possibility to live out their own dreams than any generation of americans has ever enjoyed if we meet the challenges of the present and if we do it in the right way and so i ve come here today to ask for your support not because of the warm personal feelings i feel not because of the many friends i have in this audience not even because of the achievements of this administration but because of the challenges that lie ahead and because we dare not face those challenges unless we are willing to face them with vision and to face them together that is why i seek your support look at the discussion in washington over balancing the budget i m for balancing the budget when i showed up in washington the debt of this country had been quadrupled in 12 years we cut it in half in three years just like i told you we would in 1992 and we have to finish the job but we have to do it in a way that is consistent with our interests that means we must do it in a way that honors our obligations to our parents to our children to our environment and to our future we do not need to eliminate the americorps program to balance the budget and it would be wrong to do so we do not need to cut environment protection by 30 percent and it would be wrong to do so we do not need to deprive good hardworking families who have children with disabilities of the support that medicaid gives them and it would be wrong to do so and we do not need to change the medicare program that has given us senior citizens with the highest life expectancy of any senior citizens in the entire world and break that down it is not necessary to balance the budget and we should not do so now let me tell you what i think we will do i believe we will keep that deficit coming down i believe there s a national consensus for balancing the budget and i want you to look ahead as i asked in the state of the union address at the challenges of the future and to ask what you should do and what i should do that is what this election is all about don t let anybody kid you about anything else elections for president are still about you they re about you and your family and your dreams and your challenges and your future and don t you ever let anybody take an election away from you make it about your future our first challenge is to strengthen our families and to help all children recover their childhood that s what the family and medical leave act was all about that s what providing more opportunities for head start is all about yes most of it has to be done by people in their individual families but the rest of us have a responsibility too i am proud of the fact that the vice president and i insisted on the inclusion of the v chip in the telecommunications law to give parents the right to decide whether their children watch hours and hours and hours of mindless destructive violence on television for years and years and years we have got to provide all americans the opportunities that jennifer spoke about we live in an age where education matters more than ever before just last week there was a new study saying that the difference 15 years ago between the earnings of high school graduates and college graduates was about 20 percent and now it s 80 percent i believe that we have an obligation to open the doors of college education to every person in america who wants to go we should increase the pell grant program not reduce it we should maintain a direct college loan program that gives young people the chance to borrow the money they need to go to college and pay it back as a percentage of their income so they will never be discouraged from borrowing that money and going on to college and if we are to have a tax cut the best tax cut we could give america is a deduction for the cost of college tuition for every family we have to meet a challenge today that won t wait for tomorrow to help every american family willing to work for it achieve a greater measure of economic security if we re going to see people changing jobs more and more if we want to keep the dynamism of this economy and still support families who work and want to raise their children there are a few things we have to do number one we ought to make it possible if we can t have health insurance for everybody at least everybody ought to have access to it you shouldn t lose your insurance when you change jobs you shouldn t lose your insurance because somebody in your family gets sick there is a bill before the senate today that has almost 50 republican and democratic cosponsors it has been voted out of committee unanimously but the vested interests do not want it voted on on the floor we should say to the united states senate pass that bill send it to the house pass it and send it to the president america deserves it we should guarantee the integrity of the pension systems in america we dare not go back to the time when companies were allowed to raid their workers pensions for utter short term gains and we ought to make it easier for small business people like the people who work up and down this street to take out a pension for themselves and their employees less costly and more secure we have got to do that and finally when people lose their jobs instead of having to go through this array of programs to find out whether they qualify for training i propose a g i bill for america s workers collapse all the programs put the money in the bank and give every unemployed worker a voucher let the worker decide where to get the training cut the bureaucracy increase the training put people back to work at higher wages that s what we need to do here and let me say one other thing to me among the greatest heroes in this country are the people who work 40 hours a week and do their best to raise their kids and only make the minimum wage if we do not raise the minimum wage this year it will drop to a 40 year low in terms of what it will buy there is always a lot talk in washington about family values it s hard to raise a family on 4 25 an hour let s raise the minimum wage we have got to take our streets back from crime i am glad the crime rate has gone down but we all know it s too high you know when we ll know this problem is whipped when you turn on the television news and you see the report of a crime and you are surprised we have got to make crime the exception not the rule in america again we must not repeal the crime bill s requirement to put 100 000 police on our streets and we dare not go back on the other provisions of the crime bill i know here in new hampshire where like my native state of arkansas there are a lot of people who love to hunt when we passed the ban on assault weapons when we passed the brady bill there were hunters who were frightened into opposing our policies who were told that their guns were going to be taken away well we just had a great duck season in arkansas and a great deer season in new hampshire and not a single hunter lost their guns they were not told the truth but i ll tell you who did lose their guns over 40 000 criminals could not buy guns because of the brady bill we are not going to repeal it we must meet the challenge of keeping our environment clean and safe and even better for the next generation we must discard this crazy notion that the only way we can grow the economy is to destroy the environment it is not true we can grow the economy by preserving the environment that used to be a bipartisan commitment in america and if you vote for bill clinton and al gore the environmental vice president you will send a message that will make the environment a bipartisan commitment of america again even in this time when it is tempting to say we have no challenges beyond our borders i ask you to remember that this great country of ours is looked to all across the world to stand up for decency and peace and freedom i ask you to understand that we have certain responsibilities because no other nation in the world can do the things we are called upon to do i have not sought to make america the world s policeman but i have not permitted america to withdraw from the world where we can make a difference and where it is consistent with our values and our interests we cannot be policeman we cannot withdraw but we can be the world s greatest peacemaker and that is exactly what we are trying to do today these are all challenges that begin with you but involve your government in a partnership but there is another challenge we must meet that begins with us and involves you in a partnership here in this square of keene let me say our seventh great challenge is to make our democracy work again to give you a government that costs less and works better and demands and deserves your trust and your confidence and your participation at election time let me say that just a few months ago i was in claremont with speaker gingrich and we shook hands on a commitment to try to reform the political system when we were asked by a man who came down to be with me here today named frank mcconnell frank where are you where s frank there he is he is the guy that asked newt gingrich and bill clinton to join together to clean up the political system to pass lobby reform and campaign finance reform let s give him a hand well we did half of it we passed a very good lobby reform bill and believe me the lobbyists are flooding registration offices they are getting this information for the first time on the people they are working for how much money they re spending and what they re trying to get done it s a good law and i m proud we did it and i compliment the republicans and the democrats for doing it but we need to finish the job two distinguished united states senators a republican from arizona john mccain and a democrat from wisconsin russ feingold who disagree on a lot of things but understand that the health of our democracy must be put ahead of partisan politics have sponsored a campaign finance reform bill and we ought to pass it and pass it now because of frank and because of you this bill includes the things i talked to you about in 1992 it limits spending it curbs the influence of pacs and lobbyists it ends the soft money system most important of all it would recreate the kind of town meetings that new hampshire made famous because it would give the candidates free air time no more negative ads dominating politics but open air time and honest discussions of the issues we need campaign finance reform and we need it now but let me tell you something else we need we need you we need you i want you to go out tuesday night you say well or tuesday in the daytime and vote you say you don t have an opponent mr president oh yes i do oh yes i do and so do you our opponent is cynicism it is negativism it is apathy it is division it is short term gain instead of the long term interest of the country those are our opponents remember when we re united we never lose when we re divided we defeat ourselves cynicism is a cheap cover and a poor excuse for inaction by the american citizens don t tell me your vote doesn t make a difference it does it does if you voted for bill clinton and al gore four years ago you got the family and medical leave law you got national service you got a better college loan program you got more kids in head start you got a halving of the deficit you got policies that contributed to the growth of jobs in america you did make a difference and it will make a difference you dare not permit the american people your friends and neighbors who would never think of coming out here on a cold day and standing here like you are fall victim to this kind of skepticism and cynicism it has no place in america let me tell you i know people say the government would mess up a one car parade and nothing good ever happens but i just gave you a list of things good that happened and let me tell you something else in his new book my friend james carville points out something that every american should know in the last 30 years we have spent one half of your tax money on just three things defense social security and medicare now what did you get for it we won the cold war there are no missiles pointed at america s children the elderly poverty rate has been cut in half and if you live to be 65 senior citizens in america have the highest life expectancy of any group of seniors in the world i think we got our money s worth we can make a difference when we work together and when we determine to do things if we meet the challenges of the future the way we met those three challenges this country s best days are ahead of us you can do it go tuesday stand up for your country fight for your future and determine that we are going to do this together thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton17 2 98 bill_clinton well welcome to the white house mr smiley mr leyland glad to be joined by the executive director of the players association don fehr congressman deutsch congressman foley congressman wexler i think i should also say i see my epa administrator carol browner here you should know that this administration has three members along with carol browner attorney general janet reno and the secretary of the treasury bob rubin who all grew up in south florida they re fairly happy about the outcome of the world series you can tell that i am not running for office anymore i might not have said that here but we are delighted when i was first elected president i never could have dreamed that a lot of the things that would occur in the last five years have occurred i didn t imagine then that millions of people would be using the internet every day when i was first elected president there were only 50 sites and they were all the province of physicists i couldn t have imagined that the deficit would come from 300 billion to zero in five years and i could not have predicted that the florida marlins would be here because they hadn t even played a game yet that is a truly astonishing achievement but what you did in a short time was a gift to your magnificent leader jim leyland for a lifetime in professional baseball and all of us who are baseball fans of whatever team had to be happy about that and of course a manager can t win without talented players and without teamwork livian hernandez dazzled us with his pitching and became only the second rookie ever to win the world series mvp award charles johnson s defense earned him the gold glove as catcher for the third year in a row edgar renteria s name will live in baseball history forever for ending one of the most exciting world series in history with his two out single in the bottom of the 11th you know those games got so long some of us really did want them to go on forever after a while baseball i think made a huge comeback as america s national pastime in this world series thanks to the magnificent competition which you won deservedly you know a lot of the players on this team are newcomers to our country and so are many of the fans of the florida marlins i suppose it s only right that the capital of the americas would take its turn as the baseball capital of the world but even more importantly we should be proud of the example this team set proving once again that people of very different ethnic backgrounds can play together and win together now it may not be the precise same marlin team that played the indians last year that takes the field on opening day but if the players keep the same spirit they ll be sure to be in the hunt again when the season comes to a close congratulations for all of us who grew up with baseball as a national pastime you gave america a great gift last year that none of us will ever forget thank you dem wjclinton17 3 94 bill_clinton thank you very much alicia i think your family is here with you your family members would you all stand up thank you for coming here with her i want to thank alicia for that remarkable performance you know what i said to her when i saw the psas the same thing all of you are thinking i said the one with you in it was a whole lot better this is the culmination of a long effort by good people who want to do something about this terrible problem i thank phil geier the chairman of the ad council and all those who comprise that council and who support this work i want to thank jack calhoun for the work he s done and the 123 organizations that make up his crime prevention coalition and for his remarkable remarks here today i thank saatchi and saatchi for the work they did and others members of the creative community who are here with us today who have done their own public service announcements changed their programming made a common commitment in an earlier meeting with the vice president and me to try to make a sustained effort to change the culture of violence that is gripping our country i want to say a special word of thanks and greeting to the chairman of our corporation for national community service eli segal who is in miami at the 7th annual youth crime prevention conference with 1 200 officers teachers community leaders and others active in crime watch projects peer counseling drug prevention programs and others these people are going to have to carry a lot of the future of our common efforts to reduce violence in america you know if you just read the big headlines in the papers today a lot of them are very good there s more growth more jobs more opportunity a real sense of recovery in the country but we will never become the country we ought to be if we lose another generation of our children to the violence that killed so many and holds the rest hostage i can tell you as the father of a teenager every teenager in the country talks about this issue at home at night discusses it over the dinner table is concerned about it worries about whether they have friends that are going to fall victim to crime and this is an incredible burden a burden you can see in the eyes and hear in the voice of alicia one that imposes on those of us who are grown an inordinate responsibility to change the conditions and the attitudes which have produced this incredible range of violence we now have a higher percentage of our people in prison than any country on the face of the earth no other nation has so high a percentage of their people in prison and yet we worry that we don t have enough jail space and we have to build more the broadcast the cable networks that are here who are supporting this effort and who will make time available are helping us to begin to make a difference i want to say a special word of encouragement and thanks to them because they ve done so much to help change our country for the better with other such campaigns the campaign to reduce smoking the campaign to increase seatbelt use the campaigns to remind so many young people that a mind is a terrible thing to waste or friends don t let friends drink and drive president roosevelt once said if he hadn t gone into politics he would like to have had a career in advertising president kennedy generated his first peace corps volunteers through ads like this messages can speak to dreams and respond to fears and bring people out of their shells i hope that we can do that here today this industry the entertainment industry is working hard now to help america reduce violent behavior by showing young people that there are alternatives to violence they can help us in the search for a safer and a saner land to change people have to have a willing heart we re working hard here on a crime bill which i hope so much will be passed soon to put more police officers on the street to take more assault weapons off the street to try to change the conditions in communities that exist by giving communities opportunities to help young people have something to say yes to instead of just something to say no to but we have to have more willing hearts the cable industry will air these ads on 32 cable networks the networks themselves have committed a high level exposure already 2 000 movie theaters have agreed to show the psa on their screens and we are now getting offers to put these psas on movies that are rented at video rental stores the motion picture association of american under the able leadership of jack valenti and the video software dealers are really going to do a lot of good work on this these commitments are new and unprecedented i think they reveal an understanding by people in the entertainment industry that our children have an share with us daily we somehow have to find a way to encourage young people to settle arguments with words instead of weapons we also have to encourage their parents to do the same thing for domestic violence is still the cause of a lot of these killings we have to show adults how common sense can ease tensions we have to help communities set up programs to deal with this last week i was in brooklyn college with nine people who are giving their lives to various efforts to help people turn away from violence i just want to mention two of them to you i met a women named clementine barfield from detroit who had two sons two of her teenage sons shot and one killed in gang fighting she is devoting her life to try to reach kids to make sure not only that they don t become victims like her son but they don t become killers like the people who killed her sons i met a young man named sherman spears from oakland california who is confined to a wheelchair has had one leg amputated lost the use of one of his eyes often still in pain because he was caught in the cross fire of a gun shooting he is devoting his life to an organization which reaches out to victims and tries to tell them not to retaliate not to seek vengeance not to seek revenge that no one ever gets even and you have to go on with your lives these are the kinds of people we want to support we will send specific suggestions to anyone who responds to the 800 line it s 1 800 we prevent it s mentioned in the ad and it s very important because the people who are going to air the ads can t do the grass roots one on one work after the air is quiet in closing let me just say this you probably heard alicia brown say this i want to reemphasize it in a few moments she is going to the funeral of her sixth friend to die from gunshot wounds a 14 year old child not in a war zone in a far away country not in somalia not in sudan not in angola not in burundi not in sarajevo but in the capital of the greatest nation on the face of the earth that is what has become of childhood my fellow americans while the rest of us have pursued our dreams in life had our families raised our children enjoyed the fruits of freedom that is what has become of childhood it is indecent it is unacceptable we can do something about it and we owe it to them to do it thank you very much dem wjclinton17 3 96 bill_clinton you know i ve been trying to convince everyone else in washington to delay the onset of this year s campaign and you aren t helping very much but you have my permission to vary from the official line i thank you so much i want to thank my friend david hermelin for his wonderful remarks and his remarkable service i don t know that i ve ever known anybody that had such a remarkable combination of energy and commitment to the common good he is indefatigable and all of his energies seem to me to be directed toward good causes including my own and i thank him for that to ambassador yaacobi mrs rabinovich members of the young leadership cabinet and all of you thank you for giving me the opportunity to come by tonight and let me begin by saying that a lot of people speak about trying to advance the cause of humanity but you actually do something about it so i want to begin simply by thanking you for everything you do from the hot meals for the homebound to wheelchairs for the disabled to shelter for refugees to comfort for victims of alzheimer s and aids and thank you of course for your many services to the cause of israel you know i was trying to think of something i could say tonight just one line that would capture our country s rich diversity and the common commitment we should all feel to the cause of peace and standing up against terrorism everywhere in the world and it seems to me the best line i could give all of you at this great jewish event tonight is happy st patrick s day let me say that the two days and nine hours i spent going from here to sharm el sheikh to tel aviv and jerusalem and back to tel aviv again and then home were a remarkable experience for me i am grateful that the united states is a friend of israel and a friend of the cause of peace i am grateful that the united states is an implacable opponent of terrorism and i am grateful that at this moment i was able to go on behalf of all the american people to stand with the people of israel in their time of pain and sorrow and challenge to express the outrage of our people at the latest campaign of terror and to show our solidarity all of you know this but it bears repeating that the terrorist attacks claimed not only israeli lives but also those of palestinians and some of the most gripping tales i heard when i was there came from their family members who also long for peace and two young americans sara duker and matthew eisenfeld now it is important quite apart from the peace process that we once again say to the world we know no country is safe from terror we have seen it in the world trade center and in oklahoma city in the united states we know our friends in japan have suffered it in the terrible attack of sarin gas in the tokyo subway but we know that in the middle east it has too often been employed as an instrument of politics and it is wrong we stand against it now we redouble our efforts against it and we will be against it forever the symbol of our solidarity on this trip was perhaps best conveyed by the stone from the south lawn of the white house that i was privileged to place on the grave of my friend prime minister rabin along with all of his family members that is the place where the first accord with the palestinians was signed it represents our hope for progress our belief in the chances of peace and our unwavering solidarity as you know we have resolved to strengthen our cooperation with all those who will stand against terror in the middle east we are committing more than 100 million to the task we are increasing our intelligence sharings and we are developing new methods to combat violence there we are convinced that ultimately fear will overcome the adversity of terror because overcoming that kind of adversity is the genius of the jewish people and the history of the state of israel no nation on earth has experienced more often the painful truth that the path of triumph often passes through tragedy no people knows better that we must deny victory to oppressors the jewish people have overcome every one of their would be destroyers denying them their goal and in so doing reaffirming that what is good in human nature can prevail it may be that until the end of time there will always be some group that will seek to do harm to others for their own advantage we cannot rid the world of evil it may be that until the end of time there will always be some group that will seek to distort the meaning of a religion to demonize those who are different from them but it should be heartening to you to know that today more nations than ever have risen up with israel to oppose the destroyers of the present day to oppose those who would kill and maim and who seek to destroy the peace through violence that really was the message of the meeting at sharm el sheikh that israel is no longer alone the summit of peacemakers was the largest and highest level meeting of its kind ever held at the urging of israel s neighbors 29 nations including 13 from arab states came to demonstrate their support for peace and their opposition to terrorism i believe that that summit marked the beginning of a truly unified regional effort to root out those responsible for the bloodshed it produced concrete results and soon there will be a follow up conference here in washington within the month at which representatives of all the nations will be present and we will press ahead to implement the commitments that all made at sharm el sheikh just think about it a meeting like this would have been unthinkable just a few years ago but for the first time arab nations in the region are beginning to realize that pain in israel is a danger to them as well large majorities of palestinians and jordanians and egyptians know that the destruction of innocent life in israel is a threat to the peaceful future they have declared as their goal for themselves and their own children they understood that security must not lie only at the end of the road for peace there must be security every step of the way or there can be no peace no one seriously believes anymore it is fair to ask israel to give up its security until the peace is made that is wrong and we will not support it when i read the story of the palestinian nurse who was killed in the bombing and what her son said about her loss it convinced me that what i see in bosnia and what i see in northern ireland is also true now in israel and in the middle east and it is a great cause for hope and a sobering reminder of the dimension of our challenge and that is that the great division today in the middle east is not between those of different religions or ethnic groups just as it is no longer between croatian serb and muslim in bosnia or between catholic and protestant in northern ireland it really is between those who are reaching for a better tomorrow and those who have retreated into the pointless bloody hostility of yesterday those who are willing to open their arms to their neighbors and those who want to remain with their fist clenched those who are willing to raise their children based on what kind of people they are inside and what they stand for and what their character is and those who wish to continue to raise their children based on who they are not and whom they can hate that is the clear decision that all peoples of the world confronted with these kind of conflicts have to make and even those this is a time of mourning it is also a time of hope for the rest of the world is coming to know what america has long understood israel must be strong and secure and confident if we want peace and justice for every person in the middle east and i assure you we will continue to support those who take risks for peace in the middle east in bosnia and around the world the fight against terrorism must be a national security priority for the american people last year when i announced the stronger steps we in the united states were prepared to take alone against iran because of their policies many of my colleagues around the world declined to join in some of them my friends and freedom loving people openly said i was wrong i didn t hear that so much in sharm el sheikh people are beginning to see the truth you cannot you must not countenance people who believe it is legitimate to fund and arm others to kill innocent civilians no matter where they are let me remind my fellow americans that we have challenges here at home and that if we want to be truly effective in the transnational fight against terrorism we must have the tools to deal with terrorism here at home well over a year ago i sent to congress a bill to improve our ability to investigate to prosecute to punish terrorist activity after our own tragedy in oklahoma city i made that legislation even stronger and challenged the congress to pass it last june the senate passed the counterterrorism legislation until last week the house of representatives letting more than a half year go by had not acted then last week when it did act unbelievably it acted to destroy the bill to gut it indeed to mock it the house voted for example to delete a provision of the bill that would allow us to tag explosive materials so that if a bomb is exploded somewhere in america it will be marked and we can trace it back to its source now if you have your car stolen in washington d c tonight and somebody drives it to west virginia i hope it doesn t happen but think about it and you call the police and you tell them your name and the serial and the license plate of your car and the car has any serial numbers on it and its found tomorrow morning in a parking lot of a grocery store in west virginia under the national computer network system we have within 30 seconds it can be identified as your car and you can be told that it s your car we have serial numbers on guns that are sold in america unless they re filed off now why in the world the washington gun lobby is opposed to tagging explosives which could be used to blow apart the bodies of innocent civilians is beyond me if people want to use the explosives for appropriate construction work they can still do it their civil liberties are not going to be impaired but as soon as the objection was raised the house says thank you very much we ll take it right out we had a provision in that bill that would allow us to depart more quickly people who come into this country and are obviously involved in raising funds for terrorist organizations they took that out we had other provisions that would enable us to move more aggressively against organizations that clearly engage in terrorism they took those out and they imposed a commission not to study terrorism within our borders or beyond our borders but to study the federal law enforcement officials whose primary job it is to combat these kind of terrorist activities that is the wrong response and it sends a terrible signal to people throughout the world who believe that if they can just get the right kind of extremist opposition to standing up to terrorism in america it will weaken our resolve they are wrong about that and we should pass a good antiterrorism bill immediately i just want to say if i might one more word about why you re here in this leadership conference and to say i admire this organization for many things but not the least of it is always trying to develop a new generation of leaders i sought this office more than four years ago because i believe that our country had to change direction if we were going to achieve the objectives that i feel are important for america one is to guarantee the american dream for every person who is willing to work for it second to maintain america s leadership in the cause of peace and freedom and security and prosperity throughout the world we cannot withdraw we must continue to lead and third is to continue to build the american community to forge a new unity amidst all of our diversity based on shared values and genuine honest respect for diversity now if we can do those three things this country is going to be just fine and the world will be a better place as i have said many times in order to achieve those objectives we have to grow the economy in a way that gives everybody a chance to participate we have to squarely face our shared social challenges from a high crime rate to abject poverty rates among our young people to teen pregnancy rates and other problems that make childhood more difficult we have to work hard to overcome the impulses that so many americans understandably feel to withdraw from the world at the end of the cold war and to try to chart a new course and we have to continue to try to inspire more faith and trust in the american people in their government now in each of those areas we re better off than we were but we have significant challenges ahead we should be grateful that we have 8 4 million more jobs than we did in 1992 because a lot of our other competitors have no new jobs and we should be glad that every year for the last three years we set a record in the number of new businesses we should be glad that businesses owned by women alone have hired more people than the fortune 500 have laid off we should be glad about that but that should not make us insensitive to the fact that there are pockets in the inner cities and isolated rural areas of america that have felt no economic recovery it should not make us insensitive to the fact that the educational divide in the new economy into which we re moving has become so great that about half the hourly wage earners in america in the bottom half are earning about the same wages as their counterparts were 20 years ago once you adjust for inflation we should be sensitive to the fact that even though we re creating far more high tech jobs than we re losing if you happen to be one of those 50 year old people who gets downsized about the time you re trying to send your kids to college there needs to be an answer for you as well so we re better off than we were but we have to build on our successes and face our challenges if you look at the fabric of american society we should be grateful for the fact that as compared with four years ago the crime rate is down the welfare rolls are down the poverty rolls are down and the teen pregnancy rate is dropping but we should also say compared to any appropriate standard for a civilized disciplined orderly hope for society all these problems are still far too great and we must keep going until we have literally wiped them from our concerns we can be grateful for the progress that s been made in political reform the rules on lobbying for example are much more open and much stricter than they were when i became president now congress has to apply to itself the laws it imposes on the private sector those are good things we can be glad about that but we also know that there are other things that have to be done not the least of which is a legitimate genuine campaign finance reform bill that gives every citizen the opportunity to run for office and all citizens the same influence in the electoral process until that is done we will not have finished our work and while the world is clearly a safer place not only for americans but for virtually all other people than it was four years ago we know that we have to keep going we have to keep going not only in the middle east and in northern ireland and in bosnia we have to keep going until children everywhere no longer fear that their legs will be blown off by land mines when they re walking in fields we have to keep going until we know that we have done everything that can be humanely done to remove from people everywhere the threat of biological or chemical or small scale nuclear weapons we have to keep going until we have concluded all possible agreements to ban nuclear testing so that will be the beginning of the end of any nuclear threat for the people of the world and we have to remember that nations are like children you can t just say that they should say no to bad things you have to give them some good things to say yes to and therefore it is right and decent and in our self interest to keep expanding the frontiers of economic opportunity and not to forget that all those people in latin america that still worry about whether their children will even grow to be adults deserve to be part of a new economy and if we do it right they ll be our best customers that all those people in africa we long to see free of the kind of carnage we see in rwanda and burundi deserve to have some hope for a better future if they work hard and do the right thing that the people who live in india and pakistan that we long to see walk away from their old bitter conflicts have to also be able to walk toward a future of brighter hope and that for america to do well we have to continue to be committed to creating that kind of future it s in our people s interest to do what is right in the world and so that brings me to you for except for those of us who are in effect hired by you to tend for a little while to the public interest all other americans necessarily have to be preoccupied with their own interests with the work they must do and the children they re trying to raise and the things within their immediate reach but we must we must reassert in this country a commitment to citizen leadership among the younger generation of americans you know when i was in israel i spoke in tel aviv to a large number of young people and afterward the prime minister asked me if i would take questions and i was fairly apprehensive but i said okay and a young person said well what advice would you give to someone my age who wanted to be involved in a position of leadership and responsibility what would you tell me if i wanted to go into public life what should i do and i said well in my country when young people ask me that question i tell them to do three things one to get the best education you can so that you ll be able to learn for a lifetime because the world is growing more complex there is more to know there is more to understand and more importantly there are more connections to be made you can t just isolate one body of knowledge or one experience from another the second thing you have to do is to develop a genuine interest in people you know i hear a lot of people in my line of work talking and it s hard to imagine from the anger in their voices that they like people very much you don t have to give up on your own heritage to try to stand in another person s shoes in one county in america alone there are over 150 different racial and ethnic groups and that is a great gift for our country in a global society it is a gift one we should cherish and treasure and nourish but unless we realize that curious blend of human reality that gives something common to human nature across all the racial and ethnic divides and still demands of us to respect each other s honestly held differences we will not meet the challenges of the future and our inability to do that and our tendency here in america to use elections as an excuse to divide one another so that we choose up sides based on the belief that our opponents are aliens and we learn that they re aliens from 30 second ads that tell us how evil and bad they are that is a very dangerous tendency in a global society when we need to be pulling together and when we can only solve our problems by pulling together there is no other way to solve the people problems that human societies everywhere face and that the united states has in abundance except by working together by reaching across the divides and the third thing i tell young people is that they should figure out what they believe stand up for it and work for it and not be deterred to be perfectly honest the thing i like best about your cheering tonight is that you were cheering for me but the thing i like second best about it is the thing i like second best about it was your energy your belief your conviction your passion you know i see all these surveys that say americans are cynical my friends that s a great luxury if you re worried about whether every bus you boarded was loaded with a bomb you wouldn t have the time to be cynical if you lived in a tiny village in the andes where you didn t know where your child s next meal was coming from you wouldn t have the time to be cynical if you lived in a country in africa where you were trying to save your wife s life because she belonged to a different tribe than you do and your tribe had the army and they were going through one little village after another with machetes you wouldn t have the option of being cynical you live in a country with the strongest economy the greatest potential the widest diversity the largest amount of opportunities on earth and you are not cynical or you wouldn t be here at this conference and you wouldn t have stood up and you wouldn t have exhibited all that energy but a lot of the people that you work and live with back in your communities are and they say aw it doesn t matter who wins all the politicians you ve heard all that stuff i m telling you it s a bunch of bull it s a bunch of bull it s not true and let me say you know before we had to stop them for the election season of the other party they ve got a they have to hold their elections i m not complaining but before we had to stop them for the election season of the other party the vice president and i spent over 50 hours with the leaders of the republicans and democrats in congress and we spent the time in private and most of what we said i don t think i should talk about in any great detail it wasn t all that different from what you ve already heard in public but after you spend 50 hours with other people and you talk through and you express your really what you think and what you feel you develop a certain relationship to people even if they re very different from you and the point i want to make to you is that the leaders of the majority in congress and i really do view the world in different ways but that is not a cynical statement and it has nothing to do with campaign tactics about which i spoke earlier it is a plain fact and that s why i say to young people you have to decide what you believe and take sides and stand up but there s nothing to be cynical about these differences are real and deep and profound and they matter and they re honestly held by all the party and i just want to say to you that this is a very great country but if you want your country when those of you who are younger are my age and i m nearly eligible to join aarp i hate it but it s true if you want this country when you re 50 when you re 60 when you re 65 to be the beacon of hope for the world to be israel s best friend to stand up for freedom and against terrorism if that s what you want if you want every child who grows up in this country to believe that he or she can live out their dreams if they ll work for it then cynicism and inaction and passivity have no place in your future or the future of your friends and neighbors back home where you live you have to lead and that s what i want you to do thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton17 4 93 bill_clinton thank you thank you so much senator wofford governor casey commissioner foerster happy birthday and commissioner flaherty i am so glad to be back in pittsburgh in allegheny county now where s the band who played for us up there the richland high marching band thank you very much i want to say mayor it s always good to be with you and be in your city i want to also acknowledge the presence here today of congressmen coyne klink murphy and murtha all of whom have supported this economic program to get our country moving again and a person who has made some decisions that are very good for pittsburgh and u s air and i think for the future of the country the transportation secretary federico pena who is here with us i want to say a lot of things about the economic program but before i do let me say what since all of you heard the radio address and the interview you know that this morning the jury in los angeles handed down a verdict in the rodney king case you don t know that i thought you heard it well let me say that they did and the jury found two of the defendants guilty and two of the defendants not guilty the jury convicted the officer officer powell who was shown on the film who did most of the beating and the sergeant who was in charge of the group of police officers who were there the jury acquitted two of the other officers including the one who was a rookie and the one who was on the film and in part trying to deflect some blows from rodney king now i want to say just a few words about that because i think frankly our attitude about each other may have as much to do with the progress we need to make in the future as any specific law we can pass this verdict was a tribute to the work and the judgment of the jury and the efforts of the federal government in putting the case together it was once again a reminder that our courts are the proper forum for the resolution of even our deepest legal disputes and it did establish what a lot of people have felt in their hearts for two years that the civil rights of rodney king were violated but i ask you to think about the deeper meaning of this whole issue all across the world today people are fighting with each other and killing each other because of their racial and religious differences in eastern bosnia in the town of srebrenica muslims and serbs that lived together for centuries and tens of thousands of the muslims are now about to be forced from their homes through a process called ethnic cleansing and because the serbs had decided that they just can t live unless they can live alone and without others who are different from them our country has always been about something different from that we see these kinds of racial and ethnic conflicts on every continent all across the globe but we ve always been about something different from that i once gave a speech to a university in los angeles county where there were students from 122 different countries there are now people from 150 different racial and ethnic groups in that county alone and i say to you my fellow americans unless we really do believe that underneath the differences of race and religion and ethnicity underneath the differences of political party and political opinion there is a core in each one of us given us by god in which we share in common which obliges us to respect one another and to wish to live together in harmony and peace none of the other things i came to talk to you about today can come to pass for the people of los angeles and the people of this country all around the country who need more opportunity the time has come to go forward to rededicate ourselves to the civil rights of all americans to rededicate ourselves to the fight against crime and drugs and violence to put 100 000 more police officers on the street to pass the brady bill and try to reduce the vulnerability to violence and crimes by people to commit ourselves to a new agenda of expanding opportunity and empowerment but in the beginning must be the willingness of every american to assume a personal responsibility to respect the differences of his or her fellow americans and rejoice in what unites us as human beings surely the lasting legacy of the rodney king trial ought to be that a determination to reaffirm our common humanity and to make a strength of our diversity and if we can do that then we can get on about the business of this great land i want to before i talk a little bit about the stimulus program also say a special word about the gentleman who introduced me and those of you who sent him to the senate when pennsylvania elected harris wofford against all the odds less than two years ago you started a movement not just that led to a change in presidents but that led to a change in america i m here to tell you today that pennsylvania sent shock waves to the country by electing harris wofford because pennsylvania was saying we expect our government to solve the health care crisis we expect our government to solve the jobs crisis i wonder how many people would have even taken seriously the campaign that i undertook to try to break the gridlock and change the whole way washington works to reduce the influence of special interest and put the american people their jobs their health care their education first to try to change the welfare system and start a system of national service so people could earn their way through college i wonder if any of that could have happened if pennsylvania hadn t said in a loud screaming clear voice by electing harris wofford the time has come to change the direction of this country i also want to ask you for your understanding and your patience senator wofford has been working hard on this health care issue ever since he got to the senate but you can t change the health care system unless the white house and the congress are in harness and i my wife and our administration are working on this health care issue to put the white house and the congress in harness to ensure affordable health care to all americans i also want to say again how much i appreciate u s air and the employees for giving us this wonderful terminal to meet in today and now let me talk about what governor casey spoke about when i became president i promised a long term economic plan no short term miracles but a real effort to turn this country around and i presented that plan to the congress they have to vote on it twice first in broad outlines and then in the details they adopted the outlines the so called budget resolution in record time they have never moved so rapidly it changes the whole way the federal government takes care of your money and has your priorities at stake it emphasizes a dramatic reduction in the federal deficit and at the same time increasing investment in jobs in education and health care and communities and the things that will make the country grow over a five year period not a one shot deal over five years it does it by a combination of strict budget cuts and raising some more money 70 percent of it comes from people with incomes over 100 000 a year to try to restore some fairness to this tax code that has gotten so unfair in the last 12 years this program is a good program it is what i campaigned on then i asked the congress to do something i didn t really campaign on but that i decided was important to adopt a short term jobs program to immediately create a half a million jobs in this economy and i ll tell you why i did it even though we never talked about it in these rallies when i came here because i looked around the world and i saw that every advanced economy in the world is having trouble creating jobs everyone and then i looked at america and i saw that the economists were saying that we have been in an economic recovery for a year and the unemployment rate is higher now than it was when we were in the depths of the recession so america is like a lot of these other countries if you look at the overall figures a lot of you are responsible for this by the way productivity our output per working person is up some profits of our corporations are up stock market at record high levels now interest rates are going down because we re committed to reducing the deficit and a lot of you as a result have refinanced your homes or gotten a lower mortgage on a or interest rate on a car or other consumer interest rates people have been able to get business loans or refinance them that s all good but where are the jobs this is a sweeping worldwide problem for wealthier countries but it is your problem and your community s problem if you or your neighbors don t have one and as a result of the incredible pressures on business today we see that even in this so called recovery we re having no new jobs created and we re having 100 000 americans a month lose their health insurance i say we can do better and we have to try to do better and so we came up with the idea of not having the government create a job for everybody that s unemployed you know we don t have enough money to do that with the deficit as high as it is but of having a very carefully targeted jobs plan to create a half a million jobs and hope it would operate like striking a match and then that would get the economy spurred and other new jobs would be created it was a disciplined limited targeted plan clearly designed to get this economy going again in the short run and that is what i ve asked the house and the senate to adopt the house adopted the plan right away a majority of the senate is for it all the republicans are filibustering it which means they know it will pass so they won t let it come to a vote now let me tell you what it will do it will give communities a lift by putting thousands of police officers on the street to try to make the streets safer it will invest in roads and streets and bridges and cleaner water and sewer systems and put people to work in construction work that is important it will give cities and counties and states some discretionary money to support projects like this one it will create 700 000 jobs for young people who otherwise wouldn t have any work this summer to get them off the streets after trying for a long time to pass this program and getting no help from any of the republican senators because it takes we have to have at least three or four of them to help because it takes 60 people to shut off debate in the senate not a majority 60 percent i offered a compromise well you ve heard that old saying it takes two to tango it also takes two to untangle the gridlock in washington and i came here today asking you to ask senator specter to help me untangle this gridlock the republicans say well maybe we ought to pay money to extend the unemployment benefits of people who are unemployed but not a dime to create any jobs we tried that for 12 years pay people to be unemployed don t pay them to work i say we should do both take care of the unemployed but reduce the unemployed put people to work there are those who say everything s fine we don t need this everybody who says that has got a job everybody who says that has got health insurance everybody who says that has a good education and is going to do fine almost no matter what happens they can take care of themselves the people who know how many vulnerable people there are in america know that we ve got to try to do something to put the people to work if it doesn t work we ll do something else but let s try this it can work let me say in fairness to my opponents i want you to know what their argument is they say if the congress passes an emergency jobs bill that adds to the deficit and we shouldn t do anything to make the deficit bigger nothing except maybe unemployment benefits now that has a lot of appeal here s what they don t tell you we could pass every dollar i ve asked for in this jobs plan and still be below the total spending targets that this congress established before i ever became president for how much money was going to be spent this year right congressmen number one number two we have cut and cut and cut spending in this budget over 200 specific spending cuts over the next five years that will blow away this extra spending this spending is more than covered by budget cuts and third and the most important thing of all you need to know is that before i became president just in the last four years a lot of these same people voted for the same kind of emergency spending billions and billions and billions of dollars of it a lot of it for overseas spending or other things that didn t have anything to do with putting the people of pennsylvania to work so they did this before let s do it for the american people this time what s amazing to me they also say well you can t trust the cities and counties with the money you give these community development block grants to the cities you can t ever tell well they ll fool around a build a swimming pool with it i have a couple of things to say about that first of all it was the republicans in washington that once championed these community development grants your late senator from this state john heinz was a great champion of the very thing i m trying to increasing community development block grants before i became president i heard speech after speech out of the republicans in washington that i agreed with saying that people at the local level have better sense than we do about how to spend this money how many times did the congress get that speech from the republicans let the mayors let the governors let the county officials spend this money they know how to do it well funny enough i propose to expand that program and all of a sudden they said why you can t trust those people they ll squander the money they might build a swimming pool let me tell you something i don t know how you feel but in a lot of these cities and small towns and country places i d a lot rather those kids be at swimming pools this summer than some of the places they re going to be you go to washington the president s got a swimming pool the senate has a swimming pool why shouldn t the people have a swimming pool and what about all those people who are going to work building those kinds of things in our cities i m tell you folks every argument they ve got still comes back to gridlock now again i m going to tell you this is not the end of the world but we need to keep this country moving and we need to create some jobs now and we need to stop making excuses we need to pull together i have reached out the hand of compromise to the republicans in the senate i did it all by myself i didn t have any kind of deal from them i just listened to them i listened to all those speeches about how bad these programs were so i said okay here s a different deal and by the way how about spending 200 million more to put police on the street why don t you do that let s hear what their answer is why shouldn t we have police on the street where we need it in the cities where we ve have to cut back on law enforcement coverage why shouldn t we have more people working in this country i want to ask you to help us put america back to work i want to ask you to help keep the movement going i have been very honest with you we don t have any magic bullets we know there won t be any overnight successes but we know that this economy like so many countries in the world is not creating jobs and if people were working you just think about it if everybody in this country who wanted a job had one we wouldn t have half the problems we ve got now let s try to put america back to work by the end of this month let me give you one more example if we don t fund this program the main loan program of the small business administration will be shut down the opposite party for years paraded as the champion of the small businesses of this country that program can help start 25 000 small businesses small business is generating most of the new jobs in america today that is the kind of thing we have done here i ask you please not in a spirit of partisanship not in an atmosphere of hostility not with political rhetoric just for the benefit of the people of pittsburgh and allegheny county and pennsylvania and the united states of america ask your senator and the senators in the united states senate to give us a chance to put this country back to work starting monday thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton17 5 93 bill_clinton thank you so much let me begin by thanking lynn schenk for that vigorous introduction and bob filner for what he said i can tell you if we had a whole congress full of people like lynn schenk and bob filner we could turn this country around a lot quicker they have done a wonderful job up there i d also like to thank all the people who came out to see me today and to see my first visit in this county since the election i want to thank the mayor of coronado the mayor of san diego the state officials who are here the lieutenant governor the secretary of state the state comptroller but mostly i just want to thank all of you it is wonderful to be back here again and i m happy you know i spent a lot of time here during the campaign i watched people build ships i listened to people who had lost their jobs i listened to people who were starting new companies i listened to people who were prepared to change but who did not understand why the national government would turn its back on southern california and on this state which carries with it so much of the hopes and dreams of all of america and so much of the economic future of our entire country and when i went to washington i was determined never to forget the faces that i saw and the stories that i heard and the lessons that i learned i want you to know that in the last three and a half months we have made a real beginning toward turning this country around and we are going to stay until the job is done you heard lynn talk about a little of it you heard bob talk about a little of it but let me just repeat for year and years and years we just saw the congress and the president fighting against one another decisions seemed not to be made the veto pen was used more often and people worked together seventeen days after i took office i signed the family and medical leave act to guarantee that working people could have some time off when there s a sick parent or a sick child without losing their job for the first time in 17 years the congress passed a resolution on time to set the framework of the budget that we re now working on and what that means is that we cannot raise your taxes unless we also cut spending no tax increases without spending cuts to bring the deficit down and to all the young people in the audience we managed to win one for you too after years and years of trying just a few days ago the united states congress passed and i am about to sign the motor voter bill to open up the voting rolls to millions of young people and make it easier for people to register and vote but now we must focus on the hard part how can we do the things that we have to do to turn this country around how can we open the economy up and give people who are working hard and playing by the rules the chance to have a good future how can we do these things here is what i think we have to do the first thing we have to do is to pass a budget which does the right things with your money we have seen the debt of this country go from 1 trillion to 4 trillion in 12 years and what did you get out of it we saw a decline in investment we saw working people work harder for lower wages we saw taxes on the middle class go up and taxes on the wealthy go down everything was turned around in opposite directions from where we ought to be going we are beginning to change that this budget contains over 250 billion of hard budget cuts this budget raises most of the money we raise in taxes from people with incomes above 100 000 over 74 percent of it this budget gives a tax break to working families with incomes of under 30 000 to protect them from the impact of the decisions we have to make and we have proposed to put all the taxes and all the spending cuts into a legally separate trust fund so the money cannot be spent to do anything but bring the debt down it is time we stopped talking about this and started doing something about it and you know when you hear people say no no no ask them where they were the last 12 years most of the people who say that we don t have a good plan are the very people that drove this country in the ditch in the first place they took that debt from 1 trillion to 4 trillion where were they but let me tell you some things you may not know about this bill when i came here i said that we had not only to reduce the deficit we had to provide more incentives for people to invest to create jobs so this tax bill also gives real incentives to get the real estate markets going here again it gives small business people a 25 000 a year expensing provision two and a half times greater than the present law so that there will be incentives for small businesspeople to reinvest in their businesses and put people to work it gives a big incentive to larger companies located here and throughout the united states to increase in more plant and equipment to modernize and create jobs because they can write it off more rapidly this bill is pro investment not consumption this is a bill designed to create jobs not take them away and i hope we can pass it in the united states congress and let me say this again this bill provides for tax relief for the working poor so that when this bill passes every american will be able to say with some pride we re rewarding work and not welfare in this country now if you work 40 hours a week and you ve got a child in the house you won t be in poverty anymore i think that s something that s worth doing it protects families with incomes of under 30 000 from the energy tax and for families over 40 000 up to about 100 000 it minimizes the burdens of about 10 to 15 a month and i think it s worth that to get our country back and get this deficit down and reclaim our financial future we ve got to put our house in order folks and if we don t do it we re going to be paying for it from now on but let me tell you what else we are trying to do it is not just enough to deal with the budget we have to do things that will create jobs this county knows as well as well as any in america that it was wrong to cut defense spending as much as we did with no plan to reinvest in a domestic economy we have in this budget over 1 7 billion this year and 20 billion in the next four years to convert from a defense to a domestic economy to help it go civilian jobs commercial jobs to retrain people to rebuild communities to get this country going again and we must do that i also recognize and i m sure many of you do that the financial health of this country will never be assured until finally we join all the other advanced countries with which we re competing and provide health care security with a basic health care for all americans at affordable cost and we are coming with a health care plan to do just that and i hope the american people will support it finally let me say that california needs an economic strategy that will be built from the grassroots up but that will have a partner in the white house i have delegated to secretary of commerce ron brown the responsibility of representing this administration in this state and developing a coordinated economic policy for the long term health and welfare of the california economy and we will not stop until we have turned this state around and moved this state forward we have made a beginning in this budget with all the budget cuts we ve got there is more money in this budget for california and the other states that are hit unfairly by the burdens of large immigration problems and all the costs that go into it the federal government s going to pay more of our fair share in california now and ask you to pay less we re going to invest more in environmental cleanup in the kind of water problems that you have here we re going to do our part and we re going to do it right and most importantly of all we re going to continue to work on building an economic base that will replace the prosperity you enjoyed in times of high defense spending when the cold war was at its height it is wrong to let the people who won the cold war lose the peace afterward it is wrong to turn our backs on the state that moved this country so much in the 1980s it is wrong not to have a strategy that will not work miracles but that will make progress day in and day out month in and month out year in and year out and i want you to know that we are going to work our hearts out in washington together in order to move this state forward and move this country forward and i want you to help us do it will you do it lynn schenk said it better than i could but i want to reiterate it the country went in one direction for 12 years and it was a popular direction the most popular thing in the world to do if you re in public life is to cut people s taxes and spend more money but sooner or later your string runs out sooner or later people look around and they say how did we have a 4 trillion debt how can we be spending over 300 million a year over and above what we re taking in how can we be working harder for lower wages why are these other countries able to invest and create jobs and grow and we don t have the money the reason is because we stopped thinking about the future we did what was popular in the short run we took the easy way and the shortcut and we are paying for it but i m telling you this country is still the strongest country in the world economically militarily politically the fabric of our people the strength of our families the will of individuals to succeed is as strong as it has ever been all we have to do now is to have the courage to face these problems forthrightly let s pass a budget that puts our house in order let s invest in the education of our people and the new technologies of the future let s provide health care to our people together we can do it we need your help we need your support for people like lynn and bob who care about the future and are willing to make the tough decisions stay with us and we can turn the country around and california around together thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton17 5 96 bill_clinton all across america the crime rate is dropping we re in the fourth year in a row of a big drop in crime in webster groves you re on your way to making this the lowest overall crime year in almost 20 years congratulations to you but i have to tell you something and that s the reason i m here and we re in this hot gym on this warm day if anybody had told me this four years ago i would not have believed it if anybody told me the following fact when i was sworn in as president that you will have four years of declining crime rates in america the murder rate will drop the robbery rate will drop the rate of rape and arson will drop all across america but unbelievably the rate of random violence by children under 18 will go up if someone had told me that three years ago i would not have believed it but that is exactly what has happened and so i m telling you what we have to do is to solve that we have worked very very hard to give american communities the tools they need to bring down the crime rate with the strong leadership of dick gephardt in 1994 we passed a sweeping crime bill that among other things will put another 100 000 police officers on the streets of america over a five year period we re already at 43 000 and climbing we have worked hard to deal with the problem of guns and violence we passed the brady bill after years of debate we passed we passed legislation banning 19 kinds of assault weapons we passed legislation calling for zero tolerance for guns in the schools of this country and you know there was a lot of controversy about that legislation i heard the awfulest din about it in 1994 you ever saw but it s 1996 now and in missouri and my native state of arkansas we have had every kind of hunting season you can possibly have and not a single hunter has lost his or her rifle i ll tell you what has happened sixty thousand people with criminal histories with mental health problems with other things that make it unfit to have handguns have been denied the right to get handguns because of the brady bill we did the right thing we did the right thing we have done what we could we passed a bill called the safe and drug free schools act it gives money to schools all across the country to do what they think they need to do here our program has helped station a plain clothes police officer at the school people should be safe in schools if there s any place on earth young people should be safe all day every day it is when they are in school every young person should be safe all over america schools are asking for permission to try different things i was in long beach california a couple of weeks ago that s the third biggest school district in our biggest state and they voluntarily decided to put in school uniforms in their elementary and junior high schools they let the students pick the uniforms and design them they had a gang problem and all of a sudden they realized that when their kids were in their own uniforms nobody mistook them for gang members anymore people stopped following them home from school people stopped attacking them on the play yard they were able to restore discipline reduce crime and increase learning there are all kinds of things that are happening all across america but without exception we find that they are led by people in the community and especially by active aggressive young people who say i do not want my classmates to live a life of danger i want us to be safe and secure that s what we need for you to do today because dangerous gangs are spreading across america we are working with federal prosecutors everywhere to try to go after gangs that are seriously violent in the same way our country went after the mob decades ago we cannot permit the spread of gangs to spread guns to spread drugs to spread violence all across the country to communities that don t have to face that today we are working at that but let me say one more time the places where crime is down are the places where people are working with police the places where young people are taking the lead i know what the economy will present to those of you who have a good education and who are willing to work i know what the incredible diversity of america means in a global society where any country would give anything to have the diverse resources of our various racial and ethnic groups of people educated committed to freedom and committed to hard work and free enterprise but i know too that unless we can purge ourselves of crime and violence and drugs and gangs your future will never be what it ought to be so i ask you to stand up as you have here for the concept of zero tolerance in school stand out for the concept that gangs and drugs are wrong stand up for the idea that you have to participate in a partnership with police if you want a safe neighborhood a safe street and a safe school you have shown what you can do here but you mark my words you will have the best future any generation of americans has ever known if you ll work for it but only if we can make america a safe place again so every one of you we need your personal commitment no to crime no to guns no to gangs no to drugs yes to your own future if you do that your future will be the brightest of any generation in american history thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton17 6 02 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you thank you very much pete i m delighted to be here with you because you re a better policy work than i am you could not have given me an introduction that would have pleased me more now that i am the epitome of has been ness i spend more time than i used to reading articles in the press and i got an article the other day about this seminar that was held on my presidency at the university of arkansas and one of the alleged academics said i really wasn t very interested in anything i just sort of shifted with the winds and my number one goal was to make sure everybody loved me and i thought well my god if that s true i was an abject failure as president sure enough i did bust out completely i am delighted to be here at a time when more and more people in our country are thinking many of them for the first time seriously about foreign affairs about the relationship between what happens around the world and what happens here in america i am deeply indebted to the council for doing this on a continuing basis for quite a long time now and i hope you are reassured by the fact that many of our fellow citizens are finally taking this to heart i think i should say at the outset that what i intend to say today is entirely my own opinion and no one else s and when i was president i used to get speeches like this that were all typed out for me and every now and then i would make a minor change this is what my speech looks like today in other words last night waiting for the u s open to end i decided to write this myself and tell you what i thought when i was running for president in 1992 it occurred to me that the line between foreign and domestic policy was becoming increasingly irrelevant september 11th brought that home to the united states with a vengeance it seems to me it made clear the central fact of globalization the explosion of information technology opened borders free and easy travel the enormous increases in trade and immigration we had access to information and technology have given us a world that is truly interdependent but far from integrated all of these elements after all were used by the al qaeda terrorists with different interests and values than most of us share to kill 3 100 people from 80 countries in the united states on september the 11th i think it s important to begin by saying that this interdependence brought the united states and the entire world a very great deal of good in the 1990s after the fall of the berlin wall and the end of the cold war it brought great prosperity to the developed world in the developing world more people moved out of poverty than in any comparable time period in history and contrary to the anti globalization protesters in poor countries the countries which chose to grow through openness to trade and investment grew at an average of five percent a year the countries that chose to remain closed to the outside world grew at only one percent a year even in the developing world life expectancy was up and infant mortality was down for the first time in all history over half the people of the world lived under governments they voted in the european union got itself together and obviously is still in the process of becoming with what i consider to be a very hopeful and strategically important event made a decision which i strongly supported to continue to increase its membership and to include turkey for future membership we have constructive relationships today between the major adversaries of the cold war russia china europe and the united states china has come into the world trade organization nato is expanding making a partnership with russia and the ukraine ethnic cleansing was ended in the balkans peace was brought to northern ireland there were over seven years of progress toward peace in the middle east until the current violence began in september of 2000 it seems to me that the great struggle of this era will occur within and among nations between the forces of integration and cooperation on the one hand and those of disintegration and chaos on the other manifested in terror the threat of weapons of mass destruction organized crime and narco trafficking widespread inequalities in education health in income environmental destruction and conflicts rooted in differences of religion race ethnicity and tribe how should we in the united states respond to that well first there has to be a security strategy what you might call protect prevent and punish now i have been interested in this for quite a long time in the last five years of my presidency we had dramatic increases in budgets to fight terrorism established the first white house coordinator on terrorism in an attempt to improve the coordination that seemed apparently lacking we actually put senior members of the fbi and the cia in each other s agencies and often had daily working meetings through the white house coordinator when the threat alert was high this is an important challenging complicated matter among other things i believe the following should be done first i support the president in leading our troops and their allies in afghanistan until we are certain we have captured or eliminated mr bin laden and his senior operatives secondly i support spending much more and doing much more to try to contain the production and the spread of weapons of mass destruction we had dramatic increases in the so called nunn lugar program when i was president it began in the last year of president bush s service as a bipartisan initiative directed primarily at russia and the other states that formed the soviet union there were some years when i was in office when we employed virtually half the scientific force in russia dedicated previously to weapons of mass destruction i wish we had done more on the way out of office my last budget proposal a big increase which was at first not supported has now i think even been bettered by the recommendations that the white house has made and i support them it is important to extend the concept of nunn lugar to more countries and to emphasize biological and chemical stocks especially biological ones as well as nuclear we need a global coalition against the prospect of catastrophic terror which should include the united states russia china europe india and pakistan and any other countries with research facilitates that have any amount of weapons grade plutonium this is very very important and this is really where the question of iraq comes in there s a lot of debate about what should we do with iraq and when and you may want to ask further questions but i will just make one observation saddam hussein presents no conventional military threat to us and a much smaller one to his allies than he did before the gulf war his military strength it is commonly conceded is about 40 percent of what it was before the gulf war he did try to assassinate former president bush in 1993 with the most clumsy terrorist operation i ever saw the car bombs that we uncovered practically said made by the operatives of saddam hussein in baghdad but after we bombed his intelligence building as far as we know he never took another serious terrorist act himself and the bush administration has said that iraq was not involved in september the 11th the problem he presents to the world is that he has laboratories working to produce chemical and biological weapons and they would be working to produce nuclear weapons if they had any weapons grade plutonium we know that from the people who have defected we know that from what he s done in the past we launched a military operation in 1998 after he threw the inspectors out in an attempt to destroy as many of those facilitates as possible so would it be a good idea if he weren t there and were replaced by someone committed to a responsible course with regard to weapons of mass destruction yes would it be a good idea if the people of iraq weren t siding with him since he s a murderer and a thug yes should we unilaterally attack him well that depends and you may want to ask me more about that and i ll try to weave that into my remarks later on beyond afghanistan and al qaeda and the weapons of mass destruction i think it is imperative that we move as quickly as possible to end north korea s missile program senator nunn said that it is a lot easier to prevent a missile being built in the first place than to wait eight or ten years and hope we can knock it out of the air when it s already underway over here and i completely agree with that and i can only say we were very close to ending the north korean missile program in the year 2000 i believe if i had been willing to go there we would have ended it and i did not do so because i thought we were going to finish the middle east peace agreement which i thought would do even more to enhance the security of the united states over the long run and i couldn t afford to take 12 days out of the last month i was president because you can t just drop into north korea you have to go to south korea and china and japan and so we didn t do it and i m encouraged by what i have seen in the press in the last few weeks about this coming out of the administration and i hope they will do that the fourth thing i think we have to do is to increase the capabilities of our allies to fight terror in their own neighborhoods the most important issue for me is colombia the speaker of the house mr hastert and i jointly sponsored the plan colombia in 2000 which provided funds to the colombians to try to fight the narco traffickers the president has asked the congress to change the law to make exclusive the ability of the colombians to use that money against terror as well i strongly support that request and i hope the leaders of my party will do so as well farc has long since given up any legitimate political agenda it is another smaller guerilla group in colombia that nominally is more leftist but interestingly has been engaged in serious peace talks with the colombian government and cuba farc will not do that president postrana has approved it and that s because they re basically on the take to the narco traffickers and you had one of the nightmares of the 21st century unfolding in colombia the oldest democracy in latin america with over a third of the land in the hands of these people under the guise of running a political movement they basically are providing protection for 500 million to 1 billion a year for drug people and using terrorism to do it we cannot afford to let colombia go down and i think we should continue to help them i feel the same way about increasing the capacity of our friends in the philippines and i think that we shouldn t forget that africa has its problems too even though they may not worry about weapons of mass destruction we can never forget the 700 000 people who were killed in 100 days in rwanda largely with machetes we launched something called the africa crisis response initiative to try to use our military to train african militaries to prevent atrocities and to contain civil conflict in africa and i hope that will be continued by the present administration and i think we should increase our support there finally on this point i think that it is important that we support president megawati in indonesia as she attempts to navigate the perilous waters in which she finds herself i saw when the white house asked me to represent the united states at independence day for east timor and i learned something very important about president megawati that day it could not have been convenient or comfortable for her and was doubtless controversial at home but she went to independence day for east timor and usually when a politician has to go do something that he or she would just as soon not do that is unpopular at home and you just do it because you know it s the right thing to do but you just hate it you try to sit on the back row hunch your shoulders and if at all photographed you try to make sure your people see you looking as if you had just been sucking on a lemon not megawati she did the right thing when she understood that the important thing for a leader is to be strong so having made the decision to go to indonesia she waited until all the rest of us were seated and then she walked out on the arm of the president of east timor shadana susamo almost as if they d had a date for the prom that night and the effect was devastatingly positive but she s having a tough time and a third of her parliament it s more or less sympathetic to people who engage in violent tactics and i think that we have to do what we can to be supportive that may require some reexamination of the restrictions in the leahy amendment and i understand what their purpose was i actually supported the purposes of the amendment when senator leahy was advancing them but i think there s a way to protect our values there and support the government of indonesia which is something that i think is important to do there are after all 1 700 islands in the indonesian chain it provides a virtually endless opportunity for terrorist havens should we lose the capacity of the government there to effectively govern in an appropriate way finally what about homeland defense should there be a department probably it probably will do some good and won t do much harm and we have been building toward this for some years when we began to have specific set aside counter terrorism budgets in the mid nineties for the affected agencies for the federal emergency management agencies for the health and human services people who work on vaccines for example and drugs and for various elements of the department of justice so i think we probably should i think that one thing i have learned is that in washington presidents and administrations come and go and a lot of people hang on forever and just because you ask somebody to do something doesn t mean they re going to do it so there needs to be somebody at cabinet level rank who has some swat and i think there s something to be said to that what should the focus be i think the focus should be on first keeping catastrophic things from happening like 911 focus on the big bad things that can occur and figure out first what you have to do to deal with that and the other thing i would say is the president s proposal and as i understand it the proposal on which it is modeled by senator lieberman and others a big bipartisan proposal do not deal with the fbi and the cia and they probably shouldn t i understand that but if not then the director of homeland security must be given the legal authority to have access at any time of the day or night to any intelligence on terrorism with potential impacts within the continental borders of the united states and should have the authority to compel cooperation if it is not otherwise occurring and you don t have to give people bodies to do that you don t have to transfer whole sections but based on what at least we read in the press that is one of the problems which we ve been presented with and one that frankly i thought had been corrected when we put senior members of each agency in the other counter terrorism units back in the mid nineties and then when we had these meetings at moments of high alert regular often even daily meetings with all the agencies but it s clear to me just based on what i ve read that somebody has to have the legal authority to compel this and this new director might be better off with that legal authority than all the tens of thousands of people we can give him in a government reorganization so those are my observations about the security issue now the second point i d like to make is that no one i know seriously believes that we can build the world we want with a security only strategy with a strategy devoted only to prevent and punish we need to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists i grew up in the world that harry truman and george marshall made and at the end of world war ii under circumstances of even more grievous suffering by a large stretch general marshall said you know we ought to take a little of this money and make a world with fewer enemies and more friends and macarthur in japan agreed and i can only imagine what would have happened if the voices who would play on the emotions of the american people had prevailed are you kidding me spend money on the germans after what they did in the camps spend money on the japanese after the pow operations are you out of your mind even the british and the french they re nice people and they were our allies but they re old rich sophisticated societies they ll be just fine come home because we didn t i am the oldest of the baby boomers i grew up in a world where there never was a third world war there never was another nuclear exchange we built an america the great middle class we lived peacefully through the civil rights revolution the women s rights revolution and the environmental movement and ultimately we saw victory in the cold war for free markets and freedom because the people who were putting the world together in america made the decision that they wanted to build a world that had more cooperation more friends and fewer enemies the other thing they did that we shouldn t minimize was support the creation of the united nations the international financial institutions and all the other institutions of cooperation it changed everything it enabled me and the people in my generation and everybody who came behind a chance to have the life of their dreams in peace for all the problems of the cold war and all the conflicts which it engendered and i don t think you can possibly minimize the importance of doing that now it s not just about aid but i want to say a little more about that it s partly about aid the president went to mexico to monterrey to the conference on poor nations and said we ought to increase our direct assistance from 10 15 billion a year by 2006 that s a very good start but you should know when you do that when it s all done assuming it gets done and assuming we actually spend the money we will be spending 20 percent less of our gdp than we were spending in 1995 on direct foreign assistance now here s a place where you can have an impact i talked about this til i was blue in the face as president and i learned once again that even if you re president just because you re talking doesn t mean anybody else is listening if you took a poll among the american people and you asked them what percentage of the budget do we spend on foreign assistance and what percent should we spend there s been research on this for 10 years it never changes the biggest block always say we spend between two to 15 percent of the budget and that is too much we should spend between three and five percent now i actually agree with them of course we spend less than one percent and we re dead last among all the advanced economies of the world in what we spend on foreign assistance so it s difficult for people in a democracy to make good sensible decisions if they believe things that aren t true the second thing is that most people believe we don t know how to do foreign assistance and that most of the money is wasted that is also untrue it may have been true at one time and it may have been true at one time that we didn t even care whether some of the money is wasted because it was designed to advance our interests in the cold war but it is simply not true that we don t know how to spend this money well and i ll talk more about that the third thing that americans believe that isn t right is that most people around the world who hate america resent the economic success that americans have had and the place they occupy on the world stage that we do but all the surveys show that what people really resent is they think we don t know enough care enough or do enough about people who aren t right in front of us so our lack of knowledge about what we actually spend on assistance and how well it works and how people really view us is very costly to us and since i believe people are willing to listen to this kind of argument more than ever before because of what we ve been through and the trauma it s engendered i think that you this council are in a position to have a bigger impact on what the american people know and how they think about this more than perhaps at any time in the last several decades so i hope every one of you individually and collectively will do what you can to make sure people do know what we spend and how it works and let me just give you a couple of examples first of all we need an economic strategy that includes trade but more debt relief aid and assistance in good government the biggest is the debt relief in 2000 we gave debt relief now to 25 countries that qualified eventually 32 will if they meet the conditions and i think they will in the first year after uganda got its savings in one year they doubled primary school enrollment and lowered class size because they had to spend all the money on education and health care development in one year honduras went from six to nine years of mandatory schooling a 50 percent increase and keep in mind in the developing world every single year of education is worth on average 10 to 15 percent to annual income to people in poor countries do we know how to do aid economic aid absolutely when i was president we funded two million micro enterprise loans a year and we know they work i ve been in villages in africa in east asia in latin america which have been transformed by giving credit to poor people and creating an economy and on the question of governance let me say one of the problems we have is a lot of these countries are held back from growing economically because of their own governmental incapacity the best project i think dealing with that today is the work being done around the world by the great peruvian economist hernando desoto who discovered when he was the finance minister of peru in the early fujimori years before mr fujimori s unfortunate turn away from good sense and good policy that a lot of peruvian businesses and homes were not in the legal sector not because people wished to avoid taxes but because they didn t have the time or money to wait to legalize their businesses that there was this mountain of regulation and hurdles to doing that so they slashed the time and money it took to legalize businesses and sure enough people legalized them they simplified a way of proving ownership of homes and sure enough people began to register their homes and all of a sudden they had more tax money at lower rates but the most important thing was for the first time most of the people who were working for a living had collateral upon which they could get loans it is the single most significant systematic thing i think going on in the world today economically i ve seen desoto s map of cairo where 85 percent of the business on the extra legal sector and if pete and i wanted to go to cairo tomorrow and open peterson and clinton bakery it would take us 700 days to legalize our bakery now we could afford to wait but most people can t and so they don t and so they slip the taxman a little money and they go on with their business not because they wish to be illegal but because it is the only way to function for people this is a huge deal and i want to say a little more about it in a minute but a modest amount of money in these areas will have big returns same thing is true in the social area in education and health care a hundred and thirty million kids who aren t in school and you know how to get them there the bosa escola program in brazil has 98 percent of the kids in school about 97 percent of the primary age kids in school by paying mothers in the 30 percent of the poorest families if their kids go to school 85 percent of the time mexico s doing the same thing we ve got 300 million in my last year as president to offer a good meal in school under the program that was basically championed by senator dole and senator mcgovern and we gave the money out to poor countries and we said your kids can get a good meal but only if they come to school to get it that s enough to feed six million kids you can just do the math and see how cheap it would be to cover 130 million now we ve been treated to a lot of dismal stories about the over 30 000 madrassas in pakistan since september the 11th but it s important to note that less than 20 years ago there were only 3 000 of them they grew because the government of pakistan became unable to support its public school system they started charging people to send their kids to school something which many families could not afford especially if their kids once they graduated didn t have jobs there and we continued to reward our cold war ally pakistan with good military equipment but we never gave them any money to keep their schools open had we done so it might have made a big big difference same thing is true about these health care issues ten million kids are going to die this year of preventable childhood diseases one in four of all the deaths this year will be from aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea and the aids epidemic is going to go from 4 to 100 million with the fastest growing rates in the former soviet union on europe s back door in the caribbean on our front door hillary represents 600 000 dominicans in new york alone third fastest growing rate is india the world s biggest democracy where the potential for nightmare is largest a third of the people in bombay after all are homeless so it s not just an african problem and if we permit this to go to from 40 to 100 million we ll have terrible political destabilization and a lot of angry young men that would be only too happy to be terrorists or mercenaries and mark my words a lot of these new democracies will fall if we had 100 million instead of 40 million aids cases and it s the most maddening problem of all because a it s 100 percent preventable and b there s medicine available that turns it from a deadly disease into a chronic illness and prevents mother to child transmission and c we got a court case in south africa last year that said the drug companies would negotiate lower prices with countries and if they couldn t afford it they could go get generics and the united nations has even certified some generic drugs and it is still not happening this is madness and whatever it costs it s cheaper than the consequences so i believe there has to be more partners than terrorists then that involves aid and trade and another round of debt relief where i would include more countries with higher aids rates if they put all the savings even if their incomes look too high if they have big aids rates they put the savings into dealing with that problem i would include them in a second round of initiatives now there are two other things that i think are important in building a world with more partners and fewer terrorists first i think we have to support further institutional integration of the nation states we should be for cooperation in general i think that even if things aren t perfect anything that aids integration and resists disintegration is a positive thing therefore i am as everybody knows at odds with the position of the current administration on the comprehensive test ban treaty the kyoto treaty the international criminal court i think we should make our full contribution to the fund that the secretary general has set up to fight aids and other childhood diseases infectious diseases and i think it s important that we make the wto work which means that we have to set a good example i favor giving the president fast track authority but i am very disturbed by the house bill that passed i don t know what the final bill will look like because in order to get the last vote to pass it the white house agreed to actually cut off access of many caribbean countries to the american market and to undermine the africa caribbean basin initiative trade opening we had in 2000 it s apparently the only way they could get the votes to pass the bill but let me remind you when i was president we negotiated 287 trade agreements including bringing china into the wto and most of those trade agreements were negotiated without fast track authority including vietnam jordan and the africa caribbean based initiative a lot of them i think you should have this i m for the free trade area of the americas i think there should be a free trade area in the asia pacific region i m for this but we have to continue to realize that the most important thing we can do is to open our markets to poor countries and we should invest in retraining any americans that are dislocated as a result of this but in one year our imports from some african countries increased 1000 percent after we passed the africa caribbean basin initiative and i just think it s a real mistake even to get fast track to have to turn it back so i m hoping that when the final bill that comes up to the congress it won t have this provision in it and the final thing we have to do on risk strategy is to get back in the peace business and i m very encouraged that the president has sent secretary powell back to the middle east i will only mention two areas one is the most dangerous in the short run because they both have nuclear weapons the conflict between india and pakistan the conflict over kashmir is quite old as old as the two countries themselves it is now complicated by two things one is the fact that pakistan has cooperated with the united states and our allies in the fight against al qaeda which puts even more pressure on the musharraf government from iraq to do something to let the pressure off which makes the temptation of allowing people to operate more in a violent form in the kashmir region almost irresistible and the second is that within india there are internal conflicts the awful things which have occurred in gujarat the state where i do a lot of work with my foundation where all those people were burned to death in a train people muslims and hindus that were working together after that earthquake hand in hand now doing hand to hand combat because of the medieval mosque from least the 16th century mosque that was burned down 10 years ago we re on the same side in all the things that are coming up it s very very important i don t know what the ultimate solution to kashmir is but i think since the indians are unwilling to give it up because they think it would be the beginning of a potential breakup of the country india s like russia their diversity is in discrete sections america s diversity thank god is all blended in everywhere it s a great blessing to us i went with mayor dinkins to one of their schools that was closed after september 11th they were meeting in temporary facilities in another school there were kids there from 80 different national ethnic groups in one school and i thought if you re going to be a great diverse society mix them in don t be a diverse society with all the people in their separate groups on the edges so india like russia worries about that but i think that two dem wjclinton17 6 98 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen hillary and i are delighted to have all of you here in the rose garden today for a subject that we care a great deal about i thank especially senator jeffords for his leadership congressman boswell all the members of congress who are here i thank secretary riley and the attorney general for their consistent and dedicated efforts for our children and to improve the lives of our children and chief frazier and gloria nava did i thought a marvelous job let me say as hillary and gloria made clear for millions of americans home alone is not a funny movie it is a serious risk that children and parents undertake every day all across this country on any given school day in america there will be as many as 15 million children left to fend for themselves idle in front of the television sets or out on the streets and exposed to gangs and guns and drugs incidents of violent crime by juveniles more than double in the hour after school lets out and interestingly enough our children are also at greatest risk of becoming victims of crime in the hours immediately after school but in communities where children have something positive to do youth crime is dropping and academic performance is on the rise the justice department and the department of education are today releasing a report to every school district in the country and to the public at large which shows just how much of a difference these after school programs are making in chicago for example a program with which hillary and i are familiar the lighthouse program is now reaching more than 110 000 children and nearly 250 schools around the city with intensive after school instruction in reading and math this remarkable program also provides children with three meals a day in the school and i m very proud that the department of agricultural with its support helps to make this possible since that program began not surprisingly gang activity is down and reading and math scores are up we have to do everything we can to give every community in this country the tools to follow that lead today we are announcing 40 million in competitive grants that will help more than 300 schools to start after school programs of their own as all of you know they re part of the 21st century community learning center initiative which was sponsored in 1993 in my first year in office by senator jeffords these grants will give now thousands more children a safe place to go before and after school and good things to do san francisco for example will use the grant specifically to target kids most at risk of joining gangs or using drugs baltimore county which already has as you heard successful after school programs will focus on helping more children to improve their academic performance but i think it s important to note two things one is not withstanding the wind this is a universally successful strategy this is not complicated this is something simple that has broad support that saves lives and improves learning the second thing is out in america everybody has figured this out so that for every grant we will able to give there were 20 schools that applied but aren t getting help today so we have to do more in january as part of my efforts to give quality affordable child care to all the families in this country who need it i proposed the largest after school commitment in america s history 200 million a year over the next five years to expand the 21st century community learning center program to reach a half a million children now these programs have broad bipartisan support and i very much hope that congress soon will act to fund this request fully remember there were 20 schools that had good programs that wanted this money for every one school on that map we can do better and we must let me also say again to senator jeffords this is the kind of bipartisan support that works for our country whenever we put the progress of the american people and the future of our children ahead of partisan politics in washington america wins and that s what we need to do before we close i just have to mention make a couple of other points in that spirit i have been working for six months to craft a comprehensive bipartisan bill to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco the biggest public health for children in america today as we speak the republican caucus in the senate is meeting behind closed doors to discuss perhaps even to decide the fate of the tobacco bill i urge them not to turn this meeting literally into a smoke filled room to protect the children and not the tobacco lobby we have worked very very hard to make this legislation fair and bipartisan we have met the majority in the senate more than halfway they said they wanted a tax cut to be part of the tobacco bill since we were raising the price of cigarettes to discourage children from buying them we said all right they said they wanted some money in this bill to fight drugs as well as to discourage children from using tobacco we said fine now if there is a move to kill or gut this legislation there can be no possible explanation other than the intense pressure and the awesome influence fueled by years of huge contributions of big tobacco so i again call upon the senate majority and indeed all those in the senate to pass this tobacco bill let s get it over to the house let them have a chance to pass a bill and let s do something that will give this country to have a lasting public health legacy in a bipartisan way thank you very much let me you all don t even need to sit back down i m going to answer this one question then we ll visit the question was about the support of the united states for the japanese yen let me say i talked to prime minister hashimoto last night oh for 20 or 30 minutes at about 11 30 p m our time japan is very important to the world especially to the united states and to the efforts we re making to support an economic recovery in asia which is very important to keeping our own economic progress going it is important that they take some critical steps and as they do them we will support them i was very encouraged by the prime minister s statement that he intends to pursue aggressive reform of their banking institutions and intends to do the things that are necessary to get the economy going again and therefore i thought it was important that we support them in terms of the details of our support they are contained in secretary rubin s statement today and i couldn t do a bit better than he has done but we re doing the right thing and i think the prime minister of japan has done the right thing and we ve got a chance to turn that situation in asia around before it gets any worse and america needs a strong growing stable economy in asia and i am encouraged by what the prime minister said last night and heartened and we re glad to help and we hope we will be of some help today thank you very much i think this plan to scrap the tax code is superficially appealing to since there is something about the tax code that everybody dislikes but it would be a significant mistake to vote to do that without a replacement especially now why because if you voted to get rid of it without saying what the replacement was you would put individual americans and families in an uncertain position about their investments in health insurance in retirement in education in homes you would put businesses in a period of uncertainty about their long term investments and the tax treatment of that it could create uncertainty in the financial markets and therefore could have a significant negative economic effect on america now with all this other economic uncertainty around the world everyone is looking to us as a stable rock solid forward moving country trying to give stability to other countries the last thing in the world we need to do right now is to send some signal of instability that we ve decided to get rid of our whole tax code without knowing what to replace it with now i m all for simplifying the tax code i wouldn t rule out any option if i knew what the alternative was the congress has a bill and has had a bill for months that has already passed both houses to dramatically simplify and overhaul the way that irs works it still hasn t been sent to me and i hope it will be sent soon but this would be a bad mistake in my view in enacting this procedure i m going to do my best to beat it and i don t want to give anyone the excuse to vote for it by saying i ll veto it because sometimes when you do that you wind up having so many people vote for it that you don t have enough people to sustain your veto but it s not this is something we shouldn t play games with this is a period of instability in asia of uncertainty in other parts of the world we re working with our friends in japan our friends in russia with the people in other parts of the world to try to stabilize their economy and restore growth we don t want to send out a signal of instability and uncertainty now and we don t want to do it to individual families as well so this is something that sounds good but i m convinced it isn t you shouldn t get rid of what you have until you know what you re going to replace it with no well not necessarily but it s something we ve done rarely but as i said i talked to the prime minister last night and i ve been working with him now for more than a year to deal with these difficulties keep in mind japan has been in a period of very low growth for several years now and i m convinced that he has been methodically trying to deal with these challenges and last night he said some things which made it clear that he was prepared to take some bold strokes bold steps to try to move the japanese economy forward restore growth and opportunity and i believe in that context we should be supportive you never know whether what you do in all these things will make a large difference but i wanted to send a clear signal to the markets that the united states supports japanese reform believes the japanese people can pull out of this economic slump and restore growth and opportunity and it s very important to all of asia it s a very big deal to all of asia so i think we did the right thing i don t have any question about that they need to pass it they need to pass it i know the tobacco companies have been running these ads all over america and i know that the cancer society and the heart association and the lung association doesn t have the money to run ads against them but down deep inside the american people know what the truth is the senate needs to pass this bill that will put pressure on the house to pass the bill then we ll go to congress and fashion the best possible bill we can that we can pass in both houses and do something good for america this year that s what we ought to do dem wjclinton17 7 95 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much mr breeden for your kind remarks and for your essential work on behalf of the white house and the history of this country we re delighted to be here with president and mrs bush today and vice president and mrs quayle all the members and former members of congress the members of the bush administration and friends of george and barbara bush and especially the family members we welcome you all here to the white house it s impossible to live in this wonderful old place without becoming incredibly attached to it to the history of our country and to what each and every one of these rooms represent in a way i think every family who has ever lived here has become more and more a part of our country s history just for the privilege of sleeping under this roof at night and so perhaps the most important thing i can say to president and mrs bush today is welcome home we re glad to have you back i want to say too that we thought that we ought to have this ceremony in the east room this has always been the people s room in the 19th century it used to get so crowded at receptions that one of the windows over here was turned into a door so people could get out if they couldn t bear the crowds anymore there are so many here today perhaps we should have done it again but we thought the air conditioning made it advisable for us to all stay put many of you know that it was in this room that abigail adams used to dry the family laundry when the room was nothing more than a brick shell you may not know that the great explorer meriwether lewis set up camp here surrounded by canvas tarps books and hunting rifles in the day when he was thomas jefferson s secretary john quincy adams frequently would come here to watch the sun rise after he finished his early morning swim in the potomac that also is something we re considering taking up if the heat wave doesn t break the portraits that we add here today celebrate another chapter to our rich history and particularly to the rich history of the east room where they will remain for a few days before they are properly hung i managed to get a glimpse of these portraits and i must admit that i think the artist did a wonderful job and we re all in his debt but i also want to say president bush if i look half as good as you do when i leave office i ll be a happy man i want to again compliment herbert abrams the artist he also painted the portrait of president carter so once again president bush has set another outstanding example of bipartisanship these portraits as has already been said will be seen by millions of americans who visit here reminding them of what these two great americans stood for and for what they have done to strengthen our country the portraits in the white house are more than likenesses they tell the story of the promise of one american life and in so doing the promise of all american life they offer a lesson an example a challenge for every american to live up to the responsibilities of citizenship as americans look for ways to come together to deal with the challenges we face today they can do well in looking at the lives of president and mrs bush they have been guided by the basic american values and virtues of honesty compassion civility responsibility and optimism they have passed these values on to their family and on to our american family as well and for that we should all be profoundly grateful mrs bush s portrait will hang adjacent to the vermeil room on the ground floor corridor taking her place in history in the line of america s first ladies one role of the first lady is to open the doors to the white house mrs bush will be in the hearts of americans forever for the gracious way in which she opened so many doors not just to this house but to a world of endless possibility through reading her campaign for literacy exemplified our country s great spirit of volunteerism and our primary concern for the potential of every individual american her life of helping others has brought recognition to all those americans especially to american women who have seen unmet needs in their communities and reached out to meet them we cannot thank her enough president bush s portrait will hang out here in the grand foyer across from the portrait of president franklin roosevelt the commander in chief he served in world war ii it will stand as a reminder of george bush s basic integrity and decency and of his entire adult lifetime devoted to public service most of all it will stand as a testimony to a leader who helped americans move forward toward common ground on many fronts we see this clearly in the causes george bush led us in as president causes that aimed at improving the lives not just of republicans but of all americans he made education a national priority when he hosted the education summit in 1989 something i will never forget and always be especially personally grateful for because he understood that a solid education is essential to every american s ability to meet the challenges of the 21st century he led us to a new dedication to service and extolled the real heroes in america the ordinary americans who every day go about solving the problems of this country in courageous brave and quiet manners the points of light initiative held up the best in america reminded us of what we can do when we truly work together and i can say that it was the one thing that he did that he personally asked me to continue when i took this office and i was honored to do because it was so important and it remains important to the united states today he signed the americans with disabilities act something that has now acquired broad support among people of all parties and all walks of life and which has made a real difference to the quality of life of americans who are now making larger contributions to the rest of us and he supported and signed the clean air act which is terribly important today in preserving the quality of american life he also led our nation and the world in the gulf war alliance in an example of contributions and cooperations in the aftermath of the cold war that i believe will long be followed finally since he has left this office he has continued to be an active and aggressive citizen for what he believed in he worked here to help us to pass nafta something for which i am profoundly grateful and just the other day he earned the gratitude of all americans who believe in law and order and believe in civil citizenship when he defended the honor and reputation of law abiding law enforcement officers and government employees for all these things all americans should be grateful to george bush for president and mrs bush love of country and service to it have always meant the same thing we honor them both today for their leadership their character and their concern for their fellow citizens on november 2 1800 the day after his very first night in the white house john adams wrote to his wife i pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it may none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof in the case of george bush john adams prayers were surely met it is my great honor and pleasure now to unveil the official portraits of president and mrs bush dem wjclinton17 7 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you matt for your introduction and for your years of community leadership for doing this before it was popular and making sure it becomes more popular we are grateful to you i thank all of those who have come today i m especially glad to see senator heflin and congressman kennedy congresswoman lofgren secretary kantor and joe brann who runs our cops program at the justice department he told me that we have now funded 44 000 of those 100 000 police officers so we re ahead of schedule and we intend to stay that way i thank tom wheeler for being here and the community policing consortium executive director bill matthews and all the rest of you before i begin my remarks today i just have to take a moment to express my outrage and i know the outrage of all americans at the nazi swastikas which were painted on the doors of african americans living in the army special forces barracks at fort bragg no one in america should be subject to such vile acts but these men and women of our armed forces have committed themselves to the highest level of dedication to our security they dedicate their lives to protecting our freedom they embody our commitment to tolerance and liberty and they do not deserve this kind of abuse we are taking immediate action to get to the bottom of this incident we intend to punish those who are responsible we have a zero tolerance for racism in our military and make no mistake we intend to apply it i know that i will have your support and the support of all americans in maintaining this position we are joined today by another group of courageous americans who are taking responsibility in their own communities to protect the american way of life there are about 100 neighborhood watch leaders with us here today they represent all the neighborhood watch participants all across america in the last 15 years as you ve just heard neighborhood watches have sprung up on block after block every time another american puts on an orange hat our streets become a little safer today there are more than 20 000 neighborhood watch groups in america they re in every state and they all make a difference just before coming in i saw some very impressive statistics from salt lake city and chicago and dade county i recently had the opportunity to visit with neighborhood watch activists in san diego and they have been extremely instrumental in giving that community one of the lowest crime rates of any major city in the united states when i lived in little rock we had a very active neighborhood watch group in my neighborhood and it was fascinating because if the crime rate got too low and the neighborhood watch folks got a little relaxed the crime rate went up but as soon as they went back on the street it went back down again which was i guess the ultimate test of the success of the neighborhood watch as the vice president said as a nation we have finally begun to push crime back when i ran for president i was struck by two things that seem to me directly in conflict i was struck by how many americans just had taken for granted that we d have to put up with an unacceptable crime rate forever how many people just sort of assumed that we could never make our streets safe again that our kids could never feel secure walking to and from school again that we would always be worried about being the victims of violent crime they just sort of took it for granted but underneath that it was clear to me as i traveled around the country that in community after community after community with community policing strategies with prevention efforts with neighborhood watches the crime rate was actually beginning to go down in some places dramatically and it was the experience that i saw manifested in all these communities that led us to the crime bill with its commitment to 100 000 police with its commitment to tougher punishment for repeat offenders with its commitment to prevention programs with its commitment to the assault weapons ban and the brady bill and all the other things which have come out of our initiatives all of those ideas were not born in the brain of some washington thinker they were manifested on the streets of america by people who proved to me that we could take our streets back that we could make america safe again one day as i have said many times i ll know we ve got the crime problem in the right position when you flip on the evening news and if the lead story is a crime story you re shocked instead of numb to it that will be the test and i believe we can find that day in america again i believe we can only do it however when crime prevention and crime detection is a community enterprise in every community when every citizen believes that he or she has a responsibility to support the police to be involved in it to identify suspicious circumstances to try to help kids who are coming up in troubled homes on troubled streets stay out of trouble themselves and build better lives when every single citizen believes that he or she is responsible for that those of you who work with the police in these community watch programs you are leading the way and i think we need to do more to help you i appreciated matt mentioning that at penn state i challenged another million americans to join these community crime watch programs i had just seen the difference that you are making and people in your communities feel the difference you know if you think about it if you don t feel safe in your homes and on your streets in your schools and in your places of work most of the rest of the things that happen in life don t amount to much but if you do feel safe if you feel secure then very often you feel that you can conquer the world even if things aren t going so well this is the first condition of a civilized society and you are helping to guarantee it in a difficult and challenging time the announcement that we have to make today is designed to help you do your work today a coalition of telecommunications leaders is determined to join forces with you and with our police the cellular telecommunications industry association has actually pledged to provide every neighborhood watch patrol in america with a cellular phone to use on the beat and free air time to go with it that is a remarkable commitment they have set aside an initial 50 000 phones and have promised to make sure that every patrol that needs a phone gets what it needs their board of directors is here today they met with the vice president not very long ago who issued this challenge and discussed it with them but they made the decision to do it entirely on their own it is an astonishing act of good citizenship and generosity so i d like to ask the board to stand and i think we should all give them the hand they deserve please stand up thank you and i want to thank you too tom wheeler for doing a great job in so many many ways communities on phone patrol will connect citizens on the beat to the police the fire the medical support they need in an emergency these phones will be pre programmed to local emergency numbers determined by local law enforcement officials to get a phone established volunteer groups will contact the local police chief or the local sheriff a one page application and 72 hours later the cell phone should be on its way now when drug dealers wear pagers and gang members have cell phones i think it s time we put high technology on the side of law and order this will help our citizens to have stronger links with law enforcement as they work to take back our streets in the right hands these cell phones will save lives and stop crimes when citizens are on patrol the cell phone will help to keep them safer when they see something suspicious the cell phone can bring the police when they see a medical emergency a cell phone can connect them to the ambulance service immediately from now on help will be just a phone call away from san francisco to san antonio citizens with cell phones are already making a difference in the fight against crime in dade county florida the citizens with cell phones are helping to bring down burglaries robberies and thefts in albany oregon parents are using cell phones on patrolling school grounds san francisco police chief fred lau says cellular phones help citizens on patrol quote feel safe and help police officers arrive at the scene quickly make arrests when appropriate today is a good day for our country with the support from our businesses commitments from our citizens and the constant courage of our police officers we re taking another step toward a safer future for our children our families and our communities we all know we will never be able to eliminate crime completely but we can we can make it the exception not the rule again we can create conditions in which americans are literally shocked when they hear of serious crimes not simply numb to it and we must keep working together until we create that kind of america for our children now let me say right now i have the privilege of asking a neighborhood watch volunteer to come up here and receive the very first phone which has the copp logo on it communities on phone patrol copp with two ps and they also put the presidential logo on it proving that the vice president is not the only person that can handle a piece of high tech equipment in this administration so i d like to ask sandy sparks from baltimore to come up here i want to thank her for her dedication and make her the first recipient of this incredible gift that these folks in the telecommunications industry have provided to the citizens of america thank you dem wjclinton17 7 97 bill_clinton thank you very much first let me thank all of you for that warm welcome and for what you do i thank myrlie evers williams for the wonderful comments she made and for the distinguished service she has performed as your chair and i thank your president of the united naacp that was pretty good madam mistress of ceremonies you did a good job let me say that when kweisi called me and told me he was going to leave the congress to because president of the naacp i had very mixed feelings i felt a little bereft i don t like it when a great member of congress leaves but i thought it was higher calling and my instinct it was it would be a good thing for him and for our country and i think it has certainly proved to be and i thank him for that of the many things that i have to be grateful for i thank you for the extraordinary effort you ve made to bring young people into the naacp i think that is a great great thing i m glad to be joined here by the mayor of pittsburgh my good friend tom murphy and i m glad to see all the board members i have many friends on this board bishop graves is my bishop and if they let me go home i ll be in his jurisdiction again and i know that i ve been looking for them out of my eye but i know there must be a delegation from arkansas here dale charles and the others where are you where are my people from home there thank you very much i want to thank you for honoring a number of the people that you have honored here and i m especially grateful for your giving meritory service awards to two members of my joint chiefs of staff general fogelman and admiral kramek the commandant of the coast guard thank you for that i know you have undergone some losses and our grief goes out to you in the untimely death of the president of the maryland chapter mr norment who was killed shortly before this convention i thank you for honoring dr betty shabazz a wonderful remarkable woman and i thank you for the resolution you passed just a few moments ago for aaron henry who was a long time personal friend of mine and a very great man i am joined today by a distinguished array of people from the administration the secretary of education dick riley the secretary of labor alexis herman i know you know them the chairman of our advisory board on race relations and our executive director dr john hope franklin and judy winston they re here and there are a number of other people from the white house here i d just like to ask all the people from the administration who are here to stand up and be recognized including i see chris edley who is helping us at the advisory board who is now a professor at harvard he doesn t fool with us mere mortals anymore and terry edmonds my speechwriter maria echaveste minyon moore ben johnson sylvia matthews there are a lot of people here from the administration you all stand up and be recognized here look at all of them anything good i do they had a hand in the mistakes are mine i am honored to be here to add my voice to yours in discussing what we have to do to prepare our people for this new century since 1993 i have worked hard to build one america on a simple formula opportunity for all responsibility from all a community of all americans prepared to continue to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity much has been done but much remains to be done i believe especially as it relates to bringing us together the keys are education economic empowerment and racial reconciliation it is fitting that the naacp has made education the focus of this conference because you have always emphasized the importance of education that was true in 1909 when you issued a mighty call for america to do its and i quote elementary duty in preparing african americans through education for the best exercise of citizenship it was true in 1954 when thurgood marshall and the legal defense fund led the successful fight to end segregation in the schools it is true today when we know that more than ever knowledge is power and the struggle in education today involves two things that are inextricably bound a fight for equal opportunity and a fight for educational excellence each generation must embrace its won battle in the ongoing struggle for equal rights a generation ago it was simply a fight to open the schoolhouse door that united americans of every race and background today though much segregation remains the schoolhouse doors are open yet behind too many doors too little learning is taking place therefore the struggle for excellence for all must be our great mission we must demand high standards of every student our schools and teachers must meet world class standards but we must demand that every child be given the opportunity to meet those standards every child must have a chance to succeed in this new economy we must not replace the tyranny of segregation with the tyranny of low expectations we know that in this new world we re moving into so quickly new technologies and the globalization of information and communications and the economy will require of all us new skills we know already from what has been happening in the last 20 years that those that have the skills to succeed will do so in this new economy they will thrive and those who lack the skills will not we know that we can never make real our ideal of one america unless every american of every background has access to the world s best schools the world s best teachers the world s best education this means first not only high standards but high expectations and high levels of accountability of students and parents schools and teachers and communities second we know that we can t have high standards and high expectations unless all our students have the tools they must have to meet the standards and master the basics if we do this all our children no matter where they live can achieve when i came to washington the old title i program called for watered down curricula and watered down standards and tests we ended that thanks to secretary riley now the new title i says we re going to have the same high standards for all of our children we re not going to sell any of them short just because they re poor in the state of the union address i called for national standards for the basics not federal government standards but national standards of what every child must know to do well in the world of the 21st century beginning with reading and math english is after all the same in the bronx as it is in appalachia mathematics is the same in portland oregon and tampa florida and by 1999 i believe strongly that we should give every 4th grader an examination in reading to see whether these standards are being met and every 8th grader an examination in math just to make sure the standards are being met this is not a normal exam that you grade on the bell curve this is an exam where you say here s what everybody ought to know to do well in the world and to be able to go on in school everyone should be able to get over this bar and these exams should never be used to hold children back but to lift them up and if they are not meeting the standards the school must change until they can we don t do anyone any favors by not holding them to high standards often when we see people in difficult circumstances we feel compassion for them and we should but when this compassion leads to expecting less of their children that is a mistake for it sells their future down the drain i am tired of being told that children cannot succeed because of the difficulties of their circumstances all we do is consign them to staying in the same circumstances it is wrong we now have fresh evidence by the way that our children can succeed for years and years and years we have been told that americans always lagged behind the rest of the world on any test that fairly measures our competence and knowledge and achievement of our children against children in other countries and for many years it was true not the least because we were unwilling to hold ourselves to high standards hiding behind the cherished value of local control of our schools which i support we pretended that there were no national standards but for more than a decade now people of goodwill all over this country in all kinds of circumstances have been working to improve our schools this year on the international math and science tests given to 4th and 8th graders for the very first time our 4th graders scored well above the international average near the top and it was a representative sample by race by region and income the children can learn the children can learn now that s the good news the challenging news is that the 8th graders still scored below the international average and you know why don t you because when these children start to reach adolescence then all the problems of their circumstances plus what goes on in everybody s life when they reach adolescence reach a collision point and we have not yet mastered how to take children in the most difficult circumstances through adolescence and keep them learning and keep their schools working but you look at those 4th grade test scores don t tell me that children can t learn because they are children of color they are children from poor neighborhoods they are children with only the mother at home taking care of them we can do this but we have to believe we can do it and more importantly we have to believe they can do it and then we have to understand that it is our responsibility not theirs ours to make sure they do it so i ask you to work with us no one has all the answers the naacp has always had high expectations for america when we were living through the worst of the civil rights movement you had high expectations for white people you knew we could do better you knew we could do better this is a high expectations organization you had high expectations for yourselves which is why you have revived the naacp and you re riding higher than ever do you seriously believe we would be where we are today with this chair and this president and this board and this crowd and all these young people here if you had had no expectations no dream no discipline no drive of course not you got here because you worked for it because you had a dream and because you expected things of yourselves it is no different in this education business we know it s going to be hard and we know we have to do it together but it is a solemn duty we owe to our young people the children will follow the lead of their parents and of the people in the community who may not be their parents but do have a responsibility for them my wife was right about that it does take a village to raise a child we do have to do more to give all our students the tools they need we know for example that many of our urban schools and our rural schools in really poor areas are succeeding we know that every city can actually point to some schools where committed teachers and other staff members working with parents manage to inspire and equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed for example hansberry elementary school in the bronx has made a remarkable turnaround it was once shut down by the board of education it was doing such a poor job but when it reopened with a renewed commitment to excellence the percentage of students passing the new york state math skills test went from 47 to 82 percent the new visions charter school in minneapolis is known as the reading school this public school has helped students who formerly struggled to make 12 to 18 months of progress in reading each year and is training teachers now in other minnesota schools to do the same thing these schools are just two of hundreds of examples that show us that given proper support all our children can learn despite the extra hardships they carry with them to school we have to answer the question if it can happen somewhere why isn t it happening everywhere and we have to provide the answer because we know that far too many schools are not servicing our children well and too many children from our inner cities and poor rural areas are graduating without the skills they need and i say again that is not their failure that is our failure along with demanding more of our students we must hold schools and teachers and parents and communities to higher standards we must have a bold and a national effort to improve schools that serve predominantly minority inner city and rural areas first we have to make sure these kids do have the help they need to meet the standards and that means in the beginning that every parent and every community leader must join the teachers that s why we re mobilizing a million volunteer tutors to make sure that by the beginning of the next century every 8 year old wherever he or she lives and whatever their native language may be will be able to read independently by the 3rd grade if you can t read you can t learn the rest of what you need to know the second thing we have to do is make sure that every school has good well qualified well trained teachers our nation faces a very significant teacher recruitment challenge over the next decade we will need to hire listen to this over 2 million teachers because of increasing teacher retirements and an enrollment boom that will bring more students than ever into our classrooms a total of 54 million students by the year 2006 just over the next five years we must hire 350 000 teachers in high poverty urban and rural schools now for years the government worked to reduce the shortage of doctors in many urban and under served rural areas by offering scholarships to students who agreed to work in those communities when i was governor of arkansas i don t know how many rural communities we had that were literally saved by physicians who were serving there because they had their way to medical school paid in return for their commitment to go out to poor areas and tend to people who would never have had a doctor otherwise today i am announcing a similar initiative to help recruit and prepare teachers to serve in urban and rural communities next month as part of the reauthorization of the higher education act i will forward to the congress a proposal for a new national effort to attract quality teachers to high poverty communities by offering scholarships for those will commit to teach in those communities for at least three years we will have a special emphasis on recruiting minorities into teaching because while a third of our students our minority only 13 percent of their teachers are we need a diverse and an excellent teaching force our proposal also includes funds to strengthen teacher preparation programs so that those who go into teacher are better prepared to teach their students we know students in distressed areas who need the best teachers often have teachers who have had the least preparation for example right now 71 percent of students taking physical science courses like chemistry and physics and 33 percent of english students in high poverty schools take classes with teachers who do not even have a college minor in their field so our proposal will focus not only on training future teachers well it will also improve the quality of teaching in those schools now through partnerships between the schools and the teacher training institutions and finally there is a national board for certifying professional teachers as master teachers in our budget there are only a few hundred of these teachers now and they are infectious in the enthusiasm and skills they breed in the schools where they teach many states are offering them higher salaries our budget contains enough money to have 100 000 of these master teachers so that every single school in america will have one including every poor school in america we cannot stop until we have given the best teachers the opportunity to teach the children who need them the most third let me say i believe that charter schools can be an important tool for improving education especially for children having difficulties in traditional public schools charter schools give parents and local communities the flexibility to create performance based schools open to everyone and they work our budget has enough funds to create 3 000 of these schools by the year 2001 they re open to all they offer excellence and accountability they can infect the atmosphere of an entire school district and help other public schools to perform better by offering parents and community residents the chance to take matters into their own hands and to be held accountable for the results i am pleased that rosa parks who taught us a lot about dignity and equality is now working to open a charter school in detroit and i urge you to consider doing so in your communities if you believe it will help the department of education will help you fourth i think we have to commit to rebuilding rundown schools many of them are located in our central cities when i was in philadelphia the other day at a beautiful old school building the superintendent of schools told me that the average age the average age of the physical facilities in the philadelphia school system was 65 years now a lot of these old buildings were very well built and will stand up a long time but they have to be rehabilitated if they re going to be serviceable i have been to school districts there are school buildings in washington d c where two floors are open and a whole floor has to be closed because they are literally not inhabitable this is wrong forty percent of the school buildings need major repair or replacement today my tax plan includes tax credits to finance the rehabilitation and construction of schools in distressed neighborhoods students cannot be expected to learn in buildings that are falling down in serious disrepair or painfully overcrowded fifth we have to recognize that all this new technology which seems so far beyond the reach of a lot of ordinary citizens actually gives us a chance to jump start quality and opportunity in our poorest districts i have challenged every school and library in the nation to be connecting all this classrooms to the information superhighway by the year 2000 we have got a plan working with the private sector headed by the vice president to put the computers in the classrooms to get the educational software out there to train the teachers the federal communications commission has offered steep discounts and rates for hooking on to the internet for schools and libraries so that all of our children can do it if we do this right for the first time in the history of this country the children in the poorest school districts will have access to the same information in the same way at the same time as the children in the wealthiest school districts in america and that s what ought to be the rule the last thing i want to say is that we ve got to send our children to schools that are safe and drug free there are still a lot of children who do not learn every day because they are afraid and if you think of the times in your life when you have been afraid it was hard to think about anything else we must take the fear out of our schools it is unacceptable to have children falling behind because of that we fought hard to keep weapons and drugs out of our classrooms we supported parents and communities who wanted to have things like school uniform programs tougher truancy programs who wanted to have curfew programs things that they thought would improve the safety of our students lives but the bottom line is this we can have equal opportunity and excellence in education we can have it only if we are determined to have both we will not have one without the other and lastly let me say in addition to that if you look at what this modern economy requires we must open the doors of college education to every single american by the year 2000 we must make at least two years of college as universal by the time the century turns as a high school diploma is today we must do that if you look at the high school graduation rates for african americans it s very encouraging to see how much they have increased there is not much difference now in the high school graduation rates between african americans and the white majority in america there is a world of difference in the college completion rates we have got to do more our budget has the biggest increase in pell grants in 20 years and provides tax credits in a way that would make the first two years of college opportunity literally open to everyone we have got to keep going until we push more and more and more of our minority children into higher education first finish high school then at least get two years more of college so that you can compete and get a decent income with prospects for growth and opportunity in the years ahead that must be our shared objective now let me just briefly say in addition to education i think there are two other things we have to focus on if we re going to get where we want to go the first is economics we have got to rebuild the economic life of our inner cities and our poorest rural areas they are the biggest economic opportunity today for the rest of america unemployment in this country is at a 25 year low 23 year low when you hear that the unemployment is 5 percent don t be fooled that s a national rate we ve got 10 states with unemployment rates below 3 5 percent and there are that many people just moving around all the time if you get around 3 percent it s almost functionally zero because people are just moving around in their lives but you know as well as i do there are cities or their a neighborhoods within cities that still have double digit unemployment there are poor rural counties that still have double digit unemployment there are people who are employed but grossly underemployed who are working part time just because that s all they can do there are places where people get up and go to work every day but they re always going somewhere else to work because there are no businesses in their neighborhoods now that is a huge opportunity we have development funds in the united states with countries that used to be communist countries because we want to help build a private sector economy we have got to move in our thinking from the idea that our inner cities and our poor rural areas should have their future dependent primarily on government payments to saying no no they re entitled to the same range of economic opportunities as all other american communities we ve got to have a private sector job related investment related business related strategy to bring economic opportunity to the young people who live in these areas it is not true that these folks don t want to work most of them are working like crazy they re working like crazy last year for every entry level job that opened up in st louis missouri there were nine applicants nine for every job that opened up now if we can t do something to revitalize the economy of our poorer areas when we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 23 years and business is out there looking for new opportunities to invest when can we do it we have to do it now what should we be doing we ve been working on this since 1993 to try to create the environment in which people would wish to invest and give people a chance empowerment zones enterprise communities community banks that loan money to people who live in the neighborhood to start small businesses cleaning up the environment of our cities so people will feel free to invest and they won t worry about somebody coming along and suing them because we ve already cleaned up the problems giving tax relief to our lowest income working people through the earned income tax credit strengthening the community reinvestment act so that more banks would invest money in the inner cities opening up housing opportunities i heard you say that before if you want the schools to be integrated we ve got to have middle class housing with poor people s housing in the cities again we have to have housing back in the cities where people are living together and working together a real serious strategy to move people from welfare to work and a serious strategy to do something about crime because people won t invest money if they don t think that they re going to be safe in their business operations now we ve been working on that when i spoke to the mayors in san francisco i said here s what we re going to do for the next four years we want to double the number of empowerment zones and enterprise communities we want to double the number of these community banks to make loans in the inner cities we want to clean up the brownfields of these cities so that nobody refuses to invest because the environmental problems are out there we want to clean up 500 of the worst toxic waste dumps who s going to put a plant next to a toxic dump we want to do this so that people can get investment we want to pass a juvenile crime bill that will be modeled on what boston has done where not a single child has been killed with a handgun in over a year and a half now almost two years in boston not one and i ll tell you something just for the record because we re going to debate this all year yes they re tougher on gangs and guns but they also give kids something to say yes to they have probation officers and police officers who get in the car at night and make house calls to homes of children who are in trouble and just like a doctor making house calls you can always find a patient there they have 70 percent compliance with probation orders in boston 70 percent unheard of give our kids something to say yes to so we ve got to do that we have to do something about homeownership as i said we have to do something about public health more basic services do more to fight hiv and aids include millions more children with health insurance all these things we intend to do but you have to help us the naacp has always done a good job of involving business leaders of both parties in your endeavors but we need to go back to the business community and say now is the time i will do everything i possibly can to create the environment in which people can invest and work creative mayors have ideas about how to do this but if we can t do it now with the national unemployment rate at five percent when can we do it it is america s best opportunity for continued growth if we had this many consumers in a nation 50 miles out in the gulf of mexico we would be pouring money into it and investment money i say to you our cities and our rural counties where these is unemployment and underemployment is our next big avenue of growth and we have to get together and make sure it gets done the last thing i want to say is economics education thirdly racial reconciliation look at the world you pick up the newspaper any given day and you find people killing each other halfway around the world because of their racial and ethnic and religious differences the hutus and tutsis in rwanda and burundi the catholics and the protestants in ireland my people still argue over what happened 600 years ago the muslims the croats the serbs in bosnia the jews and the arabs in the middle east and here we are with our long history of black white issues rooted in slavery with the appropriation of a lot of mexican americans after the war with mexico into our country and then with wave upon wave upon wave of immigrants now in a global economy in a global society where we re being closer together it is a huge asset for us that we have people from everywhere else we just announced an initiative on africa on promoting economic development in africa and there was a lot of excitement about it and we had a lot of republican congressmen interested in it because they think we can make a lot of money there i don t mean that in a bad way i mean several african countries grew at seven percent or greater last year and are doing the same thing again this year and more than half the countries on the continent are democracies now we can all understand that but why are we in a good position to do well there because of you because of you why are we in good position to unite all of latin america with us in a common economic group early in the next century because of the hispanic americans all the latinos why are we in a good position to avoid having asia become a separate economic block and a destabilizing force in the world in no small measure because of all asian americans in this country why do we have some hope of being a major force for peace in the middle east because of all the jewish americans here and the increasingly active and constructive arab american community here in other words it s a good deal that there are so many of us who are so different from each other this is a good deal not a bad deal this is a good thing if we can find a way not only to respect and tolerate but to celebrate our differences and still say but the most important thing is i m an american i m bound together i m part of this country i believe in the constitution and the bill of rights and i have an equal chance now that s what dr franklin and judy winston and all the people who are working with me over the next year that s what we re trying to figure out how to do and we know we have to do certain things that are government policy but we also know that this is an affair of the mind and the heart as well first the law the law makes a difference we ve had a community reinvestment act requiring banks to invest money in our under invested areas on the books for 20 years but since i became president and we said we were serious about it of all the 20 years investment 70 percent of it has been done since 1993 the law matters the law matters we have to enforce the civil rights laws i hope you will help me to secure the confirmation of my nominee to be the next assistant attorney general for civil rights bill lee for 23 years this son of chinese immigrants has worked for the cause of equal opportunity for many years as a lawyer of the naacp legal defense fund i thank you for your support of him but i ask you now to stay with him and let s make sure he will be confirmed and then i ask you to continue to work with dr franklin and judy winston and our advisory panel we have to do this together for this whole century the naacp has been a moral beacon reminding us that in the end we have to become an integrated society or one america that s going to be more important than ever before today the only state in america without a majority race is hawaii but within five years there will be no majority race in california our biggest state with 13 percent of our population in detroit wayne county michigan which we used to think of as the great melting pot of white ethnics and black folks from the south that couldn t make a living on the farm anymore that went to find a job in the car plants there are now more than 145 different racial and ethnic groups in that county in detroit we are changing very rapidly and we have not given much thought not only to how we re going to heal our old wounds and meet our old challenges but how we re going to become one america in the 21st c dem wjclinton17 8 96 bill_clinton thank you so much thank you i m glad to see you thank you first of all let me thank thank you very much thank you all for coming out hillary and chelsea and i are delighted to see you i even thank you for singing happy birthday to me i ve been a little apprehensive about turning 50 and getting my aarp card but the music makes it a little easier to bear we ve had a wonderful family vacation in the west we go back east refreshed ready to go to work i just wanted to say to all of you that next week will be a good week for our country i ll have a chance to sign a bill that increases the minimum wage and increases tax incentives thank you the bill also a lot of people don t know this the bill also increases incentives tax incentives for small business people to invest in their business and makes it easier for small business people and their employees to take out and keep retirement plans even during periods when they re not employed so it s a great bill for america it s a good thing and i have a chance to sign a bill next week that says you don t lose your health insurance if somebody in your family gets sick or if you change jobs the kassebaum kennedy bill and of course the welfare reform bill which will give states more funds for child care and for health care and then require people who can to move from welfare to work it ll be a very good week for america and all those bills passed with very strong bipartisan majorities i can only say that i wish we had more of that in washington and i know you do too but i am very very happy i m delighted to be here i love seeing all these signs here you ve made us very very happy and we d like to come out and say hello to you in time for this plane to leave thank you and god bless you idaho thank you dem wjclinton17 8 99 bill_clinton leilani most people twice your age couldn t do that ladies and gentlemen because this is my first chance of the week to speak to the press before we get on to showing the spot i have to say just a couple of words about the awful earthquake that occurred in turkey which i m sure a lot of you have heard about it has claimed hundreds of lives and many injuries so let me begin by saying on behalf of all americans our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families most of you know that turkey has been our friend and ally for a long time now we must stand with them and do whatever we can to help them get through this terrible crisis we ve already released aid for the turkish red crescent we re sending a team to turkey to help with search and rescue today our energy secretary bill richardson and general hugh shelton the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are actually in turkey and they have personally conveyed our willingness to provide additional assistance general shelton has met with his turkish counterpart to offer the military s help with disaster relief and we will continue to determine what further help is needed but you can only imagine how difficult this is for them and we will do what we can to help now let me thank leilani again and wyatt keusch and harrison boatwright who are the young people here with us who are also in the psa i want to thank secretary riley and attorney general reno who have really done a wonderful job of trying to have a coordinated and balanced approach to keeping our children safe governor romer thank you i want to thank all the people here from the entertainment industry jack and richard and eddie sheila and all the others who stood up thank you so much for your generosity and your farsightedness thank you peggy conlon you re a great spokesperson for the people you represent and you ve been great in helping us to get this far and i want to thank my long time friend drew altman and the kaiser foundation for their support in this endeavor i d also like to thank the young americorps members who are here today who spent a lot of time working with our young people and trying to help them stay safe this is a very important issue to hillary to me to our entire administration in two weeks leilani s going to start at a brand new school that s probably more scary than introducing the president to a bunch of strangers and you know there are always a lot of worries associated with going to a new school all these strange people are they going to like me am i going to like them you ve got to get to know the teachers you ve just got to find your way around got to remember the combination to a new locker those are the things that our kids ought to be worried about they shouldn t be worried about whether what they saw in littleton or conyers or what that young madman in illinois and indiana or at the jewish community center in la could possibly happen to them that s what they shouldn t worry about but they do because they ve seen the press reports and so has our entire nation we re still grieving for the young children the teacher the counselor the receptionist at the jewish community center or the family of that young filipino american joseph ileto who was killed only because he was an asian american who worked for his country s government secretary riley has gone across the country trying to make sure that all of us can put this in some kind of context the attorney general has as well the crime rate in this country s at a 26 year low juvenile crime is going down the center for disease control and the department of education show that overall violence has actually decreased in our schools it s important to tell these children here with us today and others that the chances of a tragedy happening are small less than they used to be less than one in a million but that s not good enough when you see how horrible it is when it occurs schools ought to be right next to our houses of worship as sanctuaries in america they ought to be places where young people are completely safe and absolutely certain that they are and each of us bears a responsibility if hillary is right that it takes a village to raise a child it will take our whole national village to keep the nation s children safe in their schools a big part of that responsibility lies with parents and giving parents and their children the capacity and courage to communicate with one another and that s a big part of why we re here to launch this public service campaign as you will see in a moment the psa sponsored by the kaiser family foundation by children now and the ad council sends out a powerful call to action if you re a child and you see someone committing violence or even just talking about it that s very important given the evidence we now have about the situation in colorado and others if you see someone just talking about it the best thing you can do is to first tell your parents and if you re a parent you have to take it seriously you have to sit down and talk and listen to draw your children out to give them a chance to express their fears to give you early warning and then to share that early warning with your children s teachers and principal this is an important message so i d like to again with thanks to all concerned turn the lights out and watch the ad thanks to the commitment of america s broadcast and cable networks and cable channels this ad and others like it will be seen by just about every single person in america who turns on the television tomorrow night during the family hour of prime time this so called television roadblock is really unprecedented the networks are donating 1 5 million of free air time in one night alone that s more blanket coverage than i get for the state of the union many of the networks have already pledged to continue airing these psas during different time slots for the remainder of this year so let me say once again i am very very grateful to all the people involved who have fulfilled the commitment that they made at our youth violence summit in may to use the power of your medium to send out positive messages to our children this is the kind of thing we can do when we work together and we need to continue to do so and to include all parts of our society you remember that when we had the national summit the first lady and i said we wanted to organize a national campaign against youth violence to have the same sort of galvanizing impact on our people that mothers against drunk driving students against i think it s now called destructive decisions the campaign to promote seat belt use these grassroots campaigns can have a profound effect on the way americans think and the way they behave it will be much much easier now because of the work that all of you involved in the media have done to bring these public service spots to the people of the united states but we also need our organized campaign so today i have the honor of announcing and introducing the person who will be the executive director of this campaign his name is jeff bleich and he s here with us on stage he s been recognized by the american bar association as one of our country s leading young attorneys he s also one of san francisco s leading civic minded citizens he is the father of three beautiful children he desperately wants to have a safe childhood he has received several prestigious awards for his pro bono legal service he s built strong connections in silicon valley and in hollywood both of whom can be of immense help to us in this endeavor and perhaps most important he has written a very fine book on youth violence so i d like to ask jeff to stand up and to thank him for his service and thank you for taking on this challenge to protect our children today the department of justice is also releasing 15 million to fund innovative partnerships between local police and school and community groups something the attorney general has been pushing since the first day she came here these partnerships will help schools do everything from training students in conflict resolution techniques to combatting drug dealing and use on school grounds but as every police officer in america knows we re kidding ourselves if we think we can conquer youth violence without addressing one of its undeniable catalysts the appalling ease with which young people gain access to guns hillary has already said and you know that i strongly agree it is long past time for congress to step up to its responsibility and restore some common sense sanity and strength to our nation s gun laws today i ask the republican majority when you come back to work our children will be going back to school think about them let s not wait until the next senseless tragedy to pass common sense gun safety measures to protect them now i know in a country of 270 million people and tens of millions of guns no law can stop every disturbed person from committing a violent act with a gun but we would never do anything as a people if we gave in to the objection that all of our actions would have less than 100 percent impact the brady bill has kept over 400 000 gun sales which should not have occurred from happening it has saved countless lives closing the gun show loophole will have the same impact closing the loopholes in the assault weapons ban will have the same impact doing these other things will they solve every problem no will they stop every act of violence no will they prevent every madman no if we used that kind of excuse we would all stay in bed every day we would never get out of bed we would never get of bed we would never hit a lick so we need all the tools at our disposal look what these media people have done will this public service ad get every parent in america and every child to talk about every dangerous thing that happens at every school no but it will have a huge impact and so if the media people are doing their part and the school people are doing their part and the law enforcement people are doing their part it is time to pass the reasonable and entirely modest measures before the congress for those who want to do more i say so do i but that is no reason not to do this this will make a difference and it is certainly not an argument not to do it that it won t solve every problem it will save some lives and we ought to do it we have got to work together that s what our national campaign is about that is the message that the ad council is putting out in these ads and down deep inside that s what all of us know we need to do so that when we see children like leilani don t you wish all you ever had to worry about was that the kid you re pulling for can get through the speech in front of the strangers can make it through the athletic event can play the solo or sing the song that is so excruciatingly difficult the first time you did it these are the things that our children ought to be worried about we ought to give our kids back their childhood and we can do it if we do it together thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton17 9 00 bill_clinton and mr prime minister on behalf of the american people let me welcome you again to the white house along with all your party from india i hope that in your time with us we have at least come close to repaying the warm hospitality with which you and the indian people greeted me my family and our fellow americans on my visit in march one of the most remarkable things to me about our relationship is its scope and its increasing interdependence there are hundreds of american businesses foundations and universities with long commitments to india when americans call microsoft for customer support today they re as likely to be talking to someone in bangalore or hyderabad as to someone in seattle there are more than 1 million indians here in america now and i think more than half of them are here tonight and i might say prime minister the other half are disappointed that they re not here indian americans now run more than 750 companies in silicon valley alone in india the best information available on maternal health and agriculture can now be downloaded by a growing number of villages with internet hook ups and indian americans can now get on line with people across the world who speak telugu or gujarati or bengali americans have fallen in love with indian novels i m told that prime minister vajpayee when he s not writing hindi poetry actually likes to read john grisham you might be interested to note mr prime minister that he s a distant relative of mine all the grishams of money are distant relatives of mine and don t forget whether we re in california or calcutta we all want to be a crore pati now for the culturally challenged americans among us that s from india s version of who wants to be a millionaire of course our interdependence is about more than commerce and culture we are also vulnerable to one another s problems to the shock of economic turmoil to the plague of infectious diseases to the spread of deadly military technology and as we have all too painfully seen to the terrorists drug traffickers and criminals who take advantage of the openness of societies and boarders the simple lesson of all this to me mr prime minister is that if we re already all in the same boat together we had better find a way to steer together we must overcome the fear some people in both our countries sometimes have for different historical reasons that if we meet our friends halfway somehow it will threaten our own independence or uniqueness that is why i am so gratified that with your leadership and the efforts of so many people in this room we have together built the strongest most mature partnership india and america have ever known we have so very much more to learn from each other in both our societies you can find virtually every challenge humanity knows and in both our societies you can find virtually every solution to those challenges confidence in democracy tolerance for diversity a willingness to embrace economic and social change so it is more than a slogan for americans to say that india s success will be our success and that together india and america can change the world ladies and gentlemen i ask you now to join me in a toast to prime minister vajpayee to the government and people of india and the enduring partnership between our two great democracies dem wjclinton17 9 05b bill_clinton thank you i m going to read three more commitments i hesitate to say we re getting a running total but we will be able to give them all before we leave but i would like to ask my friend rolando gonzalez bunster to join me up on the stage thirty oh i hate to say this 37 years ago we graduated from georgetown university together and he has committed to build two wind energy power plants totaling 109 megawatts in the dominican republic for a total investment of in excess of 130 million thank you very much this will provide electricity to people who need it very much while addressing global warming and promoting development in a place where i spend a lot of time and where my aids project is very active so thank you rolando thank you very much now i d like to invite up here rick fedrizzi of the us green building council thomas leppert of the turner corporation and tom tridden of haverford college and while they re coming up i will explain what they re going to do this is a green building initiative to transform the way buildings are designed and operated to reduce energy consumption environmental impact and greenhouse gases in the sector that uses one third of all energy consumed in the united states and is responsible for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions a series of conferences focused on green building and educational construction renovation will dramatically accelerate the deployment of green buildings in the us the united states green building council will sponsor these conferences to promote sustainable design and construction within the next academic year the turner corporation will host greening the schools to be held on october 24th in washington haverford college will host a green building council turner event for educational institutions and it s committed to green existing buildings at the college and challenge further other campuses to do the same let me say we went through this exercise at the white house and i was utterly astonished at the amount of greenhouse gas savings we made and the equivalent of the thousands and thousands and thousands of cars we took off the road every year just with the buildings there in the white house complex and as i have said repeatedly thanks to my architects we cut our energy emissions by 34 percent at my library so i know this is there and i know it will save money create jobs and help on climate change so thank you very much all of you thank you finally in this section i would like to invite to the stage michelle wyman the executive director for the united states office for the international council for local environmental initiatives they along with the chicago climate exchange the city of seattle generation earth and more than 200 cities and counties across america are involved in cities for climate protection their commitment is to achieve significant reductions in domestic sources of greenhouse gas emissions while building political support for climate protection at the local level across america within two years the international council for local environmental initiatives will work with us local governments to achieve an additional 20 million tons of co2 reductions through its cities for climate protection campaign its new partnership with the chicago climate exchange and its role as the implementer of the 2005 mayors climate change protection agreement and the urban environmental award they will provide training tools and technical assistance to cities and counties to accelerate the implementations of policies and programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and together they will make a major contribution to the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in our entire country thank you very very much this is dr richard sandor of the chicago climate exchange which i hope you will all help to finance thank you very much thank you now i would like to turn the program over to lael brainerd who will give us a summary of what happened in the governance section dem wjclinton17 9 05c bill_clinton you can probably see why i always enjoyed the briefings that she gave me in the white house i was always afraid i was going to be subject to a test as soon as they were over ladies and gentlemen i want to announce two more commitments in the area of governance first i d like to ask hakam kanafani and any other representatives of the young arab leaders who are here who want to come up this is first i want to promote these people a little bit this is an astonishing group of young people that first met late last year i think in dubai under the sponsorship of mohammed gergawi there are quite a number of them now they are going to have a meeting of about 500 in december their first anniversary in dubai they aspire to have 5 000 soon the reason i m taking a little time on this is i think that one of the problems that all of us have with the arab world is that we know they produce a lot of oil and they ve got a lot of problems and some of them have something to do with religion we think and that s about all people know we don t know enough about the good people and the good stories and the good things and the stunning potential and i think all of us have an obligation who came here to acquaint ourselves with the good things that are happening and to realize that we all should do more to make good things happen there i predict to you that you will hear more from the young arab leaders in the years ahead and you will like just about everything you hear so the present commitment they have made for this conference is to continue to reduce poverty by accelerating economic development and stimulating and expanding investment by helping to create something they call the arab business plan award through which young arabs will be invited to present a business plan to a jury of established entrepreneurs upon selection the newly created arab business network will match winners with established business leaders from around the world so they can implement their plan what this little piece of paper i m given doesn t say is what they propose to do to lay the ground work for this is to train a large number of young arabs in what a business plan is how to put one together what it means and how to participate in the entrepreneurial economy this is a great first step for a great group and i thank you for your commitment thank you very much now i d like to invite to the stage kathy bushkin executive vice president of the un foundation who is involved in a project with energy future cooperation the brookings institution the center for american progress to develop global development bonds that will be used to reduce poverty in developing countries through accelerated economic development a meeting will be held in october just next month to facilitate the launch of these global development bonds to catalyze development in developing countries we need more financial instruments and i am excited about what s going to happen with the development bonds and i may even want to invest in them thank you kathy bushkin and thank your partners as well dem wjclinton17 9 05d bill_clinton one of the great ironies of my presidency was that gayle smith was in my second term my principal aide for africa and whenever we went to africa we were known as the only people on the continent whose hair was whiter than our skin but when she was a young woman she trekked several hundred miles across africa with a warring army as a young reporter and a very brave and devoted friend of the continent so i thank you all i want to read a couple of the deliverables now beginning with one involving the acumen fund and i d like to ask i think tay yu of cisco systems and chris anderson the sapling foundation to come up if anyone else is here that i m supposed to recognize you come too i m doing the best i can here the acumen fund is a global non profit venture fund that serves people living on less than 4 a day it strives to create a blueprint for building financially sustainable and scalable organizations to deliver affordable critical goods and services to elevate the lives of the poor these folks have committed up to 1 million to deliver clean water health and housing to the poor cisco and the sapling foundation will match dollar for dollar contributions to the acumen fund during the clinton global initiative up to 1 million to support the global initiative on moving from talking to action so if anybody else wants to help them with clean water they ll match your money thank you very very much i d like to ask karen tramontano with the global fairness initiative to come up this is a commitment by the global fairness initiative something called the synapse market access fund to address the problem of global poverty by funding training networks to bridge the gap between poor producers and markets synapse makes investment grade grants and cultivates long term financial relationships with scalable initiatives helping to build the strength and capacity of grassroots producers in rural communities now let me just say two things first of all one of the most important things i learned listening to jeffrey sachs at this conference and i want to start by saying that i too support the reduction of american agricultural subsidies and i think we ought to do it one of the most important things i learned listening to jeffrey sachs in his argument for adopting villages at 50 a villager for health education and economic development is that there is a dramatic amount of untapped agricultural income in africa and other poor countries right now to be earned regardless of the subsidies of europe and america by increasing productivity and sales within countries and across national lines within the continents where the developing countries are so i want to thank karen for that the second thing i want to say is i am very indebted to the global fairness initiative and to karen in particular because they have supported an important initiative we took in cambodia in 1999 to try to raise the labor standards in the factories the textile factories of cambodia which she has helped to monitor we have labor rights there the right to join unions in a country with a terrible record on human rights and i hope next year we ll have better representation from southeast asia here because when the multi fiber agreement expired and all these other countries are losing textile jobs cambodia didn t because their american purchasers and partners kept the jobs in cambodia so they could say to the customers in america we are supporting jobs in a developing country where the workers are treated decently in the workplace and adults are in the workplace children are in school and a stable society is developing so i really honor the work you are doing and i thank you for this 1 5 million project thank you now we go to the next oh i have one more to read i won t bring anybody up i just got this one in my own hot little hand here i think he s gone but the prime minister of mauritius committed his country to host and sponsor an international meeting on poverty elimination in 2006 is he here come on up navinchandra ramgoolam of mauritius thank you very much we have been blessed by having many world leaders come to this conference sir but no one has stayed so long and been so devoted as you we look forward to participating and helping you put your conference together and having you bring people from your part of the world thank you so much give him a big hand thank you dem wjclinton17 9 05e bill_clinton thank you very much i must say when mr malley was working with me on middle east peace all of our team will tell you he lived the words he just spoke he was a devout jew and the palestinians and their cause of a homeland and a just life and peace for the israelis never had a better friend so thank you for your example i would like to now invite ebrahim patel who s just been mentioned of the interfaith youth corps and jack jenson of the genesis foundation up here the interfaith youth corps seeks to build a world in which religiously diverse young people interact peacefully and cooperate to serve the common good strengthening civil society stabilizing global politics this is a 100 000 commitment from the genesis foundation to strengthen the interfaith youth corps s capacity to build that kind of movement the gift will underwrite the development of an evaluation paradigm and a plan for the movement information systems the addition of key staff and a substantial expansion of the number of young people who may be able to teach us all more about how to live together thank you very much and bless you i would like to now ask john marks of search for common ground and klaus peter wachsmith and equo uko of nestl to come up this is a project to create production of two television series the station and the academy to promote reconciliation it s a commitment by search for common ground partnered by nestl at a cost of 1 5 million to support two seasons of a dramatic and reality tv series in nigeria to promote reconciliation and tolerance between religious and ethnic groups for broadcast by the nigerian television authority this is a wonderful thing and as someone who went to nigeria and spoke to the nigerian parliament to plead for the life of a condemned woman under sharia law i thank you for doing this god bless you thank you so much now i would like to ask cheryl and chaim subon to come up and mr peres why don t you come up too shimon come on up here chaim and sheryl subon are giving 1 million to the peres center to promote peace and understanding between israeli and palestinian children through the arts and education with an emphasis on the palestinian children living in gaza thank you very very much now i d like to ask my last surviving chief of staff in the white house john podesta of the center for american progress to come up i wheedled one more thing out of him the center for american progress has committed to coordinate with anyone else who s here who s interested as well as other think tanks and experts who are not here the development over the next couple of months of a concrete proposal for terrorism insurance in gaza to increase investment there thank you very very much let me say just a few brief things before we close first the window for receiving commitments will be open for another several days maybe a week or two because a lot of you came here really interested in what was going on and not knowing what your options were the commitments that we had on the first day were from people who had been working in these fields a long time and knew exactly what they wished to do so i urge any of you who haven t made commitments but who wish to to do so and we will over the next year maintain a constant presence here where we keep up with people see if they need some help in keeping their commitments we ll make regular progress reports and then have a report at the beginning of the clinton global initiative when we start next year but just as of right now just so you ll know what s happened in these remarkable days right before i came up here we had right at 190 commitments totaling over 1 25 billion there are a lot of us who and i count myself in that number who like goals that are measurable measurable not just in economic terms but in human terms there was this dialogue that was held while we were here between the world bank president mr wolfowitz and kamal dervis the new undp administrator the african development bank president donald kaberuka about this one of the reasons i like jeffrey sachs s proposal to adopt a village is you know for 50 a villager you get health education agricultural productivity and for 250 000 or 300 000 a year for five years you can actually lift 5 000 people out of extreme poverty i like that but i think it s also important for us not to minimize the impact of the commitments which may not cost as much but which may have a huge impact over the long run whether they improve the governance in certain emerging countries or develop the institutions of civil society like the young arab leaders or promote religious reconciliation for positive purposes i don t think you can minimize that one of the things i wanted to mention that i think is very important is the ability to develop systems it might not cost much money to teach people to do that but i consider the most important thing my own foundation has done since i left office by a good long stretch providing anti retroviral medicine to 175 000 people just since 2003 that s 25 percent of all people in the developing world that have gotten that medicine and we ve done it for probably 10 or 15 percent of what anybody else doing the work has done because ira magaziner and his colleagues developed the system that helped to improve the productivity of the drug producers got them to take a high volume low margin strategy work with other governments that didn t cost a lost of money but it had a huge impact so i thank you for that we re also going to develop programs which i can t put a dollar value on now because they re only now being mentioned but i ll tell you about them as we go along the nicest thing that happened right before i came up was my good friend carlos flem from mexico who has organized any number of amazing initiatives for latin america and among other things holds a conference in which he pays for over 10 000 young people a year to come to mexico city to spend three days discussing problems that have nothing to do with mexico because he thinks if the children of his country and his region learn to look at the outer world and understand it better they will clearly be able to solve the problems of their own country so he comes up to me today with shimon peres and says that if they want him he will take responsibility for developing a whole communications cell phone network in gaza and tie it into the jordanians and all the others that are in the region so i thank you carlos flem for that because that s the kind of thing we need to do i just want to say a couple of things about the other proposals the other areas first of all a lot of things were said about climate change today vice president gore was emotional powerful and persuasive but he was largely preaching to the saved too and those of us who weren t saved didn t say much but our friend mr coomber from swiss re he put 300 million into it it means he knows something that other people don t there s money there there really is profit to be made in cleaning up the environment jeffrey immelt came here to tell us that general electric one of the most important companies in the world believes that cleaning the environment and having a carbon free future at least with less carbon has to be at the core of sustaining the environment i can t add anything to that except to say that to all my friends from the middle east who are here and i ve been really gratified that we ve had a wonderful representation here if i were living in a country that had 65 oil i would put my country into the energy business not just the oil business and i would finance energy conservation solar energy wind energy i would turn myself into a conglomerate country with a diversified economy and create jobs for the next generation of my people and i hope that that will happen in the middle east on the question of faith i thank the religious leaders who came from outside the middle east from bosnia for example and i want to make another acknowledgement i saw gerry adams here somewhere i think he s still here but one of the greatest things i thought in the agreement of the ira to destroy its weapons and to hold it up to international inspection was that they were not only going to have this group that we set up in 98 to validate what the ira did they said we want the destruction of these weapons to be witnessed and verified by representatives of the catholic church and the church of england and northern ireland because they know that if the religious leaders say it it will matter so i saw david trimble who was my partner when we did the irish peace process coming here i don t even know if david is still here or not so i pulled him off to the side i said david if this is real will it matter to the people that are just walking around on the street and he said absolutely it will make a difference so religion does not have to be a divisive force the second thing i want to say this is just from my own experience from the time i was a little boy until i became president most people i knew who used religion to divide people were not motivated by their allegiance to god but by their desire for power and the same thing is true of race ethnicity or anything else i remember when we made the peace in bosnia and we signed it at the elysee palace in paris madeleine s heard me say this a lot of times i actually sat down across the table and had lunch with slobodan milosevic and he had the coldest eyes i ve ever seen but i ll tell you one thing he didn t really hate the bosnian muslims or the croatian catholics they were tools in his desire to have absolute power over a greater serbia and when these kids are sent with their bodies packed in bombs to blow up other kids they may believe they re doing allah s will but the people who put the bombs on them did it because they think they re going to win a political fight and you know every great religion basically is grounded in two things the commonness of our humanity and its imperfection you know that s why wanadizanapata the buddha says you re not fully human unless you feel the arrow piercing another s body as if it were in your own or in the koran allah it says the prophet says in the koran allah put different peoples on the earth not that they might despise one another but they might come to know one another and learn from one another the torah says if you turn aside from a stranger you might as well turn aside from god and of course in the christian new testament jesus says the greatest commandment is to love god with all your heart but the next is quote like unto it to love your neighbor as yourself what s the philosophical basis of all this there s a section in the christian new testament which says and i quote what faith is faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things unseen there s another place where it says why is love the greatest virtue love is a greater virtue even than faith because in this life we see through a glass darkly and know in part very important for us to remember this as we all leave here why are we obligated to help other people morally yes it s smart we can all make a lot of money out of climate change but it would also be nice if our great grandchildren had air to breathe and water to swim in we can make a lot of money out of it but we really have a moral obligation in america we need for africans and people in southeast asia and south asia and latin america to get rich because we re 4 percent of the world s population we ve got 20 percent of the wealth and india and china are going like crazy and if we don t have more partners to trade with we ll be poor so yes it s in our interest it s also morally right it s the right thing to do why should somebody be deprived of the right to have a life i ve just been looking into the faces of kids in china and africa who were destined to die but they were going to live because we got them aids medicine my little foundation doubled the number of kids in the developing world outside brazil and thailand who got medicine this year that sounds so great before you clap let me tell you how pitiful it is it s pitiful we doubled the number of kids outside brazil and thailand getting medicine this year 500 000 children under the age of 12 died last year of aids 25 000 got medicine to stay alive 15 000 were in brazil and thailand i got 10 000 lousy doses of medicine at a pitiful price of 200 a person don t clap we re going to get 50 000 more next year that s not good 70 000 kids get medicine and 500 000 die it s terrible so forget about yes it will benefit us economically if we do this but we need a little humility here if we really have our religious teachings grounded well we will do this because it s the right thing to do the other point i want to make is one reason that we don t get climate change is we have become arrogant in the present all of us osama bin laden s arrogant in the present i mean he really thinks it matters if he blows us up and kicks a few thousand american soldiers out of saudi arabia or whatever and we really think it matters if we blow him up more than how we all live and how people will be living 100 years from now it was just a few hundred years ago that we had the last little ice age just 15 000 years that the big ice age moved away and enabled people to move across the earth and people have been walking around as homo sapiens for 130 000 years our forefathers before that our near human forefathers were making tools 2 million years ago so if we had a huge cataclysmic event from global warming it would just be about 15 000 years from the last one which is the blink of an eye in the life of the planet or the life of humanity on the planet we are so arrogant because we are obsessed with the present so i ask all of you to think about this i ve reached an age now where it doesn t matter whatever happens to me i just don t want anybody to die before their time any more and i asked you here because i think that all of us have an unprecedented amount of power to solve problems save lives and help people see the future i m really gratified by what you ve done i hope you ll come next year i hope you ll make commitments if you haven t i hope you ll keep them if you made them and when you leave here i hope you will feel your own faith strengthened but i also hope you will leave here with a sense of humility about how much better we could do and i hope you ll help people all over the world wherever you come from to realize that human history what we re being asked to do is self evident doesn t amount to all that much but will make all the difference to children yet unborn thank you and god bless you i would like to ask all the people who worked on this all the people who worked on this give them a big hand thank you tom golisano thank you all of our sponsors all the volunteers in the back give them a big hand they did great thank you all dem wjclinton17 9 94 bill_clinton thank you thank you so much cardiss collins for your introduction your support and your two decades in the united states congress making you the longest serving african american woman in the history of the congress congressman payne thank you for your leadership here and for so much that you do but especially for co chairing along with c payne lucas our mission to rwanda to see the fine work done by the united states in that beleaguered land and thank you congressman mfume for your brilliant leadership of the congressional black caucus it has been an honor and a privilege to work with you to move this country forward and to bring this country together there are so many distinguished americans here tonight but i can t help acknowledging the presence here and to say i am so glad to see here able to be here tonight of rosa parks thank you ma am i also want to say i m a little jealous that i didn t see the rest of the program also all the things for the young people and especially reverend flake s sermon this morning the vice president came in this morning when we had our meeting and he said you know that verse in ezekiel about the dry bones and i said to him i said can there be life in these dry bones he said yes that one floyd flake just gave one of the three or four best sermons i ever heard in my entire life about that so i would like a tape or a transcript next week if i could i want to congratulate you too on your message embracing our youth for a new tomorrow you know when i ran for president i did so out of a sense of obligation to the next generation i often said in 1992 i did not want my daughter to grow up in a country in which she was part of the first generation of americans to do worse than her parents and in which her beloved land was coming apart when it ought to be coming together the theme song of our campaign was don t stop thinking about tomorrow in order to do that this country needs a clear mission and a good spirit our mission clearly has been to strengthen our economy and to preserve our security to empower our people to seize the opportunities the future offers to rebuild our american sense of community to find strength in all this diversity we have rather than division and weakness to try to make our government work or ordinary citizens again not as a saviour but as a sure partner to try to summon americans to the idea that we can do better and that we are doing better now in just a year and a half or so we have seen over 4 million jobs come into this economy a 20 percent drop in the african american unemployment rate we have seen three years of reduction in our terrible national deficit in a row for the first time since mr truman was president of the united states we have seen investments in new technologies and dramatic increases in trade and just a few days ago a distinguished panel of international economists for the first time in nine years said that the united states was once again the number one productive economy in the entire world we have begun the hard work of empowering our people everything from increasing the quantity of head start programs to apprenticeship programs for young people who don t go to college to dramatic increases in the availability of lower interest college loans to job training programs for those who lose their work we have begun the work of rebuilding our community by 1996 we should be able to immunize every child in america under the age of two we passed the family leave bill and gave 15 million working families just above the poverty line a tax break so that people could be successful workers and successful parents we dealt with all aspects of the crime problem and tried to give our young people something to say yes to as well as something to say no to we banned assault weapons against enormous odds passed the brady bill after seven years of delay we began to rebuild our communities and pull ourselves together just last week we kicked off americorps the national service program with now 15 000 and soon to be 20 000 young americans all over this country like this young lady here erika lomax who s a teacher in the teach for america corps we can revolutionize this country from the grass roots up if we just give more people like kweisi was when he was 16 or 18 or 20 something to do that is good and wholesome and pure and true that will lead to a better tomorrow and we are making a beginning at that now our young people will be working in everything from helping our elderly people to be more secure to improving our environment to tutoring kids to keeping our streets safer to dealing in drug prevention and education and treatment programs we passed the empowerment zone proposal and we re about to finish the process of reviewing those it s been the most remarkable thing i have ever seen how communities have come together across racial and economic lines to try to find a way to get investment in jobs to those people who have totally left behind in every economic recovery for the last 20 years we are making a beginning at that and i want to say a special word of thanks for one proposal to three of your members soon we will have ready for my signature the community development bank proposal thanks in no small measure to congressman rush congressman flake and congresswoman waters and i thank them for that we re also trying to pull this country together in other ways proving that an administration can be both diverse and excellent one of the things i am proudest of that as of this night it has been my privilege as your president to appoint more than twice as many african american judges to the federal bench than the last three presidents combined and more than twice as many hispanic judges to the federal bench than the last three presidents combined the really important thing is that the american bar association has given well qualified ratings to a higher percentage of this administration s appointments than in any of the last five presidencies i say that because unless we can find a way to go forward into the future together all of our particular successes will not have the general result we want still it is so easy to see the glass is half empty instead of half full and it is the spirit that burns within each of us that tells us we can get up every day and do a little better that really keeps this country going our nation has always been made great because of the efforts of its people the spirit of its people yesterday congressman mfume and congressman rangel and others invited me over to the capitol where we gave awards to a large number of african american veterans of world war ii and i couldn t help thinking as i looked out at those fine people the extraordinary lengths to which some of them had to go simply to serve their country the tuskegee airmen flew nearly 1 600 missions and they were the only fighter group never to lose a bomber in europe in world war ii well today we need all of our people and we do not have a person to waste and yes we can do better we must and we will but it is important to know that democracy is on the move in this country in no small measure because of the contributions of the members of the congressional black caucus before i go i have to say a few words about haiti as you know i had looked forward to being here tonight in a more jovial mood i even like to i ve gotten finally to the point in my life where i like to wear one of those tuxedos when i used to complain about it my momma used to tell me that i came from a family where she could still remember the first time anybody ever had a necktie and i was not to complain about wearing a tuxedo i should be proud to have the opportunity to do so so i look forward to doing that sort of thing and i always love to be with you and there are hundreds of my friends here but i came late and a little out of style because as you might imagine i have been preoccupied today with the events in haiti and the preparations we have been making at the pentagon i just want to say a word or two about that and how it relates to everything i have said before just because the cold war is over does not mean the united states can withdraw from the world just because it is almost always not necessary to resort to force and we must always do everything we can to avoid it does not mean there are never circumstances in which it might be necessary what i want to say to you tonight is this our security interests in the world are many and varied we must first finish the work of the cold war and remove the nuclear threat from our children s future and we are making real progress there we must try to limit the spread of all weapons of mass destruction and contain terrorism and the truly astonishing new threat of global organized crime we must also try to spread a system of free economies and open trading so that as people work together and deal with each other their suspicions and animosities and hatreds go down and their sense of the practical benefits of being more open and more free and more democratic come to them but we also have a special responsibility here in our own neighborhood even as other countries do in their own neighborhoods to deal with things which the world community condemns and that is why we have sought for three years to restore democracy to haiti to end violence and terrorism and human rights violations to see that all parties lived up to their commitments to keep democracy on the move in our hemisphere and encourage those fledgling democracies to be brave and to go forward to stabilize the borders and the territorial integrity of all countries including ours i have done everything i could to that end along with the united nations the caribbean community and the organization of the american states now there is an international coalition committed to implementing united nations security council resolution 940 twenty four other nations from around the world with more to come have already said they would come here to be with us to help to bring democracy back i have great pride and confidence in our troops and we are honored to have the support of these nations and of the united nations yesterday the international coalition gathered at the white house and heard a very moving address by president aristide in which he said that there should be no violence there should be no retaliation there should be no recrimination everyone should simply lay down their arms and go to work at building a country that has suffered for too long from hatred and violence and recrimination if it can be done in south africa surely it can be done in haiti and then yesterday evening as all of you now know i asked president carter and general powell and senator nunn to go to haiti and try our last best effort to have a peaceful transition to follow the will of the international community to end the bloodshed to restore democracy tonight whatever your feelings and wherever you re from i ask you to remember this simple statement made by prime minister arthur of barbados yesterday when he said and i quote the haitian people have wished for democracy they have suffered for it they have voted for it and now they are dying for it the time for idle discussion has ended there is still a little time for serious discussion tonight as we move toward sunday our worship day for those of us who are christians i ask all of you to say a prayer for all the people of haiti for the members of our armed forces and for the cause of peace we are doing our duty and i am doing mine as i believe it to be plain and evident but we all must hope everyday and every way that we can go forward in peace my decisions are firm and clear the mission is still in haiti let us hope for its success but whatever happens let us resolve that we will stand against violations of human rights and terrorism in our neighborhood we will stand for democracy and we will keep our commitments and expect those who make commitments to us to keep theirs i ask you now as i leave to remember these things and each in your own way as hard as you can say a prayer for peace and for the success of our effort there it is a part of the future we wish to build for our young people and for our country into the 21st century thank you god bless you and good night dem wjclinton17 9 96 bill_clinton thank you very much well this is a pretty active crowd even in the back there can you hear me good thank you brian duka now i think he did a pretty good job how many of you could stand up here in front of 10 000 or 12 000 people and do that give him a hand give him a hand that s great i want to say thank you to the john glenn choral group and the marching band thank you for playing and for singing for us thank you congresswoman lynn rivers for the power of your example for fighting for education including vocational education for having a terrific positive impact in congress in such a short time and for helping me to fight against the effort to cut education the environment medicare and medicaid fighting against the government shutdown fighting against things that would have divided and weakened this country you stood strong for the people of michigan and the people of the united states thank you very much thank you bill ford for being here for all of the work you did in the two years we shared together to expand head start improve college loans open the doors of opportunity to millions of more young people in so many different ways thank you dr moore principal thomas william ford career center principal bill richardson thank you my good friend ed macnamara the wayne county executive thank you mayor thomas we re glad to be in westland i understand i am the first president to come to westland i ll tell you something folks they get a good look at you on the evening news tonight i won t be the last president to come to westland i can promise you that i m glad to be joined today by barbara levin the wife of senator carl levin a man i hope you will send back to the senate to work with us and representative carolyn cheeks kilpatrick and eileen dehart thank you for being here i want to thank the people who showed me around at the william ford career center dr glen baracy bill richardson the principal over there and todd hoag and craig lindberg an instructor and a student who were terrific i thank them i understand that the john glenn rockets are 2 and 0 congratulations i think it is a great thing let me say as a man who is a friend of senator john glenn i think it s a great thing for me to be at this school named after one of the great american heroes of the last 50 years and i want you to know that by pure coincidence i was in cincinnati ohio with john glenn yesterday and believe it or not aboard air force one he actually wrote me this letter which i m going to give to the high school principal for the school s records when i finish but i want you to know what it said i want to read this letter to you because it starts out in the way i would like to start this talk anyway here s what john glenn said i am particularly sorry i could not come to westland today but i m sure you will agree the program is in good hands with the president i have been fortunate to receive some honors in my life but none have ever made me more proud than have a school bear my name we ve all been lucky to be born in a time in our nation s history when many notable things have happened and will continue to happen i ve always been more than grateful that i ve been able to participate in some of those events on behalf of this great country of ours to your generation the opportunities are boundless and education is your key what you are learning today will enable you to out distance anything we have ever dreamed of to every student good luck i know you will make us proud sincerely john glenn a generation ago senator glenn reached for the stars and became the first american astronaut to orbit the earth since then he has shown us that the sky is not the limit i don t blame them for doing this they don t want you to hear the truth it would bother them wait don t boo them don t boo them we re glad to have them here but we recognize free speech you had your turn now it s mine and what i want you to think about today is what was in that letter john glenn wrote to you i want every american without regard to age to have the opportunity to live up to his or her potential to reach that potential we have to build a bridge to the 21st century we can all walk across and the foundation for that bridge has got to be the world s finest education system available to all americans of all ages that is more true today than ever before as i said when i was working on a book i wrote recently i was trying to think of a title for it and i remembered a poem that was read to me when i was in ireland about magic points when hope and history come together this is such a time the 21st century will give more people more chances to live out their dreams than any period in human history let me just give you one little example the united states has just contracted with ibm to build a supercomputer that will do more calculations in one second than you can go home and do on your hand held calculator in 30 000 years the young people in this audience today will not only be doing jobs that have not been invented yet many of you will do work that has not been imagined yet if we want that kind of world to work for all of us we have got to build the right kind of bridge and the foundation i say again is education and education for everyone everyone to me this is part of a simple but profound strategy opportunity for all americans responsibility from all americans and a community in which every american without regard to race or gender or income or where you start out in life who works hard and shows up every day has a fair chance to live out their dreams that is the strategy we have followed folks it s working pretty well compared to four years ago we have the lowest unemployment rate in seven and a half years and ten and a half million new jobs four and a half million new homeowners the deficit has gone down for four years in a row for the first time since before the civil war the unemployment rate in michigan has been less than five percent every month this year for the first time in a generation and for the first time since the 1970s it is the united states that is producing more cars and selling more cars than any other country in the world wages are going up for the first time in a decade there are 1 8 million fewer people on welfare child support collections have gone up 40 percent and on october 1st 10 million hard working americans will get an increase in the minimum wage we are on the right track for the 21st century but if we want to get there we ve got to stop asking who is to blame and start asking what are we going to do together to make this the country it ought to be for our children and our grandchildren this bridge i want to build has a lot of components we have to have stronger families that s why i fought for the family and medical leave law so you could take a little time off from work for a baby s birth or a parent s illness without losing your job why i fought to give parents the v chip to control inappropriate television for their younger children why i fought against advertising of tobacco to young people it s illegal in every state in the country but it happens everywhere it means stronger communities that s why i fought for the poorest communities in this country to have empowerment zones detroit got one and cut the unemployment by more than half in only three years we can turn the cities around with work work work and education i now know some things that i didn t know four years ago about the american people and i can tell you i am more optimistic today than i was the day i took the oath of office i am more idealistic today than i was the day i took the oath of office because i know today from seeing what s happened in the last four years there is nothing that you cannot do if you re given the tools to do the job and that s exactly what i intend to see done i believed four years ago that if we put 100 000 police on the street and gave our police the ability to work with people in community settings if we got tougher with serious criminals and gave our young people something to say yes to we could bring the crime rate down well for four years in a row the crime rate has dropped in america and now just today the justice department pointed out that last year the crime rate dropped nine percent the largest drop in a decade there are one million fewer victims of crime than there were a year ago that is a good sign for america now i don t want to hesitate for a minute on this i m not declaring victory against crime i m just saying we re moving in the right direction and what we need to do is not to abandon the present course but to bear down and do more of it more police on the street more criminals and guns and drugs off the street we can do that if you will stay the course we ve got to keep this economy growing and strong that means we have to balance the budget all right because that keeps interest rates down that means lower car payments that means lower home mortgage payments that means lower credit card payments that means businesses can borrow money at lower rates to hire more people and raise wages and improve productivity that s important but we have to do it in the right way we don t have to wreck medicare or medicaid or turn our backs on education or the environment we need to invest more money in research and technology to create those high wage jobs for the future not less and we need an aggressive trade policy that opens new markets one of the proudest moments i ve had as president of the united states was going to an automobile showroom in tokyo and sitting in a car made in the united states of america for sale but let me say again my friends we cannot build that bridge with any of those components unless the foundation is world class education we ve already done a lot to lower the costs of college loans create the americorps program which has allowed 50 000 young people to go to college and serve in their communities raising standards supporting improved head start programs and other things but there is more we have to do forty percent of the children in this country can still not read on their own when they are in the third grade i want to mobilize an army of mentors and reading teachers to work with our schools and our teachers and our parents to make sure that by the year 2000 every 8 year old can look at a book and say i can read it all by myself i want to make sure that every classroom in this country in every school not only has computers and teachers trained to help the students use them but is actually hooked up to the information superhighway to the internet to the world wide web for those of you like me who don t know a lot about computers that may not mean much so let me put it in plain language let me tell you what that means if we hook up every classroom in america to the information superhighway what it means is this that in the poorest inner city classrooms in the most remote rural classrooms and all the classrooms in between for the first time in the history of our country all of our schoolchildren will have access to the same learning at the same level of quality in the same way in the same time as the students in the richest schools in america that is achievable and we must do it i want to make sure that we make at least two years of education after high school in a vocational center a community college in a college at least two years after high school just as universal in four years as a high school diploma is today and we can do that by giving the american people a 1 500 tax credit for the typical cost of community college education a dollar for dollar reduction for the cost of the tuition and we ought to do it i believe that we should give families a deduction for the cost of college tuition up to 10 000 for the cost of any education after high school for people of any age yes the children but their parents too if they need it we ought to do that how has the auto industry come back with greater productivity smarter technology and people who are trained to do it technology education training hard work and smart work it all begins with education and let me say one of the most important parts of education is making sure that we tear down the artificial wall in every school system in america between what is academic and what is vocational i just was in that bill ford center and i saw those young students those young men and women working on those machines that s vocational work i wasn t smart enough to do it i didn t know how to program those machines it was academic work as well as vocational work it was mind work it was smart work and that is the work of the 21st century and we have to support that work in manufacturing in services in agriculture and all forms of endeavor when i became president one of the things that really bothered me was that our country was the only advanced economy in the world that didn t have an organized system to make sure that every student like lynn rivers 21 years ago or brian today that every student who didn t go on to a college at least had a chance to continue their education by blending school and work we call it now school to work opportunities and when i was a governor i worked hard to improve those opportunities and as president we have worked hard to give 26 states including michigan the opportunity to put employers and educators together to build a seamless web of people moving from school to work in the high wage high skilled jobs that can earn them good incomes this is school to work week in america and today there are 500 000 students and 105 000 employers and 1 800 schools including both john glenn and william ford schools that have embraced the school to work opportunities our nation now offers we have to keep going until every school system in america and every student in america has the opportunities i saw your people having today they deserve it and it will build our economy brian duka has a bright future today because of the education he received here and because of the work he s doing now and we have to blend education and work for a lifetime one of the most important proposals i had that i regret this congress didn t pass that i hope the next one will is to take all these little training programs the government has and take all the money and put it in a big block and when someone is unemployed or underemployed if they re qualified for federal training help send them a check for 2 500 and say you know where the nearest good training program is take your money there get the training find yourself a job so that if you lose your job you can get a better one instead of a worse one if we do that for everybody give everybody a gi bill a skills grant that will give them a chance to move from job to job by going up not going down we will strengthen america s families and strengthen america s economy education is for everyone of every age who needs it and we have to give them that my friends in seven weeks from today you ll get to make a decision about whether to build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past about whether you believe we re all in this together or to use my wife s term it takes a village or whether you think we re on our own this country always always always wins when we put down the things that divide us when we stop fighting when we stop being small and we think big and we work together we have got to build a bridge to the 21st century that every single american can walk across there is no nation as well positioned for that century as we are and all of our diversity i look out in this crowd today there are people here today from i can see at least seven different ethnic groups just looking out here and i ll bet many more that is a strength for the united states there is no country as well positioned as we are for this global economy if we will lay the foundation and it starts with building that bridge on the finest educational system in the world thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton18 1 00a bill_clinton thank you so much let me say i am delighted first of all to be back here in the solomonts home i love this place and it s obviously a place with a loving family and i feel very good that they let us come in i thank steve and barbara grossman for their work for our party and for their help in this event tonight and all of you for being here i want to join mayor rendell in thanking you mayor menino we had a great day in boston today had a great anti crime event and senator menard thank you and i d like to also thank our dnc treasurer andy tobias my longtime friend for being here and thank you brian hardwick and thank you fran katz we re going to have a chance to visit later on i just want to make a few points first of all the kids were fabulous the singers i loved that i m something of a music lover and they sang that wonderful old jim croce song those of you who are about my age maybe a little younger it s all the more wistful because he did die young and there s that great line in that song there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them it s something that the older you get the more sober it makes you to hear that line and i guess if i could say anything to you tonight that you haven t heard is that we do have time to do what we want to do as a country and as a people to a degree virtually unheard of in our history and we need in this election and in this year to continue to find the right things and to find the strength and the vision and the will to do them i am profoundly grateful to the people of boston and the people of massachusetts they have been very good to me and to hillary and to al and tipper gore and indeed all of new england has been very good to we have carried all the states in new england in both elections and that is something for which i am very grateful and i am quite mindful of the fact that the energy and the drive for that came in no small measure out of massachusetts and out of the uncommon kindness of the democrats in new hampshire and staying with me against all the odds on more than one occasion but what i want you to think about is this a lot of you mentioned to me the wonderful 100 year old woman who came to the white house on saturday to the radio address i love that lady because she was on television she continually referred to me as a young man and i just love that and we got in a great discussion about older people and willard scott asked me if i had anybody in my family who lived to be 100 i said no but i had a very close uncle who died at 91 a couple years ago who helped to raise me and i told the story about how when he was 86 he used to once a week take a 92 year old woman for a drive and once a week take a 95 year old woman for a drive he was describing this to me and i said well uncle buddy you like those older women don t you he said yeah i do seems like they re a little more settled so anyway it s all a matter of your perspective whether you re young or not and as i ve gotten older i ve learned that the definition of young is anybody that s a day younger than i am but i ve lived a fair number of years now and there has never been a time in my lifetime when our country has had at once this level of economic prosperity social progress self confidence without overwhelming internal crisis or external threat therefore i would argue to you that we have an unparalleled opportunity to do the things we want to do and that every year it s about defining them finding them and dreaming them the second thing i want to say is that alan talked about all the tough times when we ve been here the great british essayist samuel johnson said that nothing so concentrates a man s mind as the prospect of his own destruction and many times when the democratic party s been under the gun when the administration s been under the gun people marveled at how well we did well what option did we have if we wanted to show up for work every day for the american people we just had to concentrate take a deep breath and keep on working i have found that sometimes people are most vulnerable to making errors when they think things are going along so well they don t have to think about them and this is not just this is true of people everybody here who is over 30 in this room certainly everybody over 30 everybody who can think of at least one instance in your own life when in your personal life your family life or your business life something went wrong because you thought things were going so well you didn t have to think about it anymore so i would say to you that the thing that i am seized with here in this final year of my presidency is keeping the attention of the american people on the future and making people understand that this is an enormous opportunity and accordingly a profound responsibility to define the dreams that we have for the 21st century and then to come up with a strategy toward achieving them for me it means finishing the unfinished business of the last year the patients bill of rights the hate crimes legislation the prescription medicine for people on medicare gun legislation it means an aggressive agenda which you will hear more about in the state of the union for the last year that i will be your president but it also means defining those big long term goals that can t be achieved in a year that we have to move toward and i believe that elections are always about the future and i believe we have i have always believed as anybody who s had any conversation with me about this i have always believed we would do fine this year if we were proud of our record explained how it was part of a coherent philosophy that was driving us into the future but most importantly articulated a vision that america could buy into for tomorrow and that we then had to be competitive in terms of communicating our message and that s what you ve helped us to do so we ll have more to say about this as the night goes on but i think it would be helpful you all know what i think the big challenges of the future are i think we have to make the most of the revolutions in science and technology especially in biotech and telecommunications in materials development and environmental technologies i think we have to embrace not run away from globalization but put a more human face on it so that everybody has a chance to feel they re treated fairly and has a chance to win i think we have to give every child in this country a 21st century education something we ve never really done in our whole history giving every child whatever the globally excellent education was at the moment and that we ve got to deal with the aging of america we ve got to decide what we re going to do with social security and medicare and how we re going to prepare for this explosion in the number of people over 65 doubling in the next 30 years most of us who are here hope to be among them we have to decide what our responsibilities are in an increasingly interdependent world to deal with the global challenges we have and i think most important of all as i have repeatedly said since the day i got here we have to decide whether we really believe we re all in this together and we have to keep expanding the real family of america we have to that s why i m so strongly in favor of the hate crimes legislation the employment non discrimination act continuing to work toward reconciling the differences that rend america and the world apart day in and day out every day now it seems like i m spending more and more time trying to reactivate the middle east peace process but in a calm setting like this and you see all those children up there singing tonight it s self evident to all of us that we have more in common than whatever it is that divides us and somehow if i could leave one gift to america i would leave us the ability if i could just wave a magic wand instead of getting up and going to work in the white house every day i would leave us the ability to remember that every hour of every day in everything we do because we waste so much energy and we get ourselves in so much trouble in this old world just trying to pull ourselves up by putting other people down and i am convinced that the only way we can make the most of all the modern wonders of tomorrow is to learn this most ancient of lessons so those are my big ideas for the 21st century but the democratic party has been reformed re energized and reborn in the last seven years in a way that is entirely consistent with our history and our values and we can be really proud of the role we ve played in the economic revitalization of america and the declining crime rate and welfare rolls and the fact that 90 percent of our children are immunized against serious diseases for the first time and all the progress that has been made but every election is about tomorrow and i believe with all my heart if we make time to do the things we should do we will do fine in the year 2000 the only thing that can keep us from ratifying this important direction the country has taken in the last seven years is if either we don t care enough to exert the effort to fight and to finance our side of the argument or we don t care enough to articulate the choices so that it s clear what the election is about and all i can say is if everybody in the country who thinks the way we do were as committed as you are then i wouldn t even worry about that thank you very much dem wjclinton18 1 00b bill_clinton well mayor i was just thinking that you should hope that detective holmes stays in police work and out of politics didn t she give a good speech let s give her another hand that s great i thought it was great mr mayor senator kennedy representative joe moakley barney frank mike capuano to commissioner evans and all the members of the boston police department that are here to representatives of law enforcement who have come to boston today to be with us jerry flynn of the international brotherhood of police officers tom ney of the national association of police organizations i thank you all for welcoming us i want to say that in addition to the attorney general we are joined today by treasury under secretary jim johnson the director of alcohol tobacco and firearms division brad buckles and of course as the attorney general mentioned our united states attorney don stern i also want to thank lynn jackson for welcoming us to orchard gardens community center she was nervous when she got up here to speak i said go on you re supposed to start she said i m not supposed to start until they sit down so i said you go up there and speak i ll make them sit down so then when you stood up for lisa holmes she said make them sit down make them sit down i said not on your life let me say to all of you i am profoundly grateful to the people of boston and the state of massachusetts for being so good to me and to my family and to our administration i ve been running over in my mind all the wonderful moments i ve had here just since 1991 when i first started exploring whether i should run for president the first time i visited cityyear here in boston and the day i spent commissioner evans and the mayor took a half a day with the attorney general and me to explain what you ve done to lower juvenile crime and lower dramatically the fatalities among children in this community all the other incredible times i have spent in this city and in this state including the times that hillary and chelsea and i have been vacationers here and contributed i might add to the tax base of massachusetts but this is a special day for me because it is an enormous source of pride for me to stand up after hearing a community leader a police officer the mayor your representatives in the united states congress and our attorney general talk about what you have done to give real life and real freedom back to this community when i ran for president the biggest issue on most people s minds was the economy here i am in boston just south of new hampshire eight years ago i would have been up there today but they were all concerned about the banks closing and people having their mortgages foreclosed and all these other problems but i knew that the challenges facing america were not simply economic and that we had to have a policy to try to move people from welfare to work we had to have a policy to try to open up educational opportunities to all of our young people and we had to have a policy to lower the crime rate in washington the primary debate then was whether we needed more prevention or tougher punishment and whether the federal government ought to just give speeches about it because it was primarily a local problem or give money and walk away well i felt that on both counts we should do both the first elected job i ever had was attorney general of my state before that when i was a young lawyer and even when i was a law student i used to teach criminal law criminal procedure and constitutional law to law enforcement officials i have always been interested in this and i have always been convinced that we had to have the proper balance of punishment and prevention and that the police could never do it alone not without the community not without the people in the street and the neighborhoods not without the parents and the kids people who want the blessings of a normal safe life in every neighborhood in this country and so we ve been working to try to give you the tools to do both to prevent more crime to save more kids to effectively punish those who violate the law in 1993 we passed the brady bill the congress passed it it had previously passed but it had been vetoed by the previous president i signed it and said i wanted to sign it and i believed in it and i heard all that talk about how terrible it was going to be and what an awful burden it is and now we have almost half a million felons fugitives and stalkers who have not been able to get handguns because of the brady bill and not a single hunter in america has been inconvenienced it was the right thing to do there are more citizens alive there are more police officers alive today because the brady law is in effect in 1994 the crime bill provided funds for 100 000 police officers over a six year period thanks to the leadership of the attorney general and those working with her we distributed those funds and got those folks hired under budget and ahead of schedule we passed the assault weapons ban cracked down on illegal gun dealing to young people kept an eye out also for the most innovative local crime fighting strategies like operation cease fire here in boston now the things you have done and the things we ve tried to help you do have transformed life in america as the attorney general said the crime rate s dropped now for seven years in a row the overall crime rate s at its lowest level in 25 years the murder rate is the lowest level nationwide in 31 years gun crime down 35 percent juveniles committing homicides with guns down 57 percent gun prosecutions up at all levels of government local state and federal federal firearms prosecutions are higher today than they were in 1992 but they re up 25 percent just since 1998 to 1999 those convicted of federal gun crimes are serving longer sentences we are trying to send a message an unambiguous message to people who violate the law if you commit crimes with guns or violate gun laws you will pay a heavy price no city has sent that message more clearly than boston but your message is more than that you have made us know that this is not just a numbers game you have shown that to reduce crime most and therefore to increase freedom most among your families your children and your neighborhoods prosecutions must be targeted where they ll have the greatest impact in boston s case on violent repeat offenders and on gun traffickers who supply them you have also shown that there needs to be a team effort partnerships with citizens and leaders in every community focused on saving kids and preventing crime before it occurs and so after all these years of effort and the leadership of your great mayor and others you have made boston one of the safest cities in america it is essential to making america what we want it to be in the 21st century you know yesterday we celebrated the annual holiday honoring dr martin luther king s birthday and i was honored to sign the bill that made it not only a national holiday but a national day of service we call it a day on not a day off yesterday in keeping with my tradition i went to the boys and girls clubs of washington d c with a group of citizens called greater d c cares and some young americorps volunteers and we worked on rehabing a facility but in preparation for that day i thought about all the other king holidays we ve had since i ve been president and an astonishing opportunity i had back in 1993 to speak in the mason temple church of god and christ in memphis tennessee that s where dr king spoke the night before he was killed we had all the leaders of that great church in america there at a time when america was a much more unsafe place and i just started thinking off the top of my head with the crowd i said you know if dr king could come back to earth today what would he say he d say we ve done a pretty good job of integrating our society and we have more african americans and other minorities moving into the middle class taking jobs in public service being fairly compensated for what they do but he would be sick by the crime and violence that is ravaging all the poor neighborhoods of this country and he would say i want you to know i did not live and die so that children could destroy children so that children could destroy themselves with drugs and become millionaires destroying the lives of other children and a lot of you are nodding your heads about that this is a different country today because of you yes those things still happen but now america knows we can make it better all you have to do is tell somebody the story of boston and all cynicism disappears all skepticism disappears everybody knows we can make it better we don t have to give up on our kids we don t have to give up on our neighborhoods we don t have to tolerate a level of fear and violence and crime and insecurity that no civilized society will tolerate now that is the good news and we can all celebrate that good news but if i were to ask you this question and i won t make you do it but if i were to ask you this question if i were to say to you now everybody that now thinks that boston and massachusetts and america are safe enough please raise your hand nobody would raise their hand right even though we re at a 31 year low in the murder rate even though the juvenile murder rate with guns has gone way down even though the crime rate s at a 25 year low nobody believes that america is as safe as it ought to be no one who knows anything believes that all of our kids are as safe in their childhood as they ought to be and so i say to you what are we going to do with this moment of promise we don t have any excuses anymore you know maybe seven years ago people could throw up their hands and say oh we can t make it better just support the police lock them up longer and hope someday it will get better nobody really knew now we know we don t have any excuses anymore we know how to drive the crime rate down down down and we know how to keep kids out of trouble in the first place we know how to save children i think it s time we had the real goal we ought to have as a nation we ought to say okay we got the crime rate down here s our real goal we want america to be the safest big country in the entire world we can do that not with a silver bullet but by continuing to build on what has worked and in my new budget and in the state of the union address i m going to ask the congress and the country to continue to move forward in the direction that has worked today i want to announce to you five specific initiatives that i believe will help us a lot first in my new budget i will call for hiring 500 new atf agents and inspectors the largest increase in atf firearms enforcement ever these new agents and inspectors will help us to crack down on violent gun criminals illegal gun traffickers and bad apple dealers a small percentage of the dealers who supply a very large percentage of the guns that go to criminals and to kids second we will add as the attorney general said 1 000 new federal state and local prosecutors to help take dangerous gun criminals out of our communities and put them where they belong behind bars third to strengthen the hand of the prosecutors we will invest more in the atf s national gun tracing center and supply local law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to utilize that center from computers to training we want to make it possible and we can make it possible to trace the origin of every single gun used in every single crime in the united states fourth we will create a groundbreaking national ballistics network that eventually will enable us to trace almost any bullet left at a crime scene anywhere in america to the gun of the criminal who fired it fifth the budget provides local communities with grants to run the same kind of anti gun violence media campaigns that have been such an important part of the successful strategy used to reduce gun crime here in boston or in richmond or in other cities which have tried it altogether these efforts represent the largest national gun enforcement initiative in the history of the united states they will help communities across america to push violent crime rates down by cracking down harder on gun criminals and again by interrupting the flow to prevent more crimes but i ask congress to support them and also ask congress to start this new century by abandoning another stale debate for in addition to the old debate about whether we should focus on punishment or prevention and whether the federal government should make speeches or give money there s a debate that unfortunately hasn t died out in washington and that s about whether it s better to strengthen the enforcement of the existing gun laws or to have strengthened gun laws the truth is just like the other questions the real answer is we should do both that s what we ve done with the brady bill that s what we have done with the assault weapons ban and we should do more the drop in the crime rate has been due both to changing laws and to better enforcement and better prevention last year we passed some sensible measures in the united states senate thanks to the help of senator kennedy and with the vice president casting a tie breaking vote as he says whenever he has to vote we win so by one vote we were able to defeat the high pressure tactics of the nra to pass an important advance in doing background checks at gun shows at urban flea markets having child safety locks for all new handguns a ban on importing large capacity ammunition clips but we couldn t pass it in the house of representatives even after the travesty of columbine high school i believe passing common sense gun safety legislation should be the very first action of this congress i will say again to all the people who listen to these arguments there has been no discernible increase in the burden on any law abiding sports person in this entire country with the brady bill and the assault weapons ban but we ve saved a lot of lives of kids police officers and citizens and closing the gun show loophole which is something i know something about because they ve very popular in my part of the country or the urban flea market loophole or banning the import of these large capacity ammunition clips which people can t manufacture and sell here at home anyway or requiring these child safety locks for kids is an important advance and it ought to be done it will have the same impact that the brady bill and the assault weapons ban did it won t cause anybody who is law abiding any hassle but it will save lives it s important that we do this too i also want to say i think it s important that the gun industry take more responsibility in changing the way it designs markets and distributes firearms and let me say to all of you who care about this there was some spontaneous applause there you should know this there are responsible citizens in the gun industry who actually want to work with us to find new ways to make sure the guns they sell don t wind up in the wrong hands and that kids aren t killed accidentally with them part of the answer may be in new technologies that could reduce accidents i want all of you to listen to this and law enforcement officers probably won t be surprised by this but this is important that you know this the accidental gun death rate of children under 15 in the united states is nine times higher than that in the other 25 biggest industrial countries combined combined we don t have to put up with that either technologies now exist that could lead to guns that can only be fired by the adults who own them my budget helps the gun industry accelerate the development of this technology so we need to support that as well in his last campaign in 1968 robert kennedy said the fight against crime and i quote is a fight to preserve that quality of community which is at the root of our greatness we saw something about the root of america s greatness today here in orchard gardens a community leader proud of her center a police officer who grew up just a stone s throw from here elected leaders who know the people who live in this area whom they represent a mayor proud of the progress that people working together can do all these people in uniform justifiably proud of what they have achieved that s what this is all about all of us working together and helping each other i say again for all the progress we have made we should never rest not any of us as long as there s one more child whose life needs to be saved as long as there s one more kid that can be turned away from drugs and guns and violence and kept out of prison in the first place as long as there s one more street to make safe we shouldn t quit until your country your state and your community are the safest places in the world thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton18 1 99 bill_clinton thank you very much good afternoon everyone first of all i d like to say that i am very grateful to be here at regency house with all of you i want to thank the residency council for making us feel welcome sarah beaner kenneth brown and others i want to say to the members of the press here you know the press they all think that we re all on automatic because they give us little notes here to read about every place we go but i think it would be interesting for you to know the note i got on regency house here sarah beaner is the president of the residency council kenneth brown is the past president and is now serving as the vice president not such a bad idea the regency house has 157 tenants the tenant population is made up of seniors and the disabled they are all current in their rent good for you that s great let me say to the mayor and councilmember patterson and delegate norton i am honored to be here to participate in martin luther king day as a day of service as provided by law and in the spirit of what dr king said and i am proud that i now live in a city with truly outstanding leadership eleanor holmes norton has been my friend for a very long time and is one of the most remarkable women in any leadership capacity of any kind in the united states d c is fortunate to have her the mayor in his former life was actually a member of our administration in the agriculture department and you know it didn t really offend me that we d already torn the wall down by the time he showed up because he s working hard and he s got a lot of things to do and i feel good about what he s going to achieve and mr mayor you just stay on the job and i ll tear a wall down for you any day you want any time anywhere and i thank you i want to thank david gilmore of the d c housing authority and my great member of the white house staff ben johnson who did used to be a former director of d c public housing the others whom the vice president mentioned with americorps deb jospin john gomperts but mostly i want to thank these young volunteers behind me near the end of dr king s life he envisioned a partnership in america across racial lines he could never have imagined that america would become so diverse as it is today but americorps it seems to me is the living breathing embodiment of the way martin luther king thought all of america ought to work and that s what i wanted to do when we established it you might be interested to know that in only four years since we ve set americorps up and got it going more than 100 000 volunteers have joined americorps it took the peace corps 20 years to reach that milestone and they have done unbelievable things to make america a better place helping to deal with natural emergencies helping to build houses helping to tutor children helping to immunize children working in a thousand communities across this country and if you just look at these young people standing behind me you know they come from all different parts of america they come from all different backgrounds they had different kind of reasons for joining americorps they came here after different points of experience in their lives and i m very very proud of them and i thank them you should know that today more than 100 000 volunteers are out there keeping dr king s dream alive americorps members seniors students soldiers are rehabilitating buildings painting schools cleaning neighborhoods reading to children they are doing what dr king would want us to do i also want to mention on other thing the vice president talked about the need to continue to fight discrimination dr king believed that every american regardless of race religion or background should be able to live in a home without discrimination today on this martin luther king day i am pleased to announce the largest settlement in history in a lending discrimination for home lending let me tell you about it it will affect a lot of people s lives thanks to the efforts of the department of housing and urban development under the leadership of secretary cuomo the columbia national mortgage company will offer listen to this 6 5 billion in home mortgages and extra effort to help 78 000 minority and low and moderate income families unlock the door to homeownership this settlement was made under the fair housing act which congress passed just six days just six days after dr king was killed he had worked for years to outlaw discrimination in housing and many who voted for the measure said they did it in tribute to him so here all these years later 31 years later to be exact we re proud that it s happened on dr king s national holiday now let me just say one final thing yesterday in the church that hillary and i attend they observed dr king s birthday with some special music they had a wonderful singer from the army chorus they did a lot but one of the songs they sang that i love so well was one of martin luther king s favorite hymns and it embodies what we are doing here today the first line of the hymn is if i can help somebody and the last line is then my living will not be in vain all these people are here not only because they want to help you but because their lives are richer because of it and we re all learning and growing and besides that as the press pointed out it did the vice president and me a lot of good to pick up those hammers and crow bars and tear something down you know we do this desk work all the time and we do this word work all the time and there s not always a beginning a middle and an end there was a beginning to that wall a middle and it is no longer it is over so we are very grateful that you gave us the chance to be part of this today and we thank you again i want to say i hope all across america people will hear this look at these young people they re here with you they re getting something out of this too their lives will be richer and better they will be wiser sooner they will be more sensitive and more understanding more quickly in their lives because of the experience they ve had here and the other experiences in americorps every american needs to serve and remember what dr king said everyone can be great because everyone can serve thank you and god bless you now i know we re done but i want to say a special word of recognition to melodie scales and beth mccarthy of americorps who work with me and to donald stokes who is a resident here i d like for them to come up and be recognized since they work with the vice president and me come on up here this is our crew and if you need a wall torn down you couldn t do better than this dem wjclinton18 10 93 bill_clinton thank you very much secretary shalala and fran dr love distinguished members of congress mrs cuomo mrs florio and all of you distinguished guests it s wonderful for me to be here today i was sitting here thinking that i more or less feel like the fifth wheel now just about everything that needs to be said has been said but we sort of felt one man ought to talk on this program and i won the lottery in the three minutes that will elapse at the beginning of this talk another american woman will be diagnosed with breast cancer if i speak for 12 minutes another woman will die of it during the course of the remarks and yet we know that one in every three american women does not received the basic services like mammographies which can help to detect breast cancers and that the cost of not dealing with this amounts to about 6 billion a year to this country over and above all the human heartbreak involved now that means that this is another one of those terrible american problems that is not only tearing the heart out of so many families but also has left us again with no excuse for why we would spend so much money picking up the pieces of broken lives when we could spend a little bit of money trying to save them we know all the stories many of you here are the stories i appreciate the reference to my brave mother who struggles on with her breast cancer condition and who has resumed her remarkable life but who also knows how much more we need to do i m glad to see sherry kohlenberg s husband and son here when she came to see us in the oval office sherry was one of our 50 faces of hope and we kind of keep up with all those folks that to us symbolize what we wanted this administration to be about and when sherry came to see us last june with larry and with sammy she said don t ever forget what this does to the people who are left behind and i m glad to see them here today and i m glad they had the courage to come to remind us of that since we know that there are a lot of things we don t know it s important that we focus on research as well as treatment that we focus on detection early as well as care in my first budget submission i recommended the creation of the office of research on women s health and the largest increase in funding for breast cancer research in the history of the national institute of health when you add that up to the increased funding for detection and preventive services at the center for disease control the food and drug administration and the department of defense together the combined expenditures approved by this congress thanks in no small measure to these women who are here amounts to about 600 million this year alone i also want to emphasize that in the health security plan that i have proposed to the congress we provide for increases not decreases in medical research and a means to fund those increases in medical research we cannot provide basic security to all americans and forget about the research that needs to be done on the things we don t know how to cure yet to help to coordinate our research and delivery efforts in mid december secretary shalala will bring together a broad range of health professionals government agencies and groups like yours to develop a national action plan for the prevention the diagnosis and the treatment of breast cancer a national strategy is what these petitions are all about and while i am trying to reduce the volume of paperwork in washington frankly i m glad to see these here we will do better and you will help us and we will have this national action plan i also want to point out that the health security plan that hillary and i are fighting so hard for along with the other members of our administration will also fundamentally change the dimension of the fight against breast cancer it is a plan that clearly shows the sign of several strong women at work including two on this platform based on the notion that when it comes to health care research and delivery women can no longer be treated as second class citizens we began to manifest that commitment frankly in this budget which was just passed in which virtually everything was cut or frozen but which increased services for early childhood and for little children we also believe that we have to further increase our investments in these things in prenatal in maternal and child health care and nutrition and in detecting and preventing diseases we believe that we need a health security plan that guarantees to every american a comprehensive package of benefits that not only can never be taken away but that includes preventive services to try to keep people well as well as help them when they re sick we believe that some of these preventive services are so important that they should indeed entail no out of pocket costs at all to american citizens when the considered medical judgment is that everybody should get them on a regular basis that includes routine clinician visits and not only appropriate breast exams but also important procedures like immunization and pap smears we also know that we can reduce deaths by making mammography widely available and by encouraging its use and this plan covers these mammograms at no additional cost to patients for all women over 50 and provides mammograms where important in the judgment of the physician and the woman in every case where there is a health care plan so if this plan passes for the first time everybody who s got a health insurance policy which will be everybody in america will have mammograms in the policy that is a very important thing the unique structure of this plan with some preventive benefits absolutely free to americans in the highest risk categories was based upon the best available scientific evidence expressed in the findings of the united states preventive services task force and supported by forthcoming guidelines for example on mammograms from the national cancer institute they were based on the best available scientific evidence i will say again and i very much appreciate the fact that just before we came up here today hillary whipped out an article that had dr love quoted and she said have we done it like you said we should and dr love said yes i felt like i had gotten an a in class i also want to emphasize that none of this can ever be fixed in stone you hear a whole lot of discussion as we get into the debate on the health care plan about how this or that or the other problem is not fixed well my fellow americans this is a very dynamic thing health care and even the countries that have the best system if you define best as high quality results universal coverage preventive services at lower costs even they have continuing problems you have to work on this forever this is the beginning of what we should have done a long time ago not the end of it and one of the things that we need to make a commitment to do now is to update all these preventive approaches as new and better studies become available based on recommendations like those we ll soon receive from the president s special commission on breast cancer they worked hard for two years and i m looking forward to that report finally let me say that and this is an important thing to women who live in inner cities or remote rural areas the best health care coverage in a policy is no good unless you can access it we can have great policies and coverage but we also have to have access so we had a whole group of people who work all across america on these problems and i myself spent a whole four hour period listening to this because i ve worried about it for years coming as i do from a small rural state to be able to say to you that if this plan passes as we propose it we ll be able to have the latest technologies given to doctors and nurses who can practice in the smallest rural communities and the most isolated parts of our large inner cities to allow health professionals to contribute their best to all the people of this country who need these preventive services as you know from your efforts together all these signatures change requires that people work together but when they work together and make their voices heard change can come i ll never forget the meeting i had with breast cancer advocates at a hospital during the election and i told hillary after it was over that if we had the energy of the women who were there at that meeting concentrated on about four major things we could turn this country around in three and a half weeks and so i say to you in closing we need that energy and we will give you a vehicle beginning with secretary shalala s meeting in december to develop a national action plan on breast cancer but it is important that that plan be fit into a larger commitment to the health care of americans to put women s health concerns from research to the delivery of health care on an equal footing with men s to say that it is better to focus on keeping people well than just treating them when they re sick and when you focus on that you will find them when they re just a little sick and be able to get them well a whole lot quicker and finally to say that none of this will ever come to pass until we finally join the ranks of every other advanced country in this world and give every citizen of this country health care that is always there that can never be taken away from them every american can bring some weapon to this struggle and your weapons are unique they are not the dollars and dealmaking talent of lobbyists or the stethoscopes or syringes of doctors and nurses but they are the power of the pen and the petition and most important of all the power of the personal story for in the end america ought to be shaped by the lives of americans not just by the interests of americans but by the values of americans not just by what we want when everything is going well but by what we need in our direst and most difficult moments i urge to you continue to fight in the months ahead we can win this battle as a part of the national drive for early breast cancer detection tomorrow thousands of doctors and hospitals and medical centers across the country will offer discounted mammograms thanks in no small measure to all of you i m going to sign this proclamation when i finish my remarks which declares tomorrow national mammography day i want to thank all the members of congress who pushed this through and two who are not here senator biden and congresswoman marilyn lloyd who were sponsors of this legislation and i want to remind you that you ve got to continue to bring this level of intensity of energy of passion to this battle you have the most powerful thing of all personal stories when american politics works best it s when it reflects the lives of the american people you can make sure on these issues we do that and i hope you will thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton18 11 04 bill_clinton well ladies and gentlemen if my beloved mother were here she would remind me that rain is liquid sunshine and that i shouldn t complain about this because the ground probably needs it and somebody is benefiting from it mr president and mrs bush president and mrs carter president and mrs bush members of the eisenhower nixon johnson kennedy and carter families to the vast number of members of congress and former members of congress here i don t know where they are because you re all in ponchos but there they are there s a huge group from congress and the president sent four planes down and i thank him for that to all the guests from other countries and my fellow americans welcome to my rainy library dedication thank you skip rutherford and all those on my staff and the volunteers from arkansas and across america who work so hard to make this event just perfect and except for one thing it is i thank the previous speakers and those who have sung and entertained mr president i can t thank you enough for your generous words and for coming to the opening at all i mean after all you just delayed your own library opening by four years i congratulate you on your election and i wish you godspeed especially in a new and more hopeful time for peace in the middle east i remember the first time i ever heard george w bush give a speech in iowa and i called a friend of mine and i said my god that guy can beat us he is a good politician he has been very kind and generous to my family and i thank him for that today we re all red white and blue i thank former president bush and mrs bush for coming and for their service to our nation president bush i loved all that stuff you said but i want to thank you for something seriously in 1989 after i had been governor for a long time you were the president who finally called us together and asked us to develop national education goals for america so that all our children could get a good education it was the beginning of a serious reform effort which i tried to carry through and which i know president bush has tried to push so thank you for doing that and for giving me the opportunity to work with you thank you president and mrs carter for all you did in the white house and all you ve done in the years since to make the world more just and peaceful john quincy adams once said there is nothing in life so pathetic as a former president well he turned out to be wrong because of his own service and president carter has proved that nothing could be further from the truth he just told you we met 30 years ago when he was trying to help me he didn t tell you that less than a year later and less than a mile from here jimmy carter asked hillary and me to join in his campaign for the presidency we did and as you can see from this day it was the beginning of quite a ride i recently spoke with president ford who at 91 is unable to come and with his extraordinary wife betty but they still are strong yesterday i received a wonderful letter from nancy reagan who remains in our thoughts and prayers i thank the fords and nancy and the late president reagan for their service to our country i want to thank all the vast numbers of congress and former members who are here who served with me i couldn t have done most of the good things we did without em and they re not responsible for any of the mistakes i made i can t see through all the umbrellas and all the ponchos or whatever you call those plastic things that make you all look so beautiful but i m pretty sure senator kerry s out there and if he is i want to thank him and i m glad he s back on the job i want to thank the people of my beloved home state for your support for your love your friendship the trust the sacrifices you so willingly made when we worked together here and when you carried me to the white house i thank the friends of a lifetime who also made indispensable contributions i ve said a lot of times i may be the only guy that ever got elected president because of his personal friends i thank my pastor rex horne and all the other ministers here who have taught me prayed with me and counseled me over the years i thank god for my family and hillary s family a lot of them are here today and i thank you for making this whole long trip like i said i do wish my mother were here she would have enjoyed seeing all of you even in the rain and i promise you you would have enjoyed seeing her most of all i want to thank hillary and chelsea now hillary s a senator and she has all the power in our family but she s proving what i always said she has the best combination of mind and heart conviction and compassion i ve ever encountered though i must say chelsea is giving her mother a good run chelsea your life and our love for you gave meaning to our public service they made the presidency the second most important job i ever had i love you both so much thank you and let me lastly thank the people who have contributed to and built this library the school of public service and the foundation my staff my former staff the board the architects the exhibit designers the landscapers the contractors the 1 500 people who put this building up the city and state officials who supported it i thank especially the architects jim polshek and richard olcott ralph applebaum for the wonderful exhibits and my longtime friend bill clark whose company built this building i also want to say that i thank those of you who are continuing to help in the work of the library and the foundation this library tells the story of america at the end of the 20th century of a dramatically different time in the way we worked and lived we moved out of the cold war into an age of interdependence with new possibilities and new dangers we moved out of an information i mean an industrial economy into an information age economy we moved out of a period when we were obsessed with overcoming the legacy of slavery and discrimination against african americans to a point where we were challenged to deal with an explosion of diversity of people from all races and ethnic groups and religions from around the world and we had to change the role of government to deal with that that whole story is here in 80 million documents 21 million e mails two of them mine 2 million photographs and 80 000 artifacts in the interests of openness and public access we are asking more than 100 000 of these documents to be opened early before the law requires i thank those who are working on the clinton school of public service because i want more young people to go into public service i thank those who are working in harlem and here on my foundation or who visit us on the internet as hillary said at clintonfoundation org who help us to promote religious and racial reconciliation to advance citizen service to promote economic empowerment for poor people in poor communities and to continue the fight against aids in three years in africa the caribbean india and china we have succeeded in cutting the price of the testing equipment and generic drugs by 70 percent and we hope by 2006 and expect to serve over 2 million people with medicine who were not getting it on the day i left office now this library of course is primarily about my presidency i want to say a special word of thanks to al gore and to tipper for the indispensable contribution that they made and i told al today that this library won an international environmental award even though it s got a lot of glass because of solar panels and a lot of other improvements we cut the energy usage here by 34 percent so al thanks for the inspiration and i m still trying to measure up to the challenge you set for me so long ago i believe the job of a president is to understand and explain the time in which he serves to set forth a vision of where we need to go and a strategy of how to get there and then to pursue it with all his mind and heart bending only in the face of error or new circumstances and the crises which are unforeseen a problem that affects all of us when i became president the world was a new and very different place as i said and i thought about how we ought to confront it america has two great dominant strands of political thought we re represented up here on this stage conservatism which at its very best draws lines that should not be crossed and progressivism which at its very best breaks down barriers that are no longer needed or should never have been erected in the first place it seemed to me that in 1992 we needed to do both to prepare america for the 21st century to be more conservative in things like erasing the deficit and paying down the debt and preventing crime and punishing criminals and protecting and supporting families and enforcing things like child support laws and reforming the military to meet the new challenges of the 21st century and we needed to be more progressive in creating good jobs reducing poverty increasing the quality of public education opening the doors of college to all increasing access to health care investing more in science and technology and building new alliances with our former adversaries and working for peace across the world and peace in america across all the lines that divide us now when i proposed to do both we said that all of them were consistent with the great american values of opportunity responsibility and community we labeled the approach new democrat it then became known as the third way it was as it was embraced by progressive parties across the world but i like the slogan we had way back in 1992 putting people first because in the end i always kept score by a simple measure were ordinary people better off when i stopped than when i started i grew up in the pre television age in a family of uneducated but smart hard working caring storytellers they taught me that everyone has a story and that made politics intensely personal to me it was about giving people better stories that s why i asked those six people to talk here today when i think of the family leave law i think of that good man who brought his dying daughter to see me in the white house on a sunday morning and who grabbed me as i walked away and said the time i got to take off from work was the most important time in my life i think of people like that fine woman who worked herself out of welfare and now runs her own business i remember the first woman i ever talked to who went from welfare to work i said what s the best thing about it she said when my boy goes to school and they say what does your mama do for a living he can give an answer those are the things that make politics real to me at home and around the world the record is all in there what we did at home what we did abroad i thank bono for singing about northern ireland and president bush for mentioning the balkans there were many other places we tried to help but the record is there even where we fell short we pushed forward and what i want to say is if you think of the biggest disappointment around the world to me i tried so hard for peace in the middle east i thank shimon peres and the children of yitzhak rabin and ehud barak for being here today and the current foreign minister of israel for being here today i did all i could but when we had seven years of progress toward peace there was one whole year when for the first time in the history of the state of israel not one person died of a terrorist attack when the palestinians began to believe they could have a shared future and so mr president again i say i hope you get to cross over into the promised land of middle east peace we have a good opportunity and we are all praying for you finally let me say this quite apart from all the details the thing i want most is for people who come to this library whether they re republicans or democrats liberals or conservatives to see that public service is noble and important that the choices and decisions leaders make affect the lives of millions of americans and people all across the world i want young people to want to see not only what i did with my life but to see what they could do with their lives because this is mostly the story of what we the people can do when we work together yes this library is the symbol of a bridge a bridge to the 21st century it s been called one of the great achievements of the new age and a british magazine said it looked like a glorified house trailer and i thought well that s about me you know i m a little red and a little blue what it is to me is the symbol of not only what i tried to do but what i want to do with the rest of my life building bridges from yesterday to tomorrow building bridges across racial and religious and ethnic and income and political divides building bridges i believe our mission in this new century is clear for good or ill we live in an interdependent world we can t escape each other and while we have to fight our enemies we can t possibly kill jail or occupy all of them therefore we have to spend our lives building a global community and an american community of shared responsibilities shared values shared benefits what are those values and i want to say this this is important i don t want to be too political here but it bothers me when america gets as divided as it was i once said to a friend of mine about three days before the election i heard all these terrible things i said you know am i the only person in the entire united states of america who likes both george w bush and john kerry who believes they re both good people who believes they both love our country and they just see the world differently what should our shared values be everybody counts everybody deserves a chance everybody s got a responsibility to fulfill we all do better when we work together our differences do matter but our common humanity matters more so i tell you we can continue building our bridge to tomorrow it will require some red american line drawing and some blue american barrier breaking but we can do it together thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton18 11 93a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you mr vice president let me just say that i have never been involved in an effort in which there were so many diverse people working so hard with so little concern for who got the credit after the battle was over i thank all those who were mentioned last night and were mentioned today by the vice president i will say again that i believe that his stunning performance in the debate on the larry king show played a major role in our victory now that the house has voted for the north american free trade agreement voted for america to continue to compete and win in the global economy i want to say again how grateful i am to the members who voted with us and how deeply i respect the opinions and convictions of those who did not and those who supported them it is for us now to make sure that this agreement is speedily passed by the united states senate and then implemented as it was intended to be implemented with the cooperation of both labor and management to make sure that it works to the benefit of the united states and to all the working people of our country it is also our responsibility to press on until we have the kind of education and training programs we need and finally it is our responsibility to make sure that we make the most of this effort in terms of our relationships with our neighbor to the south mexico the rest of latin america and hopefully with nations all across the world who are committed to open and free trade to lowering the barriers that they have to our products and services and to working together for more global opportunity jobs and growth last night i called president salinas and i told him that the vice president and chief of staff mclarty would be available to go to mexico city when nafta is ratified by both nations to meet with him and his government for in depth discussions about how best to launch this great new era in north american relations the president gracefully welcomed this suggestion and invited the vice president to travel to mexico as soon as nafta is approved by the united states senate and by the mexican senate which is expected to be this tuesday now i am leaving for the first ever asian and pacific economic cooperation forum in seattle with the strength in hand to fight for open markets throughout the world the 15 asian pacific economic partners that i will meet are dynamic and powerful traders and competitors from the creative tension between their nations and ours can come an economic expansion that will sustain us for years to come the fastest growing part of the world economy is in asia one thing is clear by taking the courageous step of opening trade in our own hemisphere we have the economic the political and the moral standing to make the case that that ought to be done throughout the world that america is serious about lowering trade barriers and promoting growth in our country and throughout the globe i look forward to this trip and to continuing the fight i will remind you again as i have said so many times in the past there is simply no evidence that the united states or any other wealthy country can grow jobs and increase incomes unless the world economy is growing and unless we have more customers for our goods and services we took a long step in the right direction last night and i intend to take more steps on that course in the next few days in the pacific northwest thank you very much dem wjclinton18 11 93b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much governor lowry and mayor rice chairman schronz ladies and gentlemen i thought i ought to bring air force one home and i m glad to be back here myself and i do love this town seattle has been wonderful to me the state of washington has been good to me without your support i would not have been able to take office as president and to work every day to keep the commitments i made to the american people to try to change this country for the better i want to thank you especially today for all the work that you and this city have done and all the work people throughout this state have done to help this asian pacific economic cooperation meeting come off as well as sit has everyone says you ve been a wonderful host i thank you and your nation thanks you frank noted that a number of my cabinet members came here with me today along with congressman norm dicks and heather foley the wife of house speaker tom foley i wanted to say also that senator patty murray had planned to come home with me today i invited her here and i want you to know why she s not here she s not here because she is in washington fighting to pass a crime bill that keeps in the ban on assault weapons to make our streets safer i m proud of her for doing that you know i ve been to this wonderful city for many reasons i came here as a governor to a governors conference i ve been here on vacation i came here many times asking your help to become president today i come on a truly historic mission for this is the first meeting ever of the leaders of the nations of the asian pacific economic cooperation group i ll have a chance to meet with the prime minister of japan the president of china the leaders of the other nations in this group we ll be able to talk about regional economics and political developments we ll be focusing on what we can do to help our own people make no mistake about it ultimately this meeting is about the jobs the incomes and the futures of the american people about exhorting american leadership in a world where there isn t a lot of growth now so jobs are not secure incomes are stagnant in every wealthy country on earth the only way we can turn this around now is to have more growth not only in america but throughout the world with all of the difficulties we have today our economy is growing more than europe s economy it is growing faster today than japan s economy our problem in america today and boeing s problem today is that there s not enough growth in the world economy so people don t have enough money to buy these airplanes and we re going to change that beginning at this meeting for the pacific region i know we can do that america s workers are still the world s most productive america can compete and win all over the world in all markets if only given a fair chance and if there are sensible partnerships to promote growth people cannot spend money they do not have so we come here today hoping to drive down trade barriers open up trade opportunities and promote more growth seattle has long seen itself as the portal of the pacific today it is the portal to the asian pacific region the world s fastest growing economy the largest region in our world in terms of population with enormous potential for american prosperity and new partnerships for peace and freedom and democracy washington exports more per person than any other state in our nation and over 80 percent of those exports go to the asian pacific region you know that you know also that boeing is america s largest exporter and that no country in the world better exemplifies no company in the world better exemplifies the potential of worldwide economic partnerships to create opportunity for people right here at home in america i m proud that i worked with the transportation secretary and the commerce secretary and others in my administration to see that your aircraft get full and fair consideration in the global market someone sort of made fun of me the other day they said you know president clinton is almost like a rug merchant out there selling american products well i m not ashamed that i ve asked other countries to buy boeing and i ll do it again if given half the chance i was so pleased this week that boeing reached an agreement with gulf air based in bahrain to sell six of your new 777 wide body planes with an option to purchase another six an agreement that could be worth 2 billion i was pleased to read in the paper today of boeing s agreement with southwest airlines i think you all know we re working on other sales in the middle east and i m also proud to say that i am delighted that boeing was selected as the prime contractor for our america s space station something i worked hard to save from the budget axe in the last session of congress that s another global partnership because now we re going to develop that space station in partnership with the russians in further pursuit of peace and global economic prosperity and finally i want to say a special word of thanks to congressman norm dicks for his initiative in getting congress to initiate a new airlift initiative to supplement our present airlift capacity and replace some of our old planes by buying off the shelf commercial airlines like the 747 i commend norm dicks for that initiative it can save the defense department money and put people in washington state to work i ask you here to continue your resolve in the face of adversity to be an example to the rest of our nation that we can compete and win in this global economy as frank said and as governor lowry and mayor rice noted we ve just come through a tough fight in the congress where good people on both sides argued about what was best for the working families of america i did everything i could for 12 years to advance the cause of working people as a governor i ran for president because i thought we could expand the horizons of young people and preserve the american dream and make a strength out of our diversity in the nation as you have done in seattle that s why i ran this debate over nafta was very profitable very productive but sometimes very painful because some of the best friends i ever had were on the other side of that debate and they were on the other side because they were tired of seeing americans work harder for lower wages to pay higher prices for health care housing and education to have less security in their basic lives that was a genuine fear that should be honored by every person in public life today those are the fears we have to answer i disagreed on the solution because i believe that the only way a rich country can grow richer is to find more customers for its products and services in the absence of that we cannot continue to grow we are getting more and more productive as we have to do to compete but what does that mean that means fewer people can produce more things if fewer people produce more things and you still want more jobs at higher incomes there must be more customers there is no alternative but make no mistake about it my fellow americans the fight over nafta shows us the best of both sides the winning side was right we ought to expand our trade we ve got to bring down trade barriers we have to reach out to the rest of the world we need a partnership not only with mexico but with all of latin america 700 000 million people plus in a giant trading cooperative partnership we need that but we also need to guarantee every american working family the education and training they need the investment in their communities they need the security of health care that can never be taken away and an economic policy dedicated to growing jobs and raising incomes and benefiting the ordinary citizens of this country that is what we have to do our economic strategy is simple direct and i think correct put our own economic house in order enable our people to compete and win in the global economy and find more markets for our products and services just in the last 10 months the united states congress has enacted an historic plan that has brought interest rates down to record lows kept inflation down increased investment permitted millions of americans to refinance their homes and created more jobs in the private sector in the last 10 months than in the previous four years it is not nearly enough but it s a darn good beginning and we re glad to have it we must now move on to invest in education and training and new technologies and helping us to win from downsizing defense by converting to domestic technologies and opening the world to those markets we can do it and that s what this meeting is all about so i say to you again you have helped america to make history here in seattle the meeting of the leaders of the asian pacific region if we make wise decisions and if we begin a long term disciplined partnership for growth and opportunity can create jobs here and jobs across the pacific can raise incomes here and give hope to people who never had it all across the largest ocean on the globe we can do this and when we do i hope you will always take pride in knowing that it began here in washington america s trading state america s model for the future in a town that s been awfully good to me and is now a wonderful example for the entire united states thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton18 11 97 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you tom steve grossman alan solomont and all the people who worked on this dinner tonight thank you very much for being here i have just returned from a great trip to california i stopped yesterday in wichita kansas at the cessna plant and i saw there a picture of why i got into public life so i thought i would start by telling you what i did we wanted to go to wichita to the cessna plant because they have what i believe is the best corporate welfare to work program i have ever seen in america and because they have support from any number of federal agencies who are helping them to do what they re trying to do cessna has about 10 000 11 000 employees in wichita and they have this program called the 21st street program where they built a training center for people who have been on public assistance first if you want to come there you go through their training program that s three months then if you like it you go through a sort of pre work program that s three more months if you survive them both they guarantee you a job with good income and good benefits and they take the most difficult to place people on welfare people who have almost no education no skills people who have been subject to terrible cases of domestic abuse and not only that if you don t have a car or if you ve been beat up in your own home they ll give you an apartment across the street from the training center for yourself and your kids i went there and two of these women got up and talked who had graduated from this program and there were over 200 there who had and there were all the local officials all the state officials in this incredible celebration of this partnership doing basically what we all ought to do anyway trying to make sure that everybody has a chance in life once you set up a system where people are required to be responsible you ve got to give them an opportunity and recognizing that our destinies are dependent upon one another in very profound ways it was wonderful and when i walked out of that place the two women that spoke to introduce me were by far the most popular speakers there i can tell you that and they just basically told their life stories and this lady came up to me and she on the way out i shook hands with all of the people who were graduates of the program she said you can read about me in the morning paper today and i m really glad you came so i pick up the paper and this woman is a single mother with three kids of her own and two twins she took in trying to raise five kids a high school dropout abandoned by her husband desperate all of a sudden she finds this program she s got a place to live she s got a training program she s got a future that s why i got into public life to do things like that and i say that because there is a direct connection between your presence here and what we re able to do in the lives of people in the country and it often gets lost and i think it s a real shame most of you who come to a democratic fundraiser do so not in the hope of getting a tax cut you probably when you help the democrats you just hope you don t get a tax increase most of you who come to help us come here because you believe that we are obligated to one another that we have a sense of mutual responsibility for the future and you have kind of a large and expansive hope for what people can achieve if they work together to bring out the best in each other that s probably the driving distinction between us but i want you to understand that there is a connection between your sitting here and what i ll be doing tomorrow and then how somebody will be affected by it out in the country within a week or a month or a year or sometime down the road i was thinking about it sitting at dinner tonight you know when i became president i said look i ve got a simple strategy here i want to create opportunity for everybody who is responsible enough to work for it i want us to come together across the lines that divide us into one america i want us to continue to lead the world for peace and freedom i want a government that is less bureaucratic but gives people the tools and the conditions they need to make the most of their own lives that s what i want to do we started with an economic program that not a single member of the other party voted for instead they sounded like chicken little they said if you pass the president s economic program the sky will fall the end will come the deficit will explode unemployment will increase well five years later they re out there able to brag that they voted for a balanced budget the only reason they could do it is that we had reduced the deficit by 92 percent before the balanced budget law ever triggered in because of what we did in 1993 with our democrats and it was the right thing to do for america five years later we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years look at the crime issue same thing i couldn t ever figure out what was going on in washington on the crime issue when i lived out there in the country it appeared to me that what happened was when crime got high and things got hot and heavy that congress just passed a bill and increased penalties for everything in sight but it had been a very long time since anybody had done anything to help people on the streets either catch criminals or keep people out of trouble in the first place so i gave the congress a crime bill that was essentially written by police officers community leaders and prosecutors 100 000 more police prevention programs for kids punish people who are truly bad actors take the assault weapons off the street don t let people with criminal and mental health histories buy a handgun that s what we did it was pretty simple it was a police officer s bill we had a bitter bitter fight in congress the leaders of the other party fought us we got a few republican votes for the crime bill unlike the economic bill but they were precious few and we had to break an angry angry filibuster in the senate all these you know ominous things we were throwing money away these police would make no difference the brady bill would make no difference the assault weapons ban would make no difference all i know is we ve now put 65 000 of those 100 000 police out the brady law kept over a quarter of a million weapons out of the hands of people with criminal and mental health histories the assault weapons ban is good nobody needs an assault weapon do go deer hunting and i ought to know i m from a place where people do a lot of it and i just moved last weekend to try to stop people from running through a loophole that s so big you could drive a truck through it in sending assault weapons back into the united states from foreign places of manufacture disguised as sport weapons but anyway you know they d say it wouldn t make a lick of difference all i know is the crime rate has gone down every year for five years and we have the lowest crime rate in 24 years and if you talk to the police officers of the country they believe it s because of the ideas advanced by the democratic party and supported by the democratic party there are people alive today because we did not cave in one more time to the people who didn t want the brady bill who didn t want the assault weapons ban who didn t want to do anything different on crime they wanted to talk tough they liked to do that but when it came time to step up and do something that the police and the prosecutors and the community leaders said was work the democrats were there look at the welfare bill i get sick and tired i get so tired of hearing our friends in the republican party and some of our friends in the press say oh the president caved in and signed the republicans welfare bill it s a load of bull and no one could say it and mean it and be honest unless they just didn t understand how the welfare system works the bills that they passed i vetoed and they passed another bill and i vetoed it again they passed a third bill and i signed it why because i believe we ought to require able bodied people to go to work it didn t particularly bother me that we were ending the national guarantee of a monthly welfare check and letting the states set the guarantee for the following reason we have in effect had a state set guarantee for 25 years something i never read in any article before the welfare law passed the most generous state in the union paid a welfare family of three 655 a month the most tight fisted state paid the same family 187 a month under the so called uniform federal law there was no uniform federal law on the check but i ll tell you what was uniform food and medicine for the kids so i said if you want me to sign a law requiring people who can work to go to work leave the kids with food and medicine you try to take that away i ll veto it they did and i did and i said if you want to make these people go to work don t make them be bad parents give me some money for child care give me some money to create jobs for people in the high unemployment areas and we worked it out and i signed the bill it was a great bipartisan bill it had overwhelming bipartisan support but the only reason i could get that bill and that i didn t get overridden on my veto was that the democrats said require people who are able bodied to go to work but don t make them give up on their kids don t do anything to their kids we stood for that we made it stick and we made a difference and when we did it there were people on the other side who said well it won t be as effective now all i know is that there are 3 8 million fewer people on welfare than there were the day i took office the biggest drop in welfare in history largely due to the fact that we have a good economy and the right kind of welfare reform system i could give you lots of other examples the first bill i signed was the family and medical leave law vetoed twice by my predecessor the leaders of the other party thought it was an undue burden on business to say that even for larger employers that a person ought to be able to take a little time off when a child was sick or a parent was dying but i ve had more ordinary citizens come up to me personally all over this country and thank me for the family and medical leave law than any other thing that i ve been involved with as president and i personally believe it ought to be expanded to cover regular trips to the doctor and a couple of trips to school a year because one of the biggest challenges we face as a nation is balancing the demands of work and family nobody should have to choose between being a good parent and successful at work because the most important work of any nation is raising children and if we do that right most everything else takes care of itself so i say that there s a direct connection between your presence here and the 12 million people that have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law the 8 5 million people whose pensions we saved the 13 5 million people who have jobs the 10 million people who got an increase in their minimum wage the 5 million children who are going to get health insurance coverage for the first time now under the new balanced budget law the countless number of people who will now have a real tax cut to help them pay for the cost of college tuition all the children that are going to get computers and software and better instruction in their schools because we said we re going to hook up every classroom and library to the internet by the year 2000 there s a connection between your support and that happening these things do not happen by accident they happen because parties with philosophies and choices have the power to make those choices and bring them to the american people and get them done and i must you know i ve been criticized by some in my own party i like to work in a bipartisan fashion i m always happy to reach agreement but when the tough work had to be done on the deficit our party did it alone and 92 percent of the deficit was gone by the time the balanced budget law passed when the tough work had to be done on crime and someone had to stand up to the special interest groups that have kept us from doing things we should have done years ago our party did it almost alone and when someone had to remind people that welfare was not just a way to punish poor people it was a way to support work and family it was the people in our party who supported me saying yes require people to go to work but no don t hurt their kids they gave us the right kind of law when there was a wholesale assault on the environment when people in the other party they honestly believed this i m not attacking their character i m attacking their judgment here they honestly believed that most of these environment laws and rules and regulations caused a lot more trouble than they were worth and that they were a terrible impediment to the economy i honestly believe the right sort of environmental laws grow the economy because they accelerate the movement into new technologies into new fields and dealing with new challenges that s what i believe i ve always believed that and i think that we permit the degradation of our environment at our peril i think it s an obligation we owe our children well five years later the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food supply is safer we have more to do but it s safer we have fewer toxic waste dumps and the economy is the best it s been in a generation i think our idea that you can grow the economy and preserve the environment was the right idea i think the assault they waged on the environment that we stopped them from raising was ill advised and unnecessary and i think now we have five years of evidence so when you go home tonight i want you to think about those folks i talked to you about in wichita i want you to think about all of the millions of people whose lives have been changed for the better by the policies that we ve implemented and i want you to realize there s a direct connection between the fact that you were willing to stand up and put your voice on our side put your contributions into our efforts and give our side a chance to be heard you made that all happen that s what the public system we have in america is that s what it means to be a citizen and as you look ahead i really believe that our country has the 50 best years facing it that any society has ever known if we do the right things if we do the right things we ve still got a lot of challenges out there economic educational entitlement reform environmental challenges a lot of things but we have to keep our eye on the ball we should do those things which create opportunity and reinforce responsibility we should do those things which bring us together as one community celebrating our differences but identifying those values that are even more important that bind us together we should do those things that reinforce our role as a beacon of freedom and hope and prosperity and security in the world that s what we should do that s what the democratic party stands for and that s what you have stood for i am very grateful and i hope you will always be very proud not only that you were here tonight but that you have contributed to changing the face and the future of this country thank you very much dem wjclinton18 2 98 bill_clinton thank you linda ned zechman thank you thank you secretary shalala for your wonderful work and i thank the first lady for what is now a more than 25 year crusade to bring quality health care to children we re delighted to be joined by mayor barry and members of the d c city council congresswoman eleanor holmes norton and congresswoman diana degette from colorado and many many child advocates in this audience who have been working on these issues a long long time last month in the state of the union address i asked the american people to work together to strengthen our nation for a new century and especially to build the right kind of future for all our children with world class education and quality affordable health care let me begin by thanking the men and women who work in this hospital for their efforts to restore our most fragile children to health to give many of them second chances at life this is a place where medicine shines and miracles happen every day but it should not take a miracle to ensure that children like linda s children have the care and insurance they need to stay healthy and to be treated when they re sick i still have a hard time believing that this country with the finest health care system in the world cannot figure out how to give affordable quality health insurance coverage to every single child in america step by step we are working hard to make sure all americans get the health care they deserve two years ago we passed a law and i signed a law to make sure every american could keep his or her insurance when they change jobs or when someone in the family is ill last year in the historic balanced budget agreement we extended the life of the medicare trust fund for more than a decade we also made this unprecedented 24 billion commitment to provide health care to up to 5 million more children and i want to say more about that obviously in addition to implementing the provisions of the balanced budget law to cover children this year we re also going to attempt to pass a health care consumer bill of rights which is all the more important since 160 million americans are now in managed care plans we want to extend medicare to americans age 55 to 65 who have lost their health insurance who can buy into the program and of course we want to protect all our children from the dangers of tobacco and we re hoping and praying for a comprehensive resolution of that issue but let s go back to the question of covering children congress appropriated the money 24 billion over five years with the goal of insuring 5 million of the 10 million children who don t today have health insurance now 3 million as the first lady said 3 million of the 10 million kids who don t have health insurance are eligible for the medicaid program today if we could get 100 percent of those children into the medicaid program we could actually insure more than 5 million children for the 24 billion but if we don t get any new children into the medicaid program or very few then we re going to have a very hard time meeting that 5 million goal so this issue of not only helping the children and their families but also the hospitals and the providers who have to be reimbursed for the care they give with expanding the medicare program to the children who are eligible is profoundly important if we are to reach what i know is the goal of every person in this audience which is to provide affordable health insurance coverage to our children now this children s health initiative that was part of the balanced budget agreement is part of the kind of the vision of government that has driven our administration from its first days i always believed that we had to get rid of the deficit and balance the budget because otherwise the economy wouldn t work right we couldn t get interest rates down we couldn t have new investment for businesses to create new jobs people couldn t afford to buy homes we d have all kinds of problems but i also always believed that we had to do it in a way that left more money to invest in our future particularly in education and health care and the environment and the things that will shape the quality of life so that s what we re trying to do but i want to say again just the fact that this money has been appropriated is not enough we cannot let the appropriation of money just sit there we can t just have laws on paper that say we re going to cover 5 million more people those of you who work in these programs understand that this a complex and challenging task most of these children are like linda s children most of these kids that we re trying to cover are the children of working people who are working hard and doing their very best every day and paying their taxes and simply cannot afford a traditional health insurance plan one of the ways that we have to deal with this is to expand medicaid coverage to the 3 million who are already eligible under the law one of the most shocking things to people who don t have this problem is to find out that huge numbers of these kids are prevented from getting medical care simply because their parents don t know they re eligible therefore all of us have an obligation to see to it that every child who can take advantage of this historic investment in health care does so and does it now beginning with the medicaid program the federal government must do its part states and businesses and individuals must step up to the plate and our message to parents and to teachers to preachers and to coaches must be what you do not know can hurt your children you have to find out if your child is eligible for the medicaid program today i am launching an all out effort to let every family know about health insurance whether it s medicaid or another state program that is currently or soon will be available because there are now new children s health programs coming on line under the program passed in the balanced budget bill in a few moments i will sign an executive memorandum directing the eight federal agencies who run our children s program such as wic and food stamps to cooperate in a comprehensive effort to make sure that every family gets the information they need to enroll their children whether from an agency employee or from pamphlets toll free numbers or simplified application form and i call on congress to pass the new funds i am requesting in this balanced budget to help states publicize their new child health programs and their child centers and enroll the children in medicaid automatically even as they wait for final approval of their applications next and most important every state must take responsibility for ensuring that every eligible child within its borders gets insured medicaid is one of the best ways to expand health insurance to more children and it is a state run program i m pleased to announce that colorado and south carolina will join alabama as the first states to expand insurance coverage to more uninsured children under the bill we passed last year but you should know that over 40 more states are well on their way to expanding their own insurance programs i applaud the governors for their commitment and their innovative efforts to enroll more children and i thank ray scheppach from the governor s association for being here today we can t rest until every state has a program and a commitment to implement it finally the private sector has to help us get the job done many businesses and foundations have already joined in bell atlantic will provide the leadership to establish a new 800 number that will direct families to state agencies in charge of medicaid safeway has agreed to put the 800 number on their shopping bags the national association of chain drug stores and the national community pharmacists association will help us get the words out whenever parents pick up prescriptions pampers has agreed to include a letter in parent education packages that go to millions of new mothers in the hospital i thank all of them for being exemplary corporate citizens and i m pleased to announce the robert wood johnson foundation and the kaiser family foundation have committed more than 23 million to finding better ways to expand coverage and outreach efforts america s promise the outgrowth of the president s summit on service made a healthy future for all children one of its five goals and along with the american academy of pediatrics the american hospital association the national association of education all have launched their own efforts to target and enroll uninsured children and i thank them this is an extraordinary partnership to make sure that every child gets the health coverage he or she needs to have a fair and healthy shot at life but it is only the first step we need every parent every grandparent doctor nurse health care provider teacher business leader foundation every community all across america to work until they find the ways to reach all our children who can be covered by medicaid or by the new children s health insurance program like all parents hillary and i know from experience that nothing can weigh more heavily on your mind than the health of your child the slightest cough the most minor accident can cause enormous worry i can barely imagine what it would be like to also have to worry about finding the money to pay for your children s health care in the first place too many parents live with these worries every day millions of our fellow americans people who are dedicated citizens people who get up every day and go to work people who pay the taxes they owe to the government people who do everything that is expected of them and still have to worry about the health care of their children for lack of insurance coverage this is wrong if we really want to make america strong for the 21st century we will correct it we have the tools it is now up to us to use them thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton18 2 99 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much governor to our panelists i d like to thank the mayor the numerous state legislators who are here city council members and county commissioners and others i m delighted to be back here and delighted to have a chance to meet with all of you and to hear from our panelists about an issue that i had a lot of conversations like this about in 1991 and 1992 in new hampshire i came here to talk about the health care needs of our people what we can do to address them and the special responsibilities we have now as a result of the aging of america as all of you know the number of people over 65 is going up dramatically when the baby boomers retire we will have double the number of people over 65 we do today and that imposes all sorts of challenges on our country on the nation as a whole and on the states i want to compliment the governor for the marvelous work that she has done here in new hampshire taking full advantage of our children s health program which as she said was part of the balanced budget act we think it will enable us to provide health insurance to at least 5 million of the 10 million children in our country who don t have it if the states will vigorously implement it and new hampshire has done a terrific job and i also appreciate the work she s done on health access disability and other issues we ll talk about some of that today our panelists today are going to talk about a number of the health challenges we face the right of patients to have proper health care and you talked about the right to sue as you know i tried very hard last year and i m trying again now to pass federal legislation which would give people the right to seek redress from hmos if they suffer wrongfully we want to talk about how hard it is for small businesses still to provide coverage we want to talk about the health care needs of the elderly and children and people with disabilities as i said all of these health care needs are going to be complicated by the aging of america they re going to be complicated by the fact that as we live longer more and more of us will need some sort of long term care and that s why one of the things in our balanced budget is 1 000 tax credit to help families defray the cost of providing long term care for elderly or disabled loved ones we also because health care is improving we ll have larger numbers of people with disabilities who deserve a chance to go to work if they can work to have health care to live to the fullest of their abilities i believe that we need to see this in the context of a larger picture but i would like to say just a word about the discussions that will inevitably be held about a problem that we could no one would have believed if we had talked about it six years ago in new hampshire or seven years ago and that is what to do with the surplus that was an inconceivable discussion in 1991 and 1992 in new hampshire there are all kinds of ideas let me just say that because we have a challenge with the aging of america which affects not only those who will be seniors but their children and grandchildren i can tell you as the oldest of the baby boomers one of the things that my generation is most worried about is that our aging will impose unsustainable burdens on our children and therefore undermine their ability to raise our grandchildren that s why when we talk about saving social security and saving medicare for the 21st century we re not only talking about the seniors of our country but also the children and grandchildren of those seniors and it s an economic necessity not only for the seniors but for all of their children as well and the same thing is true when you talk about doing something about long term care but i ll just say that on the surplus issue which is not primarily what i wanted to talk about today but the first question you will hear all kinds of debates in the next year about what to do with the surplus and they ll all be good ideas but we have to ask ourselves what should our first priority be my first priority doesn t take all of the surplus but my first priority is to set aside enough money in that surplus to save social security and medicare for the 21st century strengthen social security by doing something about the extraordinary poverty rate among elderly women who are increasingly living alone in their later years and lifting the earnings limit on social security to help healthy seniors get what they re entitled to and still be able to work if they choose to save medicare and to do something to modernize medicare that i think is terribly important i ll never forget the meeting i had in nashua at the senior center there with the couple that told me they missed a lot of meals every week so they could pay their medical bills medicare should have a prescription drug benefit i feel very strongly about that and let me say again this will cost money in the short run it will save big money in the long run if people can get proper medication particularly with the dramatic advances in medical science what you will see is there will be fewer trips to the hospital fewer trips to the doctor people being able to maintain their own health care so i hope these things will be done if we do that it would require us to save about 77 percent of the surplus for 15 years and we project now we will have one now of course it will be off from one year to the next some years we ll have good economies some years the economy won t be so good but there is no built in deficit in your government anymore so over any 10 15 year period we can pretty well predict if we have normal economic performance ups and downs what the aggregate savings would be if we do that let me tell you something else we can do we will pay down the publicly held debt in this country which was 50 percent of our annual income when i took office now down to 44 we ll pay it down to 7 percent that s the lowest it s been since 1917 before we went into world war ii what that means is that instead of spending 14 cents of every tax dollar you send to washington just paying interest on the debt which is what we were doing in 1993 when i took office we ll be only spending 2 cents of every tax dollar for interest on the debt so we can deal with the aging of america in a way that gets the debt down brings interest rates down keeps the economy going and strengthens long term economic health and well being for america so i hope that whatever we do on all the other issues and the details of social security and medicare and all that there will be a common understanding that our first priority needs to be to keep the economy strong deal with the aging of america and invest in the future of this country now meanwhile let s come back to the present day in the balanced budget i have presented to congress that has nothing to do with the surplus in other words whatever this debate is in the surplus is not affected by the budget i presented this year we do have a 1 000 tax credit for people to provide long term to the elderly and disabled this has become a bigger and bigger concern of americans as more and more people provide this because they think it is the right thing to do or because it is the only thing to do whether it is the right choice or the only choice it is rarely an easy choice and it is never cost free last summer at their annual family conference in nashville vice president and mrs gore talked about this whole long term care issue a lot and we got into the development of this proposal and now the vice president is having forums about this all across the nation but the basic problem is that out of pocket expenses even for family members providing long term care can be quite high and as you know it s rarely covered by private insurance or medicare and for caregivers who hold a job outside the home which that s the vast majority of caregivers they may have to take unpaid leave or work fewer hours which also is a direct drain on them now we have tried to strengthen the medicare by cracking down on fraud and abuse we ve saved billions of dollars on that we ve extended the life of the trust fund for a decade but in the next few years this long term care challenge for the elderly and for the disabled is going to mushroom so in our budget we have the 1 000 tax credit we also have a caregiver support program to help put caregivers in touch with each other so they can help each other and to provide technical and other support for them and we also have taken new steps to help medicaid pay for home and for community based care all of this i think is quite important i also believe very strongly that we should pass a national patients bill of rights like the one governor shaheen has been trying to pass here and it s obvious why more and more people are covered by managed care you re going to see this year the managed care insurance rates start to go up quite steeply after years of being around the rate of inflation and i think people in managed care programs can benefit from them as long as they don t have to give up the quality of care if you need to see a specialist you ought to be able to see one if you have to change jobs you shouldn t have to change doctors in the middle of a treatment whether it s a chemotherapy treatment or a pregnancy or some other kind of continuing treatment and you should not be denied the right to sue in my judgment if you are harmed there are other provisions in our patients bill of rights i hope we can pass that this year i believe this is not a political issue anyplace in the world except washington d c if you took a poll in dover new hampshire i ll bet you there wouldn t be a nickel s worth of difference in the support for a patients bill of rights among republicans democrats and independents we all get sick we all need doctors we all need health care this should not be a partisan issue there s another bill there we re trying very hard to pass this year that would affect some of the families in this room and many in the state and that is legislation proposed by senator jeffords senator kennedy senator roth and senator moynihan that would allow people with disabilities to keep medicaid health insurance when they go to work i think this is very very important i always remind people by the way to the younger people in this audience saving social security is an issue not just for seniors a third of the money from the social security trust fund goes to payments to disabled americans and payments to the surviving children and other family members of people who die prematurely so this is something that we should never forget when you hear all this debate on social security don t forget that that it s not just a question of what we pay in and what we get out in retirement it s also we re insuring all of each other against the vicissitudes and the fortunes of life and i think that s very important but this bill is incredibly important and finally we ve asked congress to pass a plan that would give tax relief to help small businesses insure their employees and to help them join together and form more pools to buy more economical insurance that is still a very large problem in our country when i came here in 1992 people were very concerned about the number of americans who did not have health insurance on the job i can tell you that the number of americans without health insurance on the job has increased since 1992 now we are insuring more people than we were then because we ve extended the medicare program and we want to extend it further for people with disabilities who go to work we re going to try to get 5 million kids into the program that the governor talked about but we have to do everything we can to try to help small businesses to afford health insurance for their employees well those are the things that i wanted to talk about i hope there will be broad support for them here i hope you will tell your congressional delegation you think we ought to have a 1 000 tax credit you think we ought to have a tax credit for small businesses to get health insurance you support the effort to let people who are disabled keep their medicaid health insurance when they go into the workplace and you support the patients bill of rights these are some of the things that i believe we can get done this year and i m going to do everything i can do to it now let s hear from our panelists i d like to start with beth dixon who is a mother of four from concord who spent the majority of the last year caring for her father who suffered from alzheimer s and passed away last march i d like for her to tell a little bit about her story and what we could do to help people like her dem wjclinton18 3 93 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much secretary bentsen and ladies and gentlemen thank you for that wonderful reception i have looked forward to this day when i might come to the treasury for some time and with somewhat mixed feelings i read about this building since i was a boy i remember in the periods of my life when i was absolutely absorbed in the civil war reading about the trips that president lincoln used to make across the street to come to the treasury department i learned today from the secretary that in 1830 the employees burned this building down you know i ve done a lot to increase people s sense of empowerment but i hope i didn t overdo it i ve also quite frankly heard that i would be humbled to the point of embarrassment if i walked into the offices of either the secretary or the deputy secretary of the treasury that they would make the white house look like public housing so i thought i d show up and see years ago the whole government used to be within walking distance of the white house and i m glad the treasury still is i m glad that so many of you have worked so hard to help to put together the economic program that is now making its way through the congress and i want to thank you for that and to echo what secretary bentsen said that most americans literally would have no idea they would be staggered to know the hours that were put in by public servants in the preparation of this program and in the historic speed with which it was put together i hope that you did it not only because you were here and it was your job but because you know what americans feel and that is that our national security today is tied as never before to our economic security and that if we do not regain control of our economic destiny we will soon lose the ability not only to provide for a future for our children but to lead the world that has come to look to us that s why i asked the secretary of the treasury to serve on the national security council as well as on the national economic council and why when he met to meet with the leaders of the other g 7 nations and found himself treated with such respect he helped us in the conduct of american foreign policy as much as in the conduct of american domestic economic policy our policy is a team effort i tried to convince the white house staff and all of my cabinet of that and i say that to you in lloyd bentsen i think we have a secretary of the treasury with the unique capacity to command respect not only in the halls of this building and among the financial leaders of the country but also in the congress and in the world s financial and political capitals and that is an invaluable asset he s been my neighbor for a long time i ve known him for nearly 20 years and admired him for a long time and when we were riding the bus on one of my numerous bus trips this one across texas i made up my mind then that if the people elected me president of the united states that i would ask him to become secretary of the treasury i think it s been a pretty good decision he has sought here in deputy secretary altman an old and trusted friend of mine of many many years we went to college together he made money i went into politics my mother until i was elected president my mother was absolutely convinced he had made the right decision in under secretary designate newman and under secretary designate summers and so many others i think we have a rare combination of intellect and experience of people who are committed to making this country into the high wage high growth nation that it ought to be in all the employees of the treasury department i have seen i ve noticed a rare commitment to serve this nation conscientiously and i must say with the recent tragedies freshly in our minds i think that we should all once again honor the plaque on the 4th floor of this building that notes more than 160 treasury agents who have been killed in the line of duty in our nation s history from the secret service agents who protect our presidents and who have a particular chore in me because i like to get out and see the people who put me in this job to the customs agents who wage war on drugs to the agents of the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms many of the employees of this department risk their lives to protect the lives of the rest of us my prayers and i m sure yours are still with the families of all four of the alcohol tobacco and firearms agents who were killed in waco todd mckeehan and conway le bleu of new orleans steve willis of houston and robert williams from my hometown of little rock three of those four were assigned to my security during the course of the primary or general election my gratitude is also with the alcohol tobacco and firearms agents who helped to evacuate the world trade center in new york in the aftermath of the explosion and later who helped to find the identification number of the van that led to the arrest of the first suspect in the bombing i know that all of you join with me in praying for a peaceful and sure and quick conclusion to the events in waco here in this building treasury employees made extraordinary efforts this has already been noted in the preparation of the economic plan and you are continuing to tackle some of the most important issues facing our country i want to reemphasize what secretary bentsen said the agenda that i have laid before the american people cannot be effective without the confident committed intense consistent and long lasting efforts of the employees of the department of the treasury from our efforts to find ways to control health care costs and provide coverage for every family through our plan to ease the credit crunch on small businesses to the plan to extend the earned income tax credit to lift every working family out of poverty to the proposal to create community development banks in the communities of this country where the poor are willing to work if they can access the free enterprise system to our efforts to negotiate russian debt relief and promote free institutions and free markets there and around the world and to our effort to create a comprehensive strategy for global economic growth all these things depend up on you and the employees of the department of the treasury and every one of you whether you consider your job large or small is making in inestimable contribution to our efforts to adjust to the changes in the world that have dealt so much grief to the american people over the last several years but can bring so much hope and prosperity to the american people in the years ahead if we can find a way to make these changes our friends and not our enemies indeed i think you could make a very compelling case that the central challenge of this time is the challenge of making the changes that we cannot control that are inevitably going to come anyway the friends of the average american people instead of their enemy even as we speak the congress is debating and deciding on the economic program especially on the immediate jobs package this economic stimulus will create a half a million jobs it will create some jobs immediately that will build a foundation for more prosperity in the future we have to start immediately investing in our children s schools our workers skills our families health the transportation and communications networks that will make our communities more productive our companies more profitable and our people more secure over the long run if we make these investments we will create more jobs today and have a stronger economy tomorrow every element of this plan is designed to help americans do better to get the economy moving whether by generating jobs or increasing income investing in the future or reducing the deficit that has so paralyzed our ability to control our own destiny if we give the plan s elements a chance to work altogether we can make the changes we need we can create a half a million new jobs in the short run eight million during the term of this economic program and make or next 20 years most important of all the best in our history there are those who still resist these changes who prefer the status quo they say we don t have to change anything i say just look around the world look at what happened in europe for the last decade when they had two major economic recoveries that generated no new jobs look at what happened just last month where out trade deficit went up even though the american dollar went down because our trading partners gripped in recession and without any new jobs and any incomes couldn t by any more of our products look at what has happened in this country where the unemployment rate is higher today than it was at the depths of the recession even though we just reported the biggest increase in productivity in 20 years in this country it is clear that there needs to be a partnership between the private sector and the government to get the economy going again in ways that generate incomes and jobs as well as show good economic statistics at the end of every month there are some who say well this program s all right but we ought to do a little less of it they are known affectionately as the status quo lite crowd over at the white house frankly i think that if we do a little less of everything have a little less deficit reduction a little less spending cuts a little less tax increase a little less investment then we ll get a lot less in results it is clear that the time has come to make a fundamental change in policy and direction in this country we know that the things that we re doing will work this plan contains an enormous incentive to increase private investment in the near term in ways that will generate jobs we know it contains a permanent investment incentive for small business which until just a couple of years ago had been the main generator of new jobs in this economy indeed you can make a compelling case that the recession we have endured in jobs is almost totally tied to the fact that the small business engine that created more jobs than big business lost in the 1980s came to a screeching halt in the last two years in the face of a recession a credit crunch the incredible burden of health care costs and other costs on small business in adding new employees to their enterprises we also have proposed some special incentives for new companies in high technology areas that will create the high wage jobs of the future all of these things should not be compromised if you just take the last issue alone the economist lester thurow has written a book called head to head which estimates that most of the new high wage jobs in the future will be created in seven areas of high technology and that there is a limit to the total number of jobs the world can absorb in those areas and that many of our competitors have planned for what will happen 10 years from now much better than we have we are playing catch up in some areas where we appear to enjoy the lead this program is designed to insure that we can keep that lead for 10 or 20 years and that our economy and your future as public employees will be supported by that kind of technologicallybased job growth in the future i believe that these things are critically important to our future and i hope that the united states house of representatives will vote today for new jobs and deficit reduction let me also say that there are a lot of people programs that some question the value here of but look at the plan for immunization we know that if we immunize all children against preventable childhood diseases we would save over the course of their lives 10 in health care and lost economic benefits for every 1 we spend on immunization today it works we know that if we expand college opportunities to families of middle class people and low income people who otherwise couldn t afford to go to college or stay in college we ll get more money back because of the earning power of college graduates and how much greater it is than the earning power of college dropouts or high school dropouts we know that and so when we invest in people in a world where what you earn depends so much on what you can learn we know there will be a direct return to the taxpayers and to the rest of the people in this country these things are unobjectionable but we ve always found excuses not to make a full commitment the toughest thing about this economic program is it requires so many difficult decisions if you want to increase investment and reduce the deficit at the same time that s never been done we ve reduced the deficit in times past we ve increased investment in times past and we ve had years where all we did was just let the present spending patterns spiral out of control but we have never had a disciplined plan to reduce the debt and increase investment at the same time look what this plan has produced in the markets look how much lower interest rates are just since the last election i bet there are people in this room today who have refinanced a house or gotten the benefit of a variable interest rate on a credit card or gone out and bought a car at a lower interest rate because of the interest rates going down there are americans who have literally already gotten as much back in lower home mortgage payments already than they re going to pay in the energy tax for the next year or two because if you make real changes that are tangible that people can see they have real results so many times our government has been burdened by blurring everything around the edges i hope that today the house will make a clear statement to the american people that we re not going to blur this around the edges we re going to have 150 and now more cuts in specific spending programs we re going to raise some taxes even though they re tough and make over half of the money come from people who benefited most in the 1980s those with incomes above 200 000 we re going to have a balanced program that also increases investment and we re going to say there really is a difference in government spending that in immunizing a child or sending somebody to college is not the same thing as spending more money every year on the same health care there is a real difference there is a difference and it matters and let me say finally that i appreciate more than i can say the work that you have done and the sacrifices that you will have to make to make this economic program work the vice president has been asked by me to head a program on reviewing the entire performance of the federal government trying to find ways to in effect reinvent the way government operates and he told me right before i came over here that he was well aware that treasury had been among the leading departments in installing quality management techniques and doing other things that would modernize the operations of government we have some money in the stimulus package that will help you to modernize the operations of government further and when he comes back i hope you will be willing to meet with him and work with him and in the meanwhile remember we have six months to try to get the best ideas we can from all the federal employees in the country about how to save more money and increase our ability to serve our customers the american people so if you have those ideas i ask you to give them to the vice president finally let me say that the end result of all of this has to be to help our country work better has to be to improve the lives of the american people i hope that by my coming here today millions of americans who never thought about the treasury department will know that you re here working for them and i hope you will know how very grateful i am for all you have done and all you must do if this program to turn america around is to succeed thank you very much dem wjclinton18 3 96 bill_clinton thank you very much general shalikashvili deputy secretary white general sheehan general tilelli general shelton admiral miller general sherfield command sergeant major austin command sergeant major laye to the members of congress who are here senators johnston and breaux and congressmen jefferson fields hayes and mccrery to the members of the joint readiness training center the members of the fort polk community to the department of defense civilians and to all the men and women of america s armed forces let me say i was very impressed by that recent maneuver where you rushed the ropes and i was very impressed when all the people behind you rushed up behind you and i know you re a lot warmer now and that s the main reason you did it i wish you were about five feet taller you could be a wind breaker for us up here i am delighted to be the first sitting president ever to visit fort polk i know well the joint readiness training center as some of you may know before it came here it was located in my home state when i was governor in little rock at the air base there and at fort chaffee i must say when i was governor and it was announced that we were losing the jrt center to fort polk i had some qualms about it but from the looks of things today it s been a good move it s stronger than ever before and the jrtc is serving the united states well thank you very much as all of you know i come here today primarily to stand with the veterans of operation uphold democracy the men and women who restored freedom to haiti we have been true to our word and true to our mission because of your skill and professionalism the vast majority of our forces have returned from haiti on time just as we said they would the last 500 american peacekeepers are now packing up and in less than 30 days they too will be home you made history by showing once again that when america acts on behalf of its values and its interests it gets the job done you undertook a difficult task and every single one of you who served in haiti can say with great pride mission accomplished you made a difference for our nation s security and for a neighbor in need we and other nations will now have to help haiti in the hard road ahead of it but the military job was done done by you and other allies who came to work with you and for that every single one of you should be very proud eighteen months ago our nation faced a serious challenge just a few hundred miles from our shores a brutal regime was torturing and murdering the citizens of haiti more than 3 000 of them had been killed in a reign of terror the democracy that they had voted for in overwhelming numbers was stolen from the people tens of thousands were fleeing to america and to other nations in unsafe boats and rafts and many died along the way there was a clear threat to our borders and to the civility of our region because it was the right thing to do and because it was in our interest we decided to intervene we gave our word that democracy would be restored and because the military dictators came to the united states and broke their word when they promised to leave you the men and women of uphold democracy kept america s word from beginning to end this mission was a testament to the skill and professionalism of america s armed forces the coup leaders knew from the outset they were facing the best trained the best equipped the best prepared fighting force on earth when they learned that the 82nd airborne and other units were on the way they gave way that enabled our troops to land on the ground without bloodshed and prove once again that our military might is the indispensable muscle behind our diplomacy you are trained to fight time and again you have stood down aggression and triumphed in battle in haiti you came to a different kind of mission and showed the world another side of america s magnificent military you and our troops who are now in bosnia have demonstrated a dedication to fighting for peace as great as your ability to prevail in war you ve paved the way for the return of haiti s democratic government you took guns off the street you helped to develop a local police you gave the people there a new sense of security you fixed the roads and bridges and bought the food and medicine and cleared the way for a return to normal civilized life you gave the people of haiti the breathing space they need to reclaim their democracy to get their economy started to undertake the hard work that only they can do of building a free nation now haiti has enjoyed its first democratic transfer of power in 200 years as a nation thanks you to while the country remains poor while its institutions remain fragile this country now has better prospects for the future than at any time in the past you did the job when i sent america s troops to haiti in september of 1994 joined by 27 other countries troops i said that the united states forces would remain through the inauguration of a new president that took place on the 7th of february i want to now thank and ask you to join me in thanking the extraordinary men who led the u s and the u n efforts in haiti general hugh shelton general dave meed general george fisher and general joe kinzer let s give them a big hand for their service and leadership there was a lot of extraordinary service from others in uniform as well people like army special forces sergeant first class gregory cardot who gave the ultimate sacrifice today we remember his loss we honor his devotion to duty and we honor that of all those of uphold democracy like american servicemen and women everywhere those of you who served in haiti went above and beyond the call of duty i would like to mention just a few of those in closing who went the extra distance and made the extra difference sergeant first class joseph register jr saw a mob beating a haitian man ignoring his own safety sergeant register plunged into the crowd shielded the badly wounded man and gave him first aid he protected the man despite great personal risk until other soldiers arrived to help and he probably saved that man s life for his brave actions sergeant register received the soldier s medal the army s highest peacetime award for heroism airman first class patricia hasboun who we just saw receive the joint service commendation medal used her own creole language skills to help teach a haitian town s police chief to drive as she distributed food and toys and clothes to orphanages throughout haiti while on patrol in port au prince staff sergeant mark maxwell and sergeant bill fitzpatrick now stationed here at fort polk pushed through a crowd to find a woman lying on the ground in labor and in great pain sergeant fitzpatrick secured the area staff sergeant maxwell using his skills from the combat life saver course delivered that woman s healthy baby boy special forces staff sergeant jorge ramos took it upon himself to restore the sanitation system and public washing facilities in the town of leogane he organized local volunteers and gave a community that had been badly neglected one of the essentials of a decent existence and out of gratitude to the sergeant and his troops the townspeople pained a four foot high replica of his special forces patch on a nearby wall these are only a few of the stories of uphold democracy we know that our success in haiti would never have been possible without the strong support of the military families of operation uphold democracy and i would like to now say a special word of thanks to all of them we americans know that the burden of our leadership in the world weighs heavily on the families of men and women in uniform here and around the world we ask our troops to travel a long way from home to be apart from their loved ones for long periods of time to take on difficult and dangerous missions so i thank them and let me also say here publicly what i will have a chance in a few moments to say personally to the families of the troops in bosnia who are here today we also honor your strength and your sacrifice you are giving the people of bosnia an opportunity for peace you are helping to prevent the recurrence of the most vicious bloodshed europe has known since the end of world war ii and to prevent a widened war which could have drawn in american forces in the fighting we know it s tough for one parent to be left to carry all the family responsibilities to bear the extra burden of running a household and raising the families we ask a great deal but time and again america s military families deliver too all of you have shown what is best about our country the determination to stand up for freedom and to stand against oppression the readiness to give a helping hand to do all of that together as one america i thank you for that your example explains why people all over the world look to america for help and for inspiration we can t be everywhere and we can t do everything but where we can make a difference and where our values and interests are at stake we must act that was the case in haiti you acted and acted well above and beyond the call of duty i congratulate you on your tremendous achievement i thank you for a job well done your nation is grateful and proud god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton18 3 96a bill_clinton thank you i ll tell you what it s been a cold winter in washington it s good to be down here in more ways than one i want to thank irwin joseph for his fine introduction and for his years of distinguished leadership i thank ron brinson for welcoming me back to the port of new orleans and i thank all of you who work here who make this a success i m delighted to be here with so many of your officials and former officials i want to thank my good friend senator john breaux who always brings his sense of humor to every endeavor something we need more of in washington d c i might add i want to thank senator bennett johnston and to tell you that i will miss him a great deal he s always helpful to me if i help louisiana first i want to give you an i was sitting here thinking as i was coming today well bennett is going to retire and he ll lose interest in all this stuff and mayor morial was up here speaking and talking about how the crime rate had come down in new orleans with the help of the community policing efforts which were at the core of the crime bill we passed in 1994 and i m very proud of that so i said thank you so i said to senator johnston i said i think it s just great that things are going better in new orleans the crime rate is coming down the juvenile crime rate is coming down the economy is up he said yes it is and he said i ve got just one more little project here i want to talk to you about so you may get him for free after next year for all i know i want to thank my longtime friend congressman bill jefferson and his colleague congressman cleo fields who is out here in the audience i want to also echo the positive things that were said about your fine young mayor i love working with him and let me tell you something new orleans is one of the few cities in america today where not only the crime rate is going down but the crime rate among juveniles is going down not only because you re being tougher on crime but you re giving these kids something to say yes to so they can stay out of trouble in the first place and that s a real tribute to the mayor and i respect him for that i want to thank lt governor blanco and attorney general ieyoub for being here they re over there to my left and i thank the religious leaders for coming and i want to thank all the former officials who are here i see two new orleans natives your former state treasurer mary landreau and my dear friend congresswoman lindy boggs thank you my dear for being here thank you i d like to thank the people who provided the music today the james river movement and the st augustine high school band let s give them a big hand over there you know i feel sort of like a preacher who gets up to give a sermon and i m preaching to the saved and besides that it s already been given by everybody who s spoken before i wanted to come here to help you dedicate this new national wharf because it is the symbol of the decision that you have made to reach out to the rest of the world to compete and win when i became your president i had a very straightforward vision of what i thought our country had to do to deal with the challenges of the new information age and the new global economy i wanted to see this country go into the next century which is now only four years away with the american dream alive and well for every american who was willing to work for it without regard to their race or their region or where they started out in life i wanted to see our country remain the world s strongest force for peace and for freedom for security and prosperity around the world because that makes us safer and stronger and i wanted to see us come together more as a people around our basic values of responsibility and opportunity and work and family and most importantly as a community in my state of the union address i tried to address all these things and to say what is to me the most important lesson i have learned as your president which is that whenever we are divided we defeat ourselves but whenever we are united america always wins i want to thank the members of congress who are present here for helping us to change the economic direction of this country to implement a strategy that will permit the american dream to be more available to all americans as we move into this new world for helping us to reduce the deficit to increase our investment in people and research and technology and to expand trade on fairer terms four years ago this country was drifting with high unemployment and stagnant incomes in the last three years and two months our economy has produced 8 4 million jobs and i am proud of that and you should be too the combined rates of unemployment and inflation and home mortgages are the lowest they have been in 27 years we now see the united states leading the world again in key industries from autos to telecommunication today just today for the third year in a row the distinguished world economic forum in europe has said that the united states is the world s most productive strongest economy that is what the american people have produced and they should be very proud here in louisiana over 160 000 new jobs have been created in the last three years bank lending has increased new homes are increasing by 15 percent a year homeownership in our country is now at an all time high and in each of the last three years there has been a record number of new businesses i know that we are all concerned and i want to say more in a moment about the impact of large businesses having large layoffs but you should know that entrepreneurs in america small business people in each of the last three years have created far more jobs than have been laid off by large companies so that we are net 8 4 million ahead no other country in the world has a record even remotely approximating that in the last three years and it s a great tribute to the people who are out there in the private sector working hard not only the business owners and the management but the workers who have done so much to become more productive and competitive in this global economy i m also proud of the fact that our country is getting its act together at home all across america the crime rate the poverty rate the welfare rolls the food stamp rolls the teen pregnancy rates are down in america that is good news for the united states and i m proud of the fact that our country has remained the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and security and prosperity as your ceo has said we have led the world toward broader trade agreements we ve also led the world back from the brink of nuclear disaster there s not a single nuclear missile pointed at an american citizen today for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age and i am proud of that when i leave you i ll have the honor of going up to review our troops in fort polk the brave men and women who have just returned from haiti will be especially honored because there they helped to restore democracy to stop the flow of desperate refugees to our own shores when i sent them to haiti i promised that they would finish the job and come home soon and i will be saluting them for a mission accomplished even as our you know wait wait wait a minute wait a minute we can t both wait wait wait we can t both talk at the same time i ll tell you what wait a minute i ll tell you what i ll do if you ll let me finish then i ll ask people who want to hear you go outside that door right there and hear you after i finish but let me say that even though what i said to you is true and accurate and this country is clearly in better shape than it was three years ago we know that this is a record for the american people to build on not to sit on because we know that a lot of important challenges still remain out there for our people we know that even as our economy has created more jobs too many people still work without a raise too many people fear this downsizing or layoffs that could take their own lives away from the stability they now enjoy in the flash of an eye we know that even though the crime rate is dropping dramatically a lot of people are still afraid when they walk down the street and the rate of violence in our country is still entirely too high and we re losing too many of our young people still to drugs and gangs and crime we know that even as people all across the world take strides for peace none of us are immune from the things that we have seen in the bombs in london or in israel or the poison gas in japan or even in oklahoma city so this is a time of great opportunity but also a time of great challenge this is as i said in the state of the union the age of greatest possibility the american people have ever known the greatest period of change in 100 years since the time when millions of us moved from the farm to the factory from the country to the city and the towns i am proud of the work that we are doing to take advantage of this change but i know we have more to do how will we as a nation do for all americans what you have done here to turn the challenge of the new economy into opportunity well we re going to do it the way we have always done the right things by working together i say again this country has been hurt more by permitting itself to be divided by forces for short term gain when what we really needed to do was to work together for the long run and we dare not let that happen today you heard others before me talk about trade i want to put it in a larger context i said in the state of the union and i say again to you here there are at least seven major challenges we have to face if we re going to fulfill our mission of opening the american dream to all americans who will work for it and pulling the american family together and maintaining america s leadership first we have to strengthen america s families and give all our children a decent childhood yes we have to invest in their education their health care and nutrition but we also have to give their parents the capacity to shape their lives that s why i fought so hard for the v chip in these new television stations if you re going to have 500 television stations give parents back the right to control what their young children see i think it s important we have to renew our schools and open the doors of college education to everyone if you look at the differences in wages today in america you see that the single most significant thing is the level of skills that workers have which means that we not only have to open the doors of college education to all americans we have to make available continuing education and training throughout the lifetime of every single solitary american worker and that s why i say to you the best thing we could do to cut taxes if we pass the balanced budget plan this year which i still hope we will the politics notwithstanding the best tax cut we could give american families is a tax deduction for the cost of education after high school for up to 10 000 a year that would make a difference to america s families for people who have to change jobs we have to provide a greater measure of economic security in a way that doesn t undermine our ability to create jobs what does that mean if you lose a job you should immediately be able to get a voucher to take to the local community colleges or wherever you need it to get an education to start a new job in life if you change jobs you ought to at least be able to take your health insurance with you and you ought to be able to take a pension with you when you go that s what we need to do i say again i laud what the mayor has done here but we cannot stop in our fight against crime and violence until every child has a chance to grow up safe and until when you turn on the television news at night and you see the reports of a crime you are surprised we have to make it the exception not the rule again in america as you and louisiana know we have got to find a way to grow our economy and improve our environment and we have proved time and again in the last three years that is not a choice you have to make we do not have to choose between a clean environment and a growing economy if we do it right we can have both and that ought to be the priority of every american citizen and finally we have to restore america s faith in government we have to restore your faith that you re getting your money s worth that we re doing our job and that we re not doing things we shouldn t do that you should be doing for yourselves in the last three years we have taken significant strides the government is smaller by the end of this year the government will be as small in washington as it was when president kennedy gave his speech here 34 years ago that is something all americans need to know the government is less bureaucratic we re getting rid of 16 000 pages of federal regulations the government is getting more effective the small business administration has cut its budget and doubled its loan volume the government is trying to be more responsive to you almost three quarters of all the people on welfare in the united states today are in welfare reform experiments that the federal government has told the states to have at it and try to move people from welfare to work these are important changes but there is more to do we ought to pass the right kind of balanced budget that gets interest rates down grows the economy balances the budget but doesn t wreck medicare and medicaid and doesn t walk away from education and the environment we ought to pass the line item veto that my friends in the other party have said they re for for 100 years to give the president the ability to x out unnecessary spending and we ought to pass campaign finance reform we ought to do things that will increase your confidence that washington is doing your business because that is exactly what we need to do and finally let me say if you ask me to say in a sentence well mr president what is the role of government in washington in the 21st century i would say that our primary job is first to protect your security and second to give you the ability as citizens as families as communities to meet your own challenges and make the most of your own lives the government cannot do certain things for you but we can create an environment in which you are empowered to make the most of your own lives that is our responsibility now it is against that background that you have to understand why i thought this was so important today for me to come down here and be a part of this dedication this is a picture of america s future because of the work that is being done because of the way it s being done and because of the people who are doing it and because you are doing it together thirty two years ago when president kennedy stood here or thirty four years ago he told our nation that we had a choice to trade or to fade not a bad line for 34 years ago is it and you know that we chose to compete i come here to reaffirm that choice today a fifth of all america s trade is conducted through the ports of the state of louisiana so much cargo is crammed into these wharfs that the current port can t keep up with the demand the terminal where we re standing was operating at full capacity just a week after it opened wharf c which opens in several months is expected to be at capacity within a day after it opens that s what happens when americans work together this port was expanded and rebuilt by the state and the city the business opportunities have been seized by the employers and the workers our national government has done its part by getting the deficit and interest rates down and growing the economy and expanding the barriers to trade so that we have more opportunities to sell to more people through this port passes steel from gary indiana bound for japan trains designed and made in minneapolis steaming for south america thousands of crates of pharmaceuticals made right here in louisiana bound for europe and beyond ninety thousand men and women across louisiana already earn their living because of this port the future is going to bring more trade more opportunity and more jobs because you embraced the challenge of change and looked to the future with confidence one thing has remained constant throughout our history our people have always had a restless energy and determination to conquer new frontiers to make real the promise of the american dream in each new generation today that spirit and that legacy demands that we compete and win in a world marketplace that can be punishing and uncertain but also deeply deeply rewarding all change is unsettling every change requires pain as well as bringing gain but if we remember our mission that we re trying to make the american dream available to everybody who will work for it we re trying to keep our country the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and we re trying to bring the american people together if we remember that mission we can make the right decisions take the trade issue that has been so much debated again in recent months if you hear the debate you would think there are only two choices that in the face of competition some of which is unfair and much of which comes from countries that pay people wages we couldn t live on we should just try to build walls around our country again the problem is walls don t permit this port to operate then others would say there is one other opportunity and that is simply to have pure open trade in which our markets are open to others and we hope that they ll open their markets to us but in a world of stiff competition what you need is fair rules what you need is a genuine market what we need is trade that is both free and fair truly open two way open trade the port of new orleans proves that if you have two way open trade americans will do very well and we ll be just fine in the future and let me emphasize just one of the benefits that comes from two way open trade we know that jobs tied to international trade on balance pay higher than average wages now in 1992 the year before i took office only 20 percent of the new jobs created in the united states paid above average wages since that time we have conducted 200 new trade agreements 20 with japan alone trade in america is at an all time high up one third in three years trade with japan up more than a third in the areas of agreement the 20 areas of agreement trade is up 80 percent with japan what is the result one big result is that in 1995 instead of 20 percent over 55 percent of the new jobs created in this economy paid above average wages we have to do more of that we have to keep going in that direction and so i say to you my fellow americans you are pointing the way to the future every step in the future is fraught with uncertainty in a dynamic and open world there aren t the guarantees that used to exist but we can do very well and we can achieve our mission but we must not be afraid i m reminded you know that whenever i come home i remember all my old stories whenever i come back to the south i m reminded of the old story of the minister who had been a fairly bland minister and he determined that he had to step up his preaching style and so he worked and worked and worked for months to develop a sermon that he felt was the finest most barn burning most emotion generating sermon he had ever delivered and he filled the church one day and boy he gave a stemwinder nobody could believe it it was magnificent and the punchline was i want everybody who wants to go to heaven to stand up right now and the whole congregation leapt to their feet except one lady in the front row who sat stone still and she hadn t missed a sunday in 40 years the most faithful member of the church wouldn t get up he was crestfallen he said sister jones don t you want to go to heaven when you die and she jumped right up she said oh i m sorry preacher i thought you were trying to get up a load to go right now well folks we have to go right now we have to go right now into this future and you have to send a message that america can win in this new future if we work together and we do the right things and we stay true to our values we can win in the future we need not be afraid of the world toward which we are moving if we keep our mission in mind if we stay true to our values and above all if we remember when we are divided we defeat ourselves when we are together america always wins thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton18 3 96b bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen thank you for waiting in the cold and the wind i am so glad to be here i want to thank the tioga high school band for playing didn t they do a great job mayor randolph mayor baden senator johnston senator breaux congressman fields congressman jefferson chairman meyer i am delighted to be here and i thank you for waiting for me i want to talk just a minute very briefly about what you have done here with england air force base and why that s a model of what i hope we ll see more of all across america you know when the cold war ended and we were moving into this global economy the first thing that happened that scared a lot of americans was the need to downsize the military and the plain need that the country had to reduce the size of our bases a lot of people were afraid but you people were not afraid you worked together and you were determined to make some good things happen here and i have to tell you that i have been all over this country looking at military bases i have worked with communities all over america personally to help them start their communities up and to use these bases as economic assets there is no place in the entire united states that has done a better job than alexandria has now what i want to say even in all this wind is that there are other challenges facing us you read in the press i m sure that some big companies for example are restructuring and laying off a lot of people all the time in this economy there are jobs being created jobs being abolished jobs being created jobs being abolished but what i want to say to you is that this country is moving in the right direction we have 8 4 million more jobs today than we had three years ago because the american people when they work together can find ways to solve problems meet challenges and move forward and if we will commit ourselves to a few simple things educating all of our children and providing education for adults whenever they lose jobs the moment they lose jobs making the most of our resources selling america s products around the world and taking the things we have in this country like these military bases and turning them into opportunities and if we will commit to say if a person loses a job they at least ought to be able to carry their health insurance and their pension with them so they can take care of their families when they start anew if we will commit ourselves to making it possible for people to start small businesses and for every community in america to participate in the economic recovery then this country is going to do just fine i want you to know when i became president because i had been through a base closing in my home state i started a whole new program to get the pentagon to move more quickly to move properties out and give them to the communities so that they could be used to generate jobs and that is what we have done now all across america and we re using you as a model now let me say that there s one official reason we re all out here on this windy day and that is that i am here to take the next step in the official transition of this air force base to the central louisiana community by formally presenting the deed for 165 acres of the base to jim meyer so i d like to ask him to come up here and let me present the deed mr meyer here it is it is now yours thank you again god bless you it s great to see you i ve had a great day thank you dem wjclinton18 4 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you frederic rosen and thank you jason chudnofsky i am delighted to be here i want to thank director tony streit and the young people from street level youth media who went on my tour with me over in the other part of the mccormick center to see some of the new wonders of the information technology revolution i want to thank those who have come with me here today on this last stop of this part of our new markets tour including several members of the united states congress jan schakowsky of chicago stephanie tubbs jones from cleveland silvestre reyes from el paso texas and representative bill jefferson from new orleans i want to thank secretary of transportation rodney slater federal communications chair bill kennard reverend jesse jackson bob johnson the president of black entertainment television and gene sperling and maria echaveste who operate this program for me out of the white house i am glad to be the first president to address this conference but i am quite sure i will not be the last information technology has accounted for about 30 percent of this remarkable economic growth we ve had even though people directly working in it only account for about 8 percent of our employment what we have tried to do in government is to provide the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of this phenomenal new era in human affairs what you and people like you all across this country have done have made the most of that the balanced budget the telecommunications act doubling our investment in education and training and dramatically increasing basic research opening trade to new countries and it s given us the longest economic expansion in history the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded the lowest female unemployment rate recorded in 40 years poverty down to a 20 year low the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest overall unemployment in 30 years that is the good news and it was brought about primarily by this incredible environment and the gifted people who have made the most of this celebration of ideas and innovation and ingenuity but as mr rosen said when he introduced me what i have been focused on now in the last year plus of my term as president is the people and places who have been left behind in this phenomenal new economy and i have for two reasons one is i think that all of us would like to see every american who is willing to work for it have a chance to be a part of this astonishing new era of enterprise i think just on pure ethical grounds we all sense that the american values require that everybody be given a fair chance to participate but secondly i think it is in our economic interest to do it you know we spend a lot of time in washington discussing how in the world can we keep this economic expansion going it s already the longest economic expansion in history far longer than any other one that did not include a major war how long can it go what will happen how will it come to an end will we really have inflation that will somehow bring an end to this long boom well it s clear to me that if we want it to continue we have to do more to find new markets new markets mean creating new businesses and new employees as well as new customers and if you do both it means you can have growth without inflation so this idea of closing the digital divide is good social policy it s good personal ethics but it s also very very important for our continued economic expansion as a nation so i came here today to ask you to set another trend to devote more time and technology more ideas and energy to closing the digital divide the growing gap between those who have the tools and skills and motivation to succeed in the economy which you come here to explore and celebrate and push the frontiers of and those who do not have those at this time now over the past year i have been to a lot of these places i have been to the hills and hollows of appalachia to the heart of the mississippi delta i ve been to englewood here in inner city chicago and to east los angeles i ve been to the pine ridge reservation in south dakota the home of the oglala sioux i have tried everywhere to shine the spotlight on the potential not the problems of these places yesterday we began our third new markets tour in east palo alto california right in the heart of silicon valley because i wanted the american people to know that even there there are a lot of our fellow citizens who are not yet fully participating in the information age yesterday we also went to shiprock navajo country in the far north of new mexico and saw the vast differences the literal vast distances literal distances in this case that have to be overcome to build an information infrastructure that all of america is a part of we visited a community living in the place where their forebears have been for more than a thousand years we celebrated the navajo code talkers who were very instrumental in america winning world war ii with our allies in the pacific because they developed a unique means of communication they transferred messages back and forth in navajo and the language was so different from any code or any known language that our adversaries in world war ii couldn t break it and it s quite ironic that a people whose major contribution to the modern world was helping us to win world war ii based on unique communications now live in a place where 70 percent of them don t even have telephones i was introduced by a young woman a 13 year old young girl who won a contest really a bright young woman and she won this contest and she won a computer and she found that she couldn t get on the internet because she didn t have a telephone line in her home next week we re going to rural north carolina to discuss the prospects of broad band communications and what it might do to open opportunities in poor rural isolated places and then in a couple of months we will have a part of this digital divide tour devoted solely to the potential that web accessibility offers to disabled americans to participate more fully in the educational and economic life of the united states now this is all sobering at one level but increasingly hopeful to me because i honestly believe that the new information economy has the potential at home and around the world to lift more people out of poverty more quickly than at any previous period in all of human history and that tapping that potential is actually in our enlightened self interest and that s why i came here today because i need your help and your support because now we ve come through all these years of this remarkable economic expansion we have finally seen even income inequality begin to diminish over the last two and a half years as more and more americans at the lower end of the income scale begin to fully participate in the economy we have a very important choice before us and only with your help can america make the right choice to make sure that no one is left behind to use these new technologies to widen the circle of opportunity rather than allowing the digital divide to widen the lines of division in education race income and region i will say again it s not only morally the right choice it s not just good social policy it is imperative in my judgment if we re going to keep the economy growing to find new places where we create not only new customers but new businesses and new employees now i believe we ve got to find the right combination of incentives and initiative to bridge this divide the distances that exist are in some cases as i said they re physical they re also educational and they re clearly economic but on every one of these new markets trips we have met people who are eager for opportunity and like the young people here today who made this tour with me they demonstrate that ability and drive and dreams are evenly distributed throughout the human race and throughout american society it is opportunity which is still not evenly distributed everywhere i have been i find americans who are not at all interested in charity but are very interested in opportunity not a handout but a hand up we can only tap the potential of these new workers these new business owners these new learners if we work together over and over again over the last seven years i have found in some of our most important endeavors the only thing that really works is the right kind of public private partnership i ll just give you one example we have the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the welfare rolls have been cut roughly in half since i became president and part of it is the laws that have been passed including the welfare reform act of 1996 which required people who could work to work but also invested more money in child care for their children and transportation so they could get to work and kept their kids in food and medicine while they were making the transition but part of it was this remarkable partnership now that numbers over 12 000 businesses people who committed that they would personally go out and find people help them move from the welfare rolls give them the training give them the support they needed to succeed and these people alone just the 12 000 people in our partnership have hired hundreds of thousands of people from the welfare rolls many of whom were difficult to place but have succeeded no government mandate could have gotten that done if we hadn t had the public private partnership it would not have worked nearly as well as it has the vice president has worked for more than seven or about seven years now in our partnership with the auto companies and the auto workers on the new generation vehicle and we put a lot of money into it but we couldn t develop a car in the government and yet you see if you noticed in the last detroit auto show they re showing cars they expect to market in the next year or two including larger cars that get 70 to 80 miles a gallon we have research going on now into the production of biofuels not just from corn but from agricultural waste products even from grasses and if we ever get the conversion level down to about one gallon of gasoline for eight gallons of fuel biofuel and then you get in a 70 mile an hour gas car you ll be driving a car that gets over 500 miles a gallon in conventional terms that will change the energy future of america and the world forever and will prove something i deeply believe that we can conquer the challenge of global warming and continue to grow n ot only our economy but the developing economies of the world all of this has to be done in partnership and that s basically what i propose for closing the digital divide and creating new markets throughout america what we want to do is to be a catalyst to provide investment incentives and the kind of framework and tools that will enable people in the private sector to do what is in their interest anyway we believe that tax incentives and loan guarantees can leverage private sector investment in distressed areas get capital flowing to people in neighborhoods in might otherwise miss having basically nothing to do necessarily with high technology investment today if you want to invest in a poor area of latin america or asia or africa we have a framework set up that could get you a combination of tax breaks and loan guarantees to lower the risk of doing that why because we think that we have an obligation as americans to help poor people around the world develop stable lives we know it promotes democracy it promotes peace it promotes environmental cleanup it undermines the destablizing forces at work in the world all i m trying to do in terms of the law is to give americans who have money to invest the same incentives to invest in poor areas in america we give them today to invest in poor areas in latin america or africa or asia i think that s the right thing to do last fall the speaker of the house of representatives dennis hastert and i came here to chicago met with reverend jackson and congressman bobby rush and others and we pledged to work together on a bipartisan initiative to spur investments in new markets we are making real progress on our end of the deal the house of representatives took a very important step last week toward creating the american private investment companies that i ve proposed to spur as much as 1 5 billion in private investment in our hard pressed communities now i understand speaker hastert is going to be with you tomorrow and i think you will see if this is part of the discussion that his commitment is genuine this should not be a partisan issue every american republican democrat independent green party member whatever every american has got a vested interest in seeing that every other american has the chance to live up to his or her god given potential so this is very very important and the main thing that we want to do with this portion of the new markets initiative is to make sure that we can get some investment in areas where people literally are isolated where we need local community based investment because you can t just say well we ll give them an education they can hop on the subway or get in their car and drive to a job but we also have to have a comprehensive approach that gives individuals the ability to bridge the digital divide to create businesses which are far distant because technology permits them to overcome distances and to get the education and training they need in the first place to succeed now what have we done in that well when the congress adopted the telecommunications act a few years ago we insisted the vice president and i did on something called the e rate the power of the federal communications commission to set the e rate it is now worth over 2 billion and it gives discounts to schools to libraries public institutions so they can afford to be a part of the internet and it s had a huge impact when i became president only 3 percent of our classrooms about 11 percent of our schools were connected to the internet we ve been working on this hard now for six years today over two thirds of our classrooms and 95 percent of our schools are connected including 90 percent of very poor schools and we ll be by the end of the year we ll probably be at 100 percent of the schools connected except for those whose physical facilities are literally in too much disrepair to have a connection i know that may be hard for some of you to believe but it s true we have cities where the average school building is 65 years of age or more we have there are schools in new york city that are still heated by coal fired furnaces but by and large this e rate has really worked we have a 450 million technology literacy challenge which is designed to make sure that we try to match contributions from others who put technology into our schools our budget offers 2 billion in new tax incentives to help bridge the digital divide to get the technology into the schools and into the rural communities into community computing centers and things like that can be available to adults as well as children we provide 150 million to train new teachers to use technology in the classroom so that they aren t repeatedly embarrassed by their students knowing more than they do and so that they can actually make the most of it and 100 million to create more technology centers in 1 000 communities across the country today i can tell you that 214 of these community technology centers will be created this year alone and 136 more will be expanded these are very important because they are not only available to young people but also to adults who can use such centers after work and themselves acquire these skills it s very very important that we recognize that this cannot be solely the province of the school years we have got to do more to bring adults who have been left on the other side of the digital divide into the economic mainstream we are going to expand our investment in these centers by about 86 million from state local private and federal sources together not far from here on chicago s west side is one of these centers i mentioned the young people i met today from there at street level youth media they spend a lot of their time there they are here in this audience today they can access the internet and a lot more they can have classes in website design projects in video production and most important the chance to apply their skills in real work for real wages every child in america should have this opportunity and we are trying to give it to every child in america if the budget passes we will have 1 000 of these neighborhood networks next year that is double the number we have now in the country these computer learning centers are the fruit of public private partnership under the leadership of the department of housing and urban development they have already helped residents of some of our poorest neighborhoods move from welfare to work increase their earnings even start their own businesses one of the things that is totally unappreciated about the nature of the internet revolution is the extent to which it gives people who are otherwise completely out of the economic mainstream who could never have access to the kind of up front capital it would take to start a traditional business and rent a big office space the chance to actually earn money on the net the first time i discovered this was when some of my friends at ebay told me that they now have 30 000 people making a living off ebay not working for the company but making a living buying and selling and trading and that the profiles indicated to them that a very substantial number of these people had previously been on welfare so again i will say if you believe that there is an equal distribution of intelligence ability and dreams throughout the population and if you have seen in your own lives what this has done for you and for this economy it seems to me that closing the digital divide is one of the most important things we could do that would have the quickest results in alleviating the kind of poverty which is inexcusable in the kind of economy we re experiencing today let me also say that i made a joke about it earlier but i think the idea of having teachers who are really able to make the most of technology in the classroom and teach their students is something that s very important everybody i have ever worked with on this in the last several years all the heads of all the companies that have tried to really help our schools continue to hammer this i got a letter from the deans of more than 200 colleges and universities pledging to join in that effort holding themselves responsible for results being willing to test their progress with a tool designed by the ceo forum on education and technology a forum that includes a lot of the companies that are represented in this auditorium today but this is a big deal this is a serious commitment that we haven t had in the past and i want to thank the forum on education and technology and these 200 deans for what they want to do to train our teachers but this is just the start so here is what i came to do really i want to ask you to do the following things first of all if you are not already a part of it i hope that the companies everyone represented here from the largest to the smallest would support our national call to action which i issued two weeks ago its basic goals are to provide 21st century learning tools for every child in every school and to create digital opportunity for every family and every community i have asked for businesses and schools and community groups and volunteers to enlist in the effort more than 400 organizations have signed on in the first two weeks and they are already doing amazing things many of you have been working at this for some years now to help in education and in economic development but if you are not part of this i hope you will become part of this i hope you will do more than sign a pledge i hope you will commit to fulfill it i want you all to ask if there is anything you are not doing that you could do to give our schools computers and high speed connections to design the educational software our children need to succeed to make sure our teachers are as comfortable in front of a computer as in front of a chalkboard again i say many companies are leading this effort today but we need more the biggest problem in american education and the biggest problem in combating poverty and creating economic opportunity is not that there are no good ideas every problem in american education today has been solved by somebody somewhere i remember when i started running for president and i was coming to chicago there was a woman here from my home state of arkansas who was principal of a junior high school that was in a neighborhood with the highest murder rate in the state of illinois and you had to ask to get into this junior high school they had 150 mothers and 75 fathers in that school every week they had a strict no weapons policy if you had one you were history they had a zero dropout rate the kids went on to high school and did well and a phenomenal percentage of them went on to college and i could give you lots of examples like that the problem we have and in terms of closing the digital divide and education and economics there are examples everywhere the problem we have in america with social change is getting things to scale is reaching a critical mass of people that s why i came here today this is a critical mass of the it community and you need to reach a critical mass of the at risk kids and the communities where economic and educational opportunities are needed to close the digital divide the second thing i want to ask you to do so that today s students can become tomorrow s success stories is to expand internships and to deepen your talent pool i just received a survey that i read just the day before yesterday indicating that even making allowances for differences in education women and minorities are still comparatively under represented in most it occupations we can do a lot to close the digital divide just by equalizing the representation once people do have the education and skills they need the third thing i would like to ask you to do is to recognize as i said before there is a limit to what the federal government can do i intend to set up a framework and to try to provide the necessary tools and to generate as much activity as i can but we need more partnerships at the local level with the schools with the local communities with the local community groups and with local government i think you will find that if you are not involved in this kind of work there is more interest in it than ever before and people are eager for help if we work together we can empower people with the tools and the training they need to lift themselves out of poverty if we work together we can give people the ability to use new technology to start new businesses if we work together we can close the digital divide and open digital opportunities i am asking you to do this because you can i am asking you to do this because it s right and i am asking you to do this because america needs it to have a continually growing economy the productivity increases generated by information technology in the it companies themselves and then through application throughout the economy is what has enabled us to continue to grow at 4 percent and to keep inflation down i am doing my best to open new markets around the world and to keep our markets open which helps to keep inflation down and to grow but the best opportunity we have are all those people out there that are dying to be part of what the rest of us may take for granted and i can tell you i have lived longer than most people who do very well in the work that you do our country has never had an economy like this the last time we had anything close was in the 1960s it came apart over the competing claims and crises in civil rights and the war in vietnam and the attempt to finance all that and deal with the problems of the poor i see a lot of people who are gray headed like me out there nodding their heads and when it happened when i grew up in it i thought that economy would last forever i just took it for granted that we were the most productive economy in the world we were going to win the cold war we d solve the civil rights problems in the courts and the congress and everything would be hunky dory and then boom one day it was gone and i ve waited 35 years as a citizen for our country to have the chance to give all our people the future of our dreams for our children that s the chance we ve got now and i know you re very busy i know you have a lot of other things to do but i don t know how many years we ll ever have to wait again until a moment like this comes along i can t do it alone the federal government can t do it alone but if we all do it together there is nothing we can t do we will never ever ever have a better chance and therefore a more profound responsibility to close the digital divide thank you very much dem wjclinton18 4 96 bill_clinton madam speaker mr president mr prime minister ladies and gentlemen here in this great hall of democracy on behalf of all of our american delegation including my wife the secretary of state the secretary of commerce and all other americans here let me begin by thanking the people of japan the government of japan and of course the emperor and empress for the remarkable hospitality we have been accorded in our visit here and let me thank you for giving me a chance to address the representatives of the people of japan and through you all the japanese people perhaps especially your young people i d also like to thank madam speaker for mentioning the distinguished americans who were also born in my home state general mcarthur and senator fulbright i thank you for applauding the mission of senator fulbright s name he not only helped many japanese to get an education but he also gave me a job so that i could complete my university education so therefore in a very real sense i would not be here today if it were not for him one hundred and thirty six years ago japan sent its very first diplomatic delegation to the united states of america it was a remarkable year for our country abraham lincoln was nominated by his party to become president and he subsequently became the first president of his party and many of us believe the greatest president it was a long time ago eight years before the beginning of your meiji restoration but some things don t change very much in his diary of that experience one of your envoys to the united states described his visit to our congress and here s what he said we were shown to a large hall where affairs of state were being discussed one of the members was on his feet screaming at the top of his voice and gesticulating wildly like a mad man when he sat down his example was followed by another and yet another upon our inquiring what this was all about we were informed that all the affairs of state were publicly discussed in this way well today i hope i can show you at least that we americans have made some improvement in the way we discuss affairs of state it seems impossible to believe that it was just 50 years ago that the united states and japan began to forge what is perhaps the modern world s most remarkable partnership for peace prosperity and progress today we celebrate the results japan has built one of the greatest success stories the world has ever known you turned a closed society into an open thriving democracy you transformed economic devastation into powerful growth and opportunity for your people you enriched the lives of millions by harnessing technology for positive change you have set an example for all of asia and indeed for all the world after world war ii a wise generation of americans reached out a hand of reconciliation to support your extraordinary evolution first with a security guarantee that allowed you to focus on rebuilding and with aid that helped to lay the foundation of economic growth now japan and the united states are full partners bound together by shared values and a shared vision all around the world the spread of democracy and the greater prospects for peace and prosperity owe much to the work that our two nations are doing together today i ask you to look with me ahead to the next 50 years of our partnership what will it bring and how shall we build it as the world s two largest economies and two of its strongest democracies japan and the united states must forge an alliance for the 21st century working together and leading together i am confident that we can seize the possibilities and meet the challenges of today and tomorrow to bring even greater security and prosperity to our own people and to bring the blessings of peace and progress to other people all around the world forging such an alliance will not be easy or automatic i am well aware that there are people in both the united states and japan who believe that because the cold war is over and won and because the united states and japan face challenges at home we should pull back from the world and we should pull back from each other but with all respect i believe those views are wrong think about the world we live in the revolution in information and technology from laptops to lasers from microsurgery to megabytes this revolution has lit the landscape of human knowledge and brought all of us closer together now information and ideas flash across our planet in the stroke of a computer key bringing with them extraordinary opportunities to create wealth to protect the environment to prevent and conquer disease to foster greater understanding among people of diverse cultures but we know too that this greater openness and faster change also mean that problems that start beyond our borders can quickly penetrate our borders the spread of weapons of mass destruction the threats of organized crime and drug trafficking and terrorism environmental decay severe economic dislocation and in open and flexible societies like ours homegrown forces of destruction can take advantage of the freedoms that we all cherish after the sarin gas attack in the tokyo subway and the bombing of oklahoma city the people of japan and the people of the united states know this all too well no nation can isolate itself from these problems and no nation can solve these problems alone to meet and seize the opportunities and challenges of the 21st century japan and the united states must continue to be partners we must join forces and we must join with those who believe as we do over the next few years we will have ample opportunities to do that over the past few years we have made a good beginning of course we have had some differences what two great complex nations would not have differences the important point is that we have worked through them respectfully patiently pragmatically and we have done so much together that today we can say with absolute confidence that the foundation for cooperation between the united states and japan is stronger than it has ever been the security alliance between our two nations is the cornerstone of stability throughout asia we have just completed a security review the product of more than a year s hard work and study the joint security declaration that prime minister hashimoto and i signed yesterday reaffirms our commitment to keep this alliance strong and to adapt it to the challenges of a new era in our declaration japan reaffirmed its fundamental commitment to the united states japan security framework and to supporting modern self defense forces to guaranteeing its security and stability of the region the united states will maintain 100 000 troops in east asia including a strong presence in japan at about current levels with the help of your host nation s support and we will more closely coordinate our efforts to meet new security challenges from stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction to strengthening regional and international security cooperation from countering terrorism to promoting peace recently the hospitality the japanese people extend to our troops was put to a terrible test in okinawa the american people profoundly regret the horrible violence done to a young school girl there our hearts go out to her to her family and her loved ones and to the entire okinawan community we are gratified that justice has been done in the months since this incident we have worked with the government of japan to minimize the burden of our military presence on the japanese people the joint action plan we announced this week calls for the consolidation of our bases in okinawa and a major reduction in inconveniences to the people who live there like noise and training and exercises these steps will reduce the burden of our bases without diminishing our mutual defense capability or our commitment to safeguard a pacific at peace i want to say again how much i appreciate the leadership of the prime minister and his government and the opportunity the united states has been given to do something we probably should have done some time ago i thank you for that both our nations recognize that peace has its price but the price is much less than the cost of putting peace at risk consider what might happen if the united states were to withdraw entirely from this region it could spark a costly arms race that could destabilize northeast asia it could hinder our ability to work with you to maintain security in a part of the world that has suffered enough in the 20th century through world war and regional conflict and that is now in the midst of profound change it could weaken our power to deter states like north korea that may still threaten the peace and to take on urgent problems like terrorism organized crime and drug trafficking let me say especially to the young people here in japan and back home in america who will inherit the stewardship of our nations some people in my country believe our security alliance is basically a favor to japan and some people in japan doubtless believe that our security alliance is basically a favor to the united states the truth is our security alliance benefits both our countries the entire region and the world so to the young people i say this alliance is our commitment to your freedom and to your future and what an extraordinary future it can be the economies of the asia pacific region are the most dynamic on earth already accounting for one quarter of the world s output and growing every day improving the lives of your own people and creating ever expanding markets for others who produce competitive products and services many of these products and services of course are american already more than 50 percent of america s trade is with the nations of the pacific sustaining three million good american jobs business and tourism are growing rapidly and they will continue to do so and to cite just one example of this region s extraordinary potential in the next decade alone east asia plans to spend 1 trillion united states dollars on infrastructure projects alone my country with 7 million citizens who trace their roots to asia and five states which border the pacific ocean wants to share in and add to this promise that s why we convened the summit of the leaders of the asia pacific economic cooperation nations in seattle three years ago there aided by the leadership of japan we began to give an extraordinarily diverse region a common identity and purpose that of a community of nations committed to free trade and investment to taking down barriers that block commerce and building stronger bridges of cooperation among our people as the world s economic leaders japan and the united states must set a good example and we are from our common commitment to bring free trade to the asia pacific nations to our efforts to improve our own economic relationship three years ago our nations entered into a framework agreement to better structure our economic dialogue and open markets here in japan since then we have completed 21 separate trade agreements that are making a difference to people on both sides of the pacific the sectors covered by these agreements from auto parts to medical supplies have seen their sales to japan grow by some 85 percent more than twice as fast as exports in other sectors of course for the american people these exports mean more jobs at better pay for the people of japan allowing these american goods and services to compete for the favor of the japanese consumer means greater choice at lower prices your own keidanren projects that deregulation will cut consumer prices to japanese citizens by 20 percent by the year 2000 already to cite one example because cellular telephone companies can now compete here there has been a one third cut in the cost of startup and service fees in the tokyo region of course our trading relationship is not entirely free of friction more work will have to be done to fully implement the agreements we have reached and to deal with other issues but the important part is that after years of frustration on both sides for the first time we have actually established a way to work through our differences and to resolve them beyond sustaining our security and building a future of open markets there are other responsibilities that japan and the united states have decided to assume because of our position in the world today responsibilities we have committed to a common agenda bringing the blessings of peace democracy and rights to others protecting our shared environment harnessing the power of science and technology for the benefit of all together our nations have a unique opportunity to help people the world over to learn to change the way they work indeed to transform how they live we must seize this opportunity because it is also our responsibility the united states is very grateful that more and more japan is taking on the responsibility of leadership that flows from its place as a great nation from peacekeepers in cambodia to minesweepers in the arabian gulf japan is there from financial and political support for the middle east peace process to the 500 million reconstruction package you have just announce for bosnia japan is there the people of bosnia and the entire international community are grateful for this extraordinary effort on your part from seeking an end to polio by the year 2000 to finding better ways to respond to natural disasters like earthquakes japan is also there leading the way from cleaning up the environment here on earth to exploring the heavens above japan is there we are all better off for your commitment to this kind of leadership today to the japanese people whose pride in the past is now matched by your focus on the future i say stay true to that commitment to lead make it even stronger we have come so far in the last 50 years think about it from the waste of war to the wealth of peace from conflict to cooperation and competition from mistrust to partnership now i submit to you that our generation has a sacred duty to make the next 50 years even better for all of our people in this time of remarkable possibility i am absolutely confident that we will succeed if we continue to lead and work together as allies as partners and as friends thank you very much dem wjclinton18 4 97 bill_clinton thank you very much to our teacher of the year and all the teachers of the year and their friends and supporters and family members who are here senator glenn congressman chabot secretary riley and vice president gore thank you for being such wonderful partners to me dick riley next year dick riley and i will have been working together for 20 years in one way or another and we re about to get the hang of it and i really think he s done a wonderful job as our secretary of education i want to tell you this net day idea that the vice president developed we were just sitting around talking one day and i was bemoaning the fact that he was doing some elaborate thing on his computer screen in his office and i still can hardly figure out how to turn mine on and we were all laughing about how our children were leapfrogging us in their capacity to deal with computers and one thing led to another and before you know it we have a goal that we ll hook up every library and classroom in the country by the year 2000 and then there s going to be a net day and all of a sudden one day we hook up 20 percent of the classrooms in california and i never met anybody that was any better at taking an idea and turning it into reality than al gore and this net day thing it s going to revolutionize education in this country because we re not going to stop until we bring the benefits of technology to every single child in this country and i think it s a wonderful thing i could have done without secretary riley telling that story that my my 2nd grade teacher did but i was sitting here i have no notes on this so if mess it up you ll have to forgive me but the truth is that sister mary amata mcgee whom i found after over 30 years of having no contact with her she was my second and 3rd grade teacher i found her in springfield missouri one night when i came there near the end of the 1992 campaign i had no idea what had become of her i didn t know what had happened so i reestablished my relationship with her but she was a little too generous the truth is i think she gave me a d in conduct and i think she gave me a d not because i raised my hand but because i spoke whether i was called on or not but if ever you wonder whether what you do matters after sister mary amata mcgee in the second and 3rd grade there was louise vaughn mary christianus kathleen scher my 6th grade teacher who was my steady pen pal until she died just a few days before she became 90 years old when i was governor and then in the 7th grade my homeroom teacher was ruth atkins and then there was miss teague my civics teacher in the 8th grade and mary broussard my 9th grade english teacher who was the only person in our class besides me that supported john kennedy over richard nixon in the 9th grade and i could go through my whole high school list of teachers through my college list of teachers all the people around here have to put up with stories that i forget that i ve already told once about specific verbatim things i remember that my teachers in college said in lectures over 30 years ago now don t ever think what you do does not matter i remember them all as if i were sitting with them yesterday and there are things that each of them gave to me that i am not even aware of today after all these years of having had a chance to think about it every one of you made a decision that you would never be wealthy you made a decision that you would give yourselves to the next generation you made a decision that you would do at work what we re all supposed to do in our families that you would always be thinking about tomorrow on new year s eve someone asked me in this meeting i was at if i had to write a legacy on my tombstone what would it be and i would say i said something like i don t remember exactly what i said but something like that i had the privilege of leading america into a new century and keeping the american dream alive for everyone having our very diverse country live together as one america and maintaining our leadership as the world s greatest force for peace and freedom and prosperity if you think about that every single one of those tasks requires that we do a better job of educating more of our people every single one you look around america today we have 5 2 percent unemployment it s a great thing and it s also entirely misleading unemployment is virtually zero for people who have the skills necessary to meet the demands of the emerging economy if they live in a place where investment is coming in what we have to do is to close the gaps and the skill levels how do you do that give people better education and then provide incentives to invest in the places that have been left behind the vice president was in detroit a few days ago promoting our empowerment zone concept of trying to build communities and give incentives for people to invest where people are there willing to work and there is no investment but the unemployment rate is absolutely meaningless if you re unemployed if you re unemployed the unemployment rate is 100 percent it s not one or zero or five or you know that s what it is so we can t create opportunity for all americans unless everybody first has the educational skills we certainly can t learn to live together as one america with all of this rich diversity we have without being educated to it because for thousands of years people have lived in tribal patterns that taught them to be suspicious of those that were different from themselves among the teachers of the year here today we have an immigrant from taiwan making a great contribution to the united states among the teachers of the year today we have a japanese american whose parents were interned during world war ii my state had one of those internment camps i ve been down there to see it and i still can t believe my country ever did that we have african americans and hispanic americans we have people from different religious backgrounds you know that what unites us is more important than what divides us and once having recognized that you know that what divides us makes us more interesting and far better positioned to do well in the world of tomorrow than countries that are less diverse than we are but we can t learn to do this right unless we can not only feel our way out of this but think our way out of this we have to know more than we now know and we certainly we certainly cannot take advantage of the opportunities that are there for us at the end of the cold war to create a whole new order of peace and freedom and prosperity without much higher levels of understanding or let me put it in another way the american society of newspaper editors were here the other day and one of the editors from out in the country stood up and i thought you know i m going to get a question on whatever is going on in washington he said i got a 10 year old son in the 5th grade and he wants to know what your advice is for him for the future and it was the hardest question i got asked all day and i said he should study hard he should stay out of trouble and not defile his body with drugs or anything else he should seek out people who were of different racial and religious backgrounds and get to know them and understand them he should try to learn more about the rest of the world as early as possible as soon as possible and he should begin right now taking some time to serve in his community to help people who needed help those are the five things i said why because i think that will give him a good education and give him opportunity help us to come together as one america and appreciate our differences and help us to maintain our leadership in the world and you re doing that every day the kindergarten teachers here are doing that now that s why i look so forward to this every year because most of the time frankly we just sort of take you for granted unless we get mad because we don t like the way the test scores come out or the comparative test scores or whatever else and i think it is very important that we not lose the enormous significance of your collective impact and i thought i d stand up here today and try and i didn t know if i could do it but i thought i could just remember all my teachers just to show you the personal impact you have see i ll bet you a lot of you could do the same thing i just did and that s probably why you re doing what you re doing today we do have some changes to make and we do have to recognize that we have to keep moving to lift the standards and we have to realize that there are some senses in which we do what we do very well and some senses in which we have challenges because we have so much diversity among our children that others don t have but we can t use that as an excuse we have to just deal with the facts and believe every child can learn at this brain conference yesterday that the vice president mentioned that the first lady and i hosted i was stunned when we had these scientists there talking about 1 trillion networks being developed in the brain we ve known for a long time i was taught in school that we only use a small part of our brain s capacity but i never understood the extent to which the brain keeps developing all during childhood and how we interrelate to it but what it convinced me of was what i already believed by conviction which is that nearly everybody is fully capable of learning whatever they need to learn to get where they need to go and that s to me what this whole standards business is about and what the encouragement of all the states to develop standards that are nationally and internationally sound challenging all the states to join in the 4th grade reading and the 8th grade math tests in 1999 is all about it s not about another test it s about saying we believe all our children can learn and we believe children learn according to the expectations placed on them and our expectations are going to be high that s what this is about and i hope everyone of you will support that because i think it is terribly important so far in only a couple of months the educational leadership of california has joined maryland michigan north carolina and the schools of the defense department system in endorsing in saying they will participate in this standards movement and i hope every state in the country will say yes before the time comes because we have a record number of students in our schools and they re growing rapidly and now we ve got for the first time it s rather humbling for me and the vice president we finally have more kids in school than we had during the baby boom we re going to have to find in the next ten years 2 million new teachers and that s going to be quite a challenge and we have to train them for the challenges that they ll face today and the world their children will face tomorrow so i want to thank you for your willingness to think about that and for helping to encourage teachers to achieve new levels of excellence i know many of you are participating in secretary riley s national forum which gives you a chance to share ideas with educators all across the country about the best way to train teachers this is an issue that is very hard it will never make the front page on any day there will always be something more immediate but there are very few things that are more important than how we train our teachers and how we continue to learn as teachers in the classroom and in the schools and how we can all learn from each other that s one of the reasons i encourage teachers all over the country to seek board certification from the national board for professional teaching standards and we now have 500 of these teachers nationwide governor hunt from north carolina who is well known to many of you has been working on this as an obsession for years but in our balanced budget plan we ve got 105 million that would put 100 000 master teachers in our nation s classrooms and the idea is not really it s just like you you re the teacher of the year but you know you re really standing in the shoes of every other good teacher in your state but if you can put this training in the hands of one teacher in every school building in america which we ought to be able to do with this it will upgrade the performance of all the teachers in the schools and it will change the culture of the schools so i hope you will support that as well there are a lot of other things in our education program but i wanted to focus on those two things plus our efforts to wire the schools to focus just on the public schools today we re also trying to help the schools that are terribly overcrowded get some financial help so it will reduce the cost of new construction and repair work when the local districts are willing to do their part and i hope that initiative will pass but the main thing i want to tell you is what you do really matters it matters to the country as a whole it matters to individual kids and if any if at all possible it matters even more now to our society at large than it did when i had all those teachers whose names and faces and voices and manners and stern rebukes i still remember today we honor especially sharon draper she happens to be one of our nation s first master teachers and a member of the national board for professional teaching standards and i m especially pleased about that for 27 years she has inspired students with her passion for literature and life the standards to which she holds her students at the walnut hills high school in cincinnati are legendary so much so that the seniors wear tee shirts that proclaim i survived the draper paper when they finish their senior thesis i was intrigued when i read that and i asked her for one of those tee shirts and i was denied because i haven t yet survived it her gifted teaching has not gone unrecognized she received both the national council of negro women excellence in teaching award and the ohio governors educational leadership award she is an accomplished author in her own right she was honored with the american library association s coretta scott king s genesis award and it s annual best books for young people award she has devoted her career not only to teaching and to writing but to helping other teachers improve their skills as well sharon draper is more than a credit to her profession she is a true blessing to the children she has taught and it gives me great pleasure now to present her with the national teacher of the year award and ask her to come forward and say whatever she d like to say congratulations dem wjclinton18 5 93 bill_clinton thank you very much i m delighted to see all of you here and i m glad to have the chance to come i ve had a great time touring some of the facilities and seeing some of the programs that are offered here at this college and meeting some of your fellow students everybody here is a student right everybody back there i m glad to see your president your chancellor who are here and mayor bradley i see back there thank you for coming and i see we have a number of members of congress back there if you ve got anything to ask your congressman we ve got four or five options back there will the members of congress stand up walter and javier and tony beilenson congressman it s good to see you all i see several state officials back there the secretary of state the state comptroller the insurance commissioner michael woo councilman michael woo my friend a candidate for mayor good for you good luck that woo is interesting isn t it makes a good cheer i like it i want to say to all of you first of all i am delighted to be back in california glad to be back in los angeles and to van nuys and yesterday i was in new mexico and i was at los alamos and i said los angeles so i promised them when i they all hooted so i promised them when i got here i d say i was glad to be in los alamos so there i did it i came here for a very specific purpose today and that is to try to illustrate what the economic efforts that our administration is making will do for you and how your efforts can we fix this in the work we re doing to try to turn the california economy around and i thought that there was really no better place to come than to a college like this where all the people here have already by definition taken responsibility for your own future and made a real commitment to do what it takes to be competitive to develop the skills you need to get a good job to keep good jobs and to learn new skills continuously i met a very impressive man inside who has got a full time job as many of you do who has been coming back here on his own just to continue to hone his skills because he says what i do requires me to change over and over and over again so i will always be able to have a good job and this is funny i was talking to dan palmer who introduced me he told me that before he was married and began to have children he was a musician and he realized that that s not a very solid basis for having job security i thought about being a musician too and i wasn t as good as he was and i knew i had no job security so i got into another line of work where i have no job security but anyway i understand very much that sort of motivation which i imagine got a lot of you in here what i wanted to do was to basically just talk a little bit about our national economic efforts and how it affects california and how what you re doing here is essential if we re ever going to turn the economy of the state and nation around first when i took office i found as you know a government with an enormous budget deficit that is we were running in the red every year over 300 billion our debt had gone as a nation from 1 trillion to 4 trillion it s hard to even imagine that kind of money in just 12 years we were a country for 200 years we ran up 1 trillion worth of debt then in 12 we ran up 3 trillion more why because we cut taxes and increased spending and it was fun for a while it helped california a lot cut taxes people had more money in their pocket increased spending mostly in defense put a lot of people to work in plants out here put a lot of people to work on and around the bases out here in the end it all catches up to you and you ve seen the last few years what happened the cold war was over we began to reduce defense we had no real plan for dealing with it and what s happened to your tax money is the deficit keeps going up even though defense has gone down because of the cost of health care something that won t surprise any of you so what i have tried to do is to come up with a plan that would bring our deficit down give us control of our budget and your future get interest rates down so people can refinance their homes and their businesses and i ll bet you there are people in this audience today who have refinanced their home loans since last november and saved a lot of money doing it because we re determined to bring interest rates down and at the same time while cutting a lot of spending and raising some taxes almost all of which at least well over 70 percent of it comes from people with incomes above 100 000 and we tried to give a tax cut to people with families with incomes under 30 000 so they wouldn t have to pay a tax increase but while doing that there are some things which we should spend some more money on and i want to talk about them we ought to spend some more money on having more programs like this why because you can have the best economic policies in the world and if the people don t have the training they need to do the jobs in a global economy good economic policies don t put people to work we also i ll give you another example there are also in this tax bill that i have asked the congress to pass there are also big incentives for small businesses and big businesses to reinvest their money to put americans to work and special programs to induce people to invest in communities that are particularly depressed more sweeping than anything anybody s ever offered why because the government can t put everybody to work most people work on the private sector and that s as it should be so we have to find ways to give people special incentives to reinvest their money let s take for example a business if a business goes out and refinances its business loan and gets a lower interest rate what do you want them to do with the money open another business right or expand the business they re doing and hire more people so we can get unemployment down so those are the kinds of things we re trying to do the budget i ve asked the congress to pass has over 200 specific budget cuts it s got some really tough things in it we freezed federal employee pay we reduce the size of the federal work force by 150 000 over the next five years by attrition just by not hiring people as vacancies occur we cut everything from agriculture subsidies to medicare we cut a lot of things starting with the white house staff and the administrative cost of the federal government we raised the money that i talked about but we have some targeted increases in investment so while we re going to bring the deficit down dramatically we re going to try to get some money for more funds for dislocated workers more funds for communities that are hurt by base closings or plants being closed because of defense cutbacks more funds for things like the red line transit system here where our administration announced over 1 billion in funding to put people back to work and also to have some more stops in the community and the thing i want to say to you is that if we re going to compete if you re going to be able to have a good job and we re going to turn this community and this area around we have to have the discipline to cut the things out we don t need to spend money on to raise some money in order to bring the deficit down because that means low interest rates and that s good for the economy but we also have to invest in people and technology and jobs we ve got to do that you know i got amused when i was on the way in here people holding up signs standing next together one of them said don t spend any more money and another one said close the border to illegal aliens in the jobs program i presented to congress one of the things we had was enough money to hire a lot more border patrol people you can t have it both ways if you re going to hire people you ve got to have the money to hire them and we re going to have to make these kinds of tough decisions so i wanted to come here because all of you know this if you didn t know this you wouldn t be here you have this figured out i mean maybe not just like i said it but you ve figured it out the average 18 year old going into the work force now is going to change work eight times in a lifetime eight times and whether you can get and keep a job now depends as much on what you can learn tomorrow as it does on what you know today and that s not going to change the world will get smaller and smaller and smaller more and more of our economy will depend on our ability to compete with people around the world we ll have to trade more we ll have to sell more to other countries we ll have to be able to change constantly over and over and over again and you really are on the cutting edge of that change so i wanted to come here to try to illustrate that and to ask you as citizens to support my economic program to support our efforts to bring the deficit down to cut spending to ask wealthy people to pay their fair share to give people incentives for more jobs and to invest more in education training and technology i also want to tell you before i open the floor to questions i want to introduce one more person when i was running for president out here we tried it their way for 12 years look what it got us you know what the no new taxes crowd did for 12 years they cut taxes on the rich raised taxes on the middle class ran the country in a ditch they had it their way for 12 years it sounds great all this talk they had their chance they had their chance i broke my you know what else they don t say their crowd what did they do after the election oh after the election they said oh by the way the previous administration oh by the way the deficit is going to be 50 billion a year bigger every year than we told you but go ahead and do everything you said you were going to do before sorry we didn t tell you that what did they say guys so the free lunch crowd has had their chance and i m telling you there is no free lunch crowd and so we ll just have to decide whether we re going to take a different course i want you to have a chance to do that the other thing i want to tell you is we can t turn this country s economy around unless we lift california up and so i have i asked the secretary of commerce ron brown to head a team in my administration to develop a specific strategy to try to make sure we were doing everything we could do to help to turn this economy around he has now made just since i ve been president in four months seven trips to california meeting with people working with people trying to develop a strategy for what our partnership should be and he came with me today so i want to introduce him ron stand up please he s spending more time here than in washington we re going to work hard but you ve got to do your part too and one of the messages that i hope will come out of this event today is that thousands of people in southern california will see you they will see you and they will think i ve got to do my part too i ve got to do something i have to do something to change what i m doing i have to do something to lift up my circumstances because i m telling you there is nothing the president nothing the mayor nothing the governor nothing anybody can do for you that you re not prepared to do for yourself this has got to be a partnership and a two way street thank you very much dem wjclinton18 6 96 bill_clinton thank you so much you ve made me feel welcome today you ve got my day off to a great start and you have been a wonderful wonderful friend and supporter of this administration in all the things we ve tried to do to improve the health and welfare of the american people i want to begin by saying a special word of thanks to your president ginna trotter betts for her four wonderful years as president of the american nurses association thank you i ll never forget the first time we met and talked about this al gore said you know the president of the american nurses association is from tennessee he s shameless about things like that and then we met and i thought it was especially wonderful because she did not speak with an accent i want every american today to join with me in saluting your leadership on this 100th anniversary celebration our country has the finest health care system in the world and nurses are the heart of that system as ginna said because of my dear mother i know the hard work and the sacrifice that goes into your work i want to thank you again for honoring my mother in 1994 with a special award in her name and for everything that you do i learned from her and america learns from nurses every day the basic values that make this a great country we know that the mission of our country should be to offer opportunity to every american to demand in turn that every american take responsibility for making the most of that opportunity that s the basic bargain of this democracy we know too that all of us have an obligation to see that we treat all responsible americans with respect and with tolerance to build a community out of all of our diversity today i ask for your prayers for the people who go to church in those churches that have been burned in the last year and a half and for your support for their right to worship and live i also want to thank you for the support you ve given us in our attempt to change the course of affairs here in america and to deal with the real issues that affect the lives of real people i sometimes wonder when people like you who work and live every day all across america in the heartland and get up and try to make something good happen every day when you come to washington it must be like visiting a foreign country from time to time i think it would do more good if the people who work and write here in washington had to go out and visit you more often i think it would change their attitude about what really matters in life we ve been at this business of trying to create opportunity and increase responsibility and strengthen our national community for three and a half years now there was a lot to be done three and a half years ago we had to get out economic house in order we had to reduce this terrible deficit and do it in a way that continued to invest in our people and their future and when we passed that economic plan in 1993 there are those who said well this is a terrible thing it will plunge the economy into recession it s the worst thing in the world it was a bitterly partisan fight we prevailed by the narrowest of margins well three and a half years later we now can see whether they were right or we were right in three and a half years our economy has produced 9 7 million new jobs 3 7 million new homeowners three years of record increases in the number of small businesses and the lowest combined rate of inflation and unemployment in 28 years i believe we were right in 1994 we asked the congress to take a serious approach to the crime problem to get beyond rhetoric and partisan division and tough talk and to do something smart as well as tough on crime we put 100 000 police on the streets passed the brady bill passed the assault weapons ban passed the violence against women act there was a lot of bitter partisan rancor about it all but we have now had a chance to see whether it works we are halfway through almost putting the police on the street almost 60 000 people with criminal records have been denied the right to buy handguns under the brady bill which is a health issue by the way and an emergency room issue we re enforcing the violence against women act the three strikes and you re out act we see that the assault weapons ban has worked to ban assault weapons but not to take any sporting weapons away from the hunters and other sportsmen who were told that they were going to lose their weapons we can see it now we have had three years of declining crime in a row we were right and they were wrong we did the right thing to pass the crime bill in 1994 we have had three years now to evaluate the work of expanding head start and making college loans more affordable and passing the national service program and we know that the more people we educate in america the stronger our country will be and the more people will be able to find good jobs and find other good jobs if they lose the ones they have and we know enough now to say that we ought to do more we ought to give families a tax deduction for the cost of college education and we ought to make two years of education free after high school through tax credits for every american to go to community colleges today i want to talk with you about two other issues about how we can reward opportunities increase opportunities and reward responsibility and build a stronger country by improving health care and by strengthening the requirements that parents be responsible in the support of their children for three and a half years we have worked on these things as well and even though we did not prevail in doing everything we ve tried to do i want you to know that i will never forget as long as i live the way the american nurses worked with the first lady to try to give health care to all americans she is grateful for it and so am i thank you i thank you for standing with us when this administration became the first in american history to take on the tough issue of tobacco and the marketing of tobacco to young people but we know we know notwithstanding some political voices who say this is no big deal and some people can deal with it and some can t we know it is illegal to sell cigarettes to children in every state in the country but every day 3 000 underage americans start to smoke and 1 000 of them will have their lives ended prematurely because of it that is something we know if we want to improve health care in america why don t all those people who say that s what they want to do stand up and be counted and do what we need to do to restrict the advertising and marketing and sales of tobacco products to young people in this country that s what we ought to do let s not forget what has been done as ginna said we did pass the family and medical leave act to say if you take a little time off to care for a sick child or a sick parent you won t lose your job it s amazing to me there are still some of the people who voted against the family and medical leave law defending their vote and saying they did the right thing to oppose it well i think it was right to pass it and a lot of american families think so too i never go into a big crowd of families very rarely that somebody doesn t come up to me and say i took advantage of the family and medical leave law the other day we had in the white house 50 families from 50 states who are participating in the children s miracle television network with all the children s hospitals in the country these desperately ill children and their hardworking parents almost all of them middle class people and two families came up to me on the way out of the room and said i do not know what i would have done if the family and medical leave law had not been passed i kept my job and took care of my child there s also some things that we have stopped from happening that you deserve a lot of credit for i sometimes think that the majority in this congress has forgotten the first rule of health care first do no harm we have fought to slow the rate of inflation in medicaid while preserving its fundamental guarantees for three decades the united states has guaranteed that poor children and pregnant women people with disabilities and older americans will not be denied health care simply because they cannot afford it that is the right thing to do the majority in congress is actually insisting that we repeal this guarantee i have said and i believe this would amount to child neglect for a whole generation that s why i vetoed that plan last year if they send it to me again i will veto it again working with you we have fought to balance the budget in a way that protects medicare and honors our duty to our parents let me remind you that we have cut the deficit by more than half we added time to the medicare trust fund and we re attacked by the now congressional majority for doing it but their proposal for medicare would undermine our ability to hire and train nurses would close down more hospital wings in cities and rural communities of course we have to slow the rate of inflation and medicare my plan will secure the medicare trust fund for a decade without imposing unduly high premiums on low income seniors and without wrecking the delivery system which is after all what we have to preserve if we want people to have good health care in the first place and while we re doing no harm why don t we do a little good we are working with you to improve health care access to as many as 25 million americans by fighting for the kassebaum kennedy health care bill no worker should have to worry about losing health care if he or she loses a job and no one should be denied health care simply because they or someone in their family has a preexisting condition i am working hard with the congress and i do want to say that i am encouraged that there are people in both parties who support the kassebaum kennedy bill in its purest form it passed the senate 100 to 0 all we have to do now is to get together and pass the bill pass a good bill i believe we can do it i am working with the leadership in both parties to do it but i want you to leave this town only after you have given a clear signal to congress pass this bill now and while we re at it one other thing we could do that would really help millions of working families is to raise the minimum wage now and i hope we will do that i am doing everything i can to increase opportunity for the american people but as i said we all know that the basic bargain in america is opportunity in return for responsibility we also know that where are children are concerned the most important of america s building blocks is not a strong government but a strong family it is parents who must love their children and take responsibility for them that has been the driving principle behind my efforts to reform welfare as we know it i believe the present system perpetuates a cycle of dependency and irresponsible behavior but i also know having spent time in welfare offices as a governor that nobody wants to reform this system more than the people who are trapped in it i want a system that promotes work strengthens families and encourages independence that s why i have proposed time limits and work requirements but also child care and health care to help people move from welfare to work the majority in congress often criticizes me for vetoing a bill they called welfare reform well i did i did it because it was too tough on kids and too light on work i asked them to do better and if they ll do better i ll be happy to sign welfare reform legislation meanwhile we will continue to reform welfare with or without congressional action we have worked to cut red tape for 40 of the 50 states by approving 63 welfare reform experiments just today we approved a waiver for a welfare reform effort in new hampshire which combines strong work requirements with incentives to move people from welfare to work i have received an intriguing proposal from wisconsin which has tough time limits but actually gives assurances assurances of a job and health care and child care to people on welfare and i expect to approve that request soon what you need to know all of you is that for three out of four americans on welfare the rules have already changed seventy five percent of the families in this country on welfare are already under welfare reform experiments approved by our administration and devised at the state and local level that is one big reason that today there are 1 3 million fewer people on welfare than the day i took the oath of office as president of the united states the food stamp roles are also down the poverty rate is down teen pregnancy rates have leveled off and are dropping some work and training among welfare recipients are up child support collections have reached a record high but we must do more to insist on more parental responsibility our proposals are about giving people more opportunity and demanding more responsibility and i reject the idea that when it comes to welfare it is only the mother who has to act responsibly that is a false statement for too long we have let the men off the hook we must insist that they do their part to support the children that they help to bring into this world how many times i wonder how many times nurses in this audience have seen a frightened young girl give birth to a baby alone in a hospital with the father no where to be seen how many times has the hospital and the government been left to pay the cost not only for the delivery but for the continuing care of the child well two people are required to bring a child into this world and two should help to raise the child last year i signed an executive order that cracked down on the requirements for federal employees to pay their child support three years ago i signed a law requiring states to establish hospital based programs to determine the father of a newborn child based on our first reports more than 200 000 fathers have been identified through these voluntary hospital paternity identification programs that s 200 000 children whose fathers can t just up and walk away and child support collections and paternity establishments have increased by 40 percent since 1992 i am proud of that and you should be as well but we have to do more that s why earlier today i took executive action to strengthen child support enforcement and promote parental responsibility first we re putting in place a new national program to help states track parents who owe child support across state lines today too many parents get out of paying child support by moving from job to job from state to state this must stop currently 25 of our states require that when a person is hired for a job a check be made to see if he owes child support under this new program we will check that information against our national database to catch deadbeats who have crossed state lines i want every state in the country the other 25 to give us this information so that these people who do not pay their child support have nowhere to hide today i also directed the department of health and human services to require mothers who apply for welfare to provide the name of the father and other identifying information when they apply for assistance and before they get the benefits of course there must be good cause exceptions such as those required to protect mothers from the dangers of violence against women and we will require the welfare office to contact child support authorities within two days once we get this information to begin legal proceedings to hold fathers responsible for support this is important our system should say to mothers if you want our help help us to identify and locate the fathers so he can be held accountable as well and it should say to fathers we re not going to let you just walk away from your children and stick the taxpayers with the tab the government did not bring the child into the world you did our people will help to take responsibility for those children but you have to do your part as well we have to make responsibility a way of life not an option when it comes to raising children in the united states so let me say again to you i thank you for the giving nurturing work you do we would not have a health care system without you america wouldn t be what it is without you i thank you for demonstrating responsibility at work and for most of you at home as well throughout your lifetime i ask for your continued support as we try to not only protect but to advance the cause of health care in this country we must not rest until we have made health care accessible and affordable to every single american citizen but we must also say to every american citizen you ought to be as responsible in your life every day as the nurses of america are in their lives this country works with opportunity and responsibility we cannot have one without the other and if we re going to build an america that will be the world s leading source of peace and freedom and prosperity in the 21st century if we re going to keep the american dream alive for all of us we have to have both those things you embody it in your life we re trying to embody it in the policies we advocate and i ask for your continued support you ve made me very happy personally here today but you make me very proud to be president of an america with people like you let s keep fighting to make it better thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton18 6 97 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much mr mayor my friend and neighbor thank for that generous introduction and for your great leadership in memphis i d like to thank all of those who made this dinner possible tonight i thank richard and janice and ernie and bob who aren t here and weldon and mel clarke and marianne niles and bill kirk larry gibson marianne spragen jeff thompson everyone else who got all of you here tonight i m glad to see you you know when you come to an event like this even if you ve been reelected president right before you go in you re gripped with this recurring fear that you ll walk through the door and nobody will be there so i m very grateful to see you all here tonight let me say too that i m delighted to be joined tonight by two members of the white house staff craig smith and minion moore and i see carol willis from the dnc there are a lot of other people from the democratic committee here i appreciate what the mayor said about my speech in san diego and i thought what i would try to do tonight just for a few minutes is to try to explain how that speech came to be and we brought a few copies here tonight if you want one on the way out you can get it but i thought i would like to explain how it came to be in 1992 when i ran for president i had an idea that we could make this country work again if we could liberate ourselves from kind of traditional political battles and think about what we wanted the country to look like in the 21st century and then think backward and say well what would i have to do to get it that way don t say in the first instance well you can t do both those things they re inconsistent just ask yourself what would you like our country to look like in the 21st century and i wrote a little answer down and i have said it a thousand times since then and every single day i think about it i want my country to be a country where the american dream of opportunity is alive for every person not just some i want all citizens to be good responsible citizens and assume the responsibilities of citizenship i want the united states to lead the world for peace and freedom 20 30 years from now just like we are today and i want us to live together as one community where we respect we even celebrate our differences but we re bound together as americans now those are the things i want and i wrote it down over five years ago and i ve stuck with it ever since way back in 1991 before i made the decision to run for president i said nearly six years ago now i said no point in me running unless i ve got a better reason than i d like to live in the white house what will i say when people say what do you want to do why are you doing this and every single day i think about it so the first thing i wanted to do was to change the economic policy of the country i said we can t keep on spending all this money we don t have we re going to bankrupt the country but we don t want to walk away from the poor or the dispossessed or the future of the country so we have to find a way to reduce the deficit for example and spend more on education and spend more on preserving the environment because they re our children and our future and most people didn t think you could do that but you can and we did we had to do some things that weren t so popular we got rid of hundreds of programs that i thought we could do without and we got rid of 16 000 pages of federal regulations and by attrition not firing the government s 300 000 people smaller than it was but we re spending more money on education we re spending more money on the environment and we ve cut the deficit by 77 percent and that s a big reason not the only reason by any means but a big reason the economy has done as well as it has on crime and social welfare i thought to myself there s got to be a way to protect the children and support people in moving from welfare to work but require them to do it if they can without hurting the kids and that s what we ve tried to do we ve had the biggest drop in welfare rolls in the history of america by far in the last five years on crime what i wanted to do was to deal with the causes anybody can make a tough speech on crime and pass one more bill raising the penalties but it was obvious to me having been a governor who built more prison cells than any governor in my state s history that there would be a limit to how far we could jail our way out of this there are several states that are already spending more money on prisons than they are on higher education several states so i said to myself we can t stop being tough on people who do vicious things you have to catch them prosecute them and put them in jail but we have to stop this from occurring we have to find a way to prevent crime and it wasn t so hard to find because already there were people who were beginning to bring the crime rate down by going back to old fashioned community policing and reaching out to our young people and trying to find kids something to say yes to as well as something to say no to and so we passed a crime bill we passed the brady bill we passed the assault weapons ban i heard all the people say i was going to take all these hunters guns away and it wouldn t do any good well no hunters have lost their weapons but 186 000 now felons fugitives and stalkers have not been able to buy handguns we were right about that we re putting 100 000 police on the street crime has gone down every year last year the biggest drop in 35 years and i say that not to be self serving but to say if we can get our country always to think about what do we want the country to look like when our grandchildren are our age and we re going through a time of change so we have to think in different ways then i think there s a way to find good faith solutions to these problems and no one can seriously question that we re better off than we were five years ago in terms of jobs and employment new minority businesses biggest drop in inequality since the 1960s among working families so i said to myself what do we still have to do because i never wanted to get a second term just to ratify the fact that i d done a good job in the first term you could do that with a gold watch no one should ever want to be reelected because they ve done a good job i remember the first time i ran for reelection that i was successful anyway in 1984 i went out and things were going pretty well in my state and this guy said are you going to run for reelection as governor i said i think so and i said if i do will you support me he said probably he said what are you going to say i said i ve done a good job and we re better off he said bill you can t say that that s what we hired you to do that s pretty good right you think about that he said you can t brag on just doing what you were hired out to do i mean that s so i said to myself what are we going to do in these next four years what still needs to be done and i d just like to mention three or four things and end with the initiative on race and you ll i hope understand why to me we re doing the right thing at the right time i said okay the economy is better welfare rolls are down crime rate is down another thing that was encouraging we just saw that our 4th graders ranked way above the national average on international math and science tests something that i was told for years would never happen because we had such a diverse student body and our kids were poor and all that i ve listened to that for years but our teachers and others have been out there working to get these standards up and we finally saw it manifested in international competition this year this is something people have been working on literally for 10 years since the nation at risk report was issued now 13 years ago and it s finally you re finally beginning to see people figuring out how to give poor kids the chance to prove they re just as smart as anybody not just in town but around the world and prove that we can make education work so i said what else do we have to do okay one we have to keep the economy going the best antidote to all despair and disadvantage is having a chance to make a living because if everybody else messes up as long as you can make a living you can at least take care of your own so i wanted to finish the job of balancing the budget in a way that would continue the strategy of investing in our future and that s why i was thrilled with this budget agreement i didn t agree with everything in it but after all we negotiated it with the leaders of the republican party in congress and the leaders of the democratic party but it will permit us to balance the budget and it has literally literally over 95 percent of the investments that i recommended in my budget to the congress it enables us to go on and invest in education and to invest in preserving in the environment and invest in research and development and technology it enables us to continue to try to grow the economy in the dispossessed areas more than doubles the number of empowerment zones that have been so successful in some of our communities including yours more than doubles the number has a special initiative for the district of columbia that we have paid for there in there to try to get d c up and going again in a good way has a brownfield initiative that all the mayors asked for to give private sector incentive to go back and invest in the inner cities in areas that had previously been unattractive because of environmental problems it has in this budget so i said this is a good thing has 3 billion to give to our communities to help put people on welfare back to work if the private sector can t pick them up and i might add for those of you who are concerned about it the states in this budget get the same amount of money they got in 1994 when the welfare rolls were at their all time high which means almost every state in america has got at least a 20 percent cushion that they can use to do things like pay prospective employers the welfare check as a wage and training supplement so i d really like to see the african american business community go out there and hit every state legislature in the country and say listen you asked for this you got it you ve got to give these people a chance to work give us some of that money and we will train them and give them a job and make sure they re not hurting their kids and they re taken care of in that way and that ought to happen all over this country we are spending much much more money on welfare today than we would have spent if the old law had stayed in place because the rolls are down by more than 20 percent but the states have it and they will live to regret it if they don t spend the money now to make folks independent and put them into the workplace and put them into the mainstream of american life so all that anyway is in this budget that s the first thing the second thing i wanted to do is to emphasize two specific things in education one of them doesn t cost much money and that is i wanted to provide funds to help the department of education work with the appropriate experts to develop a test that would grow right out of the ones we re using now we re just not giving them to all kids to ask every child in the country in the 4th grade to take a reading test in the 8th grade to take a math test by 1999 based on these international standards so we could see how our children were doing with no adverse consequences to the kids just a way to see whether we were really challenging our children hard enough to reach the right standards keep in mind this last international test that showed us way above the average of math and science in the 4th grade was given to a representative sample of american students by race and income and region nobody fooled with this and what i want to do is to see every child have the chance to have the basic education necessary to succeed one of things i said in my speech in san diego i don t know if you heard it applies to hispanic americans who are legendary for being willing to leave school early to support their parents in low wage jobs that they have to work long hours at that was a responsible thing to do 10 years ago today it s not a responsible thing to do the high school completion rates of african americans and whites are almost identical the high school completion rates of hispanics are 25 percent lower 25 percent lower and there is nothing all my social policies will do nothing all my economic policies will do for any young person who is at least not willing to finish high school and get two years of further training but a lot of people who have parents in need their hearts are in there they want to quit and go to work help support their parents but what happens is they get stuck in these jobs and their incomes go down so i m trying to get people to focus on those first 12 years with a view toward number one everybody should finish and number two when you finish your diploma ought to be worth something and the only way to do it is to have high standards and not be afraid of them and not punish people if they don t measure up but just show them where the bar is and then help everybody clear it the second thing i want to do is open the doors of college to everyone and that s why we proposed to give a tax credit worth about 1 500 a year for the first two years of college and then a tax deduction for any cost of higher education after that we know from the 1990 census that every young person not every but most young people who get at least two years of college or more get a job with a growing income and young people who have less than two years of college or who don t even have a high school diploma tend to get a job with a stagnate or a declining income we know that s where the break was in 1990 and we know that our economy is now producing more of the high wage jobs in the last two years that s another thing more than half the new jobs in the last two years have been in higher wage categories so that s the second thing i wanted to do the third thing i wanted to do that i ve got some differences in our party about and there s a lot of differences within the republican party both parties are split on this is to continue to expand the network of trading partnerships the united states has but we negotiated 200 trade agreements to get fair and equal access to other markets in my first term and we re now the world s number one exporter again and one of the reasons more than half our jobs pay above average is that so many of them are tied to exports now tomorrow the first lady and i and others are going to announce a very important initiative with regard to africa that we ve been working on for some time and that really was reinforced by her recent trip there but i would hope that all of you who are business people would help us to continue our normal trade relations with china and to push them on things we disagree with but to keep involved with them and to continue our reaching out to latin america even as we reach out to africa you know we re going to have a billion people in latin america before you know it and they re very excited and would like to deal with us but last year the southern countries in latin america brazil argentina and the others in a group called mercosur for the first time ever did more business with europe than the united states why because we stopped reaching out to them with our trade agreements so it s not like these folks aren t going to go on to create a future and we have a great opportunity and if we want more high wage jobs created so that when we educate young people they ll be able to get good jobs we have to create the high wage jobs mr brown s father literally gave his life for that cause and that is the right thing to do that is not against working people what is good for working people is to create more high wage jobs in america and so i hope you will support that the fourth thing that we have to face is that with all of our successes 20 percent of our kids at least are still living in poverty minority children much higher percentages now in the end no society can permit that without paying an awesome price and that is something by the way that ought to factor into this affirmative action debate when people say oh you don t need it you cannot leave people isolated for 18 years from the mainstream of economic and social life and then tell them there are no barriers into college university or starting your own business you cannot do that so the reason i thought the president s summit of service that we did the former presidents and general powell did in philadelphia was so important is it gives us a chance to mobilize millions of people around specific objectives that i m also trying to see the government do its part and let me just reiterate them real quick we want to see that every child has a safe place to grow up i ve got a juvenile justice bill before the congress now that is both tough and smart modeled on what they ve been doing in boston where our chairman mr grossman lives where not a single child has been killed by a gun in a year and a half don t tell me we can t do that not one but do we need volunteers yes why because look what they did in boston i can pass all the bills in the world in addition to the probation officers and police officers to have all these people walking the streets saving these kids lives and you go to any city where the juvenile crime rate is going down they have both citizens and appropriate action by the public sector the second thing we want is for every child to have marketable skills i already talked about that education the third thing we want is for every child to have access to health care and i was really appreciative that this is one thing that general powell and i share a common obsession with he said i can t believe we let working families get by without health care if i proposed to end the health care guarantee for people in the military when i was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff there would have been a riot no one in america would think about depriving military people and their children of health care but we have 10 million kids for example who don t have health care and we ve got enough money in that balanced budget to cover half of them we need to finish the job we need to finish the job it s not right it s not right the fourth thing and the fifth thing are things that have to be done at the community level we want every child to have a mentor and we want every child to have a chance to serve and i think that s important kids who serve feel more important they know they matter and 90 percent plus of young people in a recent national poll said that they would serve in their community even poor kids if just somebody would ask them if somebody would ask them and give them a chance so those are the things that i m trying to get down now for our country to keep this momentum going but i really believe and this brings to me to the race initiative right now we just have one state hawaii where there is no majority race within three years california our largest state will be the same within somewhere between 30 and 50 years depending on patterns of immigration it will be true for the nation as a whole that means that we really will test whether or not we are not a nation of race or place but a nation of ideas and ideals politicians have been saying that in speeches for a century now are about to find out and i don t know about you but when we find out i know what i want the answer to be think how much time i ve spent as your president and how much time i m going to spend in the next three and a half years dealing with hatred and mistrust in the middle east born of ethnic and religious difference dealing with hundreds of years of accumulated animosity in northern ireland born of their ethnic originally and religious differences the scotch irish and the irish the protestants and the catholics how many hundreds of thousands of people died in rwanda and how many had to be saved by us and the french and others because of the fights between the hutus and the tutsis most of us if we walked down the street in one of those african communities could not tell the difference but they knew enough to hack each other s children to death or what about the bosnians where there is literally no biological difference between them they are by accident of history divided because of the political forces coming together where bosnia is now the orthodox became serbs the catholics became croats or vice versa and the people that were left in the middle were colonized by the ottoman empire and became muslims but they now are ethnically different and people who lived together as friends and neighbors for decades turned on each other like that so when you think everything is hunky dory here and oh we might have an occasional riot when there is a controversial thing like rodney king but we won t really ever have a disintegrating energy in this country you just think about how easy it was for those people to fall on each other now i know we ve got a lot more to lose you would argue than they do but no great nation has ever had a multiracial multiethnic integrated society the russians are doing a good job actually of trying to preserve their democracy with a whole lot of different ethnic groups and they had that unfortunate difficulty in chechnya but there are a lot of chechens over there where they don t have difficulty but they live apart physically apart and normally in distinct what we would call states here we are together so i said to myself this would be a good time to do this because we re not having a civil rights crisis and we re not under the illusion that there s just this x little problem even if it s a big problem different perceptions of the fairness of law enforcement for example that if we fix everything will be hunky dory and we ll go on we need to imagine what it s going to be like 30 years from now because if you think about it we can have a good economic policy a good social policy we can even begin to do the things we need to do to rescue our children and if we can t get along together and we don t trust each other and we don t feel that people are treated in the proper way then the rest of it could just unravel on us somewhere down the road now that s why i did this and do i know it will be successful do i know that there s some mechanical way to define success no i don t know that but i think it will be and that s how i want all of us to see this affirmative action debate look if i didn t think we needed it i d be happy to shed it if somebody could offer me a credible alternative and then test it for a year or so and proved that it work i d be happy to shed it what i know is that we have a vested interest as a nation without regard to race in having universities where people of different backgrounds get educated together in giving people from each different ethnic group in the united states a chance to have their fair share of not a quota but at least a share a representative group of people in any form of human endeavor to inspire others to come along to have economic self sufficiency you know if you look at why why does the united states have an unemployment rate under five percent and a lot of the european countries have higher unemployment rates one reason is people like you small business people independent business people people that proved they could put together something hire a few people work over a lifetime and build something and we have a vested interest as a people in saying that there are pockets of economic self sufficiency and entrepreneurs in every neighborhood in this country and if we had it we wouldn t have half the problems we ve got today you just think about it if every block in this country had one or two small businesses succeeding on it there would be people on that block employed there would be role models for those kids walking the streets to see there would be people giving money to the school to make sure they don t have to give up their music programs you just think about it so we have a vested interest all of us in trying to make sure we can all participate so to me this affirmative action debate is somehow smaller than the larger issue i will i m doing my best to honor the supreme court decision i m doing my best to have reasonable standards i hope that there will be other things we can do as well that s why i want the empowerment zone to double the empowerment zones to pass we ve got a lot more economic things we need to do but the larger issue is what do you want this country to look like 30 years from now every other question should be answered in terms of that once you ask the right question it s a whole lot easier to come to a common sense answer now what we re going to try to do with this race initiative just very briefly is first of all stick with this vision of racial reconciliation try to get everybody to agree on what we want the country to look like second get the facts out now that s important i think when we decide what to do with the welfare system for example it would be helpful if everyone in america knew that last year in chicago there were six applicants for every minimum wage job that opened up and nine applicants in st louis don t you i was a little concerned that over 40 percent of african americans and over 40 percent of whites when asked what the percentage of the american population was black said between 20 and 49 when the correct answer is 12 we need to know the facts then the third thing we want to do is to have this kind of a dialogue in every community in the country we want to recruit and encourage local leadership and finally we want to come up with some specific concrete actions to be done at the national level and at the community level that s what we re trying to do but i wanted you to understand tonight because i want you to be a part of this i want you to feel like it s yours and i want you to go out and find your friends and neighbors and ask them to be a part of this and i want you to find people that don t agree with you on everything and ask them to be a part of this because this is a huge deal if we can pull this off the united states will be by far the best positioned country in the global society of the 21st century and if we act like we don t have to think about it until the wheel runs off there is a chance that the wheel will run off and even if it doesn t we will never be what we ought to be that is what this whole thing is about so i ask you go out there and tell people if they want to be cynical skeptical say i don t know if it will amount to anything i don t about that clinton he s got to have something to do in his second term whatever they re saying out there let them say it tell them to participate anyway saddle up they don t have anything to lose by trying i ll tell you one thing if we all try we ll be better off than if we just let it go so i ask you for your help now the last thing i want you to know is that s why i want you to be proud to be here because i think these things that our democratic party stands for now are the future i think they re not just democratic future they re not just african american hispanic american you name it this is america s future and we re going to have to make it together and tonight by your being here you re making it more likely that we will do just that god bless you thank you let me say one other thing before i leave i don t know who all was here from my office before i got here but we ve got bob nash who is my director of personnel is here if you want to be ambassador ask him he has the hardest job in the government he has to tell one person yes and 10 people no and maurice daniels the vice president s political division person is here and let me just say one other thing too i want you to know because a lot of you are friends of hers that hillary and i were deeply saddened by what happened to betty shabazz and we ve been praying for her and i know you are too that s a whole other subject but it ought to remind us that we don t have a kid to waste you don t want any of them to get away from you and they do all too soon and all too easily which is another reason we ought to think about what we came here to do tonight thank you bless you dem wjclinton18 6 98 bill_clinton senator bingaman and congressman becerra ladies and gentlemen i welcome you all here today as i announce my intent to nominate ambassador bill richardson to become our secretary of energy ambassador richard holbrooke to assume the portfolio of america s representative to the united nations i m especially pleased that their families could join me and the vice president and as you can see our entire national security team over the last two years bill richardson s experience energy and tenacity have made a real difference in advancing our interest in the united nations and around the world with diplomatic skills honed in one of the most diverse congressional districts in our country negotiating ability tested in some of the toughest hot spots on our planet and a personal touch evidenced from his first day on the job bill richardson has brought creativity and drive to our leadership at the u n he has served the secretary of state and me by tackling some of the toughest negotiating challenges from the congo to zaire to afghanistan he helped to rally the international community to speak and act as one in the crisis in iraq today the international inspectors are back on the job working to end iraq s nuclear chemical and biological weapons threat thanks in no small measure to his efforts he has been a vigorous and articulate proponent of our engagement around the world and the importance of leveraging that engagement by living up to our united nations obligations in short if there s one word that comes to mind when i think of bill richardson it really is energy but that is hardly the only reason i am appointing him to this job for 14 years representing new mexico an energy rich state that is home to two of our national department of energy labs and his long service as an active member of the house energy and commerce committee he has gotten extensive firsthand experience in issues ranging from deregulating the oil and gas industries to promoting alternative sources of energy to ensuring that energy development meets tough standard of environmental safety i thank him for his willingness to serve let me also say that secretary pena has left a very impressive legacy upon which to build i appreciate his five years of service to our nation as both secretary of transportation and secretary of energy where he surprised i might say even his greatest admirers with the speed with which he mastered the incredible complex issues of the department and the leadership he demonstrated in supporting the comprehensive test ban treaty in coming out with an electricity deregulation plan that will safe consumers 20 billion a year in helping to open all kinds of opportunities for energy conservation and a clean energy future for america let me also thank him as secretary of transportation for his service there in advancing mass transit more than at any point in recent history and for opening up our air commerce with 40 other nations with congress support bill richardson will do his part now to secure our energy future at a time when that is inextricably bound up with our obligation as americans to do our part to deal with the problem of climate change and our obligations as americans to build a secure future for our country that allows economic growth and protection of the planet i believe that this challenge will require the greatest energy from our labs from our scientists and technology from an energy department that can work clearly with the private sector on what plainly will be one of america s most important priorities for years and years to come ambassador holbrooke my new united nations designate is already a familiar face all around the globe his remarkable diplomacy in bosnia helped to stop the bloodshed and at the talks in dayton the force of his determination was a key to securing peace restoring hope and saving lives his ongoing service in the balkan region has helped to keep bosnia s peace on track through some difficult moments he has helped to advance our efforts to break the stalemate in cyprus and he s worked to diffuse the alarming tensions and violence still brewing in kosovo his expertise rests on an outstanding career of diplomatic service from his early days as one of the youngest ever assistant secretaries of state for asia an area where he has continued to be actively involved and which is very important today then he worked as my ambassador to germany and as assistant secretary of state for europe his long experience in the private sector has given him a keen eye for the bottom line economically and politically he will help us to shape a u n that is leaner more efficient better equipped that fulfills the best ideals of its founders and meets the challenges of the 21st century ambassador holbrooke understands as do all the members of our national security team the important role the united nations can play in supporting our goals around the world pursuing peace and security promoting human rights fighting drugs and crime helping people lift themselves from poverty to dignity and prosperity our nation will always be prepared to act alone if necessary but joining our strength with our u n partners we maximize our reach and magnify our effectiveness while sharing costs and risks in a world where developments beyond our borders have dramatic implications within them from rogue states seeking nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons to pollution corroding the atmosphere international cooperation is clearly more important than ever i urge congress to send my legislation therefore without unrelated issues to live up to our legacy of leadership and pay our debt to the united nations in closing let me say that the vice president and i feel very fortunate every day to have such a strong national security team men and women of vision of judgment of commitment we have worked closely together to make sure that our nation remains the world s leading force for peace and freedom for prosperity and security the line up i announce today maintains that exceptional standard i thank all of them for their willingness to serve i especially thank ambassador holbrooke and ambassador richardson for their willingness to take on these important new tasks and now i d like to turn the floor over to them dem wjclinton18 7 94 bill_clinton thank you so much secretary cisneros for that stirring set of remarks for your kind and generous introduction but more importantly for your creative vigorous and effective leadership in the department of housing and urban development the department now known as a source of innovation well run efficiently run but also a place where values count where ideas count on the cutting edge of change henry cisneros whether he is trying to integrate a housing development in vidor texas or trying to give safety and security back to the children in the public housing in chicago or donning a hard hat to try to take some buildings down and make public housing more humane all across the country he s the model of what we all ought to be in public service today let me also say only half jokingly he also has just demonstrated clinton s third law of politics which is whenever possible be introduced by someone you ve appointed to high office they will brag on you every time to president raul yzaguirre we were just reminiscing that he has been a leader of la raza now for 20 years i m very glad you don t have term limits he s been a good thing for your organization to your board chair audrey alvarado to all the members of congress who are here congressman pastor and congressman esteban torres who came from washington with me and represents california and all the members of the florida delegation who are here representatives meek and brown and deutch diaz belart and shaw and to my good friend senator bob graham and lt governor mckay and i think governor chiles is here i know he was here i am delighted to be here in florida and most especially with la raza i want to say that when henry and i were discussing what i should say today he said i should say let s see if i do it si su puede yes we can that has been the model of my presidency and in some ways it was the model i was raised with by my wonderful mother who never spoke a word of spanish but understood that message i want to especially recognize too the honored guests you have here for seniors day they know the meaning of those words and they have done so much for us as we gather here today looking into a future that will begin a new century and a new millennium i think it is important that we view all the specifics that we discuss those that you have already discussed and the things i am about to say in the larger context of the challenges of this time i asked the american people for this office because i believe that we had to do much more to restore our economy to restore the american dream to help to create a world of peace and prosperity in which americans could live up to their full potential because i believed that we could not do that unless we made a great strength of our diversity unless we were a country coming together not coming apart and because i believed we could not do that unless the government of the united states worked for ordinary citizens again the future of the 21st century the america that i want to see us build together will be an america where hispanic leadership anchors its place in boardrooms schoolrooms and all the halls of power in which hispanic americans will be sought out as leaders among opinion shapers and policymakers in the america that s now just around the corner in all our futures hispanics running for mayor governor congress and yes for president won t be running against the tide but with it they will be leading the rebuilding of america and a renaissance of community family and work from the grassroots up of course much of this is happening already more than 5 000 hispanics hold elective office in america today a world away from the numbers of a generation ago the hispanic congressional caucus has grown to 18 members and will surely grow more up and down the americas as we nurture democracy and expand trade hispanics are the bridges between our different countries and our cultures bridges that will lead us to tomorrow there is no doubt that in the unity of hispanic americans there is great strength and that in the diversity of america there is great strength if we will but develop it and nourish it in the last 18 months since i took office we have followed that course a course set in a long campaign and before that in a long public life a course of change that you deserved one of the things i have tried to do and secretary cisneros referred to that is to try to make this administration look more like america henry cisneros and federico pena have become household names but there are 288 other hispanic american appointees 2 5 times as many as in the previous administration many at the senior level eleven percent of the judicial appointments are latinos compared to just two appointments in each of the last two administrations there are people who may or may not be well known but they are making a difference every day people like aida alvarez and nelson diaz at hud norma cantu and mario moreno at education fernando torres gill at hhs and jack otera and maria echeveste at labor joe velasquez suzanna valdez carolyn curiel and many others in the white house i have recently nominated gill casellas to head the equal employment opportunity commission we ve been joined by polly baca as director of consumer affairs at the department of health and human services and by general ed baca as head of the national guard the first hispanic ever to head the national guard in the history of the united states if you ask me do we need to do more and better i would say yes but we are doing better than people have done before you just keep urging and working and we ll keep doing better broadening the base of america s government the whole purpose and strategy of everything that i have tried to do as your president is to make the american dream a real possibility for all of our citizens in a dramatic even breathtakingly changing world the first thing we had to do was to get our economic house in order to end the drift of the economy last year congress voted by the narrowest of margins for the economic plan that i proposed that included 255 billion in spending cuts tax breaks for 15 million working american families making 90 percent of our small businesses eligible for tax reductions increasing income taxes on the wealthiest 1 5 percent of our people when that budget combined with this budget which eliminates over 100 government programs cuts 200 others and reduces the federal work force by over a quarter of a million giving us the smallest federal government in 1999 that we ve had since kennedy was president when these two budgets are put together we will have reduced the federal deficit for three years in a row for the first time since harry truman was president of the united states the federal debt we will pass along to our children and grandchildren will be 700 billion less than it was estimated to be when i took office as president we re also trying to grow this economy through expanding exports through trade agreement like nafta and gatt bringing down foreign barriers to our products and services eliminating our own barriers to the exports of a lot of our high tech products already because of nafta we re exporting autos to mexico at more than five times the rate of a year ago and overall exports to mexico are growing faster than to any other country with which we trade mexico s exports to the united states are also up too both of us are winning because we did the right thing on nafta last year and i have just come from a meeting of distinguished citizens of south florida who are working to make the summit of the americas near the end of this year a success you know this meeting that we re going to have will include the democratic leaders of this entire hemisphere the caribbean and central and south america as well as in north america we are going to talk about what we can do to strengthen democracy what we can do to continue to integrate all of the americas economically and what we are going to do to help to build a system of sustainable development so that we can preserve our precious natural resources and grow our economies at the same times it will be an historic meeting and we are having it right here in miami i told the folks who were there that i had the opportunity last night to talk to the coach of the brazilian soccer team and the head of the brazilian federation of soccer once again reminding me of some of the things we have to do as americans because he spoke very good english and i didn t speak his language but he said an interesting thing to me he said you know when we all came here we wondered about this world cup because we knew soccer was not your game and yet we ve had wonderful attendance we ve had an open door to all of our people coming from other countries to see your games the american people have made this the best world cup ever well it put me to thinking soccer may not be our game but democracy is enterprise is diversity as a strength is we can make the summit of the americas a truly historic event for all of you in this room and all you represent twenty years from now we ll look back on what is happening in miami at the end of this year as one of the most important events paving the way to the right kind of future in the 21st century let me say this strategy is working bringing the deficit down investing more in education and training investing more in new technologies opening new trade opportunities it s working the last 18 months our economy has generated more than 3 8 million jobs the unemployment rate has dropped 1 7 percent last year we had the largest number of new businesses started in the united states than any year since the end of world war ii we are going in the right direction but we know we need to do more we know we have to give our citizens the confidence they need to grow we know that among latinos there has been stronger support for the idea of education and hard work through education as the way out of poverty and the way to the american dream than perhaps any other community in the united states but we also know that we have not yet provided our people with the kind of lifetime learning opportunities that we now know are necessary to succeed and win in the global economy the average person after all will change jobs seven times in a lifetime so we need a world class system that starts from the day someone enrolls in kindergarten or preschool to the day they finish high school to the day they go to college or go into a job training program or go into work for the first time until the day they retire and we are working on that this year the congress has provided largely on a completely bipartisan basis perhaps the most important education reforms we have had in a generation a total reform of the head start system serving more children at a younger age expansion of childhood immunization the goals 2000 bill which sets international educational goals for all of our schools and encourages grass roots reforms to meet them the school to work transition bill which trains young people who don t go on to college but who do need at least two years of further training to get good jobs with a growing income we must do that for every one of our non college bound young people and we are now considering a way to change the unemployment system into a reemployment system so that when people lose their jobs they can immediately begin to retrain for the jobs of tomorrow now when you put all that with what the congress did last year in the economic program which was to reform the college loans so that listen to this we made 50 million americans eligible for lower interest rates better repayment on their college loans so that no one should ever not go to college again because of the cost of a college education we are on the right track to the future we are trying to do things that honor your values opportunity responsibility community and the soul of the hispanic culture our families last year we enacted the family medical leave law and we cut taxes on 15 million working families to encourage people to stay in the work force not to slip back into welfare we established a white house commission on hispanic educational excellence chaired by raul and i am confident that he will find even more ways for us to help the people who need help our program of national service americorps has benefitted from the guidance of la raza this year we will have 20 000 young americans all across the country working in their communities to deal with problems and earning money to continue their education year after next we can have 100 000 young americans rebuilding america from the grass roots up in texas alone the community service program helped to immunize 100 000 extra children in the first year it was in place to give you an idea of the dimensions of what national service can do for america in your communities in the largest year of participation of the peace corps the largest number we ever had participating was 16 000 we ll have 20 000 this year in national service 100 000 the year after next it can help to rebuild america and the spirit of la raza should be there in project after project after project after project there are two issues i want to speak with you about in closing today without which we cannot make america what it ought to be the first is crime it is tearing our country apart costing us too much in money and in humanity and we have to take control of our streets and our neighborhoods again right now we are very close to winning passage of an historic crime bill that would put 100 000 more police officers on the street a 20 percent increase in the number of police officers on the street it would ban assault weapons that too often make gangs better armed than the police who are supposed to be protecting the american people and i might add for those of you who come from rural sporting constituencies like mine it would identify over 600 sporting and hunting weapons that could not be banned or restricted in any way it is a law enforcement measure it would provide tougher penalties for repeat offenders more money for local governments to build jail cells but for the first time ever 8 billion in prevention to give our young people something to say yes to as well as something to say no to but we ve been slowed down in the last few weeks and we need to speed up to pass the crime bill if anybody doubts why we need it notice your morning papers yesterday the department of justice released a study that showed that in america children between the ages of 12 and 17 are five times more likely to be beaten raped and robbed than adults in america children are the new victims of crime in america our children are the most common victims and the trends are not good because our children are also more and more likely to be the most common perpetrators violent crimes committed against children are up 23 percent since 1987 even in many cities where the overall crime rate is going down we are allowing our children to be terrorized a generation of children to be lost in place after place in america and we must stop it and this problem is infecting people without regard to their race i ll never forget meeting the parents of polly klaas who was kidnapped from her bedroom in petaluma california and subsequently killed and then there was the letter i got in late april or early may which a lot of you remember from nine year old james darby of new orleans he wrote me this letter and pleaded with me to do something about the crime problem he said i think somebody might kill me and i m asking you nicely to do something about it nine days later he was gunned down nine years old writing the president pleading for help then yesterday we get the statistical horror that our children are five times more likely to be victimized than the rest of us the names of polly klaas and james darby and all the others we re going to lose if we don t act it s time it s time to put all of our differences aside to work out the problems we have to work out and pass that crime bill every day every week every month that goes by is another period of time when the police aren t on the street when the assault weapons ban is not in place when the tougher penalties on repeat offenders are not in place when we don t have the prevention programs on the streets in every neighborhood in the united states this is the best and biggest and most significant fight on crime in the history of the united states and we ought to act on it and do it now the other problem i need your help and i have to thank you for is health care i want to thank first la raza for issuing its statement in favor of universal coverage and shared responsibility but i also want to talk frankly about this you know for 60 years our country has tried under presidents of both parties to reform our health care system to provide health security for all americans and we have never been able to do it there are reasons for that but first let me ask you to look at the system we have now what is good about it the doctors the nurses the technology the medical research if you can get it it is the finest in the world and there are a lot of selfless people i have been to a public health clinic here in miami that i will never forget treating people without regard to their means and giving the best health care they possibly could but if you look at our system and compare it to others and if you want america to compete and win in the global economy we must be willing to rigorously compare ourselves to others both our strengths and our weaknesses here are the facts we spend a bigger percentage of our income 14 5 percent on health care than any other country nobody is over 10 percent canada spends 10 percent germany and japan spend about 8 5 percent but we are the only nation that simply cannot figure out how to cover everybody in fact we re going in reverse ten years ago 88 percent of our people were covered with health insurance or covered by government programs today we re back to 83 percent and dropping states have struggled with reforms forty states have enacted various kinds of insurance reforms of the states which have acted 30 of those states have still had an increase in the number of people without insurance you say well 83 percent that means only one in six americans don t have health insurance that s not too bad even though nobody else would tolerate it it s not too bad but it is bad why because nearly everybody can lose your health insurance who can t lose their insurance if you re rich you can always buy it if you re poor the government will give it to you if you re in jail you ll get it if you work for the government you ll get it anybody else can lose it even if you ve got it and we simply have to find a way to deal with this the second big problems we have is i saw all of you nodding your heads when i was talking about education and training out there identifying with what i said most americans without regard to their party would say the united states today should be spending more investing in our future more on education and training more on airports more on roads more on technology more to build a powerful economy you ought to look at your federal government budget now i am proud of the fact that we re eliminating 100 programs and cutting over 200 others proud of the fact that i gave the congress the first budget in 25 years if it passes this way that will actually reduce domestic spending excluding health care and the other things we ve called entitlements but if you look at what we re doing we are cutting defense and i don t believe we can cut it much more we are right at the edge beyond below which we shouldn t go we ve cut it dramatically we re holding all other domestic spending constants and health care is exploding we re exploding health care costs at two and three times the rate of inflation paying more for the same health care you re going to be listening to presidential campaigns from now till kingdom come if we don t do something about health care where the people will be standing up and telling you something that s not so because they won t be able to spend a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon they will have to spend all the money pay more every year for the same health care small businesses in america are paying 30 percent more on average than big business and government and more and more people are going without health care coverage now this is the biggest issue a bigger issue to hispanic americans than any other group why because more working hispanics are uninsured than any other group of americans more than 32 percent of the hispanic population is uninsured compared to 13 percent for anglo americans and 20 percent for african americans why is that is that because more of you are on welfare no if you were on welfare you d have health insurance it s because you are working for small businesspeople or part time for jobs that do not have health benefits often for employers that honestly cannot afford health benefits in the current environment now one of the real problems we have with this debate is that the people who want to stop us from fixing it say they re sticking up for small business they say that small business can t afford one percent of payroll or two percent of payroll to provide for health care the problem is that most small businesses today are trying to provide health care and they re paying too much for two reasons number one because they re having to carry the burden for those who won t do anything for their employees and number two because they re small they can t get the same good rates that people who work for government and big business can and it s not right we have always believed that the states were the laboratories of democracy i m supporting the state of florida now in a very innovative thing they want to do with health care but we do have one state hawaii who 20 years ago decided that there ought to be shared responsibility a 50 50 deal employers pay half of health insurance and employees pay half of it and everybody get covered they have about 98 percent coverage their infant mortality rate has dropped by 50 percent their average longevity is more than the national average you say well hawaii is a healthy happy place we all go there to play golf or whatever the truth is that 20 percent of their health burden are poor native islanders and the most important thing is that small business premiums there are 30 percent below the national average why because nobody is refusing to do their part and because the little guys can join together in big pools and get the same costs that bigger employers can my fellow americans the hispanic community has always stood for work over welfare for holding families together against all the odds and for the notion that the community was important that we all became more by working together and being loyal to one another than we could just pursuing our individual destinies and yet we are living in a country that is the only advanced country in the world that cannot figure out how to cover all of its people we are punishing the small businesses who try to do the right thing we are spending 40 percent more of our income than anybody else we are losing ground on coverage every day and a lot of people say that what we ought to do is put a band aid on the present system i say to you this is one issue where the political rhetoric is divorced from the reality the right thing to do for small business that will generate more jobs is to ask everybody to be responsible give small business a break give small business the voluntary opportunity to join a buying cooperative so they can get better rates but cover everybody cover everybody we have experience we know what works and what doesn t this is a very tough fight because we are spending so much of our money on health care on things that relate to the financing of health care not keeping people healthy or treating them when they re sick and a lot of people don t want to change the status quo but if you look at the trends it is truly frightening 32 percent of hispanic americans working people of all the people in america without health insurance today 85 percent of them get up every day and work for a living and if they would quit and go on welfare we d give them good health care is that the message we want to send to our people is that the message we want to send to our children do you want health care for sure go on welfare go to jail get elected to congress or get rich i m not criticizing the congress be a federal employee be the president be president i ve got it and i m not going to lose it and it s not right and we know what to do do we have the will do we have the courage do we have the vision to do it i ask you this because it isn t just that one in six americans don t have health insurance it isn t just that one in three hispanics don t have health insurance it s that the two and three who do have it could lose it eighty one million of us live in families like henry cisneros family where his young son who means more to him than anything in the world has fought a heroic battle against a tragic health problem and he works for us so he s got health insurance what if henry cisneros were a traveling salesman what in god s name would have happened to his son there are 81 million of us that live in these families we owe it to them to be able to work to grow to flourish to take care of their children or if their wives get premature breast cancer or a man has a heart attack at 40 we cannot shut them down and unless you cover everybody if you try to fix their problem the only thing you re going to do is raise everybody else s insurance and have more middle class people losing their insurance we know what to do do we have the courage to do it la raza is here after 26 years because you kept pushing people to change because you did not deny the existence of real problems but instead embraced the exhilaration of dealing with them now i know a lot of the things i do as president aren t always popular but i ll tell you what i show up for work every day and i ask people to face real problems this is a real problem crime is a real problem welfare is a real problem continuing to make this economy go forward is a real problem they are also enormous opportunities this is the greatest country in human history i believe we can deal with this if you ll give us the energy and support we need to do it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton18 7 96 bill_clinton thank you very very much i want to welcome all of you here and before i begin the program let me say i m sorry i m little late today but we have been working as i m sure you understand all day long on the plane crash last night i want to talk to you about your future but before i do i d like to say just a word about the people that were on that plane i m determined that we will find out what happened but i want to urge all the american people not to jump to any unwarranted conclusions about the tragedy we should focus today our thoughts and our prayers on the families of the victims of that terrible terrible tragedy last night and you should know that everybody in our country that we believe can make a contribution to finding out what happened is on the job working overtime i want you to know if you if you haven t heard that there were 16 high school students from pennsylvania on that flight any tragedy like this is made deeper if young people s lives are lost people who haven t yet had their chance to live up to their god given promise these young people were from the montoursville high school french club in pennsylvania they were young committed filled with excitement about the prospect of visiting france our country will be poorer for their absence and the rest of you will have to work a little harder to live up to your promise and to theirs as well the mayor of that small community was just on television and i had a visit with him a few moments ago and he said you know this is a big hurt that s going to last a while i m sure that s true so i d like to ask you before we begin the formal program today to join me in a moment of silent prayer for those students for the other victims and for their families amen i would like to welcome our leaders here from the american legion joe caouette lawrence sperry judge pete johnson a member of my boys nation class back in the dark ages i welcome peggy sappenfield katherine morris the director of girls nation ron engel the director of boys nation jack mercier the director of activities who was also there and was a counselor to my class george blume the legislative director i m sure all of you know this is always a special day for me it s the 50th anniversary of boys nation almost my 50th anniversary on earth here in a few weeks this is only the second time ever the first being the bicentennial when boys nation and girls nation have come to the white house together i remember a lot of things about my visit here in 1963 not only my much heralded shake of hands with president kennedy and the meetings we had with other leaders but i remember very vividly the young men i was with from other states the conversations that we had about the kind of world we would inherit and about what we had to do about it our obligations were focused i think especially on the issues that dominated our nation more than 30 years ago now we talked a lot about the struggle for civil rights and equal opportunities for all americans we talked a lot about the struggle against communism and the cold war to be sure we weren t the first generation of americans to have those conversations they have been constant in our history and we know that many of those who founded our nation more than 200 years ago were themselves very young i d like to ask you think because we are now on the verge of a new century about what it was like the last time we stood on the edge of a new century there s a magnificent portrait right over there in the corner of theodore roosevelt by the great american artist john singer sargent teddy roosevelt became vice president in the election of 1900 and was soon elevated to the presidency when president mckinley was assassinated he was our president for seven years in the beginning of what became known as the progressive era he was the youngest person ever to become president of the united states and as we stood at the dawn of a new century he was infectious with his optimism and absolutely contagious in his determination to take on the problems of america and to make the new era we were then entering work for all americans that was a time like this of enormous change we were around the turn of the century moving from being primarily an agricultural country to being primarily an industrial country we were moving from being primarily a people who lived on farms in small isolated areas or in small communities to being a people who lived primarily in towns and in cities and it changed dramatically the way we work the way we live the way we related to each other there were enormously good things happening but a lot of things that weren t so good that required a vigorous response by our nation and so teddy roosevelt led our nation in that response and started as i said what became known as the progressive era he and woodrow wilson one a republican one a democrat both former governors were instrumental in kind of breaking out of the pattern of past thinking that had dominated our political life and taking america in a new direction it falls to your generation to do something like that now because we are changing in ways that are to some extent more profound than we changed a hundred years ago instead of moving from the agricultural to the industrial age we re now moving into an information age where every form of human endeavor will be dominated by the profound computer chip bill gates said in his book the road from here that the digital chip was the most profound revolution in the way human beings communicate with each other since gutenberg printed the first bible in europe 500 years ago it won t be very long especially if we succeed in hooking up every classroom and library to the information superhighway before people in remote mountain communities or the poorest urban neighborhoods of america can go to school hook into a computer and do research on volcanoes in australian libraries for example this is going to have enormous implications for the whole nature of work how we learn how we relate to each other and it is a fascinating thing we re also moving as people then moved from rural ares into the cities we now are primarily an urban and suburban people but people will be able to live in rural areas more easily than they used to because of the computer and to do different things and no matter whether we live in rural or urban areas we will have to identify ourselves more and more as citizens of the world as well as americans we re not dominated by a cold war world anymore where every country is either in the camp of democracy or the camp of communism where we worry about the imminence of a nuclear war that could take the lives of the whole country away but we do have a whole set of new problems in the world that directly relate to the fact that the cold war is over and things are more open now and it s easier for people and ideas and money and technology to move around and cross national boundaries and when people become more open to new ideas and new information it means that there are also more opportunities for the organized forces of destruction to take advantage of that openness that s why terrorists can put poison gas on a subway in tokyo or blow the world trade center up or the federal building in oklahoma city or set bombs in london or the holy land or do all the other things that you ve read about in the last few years the more open we are to moving around and working with each other the more we ll have to be vigilant in dealing with these problems it s why we re all more vulnerable to organized crime and drug running that crosses national lines it s why we have to be more vigilant in dealing with the problems of the proliferation of small scale nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons all of these things are the new security threats and interestingly enough there s also a very old problem that s rearing its head all over the world as the big threat of communism recedes and that is the tendency of people everywhere to look down on each other ultimately hate each other and maybe even kill each other because of their racial ethnic or religious differences that is at the heart of what is going on in the middle east that is at the heart of what is going on in northern ireland that is at the heart of what is going on in bosnia we have the most vigorous vibrant multiethnic democracy in human history but that is at the heart of what is going on in these church burnings and that is at the heart of what led some mean spirited people to paint swastikas on the doors of african american special forces personnel at ft bragg in the last couple of days the most patriotic members of a minority you could imagine still being subject to that why is that because all throughout human history you see people being told that they should evaluate themselves not based on who they are what they stand for and what their values are what s in the constitution the bill of rights the declaration of independence but on who they re not what color they re not what religion they aren t so you have to fight all that your generation will have more opportunities than any generation in human history you will have more chances to live out your dreams in more different ways than any group of people who have ever lived we have a chance to extend opportunities to people who would have automatically been left in the backwater of history without a second thought just a few decades ago because of their gender or their race or because of their disabilities things that now we wouldn t think of doing used to be the ordinary run of the mill thing just a few decades ago so on balance as i look to the 21st century i think this is going to be a great time for you it is going to be a great time for america if we meet our challenges and protect our basic values no country in history has ever lasted so long as a free country a free people with so many different kinds of people in it and the world is coming our way but there are still these dark forces of destruction that we have to stand against and you have to speak against it when you see it in a big horrible way in a manifestation of terrorism but you also have to stand and speak against it when you see it in subtle ways in your neighborhoods on your street in your schools we ve got to be able to treat each other with respect based on our shared values not our essentially superficial differences very interesting don t you think that this movie independence day is becoming the most successful movie ever some say it s because they blew up the white house and the congress and that may be but you know you see story after story after story about how the movie audiences leap up and cheer at the end of the movie when we vanquish the alien invaders right i mean what happened the country was flat on its back the rest of the world was threatened and you see all over the world all these people have all of a sudden put aside the differences that seem so trivial once their existence was threatened and they re working together all over the world to defeat a common adversary why can t we work together to achieve common dreams what is it about people that they need to adopt creeds that will enable them to demean other people and look on them as subhuman and take their lives away we have to fight that you re living in a time where literally you re going to be able to do things that have not been invented yet a lot of you will be in jobs within a decade that have not been invented yet the patterns of work and life of travel and learning will be unbelievable and no nation is as well positioned as the united states if we seize our opportunities meet our challenges and protect our values you have to ask yourself and i hope you ll take the time before you leave here before you leave the white house before you leave the capital city the whole history of your country is here and say what kind of country do i want to live in what do i want america to look like when my children are my age and what should i do to help america look like that a simple question those are the questions i asked myself before i ran for president because i knew that it s a rather rigorous enterprise and you have to have a high pain threshold today to do this sort of thing and to me there are three simple answers when my daughter is my age and i have grandchildren i want america to be a place where the american dream is alive for every person who s willing to work for it no matter where they start out in life i want america to be a place that is coming together not being split apart that really appreciates all the differences that are in this country and binds us together by the things that have held us together all this time just go back and read the declaration of independence the constitution and the bill of rights and i want this country to continue to be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity because we are doing something in this country that needs to be done in the rest of the world people have to be able to be bridge their differences and find a way to work together now that s what i want fairly simple things three things and i work for it up here every day with a simple strategy i think we have to create more opportunity for everybody demand more responsibility from everybody and do everything we can to build a community and make america stronger and our families our towns and our national community as well there are some very specific things that we ve tried to do four years ago our economic house was out of order we quadrupled our debt in four years we had a 290 billion deficit we had the slowest job growth rate since the great depression so we had to do some basic things just to put the house back in order and we had a very simple strategy drive down the deficit to reduce the burden of debt on future generations lower interest rates and get investment back to put people to work expand the trade in american products and services around the world because that creates more high wage jobs here at home and invest in education technology research and the preservation of the environment four years later it s obvious to me that that strategy is working our deficit is less than half of what it was it was 290 billion it s going to be 117 billion this year this is the first time in every year of a president s term that the deficit has been reduced since the 1840s but we had to do it because we have never had a time in history when we built up so much debt so quickly and the american people have responded our economy s created over 10 million jobs so we re moving in the right direction but that had to be done it is not enough but it s an important first step in terms of our leadership for peace and freedom in many parts of the world we re better off today than we were four years ago and there are no nuclear weapons pointed at any one of the united states for the first time since nuclear weapons were developed so we re moving in the right direction we re finally beginning to build compacts and partnerships all around the world to combat terrorism and the other problems that i mentioned we ve worked hard to give you cleaner air and cleaner water and to preserve the natural resources of the land i think one of the essential ideas that has to dominate the thinking of both parties and all americans as we move into the 21st century is that you can develop the economy without destroying the environment in fact you can enhance the development of the economy with the right sort of environmental strategy and if we continue to believe that the only way we can grow our economy is by destroying our environment some day there won t be any economy to develop and we have got to do that now we have to make that commitment now you know it s amazing how many science fiction books and movies are all predicated on the fact that one day we won t have any environment left in america we won t have any trees left the air won t be fit to breathe i m amazed we ve now got with this new sci fi channel on one of our cables here it s amazing the percentage of movies that come on that thing that are predicated on the fact the we are determined to destroy our environment we must not do it i also believe that we must now continue to tolerate the levels of crime and violence we have in our country we have a crime rate coming down four years in a row now we ve got 100 000 police we re putting on the street in community policing we ve finally done something about putting guns into the hands of young people we have a zero tolerance strategy for guns in schools we ve abolished a few assault weapons 19 kinds and passed the brady bill and i want to point out that a lot of people said some bad things when we did it there s not a single hunter that s lost a rifle since we abolished the assault weapons and passed the brady bill but there are 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers who could not get handguns because they were checked and their criminal record was found out and they did not get the guns and america is safer as a result of that so we have to continue to work on the crime problem and i want to make a personal plea to you citizens have a role to play in this yesterday the vice president and i had representatives from citizens patrol groups all over america here at the white house and we announced that the cellular telephone association is going to give 50 000 phones to these citizens patrol groups so that when people are out here walking the streets and they find something wrong they can immediately call the police department or the hospital to the emergency room or the fire department but in spite of all of our progress the crime rate among people under 18 and the violence rate among people under 18 is still going up in most communities in america that s because there are too many young people out there on the street that are raising themselves that are joining gangs doing bad things because they re not in good gangs doing good things we all want to be part of something i mean look you ve got the same shirt on you re in a good gang today it s an important thing to know and you do that you can have more influence on a lot of young people than i can so i urge you to deal with that issue and finally and most importantly if we want to see everybody do well in the 21st century we ve got to give everybody the tools to do well and more important more than ever before that means education we ve worked hard to improve educational opportunities here but we have more to do and i want to encourage all of you to do what you can to support increasing access to high quality education from our initiatives to hook up all the classrooms to the internet to help the school districts that are hardest pressed in the country get some money to do rebuilding and repairs to opening the doors of college education to everyone i hope that congress will agree with me to give a tax deduction for the cost of tuition for college i hope the congress will agree with me to give a tax credit that will enable everybody to at least get a community college diploma because we need to make at least two years after high school as universal for education as high school is today if you look at the economy if you look at the census figures if you look at the peoplethat are doing well and the people that aren t it is absolutely clear that in the information age the gains to education are far more profound than at any time in our history and we have simply got to do more to make it universal if we want america to grow together instead of drift apart we can do it you can do it if you demand that it be done finally let me say that i believe we ve got to do something more than we have done many things more to help strengthen the american family and we have to recognize that families are in a different position than they used to be i heard someone made a funny joke last night making fun of to some extent the congress to some extent me saying you listen to people talk in washington and they say the problem with people on welfare is that they want to stay home with their kids instead of going to work and then they give a speech and say the problem with middle class families is the mothers want to go to work instead of staying home with their kids you know and it s funny you think about it what s the real issue what s the real issue the real issue is most people who are parents work most people who are parents who work have to work so what should our goal be our goal should be to help americans succeed at home and at work i look at all of you and if you want to make a contribution to our future i want you to be able to make it but i also think the most important contribution you can ever make is to have children and raise them right and make them good and strong and good citizens and good people like you are so what we should be doing is to think about instead of making it an either or we ought to ask ourselves over and over and over again what can we do to help people succeed at home and at work that s what the family leave law was all about that s what my efforts which have been very controversial to try to help schools with experiments that they want to adopt including curfews or even in some school districts school uniform policy that s what that was all about you may think it sounds bad but you re all here in one and we haven t sought to impose them we just sought to give schools the opportunity to adopt them if they wanted that s what our controversial efforts to prevent the advertising and distribution and sales illegally of tobacco to teenagers is all about trying to help parents deal with the implications of being away from their kids a lot working but also trying to do a good job raising their children it s also a large part of what the vice president and i have worked on in the area of television you know we passed a law the telecommunications law which will create hundreds of thousands of jobs but it also required in new television sets that a v chip be placed that would give parents more control over the programming their young children watch and all the entertainment industry agreed to set up a ratings system for television which we thought was a very very good thing and we re working on that they re working on it the television today is very different than it was when i was 10 or 11 years old or six or seven we have hundreds of studies literally hundreds of studies showing the staggering number of hours that young people have spent watching people get killed by the time they re 16 or 17 and showing clearly that it makes people more numb to violence less sensitive to the impact of their behavior on others so we ve worked hard on that but i don t think that is enough and i just want to mention this issue because i think it s very important we have been working very hard not only to have a ratings system and a v chip which is sort of a negative thing but also to try to bring more positive educational programming for children to television this month we re challenging members of the entertainment industry who have done a great job on this rating to come to the white house to talk about improving the quality and quantity of children s programming so the industry is doing it s part the truth is that what we need now is for the government to do it s part the federal communications commission has had before it for a long time now a measure that would require broadcasters to put a minimum of three hours a week of quality educational children s programming on if you think about all the hours the television is on a week three hours a week doesn t seem like too much at least doesn t seem to me it s less than two percent of the nation s air time the initiative is stalled and some people have opposed it but the airwaves clearly under our law are designed to promote the public interest i can t imagine anything we could do that would better promote it than to put more quality educational programming for children on television so i d like to ask all of you to support that and i hope very much that the federal communications commission will finally act on it well these are some of the things that i think we re facing as we move into the 21st century we ve got a responsibility those of us in my generation particularly those of us like me that had extraordinary opportunities to be in places like where you are over 30 years ago to try to create opportunity to try to create a framework within which everybody will be expected to be responsible and to try to bring this country together as a community but most of your lives are still ahead of you and every one of you if for no other reason than you re a part of this program will have a disproportionate opportunity a disproportionate opportunity to exercise leadership and therefore you have a disproportionate responsibility to do a good job with it every one of you when you go back home your friends will look at you a little differently they ll listen to you a little more closely they ll want to know what you saw up here they ll want to know what your opinion is and i am telling you you have got to be thinking now in this rapidly changing world what do you want the country to look like when your kids are your age what do you want your work years to be like how do you want to feel about your country and what do you have to do to get there and i leave you with this it s very fashionable for people today to say well it doesn t really matter what s going on in washington nobody can made a difference why should i vote it s all a bunch of bull i m telling you in the four years i have been president i now am more optimistic than i was the day i got here i believe more strongly than i did the day i got here about the potential of all of us working together to make good things happen and this country is a very great country there are 10 million more people working than there were four years ago 8 million people have refinanced their homes 3 7 million people have homes who didn t have them hundreds of thousands of people have better college loans than they did 45 000 young people are working to rescue their communities in our national service programs and earning money to go to college don t let anybody ever tell you that you can t make a difference in a democracy that you can t change the course of the country that you can t live people up or pull people together that is not true and the most important thing maybe you can do in the short run when you go home is tell people this country works that s why we have been around for 220 years this country works this is a great country and you have to pull your weight and challenge your friends and family members to do the same but i will say that if you do it the best days of this country are still ahead thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton18 7 98 bill_clinton thank you very much it s good to see you i love coming home i always learn something new when bill bristow was giving that speech i said to myself i am sitting here watching before my very eyes the broadening of the base of the democratic party he now has got every math teacher in arkansas committed forever thank you very much bill i thought that was a terrific didn t he do a great job let s give him a hand i thought that was great really great i want to thank blanche lincoln bill bristow judy smith for being here and for their candidacies kurt dilday my longtime friend mark pryor i thank congressman vic snyder for the wonderful job he does in washington every day and in his absence i know he had to be away at a funeral today i want to thank marion berry too he has done a wonderful job especially for farmers i thank jimmy lou and gus wingfield and charlie daniels and all the people who have kept the light going in the democratic party and state office judge corbin i m so pleased to see so many people running for office you know i had mixed feelings about this term limit issue when it came along but i felt a little better with maryanne salmon decided to run for the legislature and i m glad to see her back there i want to say to all of you too i read that article in the paper today and i want to comment a little more about it ask you whether my presidency had been good or bad for the state and the one example on the negative side they had was what happened in a recent transportation bill where even the transportation secretary from arkansas could not implement the plain recommendation of the study because our neighbor from mississippi jerked away funding for i 69 no one pointed out in the arkansas democrat article that that would not have happened if we had a democratic congress that would not have occurred i say that because what the heck i never get to be partisan and it s nice to be home and also because it s true let me say to all of you i am profoundly grateful for everything you ve done for me and for our family hillary just got back from a remarkably successful tour the first of our millennium tours where we re trying to save the treasures of the united states as we approach the year 2000 she went first of all we began by trying to save the star spangled banner and then she took a remarkable tour through a lot of our country s heritage thomas edison s home harriet tubman s home george washington s military headquarters and then to seneca falls new york where the women s movement began 150 years ago where the declaration of sentiments by 68 women and 32 men who had these radical ideas like women ought to be able to vote run for office own the clothes on their back we ve come a long way and she asked me to tell you hello and i just want all of you to know too that i think quite often of that day in october nearly seven years ago now when i stood on the steps of the old state capitol many of you were there and said that i wanted to build a better future for our children and i want to quote i wrote this down usually when i come home i feel free to speak without notes but i did want to write this down nearly seven years ago this is really the test to restore the american dream to fight for the forgotten middle class to provide more opportunity insist on more responsibility and create a greater sense of community for our great country now there are some things it seems to me that are fairly clear and difficult to debate and i think it s important when we evaluate the coming campaigns of blanche lincoln vic snyder judy smith bill bristow kurt dilday mark pryor and others to remember what america was like seven years ago we had high unemployment rise crime and welfare rates increasing social division no clear vision driving the country at home or abroad preparing us for the 21st century and washington was doing what i thought it had done too much of before and what i still hate to see they were having increasingly harsh political debates in terms that didn t make a lick of sense of us who lived out here in the country there were the standard debates about well the government is the problem the government is the answer no one i knew believed either thing i couldn t figure out anybody who believed it until they got into washington d c everybody had to be a conservative or a liberal and if you had a different position somehow there was something wrong with you because it required the people interpreting you to america to think about it and the people driving the politics of the nation s capital didn t like it but we came forward in that campaign in 91 and 92 with a set of new ideas we had new approaches to the economy to education to crime to welfare to the environment to foreign policy to whole idea of government it seemed to me that the answer was that we ought to look at government as our partner in building the american future and that the role of government ought to be to give the tools to solve their own problems to build strong communities and families and to create the conditions in which that could be possible no one thought government could solve all the problems but to pretend that by getting out of the way we d all be better off would to be violate the very insight of the founding fathers who said they formed a government in the first place because we could not do alone some of the things that were necessary for america to pursue life liberty and happiness and now we ve had a few years to evaluate the results so when people ask you has it made a difference let me ask you this if on inauguration day in 1993 someone had told you that within five and a half years america would have 16 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest welfare rolls in 29 years the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years the lowest inflation rate in 32 years the highest home ownership in history with the smallest government in 35 years would you have said i will accept that and be glad for the next five years for what s going on in america and along the way with the hope scholarships the tax credits for college the reformed student loan program 300 000 more work study positions we can literally say we ve opened the doors to college to anybody who s willing to work for it we have the highest childhood immunization rates in history we ve added 5 million children to the ranks of the health insured we re in the process of doing that we protected the pensions of millions and millions of americans and made it easier for people working for small business or for themselves to take out pensions and to get health insurance 12 5 or 13 million people have taken time off from their job without getting fired when a baby was born or a parent was sick because of the family and medical leave bill we raised the minimum wage and are trying to do it again to try to help people on the lower end of the economic ladder who are working hard and we gave a big tax cut in 1993 worth about 1 000 a year today to working families with incomes under 30 000 we have 1 000 colleges in america involved in sending their students into our schools to make sure all of our kids can read well by the time they get out of the 3rd grade we have 100 000 young people now just at 100 000 who served in the americorps program working all over america including in arkansas and i see kids from arkansas all over america when i travel around helping to solve the problems of this country at the grass roots level and earning money for college our country is in a better stronger more united place than it was in 1992 you helped to make it possible and you ought to be proud of it but here s the main point i want to make today in behalf of blanche and bill and all our other candidates up here in behalf of the record that vic snyder has already begun to establish and the efforts that marion berry is making you ve been awful good to me and you made me feel great as a person when i came in and i appreciate being given some responsibility for the good things that have happened and i think there is a connection between what we have done and what has occurred even though as always the american people themselves deserve most of the credit as is always true in a free society but the changes we made the decisions we made had consequences the point i want to make to you as democrats in arkansas thinking about your state these elections and your country s future is it s not just important to get the right people it matters if you re doing the right things if you say all that matters is that you have the right people then every election is a new story and people can say oh well bill clinton gave a speech or this that or the other thing or he was a pretty good leader he could take a lot of heat you may have seen by the way the other day in florida sylvester stallone gave me the gloves the boxing gloves he used in rocky and i said it was a good thing because i proved i could take a punch for the last six years and i was ready to deliver a few now i thought it was a good idea what i want you to focus on today because it really matters to the case you re going to make here between now and november is two things are important you have to get good people but you have to do the right things these things happen because we ve done the right things and there are honest principled disagreements at home and in washington about the right things we ve got the lowest crime rate in 25 years and they re still trying to stop my efforts to put 100 000 police on the street i mean it s unbelievable we have proved what works in education and yet they re still saying no to smaller classes no to better school buildings no to so many of our efforts to improve the education of our children we have proved we can grow the economy and improve the environment and they re still trying to weaken our efforts to protect the environment even though i might have said while all this economic good news is occurring the water is cleaner the air is cleaner the food is safer we have more toxic waste dumps cleaned up in four years our first four years than they did in 12 and we set aside more land in perpetuity than any administrations except franklin and theodore roosevelt so we ve proved you could do that but there s still an assault on the environment and all this rhetoric about how perfectly terrible government is well when they had control of it it was bigger than it is now but not as good this is real important if you want to go out and make an argument for why bill bristow or any democrat should be governor for what attorney general mark pryor would do working with like minded democrats for why it would make a difference if judy smith were in congress and for why one republican from arkansas is more than enough in the united states senate you ve got to know what you re talking about you have to understand that there are really consequences i m telling you it makes a difference we re not in this old debate anymore it s the real world now people need to see things unfolding as they are not all this are you anti government or pro government are you liberal or conservative what do you stand for or what is your education policy what is your health care policy are you for the health care bill of rights or not do you believe that everybody in an hmo ought to have right to an emergency room service if they need it ought to have a right to a specialist if they need it you ve been seeing all the press we re getting in washington on that we re bringing in all of these people we re talking about the horror stories all the doctors pleading and pleading and pleading with the insurance companies do this procedure that procedure the other procedure they take 90 days or 180 days the time the procedure gets approved it s too late and the people die we had a woman who spends her life working in a medical office calling trying to get authorization for procedures she broke down and cried at this hearing i had the other day this meeting saying i m just so sick and tired of telling people that they can t have the health care my doctor is begging to give them we had a hearing in washington last week we had two brave republicans show up with all the democrats in the house and several in the senate saying we re for a patients bill of rights and one of these republicans was a doctor and i said you know we democrats now what we re trying to do we want to put progress over partisanship we welcome anybody to come who agrees with our ideas and this brave doctor from iowa stood up there and said that he had been introduced as a doctor who in his spare time would go to central america and help children with cleft pallets and fix them so they wouldn t be disfigured for life and then he showed a picture of such a child and the whole room gasps and he said this child is not from central america this child is from the united states of america and this child was denied coverage for fixing his cleft pallet on the theory that it was cosmetic surgery and then he showed another picture where the kid got fixed anyway and how good looking the child was and everybody cheered and we all felt good now the fact is that the democrats up there are for a strong patients bill of rights and the leadership of the other party are opposing it the fact is the democrats are for giving the states and the governors and the legislatures and the teachers help for smaller classes for better school buildings for more charter schools for greater investments of all kinds and by and large our whole agenda is being opposed by the leaders of the other party the fact is our party is in washington working hard to prove that we can grow the economy and preserve the environment after this summer don t you believe the climate is warming up don t you think al gore was right after all we now have ways of measuring temperature changes for over 500 years the five hottest years in history the 1990s in over 500 years the five hottest years in history 1997 the hottest year this is going to be hotter i did my radio address today on things we re trying to do to help farmers we have this bizarre situation in america now where worldwide bumper crops and financial weakness in asia and for many of our farmers heat or flood or pestilence have created this crazy condition where prices are low because there are big supplies and fewer buyers and they don t have much of a crop anyway in north dakota farm income down 90 percent from last year 90 percent and so we re doing what we can to first of all purchase a lot more food and give it to countries where people are hungry secondly i presented to congress a number of other ideas to immediately release hundreds of million of dollars that would raise farm income but anyway we re having this big discussion up there now we either are going to do these things or we re not but in a larger sense i want to make the point that the climate is changing when i was in china recently i spoke to the american chamber of commerce this is not the democratic party the american chamber of commerce in shanghai and i got two spontaneous ovations one was when i talked about climate change and how we had to work with the chinese to see them grow their economy without using energy in the same way we did otherwise we could burn up the atmosphere and it would be hard for us to breathe which is already a big problem over there now i m telling you if you look at what s happening to the climate if you look at what happened in florida you saw all those fires in florida florida had the wettest winter the driest spring in history then june in florida was hotter than any july and august and if you ve ever been to florida in july and august that s saying something the hottest month ever things are changing now we can put our heads in the sand or we can say we re going to figure out how americans solve this problem the leaders of the other party in one of their committees they have voted to deny me the right to use any funds even to have seminars about this problem and talk to the american people about it you know i never will forget the day some young person who worked for me said denial is not just a river in egypt and there are lots of examples like this in health care in education in the environment in economic policy in economic policy yes we ve got a good economy there are still towns in the delta that need help there are still neighborhoods in our cities that need help there are still native american reservations out west that need help we ve got a whole agenda that says we ought to bring the benefits of this economic moment of golden prosperity to everybody in america and give everybody a chance to be a part of it and so far it has not been embraced in congress by the leaders of the other party so i ask you about all this what is this a nightclub i will now sing danny boy and you will applaud at the right time somebody leaned against the wall there last night somebody was up too late last night over there by the wall they just leaned against the wall and nodded out we re laughing we re having a good time but i want you to be serious between now and november i have tried to put progress over partisanship all of you know me you know i work with anybody who wants to work with me and you get it what s going on and i can tell by the way you clapped before at the appropriate moment but let me tell you in the end what matters is what happens in the lives of the american people the democrats will be rewarded if we do the right things if we have the right consequences and if we convince people that it s not just a matter of name calling and labeling but whether you have the right ideas i want you to think about it we ve got new leadership in the party i thank vaughn mcquary and all the other folks that are coming in here and trying to get this thing up and going and i like to see your enthusiasm and i m glad you re here in such large numbers but if somebody asks you why you re a democrat why you support the president why we ve succeeded in the last five and a half years what we would do if given the governor s office and the attorney general s office you need to have answers and you need to be able to tell people in ways that are not hateful or small or mean spirited we don t need to respond to them in kind as they have to us we need to remember our scriptural lessons we need instead to lift our visions and lift the vision of the people and talk to them about what we re going to do while i was listening to bill bristow talk you know we can do a lot in washington to help education but the constitution of almost every state in the union makes it clear that education is the primary responsibility of the states and the communities and the schools now let me ask you something no one here i take it would dispute the proposition that we have the finest system of higher education in the world in america no one disputes that otherwise why do people come here from all over the world every year to get into it and no one would seriously assert that america s elementary and secondary schools are the finest in the world but they could be and in points they are and from time to time they manifest that you look over the horizon and you ask yourself what are the big challenges of the future the first thing that comes to mind is we ve got to prove we can have the finest elementary and secondary education for all our kids without regard to their income their background their race or their region in the world now if you believe that then every time you re in the coffee shop every time you re on the street every time you re talking to somebody you have to say to them you cannot make these decisions in november you cannot cast a vote for governor you cannot cast a vote for congress you cannot cast a vote for the senate you cannot make these decisions without asking yourself who has got the best ideas for education who is best for my children or my grandchildren what s arkansas going to look like 50 years from now you know this is true in the congress let me give you another example a huge issue i m the oldest of the baby boomers and if present rates of birth immigration and retirement continue by the time all of us get retired there will only be about two americans working for every person drawing social security unless we make some changes and start to make them now by the time this happens we will have an unsustainable situation in which we will either have to have a huge cut in the social security benefits of retirees or a huge increase in the taxes on our kids thereby undermining their ability to raise our grandchildren every baby boomer i know is determined to avoid both these consequences now are there ways we can do it you bet there are but we have to start now which is why i have said let s don t spend any of this surplus even on stuff democrats like let s don t give any tax cuts even tax cuts democrats like until we save social security for the 21st century that s important believe me this is a huge issue some of their leaders are saying well now they estimate we ll have a 63 billion surplus this year and that means the surpluses out in the years ahead are going to be even bigger than we thought and we can t use all that money we need a big tax cut now and oh it just happens to be right here before the election well i know it s right here before the election but let me remind you man we ve been waiting for 29 years for a balanced budget it took me five and a half years to get it done because there was a 290 billion deficit when we got up there and we won t have a balanced budget or a surplus officially until the new fiscal year starts on october 1st after we close our books at 12 00 a m on september 30th it looks to me like after 29 years of being in the red after the years of 1981 and 1993 when we quadrupled the debt of the country in 12 years it looks to me like we could wait just one year until we figured out to save social security and stop assuming that we were going to have a surplus that hadn t even materialized yet i d just like to see the bank account just for a day or two wouldn t you now if you believe that that s an important idea you need to know if you believe that and you need to tell your friends and neighbors who aren t as political as you are or maybe not even democrats and maybe their independents maybe they re republicans but they re thinking about this look you got to think about this this is not just where you go in and vote the way you normally do we re in a time of enormous change we didn t just elect the right people in 1992 we began to do the right things and it is profoundly important that we do the right things in the future saving social security and medicare for the 21st century making education the best in the world proving we can grow the economy and preserve the environment taking care of our health care system so that we don t keep ferreting people out and we instead keep bringing people in and let me just mention one other thing that arkansas people i think understand more partly because we have so many farmers here one of the biggest problems we ve got now looming ahead is our trade deficit s gotten real big now why has our trade deficit gotten real big because of the economic crisis in asia primarily what s happened well when the people you re doing business with run out of money one of the things that they do is mark down the things that are selling you so it s cheaper and they hope you buy more of it and they still don t have any money to buy what you ve been selling them now i have been trying for six months now this is a hard one except for people in agriculture who understand it i ve been trying for six months to get the congress just to pay america s fair share to the international monetary fund and there are a lot of politicians up there making those election year speeches saying oh man this is just a big bailout to the foreigners and why should we be doing this we contributed along with other nations to this fund to stabilize and reform economies when they get in trouble why should we do it well 30 percent of the growth that you just applauded for when i came in and i started reeling off all those statistics came because we were selling more of our stuff to other countries we have 4 percent of the world s people in america we have 20 percent of the world s income if we want to keep doing better we ve got to sell something to the other 96 percent and we have to expect them to keep doing better too otherwise they not only won t want to they won t be able to buy more of our things that s what this international monetary fund issue is about in washington d c if we want our neighbors to buy our products they ve got to have the money to do it and when they get in trouble because they re developing their societies and their economic systems this whole fund was set up not as a bailout not as a gift not as a welfare program but as an instrument to force reform and revitalization these are things worth debating you know there s a big debate here in arkansas because of what some of the elected official said about whether i should have gone to china i take it there s not as much debate now as there was before i went and i hope there s not but let me ask you so we ve got to decide that this matters you look all over the world we ve got people that differ with us they have different religious systems different political systems different cultural values we have to decide when we deal with them and when we don t now if people do things we really think are terrible should we have economic sanctions i think we should but look what happened when i put economic sanctions on india and pakistan we pointed out well we don t like it if it s on food and we say well we don t like it if it s on food because you shouldn t punish people when they re eating but we also don t like it because it hurts our farm income in a bad year so we want a mixed approach where we keep trying to reach out and work with people china has got 1 2 billion people they re going to have a lot to do with how your children and grandchildren live and we ought to try to get along with them and work with them and build a common future with them if we can and we ought to have a way of expressing our honest disagreements when we have to and you can only do both of those things if you re dealing with people this is worth debating the last point i want to make is this something a long way from arkansas usually is my foreign policy job a lot of the challenges i face but you just look around the world at the things i ve dealt with since you sent me to washington last week three little irish catholic boys killed in a fire bomb in northern ireland because they re still fighting over religious battles that have roots that are 600 years old in kosovo a place a lot of americans still have a little trouble finding on a map we re worried about a new destabilizing war breaking out because the albanians and the serbs can t get along the same thing that happened in bosnia in the middle east we still have trouble because we can t get people to take just one more step to bring the arabs and the jews the israelis together but we re working on it when hillary and i went to africa we went to rwanda where two different tribal peoples that most americans aren t even aware exist in a country that has been coherent for hundreds of years got in a fight and 900 000 people or so died in a matter of a hundred days why because as we know from our own painful civil rights history getting people to be pitted against each other because of their differences is deeply ingrained in the human psyche and easy to bring up and very often profitable for people who seek power and if you contrast that with what we are trying to achieve in america today where we re a more and more diverse country from more and more different backgrounds in a world that is getting smaller and smaller because of technology this country s best days are clearly still ahead but we have to do the right things as well as elect the right people and it s time the american people and the people of our state actually had to think about that what are the right things to do in education in arkansas what are the right things to do in health care what are the right things to do in economic policy what is the right policy in building one community one state and one nation across all the lines that divide us i have tried to give the democratic party new ideas based on old values i have tried to persuade the american people that the consequences that are good that are coming today are due to them but also due to the fact that in washington we have done the right things now this is a very important election it s important for that little child there and all the kids in this state and it s very important that the citizens of our state not do what people so often do when times are good which is just relax and say just leave everything more or less the way it is because when times are good but changing rapidly you have to use the good times and the confidence people have to deal with the underlying challenges and because as all of us who are older here know no conditions last forever if we can t use these good times to deal with our long term challenges when will we ever do it so i ask you i m glad to see you i ve had a good time i ve enjoyed the jibes and the cheering and the yelling but i want you to keep clearly in mind that we have a future to build for these children you ve got a state to build and a country to build and the reason we re in the shape we re in today is because we had good ideas that we implemented that had good consequences and the reason that i will be a member of this party until the day i die is that more often than not we have been the instrument in this century and in my lifetime in fulfilling the vision that the founding fathers gave us to always deepen our freedom and always perfect our union so i want you to help me i want you to elect these people i want you to work and i want you to go out there and literally grab your friends and neighbors by the shoulder and say let s talk about this don t go through this election in a fog don t say oh everything is fine let s just keep on going the way we re going think about where we are as a state and nation and think about where we were in 1992 and i think you ll have quite a good case to make thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton18 8 00 bill_clinton thank you well let me thank all of you for coming out tonight i thank the mayor and all of our chairs and phil lalonde and anne tubby thank you for being with us tonight i think hillary just about said it all don t you i thought that was great i want to say a few things and then ask you something from a little different perspective first of all i want to thank all the people of new york state for voting twice in 1992 and 1996 for bill clinton and al gore and i m very grateful to you and i want to say a special word of thanks to you for 1996 when we carried 52 of the states counties including franklin essex and clinton counties by big margins and i thank you now that we know you can do it i hope you ll do the same thing for hillary and al gore and joe lieberman this year i was thinking when chelsea and i were sitting there listening to hillary talk two things first of all i thought she was giving a great talk and i thought she gave a great speech at the convention monday night and i want to echo what she said about the vice president s speech last night it was an extraordinary speech and a great road map for the country s future and i m grateful for that but i want to talk to you from a unique perspective because my family has a new candidate and my party as of last night has a new leader and so in this election though i will be president and i have a lot i m going to try to get done for you in the next five months i am moving back to where i spent the first 20 years of my active life in politics from the time i was eight years old and my uncle was running for the state legislature at home and i was passing out cards for him at the polling place that is i m coming back to where you are i m going to be a citizen activist and i m going to try to be a good one but i ve had a unique opportunity to see what makes a country change and grow and also to understand clearly the consequences of elections and the decisions made by the people whom we elect so i can t begin to add anything to what i said last monday about what happened the last eight years what hillary and al gore said about what ought to happen in the next four years but i can tell you this what the election rides on is whether the people of this country the people of this state and the people of this part of new york believe it s a big election not a little election and understand that there are differences and know what the differences are so as somebody who s sort of coming back your way to citizen activism i thank you for coming here tonight i thank you for your support for all your local candidates and mr mayor thank you for being here and all the other local officials i thank you for your support for hillary it means so much to me and it will be good for new york but i want to ask you to leave here remembering what i said i tried to make the argument last monday night that for all the progress we have made in the last eight years the best stuff is still out there because that s what i believe that s what i believe if you just think about it we had to work so hard to turn the economy around and get rid of the deficit now we can bring prosperity to the people and places left behind we had to work so hard to get the crime rate going down instead of going up now we can focus on making america the safest big country in the world we had to work so hard in getting in place the things that work in education now we can focus on making sure every child in this country can get a world class education from kindergarten through college we are in a position to take advantage of all these scientific discoveries and all these technological developments in a way that has never been possible in this country and as hillary said could bring great economic opportunity to upstate new york but the people have to choose wisely and i can just tell you as somebody who spent the first 20 years of my life working to try to persuade other people to vote for folks i thought ought to be elected and then who spent 22 of the last 24 years as a public official trying to convince people i ought to be elected and reelected and what i was doing made sense as someone who s looking forward to an election where i can support a man i believe in for president a man i believe in for vice president and a woman i think would be one of the great united states senators of our time for the senate i can tell you not everybody thinks about this as much as you do isn t that right whether they re democrats independents or republicans not everybody sits around and thinks about this as much as you do this is a massive crowd tonight but there are more people from this area who aren t here than people who are right by definition that s not a criticism this is a huge crowd it blew me away when i walked in here but the point i m trying to make is that between now and election day each one of you will have a chance every day to say look this is a big deal here you ve got to take this seriously the people you work with the people you re in civic clubs with the people you worship with the people you run into on the street or drink coffee with you can say look this is a big election you remember where this country was eight years ago and those of you who are over 30 can make this point to younger people you know you get a time like this in a country s life maybe once in a lifetime where you get the chance to build a future of your dreams for your kids so once you convince people it s a big election and they have to take it seriously you re halfway home in terms of persuading them to vote for our people and then the second thing you have to convince them of is that there are significant differences that will affect their lives their children s lives and the future of new york and the united states so as someone who is profoundly grateful to all of you there s hardly a place in america that s been more generous to me more consistently than new york has i want you to know that the best thing i can give back to you is to do my dead level best to get everything i can do done for america in the five months i ve got left to be president and to persuade the american people that a chance like this comes along once in a lifetime i ve worked hard to turn the country around but all the best stuff is still out there but the american people have to believe it s a big election and there are big consequences because there are big differences if you can take some time every day between now and november to talk to your friends without regard to their parties in a calm and open way making those two points making those two points say hey we re not mad at these other guys we don t have anything bad to say about them but look it s a big election and there are big differences and here s what the differences are and they ll have consequences for your lives and your children and your future if you will take some time to do that then we ll have a great night on november 7th because al gore and joe lieberman and hillary will be elected and america will be better off thank you very much dem wjclinton18 8 96a bill_clinton thank you first of all i just want to say i hope all of you have had just half as good a time as i have i want to thank my friend whoopie goldberg and all the other magnificent entertainers and jeff margolis who did the production let s give him a hand he was great i know the hour is late but i d like to say just a thing or two i mean i only turn 50 once you know first of all i feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude tonight a lot of times some of you will come up to me somewhere around the country when something is not going so well you ask me how am i doing and i ve tried to develop the discipline of saying okay okay we hear you you want to hear them anymore okay we ve heard your message now thank you very much all right give them a hand as they exit will you we heard them give them a hand give them a hand be nice to them don t be rough they don t have a right to do this but they don t have a right to be roughed up just show them to the door thank you you know one of the greatest things about this country is you can say whatever is on your mind and nobody can shut you up on the other hand thank you four years from now some of them will come back and say you know you were right about that mr president you were right about that let me say just one or two things if i might relax relax anyway even now what i was going to tell you is i ve tried to develop the discipline when somebody comes up to me and says well how are you doing and something is not going very well of saying better than i deserve thank you and you ought to think about it because i was looking at all those decades pass by i don t know where all the time went and i was thinking of all the gifts that i have been given i thank god for my family for those who are here and those who aren t i wish my brother could have been here tonight but his wife and his son are here i wish my wonderful father in law were still living i miss him and lord i miss my mother she liked a good party you know and she would have liked this tonight but i thank them i mean who could have thought it where we all started and i thank my friends some of them have been subject to ridicule you know fobs has become i don t know an epithet in some quarters but i wouldn t be here today without them and all of you who were there with me in each step along life s way i thank you i thank all of those who worked with me in every job i ever had and all of you who helped me to come to this point i just feel a great sense of gratitude i d also like to make just two other observations in closing the first is that i appreciate what hillary said i m sure i m not the best man she s ever known but i sure have loved her and my wonderful child and i thank them there s something that s happened in our country in the last few years that i don t think is very good and that is that a lot of people in public life have taken to trying to show how good they are by showing how bad the people who disagree with them are and i don t think that s a very good thing and i have my mother to thank for that attitude because she taught me never to resent anyone else s success never to look down on anybody else and never ever to think i was better than anybody else that it was a hard enough job in life just to be a good person yourself without trying to lift yourself up in putting somebody else down and i d like to see more of that in our country i think it would be more civil and a better place the second thing i d like to leave you with is the image of those children that were up here behind us you know we have debates from time to time were they right or am i right about the welfare reform issue and i disagree with my opponent senator dole on so many things but let me ask you this just think about your own life here and ask yourself why are we doing this why are we here the purpose of politics is nothing more or less than to enable more kids like those kids that just sang on the stage to live their dreams the way i got to live mine there is no other purpose here and i thank god for everybody i ve ever been able to work with those of you who are here a lot of them are gone too now i miss my friend and brother ron brown he would have liked this tonight and what a wonderful job he would have done i started out my presidency with one of the greatest men i ever met in my life the late prime minister of israel itzhak rabin i miss him so much there are a lot of people i miss and i m sorry they had to leave this earth before i did but you know all of us left ahead because we got to live out our dreams and most of us here truth were known we d have to say we ve done better than we deserved and i would like for every child in this country and every child in this world to be able to say that more than they can say it now when our time here is done we have to get this country ready for the next century it will be the time of greatest possibility in all of human history more of our kids without regard to their race their gender their station will have a chance to live their dreams if we do our job that is really what we re here about i ve been luckier than most people because i had family who loved me friends who took care of me folks who worked with me and made me look better than i deserved and a chance to do work i loved but in the end all that matters is whether when we finish we have made it possible for more people to be what god meant them to be and you have helped to give me that chance and that is the best birthday present of all thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton18 8 96b bill_clinton thank you wait wait wait they ve had their say now we ve heard wait wait they got their message we heard them give them an applause and let them go now give them a hand give them applause thank you all right we got you and audience we did do that also now please let me talk well all i know is i just got the minimum wage raised and we cut income taxes on the 15 million poorest working families in america and there are 1 3 million fewer people on welfare today than there were the day i became president so i think we ve got a pretty good claim on that let me begin by thanking chairman don fowler i know he said before i came out a word but i d like to say another word of respect and condolence to the families of those who were on that government airplane the air force plane that was carrying those who work with me on my security detail out there in wyoming it s a very sad thing one of the safest planes we ever had we don t yet know what happened but tonight i just ask you to be thinking about their families and let me also say to the people who provided our music to smokey joe s cafe and to the cravat s orchestra i ve been out here listening while you all have been in here enjoying it directly and you know if you re president when you stand up in front of people you re always afraid that you re not supposed to be on one foot you re not supposed to be snapping your fingers you re not supposed to be doing all these things so i can really enjoy this music better if i m out there and you re not looking at me we re all paying attention to the music you guys were great thank you very much and we re grateful to you i know that governor carey is in the audience tonight and carolyn mccarthy our new candidate for congress is here i wish her well i believe mark green and judith hope are here and i thank you for being here and somebody told me two people i very much admire for their different gifts with the english language neil simon and arthur schlesinger are here if they re here i welcome them and thank you very much ladies and gentlemen i feel very grateful tonight to be on the verge of my 50th birthday i don t know why i feel grateful for that i have been getting all of these absolutely hilarious cards i got one card i couldn t begin to figure out there were nine people in black robes on it and mr perot was on it and diana ross was on it and it said happy birthday from diana ross and the supremes i got a card today pointing out that as bad as this is paul mccartney george harrison and ringo starr are older than i am so i m getting all of these cards trying to put the best face on this event i m going to be all right until i get my aarp card in the mail and there will be a couple of bad hours there let me you know our friends in the republican party that had their convention last week and i didn t watch it because i was too busy on vacation but they ve had their say and now we can have ours and i wanted i just wanted to say to you that when we have our convention in chicago next week i have told our people that i don t want anybody standing up at the platform at the democratic convention making demeaning personal remarks about any republican not their nominee not their nominee s wife not any of them on the other hand since they neglected to talk about their record for the last two years i think we ought to remind people about that every chance we get and remind everyone that this is really a great contest between two different visions of the future there is no status quo option neither of us believe that we can stay with what we did for 40 or 50 years but on the other hand there are very different consequences to where we will go in the future now this administration can be proud that compared to four years ago there are 10 million more jobs there are a record number of new small businesses including businesses owned by women and minorities there are a record number of exports we ve had four years in a row where the crime rate went down there are 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers that could not get hand guns because of the brady bill and as i said a moment ago we dramatically cut taxes for the 15 million american working families with incomes of 28 000 a year or less who are the most hard pressed and reduced the welfare roles by 1 3 million all that compared to four years ago the average closing cost on a home for first time home buyers has been cut by 1 000 we have almost 4 5 million new homeowners 10 million american families refinanced their homes things are better than they were four years ago and the most important thing to know is that the leaders of the other party their nominee for president their speaker of the house they fought us on the economic program they fought us on the crime bill they fought us on the brady bill they fought us on the family and medical leave law they fought us on the things that we tried to do that it made a difference for america the results are in we re better off than we were we need to keep going where we re going not take a great u turn and go back in the other direction and the second point i want to make to you is that this is not an election like most elections where there s a little guesswork involved this is your birthday present you get a presidential election where you don t have to guess i mean if you think about it there s normally some guesswork in any election you took a chance on me four years ago those of you who knew me maybe it wasn t such a big chance but most people didn t well now people know what we ve done for the last four years and they know that i ll do everything i can to implement these plans that we put before the american people and they know what the republicans will do because even though they did not talk about it at their convention apparently they ve already done it once i just vetoed it the first time and so that s a very happy thing so if you look at these choices the choice is not the standard choice this is not between for example as they would say cutting taxes and balancing the budget i m not against cutting taxes i m just against cutting taxes if to do it you have to explode the deficit again after we took it from 290 billion down to 116 billion a year or if you have to cut medicare and medicaid education and the environment to pay for it that would be wrong that would be wrong so if you like the budget i vetoed you will love the next one that s coming along with this new plan if you didn t stay with us we ll balance the budget and invest in education and invest in protecting the environment and protect medicare and medicaid while reforming them so that we can all preserve them over the long term and we will give the american people the right sort of tax cut targeted to education sending everybody to college raising children and giving people incentives to save for their own retirement their own health care their own educational needs that is the right thing to do for america we do not want to take a dramatic turn in the wrong direction finally let me say that there are a lot of things that have to be done in the future and i want you to think about that i want you to think about what the family and medical leave law has meant to america 12 million american families someone in the family got to take a little time off when there was a baby born or a sick parent or a sick child without losing their jobs i d like to see that extended so that parents could go to regular parent conferences and doctor s appointments with their children without losing their jobs if you look at what happened if you look at the results that we ve gotten with the brady bill the assault weapons ban and the plan to put 100 000 police on the street i d like to see that expanded so that we can ban those cop killer bullets that have no purpose other than to knock our police officers and other innocent citizens out of their lives if you look at what we did with the college loan program to make more college loans available to people and more scholarships available at lower cost i d like to see that expanded to give american families a tax credit of 1 500 a year so that every single american adult could at least get a community college education and it would be as universal as a high school education is today and we have tax deductions for the costs of college education for everybody so there s a lot more to do here but our country is stronger we are more respected in the world we are a larger force for peace and freedom and decency than we were and let me just say one last thing about this welfare issue i ve been working on this since 1980 and about 10 years ago when i was trying to write the last welfare reform bill i asked a woman from my state who had moved from welfare to work to come be a part of a panel that i had for the governors this was nearly a decade ago and this lady was asked the following question and i did not know she was being questioned by other governors i didn t have a clue about what she was going to say i just knew that she had been a successful graduate of our experiment and this lady was asked do you believe that people should be required to move from welfare to work if there is a job there and if they can take care of their kids she said i certainly do and so the questioner said well why she said well because people like me have been treated like we can t do anything for so long we ll just keep on doing nothing unless somebody requires us to do it but also gives us the help to do it and then they said well what s the best thing about having a job and she said well the best thing is not the check it s when my boy goes to school and they say what does your mama do for a living he can give an answer now what i have done in signing this bill is to give us a chance to move everybody from welfare to work but we re all thinking about this in the wrong way this welfare reform issue is not over it is just beginning it is just beginning so those folks holding those signs up and everybody else ought to be thinking about this who do you trust to give jobs to those people who do you trust to take care of their children who do you trust to implement this instead of turning around and walking away from it remember the bills i vetoed do you know what they did to the bills i vetoed no child care take away the guarantees of the school lunch program take away the guarantees of the food stamp program take away the guarantees of health care for children with disabilities that s what they tried to do i vetoed all that we got that back in we got protections back in the question is now how are we going to embark on this great experiment to put jobs in the inner cities and jobs in the isolated rural areas and give people something to do you can t just put people in the street you have to give them work and child care and health care to support them that is my commitment and that is the decision we ought to be facing in this election so let me just say this last point this is my birthday gift to you i want you to think about it for 79 days i did an interview with one of the most highly watched news programs in the country showing just in a couple of hours here today before i came up and the questioner said well mr president aren t you worried about what happened after the convention and this big tax cut promise and the movement in the polls and doesn t that really bother you and i said no i said i m not against a tax cut i just don t want one that s too big that we can t pay for i don t want one that s big and indiscriminate that will either explode the deficit or force us to really hurt people with more cuts in education and the environment and medicare and medicaid but we can have a tax cut targeted at child rearing and education and family savings and pay for it but i m not worried about that he said well what about what if it causes all these changes in the polls everybody else that s ever won on one has won i said well first of all it s a false choice between a tax cut and no tax cut the issue is are you going to have a good one that you can pay for i said you know hillary and i used to live around the corner when we were living in arkansas from this wonderful place called the community bakery i used to go down there all the time and in the morning i d buy bagels sometimes on the weekend i d buy other things but there were wonderful things in the community bakery there were cookies bagels donuts fruit tarts and so i was telling this fellow i said you know every one of them was good but if you bought them all and ate them all at once you d get sick that s my attitude about this tax cut issue we can have one but we have to have what we can afford that s consistent with balancing the budget investing in our future bringing our people together that is the right decision and then i said and this is what i want you to think about for 79 days if the american people want to go back to a failed economic plan of the past that quadrupled the deficit gave us high interest rates increased unemployment increase welfare and weakened america they can do it but that s what the election is for i cannot do that i will not do that that is the wrong thing for america there is another choice there i won t do that so my gift to you is to remember that this is a choice and i m delighted that you re here to celebrate my birthday and i m going to have a wonderful time tonight but i want to remind you that we have 79 more days before we can really celebrate the assurance that america will march into the 21st century with the vision i articulated in 1991 that i reaffirm to you today i want us to go into the 21st century with three things unquestionably true i want every child in this country without regard to race or gender or station in life to be able to live out his or her dreams if they re responsible enough to work for it i want to know that our country is the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and democracy and i want to know that with all of our incredible diversity unlike all these other countries that are coming apart at the seams because of their racial their religious their ethnic their tribal hatred i want america to be the one country in the world that says we believe in our common humanity and we are growing stronger through our diversity not weaker that is my dream and that s the present i want for you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton18 9 95 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen thank you for being here tonight and for all your support i want to thank obviously tom leonard and ken jarren and alan kessler and bill backoff and everyone else who worked so hard on this mr mayor we re delighted to be back in your city and thank my good friends from pittsburg for being here and from throughout the state the state legislators and others and of course the four distinguished members of the house of representatives who are here without whom a lot of the accomplishments the vice president just reeled off would not have occurred i d also like to say a special word of thanks to two pennsylvanians one of who is here and one of them is not my good friend harris wofford for helping me to give birth to the national service and for now his willingness to lead the fight to preserve national service and to increase it and to marjorie margolies mezvinsky for her wonderful leadership in beijing china i thank you i came up here and the vice president had just concluded and introduced me i said al whatever i say now i m going to be behind why don t you just keep on talking it sounds pretty good i forgot he did half the stuff he talked about i say that only half in jest you know when i asked al gore to become the nominee for vice president on our democratic ticket i did it after we had a long set of talks and we agreed that we were going into an uncertain time when we had to make difficult decisions rooted in what was best for the united states over a 10 or a 20 or a 30 year period that might not be popular in the short run that might not even be able to be easily explained in the short run we knew that and we and our wonderful spouses made a commitment to an administration that would always look toward the future that would always embrace new ideas that would have the highest standards of excellence but most important of all would seek to find common ground in the things we all believe in the preservation of the american dream bringing americans together around work and responsibility and family and community leading the world into a new era of peace and prosperity and giving our children the opportunity to have a better future in the 21st century and i am very grateful for that one of the reasons i like dealing with people like your mayor is that they re open to new ideas and to changing things and thanks to the vice president we ve done a lot of those things he talked about it may take 10 more years but some day america will develop what we call in our administration a clean car one that will get triple or quadruple the mileage that automobiles get today and produce less air pollution and contribute less to the global warming that we all now see all the scientists in the world saying is a problem there may not be a single vote in it but our children will live in a better world because al gore made a partnership with the auto companies for a clean car and a cleaner future that is the sort of thing that we have tried to do when we started this work on reinventing government i said there s never been a single incident when a president or an administration generated any popular support for changing the way the government works but we are going into a new age and we can no longer have a top down bureaucracy that is too heavy with management that delivers too few services and is too oriented toward yesterday s top down regulation it may not be any sort of political benefit in it but 10 years from now our country will be better off because we have downsized the government because we have abolished regulations because we have forged new partnerships with people to do the right things because they want to do the right things not because someone in washington is figuring out 900 different ways to tell them how to do it these are the kinds of things that we have tried to do and i say that simply to make this point that i really have appreciated the kind of partnership that the mayor discussed that the vice president and i have enjoyed we ve done a lot of things that no other administration has done and we have been told we were politically crazy for doing it we were advised not to liberate haiti but we did it and worked out all right we were advised that if i became the first sitting president to take on the nra over the issues of the brady bill and the assault weapons ban that it would be a terrible political mistake and it turned out to be a terrible political mistake for a lot of brave members of the house of representatives who laid down their seats in congress so that we could keep uzis out of schools and off the street and keep kids from being shot down in drive by shootings but it was the right thing to do and let me tell you we were told that we had no business becoming the first administration to ever take on the powerful tobacco companies in our campaign to reduce teenage smoking but 3 000 start smoking every day and 1 000 of them will have their lives shortened as a result and who care what the political consequences are it is the right thing to do and that is the kind of thing we are trying to do i say that to make this general point about why it is so important that you re here today this is an incredible country that we have been given and we happen to have been given the responsibility to live in this country at a remarkable moment in history when i ran for president in 1991 and 1992 i did so believing that the end of the cold war and the dawn of this new global economy presented us with challenges which would require us to change the way we conducted our business both personally as families and communities and as a country and that we had to break out of a lot of the established ideas that both parties had advanced and i wanted to do that i did not imagine even though i thought i understood it well the absolute scope and sweep and depth of those changes and i come here tonight to tell you that i believe we are living through the period of most profound change in the way we live and work as americans that we have experienced in 100 years it was about 100 years ago when we basically became an industrial and more urbanized country shifting from a agricultural and rural country and we had to decide what that meant about how we were going to treat each other for when we became an industrial country a lot of people were getting fabulously wealthy and it was a time of incredible opportunity but a lot of the ties that bound people together were uprooted families were uprooted whole communities began to disappear people came to great urban centers looking for opportunities immigrants came here from other countries looking for opportunities and those that found them were doing very well but we also saw children working 10 12 14 hours a day six days a week in the mines and the factories of this country we saw an absolute disregard for the preservation of our natural resources and for about 20 years we had this raging debate and we decided that the national government should promote genuine competition if it meant breaking up monopolies should protect children from the abuses of child labor that were then present should attempt to preserve our natural resources and should in common promote the personal well being and the development of our people those decisions were made about 100 years ago from roughly 1895 to about 1916 and what happened after that was the most dramatic breath taking period of economic and social progress in the united states ever experienced by any country yes we had to get through the great depression yes we had to win a great world war yes we had to make good on the promise of the civil war and the amendments thereafter to liberate ourselves from legalized racial discrimination but it all happened because we decided that we were going to be one country that we were going to live up to the promise of the constitution and our best values in a new time we are now going through all that all over again when you hear these radical debates in washington you hear people say things you think are half crazy you should not be surprised it is because we are being kind of uprooted again for we are moving from an industrial economy to one based on information and technology even manufacturing more based on information and technology we are moving from a cold war arrangement among the nations where we re divided into two armed camps of nation states looking across the iron curtain at each other into a global economy where the borders of all nations are becoming more porous as money and technology and trade flee around the world at rapid paces where we re becoming more integrated economically but in every country there are pressures for disintegration as the global economy makes it more difficult for families and communities to keep going and as radical political groups tend to arise capturing the benefits of the frustration of ordinary people and you see it all across the globe we don t now fear a bomb dropping on us from the soviet union i am proud to say that since i ve been president for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no russian missiles pointed at the people of the united states and you should be proud of that but we do see the development of organized terrorism all around the world whether it is someone blowing up the federal building in oklahoma city or someone blowing up a school bus of innocent people in israel or someone breaking open a vial of poison sarin gas in a subway in tokyo so we re living now in a world that is in transition that is full of incredible possibilities exhilarating hope and troubling change it is against that background that this election in 1996 must occur it is our duty to preserve the american dream for our children it is our duty to bring the american people together around our common values of work and family and responsibility and community it is our duty to lead the world to a new era of peace and prosperity and we ought to be happy about doing our duty we also have to understand that in a period like this it is hard for a lot of people to sort out what s going on and that we cannot worry about what is popular in the short run we have to do what we think 10 or 20 or 30 years from now there is no political road map we must create the future consistent with our values not based on what we think is popular in the moment so i say to you i have loved the opportunity to serve as your president i have been frustrated from time to time when there was no clear answer and in the end i have tried to do what i thought was right the vice president s account of our record would indicate that more often than not it s come out all right but we have to look to the future what is our job in the future let s look at the economy let s just begin with that if i had told you 30 months ago that in the space of two and half years we would have 7 5 million new jobs 2 5 million new homeowners 2 million new small businesses a record number of new self made millionaires in america the stock market would go over 4 700 we d have record corporate profits the african american unemployment rate would drop below 10 percent for the first time in more than two decades but the median wage of americans the guy in the middle would drop in the midst of all this it would have seemed impossible but that s exactly what happened why because only some of us are doing well in this global economy because we live in a world where what you earn depends on what you can learn because there are some people who are caught in the transition from a defense to a domestic economy that s why we had the meeting about what s going to happen at the philadelphia shipyard today because there are some places that have been ignored in all this entrepreneurial explosion and no one is investing in our best economic opportunity which is all the working people of america who live in poor communities that s why we have the empowerment zone program but s it s not surprising when you hear all this fabulous economic news and you realize it hasn t reached everybody so it is our duty to see that it reaches everybody if you look at our social situation believe it or not in almost every major area in america the crime rate down the murder rate is down the welfare roles are down the food stamp roles are down divorce is down and abortion is down almost everywhere we are coming back to our roots but we still know it s way too high and we re afraid of losing our children because juvenile crime is up people under 18 are committing more crime because casual marijuana use among young children is up because they don t know if they ve got a future so what we have to do is to say hey look at what s going on good in this country we can do it we can make it and we have to have the discipline and courage to spread those good things to everybody in this society i honestly believe if we do our job in this period of transition our best days are before us but we have to remember what we re trying to do now if you look at the budget debate in that context to me what we ought to do becomes easier and it s not so partisan or political should we balance the budget you bet we should this country never had a permanent deficit unrelated to economy slowdowns until 1981 it was only 12 years ago or 12 years before i became president that there was a political decision make or not made that it was easy to cut taxes and increase spending and then too hard to do anything about it so we just run a deficit from now to kingdom come always before the country borrowed money for two reasons one is there was an economic slowdown and we needed to pump things up and that was a good thing to do the other is we needed to borrow money as a nation the way you borrow money as a family or a business the same way you d borrow money to buy a home or start a business we didn t borrow money to go out to dinner on until 12 years before i became president and in only 12 years we quadrupled the debt of the country the democratic party should work with the republican party to get rid of this it is a bad precedent we re spending more and more money on interest on the debt if we don t balance the budget next year we ll spend more on interest than we do on defense this year the budget would be in balance but for the interest we pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before i took office and we ve taken the deficit from 290 billion to 160 billion a year and we ought to go all the way until we get the job done america should invest in the future not squander the present and we should all be for that but we should do it consistent with our values why are we going to do it because we want america to be stronger in the 21st century we want our kids to have the american dream like we had what does that mean for how you balance the budget it means number one don t cut education don t cut technology don t cut defense conversion don t cut research and development all together it s a small part of our budget but if we want to grow the economy and give children a chance why would we reduce the number of people on head start why would we reduce the number of schools in the safe and drug free schools program or the number of schools that can teach character education to kids who may not get it anywhere else or the number of schools who can put computers in their classes or have smaller classes for poor kids so they can get the kind of instructions they need or the number of people who can get low interest college loans on better repayment terms or scholarships no we should balance the budget and we can have a tax cut but we can t balance the budget in seven years with a tax cut that the congress proposes without cutting education and cutting education would be like cutting the defense budget at the height of the cold war it s our national security we ought not to do it we ought to avoid that and i say not because it s money but because of the way the money is being invested now high standards high expectations high accountability that s what we re doing now grass roots reform it is different than it used to be it s not just throwing money at the problem the same thing about medicare our administration warned two years ago that the trust fund which finances hospital care for medicare was close to running out of money we warned that and we said here s a plan to give it more life and the people now in the majority in congress said we were wrong said we were crazy said we didn t know what we were doing and so without any help we added three years to the life of the medicare trust fund then in health care reform we proposed to do some more and they said oh you can t cut medicare by that much you ll wreck the system now that they re in the majority they ve proposed to cut it more than twice as much as we ever did now do we have to slow the rate of health care inflation to preserve medicare for future generations yes we do yes we do we absolutely should do seniors who have the ability to pay a little bit more have a responsibility to do it because they have very high incomes i think you can make that case but here is what is going on folks under the guise of bailing out the medicare trust fund people in congress are trying to require elderly people who make less than 24 000 a year don t forget three quarters of all the people on medicare in this country make less than 24 000 a year they want them to pay more in their own premiums and what they don t tell you is not a single penny of that money goes into the trust fund the premium money goes to pay for things like doctor bills and that s paid for out of the general budget so what they re saying is we want to charge elderly people with incomes of less than 24 000 a year more so we can pay for this tax cut and balance the budget in seven years i say let s save medicare but let s don t take money away from older people with less than 24 000 to give it to people like me who have not even asked for a tax cut but do want their budget balanced let s do it consistent with america s values and what we owe to the people of this country who have made us what we are the vice president talked about the environment you know my family and i just took a vacation in yellowstone and grand teton national parks and every day we benefit from what our country has done for public health and the environment that we don t even think about cleaner air clean water safe food now there are those who say well we shouldn t even have the government involved in this the house of representatives actually defeated an amendment twice to say well at least give us the money to go ahead and regulate things like arsenic in water they defeated once an amendment that said at least give us the chance to keep things like tryptospiridium out of municipal water supplies that s what killed all those people in milwaukee about a year ago now folks al gore since he s been vice president running our reinventing government project has helped us to eliminate 16 000 pages of federal regulations we have cut regulations at the small business administration in half we cut the budget of the small business administration by 40 percent and doubled the loan volume doubled the loan volume we kept the loan volume the same to white males and dramatically increased it to females and minorities and never changed the standards we re committed to less regulations we ve cut the regulations at the department of education on school districts by 40 percent we re cutting the time people have to fool with the epa by 25 percent we want to get rid of regulations but somebody has to show up every day to make sure that your children have clean water clean air and safe food we should not cut that to balance the budget you heard the vice president talking about crime the crime bill we adopted was rooted in the advice we got from prosecutors and police officers it was bipartisan mayor rendell came down with mayor guiliani from new york several times to lobby for the crime bill it has punishment we just convicted the second three strikes and you re out felon five serious felonies for once the guy is going to jail for life so he can t hurt anybody anymore we have more police officers on the street and we have more prevention to give our children something to say yes to there are those who say well let s just get rid of it send a check to the states i say we had a solemn commitment to 100 000 police this is a small part of the bill we paid for it entirely by personnel cuts in the federal government that is not the way to balance the budget i could give you a lot of examples i just want to give you one more because to me it represents the most important thing of all in the world toward which we re moving it s going to be harder and harder to keep families together more and more parents are working more and more two parent families are working the most important job of any society is still to raise children in an appropriate way we therefore have no more important obligation than to enable people to succeed as parents and as workers i think we would all admit that that s why the family leave law was so important another thing that we did in that budget last year was to cut taxes on 15 million american working families with over 50 million americans almost 20 percent of our people through something called the earned income tax credit the family tax credit you heard the vice president talking about it eventually it will lower taxes for families of four with incomes of under 30 000 or 31 000 a year for families of four with incomes of 11 000 a year they can get up to 3 000 back why because we believe no one should be taxed into poverty if you want people to move from welfare to work if you believe in family work and responsibility then people who are willing to go out there and work full time and still do the best they can with their kids and they re making all they can make should not be taxed into poverty the tax system should lift them up not tear them down now in this budget fight there are those who believe that they should get rid of this earned income tax credit or cut it in half or cut it by a third how in the world can we justify raising taxes on low income working people lowering taxes on folks like me and then telling them don t you be on welfare you get out there and work and you do your part this is not about money this is about who we are what are our obligations to one another how are we going to give our kids the american dream i m telling you i will say again this is a very great country we wouldn t be around here after almost 220 years if this were not a great country and if more than half the time we didn t make the right decisions we have a set of 100 year decisions to make 100 year decisions you know that deep in your bones you know how much change we re going through but what works is what has always worked for us when we look to the future when we work together when we try to give people the ability to make the most of their own lives when we try to be a force for peace and freedom throughout the world we do just fine so i say to you this is not an ordinary election and this election cannot be won by sound bites and this election cannot be run on the politics of resentment this election must be won by the mind and the heart and the vision of americans looking down the road to the next generation and saying i want the 21st century to be an american century too i want the american dream to be alive and well when i was born in my home state the per capita income was 56 percent of the national average i was the first person in my family ever to go to college i was raised by a grandfather with a 6th grade education i became president of the united states not because of my hard work and my innate goodness but because i had the help of a country that cared about the old fashioned things and wanted every single american to have access to them so i say to you if we do this election right if we make these 100 year decisions right the best is yet to be thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton18 9 98 bill_clinton thank you so much dr franklin the advisory board to the members of the congress who are here congresswoman eddie bernice johnson congressman amo houghton congressman jay dickey congressman ed pastor congressman tom sawyer and congressman john lewis whose life could be a whole chapter of this report we thank you for coming we thank mayor archer mayor webb mayor bush mayor flores governor thomas of the gila river tribe and other distinguished americans who are here today business religious community leaders i thank the attorney general deputy attorney general eric holder the secretary of education the secretary of housing and urban development the secretary of transportation sba administrator alvarez acting assistant ag bill lann lee i hope i won t have to say that acting forever our deputy sba administrator fred hochberg thank you all for being here i m especially gratified by the presence of a large number of cabinet members members of congress and local leaders here today i thank the head of the council of economic advisors janet yellen for being here i ll have more to say about that in a moment thank you rosa parks for coming i want to say a special word of thanks to all the people who made this board possible to john hope franklin for his wise and patient but insistent leadership reverend suzan johnson cook angela oh bob thomas linda chavez thompson who was with us in the white house just a moment ago but has what i called an excused absence my long time friends and colleagues the former governors of mississippi and new jersey bill winter and tom kean i thank laura harris who has been a wonderful consultant for us on native american issues my good friend chris edley thank you for what you have done i thank judy winston and the staff of the president s initiative on race for the remarkable job they have done and i d like to thank the people in the white house who worked with them but especially minyon moore maria echaveste and before her sylvia mathews thank you all so much for what you have done now some time ago john hope franklin said the task of trying to reshape our society to bring about a climate of racial healing is so enormous it strains the imagination well again i say i d like to thank john hope franklin the rest of this board and the staff for straining their imaginations and finding the energy to take on this tremendous task of focusing the nation s attention on building one america for the new century often this has meant enduring criticism some of it perhaps justified some of it i have questioned because as dr franklin said no one could solve this problem in 15 months since it has not been resolved in all of human history to anyone s complete satisfaction but they have taken on the endeavor and it has been a magnificent journey they have crossed this country the length and breadth of america they have seen all different kinds of people for them it has been a journey across our land a journey across our culture a journey across our history and a journey i imagine for all of them across their own personal lives and experiences they ve gone from silicon valley to oxford mississippi to the fairfax county school district across the river here where there are students from more than 100 different national and ethnic groups 150 different national and ethnic groups we knew that no effort could solve all the challenges before us but i thank this board because they have helped america to take important steps forward i also thank americans unbelievable numbers of americans from all across the country who have participated all those who wanted to tell their stories and all those who were willing to listen they have brought us closer to our one america in the 21st century out in the country they found a nation full of people with common sense good will a great hunger to move beyond division to community to move from the absence of discrimination to the presence of opportunity to the spirit of genuine reconciliation this board has raised the consciousness and quickened the conscience of america they have moved us closer to our ideal but we have more to do i want to say i am especially proud of the work that every member of our administration has tried to do when i look out here at the secretary of labor the attorney general secretary cuomo secretary riley secretary slater aida alvarez janet yellen all these people who work for me they know that we care about this and they have really worked hard to do you proud and i thank them too but we have more to do you know for more than two centuries we have been committed to the ideas of freedom and equality but much of our history has been defined by our struggle to overcome our steadfast denial of those ideals and instead start to live by them it has been a hard road it is rooted deeply in our own history as john hope franklin said indeed i believe it is rooted in the deeper impulses that trace their beginnings back to the dawn of human society the mistrust the fear the hatred of those who are the other those who are them not us in the area of race it has been a special burden because you can see people who are different from you and with native americans it s been a special burden because we took land that was once theirs with african americans it s been a special burden because we all have to confront the accumulated weight of history that comes from one people enslaving another but with every area of racial tension if you strip it all away you can go back to the dawn of time when people first began to live in societies and learned they were supposed to mistrust and fear and hate people who were not in their crowd we see it manifest around the world in our time we ve seen it between the catholics and protestants in northern ireland going on for hundreds of years thank god i hope about to end we ve seen it with the hutus and the tutsis in rwanda we ve seen it with the arabs and the jews in the middle east with the serbs the croats the muslims in bosnia today the serbs and the albanians in kosovo in america we see it manifest still in racial differences but also in religious and political differences as well in whatever manifestation i think we have to begin with one clear understanding when we approach others with discrimination and distrust when we demean them from the beginning when we believe our power can only come from their subjugation their weakness or their destruction as human beings and as citizens we pay a terrible price our founders were pretty smart people they knew we weren t perfect but we needed to strive for perfect ideals and they built us a country based on a constitution that was literally made for reconciliation for the honorable and principled resolution of differences rooted in a simple proposition that god created us all equal now because they created a freedom of religion they couldn t write in the constitution therefore the first and most important commandment is this to love your neighbor as yourself but what they did write in that constitution is you are commanded to respect and treat your neighbor as yourself that s still a pretty good guidepost for what we have to do on the eve of a new millennium our country is more free and equal than ever before but we have to keep going until everybody has a chance to live out his or her dreams according to his or her capacities and efforts until everyone has a chance at a good job a decent house on a safe street health care and education for their children and most of all the chance to be treated with dignity and respect and to reap the full rewards of citizenship to relish what is different about themselves but respect what is different about others we know that gaps still exist in all these areas between the races and we must work to bridge them we must bridge the opportunity gaps we must build an america where discrimination is something you have to look in the history books to find we have to do a lot of things to achieve that let me just try to say what my thoughts are kind of following up on what dr franklin said the first thing we have to do is keep the conversation going a real gap in perceptions still exist among the american people some believe that this is no longer really an issue or it s just something that occurs when something terribly outrageous happened as did in jasper texas but it s not just that it s an issue in the back of someone s mind every time a police officer of one race pulls over somebody else of another race it s an issue in the back of everyone s mind every time a perfectly normal child is put in a remedial class because of the color of his or her skin or the income of their parents we should not underestimate the power of dialogue and conversation to melt away misunderstanding and to change the human heart i am proud to say today that the national conference for community and justice led by sandy cloud who is here will soon convene a group of religious leaders to continue this work of fostering racial reconciliation and i thank sandy for taking on this important job the second thing we have to do again to echo what dr franklin said is to make sure we have the facts about race in america a lot of us have strong opinions on the subject not all of us have the facts to back them up as a matter of fact the more i stay in washington the more i realize that sometimes the very ability to hold strong opinions depends upon being able to be deaf to the facts that s why i am very very pleased that the council of economic advisors under the leadership of janet yellen and rebecca blank has produced a book changing america indicators of social and economic well being by race and hispanic origin and i recommend it to all of you it s also not too big you can digest it with some level of comfort but it s a good piece of work this book will help us to understand how far we have come and what we still need to do in our efforts to extend opportunity to all our people finally we here in washington have to act we have put forward in this administration and within our balanced budget a comprehensive agenda to expand opportunity for all americans in economic development education health care housing crime credit and civil rights enforcement again i thank the cabinet for their leadership on these fronts just today small business administrator aida alvarez launched two major initiatives to streamline the application process for loans guaranteed by the sba for less than 150 000 to make this credit available on more flexible terms the size and kind of financing many minority and women owned businesses so desperately need as well as many other people in inner city and rural areas where the unemployment rate is still high through these efforts we estimate more than 1 billion in loans will be available to help businesses expand and create new jobs we have to make this opportunity available for more americans i also would like to say i am still hoping that in this budget fight in the next few weeks we can pass the economic opportunity agenda put forward by secretary cuomo and the vice president to provide more community development banks more job creating initiatives in the inner cities and the isolated rural areas where the economic recovery has not yet hit thank you second every place we went from north to south to east to west all the people with whom we talked recognized that in the future education will be even more central to equality than it has been in the past we have to do a great deal to set high standards and increase accountability to eliminate the gaps and resources and achievement between the races to give our children the opportunity to attend schools where diversity will help to prepare them for the world in which they will live we know too many schools are not as good as they should be we know too many students still are caught in a web of low expectations low standards poor teaching crowded classrooms the budget that i have sent to congress proposes new education opportunity zones to reward poor school districts that follow chicago s lead and introduce sweeping reforms to close down failing schools promote public school choice eliminate social promotion but make sure students get the summer school and after school help they need today the summer school in chicago the summer school is the sixth biggest school district in the united states and over 40 000 kids are getting are getting three square meals a day there so it s fine to say no more social promotion if you give children the chance to learn and grow and do to the best to of their ability thank you i am also committed to providing 35 000 new scholarships to young people who will agree to become certified teachers and then teach in our neediest areas finally i think it is very important to fund our initiative to provide 100 000 teachers to lower the average class size to 18 in the early grades it is clear from all the research that children who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are most likely to have permanent learning gains when small classes are provided so they can get individualized instruction in the early grades and i think it is very important today the house rejected that idea and instead passed a block grant proposal that would eliminate accountability reject the idea of national responsibility for helping communities to raise standards improve teaching or bring the benefits of technology to our students i also believe we have to pass this proposal to connect every classroom and library to the internet by the year 2000 otherwise the poor kids will be left further behind now i think we should be doing more in education not less governor kean said to me today he said i like this proposal to build or repair 5 000 schools the problem is it s way too small you should be doing more so that voice coming from a distinguished republican former governor i hope will echo loudly on capitol hill today we have a lot to do here we have a lot to do in the country we ve got to keep the connection between what we do here and what we do in the country and that is a lot of what this board has recommended so even though the work of the board is over they have given us a continuing mission i will say again if you look at the life of rosa parks if you read the book that john lewis has just produced about his life if you consider the sacrifice of two people who one just came to visit me vaclav havel the president of the czech republic and one will be with us in a few days nelson mandela if you look at all this you see that a people s greatness only comes when everybody has a chance to be great and it comes from yes opportunity it comes from yes learning it comes from yes the absence of discrimination but it also has to come from the presence of reconciliation from the turning away from the madness that life only matters if there is someone we can demean destroy or put down that is the eternal lesson of america we are now given a future of incomparable kaleidoscopic possibility and diversity and somehow we have to implant in the soul of every child that age old seed of learning so that the future can be ours thank you all god bless you dem wjclinton18 9 99 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen the main thing i want to say tonight is thank you thank you to the congressional black caucus for your leadership and your partnership for your genuine friendship thank you to jim clyburn to my friend of 27 years eddie bernice johnson to eva clayton to the dean of the delegation john conyers to your retiring member and a great champion of education and human welfare bill clay to corrine brown and elijah cummings and sheila jackson lee and all the other members of the cbc i thank you for your kindness your friendship your support to me to hillary to al and tipper gore to what we have done together i thank senator carol moseley brown for her continuing willingness to serve i welcome and congratulate the award winners my friends julius chambers and alvin brown and tom joyner can you imagine tom joyner and his son thanking al and me for being on his radio program you know even the people that don t like us don t think we re stupid and i want to thank and congratulate rear admiral evelyn fields who has done such a great job she started as a cartographer and went on to chart a new course of opportunity not only for african american women but for all women and thank you for honoring them i also would like to welcome the president of haiti here president rene preval we re delighted to have him here and we thank him for his friendship there are so many people here who have been associated with our administration and they were all asked to stand you know them well i want to just mention two if i might one is my chief speech writer terry edmonds because he s the first african american to ever hold that job and the reason i m introducing him is since al and eddie bernice and jim talked i can t give half the speech that he wrote for me so the least i can do is acknowledge that he did it thank you my friend you re doing great the other person i want to thank for his extraordinary leadership as our special representative to the continent of africa is reverend jesse jackson and i want to thank him very much for that and particularly his role in ending the disastrous conflict in sierra leone i want to congratulate some of the current judicial nominees more than half of whom are women and minorities including judge james wynn who will be the first african american to serve on the 4th circuit judge ann williams the first african american on the 7th circuit and this week i nominated kathleen mccree lewis to serve on the 6th circuit i congratulate them there are just two more people i want to thank i want to thank my wife for her love her friendship and for her leadership for our children and our future for the way she has represented us around the world and for having the courage to stay in public service after all we ve been through she would be the best united states senator you could ever elect to anything i also want to thank all the members of the administration here the cabinet members some are african american some are not but one of the most interesting things that anyone ever said to me is the presidential scholar that the vice president and i knew came from harvard one night to a dinner at the white house and we were pretty low it was after we had been waxed in the 94th congressional elections and this man said i have been studying administrations for a long time and you should know that i believe that yours will be re elected and one reason is you have the most loyal cabinet since thomas jefferson s second administration so to all who are here secretary slater madame attorney general secretary herman any other members of the cabinet who are here our veterans affairs secretary all the others i want to thank them and finally and most of all i d like to thank the vice president without whom none of the good things we have accomplished together would have been possible he has been by far the most influential active passionate intense effective vice president of the united states in the history of our republic and i am very grateful to him now you know this has been an exciting year for african americans a lot of things have happened i mean serena williams became the first black woman since althea gibson to win the u s open ken chenault was named the first black ceo of american express and this is very important i want you all to listen to this the magnificent african american writer toni morrison agreed with an extreme right wing journalist that i am the first black president of the united states chris tucker came to see me today he s here somewhere tonight where are you stand up there so chris tucker is in there he looks at me with a straight face and says he s come in to case the oval office because he s about to make a movie in which he will star as the first black president i didn t have the heart to tell him i had already taken the position i want to make a couple of points most of what needs to be said has been said one of the most interesting books of the bible is the book of james it challenges us to be doers of the word and not hearers only this truly is a caucus of doers and i m grateful for all the things that have happened that everyone else has mentioned but none of it would have been possible without you now we come again to what has become a fairly usual moment in the last two years the end of another budget year in which we must all make an accounting of ourselves to the american people for what we have done and what we are about to do and what we are going to do with the money they give us from the sweat of their brow now our republican friends have sent me a tax bill and it is quite large the middle class and working class and lower income relief in it is oh about the size of our bill but their bill is more than three times the size of ours and people in upper income groups who are doing pretty well in the stock market get all the rest of the relief but the main thing is that the bill makes choices we all make choices in life often when we pretend not to and often when we deny that we are but we do and so even when things don t seem to be happening sometimes decisions of the most momentous consequences are being made the vice president courageously presented himself for public office for the highest office in the land many of the rest of you will be running this year perhaps the first lady will be among you but while we are doing these things which we know are big decisions will be made in this congress which will affect what they can do if the american people are good enough to send them into office why do i want to veto this bill not because i enjoy these interminable partisan fights i frankly find them revolting most of the time it s not really what the framers had in mind they wanted us to debate our differences in advance and then figure out what we could agree on and go on and do it but there are choices here do you know the number of people over 65 is going to double in the next 30 years i hope to be one of them when that happens there will be two people working for every one person drawing social security and medicare we ought to use this surplus to deal with the challenge of the aging of america and take care of social security and medicare and give a prescription drug benefit do you know we ve got more kids in our schools than ever before you heard the vice president talk about what our agenda is and what he wants to do well you can t do it if you give away the store first we ought to invest in our kids we have the most diverse largest group of children ever in our schools and they are carrying our future in their little minds every day when they show up and we need to give them all a world class education and if we do this right believe it or not we ll be paying down the debt we could actually make america debt free for the first time since andrew jackson was president in 1835 now here s why progressives ought to be for this because if we do that we ll drive down interest rates and we ll be able to get more people to go invest money in places that haven t yet felt our prosperity we ll keep interest rates down for homes for college loans for car loans for credit cards we ll guarantee that we ll have a generation of prosperity we will pass something on to our children this is a choice what i want to say to you is i want us to get as much of this done as we can so that we leave for our successors in office the chance to do something meaningful nothing in some ways is more important than trying to make sure every american has a chance to participate in our prosperity i was so proud of alvin brown tonight when i was listening to his speech on the film getting ready to give him his award so grateful that the vice president gave him a chance to lead our empowerment zone and enterprise community programs so glad that we are continuing to try to involve businesses the vice president is determined to bridge the so called digital divide and put computers in every classroom in america not just those who can afford it on their own and make sure they can afford to use them thank you chairman kenard for what you ve done on that it s very important that we fund the next round of empowerment zones that we fund the new markets initiative that we give americans the same incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods here we give them to invest in poor places overseas i want to continue with all these incentives i wish we did more for the caribbean for central america for south america and for africa i just want to do the same thing for the poor neighborhoods of appalachia of the mississippi delta of the indian reservations of the cities that have been left behind all the things that have been mentioned i just want to say me too to the fair and accurate census me too to making sure that our children have safe and good places to learn me too to meeting the challenge of quality health care and passing and enforceable patients bill of rights and doing more in the battle against aids here at home and around the world and restoring trust between the community and police passing the hate crimes legislation and passing the other things that we talked about i want to say a few words seriously about a topic that the vice president touched on and i really appreciated it and i don t want to trivialize this i think the killing of innocent people en masse in america has been the most painful thing that he and i and our families have had to endure in discharging our responsibilities to the american people the bombing at oklahoma city the terrible school violence at littleton colorado and before that across the country arkansas and mississippi all the way to oregon and all the other places that were affected this awful spate of race related killings and then apparently people just with their anger out of control from illinois and indiana out to los angeles over to georgia and back to fort worth texas none of us should seek to make any capital out of this but all of us should seek to make sense out of it that s why we started this big grassroots campaign against youth violence that i hope all of you will be involved in two or three people came up to me tonight and said you were doing things back in your home communities and i m grateful but the vice president brought up this subject about whether it was evil rather than guns since that is the debate as it has been posed in the paper and by some others to explain the terrible things that happened in the church in texas and many of these other things and he said essentially both i just want to ask you to think about this because you think about how many times in your life you re in a and you would like to avoid taking responsibility for something that you could actually do something about in your personal life in your work life as citizens you can always find some other cause for the problem that you can still do something about you know our country has the highest murder rate in the world and here i ll tell you another thing you probably didn t know the number of children who die accidentally from gun deaths in the united states is nine times higher than the number who die in the next 20 biggest economies combined now if you believe this is about the human heart you must believe two things if the murder rate is higher here and the accidental death rate is exponentially higher you must believe that we are both more evil and more stupid than other countries don t laugh i know it s kind of funny but don t laugh the point i m trying to make is the nra and that crowd have got to stop using arguments like this as an excuse to avoid our shared responsibilities it may be true that if we had passed every bill that i have advocated and every bill that the vice president says he d pass if he were president that some of these killings would have occurred but it is undoubtedly true that many would not and that is what we have to think about and when we go into this political season where everybody will turn up the rhetoric you ought to have your antennae working real good and ask yourself are these people looking for a way to assume responsibility or to duck it and when i say that i mean no disrespect to anyone of course it is because something horrible had happened to that man s heart that he walked into that church in texas and killed those people of course it is and the same things that happened to the children in los angeles and the filipino postal worker and the same thing that happened to all those people in illinois and indiana of course it is but we cannot use that as an excuse not to ask ourselves what s the difference between our setup here and everybody else s setup and is it worth the price we re paying or is there something we can do collectively to make america a safer place and make it clear that more of our children are going to grow up safe and sound and healthy that s what we ought to be doing make this election year about assuming responsibility not ducking it for america s future you can do it and we need you to do it finally let me just say for the record and for the press here most of the things the congressional black caucus has really worked for in the nearly seven years i ve been privileged to be president have not benefitted african americans exclusively sometimes not even primarily most of the things that you have fought for were designed to give all americans a chance to live up to the fullest of their god given capacity designed to give all americans a chance to live on safe streets designed to give all americans a chance to come together and in that sense it may be that in the end the efforts we have made now manifested in our office for one america in the white house that ben johnson leads to bring this country together as we move forward may be the most important of all you know no one can foresee the future i have loved doing this job and i m going to do it to the best of my ability every day that i have left on my term i am going to do it to the best of my ability i am going to be a good citizen for the rest of my life and tell people exactly what i think but no one can see the future and no one has all the answers but i know this and you do too if every american really believed that we were one nation under god if every person really believed that we are all created equal if every person really believed that we have an obligation to try to draw closer together and to be better neighbors with others throughout the world then all the rest of our problems would more easily melt away and so i ask you as we go through the last difficult and exhilarating challenges of this year as you head into the political season next year keep in your mind especially those of you in this congressional black caucus the enormous potential you have to reach the heart and soul of america to remind them that we must be one thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton19 1 95 bill_clinton thank you very much mr secretary after that kind introduction i m loathe to say what i was about to say which is i m afraid the headline on this story will be reich comes out for playing hard but i think people who work hard should also be able to play hard i want to thank paul wood for his story and marvin clarke for his testimony in his long battle to make sure the country did something to help people so that there wouldn t be other people in the situation he finds himself in i want to thank the steelworkers and the senior citizens groups and all the others who were mentioned by secretary reich i d like to especially thank someone who is not here my longtime friend j pickle who retired from the congress and who left this as his last legacy in a long career of helping people with their own lives i d like to thank another longtime friend of mine who is still here that s maybe a disability in this town but marty slate has done a wonderful job at the pension benefit guaranty corporation i ll never forget the first time hillary told me about marty slate she said that s the smartest guy i ever met in my life he ll find a way to solve any kind of problem and you have done a fine job and we re grateful to you and i d like to thank someone whose name i don t know and i ve been trying to find out before this moment i d like to thank the person in the richmond debate in 1992 who asked president bush and ross perot and bill clinton about the problems of underfunded pensions and first got my attention on this issue i wish i don t know who that person was but i am deeply indebted and so are several million other americans to that person for bringing this issue personally to me in a very direct way two years ago from tomorrow i became president with a commitment to try to restore the american dream for all americans and to make sure that we enter the next century as the strongest country in the world a force for peace and freedom and democracy but most important of all as one which in a very different world would keep the american dream alive for all of our people when i signed the retirement protection act into law last month it was almost completely unnoticed because at the end of the year it had to go through in the comprehensive legislation that involved the passage of the gatt trade agreement and we wanted to do this today because this act was so profoundly important to so many millions of americans and it says a lot about what we are trying to do here in washington this is part of a new economic policy designed to help the american people stay ahead in a world economy that is changing so rapidly that while it offers vast new benefits to people it also is very frightening to a lot of people and causes too much insecurity and unsettling for people who have worked hard and done the right things all their lives it gives the american taxpayers a more effective more efficient and more disciplined government and this bill furthers what i have called my own contract with america the new covenant it says that people who act responsibly should be rewarded the retirement protection act says that people deserve a pension system that they rely on they deserve employers who take actions to be worthy of their own trust and the labor that they give them year in and year out they deserve a government that will protect them and stand by them a government that is their partner it says to employers that they can no longer gamble with the retirement savings of their own employees allowing pension plans to become dangerously underfunded expecting taxpayers to bale them out it means that responsible businesses with well funded plans will no longer have to carry an unfair share of the burden of the insurance costs for businesses who do not do the same as a result of the new law the funding level of large underfunded pension plans will be increased dramatically so that the benefits can be paid as they were promised the national pension insurance system will remain secure employees will get better information warning them when their plans could be at risk in stabilizing the federal insurance system we used the power of government to avert a potential crisis protecting millions of retirees corporate pension plans and the taxpayers from huge potential losses today we can be grateful that the security of our pensions are strong and growing stronger thanks to the retirement protection act and the work of all of you in this room who did so much to make it happen thank you very very much dem wjclinton19 1 98 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you i believe that we should begin by giving alma another hand she did a great job didn t she thank you i want to thank secretary riley for his work and for coming here with me today i want to say a very special word of thanks to your fine congressman solomon ortiz thanks to his leadership you are finally going to have the port of brownsville bridge you need so much thank you congressman ortiz i d like to thank the state legislators who are here representatives oliveira and solis judge hinojosa the city commissioners the city managers president juliet garcia ut brownsville mayor gonzalez i d like to thank congressman ruben hinojosa for coming over with me and congresswoman sheila jackson lee i d like to say too that my family and our administration feel that we owe a lot to brownsville the first lady was here about a year ago and hillary told me that she kind of resented my coming back without her today this community has given two of our real stars to the clinton gore administration first of all the president of the overseas private investment corporation one of 12 children here george munoz and his parents are both here thank you george and thank you mr and mrs munoz and second our secretary of energy federico pena whose parents gustavo and lucila pena are here thank you for a fine son and a fine cabinet member i d like to thank your land commissioner garry mauro for joining me today and also thank the white house aides who helped to do so much work on this trip mickey ibarra janet murgia cynthia jasso rottunno i am very proud of the fact that i have appointed far more hispanic americans than any previous president to important positions in my administration i m even prouder of the fact that they re doing a very good job for all americans i d like to welcome all the students and teachers and head start teachers here today thank you for coming and i d like to thank the bands that provided our music today thank you very much i d also like to say a special word of thanks for that plane back there i don t know if you ve looked at it and probably those of you who have live here doubtless been to see this plane before but the confederate air force preserved this bt 13 so thousands of people can come and learn about an aircraft that helped our country to fight and win world war ii it reminds me of one of the wisest decisions that president roosevelt made after world war ii and that was to give every returning soldier the chance to go on to college through the g i bill the g i bill revolutionized educational opportunity in america it made millions and millions of middle class families and better futures for their children i am exceedingly proud that last year when we passed the balanced budget agreement last year we passed an education program that opened the doors to college wider than ever before the biggest increase in college aid since the g i bill 50 years ago we learned the lesson from president roosevelt it s the right thing to do you know all of you know you live with this every day that we are living in an age characterized by increasing communication across national borders and revolutions in technology and information it s changing the way we work and live and relate to each other and it will dramatically change the lives of these children who are here what i have tried to do as i have said repeatedly is to build a bridge to this new world and the 21st century so that there is opportunity for every american child responsible enough to work for it so that we all work together as one america united across all the racial and ethnic and religious lines of diversity in this country and so that america is still the world s best hope for peace and freedom now there are a lot of things that we can do to help to grow the economy we have to do some more here in south texas and i met this morning with community leaders from the whole region to talk about that but let me tell you nothing we can do will equip our young people for the modern world unless all of our young people have a very good education and are able to keep on learning for a lifetime this week i announced that i will soon submit to congress the first balanced budget the united states has had in 30 years here s what it will do for going on to college within the context of balancing the budget there will be a hope scholarship a 1 500 credit for the first two years of college enough to make community college free for virtually every person in the united states there will be lifetime learning credits another 1 000 a year tax credit for the third and fourth years of college for graduate school and for older people who have to go back to upgrade their skills there will be education iras so that if parents save for their children s college education when they want to withdraw the money plus the interest it s earned they can do it without any tax penalty because we don t want to tax savings for education we have expanded the pell grant program to cover millions of eligible americans so that the scholarship is larger and the number of people who are eligible are more we now have had 100 000 young people including quite a number from texas serve in our national service program americorps serving their community and earning money to go to college and today a little earlier i announced that our budget will also include for the first time a request for 1 million work study positions for young people who want to work their way through college what that means is that people literally will not be able to say anymore i can t go to college because i can t afford it we also reformed the student loan program so that you can pay the money back as a percentage of your income you don t ever have to worry about being bankrupted if you have to borrow the money there is no financial excuse but we must make sure that more of our young people stay in school graduate from high school and when they graduate they know what they re supposed to know there are still too many of our children who graduate from high school not knowing that that s why i have pushed our national goals of making sure every 8 year old can read every 12 year old can log on to the internet and every 18 year old can go on to college with high standards proven reforms hooking up every classroom and library to the internet by the year 2000 making sure that every eligible child has a chance to be in a head start program or another good preschool program we have to do these things so that all of our children can learn let me also say that one of the most troubling things to me is that the high school graduation rates in america now are getting quite high they re well above 80 percent moving toward the 90 percent level they should reach for every ethnic group in america except hispanic young people too many of our hispanic young people still drop out of high school very often out of good motivation they think i ought to drop out i ought to go to work i can support myself i won t be a burden on my family i can help my family make a living that has been true for generations that is simply not true anymore and we have to change that attitude it is not true anymore it has been clear now for at least 10 years that there is a huge and growing gap in the job prospects and the earning prospects of people who have two years or more of college and people who drop out of high school it is imperative that we get 100 percent of our kids to stay in school get their high school diploma go back and get their ged if they have already dropped out and then go on to at least two years of college the financial obstacles have been removed we have to tear down the walls in the minds of people that are keeping them from doing this i have asked secretary riley to work with mickey ibarra and maria echaveste two assistants to the president and gene sperling director of my national economic council to help us do everything we can do to deal with this i have talked to representative hinojosa and representative ortiz about this but i m telling you you folks have got to change this at the grass roots level every single child has got to stay in school graduate and they need to know what they re supposed to know when they get their high school diploma you can make it happen we can open the doors we can have the opportunity we can set the standards you have to make it happen that s the way we can build a bridge to the 21st century that every single american can walk across i want you to help me thank you god bless me it s great to be back dem wjclinton19 10 94 bill_clinton you ve still got it mario among the many things i admire about governor cuomo is his remarkable family and here was his wife saying you should vote for him because he s strong and slim can you imagine what would happen to anybody else if someone got up and said you should vote for this person because he s got a good body i mean it was great his son tells him today andrew says in the economic conference don t speak very long dad so mario gets up and announces it and then gives his speech at twice the normal speed i watched him tonight and i was thinking why is this a race why is it even close i don t know how many of you saw my friend ken burns magnificent series on baseball but mario was in it and he hasn t seen it because he s been out campaigning i m not up so i stay home and watch baseball the only baseball we have right now one of the things that is in this series is the scouting report from the pittsburgh pirates on the promising young center fielder from st johns this is what the scout said about mario cuomo potentially the best prospect on the club could go all the way if he improves his hitting to the point of a respectable batting average he s aggressive he plays hard he s intelligent not easy to get to know but very well liked by those who succeed in penetrating his shell let me tell you something he s still the best prospect on the club and he ought to be sent back to the playing field and his batting average is very very good you know when mario was talking about how all of his immigrant roots and doing all that i just was virtually transported i never get tired of thinking about that sort of thing about our country in a much more blunt and less eloquent way boris yeltsin said the same thing to me the other day when he was here really was the time before last we were together yeltsin grew up in a house literally where the farm animals shared the living room with the children he was in a very difficult way as a child and he had read somewhere that i had once lived in a house without indoor plumbing so about halfway this banquet he looked at me one night and he said you know guys like us don t get to be president very often the truth is guys like us do get to be president or governor or other things in this country because this is a very great country because we ve had leaders like mario cuomo i ve had a lot of time to think about this governors race in new york you know i admire your governor so much i like him so much i feel that he is my real partner i think that he has given you strong and disciplined and responsible leadership and he s still full of new ideas and energy but i also understand what the issues are you know i was the governor of my state for a good long while and i loved it better than anything and my state was smaller but it was the same sort of deal my people had been there since about the time of the civil war i knew every country crossroads i could still walk into counties and remember the percentage of the vote i got in 1974 some people thought that was a character flaw but i thought it showed i was good at math and i want to tell you this story because it was told on me but it s something every new yorker ought to think about before this election you know in rural states and new york by the way is a big rural state with a huge agricultural sector the state fair is about the biggest thing that happens i ll tell you how big it is the guy who was my chief cabinet officer left my administration and well he worked for my successor a while and he left to become the head of the state fair he got a promotion it s a huge deal in a country place and so i used to go out to state fair every year and have a governor s day and i d just sit there and people would come up and talk to me and say whatever was on their mind which often burned my ears and after i had completed my fourth term about i had served three two year terms and one four year term and i was trying to make up my mind whether i would run for 14 years and would serve longer than anybody ever had in my state at the end of the governor s day when i had heard all this stuff this old fellow in overalls came up to me clearly in his about his 70s he looked at me and he said bill are you going to run for governor again i said i don t know if i do will you vote for me he said yes i guess i will i always have i said well aren t you sick of me after all these years he said no but everybody else i know is and i looked i swear he did and he said but he said what do you expect all you do is nag us to do better you re on us day and night talking about what we ve got to do to get jobs talking about what we ve got to do to get schools just nag nag nag he said nobody could live with that all the time he said it just wears us out but he said you know something i think it s beginning to work that s what i want to tell you it s beginning to work don t walk away from it when it is beginning to work we have a partnership now in the last 21 months new york state has over 110 000 new jobs about 1 5 percent drop in the unemployment rate 3 1 million families in this state protected by the family leave law 2 million people eligible for lower interest college loans 900 000 families got tax cuts because they work full time they have kids in the house they re just hovering above the poverty line they shouldn t go into poverty if people work and raise kids they ought to be able to succeed as parents and workers that has happened there s a 20 percent increase in the number of kids in head start you re going to get 6 100 police officers under the crime bill that s what we can do but you know something a president cannot do anything that changes the lives of people unless there are partners in the governorships in the mayoralties in the private sector on every street people who care about people who know their people and who will get things done now that is why you should reelect this governor it is clear that we have a partnership that can make a difference for the people in new york a governor is at his best or her best if the governor embodies the real qualities of a state when i see mario cuomo talking i think that is new york and i like it and america likes it you know even his opponents could not have heard this speech tonight without wanting to kind of tighten their coats and sit up a little straighter and throw their shoulders back and be proud to be an american and that s very important so if a man has a good record if he s got a good program for the future if he understands how to get things done and if he really knows his state and if he embodies the character the strength the courage of the state that s a pretty good ticket it s interesting today when we spoke at his conference on growth i said something i was embarrassed i didn t know there s a lot of things i don t know about your governor i was embarrassed i didn t know this i said that no matter what the president did no matter what the governor did no matter what the mayor does no matter what the people who are supposed to be heads of great organizations do we had to change the spirit of this country and we had to challenge more people to take responsibility for their own children their own friends their own neighbors or for somebody else s children or friends and neighbors if no one else was doing it and i said when i saw that transit policeman come home from the hospital after being so horribly beaten by those nine kids i thought what in the wide world were those kids doing on the street at that hour of the night and why didn t somebody give them some better place to go to or try to teach them right from wrong or stand up for what was right and wrong and then when i saw today in the paper that there were two people who put their lives on the line to help that poor guy at the teller machine last night in new york i thought that s what this country s all about and more people ought to do it now after i gave this speech where everybody was clapping a friend of the governor s came up and said he did the same thing three years ago he got out and chased a criminal trying to do the right thing that is the sort of person he is and he would do it again tonight he would walk through a wall to do the right thing and you ought to do the right thing and reelect him governor you know i had 17 pages of notes and i came up here with this because mario already told you what i did the last two years i want to say something else too about this election it s not just the difficulty is not just that all the stuff we ve been talking about why is there a sort of a tight anxiety ridden negative mood in the country today when we re plainly better off than we were 21 months ago i mean we have more jobs and a lower deficit we ve got a government that s finally doing things for ordinary people like middle class college loans and family leave and immunizing all the kids in the country under the age of two we re moving toward peace and prosperity we ve had more advancements in trade in the last year than we have in 30 years and we have all of the movements toward democracy and freedom that the united states has been involved in supporting the election in south africa the peace process in northern ireland what is going on in haiti what is going on in the persian gulf and of course the incredible story of peace in the middle east against all the odds this is a good time and we are plainly moving in the right direction so what is the beef why is there this anxiety this tension in the country there are a number of reasons but i d like to tell you a few because dealing with them may hold the key to how this election comes out and whether people can hear the song that your governor sang tonight america s song the song we always respond to when we re at our best first of all we are dealing with the accumulation of enormous problems that have been ignored for a long time all these social problems that we see that just tear our hearts out when we see that five year old kid hung out the window and dropped to die because he knew it was wrong to steal candy that didn t happen overnight this stuff has been developing for 30 years for 30 years what s happened to the families and the communities and the loss of hope and the vacuum that has been created drugs and gangs and guns that stuff just fills a vacuum there s a hole inside people s lives and it just goes in because there s a vacuum just sucking it in to people the economic anxieties people feel has been developing for 20 years where most wage earners who earn hourly wages have not gotten a raise the average working person is working a longer work week today than 20 years ago and the global economy requires people to change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime those of us who have knowledge and skills and can learn new things and can stay on top and dance on our toes well we re pretty secure other people are just scared and for 12 years we tried a different approach we basically had we were governed by people who tried to convince us that we should hold our government in contempt that the government would mess up a one car parade and that we should just sit on the sidelines and just let things happen and it takes time to turn that around and it takes time for people who have been disappointed a long time to scrape away all that and begin to feel as well as think again that things can be better and there s another big issue here we are going through a period of historic change at the end of the cold war the changing of our economy moving into a new century where all the rules will be different i honestly believe for the reasons mario said the 21st century will be america s best time all this diversity we have if we learn to enjoy it celebrate it reinforce it it is our meal ticket to the future because the world is a small place but every time we go through a period of change our democracy is tested because people s hopes and fears are at war think about your own life think about the first day you went to school the first day you went off to college the day you got married the day you had your first job think about only things that had more good than bad in them but were radically different you were scared to death one of those movies always work where the guy walks down the aisle and the woman walks down the aisle and they say i don t because everybody thinks about it that s why it works and because anytime you put yourself on the line and try a new thing it might not work and it s frightening so you fight this battle all the time inside between hope and fear countries are the same way when they go through big changes at the end of world war i america had done a great thing it was the first time we had ever gone abroad to fight for values and other people without our own existence being at risk it was a great thing it exhausted us and what happened we came home and we shrunk up and we had the rise of the ku klux klan we had the rise of the red scare and we walked away from the rest of the world and brought on an international economic collapse that gave rise to fascism and nazism and brought the second world war at the end of the second world war we didn t do that but there were lots of pressures to do the same thing joe mccarthy the loyalty programs a communist behind every bush but we had strong leadership it was tough harry truman s popularity was at 80 percent when he dropped the bomb and ended the second world war two years later when he sent national health insurance to congress for the second time it was at 36 percent by the time people got through working on it all of the people in the 80 to 36 crowd they all think he ought to be on mt rushmore well i was in one of those families that was always part of the 36 we were always for him and we know i was raised being told about this it was inevitable people were afraid things were changing and now you just think about what life s like for the average american today and how they get their information and how they communicate about public things what we have to do in the next three weeks all over the country is go out and say we ve turned this situation around the economy s coming back the government s working for ordinary people the world is more peaceful and secure the opportunities are great we have to vote our hopes and not our fears we have to vote for tomorrow not yesterday that s what we have to do on election morning in new york state most people in this state wake up and the scales inside of them are tilted toward hope instead of fear it will be a route for governor cuomo you know it and i know it that is our job eleanor roosevelt once said you know you can spend a lot of time fighting the darkness and there s a lot of dark things to fight but the quickest way to beat it is to flip the light switch on you think about that you think about that what we need is more americans who will go take up for the people that are getting mugged at the teller machine what we need is more americans who will put a hand on those little five year old kid and give them somebody to look up to what we need is more americans who will reach out to those 10 or 11 year old kids when they re five so their hearts don t turn to stone before it s too late what we need is everybody saying that this is a very great country if you have any doubt if you have any doubt just remember what happened last weekend when president aristide went home to haiti and president aristide went home to haiti and all those people were holding those little old signs in the street that said thank you america in creole and they were looking at these young men and women in uniform our kids who are black white brown yellow lord only knows what a lot of them are haitian americans we got every haitian american soldier we could find and sent them down there so somebody could speak creole to those folks it was unbelievable and just look at their eyes and they knew that this was a good country standing for something good doing something good bringing out the best that s the way the rest of us have to be in our minds we have to put on a uniform every day we have to say we are not going to let this country go down we re going up and we are certainly not going to let this country go back we re going forward and if we have that feeling that spirit then all the facts will fall into place and our story will be credible and our governor will be reelected he is a national treasure but he really is new york s treasure every one of you know every one of you know i kind of promised myself i wasn t going to mention this but i m going to every one of you know that he could have had another job with longer tenure every one of you know that he stayed here because he loves you he loves that neighborhood he grew up in queens he cannot imagine walking away from this fight until we have had a chance to do every last thing we can to give every kid in this state a chance at a better future you take care of it and make sure he s reelected thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton19 11 01 bill_clinton thank you very much mr president it wasn t so very long ago when he had to call me that i kind of miss the old arrangement but i m glad at least one of us landed a job without term limits i want to thank congressmen capuano and mcgovern for being here and for the help they gave me when i was president trying to move our country forward and i thank the leaders of boston and cambridge who have come and my good friends mack mclarty and bruce lindsey and the people in the audience and at harvard who were in the administration of whom there are very large numbers i want to thank my friend david pryor i never thought 30 years ago that if he had told me that one day i d have to come to harvard to see david pryor i wouldn t have believed it we spent most of our younger years at county fairs and coon suppers and with fox and wolf hunters we ve listened to the dogs bay at the moon after 2 00 and we ve eaten things that no human being should be required to eat he is one of the finest people i ve ever known and one of the best friends i ve ever had i m so glad that he got the chance to come to harvard and share his gifts with you and dean joe nye i thank you for all the support and help and advice and knowledge you gave to me in the eight years i served you might be interested to know that my daughter had to go all the way to oxford to read your books but they are required reading in her course there and she has given you a very good review i am delighted that larry summers was chosen to be president of harvard he has proved that academics and politics can go hand in hand validating the mission of the institute of politics since robert kennedy conceived it a quarter of a century ago he was brilliant in dealing with international financial problems and balancing the federal budget i couldn t help thinking when he was telling you the story about mexico he left a critical element out there was a poll in the morning paper that said the american people opposed my helping mexico by 81 to 15 and just before the meeting all the congressional leaders who said they would support it bailed out on me so if president zedillo hadn t paid that loan back with interest and ahead of schedule i would still be an ex president but larry summers would have never become president so we are both very grateful to him you know thanks to larry s leadership we actually ran some pretty healthy surpluses in the federal budget but nothing could have prepared him for the kind of money you have at harvard larry after the years you spent at harvard and all the advice you gave me one thing you didn t suggest is that we stop calling the surplus a surplus and call it an endowment if we had called it an endowment that tax cut never would have passed and we d still be on our way to a debt free america i ve got so many former staff members here i can t keep up with them all but i know that elaine kamarck and my former counsel beth nolan and michael waldman are here i saw josh gottheimer who is now here in law school he actually said he had to work that he didn t make the mistake of going to yale where i didn t have to work as hard i also know that one of my former advance staff ted carr is actually teaching a class here on presidential advance i cannot believe you can get credit for taking a class on presidential advance everybody who did advance for me had to skip class to do it so now we re even repairing the breach between politics and the academy at the advance level let me say it was 25 years ago just last month that members of the kennedy family the kennedy white house the harvard community gathered for dinner at the holyoke center to celebrate the creation of the institute of politics that night robert kennedy gave a few brief but powerful remarks he said this with mankind having the power to destroy mankind this is not the time to relax and he urged the students who would study at the iop to be vigilant to stay engaged in public affairs and to use the institute to find solutions for the changing world well because the world has changed so much in the last 25 years robert kennedy s words echo every bit as powerfully today as they did then i was deeply gratified by the iop survey showing that college students are more ready than ever to serve their country that civic engagement is on the rise that more than two thirds of you have contributed in some way to the relief efforts since september 11 i think robert kennedy would be very proud of this generation of young people and i am very proud of you one of the most important achievements of our administration was the creation of americorps the national community service program it was modeled on the peace corps for community purposes here at home with gi bill style college benefits i used the pen president kennedy used to sign the peace corp to sign the bill creating it and in seven years over 250 000 young americans have served their country more than in the entire history of the peace corps now senator biden and senator mccain have joined together to propose that we provide enough funding for 250 000 young americans a year to serve in americorps that was our original goal all inspired by what the president john kennedy asked me to do in high school to ask not what my country can do for me but what i can do for my country so i thank you for that today i want to talk a little about the road ahead for citizens and public servants in america we should begin with the fight against terror in afghanistan and here at home the terrorists who struck the world trade center and the pentagon believe they were attacking important symbols of corrupt american power and materialism they were quite wrong about that i live and work in new york now my wife hillary represents the people of new york in the united states senate i was commander in chief of the people who go to work in the pentagon every day the people who perished represent not only the best of america but the best of the world i worked hard for eight years to build the world of expanding freedom and opportunity of greater citizen responsibility of growing diversity and deeper bonds of community the world in short it looks a great deal like the student body gathered here today people from 70 nations died at the world trade center irish and italian catholic firefighters died to save muslims the terrorists died to kill those who died in new york at the pentagon and pennsylvania are part of a very different world and hold very different world views than those who killed them we are engaged mainly in a struggle for the soul of this new century victory for our vision depends upon winning the fight we re in against terrorism on spreading the benefits and reducing the burdens of the modern world on changes in poor nations themselves that will make progress possible and finally on developing a global level of consciousness about what our responsibilities to each other are and what our relationships ought to be let me take each of these in turn first with regard to the fight we re in i urge you to keep three things in mind first terror the killing of non combatants for political religious or economic reasons has a very long history no region of the world has been spared it few people have entirely clean hands in november of 1095 pope urban ii urged the christian soldiers to embark on the first crusade to capture jerusalem which he said is now held captive by god s enemies and made a servant by those who know not god for the ceremonies of the heathen when the christians took jerusalem they first burned the synagogue not a mosque a synagogue with 300 jews and proceeded then to kill every muslim woman and child on the temple mount i can tell you that story is still being told today in the middle east throughout the 20th century people continued to be terrorized because of their race or religion even in the west and although we americans have come a very long long way from the days when people could kill slaves and native americans and get away with it we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race religion or sexual orientation the second point i want to make is that in spite of this long history no terrorist campaign standing on its own has ever succeeded terror leaves bitter enemies the poison stays long in the well the purpose after all is not to achieve military victory but to achieve a change in circumstances by terror to make us afraid of today afraid of tomorrow afraid of each other therefore it cannot win unless we become admitting accomplices changing the way we think and feel and live the third point i want to make is very important for young people because i know this is a difficult time especially for young people you did not grow up as i did having exercises where you d go to a fall out shelter where you could supposedly hide in the event that nuclear weapons rained on america you didn t grow up with vietnam and by the time you came of age most of the cold war was over your parents didn t tell you about korea or world war ii so this whole thing must be terribly shocking to you here s the point i want to make in any new arena of conflict offensive action always prevails first then good people get together and devise effective defenses and civilization goes on ever since the first person walked out of a cave with a club there was a gap until somebody figured out you could put a couple of sticks together and stretch an animal skin over it and you would have a shield to defend yourself in every arena of combat from that day to this this pattern has held true first offense then defense we have been involved in this struggle against terrorism here against americans at least 20 years since our marines were killed by suicide efforts in lebanon it has been active in europe for longer but we will get better in our defenses in the years that i served as president career law enforcement officials worked very hard in the hope that a day like september 11 would never come they prevented many terrorist attacks from occurring and successfully brought to justice many perpetrators of terrorism they thwarted attempts to blow up the holland tunnel the lincoln tunnel the los angeles airport an attempt on the pope s life an attempt to destroy the largest hotel in amman jordan and a christian site in the holy land over the millennium attempts to plant bombs in cities in the northeast and northwest over the millennium weekend america ratified the chemical weapons convention tried to strengthen the biological weapons convention counter terrorism budgets were hugely increased we began training civil responses in the 30 biggest communities in america we began the stockpiling of vaccines and antidotes antibiotics and we began researching what could prove to be a very important question in the years ahead which is how to quickly develop a response to a variant toxin in the event of a biological attack vice president gore head of the commission on airport security made a lot of recommendations some of which were adopted some of which weren t the point i want to make is as chilling as what happened on september the 11th and the current anthrax scare good people have been working on this a long time they have been getting better and we will continue to get better clearly we need to do more to improve our defenses for all forms of transportation and other critical infrastructure the airline security legislation just passed by the congress is a very good step we must continue to strengthen our defenses against cyber terrorism president bush has recently put a good man dick clarke in charge of that who coordinated our counter terrorism efforts in the national security council when i was president we need to strengthen our capacity to chase money that keeps terrorist networks running when president summers was secretary of the treasury we put in a lot of very stringent efforts to try to crack down on money laundering and break in to dirty money networks we tried to pass money laundering legislation which congress refused to pass last year and i hope and believe will probably pass this year because it s very important perhaps most important we must improve our woefully inadequate computer tracking capacity integrate the information systems of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies private companies now mostly doing mass mailing for a living believe it or not have a far better capacity to track potential terrorists and other suspects who come into this country using not illegal information or intrusions into privacy but simple information that has been available for years and years and years on all of us already and their capacity far exceeds anything the government has so that s an area where we have to catch up and catch up in a hurry but the larger point holds terror has got a long history it s never worked before offense always precedes defense the more lethal the weapons the more critical it is to shorten the time between the first offensive action and the construction of an effective defense but there is no reason in the wide world to believe that not only will the campaign in afghanistan succeed but our campaign in organizing our defenses here at home will succeed i for one do not believe that the 21st century will claim anywhere near as many innocent lives as the 20th century did let me remind you over nine million people died in world war i over 20 million people died from bad governments abusive governments between the wars over 20 million people died in world war ii twenty million people were killed by abusive governments after world war ii over a million people died in korea a million more or less in vietnam seven hundred thousand at the end of the century in rwanda alone in 90 days the thing that makes this so frightening especially to americans and people in other countries that think of themselves as open minded and progressive is that this happened here at home quite often to people we knew and on television that brings me to my second point winning the fight we re in is absolutely necessary but it is not sufficient to build the world you want for your future to do that we have to build a pool of potential partners and reduce the pool of potential terrorists and that will require a much larger and more sustained effort let me explain what i mean and take you through an exercise that i have been working through with audiences now since september 11 try to remember what you thought on september the 10th if i had asked you on that day what do you believe is the single most dominant force of the early 21st century world what would you have answered i can think of four answers you might have given if you re a positive optimistic person you might have said first the global economy it brought america over 22 million jobs in the last eight years and lifted more people out of poverty over the last 20 years than at any time before in history or you might have said no it s the information technology revolution that s what s given us the increased productivity that s driven economic growth listen to this when i became president in 1993 there were 50 sites on the world wide web when i left office the number was 350 million and rising even before the anthrax scare slowed the mail 30 times as many messages were sent by e mail as the postal service every day or you might have said no even more important than the economics and the information technology would be the advances in the biological sciences the results of the sequencing of the human genome and other research now underway will rival the significance of the very discovery of dna or even newtonian physics we re developing microscopic testing mechanisms with nano technology to identify cancers just a few cells in size researching the possibility of digital chips to replicate sophisticated spinal nerve movements raising the prospect that they can work for the spine like a pacemaker does for the heart and people long in wheelchairs will get up and walk seeing young mothers who have come home with their newborns from the hospital in countries with good health systems with a little gene card mapping out their future telling what the problems are what the strengths are what to do and babies quite shortly will be born in countries like ours with life expectancies in excess of 90 years or you might have said fourthly the most important thing about this new world is the explosion of democracy and diversity within democratic societies because they make all this other progress possible i was honored to be president when for the first time in history more than half the world s people lived in democracies and to see america and other advanced open societies dramatically increasing in racial and religious and ethnic diversity proving that people from different backgrounds or different faiths can live and work together for common good you might have given one of those answers on the other hand if you re from a poor country are you more pessimistic or if you re what my wife hillary refers to as your family s designated worrier and every family has one i think you might have given one of four negative answers you might have said no the global economy is the problem not the solution because half the world s people live on less than 2 a day a billion people live on less than a dollar a day a billion people go to bed hungry every night and a billion and a half people never get a clean glass of water or you might have said before that happens environmental crises will consume us the deterioration of the oceans that provide so much of our water our oxygen the chronic water shortage and most important global warming if the globe warms for the next 50 years at the same rate of the last 10 we ll lose 50 feet of manhattan island and the florida everglades i worked so hard to save in america whole pacific island nations will be flooded and we will create tens of millions of flood refugees with more disruption and violence and war or you might have said but before the global warming gets us global health crises will we see public health systems breaking down across the globe and epidemics rising one in four people this year will die of all the people who perish will die of aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them little kids that never got a clean glass of water there are 36 million aids cases two thirds of them in africa but the fastest growing rates of aids is in the former soviet union on europe s back door in the caribbean on america s front door in india the world s biggest democracy the chinese just admitted they have twice as many cases as they had thought and only four percent of the adults in china the world s biggest country know how aids is contracted and spread if we don t change the trends there will be a hundred million aids cases by 2005 making it the largest epidemic since the black plague killed a quarter of europe in the 14th century or you might have said well even before the aids crisis descends on us we will be plagued by terrorism the marriage of modern weapons of mass destruction to ancient racial religious ethnic and tribal hatreds if you look at rwanda sierra leone the balkans east timor the middle east or until god bless them people finally did the right thing northern ireland you see that the central irony of our time is that with all of our progress we re still bedeviled by the oldest problem of human society the fear hatred and demonization of people who are different from us now i mentioned four positive things and four negative things what do they all have in common they reflect the most breathtaking increase in global interdependence in all of history philosophers and theologians have talked for millennia about how we are interdependent because of our shared humanity politicians have taken it seriously at least since the end of world war ii the dropping of the bomb and the establishment of the united nations but now it is a reality that no ordinary citizen of the world anywhere can escape you live in the age of interdependence borders don t count for much or stop much good or bad anymore in other words this is the point of the whole exercise september 11 and the anthrax scare are the dark side of the benefits we have been receiving from a world in which we have torn down barriers collapsed distances and spread information to an extent never before known openness brings us both greater opportunity and greater vulnerability the great question of our time is whether this interdependence is going to be good or bad for you and your children and people like you all over the world since we cannot escape it and we wouldn t want to rebuild the walls we worked so hard to tear down we must do everything we can to strengthen the positive forces of interdependence and to diminish the negative ones there are three things in my view we have to do first spread the benefits and shrink the burdens of the 21st century second work to create conditions in poor countries that make progress possible and give people the sense that they ve got some control over their own lives with special care for the challenges of the muslim world third we simply must develop a higher level of consciousness about how we can all cherish our faiths and our identities and still live and work together on the first point we have to reduce global poverty and increase economic empowerment we had a great effort last year to reduce the debt of the 24 poorest countries it was one of the things that i was most proud of and we did it in a completely bipartisan way the results have been stunning and the poor countries get the debt relief only if they put all their savings into health education or economic development we should do a lot more of it for the last several years america has given two million micro enterprise loans a year to poor people in africa asia latin america we should do much much more of that the u s opened its markets to people around the world to africa to the caribbean to jordan to vietnam just last year we should have more trade not less but the jordan trade agreement is a good model because it has basic fundamental labor and environmental rights written into it the peruvian economist hernando de soto has pointed out that the world s poor people already have five trillion dollars in assets in their homes and businesses but they re all in the extralegal sector they live in shanties without addresses they run small businesses that are so burdened by regulation it would take them a year and money they can never have to legalize their businesses so he is spending his life going around the world trying to help reform property laws devise effective court systems reform banking laws reform regulations all with a goal of allowing poor people to get a loan by using what they already have as collateral because without it you can t have personal advancement or national growth in a market economy we helped them a little when i was president but not enough he spends a lot of time going around trying to gather up money for each new country he operates in the rich countries of the world ought to fund this so people can do more to help themselves the same argument applies to education there are a hundred million kids that aren t in school today we ought to get them in school every additional year of schooling in a poor country adds 10 to 20 percent to a child s income brazil has 97 percent of its children in school why because they paid their mothers in the poorest 30 percent of the families a monthly fee if they send their kids to school 85 percent of the time so they have almost everybody in school in my last year as president we got 300 million to provide a meal to children in poor countries but only if they d come to school to get it do you know what 300 million will buy a meal for over six million children every day of the school year and the results are coming in and enrollments are exploding in places where this program is being put in place now we ought to fund programs like this and get these kids in school same argument applies to health care secretary general kofi annan has asked the rich countries to give him seven to ten billion dollars a year to fight aids and other infectious diseases look we got the medicine coming we have proven programs of prevention we know what works uganda cut the death rate in half in five years with prevention only brazil cut it in half in three years with prevention and medicine we ought to fund the program the same argument applies to global warming while powerful vested interests in the united states and i might add in a lot of the developing world in china and india and elsewhere still pretend that this is not occurring there is an already existing one trillion dollar market available today for energy conservation technologies and alternative energy sources that will create jobs in the developing world and in the developed world now you may say to me this costs a lot of money it does but it s a lot cheaper than going to war it s a lot cheaper than going to war and i want to have a little pander here to the massachusetts people in the audience we wouldn t have this global feeding program and all those kids in school if it weren t for congressman jim mcgovern who was the sponsor of the whole thing and i thank you jim the second thing we have to do is to help people help themselves all this aid won t amount to a hill of beans if it doesn t have an impact in a country in a position to use it that means we need to have more democracy democracies don t go to war against each other and by and large they don t sponsor terrorism they re more likely to respect the environment and human rights and social justice it s no accident that most of the terrorists come from non democratic countries if you never have to take responsibility for yourselves it kind of keeps you in a state of permanent immaturity those of you who are undergraduates imagine what you would be like today if when you turned five or six years old when you began to go to school instead your parents put you in a closet to make absolutely sure you would never scuff your knee you would never get germs no one would ever say a dirty word to you you would never hear an alien thought you would look the same but you would be very different and so you were permitted to go out into the world and take risks and make mistakes and learn to take responsibility for your own lives the same argument applies to countries when people never get a chance to take responsibility for themselves it is very easy to convince them that their distress is caused by someone else s success and it isn t enough just to have elections there s a transition here you have to have good laws and good regulations and an effective economic policy and we need to help these people succeed and finally let me say we have to have a special care for the problems of the muslim world and i hope that i have earned the right to say this i was the first president ever to observe every year the feast of id al fitr at the end of ramadan which is coming up pretty soon to bring large numbers of muslims into the white house and consult with them on a wide range of issues the last time we used military power as a nation was to protect the lives of poor muslims in bosnia and kosovo i tried until my last day in office to get a just and lasting peace in the middle east that would give a statement of the west bank in gaza to the palestinians and protect their religious equities in jerusalem and what i want to say to you is that there is as most of you know a war raging within islam today about what they think about the modern world in general and the united states in particular it is rooted in the frustrations so many muslims have with the modern world which they see as a threat to their values destructive of their way of life hostile to their economic well being in many places we cannot engage in this debate without admitting that there are excesses in our contemporary culture and that no people have ever been able to live forever only with their rational faculties without any spiritual nourishment and non logical belief systems this battle is being fought of course in the middle east and central asia but also in america and throughout the west just the other day a part time chaplain at the new york state prison near buffalo was suspended from her job for expressing sympathy with mr bin laden and other terrorists we have an afghan mosque in new york city where the iman was a stand up guy on september 12 condemning the terrorism he was terrific but a minority of his congregation walked outside and began to worship in the parking lot the new republic ran a story about a prominent conservative activist getting in trouble with the administration for bringing muslims into the white house who support terrorist networks this debate is going on everywhere in the middle east theocratic and secular but non democratic governments with troubling economic social and political problems have seen a dramatic rise in fundamentalism portraying the u s and israel in particular and the west in general as evil we ve got to get into this debate we have to strengthen the forces of moderation we have to increase the capacity of those governments to deliver for their people we have to support democratic transitions and we ve got to get our story out i ll guarantee you that most muslims in the middle east do not know that the last time we used military power was to protect muslims in bosnia and kosovo do not know that america advocated and israel accepted but the plo rejected the establishment of a palestinian state with 97 percent of the west bank and gaza east jerusalem and protection of palestinian control of the muslim holy sites most people don t know how many muslims died at the world trade center that would make a big difference they don t know how many muslims do well and keep the faith in america they do not know that when the fbi recently asked for 200 arabic speakers to help them combat terrorism there were 15 000 volunteers most muslims do not know that when 18 american soldiers and hundreds of somalis died in that firefight in somalia in 1993 that mr bin laden loves to crow about they have forgotten that those american soldiers were there on a un mission to arrest mohammed aidid because he had murdered 22 pakistani muslim peacekeepers they do not know that so we got to get our story out and we have to give some ammunition to the moderates in the muslim world that are trying to take a different course and finally let me just make one last point some people may think it sounds naive but i think it s the most important point of all we cannot make the world that you want for your children without developing a higher level of consciousness that will permit the world s people to live and work together today we and those on the other side have dramatically different notions about the most basic things in life what is the nature of truth what is the value of life what is the content of community the taliban and bin laden like fundamentalist fanatics today everywhere and throughout time immemorial believe they have the truth they have it the whole truth they believe the world is divided between those who agree with their truth and those who dem wjclinton19 11 98 bill_clinton prime minister mrs obuchi members of the japanese delegation and honored guests first let me say on behalf of the american delegation i thank you for your warm hospitality it is a pleasure to look around this room tonight and see so many friendly faces from my previous trips to japan your distinguished predecessors your ambassador and former ambassadors distinguished business leaders the relationship between our two countries has always been important but never more important than now i too enjoyed our meeting in new york two months ago tonight i am delighted to be back in the akasaka palace i also prime minister i feel terrible about the schedule which we are on together but since you mentioned it perhaps we can make sure that we both stay awake at the dinner tonight let me say in all seriousness too i was deeply honored to be received by the emperor and the empress today and very much appreciated the visit that we had and the good wishes they sent to my family since my last visit here in the spring of 1996 strong winds have blown across the world disrupting economies in every region there have also been threats to peace and stability from acts of terrorism to weapons of mass destruction yet the world has made progress in the face of adversity it is more peaceful today than it was two years ago when i was here hope has come to northern ireland peru and ecuador have resolved their longstanding dispute bosnia is building a self sustaining peace a humanitarian disaster has been averted in kosovo and the people there have now hope for regaining their autonomy the middle east is back on the long road to peace all of these areas of progress have one thing in common they represent the triumph of a wide circle of nations working together not only the nations directly affected but a community of nations that brings adversaries to the table to settle their differences year in and year out japan s generous contributions to peacekeeping efforts and your eloquent defense of the idea of global harmony have gone far to make this a safer world in central america you have provided disaster relief in the wake of hurricane mitch i should say mr prime minister that i wish my wife were with me tonight but she is there where they had the worst hurricane disaster in 200 years and i thank you for helping people so far from your home in the middle east you have contributed substantial funds to aid the peace process in recent months you have further advanced the cause of peace by taking your relations with asian neighbors to a new and significantly higher level of cooperation and despite economic difficulties at home you have contributed to recovery efforts throughout asia that is true leadership now mr prime minister you have made difficult decisions to overcome your own economic challenges the path back to growth and stability will require your continued leadership but we hope to work with you every step of the way in dealing with these difficulties japan can lead asia into a remarkable new century a century of global cooperation for greater peace and freedom greater democracy and prosperity greater protection of our environment greater scientific discovery and space exploration at the center of all our efforts is the strong bond between the people of the united states and the people of japan our security alliance is the cornerstone of asia s stability our friendship demonstrates to asia and to the world that very different societies can work together in a harmony that benefits everyone two fine examples of our recent cooperation are the new asia growth and recovery initiative that you and i recently announced prime minister and as you mentioned the space shuttle discovery which included your remarkable astronaut chiaki mukai i understand that when dr mukai spoke with you from space prime minister she offered the first three lines of a five line poem a tanka poem and she invited the people of japan to provide the final two lines i want to try my hand at this as i understand it her lines were spinning somersaults without gravity s limits in space flight with glenn i would add all is possible on earth and in the heavens when our countries join hands ladies and gentlemen i ask you to join me in a toast to the prime minister and mrs obuchi and to the people of japan dem wjclinton19 11 99 bill_clinton hello thank you all for coming out to greet us my family and our american delegation are very glad to begin our visit to greece thank you very much i have come here as a phili mou a friend of greece and i look forward to experiencing that wonderful quality of greek hospitality known to all the world as phyloxenia through this visit i want the american people to see the changing face of greece the powerhouse of southeast europe with the highest growth rate in the eu a booming stock market a nation on a fast track to join the european monetary union an old democracy that is a model for the young democracies of the balkans the gateway to their markets a driving force in the effort to rebuild war torn nations and to bring them into europe we look to ancient greece for inspiration but we look to modern greece for leadership and partnership tomorrow i want to speak with the people of greece about what we can do together to build a europe that is undivided democratic and at peace for the first time in history and about how together we can overcome the remaining challenges to that vision by stabilizing the balkans and achieving lasting reconciliation between greece and turkey with resolution of all outstanding issues including cyprus our nations have so much in common we are allies with a shared commitment to peace and security democracies with a long tradition of impassioned political debate about issues that affect our lives and engage our convictions above all we are two nations proud of our past but focused on the future i look forward to that future and to our partnership with confidence and hope and i look very much forward to our visit with you thank you very much dem wjclinton19 2 97 bill_clinton thank you mr mayor commissioner evans probation officer tanya brooks president bulger chancellor sherry penney governor weld senator kerry congressman moakley congressman kennedy i understand you re also an alumni of this university attorney general harshbarger the president of the national association of attorneys general thank you all for welcoming me here and i m delighted to be here with two of my great partners in this endeavor our wonderful attorney general janet reno and the under secretary of the treasury for enforcement ray kelly thank you for being here we re all glad to be here i want to thank all the police officers for being here especially the voices in blue for singing the national anthem they were great great job gentlemen and i d like to thank the students at the university of massachusetts at boston i know that 80 percent of the students i ve been told at least that 80 percent of the students here are working virtually full time while pursuing their degrees that s a great tribute to you and if our budget passes we ll have the direct loan program the americorps program tax cuts for tuition and a huge increase in pell grants and work study i hope it will help you all oh there s one more thing before i begin my prepared remarks this is my first trip to boston and to massachusetts in 1997 and if you will forgive me a purely personal remark i want to thank the people of massachusetts for giving me the biggest margin of victory of any state in the country thank you very much thank you let me begin if i might by trying to put today s event into some context you heard the mayor talking about declining crime generally in boston let me just ask you to go back to four or five years ago when i assumed this office i wanted to do basically two big things one is i wanted to kind of get america fixed up i wanted things to work again and then i wanted to get all of us together to focus on what we need to do to prepare our people for a new century to preserve the american dream for everyone who is willing to work for it without regard to their background or where they start out in life to preserve a sense of community that embraces every american who is willing to be a responsible citizen and to create a sense that our families our neighborhoods our workplaces our schools all of our organizations were working again and to maintain our leadership in a rapidly changing world but first we had to make sure things would work and the first thing we worked through in washington was an economic program that was designed to change the whole economic direction of the last several years to get away from spending ourselves into immediate prosperity through constant deficits to a longer term strategy to bring the deficit down get interest rates down invest in our people and prove we could trade and compete with the rest of the world now i just got a report this morning on the last inflationary numbers of that four year period which says that the core rate of inflation that is the basic things people buy the inflation rate dropped from 3 5 percent to 2 5 percent in the previous four years and that the combined rates of unemployment and inflation on average through four years together were 8 7 percent that s the lowest since lyndon johnson was the president of the united states that s a good sign that s a good sign but what i want to ask you to focus on today is that in some ways the whole question of having safe streets safe neighborhoods safe schools and safe children has to be prior to economic opportunity because if people are living in constant fear if their lives are always disoriented if they are completely unpredictable then it is very hard to say to them that you should stay in school you should learn all you can you should look forward to a better future the 21st century will give you more chances to live out your dreams than ever before and if the answer you get back is what do you mean man i m trying to stay alive until lunch time then it is very difficult to make this country work so we have spent a lot of time as you heard the previous speakers discuss working on this i asked the attorney general to assume her office because she was a prosecutor in a big urban county in america with a world of problems and because she had learned that only by empowering the people who lived there that she worked with could she not only catch criminals but more importantly prevent crime and save children for a better future and we have been working with the attorney generals with the prosecutors with community leaders with others all across the country for four years to try to create the conditions that would make it possible for normal life to prevail in our cities and in other places which had been victimized by crime when we passed the crime bill in 1994 with the help of all the members of congress here on this platform and i thank them for it we made a commitment to put 100 000 new police so we could go back to community policing why because violent crime had tripled in 30 years and the police forces had increased by 10 percent 300 percent against 10 percent what happened as a result people felt overwhelmed and more and more police officers had to ride together in cars instead of walking on streets in neighborhoods and working with their neighbors so that in a bizarre way we actually reduced the coverage of the police just so they could be safe and now this whole concept of neighborhood or community policing which boston had done so brilliantly is sweeping the country that plus the brady bill plus the ban on the assault weapons plus the new efforts the steer young people away from crime plus tougher penalties for serious offenders all those things now taking hold all across america have given us five years of declining crime for the first time in decades and that is very very good news but we have to now look at step two because until last year s statistics we had this heartbreaking heartbreaking evidence that the crime rate in america was going down but the crime rate among juveniles under 18 was going up violence among adults was going down even young adults violence among juveniles going up drug use among adults people over 18 going down dramatically drug use among people under 18 going up last year we began to see some hope that it might be dropping off but we haven t even had two years in a row but we know that in boston there have been big changes and we know that we just started the largest class of children in our schools in history there are now about 52 million young americans in our schools the largest school age population ever even bigger than the biggest baby boom year now in our schools and so we know we ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around or our country is going to be living with chaos and my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy they ll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities if we don t do everywhere in america what you have begun to do in boston and save our children so the crime bill in 94 the 100 000 police the neighborhood policing the brady bill the assault weapons ban all those things were step one step two has got to be a very sharp and disciplined focus on the problems of juvenile violence juvenile crime juvenile gangs ninety five percent of our largest cities and 88 percent of our smaller cities report that they are plagued by gang crime experts predict the number of people arrested for violent crimes will double by the year 2010 unless we do something about it fighting therefore juvenile crime has got to become our top law enforcement priority when boston launched operation night light when police and probation officers together can make nightly visits to the homes of young people on probation to make sure they re not in violation when you had your operation cease fire vigorously enforcing graffiti truancy noise statutes to reclaim neighborhoods and the conditions of ordinary life when you launched the boston gun project to shut down illegal gun dealers who sell to young people by tracing serial numbers and severely punishing those who break the law these things will work seventy percent of your young people on probation are now sticking it that s a huge percentage if you compare it to other places around the country youth murders have dropped 80 percent in five years and as you have heard twice already you haven t had a single child killed with a gun in a year and a half in this city how i would pray that could happen in every city in america i want to compliment the mayor on his youth council and meeting with young people who are representative of the city every six weeks and i d like to thank the young woman from the council who appeared today lanita on the program i d like to thank the young people who have been on probation who are making something of their lives young terry thompson was on our program today i thank him for being a model of that what i want to say to you is that we cannot permit this to be only an achievement in boston because if it is only an achievement in boston it will be harder for boston to continue to achieve sooner or later what we have to do is to create the notion that it is normal for kids not to get shot and so nobody claps when you say no kid has been killed do you realize when i was the age of the young people who were on our program today one is 19 i think the other is 17 if i had stood up as a young person there wanting to be noticed wanting to give a nice speech wanting to give accounting of myself and i had said we haven t had a young person killed in our town for the last year and a half do you know what everybody would have said so what what s that fool talking about today everybody claps we have to keep working until the answer is so what that ought to be the answer shouldn t it isn t that what you want the truth is that all across our country children are still killing children for shoes for jackets for turf and we can stop it the truth is that boston and just a few other cities have removed any fig leaf of excuse that we can t do anything about it you have now proved that it can be stopped and therefore there is no excuse for not stopping it and the united states of america through the congress this year should pass a law to give every community the tools that you have used to make your city safe again so that we can do it everywhere in america i have four parts to the legislation that i am presenting congress today first we have to break the backs of the gangs and punish juveniles who commit violent crimes with real severity we have to finish putting 100 000 police on the street and we have to make sure communities have the resources to prosecute people who violate the law this bill will help communities to hire new prosecutors to directly deal with violent juveniles to launch anti gang units to pursue prosecute and punish members who really hurt people it will give judges more power to crack down on gang members who intimidate witnesses and it will give federal prosecutors for the first time the authority in appropriate circumstances to prosecute serious violent juveniles as adults the second thing we have to do is to keep drugs and guns away from our children the brady bill listen to this has already blocked more than 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers from buying a handgun that s an old small number we ll have some new ones in the next few days but it doesn t permit someone who commits a violent crime as a juvenile from buying a handgun once he or she turns 18 i think we should close that loophole and extend the brady bill so that anyone who commits a violent crime should not be given the right to buy a handgun our plan would also require child safety locks on handguns to prevent unauthorized use and tragic accident we ought to do that we have begun an effort actually modeled on the boston gun project in 17 other cities to crack down on those who illegally sell guns to young people and i said this in the former meeting i want to say it again because i think most americans don t know it the treasury department that license people who sell guns they have to have a federal license has cracked down on that whole process in the last three years and there are now fewer than half the licensed federal gun dealers there were just three years ago we are trying to get control of this process our plan has the largest anti drug effort ever to stop drugs at their source punish those who push them and most importantly to keep working to steer young people away from them general mccaffrey our nation s drug czar has recommended that i have asked for funding to launch a massive national advertising campaign to deal with something that i had thought wrongly was basic and that is how dangerous drugs are it is clear that the main reason that drug use among teenagers is going up while it is going down among people between the ages of 18 and 35 is that too many teenagers no longer believe that drugs are not only wrong and illegal but they can kill them that it is clear and it is clear that a lot of young adults who used to be a big part of the drug problem now do understand that they can die from this as well as be punished for it and somehow we have got to bring the attitudes of the teenagers in line with the attitudes of the young adults so that we can deal with that and we ll be working with that i think every state should now begin to require drug tests of people for essential services like driver s licenses that would send a strong message out and be unpopular with a lot of young people who otherwise think their president is a pretty good fellow but i think it s the right thing to do the third thing we have to do is to reform the juvenile justice system so that it can handle today s juvenile offenders most systems were designed to deal with truants and other minor problems not violent problems and we need more people like this fine probation officer that introduced me today and more of those folks working with the police the story you have created here is the story we want to recreate in every community in the country i want to hear more stories i want it to be normal when i go some place and say we go together and we got into people s homes and we visit with them at night and they re glad to see us and they understand that we re all on the same side and we re trying to save these kids lives and give them a future that s the story we want to hear everywhere we have to have more special court proceedings for young people with greater flexibility to handle juveniles and tougher penalties to punish those who are really gone and then more flexibility and other opportunities to save those that ought to be saved the real answer to this has got to be prevention we have got to prevent these things from happening in the first place that s what all the law enforcement people know finally we have to help our young people to stay on the right track our strategy will help to fund 1 000 new after school initiatives in communities across the country to help keep schools open after school on the weekends in the summer listen to this more than 50 percent of the juvenile crime in america occurs in the three hours after school is closed and before the parents are home that s a stunning statistic you take three or four hours out of the day and you ve cut the problem in half now we don t want our young people left alone on street corners when they can be in school or at home and we have to have ways that help our educators our parents our religious and community leaders to try to save these kids this anti gang and youth violence strategy is based on what we know works it is really a national framework to give other communities the chance to get the resources to do what you re trying to do in boston that is all it is tough when you should be tough smart when you should be smart compassionate when you should be compassionate using everybody building partnerships letting everybody play a role requiring communities to take responsibility for their own streets and their own kids and then giving you the outside support you need that is all this bill does it is the critical next step in our fight to have a safe america and to give our children a safe childhood and i ask you here in massachusetts to send a clear message we know if this can be done in boston it can be done in every community in every neighborhood of every size in the united states and we ask the united states congress to do what you ve done here in massachusetts cross all party lines throw politics away throw the speeches in the trash can join hands let s do what works and make america the same place it has to be let me just make one other point to you the citizens of this country have got to do their part every citizen and one of the things that i want to announce today that i m very proud of that i think will help make all of you be better citizens and to support community policing which is clearly the single most decisive element in bringing the crime rate the neighborhood policing system not very long ago i was made aware of a problem that like a lot of problems ordinary people have but presidents don t know about because our lives are so isolated i learned that a lot of the 911 numbers were breaking down because 911 was being clogged up not only by genuine emergencies but by other legitimate calls that weren t really emergencies and so i asked the federal communications commission to set up a national community policing number for non emergencies so that 911 calls would always go through when there was a matter of life and death but all the other calls could be handled as well this morning the fcc announced that they are designating and setting aside the numbers 311 as a national non emergency community policing number and i believe it will help you so to all of you out here who are just citizens i say use both numbers and talk to your neighbors about using them in the right way be a part of a neighborhood watch support these community police officers these probation officers and do what you can to play your part we ll do our part you have to do your part if this country is going to be the country it ought to be in the 21st century we can t have any more reports like the one that came out of the center for disease control a few days ago saying that 75 percent of all the kids murdered in the industrial world are killed in the united states what we ve got to do is to create the record of the last year and a half in boston for the united states if you give our kids back their lives and their future they will make america the world s greatest country in the 21st century thank you very much dem wjclinton19 2 98a bill_clinton thank you very much governor i ll take that cuff off your hands if you want me to thank you for the introduction thank you lieutenant governor kathleen kennedy townsend i thank senator mikulski and senator sarbanes for being a wonderful team for maryland for the united states and for our administration mr mayor it s good to be back in baltimore to state democratic chair peter krauser thank you for your leadership in our party i d also like to acknowledge the presence here of our national democratic chair steve grossman and our new national finance chair len barrack from philadelphia this is his first noontime event he just came on board stand up we had a great day today looking at these living classrooms seeing what the young people of baltimore are doing announcing the administration s clean water initiative i d like to just talk very briefly michael bronfein was talking about how he had been fooling with me now for six and a half years that s a big problem you know it s hard to give a new speech to a person every time you see him after six and a half years and maybe that s not necessary some of you may have heard me tell this story but i once several years ago i can t remember hillary had to go out of town and i was governor and the person who ran the fairgrounds where we had all of our concerts knew that tina turner was coming to town when she started her what was it private dancer or whatever that tour was you know when she came out with her music you remember she was out of the limelight and she came back i remember she had a saxophone player who was a weightlifter i don t know why i remember that anyway so this guy who was my friend called me and said i ll give you six tickets and i want you to come to the concert and so i told hillary i said can you cancel the trip she said no no no here s who i want you to take so we got this crowd of people and we went to this concert and normally he put me inconspicuously back in the middle of the crowd but he knew that i liked tina turner so he put me right up on the front row which is fairly embarrassing if you re an elected official but i loved every minute of it anyway tina turner sings the whole concert sings all her new songs in the end she starts singing her first hit proud mary and the band plays the introduction she comes up to microphone people scream so she backs off the band plays the introduction again she comes up to the microphone people scream the third time she came up and she said i have been singing this song for 25 years but it gets better every time i do it so michael that s what i ll try to do today in the beginning for the first five years here i really felt that a lot of what we were doing was trying to fix things that weren t right about the way america worked to try to make the country work again just to try to get the shackles off the american people and that s what the attempt to balance the budget while increasing our investment in the future was about the attempt to open new markets around the world to america s products still a major issue for our country we only have 4 percent of the world s people and we have over 20 percent of the world s wealth and we want to continue to maintain our standard of living we have to sell something to the other 96 percent and when times are tougher and they can t buy it we see it back in our own balance sheets i wanted to try to help local communities that were dealing with crime problems i wanted to try to help break the cycle of welfare dependence and prove that people on welfare really wanted to go to work and could go to work given the right supports for their children and for education and for training and so we went about this work i think one of the reasons there was such a good response to the state of the union is that people could finally feel that life had changed in america and that things were working a person in this audience said one of the nicest things a man like me could ever hear when we were shaking hands she said that i was the only president in her lifetime that had ever done anything that affected her personally in a positive way that meant a lot to me but now we should be looking to the future i think it s very important that we not be complacent you know the fisherman that introduced me earlier today at the clean water event i was so impressed he said you know when times are going pretty good the tendency is to be complacent and he said that s the worst thing you can do and that s what i would say to you times are going pretty good for america things are in pretty good shape for us but this is a very dynamic time and the worst thing we could do is to be complacent what i attempted to do in the state of the union was to say fine i m glad things are going good i m glad we re going to have a balanced budget i m glad we re going to be able to continue to grow i m glad crime is down and i m glad we ve got the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years i m really grateful for all that but this is not the time to sit around and think about this this is the time to take advantage of this moment to try to meet the remaining challenges we have to seize the remaining opportunities to imagine what america is going to be like in the 21st century and try to do the things that will maximize the chance that our dreams can come true and that s what we re going to spend 1998 working on the governor mentioned the education initiatives if we want an economy that offers opportunity and you ll say well what else do you have to do you ve got the lowest unemployment rate in a generation the lowest inflation in a generation consistently high growth what else do you have to do i would say to you that there are in my view at least three things still that we have to do first we have to dramatically improve the education and skill level of the american people finally we re seeing wages start to rise again and incomes start to grow together again after 20 years of increasing inequality but the only way we can all rise together is if everybody s got a decent education we know we ve got the best system of higher education in the world so i spent the first five years trying to open the doors of college to everybody and if you look at what s been done with the pell grants the work study positions the americorps positions the student loan changes and the education iras and then the 1 500 tax credits for the first two years of college and then further tax credits for junior and senior year and graduate school i think you can really say that we ve opened the doors of college education to everybody who will work for it but no one believes having said that that our elementary and secondary education is the best in the world and we can t stop until it is now one of the proposals that i have put forward to the congress and to the american people this year is a proposal that would permit us to take some of the funds that will come out of a comprehensive resolution of the tobacco issue funds which should by rights go back to state and local government anyway they should not be kept by the federal government and spend those funds so that we can lower the class sizes in the first three grades to an average of 18 throughout the nation that will dramatically improve the learning of young children in america and i hope we can do it the second thing we have to do is to continue selling more of our products around the world that s one of the reasons we re working very hard to try to help work through this asian financial crisis and help our friends and partners sort of get righted over there because it s not just in their interests it s in our interests a third of all of our exports go to asia now an enormous part of our export growth goes there we have a vested interest in doing what is also the right thing to do which is to be a good neighbor and try to help work that situation out for the countries that are willing to help themselves and to do other things which will continue to open new markets and the third thing we have to do is to bring the opportunities of free enterprise which have brought so many of you to this room today to the neighborhoods and the places where it hasn t reached yet that s why i was so glad that one of you put a corporate headquarters in baltimore s empowerment zone i thank you for that i want more people to do that all across america we want to triple the number of empowerment zones we want to create a development bank under secretary cuomo at hud that can help to spur more business development in inner city areas and isolated rural areas we want to do some other things that will basically focus on the fact that the biggest untapped market for american growth now are the unemployed and the underemployed people in the isolated neighborhoods of inner city america and some of our rural areas those are the three things that have to be on the economic agenda what should we do with our social policy crime is down welfare is down drug use is down out of wedlock births are down what do we have to do well a lot first of all we have to recognize that we have larger responsibilities on the health care front i want to pass a health care bill of rights i want to let people who are over 55 and have lost their health insurance through no fault of their own buy into medicare if they can afford to do that on their own or with their children s help we want a comprehensive tobacco settlement we want to make child care more affordable and of higher quality in america and available to more people and perhaps most important of all we want to do something profound and if i could use a government word structural about the problem of juvenile crime by helping kids stay out of trouble in the first place perhaps the most important items in the budget that haven t received a lot of notice are the funds through the justice department and the education department to give to communities to set up after school programs most kids get in trouble between the time school lets out and the time their parents get home at night if you can keep kids involved in constructive activities between 3 00 in the afternoon and 7 00 at night we re going to be in good shape in this country so we ve got a good program there and finally let me say we have to have a community approach to the future that means we have to be committed to the environment it means we have to do our part with global warming it means we have to reform our basic systems like medicare and social security that are profoundly important to the future generations of all ages and i will just end on that point i think that you know we hadn t had a surplus in 30 years so we don t quite know what to do and a lot of people have good ideas for it and they are good ideas there is always another good tax cut there is always another good spending program i don t think we ought to spend any of the surplus until we have secured social security for the 21st century that s a big mistake for us not to do that so that s what we re doing and what i would like to ask all of you to think about just to step back a minute i have tried to modernize our democratic party in this administration and to build an alliance for the 21st century that would make people think that we could be trusted to govern and get good results but i have also tried to be faithful to the oldest obligations of citizens in this republic this is a time of great change at every time of great change in our country s history we have come through it stronger and better than ever before because the leaders of america and the people most importantly the people have accomplished three things you go back and think about it from the founding to the civil war to the industrial revolution to the depression to world war ii through the cold war to the present day at every time of challenge and change three things have been done to make america stronger we have at every turn always widened the circle of opportunity give more people a chance to pursue happiness at every turn we have always deepened the meaning of our freedom freedom you could argue had a very narrow meaning when we started out it only fully applied to you if you were a white male property owner we have deepened the meaning of our freedom and the third thing we ve done is we ve strengthened our union against all the arguments that it was a bad thing for us to draw closer together as one nation we have rejected them all and gone forward over 200 years later it looks like we did the right thing at every time that s what we have a chance to do now these are good times it is not the time to sit around and pat ourselves on the back and think about how good times are this is a time to prepare for a 21st century that will be america s greatest time if we spend these days when we have been given the luxury the opportunity and the responsibility to do so preparing for that kind of tomorrow thank you very much dem wjclinton19 2 98b bill_clinton thank you very much i d like to begin by thanking david and sylvia for welcoming us to their humble little home here this is a beautiful place it was worth the trip to see you and your family and your beautiful home and your art and to see you here with your friends you didn t have to do this tonight and we re very grateful to you i d like to thank senator lautenberg and congressman pascrell for being here and for their support in the congress for our agenda and our attempts to move this country forward thank you tom giblin for leading the democratic party in new jersey thank you mayor mcgreevey for a wonderful race i was honored to be a small part of it and there will be another one up the road i d like to thank the leaders of our national party who are here our chair steve grossman and len barrack from philadelphia who just took over as the national finance chair of the democratic party i m afraid that he s going to think that every day is going to be like the last 24 hours we ve had three wonderful encounters with people around the country he thinks this is no heavy lifting you know there are just a little over 650 days 700 days maybe to the 21st century and i feel very good about where america is david talked about a little of it i feel very grateful to have had the chance to serve as president in these last five years but i think that the most important thing i could say to you tonight is that it would be a real mistake for our country to be relaxed about where we are instead of to feel that this is an enormous opportunity for us to take care of the long term needs of america and to basically shape a structure of opportunity and a structure of security for ourselves and our friends around the world that will last us well into the next century they used to say when i was a boy growing up in arkansas that the time to fix the roof is not when it s raining and so i would say i think i feel that i ve spent the last five years trying to fix things in america so that the country would basically work again and so that people would have the confidence to believe that we really could be the masters of our fate that if we worked together and did the right things in the right way we actually could move forward and i don t think anyone questions that now so now what we should be doing is instead of patting ourselves on the back for nearly now 15 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate and the lowest inflation rate in a generation the lowest welfare roles in a generation lowest crime rate in a generation we should be thinking about how we can use this moment to look to the future and to build it and i think that is the most important thing i could say to you and i d just like to mention three or four things with regard to the economy we ve changed the image of the democrats with a bunch of tough votes most importantly the economic program in 1993 which reduced the deficit by over 90 percent before the balanced budget came in then we had a balanced budget bill last year a lot of which was engineered by your senator frank lautenberg you should be very proud of him for that which not only will give us a balanced budget and a surplus in the next few years but will do so while giving us the biggest investment in children s health and education in a generation and literally opening the doors of college to all americans who will work for it that is a very very important thing what still needs to be done i would argue there are two or three very important things that still need to be done number one we have to recognize that there are still a lot of americans who have not been caught up in this economic prosperity they are either unemployed or they re underemployed largely because they have limited skills and they live in areas where there is no investment i spend a lot of time trying to get americans to invest in other parts of the world a lot of you invested in various parts of the world now we need to bring this spark of enterprise to our isolated inner city neighborhoods and to rural neighborhoods and it s a great opportunity for us to continue to grow without inflation and we have a program as a part of this year s budget to do that secondly we need to continue to fight against the impulse to withdraw from the rest of the world in terms of trade i suppose it s the last remaining ideological battle within the democratic party about what kind of party we re going to be going into the future there are people who lose when we expand trade but that s going to happen whether we have new agreements or not most countries have trading systems that are more closed than ours we have 4 percent of the world s people we have 20 percent of the world s income if we want to keep 20 percent of the world s income when the rest of the world the developing world is going to grow three times as fast as the developed world we the math is not difficult we have to sell more to other people and so i hope we can continue to expand trade and really do more with it the third thing we have to do is to continue to work until we have the finest education system in the world one reason americans all over the country were thrilled i could see it i could feel it when i was giving the state of the union and i was going through the list of things that the congress has already done the 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college credits for the junior and senior year and for graduate school bigger pell grants more work study positions cheaper loans that are easier to repay iras for education one reason everybody is so excited about that is that no one in america doubts that we have the finest system of higher education in the world and that if you can access it whether it s at a community college or an ivy league school whether it s undergraduate or graduate school that you will not only be more fulfilled and be a better citizen but you ll have a better life no one questions that by the same token i don t think any of us can say with a straight face that we believe we have the best system of undergraduate education in the world i mean elementary and secondary education in the world you know that it s not the best system in the world and you know that the quality varies dramatically that s why i ve been working for national standards that s why i ve been working to connect every classroom in the country to the internet by the year 2000 that s why we have a program now to lower class sizes in the first three grades to an average of 18 students if we can pass this program it will dramatically change the future of education all the educational research shows that children who come from difficult backgrounds who have a chance to get personal attention from teachers and to work with their fellow students because the classes are small enough in those early grades have a big leg up in the rest of their learning careers so i think all of that is very very important and i hope you will support that that s going to be a big part of what we re trying to do we want to rehabilitate or build 5 000 more schools and we have a program to do that so those are the things that i would like to work on in the economy give us a world class system of elementary and secondary education give us an economic system where free enterprise can reach the areas that have been left behind and keep reaching out to the rest of the world an economy based on opportunity what do we have to do with our society if we want it to be a truly responsible society where every citizen does his or her part and we work together let me just mention two or three things there i think the most important thing we can do more important than anything else is helping every citizen to reconcile the competing pressures of work and family most parents work now most parents with children under the age of five or four or three or two work now and most of them have to do that that s why i supported the family and medical leave law and why i d like to see it extended to cover more firms all the research shows that small firms have just as easy a time as larger firms in meeting the family and medical leave law and giving people a little time off when their babies are born and their parents are sick bolsters the morale of families and makes people more productive in the workplace i think it s important that s why i think we ought to raise the minimum wage again finally finally we are seeing income gains among people in the lower 40 percent of the earners for 20 years our incomes began to split apart in america from about the mid 70s on those of us with good educations tended to have our incomes grow more than the economy as a whole and people who didn t have as much tended to have their incomes not grow at all or even fall behind inflation that s beginning to turn around again but no one who works 40 hours a week and raises kids should be in poverty in this country we shouldn t tax them into poverty and one of the things we did in 1993 that david mentioned was with the earned income tax credit the average family now with an income of 30 000 a year or less that has at least two children is paying 1 000 less in taxes than they would have paid under the old system before 1993 i think that s important i think it s important that we implement this child health program to extend health insurance to 5 million more kids there s nothing more every parent in this room has known what it is like to worry about your child s health there s not a single solitary parent here who hasn t had at least one sleepless night at some time during your children s childhood over your child s health imagine how much worse it would be if you didn t think you could afford to take your kid to the doctor or if you thought the only way you could do it would to be to show up at the emergency room and then you would be bankrupt so i think this is important i think it is terribly important i think it s important that our child care initiative pass which will make child care more affordable to millions of americans and safer and i think that it s important that we pass this comprehensive tobacco settlement that will give us the tools we need to protect our children from tobacco every year still the biggest public health problem in america every day 3 000 kids illegally start to smoke a thousand of them will die sooner because of it it dwarfs the threat of cancer it dwarfs the threat of alcoholism it dwarfs the threat of getting killed in a car when you get your drivers license it dwarfs everything it will cost more young people bigger parts of their future than anything else so we re going to try to pass that this year and if we do it will open up a whole new vista that s very important now the other thing i want to talk about a little on this is the future of health care hillary had an idea that we should basically give a gift to the country that our generation should give a set of gifts to the country for the millenium and we thought basically of two things one was that literally a millennial trust which she helped to put together with all the rest of our people with the theme of remembering the past and imagining the future and so one of the things that we re trying to do is to put some of the money if we can get a tobacco settlement put a big chunk of the money into a research fund that will double funding for the national cancer institute have a huge increase in funding for the national institute of health have a big increase in funding for the national science foundation support the international space station just do a whole range of things that will help to prepare the future for our people in addition we want to with public and private money save the star spangled banner which by the way is in tatters and needs 13 million to be saved and our precious documents all of which the bill of rights the declaration of independence and the constitution all of them need serious work that s a very important part of building the kind of society we want we have to both respect our past and always be investing in the future the second biggest thing we can do i think and this leads to the last topic i wanted to mention i ve done everything i could in a world which is constantly being torn apart by people s differences to build one community in america i have tried to take the venom out of political life with mixed results i have done my best to bring people together across racial and religious lines and i ve also tried to bring us together across generational lines and the most important proposal that we have on the table for this year is the proposal that we couldn t even have imagined even a year ago it looks like we re going to balance the budget this year if the economic difficulties of asia don t slow our growth too much if it does we ll still balance the budget next year and it is then projected that we will have a structural surplus for quite a long time that is the economy will go up and down and some years we may have it and some years maybe not but over any multi year period if we stay with the discipline we have now we re going to start running big surpluses and this is an election year so it s tempting for people to say well here s what i ll promise you with my surplus i ll give you a tax cut or i ll give you a spending program or whatever i think it is a terrible mistake i don t think we should spend a penny of the surplus until we have secured social security for the 21st century and everybody knows there are surveys which show that young people believe it is more likely that they will see a ufo than that they ll every draw social security but it s not a big mysterious problem when social security was set up you couldn t draw until you were 65 and the average life expectancy was less than 65 now the average life expectancy for americans is way up in the 70s for a young girl born today it s about 80 and for people who live to be 65 it s into the 80s today the fastest growing group of americans are in their 80s meanwhile the baby boomers and i m the oldest of the baby boomers meaning when i retire from that year for 18 years after when people my age retire will be the biggest group of retirees every put into the system the people coming along behind us in the 18 years thereafter are a much smaller group the people behind them are a smaller group only now do we have people in school in kindergarten through the 12th grade that are a bigger group than the baby boomers for the first time ever but it s going to take a while before all of them are in the work force so this is arithmetic in 1959 there were five people working for every one person drawing social security in 2019 or 2029 there will be two people working for every person drawing social security unless we all start working a lot longer or there s a huge influx of immigrants or something unforseen happens but if we make small changes now and if we husband our money now and if we look at some options for what we can do to make sure we re getting the best possible rate of return as long as it s a secure and safe return then we can look at people like the people who have served us here tonight who are going to work their whole lives and say you may be young but at least you ll have this basic thing for security when you retire the other thing we have to do though is to level with people people retiring now almost nobody retiring now can maintain their standard of living on social security so we also have to do more to help people save for their own retirement and be honest with them and level with them and say you re going to have to do this but here is an attractive way to do it and make it as easy as possible i think that s very very important we should save social security before we go about spending this surplus that hasn t even materialized yet we were in a financial wilderness for 30 years we re out of it let s not get back in it just because it s election year and the last point i would like to make is this the united states has an unbelievable opportunity to sort of sail against the tide of all the ethnic and racial and religious conflict that seems to be dominating the world now as the cold war recedes to a distant memory and the world is not divided into big blocs you know that people used to worry about little countries used to worry about being treated like little specks of metal and the united states and the soviet union were the big magnet and they were all going to be swallowed up into some bloc now we have to worry about dis integration you know everybody wants to be separate what we have worked for here in this country always with increasing levels of success is a way of appreciating the differences between people and still being united because we were able to articulate values that were more important to us than the differences so we could celebrate our differences because we all knew we were still americans now that s become more important than ever before there are in the school district which is across the river from the white house in virginia in alexandria fairfax county school district there are people from 180 different national and ethnic groups speaking over 100 different languages in one school district the world is coming into america if we can figure out a way to continue to strengthen our union to be one america to celebrate all these differences and say but here are the things that we all agree to read our constitution read our bill of rights this is what we all agree to then we are going to have an enormous leg up in the global society of the 21st century how much time have we spent around here at the table tonight talking about the middle east or the travails of my people in ireland and other place around the world but i m telling you we re on the right side of history and we have to keep fighting for these things just today we had the new leader of the republic of srbska the new premier in washington and here s a man leading the serbs saying we have to find a way to reconcile the different ethnic groups we have to come to grips with the war crimes we have to do all these things unheard of no one could have imagined it just a year ago we are on the right side of history and we have to keep fighting for these things and the last point i want to make is this i have tried to change the democratic party to modernize it i have tried to create what you might call a new democratic party and i have caused a little bit of controversy along the way in doing that but i have to tell you that the longer i go on in this job and the more time i spend reading american history as well as trying to think about the future the more i realize that there are two or three basic functions that a political party has to fulfill at every point in our history if you go back through the whole of american history i believe you will conclude as i have that there are three great challenges that confront the american people at every moment of real change and the party which serves the american people best is the party which embraces those challenges and pushes them hardest now if you go back to the beginning you look at that you look at the civil war you look at the industrial revolution you look at all the crises of the 20th century you will see that at every point in time we have been asked for ourselves and increasingly in the 20th century for people around the world to do three things to widen the circle of opportunity to deepen the meaning of freedom and to strengthen the union the republican party in fairness was born out of a desire to save the union and abraham lincoln gave his life to save the union and to make the constitution mean something when it came to freedom for black americans and they were the party of the union and of widening the circle of opportunity and of deepening the meaning of freedom all the way from abraham lincoln through theodore roosevelt and our party had a pretty weak record in that period i m ashamed to say and not so good in the years just before but if you look at the beginning and if you look at our record from woodrow wilson forward i think you would have to conclude we weren t always right on everything but on balance our party has the stronger record when it comes to widening the circle of opportunity deepening the meaning of freedom and standing up for a stronger union and that in a fundamental way is what my administration has been all about looking toward the 21st century i m proud to be a democrat i m proud of your support and i thank you for your help tonight god bless you dem wjclinton19 2 99 bill_clinton i have been friends with chairman bond a long time we have had many interesting conversations not all of them have been that laudatory but julian i have that on film now and i m going to play it whenever i need a little boost in life i m just going to turn that film on thank you i want to say publicly something i said to julian bond privately when he agreed to become the chair of the naacp i called him and i thanked him and i thank him again and i thank all of you for what you are doing when kweisi mfume agreed to become president of the naacp and leave the congress i wept but he told me he said now don t worry he said i ll have a good replacement in congress and he did and i need to do this it s the right thing for my country and for my people and he too has served well and i m very proud of our friendship and of the service i thank all of you who are helping when suzanne dubose was up here talking about scientists slowing down the speed of light and the rest of us speeding up the speed of justice i wish i had thought of that myself that line won t rest it will be used again and again i want to thank bell atlantic and all the other companies who are standing with the naacp i am delighted to see bishop graves and the other officers here and bishop thank you for your friendship most of the people with our administration have been introduced but i want to thank secretary and mrs west and secretary slater and bill lann lee for being here and judy winston who did such a good job with our initiative on race i want to acknowledge also the presence in the audience of mary beth cahill our new special assistant to the president for public liaison and i want to recognize ben johnson many of you know he is the first director of the white house office on our initiative for one america and i thank him for doing that since bell is so well recognized there s one other former member of the white house staff here eric eaves who went on for the money and the fame of bell i want to thank him ladies and gentlemen i came here tonight for two purposes one is to say a simple thank you thank you for what you ve done for america and thank you for being my friends i am grateful i am very grateful the second is to say that as suzanne said so eloquently we re in a lot better shape than we used to be but nowhere near where we ought to be and what we have to do as a people as a whole country but especially you because you know you know things about where we are and where we need to go that not every american does because of the life you ve lived and the things you ve seen and the work you do you know that no great nation and certainly not this one can afford to say well we re a lot better off than we used to be so let s take a vacation from progress let s take a vacation from our struggle for liberty and equality let s take a vacation from our attempt to spread the reach of prosperity and freedom to africa to the caribbean to our friends in the americas you know that this is not a time to take a break it is a time to thank god for our prosperity and our opportunities and make the best use of them the sun is shining and we need to make hay we need to work while the sun is shining and to do what i would like to do in these last two years of my presidency just like the last six we need the help of every one of your 2 200 branches we need to forge new coalitions across the lines of race and class and religion we need to close america s remaining opportunity gaps a lot of you have lived in homes when you were younger and not so well off and prosperous as you are now where there were literally gaps in the walls or the windows and you could feel the wind blowing well there are a lot of people still getting blown by those kinds of winds and the opportunity gaps of america kweisi said as all of you know that the naacp was formed 90 years ago it was founded as all of you know i m sure in direct response to a riot in springfield illinois now i learned something in getting ready to come here tonight that i did not know i had always thought it was simply a cruel irony that this riot occurred in abraham lincoln s hometown and where he was buried i learned that the white mob was actually deliberately conducting the riot there trying to make mr lincoln turn over in his grave they yelled storming through the black neighborhoods lincoln freed you we ll show you where you belong well quite to the contrary it was the naacp that helped to show you where you belong on any bus and any lunch counter and any voting booth in any school in the armed forces in the highest echelons of government and business you belong everywhere and so do your friends and we will never make what congressman john lewis so beautifully called the beloved community until everybody who belongs can be wherever they belong i am very grateful for the work we have done together in these last six years previous speakers commented on all these folks from our administration and how our crowd looks like america what i would like history to say is they had the administration that looked the most like america and that did the most for america proving that excellence and diversity and community all go hand in hand i am grateful that we have stronger communities with a dropping crime rate that there are only about half as many people on welfare as there were six years ago that the doors of college are open to every high school student who will work for it through the hope scholarship and the other academic aid that we have provided that we have the longest peacetime expansion in history and the lowest peacetime unemployment since 1957 i am grateful that the prosperity is wider with the lowest african american unemployment rate ever recorded the highest african american home ownership rate ever recorded record numbers of new african american businesses every year but it takes a long time to get it all fixed just before i came over here tonight 117 years too late i awarded a pardon posthumously to lt henry flipper who because of racial prejudice was wrongfully convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and dismissed from the army more than a century ago he was born a slave he was the first african american graduate of west point he served with great distinction in the 10th cavalry in fort sill oklahoma he eliminated the cause of malaria as a civil engineer by digging what is still called flipper s ditch and is now a national monument he lived to be 84 he served as an advisor to a cabinet secretary he did all kinds of wonderful work throughout the world he was cleared of wrongdoing 20 years ago but he was never never fully restored in his good name until about an hour and a half ago when in the presence of 16 of his family members several african american graduates of west point general colin powell and a number of others who were here i signed his pardon now we don t want the rest of america to wait 117 years for justice and we don t want people to have to wait until they re gone for people to say something halfway nice about them we don t want to have america outraged even though we honor the outrage by another killing like the killing of james byrd we know still every day there are qualified african americans who are turned away from home loans or business loans african american drivers pulled over because they look suspicious some of you call it the offense of driving while black we know every day there are african american children who are stuck in failing schools when they re entitled to good schools so we ve been working at it for six years to try to bring a special focus to the need to build one america and to deal not only with the problems of african americans and hispanic americans and native americans but the fact that we are now becoming the most diverse democracy in the world california 10 percent asian american soon to have no majority race we started the initiative on race in 1997 to institutionalize the work of building one america i appointed ben johnson to continue our work in an organized specific and concrete way and i want you to help us do that i would like it very much if after the next presidential election the new president is asked repeatedly now who is going to head your one america office i don t want this to be a one shot deal i want this to be a journey not a destination and i want it to be something that makes us think more and more every day seriously about how we re going to build unity out of our increasing diversity get rid of our old problems and meet our new challenges and i want you to help me do that i want you to help us also to pass this new budget which helps to close some of those large opportunity gaps the disparities in education in jobs in economic development in civil rights enforcement in home ownership and quality health care i came here tonight to celebrate and thank you not to talk policy but i want to mention just two areas first the economy we all know that even though we have the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957 there are places that haven t felt much of this vaunted recovery we all know that even though we have the lowest african american unemployment rate ever recorded and the same for hispanic americans it s still quite a bit higher than the national average and for young single men it is still quite high indeed now if we can t use this moment of unprecedented prosperity to bring jobs and opportunity and enterprise to the neighborhoods and to the people who have not yet felt it but are willing to work for it we will never get around to doing the job now is the time to do that so the naacp is a non partisan organization you do have republican supporters out across this country who believe in civil rights and i want you to go get them and haul them up here to washington with the democrats too and say look we want you to pass this new markets initiative we can put 15 billion in private investment into neighborhoods in this country that have not seen new investment and new jobs and new opportunity for people by giving the right kind of incentives the right kind of tax cuts the right kind of loan guarantees the right kind of support to business people and if we don t get around to doing it now we will never get around to it we need to do it now i also want to tell you that a lot of far sighted business people have figured out that it would be very good for the american economy why for the first five year of my presidency 30 percent of our growth came from expanded exports selling more to other people around the world last year we had a good year but we didn t get 30 percent growth from our exports why you know why because of the financial troubles in asia and in a lot of latin american countries now i think we ought to help our friends in asia latin america and in africa to trade with us more so we can grow and they can grow but in the meanwhile we ve got the most significant untapped market for the growth of the american economy right here at home in all these neighborhoods that still are not growing as they should the second thing i want to ask you to do is to help me give every child in this country a world class education i want you to help me finish the job of hiring 100 000 more teachers i want you to help me finish the job again i want you to bring your republican and your democratic friends up here and help me convince the congress not to say no this time to our proposal to build or modernize 5 000 schools i m tired of going into these inner city schools and seeing schools so old we can t even hook them up to computers with broken windows and peeling plaster it s wrong and in many other areas you go and the kids are all having half their classes in house trailers because the schools are bursting at the seams we need to do that i want you to help me continue our work to hook up every classroom and library to the internet by the year 2000 i want to ask you to help me change the way we give out federal money to not become victim to a tyranny of low expectations i have said many times that i want to end the practice of social promotion but not for the purpose of punishing the kids for a system that is failing them and let me just give you one fact i said this in the state of the union but i m going to say it until i m convinced every american knows it last year in the international test of math and science a representative sample of american children by race and income scored near the top of the world in the 4th grade test by the 8th grade they had fallen to average by the 12th grade they were near the bottom nobody came and took brain cells out of those kids heads they did not get dumber the system was failing them so yes i believe we should end social promotion but we also are tripling funds for after school and summer school and tutoring programs and sending more college students into the schools to mentor kids when they re in middle school and tell them they can stay in school and go to college and what they need to do to do that we need to do that we are dramatically increasing our scholarship program to tell young people if you ll go into inner cities or isolated rural areas and teach school for three or four years we ll pay off your student loan we want you to go out there and give something back to your country we have got to change the way we spend the money the teachers and the parents and the kids are telling us what works we ought to stop funding what doesn t work and start funding what does we ought to say that school districts should raise standards for teachers and we put money in there there are so many of our teachers out there having to teach courses with the schools overcrowded that they don t have college majors or college minors in that s what happens in high school it s not that these people are not dedicated they are but they have not had the chance to be properly prepared and the schools can t get enough teachers to put enough people in the classroom with the kind of academic background we ought to help them change that and there are school districts with schools that are doing great and schools that aren t doing so well the school with the biggest the state with the biggest gain in student performance in the last couple of years is north carolina because they adopted a strategy that says we ve got to turn around or shut down failing schools when you do that you almost never have to shut one down they find a way to turn around the great english scholar benjamin i mean samuel johnson once said i had benjamin johnson on my mind samuel johnson said that it is remarkable how the prospect of one s own demise concentrates the mind we don t want to punish anybody we want to turn schools around and there s things in this budget to do that and to help the teachers and to give the parents more information and to help more districts set up charter schools and to do things that will work so that we don t have one size fits all i read a story the other day about a school district out west that organized a school just for high school dropouts let them come at different hours let them have access to computers and special tutors and all of a sudden almost all the dropouts came back to school there are all kinds of different things that can be done to raise the performance level of our schools but i think all of you know that we ll never really have one america and we ll never really get by discrimination unless we create opportunity in the schools and opportunity in the economy so i ask you to help me pass these initiatives now let me just say one last thing i was delighted to be asked to come tonight honored to accept the work that i have been privileged to do as president and before in my life to advance the cause of equal opportunity is perhaps the thing i cherish most of all the things that i and my wife and our administration have been able to do you d be amazed how many times in my weekly lunch with the vice president after we get through with whatever business we have to do we get back to talking about this subject i guess it s because i grew up in the segregated south maybe it s because i met and was influenced by people like some of you here tonight so many years ago but part of it is i know that it s a pure miracle that starting out from where i did as a kid i wound up here tonight a pure miracle i once heard a guy say every politician wants you to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself but the truth is we don t build our log cabins ourselves and not a person standing here or sitting here tonight got here on your own and most of us get out of this life better off than we deserve because god is good and so are the people that we get in touch with but it really bothers me that there are children in this country who are certainly just as smart full of as many dreams with whatever abilities god gave me they have them who may not be able to live out their dreams and if all of us as citizens have one responsibility apart from honoring our country and constitution and laws it ought to be to make sure that at the end of our days we have done everything we can to make sure no one we ever touched was denied the chance to live their dreams we know we ll be better off when that s true we know we ll all get something out i look at these young kids that are here tonight these young people i m kind of jealous actually if they d let me be 20 i think i d let them be president you know i think about the life that lies before them and all that they might be i imagine 30 years from now some african american hispanic asian female standing here as president of the united states you know but i know that as long as there are native american reservations where young american citizens live in communities where the diabetes rate is two and three and four and five times the national average as long as there are neighborhoods where kids really don t have a chance to get a world class education as long as there are places where nobody s taking care of the pollution so the health rates are not what they ought to be as long as there is anyplace where anybody can t live out their dreams the naacp will have work to do and america will have new ground to break and together there is no better cause for our energies and our lives thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton19 3 98 bill_clinton thank you very much superintendent berg madam attorney general senator robb thank you so much for your efforts congressman castle thank you mayor donnelly welcome and i want to say a special word of welcome to all of the students i m glad you re here today and i thank you for the example you re setting for students throughout our country i also want to commend the students who were the winners of the state math and science award earlier this month this school is proving that by taking the right kind of action working with law enforcement enforcing zero tolerance for guns and drugs involving parents establishing discipline and order as primary goals we can keep our schools safe and give our children the chance to reach their highest potential now in less than 650 days all of us will enter a new century and a new millennium at a time when we re doing everything we can to prepare our children for the opportunities of that new century at a time when we know that the body of knowledge that human beings have is doubling every five years and therefore education will be more important than ever before we cannot let violence guns drugs stand between our children and the education they need for more than five years we ve worked now to make our schools places of learning not fear we have worked to strengthen and expand the safe and drug free schools program to enforce zero tolerance for guns in schools to encourage communities to crack down on truancies to support those who wish to adopt school uniform policies wearing uniforms instead of gang colors in many places is helping to keep our children safe it was just a little over two years ago that i went to long beach california the first large school district to adopt a school uniform policy since then secretary riley and the department of education have worked to help those schools that wanted to do that yesterday the new york city school board announced that it would adopt a school uniform policy in all its elementary schools i applaud them for taking this important step and i predict it will have very beneficial consequences our budget makes an unprecedented commitment as we are moving into balance for the first time in 30 years to invest for our future by raising standards and improving education for all our children and to make our schools safer we know schools with the biggest discipline problems also have the highest rates of violence very often there are simply too many students and too few classrooms with not enough teachers our budget as senator robb said will help that will help to reduce class sizes to an average of 18 students per class in the 1st 2nd and 3rd grades with 100 000 more teachers and funds to build or rehabilitate 5 000 schools perhaps even more important in the short run on the violence issue and i was glad to hear mr berg talk about this it will quadruple federal support for after school programs to keep children in school in wholesome positive environments we know that most children who get in trouble do so between the time school lets out and their folks get home from work so i applaud you for what you re doing and i hope now if this budget passes there will be many many more schools until every school in america will offer this kind of community support to our young people and their families the fundamental issue here is that we do not need to and we must not ever have to make a choice between safety and high standards between crime free schools and modern classrooms we must do both i regret that the present budget reported out by the majority in congress does not embody that kind of commitment to education in our future does not embody the recommendations i made in the state of the union address today i ask the republican leadership to join with the leaders of the other party to get with the democrats and to work with the white house so that we can once again as we have in the past pass a bipartisan budget that puts education beyond politics and says yes to safer schools yes to new teachers and smaller classes yes to modernizing our schools yes to investing in high standards we need to have a budget that says yes to our children s future the nationwide report on school safety that is being released today by the attorney general and the secretary of education shows clearly that the majority of our schools are safe free of violent crime that is good news it also shows however that too many of our children face a far more frightening reality every time they walk through the schoolhouse door in 1996 alone there were more than 10 000 physical attacks or fights with weapons in schools 7 000 robberies 4 000 rapes and sexual assaults the threat of such violence hangs over children s heads and closes their minds to learning when children have to worry more about guns and drugs than math and science when teachers are more concerned with maintaining discipline than achieving excellence when parents would rather keep their children at home than risk their safety at school then we know we must do more and if there is even one school in america where that is the case we must all be committed to change it we already know the difference community policing makes since we began to help our local communities to put 100 000 more community policy officers on our streets crime has dropped to record lows all over our country indeed in the nation overall crime is at a 24 year low i thank senator robb for his sponsorship for the 17 5 million in the balanced budget bill which is now being awarded today in grants to communities parents and law enforcement groups to put these community policing strategies to work in our schools to stop violence before it starts the more we know about school violence the more we can do to ensure our children s safety last december i asked the attorney general and secretary riley to develop an annual report on school safety today i m pleased to accept their framework for these reports from now on at the beginning of every school year parents and principals lawmakers and law enforcement will have a valuable tool that tracks school violence gives examples of school programs that are working and suggests actions parents can take to make their children s lives safer at school we know one of the best ways to reduce violence is to involve the young people themselves in the last several years americorps volunteers particularly have helped hundreds of students to resolve their conflicts peacefully this adds to americorps remarkable record of helping improve our schools and communities through volunteer service parenthetically i want to say that today we had an announcement up on the hill with the first lady participating that we are sending legislation to congress to extend our national service program into the 21st century i hope congress will support americorps as it has in the past let me say finally as mr berg said so eloquently we know that all of our schools need parents to play the primary role in their children s safety both in the school and in the home and when necessary in the neighborhood today i ask all our parents who are concerned about this to become involved in your communities and your children s schools to join a community policing partnership senator robb got the budget we re releasing the funds we can talk about what works but in the end real live american citizens are going to have to show up in every school in this country to make this work you know if you look at these young people here today if you think about the remarkable achievements of this fine school we honor if you imagine the interesting fascinating lives they can have and you remember that as they have good lives it will make all the rest of our lives better it is clear that we all have a responsibility to ensure that their educations will be safe we can do this and america s future in the 21st century depends upon it thank you very much dem wjclinton19 4 93 bill_clinton thank you very much bob and thank you ladies and gentlemen for that wonderful wonderful reception i don t know about that but i m up here fighting for you every day i ll tell you that i like looking out into a big crowd into the faces of people who have worked hard and played by the rules and tried to make this country work again i thank you for the help you gave me last november when we said together we wanted to change this country we wanted to break the gridlock in washington we wanted to change the priorities and put our people first again we wanted to develop a high wage high growth economy and we knew that do it we d have to do some very tough things all of us knew that going in we knew that these decisions would be difficult and that they wouldn t come overnight and that the country had been going in one direction for more than a decade and you couldn t turn it around overnight but everyone knew that we had to reduce this awful federal deficit we had to increase our investment in our people and jobs at the same time we had to address the health care crisis now we re spending 15 percent of our national income on health care with 37 million people uninsured 100 00 people a month losing their health insurance and more and more money every year going to health care instead of invest in jobs and growth and the economy we knew we had to make some changes i made some commitments to you and i told you that if you d vote for me i d try to bring fairness and growth and opportunity back to america i tried to do everything that i said i d do i ve confronted some different and difficult circumstances but we are moving ahead i have been gratified frankly by most of what has happened here in the last two and a half months congress passed a resolution endorsing the budget plan i presented to reduce the deficit and increase investment in jobs and education and training in record time they have never passed a budget plan that fast and then i said well now i think we ought to have an emergency jobs plan to try to jump start this economy to put a half a million more people back to work through direct investment in the public and private sector over the next year and a half because this economy doesn t seem to be creating any jobs even though everybody tells us we re in a recovery and there was broadbased support for that for creating jobs and using the money to immunize children and to rebuild our community and to rebuild our infrastructure the bill swept through the house and is supported by a majority of the senate a few weeks ago we had a meeting of business and labor leaders that included bob georgine and lane kirkland and some of the biggest business people in this country saying we need the jobs bill and the labor movement has shown real leadership on this issue in working in partnership with business on the concept of investment i tried to look hard at this economy and ask what we can do how can we move this economy forward how can we do it in the short term and in the long term over the long term we ve got to bring the deficit down that gets interest rates down you ve seen that already interest rates have come down since the election and billions of dollars are being refinanced in homes in car loans in commercial loans in business loans and that s going to mean more jobs for people like you but it also means that we have to have some direct investment to create jobs in this economy we ve got to get the economy moving there are those who say well we re in a recovery and things are going fine well i don t know about you but 16 months of seven percent unemployment or more is not fine with me i ran because i thought we could do better you know people ask me all the time what is the real difference about being president is it really different and i have to tell you after just a couple of months i ve got an enormous amount of sympathy with every predecessor i ever had who got out of touch you know you live in the nicest public housing in america and somebody drives you around everywhere and you re always being protected because you are at some risk and you ve got the nicest airplane anybody ever saw and nobody except your wife and your momma and your nearest family can call you by your first name anymore without violating protocol before you know it you re just walking around in a bubble the other day this is a true story the other day i came down from the upper residence floor of the white house down to the first floor the big floor and i was going to a meeting and i didn t know it but my wife had had a meeting with a bunch of other people and when the elevator door opened i found myself standing in the midst of 20 or 30 people i didn t know them and i just shook hands with them and said hello and went on and to give you an example of how bad it is this very nice person working at the white house said oh mr president i m so sorry i let you out in the middle of those people and so i looked at him and i said that s okay young man i used to be one myself it s so easy for people who make decisions here to forget you know everybody that makes a decision here has got a job everybody that makes a decision here that affects your life got a good education everybody that makes a decision here has got a good health care plan and has pretty good security because we keep taking in tax dollars and it s important that we think about where other people are unemployment in building trades across the board is about 14 percent about twice the national average and yet we know we re spending much less of our income investing in building things in the infrastructure and in construction and things that really make a country rich over the long run than almost all of our competitors we also know that every wealthy country in the world is having trouble creating jobs all the rich countries are even japan s seen its unemployment rate go up some and theirs is lower than everybody else s because their economy is more closed but all the wealthy countries including japan including germany are having difficulty creating jobs this is not just an american problem but we need to find the courage and the creativity to solve the problem we re not like some of those countries who give you your wages for a year and a half and all of your benefits if you lose the job in america people need to work and you just think about it about half our problems would go away overnight if everybody in this country who wanted to work had a job there are more than a million fewer jobs in the private sector now than there were before this recession began almost virtually all the net growth in employment has come in local state and federal government and if you will forgive me that s not a very sound basis for long term economic recovery because their bills are all paid by somebody else the somebody elses need the work and that s what we re trying to do last year more businesses failed than at any time in memory last month we lost a total of net 22 000 jobs including 59 000 construction jobs there are now 16 million americans who are looking for the wages and dignity of full time work there may be more who aren t on the roles who have just given up trying i ve taken a lot of heat because i have cut government programs that some people in my own party like a lot i offered a program that had 200 specific budget cuts a program that will reduce this deficit by about 500 billion over five years i don t think the government can do everything or should try to do everything and a lot of what we used to do either doesn t need to be done or must be done by state and local government or the private sector but i am not willing to say when seven percent of our people are unemployed and have been for 16 months when millions more are underemployed when business is under so much pressure that 100 000 americans a month are losing their health insurance when city after city after city in this country is full of young people who won t have anything to do this summer and have never had a good job and need to have the experience of working that we shouldn t do more to create real opportunity and to have the dignity of work and to develop the capacity of our people i just think we can do better i did not ask for this job for the honor great as it is of living in the white house and riding around in all the limousines and the airplanes it is a very great honor to be president but you can only do honor to the job if you get up every day and try to make things better and change things that s why i asked you to give me the job now i need your help today because i know that the building trades have been willing in the past to endorse builders whether they were republicans or democrats and you have been willing to endorse people that you thought at the state level members of congress and others at the state level who would help you to put people to work some of the people you endorsed are now involved in the senate filibuster of the jobs plan now this plan will create hundreds of thousands of jobs is it the answer to all our problems no is it big enough probably not but it s about as big as it can be given the size of the deficit and the fact that we ve got to bring that down and keep interest rates down will it hurt the economy no we want to put people to work in construction we also want to rehire thousands of police officers who have lost their jobs so they can do a better job protecting people from crime you know there was a fascinating article on los angeles the other day before the verdict in the king case which said that in all neighborhoods without regard to race or income people wanted more police officers they wanted community policing they knew it would reduce the possibility of abusive police power if they had enough police on the street so that they knew their neighbors they worked together to prevent crime as well as to catch criminals and people felt less tension and more community that s what s also in this jobs plan in your industry a 450 billion a year industry we can create about 23 000 to 25 000 jobs directly quickly quickly if this bill will pass we can give 700 000 young people a chance to have a job this summer that will not only be a real job but will require them to do some more work on their education so that they will learn even as they earn we will provide some loans to small businesses where most of the new jobs are created the republican party has been a champion of this small business program in the past as they have been of the community development block grants republican mayors all over america supporting my jobs program as the republican senators say how bad the community development block grant is they used to trust mayors and governors when they had a republican in the white house i don t know what this has got to do with me they ve still got the same mayors and governors they had before it s time to stop playing politics and move forward many of the projects funded by this jobs plan have sat on the shelves for years while deficits exploded and investments in the things that make the economy strong and the people strong have been totally neglected now what are my opponents saying why did they say it s okay for the minority to keep the majority from even voting on this bill they say this bill adds to the deficit well i ll give you four arguments against that i want you to give it back to them before you leave town first they re more than happy to pay for unemployment benefits to be extended that is they say okay we ll vote for that in emergency funding but they won t create any money to put people to work so they don t have to draw unemployment now we tried it their way for 12 years they always voted to extend unemployment benefits i d like to extend employment benefits that s a lot better than unemployment benefits second thing you need to know is because of some savings in the defense budget which have already occurred we could pass every dollar in this jobs bill and still be below the target for total discretionary federal spending set by these folks in congress before i ever got here they never tell you that third thing you need to know as i said is that we have proposed 200 specific budget cuts that will more than pay for this modest amount of extra spending and very often in the past these same folks have voted to spend money this year and pay for it in the years ahead in a five year budget plan and finally and maybe most importantly many and perhaps most of the senators who are blocking consideration of our plan have actually voted for emergency measure after emergency measure after emergency measure just like this for 12 years often in legislation that wasn t paid for and they didn t have much trouble with it then when their guys were in the white house this plan puts people to work it s paid for it doesn t shift jobs overseas it puts jobs on the streets of america many of the people who are leading this filibuster voted for a stimulus plan like this under president reagan back in 1983 we did some quick research over the weekend it appears that 28 times in the last 12 years many of the same people who are holding this bill up voted to do the same thing i m asking for to the tune of over 100 billion often for foreign aid and for other things that didn t have nearly as much to do with affecting the lives of the american people in main street america and it s time to help main street america we had an election in november that said stop this gridlock stop the partisan bickering compromise work together move the country forward and start by putting the american people back to work that s what this is all about don t listen to those arguments so that s it when they say oh we can t add to the deficit say well you guys you guys not the democrats you guys you voted for 12 years for these kinds of things often to help countries why not help us one two you ve got 500 billion in deficit reduction it ll cover this real well three you re still under the spending targets that you adopted before president clinton ever got to town and four we need this jobs plan we don t need to fund just unemployment benefits we want to fund employment benefits this whole thing has got to be about enabling people to live up to their potential i went on these buses all across the country with hillary and al and tipper gore and we went into little towns and big cities over and over and over again what i left those encounters with was the sense that americans were yearning just to be themselves as fully as they could be and you can t do that if you can t have a job you can t do that if you can t get a decent education you can t do that if you think no matter how hard you work you can t take care of your family if they get sick you can t do that if you think you can never change jobs without losing your health benefits but if you think about it we live in a world where the power of people is uppermost we live in a country where thank god no one is a dictator we have to work together we have to be able to put aside our partisan labels and sometimes our personal prejudices and think about what it takes to pull people together and give everybody a chance to be the most they can be that s what the whole purpose of politics is and when this bill was held up i didn t like it but i offered to compromise to take some of the jobs out of it though it grieves me to try to respond to some of the specific speeches that were given by republican senators on the floor of the senate and so far what have they said to my good faith offer same old thing stonewall this is the deficit we can t add to the deficit folks this is the crowd that had the government for 12 years they took the deficit from 1 trillion to 4 trillion have they no shame how can they say this what is going on sometimes i think the secret to success in this town is being able to say the most amazing things with a straight face we re going to get the deficit down we re going to try to keep interest rates down but we ve got to invest in people and we ve got to try to create jobs will this work wonders no will it work some good yes you bet it will it is an effort did i even campaign on this no you endorsed me without asking me to promise an emergency jobs program i offered this program for the simple reason that i looked at the performance of this economy and its difficulty in creating jobs then i looked around the world and i saw all these other countries having the same exact problem we were having and i thought we ve got to try something else and i ll tell you something if we get this done and it doesn t work i ll try something else we re living in a new and different time where we ve got to try i ask you every one of you that ever had a chance to make it because you joined this union because somebody invested in a project that gave you a chance to work because you had the opportunity to raise a family and have a house educate kids just take a little time now and ask the people you know in the united states congress who have all made it to think about how together we can provide these opportunities for others the arguments they are using just don t hold water they don t measure against the facts of what they have done in the past and what the facts of this budget that i have presented are this is a modest program to give hope and opportunity to people in this country who need it and to try to get the job engine going in america again i have compromised i have held out my hand i think it s time for somebody to reach back across the divide of party politics and put the american people first and you can help get it done today i hope you will thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton19 4 99 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you terry i also want to acknowledge and welcome congresswoman patsy mink from hawaii who is here with her husband john we re very delighted to see them i d like to thank the chief state school officers for sponsoring this award along with scholastic and i believe gordon ambach and ernie fleishman are both here terry said i d give 131 speeches on education i didn t know that until i just came in here i wasn t keeping count it is true that a few years ago i started reeling off all my teachers beginning at kindergarten and when i started running for office a long time ago now i remember i asked the fellow who was helping me put my first campaign together said people don t know much about you we ve got to do a little biographical film and we ought to put one of your teachers in it and i said well i still carry on a correspondence with my 6th grade teacher kathleen shearer i did until she died at about 91 years of age and i used to see her about once a year but you can t use her i said and they said well why that sounds like a wonderful story i said it is but she s liable to tell you what she told me the day i finished my elementary school career true story my sainted 6th grade teacher who is one of these wonderful she lived with her first cousin and they lived until their late 80s or early 90s and they taught school for a gazillion years and she looked at me when i left elementary school for the last day she said bill i just don t know about you she said you know if you ever learn when to talk and when to keep quiet there is nothing you can t achieve but if you don t learn the difference i m not sure whether you re going to be governor or wind up in the penitentiary so we found someone else to do the film but kathleen shearer continued to write me for the rest of her days including a letter i have that i received just a week before she passed away so i want to thank all of you for being here today i also would like to thank terry for the magnificent perspective she s provided to us for years now in the department of education on education and on teachers and i d like to thank her for mentioning kosovo today i know a lot of you probably in every school in the country now children are looking at maps and learning about the world we live in and i think that s very important because it is such a small world growing smaller i went out to san francisco a couple of days ago to speak to the newspaper editors and i said that it is truly ironic that here we stand on the verge of a new century and a new millennium where education is more important than ever before because we have this explosion in technology drawing us closer to different people of different cultures and our own country is becoming more diverse we can imagine a future that is more prosperous and more peaceful and more interconnected in a very human way than ever before we got by the cold war thank goodness without any nuclear weapons falling and now we ve found that that future was threatened by the oldest demon of human society which is our fear of people who are different from us i m sure one time it was rational when tribes roamed around in isolated ways in prehistorical times and fought over limited resources and saw people in different tribes who were different from them and they were maybe afraid for rational reasons but today we have an opportunity to sort of celebrate our differences and enjoy them as long as we understand they have to operate within a framework that says underneath the common humanity we all share as children of god is more important than those things which distinguish us one from another that s really what s at stake there and it would be ironic indeed if after two world wars and a cold war being fought on the continent of europe and all the lessons we have learned over this century that it would be in southeastern europe and the balkans where our vision of the 21st century would come apart so this conflict in kosovo in a fundamental way is either the last conflict of the 20th century or the first conflict of the 21st century and it s very important that our children understand that i just want to say one word about it and then i will come back to the task at hand but i do have to announce today that i intend to send to congress an emergency funding package to pay for our military and humanitarian needs of the operation in kosovo to ensure that we have the resources to sustain the air campaign until we achieve our goals while maintaining our high level of general military readiness to provide critical humanitarian assistance and relief to the hundreds of thousands of refugees and to provide for resources for the nation in the region the neighbors of kosovo who have suffered so much from the effects of this conflict one of the things that a lot of people don t understand is that this is putting an enormous burden on albania the poorest country in the region taking all those refugees struggling to maintain a democracy it s putting enormous burdens on macedonia a very small country trying to manage its own ethnic differences now having these refugees loaded on top of them it causes real problems for bulgaria and rumania this is a difficult thing for the neighborhood so i hope the congress will act on this the need for this funding is urgent immediate clearly in the national interest there are literally lives hanging in the balance and so i hope in the spirit of genuine bipartisan the congress will move the package right away now let s talk about why we re here the first teacher of the year award was presented in 1952 by a man who was one of my heroes as a child growing up harry truman he did it right here on the white house grounds the recipient was a miss geraldine jones who taught first grade in santa barbara california in a school whose name i rather liked the hope school harry truman said on that occasion that next to one s mother a teacher had the greatest influence on what kind of citizen a child grew up to be every year since presidents or members of their families have personally handed out this award as terry said to recognize not only the awardee and all of you but through you all teachers in our country eight hours a day five days a week nine months a year teachers hold the future of america in their hands they teach our children to read to write to calculate to sing to play to paint to listen to question hopefully to work with others and think for themselves they excite our children s imaginations lift their aspirations open their hearts and strengthen their values everyone probably can recall a story like the one i told you at the opening of my remarks today many of us can remember our teachers in stunning detail their faces their expressions their voices their favorite admonitions the way their hands gripped the chalk at the blackboard we can still most of us summon the pride we felt when they praised us and the absolute chill we felt when we were scolded the role of teachers while hard to exaggerate unfortunately is too often easy to overlook teachers do their jobs quietly largely isolated from other adults their work therefore is seldom glorified by hollywood and rarely sufficiently rewarded by society andy baumgartner is our teacher of the year he spent two years in the united states marines he gained inner confidence self motivation physical stamina at parris island and camp lejeune i imagine they have been useful to him in dealing with young children since he is a former marine i think it s worth pointing out that today we rightly honor the men and women serving in and around the balkans as patriots we should also honor our teachers as patriots andy s colleagues marvel at the way he rivets the attention of his kindergarten students by keeping himself in constant creative motion that s the first impression i had of him i have met a person who has even more energy than i do one minute he s using popcorn and m ms to teach counting the next he s conducting a sing a long to this land is your land a few minutes later he s marching the class up the hill behind the school to conduct a solemn funeral for a departed pet tarantula named legs as the father of a son with a learning disability he knows firsthand the struggle many parents go through to get the individual attention their children need he works hard to give that kind of attention to all his students when he s not teaching he can be found directing a school play teaching other educators writing guidebooks for parents working in community theatre participating actively in his church he is an example of the kind of vital active american that alexis d tocqueville marveled at when he came here so long ago and talked about the unique quality of our citizenship if he were alive today d tocqueville i think would agree that america could do more to honor classroom teachers like andy baumgartner perhaps more of our best and brightest young people would choose teaching as a career if we did more to lift our teachers up and honor them even though i am one we don t need many more lawyers we have plenty of financial analysts on wall street but we desperately need more teachers when our finest young people pass up teaching they re missing out on rewarding careers and we re missing out on a chance to put our talent where we need it the most today with 53 million children in our public schools the greatest number ever from more diverse backgrounds than at any time in our history certainly since the turn of the century with enrollments growing and a wave of teacher retirements about to hit our schools will have to hire 2 million more teachers in the next decade at the same time we re trying to bring down class size and that requires more teachers and the new teachers must be better trained a quarter of all secondary school teachers today do not have majors or even minors in the subjects they are teaching and of course the deficit is worse in low income neighborhoods where the need is greatest now these are enormous challenges i believe we can meet them if we act now when our economy is the strongest it has been in a very long time but we have to act now there are things the federal government can do to be sure and i want to talk a little about them but i d like to point out that we provide only about 7 percent of the funding of total public school funding in america that s a higher percentage than it was when i became president when we were cutting the deficit and cutting programs we doubled our investment in education in about five years but it s still important to remember that a lot of this has to be done at the state and local level and so as the governors of our various states enjoy great prosperity and as the crime rate comes down and presumably therefore they don t have to keep spending all their new money on building prisons as was the case when i was a governor too often i certainly hope that as much money as possible will be put into our public school systems to hire those teachers and to raise teacher pay that has to be done at the state level primarily and it is absolutely imperative at the national level we re going to do what we can to pass a bill to build or modernize thousands of schools to help to hire 100 000 highly trained new teachers to reduce class size in the early grades the studies of course confirm what a lot of our teachers have been saying for a long time that smaller classes means more individual attention more discipline and more learning last fall congress reached across party lines to put down a down payment they paid for about a third of these 100 000 teachers i certainly hope we can finish the job this year we have to redouble our efforts to recruit more of the best and brightest young americans into teaching a lot of our young people in the americorps program are getting some of their college education paid so they can go and become teachers our budget now calls for an investment to provide 7 000 scholarships for students who will commit to teach in the poorest inner city and rural schools it calls on an investment to get 1 000 native american young people to teach on indian reservations and in other public schools with large native american populations it calls for more money to recruit and train members of the united states military when they retire to become teachers through our troops for teachers program something that has really been very very successful our 25 million veterans represent a vast pool of potential teachers many of them because they re going into military retirement can actually afford to be teachers and most of them have their kids gone so it s a pool that we need to look at and draw on our teacher of the year here is pretty good evidence that soldiers can be quite good teachers we ought to make it easier for others to do the same thing third in our budget we provide more funds for teacher training i think it s quite important that teachers our new teachers especially demonstrate that they know what they re supposed to teach but we cannot expect the schools out there who have to teach the kids to be able to do what they re supposed to do unless we provide we in the public sector provide the resources we need not only to recruit but to properly train the teachers in the subjects they have to teach fourth we should do more to make our schools attractive places where people want to work in our educational accountability act we have a lot of funds for better schools and for turning around schools that aren t performing and for after school and summer school programs to help the children who need extra help now last thing i d like to say is something i ve already said i know i ve given 131 speeches on education i now know that so i ve learned a new fact today and i love facts but the larger truth is this everybody is for education in general but not enough people are for it in particular it s easy to give a talk and harder to foot the bill and i think it is very important that we not only remain committed to substantive reforms you know i believe that every school district should have a no social promotion policy but i don t think the kids should be branded failures i think if they re not making it then they should get the extra help they need and that s why we have moved on from 1 million and 20 million to 200 million to 600 million this year in federal support for after school programs and summer school programs we re working at this but america needs to focus on this we re going to honor andy i m going to bring him up here to give him his award and he s going to give a speech and we re all going to practically laugh or cry and it will be a wonderful thing but i want america to hear this when they see you tonight on television we have 2 million teachers to hire in the next few years and in the best of all worlds they would every one of them be just as committed and just as knowledgeable and just as effective as you are and it isn t going to happen unless we make the necessary decisions and put the necessary priorities in place not only in washington but in every state capital and every local school district in the country so i say today the best way we can honor america s teachers is for the rest of us to give them the tools to succeed with our children in the 21st century thank you ladies and gentlemen the 1999 teacher of the year mr andy baumgartner dem wjclinton19 5 00 bill_clinton thank you very much senator durbin thank you for those wonderful remarks and for your friendship i want to begin by joining everyone else in thanking fred and ken for opening their beautiful home i don t know what to make of torricelli s remark about the concrete since i m the only guy here that s not running for anything i m probably the only person to get away with cracking a joke about it but i m going to let it go anyway i will say this senator torricelli in your shameless pander to mayor daley referring to chicago as the greatest city in america i took the precaution of sending a note to the people who tape all my remarks to make sure we delete that so it can t be played in newark the next time you run for election and i might say i got the mayor to approve of that before i did it let me say to all of you i am so proud to be here with these members of our senate caucus and with our candidate i want to thank all the host committee not just fred and ken but joe and yvonne lou and betty and i thank you joe carey for the work you do for our party every day i could talk all night long just about the people who have been introduced tonight tom daschle is an extraordinary leader and one of the best people i think i ve ever known i ll never forget going to the pine ridge indian reservation in south dakota with him the night before we went to visit mt rushmore and i told him i said tom you win six senate seats and we ll put your face up there too senator torricelli has really been you can tell just from the way he spoke up here tonight that he s so laid back and passive it s amazing i can t thank him enough for pushing all this i thank my good friend carl levin who s here from michigan one of the states where i think we ll win a senate seat and he ll have a genuine partner after this election and senator bayh who like me was a governor and we served together many years i was once the youngest governor in america then he got elected i ve spent the last 10 years overcoming my resentment and i ve about got it done and my friend tom harkin you know it s funny to think sometimes when people are in elections together as we were in 1992 you never know how it comes out and i really all my life i will think one of the best things about my campaign in 1992 was that i had the honor of running with tom harkin he is a magnificent human being and i love him like a brother and he has been kind and generous and steadfast to me from the moment that election was over and i will never forget it and i thank you sir i want to thank speaker madigan for helping all these people what most state governments think of the interior branch of our national system of government and i too want to thank mayor daley for his friendship and support for letting me borrow his brother to be commerce secretary and i want to thank tom carper for running for the senate tom carper and i have been friends for many years when i was a governor and he was in the house we worked on the first round of serious welfare reform years and years ago 12 years ago now and i can tell you senator bayh who also served with him would echo this there is not a more respected governor in the united states than tom carper he has a fabulous record in education and a terrific record in all things related to family policy one of the things i sought to do in 92 was to prove that the democratic party was both pro work and pro family and when i talk about what we ve tried to achieve around the country governor carper is exhibit a and he s generally thought to be the most likely democratic pick up in the entire united states not because he has a weak opponent his opponent is the distinguished chairman of the senate finance committee but because he is such a good man and such a great leader and i thank you for running we need you and i m going to be glad when you get there i was making a list here to give you some feel for this we pick up six house seats we win the house and because there are more house members it s generally considered easier to do than to pick up six senate seats but i think it s quite likely there are eight or nine states in which we have a legitimate chance of winning a senate seat i believe there are probably only two states in which the republicans given what i think will be a highly competitive election for president will have a chance to win and if i were a betting person i would bet that they would not pick up more than one so this is a realistic possibility you heard them talking about the stakes and they couldn t be clearer whether it comes to confirming judges or ratifying foreign policy decisions i ll just give you one example normally in national elections foreign policy doesn t play such a big role if both candidates for president for example cross some threshold of acceptability but there is i m grateful for example that both the vice president and governor bush supported my position on china and supported the position of the senate democrats on continuing our mission in kosovo but there is an issue in which the majority of senate republicans and the presidential nominee apparently are in agreement that i think has such enormous consequences for the american people that i hope it will be hotly debated and thoroughly debated in this election and that is whether we should continue our historic commitment to reducing the nuclear threat when the senate voted to reject the comprehensive test ban treaty it sent a shock wave through the world no one could believe that america which had consistently led the way through republican and democrat administrations alike was walking away from a test ban treaty which i was the first head of state in the world to sign and the conventional quick analysis was well this is all just politics you know it s election year or it was almost election year they just wanted to kind of pop bill clinton if you talk to these senators here they will tell you a different story they do not believe in the comprehensive test ban treaty and apparently that is going to be the position of their nominee and their platform and i can just tell you that this is a big deal i have spent a lot of time in the last seven and a half years trying to get an indefinite extension of the treaty which commits countries that sign it not to proliferate nuclear weapons or materials which can be used to make nuclear weapons trying to get the chemical weapons convention ratified trying to strengthen the biological weapons convention i believe that in the years ahead the threat of a nuclear war which hung over us in the cold war between russia and the united states will probably continue to abate unless something really dumb is done but there will be more challenges from other countries who think well we need nuclear weapons to prove we are somebody or because there is somebody we feel threatened by and they re trying to develop it and i have worked with this enough now to know that unless you have very very sophisticated systems the chance of an accidental launch is not insignificant and the chance that conflicts between countries will spin out of control is always there one of the reasons i went to india and pakistan was to try to do whatever i could to minimize the chances that they would allow their conflict to escalate to the point when somebody on impulse or fear might launch a nuclear weapon so this is a huge issue and i guess one of the things people always ask me what have you learned as president one of the things i ve learned out of many is that the senate matters even more than i thought it did when i showed up in washington it really matters every single vote and one of the things that i hope will happen this year if you ll forgive me i won t give you a whoop de do speech tonight because i know i m preaching to the saved as we say at home but one of the things that i hope will happen this year is that we will actually have an honest debate on the future of america and that we ll ask the right question and i think the right question is what are we going to do with this magic moment of prosperity and improvement in our social condition and at least in this moment the absence of a searing domestic crisis or external threat and i believe the character of a nation and the wisdom and judgment of a nation can be tested just as much at a time like this as in adversity you know if we all had our backs against the wall we d know what to do now we have to decide and we have the option not to decide and just drift it would be a terrible mistake so i hope you will think about that and i would just like to just very briefly say a couple of things about it when i was running for president in 1992 and beginning in 91 i knew i had to make a good showing in illinois because illinois and michigan were the first big elections after super tuesday back then super tuesday was a southern deal and i figured i d do pretty well and it was like not a fair fight and so i did pretty well because i was the only guy from my part of the country running and i d been hanging around down there a long time so i came to illinois and i came to chicago which is my wife s hometown and i sought out a lot of friends i had here mostly in the african american community who were born in arkansas there were more here than anybody knew i might have gotten the nomination uncontested if anybody knew how many african americans in illinois were born in arkansas and a lot of you helped me so i feel a special gratitude to you and i remember when president bush referred to me as the governor of a small southern state you know i was so naive i thought it was a compliment and i still do but to be fair we knew what the deal was then the country was in trouble the economy was down the deficit was exploding we quadrupled the debt in 12 years as the vice president used to say on the campaign trail everything that should be down was up everything that should be up was down and the people took a chance on me because they knew we had to do something and i seemed like i had thought about it and i had now the test this year is more difficult because we have to decide what to do with our prosperity and there s not a person in this room tonight over 30 years of age that hasn t made at least one mistake in your life not because things were going so badly but because things were going well in your life and you didn t think you had to concentrate there is not a person here that can t recall at least some personal or business error you made at some point in your life large or small because you thought there were no consequences to the moment now i m not running for anything but i can tell you something there is a big consequence to this moment because we have not had a chance like this to build a future of our dreams for our kids in a long time and i d like to see this election run on the premise that we re not going to try to tear everybody down that both the candidates for president are honorable and mean what they say but they have to mean everything they say you ve got to take what you said in the primary and what you said in the but they mean what they say and if you look at it it s pretty clear what the choices are there is a huge difference in economic policy which the senate will have to vote on we favor starting with our nominee the vice president all the way down the line an economic program that has a tax cut for the american people targeted to what we need but one that we can afford and still pay the debt down and have enough money to invest in children and education and science and technology and the things we need to be doing as a country and i think that s important because paying the debt down is one reason that interest rates and inflation haven t exploded as we have the longest economic expansion in history and i think it s progressive social policy to keep getting this country out of debt because it keeps interest rates lower and spreads economic benefits they favor a tax cut that will exceed a trillion dollars over 10 years and if you put that with their social security proposal which would cost another 800 billion and their defense proposals which are about i don t know probably 200 billion more than ours it means the country will go back into debt and you have to assume again we don t have to criticize people just assume everybody is honorable and they intend to do what they say so you have to decide whether you would like to go back to a version of the economic policy that existed before i took office or whether you would like to continue to change but to build on what has produced the prosperity the last eight years this is a huge decision and no amount of papering it over and talking about it can obscure the fact that every time an american votes for congress for senate or for president that is one of the decisions that that voter is making and you need to talk about that we re making decisions about what to do with the aging of america and basically how to deal with medicare and social security when all the baby boomers retire and there are only two people working for every one person drawing funds out of those programs we believe that we can make medicare more competitive but we re not willing to bankrupt the hospitals and the other providers and we think there ought to be a prescription drug benefit for seniors and that every senior that needs it ought to be able to buy it that s what we believe they believe that we should cut the benefit off at 150 percent of poverty now the problem with doing that is that half the seniors that need it make more money than that and if you re living on 15 000 a year which is more than 150 percent of poverty and you get 300 400 500 drug bills a month to stay alive pretty soon you ve got to decide whether you want to eat or have your drugs so there s a difference there on social security it would take me all night long to go through the differences but let me tell you i ve spent years studying this there is a problem there the system if we don t do anything the system will run out of money in about 37 years and it will start costing us more before that in terms of foregone opportunities and that s in spite of the fact that ever since 1983 we ve been collecting more in social security than we re paying out now they believe the system could be partially privatized because the markets out perform government bonds and give everybody back 2 percent of their payroll to invest if they re under a certain age guarantee everybody else the benefits in the conventional system sounds reasonable they say well we want to get higher rates of return and we want to let ordinary people including poor people paying social security have a chance to create wealth i think that s important those objectives are worthy here s the problem if you do that the system is going to run out of money in 2037 anyway if you start taking out more money right now you have to put in 800 million at least over the next 10 years to keep it from going broke just to pay the people you promised to pay and if you put that with a 1 3 trillion tax cut you re broke again the government is broke again we re back in trouble again what we believe is at least i think most of these senators do and i know what the vice president believes is since the social security surplus that s been coming in since 83 that you ve paid in your taxes is responsible for a lot of our decline in the debt we ought to take that portion of our declining interest rate requirements caused by your social security taxes and put the savings into the trust fund that will take it out to 2057 beyond the life of the baby boom generation then i believe that there are ways without having the government interfere with the market to get the benefits of the markets for the trust fund and what we favor it s much cheaper than their costs is letting the government or having the government help lower income people have an additional ira or i call it a usa savings account to invest however they want to get into the market but if they lose the money they ll still have the social security now you have to decide the american people have to decide this is a worthy debate and it ought to be held if you look at education everybody says they re for education now we think we ought to be modernizing school facilities all over america like mayor daley is here in chicago we think we ought to have a no social promotion policy and that every kid who needs to get pre school should get it and every child who needs to be in an after school program should have it and we ought to have a strategy for turning around or shutting down failing schools and that s what we ought to fund they say they re for all that but we shouldn t really require anybody to do it when we give them federal money that s like me trying to be america s principal you have to decide whether you think we re right or they re right all i know is i ll tell you this one little story in 1996 i got a law through congress saying that every state had to identify its failing schools and develop a strategy for turning them around kentucky adopted the most aggressive program to do it i went to one of those schools in owensboro kentucky two weeks ago two thirds of the kids were on free or reduced lunches here is what has happened since 96 and i might say they also got some of the teachers the democrats fought for to make smaller classes in 96 there were 12 percent of the kids reading at or above grade level today 57 percent are there were 5 percent of the kids doing math at or above grade level today 70 percent are there were 0 percent of the kids doing science at or above grade level today 64 percent are that grade school ranked 18th in the entire state of kentucky with two thirds of the kids on free or reduced lunches and it was an absolute failure four years ago ten of the 20 schools in the state of kentucky that are highest rated have half or more of their kids eligible for free or reduced lunches race income and region are not destiny if you have high standards in education that s what we believe our position works so you have to decide which one you agree with i think we ought to have hmo reform on patients bill of rights i saw what the illinois supreme court did the other day i don t think we ought to have to wait for that i think that people ought to have a right to see a specialist if they need it they ought to have a right to go to the nearest emergency room and i ve been a supporter of managed care and i remain a supporter of managed care but i think we ought to pass a patients bill of rights and they don t i think we ought to raise the minimum wage and they don t and does our crowd here and i think we ought to do more things to spread the benefits of this economic revolution of ours to people in places that have been left behind and we may or may not get a bipartisan agreement on that but these are big issues i could go through a lot more i ll just mention one or two more i think that if you ask me what one thing i wanted for america is if i tonight got a vision from the good lord and i got a message that i had to leave the earth tomorrow morning and that i could not finish my term but i could have one wish not like a genie with three just one i would wish for everything to be done in this country that would heal all the divides of race of religion sexual orientation that s why we re for hate crimes legislation why we re for employment and nondiscrimination legislation and they re against it and i think that s really important you know this is a smart country look at all you folks most of you do well unless somebody puts you in jail or locks you in a closet this is a great country and if we can figure out a way to celebrate our diversity and reaffirm our common humanity as even more important we re going to do fine so this is a big difference these are just a few things on the environment they think i did the wrong thing to set aside 43 million acres roadless acres in the national forest the audubon society says it s maybe the most conservation move in 50 years i think if they have the white house and the congress they ll reverse it next year early next year one of you mentioned it to me when you were going through the line tonight you ask every senator here don t take my word for this we have fought for cleaner air cleaner water more land set aside we have proved you can grow the economy and improve the environment and if they have the government they will reverse a lot of our environmental gains and i think this is important to point out so if people ask you tomorrow why you showed up here tonight and most of you have never met tom carper before tell them you understand this this is an election about what we re going to do with this great and good moment and you re determined to build a future of your dreams for your child and for everybody s children the last thing i d like to say is i think it s very important that we win the white house and i think we will but i think you who have come here there are some things that even you need to be reminded of about vice president gore first of all i am something of an amateur historian of the presidency and i ve spent a lot of time since i ve been president reading books not only about all the presidents that we all are interested in but some you probably don t know much about to try to get a full rich picture of the history of america and i m interested in the institution of the vice presidency in the 19th century nobody paid any attention to it in spite of the fact that one of our presidents william henry harrison died a month after he took office abraham lincoln was assassinated benjamin harrison was shot and died after nine months of poor medical care and still nobody paid any attention if you were to come visit me in the residence of the white house and i took you to my office you d see that i work on ulysses grant s cabinet table and there are eight drawers in this table one for the president one for the seven cabinet members no drawer for the vice president nobody paid any attention to it william mckinley got assassinated he was shot and we were just lucky that theodore roosevelt was a great president warren harding had a stroke calvin coolidge worked out okay not great but okay but it didn t have anything to do with somebody thinking about whether he should be president and franklin roosevelt whom i think along with lincoln were our two greatest presidents i admire him more than anything but we re just lucky harry truman was a very great president he did not know about the atomic bomb when he became president now what s all this got to do with this president eisenhower and president kennedy took it more seriously and gave more to richard nixon and lyndon johnson to do and they had more responsibility than their predecessors then when jimmy carter appointed walter mondale he notched it up big time and vice president mondale had lunch with the president every week had defined responsibilities could come to any meeting and ronald reagan to give credit where credit is due did the same thing for george bush and made him an important figure so if you look at history you ve got everybody else here s johnson and nixon here s mondale and bush and then here s al gore he s probably the only person in the history of america who has had a clearly discernable impact on the welfare of the country as vice president he not only cast the decisive vote on a number of occasions from breaking the tie on the budget bill which started all this stuff in 93 to the issue for sensible gun control just a few weeks ago he has been our leader in technology policy in trying to hook up every classroom in the country to computers in making sure that we had an e rate so poor schools could afford to do it he s run the empowerment zone program which has brought thousands of jobs into poor neighborhoods he ran our partnership with detroit to try to develop high mileage vehicles and it won t be long until you ll be able to buy a car that will get 80 miles a gallon and a couple years after that you ll be able to buy one made with bio fuel where the conversion ratio is a gallon of gasoline to make eight gallons of that and then you ll be getting 500 miles to the gallon and the world will be different and he did that that s what he did he ran our reinventing government program that has given us the smallest government in 40 years and i heard all this talk about tough decisions he supported me on the budget on bosnia on kosovo on haiti on giving aid to mexico when the people were 81 15 against it on taking on the gun lobby and the tobacco lobby for the first time that any white house has consistently done that and he was an ardent supporter of our effort to end discrimination against gays and lesbians early so he has taken tough decisions i want you to know this because this campaign is going to have a lot of twists and turns there will be ups and downs but he should be the president of the united states nobody has ever done this but i will say this he ll have a lot harder job unless you help us elect six senators and at least six house members as i said i could tell you a story about every one of these senators who s here and our candidate that would make you feel more strongly one of things i ve learned as president is i always knew the senate was important i admired the whole story of all the great senators in our history and the great creators but it s even more important than i dreamed it was when i became president so the investment you ve made tonight is a worthy investment and i just hope when you leave here some of what i have said has made an impression so that you will take every single solitary opportunity you have between now and november to tell people why you came tonight why you stand where you stand and why this election is so important to our future thank you very much dem wjclinton19 5 95 bill_clinton thank you very much sitting here listening to my marvelous wife speak i was thinking you know i ve been seeing here lately long distance on oprah winfrey and on the morning show this morning and i thought boy i m glad she lives here i want to thank secretary reich and the women s bureau director karen nussbaum she has done a wonderful job i am very grateful to her and to him i want to say a special word of appreciation to the people who sponsored this event today from american home products the senior vice president fred hassan and the corporate secretary carol emerling let s give them a hand for what they did there are many distinguished women leaders here today but i do want to recognize one person who has been a friend of mine for more than 20 years now congresswoman eddie bernice johnson from texas we re glad to see you thank you very much for being here you know the concerns of working women are one of the few subjects that i didn t have to be educated about because i grew up with them i lived with my grandparents until i was four and my grandmother was a working woman from the 1930s on in the little town where i was born an awful lot of the women both white and black who lived in poor families or near poor families worked as a matter of course no one gave much thought to it one way or the other my mother was a working woman from the 1940s on beginning shortly after i was old enough to at least crawl around on my own and it certainly never occurred to me from the first day that i met hillary that she would do anything other than pursue her career as a matter of fact i spent the first two or three years of our relationship trying to talk her out of it because i thought it would be bad for her career but it s worked out all right for her i think you know 75 years ago a reception like this would not have taken place in 1920 women had less than one in five jobs in this economy and as hillary said were only then gaining the right to vote when she said in 25 years from now the president and her husband would open the time capsule i looked at karen and bob and said if the demographic trends continue the percentages will almost mandate a woman president and she karen said yes if they vote their own interests to which i replied we should give them every opportunity when the women s bureau was born it was designed then to improve the lot of women in the work force by fighting for fair wages and expanding opportunities for education and training and protecting women physically at work those folks 75 years ago i think would be surprised at how far we ve come hundreds of women here celebrate the progress that we have made in all walks of american life i m proud that in this administration we have 6 women cabinet secretaries twice as many as have ever served in any cabinet of the president before over 40 percent of our appointees have been women and a far higher percentage of women have been appointed to the bench and to major federal positions than previous administrations two of those appointees two of these appointees are former directors of the women s bureau esther peterson the u s representative to the u n general assembly and and assistant to the president for public liaison alexis herman who is here with six other directors of the women s bureau let s give them all a hand here all of you represent women across this country who work long hours do your best to raise your families and contribute to your communities extraordinary working women today are doing their best to hold our country together our communities together and frankly our hard pressed middle class together they deserve our admiration our respect and most importantly our support i ran for office in large measure because i was afraid that having won the cold war we might squander the peace and the victory that having struggled so hard to make the american dream available to other people around the world we might lose it for large numbers of our people here at home as we move into the 21st century and the global economy the technological revolution opening all of us to unbelievable pressures and changes which can be good or difficult i believe that my job is first to provide for the security of the american people secondly to give people the tools they need to help themselves live up to their god given potential and thirdly to try to create as many opportunities as i possibly can in a way the first major piece of legislation i signed as president which had been bouncing around here for seven years and it suffered through two vetoes was emblematic of all three of those objectives it was the family and medical leave law not very long ago i was home for a couple of days and i went back to my old church and a lady i didn t know came up to me and said i really want to thank you i know we re not supposed to talk about politics at church but i don t really think this is politics i got cancer and i had to take some time off and deal with it and my husband had to take some time off and work with me and neither one of us lost our jobs and we re both back working now and it wouldn t have happened it hadn t been for the family and medical leave law i am proud of the fact that we have moved aggressively to immunize all of our children under the age of two to enroll every pregnant woman and infant in the country who needs it in the women infants and children program for nutrition to expand head start and lift the standards in our schools and expand apprenticeship programs for young people who don t go on to universities and something which will make a big difference in the lives of young women in the future to dramatically expand and make more affordable loans to go to college but there is much much more to be done i am proud of the fact that last year the small business administration cut its budget but expanded loans to women entrepreneurs by 85 percent in one year i might add without reducing loans to qualified males we expanded for everybody but i think it s important that we recognize that women in the workplace are caught in a lot of cross currents today because all american workers or at least more than half of us are working longer hours for the same or lower pay that we were making 10 years ago and therefore more and more parents are working harder for the same or less and spending less time with their children women feel this pressure very deeply insofar as they have either sole primary or even just half of the responsibility for taking care of their children as well as earning a living because male workers over the age of 45 on average have lost 14 percent of their earning power in the last 10 years women in the work force and in the home feel the anxiety of their husband s sense of loss and insecurity and frustration and anger what is causing all this and what are we to do about it well what is causing it all is the impact of the global economy and the dramatic revolution in technology on our society opening up all kinds of new changes in ways that are perfectly wonderful if you can access them but terrifying if you cannot for example we don t have the figures yet on 94 but i think 94 will confirm 93 s trend in 1993 we had the largest number of new businesses started in america in any year in history and the largest number of new millionaires in america in any year in history and that is a good thing that is a good thing and that is happening because so many of us are now able to access the world of the future many of you in this room are part of the trend toward a brighter bigger broader tomorrow but there is also a fault line in our society that is splitting the middle class apart putting unbearable pressures on families making them less secure and making them less able to live up to the fullest of their abilities you know it and i know it that s why the family and medical leave law was important if people are going to be working for smaller companies not bigger ones and moving around at least they ought to know they can take some time off without losing a job if there s someone sick in their family or if a baby is born or some other emergency arises that s why it was important that s why the efforts of the secretary of labor and the secretary of education to create a fabric a seamless fabric of lifelong learning whenever people lose their jobs or feel that they re underemployed it s terribly important and that s why i believe it is especially important to women that we raise the minimum wage this year women represent three out of five minimum wage workers but only half the work force i have done everything i could to create a climate in which people are encouraged to choose work over welfare in which people are encouraged to be successful parents and successful workers i believe that that s what the earned income tax credit was all about in 1993 let me tell you what that meant that meant this year that the average family of four with an income under 27 000 got a 1 000 tax cut below what they paid before this administration came into office and it means three years from now if the congress will stick with it and not repeal it we will be able to say that no one who works full time and has children at home when they go home from work will live below the poverty line that is the best war against welfare we could wage but it isn t enough if we do not raise the minimum wage this year next year it will be in real dollar terms the lowest it has been in 40 years now that is not my idea of what the 21st century american economy is all about i want a smart work highwage economy not a hard work low wage economy and the working women of america and their children and their husbands deserve it as well you know i have a i don t get to watch a lot of kind of extra television but the other night just by accident i was watching a news program where a special was being done on the minimum wage and i don t even know if it was a national program or one of the state networks around here but they went down south to a town that had a lot of minimum wage workers and they went in this plant to interview a remarkable woman who worked in this plant at a minimum wage and they said to this lady you know your employer says if we raise the minimum wage that they ll either have to lay people off or put more money into machinery and reduce their employment longterm what do you say to that i could not have written the script this lady sort of threw her shoulders back and looked into the eyes of the television reporter and said honey i ll take my chances if we are going to bring our budget deficit into balance which will be good for all of us if we re going to have to over a period of years cut back on expenditures that the government used to make that makes it even more important for people who do go out into the private sector and work full time play by the rules and want to make their own way without public assistance to be rewarded for that work this is a huge issue one other thing i want to say that must be done this year the secretary of labor has taken the initiative in trying to consolidate a lot of these various job training programs into a fund from which you can get a check or a voucher if you re unemployed or underemployed to take to the local community college or the training institution of your choice to get permanent reeducation opportunities for a lifetime and we ought to do that i d like to close by introducing someone who was a working woman who was a particular influence in my life at an early time the people who sponsored this event invited me to pick someone to participate and so i picked this person lonnie luebben was my 11th grade honors english teacher and i believe that i was in the first class she taught but anyway she looked awful young at the time and she still does she had a remarkable way of making literature come to life and one of the most memorable trips i ever took in my life i still remember it was the first time i ever went to the wild mountains of the ozarks in north arkansas along the river that was the first river congress over 20 years ago set aside in the national wild rivers act they thought it was the wildest of all the rivers in the united states and we explored caves that still had ammunition stored from the civil war we talked to mountain people who had never been more than 20 miles away from home it was one of the most remarkable experiences i have ever had she taught me a great deal about american folklore and literature and life and just before we walked out here she gave me a contribution for the time capsule the textbook with which she taught our class so many years ago if you will forgive me i would like to close this event by asking my teacher to come up here and accept my thanks for being a working woman over 30 years ago thank you very much again let me thank american home products let me thank all of you for coming let me thank congresswoman eddie bernice johnson and i ve just been told that congresswoman lynn woolsey is also here somewhere thank you there she is the heroine of the state of the union address i thank you all please stay around have a good time we re delighted to see you good bye thank you dem wjclinton19 5 97 bill_clinton thank you please be seated thank you tom and thank you cynthia for your wonderful work and i want to thank steve grossman and alan solomont and all the folks at the dnc for what they have done i thank secretary babbitt and ambassador babbitt for coming tonight and mostly i want to thank you for being a part of these two very important components of our party s effort to take our country into a new century as you might imagine i m feeling pretty good about things right now i m very happy about the budget agreement very happy for our country but i think it s worth pointing out that where we are today is a function of the work of tens of millions of americans in their own lives making the most of those lives and also a direct function of the changes that we brought to washington four and a half years ago i was convinced in 1992 when i sought the presidency that we had to change the economic policy of the country if we wanted to build a structure of opportunity that would keep the american dream alive for all americans i was convinced that we would have to change the social policy of the country if we wanted to have an american community that really worked instead of being divided by race and region and religion and paralyzed by crime and i was convinced we would have to change the role of government and that we needed a very expansive view of what our responsibilities in the world are and in so many ways the conditions we enjoy in america today are the direct result of our country moving forward in all three of those areas and i d just like to say that we changed the economic policy to go from running deficits as far as the eye could see to bringing down the deficit but continuing to invest more in education research development technology science while we were cutting back on the rest of government and expanding trade throughout the world and a lot of people said it wouldn t work but four years later the deficit has been reduced before this balanced budget package is ever voted on we will have a deficit that is 77 percent lower than it was the day i took office and i m proud of that and you should be too and our economy produced a record 12 million new jobs in the last four years the unemployment rate is the lowest it s been in 24 years the inflation rate the lowest in 30 years the business investment rate the highest in 35 years i m proud of those things i m also proud as a democrat that income inequality last year dropped by the largest amount since the 1960s so that more and more ordinary americans are beginning to participate in the benefits of a growing economy and that is important because we ve had 20 years in which because of competitive problems and a lot of other things inequality among working people has increased in times where the economy is expanding and shrinking so these things are important and we should feel good about them i am proud of the fact that crime has gone down for five years in a row for the first time in about a quarter of a century that we had the biggest drop in welfare rolls before the welfare reform bill passed in 50 years fifty years and i m proud of that and you should be proud of that i m proud of the fact that the world has moved closer toward peace and freedom than it was four years ago in spite of all the problems we have and in the last four months and a couple of weeks since the inauguration we can take some genuine pride in what has happened in terms of creating opportunity we negotiated a telecommunications agreement with the rest of the world which will open up 90 percent of the world s markets to american sellers and producers of telecommunications services and equipment it will create hundreds of thousands of high wage jobs in america over the next few years this balanced budget agreement will keep the deficit coming down it will keep interest rates down it will lengthen the economic recovery it also contains almost everything that i advocated in the campaign of 1996 you heard cynthia say that it has the biggest increase in educational investment in a generation it also has the biggest expansion of aid for people to go to college since 1945 since the g i bill came in it has the biggest increase in pell grant scholarships for poor students in 20 years and will provide tax deductions and tax credits to make the first two years of college as universal as a high school diploma is today and to put college within reach of all americans i think that is very important and i hope you do too with the secretary of the interior here i can t help noting that it also has a very strong environmental budget it protects our parks and enables us to continue our historic work of rescuing the florida everglades from destruction and will enable us to clean up 500 toxic waste dumps the most dangerous ones in this country in the next four years the plan will extend that s worth clapping for the plan will extend health coverage to half of the 10 million children in america who don t have any health insurance and these are in working families these children are in working families the plan will restore as i pledged to do in 1996 a lot of unfair cuts in assistance to legal immigrants and their children who come here lawfully and have misfortunes visit them it will also provide funds to help cities in our high unemployment areas hire people who run out of their welfare benefits and have to go to work and it will provide tax incentives for businesses to hire people from welfare to work so it is a good budget there are tax provisions in this budget the budget will contain some form of capital gains tax some form of estate tax relief the entire education tax package i generally described to you and some tax relief for families with children minor children in the home to help them deal with their child care and other costs but the cost of this package is sharply circumscribed and by agreement with the leaders of the congress it will to give you some idea of it in today s dollars it will only be about one tenth as costly as the huge tax cut that was passed in 1981 so don t let anybody tell you that we have agreed to blow a big hole in the deficit we have not done so and we will not do so and i will not permit such a bill to become law the bill we agreed to is a good faith compromise reached by republicans and democrats but it validates the economic direction this administration took and it would not have been possible none of this would have been possible if we hadn t passed the economic package back in 1993 with only members of our party supporting it and with no votes to spare the vice president broke the tie in the senate and as he says whenever i vote we win so this is a happy day this budget is good for america the telecommunications agreement is good for america we re moving forward economically we re also moving forward to try to come together more i m trying to pass a juvenile justice bill in the congress which will give communities the resources and the help they need to try to restore civility and calm and order to the lives of our young people in most of america while crime is going down precipitously the crime rate among people under 18 is continuing to rise leveling off only last year but in some places in america it s a different story in boston massachusetts there has not been a single child killed with a gun in 18 months not a single child in houston texas where the mayor opened an inner city soccer program and an inner city golf program pre tiger woods he had 3 000 kids in the soccer program 2 500 kids in the golf program and the crime rate among juveniles went down so i m doing my best to pass a juvenile justice bill that will follow up with what the crime bill did in 1994 and keep the crime rate coming down tomorrow i ll have an important announcement on welfare reform to try to move more people from welfare to work there is a lot to do out there but we are moving in the right direction and you should feel good about your country on the world front we ve ratified the chemical weapons convention which will make every community in america safer from terrorism and crime in the future from poison gas we have reached an agreement between nato and russia that will have a partnership instead of enmity between nato and russia and we will in july expand nato for the first time we are moving toward a more peaceful more stable more democratic world i just got back from a very successful trip to mexico and central america and the caribbean and i just have to tell you that i m convinced that the direction we re taking is the right one but we still have some tough decisions to make and we can t rest on our laurels first of all we ve got to pass the budget and then we have to see that the terms of the agreement become law in the appropriations bills secondly we have to deal now that we ve dealt with the structural deficit in american life in the years ahead we re going to have to deal with the generational deficit that is we have to make sure that the burden of us baby boomers retiring does not bankrupt our children number one and number two we have to do something about the fact that while we have the lowest poverty rate ever recorded among senior citizens in america last year something i am proud of that s a good thing and america should be proud of it the poverty rate among children under 18 was almost twice the poverty rate among americans over 65 so we have challenges still out there awaiting us but what i want to say to you is we can look at the last four years and we can look at the last four months and understand that as a country our problems are like the problems of any other human endeavor they yield to effort when you move away from the rhetoric and you move away from the hot air and you sit down in good faith and you say what do we have to do to keep opportunity alive in america what do we have to do to be a stronger american community what do we have to do to preserve our leadership role in the world we can do these things just one last issue that i m very concerned about and that is and as i look around this room i m proud of this room for many reasons but i think the fact that we are becoming the world s most diverse democracy in terms of race and ethnicity and religion is a huge asset in a world that s getting smaller and smaller and smaller and having worked in bosnia northern ireland the middle east and in the aegean i am mindful of the fact that racial and ethnic conflicts are difficult and thorny things having pleaded with my friends in pakistan and india to try to resolve their difficulties i m glad to see them talking now i m mindful to the fact that these are difficult things but we should be able to see both from the heartbreak of other countries in the world and from the enormous opportunities we are creating for ourselves that if we can find a way to respect our differences and be bound closely together by our shared values it is i think very likely that the united states in the next 50 years even though we will be a smaller percentage of the world s population and a smaller percentage of its overall economy i think it is very likely that we will have even more positive influence in the next 50 years than we did in the last 50 years but the number one question that will determine that mark my words is not an economic question or a government budget question it is whether we can learn to live together across the lines that divide us that is the single most significant thing in my judgment along with whether we are willing to exercise our leadership in the world that will determine the shape of the next 50 years so i intend to work hard on the that and i want you to help me the last thing i would like to say is that again regarding your presence here tonight what you have done is to invest in the world of america the purpose of political parties in my judgment is not only to win elections but to give people a forum within which they can become organized to express their views and to have people who represent their views act in the public interest because you are here because you have supported us because we won the last election because we are moving forward this country is a better place and you made a contribution to that you continue to do it and i hope tonight when you go home you will be very proud of it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton19 6 00 bill_clinton thank you very much senator torricelli senator wyden mayor lanier and elise secretary bentsen and b a mr white we miss you in the administration i told lloyd bentsen when he and b a came through the line i said well your economy is still humming along pretty good lloyd and i want all of you to know that if he hadn t been my first treasury secretary might not any of us be sitting here today celebrating the strongest economy in american history and i thank you very much i am here today primarily on behalf of our democratic candidates for the senate and those who are presently serving i suppose that every american who is a reasonably good citizen understands in general what the senate does and thinks on balance it would be a good thing if good people were there who more or less agree with you but because of the unique vantage point that i have occupied in the last seven and a half years i probably feel that more passionately than any other person i know what a difference it makes in the confirmation process of judges in the weighing of the decisions about confirming people for other important positions and how legislation is shaped and how the whole direction of foreign policy is controlled and these things are very important and i think what i would like to do today recognizing that as all of you know i have a special interest in one particular senate race which thank goodness does not disqualify me from speaking here today i want to leave you with three thoughts somebody s liable to ask you why you showed up here today and you need to be able to give an answer and the three points i want to make are number one this is a big election and it s just as important as the elections of 1992 and 1996 which enabled us to turn this country around and move it in the right direction and get a lot going the second thing i want to say is there are real differences between the candidates of the two parties and i hope this will be an immensely positive election it is no longer necessary for us to engage in the politics of personal destruction i hope we ve beat that back for a long time to come but that means you can have an honest debate on the real differences and from the white house to the senate to the house there are real differences and we ought to have a good time debating them in a good humor be happy our country s in good shape and just have an old fashioned citizenship lesson and what the differences are so it s a big election there are real differences the third point however i want you to know is that for the only time i think in my adult lifetime one party the republican party doesn t really want you to understand what the differences are which is a dead giveaway that at least they think if the american people knew what the differences were they d vote with us and from my perspective i m first let me say i m grateful that i had the chance to serve as president and determined to get everything done i can do in the next six months seven months i have to serve i had a very distinguished man call me a couple of days ago and he said you know mr president for a lame duck you re still quacking rather loudly so i do think there s a lot that we re going to get done in the next six months but what i want to say to you is i ve done what i could to turn the country around to build that bridge to the 21st century to bring people involved all different kinds of people in the political process my deputy chief of staff steve ricchetti is here look around this room he said and steve grew up in ohio and he looked at me and he said this is not your typical texas cowboy crowd is it and i said you know texas has changed houston has changed america has changed this is a different world out there and we want everybody involved and so what i hope for my country now is that we will say to ourselves this is a very important election here s what we want to accomplish here s where the candidates stand from the white house to the senate to the house here s what we re going to do i mean i hope that democracy in short will work the way it s supposed to work and then none of us can have any complaints but a lot of people seem to think it really doesn t make much difference because the economy is so prosperous we ve got the longest economic expansion in history and the 22 million new jobs and the lowest african american hispanic unemployment rate we ever had the lowest crime rate in a quarter century the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years they re half what they were when i took office and there is no apparent threat to our security and our country is able to be a force for peace and freedom around the world so they say could there be any differences and the answer is yes are there consequences yes anybody who has lived more than 25 or 30 years anyway knows that nothing lasts forever now if you re in the middle of a terrible time that s immensely reassuring but if you re in the middle of good times it ought to be humbling and sobering you get a time like this maybe once in a lifetime as a nation where you really have it within your power to shape the future of your dreams for your children and to do that you have to ask what are the great challenges what are the great opportunities here before us and then how should we go about meeting them and i think you can really argue that how we handle prosperity is as stern a test of our judgment our vision our character as how we handle adversity there is not anybody in here over a certain age who can t remember at least one time in your life when you made a mistake not because things were going so badly but because things were going so well you thought there were no consequences to the failure to concentrate it s just part of human nature so that s the first thing this is a big big election the second thing is what are the questions bob torricelli said i always try to ask the right question i think that the outcome of these elections will be determined in no small measure by what people think the question is so i can only tell you what i think the big questions are number one how do we keep the economy going it s projected that we re going to have a very large surplus over the next 12 years 10 years we can actually get this country out of debt in the next 12 years should we do it or not i think we should and we can do that still have a decent size tax cut invest in the education of our children invest in science and technology and health care and preserving the environment and keep paying the debt down and in the process we will then prepare for what i think the next big challenge is the aging of america how are we going to handle it when there are only two people working for every one person drawing social security and medicare we should be saving today against that eventuality and preparing for it how are we going to extend this economic prosperity to people in places who have been left behind now this is something vice president gore and i have worked on very hard for the last eight years we have this empowerment zone program that he s done a brilliant job of running we ve got one quite successful one down in south texas which is now the third fastest growing area of america interestingly enough secretary bentsen s backyard down there but i think we ought to give americans the same incentives to invest in poor areas here we give them to invest in poor areas around the world in latin america or africa or asia and i m working with the speaker of the house i m trying to make this a totally bipartisan issue but this is a big deal because there are still a lot of people in places who aren t part of this prosperity the next big question i think a big ethical question for our society how are we going to permit people to do a better job of balancing their responsibilities as parents and their responsibilities at work a higher and higher percentage of people with young children are in the work force if they have to choose between succeeding at raising their children and succeeding in the work force society has lost from the beginning because the most important work of all is raising children and so obviously if you make people choose we re going to lose there s a lot more we can do there we have an enormous percentage of families who are racked with worry because they don t have access to health insurance houston the greater houston area one of the highest percentages in the country of working families who don t have access to health insurance what do we propose to do with that how are we going to grow the economy and continue to improve the environment and deal with the challenge of global warming which now virtually everybody acknowledges is real can it be done the answer to that is yes it can be how are we going to give all of our kids a world class education and open the doors of college and university to everybody how are we going to stay on the cutting edge of science and technology how are we going to continue to be a force for peace now what are the specifics here are there differences yes the democrats for example believe that america should ratify the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty we re trying to get india and pakistan to do it the republicans don t they believe we should walk away from a generation of leading the world toward less dangers from nuclear weapons this is a huge issue and it falls right on the senate so if you agree with them that you think it would be a good idea if america withdrew from all these global arms control regimes and stop trying to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons and say we ll just have bigger weapons we don t care what anybody else does then you should support the republicans for the senate but if you are proud of the fact that america has tried to lead the world away from the nuclear brink and reduce the nuclear threat and that we you should be i hope proud of the fact that i was the first world leader to sign the comprehensive test ban treaty and you would like to see it ratified then you should support the democrats i ll give you just another if you believe that we should pay down the debt and have a modest tax cut we can afford and that we can t possibly assume we re going to have all this money that people now say we ll have over the next decade so we should take a more prudent course then you have to vote for our side if you think that it s an absolute lock cinch that nothing bad will happen in the next decade and you want to get all the money out there right now in a tax cut and just hope to goodness it will all work out all right you should vote for them because that s what they want to do and they really believe it they don t believe there s any way anything bad can go wrong and so they want to spend the surplus right now all of it before it materializes and they think it will make the economy stronger i think it will cause interest rates to go up i think it will bring back the deficits and i think it will make it weaker but you have to decide it s not like you don t have a choice here and i could go through issue after issue after issue now obviously you ve made your choice or you wouldn t be here but the point i m making is you need to go out across the state across the community across the country to your friends and say whether you agree with me or not this is an important election the country is being tested this is the election where we will say this is what we propose to do with our prosperity that s what this election is about nineteen ninety two was about we re in a mess here how are we going to get out of it nineteen ninety six was about can we really build a bridge to the new century by keeping this going two thousand is about what do we propose to do with our prosperity and then i want you to say there are differences between the candidates at all levels and it is not necessary as we too often have done in the last 20 years the criticize them personally it is better to say here are their honest differences and then of course i hope you ll thank you and then of course i hope you ll say why you agree with our side but even if someone disagrees with you that s what an election is about that s what democracy is supposed to be and this is the last point i want to make the most important thing of all which is why i like looking around this crowd today is that we find a way to live together with all of our differences that we find a way not just to tolerate them but to celebrate them to say we are glad these muslims from south asia are part of 21st century america we think they look very nice in their garb and they re probably more comfortable than we are in the summertime and we might have something to learn from them about the way life is organized and lived and thought about and who knows maybe they ve got something to learn from us and this makes us stronger that we have sikhs and maybe hindus and we ve got jews and we ve got christians and we ve got bahais and we ve got people from every different racial and ethnic group and there has to be a way for us to celebrate this and yet reaffirm the primary importance of our common shared humanity everything i have done as president for seven and a half years when you strip away all the details of the policy has been designed to achieve that if i could have one wish for america i would wish for us to be one america in that sense because we re very smart we re very industrious we re very clever and we d figure out how to solve all our other problems if we can keep the human heart in proper balance as we relate to others we re going to be okay and one of the things i m proudest about my party and my senate candidates is that that s the america we believe in thank you very much dem wjclinton19 6 98 bill_clinton thank you very much mayor helmke for all your wonderful introductions i hope they didn t hurt you too much this one won t cause you as much trouble as the last one did seriously i want to thank you for your fine leadership of the mayors this year and mayor corradini i look forward to working with you over the next year i also want to say to your advisory board chair mayor webb who joined me at the white house this week when we honored the broncos together for winning the super bowl and hello to your executive director tom cochran who does a great job for you day in and day out here with us let me also congratulate my good friend jerry abramson on his award for distinguished public service jerry i ll always be grateful to you for a lot of things for your friendship your support and especially for your leadership for the 1994 crime bill all across america neighborhoods are now safer because of the community police officers you helped to put on the street you have really made a difference i congratulate you and thank you again and i have some good news about one of your alumni the former mayor of laredo saul ramirez last year at this meeting i announced his nomination for assistant secretary at hud well i m giving him a promotion and nominating him now to be the agency s new deputy secretary congratulations to him and to you this is the third time we ve been able to get together just this year and i m only sorry that i can t join you in person i know that i ll be well represented by members of my cabinet including our great hud secretary andrew cuomo i send greetings also to you from micky ibarra who s with me here and who runs the office of inter governmental affairs and works hard for you his deputy lynn cutler is stranded in an airport but she ll soon be in reno to represent the white house and i m proud that senior representatives from a total of 22 federal agencies who are attending your conference you can tell from the breadth and depth from the team i ve sent that my administration is more committed than ever to working with you to help our great cities thrive and reach their fullest potential last week a number of you were able to join me here at the white house as i signed a transportation bill that will help cities to build and modernize roads bridges and transit systems for the 21st century it encourages mass transit protects the environment expands opportunities to disadvantaged businesses and moves more people from welfare to work with transportation assistance thank you for helping me pass this law in no small part because of the innovation commitment and hard work of america s mayors our cities are revitalized reenergized and back in business the second annual state of the city s report which secretary cuomo will share with you in much greater detail later shows that unemployment crime poverty rates all are down and falling in our central cities new job growth and home ownership rates are up and climbing our down towns are coming back as centers of tourism and entertainment the state of our cities is strong and i thank you for leading this renaissance america is enjoying the strongest economy in a generation an era of sunlit prosperity and abundant opportunity but we cannot afford to sit back and bask in the glow instead we must make the most of this rare moment in our history and ensure that our economic renaissance touches every corner of every community as the state of the cities report shows cities still face critical opportunity gaps when it comes to jobs to education and to housing if we re going to lift even more people out of poverty and bring more middle class families back to our cities we must do everything we can to close these opportunity gaps the way we will close our opportunity gaps is with the new vision of government over the past five and a half years we ve moved beyond the false debate between those who said government could solve all our problems and those who said government was the problem our new vision has been of government as partner with business community groups and individual citizens it s been a vision of government as catalyst to bring the spark of private enterprise to our hardest pressed neighborhoods whether it s putting more police officers on the streets to fight crime or offering tax incentives to lure businesses back to abandoned downtowns or providing small business loans to inner city residents our goal has been to empower people with the tools to make the most of their own lives secretary cuomo s new streamlined hud which david osborne has called the most exciting reinvention in a decade epitomizes this vision along with the vice president who chairs my community empowerment board i am committed to helping hud and other federal agencies work even better for you and i ask you to support our expanded community empowerment agenda that reflects our new approach to filling the opportunity gaps in for our cities first we can fill in the jobs gap and bring more businesses and credit to our central cities by launching a second round of empowerment zones renewing community development financial institutions and supporting hud s community empowerment fund i ask you to tell congress that america needs 50 000 new welfare to work housing vouchers to help hard working people successfully move off welfare by moving closer to their jobs and i hope you ll work with me to ensure all americans get the child care assistance they need to be good parents and good workers second we can begin closing the education gap by helping school districts modernize and build 5 000 schools hiring more teachers reducing class sizes in the earliest grades and creating education opportunity zones to help poorer school districts make the tough reforms they need to improve third we will bridge the housing gap by strengthening our efforts to fight housing discrimination raising fha loan limits creating more section 8 housing vouchers helping families with good rental histories turn rent checks into mortgage payments and expanding the low income housing tax credit this tax credit now has the support of a majority of members in the house and the senate let s call on congress to pass the bill right away finally i ask for your help on another critical issue for cities making sure that the 2000 census is as accurate as possible as you know census statistics help to determine how much federal aid your community s receive for roads wic head start job training and other services because of an undercount of inner city residents in the last census many of you were short changed when it came to federal funds we must make sure it doesn t happen again the scientists agree statistical sampling is the most accurate and most cost effective way to get a full and fair count of our people in the year 2000 let s work together to ensure that we use this method in the next census all of these are tough challenges but i know that if we work together we can meet them last year in san francisco we set ourselves a challenge of helping 1 000 police officers buy and move into homes in the communities they serve well i m proud to announce that the officer next door program has met the challenge later today secretary cuomo will present the program s 1 000th key to deputy mark burgess a key that will unlock the door to his new home in salt lake city with citizens like deputy burgess who are taking active stakes in our community and with your continued leadership i know the best is yet to come for america s cities throughout our history our cities have always been the face america shows the world visitors have gotten their first taste of america our energy ingenuity and promise through our great cities they ve always been the gateway to opportunity for millions of americans places where new immigrants have worked hard built thriving communities and achieved the american dream we can and we will make sure that dream thrives in our cities well into the 21st century thank you for all you do and thank you for working with me tom first let me say that i m very sorry about the floods in boston i know our fema people are there and i hope they will all work out of it and dry out of it together let me say to all of you i think every mayor in america should be heavily involved in celebrating the millennium and i hope that as a group you will be in close touch with ellen lovell who is running this project for the first lady and for me so that we can coordinate what we re doing i think our vision should be the one that hillary has articulated we should honor the past and imagine the future that means that at a minimum every city should find some place in the city important to your city s history and heritage and make sure that you have restored it or protected or enhanced it for all future generations second i think every city should identify some great opportunity that you believe is there for your people in the new century and elevate that opportunity highlight it literally enshrine it as a mission of your city for the future and thirdly of course i think there should be a great celebration on new year s eve 1999 2000 that all the cities in the country participate in that is tied in with a national celebration and that involves as many americans has humanely possible well you can do a lot let me deal with each of them in turn the only part of the education program that is imperiled by the present setback to the tobacco bill is the funds that we wanted to give the states which would enable them to distribute them to communities to hire the teachers necessary to reduce class size to an average of 18 in the first three grades the school construction initiative which would allow us to build or repair 5 000 schools is still very much alive it s in my budget the congress can approve it there is some bipartisan support for it and so i think if the mayors particularly the republicans and the democrats together could really press this then when we get down to the appropriations in the month of july and in the month of september we ve got a good chance to get the construction money out and that would make a huge difference not only in repairing a lot of older schools that need to be repaired but in providing the needed classroom space without which we can t have the smaller class sizes on the after school funds we have funds in both the justice department budget and in the education department budget it s just going to be a question of fighting for those things and making sure that they re priorities initiative congress just as they are priorities for you and for me and again there shouldn t be any politics in this the evidence is so overwhelming as you know in chicago where you have tens of thousands of kids eating three meals a day in the schools that this increase is learning and lowers juvenile crime that i would think that the cities that have had good experiences with these programs could take the lead but again i say that if the republican and democratic mayors could do this together and say this is a grass roots american issue this has nothing to do with partisan politics that this part of the president s budget should prevail then i think we have a good chance to win so i d say on two out of three were in good shape whether the states get some more money that then can be used for aid to education to hire those extra teachers depends on whether we can get the tobacco legislation back on track i m still hopeful that we can anything you can do to encourage congress not on this point but on the larger point to pass legislation to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco and pass something comprehensive that will have credibility in the public health community that we know will work will make us closer to that goal as well well let me first of all say that i applause you for doing this all of you and i applaud your leadership in doing it i think the first thing i would say that in the last couple of years when we ve had all these horrible instances of school violence and killing in our schools we should not lose sight of the fact that ironically that has occurred when we ve finally seen the first drop in juvenile crime in many many years so i think it s important to keep pushing the large issue of the after school funds and the other kinds of programs that we ve seen work so well in boston and elsewhere to drive juvenile crime down then i think we have to say no matter how low we get juvenile crime we re going to be at risk of these violent instances in schools because there will always be a small number of children who will be profoundly disturbed where some incident at home or at school can set them off and they live in a culture where the access to guns is too easy and where they re too exposed from their earliest years to repeated barrages of almost casual violence in the media that they see so too many children become numb to violence and i think take guns in their hands and pull the triggers often without really feeling and knowing the consequences now there are i believe two things that we can do at the federal level that we re working on first as i said when i was in springfield oregon i ve asked the attorney general and the secretary of education to prepare a manual to train teachers parents and hopefully other students as well on early warning signs of children in trouble so that we ll be better at picking this up in every case where we ve had a killing over the last year there has been some indication that there was something wrong with the young person involved that something has happened or the young person said something or friends knew something that did not lead to preemptive action so i think we need to really focus on this prevention secondly we re going to be working on what can be done to get some more police officers out there in and around the schools just as we have on the streets thirdly there is a big debate going on in springfield oregon and in jonesboro arkansas and i m sure in all the other communities about what can be done if children are found in trouble to try to do something before they go over the edge the two senators from oregon have introduced legislation which would require of any child who was sent home from school because he or she had a gun in school and there were 6 100 children who had guns in schools and had the guns taken away and were sent home because of our zero tolerance for guns in schools just last year the senators think that their legislation i think calls for some sort of mandatory 72 hour examination period including a psychiatric exam whether this is everything that should be done exactly what should be done or not is something we re going to debate up here but it s not too soon for every mayor and every school leader in the country to determine what should be done if a case occurs like the case in springfield oregon where the young man who is now charged with all these killings was sent home the day before with a gun in the school now presently that s about all that happens because most cities and most school districts don t have a system for dealing with that i think you should make sure that your schools do have a system and maybe not just when a person is found with a gun and sent home but when threats are made or when people say they re going to do something maybe unspecific threats but give evidence of that we need some sort of intervention that can get these kids analyzed and then get them quickly to some sort of comprehensive program if necessary to try to give them the help they need and to take them out of the pressure cooker situation for a couple of days in the hope that this can be avoided i believe that we can do a lot more on the prevention front and we now know just looking at the facts of all these cases that there were significant early warnings in at least several of them that might have permitted with the right kind of intervention circumstances to develop that would have avoided the tragedies so that s what i would ask you to look at everybody should know what does your school district do with a child that makes a threat what does your school district do with a child that has a gun does the school have a system where they encourage other kids to talk to responsible adults if they hear some child making a threat most of these children if they could just get four or five or six years down the road would look back in horror that they ever entertained such a thought if we can avoid it happening in the first place so i think we can do better we re determined to do our part and after you have your meeting if the mayors and the others from whom you hear have any other ideas for goodness sakes give them to us this is something we ve got to do more on in particular i wanted to thank you for working closely with us this last year while i ve been president of the mayor s group it s been an experience and we appreciate all of your efforts this past year and you ve outlined a number of things that we need to continue to work with in the future and we plan to do that with you too thank you mr mayor thank you all and i ll turn it over to secretary cuomo and the rest of our crowd have a great meeting dem wjclinton19 7 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you so much for that wonderful welcome thank you president clough for making all of our athletes feel so welcome at georgia tech thank you dr walker for all the work you do thank you teresa for sharing your birthday with us and thank you bruce for that introduction for your leadership and your example i was looking at bruce standing up here obliterating the microphone and the podium you know what i thought i thought if i d had a body like that i d have done a better job in politics i should have gone in for wrestling earlier before i had to do it for a living you know the first united states olympics team in 1896 also did our nation proud even though they literally missed the boat for the first games they got on the wrong ship in hackensack new jersey but the lord was looking over them thank goodness they set off two weeks early so they got there on time anyway well thanks to the wonderful people of atlanta we got around that problem this time because the olympics came to us and so i d like to begin just by asking all of us to express our heartfelt appreciation to the people of atlanta the people of georgia people who have worked so hard to bring these games here and are doing such a magnificent job to make the world feel welcome in the united states there have been a lot of nice touches to this day for hillary and chelsea and me already for one thing they arranged for me to meet all the members of our team who are from my home state or who went to school and i appreciate that and i have to say since i ve got all these senior olympians here i brought another person from my home state who won the silver medal in the high hurdles in 1948 clyde scott i d like to ask him to stand up and be recognized my great friend and also tell you for you sports buffs he s the only person who ever made first team all american football for two different universities and it s not because he didn t make enough grades to stay in the first one i want to thank all of you for making it possible for the former olympians who are standing behind me to be here i owe one of them an apology mark spitz came by to see me earlier and when i saw him i could only imagine i kept remembering that picture of him with all those medals hanging around his shoulders around his neck and he informed me that he was supposed to carry the torch in and he carried it as far as he could but the presidential motorcade prevented his final entry so i think we should acknowledge mark spitz as bringing the olympic torch in here there s so many of the people standing behind me that i watched in the olympics that i admired an awful lot of them believe it or not have come to the white house since i ve been president because of something good and worthwhile they re doing today always to help other people i think maybe the most considerate act i ve ever seen one of them perform was my friend edwin moses actually allowed me to run with him at one time which i thought was uncalculated charity under the circumstances but i say that to make this point when these olympians come to the white house many years after their days of olympic glory to advance the cause of young athletes or some other cause they re interested in it s important that you know that we still celebrate what they stood for and what they did and what they stand for and what they do i say that because by making this team you become part of america s team and for the rest of your lives other people will look to you in a different way in a good way and you will have a chance not just in your field of competition but you ll have a chance from now on to have an impact on people especially young people that can be profound and lasting and wonderful for some of these you here i m sure you can hardly bear to think of it these are your first olympics some of you are veterans some of you will still be competing in the olympics in the next century but whatever your future holds athletically i just want to thank you for your hard work and your dedication for you courage and your heart and for your example because you say loudly to every young person in this country if you have hard work and discipline if you have a tough will and enough courage and heart you can live out your dreams and if every kid in this country really believed that he or she could live out their dreams we d be a lot better off and we will be because of you and i thank you for that most of you probably know this but when the olympics came back to life in modern times it was william milligan sloan who took it upon himself to organize the first american team and then when two of his athletes couldn t afford the tickets to athens he gave up the tickets that he had so he never even saw his dream come to life dr sloan s first recruit was a man named robert garrett who had never competed in sports before so he literally started with only a dream and he had to figure out what he was going to do he saw a picture of an ancient discus thrower and he asked a blacksmith to make one for him unfortunately it weighed 13 pounds but he didn t know any better he only knew he could not throw it further than 49 feet he heard the europeans were throwing it 87 feet but he showed up for the competition anyway and when he showed up the folks took away his 13 pound discus and gave him one that weighed two and a half pounds he tossed it out of the stadium and won the medal so sometimes our handicaps in live can become great advantages william milligan sloan and robert garrett started america s road to atlanta 100 years ago the grandson of dr sloan william milligan sloan is here today i d like to ask him to stand and be recognized where are you mr sloan thank you so much i d like to close with a few words to you about your country and what it means for america to be hosting these games in 1996 as i think perhaps you know before i came here i went over to your amazing dining quarters and shook hands with as many of the athletes from other countries as i could and i sat and visited with some of them and i d like to just sort of tell you what i think it means for us and therefore what you can mean for us here think about how the world has changed in the last hundred years a hundred years ago there were far fewer democracies and much less freedom now we see the american idea of democracy taking root all around the world more and more and more new nations even four years ago we could not have imagined that a country like bosnia would be able to redeem the promise of its own olympics in sarajevo but they have a team here when i was walking through the crowd a very tall fine looking man from croatia came up to me and thanked me for what our country has done for croatia it was in dubrovnik croatia that secretary of commerce ron brown s plane crashed full of americans who were going there only because they wanted to help bring the blessings of peace to people in another country when i was walking down the sidewalk a man who is a part of the palestinian team came up to me and he said we are an ancient people but we have never had a team in the olympics this is our first team because you in the united states helped us to make peace i was in the dining hall and a man from ireland came up to me almost with tears in his eyes saying that he remembered when hillary and i went to ireland last year and there had been a year and a half of peace that the united states had helped to support and thousands and tens of thousands of people were lining the streets happy and gay and now they have lost their peace again he said to me he said i m glad to be here but i don t want to lose my country make it come back that s what people think about your country that somehow we can help to make things better in the world by bringing people together it was not easy for us to come to this point a hundred years ago there was a lot more racism in the united states than there is today and segregation kept a lot of the most gifted people away from athletic competition women had few rights and no nation including ours allowed them to compete think how many medals that would cost us this time now we live a lot closer to our own beliefs now we have learned that we have to draw strength from our diversity that all of our people count and they can all be partners in our great enterprise and i m telling you that shines across the globe and when you go out to compete and people see that here s this american team and you half of them you can t tell where they re from because they re from all different kinds of racial and ethnic groups all kinds of religious and cultural traditions bound together by their common heritage in this great land you don t have to say anything about it one of the folks that walked in with me said that he was so pleased to see the spirit of the olympics taking over when he saw some north korean and south korean athletes sitting and talking together at dinner i ve been trying to get the north and south koreans to talk for four years and i haven t done it i ve been trying to get it done for four years and i haven t done it so tonight when you walk into that opening ceremony and billions of eyes all over the world are on you you carry the symbol of all that we have become not only in fact but in the eyes and the spirit and the hopes of the rest of the world and just as surely as those of us who work in the diplomatic area or the fine people who wear the uniform of the united states military you will become a symbol i want you to win all the medals you can i want you to mop up and do great but i want you to realize that just by being what you already are you are a source of enormous pride to our country and an inspiration to the world and i hope tonight and these next couple of weeks are the greatest time of your life thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton19 7 99 bill_clinton good morning please be seated hillary and al and tipper and i are delighted to welcome all of you here the members of the team the members of congress who are here we want to welcome marla messing the president of the women s world cup donna de varona the chairman of the women s world cup organizing committee thank you and yes give them a hand and we want to welcome this remarkable team they are all here but two today that s an amazing turnout give them a hand we all know this is both a moment of celebration and a moment of sadness for the united states and our thoughts and prayers are with the families of john kennedy and carolyn and lauren bessette it is at times like this that we really stop to recognize that as big and diverse as our country is we can come together as a national family we can come together in sorrow or in joy if it reflects the values that we honor most this is one of those moments the women s world cup champions here at the white house brought america to its feet had us screaming our lungs out with pride and joy they also didn t spare us the suspense but their triumph has surely become america s triumph we are all proud of them and we are thrilled to have them here at the white house today as someone who got to watch the game at the rose bowl who sat so far on the edge of my seat i actually almost fell out of the sky box i can t help recalling just a few moments of that game kristine lilly heading away what would have been a game winning goal for the other side she s not here but i have to mention michelle akers charging up and down until she collapsed from shear exhaustion the perfectly timed leap brianne scurry made to the left to block china s third penalty kick i might say i saw the last three games and i concluded that if i had to do it all over again i d like to be a goalie no pressure and of course brandi chastain s perfect shot right into the top right corner of the goal to win the world cup the day after the game a lot of us who aren t so young anymore were trying to search the whole cluttered attic of our memories to try to think if there was ever a time when there had been a more exciting climax to an athletic event that meant as much to so many i m not sure that in my lifetime there has been it s no wonder that so many young girls like stephanie howell here are following the lead of our world cup champions over a half million girls and young women have begun playing soccer in the eight years since america won the world cup in 1991 thanks to these women america s passion for women s soccer and women s sports in general is growing and we owe them a lot for that i also can t help mentioning briefly again the role that title ix has played in all this and for all of you who have supported it i thank you very much i can say this for the clintons and the gores the proud parents of daughters it is always a wonderful thing to see women finding new ways of expressing their god given talents and abilities because what we want for our children is what i think all americans want for all of our children whether they re girls or boys which is a chance to find their way and to follow their dreams these women have sent a signal loud and clear to millions and millions and millions of girls that they can follow their dreams and i thank them for that now you will be happy to know i have exercised some leadership today it s over 90 degrees out here and i cut my speech in half i don t know who s next i think hillary is next the first lady you have all been very patient in this warm hot sun i want to again say thank you all for coming thank you for supporting america s soccer team i want to thank the women on the team i would be remiss if i did not say also how profoundly impressed i was at the quality of their opposition you know when we had the last ncaa men s basketball championship and uconn beat duke the duke coach said something i think every coach would like to say he said we did not lose this game we were defeated the german team the chinese team the brazilian team they can honestly say that too and this is something happening all over the world for which i am very grateful and again i am very grateful that our women are leading the way thank you very much thank you dem wjclinton19 9 00a bill_clinton i should say joan is first of all an amazing person and her husband and her three children are here their son and daughter thanked me for getting them out of school today i just want the members of congress to know there are extended social benefits to these sort of i want to thank senators cleland mikulski and sarbanes for being here and representatives scarborough allen davis morella holmes norton cardin moran and cummings for coming all of these representatives in congress i think that s 11 and many more are truly responsible for this happy day and they worked in a genuine bipartisan spirit to produce this legislation i want to thank janice lachance and the others at the office of personnel management who worked so hard on it and the national association of retired federal employees the retired officers association the treasury employees union and others i m very honored to be signing this legislation today so near the end of my service because the first bill i signed as president was the family and medical leave law and since then some more than 25 million of our fellow citizens have taken time off from work to care for a child or an ill loved one without losing their job it s made a difference in america everywhere i go somebody comes up and mentions it to me even today we come in the same spirit to sign the long term care security act and over time this legislation will help more and more families to meet the challenge of caring for our parents and grandparents and others in our families that need long term care part of the long term care problem is what i affectionately call a high class problem we re living longer in 1900 the average american couldn t expect to live beyond 50 today the average american s life expectancy is 77 americans who live to be 65 have the highest life expectancy in the world they can expect to live to be almost 83 amazing as it sounds there are currently more than 65 000 living americans who are at least 100 years old that s enough to fill the houston astrodome and put two teams on the field and if we do it right before you know it some of those hundred year olds will be fit enough to play now these numbers are only going to keep rising as the baby boomers age by 2030 one out of every five americans will be 65 or older and there will be 9 million people over 85 i hope to be one of them we all know there are many joys to aging but unfortunately there are also the challenges to our good health our independence and sometimes a lifetime of savings the cost of nursing home care now tops 50 000 a year an extraordinary sum few families can afford even home care is expensive as you have just heard in terms of direct costs low income and enormous challenges to family time and parent time the legislation i m about to sign the long term care security act will help families plan ahead it will enable current and former federal employees military personnel and all their families to choose from a menu of quality long term care insurance options and purchase their choice at reduced group rates that means as many as 13 million people will now be able to plan for the future without fear of financial ruin should such care become necessary the legislation also will spur more american companies to offer employees the option of affordable high quality long term care insurance i believe that i believe this will lead into the creation of a market that will benefit people far beyond the reach of the employees and former employees that are covered the insurance industry has called this legislation a model for private sector employers and we thank them for their support as well we are also pleased that this groundbreaking legislation has as it must have had to pass enjoyed strong bipartisan backing further proof that not only do democrats and republicans both get old but when we put progress before partisanship we can tackle our toughest challenges today s signing represents an important step toward meeting the phenomenal demographic changes that we re facing in a humane and decent and i believe highly intelligent way it helps to make sure that the aging of america will be on balance a great blessing and not an overwhelming burden to our children and our grandchildren now as i said the long term care security act helps many families plan for the future enabling them to buy good insurance we believe it will help a lot of families beyond the reach of the law by creating markets which private sector employers will also be able to take advantage of for their employees but we know there are millions of people already chronically ill who can t buy insurance at any price and who do need help right now that s why i m so glad that joan and her family joined us here today in homes all across america 7 million of our fellow citizens are like the madarases seven million are caring for loved ones primarily elderly loved ones sometimes children or other close family members who have disabilities for some it is a joy a chance to share memories over a cup of coffee a chance to share the rhythm and cycles of life but for others it also includes constant labor or watching the shroud of alzheimer s transform a soul mate into a stranger as happened to an uncle and an aunt of mine these are burdens that people shoulder every day and as you heard unapologetically proudly loyal to their families understanding that loving someone for a lifetime means taking the bad along with the good but the rest of us ought to lighten their load and we ought to recognize that these simple extraordinary sacrifices rooted in love and loyalty are also an exceptional boon to society for whatever their cost to these families the cost to society is far less than it would be if they had to give up and put their loved ones in institutionalized care so if we were to pass our 3 000 tax credit to provide chronically ill americans and their families with desperately needed financial relief it would be over the long run less expensive than paying the full cost of institutional care for those who have to give up because the burden becomes too heavy this 27 billion initiative eventually could cover up to 60 percent of the cost the families provide incur in providing long term care but as i said it s only a small percentage of the cost that would be involved if the families had to give up providing that care it s the kind of tax cut our families most need it will improve the lives of those who need it the most it will make us a better country because we will fully live up to our professed faith and support for families after five years of waiting i hope we can also finally reauthorize the older americans act it has helped for more than 35 years millions of seniors to lead more independent lives by funding vital everyday basics like transportation and meals on wheels and i hope we will reauthorize it and strengthen it by funding our caregivers initiative as well to provide families with the information counseling and support services they need to sustain their selfless missions finally i hope that we will succeed in passing a voluntary affordable medicare drug benefit this fall which also will be a great help to families many of the people providing long term care are doing it for people with extraordinary medicine requirements studies show that seniors who lack this kind of coverage are twice as likely to be admitted to nursing homes as those who have it so again this is not only the humane and decent thing to do it s also common sense it s good for family ties and good for economics we have a golden opportunity as so many of our fellow citizens move into their golden years to meet the challenges of the aging of america we have never had a better opportunity to do it because of our prosperity and our surplus so i hope that we will continue to build on the spirit embodied in this bill today the long term care security act is worth celebrating it is worth celebrating for what it does for the indirect benefits it will have for people who are not covered by it but whose employers will be able to get this kind of group insurance and for what it says about our values and what we can do in the future i hope that we ll take every opportunity to build on it and now i d like to ask all the folks on the stage with me to gather round and i ll sign the bill thank you very much dem wjclinton19 9 00b bill_clinton you know i have a lot of interest in this race heidi was attorney general i was attorney general and i was governor for a dozen years it s a wonderful job really matters whether we have a few more democratic governors this year more than ever i think women should be elected to public office but the main thing i want to say is you ve got dorgan conrad and pomeroy and you all know how strong i ve been for diversity i just want anyone who doesn t look like a spy during the cold war representing north dakota i m convinced that sometime years ago when the republicans were winning all the races these brilliant guys made a pact and said listen guys if we all have short hair if we re thin if we wear glasses we ain t going to scare nobody and we can do whatever we want to do and look what can i say it worked i never carried north dakota it was great but i think they re really stepping out here i mean they re really stepping out now i ll be brief and serious the two things should always go together one of the greatest things about this country is its genuine diversity going beyond even race and religion and all the things we talk about in washington to the way people make a living off the land the way they organize themselves in their communities the difference in what it s like to live in a place like north dakota where heidi can invite you all to come and mean it and it s so big we could all be missed if we showed up and a place where nobody s got any elbow room and the genius of our system is that if we all do our part the country works better central to that is what happens in all these states and north dakota too is growing more diverse and more faced with the challenges of the 21st century and i can just tell you i have an enormous amount of respect for heidi heitkamp and i know how important it is that we have good governors i ll give you just one example i could give you 20 but after she by saying i talked an hour and a half in north dakota i m not going to do that i started to bring a cup of coffee up here too and i couldn t but anyway i ll give you one example we passed in the balanced budget bill in 1997 with a bipartisan vote in both houses big majorities the largest expansion in federally funded health care for children since medicaid the children s health insurance program and we knew that the number and circumstances of the children were different from state to state so we reached a bipartisan agreement that instead of just expanding medicaid we would allow the states to build and design these programs and enroll the children now there s enough money in that program to enroll 5 million kids and if the program really identified all the people who were eligible it would also picked up another 2 million or 3 millon kids who could be served by medicaid there is a drastic difference in how well the different states have done in identifying and enrolling their children it matters who the governor is in a state i ll give you another example under the leadership of secretary riley over the last seven years we have cut federal regulations on states and local school districts by two thirds but we have increased the focus of federal spending on certain standards so that for example all the schools all the states that get federal funds have to have some standards have to identify failing schools and have to have strategies to try to turn them around as some of you know i ve tried to get federal funding tied a little tighter to say you ve got to turn them around shut them down or give the kids some other alternative but already we have required them to identify failing schools now some states have said so what some school districts have said so what but i was in an elementary school in western kentucky the other day that was one of their failing schools three years ago that s now one of the 20 best schools in the state lots of poor kids lots of problems it worked i was in a school in harlem the other day to take a totally different culture that two years ago had 80 percent of the kids reading and doing math below grade level elementary school today 76 percent are reading and doing math at or above grade level in two years now if you do it on a one of the biggest problems with education reform is that no one has ever done it systematically every problem in american education has been solved by somebody somewhere places like north dakota have generally done very well because they have time and space enough to give everybody the personal attention they needed but they will have a lot of these challenges too and i m telling you it really matters who is governor no one has ever succeeded in systematically doing what teachers and principals do every day in the most difficult circumstances creating miracles all over this country it s never been done in any state in a systematic way but some are done much better than others it matters who the governor is and those are only two examples it matters economically it matters in terms of the social services it matters in terms of how the elderly are treated and especially those that get nursing home care and what about the people who are going to be living in boarding homes and what about the people that are going to be you re going to see the most unbelievable explosion of living options for elderly and disabled people as we are able to keep more disabled people alive and functioning and doing well and more elderly people live longer that you can imagine and a lot of it i don t care what we do at the national level and who s the president and what the congress does it will matter who the governor is i just the first time i ever met her i thought she was great i wanted to take her home to meet hillary and keep her there for a couple weeks and she had other obligations she is an extraordinary woman you did a good thing coming here and giving her money today and if we all keep doing it i think she ll win in november thank you very much dem wjclinton19 9 00c bill_clinton thank you very much president arias first let me thank you for your presence here tonight and your remarkable leadership and kerry i want to join this great throng in telling you how grateful we are that you have undertaken this project with such passion and commitment i know that in spite of the fact that half the seats tonight are filled by your family there are a lot of people here who feel just as strongly about you as andrew and ethel and your mother in law matilda and senator kennedy and the others who are here you are an astonishing person and we thank you for amplifying the voices of the human rights defenders who have honored us by their presence here tonight these men and women have carried on against unimaginable obstacles knowing the truth once spoken can never be completely erased that hope once sparked can never be fully extinguished they have seen injustice aided by apathy in spite of all the nice things you said about me tonight a full half dozen of them were prodding me along tonight before i came out here to do even better and i like that a lot they have carried on knowing that even a single act of courage can be contagious and their courage and that of so many others around the world has indeed proved contagious more people live in freedom today than at any time in human history and in 1999 more people around the world won the right to vote and choose their leaders than was in even the case in 1989 the year the berlin wall fell from bosnia to croatia to kosovo we are no longer struggling to stop crimes against humanity but instead working steadily to bring perpetrators to justice and to create the conditions of humane living from south africa to chile people are confronting the injustices of the past so that their children will not have to relive them and all over the world people finally are recognizing as hillary said in beijing that women s rights are human rights yet for all the brave work that is captured in this magnificent book and that will be honored tonight freedom s struggle is far from over and i think it is appropriate tonight that we all ask ourselves at this magic moment of prosperity and peace for our country what are our responsibilities to advance the struggle how can we use this global age to serve human rights not to undermine them globalization is not just about economics it has given us a global human rights movement as well whether activists are fighting for press freedom in ivory coast or the rights of children in america they can talk to each other learn from each other and know they are not alone indeed maybe the most important lesson of this evening is to say to all of them whom we honor you are not alone global economic integration can if done right make it harder for governments to control people s lives in the wrong way information technology can be one of the most liberating forces humanity has ever known twenty years ago it was a great victory if we could smuggle a handful of mimeograph machines to dissidents in poland or russia when i went to the soviet union 30 years ago young people would come up to me on the street and try to figure out if there was some way i could smuggle a book back in to them now hardly a government on earth in spite of all their best efforts can stop their much more technologically wise young people from using the internet to get knowledge from halfway around the world but for freedom to prevail we need to do more than open markets hook up the world to cnn and hope dictators are driven out by coms real change still depends upon real people on brave men and women willing to fight for good causes when the chance of success is low and the danger of persecution is great men and women like those we honor tonight globalization on the whole i think will prove to be a very good thing but it is not a human rights policy to advance freedom and justice we have to support and defend their champion today the defenders of human rights need our support in serbia where the democratic opposition is stronger than ever heading into critical elections this weekend mr milosevic has stepped up his repression surely he is capable of stealing the election but if he does we must make sure all of us not just the americans and certainly not just the american government that he loses what legitimacy he has left in the world and the forces of change will grow even stronger we must keep going until the people of serbia can live normal lives and their country can come back home to europe the defenders of human rights need our support in burma as well their only weapons are words reason and the brave example of aung san suu kyi but these are fearful weapons to the ruling regime so last week they confined her again hoping the world would not hear or speak out but voices were raised and her struggle continues those who rule burma should know from this place tonight with all these people we honor all of us will watch carefully what happens and you can only regain your place in the world when you regain the trust of your people and respect their chosen leaders in these and so many other places those who fight for human rights deserve our support and our absolute conviction that their efforts will not be in vain all human rights defenders are told in the beginning they are naive they are not making a difference they are wasting their time some have even been cruelly told they are advancing some sort of western cultural notions of freedom that have no place in their country they are all laughed at until one day their causes triumph and everyone calls them heroes the same has been said of almost every human rights policy our nation has pursued in the past kerry talked about east timor a few years ago how many people would have predicted it could become independent a dozen years ago how many people believed the baltic states would be free but all those people who came out for captive nations week year in and year out and were literally ridiculed in the 60s and 70s would be right and all the hard headed realists would be wrong the men and women we honor never gave in to repression fatigue to cynicism or to realism which justifies the unacceptable and neither should america hina jilani who has worked for women and human rights in pakistan and is with us tonight said i never have a sense of futility because what we do is worth doing if you believe that every person matters that every person has a story and a voice that deserves to be heard then you must believe that what all human rights defenders do everywhere is worth doing let us never develop a sense of futility for the people we honor tonight have proved the wisdom of martin luther king s timeless adage that the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice thank you very much dem wjclinton19 9 94 bill_clinton good morning ladies and gentlemen let me before we sit for breakfast let me just make a couple of points very briefly first of all our deepest thanks as a nation should go to president carter general powell and senator nunn they have had about four hours sleep in the last two or three nights they have worked very hard and they have i think made a major contribution toward helping us find a peaceful solution to the problem in haiti i also want to say to you i think that a significant measure of credit goes to the united states military forces for their preparation their readiness and their imminence and finally let me say that we have this morning the first peaceful introduction of our forces there to begin to carry out the mandate of the united nations so it has been so far a good day thanks in no small measure to the extraordinary labors of this delegation i know that you join me in thanking them for all they ve done we re going to have a press conference in just a minute so there s no point in having two thank you dem wjclinton19 9 96a bill_clinton thank you wow thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you way back there in the back can you hear oh thank you for waiting for us thank you for making us feel so welcome in this stunningly beautiful community what a wonderful place you have to live i want to thank right here at the outset the people who have provided our music the r a long and mark morris high school bands thank you bands thank you and the checkers thank you and i understand that the r a long football team is undefeated and down here somewhere congratulations thank you i d also like to say a special word of thanks to axel swanson the student body president at r a long now you just think about it he got up here in front of this big crowd and unlike me he doesn t do this all the time and i thought he did a terrific job and i was really proud of him you know when i was his age i had a chance to shake hands with president kennedy it made an impression on me i never forgot but i was looking at him today and i can tell you that today he looks a lot more like a future president than i did then i liked it and i hope he does very well congratulations axel i want to thank brian baird for presenting himself for congress ladies and gentlemen it s hard to run for congress these days it s a hard and arduous task and much to my dismay many of these races have become so intensely negative and so difficult often difficult to get idealistic young people to present themselves he has and i am confident he would do a find job representing you i wish him well and i hope you will wish him well and help him do well and to gary locke let me say i was so impressed with the race that you and your other fellow democrats ran in that primary you won a hard fought clean honest progressive forward looking race you can be proud of the race you just ran and the race you are now running and i hope you folks will help to make gary locke the next governor of the state of washington to keep moving forward into the 21st century you know we ve had a wonderful day today and i know we re a little late but you wouldn t believe the crowds we ve seen all along the road and everyplace we ve stopped we began in tacoma where i believe we had over 25 000 people we went to koy and yelm and tenino and centralia and then of course we were just in kelso and we crossed the bridge anybody here from kelso you could have fooled me i thought the whole town was along the highway back there and i want to say to all of you you cannot imagine what a source of encouragement it is to hillary and tipper and to al and me to see you out here loving your country believing in its future determined to play a role in its future four years ago when i came to washington state and the people of this state were so good in voting for me and giving me your electoral votes i asked you to take us on faith i had never worked in washington d c the other washington before i d been a governor for 12 years who ran for president because i didn t like what was happening to my country i didn t like the high unemployment the low job growth the stagnant wages the unaddressed social challenges i didn t like the fact that we were growing more divided and that people were becoming ever more cynical about their political system i didn t think we became the greatest country in the world and lasted for over 220 years by having those kind of problems and those kind of attitudes and i wanted to change i wanted to lead this country into the 21st century with the american dream alive and well for every single american willing to work for it with this country coming together bridging our divisions and mutual respect not dividing and with our country still the strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world and i can tell you that after four years we re in better shape than we were four years ago and we re on the right track to the 21st century i welcome i welcome this debate with our opponents over the next six weeks and five days because it will be a clear picture of starkly different approaches you could hardly find two different platforms two different programs two different records that were more opposite in their views of what our purposes are as a people and what our role in washington is you see we really do believe that it takes a village we don t think you re on your own we think here longview looks like a pretty good village to us we think you help each other to make the most of your own lives we really do believe we must build a bridge to the future we can t build a bridge to the past we really do believe that at this moment in history if we do the right things if we build the right kind of bridge we can make it possible for more people than ever before in history to live out their dreams and live up to their god given potential but we have to do the right things it is not an accident that the unemployment rate is down that the deficit has been reduced by 60 percent that we have an all time high in exports from washington state and the united states that america s auto industry is number one again that we have 10 5 million jobs that we have 10 million people about to get a pay increase when the minimum wage goes up on october the 1st that is not an accident it is not an accident finally finally we passed a meaningful piece of health care reform that says if you have to change jobs or if someone in your family gets sick you still can t be denied health insurance it s long past time when we should have done that it is not an accident that we made every small business in america eligible to get a tax cut if they invest more in their business to hire more people to grow the business to make america stronger if they take out health insurance we made it easier for them to take out retirement and to protect their own retirement and their employees when they move from job to job that didn t happen by accident it s not an accident that 40 million american retirees and workers have more secure pensions than they did four years ago it s not an accident that tens of millions of us are breathing cleaner air that we have safer drinking water standards higher standards for food safety that we have saved the national parks from an ill advised attempt to sell some of them off that this environment is cleaner that we ve cleaned up more toxic waste sites in three years than were cleaned up in the previous 12 none of that is an accident it happened because we changed the direction of this country and we re on the right track to the 21st century it is not an accident that the crime rate has gone down for four years in a row it is not an accident that finally juvenile crime has started to go down it is not an accident that the welfare roles have gone down by 1 8 million that child support collections have gone up by 40 percent and that there are 1 million fewer crime victims in the united states today that is not an accident it happened because we worked together together to create the conditions and to give you the tools to make the most of your own lives and now we have to finish building that bridge to the 21st century i came here today to tell you that if you will work with us for six weeks and five days if you ll talk to your friends your neighbors your family members your co workers and you ll help us build that bridge then we ll give you four years in which we will roar into the 21st century with opportunity responsibility and a stronger american community alive for all the people of this country will you help us build the bridge my fellow americans i want to build a bridge to the 21st century in which we have the finest education system in the world and every classroom in every school in america is hooked up to the information superhighway to the internet to the world wide web and if you re not a computer expert i ll tell you what it means it means for the first time in history four years from now if we do our jobs the children in the most remote rural school districts the children in the poorest inner city school districts the children in the small towns and the rich towns and the middle class towns all of our kids for the first time ever will have access to the same learning in the same time at the same level of quality for the first time ever will you help us do that i want to build a bridge to the 21st century in which we make college educations available to all americans who want to go whether they re young or middle aged or older if they need to go back and get more education they ought to be able to do it and i want to do it in three ways first more people saving more with iras and then you can withdraw from them without any tax penalty if you re going to use it to educate yourselves or your children or deal with health care or buy a first time home second we want to make two years of education after high school as universal in four years from now as a high school diploma is today every american we know now needs more education and here s how we re going to do that we re going to let you deduct from your tax bill dollar for dollar the cost of the average tuition at the typical community college in the united states just take it off your taxes go back to community college get that degree move this country forward third we want to give you a deduction of up to 10 000 a year for the cost of tuition at any college any place in this country whether it s undergraduate school graduate school a special program you name it if you have to go back and get more education and training to do better with your lives even if you ve been out of school for years you ought to be able to do it and we ll support you in doing it the second thing i want to do is to keep this economy going we can have tax cuts my fellow americans but they have to be paid for and they ought to be targeted to education to child rearing to buying that first time home to dealing with medical emergencies you ought not to have to pay a tax if you sell your home and you ve got a gain on it because it s appreciated in value over time but we ought to pay for those things we have to continue our work to balance the budget why because we have brought the deficit down by 60 percent that may not mean much to you every time i leave washington some political expert says now mr president don t go out there in the country and start talking about reducing the deficit people only care about it when the economy is in the tank when the economy is doing well it bores them to tears here s why you shouldn t be bored if we bring the deficit down and we borrow less money just to pay the government s bills then interest rates go down for you that means a lower home mortgage payment a lower car payment a lower credit card payment for business it means lower loan rates which means they can borrow more money hire more people grow this economy and take us into the 21st century we have to balance the budget we have to do it we can t have a tax cut so big we undermine the economic recovery of the country what good would it do you to see this deficit blown up you get a tax cut on one hand and turn around and have it taken away on the other hand with a higher mortgage payment a higher credit card payment a higher car payment and fewer jobs in america we got to keep this economy growing until everybody that wants a good job has one we need to keep going will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century i want you to help us build a bridge to the 21st century where we have security for people we have to continue to bring the crime rate down i am proud of the fact it s come down four years in a row and i can t help but noting that right here in washington state a lot of congressional districts changed hands and went to the other party in 1994 because the people in the other party came out to small towns and rural areas in washington and they said the president and his party voted for that awful crime bill and they re going to take your guns away you need a doctor over there send a medic over there right back there we ll be right there just keep your hands held up we ve got the doctor back there right back there now remember this in 1994 i remember them i remember them going into all these little towns and saying why the president voted to take your gun away the democrats in congress did that crime bill is terrible it s not going to do anything to bring down crime well now we know four years later we have four years of a declining crime rate we re half way home in putting 100 000 police on the street we didn t take a single hunters rifle away from him in washington state or my home state of arkansas everybody s still going into the woods with the same weapons they had but 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers lost their right to buy a handgun under the brady bill we were right they were wrong they were wrong about that and we need to keep going we should oppose their efforts to cut short the 100 000 police commitment when you put more police officers on the street knowing the neighbors of the people getting to know the kids encouraging young people to stay off drugs and out of gangs and out of trouble when people work in partnership they can drop the crime rate dramatically i have been to community after community after community where people gave up on it but where the streets are now safe and i don t want to stop until every american feels safe in their homes on their streets in their schools in their places of work we can do this and i want you to help me build that bridge to the 21st century let me also say that in every election people always talk about family values well our administration has tried to value families tipper gore has worked for 20 years to try to create conditions in which people could raise children without have them subject to destructive influences from our larger culture the first lady has worked for over 20 years to try to help improve the conditions of child rearing and health care for our young children we were the first administration in history that took on the tobacco history and said it is illegal to sell cigarettes to young people no more advertising marketing and sales to them it is wrong the first bill i signed was the family and medical leave law it said simply you can t be fired if you have to take a little time off for the birth of a child or the illness of a child or a parent now this is a classic example of our differences my opponent led the fight against that law he says today we made a terrible mistake to pass it that it was anti business well if it was anti business how come we got 10 5 million more jobs and record numbers of new small businesses it wasn t anti business people do better at work if they know they re doing right by their kids at home that s what i mean by a village a bridge we can all walk across and i d like to see the family and medical leave law expanded just a little bit to say that people shouldn t lose their jobs either they ought to have a little time off to go to regular conferences with their children s teachers and to be able to take their kids and their parents to the doctor when they need to go it will make us stronger it will be a good thing for the economy the last thing i want to say is the vice president and i worked very hard to prove that you could grow the economy and preserve the environment and that in the end you can t grow the economy unless you preserve the environment i told you a few minutes ago we cleaned up a lot of toxic waste dumps that s the good news the bad news is 10 million american children still live within four miles of a toxic waste site if you give us four more years we ll get rid of the two thirds worst ones 500 of them so we can say america s children are growing up next to parks like this not next to poison that s a big part of our bridge to the 21st century now i want to ask you again i want you to take the next six weeks and five days go out to your friends and neighbors without regard to their party and say let s have a talk about what we want america to look like in the 21st century let s have a talk about what we want america to look like when our children are our age let s have a talk about this election because we re electing the last president of the 20th century and the first president of the 21st century and let s have a talk about how we can build that bridge big enough wide enough and strong enough so we can all go marching across it together to the best days america has ever had thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton19 9 96b bill_clinton thank you hello vancouver thank you for being here in such wonderful numbers thank you for waiting for us we have had a wonderful wonderful trip all the way from tacoma we started this morning in the rain there were about 25 000 people there and then the sun came out and then the sun went in and the moon came out and we came to beautiful vancouver thank you bless you thank you gary locke for being with us and good luck we need you i hope you ll help him become the next governor of the state of washington and thank you brian baird for taking on this brave fight for congress congratulations on your great vote on tuesday stick with him folks this young man can make it and he ll represent you well hillary and tipper and al and i we ve had a wonderful visit in washington state it s great to be back i was just up the road woodland where i came when the flood came you know and i saw some of the people i met there i was so moved by the way they responded to the flood by what they did that i wrote about them in the book i put out this year as part of telling the american people what i wanted to do for the next four years and i have to tell you when i go around to these communities in your wonderful state i see all of the children coming out full of hope for the future i see all of you come out determined to play a constructive role in this election it is so different from the way it was beginning to be four years ago when we had a stagnant economy rising crime a more divided country and increasing cynicism today we re on the right track for the 21st century and we need to stay right on it my fellow americans this election in six weeks and five days is an election for the last president of the 20th century and the first president of the 21st century but by far more important it s an election that will shape what america will be like when our children are our age the questions i try to ask and answer every day are first what do we have to do to keep the american dream alive for every american every boy and girl willing to work for it second what do we have to do to keep our country coming together we re becoming increasingly diverse and different how can we come together in mutual respect to build the bonds of strong communities to make a strong nation how can we beat the odds and not become like so many other countries that are being torn apart by their differences their religious their racial their ethnic their tribal differences that s not america we need to be a strong community just like this is a strong community and finally how can we keep on leading the world for peace and freedom and prosperity we ve worked on that for four years with a simple strategy opportunity for every american responsibility from every american and a real effort to build our community together now i tell you yes we re better off than we were four years ago and it wasn t an accident and yes there are big differences between our opponents the nominee for president senator dole mr gingrich and all of them we fought over many different issues that we honestly disagreed on they said if our budget plan passed it would bring on a recession and increase the deficit that s what they said well four years later we ve reduced the deficit four years in a row for the first time since the 1840s we have 10 5 million new jobs our auto industry is number one we have record exports record small businesses i think we were right we re moving in the right direction we ll balance the budget if you ll give us four more years there s been a lot of talk a lot of talk about crime well folks you never heard a politician who was for crime did you i never heard a politician give a speech saying i really wish we had more crime of course we re all against crime but what i found when i came to washington is we d had six long years of talks and nothing but hot air and nothing to show for it we passed a crime bill that our opponents led the opposition to to put 100 000 police on the street to have a three strikes and you re out law to have much tougher punishment to ban 19 kinds of assault weapons to protect hunting and sporting weapons we passed the brady bill over their opposition what s happened four years in a row we re halfway home on 100 000 police we stopped them when they tried to repeal the 100 000 police we took the assault weapons off the street 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers didn t get handguns but all the washington hunters still have their hunting rifles i believe we were right and they were wrong and we need to keep on going in that direction we ve moved almost 2 million people off the welfare rolls increased child support collections by 40 percent there are 1 million fewer crime victims in america today we are moving in the right direction as the vice president said while growing the economy we ve worked hard to make the air cleaner the drinking water and the food safer to protect our natural resources and to expand them folks we re moving in the right direction and i want to ask you to help me build a bridge to the 21st century where we keep cleaning up the environment where we keep bringing crime down if we bring it down eight years in a row instead of four it ll be about low enough so we ll actually be surprised when we see a crime on the evening news at night and our children will be safe on the streets i want you to help me to keep building strong families one of the most interesting issues of this election is that the first bill i signed when i became president was a bill again which was opposed by my opponent and speaker gingrich they led the opposition to it the family and medical leave law they said it was bad for business bad for business to say you could have a little time off when your baby is born or your parent s sick without losing your job we did it twelve million families have taken advantage of it and 10 5 million jobs later we know it was good for business america is stronger when we can raise our children and work and succeed at the same time so i want you to help me do better i d like to see people be able to take a little time off to go to their children s regular meetings with their teachers the parent teacher conferences and take their folks to medical appointments and we ll be stronger because of it will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century i want to build a bridge to the 21st century where we keep this economy growing where we expand trade even more washington state because we ve had over 200 separate trade agreements the people of washington are selling more airplanes more computer software and apples from washington for the first time all the way in japan we need more of that and i will give you more of it we need to balance the budget and we can cut taxes but we only can cut the taxes that we can pay for balancing the budget why because when we bring this deficit down it keeps interest rates down it means your car payment your credit card payment your house payments are lower it means businesses can borrow money to hire people to grow the economy we have to continue we cannot have a tax cut that s so big that we have to have the government start borrowing more money again to drive up your interest rates somebody gives you that kind of a tax cut to go take it right back out in higher interest rates for credit cards car payments and home mortgages and businesses won t be growing again so yes let s cut taxes for education for child rearing for medical care for buying that first time home let s don t charge people a tax on the gain when they sell their homes but let s pay for it in a balanced budget let s do that finally let me remind you what is at stake we also have to balance the budget without undermining our commitments to education to the environment to medicaid s commitment to little children to the seniors in nursing homes the families with disabilities most of them middle class families without creating a two tier system of medicare that will be unfair to our seniors we can do that folks without walking away from research i want you to think about this we have to balance the budget but we do not have to cut head start we do not have to raise taxes on the poorest working people we do not have to do it in ways that allow corporations to raid their workers pension funds we don t have to do it in a way that abolishes the safe and drug free school program the americorps program gets rid of direct student loans which have helped millions and millions of young people in this country they were wrong our way of balancing the budget is better and i hope you ll support it will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century finally most important of all most important of all we ve got to create a bridge that all of our children can walk across that gives every american without regard to their age access to a lifetime of educational opportunity and i just want to mention two things number one i want to see every classroom and library in america hooked up to the internet by the year 2000 hooked up to the world wide web i want to make sure that children in small towns children in inner city neighborhoods children in native american tribes on reservations children everywhere for the first time in the history of this country have access to the same learning in the same way at the same level of quality in the same time everybody it has never happened we can do it will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century and the second thing i want to say is i want you to help me make a college education available to every single american citizen who needs it and we propose to do it with three simple steps first let families save in an ira an individual retirement account and then withdraw from it tax free if they re spending the money on a college education for their children or themselves second second let s make a commitment that by the year 2000 at least two years of education after high school a community college diploma will be just as normal just as usual just as universal as a high school diploma is today we can do it here s how i propose to let you take a credit just take it off your taxes dollar for dollar for the cost of tuition at the typical community college in america you go find the college reduce your taxes by the tuition that way we ll pay for everybody who needs it to go to community college and we can do it and balance the budget and third third for people who want to go on to the four year colleges or to graduate school of any age people that were working and have to back i think we should allow you a deduction on your taxes of up to 10 000 for the cost of college tuition every year will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century folks there are six weeks and five days to this election i have done everything i could do to make this an election of ideas not insults to stop the old fashioned washington politics of dividing people there was a sign at our last rally that said we don t need division we need vision and i believe that we need more of that so i want to ask you will you take some time every day that you possibly can between now and the election to reach out to your family members your friends your parents your children your cousins your uncles your aunts your coworkers the people you go bowling with the people you ate lunch with and talk to them about what they want america to look like when we start that new century i m telling you there is no nation in the world as well positioned as the united states for the 21st century it is there for us if we build the right bridge our best days are ahead if you will help us build that bridge to tomorrow will you do it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton2 10 02 bill_clinton thank you i am trying to imagine what in the world i am doing here i have never been to blackpool before i had never been to the mcdonald s in blackpool before i like the city i like the weather and i understand i may have brought it if so i will take credit for any good thing i can these days i want you to know i am honored to be here i did very much enjoy the opportunity of touring around the city last night i did like the mcdonald s i did like the people that came up and said hello i welcome the invitation and i thank you for the warm applause when i came in i accepted when prime minister blair asked me to come because he and cherie are old friends because i love this country and feel deeply indebted to it it gave me two of the best years of my life and i think my daughter is getting two of the best years of her life here as well i am sort of getting used to being the spouse of an elected official instead of one but it is flattering when someone who no longer has a shred of power is asked what he thinks so i thought i would show up and say it is also fun to be in a place where our crowd is still in office and i am glad to be here but the real reason i came here today is because politics matters it matters to the people whom you represent and because we live in an interdependent world what you do here matters to all of us across the globe i have just come here from a trip to africa which provided me with all kinds of fresh evidence of the importance of politics i spent a week working on issues that are central to the mission i follow now that i am no longer in office and to the future of africa increasing economic opportunity for the continent s poor fighting hiv and aids building bridges of reconciliation between races tribes and religions supporting still new democracies time and again i was reminded of the importance of politics to the lives of ordinary people in ghana where a new president is working with a great peruvian economist hernando de soto to bring the assets of poor people in their homes their houses their farms their businesses into the legal system so they can be collateral for loans and they can grow their own families incomes and the nation s income where i met a woman who gave me a shirt made in a factory of 400 ghanaians that came into being because of the trade bill i signed in 2000 in nigeria where decades of corruption and poverty amidst all that oil wealth had led some of the states in desperation to adopt shariya law under which a young mother of three was recently sentenced to death by stoning for bearing her last child out of wedlock and where i plead for her life in rwanda where the government established a reconciliation village welcomed me with amazing evidence of new beginnings in the aftermath of the terrible genocide just eight years ago which claimed the lives of over 10 per cent of the country s population i met a tutsi widow in that village whose husband died in the slaughter standing right next to her neighbor a hutu woman whose husband is in prison awaiting trial for participating in the slaughter i saw hutu and tutsi children dancing together in a ceremonial dance for me for what the governor said was the very first time since 1994 these kids were smiling again they were young again they were beginning to trust each other again because of a decision made by the government to establish a village and to welcome them all to come and live together in mozambique i saw the president mr chissano struggling to fight aids overcome the effects of massive flooding and build a modern economy in south africa i met with university students who are looking past all their problems with confidence towards a multi racial democratic future i saw president mbeki leading the continent to adopt africa s very first home grown economic plan called nepad it is a third way document because it calls on the developed world and africa to work in genuine partnership and assume mutual responsibilities and i saw nelson mandela 84 years young still getting me to do things he wants me to do on this particular day he got me involved in his effort to challenge young people to take personal responsibility for reversing the aids epidemic through prevention and engaging in more citizen service so politics matters and even if you are a former president there are some things that we can accomplish for the common good only through the common instrument of our elected officials it was a wonderful trip and i had such a good time i asked one of my traveling companions to come with me today kevin spacey who is over here since humanity came out of africa eons ago the whole history of our species has been marked by human beings attempts to meet their needs and fulfill their hopes confront their dangers and fears through both conflict and cooperation we have come to define the meaning of our lives in relationship to other people we derive positive meanings through positive associations with our groups and we give ourselves and we give ourselves importance also by negative reference to those who are not part of us there has never been a person i do not think of any age and i bet it applies to everyone in this room who has not said at least once in your life to yourself if not out loud well i may not be perfect but thank god i am not one of them that has basically been the pattern of life since people first came out of caves and clans we have grown ever more steadily inter dependent and wider and wider in our circle of relations and that has required us constantly to redefine the notion of who was us and who is them yet the prospect for a truly global community of people working together in peace with shared responsibilities for a shared future was not institutionalized until a little less than 60 years ago with the creation of the united nations and the issuance of the universal declaration of human rights such a community did not even become a possibility until the berlin wall fell in 1989 the history of civilization as we know with it righting and urban life is just a little over 6 000 years old human being have been on the planet depending on how you read the evidence somewhere between 50 000 and 100 000 years i say that to begin on a note of optimism the world has a whole lot of problems but we have not had a chance to bring it together for very long you should be upbeat and grateful that your party is in power at a time that you have a chance to make all the difference in the world so here we are in this interdependent world of open borders easy travel mass migration universal access to information and technology drenched in global media i will just give you a stunning example that occurred to me on the way over here when kevin and i walked over to the hotel and got into our van to ride here his cell phone rang and two friends of ours were calling from paris to say they had just watched us walk out of the hotel in blackpool and how nice we looked so i said well it s a slow day for news in paris but it is a good example of our interdependent world this world has brought great benefits to the british people and the american people and to people everywhere who are prepared to make the most of it and have the right values the right vision and do the right things but there is a big problem with our interdependent world it does not include a lot of us yet half the world s people live on less than 2 a day a million people live on less than a dollar a day including people in three of the five nations i visited on my recent trip to africa a billion people are hungry every night a billion and a half people never have any clean water 130 million kids never go to school 10 million children die every year of preventable childhood diseases even though overall life expectancy is up and infant mortality down even in the developing world one in four people this year who perish will die of aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea and it is not just the economic health and education divides there are large numbers of people who simply do not have the values and vision necessary to be part of an interdependent world because they think their differences whether they are religious or political or racial or tribal or ethnic are more important than our common humanity they believe the truth they have justifies their imposition of that truth on other people even if it takes them to the death of innocence 9 11 what happened to us in september 2001 is a microcosmic but painful and powerful example of the fact that we live in an interdependent world that is not yet an integrated global community which means that people who do not share the same values and vision and interest still have access to open borders easy travel technology and information and the al qaeda network used that to murder 3 100 people in the united states including over several hundred muslims and over 200 british citizens among those from over 70 countries who perished what does that tell you about the time in which we live that whether you are british or american or some other nationality the number one task of the world today is to move from interdependence which can be good and bad to an integrated global community in which there is a shared future shared responsibilities shared prosperity and most important shared values one that says hey these differences are interesting it would be boring if we were all the same britain and america are more interesting countries than they were 30 years ago because they are more diverse but the only way we can really live together is if we say that the celebration of our differences requires us to say that our common humanity matters more there are a lot of obstacles in the road towards that kind of world there are terrorists there are tyrants there are weapons of mass destruction there are all these people who are not part of our prosperity and there are a lot of people on our side who think that we can for ever claim for ourselves what we deny to others there are a lot of obstacles in the way but let us be realistic none of you believe that we will ever be completely defeated by terrorists we will not allow ourselves to be defeated by tyrants with weapons of mass destruction that will not happen but we could reduce the future that we can build for our children if we respond to the challenges in the wrong way whatever we do we have to have a care for the security of our nation the character of our people and the future of our children we must respond in a way that is consistent with the larger obligation we all have to build a more integrated global community it means among other things of course we have to fight terrorists but we also have to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists of course we have to stand against weapons of mass destruction but if we can we have to do it in the context of building the international institutions that in the end we will have to depend upon to guarantee the peace and security of the world and the human rights of all people everywhere when the prime minister spoke i was in london still and i watched it on television as i have most of this conference let me just get off the script here by the way and say i love these party conferences i wish we had them in america because every year you get to have your say the tories get to have theirs they are widely covered and i get to know about people i would not know about otherwise doing things that i would not know i saw your speakers this morning expressing compassion about education and the rights of working people i saw gordon brown s speech which thoroughly and forever disabused the conservatives of the notion that the center left cannot be troubled or trusted to manage the economy and when the prime minister spoke yesterday i thought to myself i hope i ll be able to give a speech like that when i grow up it was just unbelievable so it is a good thing you are here and that you can send your message out but i want to talk about the larger context the challenges that you and i share the obligation to have everything we do contribute to building an integrated global community out of the interdependent world in which we find ourselves you clapped when i made that comment about the united nations and i am glad you did but one of the challenges we face today is that all the international institutions in which we place such hope are still becoming they are still forming we have only really had a chance to make them work for a little over a decade the european union is not what most people think and at least i hope it will be in five 10 or 20 years it is becoming the united nations is not what i hope it will be in five 10 or 20 years there are still people who vote in the united nations based on the sort of old fashioned national self interest views they held in the cold war or even long before so that not every vote reflects the clear and present interests of the world and the direction we are going i take it almost everybody in this room supports what prime minister blair and i did in kosovo it was a clear and present emergency you had a million people being driven from their homes but in the end even though we had all the muslim world for it and most of the developing nations for it all of nato for it we could not get a un resolution because of the historic ties of the serbs to the russians so we went in anyway and as soon as the conflict was over the russians came in and did a very responsible job participating with the united states in an international un sanction peacekeeping environment why why did that happen because the un is still becoming you also see the same thing when we the united states do not contribute in my view as much as we should to international institutions you know i have a difference in opinion with the republicans about whether we should be involved in the kyoto protocol the comprehensive test ban treaty the international criminal court and all these things but these things stand for something larger which is our larger obligation to create an integrated world you cannot have an integrated world and have your say all the time and america can lead the world towards that but we cannot dominate and run the world in that direction there is a big difference so having said that do we want to strengthen these institutions yes why because they contribute to an integrated global community but if we cannot solve all the problems what else do we do and how do we go about strengthening these institutions one thing we know is that whenever possible the outcome is likely to be better if great britain and the united states if the united states and europe are working together we have half a century of evidence to support that i am profoundly grateful for the partnership that we enjoyed in the years when i served as president in bosnia in kosovo in the middle east in our work in africa in east timor in bringing china into the world trade organization and the community of nations in trying to build alliances with russia between the united states and europe all of the things we did together for global debt relief and a hundred other issues whenever we were working together the outcome was likely to be better i am profoundly grateful for britain s involvement with the united states and with others in diplomatic efforts and where necessary in military ones you were there when we turned back slobodan milosevic and the tide of ethnic cleansing which threatened every dream people had of a europe united democratic and at peace for the first time in history you were there in 1991 when the united states and the global alliance turned back saddam hussein s invasion of kuwait when we attacked iraq saddam hussein threw the weapons inspectors out in 1998 you were there and then when you were working towards peace in northern ireland we were there because of the recent headlines coming out of northern ireland i would like to say just a word about that the good friday accord gave hope to beleaguered peoples all across the globe from the middle east to the indian sub continent to cyprus to africa george mitchell told us at the time it was signed that signing the good friday accord was the easy part following through on it would require courage and constant commitment and he turned out as usual to be right so i would like to say today to the people of the land i have loved so well keep your eyes on the prize and don t turn back whatever america did for britain and northern ireland in the irish peace process you repaid 100 fold in the aftermath of september 11 prime minister blair s firm determined voice bolstered our own resolve his calm and caring manner soothed our aching hearts and the british people pierced our darkness with the light of your friendship in the aftermath of september 11th we went to work against terror in a world rudely awakened to its universal threat and much more willing to support the actions necessary to prevail i still believe our most pressing security challenge is to finish the job against al qaeda and its leaders in afghanistan and any other place that they might hide i would support even committing war forces to that we have only about half as many forces in afghanistan today that we had in bosnia after the conflict was over and we were keeping the peace i applaud britain s commitment to finish the job in not only the conflict but to winning the peace to staying in afghanistan with an international force and with the kind of support necessary to make sure that we do not have the disaster that occurred when the west walked away from them 20 years ago a few words about iraq i support the efforts of the prime minister and president bush to get tougher with saddam hussein i strongly support the prime minister s determination if at all possible to act through the un we need a strong new resolution calling for unrestricted inspections the restrictions imposed in 1998 are not acceptable and will not do the job there should be a deadline and no lack of clarity about what iraq must do there is no doubt that saddam hussein s regime poses a threat to his people his neighbors and the world at large because of his biological and chemical weapons and his nuclear program they admitted to vast stores of biological and chemical stocks in 1995 in 1998 as the prime minister s speech a few days ago made clear even more were documented but i think it is also important to remember that britain and the united states made real progress with our international allies through the un with the inspection program in the 1990s the inspectors discovered and destroyed far more weapons of mass destruction and constituent parts with the inspection program than were destroyed in the gulf war far more including 40 000 chemical weapons 100 000 gallons of chemicals used to make weapons 48 missiles 30 armed warheads and a massive biological weapons facility equipped to produce anthrax and other bio weapons in other words the inspections were working even when he was trying to thwart them in december of 1998 after the inspectors were kicked out along with the support of prime minister blair and the british military we launched operation desert fox for four days an air assault on those weapons of mass destruction the air defense and regime protection forces this campaign had scores of targets and successfully degraded both the conventional and non conventional arsenal it diminished iraq s threat to the region and it demonstrated the price to be paid for violating the security council s resolutions it was the right thing to do and it is one reason why i still believe we had to stay at this business until we get all those biological and chemical weapons out of there what has happened in the last four years no inspectors a fresh opportunity to rebuild the biological and chemical weapons program and to try and develop some sort of nuclear capacity because of the sanctions saddam hussein is much weaker militarily than he was in 1990 while we are stronger but that probably has given him even more incentive to try and amass weapons of mass destruction i agree with many republicans and democrats in america and many here in britain who want to go through the united nations to bring the weight of world opinion together to bring us all together too offer one more chance to the inspections president bush and secretary powell say they want a un resolution too and are willing to give the inspectors another chance saddam hussein as usual is bobbing and weaving we should call his bluff the united nations should scrap the 1998 restrictions and call for a complete and unrestricted set of inspections with a new resolution if the inspections go forward and i hope they will perhaps we can avoid a conflict in any case the world ought to show up and say we meant it in 1991 when we said this man should not have a biological chemical and nuclear weapons program and we can do that through the un the prospect of a resolution actually offers us the chance to integrate the world to make the united nations a more meaningful more powerful more effective institution and that s why i appreciate what the prime minister is trying to do in trying to bring america and the rest of the world to a common position if he was not there to do this i doubt if anyone else could so i am very very grateful if the inspections go forward i believe we should still work for a regime change in iraq in non military ways through support of the iraqi opposition and in trying to strengthen it iraq has not always been a tyrannical dictatorship saddam hussein was once a part of a government which came to power through more legitimate means the west has a lot to answer for in iraq before the gulf war when saddam hussein gassed the kurds and the iranians there was hardly a peep in the west because he was in iran evidence has now come to light that in the early 1980s the united states may have even supplied him with the materials necessary to start the bio weapons program and in the gulf war the shi ites in the south east of iraq were urged to rise up and then were cruelly abandoned to their fate as he came in and killed large numbers of them drained the marshes and largely destroyed their culture and way of life we cannot walk away from them or the proved evidence that they are capable of self government and entitled to a decent life we do not necessarily have to go to war to give it to them but we cannot forget that we are not blameless in the misery under which they suffer and we must continue to support them this is a difficult issue military action should always be a last resort for three reasons because today saddam hussein has all the incentive in the world not to use or give these weapons away but with certain defeat he would have all the incentive to do just that because a pre emptive action today however well justified may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future and because i have done this i have ordered these kinds of actions i do not care how precise your bombs and your weapons are when you set them off innocent people will die weighing the risks and making the calls are what we elect leaders to do and i can tell you that as an american and a citizen of the world i am glad that tony blair will be central to weighing the risks and making the call for the moment the rest of us should support his efforts in the united nations and until they fail we do not have to cross bridges we would prefer not to cross now let me just say a couple of other things this is a delicate matter but i think this whole iraq issue is made more difficult for some of you because of the differences you have with the conservatives in america over other matters over the criminal court and the kyoto treaty and the comprehensive test ban treaty i don t agree with that either plus i disagree with them on nearly everything on budget policy tax policy on education policy on education policy on environmental policy on health care policy i have a world of disagreements with them but we cannot lose sight of the bigger issue to build the world we want america will have to be involved and the best likelihood comes when america and britain when america and europe are working together we cannot believe that we cannot reach across party and philosophical lines to find common ground on issues fundamental to our security and the way we organize ourselves as free people that is what tony blair could not walk away from what he should not have walked away from and what we are all trying to work through in the present day i ask you to support him as he makes that effort if you will permit me even though i am a retired politician i would like to say just a word about domestic politics united states and britain cannot do good around the world unless we are good and getting better at home you think about it much of the power that we can have grows out of the power of our example we can t tell people to make a more integrated world unless they think we are making more integrated societies unless all of our children have a chance to get a decent education unless we have balanced the demands for freedom and security unless we have absorbed our immigrants in a way that is consistent with our values and the elemental obligations we have for equal opportunity we cannot do good abroad unless we are good at home the ultimate case for the third way is that it works good values good vision good policies we have eight years of evidence in the united states and now five years of evidence here that it works opportunity for all responsibility for all a community of all people good values a vision where everyone has the chance to live up to his or her dreams where we are growing together not growing apart where we are a force in the world for peace and freedom and security and prosperity where we shed ideas that don t work and embrace those that do and most of all go beyond the false choices that paralyze and make boring political debate going beyond neglect and entitlement to empowerment refusing to be told we have to choose between what s good for labour and good for business and say the best thing is if both do well refusing to be told that crime policy has to be about prevention or punishment and saying what works is both that education has to be about excellence or equity that health care has to be about access or quality that environmental protection can only come at the expense of economic growth all these things are factually untrue but they dominate control and paralyze the politics of countries all over the world you have said no to that the third way has said no to that and you got good results for doing it and you have the record to prove it in employment in crime in education in the working families tax credit it s a great record and you should be proud of it but you should be even prouder that the message coming out of this conference is schools and hospitals first increase the pressure for reform new labour will be the party of change whether we are in or out of power we want to stay in because we are still the party of positive change if i might say it worked pretty well in america too we had a 30 year low on unemployment we had a 32 year low in welfare roles we had a 27 year low in the crime rate all directly tied to policies we adopted we had three years of surpluses in the budget for the first time in 70 years and the biggest increase in aid to university students in 50 years and the thing that means the most to me is the comparison of our economic recovery with the republican recovery of the 1980s they had 14m jobs and only 70 000 families move out of poverty we had 22m jobs 50 more but 7m moved out of poverty 100 times as many that is the importance of politics of choices i understand now that your tories are calling themselves compassionate conservatives i admire a good phrase i respect as a matter of professional art adroit rhetoric and i know that all politics is a combination of rhetoric and reality here is what i want you to know the rhetoric is compassionate the conservative is the reality this is kind of fun for me i don t get to do this much any more let me be serious a minute our politics are based on ideas and i desire to increase opportunity and to strengthen community and we know we are not always right even though everybody hates to admit that we are not so we have to operate on the basis of evidence and be open to argument their politics is based on ideology and power and they don t like evidence and argument very much my wife the junior senator from new york says that washington sometimes seems to have become an evidence free zone they operate by attack but at some point you ve to look at the evidence in my country evidence shows that their ideology drove them to adopt an enormous tax cut heavily tilted to wealthy americans i ought to be happy i am one of them now but i am not why because we adopted a tax cut in america before we had a budget before we knew what our income was going to be before we knew what our expenses were going to be before we knew what our emergencies were going to be and september 11th turned out to be quite an emergency so we went from a decade long projected 5 trillion plus surplus to having it go away we went from having the money when i left office to take care of the social security retirement cost of the baby boom generation and half of the medical costs of them to having it go away and using those trust funds to pay for tax cuts for people in my income group did the evidence support it no but the ideology did they declared war on all my environmental regulations they even tried to relax the standard on how much mercury we could have in the water the democrats stopped them and besides there was a very small constituency for more mercury in the water in america so then they went on to other things to try to make the deficit look smaller they tried to refigure the accounting and requirements to raise the cost of student loans at a time when college scholarships were going up the democrats stopped them and beside they found that even amongst conservatives there was hardly anybody except the people who were benefiting who thought that college ought to be more expensive in america but their ideology drove them to it and i could give you example after example after example i say this because you should be proud that you have stayed with what works and you should stay with it you should know that you have to fight every day to explain what you are doing you have to always keep your ears and eyes open to find the errors that you make and you must always be the party of change but you have to keep going because the rest of the world looks to you when people are insecure they often turn to the right because of the rhetoric because of the ideological certainty because if we show feeling sometimes people confuse compassion with weakness a mistake that the prime minister has taken great care to avoid here and i appreciate that so we have these election reversals in europe and the election was so close in america that they won it fair and square 5 4 at the supreme court we should actually be glad though because there were seven republicans and only two democrats on the supreme court and two republicans god bless them they will be rewarded in heaven they actually took the decision that we should count votes when the american people vote and i appreciate that a lot of the retrenchment the fear of voting was understandable in europe but now it is beginning to come back pr dem wjclinton2 11 00a bill_clinton thank you whoa are you ready to win this election i want to thank all of you for coming out for your enthusiasm and your support i want to thank my good friend kenny edmonds he writes a good song and he makes a good introduction i think thank you governor gray davis for your leadership and your friendship thank you lieutenant governor cruz bustamante thank you art torres thank you representative hilda solis and to the other officials who are here jenenthea hayes assemblyman herb wesson senator kevin murray councilman mark ridley thomas and art pulaski of the federation of labor and i d also like to thank your speaker bob hertzberg and the folks that performed and sang before me here thank you holly robinson pete thank you wycliff jean and my good friend camryn manheim not on stage but interpreting me isn t she great now look i ve got to say a few things can you hear me and you have to indulge me because i know that i m sort of preaching to the saved here today and the temptation therefore is just to say things that make us all shout and have a good time but look this is a close election and there are in addition to the presidency races for united states senate senator diane feinstein and we have five count em five house seats that the democrats could win in the state of california alone on our way to recovering the majority so i want you all just to let me talk just a few minutes not too loud and tell you what i hope you will say to everybody who is not here because every one of you have a lot of friends who have never been to anything like this is that right they never came to hear the president give a speech or the governor or one of these political deals but they all vote or they could vote if they knew why they were voting is that right so here is what i want to tell you number one thank you thank you thank you for the support that california los angeles and watts have given to me and al gore these last eight years you know one of the things that i worry about in this election is that there are a lot of young people of voting age who can t even remember what it was like back in 1992 the economy was in trouble the society was divided there were riots in los angeles the political system in washington was pure tone deaf to you across the country in california and al gore and i came here and said give us a chance to put the american people first to create opportunity for all responsible citizens to create a community that all of you will be a full part of and you gave us a chance and we changed america now we have another election and another time to decide and what i want to say to you is this election is just as important as the one in which you and california sent me to the white house eight years ago now i learned a question i was supposed to ask at election time from one of my predecessors president reagan he said this is the question we re supposed to ask so i m going to ask and you answer are we better off today than we were eight years ago and let me say what s really important to me yes i m grateful that we ve had the longest economic expansion in history i m grateful that we got the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years but what i m really grateful for is in this economic expansion the middle class and the working poor along with the rich folks benefited we all went forward together i m grateful for the fact that we ve got the lowest hispanic and african american unemployment rate ever recorded a 30 percent drop in child poverty the highest home ownership in history 15 percent increase in average income i m grateful for that so here s the second question do we want to keep this prosperity going you ve got a choice al gore and joe lieberman and the democrats will keep the prosperity going by continuing to pay down the debt give us a tax cut we can afford to send our kids to college to take care of our folks if they get sick and we have to take care of them at home for child care for retirement savings and they will invest in education in health care in the environment and building our communities now the other guys they say listen to this they say we ve got a 2 trillion surplus and it doesn t belong to the government it belongs to you well of course it does so they say here s what we re going to do with that 2 trillion surplus we re going to spend 1 6 trillion on a tax cut we re going to spend 1 trillion privatizing social security and we re going to spend a half a trillion dollars on other things now here s the problem all you kids in grade school listen to this 1 6 trillion plus 1 trillion plus 5 trillion is 3 1 trillion that s bigger than 2 trillion and what does that mean what does that mean to you yes it means flunking math but it also means bigger deficits after we got rid of them more inflation higher interest rates if you go with al gore and joe lieberman and the democrats they will keep interest rates about a percent lower every year for a decade do you know what that s worth to ordinary people listen to this 10 years listen 390 billion in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower student loan payments lower credit card payments lower business loans which means more stores at the mall here more jobs and a higher stock market with al gore and joe lieberman and the democrats the rich folks keep getting richer but so does the middle class and so do the lower income working people we re all going forward together so if somebody asks you well why should i go vote and why should i be for the democrats say because we ve got the longest strongest fairest economy we ever had and because i want to keep it going now i got another question it s not just about economics there s something else you need to know compared to eight years ago the crime rate has gone down every year to a 26 year low the welfare roles have been cut in half the environment is cleaner cleaner air cleaner water three times as many toxic waste dumps cleaned up as in the previous 12 years more land set aside than any time since teddy roosevelt was president 100 years ago and the economy kept getting better the health care system medicare was supposed to go broke last year now we put 27 years on it for the first time in a dozen years the number of people without health insurance is going down because 2 5 million kids have gotten health insurance under our children s health insurance program now in addition to that the high school dropout rate is going down the math reading and science scores are going up college going is at an all time high the number of african american and latino kids taking advanced placement tests courses has gone up 300 percent in three years now in every case we did things that helped that happen so question three do you like this progress and do you want to build on it well you have a choice al gore and joe lieberman and the democrats they ll keep working until we get health care for all our kids until we have medicare prescription drugs for all the seniors who need it not just a few until we have a real patients bill of rights so that doctors not insurance company officials decide what your health care needs are they ll keep working for a new cleaner energy policy so we can keep growing the economy and breath the air they ll work for funds to build or repair schools i don t know how many kids in california but a whole lot are going to school in house trailers or old broken drown schools and we re trying to help it s very important now you also have another choice our friends in the other party what s their program they say if they win listen to this this is what they say not me they will abolish our program putting 100 000 police on the street we only have the lowest crime rate in 26 years they will abolish our commitment to putting 100 000 teachers in the classrooms to lower class size in the early grades they will roll back our environmental standards for clean air and get rid a lot of this land protection that i have enacted and they will not support a real patients bill of rights or medicare prescription drugs for every senior who needs it so you have a choice here but if you want to keep building on the progress your choice is al gore and joe lieberman and the democrats now i ve got another question for you one of the things that i have tried to do is to make people in watts feel like they had just as big a say in the white house as the friends i have in beverly hills i wanted you to feel that the white house was your house that the government was your government and i have worked for an america that helped everybody a lady over there just held a sign up that said thank you for the family and medical leave act which over 22 million americans have used to take some time off when a baby is born or a parent is sick without losing their job it s one of the best things we ever did and we ve worked for the minimum wage and family tax relief and the americorps program that has given 150 000 of our young people a chance to serve in their communities including l a and rebuild them and earn some money for college we ve tried to give you one america now the last question i have is do we want to keep building one america and not be divided again yes we do you ve got a choice al gore joe lieberman and the democrats are for strong hate crimes legislation they re for employment nondiscrimination legislation they re for stronger enforcement of equal pay laws for women because there s still too much discrimination there they re for fairness to all legal immigrants in this country in the distribution of benefits and they re for a supreme court and other federal judges who will protect a woman s right to choose and civil rights and human rights in this country now in every case their republican opponents have a different view on every one of those issues i just mentioned they talk a lot about bipartisanship but we ve got a bipartisan majority in the congress right now for a patients bill of rights for a raise in the minimum wage for the hate crimes legislation for money for school construction for campaign finance reform but their leaders say no now i m telling you i believe that the democrats have a great chance to win both the house and the senate but i want you to think about something in this presidential race you know all the struggles i ve been in these last six years trying to stick up for you one reason you need al gore in the white house is that somebody needs to be there if this crowd stays in to stop their more extremist actions and he will now i want to say something about the vice president and all i can do is kind of echo what governor davis said he has the experience for this job this is something that should be important to the young people in this audience he understands the future how it will be shaped by the internet by the global economy by the revolution in science and technology he has accomplished more for the american people as vice president than any person who ever held that job before but most important president kennedy once said that the presidency is preeminently a place of decisionmaking you hired me for eight years to make decisions that the president is supposed to make al gore is a good man who makes good decisions and with your help he will be a great president of the united states so here s what i want you to do you ve got a few days now every day you see somebody you know wasn t here today you tell them you want them to vote you tell them you want to vote for al gore for joe lieberman and the democrats why question number one you want them to vote because you want to keep this prosperity going number two you want them to vote because you want to keep building on the progress of the last eight years number three you want their vote because you want to keep building one america you kind of like it thinking that the white house is your house too this is a close election every vote counts there is a clear choice i cannot thank you enough for how good you ve been to me but let me tell you something if you want to build on the prosperity if you want to build on the progress if you want to keep building one america you ve got a clear choice and a clear responsibility your only choice al gore joe lieberman and the democrats thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton2 11 00b bill_clinton thank you you all sit down well this is a pretty rowdy crowd nice signs i want to thank first of all thanks to all of you for coming but i especially want to thank jeremy and mark nathison and my friend of more than 30 years now david mixner who still has no gray hair practically and thank you antonio villa raigosa for being here and for your friendship to me and i want to thank gerrie schipske for having the guts to run and run again and be in here i enjoyed visiting with gerrie and flo and the kids back there you know i was listening to her she tells a pretty good joke sort of an essential criteria if you want to be in congress better to tell one than be one i always say you know my mother was a nurse anesthetist i never met anybody associated with health care who didn t have a sense of humor you need it in that line of work but she was kind of hung up about me being on page one of the advocate did you notice that she was on page 56 i ve just got to say it if we do our job by less than a week from now you ll be on page one of the advocate and i ll be lucky to be on page 56 i think there ought to be more people associated with health care in the congress lois capps who represents the district a little north of here was a public school nurse and a magnificent woman and we have one or two other people in the congress who did a stint in nursing or health care one of the republican physicians in the congress greg ganske from iowa was one of the people that gave us the bipartisan majority we needed for a real patients bill of rights when you think about the role that health care plays in our national life and all the complex issues that have to be faced and how much money there is behind a lot of the organized positions taken by the other party in congress i know a lot of you are here because you support gerrie on the human rights issues and all of that but i m telling you we need more people who understand health care from the human point of view i can t tell you you know i could give you if we had all night to talk i could give you 50 examples that i have personally experienced in the last eight years so one of the reasons that i m here for her apart from the fact that i like her and i support her and i agree with her because we really do need more people who ve actually done things with their lives that could actually be valuable to people when they have to make laws and so that s it now i want to be brief here because i realize that i m preaching to the saved but let me tell you i ve been doing this a long time now this is the first time in 26 years i haven t been on the ballot running for something i was 27 years old when i started and i lost the race for the house of representatives thank goodness i i wouldn t have made it here i guess if i hadn t and i ve loved all these elections i believe in the american political system you know i don t know how many years david mixner i had to wait until we actually got to vote for somebody for president who actually won that s not true i voted for jimmy carter and you did too but it was a pretty long time there you know and i was beginning to think i would be on social security before i ever had a winning election but i believe in the american political system and i think over time the american people are an embodiment of martin luther king s eloquent statement that the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice that s a very eloquent statement and we have to not grow weary we have to just keep on working at it but most people are good people and free people generally tend to do the right thing if they have enough information and enough time to digest it and enough experience against which to test it and i say that because i do want to be just a little serious with you tonight i think elections are tight i ve been fooling with this a long time now president nixon defeated hubert humphrey by a little over a percent president kennedy defeated richard nixon by four tenths of 1 percent 100 000 votes in the whole country less than a vote a precinct president carter defeated president ford by about a percent so close races for president are not without are not without precedence but now they re manifesting themselves in these races for congress now it s quite interesting because on all of the major issues of the day except one or two the people agree with the direction we ve been taking the last eight years now what does that lead you to say what conclusion can you draw from that in so many strange places for example when i was trying to help james byrd s children pass the hate crimes legislation in texas which as you know is no heart of flaming liberalism a survey came out in austin the day i was there that showed that in texas two thirds of the people without regard to party agreed that texas ought to have hate crimes legislation that included protection for gays in texas on the other hand a massive amount of voting is always health care you look around here people tend to kind of they hang with their crowd and they kind of vote and kind of go in one direction and then they find it hard to turn around and go the other way and it takes a while for a different issue approach to register that s part of it part of it is a lot of young people can t even remember when the economy wasn t this good you know they have no recollection of this so they kind of take it for granted and indeed the nominee of the other party i can t figure out sometimes he says nothing good has happened in the last eight years and then once in a while reality will dawn and he ll say well whatever good happened it was an accident they didn t have anything to do with it which is an interesting thing because when they were in they took credit when the sun came up in the morning they even ran a campaign on the sun coming up in the morning do you remember that it s morning in america do you remember that but i do believe we re all having a good time here but seriously i think that one of the problems in this time is it s easy to forget that they weren t always good and it s difficult sometimes to make the connection between what some people in public life have do ne and the good consequences that have occurred and so everybody feels kind of like well this guy sounds good and that one sounds good the other one sounds good and you so you look around at all these and try to in the presidential race when i last checked which was this morning there were roughly a dozen states just untouchable and all over the country just unprecedented and all over the country you have races like gerrie s and so what is important is that you be able to make a case to people in these closing days that include some of the statistics you know we win on but it s part of the general approach and so i just want to share this with you because i want her to win and there are four other house seats we can win here and the vice president and senator lieberman are ahead now in the polls in california but they have to win the whole basis of the clinton gore political was never having to worry about what we called the western wall of the united states anchored california we won washington oregon and hawaii and then we never had to worry about new york and we won everything that way and we always had illinois which was my wife s home and where i have spent a lot of time and we always and we had what we had to do was we went out and out from illinois and then we just went down the mississippi river and that s more than enough to win and the rest was gravy because it s an electoral strategy now with all this closeness the same thing is true as you heard gerrie say she wants to be one of the members that gives us the majority in the house we can do that but we have to win a lot of these california seats there are five seats in california who have a bona fide chance of winning so what i m here to ask you to do i thank you for giving her money if you can give her some more you ought to because she s being out spent if you haven t reached your legal limit or you can give her some more i hope you will do that but there s something else you could do you could actually take it upon yourself to be as active as you possibly can until the polls close tuesday night because every one of you has lots of friends who have never been to an event like this is that right don t you i mean most of your friends don t come to deals like this do they they ve never been to an event like this where the president speaks or where the governor speaks or people talk about this even mark who has been living on this political stuff and has done more than anybody west of the mississippi river to try to make dick gephardt speaker even mark most of his friends never come to events like this a lot of your friends wonder what in the world you re doing spending your money on this isn t that right they say why did you spend all that money i mean you could have been home watching a basketball game right so we re laughing but let me just tell you seriously i would like to tell you what i wish you would tell everyone you can see call scream at or touch between now and tuesday and if we were alone in a room you and i and you asked me why are you really for al gore why are you really for gerrie schipske what have you really learned in eight years this is what i would tell you if you were alone and i had about five minutes to talk to you and i think this is something everybody can remember number one i learned a lot watching president reagan and he taught me what the test was for whether a party in office should be returned are you better off today than you were eight years ago and i noticed all these folks running this year are comparing themselves to president reagan so i think we should say that was one thing he was right about and we all agree and that s a test so why are we having this debate and election more seriously the important thing about this economic recovery and governor davis and i were talking about it and i agree by the way with what jeremy said about it there are very few people in this entire country that work harder and get more than gray davis than anybody you ought to really be proud and i sort of think charisma is as charisma does you know i ve always found governor davis to be highly interesting especially because he never sees me that he doesn t ask me to do something else for california so i m honored by that but now think of let me just say this here s the thing that makes this recovery interesting yes it s the longest economic expansion in history yes there are 22 million new jobs but this is the first recovery in 30 years where everybody went along for the ride we have a record number of millionaires we have a record number of billionaires and that s good but we ve also had a 15 percent increase real increase after inflation in median income over 5 000 a year median income got over 40 000 a year in america for the first time in our entire history we have the highest homeownership in history the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded so we re all going along for the ride now that is very very important in a free society everybody that works ought to be rewarded for it and we believe in policies like the minimum wage like the family leave law like the earned income tax credit for people with a bunch of kids and a modest income that gives them a little extra tax break that will allow us all to go along for the ride but in a larger sense getting rid of the deficit has helped us all to go along for the ride why because that s the best tax cut of all having lower interest rates that helps everybody with a home mortgage everybody with a car payment everybody with a college loan payment everybody with a college loan payment everybody with a credit card payment it helps every small business person that ever has to get a loan to start or expand a business and every american with credit has saved thousands of dollars most of them thousands of dollars a year because we got rid of the deficit the fundamental factor of the global economy is that conservative fiscal policy is progressive social policy because it helps ordinary people and brings money to the government to invest in education and other things now why does that matter in this election this is a huge deal it is estimated that we have a projected surplus of about 2 trillion that sounds like a bunch of money and people s eyes glaze over i promise you it won t be that much barring some unforeseen development because the congress has spent a lot of money and because of the curious way that it s calculated but let s just assume it s going to be 2 trillion dollars now what do the democrats say what do al gore and joe lieberman and our democratic candidates say they say okay first let s stay on this path to pay the debt off in 12 years to keep interest rates down then let s give people a tax cut we can afford for child care long term care sending kids to college and retirement savings and let s take the rest and invest it in health care education the environment and the other critical needs of the country but first keep the economy strong what do they say the other guys they say hey this is your money what s the government doing keeping your money which of course it is your money and they say we re going to give you a tax cut three times as big as they are and some of you in this room who can afford to be at this event tonight would actually do better under theirs in the short run and some of you wouldn t depending on your income group so they say our tax cut is three times bigger than theirs because it s your money but forget about all the zeroes okay the surplus is 2 okay the projected surplus their tax cut plus the interest cost associated with it is 1 6 but then they want to privatize social security and they have now admitted that if we give young people 2 percent of their payroll it will take a trillion dollars out of the social security trust fund so you ve got to spend 1 trillion to replace that unless you want social security to go broke earlier so that s 1 6 and 1 and then they want to spend a little money too which is good they want to be compassionate and they are interested in spending money too so they want to spend about 500 billion now 1 6 plus 1 plus 5 is 3 1 3 1 is bigger than 2 now you re all laughing but look i ve spent eight years working on this people ask me all the time what brilliant new idea did you bring to washington to get the economy going and i always say arithmetic i brought arithmetic to washington not calculus not trigonometry arithmetic you re laughing but i m dead serious i m going to be gone out here you know if i m fortunate i ll be one of those guys that will make out like a bandit under this republican tax cut but look 3 1 is bigger than 2 what does that mean it means you go back to deficits which means higher interest rates higher inflation slower growth under the gore lieberman plan interest rates will be about a percent lower a year for decade do you know what that s worth to the american people same thing as a tax cut lower interest rates 390 billion in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower college loan payments plus the credit card payments plus the business loans equals more businesses more jobs higher incomes and a better stock market so you ve got to decide do you want to all keep on going together so we ll make more millionaires and more billionaires but average people will do better too if you do you only have one choice you ve got to vote for gore and lieberman and you ve got to vote for gerrie because that s the right decision now look i still i honestly don t believe a lot of people have thought this through and you say well how can al gore afford to spend all that money because if you get rid of the deficit the debt if you pay the debt down your interest payments on the debt go down the third biggest item in the federal budget is interest on the debt we take 12 cents out of every dollar you pay to the federal government and spend that just on the debt so if you quit spending so much on interest you can spend a lot more on education and health care and yes even on a tax cut because you re getting rid of that 12 cents now look i don t think most people have clearly focused on this do you so you need to go tell people that if they want to keep the prosperity going if they like where if they compare where we were eight years ago in california and america with where we are today we ve got to do this and they only have one choice gore lieberman and gerrie now the second thing i want to say is this country is about more than economic progress we ve had a lot of social progress crime at a 26 year low welfare at a 32 year low rolls cut in half the air is cleaner 43 million people breathing cleaner air the water is cleaner we set aside more land than any administration since theodore roosevelt and we cleaned up three times as many toxic waste dumps as the republicans did in the 12 previous years we have added 26 years to the life of medicare which was supposed to go broke last year when i took office for the first time in 12 years the number of people without health insurance is going down not up thanks to the children s health insurance program which the governor strongly supported and ministered and in the schools in spite of all the problems reading math and science scores are up the drop out rate is down the graduation rate is up there is for the first time in our history almost no difference between the african american and the white high school graduation rate college going is at an all time high thanks in part to the biggest expansion in college aid since the g i bill so all this stuff is going in the right direction now what s that got to do with anything because you ve got to make a choice do you want to build on the progress of the last eight years or reverse it i ll just give you a couple of examples our crime policy is opposed by the other party not just gun safety measures they don t want to close the gun show loophole in the brady law they actually want to get rid of the 100 000 police program our education policy is opposed they want to get rid of the 100 000 teacher program our environmental policy is opposed they want to weaken the clean air standards and get rid of my order setting aside 40 million acres roadless acres in the national forest something the audubon society said was the most significant conservation move in the last 40 years so our side we want to build on we want to have a safer society a cleaner environment stronger education programs and in health care gerrie s area of expertise she can tell you better than me the differences perhaps most stark of all we re for a real patients bill of rights they re not we re for a medicare prescription drug program that covers all of our seniors and they aren t and that s just the beginning we could provide health insurance to all our kids we can now actually afford to help working families who have no health insurance buy insurance for the parents of the kids in this program and we re for that and they re not so again if you want to build on the social progress of the last eight years you only have one choice you ve got to vote for al gore and joe lieberman and gerrie and the third thing that i would like to say which maybe is the most important of all to me is i ve worked real hard to build one america a lot of you have referenced my work with the gay and lesbian community i met earlier today with a representative of one of the native american tribes who told me that i had done more to try to reach out to them than anybody had in a long time maybe ever i think it s real important for america to be a place that is constantly evolving in respect for people mutual understanding and real interdependent cooperation where we don t just tolerate one another i don t really like the word tolerance in this context because that implies that one dominant group is putting up with somebody else that s not as good as they are but at least they re not kicking them around that s not what this is about i don t like tolerance in that way you know that s not what this is about this is about you know actually appreciating the differences among us and affirming the common humanity that we share as being even more important than the differences and this is a big deal now you know we ve become wildly diverse racially ethnically religiously i mean we re going to get more that way and it s a godsend in a global society if we figure out how to be one america which means you ve got to respect and enjoy the diversity because it makes america more interesting but you also have to do the rest you ve got to affirm our common humanity so for me that has meant things like the family leave law and having an administration that represents all kinds of americans and having people like the people in this room feel like they have a friend in the white house and it s their white house too not somebody else s white house that every american can feel comfortable walking in there and knowing that you may not agree with everything i do but at least i m thinking about it from your point of view as well as mine now this is important and there are a lot of these issues out there and you have a choice to make i ll just give you a few examples al gore and joe lieberman and gerrie and our whole crowd we re for the hate crimes bill we re for the employment nondiscrimination act we re for strengthening the equal pay laws for women still a big problem we re for a supreme court that upholds not only a woman s right to choose but also civil rights human rights and the capacity of the national government to protect the american people i m telling you there s already a majority on the supreme court that has struck down provisions of the brady bill of the violence against women act of an age discrimination act because they want to restrict the power of the federal government to protect the people and to enlist the states in doing that now most people don t i think really understand this but on every one of those issues i just mentioned hate crimes enda equal pay the supreme court and i could mention a bunch of others but just those the two parties are different so if you agree with us you just have one choice you ve got to be for al and joe and gerrie so you don t have to remember all the specifics i ve given you but i m telling you you could do a world of good for her for the other four house seats we re trying to win if everybody you saw in the next week you said you ve got to vote and you ve got to vote for our crowd you want to know why because if you want to keep the prosperity going you better keep paying down the debt and investing in our future and you only have one choice if you want to do that if you want to keep the social progress going and crime is down the environment is better the schools are better the health care system is making improvements you ve got to build on that not reverse it and the other guys are against all the things we re for and if you want to keep building one america you actually have to work at it there are things you have to do and we have a program to do it and the other side honestly disagrees with us you don t have to say a bad word about anybody all you have to say is if you want to keep the prosperity going or as i said at the convention here if you want to live like a republican you ve got to vote like a democrat if you want to keep the prosperity going build on the progress of the last eight years and keep building one america you only have one choice al gore joe lieberman and gerrie schipske now this is a big deal i promise you you can have an impact on this election all of these elections are razor thin and people i m absolutely sure based on the support that the people of california have given me and the vice president in the last eight years and what i feel out there and what i know that if everyone understood what the differences were what the stakes are what the consequences are to families and communities and states in our nation that we would prevail i m honored to be here today i m honored to be here for gerrie and for the vice president and senator lieberman i can tell you that you know john kennedy said once that the presidency was preeminently a place of decision making half the time over the last eight years i ve felt like it was a place to see if you could work 19 hours instead of 18 a day but in the end you have to make right decisions and a lot of time presidents have gotten in trouble for working too hard because then they weren t clear enough to make good decisions on the other hand hard work is an important part of the job and i just want to say about al gore i know i don t have to say this to you but it s something else you can tell people that i said experience matters it matters what you know it matters how hard you work it matters whether you have done a lot of this before and he has had a more positive impact for the american people than anybody who ever served as vice president before he makes very good decisions and he will be a very very good president so please just every day don t let those election returns come in tuesday night and you be sick about the outcome of some election that you know 400 or 500 made votes made the difference you ve got to look around this room the people in this room could change 5 000 to 10 000 votes between now and tuesday look in this room 5 000 to 10 000 votes john kennedy was elected in the whole country by 100 000 votes now i m telling you every day between now and the election say i want to keep the prosperity going not risk it i want to build on the social progress not reverse it and we ve got to keep building one america we ve got to go forward together because if we do the best is still out there and the choice is clear al and joe and gerrie thank you dem wjclinton2 11 05 bill_clinton thank you very much judge keith and i have been friends a long time and i think sometimes my memory is going but he s a little bit older than i am and i can t believe he remembers the roses story but it happened just like he said bishop the assembled bishops and clergy and governor members of congress mayors other officials i d like to say a special word of thanks on this occasion to congressman john conyers for giving rosa parks that job so long ago and giving her a chance to come here i must begin by begging your forgiveness you know why i m happy here and i don t want to go anywhere but months ago months ago i promised to be in new york city before i can get there to talk about what we can do to give health care to the americans who don t have it and i think i have to go back i hope you ll forgive me i want to stay and hear the preachers preach and santita and aretha sing and i feel down right cheated because i ve heard me give a speech before and i apologize and i apologize to you rosa the world knows of rosa parks because of a single simple act of dignity and courage that struck a lethal blow to the foundations of legal bigotry but 50 years and 29 days ago when rosa parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in the south where segregation extended even to the close confines of the city bus she was just taking the next step on her own long road to freedom it began when she was just 11 when she moved to montgomery because there was no school that admitted african americans beyond the sixth grade in her little town of pine level alabama it continued when she was 19 when she married raymond parks a strong naacp member who worked for the defense of the scottsboro boys at 30 she joined the naacp one of the first women to do so in the same year she made her first attempt to register to vote and this highly articulate intelligent literal woman was judged to have failed the literacy test in fact the authorities failed the humanity test and in the same year she had a prophetic run in with a bus driver who threw her off the bus because she insisted on getting on the front door and paying at the front place and black folks were supposed to get on at the back and pay there at 33 she finally got to vote they couldn t figure out how to flunk her the third time on the literacy test at 42 after attending a workshop on integration at the highlander folk school in tennessee she got on that bus with the same old driver and refused to give up her seat to a white man in a region where gentlemen are supposed to give up their seats to ladies rosa parks ignited the most significant social movement in modern american history to finish the work that spawned the civil war and redeem the promise of the 13th 14th and 15th amendments for 50 more years she moved beyond the bus continuing her work on that promise it was my honor to present her with the presidential medal of freedom and to join the leaders of congress in presenting her with a congressional gold medal i remember well when she sat with hillary in the box of the first family at the state of the union address in 1999 and how the entire congress democrats and republicans alike rose as one to recognize that she had made us all better people in a better country when i first met rosa parks i was reminded of what abraham lincoln said when he was introduced to harriet beecher stowe the author of uncle tom s cabin he said so this is the little lady who started the great war this time rosa s war was fought by martin luther king s rules civil disobedience peaceful resistance but a war nonetheless for one america in which the law of the land means the same thing for everybody rosa parks as we saw again today was small in stature with delicate features but the passing years did nothing to dim the light that danced in her eyes the kindness and strength you saw in her smile or the dignity of her voice to the end she radiated that kind of grace and serenity that god specially gives to those who stand in the line of fire for freedom and touch even the hardest hearts i remember as if it were yesterday that fateful day 50 years ago i was a 9 year old southern white boy who rode a segregated bus every single day of my life i sat in the front black folk sat in the back when rosa showed us that black folks didn t have to sit in the back anymore two of my friends and i who strongly approved of what she had done decided we didn t have to sit in the front anymore it was just a tiny gesture by three ordinary kids but that tiny gesture was repeated over and over again millions and millions of times in the hearts and minds of children their parents their grandparents their great grandparents proving that she did help to set us all free and that great civil rights song that nina simone did so well i wish i knew how it would feel to be free i wish i could break all the chains holding me i wish i could fly like a bird in the sky at the end it says i wish that you knew how it feels to be me then you d see and agree that everyone should be free now that our friend rosa parks has gone on to her just reward now that she has gone home and left us behind let us never forget that in that simple act and a lifetime of grace and dignity she showed us every single day what it means to be free she made us see and agree that everyone should be free god bless you rosa dem wjclinton2 11 94a bill_clinton thank you very much congressman kennedy has a nice ring to it don t you think we ll take pictures later okay and i ll go over here and we ll shake hands and take pictures have a big time let me say how delighted i am to be here i was told in my briefing this morning that i am the first president of the united states to visit pawtucket since andrew jackson and that s not all that inappropriate i probably care more about average americans than any president since andrew jackson i want you to know mr mayor how delighted i am to be here in your wonderful city i am delighted to be here in the portuguese social club and for the members of the national press traveling with us we have over a million portuguese americans and most of them live in rhode island and massachusetts and in california and i m glad to be here in this community and in this club today i m glad to be here with patrick kennedy you know he s got a shade of irish luck wouldn t you love to be running for congress against a person named vigilante i mean especially in this election year with these issues i m glad to be here with myrth york and with your senatorial candidate linda kushner i hope you will support them all and my good friend jack reed who has been a terrific congressman for the state of rhode island i m glad to be here with senator claiborne pell who just took a trip with me to the middle east an historic trip for the united states and for the world and i know you must be so proud of his leadership not only in foreign affairs but also in education and in so many other areas here at home and i thank you him for it again mr mayor let me say how glad i am to be here i thank you for the key to the city i already see a lot of hearts that are unlocked and i intend to use it i ve got a little tape on my foot here you all don t need to worry about me i ll stick i don t need the tape twenty one months ago with the help of the state of rhode island the people of the united states sent me to washington to try to change the direction of this country to get the economy going again to empower our people to compete in a tough global economy to get the government to work for ordinary citizens again to try to help make the world more peaceful and more prosperous for americans to live and flourish in well 21 months later jobs are up the deficit is down we have more educational opportunities we ve taken a serious assault against crime the tax system is fairer we ve increased trade and reduced the nuclear threat for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age no russian missiles are pointing at your children or grandchildren america has become recognized as the world s defender of peace and freedom and democracy in short we ve still got a lot of problems folks but this country is in better shape than it was 21 months ago and the issue is whether we re going to keep going forward just remember the challenges we faced 30 years of deepening social problems with more and more children being born into difficult family circumstances and more and more violence and gangs and drugs building up 20 years in which most of our wage earners have worked harder every year without getting wages that even kept them up with inflation 12 years of a very different economic policy trickle down economics that really believed that you could give tax cuts to the wealthy increase spending explode the deficit and somehow stagger your way to prosperity in the last four years before i became president this state alone lost about 30 000 jobs well we re trying to change all that we try to reward the values of work and family and strengthen our communities instead of making easy promises to the american people i ve tried to have discipline commitments and challenge the american people we passed the family and medical leave law after seven years which guarantees 164 000 working families in rhode island if they have to take a little time off for a baby to be born or to take care of a sick parent they won t lose their jobs now thanks in no small measure to senator pell and to congressman reed we made 20 million students and former students eligible for lower cost college loans and better repayments including 117 000 right here in rhode island you heard mr kennedy say that we provided a fairer tax system we did ask 1 2 percent the wealthiest of our people to pay higher income taxes we put all their money into paying down the deficit along with 255 billion in spending cuts but we gave 15 million working families including 38 000 right here in rhode island a tax cut because they work 40 hours a week they have children in the home and we don t believe people who are working full time and raising kids should live in poverty in this country because of the tax system we did pass the brady bill and the crime bill and i m proud to say i wore here a watch i got on the day i signed the crime bill from the rhode island police chiefs association i wore it not only because the rhode island chief gave it to me but to highlight the fact that even though our republican opponents in the congress tried to kill the crime bill after having supported it and alleged that it was full of wasted money even though they sponsored a lot of the programs in it every major law enforcement organization in the united states supported the crime bill and we gave it to the american people to make our streets safer now when we did these things our opponents in the republican party and every one of them voted against the deficit reduction package every one of them voted against middle class college loans they said the world would come to an end they said the economy would go to pieces they said we were doing a terrible thing trying to pay our bills they said it was just awful well guess what in the last four years before i showed up your economy lost 32 800 jobs in our first 20 months rhode island gained over 10 000 jobs this deficit is 100 billion lower this year than it would have been if we d left their budgets in place we are giving the future back to our children and building an economy that can compete in the 21st century it is the right thing to do believe me i know that we have more to do i know that there are still people who don t have work and others who have work who are afraid they ll lose their jobs or never get a raise or lose their health care i know there are senior citizens in this country every single month who are not quite poor enough to be on medicaid but have a hard time getting along on medicare and social security who choose every month between food and medicine i know that but the question before you my fellow americans is if you want to make progress are you going to go with the folks that have moved forward on jobs forward on bringing down the deficit forward on making the tax system fairer forward on expanding head start to our kids forward forward forward at home and abroad or are you going to go with the crowd that s got a program to take us back that got us into trouble in the 1980s that is the choice in this election our opponents said no to our economic program no to deficit reduction no to the middle class college loans they said overwhelmingly almost all of them said no to the crime bill no to family leave no to the brady bill they said no i offered a health care bill that would have reduced the deficit over the next 10 years and provided for medicine prescription medicine supports for elderly people who aren t poor enough to be on medicaid and would have begun to phase in a long term care program in addition to nursing homes so that people who wanted to live at home or in boarding homes could have some support and they all said no once there were 24 of them who said we ll be for universal coverage we at least want everybody to have health insurance and when the time came for the floor debate in the senate we had gone from 24 republicans to zero the more we moved toward them the more they ran out the back door on health care why because they believe that the cynicism and the skepticism and the negative feelings of the american people would be so great that they could be irresponsible on every issue they could say no to health care they could say not to campaign finance reform they could say not to lobbying reform they could even say no to cleaning up the toxic waste dumps in this country they could say no to it all and they could punish us for what they didn t do but you know what you re smarter than that and you re going to send them a message on election day now i heard i watched your faces when jack reed and patrick kennedy talked to you about this republican contract and i can tell some of you find it hard to believe that anybody even the most conservative republican would propose a plan that would cut social security benefits after all social security is a solemn contract it s worked well for 60 years the percentage of our national income going to social security today is almost exactly what it was 20 years ago social security is not causing the federal deficit it s hard to believe but it s true it s true they have one senate candidate saying social security ought to be voluntary which means bankrupt the system they have another saying that he wishes the retirement age were above 70 above 70 they have a house leader who once basically called for dismantling the system just a couple of years ago now i want you to see this is the contract they signed this is what they promised they promised to give everybody a tax cut but most of it going to the wealthiest americans to increase defense increase star wars to balance the budget in five years that costs a trillion dollars that s real money even in rhode island a trillion dollars every one of us could have a pretty good time on a trillion dollars i wish it s election season i d like to help elect this candidate for the senate and this candidate for governor and these fine candidates for congress i wish i could come here and promise to write you a trillion dollars worth of hot checks but i can t do it with a straight face i just don t have it i m not shameless enough to do it but they re better than we are at this they can say anything so they made a trillion dollars worth of promises now here s how you keep those promises the only way you can give a tax cut to the wealthy increase defense bring back star wars and balance the budget in five years is to cut everything else in the government 20 percent that s 2 000 per social security recipient a year now that s it that is the only way you can do it then if you say oh no no i never said i d touch social security you have to cut medicare 30 percent and everything else you really think they re going to cut the agriculture department the veterans department 30 percent that s what they have to do they have to shut down the rest of the government close yellowstone park now if they re not serious if they just want to do what they did in the 80s spend the money and load all the debt onto our children and grandchildren and wreck the economy then what they will do is explode the deficit start sending all our jobs overseas and put this economy back in the ditch again just when rhode island is beginning to come out there are no other alternatives not if they intend to keep the signed contract the third alternative is it was just a bunch of cheap political promises to con people into voting at election time so i say to you my fellow americans we are better than that we are moving into the 21st century we have just been voted for the first time in nine years by the annual review of international economists the most productive economy in the world for the first time in 10 years we ve had nine months of manufacturing job growth in a row for the first time in 15 years american automakers have sold more cars around the world than japanese automakers we are coming back let s don t mess it up now let s don t go back you know it makes a difference whether you vote and for whom you vote on election day it is important to reward people that are moving forward and to tell people that want to take you back with beguiling promises we have heard this before the senior citizens of this country people who have seen a great world war people who can remember many of you the depression people who have seen our country at its best and its worst motivated by our hopes and our courage in the grip of our fears hopeful fearful you know that we ought to do the right thing if we re moving forward on jobs forward on bringing the deficit down forward on giving us government that s smaller but does more for ordinary citizens forward in bringing peace and prosperity increasing trade and reduce nuclear threats to the world we ought not to go backward every voter in this country on tuesday just like somebody that has a remote control on a movie about america they can push forward fast forward or reverse do not push reverse you will regret it and so will america you know i just want to close with this folks i keep seeing how people are beat down and discouraged and they re so pessimistic because they hear all these bad things all the time let me tell you something just look at what we ve seen in the last few weeks look at what we ve seen in the last few weeks about how other people look at us we had the president of russia coming here to see me a democratic country working with us on reducing the nuclear threat we had the president of south africa coming here to the united states to thank us for helping to conduct their free election we have been asked to participate in helping to bring to an end the centuries old conflict between the catholics and the protestants in northern ireland we have been involved in restoring to haiti the democratically elected government of president aristide and we are the only country in the world by the way that could have done that and actually had haitian american soldiers down there speaking creole to the natives because america is a country for everybody we are a country of all peoples all ethnic groups all backgrounds i went to see our young men and women in uniform in the persian gulf who so quickly turned back the tide of saddam hussein s recent aggressive move i was there at the signing of the peace treaty between jordan and israel let me tell you something other people around the world they are not cynical about america they admire the strength the values the energy of this country our capacity to grow they know we have the strongest military in the world but they also know we re the world s strongest peacemaker the world s strongest economy and the world s strongest example that is what we owe to our children and our grandchildren the best days of this country are before us but they will not be before us if we divide the old against the young if we walk away from our responsibilities to our children or to our parents and grandparents and if we walk away from our responsibility to ourselves so i say to you we re moving forward you be thinking on tuesday i am in control i have a remote control on america s movie i m going to go into the polling place and i m going to push forward maybe i ll even push fast forward but i certainly won t push reverse thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton2 11 94b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you for this wonderful welcome and thank you for being about twice a large a crowd as we thought we d have and for being so goodhumored about us losing the sound i want to thank first of all the bands from cranston east and cranston west high school let s give them a hand you know folks when i ran for president my slogan was don t stop thinking about tomorrow and there are a couple of people here with signs that say that today but one of them is right down here with a group of people who are tomorrow from the maryville elementary school welcome glad to see you i am delighted to be here today with my good friend senator claiborne pell who just came back with me on our mission of peace to the middle east and i thank him for his leadership for rhode island and for america i am delighted to be here and to be introduced by myrth york and i want you to help her win this election next week i read in the papers that she is an underdog well i was an underdog wait a minute that s not a bad thing i was an underdog when i started running for president nobody but my mother thought i could win and then i was underdog two more times i got up i went down i got up i went down the only election matters is the one that the voters in rhode island are going to have next tuesday the thing that impresses me about myrth york is that she understands that the first job of the governor is to prepare the state for tomorrow s economy to have rhode island moving strongly into the future commends her and i want you to elect her on tuesday i also want to say a few words about the others who are here linda kushner sponsored and supported the rhode island family and medical leave act i believe in that sort of policy we need more of that in the congress not less i want to say a special word of support for my friend representative soon to be congressman patrick kennedy he has done in the legislature here what we need more of in congress he s been willing to stand up to vested interests and to stand up for the people of rhode island i want you to help him be elected to the congress on tuesday and you re going to do it aren t you now i just want to say a simple but heartfelt thank you to jack reed jack reed was there for us on the crime bill on the brady bill on the family and medical leave bill on helping to provide more affordable easier to repay college loans to a whole new generation of american students jack reed was there and you ought to be there for him i also want to thank all these other fine democrats for being here with me your state chair guy default who has such a good voice he could almost speak without the microphone your lt governor bob weygand jim langevia sara quinn and richard james i want you to stand with all of them on tuesday i love rhode island i love to come here today i was told that today i was the first president since andrew jackson to go to pawtucket and i said that was good because andy jackson and i cared as much about ordinary americans as anybody who ever had our jobs i was then told i was the first president in anybody s memory to come to rhode island twice in the same year i d love to come here every month i love it here i mean look around this is america the italians the irish the french the portuguese the african americans the haitian americans the hispanics you name it you got it america s future here in rhode island people working hard my fellow americans 21 months ago with the help of the voters in rhode island the american people hired me to be the president on a commitment to change the direction of the country to get the economy going again to empower ordinary americans to compete in this economy to make government work for ordinary people again and not just organized interests to make the world a more prosperous and a safer place for americans to live and for these children to grow up we had this slogan don t stop thinking about tomorrow because we had always believed that and yet we had been through years in which people only did what was easiest today in which we had leaders who talked tough but acted soft and did not tell us the truth and did not challenge us to do what we have to do in order to get this country into the 21st century so that these children will have a great future and so that our best days are before us that was my commitment 21 months ago and i have to tell you this country still has great challenges but we are in better shape today than we were 21 months ago we have more jobs a lower deficit a smaller federal government less regulation we ve corrected abuses like the 500 hammers and the 50 ash trays we are giving you a government that gives you your money s worth we have done things for ordinary people the tax system is fairer 15 million working families including thousands and thousands in this state got their taxes reduced because they worked fulltime they have children in the home they re just barely above the poverty line and we do not believe in our administration that people who work hard and are trying to be good family people should be pushed into poverty by the tax system we have done more on that than anybody has in 20 years the family and medical leave law protects families so that if there is a baby born or a sick parent you can take some time off to deal with your family problems without losing your job that s an important thing that we have done we re going to immunize all the children in this country under the age of two by 1996 we are expanding head start we are establishing apprenticeship programs for young people who get out of high school who don t go on to college but do want good jobs with growing wages and a better future and we have dramatically and i mean dramatically changed the college loan program so that young people can borrow money to go to college at a lower cost and better repayment terms and the world is changing the world is changing there is more trade but a lower threat of nuclear problems we continue to work with the russians we have made an agreement with the north koreans not to become a nuclear state we are expanding trade and job opportunities all around the world we are promoting peace in a peaceful but strong manner from haiti to northern ireland to the middle east to the persian gulf this country is moving we are moving and the message must be to the voters of rhode island and america in the next week we are moving in the right direction in 21 months a good start has been made have 30 years of social problems been corrected have 20 years of economic stagnation been totally reversed have 12 years of trickle down economics been totally overcome no but in 21 months we ve made an awfully good beginning let s keep going i thought to myself over and over and over again what could have possessed our opponents to come out with this contract on america what could have possessed the opponents of congressman reed and representative kennedy to sign it it is a trillion dollars worth of promises oh it sounds so good here we are on the even of the election and one more time they re like the pied piper of hamlin you remember what happened to the people that followed him we ll give you a tax cut we ll increase defense we ll increase star wars we ll balance the budget and we ll tell you all about how we ll do it after the election so we re telling you how they have to do it before the election and they re all upset about it they wish we wouldn t tell you but when you promise people a trillion dollars and you act like it s free it s sounds like a good time but it s not free to keep their promises they would have to cut everything else that you depend upon by 20 percent across the board social security 2 000 a person a year medicare veterans programs programs for farmers in the heartland of america everything if they say they don t want to cut social security then they have to cut everything else 30 percent across the board devastating the medicare program of this country it is wrong and if it is just a cheap election year promise it is even more wrong because that means they are going to explode the deficit ship our jobs overseas again and compromise the future of these children who are here we have to say no to this we re doing fine we re going forward we re not going to turn back it was bad enough when they were just saying no when they tried to say no to the crime bill no to deficit reduction not to the college loans no to family leave no to the brady bill bad enough when they killed campaign finance reform lobby reform environmental legislation shoot this crime bill every law enforcement group in america was for it i ve got this watch on today that i got from the rhode island police chiefs association when i signed the crime bill but they were against it for political reasons because they didn t want the democrats to be perceived as being tough on crime never mind what really counted was not who got credit for the crime bill but whether the murder rate was going down whether the rape rate and the violence rate was going down whether we were saving more kids before they become criminals whether elderly people felt safer in their homes and kids felt safer in their schools that s all that matters if they would work with us everybody could have credit there s more than enough credit to go around you ought to be in the driver s seat in this country not a bunch of politicians in washington trying to cause failure to make you mad to hope you ll do the wrong thing and that s their program you ve got to do the right thing you ve got to turn the lights on in america you ve got to say we re going in the right direction let me say this you know i ought to quit but i m having a good time i was asked the other day and i got to thinking about it somebody said the other day said did any job you ever had prepare you for being president and i said well i was a governor a long time but it really wasn t the same for one reason you can stay in touch with the people better it was much more difficult for folks to get in the way of me and my constituents when i was the governor of a small state so i thought of all the other jobs i ve had and the one that my job is most like now as one i never made a penny doing was when i worked with civic clubs on car washes because i liked to clean the windows off that s what we ve got to do in america today you know if you drive your car and there s a lot of stuff on the windshield you can think it s dark outside when the sun s shining you could think there are obstacles there when the way is clear and then there could be a huge obstacle out there and you wouldn t be able to see it and you d run smack dab into it that s what they ve done they ve put a lot of dirt on america s windshield we ve got to clean it off between now and tuesday will you help will you do your part will you go forward folks this is an election between hope and fear between unity and disunity but more than anything else between going forward and turning back as i told the people over in pawtucket at the portuguese social club today think about it like this every one of you is in the driver s seat and on election day just imagine that you have a remote control in your hand and what s in the movie screen or television screen is a movie about america s future and you ve got the remote control in your hand you can push forward you can push fast forward or you can push reverse push forward go on and push fast forward if you want to but say no to reverse no we re going forward we re doing better we re going to do better still we re going forward forward forward thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton2 11 95 bill_clinton thank you very much first of all ladies and gentlemen for that wonderful wonderful welcome thank you jeff for your introduction and for this beautiful tzedakah box did i say it right tzedakah i m very glad that you explained its significance otherwise i was afraid that others would interpret it as something i might as well carry around since whenever i see you we seem to be i was very moved by the story and i m very grateful and that will have a happy place in the white house tonight thank you monte friedkin for your work here and david steiner nancy jacobson liz schrayer all the others who worked on this tonight senator dodd and senator daschle and congressman gephardt congressman frost congressman bentsen and to your wonderful honorees behind me you know when jeff said something about look at this line up eight jewish senators i thought he was going to say eight jewish senators and an arkansas redneck i didn t know what i thought he was going to say pick the person who s spoiling this lineup let me say to all of you i am i m grateful to be here i m grateful to be here among friends i m honored to be here with these eight senators whom you are honoring tonight they richly deserve it i know i don t have to tell you this but if it weren t for them for their steadfastness for their belief in the values we all share for their vision for the future my work as president today in the midst of the battles that are going on in washington would be not only difficult but indeed impossible i have never appreciated the wisdom of the founding fathers more than i have since this republican budget has been working its way through congress they were really smart those people who gave the president the veto they understood the american system they understood that there would be times in the history of our republic if we were going to last a very long time when elections would produce unintended consequences and extreme conduct and the president was given the veto because only the president has the responsibility to look after all the people of this country and to look into the future to imagine that future and to keep the country on the right path but none of that would be possible without these whom you honor tonight and their allies in congress they reflect the very best contributions of jewish americans to our way of life as do the jewish american members of my cabinet mickey kantor and secretary reich and secretary glickman and secretary rubin and many others in our administration i am delighted again i want to say that you re giving them the hubert humphrey humanitarian award and i m delighted that attorney general humphrey from minnesota is here with you tonight to present it and i thank him for his friendship and contribution i want to make a very brief argument to you tonight that i hope you will share with others throughout this country when i sought the presidency i had a vision for what i wanted america to look like in the 21st century i wanted our country to be a place with opportunity for everybody a place where children had good schools and safe streets where we had a clean environment where we were all investing and growing together where we made a virtue not a problem of our diversity and we were coming together not being driven apart a country where we were still strong enough and good enough to lead the world to peace and freedom and democracy and i believe the only way to achieve that vision is to be open to new ideas consistent with the values that have made our country great and that make life worth living both responsibility and opportunity understanding the need of people not only for work but also for strong families understanding that we are a community and we have responsibilities to each other and that if we re going to make the most of our lives we have to live by those responsibilities understanding that standing up for america sometimes means doing what s unpopular in the short run because it s the right thing to do in the long run these members that you honor tonight and i have pursued for nearly three years now a very disciplined strategy to achieve that vision based on those values pro growth economics a modern government that is smaller and less bureaucratic but still strong enough to advance the public interest and a genuine attempt to write these mainstream values into the public policy of america and i leave it for you to make a judgment but if you look at where we are now compared to where we were three years ago we have 7 5 million more jobs homeownership is at a 15 year high there have been more new businesses started in america in the last three years than in any comparable period in american history our sales to other countries of our products and services is up one third in only three years the deficit has gone from 290 billion a year to 164 billion a year as a percentage of our income the united states of america has the smallest government deficit of any industrial country in the world except norway that is the record that these people have made in the last three years and i think it is a very good record others may condemn big government these democrats changed it your national government has 163 000 fewer people than it did the day i was inaugurated next year we ll have the smallest federal government since john kennedy was president as a percentage of our work force it will be the smallest federal government since 1933 1933 sixteen thousand pages of federal regulation gone out of a total of 86 000 but we have not given up on the responsibility of the government to work with the private sector to try to sell america s products abroad to try to create jobs here at home to try to protect the environment and public health to try to empower all americans to do what they need to do to make the most of their own lives we have given you a modern government the era of big government is over the but the era of good government and strong government cannot be over because the public interest still must be advanced by the american people working together through their elected representatives that is what these people have given you and they are entitled to the gratitude and support of the united states of america most important of all to me this country is getting its act together we re coming back together as a people in the last three years compared with three years ago the crime rate is down the welfare rolls are down the food stamp rolls are down the poverty rate is down the teen pregnancy rate is down the infant mortality rate is at an all time low child support collections are up 40 percent and the delinquency rate of young people on student loans has been cut in half that is what has happened in the united states in the last three years and a lot of the policies that we adopted that they supported have contributed to that this country is on a roll we re moving in the right direction do we have problems of course we do of course we all have problems as long as we re here on this earth the books of our faith tell us that it is not given to people to be without problems what are the problems of this time too many middle class people work harder without a pay raise and with increasing insecurity and no access to health care too many areas have not been affected by the economic recovery and we have to find a way to get investment in enterprise into those areas mostly they re in inner cities and isolated rural areas and thirdly even though all the social indicators look better the truth is a lot of our young teenagers are still in deep trouble there are many places where the crime rate s going down but juvenile crime is going up there are many places where drug use is going down but casual drug use by teenagers is going up there are too many of our children still out there on the street raising themselves frankly and these are problems but the answer to the problem is to do what we re doing and do more of it to build on what we are doing not to turn around and go in the other direction this country is a force for peace and freedom around the world we have stood up for america s values and america s interests we ve been able to advance the cause of peace in the middle east in northern ireland and god willing our people are working as hard as they can now in ohio for the cause of peace in bosnia to put an end to the horrible slaughter in that troubled land we have lessened the nuclear threat we have fought terrorism and international drug running and organized crime we are doing what can be done to stand up for this country s values and yes we were honored to be able to advance the cause of peace in the middle east but we re not done yet and we have to keep working until the whole job is done that s the only way that the people of israel will ever be fully secure and the only way we will have ever finished our task there when all the people there are at peace with each other and pledge to one another s mutual existence security and freedom and i pledge to you i will keep working until the job is over you must see this fight that we re in over the budget in the context of the brief remarks i have just made in the context of what your values are and what your vision is for the 21st century let me tell you what this is not about this is not about balancing the budget and it is not about securing the medicare program that is not what this is about this is about what kind of country we re going to be what kind of people we are and whether we re going to balance the budget in a way that is consistent with our mainstream values and consistent with our pro growth economic policy that s really what this is about and you know i have had to resist this whether it s popular or not it seems that the public is coming back our way now but the truth is that it is impossible to know from one year to the next what will be popular in a time of great change the fundamental reality is we are changing dramatically the way we live and work and relate to the rest of the world in a time like this you can t read the polls you have to fall back on your values and be open to new ideas i ve done a lot of things that made a lot of people angry but i think i was right the people that are in the majority now when we passed our economic program they said it would bring the country down they were wrong it lifted the country up when we passed that economic program we provided for lower cost college loans so young people like this could go to school at lower cost and pay their loans back on better terms and they all opposed it because the organized interest groups were against it but they were wrong and we were right it was the right thing for the long term of america when these people were in the majority in congress and we became the first national government ever to take on the organized interest groups to pass the brady bill and the assault weapons ban they were all against it but we were right and they were wrong and the american people are better off now when we passed the crime bill that jeff mentioned that put 100 000 police on the street and by the way we re ahead of schedule and under budget and you talk to any major police officer in this country in any city and they will tell you that these police officers walking the street are not only catching criminals quicker they are preventing crime and after all that is our objective and when we gave the cities some money in block grants that they now are in love with we were attacked for giving cities the money and letting them decide how best to tell our children that they don t have to turn to a life of crime they don t have to turn to a life of drugs they can solve their problems in ways other than violence they were excoriated these people were because we gave that authority to cities to give our little children something to say yes to instead of something to say no to but they were wrong and we were right and the crime rate is going down and we are saving lives today because of the work these people are doing the reason the budget fight is important is because it violates our values and it will undermine our future what they are trying to do i don t know about you but my idea of america in the 21st century is not wrecking the medicare program and being tougher on the oldest the poorest and the sickest senior citizens in this country that s not my idea my idea of the 21st century is not devastating the medicaid program so that 4 million poor children will be denied medical care hospitals will close in rural and urban areas teaching hospitals and children s hospitals will stop doing the work they are now doing that s not my idea of the 21st century and we are better than that we do not have to do that to balance the budget and it is wrong to do it to advance some ideological theory a lot of you my idea of the america of the 21st century is not crippling the ability of the national government to promote clean water and clean air to protect the integrity of the american food supply and to undermine the whole movement that we have made all the progress we have made to try to prove we could in partnership have economic growth and environmental protection i believe if we give away the economy for short term greed we will all live to regret it and these young children deserve better we ought to give them a better 21st century than that my idea of the 21st century does not include raising taxes on working families that make less than 27 000 a year in the most mean spirited part of all of their budget to give people in my income group and yours a tax cut if they can figure out how to do it fine not by raising taxes on people with incomes of less than 27 000 this congress cut them and we ought not to raise them there is no group in america devoted to the family more than jewish americans when we took office and we started our work i had heard people condemn welfare forever and ever and ever i had actually spent a lot of time in my life talking to people on welfare and i knew that most of them hated it and were dying to get off and one of the things that we have to do is to make work pay so this congress that these people were in the majority in that you honor tonight voted to double the working family s tax credit so that we could make a simple statement if you work 40 hours a week and you have children back at the house we want you to succeed as a parent as well as a worker so we won t let the tax system put you into poverty even if you just make a little bit of money we will use the tax system to lift you out of poverty there will never be an excuse to choose welfare over work and if you choose work you can also be successful as a parent that s what the working family tax credit did it was signed into law by gerald ford lauded by ronald reagan as the best anti poverty program in american history expanded by george bush but because we doubled it they are determined to cut it by more than we increased it that is not my idea of the kind of america i want to live in in the 21st century it was wrong it was wrong thank you i want you to think about this last point a lot of you run companies that are doing very well and are positioned to do better in the 21st century is there a single sensible american company on the edge of the global village of the 21st century that would cut its investment in research in technology in education and in training of course not their budget cuts our investment in research in technology in education and training that is wrong why would we make college education more expensive when we want more people to go why would take 140 000 kids or 45 000 kids out of head start programs when we know young poor kids need a chance to get off to a good start in school why would we do that why would we take college scholarships away from 150 000 young people when we need more people to go to college why would we cut the research budget of the united states when japan in the midst of a terrible recession just voted to double their research budget whey would we do these things it is my job to be true to our common values to stand up for our economic interests and to look down the road toward the future for the young people of this country that is what this struggle is all about this country is on a roll the economy is going in the right direction the government has a lot of work to do but it is changing in the right direction and most important of all the american people are getting their act together there is a remarkable resurgence of personal responsibility for self for family and for community it would be a travesty if we at this moment when we have things going in the right direction when all of the problems we have require us to keep going and do more in that direction if we took a terrible veer off into the dark waters of some extremist theory that drug this country into more division in more problems in more heartache and that compromise the future of these young people there is no country in the world better positioned than the united states for the 21st century and so what i say to you tonight these folks you re honoring and the person you helped to make president we re going to do our best to give you that future you rear back relax enjoy it and help us fight for it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton2 11 96 bill_clinton can you hear me in the back wave your hands look back there what a great crowd we have tonight thank you new orleans for coming out thank you for your support thank you for the little song down here let s thank these fine young men who sang the national anthem again they were great the students who are here reverend morton mr mayor thank you for making me feel so welcome here thank you for your exceptional leadership thank you for taking up for the children of new orleans and trying to make them safer when the sun goes down i appreciate that my good friend congressman jefferson thank you for being there with me in the dark days as well as the bright ones representative cleo fields thank you for your service in the congress your support for me and mary landrieu and all of our other candidates and thank you especially for going all over america to mobilize young people to vote to reelect bill clinton and al gore thank you sir my great friend john breaux to whom i owe so much if you support john breaux as i think you do you will elect mary landrieu just to keep a smile on john s face i don t believe i could bear the thought of seeing what it s going to be like for john ladies and gentlemen i have come here tonight with a heart full of gratitude to all of you for giving me the chance to serve as president for giving me the chance to do what has been done in the last four years and to ask you to keep america on the right track to the 21st century and to help me build that bridge that we can all walk across together will you do that it is hard to believe on the banks of this great river that has seen so much history that the united states is about to elect the last president of the 20th century and the first president of the 21st century but we are we are about to do something even more important for in this election and the race for the senate and other races all across america we are going to decide just how we re going in to that 21st century whether there will be a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past whether there will be a bridge that we all walk across together where we try to help each other make the most of our own lives or whether we ll say you re on your own whether we will rise up as one people seeking common ground or whether we will give in to the old politics of division that has bedeviled people of louisiana and arkansas and our whole region for too long in the past now that is what is really at issue here we know what works four years ago everyone except the people in my own home state and the louisianans that lived near the border took me on faith i said we would create more opportunity and insist on more responsibility that we d pull closer together an american community and everybody would have a place and a role to play but you took me on faith now we know what works we have 10 7 million more jobs than we had four years ago the deficit has gone down by 63 percent all four years for the first time in the 20th century our exports out of the port of new orleans and elsewhere are at an all time high more than half the new jobs are in high wage categories wages are going up again for the first time in a very long time we ve had a 27 year a 27 year best combined rates of unemployment and inflation you have to go all the way back to 1968 that s 28 years isn t it you weren t even born that s the best it s been since you ve been alive we had the biggest drop in inequality among working people more people sharing in the bounty of america in 28 years the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years the lowest rate in poverty among our senior citizens ever recorded we are moving in the right direction we don t need the change we need to bear down we have more children in head start we ve got a better college loan program that costs students less and gives them more opportunities to repay it as a percentage of their income a 20 year high in pell grant scholarships the americorps program giving young people a chance to serve and earn money for college we ve got a 10 year low in the crime rate we have 2 million fewer people on welfare and a 50 percent increase in child support payments we are moving in the right direction right across the board we need to bear down and do more now in the face of this my opponent would have you believe that the world is coming to an end it was announced yesterday that we had or the day before we had 210 000 new jobs last month ago and his response was this is the worst economy in 20 years now wait a minute it s not all bad just two weeks ago he said we had the worst economy in a hundred years that s the best argument i ve heard for my reelection who else do you know could make up 80 years in two weeks we re moving in the right direction toward the 21st century but we are moving in the right direction because we re doing a lot of things together together i appreciate so many things that have been said tonight but i come here to tell you that i am not solely responsible for the good economic news or the declining crime rates or the declining welfare rolls but we have played a role and that is the issue so many of our friends on the other side and especially people way on over there like mary landrieu s opponent they don t believe there is much of anything we should do together but i believe there are and the great thing about this election for you is that the choice is so clear and the consequences are so great so you have to decide in the president s race and in the senate race do you want to balance the budget and have a targeted tax cut for education and child rearing and protect medicare and medicaid for folks with disabilities and poor children our seniors in nursing homes and do you want to protect our ability to have clean air and clean water and clean ground and a safe future and do you want to protect our investments in education and technology and our future well then you just have one choice because if you go the other way you ll get a very different future blowing a hole in the deficit increasing interest rates weakening the economy bigger cuts than those that i vetoed you re good keep going i think one of the most important things we have been able to do is to help more people millions of people fulfill their obligations to their children and to their workplace when we passed the family and medical leave law my opponent said it would hurt the economy he was it was terrible he tried to kill it but we passed it well now we know three and a half years later 12 million families have taken a little time off for the birth of a baby or a illness of a family member and they didn t lose their jobs and what have we had 10 7 million new jobs and record numbers of new small businesses we were right their approach was wrong we should help each other make the most of our own lives we should help people succeed at home and at work we ought to let people take some time off to go see the teachers of their children twice a year and take their kids to the doctor as well when people earn overtime if somebody in the family is sick they ought to be able to decide whether to take the overtime in money or take it in time at home taking care of their families we have to help people succeed at home and at work we ought to continue to support the safe and drug free schools program so people will be in our schools telling our children early before it s too late that drugs are wrong illegal they can kill you i support that they tried to cut it in half and they ll try again unless you have somebody like mary landrieu who believes our kids are entitled to be kept out of trouble in the first place and saved for a better brighter future we are in the middle of a great national effort to try to stop the big tobacco companies from marketing and distributing tobacco illegally to our children three thousand kids start smoking every day illegally and a thousand will die sooner because of it we are trying to stop it that is not done yet my opponent opposes that the election will determine whether we see that through we are supporting people like your mayor all over the country and working to support projects like the curfews and school uniform projects and anything else that will help keep our kids in a safer way we re trying to put 100 000 police on the street we ve only funded half of them our opponent opposed that then they abolished it in the budget that i vetoed then they tried to cut it again now the crime rate is coming down every year in part because we have more people walking the streets in uniforms working with their neighbors working with the kids preventing crime from happening why in the wide world anybody would want to stop it is beyond me i guess that s why every major law enforcement organization in america for the first time supported bill clinton and al gore for reelection if you want to keep that going support people like mary landrieu who believe we should have community policing and safer streets and futures for all of our children we want a future in which we grow the economy and clean the environment we ve taken millions of tons of chemicals out of air set aside unprecedented lands for national preservation raised the standards of food safety raised the standards for drinking water purity and cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than they did in 12 but there s still 10 million kids in this country living within four miles of a toxic waste site and if you ll help us we ll clean up 500 more in the next four years so that we ll be living next to parks not poison but your vote will decide for they have a very different view they wanted to change the law and say the polluters don t have to pay anymore for what they do the taxpayers should pick up the whole tab never mind that all the money wasn t there we might never get around to cleaning up a lot of these dumps you have to decide and there is no decision more important than the one you ll make with regard to the education of our children and our adults in the future i m glad there are so many young people here because this election is about you now what is their program well when they had a chance they cut head start and they cut student loans and they voted to eliminate the department of education and when i vetoed their budget they said they believed in it so much they shut the government down and they said oh john breaux and cleo fields and bill jefferson and president clinton they just love the government they d never let it get shut down all their rhetoric you know and you know what i told them i hate to see you shut this government down i hate to see you hurt the federal employees i hate to see you interrupt essential services but i would far prefer to see the american people hurt for 20 or 30 days than to see them hurt for 20 or 30 years i m not going to sign this budget it will not be the law of the land because i don t believe families who happen to have family members who are living in wheelchairs should be denied medicaid and the right to have a middle class lifestyle and because i don t believe we should cut college scholarships and loans what s our program for the future what s our program for the future i want to ask you to help me do this now you think about the future we are living in a time where the winds of change are not just blowing on the mississippi they re blowing everywhere in the world we re having dramatic in the way we work and live and relate to the rest of the world that s how new orleans can increase exports 30 percent in one year the world s not growing 30 percent economically a year new orleans the people who work here are taking the work of americans and finding new opportunities exploding all over the world when i became president 3 million people were making a living by working at home every day today 12 million are by the year 2000 30 million will be in the last four years we ve discovered two genes that lead to breast cancer we may be able not only to cure but to prevent breast cancer because of the research that we re doing there in the past few months for the first time laboratory animals with their spines severed have had movement in their lower legs by nerve transplants to their spine from other parts of their body we may be able to see people get up and walk that thought they d never be able to do it again we are literally bursting the frontiers of knowledge their education program is to abolish the department of education and cut funding to our public schools my education program 200 000 more work study places for young people in college get a million volunteers including 100 000 college students on work study to teach every young person in this country to read a book by the time that he or she is 8 year old hook every classroom in a louisiana school no matter how poor the district is to the information superhighway so all our kids can get access to world class learning for the first time in history and open the doors of college education to all americans will you help us do that will you help mary landrieu have a vote in the senate to do that think of it folks in just four years we can make two years of education after high school as universal as a high school diploma is today simply by saying you can deduct dollar for dollar on your taxes the cost of a typical community college tuition all you have to do is show up and make your grades and do your work i want to give a 10 000 tax deduction per year for the cost of any college tuition after high school for people of any age will you help us do that now again i say you want to know what the differences are between the efforts i m making and the efforts that senator dole is earnestly and honestly pursuing i don t like all these personal attacks i think it s just kind of a political deal we just honestly disagree the difference in my position and his the difference in mary landrieu s and her opponent is that if you look at the family and medical leave law if you look at the 100 000 police on the street if you look at the brady bill which kept 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers and now will keep people who beat up their spouses and their kids from getting handguns if you look at our new college loan program if you look at the targeted tax cuts for college we believe that we re a better stronger country when we work together to help each other have not a guarantee but the tools to make the most of their own lives they believe you re better off on your own you have to decide will you stand with us will you fight with us will you build that bridge to the 21st century with us we need you louisiana thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton2 11 97 bill_clinton thank you very much now i m a little hoarse so you re going to have to bear with me and i ll try to be heard in the back i won t be as funny as al frankin because i don t want to be driven from office but i thank him for being here tonight and for always being there for me thank you al i thank our friends peter yarrow and judy collins for performing at one of the at this event i thank all of you for being here let me begin by saying from the bottom of my heart i am profoundly grateful and will be to my last day on this earth to the people of this state and especially the city of new york for the wonderful support you have given to me and hillary the vice president and our administration thank you thank you very much i look out at this sea of people here tonight from so many different racial and ethnic and religious backgrounds somehow bound together across all your differences by a common concern for the future of your children and this is what distinguishes democrats in this time a common understanding that if we want all of our kids to do well including our own we have to go forward together and i want to tell you tonight i want to tell you tonight why i m here i know why you re here you have a vote in new york you re entitled to know why i m here i m here for three reasons number one in 1991 when i first started running for president the borough president of manhattan endorsed me now that may seem like a smart decision in 1997 but let me remind you in 1991 when ruth messinger endorsed me most people in new york didn t know who i was a lot of people in new york couldn t find my state on a map other people pointed out it was only about as populous as brooklyn and what did i have any business running for president for and then when i got into the race there were a lot of people who said that i shouldn t be president and others who said well even if i could be president i couldn t be elected and she ought to leave me and there were lots of times when it would have been more comfortable for somebody who was the borough president in manhattan to be somewhere else but through all the times when i was going through my own particular new york marathon in 1992 she stuck by me and i m standing with her tonight and i m proud to do it now there is a second reason the second reason i m here is that i am very proud to be a democrat and i am proud to be a part of a party that has a broad tent and is inclusive and welcomes all kinds of people we heard for years that if they ever gave us the range of any executive authority we d be soft on crime foolish on welfare we would wreck the economy raise taxes and mess up the foreign policy of the country well five years later the country is stronger around the world we ve advanced the cause of peace and freedom we have the best economy in a generation 3 million fewer people on welfare the environment is cleaner the schools are better and we re opening the doors of college to all americans i think they were wrong the democrats were right and i m proud to be here as a part of that i would also like to say and in that connection let me say i am especially pleased to see the people who contested the democratic primary for mayor here the fact that ruth s former opponents are here says a lot about their character and their concern for the people of new york and i thank them for being here here s the third reason and it s the most important because the third reason relates to you after all this election is not about me or any big republican leader who may have been here it only matters to those of you who live here to your children and your children s children and the future so i was thinking to myself and i had been thinking about this for weeks because i care a lot about ruth and i knew when she got into the race it would be a hard race and i knew there were good reasons it would be a hard race so i said to myself if i were a citizen of new york knowing what i know about way the world works and what s going on in our country why would i vote for her what are the good reasons well let me begin by saying i think it s a good thing that crime has come down in new york and i don t think any democrat should criticize any legitimate effort that brought it down after all remember the first aggressive community policing and the first drop in the new york city crime rate began when david dinkins was mayor don t forget that now wait a minute so if in the last four years there s more community policing more sophisticated deployment of law enforcement resources if people aren t getting hassled on the street as much there s not as much crime and less violence and people are less likely to get hurt that is a good and noble thing that is an american ideal that doesn t belong to either party and i am proud that our party in washington over the opposition of the washington republicans came out for the brady bill for the assault weapons ban for putting more police on the street for doing things that would help to bring the crime rate down now and i believe with all my heart that there is a bipartisan american consensus now that we ought to keep pushing more police officers on the street working with communities preventing crime from happening in the first place catching people when they do something wrong as quickly as possible making the streets safer now having said that every election ought to be about tomorrow what about tomorrow there are three things i want you to think about number one while the crime rate has gone down in this country and in new york city substantially in the last five and a half years crime among people between the ages of 12 and 18 has not gone down so much in some places not at all the second fact about that is most crime by juveniles is committed between 3 00 p m in the afternoon and 7 00 p m at night why because they re out of school not at home and mama and daddy are still at work now it is my opinion having been involved in law enforcement now for more than 20 years that the most serious proposal put forward in any of the elections occurring in this election year likely to deter juvenile crime and lower the crime rate is ruth messinger s call to keep all the schools in new york open after school hours second reason i heard you amen ing when ruth was talking about the schools if you really want a safe society you must a well educated society new york is blessed by having a phenomenally diverse population people from over 100 different racial and ethnic groups in your school system but they re all kids with minds given to them by god and they can all learn they can all learn but they deserve good schools with high standards high accountability adequate investment and yes we ought to do some more in washington and i m going to do my best to help the cities alleviate the over crowding problem to repair these schools and build new facilities we ve got to do that but i just got back from chicago where hillary and i went because they opened up the town to her one day it s my wife s hometown to celebrate her 50th birthday and let me tell you that not so many years ago chicago had by common consent the worst schools of any major city in america they were shut down every year by a strike whether there was an issue or not and that s all people knew about them in the last four years the people of chicago led by a mayor who put education first have begun to literally revolutionize their schools they have mandatory summer school for children who don t perform they hold kids back if they don t pass an exam to go on to high school but they don t just punish kids they give all children a chance to succeed new york city should give every child a chance to succeed ruth messinger cares about that the third thing i want to say is this i am very proud of the fact that our economic policies have led to over 13 million new jobs an unemployment rate below 5 percent and the best economy in a generation i m proud of that but it bothers me that there s still too many people in america who have not felt the economic recovery i have done what i could to provide special tax incentives for people to invest in inner cities to set up new banks for people to loan money to people who couldn t get money in any other way to start their own businesses to do other things that would rebuild the economy of areas where the unemployment rate is too high but anybody who s ever worked in this field will tell you that the federal government cannot do this alone you have to have state support you have to have local support you have to be able to work with the private sector and you have to try new ideas believe me no one has fully solved this problem so i say to you i believe if i were mayor of new york city i would say my three priorities are i m going to get the unemployment rate down to the national level i m going to fix our schools and i m going to give these kids something to do after school to keep them out of trouble in the first place and keep the crime rate going down now this ought to be a positive experience for you and a positive election and so i say to you let me just say this wait wait wait i believe in his right to free speech more than he believes in mine so we let him talk a little bit if you want to talk to me go out there don t mess with the mayor s race she doesn t deserve this who do you believe let me say something while he s on his way out let s talk about aids a minute let s talk about this you all be quiet and listen to me this aids issue is a serious issue but you never get to the facts if you re just screaming and i can t win a screaming match today you might be interested to know if you thinks it s important that we have dramatically increased spending on aids research dramatically increased spending while i was cutting other things and balancing the budget dramatically increased spending on aids treatment that the new drugs dramatically approved much faster under my administration than ever before have lengthened the life and the quality of life of people with aids and in terms of research we are spending today more than twice as much per person with aids with a fatal case of aids in research than we are women with breast cancer and more than eight times as much as men with prostate cancer i think we have done a good job on this issue i m proud of it and i think you should now secondly since we re here about the mayor s race who do you think is more likely to care more about the aids issue as mayor of new york now you ve got a day and a half you ve got a day and a half i want to ask you to do something i was glad to come up here tonight i don t have a vote you have a vote i won t be here on tuesday to drag people to the polls but you can so think about the next day and a half and say i m thinking about the future of new york i m worried about the kids and i want them off the streets and doing something positive after school i m worried about our schools and i want them to be the best in the country and i know we ve got to try something new and innovative if we re going to cut the unemployment rate from 10 percent to 5 percent and ruth messinger has a plan to deal with all three i believe i ll help her go out and do that and have a good tuesday thank you dem wjclinton2 12 94 bill_clinton thank you very much carolyn long banks and thank you all for that very warm welcome i wish you the best in your new job carolyn as league president i want to say to all of you i wish i could be there in minneapolis with my many friends in the national league of cities i d like to say a special word of hello to two of your members of the board of the directors whom i have known for a very long time from my home state sharon priest the city director of little rock and martin gipson alderman in north little rock i d also like to say a special word of thanks to your outgoing president sharpe james he s been a good friend of mine and because of his leadership of other league members we now have the toughest and smartest crime bill in our history i thank you for that sharpe and i thank all of you i have long admired the work of the national league of cities as a governor i worked with many of you on many tough issues and as president i m committed to doing all i can to face those issues with you in a genuine spirit of partnership to do that i believe as many of you do that while government cannot be society s savior neither can it sit on the sidelines our job yours and mine is to create opportunity to remove barriers to that opportunity to give our people the tools they need to make the most of their lives when it comes to our cities we ve developed a public private partnership designed to provide opportunity where it s most needed we ve encouraged businesses to take root and grow in neglected communities with the community development and regulatory improvement act we re steering billions of dollars in private investment to the places people need it the most and very soon we ll announce the winners of our empowerment zones and enterprise communities we re helping americans to rebuild the american dream for themselves the most important thing we can do what we ve been working to do since the beginning of our administration is to create high quality high wage jobs jobs that enable our people to build good lives for themselves in recent days we ve had a string of indicators that show just how strong this recovery has been this morning we have the latest job figures that show strong success in building good jobs for americans unemployment is down to 5 6 percent the lowest it s been in four and a half years since i became president our economy has produced 5 2 million new jobs so far this year there have been more new jobs created in high wage industries than in the previous five years combined manufacturing jobs are up for 11 consecutive months for the first time in more than a decade and more construction jobs have been created this year alone than in the previous nine years combined our strategy of opening up foreign markets to our goods and services has certainly contributed to this success in just a year nafta has created an estimated 100 000 new jobs and yesterday with strong bipartisan support we took an historic step and passed the gatt world trade agreement which will create hundreds of thousands of good jobs here in america despite these successes you and i both know there are too many hard working americans who are still deeply anxious about their economic futures and their families i understand that for 20 years stagnant wages and a declining rate of job security have taken a terrible toll as our workers face these terrible changes and these exciting challenges of the global economy they are rightly worried about how they and their children will adjust we know that male workers without a college education have actually seen a decline in their earnings over the last 10 years and we know that most working families are actually working more they have less leisure time we also know that this is the only advanced country in the world where working people are actually losing ground in terms of their health coverage a million americans in working families lost health insurance last year alone that s why even as we open up trade and create jobs we ve got to work hard to help americans adjust to these changes so that they can win in the global economy the most important thing we can do is to help our people to learn the skills they need to compete and win in the years to come that s the idea behind the education and training programs we ve worked so hard for in the 103rd congress a big expansion of head start the goals 2000 program with its high national standards the elementary and secondary education reform act with its grass roots reforms more computers for our schools things like charter schools more public school choice better education for poor children character education in our schools that s what s behind our determination to give more affordable loans for millions and millions of middle class students to go to college it s behind the national service act americorps which allows tens of thousands of our young people to earn money for their college education by serving their communities at the grass roots level and it s what s behind our apprenticeship programs for people who don t go to college but do want to have good jobs with good skills the strength of all these programs is that they re rooted in the idea that individual citizens and communities can decide how best to build their own futures now for you nothing in our agenda may be more important than our efforts to fight crime the crime bill we passed is the crime bill many of you helped to write it s a model for how we must continue to reinvent our government to meet the needs of our people and to move power out of washington back to the grass roots we re moving quickly to put 100 000 more police on the street and to institute our prevention and our punishment programs and we re paying for it by reducing the federal work force by 272 000 positions to the smallest level since president kennedy already there are more than 70 000 fewer people working for the federal government than there were on the day i was inaugurated president and every dollar we save is going back to you going back to grass roots communities who know best how to fight crime in the streets that s a good deal it will work for america we ve made a good beginning on crime a good beginning on the economy but to do more i hope we can continue the spirit of cooperation with the new congress that we ve seen on gatt this week i hope we can find common ground on your concerns about unfunded federal mandates which i have long opposed the glenn kempthorne legislation would restrict these mandates and we re working closely with the lawmakers to make this bill a priority early early in the next session of congress we should also continue to cooperate on health care reform the american people still want it and they still need it we have to find a way to provide working families with that help we can t continue to be the only advanced country in the world where more and more working people are losing their health insurance every year and where the cost of health care is going up at three times the rate of inflation and for small businesses health insurance premiums this year went up at almost five times the rate of inflation when the health of the american people and working families suffer the health of our economy suffers all of you know that more and more of our federal budget is going to health care medicare medicaid they re the fastest increasing areas of the federal budget we ve held everything else constant or reduced it so we need to find ways that step by step we can in a bipartisan spirit make progress on this we also have to find ways to cooperate on welfare reform we have to build a strong bridge from dependency to work for millions of americans we have to attack problems that feed dependency including the runaway problem of teen pregnancies i ve been working on this welfare reform issue for more than a decade now i know that the people on welfare overwhelmingly want to get off we have got a system that was designed for another age as so many governmental systems are and we need to change it dramatically to make it rooted in independence and responsibility not to subsidize dependence every american wants this and we re going to do it and do it together on these and many many other issues i hope and believe we can cooperate with the new congress but cooperation for me cannot mean abandoning principle abandoning the hard work we have already accomplished together in our fight to restore our economy our fight against crime our fight to give this country back to hardworking people who play by the rules i will oppose any efforts to take us back on those issues we ve worked too hard to build an economic recovery and a job strategy and to reduce this deficit that 12 years of irresponsible explosive spending left us and i will fight efforts that jeopardize the strategy to create jobs fight efforts that will explode the deficit fight efforts that will put new burdens on the backs of our children the assault weapons ban that you helped to win stands between the citizens you and i must protect and the gangs and thugs that would terrorize them i will do all in my power to keep the next congress from doing anything that will jeopardize the safety of our people and i truly hope the new congress understands how important these things are to the american people and to their elected representatives at the grass roots level we ve made a good beginning to build together and we have to get on with the job it s no secret that the landscape in washington shifted dramatically last month but what must not shift is my commitment and your commitment to continue to work for what will actually help hard working middle class americans restore the hope that they can keep the american dream alive and that will provide opportunities and insist on responsibilities for others to move into that great middle class what must not change is our conviction that we work best when we work together as partners and when we all share responsibility diversity of government is the great genius of the american system from the smallest of our communities to the biggest of our cities to the state houses and to the halls of congress and the white house no part of our effort can be isolated that s why we must keep talking with one another and listening to one another and working together if we work at all our levels we can help take america in the direction it must move we can help our people find the best path on to the bright new century that awaits us we can give the american people a smaller government a more entrepreneurial government a more flexible government that reflects their values and promotes their interests if we do it together thank you very much thank you dem wjclinton2 2 93 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much governor romer ladies and gentlemen i felt pretty good sitting at that table although that s my real place over there we had a wonderful meeting yesterday i thought for a long time maybe the longest time a president has ever met with a group of governors but we were discussing a terribly important issue health care and then we also got to discuss the deficit crisis and the budget problems a little bit i wanted to come here today as you prepare to leave to once again reaffirm my commitment to working in partnership with the governors you deal with real people in a more immediate way than unfortunately the president often gets to do when i was a governor every day i would hear directly from people or see people who had suffered from layoffs or had their businesses closed down or who were afraid of losing their health coverage or who desperately wanted to improve their schools as you and i learned from last year s elections the only pattern was not a partisan one it was a pattern of determination on the part of the american people to have their political system and their government address their real concerns they don t want our process divided by partisanship or dominated by special interest or driven by short term advantage they know things that have too often been forgotten here over the last dozen years the values that are central to our country s character must be central to our government work family faith opportunity responsibility and community what i appreciated about this meeting is that no matter what our region or our party we ve always gotten together and tried to pay serious attention to our problems i think the governors have exemplified for the last dozen years the bold persistent experimentation that president roosevelt called for at the beginning of the great depression when he took office and i m here to tell you that i m going to do everything i can to work with you in partnership to share ideas and resources and energy to try to do what we can to move this country forward as we discussed health care economic policy and the deficit yesterday i d like to spend just a few moments today talking about something that many of us have been working on since the middle 1980s the issue of welfare reform i ve often spoken with many of you about the need to end welfare as we know it to make it a program that supports people who have fallen on hard times or who have difficulties that can be overcome but eventually and ultimately a program that helps people to get on their feet through health care child care job training and ultimately a productive job no one likes the welfare system as it currently exists least of all the people who are on it the taxpayers the social service employees themselves don t think much of it either most people on welfare are yearning for another alternative aching for the chance to move from dependence to dignity and we owe it to them to give them that chance in the middle 1980s when i was governor here i worked with governor castle now a member of the congress he and governor carper changed jobs and in six months they re going to have a vote to see who won and who lost to try to work with the congress to develop a national welfare reform program with the support of people in the house and the senate with the particular help of senator moynihan now the chairman of the senate finance committee and with the support of the white house the governors had an unprecedented role in writing the family support act of 1988 which president reagan signed into law shortly before he left office and which senator moynihan said was the most significant piece of social reform in this area in the last generation the family support act embodies a principle which i believe is the basis of an emerging consensus among people without regard to party or without regard to their traditional political philosophies we must provide people on welfare with more opportunities for job training with the assurance that they will receive the health care and child care they need when they go to work and with all the opportunities they need to become selfsufficient but then we have to ask them to make the most of these opportunities and to take a job as all of you know the states never had the chance to fully implement the welfare reform act of 1988 for two reasons first because over the last four years the welfare rolls have exploded everywhere and health care costs have gone up as the job market has declined and the economy has grown at the slowest rate in half a century secondly because of the economic problems government revenues have been down and the congress and the administration were never able to fully fund the education and training portion of the act this was clearly manifested not only in the growth of welfare rolls but in the fact that last year for the first time since the program began one in ten americans were on food stamps so as the weak economy left millions more in poverty and the welfare rolls increased five times greater during the last four years than under the previous two administrations combined it made it more difficult to make welfare reform work in spite of that i think it would be a great mistake to conclude that that act was of no significance or that nothing good has occurred bipartisan efforts in state after state from new jersey to georgia to wisconsin and many others all across the country have resulted in innovative approaches to help move people off welfare roles and onto payrolls in our state through the program we call project success more than 17 000 people moved from welfare to work and more importantly at a time when the roles were exploding our roles grew much more slowly than the national average many of you have your own successes to report and i had the opportunity to visit in many of the states here represented projects that were terribly impressive to me i say this to make the following point the bill that is on the books will work given the right economy and the right kind of support systems but we need to do more than fully implement it we need to do that and go beyond i salute you for forming a state officials advisory group on welfare reform with governors and legislators and health and welfare directors from ten states i want to tell you today that within the next ten days i will announce a welfare reform group to work with you i will ask top officials from the white house the health and human services and other agencies involved to sit down with governors and congressional leaders and develop a welfare reform plan that will work i have asked the best people in the nation on this subject to come and help me do this the day i took office i promised the american people i would fight for more opportunity for all and demand more responsibility from all and that is a commitment i am determined to keep with your help by putting an end to welfare as we know it our working group will learn from and work with state officials business and labor folks and leaders from every walk of life who care about this issue on welfare reform as on health care reform there are no top down made in washington solutions that will work for everyone the problems and the progress are to be found in the communities of this country but i do want to tell you the principles this morning that will guide my administration as we work with you to reform welfare first welfare should be a second chance not a way of life i want to give people on welfare the education and training and the opportunities they need to become self sufficient to make sure they can do it after they go to work they must still have access to health care and to child care so many people stay on welfare not because of the checks the benefit levels as many of you know in real dollar terms are lower than they were 20 years ago they do it solely because they do not want to put their children at risk of losing health care or because they do not have the money to pay for child care out of the meager wages they can earn coming from a low education base we have got to deal with that i believe two years after a training program is completed you have to ask people to take a job ultimately either in the private sector or in public service there must be in addition to the full implementation of the welfare reform act of 1988 in my opinion a time certain beyond which people don t draw a check for doing nothing when they can do something and there is a lot of work out there to be done senator boren and senator wofford have offered a bill to try to recreate on a very limited basis a pilot project that would take the best of what was done a pilot project that would take the best of what was done with the work programs of the 30s and try to throw them into the context of the 90s we must begin now to plan for a time when people will ultimately be able to work for the check they get whether the check comes from a private employer or from the united states taxpayers today about half the people on welfare are just the people welfare was meant to help they fall on hard times and they have to have public assistance they re eager to move on with their lives and after five or six months or eight months they re right back at work again struggling to make their way in the american way about half the people on welfare stay on for over two years but one in four persons the people that we really need to try to help to break the cycle that is gripping their children and grandchildren about one in four stays a recipient for eight years or longer those are the folks that governor wilder i know is now working on that many of you have tried to address the problems of and i want to help you with that second we need to make work pay we have to make sure that every american who works full time with a child in the home does not live in poverty if there is dignity in all work there must be dignity for every worker therefore i will propose an expansion in the earned income tax credit which supplements the income of the working poor we can do that we ought to be able to lift people who work 40 hours a week with kids in their home out of poverty and we will remove the incentive for staying in poverty it will be much less expensive than to have government direct supplements to pay people to remain idle and it will reinforce the work ethic if we can do that and at the same time do what we discussed yesterday control health care costs and expand coverage so that no one has to stay on welfare just to take care of their children s medical needs i think you will see a dramatic breakthrough in our efforts to liberate people from their dependency third we need tougher child support enforcement an estimated 15 million children have parents who could pay child support but don t we need to make sure that they do parents owe billions of dollars in child support that is unpaid money that could go a long way toward cutting the welfare roles and lifting single parents out of poverty and money that could go a long way toward helping us control government expenditures and reducing that debt we re going to toughen child support enforcement by creating a national databank to track down deadbeat parents by having the states go as far as they possibly can to establish paternity at the hospital when children are born and if i can prevail up here by using the irs to collect unpaid support in seriously delinquent cases i ve said it before because it s the simple truth government s don t raise children people do and even people who aren t around ought to do their part to raise the children they bring into this world fourth we need to encourage experimentation in the states i will say again what you know so well there are many promising initiatives right now at the state and local level and we will work with you to encourage that kind of experimentation i do not want the federal government in pushing welfare reforms based on these general principles to rob you of the ability to do more to do different things and i want to try to flesh out a little bit of the idea i we discussed yesterday about the waivers my view is that we ought to give you more elbow room to experiment i know i was perplexed during the recent campaign when i tried to make a statement that some people in the press said reflected waffling and it seemed to me to express the real genius of the federal system i said that if i were president i would approve waivers of experiments that i did not necessary agree with and they said you re trying to have it both ways i said no i m not i m trying to honor the founding fathers if we didn t disagree on anything what would be the need to experiment that is the nature of the experiment is that one person has an idea different from another person and so i will encourage all of us to work together to try things that are different and the only thing i want to say to ask you in return is let us measure these experiments and let us measure them honestly so that if they work we can make them the rule we can all adopt things that work and if they don t we can stop and try something else that s the only thing i ask of you if we say okay we re going to have more waivers and you re going to be able to experiment in projects that use federal dollars let s measure the experiment let s be honest about it and if it works let s tell everybody it works so we can all do it and if it doesn t let s have the courage to quit and admit it didn t i think all of us want what most people on welfare want a country that gives you a hand up not a handout we don t have a person to waste we need the talent the energy the skills of every man and woman every boy and girl in this country of all the problems we have with competitiveness whether it is the deficit or the level of investment or anything else i think all of us know in our heart of hearts america s biggest problem today is that too many of our people never get a shot at the american dream and that if all of our people were living up to the fullest of their potential we would surely have a much easier path to solving all the issues that we constantly debate about at these meetings of all my moments as governor one i remember with the most pride occurred here at a national governors association meeting during that two year period when we were working on welfare reform and we had a governor castle and i sponsored a panel and i think 40 governors attended and we had welfare recipients from all over the country come in and talk to the governors about what it was like to be on welfare a woman from arkansas who was there whom i knew but had not vetted for this conversation started talking about her program and how she d gone into a training program and she had gotten a job all of that and i did something lawyers are told never to do i asked a question without knowing the answer i said do you think this program ought to be mandatory should everybody have to participate in this she said i sure do and i said why and she said well because if it wasn t there would be a lot of people like me home watching the soaps because we don t believe we can make anything of ourselves anymore so you ve got to make it mandatory and i said what s the best thing about having a job she said when my boy goes to school and they say what does your mamma do for a living he can give an answer i think that moment says more than i will ever be ever to say about why this is important not just important for the poor but important for the rest of us we must end poverty for americans who want to work and we must do it on terms that dignify all of the rest of us as well as help our country to work better i need your help and i think we can do it thank you very much dem wjclinton2 2 94 bill_clinton let me wrap up by just making a couple of observations first of all to thank all those panelists who were here the ones on my panel and the ones who were here earlier and all of you for coming what we are trying to do in our administration with the leadership of the secretary of labor and the secretary of education and many others is to establish a system of lifelong learning to recognize that people are going to change work seven or eight times in a lifetime that even if you re fortunate enough to have your employer able to keep you with the same company for a lifetime doing that will require continuous changing skills the way we do things will be different tomorrow than the way we did things today you heard father cunningham talking about the clean car well being a bank teller is a very different job today than it was five years ago too working in most hospital jobs are different today than it was five years ago things are changing rapidly and they will continue to we have some major pieces of legislation our goals 2000 bill which affects the way public schools operate and tries to give them some international standards against which to measure their own efforts our school to work initiative which tries to recognize that a lot of young people don t go to college but do need the kinds of skills that we ve been talking about today and we are going to propose transforming the whole unemployment system to try to deal with some of the problems you heard about today to make it a continuous reemployment system so that there is at least no delay from the time a person stops getting a paycheck until a person starts into a retraining program because we know that the old jobs don t come back anymore and we re going to try to do it in a way that will give enormous incentives to support programs at the local level that get rid of bureaucracy and that aren t all divided up not only consolidating the training programs but with these one stop centers making sure that nobody who loses a job is left to the chance of whether some coworker says well here s a program that might work and that no one on welfare wanders out of the welfare office and has to depend on the luck of someone else saying here s something that will help you turn your life around it seems to me that we have to do that the second thing we have to do to follow up on what linda said is to reward programs that produce results and to make it absolutely clear that those results are what matter that in the end the job training programs have to lead to work or they don t work later this month we will introduce the reemployment act of 1994 which will hopefully contain the wisdom that all of you have imparted to us today and i hope you will help us to pass it in a time in which we have to cut domestic spending we have to find more money to spend on this and i am presenting a budget to the congress on monday which will eliminate completely 100 government programs and cut back over 300 others so that we can squeeze the money out of this budget to put more money into people to get jobs in the private sector where the future of the country is and again i will say that i hope all of you will support that because we ve got a lot of yesterday s programs in the government too and we re just kidding ourselves if we just keep spending money on things that don t really move the whole economy forward don t create more jobs don t give people a different and a better future we know right now from what you ve told us that we have to consolidate all these different programs for laid off workers and again it won t be easy because there will be people good people in the congress who will say well there was reason we had this separate program there were people we were trying to help we ve got to learn to trust people like father cunningham and linda butler and other people at the grass roots level who are producing jobs we have to consolidate the programs in law and let them diversify in fact where it makes sense out in the country instead of that we had the reverse we have diversified the programs in law so that they can t have any impact out there in the country so i hope you will help to do that the bill will create one stop shopping centers and it will create incentives to put the consumer first and to try to bring the business community into this so that employers even when they don t have to will want to give their workers more notice working people in this country are grown ups they understand the global economy they know what is happening and they deserve the right to control their destiny in a better way and so we will try to engage the employer community in that and the labor community in that and i m very hopeful that we can and finally we re working hard to get as much money as we can to make this training long term to have enough time to meet the needs of people and to meet the needs of our future economy and i have learned some very specific things today that we re going to go back and try to make sure we ve got in that bill as well as in the welfare reform bill three years from now i never want to hear another cynthia scott story like that again the welfare office ought to be the work office it ought to be the job training office it ought to be the place where you can be a successful worker and a successful parent so i thank you all for coming i thank you for your contributions i want to say a little about my friend of 25 years our labor secretary i think he s done a wonderful job because he cares about people like you and we re trying to be relevant to your future thank you very much dem wjclinton2 2 98 bill_clinton thank you very much for that warm welcome good morning thank you mr vice president mr bowles members of our economic team members of the cabinet and administration and i thank the large number of members of congress who have come here today and others all of you here for the submission of the first balanced budget in 30 years one that will truly strengthen our nation for the 21st century this budget marks the end of an era an end to decades of deficits that have shackled our economy paralyzed our politics and held our people back it can mark the beginning of a new era of opportunity for a new american century consider what has been achieved in so short a time in the 12 years before i took office trickle down economics led to an explosion in the federal deficit which quadrupled our national debt in only 12 years government deficits soaked up trillions of dollars in capital that should have been used for productive investment massive deficits led to high interest rates that slowed growth and massive deficits also paralyzed the congress in their attempts to invest in our future as we spent more and more and more of the taxpayers dollars just to pay interest on the debt we had run up the new economy was being held back by old political ideas and arrangements the deficit was more than an economic reality it was a powerful symbol that government had simply failed to meet its most basic obligations and doing something about the deficit was one of the reasons i ran for president in 1992 the day i took office the deficit was projected to be about 300 billion for that year for five years beginning in 1993 as the vice president said the congress and the american people have worked tirelessly to put our economic house in order we have worked hard here to put our fiscal house in order the government is the smallest it s been in 35 years and deficit reduction has given us lower interest rates higher investment and i might add lower unemployment more taxpayers and more funds to invest in america s future that is the gamble we took in 1993 a gamble now that i thought was not such a gamble at all but it did as the vice president said cost several members of congress their jobs wherever they are today wherever they are i hope they know and remember that we passed that budget in 93 by one vote in the senate and by one vote in the house and we did not have a vote to spare and everybody that stood up and especially those who lost their seats can know they gave 14 million americans jobs that would not have been there otherwise and a brighter future for all the american people and i m very grateful for that i also want to point out as the vice president did that the job to be finished and to eliminate the structural deficit came with a balanced budget agreement last year and we should applaud all those in both parties who were part of that because it will not only enable us to achieve a balanced budget it will enable us to maintain a balanced budget long into the future if we stay with the disciplined framework that was embraced last year by very large majorities in both houses of both parties and that is very important it s one thing to get the deficit down another thing to hold it there and that balanced budget agreement will not only go from a much smaller deficit down to balance but also will hold it there if we stay with the discipline we have not done all this work to let it go now i believe if we will stay with the plan we can balance the budget without further cuts indeed the balanced budget i submitted shows we can balance the budget and still hire 100 000 new teachers and modernize 5 000 schools we can balance the budget and allow hundreds of thousands of middle aged americans who have no health insurance through no fault of their own to buy into medicare we can balance the budget and still extend child care to a million more children and above all we can balance the budget and save social security first in other words it is obvious that you can have a smaller government but a more progressive one that gives you a more stronger america we ve done more than simply balance the budget more than just line up numbers on a ledger we have restored the balance of the values in our policy restored the balance of confidence of between government and the public now we ll have a balanced budget not only next year but as far as the eye can see we have to use this opportunity to build a stronger america and let s just talk about that first and foremost we project that the budget will not only balance it will actually run a surplus of 9 5 billion next year and over 200 billion over the next five years fully 1 trillion over the next 10 years this budget reserves that surplus i want to say it again this budget reserves that surplus saving it until we have taken the steps necessary to strengthen social security into the next century one of the reasons that balancing the budget has been hard is that we have insisted on a balanced budget that honors our values finding a way to reduce red ink without shrinking the circle of opportunity has been at the heart of our efforts and when we started most people said you couldn t do it they said there is no way to cut the rest of government enough to reduce the deficit and increase investment in important areas but that is an important achievement as well now it is most important of all that we balance the budget while renewing our commitment to save social security when i left washington last week and went to champaign illinois and la crosse wisconsin i was moved by the strength and depth of the american people s priority for the surplus they created i think they want us to save social security first as well and i hope all of you and members of congress in both parties will support that we have a great opportunity now to take action now to avert a crisis in the social security system we have a great opportunity now to be able to tell all these young people who are shadowing their cabinet and administration leaders that social security will be there for them when they retire we have a great opportunity those of us in the baby boom generation to tell our own children that when we retire and start drawing social security it isn t going to bankrupt them to take care of us and undermine their ability to take care of their own children we need to do this we don t need to take any shortcuts we don t need to take any short term benefits before we do anything with that surplus let s save social security first the budget continues our efforts at education reform as i said it enables us to hire 100 000 new teachers working with states to reduce class size to an average of 18 in the 1st 2nd and 3rd grades and to help modernize or build 5 000 schools it helps to give our parents the tools they need to meet their responsibilities at home and at work among other things allowing people between the ages of 55 and 65 who lose their health insurance to buy into the medicare program it includes a breakthrough investment in child care through tax credits vouchers for states scholarships for care givers it will help america to meet its obligations in international leadership meet our obligations to stabilize the world s financial markets to pay our dues to the united nations to continue our support of our military so that our men and women in uniform can continue to do the job for us it will provide tax cuts in research and development to help meet the challenge of global climate change in a way that enables us to grow the economy while actually improving the environment it continues to support our urban empowerment strategy bringing more private sector investments to our hardest pressed cities and neighborhoods while continuing to put 100 000 police officers on the streets and giving our children something to do after school so more of them can stay out of trouble and on a path to success it will lead to future generations the gift of scientific and medical advances the 21st century research fund the largest funding increases ever for the national institute of health the national science foundation and the national cancer institute will speed the progress of biomedical breakthroughs in the fight against many of our deadliest diseases the budget funds these initiatives by continued cuts in government programs by closing unwarranted tax loopholes and from the passage of tobacco legislation which as every passing day shows is critically important to the future of our children and therefore of our country this budget meets the test i set out before congress last week no new spending initiatives no new tax cuts unless they can actually be accomplished without adding a dime to the deficit for more than two centuries americans have strengthened our nation at every critical moment with confidence unity a determination to meet every challenge for too long the budget deficit a worsening crime wave the seemingly unsolvable welfare difficulties they all seemed to challenge our innate american confidence in the past five years the american people have met these challenges and have moved to master them now we have a chance in a period of peace and prosperity with renewed confidence to build for the future that s what this balanced budget does now it is i am going to close my remarks now by asking the vice president to give me a magic marker so that i can be the first person to actually certify what the budget will say for the coming year even we can do this i am technologically challenged therefore we re not doing this on a computer dem wjclinton2 2 99 bill_clinton thank you very much if i may with all respect to caroline borrow a line from president kennedy it looks to me like that it is highly likely that i will increasingly be known as the person who comes with hillary to new york i want to first of all say to all of you how grateful i am to steve grossman for the great work he has done as our chairman nobody wanted to be head of the democratic party when it was 18 million in debt but steve grossman he thought it was just a minor irritant that we could go away with and i said today you know hillary came to new york today and i went to boston and i ll tell you more about that in a minute i had a great day in boston she said now tell me again what you re doing in boston i said well i m going to go up to boston and we re going to canonize steve grossman and she said bill don t say that it s the wrong religion so i did it anyway i introduced him to his hometown crowd today as the first person of the jewish faith ever to be called saint steven and they liked it in boston at least the irish and the italians liked it which is a big part of the crowd we had a great day i want to thank len barrack for the work he s done and governor romer all the staff folks i want to thank joe andrew and beth dozoretz for being willing to serve i want to thank judith hope for doing a great job here in new york and i cannot tell you how grateful i am to jerry nadler carolyn maloney and nita lowey they are treasures they do a magnificent job for new york but they stand up for what s right for america and you should be so proud that our party is represented by people like them in the united states congress i want to thank congressman klein and speaker silver and all my pals from indiana who are here tonight joe andrew this is a good sign but you re going to spoil us you know when we go to washington state i m going to be looking for the five people from indiana when we re in south texas i ll be looking for the five people from indiana we re going to open every meeting with back home in indiana we ll all sing it you know i could tell when hillary was talking to you about the women with whom she met today that it touched you but you have to know that i think that politics only works if you have certain principles and values you have ideas about how to implement them and then you have some sense of what the human impact of what you do is i mean if this doesn t make any difference to anybody s life why did you come out here tonight you could have eaten downstairs for less money which with all respect to the owner at this restaurant is saying something and you could have done that so i m getting ready for my next life i m going to be the comic that closes the shows my stand up life i just want to tell you two stories too that really mean a lot to me the other day well let me back up and say i believe there are two things which distinguish the two parties today on almost every issue of major significance there may be 200 but i think there are two for sure first is what is the role of government in making the america of our dreams in the 21st century the first thing is we ended the old debate that nearly wrecked this country and quadrupled the national debt and got us in a terrible hole in the 1980s where you know the argument was always is government the solution or is government the problem and my argument was always that government is neither that the role of government is to create the conditions and get people the tools to make the most of their own lives the second and i think fundamentally even more important difference is our idea of community our idea of community goes way beyond just saying you believe in the same things i think most of us in the very fiber of our being believe that we are all interconnected that we are an interdependent people in an increasingly interdependent world that when you strip away all the layers nobody is any better than anybody else and that we cannot find personal or family or business economic fulfillment without some decent concern for the ability of others to find the same i believe that and i was raised with those values and had a fresh reminder involving new york city the other day from a strange source i have a 60 year old cousin who runs the local hud office the housing project in the little town in arkansas where i was born and the other day she called the white house and we ve been friends she was the best rodeo performer in arkansas when she was 16 years old i used to watch her barrel race and rope cows and i mean the calves and all that stuff she was fabulous and she still looks like she could do it after all these years but she called and she said she was coming to washington for a hud conference wanted to spend the night and she spent the night and i got up and we had breakfast in the morning she still gets up real early like i used to when i lived there and so we were talking and she said i m really worried about something and i said what is it she said well you know i come from about the smallest place represented at this conference she said most of these people are from new york or los angeles or someplace like that and she said they tell me there are 20 000 to 30 000 children a year in foster care that turn 18 and are just turned out their parents don t get any more money and some of them are foster parents who can t afford to take care of them and a lot of these kids are just on the street when they ought to be going to college so i said well i think we re trying to do something about that and i ll get back to you four days later hillary did an event about part of our budge that she has been crusading for for years to provide funds to places like new york city to support those children to give them a decent place to live to give them a chance at going to college to give them a chance to go on with their lives twenty thousand to 30 000 people in a country of 260 million is not all that many but if it s your life it s the biggest number in the world and i thought to myself my cousin raised by the people on my mama s side of the family who had all the same values was really worried about those kids in new york city and i was very proud to be related to her and i am proud to be related to all of you because i think we care about that and i think it illustrates what our party stands for now today i went up while hillary was having a good time in new york i was in boston having a good time at the mann jackson elementary school it s a great school and i won t bore you with all the details but they had the choir singing for me and then i met with the choir afterward and a bunch of the students and gosh there were irish kids and italian kids and jewish kids and there were arab american kids and there were hispanic kids from a bunch of different countries and there were chinese kids japanese kids thai kids kids from the indian subcontinent both indians and pakistanis they were all there and it was amazing and i thought you know this is this bewildering kaleidoscope that is america so they re going to ask me all these questions right and they re all going to be very ethnically distinguishable what s your favorite food chinese american kid says why do you live in such a big house you ve got more room than you need and i said well it s not really my house it s sort of a museum and i live in a few rooms and i said well why don t you just come down and see it do you like your job i said now i have to be honest and i told them the truth i said every day even the bad every day then there was this incredibly touching child who was quite large for his age nine year old child who was blind who was either indian or pakistani he didn t tell me and we didn t have time to talk and he came up and he says i ve got a song i learned and i want to sing this song barged up to the front of the line and i said well just sing ahead and it was an environmental song about not polluting and the point i want to make to you is that what these children had that was different about them is part of what makes america interesting and will make us a more interesting country in the future but what they had in common was self evident and profound and that s the other thing that means a lot to me so i am very glad that i had the chance to serve as president i m very glad that we got a chance to put the ideas that i brought to the country in 1991 and 1992 into effect i m glad i had incredibly gifted people like the vice president and hillary and so many other people on our team to make it work not the least of whom as all of you know is my great secretary of the treasury from new york bob rubin but what matters to me is the lives have changed you know if you say well we ve got the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957 that s an applause line but the real applause line is what it does to the lives of the people you say we ve cut the welfare rolls nearly in half how did it change people s lives if we have the lowest crime rate in 30 years what difference does that make that means a whole lot of people are walking around who wouldn t be even walking around otherwise these are the stories the songs of life the texture of america and i would like to say in much briefer and more sort of impressionistic language the point i tried to make at the state of the union which is yes i m very glad for the economic record that has been amassed and i m glad that most of you have done very well in this economy and can do this and still send your kids to college be here tonight but what i would like to say is i believe that we shouldn t be celebrating we should be thanking the good lord that we have this opportunity i mean i think about past presidents past members of congress past governors past you name it people who had public responsibilities who would have killed to have the circumstances that we have now to have the freedom to face the long term challenges of america and i believe that as a political party we have a solemn responsibility to go out and tell the american people look if you want to give us a pat on the back for being right in 1993 and bringing the deficit down getting the interest rates down and for being right about family leave and right about the brady bill and right about the crime bill that s fine we d be honored to have it but what we want you to do is to think about what as a country we can do with these times and this prosperity what our responsibilities are how many new good stories we can create out there and this country even though we re doing very well we have huge challenges and i just the aging of america the children of america who are poorer than the seniors the continuing challenge to reconcile work and family the difficulty of maintaining our own economic expansion when there are places in america and in this city that have not felt any of the economic recovery and when there is such instability and uncertainty around the world about the global financial system and the global trading system where more and more ordinary citizens not in this country even as much as other countries have real questions about whether they will be personally benefitted if we continue to expand trade and when we know it s the only way to keep economic growth going these are huge questions how can we continue to grow the economy and seriously manage the problem of global warming a lot of people don t think about that i have to tell you that i am al gore was showing me those carbon charts five or six years ago but for the last 24 months it s been my cause too i am sold i am convinced this is a huge deal and the good news is that it is obvious that the technology is there to deal with this issue and continue to grow the economy probably at a more rapid rate and not only for us but for countries like china and india and pakistan and argentina and other developing countries as well now these are huge things so what i was trying to say in the state of the union is we as americans have a special responsibility from which it would be easy to walk away because we re doing fine but it s a very dynamic world and the women that hillary talked to today and the kids that i spoke with today they deserve better they deserve better and so do you and so do your children and your grandchildren we may never have another opportunity to prove that we can find ways to put billions and billions of dollars of private capital into inner city and rural neighborhoods that haven t had any new investment in this recovery and in the process keep our own economy going we will never have a better time to deal with social security and medicare by setting aside the lion s share of this surplus to do so or to provide for all americans to have the opportunity to save to invest to create a share of wealth something most americans can t afford to do even with the enormous improvement in the stock market and this is also for our children i said yesterday i want to say again if we buy in the privately held debt and obligate the repayment of the bonds to the social security trust fund and to medicare we will reduce debt held by the private citizens to the lowest percentage of our economy since 1917 before world war i in 15 years today when your members of congress vote on the budget they ll have to set aside over 13 of every dollar you pay in taxes to pay interest on the debt in 15 years that congress will only set aside 02 on the dollar if we do this can you imagine what our successors will be able to do with 11 percent of your tax money if we have a slowdown in the economy they ll be able to afford a tax cut if we have a crisis in education they ll be able to deal with it if we need to dramatically increase our investment in medical research or if we have some new security threat they ll have the money to invest in it and will still be strong and i could go on and on and on that s what this is all about and it will change the stories it will change the future of the country so i ask you to keep your energy level high to keep your sights high to realize that rarely do a whole people get a chance to help make the world their children and grandchildren will live in and to make it a better place and in the process recognizing humbly that we cannot begin to foresee everything that they will face we will at least be giving them the tools with which to face the challenges we do not know that is our obligation it is perhaps fortuitous perhaps fated that it occurs at the end of this century and the end of this millennium but hillary s theme for this occasion honoring the past and imaging the future both require us to take these steps that s what your presence here will enable us to do so i ask you to leave here with confidence i ask you to know that the president and the first lady feel a gratitude to the people of new york the city and the state that is inexpressible but the only way we know how to express that gratitude is to seize this moment and i want you to help us do it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton2 3 05 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you you need to calm down you ll have me thinking i m president again i want to begin by thanking zev yaroslavsky whom i ve known for many years and admired for a long time for that introduction and for his lifetime of service to los angeles and my great friend john emerson who when he worked for me in the white house was affectionately known as the secretary of california he became the only state to have a cabinet master every day it was something else defense conversion the healthcare crisis northridge i once asked john what i was supposed to do for the other 49 states after i gave him all the money he wanted he said he didn t care so i m glad he s home where he belongs and whatever you do for him you ll never get even i promise you that we re going to have questions and answers later so what i would like to try to do in a few moments is to basically describe in broad terms where i think we are in the 21st century world where america is and in general without being too detailed what i think we ought to do about it then you may want to have questions about specifics i just got back from a 10 country tour of asia which i did in 13 days which is prima facie evidence of insanity i think for a person in my age and condition but anyway i had a good time i began by going to thailand to indonesia to sri lanka and the maldives with former president bush on an official u s government mission to look at the tsunami affected areas to see how the aid the american people have given is being spent what is being done for the long term reconstruction and to get some feel for what now has to be done and starting next week i will become at the request of secretary general kofi annan the un envoy for long term reconstruction of the tsunami affected areas and i thought i would talk to you a little about this because i want you to think about this first of all a staggering 700 million dollars was given in tsunami relief by private citizens in america a lot of the money was given in large dollars a financial institution in new york city in which some friends of mine are involved called and said we want to help but we ve decided to give you a day s profit so that all 1 800 of our employees can participate they had a pretty good day they made 3 million dollars yesterday and i i think they wished they d picked another day when they did it so we have all these big contributions but what you should know is this is a very important fact about the modern world one third of all american households gave something to tsunami relief over half of them gave over the internet it s funny in that sense it paralyzed paralleled what happened in the 2004 elections which as a matter of political science will go down in our history because it was the first time since the importance of big money and presidential elections for advertising costs that both parties raised massive amounts of money in small amounts and for the first time the democrats raised more than the republicans did in small amounts but both raised both raised absolutely stunning amounts because of the technology of the internet which is democratizing political finance and in this case democratizing international aid and assistance now think about that for a moment what else has been in the headlines the iraqi elections the murder of the leader of the opposition in lebanon rafik hariri who was a very good friend of mine and who spent an hour with me 10 days before he was killed what happened it boomeranged on the assassins the lebanese government fell and the government of syria has said they re going to have to get out of lebanon which is what hariri wanted in the middle east the palestinians have had genuinely democratic elections their israeli government approved a plan to withdraw from gaza president bush recommended something i strongly support 350 million dollars in aid to the palestinians because one of the big problems we ve got in keeping the peace process going is you can t do all this stuff overnight meanwhile the palestinians are getting younger and poorer so there needs to be some economic aid there even egypt said it s going to have some sort of elections now hillary just got back from a trip to afghanistan iraq and india and in afghanistan the elected president there is doing very well indeed something over 20 al qaeda cells have been taken down since 9 11 combined with the 20 we took down after 1998 the operational capacity of al qaeda has been substantially eroded what does all that tell you about the world you live in how would you characterize the 21st century world when i left office and the economy was booming most people would have said it s about globalization and they would have meant the interconnections of the economy but now we see that it goes way beyond economics the brilliant job the global media did of covering the tsunami and the advent of the multiple uses of the internet led to this enormous human outpouring not just in our country but throughout asia other countries that identified with their neighbors being hurt and then northern europe where hundreds and hundreds of scandinavian tourists were killed while they were vacationing in the affected areas there is a higher degree of interdependence in the world today than ever before in human history and that is to me the key word for the 21st century it goes way beyond economics we simply cannot escape each other and that s all interdependence means for good or ill we are tied together and we know it and we understand it even if we don t explicitly talk about it interdependence can be very good for america in the 1990 s it was wonderful we got a third of our growth through global trade we got a third of our income gains through high technology even though 8 only 8 of our work force is directly involved in high tech jobs india now has the biggest middle class in the world largely because of the magnetizing impact of the seven big high tech centers in india where they now produce over half the software in the world when china faced the sars epidemic beginning in hong kong the government s original intention was to deny it then there was a citizen revolt over the internet the most amazing thing you ever saw even though they tried to control access to the internet and the websites and the government was forced to change its position after which they decided it wasn t such a bad thing to be more open and they began getting more open about aids they invited my foundation in to work i just got back from china where i think the chinese government probably has the most comprehensive anti aids effort of any government with a major problem anywhere in the world all because of global interdependence the point i want to make about it is simply this interdependence can be good or bad most of the examples i decided to use are good but if you look at the middle east where the people are completely interdependent we had seven years of progress toward peace when i was president then their second intifada was launched and for four years it was horrible in the eight years i was in office 258 israelis were killed by terrorists we got out the situation deteriorated and in the next four years almost 1 100 israelis were killed and over 4 000 palestinians but they were no less interdependent in those four years than they were in the previous eight it s just that the interdependence shifted from positive to negative now it s we hope shifted back to positive again the point i want to make about this is that interdependence is an inherently unstable circumstance it can be positive or negative or in many cases both at the same time therefore it seems to me that the big job in the 21st century world is to move from simple interdependence to a more integrated set of communities at home and around the world in an integrated community you have three things that enable you to deal with all the problems that come up and all the differences within and beyond our boarders you have shared responsibilities shared benefits and simple shared values everyone counts everyone deserves a chance everyone has a responsible role to play competition is good but we all do better when we work together and finally our differences are important they matter they make life more interesting they enable us to search for the truth they matter but our common humanity matters more now it seems to me that that is the framework that we ought to be looking at every issue through and it certainly is the framework that i use to organize my life the work i do with my foundation and the way i evaluate ever political issue in america and around the world i ask myself will this help to advance the cause of shared responsibilities shared benefits and shared values will it help whatever it is the various social security reform packages will it help to move us from interdependence to a more integrated community and so that s what i d like you to think about now how would we go about doing that i think there are four or five things that have to be done one is we need an integrative approach to security a cooperative approach in the world to fight terror restrict the spread of weapons of mass destruction and help build all the defective democratic governments second we need to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists which essentially means we need to implement the so called millennium development goals that we started to develop when i was president that were later adopted in 2001 how do we reduce poverty spread education deal with the healthcare crisis deal with the environmental crises of the world and live people together it s a big problem half the world s people live on less than 2 00 a day in india it s the only place i know where this has happened there was an upset victory for the opposition party in the last election ironically because of the economic success of india i can never remember it happening before why is that because there are a billion people in the country and 350 million in the middle class and the other 650 watch television you know it s great that they re doing well but we re not so they return the congress party to power and mr singh became the prime minister he was the architect of the original modernization efforts of the indian economy back in 1991 shortly before i was elected so they hired him to figure out how to spread the benefits of india s prosperity to a larger group it s a major major challenge everywhere in the world and one that i worked on with my foundation in india and elsewhere there are 130 million kids that never go to school it wouldn t cost much money to put them in school as a corollary benefit if they re working they re taking them out of the factories and putting their parents in but it s a serious issue if you look at the healthcare issues of the world one quarter of all the people who die on earth this year in spite of all you see about the wars and the tsunami disasters and everything else a quarter of all the deaths on earth will come from aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them are little kids that never got a clean glass of water one in four people on earth never get clean water something you take for granted when you go home tonight when you turn on the tap tonight think about that one in four people can t do what you will do before you go to bed tonight so i think it s really important my foundation works on aids in india and china five african countries with about 35 of the cases there including rwanda tanzania mozambique lesotho and south africa we work in the caribbean our first project in the bahamas i just visited in two years we quadrupled the number of people getting medicine and the death rate was cut in half the point i want to make about this is not that we re doing a good job although i think we are it is that these diseases are preventable and when not prevented are treatable and the cost of doing so is far less than fighting any war anywhere but the benefits may be greater over the long run so i think you have to think about that now so we need a security strategy a strategy for more partners and fewer terrorists we need to build up the institutions of international cooperation the united nations the financial institutions all kinds of other institutions people used to almost make fun of me when i was president because whenever people decided to get together i supported it you may find this hard to believe but when i became president a lot of americans were against the european union because they knew that if europe ever became united economically and politically they would be bigger than the united states you know my view was it still had to be good for us we weren t going to be the only military economic and political superpower in the world forever and we should want people who are successful to share our values and work with us so i supported the european union and the expansion of nato and the rebuilding of the former communist countries and lots of other networking organizations we need these organizations whether you believe the iraq conflict was right or wrong is almost besides the point when i was in law school and we studied by the so called case method where we tried to find a general rule of law that embodied in an important case the professors used to say almost as an offhand remark that hard cases make bad law and what that meant is that even if the case was decided correctly if it was a particularly difficult one it was hard to apply generally so in the case of iraq again whether you think it s right or wrong the whole world now has a stake in it succeeding and 60 of the people did show up and vote and had that wonderful ink on their fingers and risked their lives to do it but we clearly can t do that everywhere we can t have a preemptive war every time there s some place we don t like what s going on so we need we need the for example and the administration understands this for example now we need europeans to help us solve the iranian nuclear problem it s a huge problem but the president s made it clear that you know we re going to bend over backwards to let this diplomatic initiative by the british the french and the germans have full sway to try to solve it the north korean nuclear problem is a significant and thorny problem we can t solve it without help from the chinese and i could give you lots of other examples so on the whole as you look to the future and we have more and more of these kinds of problems we ll have to find ways to solve them usually through cooperative means and therefore we need to think about how to strength these institutions the problem for the united states is that at the moment we re still more powerful militarily than most places and when you join a club you have to play by the rules which means you by definition constrain your own freedom of action so arguably it costs us more to join a club today than anyone else because we re more likely than not to have to forego some freedom of action in order to get the benefits of the common endeavor but i think almost always it s worth it that s why you know even though it was a flawed agreement i thought the kyoto agreement on climate change did more good than harm and i supported it and why i think we should be in the comprehensive test ban treaty and not trying to develop any new nuclear weapons something by the way something your senior senator dianne feinstein has raised more cain about than anybody else in the united states congress and i m proud of her for doing it but apart from the specifics you get the idea here if you cannot kill jail or occupy all your enemies sooner or later you have to make a deal you have to figure out how to cooperate with people and i think it s quite possible this iraqi thing will work out iraq will stay together they ll build a genuinely representative democracy it will not be an islamic fundamentalist regime it s quite possible that it could work out and all of us should want it to work out but it cost 200 billion dollars by the time it s over it will cost us as much as world war i did in constant dollars and therefore it s not something we can do every day everywhere whether you think it was good or bad so we have to try to find other ways to work with people to achieve our common objectives in a more secure more peaceful world the forth thing we have to do is to keep trying to make america a model for the world that means we have to keep coming together we have to keep becoming not just interdependent but integrated and the two political parties in america today have significant differences between them about how best to do that and are more or less evenly divided by numbers if you look at the last election i ll just make a couple of political points about it the predictions of the demise of the democrats are somewhat premature in fact we re doing much better than we did in the 70 s and 80 s in 80 84 and 88 we had three presidential elections where we never won more than 10 states so we won in 92 and 96 we won the popular vote in 2000 and in 2004 got four listen in 2004 got 48 of the vote and president bush his reelection margin was the smallest of any incumbent president since woodrow wilson in 1916 we have never turned out a sitting president in the middle of an ongoing conflict so on the one hand the predictions of the demise of the democrats as a presidential party are not based on historic evidence on the other hand my party s in much worse shape in the congress because the culturally conservative voters who once believed they were almost religiously mandated to vote for republicans for president now think that runs down to senate and house members too and since every state gets two senators and the cultural conservatives are highly concentrated in less popular states in small towns and rural areas gives them a huge advantage in the congressional election so we have to think about the two different parties in their approaches and whether there is some way for us to build not just an interdependent america but one that s more of a community and we have to deal with the different approaches there you know i believe that we were doing the right thing to strive for a community that gave opportunity to every responsible citizen and it respected all different people s belief and tried to work on things we could agree on like stability for middle class families opportunity for all young people security for seniors i thought the role of government was to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives and then help those who through no fault of their own couldn t help themselves the contrary view is that we ought to in effect invest everything possible in the hands of individuals from their own retirement security to their own healthcare to whatever because we re living in a world where national government protections are increasingly irrelevant and we have more and more concentration of wealth and power in the hands of private interests and the other issue is what to do about conflicting social values moral values should they be used as a source of division or should there be some way of trying to come together for example one of the things that amazed me is that nobody at least as far as i knew nobody in 2004 when they were debating abortions seemed to know that when i was president the number of abortions went down by 22 without eroding the right to choose because of other policies we had to support young single mothers and their parents in helping to raise their grandchildren and the whole range of things but the point is there are a lot of things you can do to bring people together that hadn t even been talked about for tonight s purposes i ask you if you want to talk about any of the details i ll be happy to in the questions but the point i want you think about is this when i read in the press conflicting proposals on social security for example or on healthcare or on drug benefits or on anything i see that just as i do what should our middle east peace policy be through the prism of the obligation we have to move from interdependence to an integrated community and i ask myself which specific proposals are more likely to produce shared responsibilities shared benefits and reinforced shared values and therefore it becomes easier for me to sort through all this because i have a certain philosophy about where i think the world ought to go and i think you should as well two final points first of all whoever wins whatever election you should know that you have more options to impact the course of the future at home in los angeles and around the world than ever before and you should cease them in my foundation we basically work on things that would advance the millennium development goals bringing economic opportunity to poor people at home and around the world fighting aids around the world promoting religious and racial reconciliation in northern ireland the middle east the balkans other places where i work advancing the education and citizen service we re working on all this stuff and trying to advance these ideas at my library as well as through my foundation in harlem but all of you can do something like that remember a third of american households gave money to tsunami relief and there are three things that happened in the 1990 s for which i can t claim particular credit but that made this possible that made you more powerful one is for the first time in history more people than not more than half the people on earth lived under governments they voted in so this movement toward democracy in the last couple of years is basically building on the explosion of democracy that happened after the fall of the berlin wall and it is a process that is not reversible in general although it is in particular if they re a fail state which is why i spend sometime trying to help new democracies succeed that s the first thing that happened the second thing that happened was the explosion of non governmental organizations so called ngo s at home and abroad if you form a group to have a civic center and promote debates like this you re an ngo i remember one day not long after i left the white house and i d undertaken my first foundation project i was shaving one morning and i looked in the mirror and i said my god i m an ngo but literally there are for example when president former president bush and i went to the tsunami affected areas we found there were literally hundreds hundreds of ngo s who through their own devices out of their own convictions had gone to sri lanka or aichi and indonesia or some other affected area to try to change the course of history i used to go to central america or turkey or lots of other places i always asked to meet with some ngo leaders because i knew they could could literally shape the future and the third thing is as i mentioned is the use of the internet as a democratizing tool it really gives enormous power to people almost on an ad hoc basis as the issues come up so there s something for all of you to do and the last point i want to make is that i think on balance you should be optimistic about the future now human beings first rose on the african savanna they re now debating it based on the most recent architectural evidence but somewhere around between 100 150 000 years ago it now appears that we looked like people before we thought like people but anyway somewhere between 100 150 000 years ago ever since people banded together first in families and clans and came out of caves people have found it difficult to deal with the others people who were different from them there s been a continuing conflict between how you should deal with people that are different should you cooperate with them or should you fight them there was a perverse parallel development from the dawn of human history all the way through the 20th century where the circles of cooperation kept getting wider and wider and wider but the means people had to destroy each other kept getting more and more powerful so that in the 21st century we nearly got it wrong we had two world wars we had massive massive killings not just the holocaust but in the former soviet union you had all those purges you had the one huge one in china and the feel of the outcome was in doubt notwithstanding the rise of terror and the continuing threat of weapons of mass destruction i think very few people believe that in the 21st century it s more likely than not that we will destroy each other and we now know because of the cooperative efforts to sequence the human genome that we re all more than 99 the same genetically and we know that the variances of people the genetic variances of individuals within ethnic groups are greater than the profiled variances of one ethnic group than another something we didn t know before so it turns out the religious teachings of all faiths through all ages have a scientific basis and fact that our common humanity matters more than our differences and we have a we have always managed to find a way to cooperate to find common ground to find a way forward instead of to consume ourselves in self destruction and i think as a whole the people on earth will probably follow a wry comment winston churchill made about the united states in the beginning of world war ii when people in the press kept asking him over and over when america was not in the war you know we didn t join the war until 41 so it was underway for two years and two months essentially before we got in and people kept saying well what about the united states what about the united states and britain hadn t won any battles for the first year or so and churchill finally said in exasperation the united states always does the right thing after exhausting every other alternative we re still in a period where we we as a nation and we as a world are determined to exhaust some more alternatives but on the whole you should be quite encouraged if you look at what s happened just since the fall of the berlin wall we ve been reconciled largely to our old cold war adversaries you have the rise of democracy you have the raise of democratization through the internet and the ngo s you have a sense of common purpose in the world in dealing with climate change and stopping genocide and dealing with all these social problems that simply didn t exist even 15 years ago even when i became president people are always all these problems we just can t deal with so on the whole you should feel quite optimistic but you should remember that nothing ever happens by accident and therefore it s important that we do the right things but tonight i want to ask you when you leave here if you don t agree with me that the number one characteristic of the world is interdependence and the number one job of the world is to move from interdependence to integrated communities of shared responsibilities benefits and values then you need some other way to look at the world you need to ask yourself what your worldview is going to be because otherwise you ll go crazy trying to figure out what the specific answer is to all these problems you re going to be presented with whereas if you have a worldview that dictates basically where you want to go it will become much easier to analyze every single thing you read about in the press because you can ask yourself whether if you take this or that alternative it will take you where you want to go i think it s more complicated being a citizen of the united states than ever before but we have access to more information than ever before in forums like this so i think we should be able to do the job thank you very much dem wjclinton2 3 98 bill_clinton thank you all so much thank you marc and paul reid and mike ferrell and all the officers and staff of the mortgage bankers association to our national treasurer and members of the national association of state treasurers i m delighted to be here along with frank raines my omb director who used to spend some time with some of you and gene sperling and others on our staff i have looked forward to this day for a long time just to be able to thank you for the work that all of you have done in giving america the highest homeownership rate in the history of the republic it means a lot to a lot of people out there in the country and i appreciate your role in this historic achievement and i thank you very much in my state of the union address i called upon all our people to strengthen our country for the new century ahead historically that has always meant deepening the meaning of america s freedom strengthening our union and drawing our people closer together across all the lines that divide us and clearly always widening the circle of opportunity now we are seeing a remarkable increase in the circle of opportunity in addition to reaching the highest level of homeownership in history millions of americans have been able to refinance their mortgages which has amounted to billions and billions of dollars in tax cuts for families putting more money in their pockets freeing up more for investment and savings access to capital has spread to minorities who for years have been locked out of the economy and i appreciate what marc said about going to new york we do see increasing homeownership rates for minorities now and i hope it will continue our capital markets are the strongest in the world and clearly they have played a major role in helping us to do well in this new economy today what i d like to do is talk to you just for a few minutes about why we have to follow a consistent strategy of fiscal discipline and investment in our future in our people the strategy that has worked for the last five years we must continue into the next century i also want to talk about how all the discussions surrounding the tax system and the irs fit into this what is the right way to cut taxes what is the right way to reform the irs what is the wrong way to do it i especially want to comment on what i believe strongly is a misguided scheme recently introduced in the congress that i believe could take us back to policies which have failed us in the past these are good times for our country with a new economy powered by technology nurtured by the ingenuity of the human mind enlarged by our newfound fiscal discipline at home and increasing trade among all nations over the past five years our new economy has produced now almost 15 million new jobs with the highest percentage of those jobs in the private sector of any recovery in memory unemployment is the lowest in 24 years business investment is growing at 11 percent the fastest pace in 30 years since 1993 family incomes are up about 2 200 today we have fresh new evidence that the economy continues to grow personal income rose six tenths of one percent last month alone our social problems from crime to welfare are bending to our efforts the welfare rolls are the lowest in 27 years the crime rate the lowest in 24 years we now have literally a system in which we have opened the doors of college education to all people in this country who are willing to work for it with tax credits with iras with better student loans and tax deductibility for the interest on those loans more pell grants more work study positions we are adding 5 million children from working families to the ranks of those with health insurance combined with our record levels of homeownership the american dream is clearly within reach for more and more american families this did not happen by accident but no one alone can claim credit for it it was the product of a remarkable concerted endeavor by tens of millions of americans but it also was supported by the economic policies that we have followed with discipline and consistency over the last five years we moved beyond the sterile debate between those who said government was the problem and those who said it was the solution to a new way a new government for the information age that gives our people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives that is unashamedly a catalyst for new ideas where the old ones don t work that is a good partner with the private sector we have the smallest government here in washington since president kennedy was in office but it is still more progressive more active it is smaller but the nation is stronger we put in place a three part economic strategy rejecting these false choices from the past first restoring fiscal discipline and conquering the deficits that hobbled growth spiked interest rates and robbed our economy of capital for investment throughout the 1980s second investments in our people in science and technology in education and job training and health care so that everyone has a chance to reap the rewards of growing prosperity and third we responded to the global nature of the new economy by opening new markets to our goods and services the strategy is clearly working there is renewed confidence in the american economy its stability its strength its steady growth are the envy of the world more than ever we are also investing in the future a record two thirds of americans almost as marc said almost two thirds now live in their own homes and we must finish the job i agree with you that the most important thing we can do in this session of congress is to support secretary cuomo s plan to raise the fha loan limit we can pass it and we must now last month i submitted to congress the first balanced budget in a generation if we are fortunate and if we can work together with our allies around the world to minimize the impact of the recent difficulties in asia on our own economy mr raines says that we ll probably have a balanced budget this year instead of deficits america can now look forward to about a trillion dollars in surpluses over the next 10 years now that is a tempting target in an election year in washington first of all let me remind you they have not materialized yet and we shouldn t count those chickens before they hatch secondly we should remember what we did to the long term strength of america when we quadrupled the debt of this country in the 12 years from 1981 through 1992 and we should not repeat that error again finally we shouldn t use the surplus for any new tax cuts or new spending programs until we have confronted the challenge of saving social security first i think that is very important all of you are generally familiar with the problem it s projected that the social security trust fund will not cover payments starting in the year 2029 that s the year when all the baby boomers will finally be in the social security system and at presently projected birth and immigration rates and labor force participation rates it means that there will be only about two people working for every person drawing social security now those things could all change to some extent but no matter what it is clear that the generation of the baby boomers entering the social security system will be quite larger than the generation just following it indeed the generation now in public schools starting last year is the first generation in american history larger than the baby boom generation i do not know a single person my age or younger because i m the oldest of the baby boomers i hate that but it s true i don t know a single person who doesn t think about the problems we could create for our children if we don t make the changes now in the social security system we need to no one wants to burden our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren on the other hand it is important to remember that it s just since 1985 that senior citizens have been less poor than the rest of us that is an astonishing achievement for a country that 60 years ago had 70 percent of its seniors living below the poverty line many of them in abject poverty now if we make small changes today with discipline we can deal with this issue and i also want to point out something all of you know which is that hardly anybody even though social security helps people keep body and soul together hardly anybody in america can retire and maintain his or her standard of living on social security alone so we must also do more to help americans save for their own retirement we ve done a lot of work with the 401 k plans and other things we need to do more so we re going to work in this next year very hard in what i hope will be a completely nonpartisan way to acquaint the american people with the details of the challenge before us to explore all the alternatives and then to come up with a solution which i hope the congress will pass early next year to deal with this you say well if you pass it in 1999 2029 that s 30 years away first of all those of you in the audience who are my age or older know that 30 years can pass in the flash of an eye but secondly i would remind everyone that the longer we wait to deal with this the more severe actions will be required to deal with it if we move now with modest but disciplined changes we can do a great thing to ensure the financial strength of america in the 21st century and to preserve the compact that binds us together across the generations i cannot emphasize how strongly i feel about this now there are other economic challenges we face as well and i ll just mention two very briefly one is how do we extend the benefits of enterprise that have brought so much to america in the last few years to those who still have not felt the impact of the economic recovery principally in the inner cities and isolated rural areas we have a whole range of proposals in that regard a lot of them coming out of secretary cuomo a lot of them coming out of the vice president s community empowerment initiative but i think it is very important that we recognize that these people who are still unemployed or underemployed are the great target we have for the rest of us to keep the economy growing with low inflation so we can do what is morally right to try to expand opportunity to people who still don t have it and help the overall american economy as well the second point i d like to make is that if we want to continue to see this economy grow we have to have people who are skilled enough and well trained enough and well educated enough to take positions in tomorrow s economy not yesterday s economy there was a study which came out a couple of weeks ago i can t remember the exact number but there was something like nearly 400 000 openings in america today for people in information technology related jobs and when you go to some of our larger inner city neighborhoods where the unemployment rate is still 10 percent you say well what is wrong with this picture well we got one indication of what is wrong with this picture last week when we saw that our 12th graders in the international math and science survey scored 19th among 21 countries in their performance in math and science so the other big economic issue before america is how to make our system of elementary and secondary education as good as our system of higher education no one doubts that we have the best system of colleges and universities in the world we should not rest and we cannot rest until we have the best elementary and secondary education in the world it is a major economic issue for our country anyway it s against this background that i think you have to see the emerging debate or if you will the continuing debate on the tax system what taxes should be cut and how and the irs how should we go about collecting taxes this is a hazardous discussion that it s easier for me to enter into maybe because i m not on the ballot anymore since there s no such thing as a positive thing anyone ever wants to say about this but we need to think about it this debate can be a very healthy thing we should always be examining you know whether there are changes in the tax system we could have which would either be fairer or which would achieve our common objectives more or which would grow the economy faster and we should always be looking for ways that through either common sense or new technology we can ease the burden on our people of paying taxes always the door should never be shut to reform and there will always be more to do no matter what system we adopt i think all of us know that but the point i want to make today is that this debate must occur within the context of our commitment to a long term economic strategy that will work for our people it should occur within a context of our commitment to maintain economic confidence in the future there is a right and a wrong way to do reform and the right way must involve our continued commitment to fiscal discipline to investing in our people and to making the future a predictable and confident one in terms of our economic policy now within that context over the last five years we ve worked hard to reform our tax laws we ve honored our responsibilities as parents with the 500 per child tax credit we ve rewarded work by more than doubling the earned income tax credit which basically is designed to say if you re a parent and you work 40 hours a week your child ought not to be in poverty over 2 million children have been lifted out of poverty because of the changes in the earned income tax credit we ve recognized the importance and the cost of college education with the hope scholarship tax credit which is worth 1 500 a year for the first two years of college lifetime learning credits for junior and senior years and graduate schools the tax deductibility of student loan interest payments and other initiatives we ve encouraged homeownership by eliminating capital gains on almost all home sales and we ve helped americans save for their retirement for their education and health care costs by expanding iras at the same time billions of dollars in tax loopholes that were more wasteful have been closed this year the balanced budget proposal i presented to congress continues to help working families with new tax cuts to make child care more affordable our economy stronger and our environment cleaner by meeting the challenge of climate change we also had to continue our work to improve the operations of the irs like every american and the majority of irs employees who are trying hard to do their jobs well i get outraged when i hear about abuses in the irs but we are making changes and we must continue to do so i ve already signed into law 40 tax simplification measures and a new taxpayer bill of rights as of february the 20th less than two weeks ago 10 7 million americans had filed their tax returns electronically for this year that s a 19 percent increase over last year 3 8 million americans have filed by telephone that s a 25 percent increase over last year the average telephone conversation is 10 minutes i think that s pretty good and i hope more will continue to do that we are having problem resolution days which have been widely publicized by the media and i thank them for that in every irs district at least once a month where the irs employees are open they open the offices at night or on the weekends people come in with their tax problems and we try to resolve them in a quick and informal way i think all these things are very important we just approved new regulations to protect so called innocent spouses who are left with tax liabilities by their spouses that they had no role in undertaking now there s more to do but a lot has been done among the new reforms proposed are new citizen advocacy panels new systems to file taxes by phone or computer to make it even more easy and more widely used stronger taxpayer advocates phone lines opened 24 hours a day further relief for innocent taxpayers late last year the house passed these reforms almost unanimously i think there were over 400 votes for them and only three or four against so again let me say i hope that the senate will quickly pass this legislation and send it to me for my signature it s a good bill and it will do a lot of good for americans now we need to continue to do these kinds of things and we need to be open to broader reforms of the tax system but there are some people in congress who have made a proposal that i think would not fit within the formula of economic discipline and confidence that i believe we have to stay with under the guise of reform they have proposed what to me is an irresponsible scheme to eliminate our tax laws without any system to replace them now at first glance this might look good sunset the tax code when everybody knows there will be no more tax code that will shake everyone up and then they will come forward with a responsible alternative and trust me everything will be fine that s the message once you know that the old code is gone and on a date certain it won t be there well everyone will surely have to come up with something and it must be something that will be better don t worry about the details that s what this proposal is and it has a lot of appeal it s like saying you can t go on a diet until the refrigerator is empty but if you think about it it only works if you know that you can fill the refrigerator up again and what will be in there now instead of proposing reform this proposal is really economic uncertainty what we have done is to restore some confidence and predictability to the american economy when you knew that we were going to stay on a path of fiscal discipline and the deficit was not going to go to 300 billion a year was not going to go to 370 billion a year which was what it was predicted to be for this year when i took office instead of 10 billion or zero which is what it s going to be this is a way of going back to that era a total economic uncertainty what would it do think about your business it would cripple families and businesses ability to plan and save for the future while the uncertainty existed it would undermine the fiscal progress of the last five years no one concerned about fighting crime would even think about saying well three years from now we re going to throw out the criminal code and we ll figure out what to put in its place no one would do that that is what this proposal is that is exactly what some people in congress are proposing to do now think about what repealing the tax laws with no known alternative would mean it would mean that you would know there would be no home mortgage deduction but you wouldn t know what would be in its place there might be no charitable contribution deduction but you wouldn t know what would be in its place we would repeal the roth ira but you wouldn t know what would be in its place all that would be certain about this proposal is uncertainty and again i say as all of you in this room well know uncertainty is the enemy of economic growth we live in a world where there is a lot of change and unpredictability and uncertainty by definition in the nature of this new economy but to do well you have to at least know what the rules are our economy is growing because consumer confidence and business investment are at record highs last week the two indexes of consumer confidence came out one was at a 30 year high the other was at an all time high what people think is going to happen as all of you know in an economy is just as important as what in fact is happening today almost every business investment has tax consequences with no ability to predict the consequences businesses might decide to postpone cancel or pare back on plans to buy new computers build a new factory hire new workers how could you plan construct or finance a new apartment complex or shopping center if you couldn t calculate the return on investment because you couldn t determine the tax consequences business growth would stall in that kind of uncertainty and economic uncertainty is no friend to families the scheme to abolish the tax code could threaten nearly every american family s best laid plans for the future for example mortgage rates are low now people are refinancing their mortgages all the time this has been a wonderful thing for america what would happen to family behavior with regard to homeownership if people thought the home mortgage deduction might disappear would students be as serious about going to college if they thought the hope scholarships and the other tax credits and interest deductions wouldn t be there would families think twice about how much they were going to give to their church or their synagogue or their favorite charity if they thought there would be no tax deduction for it we were just talking about the social security reform and how no matter how we reform social security people have to save more for their retirement will young families who have a hard enough time paying their bills really be setting aside money for their retirement if they think the tax incentives or pensions or 401 k s and iras are about to evaporate in other words i just think it s wrong to shut down the old tax system and tell people it s going to be shut down by a date certain without saying at the same time what is going to be in its place none of us would say that no one on earth couldn t devise a better tax system than we have there may be better options but i think before we say we re going to get rid of the one we have on a date certain we need to know what we re going to replace it with and i would implore you if you agree with me to make that case to your member of congress without regard to party again i don t see this as particularly a partisan issue i just think it sounds great i will vote for a bill to get rid of this cursed tax code thank you very much it s almost irresistible you know but so was the siren s song we must continue to have predictability in the investment climate we must continue to have predictability when it comes to savings we must continue to have a framework which will keep us doing what we ve been doing for the last five years and that means by the way it means we have to continue to be open to changes in the tax law and in the way the irs operates and in all of these systematic things that we have to continue to modernize of course we must but we mustn t buy a pig in a poke we have to continue to proceed with discipline scrapping the home mortgage deductions scrapping other middle class tax cuts without presenting a clear alternative is simply reckless for the economy reckless for businesses reckless for families budgets i will not permit it if i can stop it but it shouldn t pass in the first place and i hope you will help us on that now again i say congress should pass the irs reforms that are before it it should pass further tax cuts but we should balance the budget do nothing with the surplus until we have saved social security not abolish the tax code until we know what we re going to replace it with we re going to change around here this system has proved that we are capable of change no one should stand in the way of constructive change but we should stay with the plan that we know works you look at where we are today in your business compared to where we were five years look at where we are today with the people that you work to serve compared to where we were five years ago imagine where you want to be 10 years from now imagine what you want the future to look like for your children and your grandchildren to do those things which will build that future thank you very much dem wjclinton2 5 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you and good morning i want to join with hillary in welcoming you to the white house and thanking all of you for coming i thank the foundations that have helped us and thank you david hamburg i still remember when we worked on a report about the developmental needs of young adolescents back in the late 80s in which we recommended among other things that there ought to be community service in all of our schools something that we re finally getting around to i thank all of those who are here i see so many people out here in this audience who have done so much to help our young people our teenagers live better lives i see one of the founders of the city year program in boston i see a man who has adopted a huge number of children along with his wife and personally made sure that they got through their teenage years there are many many stories here i m grateful to all of you i m very grateful to secretary shalala and secretary herman and our national service chairman senator harris wofford and deputy attorney general holder and janice lachance and all the others who are here from the administration the deputy director of our drug office donald vereen and thank you representative stephanie tubbs jones i thank you all for what you are doing i want to thank the panelists and those who will come on afterward and i think we ought to give one more hand to the families that were in the film that walked in with hillary and me they did a great job you know we ve worked very hard on these family issues for a long time and hillary has done so for 30 years but the way i see this as president as well as a parent looking ahead to the kind of america we re trying to build in the new century when i became president we had to worry about whether everybody who wanted or needed a job could get one and that was very important and the dignity of work is very important to families it helps to define the shape of family life in ways that are by and large positive i ll never forget once when i was governor i had a panel of former welfare recipients that were in the work force and one of my colleagues asked the lady from my state said well what s the best thing about having a job and she said the best thing about it is when my boy goes to school and they say what does your mama do for a living he can give an answer but by the same token we live in a country that s very good at creating jobs but is not as good at providing family supports in which people are busier and busier and busier and in which virtually everybody has some trouble balancing work and family during the period of the child s life even parents who are staying at home have trouble doing it and it is a problem that is more severe for single parents and people that have more than one job or people that have trouble getting around it s a problem that s more severe for people that work for very modest incomes but i don t think i know any parents who are working who have not had some periods in their lives when they worried whether they were letting their kids down because they weren t spending enough time with them or whether there were too many forces out there that were kind of undermining that and one of the things that i have learned in ways large and small over an unfortunately increasingly elderly existence is that everybody has got a story everybody and every child has a spark inside and i believe that everyone has a role to play and ought to be given a chance and as important as work is and i say that coming from a family of workaholics the most important work that society does is still to raise children and if that work is done well the rest of it pretty well takes care of itself and so we re here basically to do all the things that hillary said i think when a tragedy befalls a child or a child is involved in a tragedy a school shooting or this terrible incident at the washington zoo it throws it up in large relief but i think that one of the things we ought to do in beginning this conference is to take a more balanced view and i want to be very brief because i want you to have the maximum amount of time with the keynote speaker and with the panelists but i think it s important that we have a balanced view of what teenage life is like today and i asked the council of economic advisors to actually get me a statistical portrait of teenage america and here is a brief summary the good news is that the teenagers are far healthier more prosperous and look forward to more promising lives than ever before in our history the economic rewards of education are at an all time high teens have responded by completing high school and enrolling college at record rates last year for the first time in the history of the country the high school graduation of african americans and the white majority was almost statistically identical the dropout rate among hispanic young people is still too high but that s largely explained i think by the fact that we have still a very large number of hispanic children in our schools who are first generation immigrants whose first language is not english and they come from families that are struggling to make ends meet and very often they drop out to go to work still but we re making progress there as well more teenagers than ever before volunteering to serve through community service many harmful behaviors are actually on the decline including youth violence homicide suicide teen pregnancy and in the last couple of years drug use that s the good news the report also highlights some significant challenges there are still significant opportunity gaps between white students and students of color teen smoking drug use and pregnancy are still far too high and despite a marked decline in teen homicide over the past few years still far too many communities are scarred by gun violence interestingly enough statistically the council of economic advisers found that gun related teen deaths from deliberate acts and from accidents are highly correlated with gun ownership and possession rates in states with fewer guns in fewer households there are fewer gun deaths perhaps the most empowering finding in the new report is the extents to which parents have the opportunity to guide their teenagers properly sitting down to dinner can have an enormously positive impact the report found that teenagers who had dinner with listen to this the report found that teenagers that had dinner with their parents five nights a week are far more likely to avoid smoking drinking violence suicide and drugs this holds true for single parent as well as two parent families across all income and racial groups now obviously if that is not possible and sometimes it s not possible then it s really important to find some way to fill that gap but it s a stunning statistical finding for the past seven years the first lady and i have worked with our administration to try to support parents efforts to raise healthy hopeful and responsible children i d also like to acknowledge the invaluable efforts of vice president and mrs gore who have had even before he joined me they were sponsoring a family conference every year in tennessee to deal with these issues it s really one of the most astonishing consistent commitments i believe in the country and they ve done a world of good and i m very grateful to them i ll always be proud that the first bill i signed as president was the family and medical leave act a law that now has given more than 20 million americans the opportunity to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave without losing their jobs and i remember when i signed it it had previously been vetoed on the theory that it would hurt the economic growth of the country if that s what it was designed to do it s been a very poor failure what it has done is to prove that it s good economics to balance work and family that the more parents can succeed at home the more free they are psychologically to be productive at work and we ought to do more i have asked the congress to include more firms in the family and medical leave law and to expand the purposes for which people can take family leave we have also tried to give states the flexibility to use funds in federal accounts to help to finance paid leave we ve worked hard on this and i think it s very important that we recognize that the united states has done a great job at creating jobs but we still give far less support to the responsibility of balancing work and family than virtually every other industrialized country in the world and it is very important to do that we ve also worked hard to turn teenagers away from unhealthy lives toward healthy futures the rate of drug use has been cut in part by the powerful antidrug messages that have been broadcast and some of you here have helped us with that we have done our best to engage the tobacco industry in what has been a fairly epic and sometimes frustrating struggle to reduce teen smoking we made the single largest investment in children s health care since medicaid was created and we re working to get more of our kids and increasingly i hope this year their parents enrolled in the children s health insurance program and we re working to make or schools safer i think that we also need comprehensive strategies to stem violence both in and out of schools our program would dramatically expand quality after school programs when i started we had 1 million dollars for after school programs then we went to 20 million then we went to 200 million this year we ve got 400 million in after school programs and i ve proposed 1 billion and if we pass it we ll be able to say that every child at least in every troubled neighborhood in the united states of america can be in an after school program this is a big deal and i hope you will support it i also want to say a word of thanks to all those who have supported americorps including city year and its other components we ve now had more than 150 000 young people earning money for college while serving in their communities and we re trying to get more and more people to start earlier to get high school kids junior high school kids involved in community service maryland has become the first state in america to require community service as a condition of a high school diploma and listen to this the study found that teens who participate in service projects in their communities are 75 percent less likely to drop out of school because they re connected in a way that i think is profoundly important hillary talked about the work we re doing with the industry to give parents the tools to protect their children in the new media age i do think we need a voluntary system that goes across tv movies and video games if we can find some way to develop that it would make a lot of sense there s a lot of information coming at parents you know i try to sort it all out when i see it and i think it would be better if there were it s almost like you need a dictionary to explain the differences in the tv ratings and movie ratings and the video game ratings so we have to find some way this can be made more usable and today i want to just mention two things that we re trying to do to help parents and their teenagers first i m signing an executive order to prohibit discrimination against parents in the work force of the federal government believe it or not there are still some employers who are reluctant to hire or to promote employees who have children at home some of you may have experienced this yourselves the goal of this order simply says no glass ceiling for parents the job they re doing at home is more important anyway and if they can do your job you ought not to stop them second i am pleased to announce that our national campaign against youth violence the national campaign to prevent teen pregnancy and tobacco free kids and the national government have teamed up to produce a comprehensive guide to help parents support their teenagers through this crucial and often difficult developmental period now i want to introduce our keynote speaker now and say i m sorry that i can t stay for the rest of the day but after he speaks i ll have to leave but let me say that i want to thank you for coming again i want to thank so many of you here for a lifetime of commitment people ask me all the time why are we focusing on these things when all the indicators are good and things are going better this is the time to be thinking about i will say again how we can deal with the significant challenges of this country and anybody that thinks that we ve done everything we need to do to help the parents with teenagers hasn t had teenagers and hasn t been around lately it seems to me that if we can t deal with these big social issues now when we re prosperous when we re doing well if we can t strengthen the bonds of our community now when will we ever get around to doing it that s why we re here i want to introduce a person who embodies much of the good that s going on to help parents through having the village do its part in the first lady s words to raise our children ben casey is the president of the ymca of metropolitan dallas he has degrees in psychology and counseling from ucla and chapman college he currently oversees programs listen to this 145 program centers that serve a quarter of all the families in the greater dallas region we ve asked him to speak to us today about his extensive experience with teens the wise new poll which also has some important findings about the way teens and parents view their communication and time together and let me just finally say mr casey as i bring you up every minute i have ever spent with young people as president and before but especially as president has reaffirmed to me how special they are what enormous potential they have even the ones that can t make it really want to and wish they could and what a profound responsibility we have and i want to honor you sir because you spend every day trying to make sure we don t lose a single one thank you dem wjclinton2 5 94 bill_clinton thank you very much chief he s come a long way from wisconsin to bring a little middle western common sense to the nation s capital when the house of representatives votes this week on thursday they shouldn t forget the tragedy that the chief just talked about think about it a 30 year veteran of the police department killed by an m1 a1 assault rifle after a bank robbery two other police officers and a hostage also wounded these things can be prevented i also want to thank john magaw for what he s said he s done a fine job as director of the alcohol tobacco and firearms division and before that he was director of the secret service i think you could tell his heartfelt concern there he has two sons and a son in law all in law enforcement they deserve a chance to do their job with less danger not more i thank secretary bentsen for his sterling leadership we joked a lot of times about whether there will be somebody blocking his entrance to his ranch when he goes quail hunting this fall but i don t really think so one of the things that i ve learned since i ve been here even more than when i was a governor is that very often a lot of these organized interest groups don t always represent the members their unorganized members and what they really feel in their heart of hearts i want to thank the leaders of the law enforcement organizations that are here today bob scully the director of the national association of police organizations sylvester daughtry the president of the international association of chiefs of police john pitta the vice president of the federal law enforcement association mark spurrier the director of the major cities chiefs and chuck wexler who s with the police executives research forum i want you all to think about what all you ve heard there are a lot of people in this audience today who have experienced a loss of life in their own family and i realize that here today in a fundamental way we re sort of preaching to the saved but what we hope to do here is to energize you to talk to those last few members of the house we need to put this bill over the top to tell them this is not about gun control it s about crime control i would never do anything to infringe on the rights of sportsmen and women in this country i have i guess i was 12 years old the first time i fired a 22 or a 410 but i think to hide behind the rights of sports people to justify the kind of unconscionable behavior that takes place every single day on the streets of this country is an unforgivable abuse of our common right to be hunters it is an abuse of that all over the world today all you have to do is pick up the newspaper any given day and you see how we are worried about the disintegration of civic life in other countries we read about the horror of bosnia and we say my god why can t the muslims and the serbs and the croats just get along we read about bodies being thrown into the river in rwanda and say good lord why are those people doing that to each other we read now about the rise of organized crime in russia and it breaks our heart they finally get rid of communism and they try to go to a more entrepreneurial society and a new group of dark organizations springs up and commits murder we worry about what s happening in our neighboring country south of our border especially to our friends in mexico when we hear about what s being done by people running drugs and we worry we worry we worry and we don t look around and see we have more people behind bars already in this country a higher percentage of our population than any country in the world already and when we come up with a bill like this they say you ought to put more people in jail and keep them there longer well some people ought to go to jail longer and our crime bill does that but our disintegration my fellow americans is in the streets of our cities where as john magaw says we have suffered a breakdown of family and work and community and where that vacuum has been filled by guns like this and people who use them in a very well organized way will this solve all of the problems in america no like john said this is a puzzle we re trying to fill in the puzzle with the crime bill and in the end the puzzle has to be filled by people like this fine chief out there on the streets of our cities and whether the people who live in his community will work with it to take their streets back but i m telling you this is an amazing it s amazing to me that we even have to have this debate i mean how long are we going to let this go on san francisco last summer a gunman carrying two tek 9s killed eight people and wounded six others last week when we had an event for this bill i m sure a lot of you saw the husband of one of the women who was killed in that tragedy steve sposato who now is raising his beautiful daughter by himself yes that guy was crazy and maybe he d have gone in there with that old six shooter and killed somebody but steve sposato would like to have his wife s chances back five years ago a gunman using an ak 47 killed five elementary school kids this happens every day we lost two people and had three more wounded outside the cia headquarters last year remember that with a gunman with an ak 47 so i say to you i m sorry to be so frustrated but sometimes it seems that the president s job ought to be dealing with things that are not obvious i mean at least health care is a complex subject it s obvious we need to do something about it but it s complicated i concede that i welcome these debates how can we walk away from this especially when this bill protects over 650 specific hunting weapons i mean i don t understand why the organizations aren t saying well hallelujah this is the first federal explicit protection we ever had for the means of hunting and i really i was proud of what mr magaw said talking about the only color i mean i have heard people with a straight face saying well there are some adults that like to go target practice with these things well they need to read a good book or take up bowling or just follow or you know you can hunt nearly 12 months out of the year if you hunt everything this is it is imperative we just have a few days left and i urge you to spend less time with each other and more time putting the hammer of your feelings into the deliberations in the house of representatives and something else no good member of the house or senate no republican or democrat no rural legislator should ever fear losing their seat for voting for this bill and something else you ought to do is tell every office you call if you do this i will fight for you for voting for this i will there may be differences over other issues but i will do everything i can to see that nothing diminishes your standing because of this this is not a complicated issue and we will have more issues like this every great society is going to face for the foreseeable future these incredible tensions between our freedom and our abuse of our freedom between the need for liberty and the need for order between our desire to have an entrepreneurial freeflowing society and the absolute need for some discipline that enables us to live as human beings civilly together and give our children a chance to grow up and some of the decisions we ll have to make will be more difficult than this but this is a lay down no brainer and the congress must not walk away from it please help us to pass it thank you dem wjclinton2 5 96 bill_clinton good evening the first time i ever met paul harvey he and his son played through a foursome i was in on this golf course in chicago he never told me the score but since then he s tried to tell me the score about a lot of other things and i ve enjoyed it every time to the members of the graham family the members of congress who are here ladies and gentlemen i m deeply honored to join with you tonight in honoring two of america s finest citizens two of the world s greatest human resources billy and ruth graham when billy and ruth received the congressional gold medal today they received only the 114th medal in the 220 year history of this country since as paul harvey said george washington started receiving the first one in 1776 thomas edison marian anderson eli weisel winston churchill billy and ruth graham belong in their company and more i am going to make a presentation in a moment related to that but i wanted to say a few words first i m very proud that billy and ruth have decided to share this honor with the billy and ruth graham children center of memorial mission hospital in ashville north carolina in galatians 6 st paul said that while each of us must make our own efforts to sustain ourselves we are also reminded to bear ye one another s burdens and so fulfill the law of christ sharing this medal in this way does that but in so many ways billy and ruth have fulfilled the law of christ in the ministry of the word going into all nations i hardly ever go to a place as president billy graham hadn t been there before me preaching and i feel like a poor substitute from time to time because a lot of the time what i m trying to do is get people to lay down the hatreds of the heart and reach down into their spirit and treat people who are different from them with the same dignity that all god s children are entitled to billy and ruth have practiced the ministry of the deed hundreds of times the bible calls upon us to minister to the poor and the needy and they did in trying to help disaster victims in guatemala and countless other places and i know yesterday billy and i were talking about how proud he was of the work that his son franklin has done and i saw some of that when i sent our troops into bosnia and i met some people who had worked with franklin graham to try to help the poor children in that war torn land billy and ruth graham have practiced the ministry of good citizenship being friends with presidents of both parties counseling them in countless ways always completely private always completely genuine yesterday we sat in the oval office reminiscing and talking about current circumstances and i asked for billy graham s prayers for the wisdom and guidance of god that is a part of his ministry as well perhaps the most moving example of that came when billy graham spoke along with me and a number of others at the first service shortly after the bombing in oklahoma city and he knew he was speaking to a vast array of people who had been wounded by that incident most of them were christians but not all of them were and yet he sought to speak to all of them and he gave what i thought was one of the most honest messages i had ever heard a minister of the word give and i thought to myself as i watched him give it that only a man completely convicted completely secure in his own faith could have looked out at that vast wounded array of human beings and said i wish i could tell you that i understand completely why things like this happen but i don t even after all these years i don t i don t know why this happened i don t have an explanation for it but the god we love is a god of love and mercy amidst all the suffering we are asked to endure we are not supposed to understand everything but instead to lean on god and he made it more powerful because he was able to say to his fellow americans even after all these years after i have searched the scriptures and prayed for wisdom i do not understand everything i cannot explain this but that makes the case for our faith even stronger i ll remember that for as long as i live finally i thank billy graham and ruth graham for the ministry of their life and their personal example for their extraordinary achievement of five children 19 grandchildren and i think now eight great grandchildren if that achievement could be mirrored by every adult in america we would have about 10 percent of the problems we ve got today in this great country of ours i thank them for countless personal gestures that demonstrate that as private people they are what they seem to be in public i thank them for always doing things that will enable them to administer to people they may not even know i have said this in public before but i want to say it again when i was a small boy about 12 years old billy graham came to little rock arkansas to preach a crusade that town was torn apart by racial conflict our high schools were closed there and there were those who asked billy graham to segregate his audience in war memorial stadium so as not to roil the waters and i ll never forget that he said and it was in the paper that if he had to speak the word of god to a segregated audience he would violate his ministry and he would not do it and at the most intense time in the modern history of my state everybody caved and blacks and whites together poured into the football stadium and when the invitation was given they poured down together down the aisles and they forgot that they were supposed to be mad at each other angry at each other that one was supposed to consider the other somehow less than equal and he never preached a word about integrating the schools he preached the word of god and he lived it by the power of his example and one young boy from a modest family for a long time thereafter took just a little money out of his allowance every month and sent it to billy graham s crusade and i ve lived with that all my life i ll never forget that when billy graham came back to little rock 30 years later probably the most well known man of god and faith in the world he took time out one day to let me take him to see my pastor who he d known 30 years before because he was dying and my elderly pastor with only a few weeks to live sat and talked to billy graham about their life their work their trips to the holy land and the life to come there was no one there there were no cameras there were no reporters there was nothing to be gained it was a simple private personal expression of common christianity and gratitude for the life of a person who had given his life for their shared faith and finally he got up to go billy looked at my pastor w o vaught shriveled to less than 100 pounds and he said smile w o next time i see you we ll be outside the eastern gates i ll never forget that as long as i live so the congress did a great thing you have done a great thing billy and ruth graham have done a great thing in sharing this award with future generations of people who will need their help and their ministry even after they have passed their time on this earth for all that as president and in my personal role as a citizen and a christian i am profoundly grateful i d like reverend graham to come out now and i will give him a copy of the bill which i signed and the pen with which i signed it and perhaps he d like to say a word to you tonight billy dem wjclinton2 5 97a bill_clinton mr vice president thank you for that overly generous introduction i loved every word of it that five minutes was the best five minutes i ever lost in my presidency he hasn t been the same person since i want to thank tipper and al and hillary all of them in their various ways for being unique parts of our rather unique team i want to thank tommy lee jones for coming here tonight and for giving that fine speech and being loyal to his old friend al gore you know i m not as mobile as i normally am and i ve been in this big old awkward chair and i heard tommy lee s voice sort of booming out you know and i couldn t decide whether i was the fugitive and i ought to be on the run whether i was batman and i should duck i didn t know what i should do you know i really enjoyed watching tommy and al s friendship they have a lot in common they sort of like to shoot the bull and when they get around each other they ve been friends so long their accents get thicker you know and the stories get more embellished just like any other two rednecks from harvard you ever met i want to thank our distinguished leaders governor romer and steve grossman and the dinner chairs abe pollin tommy boggs morty barr janice griffin bob johnson thank you alan solomont and dan dudko and carol pinskey thanks to the entertainers but i d like to ask you all to give a special hand to our dinner chairs they worked like crazy to bring this off for us tonight and i thank them for it very much i won t take long tonight but i want to just reinforce a couple of things the vice president said tomorrow we re going to dedicate this memorial to franklin roosevelt a man who believed in bold persistent experimentation a man who became president at the country s lowest ebb in this century and whose faith and optimism and determination carried us a very long way when al gore and i sought your support and the votes of the american people in 1992 we were thankfully in nowhere near that much trouble but it was clear that we were in the midst of drift and division and deadlock it was clear that we were going through a period of profound change moving into a new century a new millennium and a new way of living together and that we had as a nation no clear strategy to pursue and i had a simple idea that i wanted my daughter and her children to grow up in an america in the 21st century where everyone willing to work for it had opportunity where all citizens recognize that there were no rights without responsibility where we cherish our diversity instead of being torn asunder by it and we grew together closer as one america and where we embrace the world instead of running away from it and we re glad to be still the leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity that is what i want that is what i wanted and that is what we are going to have in the 21st century thanks to you and millions of americans like you all across this country and i thought to do it we would have to experiment i had some ideas that people said were nutty and they weren t appropriately pure they were not perfectly liberal or perfectly conservative i had this crazy idea that you could reduce the deficit and still increase investment in people in education that you could actually reduce the size of government but put more money into the things people needed that you could actually help business and labor that you could actually grow the economy and preserve and even improve the environment now we started this economic program and all of our friends in the other party voted against it and said it was crazy and it would never work well sooner or later the posturing has to not count nearly as much as the results we had a record number of new jobs a record number of new businesses we have the strongest healthiest economy in 30 years and wages are going up and inequality in this country is going down among working families for the first time in over 20 years and you should be proud of that because you made it happen i m proud of it and i want you to be proud of it i had this idea that crime was not a political football that you should position yourself around in washington with a bunch of rhetoric that it really would make a difference if we put community policing back into america s streets and we put more police on the street not just dwayne and eddie the two that al put when he was president but 999 998 more and we re well on the way and i thought it was silly to say that an american citizen couldn t favor the right of sports people and hunters to use their weapons and not be for sensible restrained gun ownership and acquisition by criminals and dangerous people and people who were incompetent should not have them i thought that was wrong when we passed the crime bill they said well it didn t fit into anybody s little box all i know is crime is still going down every year there are more police on the street america is a safer place today because we were interested in what would work to fulfill our values and if people are not secure in america they are not fully free we were right and you should be proud of that i want you to be proud of it well i could go through a lot of other issues i m proud of what we did in haiti and bosnia and the middle east and northern ireland i m proud of the way we reached out to russia and to expand nato i m proud of the fact that we said we are going forward as one country and we started the americorps program to give young people a chance to serve their country and earn some money to go to college and as i look back on it i would have to say that thanks to all those things and the family and medical leave law the initiative on tobacco and a lot of other things this country has more opportunity more responsibility a closer knit community and is stronger in the world in its leadership role than it would have been if we d stayed the course that was dominant in 1992 you were right and you should be proud of it and a whole lot better off than we d have been if the contract with america had not been stopped in 1995 now in the first hundred days of this administration democrats and republicans are working in good faith in the hope that we can reach a budget agreement but what we want is simple and clear we want to balance the budget and invest more in education extend health care to children yes we didn t win the health care fight but franklin roosevelt was for experimentation i m glad i tried to give the hard working families in this country health insurance i m not sorry i tried to do that i think we were right to try and we ought to at least give it to the children of america in this term we can do that we ought to continue to clean up the environment now that we re requiring people on welfare who are able bodied to go to work we ought to make darn sure the jobs are there for them and we ought to stop the punishment unjust of legal immigrants in this country who work hard and do their part to make our country strong we ve got that kind of budget and i hope we ve got that kind of budget negotiations going we ve got 20 percent of the country committed already in the first 100 days to embracing national standards for learning and for the first time ever in america having an examination of 4th and 8th graders in reading and math we have got hundreds of businesses hundreds and hundreds committed to helping us move a million people from welfare to work we had hillary s conference on early childhood and the brain and the magnificent summit of service in philadelphia last weekend that embodies what i think america is at its best putting people first putting our country s future first not taking cheap shots and after a long fight we also ratified the chemical weapons convention which will take us a lot way toward eradicating the threat of chemical weapons from the face of the earth we are moving in the right direction what i want to say to you tonight in closing are two brief points first of all it bothers me that members of both parties at this moment of america s greatest influence most profound economic and social renovation when we are in the greatest position of all to try to bring the people of the world together in economic cooperation and competition advancing democracy and human rights finding ways globally to preserve our little planet s environment that people in both parties somehow feel afraid of the future and afraid of the rest of the world and don t want to eagerly embrace it if you believe for a moment that we can fulfill the legacy of franklin roosevelt and continue to lead the world by hunkering down withdrawing turning our backs on a waiting world that longs for what we now almost take for granted that is wrong the democratic party at the end of world war ii under franklin roosevelt and harry truman said to the rest of the world come on we ll all get together and go forward together and i want you to be a part of that kind of democratic party for the 21st century and the last thing i want to say is that franklin roosevelt was an awfully good politician after all he managed to get himself elected four times he managed to always look happy and strong and confident no matter what personal pain he might have endured and he was marvelously successful because he liked people and he liked politics and i hope you re here tonight because you like politics and i hope you never stop liking politics and i wish that we could have had this event tonight in the lincoln bedroom but we did not have enough coffee in the white house now the next time somebody asks you why you re helping us tell them the stories i told you tonight and think about the people you know whose lives have been changed by what we have done in moving the aids drugs more rapidly to market in coming out for the family and medical leave law in making college more affordable for people in creating all these jobs to give people the chance to work in dignity and having the biggest drop in welfare reform in the history of the country now you think about that all that was made possible by the american political system i am proud of you i want you to be proud of you and i want you to get up tomorrow and say i m glad i was part of that america is better than it was four years ago it s going to be better four years from now and the most important thing is my grandchildren will live in a 21st century that is worthy of america s glorious past thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton2 5 97b bill_clinton thank you very much senator inouye senator hatfield your highness my longtime friend david roosevelt and the members of the roosevelt family mr vice president to all those who have worked to make this day a reality let me begin by saying to senator inouye and senator hatfield the united states proudly accepts the franklin delano roosevelt memorial fittingly this is the first occasion of its kind in more than 50 years the last time the american people gathered near here was in 1943 when president franklin roosevelt dedicated the memorial to thomas jefferson today we honor the greatest president of this great american century as has been said fdr actually wanted no memorial for years none seemed necessary for two reasons first the america he built was a memorial all around us from the golden gate bridge to the grand coulee dam from social security to honest financial markets from an america that has remained the world s indispensable nation to our shared conviction that all americans must make our journey together roosevelt was all around us second though many of us never lived under his leadership many who did are still around and we have all heard about him from our parents or grandparents some of us as we pass wpa or ccc projects along country roads some of us as we looked at the old radios that our parents and grandparents kept and heard stories about the fireside chats and how the people felt today he is still very real to millions upon millions of americans inspiring us urging us on but the world turns and memories fade and now more than a half century after he left us it is right that we go a little beyond his stated wishes and dedicate this memorial as a tribute to franklin roosevelt to eleanor and to the remarkable triumphs of their generation president roosevelt said we have faith that future generations will know that here in the middle of the 20th century there came a time when men of goodwill found a way to unite and produce and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance and intolerance and slavery and war this memorial will be the embodiment of fdr s faith for it will ensure that all future generations will know it will ensure that they will all see the happy warrior keeping america s rendezvous with destiny as we stand at the dawn of a bright new century this memorial will encourage us reminding us that whenever america acts with certainty of purpose and fdr s famous flexibility of mind we have always been more than equal to whatever challenges we face winston churchill said that president roosevelt s life was one of the commanding events in human history he came from privilege but he understood the aspirations of farmers and factory workers and forgotten americans he electrified the farms and hollows but even more important he electrified the nation instilling confidence with every tilt of his head and boom of his laugh his was an open american spirit with a fine sense for the possible and a keen appreciation of the art of leadership he was a master politician and a magnificent commander in chief and his partner was also magnificent eleanor roosevelt was his eyes and his ears going places he could not go to see things he would never see to come back and tell him how things actually were and her reports were formed as words in his speeches that touched little people all across america who could not imagine that the president of the united states knew how they lived and cared about them she was his conscience and our nation s conscience franklin roosevelt s mission was to change america to preserve its ancient virtues in the face of new and unprecedented challenges that is after all america s mission in all times of change and difficulty the depth and sweep of it was unprecedented when fdr asked a shaken nation to put its confidence in him but he had no doubt of the outcome listen to what he said in september of 1932 shortly before he was elected for the first time he proclaimed his faith faith in america faith in our tradition of personal responsibility faith in our institutions faith in ourselves demanded we recognize the new terms of an old social contract new conditions imposed new requirements upon government and upon those who conduct government that was his faith he lived it and we are here as a result with that faith he forged a strong and unapologetic government determined to tame the savage cycles of boom and bust able to meet the national challenges too big for families and individuals to meet on their own and when he restored dignity to old age when he helped millions to keep their farms or own their homes when he provided the simple opportunity to go to work in the morning to millions he was proving that the american dream was not a distant glimmer but something every american could grasp and then that faith of his infused all of his countrymen with that faith he inspired millions of ordinary americans to take responsibility for one another doing their part in his words through the national recovery administration reclaiming nature through the civilian conservation corps gathering scrap giving up nylons and eventually storming the beaches at normandy and okinawa and anzio with that faith he committed our nation to lead the world first as the arsenal of democracy and then at the head of the great crusade to free the world from tyranny before the war began beyond the four freedoms set the foundation for the future and made it clear to the whole world that america s goal was not domination but a dominion of freedom in a world at peace with that faith as the war neared an end he would never see he traced the very architecture of our future from the g i bill to the united nations faith in the extraordinary potential of ordinary people sparked not only our victory over war depression and doubt but it began the opening of doors and the raising of sights for the dispossessed in america that has continued down to the present day it was that faith in his own extraordinary potential that enabled him to guide his country from a wheelchair and from that wheelchair and a few halting steps leaning on his son s arms or those of trusted aides he lifted a great people back to their feet and set america to march again toward its destiny he said over and over again in different ways that we had only to fear fear itself we did not have to be afraid of pain or adversity or failure for all those could be overcome he knew that of course because that is exactly what he did and with his faith and the power of his example we did conquer them all depression war and doubt now we see that faith again alive in america we are grateful beyond measure for our own unprecedented prosperity but we must remember the source of that faith and again let me say to senator inouye and others by showing president roosevelt as he was we show the world that we have faith that in america you are measured for what you are and what you have achieved not for what you have lost and we encourage all who face their difficulties and overcome them not to give into fear but to believe in their possibilities and now again we need the faith of franklin roosevelt in an entirely different time but still no ordinary time for in this time new livelihoods demand new skills we have to fight against the enormous destructive influences that still grip the lives of too many of our young people we must struggle to make our rich racial ethnic and religious diversity a source of strength and unity when such differences are the undoing of millions and millions around the world and we must fight against that nagging old doubt it is a strange irony of our time that here at the moment of our greatest prosperity and progress in so many years in 1932 one in four americans was out of work this morning we learned that fewer than one in 20 americans are out of work for the first time in more than two decades and at this time when the pinnacle that roosevelt hoped america would achieve in our influence and power has come to pass we still strangely fight battles with doubts doubts that he would treat with great impatience and disdain doubts that lead some urge us to pull back from the world at the very first time since roosevelt s time when we actually can realize his vision of world peace and world prosperity and the dominance of the ideals for which he gave his life let us honor his vision not only with this memorial today but by acting in the way he would tell us to act if he were standing here giving this speech on his braces looking at us and smiling at us and telling us we know what we have to do we are americans we must have faith we must not be afraid and we must lead the great legacy of roosevelt is a vision and a challenge not a set of specific programs but a set of commitments the duty we owe to ourselves to one another to our beloved nation and increasingly to our fellow travelers on this small planet now we are surrounded by the monuments to the leaders who built our democracy washington who launched our great experiment and created our republic jefferson who enshrined forever our creed that it is self evident that we are all created equal with unalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness lincoln who gave his life to preserve mr washington s republic and to make real mr jefferson s words and now franklin roosevelt who saved freedom from tyranny who restored our republic who defined mr jefferson s creed to include freedom from want and fear today before the pantheon of our democracy let us resolve to honor them all by shepherding their legacy into a new century into a new millennium our mission is to prepare america for the time to come to write a new chapter of our history inspired always by the greatest source of hope in our history thomas jefferson wrote the words but franklin roosevelt lived them out every day today i ask you to remember what he was writing at warm springs when he died that last speech the only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today let us move forward and active faith my fellow americans every time you think of franklin roosevelt put aside your doubts become more american become more like him be infused with his strong and active faith god bless you god bless america and may god always bless the memory of franklin delano roosevelt dem wjclinton2 6 00 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen chancellor schroeder lord mayor linden president rau president havel his majesty juan carlos president halonen previous laureates members of the charlemagne foundation leaders of the clergy and cathedral and members of the german and american governments let me begin by thanking the lord mayor for his welcome and his wise words and my good friend chancellor schroeder for his kind comments and his visionary statement the rare distinction you have bestowed upon me i am well aware is in large measure a tribute to the role the american people have played in promoting peace freedom and security in europe for the last 50 years i feel the honor is greater still because of the remarkable contributions made by previous recipients of this prize toward our common dream of european union of course as has already been said that dream has its roots here in aachen an ancient shrine that remains at the center of what it means to be european the seat of an empire a place of healing waters peace treaties furious fighting with its liberation at the end of world war ii aachen became perhaps the first german city to join the postwar democratic order today as i have seen aachen is both a sanctuary for sacred relics dating back to the dawn of christianity and a crucible of europe s new information economy here charlemagne s name summons something glimpsed for the first time during his life a sense that the disparate people of this earth s smallest continent could actually live together as participants in a single civilization in its quest for unity even at the point of a sword and in its devotion to the new idea that there was actually something called europe the carolingian idea surpassed what had come before and to an extent it guides us still twelve centuries ago out of the long dark night of endless tribal wars there emerged a light that somehow has survived all the ravages of time always burning brighter always illuminating europe s way to the future today that shining light of european union is a matter of the utmost importance not just to europeans but to everyone on this planet for europe has shown the world humanity at its best and at its worse europe s most violent history was caused by men claiming the mantle of charlemagne men who sought to impose european union for their own ends without the consent of the people history teaches therefore that european union not to mention transatlantic unity must come from the considered judgment of free people and must be for worthy purposes that when threatened must be defended the creators of this prize and its first winners clearly understood that we often say that theirs was the generation that rebuilt europe after world war ii but actually they did far more they built the foundation of something entirely new a europe united in common commitment to democracy free markets and the rule of law that achievement endured for half a century but only for half a continent then 11 years ago the berlin wall fell the iron curtain parted and at last the prospect of a europe whole and free opened before you all of us will remember 1989 for the wall crumbling to the powerful strains of schiller s ode to joy it was a moment of great liberation like 1789 or 1848 a particular triumph for the german people whose own unification defied great adversity and set the stage for the larger unification of europe too often we forget that 1989 was also a time of grave uncertainty about the future there were doubts about nato s future reinforced later by its slowness to confront evil in bosnia and croatia there were fears that the eu s efforts to come closer together would either fail or succeeding would fatally divide europe and the united states the countries of central and eastern europe feared becoming a gray zone of poverty and insecurity many wondered if russia was headed for a communist backlash or a nationalist coup in january of 1994 i came to europe for the first time as president both to celebrate europe s new birth of freedom and to build upon it then i spoke of a new conception of european security based not on divided defense blocs but instead on political military and cultural integration this new security idea required as has already been said the transatlantic alliance to do for europe s east what we did for europe s west after world war ii together we set about doing that we lowered trade barriers supported young democracies adapted nato to new challenges and expanded our alliance across europe s old divide we made clear and i repeat today that nato s door remains open to new members the eu took in three new members that opened negotiations with a dozen others created a single market with one currency we ve stood by russia struggling to build their own democracy and opened the way to a partnership between russia and nato and between ukraine and nato we defended the values at the heart of our vision of an undivided europe acting to stop the ethnic cleansing in bosnia and forging what i believe will be an enduring peace there we acted in kosovo in one of our alliance s finest moments a year go in germany we launched a stability pact for southeastern europe we stand still with crusaders for tolerance and freedom from croatia to slovakia to serbia and we do encourage reconciliation between turkey and greece over the last 11 years of course there have been some setbacks but unquestionably europe today is more united more democratic more peaceful than ever and both europeans and americans should be proud of that think how much has changed borders built to stop tanks now manage invasions of tourists and trucks europe s fastest growing economies are now on the other side of the old iron curtain at nato headquarters the flags of 19 allies and 27 partners fly in central europe and eastern europe the realistic dream of membership in the eu and nato has sparked the resolution of almost every old ethnic and border dispute and finally finally our friend vaclav havel has spent more years being president than he spent in prison in southeastern europe the bosnians are still fighting but now at the ballot box croatia is a democracy soldiers from almost every european country including bitter former adversaries are keeping the peace together in kosovo last year as german troops marched through the balkan countryside they were hailed as liberators what a way to end the 20th century in the meantime russia has stayed on the path of democracy though its people have suffered bitter economic hardships political and criminal violence and the tragedy of the war in chechnya which yet may prove to be self defeating because of the civilian casualties still it has withdrawn its troops from the baltic states accepted the independence of its neighbors and completed the first democratic transition in its thousand year history european unity really is producing something new under the sun common institutions that are bigger than the nation state and at the same time a devolution of democratic authority downward scotland and wales have their own parliaments this week northern ireland where my family has its roots restored its new government europe is alive with the sound of ancient place names being spoken again catalonia piedmont lombardy silesia transylvania uthenia not in the name of separatism but in the spirit of healthy pride and heritage national sovereignty is being enriched by lively local voices making europe safer for diversity reaffirming our common humanity reducing the chance that european disunity will embroil europe and america in another large conflict one thing thankfully has not changed europe s security remains tied to america s security when it is threatened as it was in bosnia and kosovo we too will respond when it is being built we too will always take part europe s peace sets a powerful example to other parts of the world that remain divided along ethnic religious and national lines even today europe has internal disputes over fundamental questions of sovereignty political power and economic policy disputes no less consequential than those over which people still fight and die in other parts of the world however instead of fighting and dying over them now europeans argue about them in brussels in a spirit of cooperation and mutual respect the whole world should take notice of this if western europe could come together after the carnage of world war ii if central europe could do it following 50 years of communism it can be done everywhere on this earth of course for all of the positive developments and our good feelings today the job of building a united europe is certainly not finished and it is important not to take all this self congratulation too far instead we should focus today on two big pieces of unfinished business and one enduring challenge the first piece of unfinished business is to make southeast europe fully finally and forever a part of the rest of europe that is the only way to make peace last in that bitterly divided region it cannot be done by forcing people to live together there is no bringing back the old yugoslavia it cannot be done by giving every community its own country army and flag shifting so many borders in the balkans will only shake the peace further our goal must be to de balkanize the balkans we must help them to create a magnet that will bring people together a magnet more powerful than the polarizing pull of their old hatreds that s what the stability pact that germany helped to establish is designed to do challenging the nations of southeast europe to reform their economies and strengthen their democracies and pledging more than 6 billion from the rest of us to support their efforts now we must turn quickly those pledges into positive changes in the lives of ordinary people and steadily bring those nations into western institutions we must also remain unrelenting in our support for a democratic transition in serbia for if there is to be a future for democracy and tolerance in this region there must be no future for mr milosevic and his policy of ethnic hatred and ethnic cleansing if southeastern europe is to be fully integrated into the continent turkey also must be included i applaud the eu s decision to treat turkey as a real candidate for membership i hope both turkey and the eu will take the next steps it will be good for turkey good for southeast europe good for more rapid reconciliation between greece and turkey and the resolution of cyprus and good for the entire world which is still too divided over religious differences our second piece of unfinished business concerns russia we must work to build a partnership with russia that encourages stability democracy and cooperative engagement with the west and full integration with global institutions only time will tell what russia s ultimate role in europe will be we do not yet know if russia s hard won democratic freedoms will endure we don t know yet whether it will define its greatness in yesterday s terms or tomorrow s the russian people will make those decisions though russia s transformation is incomplete there clearly is reason for hope in russia s remarkable journey over these last few years from dictatorship to democracy from communism to the market from empire to nation state from adversary to partner in reducing the threat of mass destruction because the stakes are so high we must do everything we can to encourage a russia that is fully democratic and united in its diversity a russia that defines its greatness not by dominance of its neighbors but by the dominant achievements of its people and its partnership a russia that should be indeed must be fully part of europe that means no doors can be sealed shut to russia not nato s not the eu s the alternative would be a future of harmful competition between russia and the rest and the end of our vision of an undivided continent as winston churchill said when he received the charlemagne prize in the far darker days of 1956 in a true unity of europe russia must have her part of course russia may very well decide it has no interest in formally joining european or transatlantic institutions if that happens we must make sure that as the eu and nato expand their eastern borders become gateways to russia not barriers to trade travel and security cooperation we must build real institutional links with russia as nato has begun to do of course it won t be easy and there is still mistrust to be overcome on both sides but it is possible and absolutely necessary the steps necessary to bring southeast europe and russia into the embrace of european unity illustrate the continued importance of the transatlantic alliance to both europe and america the enduring challenge we face therefore is to preserve and strengthen our alliance as europe continues its coming together we have agreed on the principles we have laid the foundations but the future we re building will look very different from anything we have ever known in a generation i expect the eu will have as many as 30 members from the baltics to the balkans to turkey a community of unprecedented cultural political and economic diversity and vitality it will be a bigger europe than charlemagne ever dared dream a reflection of our recognition that ultimately europe is a unifying idea as much as a particular place an expansive continent of different peoples who embrace a common destiny play by the same rules and affirm the same truths that ethnic and religious hatred are unacceptable that human rights are inalienable and universal that our differences are a source of strength not weakness that conflicts must be resolved by arguments not by arms i believe america must continue to support europe s most ambitious unification efforts and i believe europe should want to strengthen our alliance even as you grow stronger the alliance has been the bedrock of our security for half a century it can be the foundation on which our common future is built oh it s easy to point to our differences many do on my bad days i do but let s keep a healthy perspective consider these news headlines about u s european dispute allies complain of washington s heavy hand france to nato non merci u s declares economic warfare on allies protestors rally against american arms plan the first of those headlines is from the suez crisis in 1956 the second is from 1966 when france left nato s military command the third is from 1981 the siberian pipeline crisis the fourth from 1986 during the debate about deploying intermediate nuclear missiles in europe yes we ve always had our differences and being human and imperfect we always will but the simple fact is since europe is an idea as much as a place america also is a part of europe bound by ties of family history and values more than ever we are also actually connected underwater cables allow us to send staggering amounts of e mail and e commerce to each other instantaneously one billion dollars in trade and investment goes back and forth every day employing more than 14 million people on both sides of the atlantic and there is the enduring connection the 104 000 americans who lie in military cemeteries across europe today s europe would not be possible without them and whatever work i have done to merit your prize was built on their sacrifice so my friends we must nourish the ties that bind us as we work to resolve honest disagreements and to overcome potentially harmful misperceptions on both sides of the atlantic let me mention just two there is a perception right now in america that europe doesn t always carry its fair share of our mutual responsibilities yet europeans are providing more than 80 percent of both the troops keeping the peace in kosovo and the funds for economic reconstruction there and few americans know that in our own backyard europeans paid for more than 60 percent of all aid to central america when it was ravaged by hurricane mitch and one third of all support for peace in guatemala at the same time there is a perception in europe that america s power military economic cultural is at times too overbearing perhaps our role in nato s air campaign in kosovo accentuated such fears but in kosovo our power was exercised in alliance with europe in pursuit of our shared interest in european peace and stability in defense of shared values central to the goal of european integration if after kosovo european countries strengthen their own ability to act with greater authority and responsibility in times of crisis while maintaining our transatlantic link i think that is a very good thing there is no contradiction between a strong europe and a strong transatlantic partnership i would also like to mention that our partnership as the lord mayor pointed out and as chancellor schroeder said remains profoundly important not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world as well together we account for more than half the world s economy and 90 percent of its humanitarian aid if we re going to win the fight against terrorism organized crime the spread of weapons of mass destruction if we want to promote ethnic religious and racial tolerance if we want to combat global warming and environmental degradation fight infectious disease ease poverty and close the digital divide clearly we must do these things together europe and america should draw strength from our transatlantic alliance europe should not be threatened by it and america must not listen to those who say we should go it alone america must remain europe s good partner and good ally lord palmerston s rule that countries have no permanent alliances only permanent interests simply does not apply to our relationship for america has a permanent interest in a permanent alliance with europe our shared future is deeply rooted in our shared history the american revolution after all stemmed in part from the seven years war which in turn stemmed from a treaty signed here in aachen in 1748 now a few days ago i stood at the mouth of the tagus river in lisbon from that spot over five centuries ago brave europeans began to explore the far reaches of our planet they traveled unimaginable distances and conquered indescribable adversity on their way to find asia africa and the americas in their wake the sons and daughters of this continent came across the atlantic to populate places they called new spain new england new france new netherlands nova scotia new sweden in short a new europe without the longing for a new europe there never would have been an america in the first place now as the longing for a new europe takes root on the soil of the old continent we should never let a sense of history s inevitability cloud our wonder at how astonishingly europeans changed the rest of the world through enterprise imagination and their ability to grow qualities that always will define europe s identity far more accurately than any mapmaker ever will in the years ahead as pilgrims of peace come here to aachen i hope they will reflect on the similarity of the two monuments enshrined here first the magnificent cathedral holding charlemagne s mortal remains begun in his lifetime added to throughout the middle ages repaired in the 20th century when our failure to keep the peace required it and second the peace and unity that three generations have been building for five decades now in europe a work far from complete perhaps never to be completed but completely worthy of our best labors and dreams let us keep building this cathedral the cathedral of european unity on the foundation of our alliance for freedom because i have tried to lay a stone or two in my time i am honored and humbled to accept this prize thank you very much dem wjclinton2 6 94 bill_clinton mayor rutelli mrs rutelli prime minister berlusconi and mrs berlusconi to the citizens of rome for hillary and for me this is an historic moment at this site of ancient glory we say to you on behalf of all of the people of the united states greetings it is humbling to stand here romulus walked on this ground michelangelo designed this magnificent place today we celebrate something worthy of their greatness the towering friendship between the united states and italy among the americans i brought here with me today is a distinguished member of my cabinet the watchful guardian of our government s budget and one of america s greatest sons of italy my friend leon panetta well i know that washington is not rome that dollars are not lire but when the budget is made taxpayers everywhere need someone in the government like leon panetta who is paid to say basta enough because leon panetta represents the best of the italianamerican partnership and because he has such a good sense of humor and because i am deeply in his debt as an american citizen i have invited him to translate a part of my remarks here today and when he is through i want the citizens of rome to give him a grade on how well he did mr panetta i am delighted to be in rome and i look forward to returning to italy to visit naples next month there is so much of italy in america art music philosophy and most important the strength and wisdom of so many of your sons and daughters that bond of blood and spirit between our people is the heart and soul of our special relationship america and italy are more than mere partners we are now and forever will be alleati amici una famiglia translated by mr panetta so leon grazie thank you for your friendship and for teaching me a few words of italian now all of his ancestors will rest in peace all of his ancestors will rest in peace i have come to europe to recall its cruelest war and to help secure its lasting peace i am honored to begin my travels here in the eternal city on the anniversary of your republic a halfcentury ago my nation joined a great crusade to restore liberty on this continent but no moment was prouder than 50 years ago this week when we joined with you and others to return rome to its people and its people to freedom we are still told stories about that great day church bells ringing out the song of celebration children climbing onto the tanks of the liberators one brave member of the italian resistance said we cried with happiness letting ourselves realize for the first time how scared we had been to honor we must remember therefore this week as the sons and daughters of democracy we must resolve never to forget such hallowed words as anzio nettuno salerno normandy these names speak of the sacrifices of our parents and the freedom of their children and grandchildren now for 50 years our people have stood together as italy has worked a modern miracle you have transformed italy into one of the world s great economies you have helped to build nato history s greatest military alliance and you have stood firm against soviet expansion america is grateful for italy s vital role in our partnership in your hosting nato air operations at aviano and in the adriatic in your working to build the european union in your investment in the continent s new democracies the end of the cold war is permitting all of us to do the work of renewal within our nations to rebuild our economies to rebuild our sense of community and common purpose to reform our politics we must do this cicero said merely to possess virtue as you would art is not enough unless you apply it i believe italy will pursue its democratic destiny with virtue and grace and as you pursue that destiny america will stand with you and with europe for 50 years we have stood together to help build peace and prosperity in western europe now let us expand those blessings across a broader europe so to all the italians here present and to my fellow americans here present to all the citizens of other nations in this hallowed place let us hope that 50 years from now the world will say of us the children of freedom and democracy were the builders of lasting peace thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton2 6 98a bill_clinton thank you so much first let me join in thanking richard and jenny for welcoming us into their magnificent home and this magnificent art gallery you know it s amazing how you use cliches year in and year out and sometimes something happens that it gives whole new meaning this lunch has given a whole new meaning to the democratic party as the party of the big tent it s really very very beautiful and we re grateful to you i want to thank all the members of congress who are here all the candidates for congress who are here my great longtime friend garry mauro and jim maddox and ann richards who had to go and i thank you b a bentsen for being here and thanks for giving us a good report on lloyd ladies and gentlemen what was just said about martin frost is true and then some right before i came up here i was sitting down there and mary asked me about my dog buddy i don t know if you ve ever had a labrador retriever but they re smart and they re loving but lord are they insistent and about once a day my dog comes into the white house to the oval office and he ll go in the back room he knows where all his toys are and he ll sort through his toys and he ll go get his ball and he ll come and throw the ball down at my feet and you know i could be talking to boris yeltsin on the phone but he doesn t care he just starts barking the whole federal budget could be at issue buddy doesn t care he just starts barking and he ll keep right on barking until i go out and throw that ball with him for a while that s the way martin frost is about these events if i d had thought about it i d have called buddy martin but i say that out of real admiration because somebody s got to do this work somebody s got to do this work in 1996 we would have won the house back if we hadn t been outspent in 20 close districts in the last 10 days about 4 to 1 that s not an exaggeration now we had a long way to come back and we had to spend some money along the way and it s not going to be that bad this time but martin frost understands that and this is a completely thankless job in texas at least you can express your appreciation for him you can support you know but he s out there helping people in connecticut in colorado in washington wisconsin and california and it s a completely thankless job except to people who understand that the future of the country is in large measure riding on our ability to be competitive in a lot of these races so i want to say i make a lot of fun of martin barking at me but i love him for doing it and i thank you sir for what you ve done i d also like to remind everybody that this is not just an election year it s an election in which there are high stakes and important issues i have done my best to not only turn the country around but to do it with a democratic party that was rooted in our oldest values and pointed toward the 21st century a lot of you in this room have helped me to do that i d like to say a particular word of appreciation to bill white for what he s done as chairman of the democratic party here and what he did in my administration and a thank you for over 25 years of friendship to my friend billie carter who is just celebrating her 70th birthday but she doesn t look it and i love you for it keep in mind what people what the republicans used to say about the democratic party in 1992 when i ran for president i thought they might get away with it one more time you know they after 12 years of stewardship of the country would quadruple the national debt and they said well it s only because of the congress even though the democratic congress had in fact appropriated slightly less money then the presidents had asked for in the previous 12 years but they had more than half the country convinced that we couldn t be trusted with the economy we couldn t be trusted with the deficit we couldn t be trusted with taxes we couldn t be trusted with welfare or crime or the management of the foreign policy of the country or anything else that amounted to anything to a lot of americans and when i presented my economic program in which then treasury secretary lloyd bentsen was spearheading in 1993 a lot of the leaders of the republican party including a certain senator of texas said that if you do this it will bring on a recession it will increase the deficit well we re about to have the first surplus since lyndon johnson was president and it s not an accident that he was a democrat too so the first thing i want to say is that all the people here who helped me mayor brown who was my drug czar bill was in the energy department a lot of you just helped in the congress and the administration you should be proud of the fact that no one can now say with the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the first balanced budget and surplus in 30 years the lowest interest rates in 32 years the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years and the lowest crime rates in 25 years the biggest expansion of trade in american history no one can say that the democrats cannot be trusted with the economy or with social policy or with the safety of our streets and all of you played a role in that and i m proud of the success that the country has had but i think it s also important to say that as we look ahead we have to say what else still needs to be done for the 21st century because elections are always about the future and the fact that you did a good job in the time you were given all that means is that that s some evidence that you might do a good job if you get another term so we have to continue to press our agenda for the future and i d just like to remind you that these are important things that affect every american there are people up in washington that want to spend the surplus before it s materialized i don t want to spend one red cent of it until i know that we have saved the social security system for the 21st century so we don t bankrupt our kids when the baby boomers like me retire that s an important thing to do i believe and i think you believe that we will never have the america we want where everybody can participate in this prosperity until we can offer every child a world class education that means we have to continue to work on our schools we now can say that one of the achievements of this administration is we ve now opened the doors of college to everybody who will work for it with the tax credits the scholarships the grants the work study program the americorps program we ve done that now what we have to do is to improve our public schools and give our kids the tools they need to succeed we ve got an agenda of smaller classes and more teachers and higher standards and computer technology for everyone that s our agenda and we re fighting and there are differences between the parties on this issue we have a health care agenda we ought to pass the patient s bill of rights and i am impatient that it hasn t already passed through this congress i was telling the folks around our table at lunch today i did an event in washington this week with a woman from minnesota a perfectly beautiful woman who came i had never met her before and she got up and talked about how she had a lump in her breast two years ago and she asked her hmo to have it checked out and they took x rays but no biopsy and they said you re fine two years later the lump is still there she paid for her own biopsy five weeks ago stage two breast cancer she s going to go in and have surgery and they say you can t have a breast specialist you can only have a general surgeon she makes 123 phone calls 123 phone calls no satisfaction finally hires her own breast specialist and when she s under the knife in surgery she gets a call finally from the hmo saying well we ll cover this procedure but we re probably not going to cover your chemotherapy now i personally believe it s a good thing that we ve gotten into better management of our health care resources we couldn t continue to have health care costs go up at three times the rate of inflation it would have consumed all the money in the country but every change we adopt has to be rooted in basic values and the kind of decent things that allow people to build a life build a family and hold the society together that s why we need the patient s bill of rights that s part of our agenda that we re trying to pass and it s worth doing and i think if you look at how many people there are in america today that are retired early some of them have been forced into early retirement and they can t buy any health insurance we ve got a proposal that doesn t cost the medicare trust fund one red cent to let people who are over 55 years of age who through no fault of their own lost their health insurance buy into it or their kids can help them buy into it at least they ll have access to some insurance that s a part of our program we ve got an environmental proposal before the country that everybody in texas ought to be for now because you ve been eating all this smoke from these fires that are the direct consequence of el nino and the climate warming up and we re going to have more of these unless we prove that we can continue to grow our economy while we reduce the things we do that heighten the temperature of the earth in the 1990s in this decade alone the five hottest years since 1400 have occurred this is not some bogus scare issue this whole issue of climate change we don t need to be panicked we need to change our patters of production in a way that will help us to grow the economy while we reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also parenthetically it would be very good for the natural gas industry in texas but that s not why i m saying it it s the right thing to do and we can do it and grow the economy we have an initiative on that that s good for the economy not bad for the economy finally let me just mention if i might two other things i think it is unconscionable that we have not already passed comprehensive legislation to protect our kids from the problems that are associated with the fact that one third now almost of teenagers are smoking tobacco even though it s illegal it s the biggest public health problem in america more people die from tobacco related illnesses than all other conventional forms of problems every year combined it s illegal for every kid in the country to be able to buy cigarettes we ve got a program before the congress that passed 19 to 1 out of a senate committee and we can t seem to get a vote on it and they ve promised to kill it in the house i believe if we could pass it out of the senate we could pass the bill in the house and we can do something historic for public health and for our children s future and i don t understand why this is a political issue republicans have children just like democrats this is not a political issue this is an american issue and i hope you will make your voices heard and say we may not understand every detail we may not be able to write every line of this bill but the american people are smart enough to know that we are either going to do something or not and i am determined in this congress to see that we do something on this tobacco issue we ve been fooling with it for three years and the time has come to act now that s what we re for so we ve got a good record the things they used to say about us in texas so most people thought they could never vote for us aren t true anymore and we ve got the best program for the future and that s what you re contributing to and i just want to leave you with this thought many of these members of congress and i just came from a neighborhood health center here in houston in gene green s district where we met with hispanics african americans asian americans plain old white anglo saxon protestants like me a lot of people that look like houston and that look like america we talked about the census i ve already said what i have to say about that we just ought to get an honest count we ought not to politicize it but i was looking at that crowd today and thinking this is the future of america and in a world that is smaller and smaller and smaller where we re only 4 percent of the world s population and we ve got 20 percent of the wealth so if we want to keep it we ve got to be dealing with the other 96 percent of the people it is a godsend that we are growing more diverse if we can get along with each other and avoid the kind of group think and group resentment that s caused so much trouble elsewhere in the world and in some ways maybe that s the most important reason to be a democrat today my heart was rejoicing when the land of my ancestors in ireland voted for the peace process that a lot of us worked very hard to bring to fruit what did they have to do they had to give up group resentments you now have to read about kosovo every day in the newspaper like you used to have to read about bosnia what s it about albanians and serbs believing that they can t trust each other and there is group resentment that s what bosnia was about fundamentally what s holding up the next step of the middle east peace process a lack of trust between the two groups fundamentally what happened in africa when 800 000 people were slaughtered in a matter of weeks in rwanda tribal resentments i m telling you now that we have stripped off the veneer of the cold war there s still some people that are just miserable if they re not hating somebody for something and there are a lot of people who don t believe they matter unless they ve got somebody to look down on and then to be fair there are a lot of real problems out there that people have had for a long time that would make it hard for you if you were in their shoes to press people who were different our ability to be a great nation in the 21st century consists in no small measure in our ability to live together here at home so when people look at us they do not see the same devils that are tearing their own hearts out and if we want people to listen to us in other countries and other parts of the world we have to be able to hold up to them a shining light of america where people are judged as martin luther king said by the content of the character not the color of their skin not their religion not anything else other than whether they show up every day and do their best that s another thing that our party stands for and i m proud of it and god willing with your efforts the american people will ratify it this november thank you very much dem wjclinton2 6 98b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you first of all ray can you hear me i feel rather pathetic even needing a microphone after the last demonstration of music we had let me begin by saying that i know i speak for all of us when i say a profound word of thanks to ray for welcoming us into his home and for bringing his art into this tent and bringing the wonderful music here this has been a magnificent night and i have loved it i love the time you and your daughters took to show me through your home to see your art once many years ago before i ever could have known i would be here and you would be here we would be doing this i visited you in your office and you showed me some of your wonderful art work and i thank you for being a great citizen and for helping us by being having us all here tonight thank you so much i d like to thank my good friend of many many years roy romer for being here he is not only the senior governor in the united states but most people believe the best one and it is our great good fortune to have him as our chair of the democratic party i thank len barrack who has come all the way from philadelphia to be here our finance chairman tonight congressman martin frost my friend of more than 25 years garry mauro bill white and all the co chairs i thank you and i d like to say a special word of thanks to all the people who performed tonight they were magnificent and to you my friend denise graves thank you for being here i wish i could stay in fort worth and hear your concert you know ray was talking about the support that hillary and i have tried to give to the arts tomorrow night i m going back to washington to have the annual pbs in performance night at the white house we ve had all different kinds of music there we ve had jazz and blues and classical music one year we had women in country tomorrow night you can see this on educational television tomorrow night we re having a gospel fest and tomorrow night unlike all the others i actually picked some of the performers and some of the music so if you don t like it you can partially blame me as well but i was thinking and i saw all those wonderful performers who came from little towns in america as they were introduced i don t know if that wonderful man really did come from a town called resume speed south dakota but it s a great story and i intend to tell it as if it were true for the rest of the year but anyway i was thinking about what ray said about the support that hillary and i have tried to give the arts we re celebrating the millennium in 2000 it will be the last year of my presidency we have devised this great national endeavor called honoring the past and imagining the future and among the things we re trying to do are to preserve the great treasures of our natural and national heritage like the constitution the bill of rights the declaration of independence we re trying to get record amounts of research into biomedical and other critical areas of research and we re trying to preserve and elevate the role of the arts in our lives at the very time when many leaders in the other party still seem determined to de fund the national endowment for the arts and the national endowment for the humanities but i don t really want to talk about the funding issue tonight i want to talk about what lies behind all this why do we get a thrill out of seeing some young man or woman stand up and sing as they sang tonight what is it that moves us when we look at this art when we walk out there among the magnificent pieces of sculpture why do we like it better when we feel elevated and when we feel sort of united by a common bond of humanity that we feel coming back to us from a piece of artistic genius because we know that we feel more alive and we feel better about ourselves better about other people and better about life in general when we re feeling and being and reaching big rather than when we re feeling and being and digging small and if you think about a lot of what i have to do as president a lot of what i try to do what i really tried to do when i got here was to clean away a lot of the underbrush that was holding america back and to try to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives and to build good families and strong communities and make our nation stronger and reach out to the rest of the world so that we could be our better selves and it may sound kind of corny and old fashioned and pollyanna but i really believe that that s the secret of america s success that we try to capture every day in some way in all the work we do and the way we live our lives the way those performers made us feel tonight and whenever we don t we sort of disappoint ourselves and we disappoint the rest of the world so to me i m very grateful that i had the chance to serve in these last six years i m grateful that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years and the lowest crime rate in 25 years and we re going to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years and we ve got the highest home ownership in history i m grateful for all that but you ve got to understand why i m grateful for all that i m grateful for that because all that means when you strip it all away is that people are freer and they have more capacity to live big lives instead of small ones to be happy and to give happiness and to find fulfillment instead of just clawing out a miserable existence in conflict with their fellow human beings and that really i think is what our party has come to represent all the things they used to say about us well you can t trust the democrats to run the economy or handle the welfare system or get the crime rate down or manage trade or foreign policy or national defense and all that all that is gone now and i m grateful for that but your presence here tonight will help us to take a message into this election season in 1998 about where we re going into the 21st century what should our agenda be what is the unfinished business of america and maybe more important than anything else what will be the dominant spirit that pervades the nation s capital and the nation s public business if you think about where we are and where we still have to go we ve still got a lot to do shoot we haven t balanced the books in 30 years and i ve already got folks up there in congress trying to spend money we don t have yet i don t think we ought to spend a nickel of that surplus until we secure the social security system well into the 21st century so us baby boomers don t bankrupt our kids and our grandchildren that s an important thing about the future that will enable us to be big we re not going to feel very big when all the baby boomers retire and our kids have to pay money they can t afford to support us because we allowed the social security system to go bankrupt so that s a big issue that will enable us to keep going in the right direction i think we ought to keep working until we have not only the best system of college education in the world which we already have but the best system of elementary and high school education in the world that s why i m working for all the smaller classes and the higher standards and the computers for all the kids and all those things because the world we live in imposes a heavy penalty on people who cannot learn for a lifetime and gives a rich reward for those who can those of you in texas have had a very personal experience in the last few weeks with all the residue from the fires in mexico coming over the skies here believe me it is just a sign of more to come unless we face the fact that the five warmest years since 1400 have occurred in the 1990s all those people that tell you global warming and climate change is some big ruse are not right we are putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it can absorb without heating up the planet we re going to have more extreme events which will manifest itself and more extreme weather conditions heat and cold and rain and sleet and snow and more fires in places where they re vulnerable we ve got to find a way to use american ingenuity and technological advances to prove we can live in closer harmony with the environment and still keep growing the economy i know we can do that i believe in the possibility of america but it s a big part of our challenge as i said in houston earlier today parenthetically it s also good for people who are in the natural gas business in texas but i say it when i m other places as well we have to prove we can do this we have to prove that we can maintain the world s best health system and make it available to everybody and not let managed care be more than it should be which is managing care we shouldn t take the care out of managed care that s why we re for this patient s bill of rights that s why i think people that lose their health insurance who are older ought to be able to buy into medicare but all these things all the specifics are not as important to me as the big issue i m just trying to do what i think is necessary to take this country into the 21st century with the american dream alive for everybody with our leadership in the world for peace and freedom and prosperity unquestioned and with the country coming together instead of being divided look at the foreign policy issues for example that it s been my responsibility to deal with as your president in the last few days let me just give you a few of them just in the last 30 days i went to geneva switzerland to talk about the trading system we need for the 21st century some of my fellow democrats think we don t need to expand trade anymore i think we need to expand it faster there are 4 percent of the population in america with 20 percent of the income you don t have to be a genius to figure out we ve got to sell something to the other 96 percent of the people if we re going to maintain our standard of living but we have to do it in a way that helps other people with their lives as well then i went to birmingham where we worried about the economic crisis in indonesia and the political crisis there and we ve been working on the economic challenges that russia is facing i recently came back from africa where i went to rwanda and we re trying to help them deal with the aftermath of 800 000 people killed in tribal murders and building up the good things that are going on in africa at the same time and of course the number one problem and i could mention many others i ve been for the last month heavily involved in trying to get the middle east peace talks back on track we were involved happily in a success in ireland where the people voted for peace there which i m very proud of and for the last couple of weeks i ve spent more time than anything else on the tensions between india and pakistan that were manifested in the nuclear testing by both countries but if you back away from all the specifics again and you look at the general problem what is it why did these nuclear tests occur because two things one the two nations felt insecure as compared with each other and for india against china there wasn t enough trust there and secondly they felt they had to define themselves as big in a way that i think is fundamentally negative i don t think they re more secure now than they were when they set off those nuclear tests and i think whenever we try to define ourselves as big in a way that s negative by putting somebody else down or separating ourselves from others we inevitably pay a price one of the reasons i ve worked so hard for the last year on this one america race initiative to try to get people together across all the lines that divide us is i actually believe the increasing diversity of america is in a fundamental way our meal ticket to the future in a world that s smaller and smaller and smaller where there are i don t know more than a million people a day being added to the internet all these home pages coming on now at rapid rates a hundred million users now it will be 200 million by the end of the year around the world there were only 50 web sites six years ago when i became president only 50 in a world that s coming together like that a country that is both free and economically successful that has people from everywhere living there from all walks of life and all kinds of religious and ethnic and racial backgrounds where things aren t perfect but where we get along and we re driven by values that say we re going to be big not little we re going to be united not divided we re going to try to let people s spirits flow and unleash them and we re not going to be small and mean and petty and we re not going to be caught in the same trap with the people we re trying to help by dividing our power by negative ways or defining our power in negative ways that is very important and if you really look at all of it if you go back to the point ray made the position we ve taken on the role of arts in american life the importance of pursuing and preserving the national endowment for arts and the national endowment for the humanities is nothing more than a metaphor for the differences in the two parties approach to national politics today our approach to the future is optimistic it s united and it s big it believes the heart is as important as the mind and that it s important that we go forward together and we believe that america can only lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity if we are a worthy example so i m grateful that the approach we started back in 93 has worked as well as it has i m grateful for all the support all of you have given to me and to our party and i m grateful for your presence here tonight but in some ways the biggest battles are yet to be fought because sometimes when people enjoy a great deal of success it makes them downright dumb how many of us haven t all of you been had at least a moment of being downright dumb when you were really successful is there a person who here who can say with a straight face you never had one moment of stupidity in the aftermath of some success you enjoy nobody can say that so what are we going to do with our success are we going to get bigger and bolder and better i want us to feel as a country the way we felt in this wonderful setting tonight when those great american young people were singing america should be singing we ve got a lot to be grateful for and a lot to do and thanks to you our party has more than an average chance now to be successful in doing our part thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton2 7 96a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you well if we get them they ll be a lot better if dick durbin is in the senate i ll tell you that first of all i m delighted to be here with senator simon and senator carol moseley braun my good friend bill singer and all of you who have contributed to this terrific fundraiser i want to say how very much i admire dick and loretta durbin they live their family values they don t just give political speeches about them at election time and how happy i am to be here at this when dick was talking about being a lithuanian i was just thinking that the chicago person in my household would like to be here tonight but when we were in france for the g 7 meeting and i left hillary and she went on to romania the czech republic hungary poland estonia and two or three other places and she called me yesterday and she told me about her day in romania and she told me she said you realize all the places i m going all the people i m going to see and she reeled them all off and i said look i can make one trip to chicago and see people from all those places so dick reminded me of my wisecrack and i thought i d give it to you it s really true about chicago it s one of the things that makes it so wonderful the mayor and bill daley took me down to the taste of chicago today and i walked and i ate like a horse but i was an equal opportunity eater i gave every ethnic group got a fair and equal shot at me and i ll have to run an extra five miles in the morning but it was wonderful let me say on a more serious note how much i appreciate the support i felt from all the american people when i went to europe to try to get our allies to support the united states in our fight against terrorism in the aftermath of what happened in saudi arabia to our air force personnel but i also want to compliment the federal officials and those who worked with them for the arrests that were made in the terrorist incidents that were headed off in arizona which you doubtless read about in the press this morning and this is not the first time we ve been successful in doing that it s something we work hard at and i say it to make this point at the end of the cold war when the world was not divided into communist and non communist blocs and when we can worry less we haven t done away with the worry but we can worry less about the imminence of a nuclear war we see this welling up of ancient hatreds based on race and ethnic group and religion and we see the fact that we re more open to each other in terms of our ability to travel and our ability to send money and ideas and technology around the world in a split second it makes us more vulnerable to the organized forces of destruction and especially to terrorists but what i want you to know is that if we work together and we re smart we can t guarantee 100 percent security but we can prevent a lot of these instances in the middle east in israel for all the terrible terrorist incidents we see i want you to know they stop a lot more incidents than ever occur and we can do the same we can do the same but we ve got to keep in mind the terrible sacrifice of innocent victims and including those whose lives i honored in florida on sunday and we ve got to continue to work together and i felt the support of the american people in that the other thing i want to say is that i know you all support our common endeavors to try to do what we can to end this terrible rash of church burnings of black churches and other houses of worship around this country that s been an especially painful thing for me because i feel so strongly about the first amendment freedom of religion i think it s one of the most distinctive things about the united states that we have the freedom to believe whatever we want or even not to believe and it s one of the reasons i think that we are by all accounts the most religious country in the world and it gives character and depth to our nation and what s happening is i don t think there s any big conspiracy but i do believe it s evidence of this kind of dark impulse that you see welling up all over the world there are a lot of people who are disappointed in their own lives and have problems and we ve now seen that some of these people that have been arrested some that have admitted doing this they ve talked about their own lives and it s obvious that they had a lot of problems they were people if they hadn t burned churches would have evoked our sympathies because of the difficulties they were having in their lives and when people have frustrations they can do one of two things they can take responsibility for it and try to get help or they can look for somebody else to blame and someone else to look down on no matter what kind of shape i m in there s always somebody else i can look down on i think i ll go burn a church and that is not only un american it is profoundly wrong and destructive but we have to change the atmosphere in this country about that so today before i came here i declared this month national month of unity and asked every american citizen to do something either in their places of worship or where they work or some other way to reach out to people who are different from them and express our unity as a people around the shared values embodied in the constitution of the united states of america and apropos of what dick said earlier we also took a little of the money that the justice department has for police officers and dedicated it to the 12 states that have suffered the most from the church burnings and we said to every country we will give you more police officers or you can use the money to light up these churches at night or work people overtime or do whatever is necessary but we want to do more to prevent these burnings not just to catch the people who do it and we have to do that now what s all this got to do with dick durbin s election everything everything when i ran for president in 1991 and 92 it was for most people thought a totally bizarre almost and unfulfillable adventure the president at that time was at way over 70 percent in the polls my mother was the only person that thought i was going to win that s not true hillary always thought i would win she did but apart from that the pickings were pretty slim and i did it without regard to whether we could win or not because i was very troubled that our country seemed to be sort of drifting into the 21st century we had an exploding deficit we had very weak job growth the weakest since the depression we had a high unemployment rate and we seemed to be drifting apart instead of coming together just look around this room tonight look at the diversity in this room and we ve got to prove that the rest of the world is wrong when they fall out over race religion and ethnicity we ve got to prove that we can be better and bigger than that not because we re intrinsically better human beings but because we ve got a system and a history and a set of values in our constitution that tells us how we ought to behave and that we know from experience really works in the world of today and will work in the world of tomorrow and i felt very strongly that unless we had a common shared national commitment to keeping the american dream alive for everybody without regard to their race or their gender or where they started out in life to bringing this country together instead of letting it drift apart and in maintaining the leadership of the united states for peace and freedom and prosperity unless we all said that s what we re trying to do as we move into the 21st century we just keep on drifting and lose a lot of the greatness of america and the extraordinary opportunity that the end of the cold war and growth of the global economy and the information age presents us and so i set out on this odyssey and i guess the first big hurdle was cleared on st patrick s day in 1992 when we carried the democratic primaries in illinois and michigan and it became obvious that unless a wheel ran off i d be nominated and so i thank you all for that when the american people gave me the chance to serve and i got to work with people like paul simon and carol moseley braun and dick durbin we had a simple strategy i thought we ought to put the power of the government in washington to work to create opportunity not guarantees but opportunity for every american to live out their own dreams that we ought to insist on responsibility in return for that opportunity and that we ought to consciously work to bring the american people together and push this country forward now i just talked to you about a couple of examples of bringing the american people together around our basic values but that s what dick durbin s done and the different in the way we view the world and the way our opponents in the political arena view the world is daylight and dark it s not just a little difference it s a big difference when dick durbin fought against the republican cuts in the environmental community right to know laws to me that said everything i mean it seems to me that if you want to build a sense of community and you want to build a future for our children you have to believe that you have to find a way to grow the economy and preserve the environment and you have to believe that you can trust citizens to know what s in the chemicals that are in their own backyards and neighborhoods but they wanted to weaken those laws and dick durbin said no he mentioned the tobacco issue i now know why no other president has ever fooled with this it s what we used to call a character builder back home when i was growing up but you know the truth is that it s illegal in every state in america for children to smoke but every day 3 000 of them start and 1 000 of those 3 000 will die earlier than they otherwise would because of it we worry about health care costs the cost of medicare the cost of medicaid where there have to be draconian cuts in these programs to save them the truth is if we could solve that one problem we d save more in health care costs than all these things we re talking about in washington which would be destructive to the fundamental integrity of medicare and medicaid it s an important issue but nobody really wants to deal with it so they try to act like well this is a matter of personal liberty and the government shouldn t be fooling with this and all that but it just depends on what your philosophy is and dick durbin and al gore who lost his only sister to lung cancer and i believe that the law ought to be enforced and we ought to take strong steps to stop the advertising marketing sales and distribution of cigarettes to minors and i think it s a very important issue but our folks the folks on the other side they really don t believe that i mean it s not like they re you know they really don t believe that i know that senator dole said the other day he wasn t sure cigarettes were addictive and this morning said that he admired dr koop who was president reagan s surgeon general and as far as i know is a republican but has always been very forthright about the dangers of tobacco to children but he said that dr koop might have had his views colored by excessive exposure to the liberal media that might have brainwashed him well i think dr koop s problem is that he has had excessive exposure of 50 years of medical practice and reading medical journals and having evidence and facts and he is not clouded by the political pressure that can be put on by the interest groups on the other side so he stood up to the heat about this well anyway that s why i m for dick durbin i m glad that s a good reason to be for him he was out there he was out there carrying on this battle all along and he did a good job and he ll do a better job if you ratify the positions we have taken in this coming election and i just want to make three arguments to you very quickly that i hope i realize that as we used to say down home i might be preaching to the saved tonight but i want you to go out and preach this for the next four months because i need your help every one of you if you can afford to be at this fundraiser tonight you have the capacity to influence somebody else by talking by talking and speaking you can do it and if somebody says well why should i be for the president or why should i be for dick durbin i want you to give them three arguments number one these guys had a plan a plan for the economy a plan for crime a plan for education a plan for the environment and a play for family and community and the results were good and the other guys opposed them look at the economic plan when i introduced my economic strategy i said here s what we re going to do we re going to reduce the deficit and get interest rates down we re going to expand trade dramatically thank you bill daley for your help in that but we re going to do it on fair as well as free trade terms we re going to invest more in the education of our people from pre school all the way up to adults needing retraining and we re going to keep investing in the environment and in technology and research so that we can grow the economy that was our strategy here s what they said speaker gingrich this will lead to a recession next year mr armey clearly talking about our economic plan clearly this is a job killer mr dole don t kid anybody nobody is going to cut spending around here mr gramm we re buying a one way to a recession the house budget committee chairman mr kasich this plan will not work if it was to work then i d become a democrat well mr chairman we re saving a seat for you at the united center they were wrong three and a half years later we said if you adopt this economic plan we ll cut the deficit in half and have 8 million new jobs it turned out we were wrong too the deficit got cut by more than half and there are 9 7 million new jobs after three and a half years they were wrong dick durbin mentioned the crime bill you have ask senator simon or senator moseley braun what it was like in the united states senate when we were trying to get the crime bill well they said it was the awfulest thing we ever saw we don t need 100 000 police we didn t need the brady bill we didn t need the assault weapons ban we certainly shouldn t give the police any money or local community groups any money to prevent crime by giving kids someplace to go after school or jobs to do in the summertime that was all wasted money even though the police agencies were begging for the money for children to have something to say yes to that s what they said one year alone murder rate down in chicago 11 percent down in springfield 35 percent down in every major urban area in america the crime rate is about to go down for the fourth year in a row we are ahead of schedule and under budget in putting 100 000 police on the street they told everybody when they won the congress back in 1994 one of the reasons they won it is they told all these people in rural areas that the democrats were trying to take their guns away well now we ve had two deer seasons since they said that two duck seasons and every single hunter in america is still shooting with the same rifle if they wanted to but i ll tell you something but there are 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers who could not get handguns because of the brady bill they were wrong and we were right our plan said we re going to make college loans easier to get less bureaucracy lower cost better repayment terms we re going to put more kids in head start they all voted against it we said we re going to have national service and give people a chance to work in their local communities to help pay their way through college their leadership led the fight against that some brave republicans broke away on that but their leadership was against that we said we re going to give tax cuts to people that really need it we re going to give a tax cut to the people on the bottom end of the wage scale that have children at the house and that are working 40 hours a week because if you work full time you ve got kids in your house you shouldn t be taxed into poverty the tax system ought to lift you out of poverty that s what we did every one of them opposed it but we did it for the first time in years we had a reduction in the number of poor children but we had to do it alone you heard dick talking about family leave their leadership opposed it you heard him talking about tobacco let me tell you about another big family issue we fought hard in the telecommunications bill for the v chip which is not censorship it just says if you re a parent and you ve got little kids there and you ve got 100 channels on the television you ought to have the right to decide what they see before they re at least 11 or 12 and i think it was the right thing to do and they opposed that they talked about welfare we just went out and worked with the states and gave them permission to try to find ways to move people from welfare to work that were tough on work but not tough on children didn t take cheap shots at kids or hurt them because they happen to be born to immigrant parents but you know what three and a half years later there are 1 3 million fewer people on welfare than there were the day i became president that s something we did so argument number one we had a plan they opposed it look at the results we were right they were wrong and i want you to tell people that argument number two every election should be about the future and there s more we have to do i want to build on the family leave law i think people should have a little time off if they have to go to a parent teacher conference or if they have to take their parents or their children to regular medical i believe that we ought to raise the minimum wage and not let it fall to a 40 year low i believe we ought to pass that kennedy kassebaum bill that says you can t lose your health insurance if you change jobs or somebody in your family is sick i believe we ought to change the tax law so that every american can be guaranteed two years of education beyond high school at the nearest community college every american should have it every single one i believe there ought to be a million young people in work study given the change that dick durbin and i had to work our way through college that s what i think we ought to do this is about the future how are we going to create more opportunity bring the country together and go forward growing together ideas about the future not how we can divide the electorate up in some little segments here and segments there to wind up with more than a majority by terrorizing or terrifying half the people and the third thing is i want you to say to people this is a great election for the american people because there s almost no guesswork in it now you think about it you know i mean normally in every election especially in the presidential race i mean you all took a chance on me in 92 i hope you think it worked out okay but you did but you did but there s no guess work you know what i m going to do you know that you know based on the last three and a half years that what i tell you i m going to do i m either going to do it or get caught trying to do it and also you know what senator dole and the republicans are going to do because they have already done it i just vetoed it the first time so you know what they re going to do so if the american people believe the country the presidency and the congress should be in the hands of the people who fought the family leave law who fought the v chip who fought the tobacco initiative who fought the economic plan who fought the 100 000 police who fought the brady bill who fought the assault weapons ban who sought to gut the environmental protection of the country and weaken workplace protection and make it easier for people to raid the pension plans of their employees they can do that and they know and there is no guesswork now you re laughing because you never thought about it that way have you but if you like that budget i vetoed in 95 you can have it and you can get it within six months the first six months of 1997 all you have to do is give them the white house and the congress and they will give it to you but if you don t like that then you better make up your mind that as citizens one of your responsibilities for the next four months and one week and a few days is to go out and tell everybody you talk to that there are three reasons you ought to be for dick durbin and bill clinton we had a plan it got good results we got a better set of ideas for the future and you have got a clear choice and let s go back to what we started talking about at the beginning to close think about this is a great adventurous time for america we have in the space of a few years dramatically changed the way we work and the way we live and the way we relate to the rest of the world on balance we re much better off for these changes although there is a lot of upheaval and a lot of our folks are still having a tough time and we are now going to in the next four years walk across a bridge right into the next century this election is not like 1992 when the issue was change against status quo now you have two very different views of change but there is no status quo option and the american people have to decide now am i going to get on that bridge and walk into the next century or am i going to get on that bridge and walk into the next century they honestly believe the other side does that the things we do together through our government are a legacy of the industrial age of america and basically except for national defense by and large not worth doing that we d all be better off if we were on our own and unburdened by terrible things like the environment protection law and the family leave law and all those intrusions into our lives that any tax cut is better than any spending program even if it s a college loan program or putting tens of thousands more poor children into head start but i can tell you they believe it it s sincere it s not just contributions and all that stuff you hear to try to make people these are two honestly different visions of the future i believe that there has never been a great country that grew greater by shrinking opportunity i believe that the only way we can continue to grow greater and deal with the challenges of the modern world and turn this extraordinary diversity of america into our most precious asset if we decide we re going to give everybody opportunity insist on responsibility as part of the bargain and then find ways to grow together to respect our diversity to tolerate our honest differences to celebrate the rainbow of america that s what i believe but you have to decide what you believe and whether it s worth fighting for and i recommend a simple test ask yourself what you want this country to look like 20 years from now or 30 years from now when your children or your grandchildren are your age ask yourself what kind of legacy you want to leave to them and whether you really think we d be better off if we told folks you re on your own have a good time at the tender mercies of the global economy out there in cyberspace somewhere or wouldn t we be better by saying if you look at the 220 year history of this country it is the long sometimes painful sometimes agonizingly slow journey of a people to come closer and closer and closer to their ideals of equality of opportunity and decency and justice and fairness and giving everybody a chance to live out their dreams now that s what this election is about you have to help your fellow americans decide which road we re going to walk into the future and if they understand the choice i think we know what the answer will be thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton2 7 96b bill_clinton thank you very much pretty rowdy group today thank you i want to what s the problem over here on the right steve said you know he said this room is 285 feet long it s like a giant bowling alley there s kind of a wave that goes from right to left here let me first of all thank lois and tom for their introductions i want to thank your outgoing president gene glover for his years of outstanding service and wish your incoming president harry gunther well and say that i hope this means that we have an even better chance of carrying florida than we did before we started harry i thank all the distinguished labor leaders who are here george becker and jay mazur and i see doug frazier there you re looking great i m glad to see you doug thank you and god bless you sir i want to say a special word of thanks to steve protulis he has done a great job for you and a great job for me thank you steve and i want to recognize one other person apart from the elected officials and that is my great friend justin dart over there thank you for everything you have done sir i m glad to see you when tom was up there kind of being rough on the congress i wanted to say he didn t mean the members of congress who are here he didn t mean dick durbin or ed pastor or bobby rush or luis gutierrez we thank them for what they did in this congress they did a great job and mayor daley it s good to be in chicago and i ll be back before you know it i thank you for having us all here i always love to come to chicago and i like to we flew in a helicopter down to meig s field and we got to fly over some of the suburbs and i always reminisce when i do but a lot of you know that hillary was born in chicago and grew up in park ridge and i wish she were here today but she is representing our country on a tour of nine central and eastern european nations so i talked to her last night she just finished a day in romania so i wish she were here but she s over there talking about countries who love freedom thank you i want to thank you for something else that i know you feel and that is it meant a lot to me when i took this recent trip to europe to have the annual meeting of the seven largest industrial countries and then a meeting with those countries and russia about political challenges facing the world to know that the people back home were not only outraged by the murder of our service people in saudi arabia but determined to stand against terrorism wherever it exists and i know you must have been proud this morning to read in the newspaper that our federal law enforcement officials thwarted a planned attempt to blow up buildings in arizona i thank them for that and i m proud of them i can tell you this in this open world of ours where we can all move around the world and ideas and information and money and technology can move around the world in a split second we are more vulnerable to the organized forces of intolerance and hatred and terrorism but we can also prevent a lot of these things i have seen it work here in the united states in the last three years where we ve headed off a number of such incidences i see it happen in the middle east where incidences not only occur but many more are headed off and we re going to have to work at this work it together and other nations need to work with us because this is our common security threat after the cold war and we can whip this if we ll stay together and work together and we have to do that the other thing i d like to say is that i signed a proclamation late last night proclaiming this month as national unity month and asking all americans to find ways in their places of worship or in other places to stand up against this terrible wave of church bombings and the desecration of other houses of worship that we are seeing across this country just before i came to see you i announced that we reallocated a few million dollars to the 12 states that have seen the great bulk of these church burnings so that every county will receive some funds either to hire extra officers or to have people work overtime or to help churches put up security equipment or lighting at night to do something to try to prevent these things from occurring but we also need to change the atmosphere if you ve seen the profiles coming out on a lot of the people who have been charged with these church burnings they seem to be no discernible conspiracy but instead a lot of people who share common problems people who have disappointments in their own lives frustrations in their own lives and somehow think instead of saying well what can i do to straighten myself out or who can i go to whom can i go to to ask for help they say well i m just going to be mad and burn a black church and you know this is something that is sort of endemic to human nature when you re in a crisis in your life you can either say what can i do to fix it or how can i get some help or you can look for somebody else to blame or say well no matter how bad off i am there is somebody that s even lower than i am and i m going to punish them and we have to stand up against that we have to change the atmosphere in the country don t forget that don t forget this country was founded on a belief in religious liberty a lot of the first people who came to the shores of the united states came here because they wanted to come to a place where nobody would tell them how to worship god and they could make their own mind up don t forget that the first amendment to the constitution not only protects the freedom of speech the freedom of press and the freedom of assembly it protects the freedom of religion it is the first amendment to the constitution and over our entire history we have displayed a fidelity to it that has kept our country strong and we dare not allow this to continue without every american of conscience without regard to their race there region or their political party speaking up against it it is wrong and we must stand together for more than 30 years now you have been fighting the good fight you were cheering about today fighting first for medicare and for medicaid and for social security and then fighting to protect it i am very proud that one of things that happened last year with the leadership of senator moynihan primarily is that we finally made social security an independent agency giving the autonomy it needs to fulfill its mission you know as well as i do that your fight for the well being and the dignity of american seniors has never been more important than it is now you know that the victories that we won through the veto pen in 1995 didn t solve the fundamental problem of securing the medicare trust fund in a way that honors the dignity of the seniors of this country or protects our sense of fairness i am proud to stand with you but what you do from here forward is central to our mission as we move into the 21st century when i ran for president i said to all of you that i wanted to lead our country into the next century to ensure three things i wanted the american dream to be a living reality to every person who is willing to work for it without regard to their race their gender their region or what they start out with in life i wanted this country to be coming together around all of its ethnic and racial and religious diversity instead of being torn apart the way so many countries around the world are and i wanted this country to continue to be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity at the end of the cold war if the world is not going to be divided into the communist and non communist world and if we can force the nuclear threat to recede we still have to have somebody out there standing up for human decency around the world and peace and freedom you see that in bosnia you see it in haiti you see it in the fight against terrorism and it seemed to me that in order to accomplish these things we had to ask ourselves okay the cold war is over we re living in a new kind of world all right we re not dominated by large industrial bureaucracies and large government bureaucracies and mass production anymore high technology and the information revolution has changed dramatically manufacturing and agriculture and every form of human endeavor so we changed the way we work we change the way we live we change the way we are relating to the rest of the world big changes 100 year changes now what and it seemed to me that we had to start by saying we have to meet these challenges in a way that protects our values and one of the values that has made this country strong for over 200 years is recognizing that we are none of us in this alone we have responsibilities to each other that s really what all these debates are about so if for example if you just take medicare if there s a problem with medicare solve the problem but don t solve it by asking families to go back to the days when they had to choose between health care for the parents or college educations for the kids that s not the answer to solve that problem this is about more than money this is about what we are as a people what are our obligation to our parents and what are our parents obligation to their grandchildren how can we make these decisions in a way that allows america to grow but to grow together to go forward together so that we all feel like we re in this together and that we re growing stronger because we re holding hands and working together now that is what i believe we should be doing and i don t think it s very complicated i think we need a strategy which says our role is to create opportunity not guarantees but opportunity for people to make the most of their own lives to insist that our citizens act with personal responsibility and to build a stronger sense of community to recognize that we re all in this together we do have certain obligations to one another and we re all going to do better if everybody has a chance to do well and that we can t lift up one group by keeping another down we have to make these decisions together that s the way to do it take the economy four years ago our economy was drifting unemployment was high the deficit was out of control we had the slowest job growth since the great depression i wanted to chart a new course and i said what we ought to do with this economy is to have a disciplined plan to move us into the 21st century with a growing economy that everybody had a chance to benefit from let s cut the deficit get interest rates down get investment into creating jobs and homes up let s continue to invest in the education of our children the education of adults high technology research the things that will create good jobs let s have more trade but let s make sure it s not only free trade but fair trade let s do these things and it will work i also believe very strongly that we had to do more to help working families to succeed at work and to succeed at home you know a lot of people talk about welfare well one of the things that i figured out was we had a tax system that was punishing people at the low end of the wage scale who chose work over welfare so we doubled we doubled the family tax credit called the earned income tax credit so we could say if you re working 40 hours a week and you ve got a child in the home we will not tax you into poverty you should be out of poverty we will lift you out of poverty with the tax system it was pro family we fought for the family and medical leave law which simply said if you have a sick parent or a newborn baby and you have to take some time off work you won t lose your job it was a good bill and it was the right thing to do now when we passed this economic plan i predicted that if it passed we d be able to cut the deficit in half in four years and the american people would produce 8 million new jobs even though we were going to reduce the size of the national government well the republicans in the congress fought us tooth and nail and i ll give them credit every one of them voted against it they didn t fool around they were united speaker gingrich then the minority leader said i believe this will lead to a recession next year now the majority leader mr armey said of my economic plan clearly this is a job killer senator gramm said we are buying a one way ticket to a recession the american economy is going to get weaker not stronger and four years from today the deficit will be higher than it is today and not lower senator dole said president clinton knows and the american people know the plan does not tackle the deficit and john kasich the head of the budget committee from ohio said wait let me quote this here is what he said of our economic plan this plan will not work if it was to work then i d have to become a democrat well i want to tell mr kasich that mayor daley is saving a seat for him at the conventional because it works it does i don t know how they define work but in three and a half years the deficit now we know will be cut by more than half we know the american people did not produce 8 million jobs in four years they produced 9 7 million jobs in three and a half years 3 7 million new home owners an all time in the export of american products a record number for three years in a row of new businesses starting up and for the first time in 10 years thank goodness average hourly earnings for working families are starting to go up the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in almost 30 years i think it s fair to say that based on the evidence when it came to the economy we were right and they were wrong of course we have more to do the minimum wage this year is going to drop to a 40 year low in what it will buy if we don t raise it you can t raise a family on 4 25 an hour and if this congress really believes in work and family values let them go back and raise the minimum wage like they ought to and we ought to pass the kennedy kassebaum bill and pass it now unadulterated so people won t lose their health insurance when they change jobs or someone in their family has been sick we also ought to make sure that we do a number of other things i ve sent a package of retirement legislation to the congress to make it easier for self employed people and small business people to take out retirement plans and then to keep it even if they go through periods of unemployment or when they change jobs there are lots of other things we need to do but the last thing we need to do is to reverse a course that is working i also believe that when people get to the end of their working lives they shouldn t have to worry about whether they can feed themselves when they retire nor however should they have to worry about whether medicare will be there for them now i noticed when our friends on the other side debate medicare in washington they never tell people that one of the important things that we did in our 1993 economic plan was to strengthen the medicare trust fund to add a few years to it and they attacked us every step of the way for trying to do it and in fact in the 94 election promised to undo what we had done to strengthen the medicare trust fund and protect the financial integrity of medicare it s why we fought for the reauthorization of the older americans act so that seniors can get the nutrition and transportation and other services they need it s why i have worked so hard to pass and then to protect that crime bill how many seniors would say that their number one concern over the last five years has been their personal safety and again i would say if you just look at the record this administration has worked on in the area of criminal justice and law enforcement we passed the brady bill requiring a waiting period before people can buy handguns we passed the crime bill which put 100 000 more police on the street over a period of six years i can tell you this we are ahead of schedule with those police officers and under budget and they are making a difference to lower the crime rate in america we passed the ban on assault weapons and again the leadership of the other side fought us every step of the way they said we shouldn t give the communities any money to try to help prevention programs to spend money to keep kids working in the summertime or giving them some things to do after school instead of to walk the streets they said that this was a waste of money even though police officers were screaming for it all over america so that our young people could have something to say yes to as well as something to say no to they said if we passed the assault weapons ban and the brady bill we were just going to take everybody s gun away from them well i ll tell you something we ve now been through two deer seasons and where i live every last hunter that hadn t wanted to buy a new gun is still hunting with the same rifle they had when those guys were trying to scare them to death but there are some people who didn t get guns 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers didn t get guns because of the brady bill we were right and they were wrong ask mayor daley a former prosecutor about chicago community policing preventive strategies the crime rate is down in virtually every major city in this country in every major category substantial drop in the murder rate just from last year right here in chicago so those people who fought the crime bill were wrong they were wrong the evidence is here and that has to do with how senior citizens live we know that as we look to the future we have to find a way to control medical inflation of course we do we have to find a way to try to bring inflation in health care down to the level of inflation in the country and keep it there we know that as there s more seniors relative to workers in the population we have to deal with that we know that we have to have integrity in the medicare trust fund can we do that without creating two classes of people under medicare can we do it without destroying the guarantees of medicaid to families with people with disabilities to elderly people in nursing homes to poor women and their infant children you be we can we ve done it before we can do it again and we will do it medicaid most people think is a program for poor people the truth is only about 30 percent of it goes to help poor families pregnant women and little children seventy percent of it goes to care for our senior citizens most of whom come from middle class families to enable their children to have stable lives and raise their children and educate them and to go to help families with family members with disabilities many of whom can live at home or independently because of medicaid many of whom are able to raise their children with serious disabilities at home without going into bankruptcy or having to give up their jobs because of medicaid now can we do things to slow the rate of inflation there to give the people on medicaid more choices to have more incentives to do all kinds of things yes we can should we walk away from the guarantee we have given to try to help make people secure in their health care no we should not no we should not are there other strategies we can follow you bet there are what about preventive health care one of the things that i tried to do it s turned out to be very controversial and i now see why no previous president ever wanted to get into this is i believe that we should take strong action to stop the advertising sales and transference of cigarettes to children i think it s wrong you talk about saving money three thousand children a day smoke start smoking begin three thousand children a day begin one thousand of them will have their lives shortened because of it and along the way society will pick up a significant part of the health care bill now that s one way to save money now i have been amazed at the debate that s injected itself into the national campaign on this issue i notice that senator dole questioned the other day whether or not tobacco was really addictive for everybody and then apparently this morning when it was he was asked about dr koop who was president reagan s surgeon general a remarkable man who may be a republican for all i know president reagan s surgeon general but he has been one of our most outspoken advocates of trying to stop smoking among young people and this morning senator dole suggested that maybe dr koop had been brainwashed by the liberal media well i imagine dr koop was surprised to hear that i believe dr koop knows more about the dangers of tobacco than the so called liberal media or senator dole he s out there fighting for our children and that s what we need more people to do fight for children and not play politics with this issue medicaid today spends at least 10 billion in federal and state funds to pay for treatment for smoking related illnesses now if we re going to get serious about cutting the costs that s one way to do it without hurting families it will help families it will strengthen families and finally let me say that this sort of partisan division has only made the medicare trust fund problem worse let s face it we have enough savings identified in both the republican plan and my plan to take the medicare trust fund out to a decade right now and we don t know yet whether we won t be able to find more in the development of managed care voluntary options for seniors and other things that are happening in the marketplace right now now why don t we go ahead and do this why are we holding out why is the congress holding out for an agreement that would essentially develop a two class medicare system where the older and the poorer and the sicker you are the more likely you are to be in yesterday s medicare that s under funded and the younger and healthier and more well off you are the more options you re given to walk away that s not what made medicare work what made medicare work is you say we have obligations to each other and we re going to fulfill them we re going to do this and solve this together i think that is the right thing to do but you need to understand every health care program there is no such thing as a problem free health care program you have to manage this as it goes along you have to deal with the population what happens to people what the costs are but i d just like for you to remember two things when all these people tell you how bad medicare is how it needs to be worked over and changed and in effect deconstructed i d just like for you to remember two things the same thing for medicaid number one medicare has the smallest administrative overhead cost of any insurance program public or private in the entire united states of america and number two number two and far more important america s longevity unfortunately is not as high as some countries but the main reason is we have lamentably higher rates of violence among young people we have higher rates of aids which kills a lot of young people in this country and our infant mortality rate in some places is still higher than it is in some countries but if you live to be 65 in the united states you have the highest life expectancy of any group of seniors in the world medicare social security ssi that s what did that now i can t believe we can t fix the problem of the financing in a way that preserves the fact that we have the seniors with the highest life expectancy in the world with a program that already has the lowest administrative costs in the world this is not rocket science this is politics so i would say again this is a great philosophical divide should we abandon medicaid s guarantee to poor women and little children to families with disabilities to the seniors in the nursing homes no should we create in medicare we re not talking about saving money here we re not talking about securing the trust fund for a decade we re talking about whether we should create a two class system of care you know if i stay healthy i don t know if i can the way things are in washington but if i stay healthy i retire as president and i have a nice pension you know i ll probably be fine their system might be great for me i could walk away but what about my responsibilities to everybody else what about everybody else s what about our responsibilities so again i would say that the senate has new leadership and we have we have identified the savings necessary to secure the medicare trust fund why should we go into a work stoppage just because it s election season let s go ahead and secure the medicare trust fund for another decade you know how we re going to save the money and you said okay and we can do that i know you know we ve had a good time today and i know that i m here preaching to the saved it makes it easier but let me tell you there is a serious issue here we have serious questions to deal with we all know that we re living longer and that the distribution of population is changing we have the come to grips with these things the only thing i m saying is i believe the seniors of this country care about their children and grandchildren and their great grandchildren when i was the governor of my state i spent most of my time trying to improve the education of our children and i got most of my support for it from people who were in their golden years who were more than happy to come up and invest more money or do whatever it took to make sure that their grandchildren had a bright future i do not want to see the generations in this country pitted against each other we can find a clearly nonpolitical bipartisan even handed sensible solution to any problem the generational changes are going to face this country with as long as we don t use it as an excuse to divide this country one from another and to be unfair to the seniors in their quest legitimately to have a good life you know it and i know it i want to just say two things in closing while i think we have obligations to you i am impressed by how many of you still think that you ve got plenty of energy to exercise obligations to other people and i thank you for that i thank you for that i thank you for becoming foster grandparents or working with troubled young people or becoming mentors and tutors those kids need people like you and we need more kids with more seniors helping them one on one i thank those who have joined our national senior service corps i thank those who work with other seniors who aren t as well off as they are either financially or physically i thank you for your wisdom and your vigor and i ask you to bring that wisdom and vigor not just to those who agree with you in the next four months but to others as well we have here a very clear choice and in a way that s a happy thing for america because you don t have to guess this time you know in lots of elections in lots of election there s a certain amount of guesswork but you know what i will do first of all you know that we did what we said we d do or we got caught trying to do it thank you thank you thank you and that the results have been good compared to four years ago we re better off than we were on the economy we re better off than we were when it comes to crime we ve proved that you can protect the environment and grow the economy we have worked with the states to move people from welfare to work and while others in washington talked about it we now have 1 3 million fewer people on welfare than we did the day i became president we ve proved that you can shrink the size of the size of the federal government without being cruel to the federal employees or undermining the quality of federal service we have proved in other words that we could grow the economy with opportunity and responsibility and a stronger sense of community that s the first thing the second thing is there s lots more to do our country s transformation into the 21st century is far from complete i proposed the other day that we amend the family and medical leave law to let people have a few hours off a year to go to regular conferences with their kids and make regular doctor s appointments with their parents if they need it or their children if they need it that s a good thing to do a simple thing to do i proposed making two more years of education after high school universal for everyone through a system of tax credits that would let everybody go to their nearest community college and there are lots of other things that we have to do and the third point i want to make is on the you don t have to guess point is you know where i stand and you know where they stand and if the american people want the budget that they passed in 1995 that i vetoed they can get it they can get it but you need to talk to your friends and neighbors about this six months into 1997 if they had the white house and the congress that budget would be the law of the land if you think it s a bad idea that we re putting 100 000 police on the street and you want to remove that commitment and just throw money at the problem you can get that they did that once but i stopped them if you think that i was wrong to take on this tobacco issue or wrong to require the v chip in the new television sets so that parents have some control over the things their young children watch if you think i was wrong about the family leave law and you don t want it extended you can have someone who agrees with you who believes who led the fight who led the fight against everything i said but what i want you to do is not just stand with me i want you to go home and explain it to everybody else that s what i want you to do i want you to explain it to everybody else thank you thank you now let me say one other thing let me say one thing i m going to do my best in the next four months to give this country back to the people just like i tried to do in 1992 i want this election process to be in the hands of the american people and i m going to do everything i can to see that they get a chance to make these decisions based upon what will happen afterward that affect their lives their children s lives and the future of this country there is no nation in the world as well positioned for the next century as the united states no nation all we have to do is to make sure that we give people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives do everything we can to ensure responsibility from all of our citizens and remind everybody that we are in this together this is the greatest country in the world today because in wave after wave after wave after wave over 200 years we have steadily built a bigger group of american success stories i believe we re in this together that is the choice the american people face and if you go out there and remind people of the example and the story of your own lives you can look into the future for people who are younger than you are you can help them to take their blinders off you can help to make sure that they re not distracted and you can ask them to stand up to the finest and best in this country and that will ensure a good result not just in november but far more important f dem wjclinton2 7 97 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you bud selig peter angelos jim hunter to norm augustine the chairman of lockheed martin and our educational excellence partnership and to cal ripken who is the very embodiment of excellence ladies and gentlemen excellence in baseball requires teamwork hard work and setting high standards of excellence so does excellence in education the educational excellence partnership including all star athletes businesses governors and teachers are pitching in to help our children aim high the young people here behind me from the boys and girls clubs of america embody the kind of future we re trying to build for them i want to thank all of you out there who have worked hard to set high standards not only for your own children but for the other children in your community i want to thank cal and kelly ripken for the outstanding contribution they are making to literacy here in baltimore and i want to urge all of you to rededicate yourselves to the idea that every one of our children can learn and we will not get into the 21st century with the future we want for them until we expect every one of them to learn and we give them the ability the tools and the support they need to learn we are very fortunate that outstanding major league baseball players along with business leaders like norm augustine have supported this public service campaign for educational excellence i want you to watch these ads now and i hope you will heed them i hope you will support my call for national standards of excellence in reading and math and go back home and think about what you can do to make sure that every one of our children is as devoted to excellence in education as the baseball players we ll enjoy watching today from the phillies and the orioles are to excellence in their sport thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton2 7 98 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much mr mayor thank you for welcoming us to your community and for your fine remarks and senator baucus thank you for what you said i want to thank you and all the members of the united states congress who are here with you our american ambassador to china and the chinese ambassador to the united states and the other members of the chinese government who are here and especially i d like to thank chairman ding for being here and our secretary of state madeleine albright and others from the white house we are all delighted to be among you in guilin today i would also like to express my appreciation to the seven chinese citizens with whom i have just met because they are taking an active role in helping to clean up the environment either of this area or the entire country and i thank them for that and they re all right there i d like to ask them to stand up because they spoke for all of china to me today please stand and since we re here to talk about saving the environment i want to thank ambassador li for giving me this energy efficient air conditioner since chinese civilization first began to express itself thousands of years ago its poems and paintings have sung of the beauty of the land the air the water no place in china is more evocative of the beauty of your country than guilin the stunning mountains along the li river are instantly familiar to millions and millions of americans when we see them the landscapes of guilin remind of us china s past but we know they are alive and we are grateful for their preservation a new sense of cooperation is building between the people of china and the people of the united states based on our shared ties of commerce and culture our common security interests and our common enthusiasm for the future but a big part of that cooperation must rest on our common understanding that we live on the same planet sharing the same oceans and breathing the same air not so many years ago in the united states one of our rivers was so polluted it actually caught on fire foul air blanketed our cities acid rain blighted our landscape over the last generation we have worked hard to restore our natural treasures and to find a way conduct our economy that is more in harmony with the environment china s extraordinary growth has put the same kind of pressures on your environment and the costs of growth are rising right along with your prosperity you know better than i that polluted air and water are threatening your remarkable progress smog has caused entire chinese cities to disappear from satellite photographs and respiratory illness is china s number one health problem we also know that more and more environmental problems in the united states in china and elsewhere are not just national problems they are global problems we must work together to protect the environment and there is a great deal that we can do together china has the world s longest meteorological records going back over 500 years they help us clearly to understand the problem of global warming the five warmest years since the 15th century have all been in the 1990s 1997 was the warmest year ever recorded and if present trends continue 1998 will break the record we know that if this trend continues it will bring more and more severe weather events and it will disrupt the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the world during the coming century china is already taking impressive steps to protect its future leaded gasoline is being banned inefficient stoves have been upgraded people can find out about air quality from newspapers communities and provinces and the national government are doing more to clean up rivers chinese scientists are fighting deforestation and soil erosion and citizens are doing more to promote public education about the environment among families and especially among children the united states is determined to strengthen our cooperation with you last year our vice president al gore and the chinese government launched a forum to coordinate sustainable development and environmental protection in october at our summit president jiang and i oversaw the beginning of a joint initiative on clean energy this week we have made important new progress we will provide china assistance to monitor air quality we will increase our support for programs that support renewable energy sources to decrease china s dependence on coal we are helping china develop its coal gasification and working with the chinese to make financing available for clean energy projects through the export import bank because the united states and china are the world s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming our planet we must do more to avoid increasing severe droughts and floods and the other kinds of destructive things that will occur let me say mr mayor i want to extend my sympathies to you on behalf of the american people for the families who suffered losses in the recent flooding here it occurred just a few days ago and some of our young americans were already here working on the trip they were honored to be able to work with you in some of the sandbagging and other things that were done but we grieve with you in the losses that were sustained we cannot completely eliminate floods and fires and other natural disasters but we know they will get worse if we do not do something about global warming there are many people who simply don t believe that anything can be done about it because they don t believe that you can grow an economy unless you use energy in the same way america and europe have used it for the last 50 years more and more energy more and more pollution to get more and more growth that s what they believe but i disagree without any loss of economic opportunity we can conserve energy much more than we do we can use clean as opposed to dirty energy sources much more than we do and we can adopt new technologies to make the energy we have go further much more than we do now is the time to join our citizens and our governments our businesses and our industries in the fight against pollution and global warming even as we fight for a brighter economic future for the people of china and the people of the entire world as we move forward together let us chinese and americans preserve what we have inherited from the past and in so doing preserve the future we are working so hard to build for our children thank you very much dem wjclinton2 8 96 bill_clinton i d like to make some brief remarks and then ask senator daschle and congressman gephardt to speak and then we ll be glad to answer a few questions on this last day before congress goes home i wanted to invite the democratic leadership down to the white house to thank them for their hard work and eventual successes on behalf of the working families of this country the congress is going to send me two measures that this caucus has worked hard on for a long time the minimum wage bill which also has some important help for small businesses incentives to invest more in the business and to make it easier to take out retirement plans and of course the kennedy kassebaum health bill which will help millions of americans have access to health care and i d like to say a special word of thanks to senator kennedy who has worked on both these issues for years and years and who was absolutely superb in the debates in the senate and he would not let these issues die when these issues have been very key to our party our caucus and to me and my administration for a long time now and i m very very happy about it we re in a lot better shape than we were a year ago we have basically thanks to the american people standing up and standing with us we have been able to do some positive things here which are very very important in addition to that we re going to have two major environmental legislative victories the safe drinking water act and one on pesticides which i think are very very important and i m very pleased that we ve been able to move away from some of the extremism of the last two years into a position where we can get some things done for the american people so i think the american people have a lot to be proud of i think the progressive mainstream achievements of this caucus are things that they can go home and be proud of in august i have to say that this has been on balance a very good week for the american people i must say i m deeply disappointed that the antiterrorism package which had been agreed to by our caucus and our leadership and the leadership of the republican party apparently is not going to pass because the same folks who opposed the crime bill in 94 and the brady bill are not going to permit it to pass in the house and i am disappointed about that i m disappointed that we can t pass anything on the taggants yet the explosives because that s a big problem in domestic terrorist incidents but i think we have to keep working on it because this problem will not go away but in terms of these economic issues that are going to create more opportunity for the american people i think it s a very very happy day and i d like to ask senator daschle and mr gephardt to say few words and then we ll answer your questions we started this congress by saying basically that we saw it as one of our goals to stop extreme legislation from becoming bad law and i think in large measure virtually without exception we ve been able to do that but we also said that working with you we were going to put families first that we were going to lay out an agenda that would directly affect families in as many ways as we could ensuring their personal security with cops on the beat ensuring their paycheck security with an increase in minimum wage ensuring their health security by giving the at least some confidence that they re not going to lose their health insurance when they change jobs and ensuring their long term pension viability by giving them more tools with which to work when they retire mr gephardt if anybody told me at the start of this republican revolution that the three major bills that would be passed finally in the last weeks of this congress would be three democratic initiatives i would have told you you were wrong welfare reform is an issue you defined and led on from the beginning of your campaign in 1992 the health care bill was one that you led on from the beginning of your administration and with ted kennedy and a lot of other people s help we got done and the minimum wage which is maybe the most important thing we ve done this year is the result of your leadership from the beginning you bet it is dem wjclinton2 8 99 bill_clinton thank you so much andy you might consider politics when you get out of skateboarding you have to fall down a lot it s about as dangerous and we could use you i thought he did a terrific job let s give him another hand thank you general mccaffrey thank you so much and all your team for the wonderful job you do i met general mccaffrey when he was still in uniform and i decided he could do just about anything he put his mind to and i think he s just about proved it i think he and the whole team all of them who are here have done a wonderful job i m grateful to them jim burke thank you so much you and the partnership for a drug free america for everything you have done and for the inspiration and the urging you have given to me these last six and a half years thank you peggy conlin and the ad council for all you have done to make this media campaign a success and i want to thank senator specter and congressman levin and congressman cummings for being here because the congress has been a critical part of this let me say before i get into my brief remarks and we watch the ads which is why we all came here because this is my first opportunity to meet with the media today i want to say a word about this heat wave that is going on in our country that now has claimed at least 190 lives and caused great hardship especially for a lot of our farmers and ranchers our secretary of agriculture dan glickman today issued an emergency declaration for all of west virginia and for counties in surrounding states which will give family farm operators eligibility for low interest emergency loans we re also working with local governments and private agencies to help farmers get water and hay to keep their livestock alive it s literally a problem for them to keep their livelihoods alive i m also committed to working with this congress to provide the resources to help our farmers and ranchers to deal with the crisis today and by fixing the farm bill for the future to others especially our elderly who are very vulnerable in this heat we have provided 100 million to pay for air conditioning and fans and i expect we will be doing more things in the days ahead now let me talk a little bit about this whole anti drug effort and let me begin with something that has not yet been mentioned we owe a profound debt to the men and women who are engaged in this struggle for our children s lives and future all those who are here today or their groups have been mentioned i also want to say a special word of appreciation to the young people who are here who remind us what this campaign is all about and there are a lot of young people here today and i want to thank all of them for being here i d also like to say that we should not let this moment go by without acknowledging the enormous courage of a lot of our men and women in various federal services and the armed services who are working to prevent drugs from coming here in the first place last week we mourned the loss of five u s army personnel who died with their colombian colleagues when their anti drug reconnaissance planes crashed in the andes they perished far from home but in a very real sense they gave their lives to protect our families our neighborhoods our nation indeed our national security we honor their commitment we remember their sacrifice and i m sure all of us will join in a pledge to continue their work i also want to say that as much work as still remains to be done i d like to take a moment just to celebrate the work that all of you have done when we were out there running for office in 1992 the vice president had this hilarious rap about everything that should be up was down and everything that should be down was up and everything was all mixed up and it is true and one of the sad things that was up was drug use all of you i suppose have heard me say this but i have had personal experience with the devastation drugs can bring to families i know they can bring death and as i saw in my own family with my brother they can also destroy lives i also saw that they are not fatal if you survive them that you can come back for all of you who deal with drug treatment and who help young people overcome their problems i am personally profoundly grateful since i ve been here i ve done what i could to work with people who were committed to turning our children away from drugs and saving more families from going through what my family did and again i say under the remarkable leadership of general mccaffrey and with the help of all the community groups and all the others here represented we have seen the unrelenting increase in drug use begin to turn around in the last two years drug use has begun to decline among people of all ages for all types of drugs we ve tried to do more with enforcement and prevention more police on the street doing more to keep drugs from coming into the united states more drug testing of prisoners and parolees to break the link between drugs and crime and of course in december of 1997 we d launched this sweeping effort to change the attitudes of an entire generation of young people with the unprecedented youth anti drug media campaign i d like to just say a word here normally the press in washington focuses on what we are fighting about and what the parties disagree about but we had enormous bipartisan support in congress for this endeavor and for that i am profoundly grateful it seemed a little awkward at first when general mccaffrey and i went to the congress to ask for this money but i kept pointing out i said look guys look how much money we raise every year to advertise every election we advertise because we think that we have to get our message out when i m doing something up here people disagree with groups get together raise money and they advertise and they say the president is wrong and it s part of the american system and here we ve got a problem that is just as important if not more important than anything else in our society where we know we have a large number of our young people who may not be getting the right message and it seemed to me totally illogical that we would not be using one of the most important weapons for influencing attitudes in a modern information age the media campaign appears to be working even better than we had thought across all grade levels income levels races and genders today i will release the results of a detailed evaluation of the second phase of this campaign in which we began rolling out the ads nationwide this report shows that if you re a teenager or a parent it is nearly impossible to avoid seeing or hearing our anti drug messages on television or radio several times a week it shows the percentage of young people who said the ads made them stay away from drugs increased significantly during the course of the study we expected the ads would greatly increase awareness what we didn t expect was that the ads would already have a measurable effect on attitudes this is a very good sign what it proves is i suppose what we should have known all along that if advertising works in commerce and advertising works in politics advertising ought to work on this issue as well i have to say a special word of appreciation to the ad council and all those who put the ads together because they were one effective and two honest and in order to have any enduring impact i can tell you having participated for 25 years now in doing political advertising they have to be both effective and honest in order to last and to all those who helped up put these ads together i am very very grateful today we launch the next phase of the campaign i think the most appropriate thing to do is just to show you a couple of our newest ads and you will see that the gentleman who introduced me is in truth a professional athlete so let s turn out the lights and watch the ad i told andy that i had already seen him on television even i when i m channel surfing sometimes catch the skateboarders every time i see him do that i think you know a couple years ago i fell six inches and was hobbled for six months thank you let me say as important as this advertising is it isn t enough and i want to say a special word of appreciation for the partnerships at the national and community level because everywhere young people go during every part of the day they will see more than the television they will see the message that drugs are wrong they can kill they are illegal this will outdo the star wars promotion for name and brand you will see not just television radio newspapers magazines the internet you will see this message on bus stops and subway cars movie screens and video games it will be in the classroom through cable programming in schools and substance abuse materials we ll provide the teachers it will be part of after school activities through organizations like the ymca the message will be part of increasing number of sporting events like basketball tournaments sponsored by the new york knicks and last month during the x games not only did we place anti drug messages everywhere the tv viewer could constantly see them we also handed out stickers with the slogan get vertical not high they became one of the hottest items for the hundreds of thousands of spectators who came to the x games and as general mccaffrey said we will get the word out in 11 languages other than english including spanish cantonese vietnamese and navaho and lakota a language i just tried out when i was at the pine ridge indian reservation i think that this phase will be even more effective than the last phase of the campaign and i think you will see real impacts on the behavior of our young people and that teen drug use will continue to decline but i would also say that no matter how effective all of you are we still have to have more help as close to home as possible with the parents sitting down and talking to their children not waiting until their children are using drugs to talk about them and with all the teachers the coaches the mentors the community police the health care workers and of course the religious leaders making up what the first lady always calls the village that have to help raise our children and finally i d like to say that young people should not ever minimize the impact they can have not only on their own lives but on their friends and their siblings in every school in america there s a young person who is a good kid but just a little lost or confused who can be reached by a friend very often who can be reached by a friend more than the president or any other figure in a parent authority so i say to all of you first thanks and second let s keep going together we can give every single child in this country a chance to grow up in a world where the only limits are the outlines of their hopes and dreams not every child can be a skateboard champion like andy but every child can fly thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton2 9 96 bill_clinton thank you happy labor day thank you for coming out i must say when i left home this morning in arkansas to fly up here i knew that the people of depere and the whole green bay area would be in an awful good humor after the packers did so well yesterday but i never had any idea so many of you would come up to tell me how happy you are i m glad to see you thank you for this great crowd for your spirit for your love for our country for the signs you ve had here i want to thank the depere band over here thank you for coming out to play for us on labor day wearing those hot uniforms when they could be in shorts drinking lemonade give them a hand thank you senator feingold thank you for your leadership for wisconsin and for the united states thank you for your long labor for real meaningful campaign finance reform we will get it next time we will and we will get it in a bipartisan fashion that will be good for america i want to thank all those who are here mayor walsh thank you for welcoming me here the people who are on the preprogram the attorney general jim doyle dr margaret hutchinson john benson father cornwell to all of you thank you very much thank you alethia didn t she make a good talk and isn t she a good representative of the young people of this country let me also say that senator feingold mentioned your former senator gaylord nelson also a great friend of mine it was my great honor to present him with the nation s highest citizen s award the presidential medal of freedom every person from wisconsin should be very proud of the work gaylord nelson has done since he left the senate to save the environment for future generations my fellow americans this is labor day we celebrate labor and we honor labor we honor the men and women who have built every bridge in our country s history because you will have to help us build that bridge to the 21st century you may have noticed that in the last several days often with my wife and daughter and sometimes with the vice president and mrs gore i ve been on a train and i ve been on a bus to tell the american people we re on the right track and the right road to the 21st century and we shouldn t change now we should keep right on going in the right direction and build on it i wanted to take that train trip and that bus trip because i get to see more people like you i get to hear the stories that make america live i get to see the decisions in human terms that we have to make every day as i said last thursday in chicago fundamentally this year we face a choice between building a bridge to the future and building a bridge to the past between whether we re going forward together as one nation arm in arm or whether we re going to be told you re on your own just since i have been here today in wisconsin i had one person come up to me and say i m so glad that i live in a country where we re all helping each other to make the most of our lives i had a terrible accident in my family i have someone in my family with a disability now i know that the only way we can maintain our lifestyle and our work is to have the kind of help that makes this the great country it is and we re working hard to build strong families and to be productive i had another young man come up to me and say five years ago i was homeless i just finished my third year of college i m so glad that you believe in college loans and you stopped them from cutting it back last year that s the kind of america i m proud to live in my fellow americans four years ago when the people of wisconsin gave bill clinton and al gore a chance to lead the country we had a simple message we want america to go into the 21st century with the american dream alive for everyone responsible enough to work for it with our great american community growing together not drifting apart with our nation still the strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world we have a simple but profound strategy more opportunity for all more responsibility from all and a place at the table for all people who deserve to be there because they believe in our values and they re willing to work for them now just think where we are today compared to four years ago 10 million more jobs 4 5 million new homeowners 10 million homeowners who refinanced their mortgage at lower interest rates record numbers of new businesses and exports the lowest combined rates of unemployment inflation and home mortgages in 28 years we re better off than we were four years ago fifteen million of our hardest pressed working families have received a tax cut and every single small business person in the country has been eligible for a tax cut when they invest more money in the business to become more productive or hire more workers twelve million families have taken advantage of the family leave law when a baby s born or a parent s sick without losing their jobs and our economy is stronger for it forty million americans had their pensions secured after the terrible days of insecurity of the 1980s when people were losing their pensions we changed the law and we have cracked down on deficient pension funds because we think on labor day if people work their whole lives and pay into their pension funds they ought to know it s going to be there for them when that retirement period comes fifty million americans are breathing cleaner air and we have cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than the previous two administrations did in 12 this country is moving in the right direction the crime rate has come down four years in a row 1 8 million fewer people are on welfare child support collections are up 40 percent the deficit has been cut by 60 percent it s the first time since before the civil war that an administration has brought the federal deficit down in every one of its four years in office that s something you can all be proud of senator feingold has worked hard for a balanced budget what i want you to know when you think about all the proposals you will hear in the next 60 days about where to go from here is this our budget would have been balanced last year and would have a surplus this year except for the interest we have to pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before i took the oath of office let s don t make that mistake again let s keep going and finish the job we can finish the job in four more years will you help me build that kind of bridge to the future just a few days ago i signed legislation that is pro work pro business and pro family it s an example of america at its best we raised the minimum wage for 10 million hard working americans starting october 1st we made it easier for small businesses which create most of the jobs in this country to take out pensions for the owners and the employees and for those employees to keep those pensions when they move from job to job it ought to be easier for people in small businesses to have a decent retirement as well and we adopted a 5 000 tax credit for families who adopt children there are a lot of children out there who need a good home today i hope this helps more of them find it we made 25 million americans eligible to keep their health insurance even if somebody in the family has been sick and even when they move from job to job under the kennedy kassebaum bill we ve been fighting for that for a long time and it s high time and there are people in this audience today whose lives will be saved because of it because they won t lose their health insurance now if someone in their family gets sick or they have to change jobs so i say to you we are moving on the right track but there is more to do we have to build a bridge to the 21st century that enables every person in this country every family every community to make the most of their god given potential we have to build that bridge to the future strong and wide enough for all of us to walk across let me tell you some of the things i hope you ll think about on this labor day as we honor work and family i want to build a bridge to the 21st century in which we amend the family and medical leave law to say that you can not only take a little time off when a baby is born or in an emergency but also to take your child to those parent teacher conferences at school and to regular doctor s appointments i want to build a bridge to the 21st century in which we have the crime rate going down for four more years in a row in the how that we ll finally be down where it ought to be in america and to do that we have to finish the work of putting 100 000 police on the street we have to do a better job of protecting our police officers by banning those cop killer bullets which are not necessary to hunt in wisconsin or arkansas or anywhere else and i believe very strongly that the brady bill has been a good thing for america you know when i signed it and i pushed it so hard and the leaders of the other party led the fight against it they got a lot of votes in 1994 it may be why they won the congress banning assault weapons and the brady bill because they convinced a lot of rural people in wisconsin and michigan my home state of arkansas up in new england all over the country that somehow the democrats were coming to get their guns well let me tell you something folks it s been two years now and people know the truth not a single solitary hunter has lost a rifle but 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers did not get handguns because of the brady bill it was the right thing to do and we re a safer country for it and i personally don t believe that people who commit acts of domestic violence against their spouse or their children should be able to get guns either that is a dangerous thing we should not do that we ought to build a bridge to the 21st century that continues to prove we can grow the economy and clean up the environment ten million american children still live within four miles of a toxic dump if you will give us four more years we will speed up the pace of toxic cleanups even though we ve done more in three years than the previous administration did in 12 we ll clean up the two thirds worst dumps in this country we want our children to grow up next to parks not poisons will you help us build that kind of bridge to the 21st century now that we have passed the health care protection bill we ought to recognize that a lot families need some help when they re between jobs in my balanced budget plan there is a provision to help people pay for and keep their health insurance when they and their families are between jobs it s a good thing will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century and let me just mention two more things this is labor day we can be grateful that we have over 10 million more jobs but we know we have to keep this recovery going that means we have to continue to balance the budget but to do it in a way that grows the economy and keeps us together we can balance the budget without wrecking medicare turning our backs on the medical commitments of medicaid which includes families with disabilities little babies that are poor pregnant women and the elderly in nursing homes we can balance the budget and increase our commitment to education and to research and to the environment not walk away from it will you help us balance the budget in that way and then you have as senator feingold said the great tax debate we can have a tax cut that will be good for the economy i believe the tax cut we had in 1993 for the 15 million hardest pressed workers for people who invest in new businesses to try to create them for small businesses to invest more in their business i think those things were good our tax cut plan is fully paid for line by line dime by dime it supports education health care home buying and that s what it supports and child rearing if we can invest money to help people educate their children care for their children buy and sell their homes and put into an ira and let people take out without penalty for education for health care for home buying that s good for america those tax cuts will be repaid to us many times over but we have to do it while we balance the budget now let me say this the other guys will say we ought to have one that s five times as big we ll give you more money vote for us why do you care about the deficit you know in washington we have all these political consultants and if you listen to them they say don t ever go out to a labor day crowd of middle class people and talk about the deficit nobody cares about that let me tell you why you should care about it let me tell you why you should care about it they say we ll give you a tax cut five times as big you remember that budget i vetoed last year because it had excessive cuts in medicare medicaid education and the environment it allowed a raid on workers pension fund 15 billion it raised taxes on the lowest income working people if you thought the one was bad you wait until you see what you get with this tax plan that our opposition has proposed and even when they get through trying to cut things even more than they did in the budget i vetoed the deficit will still explode why should you care because if the government goes in and borrows money at the same time you re trying to what will happen interest rates will go up our friends in the republican congress said last year this is not me talking this is them talking just last year they say if we don t have a balanced budget plan interest rates will be two percent higher what does that mean for you a higher home mortgage payment a higher car payment a higher credit card payment even more important what does it mean all the small business people in this audience it means higher interest rates for them it means fewer people borrowing money to invest to create more jobs to be more productive to raise incomes folks we tried this once before would you go to the bank yourself and borrow money to give yourself a tax cut then why would you hire someone to do it for you let s keep going in the right direction let s balance the budget keep interest rates down keep the economy growing and going forward we can do it we can do it the last and most important thing is we have to recognize that the world of the 21st century will the age of greatest possibility in human history but that there is a greater challenge than ever before to make sure every person in america can participate in that and that means we have to provide every single solitary american and not just our children our adults as well with whatever educational needs they have for a lifetime excellent education by worldwide standards for a lifetime not just for childhood in the last four years we have done a lot to invest more in education from expanding head start to giving schools the power to try grass roots reforms to staying open late after school in a lot of high crime and other tough areas to give our young people something to say yes to instead of something to say no to we have expanded scholarships through the pell grant program we have got a lower cost college loan program that a huge number of young people are taken advantage of today so they can take loans and pay them back as a percentage of their income we re going in the right direction but we have to do more and let me just say this i want to build a bridge to the 21st century that has a lot of educational advances but let me just mention three number one every eight year old in america ought to be able to read on his or her own by the year 2000 every single one no one should be left behind no one i want to mobilize 30 000 mentors our americorps volunteers who are working their way through college by doing community service and a volunteer army of a million people to make sure that every single 3rd grader in america can say i read it myself that will guarantee that the rest of their academic careers and their adult lives will be filled with productive learning and enable every person to have a chance to participate in the bounty of 21st century america will you help me build that bridge number two i want to make sure we connect every classroom and library in every school in america to the information superhighway by the year 2000 so that for the first time in american history for the very first time in american history we can say with confidence the children in the most remote rural schoolhouses children in the poorest inner city schools for the first time not only have computers and trained teachers but have access to the finest learning in the same time frame in the same way as the students in the wealthiest most successful schools in america we can do it will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century and finally i want to make sure that we make a college education available to every single solitary person in this country who is willing to work for it i want the first two years of education after high school at least a community college degree to become as universal in four years as a high school diploma is today now that s a tax cut worth fighting for a tax credit for the cost of community college tuition in every state in the country will you help me do that i want college tuition to be tax deductible up to 10 000 a year i want to give unemployed and underemployed workers access to a skill grant worth up to 2 600 a year so that if you lose your job you re changing jobs and you need more education you can get the grant you can take it to the nearest community college or training facility so that even if you re 45 or 55 or 60 if you need more skills to support your family and improve your lot in life instead of being left behind in the race to the 21st century we will take you along the way will you help me build that kind of bridge my fellow americans in four years we can have a country where every eight year old can read every 12 year old can log in on the internet every 18 year old can go to college and every american can have the knowledge that he or she needs to succeed in the 21st century that is a bridge worth fighting for now as you look around at this vast sea of people here today you don t know the life story of everybody who is here there are a lot of people here who don t agree with each other about a lot of things i saw one brave soul thank you ma am has a republicans for clinton sign god bless you i wish i could sign that for you give her a hand let me remind you that this country is not around here after 220 years because we permitted ourselves to be divided by the wrong things it s because we were always united by the right things you have to continue to fight for a country that believes that without regard to race or religion or income or status in life if you believe in the constitution the declaration of independence the bill of rights and you re willing to show up tomorrow to do your best and play by the rules you re part of our america and we re going forward into the future and you re going on that bridge with us it s going to wide enough for every single solitary one of us to walk across will you help us build that kind of bridge thank you god bless you stay with us we ve got a great future thank you happy labor day dem wjclinton20 1 00 bill_clinton thank you very much nina for being exhibit a for the announcement that we re here for today thank you secretary riley for your leadership in every aspect of education and especially in this one i thank secretary slater for coming i expect he s here for two reasons one is rodney slater grew up in a county that when i was governor was one of the 10 poorest counties in america and he happened to be a good football player and was able to go to college in michigan and play football and he later in his career became an officer at a university in our home state so he also is exhibit a for why every child should be able to go to college i want to thank representative rush holt for being here he is not only a former distinguished professor at princeton but he has a task force on access to higher education in his congressional district and the people who live in his district actually are among those who will be most benefitted if this entire proposal passes as we hope it will in their absence i want to thank congressman ford and senator olympia snowe who have been very very strong on this issue and the two people i want to thank most obviously are senator schumer and the first lady who lobbied me relentlessly on this for the better part of a year if you ve ever been lobbied by either one of them you know it s sort of like are you going to say yes now or put yourself through all this misery and say yes later but it s been very interesting i ll say more about it in a moment we know when we open the doors to college we open the doors to opportunity when we make college more affordable we make the american dream more achievable that s why we re all here today i m glad there are so many young people here today they re probably sorry that they re not really getting out of school they could have gotten out of school anyway but i m glad you all came and waited some in congress i note are saying that because this is an election year we really shouldn t try to do anything for the american people we re here today to give perhaps the most powerful example for why we should reject that view nothing not a national election or a washington snowstorm should get in the way of making a college education more affordable for all americans students can t put off their growing up for a year families can t put off going to work for a year and neither should we today is a happy day for me this is my 7th anniversary as president of the united states i am profoundly grateful for the long way we have come as a nation in these last seven years that today we have the lowest poverty rate in 20 years the lowest unemployment and welfare rates in 30 years the first back to back budget surpluses in over 40 years i am grateful that we are coming together that we have the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates we have ever recorded that we have the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest single parent household poverty rate in 46 years and that in the last couple of years we have finally begun to see a reversal in the increase in inequality of incomes of working people which was going on for nearly three decades so the family of america is growing stronger and that is fundamentally a tribute to the hard work and adaptability of the american people it has also been helped along the way by our hard won economic strategy of increasing trade getting rid of the deficit and investing in the education of our people and in the economy in which they will live more than ever with globalization and the information based economy investing in the minds of our people is the most important thing we can do to assure our continued success as a nation but that has been the american policy for quite a long time now the land grant college system was established under abraham lincoln the g i bill after world war ii the pell grants in the 1970s and the hope scholarship in 1997 we have made education and access to higher education a bipartisan national priority for quite a long while you heard the other stories that were told i was sitting here thinking i was the first person in my family to go to college and i remember when i was accepted to georgetown rather late i might add in the year and they gave me a 500 scholarship for which i was very grateful and i think the tuition back then was about 6 000 which 37 years ago 6 years ago seemed like all the money in the world to me and i was literally guilt ridden when i went off to college to think of the burden i was imposing on my family and i remember we had a family meeting about it i remember my high school guidance counselor called me in the office and said i was nuts that i d pay it back many times over in the future but it bothered me a lot and then later as i stayed in school and went on to law school i was able to do it all because i had the help of scholarships and loans and jobs and if i hadn t had that help there s no way in the world i would be standing here today i know that and because of the changes in the financial costs of higher education that senator schumer talked about and because of the changes in the economy it s even more important that we do more today not only for individual students but for the health and well being of the american system so that s why we re here you have already heard that we have been working on this hard for seven years we ve more than doubled college aid in those seven years increasing pell grants by more than 50 percent rewriting the student loan program to make it easier and cheaper to get student loans and then importantly to let students pay off their loans as a percentage of their income so there would never be an incentive for people who had those loans to drop out of school for fear that they could never repay them anyway we established americorps which now has allowed 150 000 of our fellow citizens to serve in their communities and earn some money to go to college we ve expanded the work study program from 700 000 to 1 million work study slots we ve allowed families to save more in their iras and then to withdraw the money tax free if it s being used to pay for a college education and of course as secretary riley said we created the 1 500 hope scholarship tax credit to make two years of high school after education through a community college just as universal as a high school education is today that hope scholarship tax credit and the lifetime learning tax credit which helps families pay for the last two years of college graduate schools or going back to school or to a training program were designed to open the doors of college to all and to recognize that in this economy learning must go on for a lifetime and it s working today listen to this today 67 percent of high school graduates will be enrolling in college next fall that s an increase of 10 percent just since 1993 but we know we haven t truly succeeded in opening the doors of college to all if you mean everybody who wants to should be able to go to a four year school and stay and stay until they finish parents all across the country are genuinely stretched and parents in a surprisingly wide range of income groups are stretched because of the loan eligibility the pell grant eligibility limits and other things so today what we re attempting to do is to launch an agenda for higher education and lifetime learning for the 21st century that will make college more affordable for more families and in the process genuinely open the doors of college to everybody but we also want to encourage more people to stay in college once they go and we want to do more to guide young people starting in their middle school years to be thinking about college so that if they can t afford it they ll be able to get in and go first the centerpiece of this budget for the coming year will be a landmark 30 billion college opportunity tax cut to help millions of middle class families pay for college it will give families a tax deduction of up to 10 000 in tuition costs providing as much as 2 800 in much needed tax relief and as senator schumer said this has never been done before now let me tell you how this works i am for this and i believe it s the right thing to do but all of you need to know that we think there s a pretty strict limit on what the total aggregate tax cuts i can propose and sign into law is i had to veto one last year because i thought it was too big why because the main thing that s brought us all along is the strength of our economy and that requires us in my judgment to keep this budget balanced to keep running surpluses and to get this country out of debt over the next 15 years for the first time since 1835 so as you might imagine one of the things that we have to do we have these huge fascinating debates at this time every year about what does or doesn t go in the administration s budget and that s where the arm twisting from senator schumer and the first lady came in and they made the compelling argument and you heard chuck say he and olympia had this bill in the senate that there was no benefit we could give to middle class people that would benefit more families more than this one and no benefit we could give to families that would benefit america more than this one so again i say we know this idea has bipartisan support even in washington and i ll bet you would have to take a magnifying glass to find anybody out in the country who is against it once i can explain that it won t affect our ability to balance the budget and pay off the debt so this is the core this has never been done before by our country and when you take this plus what we ve done with the hope scholarships with the other lifetime tax credits with the pell grants with the work study slots and with the changes in the student loan program we will really be able to say everybody who wants to go to college can go it is important that it pass and i want to ask all of you to help me to pass it in this session of congress nina talked a little about her situation but she was too modest to tell you that she s on the dean s list so that helps her qualify for additional scholarship aid but her father works overtime when he can her mother works two jobs now what does all this mean to her for her family in their income group with the hope scholarship the new college opportunity tax cut would translate into a 4 300 tax break for her family by the time her brother george enters college that s real money that will make a difference to her family and it will make a difference to america this plan i say again is important for families but it s also important for the state of our economy we give tax relief today for businesses that invest in new plants and equipment in an economy that runs on brain power we ought to give tax credits and tax cuts for people that invest in that brain power with this action we are much closer toward taking the worry out of paying for a child s college education we re another step forward toward helping the middle class with a targeted tax cut and we re another step forward again in saying that we have literally opened the doors of college to all i am also pleased to announce that we will increase pell grants to up to 3 500 and that will benefit nearly 4 million pell grant recipients and that s important now for all of you who are in higher education this is the second thing i want to say that s important the second element of our plan is to strengthen our efforts to help americans stay in college we have really good numbers now and it s going to get better with this with the number of young people going to college but the dropout rate is way way too high given the needs of the economy and the benefits to young people in staying and getting their degrees one third of the lowest income students drop out of college and less than half of them earn degrees within five years our budget will establish the college competition challenge grants to reduce the dropout rate and improve the chances of success for nearly 18 000 of these students we re also going to expand the successful trio program to help even more students stay in college we will launch a dual degree initiative to expand opportunities for students at minority institutions to allow about 3 000 minority students to earn a degree in fields where minorities today are woefully under represented the third and final part of our higher education agenda is focused on helping young people get on the right track to college and to stay there we need to encourage more students at an early age to get them excited about academic achievement and to give them a sense that they actually can go to college and get a degree and have the life of their dreams we passed an initiative we called gear up which does just that it reaches out to middle school students who are at risk using college students to mentor them to encourage them to set high expectations to stay in school to study hard to take the right courses to go to college and to make sure they know exactly what kind of aid they would qualify for so they don t decide when they re 12 or 13 or 14 that they won t be able to afford to go our budget will double the number of students who can participate in gear up to include 1 4 million young people many of them come from families where they would never entertain the prospect of going to college and where the message they get now on the street in the school is that because of their circumstances they won t be able to make it we re giving them the exact reverse message that they will absolutely be able to make it and young people in universities all across america who have participated in mentoring these kids deserve the thanks of a grateful nation we re going to double this program and i hope you ll help us pass that as well one more aspect of this is our youth opportunity grants under the leadership of secretary herman at labor and the youthbuild initiative at hud these things are working again to reach young people who otherwise too often get left out and left behind taken together these steps will provide families with the college relief they need students with the support they need our economy with the skilled work force we need and our communities and our nation with the better citizens we all need people who decide to invest in their futures through education are taking the long look ahead making sacrifices today for rewards tomorrow that is the challenge we face today as a nation we have for the first time in my lifetime economic prosperity social progress national self confidence the absence of serious crisis at home or paralyzing threat from abroad all those conditions have not existed at one point in my lifetime and it is imperative that we take the long look ahead there is no better way to make the most of this magic moment than by helping all americans make the most of their god given abilities thanks for being here dem wjclinton20 1 96 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen i am so glad that i happened to be in houston and at the airport at the right time i just want to take a minute i know you came to see this fine crew and their families and to celebrate with them but i just want to say on behalf of the people of the united states we are very proud of this mission proud of this crew we were thrilled by its success and we re glad to have them home and let me just make one plug to i know that i m preaching to the saved here but i want to make one plug for the space program you see all of our friends and allies from japan here celebrating their participation in the person where is he of mr wakata we thank him our space program is an important part of our partnership for world peace it is an important part of how we relate to and work with the japanese the russians and others in building a more cooperative safer world for the 21st century our space program is also an important part of research we do in trying to solve medical mysteries and environmental mysteries nasa has been a major major force in helping us to figure out ways to save our planet earth as we accommodate more population growth and more economic growth so i ask all of you remain steadfast in your support for america s investment in space and in our future together with our friends and allies throughout the world thank you god bless you welcome home gentlemen job well done dem wjclinton20 1 97a bill_clinton thank you very much first let me thank senator warner and senator ford speaker gingrich leader gephardt senator lott senator daschle the inaugural committee for the wonderful job they did with the morning ceremony i thank all the participants my good friend jessye norman thank you you were magnificent and i thank santita jackson and all the choirs who sang today they were wonderful and i thank my friend of nearly 25 years miller williams for that wonderful poem i will take it as an admonition and keep it close to my heart thank you hillary and chelsea and i have had a wonderful day we got up early and went to a church service and it ran a little late reverend jackson was speaking it wasn t his fault we all were carried away and it put us all in the right frame of mind for this happy moment i feel a great deal of gratitude for many things but senator when i heard you telling that fascinating story of the fight between president roosevelt and harry byrd sr i felt an enormous amount of gratitude that at least so far you have not released the letter you made me write you to make sure we could hold this ceremony today and i thank you for that we ve been doing this a long time our country has and i just want to say to all of you that i worked for a long time on what exactly i would say today and i believe it very much i believe we re at a unique moment in history i believe that the only problems we ve never solved in america are the problems of the heart particularly relating to race we get better at them but we ve never quite gotten over it i believe that it is more possible to imagine our future and shape it now than at any time in the history of the country with the exception of our entry into the industrial age when we also had peace and prosperity and our entry into the 19th century when thomas jefferson decided to buy louisiana a decision that senator lott and i especially appreciate and a lot of others so this is a unique moment and because it is to some extent without precedent and because it is different we have to imagine the future before we can create it and when you do something like that it requires you to make alliances and get outside of barriers that normally govern your lives so i meant very much what i said about the bipartisan nature of our common task and tomorrow we will start to work on it for today i think we should all as the previous speakers have said enjoy being americans enjoy the parade enjoy the balls but most of all enjoy the great gift of our citizenship thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton20 1 97b bill_clinton my fellow citizens at this last presidential inauguration of the 20th century let us lift our eyes toward the challenges that await us in the next century it is our great good fortune that time and chance have put us not only at the edge of a new century in a new millennium but on the edge of a bright new prospect in human affairs a moment that will define our course and our character for decades to come we must keep our old democracy forever young guided by the ancient vision of a promised land let us set our sights upon a land of new promise the promise of america was born in the 18th century out of the bold conviction that we are all created equal it was extended and preserved in the 19th century when our nation spread across the continent saved the union and abolished the awful scourge of slavery then in turmoil and triumph that promise exploded onto the world stage to make this the american century and what a century it has been america became the world s mightiest industrial power saved the world from tyranny in two world wars and a long cold war and time and again reached out across the globe to millions who like us longed for the blessings of liberty along the way americans produced a great middle class and security in old age built unrivaled centers of learning and opened public schools to all split the atom and explored the heavens invented the computer and the microchip and deepened the wellspring of justice by making a revolution in civil rights for african americans and all minorities and extending the circle of citizenship opportunity and dignity to women now for the third time a new century is upon us and another time to choose we began the 19th century with a choice to spread our nation from coast to coast we began the 20th century with a choice to harness the industrial revolution to our values of free enterprise conservation and human decency those choices made all the difference at the dawn of the 21st century a free people must now choose to shape the forces of the information age and the global society to unleash the limitless potential of all our people and yes to form a more perfect union when last we gathered our march to this new future seemed less certain than it does today we vowed then to set a clear course to renew our nation in these four years we have been touched by tragedy exhilarated by challenge strengthened by achievement america stands alone as the world s indispensable nation once again our economy is the strongest on earth once again we are building stronger families thriving communities better educational opportunities a cleaner environment problems that once seemed destined to deepen now bend to our efforts our streets are safer and record numbers of our fellow citizens have moved from welfare to work and once again we have resolved for our time a great debate over the role of government today we can declare government is not the problem and government is not the solution we the american people we are the solution our founders understood that well and gave us a democracy strong enough to endure for centuries flexible enough to face our common challenges and advance our common dreams in each new day as times change so government must change we need a new government for a new century humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us but strong enough to give us the tools to solve our problems for ourselves a government that is smaller lives within its means and does more with less yet where it can stand up for our values and interests in the world and where it can give americans the power to make a real difference in their everyday lives government should do more not less the preeminent mission of our new government is to give all americans an opportunity not a guarantee but a real opportunity to build better lives beyond that my fellow citizens the future is up to us our founders taught us that the preservation of our liberty and our union depends upon responsible citizenship and we need a new sense of responsibility for a new century there is work to do work that government alone cannot do teaching children to read hiring people off welfare rolls coming out from behind locked doors and shuttered windows to help reclaim our streets from drugs and gangs and crime taking time out of our own lives to serve others each and every one of us in our own way must assume personal responsibility not only for ourselves and our families but for our neighbors and our nation our greatest responsibility is to embrace a new spirit of community for a new century for any one of us to succeed we must succeed as one america the challenge of our past remains the challenge of our future will we be one nation one people with one common destiny or not will we all come together or come apart the divide of race has been america s constant curse and each new wave of immigrants gives new targets to old prejudices prejudice and contempt cloaked in the pretense of religious or political conviction are no different these forces have nearly destroyed our nation in the past they plague us still they fuel the fanaticism of terror and they torment the lives of millions in fractured nations all around the world these obsessions cripple both those who hate and of course those who are hated robbing both of what they might become we cannot we will not succumb to the dark impulses that lurk in the far regions of the soul everywhere we shall overcome them and we shall replace them with the generous spirit of a people who feel at home with one another our rich texture of racial religious and political diversity will be a godsend in the 21st century great rewards will come to those who can live together learn together work together forge new ties that bind together as this new era approaches we can already see its broad outlines ten years ago the internet was the mystical province of physicists today it is a commonplace encyclopedia for millions of schoolchildren scientists now are decoding the blueprint of human life cures for our most feared illnesses seem close at hand the world is no longer divided into two hostile camps instead now we are building bonds with nations that once were our adversaries growing connections of commerce and culture give us a chance to lift the fortunes and spirits of people the world over and for the very first time in all of history more people on this planet live under democracy than dictatorship my fellow americans as we look back at this remarkable century we may ask can we hope not just to follow but even to surpass the achievements of the 20th century in america and to avoid the awful bloodshed that stained its legacy to that question every american here and every american in our land today must answer a resounding yes this is the heart of our task with a new vision of government a new sense of responsibility a new spirit of community we will sustain america s journey the promise we sought in a new land we will find again in a land of new promise in this new land education will be every citizen s most prized possession our schools will have the highest standards in the world igniting the spark of possibility in the eyes of every girl and every boy and the doors of higher education will be open to all the knowledge and power of the information age will be within reach not just of the few but of every classroom every library every child parents and children will have time not only to work but to read and play together and the plans they make at their kitchen table will be those of a better home a better job the certain chance to go to college our streets will echo again with the laughter of our children because no one will try to shoot them or sell them drugs anymore everyone who can work will work with today s permanent under class part of tomorrow s growing middle class new miracles of medicine at last will reach not only those who can claim care now but the children and hardworking families too long denied we will stand mighty for peace and freedom and maintain a strong defense against terror and destruction our children will sleep free from the threat of nuclear chemical or biological weapons ports and airports farms and factories will thrive with trade and innovation and ideas and the world s greatest democracy will lead a whole world of democracies our land of new promise will be a nation that meets its obligations a nation that balances its budget but never loses the balance of its values a nation where our grandparents have secure retirement and health care and their grandchildren know we have made the reforms necessary to sustain those benefits for their time a nation that fortifies the world s most productive economy even as it protects the great natural bounty of our water air and majestic land and in this land of new promise we will have reformed our politics so that the voice of the people will always speak louder than the din of narrow interests regaining the participation and deserving the trust of all americans fellow citizens let us build that america a nation ever moving forward toward realizing the full potential of all its citizens prosperity and power yes they are important and we must maintain them but let us never forget the greatest progress we have made and the greatest progress we have yet to make is in the human heart in the end all the world s wealth and a thousand armies are no match for the strength and decency of the human spirit thirty four years ago the man whose life we celebrate today spoke to us down there at the other end of this mall in words that moved the conscience of a nation like a prophet of old he told of his dream that one day america would rise up and treat all its citizens as equals before the law and in the heart martin luther king s dream was the american dream his quest is our quest the ceaseless striving to live out our true creed our history has been built on such dreams and labors and by our dreams and labors we will redeem the promise of america in the 21st century to that effort i pledge all my strength and every power of my office i ask the members of congress here to join in that pledge the american people returned to office a president of one party and a congress of another surely they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore no they call on us instead to be repairers of the breach and to move on with america s mission america demands and deserves big things from us and nothing big ever came from being small let us remember the timeless wisdom of cardinal bernardin when facing the end of his own life he said it is wrong to waste the precious gift of time on acrimony and division fellow citizens we must not waste the precious gift of this time for all of us are on that same journey of our lives and our journey too will come to an end but the journey of our america must go on and so my fellow americans we must be strong for there is much to dare the demands of our time are great and they are different let us meet them with faith and courage with patience and a grateful and happy heart let us shape the hope of this day into the noblest chapter in our history yes let us build our bridge a bridge wide enough and strong enough for every american to cross over to a blessed land of new promise may those generations whose faces we cannot yet see whose names we may never know say of us here that we led our beloved land into a new century with the american dream alive for all her children with the american promise of a more perfect union a reality for all her people with america s bright flame of freedom spreading throughout all the world from the height of this place and the summit of this century let us go forth may god strengthen our hands for the good work ahead and always always bless our america dem wjclinton20 1 99a bill_clinton thank you wow good morning good afternoon i want to say first of all how very grateful that hillary and al and tipper and i are that you all came out to see us today to make us feel so welcome i want to thank your mayor your county executive mrs eve and especially congressman john lafalce for being here with us he is a great man you know we don t want to put you through the speeches and everything because you have the monitors here and you re going to see them but let me say that buffalo has been wonderful to me and to hillary to al and tipper we are so grateful we remember when we came here together in 1992 and i m always glad to come back even in the snow yes that s right this guy says this ain t nothing and we had some buffalo wings in the holding room and we just want you to know how much we appreciate you how much we appreciate the support that you ve given us in two elections how grateful we are for the chance to serve and how committed we are to the agenda that i outlined last night we want you to be committed to it too we want to get out here and shake a few hands and we don t want to keep those other 20 000 people waiting you ll see the movie and thank you very much we re glad to be here god bless you dem wjclinton20 1 99c bill_clinton thank you very much first let me say to all of you that when we came in here tonight i think it s fair to say that hillary and al and tipper and i were literally overwhelmed by this reception and i knew that this was a wonderful community i knew this was a wonderful school i knew there was a lot of enthusiasm but it didn t all quite add up until i realized that we had caused your exams to be delayed and i want you to know that we re having such a good time we d be delighted to come back about this time next term if you want we can make this a regular thing i want to thank dr williams for his magnificent invocation i thank dr woodall for the remarks he made for making us welcome here and for the example that he and mr spencer the principal here all the teachers here and all the students and teachers from this school and the other schools here represented i thank you for what you re doing and for the example you re setting for america i d like to thank all of our musicians and the choir for playing and singing for us i thought they were great and i want to thank melissa for speaking so well weren t you proud of her did she do a great job or what i m glad i never had to run against her for anything i also want to thank all these wonderful people from pennsylvania who have come here all the officials and citizens from this area and from philadelphia and nearby areas let me say there was a lot of talk tonight keying off reverend williams invocation about vision i d like to say something else if i might out of respect to others it is a good thing to have a vision because otherwise you never know where you re going so you have to have one i ran for president beginning in 1991 because i thought our country was drifting and because i believed that if you look at these young people here one elementary school in this area has kids from 50 countries speaking 13 languages and if you look at all these young people and their parents and everybody in this room and you imagine what the world is going to be like and you know it s going to get smaller and smaller and we re going to have more and more relationships and the borders will become more and more open it s hard to imagine any country in the world that is remotely as well positioned as america to give people the chance to make the most of their own lives but we had to have a vision my vision for the 21st century was pretty simple i wanted us to have a country or the children of the gores and the clintons and all the other kids in our country where every person who was a responsible citizen would have a genuine opportunity to live out their dreams i wanted us to have a country where over all the differences between us we would relish those differences our racial our religious our cultural differences our serious differences we would debate seriously but we would honor our common humanity and our shared values as americans enough to say what unites us is so much more important than what divides us we will build one america in the 21st century and i wanted us to continue to be the country as we grew more diverse and therefore had deeper and deeper ties with more and more other people around the world i wanted america to recognize that because of our wealth and position we have not only the opportunity but a responsibility to continue to be the world s leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity for others it is good for ourselves to do the right thing in trying to build the rest of the world and build closer ties now it is a good thing to have a vision you can t get started without it otherwise you don t know where you re going the vice president talked about tommy lasorda and mike piazza my favorite baseball player of all time because he was such a wonderful speaker was yogi berra you know yogi berra said we don t know where we re going but we re making good time so you have to have a vision but you have to have something else too you have to have people who are willing to act on it i hope you could see with the four of us up here we like being together we ve worked closely together we see ourselves as a family and we see our allies as a family when i came to washington i wanted to do something about homelessness but tipper gore helped me do it i wanted to raise the consciousness of america about all kinds of things that we sort of kept hidden under the rug but were hurting people mental health was one of the most important tipper gore helped me do it i wanted to prove that we could have a smaller government we now have the smallest federal government since 1962 but i wanted to do it in a way that wouldn t just throw good federal employees in the street and that would enable us to do more the vice president made it possible for us to do that he led that effort i wanted to prove that we could grow the economy and improve the environment by doing things like building new cars that would triple gas mileage the vice president has led our efforts there and in dealing with all the promise of new technology in trying to hook up all our schools and libraries to the internet and in managing a big portion of our relations with russia south africa and other countries i can say without qualification that no vice president in history has had so much responsibility or done so much good so the vision requires an action and if it hadn t been for hillary for all the good intentions in the world we wouldn t have done nearly as much to advance the cause of health care or child care or education or the observe the millennium we wouldn t have been able to do it when i see joe hoeffel standing up here talking and i know he s going to be a strong force on the committees that he s gotten i see another new congressman out there my long time friend bob brady from philadelphia i know that they will be implementors of a vision or chaka fattah who got you all worked up up there when he stood up do you know what he did he passed a bill in the congress last year that i was for but i could not have passed it i ll tell you the truth i could not have done it but he went around to republicans and democrats alike and said you know i come from philadelphia there are a lot of poor kids there that have never had a real chance they come from poor families they live in tough neighborhoods but they ve got good minds will you help me pass a bill that will provide the necessary financial support for college students to come in and mentor these kids in middle school so they ll go on to college and we did it because of that now i ll give you one other example last time i came here as president was in 1993 to a conference on entitlement reform entitlement reform is a fancy way of saying with everybody living longer and the baby boomers about to retire all the rest of you aren t going to be able to afford to pay our medical and retirement bills unless we do something that s what entitlement reform means and i knew the first thing we had to do was to get the economy going and i said you know i ve got this economic plan and it s not going to be very popular with a lot of people because it has a lot of tough decisions we re asking people who are the wealthiest people in america to pay a little more in income taxes sometimes a lot more if they were really well off we re asking people who are used to getting government programs to do without a few hundred of them until we get this budget in balance but if we do it we ll lower interest rates cutting home mortgages and the interest rates on car payments and credit cards and we ll get investment back in the country we ll have jobs coming back in the country and the money you will save on the stock market going up and the interest rates going down will be far greater than the money those of us who are well off had to pay in a little more taxes it was very controversial and people said oh it will bring an end to the economy it will end the american economy as we know it it will drive us into recession well you heard what the vice president said about the country with the longest peacetime expansion in history the lowest peacetime unemployment since 1957 and all of that what you should know is that this county this county has had since that economic program passed and the interest rates started going down 1800 new businesses and 44 000 new jobs the highest growth in the state of pennsylvania the decisive vote that made all that possible was cast in congress by marjorie margolies mezvinsky we won by one vote in the house and it was tied in the senate the decisive vote in the senate was cast by al gore and as he says since he gets to vote whenever there s a tie whenever he votes we win now the point i m trying to make is we had a good vision but somebody has got to carry the water somebody has to make the decisions somebody has to push the rocks up the hill somebody has to take that step and jump off the diving board someone has to move people have to act on their vision that s why i said last night and that s why that sign says let s get to work we have a good vision but we must act and for all of you i thank you i wanted to come here to this school because this school district represents what i think america ought to do i know not every school district has the resources so if we want everybody to end social promotion but have summer school and after school programs we have to provide the funds to help the school districts do it if we want to turn around schools that aren t working we have to provide help from washington and we re doing that but i want people to see this school district all over america on the news tonight in the articles tomorrow i want people to know we came here to a place that has done important things to give kids who need it extra help to have high standards to do things that will create a vision that people will want to act on i think to have a motto like learn and live to serve is a stunning thing and i hope you will live by it all your lives most of you here know this but for the benefit of the press i want to say this every high school graduate in this school district gets a license driver s license sized copy of the diploma and on the back it has the computer skills the graduate has mastered that s a driver s license to the future i would like to see that modeled in other places all across america as well you ve already heard what we have to say but it s plain that america is working again but every one of you knows if we had time to do it i d give everybody a piece of paper and i d ask you to write down you might do this when you go home tonight i d ask you to write down somewhere between three and six things no more than six that you believe are the long term challenges that will face you young people in the 21st century and what is it that we could do now that would pave the way to a better future for you i can tell you that i did my best in the state of the union last night to say okay we ve got america working again but what are the long term challenges and you ve heard them talked about tonight and i won t belabor them but let me say we have to build strong communities in the 21st century that gives everyone a chance at opportunity that means we have to do more to have the kind of economic opportunity in places where unemployment is high and people make low wages that you have here that means putting more money in there it means teaching adults better skills it means teaching those who are first generation americans to read better if that what it takes it means doing whatever is necessary to get these economies going it means continuing to drive the crime rate down it means making all communities livable communities to set aside the land that we need to set aside to have the green space to manage the traffic to do the things that will make people free and happy if they live anywhere in america these are the kinds of things we have to do it means reconciling work and family one of the best things that the gores have done is for the last seven years they have had a conference in tennessee every year on the challenges modern families face and most all of them relate somehow or other to the need to balance work and family a challenge that faces americans in all income groups i ll bet there is not a family here that has not at some point in the last couple of years faced some sort of challenge of balancing your responsibilities to your children to your responsibilities to your work that s why we want a child care plan that includes help for stay at home parents when the children are very young but real help for working people that can t afford quality child care on their own because in america when i look at all of you i want you to be free and confident when you start your families that you can do what you want in your work life but you know that your first responsibility is to raise your children and you re going to be able to succeed at that responsibility the vice president told you that rather gripping story about hmos the truth is we have to manage the health care system it s like any other system we have to keep the costs as low as possible but the quality of our people s health counts most that s why we say you ought to be able to see a specialist if you need one you ought to be able to go to the nearest emergency room you ought to be able to have your medical records private and all of the other things in our patients bill of rights because we ve got to balance the need to save money with the fundamental necessity of providing quality health care to all americans and i d just like to say one other thing we ve said a lot about education tonight but i would like to say something about the very first subject i talked about last night in the state of the union and that is the aging of america and again i want to say this is an issue that should be of primary importance not to today s retirees but to tomorrow s retirees their children and their grandchildren yet unborn because when the baby boomers retire and that includes the parents of just about all of the students here people between the ages of 34 and 52 were the people born in the generation after world war ii the largest group of people in history young people until the present class of students which numbers over 53 million now when we retire we re going to double the number of seniors by the year 2030 there will be two people working for every one person drawing social security and what we ve got and the average life expectancy is already 76 years old plus for the young people here it s probably about 83 years this is a high class problem the older you get the more you ll be glad that that s going up this is a high class problem but we do not want to get into a position where our retirement is a financial burden to our children and undermines our children s ability to raise our grandchildren so when i tell you that we ought to set aside roughly 75 percent of this surplus we ve got for the next 15 years to save social security and to save medicare and in the process since we ll be saving the money we ll be paying down the national debt giving us the lowest level of debt we ve had as a nation since before world war i in 1917 keeping interest rates down investment high jobs creation going and incomes rising i say that not just for those of us who will be older but for our kids and our grandkids and i hope you will see it that way this is a big test for us we haven t had this kind of situation in a long long time and very rarely do societies have the luxury of being financially strong enough militarily secure enough and having enough information about the future to make the kind of decisions that i asked the american people to make last night yes we ought to give some tax cuts but they ought to be the right kind they ought to be for child care they ought to be for helping us to deal with our environmental challenges they ought to be for people saving for their own retirement because social security will never be enough for that they ought to be for raising children but we can save this money now and lift a burden from the young people here i want every parent here to look at the young people here and ask yourselves do you really want to run the risk of squandering this surplus that we have worked so hard for until we know for sure that our retirement will not compromise the integrity of their lives and their ability to raise their children as we have tried to raise them now the young people here are going to have a fascinating time the internet is already growing by you know millions and millions of new pages every week it s the fastest growing communication mechanism in human history people are able to move around as never before and even if you can t leave town now you ve got people from all over the world right next door we are learning things that we have never imagined before we are on the verge of not only unlocking the mysteries of the human gene but actually finding medical treatments to cure or even prevent things from alzheimer s to arthritis to all kinds of cancers this is a stunning time i went to the auto show in detroit the other day and one thing i m looking forward to i love this job and i m not looking forward to two years from now being barred from being president by the constitution s two term limit but one thing i am looking forward to now that i ve been to the detroit auto show is getting back in those cars because the cars of the future are going to be environmentally sound and hilariously fun to drive and safer this is going to be an interesting time for you to live in but we have to do our best in this time to first of all make it safe dealing with the challenges of nuclear and chemical and biological weapons to give you the strongest communities possible to build one america across our lines of diversity and to think about the future when i ran for president in 1992 before i ever made the decision to run a young man who is now not quite so young he s a graduate student named sean landris was driving me around los angeles i was an anonymous virtually anonymous governor of arkansas but sean landris knew something about me and the speeches i had made and the things i was interested in and he said are you going to run for president and i said well i haven t decided yet but i might he said well if you do here s what i think your theme song ought to be and he had a little tape deck in his car and he put this tape deck in and this old fleetwood mac song don t stop thinking about tomorrow which was made before he was born so we made it our theme song and i believe that those of us in positions of responsibility have no higher responsibility than to think about your tomorrows and when you reach our age you will want more and more to think about the tomorrows of your children and your grandchildren what i tried to say last night is there s never been a time when we had brighter tomorrows all we have to do is act on our vision let s get to work thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton20 10 00 bill_clinton thank you for that wonderful welcome thank you for coming out to help marty tonight i told him that now that he had all this support and has raised all this money we needed to go find him an opponent seems a shame to waste all this energy and support and enthusiasm you know it s a good thing there aren t many more votes he can cast against me let me say first how honored i am to be here i want to say about marty in a moment but i also want to thank richie neal for being here and for representing massachusetts so well he s a wonderful man and for supporting the efforts that we made with the irish peace process which in the beginning to put it mildly were somewhat controversial i want to thank senator kennedy we ve spent most of the day together we flew here today in an uncommon act of sensitivity he flew to missouri today for the funeral of the governor of missouri who was our nominee for the united states senate you probably know he died tragically in a plane crash with his son and one of his closest aides he was my neighbor and my very close friend when i looked out today and i saw ted and vickie at the funeral i thought what a great thing to do i say this every chance i get but whatever i have accomplished as president so much of it would never have been possible if ted kennedy hadn t been there with me every single step of the way and i cannot thank him enough you know we have a lot of fun together today i taught him a new card game so i could beat him and he was convinced i didn t play fair just because i won and he lost you know he s going to get the last laugh though because when he came to the senate i was in junior high school and when i leave the white house he ll still be in the senate thank goodness for our country s sake i would also like to thank someone in this audience for coming here tonight i was particularly glad to see niki tsongas where are you niki are you here she was in the other room when i was here i was really delighted she was here and i want to thank marty s family for coming tonight at a difficult time beginning with his wonderful mother mrs meehan thank you for being here thank you bless you for coming tonight marty and ellen and their beautiful baby and marty s mom and the whole meehan clan met me outside and i understood how he had been elected frankly there are so many of them he doesn t really need you but i m delighted that you re helping him anyway i wanted to come here as senator kennedy said i ve been to a lot of different communities in massachusetts i ve tried to in this course of my service as president beginning in the 92 campaign i ve tried to make the whole state to really spend time out in the state of massachusetts to see every part of it and to have a chance to thank the people of this state no state has been better to bill clinton and al gore than the state of massachusetts and i m very grateful you heard marty say that when i became president unemployment here was 7 5 percent last month it was 2 4 percent the lowest in 30 years down two thirds from 1992 so i want to have a serious talk here just for a minute about this election coming up what it means to you your children your grandchildren and the future of our country i want to ask you to take some time a little time every day to talk to other people about it i know that vice president gore and joe lieberman are well ahead in the polls in massachusetts but you can help them in new hampshire you may know some people in if we win this time in new hampshire i think it may be the first time the democrats have ever won it three times in a row but they ought to be with us new hampshire is a lot better off than it was in 1992 it s a lot better off and they ve been very good to me too you might have some friends in pennsylvania one of the battleground states or ohio a lot of the other places where this election could go either way i had the opportunity gosh when was it yesterday to appear before the senate and house democrats and i said that we should view ourselves from here until election day as the weather caucus because if we make things clear that is if people understand with clarity the choice before them and the consequences of the choice we will win if they make things cloudy we ll have a hard time winning so they will be for cloudy we ll be for clear what does that say about who you ought to vote for right there so i just want to take a minute or two because everybody here has friends who will never come to an event like this isn t that right every one of you has friends that will never come to an event like this but they will show up on election day you have friends in other states where the election could go either way who will never come to an event like this but they will show up on election day and i just wanted to tell you we ve now heard all the debates and the candidates are kind of going into the homestretch and sometimes it s easy to lose the forest for the tree and you know i care passionately about this election not just because of my more than passing interest in the senate race in new york and i might add another kind thing ted did he went to buffalo with hillary the other day and spoke to an irish group and he practically had her with a brogue by the time he got through it was fabulous and not just because i m so devoted to al gore and all that he s done and not just because joe lieberman has been a friend of mine for 30 years but because when the vice president says we ve come a long way in the last eight years but you ain t seen nothin yet i actually believe that and i m not running for anything that s not just political rhetoric i ve worked as hard as i know how to turn this country around and pull this country together and move us forward to fight off the most bitter partisan attacks in modern american history and just keep on going and it s worked pretty well and i think you will all agree with that but never never in my lifetime have we had at the same time so much economic prosperity social progress national self confidence with the absence of domestic crisis or foreign threat to our security it has not happened in our lifetime now when you get a situation like that you have an obligation as a free society to build for the future to seize the big opportunities to deal with the big challenges to make the most of them and i m telling you the only thing that ever bothers me is when i see well people think that they kind of like both these candidates and maybe there is not much difference and maybe we should give the other guy a chance or this that or the other thing and after all and things are going along fine who could mess this up you know you hear a lot of this talk don t you don t you hear this talk people talking and what i want to say to you is that we ought to be happy about this election because you have two people we can posit they re good people they love their families they love their country and they will pretty well do what they say they ll do if they get elected but make no mistake about it there are great differences in the candidates for president and vice president for the senate and for the house that will have profound consequences and you ve got to decide and i ll just tell you a few of them first of all i ve listened to all these debates so let me tell you what this election is not about this election is certainly not about one of us being one of our candidates being for big government the other one being for less government let me tell you what the facts are now we had a hard time getting those facts into these debates because they re so inconvenient for the other side and i admire that about the republicans the evidence does not faze them they are not bothered at all by the facts and you ve got to kind of give it to them ask richie or marty or ted don t take my word for it the evidence doesn t faze them they just sort of show up and do it anyway they know what they re for but here are the facts under this democratic administration government spending is the lowest percentage of national income it s been since 1966 tax burden on average middle income americans is the lowest it s been in more than 20 years now the size of the government is the lowest it s been since 1960 dwight eisenhower s last year in the white house the year you elected john kennedy president of the united states that is the size of the federal government those are facts so when you hear our republican friends talking about how we re for big government ask them where have they been the last eight years and if you hear somebody who acts like they believe it fill them in on the facts this election is also not about how our side can t get bipartisan action done in washington so we need a republican to rescue us to give us bipartisan action let me just run through a little of the bipartisan action once we made it clear to them that we weren t going to let them shut the government down abolish the department of education and have the biggest education and health care and environmental cuts in history and once you made it clear to them that you wouldn t support them if they kept doing that we got a bipartisan welfare reform bill a bipartisan balanced budget bill that had the children s health insurance program the biggest expansion of children s health care since medicaid in 1965 we got a telecommunications bill that s created hundreds of thousands of jobs in america we got an extension of our bill to put 100 000 police on the street we re now working on 150 000 we got a bill to put 100 000 teachers in the schools we re already a third of the way home there all in a bipartisan majority so if somebody says to you i ve got to vote for the other guys because they re against big government or they re for bipartisan solutions you say hello stop facts do a fact check here it tickles me the republicans are seeking to be rewarded for the harsh partisan atmosphere they created we made a mess of this the democrats will work with us give us the white house and we ll behave that s their argument you should say i don t think so that s not necessary we get plenty of stuff done on a bipartisan basis ted kennedy works every day marty meehan s got this campaign finance reform bill with chris shays our problems is not bipartisanship our problem is that the republican leadership in the united states senate and in the campaign for the white house are against campaign finance reform one hundred percent of the democrats and a lot of the republicans are for campaign finance reform isn t that right so that s what it s not about here s what it is about one other thing it s not about it s not about change versus the status quo al gore is not the candidate of the status quo if anybody running this year ran on the following platform vote for me and i ll do everything bill clinton did i would vote against that person why because the world is changing dramatically so the issue is not whether we re going to change it is how we re going to change are we going to keep the prosperity going and build on the changes in the last eight years that are working or are we going to reverse course that is the question and that s the way you ve got to frame it it s not whether but how we re going to change now look here s the deal on this economic business our tax cut i admit is only a third the size of theirs our candidate s tax cut but most people making under 100 000 do better under ours than theirs now why is ours only a third the size of theirs because we learned the hard way in the 12 years before we got here that if you give it all away before it comes in you may wind up with a lot of red ink on your hands and you don t want to do that again so we say let s have a tax cut we can afford for college tuition deduction for long term care for the elderly and the disabled for child care for retirement savings for giving people incentives to invest in poor areas in america but let s save a little money for education and health care and the environment and let s keep paying this debt down because this is a case where fiscal conservatism is socially progressive if you keep interest rates down the average family is already saving a couple thousand dollars on home mortgages because we ve kept interest rates lower by getting rid of this deficit if their plan passes because the tax cut is so big 1 5 trillion and on top of that they ve got a 1 trillion plan to partially privatize social security you re already in deficit once you do that by the way then they re going to spend several hundred billion dollars over and above that and i can tell you their estimate of the surplus is too big we re going back into deficit that means higher interest rates our tax cut for everybody is lower interest rates if you take gore s plan and you keep paying the debt down interest rates will be a point lower for a decade do you know what that s worth to you listen to this for a decade 390 billion in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower college loan payments lower credit card payments lower business loan payments means more jobs more business expansion higher incomes a better stock market our tax for everybody in addition to the specifics is lower interest rates and getting rid of the debt now i ll tell you something else the third biggest item in the federal budget is interest on the debt every last dollar you pay to the federal government it begins with 12 going out for interest going out for the debt because when they had the white house they quadrupled the debt in 12 years we quadrupled the debt in 12 years over the previous 200 year history of this country and i m getting rid of it thanks to them and their voting for me and we want to keep getting rid of it now so here s another interesting thing if you have eight years of a gore lieberman administration government spending will be an even smaller percentage of income than it will be if you get the republicans in why oh yes we ll spend more on education we ll spend more on health care we ll spend more on the environment but we re going to get rid of that 12 on the dollar you re paying on interest on the debt they re going to keep paying that and you re going to have higher interest rates now look we tried it their way for 12 years and they want to go try it that way again they want to say look the democrats have got things in real good shape now so let s go on a real tax cutting binge and try it our way one more time and see if it works better the second time around that s what this election is about listen this is a big deal people have to understand this plainly it s not like we haven t tried it you ve tried it our way for eight years and you tried it their way for 12 years before that and that s all this is you cannot make a 1 5 trillion tax cut several hundred billion dollars worth of spending and a 1 trillion social security privatization plan fit into the money that s there we re going back to deficits high interest rates less investment in our future less economic growth ask people if they really want to take that chance if you want to keep the prosperity going you better stay with gore and lieberman and kennedy and meehan and neal and our crowd because that s where we re going this is a big deal now i won t go into as much detail on the rest of this but the same thing on every issue on education both sides say they re for accountability the difference is we believe if you re going to hold schools accountable for the performance of their children you ought to help them succeed with preschool and after school programs and more qualified teachers in the early grades and modernized schools and they say we don t need to do that let s just test the kids and see what happens and take the money away if they don t do well we think we ought to help empower the schools to do well we know how to turn around failing schools now there s no excuse not to do it now all we have to do is to develop the system invest in it reward it big difference they re not for any of those specific things i just said on health care we say we ought to have a patients bill of rights that s real and we ought to have a medicare prescription drug program because if we were creating medicare today we would never have it without drugs in 1965 when ted voted for medicare medical care was about doctors and hospitals today anybody that lives to be 65 in america has a life expectancy of 82 the young women in this audience that are still in their childbearing years thanks to the human genome project will soon be bringing home from the hospital babies with a life expectancy of 90 years now that s the good news but it means you re going to have to totally re imagine the aging process within a few years 80 won t be all that old we will think of it as you know sort of late middle age but it also means we ve got to keep people healthy we ve got to keep people strong and pharmaceuticals are an important part of that so we have the money now if we don t squander it to take care of the pharmaceutical needs of our senior citizens not only to lengthen life but to improve the quality of life to keep people out of hospitals to minimize their institutional time in life this is a big deal and we are for a medicare program that does that why because medicare is simply a financing mechanism that has a low administrative cost and can serve everybody they re for serving about half the people that need it and telling everybody else they ve got to get private insurance the insurance companies you know ted and i we ve had a lot of fights with the insurance companies they ought to get a gold star for this they keep telling us you can t write a health insurance policy for this the health insurance policy this is another case where the republicans are not fazed by the evidence the insurance companies which are usually with them on everything have told them hey guys you can t write an insurance policy that people can afford that s worth having so why don t they want to do it what in the wide world is wrong with giving all the seniors access to the medicine they need did you ever meet a politician that didn t want more votes did you ever meet a business person that didn t want more customers why do the drug companies not want more customers see you never hear this in the debate because they don t have time to go into it but you need to know this this is a huge deal the difference in the democratic and the republican prescription drug plan the drug companies spend a lot of money developing the drugs and advertising them and every country but the united states where they sell the drugs has price controls so they ve got to get 100 percent of the cost of developing the drugs and advertising them from you when you buy them and then it s real cheap just to make another pill so then they can sell them in canada or europe or wherever and make a lot of money now i am not demonizing the drug companies i would still rather have them in america wouldn t you i mean they re great they uncover all these medical miracles and they provide tens of thousands of wonderful jobs and they ve got a problem because they think if medicare is buying for all the seniors they ll have so much market power they can get drugs made in america for americans almost as cheap as canadians can buy drugs made in america and they re afraid it will cut them so low that they won t have the money to make new drugs and to advertise them surely the answer is not what they posit to leave half the seniors who need the medicine behind that s not the american way this is a big deal now this is a huge deal a big difference between gore lieberman meehan neal kennedy our crowd and their crowd my view is let s solve the problems of america s seniors we ve got the money to do it and the drug companies have plenty of money and good lobbyists and they can come down to washington and we ll figure out how to solve their problems but we ve got the cart before the horse if we say i m sorry here s half the seniors that need medicine we can t give it to them because the drug companies are afraid they won t get enough money for their advertising and development costs let s take care of the seniors then take care of the drug companies that s our position it s the right position it is the moral position it s the right thing for america now you can go through every other issue crime the environment every single other issue and there are significant differences but you ought to be able to tell people now what the economic differences are what the health care differences are what the education differences are you ought to be able to tell them it will affect you your children your grandchildren and the future of this country i can also tell you having worked with him for eight years and having had some experience now with the presidency it is fundamentally a deciding job oh there s a lot of work harry truman said i felt like this in the middle east the last couple of days harry truman said that his job largely consisted of trying to talk people into doing things they should do without him having to ask them in the first place and to some extent that s right but the president also has to decide who are you going to put on the supreme court who are you going to make secretary of state who are you going to make secretary of defense who will be secretary of education who will be secretary of health and human services what will you send to the congress how will you deal with the first major foreign crisis you have what is the future of arms control how will we deal with terrorism and biological and chemical warfare this is a deciding job and that s the last point i want to make al gore makes good decisions he is smart he knows what he s doing he s tough he has good values he makes good decisions so i m just asking you to take a little time every day between now and the election this thing is tight and it is tight partly because things are going well and it s easy to blur the distinctions i ll close with the thing that s most important to me if somebody said to me that my time on earth was over and i got to leave america with one wish what would my one wish for america be believe it or not it wouldn t be for continued prosperity after what i ve been through with the middle east and northern ireland and the balkans growing up in the south that was segregated as i did what i would wish for america is that we could be one country united across all the various differences in this country this is such an interesting place to live now america is getting more interesting every day as we grow more racially and religiously diverse but it s really important the only way it s interesting is if we think we respect our differences but we think our common humanity is even more important and there are all kinds of issues that come up all the time where these values are at stake i think campaign finance reform is one of them why because it basically will equalize the power of people s votes i think stronger enforcement of equal pay laws for women is one of them because it gives equality to the dignity of work i think the hate crimes legislation is important for obvious reasons and you know the truth is you kind of got a little of that in the last debate the truth is we re on one side of those issues and they re on the other and i think that we re on the side of one america and in a world that s getting smaller and smaller i think we re on the right side so i want to say to you i m very i m so grateful for what you ve done for me for my family and my administration nobody s been better to us than the people of massachusetts i am grateful i am grateful for the chance i ve had to serve i am profoundly grateful that there are wonderful people like marty meehan who are willing to present themselves for public office and serve and do what they do i m grateful for that but in america our public life is always about tomorrow and the tomorrow that counts now is election day november 7th now you just remember clarity is our friend if the american people clearly understand what are the differences in economic policy in education policy in health care policy in the environment in crime and in one america how will it affect me my family my community my children my grandchildren how can i build the future of my dreams for our kids if they really are clear on that we re going to have an enormous celebration on election night but a lot of this work now will be done by word of mouth one by one so you just remember that every day between now and the election most of the people you know who will show up and vote will never ever every come to an event like this so you tell them a little bit about what you heard tonight thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton20 10 94a bill_clinton thank you you know we wanted to come here because this school has a reputation for academic excellence and because it is so diverse because it s a school that really looks like america but if i had known we were going to get such an enthusiastic reception i would have come yesterday instead of today and just waited thank you i also want to say a special word of appreciation to your student council president i thought he did a fine job up here i can tell you this if he continues to speak so well so much to the point and so briefly he ll win a lot more elections very impressive i d like to thank you principal mr flaherty your superintendent dr thayer your school board chairman mr petrini and all the people here who made this wonderful visit possible i d like to thank all the members of congress who have joined us i especially want to thank those who have come from other states senator pell and congressman reed have come from rhode island and senator and mrs jeffords are here we re glad to see them i thank congressman markey for hosting us and i thank congressman kennedy for coming and bringing his wife and his mother i m glad they re all here thank you for coming i want to say just a brief word about those who have spoken governor kunin who was the governor of vermont is now the deputy secretary of education spoke on behalf of the department and secretary riley who was the governor of south carolina all three of us served as governors together working on these education problems and think we ve made a real difference bringing a whole different approach to education to washington we look at it from the grass roots up from the point of view of the principals and the teachers and the school board members and we like to think from time to time we even look at it from the point of view of the students from the grass roots up from education at the school level where it should be i want to say a special word of thanks to senator jeffords for what he said and to congressman ford and senator kennedy let me say that you read a lot and hear a lot about all the fights that go on in washington and about how things don t get done but when the history of this time is written the progress we have made in education will be known chiefly for two things one is we really did write new ideas into the law and secondly we did it in a bipartisan fashion with republicans and democrats for all the children of this country i was sitting up here listening to these fine people speak wondering what all of our words might mean to the students who are here thinking that trying to remember what it was like when i used to sit over there in the band when i was their age and hold my saxophone you did a great job today by the way and i thank you i d like to try to tell you why this whole thing is important from your point of view because this whole education issue is really about your future twenty one months ago when i moved to washington to become president i had some very clear ideas i wanted to rebuild the american dream to restore the health of the american economy to make sure that your future would be the brightest future ever enjoyed by any generation of americans as you grow into the 21st century a new and exciting rapidly changing and very different time i knew that we had to do some things that would matter to people in the short run we had to begin to make our government work for ordinary americans again and we ve done a pretty good job of that we passed the family and medical leave law to protect parents when they need time off from work because their children are sick and we re immunizing all the kids in the country under the age of two by 1996 i see the nurses clapping there thank you because we want to reward people who are trying to be good parents and good workers we actually lowered the income taxes of 15 million working families because they make modest wages and we don t want them to be in poverty if they re working full time and raising their kids so we began to do these things and we started to work to bring the economy back to bring the deficit down to invest more in new technologies to expand trade and it is working and the economy is coming back but over the long run the united states of america cannot continue to lead the world economically in a world where the average young person will change work six seven eight times in a lifetime in a world where what you earn depends not just what you know but what you are capable of learning in a world that is incredibly fast moving and diverse we cannot do that unless we develop the learning capacities of every person in this country that is the key to the long term survival and strength of the united states when i was a governor my administration and especially my wonderful wife and i spent most of our time working on what we could do to improve our schools how we could get the test scores up how we could get more kids in foreign language how we could improve mathematics achievement how more of our young people could be ready to learn when they come to school how we could facilitate more young people going to college and i learned over and over again as i think governor kunin said that there are schools in this country including this one that are doing a very good job sometimes against great odds they are still doing a good job teaching and learning but we have some significant challenges we have to face first of all we are not as good as we ought to be as a country in taking the things that work well in some school districts and seeing them spread throughout the country secondly we have great challenges because of all the great nations in the world we are by far the most diverse racially ethnically religiously economically thirdly we know that schools have become the home away from home for a lot of children who have enormous personal challenges to face and all those things mean that we have to be constantly working overtime to try to meet the challenges that we face today and the challenges we know you will face in your lives tomorrow that s why i worked so hard several years ago to get our country to set a mission a national set of education goals most of you may not know what they are but i think they re good goals they re worth repeating that we will make sure every child shows up for school ready to learn that we will raise the high school graduation rate to at least 90 percent of all students which is the international standard all over the country that we will make sure our young people learn and are proficient in by international standards of excellence basic subjects in english and mathematics and history and geography and languages and we will learn how to measure whether we are doing that or not at least three times during the course of a student s career that we will lead the world in math and science achievement not bring up the rear that our schools will become safe disciplined and free of drugs and that we will develop a system of lifetime learning so that people no matter how old they are will always be able to develop new skills acquire new knowledge know what they need to know to move forward with confidence those are the goals of this nation educationally they have been adopted by presidents of both parties by governors of both parties they have been embraced by educators all across this country they are now the law of the land thanks to this congress the important thing about this bill is that it represents a fundamental change in the way the federal government looks at how we should do our job in helping you students achieve those goals for 30 years the federal government has shifted money to the states and the local school districts to try to help with problems that needed the money but mostly they have done it in ways that prescribe in very detailed manner the rules and regulations your schools had to follow the rules and regulations your states had to follow in applying for the money and in complying with it and very often we had teachers at the grassroots level who said this doesn t make any sense this bill changes all that this bill says the national government will set the goals we will help develop measurements to see whether framingham school district is meeting the goals but you will get to determine how you re going to meet the goals because the magic of education occurs between the teacher and the students in the classroom with the parents with the principals with the schools supporting it and you have see all this stuff we re talking about up here in terms of that we ve expanded the head start program as senator kennedy said these goals have now been written into law and 31 of the 50 states have asked for our help in devising a state strategy to meet the goals the school to work opportunities act which the senator mentioned has now all 50 states working to try to develop statewide systems of apprenticeships so the young people who don t go to college but do want to have good jobs will be able to get at least some post high school training in ways that help them academically help them practically and give them a good start into the future and that is a very very important thing our nation is the only advanced nation in the world that does not have a system that picks up every single high school graduate who doesn t go to college and gives them some further education and training so they can make a good living be good citizens raise a strong family and contribute to our future we re going to change that with this legislation and the college loan program and the national service program i want to explain in tandem you know in the 1980s the gap between what a high school graduate earns in his or her first year of work and what a college graduate earns in his or her first year of work doubled doubled earnings for high school graduates in their first year of work in the united states actually declined in the 1980s under the pressure of a global economy where there are a lot of people around the world in developing countries doing jobs for wages we cannot live on it is clear that it is in the economic interest of the entire united states to get as many young people to go onto college as possible at the same time you know we face even more social challenges especially among younger children so we ve done two things one is we ve changed the college loan program to say you can borrow money at lower interest rates you can pay it out over a longer period of time if you take a job that doesn t pay a high wage you can tie the loan repayment to the salary you make you ll have to pay it back over more years but there will never be a time when because of the cost of your college education you can t make a car payment you can t make your rent payment you can t meet the basic responsibilities you have and the national service program which you have well represented here in massachusetts simply says that if you join a community service program that s part of americorps you can earn almost 5 000 a year against the cost of a college education while helping to solve the problems of people here in the united states it s sort of a domestic peace corps and this morning i met with a couple of hundred national service corps volunteers who are in the city year project in boston which a lot of you probably know about each of them telling me about what they re doing to try to help solve a human problem in the state of massachusetts not with some bureaucracy but from the grass roots up just young people helping other people to make their lives better and earning some money for a college education that is the ticket to america s future and the ticket to your future as well now let me just say two or three things about this bill then i ll go sign it because it s getting warm in here it s getting so warm i m about to think i m in arkansas not in massachusetts in october but i have to say a few more things because now i m getting to the part that you have to do something about and this bill is a challenge to you as well this bill does many things and i won t tell you all about them but i want to give you just a few examples the first thing this bill does is to encourage schools to take kids that are from underprivileged backgrounds and instead of separating them out from other students bring them into the classrooms have smaller classes work with them have kids help kids to get everybody into the mainstream and everybody develop to the fullest of their god given capacities we know now that works better than separating kids out and trying to help them instead of bringing them in and challenging them to do the best they can do let me tell you what that means that means that every one of you has to support that not just the teachers the school district needs to encourage that especially for the younger kids but if you have a friend in your class or if you know a student who is not necessarily a friend of yours who is struggling you ought to see whether you or somebody else can help that student we need to have more kids helping kids to learn in this country we ve got to have that there are a lot of studies today and i won t bore you with all of them but basically there are a lot of studies on learning and how people learn that show that some people learn best by just going home at night opening the book and working like crazy but some people learn best in groups from their friends and neighbors from being free to ask when they don t know and from getting help and from working through problems there are a lot of young people who think they re not very smart who maybe just don t learn very well in the way that they re being asked to learn and you need to try to help them do better the second thing i want to say is something that has already been alluded to here by the previous speakers if we can t make these schools in this country safe if children are not free of fear when they come to school they are not going to learn very well and this bill has a safe schools component but it must be implemented all we can do is give the means to make schools safe to local school districts we in the national government don t do anything to make the schools safe you do that and you must and every school must the children of this country even if they are scared to death on the streets ought to feel safe when they re in their schools so they can learn the third thing i want to say is i m getting sort of progressively more controversial maybe here is there s an interesting provision of this bill that had enormous bipartisan support that provides opportunities for schools to get some help from this bill to develop what are now being called character education programs programs that basically enable schools to develop values that can be taught to students in the public schools based on a consensus of people in the community i made this national character counts week putting government on the side of having the schools tell children that there is a difference between right and wrong and there are some basic things that we ought to teach there is a bipartisan character counts coalition in the congress that s been working on this we disagree about a lot of things but we ought to be able to agree that our schools should say people should tell the truth they should respect themselves and each other they ought to be good citizens which means that we should assume responsibility for obeying the law and for helping others to develop themselves we ought to practice fairness and tolerance and trustworthiness these things should be taught in our schools and we shouldn t gag our teachers when they try to do it we ought to applaud them instead and i hope we will be doing more and more of that and now i m going to ask you young people to do one more thing there is a lot of evidence and there is a new survey that s been put out today saying that in a modest but very clear way drug use is going up again among young people in america i hope you re clapping because you agree with what i said not because you agree that it s a good thing that more and more young people simply don t believe it s dangerous to use marijuana for example and that it s okay to do let me tell you something every single scientific study that has been done in the last several years shows alarming increases in the toxicity and the danger of using marijuana especially to young women and what might happen to their childbearing capacity in the future all illegal drugs are dangerous we have to drive down usage again it has got to be not a good thing to do not a cool thing to do it is a stupid thing to do as well as an illegal thing to do and i want you to help bring it back down so this bill is about you it s not about all of us politicians up here it s about you it s about your future the age in which you are growing and the world toward which you are going can be the best time america ever had it will be exciting and our diversity in america is a gold mine of opportunity no other country is so well positioned to move into the 21st century to live in a global society that is more peaceful and more secure no one but it all depends upon whether we develop the god given capacity of every boy and girl in this country no matter where they live no matter what their racial or ethnic or religious background is that is your challenge let s do it together thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton20 10 94b bill_clinton well i m glad to be here you heard the speech in there i hope you ll reelect senator kennedy thank you very much let s go out here and say hi to them thank you and thank you for the music give the band a hand umass lowell band give them a hand thank you can you hear the sound is back ladies and gentlemen it is wonderful to be back in massachusetts wonderful to be the first president since harry truman to come to framingham and i thank you all for coming out here today i thank you all for participating in this election i want to say you heard what we had to say in there it was broadcast out here i want to make one comment that i didn t say in there that i hope all of you will listen to whatever your party or your predispositions one of the things that this country has got to do always in every age in time is to believe in itself all this business about how we should be cynical and skeptical i can tell you that everywhere i go around the world people know the united states is leading the way to the future they know our economy is coming back they know we are dealing with our problems they know we are promoting peace and prosperity all around the world if you looked into the faces of those young americans who were in haiti last weekend when president aristide went home you saw the best of this country this is a great country and i am tired of people trying to tear it down when we ought to be building it up and moving to the future with confidence i believe with all my heart if you look at the results of the last 21 months you will have to say america is in better shape we have adopted things that help ordinary americans the family leave law the brady bill immunizing all the kids under two extending head start these are things that make a difference to real people and we have got 4 5 million more jobs the economy is coming back and we are moving to the future this is a more peaceful and a more secure country than it was two years ago i ask you to help us to keep the country going forward let us not go back to the contract our opponents have offered they promise everybody a tax cut they promise everybody a spending increase they promise everybody a balanced budget it will get massachusetts and new england right back we were in the 1980s exploding deficit compromising our children s future and sending our jobs overseas we re going in the right direction help us continue to march into the future and keep this country the greatest country in the world well into the 21st century and help elect ted kennedy on november 8th dem wjclinton20 10 96a bill_clinton thank you thank you so much reverend carter reverend thomas congressman payne mr mayor mayor collins congressman torricelli ladies and gentlemen first of all i d like to say you know about this time of year people in our line of work are tired on sunday morning they hurt from head to toe i m not tired anymore i thank the choir for its magnificent music and i m glad to see all of you out here in this historic church dionne warwick it s good to see you now when reverend thomas said i lived in america s house and he made that remark about the white house well that got my attention but i ve tried to make it your house too i want to say a special word of thanks to this church for something else and that is that the chief operating officer of our whole national campaign is a member of this church ted carter and he s here with me today ted where are you stand up where s ted there he is back there he s a very modest person that has such an important job but you raised him up right here congratulations ladies and gentlemen the message we have already heard is the most important message we will here today but when he was alive president kennedy used to say that we must always remember that here on earth god s work must be our own and there are many questions before us now in this last presidential election of the 20th century and the first presidential election of the 21st century you know them all will we have more jobs will we have better education will we continue to expand health care will we give the little children that came to the airport to visit me today a cleaner environment to grow up in whether they re in the inner city or in small towns but there are two great questions in which all others can be answered the first is whether we re going to keep trying to go forward to build a bridge to the future together a bridge that everybody can walk across or are we going to say you re on your own new hope i hope you do well i ll come back and see you every now and then or are we going to say no no no we re all in this together we re going forward together we have to decide that the great british poet john donne once said that no man is an island every man s death diminishes me never send to know for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee we have to ask whether we believe that i believe that and i believe that all of us will be better when each of us has a chance to live up to our god given capacity i am glad that there are 10 5 million more people working than there were four years ago but i m not glad that there are so many million who still want to work who don t have jobs and i won t rest until they do i m glad that there are more educational opportunities than there were four years ago but i m sad that there are still so many children who don t have what they need in their schools and for their future and so i say to you this will be a better country if that bridge to the future is wide enough and strong enough for everybody to walk across our obligation is to help each other live up to what god meant us to be that s our obligation the second thing we have to do is to decide whether we think it is a blessing or a curse that we re all so different that s really the meaning of the pastor s reference to the white house you know when hillary and our daughter chelsea and i went to open the olympics in atlanta it was a wonderful thing maybe you saw it on television where they re all walking out there and there were all these groups were going by holding their flags and their different uniforms they were from 192 different nations and national groups in our biggest county los angeles county in one county in america there are people from over 150 of those places it used to be in america all the racial issues were black and white now like everything else in life it s hard to see black and white that s another reason we need to show up in church to be reminded what some things are so there we have it now you look at the whole world pick up the paper this morning where are they fighting and killing each other around the world where are they even killing each other s children because they re of different religions different races different ethnic groups different tribal groups is it in the middle east is it in bosnia no more thank god is it in rwanda and burundi where tribal battles led people to slaughter each other s children and parents or northern ireland where the catholics and the protestants still fight over what happened 600 years ago and people say to me why are you so upset because a few little churches burned in the south because i know that deep inside every heart there is a dark spot with a capacity to define ourselves and our lives not by who we are as children of god but by who we are not who can we look down on today who can we feel better than today it s a big issue in this country today and everything i have said about every issue whether it was affirmative action or immigration or education has been driven by my vision that this country is blessed by god to have so many people in it from different places different races different religion different points of view we are living in a global society it won t be very long before the children in newark will be getting on computers and they will be able to research their papers when they re in high school out of libraries in australia or asia the world is getting smaller what better place to live than the greatest democracy in human history that has people from everywhere in it when the only thing you have to do is be american is to say i believe in the principles of the constitution and the bill of rights i will obey the law and i will show up tomorrow for work that s the other big question now whether it s me or mr torricelli or congressman payne or the mayor or anybody else there s a thousand different issues but the real questions as we look toward that tomorrow of the 21st century whether we re all going to go there together or just let those who already have it go there and whether we believe that we still are one nation under god even though we re one nation of many different faiths and religions and creeds and tribes and backgrounds and if we make those two decisions right everything else will come out all right we ll make all the other decisions right this preacher up here preached a message today he doesn t have to tell you the answer to every question he told you you get the first question right everything else will come out all right god bless you on november 5th be there it is your responsibility it is your responsibility it is your responsibility thank you dem wjclinton20 10 96b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you thank you so much all of you for being here let me begin by thanking the members of congress who are here who were just introduced congressman nadler eliot engle congresswoman maloney i know that carl mccall and speaker silver and mark mcconnor and ruth messinger i think is here and mark green and judith hope our state democratic chairman i think you re all here thank you thank you harry belafonte for being great and for always being there for us and i want to thank harry belafonte for another thing the support early support and strong encouragement he gave me to restore democracy and freedom to the people of haiti thank you harry belafonte for that as well i d like to thank whoopie goldberg who has been the most faithful supporter of our common efforts for the last six months whoopie emceed my birthday party and she was a stitch as always and almost made it bearable turning 50 just listening to her and she is a wonderful person behind all that good humor and she doesn t have to do this she does it because she loves her country and cares about what happens to other people and their lives and i am very grateful to her for that and i d also like to thank marlo thomas who spoke earlier who has been a wonderful progressive force in our country for so long and there s another terrific actor here who has come to a number of our events in the last few weeks and i want to thank him for his support and say that i look forward for decades more of stellar performances mr kevin spacey is here thank you kevin for coming i want to thank chairman don fowler and our general chairman chris dodd thank you terry mcauliffe thank you senator bob kerrey for not only raising a lot of money for the democrats but for recruiting stellar candidates for the senate we ve got a lot of folks out there that you re helping tonight you ve never met but believe me you can be proud of them they are good i am proud of them and i thank them to tom daschle and dick gephardt let me say to all of you a lot of you in this room know me better than you know senator daschle who s from south dakota which if you ve never been to south dakota i recommend a trip there some day last time we went to south dakota they delayed a high school football homecoming for an hour so i could have a rally in this little town and 10 000 showed up it rained and they stayed and then they went on to the football game it s that kind of place it was absolutely wonderful but i want you to know that senator daschle and congressman gephardt have worked very hard to earn the trust of the american people have worked very hard to make sure that we were working together to move forward in a prudent but progressive way and i believe will fulfill their responsibilities in a way that will inspire an enormous amount of support even from people beyond the rank and file of the democratic party if the voters give them a chance to lead the congress in the coming election let me just say to all of you i can be quite brief about this most of you know what the consequences of this election are in specific terms i mean if you just look at the budget that was adopted in this last year in the last couple of weeks right before the congress had to go home and face reelection as compared to the budget they wanted to adopt that i vetoed they took 50 000 people out of head start we put 50 000 more in they cut the college loan program we wound up with the biggest increase in pell grants for needy college students in 20 years that s the difference they cut environmental enforcement and ended the principle that the polluters should pay we vetoed that and they wound up fully funding our environmental program setting aside the sterling forest here on the atlantic seaboard agreement we re going to create three national parks in the mojave desert area of california we re moving forward but that s because the american people made their voice heard now you ve got these two different visions weighing in the balance the big ideas it seems to me are pretty clear everybody knows that we re going into a time of greater possibility for people who are prepared for it than at any time in human history there will be more opportunities for people in a position to seize them that at any time in human history within four or five years it will be typical a kid in a school in brooklyn doing a research project on a computer out of a library in australia that will be typical it will be usual you ll have children who will be e mailing each other from every african country that has an immigrant counterpart in a united states school there will be unbelievable opportunities to give you some example we ve created 10 5 million more jobs we americans have since i became president more than half of them are in high wage categories why because they re tied to the rest of the world more closely and into the things that we do well to the emerging information society we believe that we have two great ideas here that are very important that should permeate every single policy decision we make we think that we ought to be building a bridge to the future wide enough and strong enough for everybody to walk across who is responsible enough to do their own part we believe that we believe that we ll be a stronger better country and all the rest of us will do better if we give everyone a chance to live up to their god given capacities that s why we make a decision different from them on something like family and medical leave or putting 100 000 police on the street or the brady bill or the assault weapons ban or a better student loan program we just have different views of that we believe that we should do things that help people go forward together the second thing we believe is that we should be one community in harmony with each other in harmony with our environment and insofar as we can a force for peace and freedom throughout the world and if you look around this room just take a look think about this take a look around this room tonight you ve got people here whose ethnic heritage is in europe asia south asia the middle east maybe we ve got some native americans here there have been native americans in every other crowd i ve been in for the last week and every continent in the world you live in a country which is basically bound together by a set of ideas embodied in the declaration of independence the bill of rights and the rest of our constitution and we say at our best points if you believe in these ideas and you show up and you obey the law and you respect your neighbors you re part of our american community all over the world people are being convulsed by their ethnic religious tribal racial hatreds all over the world people are less than they ought to be children are being killed because one group has to be able to look down upon another group in order to look up to itself all over the world people are still taught the most ancient stupidity of all that ultimately the most important thing about you is what you are not when clearly the most important thing about you is what you are now we we in the united states we in this administration and we on this stage we believe that the best future for america is one that consists of our saying you may be different from us you may even do things we don t think are right we don t care as long as you believe in the same values that embodied in the constitution you re willing to work you re willing to be responsible you re willing to treat your neighbors who are different from you with respect you can be part of our country you will be part of our community and you will walk across the bridge to the 21st century and that s important now if you believe that it means that if we re going to be balance the budget we can t do it in a way that hurts seniors who have no other way to take care of their health care needs except through medicare and medicaid it means you can t walk away from working families that have children with cerebral palsy for example who couldn t stay middle class working families if they lost the guarantee that medicaid gives them to buy those wheelchairs for their kids so their kids can stay at home and stay in school and grow and do the very best they possibly can it means you can t walk away from that it means you can t abandon the obligation the united states has to continue to clean up our environment while we grow the economy it means you must invest more in education not less and open the doors of college education to all it means it s not enough to say that we re going to end welfare as we know it give it to the states and walk away you can t require people to go to work unless you provide jobs for them and training for them and an opportunity to find their way to raise their children successfully the way everybody else does it means these things it means you can t just look at children and say stay off drugs and then turn around and take away the funds that the schools are using to bring the police officers and the others into the schools to be role models one on one to these kids not just a once a month speech but a daily positive presence in the lives of these children that give them a chance to reclaim their lives look toward the future and build something good for themselves so let me say this in closing we do have just a few days left the big danger in this election is that people won t show up who have the most riding on the outcome of it and what i want to ask all of you to do is to promise yourselves that every day between now and election day you will contact somebody to tell them they ought to show up to tell them there is a relationship between what we do in washington and how you live here and every other community around the country that this country is better off than it was four years ago that we do have good ideas for the next four years and that we need to go into the 21st century walking across a bridge and walking across it together and the decisions we make in these elections will determine both those things are we going to build a bridge number one and number two are we going to walk across it together the best days of this country are ahead if we answer the questions right that means people have to show up will you help us do that will you help us god bless you thank you dem wjclinton20 11 98 bill_clinton thank you very much i have to practice saying mr ambassador instead of mr speaker but i want to say first to tom foley how very grateful i am for his willingness to undertake this service in japan i think there could be no better evidence of the importance that the united states attaches to our relationship with japan than the fact that in the last six years the united states has been blessed to be represented in japan by former vice president walter mondale and former speaker of the house ambassador tom foley i am very proud of tom foley who has guided and advised me and if i d listened to him more i would have even done better and i m very very grateful to him for his service here i m glad to see glen fukushimi again and i thank him for his welcome and i thank him for his eagerness to get me to the platform i wanted to come here today i didn t intend to go anywhere glen i was going to stay around i thank patsy mink for her distinguished service and her introduction as well as senator max baucus and congressman neil abercrombie congressman earl pomeroy and delegate robert underwood and all the members of the cabinet and administration who are here the united states is well represented in this distinguished group this morning i thank you for inviting me to speak and for the work you do at the forefront of the new global economy where so much of america s prosperity will reside in the 21st century today i want to talk about the current international financial crisis what we are doing about it and the special role the united states and japan must play to lead asia and the world back to stability and growth of course in part the present difficulties are the product of our own successes the world financial system fashioned at the end of world war ii has played a central role in dramatically expanding trade promoting prosperity reducing hunger and disease throughout the world but today the sheer volume of economic activity intensified by technological change has created new risks risks which are not adequately being managed today by many national systems or by the current international arrangements the root of the problem lies in the sheer volume and speed of the movement of money 1 5 trillion a day in international exchange transactions far far in excess of the total volume of trade in good and services on any given day in country after country we have seen rapid large infusions of capital often very highly leveraged into banking systems and into corporations without adequate balance sheets or risk assessments necessary for appropriate loan rates then we have seen the equally rapid withdrawal of the money too often leading to enormous debt devaluation and dislocation and ultimately into political crisis and in many countries great personal suffering the collapse of communism the rise of democracy the information revolution all these things have spurred people to seek the benefits of greater trade and investment but in many places institutions have not caught up with aspirations lack of openness weak legal systems have bred irresponsibility and on several occasions corruption they have fueled social unrest and in turn further economic instability now i know these challenges are quite complex but i am convinced with responsible leadership from japan and the united states from the european union and from many developing economies we can restore hope and spur growth we can build a trading system and a new financial architecture for a new century if we act promptly responsibly and creatively in september after consulting with japan and other partners i called for specific and urgent steps to boost ailing economies to halt the contagion to restore growth and a long term adaptation of the global financial institutions so that we can tame the cycles of boom and bust over the long run nations around the world have rallied to this common agenda america japan and other nations have cut interest rates we at home have met our obligations to the imf we re providing credit and investment insurance to encourage capital flows into developing nations brazil is taking strong measures to address its fiscal problems and ward off the contagion the international community has come through with an aid package to help we have developed a precautionary finance facility designed to head off problems before they get started in countries that are vulnerable to economic unrest but have essentially sound economic policies the world bank and the asian development bank will more than double their support to strengthen social safety nets across asia to aid those who are suffering the most just a few weeks ago japan announced the miyazawa plan to address the central challenge helping viable asian banks and businesses emerge from crushing debt burdens and just this week prime minister obuchi and i announced a new u s japan initiative to extend this effort together we will mobilize new financing to recapitalize banks and also increase funding for trade finance and technical assistance but nothing is so vital to world growth as ensuring that the united states and japan the world s two greatest economic powers also do what is necessary to expand our own economies for the united states that means continuing the sound fiscal policies that have brought us to this point investing more in our people and in our future and continuing to work to open global markets for japan of course the challenge is even greater today because of the economic difficulties of the present and the last few years but no people have done more in the last 50 years to overcome obstacles to exceed expectations to prove that they can adapt to new economic realties than the japanese the people of japan turned a closed society into an open democracy they built from devastation a robust economy that became an engine of growth for all of asia they have created products and technologies that have improved the lives of people all around the world including the united states they have been leaders in development aid to help other nations build their own prosperity even with current economic difficulties japan comprises 70 percent of asia s economy with others in the region still struggling japan and only japan can lead asia back to stability and growth by meeting its own economic challenges i want to be clear about something that i m surprised there could be any doubt about the united states wants a strong japan with a strong and growing economy japan s prosperity is vital to our own future already we have nearly 200 billion in annual trade and over 600 billion invested in each other s economies we have a strong political and security partnership which is vital to the peace of this region and the peace of the world and which i am convinced cannot be maintained over the long run unless our economies are also strong though the u s and asia indeed all the world will benefit from a revitalized japanese economy the greatest beneficiaries will be the japanese people themselves with new jobs higher living standards and a better capacity to deal with the looming issue of an aging population a challenge that confronts virtually every advanced society in the world today the keys to japan s recovery are easy to articulate but of course more difficult to achieve reform of the banking system to clear up the balance sheets protect depositors get good lending going again an increase in domestic demand for japanese goods and services greater deregulation investment and opening of japanese economies to create more jobs through increased competitive activity prime minister obuchi has announced a new package of tax cuts and funding increases to stimulate demand and he has obtained passage of major legislation aimed at repairing japan s banking system legislation which must now be vigorously implemented as america learned with our own financial crisis involving our savings and loans and those of you who were in america in the 80s know that we wound up closing over 1 000 of them delay in a crisis like this only makes matters worse by waiting too long to act in america we increased our eventual cleanup cost by over 500 percent rapid vigorous implementation of bank reform legislation therefore will make the banks more open and accountable prompt them to sell off bad loans get them back into the business of lending to those who can create jobs and opportunities and rapid implementation of the economic stimulus plan is also important indeed the people here may conclude that even more must be done to jolt the economy back into growth i think i should say in light of the town hall meeting we did last night with japanese citizens and the fascinating questions i was asked that i was immensely impressed with the level of knowledge and interest of ordinary citizens in this country in the present conditions and one of the things that i hope our visit here will do is to at least convince the japanese people that the leaders of the united states all of the cabinet members all of the congress members the high white house officials all of us who are here we have every confidence that japan is fully capable of restoring growth to this country and all of asia fully capable of mastering this challenge just as it has the challenges of the last 50 years i think having that confidence in the mind of the japanese citizens is absolutely key over and above any government program any spending program any tax cut program any other kind of program in convincing the citizens that they too have a critical role to play here in purchasing more goods and services in the domestic economy now a high savings rate is a very good thing especially for a country that s going to have a rapidly aging population but in order for the society to work japan needs both a good savings rate and a robust economy and jobs cannot be created unless someone is buying what the people who are working are producing and so i hope that part of what has happened here will go beyond government policy and that there will be a great debate among the citizens in this country about how they can have both the benefits of appropriate savings for their own retirement and the benefits of a growing economy by contributing in buying the products and services of the people who are going to work every day both will be required to deal with the challenges that japan the united states europe other advanced countries face with an aging population i also believe that japan will benefit by going forward with efforts to increase outside investment and to deregulate key economic sectors primarily let me say given the present state of things i think this is important because it can make a major contribution to job growth here in japan just since 1993 when i took office and we began an aggressive effort on telecommunications which was culminated a few years ago by the passage of the telecommunications act we have seen an enormous number of new jobs coming in to the american economy because of the telecommunications deregulation since we deregulated our domestic airline industry we have seen tens of thousands of new jobs created i am convinced the same thing would occur here yes there would be some change and some disruption but the net effect would be to create more jobs and better incomes and more stability for the people of japan we made real progress on our enhanced deregulation initiative earlier this year at the g 8 summit and i think it is crucial that we make further progress by the time the prime minister and i meet again next year we also have to do more on trade since 1993 the united states has been party to 260 trade agreements opening global markets from agriculture to automobiles to create good jobs and lower prices for consumers in 1994 at our apec summit the leaders resolved to create an asia pacific free trade zone by 2020 and we have made good progress in some areas especially with our information technology agreement to erase tariffs on computer and telecommunications equipment this week at apec we moved forward on the early voluntary sector liberalization initiative to open trade in nine key sectors worth more than 1 5 trillion a year by referring the process to the world trade organization as all of you know i m sure we had some differences with our friends in japan on those issues and we wish that they had been more forthcoming on all nine areas but the most important thing now is that japan play a leadership role in getting a wto agreement in all nine sectors this is very very important again i say restoring growth in japan and restoring growth in asia need to be seen as interlocking objectives this year the asian ailing economies exports to japan are down by 13 billion in america they re up by 5 billion we believe that this is something that we have to do together let me say that i understand that every society has certain sectors which are especially sensitive to trade opening initiatives i also understand that even wealthy societies and especially developing ones face a constant conflict between the desire to get the aggregate benefit of an open economy and the gnawing fear that it will not be possible to maintain the social contract in the face of global economics and that this can undermine the solidity of communities and families and of society itself the key as i said in a speech to the wto in geneva a few months ago is to involve all sectors of society in the process of setting 21st century trade rules to make a commitment up front that there ought to be due account taken of the need to preserve the social contract to advance the health and well being of people as trade advances to make sure ordinary citizens benefit from advanced trade to make sure we re improving the global environment not destroying it as we expand trade we know that these things can be done but the worst thing that can happen is if it appears that when times are tough borders are closing up other markets are being heavily penetrated in ways that can t be justified by economic forces and then you re going to have i m afraid a round of retaliatory protectionism i m quite worried about this now we had a meeting early on when it was obvious to us that this economic difficulty in asia was going to be very very severe and i made a decision with the full support of my entire economic team that we would do everything we could to leave america s markets as open as possible knowing full well that our trade deficit would increase dramatically for a year or two i did it because i thought it was a major contribution we could make to stabilizing the global economy and the economies in asia and so far on balance because our economy is continuing to grow the american people and american political leadership have supported that but if there is a perception of unfair trade the consensus can disappear you know this i want this mostly to be a good news speech but i have to say in the united states now we have had this year in one year a 500 percent increase in the imports of hot rolled steel from japan and a 300 percent increase in the import of hot rolled steel from russia no one seriously believes that this is solely because of changing economic conditions and if you put that against an inability to open more markets to have more investment to have more deregulation to have more market access it will create in our country the potential for a retrenchment here in a way that will not be good for asia or japan or for the united states over the long run so i say again we want to keep our markets open but we need fair rule based disciplined expansions and we need to avoid market penetrations that have no relationship to market factors all of you in this room know a lot better than i do that it still remains extremely difficult for some non japanese businesses to succeed in the market here we will continue to work for greater opening but i will say again i believe that what we re doing is not simply good for the united states i think it s good for japan as well i would not come here and advocate any course of action that i believe was good for us but bad for japan that in the end is self defeating we should follow these policies only if they are good for our countries both our countries over the long run and not only good for us who are in positions of decision making but good for the ordinary citizens of our country good for their future prospects good for their ability to raise their children in a more secure and stable and prosperous world so the last point i want to make is let s not forget what this is all about it s about more even than the success of your businesses more than the profits that you might earn more than the jobs you might have it s about making it possible for citizens in free countries to pursue their chosen destinies to live out their dreams to give their children a chance to live out their dreams to manage the tumult of the modern world in a way that seizes all the brilliant opportunities that are out there and deals with the challenges in a forthright and fair way i believe that this is terribly terribly important let me also say i believe that it is very important that japan and the united states as two great democracies continue our partnership for peace and freedom there are those who say well all these global economic problems are inconsistent with democracy democracies can t deal with these issues we need more authoritarian governments well if you look at the evidence it contradicts it that assertion many more authoritarian governments have financial institutions and processes that are insufficiently open one great democratically elected leader the president of the philippines president estrada said the other day noting he was referring to calls for greater open processes and greater openness in institutions he said now when alan greenspan and the common people have the same view we should listen i wish i would have thought of that line myself but if you look around the world if you see the encouraging signs from thailand to south korea to eastern europe to mexico you see that if people feel they have a stake in their societies they are willing to sacrifice they are willing to take responsibility they are willing to give their governments leave to make decisions that are difficult today because they are right for tomorrow and so i say also i hope that on this trip the united states and japan will reaffirm what we have in common our support for democracy our support for openness our support for the march of peace and freedom as well as the return of prosperity to asia and the rest of the world in closing let me say we have to have your help in all this you know that the private sector has a critical role to play if we re going to address the broad challenges of global change and the challenges of the financial crisis all of this you understand i m quite sure better than i we need your creativity your entrepreneurial strength we need your sustained direct investment in emerging markets your support for training health care and good workplace conditions to ensure a strong work force and stable broad based support for open markets and global free enterprise above all right now in every country we need your leadership to support creativity and change the world is different and it is changing at a rapid rate inevitably economics changes faster than politics and yet in the end if we want stable societies and successful economics we must have good politics you can help us to achieve that president franklin roosevelt once said true wealth is not a static thing how well we know that it is a living thing made out of the disposition of people to create and distribute the good things of life we must find the right formulas to make this living thing grow stronger over a generation of extraordinary progress the people of japan have shown what is possible now it is the challenge of japan and the united states working at home and working together to fulfill this promise to restore stability to this region growth to this country and to the world i am absolutely convinced that the 21st century can be the best time humanity has ever known i am more optimistic and idealistic today than i was the day i first took the oath of office as president in 1993 but i am also absolutely convinced as my daughter s generation says that denial is not simply a river in egypt we know what the challenges are and we have to find the means to meet them if we do we will be richly rewarded thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton20 11 99 bill_clinton thank you very much professor dorsen dean sexton president oliva to my fellow leaders and especially to our hosts prime minister and mrs d alema let me say a special word of appreciation to my good friend romano prodi for the very good outline he has given us of the challenges facing not only the nation s of europe but the united states and all other economies more or less positioned as we are the hour is late and what i think i would like to do is to briefly comment on why we re here and what exactly are the elements of progressive governance in the 21st century what do we have consensus on and what are the outstanding challenges facing us without going into any detail in the hopes that that s what will be discussed tomorrow first of all i think it s worth noting that it s entirely fitting that we re meeting here at this beautiful villa in this great city where the italian renaissance saw its greatest flowering because we know instinctively that we now have a chance at the turn of the millennium to shape another extraordinary period of human progress and creativity there are many parallels to the renaissance era in this time for at the dawn of the renaissance italy was a place of great economic ferment and change rapidly expanding trade new forms of banking and finance new technologies and new wealth more education vibrant culture broader horizons today we have the internet the global economy exploding diversity within and across national lines the simultaneous emergence of global cultural movements breathtaking scientific advances in everything from the human genome to discoveries about black holes in the universe we have in addition a much greater opportunity to spread the benefits of this renaissance more broadly than it could have been spread 500 years ago but there are also profound problems among and within nations making the most of our possibilities giving all people a chance to seize them minimizing the dangers to our dreams requires us to go beyond the competing models of industrial age politics that s why we re here we think ideas matter we think it s a great challenge to marry our conceptions of social justice and equal opportunity with our commitment to globalization we think we will have to find what has often been called a third way a way that requires governments to empower people with tools and conditions necessary for individuals families communities and nations to make the most of their human potential in the united states we have proceeded for the last seven years under a rubric of opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community of all americans we have also recognized something that i think is implicit in the whole concept of the european union which is that it is no longer possible easily to divide domestic from global political concerns there is no longer a clear dividing line between foreign and domestic policy and therefore it is important that every nation and that all like minded people have a vision of the kind of world we re trying to build in the 21st century and what it will take to build that world i think there is an emerging consensus which you heard in romano prodi s remarks about what works and what challenges remain there is also a clearer consensus that no one has all the answers so let me briefly give you an outline of what i hope we will discuss tomorrow and in the months and years ahead first i think there is an economic consensus that market economics fiscal discipline expanded trade and investment in people and emerging technologies is good economics in the united states it has given us an unparalleled economic expansion the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest inflation rate in 30 years the lowest welfare roles in 30 years the lowest unemployment among our women in the workforce in 46 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years and the first back to back surpluses in our budget in over 40 years but there are problems i will get to them on social questions i think there is an emerging consensus that we should favor equal opportunity inclusion of all citizens in our community and an insistence upon personal responsibility in addition to low welfare roles through welfare reform in the united states it has given us the lowest crime rate in 25 years and unprecedented opportunities for women racial minorities and gays to serve in public life and to be a part of public discourse we have also worked particularly hard to reconcile the competing religious concerns of our increasing diverse communities of faith in the united states the challenges to this economic and social policy are it seems to me as follows and this is where we have to close the gap number one what mr prodi talked about quite a lot the aging of all of our societies in the next 30 years the number of people over 65 in our county will double i hope to be one of them now this is a high class problem in all the advanced economies anyone who lives to be 65 today has a life expectancy of 82 within a decade the discoveries in the human genome project will lead every young mother including mrs blair within a matter of years young mothers will go home from the hospital with their babies with a little genomic map and it will tell these mothers and the fathers of the children what kinds of things they can do to maximize the health the welfare and the life expectancy of their children many of our best experts believe that within a decade children born in advanced societies will have a life expectancy of 100 years now this is a terrific thing but in the short run it means that within 30 years more or less all of our societies will have only two people working for every one person retired challenge number one challenge number two in spite of unprecedented economic prosperity in many places there are still people and places that have been left behind i ll give you the most stark example in america we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years 4 1 percent on the pine ridge indian reservation in south dakota the home of the lakota sioux the unemployment rate is 73 percent and in many of our inner cities in many of our rural areas this recovery simply has not reached because of the lack of educational level of the people or because of the digital divide or because of the absence of a conducive investment environment but every advanced society that seeks social justice and equal opportunity cannot simply rest on economic success in the absence of giving all people the chance to succeed number three there has by and large in all of our societies with heavy reliance on the market been an increase in income inequality i m happy to say it is moderating in the united states in countries that have chosen to make sure that did not happen very often there have been quite high levels of unemployment which people also find unacceptable and which is another form of social inequality the next problem with more and more people in the workforce both women and men and more and more children being raised in homes that are either single parent homes or two parent homes where both the parents work it is absolutely imperative that we strike the right balance between work and family in this case i think virtually every european country has done a better job than the united states in providing adequate family leave polices adequate child care policies adequate supports but let me just put it in this way if most parents are going to work either because they have to or they want to then every society must strive for the proper balance because if you have to choose between succeeding at home and succeeding at work then you are defeated before you begin the most important job of any society is raising children it dwarfs in significance any other work on the other hand yes you may clap for that i appreciate that it does so if people at work are worried about their children at home or in child care they re not going to be so productive at work that means that either the economy or the social fabric will suffer it is a profoundly important issue that will only grow more significant in the years ahead the next big issue i believe is the balancing of economic growth and environmental protection and because of the problem of global warming we will have to prove not only that we can maintain the quality of the environment but that we can actually improve it while we grow the economy i want to say a little more about that later but it s a very important issue finally i would like to put another issue on the table there is a political problem with achieving this vision and i ll give you just three examples involving all of us here in order to pursue this economic and social vision if you start from a position of economic difficulty and you believe that fiscal discipline is a part of your proposal that is necessary then you re going to have up front pain for long term gain and the question is will we be able to develop a progressive governance that will be able to sustain enough support from the people to get to the gaining part because everybody likes to talk about sacrifice but no one likes to experience it everyone likes to talk about change but we always want someone else to go first and i have seen it in our country i was elected in 1992 and in 1993 i implemented my economic program and in 1994 the public had not felt the benefits of it and that s one of the big reasons we got a congress of the other party chancellor schroeder is facing the same sort of challenges president cardozo is facing the same sort of challenges so it s all very well for us to come here when as in our my case that things are rocking along well in our country and the public is supporting us but i think it s important that we acknowledge if we believe in these ideas they will often have to be pursued when they are controversial in the knowledge that these difficult changes have to be made in order to have results over the long term and so one of the things i hope we ll be able to frankly discuss is how we can develop and sustain political support for like minded people in all countries who are determined to pursue this approach that we all know works and has to be pursued in order to create the kind of future we want for our children and grandchildren now let me just say a word about global politics i believe there s an emerging consensus that it s good for the world to promote peace and prosperity and freedom and security through expanded trade through debt relief for the poorest nations through policies that advance human rights and democracies through policies in the developing countries that expand the rights and opportunities of women and their daughters through policies that stand against terrorism against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and against the spread of ethnic racial and religious hatred what are the specific challenges to this consensus i ll just mention a few how do you place a human face on the global economy we re going to have a wto ministerial in washington state in a few days there will be ten times as many people demonstrating outside the hall as there will be inside and i understand more than half of them may not even be from the united states i personally think this is a good thing why because the truth is that ordinary people all over the world are not so sure about the globalization of the economy they re not so sure they re going to benefit from trade they want to see if there can be a human face on the global economy if we can raise labor standards for ordinary people if we can continue to improve the quality of life including the quality of the environment and if we believe we who say we believe in social justice and the market economy really want to push it we have to prove that the globalization of the economy can really work for real people and it s a huge challenge number two we have to deal with the fact that about half the world still lives on less than 2 a day so for most of them most of this discussion tonight is entirely academic which is why debt relief is so important we have to deal with the fact that while we talk about having smaller more entrepreneurial government the truth is that in a lot of poor countries they don t have any government at all with any real fundamental capacity to do the things that have to be done even in a lot of more developed countries they have found themselves blindsided by the financial crisis that struck in 1997 so we have to acknowledge while we who say we are developing a third way and in our case we ve been able to do it with the smallest federal government in 37 years we have to acknowledge the fact that some countries need more government they need capacity they need the ability to battle disease and run financial systems and solve problems and that it is fanciful to talk about a lot of this until you can basically deal with malaria deal with aids you look at africa for example aids consuming many african countries but uganda has had the biggest drop in the aids rates of any country in the world because of the capacity of the government to deal with the problem and i think we have to forthrightly deal with that let me just mention a couple of other issues a little closer to home we re going to have to deal with the conflict between science and economics and social values example the conflict between the united states and europe over genetically modified seeds and the growing and selling of food the conflict between britain and france over the sale of beef listen this is hot stuff now but you can see that there s going to be a lot more of this and we have to find a way to manage this if we re going to be in a global society with a global economy where there are honest differences and real fears we have to find a way to manage this that has integrity and that generates trust among ordinary people another problem that i think is quite important is all of us will have to decide how we re going to cooperate and when we separate in an interdependent world i think for example our congress did a very good thing to finally pay our u n dues and to enable the united states to participate in the global debt relief movement and i think they made a mistake to defeat the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty but every one of us will have to deal with these kinds of questions because there will always be domestic pressures operating against responsible interdependence and cooperation and finally i ll mention two other things i believe that the biggest problems to our security in the 21st century and to this whole modern form of governance will probably come not from rogue states or from people with competing views of the world in governments but from the enemies of the nation state from terrorists and drug runners and organized criminals to i predict will increasingly work together and increasingly use the same things that are fueling our prosperity open borders the internet the miniaturization of all sophisticated technology which will manifest itself in smaller and more powerful and more dangerous weapons and we have to find ways to cooperate to deal with the enemies of the nations state if we expect progressive governments to succeed the last and most important point of all i believe is this i think the supreme irony of our time as we talk about a new renaissance by the way that would make new york university the successor of the medicis i think consider this the supreme irony of this time is that we are sitting around talking about finding out the secrets of the black holes in the universe unlocking the mysteries of the human gene having unprecedented growth and dealing with what i consider to be very high class problems finding the right balance between unemployment and social justice dealing with the aging of society isn t it interesting to you that in this most modern of ages the biggest problem of human societies is the most primitive of all social difficulties the fear of people who are different from us that after all is what is at the root of what prime minister blair has struggled with in northern ireland at the root of all the problems in the balkans at the root of the tribal wars in africa at the root of the still unresolved though hopefully progressing problems in the middle east a few weeks ago hillary invited two men to the white house for a conversation about the new millennium one was one of the founders of the internet the other was one our principal scientists unlocking the mysteries of the human genome and they talked together it was fabulous because these guys said number one we would not know anything about the gene if it were not for the computer revolution because we couldn t have done the complex sequencing and then the scientist said now that they had done all this complex sequencing the most stunning conclusion they had drawn is that all human beings were 99 9 percent the same genetically and that the differences of individuals in any given ethnic group genetically were greater than the genetic differences of one ethnic group to another so if you had 100 west africans and 100 italians and 100 mexicans and 100 norwegians the differences of the individuals within the groups would be greater than the composite genetic profile differences of one group to another now this is in an age where 800 000 people were slaughtered by machetes in 90 days in rwanda a few years ago when a quarter of a million bosnians lost their lives and 2 5 million more were made refugees so that s the last point i would like to make we need a little humility here what we really need to be struggling for is not all the answers but a unifying vision that makes the most of all these wonders and relishes all this diversity which makes life more interesting but proceeds on the fundamental fact that the most important thing is what it has always been our common humanity which imposes on us certain responsibilities about how we live how we treat others who are less fortunate how we empower everyone to have a chance to live up to his or her god given potential if you ask me one thing we could do it would not be all the modern ideas if i had to leave tonight and never have another thing to say about public life i would say if we could find a way to enshrine a reverence for our common humanity the rest would work out just fine thank you very much dem wjclinton20 12 00a bill_clinton thank you well first i want to thank jan lori goldman for her wonderful remarks and for her ongoing work in the area of health privacy i thank the representatives of the doctors nurses consumers and privacy community who are here today and who add input into this effort i would like to thank my great friend senator pat leahy for being here and for his strong support of privacy issues in the united states congress as others have said i want to thank the entire team of people who worked on this they worked on this issue for months and months and months they worked hard some of them worked i might add at great personal sacrifice to themselves because of developments unrelated to this issue to get this out because they believe so strongly in what they were doing i also would like to thank my chief of staff john podesta who has been a fanatic on this issue in the best sense now i want to thank all the folks at hhs for donna shalala went over just some of the things that we have done in this administration over the last eight years thanks to all of you at hhs and she said you were beginning to feel like nebraska but look there s a big difference you know they say that because of the 24 hour news cycle we re all in a permanent campaign and when you re in a permanent campaign it s hard to take the time to go to someplace you have no chance of winning nebraska or someplace you have no chance of losing the hhs building right so i might say just parenthetically i had a wonderful time in kearney nebraska and omaha and you would be amazed at all the letters i ve gotten i have already received more letters than i thought there were democrats in the state of nebraska it was quite wonderful so i m grateful i want to thank all of you and especially donna shalala for these last eight years i believe that donna shalala is a superb leader a great administrator always full of energy you will be happy to know and not surprised that she has steadfastly defended the people who work at the department of health and human services in pitched battles at the white house over various issues you guys have so much responsibility over so many things every day you get a new chance to wreck an administration the fact that you somehow managed to avoid doing so and along the way to get us up to record levels of childhood immunization to get the number of people without health insurance going down for the first time in a dozen years to involve women and seniors in clinical trials to an unprecedented extent to add 24 25 years to the medicare trust fund and 2 5 million kids to the ranks of insured and do so many other things to be a positive force in the welfare reform movement is a real tribute to you but i think also to donna shalala and her remarkable tenure as a leader of this department and she makes it fun you know now she s going to become president of the university of miami we re just sort of a weigh station on her move south she was at wisconsin and then here and then going to miami i think you can confidently predict two or three things that will flow our of her tenure there she will improve the academic quality of the institution the football team will get even better and they will do whatever is necessary to clarify the voting procedures in dade county look we re having a good time today but i want to take a moment to be very very serious we say that we are a free nation in a world growing increasingly free and in so many ways that is literally true during the period in which i was president i was fortunate enough to serve here at a time when for the first time in all of human history more than half the people on the globe live under governments of their own choosing now that s a wonderful thing that s one manifestation of freedom then there s free speech the freedom of the press the right to travel and also i might add minority rights of all kinds restrictions on the ability of government to compromise the fundamental interests and rights of those who may not agree with the majority but we must never forget in this age of increasing interdependence fueled by an explosion in information technology that is completely changing the way we work and live and relate to each other that increasingly we will have to ask ourselves does our freedom include privacy because there are new and different ways for that privacy to be restricted in 1928 justice brandeis wrote his famous words saying that privacy was the right most valued by civilized people and he defined it simply as the right to be left alone nothing is more private than someone s medical or psychiatric records and therefore if we are to make freedom fully meaningful in the information age when most of our stuff is on some computer somewhere we have to protect the privacy of individual health records the new rules we release today protect the medical records of virtually every american they represent the most sweeping privacy protections ever written and they are built on the foundation of the bipartisan kennedy kassebaum legislation i signed four years ago this action is required by the great tides of technological and economic change that have swept through the medical profession over the last few years in the past medical records were kept on paper by doctors and stored in file cabinets by nurses doctors and nurses by and large known to their patients seldom were those records shared with anyone outside the doctor s office today physicians increasingly store them electronically and they are now obliged to share those records in paper or electronic form with insurance companies and other reviewers to be sure storing and transmitting medical records electronically is a remarkable application of information technology they re cost effective they can save lives by helping doctors to make quicker and better informed decisions but it is quite a problem that with a click of a mouse your personal health information can be accessed without your consent by people you don t know who aren t physicians for reasons that have nothing to do with your health care it doesn t take a doctor to understand that is a prescription for abuse so the rules that we release today have been carefully crafted for this new era to make medical records easier to see for those who should see them and much harder to see for those who shouldn t employers for instance shouldn t see medical records except for limited reasons such as to process insurance claims yet too often they do as you just heard a recent survey showed that more than a third of all fortune 500 companies check medical records before they hire or promote one large employer in pennsylvania had no trouble obtaining detailed information on the prescription drugs taken by its workers easily discovering that one employee was hiv positive that is wrong under the rules we released today it will now be illegal there s something else that s really bothered me too for years and that is that private companies should not be able to get hold of the most sensitive medical information for marketing purposes yet too often that happens as well recently expectant mothers who haven t even told their friends the good news are finding sales letters for baby products in their mailboxes that s also wrong and under these new rules it will also be illegal health insurance companies should not be able to share medical records with mortgage companies who might be able to use them to deny you a loan that actually happens today but under these rules it will be illegal health insurance companies shouldn t be able to keep you from seeing your own medical records up to now they could under these rules they won t be able to do that anymore under the rules being issued today health plans and providers will have to tell you up front who will and won t be allowed to see your records and under an executive order i am issuing today the federal government will no longer have free reign to launch criminal prosecutions based on information gleaned from routine audits of medical records with these actions today i have done everything i can to protect the sanctity of individual medical records but there are further protections our families need that only congress can provide for example only new legislation from congress can make these new protections fully enforceable and cover every entity which holds medical records so i urge the new congress to quickly act to provide these additional protections for eight years now i have worked to marry our enduring values to the stunning possibilities of the information age in many ways these new medical privacy rules exemplify what we have tried to do in this administration and how we have tried to do it we can best meet the future if we take advantage of all these marvelous possibilities but we don t permit them to overwhelm our most fundamental values i hope that these privacy rules achieve that goal and again let me say for this and so much more i am profoundly grateful to the people who work here at hhs the people who work with them at omb and in the white house in this action you have done an enormous amount to reassure and improve the lives of your fellow americans thank you very much dem wjclinton20 12 00b bill_clinton thank you very much senator i m trying to get in the habit here you know if i might i d just like to say a word of appreciation to all those hillary has mentioned to the young people who entertained us at the beginning who i thought were wonderful to the members of congress who have supported these endeavors but i d also like to thank hillary for what she has done she has been the honorary chair of the president s committee on arts and humanities a strong advocate for the national endowment for the arts and the national endowment for the humanities the driving force behind our millennial evenings and our campaign to save america s treasures which is the largest single historic preservation movement in the history of the united states so i thank her for what she has done it is true as hillary said that this has been for eight years now a labor of love for me because of my own personal history with the arts and humanities but each passing year has convinced me more strongly of the importance of every nation elevating the kind of people we honor today and of the fundamental lessons of the human spirit being imparted in the broadest possible manner i think it is quite interesting that we live in a time where there is more personal freedom than at any time in human history where in the last few years for the very first time more than half the people on the globe live under governments of their own choosing but in the aftermath of the cold war it s almost as if an artificial lid had been lifted off the darker spirits of people around the world when we see this remarkable upsurge of racial and religious and ethnic and tribal warfare sometimes leading to breathtaking numbers of casualties and so often leading to hatred and misunderstanding mostly if not always the arts and humanities bring us together by making us more self aware and more human they make us more likely to understand our neighbors and to be better neighbors ourselves and so i hope that in the years ahead when we literally have an opportunity never before seen in my lifetime to build a world of unprecedented peace and harmony and shared prosperity and inter dependence the work we honor today will become more important to every single american citizen that s one of the reasons that i strongly support the idea of a national arts and humanities day which the president s committee on arts and humanities has recommended and if i might i would also like to recognize as a group the recipients of the presidential awards for design excellence given every four years by the national government s general services administration to celebrate excellence in federal design the things your government builds with your tax money they remind us that with a little vision we need not settle for the mundane when it comes to the objects arteries and architecture that the government places in the world around us i d like to especially thank bob peck the commissioner of the public building service for his role in our doing better with the federal government s construction and i d like to just mention the award winning projects most of you will probably have seen at least one of them but you might want to look for more as you move around america the new u s census bureau national data processing center in bowie maryland the innovative u s port of entry in calexico california the wonderful refurbished grand central terminal in new york city the soaring sweep of interstate 70 through glenwood canyon colorado the mars pathfinder mission the franklin d roosevelt memorial here in washington the national parks service s park cultural landscapes program the westside max light rail system in portland oregon and the mayor s institute on city design here in washington i would like to ask the representatives of each of these projects to stand and be honored by us please stand now the honorees for the national medal of arts maya angelou once wrote history despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived and if faced with courage need not be lived again offering us always the raw truth and the eloquence of hope maya has shown our world the redemptive healing power of art author actor poet professor and incidentally san francisco s first female streetcar conductor she has literally and figuratively navigated life s ups and downs she has had a great impression on my life and as all of you know wrote a magnificent inaugural poem for our first inauguration in january of 1993 called on the pulse of morning i re read it again this morning and it still thrilled me america owes maya angelou a great debt for keeping us looking toward the morning as a boy growing up on a tennessee farm eddy arnold learned to plow fields with teams of mules and to play country music on the guitar fortunately for us when it came time to pick a career he made the same decision that a lot of us young southerners made he did not want to work that hard with the mules he chose the guitar and country music has never been the same in his career he s made records that broke all records his bouquet of roses stayed on the charts longer than any country song in history even down to today and he s had more hits than any other country artist he brought music into millions of homes across america i told him this morning when i met him i could still remember when i was a very young boy listening to him sing on the radio before my family even had a television he has earned the title the ambassador of country music and we are honored to honor him today mr eddy arnold now we honor the greatest male classical dancer of our time and one of the greatest forces in american modern dance mikhail baryshnikov from his 1974 flight to freedom to his reinterpretation of the classics from his soaring leaps to his bold forays into new forms mikhail baryshnikov has taken risk after risk and they have paid off not only for him but for all the rest of us as well his audiences have grown bigger and broader and he continues still to inspire us again and again with a renewed sense of wonder thank you mikhail baryshnikov since i never had in my whole life more than about a six inch vertical jump it was a great thrill for me to give that award and because of my musical life it is a great thrill for me now to honor benny carter a force in the jazz world for over 75 years now he liked to say my good old days are here and now this attitude his enduring focus on the future and the present and his enduring extraordinary talents help to explain how he has marvelously miraculously continued to compose arrange teach and perform music that speaks to the human soul from the day he picked up his first alto sax the jazz world has never been the same benny carter your entire life has been a great riff to the human spirit we honor you today still young at 93 as a young painter just out of art school chuck close decided to spend an entire year painting a single portrait his goal was nothing less than a new form of realism that would honor people without embellishment in all their so called imperfection that early artistic gamble would pay off not just for chuck s career but for all of us who have had the provocative often astounding pleasure of seeing his art like many people i am always torn between stepping in for a closer look and stepping back for a broader perspective that ambiguity is part of what makes his art so powerful so interesting so clearly a reflection of life itself i want to thank you chuck for your friendship to hillary and me and for helping us see in new ways mr chuck close believe it or not the great writer horton foote got his education at wharton but not at the business school he grew up in the small town of wharton texas his work is rooted in the tales the troubles the heartbreak and the hopes of all he heard and saw there as a young man he left wharton to become an actor and soon discovered the easiest way to get good parts write the plays yourself and he hasn t stopped since among other things he did a magnificent job of adapting harper lee s classic to kill a mockingbird for the silver screen and writing his wonderful a trip to bountiful and so many other tales of family community and the triumph of the human spirit along the way he s won academy awards the pulitzer prize and countless other honors today we add this honor for his lifetime of artistic achievement and excellence mr horton foote in chicago there s a booming art and theater scene that rests to a remarkable extent on the shoulders of one man lew manilow a founder and past president of the city s renowned museum of contemporary art lew has personally donated some of the finest pieces of contemporary art ever shown at the art institute of chicago for 20 years he has pursued his vision of reestablishing a vibrant theater district in chicago s north loop that vision too is now becoming a reality president roosevelt once said the conditions for art and democracy are one lewis manilow philanthropist collector patron has spent his entire life creating those conditions and sparking chicago s theater renaissance i can also tell you he is a remarkable person and a good friend mr lew manilow thank you very much for 30 years national public radio s cultural programming division has turned a small slice of the nation s airwaves into a stage big enough to hold the world from the mechanics on car talk to the music of carmen npr covers it all enlightening and entertaining us around the clock i don t know how many years our family has gotten up every morning to npr blaring away on hillary s radio npr plays a unique role in america s cultural and intellectual life examining with wit and wisdom the myriad facets of the human condition our national life and the state of the world we are a better more humane nation for the efforts of npr npr president kevin klose will accept this medal on behalf of his colleagues and we thank them all the art of claes oldenburg has a deceptively simple purpose he once said his aim is to face the facts and learn their beauty for nearly a half century this pop art pioneer has done exactly that his sculptures and happenings begin in commercial culture but quickly blur the lines between painting and performance art and actual experience with his partner in art and in life coosje van bruggen oldenburg has made monuments to the mundane a towering clothes pin in a philadelphia plaza a massive match book on a hill in barcelona a buried bicycle in a paris park together they have transformed every day objects into enduring art and added i might add a welcome sense of whimsy to our public places he s touched us all in that way and we are grateful thank you when itzhak perlman plays his violin he takes us to places we have never been where melodies linger in our hearts long after the music has stopped from his concerts behind the iron curtain to his classical recordings to his collaborations with jazz and pop performers itzhak perlman makes music for the sheer joy of it reminding us that pure beauty can help us all to transcend ourselves and our differences i must say in all the times i ve ever seen him perform in person or on television i am always struck by the sheer energy courage and happiness with which he has embraced life without pity or regret he is an astonishing musician and we thank him for sharing his gifts with us as a boy in new york city harold prince went to broadway shows with his family every weekend it wasn t long before the plays his family came to see were his by the age of 30 he had already produced four hit shows over a lifetime he brought to the stage musical plays and operas that have earned him a record 20 tony awards from westside story to fiddler on the roof to phantom of the opera hal prince s work has made america and the world sing today we give our regard to broadway s prince thank you hal prince few performing artists are instantly recognized by only their first name but when you mention barbara the whole world knows her voice her face her capacity to touch the deepest chords of our being from the moment she won her first vocal competition at a manhattan club when she was still a teenager barbara streisand has been without peer whether on stage screen or in the director s chair whether in musicals comedy or drama she has been a singular presence she won the oscar the grammy the emmy the peabody because she has a great mind an enormous creative capacity a huge heart and the voice of a generation i m glad we have this one honor left to give her and i thank her for all she has given us and now the winners of the national humanities medal if there is a common critique of the social sciences it is that their leading voices talk often to each other but rarely to the rest of us this has never been the case with robert bellah for decades now he has been raising issues at the very heart of our national identity and rejecting the easy answers like alexis de tocqueville whose legacy he has studied robert bellah understands the tension between two of america s core values individuality and community his studies on the moral and religious underpinnings of american civic life has helped us to know better who we are as a people and where we are headed as a nation and through some very difficult periods in our nation s life he has reminded us that for all our enshrinement of individuality we can never make the most of our individual lives unless we first are devoted to our shared community thank you robert bellah for priceless gifts scripture tells us to be doers of the word not hearers only william davis campbell is a doer he has devoted his life as a preacher and writer to breaking down racial barriers a member of the national council of churches he was the only white minister asked by dr martin luther king to attend the first southern christian leadership conference from bailing demonstrators out of a selma jail to escorting nine black students to little rock central high school he was an unsung hero of the civil rights struggle he has also authored 16 books including his remarkable memoir brother to a dragonfly will campbell said to me today when i met him he said you know i m just another yellow dog from mississippi and i said well there s not many of us left down there anymore there don t have to be many as long as there s someone at every critical time for our country like will campbell he represents the best of what it means to be an american and we thank him producing great television documentaries is a passion judy crichton comes by honestly as a girl in the 1950s her father a pioneer network producer taught her to believe in the power of television to communicate the grandeur and tragedy of history and to illuminate the great issues of the day in her own career as journalist writer and producer she has stayed true to that belief traveling from war torn african jungles to dusty historical archives she has produced documentaries that not only have won prestigious awards but very large audiences and in creating and producing the pbs series the american experience she set a new standard for what television documentaries can be with talent passion and purpose judy crichton has elevated a medium she loves and lifted all those who watch it we honor her today in a poem called the dream keeper langston hughes once wrote bring me all your dreams you dreamers bring me all your heart melodies that i might wrap them in a blue cloud cloth away from the too rough fingers of the world david driskell is a modern day dream keeper as one of the world s foremost authorities and collectors of african american art he has devoted his life to keeping alive the dreams of hundreds of artist and art lovers in doing so he has helped to lift the veil on the struggles and triumphs of a people and a nation yearning to be free his vision creativity scholarship mentorship and passion have touched the core of what it means not only to be african american but to be human in a too rough world hillary and i thank him for helping to bring us the first work by an african american artist into the white house henry ossawa tanner s sand dunes at sunset atlantic city for that and for more than four decades of excellence in art we are proud to honor him today earnest gaines was born on a sugar cane plantation near new roads louisiana a town where as he once put it there were places you couldn t go things you couldn t say questions you couldn t ask at least that was the case until he took up writing it wasn t until the age of 15 that he first stumbled on the public library and discovered hemingway steinbeck and faulkner after that he was never caught without a book in his hand or a writing pad in his bag his best selling book the autobiography of miss jane pittman made him an icon in black literature his last work the remarkable a lesson before dying won him a national book critics circle award his body of work has taught us all that the human spirit cannot be contained within the boundaries of race or class mr earnest gaines of all those whom we honor today none has traveled farther to be with us than herman guerrero he flew 10 000 miles from his home in the northern mariana islands the son of a baker he has led the effort to preserve and promote the rich history and culture of his beloved islands particularly the legacy of the chamorro people who were nearly wiped out by spanish colonists in the 17th century education and the humanities he once said allows the people of the northern marianas to rediscover their identity by honoring the past herman guerrero is moving the northern mariana islands into the future today we thank this baker s son for raising the hopes and dreams of his people america has been blessed with many outstanding musicians composers writers producers arrangers conductors actors mentors and humanitarians but there is only one person in our lifetime who has displayed all these talents in unparalleled excellence for more than 50 years quincy jones has stood as a true renaissance man of music defying all the labels daring to explore the entire musical spectrum from bebop to hip hop from pop to jazz the breadth of his musical repertoire is only matched by the bigness of his heart from south central la to south africa he has emerged as one of the leading humanitarians of our time especially in his work to uplift and inspire young people he is an american treasure and he is my friend and i am honored to join all of you in saluting him today mr quincy jones barbara kingsolver writes with beauty and wisdom about the ethnic and cultural divides that challenge humanity she offers in novels and essay a compelling vision of how they might be healed from indian reservations to inner cities to the forests of the congo she writes about our limitations and our capacity to overcome them above all she reminds us of the value of hope telling us not to admire it from a distance but to live right in it under its roof i have rarely seen an author that i thought had a more direct impact on people who read her works and loved them including the two women in my home so barbara kingsolver we thank you for challenging our heart and keeping us going edmund morgan is one of the foremost historians of our colonial beginnings as an author and an educator he has shed new light on our history from the tyranny of slavery to the intellectual sparks that set off the american revolution historians and general readers alike have savored his clear writing and clear thinking and his knack for the human touch the anecdote or detail that brings history alive for every reader for more than 50 years now he has brought america s own history alive for millions of us and millions of us are grateful mr edmund morgan toni morrison once said the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time for more than 30 years she has been following her own advice and in so doing she has blessed us with some of the most powerful unflinching and beautiful stories imaginable while winning a nobel prize a pulitzer and a beloved following of readers hillary and i are fortunate to be among her readers and her friends but toni morrison has not only earned an honored place on americans bookshelves she has entered america s heart she is in so many ways remarkable i don t know how many times i ve heard her say something or seen something she s written and thought gosh i wish i had thought of that i m glad we thought to honor her today miss toni morrison like many of us earl shorris first encountered the works of socrates and plato as a freshman in college the only difference between him and most of us is he was only 13 years old at the time that kindled a lifelong passion for the humanities a passion he has helped to pass on to others from all walks of life he knows the humanities mean the most as a part of people s daily lives not locked away in some ivory tower or secret closet his clemente program in the humanities has inspired thousands of young people from hard pressed communities to pursue a college education earl shorris once said people who know humanities become good citizens they become active not acted upon today we honor him for many things but most especially for his work as a champion of the humanities and as a very good citizen when virginia driving hawk sneve was a young girl she came across an old 20 volume encyclopedia called the book of knowledge she read every one of those tomes cover to cover twice in the years since her love of words and a deep pride in her native american heritage have propelled her to write more than 20 books of her own including several about her lakota sioux people a gifted teacher and story teller she has devoted the past three decades to educating children and others about native american culture to breaking down stereotypes and replacing them with knowledge and understanding her stories have helped us to better define the american experience to understand the native americans who were here before the rest of us had the good fortune to have our ancestors arrive we thank her for sharing her timeless wisdom ladies and gentlemen we thank you for joining us today to honor these remarkable people and i want to thank them again for their remarkable work for eight years now hillary and i have had the honor of presiding over this ceremony i don t think we ve ever had a more stellar group of honorees but in each and every one of those eight years i have again felt the profound importance of preserving human freedom so that people like these will be free to think and speak create to do their work to lift our better selves and lead us away from dark alleys and wrong paths we thank them and we thank god that our country is a place where people like them can flourish god bless you all and happy holidays dem wjclinton20 12 93 bill_clinton i m delighted to see all of you here and i want to especially recognize secretary shalala and my good friend marian wright edelman senator biden thank you for being here sir congresswoman schroeder congressman edwards and my former colleague and longtime friend governor jim thompson from illinois oprah winfrey lynn swann and andrew vachss thank you all very much for helping this day to come to pass the holiday season is a time for sharing the warmth of human contact with families and friends and making this a joyous and safe time for children everywhere is important that makes this legislation the national child protection act especially significant with it we can give a great gift a much improved system for protecting our children from being abused or harmed by those to whom we have entrusted them not unlike the brady bill this law creates a national data base network this one can be used by any child care provider in america to conduct a background check to determine if a job applicant can be trusted with our children and if not to prevent that person from ever working with children for the first time we ll have a system in place to protect the many millions of american children who receive care and supervision in formal day care and in other settings from other organizations this law will give us the tools we need to safeguard children from those who have perpetrated crimes of child abuse or sex abuse or drug use or those who have been convicted of felonies it s very important that we give working parents peace of mind about child care a majority of mothers with young children now work outside the home six million children are placed in formal day care settings everyday balancing work and family is hard and parents are worried about their personal security and the security of their children in an increasingly violent world like the brady bill and the crime bill which i hope and believe will pass soon this act will help us to take our streets our neighborhoods the institutions we rely on back for american values and american children there is nothing more important that our government could be doing now like all change passing this important law has not been easy and there are many to thank first of all i thank you oprah for a lifetime of being committed to the well being of our children and for giving child abuse issues such wonderful coverage on your show you wrote the original blueprint for this law and we re grateful becoming a tireless advocate for its passage lobbying members of congress of both parties for more than two years and lobbying the president people occasionally do that too all of us but especially our children owe you their gratitude now we can help to prevent child abuse with this measure not just to catch people who do it it s a great cause and a remarkable achievement and i want to thank all the rest of you who were involved in it finally let me say especially for the benefit of the members of congress here this is the last piece of legislation i will sign from this session of congress it wraps up a very productive session a session that dealt with family leave and motor voter and a new economic plan that brought low interest rates and recovery with the national service bill that i think will galvanize the imagination of a whole generation of young people with new trade legislation and with the brady bill but this is a good bill to end on a bill that ends where all of us should begin by putting our children first thank you very much i d like to invite you all to come up here for the signing dem wjclinton20 12 96 bill_clinton i thought the era of big government was over and then i saw all of these people here let me say as we move into my second term we have the obligation to continue the progress we have made and to build on it to prepare america for the 21st century with a government that is smaller but works hard not to abandon people but instead to give them the tools they need to make the most of their own lives and to build strong families and strong communities and a strong america today i want to announce the members of my domestic policy team who will make this happen today the labor department is more critical than ever as we work to make job training available to all who need it and to make sure that employee rights are secure and our workplaces are safe i am very sorry to lose the services of my old friend secretary reich who has truly made this a department of the american work force but i am proud to nominate as secretary of labor one of my closest advisors a talented leader alexis herman who got her start as a social worker for catholic charities on the mississippi delta i first met her in the 1970s when she was director of the women s bureau at the department of labor pioneering efforts to give women training and economic opportunity she has been a successful businesswoman and a leader in efforts to bring minorities into the economic mainstream and for the past four years as director of the white house office of public liaison she has been my eyes and ears working to connect the american people business and labor individuals and communities with their government i said throughout the campaign that we have to help parents succeed at home and at work and give working people the training they need to succeed in the new economy for years now i have been trying to prevail upon the congress to consolidate training programs and pass the g i bill for america s workers all these things we must do in the next four years as secretary of labor alexis herman will be a true national leader in this mission on behalf of working families let me also say that i considered a number of superbly qualified people for this position i d like to mention two in particular and thank them for their willingness to be considered first to congressman esteban torres and second the director of the corporation for national service harris wofford who has done a wonderful job in heading americorps which has not now enabled 70 000 young people to serve in their communities all across america and which will play a vital role in the next four years over the last four years henry cisneros led a revolution of ideas at the department of housing and urban development he and his team have spent every day questioning old approaches and searching for new answers he is my friend my advisor someone who has poured his heart into making the american dream of owning a home a reality for all people today a smaller and smarter hud brings more hope and greater opportunities to american communities than ever before not only in housing but in developing economic opportunities in ways that had not before even been imagined i think it is not too much to say that he is clearly the finest hud secretary who has ever held the position i will miss him greatly and will continue to rely upon him for his advice and counsel i believe that the best person in this country who is today suited to lead hud into the 21st century is andrew cuomo he has lived and breathed housing and economic development for more than a decade first at the grass roots as a community housing developer and then as our assistant secretary for community planning and development relax this is a pro family administration he is a passionate believer in doing what s right and he is a determined leader who gets it done his test is never soft sentiments but hard results the empowerment zones effort he has led so well is a perfect example of the new hud instead of big solutions imposed by washington it creates a partnership between government business and private citizens to help communities lift themselves up this is andrew cuomo s vision and it is why i expect him to be a very strong voice for america s cities and a great hud secretary the department of energy has many missions ranging from producing nuclear fuels and managing nuclear wastes to widening the frontiers of science at our national laboratories to promoting energy efficiently and environmental technology hazel o leary has made huge strides with that department and has done this while bringing unprecedented openness to the agency i mention obviously the reports that the energy department has done on radiation experiments and the groundbreaking work that the energy department did to lead us to the comprehensive test ban treaty to manage this diverse and sprawling operation a secretary of energy must be an experienced leader and manager who understands the demands of a large government agency who will demand peak performance from government contractors who knows why we must reinvent government and how to do it as secretary of transportation federico pena has proven himself a talented leader of a large and complex government agency he found ways to encourage new technologies promote safety protect the environment i am happy to announce today that i will nominate him to be our new secretary of energy he will continue to streamline and reinvent the energy department he will build on its unprecedented commitment to openness he will oversee the urgent cleanup of our nuclear stockpiles and he will work with the energy industry to create economic opportunity by using energy in a way that does not hurt our environment i am very happy that he has agreed to remain in the cabinet in this new and ever changing role and very grateful for the service he rendered at the department of transportation to replace him i am proud to nominate the federal highway administrator rodney slater first as the chair of the state highway commission in our home state and then as federal highway administrator rodney slater has managed large programs with skill and high standards he has rebuilt and expanded our nation s highways and linked isolated communities to jobs and opportunities he has built bridges both of steel and of goodwill to bring people closer together when the north ridge earthquake struck california with such deadly force rodney led our effort to rebuild vital highways in record time he is the right person to help us meet the many transportation needs and challenges we face as we enter the 21st century he has been my friend and advisor for many years along with his own family i have watched with pride as he has built his own road to success i can say that he was recommended by more people from more places in more ways for this job than any person for any position i have ever seen and in spite of that i am confident that he will be a superb and successful secretary of transportation over the past four years first with erskine bowles leadership and then phil lader s we have worked hard to revitalize and broaden the mission and increase the impact of the small business administration sba has doubled the number of loans to small businesses tripled the loans to women owned businesses even as its staff has been cut by 25 percent phil lader told me several months ago that he wanted to return to private life after the election however i have asked him to serve in another senior role in my administration and he will be considering this over the holidays i hope he and his family agree to accept my offer i can only stand so many of these people leaving to replace phil lader i will nominate aida alvarez she has been an award winning journalist and investment banker for the past three and a half years she has been the director of the office of federal housing enterprise oversight responsible for the safety and soundness of 1 4 trillion in housing finance institutions she combines business savvy with a dedication to public service i have known her for many years and have been very proud to have her as a part of this administration i am also proud that this is the first time a person born in puerto rico has been appointed to a president s cabinet to complete our economic team i will nominate janet yellen to be chair of the council of economic advisors since it was created by president truman 50 years ago the cea has provided objective and rigorous economic advice to the president under laura tyson and then joe stiglitz the cea has been unflinchingly honest and our economic policy has had hard work hard won credibility as we work together to balance the budget in a way that reflects our values and will continue to grow our economy the cea s role will be more important than ever janet yellen will provide the leadership and experience to get the job done she is currently a member of the federal reserve board of directors she had been a professor of economics at the university of california berkeley and at harvard where she taught among others the deputy secretary of the treasury larry summers who said that his grade was sufficiently high for her to be recommended for the job she is an esteemed writer and thinker who will serve our country well the domestic policy council coordinates the work of our domestic policy agendas agencies it finds innovative ways to use our most enduring values to meet our newest challenges today i am proud to appoint bruce reed as assistant to the president for domestic policy and director of the domestic policy council replacing carol rasco about whom i will say more in a moment bruce is an original thinker someone who long ago rejected the easy answers from any part of the political spectrum and no one has a greater impact on the thinking of the administration or the president he combines a unique practical knowledge with a real powerful concern for the welfare of ordinary americans he has been at my side from the day i announced my candidacy for president in 1991 he was an architect of welfare reform he has been a driving force behind our efforts to shrink government expand educational opportunity and fight crime for the past year as assistant to the president for policy planning he has worked to hone our goals for the next four years and now he will have a chance to make that agenda happen he is the intellectual core of the vital center under his leadership the domestic policy council will be a place where dynamic ideas are turned into actions that will make a difference in the lives of our people he is a person of the highest integrity a good friend and i am proud that he will be by my side as we complete the work of preparing our country for the next century finally i have prevailed upon my friend of longstanding mack mclarty to stay on for a second term as counsel to the president remaining as a member of the national economic council in addition mack will take on new responsibilities as special envoy to the president and the secretary of state for latin america with this new role i expect him to deepen and broaden his portfolio as he helps to coordinate and strengthen our policies towards latin america he is well suited to carry out this important role because of his business experience and his broad understanding of the new global economy this prospective was clear when he served as one of the principal architects of our economic strategy and played a key role in passing our deficit reduction plan in 1993 throughout this administration he has been central to our efforts to build our relationships with our neighbors in our hemisphere his leadership was instrumental in passing nafta and he led our efforts along with vice president gore to host the summit of the americas in miami and the 1996 atlanta olympics the 1994 summit was an historic meeting and will require significant follow up as we move forward to the second summit of the americas in santiago he will head the united states delegation to the signing of the guatemala peace accords later this month and this new assignment for mack should underscore the importance that we in this administration and i personally place upon latin america as we move forward the other members of my domestic policy team are here with us today attorney general reno has led our crusade to put police on our streets and take guns off our streets donna shalala has worked tirelessly and well to give our people quality health care to move millions from welfare to work to care for our children and their future dick riley has succeeded in reforming the student loan program and lowering its costs and making it more available to millions of people he has challenged our schools to reach even higher standards we have expanded educational opportunity enhanced reform and we will do much much more of this in the next four years as i said in the campaign this year education must now be our highest priority and i am pleased that secretary riley will continue to lead our efforts earlier this week i announced that one of my oldest and closest advisors domestic policy advisor carol rasco will join the education department as senior advisor to the secretary and director of the america reads challenge the importance of this initiative to me should be underscored by my asking someone this close to me to act on my behalf if you will remember in the campaign i talked a lot about the importance of mobilizing one million volunteer tutors all across america to work with parents and teachers to make sure that by the year 2000 every 8 year old in this country can read independently if every 3rd grader can read independently when 40 percent of them are not reading at grade level today it will dramatically alter the future of america s landscape for the better secretary of veterans affairs jesse brown has been a strong and effective voice for our veterans he will continue that they have the health care and the services they deserve federal emergency management administrator james lee witt has transformed that agency into a model for disaster assistance and helped communities all across our country to rebuild in community after community from the southeast to the middle west to the west he has made the term federal bureaucrat a positive not a negative appellation general barry mccaffrey will stay on as the director of the office of national drug control policy we need his vigorous leadership and he is in the process of doing something that presidents for more than 30 years have wanted to do but never succeeded in doing actually developing a coordinated disciplined long term approach to dealing with the drug problems and reducing drug abuse in america particularly among our youth secretary babbitt has been a wise steward for our precious natural resources and has helped us to solve some of the thorniest challenges facing america in this regard he sent me a letter right after the election saying that in one way or another we have protected over 20 million acres of america s precious land in the last four years a legacy of conservation equaled only in the two roosevelt s administrations and i thank him for that secretary glickman has worked to keep our food the safest and most plentiful in the world as we have overhauled our food safety standards for the first time in decades and decades and i thank him also for finding ways to promote agriculture and protect the environment as epa administrator carol browner has cut red tape and curbed pollution she has brought common sense back to the task of protecting our environment enlisted more allies and will lead the way in the next four years to making sure we do close those hundreds of toxic waste dumps that keep our children from growing up next to parks not poison all these leaders have done a remarkable job i am delighted they have agreed to stay in their positions and now i d like to ask the new appointees to come up and make some statements beginning with the next secretary of labor alexis herman dem wjclinton20 3 00 bill_clinton thank you very much first let me say to the prime minister how delighted i am to be here in bangladesh and how much i have enjoyed meeting today with all the people from joypura i thank you asia for your teaching i thank hasan abed and the other people who are involved in the brac movement i thank my longtime friend muhammad yunus for bringing his people here today who are associated with the grameen bank and i d also like to thank the people who came with the asrayon project that the prime minister has founded thank you all for making me feel welcome today bangladesh is a country that by traditional economic measurement is still poor but as i saw today in terms of the spirit and the ability of the people it is full of riches and the challenge we all face is how to unlock the ability the brains the heart the spirit of the people of bangladesh beginning with the wonderful children that i have seen but also including the people that i met with the asrayon project and the people who have participated in the grameen bank i want my fellow americans and people throughout the world to know that the people of bangladesh are a good investment in the future if you look only at the grameen bank it has 2 4 million borrowers in 39 000 villages ninety four percent of the borrowers are women 98 percent of the loans are repaid and now with loans for people to buy cell phones entire villages are being brought into the information age i want people throughout the world to know this story i want to thank the prime minister and the people involved in the asrayon movement for setting a goal that no person in this country should be homeless that should be every nation s goal and i want to thank the teachers and the supporters of the brac school for showing us that all our children can learn and they all deserve the chance to learn i also want to thank your government and industry for working with the international labor organization and the united states to take some 9 000 children out of garment factories and put them in classrooms there are children here today including a group from a special ilo supported school that our united states senator tom harkin told me about that he visited two years ago i thank you for doing that as well i want to continue to support all these projects i am pleased to announce today that the united states will commit several million dollars to help another 30 000 bangladeshi children move from work in hazardous industries into schools that will give them safer better futures we will work with the ilo and grameen to help 3 million women in rural areas gain access to micro health insurance and we will commit several million dollars to help women get new skills improve working conditions and secure fair representation in trade organizations we will also provide several million dollars to support another grameen program a solar cell program to use the clean energy of the sun to generate power in villages throughout bangladesh cheap power clean power power that will empower all kinds of people to raise their incomes in different ways in the next few years i would like to make just two points in closing first of all i want to bring greetings from my wife who preceded me to bangladesh she and our daughter came here a few years ago and she told me of all the good things that were going on here and she urged me to have the united states do more to support the grameen bank to support your government to support efforts to unleash the ability of your children and your families to build a better future and finally i would like to thank all of you who shared your stories with me today many of you have overcome great obstacles in your lives many of you still face great challenges but you convinced me again that no one no one should believe that poverty is destiny that people have to remain poor that their children cannot learn and do better you have made me believe more strongly than ever that every child in this world should be given the chance to dream and to live those dreams because i have been privileged to be president of the united states i have traveled all over the world i have met with the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world i have been in the most successful communities in the world i have also been in the poorest villages of africa of asia of latin america and i believe more strongly today than ever that intelligence and ability and a human spirit are evenly distributed across the rich and the poor in every continent on earth and everyone must have a chance every little boy and every little girl must have a chance i will do what i can to be a good partner and a good friend in that endeavor in bangladesh thank you very much dem wjclinton20 3 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you alan and i want to thank the lung association the heart association the cancer society all the physicians who are here today with the various medical groups dr brisco it s good to see you and i thank all of you for being here i thank secretary shalala and commissioner kessler and cdc director david satcher for their leadership i want to thank someone who is not here but who had a lot to do with this effort i thank the vice president who lost his own beloved sister to lung cancer for his strength and leadership in this endeavor normally i don t think the people of america should give the president an award for anything because the president s job is award enough it is an uncommon gift with a great responsibility but to tell you the truth i m kind of tickled about this today because i admired indeed i loved mike synar very much he was a good man and a brave man who gave the rest of us a great deal of energy and hope and direction and our country could do with a few more like him people that just rear back and stand up and do the right thing and if it doesn t work out they just laugh and go on and don t expect any kind of a blue ribbon or award at the end of the day when i gave the state of the union address and spoke about the challenges facing our country as we move into the next century i said and i repeat that our first challenge not the government the people s first challenge is to strengthen our families and cherish all our children and give every single one of our young people the childhood that he or she deserves one of the most important things we can do in meeting that challenges is to protect our children from what is rapidly becoming the single greatest threat to their health cigarette smoking and tobacco addiction this is like other challenges as secretary shalala so eloquently said a challenge we have to meet together to be sure government has a role to play i want to acknowledge the presence of two other members of congress here today who stood shoulder to shoulder with mike synar our good friend congressman dick durbin from illinois who run his primary for the united states senate last night congratulations dick it is a measure of his commitment to the issue that i talked to him after midnight his time last night but he suited up and showed up here today anyway we thank you and congressman marty meehan from massachusetts thank you sir for being here and for your good work here as well i thank the parents of america who have become increasingly sensitive to this issue and are working hard to teach their children i thank the young people here who are working hard to reach out to their peers and who often can have more influence on their peers than their parents or the president i thank the athletes and the entertainers who are committed to being role models the businesses who control access to tobacco products the teachers the coaching the advertising executives i thank the health care professionals and the volunteers because of this great sea of people in america what was once the work of a few lonely activists has grown into a national movement to protect the health and the future of our children three thousand young people start to smoke every day and a thousand of them will have their lives shortened as a result it seems to me that as president if i say that what i really want is for every american child who is willing to work for it to have his or her shot at the american dream that cannot be done unless we first of all try to guarantee them the existence and the health necessary to pursue their dreams and that is also what the rest of us must do we have as all of you know proposed ways to crack down on advertising that tells young people smoking is cool we ve proposed ways to make it harder for children and teenagers to buy cigarettes by reducing their access to vending machines and free samples we issued the synar regulation in january to demand that states in return for the federal money they received do more to enforce their own laws against the sale of tobacco to minors it s worth noting here that it is illegal in every single state of the union to sell any form of tobacco to minors we re working closely with state governments to ensure that the synar regulations are implemented quickly and decisively and i have to say that so far the results on that front have been quite encouraging to me all of you i want to thank for supporting these efforts all of you who have been fighting for a long time are now working to bring your experience in new ways to bear on this effort through the national center for tobacco free kids and i want to welcome especially some of the people in this room who are new to the struggle in this effort but who can make all the difference first let me say i am very glad to announce that two groups of america s athletes heroes to so many young people have come forward to help young women in particular are bombarded with billboards which suggest that smoking is cool and glamorous and a good way to stay thin the women of the u s national soccer team know better this spring and this summer they are going to make america proud when they compete in the olympics and just when thousands of young girls around the country are looking up to them they are going to make it clear that smoking is not cool working with the federal government they have launched a major promotional advertisement effort called smoke free kids and soccer the effort including television advertising will be centered around the team s matches all across our country leading up to the olympics in atlanta this summer it will make a real difference in people s lives and two members of that team are here today i would like for them and be recognized thank you very much former major league baseball players joe garagiola and bill tuttle along with mrs tuttle have stepped up to the plate to help get spit tobacco out of baseball as leaders of the national spit tobacco education campaign they are working to educate players about the dangers and to help protect the health of young fans who look up to them in fact they have just come back from a trip down to spring training in florida where they met with team owners and the players union and they are making some very impressive progress as well i want to ask joe and bill and mrs tuttle to stand and i want to thank them thank you so much and god bless you i also want to thank some businesses who are doing their part businesses of course have a right to sell cigarettes to adults but they also have a responsibility a legal one and a moral one to prevent cigarette sales to minors i m very proud and happy to announce that major united states supermarket chains are taking decisive steps to curtail the sale of cigarettes and tobacco to young people a p company giant food and pratts supermarkets are instituting mandatory training of all their cashiers to ensure that they know the law and understand their obligations to enforce it that means requiring identification from all young people who seek to buy cigarettes in july a p chairman james wood will recommend to the board of directors that a p discontinue the use of all vending machines by the end of the year giant is going to eliminate vending machines in all stores except for their 24 hour stores pratts doesn t allow any cigarette vending machines at all and in the meantime a p and giant are converting their vending machines so they only operate with tokens that must be purchased from a cashier i urge every supermarket chain and every individual grocery store in america to follow the lead of these three companies and shut down tobacco sales to minors i d like to ask the people here from those companies to stand to be recognized today thank you very much let me just say one other thing about them you know i spend a great deal of my time as your president trying to find ways to both generate more jobs for america and to help american businesses make more money because both those things are very good for our country and i m proud of the fact that our country has produced in the last three years 8 4 million new jobs and unlike the past 15 years almost all of these jobs have been created in the private sector as we have downsized the government therefore any president and any citizen must think seriously before we ask a business to do something that will cost it money this decision costs these people money and they did it because it was the right thing to do for america and i thank you for that very much i want to thank all the activists who are here in the room who have been recognized and those of you who have not and especially i d like to say a word of thanks to the former employees of tobacco companies who have stood up to tell the world the truth and i want to recognize one in particular the late victor crawford whose wife linda is here today he was a great champion for our children we miss him today we wish he were here and we know he s smiling down on us thank you linda for being here and god bless you my friends we have come a long way in this endeavor indeed a long way since our administration made the first announcement about our efforts to reduce tobacco advertising and tobacco sales to young people now we have supermarket chains athletes workers private citizens who have recognized the threat tobacco poses and this movement is producing results just last week there was a major breakthrough when liggett agreed to settle its lawsuits it became the very first tobacco company to acknowledge that tobacco can be deadly this is the first crack in the stone wall of denial my message to other tobacco companies is therefore simple and direct take responsibility sell to adults but draw the line on children i m happy that liggett has also agreed to begin changing their own advertising practices so that they have less influence over young people that s a good start and now i want them and the other tobacco companies to go the distance if selling cigarettes to minors is illegal no good corporate citizen should be aiming advertising at those minors my fellow americans we can win this fight we can save countless lives of our young people we can give them the future that we imagine when we look into the bright faces of these children who are here but we have to do it together it is folly to pretend that any one of us including the president can do it alone when he graduated from high school in 1968 mike synar called on his classmates to quote stand and be counted when the occasion arises well he always did this occasion requires us to do it for him and i am honored that we can do it in his name thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton20 4 95 bill_clinton mr president mrs cardoso members of the brazilian delegation to all of our distinguished guests hillary and i are delighted to welcome you to the white house this evening mr president i learned many things about you today but one thing sort of surprised me i learned that as a young man you were drawn to a life of the cloth the reason i learned that and found it surprising was my grandmother told me that i would make a good minister if i were just a little better boy and failing that that i should go into politics but i think for a long time your family and friends believe you were more likely to wear a cardinal s red hat than a president s sash well you embraced politics and now you lead your great nation but i can t help wondering whether after four months in office after spending 2 880 hours dealing with congress and fielding questions from the media whether you ever wonder if you made the right choice let me say from the point of view of the people of the united states you clearly made the right choice and it is obvious to all of us that your faith has remained a powerful part of your life otherwise it would be difficult to explain how you have endured arrest blacklisting and exile without giving into despair difficult to explain that although the enemies of democracy forced you to listen to your friends being tortured and later bombed the office where you worked you never wavered from the ideals of tolerance and openness those ideals animate your leadership in brazil today and your quest for social justice for all the people whom you proudly represent and you have added to them an academic s expertise in policy and economics which i am pleased to note you have refined by teaching at some of our finest universities we have all been impressed by the results you have achieved especially the success of your real plan mr president i have been very pleased for the opportunity to continue the personal conversation we began in miami last year at the summit of the americas the warm and productive relationship that we have established mirrors the relationship that is growing closer every day between our two countries we have common interests bringing free trade to the americas promoting sustainable development throughout our hemisphere keeping peace around the world and that relationship is more important than ever i know from our discussions that we both believe brazil and the united states have an opportunity indeed an obligation to be partners for progress in the americas for all the years ahead today we have taken that partnership to a new level let me also say mr president you know that you have come here along with your wife and your fine delegation at a very difficult time for our country and all the american people have been profoundly impressed and grateful by your expressions of condolence and sympathy and your assertion that we are all partners in the struggle against evil and inhumanity for that we are especially grateful and we will never forget it so i ask all of you to stand and raise your glasses in a toast to president and mrs cardoso and to the people of brazil dem wjclinton20 5 94a bill_clinton thank you very much to my friend willie brown and to sally field for those wonderful comments to ron and jan berkle for inviting us here to their beautiful place to dick blum and all the other supporters of senator feinstein s campaign there are two remarkable things about this evening for me the first is this is the third time i have been here and every time i come when i go back to the white house i feel like i m in reasonably nice public housing the second thing is that the second thing is that i want diane feinstein to be reelected so badly that i have spoken at two of her fundraisers but this is the first one where she showed up it s a humbling job i ve got you know hollywood discovers stars all the time and now america is beginning to discover diane feinstein you can clap for that she s sort of replacing tommy lasorda as the person people think of when they think of california you know before i started running for president that s what i thought of in california i d see tommy lasorda getting smaller and smaller and smaller on television saying he d shrunk himself with that slim fast that s what we re trying to poor into the federal budget now the deficit is down the dodgers are in first place i ve asked lasorda to take over the lobbying for health care reform i don t know before we get to diane s main event we ll have to watch this primary with bill dannemeier and michael huffington who spent 5 5 million of his own money in the last election and now he s spent 2 million to go on television to review bill bennett s book i don t know how she can hope to meet and defeat a person who is foursquare for virtue but i want to say a little more about that in a moment i think diane feinstein works for virtue and embodies virtue and i hope she will be returned on that basis i want to say something serious if i might this is a actually kind of tough day for me to give a speech i had the opportunity as senator feinstein said to go with her and senator boxer and others to the inland empire today to talk about how we could revitalize san bernardino after the norton air force base closure and what is being done there which is truly astonishing and then to go to ucla and speak to some wonderful young people at the convocation but this is a sad day for hillary and me because jackie kennedy onassis passed away last night and she was not only a great symbol of courage and grace and dignity for our country but she was a real friend or ours and a special friend of my wife and very kind to our wonderful daughter and like many of you when i heard last night that she had lost her fight my mind began to race over the last 30 years back to how it was then back to how it is now back and forth what happened in between one thing that jackie and john kennedy surely did was to make us all believe that somehow together we could make a difference that what we did mattered that our role as citizens was important and that if we gave ourselves to public service that was the sign of good judgment and compassion it was a fine thing to do in other words we lived in a time then when there was much less cynicism and pessimism and skepticism and in which public discourse was a thing of honor not a shouting match bent on destruction and division and distraction i honestly believe that our ability to bring this country into the 21st century as strong as it needs to be and as united as it needs to be depends perhaps more than anything else on our uncommon strength of purpose which we have mustered in times past this time to muster on our own state of mind to fight against all the forces that seek to drag us down and pit us against one another and to somehow elevate our sense of common purpose it isn t easy and there are lots of folks who hope it won t happen for all kinds of reasons but if you think about this race in which diane feinstein is involved it is an example of what we plainly have to do i ll never forget last fall when she was fighting for the assault weapons ban and she called and she said now you said you were for this mr president and i want you to help me and i said well diane we re probably not going to win but i ll work like crazy for it so she gave me my list to call and call i did and then that incredibly sensitive senator on the other side of the issue said that she needed to become a little more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics you all remember what she said in return she recalled how she became the mayor of san francisco how she tried to find the pulse of her slain colleague how she had been trained in the shooting of a firearm when she had terrorist attacks with a bomb in her house when her husband was dying when her windows were shot out well i don t know if that other guy s made a speech on the floor of the senate since then but i do know that speech had something to do not only with the passage of the assault weapons ban but with changing the tone and tenor of the debate in the united states senate over an issue of immense national importance when we were trying to get the assault weapons bill passed in the house same song second verse charles schumer a wonderful congressman from brooklyn had carried this bill and had been defeated by 70 votes in 1991 some significant changes were made in the bill it was clarified and tightened up a bit and we even did something that had never been done before we listed several hundred purely hunting and sporting weapons that were protected under this law and senator feinstein went to work and chuck schumer went to work and so chuck called me and he said well mr president we really need your help we re probably 40 votes behind and we can t get there but we ought to try and i said i d be happy to lose in this cause but don t be too sure that we can t make it well you all know what happened but i wish i could tell you all the stories that produced that 216 to 214 vote victory one of the clear reasons was that a conservative republican from illinois who is very much respected among his party members henry hyde was undecided when diane feinstein sent him a big fat briefing book which included a list of the assault weapons shootings in illinois since 1991 henry hyde stunned the entire congress by announcing that he had changed his position he was going to vote for the ban and he credited diane feinstein for providing him with convincing information when that happened then other things started to happen first one then another person would announce for the bill a congressman from michigan in a hunting area who had never in 20 years in the congress never cast one vote against the nra changed his position two democrats from difficult constituencies one of whom as an ex police officer changed their vote walking down the aisle to cast their ballot people knowing they were putting their careers at risk because they grew weary of the shouting and the pushing and the division and the rhetoric and they wished something to happen and in doing that they ennobled the whole public enterprise again they made us all believe that yes we can together make a difference i ran for president as i told those young people at ucla today because i thought my generation did not finish its work for america because i did not want to see my daughter grow up to be part of the first generation of americans to do worse than their parents in a country that was coming apart when it ought to be coming together because i always felt that we could restore the purpose of america and the promise of america if we committed ourselves together to create opportunity to insist upon responsibility from our citizens and to reestablish the common bonds of community in this country that s what i think diane feinstein is doing you know she s been criticized lately on the television for voting for our economic plan last year let me tell you why that was such a tough vote it was such a tough vote because in washington for so long we had heard nothing but hot air rhetoric instead of reality about what it took to get the deficit down my fellow americans there are only three ways to get the deficit down one is to raise taxes the other is to cut spending the third is to grow the economy we did all three with that economic program and it was the right thing to do the first 15 months of this administration there have been three million new jobs one million alone in the first four months of this year we will have when the congress passes this year s budget three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since harry truman was president of the united states of america at the end of five years we will have reduced the size of the federal government to a point where it is below two million people for the first time since john kennedy was president and all the savings will be put into a trust fund to pay for the crime bill to make our streets safer that is what we have been doing in washington yes senator feinstein voted for the bill and so did senator boxer and i guess you can say if either one of them hadn t we wouldn t have had it then we would have had what we ve been having for 12 years a lot of rhetoric no reduction in the deficit no reduction in interest rates no growth in the economy but people would still be able to make speeches you have to decide whether you want real progress and tough decisions made or more of what you had before it wasn t very good for the california economy and we re beginning to turn that around you know one of the things we have to decide is what standard we are going to require in our public discourse i know when i see an advertisement running against a senator like diane feinstein saying that this program was just a tax bill well let me tell you 300 000 people or a little more than two percent of your taxpayers including nearly everybody in this room paid more you need to know that 100 percent of that money 100 percent of it went to bringing the deficit down you also need to know that two million of your fellow citizens actually got an income tax cut 15 percent of the californians why because they re low wage workers with children who are hovering just above the poverty line and we want to encourage them to stay in the work force instead of going on welfare i think most americans think that s a good investment ninety percent of the small businesses in this country qualify for tax cuts under the bill california was helped by the capital gains tax for investments in new enterprises by the research and experimentation tax credit by now because your college costs have gone up the availability of lower cost college loans with longer repayment terms that s what was in that economic program that diane feinstein voted for that had the most deficit reduction in history i don t think it s fair to characterize it as a tax bill and i don t think it furthers the public debate all it does is further the present state of high rhetoric and division i made a remark a few moments ago about the publicity about bill bennett s book some of you probably haven t read it but it basically quotes other people on virtues you can t run a democracy without an addiction to truth and to fairness what diane feinstein has urged is truth and fairness if she gets it she ll be overwhelmingly reelected senator feinstein talked a little about breaking gridlock that s one of the things i was hired to do it took seven years to pass the family and medical leave act seven years to pass the brady bill five years to get a crime bill that s how long it takes to get things done in washington it s taken us about a year and 15 months to get a lot of these things done we are turning these things around i d also like to say that diane feinstein is one of the most effective lobbyists of anybody in congress i said today lobbying the president that is i said today when she and barbara boxer come after me at the same time it s sort of like mutt and jeff you know and it s like i feel almost as if they ve got this gigantic fingernail file that they re putting on my head and rubbing it you know and if i will just say yes they will stop i mean just say yes that s what they want me to do this is a serious issue you don t know how i ve suffered from this it is literally true that no member of the senate has called me more persuasively more frequently for projects that would create jobs deal with the crime problem or deal with the immigration problem in a responsible way than diane feinstein nobody in the congress she s helped me to change the whole approach of the national bureaucracy on defense conversion and base closings so that we can turn closed bases into economic oases for the 21st century she has helped me to pass a crime bill that has not just this assault weapons ban but a bill to provide 100 000 more police officers for our streets not only to catch criminals but to keep crime from happening by working with the children and the neighbors and the people in the community that has not only tougher punishment with the three strikes and you re out law but also more prevention to give our kids something to say yes to and a chance to turn away from a life of violence and to turn away from resolving their differences in a destructive way toward finding constructive ways of dealing with problems and frustrations and anger this is a very important piece of legislation you heard sally talk about the california desert protection act that also has been bottled up for seven years and after she came to the senate it passed 69 to 29 you wonder what it was doing for the last seven years on this immigration issue you re going to hear a lot about it during this campaign and you ll probably hear the incumbent governor putting a lot of pressure on me to do more i don t mind that i don t think the states have been treated fairly who have had large immigration problems not just california but florida and new york and new jersey and other states they have not been treated fairly or adequately but i ll tell you this in the last year we got more money for california in education health care and border patrol officers dealing with the cost of immigration that had been the case in the previous four years we are doing better we are moving in the right direction thanks to the fact that diane feinstein has taken a responsible constructive approach not just a rhetorical pressure oriented approach she is doing something that makes sense that will actually make a dent in this problem and she ought to be rewarded for it so i say to you this senator in a remarkably short period of time has established herself as a national leader on the economy on crime on the environment on immigration that s an amazing record in no more time than she s been there and she s had the courage to challenge her colleagues and her president to produce to lower our guards to trust each other to talk through these problems one of the things that i felt very strongly having been a governor was something i know diane felt having been a mayor and that is that most of our problems that we face now as a country and as a people do not fall easily within the past labels of partisanship you know i ll just tell you a story that just tore my heart out last week i was on my way to what i thought would be a wonderful day in indianapolis to dedicate a site for a statue honoring martin luther king and robert kennedy on the site where robert kennedy spoke in indianapolis on april 4 1968 the night martin luther king was killed and some of you may remember that magnificent speech which calmed the crowd in indianapolis and made it one of the major cities in america where there was not a riot after dr king s assassination and i was so excited and ethel kennedy went with me and two of martin luther king s sons went with me and they had just come back from south africa and they were ebullient and we were all so happy and it s a wonderful thing this statue s going to be made out of metal melted down from guns turned in by gun buy back programs sponsored by the indiana pacers it s very exciting and i picked up my notes and read yet another story of another human tragedy a 13 year old boy in greenbelt maryland right outside washington had just won a scholarship to a prestigious school standing on a street corner waiting for a bus shot dead when he got caught in the cross fire between two groups of warring youngsters neither of whom knew him or gave a rip about him he just happened to be in the way now when i hear that story or when i get yet another letter from somebody telling me they can never change jobs because they ve got a child with a terrible illness and their preexisting condition won t allow any other employer to give them health insurance or when somebody talks to me like they did in san bernardino today about whether there are going to be enough jobs for their children there after the base closings it just seems to me that those are the things that our public discourse ought to be concentrated on when i looked at those kids at ucla today that s what i thought you know in this country today it s going to be a great test for willie brown with his new talk show most people i m serious i m serious he s a delightful man with a wonderful personality he ll pull it off but the truth is that most people who talk sense and try to bring out the best in folks today are not great commercial successes if you want to immediately become a popular culture figure just bad mouth somebody they ll give you a talk show you think about it we have to fight against that i want to end where i began if you think about what the kennedys meant to us a generation ago they were able to do that because we had inside a willingness a willing heart a listening ear a willingness to be summoned to higher purposes a willingness to believe that we could come together a willingness to believe that we could make a difference you all still have that here you can feel it here tonight those kids at ucla 62 percent of the student body now minority students they re in the majority just as they will be in many states within a very few years you could feel it there what we owe to our country is to change the heart of the country we just simply cannot be with all these challenges before us all of which by the way can be met with sufficient effort and thought and constancy we cannot afford to be divided diverted distracted we cannot we have to have our hearts and our ears and our eyes open we have to stop shouting at each other and start talking with each other and we surely have to make a beginning by retaining in public life those people who have devoted themselves to actually doing something that makes a difference you will rarely find anybody who has served in the united states senate for six or 12 years who has been involved in so many things that make a difference as has diane feinstein in her very short tenure there i hope you will renew it and extend it the nation needs it and it will be good for the spirit of california and the feeling that we have to bring back to our whole country thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton20 5 94b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you senator feinstein for that fine introduction senator boxer congressman brown and congressman lewis i m glad to see supervisor jerry eaves he s already been to see me in washington mayor minor it s good to see you we talked on the phone about law enforcement not very long ago i was thinking when i saw mr larson up here talking he s about a head taller than i am he could run any airport in the country for me i kind of like that and i also want to thank our secretary of the air force sheila widnall for being here and for the very poignant remarks that she made about the importance of these military bases to our communities and our life here i would like to say also a special word of appreciation for the intense efforts that the california delegation has made to bring to bear in the oval office the needs of the people of california i know you thought that senator feinstein was being somewhat aggressive here on the public forum that is nothing compared to what i hear in private if you ve never been worked on by feinstein and boxer at one time just imagine if somebody took a huge fingernail file and applied it to your head sooner or later you just say all right whatever you want take it and run i d like to say a special word of thanks too to george brown for his brilliant leadership in the fields of science and technology trying to help us to modernize the economy in ways that can only help and i want to say a particular word of thanks to jerry lewis for his work with me on a number of issues and for his kind comments today and for holding out the prospect that we can still bridge some of the awful partisan divide that still paralyzes washington too often i thank him for what he said especially especially thank him for what he said about jacqueline kennedy onassis this is a very sad day for my wife and for my daughter and for me because in addition to being a very important figure in our nation she was a personal friend of ours last summer on our family vacation we had one of the most wonderful days i ever spent with jackie and her daughter caroline and her son in law and her brother in law and a number of members of her family she was an astonishing woman who i think did a remarkable thing in raising two very fine children in what could have been the destructive public glare of the spotlight i d like to just echo one thing that jerry said when president kennedy was elected he inspired a whole generation of americans i think without regard to party with the promise that public life could be a noble and good thing and that together we could make a difference the country had grown somewhat weary after the burdens of world war ii and then the war in korea and he said we ought to get moving again we ought to get the country moving again and people felt good about it even when they disagreed about the specifics the main reason i ran for president is that i thought we ought to get the country moving again and that we ought to pull the country together again i ll never forget the day i came to the inland empire and played in that big softball game some of you might have been there it wasn t my best softball game but it was one of my better days and i left that crowd thinking you know this is america we are a very diverse country but we re at our best when we re pulling together and out here in the real world where people worry about base closures and their kids education and whether their streets are safe most of our problems do not have an answer that pulls us hard to the left or the right or calls for a label of party or philosophy and most of them can only be solved if we air our differences in a civilized and honest and listening way and then pull together and work together i was afraid in 1992 that we weren t doing what we needed to do to go into the 21st century the deficit was going up when it ought to be going down unemployment was going up when it ought to be going down we weren t adequately preparing our workers and our children we weren t investing in new technologies we weren t coming to grips with the demands of change and nothing made it more clear to me than an experience i had as governor of my own state dealing with a base closing when a base closed in a part of my state that already had double digit unemployment before it closed and they told me that i could have some of this land for a public park but not to put people back to work they told me that we d have to come up with all kinds of money if we wanted to convert the base and the whole area as i said had double digit unemployment before the base closed well we tried to change all that our economic plans got the deficit going down and unemployment going down three million new jobs in 16 months we ll have if the congress passes this plan and i believe they will pass this one on a bipartisan basis for the first time since harry truman was president the deficit will go down for three years in a row and that s something that america can be proud of and we came up with this new strategy to try to help people who had won the cold war for us but were losing the aftermath because of base closings deal with that you ve heard a little bit about it today the announcement of the dfas center here and in three other places in california is a symbol of that but i want you to know how it came about when i became president i knew that the defense department had plans to collapse over 300 very small data processing centers into some smaller number perhaps as few as eight perhaps as many as 13 and i said well what are the economies of this and they had basically opened the bidding process again inviting communities to put up as much money as they could in facilities and other things to get these things and it seemed to me that that was wrong because this was a defense investment after years and years of defense disinvestment in communities all over the country and i know how a small investment like this can really jump start a whole economy and what it can do to the psychology of a community so we decided that we would go back and change the dfas process not to pick communities we didn t know who would win and who wouldn t but to give special consideration to communities that had suffered from base closings and we also learned that the economies of this were such that we could do 25 and save about as much money as we could if we just did 10 or 12 so we decided that we would do that you were the victor in that process partly because you had the talent and the resources and because you had a base closing so you didn t have to win a bazaar all you had to do was to show that you could do the job you could do a very find job and that you had suffered grievously from the base closing process that i think was the right thing to do the second thing we did was to change the rules for how we handled these bases under the old rule we could give away bases free as i said for new parks but not for new jobs under our plan we give planning grants to communities that put together groups like this we speed up the environmental cleanup we cut a lot of the red tape and we focus on creating new jobs as you know about 1 300 acres if i remember my briefing right has already been approved here for your new san bernadino international airport there will be a few other acres approved in the course of this year for good public purposes dealing with parks and education and other problems that you have and we are working now on the negotiations for the transfer of the land which will permit economic development of all kinds the thing i want to say to you is that normally when a politician comes to a place like this the emphasis is on what we are giving to you and what we gave to you here was the dfas center now i m proud of that but you got it because you deserve it you got it because you lost a base and because you have the capacity to do it but over the long run and i predict 10 years from now you all will look back on this and agree with me as important as that dfas center is the far more important thing we have done is to change the rules by which this base is given back to you because that empowers you to create your own future with a resource that rightfully belongs to you and you should be very proud of that today when i leave here i m going over to ucla to speak at their convocation and i ll try to remember that the most important thing for young people at graduation time is that the speaker be brief but i ll be thinking about you over there and the spirit of john and jackie kennedy and the simple idea that the future is something that none of us can ever take for granted that we always have to make for ourselves for our children and for our grandchildren if i could leave that legacy as president if i could make the american people feel good about embracing the changes that we re confronting instead of feeling threatened by them and believe again that by pulling together across all the lines that divide us we can solve our problems and seize our opportunities that would be a legacy worth leaving more important than any specific project my fellow americans we have to believe in our better selves again we cannot be we cannot be distracted divided diverted dragged down this is a time for uplift for looking to the future and for pulling together you have proved that it works let us do it for all america thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton20 5 94c bill_clinton thank you so much for allowing me to be part of this wonderful occasion and for the university medal you know for a person like me who is a die hard basketball fan just walking in pauley pavilion was a great honor i dreamed of being here for many years but i never thought that it would be on this kind of occasion i m proud to be here to honor the university s 75th anniversary and to honor your chancellor on his 25th anniversary of service it is the sort of commitment our country could do with more of and i honor it and i know you do too to my good friend mayor riordan president peltason regent sue johnson president shapiro to carol goldberg ambrose the chair of your academic senate to kate anderson and khosrow khosravani we had a great talk over there i hope we didn t earn any conduct demerits but the two students told me a lot about ucla to all of you i thank you for the chance to be here the spirit in this room has been truly moving to me today this is a sad day for our country and for my family because we mourn the loss of jacqueline kennedy onassis she was a remarkable woman of courage and dignity who loved things that ennobled the human spirit she and president kennedy inspired me and an entire generation of americans to see the nobility of helping others and the good that could come in public service in later years and particularly in this last year it was my family s privilege to get to know her personally and to see that the image which was projected to all the world was more than met by the true person behind the image today as we offer our prayers and best wishes to her family i think it well to remember that jackie kennedy and her husband called us to a time when the world was full of challenges that we saw in terms of possibilities not problems we saw our own lives in terms of promise not pessimism we thought our job here on earth was to build up not tear down to unite not to divide i say to the students who are here from this magnificent institution you now have an education as fine as the world can afford the question now is as you go out into the world what is your attitude about yourselves each other your country and your future ucla as i watched that slide show it was clear to me again is an example of america s faith in the future the thing that s kept us going for 218 years now seventy five years ago this was just a tiny two year teachers college on a dirt road in hollywood now it s one of the leading research institutions in the world and a bridge to the future for tens of thousands of americans and people who come from all around the world to be here there s no better place to discuss the future than here in california america s last frontier for all your present difficulties don t ever forget that california is still america s america the cutting edge for a nation still a symbol of hope and optimism throughout the world i want to say that i very much envy those of you who are beginning your future here and now on the edge of this new century many say that this generation of college graduates is filled with pessimism with a sense of generational despair that our glory days are behind us americans of my generation have been bombarded by images on television shows and even one book about the so called generation x filled with cynics and slackers well what i have seen today is not a generation of slackers but a generation of seekers and i am much encouraged to be sure you are beginning your journey in uncertain times many of the college graduates of 1994 were born in 1973 that was a watershed year in american life you see from the end of world war ii until 1973 family income doubled in america and we lived in an era of prosperity that we almost came to take for granted the middle class grew ever larger and more secure our country was stronger people just took it for granted that they could jobs they could hold for a lifetime that they would always do better every year than they did the year before that they would be able to afford to send their children to college to have a comfortable retirement to own their own homes and to take care of their parents since then most americans have worked harder and harder for the same or lower incomes our society has suffered unbelievable stresses as broken homes and unwed mothers have become commonplace in many places devastated by poverty and despair we have seen the absolute collapse of families and work itself and the sense of community and in that vacuum have rushed gangs and drugs and violence the kind of random violence that today often makes neighbors seem like strangers and strangers thought of as enemies in the time that many of you went from the first grade through high school graduation when all this was going on your national government was embroiled in a sense of gridlock and paralysis and high rhetoric and low action the deficit quadrupled but there were no investments made adequate to the challenges of the future and many of our tough problems were talked about but not acted on here in this county you ve experienced earthquakes of all kinds not just the real earthquake of january but social and economic upheavals the trends that are shaking and remaking our entire society have hit california first and hardest next month many college graduates will move on to their first full time jobs and i wonder how many of you have like me laughed and almost cried reading that wonderful doonesbury comic strip that is on some days i think it s wonderful some days i m not so sure which means i probably feel the same way about mr trudeau that he feels about me but he s you know the great doonesbury strip about the students at the college graduation trading stories about their job openings and whether they re going to be selling blue jeans or flipping hamburgers well it s funny but it s not quite accurate the truth is that education still makes a huge difference in what you can do with your lives and your future it is still the key indeed more the key today than ever before the truth also is that your destiny will be filled with great chances and great choices as with every new generation in this country you will make your mark by exploring new frontiers once the challenge was settling a new continent now it is preparing for a new century and you face the next american frontier which you can see here at ucla all around you living with people who may seem different working with technologies that may seem difficult pursuing markets and opportunities that may seem distant for the rest of your lives you will face this choice in the face of bewildering intense sometimes overpowering change you can recoil you can hope to do as well as you can for as long as you can simply by trying to hold the future at arm s length or you can act in the spirit of america to the state or this great university of which you are a part the spirit of the families who sacrificed so much to bring you here you can embrace the future with all of its changes and engage in what the late oliver wendell holmes called the action and passion of your time the choice you make as individuals and as a generation will make all the difference three times in this century alone our nation has found itself a victor in global conflicts world war i world war ii and the cold war three times america has faced the fundamental question of which direction we would take embracing or rejecting the future seventy five years ago when this university was founded we faced one of those pivotal moments at that time just after the end of world war i there was also wrenching change and enormous anxiety the nation s hottest new novelist was a man named f scott fitzgerald he described the so called lost generation the first that would graduate from ucla he said that they grew up and i quote to find all gods dead all wars fought all faiths in man shaken america withdrew from the world seeking security and isolationism and protectionism an ugly withdrawal occurred here at home as well a retreat into the trenches of racial prejudice and religious prejudice of class bigotry and easy convenience and a simple refusal to prepare our people to live in the world as it was ten years later just ten years later in 1929 that decade of neglect produced the great depression and soon we learned we could not withdraw from a world menaced by dictators and we found ourselves again in a world war at the end of the second world war we made a very different choice as a people we decided to reach out to the future together together here at home and together with nations around the world as franklin roosevelt said of the generation of my parents and the graduates grandparents they believed history was i quote a highway on which your fellow men and women are advancing with you abroad we lifted former allies and former enemies from the ashes at home investment in the future began with the returning warriors the g i bill helped millions of americans to get an education to buy homes to build the great american middle class we made a solemn covenant we would help those who would help themselves the wise decisions of that time built four decades of robust economic growth and expanding opportunity and laid the foundation for us to be able to win the cold war now we stand at our third pivotal moment in this history and you are designed to play the leading role the cold war is over it is up to all of us to keep the american dream alive here at home even as it advances abroad but this miracle of renewal must begin with personal decisions i sought the presidency in large measure because i thought my generation had not yet done its job for america i did not want my daughter to grow up to be part of the first generation of americans to do worse than their parents as we were becoming more wonderful diverse i did not want her to live in a country that was coming apart when it ought to be coming together i wanted to forge the two great sources of strength that our nation has the power of our representative government as manifested in the presidency to address the challenges of every age and time and the far far greater power of the american people themselves to transform themselves their families and their communities to seize the future and make it theirs my generation s responsibility to you is heavy indeed we are working in washington to meet it working to turn around the economic difficulties and we have made a good beginning 3 million new jobs in 15 months three years of deficit reduction three years of deficit reduction for the first time since harry truman was president at the end of this budget cycle the smallest federal government in 30 years since john kennedy was president with all the savings going back to you to make america safer with more police officers on the street and programs to help our children stay out of crime and have a better future we are investing in the technologies of tomorrow from defense conversion to environmental protection to the information superhighway with new attacks on our profoundest problems from aids to women s health problems to homelessness to the deed to have enterprise development among the poor in cities and rural areas to the terrible difficulties of our health care system we are building education for a lifetime from dramatic expansions in head start to permanent retraining programs for displaced adults we are looking for new markets for our products and services with new trade agreements and new opportunities to sell our best efforts here around the world my fellow americans this country is on the move and california is coming back but the real problem i believe we have today is the problem i came to talk to you about what will the attitude of your generation be and how will you approach the future that is before you jackie kennedy and her husband made us believe that citizenship was a wonderful thing that we all had the capacity to be better people and to work together and that the things we could do together would make a very great difference indeed if president kennedy were alive today he would be absolutely shocked at the pessimism the negativism the division the destructive tone of public discourse in america today we know we can do better but if we are to do better you will have to lead us by looking around at all this diversity you have celebrated today by this devotion to community you have exhausted and bringing it out of us just before i came here i stopped briefly at norton air force base in san bernardino which as you know was one of the bases closed to announce the progress we are making at rebuilding that community with a new computer center there with turning over the land to a new airport and for other public purposes and eventually for economic development and it s the first one of these bases in the country that the government has finally said let s help people build their economy instead of dragging this out til kingdom come and it was a celebration that knew no party lines knew no philosophical lines knew no racial lines nobody was out there talking about left and right and liberal and conservative and republican and democrat they were talking about how we could deal with the real problems and opportunities of those people to pull that community together and push it forward into the future that is what we must do as a people and that is what your generation must do in order for america to fulfill its promise now to do that in a great democracy where there are a myriad of complex problems and legitimate differences of opinion we must learn to do something as a people that we often take for granted in the university we have to learn to talk to each other and to listen to each other not to talk past each other and to scream at one another we have been caught up in what georgetown professor deborah tannen calls a culture of critique one sure way to get instant public standing in our popular culture is to slam somebody else if you work on bringing people together and you talk about it you re likely to elicit a yawn but if you badmouth people you can get yourself a talk show this country was not built by bad mouthing go back and look at the history of the constitutional convention go back and look at how people got together wildly different points of view and argued heatedly but always with a common love of this country and the values of freedom and mutual respect we have to find a way in this age and time to restore that kind of discourse and that kind of respect we cannot afford to engage in the citizenship of division and distraction and destruction we have a future to build and you must lead the way you know you can do it because of the way you have been educated here and the people from whom you have learned and with whom you ve learned and you can lead the way for the whole future of this country it was because i believe that so strongly that i put at the center of what symbolizes our administration the national service corps what we call americorps the opportunity for tens of thousands of young people to work where they live or where they go to school solving the problems of america at the grass roots learning from each other reaching across lines that divide them and earning money for their educations at the same time rebuild america and educate a new generation it s sort of a domestic g i bill and a domestic peace corps all rolled into one it was inspired by efforts that i saw all over america over the last few years efforts like the california campus compact which your chancellor helped to found which now commits more than 50 colleges and universities in this state to helping students serve their communities at ucla alone some 4 000 of you are working in more than 40 service programs and i honor you for that this summer 7 000 young americans will work in a summer of safety helping their communities to be less violent last summer in our first summer of service thousands of people all over the country including here in los angeles taught young people everything from how to stay away from drugs to how to stay safe in an earthquake service creates heroes i was interested in the three people acknowledged there by chancellor young and i appreciate what he said let me say that there s one project i d like to mention in particular which one of the young students is involved in saru jayaraman along with another student desiree desurra they helped to found the women in support of each other acronym wise this program wise helped high school girls to make wise decisions to pursue their education and not to become single mothers desiree was one of three students selected to win this year s chancellor s humanitarian award now let me tell you what that means to me that is america at its best people helping people telling people look maybe the president should do something maybe the chancellor of the university should do something maybe the mayor should do something but in the end you also have to take responsibility for your own lives you have to make good decisions in order to be part of a good future thousands of young people just here on this campus alone have made a decision to make a difference beginning this september americorps will enable tens of thousands more to do that i hope i live long enough to see hundreds of thousands of people in this program every year earning their way to a better education by rebuilding america every day at the grass roots level the point of all that i have said is this the future is not an inheritance it is an opportunity and an obligation it is something you have to make in every generation and it will be your achievement not only for yourselves individually but for your generation for your community and for the larger community that is america if you look around you at this incredible campus where minorities make up a majority something that will be true for whole states in the not too distant future you see the future l a county with over 150 different racial and ethnic groups thousands of people in this county celebrating this month as asian pacific american heritage month because of the number of people who live here a few days ago in america we celebrated the cinco de mayo celebration mexican independence day and it is now as big a celebration in america as it is in mexico because of our diversity will it be a source of our strength in the global village or will we permit it to divide us i believe i know the answer and i think you do too there s no reason to be cynical about the future no matter how difficult our problems are look what s just happened in the last four or five years since many of you came to the university here the end of the cold war the fall of the berlin wall just in the last year russia and the united states agreed not to point nuclear weapons at each other anymore rabin and arafat agreed to self government for the palestinians in jericho and the gaza the jailer and the jailed de klerk and mandela agreed that south africa free united is more important than anything else in just a few days from now i will go to represent you at the 50th anniversary of the d day invasion just a few days ago i was able to speak on the 40th anniversary of the supreme court s landmark decision in brown v board of education it is very important for a great country to remember those moments but remember this my fellow americans when our memories exceed our dreams we have begun to grow old and it is the destiny of america to remain forever young so i ask you this young graduates especially when you see in a few days the glories of d day recounted one of the most masterful mobilization of people to achieve a common objective one of the most stunning examples of personal courage in all of human history remember that it was the work of citizen soldiers who were mostly between the ages of 18 and 25 people who had grown up in the false prosperity of the 20s and the bitter realities of the 30s people who read books and movies that protrayed them as slackers and the future as dark and cynical but they rallied that day to a cause larger than themselves and when they had done the job they were sent to do to save their country to save freedom to save a civilization they came home and got on with the business of making lives for themselves their children and their children s children thanks to them and to god almighty you will probably never have to face that kind of challenge in your life but instead to face the challenges unique to your generation the challenges of a new and wide open world the challenges of breakdown here at home that we must reverse i believe you are ready for that test and that you will meet it you have the educational tools to meet it you must now make sure that deep down inside you have the spirit the drive the courage the vision we are all depending on you thank you very much dem wjclinton20 5 95 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much dr etzioni thank you for that introduction and for the inspiration that your work has given to me and to so many others for your wonderful book the spirit of community and for working on this as hard as you have i d like to say a special word of thanks to one of the co founders of this network he s been a member of the white house staff since i became president bill galston for his constant inspiration and prodding to me i d like to thank the secretary of education and tom payzant the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education for what they have done to try to promote character education as a part of the larger strategy toward a new communitarian vision for our country you know from the time i began thinking about how we would get into the 21st century and long before i even thought of running for president it seemed to me that the there were three words which were inextricably linked as if you think about america moving into the future opportunity responsibility and community those were the three words that basically were at the heart of my campaign for president and have been at the heart of what i have tried to do as president i also believe that government cannot do these things for america i believe that we have to have in a complicated open pluralistic society like this one a great network of people working together in every major important center of our society and that s what i want to talk to you about today i d like to begin with a few comments about the most obvious recent event that in terms of your government s action that you must have noticed when you came in today which is that i have approved of the secretary of the treasury s decision to close the two blocks of pennsylvania avenue just here in front of the white house to vehicular traffic i did this reluctantly pennsylvania avenue has been open to ordinary traffic since the beginning of our republic i did it after an extensive review by the secret service the treasury department officials and a distinguished independent panel of american experts who have served in administrations of both the democratic and republican presidents all recommending that this be done they believe it is necessary to protect the president and his family the structure of the white house the hundreds of people who work there and the people who come and visit there both on official business and as ordinary citizens they believe it is necessary to protect the white house against the kind of attacks that were sustained in oklahoma city now i want to emphasize a couple of things about this first of all access to the white house itself will not be limited the area will be converted into a pedestrian mall and people will be able to visit as they always have they ll be able to have their picture taken out front with cardboard figures as they always have they ll be able to go to lafayette park and protest against the president as they always have and indeed they will be able to do that more protected themselves from becoming innocent victims of those who would seek to destroy the symbols of our freedom we also will be working with the local officials here to make every effort to reroute the traffic in a way that minimizes inconvenience and disruption to the lives of those who live in or work in washington d c our society as an open society is as we saw with japan and the terrible incident in the japanese subway vulnerable to the forces of organized destruction from within and beyond our borders and we must take reasonable precautions against them not to restrict our freedom but to secure it and as technology changes the opportunity for organized destruction we have to respond to that i think the american people should see this in the same context that they viewed metal detectors in airports do you remember when they started there were those who say oh this is a big infringement on our freedom but most of us now are only too happy to go through those metal detectors because we see that there are a lot fewer highjackings and so it is a way of preserving our freedom by changing to meet the changing realities that technology and time give for the expression of organized destruction and we should view it in that way but we should also recognize that our job is to minimize the fear that can seep into a society that s one of the reasons that hillary and i wanted to have the program we had with the children after oklahoma city because we were worried about children all across america and especially of course children in oklahoma being literally fixated on these events and their vulnerability to such things so it s important to put them in a larger context and in that sense it s also important to prevent such things from happening whenever we can this is a preventive action we re taking today i have asked congress to pass this anti terrorism legislation to give me both people and technological tools not to me but to me being the united states to us to deal with the technological and organizational realities of the modern terrorist threat so that we can prevent these things from happening more and more and more and the leaders of congress have pledged to pass that legislation by memorial day it is a commitment i hope they will keep because we need the legislation in preventive ways now what s that got to do with what we re doing here today the strength of our society is far more than our ability to stop bad things from happening and to punish wrongdoers when they do such things this country is still around today after more than 200 years as the most successful vibrant democracy in all of human history not because we could stop bad things from happening although that was important if the civil war had turned out differently we wouldn t be here today as a country if hitler had been allowed to prevail in europe it would be a very different world today so stopping bad things from happening is quite important it shouldn t be minimized but the fundamental strength of america and the real reason we re here more than 200 years is not our capacity to stop bad things from happening but our ability to do good and indeed our ability to be good detoqueville said america is great because america is good so the truly great things about our country involve the literally billions of actions that are now taken by our 250 plus million citizens every day of the world they get up they go about their business and most of them do the very best they can to be responsible first of all as individuals and then to be responsible for their families to be responsible at work to be successful members of their community to be good citizens most of our fellow citizens do everything they re supposed to do pretty much when they re supposed to do it even things they find most distasteful like paying their taxes it has long been observed by i know that when i was a young law student taking tax law and it gave me a headache i just couldn t stand it i hated the course all those rules and regulations when it was all said and done the professor said at the beginning in the middle and at the end of the course now remember in spite of all these rules and regulations that no one can keep up with and hardly anyone understands the real thing that makes this work is that you live in a good country where most people just get up and on their own do the right thing because they think this is part of the obligation of citizenship it made a deep impression on me so i think that when we view the problems of america today and there are plenty of them the intolerance the increasing divisiveness of political forces the seeming two edged sword of the information revolution where more and more information seems to be organized to harm instead of to enlighten to divide instead of unit when we look at all of this we have to see it against the background of the fundamental fact that this is a very great country full of very good people and almost all of us get up every day and do what we re supposed to do as best we can that there are new and different challenges we face today that put extreme pressure on us in trying to do good and be good pressure in the family pressure in the workplace pressure in the community and in the larger society that we are trying to cope with economic and social stresses and with the exposure to all kinds of forces in a complex modern world that we often were not exposed to in the past and that none of some of us had never been exposed to before and i think that the real trick is how we can keep the basic values that have made our country great and take advantage of the modern world with all the things that are different that has always been the genius of america to preserve what is right there in the constitution and to take it throughout history we know that we are capable of doing it unanimously what we re really all afraid of is that somehow we ll be undone either by some small minority of us who do wrong and force all the rest of us into a way of living that is so radically different from what s been before that we don t preserve what s uniquely american or we re afraid that all these forces will upset the internal balance in so many of us that we will lose our way and yet we know that fundamentally we shouldn t be pessimistic about it and we re reminded of it every time something bad happens in america when we had a 500 year flood in the middle west or that massive earthquake in california or the world trade center bombing or the horrible horrible tragedy of oklahoma city you see not only the loss and the evil and the darkness you also see the fundamental goodness of the american people there s people everywhere just stop what their doing and show up to help i remember when they had that awful hurricane in florida and i went down there the first guy i met was an independent trucker from michigan who literally cancelled all of his runs stopped all of his business and filled his one big semi truck and brought it all the way to florida stopped his whole life and he was just a single business person who was not like me an employee of the federal government who could maybe get time off he risked everything just because he risked everything just because it was the right thing to do here was this guy showing up and happy as a clam didn t have any idea what was going to happen when he went back to michigan how he was going to put it back together he was happy doing something for other people consistent with his personal values and what he had learned in his family and church and what he had imparted to his children now the question is how can we preserve the traditional values and how can we find at least a measure of the fulfillment in doing right and good things in ordinary life that we find when disaster strikes is there something endemic to the modern world or human nature that says that we can t do that i don t thing so but we plainly live in a world that is changing so fast where people are exposed to so many forces that the ties that bind us are stretched more than there were in the world in which i grew up i don t think there s any question about that the opportunities for individuals to have their internal equilibrium upset are far greater today than they were a generation ago it s important not to romanticize the past however remember what will rogers said about that don t tell me about the good ole days they never was it s important not to romanticize the past while i grew up in a society which was much more stable and where i didn t have anything like the kind of forces bearing down on me that teenagers do today when i was child i also lived in a segregated society in which a huge number of people my age were never going to be given any opportunities that i took for granted so it is important for us not to overly romanticize the past but also to recognize that the present is changing so fast and people are exposed to so many different things that it is very very difficult to build the kind of coherent character based society that builds both individual and social responsibility and gives people the necessary balance between stability and change that allows you to live the fullest possible most rewarding life and to have a society that is both growing and vibrant and stable i think we all recognize that as a sort of central challenge of this time and i think what happens when a big disaster occurs everybody throws off all the things that are bothering them and gets back to basics people stop looking at each other as a people of different races or religions or philosophical positions or political parties and realize that there is a common humanity there after all the trick will be to manage our differences on a daily basis in a way that recognizes our common humanity and to find organized ways to stamp out the social evils that are consuming us without doing away with our personal freedoms and i believe that we can do these things i believe that sometimes we throw up our hands too much in the face of all the difficulties that we have but we have to identify what the problems are and move on them i also believe that the central insight of what dr etzioni has done is important to emphasize here everyone has a role to play and we can solve this in a free and open society not by any governmental policy but by government like every other part of society playing its own role if we could start with some of the problems that are disintegrating forces in our society i would like to focus on some that we don t often focus on and those are the economic ones we all know we have too much crime and violence and drugs and family breakdown and i don t mean to minimize those things they are profoundly important but we are aware and sensitive to those things i want you also to think about things that may be more pedestrian but also are reinforcing the problem that we come here to talk about the average american today is working a longer work week and spending fewer hours with his or her children than they were 25 years ago for the same or lower wages they were making 15 years ago literally 60 percent of the american work force is making the same or less when you adjust for inflation than they were making 15 years ago and working harder and spending less time with their children than they were 25 years ago family income has gone up in many places only because there are now two workers in the family there is also in our country a feeling that there is much less security because more and more people are changing their jobs the census tells us that there s been about a 14 percent decline in earnings for men between the ages of 55 and 65 excuse me 45 and 55 it could have something to do with the so called angry white male phenomenon so that when people reach the peak of what they thought was going to be there not only their earning capacity but their ability to have a profound and positive impact on their families and on their society their communities many of them now are at a vulnerable period when they re having to deal with changes that they took for granted when they were in their 20s but never expected to have to face all over again in their 40s or early 50s this is a profound thing so that we at least thought when we started out in life we have different kinds of things to feel anxieties about as we got older i mean just getting older is bad enough and now we re having to feel anxieties about things that we thought would be behind us as a people into our 40s and 50s this is a profound thing no one has really studied the implications this has for citizenship and why more and more people may be vulnerable to siren songs of resentment that divide us instead of unite us i m telling you there are millions of people that go home every night and sit down at the dinner table and look across the table at their families and wonder whether they have failed them when all they ever did was show up for work because of the way the global economy has impacted on them in this society this is a significant thing and when you combine that with the fact that there is so much mobility in this society much more than ever before it is more difficult for many of these people to get the kind of support networks they need in their communities because a lot of folks live in communities where neighbors don t know their neighbors anymore and if there s a high crime rate in the community they don t have any way to get to know them so that all these things need to be seen in that context there is a great deal of uncertainty out there which makes people yearn for certainty but also makes them vulnerable to the wrong kind of certainty certainty that pits people against one anther instead of gives them a way to say here are my problems what are your problems let s get together and figure out how to solve them so i think that the sense of literally physical instability so many adults feel make it more difficult to hold our society together and make it more difficult to impart the fundamental character strengths and traits and the accompanying security of knowing that you re in the right place in your life that are essential to a strong society not an excuse for not doing it but it s important to understand the context in which we operate here now one of the things that we have thought about in our administration is that in this environment when so many of our children are in families that are at least not traditional families when their parents are working working harder and maybe spending less time with them and when their neighborhoods may be less settled and in many cases less safe it is more important than it has been perhaps in immediately previous years to reemphasize the role of character education in our schools something which once was taken for granted as a part of education sort of faded away and we believe should be brought back we know it has to be a supplement for the work that families and communities do not a replacement we know there s no substitute for the character lessons that are imparted to people by their parents and grandparents or for the guidance that a father or mother can bring or maybe even more importantly for the sense of security and rootedness that the right kind of relationships within families give us all but still i think it s important to recognize that all of our children show up for school sooner or later and character education can be a vital part of building the kind of society that recognizes responsibilities and has a sense of community this is an issue i ve been involved with for years several years ago in the mid 80s i served on the carnegie commission for middle school education there were to governors on that commission i had the privilege of being of being one the other was the distinguished republican governor of new jersey tom kane and one of the recommendations we made was that we should teach our children in middle school with specific objectives to behave ethically and assume the responsibilities of citizenship in a pluralistic society and that we had to connect our schools to our communities which together share responsibility for each student s success when i became president we started to work on this through the department of education secretary riley has helped us to go a good ways toward the right kind of introduction of values into our schools everybody knows that education is about more than intellect everybody knows as my mother used to say there s a lot of smart fools running around in this old world and what we want to do is to build good citizens as well as intelligent people we need to learn what it takes to build up and not tear down a society over the long run so we ve worked hard on that most of you know that the elementary and secondary education act contained new authority for programs that foster character education for us to support them and in partnership with local communities we are now making states eligible to compete for grants to help to support the institution of character education programs in local school districts all across the country i personally long for the day when this is once again a regular part of the curriculum of every school district in the united states i think it is very very important the safe and drug free schools program which is one of the things i ve been fighting for in this little rescission battle we ve got going on here in washington today also has specific explicit efforts in it to create an environment in which children are able to learn and in which we not only make drugs schools safe and drug free by negative actions like security device but in which we change the attitudes of children about what is acceptable within the schools what is acceptable conduct within the schools all of you know that there is some evidence out there already that these character education programs really work to lower the drop out rate to increase educational performance and to increase good citizenship it is elementary it is simple but i think it is profoundly important that young people be taught that it s important to tell the truth that s it s important to be trustworthy and for people to be able to rely on you that s it s important not to abuse the freedom you have by undermining other people s ability to exercise their freedom they need to be taught certain basic things in the context of the school environment which is after all for many of them the first diverse community they will ever be a part of so i feel very strongly that this is part of what we ought to be doing but not all i think that as i said the fundamental insight that i have gotten about how to do this from dr etzioni is that we have to build networks and this as you know is the second conference on character building we ve had where we ve welcomed people to the white house i would very much like to see this institutionalized as an annual event that goes way beyond my administration that encompasses republicans and democrats and that has nothing to do with politics indeed i think we should view this effort in our country not as bipartisan but as non partisan and we need to think about ways that we can continue to build networks that work together for a generation because a lot of our problems were a generation in coming and they re going to be a generation in going and because there is nothing we can do that will stop the world from changing as quickly as it is so we re going to have to work harder and harder to think of ways that keep the ties that bind therefore i believe this should become a permanent fixture of our national dialogue i would like to also from my point of view take this up a notch in the present time because of the dimensions of our challenges on june the 21st i m going to invite leaders to come here from all around the country to listen to each other to open a dialogue to try to find common ground on our great social challenges of the day and to talk about what it would take to build not only good character but good citizenship from people individually and in groups and to see whether or not we can accelerate this dialogue throughout the country i am going to ask academic and business leaders religious leaders media people people from the sports community people from other aspects of the private sector and of course government folks to try to build the kind of partnership that i think is necessary james madison once said that all governments required virtue of their citizens but democracies needed it more than other kinds of government and i believe that some of you may know that hillary is now working on a book about the responsibilities we owe to our children the title will come from that old african proverb it takes a whole village to raise a child now i ask you to think about this and i would like to make some closing remarks about where i m going with this june 21st conference and invite you to give me your ideas about it i think that in the world we are living in it will take a lot of people and not just government programs to keep our children off the streets and in school it will take every parent teacher friend and loved one we can find to teach children given all their different circumstances in american today the differences between right and wrong and to give them the kind of self esteem they need to do well in a troubled world to say no to the right things but also to figure out what to say yes to which in the end is the basis of the quality of life we all live and i am absolutely convinced as i have watched the patterns of life in our society that as people go through different stages in their lives or their in different places in society most of them are not most influenced by government there are other forces which are influencing them and that we all have to pull together if we re going to have any hope of succeeding in this enterprise if you look at business for example i mentioned the economic changes i had to fight like crazy for the family and medical leave law it had already been passed by congress twice and vetoed twice by well meaning people who thought that business people said oh the world will come to an end if the family medical leave law passes but it cannot be if you think about it first and foremost it cannot be that a society where the economic forces require most adults to work women and men even parents of very young children it cannot be that a good society can be built unless people can succeed as both workers and parents if we cannot succeed as workers then our standard of living will fall and everything that we think about america will begin to be eroded but if don t succeed as parents then we ll have a lot of people will money and miserable lives and we have too many people in this country today not only poor people but people who aren t poor who have miserable lives so the first and most fundamental thing we have to say is how are people going to succeed as workers and as parents the government can do the family and medical leave law but that s just the first step how can you justify the fact that most people are working harder for less money when business profits are up and corporations are up we had record numbers of new millionaires last year i like that by the way i don t think wealth formation is bad i think it s good but the thing that holds a democratic society together is that everybody gets their fair share in the 12 years before i became president this has nothing to do with government policies nearly as i can determine executive salaries went up four times as much as workers salaries went up in major american corporations and three times as much as corporate profits went up and you can say well labor s not worth as much as it used to be because technology means fewer people can do more with less that may be but all those people are still people they have children to raise they have mortgages to pay they have problems to confront one of the companies that i really admire in this country today has set up a system in which both the workers and the executives get paid based on the performance of the company so that when the company does well the workers have just a big a gain as the executives and if the company has a bad turn the executives have to take an even bigger hit percentage wise than the workers now that the kind they also have as part of their bonus program a 2 000 a year grant to every child of every employee in the company that goes to college they have one person that sent 11 kids to college working for that company the only reason i m not telling you who the company is is i don t every person with six or more children in america to go apply for work there but don t you see here is a company that says okay we want to make money we want to do well we think we can do right and do well we want a we believe we ll make more money if the people working for us know they can make more money if the company does well this is part of citizenship i m not suggesting the government should mandate this i m talking about partnerships networking community open and honest discussion but first and foremost most of the work of building character in america is going to be done in the family and you must make it possible for people to succeed as parents and workers so that should be a part of this debate now the media has a responsibility here we have tough choices to make as a country people need to know the facts that will shape their future important for adults important for children let me give you an example a weekly reader is launching a new project to teach the value of citizenship to young children through stories that s a good thing that s the sort of thing the media can do i m not suggesting the government should mandate it but we should talk about it nobody should feel threatened or feel like we re trying encroach on the first amendment by discussing the power on social behavior that the media has we should be able to discuss it without anybody being defensive about it here in washington we are facing difficult but important issues of public policy we have two huge deficits from a public policy point of view we ve got a government budget deficit which is much lower than it was when i became president but it s too big and we do need in a global economy a balanced budget because we don t want to be more dependant than we have to be on outside forces and we want to be able to invest in our future but we also have a big education deficit and training deficit compared to many other countries and compared to what we need for america to be the strongest and greatest economy in the world in the 21st century so we ve got a big tough decision here how are we going to solve one without undermining the other can we do both at the same time if so how now this can immediately dissolve into a huge political screaming match in which one party sticks up for one the other sticks up for the other everybody gets reelected at election time and nobody gets anything done that would not be good what we need to do is to figure out how we can reach across the divides to a common consensus that will permit up to pursue both these objectives at the same time the american people are ready for some tough decisions and difficult medicine but they want to know that it s fair and sensible and what s down there at the end of the road and to do it we need to get information in a way that is not designed to divide us but is designed to shed more light than heat and it is a very difficult thing but very important religious and community institutions have an important role to play you know if every church in america every church in america had not only a vigorous program for it s own members and the people it s recruiting but also an outreach to a fixed number of families and children to fight the problems of out ofwedlock birth teen pregnancy drug addiction school dropout if every single church had just a fixed and reasonable number of kids it was targeting it might have more impact than all the government programs we could ever devise this is the most religious country in the world we have the largest number of churches the most diverse group of people worshiping in different kinds of religions and again it s not for the government to require this but it s wo dem wjclinton20 5 97 bill_clinton thank you george stinson for your wonderful introduction your remarks and most importantly for your very very powerful example i thank the governors tom carper and tommy thompson my former colleagues and friends for being here and for the power of their example i thank the members of congress and most of all i thank all the business leaders who are here gerry greenwald and the leaders of the other companies that were with us when we just had five and all of you who are part of our first 105 thank you all and i want to say a special word of thanks to my friend eli segal he d be a lot richer man if he d never met me i have but i have made him america s reigning expert in public start ups he is truly the father of americorps the national service program that i love and i can say as i ve been around the country now for nearly four and a half years more people have come up to me and said of americorps that changed my life for the better than anything i have done as president except now this will be more numerous because now you know eli and i were just sitting around talking one day and he said now what can i do for you now and i said well we passed this welfare reform law and i said i really believe in it but i mean you know there s no way in the world we re going to get there we ve got the deficit we ve got to balance the budget and we can t possibly meet the hiring targets of the welfare reform law unless we can organize the private sector and maximize in every state all the options to give people incentives to hire people in the private sector to move people from welfare to work oh we can get a little money to put into the very high unemployment areas for the community service jobs and congress has agreed to do that but we ve got to have the private sector and he said we can do that then he found gerry and the other first four that were here who are here in the audience and then there were 100 and soon there will be 1 000 and i thank you all very much i would like to talk about this today a little bit from my perspective as president but first let me say that i respect the fact that those of you who come here come here as americans you come here primarily as business people some of you are republicans some of you are democrats some of you probably wish you had never met a politician but you all recognize that this is not a partisan issue that it is a moral obligation for our country it is america s business and therefore it must be the work of american business how did we get this goal of moving a million people from welfare to work by the year 2000 how did you get here to make a difference as you can as you saw from the young women who have been introduced here to help people to move from a lifetime of dependence to one of independence to move from burdening their children with a legacy of despair to leaving their children with an inheritance of hope well it all goes back to the effort we have made now as a nation some of us as you heard the governors talking have been involved with this welfare reform issue a long time but when i became president i was convinced that we had to change both the economic policy and the social policy of the country if we wanted america to work again for everyone that we had to do something to get the deficit down and expand trade and at the same time invest more money in education and science and technology and research and the things that would grow the economy but that we had to prove that america could work again in a fundamental human way so we had to deal with crime we had to deal with our great diversity and get people to come together across the lines the lines that divide us and a stronger community we had to deal with the conflicts people feel with family and work that working people are having trouble raising their kids too and meeting their obligations at work and a big part of this mosaic was to change the culture of dependency that had arisen around our welfare system there was lots of evidence that nobody really liked the welfare system very much especially the people that were on it there was also frankly a lot of evidence that for about half the people that were on it it worked reasonably well just because for those people you d have to practically throw them up against a wall to stop them from doing all right in life people that hit a rough patch in life and they d be on public assistance and they d go on but increasingly to the point where we wound up with slightly more than half of people on welfare were long term dependents who felt literally unable to come back into the mainstream of american life well we ve seen a lot of progress in the last few years and a lot of it s been helped by the fact that we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years and for the first time ever our economy produced about 12 million jobs in a four year administration period in that time the welfare rolls had their biggest reduction ever in that short a period of time and so i began to think well maybe we can make the welfare reform targets and then i realized i asked the council of economic advisors to study this and i said how much of this welfare decline that s due to the economy doing better and how much of it is due to the fact that most states now are really working hard on welfare reform with us they ve gotten waivers from the federal government to get out from under rules and regulations and move people to work and the study indicated that about 40 percent a little more of the people moved from welfare to work because the economy got better and just the labor markets got tighter about over a third more or less got there because most states were aggressively working with us either statewide or in parts of their states on welfare reform and about a quarter got there for some other reason but one of the reasons was that child support collections were increased by 50 percent in the last four years so then we said okay let s change let s go another step let s tell people that if they re able bodied they can only have five years of welfare over the course of a lifetime and no more than two years at one time and let s give the states responsibility and the power and the money to design state by state a welfare reform system that will work and in effect will have to be designed community by community that was the import of the welfare reform law and in that law as the congressmen here will tell you they set up very strict targets but essentially about 40 percent of the population has to be fully into this law over the next four years that s how we got to this burden you re undertaking because i want all of you who signed on to understand what is at stake here now what that means bottom line is that we have to move about another 900 000 to 1 million people in the work force in the next four years to meet the requirements of the law which will move about 2 5 million people off welfare because the average welfare family is about 2 5 2 6 million something like that now if we produce another 12 million jobs we ll get close anyway but it would be the first time in history that we ever did it eight years in a row since we ve only done it once four years in a row and we just came out of that maybe we can do it and i d be the last to say we couldn t but even if we did that here s the point i want to make even if we did that if we don t have people like this man and like all of you the people who would come off would be those who might make it off under any circumstances and what we are trying to do here the import of the reform welfare law was to change challenge and end the culture of poverty which means you have to find people who don t think they can make it who have no idea what a resume is who never had to show up on time before there are people in this audience today have helped find people like that before and i wish all of you who have actually hired people from welfare to work were up here speaking today but what this is about is saying that we are going to go beyond what the normal economy would produce we re going to make an extra effort and the government will do its part but it has to be led by the private sector now in april the vice president and i announced that we would hire at least 10 000 welfare recipients in the next four years without replacing anybody just through job turnover in an area where we will expand employment which i think is a pretty good thing in a federal government that s 300 000 people smaller than it was four years ago when i took office we ll do 10 000 and with the help of secretary slater and some of our other cabinet secretaries we re going to work with our private contractors the people that do direct business with us to hire 10 000 more and we believe we can do that when we reached the budget agreement historic budget agreement with the leaders of congress to balance the budget it not only will give us the first balanced budget in almost 30 years it contains the elements that we agree jointly should be a part of our contribution to your welfare reform effort so let me mention them first it provides as i said earlier 3 billion to help cities and states to create jobs and subsidize jobs either community service jobs or subsidized private sector jobs that money will be targeted to very high unemployment areas where you cannot reasonably expect any effort to deal with the time deadlines second it encourages employers to hire and retain welfare recipients by giving a 50 percent tax credit over two years for up to 10 000 in wages for every long term welfare recipient hired that does not displace someone else now these two things will help but in addition to that we have other big problems one of the biggest problems that we think we need to get more help on is transportation you heard governor carper talking about child care there s 4 billion more in the welfare reform bill for child care but there was a study that came out of georgia recently which said that of the entry level jobs in the inner city in fast food establishments for example something like i don t know 80 percent of the jobs were held by people who were low income adults in the suburbs just a little more than half of those jobs were held by people who were low income adults the transportation barrier kept them from maximizing their ability to move from dependence to independence so since two out of three new jobs are created in the suburbs and a significant percentage of people on welfare live in urban centers it is very important that we do more on that today we re awarding seed grants to 24 states to develop transportation schemes to help people go and get the jobs where the jobs are and the legislation that we proposed in the new transportation bill would provide 600 million to help states and local communities put these plans into action it also was approved in the budget agreement so that s a very very good thing and let me just say one other thing since we ve got two very innovative governors here and governor thompson you ve seen they ve had a huge drop in wisconsin and a sizeable drop in delaware if you look around the country there s still a lot of unevenness in how much the welfare rolls have dropped part of it is due to underlying economic conditions but part of it is due to how comprehensive the efforts are one of the things that i think is important is that the states really do get together and steal the best ideas from each other you should know that among other things the states now have the power under this new law to take what was the welfare check and give all or part of it to an employer for a period of time as an employment or training subsidy and a lot of states are doing that as well there are lots of options out there so i want to say to all of you who are part of this first hundred you have to work with the governors and with the state legislators too and with the mayors and the community based operators we ve got to have a system here that s community based finally let me say that if you look at the numbers a million people sounds like a huge amount over four years but in an american economy that has well over 100 million people in the work force that produced 12 million new jobs in the last four years with these extra incentives around the edges with committed private sector employers small medium and large businesses this is not a problem this is a start up enterprise that can be stunningly successful but as far as i know there is no exact precedent for it in our history there has never been anything quite like this and this is something we re trying to do together i will do my best to do my part but i thank all of you from the bottom of my heart starting with eli and gerry and encompassing all of you for doing your part you know i ve tried to learn about what a lot of you are doing and mr marriott here has this pathways to independence program that supports the transition from welfare to work i ve seen that then i meet a man with a small business and more than half his employees are people who were on welfare we were in kansas city not very long ago and i met a man who stores data for the federal government way out in kansas city that s what computers do for you these days and he had 25 people in his business in this data storage business and five of them were people that he had hired from the welfare rolls every time he expands now he tries to hire somebody from welfare i know we can do this i just want to say to you when you leave here today i want you to imagine what it is you would like your country to look like when we enter the 21st century there will always be people who for one reason or another are out of work there will always be people who for one reason or another have a rough spot in life and as long as we re a nation of immigrants there will always be people who start out below whatever the federally established poverty line is but we do not have to have a country with an intolerable crime rate with an intolerable failure rate among young people in poverty and addiction and violence and we do not have to have a country with a permanent culture of dependence we do not have to have that we just had this service summit in philadelphia where we said we re all going to get together without regard to party try to give every child in america five things a healthy start in life a safe place to grow up a decent education a mentor with a caring adult and a chance to serve and give something back no matter how modest the child s resources are i ll tell you we could do more to get that done by liberating their parents from the culture of dependence than anything else you are making the america we ought to have for the 21st century and i hope when you leave here today you ll be even more dedicated to it because the future of our children is riding on it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton20 5 98 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much first of all i d like to thank tara and emily there s really nothing much more to say after their presentations they weren t so muted and shy i think we all got the point didn t you think they were terrific give them another hand i thought they were great thank you i d like to thank all the members of congress who are here i think they were all mentioned except we missed congressman borski who is in the first seat no minister would do that in a congregation thank you for being here all of you thank you reverend jackson i thank the public health advocates who are here i thank the young people who are here both behind me and a few out there in the audience i thank the parents of our speakers who came and other parents who are here for what they have done i can t thank the vice president enough for his longstanding and absolutely passionate indeed all consuming interest in this issue i think it would be fair to say he talked about how we looked at the issue and all the obstacles to it and i went ahead the people that had the most influence on me were the vice president the first lady and our daughter and that was three if there were 300 million on the other side the three would have a majority so i thank them all and especially the vice president for years and years and years of dedicated work on this issue this morning i was thinking that when i was the age of even younger than most of the people here in the audience most of the children here the biggest public health threat to us was polio america went to work and conquered the disease and i was actually part of the first group of children to be immunized against polio today we all know our greatest public health threat to our children and indeed to all americans are all the related things that can happen to people who are addicted to tobacco i was a little older than most of the children here when the surgeon general sounded an alarm that has grown louder clearer and more difficult to ignore every year the warning that smoking kills for a generation americans of all ages and walks of life including young people just like those whom we honor here today have answered that alarm by fighting tirelessly to conquer this deadly threat to protect the health of our people in the face of very powerful opposition our nation has actually won some victories both large and small requiring all cigarette packages to carry warning labels prohibiting cigarette advertising on the airwaves banning smoking on domestic airline flights but today we stand on the verge of passing legislation that will do far more than anything we have every done to stop the scourge of youth smoking this week as all of you know the senate is considering historic comprehensive bipartisan legislation proposed by senator mccain and senator hollings over the last few weeks we have worked very hard with senators in both parties to strengthen this bill protecting americans from the dangers of secondhand smoke in public buildings dramatically increasing health research and funding a nationwide advertising campaign to tell young people not to smoke toughening look back surcharges to make reducing youth smoking the tobacco companies bottom line this bill includes a significant price increase to discourage youth smoking and affirms the fda s authority to regulate tobacco products i hope that in the next few days the senate will make sure we do everything we possibly can also to protect tobacco farmers in their communities this bill is our best chance to protect the health of our children to keep them from getting hooked on cigarettes ever it is a good a strong bill congress should pass it and pass it now let me also say that i believe the presence of the young people here and their active support of the tobacco free kids movement is absolutely critical there are still cynics who say well this is not the kind of problem that requires this sort of solution after all nobody forces these people to start smoking the young people here wearing their t shirts willing to look into the eyes of the lawmakers are a stunning rebuke to that kind of cynicism i thank them for saying no to tobacco and yes to their own bright futures and i want to tell you that you may well be able to have a bigger impact on capitol hill than all the things that we say here in the white house on the remaining undecided voters our lawmakers must not let this historic opportunity slip away under pressure from big tobacco lobbying i want you to go and see them i know you re going to capitol hill when you re up there i want you to ask every member of congress to go home tonight and think about how they can look you in the eye and say no to your future we now know from the release of previously classified documents that for years the tobacco companies looked on you as and i quote the replacement smokers of the 21st century but here we have more than 1 000 unique children who cannot be replaced the scientists the artists the teachers the olympic champions the engineers the leaders perhaps a future president in the 21st century the rest of us have an obligation to see that these children and all their counterparts in every community in our country have a chance to grow and live to the fullest of their god given abilities that is what this bill is all about this is more than just another bill in the legislature this is more than a culmination of an historic fight between powerful political forces we have no higher obligation than to give the young people we see here today the brightest best future we possibly can that s what this bill is about and we must pass it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton20 6 96 bill_clinton thank you very much rebekah you did a terrific job i hope you weren t nervous you couldn t tell and i know your parents are here and your teachers are very proud of you and all the other presidential scholars who are here i want to thank stuart moldaw and all the members of the commission who have the difficult job of picking presidential scholars i want to thank secretary riley for the wonderful work he has done as our secretary of education for our many years of personal friendship rebekah did such a good job we forgive you for your shameless south carolina pride in mentioning the south carolina scholars you have given me leave to mention that there are two presidential scholars here from arkansas martin beally from sherwood and caroline rothert are from my home town of hot springs so i congratulate them i also want to thank alison tupay for singing the star spangled banner on the spot she did a great job i think more than anything else i m going to see the scholars tomorrow when we send the olympic torch off but i love this moment and i was jealous that the vice president got to go to the medal ceremony yesterday this has been sort of a crazy week around here i was hoping maybe one of the scholars could explain chaos theory to me and i could apply it to what i m trying to do but i love this program i believe in it so strongly and i wanted to have a chance just to meet with not only the scholars but to see the parents and the family members the teachers the mentors the people who helped these young people come to this point and the most important message i have i ll just say and get out of the way i wanted to say congratulations to the scholars but i mostly wanted to come here to thank the families and the teachers who have made these young people s lives possible and better if every american would follow the example you have set this country would not have many problems and we would have an unlimited future and i thank you so much for what you ve done to the young people i would say this is an historic hall we are meeting in constitution hall when i was not much older than you you ll be embarrassed that i can remember this date so long ago on june 24 1967 i had the highest seat up there i couldn t afford a better one to hear ray charles sing in constitution hall and i was so excited he was so magnificent i was so excited i literally carried the reason i remember the date is i carried the ticket stub in my billfold for 15 years afterward and i never forgot the concert not all that long before then the great american singer marian anderson was denied the right to sing in constitution hall because of her race and the father of my deputy chief of staff harold ickes then the secretary of the interior arranged for her to sing on the steps of the lincoln memorial the same place that not so many years later martin luther king would deliver his famous address so this whole area in here is full of america s history and it reminds us i hope all of you really get a chance to look around and sort of soak it in it reminds us of all this country has done and meant it reminds us of how far we have come it reminds us of the continuing struggle we have to live up to the ideals of our constitution it also will remind you if you look closely that there are still hardworking people struggling to make ends meet within a mile of where we re now sitting or in the case of the young people standing there are young people within a mile of this place who have not had the same opportunities that the young people we honor here today have had so it is the story of america we celebrate our achievements we declare our loyalty to the constitution and the values it embodies and we must rededicate ourselves to making sure that the american dream never dies for every person who s willing to work for it every person here as i said is indebted of the young people who have been honored to the teachers who have helped them the parents who supported them to others who helped along the way and i believe it is the job of every generation to make sure that the next generation has a chance to live out their dreams that really is the mission of our administration i came to washington at a time of profound change for this country we were moving from an industrial age into an age dominated by information and technology the great computer genius bill gates says that the digital chip is the most significant advance in communications in 500 years since gutenberg printed the first bible in europe we know that we have left the cold war behind and we re moving into a global society in which we see ideas and information and money and technology and people move around the world in unimaginable speed and variation compared to just a few years ago we know that the young people standing on this stage many of them will actually do work that has not even been invented yet within 10 or 15 years some of them will be doing things that no one has even imagined yet so we are moving into a period really unlike any in the history of our country before when there will be more opportunity for people to live out their dreams than ever before and the real challenge i believe is to make sure that every person has a chance not a guarantee but a chance to live out those dreams that we do it in a way that brings us together as a country instead of dividing us we are today more a nation of immigrants that at any time since the beginning of this century that we re about to leave just look around this room look at them we see the kaleidoscope of america and it is a constant urgent task that we find ways to unite this country around our basic values and not let ourselves be divided just yesterday i had governor riley s successor as the governor of south carolina and a number of other governors here and other officials to talk about this recent wave of church burnings that has swept the country in the last year and a half that is the exact opposite of what this country has always stood for and it is an example of what is happening in much worse form around the world where people are tempted to give into their old demons and define themselves by what they re not rather than what they are and what they can become and we cannot afford that in this country we must all be intolerant of that we cannot be divided by religion or race and we can never never never believe that in america it is permissible to take action against someone in their place of worship it is wrong and we must stand against it i appreciate what rebekah said about the commitment of this administration to education i know that one reason it s so strong is that i wouldn t be here without mine i lived with my grandparents they started teaching me to read when i was two or three i still own one of the little readers they started me on it was printed in 1946 i think i grew up my grandparents my grandfather just barely got out of grade school my stepfather who raised me dropped out right before he got his high school diploma i was the first person in my direct line to graduate from college and if it hadn t been for my education and the gifts that others gave me along the way to help me with it i never would have become president or had the opportunity to serve my country in the way that i have i now know that there is something fundamentally different about the role of education in this time than in any other time always throughout our history education has given individuals more opportunity when we made a commitment to mass education after world war ii including making college education available to veterans who served through the g i bill it helped to build an enormous middle class and to lift this country up all of us now we re in a third stage where education can either be the fault line dividing our country or the bridge by which we all walk into the 21st century because now it is not enough as it was 50 years ago in the g i bill or even 30 years ago to have a huge number of people with a college education creating economic opportunities for everybody else in a mass production industrial society for at least 15 years and actually probably more our country has become more stratified more unequal divided more than anything else by the level of education of adults in the work force so that you have this paradoxical situation where in the last three and a half years when we ve been able to cut the deficit in half and take our exports to an all time high create opportunities for 3 7 million new people to have their own homes and see our country produce nearly 10 million new jobs 9 7 million new jobs we know in spite of all that about half of the american work force has not gotten a raise after you adjust for inflation and that compared to 15 years ago the people in the bottom half are basically working a longer work week having less time to spend with their children and not really keeping up with inflation there are exceptions to all these statements but the general rule still holds the fundamental problem is that in a global economy where we re all competing with everybody else everywhere else including people who work and live in some counties where incomes that no one could live a month on in america that we have to raise the skill levels of our people so that education has to become more democratic small d democratic more widely available and more advanced than every before it must and that is what has driven the work that secretary riley and i and others have done in this administration to try to lift the quality and standards of education but also to make it more broadly available there are some things that we can do here and we have tried to do them we have tried to make available funds for states to come up with their own plans to meet the national education goals to have high standards and high expectations and to get free from some outdated rules and regulations the secretary s cut the rules of the department of education by nearly 50 percent we have put more poor children into head start perhaps most important of all over the long run we ve tried to expand the availability of college in the last 12 years before i came here college education was the only thing that increased in cost more rapidly than health care and a lot of people are a man who was laughing i assume has just educated two or three kids already in college and he s laughing to keep from crying probably this is something this is a problem with serious implications for our country if you look at the 1990 census and pretty soon we ll be doing another in 2000 that will affect the lives these young people will have you see an utterly stunning fact that for the first time since we have been really working on the census you can see clearly in a profile of america after the census in 1990 that american workers particularly younger american workers that have at least two years of education after high school tend to get jobs where they are pretty secure in their jobs if they lose their job they re pretty good about getting another one and they tend to get jobs that have a decent income with pretty good prospects for growth those that have less than that tend to be stuck in jobs where they can t change jobs very easily and they usually lose ground to inflation and the younger you are the more profound those trends are likely to be now that means that we have to do some things to open college to more people we ve tried to expand the pell grant program for example we changed the college loan program and i want to thank secretary riley for something that i believe 10 20 years from now will be viewed as one of the most revolutionary changes we ve made we started making loans directly to the colleges so that the students could get them with less hassle pay them back at lower cost and then pay them back according to a whole range of options including their ability to repay the loan so that if for example if you take a job as a school teacher or a police officer or a nurse and you re not getting rich and you have a big college loan burden you still will be able to always pay those loans off because they can be limited to a percentage of your income and it s changed a lot for people it s made things more available by next year we ll have 65 000 young people who will have helped to pay their way through college through the americorps program earning money to go to college by doing community service and i see one of our board members is from the state of new hampshire a state that has one of the most active americorps programs in the country where they really are doing remarkable things to solve problems and pay their way through now we ve tried to do we ve got two other big initiatives here on the plate that i think are quite important and i just want to mention them because i want to encourage all of you to support these things and to embrace them the first is we re determined to see that every classroom and library in america hooked up to the internet by the year 2000 every single one and i think it will make a real difference we started this effort in california where we had a lot of private sector support and we wired about 20 percent of the schools in one day and they re already up to 50 percent of the schools now in california now in many other states this whole movement is taking off and working like wild fire but we also need to make sure that in addition to being hooked up we ve got good software available hardware for all the students and sometimes for the parents as well to participate and trained teachers that are being given the support they need there is now an alliance of educational groups teachers parents and administrators that have joined together to make sure that we have enough teachers to keep up with the connections they call themselves the 21st century teachers and this fall they re going to mobilize a voluntary effort 100 000 teachers to help 500 000 other teachers master the technology so that they can make the most of it for our young people this has enormous potential to make educational gains more widely available in poor rural areas in under served urban areas in places where finances have been a real problem we can use technology in a way that will lift the quality of education and the availability of it if we do it right the other thing i think we have to do is to make our goal a national goal that college will be accessible to all americans and that the norm will be that everybody would at least do two years after high school that should become the rule that should become what we all accept we now have both economic and social evidence that we need to do that so in addition to the college loan and in addition to expanding the head start program i have asked the congress to make the first 10 000 of college tuition tax deductible to every family in the country for both young people and adults i have asked congress to broaden eligibility for families to invest in iras and then let people withdraw from their ira tax free if it become necessary to help finance their children s education or their own re education as the case may be and a few weeks ago at princeton i asked and by the way i figured out a way to pay for all this in our balanced budget this will not increase the deficit i asked the congress in effect to make access to two years of college universal by giving families a 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of community college the average tuition in this country at community college is 1 200 a year so that would in effect make two years of community college available to every american family because we would have a tax credit that you could actually see in effect the government was helping to fund tuition free for everybody the first year given to everybody the second year that has at least a b average i think after the second year you ought to ask people to make the most of their education if the taxpayers are going to fund it but it seems to me that these are the kinds of things we ought to do in washington if we want america to grow together and when i look at these young people behind me and i think of every young person in this country that we need to make sure that we reach them when they re young and we keep them in school and we give them something to hope for this is a way of our being able to say to the poorest kids in this country if you hang on you can at least do this this is something we will give you if you hang on now the rest of it is obviously up to the rest of you and your counterparts all across america but i really believe that if we can both raise the quality and the range and reach of education we can make sure that we grow together as a country instead of being split apart i cannot tell you how important this is one of our counties the biggest county in this country los angeles county has already today children in it from 150 different racial and ethnic groups in one county and still this country is thriving it s doing well i m just about to leave for a meeting of european leaders and all over the world they ll ask me how did you have 9 7 million new jobs in america in the last three years you know how many the largest seven economies in the world have created a total of 10 million jobs in the last three and a half years 9 7 in the united states and that s something you can be proud of but if you want this country to grow together if you want these children to have the kind of future when their children are this age to see america leading the world for peace and freedom then we have got to recognize that education for everybody more of it and better is the central most important thing we can do to make sure that we go into the 21st century able to meet our challenges and protect our values and all of you because of this experience all these presidential scholars because they re now presidential scholars and all of you who helped them along the way because you re their family members or you re their teacher you can have a unique amount of influence in your communities to make sure that we all rededicate our efforts not to leave any child behind not to leave any stone unturned in opening all the opportunity we can there is no stopping this country in the 21st century if we do that one thing if we give everybody who will work for it the chance to live out their dreams if that is our shared commitment our best days are still ahead and 20 years from now they will be celebrating a whole new generation of presidential scholars in a nation that is stronger and better and closer to the ideal of america than we are today thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton20 7 95 bill_clinton thank you very much eljay if you want to see which job has more stress this is the print on his introduction and this is the print on my card let me say first of all i came here to express my appreciation to all of you for continuing these regular meetings and increasing our ability to do the work of law enforcement by this kind of coordination i think it is terribly important and i thank you for doing it because so many issues involving federal law enforcement have been in the public s mind in the last several weeks i would like to say a few things and then just sit here and visit with you and listen to you for a while let me begin by saying that we all know that this country still has too much violence too many drugs too many gangs that the culture of violence is still causing enormous difficulty in our country there was a profoundly moving story in one of our newspapers today about a 16 year old boy who just shot a 12 year old boy dead because he thought he d been treated with disrespect and this comes just a few days after a national survey in which two thirds of young gang members said they thought it was acceptable just because they treated you with disrespect this is the environment that we have to change in america today the paranoia the division the willingness to resort to that kind of destructive behavior and that s why i ve been so disturbed about the recent attempts to attack police officers in general for doing their jobs people may disagree with certain laws like the ban on assault weapons but that doesn t give them a right to disobey the law people have no right to assault or kill police officers simply for doing their duty now i want to talk just a minute about the waco hearings and especially what happened yesterday we know that law enforcement people made mistakes at waco our administration said that in 1993 we had an exhaustive review and when the results came in we took appropriate action changes were made people were dismissed that s the way our system is supposed to work in an open and accountable way congressional hearings were held in 1993 and in 1994 and if congress wants to have further hearings today that is their right and it is entirely appropriate we have to hope some more good things will come out and we can learn how to better do our jobs but i think it s important to get the facts here quite clear yesterday s testimony was a sad and painful reminder of the depravity that took place inside that compound and the facts which confronted the president the attorney general and the federal law enforcement officials at the time here was a man who was molesting young girls and paddling children with boat oars a man who was laying up supplies and illegal weapons for armageddon a man who was instructing women and children about how to commit suicide a man who took the trust of young children and twisted it who told people that if they wanted to do the will of god they had to be willing to kill for god those are the facts there is no moral equivalency between the disgusting acts of which took place inside that compound in waco and the efforts that law enforcement officers made to enforce the law and protect the lives of innocent people there is no moral equivalency that is the point that has to be hammered home over and over it is irresponsible for people in elected positions to suggest that the police are some sort of armed bureaucracy acting on private grudges and hidden agendas that is wrong it s inaccurate and people who suggest that ought to be ashamed of themselves people in law enforcement make mistakes there are all kinds of people in law enforcement just like there are all kinds of people in any endeavor and all people the last time i checked were imperfect when people make mistakes they ought to be held accountable and appropriate action ought to be taken i said yesterday i am appalled by what happened at that gathering in tennessee we re going to find the facts we re going to take appropriate action but that is a very different thing from suggesting that there is some sort of equivalency between what the law enforcement officers tried to do at waco and the kind of things that were going on in that compound and this country needs to be able to make that distinction and not to forget it in oklahoma city after the terrible bombing americans were wearing a t shirt i ve got a copy of it here that was given to me and i d never seen this before but this t shirt shows all the different things that federal law enforcement officials do and mentions all the different agencies and has the following quote on it a society that makes war against its police had better learn to make friends with criminals that s a fact we need to be accountable we need to get all the facts out if we make a mistake we need to correct it but we must not make war against police and we must not confuse making mistakes with the moral equivalency of what decent people are doing to protect the citizens of this country with the awful things that happened in that compound at waco thank you dem wjclinton20 7 98a bill_clinton thank you now you shamed me and i can no longer make fun of him sheriff lee what he was afraid is i was going to say that he had offered to take me hunting and take you and he said that he would provide the game and i said if you took me you d all be safe because i d be blamed for it no matter what happened it would be great let me say i d better get out of town because i m really beginning to enjoy myself here and and you know it s just been wonderful first of all let me thank a lot of the people who are here i want to thank len barrack who came up here before me i know most of you don t know him but he is a philadelphia lawyer and a gentleman and wonderful human being like congressman and mrs jefferson he has five great children and like congressman jefferson he over married you can t imagine here s a guy with a busy life and a lot to do and he could be home in philadelphia and every night he s somewhere else in america trying to help rebuild our party and make sure we re victorious in november and i thank you thank you very much i never want to speak again in louisiana without thanking the people of this state for voting for me twice for president and voting for me overwhelmingly in the primary in 1992 and giving me the chance to serve and it is a real joy to me to see you doing so well and to see the young leaders coming in i can tell you you would be very very proud of the mark that mary landrieu is making not only from what you know here in louisiana but if you were in washington and you heard it the way i hear it from the senators they believe that she is a fine senator with an unlimited future and so do i and i can t say enough about your mayor new orleans is getting a national reputation for saving its children for putting its economy back in order for showing the right face to the world for bringing people together for being a genuinely progressive city in the best sense and mr mayor i thank you for what you re doing and i m always proud i want to thank your state party chair ben jeffers and all the other people who ve been active in the democratic party i can t say enough in terms of thanks to ray reggie and to congressman jefferson for doing this tonight i also want to thank them for the people who are here i know there are a lot of younger people here tonight that i have not met before there are some former republicans who are here tonight that i have not met before and i thank you you know i always tell my republican friends in washington that being a southern baptist i believe in death bed conversions but i hate to wait that long so i feel somewhat encouraged that i won t have to wait that long for some of you i thank my longtime friend and our transportation secretary secretary rodney slater for being here with me tonight a great friend of the people of louisiana and let me just recognize one other person we re just 11 seats from winning a majority in the house of representatives and being able once again to put progress over partisanship in america and i believe that marjorie mckeithen will be one of those 11 victories and i thank her for being here today jeff talked a little bit about how we tried to change the democratic party i think it s worth all of us because we re neighbors and friends going back to where we were a few years ago and thinking about those circumstances most of my republican friends in the late 80s and early 90s thought there would never be another democratic president in their lifetime because they thought we kept shooting ourselves in the foot and because they thought they had developed a kind of a cardboard cookie image of us that they could always present to the american people and because they thought that they could always sort of divide every issue into the liberal position and the conservative position and the conservative position was always right the liberal position was always wrong and at a very high level of rhetoric with a lot of emotion and a lot of heat and as little light as possible they could turn every election into one where the voters didn t think and their emotions carried them to ratify their governance the thing that bothered me about that as a governor of a state that went through all the turmoil of the 80s just like all of you did is that i kept reading the newspaper every day just like all of you and i heard all those debates in washington just like all of you and most of what i heard didn t make a lot sense to me because i didn t know anybody who talked that way or who thought that way most of the people that i knew whether they were republicans or democrats we all had fights over the issues but we understood there was some core things we had to do in my home state and we did it we worked together and i thought well maybe it was just something in the water maybe that washington is so far away from the people that you have to communicate in more abstract terms and i do think there s something to that you have to elevate the debate and make it more general to some extent but the truth is this country was in trouble in 1992 and if it hadn t been i would not have been elected i think we all know that i think we all know that i had the great good fortune to bring to the american people some new ideas and a new direction at a time when they were open to hearing it otherwise the governor of a small southern state as my distinguished opponent often dubbed me would not have had a chance to become president but i d like to review with you just for a moment what those ideas were because i think it s worth pointing out what they were we believed that first of all we had to ground our party in the values that made our country great and the values that our party embodied when we were the leading party in america that we were for opportunity for everybody we were for responsibility from everybody and we thought we had to build an american community of everybody and that this country wouldn t work if we couldn t do those three things and that basically the debate which was going on in the early 90s in this country i thought was largely irrelevant to the real problems of real people when we had unemployment high crime rising welfare rising incomes diverging the country showing uncertainty around the world and great difficulties on economic policy it seemed to me that we had a lot of people talking about how terrible government spending was while they quadrupled the debt of the country which i thought was a pretty neat trick it seemed to me that what we had to do was to close the gap between the two positions and say we can t stop investing in our people we can t stop investing in education and science and technology and all this research because that s the future of the country but we ve got to do it in a way that eliminates this deficit and when i said we think we ought to invest more and still cut the deficit and that if we cut out unnecessary programs and reduced the size of government we could do that if we eliminated unnecessary inflation in some of our programs we could do that a lot of people thought we were nuts but actually it turned out we were right on education i said i m all for spending more money on education but we also have to lift the standards of excellence and accountability today i came to new orleans in part to speak to the american federation of teachers and probably more than any other single educational organization over the last 15 years they have constantly echoed that theme and they deserve a lot of credit from the american people for always saying hey we want to be held accountable and if we re not good at what we do we shouldn t be in the classroom and we re not afraid of accountability but we expect you to invest in our children and our future on matters of the environment it always seemed to me that if we got into a position where we had to choose between preserving our environment and growing our economy we were going to be defeated before we started because in the end if we use up our environment we won t have an economy and if we have to ask people to give up their right to make a living then there won t be any support for a clean environment so we said our environmental policy is going to be designed to improve the environment as we grow the economy on crime it seemed to me that the further away you got from the streets where crime occurred the more politicians despairing that they could do anything talked tough but did nothing so i said yes we ought to punish people more if they deserve it but we also ought to give local law enforcement officials the tools they need to prevent crime in the first place and give these kids something they can do to stay out of trouble in the first place on welfare the debate in washington in 1992 before i showed up seemed to be between those who said we ought to make every able bodied person work and if they can t take care of their kids that s just tough and those who said there s no way to do that so we just have to keep the same old system as bad as it is i thought that was a foolish choice so we said the position ought to be every able bodied person should work but we should never forget that everyone s job everyone s most important job even the president if you have a child is being a good parent so we can t make people sacrifice their children so we re going to make people work but we re going to give them child care and the support their children need for medical care so you can be a good parent and a good worker that s what all of us want to do that s what we should want poor people to do as well i haven t won all my debates in the democratic party mr jefferson and i are still fighting the debate on trade because some people still believe that if you expand trade well inevitably you will empower people who will despoil the global economy and weaken workers around the world it seems to me that when countries get richer they re more likely to lift the conditions of their workers and wealthy countries do better by the environment than poor countries do so my belief is we can expand trade and improve the conditions of people around the world and i want to thank bill jefferson for sticking up for that position i know that s good for the port of new orleans the truth is it s good for the rest of america because we re only 4 percent of the world s population we have 20 percent of the world s income if we want to keep it the developing world is growing at three times the rate of the already developed countries you don t have to be a mathematical genius to figure out that if you want to keep your income we 4 percent have to sell something to the other 96 percent and we ve got a real interest in their growing therefore bill jefferson s interest in africa his support of the africa trade bill his support of our outreach to the caribbean and to latin america these things are very very important and the support that he and mary and others have given to our attempt to get some funds into the revitalization of the asian economies is profoundly important if you want the american economy to keep growing then please support our efforts to get growth back in asia that is the only way for us to continue to grow over the long run so anyway we said these are our new ideas and a lot of people said oh they don t believe in anything because they re not completely liberal they re not completely conservative that s the last refuge of a scoundrel you know if you have to think just accuse the other people of having no conscience no convictions and i say yes we have very strong convictions but we have new ideas only foolish people stay with yesterday s ideas in today s circumstances facing a different tomorrow and so we have vigorously pursued those ideas in the democratic party not abandoning our principles but building on our bedrock principles to meet the needs of america in the 21st century and while the american people deserve most of the credit for any good thing that happens there is definitely a connection between the policies we have followed and the results which have ensued we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years we re going to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years we ve got the lowest inflation in 32 years the highest homeownership in history and by the way under a democratic administration the federal government is the smallest it s been in 25 years this is working this is working more to the point one big reason that you ought to elect marjorie and that what you re doing for the democratic party is important is because we are committed to taking the tough decisions over the long run to putting the progress of the country ahead of short term partisan advantage i ll just give you a few examples we ve got to reform the social security and medicare system so they ll be there for the baby boomers under circumstances that don t bankrupt our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren we have to do it now we are committed to doing that in a way that is fair and balanced to all generations we have got to continue working until we can say with a straight face yes we ve had the best college education in the world for a long time now we ve got the best elementary and secondary education for all of our people we have got to continue to come to grips with the fact that we have more and more americans in managed care and that s a good thing if you re getting rid of waste in the system but it s a terrible thing if people can t have emergency room care when they need it can t have specialists when they need it when you have literally disastrous heart breaking circumstances which is why we have so many republicans all across america and the american medical association and a lot of other people supporting the democratic party s position for a patients bill of rights that will protect the health care interests of all of our people you get the idea we re trying very hard to pass legislation to protect children from the dangers of tobacco we don t want to bankrupt the tobacco companies we want to get them out of the business of marketing tobacco to our children and it s a profoundly important thing and we are prepared to make tough decisions to make principled decisions to put the progress of the country ahead of the partisan divide we have to do this and so i ask all of you to renew your dedication i thank you but remember what makes a successful country in times like this is not all that different from what makes a successful company or community or family endeavor if you look at the whole history of america at all dynamic change eras when things were really up in the air as they are now we have grown stronger and stronger and stronger and we re now the longest lasting democracy in history because we have done what the founding fathers told us to do they set up this very flexible system rooted in bedrock values that said in every age and time you must first of all deepen freedom and extend it to all law abiding people secondly you must seek to widen the circle of opportunity what they called the pursuit of happiness thirdly you must recognize that you cannot do this alone and this is maybe the significant difference between the two parties today and i say that having eliminated more government programs more government regulations and reduced the size of the government more than any republican president in the last 50 years still remember what the founders said we are forming this government because alone we cannot protect pursue and enhance life liberty and happiness that s why we got together because in the nature of things we can t do all these things all by ourselves maybe the most important thing we ve done is to try to redefine the role of government the old debate was government is the problem versus government is the solution our position is government is neither government is a glue that binds us together and the job of government on the edge of the 21st century is to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives to solve their problems in their individual lives their family lives their community lives their business lives to be good for the american people as stewards and to be a leading force in the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and so finally i would say that the third mission after freedom and opportunity is that we are constantly forced to redefine our national union and that is the difference the critical difference between the two parties today i do not believe that we can be what we need to be unless we still believe that our eternal mission is what they said it was 220 years ago to form a more perfect union nobody you won t find anybody in america that likes our diversity anymore than i do i love our racial diversity i love our ethnic diversity i love our religious diversity i love our cultural diversity that s why i love to come to new orleans right but what is important and what makes it possible to enjoy all that is that underneath it all at the bedrock we are bound together by common values and a common understanding that we are going into tomorrow together and the only way we can make the most of this phenomenal opportunity we have is to do it so i ask you to go and impart that message to your friends and neighbors help us to strengthen our party help us to continue to move forward help us to get the message to washington the american people want progress over partisanship and the democratic party far more important the american people will go strong into that new century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton20 7 98b bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen of the aft senator landrieu congressman jefferson secretary slater mayor morial thank you for hosting this fine group of america s teachers in this wonderful city to president sandy feldman and ed mcelroy and your newly elected executive vp nat lacour and all the officers and people who are here let me say when sandy was up here giving her introduction my mind was racing back over lots of events going back to early 1992 when we first went to a school in new york together cardozo that s right you were there weren t you now anytime i m talking if i mention something that gives you an opportunity to flack for your school you stand up and do it i won t be offended i think you ought to be proud of what you do and where you work and the children that you re trying to help to prepare for tomorrow and when you think about where we were then as a nation and where we are now i was so concerned because not only was the economy in the doldrums but our society was becoming more divided the crime rates were going up the welfare rolls were exploding there were tensions among our people people were looking for racial or ethnic or religious or political reasons to blame other people for the general problems and challenges we shared as americans one of the things that i always admired most about the aft was that i felt that you have always found the right balance between being passionately devoted to public education and to the welfare and working conditions of teachers and uncompromising uncompromising in your advocacy of high standards and accountability and educational excellence for every single american child shortly before i came out here your officers told me that edie shanker had decided to give the medal of freedom that i awarded to al to the aft for safekeeping i love that for it was your legacy your values that he worked so hard to serve so you take good care of it he earned it and so did you this is a remarkable time in our country s history a time of prosperity and confidence and breathtaking change if you think about where we are now compared to where we were on the day that i was fortunate enough to be inaugurated president i don t say that our administration is 100 percent responsible for all the good things that have happened that would be foolish in a free society the people deserve the lion s share of any change that occurs but i will say this we had new ideas and new policies we said we would take this country in a new direction and there were consequences to those decisions just as there will be consequences to the decisions of those who disagree with us if they hold sway and i think every single one of you should feel a personal measure of pride if you helped al gore and me win those elections in 92 and 96 because of what has happened every single one of you because when you hear these statistics i mean think about this compared to 1992 we have 16 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest percentage of our people on welfare in 29 years the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years the lowest inflation in 32 years the highest home ownership in the history of the country and the smallest national government in 35 years and the biggest investment in education in our nation s history i am proud of that and you should be too now today i want to ask you to look ahead at where we are and what our challenges are and i want to ask you to help me with a lesson plan for america s future i know you re mildly acquainted with such things i also know that this union represents people who help you in schools who are not teachers and i thank all of them all the support people here who are here thank you for your service we have to decide what to do with this moment and i want to talk about education and the role of some other issues but let me just back up and say there are three things i want you to think about first of all all these numbers and statistics that i mentioned are very rewarding because they represent real positive changes in real peoples lives incomes for ordinary people are up poverty is down as sandy said 90 percent of our kids are immunized we ve virtually opened the doors of college to everyone who will work for it i m proud of all that but you know and i know that we face some big long term challenges and i d just like to mention a couple of them because i want you to talk to your students and to the parents and to the people that you work with about them because people need to understand that just because times are good it doesn t mean we should all be relaxing except if you want to go out in the sun in new orleans and relax i m for it but i don t want it to be a permanent condition for the american people because we have big challenges facing us if we re going to go into the 21st century with the american dream alive for everyone with america coming together as a community across all of our differences and with our country leading the world for peace and freedom and prosperity what are they well let me just mention a few of them number one we have to save social security and medicare for the baby boom generation and we have to do it in a way that recognizes that they lift millions and millions and millions of seniors out of poverty but that as presently constructed it is not sustainable because and i m the oldest know this baby boomer so i can say this when we retire at present birth rates and present immigration rates and present retirement rates there will only be about two people working for every person drawing social security so we have to make some changes if we make modest changes now we can avoid drastic changes later we must do that and every american must support it and we must find an american unified way to do it the second thing we have to do is to recognize as you can see from this sweltering heat that the vice president is right the climate of our country and our globe is changing the globe is warming and our principal contribution to it human beings everywhere is that we re putting too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere primarily because we insist on maintaining industrial age patterns of energy use when all the technology available indicates that you don t have to do that to grow an economy so we have got to take advantage of the fact that our children are natural environmentalists to use them to empower them to help us all to find a way to save our planet to improve our environment even as we grow the economy i promise you it can be done but we ve got to get people to think differently this is a huge education issue the third thing we have to do is to prove that we can bring the benefits of this great economic recovery to all americans not just to those who have it now in our inner cities in our rural areas our farming areas on our native american reservations the fourth thing we have to do is to persuade the american people that if we re going to lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity we have to be far sighted we have to pay our way in an interdependent world that means we can t walk away from our investment in the united nations we can t walk away from our investment in the international monetary fund i was just home for the weekend and i know what a lot of folks at home think they think why does bill clinton want to spend money on the international monetary fund we ve got needs here at home i ll tell you why because unless we help to reform and restore growth in the asian countries for example they won t be able to buy our products and 30 percent of our growth if you like these 16 million new jobs if you like this low unemployment if you like the taxes that are flowing into local government for education because of the economy somebody has got to buy our stuff around the world and if they don t have any money they can t buy it and if they don t have any money the value of their currency goes down so their products they sell here are cheaper so our trade deficit goes up if you want us to grow in america we have to grow together with our friends and neighbors around the world we have to be responsible partners and we ve got to teach people that just two other quick points we ve got to be able to live together as one america across all the lines that divide us many of you teach in school districts where there are children from 20 40 60 80 maybe even 100 different racial and ethnic groups speaking dozens of different languages as their native tongues this is a good thing for america in the 21st century and a global economy an information age if we can overcome the demons of racial and ethnic and religious hatred which are bedeviling the world in our time from bosnia and kosovo to rwanda to northern ireland to the middle east to the conflict between greece and turkey to the difficulties between india and pakistan and if you want your country to lead the world away from all that i can just say this in order for america to do good throughout the world we have to be good at home we have to be one america finally the last big challenge that i think we face big challenge for the 21st century is providing every single child with world class excellence in education every child every child no one anywhere in the world questions that we offer more rich quality opportunities for people to go on to college than any other country in the world we ve worked very hard to open the doors of college to everybody who will work for it but no one who is honest would say we don t have serious challenges in our elementary and secondary education there are all kinds of different arguments about well what caused it or what the problems are or what the solutions are you and i by and large agree on the solutions but the main thing we ve got to agree on is that this is one of the five or six challenges that will shape the america our children and grandchildren will live in in the 21st century if you do not want our country to continue to be divided along the lines of income to continue to grow more unequal if you don t want the 21st century to see an america where there are fabulously wealthy successful people living alongside breathtakingly poor people isolated in areas where opportunity never reaches we have to realize that if this is an information age and if the economy is growing by ideas then it is more important than ever before that educational excellence be universal and we have to provide that now i also want to say a few words today about an issue that may seem somewhat mundane to people who ve never been in the classroom and faced it but america has been thinking about it because of all the tragedies in all the schools in the last year or so and that is the whole issue of school safety and the critical role of a safe classroom and a safe school and a safe schoolyard play in the work that teachers do every day you work hard to broaden young minds to unlock their potential to sharpen skills you have faith in the possibilities of our children if you didn t you wouldn t be doing this because just about every one of you could be making more money doing something else if you weren t devoted to our children you wouldn t be doing this it keeps you in front of a chalkboard or a keyboard it keeps you up late at night grading papers and making lesson plans we have tried to be a good partner with you as sandy said i have loved working with you to raise standards to increase accountability to improve teaching to give schools the tools and the flexibility they need to reach the national education goals to try to help make sure all of our children can read and can log onto the internet and can go on to college we now have i think a great challenge before us because in spite of the fact that this agenda is clearly an integral part of america s economic success over the next few years believe it or not there are people who don t want to continue it in washington and some who downright are committed to undoing it but i have put before the congress an agenda to modernize our schools to reduce class size to connect every classroom to the internet to end social promotion but provide more funding for after school and summer school programs that work to give our children a chance to give more schools who are in disadvantaged areas the funds and the support they need to adopt the kind of comprehensive approach that chicago is pursuing with such success to give more students in disadvantaged areas mentors and the certainty in junior high school or middle school that they can go on to college if they learn and become good citizens and succeed in school to provide more funds to put teachers into underserved areas to do everything i can to help to provide 100 000 more master teachers so that we can do what needs to be done in every school building in the country and to support your efforts to improve teaching i salute sandy feldman s plan to improve teacher quality and i want to support your efforts i have always been impressed i will say again that the aft was never afraid to say that before a teacher is certified it is reasonable to have the demonstrated competence of the teacher i have always respected that and i thank you for that but i will also say that while i have strongly supported the testing of teachers before they re certified i also have strongly supported paying them once they are certified and strongly supported having master teachers in every school building in america and doing the things that sandy outlined in her proposal so as teachers you re stepping up to your responsibility i have tried to preserve the gains of the last five and a half years and put forward an ambitious program for the future and we ve had a lot of success working with congress in a bipartisan way for education in the balanced budget bill as sandy said we got this huge increase in funding for education and we got the hope scholarship we got more work study positions we got big increases in pell grants we have earlier than that got a big improvement in the student loan program to open the doors of college we ve got 1 000 colleges now participating with their kids in the america reads program going into your schools we ve got americorps people almost 100 000 young people have been in americorps when i drove by a grade school this morning on the way here there were the americorps volunteers out there with their kids holding up signs welcoming me to new orleans we have been able to do those things by working together now is the time for congress to turn away from some of these recent committee votes where they say no to smaller classes no to modernized schools no to americorps they haven t yet said yes to america reads i am pleased that we seem to be making some bipartisan progress with the proposals to prepare teachers for the classroom but i ask congress to support all these proposals they are not my ideas they are the ideas of educators they are the ideas that we know work all of them came from grassroots america i was in philadelphia the other day where the average age of a school building is 65 years a lot of those buildings are beautiful but they need rehabilitating i was in florida in a little town where there were 17 count them 17 trailers outside the major school building because the school population had grown so much if you want smaller classes they have to be held somewhere and there have to be teachers to walk in the classroom we have got to do this this is important so i ask you to redouble your efforts to reach out to all members of congress without regard to their party and say look if there s one thing in america even in washington d c we ought to be able to put beyond partisan politics it should be education of our children now if you want to fight about whether you believe in vouchers or not fine let s have an argument about it i don t mind that but while we re arguing about it don t forget this over 90 percent of the people are out there in those public schools and these ideas are good on their own merit and they deserve to be implemented and passed without regard to party in washington d c we have the money to do it it is allocated and we should do it now let me also say that you know better than anybody learning cannot occur unless our schools are safe and orderly places where teachers can teach and children can learn wherever there is chaos where there should be calm wherever there is disorder where there should be discipline make no mistake about it it s not just a threat to our classrooms and to your mission it is a threat to the strength and vitality of america in a recent study 81 percent of teachers said the worst behaved students absorb the most attention in school not the struggling students not the striving students the worst behaved seventy one percent of all high school students said there were too many disruptive students in their own classes and only 13 percent of public school students said their classmates were very respectful of teachers now teachers can t teach if they have to fight for respect or fear for their safety students can t study if there is disorder in a classroom and the disruption won t change unless there are clear strict standards for behavior you know better than anyone that we either have discipline in a classroom or we have disorder and too often danger hard experience has taught us this lesson all too well as a nation therefore we must recognize that giving you the tools to have a safe orderly classroom is central to the mission of renewing america there is another lesson to be learned from all this in this case it is from the overall decline in crime and let me back up and say one of the cruel ironies of these horrible killings in all these states over the last year or so has been that they have occurred against the backdrop of a dramatic drop in crime and the first drop in juvenile crime in years and years and years crime is dropping around the country because we re getting serious about community policing effective punishment and effective prevention crime is dropping because whole communities like boston are taking responsibility for their streets and their neighborhoods and because government is giving them the support they need i mention boston because they went two years and a few weeks without a single solitary child under the age of 18 being killed with a gun that s an amazing statistic now these things do not happen by accident they happen by design at the grassroots level but people must have the tools to do the job that s the idea behind our efforts to put 100 000 police on the street when i became president violent crime had tripled in the last 30 years and the number of police officers had only increased by 10 percent you didn t have to be einstein to figure out that was a mathematical equation for disaster and the police officers told us we can prevent crime if you give us enough police to walk the streets to be on the blocks to know the kids to know the parents to know the store owners to figure out what s going on so that s what we did but if you look at what happened in community after community where the crime rate dropped they first of all put in place a system that said we are going to have respect for the law and here s the system we re going to have to maximize respect hold people accountable who don t respect the law and guess what more and more people started to follow the law in the first place to behave as responsible citizens to walk away from the prospect of criminal conduct that s what we ve tried to do with school safety we ve worked hard to tighten security to give you the tools to do that to strengthen prevention to toughen penalties we initiated this nationwide policy of zero tolerance for guns in schools in the 96 97 school year this policy led to the expulsion of about 6 100 law breaking students it obviously prevented countless acts of violence yet as we have seen from the recent acts of violence we have to do more when i was in springfield oregon i was so moved by what the parents of injured children said the parents in some cases of children who were killed the teachers who were there talked about the necessity of doing more and developing the right kinds of intervention strategies this is terribly important and one of the things i came here today to do is to say that in the fall i will host the first ever white house conference on school safety and i want you to be a part of that we want to bring together educators and law enforcement officers and families whose lives have been touched by these terrible tragedies to find new solutions to this profound challenge again i ask congress also to be our partner and again i say this should not be a partisan issue i have proposed a juvenile crime bill to ban violent juveniles from buying guns for life and to take other important steps to give communities much needed support i ve asked that in our balanced budget 95 million be allocated to the prevention of juvenile crime i urge congress to invest in prevention you know when we talk those of us who have run for office we all like to talk about punishment because everybody has known someone who s been hurt who s been a victim of crime and because we are outraged when we see children have their lives cut short and i would point out that in our 94 crime bill we did more to stiffen punishment for crimes under federal law than had ever been done but you know and i know that we cannot jail our way out of this problem we ve got to prevent more of these kids from getting in trouble in the first place again i say this is not a democratic or a republican issue we should simply invest in prevention because the police officers tell us it works because the teachers tell us it works because the social workers tell us it works because the religious leaders tell us it works because the children themselves tell us it works we should be investing in a summer jobs program in the summer school program in the after school program because it works we also know by way of lessons that the small stuff matters the basics matter in most schools it s not the sensational acts of violence but smaller acts of aggression threats scuffles constant back talk that take a terrible toll on the atmosphere of learning on the morale of teachers on the attitudes of other students and that s why setting strict standards and enforcing them can make a powerful difference all across america as they are doing in many places and let me just give three or four examples our first effort has to be to get kids inside the schoolhouse doors and keep them there during school hours truancy is more than a warning sign it is trouble a gateway to drugs alcohol gangs and violence our children will either sit in class or stand on the streets they ll either learn from teachers or learn from the gang leaders on the streets it used to be the rule that truancy laws were enforced that local police knew kids and brought them back to school but in too many places that has long since ceased to be the case thankfully communities again are turning their attention to the old fashioned remedy of enforcing the truancy laws in milwaukee officers can now stop students on the streets during school hours in boston where more than a quarter of the public school students were absent three weeks or more this past school year they now have a strict new promotion policy if you don t attend you don t advance other cities are forming truancy task forces a united front of schools social services community police to keep our children in school and out of trouble this is important a teacher s day must sometimes seem very long but we know the school day lasts precious few hours and there s no time to waste the next thing i d like to say is when the kids are there they need to feel free and they need to feel free of danger going to and from school that s one of the ideas behind this incredible wave of enthusiasm across the country for school uniforms when i spoke about school uniforms in my 1996 state of the union address besides making half the kids in america mad at me it struck a lot of people as an idea long out of date and it was just gathering steam in places like long beach california but in the years since i have been heartened by the flood of interest from new york to houston from dade county to chicago school districts are adopting school uniform policies and they re finding ways to do it in ways that give the children and the parents and the teachers all a say in how they do it and that don t put poor kids at a disadvantage when they can t afford the uniforms but students have told me i ve talked to a lot of students about this in schools that have uniform policies when one student is no longer obsessed by another student s sneakers or designer jackets and where students are focused not on appearances but on learning crime and violence go down attendance and learning go up and i am proud of the support we have given to those of you who have done this the next thing i d like to say and i know you believe this because you applauded earlier when i mentioned it is that the responsibility that we adults have for our kids doesn t end when the last school bell rings after school an awful lot of children s parents are still working and there s nobody home to either supervise them there or know where they are or where they re going when they leave school well a lot of our kids get in trouble after school and youth crime is at its peak during the unsupervised hours of 3 00 p m to 6 00 p m that s why i have said that our schools should remain open to become community learning centers where children are safe and can learn and grow in this budget for 1999 for next year i have proposed a significant expansion in our investments for before and after school programs and for the later hours when streets become darker and more dangerous i have often urged communities to install curfews to follow the example of new orleans where mayor morial who is here with us today put in place community based curfews with very impressive results in no small measure because the children are also taken if they violate curfew to somebody who can help them if they ve got a problem and support them and get them back on the right path but these are the things that we have to do if we expect you to have a safe learning environment i should also say that i think that the character education programs that our education secretary dick riley has done so much to help implement across the country are a positive force for a more disciplined school environment where the little nagging terrible problems don t occur so we re going to have this conference in the fall on school violence i want the aft involved i want the teachers who know what the problems are to participate but i want to encourage everyplace to adopt anti truancy efforts to consider school uniforms to look at the curfew issue to look at character education programs to look to a new approach to restoring discipline in our schools and order in our children s lives we can do this the three rs of the aft responsibility respect results that s what school discipline is all about in closing let me say i am always struck by how every challenge in american education has been solved by somebody somewhere therefore i am always frustrated that we have not yet found a way to make sure when somebody somewhere solves a problem we cannot model that and make sure it s solved by everybody everywhere that is one of the things that the aft has been devoted to finding what works developing a systematic approach trying to get it done everywhere and it s one thing america needs desperately in this area of school discipline school order and school safety again i say i am very proud to be your partner in building a 21st century america that is leading the world to peace and freedom and prosperity an america in which every child is a responsible citizen with unparalleled opportunity in a community that revels in its diversity but is bound together in our wonderful ongoing effort to form a more perfect union you the educators of our nation are the architects of that 21st century america build well thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton20 7 99 bill_clinton thank you very much i want to thank you all for your welcome and i want to thank my good friend janice for her instruction i did know as a matter of fact that she was from a place called hope i didn t know that i had the endorsement of her father in quite that way but i appreciate it more than i can say i want to thank john merrigan and penny and susie and i want to thank joe andrew and beth dozoretz and all of you who have worked so hard to put our party on the soundest financial footing i think mr merrigan said we were out of debt for the first time since 91 i should point out that we were out spent by 100 million in 1998 and still picked up house seats the first time it had happened in the sixth year of an administration since 1822 i say that to say that it is not necessary that we have as much money as the other side does you know the economy the democrats have built has been an equal opportunity beneficiary and so we have showered benefits on republicans as well as democrats and if they choose to misspend their money there s nothing we can do about it is there it s a free economy but it is necessary that we have enough and if we have a good message and we stand for the right things and our people are excited then that is enough and i thank you for that we were talking at our table i have a friend who is a new york democrat who heads quite a large american company and he said he d gotten so exasperated with these republicans throwing their money around he started going up to his friends in new york saying you should give money to the republicans if your taxes went up in 1993 by more than you ve made in the stock market support them but if the balanced budget and the low interest rates and the tripling of the stock market have benefitted you more you ought to be for us and if you re not you re not even acting in your own best interest much less the country s i want to talk to you just very briefly tonight not so much about your own best interests but about our own best interests and i want to begin by thanking all of you thank you for your support many of you for your repeated support over these years some of you for your involvement in this administration like dr susan blumenthal thank you very much for being here thank you for being so good to me and hillary and to al and tipper gore and thank you for doing something that has been very good for america i want to make just a few brief points in case somebody tomorrow gives you a quiz and asks you why you came tonight this country was in trouble in 1991 and 1992 it was in trouble because we had been in a prolonged recession but even more because we kept coming out of these recessions and dripping back in coming out and drip back in we hadn t had any sustained growth for some time it was in trouble because the crime rates and the welfare rolls were up it was in trouble because our country was becoming more divided it was in trouble because the political debate in washington left most americans cold because there seemed to be a debate between people who essentially were against the government doing anything and people who wanted to preserve the status quo of what the government had been doing the country was in trouble i ran for president because i had some ideas about how we could change things i believed that we could create a country again in which there was opportunity for every responsible citizen in which we had a community of all americans who were responsible for themselves and for each other in which we led the world for peace and freedom and prosperity but i didn t think we could do it by having the same old fights in the same old way and i knew if the people gave me a chance to serve some difficult decisions would be required well it worked out and we said look we re going to cut this deficit get interest rates down and grow the economy but we still have to invest in education in medical research in technology and the environment we have to do that we said we want more money in education but we want higher standards and more competition too we said we believe you can grow the economy and improve the environment we said we thought that you could create a society where people who had to work and had children could succeed at work and at home and a lot of that just sounded like political rhetoric at the time but what i want to say to you tonight is when people ask you why you were here say look the country was in trouble we elected the clinton gore administration they had friends and allies in the government and the congress and in the private sector they implemented their ideas most of the time not all of the time but most of the time they were opposed by members of the other party and it worked out our approach turned out to be right that s what janice was saying this is no longer subject to serious debate i was told for two years i saw the republicans going into the 94 election telling everybody how we d raise taxes on people we hadn t raised taxes on and how terrible it was and how it was going to bankrupt the country and run the debt up and we went from the biggest deficit in history to the biggest surplus in history the longest peacetime expansion in history almost 19 million new jobs the highest home ownership in history the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded since we started keeping that data almost 30 years ago in addition to that we have the lowest crime rate in 26 years the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years and teen pregnancy teen drug abuse teen smoking are declining things are moving in the right direction in this country so i say to you first thank you because we have moved this country in the right direction we did it and proved you could have a better environment the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer ninety percent of our kids are immunized against childhood diseases for the first time in the history of america over 100 000 young people have served their communities in americorps in four years it took the peace corps 20 years to get to 100 000 people we have virtually opened the doors of college to every american with the hope scholarship and the other tax credits and student loans this is a stronger country than it was in 1992 and we have done it by relentlessly pushing to bring people together standing against discrimination and against hatred and against the politics of division when i say we i don t mean me we i mean we we our party the people that believed as we did and along the way we ve been a force for peace in the middle east in northern ireland in bosnia in kosovo we stood up against terrorism and stood up for trade and human rights around the world today i asked the united states senate to ratify the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty first advocated by presidents eisenhower and kennedy first signed by the united states i signed it at the u n a couple years ago we are moving the country in the right direction toward a world that works better for all the people that s the first thing i want to say we re entitled to the benefit of the doubt on the great debates going on in washington today because we just had six years of argument and it turned out we were right and i say that in all humility i am grateful for that the point i m trying to make is joe andrew always says well why is bill clinton doing this he s not running for anything i came here to say not that i was right but that our ideas were right and i am grateful that i had the chance to be president to be the instrument of bringing the country together and moving it forward but it wasn t me it was the ideas we had were right and you ve got to get out there between now and the next election cycle and hammer that home before i took office they were killing family leave because it was going to bankrupt small business i signed a family leave bill first thing i did so we d have 15 million people take advantage of it the largest number of small businesses formed in any given year every single year i ve been president broken a new record so the family leave law did not wreck the small business economy it made america a place where you could have work and family and they vetoed and killed the brady bill before i became president so i signed it first chance i got and 400 000 people couldn t get guns because they had criminal backgrounds and we have a 26 year low in the crime rate and we ve got 100 000 more police on the street even though on the other side of the aisle they said this won t make a lick of difference these police will never get out there well we funded them ahead of time and under budget and we have a 26 year low in the crime rate so as democrats we should be proud not proud as if we did it proud that the ideas we stood for were the right ones and that it actually works when you try to create a society where everybody has a chance all the rest of us are going to do fine regardless do even better that we all do better when we try to create opportunity for each other when we try to make sure we re responsible for each other in an appropriate way and we try to pull together now the second thing i want to say is we have to take that fast forward to today what s the great debate in washington today what are we going to do with the surplus now if i had been running in 92 and i had come to you and you had never seen me before and i said i want you to vote for me so that six years from now we ll be having a debate about to do with the surplus you would have sent me home to arkansas you would have said this guy has lost it he doesn t understand we ve got a 290 billion deficit we will always have deficits so what are we going to do with it first the good news there s a bipartisan agreement that we shouldn t spend the social security surplus that means until we need it to pay for social security we can use it to pay down the debt and that s good i think we have that agreement i want to see the details but i think we do that s good now the question is what to do with the rest of the surplus here s what we feel we feel what we should do is to do the following things number one we should fix medicare and provide a prescription drug benefit number two we should have appropriate money set aside to continue to invest in education national defense biomedical research and the environment number three we believe that as the interest on the debt comes down because our interest payments will come down as the debt comes down we should put the savings into social security so we can run the trust fund out to 2053 so when i leave office everybody will know social security is all right for at least 50 years and we can quit worrying about it now that s what we think and you can do what we suggest and still have a tax cut a substantial one they believe that virtually all the non social security surplus should go to a tax cut and they think it sounds really popular my tax cut is bigger than your tax cut well if that were the whole story that would sound like a pretty good argument but i say we ought to save social security and medicare and not just pay down the debt but make this country debt free for the first time since 1835 and continue to invest in education we ll still have money for a tax cut to help families save for long term care or for child care for investments in our country but we will continue we will not risk running a deficit destroying the education budget not meeting our defense responsibilities or not doing one single thing to add a day to the problems with medicare and not providing the prescription drug benefit that s the difference that s the choice so it s just all back to 1993 again or even back earlier than that most of you in this room what are you doing here you re all in upper income groups you ought to be at their deal not ours why are you here you get more money out of their tax cut this is very important why you re democrats why i am but five years from now you re going to be a lot better off and so is america if we pay down the debt save social security and medicare continue to invest in education and have a modest tax cut we can afford you know if you just think about just three great challenges this country faces we re going to double the number of people over 65 in 30 years we hadn t been in this kind of financial shape in forever and a day what in the world are we going to say to our children if we walk away from this opportunity to run the social security trust fund out at least 50 plus years what are we going to say if we walk away from our obligation to run the medicare trust fund out until 2025 or beyond and to provide all these elderly people not all of them poor a lot of them middle class a little help in dealing with the prescription drug program what are we going to say if we adopt a tax cut which causes us to cut education when we ought to be investing more in it what are we going to say when five 10 years from now some kosovo comes along and america is asked to stand up for human rights around the world we say we ll we d like to do it but we had that tax cut and i needed that tax cut closer to home what are we going to say i ve been waiting for this and i never wanted to be the first to raise it because i wouldn t have had credibility on it but now it s in the press what are we going to say if they cut taxes and the markets say well we don t need a tax cut in the economy like this we better raise interest rates so you get it with one hand and get it taken away with the other and everything gets squeezed so i say to you we ought to save social security and medicare we ought to continue to move forward in education and i want to talk just a minute about this paying the debt down a lot of people it just seems so alien it s like an alien subject we hadn t been out of debt since 1835 and for most of this century we shouldn t have been out of debt we needed to have a little debt to invest in infrastructure or to expand the economy in times of recession or outright depression but it s different now why is it different now i want you all to think about this you may not agree with me on this i ve really thought about this a lot why should the nation s progressive party be for taking the country out of debt in 1999 when we have still an unconscionably large number of poor children and any number of things that we ought to be spending this money on here s why we re living in a global economy interest rates are set globally money moves globally the best thing we ve done for poor people in america is create 19 million new jobs and give tax relief to lower income working people and raise the minimum wage to create an economy in other words that they could be a part of to support the vice president s empowerment initiative and the community development banks and all the things we ve done to try to bring jobs now if we get out of debt and if everybody knows we re on the target we re going to be out of debt in 15 years what happens interest rates stay down investments stay high more jobs are created with inflation low more money for wage increases average people pay lower interest costs for home mortgages car payments credit card payments and college loan payments and the next time a global financial crisis comes along like the one in asia nobody has to worry about america gobbling up scarce dollars and driving the price of money up so when our trading partners who are poorer than we are need to get money because times are tough they can get it and get it at a lower cost which means they will recover more quickly and we ll start doing business more quickly and if you don t think that s a big issue looks what is happening to america s farmers because of the collapse of the markets in asia here we are at the most prosperous time perhaps in this country s history with an absolute disaster in the family farms of america so that s why it makes sense in a global economy for the world s richest country to be debt free and why it is a progressive thing to do and why by the way when you do it we won t be paying interest on the debt anymore if you were a member of congress you would find that before you did anything else you d have to take about it used to be 15 and now 14 cents on every tax dollar to pay interest on the debt we have accumulated largely in the 12 years before i took office so don t forget you get out of debt you ve also got 14 cents you used to not have and 14 cents of every dollar all of you pay in taxes is a pretty tidy sum of money so that s why this is a good thing so i say to you we need to go to the country and say tax cut sure but first things first save social security and medicare and deal with the challenge of america s aging continue to invest in our children s future and in the other basic things we have to have pay that debt off for the first time since 1835 and guarantee america a generation of prosperity then have a tax cut that we need and can afford that is the debate we ought to have and i can tell you there are lots of other examples i think we were right on closing the gun show loopholes and i think they were wrong i think we were right on the patients bill of rights and i don t think they were i say that not because i take any joy in that i liked it when we got together i liked it when we had big majorities of both parties in both houses voting for welfare reform i liked it when we had big majorities of both parties in both houses voting for the balanced budget act of 1997 i wish it can be that way again but i am telling you we ve got to stand up for what s right for all the people what brings us together as a community what gives other people opportunity they wouldn t otherwise have what purges our spirit from the kind of awful arrogant hatred that led that terribly disturbed young man to kill those people because they were of different races in illinois and indiana and claim it was a religious imperative i had today a bunch of civil rights lawyers in my office and a bunch of high toned business lawyers who don t practice civil rights law to commemorate the 36th anniversary of john kennedy bringing 200 lawyers to washington to ask them to lead america s charge in civil rights and i asked them to lead america s charge in trying to integrate our law firms integrate our corporations and use pro bono legal work to help solve the economic and social problems of low income people around the country i ll just close with this one of the greatest weeks of my presidency was a couple of weeks ago when i had the privilege of going to appalachia to the mississippi delta to east st louis to the pine ridge reservation in south dakota to south phoenix and east la because i believe that we can keep this economy going better if we get people to invest in the areas that have felt none of our recovery and i have a simple proposal give americans like you the same tax incentives to invest in poor areas in america we give you to invest today in the caribbean in africa in asia and latin america i want you to have those incentives i just want poor areas in america to be as attractive our best new markets for america are here in america but what it reminded me of is all these people they re just like us just because they don t have a nice neck tie and a nice suit to wear life dealt them a little bit different hand you know janice and i we d like to have you believe we were born in a log cabins we built ourselves but the truth is you take one or two different turns in life and she and i both are back in hope arkansas doing business with each other in our little hometown some days i think it wouldn t be too bad but i m just telling you you think about it every one of you you think about this when you go home tonight why did you come here why did you come here if they ask you why you came tell them because you believe we re better off when we all go forward together tell them because you believe this ought to be one community tell them guess what we tried our ideas in the crucible of excruciating combat for six and a half years and the country is better off so it s not like there s no evidence and before we squander this surplus let s take care of the aging of america let s take care of the children of america and let s get this country out of debt so we can go forward together thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton20 9 93 bill_clinton good morning i thank you for coming here and i thank dr koop for his stirring remarks he always makes a lot of sense doesn t he and the nation is in his debt for his work as surgeon general and now for the work he is about to undertake in behalf of the cause of health care reform i also want to thank the many physicians from all across america from all walks of medical life who have made a contribution to the debate as it has progressed thus far i got very interested in this subject years ago when as the governor of my state i noticed i kept spending more and more for the same medicaid and had less and less to spend on the education of our children or on preventive practices or other things which might make a profound difference in the future in 1990 i agreed to undertake a task force for the national governors association and i started by interviewing 900 people in my state who were involved in the delivery of medical care including several hundred doctors some of them are in this room today i thank them for their contribution and i absolve them of anything i do which is unpopular with the rest of you i m glad to see my dear friend and often my daughter s doctor dr betty lowe the incoming president of the american academy of pediatrics my cardiologist dr drew kumpuris who pulls me off a treadmill once a year and tells me i m trying to be 25 when i m not and dr morris henry from fayetteville arkansas back here an ophthalmologist who hosted the wedding reception that hillary and i had in morris and anne s home almost 18 years ago next month dr jim weber formerly president of the arkansas medical society a lot of our doctors here we started a conversation with doctors long before i ever thought of running for president much less knew i would have an opportunity to do this this is really an historic opportunity it is terribly important for me one of the central reasons that i ran for president of the united states was to try to resolve this issue because i see this at the core of our absolute imperative in this sweeping time of change to both give the american people a greater sense of security in the health care that they have and call forth from our people all of our people including the consumers of health care a renewed sense of responsibility for doing what we all ought to do to make this country work again i am determined to pursue this in a completely bipartisan fashion and i have reached out to both republicans and democrats as well as the thoughtful independents to help there is one person in the audience i want to introduce a longtime friend of mine who has agreed to help mobilize support for this approach among the democrats of the country the distinguished former governor of ohio my friend dick celeste who s here thank you for being here when dr koop talked about the ethical basis of this endeavour he made perhaps the most important point if i have learned anything in all these years of public endeavors or anything in the last several months of serving as your president it is that once people decide to do something they can figure out how to do it when one week ago today on the south lawn of the white house yitzhak rabin and yassar arafat signed that peace accord they did not even know what the ultimate map drawing of the city of jericho would be or how all the elections would be held or how the palestinians candidates would advertise on the radio since the radio stations don t belong to the palestinians i could give you a hundred things they did not know the answer to they knew one thing they couldn t keep going in the direction they were going and so they decided to take a different direction when president kennedy s administration challenged this country to go to the moon they didn t have a clue about how they were going to go the vice president knows more about science than i so he can tell it in a funnier way about they didn t understand what kind of rocket they were going on and what their uniforms would be like and on and on and on but the ethical imperative is perhaps the most important thing we have to decide that the costs not just the financial costs but the human costs the social costs of all of us continuing to conduct ourselves within the framework in which we are now operating is far higher than the risk of responsible change we have certainly tried to do this in a responsible way i want to thank the first lady and all the people who work with her i want to thank tipper and ira and judy and everybody who was involved in this we have really worked hard to reach out to literally to thousands and thousands of people in this great medical drama that unfolds in america every day i want to thank donna shalala and the department of human services for the terrific work they have done we have really tried to do this in an embracing and a different way almost a nonpolitical way if you look around this room we have doctors from maine to washington from minnesota to florida some of you see patients in rural virginia some in public hospitals others of you devote your lives to training the next generation of physicians but i think everyone of you is committed to seeing that we provide the finest health care in the world that means that as we undertake this journey of change we clearly must preserve what s right with our health care system the close patient doctor relationship the best doctors and nurses the best academic research the best advance technology in the world we can do that and still fix what s wrong in fact we can enhance what s right by fixing what s wrong if we reduce the amount of unnecessary paperwork and governmental regulation and bureaucracy that will by definition enhance the doctor patient relationship if we spend less money on paying more for the same health care and the incentives to churn the system we will have some more money for example to invest more in medical research and advanced technology and breaking down the barriers which still limit our ability to solve the remaining problems before us we need a discussion we need constructive criticism we need constructive disagreement on some points this is a very complex issue i worked at this for over a year and realized when i was a governor i was just beginning to come to grips with it when we started this great enterprise and i asked hillary to undertake this task and she looked at me as if i had slipped a gasket i knew more about it than she did now she knows a lot more about it than i do this is a learning effort we are going to start today as many of you know this health care university we call it for members of congress and about 400 members of congress have signed up for two intensive days of learning that is an astonishing thing i have never seen anything like it these members without regard to their party and completely without respect to the committees they are on since most of them are on committees that would not have direct jurisdiction over this hungering to know what you go through everyday hungering to learn wanting to avoid making an irresponsible decision but determined that they should make some decisions to change this system i think that is a terrific cause for hope for patients the reform we seek will mean more choices today employers are too often forced by rising health care costs to decide which plans to offer their employees and often they are inadequate or too costly the decision is usually based on the bottom line and is a moving bottom line as more and more americans every month actually lose their health insurance for good our plans give consumers the power to chose between a broad range of plans within their region giving them more freedom to find and to stay with a doctor they like for doctors reform will mean the flexibility to choose which networks or providers you want to join if you want to be involved with one that s fine if you want to be involved with more than one that s fine so that whatever you want to do to continue to see the patients you see today you will be able to do it it s your choice we intend to see a reform that drastically simplifies this system freeing you from paperwork and bureaucratic nightmares that have already been well discussed i cannot tell you how moved i was when we were at the washington children s hospital the other day and we heard not only the statistics that the hospital has calculated that they spend 2 million a year on paperwork unrelated to patient care and keeping up with the procedures but the human stories i mean we had a nurse actually tell us about being pleaded with by a young child with cancer to play with the child and she couldn t do it because she had to go to a little seminar on how to learn how to fill out a new set of forms that they were being confronted with and she said that really was a picture of what their life was like an eloquent doctor who said she wanted to live in washington d c she wanted to care for the poor children in the area she did not go to medical school to spend her life pouring over a piece of paper and all of you have had that experience we can do better than this we also know we re going to have to trim back government regulations that get in your way and do little to protect the patients or provide better care if we simplify the system we will reduce the apparently insatiable bureaucratic urge that runs through administrations of both parties and seems to be a permanent fixture of our national life to micromanage whatever aspect of tax dollars they have some jurisdiction over we are determined to undo much of that we want to respect your training your judgment and your knowledge and not unduly interfere with what you do we also are determined to preserve the quality of health care that our people receive today part of the reason we have the finest doctors in the world are the academic health centers for years they have been the guardians the guarantors of quality training doctors and health care professionals and reaching into surrounding communities to provide help for those in need in the coming years these centers if our plan passes will have even greater responsibility to turn out high quality physicians particularly primary care physicians who will work in underserved areas and to create a system of lifelong learning for health care professionals and they must continue to expand their partnerships with communities around them the initiative i am offering offers the possibility of giving real building blocks to this nation s health care system to fill in a lot of the gaps which exist for millions of americans not just universal coverage gaps but also organizational problems and the lack of adequate access i want this plan to be fair compassionate and realistic and i believe it is health security can be provided to the american people so that you don t lose your health care when you lose your job you don t get frozen into a job because someone in your family has been sick and you re in the grip of the preexisting condition syndrome which is literally undermining labor mobility in a world where the average 18 year old american must change work eight times in a lifetime to be fully competitive when security means the ability to continuously learn and find new and evermore challenging work not to stick in the same rut you re in anymore we don t have that option we are literally rendering people insecure through job lock undermining their potential keeping them from moving on and also keeping others from moving up into the positions they previously held this is a serious economic problem this plan will guarantee that every patient who walks in your door is covered it will make sure you are paid to keep your patients healthy as well as to treat them when they re sick it will give you the flexibility and freedom you need to do your jobs in return it must demand more responsibility from all of us we must have a new generation of doctors which has a recommitment to primary care we don t have enough primary care physicians in america and i think we all know it we have to care about family practice pediatrics and preventive medicine and we all have to work together to get medical costs under control but i m convinced with your leadership we can do that without your help we could not have covered as much ground as we have covered so far i thank dr koop for what he said but the attention to detail by this project is the direct result of the painstaking effort and the hours that have been provided by physicians and other health care providers who have come to this town and spent day after day after day after day almost always at their own expense just to do something to help their country as well as to improve the quality of their own practice we know that this will not be done overnight we know that we will have to have a long term commitment from individuals from government from businesses and from health care professionals but we know that we have to begin now this is a magic moment let me just say two things in closing there are a lot of other things we haven t discussed and i know that but we didn t come here for a seminar on the details of it we are trying some innovative approaches to the malpractice problem which i think will find broad favor we are going to do some things that will increase public health clinics ability to access people who are otherwise left out of the system and try to deal with these horrible statistics on immunization and the absence of prenatal care there are a lot of those things that are going to be dealt with but i want to make two points in closing first of all there are a lot of disconnects as you might imagine between washington dc and the rest of america which everybody loves to talk about when they get alienated from the federal government but one of the most amazing in this has been the following thing i don t talk to any doctor or any hospital administrator or any nurse with any seniority in nursing who doesn t believe that there s a huge amount of waste in this system that has nothing to do with caring for people which can be gotten rid of i don t talk to anybody in washington who thinks you can do it our friends in the press are laughing because you know i ll finish this talk then they ll go talk to somebody on the hill who will say aahh they can t save that money in medicare and medicaid it s got to be that way we really need a room under the garage in the children s hospital in washington dc which is piling up paper six and a half feet a day we ve got to have that how would we function hillary goes to the mayo clinic they ve already got their annual average cost increases now down under 4 percent and we talk about maybe getting it down over the next three or four years to inflation plus population plus 2 percent and they talk about how we are slashing medicare and medicaid when what we really want to do is take the same money and not take it out of health care but use it to cover the uninsured unemployed use it to cover some new services to do more preventive primary health care so this is an interesting thing that dr koop said in the past reform has been imposed on the doctors you might have to come up here and impose it on the politicians and the bureaucrats you may have to do that i say that not to be critical of the congress we are all all of us see the world no no no i don t all of us see the world through the prism of our own experience don t we you do i do we all do that and they are so used to believing that the only way they can be decent stewards of the public trust to take care of the poor on medicaid and the elderly on medicare they are so used to believing that the only way they can do it is just to write out a check to pay more for the same health care never mind of it s two or three or four times the rate of inflation never mind if there s a 16 percent increase in the medicaid budget for the coming year when we estimate no more than a two percent increase in the enrollments in medicaid we re just so used to believing that in this town that we have to have your help to believe that it can be different and you can enhance the care people get not undermine it i don t want to minimize that yes we need your critical scrutiny of the specific plan the administration will propose yes we do but we also need for you to convince the people who live here who believe we are trapped in this system that it can be different and you are the ones who have responsibility for caring for people if you can believe it can be different you can convince the congress that it can be different that they are not going to hurt they are going to help by making some of these changes the second point i want to make in closing is this this is really a part of a great national discussion we have to have about what kind of people we are and what kind of country we re going to be and dr koop said it better than i could but we can t really get the kind of health care system we need until there is a real renewed sense of responsibility on the part of everyone in this system it is terribly important to recognize that we have certain group behaviors in this country that unless they are changed we will never get health care costs down to the level that our competitors have it s not just high rates of aids and excessive smoking it s high rates of teen pregnancy of low birth weight of poor immunization of children it s outrageous rates of violence that we willfully refuse to deal with by taking away the main cause of it which is the unrestricted access that young people in our most violent areas have to guns that give them better weapons yes within the health care system doctors shouldn t perform unnecessary procedures patients shouldn t bring frivolous malpractice suits people who use the health care system now who aren t in it now are going to have to pay a little for their health care so they realize there is a price for everything instead of when all of the money just comes from a third party source they don t know there needs to be more responsibility within this system but we also have got to remember that if we can plant the ethical roots that dr koop talked about we may then be able not only to change this system but to use this success to try to change some of the destructive group behavior that is tearing this country apart but believe me it all begins here if we can give the security of decent health care to every american family it will be the most important thing that the government has done with not for but with the american people in a generation and it can only happen if people like you lead the way thank you very much dem wjclinton20 9 94 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen i want to thank all of you for being here undersecretary frank newman and all those who were on the subcommittee on customer service to the president s management council in particular i thank you for your work today we are releasing a report that i think is literally unique in the annals of the federal government it is called putting customers first standards for serving the american people it contains specific new commitments for more than 100 agencies to improve the way government serves the american people the vice president released a report of the national performance review a year ago this month it included dozens of extremely important reforms that have already had a profound impact on our federal deficit on funding the crime bill and on making washington work better for ordinary citizens of all the recommendations it contained however one i chose to enact immediately by executive order was designed to force the government to respect the needs of ordinary citizens again by treating them as valued customers this report describes what has taken place as a result of that order the order called for a fundamental change in government it set forth a requirement that set forth a requirement that government services shall be equal to the best in business and it commanded the agencies for the first time to set and publish specific standards for the services they provide to the public over the past two decades there has been a renaissance in quality and customer service in corporate america there s no reason these same principles cannot apply with equal force in our government there s no reason for an application to government agencies to take months or for a phone call to go unanswered we face many great challenges as a nation and we can and will meet them but in order for government to do the big things well and in partnership with the american people it must do the small things better as well in ways that increase the confidence of the american people it must earn that confidence in many ways one customer at a time this report will help us to do that better customer service will also save us money for example veterans affairs is already redesigning the way it handles benefit applications so that veterans get faster and more personalized service the new system takes eight steps instead of 25 requires fewer people costs 20 percent less when the irs stopped generating puzzling form letters in response to taxpayers questions and i used to be on of those taxpayers that got those published and let their employees write and sign sensible answers instead believe it or not the cost decreased by 600 000 that s the equivalent of what 100 average families pay in federal taxes each year these examples demonstrate a larger truth that is employees of the federal government have become partners in the search for better service they also are fed up with the red tape they too want to serve customers better and the national performance review has empowered them to do so let me give you another example closer to home this report recounts the story of jackie collins miller the branch manager of baltimore s social security office not long ago she got a call from a woman who had received someone else s check by mistake jackie collins miller jumped in her car picked up the check mailed it to the rightful owner and called a few days later to make sure it had arrived that s service that rivals anything you ll see in the private sector this story reflects the work that has been done throughout the government simply to listen to the people who pay the bills and are supposed to receive the service when taxpayers said they wanted forms and instructions that were easier to understand the irs listened when businesses going through customs in miami said they wanted to get in and out quicker the u s customs listened when veterans said they wanted more personal attention veterans affairs listened this report contains more than 1 500 new standards for customer service that reflect the direct input of the american people the standards are promises and commitments in the days ahead we ll measure our performance against these standards and report back to our customers the principles represent a major step toward the goal that congress set in the government performance and results act to promote a new focus on results service quality and customer satisfaction in government and these standards help to fulfill the promise that the vice president and i made a long time ago to put the american people first again again this report was not written to sit on a shelf it s meant to be read used and followed it s written and organized to be customer friendly with chapters labeled business veterans and so on it s contents are arranged not by agency or compartment but by customer group it s organized for those who use government not for those in government finally if you re wondering where the cabinet secretaries are and the agency heads are while i am bragging about what they re doing they re not hiding in a bunker and hoping this will go away instead they re busy we have declared this day customer service day all over the united states and our cabinet secretaries are out there serving their customers in chicago the veterans affairs secretary jesse brown will help veterans file benefit claims in the regional office in new britain connecticut hud secretary henry cisneros will help renovate the home of steven and rachel rival recent recipients of a loan which allows people with low or moderate incomes to renovate distressed property all together there are 24 customer service day activities taking place across our nation today let me close by thanking the vice president for the extraordinary work that he and the national performance review folks have done since we embarked upon this task most people gave our efforts to reduce and improve government service little chance to succeed but he has proven them wrong all of you have proven them wrong events have proven them wrong we just have to keep doing what we ve been doing i want to thank him for the job he s done in general and specifically for this report which he will discuss in a moment i said when we introduced the npr on march 3rd 1933 1993 i m not that old although i feel that old today and i quote we must change the way government does business and make the taxpayer the valued customer and the boss again we have made a very strong beginning and with the energy and dedication of the people in this room and the leadership of the vice president we intend to keep on doing that as long as we are here thank you very much dem wjclinton20 9 95 bill_clinton thank you so much i love hearing it thank you very much thank you very much ladies and gentlemen let me begin by thanking you all for making me feel so very welcome thank you dr may for opening your fine institution and for bringing all your students and a lot of the folks from the surrounding area here thank you governor romer for your leadership and your friendship ladies and gentlemen i had the privilege of being a governor of my home state for 12 years before i was elected president i was never part of the washington scene but i knew quite a lot about what it took to be a governor and by the time i left office most of us thought roy romer was probably the best governor in the united states of america and was doing more for education than anybody else thank you diana for your introduction and for the power of your example you and your family are the best of what this country is all about and i came here to talk about your future and the future of all the students here and in fact this entire country i m glad to be back in pueblo anyplace where i can wear my cowboy boots and feel comfortable and has an arkansas river is all right as far as i m concerned i also believe in community colleges when i was a governor i helped start several i saw it open the doors of opportunity for people of all ages and all backgrounds they are truly the community colleges the most open and democratic and opportunity filled institutions in the united states today and i know i am at a good one today and i m proud to be here you know our country has come a long way in over 200 years because we believe that we could always make the future and we believe we had an obligation to try pueblo was established in 1862 and one of the county commission s first acts was to collect money for a school they knew that education could be better than gold way back in 1862 and in 1995 it is more important than ever before i am here because the future of your education and those who come behind you is going to be affected by decisions which will be made in washington d c in the next two to three months all of you know that we are in a period of great change in our country i believe that this period will be written up by the historians as a period of most profound change in 100 years since the time we became an industrial society from a rural and agricultural one today we are becoming a global economy an information based technology based society we know that and we know we have to make some changes so that we will be able to benefit from all these things that are going on in the world we know that one of the things we have to do is to provide lifetime learning for all of our people to give everybody the opportunity to do well and i ve worked hard at that i want to get more kids off to a good start at school that s why we expanded head start i want higher standards i want higher standards and smaller classes and more computers and other opportunities for our school s students that s what governor romer and i worked on goals 2000 for i want more opportunities for young people who don t go on to the four year schools to get good jobs with good prospects for the future that s what the school to work program that your president talked about is all about i want more scholarships more opportunities for community services and more affordable loan programs for young people to go to college and for people who aren t so young to be able to go back to college it s important make no mistake about it my fellow americans every dollar we spend investing in education has a big economic payoff not just for the people who benefit from it every year of education after high school today generates between six and 12 percent of higher income for the people who get it but it s more important than that it gives more dignity more meaning more possibility to people s lives and it makes our nation stronger we know we must do this i want to ask you today to think about all the things you know are going on in your nation s capital and the big argument we re having over the budget in terms of this fundamental fact we re living in a global economy what we can learn becomes what we can earn we have an obligation to pass on to the next generation a stronger better america we also have an obligation to balance the budget that is part of passing on to the next generation a stronger better america and so i ask you to consider this how should we do that that s the big question not whether we should but how we should i think we need new ideas and our old fashioned values we need to make decisions about this budget rooted in our devotion to freedom and responsibility to work and to family to giving young people a chance to do better to fulfilling our obligations to the elderly the disabled and to poor children to finding common ground instead of cheap and easy political rhetoric and to doing the right thing for the future even if it s unpopular in the moment we have to create the right kind of future for the united states of america we need to balance the budget your country never had a permanent structural deficit before 1981 in the 12 years before i moved to washington as your president we quadrupled the national debt over the previous 200 there s no excuse for that it s so bad now that the budget of your country would be balanced today if it weren t for the interest we pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before i took office and we have cut the deficit of your country from 290 billion a year down to 160 billion in just three years and it s the first time in 45 years that we ve been able to do that so the question now is how do we go all the way how do we balance the budget consistent with our obligations and our values i believe that we should balance the budget in the same way i ve been reducing the deficit by cutting other things and increasing our investment in education because that will make us a stronger country as well you know almost half the people at this community college have pell grants i want to see more people have access to pell grants so more people with modest incomes can go on to college next year the university of southern colorado will join so many others around the country in participating in our direct student loan program and this fine community college has applied to participate in it let me tell you what it does the direct student loan program enables the government to get rid of all the red tape the banks and the middle men and all the excessive costs from the student loan program to send money directly to a school to give to the students at lower costs with better repayment terms receiving the money more quickly every school i have talked to that has participated in this program loves it because it s a lower cost for the school lower cost for the students and there are many more options to repay one of the most important things about this direct loan program is that a young person can repay his or her loans based on a percentage of the income they earn when they go to work so you never need to fear that you can t afford to borrow money because you may not have a lot of money when you get out i believe in the direct loan program i believe in the pell grant program i believe in the americorps program the national service program which enables people to earn money for college here in colorado you have young people working to keep kids out of gangs to teach adults to read to renovate vacant houses for working families to clean up parks for children to play in and in return earning some money to go to school and i also believe that we can balance the budget and have the right kind of tax cut but i favor a smaller more targeted tax cut for middle income american families to educate themselves and their children and to raise their children let s value child rearing and education if we re going to have a tax cut let s finance more people going on to school the last thing i want to say is i think we ought to have special educational opportunities for people who lose their jobs through no fault of their own when i was 30 years ago when i was in college eight in 10 people who were laid off from work were called back to the same old job as soon as the economy got better today eight in 10 people who are laid off from work are not called back to the same old job because the economy is changing so i have asked this congress to take about 70 different training programs the government has put it into a pool of money and just simply give a voucher to a person who loses a job worth up to 2 600 a year to take to the local community college to get trained for a better life a new start a stronger beginning if we do this and balance the budget over the next seven years 20 million more people will be eligible for lower cost better repayment college loans three million more people will get the pell grant scholarships that enable so many of you to be here if we keep this commitment we can have over 1 1 million people going on to college by the end of this decade and we can do all that and balance the budget the question is will we the debate we re having in washington today i want to emphasize again is not over whether to balance the budget it s over how to balance the budget consistent with the fundamental values of this country a majority of people in the congress have a plan that reflects very different value choices if their plan prevails we won t be able to help as many poor kids get off to a good start in school we won t even be able to keep helping as many as we are now we won t be able to help as many schools to achieve those smaller classes and higher standards and more computers in the classrooms and we certainly will see it become harder and more expensive to finance a college education which means not as many people will go there will be no more americorps no national service program there will be over 4 million fewer people getting pell grants over the next seven years the direct lending program that this school wants to get into is going to be either severely limited or abolished and the application that you have to give all your people here a better chance to go on and succeed will never see the light of day now we learn that some in the senate even want to charge colleges to process the government loans the president of the university of kansas was quoted today as saying that s like charging people who run grocery stores to handle food stamps can you believe that they actually want to start making the community college pay just to have people here with college loans they want to raise the interest charged to working families who take out loans to send their children to college they also believe it or not want to do some other things which will dramatically undermine the ability of people to go to college and all told listen to this all told will cost over 7 billion for students their families and their schools over the next seven years now this is not about money this is not about balancing the budget this is about what kind of country we re going to be and what our obligations to each other are they have made three value choices in congress they say we have to balance the budget in seven years even if we could increase education and still balance it in eight nine or 10 years then they say we have to give a huge tax cut of 250 billion half of it going to upper income people like me who don t need it and don t want it but they re determined to give it anyway even if they take it away from you and your education and your children s future and they say that we re going to take some of this student loan money away from the students and give it back to the banks and the middlemen even though it raises the cost of going to college provides more paperwork headaches for the schools delays the loans getting to the students and robs you of the option of repaying based on a percentage of your earnings they say these interest groups didn t like it when they lost the money we re cutting education but we re going to give them some of their money back now those are value judgments this is not just about money our solemn obligation is to reward people who are willing to work to make the most of their own lives to make sure that the enthusiasm these young people have shown us today becomes mirrored in brilliant successful happy lives that make america a stronger place and guarantees that their children will have an even better america to grow up in that s what this is all about so i challenge congress to work with me to find common ground to balance the budget without raising the cost of going to college to pay for a tax cut it is not necessary and it is not right it is not consistent with basic american values we can balance the budget cut taxes for middle class people who need it to educate and raise their children and still increase our investment in education let us do this the right way and advance what america really stands for that s what this is all about i saw a very moving picture in the newspaper here today of the trip that president kennedy made in 1962 he came here to honor the citizens who had built pueblo 100 years before and he said this i hope that those of us who hold positions of public responsibility in 1962 are as far seeing about the needs of the country in 1982 and 1992 as those men and women well president kennedy s generation was they went to the moon they explored new frontiers of science and technology they ensured that we would win the cold war they advanced the cause of education and economic growth and world peace in this day and age the popular thing to do would be just to go along with all of this because the popular thing is to tell you that your government is the cause of all your problems all government is bad and all tax cuts are good i know that would be popular but friends almost all the money the government spends today is on medical care for the elderly and the disabled social security the national defense interest on the debt and education and other investments in our future i want to cut it some more i want to get rid of some of the things we don t need i want to balance the budget but the popular view is not right your government is you and we better invest in your education and your future twenty thirty forty years from now the people who are sitting here on this great lawn will appreciate it if they know we balanced the budget and secured our financial future in a way that protected the educational future the economic well being and the fundamental values of the united states of america let us resolve to do that and to do it together thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton20 9 96 bill_clinton when al gore and i started out together he had a reputation of being too stiff if anyone ever had told me four years ago that i would be counseling him about not being too rowdy i never would have believed it we re having a good time here hillary and tipper and al and i we love oregon we love to come here we love what you re doing and what you stand for i want to say that i m deeply honored to be here today with tom and kelly and maria and t c and their friends with our candidates for congress darlene hooley and mike dugan with the mayor and congresswoman furse with all of you but i want to say to you that i do not view in all candor this election as primarily a struggle of parties i think more than that this election is primarily a definition of our country once in a great while our country has gone through profound periods of change in how we work how we live how we relate to one another how we relate to the rest of the world everybody who thinks about it knows that this is a period like that there have been four or five such periods in our country s history and you make these decisions and when you make them they dramatically impact 30 or 40 or 50 years and shape the country forever and i want you to think about it like that i do not want you to vote for any of these people because it would be nice if president clinton had a democratic congress it would be nice but i don t want you to do that instead i want to build on what the vice president said i want you to define what you want your country to look like when we start the 21st century what you want your country to look like when these children are our age and then make your decision based on that forget about the politics of it think about your country i was listening to al talk and he did such a good job i didn t have any idea what i was going to say but i think what he was saying and what i would like to say to you is that there are these two polar opposite views competing for america s image of itself in this time of change one is a unifying vision the other is fundamentally a divisive vision one says we re all in this together the other one says you re on your own the government s the problem one says let s build a bridge to the future the other says let s build a bridge to the past when times were simpler and we didn t have to worry about all this one says we believe you can do well by doing good the other says do gooders always mess up the private economy and you have to think about which you believe i believe that the example of tom bruggere s life and success and the results achieved by the policies of our administration in the last four years make an overwhelming case for the unifying vision of our future as opposed to the divisive vision of our future every time we try to do something to sort of spread opportunity and let the american people succeed at home and at work and give everybody a chance to live up to the fullest of their god given potential those who opposed it said it was big government and it would mess up a one car parade we would weaken the economy it would be inefficient it would be this that and the other thing but four years later yes we passed family leave and yes we continue to protect the environment but we have 10 5 million new jobs and we have and i might add that the job growth rate is faster than has occurred under any republican administration in 70 years but this is not about party the things we are debating today don t fit within the old party labels the new competing philosophy abandons a lot of what the republican party adhered to for 25 years but if you look at it that s what s going on they said oh if you don t let people continue to live on 4 25 an hour minimum wage you will just cost jobs well october 1st we ll get a chance to test that out because 10 million people are going to get a pay raise and you know but in the same bill we proved that you could have a unifying vision do you know what else was in that minimum wage bill we also in the minimum wage bill increased the tax deductions that businesses get when they invest more in their own business to grow the economy we have improved we have given more tax relief for self employed people to get health insurance it wasn t either or the bill also had a 5 000 tax credit for people who will adopt children because there are still a lot of kids out there that need homes so it was pro work pro business and pro family it was a unifying vision when tom helped his workers be better parents he increased the productivity of his company he didn t weaken it that is our argument our argument is that we have been forced into too many false choices for too long by people who were too short sighted and the nature of the new economy is such that we can do best by doing the right things that there must not be a dichotomy between what people have to do in raising up their children and what they have to do in raising up their work lives and if there is we lose from the beginning if you have to choose one or the other we re beat from the start we believe we can do both we believe there must not be a dichotomy between preserving and indeed enhancing the environment and public health and growing the economy because if that is true then that ultimately would spell the doom of every civilization and many have been doomed because of the refusal to develop a unifying vision that would permit people to grow the economy in ways that are in harmony with their natural surroundings that s a fundamental choice you have to make we believe that the first lady is right that it does take a village to raise children to build an economy to build a country therefore unlike the other folks we don t think it was a waste of money to give 50 000 young people like this young woman here a chance to work in americorps to serve their communities and earn some money to go to college while they were doing it we think that s a good thing to do they believe there s two kinds of money the government s money and your money and the government s money is money they ve stolen from you and the more they give back to you the better off you are because the government would mess up a one car parade we believe it s all your money and the question is are there things we can do together that we cannot do alone and that is the question we cannot by ourselves guarantee equal access to college education we cannot by ourselves guarantee more equal opportunities for children in the schools we cannot by ourselves guarantee what the vice president and tom have worked for which is to make sure there is equal access to technology including access to the information superhighway to all the children in all the schools of america that s something we have to do together together we cannot let me just give you three examples christopher reeve talked about this at our convention we cannot by ourselves fund the research necessary to push back the barriers that are destructive of human existence just in the last few weeks for the first time in history laboratory animals with severed spines have shown movement in their lower limbs because of nerve transplants it never happened before you cannot afford to get that done by yourself together we can fund that kind of research we have doubled the life expectancy of people with hiv and aids in four years because of the more rapid you cannot afford to do that on your own we just entered a partnership the united states did with ibm even ibm did not want to do it on its own we re going to build a supercomputer that will do more calculations in a second than you can do on your hand held calculator at home in 30 000 years we have to do that together but as we do these things we change the whole nature of the future the children in this audience will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet many will be doing work that has not been imagined yet because of what we do together as well as what we do on our own so you have to decide that you look around this room look at all of this diversity in this room look how different we all are do you how much of your time i spend as president trying to get people around the world not to do destructive things because they can t live with even a limited amount of diversity because they literally cannot exist because they have to have a divisive vision of themselves and their lives they ve got to be thinking they re important because they re not someone else that s what the deal in bosnia is all about that s what northern ireland s about that s what the middle east is about that s what the slaughter between the hutus and the tutsis in burundi and rwanda was all about all over the world that s what the church burnings are all about when a synagogue is defaced or an islamic center is burned that s what it s all about there are lots of folks that just can t get up in the morning and go through the day unless they ve got somebody to look down on to make themselves feel bigger a divisive view of the world now i am not being naive here i don t pretend for a moment that there aren t tough decisions that have to be made that there are lots of moments when there is no 100 percent perfect answer but i m telling you where you go in life depends not only on all the details in dealing with the tough decisions it depends on what your view is how you look at this and that s why i tell you if you look at how the world is changing going from the cold war to a global economy if you look at the new security threats of the 21st century terrorism ethnic strife the proliferation of dangerous weapons organized crime and drug smuggling they all cross national boundaries we have to be unified in dealing with that i asked the vice president to head that commission to figure out how we could make our airports and our airlines safer we re dealing with a problem that every country has to deal with so we have to work together on that if you look at the way the economy s going and the competition that we re in with people all around the world we have to hold ourselves to international standards and then we have to work together to make sure we all do it if you think about all of us in this room most of us would do well if there were no government efforts of any kind we would do okay but we re doing a lot better because everybody else has a chance to make the most of their lives as well so i say to you you re going to have six weeks and four days of television wars here in oregon and half of what s on there may be irrelevant but this is a big deal this is a huge deal this is the last major election of the 20th century and the first election of the 21st century things have changed we have to change and america is going to go into that next century with either the unifying vision dominant or the divisive vision dominant that s what i want you to think about not democrats or republicans or any of that i want you to think about your country and if you look at the life and career and work of this man it would be hard to think of someone who could be a better poster boy for a unifying vision of america s future in the 21st century than tom bruggere thank you very much dem wjclinton20 9 97a bill_clinton thank you very much first thank all of you for coming here today and sharing your saturday morning i thank the superintendent for his really marvelous remarks he talked about all the things that we have in common i saw a living symbol of his dedication to education above all else and one thing that we have in common that he didn t mention if you look closely at his tie you will see it is a pattern of golf balls and tees and on this beautiful saturday morning he s here with us let me thank your instructional coordinator too for being here leaving her 11 day old baby i would like to see the 11 day old baby but i think it s where s the baby a wise mother leaves the baby outside hillary and i are delighted to be here and i want to spend most of my time just at this panel today but i thank all of you for coming because i believe in charter schools and i believe they are an important part of helping us to lift our standards and renew our schools and achieve the kind of educational excellence that all of our children need as we move into the 21st century i congratulate the san carlos learning center for being the first of its kind in california which obviously makes it among the very first in the united states let me just give you a little brief personal history here when i was governor of my state for 12 years i spent a great deal of time working on school reform and so did hillary spent lots of time in the schools talking to teachers talking to parents talking to students dealing with issues of curriculum development and teacher training and all those things and when we were active in the 1980s the state of minnesota became the first state in the country to pass a public school choice law to give parents and their children more choice among the public schools their children attended i think we were the second state to pass that law and we used it quite a lot then when i began to run for president in 1991 minnesota became the first state in the country again to pass a charter school law recognizing that sometimes it wasn t enough just to give the parents and the students choices but that we needed to give the educators and the parents and the students with whom they worked options to create schools that fit the mission needed by the children in the area and that if you gave them options and held them accountable we might be able to do something really spectacular then five years ago today i think california became the second state in the country to adopt a charter school law and then you became the first of those schools in 1994 i passed legislation in congress to help us support more charter schools by the end of 1995 there were about 300 charter schools in the country today there are 700 charter schools in the country many of them have been helped by the program we passed in washington in 1994 the historic balanced budget agreement that we just passed into law includes the largest commitment to new investment in education since 1965 among other things expansion of head start programs more funds to support computers in the schools i ll say more about that in a moment our america reads initiative to help make sure every 8 year old can read independently and the biggest increased investment in helping people go to college since the g i bill passed 50 years ago tax credits for the first two years of college credits for the remainder of college iras pell grants work study positions all these together mean that for the first time ever we can really say if you re responsible enough to work for it no matter what your income or your difficulties college is now a real option for you in america for every single american and i m very proud of all of that but one of the things that was in this balanced budget that didn t get a lot of notice is enough money for us to help to set up literally thousands more charter schools in america because excellence in education is more than money and from my point of view having spent years and years and years working on this we need two things we need a set of national standards of academic excellence that will be internationally competitive in basic subjects and then we need grass roots school based reform because education is the magic that takes place in every classroom and indeed in every student s mind involving every teacher every student and also hopefully support from home so that s why these charter schools are so important to me and that s why we ve tried to help a lot more schools like san carlos get started on the path that you ve been on now for some years for people who don t know exactly what they are let me say that charter schools are public schools that make a simple agreement in exchange for public funding they get fewer regulations and less red tape but they have to meet high expectations and they keep their charter only so long as their customers are satisfied they re doing a good job as i said we ve gone from the day i took office there was only one charter school in america january of 93 then a couple years ago we were up to 300 now there are 700 and what started as a movement in minnesota and california now encompasses 29 states 27 more states have passed charter school laws these funds in our budget as i said should allow us to set up several thousand more over the next four years today i am pleased to announce that we re going to release 40 million in grants to help charter schools open start up costs are often the biggest obstacle and in states that can t afford to help it s a terrible problem i see a lot of people nodding their heads out there who have had experience with this so we have curriculum development costs teacher training costs new technology costs all these things can help the 40 million we re releasing today of which about 3 4 million will come to california will help us to establish another 500 charter schools in 21 states so we ll go from 700 to 500 in one pop here and as i said pretty soon and if all the states will join in we obviously can help all of them we ll have well over 3 000 perhaps even over 4 000 by the year 2000 which is enough to have a seismic echo effect in all the public school systems of america so that s what we are trying to do let me say that there are a couple of problems that we re going to face last week the u s senate by a very narrow margin supported an amendment that would make these charter schools funding that i just announced the last such announcement that would ever be made because it would lump all the education funds together and arbitrarily distribute them to the state without regard to whether these programs were continued or not and in the process it would abolish very specific and highly successful education reform programs like the charter schools where we work with local communities and school districts it would abolish our highly successful effort to put computers in the classrooms i ll tell you how much movement has happened on there in just two years and to create safe and drug free schools i think that would be a mistake the house of representatives recently passed although the senate opposed them an amendment that would prohibit us to pay for not to develop but to pay for a non political private organization to develop voluntary national tests of excellence in mathematics and reading i think that would be a mistake this is the first time last year in history that our students in elementary schools scored above the international average in math and science we re doing much better in america but we don t test all of our kids we just test a representative sample i think we need to know how we re doing based on a common standard so we have these problems in the congress and if either one of these provisions makes it into the final bill i will have to veto it so i hope that we can continue to work on moving forward in the right direction and in that connection i d like to say a special word of appreciation to congresswoman anna eshoo who i think is one of the absolutely even i would say this if i were in washington she really is one of the finest most forward looking members of the united states congress and she s made a big difference in our country today now running these charter schools as we are about to hear is not easy it s not self evident how to do all this it sounds great to say we ll cut you free of red tape and bureaucracy you have to perform at a higher level you ve got to get the parents involved there are all kinds of practical problems and we ll hear about some of them the secretary of education dick riley is going to convene a national conference on charter schools in washington this november to bring together teachers administrators parents others who are interested in this to share best practices and look to the road ahead but just think about where we can go with this if we go we ve gone from one to 700 to 500 more with a budget that calls for funds for 3 000 more just this year s budget alone that will be funded starting october 1st if we get the funds for it will give us enough funds for another 700 or 900 to 1 000 schools so this movement can sweep the country and can literally revolutionize both community control and standards of excellence in education if we do it right that s what the panel is about and before we start let me just thank some of the business leaders who are here today for their commitment to educational excellence regis mckenna david ellington brook byers terry yang paul lippe and i d like to say a special word of thanks to larry ellison who is up here on the platform he s the chairman and ceo of oracle corporation two years ago this week i met with larry and a number of other high tech executives to talk about another one of my passions which is to connect every classroom and library in every school in america to the internet by the year 2000 and that like everything else it turned out to be more complicated it sounded great but we not only had to connect them we had to make sure we had the hardware the software and the trained teachers to do the job so we got this group of business people who knew about all this who are working very hard to try to make sure that we can do that give all the support services to every school we got the federal communications commission to give what amounts to a 2 25 billion a year subsidy to schools to lower the rates they have to pay to hook on to the internet but to give you an example of what we can do when we work together since we made that announcement two years ago california has 65 percent of the schools connected which is twice the percentage you had two years ago and four times as many classrooms connected as just two years ago that shows you how quickly we can move and larry has not only sponsored the san carlos learning center but yesterday he announced oracle s promise to spend 100 million in a foundation to help schools across america who need support to get the kind of connection to the future through telecommunications technology that we all want so thank you larry for doing that so this is a good news day but what i want to do now is to turn it over to the panel and let s get into the facts of the charter school movement and see hopefully by being here today this will encourage the 21 states who do not have charter school legislation to adopt it it will encourage the congress to fully fund the charter schools program for the next four years and it will help us to take what you have done here and spread it all across america in a way that will guarantee international standards of excellence in the education of all of our children thank you very much dem wjclinton20 9 97b bill_clinton first of all let me say i agree with everything she said i d just like to make a couple of brief point to build on what hillary said i want to say first of all i have no hidden agenda here i believe the only way public schools can survive as the instrument by which we educate our children and socialize them and bring them together across all the lines that divide us is if all of our schools eventually and hopefully sooner rather than later are run like these charter schools that s what i believe i am not running for office anymore i have no political interest in this i am think about what our country is going to be like 20 30 40 50 years from now and you know what tom said about the industrial model that s part of the problem a lot of our schools are organized on an industrial model a lot of our middle schools are almost are organized for when families were like ozzie and harriet instead of like they are today there are a lot of organizational problems it s also true that our schools get money from a lot of different places and have to suffer rules from a lot of different places and a lot of people think if they give up their rule making they won t matter anymore and in some way the most important person here is the superintendent because he s here supporting this instead of figuring out how he can control it and i think that s important and so hillary and i have been working at this business for a long time now seriously since 1983 really seriously there has been a dramatic change in the attitudes of the teacher unions which is positive there have been dramatic advances in the attitude of administrators which is positive but i just want to say we cannot there are a lot of people who believe in the information age with things changing as fast as they are and with standards needing to be as high as they are that we ought to just basically send everybody money and let them do whatever they want to about education and forget about the public education network let it sink or swim the problem with that theory is that the short term costs to people who got left behind would be staggering but if we want to preserve excellence and the socially unifying impact of public schools over the next generation i am telling you every school in the country has got to become like this one the power needs to be with the parents with the children with the teachers with the principals and those of us who are up the lines somewhere up the food chain what are we interested in we re interested in what kim said we re interested in results we don t need to make rules we re interested in results and we want to be able to measure them we want to know our kids are going to be all right and our country is going to be all right let them make the rules in the schools let them figure it out and then education will be something that will get bright young lawyers to leave their more lucrative law practices to do something that doesn t pay as much but makes them feel good when they go to bed every night and get up in the morning that s what we want and until every school is run like that you and i should not rest thank you god bless you dem wjclinton20 9 97c bill_clinton thank you very much first let me thank all of you for coming i m sorry we were a little late getting here maybe we were just a little slow on the uptake after yesterday i think you know we had another stop to make before we could come up but i m very grateful to you for being here i thank alan solomont and dan dutko for being here and for their work for our democratic party thank you john goldman and all the other co chairs of this event this has been an interesting weekend for hillary and for me and i m actually glad to be here and when mayor brown said what he did i think i came to california in my first term more than 30 times i don t know if i can come out here anymore if i come out here anymore willie will have me paying taxes in san francisco but i do want to say that i m very grateful to the people of this state not only for the support that i have received al gore and i were fortunate enough to carry california both in 1992 and by an even bigger margin in 1996 but also for the work that was done by californians with our administration which made it possible for us to help california to make the comeback that is now evident to everyone it was always clear to me that this state which was effectively the sixth biggest economy in the world and had 13 percent of the population of america had to make a big economic comeback in order for america to come back this state which has so much racial and ethnic and religious and other kinds of diversity has to be able to prove we can live and work together in order for america to be able to live and work together so i feel very much rewarded by the experience that hillary and i and the vice president and others have had not only personally but by what we have been able to achieve together and i thank you for that you know hillary told you we went to this seminar last night that was chaired by bill perry and warren christopher about the expansion of nato something i do feel quite passionately about but it was ironic that strobe talbott was there giving the speech our deputy secretary of state because the very first time i ever saw stanford was in february of 1971 when he took me there to see the woman who is now his wife i still remember everything we did i remember the movie we saw it made a very profound impression on me but we were talking last night about the world we re trying to build and leave our children and that s what i d like to ask you to think about you know the scripture says where there is no vision the people perish whether you believe that or not it is perfectly clear that no change occurs that is positive unless someone has imagined it and at a time when things are changing anyway when the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world is very much in flux it is absolutely imperative that we have citizens and leaders who can imagine the future in a different way so that we can shape it in the way that we want our children to find it the reason i m thinking about it is we were talking about that last night in terms of the world i said one of the things i admired about president yeltsin is he has a great imagination he can imagine a future for his people very different from the one they have endured in 27 years in prison nelson mandela could have just shriveled up inside but instead he bloomed like a flower in the desert and he came out full of imagination about new and different ways to bring people together who had literally been butchering each other for a long time the great thing about the former israeli prime minister the late itzhak rabin is that he could imagine a future in the middle east where he made peace with people he had spent his whole life fighting so if you think about where we are here as a country i am profoundly grateful for the results which have been achieved i am glad we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years i m glad we ve got the lowest poverty rate ever recorded among african americans i m glad we ve got the biggest drop in inequality among working people in the last two years we ve seen in decades i m glad that the crime rate has gone down every year i ve been president and we ve had record numbers of reductions in people on the welfare rolls i m glad for that i m glad for the fights that we made sometimes i think it s easy for people who are reporting on current events to forget that there is quite a difference here in who stands for what the family and medical leave law for example has enabled millions of people to take some time off when they re children are born or someone in their family gets sick one party was overwhelmingly for it the other party was overwhelmingly against it although there were some republicans thank god who stood by and helped us the same thing is true on our efforts to expand health care coverage in this last budget 24 billion in the balanced budget is allocated to help provide health insurance to half the kids in this country who don t have it does anyone really believe that would have happened had it not been for the democratic party the answer is a resounding no i can tell you i was there we had the biggest increase in investment in education since 1965 in a generation the biggest increase in helping people to go on to college of all ages since the g i bill was passed 50 years ago you can now get a 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college which opens community college to every person in the country more pell grant scholarships more work study other tax credits and deductions for all the other years of higher education for americans of any age we have finally created an environment in which we have opened the doors of college to all americans who are willing to work for it this is a stunning achievement it will change the future of america no one can seriously argue that it would have happened had it not been for our party that was the contribution we made to this balanced budget agreement that was our driving passion and so i say to you there are consequences to the outcome of elections that affect people that we can too easily forget and as you look to the future in spite of all these good results that s the point i m trying to make this is not a time for america to sit on its laurels why first of all because everything changes but the rate of change today is so breathtaking yes so we balance the budget and we have invested in our future and we ve expanded trade but what are we going to do tomorrow to keep this economy going until everybody who needs a job or a better job or an education has a chance to participate in the economy well one of the things we have to do is keep expanding trade i want congress to give me the authority every previous president for the last 20 some years has had to expand trade i do not want the europeans in effect to have a bigger foothold in latin america than we do in chile and argentina and brazil that would be a terrible mistake two thirds of our trade growth two thirds of our trade growth has come from our neighbors from canada to the southern tip of south america in the last year we dare not walk away from that i want to keep working on education until every school in america looks like the one that i visited today in california where every school is like a charter school in the control of the parents the students the teachers and the principal where red tape is low and expectations are high and the school only stays in business as long as it does a good job that s the only way we re going to save public education in a modern world and we need to have that kind of result and we need to keep working until we get there so there is a lot still to be done the world still is not properly organized although we re getting there to deal with the security threats that our children will face i hope to goodness by the time i leave we ll really be able to say there s no reasonable prospect of a recurrence of a nuclear dominated world where people will really be in fear of one country dropping a nuclear weapon on another i hope we ll be there and we re working hard with the russians to get there and with others but we will have to face the fact when i leave office in january of 2001 that the open borders we re creating and the open commerce we re creating and the explosion of technology we re seeing makes it possible for the organized forces of destruction to wreak havoc among decent people of the united states and throughout the world and we must be organized to deal with terrorism we must be organized to deal with drug traffickers we must be organized to deal with people who purvey ethnic and religious hatred into the butchery of hundreds of thousands of people whether it s in africa or europe or any other place in the world we have to be organized to deal with that there s lots to do and i just want to say that i started with a vision i wanted to be able to say when i left office that every child in this country would have the opportunity to live up to his or her own dreams and capacities if he or she were willing to work for it i wanted to be able to say that we were still the world s leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world and i wanted to be able to say that amidst all of our increasing diversity we were coming together as one america respecting even celebrating our differences but bound together by things that unite us more importantly and every day i fight against the things i think will undermine that and i fight for the things i think will advance it and all you have to do is to go back to our to the fight on family leave and the budget fight in 1993 the fight for the assault weapons ban for the brady bill for 100 000 police on the street in 1994 the fight against the contract on america in 1995 the fight against taking the guarantee of medical care away from our poorest children the fight against taking away all that federal aid to education that was helping us to advance opportunity just go through every single decision that s been made in the last five years most of you who have come here to help us could have made more money in the short run helping the other party you came here because you thought we needed to go forward together and because you shared that vision i m here to tell you that we need to keep on with that vision because we in spite of all the good times we dare not rest we have too much to do too many people to lift up and too many new bridges to cross before we get to that new century and thanks to you we re going to be able to do it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton21 1 95 bill_clinton you remember what mark twain said the reports of our demise are premature i could have listened to al gore talk all day about that do you know what he said he said for a while you thought you might have to he was waxing eloquent you know he kept saying all that stuff and i thought well why didn t we win last november i ve got some ideas about that too i ll share in a moment let me begin by thanking all these people who are here on the head table and all of you it is wonderful wonderful to see you and to see you in good spirits and with a strong heart and let me also say a special word of thanks to don fowler and to chris dodd i need one of those don fowler stickers i ve known don fowler since 1972 you think we re in trouble now you should have been there then and i owe don fowler a lot i mean he ran that convention in 88 he wrote the speech i gave in 1988 i was supposed to talk about the future here today but instead i decided to finish that speech so you all relax and i will i wish you hadn t laughed so hard at that i want to thank chris dodd who has been my friend for a long time almost that long i ve known him about 15 years now and i remember when we were young men in public life back in 1980 when i went to the democratic convention in connecticut to give the keynote speech and he was about to go to the senate and i have watched him and i wanted him to do this job because i don t think our country has a stronger voice of the values the ideas of the democratic party and because he s not afraid to fight i wanted don fowler because i thought we ought to have somebody in the leadership who does not have an accent and because whether the south knows it or not we re a lot better for most of them than the other guys are so i feel very good about this team i thank debbie delee for all of her work and for her leadership i thank david wilhelm in his absence david and dee gee brought young luke by to see me yesterday and i sat him on the desk in the oval office and they re already saving up for the inaugural gown for when luke s inaugurated in 40 or 50 years i d like to say a special word of thanks too and honor in homage i know there is something on the program about this later but i d like to tell you all personally how sad i am about the passing of john white and how much i appreciate him he was the cochairman of our campaign in 1972 in texas and i ve known him a very long time he was a great democrat a great leader for our party and i know all of you join me in wishing his wife nellie well and in thanking him from the bottom of our hearts for being such a loyal and effective leader for our party for so very long you know i was listening to the vice president talk i say first i need to thank all three of them who spoke i thank tipper gore for being basically on many occasions the continuing spark plug of our team for fighting for the rights and the interests of people who need better mental health opportunities in this country i do believe that al gore will go down in history as the most effective vice president in the history of the republic and the person who has exercised the most responsibility and i want to say this to my wife i never really thought when we started this she would become quite the target she has been it s funny when we lived in arkansas which is supposed to be more conservative and traditional than the country as a whole most people thought it was a pretty good thing when the governor s wife tried to get kids in education or make sure they didn t go to bed sick at night if it could be helped and i ll tell you something else i d like to say something else when i look at her at night i think there s a lot worse things that could happen to you in life than to get caught red handed trying to give health care to 40 million americans who don t have it i come here today in a curious role as the leader of the party i love but also as the president of the country that includes both democrats and republicans a fair number of people that don t think either party amounts to much and just kind of go with the flow of election after election i do regret in all candor that any administration that could have done as much as we have done and any group of members of congress that could have supported that did not find greater favor in the election of november and i thought well maybe there s a lot of reasons for this there are objectively a lot of reasons first of all it takes a while for the laws you pass to be actually felt in the lives of people and secondly there are all kinds of reasons today why it s hard to get good news out and it s almost harder if there s more of it and thirdly there are a lot of people in this country today who in the midst of this great recovery don t feel more secure and they really don t and they re our friends and we are their friends but they may not have known it in the last election given what they had to listen to but the truth is that a whole bunch of folks in america even in spite of the fact that we ve got over 5 5 million new jobs in the last two years are working harder for less money than they had 15 years ago their wages have not kept up with inflation another 1 1 million americans lost their health care last year and they were in working families they were not people on welfare i just signed a bill a few days ago we celebrated it this week to try to stabilize the pensions of 40 million americans who depend upon the government guarantee system and who were in danger of being let down 8 5 million of them were in trouble on their pensions people know that more and more workers feel like they re just sort of dispensable products that can be thrown away in this new rapidly changing global economy and they feel great anxiety and not all the problems of this country are economic a lot of people feel insecure on their streets and they don t like what they see happening to our families and our communities and they re vulnerable to the siren song they heard in the last election promise them anything tell them what they want to hear tell them the government is their enemy but let me tell you something else right on the front end folks when people say change is hard and you have to be strong and you have to be willing to take on popular positions that isn t just rhetoric that s true i used to carry a bunch of about nine rules of politics around in my billfold when i was governor clinton s rules of politics and one of them was everybody is for change in general but against it in particular i remember a story our junior senator david pryor told me one time about going to a birthday party for a guy who turned 100 and he said to this guy who had just passed a century of life he said you know it s remarkable you have all your faculties about you you can really you speak clearly you hear me when i speak to you he said yeah and he said you re thinking just right he said that s right he said you must have seen an amazing number of changes in your lifetime he said yes son and i was agin every one of them and that s what i see sometimes you think about it the last time we had a period of really profound change like this was at the end of the second world war we had a president named harry truman he had an 80 percent approval rating on the day that he dropped the bomb on japan two years later when he sent national health insurance to the congress for the second time and he d gone through two years of reverse plastic surgery from the organized interest groups pounding against change he was at 36 percent approval but he fought for change because it was necessary and he reached out and worked with the republicans when he could to build a structure for the post cold war world he did what was right and eventually they were able to get it across so i say to you the number one lesson is not to be cynical not to give up not to turn back but to bear down and go forward and do what is right by the american people it will come out all right in the end if we stand up for what is right and do what is right you know i have been very interested in what the new republican leaders in congress have said in the last few days the speaker quoting franklin roosevelt at length has basically said well the democrats did do almost every good thing that was done in the 20th century give them back but in the information age they re irrelevant we thank them they did a good job give them a gold watch and send them home and put us in in the information age because in the information age well government is just intrinsically a part of the problem it is intrinsically bad and those democrats they think there s a program for every problem they think government can solve the problems they are wrong they are irrelevant throw them away it s a funny world that world they re sketching a world in which big bird is an elitist and right wing media magnates are populists it s an interesting world i m still trying to get it but i m working at it real hard but i say to you my friends we have an obligation that is more than contesting the other party and certainly i do i do not believe there is a program for every problem in the information age i do not believe government can solve all the problems but i do not believe that government is inherently bad our founders created government at a time of limited government and i still think what they said it was for is the best statement we could ever make we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and government was instituted to help the american people pursue those ends that is what i believe and you know in times of sweeping change times of great uprooting times which are uncertain and insecure for people it is more important than ever that we work hard not only to do the right specific things but to define that to say what we believe so will we have a different form of government in the 21st century you bet we will and will it be less bureaucratic and more entrepreneurial and more creative you bet it must be but does it still need to be on the side of average americans to help empower them to give them the tools to give them the means so that they can survive and do well and have the american dream in their own lives and rid themselves of this gripping insecurity that still dominates the lives of so many american families i say yes that is our job and so i challenge the leaders of the other party you won a piece of responsibility exercise it stop the politics of demonization and division and let s think about exercising joint responsibility you say you want to restrain government spending so do i without help from them we took 11 000 in debt off of every family in this country we reduced the size of government as the vice president said we have begun to reinvent it to make it work nobody looks the other way now when there s an emergency and the federal emergency management agency comes like they did when the republicans were in power they now say bring them on they re our friends they re our helpers they get things done when california had their terrible earthquake we got that highway rebuilt in about half the time the busiest highway in america they said they could do if you go into the small business administration now you can fill out a one page form for a loan get an answer in three days you don t have to wait months after going through page after page i talked to university administrator after university administrator who tells me that they are saving weeks of time now in college loan applications because they like our new college loan program our direct loan program that cuts costs to the taxpayers and cuts costs to the students and gives people a better way to pay back their college loans and cut out bureaucracy they say they want to help us i say come on we need the help we d like to have some support we ve been carrying this burden for two years reducing the government reducing the bureaucracy making it better we would like to have a partner you are welcome let s go let s talk about positive ideas for our future they say we have to do something about immigration they re right there are too many illegal immigrants in america but we have increased the number of border guards we have accelerated the deportation of people convicted of crimes we have faced these problems after they were ignored by the people who were here before if they want to help in a responsible and fair way i say come on they say they re for welfare reform well in the last two years we gave 24 states permission to get around federal rules and regulations to find new ways to put people to work to give them a chance in life so i say okay come on help they say they want to be tough on crime most of them voted against the crime bill that put 100 000 police on the street passed three strikes and you re out gave our people some prevention programs and law enforcement community leaders to give kids something to say yes to and a better future but we want help in these areas and i say come on they say they want to give tax relief to working people so do we in the last two years as the vice president said we not only made 90 percent of the small businesses eligible for tax cuts but for working families under 26 000 their taxes this year will be on the average 1 000 less than it would have been if this administration had never come to office that s under the laws that are already there so let s look at what we can do but let s look at what we should not do in the last two years a lot of the important things we did were opposed by somewhere between a majority and 100 percent of the members of the other party now they re in the majority but i don t think we should repeal the family leave law i don t think we should repeal the tax cuts for working families on low income to keep them off welfare i don t think we should repeal the brady bill and i don t think we should repeal i know it may have cost us the house of representatives and most people who studied it closely believe it did i don t believe we should repeal the assault weapons you don t need them i m not sure about this you may need assault weapons to hunt giraffes but you can go with ducks just fine with an ordinary shotgun this is a serious thing policemen lay down their lives every day in this country because of the upsurge in assault weapons talk to people who run the emergency rooms of our hospitals about the increasing mortality rate of people with gunshot wounds and you know what they ll tell you it s happening because there s more bullets in people s bodies who are shot with guns on average than they re used to be a lot of good democrats laid down their careers to give our children a chance to stay alive on the street give our police officers a chance to stay alive while they do their duty we must not go back on that i ll tell you something else we shouldn t repeal the law that will make it possible to immunize all the kids in this country against serious diseases who are under two years old we shouldn t repeal the national service law we should not do that do you know on martin luther king s birthday those national service volunteers were building houses in atlanta repairing tattered housing in chicago and helping people fight the floods in california and they re earning money to go to college which is important to their future and ours and we shouldn t repeal we shouldn t repeal it i guess what i want to say to you is that i don t think the government in any given time is intrinsically good or bad is it relevant is it working does it reflect our values and our interests that is the question there are many areas in which we can find agreement and we must be big enough to seek those areas even though in so many places they turned away from the same opportunity in the previous two years we have to let that go our job is to think about the people out there in america those who are left behind in this global economy who need help to work their way from the underclass to the middle class we need to think about people out there who are working harder and falling further behind who deserve to have the american dream in a swelling opportunity middle class we need to be true to many of you in this room who are successful people who are winning in the global economy but who know that your ultimate success and that of your children and your grandchildren depends on our ability to go forward together and you haven t left the democratic party because you believe that america is one country and one community and we re going forward together we have to be true to those people and so we have to work together i hope that we will get bipartisan support for the administration s middle class bill of rights which could just as well be called the bill of rights and responsibilities it reflects all three things that i sought to do from the day i came here to create a new economic policy a new way of governing and a new covenant of rights and responsibilities if we give a tax deduction for education after high school if we let people withdraw tax free from an ira for educational purposes we are helping to rebuild our economy we re having a nonbureaucratic governmental effort to help people grow and we are establishing rights and responsibilities because you cannot be given an education all you can be given is an opportunity to get an education you have to do that for yourself anybody can offer a tax cut we saw that for the 12 years before we showed up you know you can quadruple the debt of the country increase inequality and claim you gave everybody a tax cut even if it wasn t a fair one what we ought to do is to give hardworking middle class americans the benefit of this economic recovery by having a tightly disciplined tax relief focused largely on middle class americans in ways that are paid for so that we do not explode the deficit that should be our goal and that will be my goal we re gunning with another round of reinventing government proposals we want there to be bipartisan support for that we also think there ought to be some more political reform i applaud the republicans for supporting the law applying to congress the same laws that are applied to the private sector i think that s a good idea and we should be for that everybody should be for that but we ought not stop there we ought to also pass lobby reform and require disclosure and ban the gifts and the trips and let the american people know that there is no special political class in this country forgetting about them the democrats ought to keep pushing until we get lobby reform and responsible campaign finance reform and the things that will move us forward as a people in increasing the trust of the voters in their government we ought to be doing that and say join hands with us and do that too we like what you did let s go further that s the attitude that we ought to have and we ought to also be for more welfare reform but i want to say something about this i may be the only president who ever actually spent a lot of time talking to people in welfare i may be the only president who ever when he was a governor actually went into a welfare office not just one but many and watched how they work we need to change this system and our goal should be to move from welfare to work from dependence to independence from just proving you can biologically have children to responsible parenting that ought to be our goal but our goal ought to be to liberate the energies and capacities of people to be good parents and to be good workers not to punish people because they happen to be poor and there will be some strong differences that need to be debated here because i believe the american people desperately want a change in the welfare system i believe they do not like the direction of our culture in terms of the break up of families and the rising number of our children born out of wedlock but i do not believe they want to punish parents and children just because they re poor or because they ve made some mistakes in their lives i think we ought to require a system that promotes parenting that promotes education that promotes work and we can do it in a way that builds people up not tears them down we can do it in a way that unites this country not divides it and the democrats ought to take it as their solemn mission to make sure that that is exactly the kind of welfare reform we have in this country when i sign a bill on it finally let me make this point both parties and all candidates bear some responsibility for the fact that our public life has deteriorated in recent years by treating the voters as if they were purely consumers in two senses first consumers in the sense that all they care about is economics that s not true there are other ways of defining our common security and second and most importantly perhaps for us as a party that we would treat them as consumers of politics not participants in it who s got the best 30 second add who rushes most quickly to define his or her opponent as a bad person who answers the add best and the american people become political couch potatoes very often no more involved in politics than they are in the super bowl we ve got an excuse i do for being a couch potato at the super bowl i m not good enough to play or young enough or strong enough but we re all good enough to play in citizenship and one of the reasons that we were successful in 1992 is that we got rid of a bunch of that we did all those town meetings we got on those buses and rode across the country we stopped in little crossroads where nobody had ever been before and we treated people like they had good sense and could be involved in a dialogue about our country s future we must not draw the wrong lesson from the recent election we must not think that the only answer is for us to have better negative ads than they do because we have obligations to the people of this country as well as to the party we love and i am telling you andy jackson one of the founders of our party said that the answer to every problem of democracy is more democracy so we have to do a better job of reconnecting our citizens to our enterprise the people cannot respond to us just because we pass a lot of bills in congress they have to be a part of that their lives have to change you know some of the happiest people i ve seen in america since i ve had the honor of being your president people who are fighting disasters i remember when that 500 year flood hit the middle west i met a little girl named brianne schwantes who had brittle bone disease down in iowa lived in wisconsin came down to iowa the child had all kind of broken bones fighting the flood knowing that she could break a lot of her bones again because it was a great enterprise and it made her feel that she could give something and all the other people were just the same when i was in california last week we were celebrating the one year anniversary of the earthquake they had 5 600 damaged school buildings a year ago all but 40 are open today and they are brimming with pride about what they did they re dealing with the floods i flew to northern california i went to a little unincorporated town in congressman fazio s district rio linda where rush limbaugh had his first radio program and i was in this little methodist church with all the volunteers in this flood and this lady comes up to me we were all standing around this circle we were going to say a prayer and she puts her arm around me and she said well i m a republican mr president but i think i ll stand here with you anyway why because she was an american first she was proud of what she was doing she was helping people in trouble and she felt more like a person who mattered and whether it s right or wrong whenever our party that has labored so long and so hard to lift up ordinary people and give them a chance to live out their dreams suffers a reversal it s because a lot of them don t think we think they matter and what we have got to do in addition to all these things we re doing here in washington is to change the way we are conducting politics to make citizenship matter again to let people become actors not couch potatoes in the great drama that is unfolding i am telling you the next century will be the most exciting time this country ever had our best days are still ahead of us we will have opportunities for people to move from total deprived circumstances into real success because of the technological changes that are occurring if we have the courage to make the right decision and if we do it together so that people feel they matter this party would not be here after 200 years unless at every critical juncture in our history we had been able to do that so i tell you when i say our job is to create opportunity but to provide responsibility and an opportunity to exercise it it begins with the work of citizenship when you go home i want every one of you to think about that what can you do with the state party what ought you to do with the republican party in your state what kind of debates can you sponsor what kind of ways can you reach out and touch people we must make people matter again you know we ll win some elections in the future if none of this happens we ll be smarter and we ll get cleverer and the next time this happens we ll do better but what the country needs is to take these incredible technological changes that are going on and use them to connect people together again not continue to drive them apart you just think about that why do people think they matter more in adversity than in creating a future that we can all be a part of why does there have to be a flood or a tornado before everybody who walks the streets without regard to their income their education their race their background or their politics feels like they are first and foremost an american that is what we have to give back to them and if we do we ll be doing fine because we will remember that the most important thing is whether the american people do fine thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton21 1 97 bill_clinton thank you please be seated thank you you know maybe the vice president should stay up all night more often he s on a roll today i received on saturday a day early very courteously from the new york times a copy of the new york times sunday magazine just preceding the day of the inauguration and it had a lot of nice things in it an article about whether i believed anything the conclusion was accurate that i believed in civil rights and that i believed that government can do good things for people that they can t do on their own but far more important the sunday crossword puzzle had as its theme inaugurations with several very clever clues like movie about presidential aspirations hope dreams instead of hoop dreams you get it but the most important clue in the whole thing was mathematical rules governing the vice president s macarena and the answer was al gore rhythms and it struck me that a major part of the history of this time will be the al gore rhythms that have reverberated across america ladies and gentlemen i come here more than anything else to thank you to thank our outgoing leaders and our incoming leaders to thank the members of the democratic national committee and all those whom you represent who are active in our party who were there in that vast crowd yesterday along the parade route and even more of them who were back home just watching and cheering on television i was asked many times yesterday how it felt the second time around and i always said better it feels better better because america is better than it was four years ago and you should feel a great deal of pride in that just before i left to come over here one of my staff members told me that newsweek is about to issue the book it puts out every four years on the presidential election and the title this year is back from the dead well i have some mixed feelings about that because i always felt the pulse but for your role in bringing us back from whatever it was we were in right after 1994 s election i thank you and i ll hope you ll always be very proud of it i want to say a special word of thanks as the vice president did to senator chris dodd for going all across this country and for being a powerful and eloquent voice and for proving that politics can be noble and can be fun and that we need not be ashamed of being democrats or being involved in the american political system i want to thank don fowler who has toiled in our vineyards for decades for being willing to leave his comfortable and encouraging surroundings and come up here and live in what is not always the most hospitable climate for two years to fight this battle their efforts resulted not only in the first democrat to be reelected in 60 years but to gains in the house and to gains in the statehouses across the country we celebrate the election of the first asian american governor in the history of america and the first woman governor of new hampshire in the history of america 1 million small donors now 1 million ordinary citizens sending in their money to support the democratic party and a real revival of state parties throughout the country a revival which i might add we must continue and strengthen and build upon i want to thank the democrats who helped in our inaugural terry mcauliffe ann jordan craig smith and deb wilhite and a special word of thanks to the man who oversaw it all whom you honored earlier here today harold ickes for this inauguration for two brilliant national conventions for the beginning of an organization in new york which after five years of effort produced 1 6 million votes in plurality for the clinton gore ticket in 1996 i would like to say a special word of thanks and i can t enumerate them all but i would be remiss if i did not say a special word of thanks to the american labor movement for the support it has given to our efforts and to our progress and a special word of thanks for their role in one of the still untold stories of the last four years the teachers of this country for the advances we continue to make in investment and opportunity for education in the last four years i want to thank roy romer and steve grossman for their willingness to come into this great party and to build it and to go forward roy romer and i have been friends for a very long time now i think it would be no offense to any of our colleagues if i would say that at least when i left the governorship in 1992 i think it was true then i think it is true now there is no governor in america more respected or who has accomplished more than roy romer not a single one in either party today he is recognized as being the person who knows the most about education and our national drive toward having high standards he has proved in colorado that you can be for restoring the environment and growing the economy he has proved that you can care about families and children and do things that will help them along their way in life he is an unreconstructed clear reformer and a brilliant consensus builder and a great strong voice and i thank him for his willingness to do this i want to thank my friend steve grossman who has labored in our vineyard he s been a state party chair and active in our finance operations he s been a success in business and a success in running aipac i told him if he could get everybody in aipac to get along he could certainly get everybody in the democratic committee to get along he took the reins of the massachusetts party in 1991 and 92 after the 90 elections when they were at a low ebb and began the process of rebuilding which led in 1996 to the first all democratic delegation for congress in massachusetts since 1872 and just as an aside a 62 percent vote for the clinton gore ticket in the election yesterday i said that i wanted us to build a land of new promise in america in the next century with a new kind of government a new sense of responsibility and a new spirit of community at home in the world and in our dealings with each other i called for a spirit of reconciliation and i think to me as much as anything else it means we have to give each other the benefit of the doubt i thank reverend jackson for his moving comments on the legacy of martin luther king in our church service yesterday one person told me this morning that the spirit of reconciliation may have been represented more vividly yesterday than anything else by the fact that we had christians and jews and muslims in the same house of worship and we had white penecostals and african americans singing the same song and finding the same soul yesterday what i d like to take a few minutes to do because there is always some question about this before we look forward to the future i want you to be proud of the legacy you have made and i want you to understand very clearly what it is in the last four years over the last 30 years until the last two elections our friends in the republican party were moving toward a dominance of the presidency in the national political debate and there were positive elements in their message they stood for a strong defense they stood for a strong economy rooted in free enterprise they said that they would stand for the basic values of our country but they also divided us in certain ways that at least we democrats do not agree with beginning nearly 30 years ago they began to subtly use and then sometimes not so subtly use rhetoric to divide our people one from another first on race and then later there were divisions based on religion and politics which made it much more difficult for us to come together then starting in 1981 they advanced two other elements one was supply side economics we democrats called it trickle down and the argument was that there really is a santa claus that the deficits don t matter and that they ll go away anyway with supply side economics if we just cut taxes particularly for people in upper incomes and in addition to that there was the clear explicit expressed argument that government is the problem with america now i would argue to you that in the last four years part of the historic legacy of our administration and our democrats in congress and in america is that we ended the illusion of supply side economics not until it had quadrupled our national debt tripled our annual deficit but early enough to stop it from causing permanent disaster and we ended the notion that government is the problem it was very powerful rhetorically but the american people never knew what it meant until the other party won the congress in 1995 and had the government shut down twice over the battle of the budget but make no mistake our view prevailed and you should be proud of it and we have not ended but we have at least eased this notion that we can advance our country by becoming divided one against the other people know that as they become evermore multiracial multiethnic multireligious that is a recipe for destruction in fairness i think the awful tragedy of oklahoma city had a lot to do with our coming of age we realized that we could not love our country and hate our government that the people who work for our government were our neighbors and friends they had children too in their child care centers while their mothers and fathers went to work every day but i think the fact that the democratic party was a clear and constant voice for reconciliation and for not permitting our racial or our religious or our political differences to consume us has made this country a better place and has dramatically changed the political debate forever as we look toward the future that is a part of your legacy and you should be proud of it i also want to tell you that there are at least six things that are a part of our positive legacy that i think we should go forward with they must be the basis of our mobilizing our state parties of recruiting good new candidates of getting people to show up when you have these meetings back home and of making people proud to be democrats and of making people believe that they ought to send a small check to the democratic party on a regular basis if they don t want big money and organized money to dominate the process they have to give the little money and they must do that for positive reasons let s be candid one of the most interesting things that happened in the last year was we had a huge upsurge of giving among ordinary democrats when we were standing against the budget and reversing supply side economics and reversing the idea that government was the problem and after the battles had been won against the negative forces there weren t so many people that thought they needed to send the small checks again they said well president clinton and vice president gore are going to get reelected but the question is what are we going to do so you need to know what the positive legacy of the last four years is so you will be ennobled and emboldened about what we can accomplish in the next four one we replaced supply side economics with invest and grow economics reducing the deficit investing more in education and science and technology standing for free and fair trade around the world and that s what produced the largest number of jobs in any four year term in history record small businesses and declining inequality among working people for the first time in 20 years that s a part of your legacy and you should be proud of it number two we reversed the expansion of social problems which people thought were inevitable the crime rate has dropped now in all four years the crime bill is working the welfare rolls have had their biggest reduction in history as people have moved from welfare to work people are dying to go to work if the jobs are out there for them if the training is out there for them and if there is a system there to move people through and that indicates what we have to do in the years ahead child support collection is up 50 percent you should be proud of these things just four years ago most people thought the crime rate was going to go on forever now we can visualize a time when our children can walk safely from home to school to play in the park across the street and not fear that somebody will come up to them and try to shoot them or sell them dope we can do that now because that is what we have done in the last four years we ve turned these things around that is a huge surpassing achievement part of your legacy and you should be proud of it we democrats have restored the primacy of family and community to our social policies that s what the family and medical leave act was all about that s what the earned income tax credit which is now giving tax reductions to people with incomes up to 30 000 a year who have children in their home was all about that s what our reforms in retirement we secured the retirement of 40 million people made it easier for people in small business to get retirement that s what it was all about putting family and community in the center of our social concern that s what the vice president and henry cisneros were doing with the empowerment zone initiative trying to let people and communities all across america seize control of their situation and make it better that s what we were doing with the v chip that s what we were doing in trying to protect our children against tobacco advertisements that s what we were doing with the zero tolerance for guns and drugs in schools putting family and community back at the center of our concern so that now no one thinks of family values as being the government is the problem the government is the enemy now the question is what can we do together to build strong families and strong communities that s part of our legacy and you ought to be proud of it the fourth thing we did again i say was not only to stand against the forces of division but to say that community is a good thing that we ll be better off in the future in the global society if we can all work together and learn together and build new ties that bind us together we ll be better off you can see that in what we did with affirmative action mend it yes but don t end it until it s not needed anymore you can see it with what we did with immigration protect the borders yes people are in the criminal justice system send them home be tough on the workplace don t let people go in and take jobs away from american workers because their employers want to bring in people to work for slave wages but don t denigrate the immigrants who have made this country a great land except for the native americans we re all from somewhere else you can see it in our response to the church burnings you can see it in response to what we did with the religious freedom restoration act trying to liberate people from the notion that there was never a time when they could express their religious convictions in a public forum you can see it in what was done here after oklahoma city or in response to the militias we are affirmatively building an american community it is part of the legacy of this administration and this party and you should be proud of it you can see it in the way we ve reasserted the role of america s leadership around the world and yes you can see it in the way we have resolved in the fight over government i was curious to see how people commented about that government is not the problem government is not the solution we have to be the solution government is the instrument by which we give each other the tools to make the most of our own lives which means that we have downsized the government with the vice president s reinventing government initiative but there are times when the government should do more more on family leave more on helping people succeed at home and at work more in opening the doors of college education to everyone more in investing in early childhood education and we can t rest until the people who are still shut out of the health care system especially the children of poor working people have access to it now you have to make this legacy apparent to the folks back home and in order to it we have got to end the divisions in thinking in our mind we all talk about how the so called bipolar world is over freedom versus communism but the bipolar mind is still holding us back we think you can balance the budget and invest in the future we think we can not only protect but improve the environment and grow the economy we think we can be strong at home and in order to do it we have to be strong abroad and vice versa we don t believe that every issue has to go into a democrat or a republican or a liberal or a conservative box i think you can make a compelling case that balancing the budget in a proper way is a very liberal thing to do because otherwise we ll never have the political support in this country or the money to invest in the future of the people that are otherwise left out i think you can make a case i think you can make a case that educating investing in the education of our children and providing families decent health care when the kids are young is a very conservative thing to do because otherwise you cannot conserve the basic strength and security and values of the country over the long run we re in a period of change we ve got to stop this who ever said the republicans should own crime i never met a democrat who was happy to have his child mugged who ever said the republicans own welfare reform those of us who ve known people on welfare know how bad they want to get off you have to help change the way people think about these things and to do that you have to help build a positive future now in the state of the union message i will be talking more about the specific things that i want to do in the future but i want to talk today about this whole issue of campaign finance reform for two reasons one is campaign finance reform elections are too expensive and they take too much money and it takes too much time to raise the money and it always raises questions but there s a bigger problem which is the more that elections become the province of very expensive ad wars the less people are likely to participate i think the democrats ought to be on record not only for campaign finance reform but we need to find ways mr chairman mr vice chairs all the new officers here we ve got to find ways to encourage affirmatively the increase of participation of people at the polls reverend jackson s spent his whole life going around and registering people to vote if young voters had voted in 1996 in the same percentages they did in 1992 the election would have been even more dramatic in the outcome and the congressional results would have been different we have to lift the participation of people and we need to see campaign finance reform not only as restoring the trust of citizens in their government but as one step of increasing the participation of people in our common affairs you cannot have a national community if half the community doesn t show up everybody s got to be there but we the democrats have to continue to be and intensify our efforts for campaign finance reform and it has to be a bipartisan solution today senator john mccain and senator russ feingold and representative chris shays and marty meehan in the house and the senate a democrat a republican are introducing their bipartisan campaign finance reform legislation it is tough it is balanced it is credible it should become the law of the land we know from experience i went through this for four years that all you have to do to kill campaign finance reform is just not do it nobody ever wants a vote up on the tote board i killed this bill so they just keep letting it die in the senate with the filibuster delay will mean the death of reform one more time if it happens so i ask members of congress in both parties to act now while the public is watching while the momentum is building act now don t delay you ve got a good bill you ve got a good forum resolve the differences and go forward i also ask that we not wait today let us resume our call to our friends in the republican party together let s stop accepting soft money even before the reform becomes law if you will do it we will do it we have offered our hand time and again why not just say yes today as a first step the democratic party has announced several changes unilaterally in the way we raise money i thank the dnc for agreeing with the position that we took in the campaign not to accept contributions from non citizens and foreign owned businesses and for taking other steps to limit contributions that may otherwise raise questions about the integrity of the process these are sound and necessary first steps in the reforms we need we should go forward from there and take the next step now let me say again let s be realistic about this there have been problems with this all along the way but there s a great deal of interest in this in the press and in the spirit of reconciliation let me say that we need to be candid about this on the other side our friends may not think that they have any interest in campaign finance reform why should they they raise more money they raise more foreign money they raise more money in big contributions and we take all the heat it s a free ride secondly let s be candid once you re in office whether you re a democrat or a republican if you ve done a good job and you ve got friends out there and they can relate to you you at least know that maybe even if it s bad for your party or bad for your country maybe you can protect yourself if some wave of hysteria comes along that threatens to wash you away and at least if you can raise the money you can have your own case heard i say that to make this point we hear a lot in america about the cynicism that exists between the public and the politicians or how cynical the press are about politicians the problem with cynicism is that it always eventually becomes a two way street you cannot end cynicism unless all parties involved are willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt and so i ask now for an honest open effort to pass this bill and i ask for an honest open understanding that the supreme court decision allowing all of these third party expenditures will complicate our task but we can make it better if we will suspend our cynicism and instead put our energies into getting something done for america will you help us do that will all of you help us do that stand up if you believe in it stand up if you ll fight for it we can do this and i want you to help thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton21 10 00a bill_clinton thank you very much well when bren was up here talking i thought to myself that pretty well covers it why should i speak thank you for your incredible generosity and support and friendship to me and hillary and thank you mel i want to thank cindy and paul for hosting this in their beautiful home in this beautiful yard and i think i should say that today is mel s 74th birthday and we ought to be among the first to wish him a happy birthday you know we re going to have to redefine our definition of aging by the way anybody today americans who live to be 65 on average have a life expectancy of 82 americans who live to be 74 have a life expectancy of over 85 and the fastest growing group of people by percentage in the whole country are americans over 80 pretty soon because of the human genome project young women will come home with babies from the hospital that will be born with a life expectancy of 90 years which means that in the context of the 21st century mel is just entering middle age and we wish you a long and happy life i want to thank my friend and supporter and representative julia carson i m glad to be able to come back here and also do some events for her this morning she is unbelievable in congress everybody up there loves her and she s i told somebody that she may be an african american woman but she has the political skills of an arkansas ozark sheriff when she s working the congress she sort of sidles into a room when she leaves she s got what she wants and nobody knows what they gave away until it s too late it s great thank you julia carson for doing a great job and i want to thank bart peterson i was so thrilled when he got elected and i m glad he and amy are here today and i want to say a personal word of appreciation to frank and judy o bannon i have enjoyed my friendship with them they have visited with hillary and me at the white house i want you to make sure that this election goes very well for the governor because he has done very well by indiana you can be really proud of him and i m delighted to be here with him today and finally i want to thank joe andrews who has been a great chair of the dnc joe i have to tell you when i woke up this morning and i looked outside on this beautiful piece of land and the trees are all turning and i realized how close we are to a golf course i questioned your judgment in leaving indiana and moving to washington to deal with the sharks to be head of the dnc but i m real glad you did you ve done a great job and i thank you and the indiana people should be very proud of joe andrews thank you now i will be brief i enjoyed visiting with all of you inside i just wanted to say a couple of things this election is very important the election hillary s election for the senate in which you have helped immensely today because she s doing well up there i think she s going to win but i don t want her to be out spent three to one in the last two and a half weeks and obviously the people who opposed us all along are trying to give it one last shot before they give up and hillary wins the senate and i m not in the white house so we ve had a pretty brisk fundraising opposition to deal with too so i m very very grateful to you for that but i also wanted to say that i think that as we come into the home stretch of this election the only thing that concerns me about it is the repeated number of articles i keep reading which say that the undecided voters and the people who might decide not to vote are not quite sure whether this election makes a difference and what the differences between the candidates are for the various races they re considering and all i can tell you is that i think the election makes a huge difference and i can hardly remember a time when the differences between the candidates on the issues that will affect our families our communities and our children s futures were any more sharp it is absolutely clear to me that if the american people the people in indiana just starting in your governor s race here if you understand the differences between the candidates and the consequences to families communities and the future we win if people are uncertain about the differences and the significance then we re in trouble i met with my democratic colleagues in the senate and the house at the early part of this week and i said you know you ought to look at yourselves as sort of a weather patrol clear we win cloudy they do well we ve got to try to make the skies clear for people they have to understand the choices and i would just say just two or three things this morning number one bren talked about the condition of the economy and people ask me all the time why is the economy doing so well and what did you do when you got in what new idea did you bring to washington and the truth is we did have some new ideas about how to make the most of technology and speed up the retraining of the american work force we had some new ideas but the main thing we brought to washington was an old idea arithmetic people ask me all the time what s your new idea arithmetic washington didn t practice arithmetic they quadrupled the debt of america in the 12 years before i took office because they pretended that you could take two and two make it add up to six and it never has and it never will now in some ways this may be the most significant difference to all of you in this race it s a difference in the race for the senate in new york it is certainly a difference in the race for the presidency and the vice presidency if you look at the leadership of frank o bannon here and evan bayh before him one of the reasons i think the democratic party came back in indiana is that they proved that you could be fiscally responsible live within your means run a good government grow the economy and also invest in education and in helping people that s basically what we do that s what we democrats do and when i became president the deficit was 295 billion do you know what it was supposed to be this year 455 billion instead we ve got a 230 billion surplus when i leave office we will have paid down over 300 billion of the national debt when i became president we were spending over 13 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes just paying interest on the debt when i leave we ll be down at or below 12 cents we were going to be at 15 cents and if you vote for vice president gore we pay the debt off you get rid of the third biggest item in the federal budget and that s why we can pay for more health care more education a more modest tax cut and still get rid of that debt arithmetic now the biggest difference here and it affects every one of you from the wealthiest person here to the people who have served this wonderful meal this morning the biggest difference is their tax plan is three times bigger than ours actually people who make under 100 000 a year almost all do better under ours but theirs is three times bigger so what difference does that make if you spend if you have these numbers boggle the imagination but if you think you re going to have about 2 trillion to spend if you spend 1 5 trillion on a tax cut and then you promise people you re going to give young people some of their social security payroll tax back to put in the stock market but you re going to protect old people who are already drawing their social security and they won t lose anything that costs another trillion dollars and then you promise people several hundred billion dollars worth of spending you know if you just take out all the zeroes you can add it up if you ve got two to spend and you spend three that s the republican proposal you re back in deficit and that means higher interest rates and lower growth the democratic plan will keep interest rates about a percent lower over a decade every year and let me just tell you what that means you hear people talking about tax cuts these last two weeks one percent lower interest rates every year for a decade saves the american people 390 billion in home mortgage payments 30 billion in car payments 15 billion in college loan payments that doesn t even count how much lower your credit cards will be or the fact that will have lower cost business loans which will mean more expansion a stronger economy and a better stock market so we have a tax cut all right it s concentrated on helping people get tax relief to pay for college education long term care child care retirement savings and to give people incentives to invest in the poor areas that aren t part of our prosperity yet it isn t as big as theirs we freely admit it but the reason is we want to get rid of the debt we think it s important and we think low interest rates and a strong economy is the best tax cut we can give all americans now that is a clear choice people need to understand that and it is a huge deal i ve worked as hard as i know how to turn this country around pull this country together and move this nation forward and that is the single most important difference don t let anybody tell you there is no significant difference between these two economic plans and i know here in indiana where there are a lot of conservative people they say well but gore wants to spend more money than bush he does but if you get rid of interest on the debt you get rid of the third biggest item in the budget and you quit paying interest payments on the debt you can spend more money on education and health care and the environment and scientific research and still have a tax cut because you re not you get rid of the third biggest item in the federal budget this is real important people have got to understand this all the work we have done in the last eight years can be reversed if you go back to big deficits and i think if people understood that al gore and joe lieberman would win don t you so you need to talk to people about it it s a big deal it s one of the biggest issues in the new york senate race and all over the country because we have proven that fiscal conservatism and social progress go hand in hand so we ve cut the welfare rolls in half partly because we have good welfare reform but partly because we have a strong economy and we have the number of people without health insurance going down for the first time in a dozen years partly because we have a program that helps insure children that the state runs and we send them the money to do it but partly because we have a strong economy we have a lower dropout rate in high school and a higher college going rate than ever before in history and test scores are going up and there s a movement of more and more kids to take advance placement courses a huge increase in it partly because the education reforms are going in the right direction but partly because we have a strong economy which rewards higher levels of skill so i just would say to all of you i think this is profoundly important and if don t explain anything else to any of your neighbors and friends before they vote tell them this is still about arithmetic and the numbers have got to add up our numbers will and theirs won t the second thing i want to say is i believe in addition to economic policy the central thing that we have done these last eight years that has helped move our country forward is to have an inclusive philosophy that everybody ought to be part of america s community that everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance we all do better when we help each other and we can t afford to let anyone be either left behind or abused and be the kind of country we want america is growing more diverse it s getting more interesting but as you see all around the world today most of the troubles in the world come from people who can t get along with other folks who are different from them because they think their differences are more important than their common humanity so i have worked very hard on things i thought would even the scales in america and bring us together and in each of these instances our party is in one place and their party is in another and i ll just give you a couple of examples we re for raising the minimum wage and they re not we re for strengthening laws guaranteeing equal pay for women for equal work and they re not we re for a hate crimes bill that protects people against hate crimes and allows the federal government to come in and help local law enforcement when there have been crimes of hate against people like we saw in the case of james byrd or matthew sheperd or these other highly publicized cases around the country and it s a big problem and you see it in your part of the country so i just give you these examples if you can see what i have seen around the world in the last eight years you would know how important it is for us to learn to live together across the lines that divide us when i flew to egypt earlier this week to try to help put an end to the violence in the middle east all the way over there i was just aching for these people who i know and i was thinking about the former prime minister of israel yitzhak rabin who was killed because he was working for peace and i thought how all these people have worked together for seven years and it can just be thrown away in a day or two because things happen that raise all their old demons again four or five years ago we had this horrible ethnic slaughter in rwanda in africa where the two tribal groups who had literally shared the same land that is rwanda for 500 years and on and off they d had trouble but they d always managed it and it wasn t like a lot of african countries where a hundred years ago the lines of the nations were redrawn artificially and all these people that weren t used to living together were thrown together these people had been living together on the same land for 500 years and within a hundred days over 700 000 people were killed without weapons basically they did it all with machetes why because something set off this spark of fear and loathing among people who were different so that s the last point i want to make today i know this is all kind of heavy for saturday morning but you need to think about it if i were told if god came down tonight and said to me you have to go your time is up but i ll give you one wish for america believe it or not i would not wish to continue our economic prosperity if i only had one wish if i had one wish i would wish for us to all get along together as one america to be one community to see our differences as interesting and fascinating but not nearly as important as our common humanity because the american people are smart and they re innovative and the fact that we re growing more diverse is a gold mine of potential for us in a global society but all over the world i see it over and over and over again whether it s in northern ireland in the middle east or the balkans or africa you name it most of the world s troubles stem from the fact that people are determined to see their differences as more important than their common humanity and then they slip from that into distrust and hatred and dehumanization and violence and it s a little easy slope to fall down and one of the things that i think is important about being a democrat in the 21st century is that we do believe everybody counts we think the people who are serving us here ought to have the same chance to send our kids to college as we do their kids to college that we do we think everybody should have a chance we think the role of government is to give people the tools to make the most of their own lives and we really believe that we all do better when we help each other we can only secure the independence of people which our constitution guarantees if we recognize that we live in a world where we are increasingly interdependent and life is going to be more interesting but only if we can see our common humanity as more important than all those interesting differences so you just go out and tell people that tell people our program adds up and theirs doesn t and ours will pull people together and theirs won t those are two good reasons to stick with our side and to show up on election day thank you very much dem wjclinton21 10 00b bill_clinton wow i ll tell you why i came here because julia carson asked me and i always do whatever she asks me to do because i learned very early i could do it right away or i could just wait and let her grind on me until i finally broke down and said yes so i just say yes right away to julia now and it solves a lot of my problems mr mayor i m glad to be back here in your city and i m very proud that you are now the mayor of this great city and i want to thank my longtime friend jeff smillion for helping julia carson we were friends before i ran for president before i knew i was going to run for president i met him he was just i was just what president bush used to refer to as the governor of a small southern state when we became friends and i thank you for helping julia joe andrew i am so proud of you he s got that riff down doesn t he old joe does i kind of wanted to run down here along the side and pass the plate when he was up there preaching we knew he was preaching to the saved and so i thought we ought to take up an offering here let me say i m really proud of what the democrats have done in indiana i m proud of your great governor and i want you to make sure he gets reelected he deserves to be reelected and i am very very proud of your former governor senator evan bayh and what a great job he has done we have also been friends for many many years so this is a great day for me to come here to thank the people from indiana who have sent such fine people into public office and who have given us julia carson who is truly one of a kind have you ever met anybody like julia before in your whole life i tell this joke she s talking about what a unifying force the democratic party is julia has got it all inside her i told somebody she may be an african american woman but she reminds me of a redneck county judge when she works the room she kind of sidles into these rooms in washington and all these self important people are there in their expensive suits using these big words and then julia sort of sidles out and she s got whatever it is she came in for and they still don t know what happened i mean it s amazing you know she s like a stealth bomber for indiana in washington she s got more moves than larry bird and isaiah thomas put together she s got moves man people don t see that stuff so yes i wanted to come here i m sorry i couldn t come before you know what i was doing i was working on the peace process but now wait a minute i want to say a couple of things seriously we re all having a good time but we all agree with each other or you wouldn t be here and here s what i want to say to you first thank you thank you for helping me have a chance to serve the country for the last eight years i m grateful to you second i have been reading as much as i could while i ve been running around the world and trying to get the congress out of town too i ve been reading what i could about what the experts are saying about this election and they say it s tight as ticks and they say that there are a lot of undecided voters and they say that there are a lot of voters who aren t sure what the differences are and what the consequences are to them so maybe it doesn t matter for whom they vote or whether they vote now let me tell you something i ve done everything i could do for eight years to turn this country around pull this country together and move the country forward everything i could do but in america our public life is always about tomorrow always about that s why we re still around here after 224 years because we re always thinking about tomorrow now look at where we were eight years ago and where we are now and ask yourselves where we re going to go i m telling you this is a huge election you cannot afford for anybody to think that there aren t any differences and it doesn t matter whether they vote or for whom they vote and the interesting thing about this election to me is from the elections for president and vice president to the united states senate and you know i ve got a passing interest in that senate race up in new york i know something about that to the races for governor and for congress all over the country you see the same things there are big differences the differences will have real consequences and only the democrats want you to know what the differences are what does that tell you about who you ought to vote for i see it everywhere so you ve got the other side trying to cloud the differences and blur them and we have to clarify them and i just want to say look eight years ago the country was in the ditch economically eight years later we ve got the longest economic expansion in history the lowest unemployment in 30 years 22 million new jobs the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment ever measured the lowest poverty rate in 20 years the biggest drop in child poverty in 34 years now i got tickled you know when our republican friends were in they took credit for everything that happened in america they took credit when the sun came up one of their campaigns was it s morning in america the sun came up in the morning give it to us we did it now everything that happens happens by accident did you listen to these debates i thought al gore s best moment in the first debate was when his opponent said i think clinton gore got more out of the economy than the economy got out of clinton gore the american people did this you know we just sort of were there and al gore said well you know the american people did do this but they were working hard eight years ago too and they weren t doing nearly as well so the first big question is do you want to continue the prosperity build on it expand on it to people and places that have been left behind and lift up this whole country now you ve got to talk to people because how could anybody not see this look they re offering a tax cut that s three times the size of the one that we re offering but most people making under 100 000 are better off under our proposal than theirs tax cuts to pay for college education long term care child care retirement savings to get people to invest in the communities that have been left behind now theirs is three times bigger and then they want to partially privatize social security which means forget about whether you think it s a good idea or not let s just talk about the arithmetic there are a lot of problems with the idea but forget about that talk about the arithmetic everybody here under 40 let s say under 45 can take 2 percent of your social security payroll tax keep it and put it in an investment account everybody like me starting next year who will be 65 or over gets a guarantee we re going to get it just like they always promised it now where s the money going to come from if you take away the money that they re going to pay my guarantee with they ve got to take that out of the surplus too so they ve got a tax cut three times bigger than ours a trillion dollar promise in social security to pay for the privatization hundreds of billions of dollars in other promises look folks you need to tell people they want to know why we did well in america because we brought arithmetic back to washington we made the numbers add up these numbers don t add up and look this is a big deal if you vote for a tax cut that big and you privatize social security at a trillion dollars you spend several hundred billion dollars of it you re back in deficit and do you know what that means high interest rates if you vote for al gore and joe lieberman julia carson and our whole crowd do you know what it means you ll have interest rates about one percent lower a year for a decade let me tell you what that amounts to in a tax cut listen to this one percent lower interest rates 390 billion in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower college loan payments lower credit card payments lower business loans means higher profits more folks getting hired more pay raises and a higher stock market our tax cut for all is low interest rates that keep this economy going and pay the debt off now this is very important did you watch the debate where their guy says our guy is for big government we re for big government there s a real problem with that argument besides the fact that it s not true it s manifestly not true what do i mean by that the size of the federal government today is the smallest it s been since 1960 when dwight eisenhower was president and john kennedy was running for president the federal government spending as a percentage of our economy is the smallest it s been since 1966 why is that we re paying down the debt the third biggest item in the budget for your tax money is the debt after social security and defense the debt is the third highest sum in the budget so we get rid of that we can spend more on education more on health care pay for a tax cut and still shrink the size of government vote for al gore and joe lieberman and julia carson get the country out of debt keep interest rates down keep the economy going keep moving forward that s the issue now that s clear but don t all of you know a lot of people who never will come to a rally like this you do don t you you know every one of you you know a lot of people who love their country and they re going to vote on election day but they ll never come to a rally like this you need to tell them just what i told you the first thing is if you like the prosperity and you want to keep it going and you don t want us to go back into deficit you ve got to vote with us we tried it their way for 12 years we tried it our way for eight years our way works better than their way we ve got to keep going and now the second thing i want to say is this if you look at every other area of our national life you ll find the same thing welfare the rolls have been cut in half yes if you re able bodied and you can work you ve got to go to work but we don t want you to hurt your kids so we want more for child care for education and training for transportation and it works our deal works helping people be good parents and good workers makes good sense that s why we were for the family and medical leave law we think it ought to be expanded work and family our way works crime what was our position on crime not what they say they say we re weak on enforcement and all we want to do is take hunters guns away what a load of hooey you know that s just a bunch of bull it might stir people up and get them some votes but it has a real burden of being untrue what are the facts what was our approach our approach was put more cops on the street to prevent crime in the first place do more to take guns out of the hands of children and criminals you can do that without interfering with the hunters and the sport shooters give kids something to say yes to give them an after school program summer school program and then punish the people that ought to be punished now that s been our do you know what now look at the record we have the lowest crime rate in 26 years the lowest murder rate in 33 years that is the record so what do they want to do they want to stop our efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children they want to this is an explicit commitment they want to repeal our efforts to put over 100 000 police on our streets and they just want to go back to talking tough again well look we tried it their way we tried it our way our way works and not a single indiana hunter has missed a day in the deer woods not a sports person has missed a single sporting event but a half a million felons fugitives and stalkers couldn t get a handgun because of the brady bill it s a safer country we re a better country our way works we tried it their way we tried it our way our way works you look at education compared to eight years ago test scores are up the dropout rate is down the high school graduation rate is up the college going rate is at an all time high we went from 14 states to 49 states with strong academic standards that would be applied to all students in all schools all states now have to identify schools that are failing and try to find some way to turn them around so standards accountability and resources to help people meet the standards it s working the teachers and the principals know how to turn around failing schools now now we know how to do this we re finally moving this thing we ve had a a two thirds increase in the number of kids taking advance placement tests a 300 percent increase in latino kids a 500 percent increase for african american kids taking advance placement tests to go to college now we know what we re doing here so what is al gore s program what s the democratic program high standards and accountability identify schools that are failing and within two years turn them around or shut them down and reopen them under new management but help them 100 000 more teachers funds to build or modernize or repair schools funds to train the teachers in the subjects that they re supposed to be teaching and making sure that kids get a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition and after school and pre school programs for all the kids who need it why not because we re against accountability and standards but because if you re going to lay standards on somebody they ve got to have a chance to meet the standards now what is their program their program is accountability and block grants to states and if they spend the money fine if they don t fine if they don t spend it well we ll take it away from them so if the schools get in trouble our answer is spend even less on them that s their side i think accountability plus is better than accountability minus and we ve had eight years of experience we re moving in the right direction our way works better than theirs the american people have to choose that the same thing is true with every other issue on the environment we ve got cleaner air cleaner water safer food 90 percent of our kids immunized for the first time in history we have proved you can grow the economy and clean up the environment and we set aside more land than any administration since theodore roosevelt in permanent trust for the american people al gore says vote for me and i ll build on that his opponent says vote for me and we ll relax some of their regulations we ll get rid of the president s order protecting 40 million acres in national forests we ll reduce some of these other things he s done because you simply can t do this much and grow the economy now look we tried it their way didn t we and then they came in and tried to weaken the economy again i vetoed it every time they tried it the last five years and wait a minute and you know if i were trying to hurt the economy i ve done a poor job of it so this is a serious deal you can grow the economy and improve the environment and believe me in the future the challenges will be bigger than the ones i ve faced you can t turn around on this this is a big deal this is a big deal so you ve got to go tell people this you ve got to say look look at where we were eight years ago look at where we are today the economy crime welfare education the environment health care we ve got people without insurance that number going down for the first time in a dozen years because of the children s health insurance program that we have proposed and gotten out there and implemented now the country is going in the right direction now here s the last point i want to make you all were clapping when joe andrews did his shtick you know we don t care whether you re old or young whether you walked in or wheeled in and all that that s really who we are and it s the only thing about us that s more important than the economic policy is that we think everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance we all do better when we help each other that s what we believe now it s what i call one america but there are lots of these one america issues out there where there are real differences you can go to your friends and neighbors and ask them with whom they agree our side we re for raising the minimum wage their side isn t our side we re for stronger enforcement of equal pay laws for women and their side isn t our side our side we re for a medicare prescription drug program so that every senior who needs access to affordable medicine can get it and their side isn t our side we re for hate crimes legislation that protects people on the basis of race gender disability or sexual orientation from hate crimes nobody ought to be beat up mauled dragged or killed in this country because of who they are if they re obeying the law and their side isn t now that s it so here s the deal you can t let anybody not vote or sort of stray away because they think there s no consequence here they think there are no differences here we ve actually had quite a nice election free of personal recrimination where we positive that both these candidates for president and for vice president are good honorable patriotic americans who love their families and love their country and they re going to do what they say they re going to do and i can tell you this you know the press likes to say that these politicians are always breaking their word but the truth is every study shows that most presidents pretty well do what they say they re going to do once in a while they break their word and usually we re thankful they did why roosevelt said he d balance the budget and that was a bad idea with 25 percent unemployment and we re thankful that he gave us the new deal instead lincoln to get elected said he wouldn t free the slaves and we re awful glad he broke that promise so once in a great while a guy gets elected president and has to break a promise and it makes but more often than not presidents do what they say they re going to do you re going to have a very different supreme court depending on which one of them gets elected and it s not just about the right to choose although it is about that that will change depending on what happens it is also about the ability of the congress of the united states to protect working people there are all these and ordinary citizens for all kinds of things there s a revolution here a debate going on on the supreme court and some of them want to go back to where they were in the 1930s now you ve got to decide but don t you let anybody tell you that there are no differences and i just came out here to say you know if indiana can elect evan bayh and frank o bannon back to back if indianapolis can elect bart peterson the first democratic mayor in a month of sundays if indiana can send me julia carson to drive me crazy until i say yes to whatever she s asking if indiana can provide us joe andrews the spark plug of our national revival of the democratic party all of you between now and election day can find some people to talk to look at all the people in this crowd here this is a big crowd this crowd will talk to collectively 30 000 50 000 100 000 people between now and election day look around here there are lots of folks here most of the people you will talk to will never come to an event like this but they will vote if they think it matters and you need to go tell them your friends in illinois your friends in michigan your friends in kentucky and all the states around here all those states are big battleground states look if you want to keep the prosperity going their deal won t pass the arithmetic test it doesn t add up you ve got to stick with us look at where we were eight years ago and where we are now on welfare crime the environment education health care we re moving in the right direction let s keep moving in the right direction look at where we are on building one america on hate crimes on equal pay for women on all these other issues look at this if you want one america if you want to move in the right direction if you want to keep the prosperity going you ve got one choice you ve got to be for our crowd al gore joe lieberman frank o bannon julia carson the people that helped to bring america back you can do it indiana thank you and god bless you thank you dem wjclinton21 10 93a bill_clinton thank you very much david i was hoping you d talk a little longer i didn t even get to finish my salad ladies and gentlemen i m delighted to be here tonight i ve already had a chance to say hello to almost all of you except the members of the senate who see me all the time i thanked senator metzenbaum and senator levin they came upstairs to see me senator kennedy we even had our picture taken i came all the way to boston to see you and you didn t do that i want to thank norman brownstein for the wonderful work he did tonight in getting you all here let s give him a hand i d also like to say a brief word if i might about this wonderful facility we are in we have some people here who are still associated with it the holidays who helped to found this were good enough to support me early in my presidential campaign and a lot of our friends have been active in this wonderful place this once actually had a fine showing of artists women artists from my home state here so i have been delighted to have finally the chance to come here and see this and i mr chairman i don t know who picked this place but whoever did is a near genius in my estimation because i love it it was just about a month and a week ago when we had the remarkable signing of the israel plo peace accord on the grounds of the white house many of you were there i imagine all of you saw it hundreds of millions perhaps over a billion people around the world saw it occur i would like to begin my remarks by making two observations if i might first of all about the peace process itself when i traveled across this country last year and asked many if not all of you to support my campaign i said that i believed the time was ripe for peace in the middle east but that it could not be achieved unless the president of the united states understood that in the end the united states could never impose a peace on the middle east but could only guarantee it if it were to occur after i was elected i met with yitzhak rabin in the white house and we sat for a long time alone and he looked at me with those soulful eyes of his and said that he was prepared to take real risks for peace that he thought the time had come to try to make it and i told him if he would take the risks we would do our best to minimize those risks the rest is history it was a peace made directly between israel and the plo as all the best agreements are it was a difficult thing as we saw during the signing sometimes from the language sometimes from the body language but as the prime minister said one never makes peace with one s friends you have to make peace with your enemies i want all of you to know that since that day i think that we have gone forward together to try to make the peace stick to try to make it work and to try to expand on it we ve had a donors conference of representatives from 43 nations raise several billion dollars in commitments from people to make this peace agreement work we have seen now the first public meeting of leaders from jordan and israel we ve seen the states of morocco and tunisia welcome israeli officials for the first time we have seen real progress there is still a lot to do i have urged the arab states to recognize israel to drop the boycott to get rid of the hostile united nations resolutions and i have done what i could to keep this process going an especially remarkable part of it has been the unity i have seen emerging between leaders of the american jewish community and arab americans a couple of hundred of whom met at the white house for several hours after the signing ceremony and began to explore what they can do together to try to help to bring opportunity and peace and harmony in the areas where the peace accord had been where the peace accord covered i believe we re moving in the right direction i also have to tell you i don t think that we will have a complete peace until we have just that a complete peace one that involves syria and lebanon as well as the plo and jordan one that enables the people of the middle east to live together in true security and to give the children of that area a normal life i want to ask you tonight to help me to stay with our present policy to be aggressive in pushing the process forward but to recognize always that in the end there is no peace that the parties do not themselves voluntarily undertake when we had that signing ceremony i wanted so much for the prime minister and mr arafat to come but they couldn t make up their minds whether they wanted to come for a while for reasons that i m sure all of you appreciate many of you more deeply than i in the end they decided to come because since they had agreed to it they might as well make the most of it and when they did and when they reached out across decades of division and shook hands in that electric moment that was felt around the world i think that people had a sense of possibility in so many areas that they had not had for a long time that s the second thing i want to say to you tonight as i ask you on behalf of your country on behalf of israel on behalf of all the peace loving peoples of the world to continue to help me to implement this peace process and push it forward respecting that in the end all the parties themselves will have to voluntarily decide on the next steps i ask you also to help me to give that sense of possibility back to the american people for there so many days when i think that the biggest obstacle to the dreams i brought with me to the presidency the biggest obstacle is the sense that maybe we really can t change things the sense of hopelessness so many people feel the sense of mistrust in institutions and leaders it is i think almost a truism that no great democracy can change profoundly until things are in pretty rough shape and yet when things get in pretty rough shape there are so many people who have been so disappointed who feel so injured who feel so insecure that it is difficult to make the changes that need to be made and so today america every day gets up and presents to me a complex picture of hope and fear a complex picture of eagerness to embrace the future to compete and to win and to promote the things we all believe in and a sense of insecurity that makes people sort of draw inward i think for the last year hope has been winning a sense of possibility and movement has been happening thanks to the people in the congress who have supported the initiatives of this administration including those in this audience we have moved to really bring down the deficit we ve got the lowest interest rates in 30 years business investments back up consumer spending is back up on important big products we ve got some real sense of movement in this economy thanks to this group of congress members who have been willing to support this administration we signed a week after the middle east peace accord the national service bill that eli segal did so much to shepherd through the congress which literally has the potential to revolutionize the way young people all across america look at their country and feel about themselves which ask young people to give something back to their nation and in return offers them a chance to go to college no matter how meager their own income we have begun to face the health care crisis we have begun to deal with so many issues that have been too long ignored in this struggle to find our way in the world there are those who have said well i haven t done everything right for that i plead guilty but i ll tell you one thing in this administration we show up for work every day with our sleeves rolled up and a determination to face the challenges before us and tonight and i was thinking about the history of our relationships with israel i m reminded that when harry truman recognized israel a long time ago now he was still in the process of making the post cold war world post world war ii world with our allies we had moved into the cold war but now we all look back on that era as if it were self evident what our domestic policies ought to be and what our foreign policies ought to be but in truth those of you who lived through that particularly those of you who were adults or nearly so then will remember clearly that there were a couple of years after world war ii when we had to work out what our foreign policy was going to be when we had to develop the institutions necessary to carry that foreign policy out when we had to work through in our own minds what america s responsibilities at home were and we are going through the same period now we know that we are the only superpower we know we can t solve every problem in the world but we know there are a lot of people suffering and misery that we can alleviate and if we believe in democracy and freedom if we don t want to see the proliferation of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction then we have to try we know that we have an interest in russia maintaining its democratic bent and continuing to reduce its nuclear arsenal we know clearly we know if we could bring peace to the middle east it might revolutionize the range of options we have with the muslims all over the world and give us the opportunity to beat back the forces of radicalism and terrorism that unfairly have been identified with islam by so many people we know some things for sure but we also know that we are still working this out here at home it is the same thing but i can tell you this i am convinced that if we will continue to honestly speak with one another about these issues we ll find a way to do it i believe we have to find a balance between the security people need to change and the changes we need to make i believe we will never make america what it ought to be until we provide health care security to all of our citizens i believe we will never have an america that is strong until we tell the american people you can be a successful parent and a successful worker that s what that family leave bill was all about that s what our budget bill was all about which lifted the working poor out of poverty when they have children at home i believe we will never be able to do what we need to do as a people until we say okay if we can t guarantee you a job anymore we can at least guarantee you employability if the average person has to change jobs eight times in a lifetime how can we not have a program worthy of the capacities of all americans it gives them a chance for lifetime education and training and finally let me say i believe we will never meet our challenges at home and abroad until the american people are more secure on their own streets again for all the violence in the middle east my friends we can read stories every day on every street in america that rivals anything you can read about in the gaza in the toughest times if you look at what has happened 90 000 murders in four years in america more in any given year than ever happened at the height of the war in vietnam you look at the fact that this is the only advanced country in the world the only one where we don t even check your criminal record or your mental health history in some states to see if you can get a gun and where people seriously argue that that infringes on constitutional rights this is the only country in the world where police go to work on mean streets every day and confront young people who grew up in chaotic circumstances who are often better armed than they are so i say to you we have some things to do here at home we are breeding generation after generation of people who have no claim to the mainstream of this society and on whom the future has no claim we are breeding so many people who are so alienated and who have no sense of all these things that you and i came here to celebrate tonight just three weeks ago a little named launice smith was shot and killed in this city she was on a playground three and a half miles from this wonderful building she was four years old one of 1 500 people who are shot in this town every year our nation s capital her father could not go to her funereal because he s in prison for shooting another four year old on another playground several years ago when he was 19 and got in an argument over hair barrettes he got angry and another kid handed him a gun and he used it the point of all that i am saying is this we ve got to change in this country and we ve got to have the security have to first recognize that the great power of america is the power of our ideals our values our institutions and our example and that we cannot do what we re supposed to do unless as a nation we are both for united and more self confident than millions of our fellow citizens are as we enjoy this great dinner tonight so i ask you to remember that and to renew your commitment not only to peace in the middle east and to american s continuing role in the world and i thank the many of you who said as we walked through the line tonight that you believed we did have a role of leadership in the world to alleviate suffering and to do what we can to promote freedom and democracy but also to rebuild this country here at home most people in this country whatever their incomes whatever their race whatever their walk of life and wherever they live are wonderful people they get up every day they go to work they never break the law they do the best they can by their kids and they re absolutely determined to make the most they can of their lives but they are living in a country that has not yet made the decisions necessary to organize itself in a way that permits all of us to live up to the fullest of our god given capacities and until we make the decision to have an economic program an education program a health care program a family policy and a law enforcement policy and a commitment to rescuing our kids that will permit us to do that we will not have the security we need to lead the world and to face the future i believe that we are on the road to changing this country i know what i saw on september the 13th when arafat and rabin shook hands was an instant shocking realization all across the world that things we never thought possible were in fact possible and i ask you to help me now liberate the imagination and the spirit and the energy of the american people for the jobs that we have yet to do at home and abroad because those things can also be done thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton21 10 93b bill_clinton thank you very much earl and thank you ladies and gentlemen i actually wanted to hear him talk i thought i ve heard the speech the guy behind him has to make i am delighted to be here with the elc with earl washington and buddy james and with all the rest of you i thank you for your achievements in life and i thank you for the work you have done the board of this organization met at the white house i know last spring and we have developed a very special relationship i was honored to be invited to come by the reception for a moment i wish i could stay for dinner but before you asked me to eat i was invited somewhere else and it s not polite to cancel at least that s what my mama always taught me i want to congratulate your honorees tonight suzanne de passe and corning corporation and my friend dr leon sullivan and i want to thank all of you for the efforts you re making to make america a better place i d like to also say a special word of appreciation to two very important members of my team who are here tonight a former board member and officer of this organization and your evening speaker hazel o leary the distinguished energy secretary when i saw hazel tonight i thought nobody would be disappointed that i m not speaking and also the special assistant to the president for public liaison and the highest ranking african american ever to serve in the white house ms alexis herman i thank her for being here ladies and gentlemen i ran for president in 1991 and 1992 because i was convinced that our country needed to change its direction and because i thought we were coming apart when we ought to be coming together i have always believed that the obligation of a public servant is to try to give every person he or she represents a chance to live up to their god given capacity and the challenge to do what is necessary to give others that chance as well that responsibility takes on different turns and textures depending on the moment in history when you re fortunate enough to serve right now i think all of you know as well or better than i that in order for every person in this country to have a chance to live up to the fullest of their capacity all of us have to be committed to making some pretty fundamental changes in the way we operate our economy and the way we work together as a people and the way we relate to the rest of the world whenever people are called upon to change profoundly we all know that s difficult i mean i have a hard time losing 10 pounds change is not easy you think about the dimensions of the changes we need to make we know it is hard we also know that great democracies normally only make profound changes when it is apparent to all that there is a lot of trouble the problem with that is when it s apparent to all that there s a lot of trouble there are normally a lot of people who are too insecure to want to hear about much change if you think about your own life every one of us has a little balance scale inside sort of between hope and fear between being optimistic and averse to today s changes i know if i get less than five hours sleep i m less optimistic than i am if i get more than six you know we have that every family has it every business organization has it and every nation has it i am plagued by the thought of how many americans are too insecure to feel confident in the future and to grasp the opportunities that are there before us and so i have this duty to the country i believe as president to try to lay down the markers of security that our people need as well as urge them to change and that s why we re working so hard to provide families more security with things like the family medical leave act to provide people more employment security at in a time when you can t have job security any more the average person will change seven times in a lifetime we need a dramatic erratically different way of training and educating our workers to providing health care security without which families can t be told if they may have to be willing to change jobs they think they re going to have to put their kids in the poor house because they don t have any health insurance and to try to deal with issues of personal security ninety thousand people killed in america in the last four years alone in any year more than we ever lost in any given year in the war in vietnam this is the only advanced country in the world where teenagers are better armed than police officers we talk about how terrible it is and refuse to do anything about it but just because we are insecure many of us doesn t mean we can put off until tomorrow the changes we need to make you know whenever you re confronted with a new and challenging set of circumstances that requires you to change you can do one of two things you can sort of hunker down and turn away and hope it will go away or you can face it now hunkering down works about once in 100 most of the time it s a real loser and what i m trying to do as president is to also tell the american people look this government s on your side we re trying to lay down these elements of security for families for safe streets for health care for workers but we have to change the most important fight we re going to have between now and the end of the year on the change front is the fight to ratify the north american free trade agreement and most of the opposition to the agreement comes from people who have deep seated hurts resentment and reservation that are legitimate based on their own experience because the working families of this country are by and large working longer work weeks than they were 20 years ago for the same or lower wages than they were making 10 years ago we all know that and because many people have been in work units where they think they have been treated like so much disposable material where they didn t feel that they were put first or even considered and so they look at more change in the global economy and think oh what a headache but rationally nafta will make everything that they resent better and the failure to pass it will make everything worse wages in mexico will go up faster if we adopt nafta than if we don t and the mexican government will make a commitment to honor their own labor code in ways that are not there now environmental investments in mexico will go up more if we adopt nafta than if we don t requirements in mexico that keep us out of the mexican market requirements to produce products there if we want to sell them there will go down if we adopt it they won t if we don t trade barriers tariffs will go down if we adopt it they won t if we don t we have trade problems in america 50 billion deficit with japan a 19 billion deficit with china a 9 billion deficit with taiwan we have a 6 billion trade surplus with mexico and even though it s not a very wealthy country 70 cents of every dollar they spend on products from overseas beyond their borders they spend on american products so i say to you i very much hope that we ll have a wonderful open trading system i m working hard to get one by the end of the year but neither you nor i know with any certainty what the trading philosophy of asia or europe will be five or 10 years from now we do know democracy is on the move in latin america we do know free markets are on the move in latin america and we do know that they prefer to deal with us not just in mexico but in other countries and the benefits of nafta come not just from new jobs being created out of the relationship between the u s and mexico although we are convinced 200 000 new jobs will be created and on average they ll be better paying jobs just in the next two years the real benefits will come in new jobs when that agreement is the standard by which we set new agreements with chile with venezuela with argentina with all the other countries that want very much to be part of our family so i ask you every one of you here in some way or another is a profound success all of you have had to deal with these kinds of conflicts in your own lives many of you have overcome enormous obstacles to get where you were and not a single one of you is at the top of any heap today because you hunkered down or ran away from an opportunity to embrace change and embrace the future and so i ask you as americans to help us in this next month convince the united states congress that the people who are pleading with them to vote against this treaty have legitimate legitimate fears legitimate hurt legitimate worries but they are imposing on nafta the accumulated resentment for the last 15 years and it doesn t deserve to have it if you look at the facts it will make those problems better not worse you you have credibility with a lot of people in the congress in both parties of different races and backgrounds and if you can convince them that together we re not only going to lay down these security markers that we have to lay down but we must have the courage to change then we can go into 1994 having brought the deficit down with the lowest interest rates in 30 years with business investment going up with housing going up with unemployment going down and with a view toward the future that gives us the confidence we need to make the future what it has to be for our people thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton21 10 95a bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you frank guarini for that wonderful introduction chairman frank stella vice chairman art gajarsa senator domenici always does a good job at these dinners i must say i was delighted this was not one of those annual roasts because otherwise i would have been the object of his wonderful humor i am delighted to be here with you and with all the members of congress tonight the most reverend cacciavillan and the ambassador from the holy see the italian ambassador ambassador biancheri to the foreign minister of italy foreign minister agnelli i m delighted to see you here tonight and i want to say a special word of thanks on behalf of the united states to our ambassador reginald bartholomew for what a fine job he has done to all the board members and friends of the foundation some of whom hundreds indeed of whom have come here tonight from italy i am deeply honored to be with you tonight for the fourth time in a row on the occasion of your 20th dinner and i would like to say one thing to the italians here present beginning with the foreign minister last year i came to this dinner direct from a trip to the middle east and a signing of the peace treaty between israel and jordan in the last year in many ways the world has moved closer to peace in northern ireland and haiti another signal event on the road to peace in the middle east and by the grace of god we will continue the road to peace beginning on october 31st when the leaders of all the countries involved in the conflict in bosnia meet in the united states in ohio if we are able to make the peace and enforce it i want all my fellow americans to know that it would not have been possible but for the strong and firm leadership and involvement of italy and i am very grateful for what they have done to bring about peace in bosnia i know a lot of your honorees last monday i was in los angeles with tony bennett who was the headliner for a wonderful concert put together as a benefit of the center for alcohol and substance abuse at columbia university just a couple of days ago joe montana and his lovely wife and their four wonderful children and some of their friends came to the white house and as their children were examining i think that s the appropriate word examining everything in the oval office i thought to myself now there are real family values and since we re i have to say since this event is held in washington d c and given all that s going on here in washington i think it s quite appropriate that you re honoring on the same night joe montana and john travolta because what s going on here reminds me of a cross between a pro football game and pulp fiction half the time earlier this month i was with cardinal bevilacqua when i had the great honor to welcome his holiness pope john paul ii to newark new jersey it was our third meeting since i ve been president i don t want to commit heresy here and i m not a roman catholic but there are some important parallels between the holy father s career and mine he came from poland to the vatican i came from arkansas to the white house we were both outsiders who got jobs that usually go to insiders and sometime in 1993 or early 94 or so i saw the obvious that he seemed to be doing better than i was and i searched for the reasons why and i realized it was because he had named an italian chief of staff by blind coincidence about 30 minutes after that light dawned in my brain leon panetta walked in for a meeting and that s how he got the job i want to thank all the italian americans who are active in this administration the ambassador mr panetta laura d andrea tyson pat griffin the head of our congressional liaison the director of the fbi louis freeh bob blancato the executive director of our conference on aging and one person i want to mention especially tonight who doesn t get mentioned enough marilyn digiacobbe who did such a wonderful job of coordinating for us during the pope s visit and tonight and so many other times these people have done a lot to help our administration move our country forward and do the things that frank guarini was kind enough to mention i want to thank this organization for the support that you have given us in our common efforts to move this country forward i love to come to this dinner for a lot of reasons there are always a lot of laughs there are always a lot of distinguished people here i always learn a lot but most importantly i think it s important that the president acknowledge that italian americans have given us a model all of us for valuing our families caring for our communities celebrating our unique cultures while respecting those of others italian americans have given a great deal to our nation and they ve shown us the importance of preserving and creating opportunities for generations to come it s these values that i believe should guide all americans without regard to party or position i honestly believe the best days of this country lie before us i believe there is no country in the world better positioned for the 21st century than we are as we move from the cold war thank you i m glad you believe that but we have to realize we re going through a period of more profound change in the way we work and live and relate to the rest of the world than perhaps in any time in a hundred years and we have to be visionary about the future while holding fast to the values that got us where we are and make life worth living we are moving our economy forward we ve tried to address our most serious problems at home we re trying to change the government in a way that befits the 21st century you might be interested to know that your federal government now has 163 000 fewer people working for it than it did the day i was inaugurated i didn t know it until laura tyson told me last week but she went back and checked as a percentage of the civilian work force the federal government is the smallest it has been since 1933 so the era of big government is a big myth in that sense we too have to become more productive we too know we have to do more with less but we also have to together continue to honor our basic values and pursue our common interests we have to give our kids a better future we have to give americans a chance to make the most of their own lives and hold their families together we have to recognize that as the governor of florida said the other day we are in fact a community not a crowd he said a crowd is a group of people that occupy the same piece of land but have no obligations to each other so they just elbow one another until the strongest get ahead and the others fall behind a community is a group of people that recognize that they will go forward or fall back together that they have obligations to one another and that they become better and fuller and richer by fulfilling those obligations you might be interested to know and you might find it difficult to believe but there is moving in america in this big country that moves ever so slowly a new spirit of community and family and personal responsibility in almost every state the crime rate is down in our nation the welfare rolls are down the food stamp rolls are down the poverty rate is down and the teen pregnancy rate is down now for two years in a row our country is beginning to move together and move forward what i want to say to you tonight is that i believe these decisions we are now making in washington about the budget are not really about the budget they must be about our basic values and what we imagine america should look like in the 21st century and because we are changing so rapidly frankly no one can predict anyway what will be popular a month or six months or a year from now we all have to imagine what we want america to look like 10 or 20 or 30 years from now my friend cardinal bernadine once said families give life and giving life means more than procreation it means education and nurturing children to the full status as sons and daughters of god and citizens of their country and their world the united nations calls the family the smallest democracy at the heart of society where will new generations learn about democracy s rights and responsibilities if not at home that is the question that we have to answer what will the home of america be what will our communities be what will our families be and i urge you whether you re a republican or a democrat whether you live here or all the way across the country whatever you do for a living as we debate these great issues imagine what you want america to look like for your children and your grandchildren it s changing so fast you can t predict how it s going to look in a month or six months in a year that is the context in which i hope this debate over the budget will play itself out we all want a strong economy we all want a strong america to do it we have to have strong individuals strong families and strong communities i believe that the budget debate is not about balancing the budget everybody s for that i couldn t believe what had happened to the debt when i came here and we ve taken the deficit from 290 billion a year down to 160 billion in just three years i m proud of that i think it s important and it matters and every one of you no matter what your party or political philosophy should want us to finish that job we should not leave this crushing burden of debt on our children we should not take money away that is needed in our private sector to create jobs and invest and grow america and make us stronger everybody should be for it but how we do it how we do it is a function of what we imagine our common responsibilities to be i believe we have to do it in a way that permits us to invest in education and invest in technology and invest in research so that we can grow the economy and grow strong individuals i believe we have to do it in a way that permits us to preserve the fundamental health care system that enables us to honor our responsibilities to our parents to the disabled to poor children i believe we have to do it in a way that enables us to protect our natural environment and to recognize that there is a certain elemental sense of fairness that americans always have a certain compass that always guides us and if we will hue to that and do what is common sensical and consistent with our basic values we will be fine i have done my best and will continue to do my best to move beyond traditional partisan politics at this very untraditional time to work with the united states congress to achieve a balanced budget in which all americans can win but i have to say and i want you to know i do not believe any major american company on the verge of the 21st century would cut its investment in education or research or technology and i don t think we should either i do not believe any family would willingly say that its poorest elderly members should be forced to pay for health care they cannot afford or its most vulnerable children should be put at risk of losing that health care and i don t think we should either i do not believe we should hamper our common responsibility to protect the environment of the united states or to work with other nations to secure the environment of the planet i do not believe anybody would knowingly do that and i don t think we should either i hope very much that we will see a coming together in this process everybody knows that the president under our constitution has a veto and has to be prepared to use it everybody knows what the rules are in congress they re going to do what they re going to do and if i have to use my veto pen well i ll do that but in the end what we need to do is to come together to build a stronger america good for our children good for our families good for our communities you know the lesson i will just say this and i want you to reflect on it the ultimate lesson of what i saw in the faces of the thousands and thousands and thousands of african american men who came here last week to march was people in a total spirit of reconciliation and personal atonement saying yes i do intend to take more responsibility for myself for my family and for my community but i would like it very much if i do that but the other message was i would like it very much if i do that if you would reach out and join hands with me and help us solve our common problems and move our country forward together that s why i said at the university of texas something that i think italian americans especially who came here at a time when immigrants from italy and ireland were discriminated against can identify with this we still have too many people in america passing each other like ships in the night i saw the other day an old book i have by will rogers he said for example he said the congress is someplace where somebody gets up and talks real loud no one listens and then everybody says they disagree well that s not just in congress and it s not just there that happens in america and it happens among people of different racial and ethnic groups and so i leave you with this challenge i think we need each of us as americans not only to value our own ethnic solidarity and our shared values but to share them with other people we need to find somebody who is different from us and tell them what we really thing for a change even if it hurts and then we need to have the discipline to listen to what they say and we need to work slowly to bridge these gaps in the way we view reality that have become so present and prevalent in our country i am telling you if you look at the facts this country is better positioned for the 21st century than any country on earth why because we re the most ethnically diverse with the most flexible economy with all these resources that god has given us and that our forebears have developed we are well positioned we have to learn how to use to make our diversity as an asset instead of letting it tear us apart we have to relish in our diversity you re happy to be italian here but you re also proud to be americans we want everybody in america to feel that way and we want everybody to feel that way about other groups as well and we know if we do that we ll be all right so i say to you i want you to think about this every time a decision is called upon to be made in this nation s capital or in your community ask yourself what s it going to look like in 20 years what kind of america do i want my grandchildren to grow up in will we give people the right and the ability to make the most of their own lives will we help families to become stronger will we be more of a community and less of a crowd if the answer is yes that s what we ought to do and if we do it you will be very proud of the america you leave to your children and your grandchildren worthy of your italian american heritage thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton21 10 95b bill_clinton thank you very much president havel president kovac governor branstad senator harkin congressman leach mayor serboucek mr schaeffer mr hruska ambassador albright ladies and gentlemen if we have not demonstrated anything else about the czech and the slovak heritage of iowa we have certainly shown to these two presidents that you are a hearty people i thank the czech plus band for playing today i thought they did a marvelous job and we thank them i am proud to stand here with these two presidents each a pioneer and a patriot each leading his nation through an epic transformation each representing the promise of europe s future and their presence today reflects our growing partnership as well as the deep roots of their people in the soil of iowa i will never forget visiting prague in january of 1994 the first time i had been there in 24 years and walking across the magnificent charles bridge with president havel i remembered then all the young people i had met there a quarter century before and how desperately then they had longed for the freedom they now enjoy in his devotion to democracy and through his courage and sacrifice vaclav havel helped to make the dreams of those young people a reality and the world is in his debt president kovac stands with us as a leader of a newly independent nation with a proud heritage and a hopeful future mr president we know your job has been and continues to be difficult and the united states supports your personal strong commitment to openness and reform as slovakia takes its place within the family of democratic nations and we thank you for your leadership here in america s heartland the heart of europe beats loud and clear czech immigrants first came to cedar rapids in the middle of the 19th century soon a little bohemia had blossomed in the city where czech culture flourished in journalism music and drama today that proud heritage is as vibrant as ever one in five residents of cedar rapids is of czech descent including your mayor there are eight major czech american organizations in this city and through the czech school american children learn the language and traditions of their ancestors an ocean away just a few steps from here the shops of czech village are filled with authentic crafts and home cooking i think it s fitting that in this celebration of american diversity we have a city which produces both quaker oats and kolachis in iowa and beyond americans of czech and slovak descent have added richness and texture to our american quilt the values they like so many other immigrants brought from their homelands love of family devotion to community taking responsibility and working hard these values flourished in america and helped america to flourish in the mid 19th century thousands of czech settlers formed america s new frontiers an experience immortalized in willa cather s novel my antonia slovak immigrants brought their skill and strength to the urban northeast and the midwest where they helped to build heavy industry and oil and steel and coal the children and grandchildren of these early pioneers as well as more recent arrivals have been generous with their gifts to america filmmakers like milos forman have challenged our imagination students of the humanities have been enlightened by jaroslav pelikan and stargazers stand in awe of captain eugene cernan the last human being to leave his footprints on the moon from city hall to capitol hill individuals like congressman peter veselovsky of indiana former congressman charles vannick of ohio and former senator roman hruska of nebraska have served our country with distinction our dynamic ambassador to the united nations madeleine albright who is here with me today was born in prague and as i have told president havel several times the czech republic is the only nation in the world that has two ambassadors at the united nations the national czech and slovak museum and library we are privileged to dedicate here today is a wonderful tribute to two cultures and two peoples and to the contributions czech and slovak immigrants and their descendants have made and continue to make to our great nation in keeping with tradition a dozen eggs have been added to the mortar of the cornerstone guaranteeing that the museum will serve the public as long and proudly as the charles bridge in prague to all who have played a part in creating this great place congratulations on your marvelous achievement my fellow americans i ask you to take just one more minute to reflect on what our history and this moment mean for us today and in our tomorrows we celebrate a special corner of our rich and varied mosaic of race and ethnicity and culture and tradition that is america we are many different peoples who all cherish faith and family work and community and country we strive to live lives that are free and honest and responsible we know we have to build our foundation even in all of our differences on unity not division on peace not hatred and on a common vision for a better tomorrow we know that our motto e pluribus unum is more than a motto it s a national commitment as we deal with all the remarkable changes that are moving us from the cold war to the global village from the industrial to the information and technology age we have to remember that we cannot keep the american dream alive here at home unless we continue to make common cause with people like president havel and president kovac unless we continue to stand for freedom and democracy and peace around the world the united states has made a real contribution to the march of freedom democracy and peace in accelerating the dismantling of our nuclear weapons so that now for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there s not a single nuclear missile pointed at a single american citizen we are working with people all around the world to combat the dangers of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of destruction we have tried to be a force for peace and freedom from the middle east to northern ireland to haiti and most recently in bosnia where we are hoping and praying that the peace talks will succeed and that the cease fire will turn into a genuine peace agreement all of that of course especially affects the efforts of these two presidents to secure their own people and their future the czech republic slovakia other nations in central europe they are working hard to build the democracy and foster the prosperity that we sometimes take for granted they ve made an awful lot of progress in the face of real challenges and we have to continue to stand by them by opening the door to new nato members by supporting their integration into the other institutions of europe by improving access to our own markets and enabling them to move from aid to trade the czech and the slovak people who came to the united states helped us to build our country it s time for us to return the favor more and more americans are investing in becoming economic partners there was 300 million worth of economic transaction with the czech republic and about 100 million with slovakia last year with much more in the pipeline and i have to say a lot of that was due to the extraordinary personal efforts of one distinguished citizen of iowa the head of the overseas private investment corporation ruth harkin who is here with us today and i thank her for her efforts making these countries economically strong and helping them to be free and to stay free is the best way to ensure that american soldiers never again have to shed their blood on europe s soil it s also good business for us as you well know cedar rapids is the largest exporting city per capita in the entire united states foreign trade creates jobs here but we have to do this because it s also the right thing to do for 45 years we challenged the people of these nations to cast off the yoke of communism they have done it and we dare not abandon them now we have an obligation to work together so that all our people can enjoy the rewards of freedom and prosperity in the 21st century i believe the citizens of cedar rapids understand that those of you of central european descent have to know it and feel it in your bones but all of us as americans should feel it in our hearts for we believe the american dream is not for americans only it is for every hardworking man and woman who seeks to build a brighter future every boy or girl who studies hard and wants to learn and live up to their dreams every community trying to clean its streets of crime and pollution and build a better future for all the people who live there every nation committed to peace and progress that dream belongs to every citizen of the world who shares our values and will work to support them president havel president kovac my fellow americans as we celebrate the opening of this marvelous museum a monument to those who had faith in the american dream and who struggled to make it come true for themselves and their children let us resolve to work together for hope and opportunity for all who are reaching for their dreams thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton21 10 99a bill_clinton thank you i will be brief because i want to spend most of our time in a conversation but i would like to say a few things first i want to thank senator kerry for once again opening his home i was here not very long ago with at least some of you who are here i want to thank him for his genuine commitment to modernizing our party and to making it an instrument of progress and an instrument for bringing our country together and i m very grateful for the truly exceptional effort he s made on the way in joe andrew our dnc chair said that john kerry had done more personally than any other member of the congress to try to help modernize and strengthen our party in the last few months particularly so i thank you for that and i thank teresa in her absence and i think she did the right thing to fulfill her responsibility we always say we re for opportunity and responsibility and she s had a fair share of one and discharged the lion s share of another and we appreciate that i want to thank governor romer and beth dozoretz and all of the other people who are here from the democratic party and all of you let me just say i want to tell you a story a lot of you know that hillary and i because of her not me it was her idea have had a series of evenings at the white house called millennium evenings this year which we have primarily disseminated to the public at large through the internet it s been covered by c span and occasionally by cnn and obviously by print reporters who come in but the primary means of connecting to these millennium evenings has been through the internet and at the end of whatever we do we allow people to not only in the audience there are always 200 300 people in the audience we allow people to send us questions from all over the world and it s been a fascinating thing we started off with a history of the united states and where we are now compared to the roots of our founders in a lecture by bernard bailyn the distinguished professor at harvard we ve had a poetry night with the last three poet laureates of our country and a lot of inner city kids in washington and all kinds of people in between reading their poems and talking about poetry the great wynton marsalis came and played and lectured on the history of jazz as a unique american art form in the 20th century steven hawking came all the way from cambridge and talked about black holes and undiscovered galaxies of the 21st century and what it will mean for the nature and our understanding of time and we ve had eight of these evenings it s been amazing elie wiesel talked about the price of indifference in the 20th century and how we couldn t have it in the 21st last week we had a man named lander from harvard who s an expert in genomics and a man named cerf from mci that had something to do with the establishment of the internet the architect that all of you know and what they were talking about was the intersection of genomics and the revolution in computer technology and the scientist the genomics guy said that it would really not have been possible first to decode the human gene and then to figure out anything useful to do with the decoding were it not for the computer and for digital technology generally and he said he was talking about how one of the things we ve been trying to do in medical research for example is to deal with spinal cord injuries and last year for the very first time we spent a lot of money and christopher reeve since he was injured has been very instrumental in getting higher levels of research put into this issue and last year for the first time we succeeded in getting nerves transferred from the body of a laboratory animal a rat to the animal s spine which had been severed and the animal actually took the transplant and had movement in its lower limbs the first time it had ever been done in any living organism that we know of with a spinal cord that had been severed so what this guy said he said he believes that this whole effort will be overtaken by the capacity of us to use a digital device that can be inserted into spines that will replicate all nerve movements and take the right signals and give them and he said he offered as exhibit a as sort of prelude to that his wife mr cerf s wife who had been profoundly deaf for 50 years totally beyond the reach of hearing aids and a small digital device was inserted deep in her ears and she heard for the first time in 50 years and she got up and talked about that then the genomics guy we started talking about what all this meant for the breakdown of the gene then we got into what does genetics tell us about society and he made the following point that in spite of the fact that you re talking about 100 000 genes and ultimately billions of permutations that all human beings are 99 9 percent the same genetically and then against the background of all the racial and ethnic conflicts in the world today he made what i thought was a rather stunning statement that i didn t know at least maybe a lot of you do know this he said if you take any substantial group of people like if you take say we had a group of people from india 100 indians and then let s say we had 100 chinese and let s say we had 100 people from nigeria and let s say we had 100 people from france he said that the genetic differences of individuals within the group would be greater than the genetic differences as a whole of the french and the indians and the chinese and the nigerians and therefore there was no rational basis which we all knew anyway but it was nice to have it confirmed scientifically that there was no rational basis for this human emotion of fear of the other well what s all this got to do with technology what i m interested in everything i can do while my time of service is here before it s over in maximizing the ability of our country to use technology for economic empowerment for educational empowerment for political empowerment and to do it in a way that promotes unity not division and that s what i would like to talk about and i think the democratic party is the principal engine in our time of economic empowerment political empowerment educational empowerment and certainly as compared with all the alternatives the major force for the cohesion and unity of our society as we move forward so that s why i m glad all of you are here i think this is a huge issue eric and i had some talks about how we could close the digital divide and of course we ve worked very hard on it with the vice president s leadership to make sure by the time we get through with our millennium celebration we ll have all of our classrooms hooked up to the internet but if you think about what it might mean economically for poor people in america if internet access were as dense as telephone access in america i think it would have a very positive economic impact i believe cell phones and computers if properly distributed can save 30 years of educational and economic development in a lot of the poorest countries in this world and can permit an economic development that is far less damaging to the environment and i believe that technology properly used can not only give people a more interactive and personal engagement in the political process but can in the process dramatically reduce the sense of cynicism and alienation a sense that one person doesn t matter and that none of this really amounts to much so my mind is always thinking about this but everyone knows that i m quite technologically challenged so i need people like you to help me and tell me what to do and how to do it so that s why i m here that s why i m glad you re here and i m very grateful for you presence and your commitment thank you very much dem wjclinton21 10 99b bill_clinton thank you thank you is this a rowdy crowd or what you know i m not used to showing up and being the straight man this is a very emotional moment for me when i was in the 10th grade ted kennedy was in the senate and when i retire from two terms as president ted kennedy will be in the senate and i resent it i don t know what patrick s doing here he s supposed to be raising money for house members you may have cost us four seats tonight with all this money going here actually he got an excused absence from master gephardt to come here tonight and i m grateful let me say a couple of words seriously i am genuinely honored to be here i love edward kennedy and i am something of a student of the history of our country i just one of our guests tonight gave me a biography of chester arthur because i don t own one i ve got this great i ve read all about all of our presidents studied the history of the united states congress i do believe that any fair reading of that history would say that edward kennedy was one of the four or five most productive ablest greatest united states senators that ever served this great republic of ours and i am grateful for this family s commitment to public service there is no question i was a governor for 12 years and i care a lot about these issues that the states deal with there s no question that kathleen has done more with the job of lieutenant governor than any person in her position in the united states of america and that maryland was the first state thanks to her to make community service a part of the requirement of being a student in the public schools and that is very very important and you know i said i was in the 10th grade when ted went to the senate patrick looks like he s in the 10th grade and yet here he is you know he s been here three and a half months or something in the congress and he s already the head of the campaign committee so i think that there is no limit to what he can and will do in the congress and you already heard him say he s trying to recruit one of his brothers i mean one of kathleen s brothers to run for the congress in illinois so we are grateful for the service of this senator and this family and you know vicki is my neighbor from louisiana so they ve shown a certain affinity for southerners i want you to know something else too that i m grateful for in january of 1992 jackie came to a fundraiser for me when i was running fifth in new hampshire and reached out to my wife and to my daughter in ways that i will never forget one month after her son had also come to an event for me when i think i was running sixth in new hampshire so we ve had this marvelous friendship sargent shriver was yesterday with me when we celebrated the fifth anniversary of americorps we ve had 150 000 young people in five years serve their country in citizen service earned some money to go to college we ve done a lot of things together but the reason that you re here and the reason you ought to be here is that a lot of big decisions are going to be made in the next few years and it ll make a big difference if ted kennedy is in the senate we also have a genuine legitimate chance to be in the congressional majority again and that s very important but i said in 92 if people would vote for me i would try to reinstitute the basic values of opportunity responsibility and community i said that we would try some new ideas that would transform our country i said in 96 if you ll re elect me i ll try to build this country a bridge to the 21st century i might have said in starker terms that this country was in tough shape in 92 and drifting and divided a lot of people have forgotten that and i feel that we have sort of turned around just like a big ship in the middle of the ocean and we re steaming in the right direction any statistic i could quote we have the longest peacetime expansion in history 19 5 million new jobs the highest homeownership ever and just listen when people ask you why they ought to be for the democrats we have the lowest unemployment in 29 years the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest poverty rate in 20 years the lowest crime rate in 26 years the lowest murder rate in 31 years the first back to back surpluses in 42 years all with a government that is the smallest it s been since john kennedy was president in 1962 37 years ago and ted kennedy was at the center of every decision that was made that made that possible and you should be proud of that now next time you meet somebody that says they re going to vote for a republican for the congress or the white house you give them those statistics and ask them what their answer is but what i want to tell you is we can build that bridge but the people of this country are going to make some profound decisions and there are profound differences are we really going to do what the republicans want and give all the non social security surplus away in a tax cut if they get the white house and congress we will are we going to meet the challenge of the aging of america the number of people over 65 is going to double in 30 years i hope to live to be one of them we ll have two people working for every one person drawing social security we have a chance and an obligation to save social security to reform medicare to restore some of the cuts we put in that were excessive two years ago to add a prescription drug benefit and to take care of the elderly of this country which all of the young people should favor because it means they won t have to do it and they ll have the money to raise our grandchildren it s a big issue are we going to take seriously our responsibility to the largest and most diverse group of students in our history and modernize their schools and connect their classrooms to the internet and give them teachers so they ll have small classes with well trained teachers in the early grades and give them the after school and the summer school programs they need or are we going to squander that opportunity are we going to do something finally for the people and places that have been left behind in this recovery yes we ve got the lowest poverty rate in 20 years that s the good news the bad news is that there s still about 20 percent of our kids in poverty and a higher percentage of minority children and we have a chance to bring the benefits of enterprise to people who want to work in places left behind are we going to do it or walk away from it and i hope to persuade congress that well we can do all this and still over the next 15 years pay down our debt until we re debt free for the first time since 1835 and i think another one of your nephews joe kennedy used to talk about this when he was in congress the liberal party ought to be for doing that because it means lower interest rates more jobs more investment higher incomes lower costs for home loans for student loans for car loans and for credit cards it means average people will live better and i think we ought to do it since we can meet our other responsibilities as well these are just some of the big opportunities that are out there that we re for and there are big differences on whether we ought to have a patients bill of rights big differences on whether we ought to continue to have responsible measures to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and kids we are six months past that columbine massacre and we still haven t acted to close the gun show loophole and the same crowd that s blocking it said when we passed the brady bill in 1993 that the crooks don t get their guns at gun shops they get them at gun shows and flea markets you won t stop anybody with the brady bill well 400 000 stops later they have quit making that argument but now they don t want us to do a background check where they said the crooks were buying the guns and let me tell you something else that you ought to say i want people to use this this is not just a matter of crime the accidental death rate of children from guns in the united states is nine times higher than the combined death rate of the next 25 biggest industrial countries in the world let me say that again nine times higher than the next 25 industrial countries combined together so we ve still got a lot of work to do and i guess what i want to tell you is i m grateful that i had a chance to serve i m not running for anything i m here i kind of wish i were actually but i m not and i m here i m here because i care about my country i care about my daughter s world i care about the grandchildren i hope to have someday and we turned this country around in my lifetime we have never had a chance like this when president kennedy and president johnson served we had a good economy but they had to deal with the crisis of civil rights and the problems of the cold war we have an opportunity not just to eliminate legal discrimination which we ought to continue to do with the employment non discrimination act and all of that but we have an opportunity to create the world of our dreams that s why i was upset about the comprehensive test ban treaty and i m mad that we re not paying our u n dues and why i think we ought to pay off the debt of the world s poorest countries because we can create the world of our dreams at home and beyond our borders and there is nobody better qualified to be the conscience and the heart and the tactical leader of that struggle than senator kennedy nobody this is a big deal so i m telling you i want you to feel this i am grateful for having had the chance to serve i am grateful that all these numbers i can reel off and they sound so good but the truth is nobody thinks we have given everyone opportunity no one thinks we have really built one america no one believes this country is as safe as it can be no one believes we ve met all our obligations to the environment no one believes that we have met our obligations or seized our opportunities in the world toward which we re moving so beyond all the issue you just have to keep this simple idea in mind this country is in good shape and it is moving in the right direction and for the only time in my lifetime as a people we have a chance to shape the future of our dreams it will only happen if we elect the right dreamers thank you for being here dem wjclinton21 11 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you prime minister thank you premier carr mr lord mayor mrs howard mrs carr andrew hoy thank you very much for reminding us how you defeated us in atlanta and thank you for what you said about the olympics premier you invited me to come back in the year 2000 to the olympics i have to make full disclosure this morning when i woke up the very first thing hillary said to me was now in 2000 i think you ought to make me your official representative to the olympics in sydney which means i suppose i ll have to come back as her valet if i wish to come but i ve had such a good time here i d like to come back in any capacity i thank you all very much for your hospitality it s a great privilege for me to stand here in sydney harbor to be in these beautiful botanical gardens where i had the privilege this morning to go on my morning run right by this site to see the magnificent opera house where i had the chance to tour on an impromptu basis this morning a wonderful and surprised guard even took me up to the organ and i virtually got to count all 10 500 pipes this is a magnificent place i m also glad to be here in the shadow of harbor bridge if any of you followed our campaign at all you know i m kind of into bridges this year and i think that that s a bridge that will take you to the 21st century in good shape as the prime minister and the premier have said americans have visited sydney and felt welcome for a long time you might be interested to know that almost exactly 100 years ago our great american writer mark twain came to australia now mark twain is famous for many things his great books connecticut yankee in king arthur s court tom sawyer huckleberry finn all those books but those of us in public life in america appreciate him because he was always puncturing the pompous and always reminding people that they should have a very sort of philosophical and good humored attitude about their troubles in life and we got to talking about mark twain last night in this very harbor and i told the prime minister i said prime minister you re riding high now but the first time you get in trouble remember what mark twain said about dogs mark twain said every dog should have a few fleas keep them from worrying so much about being a dog now whenever i complain at home that s what my staff tells me just once i d like to be a flea instead of a dog though in this business anyway mark twain came here almost 100 years ago and i found out something that i did not know until we decided to make this trip like all of us he was struck by what he said was the lavish hospitality of sydney s people he liked the warmth of sydney in every way but he said that sydney reminded him more than any other place of one particular town in america which was exactly as far north of the equator as sydney is south of it my hometown little rock arkansas interesting except sydney got the better of the comparison because while he said they were a lot alike and the people were very friendly sydney was better because it didn t have little rock s cold winters he wrote you could cut up an arkansas winter into a hundred sydney winters and still have enough left for arkansas and all the poor well that s another reason for me to come back in sydney s winter to see if it s true this is a remarkable community and a remarkable nation in this new global culture that we re all experiencing australia s contribution has been far out of proportion to its population in modern art in learning in music in theater in opera in the cinema the novels of patrick white thomas keneally david malouf the paintings of sidney nolan russell drysdale utopia artists the films of baz luhrmann peter weir and so many others and according to the young people in my group bands like midnight oil and silver chair dame joan sutherland and great jazz musicians i want to thank you prime minister for making it possible for me to hear james morrison and grace knight yesterday they were magnificent thank you very much i m glad to stand here today with andrew hoy who did lead your remarkable team to its remarkable showing in the centennial olympics in atlanta his own gold medal performance repeating his victory in barcelona were one of the things that made the games such a great success and i am very pleased that at the dawn of our new century the olympic torch will arrive here in sydney we know the olympics will be an enormous success for sydney just as they were for atlanta the olympics have captured the imagination and the heart of people everywhere i have thought a lot about why maybe because we all love athletics and maybe because we all love competition but i think there s more to it than that and there s something i hope you will be able to play upon here in sydney because you re perfectly positioned to do it i think people yearn for the olympics today because they work pretty much the way we think the world should work there are rules and everybody follows them and everybody has a chance to play without regard to their race or gender or where they start out in life and people are valued based on their performance and their effort even those who do not win medals and most of the people who will come to sydney won t come close to winning a medal but everybody gets a chance to do his or her best to reach down deep inside and everybody s better off for having tried unlike so many other human endeavors including the field of politics no one wins by tripping his or her opponent up in the competition or standing before a microphone and bad mouthing the other side you only win by playing by the rules and doing well and i think we think the world should work more that way when the world comes to sydney for the olympics either literally or over the electronic media they ll have a chance to see a city and a nation struggling to meet that ideal we have a chance on the verge of this new century to make it possible for more people than ever in human history to live out their dreams and to live up to their god given potential this city has people who traced their origins to more than 140 different nations there are only 197 different national groups represented in the olympics in our largest county los angeles county we have people from over 150 of those groups we re becoming an increasingly interconnected world australia has a higher percentage of immigrants who came here and built decent lives and strengthened your country through hard work than almost any other country on earth when you drive down the streets of sydney tonight and you look at all these different people making a contribution to your country think with sadness but prayerful hope about all the people who live around the world who are still being persecuted because they are different from their neighbors because they have different religious views or they re from different racial or ethnic or tribal groups think of the terrible spectacle we have seen in africa just in the last few days hundreds of thousands of refugees trooping back and forth looking for a safe place to spend the night parents losing their children along the way just because they re in different tribes and to those of us of untrained eyes who have never been there they look the same as those who carry guns and would oppress them think of what it s like in the holy land for all of us who are either jewish or muslim or christians where people still believe they cannot live with one another because they worship only one god but in a different way think of what it is like in bosnia where there is literally biologically no difference between the serbs the croats the muslims where they belong to different religious groups by accident of political history where people killed each other s children with abandon after having lived for decades in peace but there is a lot of evidence that we can all do better than that and when the world comes to sydney they will see that so think about that think about how every day in every way when you bring in people who are those like me who trace their roots to england or ireland or scotland to various asian countries or south asia or latin america or the middle east or africa every day you do that when the world is looking at you you offer a rebuke to all those who would take away the lives and the futures and the fortunes of the children of this world because they are different from them we somehow must find a way to let our children define themselves in terms of who they are not who they are not in terms of what they believe not what someone else believes in terms of what is good inside them and what can be developed into something really beautiful instead of what can be developed in terms of hatred so they can know that they re better than somebody else who s different from them that is the single great challenge that is keeping us from making the 21st century the era of greatest possibility in human history and i cannot think of a better place in the entire world a more shining example of how people can come together as one nation and one community than sydney australia i m so grateful that you ll be here for the olympics in 2000 i want you to know that the world is looking to you and i also want you to know that america will keep looking to you the prime minister mentioned our comradeship in world war i the first time our soldiers ever fought together the australians had been in combat for more than three years when america s troops first went to france and one of them asked the americans are you going to win the war for us the american answered well i hope we ll fight like the australians ever since then the spirit of australia has been renowned in america we respect it and we love working with you again let me say as i did in canberra yesterday the united states and people all over the world are especially in your debt for your determination to end nuclear explosions on earth and your leadership in helping us to complete the comprehensive test ban treaty we are in your debt for setting a standard of caring about people beyond your shores time and again you have sent peacekeepers into harm s way to end bloodshed rwanda haiti somalia cambodia almost two thirds of all the united nations peacekeeping missions have had australian troops whenever the troubled places of the earth call out australia has always been there to help throughout the asia pacific region and the entire world you are seen as a beacon of strength and freedom and democracy today when for the first time in history more than half the world s people actually are ruled by governments of their own choosing we know it is the powerful example of australia and other freedom loving people that made it possible today more people will live lives of dignity and peace because of the work that australia has done in the historic struggle for freedom so let me say again i have had a wonderful time here i have enjoyed it immensely i am about to go try to survive a golf game with your most famous golfer but more than anything else on behalf of all the american people i want to thank you for what you have done and been for the united states and the world together and i want to wish you well as we work throughout this 21st century together and i want to ask you to remember again when the olympics comes here if you can live by the rules which govern the olympics and show that light to the world it will stand as a beacon of hope for all that everyone who lives on the face of the earth can become in this great new century and that can be the enduring legacy of sydney in the year 2000 thank you god bless you god bless australia and the united states dem wjclinton21 11 97 bill_clinton thank you very much after secretary shalala made you all laugh she reminded me that she has to go catch a plane she s going on a trip to asia and she s winding up in butung she said you know some people think butung is the most beautiful place in the world and the king is there and he s got four wives and they re all sisters and she said i wonder if he d like four and a half i thought the private joke was even better than the public one so i thought i d give credit let me first of all thank the vice president and his reinventing government staff for the work that they have done on the fda and secretary shalala and all the people at hhs and sally katzen and the people at omb and folks in the white house the industry leaders who are here but let me especially thank the members of congress all those who are here and at least two who are not congressman bliley and congressman dingell for the work that this really astonishing work it was a two year process this bill passed by a voice vote in both houses and yet it is a very significant overhaul in the work of the food and drug administration it also it seems to me is symbolic of what we should be doing as a country the fda which was created under theodore roosevelt as the vice president said is really i think one of the signal achievements of the progressive era why was it necessary because more and more people were moving from the farm to the city and making a living in factories and instead of consuming the food that they raised on their own farms they had to go down and buy the food from somebody else and more and more people had access to doctors and doctors had access to medicine that was being discovered that they couldn t know everything about so somebody needed to say hey this medicine is okay we ve tested it it s okay you can give it to your patients in iowa or oregon or arizona or alabama and so a whole new world of possibility opened when people could move from farm to factory and when people could have access to a doctor when they couldn t see one before but there needed to be someone who said here s the public interest in trying to make sure the food is safe and the drugs are safe and they do what they re supposed to do and it s worked stunningly well really throughout the entire industrial era of the 20th century our country has continued to see its life expectancy increase and its economy grow and diversify but when i was out there the vice president is right i brought this up in our transition back in 92 because when i went across the country in 1992 everywhere i went people were complaining on the one hand that they were beginning to be concerned about some food safety issues and on the other hand that the health and welfare of the american people was actually being undermined by a system in the fda that at least the people who were involved in it thought was too slow and somewhat arbitrary and not giving the american people the drug approvals and the medical device approvals in a timely fashion so we set to work on it and we found there was an enormous amount of interest in the congress the vice president s right the fda deserves i think a great deal of credit for the internal changes that have been made that have been recognized and particularly on the drug approvals the speed of them but this legislation i think is very very important and again i say it is also symbolic of a larger mission we should be about we re maintaining and redefining the public interest at a time when there are new challenges to food safety which we ve tried to meet partly in the department of agriculture and partly with some important bipartisan legislation the congress passed about a year ago and when we have new possibilities in both medicine and medical devices and what we want to do is get those to people as quickly as possible and still protect the public interest and we know now we have new options for that because of the change again in the underlying nature of the society moving from the industrial age to a technology computer information dominated age in which we have a lot more opportunities to do things that will speed this approval process and on the other hand in the food area we know because we ve now gone from seeing people get their food from their neighbors who were farmers while they lived in the cities that food has become more and more and more an international commodity and we have an even higher responsibility not only through the fda but generally through the government to secure the safety of our food supply so i think the changes we are making are very important not only on their own merits but because what you have done is a model for what america has to do in area after area after area clearly define the public interest and then change they way we pursue it consistent with the tools and the responsibilities and the opportunities available in this time and all of you should be very very proud of that let me say that as everybody knows this bill is the product of three years of hard work that involves all the people i have already mentioned i just think it s worth pointing out that at the beginning of the process the sides stood worlds apart i think that is an understatement and the fact that there was a process by which you could think through differences and build a true consensus that is bipartisan and involves all the stakeholders resulting in a bill if somebody told me two years ago two years from now you ll be standing over at the old oeob and you ll be about to sign a bill that passed the congress by a voice vote and it will have more than two words in it so it won t be an empty bill it will in fact be a sweeping reform of fda i would have taken odds against that and i think you should all be very very proud of yourselves let me just highlight a few of the bill s provisions first we continue working with the business community to get more drugs approved faster we ve reauthorized the prescription drug user fee act for five more years it ensures that the cost of reviewing and approving drugs is shared between industry and government since 1992 these additional revenues have helped fda hire some 600 more employees cutting drug approval time in half already and we want to do better second the bill writes into law many of the reinventing government measures introduced by fda a few years ago reducing the requirements and simplifying the review process for new drugs and medical devices without compromising safety and i congratulate the vice president for all his work particularly on this effort third we will offer new hope to critically ill americans by expanding access to drugs and therapies whose fda approvals are still pending anybody who s ever had a family in this situation knows what an important part of the legislation this is we know that for many patients experimental treatments represent their best perhaps their only chance for recovery that s why this bill writes into law current fda policies that allow doctors and patients to use new drugs before they are formally approved already thousands of aids cancer and alzheimer patients have found new hope even new life with these experimental therapies we will also expand the database on clinical trials of drugs that fight serious illnesses so that patients can keep track of their progress it s been said that while the century we are about to leave has been an age of physics the 21st century will be an age of biology perhaps yielding cures to diseases we thought incurable we are already witnessing the medical possibilities of the future as the vice president said this fall alone the fda has approved new drugs and treatments for everything from hiv to breast cancer cardiovascular disease to cystic fibrosis parkinson s to epilepsy the fda has served america well today with a bill i m about to sign into law we can ensure that it will serve america well into the 21 century and i hope serve as a model again for how we can maintain our goals of pursuing the public interest and adjust our means to the possibilities and the challenges of a dramatically new era the fda has always set the gold standard for consumer safety today it wins a gold medal for leading the way into the future and thank you all i d like to ask the congressmen now to join me up here so we can sing the bill thank you dem wjclinton21 12 98 bill_clinton thank you good afternoon i m delighted to be here delighted to see all of you i want to thank robert egger and everybody here at the d c central kitchen for the magnificent job they do thank you harris wofford and all the wonderful americorps volunteers thank you secretary glickman thank you tony hall for a lifetime of commitment to the cause embodied by this endeavor here i would like to thank jill muller who worked with us the young americorps volunteer i d like to thank donna simmons the trainee who worked with us who is very happy about the work she s doing she has six children at home getting ready to celebrate christmas and this christmas and the christmases in the future i think will be brighter because of the work that has been done here i want to thank susan calahan for not only training donna but for training hillary and me to mass produce lasagna today we got i think jill said we got a reasonably good evaluation we finished our task we made enough lasagna for 500 people to eat in a timely and i hope edible fashion but we enjoyed it very very much there is another person who is not here i d like to acknowledge who has been a great supporter of these causes and that s congresswoman eleanor holmes norton she is elsewhere in the city today hosting an event for needy children i would like the members of the press and through them the public who are not here to know that since this remarkable organization began on january 20 1989 d c central kitchen has taken 3 5 million pounds of surplus donated food turned them into 5 5 million meals for men in homeless shelters women in battered women s shelters children in after school and child care programs in the process d c central kitchen has provided job skills and opportunities in training for a couple hundred americans who needed it with a very very high percentage of people getting jobs and keeping them after six months you have found here an incredible i think an incredible social recipe to combine things that others may be working on but have never been quite put together in this same way every day as much as we hate to admit it there are people in america who get up hungry and who go to bed hungry yet every day 25 percent of our food supply 25 percent is wasted from slightly bruised fruit at wholesale markets to unsold trays of lasagna at restaurants while the food is going to waste so are the abilities of millions of americans who want to work but can t because they don t have skills for which there is a demand in today s economy the number of food service jobs in our country is large and growing food service wages are rising at twice the rate of inflation today therefore the secret recipe is to take the wasted food and the wasted capacity train people put the food there and solve the problem it is a remarkable achievement and as has already been said the private sector has made major contributions to this endeavor i d like to just acknowledge if i might the fact that and this is something that i think is maybe most important of all d c central kitchen has become a real model for others and now there are similar efforts in 11 cities from chicago to louisville with 14 more slated to start by this time next year so i think that is the ultimate test of your success when people copy you that is the sincerest form of flattery i think and i know you re proud of that in 1996 i signed the bill emerson good samaritan food donation act to try to have government do more to help it gives limited liability protection to companies that donate food and people like those who work here to process and redistribute the food secretary glickman had a lot to do with the passage of that law and i thank him i d also like to thank the departments of housing and urban development and labor for providing food training and other resources i know the labor department supports the training program here so the government can be a good partner and finally as a matter of personal pride i want to say again i thank the americorps members when we started americorps i thought it would catch on but to be frank there s been even more interest in it and more commitment from more different kinds of people to serve their country in more different ways than even i could have imagined and i thank all of you for being the best of america at this christmas season god bless you and thank you very much now hillary alluded to this but i think i can t leave the microphone without saying that in 1993 in january d c central kitchen baked 28 000 saxophone shaped butter almond cookies for my first inaugural and it s about time i came here to pay them back and also cakes for the second inaugural i m grateful for that i hope that everyone who sees the report on the news of all of our being here today will be inspired to follow suit at this christmas season the most important gifts we give are those that we give to those who need it the most who may never know our names or remember our faces but who receive the gifts in the genuine spirit of the season and to all of you those of you who are trainees those of you who are volunteers those of you who are americorps workers all of you i thank you and most of all mr egger i thank you and the people here at d c central kitchen and i hope that as the news of this event beams across the country tonight in the remaining days before christmas and then in all the days of the new year more people will want to make the kind of contribution to our common humanity that you have thank you very much dem wjclinton21 12 99 bill_clinton thank you very much first of all i would like to thank the principal of this school dale talbert for welcoming all of us here and all the members of the maury school community thank you and thank you for the nice sign there and i want to thank the kids back here for being with me and with you today i want to thank gloria hackman for the fine statement that she made and for 20 years of dedication as a nurse as a son and the grandson of a nurse i liked hearing her speak and i also want to say a special word of appreciation for the work being done here i want to thank ned zechman the ceo of the children s national medical center for the wonderful work he does every day and in particular the last seven years the work that he and the first lady have done together and most of all i want to thank carol browner the epa assistant administrator bob perciasepe and all the other people at epa who worked so hard to make this day come about if you knew how many times over the last seven years in how many different contexts carol browner had said to me you have got to do something to reduce incidents of asthma and other respiratory diseases among young children we ve got to keep doing it it s the biggest problem out there most kids face if you had any idea how many private encounters we had had on that that led to this happy day you would be very grateful that someone like her is in public service in the united states i ll tell you that vice president gore has given me a lot of good ideas as he always reminds me when we re together but the recommendation to appoint her is surely one of the best let me say another word about gloria hackman she was here speaking not only for herself and out of her own experience but in a way for all the children and families of this school and schools like it all across america and in particularly on behalf of the children and families who struggle each day with the challenges of asthma i want to commend everyone here who is working in the american lung association s open airways program for all that you do to help our children breathe a little easier as these children know only too well a simple breath of fresh air is not something you can take for granted you know back at the beginning of our century a little air pollution was considered a small price to pay for the bright economic future the industrial revolution was bringing us in countless communities in fact black smoke billowing from the factory smokestack was a welcome symbol of new found prosperity it went on a long time i remember when i first entered politics in arkansas there was a paper mill you could smell 80 miles away and people didn t like it 80 miles away but where it was really strong in the community they d say it was the smell of money and that s what people believed but after a while the air became so fouled in places like pittsburgh that the street lights had to be kept on during the day so people could see businessmen traveling to new york knew to bring along a second white shirt even if they were staying just a day because by the afternoon the first one would be coated with soot americans soon came to realize that dirty air was not just a nuisance that it threatened their health and their lives in the decade since that realization came to pass through the actions of government and the ingenuity of american industry we have made tremendous strides in the last 30 years we have reduced air pollution in the united states by nearly a third even as our economic output has more than doubled over the past six years alone 43 million more americans breathe air that meets federal standards every day thanks to these efforts we are preventing as a society 600 premature deaths and 2 000 cases of asthma and bronchitis every single day i want to say i m going to say this 15 times before i sit down if you have noticed it hasn t done any harm to the economy i am very grateful for the opportunity that vice president gore and i have had to work with americans in industry and environmental groups to make our air even cleaner from taking actions to reduce power plant emissions and clean the air over our national parks to setting the toughest standards ever for soot and smog again i say as with all of our other efforts in the environment over the last three decades america has proven wrong the skeptics who claim that the cost of fighting pollution would be ruinous in fact listen to this since 1970 1970 the direct benefits of the clean air act lower health costs and fewer days work lost for example have outweighed the cost of the clean air act by more that 1 trillion still even as our city skylines emerge from the haze and even as millions of americans are spared from debilitating disease these hard won gains could soon be put at risk why a big part of the reason is that we americans love to drive and we are driving more than ever a new car rolling off the assembly line today is 95 percent less polluting than the typical new car was back in 1970 but there are more than twice as many cars on the road today and the number of miles driven each year has grown even faster what s more fully half the new vehicles sold today are sport utility vehicles minivans and pickups which produce three to five times as much pollution as the average passenger car driving now accounts for 30 percent of the total air pollution in america and unless we take additional measures air quality in many parts of our country will continue to worsen in the coming decades that is why today i am honored to announce the boldest steps in a generation to clean the air we breathe by improving the cars we drive working closely with industry we will ensure both the freedom of american families to drive the vehicles of their choice and the right of american children to breathe clean healthy air first we re setting tough new standards that over the coming decade will reduce tailpipe emissions as much as 95 percent second for the first time we are applying the same stringent standard to cars and to sport utility vehicles including the largest models and third because cleaner fuels also are critical to achieving cleaner air we re cutting the sulfur content of gasoline by up to 90 percent these measures will assure every american cleaner air well into the 21st century it will prevent thousands of premature deaths and protect millions of our children from respiratory disease it will be the most dramatic improvement in air quality since the catalytic converter was first introduced a quarter century ago and manufacturers will be able to meet these new standards while still offering the kinds of models popular with consumers today i want to say a special word of appreciation for all those that worked with epa in developing this new strategy i thank the auto and the oil industries the states the environmental communities the leading public health experts the issues were not always easy to put it mildly but working together we have i am convinced come to solutions that are best for our nation s health and for our nation s economy we will continue to work together also and this is very important to create cleaner diesel fuel our next big challenge in this area and i will do all i can to expand our efforts with the auto industry which have already borne a lot of fruit in the same spirit of collaboration to provide our consumers with vehicles that are not just less polluting but also far more fuel efficient yes you can clap for that it won t be long until you ll be amazed what will be available on the market on that score it seems impossible to believe but in just 10 days we will close out a century of remarkable progress on a high note and we will begin a new millennium we will have new opportunities and new challenges we all of us i think wonder what the future holds for our children as we unravel the mysteries of the human gene and search the outer reaches of black holes in the universe there s no telling what s just around the turn in the new century we are very fortunate that we end the century and begin the millennium with really an unprecedented level of economic prosperity and social progress and national self confidence with the absence of overwhelming internal crisis or external threat this combination of conditions has not existed before at least in my lifetime but i would argue to all of you that because of the good times we have a peculiar responsibility to think about the big long term issues that will frame the lives that we dream for our children and we have an opportunity to shape the future in a way that perhaps no generation before us has ever had one of the things that we ought to do first is to make sure as many children as possible have a full future you know any of us who have ever been in a hospital delivery room know that when a baby comes into the world the first thing that s done is to make sure the infant can draw its first breath as we embark on a new millennium among all of our other responsibilities surely it is our sacred obligation to ensure that each and every child from the first breath on will be drawing the cleanest purest healthiest air we can provide today s a big step in the right direction and i thank all of you who have been involved in it thank you very much dem wjclinton21 2 95 bill_clinton thank you very much i want to begin by thanking the vice president for his leadership on this issue when we formed our partnership back in 1992 and we talked about all the things we wanted to do and we had a series of long fascinating conversations in which he talked to me about science and technology and the environment and i talked to him about education and economic development and reinventing government and i told him that when i was a governor every couple of years we d eliminate an agency just to see if anybody noticed and normally they didn t and they never did complain when they did notice and i asked him if he would then after we actually won and came here i asked him if he would get involved with this and really try to make it work for the american people because i was convinced that there was so much justifiable anxiety out there among our people about the way government operates that unless we could change that we d never be able to maintain the faith of the taxpayers and the integrity of the federal government i also asked him to do it because he was the only person i could trust to read all 150 000 in the code of federal regulations at this very moment tipper is being treated for insomnia at the georgetown hospital but he s just about through i also want to thank all of you who are here who represent really the future of the federal government and the future of its ability to maintain the confidence of the american people that we re protecting and promoting their interest and doing it in a way that reinforces instead of defies common sense i believe very strongly in the cause of regulatory reform and as the vice president said we ve been working at it for about two years now i also believe that we have to hold fast to certain standards i believe we can bring back common sense and reduce hassle without stripping away safeguards for our children our workers our families there are proposals pending in the congress today which go beyond reform to role back arguably even to wrecking and i oppose them but i believe we have the burden of reform and that means we have to change in fundamental ways the culture of regulation that has permeated this government throughout administrations from administration to administration from republicans to democrats occupying the white house the federal government to many people is not the president of the united states it s the person who shows up on the doorstep to check out the bank records or the safety in the factory or the integrity of the workplace or how the nursing home is being run i believe that we have a serious obligation in this administration to work with the congress to reduce the burden of regulation and to increase the protection to the public and we have an obligation on our own to do what we can to change the destructive elements of the culture of regulation that has built up over time and energize the legitimate and decent things that we should be doing here in washington and more importantly that should be being done all across the country i thank those who have come here today as examples of the progress which has been made we do want to get rid of yesterday s government so we can meet the demands of this new time we do want results not rules we want leaner government not meaner government at a time when i have said our obligation should be to create more opportunity and also to provide more responsibility our responsibility here is to expand opportunity empower people to make the most of their own lives enhance security and to do it all while we are shrinking the federal bureaucracy to give the people a government as effective as our finest private companies to give our taxpayers their money s worth now everybody has talked about this for years now but in fact we have taken steps in the right direction already we have reduced federal spending by over a quarter of a trillion dollars reduced the size of the federal payroll by over 100 000 we are on our way to a reduction in excess of 250 000 in the federal work force which will give us by the end of this decade the smallest federal government since the kennedy administration vice president gore s leadership in the reinventing government initiatives have already saved taxpayers 63 billion some of the more visible changes have been well noted the reduction of office in the agriculture department by more than 1 200 throwing away the government s 10 000 page personnel manual i haven t heard a single soul complain about it nobody has said you know i never thought about the personnel manual but i just can t bear to live without it now i haven t heard it a single place we ve worked hard to solve problems that had been long ignored reforming the pension benefit guarantee system to secure the pensions of 8 5 million working americans whose pensions and retirement were at risk reforming government procurement so that the days of the 500 hammer and the 10 glass ashtray are over turning fema from a disaster into a disaster relief agency breaking gridlock on bills that hung around in congress for years six or seven years like the family leave law the motor voter law the brady bill and the crime bill but maybe the most stubborn problem we face is this problem of regulation how do we do what we re supposed to do here how do we help to reinforce the social contract and do our part to work with the private sector to protect the legitimate interests of the american people without literally taking leave of our senses and doing things that drive people up the wall but don t make them safer we all want the benefits of regulation we all want clean air and clean water and safe food and toys that our children can play with but let s face it we all know the regulatory system needs repair too often the rule writers here in washington have such detailed lists of dos and don ts that the dos and don ts undermine the very objectives they seek to achieve when clear goals and operation for cooperation would work better too often especially small businesses face a profusion of overlapping and sometimes conflicting rules we ve tried to set up an effective procedure here for resolving those conflicts but it drives people crazy i had somebody just yesterday mention being subject to two directly conflicting rules from two federal agencies we have to move beyond the point where washington is to use the vice president s phrase the sort of national nanny that can always tell businesses consumers and workers not only what to do but exactly how to do it when and with a 100 page guideline and as has already been said we have begun to take the first steps in doing this you ve heard about what the comptroller of the currency has done i can tell you one thing when i was out in new hampshire in 1992 i heard more grief about the regulation of the private sector by the comptroller of the currency than any other single thing and now every time i go to new england they say we re making money we re making loans and we can function because we finally got somebody down there in washington who understands how to have responsible and safe banking regulations and still promote economic growth i hear it every time i go up there and i thank you sir for what you ve done on that we ve got industry and environmentalists alike supporting carol browner the epa s common sense initiative and our proposed overhauls of the superfund and the safe drinking water laws which i pray will pass in this section of congress and i believe they will would increase both flexibility and improve results for consumers we ve slashed the small business loan form from an inch thick to a single page we haven t had to wait for legislation to streamline all regulations we ve asked regulators and instructed them to use market mechanisms whenever possible and to open up the regulatory process to more public scrutiny and involvement hhs has cut its block grant application form in half for maternal and child health programs epa is exploring using enforceable contracts instead of regulation to eliminate potential risk the faa is reviewing all of its rules to identify those that are out of sync with state of the art technology practices and there s nothing more maddening to a businessman than being told one thing on monday by one governmental agency and another thing on tuesday by another our labor department did something unusual about that as it relates to regulations that affect both labor and the environment they talked to epa before issuing their asbestos rules a stunning departure from past practices so that at least there there are now no contradictory instructions we re also trying to bring common sense in other ways targeting high risk areas focusing for example on lead in day care centers than aircraft hangars we re making school lunches more nutritious but reducing the forms the local schools have to fill out to qualify for the program today we re attempting to work with members of both parties in congress to further reform regulation soon the congress will pass legislation so that washington won t order states to solve problems without giving them the resources to do it we re working together to pass legislation that ensures that regulation is especially sensitive to the needs of small businesses and to reduce paperwork but we must clearly do more we must ask ourselves some questions that are very very important and i want to emphasize those here would you take the card down this is why i asked all of you here not just to be between me and the press corps today this is what we are now going to do i am instructing all regulators to go over every single regulation and cut those regulations which are obsolete to work to reward results not red tape to get out of washington and go out into the country to create grass roots partnerships with the people who are subject to these regulations and to negotiate rather than dictate wherever possible we should ask ourselves let me go through each one on the regulations we should ask ourselves do we really need this regulation could private businesses do this just as well with some accountability to us could state or local government do the job better making federal regulation not necessary i want to really work through these things and i want you all of you to review all these regulations and make a report to me by june 1st along with any legislative recommendations you need to implement the changes that would be necessary to reduce the regulatory burden on the american people second i want every one of you to change the way we measure the performance of your agencies and the front line regulators i love the comment the vice president had about people in customs being evaluated about how many boxes they detain i believe safety inspections should be judged for example by how many companies on their watch comply not by how many citations our regulators write we ought to be interested in results not process third i want you to convene immediately groups consisting of the front line regulators and the people affected by their regulations not lawyers talking to lawyers in washington or even the rest of us talking to each other in washington but a conversation that actually takes place around the country at our clean up sites our factories and our ports where this has been done as we saw here we have seen stunning results most people in business in this country know that there is a reason for these regulations for these areas of regulations and most people would be more than happy to work to find a way that would reduce hassle and still achieve the public interest we seek to achieve fourth i want to move from a process where lawyers write volumes to one where people create partnerships based on common objectives and common sense i want each regulatory agency head to submit to the white house a list of pending procedures that can be converted into consensual negotiations now i want to say this again this is very important by june the 1st i want to know where obsolete regulations we can cut and which ones you can t cut without help from congress we want a system that will reward results not red tape we want to get out of washington and talk to people who are doing the regulating and who are being regulated on the front line that is the only way we will ever change the culture that bothers people we could stay here from now to kingdom come in this room and we would never get that done and finally we need to look for the areas in which we can honestly negotiate to produce the desired results rather than dictate finally the vice president has been conducting a serious review of regulation in the areas of greatest concern in the coming months he will present to me a series of recommendations for regulatory reform on the environment on health on food on financial institutions on worker safety and when appropriate and necessary i will present them to the congress this is what we are going to do and it is high time but let me also emphasize what we are not going to do we have to recognize that done right regulation gives our children safer toys and food protects our workers from injury protects families from pollution and that when we fail it can have disastrous consequences the american economy is the envy of the world in part because of the public health protections put in place over the last 30 years toxic emissions by factories have dropped by more than 50 percent and lead levels in children s blood have dropped by 70 percent in three decades lake erie once declared dead is now teeming with fish 112 000 people survived car crashes because of auto safety rules workplace deaths are down by 50 percent since osha was created our food is safer and we know its true nutritional content because the government stood up for public interests these protections are still needed there s not too little consumer fraud toys are not too safe the environment is still not able to protect itself some would use the need for reform as a pretext to guy vital consumer worker environmental protections even things that protect business itself they don t want reform they really want rigor mortis some in congress are pushing a collection of proposals that taken together would bring federal protection of public health and safety to a halt later this week the house will vote on an across the board freeze on all federal regulations it sounds good but this stops in its tracks federal action that protects the environment protects consumers and protects workers for example it would stop the government from allocating rights to commercial fishermen one a person who s worked with those folks in louisiana is here today it would stop the government from authorizing burials at arlington cemetery it would stop good regulations bad regulations in between regulations all regulations no judgment sounds good but no judgment it would even cancel the duck hunting season that gives me some hope that it will not prevail it would stop new protection from deadly bacteria in our drinking water stop safer meat and poultry stop safer cars stop final implementation of the law that lets parents take a leave to care for a sick child it would undermine what we re trying to do to promote safety in commuter airlines if a moratorium takes effect all these benefits will be on hold for the foreseeable future therefore to me a moratorium is not acceptable i agree with the republicans in congress on many things we do need to change this system we have been working for two years to change it and believe you me i know we ve got a long way to go but there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it we can agree on many things but i am convinced that a moratorium would hurt the broad interests of the american people and would benefit only certain narrow interests who in the moment think they would be undermined by having this or that particular regulation pass the best thing to do is to change the culture of regulation to do the four things that i have outlined not to put these things on hold but to put these things in high gear that is the right way to do this i still believe that working together with congress we can achieve real and balanced regulatory reform but we shouldn t go too far for example we want all agencies to carefully compare the cost and benefits of regulations so that we don t impose any unnecessary burdens on business but the contract with america literally read could pile so many new requirements on government that nothing would ever get done it would add to the very things that people have been complaining about for years too many lawsuits everything winds up in court the contract literally read would override every single health and safety law on the books distort the process by giving industry paid scientists undue influence over rules that govern their employers in the name of private property could literally bust the budget by requiring the government to pay polluters every time an environmental law puts limits on profits these are extreme proposals they go too far they would cost lives and dollars a small army of special interest lobbyists knows they can never get away with an outright repeal of consumer or environmental protection but why bother if you can paralyze the government by process surely after years and years and years of people screaming about excessive governmental process we won t just go to an even bigger round of process to tilt the process itself in another direction we cannot strip away safeguards for families in this country here in our audience today are real people on whose behalf we act or we might have acted there s a father in this audience whose son died from e coli bacteria and food that might have been discovered if our proposed rule had been in effect when his son ate the contaminated food there are people here whose lives were saved by air bags let s not forget these people as we cut red tape and bureaucracy there s a woman here whose a breast cancer survivor who lost a child to cancer who lives in an area unusually high in the density of people who suffer from cancer let s not forget the kind of work that still needs to be done at every stage in the history of this country our government has always had to change to meet the needs of changing times and we need to change now we need a government that s smaller and more entrepreneurial that provides a lot less hassle that realizes that there are an awful lot of people out there in the private sector who have enlightened views and they want to do the right thing and they need to be helped instead of hindered in that i would never defend the culture of this community when it is wrong but let us also not forget that as we strive for a government that is costing less and less and is more flexible that is producing better results and not more rules that we have a job to do for the american people and that people are entitled to protection so i echo again what the vice president said earlier reform yes bring it on roll back no there is too much good to do to turn this noble enterprise into something that we would live to regret let us instead work to do what must be done thank you very much dem wjclinton21 2 99 bill_clinton i would like to first of all thank you for the wonderful warm welcome to express my deep respect and support for the iam president tom buffenbarger and all of the iam officers the uaw executive vp ruben burks i know steve yokich is in germany now and all the uaw members here and the steel workers president george becker and all the steel workers here and of course everyone up here on the platform with me george becker would give his voice his heart and his life for his members and he nearly gave his voice tonight i came here to do a number of things but i d like to start with first things first the first thing i want to do is to say a simple profound thank you thank you thank you for your support thank you for the fight you have waged thank you for the miles we have walked together these last six years i also came here to support the merger of these three great streams of american labor joining into a new river of two million strong throughout the 20th century all three of you have been at the forefront in the struggle for human progress in america the workers at river rouge and republic steel shed their blood for more than their own rights and their own families their sacrifice gave all of us collective bargaining and the minimum wage the founders and members of your three unions gave us things all working people now take for granted as essential elements in a humane society vacations health care pensions grievance procedures you have continued to lead the fight for all americans the fight to create medicare to civil rights to protecting our nation against the contract with america the uaw the steel workers the machinists have provided the minds and muscles for a progressive society in our country now in this season of renewal and rebuilding for america the house of labor is growing stronger the creation of a mighty new industrial union not just a merger but a new organization will set the stage for even greater progress for your members for your families and for all the rest of america in the 21st century i believe you have an opportunity and therefore a duty every bit as real as that which was seized by the great generations that preceded you a half century ago the labor pioneers had it hard they wore their scars proudly they were not always the easiest of personalities but in spite of their contentiousness i like to think that walter reuther philip murray and thomas talbot are up in heaven shaking hands at this new merger i thank you all for the strong support you have given not only to me and the first lady and the vice president and our administration but to our democratic party especially in 1998 i ll never forget the sense of pride i shared on election night with john sweeney when he was at the white house and we realized that for the first time since 1822 the president s party had won seats in the house of representatives in the sixth year of an administration you might be interested to know that the last time that happened in 1822 the other party disappeared we won t be that lucky but it certainly is a good incentive to continue the fight i want to thank you for your commitment to make your voices heard to advance the issues and the candidates that are pro worker and pro family for six years as george said we ve been on a journey together to renew our nation to restore the american dream for decades our nation was buffeted by the winds of economic change wages for working families stagnated working people fell further behind beginning in 1993 together we put in place a new economic strategy to put our people first because of what you have done america is working again with the longest peacetime expansion in history the lowest peacetime unemployment since 1957 nearly 18 million new jobs the lowest welfare rolls in three decades and finally after three decades of stagnation in just the last three years wages are rising at twice the rate of inflation things are not all as they ought to be but clearly at long last we have begun to move aggressively in the right direction together as has already been noted we stood up against the congressional majority that was absolutely determined to strip away the victories and undermine the rights of working people i was proud to stand with you also to defeat the paycheck protection act in california i was proud to stop every piece of anti labor legislation sent to me by the congress we knew the team act would undermine collective bargaining so we said no we knew the republican comp time bill would be unfair to working people so we said no we knew that safe pensions and a strong osha are vital to working people so when congress tried to undermine them we said no after 12 years in which my predecessors exploded deficits and quadrupled our national debt all the while talking about a balanced budget and accusing my party and our friends in organized labor of being the big irresponsible spenders we actually balanced the budget and did it in the right way while nearly doubling our investments in the education and training of our people and having big increases in things like medical research we re in the second year of surpluses with years and years more projected in the future america is working again but as i said in my state of the union address this is not a time for complacency for one reason as all of you here know especially the steel workers we are living in a very dynamic and somewhat troubling international economic environment where things can change overnight for another in a world that is changing this fast we have to take advantage of this moment of prosperity to deal with the big challenges facing america in the 21st century we cannot rest until america works for every american until prosperity extends to every working family in every community america must do more among other things we must remain a great industrial nation so i d like to talk to you tonight about three aspects of our challenge first of all before the baby boomers retire and with life expectancy increasing at a dramatic rate with people over 80 being the fastest growing part of our population in percentage terms we must use this moment and this surplus to save and strengthen social security and medicare for the 21st century now here in washington there is now a great debate about what to do with the surplus and how it should be applied and whether to social security and medicare i won t take time tonight to talk about the competing visions of social security and how we should deal with that but i will work with you on that what i want to talk about is what should be our first priority with the surplus i believe it should be to save social security and medicare and in so doing and in so doing to pay down the national debt that was quadrupled in the 12 years before i took office now i am pleased that even though we will have our disagreements about what to do with social security the republican leadership in congress has agreed that we should set aside 62 percent of the surplus to save social security i think it s important that we do it in the right way we should put 75 years of life on the trust fund we should do something about elderly women whose poverty rate is twice the rate of seniors and we ought to lift the earnings limit so that seniors who want to work can do that now unfortunately we do not agree on whether to set aside another 15 percent of the surplus to save medicare of course we will have our disagreements about how medicare should be reformed i think it should be reformed and kept solvent for 20 years and also we should add a prescription drug benefit to the medicare program and i don t want to kid you i think because of the numbers of people that are going to retire in the baby boom generation and because we re all living longer and because of medical advances which at least in their early years are more expensive we will have to make some further reforms in medicare even if we do what i want but if we set aside 15 percent of the surplus for the next 15 years for medicare we can at least guarantee that it s all right until 2020 if we don t we ll be faced with possible changes in medicare that could undermine the universality of the program and its absolute reliability for seniors and for the children and grandchildren of seniors who don t have to pay those out of pocket medical expenses so this is a huge issue now our friends in the other party say that we ought to just reform medicare and maybe shift some of the costs to seniors who may not be able to afford it and maybe get away from medicare as a defined benefit program i am against that i do not want to see medicare turned from a defined benefit program into a defined contribution program but think of what we can do if we set aside part of this surplus which will allow us to pay down even more of our debt and put 20 years on the medicare trust fund s life and then we can figure out how to make what other changes need to be made to strengthen the program and how to add the prescription drug program now that will cost more money in the short run but over the long run adding the prescription drug benefit will cut down on doctor visits will cut down on hospital costs will cut down on critical care costs because with all these advances in medical research people will be able to stay healthier the best way to cut down on the cost of the medicare program is to keep seniors healthier for longer periods of time and the medicine will help us to do that i believe the american people should have some tax relief out of this surplus but i think we should save social security and medicare first then i think we should focus the tax relief on helping working people and the middle class begin to save from their first day on the job so they will have a piece of this enormous wealth that america has enjoyed in the last six years that s what our usa accounts our universal savings accounts will do so the choice the american people will face is our plan which invests the surplus for tomorrow and focuses the tax relief on working families and the need to save and theirs which spends a lot more of the surplus today ours favors savings theirs favors consumption ours focuses tax relief on the middle class and theirs well theirs is a republican tax plan i think at least this administration and our leaders in congress ought to be entitled to the benefit of the doubt based on the performance of the economy in the last six years their economic theory gave us 12 years of rising deficits and declining incomes our economic strategy has given us growth and surpluses when i took office the national debt had risen to one half our annual income if we adopt my plan for the surplus in 15 years it will be just seven percent of our annual income that s the lowest it s been since right before we entered world war i in 1917 what that means in practical terms to you is that when i took office we were spending over 14 cents of every dollar you paid in taxes just to make our interest payments on the debt in 15 years that will be down to 2 cents on the dollar the rest can be spent on you and your children and your future and within 18 years the united states of america would be debt free think of it if we just have the discipline to do the right thing and i ll say more in a minute why it s good for the economy we could save social security for 75 years save medicare for 20 years and get the united states of america out of debt i think that is the right thing to do but i don t want to pretend that their plan won t sound good sound sweet and sound simple all i ask you is to look at the performance of our country in the last six years and give us the benefit of the doubt and support us let s save social security let s not let medicare be dissolved let s not let it be changed fundamentally in its character and let s pay down this debt to keep america s economy strong now the second thing we have to do is to keep the economy growing and to deal with crises as they occur we have to have a strategy to keep the global economy working for americans as well as to increase the economic development here at home for the first five years of my presidency 30 percent of our economic growth came from increasing exports and manufacturing employment in america increased but last year because of the global financial crisis which has left russia most of asia in a deep recession and has slowed growth dramatically in most of latin america the manufacturing sector in our country was hit very hard we saw many many jobs lost and we know many more than those that were lost are still threatened industrial america is hurting now i have worked hard to limit this global financial crisis to try to right the things that are out of whack to help our trading partners return to economic growth in an healthy way so they could buy our products instead of dump on our markets we need a 21st century financial and trading system that limits the cycle of boom and bust that strengthens social safety nets that works for ordinary working people and their families in every country in short the united states must lead a crusade to put a more human face on the global economy while we are doing that and i expect to spend an enormous amount of time this year working on that so that we can reduce the likelihood that we ll have years in the future like the last year has been we cannot let other economies difficulties be a justification or an excuse for them to violate trade laws and engage in unfair trade practices make no mistake about it it was not economic difficulty and the declining value of currency which made foreign good cheaper which precipitated the present crisis in steel this was not an ordinary economic event we know it was the result of unfair trade practices we have used tools that are unprecedented in this kind of dispute to respond the secretary of commerce speeded up consideration of the dumping cases we just announced that both japan and brazil have been dumping steel into our markets we ve put them on notice that the surge in exports is unacceptable and this means that anyone who imports steel from japan or brazil must pay large deposits or post substantial bonds to the u s customs service paying these duties will likely reduce further unfair steel imports from these countries we ve also made it clear to korea in no uncertain terms that they cannot fill the void with unfair trade practices and so far they have been responsive though we ll continue to watch it closely as you know we re in negotiations with russia on a comprehensive agreement to reduce their steel imports to the united states the goal of all these actions is to get imports back to their pre crisis levels when our steel industry was competing just fine with everybody in the world and again if we have a fair policy and we don t have unfair penetration that will happen now i know that for a lot of hard pressed plants workers families communities these trade laws work too slowly but we are accelerating the pace at which they will work to the maximum ability to do so december numbers show a 32 percent decline in steel imports across the board a 67 percent decline in hot rolled steel now i would just like to make one observation about that for all those people who said that all these imports were just the product of ordinary economic activity and therefore we shouldn t do anything the fact that they could cut hot rolled steel exports from their countries to us 67 percent in one month pretty well destroyed the argument that it was ordinary economic activity that led to them in the first place in the case of japan we have made it clear that if their exports don t return to pre crisis levels we re prepared to take appropriate action including self initiation of trade cases something that is almost unprecedented i will work very closely with you as we move forward this has been a tough year for the steel workers and for many other manufacturing workers we need to do more and we will keep at it until we turn the crisis around the challenge we face however goes beyond steel we have to make sure that the world economy works for everyone as george said in his opening remarks we ve had some disagreements about this in the past trade has divided americans for a long time i want you to know however that i am determined to do whatever i can to find common ground on this issue that will enable labor and business environmentalists and government in that united states to work together i support open markets because it has given us higher incomes and more jobs and for the first time in anyone s memory now the united states has the lowest unemployment rate in the industrialize world even lower than japan no one can remember a time when that was the case it s been a very very long time now the right kind of trade is good for working families and when a financial crisis hits our trading partners we can see the devastating effect it has on them and on others here at home but again i say we can t allow international economic competition or adversity elsewhere to become a race to the bottom here at home or in any other country my goal has got to be to level the world up not level it down we have got to that means we have to press for more open markets that have stronger safeguards for workers not weaker ones for health and safety for children for a clean environment a trade that honors the rights of workers and the dignity of work that respects core labor rights we have to do that we should do more not only through the trade framework but with the international labor organizations to race labor standards around the world and to lead the world community to conclude a treaty that bans child labor everywhere in the world now if we save social security and medicare if we can keep the economy going in the midst of all these troubles the third thing that we have to do is to make sure that the economy works for all of our people and that adversity can be quickly overcome if we can t do it now when will we ever do it that s why we ought to increase the minimum wage again 10 million working families need it and we ought to do it that s why we should expand the family and medical leave law to cover 10 million more workers and their families it is not broad enough in its coverage if we can t afford it now when will we ever get around to doing it and that s why we have to recognize also that there are people in this country in urban communities and rural areas who have not felt any upturn in the last six years that s what my new markets initiative is all about you know we have all kinds of devices to help encourage americans to invest in developing countries overseas that aren t present here one of the things that i have proposed is an american private investment company modeled on our overseas private investment corporation that would enable us to give both tax credits and loan guarantees to people who would invest in high unemployment areas in america to put in new plants and new businesses to create new markets and new jobs let me just give you an example of how it would work because i m going to need your help to pass this new york city while america has a 4 4 percent unemployment rate the unemployment rate in new york city is about 9 percent now when you consider how low it is in some places in new york city that means in a lot of big urban centers it s well over 10 percent if this whole plan passes and a group of people got together for example under these laws that i have proposed to spend 300 million and open a plant in a high unemployment area in brooklyn or the bronx or they wanted to to use congressman rangel s favorite example they wanted to rehabilitate yankee stadium instead of moving it away and hire construction workers who live in the bronx to do it suppose they wanted to do that under our plan if this law passes they put up 300 million the first 100 million they get a 20 percent tax credit for the second 200 million they d have a loan guarantee for which means they d only have 75 million at risk for the 300 million investment that s a good deal the best untapped markets for american business are here in america and it will lower everybody else s threshold of anxiety it will create economic opportunity it s good for the steel workers it s good for the machinists it s good for the auto workers because if those people have jobs they ll buy more of everything and i want you to help me pass it i also ask you to help me strengthen our education system to finish the job of cutting class sizes by putting 100 000 new teachers into our schools to pass our proposal to build or modernize 6 000 schools and i ask you to do something that will be quite controversial i hope you will support me in this every five years we pass an authorization law which sets the terms under which we give your tax money back to public schools and it s about 15 billion a year now that we give to schools to help them do their work we now know from teachers from principals from parents from students themselves from worlds of research what works in the schools and what doesn t we know that every problem in american education has been solved by somebody somewhere but we know something else our kids a representative sample of our kids represented by race income and region scores at the top of the world in the 4th grade math and science tests drops to the middle of the world by the 8th grade and is nearly at the bottom by the 12th now those children do not get dumber as they get older that means we are not doing well enough by them and we have to do better we have to make sure all these kids can read well in elementary school no matter what their family background or where their folks came from so i say we need to change the terms in which we give out this money not because the federal government makes it up in a room somewhere but because the schools have told us what works we ought to end social promotion but we ought to do it by saying we want to end social promotion but we don t want to declare the kids failures because the system s failing them so we ought to provide more funds for summer school programs for after school programs for tutors keep the kids out of trouble off the streets in the schools learning but make sure they know something when they go from grade to grade the teachers organizations have asked us repeatedly to make one requirement that every school has not only a written reasonable discipline policy but can prove it s being enforced that s important they ought to identify schools that are failing and turn them down or shut them down every state that s done this has found that they hardly have to shut any schools down because they get turned around once they know that they re going to be shut down unless they do turn around these are elemental things that have worked in community after community after community i think parents ought to get a report card on every school every year that their children are in i think if we do these things you ll be amazed at the results we ll have five years from now when we have to reauthorize this aid again but this will be real controversial some people will say it s too tough on the kids that come from poor backgrounds i think that s selling them short they can do just fine if they have good schools and i ll tell you something if they get out of school without a good education the world s going to be real tough on them and so we need to help them and then some of our friends in the other party will say well here s the president trying to micromanage the schools we just want to give them the money we re not trying to tell the schools what to do well that would be true if i had just sat in my office one day and come up with this and thought it sounded good this is what the people at the grass roots level have said and done and proved works and it is simply wrong for us to keep subsidizing failure when we can invest in success so i ask you to help us there s two other things very quickly i want you to help me this year do what we didn t do last year and pass a strong enforceable patients bill of rights now a lot of you know a lot of you know or you re about to find out in very difficult ways that after years of moderate inflation in health care costs those premiums are going up again even for managed care and if you re going to pay for health care you ought to be able to get health care if you need to see a specialist you ought to be able to see one if you have options for health care you ought to know what your options are if you re in another town and you get hit in an accident you ought to be able to go to the nearest emergency room not one that s halfway across town if you re in the middle of treatment with a doctor you ought to be able to continue the treatment even if you change health care providers these are elemental things the last thing i want to say if you want the economy to work for everybody i want to come back to something i said before i know this is an alien concept if i had been running for president in 1992 and many of you did so much for me and i said look you vote for me and six years from now i ll be coming back to you telling you what great things will happen if we pay down the national debt you would have decided that i needed a trip to a doctor not to be elected president but we can talk about that now we want the economy to work for everyone you don t know what s going to happen beyond our borders i am doing my best to turn this situation around to do everything i can to make sure we don t have another year like the year we just had in the global economy with all the trade problems and other things that came down on us but if god forbid we continue to have these kinds of problems don t we want the strongest demand we have here at home don t we want to be able to and if we do more to protect our markets from unfair trade practices then it still means that we re going to have to generate more economic activity here at home if you pay down the debt what will happen interest rates will stay down much lower than they otherwise would no matter what happens around the world that means lower home mortgage payments it means lower car payments it means lower business loans it means lower student loans it means lower credit card payments it means greater investment in the american economy more jobs and lower prices and higher consumption that s what it means now i do not know what is going to happen everywhere in the world in the next two years much less after i m gone but i know this if you ll go along with this and you ll help me do this for the next 15 years every single year the interest rates in america and the economy in america will be in better shape no matter what happens than they would have been if we don t do it and we give away this money right now so i ask you to help me do this this is the right thing to do for the united states of america finally let me just say there are a lot of changes going on in the world no one can predict the future with any certainty tell you the truth it s all worked out a little better until this last patch in the road for us than i thought when i was running but i knew we were doing the right things one of the things we know is if we put the american people first if we think about how people can balance work and family if we think about how we can preserve the dignity of work if we think about how we can give every child the right to live up to his or her god given capacity if we do the right things then in the tough times we ll do better than we otherwise would have and in the good times we ll soar the american labor movement has helped this country to do the right things year in and year out decade in and decade out in joining together i am convinced you have done the right thing for your members and their families for the 21st century and i am convinced that you will do the right things for america thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton21 3 94 bill_clinton thank you governor for your kind remarks and thank you my fellow americans for that wonderful wonderful reception that you gave to hillary and to me tonight not only for the phenomenal amount of funds which you have given and raised but for the spirit in which you have done it and for the reasons for which you have done it i want to thank my good friend bob graham for what he said and for the guidance that he used to give me when we were seatmates in the governors conference lieutenant governor buddy mckay and all the members of congress who are here and the other officials if i might say one former congressman who s here that i think the world of dante fascell i m glad to see you sir i know you have the speaker of the house here and many state legislators but too many for me to mention i suppose and i m glad to see all of you here i have always loved coming to florida and working with you and i want to say a special word of thanks to chuck mangione for playing such wonderful music to us tonight i want to thank all the dinner chairs bud and marvin and mitch berger and larry hawkins and jorge perez and mont friedkin and howard glicken and everybody else that worked so hard on this this is an amazing dinner it reminds me of why we got into this in the first place what you have said to me and to hillary tonight i also want to thank those of you who saw us on television as harry and louise and thought we were better than the first ad i thank david wilhelm for the fine work that he has done and i thank all of you for making this a wonderful very brief stop for us and today as hillary said i played a little golf with buzz stack and bob farmer and arnold friedman and my brother in law hugh rodham and raymond floyd who needless to say was slightly better than the rest of us and i thought to myself we played this one short par four hole that had big bunkers in the front of it and this is the kind of thing that keeps people doing things they shouldn t do like trying to be good golfers when you know it s never going to happen but at the end of one stroke my brotherin law hugh and i and raymond floyd were on the green in one so i thought to myself i never get to putt for an eagle i ll keep coming for years now i say that because the spark of hope is what keeps us all going i say it because don t you ever forget that when our opponents have nothing else to offer when they don t have a health care plan and they don t have an economic plan and they don t want to vote for any tough decisions to reduce the deficit and they are mad because the democrats are now the engine of change on issues like welfare reform and crime then they resort to the politics of division and distraction and destruction almost like angry people that want to bring the house down instead of help to build it up well my friends we aim to keep on building it up and you ve helped us to do it tonight we ve got a lot of help in washington from floridians and starting with your wonderful attorney general janet reno and our epa administrator carol browner but we also see the example of what we want to do in the work that is being done here by your leaders in florida in 1992 when al and tipper gore and hillary and i campaigned all across this country we did it because we really wanted to change this country i was having as much fun as i had ever had in my life being governor i wasn t tired of doing it even though i d been doing it for 12 years i was just sort of getting warmed up about to get the hang of it i got into the race for president for the reasons that lawton chiles mentioned i believed our country was adrift that we were coming apart when we ought to be coming together that because it was painful politically no one really wanted to face the hard issues and take the tough decisions that needed to be made to move the country forward i always thought that public life at best was about bringing people together and bringing out the best in people and actually getting things done so that next year you could talk about a new set of problems you wouldn t have to keep on talking about the same old thing over and over again and people could have the sense that they were moving their lives forward and that together we were doing that and yet in washington we were treated to the sort of endless orgy of posturing and political rhetoric and obsession with who had power not what was being done with power for in the end in this country the power belongs to you it doesn t belong to the president it doesn t belong to the congress even though they don t like to admit it sometimes it doesn t even belong to our friends in the press it belongs to you the rest of us are all the rest of us in various ways are all your hired hands and we serve for a little while to do our anointed tasks and then our time is over so i say to you tonight i want you to think about what it would take for you to get your money s worth out of this dinner what is it that we would have to do to make it worth the investment of time and effort as well as money to move america forward you know i really admire a lot of the things that my longtime friend lawton and buddy mckay have done here in florida because they knew if they did some of the things that needed to be done their popularity would go down they proved that you can govern in an austere fiscal climate that you could have diversity in government and still have excellence they reformed workers compensation and increased the technological capabilities of this state they ve been tough and smart on crime and they passed a remarkable health reform plan but if you look at the struggles that they went through and the beatings they took and you look at what i ve been through last year and what i m facing this year in congress just to do the work i got hired to do never mind the side shows it s like old yogi berra saying it s deja vu all over again look at the health care plan florida adopted a fascinating health care plan it may not be perfect but it s a whole lot better than just letting things drift and there is no such thing as a perfect plan when we were putting together our national health program we looked very closely at what florida had done especially the idea of bringing people together small business people and self employed people school districts and others in large purchasing co ops called alliances so that they can get lower costs florida is on the front line of this effort to reform health care and as you have found in florida change is hard if it were easy the republicans would have done it and they d still have the white house what i want to say to you is i did not run for president to hold the office to live in the white house although it is a magnificent place and it still gives me chills every time i walk in the door and realize that every president since john adams has lived there i was perfectly happy in my family life and my work life doing what we were doing before and i ran because i thought that we ought to change the country in health care i thought we ought to keep what s good about our system and change what s wrong the crazy financing system get rid of unfair insurance practices and do it in a way that wouldn t make the insurance companies go broke that s why we need big buyers groups if you want to say don t discriminate against people because they re older don t discriminate against people because they have had an illness in their family don t discriminate against people because they re small business people or selfemployed people and you want to be fair and say how are you going to do that with insurance without bankrupting people you have to have them in big pools i think we ought to keep the right to choose doctors people are losing the right to choose their doctor rapidly today fewer than half the people insured in the work force have it our plan increases choice not decreases choice that s the ultimate mockery of a lot of these ads that are being run i think we ought to keep medicare it works but we ought to strengthen it we ought to cover prescription medicine and we ought to cover long term care in the home and in the community so that people aren t forced to go into a nursing home when it costs more money if they can have some alternative care first and if we do it right we ll improve the quality of care and moderate cost increases how do i know that look at florida s purchasing alliances the bids are coming in for health care from five to 40 percent below current costs why because when you put people together in larger groups you can afford to insure them at a lower cost per person without bankrupting the insurers the same thing is happening here in a number of other areas in the crime area where i perceive you re trying to be tough and smart you know it s easy when people are scared to death and lord knows they are all over the country today to say things that excite crowds about crime but let me tell you the first job i ever had as a public servant was the attorney general of my state and i was very close to and very involved with law enforcement during my entire public career before i ever became president and one thing i know is it s one thing to talk about crime in a way that gets a crowd to stand on their feet and shout and ventilate and another thing to do something about it and i think we all of us should be intent on doing something to make our streets and our schools and our homes safer places for our children to grow up in and our people to live in so you saw the movie that s what we did last year that s what you hired me to do let s talk about this year this year we need to pass health care reform we don t need to do it next year or the year after or the year after that every other advanced economy in the world has found a way to provide high quality health care to all its citizens only the united states has not done it it is time for us to stop making excuses and start making progress we can do it the congress has before it today a crime bill which would put another 100 000 police officers on the street welltrained community policing knowing the neighbors knowing the folks on the block not only catching criminals but preventing crime i know it will work i know it will work i saw it happen in houston a city with a very high murder rate where in a matter of 15 months the crime rate went down over 20 percent the murder rate went down over 20 percent and the mayor got reelected with 91 percent of the vote because lives changed this will work and our bill bans 28 kinds of semiautomatic assault weapons that are not necessary for sporting or hunting and are used to kill and it s the right thing to do the bill is smart and tough it gives drug treatment for people who need it it provides for innovations like the drug court you have here in miami that janet reno and my brother in law and so many other people worked to make very very important and nationally recognized it provides funds for our young people to have recreations in school before and after school it provides something to say yes to as well as to say no to and yes it s tougher it says if you commit three violent crimes that threaten people s safety you can never be paroled three strikes and you re out smart and tough that s what we ought to do and we have to pass it we re going to give the congress a welfare reform bill that gives a genuine chance for people to escape the trap of welfare dependency make it a second chance not a way of life say we ll give you education and training and child support and then after two years if you haven t found a job you must go to work even if it s in a public service job but let me say i m glad you re clapping for it but let me make the point we can only do that if we also provide health care you know i met a woman just this week just this week who said i got off welfare and i went to work i didn t have a lot of education i didn t get a great job but i went to work because i wanted to work i was proud but do you know i didn t have health care coverage at my job but when i was on welfare i had health care through the medicaid program so by going to work i gave up my child s health care so that i could pay taxes to pay for the health care for people on welfare now you don t have to be as bright as a tree full of owls to know that doesn t make a lot of sense so don t listen to our adversaries there will be ultimately no real welfare reform until there is health care reform because people are not going to put their kids at risk in this country you must do both we have a whole passel of education bills up there your education commissioner is here he told me tonight that all the state education commissioners have endorsed our education reforms world class standards grass roots reforms innovative things we re encouraging that for too long the national government has not encouraged local school systems to try but still saying the ultimate test is what are the kids learning and we re going to say here s what they should know by worldclass standards judge every school every district see what the children are learning but encourage people to try new and different and innovative things if they re not working try something else we re going to have a system which will provide an opportunity to move from school to work with further training for all people who don t go on to four year colleges you know that the unemployment rate for high school drop outs in this country is 11 5 percent for high school graduates it s 7 2 percent for people with two years of further training after high school it s 5 4 percent and people with fours years of college it s 3 5 percent and the average annual earnings by category go up about 4 000 a category we have got to find a way to give the young people who aren t going to finish four year colleges at least some sort of further training in school and on the job while they re working we have to abolish this notion that there s a real difference between what s vocational and what s academic in education and move to the future and we have to do it not just for those folks but for people in the work force no matter what their age the average person will change work eight times in a lifetime i meet people in their 50s now all the time that lost their jobs had to get retrained had to get new jobs in different lines of work all the time we ve got an unemployment system we ve got a lot of employers here you all are paying that unemployment tax into a system that s flat busted it was established for a time that no longer exists when people who were unemployed were called back to their jobs after what the economists called a cyclical recession passed today most of the changes in this economy are structural most people who lose their jobs do not get called back to their old jobs we don t need an unemployment system in which employers pay that unemployment tax for people to live on a lower wage until their benefits run out and they still don t have any place to go we need to have a reemployment system where the day people lose their jobs they are immediately eligible for retraining so that they can go back to work quicker put less burden on the unemployment tax and become productive tax paying citizens again that s what we need in this country now this is what i thought public life was about and this is what i think the presidency is about and this is what i think the congress ought to be about and what i think the american people really care about how are we going to get together how are we going to get things done how are we going to lift up the human potential of the american people that s why i ran for president and that s what s going to make this dinner worth your investment tonight if we do what we re supposed to do last year we passed the nafta treaty and it was a good first step but we knew we had to do more the vice president is in latin america even as we speak and we are going to have the summit of the americas here in miami in december and we re going to do it because we know that latin america is the second fastest growing region of the world economically they are our neighbors and we are bound up together in a common future we must share our democracy we must share trade and investment we must share a common commitment to building each other up and we will win if we do it miami is the right place to do it because you are i believe committed to building the kind of multi racial multi ethnic harmonious successful democracy that the world will look to in the 21st century and so we will work on that at the summit then i hope the next time we have a summit we ll be joined by a democratically elected leader from a free cuba now until that happens this administration will support the act which senator graham sponsored which requires us to maintain a strong economic embargo as leverage for democratic reform we will also continue to make it clear that we want to reach out to the cuban people as is provided in the act with private humanitarian aid and more information we have no quarrel with the cuban people we want them to be part of our common destiny we want them to go into the 21st century a free people in partnership with us let me say this we want the same thing for the people of haiti too and they deserve it as well as long as the dictators who have prevented president aristide from returning and who continue to thwart democracy and continue to abuse human rights and continue to kill innocent people persist in trying to hold on to power we will maintain the economic sanctions which are standing up against their clouding of international law and their own agreements these are things we must do in our own backyard now let me say that lawton chiles described to you the democratic leadership council group that he and i got together through again as a group that tried to go beyond the partisan politics that paralyzed us in the 80s we tried to find new ideas and new solutions and we have reached out to all people who wanted a change without regard to their party label we had republicans for clinton gore organizations in many states in this country and they played a decisive role in our victory in some states and i have done my best to reach out to republicans in the congress and i will continue to do so i have been frankly dismayed at the level of intense partisan opposition present on so many issues and when that has dissipated i have been hopeful and the country has been better off for it the republican party has not always been against change or unity it has not always been obsessed with personal power and just in a snit because they didn t have the white house the republican party after all gave us abraham lincoln without whom we would not be here tonight the republican party gave us theodore roosevelt who taught us to save our natural resources and spoke out against the dangers of too much concentrated power in public or private life even president nixon signed the environmental protection agency bill and first proposed that employers ought to contribute to their employees health insurance so we could have universal health coverage for everybody today instead of that they don t offer a lot of new ideas and they often offer blatant blind partisan opposition last summer we were fighting for a budget to cut the deficit get the economy moving again hold interest rates down you know what they said one republican senator said if this plan passes we re buying a one way ticket to a recession another one said this plan will cost american jobs no doubt about it in the entire house and senate there was not a single solitary vote from the other party for the economic plan not one what did they vote against they voted against 500 billion in deficit reduction tax cuts for almost 17 percent of the working families in this country who hover at the poverty line and who are raising their children so that we could lift them beyond the poverty line and take away any incentive they would have to go on welfare and quit work tax cuts for 90 percent of the small businesses in this country increased capital gains for investment in new business and small business a reform of the college loan system which cut the interest rates and strung out the repayment terms that s what they voted against in that bill yes and also raised most of your taxes in this room 1 2 percent of the american people and every last red cent of that tax money will go to reduce the deficit not a penny to any new program every cent of it goes to reduce the deficit and what did it produce it produced low interest rates low inflation high investment 2 1 million new jobs in 13 months more than the entire previous four years the fastest rate of growth in years in the last quarter of last year the fastest rate of growth in a decade over 5 million americans have refinanced their homes the budget is at the lowest percentage of our gross domestic product that it s been since 1979 the deficit is going to be a third lower than it was projected to be under my predecessor and if congress adopts this years budget we ll have three years of declining federal deficits for the first time since harry truman was the president of the united states in the house of representatives we had staunch opposition from the other party not only to the budget but to the brady bill to the family and medical leave act and i applaud the republicans who voted for that in the senate filibuster after filibuster or threats of filibuster on family and medical leave motor voter the budget acts which they couldn t filibuster but didn t vote for the brady bill which finally the public opinion of the country just shouted from the rafters of the congress and they had to give up on the filibuster for these are the kinds of things that we are facing now we move to health care in the senate there are some republicans who genuinely want to provide health care to all americans and they have been forthcoming in talking to us they have said they do not want to be part of just saying no in the house there are people who say we want to talk to you but if we do we won t have any influence in our party anymore we haven t been given permission so we ve got to decide my fellow americans whether we are going to let partisan politics and obsession with destruction and division and distraction get in the way of why you made this investment and why hillary and i ran why al gore ran why most of my cabinet people left other lives and served and i say to you this year we ought to say look let s just do something for america let s keep our eye on the ball let s not demean the political process anymore by being so intensely partisan and so obsessed with who s got power and so obsessed with hurting somebody who s got it instead of somebody who doesn t that we forget that it s all going to be gone before you know it and all that really matters is what you do with the time you have when you have it that s all that counts when it s all said and done the people of this country are going to have health care or they re not we re going to reform this welfare system or we re not we re going to do something to make our kids safer on the streets and in their homes and the schools or we re not we either are or we aren t when it s all said and done we re going to be closer together as an american family without regard to our race or our age or our gender or where we live or what our party is or we re not that is what this is about not who s in but what we re doing while we re there and i say to you i will do everything i can every day i have that job to remember that your investment is for your children and your children s children larry hawkins gave me this picture of his granddaughter tonight at dinner and he said i like you a lot but i didn t raise all this money because i like you i raised all this money because this is my granddaughter and i want her to have a better future praise god that he thinks that and i hope we can do it thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton21 3 96 bill_clinton thank you very much first let me welcome the independent insurance agents of america to the white house and thank president george shaffer for the fine statement that he made i want to say to the press here assembled that this is a big announcement out in america where americans live there are 300 000 agents and their employees in independent insurance agencies all across this country people who know and serve their friends and neighbors and are active in their community and are trusted for their judgment on many issues not the least of which is health care the fact that they have decided to come in here today and express their support for the kassebaum kennedy bill is a remarkable act of statesmanship and good citizenship and it will reverberate in every main street in the united states of america it is a true bipartisan almost a nonpartisan effort to make an honest endeavor to bring health care to millions of americans who have been shut out of the market these people know the folks who lose their jobs and can t get health insurance these people see across a small desk in a modest room the people who can t get health insurance because someone in their family has a crippling condition or has once had a serious illness even if they have overcome it the independent insurance agents are therefore in some ways about the most valuable partner america could have in shaping health care reform i want to say again how grateful i am to president shaffer and all the other members here the incoming president ron smith my longtime friend from arkansas george frasier and the people who work for the organization here in washington they ve all done a wonderful job and i want to thank them for this as the vice president said this bill could help as many as 24 million americans that s a lot of folks out there working people people who are working hard to make this country go to keep our economy strong and to keep our communities strong and most important of all to raise their children and keep their families strong in this new more dynamic economy where we re creating more jobs than we have in a very long time but where people are also feeling the sting of change it is more important than ever before to pass this legislation from the beginning this proposal has had enormous bipartisan support beside the strong bipartisan support in the senate which includes 30 democratic and 23 republican co sponsors this bill has been endorsed by groups representing doctors consumer groups businesses manufacturing groups and citizens to have the support of the independent insurance agents of america and the fact that the bill has passed the senate committee on labor and human resources unanimously seems to me to virtually guarantee that before long if congress will proceed in good faith this bill will be the law of the land and millions and millions of american families will be better off and our whole country will be stronger because of it i am very pleased that the senate leadership has committed to move this bill expeditiously when the lawmakers return from recess and i urge the congress to pass it now let me also say that i hope this will become a model for what we can do on other legislation i am far from giving up on passing a balanced budget plan on passing welfare reform on passing strong antiterrorism legislation if we can do this we can do those other things as well these are important national priorities and we ought to be dealing with them this year we shouldn t be deterred by the fact that it s an election year let me just make one other comment about an issue that has come up in the last couple of days that i think i need to make a statement about and that is the proposal to repeal the assault weapons ban that assault weapons ban was adopted after a very heated debate and a lot of controversy and a lot of pain in 1994 there were clearly members of congress who lost their seats because they voted to ban assault weapons and because they voted for the brady bill the ban covers 19 deadly kinds of assault weapons and their copies it didn t take any guns away from anybody it expressly protected hundreds of hunting and sporting weapons for the first time in federal law it was passed because america s law enforcement officials asked for it every single law enforcement organization in the country it was passed to try to help save the lives of law enforcement officials who have to go out on the streets and sometimes face gangs that are better armed than they are it was passed to save the lives of innocent people who often get caught in crossfires and i believe it would be deeply wrong for congress to repeal this assault weapons ban and in essence to take the side of the washington gun lobby over the interests of the law enforcement people of this country and the law abiding citizens of this country and i very much hope that it will not pass it will endanger law enforcement officials if it does pass it will cost more citizens their lives if it does pass the only people that will be benefitted are people who engage in illegal activity i believe congress should reject this extreme step we ought to keep the assault weapons ban and i would like to call upon the republican leadership in the congress to reconsider their decision to bring this to a vote it doesn t need to be voted on in the house or the senate and if it is passed i will veto it they know i intend to do that there is no point in distracting the american people or the congress from the important work before us let me close by saying that this is what we ought to be doing more of what we re doing here and what the senate has done with the kassebaum kennedy bill again i say that it s i rarely make announcements in this room or in this white house with people that are so reflective of main street america on an issue that would have such a profound impact on ordinary americans as this kassebaum kennedy bill president shaffer and to all the rest of you i thank you you have done a good thing for your country today thank you very much i hope not very much at all it s a long time until the election we don t need a work stoppage here we need to just keep on working we ll have several months for elections dem wjclinton21 4 93 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for being here in the wonderful botanical gardens i must say there s a lot i have to learn about this town as you can tell if you follow events from day to day and i didn t know that the botanical gardens was a branch of the congress until i showed up here just one more thing i m not responsible for i m glad to be here i also think that we should introduce a guest from another country who is here with us the environmental minister from australia roz kelly would you stand up we re glad to have you here al gore introduced katie mcginty and you were all good enough to clap and i don t know if you could hear through the clapping that her parents are here and what you may not know is that the real reason we appointed her is that she s one of 10 children and we d like to carry pennsylvania in 1996 we think that there s a significant likelihood now because of that i want to say a special word of thanks to the vice president for two things first of all for the wonderful trip that he has just concluded going to poland to represent our country on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the warsaw uprising and the wonderful remarks he gave in new york on the eve of that departure and the way that he represented the united states in poland and secondly notwithstanding what he said in the introduction which was true one of the reasons i did ask him to join the ticket is that he knew more about the subject of the environment than i did and i thought i had something to learn from him and i have learned a great deal and it has been an immensely rewarding experience and one which i hope will benefit the united states in many ways over the course of the next four years that s worth clapping for i agree with that don t you think it s a good thing to have this celebration in the springtime a time when our spirits are renewed and we are reminded by nature of new beginnings and forgotten beauty this has been an astonishingly beautiful spring in washington d c and something for which i will always be grateful my first springtime here that i see every morning as i go out and jog around in it and try to breath in it something that is a continuing challenge a little more than a week ago most americans celebrated holy days of freedom and renewal today we still nurture the faith that helps us to understand more clearly that we can do better this is a time of new beginnings a time when there is anguish and anxiety all around us but we still must yearn once again to succeed in our common purposes to reach our deepest goals for all of our differences i think there is an overwhelming determination to change our course to offer more opportunity to assume more responsibility to restore the larger american community and to achieve things that are larger than ourselves and more lasting than the present moment we seek to set our course by the star of age old values not short term expediencies to waste less in the present and provide more for the future to leave a legacy that keeps faith with those who left the earth to us that is the american spirit it moves us not only in great gatherings but also when we stand silently all alone in the presence only of nature and our creator if there is one commitment that defines our people it is our devotion to the rich and expansive land we have inherited from the first americans to the present day our people have lived in awe of the power the majesty and the beauty of the forest the rivers and the streams of america that love of the land which flows like a mighty current through this land and through our character bursts into service on the first earth day in 1970 when i traveled the country last year i saw and spoke of how much had been accomplished by the environmental movement since then and how much still remains to be done for all that has been done to protect the air and the water we haven t halted the destruction of wetlands at home and the rain forest abroad for all that has been learned we still struggle to comprehend such dangers to our planet s delicate environment as the shroud of greenhouse gases and the dangerous thinning of the ozone layer we haven t done nearly enough to protect our forest communities from the hazards such as lead poisoning which is believed to cause mental retardation learning disabilities and impaired growth unless we act and act now we face a future where our planet will be home to nine billion people within our lifetime but its capacity to support and sustain our lives will be very much diminished unless we act we face the extension of untold numbers of species that might support our livelihoods and provide medication to save our very lives unless we act now we face a future in which the sun may scorch us not warm us where the change of season may take on a dreadful new meaning and where our children s children will inherit a planet far less hospitable than the world in which we came of age i have a faith that we will act not from fear but from hope and through vision all across this country there is a deep understanding rooted in our religious heritage and renewed in the spirit of this time that the bounty of nature is not ours to waste it is a gift from god that we hold in trust for future generations preserving our heritage enhancing it and passing it along is a great purpose worthy of a great people if we seize the opportunity and shoulder the responsibility we can enrich the future and ennoble our own lives just as we yearn to come together as a people we yearn to move beyond the false choices that the last few years have imposed upon us for too long we have been told that we have to choose between the economy and the environment between our jobs between our obligations to our own people and our responsibilities to the future and to the rest of the world between public action and private economy i am here today in the hope that we can together take a different course of action to offer a new set of challenges to our people our environmental program is based on three principles first we think you can t have a healthy economy without a healthy environment we need not choose between breathing clean air and bringing home secure paychecks the fact is our environmental problems result not from robust growth but from reckless growth the fact is that only a prosperous society can have the confidence and the means to protect its environment and the fact is healthy communities and environmentally sound products and services do best in today s economic competition that s why our policies must protect our environment promote economic growth and provide millions of new high skill high wage jobs second we want to protect the environment at home and abroad in an era of global economics global epidemics and global environmental hazards a central challenge of our time is to promote our national interest in the context of its connectedness with the rest of the world we share our atmosphere our planet our destiny with all the peoples of this world and the policies i outline today will protect all of us because that is the only way we can protect any of us and third we must move beyond the antagonisms among business government and individual citizens the policies i outlined today are part of our effort to reinvent government to make it your partner and not your overseer to lead by example and not by bureaucratic fiat in the face of great challenges we need a government that not only guards against the worst in us but helps to bring out the best in us i know we can do this because our administration includes the best team of environmental policymakers who have ever served the united states the vice president interior secretary babbitt epa administrator browner and i hope that the epa will soon by the grace of congress be a cabinet level department and energy secretary o leary commerce secretary brown transportation secretary pena the agriculture secretary mike espy our environmental policy director katie mcginty and our science and technology advisor jack gibbons all of them share an unshakable commitment to a healthy environment a growing economy and a responsive government our economic plan will create new job opportunities and new business opportunities protecting our natural environment the reductions in the interest rates which we have seen already will free up tens of billions of dollars for responsible investments in this year alone the jobs package i have asked the congress to pass contains this is hardly been noticed but it actually contains green jobs from waste water treatment to energy efficiency to the restoration of our national parks to investments in new technologies designed to create the means by which we can solve the problems of the future and create more jobs for americans our long term strategy invests more in pollution prevention energy efficiency and solar energy in renewable energy and environmental restoration and water treatment all of which can be found in the five year budget that we have presented to the congress these investments will create tens of thousands of new jobs and they will save tens of thousands more because when we save energy and resources we will have more to invest in creating new jobs and providing better living standards today every other advanced nation is more energy efficient than we are that is one of the reasons why over the last couple of years for example the average german factory worker has come to make over 20 percent more than his american counterpart that german workers while having higher wages also have more secure and better health care that s because that economy uses one half the energy we do to produce the same amount of goods we can do better and we will i believe we can develop the know how to out conserve and out compete any one else on earth all over the world people are buying products that help them to protect their environment there s a 200 billion market today for environmental technologies and by the turn of the decade in the century it will be 300 billion let me just share one example with you something we all know and use and something some of us are still trying to learn how replace light bulbs long lasting energy saving light bulbs didn t even exist in 1985 now american companies sell over 500 million worth of these products with sales expected to reach 2 billion by 1995 and 10 billion by the year 2000 creating thousands of new jobs american scientists have taken the lead in developing these technologies and it s time to help our companies take the lead in bringing out products and services to market i ve asked the energy department the commerce department and the epa to assess current environmental technologies and create a strategic plan to give our companies the trade development promotional efforts and technical assistance they need to turn these advances into jobs here in america as well as to help promote a better environment america can maintain our lead in the world economy by taking the lead to preserve the world environment last year the nations of the world came together at the earth summit in rio to try to find a way to protect the miraculous diversity of plant and animal life all across the planet the biodiversity treaty which resulted had some flaws and we all knew that but instead of fixing them the united states walked away from the treaty that left us out of a treaty that is critically important not only to our future but to the future of the world and not only because of what it will do to preserve species but because of opportunities it offers for cutting edge companies whose research creates new medicines new products and new jobs again just one recent example makes the point a tree that was thought to have no value the pacific yew used to be bulldozed and burned now we know that that tree contains one of our most promising potential cures for ovarian cancer breast cancer and other forms of cancer we cannot walk away from challenges like those presented by the biodiversity treaty we must step up to them our administration has worked with business and environmental groups toward an agreement that protects both american interests and the world environment and today i am proud to announce the united states intention to sign the biodiversity treaty this is an example of what you can do by bringing business and environmentalists together instead of pitting them against each other we can move forward to protect critical natural resources and critical technologies i m also directing the state department to move ahead with our talks with other countries which have signed the convention so that the united states can move as quickly as possible toward ratification to learn more about where we stand in protecting all our biological resources here at home i m asking the interior department to create a national biological survey to help us protect endangered species and just as importantly to help the agricultural and biotechnical industries of our country identify new sources of food fiber and medication we also must take the lead in addressing the challenge of global warming that could make our planet and its climate less hospitable and more hostile to human life today i reaffirm my personal and announce our nation s commitment to reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases to their 1990 levels by the year 2000 i am instructing my administration to produce a costeffective plan by august that can continue the trend of reduced emission this must be a clarion call not for more bureaucracy or regulation or unnecessary costs but instead for american ingenuity and creativity to produce the best and most energy efficient technology after the cold war we face the challenge of helping russia achieve a healthy democracy a healthy economy and a healthy environment our russian aid package includes 38 million to clean up pollution and promote better uses of energy as with the full range of our investments in russia this is truly an investment not only in promoting our own values but in protecting our national security to protect the environment at home and abroad i am committed to a government that leads by example brings people together and brings out the best in everyone for too long our government did more to inflame environmental issues than to solve them different agencies pursued conflicting policies national leaders polarized people and problems wound up in the courts or in the streets instead of being solved we seek to bring a new spirit to these difficult issues three weeks ago in portland oregon we brought together business people timber workers and environmentalists from throughout the northwest to discuss how best to preserve jobs and to protect the old growth forests and the species which inhabit them people sat down in a conference room not a court room and in the words of archbishop thomas murphy of seattle we tried to find common ground for a common good at the close of that forest conference i asked my cabinet and our entire administration to begin work immediately to craft a balanced comprehensive long term policy that is also comprehensible before i ask our companies and our communities and our families to meet any challenge it seems to me we have to set that standard for the government the american people are entitled to know where the united states stands on this issue and many other issues and it is time to bring and end to the time when issues like this wind up in court and there are five different positions from the united states government itself we can never solve problems in that fashion we can only undermine the security and stability of people s lives that s one reason i am proud that yesterday the united states army announced its plan to clean up a large number of sites where we learned recently that chemical weapons materials may be buried in some places from as long ago as world war i working with the epa the army will clean up this problem safely and in an environmentally sound manner this is a legacy of america s efforts to defend our people and the community of free nations now we are taking steps to defend our people and our environment and the environment of the world in that same spirit i plan to sign an executive order requiring federal facilities that manufacture process or use toxic chemicals to comply with the federal right to know laws and publicly report what they are doing i might add that it is time that the united states government begins to live under the laws it makes for other people with this executive order i ask all federal facilities to set a voluntary goal to reducing their release of toxic pollutants by 50 percent by 1999 this will reduce toxic releases control costs associated with cleanups and promote clean technologies and it will help make our government what it should be a positive example for the rest of the country poor neighborhoods in our cities suffer most often from toxic pollution cleaning up the toxic wastes will create new jobs in these neighborhoods for those people and make them safer places to live to work and to do business today i am also signing an executive order that directs federal agencies to make preliminary changes in their purchasing policies to use fewer substances harmful to the ozone layer here too we must put our actions where are values are our government is a leading purchaser of goods and services and it s time to stop not only the waster of taxpayers money but the waste of our natural resources today i am signing an executive order which commits the federal government to buy thousands more american made vehicles using clean domestic fuels such as natural gas ethanol methanol and electric power this will reduce our demand for foreign oil reduce air pollution promote promising technologies promote american companies create american jobs and save american tax dollars to demonstrate my commitment to this issue energy secretary o leary is creating a task force led by the land commissioner of texas gary mauro who is here in the audience today who has headed a successful effort in his own state i hope we can do as well in america as they have done in texas in that same spirit i plan to sign an executive order committing every agency of the national government to do more than ever to buy and use recycled products this will provide a market for new technologies make better use of recycled materials and encourage the creation of new products that can be offered to the government to private companies and to consumers and again it will create jobs through the recycling process we must keep finding new ways to be a force for positive change for example the federal government is the largest purchaser of computer equipment in the world and computers are the fastest growing area of electricity use that s why i am also signing an executive order today requiring the federal government to purchase energy efficient computers we re going to expand the market for a technology where america pioneered and still leads the world and we ll save energy saving the taxpayers 40 million a year and set an example for our country and for the world for as long as i live and work in the white house i want americans to see it not only as a symbol of clean government but also a clean environment that s why i m announcing an energy and environmental audit of the white house we re going to identify what it takes to make the white house a model for efficiency and waste reduction it might mean fewer memos and less paper and then we re going to get the job done i want to make the white house a model for other federal agencies for state and local governments for business and for families in their homes before i ask you to do the best you can in your house i ought to make sure i m doing the best i can in my house i ask that all of us today reaffirm our willingness to assume responsibility for our common environment and to do it willingly hopefully and joyously we are challenged here today not so much to sacrifice as to celebrate and create i ve challenged americans who are young in years or young in spirit to offer their time and their talent to serve their communities and their country i ve asked them to help in teaching our children healing the sick policing our streets but equally important are efforts to protect our environment from our largest cities to our smallest towns to our suburbs our national service plan will ask thousands of american to do their part from leading recycling drives to preventing lead poisoning the challenge to shoulder responsibility and seize opportunity extends to each of us in business communities and homes in our own lives in our own ways each of us has something to offer to the work of cleaning up america s environment and each of us surely has something very personal to gain on a colder day in the middle of winter just three months ago a poet asked us to celebrate not only the marvelous diversity of our people but the miraculous bounty of our land here on the pulse of this new day maya angelou challenged us to look at the rock the river the tree your country now it is a season of new hope and new beginnings and as we look anew at our neighbors our children and our own communities as well as the world around us we must seize the possibilities inherent in this exhilarating moment to face our challenges to exercise our responsibilities and to rejoice in them thank you very much dem wjclinton21 5 00 bill_clinton thank you bill thank you for welcoming me back to hyde park and the roosevelt library i love coming here i m sorry i ve only come three times and al thank you for your wonderful introduction and to you and ginger thank you for your years of friendship he s very good at giving the credit to everybody else but the truth is it would be hard to think of a single american citizen who as a private citizen has had a more positive impact on the progress of american life in the last 25 years than al from i am delighted to see so many members of congress here members of the senate and the house the governor present and former members of the administration mack mclarty was chief of staff when we did four big dlc things we did the economic plan the brady bill family leave law and nafta somebody said mack the other day i saw a commentator hillary and i were watching the commentators you know if it hadn t been for his first two years bill clinton s approval ratings would be the highest ever recorded and hillary looked at me and she said if it hadn t been for the first two years when you made all the unpopular decisions the next six years would not have happened mayor brown we re glad to see you here and my mayor mayor williams thank you and thank all of you for being here and for what you re about to do franklin roosevelt said he often came back to hyde park because it gave him a chance to think quietly about the country as a whole and to see it in a long range perspective that s what you re being asked to do i ve often in quiet moments at the white house thought about my predecessors the ones that succeeded the ones who didn t why they did roosevelt had what justice holmes called a first class temperament a lot of personal courage a good mind and a great attitude he had a good time being president even in difficult times and he learned to have a good time in the midst of almost constant personal pain it s worth remembering that life s successes are a curious blend of what you make happen and what happens to you the gifts god gives you and what you do with them but today i want to focus on the fact that he was always interested in ideas i read the other day frances perkins wonderful book about her lifetime friendship with roosevelt you know she was the first woman in the cabinet she served as secretary of labor the entire time president roosevelt was in office she kept trying to quit and he wouldn t let her and if you read this book at the end you get some sense just in the curious wonderful relationship between these two remarkable people that he had some sense of his own mortality she kept trying to leave and he kept trying to get her to hold on to the end and then of course he died shortly after being reelected to his fourth term but through this whole thing you get this sense that from the time she was a young social worker and he was a young state senator when he still had full use of his physical facilities and played a pretty good game of golf i might add that they had this magical chemistry born of the fact that even though they were different people from different worlds in the beginning with very different positions on certain issues they both understood that public service was something that you weren t supposed to covet for the power but something you wanted to do so you could help other people and that ideas mattered so you come here today to think about where we are and where we ought to go and what the long range challenges are and al s already said a lot of what i want to say but i want to say some of the things he said and tie it back to what we did in new orleans in 1990 because i believe that thinking is a big and often underutilized part of success in public life and i think ideas matter let me say that sometime into my first term maybe 1995 or something a distinguished scholar whom i at that time had never met and who at that time was at syracuse i believe he s at harvard now named thomas north patterson no thomas patterson i can t remember what his middle name was anyway he wrote this article and he said contrary to the popular belief that most politicians are congenitally dishonest most people do what they say they re going to do when they get elected and if you look at the history of presidents most of them do what they say they re going to do and when they don t it s usually because something has really changed and we re glad they didn t we re glad franklin roosevelt didn t balance the budget because if he had under those circumstances it would have been worse abraham lincoln promised not to free the slaves we re glad he broke that commitment but by and large if you look at the whole history of american public life when a president runs for office and says vote for me this is what i want to do they pretty well do that or they at least get caught trying to do it and one of the things that really has meant the most to me of all the things i ve read and i ve read a lot a stuff i just as soon not have in the last eight years was patterson said that by 1995 our administration had already kept a higher percentage of its commitments to the american people than the previous five presidents and we had made more commitments and the point i want to make today to emphasize the importance of what it is you re about to do is that the reason that was possible is i had thought a lot about that what i would do and i had thought with many of you with bruce and will and rob and the whole dlc crowd and a lot of you that were going to these meetings back in the 80s and the 90s so that when i announced for president i did it not because i wanted to get out of what i was doing i was actually happier than i had ever been with my work as governor and with my situation at home in arkansas but because i thought something needed to be done and i had thought a lot about it and this new orleans declaration had a lot to do with it so the first thing i want to say to you is you cannot possibly overestimate the importance of what you re here to do if you do it in all seriousness let s just look the new orleans we met in new orleans in 1990 as al said the times were different the economy was bad the deficit was high the debt had exploded all the social conditions were worsening and washington seemed to be stuck in a kind of ideological trench warfare where the republicans said that government was the problem and we said that it was the solution and we always had to have a false choice you had to choose the economy or the environment you had to choose impoverishment or entitlement you had to choose business or labor and most of us many of the dlc people this is one of the reasons the dlc succeeded by the way is that we had people who were in politics in washington and out in the country and a lot of our people in washington spent a lot of time in the country and we realized that no one else in the world thought about things or experienced things in the way the washington media and political establishment talked about issues and that we didn t agree with all these false choices and so in new orleans 10 years ago we set out to say and to outline what we believed ought to be done our approach came to be known as the third way but basically it was rooted in common sense a common devotion to our party s oldest values and a common vision of the new era in which we were living in 1992 the american people gave us a chance to put our ideas in the action and we have done our best to do that working across party lines where possible and where bitter partisanship forced it going alone in new orleans let s just look at some of the things we said in new orleans as against some of the things that al has already mentioned this is what the new orleans declaration said we believe the democratic party s fundamental mission is to expand opportunity not government that economic growth is a prerequisite for expanding opportunity for everyone and that the way to build america s economic security is to invest in the skills and ingenuity of our people and to expand trade not restrict it now these ideas were all turned into action in the 93 economic plan in the 97 balanced budget act in the telecommunications act in our commitment to science and technological research in our education budget we doubled investment for education and training even as we were reducing the deficit and we emphasized results and proven strategies we very nearly opened the doors of college to all americans we had 300 trade agreements those ideas put into action have given us those 21 615 000 jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the highest home ownership ever and the longest economic expansion in history and the government is now continuing to shrink it is now the smallest it has been since 1958 we said we believe the purpose of social welfare is to bring the poor into this nation s economic mainstream not to maintain them independent that idea turned into action through the expansion of the earned income tax credit the vice president s empowerment zone program and welfare reform has given us the smallest welfare rolls in absolute numbers in 32 years a 20 year low in the poverty rate the lowest single parent household poverty rate in 46 years while we fought and succeeded in maintaining health and nutrition benefits for poor children and increasing our investment in child care and transportation for lower income workers we said we believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals not explaining away their behavior that idea was turned into action through the crime bill which gave us 100 000 police assault weapons ban and through the passage of the brady law which has kept a half a million felons fugitives and stalkers from getting handguns that s given us the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest homicide rate in 30 years and a 35 percent reduction in gun crime since 1993 we said we believe in the politics of inclusion in the protection of civil rights and the broad movement of minorities into the american economic and cultural mainstream that idea turned into action has given us the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded record numbers of minority owned businesses vigorous enforcement of civil rights and the widest participation of minorities in the federal government at high levels and the federal judiciary in american history we said we believe in the imperative of work and the importance of family i could give you lots of examples of that but if you just take the family and medical leave law the first bill i signed vetoed by the previous administration 21 million plus americans have taken some time off when a baby is born or a parent is sick and they said it would wreck the economy well 21 million families are stronger and so is the american economy the idea was right in the new orleans declaration we said we believe american citizenship entails responsibility as well as rights and we mean to ask citizens to give something back to their community that idea turned into action has led to a whole series of remarkable partnerships the welfare to work partnership for example has led to 12 000 companies to voluntarily commit to hire now something like 400 000 people off the welfare rolls the vice president s partnership with the auto companies and the auto workers has led to this whole effort to develop the next generation vehicle which already has prototypes that will be on the market within two years 60 70 80 miles a gallon the partnership we had with the entertainment industry led to the passage of the v chip requirement and rating systems for movies television programs and video games and most of all of course it led to americorps which now has permitted over 150 000 young americans to serve in their communities we had more people in americorps in five years than the peace corps did in its first 20 years of existence because of the idea that the dlc relentlessly advanced we said we believed the u s must remain energetically engaged in the worldwide struggle for individual liberty human rights and prosperity not retreat from the world that idea turned into action has given us a stronger and expanded nato new initiatives against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction progress on peace in northern ireland and the middle east forceful stands against ethnic cleansing in bosnia and kosovo and new initiatives to expand trade and advance democracy in africa the caribbean basin latin america and the asian pacific region in short because of the work done in new orleans and the fact that the american people gave us a chance two years later to test it we have proven that ideas matter and that for the decade of the 90s our ideas were the right ones they have put the democratic party at the vital center of american life and inspired the rise of new progressive governments throughout europe and the industrialized world indeed i m going to be meeting with many of these leaders next month in berlin people all over the world now who have seen what happened here taken ideas seriously and want to see what they can do to lift their people and make them a part of the new information age of globalization and most important of all these ideas put into action have brought our country into a moment of unparalleled prosperity and promise now i think we have a rare opportunity to identify and move on the big long term challenges the country faces in the new century and i think the dlc to borrow a little of your own medicine has both the opportunity and the responsibility to put forth a declaration here which will guide our party and should guide our nation for the next 10 years that s your task what is the new democratic agenda for the 21st century here s what i think it ought to say first we will keep the economy strong by paying down the debt maintaining our lead in science and technology and extending our economic benefits to people and places left behind opening new markets and closing the investment and digital divide second we will lift up all working families out of poverty ending child poverty by increasing the eitc the minimum wage our support for child care housing and transportation and for responsible fatherhood third we will make sure every child starts school ready to learn graduates ready to succeed has the chance to go to college by investing more in education and demanding more of all the participants in our education process and by opening college access to everyone by making tuition deductible fourth we will enable americans to succeed at work and at home with more support for child care expanding opportunity for health care coverage passing a patients bill of rights and providing middle class families tax relief to educate their kids take care of them through child care take care of their parents if they need long term care fifth we will make america the safest big nation on earth with more police more prevention more prosecutors and more effective measures to keep guns away from children and criminals sixth we will meet the challenge of the aging of america by extending the life of social security strengthening and modernizing medicare with a prescription drug benefit and providing a tax cut for long term care and helping working families to establish their own retirement accounts so that more americans have a chance to create wealth next we will reverse the course of climate change while enhancing rather than eroding economic growth with new technologies and new sources of alternative energy let me just say when i went back and read the new orleans declaration the one thing i wish we d made more of is the environment because we have now proved you can growth the economy and improve the environment and this is a much more important issue now than it was 10 years ago because of the global impacts of climate change we must address this every member of congress here will tell you that a huge portion of decision makers in our country and throughout the world and most troubling in some of the biggest developing nations still believe you cannot have economic growth unless you pour more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere just like these big ideas helped us back in 1990 there is nothing so dangerous as for a people to be in the grip of a big idea that is no longer true it was once true that you had to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to grow the economy to build a middle class make a country rich it is not true anymore and there are all kinds of manifestations of this the assault that the other party is making on my decision to set aside the roadless acres in the national forests the audubon society says it s the most important conservation measure in the last 50 years it s just a i say that not the applause is nice but that s not the point i m trying to make here the point i m trying to make is that good people will continue to make bad decisions if they re in the grip of a wrong idea this is not simply a case of interest groups fighting each other this is really a question of whether we have honestly come to terms with what the facts are what the evidence shows about the way economies can and indeed should work and there s no way in the world we ll be able to convince our friends in india or china which over the next 30 years will become bigger emitters of greenhouse gases than we are that they can take a different path to development and that we re not trying to keep them poor unless we can demonstrate that we have let this idea go and that we have evidence that a different way will work you can t expect any of these members of congress who come from rural districts that have a lot of poor people or that rely on agriculture to take different approaches unless there is a specific clear meaningful alternative that they can embrace so i m sort of off the script here but this is a big deal we need more of our people every one of our people we need to know what the facts are here we need to know what can we really get out of automobile and truck mileage how realistic is it to have alternative sources of fuel what can you get if you build all new houses and office buildings with glass that lets in more heat and light lets in more light and keeps out more heat and cold we need to know these things this is something that most of you normally wouldn t think of as something that an elected official needs to know we need to know this this is a huge huge issue and we will not be able to convince either our own people or even more importantly developing countries who are our partners around the world unless we have the evidence in hand and we understand the argument next we will keep working to build one america at home to make a strength of our diversity so that other nations can be inspired to overcome their own ethnic and religious tensions for me that means passing the employment nondiscrimination act the hate crimes bill and expanding national service i meet with these americorps kids everywhere i go and the thing they say over and over and over again is that this gave me a chance to see how different people live to see how much we have in common as human beings and understand just what it means to be an american citizen at the dawn of a new century and last we will continue to lead the world away from terror weapons of mass destruction and destructive ethnic racial and religious conflicts toward greater cooperation and shared peace and prosperity that s what this vote about china is all about yes it s a good economic deal china has agreed to open its markets i just stopped when i got out of the airplane here where i drove up here there were a few hundred people at the airport so i went over and shook hands and said hello to all the children and this guy says you really think this china thing is a good deal i said yes it is i do and he said why and i said well in the first place we ve been calling it a trade agreement and it isn t i said you know when i made the agreement with mexico and canada it was a trade agreement so i got a few things and i had to give up a few things i said this is a membership agreement all we give them is membership and they do all the market opening and that s their dues for membership in this world organization that s why in narrow self interested terms it s a 100 to nothing deal not only from the united states but for anybody else who lets the chinese votes to let the chinese into the wto but even though for me the economic choice is clear i have to tell you far far more important to me are the moral and national security arguments i looked at all those kids in that crowd today i was shaking hands with and i was reminded again that we fought three wars in asia in the last half of the 20th century and that we have a chance to build a different future not a guarantee but a chance yes china is still a one party state restricting rights of free speech and religious expression doing things from time to time that frustrate us and even anger us but by forcing china to slash subsidies and tariffs that protect inefficient industries which the communist party has long used to exercise day to day control by letting our high tech companies in to bring the internet and the information revolution to china we will be unleashing forces that no totalitarian operation rooted in the last century s industrial society can control two years ago there were 2 million internet users in china last year there were 9 million this year there are something over 20 million at some point there will be over 100 million and at some point some threshold that no one can identify with precision will be crossed and it will be a very different world and i think it is worth also pointing out that the more china operates within rule based systems with us and with other countries the more likely they are to see the benefit of the rule of law and the more likely that benefit is to flow down to ordinary people in those 900 000 villages where they re already electing their mayors and in other places so this is very important i think it is quite interesting that the people who hope we will beat this next week in china are the ultraconservatives in the military and the state owned industries and quite interesting that people who have been persecuted in china and other places by and large want us to adopt this want us to vote yes on pntr martin lee the head of the democracy movement in hong kong came all the way over here to ask congress to vote for this this is a man who cannot himself go to china a man who has never met zhu rongji a man who is still considered persona non grata but he said to me he said you know we ve got to back the reformers in china we ve got to get them into a system where there is rule of law we have got to move this way this is the next big step all the human rights activists in america are i think he said blinded by their opposition to things that have happened in the past and may be happening now instead of thinking about what is most likely to change china in the future the new president of taiwan supports us letting china into the wto and america extending pntr and yesterday the dalai lama a man who has undergone literally decades of frustration in his dealings with china strongly endorsed pntr with china so this is a big deal to me beyond the obvious economic benefits which make it easier for some members and others to vote for because of the economic makeup of their districts you have to understand that by far the bigger issue is what can we do to promote human rights what can we do to promote the rule of law what can we do to minimize the chances that there will be another war in asia in our lifetime or in our children s lifetime to me that is what is at issue so that s my pitch here what you re about to do is really important i ve told you the kinds of things that i hope you ll do but those of you out here listening to me will have a bigger role than me in the next 10 years of america if you just remember what i did with that new orleans declaration today and every specific thing that i could cite to you that grew right out of that it really matters whether you think and whether you put your feelings into organized fashion and whether that then organizes the process for developing specific policies the new orleans declaration is largely responsible for the success we have enjoyed in the last eight years because it gave us a platform on which to stand and a framework from which to work you ve got a lot of really creative people here i could cite a thousand examples but i want to just mention two or three to give you an illustration of how we got started partly on what we did you remember franklin roosevelt one of the greatest successes of his new deal was that he essentially took social welfare progress that had been made in various states and went national with it especially in new york which is one way frances perkins got to be secretary of labor but marc pacheco back there from massachusetts the state senator sponsored a program to give medical students and other health professionals academic credit for providing primary and preventive health services to underserved people should we do more in our public health clinics like that mayor webb negotiated a contract with the teachers unions in his city to give an incentive to teachers to improve academic performance michael thurmond his georgia labor commission has taken absent fathers who weren t supporting their children and giving them training and jobs and values of responsible fatherhood and now 84 percent of those fathers are working and supporting their children that s a huge deal shouldn t we go national with that these are the kinds of things that i hope you will think about there s just one other thing i want to say i didn t do this by myself if it hadn t been for the members of congress here who have helped me i couldn t have done it if it hadn t been for the members of the administration past and present i couldn t have done it if it hadn t been for the dlc with its constant idea machine and al from constantly harping on me not to abandon the reformist path i couldn t have done it if it hadn t been for al gore i couldn t have done it and i just want to i have said this in other places but i have i believe i have a good grasp on the institution of the vice presidency and i can tell you it is my judgment that he has had far more positive impact in practical ways on the way the american people live as vice president than any other person as vice president in the history of the nation by a good long ways he managed the empowerment zones program he managed our administration s position on the telecommunications act which had two important features one it was pro competition we didn t give into the monopoly forces and there are now hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been created mostly in companies that didn t even exist in 1996 because we stood firm for competition and we got the e rate which is now providing 2 2 billion a year so that poor schools and libraries and hospitals can hook up to the internet second he managed our positions many of them on the environment including the partnership for new generation vehicles which i mentioned and the climate change third he ran the rigo program which many of you were involved in which in addition to reducing the size of government has dramatically improved the performance of many agencies expanding health care for children and parents of working families and the mental health parity issue and the fatherhood initiative he cast the deciding vote on the economic plan and on the gun safety legislation in the senate and on every tough decision i had to make from haiti to bosnia to kosovo to loaning money to mexico now there was a winner the day i made that decision there was a poll that said by 81 15 the people didn t want me to do it to taking on the gun issue and tobacco issue to lobbying for nasa at the beginning and now all the calls he s made on china pntr at the end he s been there so i wanted to say that because we did this together and that s the last thought i ll leave you with roosevelt loved ideas had good ideas but he had a first class temperament and he had a good time and he enjoyed working with people so you guys have got to keep working together we ve got to get behind all of our crowd we ve got to work to win elections but afterward remember this document is a big deal some day somebody will write a whole book on how this new orleans declaration was the foundation of the success of the last eight years that s what what you do at hyde park ought to be and if you do it you will change america forever for the better and what happens in 2000 fundamentally is just as important as what happened in 92 and 96 because what a country does with its prosperity is just as stern a test of its character and vision and wisdom as what it does when its back is against the wall i ve done everything i could to turn the ship of state around now you ve got to make sure that it keeps sailing in the right direction thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton21 5 04 bill_clinton thank you thank you thank you thank you very much thank you very much i was looking at this crowd and listening to the warm welcome thinking how kind and generous bob dole is to arrange for 90 of my total vote in kansas to come here and listen to me speak today i m very grateful for that i d like to thank the chancellor and all the people at the university and especially i d like to thank coach bill self and the basketball team for showing up and giving me a jersey i m a huge basketball fan and i thought you did very well this year i thank you governor kathleen sebelius for being here and former congressman slattery i have a lot of friends in this room today janet worked for me in the white house then worked here at ku and hannah a 1992 graduate is my personal assistant in harlem in new york city today so i thank her for coming with me and i just want to say something i m tired of being bob dole s straight man i used to be funny before i was president and nobody would let me tell jokes anymore they said you know it s not presidential and most of your jokes are not repeatable and you can t do this anymore so anyway i just finished this book on my life it was awful it s hard enough living it the first time the second time was agony but i kept this little oral history when i was president once a month this great historian who had been a friend of mine since we were boys would come in and we would visit and after we got waxed in the 94 election and senator dole became the majority leader and gingrich became the speaker the truth is dole was with me more than gingrich half the time but we all covered it up at the time because you know how politicians do so they were just killing me one day about something and i was out in the country and a 10 year old kid came up to me and i had a record of this a 10 year old kid came up to me and he said congress is giving you a tough time isn t it i said yes he said i bet it s hard to find a joke you can tell in public when you re president isn t it pretty insightful kid i said it is it is he said you want one i said sure he said being president with this congress is like standing in the middle of a cemetery there s a lot of people under you but nobody is listening that was one smart kid one of the things that i used to tell people all the time about all this partisanship in washington i m going to actually address it seriously in a moment but one reason people are so mean to each other in washington today is they re all sleep deprived they re exhausted because it costs so much money to run for office they got to go out every night and raise money go home every weekend they re living on an airplane you think you won t get into bad humor you ought to try it sometime i used to tell everybody it was a lot easier for me to stay in a positive frame of mind when i was president because i worked above the store i lived above the store all i had to do was come downstairs and go to work i didn t have an hour long commute i didn t have to fly someplace else every weekend and they re irritable all the time and it gave all these opportunities for misunderstanding and in our campaign together senator dole s and mine my last stop was in south dakota where we had a very close senate race it was interesting the guy i campaigned for won and bob beat me anyway up there but anyway i went there and i was trying to explain how there was so much misunderstanding in washington and i said it reminded me of the young politician that went up to a farmer s fence and said that he wanted to come ask for his vote but he saw the dog in the yard and he said does your dog bite and he said no so he climbed the fence and came over and the dog bit him and he said i thought you said your dog didn t bite he said son that ain t my dog we have those things like that happen in washington all the time because they re sleep deprived so tell all your politicians to get more sleep i want to say something seriously now you know bob dole and i flubbed up on 60 minutes because we wouldn t be mean enough to each other that s the truth they wanted us to say things we didn t believe they wanted us to call each other names they wanted us to check our brains at the tv studio and smart out these 10 or 15 second sound bytes that make good television and make sparks fly and nobody who watched us would have learned a thing they would have no idea where we disagreed no idea of where we agreed and no idea what our reasons were and maybe it s just intrinsically unsuited what we believe to the modern television airline but that s the modern television age but that s the truth they kept saying can t you say this can t you say that can t you say the other thing once or twice we got on each other s nerves and we worried about it for 24 hours afterward now i want to talk about that it is true that i have always admired senator dole after the sacrifice he made for this country in world war ii he could have been forgiven if he never hit another lick for his country he d already done what he should have done and then some a hundred times over but instead he gave another nearly 50 years to public service and it is true that he is a convicted conservative republican and i am a convicted democrat and i m maybe i got 95 of my voters here today but i want to talk about why we work together and when we don t and i want you to think about it first it really is partly a matter of psychology by temperament and experience as i ve heard bob say many times in politics there are talkers and there are doers now i never met a politician that didn t like to talk and we do but we always kept score by what we did not but what we said and if you look at it that way you work hard you get the job done you spread the credit around then you go on to the next problem i think that s very very important so how come it doesn t happen more often or when it does you don t see it back in 1996 on the pbs program frontline there was a documentary about the clinton dole race in which a writer for the new yorker magazine rick hertzberg said the following thing i think he was criticizing us but i couldn t be sure he said of senator dole and me he said they re both people who would rather settle something they would rather come to an agreement than have the battle of armageddon that makes them alike in certain ways now some people think compromise is bad in the 1960s when there was so much controversy in america over the vietnam war most of the haters in american politics were on the left and i was often very uncomfortable because i didn t agree with our policy either but a lot of the people who agreed with me thought there was something wrong with our leaders i didn t i don t think there s something wrong with you if you just got a wrong attitude or just make a mistake and i never liked all that harsh rhetoric i don t think president johnson ever wanted one person to die who didn t have to die i don t think he ever wanted anything but what he thought was right and best for america now i saw the other day mr grover norquist who organizes a lot of the ultraconservative interest groups once a week in washington said i hate to tell governor sebelius this he said his main goal was to bring the same bitter partisanship that exists in washington to every state capitol in america i think that s a bad idea and i m not running for anything so i can say what i think now the good news about not being president is you can say what you think and the bad news is no one cares anymore so but i can do that listen to what senator dole talked about and what you applauded for he worked with senator moynahan on social security with senator mcgovern on food stamps he supported voting rights and supported its extension the voting rights act consistently for 25 years he was one of the major movers behind the americans with disabilities act one of the most important pieces of social legislation since world war ii when 9 11 happened we got together and raised 110 million with the first college as you heard the first university contributions we got from ku but we raised 110 million to pay for a college scholarship for the children and family members of every person killed or disabled and when we talked about it one of the things that we told the people who talked to us about helping was that we would only do it if these scholarships were available not simply to the american families who were victims but for those from 70 other countries who were killed in the united states because they came here looking for the american dream and one of the reasons that i asked senator dole to head the international commission on missing persons in the former yugoslavia is that in an age when there is so much divisiveness and so much ethnic and religious and animosity he believes that people in kansas and people in kosovo have more in common than what separates them and i think that is very important so here s what i want to say whether you re a republican or a democrat whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative whether you re still trying to make up your mind i want to start with an outline of where i think the world is and why i think there s so much partisanship today and what i want to challenge you to do is not to agree with me but to decide to think the most important thing you can get out of a university education is not any particular set of information or skills it is the ability to think to reason and then then you can spend the rest of your life doing what bob and i did and being frustrated by it because once you get to where you can think you realize you re not smart enough to understand everything and you spend your whole life searching for some way to make sure that your mind and your heart and your spirit are all in the same place at the same time going in the same direction but first you have to understand now here s my take on where we are i don t ask you to agree with me but if you don t ask yourself what you think when our country was founded the founding fathers said they pledged their lives their fortunes their sacred honor to an eternal mission what was it to form a more perfect union now there are two or three ideas that are important there i ll just mention two of them one is the idea of union the only reason you unite is because you need somebody else right the only purpose for having a union is that you can do more with somebody else than you can do all by yourself or with just your crowd the second and equally important thing which accounts for a lot of the fights i ve had in my political life is our framers were essentially both deeply religious and deeply influenced by the scientific revolution and the rationalism of the 18th century they did not say form a perfect union they said form a more perfect union what does that mean that means we will never be perfect because there will always be problems as long as humans occupy the earth and because nobody is smart enough to have the whole truth now you may not agree with that you may believe some people do have the whole truth and therefore they have a right to impose that truth on everybody else but that s not what the framers believed they didn t say we re going to form a perfect union they said our kids will be able to have a union more perfect than ours and our grandchildren more perfect again and their grandchildren more perfect again and we will never achieve perfection and so we set up this government that had both enough power to do what people needed to do to have a union and enough protection from power to guarantee that the government could never become the primary force in our lives that people could pursue their private lives their personal lives build their families say what was on their mind worship god as they please or if they didn t please that s the way it was set up now when we have understood what our mission was we have enjoyed a fairly high level of bipartisanship even though there have been great fights and great disagreements at the end of world war ii with the bitter memory of our withdrawal from the world after world war i and what happened afterward the depression and the second world war and with the looming threat of the soviet union and the beginning of the cold war and with the fresh evidence of the sacrifice of people like bob dole and over 400 000 americans who never came home the united states for the first time decided that we must be permanently involved in the world on the side of freedom in 1989 over 40 years afterward when the berlin wall fell and we saw all that joyous celebration it fell in no small measure because every president from harry truman to george bush believed that the united states had a mission of freedom in the world and that was part of our more perfect union and we could not be safe at home unless we tried to be a force for good around the world did we make mistakes from time to time i think we did but as i said when i went to vietnam with our ambassador pete peterson who was a pow there for six and a half years i told the leaders i said you know pete was in prison here for six and a half years and i was on the other side but we had one thing in common we both thought we were doing what was right for freedom don t you ever think the americans who came here wanted to colonize vietnam just like we don t want to colonize iraq we don t go places to control them we go places to try to help people become free now i say that to try to drive this point home you may agree or disagree with our policy in iraq you may think for example we should have put more emphasis in afghanistan where the al qaeda are because they re the ones that caused 9 11 but wait wait wait this is thinking time not cheering time you can cheer later if you like it but think the point i wish to make is this you should have disagreements with your leaders and your colleagues but if it becomes immediately a question of questioning people s motives and if immediately you decide that somebody who sees a whole new situation differently than you must be a bad person and somehow twisted inside we are not going to get very far in forming a more perfect union now why does it happen here s why because at the end of the cold war the paradigm the way we looked at the world evaporated and we had to create a new one it was my great good fortune but also challenge to become the first president to serve my entire term in the post cold war era to be the first president of the 21st century as well as the last president of the 20th century america is in one of those periods where we are trying to come to grips with fundamental questions how are we going to relate to globalization how are we going to relate to the global threat on terror what is the role of government in our lives now what are we to make of all this new diversity is it going to the religious and racial and ethnic diversity is it going to make us more fractured or will it make us more interesting and more unified these are big big questions when the cold war was over and the industrial age began to be replaced by an information age ever more globalized we changed the way we work the way we live the way we relate to each other and certainly the way we relate to the rest of the world in ways that are marvelous and ways that are frightening the intense political conflict that has marked the last 10 years or so is in large measure a result of that the democratic party had to reform itself because we were used to being in power at a time when we wanted to preserve and extend the benefits of social justice civil rights social security health care we weren t used to the conditions i found in 1992 a decrepit economy high crime big questions to face about how we were going to relate to the rest of the world the republican party thought government was supposed to protect us in the cold war and old fashioned conservatives including most of the governors that i served with in my long tenure define conservatism thus they were fiscally conservative they thought other things being equal the private sector should be given a chance to solve problems before the government did and that if the government had to be brought in other things being equal we should try to solve these problems at the state and local government before the federal government came in that was the definition of a conservative for almost all my life now slowly over the last 20 years a bitter anti government anti tax feeling combined with the religious right has essentially defined government differently and so now you wind up with i mean i sound like calvin coolidge compared to these guys running things in washington now and the question of deficits and things like that but it s important for you to understand that both parties are trying to build one slightly right of center one slightly left of center a new consensus that actually responds to the challenges of the 21st century world and as long as we don t have that extremists will have more influence than they ought to and politics will be more bitter than it should be now that s my explanation there is another explanation for the washington i found which is the story of the guy that was walking along the grand canyon you know this story nice man is walking along the side of the grand canyon slips off and is falling to certain death and he sees this twig sticking out of the canyon and grabs it and it breaks his fall and then he sees the roots start to come out of the side and he knows he s done for and he says god why me i m a good man i worked hard paid taxes all my life i m a really good man why me this thunderous voice comes out of heaven and says son there s just something about you i don t like now if you don t believe in explanations like that then you have to ask yourself why is this happening i ll give you some evidence arguably the most partisan time in american history in terms of personal attacks before the last 10 years was in the early republic go back and read what thomas jefferson and john adams and their supporters said about each other those guys started this country off and quit talking for 20 years because they were so mean why because after george washington left the scene who knew what america meant we didn t have a national economy were we going to build one we didn t have a national legal system were we going to have one and why the matter was in doubt the partisanship raged so instead of moaning about this or throwing up your hands about this let s get about the business at hand how should we look at the 21st century world how can we develop a consensus that we can then have a republican and a democratic response to that would be civilized and lead to positive constructive honorable compromise this is the best i can do i believe we live in an age normally referred to as globalization sometimes referred to as the global information society i prefer the term interdependence because it goes far beyond economics there s good and bad in it i have a cousin that lives in the hills of northwest arkansas that plays chess over the internet with a guy in australia twice a week they take turns figuring out who s got to stay up late on the other hand 9 11 was a testimony to the power of inter dependence don t you agree the al qaida what did they do they used open borders easy travel easy access to information and technology to turn an airplane into a weapon of mass destruction to murder 3 100 people nearly in washington pennsylvania and new york from 70 countries it s a story of global inter dependence the dark side of global inter dependence when i was president 30 of the economic growth that we had came from trade when i was president senator dole was always pushing me until we got it right to end the ethnic slaughter in bosnia a hundred years ago we wouldn t have known how to find bosnia on a map but it offended us because we had to watch those people being killed just because they were muslims being slaughtered and because we wanted europe to be united and peaceful and democratic for the first time in history to make the cold war all worthwhile so then we would be united we d be working together we d be fighting the problems of the rest of the world together that too is inter dependence so if it can be positive or negative it s obvious what we ought to be doing if you agree with me we need a strategy that builds up the positive and beats down the negative we need to recognize that inter dependence is inherently an unstable condition and we need to move the world toward a more integrated global community defined by three things shared benefits shared responsibilities and shared values that s what i believe now here s the point i want to make this may seem simple to you but if everybody thought that way then in every area there would be a slightly liberal or a slightly conservative way to do that and then we would have all these debates and in all probability as free discussion usually does it would lead to the best possible outcome i ll just give you an example in my view there are five big issues here for whatever it s worth number one we have to have a strategy to fight the new security threats of terror and weapons of mass destruction that is both offensive and defensive what s the best way to have homeland defense if you have limited amount of money if you think about it like this then you can say well i think what we should do is triple or quadruple the number of containers we re checking at the ports and airports for biological or chemical weapons or somebody else can say no i think we should be reinforcing the bridges or putting guards outside the electrical plants that have nuclear power or whatever you think but the point is if you re focused on it that way you can focus on homeland defense what s the best way to pursue an offensive strategy is it to go to iraq and establish a beach head of freedom in the middle east or is it to stay in afghanistan and root out the al qaida and then turn your attention to the rest of the world but once you re focused on it you can have a civilized debate and if you both agree on the issue then just because somebody has got a different idea than you do about how to handle it you don t think there s something wrong with them so that s the first thing second thing we have to do is to have a strategy to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists now why do i say that besides the fact that i m a democrat why would i say that why should every american think that even people that don t believe in social programs because if you believe the world is inter dependent and you cannot kill occupy or imprison all your actual or potential adversaries sooner or later you have to make a deal that s what politics is if there s a factual matter that s what i talked until i was blue in the face in the middle east about they walked away from that peace deal in 2000 it was the dumbest thing i ve ever seen in my life all we ve got now is the middle east is not a bit less inter dependent today than it was when we made seven years of progress toward peace we got 3 000 dead palestinians about 9200 dead i mean 920 dead israelis they re no less inter dependent nothing has changed except more people are dead and now more people are mad and there s less trust and it s harder to deal with it but they are not a bit less inter dependent so you remember that if you re in any environment in life that you don t have total control over you have to make a deal that s what politics is and that s why compromise is honorable not dishonorable so anyway so how would you go about making a world with more friends than fewer enemies well first of all you gotta realize that half the people that live on earth aren t part of this globalized economy that works on earth half the people live on less than 2 a day of the 6 billion people on earth 1 billion live on less than 1 a day a billion and a half people never get a clean glass of water a billion people go to bed hungry every night 10 million kids die of preventable childhood diseases and one in four deaths every year on earth now come from aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them are little children who never got a single clean glass of water in their lives so for a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense and homeland defense and i do mean tiny we could double what we spend to help put all the children in the world who aren t in school in school to pay our fair share of the fight against the world s diseases and to do these other things and to give you an example after 9 11 i think we increased i believe this is right i think we increased defense and homeland defense 60 something billion dollars in one year we could double our assistance programs in these other areas double them for about 10 or 12 in a budget that must now be nearly 2 trillion i don t know what it is i haven t looked at it i don t have to look at it anymore so i don t but i think that s about what it is so you got to have a strategy for terror a strategy for more friends the third thing i think is to find more ways to cooperate institutionally this is a big challenge for america because we re going through a period in history when we have unrivalled military economic and political power so every time we make a deal with anybody to do anything we re giving up some of our freedom of action maybe a good deal for them not a good deal for us because most of the time we can do whatever we please the problem is we will not be the only military economic and political superpower forever if present growth rates continue china india and the european union will equal or surpass the united states sometime in the 21st century just because of their size they may not ever have to reach the per capita income we do to have greater output so i think we should do that but if you believe that then it puts a whole different cast on the debates you hear today over putting up missile defense getting rid of the antiballistic missile treaty should we be part of the comprehensive treaty should we be part of the criminal court should we be part of the kyoto climate change accord and i say that i didn t join there s one i didn t join i didn t join the land mine treaty because they wrote it in a way that was absolutely hostile to the united states and we have the finest record of any country in the world in promoting de mining in the last 15 years and it had enormous bipartisan support bob supported it and so i m not saying we can join every treaty but i m saying we should have a preference for being part of every conceivable network that will bring people together because i can tell you something it s just like any club you belong to any organization you belong to it builds the habit of working with other people and the more you re in the habit of believing that if you stay on the team good things will happen as compared to if you get off the team the more likely we are to find peace and resolution to the problems of the 21st century so i think that s very very important and now i want to make just two more points so terror more friends more cooperation fourth thing is we have to keep making america better a lot of our influence in the world comes not from the size of our military or our arsenal of weapons but from the power of our example one of the schools that was destroyed in new york city on september 11th 2001 the children had to leave and go meet in a temporary facility so hillary and i went to this school to see these kids elementary school kid 600 kids from over 80 different national racial and ethnic groups one school if we can prove that freedom brings mutual respect and that people can be proud of their heritage and proud of their religion and proud of everything that s special and still bound together in a more perfect union that will do as much to undermine the long term appeal of terror as anything else we can do just continuing to prove america works now last thing i want to say is this i don t want you to think i m flaky here but i believe this like i said no consequences i don t really care what you think but anyway none of this will happen until we move the american people s way of thinking about other people forward and let me explain what i mean by that you guys love your basketball team i like the arkansas razorbacks we re all pulling for different people in the nba playoffs we have wars you know who you re for you got over 600 people from kansas in iraq today putting their lives on the line we think in categories that are oppositional and we have to organize ourselves in little boxes i see a man i see a woman i see somebody that s white i see somebody that s black i see somebody that s brown all right i see a baptist a catholic a jew a muslim a buddhist a sikh i mean if we couldn t put ourselves in boxes nobody could function you think about how many university courses are designed to giving people more boxes to think with you got this amorphous reality out there and the person with a largest number of boxes who can keep them all straight is called a genius right that s all true but at some point it has to become irrelevant the whole story of humanity is a story of forming a more perfect union ever since our fore bearers stood up on the african savanna something over 100 000 years ago they learned to relate to other people first they were in clans then larger tribes then villages and they would come into contact with wider and wider circles of people that had different views and felt threatened and there would be fighting and killing but sooner or later before they destroyed the human race they d find a way to get along in the 20th century our weapons were so powerful we nearly got it wrong but we escaped we gave in to neither the tyranny of hitler or the tyranny of communism or the power of our weapons to destroy we threaded a big needle there and everybody that made a contribution deserves our gratitude but the point i want to make is that if you believe to go back to the founders that our job is to form a more perfect union and nobody has got the whole truth then everybody s got a contribution to make and i think america if we re ever going to truly defeat terror without changing the character of our own country or compromising the future of our children has got to not only say okay i want to shoulder my responsibilities i want to create my share of opportunities but we have to find a way to define the future in terms of a humanity that goes beyond our country that goes beyond any particular race that goes beyond any particular religion we should continue to judge people based on what they do and if they persist in terror we should punish them we should go to war we should use military power we should do whatever we have to do i m not suggesting we act like it doesn t matter what you do it matters a great deal what you do but we have to be able to say to the world we want a home for every peaceable person we like our faith we like our e dem wjclinton21 5 97 bill_clinton thank you very much senator kerrey thank you so much for what you said i certainly hope someone taped that i may need it later thank you senator torricelli for your tireless efforts your great energy i thank all the other senators who are here from our party i have seen senators harkin dodd mikulski breaux and rockefeller i m sure i ve missed someone who else is here senator graham bryan bumpers is not here is he dale bumpers came to a fundraiser my senator is here give him a hand that s great anyway i want to say a special word of appreciation to senator daschle who took on the leadership of our party and the senate at a difficult time and i think that every single member of the united states senate would have to say that he has performed with incredible skill and discipline and leadership and humanity and we are very grateful to him ladies and gentlemen i thank you for being here tonight i m here because i want to see the democrats who are running for reelection win i want to see senator biden have a chance to chair the judiciary committee i want senator hollings i know he s here to be reelected and senator boxer senator murray senator carol moseley braun i m here because even though we have had occasional well publicized disagreements the last time i checked the democratic congress had supported me more frequently than the democrats supported my last three democratic predecessors so i am very grateful for the partnership that we have had it means a lot to me and i thank them for that and i m here because i wanted to tell all of you who contributed to us so that we could all be here tonight i am proud of you you are doing what it takes to make the american political system work and you ought to be proud of yourselves because if it hadn t been for you a lot of us would not be here doing the things which have been done to advance the cause of the american people and i hope you will always be proud to be here among your friends who agree with you and who are trying to move this country forward and thank you dale chihuly for your support and your artistic gifts to all of us god bless you sir ladies and gentlemen for almost four and a half years now we have worked hard to lead this country into a new century with a different way of governing america in 1992 our country was drifting and divided and i had a new idea that we could bring the american people together and move us forward if we thought about what it would take to essentially preserve the american dream for everyone in the 21st century opportunity for all responsibility from all everybody is part of our community and we re prepared to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity a very simple program at the time democrats had had a hard time commanding national trust because people said well we couldn t be trusted because we d spend every dollar we got our hands on we couldn t be trusted with the deficit we couldn t be trusted to manage the economy we couldn t be trusted with defense we couldn t be trusted with foreign policy we couldn t be trusted with crime you remember all that whole litany that our friends on the other side used to say about us well now we have four and a half years of experience yes we re going to pass a balanced budget plan but don t you forget 77 percent of the work has been done done entirely by democrats who voted in 1993 for the economic program that represented the philosophy the voters ratified in 1992 and we were right and that s why we can balance the budget today and continue to invest in our country and move us forward senator daschle talked about a record number of new jobs we ve also got the lowest employment rate in 24 years the lowest inflation in 30 years the highest business investment in 35 years and here s something important to democrats the biggest decline in inequality in incomes of working families in over three decades that s what we came here to do that s what we re doing and that s what we re going to do more of if you help us keep these people in the senate and bring some friends along so that we can have a majority and continue to move this country forward thank you very much crime has gone down five years in a row for the first time in over two decades we ve had the biggest drop in welfare rolls before the welfare reform bill was signed in 50 years the democrats have a lot to be proud of and we have a lot to do and all elections are about the future now when this agreement passes it will provide for a balanced budget that has the biggest increase in education in a generation enough funds to continue protecting the environment and close 500 of the worst toxic waste dumps and continue our work to try to preserve our national parks to try to save the florida everglades to try to move this country forward environmentally it contains funds that are adequate to restore almost all of the cuts in wrongful cuts in aid to legal immigrants that were imposed last year by the congress and it provides funds to help us make sure that all those people we are telling you have to move from welfare to work will actually be able to get from welfare to work and will be able to have a job when they get there yesterday we announced a new partnership with 100 companies that will soon go into 1 000 who are committing to hire people to move from welfare to work we are going to move another million people into the workforce from welfare in the next four years that is our approach don t cut people off and walk away from them give them a chance to raise their children and succeed in the workplace let me just say that we have a lot of challenges ahead we have cured the structural deficit in our country but we have to attack the generational deficit that means that we have to recognize that while poverty is at all time low among senior citizens and we re proud of that it s twice that high among our children and we can t let it get worse as those of us in the baby boom generation move toward our retirement years we have to literally carry out a crusade to take care of the future of the children of this country part of the things that i like about this budget is that it s got funds in there 16 billion worth of funds to extend health insurance to half the kids in this country who don t have it and we shouldn t quit until we finish that job and finally let me say we have one big debate still raging in our party and in our country and i m clearly on one side and i m here to plead guilty i believe it s good for america to lead the world to a more open economy to more peaceful arms arrangements to more cooperation to more democracy and i believe we did the right thing in the last four years to conclude over 200 trade agreements the largest trade record of any administration in the history of the country that s one of the reasons in the last two years more than half of the new jobs coming into our economy have paid above average wages i believe we re doing the right thing to make an agreement between nato and russia which i m going to paris to celebrate next week i believe we re doing the right thing to open nato membership to new members so that we can avoid having a 21st century like the 20th century and frankly virtually every century before it where wars were fought and people were killed on the soil of europe thank you i believe it s a good thing for the united states to try to make peace in the middle east and northern ireland and bosnia to try to ask our friends in greece and turkey to work with us to resolve their problems i believe it s a good thing for us to care about what s going on between india and pakistan and hope that it can be worked out i believe it s a good thing for us to believe that here at home our incredible racial and ethnic diversity should be seen as an asset and i am proud of the fact that i have consistently opposed the dismantlement of all affirmative action programs i think it is a terrible mistake and you can see it in the enrollment figures in these colleges and universities in texas and california now so that s what i believe and it s hard to quarrel with the results now if you can help us with your ideas and your contributions and with recruiting good candidates in all these states we now have a record it is no longer open to serious debate that when we said in 1993 you could shrink the deficit cut the size of government and increase investment in education technology and science and research they laughed at us and said all you re going to do is bring on a recession and make the deficit worse the deficit s been cut by 77 percent you heard tom daschle say we produced 12 million jobs for the first time in history in a four year period and the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years our approach was right and they were not and that s why we got a budget agreement today that will enable us to balance the budget all we have to do is to stay on the good issues run on the high road and be able to find good candidates and finance them and we can keep moving this country forward don t you ever forget you go home tonight 12 million people have jobs because we changed the economic policy of the country 186 000 felons fugitives and stalkers did not buy handguns in the last four years because we changed the policy of the country 12 million working families got to take a little time off from their jobs when they had a sick parent or a sick child without losing their jobs because we changed the direction of the country and i could go on and on and on what you do makes a difference in the lives of people you will never meet you will never know who could never afford to be here tonight that is the unique role you occupy in american democracy i am very proud of it and very grateful to you and deeply determined to keep this country and our party moving in the right direction thank you for your support thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton21 6 00 bill_clinton that was one of my great jokes that i intended to be president again next year president of the senate spouses club let me say that i love coming to this magnificent home i m always so happy here it s a happy place i love being here and now i m here as surrogate in chief hillary is in new york tonight and i was delighted to come by and have a chance to talk to you at the table i would like to just say a couple of things first of all thank you i am very grateful that i ve had a chance to serve as president and i m grateful that i had a chance to get elected in a moment where i felt that i had some ideas that would change the country for the better and only after i had years and years and years of working seriously on these ideas so i could test them and it turned out most of them worked out pretty well and i feel good about it we ve still got a lot of good things going and i think a lot of good things are going to happen in the next seven months you may have seen yesterday the house the senate passed the hate crimes legislation i ve been pushing for two years a couple of days before that the house reversed itself and decided to leave my process of creating national monuments to protect land for all time to come alone we re moving on a lot of the fronts that i hope we ll have some progress on i think we will the second point i d like to make is that people come up to me all the time and say well who is going to win this election or that election or the other except i always say hillary now but apart from that and i believe that very strongly but i think my experience has been that the outcome of elections are largely determined by what the voters believe the elections are about that s what you were talking to me tonight on the new york city what you think an election is about may determine more than anything else which candidate you vote for and what i have been trying to hammer home all across the country to all kinds of audiences partisan audiences nonpartisan audiences alike is that this election must be about what we re going to do with our prosperity eight years ago when we were in deep trouble the economy was down society was divided we had all kinds of difficulties everybody knew what we had to do we had to roll up our sleeves and get out of the ditch we had to turn things around we had to put things moving in the right direction well now things are moving in the right direction and the real question is what do we do with it not just the budget surplus but the confidence the capacity to deal with the challenges facing the country to deal with the big opportunities out there and if the american people think that is what we should do then we re going to have a very good election because that means it s no longer necessary to have one of these sort of mud slinging campaigns where everybody tries to convince everybody else that their opponent is just one step above a car thief i mean how many elections have we had like that that s not necessary you start with the two presidential candidates you go through these senate races these house races you ve got people that make a very presentable case for their point of view and that argue it out and so we really can have an election about the future and i worked as hard as i could to turn this country around get it going in the right direction and that s really what i want to have if you believe that then there are three things i want you to know and don t laugh number one it s a really big election how a country deals with its prosperity is as important a test of its character and judgment as how you deal with adversity there s not a person around this room tonight who cannot remember one instance in your life when you made a mistake not because things were going so badly but because things were going so well you thought there was no consequence to the failure to if you live long enough everybody knows that so this is a big election point number two there are real and honest differences between the candidates for president for senator for the house and people historically pretty well do what they say they re going to do when they get in office contrary to a popular expression that all politicians are a bunch of slugs and don t keep their word by and large they do if you look at all the historical studies they do pretty much what they said they were going to do one of the proudest days i ve had as president was in 95 when things looked so bleak for us a scholar of the presidency and the media named thomas patterson published a report and said i kept a higher percentage of my promises to the american people than any of the last five presidents by 95 even though i d made more which made me feel very good but most people will do most of the things they say and usually when a president doesn t do it you wind up being glad for example aren t you glad that abraham lincoln didn t keep his promise not to free the slaves that was one of his 1860 campaign promises aren t you glad that franklin roosevelt didn t keep his promise to balance the budget in 1932 when we had 25 percent of the people out of work in 1933 it would have been exactly the wrong thing to do for him just like it was the right thing to do for me so basically you ve got a big important election you ve got real differences now here s the third thing only the democrats want you to know what the differences are really the real differences you see that in the way the republicans are basically trying to make everybody forget they had a primary season in which they made a lot of very specific commitments and they don t want to talk about them anymore but i think they re honorable i think they ll keep the commitments they made in the primaries and it makes it uncomfortable for them when like mr lapierre the nra guy says well we ll have an office in the white house if bush wins the election because they want him to go away until after the election but there are real differences and by and large they relate to how we think we ought to manage this moment of prosperity and i ll just say a brief word about the vice president i do believe by now i know him as well as anybody besides his wife maybe his children he s been by far as a matter of historical fact he s had by far a great positive impact on the country in this job than anyone who has ever had this job now i have to make full disclosure that s a very self serving statement for me because the way the job works you ve got to know what the president asks the vice president to do but i ve spent a lot of time studying the presidency and i never could figure out why you would want a vice president who didn t go to work every day i never could figure out why the presidents felt threatened by their vice president i didn t get all that stuff i picked al gore because he basically was in tune with me and we got along together but he knew things i didn t know he had experiences i didn t have and he has made an absolutely incalculable contribution to whatever good we ve accomplished in the white house and i think he should be elected because i agree with his economic plan as compared with the alternative and we need to keep the prosperity going because i know he ll work harder to extend the benefits of our prosperity to other people whether it s the differences they have over the minimum wage or the patients bill of rights or you name it and because he understands the future he understands issues like climate change and other energy and environmental issues or the internet privacy issues which i predict will be very big for all of you over the next five or six years i mean all of our medical records and all of our financial records and all of our other records everything is on a computer somewhere i think that s a big issue i m very pro high technology i ve tried to do everything i could to create as many jobs to support a competitive environment with the telecommunications act and all but i think these privacy issues are going to be big so i think he s good because i like his economic plan i think he ll do more to help everybody participate in our society and i think he understands the future and it s really important because the next eight years are going to be different from the last eight so the issue is not whether we re going to change the issue is how are we going to change i wouldn t vote for anybody that said hey i d like to be president because i ll do everything bill clinton did i wouldn t support a candidate that would be wrong things are changing too much so that s my take on that now in hillary s case what i think will happen is she ll go through a period of time where apparently just looking i saw mr lazio had a film the other day that had me on it saying something nice about him well i m not like them if a republican votes on something that i thinks good i ll brag on them i m not ashamed of it i don t think you have to say just because somebody is a member of the other party that they re right over there with attila the hun but i kind of it was a gas that he would try to give the people of new york the impression that i d prefer him to my wife in the senate because she would have voted for my economic plan not against it and she would have voted against the contract on america not for it she wouldn t vote to shut the government down and get rid of the department of education or get rid of the 100 000 police that lowered the crime rate in new york and other places so there too there are real differences i think the big issue here on the economic front for both of them and it s one that all of you need to think about because you could actually be better off the day after it passed with the republican plan everybody here the day after it passed because basically what they want to do is spend the whole projected surplus on the tax cut for social security transition costs and extra defense costs and what we want to do even though i m not a candidate i strongly support this is to set aside at a minimum at an absolute rock bottom minimum at least 20 percent of this projected surplus which comes then from your medicare taxes and put it in a medicare trust fund and get it away from any spending and use it to continue to pay the debt down now and then we want to have a tax cut that s much smaller probably about 40 percent the size of theirs still substantial but not as big as theirs slightly less than half of it and we want to invest more money in education and research and technology and health care and the environment now why is ours better because number one we may not have just because some economist says we re going to have 1 9 trillion over the next 10 years doesn t mean it s going to happen and i ll bet you everybody in this room in your heart of heart says gee i hope that will happen but it might not you know we might not have four years like these last seven years if i tell you this gentleman was telling me about his business in buffalo if i said what s your projected revenue are you going to go out and not only spend it all but borrow money on the basis of it no matter what with no safety net you probably wouldn t do that and so i think if we i believe if you have sort of a bush lazio tax plan and it passed you d all be better off the day after because all of you can afford to come here tonight but you wouldn t be better off if it led to a increase in interest rates but in two years the impact it would have on the markets on the overall economy on the unemployment rate you d be worse off and the overall economy would be worse off and we wouldn t have any money to do these things and the way our crowd has it structured is number one they re going to save 20 percent of the money on the front end and put it into medicare as long as it materializes which is good because when the baby boomers retire it s going to be hard to and we re going to keep paying the debt down as fast as we can which i believe is good i think since there s so much private debt we should pay the public debt down and keep interest rates as low as possible that s what i believe and most of the people i know that have done well in this economy if they have to choose between low interest rates and a growing stock market and a tax cut and if it s either or they would choose the former every single time so this is a big issue and i think it s important the second big cluster of issues i ll say again what do you believe our obligations are to those who haven t done as well in this whole thing as we have or those that have got the good jobs but they have other problems the biggest challenge most working families even upper class working families that work for salaries face today is how to balance the burden of raising their children and succeeding at work because in the united states we have less support for that than our competing countries do we don t do as much to help people pay for child care we don t do as much to make sure they all have affordable health insurance we don t do as much to make sure the kids are all in pre school or after school programs we don t do as much to guarantee that they have family leave options so that if the baby is sick or the parents are sick or there s a newborn baby that everybody can get pretty much what they need now i think this whole cluster of family related issues i ll predict to you will be very big over the next decade because we re not all working just to have money to go spend it on things that s not why people do it they find reward from their work and they try to run businesses that they re proud of and they want to raise families they re proud of and this all has to be done in the context of a certain value structure and if we ve got a country where in order to be a success you have to just basically walk away from your responsibilities as parents we re in deep trouble here and this is a challenge for every business for everybody and we re going to have to work through a lot of these issues together but one of the reasons that i think hillary ought to go to the senate is that she spent 30 years working on this stuff she knows more she knows more than anyone i personally know about adoption about foster care about the children s health care and emotional and nutritional and educational needs about the relationship of early childhood brain development to whatever the government policy is she has lived with this stuff and i was just kind of surprised when all those new york house members came to see her and asked her to run for the senate i was surprised she d even think of it i said do you know how much this is going to cost you she said you re talking to me about money she laughed at me she said you who have never cared if we had a nickel in the bank and we laughed about it you know and we admitted that in the end we were kind of public service junkies it s what we care about and for 30 years she s worked for me and worked on the side the whole time we were in arkansas she gave away lots of potential income every year just to do public service because it s what she wanted to do and i can just tell you that in a lot of ways she s better than i am on a lot of this stuff and she knows things i don t know and she will be absolutely unbelievable i know there are still some people in new york who say well why is she doing this and why are they coming to new york and why is she running for the senate it s not very complicated she would prefer to do that than go out and get real rich i mean that s basically she would prefer to do this work than even be a wonderful commentator and talk about it arguably in the modern world people who have access to communications can influence more people because they can just talk to a lot of people and convince them to go change their behavior not her man she thinks she s supposed to show up for the job do it in the old fashioned bam bam bam that s what she believes all i can tell you is i ve been around a lot of people and i ve never seen anybody that i thought had the gift for public service that she does and so what she s got to do is work like crazy and just keep meeting people in new york and basically chip away at the people who are still questioning well why is she doing this and at some point between now and election day a critical mass of people will have been reached and they will be talking to other people who will be talking to other people who will be talking to other people did you read that little book the tipping point have you all read that how little things make big changes at some point we ll reach the tipping point in this whole issue and it will vanish and i think she ll be elected but she can only do it if we can get our message out which is why it s so important so anyway that s my pitch you ve got a good senator you ve got a good presidential candidate it s a big election there are big differences and i do want you to know what they are thank you very much dem wjclinton21 6 94 bill_clinton thank you very much john i m trying to fix this lectern if you re wondering what i m doing up here i m proving that i don t have sufficient mechanical skills i want to thank john for his leadership as the chairman of this distinguished group and welcome the incoming chair john snow with whom i just shared a few words about some of our common interests in europe i d also like to say a special word of appreciation for two of your members for working on issues that we share a common concern about joe gorman who s chairing your session on education and larry perlman who s chairing the work force development section and discussing the reemployment act that he s helping us to work on and about which i wish to talk today i want to thank the business roundtable for sharing a belief with me and with our administration that we have to move aggressively to embrace the challenges of the global economy that after all is why we worked hard on the north american free trade agreement and why we are working together to pass the gatt agreement i also want to thank you for our common understanding of a simple but powerful truth which is that even as we lower barriers to trade around the world we must work hard to lift our people up here at home so that they can compete and win and carry on their work and build their lives investing in our people s god given potential is good economics you know that and i do it pays off in higher productivity more incomes a competitive edge for our companies and our country in the global marketplace we talk about this all the time in the white house i know that i see our my chief of staff mr mclarty and our economic advisor mr rubin the deputy treasury secretary mr altman is here there may be others here from the administration these are things that we say all the time in our meetings i appreciate the work that you did in helping us to pass the goals 2000 legislation one of the most important education reforms in a generation in this country when we work together we can do things that help america prepare for the future i think today is an especially appropriate day for me to be here speaking with you about how we can better prepare our country for change fifty years ago tomorrow as the allied armies advanced from the beaches of normandy president roosevelt signed a bill that was called the serviceman s readjustment act better known as the g i bill of rights just as d day was the greatest military action in history the g i bill arguably was the greatest investment in our people in american history its legacy is the world s largest middle class the world s strongest economy its lesson is in large measure the mission of our administration if you give people a chance to help themselves they ll do it and they ll do extraordinary things before world war ii our country often failed to prepare returning veterans after wars we gave them pensions and bonuses but they had nothing left to build their future with that s why jobless and despairing veterans of world war i actually marched on washington in 1932 why president roosevelt declared that the g i bill quote gave emphatic notice to the men and women of our armed forces that the american people do not intend to let them down we know why the g i bill didn t let them down it relied on american values of work and responsibility it offered a hand up not a handout the veterans of world war i by contrast got a handout to be sure one they earned and one the country was grateful for but they got cash and a train ticket home but the veterans of world war ii got a ticket to the future instead uncle sam helped them to go to college to get job training to finance homes and businesses of their own but it was up to them to seize the opportunities they did and all of us are the better the g i bill helped eight million returning veterans begin that journey they flooded colleges and trade school 450 000 veterans became engineers 360 000 became school teachers 240 000 became accountants 180 000 became doctors and nurses 150 000 became scientists millions more bought homes or built businesses maybe some of them are among you who invited me here to be with you today we really can t even begin to calculate how much our nation was enriched by the g i bill how many communities sprung up how many companies prospered how many families earned their share of the american dream this much we do know together all those people built the american middle class that has been the bulwark of our prosperity since world war ii fifty years after the signing of the g i bill the world s changed a lot our economy has clearly changed but what it takes for our people to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow has not changed now as then we stand at a pivot point in history in the five decades between our country mustered another great international commitment the commitment to stand strong in the cold war that succeeded now we see a world economy taking shape where investment and information flow rapidly across national borders competition for jobs and incomes is international and highly intense and once again we are being called upon to decide our future i have a vision a mission a strategy for how i believe all this should take place how we can move forward in the 21st century what the partnership between government ought to be what the whole atmospherics in this country the feeling about our mission ought to be i must say it doesn t sit very well into the established categories of left and right and liberal and conservative and democratic and republican and i feel frustrated sometimes at my ability to pierce the atmosphere that prevails here but it is clear to me that if we are going to make a future that is consistent with our values we re going to have to do it with a different approach still it has to be built on the spirit that animated the gi bill give americans the chance to make their own lives in this fast changing world so the change can be their friends and not their enemies to do it we have to move on many fronts we have to create an environment where business can create new jobs and new growth we have to open markets for our goods and services for our companies and our workers we have to invest in our people s work and security when i assumed this office the deficit had been increasing exponentially for 12 years trade agreements were stalled job growth was agonizingly slow consumer confidence was shaky we were actually facing the prospect that for the first time a generation of americans would grow up to a future that was more limited than that which their parents enjoyed i adopted a strategy to first work on expanding the economy and getting our own economic house in order second to make government work for ordinary citizens and end gridlock third to empower people and strengthen communities and fourth to secure our role in the world defending our fundamental security interests expanding our economic interests promoting democracy human rights and limiting the spread of destructive chaos arising out of ethnic and other hatreds the atmosphere frankly here has been more hostile to change than i had imagined it would be the american people desperately wanted change but were often unwilling to listen to the complex debates and make the difficult decisions that are inherent in it and this town still is in my judgment too partisan too negative too obsessed with process and conflict instead of results and progress too interested in blame and too little interested in responsibility nonetheless we have been able to put together an economic strategy for putting our house in order making hard decisions that will make it possible next year for the first time since truman was president to have three years in a row of deficit reduction eliminating over 100 government programs outright cutting 200 others eliminating cutting domestic discretionary spending that s everything besides social security medicare and medicaid the other entitlements cutting discretionary spending on the domestic side not just defense for the first time in 25 years all of that will enable us to reduce the deficit three years in a row for the first time since the truman presidency it means we ve had to slash the federal government to bring more responsibility into the budgeting process we completed the budget by the may 15 deadline for two years in a row for the first time in 17 years we are making progress we ve adopted a very aggressive attitude on trade which you ve been a part of as all of you know nafta gatt the apec meetings i m going to second one in indonesia this fall a hemispheric summit at the end of the year with all the leaders of the latin american democracies and 33 of the 35 countries in latin america along with the united states are now headed by elected governmental officials we ve now got the first investment led low inflationbased economic recovery since the early 1960s in addition to that we have worked hard to make government work with the reinventing government program that the vice president has spearheaded at the end of five years we will have a federal bureaucracy that has 250 000 fewer federal employees and is under two million in civilian workers for the first time since the kennedy presidency we have federal agencies that are working again in fundamental ways to engage the business community in the growth of the economy all around the world the export import bank i see mr brody over there i don t know how many businessmen have come up to me and said for the first time in my life i travel overseas and i see the state department and the commerce department actually working together trying to promote american business interests and i appreciate it the small business administration has been virtually revolutionized in the way it works with small businesses you can now apply for a loan on a one page form people talk to me everywhere i go in america about the emergency management agency fema of the federal government saying it finally has become the shining light of what a government ought to be when people are in trouble instead of just in pain in the neck that has to be dealt with we are trying to make government work the congress has before it major campaign finance reform and lobby reform legislation that has passed both houses of the congress awaiting now a conference that will iron out the differences and send that to me for signature maybe most important of all in spite of everything gridlock is being dealt with last year the congress passed the brady bill and the family leave bill after seven years of gridlock we got agreement among the great nations on gatt after seven years of debate this year the congress is going to pass a crime bill after six years of gridlock one that will be the most sweeping anticrime legislation ever adopted by the congress 100 000 more police officers on our streets tougher punishment innovative prevention programs a ban on assault weapons that people said could never be passed over the opposition of the nra and at the end of last year according to nonpartisan sources we had the best first year in working with congress of any presidency since the end of world war ii except the eisenhower first year and president johnson s first year which were about the same and if i may be forgiven a little bit of bragging rights i think the things we tried to do in the atmosphere in which we tried to do them were far more difficult so we are trying to make government work i say that to say that yes there have been some good results and a lot of them are because you did a lot of work in the 1980s and the early 90s to become more productive and to be more competitive and in the first 16 months of this administration over three million new jobs in the private sector came into this economy two and a half time as many than in the previous four years alone we had the first quarter of this year the first time in well over a decade when there was no bank failure in a quarter there were more incorporations of new businesses than at any time since world war ii in 1993 but i will say again we can do these things and unless we also empower our people to deal with the challenges of the global economy as we did with the g i bill we re going to have a tough time with your help and support a lot of things have already been done a bigger and better head start program will improve the quality of the program and serve 40 000 more children this year and 90 000 more children next year than were being served previously goals 2000 will link grass roots reform with world class standards for our public schools the first time we have ever had any national standards for achievement the school to work opportunities act will help high school students learn real skills and provide america with better trained higher skilled workers student loan reforms which the secretary of education who s here has done so much to administer will make it possible for 20 million american students to repay their loans some 50 billion of them on more favorable terms and make it possible for students in the future to borrow money to go to college at lower interest rates and better repayment terms but it will make it harder for them to avoid paying their bills these things are very hopeful signs the national service program americorps will make it possible for 20 000 young people to serve their country at the grass roots level and earn money to go to college this year the year after next 100 000 young americans doing that the peace corps in it s largest year had 16 000 americans serving this national service program literally has the potential to change the way our young people think about themselves their country and their role as citizens so many of you have helped us on all these issues and this summer we re going to have two or three more things i want to ask you to help us on first of all as i go to the g 7 conference there will be a lot of discussion about gatt everybody that i know sort of treats gatt as if it s already done but as you know the congress has not yet passed the enabling legislation i will submit that legislation implementing the agreement this summer we have worked very very hard on meeting the strict budget rules to find a way to pay for gatt you and i know gatt will make the government money but under our budget rules we have to pretend that it s going to cost us money because we re getting rid of tariffs i want to urge you in the strongest possible terms do everything you can to persuade the congress to give this high priority to pass it with as little controversy and as little delay as possible and to move on it this year only the united states of all our trading partners has to go through the budget hoops we do to pass gatt all of our trading partners look at me and say you re the person that got us all together and made us do this last year how can you not ratify it we need your help and we must do it this year not next year secondly i ask for your help to pass the reemployment act which will change the whole way our unemployment system works it will turn a bewildering array of training programs into a system where workers who lose their jobs can present themselves at a onestop service center and get the guidance the training opportunities and the information they need for real jobs in the private sector the boards that supervise these programs will be controlled by people who know most about the opportunities the private sector and i want congress to enact that this year this is very very important the average person does not go back to the job from which he or she is laid off but the unemployment system is still built on the premise that they do the consequence of that is that employers pay too much in unemployment for people to just hang around on the system instead of prepared to take new jobs and employees spend too much time doing just that instead of moving more quickly into a new economy we can change this but we need to do it this year let me finally say that on this issue a lot of you have expressed support to me personally for the welfare reform efforts whether that can pass this year or not depends upon how much fire it catches in congress and how much controversy we can avoid in how to fund it but we have to change the culture of welfare and this program that i have presented to congress along with the others that have been presented go right at the heart of parents who don t pay child support they owe to the heart of the teen pregnancy problem to the heart of requiring people to work once they have the skills to do so and i hope you will continue to support that now despite all these efforts i have to tell you that i do not believe that the american people as individuals will be able to embrace the changes of the global economy and successful workers unless and until we address the health care crisis this goes to the heart of our debate on all of the other things in the strategy i outlined it goes to the heart of whether we can get our own economic house in order it goes to the heart of whether we can make government work from ordinary people it goes to the heart of whether we can empower people to view change as a friend instead of an enemy unless we can provide coverage for every american in a reform system which focuses on both quality and control of costs the deficit will grow your costs will continue to grow and undermine productivity and more and more americans will lose their coverage or be at risk let me briefly discuss this whole thing from my point of view from your point of view and from the american citizen s point of view from a worker s point of view from my point of view as the president in charge of the budget i ve worked hard to get this deficit down for three years in a row for the first time since truman was president i have done things that people who say they re more conservative than me talk about but don t do we re eliminating over 100 government programs we re cutting 200 others we re reducing discretionary spending for the first time in 25 years and still with the discipline to increase investment in education and new technologies and training we have reduced defense all we can reduce it and i think we are right at the margin and we should not reduce it any more given the challenges we face in this economy a lot of you will probably be called to testify or to support the work of senator kerrey senator danforth and others in this entitlements commission because you know that the only thing that is increasing our deficit now is entitlements keep in mind when you strip all that away some of the entitlements are going down social security is going up only with the rate of inflation and is roughly the same percentage of our gdp it was 20 years ago the only part of the entitlements going up much more rapidly than inflation are medicare and medicaid the government s programs for the elderly and the poor and i can tell you that unless we can bring them in line with inflation we will be forced to either let the deficit go up again raise taxes more than we should or cut our investment in public investment in things you support to a dangerously low level in a global economy so that s what it looks like from my point of view just from a budget perspective from your point of view you know already that the government does not reimburse medicare and medicaid providers at 100 percent of cost so the costs are being shifted to you the other people who are shifting costs to you are businesses and employers who do not have health insurance but who get health care they are shifting the cost to you now if our deficit goes up and we have to bring the deficit down and we cut medicare and medicaid without fundamental reform we re going to shift more cost to you and you will be put in the position of paying more or covering less keep in mind in the last three years three million american workers have lost their health insurance there are three million more americans without health coverage today than there were three years ago you are also paying for them in cost shifting so unless we have comprehensive reform you will be put in the position of some day coming to the end of how much you can do managing your health care costs on your own which you ve done a very good job of almost all of you and you will be facing the cost shift coming at you from the federal government and from the increasing numbers of employers who don t provide any coverage now the third and most important thing of all what does this look like if you re out there working in this country and you hadn t had much of a pay increase in the last 10 years but you know that your country s becoming more competitive and you re excited about the 21st century and you know that you re raising children who will have to change jobs eight times in a lifetime what are you going to do if you re a man and you have a premature heart attack or your wife gets breast cancer your kid develops some strange disease and you have a preexisting condition and you re being told it s a brave new world out there don t worry if you have to change jobs just get some new retraining you ll do fine and then it turns out nobody wants to hire you because you ve got a preexisting condition oh i know there are those who say we can just legislate these things we ll just legislate the insurance reforms say you can t discriminate against anybody and it will be fixed look at the study that many of my adversaries in the congress on this issue keep citing the lewin vhi study they say that all you can get out of insurance reforms is coverage in the short run for 2 2 million more people they say that if you you look at the experience of new york that tried to mandate insurance reforms alone what happens a lot of people s insurance goes up and a lot more people opt out of the system i say if you look at the rest of the world and you look at us we have 81 million americans out of a population of only 255 million 81 million of us live in families with people who have preexisting conditions but they all still need to be able to change work seven times in a lifetime thirty nine million of us do not have health insurance there is no compelling evidence that we can both have quality and cost control and stop cost shifting in the absence of covering everyone there is no compelling evidence the lewin vhi study so often cited by those who say well we could get 91 percent coverage in america up from 83 percent covering 97 percent of the cost of health care if only we did this stuff which doesn t require employer mandates or of some other universal coverage that s being talked about but if you notice there s not been a bill really pushing that why because when you strip it away you see that it costs literally hundreds of billions of dollars over the next five or six years to finance that in massive subsidies which basically benefit poor people most of whom are not working some of whom are working and does nothing for middle class workers which means to do that instead of an employer mandate we would have to go back and raise the heck out of everybody s taxes which we are not about to do at that level it would not be fair now how is it that every other advanced country in the world and all of our competitors we re only too happy to learn from our competitors in every other way and we re very proud when we beat our competitors and i don t know how many of you have told me personally we re better now than anybody else in the world at what we do we went through all kinds of agonies in the 80s and we faced all these challenges and now we re better than our competitors well our competitors not a single solitary one of them spends more than 10 percent of gdp on health care we spend 14 percent and we re the only people that can t figure out how to cover everybody now i refuse to declare defeat why should we jump in the tank i heard the messages about what people didn t like about our original proposal don t put restrictions on experimental drugs don t make businesses go into alliances if they don t want to let it be voluntary people know their own interests let multistate businesses have an approach which makes sense for all their employers we re making the changes that we heard people complain about those changes are being made we know we needed to make some changes but if you remember when i offered my health care plan i said this is not the end all and be all it s the beginning of a debate but what we need to decide is whether we re going to walk away from this session of congress without the debate harry truman said 50 years ago americans will never be secure unless we did something about health care everybody thinks of harry truman now as the fount of all wisdom i come from a family that liked him when he was unpopular but most americans didn t like him too much at the time he kept telling them uncomfortable truths he was right 50 years ago and it s still true so yes we need to make some changes in the original proposal i made we put them out there but what we need is a quick honest forthright debate we need to deal with this issue this year because until we do we will continue to spend a higher percentage on health care than our competitors you will continue to have costs shifted to you your government will continue to face the agonizing choice of continuing to spend more and more of your tax money on entitlements less on investment and still increasing the deficit and still shifting costs to you so i ask you enter the debate and just tell people what you have to do every day in your own businesses you get a real hard decision if you don t want the thing to collapse you can t walk away and almost always you make a decision that is less than perfect but is better than making no decision so i ask you help me pass the reemployment bill help us pass gatt help us pass welfare reform but don t walk away from health care the numbers are big they re enormous and we can t tell an average american can t tell a mother on welfare get off of welfare and take a job so you can lose your children s health insurance and start paying taxes for people to pay for their kids health care who stayed on welfare we can t tell a worker give up your job security and find a new security in your mind in you ability to learn and change if your illness or the illness of someone in your family will put you out of the job market we must not ask people to choose between being good parents and good workers we cannot ask people to risk their children s health to participate in the global economy and most importantly we can t just keep working with a system that is fundamentally flawed that we can fix we can look around the world we know there are all kinds of fixes here we may have to do more for small business i m willing to do that we may have to do more and we should to make the thing less regulatory i ve already made a lot of those changes but let us not walk away when i spoke at normandy a couple of weeks ago in the greatest honor of presidency to represent our country in commemorating the 50th anniversary of d day the thing that overwhelmed me about that was that people did what they had to do because there was no option and they measured up and literally saved the world and that in that moment there was no option to be cynical there was no luxury available for people to avoid the decisions before them and they did not have the option to be cynical today i tell you we have fundamental decisions to make about what kind of people are going to be into the future walking away is an option that s not really there being cynical or negative is always an option that s there but it s something we pay a terrible price for this country can do what we have to do we have to be what the people that led the d day invasion were they were called pathfinders the people that went first that s what we re being asked to do you live in an age which glorifies commerce and success and international trade more than any other in the lifetime of anybody in this room therefore you have enormous responsibilities and you have to light the path to the future in the way that the gi bill did 50 years ago we can do it we can do it if we make the right choices thank you very much dem wjclinton21 6 96 bill_clinton good morning i want to begin by thanking lang brown not only for what he has done this morning in bringing the torch up here but for what he does every day he gives his best to help troubled teenagers to teach them how to live responsible lives and to know that they are not alone as they do their best today we honor that spirit the spirit of the olympics as we send forth the olympic torch to light the way to atlanta thank you lang brown this torch has seen more of america than most of us americans will see in a lifetime and much of america has seen the torch cheered it and the people bearing it the torch burning bright and strong stands for the joy of athletic competition and more for the importance of international cooperation and more for the price we feel when our strong young americans win the told and more for this olympic flame also calls upon each of us to be our very best as individuals to do our best to build strong families and strong communities and a strong country it tells us that victory comes to the united not to the divided every olympian has reached within and worked hard to be the fastest the strongest the most graceful we all have hurdles to leap to finish high school or college to be a good parent a good worker a good neighbor every one of us must summon that spirit of responsibility and best effort in our own lives every olympian stands at the starting block or at the beginning of a great game alone but they do not win alone they draw strength from a lifetime of support from family and friends coaches and role models and every one of us must summon that spirit of community to meet our challenges every olympian is proof that for all of our differences we are one america we cheer our athletes not because they are men or women not because of the color of their skin we cheer them because they are americans they represent us all and they fill us with pride and every one of us must summon that spirit of unity to embrace those things that bind us together and never to succumb to those things that would keep us apart my fellow americans in the last several months we have had to deal with some different kinds of flames but it is this flame that represents the best of the united states of america the olympic spirit is the spirit of personal responsibility and best effort the spirit of community the spirit of unity the people who carried this torch all across america show us exactly how that spirit can lift all our lives every day this torch has been carried by a 74 year old woman in nevada who has cared for more than 100 abandoned children by a new york businessman who has put thousands of disadvantaged young people through college by a north carolina teacher who organized students in 48 states against violence this torch has been carried by america s best they are everyday olympians now this torch will be carried by someone who is america s best who is both an everyday olympian and a member of our olympic team eight years ago carla mcghee was in a car accident she almost died her body was broken but her spirit was whole she fought her way back to a promising basketball career that most people thought had been lost forever she went on to return to the university of tennessee and to help her team win a national basketball championship the vice president is particularly proud of that achievement and now we hope that she will help to work the same magic for our olympic women s team a miraculous road back for a wonderful young woman may the olympic flame always carry the ideals that burn in athletes and citizens like carla mcghee that burn in people like our torchbearers the community heroes the veterans of war and the keepers of peace and all of those who have run with it walked with it wheeled with it and set eyes on it and may these ideals cast light on every shadow and brighten every dream on america s road to tomorrow may god bless america and to carla and all our olympians godspeed dem wjclinton21 9 00 bill_clinton thank you if jennifer had just given me credit for the sun coming up in the morning i would have been sure i was at a republican rally i mean look up here i m basically here as an affirmative action prop so the men wouldn t be too outnumbered i want to thank jennifer grandholm for her introduction for her service for holding the flag of the democratic party high in michigan and for her there will be life after the attorney general s office i ll guarantee you that i want to thank diane byrum for running for congress you get a two fer if she s elected you ll have a great member of congress a great successor to debbie stabenow and you ll help make john conyers chairman of the judiciary committee i want to thank matt frumin for running for congress and for proving that democrats can tie and wear bow ties i ve never been able to do that see look at orsen porter down there laughing he wears a bow tie every day and i still can t do it and i m 54 i want to thank marty robinson for running for the supreme court she s out here somewhere we thank her i want to thank carolyn cheeks kilpatrick for being a great representative and a great personal friend to me in these years that she has served and i don t know what to say about john dingell but when i was at the congressional black caucus dinner the other night i mean about john conyers i want to say something about john dingell but i m going to save that i want to tell you something about john conyers i was at the congressional black caucus dinner the other night and all these people got up and talked about how the caucus always had their back how good they were always even the ambassador from south africa talked about when they gave an award to nelson mandela and she was passionate about how the black caucus was always there always had their back the vice president got up and said the caucus always had his back i got up and said covered my back when they came after me with a torch and lit the fire john and the black caucus brought the buckets and poured water on it and i appreciate it i want to say something very serious about debbie stabenow i was here at an event for her not so long ago or two events it is next to a certain race in new york the senate seat that i may feel the strongest about nobody in america now appreciates the importance of every single senate seat as much as i do they confirm judges they can hold up bills they can hold up judges including two from michigan that should have been confirmed a long time ago in the senate except for the budget 41 senators not a majority 41 can stop anything from happening and i can t imagine a clearer choice whether it s on a real patients bill of rights or a real drug benefit for seniors through medicare or a real commitment to human rights and building one america or a real commitment to an economic policy that continues to benefit average people what she said is true they ve got more dollars they should have they earned them they earned them you want to see them vote follow the money and there s nothing wrong with that i believe in raising money i think people ought to contribute but forces that block positive change have to be opposed or they will prevail and very rarely nowadays it s hard to find somebody to take on an incumbent republican senator now we have a man who was brave enough to do it in minnesota but he s independently wealthy we have a wonderful woman who voted for my economic plan in 1993 lost her seat in the house and is now ahead in running against the incumbent senator from washington state but she s independently wealthy debbie stabenow is just independent but it s really true even if they do have more dollars i can tell you for sure i know her well she does have more sense i ve watched this thing very closely i know if one person goes off the air and the other dumps several million on the air you can move the numbers but they re not getting above 50 percent she can win and she will win if you will fight for her and do not be discouraged do not give up fight this is worth fighting for it s worth fighting for now i ve got a little something substantive i want to say but first i ve got to say something about my young friend mr mcnamara all the talk about ireland and the trains and all that this guy was there for me when only my mama thought i could be elected president and this is his 74th birthday so we re going to sing happy birthday ready one two three comment happy birthday is sung you may be the only 74 year old man in america with more than enough hot air to blow out those candles go blow those candles out and make a wish now i just want to say a couple of other things first on behalf of al gore and tipper and hillary and me i want to thank the people of michigan and the democrats of michigan you heard in the introduction that no democrat had carried this state since 1968 michigan gave me a margin of eight points in 1992 and 13 points in 1996 and even before on st patrick s day in 1992 the voters in the democratic primary in michigan and illinois ensured that i would be the nominee of my party i will never forget that ever michigan is a special place with special leaders one of them who s not here tonight is john dingell i wanted to say that i thank debbie for being here for carrying all of our water all these years and doing all this work and i m deeply indebted to a lot of people from michigan senator riegle is here and we worked two years together and he was terrific jim blanchard was great to me but john dingell is sort of a vanishing breed he s just an old style person who believes politics is an honorable profession and who believes that there s no point in being in office unless you re going to get something done or stand against something you don t believe in and so what i want to say to you is you need to treat this election like you re going to get something done and michigan is really america yes it s different than america people make more cars here than anyplace else but it s also an agricultural state it s a small business state it s a high tech state it s a place with worlds of very remote rural communities and big thriving cities it is america and what i want to say to you is for 47 days it will be the center of the conflict between the democrats and the republicans for the senate and the house and between al gore and joe lieberman and governor bush and secretary cheney and i was told on the way up here that the republican nominee is coming here in a day or two and is going to stand in an automobile factory and blast al gore over the internal combustion engine the only thing i want you to remember is when you voted for me when they had the white house the last time not very many people could afford to buy an internal combustion engine or fill it up we ve had a real partnership with the people of michigan and i ve worked when i could on a bipartisan basis we ve had a partnership that s helped to lower the welfare rolls to lower the unemployment rates and lift the state up we ve also had a very important partnership with the uaw and the automobile industry to build the next generation vehicles now you all are following what s going on with the oil prices and i don t want to say much tonight otherwise it will be a big story tomorrow and i m going to have more to say about it later but the point i want to make is one of the reasons we re doing better than we were the last time this happened is that the american people have become much more energy efficient our cars get better mileage our homes are more energy efficient our factories are more energy efficient and we know we know that the work being done now with high tech companies with the major auto companies and the uaw work that our administration has supported financially and otherwise to build a next generation vehicle that can get 70 or 80 miles a gallon or use fuel cells or use electricity and gasoline or use alternative fuels that don t pollute the atmosphere that we can make here from an unlimited supply of other things let me just say you know this whole business about ethanol and farm based fuel products right now the reason we don t have more of it is it takes about seven gallons of gasoline to produce about eight gallons of ethanol but we are funding research which is very close to making a breakthrough that is the equivalent of what happened when crude oil was broken down so that it could be refined into gasoline and when that happens when that happens you ll be able to make eight gallons of ethanol for about one gallon of gasoline and the whole world will change that is what al gore has been doing the last eight years and whatever they tell you in the next 47 days i m not running for anything but i ve got a record in michigan if i were trying to cost you jobs i ve done a poor job of it now if we develop new engines new fuel cells and new fuels it will save the automobile industry in michigan not destroy it it will be more prosperous than ever before and every single year i have had to fight the other party in congress for funds for the partnership for the next generation vehicle for funds to promote energy conservation for funds to develop alternative sources of fuel to keep our automobile industry strong and our people able to afford to drive and our country more secure every single year so what we need is not to stick our heads in the ground and deny that there s a challenge what we need is what we ve had a genuine partnership that will save america s auto industry create more jobs and lower our alliance on expensive and unreliable fuel we can do that together if we do it now let me just say something else in the last few weeks since the convention where i thought the vice president and senator lieberman made great speeches and laid our program out for the american people our side has been doing pretty well and their side has had a few problems but one of the things i ve learned in life is that all those martial arts people you ever watch those martial arts the judo and karate contests or the taekwondo contests you know what they do before every match they bow to their opponents why do they do that because they know that the surest sign of defeat is to disrespect your opponent to underestimate your opponent to have contempt for your opponent so i have said all along why don t we just call a moratorium on personal abuse and attacks why don t we posit the fact that our adversaries are patriots and good people they love their families and why don t we thank them for abandoning or at least appearing to abandon the 20 years of negative politics that they have brought to this country s political life and talk in a more inclusive way and thank them for that and say okay let s have an election on the differences and i can just tell you i have worked hard to turn this economy around but the best is out there believe me as good as everything is the best stuff is still out there if you make the right decisions we could bring jobs and economic opportunity to people and places that haven t felt it yet i was in flint today to highlight the possibilities of the internet to educate empower and employ people from michigan with disabilities and it s stunning i was able to talk in flint because we had one of the machines there this new laser technology that operates with the eyes about a friend of mine from north carolina who has lou gehrig s disease who can no longer move any part of his body he can t speak and he can t move and when we were friends and working together in the 80s he was a strapping healthy charismatic handsome active vital guy but he s an even greater person now because of the courage with which he s proceeded but because of new technology he is about to publish a book he wrote on the computer with his eyes now because of new technology he still can work at home and earn a living and doing business at the bank he used to run unbelievable so i m telling you the best of it is still out there if you make the right decisions in the next decade you can get rid of child poverty you can give all working families access to affordable health insurance we can take social security and medicare out beyond the life of the baby boomers we can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 we can generate more jobs in transportation including automobiles by developing cars that get 80 or 90 or more miles to the gallon and we can clean up the environment and generate hundreds of thousands maybe even millions more jobs we can do all this stuff if you make the right decisions we ve opened the doors of two years of college to all americans we can open the doors of four years of college to all americans if you make the right decisions every time i see debbie out here making this campaign and i realize she could have just stayed in congress and enjoyed her seat rolled along she knew what she was up against what i see are all the little children that will grow up with a better education have access to college all the older people that will have real medicine when they need it a genuine patients bill of rights so that the doctors not the hmos will be making your health care decisions and an america with a stronger economy and when i see al gore and joe lieberman i am telling you they have a different economic policy you cannot you cannot i don t care what they tell you these projected surpluses are believe me they re just projected and because i was conservative with your money every year every year first the deficits were less than they were supposed to be and then the surpluses were bigger but why because i didn t play like it was and i didn t play games with your money now they say we ve got a 1 8 trillion or 2 2 trillion projected surplus that sounds like a lot of money what they don t tell you is that doesn t assume that government spending will grow with inflation and population which it s done for 50 years whack 300 billion off what they don t tell you is that those of you who are upper middle class people if we don t continue to raise the earnings limit on the alternative minimum tax you ll start paying taxes you ve got no business paying just because you get a pay raise so we fix that whack another 150 billion off what they don t tell you is that we don t have in there continuing the research and development tax credit which we ve got to do if you want to develop these new cars that get high mileage whack another 40 billion off you get the idea and then the money may not come in and what about the emergencies that could come up along the way we ve had to give the farmers 6 billion 8 billion 10 billion every year for the last three years because farm prices have been so bad now so when they tell you hey what do we care our tax cut is a trillion and a half dollars and we ll privatize social security for young people and guarantee everybody over 55 that they ll get their benefits and when you transfer that it costs a trillion dollars more because if you take money out of social security but you leave everybody drawing out the same money somebody has got to replace it right they don t ever talk about that that s another trillion whack 2 3 trillion 2 5 trillion 2 8 trillion you re already back in deficits they don t ever say that i m telling you that means higher interest rates that means higher interest rates do you know what i got a study last week that said the difference in our candidate s economic plan and theirs going back into deficit into the social security trust fund is 1 percent a year on interest rates do you know what that s worth to you listen to this 390 billion in home mortgages 30 billion in car payments and 15 billion in college loan payments over a decade in other words if you do what vice president gore wants to do in interest savings alone you ll get the equivalent of a 425 billion tax cut that will go straight to the working families of the united states of america so we ve got a different we have a different economic policy a different energy policy a different education policy we want high standards smaller classes modern schools we want schools to get more aid but we want to turn around these schools or put them under new management because we know we can turn schools around i was in a school in harlem the other day in new york two years ago 80 percent of the kids 80 percent doing reading and math below grade level two years later 74 percent doing reading and math at or above grade level in two years we can turn these things around and they didn t do it by taking limited public funds with the largest number of school children in history and siphoning it off into a voucher program they did it with high standards and accountability if you want more choice for parents pass a statewide school choice plan have more public charter schools but we don t have enough money in education now we ve got more kids than ever before we ve got all these facilities that are inadequate we ve got all these schools we still have to hook up to the internet we need more pre school and after school programs and i m telling you the gore plan is what we ve been trying to build on just make the money accountable say okay we ll give you the money but you ve got to identify the failing schools and turn them around or put them under new management you don t have to put up with schools that don t work that s what the teachers want that s what the good principals want and that s the right thing to do we have a different human rights policy we re for employment nondiscrimination we re for a hate crimes bill we re for one america we have a different health care policy we re for a real patients bill of rights and a real medicare drug program now if you want these things and you want to achieve these big goals you ve got to make the right decision what debbie told you was right look this is the first time in 26 years i haven t been on the ballot and most days i m okay about it i tell everybody my party has a new leader my family has a new candidate my new official title is cheerleader in chief but i have loved this job and i have been honored to serve but you have got to know something you ve got to believe me on this we spent a lot of time john and carolyn and debbie and don riegle and everybody else that served with me in the congress we spent a lot of time just trying to turn the ship of state around and get it going back in the right direction and get america coming together instead of being driven apart and in my lifetime there s never been this much prosperity and promise and progress anybody that s lived to be 30 years of age or more will tell you there s been at least one time in your life when you ve made a mistake not because times were tough but because they were so good you quit concentrating sometimes it s harder to make a good decision when times are good than when they re bad you get lulled along you think there s no real consequence you just sort of feel one day one way one day and one way another day and you believe stuff like this tax stuff they re saying based on the projected surplus i told somebody the other day this projected surplus tickles me this is like those letters you get in the mail from publisher s clearinghouse did you ever get one ed mcmahon wrote you a personal letter and told you you may have won 10 million you may have did you go spend the money the next day if you did you should seriously consider voting for the republicans but if you didn t if you didn t you d better stick with us i m dead serious the best stuff is still out there when al gore says you ain t seen nothing yet that s not just a campaign statement that s just not something that sounds good that is the truth but we have to make the right decision you need this crowd behind you you need them all now if you take this senate race down deep inside people in michigan know that otherwise with all this money that has been spent against debbie the other fellow would be above 50 percent and he s not there yet not by a good stretch so i m telling you she can win and she has to win al gore and joe lieberman have to win but there are 47 days and there will be a lot of twists and turns in this race before it s over respect our opponents say they re good people say we have honest differences tell people even though times are good the best is still out there clarify the differences give people the focus don t get tired we ll have a great victory in november thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton21 9 95a bill_clinton well mr vice president you convinced me i think i ll just play you a tune on clarence s saxophone and leave i want to thank you all so much for being here for the support that you have given to me and to al gore and to our family and our administration i wish that hillary could be here today but we ve been gone all week and she had to stay in washington to receive an award a couple of days ago from the save the children foundation so we re sort out here on our own but i thank dick bloom and walter shorenstein and ernest gallo and sean lowe and my friend susie thompkins all of you for your leadership on this very outstanding event and all the rest of you who have done so much to help this administration to continue to do the work that we are about i thank reverend cecil williams for being here to pray over us and get us off to a good start and i thank clarence clemons who whenever i played saxophone with him i loved it because he was big enough and loud enough and good enough to cover all my sins i loved that and i thank the glide memorial ensemble from for being here you were wonderful today thank you so much they put me in the proper frame of mind for what i want to say to you you know my first exposure to reverend williams and glide memorial was on mother s day in 1992 when i was running for office and i got to talk about my mother and at the time i couldn t have known it but i just had one more mother s day with her and i never will forget the way i felt in that magnificent church with all those people coming together they were all so different some were very wealthy and some were living on the street they were of all different backgrounds and all different dispositions toward life but they were united there that s what america is when we re at our best when we re getting together and working together it is no secret to anyone who lives in california and who s been through all the tumultuous ups and downs of the last few years that we are living in a time of profound change and we have to decide how we re going to respond to that change the challenge that i issue is more complicated because it requires all of us to do something the other prevailing vision just tells you the government s the problem and if you get rid of it everything will be all right i understand from long experience why that s more attractive one of clinton s laws of politics is that everybody s for change in general but they re in against in particular and i have one famous story that comes out of my own political heritage in the south about huey long during the depression when he was going around telling everyone louisiana they should share the wealth because 30 percent of the people were out of work and the rest of them were poor and he could always get elected on his share the wealth platform in the depression and once he was out on a country crossroads and he was giving his speech and he identified a farmer in the crowd that he knew who he thought was absolutely certain that he could make the point he wanted to make and he said i see farmer jones out there he said now let me ask you something if you had three cadillacs wouldn t you give us one of them to go around on all these country roads and gather up the children and take them to school during the week and take them to church on the weekends he said of course i would he said and if you had 3 million wouldn t you give us a million dollars so that we could put a roof over every family s head in this county and feed every family he said of course i would he said and if you had three hogs and the farmer said now wait a minute governor i ve got three hogs so every one is for change in general but when you get particular then it s another thing altogether and what i want to say to you is we have no choice i believe when the history of this era is written people will say that the period from about well the sometime around the mid 1980s until the first decade or so of the next century was the period of greatest economic and social change the biggest changes in the way we live and work that america has experienced in 100 years since roughly 1895 to 1916 when we moved from being an agricultural and rural country to a more urbanized and more industrial nation that s the depth of the change that is going on we re now moving into as all of you know in california an age dominated by information and technology even in agriculture and industry we re moving out of the cold war environment where the world was largely organized among nation states and two big camps into a global economy where the world is often disorganized and where all the forces are toward economic unity in global trade but political and social disintegration in its sharpest sense you see it manifested in racial and ethnic and religious hatred whether it s a war in the balkans or the horrible things in rwanda and burundi or a bus blowing up in israel or sarin gas breaking open in the subway in japan or the awful bombing of the federal building in oklahoma city it is in short a world that is full of possibility the most exciting period the world has ever known and full of challenge and it is clear that we have to bring to this new world a flexibility an openness a willingness to embrace new ideas and new approaches it is also clear that we have to have a clear idea about where we want to go my vision for this country in the 21st century is of a high opportunity nation where we grow a lot of entrepreneurs every year and we expand our middle class and shrink our underclass where we empower individuals to make the most of their own lives and families and communities to solve their own problems and where we define ourselves in terms of what we can do together not how we can divide one another the governor of florida was with the vice president and me a couple of days ago and he said in another fast growing multiethnic state he said we have to decide whether we are going to be a community or a crowd a crowd is the collection of people in the same place who swarm all over each other seeking their individual interests and the fittest survive and the others don t do very well a community is a collection of people that ban together and think they ll all do better if they all do well and so they have obligations to one another which they recognize that s my vision to get there we ve got to have a lot of new ideas but we have to be faithful to our fundamental values to supporting freedom and responsibility to helping families raise their children to helping all people make the most of their own lives to holding people accountable for what they do that is destructive of our common purposes to standing up for america here at home and for our best values and our better selves around the world to finding common ground instead of cheap short run partisan gain and to doing what is important for the long run even if it s unpopular in the short run i say that because there are a lot of perplexing problems that require us to do this and i ll just give you two if i had told any of you the day i was inaugurated that within 30 months we would have working with the american people created conditions which would produce 7 5 million new jobs 2 5 million new homeowners 2 million new small businesses with entrepreneurs growing in america businesses at three quarter of a million a year a rate never before achieved the largest number of new self made millionaires in our history a stock market at 4 700 that all of these things would occur but the earnings of the guy in the middle would go down one percent you d have a hard time believing that wouldn t you but that s what s happened because in the global economy those in wealthy countries not just the united states but in all wealthy countries who are not plugged in to the growth and opportunity of the future will be punished will be rendered more insecure and within their family lives their community lives their aspirations for the future their ability to impart the american dream to their children will be impaired so we have to figure out how to keep these good things going but how to bring the rest of america on board that s why this computer initiative being undertaken by these major california companies was so important i looked at those school children that we had gathered today from all their different backgrounds from all walks of life i saw the asian children and the hispanic children and the white children and then i ran up to a little girl and she said mr president i was born in stevens arkansas and i m living here in california with my grandmother stevens is a little country town full of people who go to church every sunday and sing songs like you just heard all this is a very different country we ve got to get everybody on board i ll give you another example the vice president talked about our crime bill america is believe it or not is actually making progress in the war against crime and in the war to reassert social responsibility in virtually every major area in this country the crime rate is down the murder rate is down the welfare rolls are down as the economy improves the food stamp rolls are down almost everywhere this is so drug use among people between the ages of 18 and 34 is down that s the good news against this background it is shocking that the rate of violent crimes committed by juveniles between 12 and 17 years of age is up and casual drug use among people between the ages of 12 and 17 is up this is a perplexing thing too many of these children are out there raising themselves too many of them get out of school too early with nothing else to do too many of them have problems that are treated only with the kind of harshness that may be appropriate for some but won t save anybody from getting in trouble in the first place and nobody has all the answers so we have to be open to new ideas rooted in old values because we want this to be a strong country but we ve got to get these kids on board we can t lose a whole generation of americans we can t have people think that life is only about power and money did you see the story the other day that said two thirds of kids between who belong to gangs who are under 18 think it s okay to shoot somebody who disrespects them and then about a week later you had a 16 year old in new york kill a 12 year old because he thought he d been disrespected it turned out the kid had a great sense of humor and was just made fun of everybody it cost him his life what about counting to 10 before you do anything what about sticks and stones will break my bones or the family you know that was subject to the hail of bullets because they lost their way in los angeles the other day it s not just violence we have come to see children as a class of people as something to be marketed what i said yesterday in denver maybe i m just getting old fashioned but i just came out of my shoes when i saw those teenagers depicted the way they were in those calvin klein ads i thought it was wrong i thought it was wrong but the main point i want to make is we ve got a realize that we re making progress on these big problems but we have these problems underneath so we need to keep doing what we re doing but we need to be humble about it and recognize that we ve got to have new ideas rooted in old fashioned values that s what this budget debate is all about it is not fundamentally about money fundamentally it s about whether we re going to be a community or crowd and what our obligations to each other are and i just want to mention one or two things i favor balancing the budget we never had a permanent deficit in our budget that was structural until 1981 we quadrupled the debt of this country in 12 years it s so bad that the budget would be in balance today and we d have more money to give california for defense conversion but the interest rate we pay on the debt run up between 1981 and the day i became president has thrown us into a deficit this year that s the only thing putting us in deficit and if we don t do something about it next year interest payments on the debt will be bigger than the defense budget so no one has a stake in this kind of permanent spend deficit spending but the question is how are we going to do it we know how important education is to our future and we know that we have programs that give young kids a chance to get off to a better start in life that make for smaller classes and more computers and higher standards in our public schools that give young people who don t go to four year schools the chance to get good training opportunities that offer opportunities like americorps to work and serve your community and earn money to go to college that provide for more scholarships for poor children and provide for better loans at lower cost for other young people to go to school we know that if you raise the cost of a college education you ll drive down the enrollment look at california college enrollment down 10 percent in the last two years in the face of a bad economy it should have been exploding in the face of a bad economy so i say to you it is a violation of our solemn obligation to give people the chance to make the most of their own lives to have a budget in the name of balance that takes children off head start raises the cost of going to college abolishes americorps and takes the american dream away from millions of americans it is wrong it is a violation of our basic values it is not necessary to balance the budget we have given a balanced budget plan that increases our investment in education you heard the vice president talking about the environment hillary and chelsea and i spent a wonderful summer vacation in grand teton in yellowstone national park i want you to know one thing that any family in america that can get in an automobile can go in that national park for 10 bucks a car that s an incredible thing it s a priceless wonder there are people who think we ought to close a bunch of the parks or we ought to have a no restrain on whether you can have a diamond mine next door or who actually have the idea that it is oppressive for us to try to preserve clean air clean water and safe food people who tried to stop us from implementing new regulations on food safety after all those people died from e coli and believe it or not until we developed these new standards when i became president we were still inspecting meat the way dogs do you laugh about it we were looking at it touching it and smelling it and we ve finished with all that we want to put in these new regulations people are trying to stop us it is funny but you re really laughing to keep from crying it s inconceivable that anybody would say don t do that cryptosporidium killed all those people in milwaukee do you remember that polluting the water supply we don t want it to happen to san francisco there were people who wanted to stop us from implementing them who want to take away from the epa the budget they need to enforce these things now we want to reduce government regulation but america needs clean air clean water safe food and a devotion to our natural resources that is a part of our moral obligation to our children and our future as well there are those who want us to take away our commitment to put 100 000 police on the street and just send a smaller check to local governments we were in jacksonville florida the other day a republican county with an african american democratic sheriff why because out there where people live crime and preventing it is a bipartisan issue out on the streets of america there s not much of a constituency for raising the crime rate i m having a hard time finding anybody for it but back in washington there are people who are perfectly prepared to do things that will lead to an increase in the crime rate in the name of a balanced budget but it is not necessary if you look at the medicare and the medicaid issues we have to slow the rate of growth in these entitlement programs they re growing faster than the rate of inflation we have to do something about that our budget does it their budget says in order to get a 250 billion tax cut and a seven year balanced budget we ll just take 450 billion out of the health care system over the next seven years well how did you arrive at that number was there a study done no it s how much we have to take out to have the 250 billion and a balanced budget in seven years well what about a little smaller tax cut and take another year or two to balance the budget no no no the most important thing is seven years and 250 billion well what about our obligation to elderly people three quarters of them are living on less than 25 000 a year how much can they pay in medicare premiums it doesn t matter we ve got to do this well what about the fact that inner city hospitals here in san francisco can t operate without medicaid funding for poor children or poor elderly people what are all these folks with hiv going to do if not for medicaid trying to keep them alive in some dignity so they can continue to work and be productive members of society but have some access to medicaid and then when they really get sick how are they going to get the care they need without it it doesn t matter we ve got to have seven years and a 250 billion tax cut these are choices folks these are ethical choices we can balance the budget in a credible way in a short time we can actually have a modest tax cut directed to child rearing and education and still fulfill our fundamental obligations to one another but this is not fundamentally about money it s about whether we re going to be a community or a crowd whether we re going to have common ground or division i think i know where you stand what i want to tell you is i thank you for the contribution but the contribution won t amount to much if we don t also have the contribution of your time your effort your passion your willingness to engage your fellow citizens in saying that we have to have common ground and we can have a balanced budget and we can have a good economy and we can have a good education system we can have it all but only if we proceed based on our rooted values that have taken america to this point in time that s what i want you to do from now until november of 1996 i want to close now with two brief points that i want you to think about america has a lot of problems to face that require us to make difficult choices and whether we make the right decision depends as much as anything else on our attitude and on whether we re willing to do the right thing for the long run we have to find common ground we need to reform the welfare system but we need to do it because of people on welfare will be better off if they can raise their children and get an education and be successful workers it s not a lot of the budget but it s good for our values to do that therefore when we reform welfare we should do it in a way that lifts people up not that divides people and tries to ethnic background it s no longer necessary to make a conscious effort i say to you i m against quotas i m against reverse discrimination we ve brought lawsuits against people for practicing reverse discrimination but when federal law enforcement officials who happen to be african american get discriminated against in a restaurant that s part of a national chain that is just one single example the fact that we have not yet succeeded in creating an environment in this country where there is no more discrimination so let s keep making the efforts and fix the program without doing away with it that s what i think we ought to do i feel the same way immigration do we need to make some changes in immigration of course we do we have spent more money in california trying to stop illegal immigration and return illegal immigrants than any previous administration congresswoman jordan former congresswoman jordan from texas a very distinguished american has made some strong recommendations on what the volume of immigration of the united states should have on an annual basis so that we can have a stable economy but let s not forget one thing except for the native american all the rest of us came from somewhere else we are a nation of immigrants and we should be proud to be a nation of immigrants our gateway to the 21st century resides in the fact that we are the most diverse successful big country in the world and we need to keep it that way and remain committed to it the last point is this i ll be you anything that i have done at least one thing and probably a half of dozen things that everybody in this room has disagreed with in the last two and a half years and that s because a lot of our decisions that come to me are hard ones and because we are always pushing the envelope of possible change but what i want you to know is that at least every day i am trying to do what i think is right and i know that a lot of times it will not be good in the short run politically there s hardly anybody that thought we were in our right mind when i sent our forces to haiti to restore president aristide and to remove the military dictators but i would remind you that those people those dictators came to our country and promised on our ground in front of our statue of liberty that they would go and that democracy would be restored that every country but one in all of central and south america is in the caribbean is a democracy we had to do that the united states if people can t look to us to make sure people keep their word to us and to freedom we would be in terrible shape and it was the right thing to do i had all these people tell me that hillary should not go to china on both sides they d say gosh if she goes it ll be like saying everything that happens over there in human rights is all right and others who said if she goes and she says what she ought to say it will ruin our developing relationship with china but i knew that she would be able to say what was in the heart of every american about what we believe ought to be the condition of women and young girls not in china but in the united states in india in every other place in the world and she did a great job it was the right thing to do i had lots of people tell me and they turned out to be right in the short run that if we did what we ought to do and we passed the brady bill and we passed the assault weapons ban and i became the first sitting president ever to publicly clash with and prevail against an organized effort by the national rifle association that it would be a political disaster because the people who disagreed with me about that would be against everybody who supported what i believed in and the people who agreed with me would find some other reason to be against those people and i can tell you today that one of the reasons that my party lost the house of representatives perhaps the main reason is that people in close race after close race after close race in rural areas were stampeded and scared into believing we were trying to take away their right to hunt and to own weapons and to protect themselves it wasn t true but they prevailed so they said don t do it but i kept thinking to myself you know sooner or later somebody s got to stand up and tell the truth there are tens of thousands of people who could not get weapons since the brady bill became law because of their criminal backgrounds and if we can get a few more uzis out of a few more high schools and off of a few more streets and stop a few more innocent kids from being shot down standing on the street corners it is worth the consequences we ve got to stand up for what will be right 10 and 20 and 30 years from now that s what i want to say to you i want all of you to believe that the vice president and i sat in meeting after meeting when they said don t do this teenage smoking thing oh everybody will tell you it s a great idea but the tobacco companies will gut you they will terrify all those tobacco farmers that are good fine honest people they will convince them that you re trying to bankrupt them they will mobilize people against you and everybody in america that agrees with you will find some other reason not to be for you don t do it it s a terrible mistake they say there s got to be some reason no other president ever did this every other president always made a deal made an agreement did all this but you know what after 14 months of study they came back and said two things these people have known for 30 years that what they were doing was addictive and dangerous they are marketing to children they are trying to sell to children and every day 3 000 children start smoking and 1 000 of them will die early because of it and it just seems to me that if we can give 1 000 more kids a day a chance at a full good american way of life it is worth whatever the near term political consequences are that is how we all have to begin to think about our future that s the way i want you to think about our future and i want you to go out of here just remembering with all of our difficulties with all the problems california s been through there s a reason we re still around here after 220 years now this is a very great country and when we remember our basic values and when we work together and when we look to the future we always do all right so i just want you to remember that you stay with us stay with what you know is right and the best is yet to come thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton21 9 95b bill_clinton thank you very much first of all i d like to thank mr delecourt and all of the people who hosted us here to mayor jordan and your outstanding california commissioner of education delaine eastin and to all of the others who are gathered here today thank you very much for being here with us i want to say to all the students here that the vice president and i are delighted to see you normally we would not want to be responsible for taking you out of class but today we think maybe we have a good reason and we hope we have a chance to shake hands with a lot of you as soon as this brief ceremony is over i want to say to all of the executives of the information companies that we just met with how very grateful i am to you and i ll say a few words about them in a moment i came here to san francisco today to issue a challenge to america to see to it that every classroom in our country every classroom in our country is connected to the information superhighway to demonstrate that this is possible we are all here today to announce a giant step toward that future by the end of this school year every school in california 12 000 of them will have access to the internet and its vast world of knowledge by the end of this school year fully 20 percent of california s classrooms 2 500 kindergartens elementary middle and high schools from one end of this state to the other will be connected for computers if that can be done in california we can do it in the rest of america but the key is to have the kind of partnership that we are celebrating here the job of connecting california schools will be undertaken by a wide alliance of private sector companies among them sun microsystems apple xerox parc oracle 3com silicon graphics applied materials tci cisco systems and others our administration has brought these companies together we have set goals but they are doing the rest just as the connecting of our classrooms is a model for the 21st century so is the way we are doing it here today with government as a catalyst not a blank check so today i challenge business and industry and local government throughout our country to make a commitment of time and resources so that by the year 2000 every classroom in america will be connected tens of millions of parents all across our nation have watched their children play every kind of video game from mortal kombat and primal rage to killer instinct and super streetfighter but the really important new computer game in america is learning and we are going to put it at the disposal of every child in this country by the end of the century last month i announced a broad initiative to stop our children from being addicted to tobacco because it was bad for them today i hope to encourage a good habit a lifelong commitment to learning i want to get the children of america hooked on education through computers our country was built on a simple value that we have an obligation to pass better lives and better opportunities on to the next generation and we see them all here education is the way we make this promise real today at the dawn of a new century in the midst of an information and communications revolution education depends upon computers if we make an opportunity for every student a fact in the world of modems and megabytes we can go a long way toward making the american dream a reality for every student not virtual reality reality for every student the facts speak for themselves children with access to computers learn faster and learn better scores on standardized tests for children taught with computers according to apple classrooms of tomorrow a 10 year report that is coming out in a few days caused scores to go up by 10 to 15 percent children mastered basic skills in 30 percent less time than would normally have been the case also they stayed in school absenteeism dropped from over eight percent to under five percent i cannot emphasize how important this is at a time when we want people to stay in school and get as much education as they possibly can technology enriches education it teaches our children how to learn better as the vice president and i saw with the young people who walked in with us in their three different exhibitions of learning and we thank them for that today we must make technological literacy a standard preparing our children for a lifetime of computer use is now just as essential as teaching them to read and write and do math with this effort we are also reinforcing the core convictions that have stood us so well for so long computers offer a world that lives up to our highest hopes of equal opportunity for all and look what we need equal opportunity for all for computers give us a world where people are judged not by the color of their skin or their gender or their family s income but by their minds how well they can express themselves on those screens if we can teach our children these values if they can learn to respect themselves and each other then we can be certain we ll have stronger families stronger communities and a stronger america in the 21st century i could think of no better place for us to begin than here in california the state that leads the world in technological innovation until now this leadership too often has stopped at the schoolroom door for california ranks 45th in the nation in the ration of students to computers while suburban children often have access to computers in their homes other children in rural areas and inner cities pass their school years without coming close to the information superhighway the longer they re kept away the less chance they have of building good lives in a global economy well thanks to the dedicated americans gathered here today all that is going to change these companies who compete vigorously every day in the marketplace have come together in the classroom we shared with them our vision and they shared with us their ideas their resources and their know how every company represented here today is making a different contribution but they re all committed to the goal of connecting california because they know the future depends upon it sun microsystems is organizing a coalition of companies and volunteering in net day an effort to install networks in at least 2 000 schools and the number is growing with each new company joining the effort in the morning volunteers will arrive at each school by noon they will have wired the library the labs the classrooms by nightfall those schools will have the technology they deserve smart valley a coalition of silicon valley companies has contributed 15 million to putting technology in our schools smart valley has agreed to develop 500 model technology schools over the next two years america online has offered internet services for a year even those phone companies that are always going after each other on tv have joined forces in this cause at t will provide internet access and voice mail to all california schools sprint will help to connect the schools mci will provide software for entry into the internet and help to connect the schools and pacific bell which has led the way in linking california schools is accelerating its efforts this school year by hooking them up to high speech phone lines i want to thank them all and i d like to ask the leaders of these companies here to stand and i hope the children will give them a hand because they ve done a great thing for your future please stand up all of you who met with me earlier today thank you so much this is an enormous effort it will take the same spirit and tenacity that built our railroads and highways it will take leadership and dedication of groups like the advisory council i have appointed on the information superhighway so let us begin let today mark the start of our mission to connect every school in america by the year 2000 if we can connect 20 percent of the schools in the largest state in the nation in less than a year we can surely connect the rest of the country by the end of the decade in the coming days i will announce the winners of our technology learning challenge and over the next several weeks i will put forward a public private partnership plan that lays out how we can move our entire nation toward the goal of technological literacy for every young person in america here are its guiding principles modern computers in every classroom accessible to every student from kindergarten through 12th grade networks that connect students to other students schools to other schools and both to the world outside educational software that is worthy of our children and their best aspirations and finally teachers with the training and the assistance they need to make the most of these new technologies make no mistake you can count on us for leadership but the goal we have set cannot be set and cannot be achieved by government alone it can only be met the way these companies are doing it with communities businesses governments teachers parents and students all joining together a high tech barn raising what we are doing is the equivalent of going to a dusty adobe settlement in early 19th century california and giving every child a slate and a piece of chalk to write with it s akin to walking into a rough hewn classroom in the sierras of the 1860s and wiring it for electricity for the first time it s like going to the central valley in the 1930s to the canvas classrooms of the dust bowl refugees and giving every child this book chalk boards electricity accessible books there was a time believe it or not when all these were rare now every one is such a familiar part of our lives that we take them for granted if we stay on course we ll soon reach a day when children and their parents and their teachers will walk into a classroom filled with computers and not even give it a second thought let s go to work our future depends upon it and these children s lives will be better for it thank you very much dem wjclinton21 9 99b bill_clinton i was hoping regina would speak since i m so hoarse i ve spent all day at the united nations and i m delighted to see all of you texans washingtonians michigans michiganders and whoever came from new hampshire we can give you one night off between now and let me say first of all i am delighted that lloyd and libby have opened their beautiful home and let me come in through the kitchen i m delighted that regina is running for congress most of you know that she was the first assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs she s had a distinguished career in the non profit sector as a lawyer and she did great in the white house and she s been my friend a long time her husband has been a distinguished united states attorney in texas so she is supremely well qualified to go to congress we are just a few seats away from being in the majority and this should be one of them i just want to make three brief points i have to take care of my voice a little bit but i think it s worth your saying this to people all over america as the election season begins when we started in 1992 we made an argument to the american people we said look the country s in the worst recession since the great depression the social divisions in this country are deepening the basically anti government philosophy that had dominated the last 12 years masked a growth in the federal government and a profligate explosion in the federal debt and we were in trouble so we said give us a chance and we ll cut the deficit until we get rid of it that ll drive down interest rates and bring jobs we will expand trade because we re only 4 percent of the world s people and we ve got 22 percent of the world s income so we have to sell something to somebody else and we will find a way to do this and continue to invest in the education of our children and the other things that bring us together that s why we say it was an argument we said we believe it ll work and enough people agreed with us that the vice president and i were elected none of what has happened in the last six and a half years plus would have been possible without the support of the democrats in the congress because we have lived through the most partisan era in my lifetime even more i think if you go back and look at the division of votes and the rhetoric than the mccarthy era probably but now it s not an argument anymore we don t have to argue with anybody it is an established fact that the policies we implemented have given us the longest peacetime expansion in history millions more jobs than were created during the reagan boom which was fueled by massive deficit spending the biggest surplus we ve ever had lowest minority unemployment in history the lowest unemployment in 29 years the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years and the lowest crime rates in 26 years we had some other arguments we said we believed that we ought to do more to help balance work and family so unlike the previous president i won t veto the family and medical leave law i will sign it and they said oh if you do that you will raise the cost of employing people small business will go under it ll cut jobs well we ve got 19 4 million jobs and for six years in a row we ve set records every year for new small businesses getting started it s not an argument now it s a fact we said we ought to unlike the previous administration i would sign not veto the brady bill and i thought we ought to ban assault weapons they told all the hunters and sportsmen they d lose their guns and everything would be miserable and nobody who shouldn t have a gun would have any difficulty getting one now we know 400 000 people didn t get guns because of the brady bill we know that nobody s hunting or sport shooting has been interrupted and we know we ve got the lowest crime rate in 26 years so it s not an argument anymore it s an established fact i say that because every election is always about change and it should be this country should never stand pat even when it s working the question will be not whether the election is about change whether it s a presidential election a senate election or an election for the house of representatives the question will be what kind of change are we for and are we going to build on what works or take it down that is the issue therefore every single race for the house of representatives is a race that matters enormously to the people who live in that district and also will have huge implications for the united states as a whole so now we re having a new debate where we say look before we squander this surplus it took us 30 years to get back last one we had was 30 years ago and we never had one this big shouldn t we take account of the fact that the number of people over 65 is going to double in the next 30 years that there ll only be two people working for every one person drawing social security and medicare shouldn t we take account of the fact that social security is supposed to go broke in a little over 30 years and medicare in 15 years shouldn t we fix social security and medicare shouldn t we give the elderly people of this country access to prescription drugs since if we were starting medicare today we d certainly cover drugs because it substitutes for so many medical procedures before we give all this surplus away shouldn t we figure out what we ve got to invest in education and health care and the environment and medical research and science and technology the things that will keep us strong in hope and shouldn t we since we know lower debt leads to lower interest rates higher growth and higher incomes shouldn t we get this country out of debt over the next 15 years for the first time since andrew jackson was president now in the 5th congressional district in texas if what we re fighting for comes to pass the elderly will be better off the children will be better off the poor will be better off the middle class will be better off and the republicans will have more money to give to their candidates in the 2002 election you know when i see how much money they re raising it s just testimony to how successful our economic policy is and so i say that because this is it s something that s very important for people to realize and we haven t done all this work to get the country up to the point where it s working to go into reverse we need to continue to change but we need to change from the base of what is working there s still a lot of poor people in this country there s still too many poor children in this country there s still places from the indian reservations to the mississippi delta to the inner cities to the rural farming communities and the little towns that have lost their industries that haven t felt this recovery there are still too many working people who don t have any insurance for their children there are still significant environmental challenges there are still enormous opportunities out there we re trying to get funding for the next generation of the internet because it s becoming so clogged the fastest growing instrument of human communication in history everyone knows we need a next generation everyone knows we need some government money to fund basic investment their party s against funding it our party s for it we want to rehabilitate 6 000 schools they want to rehabilitate 600 schools we want to put 100 000 teachers out there to make classes smaller so our children will learn more they don t want to do that there are significant differences they are huge and they will affect the lives of every family in america so what i want you to say is that every race is important this one s really important and she is superbly qualified that we now are not making an argument to the american people we are taking the evidence to them and we have to remind them of what it was like before so they can remember the difference it really matters who s in the congress and what decisions are made on any given issue and as someone who probably i m the only person in this room that can t run for office again or for the first time my interest is seeing my country do well that s what i want yes i think the world of regina and yes i feel very loyal to my party but we have delivered for this country and there is so much more to do there are still vulnerable people there are still unseized opportunities and there s still a lot of change to make but it needs to be the right kind and if you want it made you need to send her to congress thank you very much dem wjclinton22 1 00 bill_clinton thank you very much i am first of all delighted to be here i want to thank irwin and lynn for putting this luncheon together on short notice and i thank all of you for coming i thank gray and sharon davis for being here to share this moment with us and for their long time friendship not only to the deutchs but to hillary and me the first person who told me that gray davis was the most underrated politician in america was my wife she s got a pretty good feel for those things and i congratulate you on your success and even more on the substance of what you have fought for and achieved it s one thing to win elections and be popular it s another thing to do the right things you re doing the right things now i admire you and i thank you for it it s very important i thank joel hyatt for becoming one of our co finance chairs a lot of you don t know him as well as i do because he hasn t been in california very long but he founded a remarkable company called hyatt legal services which swept the northeast and provided affordable legal services for real people many of whom could never afford to come to an event like this and made him a famous character because he was on television all the time and he was also prominent in ohio democratic politics where his father in law howard metzenbaum was our united states senator and he is a wonderful guy so he s out here now and i want you to take care of him make him look good by helping him raise money for the democratic party i want to thank jane harmon for being willing to serve in congress again and for being there before our economic plan in 1993 which passed by a single vote in both houses or as the vice president says whenever i vote we win but it passed by a single vote in both houses really sparked this astonishing economic recovery we ve had and so there s a real sense in which jane harmon can say if it hadn t been for me it wouldn t have happened and i think she is one of the ablest people that i have served with with the congress and one who most embodies the philosophy that i have tried to get our party and our country to embrace so thank you jane harmon for being willing to do this and of course i want to thank the women s leadership forum for this and for all the countless events we ve had around the country mobilizing a whole group of people many of whom never have been involved in national political affairs before so thank you and thank all of you for coming now i want to just make a couple of points about what has previously been said by janice and mayor rendell who we re very lucky to have because he was a fabulous mayor of philadelphia and always made sure the clinton gore ticket carried pennsylvania which is a not inconsiderably important thing in the business we re in number one i am very grateful for the chance that hillary and i and the vice president and mrs gore have had to serve this last seven years i celebrated my 7th anniversary as president the day before yesterday and i m very grateful and for the progress that our country has made i am grateful that it s about more than economics our country is beginning to come together more we have the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded the lowest single parent household poverty rate in 46 years the lowest overall poverty rate in more than 20 years the highest homeownership in history cleaner air cleaner water safer food we tripled the number of toxic waste sites we cleaned up from the previous 12 years we set aside more land a lot of you mentioned that to me today we set aside more land in perpetuity to protect in the continental united states than any administration in our history except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt over 20 million people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law take a little time off from work without losing their jobs to take care of a new born or a sick parent about 5 million people have now claimed the hope scholarship tax credit that s designed to open the doors of college to all americans for at least two years we ve had about half a million people haven t been able to buy handguns because they have criminal backgrounds because of the brady bill a lot of people are alive because of that and i could go on 90 percent of our kids were immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of the united states and our country has been a force for peace and freedom around the world from bosnia and kosovo to northern ireland to the middle east to our efforts to try to help african nations resolve their difficulties and i could just go on and on i am very grateful for where we are now especially when i remember where we were in 1992 and i hope that s one of the reasons you re here today but the second thing i would like to say is that in my lifetime which thankfully continues to lengthen even though i don t like it i tell this story all the time i had a six year old girl was one of the a friend of ours spent some time with us over thanksgiving weekend he brought his kids up there they ve got four little kids and the second youngest is a six year old girl and she looked up at me and she says well how old are you anyway and i said well i m 53 and she said oh that s a lot the kid should be in the movies and it is but it gives you the benefit of memory in february next month in just a few days this will become the longest economic expansion in the history of the united states including those which for example embraced the second world war when we had to be fully mobilized nothing like this has ever happened before part of it is the explosion in information technology much of which came out of california part of it is our success in exporting our culture and ideas around the world a lot of which comes out of california but part of it is the environment and conditions and tools we established when we changed the whole direction of the country and got us out of debt and still continued to invest more in education and in making our streets safer and our air cleaner and our children healthier now in my lifetime we have never had the following conditions all in the same place at the same time we have never had so much economic progress social progress political self confidence as a nation i say political as citizens we re pretty confident with the absence of an overwhelming or paralyzing domestic crisis or foreign threat we ll always have security threats but there is nothing that s not the cold war this is not the vietnam war this never happened the last time we had an economy that in the terms of that age was about this good was in the early 60s and it came apart with riots in the streets and the paying for the vietnam war paying for it in cash and paying for it in blood and politics we have never had a time like this one of my friends said to me this morning when we were talking he said you know the problem is things are going along so well nobody wants to talk about this people aren t really obsessed with this election and i guess what i want to say to you is you should be because there is an enormous opportunity here and therefore an enormous responsibility to make the most of what is truly a magic moment that coincidentally fits with the changing of the century and the millennium but i m just telling you that a time like this doesn t come along very often where all the social indicators are getting better the economy is booming and becoming more widely shared we are not paralyzed by a domestic crisis or a foreign threat we have the ability to chart the future of our dreams for our children that s what this election is all about if the whole 20th century could be fairly characterized as the triumph of freedom over depression and want over nazism and fascism over communism then the question for the 21st century would be whether that freedom is wisely used for the first time in all history more than half the people of the world live under governments of their own choosing but over a billion people in this old world live on less than 2 a day there are a lot of challenges out there so i say to you you know i m not running for anything the reason i m here is because i work like crazy to turn this country around to make sure people believed america could work just so we would be in this position and it would be an era of colossal proportions if we treated this like an ordinary election a ho hum deal how many times everybody in this room who is over 30 can cite at least one time in your life when you got in trouble and made big mistakes because you thought things were going so well that you didn t have to think about tomorrow you didn t have to make any tough decisions you could be sort of self indulgent you could get distracted because everything is going so well nothing could go wrong if you live long enough that will happen to you that s human nature it s just a question of whether you live long enough sooner or later everybody makes that mistake in some way or another well countries are no different from individuals and families and businesses so the test is whether freedom will be wisely used what will we make of this magic moment gray said we ve taken some issues off the table for the republicans i think there is a reason for that until 1992 the political debate was always an either or proposition in washington there was a democratic proposition a republican proposition a liberal proposition a conservative proposition and everybody got put in their little boxes and they lobbed their verbal bombshells across the great divide at each other nothing ever happened but at least we could understand who the players were the only problem was nobody lived like that the way washington talked and so we said the vice president and i did look give us a chance and we won t say government is the problem or the solution we ll say the government should be the partner of the american people if the role of government is to establish the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives we won t say that government can guarantee opportunity to everybody but we ll say government should provide opportunity to every responsible citizen that you have to do your part and we will say that we should have a community of all americans and it s worked so that s the first point i want to make it s worked but all it s done is to bring us to the point now where we can face these big challenges i ll just mention a few of them we re going to double the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years i hope to be one of them at present retirement rates there will only be two people working for every one person drawing social security are we going to save social security and medicare and add a prescription drug benefit for the 75 percent of the seniors who can t afford it themselves or not big question and how are we going to do it to make sure that when the baby boomers retire we don t bankrupt our kids and their ability to raise our grandkids huge question example number two we have the largest number los angeles knows this we have the largest number of school children in our history and the most diverse the good news is that in an increasingly globalized society it means america is the best positioned big country in the world for tomorrow this diversity is our meal ticket to tomorrow but only if we can figure out how to make sure these ever more diverse kids all get a world class education no one has ever done it before no other society has ever had to do it before universal educational opportunity for people without regard to race or income in this kind of environment no one has ever tried to do anything of this dimension before example number three we ve got the lowest crime rate in 30 years and that s good but anybody who believes america is safe enough please stand just the accidental death rate of children by guns in this country just the accidental death rate of children by guns i want you all to listen to this is nine times higher than the accidental gun death rate of the next 25 largest industrial economies combined so i say you know in 92 a lot of people didn t believe the crime rate would ever go down again so we got a lower crime rate we know we can do this sensible gun legislation preventive things get the kids involved in positive things put enough police on the street do the things that work i think as a nation we ought to set a goal that america is going to be the safest big country in the world in the next 10 years and we re going to keep going until we do it so that every child can feel safe again we can do this you don t have to doubt it anymore now those are just three examples and i could give you lots more i ll give you just one or two more just so you can think about it america grew rich in an industrial economy and is now becoming even wealthier in a post industrial information technology economy the industrial economy was powered by energy translated into electricity primarily and into gasoline it made factories work moved cars and trucks around made trains run with the help of coal coal and oil turned into these things now in the industrial economy in order to get richer you had to burn more energy and if the energy you burned was based on oil and coal you put into the air more greenhouse gases that s what causes global warming a big issue in the world today and huge for your children and grandchildren i believe america is in a position to prove that for the first time in history a country can grow rich and build a middle class and actually improve the environment and put fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere because the economy has changed the technology has changed and that s very important for your kids do you know why because until climate change came along every environmental problem was reversed so for example a lot of us who used to go to japan 20 25 years ago can remember when workers in japan would wear masks surgical masks to work riding their bicycles and now the air is cleaner than it is in many american cities in tokyo that s just one example every environmental problem was reversible a lot of you remember when you could strike a match on a great lake in america and start a fire and a lot of them are very clean now though we ve got a new initiative to do even more the climate change it s reversible but not for a long time once that stuff gets in the air it hangs around and continues to warm the climate for 100 years so we ve got to figure out how to prove not only to americans but to people all over the world that i m right you can grow the economy get rich and improve the environment the detroit auto show this year has four seater cars that will be commercially available very soon get 70 and 80 miles a gallon there is a modest income housing project in the inland empire not far from here built in cooperation with hud the energy department and the home builders a couple years ago i went out there for the announcement and we told these lower income working people if they moved into this housing project because we had new lighting that was more efficient new insulation that was more efficient and glass that let in more heat that kept out more heat and cold and let in more light that their power bills would go down an average of 40 percent they ve gone down an average of 65 percent if you ve been following the presidential campaign you know in iowa there is a lot of talk about ethanol and that s because people grow corn but let me tell you what the big issue is the big issue is today you can make ethanol efficiently but not real efficiently it just takes about seven gallons of gasoline to make about eight gallons of ethanol that s why there s a fight about it but scientists in projects funded by us are on the verge of breaking the chemical barriers to the efficient transformation of not just corn but all kinds of biomass rice field grasses into fuel when that happens it will have the same impact that turning crude oil into gasoline had a hundred years ago and you will be able to make eight gallons of biomass fuel with one gallon of gasoline which means that in effect when you get the next generation of cars if they run on ethanol you ll be getting the equivalent of 500 miles a gallon this is going to happen within your lifetime within just a few years young mothers will bring home their babies from the hospital with genetic maps that will tell them all the possible things that can go right and wrong in their lives and how to plan to lengthen and strengthen their children s lives and most of my friends in the medical field that study this believe that early in the new century young mothers will bring home babies with a life expectancy of 100 years in america today people over 65 have a life expectancy on average of 83 so this is an exciting time but you can see we ve got all these new challenges and i ll just mention one last one i know you all maybe get tired of me talking about this but i think it is the supreme irony of our age that we re talking about unlocking the mysteries of the human gene and finding out what s in the black holes in the universe and driving cars that get 100 miles a gallon but the biggest problem of human nature is the oldest problem of human society people s fear of people who are different from them you think about it what have we done with the end of the cold war what has it wrought it s like it took this big old lid this metal lid off all these long simmering festering fears and hatreds all around the world so you ve got bosnia kosovo rwanda trouble again brewing in burundi and africa you ve got obviously the middle east and northern ireland you ve got less well known ethnic and religious conflicts in western china a long way from cnn coverage all over the world and here in america you have this upsurge of hate crimes james byrd in texas matthew sheppard in wyoming the jewish community school here in los angeles and then the filipino postal worker who was murdered and then the guy who went on a rampage who said he belonged to a church in the middle west that believed not in god but did believe in white supremacy so he kills an african american basketball coach a young korean christian coming out of school and a bunch of other people because they were the wrong ethnic or racial or religious group and it s very interesting isn t it that all these really ugly primitive things and the dominant problems are the world s inability to get rid of things come from the fact that we have a tendency first of all to be afraid of people who are different from us then we distrust them and then it s not a big step to dehumanize them and then once you do that you can justify killing them it s a sort of a slippery slope and this trust thing is such a problem i don t know how many times we ve been right up to the edge in a lot of these peace processes i ve worked in the last seven years and then some hangnail will develop and when you strip away all the rhetoric it is i just don t know i don t know if i can hold hands with this person and jump off this diving board and i want you to think about that because i believe building one america whether it s in specific things like passing the employment and nondiscrimination act or the hate crimes act or just demonstrating that we can work together across the lines that divide us in some ways is more important than all the other stuff that i ve worked on the american people nearly always get it right this is a great country with a bunch of brain power and a bunch of energy and a bunch of and the truth is if we can get this right if we can figure out how to let go of all of our accumulated resentments we re going to do just fine so number one the country is better than it was seven years ago and it s not an accident and it has something to do with the fact that we did the right things number two we should be thinking about the big challenges before us and they are significant and not be dumb enough to think we can relax and sleep our way through this election season and the last point i want to make is this and not in any hateful way there is a significant difference between the two parties and the two candidates which will manifest itself in all kinds of ways the next president i appointed two members to the supreme court in all probability the next president will appoint more and you saw the headline mayor rendell held up there is absolutely no question in my mind that whether roe v wade is preserved or scrapped depends on what happens in the presidential race and to pretend otherwise is naive in the extreme it s not whether your compassion is good or bad it s what you believe and we ought to tell the american people what we really believe and let them decide and i appreciate governor bush being candid enough to say he didn t believe in roe v wade in another article a couple weeks ago he said the two justices on the supreme court he most admired were justices scalia and clarence thomas i think this is good no no this is a good thing people should say what they think and we shouldn t be hateful about it we shouldn t be mean we don t have to get in the but we should make sure that everybody knows where everybody else is coming from in this deal and it s not helpful to go around with your head in the sand and pretend that there are no consequences here i believe we ought to get this country out debt for the first time since 1835 i think one of the reasons we re cooking right along here is that we ve gone from running up debt to paying debt off we ve even paid some of our debt off early this year for the first time in history ever and that keeps interest rates down lower for the rest of you and enables us to have more broadly shared access to capital and to keep things going so even though i am a democrat i m going to recommend at the state of the union we spend more money on education and health care the environment i want to keep running some surpluses and keep paying this debt down and not fool with the social security portion of the surplus so we can get out debt for the first time if we adopt the tax cut that the leading candidate in the other party has proposed it won t happen and all of us will get money out of it i mean you ll all be happy for a month or two but it s a bad deal we won t have the money we need to continue to improve education and we will not be able to manage this economic situation and we will never get this country out of debt over the next 10 to 15 years so there are real consequences here so again i say i m glad you re here but when you leave here i want you to leave with a renewed sense of citizen activism i want it to be beyond writing checks and if somebody asks you how come you were there i want you to be able to tell them number one it s better than it was seven years ago and they had specific ideas and they implemented them and it worked number two we ve got to think about what the big challenges of the future are and number three there is a real difference between the two parties and we don t have to be bad mouthing each other and throwing rocks at each other and saying terrible things about each other we can just have an honest discussion about that that s one thing i do hope our new self confidence will allow us to have a less acrimonious less hateful election but it should be no less intense so i ask you all of that you know most of us have been blessed or we wouldn t be here today our grandchildren s generation should never forgive us if we walk away from our responsibility to do what is necessary in this millennial election so that they will be living the future of their dreams thank you very much dem wjclinton22 1 93 bill_clinton please sit down ladies and gentlemen today i am acting to separate our national health and medical policy from the divisive conflict over abortion this conflict which stems from the roe v wade decision of 20 years ago has brought to a halt promising research on treatment for serious conditions and diseases that affect millions of americans millions of american men women and children who include the members of my family and friends of mine and i m sure virtually every other set of family and friends in the united states we must free science and medicine from the grasp of politics and give all americans access to the very latest and best medical treatments today i am directing secretary of health and human services shalala immediately to lift the moratorium on federal funding for research involving transplantation of fetal tissue this moratorium which was first imposed in 1988 was extended indefinitely in 1989 despite the recommendation of a blue ribbon national institute of health advisory panel that it be ended five years later the evidence is overwhelming the moratorium has dramatically limited the development of possible treatment for millions of individuals who suffer from serious disorders including parkinson s disease alzheimer s disease diabetes and leukemia we must let medicine and science proceed unencumbered by anti abortion politics today also marks the beginning of a new national reproductive health policy that aims to prevent unintended pregnancies our administration is committed to providing the kind of prenatal care child care and family and medical leave that will lead to healthy childbearing and support america s families as a nation our goal should be to protect individual freedom while fostering responsible decision making an approach that seeks to protect the right to choose while reducing the number of abortions our vision should be of an america where abortion is safe and legal but rare let me also say that our administration is particularly concerned with the epidemic of teenage pregnancy the greatest human cost of our continuing national debate over reproductive policy is borne by our children and by their children a few teenagers choose to have and raise children and we must help them to succeed but for millions a teen pregnancy is unintended leaving the young woman and her partner totally unprepared for the responsibilities of parenthood the social and economic price paid today and for the last several years by our nation is enormous so today i am also directing secretary shalala to act immediately to implement her intended suspension of the title x family planning regulations that are also known as the gag rule for almost five years hhs has prohibited title x recipients from providing their patients with full information and counseling concerning pregnancy this dangerous restriction censors the medical information and advice that health care professionals can give their patients as a result of today s action every woman will be able to receive medical advice and referrals that will not be censored or distorted by ideological arguments that should not be a part of medicine i m also ordering today the director of the agency for international development to repeal immediately what has become known as the mexico city policy that has effectively applied the gag rule to organizations that receive united states funding even when those organizations uses non aid funds for those activities today s actions will allow organizations that received aid funds to provide information regarding all family planning options to individuals in foreign nations it will reverse a policy that has seriously undermined much needed efforts to promote safe and effective family planning programs abroad and will allow us to once again provide leadership in helping to stabilize world population many believe that this is one of the most important environmental steps we can take today i am also directing secretary of defense aspin to lift immediately the near total ban on abortions at united states military facilites and to permit them to be performed at those facilities provided that the procedure is paid for entirely with private funds this action will allow military hospitals to perform abortions and to reverse a ban that has adversly affected the lives of scores of men and women who serve our nation around the world or members of their families finally i am directing secretary shalala to instruct the food and drug administration to determine whether the current import ban on the drug mifepristone commonly known as ru 486 is justified and to rescind the ban if there is no basis for it here in the united states ru 486 has been held hostage to politics it is time to learn the truth about what the health and safety risks of the drug really are if the fda removes the ban americans will be able to bring the drug into the country for their personal use consistant with existing fda policy that govern drugs not approved for distribution i ve also ordered hhs to immediately explore the propriety of promoting testing in the united states as well as the possiblity of licsensing and manufacturing according to the standards which govern all other drugs so reviewed by our government taken as a group today s actions will go a long way toward protecting vital medical and health decisions from ideological and political debate the american people deserve the best medical treatment in the world we re committed to providing with nothing less i d like to say in closing a special word of personal thanks to the unbelievable number of americans from all walks of life and all different political perspectives who have children with diabetes or who like me have lost relatives to alzheimer s or have friends suffering with parkinson s and other diseases who came up to me over the last year and made a personal plea on the fetal tissue issue their statements to me and their life stories had a far greater impact on me even than the actions of the united states congress which included as you know a very broad spectrum of republicans and democrats on this issue i d like now to sign these directives thank you very much after a considered policy debate we decided that i should sign my full name to all official documents of the government and i ll continue to sign all my non my letters bill clinton no i want to answer this i think the american people are entitled to know that if you go back to my statement i acknowledged that there were errors in the evaluation process for which i take full responsibility what happened was this she voluntarily disclosed that it was not in any way picked up in the vetting it was as you know we were trying to make a christmas deadline which was probably my error again on this so just before she was announced but after i had discussed the appointment with her i was told that this matter had come up nobody said anything to me about the taxes and what i was told was what you heard in a very cursory way was that an error had been made in the hiring of an illegal alien that it had been made after consulting a lawyer who was an expert in this area so basically they had acted on counsel s advice but they were wrong they moved immediately to try to correct it and the status had been corrected in terms of the legality of the person and that the vettor s conclusion was there would be no problem i have to tell you that during the course of these inquiries i received other weightier warnings if you will of things which had to be worked through with other potential nominees in retrospect what i should have done is to basically delay the whole thing for a couple of days and look into it in greater depth but that was i take full responsibility for that it is in no way this process is in no way a reflection on her we would not have known any of this had she not disclosed it to us and to the united states senate subseqently so i will say again what i said this morning i m sorry about this i still think she is an extraordinary person and a very able person who will have a rich and successful career and i take full responsibility for what happened in the review process thank you dem wjclinton22 10 94 bill_clinton it s nice to be back in california it s nice to be here in belmont it s nice to be here at carlmont high school i m honored to be the first president to come here and it s only fair that i came here to see your principal since he didn t get to come and see me now that should not be interpreted as a sign of dissatisfaction with the lady who got to be the principal of the year but he would have made an awful good one and he sounds to me like the principal of the year here i want to say how very honored i am to be here with all of you i thank mayor riande for her welcome mayor davids for what he said i thank them for their leadership and their devotion to public service at the grass roots level where so many of our problems and challenges have to be met i thank congressman lantos and congresswoman eshoo for not only being my friends but for their extraordinary service in washington i can tell you that there is this popular feeling i think that nearly everybody who goes off to washington has something bad happen to them and forgets about the folks back home they do not and they represent you well and you should be very proud of them i m also very pleased to be joined today by your state treasurer kathleen brown and your state insurance commissioner john garamendi thank you john i d like to introduce one other person too who is my partner in these education endeavors a former colleague of mine and former governor of vermont and now the deputy secretary of education come all the way from washington with me today governor madeleine kunin please make her feel welcome i want to say a little more about senator feinstein in a moment in connection with this work but i appreciate what she said today but let me begin by saying that as all of you know i had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time in this magnificent state of yours a couple of years ago and since i have been president i think i ve been back here a dozen times i ve worked on the emergencies for california like the earthquake and the fires i ve worked on trying to get the economy of this state going again to sell computers overseas to sell the farmers rice to japan for the first time to start the ship building industry in the southern part of the state to help the defense conversion momentum really get going here so we could build a lot of jobs out of this defense downsizing and not just lose them i ve tried to do things that would help you deal with the crime and the immigration problems real concrete steps not just talk about it ten thousand more police officers will come to california under the crime bill we have doubled the number of immigration officers along the southern border of the state we ve begun to have a real impact in dealing with the problem of illegal immigration but what i want to say to you is that over the long run if we are going to have a bright future for the people of the united states and if california is going to work and it can work you look around at the students here look at all the different ways they found to say welcome to me up there if this country is going to work and this state is going to work then schools like this school have to work all across america we have to prove that there is strength not weakness in our diversity we have to prove that all children can learn and we have to prove that with all the changes that we re going through in america today we can still give our kids an oldfashioned safe upbringing and a good education because that is the key to the future of the global economy one of the least known stories perhaps of the recent concluded session of congress is that it was the best session for education in at least three decades that s worth clapping for i appreciate that this congress expanded the head start program making more children eligible and making younger children eligible this congress passed the goals 2000 bill writing into national law our national education goals world class standards and saying that we would help to develop means of measuring whether we re meeting those standards but emphasizing that education reform has to come from the grass roots school by school just a couple of days ago i signed the elementary and secondary education act which dramatically reduces the federal regulations telling schools how to spend the money we give them to help kids who need extra help in schools and encourages schools to do things that will actually prove that children can learn without regard to their racial or economic background the bill also as senator feinstein said helps to support the safe schools initiative and promotes the concept of character education when basic civic values to be taught in the schools are developed at the community level we also passed a bill for young people who don t go to college but do want to get good education an apprenticeship bill to help every state in the country develop a system to guarantee that even those who don t go to college will have a chance to get some further education and training and get a good job with a prospect of a growing income finally and perhaps most important we dramatically reorganized the system by which the national government makes colleges loans available not only to low income but also to middle class young people one of the things that s always bothered me in the last couple of years is seeing the cost of a college education go up faster than any other essential part of a family s budget even more rapidly than health care costs in my own state i saw young people start college and then drop out because they either couldn t get loans or they were convinced they would never be able to repay them then i saw young people get out of college with big debt and take jobs that paid higher wages not because they wanted them but because they were afraid they couldn t afford to do something they really wanted to do like work with people in the community to help kids get a better start or be school teachers or police officers or do other things because they were afraid they could never repay their college loans under this system you won t have to worry about that anymore when you become of age and you get out of high school you ll be able to choose to borrow money and pay it back over a longer period of time at a lower interest rate as a percentage of your income so that if you choose to serve the public and you choose not to get rich you at least won t be driven into the poor house by the cost of your college education the last thing the congress did was to pass a program that s already being felt here in california the national service program americorps to give young people the chance to serve their communities and earn money for their college education this year 20 000 young americans are doing it year after next 100 000 young americans are doing it if the congress will continue to support it i am convinced we can have as many as a half a million young americans paying their way to college by solving the problems of this country one on one person by person at the grass roots level all across america and i thank the congress for that record of education reform now having said that let me come to the point education still does not occur in washington education occurs school by school class by class student by student the magic of education is in what happens between the teachers and the students what the role of the principal is whether the parents are supportive at home what is going on inside the student none of that can happen in an atmosphere of fear we all know stories horrible stories of children being shot or cut or terrorized when i was in california last year i did a town meeting and a young man from northern california told me that he and his brother changed schools because they thought the school they were in was so dangerous and then when they lined up to register in the new school they thought was safer somebody just came in the school door and shot his brother standing right there in line to register he just happened to be in the wrong place you would not believe the letters i get from children of all ages begging me to do something about the violence that terrorizes their lives you may have seen me read a letter that i got from a young man from new orleans when the crime bill was being debated who said i know you can do something about crime and i am frightened that young man was shot a couple of weeks after he wrote a letter to me i got a letter after the crime bill was signed from the son of a friend of mine in my administration who said i have a nice family we have a high income we live in a good neighborhood i go to a good school my friends and i are still scared every time i go downtown to the movies i feel better now that the crime bill has been signed we cannot operate in a country where children are afraid and cannot feel much less think you cannot learn in that kind of atmosphere that is why as the principal said we re trying to be tough and firm and strong in some of these critical areas that s why we had to pass the brady bill that s why we had to pass the crime bill that s why we adopted senator feinstein s amendment to ban assault weapons on the streets of our cities and that s why we come here today to sign this executive order i know here in this high school you already have a zero tolerance policy for guns and i applaud you for it i applaud your principal and i applaud the students who support it now students all over the country their parents their teachers their principals will be required to meet the challenge that you have met to follow your example students have to take the lead to take responsibility for this we can do better and we must zero tolerance is a common sense policy why does anybody need to have a gun in school that s why this order directs the secretary of education to withhold funding the states that don t comply with the law young people simply should not have to live in fear of young criminals who carry guns to schools and again i will say just like the assault weapons this bill is in the federal law because senator feinstein sponsored it and demanded it and we got it thanks to her efforts and those of senator dorgan and i thank them both now as i sign this order just before i do i want you to think about it all of you students here what are you going to do what are you personally going to do about what s going on that s really what counts we can have this rule and fewer people will bring guns to schools we also need fewer guns on our streets one of the things in the crime bill is the banning of juvenile possession of handguns unless the juvenile is under the supervision of an adult we are doing all we can to pass laws but in the end your future will be decided by what is inside you what you decide to do i think all americans have been very moved i know i certainly have by the signs of the haitian people getting their freedom back and president aristide going back to bring democracy back to haiti you know one of his biggest challenges after all the violence that those people have suffered is to make sure that his own supporters now do not resort to violence to retaliate why is violence going up so much among young people in our country violence begets violence begets violence begets violence it has to end somewhere and if you watched president aristide back in haiti perhaps the most gripping thing was when he stood there having had many of his friends killed having had children that he tried to help terrorized standing there saying to the masses of his people no to violence no to retribution yes to peace yes to reconciliation and if they are saying that inside their heart that will do more than any law so i say to you as your principal said we ve done some tough things to try to give you a bright future and we re not ashamed of them we re proud of them if we can think of other things to do we will do them as well but in the end what you say inside is even more important you must say no to guns no to gangs no to drugs yes to education yes to hope yes to your own future the 21st century can be the best time this country and this state ever knew because of all of you because of our diversity because in a global society we will be the great global nation because everybody can be an american you don t have to be of a certain race or ethnic background or religious conviction you just have to come here and share our land and share our values and make the most of your own life that is what you have to do but in the end you will have to do it so i say to you i m proud to sign this order to give you the chance to say yes to your future and i hope and pray you will do it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton22 10 96a bill_clinton thank you thank you thank you so much well this crowd s a little rowdy tonight but it s only two weeks until voting time it s about time to get a little rowdy so i m glad to see you let me ask all of you to join me in once again expressing our appreciation to the wonderful wonderful entertainment we had tonight thank you peabo bryson thank you thank you you were fabulous thank both of you so much thank you i am so glad to see you here i m glad to be up here with buddy mckay and lawton chiles and bob graham we ve all been friends a long time we ve worked together on so many things for so long we read each other s mind i think we can say each other s speeches tonight i was kind of tired i thought maybe i could be lawton he won t talk very long then maybe i can be me and not talk very long who knows let me say to all of you i expect to be back here in florida before this election is over but and i have worked hard for this state for four years and with your leaders for four years in trying to help you overcome the impacts of the hurricane in trying to help deal with the challenges of education and health care and trying to help you grow your economy in trying to help you save your environment in trying to help you save and enhance the state s program this is my last election unless i run for the school board someday for me as lawton chiles said it all started in florida in december of 1991 you gave me the first step up on the road to the white house and i will never forget that i will always love you for it and always be grateful and i d sure like to go out with a victory in florida we have worked together to try to seize the future not only on the things i mentioned but the summit of the americas which senator graham spoke about the extra efforts we have made over the last four years to try to bring freedom to cuba the work that we must do the work that we have done and must continue to do to shore up democracy in the rest of our hemisphere and our neighborhood but tonight i just want to ask you very briefly this will be brief to take some time when you go home tonight i hope you will pat yourself on the back for the contributions you have made and the efforts you have made and then i hope you will redouble your efforts in the next two weeks and i think you can do it if you go home tonight and go through an exercise that i frequently go through myself if you ask yourselves before you go to bed what do i want my country to look like when we start the 21st century just four years away and what do i want my country to be like when my children are my age what do i want it to be like when my grandchildren are my age we are going through one of those periods of profound change in how we work and live how we relate to each other how we relate to the rest of the world you know it here in florida and particularly here because you re on the cutting edge of so many of those changes it is not as if we have an option to repeal those changes that s nothing i can take credit for these changes are big deep historical currents the issue is how will we respond to these challenges how will we make these changes our friend how will we be able to meet the challenges and preserve our values for me the answer has always been very simple it s the thing that got me into the presidential race in 1991 it has driven our administration every day for the last four years it is what can we do to make sure that when we start that new century in a new millennium opportunity is still alive for every single person in this country who s willing to be responsible and work for it what can we do what can we do to make sure that the united states continues to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity and what can we do to make sure america incorporates all these vast changes in a way that strengthens our american community that brings us together instead of driving us apart how can we learn to help people succeed more at home as parents and in the workplace how can we live in greater harmony with our natural environment and how can we live in greater harmony with each other in spite of all of our differences and i have worked very hard and i m proud to be able to say that compared to four years ago in virtually every category of measurement by those standards we are better off than we were four years ago we are on the right track to the 21st century you know in nearly every election and in too many over the last 10 years or so as you get along toward the end of the election things tend to get sometimes harsh and personal and many of you said to me tonight i appreciate it that you liked the way i avoided that in the second debate i thank you for your comments about that but let me say that to me it is not necessary to do that and in fact doing that undermines what i think we ought to be doing which is to look at the fact that we have two candidates and two philosophies here that are very different about how to reach the 21st century and they are so different and clear a vote should be easy to cast and no one should be willing to stay home because the consequences are so significant for how we ll have to live i believe that the human dimension is very important and you know as i ve said repeatedly i had a good personal relationship with senator dole when he was the senate majority leader i had a good personal relationship when i vetoed the budget he passed it wasn t personal i realized that he thought it was a good thing to cut education by 30 billion and get rid of the national service program and undermine our environmental protection programs he thought it was good because he thinks the government is a disembodied bad force in our lives and i honestly disagreed he wants to say that we re the party of government but you know our democratic administration reduced the number of people working for the government the number of regulations on the books and eliminated more programs than they did in 12 years when they had the white house this has nothing to do the central question here is do you believe there are some things that we must do as partners together because we can t do them on our own i went out to the largest community college in america today the president of that college a cuban american who came here 33 years ago to start his life now heading the largest institution of its kind in our entire country and i looked out at that college and i said you know this is the way america ought to work this is a flexible non bureaucratic high performance organization committed to the realization of everyone s potential but they give you no guarantees you have to work all you get is a chance but on the other hand everybody gets a chance nobody get filtered out because they re in some special category all you have to do is to show up and be willing to work and that s the way america ought to work and that s what i believe we should be working for so that s the big issue should we build a bridge to the 21st century wide enough and strong enough for everybody to walk across or should we say that in order to do that i ll have to undermine your freedom so there s the 21st century and there s a big deep valley and there s a big high mountain i hope you get across good luck should we say to people you re better off on your own or should we say hillary was right it takes a village to raise a child and build a country and build a country and i didn t want i don t feel that it is necessary to believe that people who disagree with me on this are bad people i do believe the consequences would be bad i think we were right for example to take more chemicals out of the air and raise the standards of our food and strengthen environmental enforcement in a way that grew the economy didn t undermine the economy we ve had more new businesses start in environmental technology hiring more people by far than anyone can reasonably claim jobs have been lost because we fought for clean air clean water and the preservation of our natural resources i believe we were right but you have to decide you know most of us will do fine no matter what happens in terms of educating our children but i believe we re going to do better if we pass our program to open the doors of college education to all americans and let everybody have access to at least two years of education after high school and give everybody some sort of tax deduction for the cost of college tuition up to 10 000 a year i think we ll all be stronger if everybody gets a good education that s what i believe so you have to decide that but i believe we must remain an aggressive forward looking reformist country committed to meeting these challenges and meeting these changes and i know we can do it i think you know we can do it that s the last thing i want to say this election is not over it has not even occurred yet except among those of you who have voted absentee or if you live in one of those states where they let you vote for three weeks otherwise all these poll are pictures of horse races that aren t over now i know there are no gamblers in this audience but if there were people who had ever been to horse races in this audience chances are that several of them held winning tickets on horses that were ahead at the three quarter turn some of them held tickets on horses that were ahead in the stretch but the only tickets they collected on were the horses that were ahead at the finish line the finish line is november 5th and i want you to be there i want you to bring people there and i want you to help us build that bridge to the 21st century thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton22 10 96b bill_clinton thank you thank you very much let me first of all say i have had a lot of introductions in my life i have had a lot of real good introductions in my life but i have never been introduced better than jerry sawyer did it just then and he was up here you know talking and he got a real head of steam up and he started talking about how the other side said my economic program would fail and they all voted against it and they said the sky would fall and then all the good things that happened i thought to myself when he was up here really wound up i thought now where were you when i was preparing for that debate last week i could have used you jerry sawyer president eduardo pedrone thank you for having us here at this wonderful place governor chiles thank you for your leadership for florida and your friendship and advice to me and the same for you lieutenant governor mckay congresswoman carrie meek was up here she told me that she started out here at miami dade community college and i could tell that you are still her people and she is still yours and you should be very proud of her very proud of her i d also like to thank some other folks who are up here with us today attorney general bob butterworth our insurance commissioner bill nelson congressman peter deutsch and of course the chairman of your board of trustees martin fein thank you all for being here thank you gentlemen for coming thank you i have wanted to come here for a long time to the largest community college in the entire united states of america i am grateful to you for many things but some of you may not know it i actually have a member of my cabinet who went to school here whose parents taught here and whose mother i believe is still in the audience carol browner went here and then on to the university of florida and wound up being head of the environmental protection agency where she is helping us to save the florida everglades thank you miami dade and i d like to thank her mother if she s here in the audience ladies and gentlemen this is college day for us the first lady is at the university of nevada at las vegas the vice president is at the south dakota school of mines and technology i got to come here to america s largest community college because i believe that community colleges work the way america has to work in the 21st century if you just think about it this is not a bureaucratic organization it s a flexible creative organization you change from year to year the programs you offer and you have to meet a high standard of excellence otherwise you ll be punished for what you don t know in the marketplace it is a purely democratic organization that s small d democratic in the sense that it s open to all nobody asks you what your race your religion your ethnic background is all you ve got to do it be willing to work hard learn what you re supposed to learn take the exams make the most of your own lives if you show up you re a part of the community college and you ought to be a part of the american community as well this is the way america ought to work the way these community colleges work today i came here to talk about expanding opportunity to colleges but i want to say something about what jerry mentioned today we got some more evidence that america s economy is on the right track with low unemployment low inflation and low mortgage rates we now have 4 5 million new homeowners in the last four years and lower interest rates have helped 10 million more americans to refinance their old mortgages at lower rates saving huge amounts of money for those families homeownership is an idea that ought to be available to every working american we now have the highest rate in 15 years and by the 21st century if you ll give us four more secretary cisneros and the rest of us who are working on this will have an all time high of homeownership by the year 2000 more than two thirds of the american people will be living in their own homes if you will work with us and help us to build that bridge to the future my fellow americans you ve got a big decision to make on november the 5th are we going to build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past are we going to build a bridge wide enough and strong enough for everybody to walk across together or will we say there s the future out there i hope you can make it are we going to tell the american people you re on your own or are we going to say that yes it does take a village to raise and educate our children and build our country and go forward together you heard jerry say it and you know we re in better shape than we were four years ago 10 5 million more jobs the deficit cut by 60 percent nearly 2 million fewer people on welfare the lowest violent crime rate in 10 years we are moving in the right direction but your vote will decide what bridge we take to the future and whether we build one wide enough for everyone to walk across i want to ask every one of you who s here tonight this afternoon on this beautiful florida afternoon to do something tonight when you go home i want you to do this not for me but for you just take a few minutes and see if you can say to yourself the answer to this question what do i want my country to be like when we start that new century what do i want my country to be like when my children are my age when my grandchildren are my age what is my dream for america for four years i ve been working on that dream for america mine it s simple and straightforward i want the american dream alive and well for every single person who is responsible enough to work for it i think everybody should have the chance to live out their dreams and to live up to their god given capacities i want this country to be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity and i want us to go forward together where families can succeed at home and at work where we re living in harmony with our environment and most important where we re living in harmony with each other that is my vision and so i have worked to create more opportunity for all to reinforce the principles of responsibility from all and to create an american community where every person without regard to race color creed gender you name it believe they have a place at the american table and in the american future that is what i have worked for but now you will decide you will decide by how you vote you will decide by whether you vote you have to decide you will decide whether we balance the budget and protect medicare medicaid education the environment and research whether we have targeted tax cuts to help people educate their children and themselves raise their kids buy a home deal with medical costs or whether we adopt that big risky tax scheme that would blow a big hole in the deficit weaken our economy and force even bigger cuts in education in the environment in medicare and medicaid than those i vetoed a year ago you will decide you will decide by how you vote you will decide by whether you vote you will decide whether we can help more people to succeed at home and at work twelve million families have taken a little time off from work without being fired when a baby was born or a parent was sick it s helped the american economy and i want to keep it and do more i want to say that parents ought to get a little time off to go to those regular conferences with their children s teachers or to take a family member to the doctor to a regular appointment you will decide whether we do it and whether we build that bridge we have started to protect our children from the dangers of guns and gangs and drugs and tobacco over the intense partisan opposition we passed the brady bill and the assault weapons ban we extended the brady bill to say if you beat up your spouse or your child you should not be able to buy a handgun you re a danger to society we said to the tobacco companies you may sell your products to adults but it s illegal for children to smoke so stop marketing advertising and delivering cigarettes to our children we passed tough new laws against drug dealers including the death penalty for drug kingpins we dramatically increased funds to help our schools keep our kids out of trouble in the first place with safe and drug free schools program we said to the states we want you to start drug testing parolees if people want to be out on the streets they ought to stay off of drugs if they re going to get back in trouble they ought to lose their rights to walk the streets don t get any more kids in trouble your vote will decide whether we finish this work with tobacco and drugs and gangs or whether we walk back on it we passed the kennedy kassebaum bill which says to 25 million americans we can t take your health insurance away from you anymore just because you changed jobs or somebody in your family s been sick we stopped we passed a law that said insurance companies cannot force hospitals to kick new mothers and their newborn babies out of the hospital after one day anymore but your vote will decide whether we keep on doing that whether we provide health insurance to another million children whether we help families who lose their jobs keep their health insurance when they re between jobs whether we continue to work with states like florida to help offer affordable health insurance to working people with limited incomes your vote will decide and whether you vote will decide we passed a historic welfare reform bill and i want to applaud governor chiles on being one of the first three states in the country to submit a plan to actually move people from welfare to work not to abandon poor families and poor children thank you governor now we moved 2 million people from welfare to work the new law says every state and every community has two years for every able bodied family to turn that welfare check into a pay check meanwhile we ll guarantee health care we ll guarantee food on the table we ll spend more for child care if you go to work but if you can work within two years you ve got to turn the paycheck the welfare check into a pay check that sounds good but to do it there has to be a paycheck i ve got a plan to create a million more jobs for people on welfare in partnership with the private sector your vote will decide whether we walk away from those people or create those jobs so they too can be part of the american dream we have made our streets safer with 100 00 more police on the books but not all on the streets we ve only funded about half of them and our friends on the other side just as jerry said with the budget they fought us every step of the way with the crime bill but we have saved that and that s why the crime rate s gone down for four years in a row but it s still not safe enough on florida s streets and we don t want to just catch criminals we also want to prevent crime in the first place that means you need people out there working with the kids being strong role models and preventing things from happening in the neighborhoods and on the streets you need to help us finish the job of putting the rest of those police officers on the street and your vote will decide whether we do that or go back it is up to you will you help us do that we have taken more chemical pollutants out of the air we have made our drinking water safer we have raised the standards for food we have done more to protect national parks and to expand national parks we have begun the work but not finished the work of protecting the everglades you will decide you will decide whether we will keep up this work and finish the job on the everglades you will decide whether we will clean up 500 more toxic waste dumps because there are still 10 million american children growing up within four miles of a toxic waste site that is wrong i want them growing up next to parks not poison you will decide will you help us do that but most important of all you will decide whether we build an america in which we have a world class education system open to all americans i have worked hard from expanding opportunities for head start to giving our schools more tools for the kids to meet higher standards to creating the national service program americorps some of the people are here that have allowed people to work in their communities and earn their way to college to the biggest increase in pell grants in 20 years to the direct student loan program and thank you president pedrone and others for supporting that we are saving the average college student on the direct loan program about 200 a year but more important we re saying to every student who borrows money in that way you don t have to worry about your college loans anymore because you can pay it back as a percentage of your income no one can ever make you go bankrupt because you borrowed the money to go to college that is a good thing every step along the way we had to fight our opponents on the other side they tried to kill the student loan program improvements they tried to cut back on head start they tried to kill the national service program now they even have promised to eliminate the department of education your vote will decide and whether you vote will decide that s their program go into the 21st century with not a single soul in the president s cabinet speaking for the education of our children is that the future you want well you have another alternative jerry talked about it but i want to say again i want to emphasize four things to you that i want to do in education all important to florida number one 40 percent of the 8 year olds in america cannot read a book on their own today part of that is because we re a nation of immigrants we have a lot of young kids who s first language is not english but everyone needs to be able to read in order to keep learning i want to mobilize 30 000 people the americorps volunteers trained reading tutors and others to get a million volunteers across america to go into the schools to work with the parents so that in four years we can say every 8 year old in america can pick up a book and say i can read this all by myself i was in tampa the other day at a school which was so crowded they had folks meeting in trailers next to the school a beautiful old school we have the largest number of school children in america today ever in history almost 52 million the united states government has never helped schools with their building problems but children cannot learn if they re in impossible rundown beat up substandard conditions without adequate equipment so i have a program to lower the interest rates and therefore cut the costs to the taxpayers in the school districts of building those facilities or repairing them if local people are willing to make an extra effort to help their schools the federal government should be a partner and lower the cost of doing it and i want you to help me do that the third thing i want to do now when jerry said this all the young people clapped and i couldn t tell whether those of us who are older were or not let me tell you what it means to hook up every classroom and every library to the information superhighway by the year 2000 it means for the first time in the history of america children in the poorest school districts children in the richest school districts and children in all the school districts in between for the very first time will all have access to the same information in the same way at the same time will you help me do that folks this is a big deal we can t turn our backs on learning learning is generating more jobs for us more than half of these new jobs are high wage jobs that s the good news the challenging news is if you want them you have to know something and you have to be able to keep learning just in the last four years learning has done the following things we have more than doubled the life expectancy for people with hiv we have discovered two genes that cause breast cancer giving us hope that we can not only cure it earlier but actually some day prevent it in the last four years we have developed the first real treatment for people who have strokes never any real medical treatment before these are things that are happening a lot of you heard christopher reeve talk at the democratic convention and he talked about medical research sitting there so bravely in his wheelchair about the time he spoke for the first time ever a laboratory animal with its spine completely severed had movement in his lower limbs because of a nerve transfer to the spine from another part of the body learning is the answer to so many of our problems and the key to our future and to our prosperity and to our quality of life we are working to build a supercomputer with ibm that will do more calculations in one second than you can do on your own calculator in 30 000 years that s how much learning is going forward so i say to you the last thing we have to do is open the doors of college education to every american of every age at any time who needs to go and i want you to help me do it i want you to be able to save in an ira and withdraw from that ira without any tax penalty at all if you use the money on a college education i want you to be able to do just what jerry says i want every community college in america to know that we have to make at least two years of education after high school as universal by the year 2000 letting you just take off your tax bill dollar for dollar the cost of a tuition at any community college in the country that s what i want you to do and i want you to help us do it and finally for people that go on to college i think you ought to be able to deduct up to 10 000 a year for the cost of any college tuition anywhere at any level and i want you to help me do that now i say again your vote will decide and whether you vote will decide this is not a small election the world is changing too much the best days of this country are ahead you will have more opportunities than any generation of americans before if you make the right decision but you have to decide and the last thing i leave you with is this we will never be what we ought to be unless we prove that our diversity is a great asset not a liability unless we reject the religious the racial the tribal the ethnic hatreds that are consuming people all around the world pick up the newspaper any day and you can see it in america that is not for us we stand for freedom we stand for equal opportunity we stand for the responsibility of every citizen and the right of every citizen to be treated equally under the law will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century will you be there on november 5th i need you thank you god bless you thank you dem wjclinton22 10 96c bill_clinton thank you very very much thank you so much mayor and mrs archer congressman dingell congressman bonior congressman levin governor and mrs blanchard mayor stanley you can clap for anyone you like mayor stanley bishop mayor bob kazaren of hamtramck welcome thank you i d like to welcome the 4th grade students from the hiller elementary school from lapeer michigan they re here somewhere where are they welcome i m glad you re here and students from the academy of military science in detroit are here somewhere i think where are you back there in the back welcome i want to thank senator carl levin for his extraordinary work as you know i m sure everyone in michigan knows that in january senator levin will become at least the ranking democratic member of the senate armed services committee and perhaps the chairman of the senate armed services committee in addition to his vigorous representation of the people of michigan on all kinds of domestic issues he has been a great leader for keeping our nation strong and secure in this time of remarkable change and the state the nation and the president are in your debt senator thank you very much i am delighted to be here in detroit to discuss the challenges we face as we enter the 21st century to make sure that we remain the world s strongest force for peace and freedom for security and prosperity detroit is a city meeting the challenges of the future and is the perfect place for me to have this opportunity to visit with you yesterday i couldn t help thinking that in the empowerment zone that the mayor and others have worked to make so much of which has generated 2 billion in private capital to develop the resources of the people of detroit here and in the ground we broke yesterday for a 1 6 billion new airport to give you the capacity to reach out to the rest of the world detroit is doing what all of america must do we must develop ourselves and reach out to the rest of the world congratulations mayor and to all the other local officials here from its very founding our nation has stood for the idea that people have the right to control their own lives to pursue their own dreams in this century we have done far more than just stand for these principles americans have acted upon them and sacrificed for them fought two world wars so that freedom could triumph over tyranny then made commitments that kept the peace that helped to spread democracy that brought great prosperity to ourselves and helped to win the cold war now the idea as we struggle for democracy and freedom freedom of religion freedom of speech freedom of assembly open markets respect for diversity these ideas are more and more the ideals of humanity when we adopted democracy as our form of government in 1776 and then when we ratified our constitution a few years later it was an unusual choice that we made democracy had largely vanished from the earth for nearly 2 000 years since ancient greece in this century amid all the wars and bloodshed we have struggled to advance the cause of democracy and to support those who are seeking it and now for the first time in history 61 percent of the world s nation and for the very first time in the last couple of years over half of the people on the face of the globe live in democratically elected under democratically elected leaders in free countries that s a remarkable thing this never happened before four years ago when i sought the presidency i said that to build a strong community based on opportunity and responsibility here at home to be both prosperous and secure we would have to continue to lead abroad in this new era the burden of american leadership and the importance of it indeed the essential character of american leadership is one of the great lessons of the 20th century it will be an even more powerful reality in the 21st century a century in which the blocks and barriers that defined the world for previous generations will continue to give way to greater freedom faster change greater communications and commerce across national borders and more profound innovation than ever before a century in which more people than ever will have the chance to share in humanity s genius of progress as walls come down around the world so must the walls in our minds between our domestic policy and our foreign policy think about it our prosperity as individuals communities and a nation depends upon our economic policies at home and abroad on detroit s empowerment zone and your commitment to an airport facility that will connect you better to the rest of the world our well being as individuals communities and a nation depends upon our environmental policies at home and abroad our security as individuals communities and a nation depends upon our policies to fight terrorism crime and drugs at home and abroad we reduce the threats to people here in america by reducing the threats beyond our borders we advance our interests at home by advancing the common good around the world let me just give you one example that i ll return to in a moment in the last four years the american people working together have created 10 5 million new jobs now that is good news but perhaps even more important more than half of those jobs are in high wage categories that is one reason that real wages for the typical working family have started to rise again for the first time in a decade now that has to be seen in terms of what is happening to the american economy becoming connected to the rest of the world we ve had an all time high in exports an increase in exports of about 35 percent and we know that export related jobs on average pay considerably higher than jobs which are totally confined in their economic impact to the domestic community the 200 plus agreements we ve made in trade including over 20 with japan we ve seen an increase of 85 percent in the export of american products to japan i visited as many of you know an american auto dealership in tokyo and just yesterday we learned that our exports of american cars to japan increased 40 percent in just one year last year i say that simply to make the point that our economic policies at home and abroad affect the well being of america s families and in a world that is increasingly interconnected we have to just sort of take down that artificial wall in our mind that this is completely a foreign policy issue and this is completely a domestic issue because increasingly they impact one on the other that is why i think among other things we have to resist those who believe that now that the cold war is over the united states can completely return to focusing on problems within our borders and basically ignore those beyond our borders that escapism is not available to us because at the end of the cold war america truly is the world s indispensable nation there are times when only america can make the difference between war and peace between freedom and repression because hope and fear we cannot and should not try to be the world s policeman but where our interests and values are clearly at stake and where we can make a difference we must act and lead we must lead in two ways first by meeting the immediate challenges to our interests from rogue regimes from sudden explosions of ethnic and religious and tribal hatreds from short term crises and second by making long term investments in security prosperity peace and freedom that can prevent these problems from arising in the first place and that will help all of us to fully seize the opportunities of the 21st century we have approached the immediate challenges with strength and flexibility working with others when we can alone when we must using diplomacy where possible and force where necessary when i took office the bloodiest war in europe since world war ii was raging in bosnia thanks to u s led nato air strikes american diplomacy and ifor s peacekeeping efforts the war is over elections have been held the bosnian people are now getting on with the very hard work of rebuilding their lives their land their economy and their capacity to deal with each other in an atmosphere of respect none of it will be easier but america acted our partners and allies acted and think of what would have happened if we had walked away when i took office dictators terrorized haiti they forced tens of thousands of refugees to flee because we backed american diplomacy with military force and the power of an international coalition the dictators are gone haiti s democracy is back the flight from fear has ended difficulties remain but think what it would be like if america had not acted as senator levin said when i took office north korea was moving forward with a dangerous nuclear program it had been working on for more than a decade thanks to our diplomacy and with the help of japan south korea and china north korea has frozen that program under international monitoring i wish that more progress were being made in north korea toward openness but think how much worse it would be if we had not acted two years ago the collapse of the mexican peso jeopardized our own economy and the sanctity of our borders because we stepped in immediately and rallied others to join us mexico has rebounded three quarters of our loans have been repaid ahead of schedule we are earning interest on the deal i believe we have made about a half a billion dollars so far i know that was one of the more unpopular decisions of my presidency but think what would have happened if we had allowed our neighbor to the south to collapse economically without a supporting hand from the united states for their efforts to reform their political and economic systems and therefore to be able to work with us in a supportive way in each of these cases we were able to succeed because first we accepted the responsibility to lead but it isn t enough just to handle these immediate crises we also must set our sights on a more distant horizon through our size our strength our relative wealth and also through the power of our example america has a unique ability to shape a world of greater security and prosperity peace and freedom these are long term efforts and often they take place behind the headlines but only by pursuing them can we give our children the best possible opportunity to realize their own god given potential that s why we have worked patiently and pragmatically to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction to take on the challenge of terrorism to build an open trading system for the 21st century to help secure the gains that peace and freedom are making around the world we are making the future more secure by lifting the danger of weapons of mass destruction it has taken hard negotiations and persistent diplomacy but consider the results today not a single russian missile targets america we are cutting our nuclear arsenals by two thirds we are working to keep the remaining weapons safe and secure we helped to convince ukraine kazakhstan and belarus to give up the warheads left on their lands after the soviet union dissolved we won the indefinite extension of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty our most powerful tool in keeping nuclear weapons from spreading and just a few weeks ago after literally decades of discussion that began under presidents eisenhower and kennedy i was proud to be the first head of state to sign the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty once enforced it will end nuclear testing for all times there is to be sure more hard work ahead of us we must secure the ratification in the united states senate of the chemical weapons convention to make it more difficult for rogue states and terrorists to acquire poison gas we must strengthen the biological weapons convention to help prevent the use of disease as a weapon of war and we must succeed in negotiating a worldwide ban on anti personnel land mines which murder and maim more than 25 000 people a year as we keep our focus on these goals we must also keep the heat on terrorists who would darken the dawn of the new century piece by piece we have put in place a strategy to fight terrorism on three fronts toughening our laws at home tightening security in our airports and airplanes and pressing our allies to adopt with us a strict policy of zero zero tolerance for terrorism in the congressional session just concluded two important pieces of legislation were passed to help give us the tools to fight terrorists at home and almost all the vice president s recommendations for increased security at our airports and on our airplanes were adopted in a billion dollar bill designed to help us move immediately and aggressively to improve airport and airline security i am encouraged by that when i met last summer with the leaders of the g 7 nations in france they agreed to work with us to try to get a zero tolerance for terrorism policy around the world while we can defeat terrorists and we have been successful in thwarting attempted terrorist attacks in the united states attempted attacks on our planes flying out of the west coast recently there was a conviction in a united states court of a person we extradited back to the united states who was charged and then convicted of conspiring to blow up a number of airplanes flying out of our west coast over the pacific it will be a long time before we defeat terrorism but we have to remain determined and strong if we do we know we can prevail it took a while for the cold war to be resolved in a way that was favorable to humanity and freedom but we stayed the course and we must stay the course against this and our allies must help us we simply cannot be doing business by day with people who are supporting terrorists who will kill us by night that is wrong and we must work to develop a common policy on that we are building prosperity at home by opening markets abroad as i said earlier i believe that decades from now people will look back on this period and see the most far reaching changes in the world trading system in generations more than 200 trade agreements we have negotiated have led to more than a million new jobs they ve helped to make america the number one exporter again you know that here in detroit you led the nation here with the fastest recent growth in export trade and today for the first time since the 1970s the united states is again the number one producer of automobiles in the world it is not easy to both expand trade and keep the rules fair it has to be done issue by issue agreement by agreement it is hard work day in and day out month in and month out year in and year out but we must continue to do it next month i will travel again to asia to the philippines for the fourth annual summit of the asian pacific economic cooperation forum because a lot of america s future is tied to asia s future as a pacific power we have a responsibility to work for stability and security in asia and an opportunity to benefit from that region s extraordinary economic growth we are also working to advance the cause of peace and freedom around the world this also is a mission rooted in both our ideals and our interests after all when people live free and they re at peace they re much less likely to make war or abuse the rights of their own citizens much more likely to be good trading partners and partners in the struggle against terrorism international crime and drug trafficking working with us to prevent global environmental decay from the middle east to northern ireland from cuba to burma from burundi to south africa those taking risks for peace and freedom know that the united states will stand at their side nowhere are our interests more engaged than in europe when europe is at peace our security is strengthened when europe prospers so does america we have a special bond because our nation was formed from the hopes and dreams of those who came to our shores from across the atlantic seeking religious freedom fleeing persecution looking for a better life from the pilgrims of 1620 to the hungarian freedom fighters of 1956 whose struggle we commemorate tomorrow they gave america the strength of diversity and the passion for freedom remarkable generations of americans invested in europe s peace and freedom with their own sacrifice they fought two world wars they had the vision to create nato and the marshall plan the vigor of those institutions the force of democracy the determination of people to be free all these helped to produce victory in the cold war but now that that freedom has been won it is this generation s responsibility to ensure that it will not be lost again not ever president reagan gave strength to those working to bring down the iron curtain president bush helped to reunify germany and now for the very first time since nation states first appeared in europe we have an opportunity to build a peaceful undivided and democratic continent it has never happened before it can be done now a continent where democracy and free markets know no boundaries but where nations can be assured that their borders will always be secure and their sovereignty and independence will always be respected in january of 1994 during my first trip to europe as president i laid out a strategy for european integration political integration around democracies economic integration around free markets security integration around military cooperation i urged our enduring allies and new friends to build the bonds among our nations that are necessary for this time through the european union through nato through the other institutions of a new europe i challenged all our people to summon the will and the resources to make this vision real the united states and europe are answering that challenge with our help the forces of reform in europe s newly free nations have laid the foundations of democracy they have political parties and free elections an independent media civilian control of the military we ve helped them to develop successful market economies and now our moving from aid to trade and investment look at what has been achieved by our common efforts in the seven years since the fall of the berlin wall two thirds of russia s economy has moved from the heavy grip of the state into private hands poland has now one of the west s highest rates of growth you re as likely to read about poland on the business page as the front page today the private sector produces half the national income of an independent ukraine from the czech republic to hungary to estonia the same forces of freedom and free markets are creating bustling prosperity and hope for the future the bedrock of our common security remains nato when president truman signed the north atlantic treaty 47 years ago he expressed the goal of its founders plainly but powerfully to preserve their present peaceful situation and to protect it in the future all of us here today every single one of us are the beneficiaries of nato s extraordinary success in doing just that nato defended the west by deterring aggression even more through nato western europe became a source of stability instead of hostility france and germany moved from conflict to cooperation democracy took permanent root in countries where fascism once ruled i came to office convinced that nato can do for europe s east what it did for europe s west prevent a return to local rivalries strengthen democracy against future threats and create the conditions for prosperity to flourish that s why the united states has taken the lead in a three part effort to build a new nato for a new era first by adapting nato with new capabilities for new missions second by opening its doors to europe s emerging democracies third by building a strong and cooperative relationship between nato and russia to adapt nato we have taken on missions beyond the territory of its members for the first time and done so in cooperation with non member states shifting our emphasis to smaller and more flexible forces prepared to provide for our defense but also trained and equipped for peacekeeping we re setting up mobile headquarters to run these new missions more effectively and efficiently we re giving our european allies a larger role within the alliance while preserving nato s vital core which is an integrated command military structure the united states will continue to take the lead in nato especially in the southern region where the most immediate threats to peace exist but we welcome our allies willingness to shoulder a greater share of the burden and to assume greater leadership bosnia has been the first major test of the new nato at first nato could act jointly only with the united nations but once nato took charge once its lead its air power together with it s diplomat leadership was available fully it pushed the bosnian serbs from the battlefield to the bargaining table the nato led implementation force has restored security to bosnia it has given the bosnian people a chance not a guarantee but a chance to build a lasting peace but for nato to fulfill its real promise of peace and democracy in europe it will not be enough simply to take on new missions as the need arises nato must also take in new members including those from among its former adversaries it must reach out to all the new democracies in central europe the baltics and the new independent states of the former soviet union at the first nato summit i attended in january of 1994 i proposed that nato should enlarge steadily deliberately openly and our allies agreed first together we created the partnership for peace as a path to full nato membership for some and a strong and lasting link to the alliance for all i think it would be fair to say that the partnership for peace has exceeded what even its most optimistic supporters predicted for it in the beginning there are more than two dozen members now the more than two dozen members and the astonishing amount of cooperation and joint training and partnership that has developed as results of this partnership for peace has made it something of significance i believe enduring significance beyond what we ever imagined when we started it and the strategy is paying off the prospect of membership in or partnership with nato has given europe s new democracies a strong incentive to continue to reform and to improve relations with their neighbors through the partnership for peace prospective new members are actually gaining the practical experience they need to join nato thirteen partner nations are serving alongside nato troops and helping to secure the peace in bosnia there are polish and czech combat battalions hungarian and romanian engineering troops soldiers from ukraine and the baltic states forces from sweden and finland and a full russian brigade just seven years ago these soldiers served on opposite sides of the iron curtain today their teamwork with our troops and other european nato allies is erasing the lines that once divided europe while bringing an end to the bloodiest conflict in europe since world war ii we have kept nato enlargement on track now it is time to take the next historic step forward last month i called for a summit in the spring or early summer of next year to name to first group of future nato members and to invite them to begin accession talks today i want to state america s goal by 1999 nato s 50th anniversary and 10 years after the fall of the berlin wall the first group of countries we invite to join should be full fledged members of nato i also pledged for my part and i believe for nato s part as well that s nato s doors will not close behind its first new members nato should remain open to all of europe s emerging democracies who are ready to shoulder the responsibilities of membership no nation will be automatically excluded no country outside nato will have a veto we will work to deepen our cooperation meanwhile with all the nations in the partnership for peace a gray zone of insecurity must not reemerge in europe now i want to say that as we go forward the american people should be aware that this plan is not free of costs peace and security are not available on the cheap enlargement will mean extending the most solemn security guarantee to our new allies to be a nato member means that all the other members make a commitment to treat an attack on one as an attack on all but mark my words if we fail to seize this historic opportunity to build a new nato in a new europe if we allow the iron curtain to be replaced by a veil of indifference we will pay a much higher price later on down the road america will be stronger and safer if the democratic family continues to grow if we bring to our ranks partners willing to share the risks and responsibilities of freedom by overwhelming majorities this summer both houses of congress passed a nato enlargement facilitation act i greatly appreciate this bipartisan support for our efforts to forge a broader alliance of prosperity of security and as the first lady said in prague on the last 4th of july an alliance of values with europe i look forward to working with congress to ratify the accession of new members to provide the resources we need to meet this commitment to secure the support of the american people nato enlargement is not directed against anyone it will advance the security of everyone nato s old members new members and non members alike i know that some in russia still look at nato through a cold war prism and therefore look at our proposals to expand it in a negative light but i ask them to look again we are building a new nato just as we support the russian people in building a new russia by reducing rivalry and fear by strengthening peace and cooperation nato will promote greater stability in europe and russia will be among the beneficiaries indeed russia has the best chance in history to help to build that peaceful and undivided europe and to be an equal and respected and successful partner in that sort of future the great opportunity the russian people have is to define themselves in terms of the future not the past to forge a new relationship with nato as enlargement moves forward the united states has suggested that russia and nato work out a formal agreement on cooperation we should set up a regular mechanism for nato russia meetings at all levels we should consult on european security issues so that whenever possible nato and russia can act jointly to meet the challenges of the new era just as we have acted jointly in bosnia just think about it in bosnia russia and nato are already partners for peace we should set our sights on becoming full partners and bringing all of europe together together we can help to turn the main battleground for the bloodiest century in history into a continent whose people remain secure and prosperous free and at peace these past four years it s been one of the greatest privileges of my life to represent america around the world from the halls of kremlin to the hillsides of port au prince from the deserts of jordan to the tokyo harbor from the charles bridge in prague and riga s freedom square to the dmz in korea i have heard the voices and shaken the hands of presidents and prime ministers and just as important citizens on the streets of distant lands wherever i go whomever i talk with the message to me is the same we believe in america we trust america we want america to lead and america must lead i wish every american could see our country as much of the world sees us our friends rely upon our engagement our adversaries respect our strength when our family went to open the olympics in atlanta i was so moved by the statements of young people from around the world about the efforts the united states had made to foster peace in bosnia peace in northern ireland peace in the middle east things these young athletes felt personally because it was their lives their future and the children they still hope to have on the line as we enter the 21st century we must make a commitment to remain true to the legacy of america s leadership to make sure america remains the indispensable nation not only for ourselves but for what we believe in and for all the people of the world that is our burden that is our opportunity and it must be our future thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton22 11 95b bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen welcome to the rose garden and happy thanksgiving i want to acknowledge especially kenneth rutledge the chairman of the national turkey federation his wife brenda his son john stuart proctor kenneth is the chairman stuart proctor is the president of the turkey federation his wife sherry i also want to recognize the presence here of congressman cal dooley and i want to on this cold day warmly welcome the young people and the volunteers who are here from the boys club the girls club of america the big brothers and big sisters program and the members of the americorps program from baltimore i also want to say that s the most multi colored best looking turkey we ve had here since i ve been president you know we re here today to have a little fun and to begin the official thanksgiving in our country that we give every year at this time for the blessings that god has given us for the personal gifts he s given us the gifts to our families and communities and to our great country thanksgiving is a uniquely american holiday as all of you know it goes back to our foundings but i think it s important to note that the first official proclamation of thanksgiving issued by a united states president was issued by abraham lincoln during the civil war when our people were overwhelmingly preoccupied with their problems and indeed with whether our country would even continue to exist nevertheless mr lincoln reminded us that we had things to be thankful for on this thanksgiving here in america we ve got a lot to be thankful for the combined rates of unemployment and inflation in our country are at their lowest levels in 27 years homeownership and new business formation and the stock market now are at an all time high all three of them maybe even more important the crime rate the welfare rates the poverty rates they re all down this year and we re grateful for that i m grateful that the united states has been a force for peace from the middle east to northern ireland and to haiti and now of course we hope in bosnia but we should never forget that there are still people in our country that need our concern and our caring the young people who are here today are interested in making the most of their own lives and serving those in their community and that s an important part of thanksgiving as well we have obligations to our parents and to our children to people who are disabled or otherwise through no fault of their own need a helping hand and just before i came here i was with secretary cisneros and the first lady at a homeless shelter here in washington d c where we were feeding people and i m sad to say i saw a fresh and personal example of the fact that the fastest growing group of homeless people in our country are young women and their young children so on this thanksgiving we should be thankful for our blessings and we should redouble our resolve to do everything we can to make america a place of honor and decency and community where we can all give thanks i d like to say one other thing too i m very proud of the united states negotiators who did so much to help to bring about the peace agreement in bosnia yesterday there will be many questions in the days ahead about all the things that have to be answered before we can go forward with this project and i expect to be addressing the nation about it shortly but let me just remind you of one thing on this thanksgiving eve among other things in that tiny country so much smaller than the united states there are 1 million homeless people so i say on this thanksgiving i hope god will bless the peace and bring those folks home again as well let me now turn to the moment at hand which i look forward to every day every year i mean this is a i wouldn t mind having it every day actually in 1947 president truman began this great tradition of accepting a thanksgiving turkey and then granting it a presidential pardon you can see one person thoroughly agrees with my decision here this year i guess we can say since the government is back to work i can at least grant to one living thing in america a permanent furlough approximately 45 million turkeys will be consumed tomorrow all across our country but not this one as in previous years it will be donated to kidwell farms a petting zoo in fairfax virginia i am glad to be able to give this turkey a pardon and as i said if you look at his very patriotic red white and blue face and feathers it seems like the american thing to do on thanksgiving i believe this turkey was born in the state of california and raised there and we re delighted to have the turkey and the turkey s owner come all the way from california and to all the farmers who raise turkeys in north carolina minnesota california my home state of arkansas and throughout the country let me say we appreciate what you do for our agricultural sector and for the nutrition of the united states but i m very glad that one of your products is going to be exempt from the cruel fate that will make so many of us happy tomorrow and by this action i hereby pardon this turkey there are so many turkeys in washington i should pardon at least one a year i think thank you very much dem wjclinton22 2 00 bill_clinton thank you very much lieutenant governor minner senator biden ladies and gentlemen i was sitting here looking at all of your faces and i reached over and whispered to joe biden i said you know i really like delaware it has certain unique parallels to my home state it s two of the places in america where there are more chickens than people and depending on what day it is that s not all bad i am profoundly grateful to delaware for many reasons you have been so good to me and to al gore twice you have given me your electoral vote you supported the vice president for which i am very grateful i couldn t even begin to tell you in the time i have allotted tonight all the reasons for my gratitude respect and affection for senator biden beginning with his uncommon humility his retiring personality his always muted voice actually if you re looking for somebody in american politics who understands what life is like for ordinary people who s always there to defend the constitution of the united states and understands the rest of the world in other words the three big things you ve got to do if you re a senator there is nobody in the senate who can do all three as well as joe biden you are very well served and the third thing i d like to say is i m also grateful to your governor for a lifetime nearly it seems like a political lifetime of friendship and all the work we ve done together on welfare reform on strengthening families on child support enforcement i m elated that he s running for the senate and i look forward to his success and to his service the fourth reason i m here is this is my year to support women for elected office i m into that i think we ought to do more of that hillary tried to call me right before i got here she s up in new york and coming home tonight and i would imagine she was trying to call me before i got here to say that she thinks you guys ought to stick together and so do i but let me tell you finally i m here because i really admire ruth ann minner i really admire ruth ann minner some of you know this but i was born to a widowed mother who had to leave to go back to school i can only imagine what it was like she had to go back to get a ged start her own business depend on herself raise three sons i met two of them tonight they both look like they look like they ought to be playing for the redskins they d improve our defense a little bit and i ve watched her in public life and you know people make fun of little states when i ran in 92 president bush kept referring to me as the governor of a small southern state i had to hear him say it five times before i realized it was a putdown i thought he was bragging on me i was proud of it i didn t have any better sense than to think that was a good thing you can t really play games with people in a place like delaware and you can t posture and people don t hire you for hot air they hire you to produce and people know most of the problems we have are human problems and they don t expect us to let our political differences paralyze us and i just wish there were more people like ruth ann who have been through the kind of life experiences she s been through who still had enough energy and optimism left to devote themselves to public life we need more people who are making decisions in state capitols who know what it s like to try to feed kids without a high school diploma we know we need more people who can remember what it was like when they wanted their children to be able to get a decent education who understand what it s like to be on the other side of life s arc of opportunity both because they understand the government ought to give people a helping hand and because they understand that if the hand is outstretched and you don t work for it you still won t reach it we need that our country needs it and i was flattered that she said that what we needed in this election was to ratify the direction in which we re going i have only a slightly different take on that and i d just like to close with a few moments speaking to you more as a citizen than as your president before i was president i had the privilege of being governor for a dozen years and i loved it and i was not burned out on it and every time i got tired a week or two later i d get a second wind and go on i think i could be doing it still because if you are a truly committed governor or a truly committed mayor or you have some other responsibilities at the grassroots level you can actually see people s lives changing before your very eyes and we have the way i view this last seven years is that we basically turned the ship of state around when i took office we had high unemployment and the social problems were getting worse and there was political gridlock in washington and we had had decades of national elections decided by the politics of division us and them and it never made much sense to me and i tried to turn it around and i think we have turned it around the question for the country now is what are you going to do with this good fortune i d like for more people in positions of influence to have the memories ruth ann minner has of what s it like not to have good fortune they are more likely to make good decisions in times of prosperity they are more likely to remember that not all people and communities have participated in this economic recovery more likely to remember that we still need to keep paying the debt down get this country out of debt so we ll keep interest rates down for other people more likely to remember that not every child has a world class education more likely to remember that there are still young families out there struggling to balance work and family trying to succeed at home and at work and that is very important i told somebody the other day if somebody stood up and ran on a platform vote for me i ll do just what bill clinton did i d vote against them because times are changing we re living in a time of very rapid change but i do believe we ought to change in the direction in which we have been going the question is ought we turn the country around now not me we all of us together now we have a chance to meet the big challenges out there the longest economic recovery in our history what are we going to do with it now is the time to think about the big challenges what are the big challenges our kids face how are we going to deal with the retirement of the baby boom generation how are we going to grow the economy and continue to improve the environment big big challenges and you are so lucky to be backing someone who not only has a distinguished career in public service a proven ability to make progress but a life story which guarantees that even in these good times she won t forget what our shared mission is that is a great privilege you ought to make sure the people of delaware take full advantage of it thank you very much dem wjclinton22 2 93 bill_clinton first of all i want to thank you all for the introduction to your wonderful company i want to thank ed and ken we saw them last night with a number of other of the executives from silicon valley people many of them with whom i ve worked for a good length of time many of whom the vice president s known for a long time in connection with his work on supercomputing and other issues we came here today for two reasons and since mostly we just want to listen to you i ll try to state this briefly one reason was to pick this setting to announce the implementation of the technology policy we talked about in the campaign as an expression of what we think the national government s role is in creating a partnership with the private sector to generate more of these kinds of companies more technological advances to keep the united states always on the cutting edge of change and to try to make sure we ll be able to create a lot of good new jobs for the future the second reason can i put that down we re not ready yet for this the second reason i wanted to come here is i think the government ought to work like you do and before that can ever happen we have to be able to get the people the congress and the press who have to interpret all this to the people to imagine what we re talking about i have for example the first state government in the country that started a total quality management program in all the departments of government trying to figure out how we could reinvent the government and i basically believe my job as president is to try to adjust america in good ways so that we can win in the 21st century so that we can make change our friend and not our enemy ed said that you plan your new products knowing they ll be obsolete within 12 to 18 months and you want to be able to replace them we live in an era of constant change and america s biggest problem if you look at it through that lens is that for too many people change is an enemy not a friend i mean one reason you re all so happy is you found a way to make change your friend right diversity is a strength not a source of division right change is a way to make money not throw people out of work right if you decentralize and push decisions made down to the lowest possible level you enable every employee to live up to the fullest of their ability and you don t make them by giving them a six week break every four years you don t force them to make these sharp divisions between your work life and your private life it s sort of a seamless web these are things we need to learn in america and we need to incorporate even into more traditional workplaces so i d like to start we ll talk about the technology policy later and the vice president who had done so much work will talk a lot about the details at the end of this meeting but i just want to start by telling you that one of our missions in order to make this whole thing work we re going to have to make the government work differently example we cut the white house staff by 25 percent to set a standard for cutting inessential spending in the government but the work load of the white house is way up we re getting all time record telephone calls and letters coming in and we have to serve our customers too our customers are the people that put us there and if they have to wait three months for an answer to a letter that s not service but when we took office i walked into the oval office it s supposed to be the nerve center of the united states and we found jimmy carter s telephone system all right no speaker phone no conference calls but anybody in the office could punch the lighted button and listen to the president talk so that i could have the conference call i didn t want but not the one i did then we went down into the basement where we found lyndon johnson s switchboard true story where there were four operators working from early morning till late at night literally when a phone would come and they d say i want to talk to the vice president s office they would pick up a little cord and push it into a little hole that s today right we found procedures that were so bureaucratic and cumbersome for procurement that einstein couldn t figure them out and all the offices were organized in little closed boxes just the opposite of what you see in our campaign however we ran an organization in the presidential campaign that was very much like this most decisions were made in a great big room in morning meetings that we had our senior staff in but any 20 year old volunteer who had a good idea could walk right in and say here s my idea some of them were very good and we incorporated them and we had a man named ellis mottur who helped us to put together our technology policy who said he was one of our senior citizens he was in his 50s and he said i ve been writing about highperformance work organizations all my life and this is the first one i ve ever worked in and it has no organizational chart i can t figure out what it looks like on paper but it works the vice president was making fun of me when we were getting ready for the speech i gave wednesday night to the congress it was like making sausage people were running in and out saying put this in and take this out but it worked you know it worked so i want to hear from you but i want you to know that we have hired a person at the office of management and budget who has done a lot of work in creating new businesses and turning businesses around to run the management part of that we re trying to review all these indictments that have been issued over the last several years about the way the federal government is run but i want you to know that i think a major part of my missions is to literally change the way the national government works spends your tax dollars so that we can invest more and consume less and look toward the future and that literally will require rethinking everything about the way the government operates the government operates so much to keep bad things from happening that there s very little energy left in some places to make good things happen if you spend all your time trying to make sure nothing bad happens there s very little time and money and human energy left to make good things happen we re going to try to pare away a lot of that bureaucracy and speed up the decision making process and modernize it and i know a lot of you can help technology is a part of that but so is organization and empowerment which is something you ve taught us again today and i thank you very much we want to do a question and answer now and then the vice president is going to talk in more detail about our technology policy later but that s what we and ed agreed to do he s my boss today i m doing what he so i wonder if any of you have a question you want to ask us or a comment you want to make yes go ahead dem wjclinton22 2 94 bill_clinton thank you very much father malloy for that introduction now that we re in washington d c i should say that the most important thing about him is not that he is the president of notre dame but that he was a legendary high school basketball player who played on the same team with the great john thompson here in washington d c now some people this is one of our big struggles in life some people would question is it better to be the president of notre dame or be a great high school basketball player the answer is it s better to do both if possible i d like to thank you all for inviting me here and to say that i ve looked forward to this day i want to recognize many of you in the audience but i think if i start i don t know where i ll stop i am glad to be joined here by the secretary of education and i know that the secretary of health and human services and the secretary of labor also are on this program many leaders in our administration have come from the ranks of higher education donna shalala was the chancellor at the university of wisconsin the director of usia joseph duffy who came in with me was the president of american university and formerly the president of the university of massachusetts at amherst dr david satcher the director of the center of disease control was formerly the president of maharry medical center in tennessee shirley chater the commissioner of social security was the president of texas women s university then there are the people in our administration like the secretary of labor bob reich the first lady and me who taught at institutions of higher education and complained about you all the time so we re actually all exhausted after the last year and we re looking for a home to go back to so i sort of came here for a job interview today for 75 years the american council on education has represented colleges and universities with real distinction and in large measure because of your common efforts it is now generally agreed that we have the finest system of higher education anywhere in the world no other nation gives such a high percentage of its high school graduates the opportunity to go on to college none other offers such diverse choices among institutions no other nations conducts as much basic research at its universities or produces as many nobel laureates no wonder tens of thousands of students come here from all over the world every year to study the shape of american higher education is changing and with it the needs and demands this morning in preparation for this speech in part i went jogging with about 12 students from the northern virginia community college one had just become a citizen was a native of iran another was a native of sierra leone another was a native of peru another a native of scotland nobody but me had a southern accent in the whole crowd every great chapter in our history has begun by expanding educational opportunities from guaranteeing free public education to creating the land grant colleges to enacting the g i bill education has propelled our economy strengthened our democracy and created our great american middle class as governor i worked to improve our schools because i thought it was the best way to lift people up in a state with a lot of people who worked hard but were not rewarded sufficiently for their work i ran for president in large measure because i thought too many of our people were working too hard for too little that the american dream of upward mobility was seriously imperiled and that our country was coming apart when it needed to come together as president i work every day to try to secure and expand opportunities for people to be in that middle class and to see that american dream it is now clear that in order to do that more than ever before americans must seek their own opportunities to improve their lives through education and training and that it must happen over the course of a lifetime we now know that the average american because of changes in the economy at home and abroad will change work seven or eight times in a lifetime even if that person stays with the same employer although most will change employers frequently throughout a lifetime if that is true it is clear that we need an agenda as a people for lifetime learning and so today i want to offer you a seven point agenda for lifetime learning first to help every child begin school healthy and ready to learn second to set and achieve world class standards in public education third to open the doors of college opportunity to every young american who is eager and able to do college work fourth to expand opportunities for our young people to serve their communities and their country while earning money for their education fifth to provide new learning opportunities for young people who are going from high schools to work sixth to change our unemployment system into a reemployment system and finally to challenge every sector of our society to accept greater responsibility for achieving an environment of lifelong learning i come today to ask for your support to invite the congress to continue its cooperation in enacting the lifelong learning agenda and to call on all americans to do their part throughout our history people have had the idea that if they worked hard played by the rules and made the most of their opportunities they would be rewarded by a decent life and greater opportunities for their children but for the last two decades that whole idea has been called into question as more and more americans have lengthened their work week while their wages have remained stagnant or have actually declined relative to inflation this happened because of a lot of things the world is changing rapidly more rapidly than our polices perhaps more rapidly than our ability to understand the changes themselves an economy that was once almost entirely domestic is now global in its competition for markets and for jobs once capital and information management and technologies were limited by national boundaries clearly today they are not once the principal source of wealth was natural resources then it was mass production today it is clearly the problem solving capacity of the human mind making products and tailoring services to the needs of people all across the globe in the 19th century at most young americans needed a high school education to make their way it was good enough if they could read well and understand basic numbers in the 20th century as the century progressed more and more they needed more education college as well and in the 21st century our people will have to keep learning all their lives this is clearly evident everywhere next month in detroit i will host a conference of the world s leading industrial nations to discuss how we can make technology information trade and education create more and better jobs for all our citizens this now is a problem throughout all advanced countries the problem we have been experiencing for 20 years in america we have had more good fortune than the europeans for example in creating new jobs our problem has been increasing incomes in europe hardly any new jobs have been created now in japan they re having great difficulty creating new jobs so you see in all the advanced countries there is a combined crisis of jobs and incomes in the united states even though we created almost two million jobs last year we are still millions short of where we would be going back to 1989 if this had been a normal economic recovery so you now have a global crisis in the advanced nations how do you create jobs how do you raise incomes if you look at the charts behind me you will see however that even though this is an international problem for all the advanced countries it is clear that for individuals in our country education goes a long way toward solving the problem of jobs and incomes first if you look at the unemployment rate in america in march of 1993 these numbers would be all slightly lower now but still more or less the same the ratios would all be the same people with no high school diploma had a 12 6 percent unemployment rate people with four years of high school had a 7 2 percent unemployment rate people with some college education had a 5 7 percent unemployment rate that is below the national average people with four years of college had a 3 5 percent unemployment rate way below the national average and i would point out that this is this is after several years of severe defense downsizing which has dramatically increased unemployment among college educated workers in some sectors of the economy and these numbers still hold now if you look at the chart to my right and now i m on your right too i ve turned around if you see the earnings here it is clear that what you earn depends upon what you re able to learn again the mean earnings of full time workers this is calendar year 1992 19 100 for people with no high school diploma 5 000 more for four years of high school 4 000 more for some college 11 000 more for four years of college stepping up it is therefore clear that if we really want america to grow jobs and increase earnings we will have to dramatically improve the levels of education of the american people that we have to start with the pre schoolers but we can t stop with the adults today these dozen young people that i ran with i asked them what their ages were the youngest was 19 the oldest was 32 in this community college i would say their average age i didn t run the math but their average age was probably oh 24 25 the average age of a college student in america today is i think is 26 and it is likely given the demographics and the fact that the youngest of the baby boomers are now 29 if my math is right that the average age will continue to go up for another 10 years or so so any hope we have to hook the american economy to the 21st century and to open up opportunity again depends upon making sure that our education system is responsive to and adequate to the demands of the times and able i might add to make a strength of that diversity that i spoke about a few moments ago in 1993 we tried to clear some of the noneducational obstacles by bringing the deficit down creating incentives to invest in a growing economy stripping away controls on exports that were outmoded so that we could export more of our high technology products opening up trade opportunities in mexico and throughout the world with the gatt agreement and other initiatives trying to build a foundation for economic growth last year our economy created almost two million jobs 90 percent of them in the private sector a real change from previous years when more and more job growth had come only from government and we have begun clearly to move in the right direction but over the long run if you look at these charts behind me it is clear that the future of our economy and therefore the fabric of our society is in no small measure in your hands and the hands of others who are committed to educating our people for a lifetime we re going to have to make some tough choices because we can t do everything we would like to do but i believe we can with discipline continue to bring the deficit down and make room for investments that improve the skills and the productivity of the american people in order to do that we have to take the long view and we have to avoid gimmicks i believe and i think i have some credibility in saying this now since i lived in a state and governed a state for a dozen years with i think the toughest budget mechanism in the country and since we now have adopted one tough budget bringing the deficit down and if this budget is adopted our administration will be the first since harry truman s to have three consecutive declines in the deficit i think i can say that i think this balanced budget amendment is not a good idea for the united states and i ll tell you why first of all if you constitutionalize the budgeting process and no one s sure what it all means you re going to wind up having courts making decisions about budgets if any of you have ever had your budgets in court you know that s not a very good place to do it secondly if the amendment is carried out it will lead to in the near term until we reform health care it will lead in the near term either to huge tax increases which could cramp economic growth or to huge cuts in defense or social security and medicare or investments in education and technology or all of the above and if it is decided to ignore that then what you will do is basically put the filibuster in the senate and in the house in the only area where it doesn t exist today the budget that is you will put 40 percent of the senate and 40 percent of the house plus one vote in total control of the american government and america s future now that s what this does if it passes the way it is the budget that i presented cuts or eliminates outright over 300 government programs and reduces the deficit according to very tough targets and increases our investment at the national level in lifelong learning by 23 percent by getting rid of some things and investing in others if you think that s the way we ought to go i wouldn t mind it since you re in town if it s not even a long distance call if you call your senator or congressman and tell them that that s the way you feel why do we need to spend this money let s look at the various elements that i outlined earlier first in life long learning with regard to early childhood we all know that parents are the first and most important teachers but sometimes government can help them to do that that s why our agenda begins with investing in our youngest children giving them a healthy start in life giving them a chance to succeed later as students and ultimately as citizens giving them a chance to stay out of prison and in the work force and become full fledged human beings in every way that s why we re increasing our investment in child nutrition and immunization and investing not just in a bigger head start program but in a better one as well our budget will serve about 850 000 children this year and provide new opportunities for the very youngest children with regard to public schools i want to talk a little about our goals 2000 legislation that the secretary of education has worked so hard on back in 1989 i represented the governors in negotiating the national education goals with the administration the goals were designed to recognize the fact that from the day they start kindergarten to the day they graduate from high school we owe our young people the best education in the world and then the chance to go to a lifetime of learning our states and communities have always taken the lead in public education and they will continue to do so but the national government can do more to help with the goals 2000 legislation we enshrine the national education goals establish national standards by which we can determine whether schools are meeting those goals encourage grass roots reforms and give the schools the flexibility and the tools they need to meet the goals we encourage states and communities to learn from one another empower individual school districts to experiment with ideas like public school choice and charter schools asking always one overriding question of every education official are the children learning what they need to learn to compete and win in the global economy goals 2000 has been approved by bipartisan majorities in both houses of congress i look forward to a speedy conference and to signing the bill into law next month we also favor dramatic reforms in the education and secondary education act our efforts to raise standards and to focus resources have sparked some controversy so i thought i would mention this even though it only indirectly affects you i just think the status quo in this act is not good enough as the house debates this act this week we will fight for fundamental changes first of all high standards of all students wherever they are secondly significant waiver authority for schools to make experimental decisions we ve got real problems in this country today folks baltimore for example has in effect chartered several of their schools i think up to nine now to be operated by private corporations to see if they can at least fix the physical facilities if you want to know why i don t know how many of you saw here i ll promote al gore a little bit here the sunday times magazine has a wonderful article on the vice president it also has a stunning picture essay which says this better than i could america s best building see this is a beautiful library and this is a lousy building this is a school building this is a prison library why because you can take a state into federal court and make them build buildings like this for prisoners and the students don t have any such constitutional claims now so these school districts are having to try some fairly radical approaches and they re trying to say well if we ve got some fat in this budget if we can clean up the physical facilities if we can make it available we ought to try some things we want to give people a chance to try that i made a joke about father malloy s basketball prowess but you know i think it s important for children when they re in school to be able to play basketball and baseball and have music and learn something about art and a lot of schools in this country where the kids need it the worst can t afford it anymore you know there are kids in neighborhoods that produce the greatest baseball players in the history of american where there are no gloves and balls and bats and playgrounds anymore it s a serious problem and i don t want i could spend the rest of the time talking about that picture essay but you ought to get that picture and ask yourself how did my country come to this why when it s so much cheaper to educate somebody than it is to keep them in prison can you get a better library in the prison than you can in the school which leads me to the next point the other thing we try to do in this is to make sure that the limited money we do have goes to the school districts that need it the most why because they don t have access to the federal courts to order people to build them those kind of buildings so we have to spend the money that we have where it is needed the most and finally we try to promote more parental involvement in the schools knowing it will make a difference if it makes a difference in head start it will make a difference in elementary school too we have a safe and drug free schools initiative first of all we know that more than 160 000 kids every day stay home because they are afraid to go to school tens of thousands go to school carrying not just their lunches but knives or guns in that kind of environment it s hard for teachers to teach and for students to learn when people are scared and people are armed our safe schools act helps to reduce violence by adding security removing weapons and maybe most importantly helping schools to get the resources to teach young people to resolve their problems peacefully and our national drug strategy provides more education to help them stay away from drugs and guns and gangs let me just mention one thing i know you re going to think i m obsessed with this but i heard about a program the other day in a school that is immensely successful teaching children ways other than violence to resolve their difficulties it was wildly popular among the students there was a drop in violence in the school in question a business had given this school 3 000 to pay for somebody to come in and teach the program but because it was dependent upon largesse the grant wasn t forthcoming the next year and so the 3 000 was gone if 3 000 kept one person out of the penitentiary it saved 30 000 a year we have got to get our priorities back in order on this investment issue the next thing i want to talk about with regard to education is student loans something you know a lot about last june i addressed a commencement at northeastern university in boston and i met the young student who spoke there named doug luffborough who delivered an incredibly moving address he talked about how his mother had worked hard at very low wages all her life and he tried to tell her that he wanted to give up college so he could help her support his two younger brothers and their sister but his mother insisted that he go on to college no matter how difficult her circumstances his message was never say i could have i should have i would have just say i can i will well that s great that he did that but you and i know that there are too many young people who go to college and drop out or defer going to college because they think they can t afford it and last year i proposed and the congress adopted initiatives to change the student loan program to help people like doug luffborough and i thank all of you for helping it pass the new direct lending program reduces fees interest rates and monthly payments for millions of borrowers it gives every student the choice of repaying loans as a small percentage of income over time which is a big deal for young people who know they want to do things that are personally rewarding but don t pay very much it will decrease the debt burden that crushes too many of those people and discourages them from spending a few years in lower paying jobs and it will save the taxpayers over 4 billion in just the first five years we have also strengthened the pell grant program when i became president the pell grant program was 2 billion in arrears that s one of those pleasant things you don t know about until you show up one day and they drop that on your desk i am pleased to report that if congress accepts the proposal that the secretary of education has developed the shortfall will be eliminated by the end of the next fiscal year the number of student recipients will increase to 4 1 million the most ever average awards will increase and for the first time in four years the maximum benefit will increase congress has also given us the tools to root out fraud and to decrease default and we re beginning to use them we want to listen attentively to your suggestions for reducing federal intrusion and red tape but we have to faithfully implement and vigorously enforce this law that was the compact i made with students all over america in 1992 if i became president i would try to open the doors of education to all young americans never make the cost a deterrent but you ve got to pay your loan back we also need to do more to open the doors of equal opportunity last fall i signed an executive order strengthening the partnership between the federal government and historically black colleges and universities last week the department of education issued guidelines that lifted the cloud hanging over scholarships for minorities you know it s interesting to me the more people know about this issue the more likely they are to be on our side did you notice that later today i will sign another executive order to advance educational excellence for hispanic americans i believe we now live in a nation with way over 150 ethnic and racial groups in a global economy with shrinking distances instantaneous communication and blurred borders this can give us an advantage in the 21st century unlike that enjoyed by any other nation but only if we have a genuinely deep commitment to universal education and the development of the capacities of all americans now let me say one word about my favorite project national service last year we provided new opportunities for tens of thousands of our young people who wanted to contribute something to their communities and earn money for education the national service program which congress adopted americorps will this year send 20 000 young people out across our country helping police to stop crime and violence tutoring the young keeping company with the old helping the illiterate to learn to read organizing neighborhood cleanups conserving national parks within three years we ll have 100 000 young people a year doing that there was a program in texas last summer where the young people helped to immunize over 100 000 people and a respected evaluator just looked at the program and said that for every one dollar in tax money spent in that program of immunization 5 50 in tax money would be saved with a healthier population national service is more than a program it carries the spirit of what america is going to have to be like if we re going to solve our problems and grow closer as a people i want to thank the colleges and universities that are participating smith college makes community service a requirement for graduation spellman is forming real partnerships with communities throughout the atlanta area hampshire college matches assistance with the national service program provides for young people who join americorps for every american who needs to find a first job national service is a good place to begin let me also now talk very briefly about this school towork issue something that the community colleges have been particularly involved in we have the best system of higher education in the world but we are the only advanced country that basically has no system for helping all of our young people who don t go to the four year colleges at least have a smooth transition from school to work where they ve got a chance to have a good job with a growing income for the half of the young people who don t go to college and the nearly three quarters who don t get a four year college degree we propose a better system to move from school to work a new kind of education and training connecting the classroom and the workplace removing the artificial distinction between the academic and the practical students will learn practical problem solving in the classroom and at job sites and for at least a year after graduating we want young people to get more training in workplaces and community colleges we have to have rigorous academics and practical learning we have to tie the workplace to the learning environment in high school for young people who know their are not going on to four year colleges in a way that makes them respect learning and gives them the option therefore to go on to a four year college later and to work and succeed if they do not we know now from a lot of studies that have been done of people s personal learning capacities that a lot of very bright people actually learn more in a practical setting than in a more abstract setting we also know that a lot of practical tasks now require very sophisticated levels of knowledge therefore we have an opportunity to do something that americans have resisted for too long which is to merge instead of keep divided our notion of vocational education and academic education and that is what the school to work program is all about part of goals 2000 is voluntary national skills standards that will enable every young person who goes through this program to get a nationally recognized credential good for young men and women good for employers who need skilled workers but don t always know how to recognize it a b a degree should not and must not be the only ticket to a good job and a good livelihood but you shouldn t be foreclosed from going on to get one by what you do in the school to work program our approach would solve both problems finally let me say just as we need to train our young people we have to retrain millions of workers who are losing their jobs people who have been displaced by technological change international trade corporate restructuring reduced defense spending and ordinary cycles in the business economy aggravated by changes in the global economy the unemployment system into which employers all over america pay taxes was designed for a time when there would be cyclical changes in the economy which would require them to lay their workers off so that humanity demanded that they give their workers some even though a reduced level of compensation and then they would be brought back to work when the economy cycled upward again the truth is that that doesn t describe what happens to most unemployed people anymore and yet the structure of unemployment is still designed for that economy what we need to do is sort of erase the whole concept of unemployment and develop one of reemployment what would that mean it would mean that at least on the day that someone loses a job and before if they have any advance notice people would be planning to use the unemployment time as a retraining time not just waiting around until the unemployment benefits run out to have to look around for a new job or a new skill but to use the time on unemployment to learn and to grow and to develop new job skills and new awareness of what kinds of jobs are offered we want to create one stop job centers where unemployed workers can get counseling and assistance and learn about new job opportunities the skills they require and where they can best get the training last month just to give you one example i attended a labor department conference on training and retraining and i met some interesting people i met a woman named deb woodbury from bangor maine who lost a factory job had a bunch of kids didn t know what in the world to do learned new skills to be a marketing representative i met a woman named cynthia scott from san antonio who went from welfare to a training program in nursing and a good job in a hospital i met a man named john hahn from niagara county new york who was laid off for a job he had for 28 years because of defense cuts and being an older worker was still given the opportunity to learn new skills for a new career as a biomedical technician and i might say he was lucky enough to find an employer who was smart enough not to discriminate against people because they weren t young which has got to be a big part of this we re going to move people through a mobile learning environment we have to get over the notion that since you re not going to keep somebody for 30 years anyway or at least not in job x for 30 years people are going to have to be willing to hire people who are not young as well as people who are young we really do have ironically we ve got two big blocks here in the labor mobility one is a lot of young people can t get hired coming out of college because they haven t had any experience and so they keep running around like a dog chasing their tail how do you ever get it if nobody hires you the other is people who have worlds of experience but because they re so old people say well they don t want to hire them well they look younger to me every day so i think that these are employer attitudes are some things we re also going to have to work on but if we can set up this kind of system this reemployment system it will become normal then losing a job may not be so traumatic because with income supports and retraining people will be able to see it as an opportunity to move to a new and exciting and different career so that job security won t be tied to a particular job so much as it will be to the ability to work and the ability to find a job we ll have to redefine that security but if we do it will be deeper becau dem wjclinton22 2 96 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president hannah and vinnie and the congressmen the mayors county officials and others here can you believe the vice president asked me in front of all of you about this trade deal i figured that the you know in this league there s only two teams nobody on their team i want to trade him for i m a lot more worried about the other team treating him like a free agent making him an offer he can t refuse i want to say to vinnie johnson all of us saw him play on television with detroit but i was in my very first term as governor of arkansas when he was a star at baylor so i want to say here in front of all of you i forgive him for all the points he scored against my team when i was trying to succeed at everything in every endeavor i thank him i thank hannah for their stunning examples i want to thank the vice president and secretary cisneros and assistant secretary cuomo and secretary glickman and all the people in our other departments who have worked to make this community empowerment effort a success i had believed in this concept long before i became president long before i ran for president but to make it work in the way that it has worked required an incredible amount of planning and discipline and follow up and effort and i must say i have been pleased beyond my wildest dreams not only with what you have done but with the role that our administration has played and the role that they have done the idea and the passing of the law in congress was only the first step and had they not done such a superb job in the follow up all the people on the community empowerment board but beginning with those i mentioned and starting first and foremost with the vice president this would not have happened so i want to thank them for what they did i also want to say just before i get into my remarks about you the congress is coming back next monday and in the weeks since they ve been gone you can see that sometimes partisan activities lead to inattentions of the public s business now we ve got a real opportunity for action between now and easter when the congress goes out for its next recess and i think it s time that we here got down to doing our work the way that you are doing your work in your communities it s time to deal with the unfinished business of this country to continue to create opportunity to continue to give people like you the opportunity to take responsibility for your own lives and to build our american community to grow this economy in a way that will help you to succeed that means we should act now not later but now to pass a seven year balanced budget plan that is consistent with our values and our interests that protect medicare and medicaid our investments in education and the environment that gives a modest tax cut to those who really need it and that grows our economy it means we ought to act now to pass real welfare reform that elevates work and family and protects children and gives people a chance to make the most of their own lives you want to know what kind of welfare reform i want you just heard her speak up here that s what this country needs we ought to pass the health care reform bill now before the senate unanimously voted out of the committee republicans and democrats alike for it the labor unions are for it the national association of manufacturers are for it the chamber of commerce is for it why has it not been voted on the health insurance lobby is against it everybody else is for it it s a simple little bill it says if we can t find a way to give everybody health insurance at least everybody ought to be able to afford health insurance and people shouldn t lose their insurance just because someone in their family gets sick or because they have to change jobs that bill the kassebaum kennedy bill should be passed immediately to help the american people i heard vinnie say he was going to give his employees a 401 k plan there are a lot of small businesses that simply cannot afford pension plans for their employees now because of the laws that exist one of the things in our balanced budget plan is a top priority the white house conference on small business would make it much easier for the small businesses in your community empowerment zones to take out retirement programs for themselves and their employees we ought to pass that right away and i ll tell you something else we ought to do when they come back we ought to raise the minimum wage you know i believe if we raise the minimum wage you d have people coming out of welfare looking for work even more intensely than they are now if we don t raise the minimum wage it will fall to a 40 year low this year in terms of what it will buy you know it s hard to raise a family with children on 4 25 an hour and yet that s what a lot of people are trying to do now if we want to value our families and value work we ought to do it we ought to do it now we ought to pass antiterrorism legislation that has been languishing for a year almost and we ought to enact real campaign finance reform there is a lot for congress to do and this can be an era of genuine bipartisan achievement for our country it s the only way we can achieve anything since the congress is in the hand of the republicans but we need republicans and democrats to vote for things and the white house is in the hands of the other party we can do that what we really need to do here is to behave the way you are back home what we really need to do is to adopt a model that you have had to adopt back home get all kinds of people together different people different walks of life different parties different attitudes different outlooks and bring everybody s strengths to the table and prove that we can create an era of possibility for everyone you know sometimes people say to me when i give these speeches well what exactly is it that you believe what is your philosophy of how people ought to work together and how this country ought to work and you re it i mean basically this is how i think we ought to approach all of our major challenges if you want to know how i think we should work and what government should do look at what we have done to work with you to basically empower you to work together to take control of your own destinies to help individuals and families and neighborhoods and communities make the most of their own present and their own future i said in the state of the union address that these enormous economic changes our movement to an information and technology age into a global economy have created an age of possibility for untold numbers of americans but as all of us know it is a strange and different time none of us have ever lived through a time of this much economic change before the last time this happened was a hundred years ago when we moved from an agricultural to an industrial society so none of us have the experience of knowing what this is like but what is going on is we are exploding opportunities at a record rate and half our people feel like their stuck in idle and there s a reason for that i mean if i had told you three years ago suppose i d had given the following inaugural address how would you have responded my fellow americans in three years we ll cut the deficit in half have 8 million new jobs have three years in a row of record new formations of small businesses record new self made millionaires not people who were given it will have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 years homeownership will be at a 15 year high we will have record exports for the first time in 10 years our exports to other countries will be growing faster than their imports to us and after three years half the american people will be making the same thing they were making three years ago you would have said that guy is on another planet right those things don t follow but that s exactly what happened and that s why you see these different stories coming out about the economy and people taking a different tack on it and the rhetoric of the election season because the good news is true and so is the bad news and what is causing that is this great uprooting this time of change we re going through where more and more work is more mind and less muscle where this fine lady and her son do computer programs and work out the software to help the empowerment zone work in their community and more and more work is being created by people like vinnie small business people in highly flexible interpersonal relationships with fewer layers of bureaucracy and more and more people who used to be in big structural bureaucracies are finding themselves downsized which is a cruel way of saying you re middle aged and out of work and so it is the best of times for america except for the people who don t quite fit into all the changes when the gears don t quite mesh and obviously if you look across america economically you will see that there are essentially three big problems there are places where the recovery hasn t hit where the unemployment rate is still too high and people want jobs and don t have them there are the people who are working harder and harder just to keep up because they haven t gotten a raise and then there are people who happen to be in certain sectors of the economy where they re being downsized and it s taking them a much longer time to find another job making what they were making before with the same level of benefits so the challenge the economic challenge for america is not how do we put up a wall and walk away from the world but how do we capture the dynamism of the good sectors of the economy all these great things that are happening and spread it to the rest of the economy so that everybody has opportunity again so that when you talk about how the country s doing you re talking about how everybody can do and not just how some can do the same thing is true on the social front if you look at it three years ago i would not have believed that in three years we could have the crime rate the poverty rate the welfare rolls the food stamp rolls the teen pregnancy rolls all dropping but that is good that s the good news they re all going down the bad news is in most places they re still too high and the really troubling thing is that if i had told you this three years ago what if i had given you this speech my fellow americans in three years the rate of drug use in our country among people between the ages of 18 and 34 will be going down and the crime rate in america will be going down but the rate of casual drug use among people under 18 will be going up and random violence among people under 18 will be going up you would say wow how did that happen it s the same story on the social crime we have not we have not succeeded in revitalizing our institutions our neighborhoods in strengthening our families and reaching others there are still too many of those kids out there raising themselves with nothing to say yes to and people not touching them and working on them that s what you re trying to do now there is no way a government program alone can either deal with the issue of opening up opportunity for all who will assume responsibility for it or solving all the social problems and not only that no big bureaucracy is particularly effective anymore this government is much smaller than it was when i took office 205 000 smaller it s the smallest government we ve had in 30 years but that does not mean as the vice president said it does not mean that the answer to america s issues and america s challenges is going back to a time when people were left to fend for themselves or that we need a weak government what we need is a kind of partnership embodied by this endeavor community based efforts where everybody does their part that s what we have tried to do and that is what you are doing and i just want to tell you that i am grateful to you for the progress you have made and i want you to continue and i want this model to sweep the country the solutions to america s real challenges economic and social challenges have got to be community driven the private sector has got to be an integral part the government it s not like the depression the government is broke we have some money to invest in education and training to invest in environmental protection to invest in new technologies to invest in infrastructure but we got to get rid of this deficit so we can t just go out and hire everybody that doesn t have a job the private sector has got to do that and we have to have the right kind of partnership to get them involved so that we have 10 000 stories like the one vinnie told today or 100 000 or a million or how ever many it takes to bring opportunity back to everybody in this country the third thing we ve got to do is to have government at every level doing its part the most important thing i will say again about this whole empowerment zone process i think is not that we broke 13 years of gridlock to finally pass it into law in 1993 in the budget it is that after we did that over 500 communities applied to participate and even the ones that were not selected wound up being richer and better off because they had to get together and ask themselves what is our vision for this community and what is my responsibility and what is your responsibility to achieve that vision and how are we going to do it together we cannot afford to be divided anymore we can t afford to sit home passively and read the papers every day and watch the news every night and be upset about what s not happening and blame somebody else instead we re going to go out and meet together and work together and change it together if everybody in america would do that we would be on the way toward the american dream for all of our people in the 21st century just what you ve done the first round of the empowerment zone s enterprise community initiative was so successful that more than 8 billion in additional commitments of investment in these areas have been made from the public and private sector in addition to the money that was committed by the federal government that is amazing one hundred and five communities were chosen in the first round you heard vinnie johnson s story detroit alone has attracted 2 billion in local private sector investment commitments creating hundreds and hundreds of jobs we can do that everywhere in los angeles federal funds helped to set up a public private partnership to form the largest community development bank in the nation we know this country your country has funded banks in developing nations to make loans to people with far fewer assets skills and capacities than we have in the american inner cities and we have put those people back to work and given them a stake in the future and strengthened the economy of other countries it is unconscionable that we don t do it in this country every community should have one of those in one of the smallest and poorest communities in the mississippi delta two new manufacturing plants are coming to itta bena a town that had never had one before we can do that everywhere one of the things that we ought to do in this budget debate is to make sure that we leave in the commitment of a modest amount of money to establish these community development financial institutions everywhere if it works in third world countries it will work in the rural and urban areas of america that have been left out stay with it we have to do it and let me say that most of what we are talking about here all of what we are talking about here need not be a partisan issue every american republican and democrat alike independent green party whatever there s nobody in america that says i ve got a real vested interest in keeping that crime rate up except people we want out of the way there s no one in america that says i ve got a vested interest in keeping more mothers on welfare i ve got vested interest in keeping our schools substandard nobody s giving these speeches fiorello laguardia once said there is no republican or democratic way to clean the streets no one in america says i ve got a vested interest in making sure that that playground a block down from my apartment house never has a net on the basketball goal this is basic human values when we fail to give every person a shot at the american dream when we fail to grow the economy when we fail to build up the potential of the american people and when we fail to work together we all lose and when we do it we all win this is not a question of class warfare americans don t resent successful people they admire successful people americans want people who are successful to be rewarded we do expect successful people to do what vinnie s done that sometime in their lives to give a little something back to help other people succeed but nobody resents success the only time resentment comes into our society is not when people who are successful have more it s when people who don t have more never have a chance to do better that is the problem here people want their own chance to do better and we have an obligation to give it to them and that s what this whole empowerment zone enterprise community endeavor is all about now let me say that i believe that you have made round one a phenomenal success there are many other rural and urban and indian nation communities that i believe deserve a chance and so let me say when the congress comes back i m going to urge them to do one more thing i m going to ask them in this budget negotiations to give us a round two so that others have a chance to do what you have done if we are going to have tax relief we will never give so little tax relief and have spent so little money to have such a big impact to generate so much private sector and other public sector investment in any other way as we will with this there is more bang for the buck here than anything else we could do and i believe we should do it i also want to say that i want to challenge again every community to come together and devise your own rebirth there are other ways for communities to work with us for example if the baltimore empowerment zone can develop a plan to transform 600 acres of abandoned industrial land into an eco industrial park imagine how many other acres can be reclaimed if the kentucky highlands empowerment zone can create a cooperative to get credit to farmers imagine how other farmers and businesses could be helped if only credit were available if other communities have done this kind of thing to help themselves why can t every community do the same thing we want to do everything we can to help everybody in america be a part of the kind of comprehensive strategy for the future embodied in the empowerment zones in the enterprise communities taking on tough jobs like reclaiming abandoned industrial sites improving access to capital and making homeownership easier working with the communities with which we are working and those with whom we are prepared to work we are beginning to clean the environment in our cities by taking a common sense approach and i wish i had a chance to talk about 10 of these examples because they re all so thrilling to me but there are literally hundreds of thousands of old neglected industrial sites now popularly called brownfields that can be redeveloped as baltimore is doing protecting our environment in the urban area can go hand in hand with redevelopment it can create jobs and at the same time make more people want to live in the cities of america again finally let me say we have to do more to create housing that will encourage vibrant neighborhoods in our inner cities and rural areas you know cities used to be places where teachers and firefighters and police officers wanted to live and they can be again if we can help communities to develop good affordable housing if we really want all of our communities to be revitalized again we not only have to create opportunities for poor people we have to make the environment so that middle class people will want to live in them again and that the poor and the middle class will live side by side as they did in the neighborhoods when i grew up we have to do that we have to be committed to helping all americans achieve this large part of the american dream known as homeownership i m very proud of what secretary cisneros has done with dwindling resources at hud working with the private sector to see home ownership reach a 15 year high this year and we have to do more we proposed to reclaim tracts of vacant or blighted land and to renovate whole neighborhoods to bring back to the city hard working middle income families to stimulate business and private investment we want to work with private sector and other investment to create scores of livable inviting inner city neighborhoods homeownership initiatives now are working in detroit buffalo in san antonio and new york and baltimore i say again let us build on our success homeownership is one of the best ways to empower local residents to give them a stake in the community and to increase the bonds that tie people together it means commitment if we have any hope of bringing success back to these inner cities we have to have people there who care and who are committed homeownership can help us achieve that goal as well together i believe we can find the kind of long term solutions we need but i will say again if we really have a vision of all american communities where there are good jobs where there are businesses that are flourishing where the streets are safe and the environment is clean and the families are stable and the schools work to educate and prepare all children it begins not so much with any specific initiative as with you with people like you who are committed to working together to working in an honest forthright way and it ends with having the kind of partnership that you have achieved with each other and with every level of government and with the private sector the difference is the way you are doing this and your understanding that you cannot succeed unless you work together so i ask you when you leave here to continue to prove that we can do this and i ask you to join us in reclaiming more of our distressed communities and spreading the message throughout america that there is no challenge facing this country we cannot meet if we will get rid of our cynicism get rid of every excuse for inaction get rid of the notion that we have the luxury of blaming other people for our problems instead of working together to solve them together that s what you have done that s what you can give to all america thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton22 2 99 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen thank you for the warm welcome i thank governor o bannon for his kind introduction i thank him and governor patton for their leadership of the democratic governors i am delighted that all of them are here tonight and i want to pay a special compliment to tom carper for his leadership for the national governor s association this year and i might add a special compliment to all the democratic governors who showed up here in washington with an agenda for the nga to put the children of this country first and put education on the front burner and not let it get mired in the partisan politics they deserve an enormous amount of credit and i thank them i want to thank katie whelan jennifer rokala mark weiner for their work for the dga and i d like to thank the leaders of our national party who are here tonight governor romer mayor archer congresswoman sanchez and joe andrew whom we stole from indiana thank you very much i thank the members of congress who are here senator akaka senator bayh senator dodd congresswoman mink congressman hoyer and goodness knows who else is here former democratic chairman don fowler and all the former governors who are here governor waihee governor miller of nevada governor bayh a two for let me also say one other thing by way of introduction i am profoundly grateful to the nga for putting together courtesy of my good friend frank greer that magnificent film on lawton chiles one of the best ablest people i ever knew and i thank you for that when rutherford b hayes became governor of ohio he described his position in this way not too much hard work plenty of time to read good society et cetera hasn t changed much has it after he became president he said i am heartily tired of this life of bondage responsibility and toil well i don t think he was right about either job and i m proud of the work you do and grateful for the role that all of you played in giving me a chance to serve you as president it is not bondage or toil although it is responsibility nearly everybody who has had this job has written something like that and it makes you wonder if they complain about it so much why they work so hard to get it there is no place on earth i think as president kennedy once said where a person is called upon to reach deep into what you believe and what you think should be done and then given the opportunity to marshal the resources of the country to move forward but i think it is clear to all of you who have worked with me in the past that much of the success that this country has enjoyed that we were a part of and i certainly don t claim responsibility for all of it but whatever success we have been able to enjoy in this administration is in no small measure the result of the fact that i had a chance to serve as a governor for a dozen years and i thank the people of my state for giving me that chance and all the governors who worked with me in 1992 we said that we were bringing a new democratic philosophy to the country all it really meant was that we were going to bring democratic ideals of opportunity for all and a community of all americans and the governors way of work putting new ideas over old ideology and people over old fashioned washington politics it turned out to be a pretty good theory all of you know that we ve gone from a record deficit to a record surplus that we have the longest peacetime expansion in history the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957 now the lowest unemployment rate of any industrial country in the entire world we have opened the doors of college to all americans who are willing to work for it provided immunizations for over 90 percent of our children for the first time in history we re in the process with your help of providing health insurance to 5 million of the 10 million children in america who don t have it our country is working again and for that and for the role all of you have played in it not only the governors and their staffs who are here but all the others who are here from the labor organizations and the education groups and the business groups i am profoundly grateful what i would like to just take a couple of minutes to talk to you about tonight is the urgency of the governors being involved in dealing now with the great long term challenges of this country the easiest thing to do when things are going well is to say we worked hard to get here let s take a break i might say that every time our country has done this you go back through the whole history of america every time we have done this it has gotten us into trouble and we can ill afford to do it now when the world is changing so fast and when even amidst our own prosperity as all of you know there is a lot of trouble around the world virtually all of asia is in recession our neighbors in latin america our fastest growing markets all have had their economic growth dramatically reduced because of the global financial trouble there are a lot of threats to our security lurking out there in nooks and crannies with discord the world over and i asked the american people in the state of the union and i ask the governors here tonight to join me in making the most of this opportunity that we have because of our prosperity and equally because of our national confidence to look at the long term challenges of the 21st century we have a chance to guarantee for the next several decades that these challenges we know about now can at least be met no one can foresee for sure what will happen 10 or 20 or 30 years from now but we know that if we deal with the problems that we know are out there now if we seize the challenges we know are out there now that our successors will have an easier path and our country will do a better job with more of its children we have to deal with the aging of america there will be twice as many people over 65 in 2030 as there are now and i hope i m still one of them you know a lot of people go around wringing their hands about the problems with social security and medicare this is a high class problem we have this problem because we re living longer and staying healthier the fastest growing group of americans in percentage terms are people over 80 so i have asked the congress to set aside 77 percent of this projected surplus for 15 years to save social security and medicare and to improve them if we do that we will also be able to pay down the national debt so that in 15 years instead of half our annual income which is what it was when i took office it will be 7 percent of our annual income that s the smallest percentage it has been since 1917 before this country entered world war i instead of spending 14 cents on your tax dollar to pay interest on the debt which is what we were paying in 1993 we ll be spending 2 cents and if future congresses have the discipline to stay on this track we could actually be a debt free nation in 19 years just think of it and what it would mean for our children we can save social security we can do something about the inordinate rate of women on social security who are still living in poverty we can lift the earnings limit that now is imposed on people on social security which i think is a mistake since we have more and more older people who are healthy who are strong and who want to work we can add 20 years to the life of medicare and add a prescription drug benefit with some significant but doable reforms if we will have the discipline to set aside 77 percent of this surplus that leaves us plenty of money to have tax cuts i think we should have them dedicated to helping middle class people save for their own retirement to have more investment in education and to pay for our military needs we can do all of that now the easy thing to do we ll say well we ve got this surplus we waited 30 years for it let s just give it away it will be popular there are a lot of americans who could use all the money now but it would be a mistake and believe me if you look at all this turmoil around the world and the governors that are going on the trade missions that are seeking foreign investment that want to do more business you understand this i don t know and i ll say more about this in a minute i don t know whether the united states can rectify a lot of these problems in the global economy in the next couple of years i m going to do everything i can to get that done but i know this if we have the debt going down we ll keep interest rates down and investment high if things go wrong overseas they will be better than they otherwise would have been and if things turn around overseas our boom will be greater than it otherwise would have been if we have the discipline to do this and i implore you to help me the governors democrat and republican alike complained for years and years that everybody in washington talked about balancing the budget and no one ever did anything about it and after i got here and i saw all the blood that was on the floor after the 93 economic plan i understood why nobody did anything about it dick riley my education secretary another of our former colleagues used to always tell me after that when i d be moping around he d say just remember my old saying let s change you go first but we re here now and we don t want to turn around we want to keep going you know we have to do something about the children and families in 21st century america we have more kids in our schools they have more diverse backgrounds more of them come from parents who don t speak english or whose first language is not english than ever before a lot of them are going to school in trailers or in school buildings so old they can t even be hooked up to the internet i thank you for your support of our agenda to help you hire more teachers to help you build or modernize schools i ask you to continue to support our efforts to raise the standards governor carper had the right slogan for this year s governors meeting raising student achievement we ought to end social promotion but help the kids with after school programs and summer school programs we ought to turn around the failing schools we ought to give the parents the report cards we ought to do what it takes for educational excellence we also ought to do more to help working families afford quality child care one of the great ironies is when we fought very hard for welfare reform the democratic governors stood with me in insisting that we get billions of dollars in that welfare reform bill for child care that we keep the guarantee of medical care and nutrition for the kids the welfare rolls have dropped by nearly 50 percent the people that are left are harder to place we can t just let them be thrown into the streets so a lot of you are using your surplus funds to put more money into child care and more money into training it is an irony that a lot of people who have never been on welfare but who have young children cannot afford their child care needs in our balanced budget this year we have a comprehensive program that will allow millions of children to have comprehensive child care while their parents go to work and succeeding at home and work ought to be america s family mission for the 21st century i ask you for your support for that and for our efforts to expand the family leave law to raise the minimum wage to pass the patients bill of rights to do more to support equal pay for equal work a bigger and bigger issue among working husbands as well as working women all these things need to be done if we are going to have the proper balance between work and family so that our parents can do their job if our schools do theirs we have to build the right quality of life for the 21st century we talked a lot at the governor s meeting today about the livability agenda that i put forward with the leadership of the vice president carol browner rodney slater dan glickman to try to help our communities manage their traffic problems their toxic problems their need for more green space with no federal mandates and a lot of empowerment i hope you will help me pass that and finally as the governors get more and more and more involved in the global economy and you ve been leading us that way for 25 years now i hope you will help me in my continuing effort to convince the congress and the country that there is no longer a clear dividing line between our interest beyond our borders and our interest within our borders i ll just give you one example i want to keep this economic expansion going i am convinced that to do it we have to have more economic growth at home and more economic growth abroad governor patton invited me to kentucky s appalachian region to push my america new markets initiative tax credits and loan guarantees to get people to invest in the high unemployment areas of america mayor archer here in detroit got one of our first enterprise zones and the unemployment rate in detroit is now one half of what it was in 1993 detroit s unemployment rate is about at the national average we can do that in rural areas and urban communities all over america and then we have to reach out beyond our borders to create a financial system and a trading system that works for ordinary people in the 21st century to have labor standards environmental standards and more open markets to make it possible for money to go into places but to make honest loans and open loans and protect against these wild fluctuations that have not only hurt overseas countries but have hurt american farmers have hurt our companies like boeing and have been a killer for the steel industry we have got to put a human face on the global economy but we cannot run away from it the governors know that and i ask you to help to build a national consensus for that approach not for running away but not for saying well we ll just open things up and forget about how it affects ordinary people in the end the test of all of our efforts as democrats is are people out there in the country who never come to a fundraiser but get up every day and work their hearts out and raise their kids and do everything they re supposed to do are they going to be better off if this policy prevails that is the heart and soul of what drives our party and if we can deal with the aging of 21st century america the challenges of children and family in 21st century america the challenges of our environment in 21st century america the security challenges of 21st century america we re going to do just fine we can only do that if we deal with one last challenge which i believe today more than any other thing is the distinguishing difference between the two parties and that is we believe the 21st century america must be one america united indivisible with liberty and justice for all every night for the last several nights i made a call to the secretary of state who is over in france trying to broker a peace agreement in kosovo trying to avoid another horrible ethnic slaughter in a country right next door to bosnia and you know what we went through there every week i try a little harder to use the time i have remaining to get a just and lasting peace in the middle east in the last several weeks i have exerted what efforts i could so far without success to avoid a brutal murderous conflict between ethiopia and eritrea to minimize the other tribal wars in africa now after years of work we ve hit another snag in the peace process in northern ireland and we are doing our best to try to get by this last tough thing all you have to do is to read the papers to know that there are continuing tensions between india and pakistan between greece and turkey that have old deep ethnic and religious roots all over the world in the so called modern world ancient animosities are driving people to the point of war and are keeping people down ordinary people in other countries the kind of folks we try to represent here cannot build a normal life because their leaders are determined to continue conflicts based on racial religious or ethnic lines and it s why we have to guard so hard against that sort of thing here at home we think we re doing great now and we can indulge ourselves in conflicts that we know better than to pursue that is wrong and we have to honestly say the great test of our democracy in the end is whether in good times and bad america not only tries to do good abroad but to be good at home in the end we will be judged by that we have to be a country where we all serve together which is why i ve worked so hard for americorps we have to be a country where we re pushing back constantly the frontiers of discrimination which is why i have supported so strongly the employment nondiscrimination act and we have to be a country that relishes our racial our ethnic our cultural diversity and says we celebrate all this but we know that underneath what god gave us all in common in spite of all of our differences is more important that the framers of our constitution so long ago were pretty smart when they talked about the inalienable rights given to every human being and if we recognize that then we ought to be able to find a way to live together i have done everything i know to do for six years to move us toward that one america should we have differences should we have arguments should we have elections should we have discussions of course we should but when you leave here tonight if you don t remember another thing i said you just remember this no country throws away its common values and common humanity even for an instant without paying a price and every night every night i thank god that we have the chance to be a force for peace from northern ireland to the middle east to kosovo to africa i ask for the opportunity every night to make one stab to work out the problems between greece and turkey on cyprus to try to bring india and pakistan closer together and i thank god every night that we have not been cut apart by those things but america is growing more and more diverse one of our new governors here governor davis while he is governor while he is governor may preside over a state that has no majority race now this is a good thing in the world of the 21st century if but only if america not only preaches our doctrine to people abroad but lives by it at home the democratic party in the 1990s has constantly been for opportunity for change and for community i like to joke that at the end of the 20th century looking back on over 200 years of american history our party leaves this century and enters the next as not only the party of jefferson and jackson and franklin roosevelt but also now the party of abraham lincoln and theodore roosevelt and i am very proud of it i want you to stay proud of it and i want us to live by it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton22 4 93 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president mrs gore president and mrs herzog distinguished leaders of nations from around the world who have come here to be with us today the leaders of our congress and the citizens of america and especially to mr meyerhoff and all of those who worked so hard to make this day possible and even more to those who have spoken already on this program whose lives and words bear eloquent witness to why we have come here today it is my purpose on behalf of the united states to commemorate this magnificent museum meeting as we do among memorials within the site of the memorial to thomas jefferson the author of our freedom near where abraham lincoln is seated who gave his life so that our nation might extend its mandate of freedom to all who live within our borders we gather near the place where the legendary and recently departed marian anderson sang songs of freedom and where martin luther king summoned us all to dream and work together here on the town square of our national life on this 50th anniversary of the warsaw uprising at eisenhower plaza on raoul wallenberg place we dedicate the united states holocaust museum and so bind one of the darkest lessons in history to the hopeful soul of america as we have seen already today this museum is not for the dead alone nor even for the survivors who have been so beautifully represented it is perhaps most of all for those of us who were not there at all to learn the lessons to deepen our memories and our humanity and to transmit these lessons from generation to generation the holocaust to be sure transformed the entire 20th century sweeping aside the enlightenment hope that evil somehow could be permanently vanished from the face of the earth demonstrating there is no war to end all war that the struggle against the basest tendencies of our nature must continue forever and ever the holocaust began when the most civilized country of its day unleashed unprecedented acts of cruelty and hatred abetted by perversions of science philosophy and law a culture which produced goethe schiller and beethoven then brought forth hitler and himmler the merciless hordes who themselves were educated as others who were educated stood by and did nothing millions died for who they were how they worshiped what they believed and who they loved but one people the jews were immutably marked for total destruction they who were among their nation s most patriotic citizens whose extinction served no military purpose nor offered any political gain they who threatened no one were slaughtered by an efficient unrelenting bureaucracy dedicated solely to a radical evil with a curiously antiseptic title the final solution the holocaust reminds us forever that knowledge divorced from values can only serve to deepen the human nightmare that a head without a heart is not humanity for those of us here today representing the nations of the west we must live forever with this knowledge even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts far too little was done before the war even started doors to liberty were shut and even after the united states and the allies attacked germany rail lines to the camps within miles of military significant target were left undisturbed still there were as has been noted many deeds of singular courage and resistance the danes and the bulgarians men like emmanuel ringelbaum who died after preserving in metal milk cans the history of the warsaw ghetto janusz korczak who stayed with children until last breaths at treblinka and raoul wallenberg who perhaps rescued as many as 100 000 hungarian jews and those known and those never to be known who manned the thin line of righteousness who risked and lost their lives to save others accruing no advantage to themselves but nobly serving the larger cause of humanity as the war ended these rescuers were joined by our military forces who alongside the allied armies played the decisive role in bringing the holocaust to an end overcoming the shock of discovery they walked survivors from those dark dark places into the sweet sunlight of redemption soldiers and survivors being forever joined in history and humanity this place is their place too for them as for us to memorialize the past and steel ourselves for the challenges of tomorrow we must all now frankly admit that there will come a time in the not too distant future when the holocaust will pass from living reality and shared experience to memory and to history to preserve this shared history of anguish to keep it vivid and real so that evil can be combatted and contained we are here to consecrate this memorial and contemplate its meaning for us for more than any other event the holocaust gave rise to the universal declaration of human rights the charter of our common humanity and it contributed indeed made certain the long overdue creation of the nation of israel now with the demise of communism and the rise of democracy out of the ashes of former communist states with the end of the cold war we must not only rejoice in so much that is good in the world but recognize that not all in this new world is good we learn again and again that the world has yet to run its course of animosity and violence ethnic cleansing in the former yugoslavia is but the most brutal and blatant and ever present manifestation of what we see also with the oppression of the kurds in iraq the abusive treatment of the baha i in iran the endless race based violence in south africa and in many other places we are reminded again and again how fragile are the safeguards of civilization so do the depraved and insensate bands now loose in the modern world look at the liars and the propagandists among us the skinheads and the liberty lobby here at home the afrikaaners resistance movement in south africa the radical party of serbia the russian blackshirts with them we must all compete for the interpretation and the preservation of history of what we know and how we should behave the evil represented in this museum is incontestible but as we are its witness so must we remain its adversary in the world in which we live so we must stop the fabricators of history and the bullies as well left unchallenged they would still prey upon the powerless and we must not permit that to happen again to build bulwarks against this kind of evil we know there is but one path to take it is the direction opposite that which produced the holocaust it is that which recognizes that among all our differences we still cannot ever separate ourselves one from another we must find in our diversity our common humanity we must reaffirm that common humanity even in the darkest and deepest of our own disagreements sure there is new hope in this world the emergence of new vibrant democratic states many of whose leaders are here today offers a shield against the inhumanity we remember and it is particularly appropriate that this museum is here in this magnificent city an enduring tribute to democracy it is a constant reminder of our duty to build and nurture the institutions of public tranquility and humanity it occurs to me that some may be reluctant to come inside these doors because the photographs and remembrance of the past impart more pain than they can bear i understand that i walked through the museum on monday night and spent more than two hours but i think that our obligations to history and posterity alike should beckon us all inside these doors it is a journey that i hope every american who comes to washington will take a journey i hope all the visitors to this city from abroad will make i believe that this museum will touch the life of everyone who enters and leaves everyone forever changed a place of deep sadness and a sanctuary of bright hope an ally of education against ignorance of humility against arrogance an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead if this museum can mobilize morality then those who have perished will thereby gain a measure of immortality i know this is a difficult day for those we call survivors those of us born after the war cannot yet fully comprehend their sorrow or pain but if our expressions are inadequate to this moment at least may i share these words inscribed in the book of wisdom the souls of the righteous are in the hands of god and no torment shall touch them in the eyes of fools they seem to die they re passing away was thought to be an affliction and their going forth from us utter destruction but they are in peace on this day of triumphant reunion and celebration i hope those who have survived have found their peace our task with god s blessing upon our souls and the memories of the fallen in our hearts and minds is to the ceaseless struggle to preserve human rights and dignity we are now strengthened and will be forever strengthened by remembrance i pray that we shall prevail dem wjclinton22 4 97 bill_clinton well first of all let me say to all of you that i m honored to be here with the people from our administration thank you mayor owens and mayor stauss the other mayors that are here i thank senator conrad and senator dorgan senator daschle senator johnson who came in with me and senator wellstone and senator grams who met us and congressman pomeroy and and congressman peterson who met us here governor shaefer governor carlson i also want to thank all the people who came with me from my administration the secretary of agriculture dan glickman the secretary of health and human services donna shalala the secretary of housing and urban development andrew cuomo the secretary of transportation rodney slater aida alvarez our small business administration and togo west the secretary of the army i want to thank the air force the national guard the red cross the corps of engineers the coast guard the salvation army and all the people at the state and local government and the community groups that have worked so hard on this endeavor today we saw obviously these two communities that have been so devastated but we know that there is a lot of other loss in north and south dakota and minnesota we re going to meet with people now and i m going to get a briefing from people who have unbelievably dealt with blizzards floods and fires all at the same time i have never seen that before and when i saw pictures of some of you stacking sandbags in a blizzard i thought that i had bad reception on my television at first it was an amazing thing i don t recall ever in my life seeing anything like this and i ve been very impressed by the courage and the faith that all of you have shown in the face of what has been a terrible terrible dilemma i want to say before we start this roundtable discussion that we are going to do everything we can to move as quickly as possible to do as much as can be done to help i want to be briefed by everyone here at the table and james lee witt has already talked to me quite extensively about this over as you might imagine a long period of time now but i wanted to say that there are three things i d like to announce first first of all before i left the white house this morning i authorized fema to provide 100 percent of the direct federal assistance for all of the emergency work undertaken by federal agencies in the 149 counties where disasters have been declared we will do this retroactively from the moment that the counties were recognized as disaster areas which i hope will relieve the state and local governments from the worry of whether or not they re be able to actually afford to help the citizens and the communities through the clean up we do this only in the most difficult of circumstances normally the reimbursement rate is 75 percent but anyone who has been here and seen the destruction as i have knows that this is not an ordinary disaster if there is such a thing the people here are giving 100 percent and we should too second we are dramatically expanding fema s public assistance grant program we ll add 18 counties in minnesota and 53 counties in south dakota today and these counties also will be eligible for funds for repair and restoration of their communities after the waters subside let me also say that we expect to make additional counties in north dakota and minnesota eligible for this assistance as soon as we can fully assess the damage that they have sustained the third thing i d like to say is that today i m asking congress to approve an additional 200 million of contingency emergency funds for north and south dakota and for minnesota i ve asked that these funds be made available both for short term emergency response activities and for long term efforts to help the region to rebuild in the aftermath of the flood if approved this action will bring to 488 million the total amount of disaster assistance we ve requested for the people of the states finally i m directing our fema director james lee witt to lead an interagency task force to develop and direct a long term recovery plan for north dakota south dakota and minnesota we know that this is going to be a long term effort and when we were coming in today one of the things that i was just noting based on my now 20 plus years of experience in dealing with things like this although i have never seen a community this inundated by flood this large a community we have to deal with the long term problems and you have to know that we can be relied on to be there in all these communities over the long run the only other thing i d like to say madam mayor to you and the other officials you know this already but a lot of people are still almost in shock i m sure and have not had time to focus on some of the things which will make the losses most painful the things that have been lost in these homes the records of family occasions the letters from world war ii the letters from the kids that go off to college all the things that people will have to come to grips with in the days ahead and i know that 488 million or 4 billion wouldn t make that go away but at least we want you to know that we are going to be there over the long run and the rest of america has i think looked with great compassion and pain but also enormous admiration at the heroic conduct of the people of this community and of all these states in the last several days when they ve gone through things that most of the rest of us can t imagine we could never imagine facing a flood and a fire and a blizzard all at the same time and we admire you greatly and we re going to do what we can to be there with you over the long haul thank you dem wjclinton22 5 93 bill_clinton thank you very much madam president members of the faculty and staff distinguished members of congress and other platform guests and ladies and gentlemen and most importantly the members of this graduating class to answer the president s question i came here to address this class because you were the people that i ran for president to serve it was your america that i hope to make better i m proud to come back to the state that 15 months ago made me the comeback kid in this country on february 7 1992 when i came to this college the people i met here asked me about things that matter to mainstream americans about jobs and health care and getting the economy moving again and whether the future for our young people would be better than the present after i finished speaking one of your students greg fuller then asked me to come back and speak at this graduation stand up greg and then he wrote me a letter to confirm his request that itself was miracle enough in three months and two weeks we had received more mail at the white house than had come in in all of 1992 there may be another letter from greg somewhere we haven t found yet but i m delighted to be here this is the first graduation ceremony i have addressed as president and i am i don t know but it may be the first time a president has ever addressed a graduation of a technical college but i will say this more colleges like yours should have visits from the president because people who work hard and study hard and who have to raise children and go to work while they go to school and who are really on the cutting edge up and down of this economy you are the heart and soul of our present and our future the world in which you your families are clapping for you the world in which you live to be sure has been full of bad news here in new hampshire for the last few years but it s also a very exciting and challenging place and it will be different from the world in which i grew up in two very important ways first of all more than ever before america will be captured by the reality of the global economy more and more of our jobs will depend on trade and more and more of our future will depend on not only how well we are doing but how well our trading partners are doing one of our problems today is that europe and japan s economies are down so it s hard for ours to go up more and more our national security will depend not just on military power but on our renewal of economic strength more and more we ll have to find ways to cooperate as well as to compete with other countries we ll have to find ways to preserve the global environment and still make it possible for the economies of our world to grow that s the first thing the second thing is something you already know or you wouldn t be here we are moving very rapidly in all forms of production and service to a knowledge based economy in which what you earn depends on what you can learn not only what you know today but what you re capable of learning tomorrow and in which every graduate of high school needs at least to go on to two years of further education and training you know that or you wouldn t be here all of you have invested your money your time your energy to take personal responsibility for your own lives developing your own skills and in recognition of this new world reality your investment in a way is an act of faith you know the world is knowledge based you know you have to do this now having done it you have to have faith that there will be opportunities for you that if you have worked hard and played by the rules you will be rewarded as president i share that faith i believe we can make our system work i believe we can see our country once again reflect the values with which all of us were raised i don t think any of us can ever lose sight of that it s appropriate that i m at this graduation because new hampshire taught me all these things once again in the fall and winter of 1991 and 1992 when i spent so much time here i literally as we say in my part of the country went to school with you two winters ago i came face to face with middle class people who had lost their jobs and their homes and their health care i met people whose business loans had been cancelled even though they had never missed a payment in their lives i saw people who went down to the public assistance office and began to draw welfare checks just to make their home payments to keep from putting their kids in the street middle class people who had had jobs and never thought they would be unemployed every day when i get up in the white house and go to the oval office to work i think about the people i met here and people like them all over america whose quiet courage and determination inspires me to keep fighting to restore the middle class and the fundamental strength and purpose of this country i ll never forget people like ron macos jr who couldn t get a job with health insurance because his little boy had open heart surgery and when the first lady s health care task force presents the national health care proposal in the next few weeks to the congress if that proposal passes the ron macoses of this world will be able to keep working and raising their children in the future i ll never forget a young woman i met named emily teabold who was a senior in high school when i met her her father lost his job in new hampshire and he spent her entire senior year in north carolina because that s the closest place he could find a job i met a man here named david springs who was a month away from having his pension vested when he was fired from his company because people who owned his company sold it out in one of these leverage deals and they bailed out with a golden parachute to a happy life and left their employees on the rocks i remember some stories of courage too i went to clairmont and met the people who were working in the american brush company trying to help revive that community and i tried to help them find some customers for their products i remember going to manchester and visiting a company called envirotote that made bags that we wound up buying all during the campaign and giving out with our little clinton gore stickers on all across the country i saw people who were trying to make this country work again and trying to make new hampshire a beacon of opportunity again most of the people i saw for all their hurts never lost their hopes and i m here today to thank you for not losing yours for going through this program and believing in it your president said something i want to reiterate for most of the 20th century there s been a big division in our minds about what kind of learning counts and what kind of learning doesn t count as much the big division between what is vocational and what is academic between what is practical and what is intellectual in the last few years really smart people realize that that s a bogus distinction and that we have seen all over the world and especially here in america the line drawn down between the vocational and the academic between the practical and the intellectual all work requires knowledge and it s not so bad if it has a practical application that is what you have proved here so here we are with you you have done your job you have done anything that could be asked of you many of you have done this at great personal sacrifice i wonder how many of you have gotten up in the morning wondering about what you were going to do for child care that day wondering about whether you should keep doing this given the fact that it costs money and the unemployment rate in the state is above the national average wondering about all kinds of uncertainties you have done it you have done your job you have now a right to ask what is our job what can you expect of your country what can you expect of your government what is our job if you have been responsible what opportunities should you be able to claim our job is to try to put your values and your dreams into law and into facts it means we have to have a new economic policy that recognizes that for 20 years through the administrations of democrats and republicans alike most working people have been working harder for lower hourly pay one that recognizes that for a long time we have been the only advanced industrial country that didn t provide basic health care to all of our citizens the only one that puts people in the trap of not being able to change jobs if anybody in their family has ever been sick because they ve got a preexisting condition that will cost them their health insurance if they change jobs that s a huge handicap in a world where the average 18 year old will change work eight times in a lifetime and where because of global competition most new jobs are created by small businesses that are coming into existence and going out of existence all the time and then for 12 years we have seen our national debt go from 1 trillion to 4 trillion and our national investment in many things that are critical to our future go down so we re spending less on what we should be spending money on and costs are exploding you have a right to better than that you have a right to an economic policy that puts our people first our jobs our technologies our education you have a right to an economic policy that brings this deficit down so that we are not crushed and paralyzed with it into your children s children s lifetime with high interest rates and a mortgaged future you have a right to be treated fairly and to be given a chance to make it you have a right to live in a country where everybody is given a chance to make it which is not prejudiced against the wealthy we don t like to be that way but gives those who aren t a fair chance to earn their due that is what you have a right to and that is what you do not have today we are doing our best in washington to turn that around to get control of the deficit to bring it down to invest in those things that will create more jobs and to guarantee over the long run that we ll have jobs and incomes and health care that will justify the efforts you have made by going through this program that is our responsibility i ve asked the united states congress to adopt a program that begins with spending cuts starting with a reduction in my own staff a reduction in the size of the federal government by 150 000 over the next four years big cuts in the administrative budgets and asking the federal employees to accept a wage freeze and lower increases in later years so that we can bring the deficit down i have asked also that more than 200 other spending programs be cut including the entitlements that have so much special interest support second it is clear to anyone who studies this problem that we need new revenues also to bring the deficit down i ve asked those who can best afford to pay whose taxes went down in the 1980s the wealthiest americans to pay most of what we need to raise over 74 percent of my tax program comes from the top six percent of income earners i also have proposed i also have proposed an energy tax which most americans will pay it is one that s called a btu tax which will help promote conservation and the use of the most clean and fuel efficient fuels but listen to the way it works because we offer income tax cuts to working families with incomes under 30 000 those will offset the impact of the energy tax and for larger families under 25 000 there will even be a relief in the tax burden for people with incomes above 30 000 at 40 000 and 50 000 and 60 000 here s what it costs you re entitled to know in plain language next year it costs a dollar a month per family the next year after that 7 a month and the next year after that depending on the size of your family between 14 and 17 a month you have to decide if it s worth it to bring the deficit down but let me tell you all the tax increases and the spending cuts will be put in a trust fund so that they can t be used to do anything but bring the deficit down and and we can t have the taxes without the spending cuts that s what the budget resolution that was adopted a few weeks ago means we must cut spending so we re going to do that both things now is it worth it you have to be the judge but let me ask you just to consider this since november since we made it clear that we were going to try to attack this deficit and after the announcement had been made after the election that the deficit over the next four years would be over 160 billion bigger than we were told before the election since november long term interest rates have dropped millions of americans have already benefitted by refinancing their home mortgages refinancing business loans many others will benefit by lower interest rates on car loans or consumer loans or student loans if just someone here has refinanced a home loan since november in all probability depending on the size of the mortgage you will save more in one year than you will pay in four years in the energy tax i think it is worth it to keep the interest rates down and to drive the deficit down but you have to decide that there s a third way that we re trying to make some fundamental changes just as we stop wasting money on things we don t need i think we do have to invest some in what we do need a lot of you just in order to get through this program had to cut back on some of the things that you would like to have spent money on a lot of you made meaningful financial sacrifices in your own family life just to get here today so you could wear the cap and gown i know that but you ve been wise to make that decision because of the investments you ve made in education and training in the years ahead you ll be able to do more of the things that you gave up doing in the last two years you ll be able to provide more opportunities for your children you ll be able to build a stronger family unit with a stronger family future that s what we re also trying to do this program offers dramatic increases in incentives for small businesses to invest money to become more productive and hire new people to invest in research and development to find new products it offers dramatic incentives to people to try to end the real estate depression that has gripped new england and southern florida and california and many other places it offers real incentives for people to invest in new businesses the biggest in the history of america for people to try their hand in starting new businesses it offers an investment in new technologies in defense conversion for all these people around america who have lost their jobs because of defense cutbacks and it attempts to establish a transition from school to work so that everybody by the time we finish this program who graduates from high school who doesn t go to a four year college would at least have the clear opportunity to move right into a two year program like this one so they don t lose time becoming productive and able to earn the best wages they can earn i think that is a good investment in our future in other words what i think our government owes you is to move beyond the two dichotomies that have argued so long in washington in what i think is a very stale way one says well you re out there on your own and all we ve got to do is make sure we don t spend a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon the other says we ll take care of you we can do things for you don t you worry about it neither one of those approaches is right we can t give entitle people to something that they won t work for but neither can we turn our back on the plain responsibility of the united states to provide opportunity for people who will work for it we have to empower people to seize what they are willing to seize you have done your part now we have to do ours i want to emphasize again for the majority of people who do not go on to a four year college it is imperative that we join the ranks of the other high wage countries and provide a system by which 100 percent of them at least know they have the opportunity to move into a program like the one that you have been a part of it is imperative why because just as what you earn depends on what you can learn what america does in terms of growing jobs depends on how functional all the people in this country are we don t have a person to waste there ought to be twice as many people here today as there are at this graduation ceremony and if there were the economy of new hampshire and the united states would be stronger as a result i also believe very strongly that the united states ought to make available on terms everybody can afford the funds that people need to borrow to finance their education to two or four year schools and we have proposed we have proposed to change the whole basis of the way the student loan program works to lower interest rates number one and number two to make available loans and then let people pay them back after they go to work and as a percentage of their income so that people will not be discouraged from borrowing money today with the fear that they won t be able to pay it back if they get a job especially if they get a job with a modest wage you ought to be able to pay it back as a limited percentage of your income it will make a huge difference now i believe these policies together will restore the sense of optimism to middle class america that we need the idea that we can create jobs that people who work at jobs can raise their incomes over time if they continue to improve their education and their productivity and if we can do that and deal with the health care issue we can restore a sense of possibility to america i don t pretend that this will be easy that the progress will be uninterrupted that nothing bad will happen as i said at the beginning some of what happens to us economically here in this country depends on what is happening to all these other countries around the world a big percentage of the new jobs we ve gotten in the last five years have come from trade we won t get many if europe and japan are flat on their back but a lot of what happens to us depends upon what we do here and you re entitled having done your part to know that your government has done its part it may not happen overnight a lot of these economic trends have been developing for 20 years the political policies that we seek to change have been developing for a dozen years and i must say it is much easier to tell people that i m going to cut your taxes and spend more money on everything than to say we re going to have to raise some money and spend less money on most things a lot of the easy things have been done but i want you to believe that we can do it we have made a good beginning here s something that can affect you after years of arguing we finally passed the family leave bill that says you can get some time off when a baby is born or somebody s sick without losing your job i signed last week the motor voter bill which opens up the political process to easier registration because another young student from new hampshire got me to sign a card when i was here saying that i d do my best to pass it if i got elected president but changing this economy is a hard job it requires a lot of discipline and it requires our patience and concentrated effort yours and mine over a long period of time but we can do it we can do it the work of change is never easy but you have proved you weren t afraid to change the average student here is 30 years old i can remember when i was your age a lot of people would have been embarrassed to go back to school when they re 30 now we ve got people going back to school when they re 70 and let me tell you something you must remain unafraid to change you must remain unafraid to change many of you will have to go through retraining programs when you re in your mid to late 50s you should look at that as a great opportunity to live a rich and diverse and interesting life if we can do what we should do at the national level to reward the efforts you are making then change can be your friend and not your enemy the heartbreaking thing i saw in new hampshire all during the primary season last year and in 1991 was how many people had been victimized by change i cannot repeal the laws of change no person can our common challenge is to preserve the values of work and family and community and reward for effort in the midst of all this change you have done your part you should be proud of yourselves today and you should commit yourselves to continue to work to make sure that change is your friend and that you are rewarded for the extraordinary and courageous efforts you have made god bless you and good luck dem wjclinton22 5 95 bill_clinton thank you very much mr bersoff thank you for your comments and for the outstanding example of the family business you have built to such a remarkable extent thank you sally katzen before i begin as a matter of personal privilege i would just like to say a brief word about the death of my good friend les aspin hillary and i grieve his loss and along with all other americans we thank him for the remarkable service he rendered to our country as a distinguished congressman from wisconsin as the chairman of the armed services committee of the house as secretary of defense and as head of the president s foreign intelligence advisory board he did a lot of work to keep us safe through a turbulent time and we are all very very much in his debt let me thank the members of congress who are here you know i ve got to say i was sitting here listening to mr bersoff talk and i thought it ll be a miracle if we get this on the news tonight because this is something we did without anybody fighting and the real reason this languished around for five years was because nobody was fighting anybody else about it and after i got here i discovered some of the best ideas in washington were not being implemented simply because there was no anger attached to them it s a sad thing to say but it s absolutely right and so sometimes energy is not behind things that hang around here for years because there s no real brutal conflict and in that context i want thank the members of congress who are here for overcoming all the inertia against consensus and actually passing a bill that everybody was for and i thank you i thank senators nunn roth and glenn representatives meyer sisisky peterson and davis all of whom are here and of course former congressman horton and former senator now governor lawton chiles for the work that they have done this is a remarkable bill and i want to talk about what it does but first let me say that for a bill in which there was not a lot of opposition there was an awful lot of support and input about exactly how to do this people all over our country big and small businesses organizations from the national governors association to the national association of towns and townships to librarians actually testified in favor of this bill what we ought to do and how it ought to be done the legislation recognizes that the private sector is the engine of our prosperity that when we act to protect the environment of the health of our people we ought to do it without unnecessary paperwork maddening red tape or irrational rules we have to reform our regulatory system in ways that protects the larger public interest without strangling business these changes reflect the right way to reform government it is very consistent with the things that i believe need to be done in the last two years we have already reduced the size of the federal bureaucracy by more than 100 000 employees going down under existing budgets to a reduction of more than 272 000 and if the last two weeks are any indication we re about to reduce the government some more this paperwork reduction act helps us to conquer a mountain of paperwork that is crushing our people and wasting a lot of time and resources and which actually accumulated not because anybody wanted to harm the private sector but because we tend to think of good ideas in serial form without thinking of how the overall impact of them impacts a system that is very dynamic and very sensitive to emerging technologies but which government does not always respond to in the same way i want to say again how much i appreciate the work that sally katzen and her shop have done and i want to thank the congress for enabling them to continue on the job in recent months some others have made similar announcements carol browner at the epa announced that she would cut the paperwork requirements of the epa on the private sector by 25 percent to give you an idea of what that means that is 20 million hours of labor a year we often debate here what we can give the american people we re about to have a debate should we give the american people more funds for education more funds for medicare or more money back in a tax cut but nothing is more precious i see as i get older than your own time and for a government to give the american people back at no cost to the public interest 20 million hours is an extraordinary gift and worth a great deal of money and additions to the quality of life the fda is going to dramatically speed approvals of many different kinds of medical devices the sba has reduced the inch thick loan form applications to one page here are some other places we will cut the department of agriculture so far has eliminated the need for more than 3 million pages of government forms from one quarter million farmers the department of energy took these three big binders here filled with reporting requirements and sliced them to 11 pages 11 pages from those three big binders that saved 48 million a year but it also gave the gift of time back to the people who were subject to it the department of education required both parents to sign a student loan and other financial aid forms this is impossible in some cases when the non custodial parent is not available in lots of homes today it s hard for both parents to be in the same place at same time anyway now one parent signature is all that s required so far we have eliminated the forms represented in this large stack of papers here on the table when you count all the people and all the businesses that have to fill out the forms already eliminated in one year we ve eliminated paper that would stretch end to end from washington d c to san francisco california to further reduce these burdens i have directed our agencies to continue to review their regulations to eliminate the outdated and streamline the bloated i have also directed them whenever possible to cut in half the frequency of reports they require from citizens for example if they ask for quarterly reports why don t we just have them twice a year instead as we reform we need not compromise the quality of life or the needed oversight from the government but the truth is we can actually improve the system by making it less hidebound and by innovating as americans are innovating today i want to add another dimension to this effort from this point forward i want all of our agencies to provide for the electronic submission of every new government form or demonstrate to omb why it cannot be done that way the old way will still be available but i think once people see how fast and efficient electronic filing can be we ll see less paperwork and more of these so we re trying to do our part to act in good faith the way these members of congress intended the executive branch to act as you know these little things store incredible volumes of information incredible my daughter knows more about it than i do but i m learning myself just in the things that we do incredibly how much more we can do and at a tiny fraction of the space involved not to mention the speed so the more we use electronic transmissions the more we ll all be working quicker and smarter giving better service to the american public a more efficient government and far far less paperwork i want to say again the remarkable thing about this effort was that at the time we actually got it through the congress there was not a single dissenting vote but very often the things we do not do in life are the things we all know we should do that is a principle that extends beyond this bill and we owe a great debt of gratitude to the members of congress especially those here present who exercised the leadership to get this done as well as to governor chiles and former congressman horton for the work they did to pave the way so i would like to ask the members to come up while we sign the bill and congressman horton and governor chiles to come up as well please come up and we ll do it thank you very much thank you dem wjclinton22 5 97 bill_clinton thank you very much well did you see it on the screen and the internet well you may have had the better deal because it s cooler in here let me thank danny phares for his introduction and i want to say i m glad to be here with governor underwood and with secretary of education dick riley and with cleo matthews the president of the state board of education and you may have heard me say that her daughter sylvia who is here today is my deputy chief of staff in the white house and she graduated from high school in hinton west virginia so i think that s a pretty good statement of west virginia s educational quality and i have to tell you i did not have an auditorium this nice when i was in high school i love this school congratulations on having a beautiful beautiful school you heard the town hall meeting i m just going to come down here and shake hands with anybody who wants to come down and say hello but i just want to say one thing to all of you we are about to enter not only a new century but a new millennium literally a time which happens once every thousand years by coincidence you are also entering a period in our history which will be very different from the past different in the way people work different in the way people learn different in the way people relate to each other and it can be the greatest moment of human promise in all history it may be if we do everything as we should that young people your age and those coming along behind you will have more opportunities to live their dreams than any group of people who ever lived but none of this will happen unless we continue to put top priority on education continue to believe that all young people can learn and continue to be dedicated to the proposition that everybody should have a maximum opportunity to learn as much as possible so when you leave this high school i hope you will keep that conviction with you for the rest of your lives and be dedicated to the proposition that not only you but all the young people coming behind you should have those opportunities thank you god bless you and good luck dem wjclinton22 6 00 bill_clinton thank you i m sorry susan couldn t be here today but i m glad she s doing her job that s what democrats do and i feel really comfortable having steve here because we re both campaigning for positions in the congressional spouse s club i want to thank congressman bob filner for that rousing speech and for the wonderful service he gives to you to california and to our nation every day in the united states congress somewhere in this crowd we have two other democratic candidates for congress george barraza and craig barkacs where are they they re here somewhere give them a hand there they are on my way in the first lady of california sharon davis met me i want to thank her for being here and i want to say to all of you thanks i think all of you know the role that this state played in our campaign in 92 and in 96 the unbelievable vote we got here against all the odds in 1992 when i became the first democrat since harry truman to carry san diego and i thank you i just want to say one or two words you know i can speak with a certain freedom about this election because it s the first time in 26 years i haven t been on the ballot most days i m okay about it i know it s hot in here and i want to get out and shake hands and all that but i want you to just listen for a minute somebody might ask you why you came here and i want you to be able to give a good answer now we have worked hard to turn this country around and where i could where i could in good faith i have worked with the republicans but they opposed our economic policy and said it would bankrupt the country instead it gave us the longest economic expansion and the biggest surpluses in our history they opposed our social policies they were against the family and medical leave law they said it would hurt the economy instead we ve had over 20 million people take advantage of it when a baby was born or a parent was sick and we ve got over 22 million new jobs basically they oppose us on the brady bill the assault weapons ban putting 100 000 police on the street putting 50 000 more on the street they said it wouldn t put a dent in crime instead it gave us the lowest crime rate in 25 years and a 35 percent drop in crime they kept trying to put these riders to weaken our environmental protection on all the bills that i passed ever since 1995 they opposed it when i tried to set aside national monuments when i set aside over 40 million acres for roadless areas in the national forests they said all of our efforts to have cleaner air cleaner water were going to hurt the economy instead we ve got the strongest economy and the cleanest environment in history now what s the point of all this we have had a contest of ideas and that s what you have to remind the voters of this november the people who aren t here the people who don t follow this so closely but the people who love our country and love this state and want to do right by america when they go into the voting booth we have had a contest of ideas ours have been tested in the crucible of experience and guess what they worked they worked i recommend you go out all across this community and to your friends all across the state and throughout the nation and say the following number one this is a really important election it is just as important as the election of 1992 or the election of 1996 and the danger is that people may not understand it in 92 california was hurting the economy was hurting the open wounds of society were laid bare we knew what the election was about we knew we had to change in 1996 the election was clear were you going to ratify what we were doing or reject it and build our bridge to the 21st century what is the election of 2000 about it is about what do we propose to do with our prosperity with our surplus with our good fortune with our social progress with our confidence that s what it s about i believe with all my heart if the american people believe that s what this election about we ll win i believe al gore will win i believe susan davis will win i believe hillary clinton will win i believe here s the good news you don t have to go out and say anything bad all you ve got to do is tell the truth about the differences i m sick and tired of elections for 20 years i have watched elections mostly driven by the far right in this country where in the end people were so angry and upset with each other both sides were essentially trying to convince the voters that their opponents were just one notch above a car thief now you don t have to do it and you shouldn t what you ought to say number one this is a big election we ve got the chance to build the future of our dreams for our children number two there are real differences and they are profound and you should assume that people on both sides are honorable and they will continue to do what they have done and they will do exactly what they say they will do and number three only the democrats want you to know what the real differences are in this election you watch i tell you i love watching these republicans now butter wouldn t melt in their mouth they want you to forget all about the fact that they even had a presidential primary campaign and they certainly want you to forget the commitments they made in their primary campaign and you watch a lot of them voting this year they want you to forget all about how they voted from 1995 until they figured out where the voters were and they figured they could just get by this election and they could go back to being the way it was now look there are real differences on economic policy they want to take all this marvelous projected the operative word is projected surplus and spend it on their plan for a tax cut 1 3 trillion to 1 5 trillion on their plan to partially privatize social security which would cost about 800 billion they want to spend more for their missile defense system and their other defense ideas and for their school voucher program in other words they want to spend it all now because they know it s going to materialize now i ought to say that it will because it s self serving for me we turned this deficit around and we got a projected huge surplus but i say again it is projected now what al gore and the democrats want to do is to first of all say it s projected we don t have this money yet how in the world can we give it all away before we ve got it let s save 20 percent on the front end by taking all the taxes you pay for medicare and putting it over here so it can t be spent on anything else and keep paying down the debt let s give the people a tax cut but one they really need to help educate our children send them to college pay for child care pay for long term care for the elderly pay to give people incentives to invest in the poor areas that have been left behind but let s make sure it s something we can afford even if what is projected doesn t materialize and let s save some back to invest in the education of our children and cleaning up the environment and extending health care coverage to people who need it now folks this is a huge deal do you want the main benefits of this surplus we worked so hard for to go to just a few and do you want to risk the fact that we ll be back in deficits before you know it or do you want to keep paying the national debt down and investing in the future of our children and our families you know now that i ve just got about seven months to go all these people come up to me all the time and say what was the secret of your economic policy what did you bring back to washington what new idea did you introduce and i give them a one word answer arithmetic we tried their way for 12 years we tried it our way for 8 years does anybody seriously doubt which way works best let s don t go back to that old way let s go forward now what about building one america we re for a minimum wage increase they re not only now they feel bad about it when they re not we re for a patients bill of rights and they re not only now they act like they feel bad about it when they re not we re for a medicare voluntary prescription drug program so that all of our seniors have access to prescription drugs they re not only now they have posters to tell them what words they re supposed to say so you ll think they re for it now i m not the most partisan person we ever had in the white house i like working with republicans i will work with republicans every day until i leave if they ll work with me but i m not going to paper over the differences and you shouldn t either there are real differences here on economic policy on medicare and prescription drugs on the patients bill of rights on the minimum wage on whether we re going to protect the environment or weaken our environmental protections on whether the next supreme court will protect a right to choose or get rid of it so i m here for susan davis because i think she s on the right side of those issues and because she has worked hard at a public job and represented you well and she s doing her duty today which is what she ought to be doing and that s what we need more of in this country and i m here for al gore because i know he will have an economic policy that will keep the prosperity going you ought to ask i just want you to ask your friends in california and throughout the country if they really want to go back to that economic policy or wouldn t they like to build on what we ve done and go forward that s the first thing second thing i m for him because i know he will try to extend the benefits of this prosperity to the families of people in the places that have been left behind which is a passion of mine if we can t take economic opportunity to the poor neighborhoods the poor people and the poor places that have been left behind now if we can t close the digital divide if we can t raise educational opportunity if we can t do this now when will we ever get around to it now is not the time to change our commitment to spreading the benefits of this new economy and the final thing the third reason i m for him is that he understands the future and we need somebody in office who understands the future there will be all kinds of new issues the children in this audience will spend the next 30 years worrying about global warming if we don t take action now and al gore was the first public figure in american life to understand that when everybody else was saying it was some sort of conspiracy to undermine the american economy he said no the climate is getting warmer and it s going to wreck a lot of what we do and a lot of how we live and we can still grow our economy and improve our environment when we rewrote the telecommunications law in a way that created hundreds of thousands of jobs all the big monopolists moved in on congress and al gore said no we re going to have competition here we re going to let small entrepreneurs and little guys get in here and take advantage of this technological revolution and we re going to have the e rate so that every school and every library can afford to log onto the internet and none of our kids will be left behind all of our health records and all of our financial records are on somebody s computer somewhere and a lot of big economic interests want to get their hands on it for obviously reasons al gore is up there in washington saying no americans should have the right to privacy and unless they say you can have their information you shouldn t get their health or their financial information so i want you to take that message out of here i want you to work for susan davis not just when the president comes to town but every day between now and november i want you to work for al gore and the other democrats i want you to remind the people of california what it was like in 1992 and what it s like today and i want you to say look we need somebody who will keep the prosperity going who will spread it to more families and people who have been left behind and who understands the future and remember it s a big election there are real differences and only the democrats want you to know what they are thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton22 6 00a bill_clinton thank you fred thanks for the great work you did at the white house thanks for this today thank you steve and to all of you who contributed and raised money and made this a success i thank you i want to thank mayor rendell remember that old joke about w c fields he said he wanted on his tombstone all things considered i d rather be in philadelphia mayor rendell would always rather be in philadelphia but he s seen a great deal of america here and he s done a great job for us i also want to introduce congressman bob filner and his wife jane from san diego who s here with us today i m glad to see you they re taking me to san diego after i leave you i know about half of you were in the other room and i m loath to repeat my speech although i m reminded once i went to i once went to a concert when i was governor of arkansas that tina turner held in little rock and the guy that ran the place where we had the concerts knew that i was a huge tina turner fan and so was hillary and she was out of town and she was really steamed that she couldn t go so i took six of our friends and i went to this tina turner concert and she was just making her big comeback and she sang all these new songs then at the very end of the concert she started the band started playing proud mary which was her first hit and we d all heard it before and so tina turner goes up to the microphone everybody cheers like crazy and she said you know i ve been singing this song for 25 years but it gets better every time i do it so maybe i should just give the same speech i just gave i want to say to all of you how much i have loved coming here to arizona and working with the people here on a wide variety of issues how grateful i am for the service of all the arizonans in the administration including fred and bruce and hattie and all the others and how profoundly grateful i am that we actually won arizona s electoral votes for the first time since harry truman was president i want to say a special word of appreciation to the native american tribal leaders who are here when i became president i had spent a lot of time and so had hillary actually going out into indian country across america and first of all there is no monolith there some of the tribes have great wealth and success because of their gaming operations and some of them have diversified into operations others including the navajos in northern new mexico up near the colorado border the lakota sioux in southern south dakota are still so physically isolated that more than half the people are unemployed in some places more than half the people don t have telephones and the relationship between our national government and the native american tribes in my judgment have never really been as it should have been and certainly has never been consistent with the promises we made in return for all the land and minerals and other things that we took so long ago so shortly after i became president in 1994 i invited all the tribal leaders in america to come to the white house for the first time since james monroe was president in the 1820s and we had an incredible day there but it was very instructive for the senior members of my administration because we had people who could fly in on their private jets and other people where the tribal members had to pass the hat to raise enough money to buy an airplane ticket and i just say that to you here in arizona because we have to keep working on this we have come a long way we ve made a lot of progress we ve done a lot in education i ve got an economic initiative out there that i think we ll pass this year that i believe will make a big difference but we have a lot of work to do and we are beginning to build i m happy to say we re beginning slowly to build some bipartisan coalition for building the right kind of commitment to empowerment and equality and i thank you all for being here and i think the vice president will show up at your i would like to also say that a lot of people are when i go to these events people say thank you and i look around and wonder if they re talking about somebody that s still breathing and so i got a great call the other day from a very distinguished gentleman who said you know mr president for a lame duck you re still quacking quite loudly i like that we re trying to get a lot of things done but we re also in an election and i just want to give you a couple of observations first of all insofar as we have had any success over these last seven and a half years the real credit belongs to the people of this country for supporting us and for what they do outside the government sphere all day every day and to the fact that i think we had good ideas people come up to me all the time and they say gosh you really brought a certain political skill to the office and i said what difference does it make if we had the wrong ideas we wouldn t be where we are it really matters what your ideas are and whether you can turn those ideas into policy and janet napolitano said in the previous event something that i really appreciated very much she talked about the work i did in 1990 when i had no idea that i would be here to write a document for the democratic party through the democratic leadership council that said okay here s where we think america is here s what our core values are here are the specific things we would do if we had a chance to govern really it s like being president s not all that different from any other job it matters how hard you work and it matters whether what you re working on is right and i say that because we re so fortunate this year to have such a good set of circumstances in the country although we are reminded to be a little humble about it like the gas price rises in the middle west there should be a little reminder that there s no such thing as a static reality things are changing in this country very rapidly and in the whole world but we re very fortunate and the only thing that i really worry about is whether we kind of get lulled to sleep in the midst of our own prosperity and progress and think that there are no serious consequences to this election this election is every bit as important as the elections of 1992 and 1996 in 92 we all knew what we had to do we had to change something we not only had to change the economic and social policies of the country we had to change the way politics works because washington had virtually become paralyzed in the shouting match between the two political parties i d sit home in little rock and look at the news at night and it appeared to me that the paradigm for how it was working was something like i ve got my idea you ve got your idea let s fight because if we don t fight neither one of us will get on the evening news now we won t get anything done but we might get on the evening news and i was stunned that when i became president and i started trying to implement some of our ideas say for welfare reform people would say well you can t do that that s supposed to be a republican idea and i d say well what is that and there was never any substance it was just like a tag and if you had the tag whether it was crime or welfare reform that was a republican tag if it was education or health care that was a democratic tag and that doesn t tell you very much that s just a category that s a word you have to give meaning to it so we ve really worked very hard in the last seven and a half years to actually show up every day have ideas and try to implement them and it s amazing it s like any other kind of job it actually yields to effort and i say that because it s very important to me as someone who is not a candidate for the first time in more than a quarter century that you understand that this is a really really significant decision that is in your hands and that we are very fortunate to be able to make this decision at a good time for our country and i hope we will make it in a very positive way which doesn t mean that i don t think there ought to be any fights and arguments that s what elections are for then you have to do your best to govern after the election but i ve been so troubled in the last 20 years how many elections seem to have revolved around both sides as i said in the other meeting trying to convince the voters that their opponents were just one notch above a car thief and the truth is if you look at the whole history of american politics presidents pretty much do what they say they re going to do when they run and when they don t do it we re normally glad they didn t i ll give you an example aren t you glad that abraham lincoln didn t keep his campaign promise in 1860 not to free the slaves aren t we glad that he basically said my commitment is to limit slavery but i won t try to free them and he got in the middle of the civil war and he realized that in good conscience it was wrong at least three times a week i walk into the room in the white house where lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation and thank god that he changed his mind aren t you glad that roosevelt didn t keep his campaign promise in 1932 look at bert laughing over there he brought me a roosevelt letter the last time i was here so i could read it and he promised in 32 that if he got elected he d balance the budget well it was a good thing for me to promise but a very bad thing for roosevelt to promise because the unemployment rate of the country was 25 percent and if he d balanced the budget it would have made the economy worse so instead he experimented until he found something that was working but by and large people do what they say they will do one of the nicest things that i have read and i have read some things about myself that weren t so nice as you might imagine but one of the nicest things that i ve read way back in 95 when we were in political trouble a distinguished presidential scholar of the presidency and the media named thomas patterson did an analysis of our record and said that i had already kept a higher percentage of my campaign commitments than the previous five presidents even though i made more of them i say that the people on our side we took these ideas seriously we took these policies seriously we really worked at them and this is i m not giving you a slogan or a 30 second ad but i m saying how i hope you will approach this election we can approach the election and say okay we ve got two candidates for president that are honorable people we have candidates for the senate and the house that are honorable people let s tee it up and see what they expect to do with this magic moment the most important thing for the democrats is that people understand how important the election is we knew what the deal was in 92 and we knew it was real important we had a huge turnout the country was flat on its back but i say this over and over again but i m going to say it again there s not a person in the world over 30 years old that cannot remember at least one instance when you made a personal or a professional mistake not because things were so bad but because things were so good that you thought there was no consequence to the failure to concentrate there is nobody who has lived very long who can t remember at least once when that happened to you that is what we have to avoid if we understand that this is like the moment of a lifetime and then we say okay what are we going to do with our prosperity i hope the answer is big things it s a chance to paint the future that we all want for our children how are we going to deal with the aging of america when all the baby boomers like me get in the retirement system there will be two people working for every one person drawing social security how will we manage that both candidates have an idea about social security the vice president said more about medicare who s right how are we going to grow the economy and deal with the challenges of the local environment where you have a lot of growth and the global environment and global warming which is real and can change everything about the way our children live how are we going to be a force for peace and freedom and decency throughout the world and minimize the new security challenges that the young people in this audience will face from chemical biological nuclear weapons that like everything else will benefit from unfortunately new technology and miniaturization how are we going to give all of our kids a world class education how are we going to make sure everybody has got a chance to participate in this economy one of the things we are doing in a bipartisan fashion in washington now is pushing this new markets legislation of mine i ve been on two reservations lately to say that america ought to give people with money the same incentives to invest in poor areas in america we give them to invest in poor areas in latin america and asia and africa because we ll never have a better chance to bring the benefits of free enterprise to neighborhoods that have been left behind see these are big questions these are questions most of these questions we couldn t even ask back in 92 because we were 300 billion in debt now so it s a big election ought to be about big things as ed said there are real differences i ll just mention three or four there s a huge difference between the democratic take on where we are and how to keep the prosperity going and the republican take they think that we ought to have a tax cut that costs somewhere between 1 3 trillion and 1 6 trillion and they say well the projected surplus is bigger than that but if you take their social security proposal and other things the missile defense and all those other proposals it s way more than the projected surplus we think the vice president said the other day we ought to take 400 billion of this projected tax cut that s going to come right out of the medicare taxes you pay and take it out of the budget save it wall it off and use it to pay down the debt until we need it for medicare now that has two benefits first of all you re protecting the money and paying down the debt secondly you re protecting yourself in case all that projected surplus doesn t materialize i think it is really a mistake to decide now to spend all of this projected surplus over the next 10 years which may not materialize and they say back well you guys want to spend a lot of it we do but the difference is you have to approve the spending bills every year so if the money is not coming in you just don t approve the bills but if you build it all into a tax cut on the front end it s gone so we want a tax cut too but we think it ought to be more modest in scope because the main thing we can do for the economy is to keep these interest rates down keep paying that debt down keep this thing going that s a big difference then what about including people we think we ought to raise the minimum wage again they don t we think we ought to pass a patients bill of rights they don t we think we ought to provide a medicare prescription drug benefit to every senior at an affordable price on a voluntary basis and their plan doesn t do that now you ought to tell your friends out here that are independents and republicans you ought to listen to them hear their side out let them say why they differ with us but don t pretend they don t differ i got a big laugh in the other meeting when i said there are three things you need to know about this election it s important there are differences between the candidates and the parties and only the democrats want you to know what the differences are but there s a certain truth to that and i think it s important that we have a great decent candid clear national debate without trying to impugn anybody s personality integrity but to say this is we have been given a gift here and we can talk about it and we can chart our future we re not bailing water out of a leaky boat anymore now we ve got a chance to really just think about where we re going there are lots of other issues this country is fast becoming the most multiracial multiethnic multireligious democratic society in the world how do we intend to go forward into the future actually not just tolerating each other but celebrating our differences and feeling secure enough to do it because we know our common humanity is even more important than all of our differences this is a huge question you think about what i have to how have i spent the time you gave me as president on foreign policy i worry about northern ireland i worry about the middle east i ve worried about kosovo i ve worried about bosnia i worry about the tribal wars in africa all over the world in this so called modern world people are still out there killing each other because they re from a different tribe a different faith a different race a different ethnic group and still in america we have hate crimes where people get killed just because of their race or their religion or because they re gay this is a big deal we ve got to figure out we re not going to able to do good around the world unless we are good here at home and we have the opportunity to honestly discuss this how are we going to get this done now and you can say well you can say all this high minded stuff because you re not running in the end there will be some 15 second slogan that will pierce to the heart of this that does not have to be the case that does not have to be the case we had two guys offer i think or one man offered the other day a million dollars to the presidential candidates favorite charity 500 000 each if they d just show up and have a debate on nothing but education and he happens to be a republican and the vice president i was proud of him said absolutely right now i ll do it but i think the more we just sit around and treat each other like we ve got half good sense and we know what we re doing and we talk about what kind of future we want the better off we re going to be now do i believe it helps the democrats you bet i do do i think if that s the environment of the election al gore will be elected that we ll pick up seats in the senate including one i hope in new york that we ll take the house back yes i do i think that but i might be wrong i trust the american people why are we around here after 200 years because most of the time we get it right if we have enough time and enough information the sort of internal compass of the american people if it s not threatened normally comes out all right that s why we re still around here after all this time so that s what i d like to ask you all to think about i d like to ask you to go out and talk to people about it because there is a lot more consensus on a lot of these issues than i think we think number one number two there are a lot of these issues that nobody has got the answer to that we need debates on i mentioned in the other room i want to mention again i was thrilled when i found out that your republican governor and the whole democratic legislature all the democratic legislators were pushing an education initiative to lower class size raise teacher pay and improve the quality of education that s a great thing because i can tell you this if we can t provide a world class education to all of our kids then we will never be the country we ought to be and i can also tell you that we can do it i was in a public school in spanish harlem in new york the other day two years ago 80 percent of those kids were reading below grade level and doing math below grade level two years ago today 74 percent of them are at or above grade level in two years i was in a little school in kentucky the other day where way over the half the kids are on free or reduced lunch they were identified as a failing school that had to do better they were going to have to shut down or turn around and in three years they went from 12 percent of their kids reading at or above grade level to 57 percent they went from 5 percent of their kids doing math at or above grade level to 70 percent they went from zero percent of their kids doing science at or above grade level to two thirds of them and it s one of the 20 best grade schools in kentucky today over half the kids from very poor homes so we can do this that s another thing i d like to see this debated i ve been working on this school reform business for 20 years and when we started when hillary and i started with the schools at home we kind of thought we knew what needed to be done and some of the stuff was obvious but now we actually know now there are a remarkable number of success stories like this about educating our children we know how to do it now there s not a state in america where you can t identify a cluster of schools that were in the tank that are performing at very high levels now not a one so what s our excuse for the others that ought to be a big source of debate in this election how are we going to close the digital divide what about the indian reservations where half the people don t have phones i was introduced the other day on the navajo reservation by a 13 year old girl that won a contest and she was very brilliant and she won a contest she won a computer and she couldn t get on the internet because there was no phone line in her home so who s got the best ideas about what to do with that the point i m trying to make is there s plenty of stuff to debate and i don t think the american people would be bored if we had an honest civil explicit discussion about the big challenges out there now do i think we would win you bet i do in a heartbeat i believe that but i might be wrong we ought to suit up and find out and i ll just say this about al gore i think i now know al gore better than anybody outside his family we had lunch once a week the whole time we ve been there together except when he had something more pressing to do when he started running for president and i picked him not only because we shared a certain orientation toward the challenges of the 1990s but because he had experience in washington i didn t have and he knew things about technology and the environment and arms control and foreign policy i didn t know and it has been one of the best decisions i ever made in my entire life about anything and i can tell you on every tough decision that i had to make and we made some tough ones when we decided to help mexico something that would have a big effect on arizona the mexican economy it collapsed a few years ago the day we did it there was a poll that said by 81 to 15 you the american people thought i shouldn t do it that was a real tester but we did it because i knew it was the right thing to do and i figured a poll is like a horse race it s not over yet people pay you to win and to do the right thing for the country and if it comes out all right it s all right but al gore was for that when we went into bosnia and kosovo al gore was for that when we went in to save democracy in haiti al gore was for that he broke the tie on the economic plan of 93 where we had no votes from the other party and if it hadn t been for that economic plan passing the rest of us we wouldn t be sitting here in this nice hotel having this lunch today so he as a person of extraordinary intelligence extraordinary energy and like me he loves all these issues he also knows a lot about these technological issues that we re going to have to face for example we ve got to close the digital divide wouldn t you like to have somebody as president who knew how to do it and who had been working on it for six or seven years we ve got to deal with the privacy issues we re all going to have all our records on computers all our financial records all our health care records if you had to put up health care records to get health insurance don t you think there ought to be some limit to who gets access to them shouldn t you have to give your own permission before you give them up do you think you ought to be denied a job because somebody can log onto the internet and find out something about you your first cousin may not know these are big issues so anyway i realize this is not a traditional political speech this is a conversation but you just remember what i told you it s a real big election real big issues honest differences not bad guys and good guys honest differences and if people know what they are we ll win that s what you have to help us do thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton22 6 00b bill_clinton let me say first of all mike you gave a wonderful talk and you gave a wonderful toast and i like it either way and i want to thank you and carol and all of you for the work you did to make this a success tonight i d like to thank california s first lady sharon davis for being here i d like to thank representative bob filner and his wife jane who are here thank you for being here former representative and chief of staff to the governor lynn schenk thank you for being here and i also would like to thank the leaders of the barona and viejas tribes for their support and for the example they re setting we had a great talk around the table tonight about the differences among the tribes in terms of economic circumstances and potential in indian country throughout america and it s one of the great honors of my presidency has been the opportunity i ve had to spend more time with more people from the native american tribes and the tribal government than any president probably in history i invited all the tribal leaders to meet me at the white house for the first time since james monroe was president in the 1820 that happened it was quite wonderful so it s been a great thing i would like to thank bertrand the owner of mr a s restaurant for a wonderful dinner tonight was this great or what when i used to do these back home and we didn t eat like this i feel pretty great about it i d like to thank mayor rendell who i did he was looking forward to a fairly peaceful retirement of a year or so and then he was going to ascend to the governorship of pennsylvania which i still hope he will do so i told him i had this little part time job i was interested in him doing and he has part timed himself all across america exhausting himself trying to make sure that we preserve the progress in this country and preserve the prosperity and i m very very grateful to him he s been a great leader for our party and all these young people that work on these events i m grateful to them i ll tell you a story i don t know about a joke but i ll tell you a story you gave the irish blessing so my people are from a place called fermanagh they were irish protestants living on the border fermanagh is a little village literally on the border of northern ireland and ireland in the west and my mother was a cassidy so we found the protestant cassidys we traced them all the way back to a farmhouse built in the 1750s and i went to ireland in 95 they actually gave me a watercolor of the farmhouse which is the only the oldest known residence of relatives of mine at least any relative that s willing to admit it still and you know i ve had this remarkable love affair with ireland because i got the united states involved in the peace process and it s worked out in a remarkable way i went to dublin in 95 we had 100 000 people in the street it was really one of the great days of my life i turned on the christmas lights in belfast and there were 50 000 people there it s just been unbelievable what happens especially when you re not running anymore you tend to get a little free with what you say sometimes you actually commit the sin of saying exactly what you think i can say this because we ve had a happy ending now you may remember for a while we got the institutions of self government up to northern ireland and everybody is working along together and then all of a sudden it all gets taken down because they can t agree on the decommissioning issue and it was maddening and all these people had been working for years many of them a lot longer than i had though that after we had actually ended the irish civil war and we had got it all done it was all going to pieces again and i said not thinking about stereotyping the irish of which i am one i said this reminds me i said these two sides in northern ireland remind me of two guys that are kind of drunk and they decide they re going to quit drinking and they walk out of the bar together arm in arm and right as they get to the swinging door they say no and they turn around and go back so i was blasted all over ireland clinton let us down he s stereotyping the irish and i was really worried about it until about three days later i got in the mail a copy of a letter to the editor from the irish times saying i see all this criticism of president clinton for comparing us and all those things he said and he said it is terrible what he said i ve been a drunk all my adult life and i resent being compared to those people so sometimes when you re uptight you ve just got to tell a joke and laugh it off and go on but anyway i m delighted to be here and i m delighted that i sort of thought there would come a time this year when i d show up at one of these dinners and no one would be there and so i m very grateful to you i m grateful to the people of california and i m very grateful to the people of san diego i ve had a special relationship with this community from the beginning i love it here my family and i have had a wonderful set of experiences here we had a wonderful vacation here one year around a springtime vacation and i m particularly glad that i came here tonight and somebody showed up i got a call last week from a very distinguished citizen of the world who said well mr president for a lame duck you re still quacking rather loudly so that s what i m trying to do i would like to just say a couple of things to follow up on what mayor rendell said i thank you for coming here and we ll do our best to invest the funds you have given us wisely but we need your help in telling people why you feel this way people ask me all the time they come up to me and they say who do you think is going to get elected and i always say i think the vice president is going to win i do i said it a year and a half ago when he was 18 points behind in the polls then they kind of say do you think hillary is going to win i say of course i mean what do you expect me to say but i actually believe it but let me say what i think the real issue is in all these senate and the house and the president s race and i do think we re going to win but the issue is what do the voters think the election is about this is one of those deals we ve got a lot of trial lawyers in this room sometimes the answers people give depends upon the way the question is asked or what you think the real question is and this election really the outcome of this election is going to be determined by and large by what people think this election is about and i think if we can demonstrated number one that we ve been working here for eight years with a core set of ideas designed to give opportunity to every responsible citizen and to create a community in which any american can be a part and that we ve tried to be a force for peace and freedom and prosperity and decency around the world and that what we need to do is to build on that not undo it if we can make that point then the second point we need to make is that we have to decide we need to make a conscious decision about what to do with our prosperity i mean sometimes i feel like a broken record but i will say this over and over and over again anybody who is over 30 years old can remember at least one time in his or her life when you have a made a whopping mistake not because you were faced with adverse circumstances but because things were rocking along so well you thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate anybody who is over 30 years old can remember at least one time in your personal life or in your work life when a mistake has been made because it seemed that there were no consequences to the failure to concentrate because everything was rolling alone and if you really listen to the two sides the other side really seems to be saying look we need to just take this thing while it s coming because nobody can mess up this economy if they try and i don t believe that i think we need to make a conscious decision as a people that we have an obligation a solemn obligation to our children s generation to use this magic moment to deal with the big issues out there the big challenges the big opportunities of this century now if you get that far then you have to say what are those challenges what do you think they ought to do and are there any real differences between the parties and i have to tell you that i think it s obvious what we ought to be doing we need to figure out how to keep this prosperity going and spread its benefits to people and places who have been left behind we need to figure out how to make people who have jobs better able to balance their responsibilities at work and their responsibilities at home something america still has not done enough on child care preschool after school health care for the families that are working out there that don t have it yet all of those things we need to figure out how to continue to grow the economy and do even better at preserving and improving the environment and especially dealing with the problem of climate change we ve proved that we can get the crime rate down we ought to commit ourselves to making this the safest big country in the world we can do that in five years if we made up our mind to do it we ought to commit ourselves to paying america s debt off we re not running deficits anymore we re running surpluses i think it ought to be a national policy goal to pay off the public debt that s what i believe now i have to tell you that s a very controversial position among democrats because we also want to spend more money to educate people to provide health care to poor people but here s why i m for that if we keep paying the debt down we ll keep interest rates down it ll be easier for people to borrow money it will be easier to invest there will be more jobs there will be higher incomes and we ll keep the expansion going along and the best social program any government can provide is a good private sector jobs you ve got to have a growing economy first we wouldn t be here having this conversation this election wouldn t even be about all this stuff we re sitting here arguing about how to spend the surplus and is it 1 or 2 trillion over the next 10 years if i had told you 92 if i had to come to california and i said i want you to vote for me and i ll get rid of this deficit we d been running a deficit for 30 years and we quadrupled the national debt in the last 12 years now vote for me and i ll get rid of it and before i m gone we ll have three different surpluses and we ll know that we can pay off our debt in the first decade of the 21st century do you know what you would have said you would have said he seems like such a nice man but he s slightly daft and we better send him home but it happened people ask me all the time what magical new idea did we bring to washington in the economic area and i always say in one word arithmetic that is we stopped playing games with the numbers we stopped promising people something we couldn t deliver we said if we re going to spend the money we ve got to have the money and we made hard choices i got rid of hundreds of programs so that we could double our investment in education while we were cutting the deficit and those things had to be done now what s all this got to do with where we are so here we are now if you believe these big challenges ought to be faced then you have to say well are there consequences to the decision of who gets to be president are there consequences to the decision who gets elected to the senate who gets elected to the congress and i would argue that there are big differences between these candidates and if you ll listen very closely to the debate the democrats are a lot more interested in you knowing what the differences are than the republicans are because they know if you really understand the differences two thirds of the people agree with us for example should we say okay now we have the surplus at 2 trillion over 10 years estimated projected over the next 10 years so their policy is to spend over half of it on a tax cut 1 3 trillion and then to partially privatize social security which and guarantee the benefits of everybody still in the system which will cost about another 800 billion so there s 2 billion there and then to pay for star wars and school vouchers and some other promises so that we ll be back into deficits sooner or later in the next decade if we get the whole 2 trillion our policy as reflected in the vice president s position is we may not get the 2 trillion that great line from gerry mcguire show me the money the problem with all this tax cut stuff it sounds great and most of you would be better off in the short run with their policy but i emphasize in the short run because if we have a big tax cut with 4 percent unemployment it will be perceived as inflationary interest rates will go up more than they ve already gone up it will slow the economy it will cut the profitability of your investments and therefore the projected surplus will not materialize and we ll be right back in the deficit suit so we re put in a position of telling you things you may not want to hear like the vice president said the other day why don t we just start by saying we re going to save 20 percent of this projected surplus because 400 billion of this projected surplus are taxes you re paying for medicare so let s just wall it off use it to pay down the debt until we need it and then medicare will last a lot longer why don t we have a tax cut but less than and a sizable one but still less than half the one they propose so we can focus on wealth creation for people that can t do it otherwise help them establish their own savings account child care sending kids to college long term care when you ve got an elderly or disabled relative who is sick and then save some money to invest in our future in education in science and technology in new environmental technologies in health care and the things that will change our future now there s a huge difference what do you propose to do with the surplus what do you propose to do with this moment of prosperity it will affect economic policy it will affect social policy what are the other differences well we think we ought to bend over backwards and let everybody participate we think the people that served this food tonight if they re working hard and obeying the law have just as much right as we do to benefit from this new economy that s what we think and so we think we ought to raise the minimum wage they don t we think we also ought to have a tax cut for working people that have modest wages with children at home we think that we ought to pass the patients bill of rights and they don t we think we ought to have a medicare based broad based prescription program for seniors so that people can get medicine that can t afford it today and they don t if we were creating medicare today we d never create medicare without a drug program today it was a doctor and hospital program in 1965 because that s what medicine was now anybody that lives to be 65 years old has got a life expectancy of 82 and if they take care of themselves and they have access to good health care they could live longer in a few days we ll have an announcement that the human genome project is essentially completed its basic mapping you will then see in the next couple of years this breath taking explosion of discoveries about the pattern and genes that make you more likely to get certain kinds of cancer or parkinson s or alzheimer s or become over weight or have a heart attack or whatever you ll see all this stuff and you will begin to see kind of individualized plans develop for little babies when the mothers bring them home from the hospital that will change the whole landscape of health care and it wouldn t surprise me a bit to see children being born within the next 10 years in our country and other developed countries that are being born with a life expectancy of 90 years that is going to change everything so if you re going to live that long it seems to me that the society s obligation is for people not only to live as long but to live as well as possible one thing the congress did on the bipartisan fashion and i applaud everybody who did including the republicans and take the earnings limit off social security we need to do that you can t have if a huge percentage of your population is over 65 and a bunch of them are healthy as can be and they want to work you don t want to have an economic incentive for them not to work when you re going to have a ratio of people on social security to not of only two to one so we have to think of all these things now why am i for al gore for president not just on all these issues i could go through let me just talk about crime a minute i want to talk about crime i want to talk about welfare we got a bipartisan welfare reform bill through but i had to veto two bills why because i agreed with the republicans that people who were able bodied on welfare who could work should work but what i did not agree with is that we should abandon the national guarantee of health care and nutrition to their children so we finally got a bill and i said we ve got work requirements in here this is not going to be a disincentive but we ve got to take care of these children so i vetoed two bills and we finally got one we agreed on i signed it and they were saying well maybe it was too weak all i know is since i became president we ve got the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years and they re less than half the size they were in 93 on the crime bill the first time i ever did an event with ed rendell when he was mayor was on an anti drug anti crime anti gang event ed and i were so dumb we didn t know crime was a republican issue we thought it was an american issue all this idea that it s a republican issue is like that s what the matter with washington it s all about words and stuff instead of what are you really producing so we had a crime program put more cops in the streets do more things to keep kids off the street and out of trouble and take steps to get guns out of the hands of criminals and kids it wasn t rocket science yes the improving economy helped the crime rate yes the aging population in some places helped the crime rate yes the sort of waning of the crack epidemic helped the crime rate but put more police on the streets giving the kids something positive to do and doing more to take guns out of the hands of criminals and children also had something to do with it now i realize that it was a political risk we lost a dozen members of our caucus in the 94 election because they had the guts to vote for the brady bill and the assault weapons ban because the nra convinced people we were going to come and take their guns away a dozen gave up their careers so that your kids could be safer and these people are still talking about now they say if governor bush wins they ll have an office in the white house and figuratively they will because they ve made their commitments and they ll have to honor them but look here not a single hunter has missed a day in the deer woods because of the brady bill or the assault weapons ban and when we banned those cop killer bullets they still haven t found the first deer wearing a kevlar vest i mean there are no problems here what is the deal here i mean what is this about i mean i can say it one of the reasons that they dislike me so intensely is that i grew up in one of the all time hunting cultures of the world but this is crazy you can t have a society where you take no sensible steps to keep criminals and little children from having access to guns so the brady bill has kept a half million felons fugitives and stalkers from getting guns we ve got a 35 year low on gun crime so what do we want to do well we want to close the gun show loophole that means if somebody goes to a gun show we think we ought to do a background check we want child trigger locks on the guns we want not to import large capacity ammunition clips which can be used by people in america to get around the assault weapons ban now there is still not anybody going to miss a day in the deer woods all this rhetoric about gun control is crazy you know in america we have a constitutional right to travel too the supreme court says there is a constitutional right to travel but if you leave here and you get in your car and you go home you ll have seatbelts you ll have a speed limit if you ve got a little baby you d have a child restraint law and you don t ever hear anybody griping about car control do you car control it s a threat to the constitutional rights of travel car control is if i come get your car and put it in my garage otherwise it s highway safety so there is a big difference between our two parties in this and i think it s a huge issue i m glad we ve got a lower crime rate but this country is nowhere near as safe as it needs to be and i don t think we ought to quit until we re the safest big country in the world just like i don t think we ought to quit paying down the debt until we re out of debt and these are big ideas you get the drift here and we re different on these issues so the last thing i want to say is i hope this election will be an honest open debate where we posit the fact that the candidates for president and senate and congress are basically honorable people who intend to keep their commitments and talk about their differences and have an honest debate i think if we do that i think al gore will be elected president i think that all these great candidates we ve got in california we ve got a chance to pick up several house seats here i think we ll win all of the ones we ve got a chance to win because they re good candidates and because the voters will agree with us because we ve got a record that proves that in the areas where we re different we ve gotten results and because we ve got new ideas and i just want to say one word about the vice president i think i probably know him better than anybody outside his family now there are three reasons that i d be for him if he weren t my vice president and i didn t feel obligated in a profound and wonderful sense one is i agree with the economic policy he s articulated i don t think we ought to risk giving away the whole projected surplus on tax cuts and long term spending commitments i think it s a risky strategy and it s not worth it and you wouldn t run your family business that way and you wouldn t run your business that way and we shouldn t run our government that way we worked a long time to turn this thing around and we don t want to just squander it again number two i think he ll work harder to extend the benefits of this prosperity to people in places that aren t part of it now and to help average families balance work and child rearing open the doors of college to everybody number three i think he understands the future this is a big deal al gore was talking about global warming before most people even knew the two words went together i m talking years and years and years ago he was talking about now even the major oil companies admit that it s real the first time we ever had lunch together he showed me this chart he s got about greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and how much they ve gone up and in the eight years we ve been here in the white house seven of them were seven of the ten hottest years recorded since 1400 al gore was talking about the internet before other people in congress he s been falsely accused of claiming he created it that s not true that s like another one of those bum raps once somebody says something in the press they just keep on playing it it doesn t matter if it s not true any more it sort of acquires it what he said was that he introduced legislation which helped to create it and it did create it as a phenomenon that went beyond a small private government research project do you know how many sites there were on the worldwide web when i became president fifty how many are there now everyone fifty million fifty and now fifty million he understood that he understands that there is all these fabulous possibilities to close the digital divide and to do things that we haven t even imagined but we also are going to have to work hard to protect our old fashioned values for example if all of our health records and all of our financial records are on somebody s computer somewhere i think that you ought to have some privacy protection and there are some things i don t think other people ought to be able to get unless you say okay and somebody that understands all the competing the considerations it would be a good things to have a president that understood that so i think his economic policy is right i think he ll do more to try to help everybody benefit from the things that are going on and i think he really understands the future and i think that s what you want so what i d like to ask you to do is to go out and tell people who want to know why you came here tonight not to hear me tell irish jokes that well california is a better place than it was eight years ago they had some ideas and they turned out to be pretty good that you agree with gore s economic policy and you think we ought to spread the benefits to more people and build one american community and you want somebody who understands the future and can lead us there and on the critical issues there really are differences between the parties and it s important that they be clarified and uplifted but if the people believe that this election is about whether we can build the future of our dreams for our children we ll be just fine thank you dem wjclinton22 6 94 bill_clinton thank you very much chairman wilhelm my good friend vernon jordan between the two of you there s nothing left for me to say i thank you for your leadership of our party i congratulate you and deegee on the upcoming birth of your first child i thank vernon and ann jordan and all those others who worked on this dinner and made it so successful tonight i want to thank terry mcauliffe and all the cochairs of this dinner the members of the congress the members of the cabinet members of the administration who are here and my fellow americans i have two pieces of good news tonight the first is that with about a half an hour left to go the united states is ahead in the world cup 2 0 over colombia i kind of like this world cup it reminds me of my campaign we re the underdog in this deal i like it the second is far more important and perhaps most of you have already heard but this afternoon the united states received official confirmation that north korea is prepared to freeze its nuclear program in return for talking to us about their differences this event of course is important to all of us to our children and if we re successful even to our children s children it does not solve our problems but it gives us a chance to begin to solve them it came about because of the steadfastness and resolve of our administration and working with our allies in this case we had an interesting set of allies from the very beginning of course our friends in south korea and japan but also in russia and china there was a sense that we had to do something here it came about because of the deft footing of our case and the case for north korea s coming into the community of nations by another great democrat former president jimmy carter and tonight i mentioned it not only because it is so important to all of us and to our future but because in addition to this being a party gala it is an american celebration when i heard on the way in the themes of the little film you saw on our administration i thought to myself that most of those things we have done benefit people without regard to their party and that democrats in 1992 promised a new direction for our country one rooted in the real problems and the real promise of this nation i had some fairly basic ideas i thought that we could not be strong abroad unless we were strong at home that we could never be strong at home if we tried to withdraw from the world but that we had to rebuild ourselves from the grass roots based on the real conditions in our country i ll never forget when david wilhelm suggested that we get on that bus it was easy for him to say he didn t have to ride on it as long as we did but i think hillary and al and tipper would admit that that bus and those trips not only became the symbol of our campaign but kept us firmly rooted to the american people we saw individually the people that had been beaten down and had often given up on their national government maybe collectively they were cynical and believed gridlock was inevitable but individually they were full of hope and concern they wanted so much for the promise of america to be alive for their children and they knew that some tough things would have to be done there s no way that tv ads could convey what we saw in the eyes of a woman on the side of the road in the middle west one night who told us that her husband and she had been married for 35 years and he had been having increasing difficulty holding on to jobs because of the decline of the economy and finally he had taken a job paying just over 5 an hour and they had lost their health insurance and she was ill and she did not know what to do but she was absolutely sure that they had worked hard and played by the rules there s no way a poll or a commercial could recapture the face of the woman i saw in cedar rapids iowa one day at a quaker oats plant holding a child of another race while we were being demonstrated against by people who disagreed with my pro choice position this woman had a pro choice sticker on and she had a baby in her arms of another race and i said where did you get that baby and she said this is my baby and i said well where did you get this baby she said i got this baby from florida and she has aids but somebody s got to take care of all these babies with aids this woman had been divorced was living in an apartment with her own two children struggling to make ends meet and she had adopted another child she said i m for you and i wish you d tell those people back there with their signs if they feel so strongly about it come help me adopt these babies and stand up for their right to grow up and live a good life i met a sheriff in east texas who s got to be the only east texas sheriff in america that subscribed to rolling stone who told me he wanted me to pass a real tough crime bill but not to forget that the kids needed something to say yes to as well i wish i could just tell you all these stories but when i showed up here i knew that as my granddaddy used to say there would be a lot of slips between the cup and the lip but if i could just keep remembering all those people in the end it would come out all right and what we have tried to do is exactly what i said i would try to in the campaign we ve tried to restore the economy to restore the link between the people and the government to make it work for ordinary people again to rebuild a sense of work and family and community and empowerment of individual citizens and to move this country into the 21st century still the greatest country in the world with the most hopes for our children if you look at what has happened in the last 18 months i think you can make a pretty compelling case that we re doing the right things our economy is growing steadily over 3 4 million new jobs in 16 months more than in the previous four years combined a point and a half plus drop in the unemployment rate in 1993 more new business incorporations than in any year since world war ii in the first quarter of this year the first quarter in over 15 years when there was not a bank failure our republican friends always talk about how they deplored the deficit and they deplored government spending but it just kept getting bigger when they were in office and they blamed the congress but when you look at the facts the truth is that in spite of the exploding deficits congress actually appropriated slightly less money in the previous 12 years than the administrations asked for and all that about there s the congressmen clapping out there tell you the truth but they were very skilled at saying one thing and doing another and i m not very good at that and it embarrasses me so we decided we d actually try to bring the deficit down last year by the narrowest of margins because we got no help and a lot of hot rhetoric our economic plan passed and it began a system of disciplined budgeting which will be accompanied by this year s budget the first time in 17 years two president s budgets have been adopted on time by the united states congress that will give us three years of deficit reduction for the first time since harry truman was the president of the united states of america and i want you to know working with this congress this budget the congress will eliminate over 100 government programs outright will cut 200 more will not only be reducing defense but will reduce domestic discretionary spending for the first time since 1969 in 25 years and still we will spend more money on head start more money on women and infant children more money on school to work opportunities more money on education and new technologies for the future we will invest more in people and still cut government spending because we hired on to get things done not to just about them and that is what the democrats are doing in this town today when you put that with the initiatives in trade that this administration has taken more in 18 months than had been done in a generation we have the basis for the first growth in america in 30 years that is led by investment and that has no inflation in 30 years that is what i asked for a chance to work on and what you helped to give me and no amount of rhetoric to the contrary can take away those facts the second thing i said i would try to do is to make government work for ordinary people and i think we ve made a pretty good stab at that with the support of the public employee unions we have passed budgets which will reduce the size of the national government by a quarter of a million by attrition over five years and leave us at the end of a five year period with the smallest federal work force since john kennedy was the president of the united states and the money will be used to pay for the crime bill to make our streets safer that is a matter of record we ve also begun to make the government work again terry mcauliffe told me yesterday that a reporter for a newspaper that is not exactly a house organ of the democratic party called him and said how did you get all these businesspeople to contribute to the democratic party he said well the president s got a good probusiness position and a reporter starting laughing one of the real problems here you know you re always in the most trouble when you think you have nothing to learn the small business administration under the leadership of erskine bowles will now let you apply for a loan on a one page form something small businesspeople have been begging for for years the emergency management agency which was the source of ridicule and anger and frustration and revulsion for years because it was dominated by political appointees now has a director from my home state who did it for a living and he s the most popular federal bureaucrat in the united states because fema has been there in earthquakes and fires and tornadoes when people needed it nobody worries about whether the federal government is going to be there to do its job anymore rice farmers in northern california a few weeks for the first time ever shipped their rice out of ports in northern california to sell in japan because the government is working for ordinary people again i don t know how many businesspeople i ve had come up to me in the last year and say you know i m a republican but you have the only administration where the commerce department and the state department work together to try to help me do business overseas and i appreciate that i wanted to break gridlock for seven years the world trade agreement was tied up it was ratified last year by the nations and we re going to implement it this year for seven years seven years even after the attempt on president reagan s life with his fine press secretary jim brady surviving by a miracle and campaigning like crazy for the brady bill for seven years the nra and others tied it up in congress but we passed it last year for seven years even though it had some bipartisan support the family and medical leave act could not pass the congress but we passed it last year no presidential vetoes support for families in the workplace for six years now politics has kept the crime bill from passing but we are on the verge of passing the most important piece of anticrime legislation in the history of the united states more punishment but more prevention more police and the ban on assault weapons which lost just two years ago by 70 votes in the house of representatives passed we have brought an end to the gridlock in this country and we should not let it go back the other way at election time now we re working on health care first the other side said there was no crisis then there was a crisis but we needed a bipartisan solution i said fine here s my plan you tell me how we going to change it but we ve got to cover everybody then they started running ads saying i was trying to give health care to the government which wasn t true but i went out and listened to people and i said well maybe it is too bureaucratic so we changed it some more and took out some of the mandatory provisions and made it more flexible to try to make it more responsive and then a republican congressman from iowa named fred grandy stood up and told the awful truth that he and his colleagues had been given marching orders to do nothing to cooperate to try to solve the health care problems in this country the governor of florida was in here today talking about how he had a bill in florida that was not mandatory but would made the situation better that had the support of every organization in his state and it still died the in senate of the state of florida because there s a 20 20 split between republicans and democrats and with all the interest groups saying please do something about health care every last republican senator still voted against it so they couldn t say he did anything on health care now in the senate finance committee there are a couple of republicans who have worked on health care for years who are trying to come together and reach some accommodation and i can tell you they are under withering pressure but folks those people who say let s just cover 90 percent and forget about it it won t work it won t work three million working americans have lost their health insurance in the last three years we are going backwards we are the only country in the world with an advanced economy that has not figured out how to cover everybody read the article in the washington post today about the german health care system the german health care system today takes up a smaller percentage of the income of germany than it did two years ago it s about 8 5 percent our health care system costs us 14 5 percent of our income and we still can t figure out how to cover we re not even at 85 percent anymore and all the solutions that say well let s just not make any tough decisions and go up to 90 percent cost you a doubleton of money in taxes subsidize the poor most of whom already can at least get medicare and do not one single solitary thing for the working middle class 80 percent of whom are those who don t have insurance and who are terribly insecure i m telling you we have got to face this problem and face it now harry truman tried to get us to do it 50 years ago and we didn t do it and we ve been paying for it ever since let me say that any time you quote harry truman now the republicans stand up and clap and everybody says gosh i wish we had him around it s too bad we don t have anybody like truman anymore let me tell you something folks i came from one of those families that was for him when he was living and a lot of the people that brag on him today wouldn t have walked across the street to shake his hand when he was in office because he stood up for ordinary people and he told extraordinary truths and he tried to get us to face the problems of our time now in retrospect we can see that he did a good job every midterm election in the 20th century except one when president roosevelt could not pass social security in 1934 every other one has seen a loss in both houses or at least one house for the president in power his party why because there is always a disappointment from the bright promise of the inauguration to the hard reality of governing governor cuomo used to say we campaign in poetry and we govern in prose but there is a special problem this year what is it it is that there is so much accumulated cynicism in this country and people are always told about the process the conflict the ups the downs the differences that a lot of people don t even know what i have just told you and our adversaries are banking on two things number one they believe the cynicism of the electorate will a cause them to say i don t believe it if they hear what we have done and b cause them to blame those of us who are in if we fail to change because they bring back gridlock and so they think they can be rewarded if they stop anything from happening and the second thing that they hope is that they can divert the attention of a significant number of our voters from the crying issues that unite us as a people by trying to launch another cultural war and this is not just my opinion there s a new book out by david frame conservative and former editorial writer of the wall street journal that you can find adapted in harper s this week he says that conservatives fail to control the size and cost of government and they ve basically given that up that s true we ve done a better job of that than they did so instead he predicts politics in the future will become a lot nastier and that the only way to mobilize and excite voters will be to trade on our differences on moral and ethnic and racial issues i can tell you folks we have not survived over 200 years as the strongest and oldest democracy in this country by fighting out our differences on moral and racial and ethnic issues and we did not get where we are by becoming mired in the luxury and i use the word clearly the luxury of cynicism you know the biggest honor i think i ve had as your president was going to represent us at the d day ceremonies it was one of the most extraordinary events of hillary s and my life going first to italy and seeing what our soldiers endured there being shelled and killed on those beaches week after week not able to get off going to england and seeing the 3 800 graves of people who fought in the air war for two years before the d day invasion and the list of 5 000 names of people who never came back including joe kennedy jr and the great american band leader glenn miller and then going to the beaches at normandy and the thing that struck me overwhelmingly was that these people who saved the world who laid their lives on the line they didn t have an option they knew what was at stake and it makes a mockery of their sacrifice for us to be cynical about fulfilling our own legacy this whole atmosphere that permeates this town now nothing makes any difference and it s all who s up and down and in and out and all that this obsession with process and conflict over product it makes a mockery of what has gotten us here for 200 years i m going to tell you something most of the people i ve known in politics for 20 years both parties have been honest most of them have worked hard most of them have done what they thought was right most of the time we fought over things that were honest differences worth arguing and fighting over and we re about to get ourselves in a fix on the dawn of the 21st century we ve got the strongest economy in the world we are the envy of the world our diversity is a source of great strength and the great great mother lode of wealth for us in the 21st century in the global economy if we ve got sense enough to rescue these kids out of these cities whose lives are being squandered and the only thing that can mess it up for us is if we permitted ourselves to have the wrong fights to believe that we were immoral because we had differences over certain issues and if we permitted ourselves to become so cynical that we wouldn t even listen to the truth and i am here tonight to tell you that what you need to do is to go out of this room tonight and not just be glad that you gave money to this party and to our administration and to our continued efforts but to think of your words as a knife that can cut through stone and every time you hear one of your fellow americans say some cynical and nonsensical thing implying that we re all up here just trying to feather our nest and it doesn t make any difference what s done and everything s in trouble you tell them the truth not to benefit me and the democrats in congress although to be sure we ll be benefitted for it because we have broken gridlock and we are moving forward but to give americans their citizenship back we did not get here by being cynics we got here by being believers thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton22 6 96 bill_clinton thank you very much mayor rice his speaking has improved now that he s getting so much practice out there on the stump i m delighted to be here with you i thank you for your great year as president of the u s conference of mayors and looking forward to working with mayor daley this year and i m glad the democrats are going to give him a little boost in the local economy in chicago in a few weeks try to get his term off to a good start i want to say a special word of appreciation to the mayor of chicago for the city livability awards that he presents every year at this conference along with philip rooney of waste management i think that s a very good thing to do and i ve always been impressed with the achievements that earn the awards i m delighted to be here with the other mayors on the platform mayor white and my longtime friend mayor helmke mayor rhea i was glad to see congressman stokes this morning and congressman sherrod brown and reverend mcmickle i got prayed over from a distance i thank you i heard it and needed it more than the others i appreciate it very much i enjoyed all of the music in advance and i want you to know that mayor rice and i were out there trying to sing along with glenn burke i didn t make the low notes and he did but i appreciated it very much i want to thank mayor lanier from houston for his hosting me yesterday in houston and we flew up today and i know that he is the head of the rebuild america coalition that s an important part of your efforts and we re glad to work with him and looking forward to it i also want to thank all the mayors here for the work you did yesterday on the habitat house i saw the picture in the local paper when i got here and i think it s a wonderful thing that you did i appreciate that i m sure that many of you know that i signed an appropriation this year for the first time ever to habitat for humanity so that they could buy larger tracts of land in our urban areas and build more houses at one time in one place and i hope that that will enable a lot of you to cooperate with them and meet the housing needs of your people and i think you sent a great message to america yesterday and i thank you mayor white for making that opportunity possible for them and i thank all of you for doing it i would like to say a special word of thanks too to tom cochrane because he works for you full time and he has to work with us and i think sometimes we overlook i know i was in the governors association and the attorney generals association and we showed up for our conferences and we got credit for whatever we were doing most of the time the staff had done it and we just stood in the way of the camera so i thank tom cochrane for what he does every day for you as well mayor i want to say thank you for welcoming us to cleveland i heard what you said outside about the remarkable progress of cleveland and i ve had an opportunity to see a lot of it myself over the last several years you remember it wasn t so many years ago that i came here i think for the democratic leadership council in the 80s and then when i was running for president i have seen this remarkable city s turnaround under your leadership and with the partnership of the private sector and with the enormous spirit of the community here i have been in all sections of this community and i have loved every opportunity i have had to be here i liked throwing out the ball at your stadium somebody told me mayor riley was going to throw the ball out tomorrow is that true mayor riley can t throw a baseball better practice joe wherever you are and thank you for welcoming me to charleston the other night i also i ll tell you one thing you can all do you can go home and you can get one great story out of this conference you can go home and tell everybody that after all elvis is alive in cleveland at the rock and roll hall of fame he s packing them in as never before i m going to see how many times i can run that out before people figure out what i m talking about if i can get willie brown to laugh at my jokes i m doing well i ve got a real future in this business if i can do that i d like to begin on a serious note if i might now i was thinking about cleveland coming in here and the remarkable amount of partnership in reaching across the lines that too often divide us that made possible the revitalization of this city in the last few years and i was thinking about all the different people that i had met over the years in cleveland who had been in my mind heroes of this country of ours because of the work they ve done in their churches in their housing projects on the streets trying to prevent crime trying to rebuild their communities and it reminds me of what i ve been doing the last couple of days i m sure some of you saw the press reports that hillary and i were privileged to welcome the olympic torch into the white house the other night and it burned on the white house lawn for a night and then we saw it off the next day the torch was brought into the white house by a nun who had devoted her life to community service and by dr i king jordan who is the president of gallaudet university he s the first deaf president of our nation s deaf university he s i don t know how old king is but he s a couple of years older than i am and this week he s going to run a 100 mile race so he s in reasonably good shape as well and then the next day the people who brought the flame out of the place where it was sitting in the white house and then ran it out of the white house as we saw it off the next morning it was a man named lang brown who has devoted his life to trying to save the lives of troubled children he s an african american man of about oh i don t know maybe a little older than i am and he walked up the way at the white house there with 12 kids they were white hispanic african american all walks of life kids who were in desperate trouble he helped them to put their lives back together again he spends his whole life doing that one of the people that carried the olympic torch is a 74 year old woman in nevada who has taken in at a rather advanced age now 100 children who were abandoned and she tried to give them their lives back the young woman that carried the torch out of the white house was a young woman named carla mcghee who was a highly recruited high school basketball player she went to the university of tennessee seemed destined for a streaking career and she was in a terrible accident almost died her body was totally crushed and by sheer dint of will she pulled herself back to the point where she recovered her mobility first and then she recovered her ability to play basketball and within a couple of years she had gone back to the university of tennessee and helped them to win a national championship and now she s leading our women s olympic basketball team a miraculous story and they were carrying this olympic torch like thousands and thousands of our fellow citizens have done that that s the flame i want america to be remembered by and then we ve been bedeviled as i heard someone mention i think the pastor mentioned in the prayer by another sort of flame we ve had more than a tripling of church burnings in our country in the last year and a half that s the opposite side of the coin but we still have some people in our country that give into what seems to be if you look at bosnia if you look at the middle east if you look at northern ireland if you look at the problems between the tribes in burundi and rwanda it seems to be an almost universal impulse of human nature that there is this dark part of our soul that can be revved up so that we define ourselves not in terms of our common humanity and what we can do and what we can be for and what our good qualities are but in terms of who we can hate and who we can put down and who we can be different from and that s really what the racially motivated impulses in the church burnings that have been racially driven represent and it is the antithesis of everything that makes our american cities great we ve had an enormous number of black churches burned unfortunately we ve also had at least one mosque and another islamic center burned we ve had several synagogues desecrated in this country in the last couple of years and unbelievably enough we ve even though there haven t been as many of them we ve had a substantial increase in the number of white churches that have been burned people are sort of looking at our houses of worship as targets now and i just want to say to all of you that that s the opposite of what makes you successful as mayors and it s also the opposite of what it means to be an american in the finest sense a lot of these churches have been burned out in the country where people can t catch them but there have also been burnings in sizable cities in knoxville and sacramento and tucson and just this past thursday the emmanual christian fellowship in portland was added to the list of suspicious fires so i just want to say to you i want you to keep speaking out against this i know that mayor menino has sponsored a resolution that you re going to pass and i thank you for that but this country has the largest number of houses of worship per capita of any nation in the world we got started by people coming to our shores searching for religious liberty it is the first amendment to the constitution and so i say to you your lives and your successes are living examples of what is best in this country you bring together people every day that are like those folks carrying the torch to mayor campbell s city and i hope before you leave here you will issue the strongest possible statement saying this church burning is not america and we re not going to tolerate it we re going to stand up to it for nearly four years now we have worked together on a strategy that i called in 1992 putting people first i ran for this job because i wanted to see our country go into the 21st century with great vigor and purpose and determination meeting our challenges and protecting our values in a way that would enable us to achieve three things one to keep the american dream of opportunity available for every person in this country who would assume the responsibility necessary to achieve it two to see this country come together as a community over all the lines of our diversity and not be divided and three because at this particular moment in history to make sure that america continued to be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity now while no one could say we solved all the problems in this country and none of you would assert that you have done that in your cities we are plainly better off than we were four years ago we are clearly moving in the right direction and the thing that has underpinned a lot of the successes that we have had in other areas has been the revitalization of the american economy our strategy was very straightforward cut the deficit in half so you can get interest rates down and the private sector can invest again and create jobs continue to work to invest in our people in their education in their skills in technology and research expand trade so that america can sell more of its products and services abroad well four years later we have had the deficit reduced they say now by more than 50 percent from over 290 billion to about 130 billion by the end of this year we have negotiated 200 separate trade agreements and our trade is at an all time high now in the 21 areas we negotiated with japan american exports are up 85 percent in three and a half years we have continued to expand opportunities in education and to continue to invest we have increased our investment in infrastructure by about 10 percent while reducing the deficit something that i know is important to all of you and the american people have produced 9 7 million new jobs in three and a half years now to give you some idea i m about to leave next week to go to the annual conference of the g 7 the big seven industrial nations in europe the g 7 nations in total in the last three and a half years have produce 10 million jobs 9 7 million in america that s something to be proud of our fellow citizens for they have done a good job we ve done a good job of bringing this country back we also see that the welfare roles have been reduced by 1 3 million food stamp roles are down a million the poverty rate has dropped for the first time in many years and thank goodness for the first time in 10 years for the last two years average wages are finally going up again in america instead of going down so we are moving in the right direction we ve also worked together on some other things we passed the national service law and i know a lot of you have made good use of the americorps volunteers i want to thank mayor ashe for his willingness to serve on the americorps board i m going to appoint him formally next week we passed some other very important legislation for america the family and medical leave law we now know from a bipartisan study that 12 million americans have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law in the last couple of years to take a little time off when they had a family member sick or a baby born or an elderly parent in trouble without losing their jobs and it may be in some ways the most immediately impactful law that i ve had the privilege to sign as president because i hear everywhere i go people come up to me and talk to me about how their children were sick and they couldn t have taken care of them and kept their job if it hadn t been for that so i feel good about that i think we all know we ve got more to do and that we can never never succeed in getting opportunity to all of our people as we move into this information age in this global society unless we have a strategy to make sure that our cities are strong and vibrant if america s cities can go into the 21st century flourishing then america will do very well we have sought to forge a partnership with you mayor rice talked about it talked about our early meetings the accessibility of the cabinet i must tell you i think it s been made a lot easier by this remarkable generation of mayors in the room i was talking this morning about how i m amazed that the mayors seem to get more and more and more talented and more innovative with each successive year and i thank you you re very easy to work with practical people oriented flexible interested in solving problems and working and going forward i also think it s been made a lot easier because i have been privileged to have the service of the person i believe will go down in history as the finest hud secretary in the history of the united states henry cisneros we have worked to establish a comprehensive approach with you to deal with jobs issues to deal with housing issues to deal with environmental issues to deal with the issues of education the school to work program expanded head start aid to the public schools and chapter i to deal with transportation issues we ve tried to put this program into our community empowerment agenda and i want to thank the vice president for the work he s done in leading that effort along with henry you have made it possible we now have 105 communities that have qualified to be empowerment zones or enterprise communities we have seen some remarkable transformations in those communities here in cleveland dozens of new businesses are moving into or expanding in the city zone one of them is bearings a fortune 1000 company that will build a new 28 million world headquarters here and employ more than 300 workers mayor white has taken action to make sure that the local workers will be trained for these jobs and for other jobs that will come into the zone so that we won t have a purported advantage that doesn t really benefit the people it was supposed to benefit so i m pleased about that we ve got to build on our successes and i have made some very specific proposals to the congress which i intend to take into this campaign if they are not enacted in this session of congress first i ve asked congress to create a second round of empowerment zones my goal will be eventually to get to the point where we can have an empowerment zone of some scope in every community in the country that needs it that s really what the rule ought to be and if it works will generate more investment more jobs more incomes and there won t be any loss to the treasury so i think we have to keep going on this this approach is working and it s working because it requires the communities to come up with a strategy to make the most of the opportunity and then let the communities drive their future not some federal rule or regulation second as all of you know i have asked congress to enact a new 2 billion incentive to encourage the clean up and redevelopment of abandoned industrial sites our so called brownfields initiative this one thing could do as much to bring jobs back to urban america as any other thing that we ve talked about in a long time and i want you regardless of your party to help me get this passed in congress this is good for america it s good economics congressman lou stokes has been a leader in this effort i want to thank him and senator carol moseley braun of illinois congressman charles rangel of new york who will be introducing the community empowerment legislation this week we also fought to preserve the low income housing credit and i m pleased that the local initiative services corporation lisc is prepared to announce that it has raised 410 million from corporations to build 8 500 housing units and create another 12 000 jobs that will benefit a lot of your areas we have to do more particularly we have to recognize that there are places in our country where the free enterprise system simply hasn t reached yet and we have got to do more to provide jobs and opportunities i recently signed two executive orders to address this issue the first one created a new empowerment contracting program which will offer special incentives for government contracting awards for companies that locate in distressed communities in all parts of america i also signed an executive order directing federal agencies that are building facilities or relocating to give first priority to the historic districts of our central cities instead of running away from them the government should be investing in america s future where it s most needed i think one of the great success stories of urban america in the last couple of years is the success that so many of you have made in lowering the rate of crime and violence and we have to build on it because we are nowhere near where we need to be but we are a lot better off than we were just a few years ago i have tried to be a good partner in that regard we have worked to help you put 100 000 new police officers on the street with the crime bill of 1994 i can tell you that we are ahead of schedule and under budget there we have funded almost half of the 100 000 police already the assault weapons ban is making a difference the brady bill is making a huge difference we have now seen since the brady bill became law 60 000 i ll say that again 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers who were prevented from buying guns simply because we took a few days to check their eligibility it was the right thing to do we have worked to try to help communities give our children something to say yes to to support your preventive programs and your role models that keep children out of drugs and gangs and violence in the first place we cannot jail our way out of this crisis we have to find ways to change the culture of america to give more of our kids a chance to stay on the right path in the first place all of you know that i have not had as much success as i wanted with this congress in preserving the prevention aspect of the 94 crime bill but all of you know and so do your law enforcement officials know that this is a critical aspect of the strategy we need to do more in this area not less these programs can work they save children s lives every single solitary day and again i say i hope you will help me to bring some balance more balance back into the approach that congress is taking we are fighting to preserve every single dollar for prevention we can but we need all the help we can get we have also tried to help cities to implement their own strategies long beach california led the country in implementing the school uniform policy they found that it reduced the vulnerability of their children to gangs and that it increased learning and reduced the dropout rate and it increased a sense of cohesion that even the upper income kids wound up liking it because people began to be identified by what they were inside rather than what they were wearing outside we helped them and we have helped others now through the justice department and the education department do that in a way that is legal and constitutional and avoids the hassles we are supporting cities like new orleans and many others that have curfew policies that have led to dramatic drops in the juvenile crime rate to do so in a way that at least based on anything that we can find through the justice department is likely to be most effective and most positive i see mayor pat hays from north little rock out there he s the first mayor my mayor that actually introduced a curfew policy we had a terrible problem in his community i think most of the mayors that have done it believe that it s a smart thing and a good thing to do we want to make sure that at least that if you re interested in it you know what everyone s experience is what seems to work best and how to avoid any potential pitfalls that we have determined around the country here in cleveland i know the murder rate has been down 12 percent in the last two years alone we see this nationwide and i guess one of the things that i want to make sure that all of us are doing together and i would like to help on is i want the folks back home to know that we can do something about the crime rate i want people to believe that we can do something about the crime rate it wasn t so very long ago that i think people had more or less given up and that would be a terrible thing in this country it would be a terrible thing if people gave up on our ability to provide common security then within 10 or 20 years those of us who could afford it would be living behind walls with our own private security systems and everybody else would be living in a jungle so this crime issue is critical to the economic issue it s critical to the welfare issue it s critical to all these other issues we have got to convince our people that in common we can bring the crime rate down we can restore order and civility and decency and safety to our children s lives and it s very very important let me say that in the last few months especially we have been very active in dealing with those who commit crimes against children especially those who commit sexual offenses children and i wanted to mention that just a moment today in the crime bill we required every state to compile a registry of sex offenders and gave the states the power to notify communities about child sex offenders or violent sex offenders that moved into neighborhoods and then last month i signed megan s law to insist that states tell a community whenever a dangerous sexual predator is in the midst of the people too many children and their families have paid a terrible price because of what their parents didn t know megan s law was named after a seven year old girl from new jersey who was taken at the beginning of her life and i believe it will help to prevent further megans but there is one other step we have to take senator biden and senator gramm have introduced a bipartisan bill to develop a national registry to track offenders and child molesters across the country that is the right thing to do but i believe we can move forward now today i directed the attorney general to report back to me in 60 days with a plan to guarantee that police officers can get this information right away to make sure that police officers in every state get the information they need from any state to track sex offenders a police officer in cleveland ought to know about somebody in cleveland whether the crime was committed in los angeles or new york these things have to be shared and we need a system to share it so we are working very very hard on that and i hope you will support us in that endeavor as well let me just say one last thing about crime unless someone finds a magic formula to transform human nature we will never eliminate crime completely from america but we can go back to the time when it s the exception not the rule and i think that the test that i always say that i will follow is i will believe we re on the right side of the crime problem when i can turn on the evening news at night and if the lead story is a horrible crime i m absolutely shocked instead of numb to it i don t expect the lead story to be the biggest latest crime story so i say again you have proven mayor after mayor most of the mayors in this room have seen a drop in the crime rate for three or four years in a row now and it s very important that our people believe we can do this we cannot allow the people to believe that we cannot do this i think the resurgence of our cities and i predict to you that it will continue driven by new economic strategies and more jobs coming in driven by innovative housing strategies and more affordable housing we re going to make secretary cisneros s goal we re going to have more than two thirds of the american people in their own homes by the end of this decade for the first time in american history we re going to do that the marrying of our attempts to improve the environment and to direct the economy to develop the economy as embodied in the brownfields initiative the continued assault on crime the continued commitment to invest in our infrastructure these things will develop a strategy not only to rebuild urban america but to make america great as we move into the next century the main thing i would say again we have to have a vision you have to imagine what do you want this country to look like when these children grow up and they re raising their children i want this to be a country in a world that is so full of possibility it s unimaginable to us but i want those possibilities available to every child who will work for them without regard to their race or the station they start out in life or where they happen to live in the united states and i want our diversity to be the crown jewel of our assets in the global society i want us to revel in the racial and ethnic and religious diversity of america and i want us to still be standing up for peace and freedom and prosperity for all the people of the world and if you want that you have to lead the way and we have to do it by working together when i look at this crowd i am very optimistic that that is the future that these children will have thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton22 6 98 bill_clinton is there any kind of national organization of people like you who are working for family centered care everywhere and advocating it don t you believe that recovery rates are better when there s family involvement when the people are in the hospital whether it s children or parents or siblings if i could just reinforce something tony said and i thank you for everything you said you may hear this in the debate in the congress when this comes up this year there may be some who really don t want this to pass who say well look a lot of companies are embracing these principles anyway if a company is willing to say all the things tony said if you ve got to go to an emergency room you can go if you need a specialist you can have it the doctors can t be gagged they can recommend whatever good care is if you have a problem with your plan you can have an appeal if you have all those things if he does that why should somebody else be able to put him at a financial disadvantage in whether his plan can make money as compared to their plan by simply not following the same thing it s even more unfair to the good hmos and the good managed care operations in this country not to have this legislation because if they go out and do the right thing then other people who are unscrupulous can come in and try to undercut them by appearing to offer the same service at a lower cost so he just made a terrific argument for why this bill ought to pass this year by doing the right thing and because he s doing the right thing i thank you very much i would just like to thank you for what you said i hope that this order that i m signing today will deal with that by essentially telling all the government agencies that whenever possible they have to work through people like you to do the outreach because well this weekend hillary and i spent some time with some friends of ours and one of them commented that he d just been to a high school graduation in northern virginia where it was announced that the graduates just a few hundred kids came from 70 different national and ethnic groups that s just one high school we have so many communities the asian communities alone if you think from southeast asia and all the different language groups that a lot of these people as you pointed out two thirds or more are working people many of them their first language is not english and if there is not some affirmative attempt to reach them through someone they know and trust their children will not get on this program i don t care how many flyers we put out or psas we do or anything else this is very valuable what you ve said and i think we need to work a little harder on it but i thank you for being here first of all i d like to thank you for the work you do and i d also like to thank mrs gore for being our administration s leading person on mental health issues if it hadn t been for her we wouldn t have had a strong mental health component in the child health insurance program or the mental health parity legislation and i m very grateful for that i d like to ask a question which may be a little unfair because i know you haven t been prepared for it exactly but i m sure you ve thought about it i just got back from a very moving trip out west and you may have seen it i visited springfield oregon where they had one of the many many school shootings we ve seen and i ve been studying the facts of all these cases and it does appear that in each case or in most of the cases where we ve had these terrible tragedies i might add against a background of dropping juvenile crime overall that there was some kind of early warning and i wonder if you could recommend to me because the congress wants to do something on this everybody is interested in this this is how do you think we ought to deal with children who 6 100 kids were removed from school last year for bringing a gun to school i d be very surprised if more than 10 percent of them got some sort of comprehensive mental health analysis as a result of it we have goodness knows how many kids made threats that they had no earthly intention of doing anything about it but in one of these school shootings there was an explicit threat made beforehand what advice can you give us about what the role of mental health ought to be and sort of early warning systems preventive care and that sort of thing and particularly like i said i don t want to put you on the spot on the springfield thing but it s very much on my mind because of what was told to me out there about the facts and because the young man did have a gun in the school the day before and was sent home there are so many children with unmet needs and so often their activities get interpreted as behavior problems as discipline actions and we don t ever stop and do a strong assessment of what are the needs of these children children that carry guns are afraid they really have very strong reasons for carrying them and we work with a lot of children that have been suspended or expelled because they ve been carrying weapons to school and we ve been real fortunate in houston but i know it s of growing concern because there are so many children that don t think that they ll live to see 20 and so those are kids that carry guns to protect themselves we ve spent a lot of time and a lot of prevention efforts that focus on children being okay and so i ve seen a lot of children who suppress their emotional disturbance they see violence on the streets they see violence in their homes and rather than being emotionally disturbed they re being trained to be okay and so when children respond that way their sensitivity becomes dull and they can act out in those kinds of ways that really hurt humanity thank you dem wjclinton22 7 00 bill_clinton thank you well this is the largest crowd i have ever addressed at this late hour hello u s forces okinawa thank you general hailston general smith general hughey admiral schultz colonel sullivan let s give another round of applause to staff sergeant wehunt he did a good job for you up here didn t he i m delighted to be here with my daughter chelsea and ambassador foley we re glad to be here thank you we were supposed to do this tomorrow but i think you know that i have to leave early to try to go back to the peace talks at camp david on the middle east and i hope we will have your thoughts and prayers and that s why we can t do it tomorrow but now i will go back in the right frame of mind since i spent the night with you and when i fly back home to peace in the middle east maybe you ll be going to okuma instead of listening to me give a speech this is a really beautiful place and i feel blessed to have had the opportunity to come here and to see the impact of your service here in spite of how beautiful okinawa is i know you re still a long way from home so let me begin on behalf of every american citizen by thanking our soldiers sailors airmen and marines and your families for your service here for the united states earlier this month i spent the 4th of july my last 4th of july as president in the shadow of the statue of liberty on the flight deck of the uss john f kennedy on the very first 4th of july back in 1776 george washington was not in philadelphia when the declaration of independence was signed instead he was with his troops in new york in manhattan as the british ships landed just a few miles away on staten island when the declaration of independence arrived from philadelphia general washington had it read aloud to his troops so they would understand that the success of america depended upon the success of our military it was true 224 years ago it remains true today thanks to you the work you do everywhere and here with our ally japan we live in peace there is peace here in part because three mef is here with the third marine division the first marine aircraft wing the third force service group the marine corps base camp butler the air force s 18th wing the army s 10th area support group the navy s task force 76 and fleet activities okinawa and everybody i didn t mention cheer for yourselves here all of you know well the sad and difficult history of the battle of okinawa on friday i had the honor of visiting the cornerstone of peace park the names of all who died are inscribed on the walls there japanese and americans and okinawan soldiers and civilians alike it is a remarkable memorial not just to one side in a battle but to all the people who lost their lives it is a stirring statement of our common humanity and it strengthens our commitment to see that such a terrible thing never occurs again that is why you are here i don t want you to ever forget it and i want you to always be very very proud of what you are doing you will never know how many wars you have deterred how many deaths you have prevented but you know the number of wars that have been fought in these waters since the united states forces have been stationed here that number is zero you should be very very proud we know our hosts in okinawa have borne a heavy burden hosting half our forces in japan on less than one percent of its land they too have paid a price to preserve the peace and that is why we need to be good neighbors to them in addition to being good allies why each one of us has a personal obligation to do everything that we can to strengthen our friendship and to do nothing to harm it we must continue to hear the concerns of our okinawan friends to reduce the impact of our presence to promote the kinds of activities that advance good relations activities like those of the volunteers who help with english language instruction for elementary schoolchildren in okinawa like the 9th engineer support battalion who just replaced a 30 foot high steel footpath bridge in an island village in northwest okinawa like the volunteers from the 10th area support group who joined the people in yomitan village in getting the island ready for the g 8 summit like our naval hospital and our fire departments working with their counterparts to improve emergency services like the 7th communication battalion s efforts to do clean up make repairs and pay visits to the residents of hikariga ogata nursing home and so many of you the rest of you who reach out in your own way to schools to orphanages to hospitals to retirement homes these acts of kindness give a whole new meaning to the old words send in the marines two hundred and twenty four years ago when america was born the world s only democracy was defended by an army that was then very badly outnumbered today you are part of the greatest fighting force in history part of the forward march of freedom but the most important thing i want to say to you is that your fellow americans are proud of you and grateful to you as i think about the enormous honor i have had for seven and a half years now to serve as president an honor which included visiting more military units than any other commander in chief in the history of the republic i am profoundly moved by what i have seen and by what i see here tonight i wanted to come here and i thank you for changing the schedule and coming out tonight i thank you for the inspiration you ve given me as i go back to try to finalize the peace talks on the middle east i thank you for giving your lives to the united states and the cause of freedom and peace thank you god bless you and god bless america thank you dem wjclinton22 7 93 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you please be seated it s wonderful to have you in the rose garden today as i think all of you probably know i myself owe a great deal to the american legion for sponsoring this wonderful program that teaches our young people so much about our country and the responsibilities of citizenship boys nation made a major impact on my life and very much inspired the career that i subsequently pursued in public service like many of you i was just a high school student from a fairly small town i had never been to washington before and i never knew whether i d ever get to come when i stood here right over there in that corner 30 years ago this week and had the opportunity to hear president kennedy speak i was reviewing an article in a paper from that week before i came out here to speak with you and i noted that when president kennedy spoke to our group he actually got into some hot water by saying that our group in adopting a civil rights resolution in the early 60s had acted more responsibly than the nation s governors who were meeting at the same time he said we had shown more initiative than the governors well we loved it but somehow the governors didn t and so i would say to you i don t want to make any other group mad but i hope you today will leave here with a real sense of initiative it s very important not only that we have convictions and feelings and concerns but that we act on them every program that i have pursued every challenge i have laid down has been animated by a desire to get the american people to assume more responsibility for themselves and their neighbors to offer more opportunity to all people and to rebuild a sense of community a sense that we are all in this together that we share a common destiny and that we will be more likely to achieve our individual capacities if we work together with the help of young people all across the country we were able to pass and we had a wonderful signing ceremony on the motor voter bill which many of you will be familiar with which makes it much easier for people to register and vote together with other groups of young people again from all over america we are on the verge of passing an historic bill for national service that will make it possible for millions of young people to get much lower interest college loans and pay them back on more favorable terms and over the next few years for hundreds of thousands of them to work off a portion of their loans by giving some service to their community either before during or after college this will help to build america by strengthening the bonds of community offering people the chance to take more responsibility for their own lives and really creating opportunity that wasn t there before we re also trying to improve your future by cutting the federal deficit by 500 billion over the next five years in 1980 the entire debt of our country amassed since george washington became president was 1 trillion from 1980 to 1992 that debt grew to about 4 trillion quadrupling in only 12 years now when a problem like this gets that severe you can t solve it all at once the spending cuts and tax increases it would take just to do away with the debt deficit in four years would be so severe as to undermine our economic recovery but we re in a box if we don t move on the deficit now we can t have any economic recovery either and because of the progress which has been made interest rates are coming down and we re moving forward you should know that you re not only moving into a time when the global economy offers you unparalleled exciting opportunities but where it also presents some mysteries to us that no one quite understands for example almost all of the wealthy countries are having difficulty creating new jobs even when their economy is growing and certainly when the economy is not and so this economic program that i have offered not only seeks to reduce the deficit by cutting spending and raising taxes 70 percent of which will fall on people with incomes above 200 000 it also seeks to help people to create jobs ninety percent of the small businesses in america will be eligible for a tax cut under this plan if they invest more money in their businesses to create jobs new opportunities for people to avoid higher income taxes but only if they invest in companies that will create jobs we have got to find a way to make sure that if all of you go to college and all your classmates go to college and everybody plays by the rules there will be something for them to do when the effort is over thirty years ago when the delegates from girls nation came to the white house in the same summer that i was here my next door neighbor represented our state at girls nation it was a great thrill for me and she s still one of my closest friends just last week when i went home she got some of our high school friends together and they and all their children there must have been 30 of us in her home having dinner together and when she was here where you are president kennedy told the young women there assembled that it might be possible for one of them to become president but it was not likely and almost as a consolation prize he said at least i m sure i m talking to a future first lady well today a lot of things have changed first of all i think that it is a very honorable thing to be the first lady some day there will be a first man and i think it is not unlikely that 30 years from now the delegates from girls nation may well be in the rose garden being addressed by a woman president who is in this crowd today again let me wish you well and thank you for coming here let me tell you that the 30 years that have passed since i sat where you are today have passed in the flash of an eye that i hope for all of you a rich and full life and i would encourage you to focus on the point i made earlier you came here to learn about your country your history your opportunities and your responsibilities as citizens none of it matters very much unless you not only think and feel but also act good luck and god bless you let me also say i m going to embarrass somebody who s here maybe a little bit there are other things in life after a girls nation or boys nation than being president i just learned that my military aide came to girls nation raise your hand this major michelle johnson the united states air force she is from iowa graduate of the air force academy rhodes scholar terrific athlete i told her someday i was sure i d be saluting her and calling her general so that also is something that you might do with your life that you couldn t have done perhaps a few years ago i d like to now ask joanne cronin to come up and take over the program i saw the first resolution was the sex education one that s one i said i was for you may know that tomorrow the hearing begins on the appointment i made of an african american doctor the director of the department of health in my home state to be the surgeon general of the united states and we caused a lot of controversy because we tried to promote comprehensive family education parenting education and we did our best to reduce the scourge of teenage pregnancy in our state not by denying it but by embracing the challenge and i appreciate the resolution that you sent i will also review the other resolutions on saturday you mentioned 30 years from now saturday your counterparts from boys nation will be here and we re going to have a 30 year reunion of my class saturday at noon when they re here so i m looking forward to it one of the things that happens when you run for president is that the people you haven t seen in a long time show up and that s mostly good so i m looking forward to it now are we going to take a picture is that the way we re going to do it and then aren t we going to take a group photo also okay great dem wjclinton22 8 00 bill_clinton well first i d like to thank bill and michelle for letting us come into their home while it s still new it might have been built for this event who knows it s a really beautiful place and they re really good people they ve been so good to me and hillary and the vice president and tipper and thank you for helping debbie and thanks for being my friend all these long years i m very grateful to you i want to thank all your office holders who are here jennifer grandholm whose husband was giving me some tips on how to be the spouse of a candidate and i listened very carefully i don t want to blow this i thank dale kildee for being my friend and for working with us for eight years for the interests of the families of michigan and the united states it s been really great and i can t say enough about carl levin he and barbara rode over here with us and we were talking about the last eight years and i was thinking about all the things that he has educated me on but i can tell you that he is one of the handful of people that is universally respected in the senate by everybody and when he talks everybody listens i want to thank all of you who worked on this event i see peter buttenweiser back there thank you sir and all the rest of you who helped to make this successful and i d like to say my special word of appreciation to jane hart for being here tonight you know when i was a young man in college i worked for senator bill fulbright who was then the chairman of the foreign relations committee and it was a very long time ago but i remember vividly when i was there one of the most tumultuous times in modern american history we had big struggles over civil rights big struggles over riots in the streets big struggles over vietnam and i remember very vividly how senator phil hart conducted himself how he spoke what he said and how other people respected him and one of the reasons that debbie stabenow ought to go to the senate apart from the fact that she will vote more like phil hart would have voted and speak more like he would have spoken is that we in the democratic party have tried our best to work in good faith with the republicans and we have tried to end the politics of personal hostility and negativism and i think almost as important as anything else debbie will restore along with hillary and president gore and vice president lieberman a sense of real humanity to our national political life the american people will say one more time we don t like that stuff we sent you up there to do a job we want you to treat each other with respect and we want you to show up for work every day that is the legacy of phil hart that i remember and one i will always remember and i m very honored that you re here tonight jane and i thank you very much i d also like to say at the last meeting i don t even know if he s here tonight but if he came over here but i saw matt fruman who was one of the original co chairs of my saxophone club who is now running for congress in the 11th district and he s really doing a good job and i hope you ll help him as well now if you heard what i said in los angeles i don t know that i have much more to say about about what i think this election is all about but i will try to be briefer and more colloquial first of all i am profoundly grateful to the people of michigan for voting for me twice by big margins the last time by almost twice the margin by which we prevailed in the country the people of this state have been good to me and have come to reflect the diversity and the success that has been the hallmark of america in these last eight years and i m very very grateful secondly this is the first time in 26 years they ve held an election when i wasn t on the ballot i used to have to run every two years and as i ve often joked most days i m okay about it because i feel my heart is full of gratitude and i m really rather looking forward to trying to figure out what to do in the next chapter of my life and how to be a good citizen i have five months and i intend to do a great deal in these last five months as president but i speak today also as someone who for most of his political life was a citizen activist i was eight years old handing out cards for my uncle who was running for the legislature i spent 20 years working for other people before i spent 24 years scurrying around on my own behalf and also working for other people and what i would like to say to you is i have now lived long enough to know that sometimes you re most in trouble in political life when you think you re least in trouble and most vulnerable as a people when we think we re least vulnerable and the big danger when things are going well is that you think you can go to sleep there are a lot of young people here bill and michelle and their wonderful kids are here a lot of the rest of you brought your kids here and they most of them don t know this but anybody who is over 30 years old has lived long enough to have made at least one whopper of a mistake in your life not when times are going real poorly but when times were going so well you thought there was simply no consequence to the failure to concentrate if you live long enough you ll make one of those mistakes and so what i want to say is if the people of michigan understand the difference in debbie s voting record and her opponent if they understand the difference in her positions on the issues that are hanging fire today and her opponent s if they understand the general difference in her approach to how america should go into the 21st century and her opponents she will win the election i don t think any of you doubt that so wouldn t it be ironic if the big adversary of al gore and joe lieberman and the new candidate in my family hillary and some of you have already helped and for that i am very grateful and debbie was the very success that all of us have worked so hard to help the american people create now that is what i want you to think about and i don t want you to just think about it tonight i want you to think about it every day between now and the election because as much as i appreciate the money you have contributed to her campaign and as much as i hope you ll keep trying to help her and all the rest of our crowd s races it s not enough because america has to be thinking about this election in order for us to prevail we can t sleep walk through it we can t sort of sidle into it we ve got to actually think oh my goodness there s an election the only time in my lifetime we ve had this much prosperity with the absence of domestic crisis and foreign threat we have the chance to build the future of our dreams for our kids what is this about and every one of you know lots and lots of people who are far less involved in politics than you are people who are your relatives people who are your friends people with whom you work people with whom you worship people with whom you play golf or bowl or whatever you do you know a lot of people that you really like and care about who aren t nearly as into this as you are but they re good people and they re good citizens and they re going to show up on election day they re going to vote sure as the world if they have to walk through the ice they ll go vote don t you want them to know what this is about and don t you want them to have at least the same framework you do this is the whole shooting match folks we have the chance to build the future of our dreams for our children it s a big election we will never forgive ourselves if we sleep walk through it it may not come around again in your lifetime if you heard my convention speech you heard me talking about the late 60s that s the last time we had an economic run this long and i m telling you i finished high school in the middle of it and if anybody had told me that within two years we d have riots in the streets and within four years dr king and bobby kennedy would be dead and the president that i admires do much lyndon johnson wouldn t run for reelection and the country would be split in two and then we d have a divisive presidential election and then the economic expansion would be over i would never have believed it i would never have believed it now we re more fortunate this time we don t have that level of internal crisis or external threat right now but we have to concentrate and you ve got to go out and tell everybody you know that this is an important election with the opportunity of a lifetime to build the future of our dreams then you ve got to tell people hey there are real differences here that are big and have practical consequences for the lives of the families in michigan huge difference in economic policy do you really believe that right now we should say we ve got a 2 trillion projected surplus and we ought to give it all away in a tax cut right now right now give it all away for the next 10 years before the money comes in before we see about the emergencies before we set aside anything for education or health care or do anything to lengthen the life of social security and medicare or give up trying to get the country out of debt to keep interest rates down the stock market high and growth going and jobs coming in this is huge i promise you most people don t know yet what the difference is in the economic policies of debbie stabenow and her opponent and al gore and joe lieberman and their adversaries they don t know you can tell them it s a huge deal i got a report last month that said that interest rates best case for the republican plan that is if all this money actually comes in interest rates would be a point lower every year for a decade under our plan that s worth for most folks totaled 250 billion in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments and for those of you with kids in college 15 billion in lower student loan payments this is a huge deal and never mind what happens if the money doesn t come in we don t have to spend it if it doesn t come in but i promise you if they have a tax cut next year and give it all away they re not going to turn around and raise taxes if it doesn t come in and we ll be right back in the soup again and a lot of you have heard my little joke but it really does remind me their position is like getting one of those letters in the mail from ed mcmahon you know the publishers clearinghouse the sweepstakes letter you may have won 10 million wow if you ran out and spent the money the next day you should seriously consider supporting her opponent in this election but if you didn t i hope you ll stick with her and with al gore and joe lieberman and all the people that have been a part of the enormous effort to give you the chance to build the america we enjoy today there are huge differences in the environment we believe you can improve the environment and grow the economy i think we ve got lots of evidence don t you we have 22 million jobs cleaner air cleaner water safer food three times as many toxic waste dumps cleaned up 43 million more americans breathing air that meets federal air standards and the best economy in history if you do it right you can do it now they ve got a commitment to weaken that this is a serious choice you have to make the choice and this medicare drug issue it s a big deal the average 65 year old in america has a life expectancy of 83 people over 65 in america have the highest life expectancy of any group of seniors in the world but if you want people to live longer and live well they have to have access to medicine our plan would give everybody that needs it access to it it clearly can be paid for notwithstanding her opponent s attack over this because it costs so much let me just tell you something they have the congressional budget office they give us the cost estimates by their estimates by their estimates not ours we can pay for the drug plan she wants to vote for we can have a sizable tax cut to help people with education long term care marriage penalty relief retirement savings we can invest in education and we can still get the country out of debt because we have a cushion in case the money doesn t come in now those are the facts there s a huge difference here big difference in the patients bill of rights there s a big difference in gun safety legislation you know the previous administration they vetoed the brady bill this crowd is against closing the gun show loophole the congressional leadership was against putting 100 000 police on the street and another 50 000 this ticket says they ll get rid of the program that i ve worked so hard for i mean it s not like you don t have a test here crime is at a 25 year low if you put more police on the street they stop people from committing crimes if they re smart and they do it right if you keep more guns out of the hands of criminals and children you don t have as many people dying it s not like there s no test here there s a big difference you ve got to make sure people understand this they re committed to repealing roe v wade al gore is committed to continuing it debbie stabenow will have to vote on who gets appointed to the supreme court it s a big deal you have to decide what you believe so i just want to say i m not trying to make you everybody wants to be happy now because things are going so well and i m happy they re going well but i m telling you and i d like to sort of ride off into the sunset singing happy trails but life doesn t work that way just because somebody s term is over everything that needs to be done doesn t go away we ve got a chance to go out and reach these the native american reservations these inner city neighborhoods these poor rural towns that don t have any kind of economic recovery and give them jobs and businesses it will help all the rest of us we ve got all kinds of opportunities out there but i m telling you there are huge choices you just remember what i said if somebody asks you what s the difference in stabenow abraham gore bush on economic policy can you answer what s the difference on the patients bill of rights what s the difference on medicare drugs what s the difference on the environment what s the difference on gun safety closing the gun show loop hole what s the difference on choice can you answer you have got to be able to talk to other people between now and november and tell then it may be 50 years before we have a time like this again and we can t blow it and i want to tell you something i worked with this woman for years now she is special she is strong she has a good heart and a good mind and she s a good politician in the best sense and you ll be very very proud of her when you put her in the senate thank you very much dem wjclinton22 8 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much lillie thank you thank you mr vice president to the members of the cabinet all of the members of congress who are here thank you very much i d like to say to congressman castle i m especially glad to see you here because eight years ago about this time when you were the governor of delaware and governor carper was the congressman from delaware you and i were together at a signing like this thank you senator long for coming here thank you governors romer carper miller and caperton i d also like to thank penelope howard and janet ferrel for coming here they too have worked their way from welfare to independence and we re honored to have them here i d like to thank all of the people who worked on this bill who have been introduced from our staff and cabinet but i d also like to especially thank bruce reed who did a lot to do with working on the final compromises of this bill i thank him lillie harden was up there talking and i want to tell you how she happens to be here today ten years ago governor castle and i were asked to cochair a governors task force on welfare reform and we were asked together on it and when we met at hilton head in south carolina we had a little panel and 41 governors showed up to listen to people who were on welfare from several states so i asked carol rasco to find me somebody from our state who had been in one of our welfare reform programs and had gone to work she found lillie harden and lillie showed up at the program and i was conducting this meeting and i committed a mistake that they always tell lawyers never to do never ask a question you do not know the answer to but she was doing so well talking about it as you saw how well spoken she was today and i said lillie what s the best thing about being off welfare and she looked me straight in the eye and said when my boy goes to school and they say what does your mama do for a living he can give an answer i have never forgotten that and when i saw the success of all of her children and the success that she s had in the past 10 years i can tell you you ve had a bigger impact on me than i ve had on you and i thank you for the power of your example for your family s and for all of america thank you very much what we are trying to do today is to overcome the flaws of the welfare system for the people who are trapped on it we all know that the typical family on welfare today is very different from the one that welfare was designed to deal with 60 years ago we all know that there are a lot of good people on welfare who just get off of it in the ordinary course of business but that a significant number of people are trapped on welfare for a very long time exiling them from the entire community of work that gives structure to our lives nearly 30 years ago robert kennedy said work is the meaning of what this country is all about we need it as individuals we need to sense it in our fellow citizens and we need it as a society and as a people he was right then and it s right now from now on our nation s answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never ending cycle of welfare it will be the dignity the power and the ethic of work today we are taking an historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be a second chance not a way of life the bill i m about to sign as i have said many times is far from perfect but it has come a very long way congress sent me two previous bills that i strongly believe failed to protect our children and did too little to move people from welfare to work i vetoed both of them this bill had broad bipartisan support and is much much better on both counts the new bill restores america s basic bargain of providing opportunity and demanding in return responsibility it provides 14 billion for child care 4 billion more than the present law does it is good because without the assurance of child care it s all but impossible for a mother with young children to go to work it requires states to maintain their own spending on welfare reform and gives them powerful performance incentives to place more people on welfare in jobs it gives states the capacity to create jobs by taking money now used for welfare checks and giving it to employers as subsidies as incentives to hire people this bill will help people to go to work so they can stop drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck it s also better for children it preserves the national safety net of food stamps and school lunches it drops the deep cuts and the devastating changes in child protection adoption and help for disabled children it preserves the national guarantee of health care for poor children the disabled the elderly and people on welfare the most important preservation of all it includes the tough child support enforcement measures that as far as i know every member of congress and everybody in the administration and every thinking person in the country has supported for more than two years it s the most sweeping crackdown on deadbeat parents in history we have succeeded in increasing child support collection 40 percent but over a third of the cases where there s delinquencies involve who cross state lines for a lot of women and children the only reason they re on welfare today the only reason is that the father up and walked away when he could have made a contribution to the welfare of the children that is wrong if every parent paid the child support that he or she owes legally today we could move 800 000 women and children off welfare immediately with this bill we say if you don t pay the child support you owe we ll garnish your wages take away your driver s license track you across state lines if necessary make you work off what you pay what you owe it is a good thing and it will help dramatically to reduce welfare increase independence and reenforce parental responsibility as the vice president said we strongly disagree with a couple of provisions of this bill we believe that the nutritional cuts are too deep especially as they affect low income working people and children we should not be punishing people who are working for a living already we should do everything we can to lift them up and keep them at work and help them to support their children we also believe that the congressional leadership insisted in cuts in programs for legal immigrants that are far too deep these cuts however have nothing to do with the fundamental purpose of welfare reform i signed this bill because this is an historic chance where republicans and democrats got together and said we re going to take this historic chance to try to recreate the nation s social bargain with the poor we re going to try to change the parameters of the debate we re going to make it all new again and see if we can t create a system of incentives which reenforce work and family and independence we can change what is wrong we should not have passed this historic opportunity to do what is right and so i want to ask all of you without regard to party to think through the implications of these other non welfare issues on the american people and let s work together in good spirits and good faith to remedy what is wrong we can balance the budget without these cuts but let s not obscure the fundamental purpose of the welfare provisions of this legislation which are good and solid and which can give us at least the chance to end the terrible almost physical isolation of huge numbers of poor people and their children from the rest of mainstream america we have to do that let me also say that there s something really good about this legislation when i sign it we all have to start again and this becomes everybody s responsibility after i sign my name to this bill welfare will no longer be a political issue the two parties cannot attack each other over it politicians cannot attack poor people over it there are no encrusted habits systems and failures that can be laid at the foot of someone else we have to begin again this is not the end of welfare reform this is the beginning and we have to all assume responsibility now that we are saying with this bill we expect work we have to make sure the people have a chance to go to work if we really value work everybody in this society businesses non profits religious institutions individuals those in government all have a responsibility to make sure the jobs are there these three women have great stories almost everybody on welfare would like to have a story like that and the rest of us now have a responsibility to give them that story we cannot blame the system for the jobs they don t have anymore if it doesn t work now it s everybody s fault mine yours and everybody else there is no longer a system in the way i ve worked hard over the past four years to create jobs and to steer investment into places where there are large numbers of people on welfare because there s been no economic recovery that s what the empowerment zone program was all about that s what the community development bank initiative was all about that s what our urban brownfield cleanup initiative was all about trying to give people the means to make a living in areas that had been left behind i think we have to do more here in washington to do that and i ll have more to say about that later but let me say again we have to build a new work and family system and this is everybody s responsibility now the people on welfare are people just like these three people we honor here today and their families they are human beings and we owe it to all of them to give them a chance to come back i talked the other day when the vice president and i went down to tennessee and we were working with congressman tanner s district we were working on a church that had burned and there was a pastor there from a church in north carolina that brought a group of his people in to work and he started asking me about welfare reform and i started telling him about it and i said you know what you ought to do you ought to go tell governor hunt that you would hire somebody on welfare to work in your church if he would give you the welfare check as a wage supplement you d double their pay and you d keep them employed for a year or so and see if you couldn t train them and help their families and see if their kids were all right i said would you do that he said in a heartbeat i think there are people all over america like that i think there are people all over america like that that s what i want all of you to be thinking about today what are we going to do now this is not over this is just beginning the congress deserves our thanks for creating a new reality but we have to fill in the blanks the governors asked for this responsibility now they ve got to live up to it there are mayors that have responsibilities county officials that have responsibilities every employer in this country that ever made a disparaging remark about the welfare system needs to think about whether he or she should now hire somebody from welfare and go to work go to the state and say okay you give me the check i ll use it as an income supplement i ll train these people i ll help them to start their lives and we ll go forward from here every single person needs to be thinking every person in america tonight who sees a report of this who has ever said a disparaging word about the welfare system should now say okay that s gone what is my responsibility to make it better two days ago we signed a bill increasing the minimum wage here and making it easier for people in small businesses to get and keep pensions yesterday we signed the kassebaum kennedy bill which makes health care more available to up to 25 million americans many of them in lower income jobs where they re more vulnerable the bill i m signing today preserves the increases in the earned income tax credit for working families it is now clearly better to go to work than to stay on welfare clearly better because of actions taken by the congress in this session it is clearly better and what we have to do now is to make that work a reality i ve said this many times but you know most american families find that the greatest challenge of their lives is how to do a good job raising their kids and do a good job at work trying to balance work and family is the challenge that most americans in the workplace face thankfully that s the challenge lillie harden s had to face for the last 10 years that s just what we want for everybody we want at least the chance to strike the right balance for everybody today we are ending welfare as we know it but i hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended but for what it began a new day that offers hope honors responsibility rewards work and changes the terms of the debate so that no one in america ever feels again the need to criticize people who are poor on welfare but instead feels the responsibility to reach out to men and women and children who are isolated who need opportunity and who are willing to assume responsibility and give them to opportunity and the terms of responsibility dem wjclinton22 9 06a bill_clinton thank you very much this session will bring cgi to a close but i can t help thinking just a moment about the commitments that were made last year that have been kept and my gratitude for them and the new beginnings that many of you have brought to life in the last three days it s hard for me to say this without a little bit of a smile but as of now we have 215 commitments from about twice that many people and the value my staff swears is 7 3 billion i can t thank you enough for your commitments large and small and i ask both all the attendees here and the press not to forget that over the past year some of our smaller dollar commitments have had some of the biggest positive human impact and that time and talents are actually priceless gifts i thank you who participated in the plenaries the smaller groups the tabletop discussions i d like to thank our cgi staff and literally the hundreds of volunteers i think they did a phenomenal job this year and i d like you all to express your appreciation i want to thank the sponsors the participants the moderators the panelists and the people who every year work behind the scenes to help us conceive of and put together all the discussions an enormous amount of time and effort goes into preparing how we will structure every one of these sessions and who will participate and it is a special burden for all those who do it that they have to deal with me because i m such a nitpicker about such things so i thank all of them i thank the heads of state and government who came here i d like to thank our first lady laura bush and the other dignitaries who joined us i want to welcome and thank all the participants those bloggers who have helped the world follow this and over 50 000 viewers from around the world who helped to make this a truly global initiative by following it every day over the internet this morning i want to ask each of the working group chairs to share a little bit about the proceedings and about the commitments you should know there s still a lot of activity going on there are probably well over 100 potential commitments that will come to fruition in the next few weeks after we go home i want to tell you about a couple of developments that have happened just in the last few hours first this is really important i am very grateful that google is generously offering to make available advertising or sponsorship credit of up to 480 000 a year to every ngo that makes a commitment they can use the credits to leverage the power of the internet to enlist volunteers to raise funds to disseminate information worldwide we should thank larry page and sergey brin who are here let s give them a round of applause thanks guys it is legendary how much money these young men who barely look old enough to shave made when they took their company public most people wait until they are much much older to begin to give away what they have made they have already dedicated a huge amount of money to their own charitable activities way over a billion dollars and i thank them for that as well asha and raj rajaratnam trustees of the american india foundation a group that i helped to start after the 2001 gujarat earthquake have just made a commitment of a million and a half dollars to build the capacity of the health care system in india to effectively combat the hiv aids epidemic by providing increased access for pregnant women to get tested and treated for aids and by reaching 100 000 vulnerable adults and children with prevention education our foundation does a lot of work in india and it s really important that groups like this get out and reach people at the grassroots level unfortunately there s still a lot of stigma there richard gere has reached a lot of people in the entertainment industry there to try to overcome the stigma when i was last there a small family tried to commit family suicide because they were all hiv positive and the people they passed on the street in their little village actually thought if they were breathed on they could be infected so we re making great strides the government there has actually been quite good but we need this kind of support so let s thank asha and raj and the american india foundation it s important this is a story about how this meeting is supposed to work nigel green actually visited our commitments desk looking for a partnership opportunity he wound up pledging 100 000 to help fund the microcredits summit campaign to enroll and train the world s 20 largest microfinance institutions in measuring progress above the 1 dollar a day threshold grameen bank and brac two other organizations who have made commitments already are on board with the microcredits summit idea this is the way i wanted this to work he showed up and said i want to spend some money in a way that will have a high probability of a good return in an area i care about and he found this project let s give him a round of applause working together with americans for informed democracy jim zogby the president of the arab american institute is committing to do four live interactive television programs with participating audiences on four american campuses and campuses in the arab world to increase this very important dialogue among the young i think this is important as i said when we started here commenting about the young arab leaders organization because there is a whole other arab world out there and if we could just get one story about that world for every two bad stories that inevitably have to be printed because somebody s getting killed we would all be way ahead so thank you jim zogby and ladies and gentlemen give him a hand i think that s great scott garrett the president of beckman coulter inc is committing at least 100 000 a year to develop a grant program for research and development of new diagnostic test methods or instruments of particular value to people living in developing countries around the world in africa and elsewhere one of the really unique contributions of cgi was that we talked about the collection of infectious diseases that aren t famous that aren t aids tb and malaria that collectively affect tens of millions of people in developing countries all across the globe and can be assaulted and reversed with relatively modest expenditures this is a very important commitment so thank you scott garrett for doing that this is a commitment i love roger barnett the president of shaklee corporation has made a commitment for his company to become fully carbon neutral 100 percent carbon neutral all year long from this year through 2011 instead of doing it by buying carbon credits although i like the climate exchange very much shaklee intends to oversee the purchasing and installation of solar energy to provide decentralized electrification to the millennium villages that dr jeff sachs is doing so much to develop thank you very much roger and thank you shaklee now as i did last year i want to call upon the working group chairs to give us a summary of what took place in each subject area and share a few more of the commitments with us beginning with our climate change chair david sandalow an environmental scholar with the brookings institute who served as assistant secretary of state for oceans environment and science senior director for environmental affairs at the national security council and on the white house council on environmental quality i am personally very grateful to him for all of that service as well as for what he did here david the floor is yours dem wjclinton22 9 06b bill_clinton thank you david i just want to make two brief points about this area because i didn t get to attend some of the sessions the first is about the economy one of the great challenges for wealthy countries is to continue to discharge our responsibility to the global economy by keeping our markets open to products produced in poorer countries we cannot do that if our own people lose confidence in the ability of the american market to function for them if you look at america our fundamental problem is we still have a relatively low unemployment rate but flat wages this is the first time we ve ever had five years of productivity growth a 40 year high in corporate profits and stagnant wages the reason is we haven t found a serious source of new good paying jobs the obvious answer is a commitment to a clean independent energy future if you look at europe the big problem is that the cost of preserving the social safety net has led to higher unemployment levels than is desirable the obvious answer is a commitment to clean new jobs if you look at the performance of the uk the european economy most like ours they have a comparable unemployment rate but they haven t had wage stagnation i am convinced it s because they made a commitment to beat their kyoto targets and created a whole range of new jobs if you look at the developing world and you want to raise per capita income you will have to spend a fortune and wait for a long time for the most remote villages to get centralized power grids but if we went to decentralized power the way we went to decentralized cell phones so you don t have to wait for the power lines to run out and you had a commitment to solar energy to wind energy and to energy efficiency in the developing world it could contribute to economic growth the second thing i wanted to say for those of you who haven t made commitments yet many of you are involved locally in the welfare of your institutions of higher education our chief sponsor tom golisano has done an enormous amount of work in rochester at the institute of technology there a lot of you do this the colleges and universities in the united states and throughout the world have enormous potential to lead the way toward a clean energy future in minnesota earlier this year two colleges st olaf s and carleton had a contest to see who could have the biggest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions it was fascinating to read it read like a football saga we got our windmill up first yeah but we fixed our buildings first former president bush and i just funded two green schools in new orleans as a part of the katrina rebuilding effort all these school kids are going to learn as they go to school about how to do this it will affect everything they do for the rest of their lives so one of the things we need to do which i hoped to get done by cgi but haven t finished is to get the colleges and universities in america committed in an organized way to greenhouse gas reductions in a way that reduces the cost of operations and if you re still a parent of a college age child may help to ameliorate the tuition burden in the years so i ask those of you who haven t made a commitment yet if you re looking for a place where you get a quick turnaround and high return that s it thank you very much david now i d like to ask our you re not done i m sorry i thought you were oh okay oh this is good wal mart is making a commitment to the packaging of every product sold at wal mart stores through a supplier packaging scorecard and reward system the commitment is a million dollars in the first year that will achieve a minimum of 100 million in cost savings right sizing the packaging of just one wal mart store owned line of toys kid connection just by doing that listen to this this is unbelievable wal mart saved 1 358 barrels of oil 5 190 trees and 3 5 million in transportation costs in one year now the company will measure how much packaging its 60 000 suppliers use in transport and will reward its suppliers according to how much they can reduce their environmental impact the company expects that by 2013 the commitment will keep 213 000 trucks off the road in the united states every single year for a total cumulative savings of 66 7 million gallons of diesel fuel saving the supply chain 3 8 billion by 2013 i rest my case thank you very much is lee here come on up it s still in my hand this is great now i d like to ask rick fedrizzi the president ceo and founding chairman of the u s green building council and ladonna monsees the ceo of newland communities to come up here they have made a commitment to help americans make their homes more energy efficient through an informative online consumer resource center that will give its users practical easy to use credible information on the benefits of green homes explaining how saving energy saves money cuts greenhouse gas emissions and makes for healthier living the resource center will be the cornerstone of a comprehensive year long campaign by the green building council and newland communities to educate consumers about the benefits of environmentally friendly energy efficient homes generally green homes are 30 to 50 percent more energy efficient than traditional ones and reports say that the green home marketplace may be at a tipping point by mid year 2007 64 percent of all homebuilders surveyed reported that they anticipated that they would be moderately or heavily involved in green building practices the epa ranks indoor air pollution among the top five environmental risks in the united states unhealthy air is found in up to 30 percent of new and renovated buildings but not in green buildings so i thank you for that i m proud that our presidential library has received a certificate for leadership in energy and environmental design and has cut its energy costs by 34 percent as i get a little ahead i m going to do better than that thank you very much let s give them a big hand this is great thank you see you soon thank you as the owners of a home that s over 100 years old i can testify to how important this is you know during the week when i m home alone and my senator is down there voting in washington i actually decided that i would personally see how hard it would be to replace all my light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones it s not as easy as you think i even called jeffrey immelt and said i was trying to buy ge bulbs made in america but i needed more shapes and sizes and he said to me well get my market up and i ll make different bulbs so it s a chicken and egg deal but this is really important what they have done you d be amazed how many people want to do something but they have a limited amount of time and they shouldn t have to go looking around schlepping all over the universe trying to figure out how they can get the job done so this is really important thank you very much and i have now on at least two occasions during cgi perhaps embarrassed but i meant to compliment both barbra streisand and rupert murdoch for finally finding something they agreed on but i would like to ask barbra streisand to come up here and be recognized she gave me the first million dollars for the clinton foundation to represent and help facilitate the movement of the large cities group in drastically reducing their greenhouse gas emissions we have now enrolled 32 of the 40 biggest cities in the world in a common commitment to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions i refuse to take any money any public money from any of them so i had to raise the money from contributors barbra gave me my first million dollars and then rupert murdoch gave me a half a million dollars and that will get us through the first year so let s give her a big hand and ask her to come up i told him we were going to get more out of him she says rupert s richer than she is and should give more i knew we could get a little politics here if we waited long enough you may have to reissue evergreen now with a new meaning now i m going to try again i think we re going to our health group with chris jennings is that right is that next this man has got more scars on him than i do because he was my principle health advisor when i was president he s now head of jennings policy studies a health care consulting firm and a knowledgeable and terrific public servant thank you chris it s your turn dem wjclinton22 9 06c bill_clinton now we have a few health commitments the first is a commitment from unicef and i d like to ask the executive director ann veneman who was secretary of agriculture in president bush s first term to come up here i have had the honor to work with ann and with unicef in my capacity as the un special envoy on tsunami recovery and it s a great organization and you have done a terrific job in getting to the bottom of all the responsibilities you have i thank you so much unicef s new accelerated child survival and development program will operate in 10 african countries where unicef and the national governments have found opportunities to cut the death rate among children the program will eliminate bottlenecks that prevent desperately needed services from reaching children creating packages with country specific cost effective priority interventions like vaccinating children promoting breast feeding giving vitamin a supplements and organizing community prenatal care by 2009 the accelerated child survival and development program will save an estimated 399 000 lives a year almost six million of the 11 million children who die every year could be saved more than half of the children who die every year could be saved by low tech evidencebased cost effective measures like these like vaccines antibiotics micronutrient supplements insecticide treated bed nets and improved family care and breastfeeding practices each year vitamin a supplementation alone saves over a quarter million lives oral rehydration prevents an estimated million deaths immunization programs save the lives of three million children so i thank you and africa thanks you with 10 percent of the world s population but 42 percent of all the deaths of children under 5 thank you very much ann veneman this is a commitment from the debeers family of companies i d like to ask jonathan oppenheimer the chairman jennifer oppenheimer and the president of tanzania president kikwete who s here behind me please come up the commitment is to create a community diamond partnership to encourage economic development and good health in tanzanian communities with small scale diamond mining debeers will work with williamson diamond ltd and the government of tanzania to insure that unregulated tanzanian miners maintain good health and get their fair share of the wealth they create by pushing for better regulation of informal mining offering innovative smart wallet technology with third party verification to make sure miners don t fall prey to rogue traders who buy stones for prices well below their worth equally important the community diamond partnership will work to transform the communities surrounding the mines offering health services to manage hiv aids and malaria supporting sustainable farming and providing training and education programs the goal is to produce a model that can be replicated in other unmanaged small scale diamond mining economies including those in sierra leone angola guinea and the drc this is a profoundly important thing i had the honor of working in tanzania on hiv and aids i have a high regard for the new president and his predecessor they re a wellorganized committed country doing good work and they deserve this kind of support and the idea that this is being done through mining which has been such a source of exploitation and shame and destruction in africa for too long is a wonderful wonderful thing so i thank all of you congratulations what mr oppenheimer said on the way down reminded me that these principles could be applied to all forms of mining and not just diamonds that s another example of an idea we could have for next year now i would like to ask to the stage frank sasinowski the director of the catholic medical mission board and sister pat eck of the catholic medical mission board to come up here the catholic medical mission board is making a commitment worth two million dollars over the next two years to solicit pharmaceutical company donations and volunteer medical staff to treat neglected tropical and chronic diseases in honduras and kenya volunteer nurses and physicians from the united states will use the donated medications to help diagnose illnesses and deliver the donated life sustaining products to over 50 000 hondurans alone in kenya we will have the same sort of program where the total health expenditure today is just over 65 a person and accounts for about four percent of gdp in both countries there is just over one nurse per 1 000 people not enough part of our aids work in kenya involves training and actually hiring new nurses to try to stop the collapse of the nation s health care efforts so this is a very very important commitment by the catholic medical mission board let s give them a big hand while they sign it thank you now i d like to call on the chair of our poverty alleviation working group gayle smith to take the microphone she s a senior fellow at the center for american progress she served on the national security council when i was in the white house between 1994 and 2001 we couldn t have done half of the good things we did in africa without her she s not responsible for any mistake i made and she is now a massive asset to cgi when we go to africa people believe we were cloned together gayle the floor is yours dem wjclinton22 9 06d bill_clinton we have some commitments i want to announce first i d like to thank gayle smith and remind you that a lot of the commitments that will be made in health care and that have been made in energy and religious reconciliation will also be a very important part of the campaign against poverty i was recently in your adopted country of ethiopia you can see what a shrinking violet gayle is over 20 years ago when she was a young journalist she went hundreds of miles alone with the rebel army in ethiopia writing stories about it across the desert and through all the waste it s an amazing story but they still like her a lot here and the prime minister of ethiopia mr meles said to me you know i ve been studying this alternative energy thing we can grow sugarcane as well as the brazilians and that s an eight to one conversion ratio that s better than an ear of corn so he said what we africans should do is become the first oil free continent when it comes to transportation and we should sell you our oil which will reduce the tensions of the world and reduce global warming and make us have a sustainable economy i said well what about cellulosic fuel he said well if it s good you get a four to one conversation ratio i m sitting there talking to the prime minister of ethiopia a country with a per capita income of about 2 dollars a day and he s got this thing down cold and there are lots of people like that in africa in asia and in latin america that are thinking about this we have this preconception about what people can and cannot do to lift their spirits so i thank you gayle and all the committee for what you ve done i d like to invite john hatch the ceo of the foundation for international community assistance but he can t be here i don t think but we have scott larkin and fred hochberg here i d like to ask them to come up somebody s here from this group and this is a good commitment i m going to talk about it whether you re here or not thank you fica currently operates 38 000 banks in 21 countries they have committed to expand into 10 new markets including china brazil turkey and pakistan to be operating 100 000 village banks within five years serving one million people a commitment worth 40 million over the next five years to provide financial services to the poorest of the poor and to those living where there are no other formal financial institutions and to help create community run community focused credit and savings associations as microfinance matures the foundation for international community assistance is bringing services to communities that previously were untouched believing that microfinance can be the leading edge of a global drive to eradicate poverty let s give them a big hand you should both sign this now i d like to ask dr iqbal surve and the surve family foundation to come up they have made a 10 million commitment over the next five years to establish the social entrepreneurship foundation in south africa to help social entrepreneurs fight poverty and encourage tolerance between diverse communities now i personally am grateful for this because i helped to establish the city year chapter in johannesburg in south africa we now have 200 young black and white south africans working together on social entrepreneurship the foundation intends to support existing social entrepreneurs in their fight against poverty especially among poor urban and rural blacks and to promote greater tolerance and they will convene a conference on social entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation in south africa to begin thank you very very much doctor for personal reasons this is one of my very favorite commitments in the whole conference i d like to ask bob johnson the founder of bet and the ceo of rlj companies nathaniel barnes ambassador and permanent representative to the united nations from liberia debra lee the ceo of bet rodney slater my former secretary of transportation cicely tyson chris tucker jeffrey wright clarence avant and anybody else bob wants to bring to come up here and i ll explain why they re all here thank you this is a 30 million commitment to renew the historic link between the united states african american business community and other community leaders in liberia bob johnson has committed to lead a high level delegation of african american leaders to liberia to discuss direct investment in the country with president johnson sirleaf s priorities with business leaders doctors engineers lawyers and entertainers they commit that they will raise 30 million through direct investment and donations and establish a permanent group to work expressly on behalf of liberia and the liberian people promoting investments globally those of you who heard president ellen johnson sirleaf at the beginning of this meeting had to have been immensely impressed with her she was a distinguished world bank official she went home and presented herself as a candidate as far as i know she d never run for public office before she won a resounding victory over one of the most charismatic and famous people in her country but liberia has suffered greatly as a result of 14 years of terrible war and conflict it s going to take an exceedingly able president my foundation has agreed to help the president with hiv and aids and i recently went to liberia so i called her in advance i said i told her the truth i said hillary had met her and been so impressed with her i was ordered to do whatever she wished me to do and she said i want you to meet with my university students so i met with these immensely impressive young people all dressed up very well turned out asking the most penetrating questions and then we re driving out of town and i noticed that not 20 percent of the buildings in the capital monrovia had electricity yet i have no idea how those young people prepared themselves to look so grand under such extremely adverse circumstances eighty percent of liberians now live below the poverty line last year the country only had 85 million in revenues they have been devastated by the worst kind of oppression and looting and the reason i love this story is that a lot of those kids i met reminded me of a young bob johnson who came out of the american south and figured out how to do what he did so bob comes up to me after he sees the president he says is she as good as i think she is is she for real i said yes she s really something he said well you know liberia was founded by freed american slaves and i think now we need a second african american diaspora to go back to liberia and have all these rich black people lift their economy there are just three million of them surely we can do it in next to no time so thank you very much god bless thank you this is great here s another thing i love about cgi so bob and i are sitting there feeling smugly self congratulatory and jeffrey says you know sierra leone is right next door and tell them what you said about fighting in the revolution jeffrey wright well it was founded by freed american slaves who fought with the british during the american revolution and ended up in nova scotia and the climate was better in sierra leone i think so they ended up there president clinton that means we can get the british to help us with sierra leone that s good thank you bless you all thank you now i would like to ask rob malley to take the microphone rob chaired our ethnic and religious conflict working group he comes with a first hand perspective as the middle east and north african program director of the international crisis group he served in my second term on our national security council he was heavily involved in the israeli palestinian negotiations and the 2000 camp david summit and his passion for justice for the palestinians was so great and his reputation for fairness so immense that he was sometimes known as the only jewish member of the palestinian delegation the floor is yours dem wjclinton22 9 06e bill_clinton i would like to invite to the stage first gareth evans the president of the international crisis group dr hamza al kholi the chairman and ceo of the al kholi group and anyone else who wishes to come up here involved with the partners here the international crisis group the al kholi foundation iara lee and george gund iii foundation and the radcliffe foundation which i know my good friend frank giustra is behind i want to thank them for this commitment worth 900 000 over three years the international crisis group with top level international figures will work to build a just and lasting peace in the middle east by fomenting the broad political support needed to build this peace they already convened a brainstorming session at the un earlier this month and they plan to convene a high level group of former american government officials to generate bipartisan support for middle east peace efforts and produce a series of reports and briefings on the conflict to be presented to policy makers after the troubles in lebanon the frustrations after the recent elections all the ups and downs in the last two years all of us who have ever dealt with this know that there will be no ultimate security for israel until this is resolved and that other wealthier people will play games with the poor and often brutalize palestinians until this is resolved we all know more or less what the resolution will be i have never dealt in my life with something it s like doing a math problem where everybody knows the answer and no one will give you a pencil to solve the problem so this is a good thing that these two good people are doing thank you hamza thank you gareth it s great to see you both please sign thank you now i d like to invite john marks the president of search for common ground kamran elahian philanthropist and entrepreneur deborah berger president of unbound philanthropy and anyone else who s supposed to be up here with them the organizations involved in this project are search for common ground the alan b slifka foundation kamran elahian and unbound philanthropy they have made a commitment to communicate to millions of people the ideas and values of coexistence mutual understanding and reconciliation this idea came out of one of the religious and ethnic conflict working sessions on thursday where the idea was proposed and the money pledged to bring together a number of world renowned influential people to create a series of public service announcements to promote tolerance and reconciliation worldwide archbishop tutu and cicely tyson both of whom have participated obviously in this year s cgi will be among those featured alongside musicians athletes and other well known figures so i thank them for doing this in the democratic republic of congo studies have shown that search for common ground s works are one of the critical sources of public awareness of the peace process and has helped to reduce suspicion and rumors that can lead to violence so let s give them a big thanks and wish them well thank you john just told me that all of you should consider yourselves potential interviewees for this project now i would like to invite 2006 olympic gold medalist joey cheek founder of the where will we be campaign to come up here this is a fascinating commitment come on up this commitment is to unite a majority of 2008 olympians to speak with one voice to apply political pressure and build partnerships with ngos to help end the crisis in darfur by the summer olympics onset in 2008 and the proposal is to assemble a core group of elite international athletes to travel to sudan and film a documentary of their experiences on the ground to raise media attention develop as a source of recruiting for more athletes localize the message lead a public relations campaign and hold international screenings of the film each athlete will return to his or her home country and share the experience with the media call upon others to join to work to unite a majority of 2008 olympians to speak with one voice to apply political pressure to build these kinds of partnerships with ngos so that the crisis can be ended by the summer olympics of 2008 let me also say that as he might say the olympians will reach collectively an audience of almost four billion people worldwide because of the fascination with the olympics and we know that one of the problems the united nations is having is that individual governments don t want to commit to expand the african union for us or to replace it or to fund an expansion or replacement in the absence of the approval of the sudanese government the athletes bringing this kind of public attention given their importance in countries all over the world could help to change many many governments policies perhaps a lot more than my endless round of private meetings have been able to do so far so i am profoundly grateful and i thank you joey for doing this let s give him a big hand ladies and gentlemen we re almost done now each one of these commitments highlights a great source of promise but also reminds us that the whole reason we re here is that we live in an interdependent world that s been good to us but is fundamentally unstable unequal and unsustainable and a lot of our commitments illustrate that one in particular that deals with sustainability because it caught my eye is the global partnership for afghanistan a very old nation with a very rich history which has been torn to smithereens by conflicts since the soviet invasion nearly 30 years ago now its moderate muslim democracy is once again threatened by a resurgent taliban in the south and an explosion of poppy growing which increased 60 percent last year and now produces 92 percent of the world s poppies for opium and heroin the global partnership is the essence of what cgi is all about they said we want to do something specific about it they proposed to partner with local farmers to launch a hundred commercially viable orchard and wood lot businesses each projected to generate an income sufficient to support a family of eight now living in poverty with a rate of return on the endeavor higher than the same people could earn by cultivating poppies it s a huge deal it gives afghanistan a better chance and it means less opium and less heroin on the streets of cities all over the world now keep in mind this is also a model which is infinitely expandable so if any of you haven t made a commitment yet here s something you can invest in that you know is going to work if it happens because the criteria says that the return has to be greater than they would earn growing poppies on the same amount of land so thank you very much for that almost every commitment in some way or another seeks to reduce the impact of inequality which we know is staggering across the globe and even within developing countries half the world s people still live on less than two dollars a day chelsea told me this morning that fortune had just published its annual list of the 100 richest americans and for the first time they re all billionaires the poorest one is worth a paltry two billion and yet poverty among working people has gone up in this country so this inequality is a problem that is getting worse and will eventually challenge existing democracies and coherent societies as well as serve as enormous barriers to human relations in emerging economies a lot of our commitments deal with that i want to mention one the sunam quraishi foundation partnered with the renowned children s rights activist craig kielburger and his organization free the children to adopt a village in the masai mara of kenya they re going to provide several new schools and essential community services including clean water and i mention this because they re able to help a thousand children and adults for the relatively modest sum of 68 000 again this is a replicable model so if you care about inequality and you don t have a fortune to spend but you d like to do something to change the reality of people s lives on the ground this is an example and kenya it s very important because when the new administration came in kenya they said one of the dumbest things that happens in poor countries all over the world and one of the reasons we wound up with so many kids and radical madrassas in pakistan is that poor countries can t afford to fund their education system so they charge the families of the poorest kids to send their kids to school in country after country they abolished those fees in kenya guess what in 30 days another million kids showed up within six months two million more children had shown up for the schools but they didn t have schools they didn t have teachers they didn t have materials they never dreamed it would be that explosive so here is something you can do at an affordable price to have a direct and tangible impact on inequality the current world is unsustainable because of two things we ve discussed the imminent threat of climate change and the persistence of religious racial and ethnic divides what richard branson did here is truly wonderful but you don t have to have 3 billion to commit over ten years to replicate it it will get a lot of press because of the staggering dollar amount and because he is brilliant and charismatic but the ultimate lesson is how did he get this money in the first place because he understands how this system works the most important thing richard branson has done is to remind us that yes we need government changes yes we need rule changes but for those of us who aren t in and can t make those changes except to vote for different policies when we get the chance in our respective countries there is today a staggering set of economic opportunities that will yield good return on investment to reduce the threat of global warming create new jobs start new businesses promote greater equality as well as a sustainable environment that is the real lesson of the branson commitment and all of us can participate in that going forward finally in the continuing fight against religious racial and ethnic hatreds and the violence and terror which often accompany them we have to remember the stunning impact on all of us of bishop tutu his personal example his unifying words his reconciling spirit not all of us can be him but all of us can support him and people like him he s too good a man to mention it and he never even asked to be considered here but he has established a foundation for peace that will enable him to continue his work now that he has no organized clerical responsibilities or any responsibilities within the south african government he s got to raise a few million dollars to fund it hillary and i are going to support him personally if you want to do something in the area of reconciliation where you can amplify your words in a huge echo chamber even a modest contribution can help bishop tutu to put his stake in the ground and to give that speech i will never forget as long as i live that religion is like a knife if you slice a loaf of bread it s good if you slice somebody s hand off it s bad i will never forget that the reason that we started this whole thing is that the world is unequal unstable and unsustainable that governments alone can t move us from inequality to equal opportunity from instability to shared responsibility from unsustainability to integrated communities where we live in harmony with nature and each other and that all of us can do it all we tried to do here is to create a small piece of common ground in a highly contentious world common ground where people like laura bush and bill clinton rupert murdoch and barbra streisand muslims jews and christians a conservative latin american president like alvaro uribe and a populist one like evo morales the great winners of the 21st century the gateses the buffetts the scotts carlos slim bob johnson richard branson and those who represent the poor the sick the unlettered where they can all stand together and make common cause where we can state our differences directly and respectfully clarify our thoughts and maybe most important of all leave our useless resentments behind so we can learn from each other and lift our vision to a better place it seems to me that s what this interdependent world demands of us a relentless quest for new communities of equal opportunity shared responsibility and genuine belonging cynics may say we are latter day don quixotes and sancho panzas i say if you will build me another windmill i ll be glad to tilt at it and the world will be a safer place all i know is that every time i go somewhere i see all over again like i did in that little building that was one of the few with electricity in liberia that intelligence ability and dreams are evenly distributed and i know something else having lived a long time now every denial of our common humanity from a terrorist tragedy to the daily miseries of life leads to heartache and every affirmation of it brings some measure of joy and peace so i m really grateful to the people we celebrated here people like my friend wangari maathai who rose against all the odds on the strength of her spirit and whose book about it will move you to tears but i m also grateful to people you and i will never know who do the same thing every day otherwise the wars would be longer the deaths would be greater and we wouldn t even come here i took bill and melinda gates to lesotho with me and we looked at this attempt we re putting together to have a national testing campaign to get everybody over 12 to be tested for hiv and aids by promising no discrimination and absolute access to medical care and medicine when they need it to do this since you have the right to opt out we had to find partners who would go into every little village and be good models we had one guy who was a national boxing coach he still had a great though very frail body his cd4 count got down to 4 and was now 750 and he s alive because of our program but the most moving person was a young girl who had been raped and infected in a traditional society where she could have been stigmatized and broken forever we re not talking about the streets of new york here here s a woman high in a village in lesotho going in and looking into the faces of her countrymen and women saying i m hiv positive do you know how i got it i was raped am i ashamed no was this my fault no am i going to be a victim no and neither should you but you shouldn t infect anybody either now if i can stand up here and tell you that i m hiv positive because i m a rape victim the least you can do is to be tested and find out if you are and then do the right thing now she ll never be a millionaire and she ll never be a movie star but she may save lives beyond what all of us will do there are people like them everywhere and they deserve our support when i went to nelson mandela s 88th birthday party recently in south africa i was supposed to show up at a hospital event with him he sent me over a shirt to wear that had his prison number on it 46664 so i showed up with mandela s prison shirt he s a lot better performer than i ll ever be he knew that was a good thing to do but it reminded me of something he said and i want to read it to you to be free is not merely to cast off one s chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others that s what cgi is all about that s why you re here that s what we re trying to do madiba spent a third of his life behind steel bars today three billion people are trapped behind the bars of poverty lack of health care war terror environmental devastation and the imminent specter of global warming to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others requires that we break through those bars and cast off each other s chains bishop tutu reminded us that the essential wisdom of africa about the human condition is captured in the word ubuntu he didn t give you the literal translation because it is almost mystical the literal translation of ubuntu in english is i am because you are now when we finished sequencing the human genome we discovered the astonishing fact that genetically every breathing human being on the planet is more than 99 9 percent the same the further astonishing fact is that if you took clustered pure ethnic groups we have the president of iceland and the first lady here if you took let s say 100 icelanders who had never lived anywhere else they were 100 percent icelanders as far back as we could trace and you put them with 100 bolivian indians who had always had intermarriage and you took any tribe in africa and you found some sikhs who had always intermarried so there are no ethnic differences as far as we know if you put all of these groups together the genetic differences among individuals within each group would be greater than the differences in the genetic profile in the groups from one another now that s stunning right think about this every one of us it s easy for us to point the finger and say we wish the venezuelan president wouldn t say hateful things we hope the iranian president will moderate we wish the israelis and hamas would make peace you think about how much of your life your own life is organized around that one tenth of one percent you had better grades than somebody else you re better looking than somebody else we re arrogant enough to think that those of us who have a lot of money are so much better than that poor girl who s in that village in lesotho trying to get people to get tested for aids now think about it all of us organize more than 90 percent of our lives our thoughts our energies our self image we all do it around that one tenth of one percent even the most liberal social minded giving unselfish we always think about what is it barbra got the voice of a generation out of one tenth of one percent of her genetic pool all of us do that we have lived our whole lives that way so we come here for a couple of days to remember ubuntu if we were alone on this planet alone and we were the most beautiful the most brilliant the most powerful the most wealthy and the longest lived person ever to exist if we were alone we would not amount to a hill of beans and if we did nobody would know it so ubuntu for us it means the world is too small our wisdom too limited our time here too short to waste any more of it winning fleeting victories at other people s expense we have to find a way to triumph together and so you have here thank you dem wjclinton22 9 94 bill_clinton thank you and please be seated well we re a little late and a little wet but i hope that you re as glad to be here as hillary and i are glad to have you here i want to thank marilyn bergman and frances preston for their leadership in promoting american music and for their help in making this evening possible in this tent tonight there are representatives of many creative disciplines lyricists composers authors photographers film makers dramatists and others all of you have heightened the way the rest of us experience beauty pleasure pain i can t even begin to contemplate a world without the gifts that you have given i m also glad you ve brought some great performers with you the theme of tonight s program is soul tree a celebration of the roots and reach of american music soul music in all of its forms blues gospel jazz country pop rhythm and blues and rock n roll it was all born and bred in america from memphis to motown from new orleans to new york in ken burns new pbs series on baseball gerald early a professor at washington university says that 2 000 years from now when people study our civilization there are only three things america will be remembered for the constitution baseball and jazz he says they re the three most beautifully designed things our culture has produced and the three greatest tributes to american improvisation well wonderful as it is and even though i used to teach it you probably don t want to hear my lectures on the constitution tonight and sadly there is no baseball so we re left with music jazz rhythm and blues all the sounds of america s soul let s get on with the show thank you and welcome to the white house dem wjclinton22 9 99 bill_clinton thank you very much you have to give me two seconds to recover myself ann richards just told me a joke i ve got collect myself here i ll be quite brief tonight first because i m hoarse and secondly because you re all hungry and thirdly because i want to listen to the vice president but i want to say a few things beginning with thank you thank you for being here thank you for supporting his campaign thank you for giving the good things that we have done these last eight years a chance to be the springboard for positive change in america you know a lot of people have forgotten that when vice president gore and i went out across the country in 1992 we were in the worst recession since the great depression we had a lot of division in our society that was complicated by the previous administration s vetoes of the brady bill which is now the law and the family and medical leave bill which is now the law and we asked the american people to give us a chance to put them first and to take a new direction and the results are clear we ve had the lowest unemployment welfare rolls and crime rates in a generation and the longest peacetime expansion in history so the question facing the american people now is not as it is often put do we need a change the answer is yes we do the question is not will we change the question is how are we going to change are you going to build on the good things that are going on in america now to face the unmet challenges of the country in the 21st century or will we basically go back to the approach that got us in so much trouble in the first place that is the choice before the american people and i want you to know three things about al gore number one he s done more with the job he s had the last six and a half years than any person in history whether it was something very public and visible like breaking the tie to give our economic plan the chance to bring the american economy back or breaking the tie to stand up for closing the gun show loophole so the background check law really works to things you may not see like taking the lead in giving us the smallest federal government in 35 years hooking up every classroom in this country to the internet managing big chunks of our foreign relations being the main person in the administration in the drafting of the telecommunications act which has already created 300 000 high tech jobs in this country the american people ought to know that the second thing that i think is very important is he has really told you what he would do if he got to be president and i ll let him speak for himself on that but i think one of the principal reasons for the success we had in the last six and a half years is that i was forced to sit down and think through precisely what i would do if the american people gave me this job and then when he joined the ticket we sat down together and we reissued a blueprint he s done that in greater detail than anybody else the third thing i want you to know is i believe having done this job now i have some sense of what it takes to succeed and who would be good at it he has the character the integrity the experience the intelligence the energy and the ideas necessary to lead this country into the new millennium he can only do it if you help him i hope you will keep helping him because america needs him and i thank you for being here the vice president dem wjclinton23 1 03 bill_clinton thank you very much for the warm welcome and ron thank you for the reference to hillary you actually should have given her a bigger round of applause because unlike me she can still do something for you i am delighted to be here chris jennings who was my health care adviser in the white house and several other people who worked with us are here today and i see a lot of other old friends in the audience some of whom i worked with in arkansas over 20 years ago i can t say how much gratitude i feel for the work that families usa did with us the information they gave to us and the mistakes they kept us from making during the eight years i had the privilege to serve here in washington social change is hard work in 1918 in a remarkable essay called politics as a vocation the great german sociologist smart guy max weber said politics is the long and slow boring of hard boards ron pollack and the families usa crowd have never forgotten that never whined about it never quit in the face of frustration and defeat they just keep boring the hard boards and i m very very grateful i came to talk today primarily about the situation in health care and some things i think ought to be done but i d like to just do a very brief scene setter to put this in the larger context of global events why are we here talking about this when all the breathless discussion is what s about to happen in iraq and is north korea developing nuclear weapons and where are osama bin laden and al zawahiri and what should we be worried about i think this is a perfect time to be here and i want to explain why my view is that the 21st century which most people would characterize as an age of globalization is instead an age of global interdependence i use the word interdependence instead of globalization because for most of us globalization has an exclusively economic connotation and the world has been this globalized in purely economic terms before a century ago before the outbreak of world war i the rich countries in the world the united states and the major european powers were as trade dependent as we are now as a percentage of our population immigration flows just before and just after the turn of the last century were even greater than today we are more socially diverse today but today in addition to that we have the internet we have global telecommunications we have much more widespread travel than ever before we are interconnected in fundamentally profound ways that go way beyond the economics that we ve seen in the past now my basic analysis of this time is if we live in an interdependent world and a set of interlocking interdependent communities all the way down to your neighborhood that interdependence is good if you re in position to take advantage of it but not necessarily good interdependence is a nice way of saying you cannot escape each other you can t get away from each other it was really good to us in the 1990s we made a lot of jobs we made a lot of income gains the fastest growing income gains were in the upper 10 percent but the second fastest growing was in the bottom 20 percent and that s before our tax policy made it even better so we tried to grow together but if you re not in a position to take advantage of it or you do not see the benefits of it or you don t recognize any fundamental responsibilities or you think that the values of the people doing well are alien to yours then a lot of bad things can happen so on 9 11 people who perceive no benefits from this world recognize no responsibilities and thought their values irreconcilable with ours killed 3 100 people from 70 nations in new york washington and pennsylvania so interdependence is not enough in the health care context everybody s interdependent which means if you ve got health insurance you re paying higher than you would because of all the people who don t have health insurance right all of you know that although i had a hard sell on it in 93 and 94 in any interdependent environment we must always be striving to go from interdependence to integration to a community of shared benefits and shared responsibilities rooted in shared values simple values everybody counts everybody deserves a chance everybody has a responsible role to play we all do better when we work together now why does that mean we should be working on health care while most people are focused on terror or weapons of mass destruction or other problems because we have to move the world from interdependence to integration and to do that we have to do four things we need a security strategy we also need a positive strategy to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists just like we did at the end of world war ii with the marshall plan and rebuilding japan we need a strategy to do more work in organized ways through international institutions which is why it s important to work through the u n on this iraq business why we were right to go to the u n get the resolution and why it s important to let these inspectors do their work but we also have to recognize that a big part of america s appeal in the world comes from the power of example so we have to keep trying to be better at home you can t just say oh well we ve got a lot of problems around the world therefore let s just forget about where we are at home and four or five years from now when there are no more problems in the world we ll think about whether all the problems in america should be addressed again it doesn t work like that we ve got some big profound challenges in health care now if we address them in the right way we will continue the process of the integration of america into a community with shared benefits responsibilities and values and the process will make america stronger we will be a better beacon of hope and more likely to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists so i think that it s very important that you re here we just can t stop trying to make america better as a matter of fact no one really thinks that these terrorists are going to win a military victory over us even if god forbid there should be another terrible incident or two in our country the only way that we could be vanquished is if we respond to this moment in a way that compromises the future of our children or the character of our country every time you come to a meeting like this and you try to deal with the health care challenges you are acting in a way that is good for the future of our children and consistent with the character of america and our eternal mission to form a more perfect union so you should feel good about being here you should feel energized and if people tells you they don t have time to think about this now they ve got to think about that other stuff tell them that that s what you develop a brain for so you can think about more than one thing at once it s really important the next point i want to make is there s a lot of good news in health care the 21st century is going to see stunning advances in health care as a result of the sequencing of the human genome we ve already found the genetic variances that are the highest predictors of breast cancer and we re getting very close on alzheimer s and parkinson s eventually genomics will really help us in dealing with diabetes and the development of nanotechnology into which when i was president we sunk about a billion dollars of your tax money has raised the prospects of new diagnostic technologies to identify tumors so small they are presently unidentifiable raising the prospect that virtually all cancers will become curable i fully expect that sometime within the next 20 years the average life expectancy for children born in the united states will rise above 90 years so there s a lot to be hopeful about at the same time you all know what the current challenges are after we reversed the rise in uninsured for the first time in 12 years they re going up again accompanied by double digit increases in health insurance premiums which cause great anxiety for businesses states and millions of american families furthermore putting more money into health care to pay more for the same health care at a time when there s no inflation and under investment elsewhere is aggravating the nation s economic downturn and increasing the upturn in unemployment and uninsured it s also thank goodness spurring new interest across the political spectrum in the question of health care reform i thought about this coming down here today i thought about yogi berra everybody s friend we ve got an economic recession with the number of uninsured people going up sounds like deja vu all over again and we have a chance to get it right this time because people in both parties are talking seriously about new proposals but there s a risk that things that look like they re doing something actually can make the situation worse i think we have to avoid two things in health care in this debate one is just doing something because it looks good even though we know it won t make it better the other is using this debate to divide the american people again keep in mind consensus is a good word not a bad word as long as it results in real progress nobody s got the whole truth on this and if this were easy somebody would have done it a long time ago the fundamental problem if you believe as i do that the number one task of the world is to move from interdependence to an integrated community and the number one task of america is to find gaps in the way we do our business and try to make a more integrated community here is that politics often rewards division fear and negativism in the moment i was stunned that in 2002 we could have elections turn in the south on the need to punish two governors who took the confederate flag off the south carolina dome and the georgia flag it s exactly what we do not need if the main task of america in the 21st century is to move from interdependence to an integrated community we have to keep that in mind in health care if we expect others to compromise and to have their ears opened then we have to do the same we can t really believe that we are the repositories of all truth but neither can we be played for suckers now i was grateful that ron mentioned some of the things that we did in the 1990s over 35 million people have used the family and medical leave act now when we did it i was told it was going to be terrible for the economy it turned out to be good for the economy why because it was an integrating device because when most parents are in the workforce and the most important job of any society is raising children and holding families together then you have to find things that help them to succeed at work and at home that s what family leave does in that sense it is a metaphor for the kinds of things that we ought to be doing today the chip program was really important we have over 4 6 million children now who have health insurance as a result of the children s health insurance program it was the biggest expansion in child health care since the medicaid program in 1965 we also ended drive by deliveries and improved coverage for screening for breast cancer and prostrate cancer and colorectal conditions and we had a dramatic increase in diabetes health care and self management which the american diabetes association said was the most important advance in diabetes care since the development of insulin we fought against the cuts in medicaid and block granting 85 million americans were covered by the executive order that gave the protections of the patients bill of rights to people in federal programs in medicare medicaid veterans administration care and the federal employees health insurance program we also tried to deal with the waste and inefficiencies in the federal programs when i took office in 1993 medicaid was supposed to go broke in 1999 we added 30 years to the life of the program when i left office we had enough money for medicaid to be solvent until 2029 and for social security if the surplus were properly applied to be solvent until 2053 so what s happened since well part of it is we had a big drop in the stock market a big crisis in the economy occasioned by september the 11th and the need to spend more money on national defense as a result but we can t overlook the fact that we ve got 41 million americans and rising without health insurance premiums are going through the roof again and they re going up at a time when other inflation is quite low many companies are facing premium increases as high as 25 percent and as everybody knows these costs are being passed on to employees in the form of higher premiums and large co payments the kaiser family foundation recently issued a study that said that employer plans increased deductibles by 13 percent now the employers are worried about how they re going to keep their obligations to their workers meet their bottom lines and compete in the world economy and the more americans who lose their jobs and lose their health insurance the worse this is going to be we also can t look to the states now because they re in the worst fiscal crisis since world war ii the reports are that 18 states are already planning to reduce medicaid coverage and 15 states are thinking of reducing benefits and this could be just the beginning furthermore in times likes this states usually get a little extra help from washington but instead they re going to give the money to me i get the money you can see that i can afford a nice suit and a tie but i need an income tax cut and a dividend tax cut they want to give the money to me i don t get it i don t get it so the administration says that there should be a tax credit to help people buy health insurance but if you give a worker less than 100 a month in tax credit to buy health coverage that costs more than twice that it probably won t work it s like saying i m going to give you 100 a month tax credit to buy a car but you have to buy a lexus and you figure out where the rest of the money comes from you know one of my great achievements as president was that i finally found a tax cut the republicans didn t like i was so proud of myself i worked for years and i finally found one they didn t like i offered a 25 percent tax credit to anybody who would produce or purchase energy conservation or clean energy products they thought that was a terrible waste of the taxpayers money i said you know we combat global warming with a free enterprise system there s a trillion dollar market out there but the real problem is the old energy economy is centralized and well financed and politically connected the new energy economy is highly entrepreneurial and needs venture capital and is not well connected so let s just nudge this market well they thought that was a terrible idea so i considered it one of the single achievements in my political career that i found a tax cut they didn t like well i don t like this proposed tax cut because it won t work it looks like we re giving people something we re not we have a highly inefficient way of financing health care it may be politically attractive but it s totally inefficient we re spending roughly 3 percent of gdp on administrative costs you probably can t run a health system like ours for less than 11 percent of gdp canadians spend 10 the europeans spend less but as a practical matter we couldn t do it for less than 11 percent maybe 12 percent but we re spending over 14 percent now and it s because of the way we finance healthcare yet we keep trying to find ways to jerry rig this deal we ve made a decision as a country to throw away about 2 to 2 5 percent of our gdp every year because this is where the politics are in the way we finance health care as a result we spend more money than anybody else and cover fewer people and charge more for the premiums to the people who are paying because we have to pay for the emergency costs that hospitals and doctors have to absorb when the people without insurance show up now that can t be fixed with a tax credit moreover study after study shows that if you just leave this present financing system intact problems will if you were in the health insurance business and you had to make a profit you d make probably the same decisions they do but they re not pretty if you re sick or have a previous health insurance condition then the market won t give you a quality plan if you ve got asthma we won t cover your treatment if you have a cancer you can forget it if you re over 55 we won t cover any chronic condition i ve got a friend who s just a little older than i am he says he s happy when he wakes up hurting every morning of his life because that s the way he knows he s still alive those of us over 55 are in a permanent chronic condition if you can buy it coverage is so expensive that very few people can really afford what they need so this insurance financing market that we have is already a house of cards it works for the wealthiest people but not for most people we ve got to have some new solutions first we have to figure out a way to prevent the number of uninsured from rising we ve got to help to relieve the growing burden states and employers are being asked to shoulder we can t move backward cutting people off medicaid is not only the wrong thing to do it s actually bad for the economy it will spread all kinds of anxiety throughout this country it will hurt people it will hurt businesses and it will hurt hospitals and health care workers families usa just released a report on the multiplier effect of cutbacks in medicaid clearly we should increase the federal contribution to medicaid it will save jobs and improve health care we should do it without delay but we can t do that because they want to give me the money you know i never made a nickel to my name until i left the white house and i love being able to talk like this now a recent study was done that found that the administration s tax proposal not only will blow a long term hole in the federal budget bigger than the first tax cut did but will cost the states 4 billion in revenues a year how many uninsured kids could you cover for 4 billion bucks how many hospitals could you keep open for 4 billion so you know that old adage is true the first thing you ought to do when you find yourself in a hole is to quit digging instead they re looking for a bigger shovel now i guess i can say this because i m not running for anything but i think most americans are big enough to get the truth here as i understand it people in my income group have already gotten a 10 000 tax cut under that first tax bill which is 10 times as much as the average american will get when it s all phased in so if we froze the top rate that s just 400 000 and above you d recover hundreds of billions of dollars for the next 10 years most people i talk to who pay the maximum rate in new york where state taxes and local taxes are very high think it s crazy to give us a tax cut with all the problems america has we re out here fighting a war on terror with all these other problems and they re shoving money at us you know i want the people who work in this hotel to be able to send their kids to college i d rather them keep my tax money for that i don t get it you can make a case for a kind of tax cut now because of the condition of the economy but not the one proposed what we need is a tax cut targeted toward middle class people who have huge credit card debts and small businesses that need incentives to invest to hire people or keep their folks on we could spend a good deal of money on it in one or two years then get rid of it so we wouldn t blow a hole in the long term deficit instead by giving a disproportionate amount of that first tax cut and a hugely disproportionate amount of this tax cut to people in my income group what we re really going to do is pay for that tax cut out of the social security and medicare trust funds let s don t kid ourselves that s what we re doing so they re giving me money out of the social security trust fund so that when the people i grew up with in arkansas who ve worked just as hard as i have all their lives most of whom never saw 50 000 a year in their lives when they retire because of my tax cut their kids are going to have to support them instead of their grandkids now that s bad ethics and terrible economics and furthermore as george soros said the other day god bless his soul he and bill gates gave a big speech here in washington against repealing the estate tax george said look right now interest rates are low even though we re running deficits because the economy s down when the economy picks up interest rates will soar and that will slow economic recovery in america there s something he didn t say if you believe we re living in an interdependent world which is it ll be just like the 1980s but more so we ll still get the money because we re rich enough to pay higher interest rates oh it ll be really bad on middle class people who want to buy homes and cars but we ll get the money at higher interest rates and whom will we take it away from from the africans the latin americans the east asians people in the middle east this new middle east we want to make where average people can make a living again where are they going to get the money we re going to be sucking it up to pay for the deficits we ran up to give me a tax cut i don t get it bill gates sr said something the other day that made me so proud i could pop he said i don t understand why they keep trying to give me a tax cut he said what do you think people like me would pay in advance just to be born in america that ought to be worth something why do we think that we re somehow entitled to be a permanent privileged class with no responsibility to the country that s given us these opportunities there was a cartoon the other day in the paper i almost fell out of my chair laughing this kid is asking what did you do in the war on terror daddy and the daddy says oh i took a tax cut so that you could pay higher taxes when you grow up we re all supposed to sacrifice you know poor people don t get job training money middle class people are losing the stability of the social security trust fund and people in my income group what s our sacrifice we have to exert the extraordinary energy necessary to open the envelope containing our tax cut this is a big deal if you want to talk about health care reform we ve got to stop this you re sitting here having a conversation about air if you don t have any money so the first thing we need to do in my opinion is say to top rate no more tax cuts we ve already gotten 10 times what the average person is going to get out of that first tax cut the second thing we ought to do is to rework the administration s current proposal to have all the benefits come in the next two years targeted to small business and middle class people that will juice the economy again but have no long term impact on the deficit then with the ceiling you put on the first tax cut you will have some money to relieve the medicaid problems on the states we ought to give them some help out there the next thing we ought to do is provide a workable affordable prescription drug benefit if we do it in the right way it will not only provide relief to seniors but also to states and employers whose drug costs are presently just bankrupting them if we structure it in the right way next i think we can actually use tax credits in a way that would further meaningful workable group insurance if you re going to use tax credits you ve got to do it in a way that creates a real market not an illusory one and builds on insurance reforms and protects the elderly and sick from discrimination it has to be carefully structured we could pattern it on the policies of the federal employees health program i think it would most likely do a lot more good than harm if we do it right next we really do have to strengthen the basic programs medicare and medicaid the proposed tax cut and the one passed before will directly weaken medicare because there s no way they can be paid for without taking money that would otherwise go to social security and medicare trust funds instead we should be bolstering those programs we also should give some direct help to the states which we could well afford to do if we cap the first tax cut for the wealthiest americans and don t pass this one in this present form finally i think we need to continue to work to get better value for our investment by supporting measures that reduce medical errors improve medical outcomes and accelerate medical discoveries being turned into treatments and cures now president bush has said that malpractice insurance is a driving force behind everything that ails the health care system there are some problems with malpractice insurance premiums if you talk to enough doctors and you see how many people don t deliver babies anymore we d be foolish to deny that but to say that it is the number one problem is like saying we can fix broken legs with band aids but we shouldn t get caught denying that there are no problems for these doctors i ve talked to too many of them who stopped doing too many things the first experience i had with this was when i was governor of arkansas and i realized that we were giving 90 percent of all the immunizations in our state including to wealthy children through the county health units because no doctor ever wanted to give anybody a shot again so we should deal with this problem but do it as part of a comprehensive effort and we also need to recognize that there will be occasions when people really do get hurt badly through clear negligence or worse and they ought to be able to have their day in court there has to be a way that society tries to make the people who are the victims of those mistakes whole let me say one final thing about all of this we ve got to try to find a bipartisan solution here if this just gets down to a shouting match between the democrats and republicans and they scream at us oh you just want to raise taxes or this is a shouting match between trial lawyers and victims on the one hand and doctors and insurance companies on the other then we ll have politics as usual gridlock and no change we ought to go to all these groups and say we propose a political truce here this is so important to the fabric of our country if you will work with us in honest good faith and promise to do the same we won t turn it into a political issue as long as you don t we won t demonize you in public if you don t demonize us first we won t turn you into a cartoon cut out of your position if you don t do that to us you can t build an integrated health care system without integrated politics but you have to be willing to fight for real solutions to real problems and there are lots of things we can do i didn t mention this and neither did ron but one of the things that we did have total bipartisan agreement on when i was president is biomedical research we more than doubled it and there were good results for america we probably should develop a national treatment and cure center devoted to accelerating the time between when a discovery is made and when its practical applications are felt by people and i think there would be a lot of support for that among the republicans in congress we have got to do this together what i talked about today strengthening medicaid strengthening schip if you want to expand coverage the first place we ought to start i read henry aaron s article about this the other day in the press if we could get some relief from the burden of these tax cuts for me we could stop the erosion of health coverage even with premiums going up by simply giving the states enough money to cover the parents of the children in the schip program that s something i proposed you know in the last year i was president when the states aren t broke they like this schip program it s worked we have 4 6 million kids in it you could then identify other discrete populations which aren t covered like young single people who think they re going to live forever and therefore don t want to buy anything they could be covered by expanding the schip program the states could figure out how to do this and we could funnel the money in there these people are not going to be picked up by the private market anyway but in order to do that the states first of all have to be able to fund what they re doing now and then they have to be able to get some funding stream for this we should be able to do this there was enormous bipartisan support for the schip program it was part of the balanced budget act of 1997 i ve talked to a number of republican members of congress who are quite proud that they voted to create that program again i want to say the way families usa has tried to reach out to people in every sector of our society who are giving care who are paying for care who are receiving care is important i think this covering the uninsured week you re going to launch in the spring is very very important i hope all of you will participate in that again i want to acknowledge that it s easy for me to give this speech now i have no responsibilities but at least you know i did try for eight years to fix this and i was willing to pay quite a high political price for it i think it s quite interesting that the worst congressional losses the democrats suffered in the last 60 years were the midterms of harry truman and my first midterm and both happened after we tried to fix health care we both were demonized and accused of trying to have the government take over health care it was really interesting because at the time the experts said that we had made a very moderate proposal that allowed the private health insurance companies to stay in business this lasted about two weeks until the health insurance industry spent a couple hundred million dollars performing its reverse plastic surgery now whenever you read what the press says about it it s a classic example about how the victors in every conflict get to write the history so you have to be patient here you have to be willing to fight but you have to first offer to all the people involved the prospect of having an integrated solution that we can do together this is just crazy this is 2003 we sequenced the human genome we figured out people genetically are 99 99 percent the same the genetic differences between you and anyone here of european origin and me individually are greater than the genetic differences of racial groups from one another the stuff we know is stunning and yet america with all of our high technology is the only rich country in the world that can t figure out how to give everybody health insurance the reason is the way we finance it and the money we spend on the financing and the way we re always willing to put it on the back burner whenever anything else comes up think how cruel it s going to be when the nanotechnology diagnostic capacity is fully realized and those of us who can afford it will be able to walk into some tube six times a year and find every little nascent cancer and have it zapped out they ll be able to make substitute parts for dem wjclinton23 1 96 bill_clinton thank you very much mr speaker mr vice president members of the 104th congress distinguished guests my fellow americans all across our land let me begin tonight by saying to our men and women in uniform around the world and especially those helping peace take root in bosnia and to their families i thank you america is very very proud of you my duty tonight is to report on the state of the union not the state of our government but of our american community and to set forth our responsibilities in the words of our founders to form a more perfect union the state of the union is strong our economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades we have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 years we have completed created nearly 8 million new jobs over a million of them in basic industries like construction and automobiles america is selling more cars than japan for the first time since the 1970s and for three years in a row we have had a record number of new businesses started in our country our leadership in the world is also strong bringing hope for new peace and perhaps most important we are gaining ground in restoring our fundamental values the crime rate the welfare and food stamp rolls the poverty rate and the teen pregnancy rate are all down and as they go down prospects for america s future go up we live in an age of possibility a hundred years ago we moved from farm to factory now we move to an age of technology information and global competition these changes have opened vast new opportunities for our people but they have also presented them with stiff challenges while more americans are living better too many of our fellow citizens are working harder just to keep up and they are rightly concerned about the security of their families we must answer here three fundamental questions first how do we make the american dream of opportunity for all a reality for all americans who are willing to work for it second how do we preserve our old and enduring values as we move into the future and third how do we meet these challenges together as one america we know big government does not have all the answers we know there s not a program for every problem we know and we have worked to give the american people a smaller less bureaucratic government in washington and we have to give the american people one that lives within its means the era of big government is over but we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves instead we must go forward as one america one nation working together to meet the challenges we face together self reliance and teamwork are not opposing virtues we must have both i believe our new smaller government must work in an old fashioned american way together with all of our citizens through state and local governments in the workplace in religious charitable and civic associations our goal must be to enable all our people to make the most of their own lives with stronger families more educational opportunity economic security safer streets a cleaner environment in a safer world to improve the state of our union we must ask more of ourselves we must expect more of each other and we must face our challenges together here in this place our responsibility begins with balancing the budget in a way that is fair to all americans there is now broad bipartisan agreement that permanent deficit spending must come to an end i compliment the republican leadership and the membership for the energy and determination you have brought to this task of balancing the budget and i thank the democrats for passing the largest deficit reduction plan in history in 1993 which has already cut the deficit nearly in half in three years since 1993 we have all begun to see the benefits of deficit reduction lower interest rates have made it easier for businesses to borrow and to invest and to create new jobs lower interest rates have brought down the cost of home mortgages car payments and credit card rates to ordinary citizens now it is time to finish the job and balance the budget though differences remain among us which are significant the combined total of the proposed savings that are common to both plans is more than enough using the numbers from your congressional budget office to balance the budget in seven years and to provide a modest tax cut these cuts are real they will require sacrifice from everyone but these cuts do not undermine are fundamental obligations to our parents our children and our future by endangering medicare or medicaid or education or the environment or by raising taxes on working families i have said before and let me say again many good ideas have come out of our negotiations i have learned a lot about the way both republicans and democrats view the debate before us i have learned a lot about the good ideas have that we could all embrace we ought to resolve our remaining differences i am willing to work to resolve them i am ready to meet tomorrow but i ask you to consider that we should at least enact these savings that both plans have in common and give the american people their balanced budget a tax cut lower interest rates and a brighter future we should do that now and make permanent deficits yesterday s legacy now it is time for us to look also to the challenges of today and tomorrow beyond the burdens of yesterday the challenges are significant but our nation was built on challenges america was built on challenges not promises and when we work together to meet them we never fail that is the key to a more perfect union our individual dreams must be realized by our common efforts tonight i want to speak to you about the challenges we all face as a people our first challenge is to cherish our children and strengthen america s families family is the foundation of american life if we have stronger families we will have a stronger america before i go on i d like to take just a moment to thank my own family and to thank the person who has taught me more than anyone else over 25 years about the importance of families and children a wonderful wife a magnificent mother and a great first lady thank you hillary all strong families begin with taking more responsibility for our children i ve heard mrs gore say that it s hard to be a parent today but it s even harder to be a child so all of us not just as parents but all of us in our other roles our media our schools our teachers our communities our churches and synagogues our businesses our governments all of us have a responsibility to help our children to make it and to make the most of their lives and their god given capacities to the media i say you should create movies and cds and television shows you d want your own children and grandchildren to enjoy i call on congress to pass the requirement for a v chip in tv sets so that parents can screen out programs they believe are inappropriate for their children when parents control what their young children see that is not censorship that is enabling parents to assume more personal responsibility for their children s upbringing and i urge them to do it the v chip requirement is part of the important telecommunications bill now pending in this congress it has bipartisan support and i urge you to pass it now to make the v chip work i challenge the broadcast industry to do what movies have done to identify your program in ways that help parents to protect their children and i invite the leaders of major media corporations in the entertainment industry to come to the white house next month to work with us in a positive way on concrete ways to improve what our children see on television i am ready to work with you i say to those who make and market cigarettes every year a million children take up smoking even though it s against the law three hundred thousand of them will have their lives shortened as a result our administration has taken steps to stop the massive marketing campaigns that appeal to our children we are simply saying market your products to adults if you wish but draw the line on children i say to those who are on welfare and especially to those who have been trapped on welfare for a long time for too long our welfare system has undermined the values of family and work instead of supporting them the congress and i are near agreement on sweeping welfare reform we agree on time limits tough work requirements and the toughest possible child support enforcement but i believe we must also provide child care so that mothers who are required to go to work can do so without worrying about what is happening to their children i challenge this congress to send me a bipartisan welfare reform bill that will really move people from welfare to work and do the right thing by our children i will sign it immediately let us be candid about this difficult problem passing a law even the best possible law is only a first step the next step is to make it work i challenge people on welfare to make the most of this opportunity for independence i challenge american businesses to give people on welfare the chance to move into the work force i applaud the work of religious groups and other who care for the poor more than anyone else in our society they know the true difficulty of the task before us and they are in a position to help everyone of us should join them that is the only way we can make real welfare reform a reality in the lives of the american people to strengthen the family we must do everything we can to keep the teen pregnancy rate going down i am gratified as i m sure all americans are that it has dropped for two years in a row but we all know it is still far too high tonight i am pleased to announce that a group of prominent americans is responding to that challenge by forming an organization that will support grass roots community efforts all across our country in a national campaign against teen pregnancy and i challenge all of us and every american to join their efforts i call on american men and women in families to give greater respect to one another we must end the deadly scourge of domestic violence in our country and i challenge america s families to work harder to stay together for families who stay together not only do better economically their children do better as well in particular i challenge the fathers of this country to love and care for their children if your family has separated you must pay your child support we re doing more than ever to make sure you do and we re going to do more but let s all admit something about that too a check will substitute for a parent s love and guidance and only you only you can make the decision to help raise your children no matter who you are how low or high your station in life it is the most basic human duty of every american to do that job to the best of his or her ability our second challenge is to provide americans with the educational opportunities we ll all need for this new century in our schools every classroom in america must be connected to the information superhighway with computers and good software and well trained teachers we are working with the telecommunications industry educators and parents to connect 20 percent of california s classrooms by this spring and every classroom and every library in the entire united states by the year 2000 i ask congress to support this education technology initiative so that we can make sure this national partnership succeeds every diploma ought to mean something i challenge every community every school and every state to adopt national standards of excellence to measure whether schools are meeting those standards to cut bureaucratic red tape so that schools and teachers have more flexibility for grass roots reform and to hold them accountable for results that s what our goals 2000 initiative is all about i challenge every state to give all parents the right to choose which public school their children will attend and to let teachers form new schools with a charter they can keep only if they do a good job i challenge all our schools to teach character education to teach good values and good citizenship and if it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms i challenge our parents to become their children s first teachers turn off the tv see that the homework is done and visit your children s classroom no program no teacher no one else can do that for you my fellow americans higher education is more important today than ever before we ve created a new student loan program that s made it easier to borrow and repay those loans and we have dramatically cut the student loan default rate that s something we should all be proud of because it was unconscionably high just a few years ago through americorps our national service program this year 25 000 young people will earn college money by serving their local communities to improve the lives of their friends and neighbors these initiatives are right for america and we should keep them going and we should also work hard to open the doors of college even wider i challenge congress to expand work study and help one million young americans work their way through college by the year 2000 to provide a 1000 merit scholarship for the top five percent of graduates in every high school in the united states to expand pell grant scholarships for deserving and needy students and to make up to 10 000 a year of college tuition tax deductible it s a good idea for america our third challenge is to help every american who is willing to work for it achieve economic security in this new age people who work hard still need support to get ahead in the new economy they need education and training for a lifetime they need more support for families raising children they need retirement security they need access to health care more and more americans are finding that the education of their childhood simply doesn t last a lifetime so i challenge congress to consolidate 70 overlapping antiquated job training programs into a simple voucher worth 2 600 for unemployed or underemployed workers to use as they please for community college tuition or other training this is a g i bill for america s workers we should all be able to agree on more and more americans are working hard without a raise congress sets the minimum wage within a year the minimum wage will fall to a 40 year low in purchasing power four dollars and 25 cents an hour is no longer a minimum wage but millions of americans and their children are trying to live on it i challenge you to raise their minimum wage in 1993 congress cut the taxes of 15 million hard pressed working families to make sure that no parents who work full time would have to raise their children in poverty and to encourage people to move from welfare to work this expanded earned income tax credit is now worth about 1 800 a year to a family of four living on 20 000 the budget bill i vetoed would have reversed this achievement and raised taxes on nearly 8 million of these people we should not do that we should not do that i also agree that the people who are helped under this initiative are not all those in our country who are working hard to do a good job raising their children and at work i agree that we need a tax credit for working families with children that s one of the things most of us in this chamber i hope can agree on i know it is strongly supported by the republican majority and it should be part of any final budget agreement i want to challenge every business that can possibly afford it to provide pensions for your employees and i challenge congress to pass a proposal recommended by the white house conference on small business that would make it easier for small businesses and farmers to establish their own pension plans that is something we should all agree on we should also protect existing pension plans two years ago with bipartisan support that was almost unanimous on both sides of the aisle we moved to protect the pensions of 8 million working people and to stabilize the pensions of 32 million more congress should not now let companies endanger those workers s pension funds i know the proposal to liberalize the ability of employers to take money out of pension funds for other purposes would raise money for the treasury but i believe it is false economy i vetoed that proposal last year and i would have to do so again finally if our working families are going to succeed in the new economy they must be able to buy health insurance policies that they do not lose when they change jobs or when someone in their family gets sick over the past two years over one million americans in working families have lost their health insurance we have to do more to make health care available to every american and congress should start by passing the bipartisan bill sponsored by senator kennedy and senator kassebaum that would require insurance companies to stop dropping people when they switch jobs and stop denying coverage for preexisting conditions let s all do that and even as we enact savings in these programs we must have a common commitment to preserve the basic protections of medicare and medicaid not just to the poor but to people in working families including children people with disabilities people with aids senior citizens in nursing homes in the past three years we ve saved 15 billion just by fighting health care fraud and abuse we have all agreed to save much more we have all agreed to stabilize the medicare trust fund but we must not abandon our fundamental obligations to the people who need medicare and medicaid america cannot become stronger if they become weaker the g i bill for workers tax relief for education and child rearing pension availability and protection access to health care preservation of medicare and medicaid these things along with the family and medical leave act passed in 1993 these things will help responsible hard working american families to make the most of their own lives but employers and employees must do their part as well as they are doing in so many of our finest companies working together putting the long term prosperity ahead of the short term gain as workers increase their hours and their productivity employers should make sure they get the skills they need and share the benefits of the good years as well as the burdens of the bad ones when companies and workers work as a team they do better and so does america our fourth great challenge is to take our streets back from crime and gangs and drugs at last we have begun to find a way to reduce crime forming community partnerships with local police forces to catch criminals and prevent crime this strategy called community policing is clearly working violent crime is coming down all across america in new york city murders are down 25 percent in st louis 18 percent in seattle 32 percent but we still have a long way to go before our streets are safe and our people are free from fear the crime bill of 1994 is critical to the success of community policing it provides funds for 100 000 new police in communities of all sizes we re already a third of the way there and i challenge the congress to finish the job let us stick with a strategy that s working and keep the crime rate coming down community policing also requires bonds of trust between citizens and police i ask all americans to respect and support our law enforcement officers and to our police i say our children need you as role models and heroes don t let them down the brady bill has already stopped 44 000 people with criminal records from buying guns the assault weapons ban is keeping 19 kinds of assault weapons out of the hands of violent gangs i challenge the congress to keep those laws on the books our next step in the fight against crime is to take on gangs the way we once took on the mob i m directing the fbi and other investigative agencies to target gangs that involve juveniles and violent crime and to seek authority to prosecute as adults teenagers who maim and kill like adults and i challenge local housing authorities and tenant associations criminal gang members and drug dealers are destroying the lives of decent tenants from now on the rule for residents who commit crime and pedal drugs should be one strike and you re out i challenge every state to match federal policy to assure that serious violent criminals serve at least 85 percent of their sentence more police and punishment are important but they re not enough we have got to keep more of our young people out of trouble with prevention strategies not dictated by washington but developed in communities i challenge all of our communities all of our adults to give our children futures to say yes to and i challenge congress not to abandon the crime bill s support of these grass roots prevention efforts finally to reduce crime and violence we have to reduce the drug problem the challenge begins in our homes with parents talking to their children openly and firmly it embraces our churches and synagogues our youth groups and our schools i challenge congress not to cut our support for drug free schools people like the dare officers are making a real impression on grade schoolchildren that will give them the strength to say no when the time comes meanwhile we continue our efforts to cut the flow of drugs into america for the last two years one man in particular has been on the front lines of that effort tonight i am nominating him a hero of the persian gulf war and the commander in chief of the united states military southern command general barry mccaffrey as america s new drug czar general mccaffrey has earned three purple hearts and two silver stars fighting for this country tonight i ask that he lead our nation s battle against drugs at home and abroad to succeed he needs a force far larger than he has ever commanded before he needs all of us every one of us has a role to play on this team thank you general mccaffrey for agreeing to serve your country one more time our fifth challenge to leave our environment safe and clean for the next generation because of a generation of bipartisan effort we do have cleaner water and air lead levels in children s blood has been cut by 70 percent toxic emissions from factories cut in half lake erie was dead and now it s a thriving resource but 10 million children under 12 still live within four miles of a toxic waste dump a third of us breathe air that endangers our health and in too many communities the water is not safe to drink we still have much to do yet congress has voted to cut environmental enforcement by 25 percent that means more toxic chemicals in our water more smog in our air more pesticides in our food lobbyists for polluters have been allowed to write their own loopholes into bills to weaken laws that protect the health and safety of our children some say that the taxpayer should pick up the tab for toxic waste and let polluters who can afford to fix it off the hook i challenge congress to reexamine those policies and to reverse them this issue has not been a partisan issue the most significant environmental gains in the last 30 years were made under a democratic congress and president richard nixon we can work together we have to believe some basic things do you believe we can expand the economy without hurting the environment i do do you believe we can create more jobs over the long run by cleaning the environment up i know we can that should be our commitment we must challenge businesses and communities to take more initiative in protecting the environment and we have to make it easier for them to do it to businesses this administration is saying if you can find a cheaper more efficient way than government regulations require to meet tough pollution standards do it as long as you do it right to communities we say we must strengthen community right to know laws requiring polluters to disclose their emissions but you have to use the information to work with business to cut pollution people do have a right to know that their air and their water are safe our sixth challenge is to maintain america s leadership in the fight for freedom and peace throughout the world because of american leadership more people than ever before live free and at peace and americans have known 50 years of prosperity and security we owe thanks especially to our veterans of world war ii i would like to say to senator bob dole and to all others in this chamber who fought in world war ii and to all others on both sides of the aisle who have fought bravely in all our conflicts since i salute your service and so do the american people all over the world even after the cold war people still look to us and trust us to help them seek the blessings of peace and freedom but as the cold war fades into memory voices of isolation say america should retreat from its responsibilities i say they are wrong the threats we face today as americans respect no nation s borders think of them terrorism the spread of weapons of mass destruction organized crime drug trafficking ethnic and religious hatred aggression by rogue states environmental degradation if we fail to address these threats today we will suffer the consequences in all our tomorrows of course we can t be everywhere of course we can t do everything but where our interests and our values are at stake and where we can make a difference america must lead we must not be isolationist we must not be the world s policeman but we can and should be the world s very best peacemaker by keeping our military strong by using diplomacy where we can and force where we must by working with others to share the risk and the cost of our efforts america is making a difference for people here and around the world for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there is not a single russian missile pointed at america s children north korea has now frozen its dangerous nuclear weapons program in haiti the dictators are gone democracy has a new day the flow of desperate refugees to our shores has subsided through tougher trade deals for america over 80 of them we have opened markets abroad and now exports are at an all time high growing faster than imports and creating good american jobs we stood with those taking risks for peace in northern ireland where catholic and protestant children now tell their parents violence must never return in the middle east where arabs and jews who once seemed destined to fight forever now share knowledge and resources and even dreams and we stood up for peace in bosnia remember the skeletal prisoners the mass graves the campaign to rape and torture the endless lines of refugees the threat of a spreading war all these threats all these horrors have now begun to give way to the promise of peace now our troops and a strong nato together with our new partners from central europe and elsewhere are helping that peace to take hold as all of you know i was just there with a bipartisan congressional group and i was so proud not only of what our troops were doing but of the pride they evidenced in what they were doing they knew what america s mission in this world is and they were proud to be carrying it out through these efforts we have enhanced the security of the american people but make no mistake about it important challenges remain the start ii treaty with russia will cut our nuclear stockpiles by another 25 percent i urge the senate to ratify it now we must end the race to create new nuclear weapons by signing a truly comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty this year as we remember what happened in the japanese subway we can outlaw poison gas forever if the senate ratifies the chemical weapons convention this year we can intensify the fight against terrorists and organized criminals at home and abroad if congress passes the anti terrorism legislation i proposed after the oklahoma city bombing now we can help more people move from hatred to hope all across the world in our own interest if congress gives us the means to remain the world s leader for peace my fellow americans the six challenges i have just discussed are for all of us our seventh challenge is really america s challenge to those of us in this hallowed hall tonight to reinvent our government and make our democracy work for them last year this congress applied to itself the laws it applies to everyone else this congress banned gifts and meals from lobbyists this congress forced lobbyists to disclose who pays them and what legislation they are trying to pass or kill this congress did that and i applaud you for it now i challenge congress to go further to curb special interest influence in politics by passing the first truly bipartisan campaign reform bill in a generation you republicans and democrats alike can show the american people that we can limit spending and we can open the airwaves to all candidates i also appeal to congress to pass the line item veto you promised the american people our administration is working hard to give the american people a government that works better and costs less thanks to the work of vice president gore we are eliminating 16 000 pages of unnecessary rules and regulations shifting more decision making out of washington back to states and local communities as we move into the era of balanced budgets and smaller government we must work in new ways to enable people to make the most of their own lives we are helping america s communities not with more bureaucracy but with more opportunities through our successful empowerment zones and community development banks we re helping people to find jobs to start businesses and with tax incentives for companies that clean up abandoned industrial property we can bring jobs back to places that desperately desperately need them but there are some areas that the federal government should not leave and should address and address strongly one of these areas is the problem of illegal immigration after years of neglect this administration has taken a strong stand to stiffen the protection of our borders we are increasing border controls by 50 percent we are increasing inspections to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants and tonight i announce i will sign an executive order to deny federal contracts to businesses that hire illegal immigrants let me be very clear about this we are still a nation of immigrants we should be proud of it we should honor every legal immigrant here working hard to be a good citizen working hard to become a new citizen but we are also a nation of laws i want to say a special word now to those who work for our federal government today our federal is 200 000 employees smaller than it was the day i took office as president our federal government today is the smallest it has been in 30 years and it s getting smaller every day most of our fellow americans probably don t know that and there s a good reason a good reason the remaining federal work force is composed of hard working americans who are now working harder and working smarter than ever before to mak dem wjclinton23 10 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you for being here and thank you for your enthusiasm i was tired when i walked in but i m not tired anymore you ve given me a lot of energy i see that do you see that young man there patting on his father s head that young girl dad someday you may wish people couldn t tell the difference that is the postcard for what this election is all about right there that s the picture that is the picture i want to if i might i d like to join senator daschle in thanking my friend and our friend and america s friend wynton marsalis for his brilliant play here tonight and for thank you i thank senator chris dodd who gives a better stump speech than anyone for declining to speak tonight because he said you will like it if the program s shorter but you have no idea remember that chris dodd agreed to be the chairman of the democratic committee when no one thought we would be here two years ago and he has gone all across this country sending our message and sticking up for us and i m grateful to him let me also tell you that i agree that tom daschle will be a great majority leader that dick gephardt will be a great speaker and what i want you to know clap for them that s good but what i want you to know is that i ve had the opportunity to work with them together now for a couple of years in the beginning under very very difficult circumstances and see this whole thing turn full circle as they stood by me when i vetoed the republican budget and they shut the government down and i said can we hold our ranks together not matter how much they shut it down when the other side said to me well you guys care too much about government you will wilt when we shut the government down tom daschle and dick gephardt did not wilt and that spoke volumes to the country about where we stood and what we were fighting for and what we wanted to do they also worked hard to put together constructive proposals for our own balanced budget that we could all agree with and work for and to continue to press our agenda until in the end we were even able to pass a significant percentage of it in the closing weeks of this congress when the majority had to go home and face the voters too and so i want you to know that i have enormous confidence in their ability to participate in leading our country into the 21st century and the american people will be very proud of the work that they do together and that we do together and i thank them from the bottom of my heart for what they have done and what they will do and what they represent for the future of our country you should be proud of them you know we re getting very close to the end of this election now and i only want to make a couple of points for you the first is i just came back from a fascinating trip and today i was in florida and yesterday evening in miami i talked to the newly elected mayor of dade county they adopted a new form of government alex penelas who is a 34 year old young progressive leader and the first thing he said to me was henry cisneros has been a brilliant secretary of hud and because of his support we were able to take hundreds and hundreds of people off the streets and out of the ranks of homelessness in miami no one else has been able to do that then governor chiles and senator graham and i went with congresswoman corrine brown up to daytona beach and i met with four women today who were part of the florida welfare reform project that we had worked with them to help put together for women who had immense challenges and difficulties in their lives women who desperately wanted to be working and to be productive members of society and wanted their children to be able to look up to them to be able to see them go to work every day and they were involved in the program and each of them was about to come out to go to work one of those young women introduced me today when i spoke to a big crowd in daytona beach and i couldn t help thinking as i was on my way back up here to see you that sometimes in washington it s easy to forget and in america out there in the country it s awfully easy to forget the incredible impact what we do here can have on people s lives out in the country so i would say to you in the closing days of this election anything you can do to remind people that every single person especially younger voters who often don t vote in the same percentages as older voters do that there is a huge practical impact on their lives that will be substantially different depending on the choices they make in this election it s something you ought to do it will affect millions of people in terms of their access to education in terms of the quality of the education they get it will affect all of us in terms of our commitment to protect our environment as we grow our economy it will have a profound impact on how we deal with the challenges of the coming retirement of the baby boomers it will have a terrific impact on whether we continue to reach out to the rest of the world perhaps most profoundly it will have an amazing impact on whether we decide to grow together or continue to practice the politics of division which may help politicians get elected at election time but don t create jobs don t care for children and don t solve the problems of the country so i would ask you every one of you who can be here tonight you know people all across this country and take a little time in the next 13 days to talk about that i was in michigan before i went to florida and we broke ground on a new airport there so that michigan will spend 1 600 000 000 partly federal money doing something that we did together that s government not bad it s something that we had to do together because no one could do it alone very few people can write a check for that kind of money and it will enable them to reach out to the rest of the world but this is the interesting thing when i thought of michigan as a child and even when i ran for president in 1992 i thought of it as the auto capital of the world it s also a place where countless numbers of people from my home state poured out of arkansas and places like it in the 40s and 50 s going to michigan because they could get a good job in the factory and they could actually support their families and have a decent house and send their kids to college michigan has increased it exports more than any other state since i ve been president and now in wayne county where detroit is there are people from 140 different racial and ethnic groups wayne county michigan one county in america when you go anyplace in america now you can t help but be struck by the fact that this vibrant democracy of ours still is a magnet for people from all over the world in all different kinds of places and especially to those of you who are younger you think about what i have to spend my time on as your president in terms of foreign affairs the middle east bosnia northern ireland trying to stop terrorism trying to stop the development of dangerous weapons programs chemical and biological weapons how much of that is rooted in racial ethnic religious tribal hatred how much of that is rooted in the fact that all over the world people who are otherwise cultivated intelligent caring people people that you would be honored to be with in some sort of personal circumstance because you think they re doing a good job raising their children and they seem to be nice people still persist in defining themselves not in terms of what they are and who they are but in terms of who they are not who believe that they cannot think highly of themselves unless there is some group that they can look down on and if you tell the truth there s not a person in this room me included that at some point in your life hasn t fallen into that trap well at least i m not them the great genius of america is that for all of the problems that we still have when the church burnings arrived or when the terrible tragedy of oklahoma city occurred borne of an irrational hatred of our government we basically are beating that historical trend we are trying to create a world in the 21st century in which all of you can raise your children with genuine respect for people who are different from you because you share the values of the constitution and because you want to be responsible productive citizens this is a matter of enormous moment the future that the young people in this audience have is breathtaking a lot of you in a few years will be doing jobs that haven t been invented yet some of you will be doing jobs that haven t been imagined yet you ll have more opportunities to live out your dreams to imagine things and then make them happen in your lives than any generation of people in all of human history but it will only happen if you can preserve some of the old fashioned virtues that have gotten us here after 220 years and so i say to you that s another big thing and that s why i ve tried so hard in this election to keep talking about the issues and to keep trying to bring people together and keep telling americans look this is a godsend this gift we ve been given of all of this rich diversity this fabric of america nobody is as well positioned as the united states to move into that new millennium that starts just four years from now that s another thing you need to think about saying i ve taken to asking everybody in my audiences now in the closing days of this campaign to take some time before they go to bed at night and just see if they could write down in a few words what they want our country to be like when we start the new century what they want our country to be like when their children are their age or their grandchildren are their age that s really what this is all about and it happens to be because of the ideas and the philosophies that we have advanced that it is our party and this administration and what we re trying to do that has been given both the opportunity and the responsibility to carry this message it didn t have to be that way but that s the way it s worked out and so you know what all of the issues are but you need to understand that underneath those issues this idea of building a bridge to the 21st century that s wide enough and big enough for us all to walk across is a fundamental idea about the decision we re going to make about how we re going to live together and what kind of world your children will have to live in and i want you to be enthusiastic and happy and have a good time tonight but i want you to be in a position to really celebrate on november 5th that s the night that matters and so i say to you there are if you think hard enough about it every single one of you can think of somebody you know that hasn t made up their mind yet for whom they ll vote or whether to vote and one of the big questions in these elections you know when you see all of these endless polls published every day and there seems to be 10 or 15 points difference between them and you think gosh all those people are smart and aren t there established methodologies and all that you know what one of the biggest differences is in them how skeptical the pollster is about whether the younger generation will vote how skeptical the pollster is about whether young women working for meager wages struggling to make ends meet often supporting their own children sometimes without the child support they re entitled to will be too exhausted too frustrated or too skeptical to show up and vote on november the 5th so i say we work very hard to register people we re working very hard to get our message out you have been incredibly generous to us far more than we could have possibly expected we re being outspent still heavily by the other side in most of these races but we re still getting our message out there we re still fighting the fight we re still moving forward so ask yourself what do i want my country to be like in the 21st century and then what can i do in the next 13 days to make sure that happens and then we ll have a big celebration on election night between now and then just know i am grateful to you and know never never never doubt there is an enormous connection between the decision you and your fellow americans make and what kind of bridge we build to that bright new tomorrow thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton23 11 99a bill_clinton thank you thank you i want to begin by thanking you for your wonderful welcome i thank ramadan for his introduction i think maybe some day he will be an elected official if he speaks so well from now on i thank luljeta for her equally fine introduction of secretary albright and i thank your principal shafije hajdari for welcoming us here we are honored to be here with all of you today especially with the school children when i was introduced ramadan said he thanked me for making it possible for you to come home there are some other people who were largely responsible and i would like to introduce them as well we have four members of the united states congress representative peter deutsch of florida representative eliot engel of new york representative jack kingston of georgia representative carolyn maloney of new york they voted for the funds that enabled our military to come here and end this terrible ethnic cleansing i d like to ask them to stand up please stand thank you in addition to secretary albright whom i know you know because you gave her such a wonderful reception was the strongest advocate of the stand we took in kosovo i d like to thank sandy berger my national security advisor and larry rossin who is the chief of mission for the united states government in pristina and ask them to stand thank you and finally i want to thank all the members of our armed forces and our allies who are serving here with the u n and those who were here previously in the nato campaign and i would like to introduce the commander of all of our nato forces general wes clark and thank him for what he has done thank you i know with all these people here and all the children here it is difficult to listen to a long speech but i hope you can listen to a short speech mr milosevic wanted to keep control of kosovo by getting rid of all of you and we said no now he has lost his grip on kosovo and you have returned no more days hiding in cellars no more nights freezing in mountains and forests i know that for those who have lost their homes perhaps homes where your parents and grandparents were born this is still a difficult time i know it is hard for children to feel a sense of security and happiness when they have seen too much killing and hatred but i know this too the united nations troops and international organizations that have come here to help will stand with you every step of the way and the coming winter in kosovo is going to be a lot better than the last winter was there is still a lot of work to do but it is important that the world know what has already been done since you came home a few short months ago thank you we are preparing houses for the winter fixing schools bringing in police officers kla fighters are returning to civilian life radio stations and newspapers are operating the u n is doing a good job under tough conditions and last week the international community pledged another 1 billion american dollars to help kosovo to fully fund the u n operation next year with all the problems that remain we should remember kosovar children are going back to school learning in their language in communities that answer to their parents that is in some ways better than it was before and we can do better still i want to make one last point more important than anything else i have to say to the children and to the parents you can never forget the injustice that was done to you no one can force you to forgive what was done to you but you must try and let me tell you why first of all all the schoolchildren will soon be learning in their biology classes that all the people in the world all the people in the world in terms of their genetic makeup scientifically are 99 9 percent the same the serbs the albanians the irish the africans the latins the asians children are not born hating those who are different from them and no religion teaches them to do so they have to be taught to hate by people who are already grown but all over the world not just here in kosovo all over the world it is children who bear the burden of their parents blind hatred i have been in africa with a young man who lost his arm to someone of a different ethnic group who cut it off with a machete simply because of his family heritage i have been in israel with schoolchildren staring at the pictures of their classmates who were blown up in buses simply because they were jewish i have been in ireland with a beautiful beautiful 16 year old girl playing and singing to me but her eyesight was gone because she was blown up in a bomb just because of the religious differences in ireland we owe the children in kosovo a better future than that now you cheered for us when we came in because when you were being oppressed we stood by you and we exercised military power to defeat the aggression of mr milosevic we won the war but listen only you can win the peace the time for fighting has passed kosovo is for you to shape now the international community will stand by you but you must take the lead what will you think about will you be focused on hatred and past wrongs and getting even or will you be thinking about good schools for your children new homes for them new businesses the effort to create genuine self government to eradicate corruption and violence and give your children the joys of a normal life i beg you who are parents to teach your children that life is more than the terrible things that are done it is how you react to them do not let the children s spirits be broken do not let their hearts harden the future we fought to save for you is the future we see here today smiling cheering happy children give them the tomorrow they deserve the american people have been honored to stand with you and we will stand with you every step of the way thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton23 11 99b bill_clinton thank you hello from the reception you gave my daughter i thought he was going to say i was chelsea s father too thank you i want to thank all of you for making us feel so welcome i want to introduce the people who came with me our secretary of state madeleine albright our nato commander general wes clark my chief of staff john podesta national security advisor sandy berger and four members of the united states congress representative jack kingston from georgia representative peter deutsch from florida representative carolyn maloney from new york city and representative eliot engel from new york city and chelsea let me say that we are honored to be with you we thank you for your service we re looking forward to eating a big early thanksgiving dinner with the men and women of task force falcon i want to salute some of the troops for what they have done at camp bondsteel and camp monteith and also i want to thank those from other nations in our multinational brigade east i want to visit you now at this season of thanksgiving not only because you re doing a hard job a long way from home but because here we ve got a lot to be thankful for thanks to you we have reversed ethnic cleansing we have a successful military mission which was brilliantly executed with no combat casualties and now we have a chance not a guarantee but a chance to work with these folks to build a lasting peace in the balkans now that operation allied force is over there is a new struggle underway and camp bondsteel is on the front lines operation joint guardian will protect and deepen the peace we are working so hard to make permanent you certainly haven t wasted any time the story of bondsteel reads like something out of the settling of the old west not long ago this was a hay field soon after nato came into kosovo it became a beehive of activity between the army engineers and the navy seabees well anyway somewhere somewhere between the army engineers and the navy seabees you move over a half a million cubic yards of earth you brought enough gravel to lay a two lane road all across the state of missouri in less than five months you built 160 sea huts a chapel a gym a hospital mess halls a px a barber shop and an aviation area i want to salute a few of the responsible units don t be shy the headhunters of the engineer brigade first infantry division the blue devils of the 3504 parachute i just want to note for the press that the blue devils of the 3504 parachute infantry regiment are also known as devils in baggy pants the steel tigers of the 177 armor battalion the bone crushers of the 2nd platoon bravo company the blue spaders of the 126 infantry regiment the hellcats of the 299th forward support battalion the eagles of task force 21 aviation regiment the spartans of the 793rd military police battalion the dagger brigade of the 1st infantry division the navy seabees of battalion 3 you did pretty well let me say to all of you i know that a lot of your assignments are still dangerous i appreciate the hard work you have done to protect all the people of kosovo including the serbs i appreciate your pursuit of local thugs like the mad mortar man i appreciate your constant mediation between people who have a long way to go toward reconciliation i m told that children routinely say we love you united states well they love the united states because they love you because we gave them their freedom back we gave them a chance to go home we re giving the children a chance to have a different life than their parents have lived but let me just say this i say this every time i speak to a group of american servicemen and women overseas the biggest problem in the world today with all the modern technology all your fancy computers everybody getting on the internet all the new discoveries in science the biggest problem in the world today is the oldest problem of human society people tend to be afraid of people who don t look like them and don t worship god the way they do and come from a different place and when you re afraid of somebody it s just a short step to disliking them if you dislike them it s a short step to hating them if you hate them it s a short step to dehumanizing them and once you do that you don t feel bad about killing them now that s what this whole deal is about and you see this problem in our inability to solve the peace in the middle east although we re getting there but it s been a long time coming we may be about to have a final breakthrough in the irish civil war been 30 years coming almost 800 000 people were killed in a hundred days in rwanda by people of two different tribes one hacking the other to death with machetes they hardly had any guns at all and if you strip it all away the number one problem in this whole world today is the problem of bosnia the problem of kosovo it s racial and ethnic and religious hatred and dehumanization all you ve got to do is look around the room today and you see that our military is a stunning rebuke to that this is the american idea in flesh and blood all of you you come from all different backgrounds all different races all different religious faiths all different walks of life and you re here working together as a team you can appreciate your differences you can even make fun of them you can even make jokes about them because you know that your common humanity and your shared values are even more important than you differences now the most important thing you can do besides keeping these people alive and having security is to teach that to the children and to their parents by the power of your example and your own testimony because i am telling you what they re going through here today is an example but by no means the only example of the worst problem the world faces on the eve of a new millennium and it violates everything we in america stand for and the power of our weapons could win the military battle in kosovo but the peace can only be won by the human heart and every day they see you every day these little old kids see you working together even if they don t speak our language even if they never met any african americans or hispanics before even if they don t know any asians before they can see they have eyes they ll get it you just show up and you be yourself and you do what you re supposed to do and you treat them right the power of your example will show them that they do not have to be trapped in the pattern which led to the slaughter of a quarter of a million people in bosnia 2 5 million refugees there almost 1 million refugees here though we acted quicker and because we acted quicker they all came home but now that they came home they ve got to learn how to win the peace and i say that to the other nations who are here represented i want people to see americans working with you i want these children to know that the world is a better place when people are proud of their own race and ethnicity and religion but respectful of others when they are secure enough in who they are that they don t have to put anybody else down hurt anybody else torch anybody else s church or mosque just to feel that they matter this is the most important issue in the whole world today and just by getting up every day going to work keeping the kind of morale that you manifested today with your cheers and your pride you are a rebuke to the biggest problem in the world and the power of your example can do more than anything else to help us to win the peace thank you god bless you and happy thanksgiving you all know i have an important job because i m your commander in chief right well tomorrow because i m also the president and i have broad executive authority i get home at 10 00 p m tonight we re all dog tired but i ve got to get up and go to work tomorrow because i have to do something that every president has been doing since the 1920s i have to pardon the thanksgiving turkey and they bring me a big turkey and we let one go so we can eat all the others and they put this turkey in a petting zoo for children to see in the washington area anyway it s always a great deal i just say when i go into the office tomorrow to pardon the turkey i m going to take the falcon and put it on my desk so all of america can see when my desk is on television what you re doing thank you dem wjclinton23 2 94 bill_clinton thank you i have to bear so much bad news i must say that s the only time i ve ever been introduced as the bearer of good news thank you mr vice president and thank you all for being here the members of the administration the members of the congress and our distinguished guests from california we re glad to see all of you here we are here to announce some new help for california as you work to come out of the consequences of the earthquake but first i want to talk about the announcement made just this morning at the pentagon to which the vice president referred this morning we announced the latest round of awards in our technology reinvestment project which helps companies and workers in defense industries to develop technologies to meet our nation s commercial and military needs this is the fourth round of trp awards we ve announced since october so far 605 million in competitive federal grants awarded on merit have gone to firms and communities through this innovative program it s a cornerstone of our reinvestment and conversion initiative recognizing that those who worked so hard to win the cold war should not be unduly burdened by cutbacks in military expenditures and that all the work they have done the expertise they developed the barriers that they have broken should be turned to the advantage of america as we move into the 21st century the trp is of special interest to the people of california because california has been on the leading edge of military technology and converting this know how for dual use and commercial applications will help our country move into the next century as the economic leader of the world using things that relate from biomedical and environmental technologies to advanced transportation and communications systems all rooted originally in our investments in national defense the projects which have been funded are exciting they re futuristic they re farsighted they have potentially enormous beneficial impact to all the american people i can t tell you about all of them we awarded 50 just today but let me just mention a couple one involves the bay area rapid transit system and hughes aircraft together they ll develop an advanced automated train control system that will identify the precise location of every train even those in tunnels that will allow trains to operate at closer distances to each other and that means the existing infrastructure can double its rider capacity another project will establish a technology center in cerritos california to transfer leading edge composites manufacturing technology to 16 000 small defense and commercial firms just in the los angeles area the university of california at san diego will work with alcoa electronic packaging and hewlett packard to offer displaced defense engineers a two year master s program in world class manufacturing engineering this will emphasize foreign language training and equipment internship in international manufacturing companies the aim of course is to help these folks build on their old skills with new learning to keep them vital and employed and to keep our country competitive in the global marketplace to provide economic opportunity and shore up military strength and to ensure that the people who own the cold war won t be left out in the cold that s what this trp the technology reinvestment project is all about and that s why i m proud it s proving to be such a success i will say that on the last round of grants i think california won again i will say on a purely competitive basis almost 40 percent of the total dollars and when you consider the fact that when we started this the state of california with 12 percent of the country s population had over 21 percent of the nations s military expenditures and has had almost 40 percent of the base closings the last two rounds of base closings and over 40 percent of the last round of base closings it is heartening that in the race for the technologies of the future and therefore the jobs of the future that the whole conversion effort is obviously beginning to work in the way that it ought to work let me now say a few words about our continuing efforts to deal with the consequences of the earthquake in the five weeks since the northridge earthquake our administration has worked closely with state and local officials as all of you know to try to help families businesses and communities we are working to get the whole region back on its feet again all of you know what the vice president has already said that the fema director james lee witt secretary cisneros secretary pena mr panetta and many many others have worked tirelessly to try to deal with the problems that were generated by the earthquake immediately after the earthquake i extended the period for which federal government paid the entire cost of fema disaster assistance and increased from 75 percent to 90 percent the share paid by the federal government for fema public assistance programs now today we are announcing some loan guarantees which will help to meet the remaining share owed by the state of california congress has appropriated new funds for fema for the small business administration for the departments of transportation housing and urban development education and veterans affairs to rebuild these homes and businesses to house the homeless to repair the highways and bridges to restore the damaged schools and other facilities i do want to say a word of thanks to secretary pena for trying to accelerate the construction process and we stood on one of those totally broken sections of highway and they said it was going to take a year to fix i can only imagine how mad the drivers would be i know how mad the drivers get at me when we stop traffic at one intersection for two minutes here i multiplied two minutes times whatever the number is to get to one year and it seemed to me that we ought to try to make the contracts go faster i thank you for that recently your governor speaker brown and the senate president pro tem bill lockyer mayor riordan and other officials have asked if there was any way we could lend california the money they believe is needed to pay the state and local share of the fema assistance costs today i am asking secretary cisneros to offer loan guarantees totalling more than 500 million to jurisdictions affected by the earthquake including the cities of los angeles and santa monica los angeles and ventura counties and other towns and communities which suffered damages this loan guarantee authority we are extending to local governments will enable them to obtain loans from private lenders at below market rates that will take some of the bite out of the cost of recovery the assistance will be provided under hud s community development block grant section 108 loan guarantee program i ve asked secretary cisneros to work with the local governments to work out repayment terms that meet the needs of local communities the secretary is also committed to providing technical assistance in preparing the applications and to expedite the review process this will ensure that the flow of assistance to those in need in southern california will continue without interruption i ve asked the federal agencies whenever possible to use their discretionary authorities to waive rules and regulations to expedite the delivery of further assistance this step today builds on these efforts it reflects a commitment that our administration has made to the people of california a commitment to do all that we can to help your people work their way out of this disaster day in and day out until all the work is done in recent years the citizens of southern california in particular have endured multiple disasters from riots to fires and mudslides and now the earthquake that s what people around here call a character building experience i just want you to know that i am committed to ensuring that our government continues to meet those obligations that we have to give you the opportunity to make a full comeback in the face of this latest setback let me just say one other thing if i might even though this is a time of renewal and reconstruction for the people of los angeles and california it s also a day of sadness for many people in that area and for many of the rest of us who believe in the rule of law and appreciate those who enforce it yesterday as all of you know a rookie policewoman named cristy lynne hamilton was shot and killed in the line of duty less than one week after she became a commissioned police officer a teenager with a semiautomatic weapon hardly gave her a chance to emerge from her patrol car before she was shot down she received her diploma as i said just five days ago at the academy she was honored by her classmates as being the most inspirational officer candidate and now her city has lost a policewoman who could have made a difference to people on her beat her force has lost its ninth officer this year her children have lost a mother there have been too many funerals and too many folded flags presented to too many grieving survivors our duty is clear we have pending before the congress an opportunity to pass crime legislation that is both tough and smart that would put another 100 000 police officers on the street a proposal of real value for the cities of california and at the same time ban the kinds of semi automatic weapons that are used for killing people like cristy hamilton and which have no justification for sporting or hunting purposes i hope that we can make this legislation law and that we can do it soon many of you in this room have worked for a long time on these issues senator feinstein in particular got the semiautomatic weapons ban into the senate crime bill and we all thank him for that all i can tell you is that we are here primarily to celebrate our coming together to overcome the destructive impacts of an act of god it is time that we here in washington muster the courage and the fortitude to do something to help you also overcome the acts of people that have no basis in law or honor not only to honor the memory of cristy lynne hamilton and all those others like her we have lost but to defend the honor of the american people to live together as human beings in a common community thank you very much dem wjclinton23 2 95a bill_clinton mr prime minister and mrs chretien mr speaker of the senate mr speaker of the house of commons honorable senators and members of the house of commons distinguished members of the diplomatic corps ladies and gentlemen i have pondered for some time the differences between the canadian political system and the american one and when the prime minister pointed out the unanimous resolution you passed yesterday i realized that in one respect clearly you are superior we do not control the weather in washington d c and i am grateful that you do i also thank the prime minister for his history lesson i have never believed in the iron laws of history so much as i do now i thank the prime minister and all of you for welcoming me to this magnificent capital city the prime minister first came to this chamber to represent the people of canada when president kennedy was in the white house i resent that because when president kennedy was in the white house i was in junior high school and now the prime minister has less gray hair than i do and he does in spite of the fact that since that time he has occupied nearly every seat in his nation s cabinet the first time i met him i wondered why this guy couldn t hold down a job i can tell you this we in the united states know that his service to this nation over so many years has earned him the gratitude and the respect of the canadian people it has also earned him the gratitude and the respect of the people of the united states i know it is traditional for american presidents when they address this body to speak of their affection for their ties to the canadian people on behalf of the united states let me stay with that tradition and say l amitie solide but let me say to you that it is a big part of our life i remember so well more than a decade ago when hillary and i with our then very young daughter came to canada to celebrate the new year and we started in montreal and we drove to chateau montebello and along the way we drove around ottawa and we watched all those wonderful people skating along the canal i came from a southern state i couldn t imagine that anybody could ever get on skates and stand in any body of water for very long and i could see that always hillary has had in the back of her mind all this long time how much she would like to be skating along this canal and i think tomorrow mrs chretien is going to give her her wish and we are looking forward to that my wife has visited toronto and we had a wonderful wonderful family vacation in western canada in victoria and vancouver back in 1990 one of the best times that all of us have ever had together anywhere we are deeply indebted to your culture our daughter s name was inspired by canadian songwriter joni mitchell s wonderful song chelsea morning and all of you know that in the spring of 1993 the first time i left the united states as president i came to vancouver for the summit with president yeltsin both of us at this time were under some significant amount of stress as we tried to reaffirm our relationship and solidify democracy in russia and i can say without any equivocation the reception we received from the people of canada as well as from the government and the prime minister made it very very easy for us to have a successful meeting and for that we are very grateful i come here today to reaffirm the ties that bind the united states and canada in a new age of great promise and challenge a time of rapid change when both opportunity and uncertainty live side by side in my country and in yours a time when people are being lifted up by new possibilities and held down by old demons all across the world i came here because i believe our nations together must seize the opportunities and meet the challenges of this new age and we must i say again do this together from the oil from alberta that fires factories in the united states to the silicon chips from california that power your computers we are living proof of the value of partnerships and cooperation technologies produced in your nation save lives in our hospitals while food from our farms line your supermarkets our horizons have broadened because we have listened in the united states to the cbc and our culture is much richer because of the contributions of writers like robertson davies whom hillary had the pleasure of meeting last week after reading him for years and margaret atwood and because of the wonderful photography of josef karsh whose famous picture of churchill i just saw he took some pictures of hillary and me that aren t so distinguished but i love them anyway and as a musician i have to thank you especially for oscar peterson a man i consider to be the greatest jazz pianist ours is the world s most remarkable relationship the prime minister said whether we like it or not i can tell you that on most days i like it very very much we have to strengthen that relationship we have to strengthen it for our own benefit through trade and commerce and travel and we have to strengthen it because it is our job to help to spread the benefits of democracy and freedom and prosperity and peace beyond our shores we re neighbors by the grace of nature we are allies and friends by choice there are those in both our nations who say we can no longer afford to and perhaps we no longer even need to exercise our leadership in the world and when so many of our people are having their own problems it is easy to listen to that assertion but it is wrong we are two nations blessed with great resources and great histories and we have great responsibilities we were built after all by men and women who fled the tyranny and intolerance of the old world for the new we are the nations of pioneers people who were armed with the confidence they needed to strike out on their own and to have the talents that god gave them shape their dreams in a new and different land culture and tradition to be sure distinguish us from one another in many ways that all of us are still learning about every day but we share core values and that is more important a devotion to hard work an ardent belief in democracy a commitment to giving each and every citizen the right to live up to his or her god given potential and an understanding of what we owe to the world for the gifts we have been given these common values have nourished a partnership that has become a model for new democracies all around this world they can look at us and see just how much stronger the bonds between nations can be when their governments answer the citizens desires for freedom and democracy and enterprise and when they work together to build each other up instead of working overtime to tear each other down of course we have our differences and some of them are complex enough to tear your hair out over but we have approached them directly and in good faith as true friends must and we in the united states come more and more every day to respect and to understand that we can learn from what is different about your nation and its many peoples canada has shown the world how to balance freedom with compassion and tradition with innovation in your efforts to provide health care to all your citizens to treat your senior citizens with the dignity and respect they deserve to take on tough issues like the move afoot to outlaw automatic weapons designed for killing and not hunting and i might say since you applauded so you are doing it in a nation of people who respect the right to hunt and understand the difference between law and order and sportsmanship those of us who have traveled here appreciate especially the reverence you have shown for the bounty of god s nature from the laurentians to the rockies in a world darkened by ethnic conflicts that literally tear nations apart canada has stood for all of us as a model of how people of different cultures can live and work together in peace prosperity and respect the united states as many of my predecessors have said enjoyed its excellent relationship with a strong and united canada but we recognize just as the prime minister said with regard to your relationships to us a moment ago that your political future is of course entirely for you to decide that s what a democracy is all about you know now now i will tell you something about our political system you want to know why my state of the union address took so long it s because i evenly divided the things that would make the democrats clap and the republicans clap and we doubled the length of the speech in common enthusiasm i ask you all of you to remember that we do look to you and to remember what our great president of the postwar era harry truman said when he came here in 1947 canada s eminent position today he said is a tribute to the patience tolerance and strength of character of her people canada s notable achievement of national unity and progress through accommodation moderation and forbearance can be studied with profit by sister nations those words ring every bit as true today as they did then for generations now our countries have joined together in efforts to make the world more secure and more prosperous we have reached out together to defend our values and our interests in world war i on the beaches of normandy and korea together we helped to summon the united nations into existence together we stood fast against communist tyranny and prevailed in the cold war together we stood shoulder to shoulder against aggression in the gulf war now our nations have stepped forward to help haiti emerge from repression and restore its democracy i thank the prime minister for what he said about that when it was not popular anywhere in the world to worry about poor beleaguered abandoned haiti canada was truly a friend of haiti in one international forum after another we stand side by side to shape a safer and a better world whether it is at the world population conference pushing together for an indefinite extension of npt in any number of ways we are working together and we know that for canada this history of action is a matter of deep tradition and personal conviction the tradition runs from lester pearson to jean chretien it says we must be engaged in the affairs of the world you have always shown the wisdom of reaching out instead of retreating of rising to new responsibilities instead of retrenching your tradition of engagement continues to this day and believe you me it earns respect all around the world from people of races and ethnic groups and political systems in places like cyprus and the sinai canadian troops have played an invaluable role in preventing more violence in those critical hot spots today your 2 000 peacekeepers in the former yugoslavia are courageously fulfilling their mission in the midst of one of the most intractable difficult problems in our lifetime for a half century the united states has shared your philosophy of action and consistent exercise of leadership abroad and i am determined notwithstanding all the cross currents in our country that we shall preserve that commitment these times may be turbulent but we have an historic opportunity to increase security and prosperity for our own people and for people all around the world and i want you to know that i intend to do everything in my power to keep our country constructively involved in the problems that we must face if we re going to guarantee that our children will live in a peaceful sane and free world imagine what the persian gulf would look like today if we had not risen to the challenge of iraqi aggression imagine what tariffs and barriers would plague the world trading system if we hadn t worked so hard together over such a long period of time from the end of world war ii to the events the prime minister described to nafta to gatt to the asian pacific cooperation to the summit of americas that was held in miami in december imagine how different it would have been imagine how much worse the horrible tragedy in rwanda would have been if we had not been there to try to provide essential help in those refugee camps to keep people alive we cannot let anyone or anything break this great tradition of our nations in our partnership we will find the key to protecting our people and increasing their prosperity and the power to reach beyond our shores in the name of democracy and freedom not only because it is right because it is our interest to do so just before we came down here the prime minister and i agreed again that if we were going to meet these new challenges in the 21st century we must adapt the institutions that helped us to win the cold war so that they can serve us as well in the 21st century we have to do that some have evolved with the changing world some have clearly already discarded their old missions and assumed new roles but we have also seen that the end of the east west conflict the advent of 24 hour financial markets sudden environmental disasters the rise of international terrorism the resurgence of ancient ethnic hatreds all these things have placed new demands on these institutions that the statesmen of 50 years ago simply did not imagine the 21st century will leave behind those who sit back and think that automatically these problems will be solved we simply have to face these challenges and ask ourselves what do we have to change and how are we going to do it for example to meet the security needs of the future we must work together to see that nato the most successful military alliance in all of history adapts to this new era that means that we must make certain that the inevitable process of nato expansion proceeds smoothly gradually and openly there should be no surprises to anyone about what we are about and we will work so that the conditions the timing the military implications of nato expansion will be widely known and clearly understood in advance and to parallel the enlargement of nato we have to develop close and strong ties with russia i have worked hard for that and so has the prime minister we must continue working together at the united nations where our nations have together taken the lead in efforts to reform our peacekeeping operations to control costs to improve information gathering to make sure we have the right kind of command and control system before the young people who put on our uniforms are put in harm s way we have to continue also to work at reforming the international economic institutions we ve already made some great strides in reshaping the new global economy with the passage of gatt which is the most comprehensive trade agreement in history but the work is only beginning at the upcoming g 7 summit in halifax which we re very much looking forward to we will be working to ensure that our international trading institutions advance the cause of trade liberalization in ways that produce tangible gains for the people of the countries involved we also have to reexamine the institutions that were created at the time of bretton woods the imf the world bank to make sure that they re going to be able to master the new and increasingly complex generation of transnational problems that face us problems like explosive population growth and environmental degradation problems like those that we have been facing together in mexico and throughout latin america in the recent financial crisis real progress on all these areas will depend not only on our willingness to be involved but our willingness to lead as partners together canada and the united states are striving to seize all the advantages the new global economy has to offer trade produces high wage jobs we know that the kind of jobs that give our people the opportunity to care for their families and educate their children and to leave the next generation better off than they were a dream that has been called into question in many advanced economies in the last few years the success of nafta which is generating new jobs and creating new markets from monterrey to medicine hat is the proof and now as the prime minister has said so well we in nafta are on our way to becoming the four amigos that phrase will go down in history i wish i d have thought of it we ll soon start our consultations with chile for accession in nafta and they will be a very good partner the addition of that thriving economy will only continue to increase the benefits for all of us i want to take another moment here to thank canada for its recent support and help in the financial crisis in mexico you understood what we had on the line that more than mexico was involved that jobs and trade and future and our support for democracy and stability throughout latin america was at issue you understood it and we are grateful because we stood shoulder to shoulder we have a chance to preserve this remarkable explosion of democracy that we saw at the summit of the americas and we should continue to do that i want to say a word if i might about the environment as we expand trade we have to remember we must defend that which we have inherited and enhance it if we can the natural riches of this continent we share are staggering we have cooperated to such great effect on our continent in the past our air quality agreement is solving the acid rain problem the great lakes are on the road to recovery the eagles have returned to lake erie now we have to build on those accomplishments with the nafta environmental commission located in montreal your country will play a key role in ensuring that we protect the extraordinary bounty that has been given to us for our children and our grandchildren nafta is only one of several fronts on which we can work together to both increase our prosperity and protect our environment but we must do both our nations are building on the progress of last years summit of the americas as well it will create a free trade area embracing the entire hemisphere across the pacific as the prime minister said we paved the way for new markets and for free trade among the dynamic economies in the asian pacific area that was a very important thing for us to do because they are growing very fast and we did not want this world to break up into geographical trading blocks in ways that would shrink the potential of the people of canada and the united states for decades to come all these efforts will only enhance what is now the greatest trading relationship yours and ours every day people ideas and goods stream across our border bilateral trade now is more than a billion canadian dollars every day i learned to say that and about 270 billion united states dollars last year by far the worlds largest bilateral relationship our trade with each other has become an essential pillar in the architecture of both our economies today 4 5 million americans have jobs that involve trade between our two countries those are the concrete benefits of our partnership between 1988 and 1994 trade between our nations rose about 60 percent last year along it increased by 15 percent but the statistics don t give the human reality behind the flourishing exchange of goods and ideas our trade is creating real jobs for real people in boscawen new hampshire just for example a small company called secure care products produces monitoring systems for patients in nursing homes recently secure care began exporting its products to canada sales there are already growing fast and the company expects them to triple this year and so secure care is hiring people like susan southwick the granddaughter of quebeckers the mother of two and now the company s 26th employee giving susan and her husband a shot at the dream which canadians and americans share that s what this partnership is all about much further away from you in greensboro north carolina another small company called createc forestry systems is showing how our trade helps people turn their hopes into realities it was founded by a man named albert jenks in his family s kitchen createc makes hand held computers that track lumber mill inventories those computers help managers assess their needs better so fewer trees are cut unnecessarily a few years ago createc began to export to canada and now those sales accounts have risen to nearly 20 percent of their total business that means a more secure future for the company for mr jenks for his son patrick who works with his father in the family business that shows how our trade can increase our prosperity and protect the environment as well your companies are thriving in our markets bringing tangible benefits to canadians whether its repairing the engines of some of the u s air force s largest planes or manufacturing software to manage our natural resources or building some of the olympic village for atlanta s 1996 games canadian firms are a strong presence in the united states their successes there help your people to turn their hopes into facts and their dreams into reality the example of our biggest industry shows another side of this remarkable story working together u s and canadian companies have integrated north america s auto industry and staged one of the most remarkable comebacks in all the history of the industrial revolution we have drawn on each other s strengths and today our companies work so closely that we do not speak any longer of u s or canadian in these vehicles but of north american content whether it s a chrysler minivan made in windsor or a chrysler jeep made in detroit i think that was the ambassador from michigan i mean from the united states clapping down there productivity and employment have risen to such a point that when i visited detroit last fall the biggest complaint i heard in a state that was given up as lost economically a decade ago the biggest complaint i heard from the autoworkers was that they were working too much overtime now where i come from that is known as a high class problem the auto industry now provides more than one million jobs in our countries to reinforce our commitment to nafta and to dramatically expand an important market tomorrow our nations will sign an agreement to open the skies between our two nations this agreement which allows for a dramatic expansion of u s and canadian service to each other s nations will create thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars of economic activities in our cities yours and mine we ve reached a fair solution that will make life easier for travelers on both sides of the border that will profit both canadian and u s airline carriers that will increase the mutual travel and interconnections of our people that we have done so amicably provides yet another model of how neighboring nations can settle their differences friendship engagement canada and the united states have shown the best there is in partnership s between nations all the great potential that awaits all the free peoples of this earth if they can join in common cause we are as the monument at the st lawrence seaway declares two nations whose frontiers are the frontiers of friendship whose ways are the ways of freedom whose works are the works of peace every day we see the enormous benefits this partnership gives to us in jobs in prosperity in the great creative energy that our interchanges bring but we have only seen the beginning for the susan southwicks who want a chance to build better lives and the companies like createc that are trying to build solid businesses that will last this partnership of ours holds a great promise with vast horizons as vast as our great continent together we ve turned our energies toward improving the world around us for now nearly a century today more than ever let us reaffirm and renew that great tradition let us engage and confront the great challenges of the end of this century and the beginning of the next we must sustain our efforts we must enhance our efforts we must maintain our partnership we must make it stronger this is our task and our mission together we will be equal to it the border separates our peoples but there are no boundaries to our common dreams thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton23 2 95b bill_clinton prime minister and mrs chretien ambassador and mrs chretien ambassador and mrs blanchard ladies and gentlemen let me begin by thanking the prime minister for his generous words and by thanking prime minister and mrs chretien and all of our canadian hosts for making hillary and me feel so at home here today in our first day of our wonderful visit we all have so much in common so many roots in common i couldn t help thinking when we shared so many jokes in the parliament today and so many good laughs of all the things i might have said one of the things that is most fascinating to americans about canada is the way you blend your cultures i understand now that we ve come across the river from ottawa to hull everything is first in french and then in english and i m trying to accommodate to all this and i thought about a true story that i would share with you one of the members of our official party today came all the way from georgia mr gordon giffen who s sitting out here but he was born in canada and you should know that georgia in the heart of the american south has a lieutenant governer named pierre howard he was very self conscious about running with a name like pierre in the south and in desperation one day he said well you have to understand pierre is french for bubba and you all know that i come from arkansas i can say to you with absolute confidence that if any person were here from my state tonight he or she would say je me sens chez moi au canada the prime minister and i have a lot in common we have small town roots and modest backgrounds his in shawinigan and quebec did i say that right shawinigan shawinigan better and mine in hope i have a hometown that s easier to pronounce we began early in political life he entered the parliament i think when he was 29 i tried to enter the congress when i was 28 i failed and i have been grateful for it ever since our political persuasions and our programs are so similar that one magazine called me a closet canadian i think that is a compliment and i take it as such we talk a lot about our humble roots at home when our friends wish to make fun of me they say that if i talk long enough i will convince people that i was born in a log cabin i built myself and that s what i thought the first time i met prime minister chretien we ve had a few agonizing political defeats and we ve managed a comeback as i think about it i can only think of one thing that separates me from the prime minister about 15 points in the public opinion polls i resent it but i m doing what i can to overcome it mr prime minister one of the glories of ottawa is the wonderful old canal that winds through this community it s protected by sweeping and weeping willows in the summertime and it s as i saw today animated by skaters in the winter as i understand it the canal was constructed about 150 years ago by a british engineer to help defend canada from the united states thankfully i m told that if you ask most canadians today why the canal was built they can t say the fact that the canal s origin is unremembered speaks volumes about the unique relationship between our two countries neighbors allies friends each of us is blessed to share with the other the bounty of this magnificent continent over the years the partnership we have forged has produced many tangible benefits for our people as you pointed out we have a joint defense program that protects our skies and makes us more secure we have a shared commitment to our environment that improves the quality of the air we breath and the water we drink we have economies that are so complementary we enjoy the world s largest trading relationship in ways that create jobs and raise incomes on both sides of our border we have a common passion for democracy that has united us in trying to protect freedom and peace and democracy and enterprise far from our own lands the interest and values we share have allowed us to recognize and respect our differences as well canada has shown the world how to build a gentler society with a deeply felt concern for the health and well being for all its citizens it has shown the world that strength and compassion are not incompatible there is much in your country from which americans can and do draw inspiration and so tonight in celebrating all that unites us let us also remember that which is unique in our countries hillary and i enjoyed very much our all too brief tour of this magnificent tribute to your unique culture let us resolve to work together to bring out the best in each other as we move forward together as partners and as friends long live this great nation mr prime minister one of your most illustrious predecessors lester pearson put it well when he said i now accept with equanimity the question so constantly addressed to me are you an american and merely return the accurate answer yes i am a canadian and so tonight in celebrating our countries and what unites us let us work together and let us say long live canada vive le canada dem wjclinton23 3 96 bill_clinton thank you so much thank you for the wonderful welcome thank you mayor qualls for the kind things you said for making me feel so welcome here for your outstanding leadership for cincinnati and congratulations on the recent success of your education and your stadium referendum that was a very impressive thing thank you father hoff for making me feel so welcome here at xavier you know i graduated from georgetown i tell everyone i m the closest baptist you ll ever get to a jesuit and i m delighted to be here the jesuits have always been famous for their humility i hope father hoff doesn t get in trouble for saying that now that i had seen the pope three times i could finally come to xavier but i m trying to move up in life and i enjoyed it thank you i want to say a warm word of thanks to my good friend senator john glenn hillary and i admire john and his wonderful wife annie so much i want all of you to know that one of the most challenging jobs we ve had in washington in the last three years is to figure out how to downsize the government without undermining the quality of service we re giving to the american people and we now have the smallest federal government in 30 years it s 205 000 people smaller than it was when i took office by the end of this year it will be the smallest federal government since john kennedy was president but if you want to do that in ways that first are humane to the employees involved that do the maximum amount through early retirement or give the employees time to find other jobs and generous severance packages and don t hurt public services it takes a really careful strategy and the leadership of john glenn from his committee telling us how to do this and helping us do it was absolutely essential and the whole country is in his debt for that and for many other things and i wanted to say that in front of his constituents today so that you could know he deserves a lion s share of the credit for what you did i d like to thank the young musicians for playing hail to the chief so well thank you very much i d also like to say that felisha coady can sing for me any time i thought she was great you know i love coming to cincinnati today because cincinnati really disproves something that mark twain said about you a long time ago remember what mark twain said about cincinnati if the world would end i d come to cincinnati because everything happens here 10 years later that s not true cincinnati is ahead of the times in many ways i saw it today in looking at the remarkable work that you re doing with the communications between the school systems here and the universities and the business community trying to help every young person succeed i saw it in the votes that were cast in the referendum i see it in the growth of the phenomenal businesses you have here i see it in your successful obsession with basketball i see it in many ways so i am honored to be here today and what i want to talk to you about today is something that will affect the lives of every person in this audience but especially the young people and let me begin with a little background i ran for president in 1992 having been governor of my state for 12 years because i was literally obsessed with trying to deal with all the sweeping changes going on in our nation and world in a way that would allow us as a people to achieve three critical objectives one is i wanted then and i want now for this country to go into the 21st century in a way that every american who is willing to work for it will have a shot at the american dream secondly i wanted to maintain the leadership of the united states at the end of the cold war as the world s strongest force for peace and freedom for security and prosperity and thirdly i wanted to see this country come together around its basic values not be divided as it too often is especially in election season if you were to ask me three years later what the most important lesson as president i have learned it is this simply when we are divided we defeat ourselves when we work together america always wins and so i began to work on these objectives i believed that we needed a new economic policy i believed we needed a new social policy that emphasized personal responsibility as well as giving people the opportunity to escape the problems before them i believed that we needed a new aggressive sharply focused policy in the world that got america more fair trade agreements and reduced the threats of not only nuclear war but terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction and i thought we had to dramatically change the role of government to make it smaller and less bureaucratic and less burdensome but still very strong and effective in working with the private sector to create an environment in which individual citizens and families and businesses and schools and community groups could make the most of their own lives by working together now three years later you see the incredibly impressive dimensions at the time in which we are living including some things that seem to be paradoxical and so let me describe this time as i see it to explain why i ve come here to talk about this issue of not only our responsibility in government but businesses responsibility to make a better future for the united states and for the working people of america consider just the last three years three years ago we had much higher unemployment the jobs we were creating were overwhelmingly lower paying jobs the deficit was more than twice as big as it is now well after three years the good news is that the deficit is half of what it was three years ago that our economy has produced over 8 4 million jobs that in 1995 most of those jobs actually paid above average wages not below those new jobs we ve had three years in a row of record new formation of small businesses our trade is at an all time high with other countries interest rates have been low for home mortgages so home ownership is at a 15 year high that is the good news and that is good news america has recovered our lost lead we now lead again the world in the sales of automobiles and semiconductors every year there is a world economic forum in europe that votes on the most productive economies in the world after we had slipped to fifth four years ago for the last three years we ve been voted first by a panel of international economists again america is number one that s good news if you look at where we are with our social problems the crime rate is lower the welfare rolls are lower the food stamp rolls are lower the poverty rate is lower the teen pregnancy rate has dropped what has gone up is child support collections in the last three years i think that s very hopeful for all of us now we ll never come together again until we acknowledge some truths though the other side of this time of change first on the social side all of those things are lower but they re all still too high they re all still too high and i m not going to talk at great length about that today but i will say this if we know what brings the crime rate down which is more police officers on the street and community policing effective partnerships in the community and giving our young people something to say yes to as well as something to say no to we ought to do more of it not less of it we shouldn t turn away from it if we know now because i have given the states and localities more freedom to experiment in the area of welfare in three years than occurred in the past 12 years combined even though the congress has still not passed welfare reform legislation that is both tough on work and good for children almost three quarters of the people on welfare in america today are under welfare reform experiments because our executive branch has just told the states to have at it and if we know what works which is investing in children providing work alternatives being tough and requiring people to go to work but making sure there is a job there and making sure the kids aren t punished then we ought to do more of it not less of it that s what we ought to do we need to do that but let me come back now to the economy how do you square all of those good statistics i just gave you with the fact that you constantly read articles about businesses downsizing you constantly read articles who have worked harder and harder without a raise in years and years and constantly see from your own experience that there are communities that have not been touched by any economic recovery how can those two things be squared i want to focus on that today and what everybody s responsibility is the truth is that the good news is true and so is the bad news so are the problems they re both true why because we are entering a new economy that is so different that we re going through the period of most profound change that we ve been through in 100 years it was 100 years ago when most americans stopped living on the farm and started living in towns cities 100 years ago when most people stopped working on the farm and started working in factories or in businesses that supported factories or depended upon them and when that happened there was a great uprooting of the patterns of life in america and a lot of people had untold new opportunities and a lot of people had a lot of money that they never had before and a lot of people were left out in the cold and sort of felt like they were twisting in the wind america developed what was called then a new progressive movement and its first embodiment was a great republican president theodore roosevelt which began to ask the question what are we going to have to do together to reap the benefits of the industrial era when most of us are now living in towns and cities not living in the country anymore in order that every american will be treated fairly and we can grow stronger together that s what the big debate was that debate went on for 50 years from the late 1800s arguably until the end of world war ii when with the g i bill and a lot of other things the united states of america built the greatest middle class the world has ever known and we had 30 years in which all americans incomes were growing whether they were in the poorest part of our income scheme or the wealthiest part and we had a very strong growing country that was growing together then along comes the information and technology revolution and now most economic markets are not national they re international the market for money the market for products the market for services more and more global now most work is done with the mind not with muscle even in factories now because of the information revolution the nature of the workplace itself is changing how could i reduce the federal government by 205 000 people and nobody know it in cincinnati why because of the digital chip because fewer people can do more work that is related to information gathering and dissemination it is the most sweeping change in 100 years bill gates the great computer genius who founded microsoft says that the digital chip is the most significant change in communications in 500 years since gutenberg printed the first bible in europe and that explains how you can have all this basically good news and still hear these gripping stories of people who are caught in the crosswinds of change there are basically three groups of americans who are caught in those crosswinds number one there are people who live in isolated inner city neighborhoods and isolated rural neighborhoods who have felt no economic recovery because they don t have new jobs there it s hard to get the investment in number two there are the people principally those in the bottom half of the hourly wage earners of america who work harder and don t seem to ever get a raise because they don t have a special educational skill that a rich country can pay high rewards to in a global economy where people who live for things we can t live on can send products into our markets and number three there are these people who have worked all their lives for big companies that are now being downsized either because they have to to survive or because if they do it they can make more money because they don t need as many people especially in middle management anymore and you ve been seeing a lot of their gripping stories a lot of them are about my age you know when you re 50 years old and you ve worked for the same company for 25 years and you ve got two kids about to go to college and you get laid off and you think my goodness i ll never get a job paying this again how am i going to send my kids to college it s not a very comfortable thing for somebody to say well relax the president just signed a telecommunications bill and it s going to create 3 million jobs in the next few years go to work for sprint or mci and you say but i d have to go 500 miles away and i ve got this home mortgage and i ve got these two kids that are just about to get out of high school and what am i supposed to do so the good news is true folks and it s important the united states has created 8 4 million jobs in the last three years and one month and during that time the people in the other big six economies of the world have created a net zero three of the countries have created a few thousand jobs three of the countries have lost a few thousand jobs they netted out zero so the big seven economies of the world have created 8 4 million jobs in the last three years all of them in america i wouldn t give that up for anything in the world that s nothing to sneeze at that s something we should want so the question is how do we do today what was done 100 years ago how do we keep the dynamism of the american economy how do we go forward into the future with great confidence how do we do it together in a way that enables us to achieve our objectives every american willing to work for it has a shot at the american dream we have stronger families and better childhoods for all of our people how are we going to do that that is what i want to talk about today yes the government has certain responsibilities i ve described some of the things we have already done there are other things that we should do in government we ought to finish the work of balancing the budget to get interest rates down even further in a way that will enable us to invest and grow our economy we ought to do that without cutting our investments in things like education and the environment and research and technology and college loans and college scholarships the things that will grow the economy we should do that and we can do that we ought to pass some tax relief for average families and i think the most important tax benefit we could give america at a time when education is critical to income in the future is to give every american family a deduction of up to 10 000 a year for the cost of college education i believe that now there are other things that we ought to do but let s face it one of the things that we have done in downsizing the government is to become even more reliant on the private sector a far higher percentage of the new jobs created in our administration our private sector jobs as compared with the jobs created in the previous 12 years i want it that way but if that is true that means that this new era puts even more responsibility on that private sector not only to grow and do well but to help in dealing with the dislocations the problems and the challenges that this new age imposes upon us that s what i want to talk about today and i don t want to ask you if you agree with me on all these things but at least i want you to think about this because we have to succeed as citizens as workers and as parents in order for america to grow we all have mutual roles and let me begin again by saying what i said before our business community is the engine of economic growth that s the envy of the entire world the most fundamental responsibility of any business in a free enterprise system is to make a profit that s how they hire people and pay them that s how they serve their consumers so that s important but we recognize that there are other responsibilities as well some businesses are in trouble and some businesses are so small they can only worry about the bottom line but what i want to say to you today is that a lot of businesses in america today never make the headlines because what they re doing is good in trying to help people cope with all these changes and in trying to help their employees cope with these changes they re actually making more money so as we look ahead we should ask ourselves what is the role of government in this new era it should be smaller it should be less bureaucratic but it should be strong enough to help to create a climate which enables people to make the most of their own lives what is the role of business in this new era it should first and foremost do well make money so you can hire people and contribute but it should whenever possible do well in a way that strengthens families and grows the middle class in a way that develops a loyal productive work force for the business and keeps the middle class alive so we can support all these businesses by buying the goods and services that they produce that is the balance that we must seek to achieve it is also true that none of us exists in a vacuum business leaders would be the first to say that they are not motivated solely by economic considerations i just talked about the work here done in cincinnati in trying to develop the capacities of our young people here and john pepper of proctor and gamble was there they ve invested a lot of money in this i don t know if it helps their bottom line in the short run but in the long run it s the morally right thing to do i think will turn out to be good for the company by building a community that s positive to live in the other day i was with three grocery store chains who announced that they were going to give up all their vending machines for cigarettes because they couldn t enforce the law that says it s illegal for young people under the age of 18 to smoke and they didn t want to be a part of it so they re just going to give up the income they re just going to give it up so i think it s important to recognize that there are a lot of incredibly good things going on in the private sector today and that s what i want to talk to you about because the people of this country are our most important asset and our ability first of all to develop the educational capacity of our people and secondly to develop good values and a good sense of partnership in every workplace in america is going to be critical to our future because you look a the work you can move technology anywhere you can now move information anywhere you can move money anywhere in the flash of an eye what we have that is special what you have that is special in cincinnati are what s been done here already and the people who live here that s what s special that s the key to the future so i believe that the government has a responsibility to create a framework in which the economy can grow and the government has a responsibility to help people who fall between the cracks in this new era the private sector also has some challenges facing it and many companies are meeting those challenges let me just mention five one or two were mentioned by senator glenn first and most important we have to encourage companies to be more family friendly because most parents work most parents work most of us who are parents believe that that s still our most important job for all my responsibilities to you i still think it s my most important job so we have got to work for a country where people can succeed at home and at work let s take procter gamble i ll talk about their policy when a p g employee gives birth to a child she gets a year of maternity leave then eligible for up to five years of reduced work hours to have more time to care for the child now arguably that costs some money but arguably you get it back in a fanatically loyal employee who can stay with the company for a longer period of time not every company can afford to do that but those who do wind up doing pretty well the company offers direct subsidies for child care so that children can have a more safe and secure environment the first major bill i signed into law was the family and medical leave act which requires most companies except the very smallest ones to at least give people some time off without losing their job when there s a baby born a sick parent or some other kind of family emergency i think that that is a very important principle if we want to succeed in a world where most parents have to work then the workplace has to be more family friendly and the government and all the rest of us should do whatever we can to give the incentives and the encouragement to the business sector to make those workplaces family friendly secondly we need to encourage companies even the smaller businesses to find ways to give their employees access at least to health care and to retirement you know now that more and more people are working for smaller companies we have a smaller percentage of people in the work force with health insurance tied to their job than we did 10 years ago and we re the only wealthy country in the world that doesn t provide a system for health insurance for all working families when they re under 65 medicare takes care of it for everybody over 65 this is a big challenge the same thing is true with pensions more and more small businesses are developing what are called defined contribution plans instead of defined benefit plans and more and more people now are changing jobs before they stay 10 years on the job and before their pension vests so what do we have to do we don t want to stop the dynamism in the economy if you try to freeze things unemployment will go up we want to keep creating jobs so what do we have to do we have to develop health care packages that people can carry around with them from job to job we have to make it easier for small businesses to take out pension plans for the owners and the employees and we have to develop some portability provisions so that people can carry those pension plans around including being able to stop contributing in the period when they re unemployed and pick it up again and make up the difference we ve got to do some things like that if we want people to do well over the long run i met a young man at the airport when i came in today wrote me a letter about his mother not being able to get health insurance and it led to his mother being able to get health insurance but the kassebaum kennedy bill that senator glenn spoke about is the first step along the way it doesn t solve all the problems but it s a first step along our journey to developing a system that will enable the economy to continue to grow and provide some economic security for families who need it it simply says that you can t automatically lose your health insurance when you change jobs or when somebody in the family gets sick that s what health insurance is for to cover people when they get sick we also need to make it easier for small businesses to buy in the insurance pools that are large so they can buy insurance more cheaply but we also need to encourage and laud and lift up companies that provide these kinds of benefits starbucks coffee is a big chain now in america it hasn t always been a big chain but they provide health insurance for their employees quite unusual in that kind of business and why do they do it well they think it s the right thing to do but they also conducted an analysis of why there was so much turnover in that line of work and one reason was all these young people who work for them said we can t get any health insurance we would stay a year and go do something else so they discovered that it cost them 1 500 to train a new employee which meant if they bought health insurance for their work force most of whom are young healthy and single and they stay three years instead of one year they would make up all the money and still some so sometimes it s possible to do right and do well and we should encourage that the other thing we need to do is to do more to encourage companies and to challenge them to invest in their employees i got a letter the other day from a man who is head of a big high tech company who said the single most significant challenge facing the american people today in the area of education is reeducating the existing work force it s the only way to get incomes up we have got to help people do that now there are lots of companies that are doing this the american people need to know about it we need to lift them up others need to be encouraged to follow their lead they should get telephone calls and ask how they did it and made money besides you take one of my favorites harley davidson because they brought motorcycles back to america they set up basic reading writing and math skills instruction at an on site learning center and they made money out of doing it because their employees became more productive xerox a lot of other companies do this united technologies will permit a person who is an employee there to go back to school for any degree program whatever it doesn t even have to have anything to do with their job and they ll pay a lot of the tuition and give them half the time off we need to look at what the policies of good companies are and lift these companies up and ask ourselves is there something the government can do something the community can do to make it easier for others to do this but this is an important thing the fourth important point i believe is to encourage business to work in greater partnership with their employees that can mean a lot of things it can mean a greater voice in the production process it can mean good faith in collective bargaining it can mean gain sharing of all kinds sharing the benefits when times are good if you have to share the burden when times are bad it can mean that when there has to be layoffs it can mean having policies that really work to at least let the employees know that you re doing your best to make sure they can move from this life to another one i was at an interesting company in california a couple of weeks ago harman international where they make a lot of electronic speakers for sound systems for automobiles and offices and homes and everything else there s great fluctuation in their orders but to try to keep their work force whole and loyal they set up a whole new business called ole off line enterprises and they used all of their scrap materials to let their employees design products having nothing to do with their main line of work and then sell them and they were able to keep a couple of hundred employees all the time that otherwise would have gone out on the street so they can call them back without wrecking their lives it made the company money but it also made the company a world reputation among the work force that they cared about them and they were trying to keep them whole in the tough times we need to encourage things like that and support them if you look at what synergy here in cincinnati did they had to trim their work force by 10 percent and they did it by the beginning of this year without laying off a single solitary soul that s an important thing they did it through early retirement incentives through voluntary generous severance packages and they have now put in a policy of no layoffs between now and 1999 now the government can t make all companies do this for one thing not every company could do it there are too many differences in the market but we all ought to be out here knowing that these things are going on and that they re good and we ought to be able to get this information out all across america so when other companies are confronted with these challenges they will ask themselves are there things i can do to support the economic security of the families of the people who are working for me are there things the government could do not to make me do this because you can t freeze the future but at least to create a climate in which it would be easier for me to do this and still do well the last point i want to make is that every company has a duty to provide a safe workplace now a lot of people see this as the government s duty and it is to some extent for 25 years or more the occupational safety and health administration has had the responsibility of providing a safe work place and i ve opposed the attempts in the congress to weaken osha and to undermine its budget and to make it turn back on its mission fundamentally what you want is for the value of every company to be a safe and healthy work place you take motorola i m proud that we worked with motorola to open up the japanese market to their cellular telephones and help them create jobs in america but i m even prouder in some ways that because of their own safety programs their own safety training things that government does not require them to do injuries are 70 percent below the industry average in those plants that s the sort of thing that we ought to encourage osha ought to be out doing more of what we re trying to do now making partnerships with companies and saying look if you can figure out how to have a safer better work place we could care less you can throw the rule book away we re interested in results we want the employees to feel good when they go to work every day we want them to participate in making the workplace safer these are the elements of corporate citizenship that together with the proper policies from the government will enable us to move into the 21st century with the american dream alive for everybody just think about it five simple things family friendly workplaces health care and pensions training and education more partnership and safe and healthy workplaces five challenges that the rest of us ought not only to encourage but business community in america to meet but to help them to meet wherever we can soon i will announce i will invite excuse me the chief executive officers of some of our country s best companies to come to washington for a conference on corporate citizenship before i leave for japan and russia next month and we are going to talk about the good things that are being done and how we can spread them we re going to talk about not how we can complain about the disruptions that the global economy is bringing to america but how we can do something about it to guarantee more economic security to the american families that are out there doing the best they can and working hard let me say again there is no running away from this future we don t have to run away this country can compete and win and maintain its standard of living and enhance it and that is the only way we can maintain our standard of living and enhance it you will not find a country that has run away from the global economy who is doing as well as the united states is we can t run away and we cannot do anything that will try to freeze the dynamism of the economy otherwise we won t be able to create jobs but we can lift up those companies that are doing a good job we can ask ourselves relentlessly what sort of governm dem wjclinton23 3 98 bill_clinton thank you president and mrs rawlings honorable ministers honorable members of the council of state honorable members of parliament honorable members of the judiciary nananom and the people of ghana mitsea mu america fuo kyia mo now you have shown me what akwaaba really means thank you thank you so much i am proud to be the first american president ever to visit ghana and to go on to uganda rwanda south africa botswana and senegal it is a journey long overdue america should have done it before and i am proud to be on that journey thank you for welcoming me i want to listen and to learn i want to build a future partnership between our two people and i want to introduce the people of the united states through my trip to the new face of africa from kampala to cape town from dakar to dar es salaam africans are being stirred by new hopes for democracy and peace and prosperity challenges remain but they must be to all of you a call to action not a cause for despair you must draw strength from the past and energy from the promise of a new future my dream for this trip is that together we might do the things so that 100 years from now your grandchildren and mine will look back and say this was the beginning of a new african renaissance with a new century coming into view old patterns are fading away the cold war is gone colonialism is gone apartheid is gone remnants of past troubles remain but surely there will come a time when everywhere reconciliation will replace recrimination now nations and individuals finally are free to seek a newer world where democracy and peace and prosperity are not slogans but the essence of a new africa africa has changed so much in just 10 years dictatorship has been replaced so many places half of the 48 nations in sub saharan africa choose their own governments leading a new generation willing to learn from the past and imagine a future though democracy has not yet gained a permanent foothold even in most successful nations there is everywhere a growing respect for tolerance diversity and elemental human rights a decade ago business was stifled now africans are embracing economic reform today from ghana to mozambique from cote d ivoire to uganda growing economies are fueling a transformation in africa for all this promise you and i know africa is not free from peril the genocide in rwanda civil wars in sierra leone liberia both congos pariah states that export violence and terror military dictatorship in nigeria and high levels of poverty malnutrition disease illiteracy and unemployment to fulfill the vast promise of a new era africa must face these challenges we must build classrooms and companies increase the food supply and save the environment and prevent disease before deadly epidemics break out the united states is ready to help you first my fellow americans must leave behind the stereotypes that have warped our view and weakened our understanding of africa we need to come to know africa as a place of new beginnings and ancient wisdom from which as my wife our first lady said in her book we have so much to learn it is time for americans to put a new africa on our map here in independence square ghana blazed the path of that new africa more than four decades ago kwame nkrumah proposed what he called a motion of destiny as ghana stepped forward as a free and independent nation today ghana again lights the way for africa democracy is spreading business is growing trade and investment our rising ghana has the only african owned company today on our new york stock exchange you have worked hard to preserve the peace in africa and around the world from liberia to lebanon from croatia to cambodia and you have given the world a statesman and peacemaker in kofi annan to lead the united nations the world admires our success the united states admires your success we see it taking root throughout the new africa and we stand ready to support it first we want to work with africa to nurture democracy knowing it is never perfect or complete we have learned in over 200 years that every day democracy must be defended and a more perfect union can always lie ahead democracy requires more than the insults and injustice and inequality that so many societies have known and america has known democracy requires human rights for everyone everywhere for men and women for children and the elderly for people of different cultures and tribes and backgrounds a good society honors its entire family second democracy must have prosperity americans of both political parties want to increase trade and investment in africa we have an african growth and opportunity act now before congress both parties leadership are supporting it by opening markets and building businesses and creating jobs we can help and strengthen each other by supporting the education of your people we can strengthen your future and help each other for centuries other nations exploited africa s gold africa s diamonds africa s minerals now is the time for africans to cultivate something more precious the mind and heart of the people of africa through education third we must allow democracy and prosperity to take root without violence we must work to resolve the war and genocide that still tear at the heart of africa we must help africans to prevent future conflicts here in ghana you have shown the world that different peoples can live together in harmony you have proved that africans of different countries can unite to help solve disputes in neighboring countries peace everywhere in africa will give more free time and more money to the pressing needs of our children s future the killing must stop if a new future is to begin fourth and finally for peace and prosperity and democracy to prevail you must protect your magnificent natural domain africa is mankind s first home we all came out of africa we must preserve the magnificent natural environment that is left we must manage the water and forest we must learn to live in harmony with other species you must learn how to fight drought and famine and global warming and we must share with you the technology that will enable you to preserve your environment and provide more economic opportunity to your people america has good reason to work with africa 30 million americans more than one in ten proudly trace their heritage here the first peace corps volunteers from america came to ghana over 35 years ago over 57 000 have served in africa since then through blood ties and common endeavors we know we share the same hopes and dreams to provide for ourselves and our children to live in peace and worship freely to build a better life than our parents knew and pass a brighter future on to our children america needs africa america needs ghana as a partner in the fight for a better future so many of our problems do not stop at any nation s border international crime and terrorism and drug trafficking the degradation of the environment the spread of diseases like aids and malaria and so many of our opportunities cannot stop at a nation s border we need partners to deepen the meaning of democracy in america in africa and throughout the world we need partners to build prosperity we need partners to live in peace we will not build this new partnership overnight but perseverance creates its own reward an ashanti proverb tells us that by coming and going a bird builds its nest we will come and go with you and do all we can as you build the new africa a work that must begin here in africa not with aid or trade though they are important but first with ordinary citizens especially the young people in this audience today you must feel the winds of freedom blowing at your back pushing you onward to a brighter future there are roughly 700 days left until the end of this century and the beginning of a new millennium there are roughly 700 million africans in sub saharan africa every day and every individual is a precious opportunity we do not have a moment to lose and we do not have a person to lose i ask you my friends to let me indulge a moment of our shared history in closing in 1957 our great civil rights leader martin luther king came to accra to help represent our country as ghana celebrated its independence he was deeply moved by the birth of your nation six years later on the day after w e b dubois died here in ghana in 1963 dr king spoke to an enormous gathering like this in washington he said these simple words i have a dream a dream that all americans might live free and equal as brothers and sisters his dream became the dream of our nation and changed us in ways we could never have imagined we are hardly finished but we have traveled a long way on the wings of that dream dr dubois a towering african american intellectual died here as a citizen of ghana and a friend of kwame nkrumah he once wrote the habit of democracy must be to encircle the earth let us together resolve to complete the circle of democracy to dream the dream that all people on the entire earth will be free and equal to begin a new century with that commitment to freedom and justice for all to redeem the promise inscribed right here on independence arch let us find a future here in africa the cradle of humanity medase america dase thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton23 5 02 bill_clinton thank you very much sam mayor yoo thank you for your welcome and your very impressive review of the progress of your community chim pwah thank you for your remarks and ronyan thank you for managing this event so well it s a great pleasure for me to be here today i have come with a number of people and two of them they now work in asia they re members from my white house staff maria haley a native of the philippines who works for the company headed by henry kissinger and mack mclarty and nancy bowen who actually commanded my oval office operation for 8 years when i was president she now lives in hong kong and works with her cousin i appreciate their coming let me say i am delighted to be back in china and when i flew in today i was reliving the trip i took here as president four years ago it was wonderful for me i had the opportunity to talk directly to the people of china on television to see the remarkable progress here i even went to a church in beijing i spoke to young students at beijing university i got to see some of the wonderful sights in chion and boilin in shanghai i even got to answer citizens questions on a radio call in show with the mayor mr mayor you might be interested to know when i was in shanghai most of the callers were much more interested in talking to the mayor about traffic problems than with the president of the united states comment he laughs which may be some indication of the importance of economics in a modern world since i left office i have had the privilege to come back to china a couple of times i m always amazed by the physical changes occurring here and they are reflective of the people in this room and their efforts i d like to make a special note of shenzhen s successes with jingji real estate it s amazing to me to see how far china has come in such a short time i also want to say how much i appreciate the work that jingji has done in corporate citizenship through the china health fund and other charitable organizations i think as china grows economically and you have more and more of these social changes they cannot be entirely managed by government alone it will be more and more important for people in their private business capacities to try do things to help deal with the social challenges of their communities so i thank you sir for that let me say when i was president i thought my major jobs were two one to do a good job for the american people our economy was in trouble and our society was divided when i took office and i tried to make the american people understand that if we could recover our economic growth and make our society more just at the same time and that i think we largely succeeded the second thing i tried to do was to make american a leading force for building the kind of 21st century world i believe we always want a world of peace and security of freedom and prosperity i couldn t imagine how we could build that kind of a world unless the united states had a constructive relationship with china the world s largest nation and oldest civilization and unless the united states was heavily involved in trying to build the right kind of future for asia involving also our traditional allies of japan south korea the philippines thailand australia new zealand and nations in the indian south continent at the very beginning of my administration we established for the first time an annual meeting of the leaders of the asian pacific region around the apec conference we made a commitment to free trade in the asian pacific area by 2020 we established a regional quorum on security with the osion nations we made an aggressive effort to minimize the financial crisis in acion in the late 1990 s we normalized relations with vietnam and signed an important trade agreement with them we restored good ties between united states and india for the first time in 40 years and in partnership with south korea we worked to end north korea s nuclear program it s missile testing program and i hope soon we will end its missile program as well we worked with our allies in australia and other countries to bring peace and dignity to east timor i recently was honored to represent president bush in independence day for east timor just a couple of days ago on may the 20th we worked with cambodia to reduce the horrible problem with landmine deaths and injuries with singapore to start bilateral trade negotiations with japan on a host of economic and security issues and of course with indonesia to deal with the impact of financial and political crisis there but the most important work we did for the long run was with china permanent normal trade relations our agricultural agreement our _______ project our cooperation to the united nations and other forums and of course the wto agreement the basic idea behind this is that the united states and china must build a future of cooperation not conflict the u s should speed china s immigration into the world not contain its influence the wizard of this course is reflected in the transformation right here in shenzhen the mayor talked about it the astonishing transformation over the last two decades of a largely agricultural area in an industrial area with a lot of high tech industries an enormous number of foreign companies and foreign investments from more than 40 nations the question we face today is how to make the most of this and how to deal with the problems that are clearly facing china and the rest of the world so let me begin with what i think is the big question the world must deal with today what do the positive developments here in this city and in china generally the wto shanghai and all the other things that are going on and on the other hand the current problems of the world what happened in america on september the 11th the turmoil in the middle east the aids epidemic the threat of climate change what do these good things and these bad things tell us about the world in which we live they tell us first of all that for good or ill it is an interdependent world we live in a world where we have torn down barriers collapsed distances and spread information and technology now if you re here in this beautiful hotel in this beautiful ballroom listening to the mayor s account of its success we celebrate the benefits of that interdependent world but on september the 11th people with a very different set of values and objectives used open waters easy travel access to technology and information to murder 3 100 people in the united states who themselves came from 70 different nations and they were in our country seeking the benefits of the interdependent world so what do the good things and the bad things tell us we live in a world that is interdependent but not fully integrated we therefore reap both the benefits and are exposed to the dangers of a world without walls the great challenge for all of us is to move from interdependence to an integrated global community one in which we can claim the benefits of our openness and dramatically reduce the burdens and the dangers that is what we face today i think on balance in spite of all the trouble in the headlines we should be quite hopeful the world has after all been working at this for only about 50 years since the establishment of the united nations in 1945 the establishment of global trading system in international financial institutions after the war and it has only been actually possible to do since china made the decision a couple of decades ago to move toward openness and integration with global economy and then in 1989 the berlin wall fell with triumph with new markets and freedom in the foreign economies over in europe so we haven t had a lot of time against the whole background of human history to build an integrated global economy and an awful lot of good things have happened the great adversaries of world war ii are now cooperating the great adversaries of the cold war are now cooperating the united nations is doing more than ever before east timor is largely a tribute to its success we find ways to reach across cultural divides for common objectives china supported the united states in the u n for example in our efforts to end ethnic cleansing and build a free society in the balkans that could be part of the united europe the european union is becoming more integrated economically and politically i think on balance that s a good thing in the years when i was president i tried to speed all this process toward integration in our region and latin america we adopted a north america free trade agreement and committed ourselves to a free trade area in the americas we fought narco traffickers and terrorists and helped to deal with financial crises in mexico and elsewhere in europe as i said we supported the european union peace in the balkans peace in northern ireland and the integration of turkey into europe which is a big thing for the future of the world economy in africa we opened our markets to african countries wider than ever before and established partnerships to help them deal with the terror associated with tribal conflicts in the middle east we signed a peace agreement with jordan supported egypt and tried with a lot of success for most of the time i was president to advance the cause of peace in asia we did all the things i said but i think the most important of them all was the entry of china into the world trade organization globally the years in which i served as president saw a lot of progress toward building an integrated world we brought the wto into existence a huge achievement the kyoto protocol defining global warming was drafted and approved by governments we agreed to a comprehensive test ban treaty established an international criminal accord saw the worldwide adoption of the treaty against childhood labor and saw in 2000 an amazing initiative to forgive the debt of the poorest countries in the world but only if they would put all the savings into the education and healthcare of their people and the development of their economy outside of the things the government did the world was being brought together by two of the great factors of historic significance the first is the information technology revolution when i became president in january of 93 there were only 50 sites on the worldwide web 50 it was still largely the private providence of research physicists when i left office there were 350 million sites on the worldwide web and there are many many more today there s never been anything like this in the history of the world the other thing that happened is that an international consortium of scientists began to find out things about our world which will change the future forever and largely for the better internationally scientists established i think beyond any doubt that the phenomenon of global warming is real and that if the planet warms for the next 50 years at the rate of the last 10 we re going to have massive numbers of refugees because whole areas of the world won t be able to grow food in your region whole island nations in the pacific will flood in my country we ll lose 50 feet of manhattan island in new york among other things something that s close to me because i live there and my wife works in new york at the senate but we know that now because of global efforts by scientists because of global efforts by scientists we ve discovered new life forms in the deepest oceans and river bottoms and most importantly a global consortium sequenced the human genome and in all that we ve identified the major genetic variances that cause breast cancer in women we were very close to the discovery of those which parkinson s disease and alzheimer s disease when you combine this with the development of nano technology super micro technology within a matter of just a few years we ll be able to identify almost all tumors when they re just a few cells in size completely unreachable today by all of medical science and when that happens and when young mothers bring home their babies from the hospital with a little gene card telling them what the problems and prospects of their children are life expectancies in good families in countries with good health systems will rise above 90 years quite rapidly all this is happening in the world we live in so what i would like to say to all of you if i were in your position if i were the mayor of this community if i were a young entrepreneur if i were in charge of public affairs in china i would be asking they were wrong when they would say the problems of the world had been caused by globalization we had a study just a few months ago from the international financial institutions pointing out that developing nations which chose growth from trade and investment over the last 15 years have grown at 5 a year developing nations which chose growth through closed societies grew at 1 a year so we need more trade and more investment we need a successful new trade which will require the united states and other countries to seek reasonable compromises and be prepared to make them the second thing i think you need is what the mayor said i think there should be continued efforts and internal reform and progress subject to attract evermore investment and make the most of the wto system the third thing i think i would want if i were chinese is more effective trading partners throughout asia and that means more must be done to modernize the systems of other asian countries so they can make full use of the global trading system and the growth china for example in my last year as president 2000 we did a study on internet usage in the 19 asian pacific economical operation countries at present trends for the 8 wealthiest countries internet penetration will be 72 within 5 years for the 11 poorest it will be 4 if i were chinese i wouldn t want that to happen i would want to close that gap and spread technology more evenly throughout the region and generate more wealth more economic activity and more trading partners for all of you i think it means more prosperity and more stability in this area the second thing i would do beyond economics is to say that the protestors against the global economy are wrong when they say the globalization caused the world problems but they are right to say that the economy will not solve the world s problems half of the world s people still live on less 2 00 a day a billion people live on less than 1 00 a day a billion people go to bed hungry every night therefore it seems to me our strategy should be trade and investment plus an attempt to create sensible global economic healthcare and education policies and global security cooperation i think the most important things i will just mention three or four of them the most important things we can do are first to get the 130 million children of the world who are not in school in school 130 million kids don t go to school at all including 25 of the children in east asia in the poorest developing countries now there are all kinds of strategies that work and i think the united states and other countries should pay every additional year of schooling adds 10 15 to the income of an individual in a developing country if you do that for enough people you lift the whole economic prospects of the country the second thing i think we should do is to fund the secretary general of the united nations called for a 10 billion fund against aids and other infectious diseases there are 10 million kids who die every year of preventable childhood diseases this year 1 in 4 of all people who die on earth will die of aids tuberculosis malaria and infections related to diarrhea little children who never get any clean water these kinds of investments will make all those countries more productive better trading partners more stable politically the secretary general is right about this i might say i really admire the way china has openly acknowledged in the last several months that it had twice as many aids cases as it thought just a year ago that gives you a chance to deal with the problem this is a very manageable problem except in countries that refuse to accept the reality i did a lot of work on this around the world in south africa and india and other places and i think the most important thing is to find out what the facts are make sure people know this is a 100 preventable disease make sure people know there is medicine that keeps you alive if you are infected and get a system which gets prevention and the medicine out there so i think other countries will be probably trying to figure out how they can follow china s lead over the next three or four years but being forthright about the facts is very important there are countries whose total economy will be destroyed by this in the next 5 years and china will not be one because you re dealing with it but all of you should support your leaders and the public health personnel in dealing with it i have seen what s happened in countries that let their infection rates get up to 30 it impairs their government and it breaks their economy and it leads to more violence so i think this is a very good thing the final thing i d like to say is this i have a lot of conversations with president jiang zemin in the 8 years i was president about our differences he even and i m very grateful for this on my trip he supported our having a joint press conference on television in china in which we had honest differences of opinion it was really exciting for me he said what he thought about the tibet i said i thought he liked the dali lama it was quite funny but we had an honest discussion about our differences the reason we were able to do that when he thought maybe we shouldn t go into bosnia because we shouldn t interfere with the internal affairs of another country i was able to call and discuss why i thought this was important the reason we were able to do this was a very simple thing not because i asked him to stop being the president of china or he asked me to stop being the president of the united states not because we all of a sudden came out of the same spiritual tradition or intellectual vision not because we thought our countries had identical interests but because we thought what we had in common was more important than our differences so that the differences that we have that were good we could celebrate the differences that we had that we worried about we could manage only because we thought that what we had in common was more important this is the central question facing the world today why all this fighting in the middle east because they cannot imagine sharing the land the sacred sites and the future they think their differences matter more than their common future i tried as hard as i could for 8 years to persuade them that was not the case why did those 19 young people kill themselves on september the 11th to murder 3 100 people in america because they thought they were in possession of the truth that we did not share and because we did not share their truth they could take our lives and the lives of people including muslims from 70 other countries because our differences were all that mattered to them there was no way they could get to our common humanity and what we shared now you normally if you re busy in business you don t think about this every day but imagine this you ve got all these investors from 40 other countries here if they hated you they wouldn t show up if they thought their religious traditions and their racial or ethnic backgrounds were a bar to treat you as a human being they would never trust you enough to do business here this community is a microcosm of the global community we have to build and it requires explicit effort of saying over and over again the only way our differences can be preserved and honored in an interdependent world is if our common humanity matters more that s the way we made progress for 8 years between the united states and in china and that s what the world has to do in the future the wto itself is a statement for that we had all kinds of fights in the wto maddening fights even in my own area where you know we have to submit these disputes and we don t always agree with the way the wto is often why do we do that because we think the wto is always right and we re wrong if they go against us no because we think the importance of preserving a common system is greater than the importance of our winning everything we feel strongly about i hope that now when you read of all these troubles around the world and you think about some issue you have to face you look at it through that prism the whole future of the 21st century depends upon making more communities like this one open to the world people not giving up what is distinctive or unique or interesting about themselves but finding a way to celebrate their differences within a context of their common humanity finding a way to assert their interest within the context of saying what we have in common is more important than whatever divides us you can watch over the next 20 or 30 years to see what happens but i believe the historic contribution of the chinese leaders have chose to engage the rest of the world president jiang and president yoo and some of their predecessors they made the decision that the unique and great history of china manifested in the lives of all of you here or who are younger and have your future before you can only be enhanced if china became a part of the world instead of staying apart from it so they were able to say you know i don t understand everything america does but i think we can build a future together that idea has to trump what is going on in the middle east and all the other destructive forces if it does in 50 years from now mr mayor whoever is the mayor of this community will be able to give a speech like the one you gave with even better facts thank you very much dem wjclinton23 5 03 bill_clinton thank you for coming i m glad it s not too hot you know i just finished giving a couple of college commencement speeches it s an awesome feeling you re standing up therenot president anymorewhat you say doesn t have any impact and you realize you re the only person standing between all those young people and their college degree when it happened to me a storm came up so the speaker said ladies and gentlemen if we don t get out of here we re all going to drown i ll send you a copy of my remarks good luck and god bless you we were ready to elect that guy president i m delighted to be here i want to thank senator david pryor and barbara for coming i would like to thank all the people who have helped me with thisbeginning with skip rutherford and stephanie streett and lynda dixon david alsobrook and his wife and the people from the national archives who have to look after all these documents that we amassed that i wrote on over the years and gave the government too much stuff to say i would like to thank janet for her remarks and all the people from the sturgis foundation who are here for the wonderful gift to the library and foundation this history of this state has always been very important to me i try to protect it preserve it and promote it and one of the things i m proudest of is that we re going to build in some ways the most modern presidential library ever built by a long stretch and in the process preserve this magnificent old choctaw station i m very grateful to you all thank you very much i want to thank kristin and amelia for leading the pledge of allegiance and my good friend bill clark for being my friend for a long first of all and secondly for taking on this headache and thirdly for staying on schedule and more or less on budget there are some days when i m not doing so well raising money for this thing when i hope he will get behind but so far he hasn t so we re in a race to the finish line i d like to thank the over 80 000 people all across this country who have made contributions of less than 100 to this endeavor more than 80 000 people just a handful have given as much as the sturgis foundation and i hope we can find another handful or two before we re done but what s really important to me is the people that are giving what they can thanks to the internet you ll be able to tour this library from anywhere in the world you ll be able to see what the activities of the foundation are you ll be able to review the speeches that i m giving and their backgrounds and sort of continue the education project because i ll be trying to explain at least my point of view on a lot of things that are happening and i hope that someday we ll have hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who believe that this is worth a modest contribution to capture the history the present and the future of america from the point of view of those of you who helped to make me attorney general and governor and president over the last 30 years now well thank you i look out into this audience and i see so many people who have played a big role in my life some of you know this hillary and i have been writing our memoirs and she was supposed to go first so she finished her book is coming out in about a month on june 9th it s really really good arkansas comes out well she called me this morning the senate s in session and she has to vote she s kind of jealous about my being here so she asked me to give you her regards and i want you to know that i think she s done a magnificent job in the senate i m very very proud of what she s doing when i first showed my editor the drafts of my memoirs he said boy you got a lot in here about arkansas i said read it before you cut it out he read it and he said that he laughed and cried and hooted and hollered and he said did you make half of that stuff up and i said no it really happened that way he also said there s only one thing about you that s wrong with this book there s only one way that you still act like a politician you know that you can t run for office anymore i said i know he said you cannot write a book for general readers and mention the name of every single person you ever shook hands with you cannot do that you got to cut some of this out one fellow gave me a copy of alfred hitchcock s autobiography and his editors told him the same thing so he had 100 people he wanted to write about and they said he didn t have space he put them all in the index with their name indexed to that page so at least they d know they were mentioned in his book well if i did that the book would be 2000 pages long no person was ever given so many gifts of friendship and support in life as me without ever thinking about it in these commencement addresses i ve been giving i said i ve lived a highly improbable life for all of you who have contributed to that i thank you i hope this library and museum will capture a little of that life and the larger sense i went into public service because i thought it d be the most rewarding life on earth i never made a nickel until i got out of the white house and i ve felt like richest person in the world my whole life because i got to get up everyday and do something i loved i believed it was noble and honorable one of the things that bothers me about the coverage of so much politics today is that it s all about argument nobody ever explains anything and it doesn t matter whether you have facts backing your opinion or not if you have enough airtime you just scream it right out and go on i was raised to believe that there really are consequences that ideas matter that the policies based on the ideas matter and how well you implement them matters people s lives get better as a result or they don t as the case may be i thought this was serious work and i hope that this museum will capture that i also hope it will capture america s transformation in to the 21st centurywhat it was like when we started what it was like when we finished and the connections between the ideas and the actions that we all took and the consequences in the lives of the american people i hope it will adequately capture the work we re doing now trying to bring economic opportunity to poor communities in the united states africa and india trying to fight aids in the caribbean and africa trying to build educational opportunities in this country and across the world and continuing the most important thing to me i ever did by working for racial and religious reconciliation across the globe i hope that will be apparent here i hope a lot of people will want to come here because of this school of public service that the university has graciously agreed to establish and the sturgis folks have graciously agreed to house along with the headquarters of the whole operation i think it s a noble life if i had to do it over again i would do it tomorrow you have to have a higher pain threshold than you do for most kinds of workespecially this day and age if you belong to our party but i never thought they could turn tom daschle from south dakota the hero of farmers and the rural americans into some liberal leftwing ogre it shows you the power of the media to distort the truth if there s enough money behind it it s painful that s the only political thing i m going to say today i like daschle and i don t like what s being done this country is still around here because we had free discussion free debate and honest people who had disagreements you know i was actually for giving president bush the authority to take out saddam hussein but i ve learned one thing having lived a long time we don t need to criticize those who dissent from us too harshly because after 200 years when you look back on it the critics turned out to be right about half the time then their position became the majority position and then we just kept on going so maybe it s just because i m old and not in the fight but i think that winners ought to be generous to those who disagree because down the road they might be right someday and you never can tell when you might need another friend so i want to thank all of you for helping me capture all of this because i hope that what will be felt when people go through here is not just the story of where america was when we started where it was when we finished how the world changed what we did to get it that way but also a story of the nobility of public service and how we ought to treat each other as americansand how we ought not to stop treating each other as human beings just because we may happen to be republican democrat or independent or because we may decide to go into public life you know when i was governor i had a lot of good friends in the legislature who were republicans i had a lot of good friends in other states whom were republican governors i remember when i was a nominee in 1992 president bush who i liked very much personally asked the governor of new jersey tom kean to nominate him they asked tom kean you ve been working with governor clinton a long timewhat do you think of him and he said i think both parties nominated their best i love tom kean he could no more give a speech to a national convention having said that then a man on the moon now because now the climate is you know it has to be all bad or all good life is not a cartoon it s not a cartoon it s not two dimensional and flat nothing is all bad or all good nobody is all bad or all good we are hopefully moving together toward a more perfect union that s what our founders told us to do they said that we will never be perfect but we can always be more perfect than we were yesterday in order to do that we have to believe in the importance and the integrity and the nobility of public service we have to encourage good people to get in it and i think that graduate program will accomplish that so i hope people will get a little history i hope people will get a little sense of what i m trying to do now to continue the work of my presidency i hope young people will be inspired to vote to be active in politics and some of them to run for office themselves america works more than half the time more than half the people have been right on more than half the important issues or we wouldn t all be here today so i hope you will leave here a little more optimistic than you were yourself you know bill is just as foolishly optimistic as he was 30 years ago and that s true when i left the white house i was more optimistic and idealistic than the day i walked in you just can t give up or give in you got to suit up and go on and you can t win if you don t play i just hope all of you who have played any role in the public life i ve had and who have been my personal friends over the years will always know that a piece of this building and its message and the hope that i hope it brings to young people both throughout america and the worlda piece of it is yours i never did think i was born in a log cabin i built myself like a lot of people do i told someone the other day the reason that i didn t get rid of affirmative action is that i benefited from it from the time i was old enough to crawl around there were people helping me for no other reason than they wanted to i wasn t entitled to itthey just did and if you were one of them thank you i hope you will be proud of what you brought here god bless you dem wjclinton23 5 94 bill_clinton thank you very much mr secretary attorney general reno mr frampton mr kennedy congressman vento ladies and gentlemen i sure have had a good time this afternoon you know this is a wonderful occasion for all of us as americans and in many ways it s a very personal occasion hillary and i were up here whispering to each other i said now didn t we go to the dinosaur national park in utah and to the buffalo and then i started reeling them off she said bill forget it you will never remember all the parks we have visited and we can t we can t begin to remember all the ones we have visited and all the things that have happened to us from florida to northern california and all points in between i do want to say that i am personally very grateful to the people who have been recognized this year ambassador lane thank you sir for your many contributions steve coleman and josephine butler and the other people from meridien hill we were there on earth day and i want you to know that not that i didn t trust you but the other day i was in the neighborhood and i had my car sort of drive by the park again just to make sure there was no false advertising and sure enough it was just like it was on earth day and i thank you for that urban miracle of nature i congratulate the dade county public schools and phyllis cohen thank you for coming here and for teaching our young people about the importance of our natural resources the children of florida have a great burden as they grow up now to reconcile our responsibility to the remarkable ecostructure of that state and the explosion of growth that s going on there richard gale congratulations to you sir and thank you for your career you know we were talking here a moment ago i ll bet you that more american citizens have met employees of the park service than any other department in the federal government they may have thought more about employees of the irs but they have actually more employees of the park service and i ll bet you you think about it i bet each and every one of you here can remember park rangers you met at carlsbad or yellowstone or yosemite or you name it and that s a very important thing at time when people have such negative impressions of government this is our government at its best and i appreciate what secretary babbitt said about the budget just so you ll know exactly how hard that was this budget recommends the outright elimination of over 100 government programs slashing over 200 more if adopted it ll be the first time in anybody s memory that the congress and the president have actually worked together to pass an executive budget for two years in a row and will give us three years of deficit reduction for the first time since harry truman was president but we still spent more on the park service because that s where a lot of america s heart is and where a lot of america s future is and the california bill will be an astonishing achievement if we can get it through and we re working hard on that thank you elizabeth barlow rogers for your work in central park for all of us who have ever been to the zoo or the carousel or jogged around the reservoir with bated breath we thank you for what you have done to give that great park a new lease on life most important i d like to thank secretary babbitt we ve been friends a long time we ve talked about these things a long time he grew up near the grand canyon i grew up in hot springs which actually is i think the only city in america perhaps except this one that actually has a whole national park within the city limits and it was the first reservation set aside by congress for a national reservation in 1932 in recognition of the fact that in the 16th century hernando desoto came there and found the indians bathing in the hot sulphur springs he was looking for the fountain of youth i grew up there and lost it but bruce and i have been through these things for so many years and when we served as governors i don t know how many times i heard the western governors who cared about the environment say that there had to be some way that interior could push this country toward sustainable development push this country toward maintaining its resources and still not feel that we were violating the culture and the way of life of the people especially in the west where the interior department owns so much land i think he has managed the tension between traditional culture and change better than any other person in the entire united states could have done it in the only department that really still literally affects the lives of more than half the people in many communities in this country so i am very grateful to him i thank him for what he s done and i know all of you will join me in expressing your appreciation for his leadership now i have to say just a parochial word about where i live now i live on national park service reservation 1 and i want you all to take note of that the next time you hear somebody say the president s off the reservation i m actually here with hillary and chelsea on part of the original design of washington laid out by george washington and pierre l enfant like other families who ve lived here we ve had the honor of planting several trees on these grounds a willow oak a leaf linden an american elm we love this place that is maintained by our park service i want to recognize two special contributors and say i enjoyed having my picture taken with the white house staff who do so much to maintain the house and the grounds of just a moment ago i want to thank our head usher gary walters who does a great job for us on so many events here where s gary there s gary back there and i d like to ask irv williams the executive grounds superintendent for nearly 40 years he s been here where are you irv stand up thank you so much three decades ago mr williams helped jacqueline kennedy redesign the first lady s garden it was later renamed the jacqueline kennedy garden it is just opposite the rose garden in the back of the white house it s another of the wonderful legacies that this fine lady left our country with the help of irv williams who s given his life to this work and we thank you sir wallace stegner said the national parks are the best idea we ever had absolutely democratic absolutely american they reflect us at our best rather than our worst i could say it no better let us try to live by the mottos of the national parks let us try to lift our spirits on a daily basis as we are all uplifted when we visit them and let us for the rest of our lives rededicate ourselves to preserving and enhancing them they are the legacy of every generation they re our hope for the future our tie to the past our connection to the land they re bigger than any of us and they make us all better and we thank you all for your contribution to that end thank you dem wjclinton23 5 96 bill_clinton thank you very much tony for your remarks your support your friendship and your leadership of the committee i want to say hello to the others who are there to john sweeney and to al checchi i want to say a special word of thanks to my good friend justin dart who i know had to leave but who has been a real champion for americans with disabilities indeed for the rights and interests of all americans i want to say a special word of greeting to the cochairs of the committee the vice chairs norm miller i king jordan karen meyer neil jacobson dr sylvia walker and ron drach thank you all of you who are there for your very warm welcome i m sorry i couldn t join you in person today i have to be in milwaukee with the german chancellor but i didn t want to miss this opportunity to talk with you about what we must do together to ensure the full participation of the 49 million americans with disabilities in the vibrant life and economy of our great country three and a half years ago when i took the oath of office i had a very clear vision of what i hoped our country could be like as we move into the 21st century i wanted us to be a country that offers great opportunities to all who are willing to work for them i wanted us to remain the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and i wanted us to rebuild our sense of unity and community around the shared ethic of responsibility and a respect for diversity together we ve made great progress toward achieving those goals our economic strategy to reduce the deficit expand trade and invest in our people is paying off the deficit is now less than half of what it was four years ago we have 8 5 million more jobs the lowest combined rates of inflation mortgage rates and employment in 27 years homeownership is at a 15 year high and we have all time highs in exports and new business formations for each of the last three years we ve also worked hard to increase educational opportunities for all americans from more positions for children in head start to more affordable college loans to a national service program we ve done our part to fight to lower the crime rate by passing a crime bill which is putting 100 000 police officers on the street banning assault weapons and passing the brady bill which has kept 60 000 people with criminal records or other disturbing histories from getting handguns and we have maintained our commitment to a clean safe environment for all americans compared to four years ago the world is also a safer and more peaceful place the nuclear threat is diminished no weapons are pointed at the people of the united states peace and freedom are taking hold from haiti to south africa to northern ireland to bosnia to the middle east we have moved a long way in three and a half years but today i want to talk to you about our country s future especially in terms of that first objective expanding opportunities for every american who is willing to take responsibility for making the most of his or her god given abilities the theme of your conference is investing in abilities that s been something we ve tried very hard to do and something i intend to keep on doing in 1992 i issued a challenge to our nation i said we must not rest until america has a national disability policy based on three simple creeds inclusion not exclusion independence not dependence and empowerment not paternalism i remain committed to that vision and i want to thank all of you for working so hard with us to make it a reality more than ever before in our history america s greatness in the next century will depend upon the ability of all our citizens to make the most of their own lives americans with disabilities are an enormous largely untapped reservoir of that potential employment is the key to economic security for americans including people with disabilities even though we have created 8 5 million new jobs it remains a tragedy today that two thirds of the people with disabilities are unemployed and it s up to all of us employers labor people with disabilities and government to work together to change this picture in the past four years we have made progress we re fighting to make sure that people with disabilities have health care and the living wages they need to live independently our strong commitment to the americans with disabilities act has opened up town halls schools transportation systems workplaces groceries restaurants and movie theaters to millions of people with disabilities our 1997 budget calls for an increase in funding for ada enforcement at the department of justice the individuals with disabilities education act is preparing students with disabilities to get their share of the high wage jobs that are opening up in this new economy i know how much the idea means to millions of students with disabilities and to their parents i strongly support it high school graduates with disabilities who went to school under idea have an employment rate twice that of the overall population of individuals with disabilities we re building on this achievement by supporting efforts like your high school high tech program that is guiding promising students to college and careers in science and technology we re making sure people with disabilities are included in our school to work efforts no one no one should have to go through what judy heumann went through to get an education in our country she s been a pioneer in the struggle for the rights of people with disabilities she developed polio when she was 18 months old and she was denied the right to attend public school until the fourth grade she had to sue to get a teaching job that was denied her because she uses a wheelchair and during the 70s she participated in a sit in that resulted in the creation of the individuals with disabilities eduction act as my assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services at the department of education she now runs idea that is her remarkable story and we need more of them but you and i know the ada and the idea alone will not achieve our vision of inclusion independence and empowerment for people with disabilities that s why i fought so hard for measures like the family and medical leave act and today i m announcing that as a result of your work federal agencies are now developing a better system for tracking the unemployment rate of people with disabilities this new system will strengthen our ability to include people with disabilities in all our employment policies and program in addition i ve asked the secretary of commerce to work with your committee and relevant federal agencies to recommend to me ways that we can ensure that people with disabilities are included in all our efforts to assist entrepreneurs and small businesses so we are making progress but let me say there is more to do first we must preserve the guarantee of medicaid coverage for people with disabilities for three decades americans have stood on common ground about the need for guaranteed medicaid coverage for older americans pregnant women low income children and people with disabilities but last year congress sent me legislation to repeal that guarantee legislation that would have taken away health care coverage from millions of americans who need it most i vetoed that legislation and if they send it to me again and they want to repeal the guarantee again i will veto it again let me be clear we can balance this budget without repealing guaranteed medicaid coverage for the six million americans with disabilities who depend upon it including one million children medicaid is a family issue as people with disabilities know making it possible for more people to get care at home and in their communities without the guarantee a middle class family with a child with a severe disability could be forced into poverty to pay for the child s medical care parents could be forced to give up jobs to stay home to care for a child children and adults who live independently today might be forced into institutions i will not let that happen the second thing we have to do is to strengthen the health security of people with disabilities and indeed for all americans with the passage of the kassebaum kennedy health insurance reform bill this legislation would not allow insurance companies to deny coverage for anybody with a preexisting condition and will allow people to keep their health insurance if they change jobs or if someone in the family gets sick so i urge congress to stop stalling and pass the bill now as an important step forward finally let me say i ve called on congress to increase the minimum wage which will benefit millions of americans with disabilities who face extra costs for accessible housing and personal assistance we need that all of you know that america is in the best position to be a winner in the global economy of the 21st century because of the depths of our values the strengths of our diversity the power of our economy but we don t have a person to waste we have to continue to expand opportunity demand responsibility from all of our citizens and that does mean inclusion not exclusion again let me thank you all of you for everything you ve done and for everything you will do thank you for the progress we ve made and the progress we still will make just last week i had a very moving visit with christopher reeve in the oval office and i mentioned to christopher that in 1933 the oval office was the first government office designed specifically to be accessible to accommodate president roosevelt he said to me that it was too bad that at the time he had to hide his disability i hope with christopher reeve that as the roosevelt memorial becomes a reality with your efforts to remove the stigma of disability they ll find a way to make sure that the american people know that this great great president was great with his disability thank you all and god bless you dem wjclinton23 5 99 bill_clinton thank you good morning i thank you for the wonderful wonderful welcome president favors thank you for the degree i m beginning to feel smarter already my good friend reverend jones thank you for your wonderful invocation and reminding us why we are here on this lord s day mayor williams thank you for making me feel welcome and i thank the other mayors and councilmembers who met me dr jindal thank you for your remarks i must say i was especially impressed by the remarks of your student government president tony easton and miss grambling martha fondel after they spoke i wasn t quite sure i wanted to give my speech let me also say that i am delighted to be joined today by your distinguished senator mary landrieu and congressman william jefferson from new orleans by our secretary of transportation and like me a neighbor of yours to the north from arkansas secretary rodney slater i thank him you know when i heard that i might be able to come to grambling there was very little discussion about this in the white house now usually when the president has a chance to go someplace there s always an argument about it because they think you should be somewhere else somebody who works for you thinks you should be somewhere else but i told my staff that i wanted to take a day away from washington d c now washington is a town where everybody thinks they re somebody and i wanted to come to the place where everybody is somebody i also was not about to miss a chance to hear the best band in the land and i thank you for the musical tribute and i m glad at least the tuba players were standing up and dancing i would have missed that too i also hey i m just getting warmed up you know come on to the last grambling class of the 20th century this is an important day in your lives in so many ways well you ll be able to get one now in so many ways the story of this institution embodies the whole 20th century experience of african americans in 1901 not a single public school in this part of louisiana would welcome an african american into its classes but the visionary farmers of this community the children and grandchildren of slaves were determined to give their children the education and pride and power to rise above bigotry and injustice and so even though they didn t have much they scrounged around and raised some money and wrote a letter to booker t washington asking him to send a teacher to help build a school in the piney woods out of that determination grambling has truly grown into a university for the 21st century you have nurtured some of our nation s best educators and lawyers pastors and public servants nurses and business leaders of course the nfl recruits here thanks to eddie robinson and his successor superbowl mvp doug williams of course you re known for your band and your other athletic teams but america s top technology firms recruit here too because grambling confers more computer and information science degrees to african americans than any other university in the nation so you join a proud tradition today and i congratulate you all you have gained knowledge that will enrich you for the rest of your lives and i can just see by looking at you you ve made friends who will stay with you for the rest of your lives through long hours in the class and late nights in the library through moments of both self doubt and triumph you have today gained the prize an education that will help you succeed in one of the most exciting eras in all of human history i d also like to congratulate and honor today your parents your grandparents your aunts and uncles all those who had a hand in raising you they should be proud of you but they should also be proud of themselves to raise a child from infancy to college graduate is no small feat you hear the amens from the audience on that one one of the most beloved presidents of grambling ralph waldo emerson jones i understand often said to his students when you go home be sure to kiss everybody including the mule because the mule is the one who pulls the plow and keeps the family going well i m not going to ask the graduates to kiss any mules today but i do ask each of you before this day is over to say a special thank you to the people who kept your families going i asked for some research on some of the families i d just like to mention two people like joyce gaines of vallejo california listen to this even through the pain of five ruptured disks in her back she worked three jobs and commuted 200 miles a day to put her daughter tieaesha through grambling where are you stand up there today she s graduating with a degree in sociology and she plans to open a home for abused children she is a tribute to her mother s love and sacrifice people like james and lilly bedford of shreveport james is a plumber lilly is a cook both took on extra work at night and on weekends to help their youngest son terrence pay for college she was a student at grambling back in the 50s but lilly had to leave before graduating now terrence is the second of the seven bedford children to earn a grambling degree and he s the senior class president congratulations to the bedfords where are you thank you stories like this remind of us what people can achieve when they set their minds to it but they also remind us of how hard it can be to raise a child right especially today in our very busy society with its very demanding economy now this is the serious part of the talk i want you to have a good time today but i want you to listen to this this spring i m going to speak to seniors about how this new economy is transforming every aspect of our lives next month at the university of chicago i ll talk about how we must put a human face on the dynamic but often disruptive international marketplace but today i want to talk to you about what we as a nation must to do help families like those i just mentioned and those will be your families master the challenges of the new economy i ve been thinking a lot about family lately and i expect a lot of you have in the aftermath of the terrible tragedy at littleton and the other school shootings we ve had in our country they ve forced us to confront the need not only to make guns less available to criminals and children not only to make our culture less violent and our schools safer but also to make the bonds that tie parents to children stronger the spate of hate crimes that we have seen taking the lives of james byrd jr in texas matthew shepard in wyoming and others force us to confront the need to raise our children to respect others who are different from themselves and to recognize that all hard working law abiding people are part of our national family the horrible ethnic cleansing of this decade in bosnia then rwanda now kosovo demonstrate in stark terms what can happen when a people raise their children without the fundamental premise embodied in our declaration of independence that we are all created equal equally endowed by god with the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness it all begins with family with parents who love their children more than life and raise them to live their dreams most of you today are probably thinking more about the adventures of the work that awaits you at this marvelous time in your lives and well you should be but most of you also will become parents when that happens it will be the most important work you ll ever do you will have the awesome responsibility of your children s physical intellectual emotional and spiritual development while at the same time pursing your own lives in a society that will reward your knowledge and skills in power and entertain you with its explosions of technology and mobility and keep you very very busy for those without your level of education in your time just earning enough to pay the bills may be a chore especially if there are children to be raised now the class of 1999 is entering an era of unparalleled opportunity and possibility with for example the lowest african american unemployment and poverty rates ever recorded and the highest african american homeownership in history to give more people like you a chance to participate fully in this economy we ve opened the doors of college to more and more americans with the hope scholarship tax credit larger pell grants lower cost student loans tools many of you have used to finance your education now with your diplomas in hand you will have the chance to reap the benefits and shape the future of this new era your time to lead lives of greater accomplishment and affluence than most of your parents even dreamed of but as you form your own families you will no doubt feel the pressure of trying to balance the demands of work and family and doing a good job at both in a world that moves faster and faster and often leaves parents less and less time and energy for their children today s working parents too often feel enormous stress and bring the stress home with them this is a problem not confined i want to emphasize this to you it is not confined just to people who work for low and modest incomes most of the parents i know have had problems balancing work and family and as you move through your careers unless we act now this problem will get worse therefore i believe it is imperative that your country give you the tools to succeed not only in the work place but also at home if you or any american has to choose between being a good parent and successful in your careers you have paid a terrible price and so has your country i asked the president s council of economic advisors to study the sweeping changes the modern economy has brought to our families now no offense to anybody on the faculty here but you know it s been said that if every economist on earth were laid end to end they still would not reach a conclusion but on this question these economists did reach a conclusion one that conforms to common sense and common experience they found that because more and more parents were working outside the home they have less and less time for their children the percentage of married mothers in the work force has nearly doubled in a generation from 38 percent in 1969 to 68 percent in 1996 because more mothers are working outside the home and because the number of single parent families has grown listen to this because this will be your life parents in the average family now have 22 fewer hours each week to spend at home that s nearly one full day less time per week for parents to devote to their children that means by the time a child reaches the age of 18 in today s world those 22 hours a week amount to over two years more the parents are away from home we as a nation must find a way to give your generation of parents some of that time back even as you ve gotten an education to succeed in the work force most of today s parents the vast majority are doing everything they can to do right by their kids but they still worry that no matter how hard they try it won t be enough they worry that waking up early and staying up late to make time for their children may not be enough when a child still has to come home to an empty house after school they worry that all those sunday morning sermons about a world of love might not be enough when tv and movies their children watch the music they listen to the video games they play show too much hate and violence they worry that all those nights working overtime to buy a computer so that a child can visit some of the worlds finest libraries on the internet might not be enough when the same internet can also lead them to recipes for pipe bombs and explosives or to website discussions of dark visions of life and society so very different from the ones the parents have tried to impart last week hillary and i took a sad journey to colorado to visit with the students and the families of columbine high school i came away from that experience more certain than ever that as we work to strengthen our gun laws we also have to work to strengthen our families now it seems to me that the modern economy you re going to be a part of poses four great challenges for you as parents the greatest and most obvious as i ve said is time in our around the world around the clock economy there just don t seem to be enough hours in the day for parents to do everything they need to do i m proud that the first bill i signed as president was the family and medical leave act and since 1993 millions of americans have used it to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn or a sick relative without losing their jobs it has been a great thing but to be truthful the current law just meets a fraction of the need too many people too many family obligations aren t covered at all too many families can t take advantage of the law because they can t afford to take the time off because they can t live without their paychecks for all of this nation s pro family rhetoric the hard truth is that other countries with advanced economies do a lot more to support working parents than we do we must think bigger and do better on the eve of the 21st century we ought to set a goal that all working americans can take time when they need it to care for their families without losing the income they need to support their families achieving that goal cannot come overnight and will require a significant shift in how our nation helps families to succeed at home and work but it can make all the difference in your lives it will demand thought and creativity a willingness to experiment it has to be done in a way that gives families flexibility and doesn t undermine our dynamic and growing economy today using my executive authority as president we re going to take an important step toward that goal i am directing the office of personnel management whose director janice lachance came down here with me today to allow all federal workers to use the sick leave they ve earned to take time off to care for other sick family members now what this means is on sick leave you get paid currently the most sick leave a worker can use in these kinds of cases is 13 days a year with the new policy i propose today federal employees will be able to take up to 12 weeks paid sick leave to nurse an ailing child or parent back to health if every company in america that offers sick leave to its workers adopted the same policy we re adopting today half of all the american work force would have this important benefit for their families we have to find other creative ways to help americans use benefits they ve worked for to finance the time off they need for their families let me give you another example a few states have asked the federal government if it would be possible to try a bold idea allow workers who have earned unemployment insurance coverage to collect unemployment payments while they re on leave caring for a newborn or a newly adopted child this is a very promising idea today i m directing the secretary of labor to issue a rule to allow states to offer paid leave to new mothers and fathers we can do this in a way that preserves the soundness of the unemployment insurance system and continues to promote economic growth as the first lady said in her book it takes a village those first weeks of life are critical to the bonding of parents and children and they can have long term positive developments for the children no parent should have to miss them i also am challenging congress to help i have proposed expanding unpaid family leave to cover more workers and more parental responsibilities and congress ought to respond positively parents should not have to fear a boss s wrath because they left work to take a child to the doctor they shouldn t have to call in sick to attend a parent teacher conference at the school the second challenge parents face is finding affordable high quality child care and a lot of you will face that low income families spend up to a quarter of their income on child care studies show that only one in seven child care centers meet all the standards of good quality now i m supporting subsidies for child care and tax credits better training for care givers stronger enforcement of safety standards and i want business to do more by helping their own workers find and afford quality child care in addition to that you know today millions of working parents and a lot of them right here in north louisiana start looking at the clock every day about 3 00 p m in the afternoon wondering if their kids have come home from school wondering how they ll fare at home alone the hours after the school bell rings and before parents come home are a perilous time for children the time they re most tempted to try drugs and alcohol most likely to become victims of a crime that s why i have asked congress to triple our investment in quality after school programs i challenge school districts all across this country unlock those empty classrooms in the late afternoon fill them with the sounds of children playing and learning the third challenge parents face since they re more and more at work is that they re literally physically apart from their children more now because of some modern developments in the work force we can actually close that distance by bringing back a very old idea letting children who can be be with their parents more at work when i was a young child i often went to work with my grandfather who worked as a night watchman in a sawmill outside hope arkansas and i often went to the little grocery store he ran and i tried not to be in the way too much or to eat too many cookies that i didn t pay for but i learned lessons there that have stayed with me for the rest of my life as i became president i realized that as a father with a daughter who was then still in junior high school i had the privilege of in effect living above the store the place where i worked was only a two or three minute walk to have dinner every night with my family when i was governor i still remember when i was governor i had a little desk over in the corner of my office for my daughter and i still have vivid memories i would be at my desk she would be at hers with her crayons drawing me little pictures now because of changes in the work force we can t do this for everybody but we can do it for more more of america s employers can use technology to bring workers and children closer together by allowing more employees to telecommute at work that is work at home with a modem where it s feasible more employers can open more on site child care centers and i have seen them working very well in this country i support tax breaks to help them afford to do that more employers can team up with school districts to build public schools at work sites if they re large enough dozens of companies have already built innovative public schools that s what you ve done here at grambling that s what the lab school is isn t it it s a school at a work site especially friendly to education these are good things to do and i challenge the employers of this country to look at them closely finally the last great challenge parents face in the modern economy is cultural the new economy has enriched our lives with lower priced electronic gear and a growing variety of media entertainment and it sure is interesting but too often tv radio the internet bombard our children with images and ideas that no parent would ever want them to see we need tools to protect free speech and give parents more control over what their young children see hear and read under the leadership of vice president gore those tools are now being crafted soon half of all the tv sets sold in our country will come with v chips so parents can basically make the most of the new tv ratings systems these devices enable parents to screen out violence sex or any program they don t want their children to see soon with just a click of a mouse parents who have the courage to learn how to use a computer will be able to take offensive websites off their children s screens the entertainment industry must also do its part they should stop showing guns and violence in ads children can see when they can t see the movies in the first place they should enforce the movie rating system more strictly and they ought to reexamine that rating system to see whether it s too loose when it comes to giving a pg 13 rating to films full of gratuitous violence these are tools that can help working parents succeed at the most important job you ll ever have raising children but government s responsibility is to make tools available your responsibility is to use them doctor king once wrote it is quite easy for me to think of a god of love mainly because i grew up in a family where love was central and loving relationships were ever present i hope and pray that the class of 1999 will have the chance to build those ever present loving relationships with your children to raise your children well you will have to make many sacrifices but then as we learned again today and as you showed by your applause for them your parents made many for you i ask you to think one more time about how you got here today to be sitting in the hot sun i m sort of sorry i m in the shade i ought to be in the sun and you ought to be in the shade since i m talking but think about this how many of you would be here today if it weren t for one or more people in your families who were reading to you or telling you stories when you were little who were helping with your homework who were attending your school events even if they were dog tired after work imparting wisdom over dinner working with you to give you chances they didn t have giving you that unconditional love support and faith that says you are the most important person in the world to me your parents have worked and sacrificed if you ask them today was it worth it you know what they would say but until you watch your own children grow up you can t really know how proud your parents are of you today and how sure they are that all the sacrifices were more than worth it no matter what else you accomplish in life and many of you will accomplish a very great deal your children will still matter most we have to make sure that you and they get all the benefits of this fabulous modern world and still keep the enduring gift of your devotion and love as you journey into the new millennium i wish you success and fulfillment at work and with your children congratulations good luck and god bless you let me say i must say when i was invited to come back and teach and i was told all about the food and all the perks of the job and then the president said he wasn t serious i was getting into this i ve got a good pension i can work pretty cheap let me say one thing seriously i very much hate that i have to go back now but i have as you know we have got a lot going on overseas and it s six hours ahead there and i have to make a lot of phone calls today and do a lot of work otherwise i wouldn t leave i would like to stay here until midnight not talk until midnight just stay here until midnight this has been a wonderful thing for me i have had a lot more fun than you have so far at this i cannot thank you i m so proud of you and i like looking out there and seeing your faces and your eyes and your self confidence and i want you to go out and do a great job with your lives thank you god bless you dem wjclinton23 6 00a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you deena for the wonderful introduction and for the way you represent our country and for the little local reference to arkansas i liked that thank you bill hybl for the work you do with the olympic committee and i want to say a special word of thanks to pat milkovich for the wonderful tour of the training center today we had a great time and i thank you so much i want to thank representative bob filner the congressman from this district for being with me today and for his support someone just thanked him on the way for being against having all that cargo noise coming over here and interrupting your training center i figure he ll take a lot of heat for that position so somebody who likes it might as well clap i want to thank the venita vista high school marching band for playing let s give them a hand they re great some of their members have been selected to perform at the opening ceremonies in sydney and i know they ll have a good time i d like to thank mayor morton from chula vista and the chula vista council members who are here and the county officials who are here and representative susan davis a candidate for congress thank you for coming i m glad to see all of you here most of all i d like to thank the athletes and the coaches and the trainers that gave me a tour around this magnificent facility today i had a great time and i realize that most of these things i can t do anymore but i really had a great time deena talked about perseverance and hard work but i want to tell you a little something about her she was too humble to mention her own experience with cross country championships in portugal this year about 100 yards into the race her throat closed up and she couldn t breathe after five kilometers she blacked out and fell it turned out a bee had flown into her mouth and stung her in the throat but she got up and kept going and thanks to her the women s team still left portugal with a medal she gave new meaning to the term making a beeline giver her a hand she was great one of the real highlights of our white house years for hillary chelsea and me has been the chance to be a part of the olympic experience cheering on our teams from lillehammer to atlanta to nagano and now to sydney where at least i know my daughter is going my wife is in a competition of her own and i am informed that my services may be needed elsewhere but our daughter informed us that she would be in sydney to cheer the teams on i am so glad to have this chance to see all the work that you re doing to prepare for the games here you know just moments before he won one of his gold medals the legendary jesse owens said a lifetime of training for just 10 seconds in the magic of the olympic moment it may be easy for those of us who aren t part of it except as spectators to lose sight of all that had to be done before the years and years of getting up before the sun the time away from your loved ones the hard work the sacrifice and something that s often overlooked the pain so on behalf of all the people in this country i d like to just say more than anything else i wanted to come here to say to these team members and those who want to make the olympic teams we appreciate you we thank you and we are very very proud of you i have thought a lot especially in the olympic season about why the olympics mean so much to people all over the world and especially why the american people get so completely caught up in them why they capture our imagination and our hearts obviously we love athletics and we are highly competitive people as that little in your face rap that deena gave us showed about the american team but i think there s even more to it than the love of competition and athletics i think people like the olympics in large measure because the olympics work pretty much the way we think life ought to work the way we think the world ought to work everybody gets an opportunity to play and regardless of race or station in life and increasingly thank goodness regardless of gender people are valued based on their performance and their effort not their posturing people get a chance to do their best and also to bring out the best in one another and everybody including those that don t win medals is better off for having tried in giving his or her best you win by playing by the rules and by doing it well i think we like the olympics because we all think the world ought to work that way and we know if other forms of human endeavor worked that way we d be better off one of the reasons i ran for president eight years ago is that i thought that washington ought to work more like that i thought it ought to be more about production and less about posturing and it s tough for people in politics because they know that if they produce they may not get on the evening news but if they posture they can get there and so i hope part of what will happen in this is that the olympic spirit will catch up in washington and will actually produce some things medicine for our seniors on medicare and a patients bill of rights and an increase in the minimum wage a lot of other things we could be doing that we could actually reach agreement on across party lines even though it may cost everybody a few seconds on the evening news the rules of the game there are too often i ve got an idea you ve got an idea let s fight and you give us all a good sober reminder that in the end when it s all said and done we re going to be judged not by what we said but by what we ve done and i thank you for that now let me just say this day is special for a lot of reasons it s olympic day on this day more than a hundred years ago the modern olympic games were founded it was also a hundred years ago this summer that women were first allowed to compete in the olympic games and they did all 11 of them this year more than 4 000 women will compete in the olympic games the largest number ever let me say a couple of other things about this day on this day 60 years ago one of the greatest olympians of all time was born wilma rudolph she won her first medal the last time the olympics were held in australia in 1956 and finally today is special because it s also on this day 28 years ago that title ix became the law of the land now it s interesting that all this stuff happened on this day but title ix has really enabled america to live up to the olympic spirit to give everybody a chance to give everybody a chance to play by the rules everybody a chance to live up to his and her god given abilities before title ix there were 300 000 girls in high school sports today there are more than 2 million it s not a coincidence that in atlanta the first generation of women to grow up under title ix literally to have their whole lives in title nine went on to win the gold medal in soccer the gold medal in softball the gold medal in gymnastics and the gold medal in basketball it works believe it or not i found out not long ago that title ix s requirement for equal opportunity in sports and in education does not apply to the education and training programs run by the federal government itself so on this anniversary of title ix i am actually signing an executive order that applies title ix to the federal government s programs and prohibits discrimination of any kind in federally conducted education and training programs let me just say one other thing about the importance of broadening opportunities here i would like to ask all of you who are presently athletes or who have been or who are otherwise involved in this olympic movement to continue to share your gifts not only on the field of competition but in the playing field of life and especially with our young people and with those whose job it is to raise them well let me just give you one example of something that really concerns me over the last 20 years too many of our schools have abandoned their music their arts and their psychical education programs you may have noticed that last week i went to new york city to be on the today show to talk about the vh1 music and school program where they worked so hard to get instruments back into schools so schools can start their school music programs again there is so much evidence that a lot of young people learn better if they have access early to music and arts programs but it s also really troubling to me that so many schools have just completely abandoned physical education programs for all kids while maintaining team sports now a lot of the athletes behind me may be going to the olympics in sports for which there was no competition in their schools and they wouldn t necessarily have been football or basketball players or even soccer players if their schools had competitive soccer listen to this the percentage of high school students in daily physical education has declined more than 30 percent in the last 10 years today fewer than one in three students are enrolled in phys ed every day meanwhile the percentage of young people who are overweight has doubled in the same time period the two things are closely related and we know that it has an effect on learning on self image on self esteem on a sense of what you can do today i m directing our secretary of education dick riley and donna shalala the secretary of health and human services to work with the u s olympic committee our physical fitness council and others to try to find ways to encourage more young people to get fit and stay fit and i m asking congress to establish a foundation that will leverage the energy creativity and resources of the private sector in furthering the mission of the president s council on physical fitness to help every young person in america to live an active safe and healthy life i hope you ll help us do that we need to remember that not every six or eight or ten year old can be on the football team or on a basketball team or even on a soccer team and all of our kids need access to healthy lifestyles good exercise and basic good athletic habits we need your help in achieving that goal finally let me say i d give anything to be in sydney i thank you for your dedication your courage for reaching deep inside for giving your heart and soul to this and i want you to win all the medals you can just like deena said but i want you to realize that by what you have accomplished already and by the way you have done it you have already made your country very proud you carry more than our flag to sydney you carry the spirit of our country our hopes our dreams our prayers and all of us will be with you all the way thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton23 6 00b bill_clinton well thank you very much i never thought i d live to hear bill maher say those things and he said it in front of the press which means he ll have to dump on me twice as hard next week but it ll be worth it i love it thank you bill thank you vivica thank you ladies and gentlemen i want to thank our hosts for having us here i was coming over here with my buddy terry mcauliffe tonight and he said now tell me where we re going he s a good irish catholic boy i said we re going to a place called the garden of eden he said we can t go i said why he said they ll accuse one of us of being in search of original sin but here we are and they did a nice job for us thank you very much all of you it s really beautiful thank you thank you so much now look you all came here to have a good time and you probably don t want to hear a political speech but i do want to say one or two things first of all i am very very grateful for the chance that i have had to serve as president these last seven and a half years i am grateful for the support i received from california from southern california from los angeles and from this community and i thank you very very much i don t think so you ve got a good governor and you ve got to get a good president the second thing is somebody might ask you why you came tomorrow and i want you to be able to give a serious but brief answer there are three things you need to know about this election number one it is real important it s just as important as it was in 92 and 96 and i want all the young people here everybody here under 40 to listen to me about this in 92 when i got elected california was in the dumps we had had riots in the streets we had the politics of division everybody knew what had to be done we had to get the show back on the road we had to turn the economy around we had to get the society coming together again the political system had to work you didn t have to be a genius to know what we needed to do but now things are going well and what i want to say to you if you re young is this it is just as stern a test of a nation s judgment and character what you do with the good times as what you do with adversity and everybody here who is over 30 can remember at least one time in your life when you made a significant mistake not because things were going so badly but because things were going so well you thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate nobody who s lived any length of time has failed to make a mistake like that so the first thing i want you to know is this is a big issue this election what s the question the question is what are we going to do with the prosperity are we going to indulge ourselves take all the short term fixes pretend there are no consequences or take this opportunity to build the future of our dreams that s really what this is about and there are a lot of things out there to do what are you all going to do when all the baby boomers like me retire and there s only two people working for every one person drawing social security and medicare we need to prepare for that we have more kids in our schools than ever before and they re more diverse what are you going to do 20 years from now if you re young and we don t succeed in giving them all a world class education we still have people in this country in this city on the indian reservations and the rural areas that aren t part of all this prosperity if we don t give them a chance to participate now when will you ever get around to it what are you going to do 20 years from now if we don t do something about global warming and prove that we can still grow the economy and improve the environment if all these people that say you can t do that and don t worry just keep putting stuff in the air what are you going to do if the sea level rises a foot what will it be like here what will you be making movies about so you ve got to think about these things we have never in my lifetime had the chance we have now for you as citizens to decide that you want to do big things and get them done so it s an important election the second thing i want to tell you is as if you needed reminding there are huge differences between the two parties from the candidates for president to the senate to the house now bill made a joke about governor bush and people have made a few jokes about me as he pointed out people made a few jokes about al gore al gore makes jokes about himself we all ought to make a few jokes and laugh and have a good time but i want to be dead serious about this you have a chance here to have a positive election that is most of these elections the last 20 years have been fueled by fanatics or people who wanted power and they thought that the best way to win an election was to keep everybody home that could think and then try to persuade those that were going to vote that their opponents were just one notch above a car thief i mean how many elections have you seen like that now you don t have to say anything bad about anybody in this election all we ought to do is just have a debate about what we think we ought to do with our prosperity and know what the differences are so number one it s a big election it s about your future number two there are real differences and here s the third point and it s real important only the democrats really want you to understand what the differences are you listen to the republicans talk you d think they never even had a primary and when the lobbyists for the nra says that if they win the white house then the nra will have an office in the white house it s probably true but it s inconvenient for him so they sort of hide that we differ they want to spend all this projected surplus we ve worked so hard to get over the next 10 years on a big tax cut which would benefit a lot of you a big tax cut and spend the rest of it on partial privatization of social security and a big national missile defense program and whatever else they ve promised and there won t be any money left even if all the surplus materializes if it doesn t materialize we ll be back to deficits high interest rates not such a good economy and you will pay the price we say and i m proud of al gore for saying this it may not be popular but we re going to save some of this money because it may not materialize the taxes you pay for medicare we re going to save pay the debt down and know we can take care of the baby boomers when they retire without bankrupting the rest of you it s time to think about the long run we have differences on the environment we have differences on education we re for putting 100 000 teachers in our schools and modernizing our schools and providing extra funds and requiring schools to turn around if they re failing or shut down and they re not we re for raising the minimum wage and they re not we re for a patients bill of rights and they re not we think all seniors on medicare ought to have access to affordable prescription drugs and we ought to take this time and provide it and they don t now there are lots of others but you get the idea if we have a debate about this we will win now let me just say one other thing in the history of america we have always had a vice president we ve had some pretty great vice presidents thomas jefferson was vice president made a pretty good president theodore roosevelt was vice president made a good president harry truman was vice president was a great president but we have never had a person in the office of vice president who while he was vice president had anything like the positive impact on the economy and the society of our country that al gore has had he s by far the best vice president in the entire history of the united states and therefore he is by far the best qualified person to be president who has run for office in my adult lifetime because of the way he spent the last eight years and because i had sense enough to give him a lot to do it s self serving for me to say but he has performed magnificently and there are three reasons you ought to be for him number one he will keep this prosperity going because he won t change our economic policy he ll build on it number two he ll try to include everybody in his vision of america the people in places left behind all the families that are working for a living but need help to raise their children need help with child care or long term care for their parents or their disable family members or after school programs for their kids he ll try to do that and everybody will have a place we led the fight for the hate crimes victory that we got in the senate this week which a lot of you like we think everybody should be part of our america and the final reason you ought to vote for him is he understands the future and he can lead us there he understands the implications of the internet revolution he understands that all your medical records and all your financial records are going to be in somebody s computer file somewhere and your privacy ought to be protected and they ought not to be invaded unless you give permission to do it that s an important issue he understands that global warming is real he s the first politician in american life that said anything to me about climate change long before it was widely accepted that it was happening so what do you need in a president somebody with the best experience somebody that will keep the prosperity going somebody that cares about all of us someone that understands the future if you want all of you so many of you said thank you very much for being a good president i wish i could do something for you you can do something for me make sure that everybody you know in this state and across america understands it s a big election there are real differences and we want you to know that they are and that we intend to build the future of your dreams and we need al gore we need these candidates for the senate and the house and if you ll go out and tell people that and tell people we don t want to bad mouth anybody just let s talk about what our honest disagreements are we re going to have a big celebration in november and more important you young people here are going to have the best days america has ever known thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton23 6 97a bill_clinton thank you very much senator boxer senator torricelli elaine easton thank you for being here and for supporting our educational standards of excellence movement i thank the saxophone quartet and the bacich school second grade choir i thought they were both terrific thank you i guarantee you one thing when the kids are up there singing everyone of us is saying i wonder if i could sing that song if i could remember all those things in alphabetical order good citizenship when barbara boxer was finishing her remarks bob torricelli who is an old friend of mine old friends talk she should have chided us for talking bob torricelli leaned over to me and said she has the best spirit in the entire senate you know in the spirit of campaign reform one of the things that i favor is full disclosure and for those of you who don t know barbara boxer s first grandchild is my second nephew so that s really why i m here it has nothing to do with party or conviction or anything therefore i have had an unusual opportunity to get to know this woman and what i can tell you is that everything i have ever seen of her in private is completely consistent with the face and the voice she presents to the public and that is important what you are seeing is exactly what you get 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 weeks a year and while we normally but not always agree on the issues the thing i would like for you to think about today is the spirit the heart of the matter because i ve been here a good while now in washington and i had a real life before i moved to washington and i expect to have a real life when i leave and i have almost come to the conclusion that more important than the ideological debates or the party differences is which spirit will dominate washington as we move into the 21st century i mean here we are basically with the strongest economy in a generation with an unemployment below 5 percent for the first time in 24 years the lowest inflation in 30 years and for us democrats a very important statistic the biggest decline in inequality among working families in over three decades the number one exporter in the world the lowest deficit as a percentage of our income of any major economy in the world the crime rate has dropped the biggest drop in 36 years last year before the welfare law took effect the biggest drop in welfare rolls in the history of the republic and yet there are really still people in washington who seem like they re mad about it and they want to do whatever it takes to make sure you don t think about it and this whole spirit you know are you going to be for the people who try to drive you down or the people who try to lift you up that s really what it s about you know you listen to some of these people talk in the nation s capital you d think that they spent the whole morning sucking lemons before they got up to give the speech and you listen to barbara boxer talk in the middle of a rain storm and you d be convinced you were on the beach in some sunny resort it s a difference in approach to life and attitude and whether you believe the purpose of politics is to elevate the human spirit and bring together across the lines that divide and make people believe that tomorrow can be better than today or whether you believe the purpose of it is to carve out power and anything that threatens it including good news should be crushed at the earliest possible moment with whatever means at hand now that really is the great choice here we must not let this woman be defeated by all the people who will say well she s too liberal on this that or the other thing if she ever made a mistake in her life it was a mistake of the head not the heart and don t you ever forget it we all make mistakes and that is really what is at issue i have done everything i can as president to heal the kind of divisive destructive political climate that has come to dominate too much of the discourse in washington the automatic assumption that anybody who is different from you has got something terrible wrong with them the feeling that anything you can do to beat somebody who is your opponent no matter how much you have to denigrate them is all right i tried to get beyond that i tried to treat my opponents with respect and dignity and honor and i tried to restore what i thought was the best tradition of this country but you ve got a senator that works like crazy every day that gets things done you heard that list one thing she didn t mention she ll be glad torricelli told me this he said she forgot to say something she forgot to say that when she was fighting for that emergency supplemental that we got passed for all the emergencies one of the things it had in it was money for breast cancer research in the san francisco area to see whether environmental causes are leading the high rates of breast cancer here than other parts of the country she did that you know i hope you ll forgive me but i m as high on america as those kids are i think they re right i think they re right and i don t pretend to have all the answers all i know is that this country is better off today than it was when barbara boxer got elected to the senate i know that she has made material contributions to the efforts that our administration has made to grow the economy to give people a chance to increase the availability of education to increase the accessibility of health care to drive the crime rate down and to bring us together across the lines that too often divide us that s what i know and that s far more important that any specific issue that you can turn into a 30 second ad one way or the other and i know that the spirit she brings to public life is the spirit we need from all people who go to washington to represent you without regard to their party or their philosophy if we brought that kind of spirit into all of our endeavors instead of thinking about how we could drive a stake into the spirit of the american people by our short term advantage this country would have no problems and also we cannot afford to be afraid of the future and that sort of divisive talk you know it makes people afraid of the future we don t have anything to be afraid of if we just face our problems face our challenges realize that we ve still got a lot to do realize that we don t have a person to waste and realize that we all deserve to be represented by people who wake up in the right spirit and i believe that this woman is a rare treasure for our country yes we re now united by marriage yes i m personally crazy about her that s all true but the most important thing i m not running anymore i won t be on the ballot anymore i ve been in public life for a long time i ve seen a lot of people come and go contrary to what you may read or feel the overwhelming majority of people i have known of both parties and all philosophies have been scrupulously honest people who worked hard and made less money than they could have made doing nearly anything else with people of their talent and energy and ability who wanted to make this a better country and everybody who is trying to convince you of the contrary is wrong and people who try to keep the american people in a bad frame of mind because they just can t bear to think that somebody is happy and successful somewhere are wrong and what we need to do is to be focused on our common problems and our common business so don t let the people who trade on fear and only win when you re unhappy turn barbara boxer into a cardboard cutout of what she really is don t let that happen and remember it s way more important than the issues it s about the spirit of the country it s about the spirit of california california did not get where it is you didn t come back from all those disasters and a terrible recession just on my policies i d like to think i helped but you didn t get there you got there on the spirit of the people and if everybody had sat around being in the frame of mind that the kind of people who are going to fight her so hard want you to be in when you go vote on election day you would not have recovered we cannot behave on election day in a way that is different from the way we want to behave on every day of the year we cannot look at the world in a different way on election day in a way different from the way we want to look at our life and expect to get the kind of elected representatives we want and the kind of collective decisions we have to make as a people remember that remember senator torricelli s line and through the ups and the downs you stay with her and you make up your mind that you will not let the people of california be taken in by an attack on her because she is the great spirit of the senate and that s what america needs the right spirit thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton23 6 97b bill_clinton i thought he was going to say when the son of a migrant farm worker can introduce the redneck grandson of poor dirt farmers that s what i thought he was going to say they take all our fun away thank you kevin thank you paul thank you campbell brothers thank you bennett kelly for all your work on the saxophone club i thank lieutenant governor gray davis and congressman brad sherman who were here earlier and i thank all of you for being here i just i love the saxophone club i love it i love the idea that we ve given so many people who never were in the political process before a chance to be a part of it and to help to forge your own future i like the fact that most of the people who are in the saxophone club are a lot younger than i am that s not true i don t like that but i do like the fact that people who have most of their days in front of them and who have a great stake in what we re doing believe enough in this to be a part of this you know i was just thinking today coming out here to california how wildly different things are here than they were just five years ago and i was thinking how profoundly grateful i feel to all of you for the fact that california voted for me twice to all of you for the support you ve given the policies that we have enacted to all of you for helping to make it possible for al gore and hillary and me and all of us in our administration to do things that have helped to get the unemployment rate below 5 percent for the first time in 24 years to get the inflation rate to its lowest point in 30 years to make america the number one exporter in the world again and for a democrat something that s very important have the biggest decline in inequality among working people in over 30 years i m proud of that and thank you for that i m proud of the fact that we had the biggest drop in crime in 36 years the biggest drop in the welfare rolls in history i m proud of the fact that we ve cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in four years than they did in the previous 12 and we re going to clean up 500 more next time i m proud of that i m proud of the fact that i was able thanks to you to get a balanced budget agreement which will have the biggest increase in health care coverage for america s children since medicaid was enacted in 1965 and the biggest increase in investment for excellence in education in 35 years and for the first time if we pass this budget consistent with the agreement we ll be able to say to every child in this country i ll get to that we ll be able to say to every child in this country when they re 10 years old you will be able to go to college you will be able to go to college that s a big deal i m proud of the fact that you ve made it possible for us to pursue a policy that says that we can grow the economy and preserve the environment that we can go forward together that we don t have to do things like target the nea or the national endowment for the humanities i never could figure out why we d want to get rid of sending 150 million a year which is a small amount of a 1 5 trillion budget to bring the arts and the humanities to people all across the country in little by roads who wouldn t have it otherwise or to give young artists the chance to fulfill their god given abilities i think it s a pretty good investment but more than anything else i m proud of you just look around this crowd tonight nine days ago i had the opportunity to come to the university of california at san diego and give a speech that was very important to me i had been wanting to talk about it for a long time asking the american people to join me in a national honest conversation about race to have in every community and every neighborhood on every block an honest conversation about what it is that still divides us and what unites us that s more important to identify those laws that we ought to be enforcing that we re not whatever changes we need to make what new policies we need but most important what attitudes we have to have i am convinced that even more than the continuing examples of illegal discrimination this country is being held back by things that aren t illegal but are equally damaging that relate to stereotyping one another by race or other category i am really concerned about it and in california you have both the opportunity and the obligation to lead the way in this which is why i went to san diego to give this speech i mean just look around the crowd tonight today america has one state hawaii which has no majority race in three to five years california will join hawaii in 30 to 40 years america will join hawaii and california and for the first time ever we will have a chance to see whether all these things we ve been saying about america for a hundred years are true that this is not about this country is not about one race it s not about one place it s about a set of ideas and a set of ideals that anybody can share and be a part of and make a future on well we re about to find out and it s high time we started thinking about it what is the unfinished business between black americans and white americans what is the unfinished business that hispanic americans have growing out of their unique heritage and they will soon be the second largest minority group when we re all minority groups in america what about that what does it mean to have los angeles county with over 150 different racial and ethnic groups what does it mean not to be the providence of the coast anymore wayne county detroit michigan has more than 140 different racial and ethnic groups in it what does all this mean for us can we become the first truly multiracial great democracy in human history can we shed all the historic baggage that s been with us ever since pre history when our ancient ancient ancient ancestors gathered together in bands and traveled across the earth as hunters and gatherers and learned to distrust people who looked different from them because they really had reason to be afraid of them why are we still living like that can we get rid of those deep sort of psychological impulses that are inside how many times did you ever have a day where you couldn t have gotten through the day if you didn t really dislike somebody you say no matter how bad it is at least i m not as bad as that sucker right how many days have you everybody here has had a day like that right everybody here has had a day like that i don t think much of myself today but i sure am better than so and so it s almost like we need this sort of thing and we re laughing about it but we have been given a great gift and those of you particularly those of you who are younger have been given a great gift you re going to grow up and live and raise your children and see your grandchildren grow up in an america where people have more chances to live out their dreams than ever before if we can prove that we really can live together as one america where we not only accept we actually celebrate what s different about us and we re secure in celebrating it because we know that what we share in common is even more important now that s really what this is all about when we started the saxophone club in 1992 i had a set of simple little ideas that i wanted to bring to america i said to myself what do i want this country to be like when my daughter is my age in the 21st century i want everybody to have an opportunity who is responsible enough to work for it i want my country to be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and i want this country to be coming together instead of being driven apart i am sick and tired of short term destructive negative political strategies that divide people when we need to be united that s what i wanted then and that s what i want now now so i say to you i thank you for being here tonight i want you to stay active in public affairs i want you to every time you hear somebody who is cynical and say it doesn t matter say compare how we are today with how we were then this is what i supported it was right it made a difference people s lives have changed and then say but there s a lot more to do and that s why i m in it for the long haul thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton23 6 98a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you mr carlson for your very eloquent and enlightening statement and for the work you do every day as a farmer both with your crops and with the bison when dan glickman said you had bison i saw a lot of people s eyebrows go up we ve come a long way since teddy roosevelt saved the buffalo with the national park we went from millions of head in the west and the high plains down to only 20 known head of buffalo when teddy roosevelt actually established that national preserve now we ve got enough that we know they ll be there with folks like you farming and we appreciate that thank you secretary glickman for the truly outstanding job you do as secretary of agriculture i would like to thank senators lugar and harkin and congressmen smith and stenholm and i would also like to thank congressman becerra the head of the hispanic caucus for the work he did and all the other members of congress who are here we are joined by a number of local officials who had great interest in this legislation including but i m sure not limited to l a county supervisor gloria molina chicago city treasurer miriam santos virginia state delegate karen darner i would also like to thank all the representatives of our country s farmers and ranchers who are here the religious leaders our immigrant and anti hunger advocates this is a very good day for me personally for two reasons first of all you heard secretary glickman give you the official population of the town in which i was born it s about 50 percent larger then it was when i was born there but all my mother s people came from a little town called bodcaw which still has only 50 people in it and i have on my desk upstairs a picture of my grandfather with his family in 1907 just about all of them were farmers and when they were forced to leave the land and come into the large city of hope most of them kept little plots of land out in the country for decades where they kept there hand in and they continued to grow their crops and harvest them even when they could no longer themselves make a living on the land and when i was a boy it was part of the ritual of every summer that i would go out and help them work the land when i wasn t in school and in the fall help them to bring in everything from vegetables to watermelon i don t know if watermelon is a fruit or vegetable i think it s something in between also when i was governor i governed a state which had a lot of people who didn t have enough to eat and i saw this remarkable coalition of people following the moral tradition of virtually every religion which consistently admonishes us to take care of the poor and the hungry so this is a remarkable day and something that all of you can be proud of and those of you who worked on this bill know that you can be especially proud of it because you had some very powerful opponents of what we attempted to do we are carrying on here a long and proud tradition of bipartisan commitment a coalition that was first forged by hubert humphrey robert dole and george mcgovern a generation ago by standing together in that tradition we have ensured that america keeps its contract with our farmers and ranchers and with people in need we all know that our nation s core values in many ways have their deepest roots in rural america in its commitment to community and mutual responsibility to strong families and individual initiative direct trusting interaction among neighbors so hard to find in some places in our country and throughout the world still have very strong roots in rural towns every american has a stake therefore in making sure that rural america stays strong into the 21st century not only because they feed us but because in many ways they feed our spirit and help us to forge our character as a nation this bill as has already been said does a lot of very good things for america first it rights a wrong when i signed the welfare reform bill in 1996 i said the cuts in nutritional programs were too deep and had nothing whatever to do with welfare reform last year we restored medicaid and ssi benefits to 420 000 legal immigrants today we reinstate food stamp benefits to 250 000 legal immigrants including seniors persons with disabilities and 75 000 children in addition the hmong immigrants from laos who heroically fought for our nation during the vietnam war will again receive their full food benefits overdue high time and i appreciate the fact that they were included in this bill none of these benefit cuts had the first thing to do with welfare reform reinstating them is the right thing to do and will have nothing to do with the success we ve enjoyed which has brought welfare rates in america down to a 29 year low now beyond that this bill extends opportunity for all americans especially for farmers and ranchers today i think it s worth noting again as i prepare to leave for china american agriculture is one of our most powerful export engines products from one of every three acres planted in america are sold abroad as this strong growth continues in the new century our farmers and ranchers will need to feed millions and millions of more people around the world they will need to do their work in a more sustainable way to protect our water and fragile soil they will need to continue improving food safety by investing in cutting edge agricultural research funding rural development and bolstering crop insurance this bill will help our farmers meet the needs of tomorrow s world we are channeling an additional 120 million a year over the next five years to vital investments in food and agriculture genome research food safety and technology human nutrition and agricultural biotechnology we re allocating 60 million a year over the next five years to give grants and loans to underserved rural communities where people must diversify their economy on an available attainable scale in order to preserve the fabric of life there these grants will ensure i hope and believe that more and more of our rural communities can finally share in this remarkable national economic prosperity that we are enjoying we are also providing our farmers with peace of mind because crop insurance will be there for them should disaster strike in certain parts of the country farmers are hurting now and it is clear that in addition we need to strengthen the farm safety net for the future the legislation that we signed today is a very good start but there are some more things i believe we should do in addition to strengthening the safety net for farmers we must protect our exports by passing the legislation sponsored by senators murray and roberts and representative pomeroy to allow our farmers to continue to export wheat to pakistan and india it was never intended i don t believe to use food as a weapon in foreign policy even in this extreme circumstance and i strongly support that legislation and believe we have big bipartisan support for doing something about it immediately and it s important that it be done immediately because of the necessity of getting those contracts out and making sure the shipments are there if they re going to be there i feel that we will be successful congress must also give the imf the resources it needs to help to stabilize the economies of asia in part because they are huge markets for united states farm products finally we must protect the many advances we re making in the bill i m just about to sign believe it or not the bill i m just about to sign already has some provisions which are in jeopardy there are some in congress who are working to undue the progress embodied in this bill the appropriations committees have taken steps to cut the funding next year for the research and rural development programs i just mentioned limit our food safety efforts and cut as many as 100 000 women and children from the wic program at a time when our economy is doing well and we can clearly afford to continue these things this bill is the example of how we should work together let me just mention one other issue before i sign the bill an example of how the country does well when we put progress ahead of partisanship in the bipartisan balanced budget agreement i was proud to sign into law last year we gave medicare patients new choices enabled them to enroll in private health plans and extended the life of the medicare trust fund for a decade building on that new bipartisan law i instructed our administration to implement a patient s bill of rights for the one third of americans who receive federal health care benefits beginning this week we are putting those protections into effect from now on for example medicare patients will have the right to see a specialist in a broad range of areas women will have a right to see women s health specialists medicare patients will have a right to privacy for their medical records this marks the most significant change in medicare in three decades it shows what we can do when we put progress over partisanship that s why i also strongly support the bipartisan effort being launched today in the house of representatives by congressmen dingle and ganske to extend the patient s bill of rights to all americans today we mark another milestone in this kind of bipartisan cooperation we ve come along way from the days when thomas jefferson thought every american should be a farmer even the farmers are glad that s not true but what he said then is still true in many ways the cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens the most vigorous the most independent the most virtuous they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interest by the most lasting bonds today we strengthened those bonds and we strengthened those bonds to those whose hold on the american dream is still fragile in so doing we do our part to do what mr jefferson wanted us to do to always be about the business of forming a more perfect union thank you very much i would like to ask all the members of congress to come up here while we sign the bill come on up thank you dem wjclinton23 6 98b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you garry and thank you ladies and gentlemen for the warm welcome and even more thank you for being here for garry mauro i don t know what to make of that eulogy you gave me at the end of those remarks it reminds me the other day i was in cleveland this is a true story i was in cleveland the other day and i went with congressman lou stokes who is retiring after a long and distinguished wonderful career in congress on a motorcade through his congressional district in inner city cleveland and we went by all these little schools and then finally we stopped at a grade school and i was there because a wonderful community program called city year which may have a chapter in texas i think they do and it has a couple thousand kids around the country they re all part of our americorp program our national service program they were having their national convention in cleveland but i went to this elementary school where some of our young volunteers are working with the kids in the inner city so i gave them a little talk you know and then i went down the line and i was shaking hands with all the teachers and the parents and as many children as i could possibly shake hands with and i got to the very end of the line and there was a little kid standing there that barely came above my knees he was probably six i guess he could have been seven but i don t think so he looked up at me and normally when i see kids like that they say i ve seen you on television and i say thank goodness this kid said are you the real president i said yes i am he said and you re not dead yet then i realized that he thought presidents were you know he had studied george washington and abraham lincoln he thought a part of the job description was you couldn t be living anymore and some days i wonder whether he s right or not but at least i died with honors from gary s introduction let me say to all of you i think you re doing a good thing here and i think it s even more important that you re doing it because you know you have a long way to go but i would like to tell you a story or two in 1991 when i started running for president only my wife and my mother thought i could win my daughter thought i had a chance when i entered the new hampshire primary i was fifth among the democrats starting out and the incumbent president was at a 75 percent approval rating when i won the nomination of my party on june 2 1992 with victories in california new jersey and ohio i was running third in the public opinion polls six weeks later i was first in the public opinion polls six weeks later go back a few years i met garry mauro over 25 years ago when we worked in 1972 together two years later i ran for congress i ran against a member of congress who had 99 percent name recognition and an 85 percent approval rating in 1974 and i was zero zero on labor day i was behind 59 to 23 on labor day not june the 28th on september the whatever it was that year and i got 48 and a half percent of the vote if i had had another week to campaign i could have won i say that to make this point when people are satisfied with good conditions and they like their incumbent office holders personally they tend always to say they are for them and so would you if you didn t know him or you didn t happen to be in the other party in order to make an election in this kind of an environment it is necessary that people believe there is a reason to think about the election and that there is a choice to be made and that the choice if it is made would be good for them and i think you ve got what you need here you ve got a good candidate who is a wonderful human being and an exemplary public servant with a record that anyone could be proud of you ve got the right issues and i want to say a little more about that and you ve got if you all do your part an adequate support base so that people in your vast huge state will be aware that you have a good candidate and the right issues and there is a reason to make a choice you also have in my view the best of all possible worlds because garry mauro can just get out there and run as himself and run a completely positive campaign and only talk about those areas where there is an honest disagreement now then it determines it really turns on the same thing that really will shape the elections in november here for congress or that will shape the attitudes how to people respond to good times i m very grateful i ll just amplify what gary said i am very very grateful that today in our country we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years 16 1 million new jobs the lowest welfare rolls in 29 years the first balanced budget and the surplus we believe this year in 29 years the lowest inflation in 32 years the smallest federal government in 35 years and the highest home ownership in the history of the country i m grateful for that and i think that i also know that the american people deserve primary credit for that but the decisions made by our administration more than half of which were made under withering partisan criticism from the leadership of the other party had a lot to do with creating the framework in which it became possible for the american people to do these great things now having said that the question is when times get good what do you do a lot of people say well i ve been working hard for years and i m tired of thinking about insecurity and difficult things and you know i would like to take it easy and i don t want too much to change well there are two problems with that one is nothing ever stays the same anyway ever not in an individual life not in the family s life not in a business not in a state s life not in a nation s life the second is all you have to do is pick up the paper everyday to know that things are changing quite a lot around the world and there are a lot of outcomes that aren t clear i m going to china tomorrow as all of you know against a backdrop of the nuclear tests in india and pakistan which occurred after years and years and years in which just since i ve been president we had gotten an indefinite extension of the non proliferation treaty we had gotten all these countries to agree to control their missile technology we passed the chemical weapons convention we passed the comprehensive test ban treaty we had a hundred and forty something countries around the world sign it we and the russians began to lower our nuclear arsenals dramatically and destroy nuclear weapons and it seemed that we were on a constant and stable path now we have a new challenge i m going to china at a time when we are appreciative of the discipline with which the chinese have managed their economy and the fact that they haven t yet felt the need to devalue their currency why because of the economic difficulties in indonesia the challenges that japan faces and any number of other asian countries it s a big deal because a huge percentage of our economic growth has come from foreign trade about a third of it no small measure from asia so i tell you this because it s well to be reminded that whether you re the president of the united states the governor of texas or the mayor of seattle washington you know when times like this come along if you relax in an atmosphere of change you ll spend the rest of your life if you ve got a conscience and a brain kicking yourself in the behind because you didn t take advantage of them to do every single thing you could to meet the challenges of the day and prepare for tomorrow that is the case that has to be made not just in texas but in every community in this country and if you look at what garry talked about let s just take what are these big challenges some of them have to be dealt with by us here in washington for example we ve got reform social security and medicare so that when the baby boomers retire we ve still got a social safety net but it doesn t bankrupt our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren we owe that to the next generation that has to be done in washington there are things that we need to do in other areas in improving the quality and access to healthcare in improving public education and access to college and we ve done a great deal there in proving we can preserve the environment while we grow the economy if you just take those three things in extending economic opportunity to people who still don t have it even though we ve got a low unemployment rate now i will mention those four things in all those areas we have a role to play but in none of those areas can any of those endeavors be successful unless the states are doing the right thing yes we want to move more people from welfare to work the states are basically in control of that program so it matters more who the governor is now in terms of whether initiatives are taken or not then ever before at least in my lifetime and because i used to be a governor and i believe in the system i ve off loaded a lot of responsibilities to the states but in doing that you know you run the risk you get the benefit of having people closer to the grassroots issues make the decisions you run the risk that if you ve got somebody who is relaxing when they ought to be moving that the consequences won t be so good now you just take the issues garry reeled off here i m trying to get the congress to approve a budget that will help to build or repair 5 000 schools that will help 100 000 more teachers to be hired to lower class sizes in the early grades that will connect the classrooms and the libraries of this country to the internet that will help to improve teacher training and accountability and train more teachers to be master teachers nationally certified master teachers to help all the others in their schools but none of this will amount to much unless there is a complementary commitment at the state level where the primary constitutional responsibility for public education is lodged to do those things and i don t think there is a person in this room that believes i don t care how big texas gets i don t care how many billionaires you have i don t think any of you believe that your state will ever reach its full potential until you can say we re proud of our university system and now everybody who deserves it can afford to go number one and number two now we re proud of our kindergarten through twelfth grade too we ve got the best system of elementary and secondary education that the world can offer and no one believes that any state in the united states can make that claim today no one so i say to you i m glad you ve got these good times i am grateful to have been given the chance to serve at a moment in history where my experience as a governor enabled me to see what i thought our country needed to do i am grateful that the consequences have been as they have been i m very grateful the american people have done all the things they have done but i m telling you we re living in a dynamic world where things are changing more rapidly then ever before where we ve got to learn to live together across the lines that divide us both at home and with others in the world and where it all begins with whether we are treating individuals with the dignity that i think is embodied in this patients bill of rights that i ve advocated at the national level that you ve advocated at the state level and most importantly with the commitment to develop the capacity of every young person there is nothing more important nothing the last point i want to make in this regard is that there are a lot of things we can do at the national level to deal with what i predict to you will be one of the three biggest issues of the next 40 years which is how to do better at preserving the environment as we grow the economy now you know that s going to be a big issue there are a lot of things we can do at the national level but an enormous amount of environmental protection an enormous amount of resource conservation an enormous amount of figuring out what kind of flexible sensible ways you have to adopt to grow the economy while you preserve the environment that s done at the state level i know i was a governor for a dozen years and i dealt with all kinds of national administrations that had different philosophies on the environment there is not a person in the state of texas nowhere this is no disrespect to the current governor there is nobody in the state of texas that has a better background than garry mauro for making the right decisions about how to protect the environment and grow the economy i want you to think about that i want you to go home to texas and talk about it and i want you to forget about the public opinion polls the only poll that matters right now is the one inside your heart inside your mind if you believe that your candidate is as good as i believe he is if you believe that the issues are as important as i believe they are if you believe he s on the right side of the issues and most important of all if you buy what i just said about the nature of this time yes times are good yes we are grateful but it just imposes on those of us who have done well enough to show up at this fundraiser tonight a bigger responsibility to see that we use these good times to prepare for our children s future you re going to have a fine election and you re going to be proud of what you re doing thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton23 8 00a bill_clinton thank you well first this place has wonderful memories for me i remember when i came here in 1992 it was i think the sunday evening before the election the race was close in new jersey and close in the country and we had this great rally here and then on election night the people of new jersey voted for bill clinton and al gore and i ll never forget it then in 1996 new jersey went from giving us a two point margin of victory to giving us a 16 point margin of victory one of the largest in the entire united states and i will never forget that so the first thing i d like to say is thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you new jersey now the second thing i would like to say is i thought alexis ettinger was gangbusters wasn t she wonderful to inspire the young is one of the most important responsibilities of any public leader and if susan can inspire alexis that s about as good a recommendation for her representation to congress as anything i can think of and i really think that s wonderful i want to thank jon corzine for being here i know he s been out stirring up the crowd before i got here but i like him i admire him i hope that he gets to be a partner with the new senator from new york across the river we were just up in princeton together with congressman rush holt another good friend of mine and i told somebody i love reading the press about john you know people whaling away about the fact that he invested so much money in the primary and i said i don t know what they re complaining about he s the only rich guy that i knew who would spend that kind of money to avoid giving himself a big tax cut so he could give the rest of you a better tax cut a better education a better economy and a better future i hope you will support him and get him to the senate we need him and let me say when susan and i were walking down the steps tonight i said i looked at her and i said i am so glad that you gave me a chance to do this for you tonight because for more than eight years now you have been there for me every single day in the good times and the bad in every single way i am so grateful to her and that s another mark of a good leader if you live long enough and you stay in public life long enough and you take on enough issues and you make enough adversaries you will have your bad days as well as your good ones the mayor of cherry hill was always there for me and for our administration for what we were trying to do for america and i will never forget it so that brings me to why i am here tonight now if you will let me use a colloquialism from my part of the country i always wonder whether i can do any good at events like this because i know that in a way i m preaching to the saved i mean if you weren t for her you wouldn t be here either that or you ve got a lot of extra money on your hands but i want you to listen to me just for a few minutes tonight because what i want to tell you is number one i believe she can win and number two i know she should win and number three the only way she can win is if you do more than give her money every one of you every one of you has friends who live in this district who will vote on election day people who think of themselves as good upstanding citizens and wouldn t dream of not voting but they don t spend nearly as much time as you do going to events like this they may not know her as well as you do they may not be living within 50 miles of here every one of you has people that you work with you go out to dinner with on the weekends maybe you worship with maybe you play golf with or go bowling with or your kids play soccer with or some other way you come in contact with people they will vote but they don t know as much about this as you do they don t know her as well as you do they don t have as clear an understanding of what the differences between our parties our candidates for president and vice president jon corzine and his opponent as you do and i am telling you you know i ve been doing this a long time the first time i passed out cards at a polling place was in 1954 when my uncle ran for state representative i was eight years old he served one term his wife made him quit because she thought politics was too tough ha what does sue know every election is different this election will turn in my opinion on what the american people what the people of new jersey and what the people of this congressional district think it s about i was so proud of vice president gore and his speech last thursday because he gave sort of a mini state of the union speech he said okay here s who i am here s what i believe but let s get to the meat of the coconut here if the president is somebody who works for the american people if you vote for me here s what i ll do now you ve got to be able to tell people why they ought to vote for them and yet the election for congress and the new jersey senate election in the context of what s going on in this country today you clapped for all of susan s issues but i want to try to give some clarity to the ones she mentioned and then talk about ones she didn t the one that may affect you most of all that i m afraid is least understood if we started eight years ago i had this idea that if we could create an economic policy a social policy an environmental policy and a foreign policy that would reward opportunity for responsibility would create an american community that stopped dividing us by race by religion by gender by secular orientation by whatever and pulled us together even by party lord knows i tried to work with our friends in the republican party under somewhat ugly circumstances that we could really go into the 21st century with america as the leading force for prosperity and peace for human rights and freedom all around the world and we are today and i m grateful but what i want you to understand is all the best things are still out there the good things that have happened in this country in the last eight years are nothing compared to what all of us together could achieve in the next eight or ten years if but only if we make the right choices about our future everybody in this room at least who is over 30 years old you can see a lot of nodding heads everybody in this room over 30 years old can remember at least one time in your life when you made an error a mistake not because things were going so badly but because things were going so well you did not believe you had to concentrate think or dream you could just sort of wander through the day now our country has never been in a position like this before and it may not be like this again in our lifetime where we have so much prosperity and social progress the absence federal crisis at home and threat abroad a projected surplus we can build the future of our dreams for our children so i will say again how this race for congress how this race for senate how the presidential race comes out how hillary does over in new york it all depends on what people believe the election is about are we going to build the future of our dreams for our children if so what do we have to do to give them all a world class education what do we have to do to deal with the aging of america to preserve social security and medicare in a way that when the baby boomers retire and there s only two people working for every one person on social security people like me don t bankrupt our kids and their ability to raise our grandkids how are we going to deal with the challenge of global warming and still grow the economy how are we going to take advantage of these marvelous changes in medical science the human genome project and all the other biomedical revolutions that may allow people who are living with severed spines to stand up and walk that may allow people who have parkinson s disease to get over it that may people who are certainly going to have alzheimer s not to get it that i believe will allow young mothers girls in this audience today by the time they have their babies will go home fr om the hospital with a little gene card that will tell them how to maximize their children s health and minimize the problems and within 20 years young women will be giving birth to babies with a life expectancy of 90 years you can book it it will happen now so how are we going to do all that and still make sure when you carry your gene card around nobody can deny you a job or health insurance because of something that s on that card how are we going to bridge the digital divide and hook up all of our schools and make sure everybody has got access to computers but nobody has access to your health and financial records on those computers unless you say yes these are big challenges and there are clear differences and susan mentioned some but i ll be more explicit let s go back to the one she mentioned education test scores are going up the college going rate is at an all time high the african american high school graduation equals that of the white majority for the first time in history in the last few years the schools are turning around we have a very specific strategy to work with the schools invest more money but demand more results identify failing schools have more pre school summer school after school mentoring programs smaller classes in the early grades hook all the school including the poor ones up to the internet their strategy is get rid of that stuff and just write a check to the state and hope they spend it right now there s a very great difference and don t give it all to the state have some of it off in vouchers so you have to decide whether you agree with our strategy or their strategy it s not just this woman you like it will affect people s lives how she votes and you don t have to say anything bad about her opponent or anybody else but you ve got to know there are consequences health care the patients bill of rights their leadership still won t let us bring it up because the hmos either don t want us to cover everybody or if they guarantee a patients bill of rights and somebody gets hurt they don t want to them to be able to sue and get any help if they get hurt that s like a patients bill of suggestion it s not rights and look i support managed care because we can t i didn t want to have an explosion and inflation in health care costs but care is even more important than managed in that phrase and you can t take these medical decisions away from the doctors and the people in prescription drugs i support and susan said she supported john supports a medicare prescription drug program that would allow all the seniors in this country who need it access to affordable prescription drugs through the medicare program they support a program that wouldn t cover half the seniors in the country who need it now i support the pharmaceutical excellence of america i m proud that we ve got all these great drug companies in our country a lot of them headquartered right here in new jersey and what they re worried about is if medicare can buy all these drugs for the seniors that maybe they ll buy them at such a low price that they ll be put in a there s got to be a way to resolve that the answer is not what the republicans want to do which is to make sure half of the seniors can t get the drugs they need that is not the answer there s got to be a good answer to that so she says he says we say al and joe say take care of the seniors and the drug companies now this is a big choice for you to make this is not just another walk in the park here we re talking about millions of people crime what s our position our position has been 100 000 police on the street prevent as much crime as you can the assault weapons ban the brady bill and our position now is close the gun show loophole on the brady bill mandatory child trigger locks don t let them import all these big ammunition clips that you can then hook on to a rifle here and make it into an assault weapon that s our position now what s their position their position is we were wrong when we passed the brady bill we were wrong when we passed the 100 000 police we re wrong now in putting 50 000 more police on the street and we re wrong trying to do all this their nominee said just a couple of days ago that if he were elected he would get rid of the 100 000 police program that that was not a national responsibility all i know is crime is at a 25 year low gun crime s down 35 percent we tried it their way we tried it our way our way works now they say what we should do is have even more vigorous prosecution even though we increase prosecution we ve got a record number of people in jail but when they tried it their way it didn t work as well and what s their weapons position their weapons position is more people should carry concealed weapons even into houses of worship that s their leadership position now they believe that i m not saying anything bad about them that s what they believe but it s not like we haven t had a test here we tried it their way we tried it our way our way works better and america is not as safe as it needs to be this will have significance i m telling you every vote in congress every vote in the senate matters we re talking about the way the children in this room are going to have to live now so what have we done we ve got education health care and crime then she said and you clapped she said i m for preserving a woman s right to choose what she didn t say is what she didn t say is every year there is a wholesale assault on it in one way or the other through little riders in congressional legislation so if you re in the house of representatives you actually have a chance to protect it and i don t know whether john said this or not but the next president is going to appoint two to four members of the supreme court and the united states senate has to confirm those members and they have told us and again i accept that this is their sincere conviction this is not a personal criticism honorable people can have honest differences but we can t claim that we don t know that there is no consequence here their nominee is against roe v wade and you have to assume being an honorable person that he will act on his convictions and you have to assume that their members of the senate are more likely than ours to vote to ratify those judges because that s what is going to happen so if this is important to you either way if it matters to you either way you need to know that you can affect the outcome by the choice you make for congress and for the senate now this is the last point i want to make and i want to say a little something about the economy because i think maybe the differences in economic policy between the republicans and democrats today are the least understood and yet they ll have a huge impact on you now you all know that we have a large projected surplus that s what we think we re going to get in over the next 10 years they have a very compelling position their position is hey we had a deficit for years now we ve got a surplus it s your money and we re going to give it all back to you in a tax cut it takes about five seconds to say and it sounds so good it s your money and i m going to give it back to you in a tax cut all of it why should the government keep your money our position is number one you should get a tax cut but it ought to be something less than half of theirs in total yes there ought to be some marriage penalty and estate tax relief in there but we ought to really focus on helping families who need it pay for college education long term care child care and retirement to help people who need it do that and by the way we have to save some money for education and the environment and health care and science and technology and there might be an emergency and we ve got to save some money for that and oh by the way this is projected income that means it s not in the bank yet and if you cut the taxes now for all the projected income and the money doesn t come in you ve still got the tax cut i told somebody their position reminds me of those letters i used to get back when i was a private citizen from that that sort of publisher s clearing house sweepstakes letters from ed mcmahon you ve seen them you may have won 10 million you may have and when you got those letters if you went out the next day and you spent the 10 million you should seriously consider supporting them in this election but if you didn t do that you better vote for susan and jon and al and joe and hillary if you live in new york jon corzine made a lot of money in investments ask him nobody would do this let me tell you something else this is before they spend their own money their social security privatization program it s about a trillion bucks over 10 years and the other things they want to spend money on before they have to deal with emergencies i m telling you folks we don t want to go back to deficits now let me tell you one other thing we have a study from the council of economic advisors that says that if their plan were enacted as opposed to the one the vice president and jon and susan have endorsed interest rates would go up by 1 percent a year for a decade now if we keep interest rates 1 percent lower a year for a decade would you like to know what that s worth to you two hundred and fifty billion bucks in home mortgages 30 billion in car payments and 15 billion in college loan payments in other words 1 percent lower interest rates is a 300 billion tax cut to ordinary americans who desperately need it and you get the benefit of getting the country out of debt investing in our future saving social security and medicare listen it may take me longer to explain our economic program but i m sure now that i ve done it you can get the gist here you ve got to be able to do that now i m going to close where i started it is not good enough for you to come here for somebody you know and believe in and contribute and go home and forget about this you ve got to be like alexis you ve got to be a volunteer even if you don t go in the headquarters every day between now and november you need to go up to somebody you know who is not here tonight and say listen here is why i am for susan here s why i m for jon corzine here are the differences on economic policy education policy health care policy human rights policy crime policy boom boom boom boom here s how it s going to affect your life your future our children s future and you ve got to be able to answer those questions and you have to feel comfortable and you can remember the ed mcmahon story i m telling you this is a big deal i worked real hard to get our country out of debt and get this economy going and i m telling you when i hear people say there is no real difference in economic policy you know i want to just sort of jump in the ocean i mean come on here we ve got poverty going down all income groups have their income going up all the things are going in the right direction we cannot change our economic direction we need to do more to bring in people who still aren t participating in this economic recovery but we don t need to throw away the policy that brought us to this dance we re at that we re enjoying so much it would be a terrible mistake so think about this when you go out of here if you don t remember anything else you remember you ve got to be able to say i am for susan bass levin because she s my friend because she s been a good mayor but because she s right for me and you and our kids and our future on education and health care and choice and the environment and the economy and crime and our future look i can hardly remember an election where the choices were any clearer the rhetoric is not clear anymore because they understand now that people don t like all that hateful stuff anymore so they chucked it and they re talking about inclusion and you re laughing and we have all made fun of them about it but actually it s a good thing it s a good thing the words people use matter and we should say thank you very much for not being so hateful anymore and demonizing your opponents and doing all we should say it matters we should say that but i m just telling you the substantive differences are still there now i know this woman i admire her she will be a great great member of congress but when it s all said and done it s not those of us who hold office that matters it s those of you who hire us to serve and whether we do what you hired us to do i want to close with a little story i m surprised i m going to say this but i want to tell you something i got off the plane today in new jersey to do these events and the first person i saw was a young businessman from san francisco i didn t know he was going to be in the line i was amazed to see him i hadn t seen him in four years maybe more his name is steve sposato he was there with his beautiful daughter megan and her very young little sister and his wife the first time i met steve sposato he was a grieving young widower with an infant child whose wife was cut down by a crazed person with an assault weapon in an office building in san francisco you may remember that awful incident when it happened he was a republican always had been he was just a businessman and he thought he couldn t understand why the political system in washington didn t want to stop people like this crazy guy from getting a hold of assault weapons and going into office buildings and shooting people like his wife he wasn t all that political he just wanted to make sure there wouldn t be any other little girls like his gorgeous little daughter and i met him and he came and stood in the rose garden at the white house and talked about this in very moving terms and he said you know i m not a politician i m not a speaker i just don t want any more kids to be without their parents and he stood and went through that rough fight with me in 1994 and thankfully he met another lady and they had another baby and i saw beautiful little megan today and her new little sister and her step mom and steve s mother who lives on long island they all came out to see me it changed his politics forever why because in the most awful agonizing way he had to come to terms with the fact that what we do as citizens whether we like it or not affects how we live as people and that brave good fine young man is standing here now i hope to goodness not a single living soul in this audience has ever gone through anything like this but i promise you in some way or another for every single one of you what you do as citizens affects how you live as people i tell people all the time politics is not the most important thing in life not even in my life being president is the second most important job i ever had next to being a father when they get ready to lay you down you don t think about all the time you should have spent at the office you think about who liked you who loved you how the flowers smelled in the springtime what it was like to be a child but politics is supposed to create the conditions and give people the tools to shape their dreams not tear their hearts out when it s all said and done that s what it s about in my lifetime we have never had this chance before like we have it now i m not running for anything for the first time in 26 years i tell you this as a citizen make sure susan wins make sure jon wins make sure joe and al win give this country its best chance thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton23 8 00b bill_clinton thank you please be seated everybody we all appreciated the standing ovation but you re about to get tired i am so glad to be here let me say first of all i thought malaika carpenter gave a terrific talk didn t you i understand her parents nancy and lenny and her brother jerren are here where are they stand up there you did well i d like to thank dr stewart for welcoming us here and dr warfel the principal here i d also like to say a special word of appreciation for this terrific band weren t they great this jazz band i mean they played hail to the chief and on broadway and caravan and lots of other things and they did it very very well there aren t many middle school bands in america that are that good i can tell you and you should be very proud of them they re really good and i d like to thank the other students that met with me just a few moments ago and i d like to say a special word of appreciation to your representative in congress rush holt who is here with me since i m at a school i can say this rush was a university professor for about a decade an educator a trained physicist when he got elected we all used to kid him that he knew entirely too much to be a politician we thought it would be a terrible burden but i can tell you from my point of view as someone who has worked for eight years to improve the quality and the availability of opportunity in education it has been a real joy to have someone like him with the depth of commitment to education that he has demonstrated these last two years it s been wonderful well we re about to go back to school and i ve always thought of back to school time as sort of a new beginning it certainly is for the students and the teachers new students new books new school supplies new faces in the classroom a time when a lot of parents stop and think again about the role of education in their own children s lives and what they hope will be their children s future i think it s a good time for our country to do the same so today i d like to talk a little bit about what we can do to prepare our schools and our children not just for the new school year but for the new economy of the 21st century we are very fortunate in america today to be living in the longest economic expansion in our history to have 22 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the highest homeownership ever a 25 year low in the crime rate a 35 year low in the welfare rolls with incomes going up and poverty going down the great thank you the great debate that i hope our country will have not only in this election year but in the remaining weeks of this session of congress is what are we going to do with this good fortune you know the parents here in the audience can empathize with this one of the things you learn when you live long enough is that sometimes you make mistakes not because times are so tough but because they re good and you kind of break your concentration and you let moments pass by and anybody that lives over 30 years can think of some time in his or her life when you made a mistake like that so this is a very important time for our country what are we going to do with this good fortune unprecedented in our whole history i hope that we will use this time to dream about the future we want for our children and to literally make a list of what we have to do to achieve it i hope we ll use this time to pay down our debt and get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 to keep interest rates lower and keep the economy going i think that s a good thing to do i hope we ll use this opportunity to create incentives for people to invest in the poor areas that still aren t participating in our recovery here in new jersey you might find it hard to believe but there are several indian reservations in america where the unemployment rate is still over 50 percent even though the national rate is 4 and inner city areas and small rural towns so i hope we ll do that i hope we will take this opportunity when we have some money to lengthen the life of social security and medicare take it out beyond the baby boom generation so that when those of us who are baby boomers retire we don t bankrupt our kids and their ability to raise our grandchildren because they shouldn t be prejudiced by the fact that time has taken us into our later years i hope we ll use this time to provide some needed health care advances including prescription drug benefits for seniors on medicare but there is nothing more important for us to do if we want to use this moment to build a future of our dreams for our kids than to make sure all of our children get a 21st century education and that requires both investment and standards in accountability it requires us to invest more and demand more it requires us to do what vice president gore and i have been trying to do for eight years now we have doubled our investment in education and training we ve expanded college opportunity by more than any time since the g i bill 50 years ago with the student loan program improvements and saved 8 billion for our kids with the hope scholarship which gives every family a 1 500 tax credit on the cost of college tuition just about covers community college makes it free in most states in the country and we re now trying to get the congress to allow taxpayers to deduct the cost of college tuition up to 10 000 from their tax bill which will be worth 2 800 a year in lower taxes for families with kids in college with the help of the e rate program which the vice president pioneered through congress we have worked with schools to connect 95 percent of our schools to the internet that s up from only 35 percent five years ago when we started we re also working to help turn around failing schools with after school and summer school programs and mentoring programs i was in a school in new york the other day an elementary school where two years ago 80 percent of the kids were reading below grade level and doing math below grade level today two years later 74 percent of the kids are at or above grade level in both reading and math these schools can be turned around the teachers can do the job we ve got to give them the support that they need to succeed and we can do it we re working hard to put 100 000 more teachers in the early grades to have smaller classes because of all the research that shows how important that is and i know that with all these kids coming into this school district filling these trailers now you ve had to hire a lot of new teachers and i understand that you ve got some of your first time teachers here mr superintendent for their first day of orientation so i d like to ask all the new teachers stand and be recognized where are the new teachers in this district raise your hands back there give them a hand thank you very much i want to thank you for choosing a proud and challenging profession when you made a decision to become a teacher you knew you would ever become wealthy but you will be in the most important way of all because of what you re going to do for the children of this country and this community and i thank you for that now that brings me down to what we re here about what i think is a very important part of our long term commitment to our children all over america our faculties are better than our facilities nice ring don t you think why is that because we now have the largest student population in history what s called the baby boom echo 53 million echoes in our schools shattering enrollment records for five years running that s right for the last five years it s the first time since the baby boomers in school that we have a group of kids in our schools bigger than the baby boom generation today i m releasing a report from the department of education showing that new jersey has its highest enrollment in 20 years if you had a statewide roll call 1 3 million students would answer that s a 20 percent increase in the last 10 years alone i understand in this school district the increase has been more like 90 percent in the last 10 years now what s the problem the problem is that you ve got all these kids who are going into schools that were never built for this many kids you have them in small towns i was in a little town called jupiter florida a couple of years ago where there were 12 trailers out behind the school a community much smaller than this one you have the suburban areas that are swollen up i was in a community in queens the other day where the same thing was true where there were 400 more children in a school than the school was built for so you ve got the problem of the trailers and then you ve got the problem in our cities of so many old school buildings that either can t be or haven t been modernized so that you ve got whole floors in some of these schools that are shut down even though the schools are filled to the gills because the schools cannot afford the cost of modernizing these old buildings philadelphia the average school building is 65 years old new orleans 68 years old new york city schools still being heated in the winter by coal burning furnaces so you have these two big problems and i believe the federal government has a responsibility to help the states and the local school districts deal with it and i believe that this is the important thing and you all have to think about this whether you re democrats republicans or independents because it is a new thing this is virtually unprecedented except for a temporary amount of help the government gave to school districts after world war ii for the baby boom generation so the leaders of the majority party in the congress in washington say that we shouldn t do this because the federal government has never been in the business of school building in some states the states don t help school building it s all local i think we should do it for the following reasons and i want you talk to your friends and neighbors about it because you re living with it here number one education is the constitutional responsibility of the states and the operational responsibility of the localities but it is a national priority and it must be number two we ve got some money now and a lot of states and localities don t and there s no better way to spend it than by investing in our children s future number three there are real practical problems with saying that this school district here should solve this whole problem and you know what they are even though we ve got the largest number of school children in our history the actual percentage of property owners who have kids in the schools is slightly smaller than it has been at its largest time first a lot of you nodding your head you know this secondly there are a lot of states like new jersey new york and many others which already rely very heavily on the property tax to finance their schools and there s just a limit to how big it can be and i don t think we ought to let in this sense philosophy get in the way of practicality here i m not proposing to take over the schools i m not proposing to do anything except to have legislation that will give tax credits to communities to help them build or drastically modernize 6 000 schools by lowering the property tax burden on you to do what you re going to do anyway that s what i want to do and by the way our bill would also provide grants and loans to repair another 5 000 schools a year every year for five years to help with a lot of these problems with the old school buildings that need to be upgraded now i hope that you will talk to your friends and neighbors about this now congressman holt is already a cosponsor of the legislation by representative rangle of new york and nancy johnson of connecticut a democrat and a republican as i said we have a bipartisan majority in the house for this thanks in no small measure to the work of the teachers and the members of the building and construction trades union who are here today and i thank them the teachers and the building and construction people for what they ve done i think if we can get the bill up in the senate we d have a bipartisan majority there but again there is this debate should the federal government be involved in this now the congress is coming back we ve got almost all the major budget work still to be done we ll be there a month maybe five weeks six weeks we debated this for two years now nobody s in the dark about how it works it s just a question of whether we can get over this philosophical objection that the federal government s never done it before and all i can tell you is i was there looking at these wonderful children behind me talking to me in their school and these two young teachers full of enthusiasm thinking that all the good they re doing and all the practical arguments for not putting them in a decent classroom just evaporated there just are none so if people ask you why this is a big deal first you can cite what s going on in your school district and then they say but the federal government s not doing this anymore is this setting a dangerous example remember all we re proposing to do is spend some of the surplus to provide tax credits to lower the cost to local school districts and to states where they do this of building these facilities so that it eases the property tax burden and makes it easier to do that and we re proposing to give direct loans and grants to repair another 5 000 schools a year for five years where there s a building that s not fully usable and the need is enormous it is national and these children s education is a national priority look all over america today the schools are working better reading scores are up math scores are up i was in a school in kentucky the other day that four years ago was one of the worst schools in the state where listen to this this is what they did in three years over half the kids were on student lunches three years ago 12 percent of the kids were reading at or above grade level today almost 60 percent three years ago five percent of the kids were doing math at or above grade level today 70 percent three years ago not a single kid in that elementary school was doing science at or above grade level today nearly two thirds this is happening all over america the schools are working better we actually have learned a lot in the last 15 years about how to increase student performance the teachers the principals it s breathtaking what s going on college enrollment s at an all time high but sooner or later we re going to pay price after price after price just like malaika said in describing this in very human terms we say our children are the most important things in the world to us but we don t really care if they ve got a decent place to go to school we really want all these young people like those enthusiastic young teachers that waved their hands back there to go into teaching but we don t care if they have a lousy place to go to work now sooner or later we have to deal with this this is not consistent if we care about it we need to put it beyond politics and put our children first and get this done so i d like to ask you for your help i need your help talk to your friends and neighbors who don t live here who don t live in this congressional district tell them it is not a political issue it s about the children thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton23 9 99 bill_clinton good morning thank you very much please be seated thank you and good morning as all of you know congress has sent me the tax bill i have repeatedly pledged to veto in a moment i will do that because at a time when america is moving in the right direction this bill would turn us back to the failed policies of the past in the 12 years before i became president irresponsible policies in washington piled deficit upon deficit quadrupling the national debt leading to high interest rates eventually bringing us the worst recession since the great depression interest rates and unemployment were too high wages were stagnant growth was slow vice president gore and i came into office determined to change all that with a new economic strategy focused on fiscal discipline expanded trade investment in our people the strategy has worked in the past six and a half years it has produced lower interest rates and ushered in the longest peacetime expansion in our history with more than 19 million new jobs rising wages the lowest unemployment in a generation and record breaking levels of home ownership and by balancing the budget for the first time in a generation we have changed red ink to black turning a deficit of 290 billion into a budget surplus of 99 billion this year with growing surpluses projected for years to come the american people understand that these are not simply numbers on charts the progress we ve made is something they see and feel every day in more jobs higher paychecks hope scholarships that help send their children to college lower interest rates for owning a home and buying a car this is the right course for our people and our nation it is making a difference in the lives of americans and they want us to stay on it our hard won prosperity gives us also the chance to do something few people ever have the chance to invest our surplus to meet the long term challenges of america we can lift the burden of debt from the shoulders of the next generation we can secure the future of social security and medicare we can ensure a first rate education and modern schools for our children unfortunately the tax bill congress has sent me would deny those opportunities to the american people the bill is too big too bloated places too great a burden on america s economy it would force drastic cuts in education health care and other vital areas it would cripple our ability to pay down the debt it would not add a day to the social security trust fund it would not add a day to the medicare trust fund or modernize medicare with prescription drug coverage nearly a trillion dollars in tax cuts but not one dollar for medicare i will veto this bill because it is wrong for medicare wrong for social security wrong for education and wrong for the economy now in the face of my determination to do this many in congress seem ready to throw in the towel that would be a disservice to the american people they sent us all here to get things done and we have proved in the past with the welfare reform bill of 1996 and the balanced budget act of 1997 that we can work together to get things done and bring good results to our country so instead i ask congress not to go home until we have worked together once again in a good faith effort to meet the long term challenges our people face first let s reach a bipartisan agreement to save social security the congressional majority s current plan and its so called lockbox would fail to protect the social security surplus from being spent and it would not add a day to the social security trust fund instead of this weak lockbox and no additions to the trust fund i ask congress to work with me to construct a real lockbox that would keep social security solvent until the year 2050 second let s work together to save medicare with medicare facing insolvency in just 16 years and with three out of four seniors lacking dependable affordable prescription drug coverage we know we must not put off this challenge months ago i put forth a detailed plan for medicare that would reform and modernize it with a voluntary prescription drug benefit it would address the immediate critical needs of teaching hospitals skilled nursing facilities and other priorities while extending medicare s solvency to the year 2027 now i don t expect the republican majority to agree with me on every detail of my plan i never thought that would be the case but i do expect and the american people have a right to expect that we will work together in good faith to meet these long term objectives third we should fulfill our obligations to the future by producing a real budget that pays down the debt brings down interest rates and makes vital investments in education the environment national security biomedical research health care and other areas so vital to our future if we do this within the framework i have outlined we can not only invest in our future we can pay down america s debt over the next 15 years and make our country debt free for the first time since andrew jackson was here and planted that big magnolia tree in 1835 so i say again let s do first things first pay down the debt save social security save and modernize medicare invest in education in the days ahead i will ask the republican majority to work with me to fulfill these fundamental obligations we have to our children and to our future if we can work together to meet these objectives we can also work together to pass tax relief we can afford affordable middle class tax relief that reflects the priorities of both parties and the values of the american people that would be a good bill i would happily sign every generation of americans is called upon to meet the challenges of its time but few have the unprecedented opportunity we have to meet the challenges not only of our time but the great challenges of our future we must seize that opportunity thank you very much thank you dem wjclinton24 1 99 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you ladies and gentlemen good afternoon thank you for making me feel welcome let me say first of all that i brought my arkansas cabinet secretary slater and mr witt down here today along with a number of arkansans from the white house staff including missy kincaid who is from this community i have been here many times i have a lot of friends here and i was very sad when i flew over beebe and mcrae today and i saw how much damage had been done and i saw a lot of pain in a lot of faces up on the road there but i also saw a lot of determination i want to thank your mayor for being even with his bad foot walking around with me in some pretty lumpy places he must think he has impeccable timing he got himself installed just in time for the tornado but he s a young man and a teacher so he ought to be about rebuilding schools and that s a good thing and i thank your county judge i thank your superintendent mr williams i thank my good friend senator beebe and mrs beebe and representative hendren i d also like to compliment your fire chief mr kennedy and the national guard people i know they ve worked very very hard the last few days and i know that we re all appreciative of them and you ve had some young americorps volunteers who came down from st louis and that s a program that was started after i became president i m proud of these young people they volunteer a year or two years of their lives to work in communities just doing what needs to be done and i m very grateful for that let me say on the points that i ve heard people talk about as all of you know we ve got a relationship here with the state emergency folks we are going to set up programs to provide whatever help we can to this community i think the most immediate public need obviously is for some place for the children to go to school and we ve talked about how quickly we could get some of the portable classrooms in here in large numbers and with the best possible quality and i assure that we will i will personally be involved in that and so will mr witt and secretary slater we ll get on it and we ll get the job done as quickly as it can physically be done we also want to make sure that both the community and individual families are clear about what the federal government can and cannot do and what kind of support is there we don t want anybody to leave something on the table that we could contribute to rebuilding the lives of the families and the community and again i just want to encourage you you probably know right before i came here i was walking through my old neighborhood in little rock the quapaw quarter where the governor s mansion is and where i lived for 12 years i saw a lot of people who hillary and chelsea and i spent a lot of time with with their homes down around their ears today too they ll have to decide how to go forward and many of you will but i just want to encourage you i want to tell you that as awful as it is i just thank god there weren t more people killed and i hope we can all keep the right attitude and i hope all the neighbors will keep helping their neighbors and in the end i think it will come out all right and again let me thank you mayor thank you judge and i thank all the other local leaders and thank you for giving a chance to be here giving us a chance to be with you today god bless you thank you very much i also wanted to say just one other thing just because i there s one part of arkansas i am not visiting today in addition to congressman snyder who has pulaski and white county independence and st francis county and i think one other county have been declared disasters and the east arkansas counties are in representative marion berry s district and congressman berry is here with us today too and so our thoughts are with the people east of here who are suffering as well and some of those folks lost everything they have and i just wanted to mention them and say our thoughts and our prayers and our support are with them too thank you very much dem wjclinton24 10 94a bill_clinton thank you it s kind of nice to be out of washington and it s very nice to be back here for my third appearance on the way in i told steve i said shoot if i show up again you re going to have to start charging me dues he said you ve forgotten senator metzenbaum s already paid your dues so i thank you senator for paying my dues i m glad to be joined here by so many guests and especially by some of your distinguished political leaders i want to thank howard metzenbaum as he leaves the senate for the things he s done for ohio and for the united states over the years this is not what i came to talk about but i want to mention in particular a bill that he got into the very last set of bills that passed in the filibuster wild senate at the end of the session it s a bill that has achieved finally some long overdue national notice to make it easier for parents to adopt children and to make it easier to get these kids out of long term interminable delays in foster homes and into solid adoptive homes and it s a great contribution to what i think out to be the pro family position of the united states of america i thank you for that sir it was a great i m glad to be here with senator glenn and congressman fingerhut congressman stokes congressman sawyer congressman hoke former congresswoman mary rose oaker is here and as an arab american is going to the middle east with the american delegation i m glad to see you here mayor white i thank you for meeting me at the airport last night at midnight i thought now there is a guy who is leaving no stone unturned i thought cleveland already had all the federal money the law allowed and there was mike at the airport at midnight your ex treasurer our new treasurer mary ellen withrow is here thank you the only person happier than i was when mary ellen withrow was appointed was lloyd bentsen the secretary of the treasury because you can t print a new dollar bill until you ve got a treasurer and he didn t have his name on any dollar bills so after mary ellen was confirmed lloyd bentsen sent me the first dollar bill with his name on it and with her name on it which is framed in the white house i m glad to see my friend joel hyatt here and so many other friends of mine here in ohio i thank you for coming eighteen months ago i had the privilege of speaking here at your club and outlining our economic program to get the economy moving again that was on may 10th of 1993 ninety days after i spoke to this distinguished gathering congress passed that economic program by a landslide you may remember one vote in both houses as the vice president always says he s the most successful member of my administration whenever he votes we win today i wanted to come back here to discuss with you the progress that s been made and what we still have to do and the decisions that lie before you as citizens of this great country we have made an important beginning with a comprehensive economic strategy designed to empower american workers to compete and win in the 21st century that is after all our mission the key elements of the strategy are simple and direct and important first reduce the deficit second expand trade and intensify the efforts of the united states government to be a partner with american business in doing business beyond our borders third increase our investment in education and training in technology and defense conversion fourth bring the benefits of free enterprise to areas which have been isolated from it in our inner cities and rural areas with new strategies including but not limited to welfare reform fifth reinvent the federal government make it smaller more effective less regulatory more efficient these strategies have all been implemented and i want to go through them point by point but i want to say what is clearly obvious the implementation of these strategies required a reversal of the policies of the past 12 years it required much more aggressive innovative partnership with the private sector we recognize that government s role cannot be either to save the economy because we don t have the capacity to do that in the global economy or to sit on the sidelines but instead to do everything we can to create the right climate the right conditions and to empower people so that they can compete and win by taking responsibility for themselves and their families the increasing changes in the world make this imperative the course of the last 21 months is very different from the previous course as i have said and one of the great questions in this election season is whether we will press on this course or return to the course we abandoned just 21 months ago of course with easy promises and superficial attraction but which is a proven failure we cannot afford to bankrupt the country when we need to invest and grow the economy let s look at the record business leaders here and all around the country understand that a nation like any successful enterprise needs a clear mission a strategy to achieve the mission the determination and the patience to implement the strategy and a willingness to look at the bottom line to measure success and failure and to make adjustments as indicated by results the mission is clear to empower the american people to compete and win the strategy is sound i just outlined it we clearly have pursued it with determination and the bottom line is getting stronger everyday let s look at the elements of the strategy starting with the national deficit you all know that the deficit exploded in the 1980s and that the aggregate debt of the united states quadrupled in only 12 years from what had been accumulated in the previous 190 plus years last year we began to change that we passed huge reductions in federal spending cuts in over 300 federal programs outright eliminations in scores of programs a fiveyear freeze on domestic discretionary spending restrictions on entitlements in the budget i just signed we not only reduced defense spending we reduced discretionary domestic spending for the first time in 25 years the congress enacted the reinventing government program in which the vice president has taken such a lead and in which we committed to reduce the size of the federal government by 272 000 over a six year period bringing the government to its smallest size since president kennedy served in this office already there are more than 70 000 fewer people working for the federal government than there were on the day i became president one hundred percent of this money is going to help you and people like you all over america fight crime at the grass roots level that is how the crime bill is paid for that is how we are going to increase the police forces of this country by 20 percent build another 100 000 jail cells for serious offenders to enforce the tougher penalties in the bill and pay for the preventive strategies that the law enforcement officers and the community leaders and the mayors say will work not by increasing the deficit not by raising taxes but by shrinking the government one other part of this strategy that i think is terribly important especially in ohio to mention is the procurement reforms the united states spends about 200 billion a year buying goods and services under rules and regulations that would give anybody a headache it was the rules and regulations not outright banality which caused the famous stories you ve all heard of the 500 hammer and the 50 ashtray rules and regulations which literally added 50 to every government purchase that costs 2 500 or less 50 if it was a 50 purchase it cost 100 if it was 1 000 purchase it cost 1 050 after years of haggling about it we have finally passed procurement reform which will save hundreds of millions of dollars a year and put an end to the policies which brought us the 500 hammer thanks largely to the leadership of senator john glenn and i thank him for that well all this has led to deficit reduction when i spoke here last year the federal deficit for 1994 the fiscal year that ended on the last day of september was estimated to be 305 billion today the treasury has announced its preliminary estimate 203 billion 102 billion less than was projected before the plan was passed the decline in the deficit since 1992 is the largest two year decline in our history and the first time in 20 years the deficit has gone down for two years in a row let me go over here and try to illustrate what this means and i hope this microphone works it does that s the technology wizards in our administration having their way so you can get a feel for this the deficit which was very small in 1979 began going up dramatically it was at about 60 billion or 65 billion in 1980 and then it began really rising it had gone to 220 billion by 1990 you see where it was in 1992 our budget took quite a bit off of it last year and what these figures mean is that now we are drawing the line on the deficit down to 200 billion a dramatic change so you can get an idea of the difference if we hadn t passed that deficit reduction plan last year the deficit would have been off the charts up here at 305 billion and because we did next year it will be off the charts down here at about 170 billion and when that happens it will be the first time that the deficit s gone down three years in a row since harry truman was the president of the united states the congress deserves credit for doing this and helping to lift a burden of debt from our children and helping to free up funds that would otherwise have been consumed in financing government debt to finance homes and businesses all across the united states the second thing i want to emphasize is that the remarkable thing about this budget is that while reducing the deficit and reducing spending we have actually been able to increase our investments in education and training and technology we increased head start we increased funds to help all states develop apprenticeship training programs for young people who don t go to college but do want to get good jobs with the new individual education accounts that i announced on friday we are reorganizing the college loan program to provide lower interest loans lower fees on the loans longer repayment options for young people who get jobs when they get out of college with modest wages and should not have to pay more than a certain percentage of their income over the next few years this will make 20 million americans including almost a million in ohio eligible for lower interest longer term repayment on their college loans at a time when what you earn depends upon what you can learn these investments are very very important for the economic future of the entire united states in addition to that we have increased our investments in defense conversions including in several sites here in ohio this is especially important because defense has come down rather dramatically since 1987 and we had built a huge high wage high tech infrastructure around the defense industries that can make a major contribution to our moving into the 21st century if we have the kind of partnerships to help them make the transition the third thing we did was to expand trade and to intensify america s effort to promote the sales of american products we passed nafta we negotiated a new trade deal with japan which has opened markets for everything from cellular telephones to american rice and apples for the first time we have negotiated the gatt agreement and i believe congress will pass it after the election when they come back in a special session to do that that will add 100 to 200 billion a year to the gross national product of the united states we ve also changed the time when the american government thought that it should be totally passive in helping american companies pierce foreign markets when other governments were doing everything they could to help their companies do the same we ve worked hard from saudi arabia to south africa to china to open up contracts for american businesses that they can win on the merits the fourth thing i mention i want to take a minute of time to talk about because it relates to the kind of things that mayor white has tried to do here in cleveland we know that even as the economy grows there are pockets of our country that have not been affected by the economic recovery where investment has not come where jobs have not come where people are still despondent places where free enterprise has not reached this is true by the way in every advanced country but it s more true in the united states in our inner cities and in some of our isolated rural areas what are we to do about it the first thing we have to try to do is to change the job mix keep getting more good jobs here which we re doing the second thing we want to do is to try to provide special incentives for people to invest in isolated areas the empowerment zones the enterprise community concept all of which offer incentives for people to put their money into areas that are otherwise not so attractive you know for years we ve had special incentives for our businesspeople to invest in the caribbean i don t quarrel with that but we ought to have the same sort of advantages for people who invest in places in the united states that have no jobs and no hope and no future we have i signed a bill not very long ago that will set up a network across the country of community development banks modeled on successful experiments in chicago and even in rural areas in our country and in other parts of the world to make small loans to lower income people at a profit to generate capital in areas that otherwise don t have it there are markets all across this country in areas where people live but there aren t very many jobs and we need to bring capital investment to development banks there the last thing i d like to say is we ve tried to make government a better partner with deregulation of banking and trucking and exports of high tech products and by just having our government work better the small business administration when i took office was for most small business people kind of a bureaucratic pain we have reorganized it now so that the loan applications are one page long and you re supposed to get an answer yes or no if you put the documents in within 72 hours that s the kind of service the american people ought to get if we re going to have an agency of that kind now this strategy of ours has a lot of critics when the deficit reduction plan passed there was speech after speech after speech saying gosh if we do this the economy will collapse the deficit will explode middle class taxpayers will be bankrupted this will be the end of the world i heard it all then when nafta passed we had a different set of critics who said there would be a giant sucking sound i think that was his phrase do you all remember that to destroy our industry well the economic program passed and jobs went up and the deficit went down middle class families did not have their tax rates hiked the wealthiest americans and corporations with incomes of over 10 million did but all the money went to deficit reduction and we built a new partnership with business by things like deregulation of banking and deregulation of interstates trucking which saves billions of dollars a year which then can be freed up to invest in this economy since nafta passed exports to mexico are up 21 percent the big three automakers report their exports are up 500 percent to mexico nafta isn t a year old and i just back from detroit where the biggest problem in detroit is now complaints by auto workers working overtime that is a high class problem so that s the strategy that s what we ve done what are the results we are in the midst of the first investment led low inflation productivity driven economic expansion in over three decades new businesses are up exports are up jobs are growing the deficit is falling in the last 21 months there have been 4 6 million new jobs in the american economy 90 percent of them in the private sector in 1994 something perhaps more fundamental and important has finally begun to happen more than half the new jobs created by our economy in this year are above average wage more high wage jobs in this year than in the previous five years combined and that is good news for the american working people investment in new equipment is eight times what it was in the last four years and the federal government s purchases are down almost eight percent this is not a government inspired deficit driven recovery this is more enterprise and less government better for the long run for the first time since 1979 america leads the world in the sales of automobiles for the first time in a decade we ve had nine months of manufacturing job growth in a row for the first time in nine years the annual vote of international economists said america not japan was the most productive economy in the entire world now you might say if all that s so why aren t we happier well partly because the atmosphere in which we operate today is particularly contentious and i believe entirely too partisan partly because of the way we get our information guarantees that we ll know more about our failures than our successes guarantees that we ll know more about our conflicts than when we cooperate partly because we re dealing with long term problems that haven t really affected a lot of real people s lives yet if you look at the problems of crime violence family breakdown drugs gangs and guns they are a complex of social problems that have been developing over 30 years you can t just wipe away their reality in a few months if you look at the economic anxieties of people average hourly wages in this country actually peaked about 20 years ago and we have working people have been losing their health insurance steadily for about 10 years the only advanced country in the world where this is the case another million americans in working families lost their health insurance last year so there are real reasons that a lot of hard working americans don t feel more secure or more happy with good statistics and growth rates they re still not sure that guarantees them a good future and a good job the ability to keep their kids health insurance or put aside money for their college education they re still not sure that we re going to be able to solve a lot of the problems that violate our values and our conscience in our society they re still not sure that they re going to be able to achieve the american dream or that their children will be able to what i want to say to you the only way to do that is to keep facing our problems and facing our challenges and moving into the future with a strategy we know has the best chance to work and to resist easy promises quick fixes and things that have already caused us trouble in the past the realities of the modern world are that the economy is so globalized and change is so institutionalized that no government of any nation can promise to protect people from the changes of the world economy you can t make the world go away to use the phrase from the old song you cannot do that so if change is inevitable and if we will never have a single economy anymore we ll have a local economy in cleveland and a state economy in ohio and a regional economy in the middle west and a national economy in america and a global economy in the whole world if that is the reality then what do we have to do we have to facilitate people making the changes that will make change our friend and our enemy that will make change a source of security for us not a source of insecurity and we have to do it in a way that promotes those institutions of society that are most important to us principally our families and our communities companies are making changes like this all the time and the changing nature of work is placing enormous demands on working people the average worker today in every kind of work has to be able to work with more information to be more creative to solve more problems on his or her own initiative we have to see more responsibility being down to workers at the grass roots level and they have to learn more skills and information than ever before because the average worker will change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime even if he or she stays with the same firm this is the law of change with which we all will live and which we will either use to help make us more prosperous or walk away from and pay the penalty since every american has to face these forces and every american family does the job of the government ought to be to try to empower people to make the most of them a family can t treat these problems just like a business can you know if a family s under economic stress you can t divest yourself although some people with teenagers would like to from time to time you can t really downsize you can t restructure i mean you re sort of stuck with who shows up at the dinner table at night so when the family is under economic stress what are their options you either have to learn and to become more productive or get a better job or you face increased competition by hunkering down working harder for less and just try to be as tough as the times are now that is what has happened to millions and millions of american families for the last 20 years that ladder alternative working harder for less the average working family is spending more hours at work today than 25 years ago for about the same hourly wages adjusted for inflation when working families are doing everything they can and small business people are and they lose their health insurance or their health insurance deductibles are so high that all they really have is the insurance that if they get sick they won t lose their home it s tough on them it s hard to maintain the sense of security and optimism that a country like ours needs to lead the world into the future and to keep our own dreams alive so what are we going to do about that well we need more pro family policies like family and medical leave we need to pass welfare reform that enables people to move from welfare to work to be successful parents and successful workers and we can do that i sent a bill to the congress last spring we ve given 19 states permission to get out from under all the crazy federal rules that keep them from moving people into the workplace and we re going to pass it next year we need to set up a national network of these manufacturing extension centers like the great lakes manufacturing technology center here in cleveland to help small firms to accommodate new challenges to compete and to get new technologies we need to pass a telecommunications reform bill which died at the end of this congress which will help us to get along that information superhighway and provide unbelievable numbers of high wage jobs for our people we need to reform our job training programs especially our unemployment system and transform it into a reemployment system we are still stuck with the same unemployment program we ve had for 40 years it s not fair to working people but it s not fair to employers either to pay a futa tax which you pay to somebody when they re unemployed so that they have enough money to get along on it s less than they were making at work but more than they d be making on welfare the whole assumption is they re going to be called back to work eighty percent of the people who lose their jobs today don t get called back to their old jobs we are stuck with the 1950s system when we need one for the 21st century that will encourage continuous retraining and placement in the work force so these are some of the things that we have to do let me just say one last word about health care by the time the people who like the system the way it is got through spending between 200 and 300 million to convince the rest of you that i was trying to have the government take over your health care and take away your choice of doctors you didn t like my plan too much that didn t happen to be what i was trying to do but there was nothing i could do to stand against that here is the problem that we ll have to face no country in the world spends more than 10 percent of its income on health care except us we spend 14 percent that is 260 billion more than the other most expensive system in the world now if we were just buying better health care who would complain the problem is no other advanced economy in the world the other countries that are about as rich as we are they cover everybody their costs are more nearly in line with inflation and people don t lose their health care when they move from job to job all of which happens here i will say again the 1 100 000 people who lost their health insurance last year almost all were in working families they weren t people who were on welfare they were in working families so we have to find a way that you folks can accept and feel comfortable with that lets you keep what you ve got if you ve got it and you like it gives people the security that they won t lose their health insurance when they change jobs or if they happen to have a baby born with an illness and still brings cost in line with inflation and provides coverage to the people who don t have coverage now 85 percent of whom are workers we ve got to find some way to do that now keep in mind we have reduced defense about all we can we have reduced domestic spending for the first time in 25 years the only thing driving the federal deficit now is medicare and medicaid costs going up at three times the rate of inflation this is a serious problem we ll have to face it now having said all that i hope that you are optimistic about the future i hope that you will make a decision in these coming elections that is consistent with keeping on this course because it is working this is not necessarily a partisan issue there are a lot of republicans who have good serious ideas for how we keep bringing the deficit down and be discriminating about what we invest in but i don t think this contract is a good idea because it promises everybody a tax cut it promises a defense increase promises to revive star wars and promises to balance the budget now that will indulge the present instead of preparing for the future it will cut college loans explicitly when we ought to be educating more people it won t reduce the deficit it will explode it but it sounds good it s a trillion dollars in promises we re just two weeks away from the election after all i ve been through i d love to make you a trillion dollars worth of promises i could show everybody here a good time on that we could have a good time but it wouldn t be the responsible thing to do the responsible thing to do is to take your licks and say look for the long run look for the long run you know i know people are frustrated and angry one of the first things that every parent learns to try to teach your children is not to make decisions based on frustration and anger but to make decisions based on what you really know when you re thinking is best for the present and for the future so i ask you to think about this we have made a substantial start at building the kind of america that will be strong in the 21st century there are reasons for americans to still feel uncertain and worried but the reasons can be addressed only if we keep going forward not if we go back and the last thing i want to say is this sometimes we have to see ourselves as others see us sometimes we get discouraged or so caught up in the day to day business that it s hard to make our contract with the future our commitment to the long run our covenant to revive the american dream we need to remember how other people see us other people think folks this is a pretty great country it s no accident that when they want to have elections in south africa they ask us to come help put them on or when after hundreds of years of fighting in northern ireland they want the united states to bring people here who are on opposite sides and let them come to america and see people who share their roots and try to work through this it s no accident that when saddam hussein reared up again in the gulf the countries there that want to be free look to the united states for quick leadership it s no accident that in the middle east it was the united states that was asked to witness this historic peace agreement between israel and jordan that is not an accident it was no accident if you could have looked into the eyes of those young men and women we sent to haiti in uniform when president aristide went back and all the haitian people had those signs in creole saying thank you america they know other people know this is a very great country it is our job to build on that greatness even when it requires difficult decisions and looking toward tomorrow and not giving in to the easy path today that is what is before us and i believe that today you can see that we are a very different place than we were 21 months ago we re in better shape than we were 18 months ago we are going in the right direction we should stay on this economic course and make it a bipartisan commitment to a strong america and a global economy that keeps the american dream alive into the next century thank you very much dem wjclinton24 10 94b bill_clinton thank you thank you so much for being so enthusiastic i thank congressmen sawyer and joyce and mayor plusquellic and deputy mayor jackson thank you for helping us get through this today bless you joel and susan hyatt and our wonderful senators here howard metzenbaum and john glenn i m glad to be here with all of you i ve been to the last two times i ve been to akron i ve been in two of the most interesting buildings i ve ever been in i was you know we had the campaign rally in the air dock do you remember that i am sure it was really good for me it was calculated both to make me ecstatic and to keep me humble because we were ecstatic that we had 50 000 people there and humbled that the building was 80 percent empty it was amazing and this place is magnificent and a great treasure for you and i m honored to be here i ve had a great day today with tom already we ve been to inventure place and i m looking forward to coming back when the inventure place is open full of inventions that i can come play with as all of you know i am here in behalf of tom sawyer tonight and in behalf of joel hyatt and so many others who want to make this country a better place i have much to be grateful for in the incredible contribution and support that senator glenn and senator metzenbaum have provided and i want to thank them as well you know this is an unusual election i think that s putting it mildly i went to washington 21 months ago with a charge from you to try to change this country to try to get america into the 21st century able to compete and win to rebuild the american dream to help us go through this period of remarkable change in a way that would bring this country and our people out on top to forge a new partnership between our national government and our citizens and our businesses not with the government pretending to be able to solve all the problems or with the government sitting on the sidelines but walking hand in hand into a brighter and better future and i committed to you that i d try to do three things if you voted for me i d try to make the government work for ordinary americans again to reward work and family to make a serious stab in the fight against crime and our social problems and to build up the strength of our people i d try to bring back the economy to reduce the deficit and increase jobs and move us forward i d try to make the world a more prosperous and a more peaceful place and i leave it to you to decide how well we ve done but here are the facts thanks to the leadership of the people on this stage we passed the family and medical leave law it helped almost a million people in this state to take a little time off when they need it we passed an expansion of head start and immunizations for all children under the age of two by 1996 we gave tax relief to half million ohio families who have children in the home work full time but are just above the poverty line because we don t think anybody who s working full time and raising their kids should fail and should be in poverty we think people should succeed as workers and succeed as parents that s rewarding work and family we passed the brady bill and the crime bill to make a serious assault on crime and i might say i want to thank the mayor for his support i want to thank the congressman for his support and i want you to know that i signed that bill only about three weeks ago and the city of akron has already received assistance to hire more police officers to go on the street to lower the crime rate here in akron because of the crime bill and perhaps most important and thanks in no small part to tom sawyer we have begun to give the american people the kind of educational help they need to develop a system of lifetime learning so that when places like akron get hit with what you faced in the 1980s again we will have a system that will enable people to continuously learn and relearn new skills from the get go so we will not have to pass through a dark night of despair congressman sawyer deserves reelection if for no other reason than his contribution to this education congress in 1991 he was the principal sponsor of the national literacy act look what happened in this congress we expanded head start we passed the goals 2000 legislation to establish national education goals but to support grass roots reform because we know he knows since joyce is a teacher yes you can clap for her she probably deserves more credit than the rest of us do this is a very important point for the first time in a long time the federal government recognized that the magic of education occurs in the classroom between the teacher and the parents and the students that s what works and we passed the elementary and secondary education bill which cuts out all kinds of federal rules and regulations and lets the schools decide how best to spend federal money to make sure all of our children learn it is a very important piece of legislation we passed legislation to help make our schools safer to give schools the opportunity to get together with grass roots community leaders and decide what basic values of citizenship and character they want to teach in the school and not run away from that but run toward it to give all of our kids a common foundation of good citizenship we passed legislation to have every state in the country set up a national system state by state of apprenticeships for young people who don t go to college but want to get good jobs and finally we made 20 million americans eligible for lower interest longer term college loans so the middle class of this country need never walk away from a college education again and he was a leader in all that on the economy as i told the cleveland city club today we brought the deficit down we increased investment in new technologies and in education and training we ve had 4 6 million new jobs the unemployment rate in ohio has dropped one and a half percent since i have been president ninety percent of those jobs are in the private sector and this year here s the real good news for the first time in a very long time more than half the new jobs coming into the american economy were above the national average in wages above the national average if you look at the world this is a more prosperous and peaceful place we passed nafta we negotiated the gatt world trade agreement we are reaching out to asia we are reaching to latin america we took controls off all kinds of exports so we could sell more high tech products we are reaching out to the rest of the world and this is plainly a more peaceful place because of what the united states has been involved in for the first time since nuclear weapons were developed no russian missiles are pointed at the children of ohio and the united states this year we are leading the fight for democracy in haiti for freedom in the persian gulf for an end to the war in northern ireland and yes for peace in the middle east the united states is making this world a more peaceful place we ve got a long way to go folks and we ve got a lot of problems to solve but this country s in better shape than it was 21 months ago and you should reward the people who are helping now here s the real rub if all this is true why aren t we happier what is going on here i ll tell you one thing one thing thomas i mean mark twain once said that the american people i started to say tom sawyer maybe it was huck finn maybe it was old jim but mark twain once said you know the american people should never have to see two things sausages and laws being made and sometimes i think all we do is concentrate on the negative and then there are people in this country today who only communicate with us through what is known as attack journalism unconstrained by the facts designed to destroy arguments credibility to make people more cynical to get them upset and to be fair our opponents have had more time to bad mouth than we have had to defend because we ve been working and when they re not trying to help they have a lot of free time that s right that s right that s right what do they offer i want you to think about this when you think about joel hyatt and his opponent for the senate and you ask john glenn and howard metzenbaum if i m not telling the truth i want you to think about this what have they offered they have offered no right they all voted against the middle class college loans they voted against the tax relief to working people their leaders tried to beat and mostly voted against the family leave law the brady bill they did everything they could do to kill the crime bill they said no and at the end of this session of congress this is important because they just stepped on things important to our country and to your legislators they decided that they would kill every living thing they could and right before they decided that we did get through john glenn s procurement bill to change the way the government buys things we re going to save hundreds of millions of dollars no more 500 hammers no more 50 ashtrays thanks to senator glenn but then they decided they would say no and they brought up the filibuster which means 41 senators can kill anything the rest of america wants they killed campaign finance reform they killed lobby reform that a freshman congressman from ohio eric fingerhut had so much to do with he ought to be reelected if for no other reason that carrying on this courageous fight to reform the lobbying practices in washington dc they killed all the environmental legislation they even killed the superfund bill you know the superfund bill folks is designed to clean up toxic waste dumps i want you to listen to this you think about this every time you think about joel hyatt and his opponent between now and election day his opponent who said he can t wait to get up there and get in with that crowd so he can stop things too now the superfund bill was supported by the chemical companies by the labor unions and the sierra club they ve never been for anything together before you could not get that crowd to agree on when the sun s coming up tomorrow morning but they were for this as a matter of fact no one in america was against the superfund bill except more than 40 republican senators and why were they against it because they would have rather left the poison in the ground than let tom sawyer come home to akron and tell you he helped to clean it up that is wrong and we should stop it that is wrong and if you don t like what they did to kill campaign finance reform lobby reform the superfund bill all the other environmental legislation you have a way to send the message you can send tom sawyer back to the house and you can send joel hyatt to the united states senate and you will tell the american people that ohio wants things to be done not things to be stopped now let me just say this today in cleveland i had the opportunity to engage a member of the house of the other party and his administrative assistant who apparently by lottery out of hundreds of people drew questions one and two to get to ask me and it was fine but they wanted to talk about their contract for america and to complain that i had called it a contract on america and they said well there are things in this contract that you like you re for the line item veto and i am you re for welfare reform i am i sent legislation to congress in march to change the whole welfare system and move people from welfare to work you re for giving more tax relief to the middle class you re for shrinking the government why aren t you for our contract i want you to know why that was a very clever question they asked they took all the popular things out of their contract but what their contract does is to promise a huge tax cut a big defense increase an increase in star wars and a balanced budget and when i said well how are you all going to pay for this they said well we ll tell you that after the election it s a trillion dollar promise they made and it sounds familiar doesn t it vote for me i ll cut your taxes raise spending and balance the budget with no consequences we tried that once it didn t work out too well you know what it means it means we re going to explode the deficit after we got it down coming down three years in a row for the first time since truman was president it means that we are going to ship our jobs overseas it means we re going to have gut a lot of programs they specifically call for cutting the college loan program three years in a row when we need more kids going to college not fewer this is a bad idea this contract this is a bad idea so what is going on we don t want to go back we need to go forward we don t want to reward the blame crowd we want to reward the crowd that wants to take responsibility for this country we want to reward people that want to empower americans not people that want to grab power by telling us what we want to hear shoot i d like to promise you a trillion dollars worth of stuff it s two weeks before the election i mean we could have a good time on a trillion dollars worth of hot checks but it would be wrong she would pay the bill we would set up the risk of setting us right back where we were in the trickle down 80s it would be wrong you need to think about this in terms of what you do between now and the election for senator and congressman you know if tom sawyer were a republican running for reelection and he had voted now listen this is serious because you we re preaching to the saved here you ve got to go out and convert so you need to listen to this if he were a republican running for reelection who had voted to reduce the federal government to its smallest size since kennedy was president to give us three years of deficit reduction for the first time since truman was president for the toughest crime bill in the history of the country and for economic policies that literally exploded the economy and drove down unemployment in akron and throughout ohio the republican party would be building a statue to him and saying no one should run against him that s what they should be doing anyway because that s what he voted for now that s the truth so what is all this rhetoric it s just a bunch of stuff but if you talk loud enough long enough and people are upset enough maybe it gets across i want you to think about this this is the last point i want to make because i want you to do something besides stand here and cheer me i like that and it s a new experience for me having been in washington but that s not what i want you to do i want you to think about all your friends and neighbors in ohio who don t have their minds made up or even think maybe they re going to vote against the congressmen or not vote for joel or anybody else you know in these other districts like young mr fingerhut who has done so much i want you to think about this i got to thinking what s my job like today and is it like any job i ever held before and i thought well you know i ve done a lot of things for a living i mean the time i was a little kid i ve worked in a grocery store i had wholesale comic book business i ve mowed lawns cleared land built houses i mean i ve done a lot of different things i was a governor i thought well maybe it s like being a governor but it s not really the job that i think i should be doing now that is most like what i ve done before was something i didn t make money for it was when i was in junior and senior high school when i was in little clubs we would raise money by doing car washes and i was the guy that liked to clean the windshield that s about what i need to do today you think about that if you re driving a car and the windshield is real dirty it could be sunshine outside and you d think it was about to storm it could be clear way ahead and you would think that there are all kind of obstacles in the way or there could be a real obstacle in the way and you d run smack dab into it because you couldn t see it that s where we are in america today we need to clean the windshield off we need to turn the lights on in this country this is a very great country and we are moving in the right direction and we need to reward that not punish it and that s what you need to do that s what you need to do so i want you to think about that and i want you to clean the windows for tom sawyer and clean the windows for joel hyatt most importantly of all clean the windows for your fellow ohioans and your fellow americans you cannot blame people for being torn up and upset look at how they get their information and what they hear go out and find people that you know and tell them to take a deep breath tell them a joke buy them a cup of coffee get them to where they think and remember that even parents don t let their children make decisions when they are angry you almost always make a mistake and imagine that between now and november 8th everybody you see is an opportunity for you to clean the windshield and turn the lights on america deserves it and so do you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 10 96 bill_clinton thank you thanks thank you very much well let me i was listening to yvonne mcpherson talk wondering if she was reverend mcpherson and when she really got stirred up i thought if this lady passes the plate we re all going to leave here broke thank you thank you for your wonderful wonderful words and your wonderful example thank you lieutenant renee washington for your 18 years and for the work you re doing to make our children safer and for your great remarks i want to thank all of you for making all of us who don t live here feel so welcome tonight i understand the west jefferson high school band played i thank them for that i want to thank congressman cleo fields for coming with me tonight and for all the work he s doing on our behalf thank you my good friend congressman bill jefferson who plays both sides of the river here and that s good politics sometimes it s not good in public life to straddle the fence but i picked up pretty quick it s a good thing to straddle this river if his in laws hadn t been from here i think he would have moved them over here just to make sure he was covered thank you my good friend senator john breaux for all you do for louisiana and all you ve done for me thank you and god bless you sir thank you mary landrieu for running for the senate and for standing up for what is right and supporting our crime program thank you and sheriff thank you i want to thank everybody in the sheriff s department who s worked on this program i understand that deputy chief gus clavery has done a lot of work on it and others have but this star program is an example of an issue that i think is very important when i ran for president i found people all over america frustrated and angry by the crime problem but nearly resigned to it there were no new ideas in many places so people said just throw the book at them and leave me alone and i ll duck and dodge the bullets everywhere but there were thank goodness a number of local leaders in law enforcement like harry lee there isn t really nobody like harry lee but you know what i mean people that i wasn t going to say this but i m going to say this as you know it s fairly well known throughout the country that i enjoy a meal now and then and last time i came to new orleans i always love to come here and i m always angry if they make me leave without eating when i m in here so harry took john breaux and me to lunch and i was finally with somebody i didn t have to be a bit embarrassed by enjoying my lunch with i loved it i loved it and we had a good one didn t we sheriff but the important thing let me get back to this law enforcement leaders like harry lee who understood and i found them all around america that it wasn t only important to do things right it was important to do the right things which is very different it was one thing for a person with a badge and a uniform on to look tough be strong and not do anything wrong and quite another thing for a person to always be searching out new ideas ways to involve people in not only solving crime but preventing crimes in the first place you heard him say up here when he talked he just picked up on something i mentioned at lunch about the way new york city had dramatically lowered the crime rate by radically increasing its ability to move law enforcement officers around every day among neighborhoods based on where the crime was moving so i come the next time i come to louisiana he tells me he s instituted the same thing that s what we need local leadership citizens like yvonne mcpherson dedicated officers like renee washington and law enforcement leaders like harry lee who want to do the right things as well as do things right and i was astonished when i ran for president the extent to which people on the one hand were screaming for something to be done about crime and on the other hand absolutely believed nothing could be done about it deep down inside they had sort of given up but they wanted us to make the right moves and make some right noises but they didn t really believe we could take our streets our schools our neighborhoods and ultimately our children back and i began to see things that changed my mind i ve told this story a lot of times but i made a good friend one night early in 1992 when i was dropping in the polls in new hampshire and people were writing my obituary i went to new york city to a fundraiser and frankly i was a pretty sad case i was feeling sorry for myself and i was walking through the kitchen to get around like we sometimes do to get around to where i was going to give the speech and a greek immigrant with a waiter s uniform stopped me and he said now mr president my son is 10 he s in the fifth grade he studies this election he says i should vote for you so i think i will vote for you if you will do one thing for me i said what do you want he said i want to make my boy free and i said well sir i said mr theophanos this is a democracy he said yes it is but my boy is not free he said where i lived before i was poor much poorer than i am here in new york but at least we were free here across the street from our apartment in new york there is this beautiful park i can t let my child go to the park unless i go with him i m lucky i live only two blocks from the school and it s actually quite a good school but my boy can t walk down the street to the school unless i go with him so i ll vote for you but you have to make my boy free and i heard stories like this all over america but i also saw neighborhoods in los angeles where the police had cut the response time down to two minutes i saw streets in philadelphia that had been infested by gangs and drugs where neighborhood groups had worked with the police to take their streets back and just a little bit here and there i would see these glimmers of hope and i promised myself that if i got elected president i was going to take the politics out of crime and try to put the police and the people back into the business of lowering the crime rate and bringing safety back to america and restoring fundamental freedom now the crime bill that you ve heard everybody brag on i appreciate that all the credit they re trying to give me all i did was take the politics out of crime all we did was to let law enforcement people and community activists like the folks that have spoken tonight tell us what the federal government ought to do to be a good partner to help communities take their streets back and give their kids a future back that is all we did but as it turned out that was quite a lot because for six years the debate in washington had been a bunch of rhetoric and who could talk the toughest and who could do the least because they we didn t want anything to make any of the organized groups mad and the problem was nothing ever got done so all we did was to let law enforcement officials in effect tell us what ought to be done let community activists tell us what ought to be done that s what the 94 crime bill was about it s been a remarkable four years in the area of fighting crime in this crime bill we agreed that over a five year period we d fund 100 000 police after only two years we ve funded almost half of them so we re ahead of schedule and under budget as the sheriff said there were no strings in this bill except one there was just one string the money had to be spent to hire law enforcement officers who would go on the street not behind a desk that was the only string we said you figure out who to hire you figure out how to train them you decide how to deploy them you decide how you re going to relate to the community it s all your decision we don t know in washington how to do that but we do know that in 30 years the violent crime rate has tripled and the police forces have only gone up by 10 percent in this country there s no way you could do it we had place after place after place that were more violent without any more police officers and they were covering less because they had to go around two at a time and then they had to get in the car so nobody was on the street and we were losing the battle because we weren t doing the right things so that s all we tried to do we also passed a three strikes and you re out law for people who are prosecuted in federal court for serious crimes they do it a third time they re not eligible for parole not ever and life imprisonment we passed the capital punishment for drug kingpins and people who kill our law enforcement officers in the line of duty we passed a strong safe and drug free schools program to give our little children something to say yes to to put more of those dare officers and other people out there in the classrooms when the kids were in grade school saying drugs are wrong drugs are illegal drugs can kill you we also we re giving schools more funds to stay open later i ve fought to maintain the summer jobs program i ve fought to try to give our young people something to say yes to i m now trying to make sure we open the doors of college education to everybody so no young person has to worry about whether they ll be able to afford to go to college if they stay in school and stay off drugs and stay out of trouble and make their grades i think that s important that s important we ve also tried to support more people like yvonne in citizens groups over the next four years we re going to try to mobilize another million volunteers to work with the police to get the crime rate down san diego california has the lowest crime rate of any of the 10 big cities in america even though it s right on the border where we re constantly fighting illegal immigration and people trying to bring drugs across the border they still have in any of the 10 biggest cities they ve got the lowest crime rate why one reason is they have hundreds and hundreds of retired people who work in these citizens groups with the police not only to catch criminals but to keep crime from happening in the first place watching out for the little kids on the street watching out for their neighbors they know whenever somebody s gone on vacation they watch their homes and they work together so this is something we ve got to do together there s more to be done we have to continue to support these police officers you know harry lee and i were laughing i once had a lifetime membership in the nra i think it s been revoked now because i stood up for the brady bill but we didn t take any guns away from hunters or sportsmen not a single one we haven t done that but at least 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers couldn t get guns now if you beat up your wife or your kids you can t get a handgun under the new law it s a good thing it s a good thing i would oppose any effort to undermine my ability to duck hunt or anybody s ability to be a championship skeet shooter or to do anything else that s appropriate and legal but i still think we ought to ban those bullets that are built only for one purpose to pierce the bullet proof vests that our police officers wear i don t see why we need those things out there let me tell you we just started this program two years ago as i said when i signed the crime bill in 1994 today i met with the first the family of the first one of the police officers hired under our crime bill killed in the line of duty i met here in louisiana in lake charles i met with that officer s widow and two beautiful beautiful young sons and i thought to myself you know if people like these folks here are going to put their lives on the line for us the least we can do is tell them if they put on a bullet proof vest it will protect them from being killed that s the least we can do for them and so what i want you to believe is number one this is not an accident what harry lee said about reducing the violent crime rate and the crime rate by 85 percent that is not an accident that happened because people did the right things the second thing i want you to believe is the federal government your president and the congress we can make a difference and we are but we re not doing it because of our political connections or philosophy we re doing it because we took the politics out of crime the third thing i want you to know is this could all be reversed in the budget i vetoed last year that the majority in congress passed they eliminated the 100 000 police program again i had to stop them from trying to cut back on it for reasons i do not understand they do not believe in it they tried to cut the safe and drug free schools program in half drug use is going down in america folks big time but drug use among children under 18 is still going up the last thing we need to do is to cut back on safe and drug free schools effort we need more adults in those schools talking to those kids and my newest proposal which is probably going to get me in trouble with some of the young people in america but i want to say look 90 percent of our kids are drug free and we need to support them and we need to lift up the good kids and we need to give them something to say yes to i want to say that again we need to say it but i m going to ask those 90 percent to do something that may be unpopular with them i m going to ask them to go along with my proposal to get every state in the country to make a drug test part of getting a driver s license so we can find the other 10 percent and save their lives and help them and give them a chance for the future i say again you deserve most of the credit here the sheriff lieutenant washington yvonne mcpherson all of you that work in this these police officers you deserve the credit but we have to do our part and we have tried to do our part and i want you to sustain this effort by what you say on november 5th and i know what mary landrieu will say she ll stay with us she ll support us and that s important so i want you to help by sending people to washington who will continue to take crime fighting out of politics and give it back to the people of every neighborhood in america that s important and mary will do that that s important and i want you to continue to support these efforts here but just remember this if you don t remember anything else remember this this is an example of what we can do when we stop talking and start acting and when we reach across the lines that divide us and join hands and agree on things that we all agree on we do not have to put up with unacceptable rates of crime and violence we do not have to put up with what i have seen in america we re almost to halloween now just a couple of years ago in baltimore where the mayor has labored mightily on this there was this wonderful young man 17 years old his whole life before him took two little kids out trick or treating so they would be safe and somebody shot him from across the street and ended his life just for kicks last year in washington in a suburb a 13 year old honor student standing innocently at a school bus stop a city bus stop shot down just because he happened to be standing in the wrong place in a drive by shooting you don t have to put up with that you don t have to give up your children to that you don t have to do that we can make a difference we are making a difference and you re making a difference here and i will do my best for four more years to make sure we have four more years of declining crime here in jefferson parish thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 10 96a bill_clinton thank you very very much thank you hello alabama can you hear us all the way back down there to the road thank you for coming ladies and gentlemen i promised howell heflin i would come to alabama and ask the people of alabama to support our efforts to build a bridge to the 21st century it is such a beautiful day and the crowd is so large maybe alabama is going to come along with me on that bridge to the 21st century let me say first of all to dr birdie and all the people who are here from this wonderful wonderful school i thank you for hosting us i ve looked forward to coming here for a long long time i have two great friends who teach here at birmingham southern mark lester and jean jackson i thank them and i have heard about what a great place this is senator heflin told me he had lifetime tenure on the board here and he was going to continue to serve even after he left the senate he didn t ask me for permission to leave the senate or i wouldn t have let him do that i want to tell you how honored i am to be here with all the people on this program today the candidates for congress the officials of our democratic party the distinguished mayor of birmingham my long time friend richard arrington chief johnson the leaders of the alabama teachers association the alabama federation of teachers the education association the birmingham southern college young democrats all the others that are here i want to thank congressman earl hilliard for being here with us and for his service i want to thank another distinguished alabamian who is retiring congressman tom bevill i d like to ask him to stand up tom he s back there with his partner bob wilson who s trying to succeed him i thank him and mary lynn bates and bob gaines and judge ingram thank you all for being here today i d like to say a special word of thanks to lieutenant governor don siegelman who s been our friend a long time and i d like to say to that i m very very glad to be here with another distinguished alabamian the president s special assistant for public liaison and the highest ranking african american ever to serve in the white house alexis herman from mobile alabama who s here with me today thank you alexis the last thing i want to say is that by way of introduction is that i met howell heflin 21 years ago when he was the chief justice of the alabama supreme court and i was a former candidate for congress and a loser i might add he came in the law school at the university and i thought that he was the darnedest fella i ever met in my life he had a wonderful sense of humor a great sense of compassion a fine mind and a lot of country common sense wisdom and as he leaves the united states senate i can tell you that hillary and i have come to know and love both mrs heflin and senator heflin we will miss them they have been a treasure for alabama and a treasure for america and i want you to bring them home and lift them up and make their days happy and warm and good folks we are on the verge of a new century all of you students here in this crowd and i thank all of the young people for coming today you are moving into a time with more opportunities for people to live out their dreams than any period in human history you are moving into a time where things will change more rapidly in how we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world and you have to decide how we re going to walk into that 21st century this is the last election for president of the 20th century and the first election for president of the 21st century and you have to decide many of you young people in this audience in a few years you will be doing jobs that haven t been invented yet some of you will be doing work that has not even been imagined yet and you have to decide what kind of america do you want from all the way over here to way back yonder down the street i want to ask you to do something when you go home tonight before you go to bed just take a few minutes with a piece of paper and a pencil and see if you can write down the answer to this question what do i want my country to look like when we cross that bridge into the 21st century what do i want my country to be like when my children are my age you know if you ask the right question america nearly always gives the right answer we only get in trouble when we let ourselves get confused and start asking the wrong question that s the right question and when you ask that question i tell you i ve been asking myself that question since before i made the decision to run for president in 1991 and for me the answer is simple but profound i dream of an america in the 21st century where every person without regard to race or region or income or religion or gender or background who is responsible enough to work for it can have a shot at the american dream i want an america that is still leading the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and i want an america which is coming together not being driven apart by our differences and that is important how long did we live in the shadow of our differences in the south how much do we see around the world today from bosnia to the middle east to northern ireland to africa and rwanda and burundi everywhere are the world to the problems of terrorism and people sending each other dangerous weapons what is driving it all racial ethnic religious and tribal hatred that s why i said the church burnings were wrong that s why i said we couldn t go back down that road again when we respect each other and work together there is no stopping america there is no stopping america now that s my vision you ask yourself tonight what your vision is if you ask the right question you ll get the right answer what i have tried to do is to expand opportunity increase responsibility from all citizens and bring us together in an american community and even though our friends on the other side don t like to admit it we are better off than we were four years ago and we are moving in the right direction the unemployment in alabama has dropped from 7 5 to 4 5 percent we have 10 5 million more jobs the other side said they were fiscal conservatives but our administration with the help of howell heflin reduced the deficit in all four years that s the first time a president s done it in ever year of his administration in the 20th century we re moving in the right direction incomes are on the rise again the typical family income is up 1 600 in the last two years and we re growing together again the inequality of incomes among working people which had become so deep in the last 20 years had the biggest drop in 27 years last year the biggest drop in child poverty in 20 years the lowest rate of poverty among senior citizens ever reported since we ve been keeping statistics we are moving in the right direction to that 21st century you heard the police chief and the mayor talk about it but we ve had four years of declining crime rates we ve also had four years of declining welfare rolls we have almost 2 million people fewer on welfare and more at work than we did four years ago and child support collections have been increased by 50 percent in four years people are paying for their kids more just in the last few weeks we raised the minimum wage for 10 million working americans because they couldn t live on 4 25 an hour we made 25 million working americans eligible to keep their health insurance by saying that you can t lose your insurance anymore just because you change jobs or someone in your family has been sick if somebody like roger bedford gets sick and has a spouse working they ought not to have their insurance taken away from them that s what health insurance is for and that s what we have done we also said that insurance companies can t make hospitals kick new mothers and their newborn babies out of the hospital after 24 hours any more so we re moving in the right direction and you have to decide whether you like this direction whether you want to build a bridge to the future wide enough and strong enough for all of us to walk across or whether you want to say there s the future you re on your own i hope you make it good luck you ve got to decide whether we re all in this together or we re just a swarm of isolated individuals you ve got to decide in short whether you think it takes a village to raise a child and build a community and build a future you know there is a lot of talk here about these labels you know our adversaries love labels i ll bet you there are good professors here at birmingham southern who would tell you that you start throwing labels at people and calling them names when you don t have anything to argue about any more and you can t win when the evidence is not on your side when all else fails call somebody a name maybe it ll work that s what senator bedford s up against i am proud to be running on the same ticket with a person like roger bedford who supported our efforts to lower crime and improve education and who would represent good old fashioned mainstream alabama values and modern alabama economic educational and environmental interests in the united states senate but you have to decide when they call names you ve got to look at the facts i want to balance the budget i want to finish the job we have cut that deficit 60 percent in four years i want to finish the job but we can do it while protecting medicare and medicaid and investing in education and investing in environmental protection they want to pass this big risky tax scheme that will increase the deficit require bigger cuts than i vetoed when they shut the government down raise taxes on 9 million hardworking people and allow companies to raid their workers pension funds you have to decide i don t think you need a label on that you don t need to call anybody any names just say i m for the right kind of balanced budget and i m for targeted tax cuts we can afford tax cuts but they need to be targeted to help you pay for education child rearing buying a first home paying for health insurance we can afford that and we can pay for it in our balanced budget plan but you have to decide will you help us build that bridge you have to decide everybody is for family values but do we value families you heard roger bedford talk about the family and medical leave act twelve million families have benefitted from that taken a little time off from work when a baby was born or a family member was sick the other day i was down in longview texas no hotbed of liberalism and i m shaking hands in the crowd and this woman s there with tears in her eyes saying mr president my husband had cancer and i was the only one in our family working and he was desperately ill because of the family and medical leave law i did not lose my job our family was not ruined and we were able to keep going that was a good thing for america that s not against american values that s for american values the other side led the fight against it my opponent still says it was wrong i say it ought to be expanded to let parents go see their children s teachers once a semester and take their kids to the doctor you have to decide you have to decide what we re going to do in health insurance we worked hard for the kennedy kassebaum bill to expand that health coverage now we want to say in our balanced budget plan paid for if you lose your job you re between jobs we re going to help you keep your family s health insurance for six months we re going to add another million kids in low income working families to the ranks of those who have health insurance we re going to help families who are taking care of their parents with alzheimer s get a little respite care so they can care for their families and still survive and keep their sanity and keep going we re going to help women on medicare get regular mammograms and we re not going to turn away from medical research we re going to put a billion dollars more in medical research why in the last four years we ve doubled the life expectancy of people with hiv we ve uncovered two genes that cause breast cancer two genes that will enable us to detect it earlier and maybe to prevent it we have used technology that we use in space and intelligence for imaging that will help us to detect all kinds of cancers early we have detected unbelievable things about strokes for the first time we ve got some treatment for strokes all for medical research we now have for the first time in history seen movement in the lower leg of laboratory animals whose spines were completely severed because nerves were transferred from the rest of the body to the spines we must continue to pass legislation that pushed the frontiers of knowledge and have medical research will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century will you help us way back there build that bridge to the 21st century most important of all are two things to me one is education we are living in a world let me just give you one example one tiny example of how fast knowledge is exploding we ve just signed a contract the united states did to do a research venture with ibm to build in the next couple of years a supercomputer that will do more calculations in one second than you can do on your hand held calculator in 30 000 years now i would say in a world where knowledge is increasing like that education is pretty important i just want to talk about three things today number one kids can t learn if they can t read forty percent of the 8 year olds in america today cannot read a book on their own i have a proposal to mobilize 30 000 people reading tutors americorps volunteers to get a million volunteers to go in and help parents and teachers teach our young children to read so that by the year 2000 every 8 year old in america can pick up a book and say i can read this all by myself secondly i want to hook up every classroom and every library in every school in the united states to the information superhighway by the year 2000 with computers with educational materials with trained teachers on the internet on the world wide web now for all of you older folks like me who are not great computer geniuses let me tell you what that means in practical terms it means that for the very first time in history and this is important to us in the south for the first time in history the children in the poorest inner city schools the most remote rural schools will have access in the same way at the same time at the same level of quality to the same learning that the children in the wealthiest school districts in the united states have it has never happened before will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century and finally as senator bedford said we are going to make college education available to every single american of any age who needs it i want to be able to say in the year 2000 that we ve made two years of education after high school just as universal as a high school diploma is today and i propose to do it not by a big bureaucratic program but simply by saying to every american if you want to go to a community college for two years you can deduct from your tax bill dollar for dollar the cost of a typical community college tuition it will revolutionize opportunity i want to say to people you can save in an ira and more families can save in an ira but they can take the money out without any tax penalty if they use that money to educate their children or themselves to buy a house or take care of medical care and yes i ll say it again i want to make for every form of college tuition a tax deduction of up to 10 000 a year from now on will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century and finally will you help me build an environment of security and good values for our children we have to make our children safe from gangs and guns and violence and drugs and for our children it is illegal for them to be exposed to tobacco as well and i m proud that our administration has tried to stop that we are putting 100 000 police on the street we supported the safe and drug free schools program so that our children could hear early that drugs are wrong drugs are illegal drugs can kill you we have done what we could do strengthen our control of our borders more than any administration ever has we have also supported as the mayor said local initiatives like school uniforms for younger children truancy law enforcement curfews at night you know why because the crime rate was going down all four years i was president but the crime rate among juveniles people under 18 only started going down last year because the violence rate has been going down all four years but the rate of violent crime among juveniles only started going down last year because drug use in america has dropped dramatically in the last four years cocaine use down 30 percent but drug use among children under 18 is still going up there are too many of our children out there raising themselves on the street we need to take them back into our bosoms into our homes into our hearts and give them a chance to live good positive lives will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century i said the other day and i expected to get a lot of grief from it from a lot of young people in america that even though 90 percent of our children were clearly drug free and had never experimented with drugs i wanted to ask them to do something really responsible to help us find the other 10 percent before it s too late and they re too much trouble i think we ought to have a drug test as the part of the driver s license process in america to find those kids and help them before they re in trouble and before it s too late will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century now folks my opponent has a different vision and i don t want to get into what they said you don t have to believe anything bad about him to disagree i was raised to respect people i told somebody the other day they started doing all this he s a better person i said i don t know but where i was raised my mamma would have whupped me if i ever said i was better than anybody else we were taught never to look down on anybody but to look up to everybody and try to life everybody up we were taught it in church and at home this has nothing to do with who s a good or a bad person i ve been in this business for some time now although i ve only lived in washington four years let me tell you something folks nearly everybody i ve met in public life works harder than average and tries to make a difference this is not a question of who s good and bad it s a question of what s right and wrong for our future i was for the 100 000 police and he was opposed to it i was for the family and medical leave act and he led the fight against it i m for making college education tax deductible and he wants to eliminate the department of education so that they ll be nobody to speak for education in the president s cabinet as we stand on the brink of the 21st century our economic policies are working our crime policies are working and our partnership with america for opportunity and responsibility is working so i want to say to you alabama has to decide go home tonight ask yourself what do i want my country to look like when we cross that bridge to the 21st century i know what the answer will be will you help us build that bridge will you help us build it wide enough and strong enough for everybody to walk across are you proud to be an american on the brink of america s greatest days do you believe we can make america even greater then you be there on november 5th and we ll do it thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton24 10 96b bill_clinton thank you thanks thank you very much well let me i was listening to yvonne mcpherson talk wondering if she was reverend mcpherson and when she really got stirred up i thought if this lady passes the plate we re all going to leave here broke thank you thank you for your wonderful wonderful words and your wonderful example thank you lieutenant renee washington for your 18 years and for the work you re doing to make our children safer and for your great remarks i want to thank all of you for making all of us who don t live here feel so welcome tonight i understand the west jefferson high school band played i thank them for that i want to thank congressman cleo fields for coming with me tonight and for all the work he s doing on our behalf thank you my good friend congressman bill jefferson who plays both sides of the river here and that s good politics sometimes it s not good in public life to straddle the fence but i picked up pretty quick it s a good thing to straddle this river if his in laws hadn t been from here i think he would have moved them over here just to make sure he was covered thank you my good friend senator john breaux for all you do for louisiana and all you ve done for me thank you and god bless you sir thank you mary landrieu for running for the senate and for standing up for what is right and supporting our crime program thank you and sheriff thank you i want to thank everybody in the sheriff s department who s worked on this program i understand that deputy chief gus clavery has done a lot of work on it and others have but this star program is an example of an issue that i think is very important when i ran for president i found people all over america frustrated and angry by the crime problem but nearly resigned to it there were no new ideas in many places so people said just throw the book at them and leave me alone and i ll duck and dodge the bullets everywhere but there were thank goodness a number of local leaders in law enforcement like harry lee there isn t really nobody like harry lee but you know what i mean people that i wasn t going to say this but i m going to say this as you know it s fairly well known throughout the country that i enjoy a meal now and then and last time i came to new orleans i always love to come here and i m always angry if they make me leave without eating when i m in here so harry took john breaux and me to lunch and i was finally with somebody i didn t have to be a bit embarrassed by enjoying my lunch with i loved it i loved it and we had a good one didn t we sheriff but the important thing let me get back to this law enforcement leaders like harry lee who understood and i found them all around america that it wasn t only important to do things right it was important to do the right things which is very different it was one thing for a person with a badge and a uniform on to look tough be strong and not do anything wrong and quite another thing for a person to always be searching out new ideas ways to involve people in not only solving crime but preventing crimes in the first place you heard him say up here when he talked he just picked up on something i mentioned at lunch about the way new york city had dramatically lowered the crime rate by radically increasing its ability to move law enforcement officers around every day among neighborhoods based on where the crime was moving so i come the next time i come to louisiana he tells me he s instituted the same thing that s what we need local leadership citizens like yvonne mcpherson dedicated officers like renee washington and law enforcement leaders like harry lee who want to do the right things as well as do things right and i was astonished when i ran for president the extent to which people on the one hand were screaming for something to be done about crime and on the other hand absolutely believed nothing could be done about it deep down inside they had sort of given up but they wanted us to make the right moves and make some right noises but they didn t really believe we could take our streets our schools our neighborhoods and ultimately our children back and i began to see things that changed my mind i ve told this story a lot of times but i made a good friend one night early in 1992 when i was dropping in the polls in new hampshire and people were writing my obituary i went to new york city to a fundraiser and frankly i was a pretty sad case i was feeling sorry for myself and i was walking through the kitchen to get around like we sometimes do to get around to where i was going to give the speech and a greek immigrant with a waiter s uniform stopped me and he said now mr president my son is 10 he s in the fifth grade he studies this election he says i should vote for you so i think i will vote for you if you will do one thing for me i said what do you want he said i want to make my boy free and i said well sir i said mr theophanos this is a democracy he said yes it is but my boy is not free he said where i lived before i was poor much poorer than i am here in new york but at least we were free here across the street from our apartment in new york there is this beautiful park i can t let my child go to the park unless i go with him i m lucky i live only two blocks from the school and it s actually quite a good school but my boy can t walk down the street to the school unless i go with him so i ll vote for you but you have to make my boy free and i heard stories like this all over america but i also saw neighborhoods in los angeles where the police had cut the response time down to two minutes i saw streets in philadelphia that had been infested by gangs and drugs where neighborhood groups had worked with the police to take their streets back and just a little bit here and there i would see these glimmers of hope and i promised myself that if i got elected president i was going to take the politics out of crime and try to put the police and the people back into the business of lowering the crime rate and bringing safety back to america and restoring fundamental freedom now the crime bill that you ve heard everybody brag on i appreciate that all the credit they re trying to give me all i did was take the politics out of crime all we did was to let law enforcement people and community activists like the folks that have spoken tonight tell us what the federal government ought to do to be a good partner to help communities take their streets back and give their kids a future back that is all we did but as it turned out that was quite a lot because for six years the debate in washington had been a bunch of rhetoric and who could talk the toughest and who could do the least because they we didn t want anything to make any of the organized groups mad and the problem was nothing ever got done so all we did was to let law enforcement officials in effect tell us what ought to be done let community activists tell us what ought to be done that s what the 94 crime bill was about it s been a remarkable four years in the area of fighting crime in this crime bill we agreed that over a five year period we d fund 100 000 police after only two years we ve funded almost half of them so we re ahead of schedule and under budget as the sheriff said there were no strings in this bill except one there was just one string the money had to be spent to hire law enforcement officers who would go on the street not behind a desk that was the only string we said you figure out who to hire you figure out how to train them you decide how to deploy them you decide how you re going to relate to the community it s all your decision we don t know in washington how to do that but we do know that in 30 years the violent crime rate has tripled and the police forces have only gone up by 10 percent in this country there s no way you could do it we had place after place after place that were more violent without any more police officers and they were covering less because they had to go around two at a time and then they had to get in the car so nobody was on the street and we were losing the battle because we weren t doing the right things so that s all we tried to do we also passed a three strikes and you re out law for people who are prosecuted in federal court for serious crimes they do it a third time they re not eligible for parole not ever and life imprisonment we passed the capital punishment for drug kingpins and people who kill our law enforcement officers in the line of duty we passed a strong safe and drug free schools program to give our little children something to say yes to to put more of those dare officers and other people out there in the classrooms when the kids were in grade school saying drugs are wrong drugs are illegal drugs can kill you we also we re giving schools more funds to stay open later i ve fought to maintain the summer jobs program i ve fought to try to give our young people something to say yes to i m now trying to make sure we open the doors of college education to everybody so no young person has to worry about whether they ll be able to afford to go to college if they stay in school and stay off drugs and stay out of trouble and make their grades i think that s important that s important we ve also tried to support more people like yvonne in citizens groups over the next four years we re going to try to mobilize another million volunteers to work with the police to get the crime rate down san diego california has the lowest crime rate of any of the 10 big cities in america even though it s right on the border where we re constantly fighting illegal immigration and people trying to bring drugs across the border they still have in any of the 10 biggest cities they ve got the lowest crime rate why one reason is they have hundreds and hundreds of retired people who work in these citizens groups with the police not only to catch criminals but to keep crime from happening in the first place watching out for the little kids on the street watching out for their neighbors they know whenever somebody s gone on vacation they watch their homes and they work together so this is something we ve got to do together there s more to be done we have to continue to support these police officers you know harry lee and i were laughing i once had a lifetime membership in the nra i think it s been revoked now because i stood up for the brady bill but we didn t take any guns away from hunters or sportsmen not a single one we haven t done that but at least 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers couldn t get guns now if you beat up your wife or your kids you can t get a handgun under the new law it s a good thing it s a good thing i would oppose any effort to undermine my ability to duck hunt or anybody s ability to be a championship skeet shooter or to do anything else that s appropriate and legal but i still think we ought to ban those bullets that are built only for one purpose to pierce the bullet proof vests that our police officers wear i don t see why we need those things out there let me tell you we just started this program two years ago as i said when i signed the crime bill in 1994 today i met with the first the family of the first one of the police officers hired under our crime bill killed in the line of duty i met here in louisiana in lake charles i met with that officer s widow and two beautiful beautiful young sons and i thought to myself you know if people like these folks here are going to put their lives on the line for us the least we can do is tell them if they put on a bullet proof vest it will protect them from being killed that s the least we can do for them and so what i want you to believe is number one this is not an accident what harry lee said about reducing the violent crime rate and the crime rate by 85 percent that is not an accident that happened because people did the right things the second thing i want you to believe is the federal government your president and the congress we can make a difference and we are but we re not doing it because of our political connections or philosophy we re doing it because we took the politics out of crime the third thing i want you to know is this could all be reversed in the budget i vetoed last year that the majority in congress passed they eliminated the 100 000 police program again i had to stop them from trying to cut back on it for reasons i do not understand they do not believe in it they tried to cut the safe and drug free schools program in half drug use is going down in america folks big time but drug use among children under 18 is still going up the last thing we need to do is to cut back on safe and drug free schools effort we need more adults in those schools talking to those kids and my newest proposal which is probably going to get me in trouble with some of the young people in america but i want to say look 90 percent of our kids are drug free and we need to support them and we need to lift up the good kids and we need to give them something to say yes to i want to say that again we need to say it but i m going to ask those 90 percent to do something that may be unpopular with them i m going to ask them to go along with my proposal to get every state in the country to make a drug test part of getting a driver s license so we can find the other 10 percent and save their lives and help them and give them a chance for the future i say again you deserve most of the credit here the sheriff lieutenant washington yvonne mcpherson all of you that work in this these police officers you deserve the credit but we have to do our part and we have tried to do our part and i want you to sustain this effort by what you say on november 5th and i know what mary landrieu will say she ll stay with us she ll support us and that s important so i want you to help by sending people to washington who will continue to take crime fighting out of politics and give it back to the people of every neighborhood in america that s important and mary will do that that s important and i want you to continue to support these efforts here but just remember this if you don t remember anything else remember this this is an example of what we can do when we stop talking and start acting and when we reach across the lines that divide us and join hands and agree on things that we all agree on we do not have to put up with unacceptable rates of crime and violence we do not have to put up with what i have seen in america we re almost to halloween now just a couple of years ago in baltimore where the mayor has labored mightily on this there was this wonderful young man 17 years old his whole life before him took two little kids out trick or treating so they would be safe and somebody shot him from across the street and ended his life just for kicks last year in washington in a suburb a 13 year old honor student standing innocently at a school bus stop a city bus stop shot down just because he happened to be standing in the wrong place in a drive by shooting you don t have to put up with that you don t have to give up your children to that you don t have to do that we can make a difference we are making a difference and you re making a difference here and i will do my best for four more years to make sure we have four more years of declining crime here in jefferson parish thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 11 98 bill_clinton thank you very much i asked charday if she was happy about being here and she said yes but i m a little nervous and i said well all these people are your friends just remember that and i thought she did a terrific job don t you think she did i think she did governor and mrs edgar senator levins senator landrieu congressman and mrs oberstar mayor barry thank you all for joining us here today i d like to thank the previous participants on the program mayor elect williams for the power of your example which speaks louder than our words and mrs williams we re glad to have you here today and we wish you well in your new endeavors judge hamilton thank you for your work and the power of your example and dave thomas he said some very nice things up here about hillary and me but the truth is that no other citizen in the united states today or ever has done as much as a private citizen to promote the cause of adoption as dave thomas and we are very grateful to him thank you sir i d like to thank secretary shalala the longest serving and notwithstanding her voice today the most effective secretary of health and human services in our history i want to congratulate all the families who are here today and thank them for coming and i hope judge hamilton is right i hope that the images of them that go across america today will inspire other parents to do the same i want to also congratulate the adoption 2002 award winners and thank them for the work they are doing in their states and communities i d also like to say a special word today before we came in here dave thomas said well you know your administration has done more than any in history to promote adoption and i told him that the real reason for that is because it has been a consuming passion of the first lady for as long as i have known her i remember when we were young and we hadn t been married long when she had a client a couple in arkansas who were foster parents and who were in the foster system and the rules then didn t permit them to adopt and she waged a long and sometimes lonely legal battle through our courts to get that couple the right to adopt the child they loved very much and had already invested a great deal in and it began to change things for a lot of families in our state i remember when she organized more than 25 years ago the arkansas advocates for families and children and one of their missions was to improve the system of adoption as well as the system of foster care in our state so i can tell you that while many people have played a role in what we have been able to do especially the remarkable bipartisan cooperation we ve enjoyed in passing these two important adoption bills no one deserves more credit than hillary for what has happened in the last six years and i m very grateful to her as all the speakers have said we are working hard on making good on our commitment to find our foster children the homes and the futures they deserve we do want to double the number of adoptions by the year 2002 we want to reform our nation s whole approach to this profoundly important issue to make the system work better for the children and the families it should be serving with pioneering efforts like those in the state of illinois we are getting closer to our goal of doubling the number of children adopted or permanently placed by 2002 between 1996 and 1997 the number of adoptions increased by 10 percent from 28 000 to 31 000 we know however that that cannot be the sole measure of our progress we also must ask ourselves whether our child welfare system always puts the health and safety of our children above all else whether children have the chance to live out their dreams and fulfill their potential whether families who open their arms can actually reach to embrace a child in need as we celebrate national adoption month americans can take pride in the progress we re making but we know there is much more work to be done we know geographic and other barriers to adoptions still exist we know we have to do a better job in informing america s families about the many children who wait in the foster care system for adoption to give those children the permanent homes they need to give our families the opportunity to give them those homes we must make technology a partner and propel the public welfare system into the 21st century today therefore i am directing the secretary of health and human services to work with the states the courts the private agencies to report to me within 60 days on a plan for a national internet based registry of children waiting to be adopted everywhere in the united states as hillary said there are 100 000 children just like those whom we clapped for today in foster care still waiting for permanent adoptive homes the internet holds the potential to shorten their wait to make an on line link between foster care centers and families looking to adopt some states and private partners already are forging these connections bringing together families in alaska and children as far away as pennsylvania for example we want to build on these efforts to the extent that it is possible and appropriate working closely with the states supporting their efforts learning from them we can use the internet to promote adoptions while protecting the confidentiality of children and families technology has given us an important tool and we should use it again thanksgiving is approaching families across our nation will come together to express their gratitude for all the things that matter most we sometimes speak of the comforts of home as the small blessings but when you look into the eyes of these children today we remember that there are few greater blessings i d like to encourage more families to follow the example of those we have honored here today to open their arms their hearts to children who need them very much to give them the futures they deserve and to make sure that in all of the thanksgivings to come we will all be blessed as a nation as more and more of our children come into loving homes a very happy thanksgiving to all of you and now let me invite all of you to join us to celebrate this special day with a reception in the state dining room thank you very much dem wjclinton24 2 00a bill_clinton if i had any sense i would quit while i m ahead next time we have an argument shelby i m going to play that back to you we tape everything thank you shelby thank you leo thank you all of you ladies and gentlemen for being here tonight and for your support at i think a very critical time i would like to make just a few brief remarks and i d like to begin by thanking all of you for the contributions that you have made to america s prosperity i have had occasion over the last couple of months because we were coming up to february and if the economy kept growing then we knew it would be the longest economic expansion in our history and the first time we ever had an economic expansion remotely this long without a war somewhere in there chugging up things and so and i knew i would be doing interviews and members of the press would be asking me well what caused all this and i thank you for what you said but if i could go back my whole theory was in 1991 and 1992 when i was running for president on the economic issues is that there was this enormous pent up capacity in the american economy a whole culture of entrepreneurism of dramatic restructuring of traditional industries which had gone on in the 1980s in response to all the competition we had by then already 20 really almost a 40 year history but certainly a 20 year history that went through my republican predecessors as well of having at least the presidents always support open markets and expanded trade which i think is a very important part of this whole strategy and i think we should be doing more of it and i ll say more about that in a minute but i had a feeling that there was something structurally amiss that kept holding us down we go into these recessions and then we get out but we had anemic recoveries we were in the midst of a statistical recovery that was generating no jobs unemployment was still going up and i felt strongly that it was the product of two things number one we didn t get rid of the structural deficit that was created in 1981 when we were in a recession and you could make a compelling argument that we needed to do what governments had been doing since the great depression either cut taxes or increase public investment or both to get us out of the recession but always before after a period when the economy started to grow again we got rid of it and instead i think because we were in the grip of an ideology that said government is always the problem it will mess up a two car parade you should never ever do anything that increases revenues or does anything about this deficit we built in these huge interest rates and serious serious imbalances in our economy the second thing that i thought was holding us back is there was no real coherent theory about what kind of economy we were trying to create what our role ought to be and what your role was bound to be and so we set about trying to change that and i think that we ought to say here that i felt confident that if we could get the deficit cut in half and then get rid of it that we would lower the structure of interest rates in a way that would put more money into the hands of ordinary american consumers and make capital more available at more affordable rates to investors and to entrepreneurs no one predicted that the recovery would go on as long and be as strong as it has because no one had an economic model to measure the impact of technology on productivity and one of the things i always say is you have to give the federal reserve a lot of credit for this because if alan greenspan had followed all the textbook economic models he could have killed this recovery because everybody would have said well after two years or three years or four years or five years some point along the way you ve got to shut this down because every time this has ever happened before inflation has been raging and he was willing to look at the evidence not the theory and not get in your way and what i tried to do was two things i ve always believed that the primary role of government in the globalized information society in which we live is to establish the conditions and give people the tools necessary to make the most of their own enterprise and their own talent and to invest in those things that otherwise would not be invested in without which we cannot be the society we ought to be that s basically what i think the role of government is but the first thing we had to do is get rid of the deficit and you heard shelby say that pointed out that al gore passed the tie breaking vote one of his great lines is whenever i vote we win and i must say i didn t have any grey hair when i became president he s cast too many votes to suit me there are all these close votes you know but it s true whenever he votes we win so and when we announced the economic program just when we announced it when lloyd bentsen announced it in december of 92 the bond market went up the interest rates dropped and the rest is history and the deficit reduction package turned out to have greater savings than we thought because there was more economic growth than we thought being triggered out of it then in 97 we had a bipartisan balanced budget act that carried big majorities of both parties and both houses and i thought we had established the first bipartisan economic policy or at least fiscal policy in 16 years and then the congress passed the tax cut i felt strongly was too big given the obligations out there on social security and medicare and other things and i vetoed it and now just listening to the debate we might be about to get back to a bipartisan fiscal policy but i think that is very important the other thing we tried to do the second thing i think is also very important i believed that it was very very important that we do other things the financial modernization bill a continued aggressive trade policy we ve had over 270 trade agreements i hope all of you will support my attempt to bring china into the world trade organization by giving them permanent normal trading status i think it s very important not just for economic reasons but for economic reasons among others and it s a 100 percent economic winner for us because we make no concessions except to let them come in and they open their markets to us i also think it would be very good for the cause of freedom and human rights in china then i thought the telecom act was very important and i know a lot of you do but we had these big big fights some of which were public some of which weren t so public because we were trying so hard to get it right and it seems to me that other things being equal we ought to always opt for competition we ought to always opt for we ve got an idea based economy here one factor that never gets enough credit by the way i think in america s recovery is the sophistication of our capital market just like the failure of the s l crisis and doing deregulation in the wrong way helped to hurt us badly in the 80s i think the sophistication of capital markets in america today has played a major role in this long term recovery the ability of people who have good ideas to get capital and the kinds of judgments that have been made have on the whole served this country very very well so the telecom act i think had a big role in this i think the fact that we have continued to aggressively invest in research in science and in technology in bio medical science but in other science as well is going to have a big long term impact and i believe over the long run the fact that we ve doubled investment in education and training generally and dramatically increased the college going rate will help a lot of companies to sustain their growth and their prosperity so i feel good about where we are and i guess what i would ask all of you to think about is and what i hope the subject of this election will be because i ll be a citizen bystander not a candidate is now what you know seven years ago we had high unemployment low growth we quadrupled the debt social problems were getting worse and we had total political gridlock the country is sort of turned around now and almost every social indicator is better we have the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the lowest female unemployment in 40 years the lowest poverty rate among single parent households poverty rate in 46 years there are more people in poverty there because there are so many more single parent households we have a very robust movement and the real question ought to be what are we going to do with this moment of prosperity and i talked about that in length as ed rendell said i almost put him to sleep at the state of the union but i would just like to reiterate it seems to me that these are the questions we have to ask and my answer is number one we ve got to try to keep this economy going and when a down turn comes we ve got to do our best to make sure it s minimal in duration and depth whenever that is i think continuing to pay down the debt is very important and there is some difference of opinion about that but let me say why we financed you can t expand the economy this quick without people borrowing money and going into debt people have to borrow money to start most businesses and of course there s been a lot of consumer debt too but basically you ve got all this business borrowing i think it s served us well but the net debt of the country can be much less if we re continuing to save by paying the government debt down and i think we ought to keep going i know a lot of people in the bond market disagree with this but i think we ought to have a goal of making america debt free over the next 13 years because it will lower the interest rate structure over the long run and i think it s good social policy you know the average person i had an economic analysis given to me the other day that said the average person because of lower interest rates over the last seven years was saving 2 000 a year on home mortgage payments and 200 a year on car payments and college loan payments so i think it s good social policy and i know it s good economic policy it maintains confidence and it frees up capital and it keeps the economy in greater balance so i think that s the first thing the second thing i think we have to do is to try to do more to bring prosperity to people in places where it hasn t reached yet i think that one of you said to me tonight that you approved of our attempts to close the digital divide but it shouldn t be seen as social policy it ought to be seen as part of our long term economic strategy to increase economic growth if you think about how the american economy can grow we have to find more businesses and more consumers more employees and more purchasers we do that by expanding trade we also do that by expanding opportunities to the people in places in this country that haven t yet been a part of it some of them are in inner cities some of them are in small rural areas some of them are on indian reservations i bought christmas gifts over the internet this year to try to show that i m not as hobbled as al gore says i am but also to make a point about this i bought two christmas gifts from the lakota craftsmen on the pine ridge indian reservation in south dakota where the unemployment rate is still 70 percent 7 0 now these people do not want to leave the land of their ancestors and they should not have to do so to make a decent life but they are way away from any kind of big market it s not easy to get there if you go visit it s probably because you wanted to go out and see mt rushmore or the crazy horse monument but the internet gives them a chance to build an economy without moving it s for the same reason i m trying to make it easier for poor people to own cars without losing their food stamps because two thirds of the new jobs are in suburbs and three quarters of the people who need work are in rural areas and inner cities somehow they ve got to get where the jobs are even if they re willing to go back to community college and train i did an event this week at the white house with a young 24 year old man who lives in a small town near buffalo new york who is going back to community college learning how to repair computers he s a single father with two kids and under the old rules if he d gotten a car he wouldn t have been able to keep his food stamps for his kids this kid is out there doing everything he s supposed to do and there s millions of people like that we re here having a great dinner tonight there are a lot of people out there who have to think about it before they take their kids to mcdonald s so i think that there is so much we can do one of our proposals in this budget is to give people the same incentives to invest in poor areas in america we give them to invest in latin america or asia or africa which i support but i think we should have the same incentives here and i want to try to do more to set up a thousand community computers centers around the country in areas that wouldn t have them otherwise so that not just kids in the schools with internet hookups but adults can come in and become conversant and figure out how to do it i was out in northern california the other day with some young executives at e bay and they told me over 20 000 people are now making a living off e bay not working for e bay making a living buying and selling and they said they ve done some profiles of these people and a substantial number of them used to be on welfare and if you believe that intelligence is more or less equally distributed and so is good and bad luck there s a lot of other people that could be doing that if we could figure out ways to hook them into the future so i think that s very important i think we ought to make access to college universal which is why i want to make college tuition tax deductible i think we ought to do more to help people balance work and family which is why i want to expand the reach of the family leave law i was told that if i passed the family leave law and signed it it would hurt the american economy but it s hard to prove we ve had 20 million people take some time off from work when a baby was born or a parent was sick and we ve got 21 million new jobs so i think the evidence is i believe most of you work in places where you think if the people who work with you aren t worried sick about their children while they re at work they re more productive and they do better i believe we ought to do more to be a better partner around the world not just with the china wto but with the africa and the caribbean trade initiatives i put up there with the debt relief to poor countries that could be doing more trade with us and these are the kinds of things that i want you to think about i won t go through the whole litany of issues but a lot of you know a lot about this economy a lot of you have been a big part of it and you live in a dynamic world the think that i want most for my country now is for this to be a dynamic decision making process in this election the worst thing we could do is to think and i appreciate what ed said about people said they supported my policy but if someone were running for president and said vote for me i ll do exactly what bill clinton did i would vote against that person because i think we should stay with the direction of the policy but we have to keep changing we have to keep seeking new frontiers we have to keep moving and government is no different from your enterprise whatever you do it is no different we still have we re still bedeviled by some old problems you know all these hate crimes you see that are so upsetting where somebody gets killed or shot just because of their religion or because they re gay or because of their race that shows you that in this most modern of worlds we re still subject to very primitive emotions even in this country that we still have our more minor version of the conflicts that have engulfed the balkans that bedevil the middle east that torment indian and pakistan over kashmir so these are the things i want you to think about because i m convinced that we have a chance that maybe has never been existed in my lifetime to work together as a country to build the future of our dreams for our children and be a truly good citizen in the world and to benefit from it and i think we ll make more money doing the right thing and that s what i want for my country now a lot of you are younger than i am but a lot of you are about my age and i want to tell you when i was studying this whole deal about this expansion i noted that the longest expansion in american history before this was between 1961 and 1969 and i ll just close with this thought i graduated from high school in 1964 president kennedy was assassinated in 1963 some people write about the history of the last 30 years and american cynicism and all that business and they say it all started then that s not true i was there americans were not cynical after john kennedy was murdered they were heartbroken but not cynical and they united behind lyndon johnson he won an enormous election mandate we were passing civil rights legislation and most people believed in 1964 when i graduated from high school that we could keep low unemployment high growth low inflation going indefinitely they thought we could actually bring opportunity to people in poor areas there were differences about how to do it and they thought we would solve the civil rights challenges of america through the congress through the courts in a lawful way and they thought we would successfully pursue the cold war until eventually we prevailed that s what we thought in other words we were about as confident then as we are now two years later we had riots erupting in our cities the country was becoming divided over vietnam the economy began to be unraveled over the conflict between guns and butter four years later when i graduated from college it was two days after robert kennedy was killed two months after martin luther king was killed nine weeks after lyndon johnson said he wouldn t run for president again the country was totally divided over the war in vietnam and we elected a president of i think immense ability but on a campaign of division he said he represented the silent majority which meant i guess the rest of us were in the loud minority and it was us against them and we ve been playing us against them politics ever since i have done my best to bring an end to that i m sure you would admit with decidedly mixed results but i have done my best to bring an end to that because i m old enough to know that today s confidence can get away in a hurry and i say this to you not as a president but as a person as an american i have waited now for 35 years for my country to have the chance i thought we had 35 years ago and i don t want us to squander it if somebody asks you why you came here tonight give them that for an answer and think about in your own mind and heart what you think we have to do to make the most of this we ve been given a second chance those of you who are my age or older and we need to make the most of it thank you very much dem wjclinton24 2 94a bill_clinton thank you very much i think john kiszkiel did a great job of introducing me and talking about the problem sam when you get done maybe we ought to run him for office around here he did a great job didn t he i thank him for opening his pharmacy this morning and for introducing me to some of his customers i ll mention them in a moment i also want to thank charles west who if you notice when i heard charles west up here talking i thought he s the only guy up here that doesn t have an accent he s from arkansas he s like me so i loved hearing him talk but i want to thank charles and ron ziegler for coming here and expressing the support of the pharmacists of america and the people who run our drugstores all over the country for the administration s health care initiative i am very grateful to them and their support will be pivotal as we go into this critical session of congress and try to pass the health care bill i thank your members of congress for being here especially our host sam gejdenson who has done a great deal of work in congress on a number of issues that are important on health care and defense conversion and job training and exports if there is an issue that requires us to be on the cutting edge of change you can bet that sam gejdenson will be on the cutting edge of the issue and i really appreciate that i thank my friend barbara kennelly for coming here and for her support and outstanding work in congress my longtime friend senator lieberman you heard him talking about that i actually worked in his first campaign for the state senate when we were both in our 20s and that was a day or two ago and my friend of many years senator chris dodd who talked about his connections to this wonderful community and who is really working hard on this health care issue as he has on all human resource issues over the years i thank him for that there are many others in the audience that i can t mention state and local officials including my old classmate your attorney general richard blumenthal i m glad to see him here and a recent father i want to thank our host the norwich free academy this is a fascinating school with a great history the administration the teachers and all others especially mary lou bargnesi and everybody that s made me feel so welcome here today and i d also like to say just a special word about how nice it is for me to be back in connecticut connecticut has been awfully good to me since long before i ever thought i d be up here running for the president i went to law school here the most important thing that ever happened to me happened here i met my wife when i kissed my wife and daughter goodbye this morning they were sort of jealous that i was coming here even after we d seen all the snow on television last night this state and this congressional district were good to me in the last campaign for president and i m doing my best to keep faith with the commitments i made i also have to say i ve been immensely impressed as a fanatic basketball fan with your basketball team this year i think they ve got a good chance to get to charlotte but i can t promise to cheer for them if they play arkansas it s amazing when i come in late at night sometimes they show these basketball games fairly late at night it s one thing that i still get to do most of my interests and hobbies are restricted to some extent by my job but at least late at night i can channel surf like the rest of you do and sometimes i pick up the basketball team i also want to say because one of the congressional members mentioned this that i frankly quite appreciate the fact that most of your big insurance companies here who write health insurance aetna travelers itt hartford signet have not participated in financing the misleading campaign against the administration s health plan i am not trying there are people who believe we should just eliminate insurance companies altogether from this health plan what i have proposed is that we guarantee private health insurance to everybody and then give small business people and self employed people and others the same market power that big business and government have so that everybody can get lower rates so that the companies that operate here will actually do quite well if our plan passes as long as they re willing to give people competitive prices and as long as we re willing to have a comprehensive simple plan so that there is no incentive to spend time figuring out how not to pay for people s health care and instead we figure out how to provide it at high quality and reasonable costs so i appreciate that this is a people issue to me you know so many of these issues in washington you must be bewildered some nights when you hear turn on the evening news and you hear some big issue being debated in washington and they re using ten dollar words that don t mean anything to you there s a whole different language that surrounds this health care debate and when we started working on this sometimes i d have to stop our own people in the middle of a sentence and say no no no speak english explain to me what you re really talking about don t use all this gobbledy gook language let s talk about how this affects real americans in their daily lives this is a big deal folks it s a big deal because it s a big deal first because there are an awful lot of very good things about american health care an awful lot of very good things about it the doctors the nurses the health facilities the fact that most of our people have at least access to some health care is better than if they didn t have anything medicare works well it s efficiently administered with a low overhead and for those things which it covers it works well and it shouldn t be messed with or changed where it works but there are a lot of problems as you know my wife received almost a million letters when we started this health care effort from americans who described what was wrong with the health care system as it affected them i met with four of those folks here today and i want to ask them to stand up in a minute then i met with three others in the greenville drug store as you heard mr kiszkiel say bob hug from milford where is he back here behind me stand up bob i lived in milford my first year in law school on the beach in a house that i bet hasn t survived the condo craze of the 80s but anyway i liked it he s written three letters to us he lives on a fixed income is paying more as many do in fees and premiums without getting better benefits he pays 2 000 a year for medicine not covered by medicare under the present system in june he wrote and i hope this won t embarrass him but i m telling you this because i want to illustrate what this fight is all about my wife and i sometimes don t take our medication as we need the money for food other seniors do too why can t we include prescription drugs in medicare well under our proposal we will marian darling from madison is marian up on the stage who had the same story for herself and her husband except their annual bill was 5 000 arthur poppe of simsbury he s here i think who had some services for his wife which were covered when she was in the home but when she had to be put in a nursing home then they weren t covered anymore so the government program sometimes operate just like insurance policies do you got to read the fine print to figure out what s covered and not and then you still can t control it if it happens to you and edith longe of oakdale is edith here let s give her at greenville drug store i was joined by louise jaczynski louise where are you are you here she still works part time she works as a crossing guard for schoolchildren give her a hand but she s on maintenance therapy for a substantial health condition which requires expensive medication you have a state assistance program here which has done a lot of good most states don t have it but there are strict income limits and because of the way medicare benefits are now being calculated the income limits she s now 80 bucks over the income limit so what should she do quit her job and lose thousands of dollars plus the right to keep helping young people plus the probability that she s lengthening her own life and lowering her own health care bills by staying active or keep the job and pay thousands and thousands of dollars for medical bills what should she do joe riley joe are you here joe riley was a foreman at king seeley thermos before it shut down he was laid off a year before his retirement so he lost all his benefits with medicare and now he has cancer now listen to this every time he gets out of the hospital his benefits are covered for the next few months or up to 500 bucks for medicine so as long as he keeps going back to the hospital before the benefits run out he can get the drugs now what we hope is that he ll get better and he won t have to go back to the hospital but he ll still need the medicine so what should he do go back to the hospital if you do what does that do to the cost of the health care system if you need to do it it ought to be there but no one should be sitting here thinking i m going to lose drug coverage that i have to have unless i go back to the hospital finally arlene sullivan is here arlene she made my day she gave me a kiss when i showed up to the drugstore then louise did too arlene is a widow a retired secretary she has some pretty serious health problems and she gets some of her drugs at a discount through the aarp program others she purchases directly from greenville drug store but there are a lot of these and sometimes she has trouble which drugs treat which illnesses and the coverage is not clear why should there be any difference in what is covered and what isn t if the doctor prescribes them and you have to have them just by what s covered now americans are now engaged in a very serious debate about this issue this is a complicated issue almost 15 percent of our income goes to health care in america no other nation spends more than 10 percent canada spends 10 percent of their income germany and japan spend about nine percent now in spite of that all three of those countries provide health care to everybody we don t cover everybody and from those people who have coverage as you ve seen all these people had coverage but they often don t have what they need covered especially prescription drugs and for people who aren t old enough to be on medicare almost all of them can lose their health insurance at some time or another you know you ve had some big companies in connecticut who have been forced by the pressures of the global economy to have some layoffs now under the present law they can keep the health insurance they ve got from their old company for 18 months as long as they can afford to pay for it what about those that can t afford to pay for it nine months later if they don t have a job what about those that after 18 months lose their health insurance because they had to get a job at a small business that doesn t provide health care so there are some serious problems here the question is how do we keep what s good about our health care system and fix what s wrong how can we give health care security that really means something to all our people other countries do it and they do it and don t spend as much money as we do for many elderly americans the neighborhood pharmacist is the symbol of good health care for many older americans the local pharmacist does a whole lot more than just fill the prescription and ring up the register he s a problem solver he s a friend one of the people in john s pharmacy today told me he spends a lot of time with me he explains how these things work i saw one bill rung up in the pharmacy today and with every new prescription you get a little print out from this pharmacy which says here s what the drug is here s what it s supposed to do here s the proper usage explaining how to manage this the pharmacist is often the one person who can really be counted on to answer questions and calm fears and to catch a problem sometimes before it becomes a crisis they can call different doctors and let them know the effects of combining the drugs that have been prescribed they sometimes tell you actually what you are taking and why you should take it and how often you should and why they are really problem solvers if a medication isn t helping or is causing harmful side effects often it s the pharmacist who gets the first call that s why i am especially grateful for the support of the leaders here today for charles west and ron ziegler and for the grass roots americans they represent more than 100 00 community pharmacies retail druggists and the 1 million employees who work for them they understand that we can fix what s wrong with the american health care system without messing up what s right i heard a lot of you clap when one of the members one of the people who spoke before me mentioned preserving choice of pharmacies and doctors it s a good thing to do but millions of americans are losing their choices of doctors of plans of coverage under our approach we preserve choices and we will actually increase the number of choices available to a lot of folks still covered in the workplace under our proposal you can keep you medicare you can keep your doctor your children and grandchildren will have much greater access to primary care and preventive care under our proposals older americans in need of long term care will have new choices new choices the choice of getting that care in the home or in a community setting what we re trying to do is to give health care security to people over 65 and people under 65 we re trying to preserve medicare and to improve it by adding the prescription drug and the long term care benefits and that s why the pharmacist and the druggist here support this proposal in addition this proposal provides as a basic benefit coverage of prescription drugs and pharmacy services for all americans for the very first time for the very first time and provides for prescription drugs for people on medicare for the very first time listen to this pharmacists have studied this question and determined that each year they write 17 million prescriptions that are not filled because customers cannot afford them that s 17 million hillary often recounts to me her conversations with the hospital pharmacist she met during her father s illness he told her of the many patients he sees leaving the hospital with prescriptions he knows they will never fill because they can t afford it now medicine can t work miracles unless it is used there s overwhelming evidence that without the regular treatment of adequate medicine many people actually get sicker or hospitalized or require nursing home care and therefore impose far far greater costs on the health care system on the taxpayers than would be the case if there were a prescription medicine benefit without medicine care often comes too late and costs too much pharmacists know this they see this in americans everyday they see it in human terms you heard it talked about today they are here because they want to solve the problem until we do as many as 8 million americans 8 million americans each month will continue to make choices between drugs and other essentials including literally the food on their table just like this letter said i ve had people tell me this in state after state all over america under our proposal anyone receiving medicare will continue to choose the doctor and the druggist they want but they will have the drugs covered under medicare and under the basic benefit for people who are not old enough to be on medicare now i want to make it clear that this is not just some pie in the sky offer that is not paid for and not thought through yesterday two independent studies concluded that if we cover medicine under medicare we could save about 30 billion between 1996 and the year 2000 mostly by involving community pharmacists in preventing related hospitalizations and nursing home stays one study was done by the center for health policy studies the other by the respected nonpartisan consulting firm lewin vhi the lewin firm also determined that this benefit would improve the lives of medicare beneficiaries forty six years ago harry truman passed through this community campaigning for guaranteed private health insurance for every american he was right then when richard nixon said 20 years ago as ron ziegler said that employers and employees ought to contribute and ought to provide health insurance for everybody we ought to cover everybody he was right then and we re right now the real question is whether senator dodd is right are we in one of those cycles of history where we re going to do something about it the early part of the century free public education in the 30s social security in the 60s civil rights are we going to fulfill the responsibilities of this generation to finally after 60 years of talking about it solve this problem are we going to continue to make excuses walk away because everybody s got a different idea or are we going to solve the problem that is the great question facing the united states congress and the american people i full well realize that when you have a system that involves 1 500 separate insurance companies writing thousands of different policies with a blizzard of different rules and regulations compounded by the government s medicare and medicaid programs that have a lot of good features but a lot of dizzying complexities and things that aren t covered when we are spending 10 percent more on paperwork than any other country in the world but that employs a lot of people and generates a lot of earnings that there are a lot of interests at stake i know that but fundamentally this is a simple direct profound issue how can we justify spending almost 50 percent more of our income than any other country on earth and still have to put up with stories like the stories of the people i introduced here who stood up i say to you my fellow americans this is the responsibility of our generation and we must fulfill it the strange thing is that this is just another one of those deals as my mother used to tell me when doing the right thing turns out to have the right consequences in all kinds of other ways if we do this we will also help to reduce the government s deficit we will also help to improve the quality of life we will also actually lower the cost of the health care system if we adopt our program we will improve individual responsibility because we ask everybody to share some of this but most importantly we will not have to listen to these stories anymore and all the other stories that are in those million letters that hillary got i once heard a distinguished new englander former senator and secretary of state candidate for vice president ed muskie from maine say that when he was the governor of maine one of the ways that he really thought that you could gauge success was by whether the problems came around twice and if the same problem came around a second time somebody hadn t done their job this problem my fellow americans has been coming around to us and getting worse and worse for six decades i say to you it is time for all of us to do our job the congress cannot do it alone they have got to know that you will stick with them they have got to know that you expect them to work their way through all these complicated claims and counterclaims by the interest groups with the vision the stark clear vision of the human beings that are being affected by this and our responsibility for the future in spite of the difficulties we face i think we are going to do it thanks to you god bless you and thank you dem wjclinton24 2 94b bill_clinton well this is hardly the time and place for a speech but i am delighted to be here with senator dodd and senator lieberman congresswoman kennelly and your congressman mr gejdenson we re here to talk about health care today and to talk about the future of the people of the people connecticut and the future of our country i also want to say since i am fairly near groton that i think most of you probably know but yesterday electric boat was awarded one of the administration s technology reinvestment projects for defense conversion to help to use the defense technologies that were developed in the 1980s to build the high tech jobs here at home of the 1990s and that will be a help in the future well we hung in there with the sea wolf we did the sea wolf i did that we reversed that decision that s right i also want to just say a special word of thanks to all of you for braving this weather and for coming out and for bringing your messages as well as your support my family and i are very grateful for the friendship that we ve been given all across this country especially in the last month as i ve dealt with the loss of my mother and we ve tried to deal with a lot of the challenges facing our country and when you come out here and stand in this rain after the tough snow you had last night it s very moving to me personally i thank you for that i want you to know one other thing we ve got a lot of tough challenges still ahead facing our country we ve got a lot of hard work to do in the congress we are facing the health care issue the welfare reform issue we re going to try to redo the unemployment system of the country we have got a lot of big challenges facing this country but we re going to meet them with your help and your support and i just want you to tell these folks standing behind me that you do support them when they take the chances and show the courage to change the country and move it toward the 21st century thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton24 2 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you melissa machit didn t she do a good job give her another hand mayor o neil superintendent cohn chief ellis our host principal alexis ruiz alessi the principal of jackie robinson academy where we are now to the president of the board of education bobbie smith to the jrotc groups from wilson and poly thank you very much for being here and to the poly high school band thank you very much for playing so well just before i came out here i had a little roundtable discussion about the school uniform policy with melissa and another fine student names maurice troutman and a number of i thought he was going to run for office someday he s already seeded the crowd and a number of teachers and parents and the chief and your board president i would like for all the people who were in our roundtable to stand and be recognized they did such a good job of educating me about what was done thank you very much i m glad to be back in long beach it seems like only yesterday when i was here last i do have my pen on today it s sort of my uniform and i m honored to be here i came here today to applaud and support the efforts of this remarkable community yesterday the mayor and community leaders briefed me on the remarkable plan that this community has to revive itself and deal with the impact of the defense downsizing of the last several years today i m here to support what over the long run may have an even more profound impact on the future of this community and our country this remarkable progress you have shown in your schools as a result of the school uniform policy making them safer more disciplined and orderly freeing teachers to focus on teaching and students to focus on their job of learning you are returning their schools to their original purpose and proving that public institutions can excel when they have high standards high expectations for all children and a high purpose with a strategy at the grass roots level supported by everybody in the community for carrying it out i have to tell you on a very personal note as i told the panel this has made my life at home even a little more difficult because for 10 years 10 years several times a year before long beach finally took this ground breaking step the only person who ever talked to me about school uniforms was the first lady and six or seven times a year we d go to chelsea s school and we d go to this or that event at school or we d visit other public schools and she d come home and say you know if we had a uniform policy it would make things better in these schools i heard it over and over and over again and thanks to you i have to listen to i told you so being able to endure i told you so is one of the essential requirements of a successful marriage and i must say i can t think of a time when i have enjoyed hearing it more i applaud all of you i want to take a few moments today to talk about how what you have done here fits into the larger pattern of what i hope is going on in america and what i am trying to do and what we are trying to do to help you to spread this message throughout the united states when i became president i was convinced that our country had to go into the next century making significant changes if we wanted to ensure that the american dream was available to everyone willing to work for it without regard to their race or income or background if we wanted to bring the american people together instead of seeing them continue to drift apart and if we wanted to see our country remain the leading force in the world for peace and freedom and prosperity we have worked very hard over the last three years on all those three objectives and we see that while progress has been made which is very substantial serious challenges remain challenges that can only be met if we do a better job of working together if you were to ask me what the single most significant lesson i have learned as your president in the last three years is i would with out hesitation answer it is that when americans work together we never lose and when we are divided we defeat ourselves today california newspapers reported 285 000 new jobs in this state in 1995 alone we are moving this economy almost 8 million new jobs a 15 year high in homeownership three years of record highs in new businesses formed businesses owned by women alone in the last three years have created more new jobs than the fortune 500 have laid off the combined rates of unemployment inflation and home mortgage interest rates are the lowest they ve been in 27 years we are moving forward but we know we know that a lot of americans have not participated in this economic recovery they haven t gotten a raise or they live in the inner city or isolated rural areas where there aren t any new jobs or they work for one of these big companies where sometimes when they re my age and ready to send their own children to college they ve been downsized so we have more challenges to meet until we can say to every american you re going to live in a more rapidly changing economy but you will still be all right if you re willing to work for it if you look at our most fundamental institutions many of the social problems we ve had the objective indicators clearly point out the fact that on balance our schools are doing a better job you should know that the welfare rolls are down in this country the poverty rolls are down in this country every state in the country has reported a decline in violent crime this is all encouraging that s the good news everybody knows this country is still too violent it s still too dangerous for children there are still too many problems out there there are still too many people trapped in a culture of dependence when they ought to be out working and being successful in supporting their families and contributing to their communities and country so we have a lot to do now a lot of the things we have to do involve modernizing our systems for example we have reduced the size of your national government we have gotten rid of thousands of pages of regulation we ve made it far less bureaucratic it s the smallest government you ve had in 30 years but you don t want it to be weak it s still strong enough to be there when you need it if there is an earthquake or a fire or a flood it s still strong enough to be there to help companies change when they have to go from defense to civilian construction and these are the kinds of things that we need to focus on i want to give you a government that is less bureaucratic and smaller but still able to help every person every family every neighborhood every community make the most of their own lives and so all the institutions have to change we have to modernize in just a couple of weeks the vice president and i will be out here to celebrate net day in california the biggest next step in our campaign to make sure that by the year 2000 every single classroom and every single library in this country will be hooked up to the internet 20 percent of california s schools will be hooked up this year but it s not all modern some of what we have to do is to get back to basic values and basic institutions i see at least two members of the congress out here congressman horn and congressman martinez there may be others here we know that there are things in washington we cannot do that you have to do we have to find ways to reassert the vitality of the basic institutions of this country of the family of the schools of the neighborhood and the community in the schools i have always had a very simple formula i believe i have spent more time in classrooms more time listening to teachers and parents and students than any person who had the privilege to hold this office and i believe that all children can learn i think that we have to have high expectations i believe in high national standards i believe in high technology nationally spread but i believe in grass roots reform giving kids a good head start giving every person access to college and giving adults a lifetime chance to always always get education when they need it for economic reasons but let s not kid ourselves none of this is going to work unless our schools work and unless our children feel safe and secure unless the environments of education are disciplined and drug free we saw the tragic consequences of the time in which we live again just a few days ago with the terrible painful agonizing senseless shooting of that fifth grade teacher in front of his students in los angeles we are praying i m sure all of you will pray along with our family that alfredo perez will pull through and that his wife who is also a school teacher will have the courage the bravery to carry on and that those students in that school who underwent that horrible experience will somehow find the courage to believe in their adults who are responsible for their lives so that they can go and grow and learn again we know that most of our schools are safe but we know that our country is not as safe as it ought to be we know that every parent who walks a child to the bus stop and waves goodbye in the morning should never worry whether the child will come home safely every parent has a right to expect that their children will be safe in school every parent has a right to believe that the children are spending their time learning and teachers are able to spend the day teaching when we identify national problems that have to be solved by local communities using basic values what i believe we should do at the national level is to help to define what we ought to do and let you decide how to do it that s what we re here to celebrate today we ve tried to help promote school safety with the gun free schools act we are educating our children through you with the funds we provide about the dangers of drugs with the help of the safe and drug free schools act we are tackling student drug use through our random drug testing programs that we have advocated for local school districts we are getting tough on criminals when they are seriously violent by permitting the prosecution of hardened young criminals as adults we are promoting greater parental involvement through our family partnership for learning at the department of education we are supporting you and teaching our children the values of hard work discipline mutual respect through the introduction of character education programs all across america again at the initiative of local school districts not from washington but when you want to do it we re there for you and we think you should do it and we have worked very hard in this country where so many people come from such diverse backgrounds and so many different faiths which they want to express in different ways to say that the first amendment s freedom of religion is the freedom from oppression but it doesn t make schools religion free zones there is a way people can pursue their values and their faith consistent with the first amendment we have tried to do all these things but i have to say in the end it matters whether all of you are working together and whether your counterparts in every school district in america are working together that s why i took some pains in the state of the union address to urge that other school districts in our nation consider following the example of long beach on school uniforms one of the great hazards of our culture with all of its wonderful opportunities is that we can sometimes as a friend of mine used to say without meaning to teach our children to minor in the majors and major in the minors it s important to be able to make a good living and it s important to be able to buy things that you d like to have but that s not the most important thing in life and it s tragic when young people without a balanced upbringing without grounded values without a secure education wind up believing that it s all right to kill somebody for a pair of sneakers or jewelry or a designer jacket in detroit a 15 year old boy was shot recently for his 86 basketball shoes in fort lauderdale a 15 year old student was robbed of his jewelry just this past december near where i live now in oxon hill maryland a 17 year old honor student was killed at a bus stop just standing there caught in a cross fire during the robbery of another student s designer jacket as parents every one of us has been wrenched by these stories we cannot stand idly by while our children are having their childhoods robbed from them and from us by people who place more value on the material things than even human life not to mention human learning the long beach unified school district and the parents here have not stood idly by i want to again say the entire united states of america is in your debt because you took the first step to show that elementary and middle school students could wear uniforms to class reduce violence reduce truancy reduce disorder and increase learning and as was said more ably than me by my remarkable introducer give a sense of unity and purpose and teamwork to the students and the schools that are in this school district we are all in your debt in the united states after the first year of this program fights between students and other students who bring guns to school were cut in half overall crime in the schools was cut by more than a third in one year in addition to safety learning improved schoolwork became more important for students than showing off what they were wearing or resenting what someone else was wearing and maybe most important of all over the long run i think these uniforms do not stamp out individuality among our young people instead they slowly teach our young people one of life s most important lessons that what really counts is what you are and what you can become on the inside not what you are wearing on the outside and at least on that score i think you can make a serious argument that this school uniform benefits the children of affluent families as much as it benefits the children of poor families because that is a lesson all our children need to learn but in the end we should remember it should be safety first i was so moved in this panel listening to melissa talk about unity and then listening to young maurice say i can walk down the street now and because i have my uniform on those gangs know that i m not a problem i m just a student i don t have to look over my shoulder all the time it is wrong for a young person to look over his or her shoulder walking down the street of the united states of america that is wrong and you have helped to stop it and let me say finally about you you did it reflecting the lesson i said that was the most important i have learned you did this together this was not imposed on you the parents decided to do it working with the teachers working with the school board working with the police department working with others you worked this out together and i ve learned about the differences from school to school i ve learned about the differences in permissible uniforms i ve learned all about this it has really pleased me to understand just how much of a grass roots endeavor this is and that also is important i do want to say though that in all the years that i have spent in public schools the thing that has frustrated me most is that nearly every problem in america has been solved by somebody somewhere in some school but ideas don t travel very well the most heartening thing to me although i know it s been a headache for your superintendent is that you ve been deluged with phone calls that s good that means people say i m not too proud to learn from them you know the founding fathers of this country set up state governments as the laboratories of democracy with the express intent that they would not be too proud to learn from one another when i was a governor whenever we were the first state to do something i was always proud of that but i used to tell our people i m even more proud when we re the second state to do something because that meant that we weren t too arrogant hard headed and deaf to learn from what somebody else was doing right so we want to support what you have done here and so we have taken on the job of finding out what works and how and i want you to know that just before i came here today i signed a directive instructing the secretary of education to distribute this new manual on school uniforms to every one of the nation s 16 000 school districts so they will know how to do what you did the department of education worked with the department of justice and the attorney general to develop this it s a road map for the establishment of a policy for school uniforms for schools that want to use the tool it provides a central source of information about successful programs yours and those that have followed that are making a difference all across america let me be clear this is not a national government mandate this is not washington telling any school or school district what to do the decision about whether to adopt a uniform policy as a tool in an overall program to promote safety and improve learning is a local decision to be made entirely by parents teachers and local school officials but at least now nobody will say we didn t know about this we couldn t imagine how to do it and we re not sure it will work if they read this they will know it will work and they ll know about it and they ll understand how to do it in the meanwhile let me leave you with these two thoughts please don t grow weary in pursuing this goal we can never rest until violence against our children is the exception not the rule until we are horrified until we are genuinely surprised when we hear about something bad happening to a child we can never rest until we have more of our children wearing the colors of school uniforms than the colors of gangs we cannot rest until that is true and please each and every one of you in your own way be willing to reach out to your friends and neighbors and anyone with whom you come in contact across this great state and across our beloved country to tell people the story of how this works people are desperately looking for ways to restore integrity and meaning and purpose and direction and success to our schools all across america you have shown that it can be done share your knowledge share your passion share your conviction and remember what i said whenever we are defeated we defeat ourselves if we are divided we can t win but when we re together america never loses thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 2 97 bill_clinton thank you very much good morning welcome to the white house dr ponder dr wilson dr shaw where s bill gray is he here you re hiding your light under a bushel back there i wanted to say again to all of you how grateful i am to bill gray for the historic role that he assumed in restoring democracy to haiti we ve got another year behind us now bill and we re still going thank you dr payne and dr hackley mr secretary i d also like to thank catherine leblanc for her work on the white house initiative on historically black colleges and universities welcome to the white house i m especially glad you could join us during black history month as we pay tribute to the contributions of african americans to american life none of those has been more important than our nation s historically black colleges and universities when the doors of college were closed to all but white students and black people s aspirations were scorned historically black colleges and universities gave young african americans the high quality education they deserved the pride they needed to rise above cruelty and bigotry as the graduates and teachers of hbcus haven t just taken care of themselves they fought for freedom and equal opportunity for all other americans as well this has been important throughout our history and in the future it will be more important than ever before because education will be more important than ever before to prepare our people for the new century every young american must have the world s best education you know better than anyone how much a difference an education can make to name just a few of the young americans who were educated at hbcus you d have to look at justice marshall congresswoman barbara jordan reverend jesse jackson naacp president kweisi mfume nobel prize winner toni morrision and of course dr king eighty five percent of our nation s black physicians 80 percent of our african american federal judges 75 percent of our black phds 50 percent of our black business executives and elected officials all were educated at hbcus historically black colleges and universities have served with distinction of course in terms of their contributions to our administration our former secretary of energy hazel o leary former surgeon general dr joycelyn elders the director of presidential personnel bob nash and of course as the vice president said alexis herman who is here with us today and who did a superb job for us as director of public liaison and with your help will be a great secretary of labor and i want your help over the last four years we have put in place a comprehensive college opportunity strategy to make college available to every american citizen i directed the department of education and the white house initiative on historical colleges to work to increase funding to hpcus we ve made student loans less expensive and much easier to obtain under the direct student loan program americorps our national service program has given tens of thousands of young people the chance to earn college tuition while serving in their communities we have created already in the last budget 200 000 more work study positions to help students work their way through college and in the new budget there is another 100 000 which will mean we will go from 700 000 to 1 million work study slots in only four years we know that financial aid is critically important but some of your colleges as many as 90 percent of the students receive financial aid last year we increased the pell grant program by 20 percent taking the maximum grant up to 2 700 from about wherever it was 2 460 that was the biggest increase in 20 years this year s budget is bigger still it increases pell grants by another 25 percent the largest increase again in well over 20 years and increases the maximum pell grant award to 3 000 per year it expands the program to include older students who are starting college late or returning to school it raises the maximum family income level to include hundreds of thousands of families who did not qualify for pell grants before in total these changes will help almost 350 000 more families send a family member to college the balanced budget also includes a 10 000 tax deduction to help families pay for college and a 1 500 hope scholarship tax credit which is enough to pay for the tuition at the typical community college in america for two years this college opportunity agenda will open the doors of college wider than ever before now we need to work to make sure that the congress without regard to party will enact these changes into law before i answer questions now i d like to ask for your help with one more thing we all know that literacy is the basic tool of learning but 40 percent of our children cannot read independently by the time they re eight years old we can and must do better my budget includes more than 2 billion to help us with the literacy challenge but that is not enough i launched our america reads initiative to mobilize an army of reading tutors all across america and i asked college and university presidents to help me achieve that i sent a senior member of the white house staff carol rasco to the department of education to work with secretary riley to make sure the america reads initiative does that we have dedicated several thousand americorps volunteers to becoming trained so they can in turn train reading tutors to work with schools with parents and with children to help make sure our children can read but now we need a lot of volunteers as many as a million and a lot of them will have to come from students i am pleased to say that over 80 college presidents have already committed thousands of their work study students to participate as reading tutors i hope you will join them and commit a percentage of your own work study students to help our children learn to read because without literacy the job manuals and the history books are both closed and so are the doors of college we need your help to open them wider i m looking forward to working with you in the months and the years ahead but especially this year to make sure that we pass this education in congress number one and number two that we enlist the idealism the ability and the energy of our young college students in helping us to teach our children to read thank you very much dem wjclinton24 2 99 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen good evening i want to welcome president rawlings and mrs rawlings and the entire ghanaian delegation along with the distinguished secretary general of the united nations kofi annan and our other distinguished guests to the white house hillary and i are delighted to see you all here there was so much interest and enthusiasm about this dinner that we had to move it from the dining room into the east room and you might be interested to know that it was in this room that thomas jefferson met with meriwether lewis to plan the great lewis and clark expedition which explored the american continent it is fitting that we are having this dinner here almost 200 years later to chart a new century and to explore our relationship with ghana and with africa it was no accident the ghana was our first stop our gateway to africa when hillary and i and our delegation the members of congress the administration and citizens traveled to africa last year mr president in the last decade under your leadership ghana has made great strides toward fulfilling president nkrumah s vision of a proud strong country in important ways it may even have surpassed that vision starting our african journey in a democratic country with a growing economy a powerful commitment to tolerance at home and peace around the world allowed us to highlight for all americans the progress that africa has made and the promise of our future together it allowed us to reaffirm for all of africa that the united states is proud and determined to build a partnership of mutual respect with african nations which share our dreams of a better world it also gave us the opportunity to get to know ghana it has become the subject of some raw humor in the white house that i never tire of telling people that we had a half a million people in independence square in ghana about thank you every time the vice president gets a good news story these days i say but have you ever spoken to a half a million people let me say also mr president we all know that you have so many friends in the united states quite a few here tonight i want to mention though an astonishing fact that i learned about a friend of ghana and yours who is not here tonight also a friend of mine who performed here for the prime minister of great britain stevie wonder he has spends considerable time in ghana and actually mr president he has boasted in the united states that he s flown your airplane i hope you wore a seat belt with a story like that he may be planning to run for office soon i want you all to know i have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about president rawlings political predicament listen to this he was elected president by his fellow citizens in 1992 he was reelected in 1996 he loves his country and he loves being president of his country his constitution prevents him from running again in 2000 mr president i feel your pain it seems to me the only response for two slightly scarred but energetic warriors like us is to renew our commitment and dedication in these remaining two years of our service to make them count every day for all our people so that when our citizens choose new leadership for a new century we can know that we have done our best to pave their way so let us tonight commit together to work on the things that matter to real people and to the children and their future to strengthen our democracies to broaden the reach of our economies to make education and health care better and more widely available to protect our environment to work to convince others to seek peaceful solutions to conflict within and among the nations we can reach and let us commit to making the bonds between our two nations stronger than ever mr president it is a profound honor for hillary and for me to have you here and we now ask all of you to join us in a toast to the president and the first lady and the people of ghana dem wjclinton24 3 00a bill_clinton thank you thank you president goenka chief minister deshmukh my good friend ambassador wisner my colleague and longtime friend ambassador celeste secretary daley our distinguished crowd here we thank you for welcoming us i have brought quite a group from the united states including six members of our congress and we were just down in hyderabad and i asked the crowd to acknowledge them because i always got to give the speech they always have to listen but when we go home they control all the money so i would like to acknowledge the presence here of congressman jim mcdermott congressman gary ackerman congressman ed royce representative sheila jackson lee representative nita lowey and representative jan schakowsky all members of the united states house of representatives we thank them for coming this has been a remarkable week and i think a wonderful week for me and my daughter chelsea who is here and for our entire american delegation we came as friends to a changing india to gain a better understanding of your country your views in order to build a new partnership on a higher level than that which we have experienced over the last 22 years if you imagine the world you would like to see 10 years from now or 20 years from now if you imagine how you would like india to be 10 or 20 years from now it is difficult to believe that the world you would like and the india you would like can be achieved without a deeper and better partnership of mutual respect and common endeavor with the united states i can also say i m grateful for the presence of the american ambassador one former american ambassador to india and the indian ambassador to the united states ambassador chandra that i cannot imagine the world that i want for my children s generation in america that does not include a deeper and better partnership with india and so i came here to try to build it or at least to have the foundations there before my time as president is done already as all of you well know america is the largest trading partner and investor for india this week american companies signed about two dozen agreements to create or advance projects worth another 4 billion and i m very pleased that our export import bank will make available a billion dollars in new financing for small and medium sized businesses in india to export to the united states this week we have strengthened our commitment to work together to protect the environment to promote clean energy to fight against deadly diseases to use science and technology to help people rise from poverty i visited a small village in rajasthan yesterday you probably saw the pictures in the paper where i was dancing with the village ladies it was pretty good odds there were about 30 of them and one of me and they were throwing the children were throwing flowers petals of flowers on us but the reason we were dancing was because of the time we had shared before and i saw the work that was being done in the poor village to lift the lives of women to give them access to credit to give them support in the workplace to keep their children including their girl children in school i saw the role of men and women and people of different tribes and castes working together in the local government units and so there was cause for celebration today in hyderabad when i was there i talked to representatives of all 23 districts of the state in a teleconference about the same sorts of activities that are occurring i say that because i believe that while there is plainly a digital divide in india and a digital divide in the united states not just from place to place but within every city where there is a strong business group well connected to the new economy the truth is that the information age gives us the chance to eliminate poverty more quickly for more people than ever before in all of human history i saw that yesterday when i was in this little village of nayla and there was a computer hook up to the state and federal government so that all the people could come in and find out what all the services were that were available to them and there were printouts so that the women could get actual prints that they could take home that would tell them how to take better care of their children and some day every village will have all the educational software available anywhere in the world on it so that in the poorest villages of india or africa or china or latin america people will be able to print out for their school children the most modern educational materials available anywhere so that people in the poorest villages of the world will have access to the same learning materials that the people in the richest schools in the united states or any other country have today if we do this right we will find that doing what is morally right consistent with the values of india that s a sense of community and mutual responsibility also turns out to be very good economics in the information age because you need more education you need more people with the capacity to make the most of this new economy the same thing is true with the environment all over the world today there s a general consensus that the climate is warming too quickly and that the consequences are likely to be disastrous i met with a man doing malaria research shortly before i came here tonight and we talked about how troubling it was the malaria is now being found at higher and higher altitudes in countries all across the globe where it manifests so that it s attacking people in villages that have never seen it before and they re much more vulnerable and likely to have many more problems all the consequences of changing environment but in the information age no nation has to grow rich by putting more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and in fact there will be enormous opportunities for india millions and millions of jobs a trillion dollar global market in developing alternative energy sources maximizing the use of new energy technologies the development of fuel for automobiles from farm sources all over the world it will change the world in the next five years about as much as the internet has changed it in the last five and it will do nothing but help india it would reduce the pressures on your people to continue practices that lead to soil erosion or the loss of precious species yesterday i went to the ranthambhore national park and i saw two magnificent bengal tigers one a vast male tiger named boomerang interesting name for a tiger and the other a female tiger rather like often happens the female was doing all he work in this setting she was stalking a herd of deer and it was an amazing sight to behold already this year 20 tigers have been killed in india even though it is not legal to do so all these competing economic pressures i hope all of you will help to preserve your tiger population it s an important part of india s heritage but i think we all understand that the stronger and more diversified the economy gets the easier it will be to preserve the species to preserve the environment to restore the magnificent historical and cultural artifacts that dot the countryside in every part of this magnificent country so we have a lot at stake in this so does the united states we have in silicon valley alone 750 companies started by indian americans 750 in silicon valley alone we have seen the country literally transform because of the infusion of new talent from people from all over the world but we have been especially blessed by people from india and indeed from throughout south asia and as i look at the world of tomorrow a world that i hope will be characterized by peace and prosperity by a genuine commitment to he dignity of all people by societies which celebrate their ethnic their racial their tribal their religious diversity but are bound together by a common acceptance that the humanity we all share is even more important than the differences among us i know the world will never be that way unless south asia is that way and i have seen in these local experiments in india something i wish for all the world yesterday in that little village where i am known now only for dancing not very well with the village women i talked to people on the local government council who told me that they now had 10 of their tribes and castes represented in their local government that for the first time in the history of the village people from different groups were regularly dining together now it seems like a little thing but if you consider the fact that 800 000 people more or less were killed in the rwandan tribal wars in the space of 100 days that a million people were driven from their homes in kosovo simply because they were muslim in a country that was mostly serbian and orthodox christian that the irish troubles have been going on for 30 years and in the middle east people still die because of their faith and ethnic background and i could go on and on and on it was a truly remarkable thing to see that in a local community in india people were worried about how they could get clean water and it didn t matter much what your caste or tribe was and they were rather proud of the fact that women as well as men were in the government and that their positions were to some extent guaranteed and they couldn t even remember why they didn t want to have dinner together anymore this may seem small to you but if you have seen people like i have seen them a widow in rwanda who woke up to see her husband and six children cut to death all around her just because of the tribe they were in if you had been in the refugee camps that i ve been in in the balkans in bosnia and kosovo to see people run out just because of their religious faith it is not something to be lightly discarded if you can figure out how to take what i saw yesterday at the village level and keep working until you reach some sort of acceptable accommodation on the other larger problems on this subcontinent there s no stopping you i really do believe that if india and of course as i said in my speech to the parliament you ll have to make all these decisions yourself and we don t agree on every issue and we shouldn t and friends don t have to agree on every issue they just have to have an honest relationship about it and then whoever is supposed to make the decision has to make the decision but i do believe if we can lead the region or you can away from the proliferation of dangerous weapons toward the proliferation of new ideas new companies and new technologies away from the kind of racial and ethnic tensions that we see now in the trouble spots in south asia toward the sort of harmony i saw in that little village yesterday then the dreams that your chief minister spoke of are well within your grasp i believe that if we work together to turn our common vision into common progress to educate our children as partners to fight disease as partners to protect our environment as partners to expand commerce as partners to lift the lives of the poorest among us as partners to fight terrorism and work for tolerance as partners i believe if we do that then what gandhi said of india so long ago will certainly be true he once said it is my conviction that india numbering one fifth of the human race can be a great force of service to the whole of mankind if we have the right kind of partnership and the best of india that i have seen in these last few days becomes the guiding force for all of india then gandhi s cherished hope will become the accepted reality for your children and america s children in this new century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 3 00b bill_clinton thank you thank you very much first of all thank you all for coming out in such large numbers on this warm day to this wonderful facility it may be that every day is a warm day but for us it s a new experience and i rather like it mr raju thank you very much president bajaj president batnagar mr hariharan and chief minister naidu thank you all for welcoming us here and i must say when i was watching the chief minister give his speech i wish i had brought some slides because it was so very impressive and you should know that he is becoming yes he did a good job if a picture is worth a thousand words you will remember much more of what he said than what i am about to say and he is becoming very well known in the united states and very much admired for all of these remarkable achievements and i thank him i would like to thank your ambassador to the united states ambassador chandra for coming back to india and making this trip with me and thank you very much mr ambassador for what you do i would like to thank the large number of americans who are here with me including six members of our congress and i would like to ask them to stand because they come on these trips with me i get to give the speeches they have to sit and listen and then when we go home they have all the power over the money so i would like to introduce representative gary ackerman from new york representative nita lowey from new york representative jim mcdermott from washington representative ed royce from california representative sheila jackson lee from texas and representative jan schakowsky from chicago illinois thank you very much if that doesn t improve the aid program for india i don t know what will and make sure we have no burden on e commerce between ourselves i want to thank secretary daley the secretary of commerce for being here and brady anderson the administrator of our usaid program and dr neal lane my science advisor and dr rama murthi and of course ambassador dick celeste and jacqueline his wife i d also like to point out i have i don t know how many but i have at least four indian americans with me working on this trip who are actually in the audience today and two of them are from here in hyderabad so i d like to acknowledge rekha chalasani from aid and mona mohib who works with us in the white house i thank them for being here you should also know this was a very coveted trip from washington to india my chief of staff is on this trip my national security advisor everyone wanted to come those who did are happy those who are still at home working are angry but we know we know a lot of our future depends upon whether we have the right kind of partnership with india once historians said of your nation india is the world s most ancient civilization yet one of its youngest nations today in this ancient city we see leadership to drive the world s newest economy one of the greatest joys of being president of the united states for me has been to be involved with the people at home who are pushing the frontiers of science and technology many people believe that i asked al gore to be my vice president because he knew roughly 5 000 times more about computer technology than i did but i have learned every day now for over seven years and i think it s very interesting for a man my age i m 53 which is way too old to make any money in information technology but it s very interesting the terms that are used today by young people and not so young people anymore had such different meanings for me when i was in my 20s when i was a young man chips were something you ate windows were something you washed disks were part of your spinal column that when you got older often slipped out of place and semiconductors were frustrated musicians who wished they were leading orchestras the world is a very different place today i want to speak briefly about how our nations already are working together to seize the possibilities of the information age and about what we can do to make sure no one is left behind i particularly appreciated the chief minister s emphasis on this in his remarks because for me the true test of the information revolution is not just the size of the feast it creates but the number of people who can sit at the table to enjoy it it is incredible to think about how far science has come in just the seven years and a few months since i first became president in that time we have explored a galaxy 12 billion light years away we have seen the cloning of animals we are just a few months away from completing the sequencing of the human genome with all that promises for improving the life and the quality of life of people all around the world when i was elected president there were listen to this there were only 50 sites on the worldwide web in january of 1993 today there are more than 50 million and it is the fastest growing communications medium in history here in india the number of internet users is expected to grow more than 10 times in just four years ten years ago india s high tech industries generated software and computer related services worth 150 million last year that number was 4 billion today this industry employs more than 280 000 indians in jobs that pay almost double the national average little wonder as the minister said hyderabad is being known now as cyberabad now i realize to many of you this comes as no surprise since the decimal system was discovered invented in india if it weren t for india s contributions in math and science you could argue that computers satellites and silicon chips would never have been possible in the first place so you ought to have a leading role in the 21st century economy companies with names like infosys wipro and of course satyam again i want to say that i think chief minister naidu deserves a lot of credit for giving you the right kind of governance there are some people who believe we were talking about this before we came out here there are some people who believe that the 21st century world because the internet will make the globe more interconnected and we will have all kinds of connections with people beyond our borders that we never had before and therefore government will become completely irrelevant to most people s lives if you look at the example of this state and this city you see we need a different kind of government it can be smaller it can be far less bureaucratic it should be far more market oriented it should be smart as i learned from the minister s chart but it is a grave mistake to think that we can really go forward together without that kind of smart governance and the chief minister s role in your success i think is evident to all of you by your response i m personally intrigued by the fact that you can get a driver s license on the internet and you don t have to go wait in line as you do in america i have my driver s license here and in a few months i may come back because it may be the only place i will have a license to drive you may see me just tooling around on the streets here causing traffic jams i want to also acknowledge if i might just very briefly something which has already been mentioned by previous speakers and that is the remarkable success of indian americans in this new economy from suhas patil the chairman emeritus of cyrus logic to vinod khosla who helped to build sun microsystems to vinod dahm who created the pentium chip the remarkable fact is listen to this indian americans now run more than 750 companies in silicon valley alone in one place in america now as again i learned on the screen we re moving from brain drain to brain gain in india because many are coming home the partnership of americans and indians proposes to raise a billion dollars for a global institute of science and technology here i have no doubt they will succeed after welcoming your engineers to our shores today many of our leading companies from apple to texas instruments to oracle are coming in waves to your shores i m told that if a person calls microsoft for help with software there s a pretty good chance they ll find themselves talking to an expert in india rather than seattle india is fast becoming one of the world s software superpowers proving that in a globalized world developing nations not only can succeed developing nations can lead one of the reasons india is finding so much success i believe is because of your enduring values of nationhood fifty years ago prime minister neru had the vision to invest in the indian institutes of technology i am very proud that the united states helped in its early development today not only are itt graduates leading the information revolution india has the second largest pool of trained scientists in the entire world as i said we have to do more together two of our leading associations the u s india business council and your federation of indian chamber of commerce and industry will launch a dialogue to take our infotech trade to new heights to create more jobs and more opportunities in both our nations but as i said at the beginning in the midst of all this celebration of tomorrow and in the midst of all of our satisfaction at our own good fortune there is something we cannot forget it s a good thing that we re creating a lot of 25 year old multi millionaires it s a good thing that we re seeing the latest indian start ups shoot up the nasdaq but this whole enterprise cannot just be about higher profits there must also be a higher purpose in india today as in america there is much to do millions of indians are connected to the internet but millions more aren t yet connected to fresh water india accounts for 30 percent of the world s software engineers but 25 percent of the world s malnourished and there are other statistics which given the wealth of the united states i could cite you about our country which are just as troubling and challenging so our challenge is to turn the newest discoveries into the best weapons humanity has ever had to fight poverty in all the years of recorded human history we have never had this many opportunities to fight poverty and it is good economics to do so there is so much we can do for example to help the poor have better health care this morning i was at a clinic in mahavir and i helped to immunize a child against polio together we have nearly eradicated this disease but tuberculosis is still a major problem malaria is on the rise hiv and aids are big problems for you as they have been for years for the united states these are global problems we must find a science to solve them and the technology to disseminate those solutions to all people without regard to their income there is much to do to protect our planet and those who share it with us in agra i saw some efforts that local citizens are making to clean the air and preserve the taj mahal i talked to an engineer who is doing his best to clean up the ganges river that he worships as an important part of his faith and his country s history yesterday i was in the national park in rajasthan to see the magnificent tigers and i learned much to my dismay that from a man who has spent a great deal of his life and risked a lot of his life to save those tigers that last year still 20 of them were poached and you are still in danger of losing them they too are an important part of your heritage and your future we must find a way to help people make enough money and have a decent enough income that they wish to preserve the environment and the biological species with which we share this planet this is very very important and technology has a big role to play in all of this this week you are establishing a green business center here in hyderabad with some assistance from usaid to bring the private sector and local government together to promote clean energy development and environmental technology this is a profoundly important issue and i hope that this city will lead your nation and help to lead the world toward a serious reassessment of our common obligation to reverse the tide of global warming and climate change because in the new economy you do not have to pollute the atmosphere and warm the planet to grow the economy in the new economy you can create more jobs by promoting energy efficiency and alternative sources of energy than by polluting the environment the economic wave of the future is in environmental preservation not in environmental destruction that is a lesson this city can teach the rest of your nation people in my nation and people throughout the world and i hope you will do it there is still much we can do in science and technology to feed the world s people american and indian scientists are working in the biotechnology industry to pioneer new crops more resistant to pests diseases more nutritious with higher yields per acre there is much we can do to protect the rich cultural diversity of our planet i know that some worry that globalization will produce a world where the unique gifts nations and peoples bring to the world are washed away i do not believe that if we do the right things the internet can have precisely the opposite effect look at india with 17 officially recognized languages and some 22 000 dialects you can get on the internet today and find dozens of sites that bring together people who speak telugu from every part of the world you can download fonts in gujarati marati assamese and bengali you can order handicrafts made by people from every part of india i saw one of the sites just before coming in here and you know the proceeds are going to the people in need the new technology can reinforce our cultural distinctions while reaffirming the even more important fact of our common humanity and india can also help us lead the way in doing that now finally let me say we cannot work to lift what has been called the silk curtain which has divided the united states and india for too long now only to have a digital divide arise in both our countries between the haves and have nots in america we have worked very hard to wire all our schools to the internet and we ve made great progress we are now going to provide some 5 million through aid to help bring the internet to schools and businesses in under served areas in rural india this state is doing a remarkable job in providing the internet to people all over the state in the smallest poorest villages we have to bring government services with printers to every village so people can see in basic ways what it is they need to do to improve the health care of their children we need printers with computers on the internet with all the educational software available if we could do that for every village in south asia in africa in latin america in the middle east then overnight the poorest places in the world could have access to the same learning materials that only the richest schools offer their students today we can do that if we do it together and it isn t just good public values it would be good economics it would mean among other things that the world s most populous nation would have the world s largest number of educated people and therefore in no time would have the world s largest economy doing the right thing is good economics in the information age and we have to do this together finally let me say that we just want to be a good partner with you in all these endeavors two days ago in delhi i signed an agreement to create a u s indo science and technology forum to bring scientists from our nations together to discuss future cooperation today the top science minds in our two governments are sitting down together to begin a dialogue on how we can conduct new research across a whole range of scientific frontiers there is a lot we can do but you know as i said before i came out here i visited a lot of the booths i met a lot of the business people and i also was treated by the chief minister to a video conference with people in all 23 districts of this state who are working on empowerment projects who had access the microcredit i learned something i didn t know before i got here which is that 20 percent of the people in the world in poor villages who have access to microcredit are in this state in india and that s something my wife and i and our administration have worked very hard on we financed through aid about 2 million microcredit loans all across the world every year so i saw all this and i would say there s one thing that i hope my country will learn from the values expressed in the chief minister s speech in the local government councils i have visited here in the local women s communes i have visited here working on all kinds of economic and educational issues and that is that the two most important things that we can promote in the new world are empowerment of individuals and a sense of community and if you do one without the other you will not succeed very often people who are very interested in empowerment don t have much interest in community when they re talking about empowerment they mean their own empowerment and very often a lot of people who have always cared deeply about community are almost a little suspicious of empowerment but the lesson that you are teaching us is that we must do both together we are here to talk about the future of cyberspace cyber comes from the greek word kybernautis it means helmsman one who steers the ship so i am here to say i admire what you are doing to steer the ship of this state into the future i want to steer with you but we cannot forget the simple message that no matter how much new technology there is the two things we must remain committed to are empowerment and community everyone counts everyone should have a chance everyone has a role to play and we all do better when we help each other thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 3 98 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you and good afternoon president museveni mrs museveni ms vice president mr prime minister mr speaker to education minister mushega to their highnesses the distinguished kings here the religious leaders and other distinguished leaders of uganda members of our united states congress my cabinet and other important citizens and public servants from the united states and most of all i want to thank the principals the teachers the students for showing me this wonderful school the wonderful young people who walked down with us today and the wonderful dancing exhibit we saw here today let s give them a big hand i thought they were quite wonderful as hillary said she and our daughter chelsea came to africa and to uganda last year i have heard a great deal about uganda since then over and over and over again in selecting countries to visit i almost felt i didn t need to come here because i knew enough anyway from talking to hillary about it she has i think become your unofficial roving ambassador to the world but let me say i am profoundly honored to be here honored to be on this continent honored to be in this country honored by the progress that has been made in these last few years in improving economic conditions in improving political conditions thank you for what you have done mr president and to all of you earlier today we talked about trade and investment and president museveni wants more of both and he should we talked about political cooperation and how we could work together for the future and i listened very carefully to what the president said about the history of africa the history of uganda the future what mistakes had been made in the past it is as well not to dwell too much on the past but i think it is worth pointing out that the united states has not always done the right thing by africa in our own time during the cold war when we were so concerned about being in competition with the soviet union very often we dealt with countries in africa and in other parts of the world based more on how they stood in the struggle between the united states and the soviet union than how they stood in the struggle for their own people s aspirations to live up to the fullest of their god given abilities and of course going back to the time before we were even a nation european americans received the fruits of the slave trade and we were wrong in that as well although i must say if you look at the remarkable delegation we have here from congress from our cabinet and administration and from the citizens of america there are many distinguished african americans who are in that delegation who are making america a better place today but perhaps the worst sin america ever committed about africa was the sin of neglect and ignorance we have never been as involved with you in working together for our mutual benefit for your children and for ours as we should have been so i came here to listen and to learn to offer my help and friendship and partnership and i came in the hope that because all these good people up here in the media came with me and they re telling the american people back home what we re doing it s not raining is it it s been cold and cloudy in washington i need a suntan i came here in the hope that the american people would see you with new eyes that they would see the children dance see the children learning hear the children signing and say we should be part of the same future today i want to talk very briefly about that future for our children president museveni and education minister mushega have made education a top priority especially through the universal primary education program and i loved hearing the children sing about it but your leaders have done more than talk and sing they have acted in five years education spending in uganda has tripled and teacher salaries have gone up 900 percent i hate to say that back home they ll wonder why i m not doing better and more importantly your getting something for your investment better trained teachers higher test scores improved performance in school attendance from girls i know that kisowera school is proud that it graduates as many girls as boys because we want all our children to learn so that all of them can succeed and make us all stronger in most african countries however far fewer girls than boy3 enroll in school and graduate one half the primary school age children are not in s chool and that has led inmany nations to a literacy rate among adults below 50 percent africa wantsto do better uganda is doing better th united states wants to help througha ne7 initiative education fordevelopmen4 and democracy we want to give 120 million dollars over the next two years to innovative programs toimprove education we want to widenthecircle of educational opportunity as is already happening here in uganda we want to make investments in primary education for those who will educate boys and girls because that is critical to improving health reducing poverty raising the status of women spurring economic growth we want to promote girls education with leadership training and scholarships nutrition training and mentoring we also want to support efforts to reach out of school youths this is a huge problem in parts of africa where there are children who were soldiers and are now adrift and without hope second we want to help create community resource centers with schools that are equipped with computers linked to the internet along with books and typewriters and radios for more long distance learning we want them to be staffed by africans and american peace corps volunteers third we want more new partnerships among african schools and between american and african schools so that we can learn from and teach each other through the internet we do this a lot now at home let me give you an idea of how it might work a student here in mukono could make up the first line of a story and type it in to the internet to a student in accra ghana who could then add a second line and they could go on together back and forth writing a story a teacher in new york could give five math problems to students in kampala and they could send the answers back one of the very first partnerships will link this school kisowera with the pinecrest elementary school in silver spring maryland usa i want more of them fourth we want to support higher education with the development of business health care science math and engineering courses these are absolutely essential to give africans the tools they need to compete and win in the new global economy and we want to help do that finally we want to build ties between associations and institutions within africa and in america so that groups in your nations and ours concerned with trade and investment consumer issues conflict resolution or human rights can connect with distant counterparts and learn together and work together this will empower citizens on both continents this initiative will help more africans all right to start school stay in school and remain lifelong learners but americans will learn a great deal from it as well we also want to support your efforts in health and nutrition uganda has suffered so much from aids but president museveni launched a strong education campaign with frank talk and he has made a huge difference as have all of you who have worked to turn around the aids problem in uganda we will continue to combat it with global research and health care and prevention efforts but these efforts are also essential to combat malaria an even greater killer of africans nearly 3 000 children every day a million each year are lost to malaria by weakening as well as killing people malaria contributes to poverty and undermines economic growth ninety percent of all malaria cases arise on the continent of africa but with increasing globalization we are all at risk we now fund in the united states half the research on malaria but we want to do more this year we ve committed 16 million more to help african nations fight infectious diseases including malaria with an additional million dollars to the west african malaria center in mali we also want to support good nutrition there are troubling signs that without concerted efforts africa could face a major food and nutrition crisis in the coming years because of natural causes and social unrest children cannot learn if they are hungry so we have proposed a food security initiative for africa to ensure that more african families can eat good meals and more african farmers can make good incomes over the next 10 years we want to stay with you and work at this in the next two years we propose to spend over 60 million in uganda mali malawi mozambique and ethiopia to increase food production enhance marketing expand agricultural trade and investment i ve learned a lot since i ve been here about ugandan bananas ugandan coffee i will be an expert in all these matters when i go home i want you to understand again what i said at the beginning we want to do these things in education in health care and agriculture and nutrition because they will help you because we want to see the light that is in these children s eyes forever and in the eyes of all other children but make no mistake about it the biggest mistake america ever made with africa over the long run was neglect and lack of understanding that we share a common future on this planet of ours that is getting smaller and smaller and smaller we do these things yes because we want to help the children but we do it because we know it will help our children for we must face the challenges and seize the opportunities of the 21st century together the next century in a new millennium will be the brightest chapter in all of human history if but only if it is right for all of our children thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 4 00 bill_clinton thank you very much well first i want to thank bill and nancy for having us in their beautiful apartment i must say they ve been so wonderful to hillary and me i m going to forgive them because they stripped me of one of my important legacies today i felt a little awkward standing up here on these beautiful stairs and now people will never be able to say what one man came up to me and said when i was out in the west recently he said i ll tell you one thing bill they will never say that when you were president you looked down on the american people but i actually enjoyed it up there i could see everyone s face i was thinking how proud i am to be here and to be here with you i want to thank congressmen nadler towns and ackerman for being here and gary thank you for rounding out the funds race today that was a gary ackerman just went to india with me i heard how many people lived in india over 900 million people do you know every third person i met knew who gary ackerman was it was very disorienting it was utterly amazing let me say these three people have really represented not only new york but the united states very well and you can be proud of them jerry nadler is everyone s conscience including mine when he thinks i m straying too far ed towns was with me in 1991 when only my mother thought i could be elected president so i really like them very very much i want to welcome again mike and barbara and abby who is going to be a teacher by the way she s a senior at the university of virginia and she s going to be a teacher we ought to give her a hand and i want to be brief but fairly pointed here i believe that mike forbes became a democrat because of his convictions on education the environment the patients bill of rights campaign finance reform prescription drugs for seniors continuing the economic path the country is on doing more for the poor and being even more aggressive in education that s why i think he did it i don t think it s very complicated in a larger sense i think he did it because we have been able to prove in the last seven years that our party can be for economic growth and for improving the environment that we can be pro business and pro labor that we can be pro work and pro family and divisive politics which have served the other party rather well from election to election are no way to run a country particularly a country in a global economy an increasingly globalized society where diversity and the power of the mind is becoming more important every day what i want to say to you is that there will be an attempt in this election to blur the distinctions between the parties in the hope that the traditional advantage that our friends in the republican party have enjoyed among large voting blocks around the country will be there and that they will basically make people sort of feel like it s okay if they win things are going so well and there are no consequences what i want you to understand is there are sharp consequences to whether we hold the white house and whether we win the house and whether we pick up seats in the senate sharp dramatic consequences that will make a significant difference in the lives of the american people and i ll just give you a few but i think it s important you need to tell people that if they want to vote for person x or person y there are consequences number one on the economy our position is we ought to keep paying down the debt save social security and medicare provide a prescription drug benefit for seniors make substantial investments in education health care and the environment science and technology and then we can afford a tax cut but it s a modest one designed to help people who need help most to educate their kids to provide child care for them to provide for health care and that we ought to give people like those of you in this room who can afford to be here a tax cut if you help us solve some of our biggest problems i want to give you the same tax benefits to invest in poor areas in america we give you to invest in poor areas overseas i want to give you tax incentives to produce or to purchase energy efficient products that will help us deal with climate change and other things that are investment oriented we had an investment strategy to get this economy going again and it worked and we ought not to abandon it their strategy is to pass a tax cut even bigger than the one i vetoed before and they ll do it you have to assume they re honorable people people normally mean what they say in elections there have been a lot of studies done on politicians and even though i m proud to say that one said that i had kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than the last five presidents even though i made more in more detail by and large people who run for president do what they say they re going to do when they get in so you have to assume that when they run for president and for congress based on a tax cut even bigger than the one i vetoed which will certainly take us back to deficits and higher interest rates and slower growth that they mean it and now the second thing is there will be enormous consequences for our other objectives i think we ought to meet the challenge of the aging of america i m the oldest baby boomer and when we retire all of us there will only be two people working for every one person retired and i do not want our retirement to bankrupt our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren so we re for taking the interest savings we re getting from paying down the debt put it in the social security trust fund because they can t we re paying it down because of social security taxes so we take this social security trust fund out to 2054 beyond the life of the baby boomers and they re not for it we re for a prescription drug program for seniors to benefit all the seniors that need prescription drugs their program primarily benefits the people that are producing the drugs there are significant differences if you look at the children and mike and his whole family s passion for education no matter what they say they re for they re not going to have the money to invest in education after they pass their tax cut and their defense increases somebody asked me the other day what the principal economic reform i brought to the united states when i became president was and i said arithmetic that was the dramatic new idea in the information age we reintroduced into budgeting arithmetic all of a sudden the numbers added up again the money won t be there we say we ought to give a tax deduction to people for up to 10 000 for the cost of college tuition their leader says that we don t need any more help to help people go to college i think everybody needs to be able to go to college we ve tried to open the doors of college to all americans because of the world we re living in these are significant differences on work and family we favor raising the minimum wage and they don t we favor increasing tax relief for child care coverage and they don t we favor expanding health care coverage to people who could never afford to come to this fundraiser but they all work and they all pay taxes people between the ages of 55 and 65 who lose their jobs and therefore don t have health insurance and are not old enough for medicare low income families who can get their kids insured today but they can t get insured we re for that we think we ought to do that and give them health care coverage and they don t on the environment i don t even think i need to say anything about that ever since the republicans got the majority in congress with a few notable exceptions like mr forbes i have waged a relentless battle to try to prevent an assault on our efforts to improve the quality of our air our water and our land and to set aside precious spaces both in the vast unpopulated areas of america and green spaces within our own neighborhoods i don t think there may be no issue on which the record is clearer particularly given the decisions of the republicans in the nominating process now these are significant my belief that we all belong in america and that we ve all got to get along as long as we re law abiding we re for hate crimes legislation and employment nondiscrimination act and they re against it i could go on and on but those are just six things there will be significant consequences to the american people from the outcome of the elections in the house and the senate and the presidential election you should know what those consequences are and you don t have to say a bad word about our opponents to understand that i don t like all the politics of personal destruction most people who do that do it because they re more interested in power than people and they think voters are ultimately not very smart and so if they can make their opponents look bad enough they can get some votes the truth is this is not about all of us who run for office and besides that i m not running for anything i m telling you this as a citizen but i ve worked very hard for over seven years now to turn this country around to move us in the right direction and to pull us together and i promise you everything i have learned in my entire public life tells me that these differences are real that we mean what we say and they mean what they say now they will attempt to paper over all this between now and november in the hope that basically a satisfied almost somnambulant electorate will give them the reins of power so i want you to leave here and if they ask you how come you showed up at mike forbes fundraiser tell them it s because you d like to see the economy grow tell them it s because you want to see more people brought into the mainstream of american life tell them it s because you want to see investments made in education and the environment and health care tell them it s because you think we ought to go forward together instead of being divided these are significant consequences this is very important i know the country was in trouble in 92 and it looks like we re doing great today but believe me this election is every bit as important as the elections we had in 92 and 96 because we are going to decide whether to ratify the direction of change we have embraced or abandon it and there will be substantial consequences positive or negative to that decision if you go out and tell the people that you know in new york and in other states around this country that we ll be all right and if you tell the people you know that can vote in mike forbes congressional district he will be overwhelmingly re elected thank you very much dem wjclinton24 4 95 bill_clinton thank you very much secretary riley thank you for your introduction if i were you i would go bowling we re going to save your job thank you secretary reich for your enthusiasm for being enthusiastic about the right things in your heart alone you have enough domestic content to be the secretary of labor thank you jacqueline belcher and david pierce i also want to say how very glad i am to be joined here by the distinguished united states senator from minnesota senator paul wellstone and his wife sheila who s here two of our colleagues in the house of representatives congressman bruce vento and congressman bill luther also back there thank you for being here i want to say a special word of congratulations to the 20 students who were named to the 1995 all usa academic team i want to thank those who are watching us via satellite and i also want to say a special word about some fine students and advocates i met just before i came in here i met two students who have benefitted from our direct loan program i ll talk more about them in a moment two students who are critically interested in public assistance to education because without that they would not have been able to go to school and i met a gentleman who is devoting his time to organizing people against the attempt in washington to start charging interest on student loans while students are still in college sandra tinsley jessica aviles jeffrey lanes robbie dalton kirtley who is also one of the academic team all americans and dave dahlgren i thank all of them for meeting with me and they re here somewhere if they are they ought to wave or stand up there s jeffrey thank you thank you very much before i begin today to talk about education and training i d like to say just a word or two if i might before this audience of educators and people who believe in and appreciate the value of free speech about where we are in the aftermath of the oklahoma bombing and what we are going to do about the kind of america our children will inherit yesterday hillary and i joined tens of thousands of people in oklahoma city and of course millions of you all across the country to witness the end result of abject hatred i was there as president to represent all of you in the mourning but also i felt that we were there hillary and i as ordinary american citizens well as husband and wife as parents as neighbors of those people no words can do justice to how moving it was to be there yesterday no words can do justice to the courage of those who worked in the rescue operation around the clock and one person has already given her life in that endeavor no words can do justice to the small act of kindness and generosity all the people in oklahoma who won t take money at the gas station or the local coffee shop or the barber shop or even at the airline ticket terminal for people who are there working to try to help them put their lives together but i will never forget more than anything else the faces and the stories of the family members of the victims i was walking through the room shaking hands with them and i saw a lady with her children who had been in the oval office just a few weeks ago as her husband left my secret service detail to go to what seemed to be a less hectic pace of duty in oklahoma city i saw the children of a man who was a football hero at the university of arkansas when so many people who are now on the white house staff were friends of his the young air force sergeant took out two pictures his wife had taken of me just three weeks ago when i visited our troops in haiti and she was one of those troops but she came home because we wound down our mission there and she married her fiance and three days later she went to the federal building to change her name and so he had to give me the pictures his wife took i saw three children teenage children with a woman and another child taking care of them one of them had one of my inaugural buttons on their mother died last year of an illness their father went to our inaugural and they asked me to sign the pin to their father who is still missing three teenagers losing both parents i could go on and on and on i say to all of you first we must complete the rescue effort and the recovery effort of course we must help that community rebuild we must arrest convict and punish the people who committed this terrible terrible deed but our responsibility does not end there in this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech we know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore and we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree but we hear so many loud and angry voices in america today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other they spread hate they leave the impression that by their very words that violence is acceptable you ought to see i m sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in america today well people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the american people if we are to have freedom to speak freedom to assemble and yes the freedom to bear arms we must have responsibility as well and to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division with the promoters of paranoia i remind you that we have freedom of speech too and we have responsibilities too and some of us have not discharged our responsibilities it is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior if they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties when they talk of hatred we must stand against them when they talk of violence we must stand against them when they say things that are irresponsible that may have egregious consequences we must call them on it the exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable so exercise yours my fellow americans our country our future our way of life is at stake i never want to look into the faces of another set of family members like i saw yesterday and you can help to stop it our democracy has endured a lot over these last 200 years and we are strong enough today to sort out and work through all these angry voices but we owe it to our children to do our part billy graham got a standing ovation yesterday when he said the spirit of our nation will not be defeated i can tell by your response that that is true but you must begin today the little girl who read the poem yesterday at our service said remember the trust of the children darkness will not have its day the trust of the children is what we are here to talk about this whole community college movement has made as big a contribution to the future of america as any institutional change in the united states in decades all of you live every day with the future you have important work to do i ask you only to think of how different what you do is from what you have been hearing from the voices of division why do community colleges work well first of all they re not encumbered by old fashioned bureaucracies by and large they are highly entrepreneurial they are highly flexible they are really democratic small d they re open to everybody right in the best sense they are open to everybody and people work together and when something doesn t work they go do something else that s what you do you do it in a spirit of cooperation you are remarkably unpolitical in that sense in other words every experience you have and you see people of all ages coming through your doors walking out your doors going on to better more fulfilling more satisfying lives able to help themselves and strengthen america in the process it is the direct antithesis of the kind of paranoia and division and hatred that we hear spewed out at us all over this country day in and day out by people exercising their free speech to make the rest of us miserable and it contradicts the experience of what works in america so today that is why i have asked you to do this i also want to talk to you a little bit about what i hope we can do in education you want americans to be more hopeful you want this to be a more positive place you want people to be rewarded for their labors strengthen education in america build the community colleges open the doors to all that s the way to build the future of this country not by dividing us and bringing us down but by uniting us building us up and pointing us toward the future you know i have seen the faces of america s future i met a 46 year old former welfare mother at san bernardino community college full of enthusiasm and hope for the future i met a 73 year old holocaust survivor in kutztown pennsylvania who built a successful business and is now committed to investing in the education and training of his employees using his local educational institution i met a 52 year old woman at galesburg community college in illinois laid off from a factory job after 20 years but building a better future today i met some impressive people i met this fine young man down here jeffrey lanes who had an injury but didn t let it defeat him instead he went back to school with the help of public assistance to make a new and better life for himself but we are better off that he is going to have a better life he is giving us a better america and we thank him for it and we ought to support opportunities for other people just like him i mentioned her before but when i met robbie dalton kirtley who s part of the all usa academic team she s one of these nontraditional students she waited until her youngest child was in kindergarten and she went back to school she s from flat rock north carolina but she is building a future that will strengthen not only flat rock north carolina and her family but all the rest of us as well so i thank you for what you are doing and i ask you how we can do more of it and what should we be doing in government well when i ran for president i ran with a heavy bias toward education i look out on this crowd today and i see a lot of people from our community colleges in arkansas i m proud of the fact that when i was governor we built more of them we helped to strengthen the ones that were there we helped some of the vocational schools to either convert or merge or to become more alike by diversifying their curriculum the community colleges in fact i was looking at a couple of people out there i was at their places so often they probably wanted me to leave so they could get some work done when i was a governor i ran for president in large measure because i felt that the work of america that was being done out in the grass roots the work of creating opportunity and demanding responsibility and rewarding it was not being done in washington that we were increasing our government s debt at a rapid rate and unbelievably reducing our investment in our future i believed then and i believe more strongly now that this country has two deficits we ve got a budget deficit but we ve got an education deficit as well and we have to cure them both we are still living with the legacy of the explosive debts of the last 12 years the budget cuts we have made already and the taxes we have asked the top one and a half percent of our people to pay listen to this would balance the budget to today today we would have a balanced budget except for the interest we owe on the debt run up between 1981 and the end of 1992 so we are bringing the deficit down we are committed to that but we have to remember we have more than one deficit you heard the secretary of labor talking about this but i have been obsessed since the late 1980s with the increasing inequality in america you know when i was born at the end of world war ii i grew up in the american dream and the great domestic crisis we had was a civil rights crisis and we thought if we could just get over racial prejudice that our economy was so strong our society was so powerful that the american dream could just be opened up for everyone and from the end of the second world war until the late 70s that is pretty much what happened all income groups increased together and in fact the poorest 20 percent of our people did slightly better than the rest of us in terms of where they started we were growing together and going forward today we are going forward our economy has produced over 6 million new jobs you heard what the secretary of labor said we had the lowest combined rate of unemployment and inflation in 25 years but we are not growing together and that is why so many americans say they do not feel more secure even though we re having an economic recovery they say yeah i read that in the papers but its not effecting my life i haven t gotten a raise sixty percent of our people are living on the same or lower wages than they were making ten years ago working a longer work week why because of the combined impact of the global economy the technology revolution the lack of a government response to it in fact the government response made it worse the minimum wage next year if we don t raise it this year the minimum wage next year will be at its lowest level in 40 years that is not my idea of how to get to the 21st century so we have these thank you so we basically are splitting apart economically if you look at it it is clear that the fault line is education earnings for high school dropouts have dropped at a breath taking rate in the last 15 years earnings for high school graduates have dropped at a less dramatic rate the only group for which earnings have increased steadily are earnings for people who have at least two years of post high school education and training you you are at the fault line in america the fault line of american society is education those who have it are doing well those who don t are paying and the future offers more of the same at a faster rate therefore it is clear that our common mission if we want to help people help themselves and strengthen this country must be focused on a relentless determination to see that every american lives up to the fullest of his or her capacities it is in our common interest so all these wonderful stories you can tell about your community colleges all these touching individual triumphs are also the story of america s rebirth at the dawn of the 21 century make no mistake about it you are doing more than helping individual americans live out their dreams you are creating the system in which we can keep the american dream alive for our country and the american idea alive for all the world in the 21st century if you succeed we will you must succeed and the rest of us must make sure we do what we can to help you do it i want to make some brief points today about what we are trying to achieve in this congress and what we are trying to stop from being achieved in this congress and i want to ask for your help in the last two years we had broad bipartisan support for the most substantial increased effort by the national government to support education in a generation big increases in head start world class standards for our schools and more flexibility for our teachers our parents our administrations and our students to meet them school to work programs so our young people who don t go on to four year colleges would have the opportunity to move into the workplace with the kind of training and skills that would give them jobs that would raise their incomes not drive them down tech prep programs as a part of school to work a lot of you are involved in the tech prep issue and it s something i know a lot about from my personal experience enabling high school students to get work experience and to go straight to community colleges we created americorps our national service initiative and more than 30 community colleges and this association are participating in americorps we ve got people doing everything from helping the elderly in kentucky to tutoring kids in inner city chicago to helping with community policing in rochester new york thanks to the community colleges and i thank you very much for your endeavors now what should we do number one do no harm don t undo what we just did number one do no harm number two yes we need to reduce the deficit but we should increase the pell grant program as we have proposed not reduce it as some have proposed yes we should cut the deficit but one way to cut the deficit that is absolutely wrong is to start charging interest on student loans while the students are still in school there is an answer you know in education to the budget conundrum almost unbelievably there is an answer it is our direct student loan program we want to make it available for anyone who wants to finance assistance to college the student loan program the direct loan program started when i became president because i wanted to find a way to cut the cost of college loans to cut the unbelievable bureaucratic paperwork headache and to give students more options about how to repay loans because i began to see students in our state who were dropping out of college because they were terrified that they would never be able to repay their loans especially students who were going to do things that were important to our society but didn t pay a lot students who wanted to be teachers students who wanted to be nurses students who wanted to be police officers students who wanted to serve the public and knew that they would have big loans and modest salaries to repay them with so we began to look around for ways to do this and we settled on and the congress adopted the direct college loan program when i took office everybody in the country was complaining about the way the student loan program worked students complained that they couldn t get loans or if they did it took them too long and it was an absolute nightmare to fool with the paperwork colleges complained that the paperwork was driving them crazy and everybody was worried about the nature of the repayment terms and the fact that there weren t enough options there was also i might add an unconscionable amount of loan default people who would not pay their loans back costing the taxpayers 2 8 billion a year and the banks didn t have much incentive to help because they had a 90 percent guarantee so by the time if they brought some sort of action they d spend the 10 percent trying to college the rest so why not just take a check from the government well the direct loan program addresses all those problems it lowers costs for students it allows borrowers to choose flexible repayment arrangements including a pay as you earn option therefore it doesn t doom anyone to a crushing debt burden it s also believe it or not helping us to save billions of dollars of taxpayers money that plus secretary riley s more vigilant enforcement of the loan program have cut your losses as taxpayers from 2 8 billion a year to 1 billion a year a reduction of almost two thirds but get this what are we going to do now in the first year we had 104 schools with over 252 000 students in the program in the second year we ll have more than 1 400 schools representing 37 percent of all loans committed to enrolling today i am proud to announce that in our third year beginning july 1996 450 new schools will join the program which will mean 45 percent of all student loans will be administered through this program now that s the good news you don t have to take my word for it you can look at the students that i just mentioned jessica aviles or sandra tinsely they re both here go ask them about it listen to them talk about how much quicker they got the loan and what a joy it was not to have to go through the hassle and the delay and the uncertainty but here s the good news if we keep going until we make the student loan program available to all the schools on a voluntary basis it will save the taxpayers 12 billion over five years or about the same amount of money that would be saved if we started charging interest on student loans while the students are in college so if we want to reduce the deficit let s reduce the deficit by increasing education not by reducing it that s the message that i want you to take out there the second thing i want to say to you is that we have a lot of americans who are unemployed or underemployed who want more training and education and a lot of them now only have access to certain highly specified and difficult to understand and access government programs there are dozens of federal training programs most of them enacted with the best of intention by congress what we proposed to do is to put the american people who need training in control of their own destiny with these programs instead of just shifting the power from a federal bureaucracy even to a state one what we propose to do is to consolidate all these training programs and create a skill grant essentially a training voucher to people who are unemployed or underemployed or qualified for federal help let them get the voucher and take it to their local community college and have access to the programs you offer for up to two years to get the training necessary for the future that is a much better expenditure of that money than to continue in these programs which may or may not be easily accessible and which require a whole lot of paperwork and are very confusing we want to consolidate the money give it directly to the people who are entitled to it in the form of a voucher and let them take it to you to get the education you need i hope you will help us pass that as well in this congress finally let me talk about the tax cut issue everybody is for a tax cut who could be against it sounds great but i would remind you that this a serious issue this deficit issue we have worked very hard to reduce it by 600 billion when we brought the deficit down that s what drove interest rates down in 1993 that s what gave us our economic recovery that s what unleashed the engine of american enterprise and the uncertainty that hangs now around whether we continue to show discipline in our budget is causing difficulties for our economy we cannot afford a 200 billion tax cut and continue to reduce the deficit and meet our responsibilities to education and our future we cannot afford to tilt most of the benefits of the tax cut to upper income people they are doing very well in the economy as it is they are doing very well and this is not a statement of class warfare i want to create more millionaires i am proud of the fact that a lot of people have become millionaires since i have been president but what will do that is a strong economy a healthy economy in which everybody has the opportunity to succeed that s what will create more successful entrepreneurs if we have a system that grows the middle class and shrinks the underclass and keeps this economy strong the entrepreneurs will do well so what we should do is have a much smaller tax cut it should be targeted sharply to people who need it middle class people and in my judgement it should be targeted to education people should get a deduction for the cost of education after high school because that will raise their incomes over the long run as well as over the short run they will more than pay it back to the treasury in future years because we will be accelerating the number and the intensity and the pace of those getting an education in america that s the kind of tax cut we need less target it to middle class and focused like a laser beam on education we need an education tax cut that s all we need for this country let me close by asking you once again to make your voice heard in another way the community colleges of america look like america if you go to a board meeting of a community college and hear people talk about what programs they re going to have and what projects they re going to have and what partnerships they re going to create chances are a hundred to one you can t tell whether there s a republican or a democrat talking at the board meeting community colleges are open to people of all races and backgrounds and religious and faiths and views they bring people together they are america at its best we need more of that in washington so if you believe that we shouldn t start charging interest on the loans especially since there s a better way to reduce the deficit if you believe we should increase the pell grants not decrease them if you believe we should keep expanding the direct loan program on a purely voluntary basis and see if our program is as good as i think it is and people keep using it if you believe we should have this training voucher instead of this complicated welter of federal programs if you believe it s important to cure the education deficit and the budget deficit and therefore we should focus on a tightly targeted education related tax cut then go back home and ask the students and the faculty members and the board members to sign petitions that you can send to your local members of congress and your senators without regard to party we dare not let education become a political partisan issue in america it was not in the last two years it should not be in 1995 and 1996 every american has a vested interest in seeing that we all go forward in education every single solitary bit of evidence shows us it is the fault line standing between us and a future in which the american dream is alive for everyone if you want to reward hard work in america that work must be smart work our future is on the line so i implore you when you go home make your voices heard say it is not a partisan issue it is not a political issue it is a question of keeping the american dream alive into the 21st century thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton24 5 02 bill_clinton thank you thank you thank you very much for that wonderful welcome i d like to thank ambassador lavin for his kind and generous introduction i d like to thank the people from success resources for inviting me to singapore richard and veronica tonn patrick lude i d also like to thank your former ambassador steve green for coming here to be with me today we re long time friends and i thank him for his service in this great country i am particularly grateful to be here today because your invitation gave me a reason to make my first trip to singapore lest you believe that i didn t come here when i was president because i did not have sufficient respect for singapore let me tell you that s not true i went to 72 countries when i was president but there were never enough problems here this country is the living embodiment of success and i normally had to show up some place where people had a problem they needed my help on so it is perfectly fitting that you meet here singapore is the embodiment of all the economic and political transformation of asia over 3 000 multinational corporations here one of the smallest 20 countries in the world but america s 10th largest trading partner i was especially honored to work with prime minster goh on a whole range of things from expanding trade to combating terror and always honored to think about the success of this country with its 3 major and very diverse economic groups different religious traditions and 4 official languages a lot of the rest of the world has something to learn from singapore singapore and america and prime minster go and i were among the founders of the annual leaders meeting of the asia pacific economic group in 1993 we voted for a free trade area in the asia pacific region early in this new century we started negotiations for a free trade agreement between our two nations and i am very pleased that president bush s administration has pledged to finish the work we started making the first bilateral trade agreement ever reached between the united states and an asian nation by any measure the partnership between the united states and singapore was and is a success part of a shared vision of asia in the 21st century a region in the forefront of increasing prosperity security peace and freedom our strategy to advance that vision had a lot of other elements as well security cooperation with asion minimizing the financial crisis in the late 1990 s in asia a trade agreement and normalization of relations between the united states and vietnam something that meant a great deal to me personally improved relations with india for the first time in 40 years working with the great president of south korea and nobel peace price winner kim dae jung to end north korea s dangerous missile program as we had previously ended its nuclear program peace and independence of east timor i was honored to represent president bush and the american people at independent day for east timor just a few days ago we worked to reduce the toll of landmines in cambodia we worked on a whole range of issues with our old ali japan and perhaps most important together we brought china into the world trade organization began to advance the rule of law there and cooperated in the united nations on a whole range of issues now what has all that got to do with what you re here for i believe that we were successful in building an asia pacific region that advanced freedom and prosperity and security and reduced the allure of terrorism and other destructive forces how did we do it we had a vision of where we wanted to go we had a clear notion of where we were and what the distance was between where we were and where we wanted to go we had a strategy from getting from here to there and we believed that we could do it it s a great thing having a vision a strategy based on a clear view of where you are you never have to wonder what you re going to do when you get up in the morning it just flows naturally from the vision that drives you the strategy you developed to implement the vision and the evidence you see everyday that you haven t gotten there yet but it s also important to believe you can do it when young people come up to me in america all the time and they say i want to be in politics i d like to run for president some day i d like to do this that and the other thing give me some advice and i always say first of all there s a big difference between wanting to do something and believing you can i m a great basketball fan once on a miraculous spring night when i was 16 years old in my church basketball league i actually dunked a basketball game ball in a game in which i scored 16 points the only time in which i ever won a game for my team and the only time in my life i d ever dunked a basketball i want to dunk a basketball again but i don t believe i can there s a big difference in wanting to do something and believing you can now whatever you do whatever you re doing now and whatever you do for the rest of your life will take place within the larger global context of the early 21st century so i want to talk to you about that what is it what would you like it to be what are we all supposed to do to get from where we are to where we d like to go let me ask you a question in a way that you may have not considered what does the success of singapore as an open trading multi religious multi ethnic successful country and the horror of what happened in america on september the 11th what do those two apparently totally unrelated things tell us about the world in which we live most people if you ask them say give me a word that describes the modern world most people who say that word is globalization i much prefer the word interdependence because it implies more than economics economics plus we clearly live in the most interdependent age in human history i spent the night in a hotel here last night i could watch cnn i could watch bbc i could watch korean movies japanese movies chinese movies american movies we live in a world where we have torn down barriers exemplified by the fall of the berlin wall in 1989 we have collapsed distances exemplified by how rapidly we move around and by the growth of the internet when i became president there were only 50 sites on the world wide web when i left office there were 50 million only 8 years later and the number is much larger than that today and we have spread information and technology wider than ever before the world bank and the discovery channel are now putting solar power generators on carts driven by animals to take into the bush in africa and the rain forest in latin america so that technology could be accessed in the most remote parts of the world to educate children who otherwise would never go to school now in a world where you have torn down barriers collapsed distances and spread information and technology you can expect a lot of good things to happen and singapore has made the most of those good things but if there are people with different values then you have and different objectives who see life as a zero sum game in order for them to achieve their objective someone else has to lose in an interdependent world they can use those very same attributes for negative purposes so on september the 11th members of the al qaeda network used the open borders of the united east the ease of travel the access to technology an airplane and information how to fly the plane to kill 3 100 people people who were not part of their community people they did not believe had a right to live because their view was different that is the central thing i have to say to you about the world in which you live you live in a world that is highly interdependent it s been really good for more than half the people of the world in a lot of ways but it is not an integrated world and the central question of the next few decades will be whether those of us who are benefiting from this new world can move it from interdependence to an integrated global community in other words can the globe work more like singapore across all the differences in order to do that we have to have a strategy if we want a 21st century world that makes maximum use of these fabulous developments and technology and economics and the biological sciences and minimizes the destructive forces we have to frankly say we re nowhere near there now so we have to ask ourselves how do we get from where we are to where we want to go what is our strategy then you have to ask yourself unless you re in the government somewhere you say well i can t do anything about most of these things except vote for somebody who s for it what am i supposed to do but there is something for everybody to do even if it s nothing but sticking up for the fundamental ideas that have to guide us into the future basically i think we have to do three things first we have to work together to prevent the forces of destruction from defeating us that s what we re trying to do in afghanistan that s what we re trying to do in ending north korea s missile program that s what we re trying to do in limiting the production and distribution of biological chemical and small scale nuclear weapons that s what we re trying to do in america when we help other countries from africa to the philippines to indonesia to our neighbors in columbia to defend themselves against terrorism so we have to work on what i would call a prevent and punish strategy so that people who share these values can protect themselves better but that will never ever be enough not in an interdependent world not if you have open borders easy travel and wide access to information and technology so if you can t have a strategy that just says we re going to keep all these bad things from happening so nobody will bother you here while you go about pursuing success what else is there to do the second thing we have to do is build a world where we have more partners and fewer terrorists i grew up in a world that was built by people that thought that way at the end of world war ii the major players in the united states president truman secretary of state marshall general macarthur said to the american people and our friends in europe we ought to spend some money to make more partners to avoid world war iii we ought to organize free nations until we can win the cold war think about what s happened what did we do we established the united nations the international financial institutions the world trading system in europe we had nato we had alliances for freedom similar ones in asia we had wars in the last 50 years but there was no world war iii in the 1970 s china made a decision toward engagement rather than with the rest of the world and in 1989 the berlin wall fell and all of europe gave itself up to the democratic government and free markets so the major adversaries in world war ii now cooperate and the major adversaries in the cold war now cooperate and all of us can come to this fabulous building today and think about how we re going to make more money or whatever else you re thinking about because at the end of world war ii people who were in positions of responsibility made a decision to build a world that had more friends and fewer wars so now it s more complicated because the great conflicts of the future will probably not be between nation states but within people within nations or terrorists operating across national borders so how do we build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists first we have to recognize that not everybody lives like we do and that even though singapore has found the modern world virtually an unmixed blessing the world is full of paradoxes let me just give you a few of them because you have to deal with the contradictory reality keep in mind there are about 6 billion people on earth today consider this the global economy that has served singapore so well and america has lifted more people out of poverty in the last 20 years than at any time in history therefore all the protestors at these globalization meetings are wrong when they say globalization caused poverty in the last 20 years poor nations that chose openness through trade and investment grew at 5 a year poor nations that were closed grew at 1 a year that s the good news what s the paradox half the world s people still live on less than 2 00 a day a billion people still live on less than 1 00 a day a billion people go to bed hungry overnight consider the social paradox there are more benefits to education than ever before even in poor countries just one year of schooling adds 10 a year to income so the benefits are uniform and felt everywhere but 130 million children are not in school at all half the children in sub sahara and africa half the children on the indian subcontinent a quarter of the children in the poorest nations of east asia look at healthcare infant mortality is down infant mortality is up even in the developing world the sequencing of the human genome and the development of submicroscopic diagnostic techniques for identifying tumors through nano technology mean that within a decade young mothers will be coming home from the hospital with babies and gene cards which will plot the future of your child and also tell you how to minimize the problems we ve already identified the two major genetic differences that lead to breast cancer we re close on alzheimer s close on parkinson s when this happens sometime in the next 10 years those of you still in your childbearing years will bring home children with life expectancies of 90 years there s never been anything like it it s wonderful on the other hand what s the paradox 10 million children die every single year in the world of largely preventable childhood infectious diseases of all the people who perish this year 1 in 4 will die of aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them little children who never got a single clean glass of water in their entire lives in these places terrorists find fertile ground they build on resentment humiliation shame and make no mistake about it they threaten the success you hope to pursue because everything that brings you into this auditorium today depends upon more and more places working the way singapore does consider the environment the richer a country gets the cleaner the environment gets you can see that in every major country in asia i ve been coming to this part of the world for almost 25 years now and i have seen it happen over and over again what s the paradox the overall impact of economic development on the world has been negative why because in the industrial economy most people believe to get rich stay rich or get richer you have to burn more coal or oil and put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that drives up the temperature of the climate that causes global warming if we warm for the next 50 years at the rate of the last 10 whole island nations in the pacific will flood we in america will lose the florida everglades and 50 feet of manhattan island where i have my office now i m going to have to take a boat to work but most importantly the ability to grow food will vanish in major parts of the world and millions of people will be turned into food refugees adding to the instability of the world at the very time when we want it to be more stable so what s the answer we have to take some of our wealth to resolve these paradoxes in a way that brings more people into the world that we almost take for granted if we do the right things in 20 years they ll be having conferences like this in african capitals that wouldn t know how to have a meeting like this today you talk to somebody about success they d say success give me a job success is feeding my family tomorrow success is not having my child die of malaria but it s important the third thing i want to say and maybe the most important of all is that we are driven by values and ideas yes money is important but the systems within which we make money are rooted in values and ideas the great french writer victor hugo said that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come he might have said for this time there is nothing more destructive than an idea whose time has come and gone but it hangs on you are living in a world where we have to create a global community based on simple rules everybody counts everybody s got a role to play we all do better when we work together that is based on a core value our differences are important but our common humanity matters more now we re here in singapore a country with 3 big ethnic groups 4 languages where people work together and against all the odds this little place with no natural resources sits astride the world economy like a colossus why because everybody counts everybody s got a role to play and people work together economic and social policies flow from those basic ideas you can go to a mosque or a temple or a christian church this afternoon because we value differences and community preferences and convictions matter but you can to go all of them because common humanity matters more now that may seem self evident to you but the truth is for most of human history people have behaved more like the terrorists of september the 11th or the combatants in the middle east than the people going to work in the businesses of singapore or the people who rose to the challenge of peace in northern ireland and put aside 600 years of fighting there i just ask you to bear with me because whatever you do trust me this is the issue of the new century depending on how you read the archeological evidence people like us identifiable human beings have been walking around on earth in some condition or another for somewhere between 50 and 100 000 years civilization as we know it has existed only for about 6 000 years during almost all that time the time when we became civilized that we came out of the caves and we began to gather in cities and we began to gather in cities and we began to cooperate as humans with one another almost that entire time cooperation always had 2 elements we ll cooperate with our family with our clan with our tribe with our city with our nation because we get more done inside when we cooperate and besides we have to defend ourselves against those people over there the other people our enemies our adversaries throughout all of human history with the economic progress we made and in spite of all the religious teachings we ve had and i ll say more about that in a minute we were never able to escape organizing ourselves and thinking about hating the other first you don t trust them then you don t like them then you hate them then you dehumanize them then it s okay to kill them this has been the way of the world from the beginning in the first part of the 20th century we almost destroyed each other world war i world war ii the holocaust the massive slaughters in the soviet union we nearly destroyed ourselves it s a miracle nobody ever dropped another automatic weapon then we had the u n the idea that there could be a global community keep in mind in 6 000 years of human history this happened 57 years ago but because of the cold war it wasn t possible then china decides to integrate with the rest of the world then the berlin wall falls 1989 so in 6 000 years of history for the first time 13 years ago we finally had the chance to live together in peace is it surprising to you that we didn t just up and do it you should not be discouraged keep in mind what i said it s a big difference between wanting to do something and believing you can do it you read all these terrible headlines today there s a million troops facing each other in cashmere continued turmoil in the middle east new warnings of terrorist incidents indonesia worried about terrorists now you read about these things it s enough to believe there s nothing you can do about it you shouldn t feel that way we ve only had the chance to create a global singapore for 13 years and all this time we ve been learning how to do this and fighting against all these human instincts that are almost built into us now this is hard to do i believe mohandas ghandi was the greatest person to walk the earth in my lifetime the indians here will remember that he was murdered in india not by a muslim but by a fellow hindu why because he wanted india for everybody for the muslims and the jains and the sikhs and the jews and the christians in the middle east which political leaders have been murdered sadat and my friend rabin who killed sadat not the israeli commandos an angry egyptian who thought that he was a bad egyptian because he wanted a secular government for egypt and peace with the israelis and on the darkest day of my presidency i think my friend yitzhak rabin whom i loved as much as i ever loved another man was killed by an angry young israeli who thought he was a bad jew and a bad israeli because he wanted to give up a lifetime of fighting and give the palestinians their state in the westbank in gaza and give the palestinian kids some hope because he realized that israel no longer needed land for security since you could have terrorists blowing you up from within and missiles attacking you from without that you had to have harmony for security in my last year in college in america martin luther king the greatest american in my lifetime and robert kennedy were both murdered trying to reconcile the american people to each other this is hard and it violates all these behaviors violate thousands of years of scriptural teaching the tora says he who turns away from a stranger might as well turn away from the most high god the koran says allah put the different peoples on the earth not that they despise one another but that they might know one another and learn from one another the christian new testament says that the greatest commandment is to love god with all your heart and the second is and i quote like unto it to love your neighbor as yourself in the dhammapada the buddhist says never by hatred does hatred cease hatred ceases by love alone this is an eternal law so people a lot smarter than i have been saying this for a long time none of us behave that way you know we re still that way all of us our faiths we read these things and we can t live by them only since 1989 have we had a chance to say we will keep our faiths we will be proud of our ethnical and racial traditions we will be proud of the nations we re from but the only way we can cherish our differences is if we live together in a global community we have to move from interdependence to integration it s never been done before if you really want to have a successful life you have to support that movement for the great contest of the 21st century is between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration the forces of community and the forces of chaos we can do this we can do this it won t be easy but it will be ultimately the measure of humanity s success thank you very much dem wjclinton24 6 00 bill_clinton thank you very much when i get home and they ask me how dianne s campaign is doing i will say it is really hot i want to thank all of you for being here i want to especially thank our friend ron berkle for opening his home and being so generous on this and on so many other occasions and i thank the other officials who are here and i m glad to see roz lyman here it reminds me of my ties to my roots and her loyalty to our party and our candidates is something i hope i can emulate for the rest of my life let me say to all of you it s hot and you ve been here a long time and i m preaching to the saved so i ll be brief once i came to a fundraiser for dianne six years ago in san francisco and she didn t show up because she had to stay and vote so i was her surrogate and told the folks out here i said we were talking about this and hillary suggested that i make it a habit for her so now last week i went to a couple of events for hillary and she didn t show up on purpose so we can be in two different places so i m not the surrogate in chief of the country and i m having a good time if dianne hadn t provided me that opportunity it never would have occurred to me let me say i want to say one thing seriously about senator feinstein in my experience i know of no member of the united states congress of either party in the majority or the minority that got so much done in his or her first term of service now you think about the assault weapons ban would not have happened without her the resolution of the northern california water problem the mojave desert national park and the other expansions of the parks we ve done in california the headwater forest the preservation of the priceless redwoods none of this stuff would have happened without her it s unheard of for somebody in his or first term of service to have this kind of constructive impact nobody does that and so she has become not only california but the nation s resource and you ve got to send her back for that reason alone and i mean that now the second thing i want to say again very briefly is i think we ll have a very good election this year i think we ll pick up a lot of seats in the senate and the house and i think we ll win the white house if the people believe the election is about what i think it s about if they understand there are real differences between the two candidates and the two parties and if they understand what those differences are then we ll do just fine i tell everybody the three things you need to know about this election it s real important there are real differences and only the democrats want you to know what the real differences are but it s really worth remembering that and i won t go into it basically if you heard my state of the union address you know what i think but i want to tell you this we ve had some children here at this event today we ve still got this young lady here and this young lady over there and steve and chantal cloobeck brought their little boy here you ought to be thinking about these kids between now and november and you ought to be thinking about what their life will be when all the baby boomers retire what their life will be like in the most diverse society we ever had if we have the ability to provide excellence in education to all of our kids and if we don t what their lives will be like if we have a society that values both work and family and the importance of child rearing and giving all of our kids a decent upbringing and if don t what their lives will be like if we can deal with climate change and other environmental problems and still grow the economy or if we don t and what their lives will be like if we continue this econo mic expansion and extend it to the people in the places that were left behind or if we don t what their lives will be like if we continue to follow senator feinstein s lead and make america a safer and safer country or if we decide to give crime policy back to the interest groups what their lives will be like depending on the attitudes of the next two to four justices of the supreme court that the next president will appoint this is a big election and i can only tell you that not only from my life s experience which regrettably is getting increasingly longer although i prefer it to the alternative and from my reading of american history a time like this comes along at the most once every 50 years or so sometimes maybe once every 100 years we have economic prosperity social progress national self confidence no overwhelming domestic or foreign threats to the fabric of the nation s life and those of us who are older particularly those of us who have lived most of our lives have a heavy responsibility not to squander this to make sure that people understand what a profoundly important gift this election is and i tell people all the time i don t want this to be a negative campaign i don t want to see people saying trying to attack the character of their opponent we ve had too much of that and there s a verse in the new testament that says that they who judge without mercy will themselves be judged without mercy and we don t have to have that kind of campaign what we ought to have is an old fashioned debate we ought to have civics 101 because you should assume that we have good people who in good faith will attempt to do exactly what they say and then we can identify the differences clarify them and say we want to build the future of our dreams for our children which choice is better now believe me if that s what the election s about if people understand it s big that there are real choices and they understand what the choices are then on january 20th al gore will be inaugurated president dianne feinstein will be overwhelmingly reelected and she ll have a lot more democrats helping her dick gephardt will be the speaker of the house and i ll be a member of the senate spouses club thank you very much dem wjclinton24 6 93 bill_clinton i hope you enjoyed your tour of the white house and i m sorry we had to start a little late but as i m sure you know a very important debate is now occurring in the united states senate on the administration s economic plan and i had to make a call or two congressman beilenson it s good to see you i bet you re glad you re not involved in that this afternoon and glad to be here with your folks it s a real honor for me to welcome to the white house a group of true student athletes the gold silver and bronze medalwinning teams in the 1992 93 united states academic decathlon the gold medalists are from plano east high school of plano texas the silver medalists from taft high of los angeles the bronze medal winners of mountain view high school of mesa arizona these students have experienced the excitement of competition and the thrill of victory and they should be a source of pride for young people all across our country they ve competed for medals in 10 different events from math and science to language and literature in an innovative and inclusive program which fosters competition enhances self image and shows how truly exciting the pursuit of knowledge can be as i understand it the team members also are required to give speeches both prepared and impromptu that s a good preparation for being president write essays and experience interviews these young people are equipped not with javelins or shotputs but with intellect and knowledge and the ability to think creatively but with discipline the importance of this kind of pursuit of educational excellence cannot be overemphasized we re at a moment in our history when we have to increase the educational ability of all americans and in which it is not simply important how much our people know but what they are capable of learning and how quickly and well they are capable of thinking through complex problems that may face them tomorrow but are even unpredictable today because of these kinds of challenges we cannot meet our educational excellence goals through government mandates we have to meet them through incentives and through environments which promote excellence and leadership from teachers and principals the kind of group work that we see in this academic decathlon i applaud the academic decathlon its president john foley and it s executive director ann joynt at this time i want to say a special word of congratulations to the national champions plano senior high school from plano texas plano east they re right behind me right in the center when i was in high school plano had a great high school band do you still have a good band it won a lot of national awards of course that was back in the dark ages but anyway under the coaching of joyce gillam and jack worsham plano east amassed the highest total score capturing seven gold and five silver medals one particular youngster sunny chu deserves special mention sonny s father suffered a severe stroke just days before the national competition nonetheless sonny still managed to win the gold medal for highest overall score in the nation and i m pleased to report that sonny s dad is back home recovering congratulations to you let s give him a hand now the group from taft high in los angeles that s you right coached by michael wilson taft high pulled in seven gold and six silver medals mara weiss achieved the second highest total score in the nation earning a gold medal in the essay event and a bronze in fine arts in fact i understand mara recently wrote to my wife expressing her frustration that intellectual pursuits in high school are still seen as the domain of the male student mara where are you did you really do that good for you i ll hear more about that as time goes on let me say that i think that is a real problem and there is actual documented evidence of that particularly in the math and sciences areas as young people move out of grade school into junior high and high school and you deserve a lot of credit for pointing it out just a few days ago in the rose garden however i appointed another distinguished student and scholar judge ruth ginsburg to the supreme court i think those kinds of things should do something to shatter the myth that intellectual pursuits should remain the exclusive domain of men and i m sure you ll have a lot to do with that as you go through your life and i want to congratulate finally the mountain view high school team from mesa arizona they re here to my left under the watchful eye of coach mary mcgovern mountain view netted four gold and seven silver medals senior tagg grant amassed the highest individual point total for his team with the best event being economics where are you tag i order to stay here for the next two or three months this country needs your help i understand that the scholarships are awarded to the top three overall medal winners in each of three divisions it just so happens that eight of those nine scholarship winners are on these three teams but we ve indicted the ninth scholarship winner to be with us today as well he s dan casey from lower merion high school in bala cynwyd pennsylvania where are you dan welcome i m glad they took you in over there i looked up there and counted i thought they had an unfair advantage dan took the silver medal for the second highest point total in the varsity division each of these young people represents our best future our best hopes they have proven how much people can do when they put their minds to it and i am very proud of them i d like now to invite john foley to say a few words and then i d like to have some pictures taken with the teams and say hello to them but first mr foley thank you for your work and come up and have a if i could i d like to just mention our founder twelve years ago dr bob peterson who was then superintendent of schools in orange county had a great idea he wanted to promote learning and achievement in our schools by creating new role models on the campus if athletes could be heroes as they are why not recognize outstanding students that s what you re doing today mr president and we truly appreciate it i just want to say that we re all extremely pleased and gratified to be here your speech captured i think our program very well its essence its cooperation team spirit and nonelitism since these students all represent we have students representing a b and c grade levels we had over 3 000 students high school s participating last year at our national finals in phoenix arizona we had teams from 43 states and the district of columbia that competition was very closely fought there was very little difference between the top three teams as you noted next year we will be in newark our theme will be the documents of freedom and if you re schedule which i know is a very busy one should permit we d love to have you join us there thank you they did last year maybe the senate will save it and we can save it in conference i m not surprised you know i m grateful to them for saving the space station that was headed for defeat and we did a lot of work on it and i m glad we were able to save it i always anticipated that if we were going to save the supercollider it would have to come in a conference after the senate did it so it s really up to the senate now to decide on the supercollider dem wjclinton24 7 95 bill_clinton thank you very much to all the delegates of boys nation i m delighted to be here as you know with many members of our administration who are involved in the setting of economic policy for our country delighted to see mr william detweiler the national commander of the american legion here along with your other leaders ray smith ron engel jack mercier who has been with boys nation for 31 years and i believe was there that would make 32 years when i was there in 1963 george blume and others let me say as i m sure you know i am especially delighted to welcome all of you here to the white house i don t have to tell you what an important event this is for me every year and how much i look forward to it but this is an especially important time for all of you to be here the world in which you will live the world which i am sure many of you will help to lead can be america s greatest time but it is a world being transformed to a degree seldom seen in all american history much of this change is good but it s not all good if you look at what is happening in america we have more new businesses being formed more americans becoming millionaires more people finding success than at any period in our history but most americans are still working harder for the same or lower pay they were making a few years ago with greater levels of personal insecurity about their ability to take care of their parents if they get sick their ability to educate their children their ability to hold on to their own health care if you look at what s going on most of our social problems are being addressed very well in many places in most major cities the crime rate is down but the rate of random violence and crime among our youngest teenagers is going up and there are still too many problems with crime and violence with drugs and gangs if you look around the world the cold war is over and peace and freedom and democracy and world trade are all increasing but still there are serious problems with what i call the organized forces of destruction ethnic religious racial hatreds leading to awful wars the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in tiny amounts as you saw when the terrible bomb exploded in oklahoma city or the gas was released in the japanese subway so we have both a great deal of good and a great deal of troubling change going on in the world today and in our country in recent weeks i have addressed those challenges in the face here at home first to restore the american dream of opportunity and the american value of responsibility and second to bring our country together in a stronger community so that we can move forward together i believe those two goals are inseparable i believe the only way we can restore economic opportunity and solve our social problems is to unite our people more i can tell you that it would have been unthinkable when i was here in 1963 we had a lot of problems in 1963 we had severe racial problems still the country was still largely segregated but it would have been unthinkable if someone had told us in 1963 that 30 years from now the country would be as deeply divided as it is today and that people would have lost faith in their institutions and would have the level of cynicism and skepticism that they have today my vision for your future is a very positive one i want this country to be a high opportunity smart work country with good jobs and safe streets with a clean environment and excellent education and health care a country in which diverse people live and work together in which communities and families can solve their own problems and in which people are given the chance as individuals to live up to the fullest of their god given potential in a world that is steadily moving toward more peace and freedom when i say we have to restore the american dream of opportunity and the american value of responsibility when i say we have to rebuild america s sense of community that is simply a strategy to reach that vision a strategy rooted in an obligation americans have always accepted the obligation to give each successive generation a better life than the preceding one had that is an obligation from which i benefited and one from which millions of others have benefited as well exactly 32 years ago on july 24 1963 i came here as a delegate to boys nation when john kennedy was president i would never have made it here and gone from that day to this one without the benefit of the shared beliefs and convictions and opportunities that made up the america of my youth i lived in a family where everyone worked hard and where children were expected to study hard i also had a lot of opportunity given to me by my community i had good teachers good schools and when i needed them scholarships and jobs to make my education possible i saw what happened too when good people had no opportunity there were a lot of good people i grew up with who had no opportunity because they were of a different race or because they happened to be poor and white and isolated in the poor communities in the hills and hollows of my state i have lived my public life believing that everybody ought to have the chances that i had and that if everybody did and we all worked together this country would be able to go on indefinitely as the world s best hope for freedom and opportunity my philosophy is rooted in these beliefs and the experience of the united states bears out that they are the right ones i imagine the same is true in your lives i m sure a lot of you have been amazed at how very different your backgrounds are and yet how much you seem to have in common our nation s work must reflect what you have in common and our nation s budget which we re debating here with such intensity now must also reflect those common values and our shared vision for the future the priorities of american families and their household budgets aren t all that much different than the priorities of our larger american family and our nation s budget the way we spend our money as individuals as a family and as a nation says an awful lot about who we are what our values are and what our vision for the future really is we are at an historic moment as i have said for the first time in a long time the leaders of both major parties agree on one thing we have to do consistent with our values and that is to balance the federal budget and relieve our children and our grandchildren from the burden of a permanently increasing federal debt you know we never had a structural or permanent deficit in our country until about 1981 but from 1981 until the day i took office the national debt was quadrupled when i came here i was committed to getting that deficit off our backs in the first two years of our administration we cut the deficit by a third and we are now reducing it for three years in a row for the first time since harry truman was president of the united states just after world war ii but it is still such a problem what happened in the previous 12 years that the budget would be balanced today today except for the interest payments we make on the debt run up between 1981 and the day i became president and this debt is so great that next year interest on the debt could be larger than the defense budget this is a very significant problem and there is more to do therefore it is good news that both the congress and i have offered plans to balance the budget both plans involve significant spending cuts which will not be easy to meet both plans protect our ability to maintain a strong defense and the world s finest military beyond those similarities however there are profound differences differences that go to the heart of our ability to find common ground to rebuild the american community around the old fashioned values that i talked about just a moment ago the commitment to our future i believe that we all have must be defined in large measure today in how this budget contest is played out the congressional budget balances a budget in seven years my budget does it in 10 the congressional budget cuts taxes by about 250 billion over seven years our budget cuts taxes but by slightly less than half that amount why because our budget by making those changes enables us to increase investment in education and training by about 40 billion over the next seven years to help make sure all americans have a chance to develop the fullest of their abilities and to compete and win in the global economy this is very important about half of all the students in college today everywhere in america have some form of financial assistance it is critically important to maintain it it is critically important that everybody who wants to go to school has a chance to go and has a chance to finish and it s a big part of what our national security will mean in the global economy our budget strengthens health care coverage especially for senior through medicare and provides families some help in caring for their elderly parents who don t go into nursing homes our budget protects the food we eat the air we breathe the water we drink it rewards work concentrating tax policies on helping working families to raise their children and to educate both their children and themselves because we know more and more adults will have to go back for job training over the course of their work lives and it preserves our investments in science and technology so that our workers and our businesses can compete the world over in a rapidly changing technological era our budget achieves all the economic benefits of balancing the budget it gives you lower interest rates higher investment in private dollars it reduces the amount we ll have to pay on the debt for interest in the years ahead but it maintains these other priorities which i believe are essential to rebuilding the american community and finding common ground these priorities are not democratic or republican priorities they are common sense national decisions that have served us very very well over the last generation they have stood the test of time they have marked our character as a nation and they mark the road to the future we should take now some in congress say we need to retreat from the common ground we have so carefully built on education on medicare on the environment on science and technology to balance the budget in seven years with these big tax cuts they say we need to slash federal aid to the schools and to increase the cost of student loans they say it is all right to make the elderly pay up to thousands more for their medicare benefits and to dramatically reduce our ability to protect the environment to meet the seven year time period with the big tax cuts they say all this is necessary to balance the budget but many would use the balanced budget as an excuse to do these things which they wish to do anyway i have shown we can balance the budget without retreating from our common ground on education on health care on the environment so i invite senators and members of congress from both parties to join me in balancing the budget while protecting our common ground i will work hard to get their support but if they refuse i must continue to act alone if necessary to protect the common ground that brought every single one of you into this white house today i will do that thank you very much let me say again there is no question that we have to balance the budget and the majority in congress deserve credit for proposing a plan to do that but we do not have to do it in seven years we do not have to do it with massive tax cuts to people who don t really need it the haste of their schedule and the scope of their tax cuts are luxuries and this is not a time for luxuries think again about your family s budget if you can t afford luxuries right now you don t sacrifice necessities to have them take education i think it s a necessity from the birth of the land grant colleges during the civil war to the creation of the g i bill 51 years ago this summer we have understood that when we invest in the education of our people it makes the whole country stronger we have understood that regardless of party right through the first two years of our administration in 1993 and in 1994 we had bipartisan support for the most remarkable education agenda in the last 30 years we had higher standards for our schools we had more affordable college loans with better repayment terms we had a national service initiative americorps that now gives 20 000 young people a chance to serve in their communities and earn money for their college educations we had a dramatic expansion of head start a program that has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades now we expanded the age at which children were eligible improved the quality of the program and increased the number of kids in head start to make it more likely that more americans will have a chance to be sitting where you re sitting today but now as a part of this balanced budget program many in congress are willing to cut 50 000 out of the head start program and block its expansion another example is the commitment to educate and train all americans we know the global economy demands more skills and information than ever before we know we know that the middle class in america today including many of your parents are either going up or going down economically are either increasing their security or feeling more insecure based directly on the level of skills they have we know that we know that is a reality for the lives of americans all across this country so what did we propose we proposed to do everything we could to increase the access of people to college and to increase the training available to adults but again many in congress would cut the pell grant program by 300 000 slots a year that s 300 000 poor people who won t get college degrees to become middle class people maybe even rich people and pay back far more to the tax treasury to the treasury in taxes than they ever took out in the pell grants and the job training in some ways is the most troubling of all i have proposed that we consolidate all the government s training programs into one big scholarship program for adult workers who are unemployed or who are underemployed giving them a voucher worth up to 2 600 a year to go back for two years to get further training so they can increase their abilities to earn a good living we should not reduce this we should increase this we shouldn t reduce it people are in trouble out there today in this country because they don t have the education and skills they need to maintain family wage jobs in a global economy these are very important we don t have to get rid of this to balance the budget the same is true about health care thirty years ago we decided as a people that we would at least protect the elderly of this country from the fortunes of not having adequate health care we did it with medicare we did this as an extension of the compassion we feel in our own families for the elderly in our individual families medicare has worked well it has low administrative costs it has covered all people over 65 i might add that we are the only advanced country in the world that doesn t have some form of universal health coverage for everybody but at least we do it for senior citizens it s a basic american value we help take care of people who raised us up and took care of us before medicare half of the elderly people in this country had no health insurance whatever now 97 percent of the senior citizens in america have access to health care of course we have to reduce the rate of inflation in the medicare program i have said that from the first speech i gave to the congress as president but we can do this by reforming medicare not by ruining it we can still maintain protections for every senior citizen in american instead of deciding that some will do fine and other will get the shaft some in congress want to cut 270 billion from the medicare program about the same amount they want to cut taxes their proposal would require our seniors maybe some of your grandparents to pay as much as 5 600 more a couple in out of pocket costs so we cut spending in one way and off load the burden to others that does not reflect the values of most american families maybe some people can afford to pay some more because they re upper income but most seniors in this country hardly have enough to live on as it is if you look at the attack on the environment you see another example the environment has been a bipartisan issue in america the environmental protection agency was established under the presidency of richard nixon a republican president we have shared a common commitment to the environment perhaps our country s most outstanding environmental president was our first environmental president theodore roosevelt again a republican this has never been a partisan issue we have agreed for a long time as a people that the stewardship of our natural environment is a big part of maintaining the american dream with the first earth day 25 years ago americans came together to say no to dirty air toxic food polluted water and say yes to leaving our children a nation as unspoiled as their dreams we recognize together that our business in creating jobs was not undermined and in fact could be enhanced by protecting the environment we all know that in the last two decades there have been some rigid regulations and some unreasonable enforcement that have limited the effect of our laws and alienated people from the whole cause of environmental protection so we should change the way our regulators do their work we have worked very hard to do that right now we have in motion an initiative that will reduce by 25 percent the amount of time people in the business community spend complying with the environmental laws right now we are putting in place a small business program that says to every small business person in america if you re worried about an environmental law if you will call us and ask for help you cannot be fined for six months we will work with you because you asked for help we re not interested in fining people we re interested in protecting the environment but that is very different from just walking away from our commitment to protect the environment some in congress want to slash funding for enforcement by almost 50 percent it could put at risk the safety of the water we drink it would increase the chances of raw sewage washing up on our beaches it would excuse some polluters from having to clean up their mess that is not our vision believe it or not some of these restrictions would actually undermine the ability of the united states to enforce the clean air act the clean air act was last signed by president bush my republican predecessor who said it was his proudest legislative achievement this has always been a bipartisan thing it is now being put at risk in this budget debate and i believe it undermines our ability to find common ground others say we should cut science and technology the most powerful engine we have to boost our economy finally there are even proposals that would undermine our ability to make work more attractive than welfare i have worked now for 15 years long before i became president to move people from welfare to work i have learned that most people on welfare want to go to work and that one of the things that we permitted to happen over the years was to build in too many disincentives to work so that s why i ve supported welfare reform proposals that would move people from welfare to work we have given 30 states permission to get out from under federal rules and regulations to come up with new and innovative ways to move people from welfare to work including letting states take welfare checks and give them to employers as income supplements so they would actually hire people to go to work one of the things we have to do is to make sure we don t tax people back into poverty and when people are out there working on low wages what we did in 1993 was to say if you re out there working 40 hours a week and you have children in your house you should not be in poverty the tax system shouldn t put you in poverty we will lower your taxes if necessary we will give you a tax refund so that if you will work 40 hours a week you can raise your kids outside of poverty there are even some people who want to erode that tax cut so that we can cut taxes for people who don t really need it in this budget program there are a lot of things being done here which will violate and undermine our chances to achieve common ground and they do not fall into the traditional partisan differences most of these things have been supported by republicans and democrats the tax provision for working families was called by president ronald reagan the most important pro family anti poverty initiative in the last 30 years now there are people in congress who are trying to erode it and it is wrong and it undermines our ability to make common ground the seven year time table and the huge tax cut these are luxuries to make room for them some in congress would slash necessities i say let s take 10 years instead of seven let s have a modest tax cut targeted toward what people really need which is help in raising and educating their children and knowing they can always get new education and training themselves and let s keep on investing in the things that are our necessities these things will create millions more american dreams if we continue them we can cut taxes we can balance the budget but we have to do it in a way that maintains what has been for decades and what clearly is now the common ground on which we can go forward together your parents recognized that it was unacceptable to destroy the environment and created the environmental movement my parents saw the pain of their parents and insisted that we create medicare every generation has done something to build up and create the fabric that is what we know as the american dream we now have to create a system of lifetime education and training that all can have access to and we now have to deal with these social problems that have been too long ignored we can do it in a way that permits us still to balance the budget and lift that burden from your future so i say to the congress come back to common ground we can do this the congress has recently passed the so called rescission bill you may not know what that means but it basically it s a down payment on our balanced budget it cuts from the budget that we are presently spending in this year this rescission bill when they first sent it to me caused me to veto it because it had unacceptable cuts in education training and the environment when we went back to the table to work together congress came up with a revised bill that reflects our shared values it permits us to cut 16 billion from this year s budget to maintain our commitment to education health care and the environment to invest in helping those people in california who still are suffering from the earthquake to deal with the terrible tragedy in oklahoma city to keep our commitment to the middle east peace process and a number of other things and still cut even more spending to continue our work toward balancing the budget now we share i hope and believe a basic commitment that each generation must take account of the accumulated wisdom of generations that have gone before as well as our new ideas when we ignore the evidence of what has plainly worked in the attempt to fix what is plainly wrong we pay a terrible price we mustn t throw over in a moment of partisan zeal the common sense and bipartisan conclusions of our fathers and mothers derived from lifetimes of experience with problems that we will only have to suffer through again if we ignore that experience so i ask you as you come together in this wonderful boys nation experience and you debate these issues imagine what you want your country to look like ask yourself what your vision of the future is like write it down on a piece of paper what do you want america to look like in 20 years what is your vision and how will be achieve it and what things do we have to do together what things ought we to be for whether we re republicans or democrats whether we live in the northeast or the far west whether we re men or women and without regard to our racial and religious background what are those things that we can say this is what we want america to look like that my friends is where we must find our common ground and that is what i am determined to protect in this great debate to balance the budget thank you very much dem wjclinton24 7 99 bill_clinton thank you first of all let me say that the setting is too gorgeous and the day too beautiful really to have a political speech i was hoping no one would clap when i said that but anyway and so i will be brief but i want to thank you for being here i want to thank all the people involved with the democratic party and all of those who were hosting events or doing things for us who had to go through this mad scramble of change in our schedule because of the death of king hassan and the absolute conviction that hillary and i have that we should go to morocco to the funeral service he was a great friend of the peace process and after hillary went over there and went to see him he stood with us in human rights battles he s done a lot of things that were very very good for the united states and for the world and so and he was our friend so we re going to go but i thank all of you for changing your schedules and i thank you for your support i want to thank our good friends diane and dick for having us at their humble little place here this is a gorgeous serine wonderful setting and i thank them i want to thank congresswoman diana degette and i know that maggie fox is here congressman udall s wife i thank her for being here i thank all the officials of the colorado democratic party and the people from here in aspen who met me last night when did i get in 12 30 a m a quarter to 1 00 a m some ridiculous hour and 12 people came out we had a little 30 minute discussion last night about the state of the world it was quite wonderful i want to make a few points as briefly as i can governor romer made many of them and hillary referenced the work that he and bea and she and i did for many years when we were governors together first of all this is a very different country than it was in january of 1993 a lot of people have forgotten that this is a different country than it was in january of 93 and it changed because we had a different set of ideas and we implemented them and they worked and i won t bore you with all the details but i think it s very important and it s very important as we let the next year and a half unfold what happens in our country what happens in our politics system you know i hear some of the people who oppose us now basically after telling everybody for six and a half years what a bad guy i was they re now basically saying oh well bill clinton is like michael jordan he just jumps higher than the other guys now the democrats he s gone so we ll put them in the cellar again there s a sort of cynical politics theme let me tell you something i could not have done anything anything in the last six years if our ideas hadn t been right and if i hadn t had the help of al gore and hillary and diane feinstein and every member of congress and all the people in our administration team who did that and all of you who helped us throughout all these long years in the good and the bad times politics is about values and ideas and action and whether they change people s lives or not so the first thing i just want to say to all of you who have been with us all the time you ought to feel pretty good out here not just because of the beautiful day in a beautiful place but this is a different country than it was the second thing i want to say is we have to decide two things in the next year and a half we have to decide what are we going to do right now with our prosperity with our surplus and what decisions will we make in the next election cycle about where we go i had a very interesting question in the press conference earlier this week susan page said well mr president your approval ratings are back up after kosovo and you won the war and it s very strong approval ratings but this question was asked our voters do you want to vote for someone who will just continue the president s policies or someone who will change policies and someone who will change policies won 50 to 38 and i said well susan if they told me i d have been in the 50 percent too because our country is about continuous renewal and i had to spend the last six years trying to make sure this country could work again now that things are working well the question is what kind of change are we going to have not whether we ll change are we going to build on what we ve done and go beyond it or are we going to go back to things that didn t work before in the blind hope that they will and i ll just give you a couple of examples first of all in the moment the big debate in washington is what do we do with the surplus well let me tell you this we produced a balanced budget in 1997 by cutting spending rigorously and saying we would keep these caps in place by five years and by continuing to grow the economy by getting interest rates down and investment up now so we now have this projected surplus but you should also know that we have an enormous number of teaching hospitals in cities throughout america for example saying we need to put more money in the medicare program to take care of the health care system in the country i believe that we should be investing more not less in education the environment and biomedical research i don t think we should cut back and perhaps most important i think this gives us a chance to meet the challenge of the aging of america and the challenge of giving this country a long term pattern for growth and let me just address those briefly the number of people over 65 is going to double in the next 30 years there are going to be fewer people working and more people retired social security is going to run out of money in 2034 medicare is going to run out of money in 2015 i think we ought to set aside most of the surplus to save social security to save and modernize medicare to add more preventive tests for osteoporosis and cancer and other things to try to keep people out of the hospital in the first place to add a prescription drug benefit that is modest but will be very helpful to 75 percent of the people who are over 65 who don t have adequate drug coverage and to do it in a way that would allow us to become for the first time since listen to this 1835 debt free now why should the liberal party the more liberal party be for making america debt free because in 1999 and in 2000 and from now on in a global economy when money travels across national borders at the speed of light interest rates are set in a global environment and if a wealthy country is out of debt it means that the people who live in that wealthy country can borrow money at lower cost which means there will be more investment more jobs higher wages lower car payments lower credit card payments lower home mortgage payments lower college loan payments and higher economic growth over a longer period of time it also means that when a global economy gets in trouble as asia got in trouble russia got in trouble and our friends and trading partners and people we hope will remain democracies need money they can get the money they need at lower cost because we won t be out there taking it away from them and i think it is an unbelievable opportunity and we can do it the point i want to make to you is the republicans are trying to cast the debate in washington today as our tax cut is bigger than your tax cut it s almost like the arguments i used to have when i was in school our tax cut is bigger than your tax cut well if that s the choice you know that s a pretty hard deal to argue with the question is if you take our tax cut which is smaller than theirs you get to save social security and medicare you get to take the country out of debt you get to continue to invest in education environment medical research if they get their budget through we will do nothing to extend the life of medicare nothing to extend the life of social security we will imperil the future stability of the country therefore we will pay down the debt but we won t pay it off and we will actually have to have drastic cuts in the investment in education in the environment in medical research and believe it or not even in defense now that s what s going on here and what i want to ask you is after all this debate couldn t even occur if we all had a clear memory of what this country was like in 1991 and 1992 the democrats are being punished for our success can you imagine why is the first issue the size of the tax cut before we really assess how much we have to give these hospitals to make them whole did we tell them too much and if we did shouldn t we fix it what does it take to fix social security and medicare what does it take to get us out of debt what does it take to fulfill our basic responsibilities then why don t we talk about the tax cut in washington it s all backwards again and one of the young men who works for me said mr president this is like a family sitting down around a table and saying let s plan the vacation of our dreams to hawaii and when we get back we ll see if we can make the mortgage payments and send the kids to college i mean this is it doesn t make sense so the democratic party again is telling the american people remember what got us to where we are do we need to change absolutely and we have a plan and i talked about it in my radio address today to save social security and medicare to make the country debt free to continue to invest in education and the environment to literally make this the safest country in the world early in the next century and none of it can be done if their idea prevails so i think we ought to have a big debate about it and if we look to the future i just want to echo one thing roy said i m convinced the more i think about it and the longer i live and i m not running for anything anymore that the biggest difference between the two parties today is the way we think of community it s not whether some of us are warm hearted and others are cold blooded it s not whether some of us are nice people and others aren t nice it s whether we believe down deep inside that those of us who are pretty fortunate would be better off if everybody else did better and that we ll be not only sort of morally satisfied but actually better off if we try to go forward together in a country where there s opportunity for every responsible citizen and in which everybody has a place in our community and i ll just give you a few examples of that where their party genuinely disagrees with us from top to bottom from all the candidates to all the congressman the patients bill of rights i supported unlike some people i supported managed care but only if the people didn t have to give up quality of care i think it is unconscionable that a person in a managed care plan could have a doctor pleading for the person to go to see a specialist and some non physician could block it for long enough to make the damage irrevocable i think it is unconscionable that in cities every day somebody gets hit by a car and has to go to an emergency room and has to drive by the nearest one to one two or three down the way because that s the one covered by the plan i think it is wrong for a person working for a small business to have cancer and is in the middle of chemotherapy or who is pregnant and having a difficult pregnancy to have to change their doctor in the middle of the treatment because the employer has changed his coverage why it doesn t affect me i m the president i have great health care it doesn t affect you most of you have got you can pay for whatever you need so why are you here because we feel that our country is better if more people are healthy and if people are treated fairly i ll give you another example it may not be popular in all parts of colorado i grew up in a state where half the people had a hunting or fishing license or both but i think that we did the right thing to pass the brady bill i think we did the right thing to pass the assault weapons ban and i think diane feinstein did the right thing to pass the assault weapons ban and then keep trying to close all the loopholes in it why is that because i think not because i don t think people ought to be able to hunt or go to sporting events but because i think that all of us ought to be willing to make reasonable compromises to the safety of the society as a whole just like we do when we walk through an airport metal detector you know it didn t take too many planes to be hijacked before nobody screamed anymore when they walked through an airport metal detector you are interfering with my constitutional right to travel now think about it this is crazy so look at the fight in washington all of them from the candidates to the congress were against closing the gun show loophole we don t do background checks at gun shows and urban flea markets where a lot of criminals buy guns and we have the technology to do it with very minor inconvenience we think we should do it and i think it is unconscionable that we would run the risk that one person would lose his or her life next year because we don t do that we re for the employment non discrimination act we re for hate crimes legislation and we believe that it ought to specifically mention no discrimination against people because of sexual orientation and we re not afraid of that now why is that because we think all law abiding citizens ought to be part of america s community now so i ask you when you think about what we re doing in washington now and the politics of the next year and a half if people ask you why you re here in colorado a lot of people would say you re nuts they d say don t you understand if you got to a republican fundraiser that you d get a great tax cut right now why are you here tell them because the country is better off because we changed the direction of the country and you want america to go forward into the new century together thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 9 93 bill_clinton thank you very much we are delighted to be here today all of us i m especially glad that attorney general reno came down from washington with me when she became the attorney general florida gave the united states a great national resources and i know you re all proud of the job that she has done i also want to thank my longtime friend governor chiles you know in his former life governor chiles was a member of the united states senate and was head of the budget committee he thought arithmetic was functioning better at the state and local level so he decided to leave washington but when he left it made it harder for the rest of us to make arithmetic work in washington and i m glad to be here with him and i especially honor the innovations that he has pushed in health care and in crime i want to thank congressman bill young for hosting me in his district and for coming down last night on the plane i m also glad to see congressman miller here today and congresswoman karen thurman from your neighboring districts we had a remarkable health care forum last night as you probably know in tampa with about 1 000 people there and there were six or seven members of congress roughly evenly divided between republicans and democrats who came there with me in our effort to bring this country together around that issue i got a little briefing on st petersburg beach from mayor horan when i was up here he told me that we had a wide variety of ages here i think he said your grandson is here and he s one year old today where is the mayor s grandson here hold up the mayor s grandson look at that and we have at least one of your distinguished citizens here who is in her 90s melita stand up there thank you in between we ve got a president an attorney general a governor three members of congress your state attorney general bob butterworth who is here the mayor of st petersburg david fisher the chief of police of st petersburg darrel stephens a number of state representatives and county officials and representatives from community groups crime watch and other groups i say that to make this point if you look out across this crowd today from that young man celebrating his first birthday to this fine lady who has seen almost this entire century come and go you see across this crowd people of different races different political parties different walks of life all of us part of the family of america all of us caught up now in a time of sweeping and profound change change which opens up to us vistas of opportunity that our forebears could never have imagined and change which presents us with threats and troubles that our forebears never could have imagined i really believe that in a time like this my job as your president is to try to identify the challenges facing our country and then to try to offer my best ideas about a solution and then to try to energize people all across the country to work until we find a solution whether it s the one i suggested or some other one we have to urgently face both the opportunities and the problems before us in a time when we have to change so much and that s the first decision we all have to make whether it s in education or the economy we have to be willing to change when you re confronted with a time of sweeping changes with a bunch of things that are happening that are good that you can be part of and a bunch of things that are happening that are bad that you want to avoid basically you have two options you can sort of hunker down and put your arms around yourself and hope it will go away and about that works about one time in a hundred and then if you play the odds 99 percent of the time what you have to do is take a deep breath and stick your chest out and turn right into the change and figure out what you can do now one of the things that all of us have learned in our lives that even children learn early is that you are more able to make changes you need to make when you are more secure the more personally secure you are the more you feel good about who you are and your connections to other people and your roots in a community the more you are able to change it seems almost ironic but the more rooted you are in the traditionally human ties and the traditionally human values that make life so rich the more you re able to change so that you can enhance what you value the more insecure we are the more difficult it is for us to change because we re too busy just trying to survive so in a funny way the pursuit that we must have as a people for security is tied closely to the pursuit we must have as a people for change and i believe as strongly as i can say that that s one of the reasons that makes this campaign for health care reform so important that it will give our people the security to change and it s one of the things that makes our efforts to try to reduce the crime rate and enhance human decency and dignity and reduce violence and destruction in our country so important because that is the security we need the bedrock we need to make the economic changes to make the education and training changes to make the other changes we need in this country last night when we had that wonderful town hall meeting people asked dozens and dozens of questions i don t know how long we stayed there it was way too late there are a lot of people in america if they watched that whole show last night are sleepy at work today i ll tell you that but what you saw there is people yearning for security here in this area the principles i announced in health care reform are very must related to the principles of this anticrime effort our administration is undertaking security health care that you ve always got that can t be taken away simplify the system it s a nightmare for the doctors and the nurses and the people who are getting health care achieve savings because the system is too wasteful you can t justify putting more money in a broken machine until you ve fixed it maintain choice for consumers and have quality one of the things that matters so much about in florida is the idea that people on medicare as well as people on medicaid will be able to get prescription drugs now under this program very important for older people to maintain their quality of life and finally to have more responsibility in the system and that relates directly to the crime issue because one of the reasons american health care is so expensive is that our hospitals and our emergency rooms are full of people who are cut up and shot if you look at the amount of money the american taxpayers pay in health care for violence it is staggering and the more we do that the less we have to stand on other things that make us all well and more secure now one of the things that our health care reform package and the crime initiatives that the attorney general is leading have in common is a focus on prevention i got a great hand the other night talking to congress and i said you know how your mother said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure well your mother was right well that s the truth for the first time if we pass this health care reform program everybody will have in their health care package preventive services we will save money and enhance the quality of life enhance security if you give every child an immunization plan if you have well baby visits if you have pap smears and mammograms and cholesterol tests and the kinds of things that keep people well as well as help them to get well if they get sick the same thing is true in crime we know from experience after experience after experience that the kind of violence that has unfortunately gripped the headlines in florida in the last several days and grieved so many of us as americans when people who come to our shores are hurt or killed when they want to see our country and they want to get to know the best about it that is far from a problem of florida alone and certainly not a problem for our foreign visitors alone when michael jordan s father was killed recently a nation grieved but no one knew the names of the other 22 people who died in that county this year this is a national problem when i was born in 1946 homicide wasn t even in the top ten leading causes of death in america in fact listen to this throughout my lifetime homicide never made the top ten until 1989 and yet now homicide is the second leading cause of death among americans age 15 to 25 and more of our teenage boys die from gunshots now than any other cause now we can decide again what to do with this are we going to hunker down and turn away and pretend it s not happening maybe it will go away we ve got a one chance in a hundred that will happen or we can face it and we can face the problem in all of its human manifestations just the way the attorney general said these kids we just met out here who got in trouble and now they re in this program pretty good kids they ve got a whole life ahead of them they ve got contributions they can make and we need to see what we can do about preventing the life that might happen that none of us want to occur this initiative that we have undertaken in our administration to give more security and to make this society safer include at least three forms of prevention i want to emphasize because we know they work and because they are rooted in getting people at the grass roots community level more power over their own lives first is giving these children who get in trouble something to say yes to and some order and framework in their lives senator moynihan said on television last sunday the distinguished senator from new york who s been a student of american social history for 50 years we have gotten used to accepting a lot of behavior from people in this country that s pretty destructive we have gotten used to the fact that a lot of kids grow up alone or almost alone in conditions that are very damaging to themselves and aren t conducive to learning good things and good habits and we have let it happen but all over america there are programs like the boot camp program one of these young men just came out of the boot camp program of this program and he told the governor that he liked the program more people ought to be in it because he said it used to be you could he knew this he said it used to be you should ship kids my age off to the service but we re going down we don t have a draft anymore we re going down the number of people in the service so we ve got to have a substitute where people can learn discipline and order and be able to see the future as something that happens three years from now not three minutes from now and we have to have programs like this marine institute which now is spreading across the country this program is giving young people a chance to take their future back a chance to understand that there is good inside them that they can do things that are useful and productive and profitable and a lot more fun than whatever it is that got them into this program in the first place those young people told me those young people told me what it was like to learn how to give cpr to learn how to scuba dive to learn how to repair a boat and fix it so it would sail to learn how to deal with each other and with adults so that they could get jobs this program now operates in partnership with grass roots people in seven other states nationwide they ve taken 20 000 young people at risk and helped them to become responsible citizens and so far after they leave this program 75 percent of the young people that go through this program never have any criminal convictions again if every young person in america that got in trouble had a chance to be in a program like this think what a difference it would make it s very important how many times do you pick up the paper and read about somebody finally did something terrible after they had been arrested 13 times or 15 times or 20 times we need a system in this country and the national government cannot do it but we can help you do it we can help provide funds and support and technical expertise but people at the grass roots level have to do it we ve got to have systems in this country where everybody in those critical young years has a chance to be in a boot camp like this like you have in florida or a program like the marine institute or both if they need it we have an experimental program we started last june ten military facilities have been enclosed across the country where kids who are high school dropouts are able to come back and get their ged and have the benefit of military type training and a lot of these kids just love it it s just changed their whole outlook on life we have got to understand that we are raising a generation without the structure and order and predictability and support and reinforcement that most of us just took for granted we took it for granted and there s no use in us pretending that some national government program and money alone will fix it but there s no use in us pretending that just preaching at people will fix it either we have to actually change the conditions of opportunity for these young people the second thing we have to do is to recognize that our police forces can do more if they re more closely connected to the community if there are enough of them and if they operate in the same neighborhoods and concentrate on the problem areas that s known today the buzzword for that is community policing and it works it works i have been in cities all across america where the crime rate is dropping because of concentrated community policing strategy where police work in partnership with the citizens who live in a community focus their resources on the areas of greatest opportunity respond quickly to problems i have seen that that works the chief of police of st petersburg darrel stephens who s here has been one of our nation s leading promoters of community policing and it does move away from the old ways of trying to catch criminals after a crime occurs to doing as much as you can to prevent crime in the first place that drives down the crime rate this year under attorney general reno s leadership our department of justice will fund five community policing projects in our nation to serve as models for the rest of the country in a competitive process the justice department tried to find rural examples and urban examples small and medium sized towns as well as big ones due to the strength of the programs in your communities the justice department has selected two of the five prototypes to be here in florida one in st petersburg and the other the other in hillsboro county right next door and these funds not massive amounts of money 200 000 apiece will enable these communities to strengthen their own community policing programs and develop them in a way that can be copied by other communities one of the things that the attorney general and i were talking about on the way up here is it never ceases to amaze me that nearly every problem in america has been addressed well by somebody somewhere but we don t learn very well from one another yet and one of the things that this government is dedicated to doing in my administration is taking what works at the grass roots level and giving other people a chance to do it and i thank you for that now the third thing i want to emphasize and the third thing i think we have to recognize is if you want to prevent crime in this country violent crime if you want to stop gunshot wounds from being the leading cause of death among young teenage boys if you want to change the circumstance in which the average age of people killing each other is now under 16 in some of our cities you have to change the fact that america is the only country in the civilized world where a teenager can walk the street at random and be better armed than most police forces we have to face that fact the crime bill which was introduced just a couple of days ago in both the senate and the house contains more funds for more police officers on the street something i believe in we want to put another 100 000 out there in america so everybody can adopt a community policing strategy it also has the brady bill which will require a five day waiting period before anybody can purchase a handgun and in addition to that there are several bills in the congress and i hope and pray one of them can reach my desk this year which will ban various types of assault weapons entirely from being held in the possessions of our young people let me tell you something folks i come from a state where more than half the adults have a hunting or a fishing license or both where most of us were in the woods by the time we were six years old where some schools and some plants have to be closed on the opening day of deer season nobody shows up anyway there s not a person in this country that values the culture of the outdoors and the hunting and all of that any more than i do but neither those who love to hunt or who love to shoot weapons in contests nor the framers of the constitution when they wrote the second amendment ever envisioned a time when children on our streets would illegally be in possession of weapons designed solely to kill other people and have more weapons than the people who were supposed to be policing them and we better stop it if we want to recover our country just last week the governor of colorado governor roy romer signed a law that prohibits juveniles from owning handguns he joined governor florio of new jersey and 17 others who have passed that law this year these are things we have to do all three of these things are preventive there worth a pound of cure have more programs like this one give these kids a chance to have something to say yes to not just telling them what they have to say no to and a chance to order their lives and to fill themselves from the inside out a lot of these programs don t deal with people from the inside out that s the only way you can really change people s lives give our police forces a chance to succeed with a community based strategy that prevents crimes as well as catches criminals and get the guns out of the hands of the kids give our law enforcement officers a fighting chance to keep the streets safe and people secure there are elements of prevention that will give us the security we need to make the changes we need economically to move into the 21st century they will have the extra benefit of dramatically lowering the costs of health care and enabling us to finance the kind of progress we need in health care and enabling us to finance the kind of progress we need in health care which again will give us the security we need to be the people we have to be in this dynamic era thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton24 9 96 bill_clinton four years ago when i came to new jersey and asked for your support i said i had a simple vision for our country on the edge of a new century i wanted us to go into the 21st century with the american dream alive and well for everyone who is willing to work for it i wanted us to go into the 21st century as a country that respected our diversity and relished it that was coming together more closely as a community not drifting apart as so many other nations of the world are and i wanted us to continue to be the world s strongest nation for peace and freedom and prosperity and i say to you today the strategy we adopted opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community in which every person has a role to play and a part is working we not only have a stronger economy the crime rate has gone down for four years in a row the welfare rolls are down by nearly 2 million child support collections are up by 3 billion 40 percent there are no russian missiles pointed at the children of the united states and today i became the first head of state to sign the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty to ban all nuclear tests forever now this did not happen by accident these things happen because we changed the way washington works we got out of who s to blame and we asked what can we do about our problems we invited everyone to help us we invited everyone to put aside their partisanship their extremism to roll up their sleeves and tackle america s problems seize america s opportunities it worked that s why we re on the right track now you have a great choice to make and it has been clearly and i must say candidly articulated not just by me but also by my opponent are we going to build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past are we going to say you re on your own out there we can t afford things like family leave or are we going to say the first lady s right it does take a village to raise our children and to build up our country all across the spectrum if you look at what is at stake here i offer you a bridge to the 21st century that you have to help build no guarantees but opportunity and the challenge of responsibility and the reminder that we have to do it together think about our economy if i had told you four years ago we have 10 million new jobs a seven and a half year low in unemployment virtually no inflation the lowest combined rates of unemployment inflation and home mortgages in 28 years you d have said that s pretty good bring it on but we can do better i want to build a bridge to the 21st century that gives all of our children the best educational opportunities in the world we want to hook up every classroom and every library in america to the information superhighway to the internet to the world wide web let me tell you what that means it means for the first time in history the children in the most remote rural districts and in the poorest urban districts will have access to the same information and the same way at the same quality and the same time as every other child in america it will revolutionize education and we intend to do it if you ll help us build that bridge to the 21st century we want to build a bridge to the 21st century in which every american can go to college every american of any age and we propose to do it in the following way number one more people than ever will be able to save through an ira and withdraw from that ira tax free if the savings are used to pay for college medical care a first time home number 2 we re going to say in the next four years we want a community college education to be just as universal in the united states as a high school diploma is today everybody needs more than a high school diploma today and here s how we re going to pay for it we want to say to working americans if you go to a community college you can deduct from your taxes dollar for dollar the cost of tuition at a typical community college in the united states we can do that no bureaucracy no extra hassle and we can pay for it in the balanced budget amendment and finally we want to permit every family to deduct the cost of college tuition any kind of college undergraduate or graduate school up to 10 000 a year from their taxes so that we can educate our people will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century i m mighty proud to be here with you proud to be representing the people of new jersey grateful for the support you have given me and asking you to think among yourselves not about party not about politics but about what you want our country to look like when we start a new century in a new millennium and what you want america to be like when your children are your age that is all that matters i believe as strongly as i can say that if you want the kind of america i believe you do we ve got to build a bridge to the future we can revere our past but we can t recapture it the best days of america are still ahead the children in this audience today many of them will do jobs that have not been invented yet some of them will do work that has not been imagined yet all we have to do is to build the right kind of bridge that s broad enough big enough and strong enough for all of us to walk across i hope you will help me build it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton24 9 98 bill_clinton she was terrific wasn t she let s give her another hand i thought she was great congressman cardin welcome i know you re proud of your constituent here jessica welcome we re glad to see you i think congressman blagojevich is here we welcome him along with senator ephraim gonzalez who is the president of national hispanic caucus of state legislators and councilman robert cantana of buffalo let me once again thank monique for her remarkable statement and her even more remarkable life i m delighted to be joined here by our economic team by erskine bowles and secretary rubin secretary herman gene sperling jack lew janet yellen larry summers their tireless often literally sleepless work has been very instrumental in sparking and maintaining what soon will be the longest peacetime boom in american history officials of the census bureau who are here today i want to thank all of you we re going to be talking a little bit about some census bureau statistics sometimes we take your hard work and statistics for granted the fact is that you ensure that our democracy is truly representative and let me say in that connection once again congress must not hamstring the census bureau s efforts to maintain the most up to date accurate scientific methods to produce the year 2000 census they deserve the chance to succeed monique miskimon has shown us today once again that every american counts that means that every american deserves to be counted now before i get into the details of the very positive economic report which monique and her daughter so vividly represent i think we all want to say just a few words and reflect on the powerful impact of hurricane georges in the caribbean islands businesses and homes have been swept away tragically many lives have been lost meanwhile the projected track of the storm places the hurricane center over or near the florida keys late tonight or early tomorrow morning as we speak we re helping the people of florida prepare for the hurricane we ve already sent assistance to haiti and the dominican republic obviously we re working with the officials in puerto rico and the virgin islands james lee witt the director of the federal emergency management agency has informed me that fema s region six emergency response team arrived in tallahassee florida at 10 00 a m this morning here in washington the fema emergency support team is operating at level one its highest level on a 24 hour basis our support teams and our prayers are with those in the caribbean as they begin to rebuild and those in the florida keys as they brace for the impact of the storm now as president from my first day here i have done my best to fulfill a commitment i made to the american people first of all to restore the reality of the american dream of opportunity for all responsible citizens of a community in which we all count and work together and secondly to reclaim the future for our children to strengthen our country for the century ahead to accomplish that mission we began first with an economic strategy to shrink the deficit and balance the budget to invest in the education and skills of our people and to expand the export of american goods the census report released this morning represents one more year s worth of compelling evidence that this economic strategy is working and that there are lots more people out there like monique miskimon the report shows that last year the income of the typical american household grew at nearly twice the rate of inflation since we launched our economic plan in 1993 the typical family s real income has risen by more than 3 500 that s an extra 3 500 that hardworking families can put toward their children s education or a down payment on a first home income for typical african american and hispanic families increased by more than 1 000 last year alone this report also shows that our growing economy is giving more and more families a chance to work their way out of poverty the poverty rate fell to 13 3 percent and while we still have plenty of room for improvement the african american poverty rate fell to another record low hispanic poverty saw the largest one year drop in two decades child poverty has dropped in the past four years more than in any four year period in the last three decades and the earned income tax credit which monique spoke of a moment ago has raised more than 4 million people out of poverty in the last year alone the report this morning shows that economic growth continues to raise incomes lift millions out of poverty and extend opportunity it also shows that we have more to do since 1993 every income group has benefitted from our nation s economic growth and the lowest 20 percent of our people in terms of income have had the highest percentage increases that s the good news after over 20 years of increasing inequality but that inequality is still too high and it simply means there are too many american families out there working hard doing everything we could possibly ask of them and still having a hard time getting ahead we have to use our prosperity and the confidence that it inspires to help our hardest pressed families and our hardest pressed communities to ensure economic growth for all americans the most important thing we have to do of course is to maintain the economic strategy that got us here in the first place above all the strict fiscal discipline that has given us low interest rates low inflation big investments and more jobs exactly a week from today we will have the first balanced budget and surplus since neil armstrong walked on the moon in 1969 unfortunately this week in the house of representatives the republicans are moving forward with a proposal that drains the new surplus to pay for their tax plan we can cut taxes indeed my balanced budget includes targeted tax cuts for child care for education for environmental clean up but tax cuts must be paid for in full if we are to expand opportunity in the years to come i say again we have been waiting for 29 years to see the red ink turn to black we have a huge baby boom challenge coming when all the baby boomers retire social security as presently constituted cannot sustain that retirement we have to reform social security if we want to have it for our parents that s me when the baby boomers retire without undermining the standard of living of our children and grandchildren so i say again let us not get into this surplus we have worked for 29 years for or we ve waited for 29 years for and worked for 6 years for let s don t get into that and spend it in an election year tax cut until we have saved social security for the 21st century for the sake of our children and our grandchildren second we have to continue to invest in our people and lift them all up i was deeply disappointed this week when 95 percent of the republicans in the senate voted not to raise the minimum wage to reject an increase in the minimum wage when there are still so many people working full time and raising children in poverty when the unemployment rate and the inflation rate is so low i believe is a mistake and sends the wrong signal to the american people i thank the 95 percent of the democratic caucus in the senate who voted for the increase in the minimum wage working americans deserve it i m disappointed with only a week left in the fiscal year we rejected this and i haven t quit fighting for it i think eventually we will get it in the next several months if we have to wait until next year we will get it but i m also disappointed as i said a week from today we end the fiscal year and we start a new one and there s still been no action in the congress on our vital education investments indeed what action there has been in the house of representatives has been negative has been a setback for education congress should work with us to enact my plan paid for in the balanced budget to reduce class size to an average of 18 in the early grades to hire 100 000 teachers to teach those children in smaller classes to rebuild or to construct or repair 5 000 schools so our kids will have good adequate safe schools to attend to hook up all of our classrooms all of them even in the poorest neighborhoods to the internet by the year 2000 to improve early literacy by funding the program to send volunteers in to make sure that every eight year old can read to lift our children s sights with voluntary national standards and clear means of measuring them now if we hope to maintain our economic growth well into the next generation we have to give every american child a world class elementary and secondary education so i say again we ve been here for months and months there s just a week left in the budget year let s finally have action to improve our public schools and give all of our kids a world class education the third thing i d like to say is we have to continue to lead in the global economy if we want the american economy to continue to grow we re enjoying unsurpassed economic prosperity but all of you read the papers every day you see the news at night you know there are troubles elsewhere in the world you know our friends in asia and russia are facing great turmoil you know we re trying to keep our big trading partners and friends in latin america from having the negative effect of that turmoil reach them even though they are pursuing good policies that s why it s important for congress to fund our america s share of the international monetary fund because the international monetary fund helps the countries that are helping themselves to return to growth and serves as an insurance policy against having the financial crisis spread to the countries that are doing the right thing and keeping americans at work by buying our products again i say there is no reason not to do this we ve only got a week left in the budget year we ve been talking about it all year long the problem has only gotten worse it is time now to say we re doing this because it s what america owes as the world leader and more importantly we re doing it because it is absolutely necessary to keep american economic growth going finally let me say that with just a week left in this budget year i d still like to see the congress pass a decent patients bill of rights one that covers our bill would provide protections to all americans simple ones if you get in an accident you can go to the nearest emergency room not be hauled to one halfway across town if your doctor tells you you need to see a specialist you can see one if it comes down to a dispute about whether a medical procedure should or should not be applied the decision should be made by a doctor not an accountant your medical records ought to be protected in privacy if your employer changes health care providers it shouldn t affect you if you happen to be in the middle or a pregnancy or a chemotherapy treatment or some other thing that would be entirely disruptive and dangerous and damaging to your health care if you had to change doctors in the middle of the procedure now we do that for everyone the house passed a bill on a partisan vote completely party line vote that doesn t protect 100 million people and doesn t provide any of those protections to the people that are covered the senate majority leader actually shut down business in the senate a few days ago to keep them from voting for it so they wouldn t be recorded they wouldn t be recorded as killing the patients bill of rights but they could kill it and still satisfy the insurance companies that are doing their best to do it there s still time we haven t broken for the election yet we can still do the right thing by the american people but we have to think about it we have to focus on it and we have to put our priorities where they ought to be i think it s worth fighting for the patients bill of rights in the closing days of this congressional session again i want to thank the economic team here and our supporters in the congress including those who are here today for giving more americans a chance to live the story that monique has told us about i want to thank her for coming today and bringing her beautiful daughter i know we all wish them well our prayers are with the people who are about to be affected and those who have been affected by the hurricane and i ask that all of us focus on using these last days of this congressional session to think about the american people to think about our responsibilities to think about what got us here over the last six years and instead of departing from it to bear down and build on it that is my goal and that s what we ought to do thank you very much well let me answer you this way the right thing to do is for us all to focus on what s best for the american people and the right thing for me to do is what i m doing i m working on leading our country and i m working on healing my family and if you look at what we announced today what does it tell you it proves number one that the course we have followed has been the right course for america that s what it proves after six years it can t be an accident anymore but the second thing it proves is that it is utterly foolish for people to be diverted or distracted from the urgent challenges still before us i told you that we had a record a record low in african american unemployment and poverty a record low in the poverty rate for children of african american children do you know what that record low is it s about 39 percent in other words it s breathtakingly high that s just one statistic so what does that tell me it tells me that the right thing to do is if we all put progress over partisanship put people over politics put the american people first what would we do well we would keep the budget balanced we would save social security before we squandered the surplus we would improve our schools we would clean up our environment we would pass the patients bill of rights and we would keep the economy going that s what we would be focused on that s what i am focused on that s the way out the way out here and the only way out is for people in washington to do what the folks in america want them to do which is to take care of their concerns their children and their future that s what i mean to do and i m going to do my best dem wjclinton24 9 99a bill_clinton thank you you think that story john told was true i just you better keep that republican s name secret or they ll subpoena him before a committee before you know it i want to thank all of you at the dbc i want to thank my long time friend john merrigan and mitchell delk and my good friend jan jones and all the others who have been involved with the dbc i want to thank our finance people starting with beth dozoretz and fran katz and going through all the people who have worked on this event i want to thank all of you who give so consistently to our party to give us a chance to get our message out thank you joe andrew thank you lou weissbaum lonnie shackleford janet scriffin thanks secretary slater for being here and for being there for me for nearly 20 years now and i want to say a special word of thanks to roy romer for his wonderful service to our party thank you very much thank you our former chair don fowler is here we ve got a lot of other good folks here but i wanted to say to all of you that i think it s quite important how you think and how you talk about where we are where we ve been and where we re going so if you will forgive me i will get down to business i m sorry i m a little late but i had to spend an extra amount of time at the dnc because they had a big crowd there and i wanted to make sure they were thinking right about the moment and i feel the same way about you in 1991 i asked the american people to give me a chance to be president and i said if you ll vote for me i ll do my best to change our party to change our national leadership to change the direction of our country i think we need new ideas for the new economy and all of the new challenges in our society and the world at large but they have to be rooted in old values of opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community of all americans and i asked the american people to give me a chance and i made an argument for them about what i would do then when the vice president joined the ticket we reissued our economic plan and asked the american people to give us a chance to put people first and i would like to ask you to think about that john said we brought the economy back and brought the democratic party back to the center i think we did bring it back to the center but i prefer to think of it as pushing the democratic party forward into the future by getting out of making what seemed to me to be completely false choices if you hang around washington long enough you learn that putting people and issues into categories i m sympathetic with people in washington because they have to deal with so many people and so many issues if you put everybody and every thing in a little box it saves you the trouble of having to think but it s a very poor way to run a country and to make decisions about the future of the country so we say hey give us a chance we believe that the democratic party can be pro business and pro labor we believe we can be for family values and be against discrimination against women or gays or anybody else we believe we can be for one america and still celebrate our diversity we believe you can grow the economy while you improve the environment not degrade it we believe that we ll have a better work place if we also help workers to succeed at home in their parental responsibilities we believe these things we believe we can prevent crime and be tough on criminals who should be punished and so we made this argument and the results speak for themselves but i want to make just a couple of points number one we ve got to take a little longer walk down memory lane because the economy s been so good now that people can t remember when it wasn t i saw a poll the other day where people think the economy was good when president bush was here i think they think it was good when herbert hoover was here it s been good a long time but it s important to point out that in 1980 when the reagan revolution occurred the premise of the reagan revolution there were two premises one is that government is your enemy and the cause of all of our problems and you should dislike it and make it as small as possible unless it s building defense or pouring concrete that was the first one the second was the way to have a strong economy forever and a balanced budget forever is to increase spending and cut revenues let me repeat that you don t have to laugh but i want to make sure you heard it the way to balance the budget and have a strong economy is to increase spending and cut revenues that was their whole deal and we proceeded to try it for 12 years and it got him elected and then reelected and then got president bush to become only the second vice president in american history to become directly elected after the president but did it work for a while as i told the dnc today my former senior senator dale bumpers in talking about the reagan years used to say of course it worked if you let me write 2 billion of hot checks i ll show you a good time too so it worked but by the third incarnation of it between 88 and 92 the quadrupling of the national debt put us into a position of permanently high interest rates which gave us stagnant growth high unemployment stagnant wages and the longest deepest recession since the great depression that was the reality we confronted and we kept getting out of these recessions but every time we d get out we d go right back in because of the high interest rates so al gore and i said hey give us a chance we re going to try this other thing here and we went in and it was an argument in the beginning that is the ordinary voters couldn t know who was right because they hadn t tried our way and then we got in and we found the most partisan atmosphere in modern american history and my economic plan passed with not a vote to spare and not a vote from a republican the vice president broke the tie in the senate and we had only a two vote victory in the house which means if one had changed it would have been even and it wouldn t have passed now we ve been through several incarnations we also put our crime program through and we passed the brady bill which the previous president had vetoed we passed the family and medical leave act the first big leg in our work and family bill which the previous president had vetoed we proceeded to clean up toxic waste dumps clean the air clean the water make the food safer the economy kept getting better not worse in spite of their fears and they said when we passed our economic program they said the world would come to an end they said we re going to try it the other way we re going to cut expenses and increase revenues until we get this deficit out of our hair and they said oh no this is a terrible idea it will bankrupt the country when we passed the crime bill and said we were going to put 100 000 police on the streets they said you ll never do it even if you did it won t bring the crime down and when we said we could ban assault weapons and do background checks on handgun buyers and we would keep more guns out of the wrong hands they said oh the criminals will have guns and all you re going to do is unduly burden hunters and sports people you remember all these debates we did one thing they said another and so now after six years and eight months we re not having an argument anymore we can still fight but it s not an argument over the facts our economic plan has unleashed your energies with low interest rates and we can have the longest peacetime expansion in history a 30 year low in unemployment a 32 year low in welfare and a 26 year low in the crime rate we have the highest home ownership in history the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded and each year we ve set a record for new small business start ups but the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we have done away with three times as many toxic waste dumps as they did in 12 years and set aside more land in perpetuity protection than any administration in history except those of the two roosevelts along the way we got 100 000 young people to serve their communities in americorps and immunized 90 percent of our kids against serious childhood illnesses for the first time and opened the doors of college to all with the hope scholarship it s been a pretty good run but it s not an argument anymore there are facts i never will forget and the voters returned us to office in 1996 and let s look at these elections and this one in connection with the others so in 92 we won because people thought times were tough and they gave us a chance in 94 we got beat bad why well they ran with this contract on america and they had a plan and a message and it sounded good and they said that we had raised everybody s taxes although we hadn t we raised all of yours but we didn t raise everybody s taxes over 90 percent of the people didn t have their taxes raised one of my friends who runs a fortune 100 company endangered species in that crowd he s a democrat is going all over new york saying if you paid more in taxes than you made out of low interest rates in the stock market in the last seven years you ought to be for george bush but if you didn t you ought to stick with us it s a pretty good argument isn t it you might try it so anyway in 92 they took a chance on us in 94 we lose big why because people were told we d raise their taxes even when we didn t and they hadn t felt the good economy yet and because we had just passed the crime bill and they terrified everybody saying we were going to take their guns away and because we didn t pass anything on health care so the people who wanted something done were disappointed and the people who believed their propaganda that we were trying to have the government take over the health care system believed it it was the worst of all worlds and election results showed it and our obituary was written remember that now when you read the papers in the next few months our obituary was written hopeless helpless terrible situation but in 96 we roar back in bigger victory than 92 why because there was no argument anymore people had evidence and then in 98 we had a plan in a midterm election we said hey we re not tired we re not burned out vote for us and we ll give you 100 000 teachers we want to save social security and medicare before we spend the surplus we want to pay the debt down we want to pass a patients bill of rights that s our national plan and all over america we said it and you know what they said in 98 and they said and all the experts said well are they going to lose five six or seven senate seats are they going to lose 20 30 or 40 house seats and instead while we were being outspent by 100 million 100 million in 1998 we lost no senate seats in the worst year i can remember for democrats in term of whose we had up and whose was vacant and we picked up five house seats and it s the first time since 1822 that the party of the president had gained house seats in a midterm election in the sixth year of the presidency and only the third time since the civil war it happened in any midterm election why because we decided what we were for we decided ideas matter because we put them in and they made a real difference in people s lives and people who make the real decision the voters out there once they got a chance to take a look at our crowd said i think they care more about me than the other guys do and one real problem almost all people have sooner or later if they stay in politics long enough is they spend so much time with other people in politics and commentators and experts and pollsters and people writing articles that they forget that this is not about any of us most of you are going to be all right no matter what otherwise you couldn t afford to be here this is about the great mass of people and i hope that you re here because you believe as i do that all of us do better when the country as a whole does better you know my economy has made it possible for those republicans to give george bush all that money al gore told me the other day he said if i d known this economy was going to make so much money for bush i d have voted against your economic plan i may start listing that as one of the achievements of my administration see it just depends on how you talk about this stuff and how you think about it we re all laughing but i have a very serious purpose here so now we come to 2000 and we re first in this year i believe that the democratic party has gotten a long way by being willing to work with the republicans to get something done we worked with them in 96 passed the welfare reform bill that s given us the lowest welfare rolls in a generation but we didn t let them cut off medical care and food to those poor kids and we made them come up with more child care so that when people go to work they can still take care of their kids i believe we were right when we worked with them in 97 on the balanced budget bill because it s continued this remarkable low interest rates and recovery of the economy and i think we still ought to work with them if they ll work with us to save social security and medicare and modernize medicare with prescription drug coverage to continue to invest in education to invest in giving people here s a tax cut i m for i m for giving people the same incentives to invest in poor areas in america we give them to invest in poor areas around the world so that we can go national with the empowerment zone program that the vice president s done such a brilliant job of supervising in mayor archer s city of new york and other places but we need to take care of business we need to do that and if my plan were adopted we would have the ability to save social security and medicare invest in education defense and the other things we need to invest in still have a tax cut we can afford and get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 which would give us a generation of low interest rates and long term recovery for our children now that s why i vetoed their tax bill and once again i did the republican candidates for president a favor every one of them running on the other side is for this republican tax bill and if i had signed it it would have made a lie to of every campaign speech they re going to give between now and the election about what they ll do because they wouldn t have any money to do it i noticed one of them yesterday said vote for me and i ll give you new weapons and higher paid soldiers and everything the defense department wants i ll spend more money on ignoring the fact that we re just about to pay a big pay increase and build new weapons and i thought to myself this is a nice speech but if i sign this tax bill that he s for there won t be any money for the promise he just made i need to quit helping these republicans this way but anyway i vetoed the tax bill because if their bill passes it wouldn t add a day to social security not a day to medicare not a day so when the baby boomers retire all those risks would still be out there it would force big cuts in education we d never get the debt paid off it really had no special effort to get economic growth into the areas that have been left behind by our prosperity so i vetoed it but i still want to get things done and i still want you to help us going forward and here s the point i want to make i just want to make two or three points number one the american people say they want a change guess what i agree with them if they polled me in all those polls and said do you think we ought to change i d say yes this country only works when it s in a perpetual state of creation and recreation that s how it works that s why we re still around here after all this time why do you think i worked so hard so that we could just fix this country again so then we d be free to look at these big long term challenges and seize the big long term opportunities none of which were possible to deal with in the shape we were in in 1992 so i m for change too the question is going to be what kind of change are you for are we going to build on all the good things that are going on now to deal with the outstanding big problems and to seize the outstanding big opportunities or are we going to turn around and go back to the approach that got us in so much trouble in the first place that s the question before the american people do you want to save social security or privatize it and worry later what happens to the people that lose in that deal do you want to save medicare or force everybody into a managed care plan even though you won t pass the patients bill of rights do you want to keep on with this program that s given us the lowest crime rate in 26 years until we have the safest big country on earth or do you want to give crime policy back to the nra these are the questions we have to face meanwhile there is a lot we can do but there are big questions do you really believe america s diversity is its strength and we can come together in our common humanity or do you agree with them that we shouldn t pass the hate crimes bill or the employment non discrimination act you ve got to decide there are big issues here and these economic issues would we be better off if their tax bill passed or would they be better off if my modest bill passed and we took care of social security medicare our investments in our children their education and got the country out of debt for the first time since andrew jackson was president because even if we voted for everything i want now it could all be revisited next year so these are decisions worthy of a great nation and i just want to say two or three things about the politics of this number one what you do is terribly important it s okay if they have more money than we do if we have enough i will remind you they out spent us by 100 million last time if you take all their third party committees and all that stuff and we won anyway why because we had enough because the people out there knew what we stood for because we had clear sharp unambiguous message and people heard it number two it s very important that you stay in the right frame of mind you know how to talk about this my philosophy all the years i ran for office now i can say this since i m not running anymore i get to sound like a wise man i ve had a lot of young people come up to me and say mr president i want to run for office have you got any advice and i always say one thing i say you know every time i was on the ballot my goal was to make sure that every single person who voted against me knew exactly what he or she was doing now you think about that that s why your role is important because in a free society if the people who vote against you know exactly what they re doing you have no beef none of us have a right to be here for goodness sake and the reason the money is important is so we can get the message out and to have enough but you need to make sure when you go home and you start talking to other people that people that aren t for us know exactly what they re doing and why you know the american people nearly always get it right if they know one of my favorite stories of what s happened to me i went back to new hampshire to run for re election in 96 you know i love that little place with all my heart they kept me alive when the republican party and the pundits told them i was dead and the voters of new hampshire said i don t think so we re not letting you tell us how to run our lives thank you very much and then i went back in 96 and they gave al gore and me a majority of the vote in 96 unheard of both republicans and independents i believe have larger numbers of registered voters than the democrats do there they ve been real good to us but in 94 they participated in a whipping we took and they beat one of their congressmen because he voted for the crime bill so i go back to new hampshire in 96 and i want you to think about this when you read all about this election now and all the experts and what all they re telling you about and we got a big crowd of people in manchester and i said get me a bunch of redneck hunters there and we had a bunch of big muscle bound guys in their plaid shirts you know waiting for deer season and so we had them all up there and i said listen guys in 1994 your congressman voted for the crime bill which banned assault weapons and voted for the brady bill and you beat him because of it they all started kind of nodding their heads and shuffling their feet you know and i said here s what i want you to know i feel terrible about it because he did it for me and he did it because i needed his vote and i pleaded with him to do it so i said if a single person here has suffered any inconvenience in hunting or sport shooting in any way if all the stuff they told you about how we re going to come get your guns and mess with your lives if it was true then i want every one of you who experienced that to vote against me too because that guy did it for me but i said if that didn t happen they lied to you and you need to get even and so in republican new hampshire we got a majority of the vote why because people got to think about what they really felt and what really counted and what had really happened so i want to remind you of something else as you read the paper as happily for the next few months this is september of 1999 a year and six weeks before the election in june of 1992 three months before the election on june 2nd i won the primaries in california new jersey and ohio and became the first round the certain nominee of the democratic party and the next day the only thing in the press was but who cares if he won all these things we polled in the exit polls the voters in the california primary and they re really for perot they don t care anything about this guy we told them that he was no good and the voters agree with us we laid it out to them and they ate it and they re doing exactly what we tell them to do that s what they said this was three months three or four months before the election i was in third place not second third it s not a horse race you don t get any money if you show let me tell you something they re thinking about this race in iowa and they re thinking about in new hampshire and they re thinking about it in the headquarters of all the candidates at the sale barn at conway arkansas they re still thinking about the price of cattle and both parties would do well in washington to remember that if most people still think they re giving us a paycheck up here and they want us to keep working for them for a little while longer instead of dissolving into political indulgence but don t you believe all these people who write our epithet because of the money they have or because of what they say about this that or the other thing i m living proof that they can chisel a lot of tombstones for you before you have to lay down and you don t understand half of this stuff is designed to break your heart and your spirit anyway now here s what i want to tell you who knows what s going to happen next year my gut is we win because we ve done a good job for america because we had an argument over ideas and we turned out to be right and because i know what the differences are going to be for the issues going forward and i think we re right about that that s what i think but what i really want you to believe is the american people nearly always get it right and they have an extraordinary sense of enlightened self interest and if sometime during this whole process their minds will kick in and then their hearts will kick in and they ll do what they really believe and they ll give everybody that wants a vote a fair hearing they ll try to be fair and what we owe to them is to make sure that however they vote they know what they re doing and then whatever happens none of have any gripe but people who get caught up in politics as an end in itself who want the power the position rather than the purpose forget that no matter how much power you have and no matter how long you serve and i ve laughed at people i said i m glad we ve got this two term limit because if i could run three or four more time i probably would that s true but no matter how long you serve in the grand sweep of things it s like a minute or two i went to a memorial service for lane kirkland yesterday he was over 75 years old he seemed like a young fellow to me because he kept his spirit young but none of us are around here for very long we don t get to live very long we don t get to serve very long and we need to remember that this is all about the people that served us lunch today this is all about children that hillary and i were with this morning who got adopted because we used the power of the federal government to end the rules and the bureaucratic snarls that kept foster children from moving quickly into adopted homes this is really all about the american people and it is a gift to be able to serve and i believe it s a gift to be fortunate enough in this country to have the resources to give and i think we should walk out of this room thanking our lucky stars that we could be here today thanking god we got the chance to serve and test our ideas and being absolutely determined that we are going to be of good cheer of strong confidence and we re going to make absolutely sure the american people know why we stand for what we stand for and exactly what we intend to do in the 21st century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton24 9 99b bill_clinton thank you well i m glad to see you and i seemed to have recovered enough of my voice to get through this so i ll try to do that governor romer representative sanchez mayor archer joe andrew andy tobias and beth dozoretz and all of our team i wanted to begin by saying a simple thank you to all the members of the dnc and to the leaders i want to say a special word of thanks to the finance staff with whom i have been dealing a lot lately we ve been working hard and they ve done a very good job and we ve done a good job under pretty difficult circumstances raising the funds that our candidates and our party needs and i want to thank them for their work i want to congratulate the convention team that was announced governor romer lydia camarillo don foley and all the others thank you for your determination to make los angeles a great success and i want to thank my friend of many many years roy romer for the work that he has done for our party i will recommend to the dnc tomorrow that as governor romer moves on to this new responsibility we elect mayor rendell of philadelphia in the position of general chair for those of you who know him he has provided and absolutely astonishing leadership for us there we ve not had a governor in pennsylvania since i ve been president in the last election we carried the greater philadelphia area by 370 000 votes i think about 20 000 votes more than our margin in the state of pennsylvania and the city of philadelphia in 1996 for the first time the vice president and i had the same victory margin that president kennedy did in 1960 when there 400 000 more people there i say that to tell you i think our party has been well led and will be well led i just want to mention one thing that roy romer will always have on his resume in 1998 when we gained five seats in the midterm elections though we were out spent by 100 million 100 million and all the pundits said i want you to remember this as you re treated to more punditocracy over the next year all the pundits said we were going to be wiped out they were on all these shows i believe they ll lose 20 seats no i think they re going to lose 30 seats no i believe they might lost more and they re certainly going to lose five or six in the senate they ll never be able to stop anything there i heard it for a year it was a terrible senate election for us in terms of who was up who was not we lost no senate seats we gained five house seats and it was the first time since 1822 that the party of the president had won seats in the midterm of a second term thank you so for all of you that were part of that i thank you i thank you and i want to just take a few moments to try to talk about where we are in this moment as a country as a party by referring briefly to the recent past and by looking at the present and the future when i first announced for president it s amazing how much quicker things are happening now you know i did not even announce for president until october of 1991 it s september i feel like i ve been going through this campaign all my life and i m not even running but anyway back to the subject at hand in 1991 when i announced i asked for change in our party in our national leadership and in our country i asked america to embrace the new challenges that we faced with new ideas based on old fashioned values of opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community of all americans i asked that we have a new role a clearly defined role for our national government that didn t say we could solve all the problems but didn t say we could walk away from them either i asked us to stop demonizing government on the one hand but to stop defending everything government did on the other and instead to focus on what we could do to give the american people the tools to meet their challenges to solve their problems and then i asked the vice president to join the ticket we put out our economic plan and we asked the american people to give us a chance to put people first people gave us a chance in 92 we made a lot of very tough decisions we passed an economic plan i would remind you with not a single republican vote with the vice president breaking the tie in the senate and they told everybody in america we d raise their taxes even though for most people we hadn t and that it would be a disaster and that a recession was on the way then we passed a crime bill to put 100 000 police on the street to ban assault weapons we passed the brady bill they told everybody in america we re going to come take their guns away didn t they and in 1994 they put out their contract with america and they thumped us good they beat us good because the voters had not felt the benefits of the economic plan we had just passed the crime bill a couple of months before and for all they knew some government bureaucrat was going to knock on their door and take their guns away probably that alone cost us the house of representatives and everybody said same crowd said oh these guys can t win they re history remember that it s over i always believed if we got up every day and thought about the american people the kind of people i met in new hampshire that were being evicted from their homes and we just thought about the people that nobody else in washington seems to think about and we kept asking ourselves what is the right thing to do for them that we could marry good politics and good policy and it would work out all right well 1996 came around and the economy was cooking and the country was pulling back together and i went to new hampshire where they beat a congressman who voted for the crime bill with the assault weapons ban in it and i never will forget this i went in 96 to new hampshire you know i have a special feeling about the place they voted for me twice and they normally don t vote for democrats and i got all these people there and a bunch of them were kind of big old rural guys in their plaid shirts obviously hunters and i stood up before this crowd in new hampshire and i said you know in 1992 you voted for me to give me a chance then in 1994 you beat a congressman who voted for my crime bill i caused him to get beat because they told you that we were going to take your guns away and i feel terrible about it so here s what i want you to do if any one of you suffered any inconvenience at all at hunting season since we passed that bill i want you to vote against me too but if you didn t they lied to you and you need to get even and so a majority of the voters in new hampshire a state where both independents and republicans outnumber registered democrats agreed then in 1998 as i said under the leadership of our team we ratified the course the country was on i think it is very important a lot of you almost all of you come from somewhere else you actually live in america with real people and you go about your business every day and it seems that a huge part of our job every year is to make sure that people can think for themselves and follow their own instincts and see the world as they experience it and not be swayed too much either by the financial advantage of other side or the conventional wisdom that emanates out of washington so i want you to be of good cheer and proud because america is a better place than it was in 1992 you know i saw a survey the other day that said that times had been so good for so long the american people couldn t remember when it was bad and tended to give everybody good ratings on the economy bush hoover the whole crowd it s been good a long time so let s take just a little walk down memory lane here shall we in the 12 years before i became president the administrations told the american people the government was the problem and they railed against the government but under them the government got bigger not smaller and the deficits got bigger they said that supply side economics would overcome the laws of arithmetic that if you cut taxes and increased spending it would somehow balance the budget and boy we stuck with that theory for a long time we just kept doing the same thing over and over again and after 12 years we had quadrupled the debt of the united states of america we had very high interest rates and it actually did work in the short run my retired senior senator dale bumpers used to say if you let me write a couple billion dollars worth of hot checks i ll show you a good time too so you know it worked for a while you know we had all this money and who knew where it came from they just kept throwing this old money out there at us and so we got out of the early recession and got through 84 and got through 88 then lo and behold but we never could get a recovery really going we kept falling back kept falling back and lo and behold after the 88 election we found ourselves in the worst recession since the great depression and wages were stagnant unemployment was high and unlike previous recessions we couldn t exactly go into deficit spending because that s what got us there in the first place so the vice president and i went to the american people and we said look we re going to have to get rid of this thing and here s our plan to cut it in half and after we do that we ll go on and get rid of it we ve got to do it because otherwise for the people who care about the business economy we re never going to get interest rates down we re not going to be competitive in the global economy and for our liberals that want the government to have money to invest in social programs and education we re never going to do it because the budget s paralyzed with the deficit and we d gotten to the point where we were spending about 15 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes just to pay interest on the debt so we said we ll find a way to do it it won t be easy it will make a lot of people mad might have to get rid of a bunch of stuff but if you vote for us we ll go after the deficit we ll continue to invest in the education of our children science and technology and helping the environment but we ll get rid of a bunch of stuff too and we ll give you a new government that s smaller but more active in the ways it needs to be and the people gave us a chance and it was an argument when we were elected that is we made an argument to the american people and in 94 in their lives it was still an argument and we won the argument in 92 we lost the argument in 94 but the reason we won it in 96 and 98 is it wasn t an argument anymore there were facts out there in people s lives so the debate took on a whole different turn when people s lives real people s lives had been changed and now we have the longest peacetime expansion in our history instead of the worst recession since the great depression we have over 19 million jobs instead of a handful we have rising wages instead of stagnant wages we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years and the lowest crime rate in 26 years folks this is not an argument anymore it s a fact and you should be proud of it thank you instead of a 290 billion deficit we ve got a 99 billion surplus and projected surpluses into the future for years the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we ve cleaned up three times as many toxic waste dumps as they did in 12 years ninety percent of our kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of this country nearly everybody now can afford to go to college because of the hope scholarship and the other college aid we ve provided the strategy has been validated you can get rid of the deficit and still invest in the things you have to invest in we ve eliminated hundreds of programs but nearly doubled investment in education while getting rid of the deficit you can expand trade in ways that help ordinary people you can balance the environment and the economy and you can balance work and family and i think this is very very important for the american people to make decisions now about where we go from now to 2000 because you know a lot of political rhetoric since people always want to change and that s a good thing not a bad thing by the way but a lot of political rhetoric is premised on the fact that we were all born yesterday the older i get the more i wish that was true it would be nice for individuals like me but very bad for a country so we can t allow a collective amnesia here there is a history here there was a clash of ideas then there was a test of ours just like there was a test of theirs so the question is not whether we re going to change but how are we going to keep changing here now what are we going to do with this surplus i vetoed their tax bill yesterday you all know that now but you know i will say again i still believe there is the opportunity for us to work together this is not an election yet i mean the election may be going on in the newspapers every day but here in the minds of the american people they still think we should be drawing a paycheck to work for them where you live for most people the election is not going on if you live in iowa or new hampshire it s already going on if you live in arkansas you re still worried about the price of cattle so we got hired to show up for work and we still get a paycheck here every two weeks all these guys in congress we still get paid and i believe that it is imperative the reason i vetoed the tax bill is it would make it impossible for america to meet our long term challenges and we can do a lot of that now before the next election what are they number one the aging of america we re going to double the number of people over 65 in 30 years i hope to be one of them the aging of america that s a big problem not only for those of us in the baby boom who are going to age but for our children and grandchildren why because we re the biggest generation in american history until the kids that are now in school they re bigger than we are but it took that long so now that we have the funds i believe we ought to save social security by that i mean i think we ought to by that i believe we ought to do some special things most importantly we ought to run the life of that trust fund out at least 50 years that will take you through the life span of the baby boomers when the generational balance will tend to right itself i think we ought to do something for elderly women who are retired they re the fastest group of seniors and they tend to be poorer than the rest of our seniors and living on their own and i personally would like to see the earnings limitation lifted because i think we ought to encourage our seniors who want to work who want to work to work and not penalize them for doing so i think we ought to do something about medicare it s supposed to go broke in 15 years and as all of you know if you deal with health care at all in the balanced budget act of 1997 as we feared the one thing that hasn t worked out very well is it s clear to me that the cuts in medicare in terms of teaching hospitals rural hospitals therapeutic services nursing homes that the cuts were too severe and we have to put some more money back in it so we ve give the congress a plan that would lengthen the life of the medicare trust fund to 2027 and that s the longest it s been alive believe me the trust fund in who know when and it would provide for a modest affordable but significant prescription drug coverage now this is a big deal if you were designing a medicare program if there were no medicare and we were creating it today we would absolutely have a drug benefit in it because a lot of people just stay out of the hospital a lot of people just stay alive longer a lot of people just stay healthy longer we would never consider having such a program without covering prescription drugs and because we don t about 75 percent of our seniors don t have affordable adequate coverage and we can do this now and we can do it without breaking the bank because there are also some structural changes we can make which will save a lot of money over the next few years i believe that s the first thing i think we need to meet the challenge of our children s education we have the largest and most diverse group of children in the history of america every one of them needs a world class education every one of them if we if i had allowed this tax bill to become law we would have had to have huge cuts in education or spend one half of the surplus attributable to social security taxes which would have really put us in the pickle with the seniors about to retire the baby boomers about to retire so i gave the congress a plan that would save social security and medicare continue to invest in education and defense and the other things that are important and do it in a way that over the next 15 years would pay down the debt so that in 15 years for the first time since andy jackson was president we d be out of debt as a country debt free now they think that s a bad idea on the other side and they re supposed to be the conservative party why should the progressive party for getting us out of debt why should the democrats be for i mean we re supposed to be more liberal than them we want to help poor people why in the wide world should we be for that i ll tell you why we live in a global economy where interest rates are set globally you saw what happened to asia a couple of years ago when everybody all of a sudden overnight decided it wasn t such a good place to invest and all of a sudden all of these countries that thought they were doing a good job woke up with a severe headache and we ve seen this sort of thing happen no the decisions aren t always rational and fair but we know that money is an international commodity and interest rates therefore are globally set although we can all influence them obviously the federal reserve can influence them others can if we could take ourselves out of debt publicly held debt which is what i propose for the first time since 1835 here s what would happen for the next generation even if we have a recession and we had to borrow some money later to keep things going interest rates would be much lower because the government wouldn t be competing with you for the money that means all the working people people like those who work in this hotel here their credit card bills would be lower their monthly car payments would be lower your home mortgage payment would be lower your college loan payment would be lower all the people we represent would be better off if we could have long term low interest rates and lower inflation and that s why we ought to be for this now people that have lots of money and don t have to work very hard i hope i ll be one of them one day too i doubt it you know they re okay with high interest rates they just move their money around and make more money but we should be for this conservative position because we have a progressive conscience and heart and so this is a plan that the vice president and i and our administration have asked congress to adopt there are plenty of things that we can work together with the republicans on to work this out but we ought to save social security and medicare keep investing in education and get this country out of debt and if we could make an agreement i might say there s another reason the republicans ought to be for it so if we could make this agreement and keep the thing going on then all their campaign speeches for the 2000 elections would make more sense because right now every one of their presidential candidates is out there telling us that they want to spend more money on defense or pay our service men and women more you know they don t want to stop investing in education or whatever it is they re saying out there and every one of them is for this tax bill that i vetoed and if it became law they d all be stuck every one of their campaign speeches would be bogus because there would be no money to pay for all these things they re out there promising the voters so they ought to be for what i m doing too i m saving them a red face in 2000 everybody ought to be for it but just think of this think of how proud we can feel if we were to lift the burden not only off the baby boomers but off our children and grandchildren of the baby boom retirement by saving social security and medicare if we were to guarantee a generation of lower interest rates and greater investment and more jobs and higher incomes by getting this country out of debt if we really committed ourselves to a world class education for every child in this country without regard to their race to their background or where they lived these are big things and we have to lay the foundation now and as you look ahead just remember there really are differences between these two parties that are honest and heart felt you know we want to save social security not privatize it and leave individual seniors to the luck of their own investments we want to save medicare not force seniors by pricing systems into managed care plans and the people that want to do that don t even want to vote for a patients bill of rights we want a real enforceable patients bill of rights and their leadership and a lot of their folks are still trying to find a way not to do that this is the party that opposed family and medical leave before now they re against the patients bill of rights remember how they told us family and medical leave is going to bankrupt the country it s a terrible thing millions of people millions of people have taken time off now millions because of a baby being born or a parent being sick millions of people and every year we ve set a new record for new small businesses formed they were wrong and we were right about that we want to close the gun show loophole in the brady bill why why we want to do that because now 400 000 people who had criminal backgrounds or were otherwise unfit to get a handgun have been blocked by the brady bill but as they know that more and more people are going to use the gun shows or the urban flea markets so we want to close the loophole and do background checks it s the same old thing you know and the same old crowd s against it and it s so interesting it s funny to me when they were against the brady bill they told us that crooks didn t buy guns in gun shops anyway so the brady bill was a total waste it was just a burden on poor gun shop owners and poor gun buyers because no crooks the guns the crooks they said they all get their guns at the gun shows and the flea markets that s what they said then so now i say okay let s do the background checks and they say oh we can t do that it s too burdensome and when we asked the leadership of the other party to do it when we asked the candidates running for president to do it they flew like a covey of quails back to the nest of the nra there are differences between the two parties and again in 92 it was an argument because this issue of what is a sensible way to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children had not been seriously debated for 30 years since or then 24 years since robert kennedy and martin luther king were assassinated and we had a brief all to brief burst of focus on this thanks to the leadership of president johnson who like me came out of a hunting culture and like me understood what was true about what the other side was saying and what it was not as a result they don t like either one of us very much but i m telling you folks this is a big deal going forward this is a big deal we have given you the lowest crime rate in 26 years by doing what law enforcement people and community leaders say makes sense but this country s still too dangerous there are still too many people getting killed with people with mental health problems walking around with guns a lot of these horrible killings we re seeing here we need to do more to help these people we need people identifying these people and getting them help quicker and doing things you re trying to stop some of this stuff from going on but you know we can create a country in which everybody wants to go hunting can go hunting everybody who wants to be a sport shooter can do it and we can still stop putting weapons into the hands of children criminals and people who are unstable we can do that we got the crime rate down to a 26 year low but it s too high we can make this the safest big country in the world and the american people will make that decision in the next election by the decision they make there are honest differences between us and what i want to say to you is thank you let s get as much done as we can people still where you live most of them don t think we re in a presidential election that s something that happens after the conventions they think that they re paying good taxes to pay our salary and they d like us to work a while longer and so let s do that and as you go into the next election don t fight with people when they say we need a change tell them we certainly do we always need a change the question is not whether we re going to change but what kind of change we re going to make and are we going to change based on all the good things that are going on in america now or would we instead take a u turn and go back to the stuff that got us in so much trouble before the vice president and i came here and got the help of the fine members of congress and others who have worked with us that is the issue and you don t have to argue so much anymore you ve got evidence now we ll be at a financial disadvantage of course one of the interesting consequences of the recovery of our administration the economic recovery we sparked is we ve given all those republicans a lot more money to spend on politics you know every time i see the total amount of money they re spending i think there s one more statistic for our economic plan and some more evidence that some folks never learn so we ll do that the last thing i want to tell you is be of good cheer let me tell you something i come to this hotel and give a lot of speeches as you might imagine and today i came in and they had six working people from the hotel in their uniforms to greet me not the executives not the management people that work here and they gave me my very own employee id card they re the people we re fighting for you just imagine you have an employee id card every day when we fight for the minimum wage and we fight to save and reform medicare and social security and we fight for the education of our children when we fight to let disabled people keep their medicaid when they go to work so they can go into the work force we fight for all these things when we fight for one america across all the lines that divide us when we fight for the employment and non discrimination act when we fight for the hate crimes legislation we fight for these things because we identify with each other it s a long time between now and november of 2000 in june of 1992 you know where i was in the polls not behind third third this is not a horse race you don t collect any money if you show but you know what i thought i ll never forget june 2 1992 we win the california primary and we win in new jersey and we win in ohio and we have enough votes to be nominated on the first ballot and the story the next day is oh but we did exit polls in california and what they really want is mr perot and not governor clinton and you know i got that probably because i d had such wonderful national press during the entire nominating process but then what happened then the election started for the real people then it wasn t they weren t you know sort of saying well this is what i ve heard and this is sort of this vague thing then it became real and people began to look and listen and they opened not just their minds but their hearts and they get feel about these things you know and the american people nearly always get it right that s why we re still around here after all this time that s why we re still around here it s the longest lasting great democracy in history they nearly always get it right but you have to help them make sure that they hear every element of our side a lot of times young people come to me and ask me for advice on running for office and i say i always had one rule i wanted to make sure that by election day everybody that voted against me knew exactly what they were doing you think about that in a democracy that s what you want that s what you want our party has been revitalized people all over the world now are trying to do their versions of what we have done to marry fiscal responsibility and a strong national posture involved in the rest of the world with compassionate policies at home that bring people together and lift people up and it s working you think about having your own employee id card and let s not ever forget who we re here for why we belong to our party and why we did all this and let s just work like crazy keeping a good frame of mind and i ll bet you anything it will come out all right thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton25 1 94 bill_clinton thank you very much mr speaker mr president members of the 103rd congress my fellow americans i m not at all sure what speech is in the teleprompter tonight but i hope we can talk about the state of the union i ask you to begin by recalling the memory of the giant who presided over this chamber with such force and grace tip o neill like to call himself a man of the house and he surely was that but even more he was a man of the people a bricklayer s son who helped to build the great american middle class tip o neill never forgot who he was where he came from or who sent him here tonight he s smiling down on us for the first time from the lord s gallery but in his honor may we too always remember who we are where we come from and who sent us here if we do that we will return over and over again to the principle that if we simply give ordinary people equal opportunity quality education and a fair shot at the american dream they will do extraordinary things we gather tonight in a world of changes so profound and rapid that all nations are tested our american heritage has always been to master such change to use it to expand opportunity at home and our leadership abroad but for too long and in too many ways that heritage was abandoned and our country drifted for 30 years family life in america has been breaking down for 20 years the wages of working people have been stagnant or declining for the 12 years of trickle down economics we built a false prosperity on a hollow base as our national debt quadrupled from 1989 to 1992 we experienced the slowest growth in a half century for too many families even when both parents were working the american dream has been slipping away in 1992 the american people demanded that we change a year ago i asked all of you to join me in accepting responsibility for the future of our country well we did we replaced drift and deadlock with renewal and reform and i want to thank every one of you here who heard the american people who broke gridlock who gave them the most successful teamwork between a president and a congress in 30 years this congress produced a budget that cut the deficit by half a trillion dollars cut spending and raised income taxes on only the wealthiest americans this congress produced tax relief for millions of low income workers to reward work over welfare it produced nafta it produced the brady bill now the brady law and thank you jim brady for being here and god bless you sir this congress produced tax cuts to reduce the taxes of nine out of 10 small businesses who use the money to invest more and create jobs it produced more research and treatment for aids more childhood immunizations more support for women s health research more affordable college loans for the middle class a new national service program for those who want to give something back to their country and their communities for higher education a dramatic increase in high tech investments to move us from a defense to a domestic hightech economy this congress produced a new law the motor voter bill to help millions of people register to vote it produced family and medical leave all passed all signed into law with not one single veto these accomplishments were all commitments i made when i sought this office and in fairness they all had to be passed by you in this congress but i am persuaded that the real credit belongs to the people who sent us here who pay our salaries who hold our feet to the fire but what we do here is really beginning to change lives let me just give you one example i will never forget what the family and medical leave law meant to just one father i met early one sunday morning in the white house it was unusual to see a family there touring early sunday morning but he had his wife and his three children there one of them in a wheelchair i came up and after we had our picture taken and had a little visit i was walking off and that man grabbed me by the arm and he said mr president let me tell you something my little girl here is desperately ill she s probably not going to make it but because of the family leave law i was able to take time off to spend with her the most important time i ever spent in my life without losing my job and hurting the rest of my family it means more to me than i will ever be able to say don t you people up here ever think what you do doesn t make a difference it does though we are making a difference our work has just begun many americans still haven t felt the impact of what we ve done the recovery still hasn t touched every community or created enough jobs incomes are still stagnant there s still too much violence and not enough hope in too many places abroad the young democracies we are strongly supporting still face very difficult times and look to us for leadership and so tonight let us resolve to continue the journey of renewal to create more and better jobs to guarantee health security for all to reward work over welfare to promote democracy abroad and to begin to reclaim our streets from violent crime and drugs and gangs to renew our own american community last year we began to put our house in order by tackling the budget deficit that was driving us toward bankruptcy we cut 255 billion in spending including entitlements and over 340 separate budget items we froze domestic spending and used honest budget numbers led by the vice president we launched a campaign to reinvent government we cut staff cut perks even trimmed the fleet of federal limousines after years of leaders whose rhetoric attacked bureaucracy but whose actions expanded it we will actually reduce it by 252 000 people over the next five years by the time we have finished the federal bureaucracy will be at its lowest point in 30 years because the deficit was so large and because they benefitted from tax cuts in the 1980s we did ask the wealthiest americans to pay more to reduce the deficit so on april 15th the american people will discover the truth about what we did last year on taxes only the top 1 yes listen the top 1 2 percent of americans as i said all along will pay higher income tax rates let me repeat only the wealthiest 1 2 percent of americans will face higher income tax rates and no one else will and that is the truth of course there were as there always are in politics naysayers who said this plan wouldn t work but they were wrong when i became president the experts predicted that next year s deficit would be 300 billion but because we acted those same people now say the deficit is going to be under 180 billion 40 percent lower then was previously predicted our economic program has helped to produce the lowest core inflation rate and the lowest interest rates in 20 years and because those interest rates are down business investment and equipment is growing at seven times the rate of the previous four years auto sales are way up home sales are at a record high millions of americans have refinanced their homes and our economy has produced 1 6 million private sector jobs in 1993 more than were created in the previous four years combined the people who supported this economic plan should be proud of its early results proud but everyone in this chamber should know and acknowledge that there is more to do next month i will send you one of the toughest budgets ever presented to congress it will cut spending in more than 300 programs eliminate 100 domestic programs and reform the ways in which governments buy goods and services this year we must again make the hard choices to live within the hard spending ceilings we have set we must do it we have proved we can bring the deficit down without choking off recovery without punishing seniors of the middle class and without putting our national security at risk if you will stick with this plan we will post three consecutive years of declining deficits for the first time since harry truman lived in the white house and once again the buck stops here our economic plan also bolsters our strength and our credibility around the world once we reduce the deficit and put the steel back into our competitive edge the world echoed with the sound of falling trade barriers in one year with nafta with gatt with our efforts in asia and the national export strategy we did more to open world markets to american products than at any time in the last two generations that means more jobs and rising living standards for the american people low deficits low inflation low interest rates low trade barriers and high investments these are the building blocks of our recovery but if we want to take full advantage of the opportunities before us in the global economy you all know we must do more as we reduce defense spending i ask congress to invest more in the technologies of tomorrow defense conversion will keep us strong militarily and create jobs for our people here at home as we protect our environment we must invest in the environmental technologies of the future which will create jobs this year we will fight for a revitalized clean water act and a safe drinking water act and a reformed superfund program and the vice president is right we must also work with the private sector to connect every classroom every clinic every library every hospital in america into a national information super highway by the year 2000 think of it instant access to information will increase productivity will help to educate our children it will provide better medical care it will create jobs and i call on the congress to pass legislation to establish that information super highway this year as we expand opportunity and create jobs no one can be left out we must continue to enforce fair lending and fair housing and all civil rights laws because america will never be complete in its renewal until everyone shares in its bounty but we all know too we can do all these things put our economic house in order expand world trade target the jobs of the future guarantee equal opportunity but if we re honest we ll all admit that this strategy still cannot work unless we also give our people the education training and skills they need to seize the opportunities of tomorrow we must set tough world class academic and occupational standards for all our children and give our teachers and students the tools they need to meet them our goals 2000 proposal will empower individual school districts to experiment with ideas like chartering their schools to be run by private corporations or having more public school choice to do whatever they wish to do as long as we measure every school by one high standard are our children learning what they need to know to compete and win in the global economy goals 2000 links world class standards to grass roots reforms and i hope congress will pass it without delay our school to work initiative will for the first time link school to the world of work providing at least one year of apprenticeship beyond high school after all most of the people we re counting on to build our economic future won t graduate from college it s time to stop ignoring them and start empowering them we must literally transform our out dated unemployment system into a new reemployment system the old unemployment system just sort of kept you going while you waited for your old job to come back we ve got to have a new system to move people into new and better jobs because most of those old jobs just don t come back and we know that the only way to have real job security in the future to get a good job with a growing income is to have real skills and the ability to learn new ones so we ve got to streamline today s patchwork of training programs and make them a source of new skills for our people who lose their jobs reemployment not unemployment must become the centerpiece of our economic renewal i urge you to pass it in this session of congress and just as we must transform our unemployment system so must we also revolutionize our welfare system it doesn t work it defies our values as a nation if we value work we can t justify a system that makes welfare more attractive than work if people are worried about losing their health care if we value responsibility we can t ignore the 34 billion in child support absent parents ought to be paying to millions of parents who are taking care of their children if we value strong families we can t perpetuate a system that actually penalizes those who stay together can you believe that a child who has a child gets more money from the government for leaving home than for staying home with a parent or a grandparent that s not just bad policy it s wrong and we ought to change it i worked on this problem for years before i became president with other governors and with members of congress of both parties and with the previous administration of another party i worked on it with people who were on welfare lots of them and i want to say something to everybody here who cares about this issue the people who most want to change this system are the people who are dependent on it they want to get off welfare they want to go back to work they want to do right by their kids i once had a hearing when i was a governor and i brought in people on welfare from all over america who had found their way to work the woman from my state who testified was asked this question what s the best thing about being off welfare and in a job and without blinking an eye she looked at 40 governors and she said when my boy goes to school and they say what does your mother do for a living he can give an answer these people want a better system and we ought to give it to them last year we began this we gave the states more power to innovate because we know that a lot of great ideas come from outside washington and many states are already using it then this congress took a dramatic step instead of taxing people with modest incomes into poverty we helped them to work their way out of poverty by dramatically increasing the earned income tax credit it will lift 15 million working families out of poverty rewarding work over welfare making it possible for people to be successful workers and successful parents now that s real welfare reform but there is more to be done this spring i will send you a comprehensive welfare reform bill that builds on the family support act of 1988 and restores the basic values of responsibility we ll say to teenagers if you have a child out of wedlock we will no longer give you a check to set up a separate household we want families to stay together say to absent parents who aren t paying their child support if you re not providing for your children we ll garnish your wages suspend your license track you across state lines and if necessary make some of you work off what you owe people who bring children into this world cannot and must not walk away from them but to all those who depend on welfare we should offer ultimately a simple compact we ll provide the support the job training the child care you need for up to two years but after that anyone who can work must in the private sector wherever possible in community services if necessary that s the only way we ll ever make welfare what it ought to be a second chance not a way of life i know it will be difficult to tackle welfare reform in 1994 at the same time we tackle health care but let me point out i think it is inevitable and imperative it is estimated that one million people are on welfare today because it s the only way they can get health care coverage for their children those who choose to leave welfare for jobs without health benefits and many entry jobs don t have health benefits find themselves in the incredible position of paying taxes that help to pay for health care coverage for those who made the other choice to stay on welfare no wonder people leave work and go back to welfare to get health care coverage we have got to solve the health care problem to have real welfare reform so this year we will make history by reforming the health care system and i would say to you all of you my fellow public servants this is another issue where the people are way ahead of the politicians that may not be popular with either party but it happens to be the truth you know the first lady has received now almost a million letters from people all across america and from all walks of life i d like to share just one of them with you richard anderson of reno nevada lost his job and with it his health insurance two weeks later his wife judy suffered a cerebral aneurysm he rushed her to the hospital where she stayed in intensive care for 21 days the andersons bills were over 120 000 although judy recovered and richard went back to work at 8 an hour the bills were too much for them and they were literally forced into bankruptcy mrs clinton he wrote to hillary no one in the united states of america should have to lose everything they ve worked for all their lives because they were unfortunate enough to become ill it was to help the richard and judy andersons of america that the first lady and so many others have worked so hard and so long on this health care reform issue we owe them our thanks and our action i know there are people here who say there s no health care crisis tell it to richard and judy anderson tell it to the 58 million americans who have no coverage at all for some time each year tell it to the 81 million americans with those preexisting conditions those folks are paying more or they can t get insurance at all or they can t ever change their jobs because they or someone in their family has one of those preexisting conditions tell it to the small businesses burdened by the skyrocketing cost of insurance most small businesses cover their employees and they pay on average 35 percent more in premiums than big businesses or government or tell it to the 76 percent of insured americans three out of four whose policies have lifetime limits and that means they can find themselves without any coverage at all just when they need it the most so if any of you believe there s no crisis you tell it to those people because i can t there are some people who literally do not understand the impact of this problem on people s lives and all you have to do is go out and listen to them just go talk to them anywhere in any congressional district in this country they re republicans and democrats and independents it doesn t have a lick to do with party they think we don t get it and it s time we show them that we do get it from the day we began our health care initiative has been designed to strengthen what is good about our health care system the world s best health care professionals cutting edge research and wonderful research institutions medicare for older americans none of this none of it should be put at risk but we re paying more and more money for less and less care every year fewer and fewer americans even get to choose their doctors every year doctors and nurses spend more time on paperwork and less time with patients because of the absolute bureaucratic nightmare the present system has become this system is riddled with inefficiency with abuse with fraud and everybody knows it in today s health care system insurance companies call the shots they pick whom they cover and how they cover them they can cut off your benefits when you need your coverage the most they are in charge what does it mean it means every night millions of well insured americans go to bed just an illness an accident or a pink slip away from having no coverage or financial ruin it means every morning millions of americans go to work without any health insurance at all something the workers in no other advanced country in the world do it means that every year more and more hard working people are told to pick a new doctor because their boss has had to pick a new plan and countless others turn down better jobs because they know if they take the better job they will lose their health insurance if we just let the health care system continue to drift our country will have people with less care fewer choices and higher bills now our approach protects the quality of care and people s choices it builds on what works today in the private sector to expand employer based coverage to guarantee private insurance for every american and i might say employer based private insurance for every american was proposed 20 years ago by president richard nixon to the united states congress it was a good idea then and it s a better idea today why do we want guaranteed private insurance because right now nine out of 10 people who have insurance get it through their employers and that should continue and if your employer is providing good benefits at reasonable prices that should continue too that ought to make the congress and the president feel better our goal is health insurance everybody can depend on comprehensive benefits that cover preventive care and prescription drugs health premiums that don t just explode when yo get sick or you get older the power no matter how small your business is to choose dependable insurance at the same competitive rates governments and big business get today one simple form for people who are sick and most of all the freedom to choose a plan and the right to choose your own doctor our approach protects older americans every plan before the congress proposes to slow the growth of medicare the difference is this we believe those savings should be used to improve health care for senior citizens medicare must be protected and it should cover prescription drugs and we should take the first steps in covering long term care to those who would cut medicare without protecting seniors i say the solution to today s squeeze on middle class working people s health care is not to put the squeeze on middle class retired people s health care we can do better than that when it s all said and done it s pretty simple to me insurance ought to mean what it used to mean you pay a fair price for security and when you get sick health care s always there no matter what along with the guarantee of health security we all have to admit too there must be more responsibility on the part of all of us in how we use this system people have to take their kids to get immunized we should all take advantage of preventive care we must all work together to stop the violence that explodes our emergency rooms we have to practice better health habits and we can t abuse the system and those who don t have insurance under our approach will get coverage but they ll have to pay something for it too the minority of businesses that provide no insurance at all and in so doing shift the cost of the care of their employees to others should contribute something people who smoke should pay more for a pack of cigarettes everybody can contribute something if we want to solve the health care crisis there can t be any more something for nothing it will not be easy but it can be done now in the coming months i hope very much to work both democrats and republicans to reform a health care system by using the market to bring down costs and to achieve lasting health security but if you look at history we see that for 60 years this country has tried to reform health care president roosevelt tried president truman tried president nixon tried president carter tried every time the special interests were powerful enough to defeat them but not this time i know that facing up to these interests will require courage it will raise critical questions about the way we finance our campaigns and how lobbyists yield their influence the work of change frankly will never get any easier until we limit the influence of well financed interest who profit from this current system so i also must now to call on you to finish the job both houses began last year by passing tough and meaningful campaign finance reform and lobby reform legislation this year you know my fellow americans this is really a test for all of us the american people provide those of us in government service with terrific health care benefits at reasonable costs we have health care that s always there i think we need to give every hardworking tax paying american the same health care security they have already given to us i want to make this very clear i am open as i have said repeatedly to the best ideas of concerned members of both parties i have no special brief for any specific approach even in our own bill except this if you send me legislation that does not guarantee every american private health insurance that can never be taken away you will force me to take this pen veto the legislation and we ll come right back here and start all over again but i don t think that s going to happen i think we re ready to act now i believe that you re ready to act now and if you re ready to guarantee every american the same health care that you have health care that can never be taken away now not next year or the year after now is the time to stand with the people who sent us here now as we take these steps together to renew our strength at home we cannot turn away from our obligation to renew our leadership abroad this is a promising moment because of the agreements we have reached this year last year russia s strategic nuclear missiles soon will no longer be pointed at the united states nor will we point ours at them instead of building weapons in space russian scientists will help us to build the international space station of course there are still dangers in the world rampant arms proliferation bitter regional conflicts ethnic and nationalist tensions in many new democracies severe environmental degradation the world over and fanatics who seek to cripple the world s cities with terror as the world s greatest power we must therefore maintain our defenses and our responsibilities this year we secured indictments against terrorists and sanctions against those who harbor them we worked to promote environmentally sustainable economic growth we achieved agreements with ukraine with belarus with kazahkstan to eliminate completely their nuclear arsenal we are working to achieve a korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons we will seek early ratification of a treaty to ban chemical weapons worldwide and earlier today we joined with over 30 nations to begin negotiations on a comprehensive ban to stop all nuclear testing but nothing nothing is more important to our security than our nation s armed forces we honor their contributions including those who are carrying out the longest humanitarian air lift in history in bosnia those who will complete their mission in somalia this year and their brave comrades who gave their lives there our forces are the finest military our nation has ever had and i have pledged that as long as i am president they will remain the best equipped the best trained and the best prepared fighting force on the face of the earth last year i proposed a defense plan that maintains our post cold war security at a lower cost this year many people urged me to cut our defense spending further to pay for other government programs i said no the budget i send to congress draws the line against further defense cuts it protects the readiness and quality of our forces ultimately the best strategy is to do that we must not cut defense further i hope the congress without regard to party will support that position ultimately the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere democracies don t attack each other they make better trading partners and partners in diplomacy that is why we have supported you and i the democratic reformers in russia and in the other states of the former soviet bloc i applaud the bipartisan support this congress provided last year for our initiatives to help russia ukraine and the other states through their epic transformations our support of reform must combine patience for the enormity of the task and vigilance for our fundamental interest and values we will continue to urge russia and the other states to press ahead with economic reforms and we will seek to cooperate with russia to solve regional problems while insisting that if russian troops operate in neighboring states they do so only when those states agree to their presence and in strict accord with international standards but we must also remember as these nations chart their own futures and they must chart their own futures how much more secure and more prosperous our own people will be if democratic and market reform succeed all across the former communist bloc our policy has been to support that move and that has been the policy of the congress we should continue it that is why i went to europe earlier this month to work with our europeans partners to help to integrate all the former communist countries into a europe that has a possibility of becoming unified for the first time in its entire history its entire history based on the simple commitments of all nations in europe to democracy to free markets and to respect for existing borders with our allies we have created a partnership for peace that invites states from the former soviet bloc and other non nato members to work with nato in military cooperation when i met with central europe s leaders including lech walesa and vaclav havel men who put their lives on the line for freedom i told them that the security of their region is important to our country s security this year we must also do more to support democratic renewal and human rights and sustainable development all around the world we will ask congress to ratify the new gatt accord we will continue standing by south africa as it works its way through its bold and hopeful and difficult transition to democracy we will convene a summit of the western hemisphere s leaders from canada to the tip of south america and we will continue to press for the restoration of true democracy in haiti and as we build a more constructive relationship with china we must continue to insist on clear signs of improvement in that nation s human right record we will also work for new progress toward the middle east peace last year the world watched yitzhak rabin and yassir arafat at the white house when they had their historic handshake of reconciliation but there is a long hard road ahead and on that road i am determined that i and our administration will do all we can to achieve a comprehensive and lasting peace for all the peoples of the region now there are some in our country who argue that with the cold war america should turn its back on the rest of the world many around the world were afraid we would do just that but i took this office on a pledge that had no partisan tinge to keep our nation secure by remaining engaged in the rest of the world and this year because of our work together enacting nafta keeping our military strong and prepared supporting democracy abroad we have reaffirmed america s leadership america s engagement and as a result the american people are more secure than they were before but while americans are more secure from threats abroad i think we all know that in many ways we are less secure from threats here at home dem wjclinton25 1 96 bill_clinton mayor rice mayor daley mayor helmke my old classmate it s good to see you here mr vice president you are the only person in the country that could have transformed a straight man routine into the best comedy act in america i used to be able to be on a platform with someone i liked and when they cracked a joke i d just write it down and when no one else was looking i would use it all of his jokes are now so carefully bound to the persona he has created they aren t stealable they don t even need to be patented anymore we are all of us very glad to have you here i speak for secretary cisneros secretary pena for carol browner we re glad to have you here in your house i want to say a word of thanks to tom cochran for being a good representative of your interests and your concerns and of working so closely with marcia hale and others here in the white house i want to thank you for the work you do every day and for so many of you who have made me feel welcome over the last three years as i ve come to your cities as i said in the state of the union a couple of days ago the state of the union is strong we have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation we ve had in 27 years we ve had 7 8 million new jobs those big numbers don t mean much to people they really want to know how they are doing in their communities how is it on my block but i think we can take some encouragement from knowing that the unemployment rate has dropped 3 5 percent in detroit it s about 4 5 percent total in chicago it s dropped to under 5 percent in philadelphia 2 percent decline in los angeles 2 5 percent decline in new york we could go through city and city and community after community to say that that is good news it is good news that our country is helping peace to take root around the world from the middle east to bosnia it is good news that all over our country we see a lot of the social indicators that have troubled so many of us for so long turning around the crime rate the welfare rolls the food stamp rolls the poverty rate the teen pregnancy rate all down over the last two to three years that is very very good news but we also know that we ve got a lot of work to do and we know the world is changing very quickly and we know that there are an awful lot of americans that have not been privileged to participate in this recovering economy and we know that saying that all these things are going down masks the fact that the crime rate the welfare rolls the food stamp rates the poverty rolls the teen pregnancy rates they re all still far too high unacceptably high in the state of the union address as i was preparing for it i really tried to say to myself if i were in anybody s living room what would i say to them if i were just talking to one family about what the future of our country would be like five years from now 10 years from now 20 years from now what is it i would say that we have to do to keep the american dream alive for all of our people to keep this country coming together and moving together around its basic values and to maintain the leadership of the united states in the world that is what i tried to talk about on tuesday night i think we should start with our families because we know now that families that work together and stay together are almost never in poverty we know that their children are far less likely to have the problems which have consumed so much of our time and our emotions and so much of the public treasure an important part of helping our families is passing the right kind of welfare reform not the wrong kind of welfare reform i believe since almost every parent in america has to work to make ends meet whether in a one or a two parent household it is perfectly acceptable to require people on welfare who can work to work i think we ought to do that we ought to be moving people from dependence to independence but it s also important to remember that we want people to succeeds as parents and as workers and that all of us have our first job is to our children that s why i say that i hope we can reach a bipartisan agreement on a welfare reform bill that will be very tough when it comes to work requirements and time limits and child support enforcement but will understand we need adequate child care and we need adequate support for those children because what we really want in america is for every single parent to be able to succeed at home and at work the second great challenge we have is to provide our people with the educational opportunities they need for the 21st century the 1990 census had if you went through all of the data it had one stunning piece of information that i personally felt was the most important information i got out of the 90 census it was the first time we could see from 1990 to 1980 looking backward one clear reason for the growing inequality in america why were so many middle class people working harder and harder and not getting ahead why was the rising tide not lifting all boats if you look at the 90 census you will see americans who had at least two years of education after high school tended to get jobs that they were able to keep where the incomes tended to grow those who didn t were in the other boat we have got to create a whole set of opportunities in education that will sustain the american dream for everyone we ve got to get more parents and teachers able to run their own schools and able to have flexibility from red tape but they ought to have national standards of excellence and a recognized way of measuring it and people should be held accountable for results more flexibility to meet higher standards and one of the things that we can do together one of the things the national government can do is to implement this initiative that the vice president has worked with the telecommunications industry to develop to hook up every school in every library in america to the internet by the year 2000 every single classroom and make sure that we not only have a hook up but that we have good software and skilled teachers so that every single one of our children will be part of the information age we re committed to that the third thing i think we have to recognize is that in this increasingly mobile economy we have to redefine what security means to a working family it s amazing the fortune 500 companies keep laying off people but there have been more people hired by just only by businesses owned by women in the last three years than have been laid off by the fortune 500 interesting statistic there is that much dynamism in this economy and all this change is real exciting unless except in the times when you come out on the short end golly elections are exciting unless you don t win them then they re less interesting so the big picture is very exciting but we have always recognized that the american people who are working hard and playing by the rules obeying the law and doing the very best they could were entitled to some level of security let me just give you one example about how the old security systems don t work and a lot of you particularly before you became public officials i m sure were involved in unemployment system as employers or employees where you paid if you were an employer you paid tax to the unemployment system the unemployment system was a great idea the way it worked for decades you paid the money in and then when times were tough and you had to lay your workers off they could at least draw a living wage a little less than they were making but a living wage until you called them back for decades 85 percent of the people who were laid off from work were called back to the job from which they were laid off today over 80 percent of the people who are laid off are not called back to the job from which they were laid off because of the changes in the economy so how do we deal with that for decades people had a pension they could rely on in addition to social security if they worked for a big company because they knew they d go to work for one company and they d stay there until their work career was over and the same thing with health insurance but a million people in america lost their health insurance in the last two years and we ve had real trouble trying to maintain the integrity of pension systems in december of 1994 and almost unanimous vote of the congress in both parties basically stabilized the pensions of 8 million americans that were in real trouble and 32 million more that could have gotten in trouble so how are we going to define this kind of security for the working families that you represent i think at a minimum we have to do the following things we have to give people access to affordable health insurance that they don t lose when they change jobs or when somebody in their family gets sick and there s a bipartisan bill before the congress today which they could adopt which would do that secondly we ought to recognize that people know their own best interests when they re laid off and we ought to do what we can to move help to them as quickly as people and what i favor doing is collapsing is 70 of the government s training programs which were each developed for little problems collapse them put the big pot of money there and when somebody in your community is laid off or is grossly underemployed and they would qualify for these training programs instead of having to figure out what training program for which they should sign up just send them a voucher and let them go to the local community college or whatever training institute is there then the third thing i think we have to do is to figure out a way to make it easier for small businesses and farmers particularly to take out their own pension plans for themselves and their employees there s a bill in the congress today it hardly costs any money but it would make some changes i think it was on of the top of the three or four priorities of the white house conference on small business it would make some changes which would make it possible for almost every business that could possibly afford to do it including a lot of them that cannot even afford the legal costs today to begin a pension program so these are good beginnings and they would strengthen your communities by enabling your families that are working out there in this more dynamic economy to succeed the fourth thing we have to do is do a better job of helping you to bring the crime rate down but you this is a great success story in america the crime rate is going down in most communities in this country thanks to the efforts that you and your police chiefs your police officers and your community leaders are making finally a couple of weeks ago there was a big cover story in one of our major magazines acknowledging that saying we can have some hope that we can drive crime down yesterday i was with mayor abramson in louisville and we sat and talked to the citizens and the community police officers that were working together in louisville just a few days ago i was with mayor lanier in houston we were conducting a funeral service for our friend barbara jordan and he was telling me about the work that they have done there to drive down juvenile crime they have 3 000 young people in a soccer program and 2 500 of them get their uniforms and shoes from the city they are kids that would never otherwise be able to afford to participate in that sort of activity these things are going on all over our country and we are taking our streets back and i want to say a little bit about this because this is the model we ve had together in fighting crime is the model that i believe we should try to replicate in other places we ve worked together we passed the crime bill of 1994 we passed the brady bill that needed to be a national law uniform standards 44 000 people with criminal records have not gotten handguns as a result of it we passed the assault weapons ban that needed to be a national law it wouldn t be worth you know a city ordinance on assault weapons a state law on assault weapons it wouldn t have worked we passed the crime bill and we said okay this money can only be used for police but that needed to be a national standard why because for 30 years we saw the violent crime rate triple and the aggregate size of america s police force only went up 10 percent but the attorney general worked very hard to clean away all the sort of bureaucratic hassles to getting the money no one said the cities decided whom to hire how to train them where they ll be deployed how they ll work the cities decide what the relationship with the communities are you make all the decisions of any significance within the framework of saying we ve got to go to community policing we ve got to drive this crime rate down that is the kind of community based partnership that i think ought to be the model and the results are pretty hard to quarrel with as all of you know now the only thing i want to say about that is we have made progress bringing the crime rate down but everybody knows it s still too high you go out and interview any 20 citizens in america and they ll tell you it s still one of their deepest concerns we have to keep working on this what should our goal be our goal should be to make the crime the exception rather than the rule it s a simple goal our goal should be to make crime the exception rather than the rule so that people feel comfortable when their kids are on the street playing people aren t afraid to walk down the street to the movie we know that we will never abolish crime in america you will never take we can t transform what is inside every human being but we could go back to a time when it s the exception rather than the rule and we have to keep working until we achieve that goal the other challenges that i put before the country were obviously the important ones that you ve worked on to make sure that we continue to protect the environment and that we find even more ways to grow the economy while we re cleaning up the environment instead of the reverse to maintain our country s leadership in the world and to give our government greater and greater and greater capacity to do more while it costs less and serve the people better and we don t have the era of big government is over but the era of strong effective government in partnership with people is not over we re not going back to a time when people can fend for themselves why do people come to cities in the first place what do cities give people the ability to make more of their lives together than they could if they were apart i mean the whole concept of cities is the symbol of what it is we all be trying to do in america people live together because they think they ll all be better off than if they were all out somewhere else by themselves that is the idea and that is to me the model that we ought to all have in our minds of what the role of government ought to be as we move into the 21st century to make people to make more of their own lives not to do anything for anybody that they ought to do for themselves but to help people make more of their own lives and that is the kind of partnership we have tried to have with you it is very difficult to do that and to say you re doing it in washington because everything here compulsively is filtered out to you through party politics no matter how hard we try to avoid it you don t have to worry about that quite as much as we do i think it was mayor laguardia who once said there is no republican or democratic way to clean the streets and i believe we need to take some of that wisdom and bring it back here there is yes a democratic and a republican way to balance the budget i understand that but there is also a whole lot of overlap and that s what we ought to be focused on so let me just mention four things very quickly that i know you ll be discussing here that i think ought to be the basis of our partnership within this framework that i outlined in the state of the union first of all i want to thank again the vice president and secretary cisneros for the work they ve done on empowerment zones and the enterprise communities we are trying to find ways to take the lessons we learned there and apply them to other communities and as we work through this budget and next year s budget i believe that there should be a bipartisan consensus to find ways to use the power of the federal government in ways that essentially help build public private partnerships to redevelop our cities and i would urge you to support that and to give us any other ideas you have for that we have the home initiative which all of you are familiar with which provides funds for you to build and rehabilitate houses for your citizens we continue to strongly support the community development block grants they ve been around a long time but they really are the symbol of what it is we re trying to do here are the subjects you do it be accountable at the end if you mess up we ll tell you but otherwise why should we be telling you how to do all this those community development block grants have worked well for america this is a stronger country because of the way that program worked we have secondly let me just make one other comment i believe that the way the secretary of housing and urban development has worked with you on the problem of homelessness has worked well too you know how to move the homeless people off your streets every community has a slightly different homeless problem and one of the things i would like to say is when we do this budget i know we re going to have to cut a lot of things but i think we ve made some real progress in dealing with homelessness in the last few years and i think it would be a great mistake if we reverse that progress i think it would be a great mistake if we reverse that progress we need to continue to reduce the number of homeless people on our street this again should not be a partisan issue i don t believe there is a single person in america that really believes that we should weaken our effort to do that the second thing we ve done is to work on these community development banks they re quite controversial now in the congress because they seem like an easy thing to cut because they haven t been fully implemented but if you look at the experience of the south shore development bank in chicago or if you look at the experience of any of the other microenterprise loan programs that have been done in the united states or if you look at how much our aid program has done in other countries setting up development banks in places where they would be a lot harder to start than it would in most of your cities it is obvious that if we had a source of capital to start more new businesses and small businesses no matter if they re just one person businesses in a lot of our poorest areas we could grow the economy more quickly there than anyplace else what s the greatest opportunity for american business today the distressed neighborhoods in our urban and rural areas where do the largest number of people live in america that we could use to expand the work force in a hurry or to expand the number of our consumers in a hurry in the distressed neighborhoods of our urban and isolated rural areas aid gave a 1 million grant several years ago to a central american country to set up a loan program an average loan was 300 apiece that loan program now accounts for one percent of all of the jobs in that country and the 1 million fund that aid put down there now has there s 4 million in that bank account now those loans have been paid back several times with interest over and over again if we really believe that free enterprise and not government spending is the answer to the problems of the inner city we re going to have to give them some free enterprise and free enterprise begins with capital and there is lots and lots and lots of evidence that this can be successful so i urge you to support that the third thing that i know is very important i think more mayors have mentioned this to me than any other single issue is our brownfields initiative and i want to thank carol browner for the work she has done on it we were getting ready to come over here and i was preparing it and i said we ought to call this browner s brownfields it sounds like a kids softball team you know it was great this is a very important thing if we can get these vacant spaces that you have to put fences around that basically divide neighborhoods and are inviting targets for all kinds of destructive things to turn back into safe sustainable economic endeavors we could do more in less time with less money to move our cities forward than nearly anything else we can do so we want to help communities clean up old waste sites by giving tax incentives to those who will buy an clean them up we want to clear away regulatory burdens we want to do whatever we can to support you but i know that the mayors have been on this issue and i just want to assure you that we want to be there with you and i believe again we can go broad bipartisan support for the brownfields initiative the fourth thing that i want to comment on is the reinvention of hud that mayor cisneros is overseeing i call him mayor when he starts talking to me about this hud has now got 81 field offices they ve moved huge numbers of people out of washington they re collapsing their divisions down to four basic programs for communities of over 150 000 there will be a single point of contact in the community so you can do all your business in one place grants that once required 12 separate applications will now require only one so that s the kind of flexibility that i think we ought to have our goal is to reach by the year 2000 67 5 percent homeownership in america we re already at a 15 year high right now we re moving and if we can keep going in this direction and you ll help us and we work together we can get up to the point where 67 and a half percent of the people are in their own homes that has never happened in the united states before and that again will carry with it a certain amount of economic growth and development in all your communities and let me just say one other word since secretary pena is here we have been quite successful and again have had a good support from the congress in our efforts to maximize the amount of money we re putting out through the department of transportation in communities for infrastructure development that s one place where we have worked together with hardly a hitch and because we have it s attracted hardly any notice but we re moving in the right direction and i want to thank you for doing that so these are the things that we believe we can do with you and i hope that they will be symbolic and will exemplify the kind of partnership that will take this country along way down the road let me just say one other thing about the budget since i gave the state of the union address there have been some encouraging things said by the congressional leaders about the prospects of our getting a budget agreement and continuing to work to bring the deficit down but i would remind you that we still have some roadblocks in the way that i think need to be cleared away i urge congress to keep the government open and to pass the straightforward continuing resolution until we pass the rest of the appropriations bills for this year we ve also seen news that just today of the serious consequences that could result if the congress was to default on the debt limit no mayor would ever consider doing such a thing the repercussions would be far too harmful and the congress should not either congress must choose not to shut the government down again and must choose to honor the full faith and credit of the united states we are a very great nation and we are a very great nation not just because we re big not just because we re wealthy and not just because we ve got a powerful military it s because people know that we stand for certain things they know we can be trusted they know we keep our word when the united states of america borrowed that money the united states gave its word it would honor its obligations and we should not under any circumstances for any reason ever ever not a single one of us break the word of the united states of america let me say too to all of you i have been very honored to fight the battles that we have fought together across party lines for the crime bill to end unfunded mandates you have been a source of great inspiration to me but this organization has been a source of inspiration for progressive positive change ever since you convinced a reluctant president hoover to sign a municipal assistance bill in the depression so i ask you to keep working with us help us to pass the community flexibility act help us to protect the community development banks help us to support the reform of hud help us to get real welfare reform help us to keep the crime rate coming down help us to do these things we can do these things if we do them together the cities are the model why did people begin to live in cities because they knew instinctively they could do things together that they could never do on their own america can do what we have to do if we do it together and the mayors the cities the community leaders can lead the way thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton25 10 96 bill_clinton thank you hello macon thank you so much thank you mr mayor thank you for a beautiful day in a beautiful city i m delighted to be here thank you for the macon whopee hockey jersey you know tomorrow is hillary s birthday maybe i ought to give that to her if that gets on the news before i get home tonight i m in deep trouble i want to thank all of our musicians here the central high school marching charger band the northeast high school raider band i thank the community church of god choir the new fellowship missionary baptist church choir the swift creek church choir thank you all i thank the mayor again for welcoming me here i thank mayor floyd adams who has come all the way from savannah to be with us one of the most beautiful cities in america thank you i thank the legislators and the others who are here i thank rosemary kaszans who s running for congress in georgia and wish her well i want to say a special word of thanks to the person who seeks to be your congressman here jim wiggins jim wiggins is really what a member of congress from this district ought to be a distinguished american veteran a distinguished prosecuting attorney who did an excellent job as the united states attorney here i frankly hated to lose him in that position but i was proud of him for coming back home and wanting to run for congress to try to give this district to the people of georgia and to its future thank you jim wiggins thank you richard gallow and the international brotherhood of police officers for your support one of the most moving things to me in this election has been to have every major law enforcement organization in the country endorse four more years for bill clinton and al gore we re making the streets of this country safer if you give us four more years we ll do a better job and people will feel safe in their streets in their neighborhoods and in their schools i want to say a special word of thanks too to congressman sanford bishop what a fine fine member of congress he has been he will be an even greater member of congress when you give a young man like him some more terms some more experience and greater capacity to help this state his district and the people so if any of you here live in his new district give him a boost he s earned it you need to help him thank you sanford bishop there are some people here too i know that herschel dober the deputy director of the department of veterans administration and mary lou kenner are up here on the stage they re veterans for clinton gore taking caravans all through georgia thank you very much there they are over there thank you i treasure your support i want to say now a special word about my friend governor zell miller zell miller spoke at the 92 convention about growing up in a house his mother built herself with her own hands it was about the most moving talk i ever heard at one of those political conventions maybe because it was so personal so human and because the political positions that zell miller holds flow out of the experience of his life he s been a teacher a united states marine and a brilliant brilliant governor of georgia he wrote the new platform that the democrats are running on and i got so tickled when our friends met in san diego and their nominee my opponent said they said well what about this platform do you agree with the things in this platform and he said oh i haven t read it they were running from their platform just like they re running from what they did in 1995 and early 96 well i want to tell you something folks i m not running from the platform zell miller wrote i m running on it and i m proud of the new democratic party that he s helped to chart i was honored to take zell miller to princeton university with me when i proposed an american version of georgia s hope scholarships to make two years of college as universal in america as a high school diploma is today and i thank you zell miller for that as well and i want to thank senator sam nunn for his early support for the ideas he has contributed to our administration for the work that he s done to make sure our military remains the strongest in the world and the many many contributions he has made to making georgia and america a better place there are some americorps folks out here sam nunn was out there supporting national service before i became president and when i got in office i was able to take the advocacy that sam nunn had had for so long and now we ve given 60 000 americans a chance to serve in their local community to solve problems at the grass roots level and pay their way through college thank you sam nunn senator nunn told you that very moving story about seeing the russian nuclear sub destroyed but he was characteristically too modest i wrote him a letter the other day and i said senator when the history of this era is written and people talk about how the cold war came to an end and how we moved into a bright new day of security the name of sam nunn will loom large because it was sam nunn s leadership along with senator dick lugar that got the funds through congress that helped us to contribute to the effort to make sure that the nuclear missiles were removed from the non russian republics of the former soviet union and helped us to reduce nuclear arsenals by two thirds and helped make sure that today as we stand here in macon georgia there are no russian missiles targeted at the united states of america thank you sam nunn i want to thank those of you who have anything to do with robins air force base it did win the president s award as the finest air force base in the world last year it will be the home of 19 new j stars which i saw yesterday the place where they re made in louisiana it will get 1 500 new high skill high wage jobs as a result of the base realignment those of you who are making the c 17 need to know that i flew into bosnia on one it is unquestionably the finest transport plane in the entire world you should be proud of your contributions here to the nation s defense and the future security and peace of the world thank you very much my fellow americans it s only 11 days till we vote on the last president of the 20th century and more importantly the first president of the 21st century we are on the right track i said in 1992 when i came here if you give me a chance to serve we would change politics as usual in washington we would get out of all this name calling we would stop pointing our fingers and saying who s to blame and we would start saying what are we going to do to make america a better place together and that s what we ve done if we could build a new majority in america on three principles opportunity for all responsibility from all and an american community where if where if you show up for work tomorrow and you believe in our constitution our bill of rights our declaration of independence we don t need to know anything else about you you are a part of our american community and we re going forward together you heard senator nunn say it we are on the right track compared to four years ago we are better off and our opponents would be saying it is morning in america if they had this record we do have 10 5 million more jobs we have the highest rate of homeownership in 15 years we have incomes going up for the first time in 20 years for middle income working people we have the lowest rate of poverty ever recorded for american seniors and for african americans we ve got the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years we re moving in the right direction there are nearly 2 million fewer people on welfare than there were the day i became president of the united states and i m proud of that and one of the reasons is that we ve increased collection of child support that absent parents owe their children by 50 percent and i m proud of that we ve cleaned up more toxic waste sites in three and a half years than the people before us did in 12 and they talk about being conservative listen to this folks we reduced the deficit in each year of this administration all four years that s the first time that s happened in the 20th century they talk about being against big government our administration has reduced the size of the government the number of government programs the number of government regulations and we have privatized more government operations in three and a half years than the previous two republican administrations did in 12 we re moving in the right direction to the 21st century but there is a difference what i m trying to do is to give you a smaller and less bureaucratic government in washington but one that is strong enough to help give you the tools to make the most of your own lives care for each other and your families and communities deal with emergencies as they arise and protect america in the new environment of the 21st century the best days of this country are still ahead don t let anybody kid you our best days are still ahead the young people in this audience and i m glad to see so many young people here this election is about you the children in this audience will be doing many of the children in this audience today will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet some of the children in this audience will be doing jobs that have not been imagined yet we were just in atlanta we had a great rally there and one of our speakers was an attractive young mother from georgia she and her husband lived in new york and he got an opportunity to come back to georgia she wanted to go home in the worst way and because of computer technology she didn t have to leave her job she just left her place of work she still works for the same company in new york she worked for when she lived in new york now she can live in atlanta she thinks it s a good deal she thinks it s a good deal there were 3 million people doing that when i became president today there are over 12 million by the 21st century when we start that new century there will be over 30 million people working at home because of computers and technology where they can take care of their kids and succeed at their work this world is changing folks this old world is changing and you know i appreciate what senator nunn said about our record but the real issue is what kind of future are we going to build i never will forget once in 1984 i was running for reelection as governor and i was going on and on about my record and i was out in a little country crossroads giving a talk and the fellow that sort of represented me was in his overalls leaning up against a tree in the shade and i was giving in a speech frankly i thought it was one of the best talks i ever gave i thought i was terrific frankly and after it was over i shook hands and i ambled over to my friend and i said well how did i do he said well that was a pretty good speech you told us all about what you did but he said now bill tell the truth he said that s what we hired you to do a good job you drew a paycheck every two weeks didn t you he said you can t expect us to reelect you cause you did what you were supposed to do what are you going to do next time that s what really matters you can hardly have a clearer choice you can read the platform zell miller wrote if you want to know what we re going to do next time i wish i could have printed up enough copies to give it to every american citizen it s not very long it s a good read and it says what we stand for and what we re going to do and you have this huge choice do you believe that we re better off being told that we re on our own there is no we the people or do you believe it does take a village to raise our children and build a future for america do you believe that we can really reach back and build a bridge to the past or shouldn t we build a bridge to the 21st century we can all walk across together do you want to balance the budget in a way that protects our obligations to the elderly to families with members with disabilities to our poorest children to protect the environment to invest in eduction to grow the economy and keep interest rates down or do you want some risky tax scheme that sounds great at election time but it will blow a hole in the deficit require bigger cuts in medicare medicaid education and the environment that i vetoed last year and their plan to boot actually raises taxes on 9 million hard working americans i think i know the answer to that we want to build a bridge to the 21st century let s balance the budget grow the economy and invest in our future i think one of the most important things that we can do to fulfill our values of work and faith and family is to help folks who are working and who have children to succeed as parents and as workers all over america i can go to any crowd virtually any income group and people tell me over and over again their stories of times when they ve been worried about how they could fill their obligations to their children or their parents and do what they re supposed to do at work the family and medical leave law which our opponents oppose have given 12 million americans a chance to take a little time off from work when a baby was born or a parent was sick or a spouse was sick without losing their jobs we re a stronger country because of it and i want i want to expand that law in a modest way to say that folks ought to be able to take a little time off to take their kids to regular doctor s appointments or go to the school twice a year and see the teacher and see how their kids are doing i think it will make us a stronger country but you have to decide you will decide what we re going to do about health care we worked hard hard hard to try to protect the american people s ability to buy and keep health care in the last few weeks of this congress finally we passed two bills that i ve been working hard for one says you can t lose your health insurance anymore just because you change jobs or somebody in your family gets sick the other bill says an insurance company can no longer force a hospital to kick a new mother and a newborn baby out of the hospital after only one day another part of what we did at long last says to vietnam veterans who served their country in vietnam and were exposed to agent orange whose children were born with a terrible disease spina bifida finally after 20 years we re going to give you the medical support and the disability payments you deserve to help you with your families our veterans should not be punished for not being able to take care of their kids who were injured through their own service so we re moving in the right direction but my balanced budget plan will help families when they re between jobs keep their health insurance for another six months we ll add another million children to the ranks of people who have health insurance we ll provide for mammograms for women on medicare to help save their lives and for families that are taking care of family members with alzheimers over a million and a half of them in america today we ll give them a little respite care so they can keep their parents at home and still keep their families together and their sanity it s a good program we need to keep on going but you have to decide you will decide whether we keep our work up to clean up the environment or whether we buy a theory that says you can t grow the economy and preserve the environment let me tell you folks we can t grow the economy unless we preserve the environment it is the key to our future all over the world today american companies are creating jobs for americans here at home helping other countries to avoid their environmental problem with new technologies if you will give us four more years we re going to clean up 500 more toxic waste dumps so our kids will be growing up next to parks not poison we need your help to build that bridge to the 21st century the most important thing we can do is to give you a safe strong learning environment i have worked hard to make our streets safer but we re only half way home that 100 000 police program it s a five year program we ve funded about half the police and the departments are training them and putting them on the streets the question is should we finish you heard senator nunn say we ve got the lowest crime rate in 10 years the crime rate in america has gone down for four years in a row that s the good news but there are problems out there juvenile gangs are growing at a rapid rate terrifying our children committing random acts of violence often selling drugs so you have this situation in america that i never thought i d see the crime rate goes down for four years in a row in america but the crime rate among juveniles went up for three of those four years and only started going down last year the drug use goes down dramatically in america 30 percent drop in cocaine use 13 percent drop in overall use but drug use among people under 18 going up and these gangs taking over neighborhoods and neighborhoods and neighborhoods i say yes we ve made progress with the three strikes and you re out with the 100 000 police with the brady bill which left every hunter in georgia and arkansas with his weapon but kept 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers from getting handguns it s the right thing to do we re making progress but we ve got more to do and let s just talk about that we ve got to first finish the job of putting 100 000 police on the street our opponents led the fight against it then they tried twice to kill it i say we ought to finish it it s your decision you want some help in making a deal with your gang problem you ve got to vote for our administration because we ve got a plan to give it to you the other thing we ought to do is use the full power of the federal prosecutors to go after these violent gangs with the same laws that we use to break the mob the mafia years ago they should not take our children s future away from us and we can t let them do it the third thing we ought to do is to remember that the best thing we can do is to save our kids in the first place and keep them out of trouble i ve worked hard to promote the safe and drug free schools program so that there would be a dare officer or somebody else that young kids can look up to in every grade school in america telling these kids drugs are wrong drugs are dangerous drugs can kill you our opponents they tried to cut in half and take those services away from millions of kids you have to decide i think you want more people telling your kids to stay off drugs and keeping them out of trouble not fewer it s your decision i think i know what you want this won t all be easy folks i asked this last week i might get booed a little by the young people here but i m going to say this again even though youth drug use has gone up dramatically in the last four years 90 percent of our kids are still drug free they re good children they re not doing the wrong thing they deserve to be protected but i m going to ask those young people to make a sacrifice for their country and the kids who aren t drug free i m going to ask every state in this country to make a drug test a part of driver s licensing so that we can identify the kids that are in trouble and save them before it s too late get them out of trouble and save them and i think the young people will accept the challenge to help their fellow boys and girls to have a better life but you have to decide this is your decision and we are going to build the best education system in the world for everybody today in atlanta i said something i want to say again forty percent we all know education is the key to the future but forty percent of our 8 year olds still cannot read a book on their own if you can t read what good is it to have a computer how can you learn anything i have a proposal to take americorps volunteers and other trained reading tutors 30 000 of them to go across this country and mobilize a million volunteers the congress finally appropriated our recommendation on work study funds we re going to have a couple of hundred thousand more college students drawing work study and i m going to try to dedicate 100 000 of those college students to teaching young children to read i want to be able to say think about it by the year 2000 we want every 8 year old in america every single 8 year old to be able to hold up a book and say i can read this all by myself will you help us do that the second thing we want to do is to hook up every classroom and every library and every school in every community in america to the information superhighway by the year 2000 computers educational software trained teachers hooked up to the internet and the world wide web now for all of you who are older like me and you re not just computer geniuses let me tell you what that means in practical terms for your kids it means that for the first time in the history of this country ever that children in the poorest inner city and rural school districts that children in the middle class school districts that children in the wealthiest districts public or private for the first time ever will have immediate access to the same learning at the same level of quality in the same way as every other child in america it has never happened before will you help us do that and lastly we re going to follow georgia s lead and governor miller s lead and open the doors of college to every american who needs to go every american we propose to give every student who will work hard and maintain decent grades access to two years of education after high school by simply letting you deduct dollar for dollar the cost of the typical community college tuition from your tax bill that s our hope scholarship do right and you can have two years of college we propose to let every family save in an ira and save and save and save but to draw withdraw from that without any tax penalty if you re using that money to pay for college education or for medical cost or to buy a first time home and we propose to give families in this country a 10 000 tax deduction for the tuition in any kind of education after high school any time in america for graduate school or undergraduate of whatever age now that s what s at stake that s what we re going to do for the next four years and it s your decision so i ask you to go out 11 days from now and vote your convictions about your future and i ask you to talk to those who are not here and tell them that if you stay home you re voting too you re making a decision the idea that you don t make a decision as a citizen if you don t vote is not true you do so just think about this beautiful day and look around this crowd and let me leave you with this last thought how long have we seen america divided by politicians at election time for their own benefit how long have we seen people pitted against one another i will say again the most important thing we have to remember is that we are all better off when we all have a chance not a guarantee but a chance to make the most of our god given abilities we are all better off we are all better off when we help each other have the tools to build strong families and strong futures and strong community so i say to you i want you in 11 days for bill clinton and al gore for max cleland for jim wiggins for sanford bishop for the people that are interested in building a bridge to the 21st century wide enough and strong enough to make sure our best days are still ahead to go out there and help us build that bridge thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton25 3 98 bill_clinton thank you mr president first let me thank you mr president and vice president kasame and your wives for making hillary and me and our delegation feel so welcome i d also like to thank the young students who met us and the musicians the dancers who were outside i thank especially the survivors of the genocide and those who are working to rebuild your country for spending a little time with us before we came in here i have a great delegation of americans with me leaders of our government leaders of our congress distinguished american citizens we re all very grateful to be here we thank the diplomatic corps for being here and the members of the rwandan government and especially the citizens i have come today to pay the respects of my nation to all who suffered and all who perished in the rwandan genocide it is my hope that through this trip in every corner of the world today and tomorrow their story will be told that four years ago in this beautiful green lovely land a clear and conscious decision was made by those then in power that the peoples of this country would not live side by side in peace during the 90 days that began on april 6 in 1994 rwanda experienced the most intensive slaughter in this blood filled century we are about to leave families murdered in their home people hunted down as they fled by soldiers and militia through farmland and woods as if they were animals from kibuye in the west to kibungo in the east people gathered seeking refuge in churches by the thousands in hospitals in schools and when they were found the old and the sick women and children alike they were killed killed because their identity card said they were tutsi or because they had a tutsi parent or because someone thought they looked like a tutsi or slain like thousands of hutus because they protected tutsis or would not countenance a policy that sought to wipe out people who just the day before and for years before had been their friends and neighbors the government led effort to exterminate rwanda s tutsi and moderate hutus as you know better than me took at least a million lives scholars of these sorts of events say that the killers armed mostly with machetes and clubs nonetheless did their work five times as fast as the mechanized gas chambers used by the nazis it is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental it is important that the world hear what your president just said they were most certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles indeed these people had lived together for centuries before the events the president described began to unfold these events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people the ground for violence was carefully prepared the airwaves poisoned with hate casting the tutsis as scapegoats for the problems of rwanda denying their humanity all of this was done clearly to make it easy for otherwise reluctant people to participate in wholesale slaughter lists of victims name by name were actually drawn up in advance today the images of all that haunt us all the dead choking the kigara river floating to lake victoria in their fate we are reminded of the capacity in people everywhere not just in rwanda and certainly not just in africa but the capacity for people everywhere to slip into pure evil we cannot abolish that capacity but we must never accept it and we know it can be overcome the international community together with nations in africa must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy as well we did not act quickly enough after the killing began we should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers we did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name genocide we cannot change the past but we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear and full of hope we owe to those who died and to those who survived who loved them our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who would commit such atrocities in the future here or elsewhere indeed we owe to all the peoples of the world who are at risk because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated the unimaginable becomes more conceivable we owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events and where they cannot be prevented we can move more quickly to minimize the horror so let us challenge ourselves to build a world in which no branch of humanity because of national racial ethnic or religious origin is again threatened with destruction because of those characteristics of which people should rightly be proud let us work together as a community of civilized nations to strengthen our ability to prevent and if necessary to stop genocide to that end i am directing my administration to improve with the international community our system for identifying and spotlighting nations in danger of genocidal violence so that we can assure worldwide awareness of impending threats it may seem strange to you here especially the many of you who lost members of your family but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices day after day after day who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror we have seen too and i want to say again that genocide can occur anywhere it is not an african phenomenon and must never be viewed as such we have seen it in industrialized europe we have seen it in asia we must have global vigilance and never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence secondly we must as an international community have the ability to act when genocide threatens we are working to create that capacity here in the great lakes region where the memory is still fresh this afternoon in entebbe leaders from central and eastern africa will meet with me to launch an effort to build a coalition to prevent genocide in this region where the memory is still fresh this afternoon in entebbe leaders from central and eastern africa will meet with me to launch an effort to build a coalition to prevent genocide in this region i thank the leaders who have stepped forward to make this commitment we hope the effort can be a model for all the world because our sacred task is to work to banish this greatest crime against humanity events here show how urgent the work is in the northwest part of your country attacks by those responsible for the slaughter in 1994 continue today we must work as partners with rwanda to end this violence and allow your people to go on rebuilding your lives and your nation third we must work now to remedy the consequences of genocide the united states has provided assistance to rwanda to settle the uprooted and restart its economy but we must do more i am pleased that america will become the first nation to contribute to the new genocide survivors fund we will contribute this year 2 million continue our support in the years to come and urge other nations to do the same so that survivors and their communities can find the care they need and the help they must have mr president to you and to you mr vice president you have shown great vision in your efforts to create a single nation in which all citizens can live freely and securely as you pointed out rwanda was a single nation before the european powers met in berlin to carve up africa america stands with you and we will continue helping the people of rwanda to rebuild their lives and society you spoke passionately this morning in our private meeting about the need for grass roots effort in this direction we will deepen our support for those grass roots efforts for the development projects which are bridging divisions and clearing a path to a better future we will join with you to strengthen democratic institutions to broaden participation to give all rwandans a greater voice in their own governance the challenges you face are great but your commitment to lasting reconciliation and inclusion is firm fourth to help ensure that those who survived in the generations to come never again suffer genocidal violence nothing is more vital than establishing the rule of law there can be no peace in rwanda that lasts without a justice system that is recognized as such we applaud the efforts of the rwandan government to strengthen civilian and military justice systems i am pleased that our great lakes justice initiative will invest 30 million to help create throughout the region judicial systems that are impartial credible and effective in rwanda these funds will help to support courts prosecutors and police military justice and cooperation at the local level we will also continue to pursue justice through our strong backing for the international criminal tribunal for rwanda the united states is the largest contributor to this tribunal we are frustrated as you are by the delays in the tribunal s work as we know we must do better now that administrative improvements have begun however the tribunal should expedite cases through group trials and fulfill its historic mission we are prepared to help among other things with witness relocation so that those who still fear can speak the truth in safety and we will support the war crimes tribunal for as long as it is needed to do its work until the truth is clear and justice is rendered fifth we must make it clear to all those who would commit such acts in the future that they too must answer for their acts and they will in rwanda we must hold accountable all those who may abuse human rights whether insurgents or soldiers internationally as we meet here talks are underway at the united nations to establish a permanent international criminal court rwanda and the difficulties we have had with this special tribunal underscores the need for such a court and the united states will work to see that it is created i know that in the face of all you have endured optimism cannot come easily to any of you yet i have just spoken as i said with several rwandans who survived the atrocities and just listening to them gave me reason for hope you see countless stories of courage around you every day as you go about your business here men and women who survived and go on children who recover the light in their eyes remind us that at the dawn of a new millennium there is only one crucial division among the peoples of the earth and believe me after over five years of dealing with these problems i know it is not the division between hutu and tutsi or serb and croatian and muslim in bosnia or arab and jew or catholic and protestant in ireland or black and white it is really the line between those who embrace the common humanity we all share and those who reject it it is the line between those who find meaning in life through respect and cooperation and who therefore embrace peace and those who can only find meaning in life if they have someone to look down on someone to trample someone to punish and therefore embrace war it is the line between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past it is the line between those who give up their resentment and those who believe they will absolutely die if they have to release one bit of grievance it is the line between those who confront every day with a clenched fist and those who confront every day with an open hand that is the only line that really counts when all is said and done to those who believe that god made each of us in his own image how could we choose the darker road when you look at those children who greeted us as we got off that plane today how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children to experience the joy of another morning sunrise to learn the normal lessons of life to give something back to their people when you strip it all away whether we re talking about rwanda or some other distant troubled spot the world is divided according to how people believe they draw meaning from life and so i say to you though the road is hard and uncertain and there are many difficulties ahead and like every other person who wishes to help i doubtless will not be able to do everything i would like to do there are things we can do and if we set about the business of doing them together you can overcome the awful burden that you have endured you can put a smile on the face of every child in this country and you can make people once again believe that they should live as people were living who were singing to us and dancing for us today that s what we have to believe that is what i came here to say that is what i wish for you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton25 4 95 bill_clinton thank you very much mr president mr speaker governor branstad mr chief justice and members of the supreme court distinguished iowa state officials and former congressman neil smith my good friend and mrs smith thank you for being here to all of you who are members of the iowa legislature house and senate republican and democrat it is a great honor for me to be here today i feel that i m back home again when i met the legislative leadership on the way in and we shared a few words and then they left to come in here and i was standing around with my crowd i said you know i really miss state government i ll say more about why in a moment i d like to if i might recognize one of your members to thank him for agreeing to join my team representative running will now be the secretary of labor s representative would you stand up please thank you representative running is going to be the representative of the secretary of labor for region 7 iowa nebraska missouri and kansas and if you will finish your business here pretty soon he can actually go to kansas city and get to work which i would appreciate i m delighted to be back in iowa i had a wonderful day here and it was good to be here when it was dry although a little rain doesn t do any harm we had a wonderful meeting today at iowa state university with which i m sure all of you are familiar this national rural conference we had designed to lay the groundwork for a strategy for rural america to include not only the farm bill but also a rural development strategy and a strategy generally to deal with the problems of rural america with the income disparities with the rest of america the age disparities with the rest of america and the problems of getting services and maintaining the quality of life in rural america i want to thank governor branstad for his outstanding presentation and the information he gave us about the efforts being made in iowa in developing your fiber optic network and developing the health care reform initiatives for rural iowans and many other areas i want to thank senator harkin for his presentation particularly involving the development of alternative agricultural products as a way to boost income in rural america and i want to say a special word of thanks to the people at iowa state they did a magnificent job there and i know you are all very proud of that institution and you would have been very very proud of them today the way they performed i m also just glad to be back here in the setting of state government you know governor branstad and i were once the youngest governors in america but time took care of it and now that he s been reelected he will actually serve more years than i did i ran for a fifth term as governor we used to have two year terms and then we switched to four year terms and only one person in the history of our state had ever served more than eight years and only one person had ever served more than two people had served more than two terms but those were two year terms in the whole history of the state so i was i had served 10 years i d served three two year terms and one four year term and i was the attempting to be reelected and i had a high job approval rating but people were reluctant to vote for me because in my state people are very suspicious of too much political power you know and i thought i was still pretty young and healthy but half of them wanted to give me a gold watch you know and send me home and i never will forget one day when i was running for my fifth term i was out at the state fair doing governor s day at the state fair which i always did and i would just sit there and anybody that wanted to talk to me could up and say whatever was on their mind which was for me a hazardous undertaking from time to time since they invariably would do exactly that and i stayed there all day long and i talked about everything under the moon and sun with the people who came up and long about the end of the day this elderly fellow in overalls came up to me and he said bill you going to run for governor again and i hadn t announced yet i said i don t know if i do will you vote for me he said yes i always have i guess i will again and i said well aren t you sick of me after all these years he said no but everybody else i know is but he went on to say and that s the point i want to make about state government he said people get tired of it because all you do is nag us you nag us to modernize the economy you nag us to improve the schools you just nag nag nag but he said i think it s beginning to work and what i have seen in state after state after state over the last 15 years as we have gone through these wrenching economic and social changes in america and as we face challenge after challenge after challenge is people able consistently to come together to overcome their differences to focus on what it will take to build a state and to move forward and we need more of that in america in iowa you do embody our best values people are independent but committed to one another they work hard and play by the rules but they work together those of us who come from small towns understand that everybody counts we don t have a person to waste and the fact that iowa has done such a good job in developing all of your people is one of the reasons that you are so strong in every single national indicator of success that i know of and you should be very very proud of what together you have done i saw some of that american spirit in a very painful way in oklahoma city this week and all of you saw it as well i know you share the grief of the people there but you must also share the pride of all americans in seeing the enormity of the effort which is being exerted there by firemen and police officers and nurses by rescue workers by people who have come from all over america and given up their lives to try to help oklahoma city and the people there who have suffered so much loss rebuild i want to say again what i have tried to say for the last three days to the american people on this national day of service there is a service we can do to ensure that we build on and learn from this experience we must always fight for the freedom of speech the first amendment with its freedom of speech freedom of assembly and freedom of worship is the essence of what it means to be an american and i dare say every elected official in this room would give his or her life to preserve that right for our children and our grandchildren down to the end of time but we have to remember that that freedom has endured in our nation for over 200 years because we practiced it with such responsibility because we had discipline because we understood from the founding fathers forward that you could not have very very wide latitude in personal freedom until you also had or unless you also had great discipline in the exercise of that freedom so while i would defend to the death anyone s right to the broadest freedom of speech i think we should all remember that words have consequences and freedom should be exercised with responsibility and when we think that others are exercising their freedom in an irresponsible way it is our job to stand up and say that is wrong we disagree this is not a matter of partisan politics it is not a matter of political philosophy if we see the freedom of expression and speech abused in this country whether it comes from the right or the left from the media or from people just speaking on their own we should stand up and say no we don t believe in preaching violence we don t believe in preaching hatred we don t believe in preaching discord words have consequences if words did not have consequences we wouldn t be here today we re here today because patrick henry s words had consequences because thomas jefferson s words had consequences because abraham lincoln s words had consequences and these words we hear today have consequences the good ones and the bad ones the ones that bring us together and the ones that drive a wedge through our heart we never know in this society today who is out there dealing with all kinds of inner turmoil vulnerable to being pushed over the edge if all they hear is a relentless clamor of hatred and division so let us preserve free speech but let those of us who want to fight to preserve free speech forever in america say we must be responsible and we will be my fellow americans i come here tonight as i went recently to the state legislature in florida to discuss the condition of our country where we re going in the future and your role in that we know we are in a new and different world the end of the cold war a new and less organized world we re living in but one still not free of threats we know we have come to the end of an industrial age and we re in an information age which is less bureaucratic more open more dependent on technology more full of opportunity but still full of its own problems than the age that most of us were raised in we know that we no longer need the same sort of bureaucratic top down service delivering rule making centralized government in washington that served us so well during the industrial age because times have changed we know that with all the problems we have and all the opportunities we have we have to think anew about what the responsibilities of our government in washington should be what your responsibility should be here at the state level and through you to the local level and what should be done more by private citizens on their own with no involvement from the government we know now what the central challenge of this time is and you can see it in iowa you could see it today with the testimony we heard at the rural conference we are at a 25 year low in the combined rates of unemployment and inflation our economy has produced over 6 million new jobs but paradoxically even in iowa where the unemployment rate has dropped under 3 5 percent most americans are working harder today for the same or lower incomes that they were making 10 years ago and many americans feel less job security even as the recovery continues that is largely a function of the global economic competition the fact that technology raises productivity at an almost unbelievable rate so fewer and fewer people can do more and more work and that depresses wages the fact that unless we raise it in washington next year the minimum wage will reach a 40 year low there are a lot of these things that are related one to the other but it is perfectly clear that the economics are changing the face of american society you can see it in the difference in income in rural america and urban america you can see it in the difference the aging process in rural america as compared with urban america and if we want to preserve the american dream we have got to find a way to solve this riddle i was born in the year after world war ii at the dawn of the greatest explosion of opportunity in american history and in world history for 30 years after that the american people without regard to their income or region grew and grew together that is each income group over the next 30 years roughly doubled their income except the poorest 20 percent of us that had an almost 2 5 times increase in their income so we were growing and growing together for about the last 15 or 20 years half of us have been stuck so that our country is growing but we are growing apart even within the middle class when you put that beside the fact that we have more and more poor people who are not elderly which was the case when i was little but now are largely young women and their little children often where there was either no marriage or the marriage is broken up so there is not a stable home and there is not an adequate level of education to ensure an income you have increasing poverty and increasing splits within the middle class that is the fundamental cause i believe of a lot of the problems that we face in america and a lot of the anxiety and frustration we see in this country every rich country faces this problem but in the united states it is a particular problem both because the inequality is greater and because it violates the american dream i mean this is a country where if you work hard and you play by the rules you obey the law you raise your children you do your best to do everything you re supposed to do you ought to have an opportunity for the free enterprise system to work for you and so we face this challenge i have to tell you that i believe two things one the future is far more hopeful than worrisome if you look at the resources of this country the assets of this country and you compare them with any other country in the world and you image what the world will be like 20 or 30 years from now you d have to be strongly bullish on america you have to believe in our promise secondly i am convinced we cannot get there unless we develop a new way of talking about these issues a new political discourse unless we move beyond the labeling that so often characterizes and in fact mischaracterizes the debate in washington d c now we are having this debate in ways that affect you so you have to be a part of it because one of the biggest parts of the debate is how are we going to keep the american dream alive how are we going to keep america the world s strongest force for freedom and democracy into the next century and change the way the government works there is broad consensus that the government in washington should be less bureaucratic less oriented toward rule making smaller more flexible that more decisions should be devolved to the state and local government level and where possible more decisions should be given to private citizens themselves there is a broad agreement on that the question is what are the details what does that mean what should we do what should you do that s what i want to talk to you about there are clearly some national responsibilities clearly some that would be better served here at your level the main reason i ran for president is it seemed to me that we were seeing a national government in bipartisan gridlock where we d had 12 years in which we exploded the deficit reduced our investment in people and undermined our ability to compete and win in the world and i wanted very badly to end the kind of gridlock we d had and to see some real concrete action taken to go forward because of my experience doing what you re doing now my basic belief is that the government ought to do more to help people help themselves to reward responsibility with more opportunity and not to give anybody opportunity without demanding responsibility that s basically what i think our job is i think we can be less bureaucratic we have to enhance security at home and abroad but the most important thing we have to do is to empower people to make the most of their own lives now we have made a good beginning at that as i said we ve been able to get the deficit down you know here in iowa because you re a farming state that we ve had the biggest expansion of trade in the last two years we ve seen in a generation we now have a 20 billion surplus in agricultural products for the first time ever this means more to me than you but we re selling rice to the japanese something that my farmers never thought that we d ever do we re selling apples in asia we are doing our best in washington some of us are to get the ethanol program up and going this administration is for it and i hope you will help us with that and we re making modest efforts which ought to be increased to work with the private sector to develop alternative agricultural products today i saw corn based windshield wiper fluid and something that i think is important biodegradable agriculturally rooted golf tees and a lot of other things that i think will be the hallmark of our future we have only scratched the surface of what we can do to produce products from the land from our food and fiber and we must do more in education we are beginning to see the outlines of what i hope will be a genuine bipartisan national partnership in education in the last two years we increased head start we reduced the rules and regulations the federal government imposes on local school systems but gave them more funds and flexibility to meet national standards of education we helped states all over the country to develop comprehensive systems of apprenticeships for young people who get out of high school and don t want to go to college but don t want to be in dead end jobs we are doing more to try to make our job training programs relevant and we have made literally millions of americans eligible for lower cost better repayment college loans under our direct loan program including over 350 000 students and former students in iowa including all those who are at iowa state university now if you borrow money under that program you get it quicker with less paperwork at lower cost and you can pay it back in one of four different ways based on the income you re going to earn when you get out of college believe it or not it lowers costs to the taxpayers and we have demanded responsibility we ve taken the loan default costs to the taxpayers from 2 8 billion a year down to 1 billion a year that is the direction we ought to be going in we ve worked hard to increase our security at home and abroad the crime bill which was passed last year by the congress after six years of endless debate provides for 100 000 more police officers on our street we have already over the next five years we ve already awarded over 17 000 police officers to over half the police departments in america including 158 communities here in iowa it strengthens punishment under federal law the three strikes and you re out law in the crime bill is now the law of the land the first person to be prosecuted under this law was a convicted murderer accused of an armed robbery in waterloo last november if he s convicted he will go to jail for the rest of his life the capital punishment provisions of the crime bill will cover the incident in oklahoma city something that is terribly important in my view not only to bring justice in this case but to send a clear signal that the united states does not intend to be dominated and paralyzed by terrorists from at home or abroad not now not ever we cannot ever tolerate that we are also more secure from beyond our borders for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no russian missiles pointed at america s children and those nuclear weapons are being destroyed every day we have reduced the size of the federal government by more than 100 000 we are taking it down by more than a quarter of a million we have eliminated or reduced 300 programs and i have asked congress to eliminate or consolidate 400 more we have tried to give more flexibility to states several states have gotten broad freedom from federal rules to implement health care reform and we have now freed 27 states from cumbersome federal rules to try to help them end welfare as we know it in the almost two years since iowa received only the second welfare waiver our administration issued the number of welfare recipients in iowa who hold jobs is almost doubled from 18 to 33 percent you are doing it without punishing children for the mistakes of their parents and i want to say more on that later but you are doing it and that is clear evidence that we should give the states the right to pursue welfare reform they know how to get the job done better than the federal government has done in the past we should give you all more responsibility for moving people from welfare to work now here s where you come in because i want to talk in very short order one right after the other about the decisions we still have to make in washington do we still have to cut the federal deficit more yes we do we ve taken it down by 600 billion the budget in fact would be balanced today if it weren t for the interest we have to pay on the debt run up between 1981 and 1992 but it s still a problem and you need to understand why it s a problem it s a problem because a lot of people who used to give us money to finance our government deficit and our trade deficit need their money at home now that s really what s happening in japan they need their money at home now we must continue we must say to the world to the financial markets we will not cut taxes except in the context of reducing the deficit america is committed both parties are committed americans are committed to getting rid of this terrible burden on our future we must continue to do it now the question is how are we going to do that should we cut unnecessary spending of course we should how do you define it should there be more power to state and local governments and to the private sector you bet but what are the details in other words what we ve got to do in washington now is what you do all the time we ve got to move beyond our rhetoric to reality and i think it would be helpful for you because we need your voice to be heard and at least my experience in the governors association was or working in my own legislature was that on these issues we could get republicans and democrats together so let me go through what we ve done and what s still to be done first of all i agree with this new congress on three issues that were in the republican contract and two of them are already law number one congress should apply to itself all the laws it puts on the private sector we should know when we make laws in washington what we re doing to other people by experiencing it ourself that was a good thing number two i signed the unfunded mandates legislation to make it harder but not impossible when it important but much harder for congress to put on you and your taxpayers unfunded mandates from the federal government where we make you pay for something that we in washington want to do i strongly support that and i think all of you do as well the third thing we are doing that we have not finished yet although both houses have approved a version of it is the line item veto almost every governor has it i don t want to embarrass anybody here but i don t know how many times i had a legislature say now governor i m going to slip this in this bill because i ve got to do it and then you can scratch it out for me and it was fine we did it now if they slip it in a bill i have to decide what to do or not i have to decide when the farmers in iowa desperately needed the restoration of the tax deduction for health insurance the 25 percent tax deduction that self employed farmers and others get for health insurance there was a provision of that bill i didn t like very much i had to decide am i going to give this back to 3 3 million self employed americans and their families to lower the cost of health care by tax day or not but when we have the line item veto it won t be that way and we need it here are the hard ones number one the farm bill should be reduce farm supports yes we should as required by gatt i worked hard to get the europeans to the table in agriculture in this trade agreement a lot of you understand that the deal was they would reduce their subsidies more than we would reduce ours so we would at least move toward some parity so that our farmers would get a fair break for a change now some say let s just get rid of all these farm support programs well if we do it now we give our competitors the advantage we worked for eight years to take away we put family farms more at risk now if anybody s got better ideas about what should be in the farm bill that s fine if anybody s got a better idea about how to save the family farmers let s do it if anybody has new ideas about what should be put in for rural development fine but let us do no harm let us not labor under the illusion that having fought so hard to have a competitive agricultural playing field throughout the world having achieved a 20 billion surplus in agriculture we can turn and walk away from the farmers of the country in the name of cutting spending that is not the way to cut the federal deficit i ll give you another example some believe that we should flat fund the school lunch program and then there s a big argument in washington is it a cut or not let me tell you something all these block grants are designed not only to give you more flexibility but to save the federal government money now it may be a good deal or it may not you have to decide but when we wanted to cut the agriculture department budget we re closing nearly 1 200 offices we re reducing employment by 13 000 we eliminated 14 divisions in the department of agriculture my own view is that is better than putting an arbitrary cap on the school lunch program which will be terribly unfair to the number to the numerous school districts in this country that have increasing burdens from low income children there are a lot of kids in this country a lot of kids the only decent meal they get every day is the meal they get at school this program works if it s not broke we shouldn t fix it so i don t agree with that but you have to decide welfare reform i ve already said we have now given more welfare reform waivers to states to get out from under the federal government than were given in the last 12 years put together in two years we ve given more than 12 years i am for you figuring out how you want to run you welfare system and move people from welfare to work i am for that but here are the questions number one should we have cumbersome federal rules that say you have to penalize teenage girls who give birth to children and cut them off i don t think so we should never punish children for the mistakes of their parents and these children who become parents prematurely we should say you made a mistake you shouldn t do that no child should do that but what we re going to do is to impose responsibilities on you for the future to make you a responsible parent a responsible student a responsible worker that s what your program does why should the federal government tell you that you have to punish children when what you really want to do is move people from welfare to work so that more people are good parents and good workers you should decide that we do not need to be giving you lectures about how you have to punish the kids of this country we need a welfare bill that is tough on work and compassionate toward children not a welfare bill that is weak on work and tough on children i feel that that should be a bipartisan principle that all of us should be able to embrace now the second issue in welfare reform is whether we should give you a block grant instead of having the welfare being an individual entitlement to every poor person on welfare should we just give you whatever money we gave you last year or over the last three years and let you spend it however you want there are two issues here that i ask you to think about not only from your perspective but from the perspective of every other state in florida the republicans in legislature i spoke with were not for this and here s why the whole purpose of the block grant is twofold one is we give you more flexibility the second is we say in return for more flexibility you ought to be able to do the job for less money so we won t increase the money you re getting over the next five years which means we ll get to save money and lower the deficit if it works for everybody concerned it s a good deal but what are the states there are two problems with a block grant in this area and i want you to help me work through it because i am for more flexibility for the states i would give every state every waiver that i have given to any state i want you to decide what to do with this i want you to be out there creating innovative ways to break the cycle of welfare dependency but there are two problems with this number one if you have a state with a very large number of children eligible for public assistance and they re growing rapidly it s very hard to devise any formula that keeps you from getting hurt in the block grants over a five year period and some states have rapidly growing populations florida texas probably california number two a total block grant relieves the state of any responsibility to put up the match that is now required for you to participate in the program now you may say well we would do that anyway we have a tradition in iowa of taking care of our own but what if you lived in a state with a booming population growth with wildly competing demands for dollars and what about when the next recession comes keep in mind we re making all these decisions today in the second year in which every state economy is growing that has not happened in a very long time will that really be fair how do you know that there won t be insurmountable pressure in some states just to say well we can t take care of these children anymore we ve got to give the money to our school teachers we ve got to give the money to our road program we ve got to give the money to economic development we ve got environmental problems so i ask you to think about those things we can find a way to let you control the welfare system and move people from welfare to work but there are two substantive problems with the block grant program that i want to see overcome before i sign off on it because there is a national responsibility to care for the children of the country to make sure a minimal standard of care is given thank you in the crime bill there is a proposal to take what we did last time which was to divide the money between police prisons and prevention and basically give you a block grant in prevention and instead create two separate block grants one for prisons and one for police and prevention in which you would reduce the amount of money for police and prevention and increase the amount of money for prisons but you could only get it if you decided a mandate but a funded one if you decided to make all people who committed serious crimes serve 85 percent of their sentences so washington is telling you how you have to sentence people but offering you money to build prisons the practical impact means that a lot of that money won t be taken care of and we will reduce the amount of money we re spending for police and for prevention programs i think that s a mistake i m more than happy for you to have block grants for prevention programs you know more about what keeps kids out of jail and off the streets and from committing crime in des moines or cedar rapids or ames or anyplace else than i would ever know but we do know that the violent crime rate has tripled in the last 30 years and the number of police on our street has only gone up by 10 percent and we know there is city after city after city in america where the crime rate has gone down a lot a lot when police have been put on the street in community policing roles so i say let s keep the 100 000 police program it is totally nonbureaucratic small towns in iowa can get it by filling out a one page eight question form there is no hassle and we should do this because we kn dem wjclinton25 4 99a bill_clinton thank you very much i d like to begin just by expressing my profound gratitude to al from and to all the people at the democratic leadership council for having the passion and the patience to work at this for years and years and years i too want to thank hillary and the hearty band within the white house who keep us focused on the big ideas and values that got us here in the first place and i d like to say a special word of thanks to my friend and aide sidney blumenthal for the work that he s done in trying to put this meeting together i would also like to just very briefly say how very much i admire the people who are here with me at this table today how much i have learned from them how much i look forward to working with them at every opportunity wim kok from the netherlands actually was doing all this before we were he just didn t know that he didn t have anybody like al from who could put a good label on it but he was doing it for years and years and years tony blair has made me long for a parliamentary system gerhard schroeder had to wait even longer than i did and was also a distinguished governor and massimo d alema has proved that you i think i ll make you a prediction here i think he is already proving that even in italy where governments tend to be like the flavor of the month for ice cream that the right sort of politics can have a sustained long term impact on some of the most wonderful people in the world so i m honored to be here with all of them i d like to thank my friend and ally congressman cal dooley who is out there the secretary of transportation rodney slater the secretary of the army luis caldera who helped me in so many ways and we re going to hear afterward from lt governor kathleen kennedy townsend former governor and democratic party chairman roy romer mayor wellington webb of denver and commissioner michael thurman i thank them all of you know we ve just finished a three day nato conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of nato bringing in new members celebrating an astonishing partnership with over 40 countries including the countries of southeastern europe all except for serbia and the countries of central asia in this amazing new group which itself is full of third way questions at our last luncheon one of the members made a crack that we had five members of the last politburo of the soviet union sitting around our table today and another one said yes and a lot of the rest of us should have been on the politburo but we weren t and it was a picture of how much the world has changed what gives rise to this kind of politics when the old order is destroyed or when the realities of daily life or popular dreams can no longer be accommodated by a given set of political arrangements through a political debate we see that in southeastern europe today with the crisis in kosovo where the old choices between state stability and being consumed by ethnic hatreds and what we re arguing for is a new integration based on the embrace of difference not the oppression of it i would like to just pose a couple of questions and then let our panelists take off your heard al from say that basically our lodestars have always been in the united states the concept of opportunity responsibility and community we worked on this for years we tried to think of simpler and more complex ways to say what we stand for but we ve never done any better than that so i think i will just leave it there but let me say what could that mean in the present time what is giving rise to all these people s elections why is this happening everywhere it s not some blind coincidence i believe it is because the social arrangements which were developed within countries and the international arrangements among them which grew up from the great depression through the second world war and then the cold war are no longer adequate to meet the challenges of the day and most of the parties of the right made a living by beating us in elections by saying how bad we were and whatever we were always for more government and they were for less of it and if you thought it was by definition bad then less is always better than more so they had quite a run in the 1980s and then it became readily apparent that that didn t really solve any problems and that they were serious questions that demanded serious answers so i will just pose three and then let our panelists go in whatever order they would like it seems to me that the great question that any political party that purports to represent ordinary citizens must answer is how do you make the most of the economic possibilities of the global information economy and still preserve the social contract what can governments do to help make sure that every responsible citizen has a chance to succeed in the global economy and how can we discharge our responsibilities as the leaders of wealthy countries to put a human face on the global economy so that in other countries as well no one who s willing to work is left behind the second question i d like to ask is what is the nature of the social contract now and how is it different from what it used to be what does it mean are there entitlements that we should still have beyond entitlements what are the empowerment issues of the social contract what is the role of the private sector and the relationship of the government to it and finally what do we mean by the concept of community who s in who s out and how can we create a concept of both national and international community that is a more powerful magnet drawing people together than the awful magnets pulling them apart rooted in racial and ethnic and religious difference throughout the world and i will leave with that it is a cruel irony that in this world we re entering that we have always celebrated in our dreams as a place of unbelievable technological explosion unbelievable scientific advance unbelievable advances in health care and using computer technology to empower people in small african and latin american villages for example to learn things would be dominated by the most primitive hatreds in all of human history those rooted in our basic fear of people who are different from us how can we construct a community in which those forces pulling us together are more powerful than those tearing us apart there are hundreds of questions we debate all the time but just about every question we debate falls within one of those three categories and so having set it up like that we have no agenda and i ll just turn it over to our friends mr blair would you like to go first dem wjclinton25 4 99b bill_clinton i should say that the prime minister is a good friend of the man who is now the most famous italian in america roberto benini and after his performance at the academy awards you have both affection and respect i would just like to try to comment on a couple of things to maybe make the conversation somewhat more specific and sort of segue into the participation of our other american leaders here if you look at this whole third way challenge in america for the democratic party it meant we had to prove we could manage the economy in an intelligent way and then deal with the whole question of social justice and in our country those questions basically meant three things one is what to do about the poor and how to have a welfare system that empowered people who could take care of themselves but also took care of people who could not take care of themselves first question the second question how to deal with the fact that we had phenomenal economic growth but increasing inequality that inequality had been increasing for quite a long time partly because of government policies partly because the new economy gives such a wage premium to education and skills and the third question to my mind in many ways the most important how can this country with all of its phenomenal success and low unemployment the lowest unemployment in 30 years and now finally rising wages again how can we strike the right balance a better balance between work and family give families the support they need to raise their children take care of their parents have the time they need have the child care the health care they need and still maintain the economic dynamism what is the right balance now for europe it goes the other way i wish prime minister jospin were here from france very interesting france has had economic growth averaging over 3 percent for the last three or four years but their unemployment rate hasn t gone below 11 percent i think something like that any way still in double digits and we know from our own experience that when unemployment i mean when growth can be sustained above 2 5 percent in an industrial society normally the unemployment will go down until it bottoms out at around at least around 6 percent even without going over 3 percent so the european question is how do you get growth manifested in jobs and not give up your social solidarity in america the question is how do we keep all this growth we love it and get a little more stability for families and make sure we have done what we should for the poorest of our communities and our people and try to make sure that americans who do work and carry the load in this country have a chance to have more of the growth in terms of their personal wealth and well being so to some extent we are crossing now i mention that to just give you a couple of specific examples gerhard schroeder mentioned the german job training system we sort of copied a lot of elements of that and tried to amend it for america in setting up our school to work program in 1993 because the germans do the best job of moving people from who do not go on to university for four years moving most people into the workplace with modern skills so they can claim a higher wage and in our country we have john sweeney the head of the american labor movement the labor apprenticeship programs a lot of the labor training programs do a good job of that but as a society we don t do as good a job of that so we re trying to improve that another interesting example how do you deal with the fact that more and more people are working at home more and more people are working in flexible work environments you re going to have more and more part time jobs how is that consistent with maintaining a kind of social safety net i would argue that the netherlands have done the best job of that wim kok s country has the highest percentage of voluntary part time workers in all of europe that is they choose to do so and they ve worked out an agreement which maybe he would like to talk about so that even the part time workers earn on a pro rata basis their vacation annual vacation and have retirement and health care and other things they have the social protections and there it makes them more willing when necessary to take part time work this is a big deal when i became president in america there were 3 million people making a living primarily out of their own home for example when i was reelected there were 12 million now there are 20 million in only two years so this economy is going to if you will atomize a lot it s going to get a lot more diverse and kaleidoscopic so we ll have a lot of challenges to face in having the proper sense of social safety net and then as i said the most important thing is getting it right between work and family since i think we would all admit that the most important job of any society is raising children as well as possible something we are even more burdened with in the moment that conviction so i just throw those ideas out these are things that are going on in other countries something that we re battling with here constantly and i wonder if any of you would like to comment on that dem wjclinton25 5 94 bill_clinton thank you very much secretary dalton for those fine remarks admiral lynch thank you for your comments and your leadership here at the academy admiral owens admiral boorda general mundy proud parents and family members faculty and staff of the academy brigade of the midshipmen it s a great honor for me to join you at this moment of celebration i m delighted to be back here on the eve of the academy s 150th year since 1845 the u s naval academy has provided superb leadership for our navy for our marine corps and for our entire nation and i cannot imagine a more valuable contribution the last time i was here i joined some of you for lunch at king hall and ever since then whenever people have asked me what i liked best about my visit to the naval academy i try to think of elevated things to say but part of my answer is always pan pizza and chicken tenders in memory of that luxurious meal i have today a small graduation present in keeping with longstanding tradition i hereby grant amnesty to all midshipmen who received demerits for minor conduct offenses see today the interest group is in the stands not on the field next week i will have the proud responsibility to represent our nation in europe in the ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of d day the invasion of italy and world war ii that war marked the turning point of our century when we joined with our allies to stem a dark tide of dictatorship aggression and terror and to start a flow of democracy and freedom that continues to sweep the world down to the present day that war also marked an era of sacrifice almost unequaled in our entire history some 400 000 of our fellow countrymen and women lost their lives over half a million more were wounded today we have among us many who took part at normandy and the other great battles of world war ii such as retired commander alfred mckowan academy class of 1942 who served aboard the u s s quincy off utah beach on d day they re a great reminder of what our armed services have done for america and i would ask all the veterans of that war to stand now so that the rest of us might honor them to the members of the class of 1994 my parents generation and your grandparents generation did not end their work with the liberation of europe and victory in the pacific they came back to work wonders at home the created the g i bill so that freedom s heroes could reenter civilian life and succeed and build strong families and strong communities they built our interstate highway system they turned our economy into a global wonder they forged the tools of international security and trade that helped to rebuild our former allies and our former enemies so that we could ultimately win the cold war it brought us decades of peace and prosperity today we have come to celebrate your graduation from this academy and your commission as officers of the united states navy and marine corps as we do the question which hangs over your head is the question of what your generation will accomplish as the generation of world war ii accomplished so much lately there have been a number of books written not about you of course but about your generation that says that so many people your age are afflicted with a sense of fatalism and cynicism a sort of generation x that believes america s greatest days are behind us and there are no great deeds left to be done well this class this very class is a rebuke to those cynics of any age look at the extraordinary effort you have made to become leaders in service to america formation at dawn classes at 8 00 a m rigorous mandatory pt parading on worden field summers spent aboard ship or down at quantico most college students never go through anything like it it s a routine that turns young men and women into officers and that has taken your basketball team to the ncaa tournament i deeply respect your decision to serve our nation your service may take many forms in the years ahead commanding ships in combat training aviators for flight running a business perhaps one day even sitting in the oval office your career regardless of its past will require sacrifices time away from loved ones and potentially service in the face of danger but regardless of where your careers take you you clearly understand the imperative of civic duty there s no brighter badge of citizenship than the path you have chosen and the oath you are about to take you just heard secretary dalton speak of president kennedy s wonderful speech here at the naval academy when he was here i read that speech carefully before i came here and among other things president kennedy said along the lines that secretary dalton quoted that if someone asked you what you did with your life there s not a better answer than to say i served as an officer in the united states navy the challenge for your generation is to remember the deeds of those who have served before you and now to build on their work in a new and very different world the world wars are over the cold war has been won now it is our job to win the peace for the first time in history we have the chance to expand the reach a democracy and economic progress across the whole of europe and to the far reaches of the world the first step on the mission is to keep our own nation secure and your very graduation today helps ensure that today the american people have 874 new leaders 874 new plates of battle armor on our ship of state 874 reasons to sleep better at night the past four years have been a time of challenge and exertion for each of you a time of challenge and exertion too for the u s navy and for this academy the navy has had to confront the difficulty of the tailhook scandal and this year the academy had to confront improper conduct regarding an academic examination these are troubling events to be sure because our military rests on honor and leadership but ultimately the test of leadership is not constant flawlessness rather it is marked by a commitment to continue always to strive for the highest standards to learn honestly when one falls short and to do the right thing when it happens i came here today because i want america to know there remains no finer navy in the world than the united states navy and no finer training ground for naval leadership than the united states naval academy you have my confidence you have america s confidence these are challenging times to be in the navy because it s a new era in world affairs when this class entered the academy in june of 1990 think of this israel and the plo were sworn enemies south africa lived under apartheid moscow kiev and riga all were still part of the soviet union and the united states and the soviet union still pointed their nuclear weapons in massive numbers at each other but now nelson mandela is the president of his nation there is genuine progress toward peace in the middle east between israel and the plo and the other parties where the kremlin once imposed its will a score of new free states now grapples with the burden of freedom and the united states and russia at last no longer aim their nuclear weapons at each other these amazing transformations make our nation more secure they also enable us to devote more resources to the profound challenges we face here at home from providing jobs for our people to advancing education and training for all of them to making our streets safer to ensuring health care for all of our citizens and in the end building an economy that can compete and win well into the 21st century but the world s changes also can create uncertainty for those who have committed their careers to military service indeed they create uncertainty for the united states and in this time of uncertainty they tempt some to cut our defenses too far at the end of the cold war it was right to reduce our defense spending but let us not forget that this new era has many dangers we have replaced a cold war threat of a world of nuclear gridlock with a new world threatened with instability even abject chaos rooted in the economic dislocations that are inherent in the change from communism to market economics rooted in religious and ethnic battles long covered over by authoritarian regimes now gone rooted in tribal slaughters aggravated by environmental disasters by abject hunger by mass migration across tenuous national borders and with three of the soviet union s successor states now becoming non nuclear and the tension between the u s and russia over nuclear matters declining we still must not forget that the threat of weapons of mass destruction remain in the continuing disputes we have over north korea and elsewhere with countries who seek either to develop or to sell or to buy such weapons so we must we must do better for this generation to expand freedom s reach we must always keep america out of danger s reach last year i ordered a sweeping review we called it the bottom up review to ensure that in this new era we have a right sized navy marine corps army and air force for the post cold war era that is especially important for our naval forces for even with all the changes in the world some basic facts endure we are a maritime nation over 60 percent of our border is sea coast over 70 percent of the world is covered by water and over 90 percent of the human race lives within our navy s reach from the sea now as long as these facts remain true we need naval forces that can dominate the sea project our power and protect our interests we ve known that lesson for over 200 years now since the time admiral john paul jones proclaimed without a respectable navy alas america the right size defense costs less but still costs quite a bit that is why this year i have resisted attempts to impose further cuts on our defense budget i want you to understand this clearly it is important for your generation and your children to bring down this terrible debt we accumulated in recent years and i have asked the congress to eliminate outright over 100 programs to cut over 200 others we ve presented a budget that cuts discretionary domestic spending for the first time since 1969 that will give us three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since harry truman was president of the united states right after world war ii but we should not cut defense further and i thank the congress this week for resisting the calls to do so that enables us to answer john paul jones s cry today you can see the importance of our naval forces all around the world right now at this very moment as you sit here the uss saratoga and her battle group are steaming in the adriatic to help enforce the nofly zone and to protect the safe havens in bosnia at this very moment the uss carl vinson is in the persian gulf to help enforce sanctions on iraq right now the uss independence is patrolling the waters of northeast asia to protect our allies and interests in japan korea and throughout the asian pacific region as we adjust our forces to a new era our motto should still be reduce where we should but strengthen as we must that s why we re investing in new weapons such as the next carrier cvn 76 our new sea wolf attack submarine new aegis ships like the ddg 51 new air capabilities like f 18 upgrades and the joint advanced strike technology it s why we re improving our weapons systems and making the technology that won operation desert storm even better tomahawk missiles with increased accuracy and target area and better night fighting capabilities for our harrier jump jets and other aircraft so we can not only own the night today but dominate the night tomorrow we have been able to afford a right sized military at lower cost but this year we must continue to fight any deeper cuts to defense i want to emphasize how important it is that the house of representatives and the senate do that i want to thank congressman gilchrest who is here and congressman machtley from rhode island a graduate of the naval academy also here and their colleagues for their support for the c 17 vote and for their continuing support for an adequate military this is a bipartisan issue it knows no party we have done all we should do and we now must support and adequate defense we are working to safeguard the quality of the most important defense asset of all you and the more than one million other men and women in uniform who stand sentry over our security today our armed forces are clearly and without dispute the best trained the best equipped the best prepared and the best motivated military on the face of the earth as long as i am president that will continue to be the truth the question of our security in this era still ultimately depends upon our decisions about where to bring our military power to bear that is what makes it possible for our enormous economic strength to assert itself at home and around the world and there is no decision any president takes more seriously than the decision to send americans into harm s way history teaches us that there is no magic formula nor should a president ever try to draw the line so carefully that we would completely rule out the use of our military in circumstances where it might later become important after all the mere possibility of american force is itself a potent weapon all around the world but this is clear we must be willing to fight to defend our land and our people first and foremost that s why we responded forcefully when we discovered an iraqi plot to assassinate former president bush and the tomahawks we fired that day were fired by the navy we must be willing to fight to protect our vital interests and that s why we ve adopted a defense strategy for winning any two major regional conflicts nearly simultaneously we must be willing to fight to protect our allies that s why we deployed patriot missiles to south korea and working with others working with others we must be willing to use force when other american interests are threatened and that s why we sought a stronger role for nato in bosnia the hardest cases involve the many ethnic and religious conflicts that have erupted in our era the end of the superpower standoff lifted the lid from a cauldron of long simmering hatreds now the entire global terrain is bloody with such conflicts from rwanda to georgia we cannot solve every such outburst of civil strive or militant nationalism simply by sending in our forces we cannot turn away from them but our interests are not sufficiently at stake in so many of them to justify a commitment of our folks nonetheless as the world s greatest power we have an obligation to lead and at times when our interests and our values are sufficiently at stake to act look at the example of the former yugoslavia for centuries that land marked a tense and often violent fault line between empires and religions the end of the cold war and the dissolution of that country into so many new republics surfaced all those ancient tensions again triggering serb aggression ethnic cleansing and the most brutal european conflict since the second world war whether we get involved in any of the world s ethnic conflicts in the end must depend on the cumulative weight of the american interests at stake now in bosnia we clearly have an interest in preventing the spread of the fighting into a broader european war in providing that nato can still be a credible force for peace in the post cold war era in this first ever involvement of nato outside a nato country in stemming the incredibly destabilizing flow of refugees from the conflict and in helping to stop the slaughter of innocents these interests do not warrant our unilateral involvement but they do demand that they help to lead a way to a workable peace agreement if one can be achieved and that if one can be achieved we help to enforce it our administration is committed to help achieve such a resolution working with others such as nato the united nations and russia those efforts have not been easy or smooth but we have produced results by securing nato enforcement of the no fly zone over bosnia we kept the war from escalating into the air we inherit initiated humanitarian air drops and have now participated in the longest humanitarian air lift in history we secured nato enforcement of the exclusion zones around sarajevo and garazde and as a result the people of sarajevo have experienced over three months of relative calm and garazde is no longer being shelled and by stepping up diplomatic engagement we have worked with others to foster a breakthrough agreement between the croats and the bosnians signed here in washington which i believe eventually will lead to a broader settlement one of the dreams of world war ii was that after the war through the united nations and in other ways the united states might be able to cooperate with others to help resolve the most difficult problems of our age not always to have its own way not always to be able to prescribe every move but in order to help resolve the problems of the world without having the commit the lives of our own soldiers where they should not be committed and still being able to play a positive role that is what we are attempting to work out in bosnia and if it can be done if it can be done we ll be on the way to managing some of this incredible chaos that has threatened to engulf the world in which you will raise your children today i want to acknowledge the outstanding contributions of admiral mike boorda which were made to our efforts in bosnia his stunning leadership there his clarity of thought and resolve of purpose is one of the key reasons i named him to be our new chief of naval operations thank you admiral boorda at every turn we have worked to move the parties there toward a workable political solution this is one of those conflicts that can only end at the negotiating table not on the battlefield they can fight for another 100 years and not resolve it there at every turn we have rejected the easy out of simplistic ideas that sound good on bumper stickers but that would have tragic consequences the newest of these is that we should simply unilaterally break the united nations arms embargo on bosnia and the other former yugoslav states i do not support that arms embargo and i never have we worked with our allies and tried to persuade all them that we should end it now some say we should simply violate the embargo on our own because it was a bad idea to impose it in the first place well if we did that it would kill the peace process it would sour our relationships with our european allies in nato and in the u n it would undermine the partnership we are trying to build with russia across a whole broad range of areas it would undermine our efforts to enforce u n embargoes that we like such as those against sadaam hussein colonel gadhafi and general cedras in haiti we simply must not opt for options and action that sound simple and painless and good but which will not work in this era of interdependence where it is important that we leverage american influence and leadership by proving that we can work with others especially when others have greater and more immediate stakes and are willing to put their soldiers in harm s way our administration will not walk away from this bosnian conflict but we will not embrace solutions that are wrong we plan to continue the course we have chosen raising the price on those who pursue aggression helping to provide relief to the suffering and working with our partners in europe to move the parties to a workable agreement it is not quick it is not neat it is not comfortable but i am convinced in a world of interdependence where we must lead by working with others it is the right path it is the one that preserves our leadership preserves our treasure and commits our forces in the proper way the world s most tearing conflicts in bosnia and elsewhere are not made in a day and one of the most frustrating things that you may have to live with throughout your life is that many of these conflicts will rarely submit to instant solutions but remember this it took years after d day to not only end the war but to build a lasting peace it took decades of patience and strength and resolve to prevail in the cold war and as with generations going before we must often be willing to pay the price of time sometimes the most painful price of all there is no better source of the courage and constancy of our nation that we will lead in this era than this academy and our armed forces this academy has prepared you to lead those armed forces as you take your place in the navy and the marine corps always bear in mind the heroism the sacrifice the leadership of those who have served before you i think in particular of one of the stories that comes out of d day june 6th 1944 on that gray dawn as u s rangers approached pointe du hoc they were raked by german fire from the cliff above one landing craft was sunk others were endangered but then an american destroyer the uss satterlee along with a british destroyer came to the rescue they came in perilously close to the shore and opened fire with all their guns at the germans who were raining fire down on the rangers by its actions the satterlee saved american lives and enabled the rangers to carry out their nowfamous mission forty eight years later a ranger platoon leader said someday i d love to meet up with somebody from satterlee so i can shake his hand and thank him the valor of those who proceeded you is the stuff of inspiration a great country must always remember the sacrifices of those who went before and made our freedom possible but even greater accomplishments lie ahead if you can make them happen for remember this when our memories exceed our dreams we have begun to grow old it is the destiny of america to remain forever young as the guardians of your generation s freedom and our future may you never know directly whose lives you have saved you may not whose future you have improved you may never hear their thanks or get to shake their hands but they ll be out there we ll all be out there aware of your courage impressed by your dedication grateful for your service to god and country you can keep america forever young good luck and god bless you dem wjclinton25 6 96 bill_clinton good morning ladies and gentlemen and let me thank you all for being here thank you senator kyl and senator feinstein for your ground breaking work here thank you senator exon my longtime friend senator heflin thank you congressman frost congressman stupack congressman orton i thank all the representatives here of the victims community the law enforcement community i thank the attorney general and john schmidt and aileen adams and bonnie campbell for doing such a fine job at the justice department on all criminal justice issues i thank the vice president and especially i want to thank roberta roper and the other members of the national movement for victims advocacy and mr roper thank you for coming thank you john and pat byron thank you mark klaas and thank you pam mcclain and especially john walsh thank you for spending all of these years to bring these issues to america s attention thank you sir i d also like to say a special word of thanks to the person who did more than any other person in the united states to talk me through all of the legal and practical matters that have to be resolved in order for the president to advocate amending our constitution former prosecutor and a former colleague of mine governor bob miller of nevada thank you sir for your work here for years we have worked to make our criminal justice system more effective more fair more even handed more vigilant in the protection of the innocent today the system bends over backwards to protect those who may be innocent and that is as it should be but it too often ignores the millions and millions of people who are completely innocent because they re victims and that is wrong that is what we are trying to correct today when someone is a victim he or she should be at the center of the criminal justice process not on the outside looking in participation in all forms of government is the essence of democracy victims should be guaranteed the right to participate in proceedings related to crimes committed against them people accused of crimes have explicit constitutional rights ordinary citizens have a constitutional right to participate in criminal trials by serving on a jury the press has a constitutional right to attend trials all of this is as it should be it is only the victims of crime who have no constitutional right to participate and that is not the way it should be having carefully studied all of the alternatives i am now convinced that the only way to fully safeguard the rights of victims in america is to amend our constitution and guarantee these basic rights to be told about public court proceedings and to attend them to make a statement to the court about bail about sentencing about accepting a plea if the victim is present to be told about parole hearings to attend and to speak notice when the defendant or convict escapes or is released restitution from the defendant reasonable protection from the defendant and notice of these rights if you have ever been a victim of a violent crime it probably wouldn t even occur to you that these rights could be denied if you ve never been a victim but actually it happens time and time again it happens in spite of the fact that the victims rights movement in america has been an active force for about 20 years now the wife of a murdered state trooper in maryland is left crying outside the courtroom for the entire trial of her husband s killers because the defense subpoenaed her as a witness just to keep her out and never even called her a rape victim in florida isn t notified when her rapist is released on parole he finds her and kills her last year in new jersey jakiyah mcclain was sexually assaulted and brutally murdered she had gone to visit a friend and never came home police found her in the closet of an abandoned apartment now her mother wants to use a new jersey law that gives the murder victims survivors the right to address a jury deciding on the death penalty she wants the jury to know more about this fine young girl than the crime scene reports she wants them to know that jakiyah was accepted into a school for gifted children the day before she died but a new jersey judge decided she can t testify even though the state law gave her the right to do so he ruled that the defendant s constitutional right to a fair trial required him to strike to law down well jakiyah s mother had the courage to overcome her pain to be with us today we have to change this for her and for other victims in america thank you and god bless you the only way to give victims equal and due consideration is to amend the constitution for nearly 20 years i have been involved in the fight for victims rights since i was attorney general in my home state we passed laws then to guarantee victims rights to attend trials and to get restitutions and later to get notice and to participate in parole hearings over all those years i learned what every victim of crime knows too well as long as the rights of the accused are protected but the rights of victims are not time and again the victims will lose when a judge balances defendants rights in the federal constitution against victims rights in a statute or a state constitution the defendants rights almost always prevail that s just how the law works today we want to level the playing field this is not about depriving people accused of crimes of their legitimate rights including the presumption of innocence this is about simple fairness when a judge balances the rights of the accused and the rights of the victim we want the rights of the victim to get equal weight when a plea bargain is entered in public a criminal is sentenced a defendant is let out on bail the victim ought to know about it and ought to have a say i want to work with the congressional leadership the house and senate judiciary committees including senators kyl and feinstein and chairman hyde and law enforcement officials to craft the best possible amendment it should guarantee victims rights in every court in the land federal state juvenile and military it should be self executing so that it takes effect as soon as it s ratified without additional legislation congress will take responsibility to enforce victims rights in federal courts and the states will keep responsibility to enforce them in state courts but we need the amendment i also want to say just before i go forward again i want to thank senators kyl and feinstein and the others who have approached this in a totally bipartisan manner this is a cause for all americans when people are victimized the criminal almost never asks before you re robbed or beaten or raped or murdered are you a republican or a democrat this is a matter of national security just as much as the national security issues beyond our borders on which we try to achieve a bipartisan consensus and i applaud the nonpolitical and patriotic way in which this manner has been approached in the congress just like it s approached every day in the country and we ought to do our best to keep it that way we know that there can be with any good effort unforeseen consequences we think we know what they would likely be and we believe we know how to guard against them we certainly don t want to make it harder for prosecutors to convict violent criminals we sure don t want to give criminals like gang members who may be victims of their associates any way to take advantage of these rights just to slow the criminal justice process down we want to protect victims not accidentally help criminals but we can solve these problems the problems are not an excuse for inaction we still have to go forward of course amending the constitution can take a long time it may take years and while we work to amend it we must do everything in our power to enhance the protection of victims rights now today i m directing the attorney general to hold the federal system to a higher standard than ever before to guarantee maximum participation by victims under existing law and to review existing legislation to see what further changes we ought to make i ll give you an example there ought to be i believe in every law federal and state a protection for victims who participate in the criminal justice process not to be discriminated against on the job because they have to take time off that protection today is accorded to jury members it certainly ought to extend to people who are victims who need to be in the criminal justice process and we shouldn t wait for that kind of thing to be done i want investigators and prosecutors to take the strongest steps to include victims i want work to begin immediately to launch a computerized system so victims get information about new developments in a case in changes in the status or the location of a defendant or a convict i do not support amending the constitution lightly it is sacred it should be changed only with great caution and after much consideration but i reject the idea that it should never be changed change it lightly and you risk its distinction but never change it and you risk its vitality i have supported the goals of many constitutional amendments since i took office but in each amendment that has been proposed during my tenure as president i have opposed the amendment either because it was not appropriate or not necessary but this is different i want to balance the budget for example but the constitution already gives us the power to do that what we need is the will and to work together to do that i want young people to be able to express their religious convictions in an appropriate manner wherever they even in a school but the constitution protects people s rights to express their faith but this is different this is not an attempt to put legislative responsibilities in the constitution or to guarantee a right that is already guaranteed amending the constitution here is simply the only way to guarantee the victims rights are weighted equally with defendants rights in every courtroom in america two hundred twenty years ago our founding fathers were concerned justifiably that government never never trample on the rights of people just because they are accused of a crime today it s time for us to make sure that while we continue to protect the rights of the accused government does not trample on the rights of the victims until these rights are also enshrined in our constitution the people who have been hurt most by crime will continue to be denied equal justice under law that s what this country is really all about equal justice under law and crime victims deserve that as much as any group of citizens in the united states ever will thank you god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton25 6 97 bill_clinton thank you very much mayor and mrs daley reverend barrow representative jones and chairman lapel mr houlihan i m sorry paul simon left i have sat in on so many of his speeches and he sat in on so many of mine i was sort of getting used to getting back to our old routine i miss paul simon in the senate but i m glad he s still here caring about illinois he doesn t have an axe to grind and i think we ought to listen to his recommendations let me also say that i had a good time mayor when i got off the plane and i took my little helicopter to meigs field soon to be daley park and there were still people there when i got out and they said welcome home mr president and i love that chicago has sort of become my second home illinois has and you all remember that on st patrick s day in 1992 the victory we had here and up in michigan pretty well assured the nomination and i will always be grateful for that and i try to water my chicago roots whenever i can you know we had the bulls at the white house the other day and scottie pippen got up and referred to me as his home boy after which michael jordan said that hillary would always be first in the hearts of chicagoans that s a battle i was glad to lose the mayor was terrific leading the mayors this year he did a great job you should all be very proud of him and they had a great meeting in san francisco i was afraid that his tenure might be tarnished by the outbreak of civil disobedience here when they started inter league play in baseball and i want to congratulate you for doing whatever was necessary to avoid that let me say we re all among friends tonight i want to make a fairly pointed and brief argument for why i m here and why i hope that senator carol moseley braun will be reelected in 1992 when i ran for president i had an idea that we could only change america if we changed the way we were doing politics if we broke out of the debates which were always dividing people into yesterday s categories it s okay to be a liberal or a conservative but it s not okay to be irrelevant in american politics it s not okay to be divisive for the sake of being divisive it s not okay to be interested in rhetoric only and no reality it s not okay to trap yourself in a pattern of conduct which never permits progress to occur and it was obvious to me that we had to change what we had to do and that we weren t even asking the right questions so i started with what i thought the right question was what would i like america to look like when my daughter is my age how would i like america to go into this new century what do we need to do to prepare america to go into the new century i still believe in what i said then i want our country in the 21st century to be a place where every american without regard to race gender or background has a chance to live out his or her dreams where our communities are full of citizens who are exercising their individual responsibilities for themselves their families their communities and their country where we are celebrating our diversity but coming together as one america in a strong united community and where because we did these things we can still lead the world to greater peace and freedom and prosperity that s what i still want for our country in this new century what is the principal way we have to achieve that we have to look at every significant area of national life and ask ourselves does it create more opportunity for all does it induce more responsibility from all does it help us build a community of all americans if the era of big government and big centralized bureaucracies is over that doesn t let government off the hook far from it in some ways we should be more active but it does mean we have to focus on what works which is giving people the tools they need to empower them to seize their own opportunities and solve their own problems and build their own lives and their own community so we took that approach in the economy we said we have to bring the deficit down it s killing america but we have to invest more in our children in our future in technology and science and research we can t just stop investing in medical research because we ve got a deficit we have to cut in the right way and our opponents said it couldn t be done some of those in our own party said it couldn t be done because you couldn t cut and invest and every single person in the other party said that if my economic plan passed in 1993 the country would go into a nose dive we d have a terrible recession it would be the awfulest thing you ever saw and so every single one of them voted against it which means that if carol moseley braun had not been in the senate we would not have prevailed now on that alone she deserves your support for reelection the state of illinois is a lot better off today than it was the day i was sworn in as president in 1993 and that economic program we passed by one single solitary vote in the senate and in the house is a big reason vice president gore even had to vote in that and as he says whenever he votes we win but she was there she stood up she listened to all the nay sayers and said i don t believe that s right well now before this balanced budget plan passed we cut the deficit by 77 percent we got 4 8 percent unemployment rate the lowest unemployment in 24 years the lowest inflation in 30 years and something that s very important to democrats the biggest decline among inequality among working people in over 30 years and carol moseley braun played a major role in bringing that about and she deserves your support because of it and i hope you will give it to her we thought we could be tough and smart about crime and give the streets back to the people if we just listened to people like mayor daley who had been a prosecutor the police officers of our countries the community leaders and fashioned a crime bill that made sense we did it and we supported the innovative work going on in communities all over this country last year we had the biggest decline in crime in 36 years in 36 years and not all but nearly all of the folks in the other party opposed us on that and said what we really need is tough talk and more jails and nothing else we said what we need is more police tougher punishment on people who were serious offenders but more aggressive efforts to prevent young people from getting in trouble in the first place and that strategy has worked that strategy has worked now it s not as if this is a debatable point you know we ve had the debate and now we ve got the evidence and it would seem to me that the people of illinois would want to support someone who is out there advocating policies that work and a direction that s good for the ordinary citizens of illinois for the business community and the working people for the poor the middle class and the wealthy because we re going together and we re going forward together and i could give you example after example of that but we have changed the way politics works in washington it drives some people crazy but we ve done it there are lots of people who really i think in washington who are just kind of unhappy when the country is happy you know they would prefer it if the world really worked like those talk shows you know where people scream at each other and call each other names and hurl labels around like they really meant something but out here in the real world in all those little towns i visited on the bus in illinois in 92 and 96 those people don t need talking heads screaming at each other they need reasoned public debate by people who care deeply about their future and what their children s lives will be like actually producing results that make a difference and that s what we re trying to do and that s what you ought to reward because that s what helps the people of illinois to build a better future and if you just look at this budget debate that we re having it s a historic marvelous thing and i still believe even though we re disagreeing mostly because members of congress being contentious as they are some of them don t want to adhere to the terms of the agreement at some point but if you look at that agreement it would balance the budget but it would give us the biggest increase in health care investment for children since medicaid passed in 1965 it would balance the budget but it would give us the biggest in educational investment for our children since 1965 and the biggest increase in access to colleges and universities since the g i bill was passed 50 years ago that s what s in that balanced budget and make no mistake about it those priorities are there because of our side and what we believe and what we brought to the table and i think they deserve to be supported and i ll just give you three specific examples of things that bear the imprint of carol moseley braun one in the past i ll give four two in the budget and one still in the future number one she was a co sponsor of the family and medical leave act it was the first bill i signed as president every month my staff pulls for me a representative sample of mail i get from ordinary american citizens people i ve never met people i never will meet and among the most moving letters i have ever received are those that come from people who tell me my wife got sick my child got sick my father was dying i got to take a little time off from work without losing my job i got to be true and faithful to my family and true and faithful to my job and i didn t lose it i m a better employee and america is a better place because of the family and medical leave act believe me if people who thought like us had never attained the white house and kept the majority in congress when we did it never would have become the law of the land the other side said it s going to hurt the economy it was the first bill i signed in 93 if it s hurting the economy it s doing a poor job of it i believe we re a better place when people can succeed at home and at work this is a problem that affects americans of all income groups a lot of upper income people tear their hair out worrying about how they can do what they re supposed to do at work and still do right by their children this family leave act symbolizes the values this country ought to stand for two things in the budget number one in 1993 we knew we would have to do something extra if we wanted our cities and people who had literally been physically isolated from the mainstream of life to have any chance whatever to participate in the free enterprise system and succeed so we created the empowerment zone concept which carol moseley braun supported and chicago is participating we created the community development financial institutions act to set up banks like the south shore bank here in chicago all over america so that people who could otherwise never get any credit to start their own business very often a self employed business in isolated inner cities and poor rural areas would have a chance to do that hillary did a lot of work on these things when we were still living in arkansas and has been all over the world promoting these kind of community financial institutions and these microenterprise businesses and loans to them in developing countries it is amazing how much your government has done to help people who would otherwise be desperately poor in countries all over the world to get credit to start their own businesses and we had never done anything to help our own people do the same things carol moseley braun was a co sponsor of that in this balanced budget amendment we more than double the funds for the community development financial institutions everybody ought to have a chance to participate in this economic boom and it won t be good enough for me until everybody does and that s what she s trying to do number two the cities of this country have worked and worked and worked to bring back economic vitality and we now see unemployment in our 50 largest cities falling by a third in the last four years we ve got economic growth coming back and one of the biggest barriers to growth in the city is an environmental problem where sites have been abandoned where economic activity used to occur and it is not economical for someone else to come in and redevelop those sites and put people to work because of the cost of environmental clean up and our balanced budget and these sites by the way are called brownfields most americans don t know what that is you read of a brownfield is a place almost always in a city where people used to make money and they left and it s now polluted and people can t afford to go in and make money there again otherwise the cities would very often be the most economical places to invest for new business because that s where the labor pool is very often so what we have done is to come up with a strategy to give tax credits to people who invest there and also to invest a lot more money through the environment protection agency to try to help clean them up so we can have economic vitality coming back to the cities carol moseley braun is one of the chief cosponsors of the brownfields legislation it s a very important part of chicago s future and important to illinois and you ought to be for it and the last thing i want to say is carol moseley braun is the first person who came to me and said mr president i know the national government has never done this before but we ought to try to do something about the crumbling buildings in our country s school system we ve got too many places like a school district where i was in florida recently when i had my unfortunate accident where the children were going to school in 17 trailer houses as well as the regular school building that s how over crowded they were i was in philadelphia the other day the average age of a school building in philadelphia is 65 years of age now a lot of those schools are very well built but they re in poor repair and there are a lot of school districts that simply don t have the property tax base and simply don t have a high enough percentage of parents living in the school district as property owners to do everything they need to do to rebuild these buildings i m trying to put a computer in every classroom and library in the country it will be of precious little comfort if the ceiling is leaking and the windows are cracked and carol moseley braun said we ought to do something about this and she persuaded me to offer a partial solution to a huge national challenge and in the budget agreement i could not persuade the leaders of the congress the majority to go along with it but i still believe in the end well get this done especially if you reelect her because it s the right thing to do but here s a case where she was out front on an issue she said we have a national interest we re fixing to have the biggest increase in investment in education from the national government in a whole generation and we re going to leave tens of thousands of our children in substandard physical facilities where it will be very difficult for them to learn and for the teachers to teach and we can t solve the whole problem but we ought to give states and localities the incentive to do more and say if you will do more we ll do more to help you you have to carry your load but if you will we ll do more to help you that is leadership that s what you hire people for you hire people to make good decisions to make your life better to give you the tools to make the most of your own lives and you hire people to look to the future and come up with leadership ideas that may not be accepted when they re first floated but that have merit that are right and that in the end are going to prevail if you give the people who are advocating them the chance to serve long enough to do it that s my simple case to you this is a better country today because in 1992 the state of illinois sent carol moseley braun a democrat to the united states senate instead of her opponent if you had sent her opponent there the economic program i advanced would have failed by one vote and this would be a different country today you should reward people who do things that are good for this country and it s a better country because we have someone like her up there advocating these innovating approaches in the environment in the economy in families and in education listen our best days are still ahead of us don t kid yourself this country has got a brilliant future but we have to face our challenges and i close with this point about 10 days ago i went out to san diego and gave a speech about race not yesterday s racial challenges but tomorrow s and i pointed out among other things that today we already have five school districts in america where the children come from over 100 different racial and ethnic groups in a matter of a year or two we ll have 12 school districts we have a large number of our biggest countries including this one where there are people from over 100 different racial and ethnic groups today we have one state hawaii where there is no majority race in three years california will join hawaii and they represent 13 percent of the total population of america but within 30 years america will have no majority race we must find a way to work with each other across racial lines to sit down and talk honestly with each other and to realize that we have a deep and profound stake in the success of each other s children that s what i couldn t help thinking about when those kids were up here singing tonight you didn t care what color they were did you and you didn t care what their backgrounds were and they made you feel better didn t they you felt better when they were singing than you ve felt all night long why because they represented the best of you and all of your hopes for the future one of the things i like about carol moseley braun is she can work with different kinds of people she can reach across the lines that divide and she gets up there every day and tries to get something done and that s why i tried to become your president that s the test that i always wanted to measure myself against but most importantly that s the right thing for all those children that were up here singing so you think about those things and think about them today tomorrow and through november of 1998 and send her back to the senate so we can send america forward thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton25 7 00 bill_clinton think my friend would get a big kick out of knowing today that i am virtually at a loss for words every friendship has a chronology ours started in 1972 when i came up here to fayetteville to see diane because she was a delegate to the democratic national convention and we two comprised along with jim some 50 percent of the white arkansans who wanted to vote for george mcgovern so we re drinking a cup of coffee or drinking a coke or something at the union and i d met this woman like 10 minutes ago and i was supposed to be talking politics with her and all of a sudden i started talking about hillary and i was talking about how much she had reminded me of hillary and all of a sudden i felt that somehow she had totally captured me and in some fundamental way i would somehow belong to her for the rest of my life and that s exactly what happened and in 1973 when i came home to arkansas and then hillary came here and i made sure they got together and diane and jim and i we d meet her one of us we weren t married then and it s been kind of the most interesting thing in my friendship life that hillary and i always considered diane and jim our best couple friend but we were both privileged to have individual friendships with both of them and it has been a true blessing it does tickle me that she worked in all my campaigns and after jim made her a rich lady she still lived in that lousy apartment in little rock in 92 still working the campaign it tickles me that when i married them in 1979 that s one way a governor has more power than a president i can t do that anymore they wanted me to wear a top hat tails i even had a cane and i never get tired of looking at that wedding picture it s in the program then this was not a woman to let you wallow in self pity in 1980 i became the youngest former governor in the history of america so after giving me a couple of months to lick my wounds and feel sorry for myself she made me show up at her political science class to explain how i got my brains beat out so many times over the last several years she gave me a home away from home and then since we ve been in the white house as you heard hillary say even in the governor s mansion we tried to give them the same it was just a little over five months ago and probably two or three days before we learned that diane was ill that jim came up and spent three nights three days and three nights in washington and we were thinking about all the trips that we would take together when finally hillary and i were liberated from our present responsibilities it doesn t take long to live a life and i guess what i would like to say today is that somehow i felt about her as i have rarely felt about any human being that she had this peculiar blend she was beautiful and good she was serious and funny she was completely ambitious to do good and be good but fundamentally selfless sometime in our mid 30 s when hillary and i were living in the governor s mansion we woke up one day and realized we might not live forever and that something could happen to us and we actually made out a will and i called diane and jim and said you know we re making out this will would you raise chelsea if anything happens to us thankfully we were able to watch our children grow up together diane had great kids and great stepchildren bill and missy both work for hillary and me now and we re very grateful for that there are just three other points i would like to make diane had an interesting life came to arkansas because she married hugh kincaid and she stayed jim blair would be the first person to tell you she made a lot better man out of him than he was before he married her and most of us would tell you that she somehow made better people of us as well but i want to say this because somebody needs to i ve never seen a more beautiful complete expression of love in my life than you jim when you fought to save her and you took care of her when you realized you couldn t the second thing i want to tell you is diane blair lived to the very end i mean really lived she and i were still doing the new york times sunday crossword puzzle together all these times you know we got all these hillary and i would get good publicity for flying down here to see diane and people wanted to know what we did we sat on a couch and we worked the crossword puzzle and she was exceedingly jealous of me because i would get the copy three or four days before sunday and she got it a couple days later so i used to taunt her i would do it i would do the crossword puzzle and i was faithful in doing it once she got sick i did it the first day i got it i would send it to her and i would taunt her because she prided herself so much in being too noble to sneak and see whether i had gotten the answer right if she was having trouble the second thing i want you to know is she was still writing me letters to the end dear president bill you should give a farewell address only a few presidents have you should do it and here is exactly what you should say i was looking at all of these pictures up here and i thought about how many times over the years i would just we d be up at the lake doing something just grungy as we could be all four of us and diane would turn a certain way and i would think my god she s beautiful in a totally unique way and i was seeing all these pictures thinking about that again the last time hillary and i saw her i think it was the day before she essentially lost consciousness and she was there with her little grandchildren on the bed and she had lost all her hair and she wasn t going to the trouble to wear a wig anymore but her eyes were still burning and she was so beautiful and the last thing she ever said was the thing i d like to say to you hillary and chelsea and i were standing there and hillary and i were holding her hands and she said before i go because we were leaving we had to leave she didn t say before you go she said before i go i want to tell you remember and hillary said remember what diane and she smiled and said just remember so that s what i say to you and every dark and difficult moment of your life whenever you need to remember something profoundly good get a little more energy to redouble your efforts feel less sorry for yourself be more grateful just remember thank you dem wjclinton25 7 97 bill_clinton thank you very much superintendent paz president allen my longtime friend sam sava thank you secretary riley i believe the record will reflect when your tenure is over that you have done more for the children of america than any secretary of education who ever served and i thank you i want to say we are joined today by a number of other distinguished education leaders other superintendents from cities around our country along with bob chase the president of the nea sandra feldman the president of the aft michael casserley the executive director of the council of great city schools and ann bryant the executive director of the national school board association and my good friend mayor beverly o neill from long beach california and a lot of superintendents are here i thank you for joining the elementary school principals and for your support for better education for our children i want to begin by thanking the elementary principals for what they do for america s children like every parent i remember very well the first time i sent my child off to school putting her in the hands of a principal i did not know but whom i came to know and like very well every year hundreds of thousands of children arrive on your doorstep entrusted to you by their parents and every year you prove their trust is well placed when i was the governor of arkansas i had the opportunity to co chair a national task force on school leadership for the education commission of the states and we found about a decade ago what you have always known that when it comes to the quality of education in the school it is the principal who makes all the difference as school enrollments reach record levels up to 54 million by the year 2006 and as we move into the 21st century s knowledge economy where learning for a lifetime will be essential to success your leadership will be more important than ever and your ability to inspire people and to make them believe that we can achieve educational excellence will be more important than ever beginning with our nation s elementary schools we have to demand excellence from every school every teacher every student we have to repair and rebuild our schools we have to make sure they take advantage of the newest technologies we have to make sure that they are safe and drug free we have to make sure that we are supporting promising reforms like charter schools and other initiatives underway in many of your districts but i believe the single most important thing we can do to give our children world class education is to insist on high national standards so that we make sure that we ve done everything we can to see that every single child learns what he or she knows to succeed in the exciting world of the 21st century for too long we ve been unwilling to insist on that as a nation perhaps for fear that some of our children could not reach those standards perhaps out of a misguided notion that such standards would lead to too much federal government involvement or too much loss of local control i believe a lot of americans have always feared that children from disadvantaged backgrounds and struggling communities just might not be able to hold their own i believe that too many americans have thought that with so much diversity and poverty and family difficulties among our young students american children would simply always lag behind other countries that had more homogenous less disruptive cultures and perhaps longer school years still for more than a decade now at least since the issuance of a nation at risk report in 1983 and indeed going back some years before americans have been working hard led by their educators and reform minded public servants to improve our schools and it is making a difference as secretary riley said last month we learned that our fears were wrong when america s 4th graders finished second only to korea in science in the international math and science tests they scored well above the average on the annual math tests six years earlier our 4th graders had scored well below the international average these tests of course are not of all of our 4th graders but they are of a rather large and representative sample of them and they tested enough of them to prove that we don t have to settle for second class expectations or second class goals for any of our children they also show frankly that by the time our students reach the 8th grade the high test scores drop back below the international average i think we all know that the problems our children face are aggravated in those middle school years when they move into adolescence and that in many of our communities the structure and organization of the middle school was more adequate to a previous time when a lot of those problems did not exist nonetheless the 4th grade test proved number one that you re doing a good job and number two that our kids can do it and that is after all the most important thing therefore i believe it is imperative now to take action and to begin the movement to high national standards for all of our children when we don t expect or encourage our children to learn we indirectly encourage them to fail when we set high standards and when we insist on them there s no end to what our kids can do you see that every day you know that better than anyone in my state of the union address i challenged every state and every school to adopt high national standards and by 1999 to actually test all our 4th graders in reading and all our 8th graders in math to make sure the standards are being met not federal standards but national ones standards that every child can meet in every city and state in america and standards that every child must meet if we want every child to be able to live out his or her dreams after all national standards are defensible because reading is reading and math is math in appalachia and in alaska and all points in between since i issued that call education leaders or governors or both in seven states california north carolina maryland massachusetts michigan kentucky and west virginia along with our department of defense schools all over the world have announced their support for national standards and their desire to participate in the testing program as soon as it becomes available in 1999 today i am pleased to make an announcement that would have been literally unthinkable just a couple of years ago fifteen of our largest school districts including schools in six of the seven largest cities in the united states have committed to meet these standards and to participate in the tests to measure the progress of their students against them now i don t know how much news this will be tonight on the news or tomorrow in the papers but every one of us who has been involved in education if i had told them five years ago that the leaders of the school districts in new york philadelphia atlanta broward county florida cincinnati detroit chicago houston san antonia el paso omaha los angeles long beach fresno and seattle that the leaders of these school districts have asked that their students be held to and measured against the same standards in reading and math that we expect our children to meet to have a world class education no one would have believed that educators know this is an historic astonishing wonderful moment in american education and i thank them for doing that this commitment means that 3 5 million more children one out of every 14 public school children in america will be held to these world class education standards in the basics and it means after the test is given all of them will get better education because we ll all learn from the test results and keep working until we get the results we want in every one of those districts i would like to ask the representatives of those 15 school districts who are here to stand up and be recognized the superintendents the teachers the principals thank you very much and let me say the secretary of education and i are about to leave to go out to las vegas to meet with the governors now if this event had gone on in 1979 or 1980 or 1983 or 1984 the governors would have been the first group out there and they ve been dragging their feet and don t you believe for a moment that dick riley and i aren t going to tell them what we saw at the elementary school principals convention when we get these results they ought to incorporated into school and school district report cards so that parents and taxpayers can see how our kids are doing but can also measure their progress keep in mind you all know this and we have to explain this to the citizens and the parents these tests are not graded on the curve if you make the highest grade in the class and it s not high enough you don t know enough if you make the lowest grade in the class and you re over the bar you re at least qualified to do well in the world you will live in it is very important that we get that message across to our people we are measuring what is required to succeed in the world our children will live in we in the national government will continue to do our part the balanced budget agreement we reached with congress that was voted for overwhelmingly in both houses by members of both parties takes head start the next step toward our goal of a million children it will fund the technology literacy challenge to help us participate with the private sector in hooking up every classroom and library to the internet by the year 2000 it will help to fund america reads our program to get a million trained reading tutors available to give extra help to children who need it most to make sure that all of our 8 year olds can read independently i urge congress to act to implement this program all told you should know that if this balanced budget agreement passes the increase in education funding federal support for education will be the largest since 1965 i also want to emphasize that we know that one of the challenges especially that a lot of our big city schools will face is a looming teacher shortage that we re going to have more students coming in and more teachers retiring just last week i offered a new initiative to provide extra scholarship money modeled on the federal health service corps where we pay for medical school costs for doctors who will go out to under served areas to pay for the education costs of young people who will agree to teach for three years in areas that are especially challenging and i hope congress will pass that as well finally let me mention in regard to the budget that in addition to the support for education from head start through high school graduation this budget takes another huge step toward opening the doors of college education to all americans the agreement provided for a tax credit for the first two years of college that would be sufficient to virtually guarantee universal access at least to community college for every high school graduate in the united states and for every adult who needs to go back to school in addition it provides tax relief for the third and fourth years of college and for graduate school and that s what we re working on now in these budget negotiations the agreement provided for that the tax plan that the republicans released a couple of days ago falls far short of the commitment in the agreement now let me say again i believe we should have a tax cut we can afford it and still balance the budget because the budget is now going to finish this year over 80 percent below what it was when i took office we ve already done over 80 percent of the work in balancing the budget but the tax cut has to first of all put middle class families who need the relief most at the heart of its objectives it should help families to pay for all four years of college and for graduate education it should help working people get training throughout a lifetime it should help middle class parents to raise their children and equally important it should keep us within the limits of balancing this budget and keeping it balanced and not having it explode in the out years we have been handicapped severely for years and years and years because we went on a binge of deficit spending in the early 80s that we couldn t break now we have done it you see the results in our economy when we have fiscal discipline you have lower interest rates you have more investment you have a growing economy and it s required us to show some restraint here over the last few years but it s also helped to swell the coffers of state and local government which fund our schools primarily because we have a healthy economy so all of this has to be observed i have to tell you that even though there are differences which are clearly and publicly stated between the white house and the republican leaders and to some extent also clearly stated between the democrats in congress and others i think we re going to get this agreement the negotiators are working even as we speak and i think we all know that this is a remarkable moment in american history and we have an obligation to balance the budget for the first time since 1969 to keep this economic growth going and to do it in a way that gives us the biggest investment in education in over 30 years and i might add also the biggest investment in expanding health coverage to our children since 1965 and this is important that will also help you do your jobs better and i want to emphasize that if we pass college benefit provisions as contemplated by the budget agreement it will be the biggest increase in access to college federally supported access to college since the g i bill passed in 1945 this is a very good agreement a very good agreement so this is a day that we celebrate these 15 school districts stepping forward representing so many of our children putting the lie to the notion that our children can t meet the high standards because they re from immigrant families or because they re from poor families or because they live in difficult circumstances we can all make excuses until the cows come home but in the end these kids have to get up and live their lives and we ve got to give them a chance to live their lives in the best way possible and we have done that we celebrate that we celebrate that we live in the expectation of a successful conclusion of these budget negotiations but the thing i want to close with is that when you go back to your school i want you to know that i know that you are leading the fight for the future of our children more than anybody else you have to have the conviction that every child can learn to high standards you have to have the conviction that your teachers can do what they have to do you have to have the convictions that you can establish the alliances with your parents and your communities that you have to establish you have to believe that if you demand high standards and have high expectations that our kids can meet them you have to believe that we actually can succeed in giving our children the tools they need to make the most of their own lives and to keep our country the great beacon of hope and freedom and opportunity in the 21st century pearl buck one said that if our american way of life fails the child it fails us all it follows that if our american way of life supports ennobles lifts up our children it does that for all of us that is what you do and i am very grateful thank you and god bless you a young man michael morrison a wheelchair bound student raised by a single mother who became my friend on that cold november tuesday in 1992 when it was really cold in new hampshire michael morrison got up to go to the polls to work for me and his car was broken down his family car his mother couldn t take him and so he wheeled his wheelchair alongside an icy highway for more than two miles to reach the polling place he is now a college honor student don t ever forget what you do makes a difference thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton25 8 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you very very much thank you thank you thank you so much thank you mr mayor it s great to be back in chillicothe the last time i was here it was three degrees and we still went running in the park and i m amazed i can move but i survived it and i m glad to be back it s a wonderful place thank you thank you senator john glenn for your heroic career your magnificent service to ohio and to the united states thank you for your leadership in defense and foreign policy and in helping al gore and me to give this country the smallest federal government in 30 years and the most efficient since john kennedy was president of the united states and thank you ted strickland i want to thank you for a couple of things i want to thank you for coming to me personally and riding with me on air force one and pleading with me to help you keep open the gaseous diffusion plant in portsmouth i want to thank you for helping work with me on the enterprise community designation for portsmouth i want to thank you for having the courage and i think it cost you your seat in 94 to vote for that economic plan when our friends in the opposition said it was tax and spend and of course it wasn t we cut taxes for 15 million of the hardest working americans we made 90 percent of the small business in this country eligible for a tax cut but we did cut the deficit and our friends in the opposition said give us the congress bill clinton s plan will bankrupt the country increase the deficit cost us jobs well the verdict is in friends four years later we have 10 million more jobs the deficit has gone down four years in a row under the same administration for the first time since before the civil war ted strickland was right and his opponent was wrong i want to thank you for voting for the family and medical leave law twelve million working americans have been able to take some time off in the last three and a half years when there was a baby born or a parent sick without losing their jobs and we just got a bipartisan study that said 90 percent of the businesses said it was no problem we have grown jobs faster in this economy in the last four years than as senator glenn said any republican administration since the 1920s and we still passed the family and medical leave law so people could succeed at home and at work thank you ted strickland you were right and they were wrong and let me say one other thing after ted left the congress they had a chance to implement their contract with america don t forget that either folks i ll have more to say about that in a minute this man was a good congressman he did you proud he s a good human being he s a good person and he ought to be given a chance to represent this place again let me also say i brought some people with me your state treasurer and our national treasurer mary ellen withrow thank you for coming my good friend and a former official in the u s department of agriculture whose farm i visited in ohio in 1992 gene branstool our nominee for the senate last year joel hyatt and we have several members of the ohio legislature and officials of the party state representatives mike shoemaker and bill ogg i know we have county auditor steve neal state senator january michael long somebody told me that in this crowd the lady who gave me a handcrafted quilt last time was here leona long are you here thank you very much if you re here there you are god bless you thank you and i told you i d save those quilts and i ve still got yours and a young woman who introduced me at the last town meeting melissa hagen i think she s here too somewhere thank you melissa if you re here there you are back there thank you i d like to thank all the bands that were here i d like to say that my daughter chelsea and i are delighted to be here hillary started this train trip with us but you know she s from chicago so she had to fly home to make sure everything was all right when we got there the vice president said to tell you hello and he s in chicago as well and i know that this is not the most direct route to chicago but i ve been in huntington west virginia and ashland kentucky today and now i m in chillicothe and i ve been in all kind of places along the way saying hello to people because i wanted to go to the convention to accept the nomination of my party for another term as president by seeing the people that i ran for president to represent and i wanted you to see me on this train because i wanted you to remember we re not only on the right track to chicago we re on the right track to the 21st century and we need to stay on the right track in 1992 when i came here the country had high unemployment slow job growth stagnant wages rising crime we weren t facing up to our challenges we were drifting apart but i said then and i ll say again tonight i think our best days are ahead i think this new world we are moving into offers people more chances to live their dreams than any period in human history the children in this audience tonight within a decade will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet all we have to do is to meet our challenges and protect our values all we have to do is to say opportunity for all responsibility from all and we re going forward together we re not going to be divided anymore we re going forward together as an american community and you know what it is working look what we did just last week we raised the minimum wage for 10 million americans in the same bill in the very same bill we made 90 percent of the small businesses in this country eligible for another tax cut if they invest more in their business we made it easier for people in small businesses to take out pensions and to keep those pensions when they changed jobs that s terribly important we made it easier for parents to adopt and gave them a 5 000 tax credit if they would adopt a child that needs a home and removed the barriers to cross racial adoption because we want a pro family country that takes care of every child and finds a home for every child i signed a bill to end welfare as we know it but not to take from poor children their medical care their nutrition their help if they re disabled but to say we are going to change this system from one that fosters dependence to one that fosters independence we want people who are poor to have the same chance everybody else does to succeed at home and at work and that is my goal and i want to say more about that it s terribly important and maybe most important of all you know another thing ted strickland did was try to help us get some work done on health care reform and they spent a lot of money the people who didn t want any changes telling everybody how terrible our plans were and what a big government plan it was and never mind that all the experts said it was actually a modest moderate progressive plan to provide coverage and keep the private sector in our health system but we didn t succeed in 94 and a lot of the democrats paid the price but because of the work we did last week i signed a bill that does about 30 percent of what we tried to do and a big first step the kennedy kassebaum bill it says you cannot lose your health insurance just because somebody in your family has been sick or if you change jobs you cannot do it anymore you have a right to health insurance twenty five million americans think of it 25 million americans will have a chance now to get or keep their health insurance that s a lot of children sleeping better at night that s a lot of parents feeling more secure and so ted strickland i m sorry you weren t there to vote for it but your vote counted because you were there first and we appreciate you sir for sticking up for it it was the right thing to do and so i say to you my friends we re on the right track unemployment is down there is more opportunity we ve got not only 10 million new jobs 4 5 million new homeowners 10 million homeowners that have refinanced their homes at lower interest rates the unemployment rate in ohio is down to 4 9 percent now what do we got to do now we have to keep this economic recovery going until everyone can participate that means balance the budget don t gut medicare and medicaid education and the environment to do it we can do it without doing that we can invest in our future and still do it what else does it mean it means that we have to increase the educational level of the people of this country you heard cindy talking about her education i want to make by the year 2000 two years of college after high school as universal as a high school education is today i want it to be there for everybody and so i have proposed to give working families in america a 10 000 tax deduction for the cost of college tuition for any kind of tuition after high school and a 1 500 refundable tax credit for the cost of the first two years of community college in every state in the country that is what we ought to do i want us to have more responsibility in this country you know there are 1 3 million fewer people on the welfare rolls than there were when i became president child support collections are 40 percent higher and the crime rate has gone down for four years in a row in 1994 our friends in the opposition said oh look what the president did they re going to take your gun away from you guess what everybody in ohio is still hunting with the same gun they had when they said that it wasn t true then and if you believed them when they misled you you need to pay them back this time and tell them you don t appreciate being misled you ve still got your gun but the country is safer i ll tell you who doesn t have guns 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers don t have guns because of the brady bill but we ve got more to do if we want real responsibility we ve got to finish the work of putting 100 000 police officers on our street we ve got hundreds here in ohio they re bringing the crime rate down we also have to recognize in this welfare reform bill i signed folks that s the beginning not the end it s all very well to say to people after a certain time we re going to cut you off welfare and make you go to work there has to be work to find and i am going to the convention to tell the american people what i propose to do to help find jobs to move people from welfare to work and help jobs for other people who are not yet there we must not let this welfare reform be some cruel budget cutting hoax that throws poor children in the street they re our children too what we want is for their parents to go to work to be able to go to work to live like the rest of america to come and be part of our big family and go forward together that s what we all want finally let me just say this i want us to go forward together together with people around the world who agree with us together with people here at home and maybe of a different religion or a different color but who share our convictions and our values that means we ve got to do more to work together to build strong families that s what the family leave law was about we ve got to do more to work together to build a clean environment 50 million americans are breathing cleaner air now than they were four years ago we ve got safer meat standards safer standards against dangerous pesticides all supported by the agricultural community we ve cleaned up more toxic dumps in three years than they did in 12 we re moving in the right direction and finally i want americans who need it to have a tax cut but i want it to be a tax cut we can afford that will do some good for individuals for families and for our country i proposed a targeted tax cut i already told you about the education cuts a 500 credit for children under 13 an expanded ira for people with incomes phasing up to 100 000 that you can put into and then save and withdraw from for education to buy that first home for health care costs those are the kind of tax cuts that will help ordinary american families we can afford those now as you heard from our friends in san diego my respectable opponents they offer you one that s five times as big so why shouldn t you go for them well let me ask you this would you wake up tomorrow morning well you wouldn t tomorrow morning i guess but yes you would it s monday would you wake up tomorrow morning go to the bank and borrow money to give yourself a tax cut well then why would you hire somebody to do it think about that you think about it our friends in the republican party last year said not me they said they said and they were right that if we re on a balanced budget plan interest rates will be two percent lower than if we re not you just figure it out if your home mortgage your car payment your credit card payments go up two percent all your tax cut will go out the window paying higher interest rates and we ll have slower job growth and we won t be putting more people to work and the economy won t be growing but if we have a targeted disciplined tax cut that creates more people like this fine lady who introduced me if we have more people like her who feel like they can write the president six times until he shows up who are proud to be working to improve their education while they re raising children then they ll be a lot more cindy bakers in this country i can give you a tax cut that we can afford that will balance the budget keep the economy growing educate our children educate their parents allow us to save for health care and home buying and we can balance the budget that s the tax cut we need going forward on that track into the future not backward we tried it the other way and it did not work so i want you to help me give that message we re better off than we were four years ago we ve got health care reform minimum wage reform 10 million more jobs a stronger economy a crime bill that s working to bring down the crime rate we re in the middle of welfare reform and we re doing the right things we re bringing the american people together not dividing them but we re only halfway home we ve got a lot me to do we have gotten the country going in the right track in the next four years we need to make sure that every single american whose responsible enough to work for it has a chance to benefit and be rewarded and built a strong career a strong life a strong family a strong community and a strong nation that is my commitment to you that s what the next four years are about that s why i need your help will you help will you help will you help me every day every way stay with me on to chicago on to november we have to have ohio i m glad to be back bring me home again god bless you and thank you dem wjclinton25 9 00 bill_clinton thank you very much connie you can drink my water anytime didn t she do a good job i was really proud of her thank you thank you greg neal for welcoming us here in this beautiful beautiful center i d like to thank your congressman representative tom udall for joining us today thank you tom for being here and attorney general patsy madrid thank you for being here a little bird told me this was your birthday today so thank you for spending your birthday with us in a worthy cause santa fe mayor pro tem carol robertson lopez thank you for being here i thank the members of the city council and county commission and many others who have come here our former u s attorney john kelly and my college classmate thank you for being here i ve got a lot of other personal friends here as well as those of you who are involved in these endeavors and i thank you but most of all i want to express my appreciation to the brave women in this audience who have survived the horrors and fears of domestic violence for being with us today and for being in this very public setting connie i thank you for sharing your story with us and for somehow finding the strength to help other women deal with theirs we are here today to salute your efforts to recognize that progress has been made and to remind all americans that the struggle with domestic violence is far from over we re also here because on saturday night on the very eve of national domestic violence awareness month the violence against women act will actually expire without congressional action we re here to say to congress we owe it to women like connie trujillo and millions of others and their children and families to reauthorize and to strengthen the violence against women act and to do it this week now before the clock runs out for too long women like those who have been victimized in this room today fought a lonely battle for too long domestic violence was an issue kept behind closed doors treated as a purely private family matter despite the fact that it usually does occur at home despite the fact that victims are almost always women and children domestic violence is not just a family problem that neighbors can ignore not just a woman s problem men can turn away from it is america s problem the statistics speak for themselves domestic violence is the number one health risk for women between the ages of 15 and 44 in our nation close to a third of all the women murdered in america were killed by their husbands former husbands or boyfriends every 12 seconds another woman is beaten amounting to nearly 900 000 victims every single year and we know that in half the families where a spouse is beaten the children are beaten too domestic violence is a crime that affects us all it increases health costs keeps people from showing up to work prevents them from performing at their best keeps children out of school often prevents them from learning it destroys families relationships and lives and often prevents children from growing up to establish successful families of their own it tears at the fabric of who we are as a people and what we want for our children s tomorrows for many years when hillary and i were living in arkansas we lived very close to the domestic violence shelter and center in our hometown we spent lots of hours there talking to the women and the children and listening to their stories i m very proud of the fact that after we moved to washington hillary traveled all around the world to highlight the fact that violence against women and children is not an american problem it s a global problem with different manifestations and in many places violent practices masquerade as cultural traditions that is wrong and i have to tell you that every time i come into a setting like this i think about the encounters that because of hillary s efforts i ve had with village women in remote places in africa and in latin america and it is truly chilling to think about all the different rationalizations people have cooked up all over the world to justify men beating up on women and twisting the lives of their children we have come a long way in the united states in recognizing that this is criminal conduct that there may be deep seated emotional reasons for it which treatment is a better answer for than incarceration in some cases but it s a crime and it s a crime against the people who suffer and against the children who are tormented by it very often for the rest of their lives and against the larger society that we are trying to build for eight years now the vice president and i have tried to convey this simple message our message to the perpetrators is that you should be punished and to the victims is we want you to have safety and security no american should live in fear least of all in his or her own home the violence against women act was part of our landmark 1994 crime bill it was the very first time in the history of america that the nation s government in a comprehensive effort joined those of you here and your counterparts all across america in standing up and making common cause on this issue the violence against women act imposes tough penalties for actions of violence against women it also helps to train police and prosecutors and judges so they can better understand domestic violence something which believe it or not is still a significant problem all across the united states it helps to train people to recognize the symptoms when they see it it helps people perhaps most important of all to take appropriate systematic steps to prevent it the law gives grants to shelters who need more beds and better programs it provides assistance to law enforcement the courts and communities to help them respond to domestic violence sexual assault and stalking when they occur it established a 24 hour seven day toll free national domestic violence hotline to help women get emergency help and counseling find a shelter report abuse to authorities since 1996 this hotline has given more than 500 000 people a place to call to find help when they need it most the act has offered hope to countless numbers of women by letting them know they are not alone police officers who often shy away from so called family squabbles should now get involved physical violence is unacceptable in our homes the law s impact is no clearer than here in sante fe where the act and its much needed funding has helped make the city s streets schools and homes safer with the act s help connie and her esperanza shelter for battered families provided counseling and shelter to nearly 2 000 families last year with the act s help eight northern indian pueblo councils here in santa fe now have the means to give legal advice and victims counseling to native american women and proper training to tribal police departments courts and prosecutors with the act s help the morning star program in albuquerque provides safe houses and support groups for victims and their families all told the violence against women act has dedicated nearly listen to this 1 7 billion since 1994 to programs combatting domestic violence around our nation including more than 173 million this year alone today the department of justice will award nearly 2 million in violence against women act funds to combat domestic violence here in new mexico to strengthen tribal law enforcement address child abuse and domestic violence in rural areas and improve civil legal assistance programs now has all this made a difference well thanks to your work in programs like the ones here in santa fe we know that the violence against women act is having a real impact on domestic abuse according to a recent study from 1993 to 1998 violence against women by an intimate partner fell by 21 percent in the years 1996 97 and 98 intimate partners committed fewer murders than at any other time since 1976 when there were far fewer people in this country so while we have made strides in our war against domestic violence you only have to look around to know we ve still got miles to go we cannot turn our backs on the millions of women and children trapped in the cycle of domestic violence we can t allow them to face a nightmare alone let me say to you this really shouldn t be a partisan issue when congress first passed the violence against women act we had strong support from republicans as well as democrats this summer in a bipartisan effort both the house and the senate judiciary committees approved extending and reauthorizing and approving the violence against women act both republicans and democrats why is this not law now the committees have approved it we have more than enough votes in both houses to pass it because this issue for reasons i cannot understand has been used as a political football in washington all the congressional leadership has to do is to put it up for a vote and it will fly through and so again i implore the leadership of congress not to play games with the safety and future of women and children i ask all of you and those who will hear this message all across america tonight contact your senators and your representatives and tell them to ask the majority leadership in congress simply to schedule this for a vote this is not rocket science there is no complication here everybody knows what this law is everybody knows what it will do everybody knows what it has done yes we re close to an election and yes there are a lot of things that various people want to get done in congress between now and the end of the session when they go home for the election nobody wants to get anything any more done than i do but it is wrong to delay this one more hour schedule the bill for a vote i have spent a lot of time in the last eight years trying to make peace around the world trying to get people from northern ireland to the middle east to the balkans to the african tribal conflicts to lay down their ancient hatreds and stop dehumanizing people who are different from them i spent a good deal of time trying to make peace within our borders trying to get people to give up old hatreds of those who are different than them because they re of a different race or religion or because they re gay to give up all that but it is very hard for us to make peace around the world or even around the land unless we are first committed to making peace within our homes and i think we should stay at this until the day when we are truly shocked if we hear a little boy or a girl say something at school about witnessing a violent incident in their home when it is so rare people gasp in astonishment we re a long way from there but we owe it to our kids and all the women and children who have already been injured to keep at it until we reach that day thank you very very much and god bless you dem wjclinton25 9 94 bill_clinton thank you so much that s my introduction there you hear it pastor macky thank you thank you very much pastor macky first let me say on behalf of my family we are proud to be here in this church with its great history going back to 1819 running the underground railroad to help people to freedom i m also glad to be here in this african methodist episcopal church because your church has a long history with my home state arkansas and my hometown little rock where bishop allen came a long time ago as part of his effort to found this church i also want to thank you if i might for just letting us come here and worship and i would like to say that for hillary and for chelsea and for me this has been a great morning and i m sure i can say that all three of us are very grateful to all of you just for letting us come in here and to be with you i got a good lesson out of the briefest sermon i ve heard in a long time and i got a good lesson out of one of the most beautiful songs i have heard in a long time i loved all the music you know i like music and even as i get older and i can t sing quite in tune anymore i heard that fine man singing work on me so i need to be here and i need to hear that and then i heard your pastor say there is always a word from the lord i am grateful to be here with all these people who are my friends with the governor about whom i will say more in a moment and carl mccall and my dear friend ruth messinger and mark green and denny farrell and senator patterson alderman wright and karen burstein who wants to be your attorney general that s the best job i ever had i was attorney general of my state and you don t have to hire people or fire them you don t have to raise taxes or cut programs and if she ever does anything unpopular she can just say the constitution made her do it i hope you ll give her the chance to do it and i want to say a special word of thanks about my friend charlie rangel for what he said you know charlie talked about haiti let me say that for hillary and for me for both of us he has been a wonderful friend and partner in so many ways but i want to use him today in a way to get into what i want to talk about briefly charlie mentioned haiti and how the people were defenseless and poor and how hard it is for me to convince some people that our interest is at stake there although i think more and more americans are seeing that what we are doing there is good and supports democracy throughout our hemisphere which is nothing more than saying our neighborhood helps to end human rights violations that we find intolerable everywhere but unconscionable on our doorstep and offers them a chance at stability but it is an example of what i ran for president about i thought i had two jobs to get us into the next century one is to move this country forward just to get us to face our problems again jobs education drugs violence crime health care just to face the problems and go to work on them instead of just talking about them all the time and the other was to bring this country together instead of letting it drift apart and to try to bring the world together across the lines of race and region and income and religion i have just finished reading late last night a book about world war ii and president and mrs roosevelt and i am reminded as i think of our brave soldiers from all over the country and all their backgrounds doing their work today in haiti that in world war ii african americans were kept segregated in units in the army until the battle of the bulge at the end of the war had so many casualties that blacks and whites had to fight together and they didn t do it very long before they found out they liked it very well and the only complaint recorded in this book i read was that some of the white officers said that their black comrades were so ferocious they could hardly get them to quit fighting even when they needed to rest i am reminded that in world war ii we put japanese americans in concentration camps and then we let their children serve and a japanese outfit had the highest casualties of any american outfit in world war ii and in this book i saw the picture painted by the author of the military people going to the concentration camps to give the parents of the dead boys their medals while they were keeping them behind bars because we were fighting japan a country they had given up when i was fighting to build an economic partnership with mexico i was reminded in so many of our endeavors mexican american soldiers have had the highest rate of casualties i look at charlie rangel who served his country in uniform bravely and his son who served as a united states marine and i think to myself this is a country that if we can figure out how to live together will be strong all the way through the next century because the world is getting smaller and if people who are different can find oneness there is nothing that can stop them that is why the south africans wanted the united states to help run the election and spend a few million dollars for an honest election that produced the president nelson mandela that is coming here to see me in a few days that is why the people in ireland having fought for 800 years against one another wish the people of the united states to be involved in trying to bring an end to their conflict that is why the israelis and the arabs wish the united states to be involved in bringing an end to that horrible horrible period of violence in the middle east this is a very great country even in the moment of great tension one week ago today in haiti when i did not know whether we would actually have to shoot our way in there the de facto military leaders told our delegation there president carter general powell and senator nunn well if the president is determined to do this if the united nations is determined to do this we want the americans here because we trust them i say that because if we can just face our challenges and move forward and come together we re going to be all right now when the pastor said there is always a word from the lord i looked at the program and i saw the word from the lord isaiah 40 31 they that wait upon the lord shall renew their strength they will mount up with wings as eagles but i want to talk to you about the rest of the verse they shall run and not grow weary they shall walk and not faint i have a simple message for you today the people who don t want us to get together and who have a very different idea about moving forward than most of us do are hoping and praying that you will grow weary that you will not run that you will not walk that you will just grow weary look at mr mccall here how many times do people all over america say if only our children had more role models if only men would take responsibility for their families and their communities and set a good example and lift our children up oh how many times do you hear it said well folks you ve got a chance to send a message to this entire country that people who make something of themselves and who stand for something good and who work for what is right will be rewarded without regard to their background that we are going to go forward and we are going to do it together and if you will not grow weary you can do it and let me say something about governor cuomo his greatest failing is he speaks about me better than he speaks about himself by the time he got through nominating me for president in new york he had me convinced i ought to have the job i grew three inches sitting out there in the pew today just listening to him talk they say well the governor will have a hard time getting reelected after all he s running for a fourth term i know about that i did that one time and i was out in a little booth in the state fair in little rock i want you to listen to this this could be about him instead of me this is how it happened and every year at the state fair in my little rural state i would go to the fair and have a governor s day and anybody could come up and talk to the governor and say whatever they wanted and i lived in a rural state where most people call me by my first name including my enemies and they said whatever they wanted and so i listened to this all day and i was having to decide whether i would run for reelection i had been governor a long time and along toward the end of the day an old man in overalls came up to me and he said bill you going to run again i said i don t know if i do will you vote for me he said yes i will i always have and i said well aren t you sick of me after all these years he said no but everybody else i know is and then he said but what do you expect all you have done is nag us you re always trying to get us to do something else always pushing us on jobs and education and taking care of kids and he said you know it s just hard to take all that but you know something it s beginning to work and i m going to stick with it and i went all across my state and told that story on myself but i told the last part too and the people sent me back how many times in the bible i think two or three times does our saviour say a prophet is not with honor except in his own land most places would give anything to have a leader like governor cuomo and you can say well he s been there a long time let me tell you something in a lot of ways this is his first term and it just started because it s the first time we ve had a chance to work together as partners i ask you to consider the problems of america the breakdown of community the breakdown of family the rise of drugs and violence and gangs the things that grip you here every day do you think that just started yesterday that s been going on for 30 years i told my wife and daughter as we were coming up here today that when i was a young man living in england i used to come back to the united states when i was sent over there for a couple of years and i would land in new york and unlike most people like me i mean here i was and i had an even bigger accent back then i took the transportation and i got off at 125th and lennox every time i came back here and i walked alone through harlem because i was fascinated by it i wanted to see the people i wanted to talk to the people i wanted to see what they were up against even then i can remember some people back when the drug of choice was heroin leaning in corners with needles in their arms this didn t just happen overnight friends and these economic problems that we ve got they ve been going the social problems 30 years what are the economic problems not only do we have a lot of people out of work we ve got a lot of people working like crazy never getting a raise right and they are worried about losing their health care or they re worried about losing their pensions how long has that been going on twenty years twenty years we have been struggling to organize ourselves and to educate ourselves and to be competitive in a global economy and then our governmental policies how long did we hear from our government that the real answer to all of our problems was bad mouth the federal government lower taxes on the wealthiest of americans burden the middle class reduce investment in our future and explode the debt and all the time the people that were in cussed the government as they were doing their best to stay in the government and keep drawing those checks that happened for 12 years right i have been president for 20 months not 30 years not 20 years not 10 years when mario cuomo became governor it was all he could do to stand up against the tide of walking away from the states walking away from the cities walking away from the people and in 20 months because we re working together my partner mr rangel and i my partner governor cuomo and i we re all working together with people in the private sector we brought out national deficit down for three years in a row for the first time since mr truman was president we ve done something the other party said they were for but never did we have reduced the size of the federal government it s going to be as small as it was since mr kennedy was president at the end of my term but we gave all the money back to you to pay for the crime bill the governor talked about we empowered the communities and the states to hire the police to build the prisons to have the drug education the drug treatment the other programs for the kids the job programs we at least got the health care into both houses of congress and on the floor for the first time in american history and we ve got to keep doing that we ve had 4 3 million new jobs manufacturing jobs increasing for almost a year now the longest period they ve increased in a decade our country was voted the most productive country in the world by a panel of international economists just the other day for the first time in nine years just this week i signed a bill that will help harlem that will help new york city that will point 4 8 billion into special banks to loan money to poor folks who can t borrow money to go into business just this week something i specifically pledged to do when i ran for president what s happening we re having an election in which there are 30 years of social problems 20 years of economic problems and 12 years of politics bad mouthing the government and we ve done more in any 20 month period than anybody has in a month of sundays but a lot of people have not felt it yet and they cannot know it as the governor said because there s no way for them to get the information except in an election where we tell people so we now find a situation in which the people may actually go out and vote for the very things that they are against because they don t know what has happened in the last 20 months and they see the wake of the last 30 years and election which depends largely on its outcome on those same people s ability to bad mouth those of us that are trying to move the country forward and bring the country together so you will be weary and stay home and not mount up with wings as eagles not run or walk without growing weary or fainting one day a long time ago i suffered a terrible setback in my public life i was trying to do something for the people of my state it was a very bad day for me not personally but because i had failed to help hundreds of people i had worked to help and my secretary who was a great woman of faith kept one of those scripture calendars on her desk and i was alone in my office almost in tears and she looked at the calendar for the first time and ripped off the calendar piece and brought it into me and gave me what has ever since been my favorite verse of scripture from st paul s letter to the galatians let us not grow weary in doing good for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart i say to you today my fellow americans we ve just been here 20 months we re 4 3 million jobs better we re a crime bill better we re the immunization bill better two million kids are going to get their shots by 96 we re 200 000 more children in head start better we re coming together more do not lose heart show up talk to the people in your neighborhoods tell them to show up scripture says we re supposed to be good citizens too mario cuomo is the heart that you must not lose mr mccall is the heart that you must not lose these people are the heart that you must not lose do not let a moment pass when the movement is in the forward direction and the feelings are not there yet stay strong mount up go forward god bless you dem wjclinton25 9 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you so much well i thought i had a long day in pennsylvania i went to pittsburgh and to robert morris college robert morris was one of the main financiers of the american revolution and he quit the continental congress in 1778 because he thought they were printing too much hot money i guess he would have quit the congress in the 12 years the other folks were making economic policy i announced there with secretary rubin a new savings instrument for the american people a bond that will appreciate with inflation an inflation proof savings bond that the american people will be able to buy from now on so that families that are trying to save for their children s education or for their retirement will always know that inflation will not eat up the value of a secure government investment i m very proud of that it was a good day i went then to philadelphia and i went down to the south side to eat a philly cheesesteak a lot of you have done that and all the people were gathering in the neighborhood and i met a lady who had just been in our country for three months she had moved here from hong kong and she introduced me to her children and she said i can t believe this happens in america i said well ma am that s the way it works here i work for you not the other way around and she was pretty happy about that and i was glad to see it so then i went to two events there and came home just in time to put on my uniform so i could come and be with you i thank you ed pastor for your leadership i thank all the members of the congressional hispanic caucus for their service to our country thank you rita elizondo for your leadership for the caucus institute the institute fellows thank you for your support john quinones i wish i had heard you you re probably better at this than i am to the members of my cabinet who are here and the members of our administration in every facet of it i thank you for your service and for being here i would like to say a special word of thanks to my long time friend congressman kika de la garza i heard the last of his remarks outside and i loved it i wish i had heard the whole thing he is a wonderful man much loved and much respected he will be much missed and we wish him well and thank him for his remarkable service as ed said this is the fourth year you have invited me and the fourth year i ve showed up you know by this time of the year i m normally pretty tired even when it s not an election year i come here out of purely selfish motives there is more energy in this room than any other place i go all year long and you get me going you know as all of you know i have been trying to sort of improve my spanish as my daughter races off into the sunset of increasing fluency and i try to demonstrate that every year and it was suggested that i try to do something different this year that maybe i should do the macarena but al gore has a corner on that i can t begin to move in the way he does doing that so how about this siempre es un placer estar con ustedes now tomorrow i will get a grade on this from bill richardson i hope the others will be more gracious this is the 19th anniversary of the caucus institute you have worked to do some profoundly important things you have worked to demonstrate what i have been working for in america opportunity for all responsibility from all and an american community that truly includes all of us for the last few weeks i ve had the extraordinary opportunity to get out and around our country again hillary and al and tipper and i have traveled by rail by bus we ve gone all over america we ve asked people everywhere to help us build the bridge to the 21st century and frankly i have been overwhelmed by the hope the conviction the energy the determination that i see in the faces of people we were in seattle not very long ago in the rain and i know it always rains in washington but 35 000 people waited some of them up to four hours in the rain to say they wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century that we could all walk across they did not think that we should walk away from one another and they believed it does take a village to raise a child and to build a country now that s a far cry from where we were four years ago we had high unemployment the slowest job growth since the great depression stagnant wages rising crime increasing cynicism among our people and evidence of division that was truly troubling washington had been caught up for too long in my view in asking who s to blame and who shortly had spent too little time in asking the question that i always ask everybody when they bring me a problem i ask well what are we going to do about it that s important what are we going to do not who can we blame not how can we divide the american people for our political advantage but how can we come together and meet our challenges advance our values and give our children a better future well we ve been working at that for four years now and we ve gotten some pretty good results if you look at them they re hard to dispute in the last four years we ve got 10 5 million new jobs in the last four years we have record numbers of new small businesses we have record numbers of new businesses owned by all kinds of minorities and women we have an astonishing growth in homeownership it s at a 15 year high the combined rates of home mortgages unemployment and inflation are at a 28 year low of the 10 5 million new jobs 1 5 million of those job holders were hispanic american crime has gone down in this country four years in a row the welfare rolls are down by nearly 2 million child support collections are up 40 percent about 3 billion twelve million americans have been able to take some time off under the family and medical leave law when a baby is born or a parent is sick under the increase which the congress voted in 1993 in the earned income tax credit 15 million working families have been given a tax cut it s worth about 1 000 in lower taxes to a family of four with an income of less than 28 000 and that s most hispanic families in the united states and that s one big reason that the welfare rolls are down because we re making work pay on october 1st 10 million more americans will get a pay raise when the minimum wage increase goes into effect in addition to that we have moved hard to help small businesses where most of the new jobs are being created every small business in america is now eligible for a substantial tax cut when they spend more money to invest in their business to become more productive or hire new people people who are self employed are now getting a bigger tax deduction on their health insurance premiums and we ve made it a lot easier for people in small business to take out pensions for themselves and their employees and then to take those pensions from job to job the kennedy kassebaum bill says to 25 million americans you can t be denied health insurance anymore just because you changed jobs or because someone in your family has been sick a very important advance and i m very pleased that at the end of this session of congress we finally were able to get an agreement that new mothers and their newborns should not be thrown out of the hospital before the doctor says that they are ready to leave we re breathing cleaner air our food standards have been improved we ve shut down more toxic waste dumps in the last three years than the previous administration did in the last 12 the last two our deficit has gone down four years in a row for the first time since before the civil war that s the good news do you want the bad news the president who did that was john tyler and john tyler did not win reelection but it was still a good thing to do and it s too bad it s been 150 years since it happened and we re better off because that means lower interest rates it means lower interest rates on your car payments your house payments your credit card payments lower interest rates for business people who borrow money to invest and grow the american economy clearly if you look at all the evidence we are moving in the right direction and we need to keep right on going in that direction in addition to the 1 5 million new jobs for hispanic americans more than 220 000 of those new businesses are owned by hispanics the unemployment rate has gone down to single digits for the first time in a long time for hispanics wages are on the rise we are clearly moving in the right direction now one reason i believe that we ve been able to do these things is that i have done my best to create as ed alluded to a real partnership that includes everybody in america who s willing to work with us for the common good i was rather surprised when i came to washington that i was attacked even by some people who claim to be progressive for making an honest effort to put together an administration that looked like america i said that i would never sacrifice quality i said i believed we could have excellence and diversity but i thought it was worth taking a little time to have both because i thought we would be more effective if you look at our judicial appointments which include a record number of hispanics a record number of women a record number of other minorities those judicial appointments as a group have the highest ratings from the american bar association of any presidencies since they have been doing the ratings you can have excellence and diversity it s also important that we recognize that in our policy making and in our politics we have people involved you know that this room is full of members of my administration i mentioned them before but i want you to know that i m proud of each and every one of them their voices are heard their work is legendary and they have made a difference for you and for all the american people i am proud of them i d also like to thank the hispanic americans who are in our campaign linda chavez thompson the highest ranking hispanic in organized labor our honorary chair ray martinez who s left the white house to go work in our reelection and mickey ebara who s serving as a senior advisor my senior hispanic in the campaign i d like to make another announcement tonight our campaign as all campaigns do has to have certain funds accumulated which we have to save for other purposes later we have decided to deposit 5 million equally among four minority owned banks two hispanic banks and two african american banks one is the largest hispanic commercial bank in our country the international bank of commerce in laredo the other is the banco popularo of puerto rico which has a branch in new york the 1 25 million going to each bank will help them to support inner city development it will stimulate growth in other investment it means job stability and new life for their communities this is the first time i was surprised to learn that any national campaign has made this kind of commitment to any minority owned bank and i think it is a very good thing to do ed was saying when he introduced me that we ve done a lot of good things together but that is in the past i didn t like quite the tone of it but i don t think he meant it that way do you but it reminded me of a story once when i was running for reelection as governor of my home state in 1984 i went through a litany of things that i had done as governor just kind of like i just did with you and all i said and frankly i thought it was a great speech i was out in the country giving this speech on a country crossroads and there was a man in overalls in the mountains of north arkansas in the ozarks leaning up against a tree he d always supported me listening to this speech i mean i thought it was really great i thought i was terrific so after it was over i went up to him and i said well what do you think he said well that s a pretty good speech he said i heard all that about what a good job you did but he said now after all that is what we hired you to do and you did draw a paycheck every two weeks he said this election is about what you re going to do if we give you a new contract not what you did before and in truth that is what this election is about and my record and the record of all those others who are running for office is really relevant only as an indication of what we will do in the future and whether our general view of the direction for our country is right or wrong i believe that this is a profoundly important election because we will decide whether to validate my view which is that what we ought to be doing is breaking out of the old stale debates that paralyze politics up here too long and being really committed to finishing the work of build that bridge so that every american has the opportunity to make the most of his or her life so that we are growing together instead of coming together we re beating the odds in the rest of the world consumed by ethnic and religious and tribal and racial hatreds we re going to say no in america we re going to be together we re going to make a virtue of our diversity and wear it like a badge of honor and a cloak of pride but to do that we have to decide are we going to build a bridge to the future or try to build a bridge to the past is it going to be a big wide bridge strong enough for everybody to walk across and strong enough to stay up so that all of our kids and grandkids can walk across it after us and are we going to build it together do we think it takes a village or do we think you are better off on your own is the government inherently bad and part of the problem and totally irrelevant to this modern high tech entrepreneurial world or is the government inherently neither good or bad simply the servant of the people that has a role to play but not the only role in the partnerships that we have to create these are the questions we must face in this election i want to build a bridge to the 21st century that will keep this economy growing until everybody has a chance to live up to the fullest of their abilities that means a lot of things it means yes we have to go on and balance the budget because that will keep interest rates down and that will help you to grow those of you in the private sector to grow this country but it means we have to do it in a way that honors our obligations to our parents and our children to those who through no fault of their own need our help and will do better and so will we if they get a little of our help we have to honor our obligations to the environment and to our future we have to invest in education and in research and technology and if we walk away from those things we will pay a terrible price and no one will do as well as all of us will if we work together can we have tax cuts yes we can but they ought to be targeted to the people who need them and to the places that will do the most good to child rearing to paying for college education to helping people pay for health care or to buy a first time home or not imposing taxes on the gain people have when they sell their homes because that s the only savings a lot of people have we can pay for those things and balance the budget and protect medicare medicaid education and the environment that s the right direction for the future and that s the way to build a bridge we can all walk across we also have to commit ourselves to the proposition that in the modern world education is more important even than it was for us and our parents that our children will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet that many of them will be doing jobs that have not been imagined yet and so it is unacceptable that 40 percent of our third graders cannot read on their own that s why i have a plan to mobilize an army literally an army of reading tutors to work with teachers and schools and with parents so that by the year 2000 every eight year old can pick up a book and say i can read this all by myself that is terribly important we must also understand that technology if we use it right offers us an opportunity to democratize educational opportunity and educational excellence in ways that were never before attainable if we achieve the goal that the vice president and i have set out to hook up every classroom and every library not only with computers and software and trained teachers but to the information superhighway to the internet to the world wide web to all these interlocking networks of information if we do that by the year 2000 then for the first time in american history the children in the poorest remotest school district in the mountains of my home state of arkansas the children in the poorest school districts in south texas the children in the poorest inner city neighborhood will for the first time ever have access to the same information in the same way in the same time as the children in the wealthiest districts of the united states it will explode opportunity in the united states if we do it and finally we ought to build a bridge to the 21st century that says we re going to create education for a lifetime for everyone beginning with the proposition that everybody who s willing to work hard ought to be able to go to college and we re going to make it available to every single person in this country we can do it pretty simply almost every american lives within driving distance of a community college i want to say if you ll go get two years of education after high school so that we can make that as universal in four years as a high school education is today you can take the cost of a typical community college tuition right off your tax bill dollar for dollar a tax credit for two years to do that that s paid for in our balanced budget plan i want to say you can save in an ira and withdraw money from that ira with no tax penalty at all if you re paying for a college education and i believe we ought to let people deduct the cost of any education after high school for the tuition up to 10 000 a year for undergraduate school graduate school you name it that money will pay itself back many times over i want to build a bridge to the 21st century where everybody has a chance to work and i want to challenge every one of you now to examine what your own responsibilities are under this new welfare reform law let me explain to you exactly what it says and imagine what it means in a community where you live the law says that the united states will continue to guarantee to poor families eligible for welfare health care nutrition and if the parent goes to work more child care by far than ever before but the monthly welfare check which used to go which is part federal money part state money which used to go direct to the recipient may still continue to do that but now the states have to come up with a plan that will be community based to move people who are able bodied from the welfare check into a paycheck within two years now the only way this will work is if in every community in the country employers and churches and nonprofit and educational institutions as well as people involved in social work are actively involved in this i was just in kansas city let me just give you this example because it s important anybody can do this two years ago our administration gave the state of missouri a waiver to try an experiment in kansas city that i have been begging for years every place in america to do here s what they do in kansas city they say if you will hire a new employee not a replacement but a new employee from the welfare rolls we ll give you the welfare check for up to four years as a wage supplement and if you re a small business person and you don t have a health care policy we ll cover them with medicaid for four years and in that four years you have to pay them at least 6 an hour above the minimum wage but let s say the welfare check is worth 2 00 and hour or 2 50 you keep that and that s what we pay you for helping us give those folks a new life for training them for investing in them for dealing with people who may have never been in the workforce before and all the little problems that may mean but we want you to give them a new chance i met a man running a business with 25 employees five of his employees are people who came from the welfare rolls he says they re all doing great and when they leave if they leave early he can keep that position for up to 10 years if he ll keep bringing people onto the welfare rolls folks if we do that in every community in the country and people like you sign up and say what can i do this is now my problem i m tired of complaining about it we have a responsibility to give people a future and the ability to support their children and i will participate we can solve this problem and we ll have a community based support system for poor families that is work oriented and that does not isolate people but we have to do it and i am committed to helping the states and the cities create a million new jobs to solve that problem in the next four years and i want to ask you to help let me say there s a lot more things that i could talk about there are things we have to do in crime things we have to do in the environment we have health care challenges still to go our balanced budget plan helps people keep their health insurance when they re between jobs for six months 5 million people a year change jobs and are without health insurance for some time just because they re changing jobs and they re unemployed for several months we have a lot more to do but the main thing i want to say to you is we have to decide whether we believe we have an obligation to work toward this future together this is not about big government we have the smallest government in washington we ve had since president kennedy was here and as a percentage of our workforce it s the smallest it s been since franklin roosevelt took the oath of office in 1933 that is a red herring but we do need we do need a government that can bring us together and help us to go forward together there are some things we cannot do on our own we re building a supercomputer with ibm and ibm is no tiny company they needed us to help it s a research project that will give us a supercomputer that listen to this will do more calculations in one second than you can go home and do on your hand held calculator in 30 000 years now i don t know about you but i think it s worth it i want america to have the first one of those and it means more jobs and more discoveries every time we send a mission into space we learn something else about how the human body works and we learn something else about the earth s environment that will help our children and our grandchildren create opportunity and live in a better world the investments we have made in the last few years have reaped untold benefits the average life expectancy of people with aids and hiv has more than doubled in the last four years alone because of medical research and moving drugs to market faster a lot of you were very moved as i was i m sure by christopher reeve s wonderful speech at the democratic convention at about the time he made that speech just a few days before for the first time in history laboratory animals whose spines had been severed had movement in their lower limbs because of nerve transplants that s what research brings you so it is simply not true that we do not need to invest in our common future whether it s education the environment health care research or technology we do it does take a village and we do have to build a bridge and that is the decision before the american people that i know you the most family oriented group in the united states will help to make the right decision let me also say a strong word of thanks to every member of congress here today that helped us to get that gallegly provision out of the immigration bill it was a great victory for the life of me i could never understand why the leaders of the other party wanted to put that provision in and try to turn teachers into people who would be putting kids on the street when every law enforcement agency every education agency in the world said so so we got it out of there oh if it comes to my desk it s history but i don t think the gallegly amendment will even pass now i don t believe the senate will vote for it i believe when it s put up there i doubt very seriously that the senate will do that but anyway for those of you that helped to get it out i thank you let me also say that i do believe we should have a tough strong defense against people who violate our immigration laws because it s unfair to people who wait in line to be legal immigrants but i m proud of the fact that this year by the end of 1996 more than one million people will have become citizens by naturalization in one year that is more than twice as many as last year and i think one of the things that s happened here in this very ill advised assault on legal immigrants the people who have carried it on have made a lot more people interested in becoming citizens and exercising their right to vote and being heard and saying we don t appreciate people who try to divide the american people and that is a very positive thing let me just close with this thought there s no country in the world better positioned for the 21st century than we are in no small measure because of you our neighbors to the south all the way to the tip of south america are the second fastest growing region in the world they re our trading partners our friends all but one of their countries is a democracy if you think about how well america is positioned what we have to do is to create the conditions in which we have opportunity and responsibility so we re making progress on our challenges here at home and then we have to beat this terrible thing that has bedeviled the rest of the world this curse of the human spirit which makes whole groups of people believe that the only way they can exist and feel important is if they have some other group of people to look down on to hate to fight to shoot look at bosnia a small country where biologically the croats the serbs and the muslims are indistinguishable there is no true ethnic difference they are in different groups because of accidents of political history they lived together in peace and harmony for decades and in no time at all they were killing each other s children now we ve had peace for several months nearly a year now we ve had elections it s going to be a long road back for people that had among other things one of the most beautiful cities in the world in sarajevo and were willing to throw it all away just so they could feel superior to somebody else look at northern ireland where they had a cease fire for 15 months and hillary and i went over there and the catholics and the protestants lined the streets together and cheered and people who did not have the patience for peace broke the cease fire then others did things that were foolish now they re back to arguing about battles that occurred 600 years ago that have nothing to do with the future of any catholic or protestant child in northern ireland look at the middle east where every day we see both the exhilaration and the heartbreak that comes from the progress of peace and the shattering of hopes because they cannot lay down the things which have driven stakes in too many hearts some people i overreact when a church is burned or a synagogue is defaced or an islamic center is destroyed in this country but what makes this country work is you don t have to be in any ethnic or racial or religious group all you have to do is say i believe in the declaration of independence the constitution the bill of rights show up tomorrow do the right thing raise your kids and you re part of our country that is what is special about america and folks i understand there are difficult issues and i understand when people are having a hard time economically they get frustrated but that s why i fought to mend affirmative action instead of destroy it that s why i stood against proposition 187 in california and the cpri because i think we have to prove that america is different and we re going to be given a chance to prove it think how tragic it would be if having won the cold war for freedom seeing the nuclear threat recede i was so proud that america was the first country to sign the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty yesterday at the united nations banning all nuclear testing forever think how tragic it would be if we did all that and then we saw the world consumed by terrorism by weapons of mass destruction like biological and chemical weapons by organized crime and drug gangs and all that but all of it rooted in nations consumed by tribal racial ethnic and religious hatred it does not have to be that way we know better we know better so all of us but especially you who have succeeded who are articulate who can pierce people s heart and get people s reasoning going you ve got to say one of the things that we have to say to ourselves and to the world in this season of democratic choosing is this is one country we like our diversity we are proud of it and we are going to take it into the next century all of us are going across that bridge because we know if we do that our best days are still ahead thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton25 9 97 bill_clinton governor and mrs huckabee mayor and mrs dailey my good friend daisy bates and the families of wylie branton and justice thurgood marshall to the co chairs of this event mr howard and all the faculty and staff here at central high to fatima and her fellow students to all my fellow americans hillary and i are glad to be home especially on this day and we thank you for your welcome i would also be remiss if i did not say one other word just as a citizen you know we just sent our daughter off to college and for eight and a half years she got a very good education in the little rock school district and i want to thank you all for that on this beautiful sun shiny day so many wonderful words have already been spoken with so much conviction i am reluctant to add to them but i must ask you to remember once more and to ask yourselves what does what happened here 40 years ago mean today what does it tell us most importantly about our children s tomorrows forty years ago a single image first seared the heart and stirred the conscience of our nation so powerful most of us who saw it then recall it still a 15 year old girl wearing a crisp black and white dress carrying only a notebook surrounded by large crowds of boys and girls men and women soldiers and police officers her head held high her eyes fixed straight ahead and she is utterly alone on september 4th 1957 elizabeth eckford walked to this door for her first day of school utterly alone she was turned away by people who were afraid of change instructed by ignorance hating what they simply could not understand and america saw her haunted and taunted for the simple color of her skin and in the image we caught a very disturbing glimpse of ourselves we saw not one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all but two americas divided and unequal what happened here changed the course of our country here forever like independence hall where we first embraced the idea that god created us all equal like gettysburg where americans fought and died over whether we would remain one nation moving closer to the true meaning of equality like them little rock is historic ground for surely it was here at central high that we took another giant step close to the idea of america elizabeth eckford along with her eight schoolmates were turned away on september 4th but the little rock nine did not turn back forty years ago today they climbed these steps passed through this door and moved our nation and for that we must all thank them today we honor those who made it possible their parents first as eleanor roosevelt said of them to give your child for a cause is even harder than to give yourself to honor my friend daisy bates and wylie branton and thurgood marshall the naacp and all who guided these children to honor president eisenhower attorney general brownell and the men of the 101st airborne who enforced the constitution to honor every student every teacher every minister every little rock resident black or white who offered a word of kindness a glance of respect or a hand of friendship to honor those who gave us the opportunity to be part of this day of celebration and rededication but most of all we come to honor the little rock nine most of us who have just watched these events unfold can never understand fully the sacrifice they made imagine all of you what it would be like to come to school one day and be shoved against lockers tripped down stairways taunted day after day by your classmates to go all through school with no hope of going to a school play or being on a basketball team or learning in simple peace speaking of simple peace i d like a little of it today i want all these children here to look at these people they persevered they endured and they prevailed but it was at great cost to themselves as melba said years later in her wonderful memoir warriors don t cry my friends and i paid for the integration of little rock central high with our innocence folks in 1957 i was 11 years old living 50 miles away in hot springs when the eyes of the world were fixed here like almost all southerners then i never attended school with a person of another race until i went to college but as a young boy in my grandfather s small grocery store i learned lessons that nobody bothered to teach me in my segregated school my grandfather had a 6th grade education from a tiny rural school he never made a bit of money but in that store in the way he treated his customers and encouraged me to play with their children i learned america s most profound lessons we really are all equal we really do have the right to live in dignity we really do have the right to be treated with respect we do have the right to be heard i never knew how he and my grandmother came to those convictions but i ll never forget how they lived them ironically my grandfather died in 1957 he never lived to see america come around to his way of thinking but i know he s smiling down today not on his grandson but on the little rock nine who gave up their innocence so all good people could have a chance to live their dreams but let me tell you something else that was true about that time before little rock for me and other white children the struggles of black people whether we were sympathetic or hostile to them were mostly background music in our normal self absorbed lives we were all like you more concerned about our friends and our lives day in and day out but then we saw what was happening in our own back yard and we all had to deal with it where did we stand what did we believe how did we want to live it was little rock that made racial equality a driving obsession in my life years later time and chance made ernie green my friend good fortune brought me to the governor s office where i did all i could to heal the wounds solve the problems open the doors so we could become the people we say we want to be ten years ago the little rock nine came back to the governor s mansion when i was there i wanted them to see that the power of the office that once had blocked their way now welcomed them but like so many americans i can never fully repay my debt to these nine people for with their innocence they purchased more freedom for me too and for all white people people like hazel brown massery the angry taunter of elizabeth eckford who stood with her in front of this school this week as a reconciled friend and with the gift of their innocence they taught us that all too often what ought to be can never be for free forty years later what do you young people in this audience believe we have learned well 40 years later we know that we all benefit all of us when we learn together work together and come together that is after all what it means to be an american forty years later we know not withstanding some cynics that all our children can learn and this school proves it forty years later we know when the constitutional rights of our citizens are threatened the national government must guarantee them talk is fine but when they are threatened you need strong laws faithfully enforced and upheld by independent courts forty years later we know there are still more doors to be opened doors to be opened wider doors we have to keep from being shut again now forty years later we know freedom and equality cannot be realized without responsibility for self family and the duties of citizenship or without a commitment to building a community of shared destiny and a genuine sense of belonging forty years later we know the question of race is more complex and more important than ever embracing no longer just blacks and whites or blacks and whites and hispanics and native americans but now people from all parts of the earth coming here to redeem the promise of america forty years later frankly we know we re bound to come back where we started after all the weary years and silent tears after all the stony roads and bitter rides the question of race is in the end still an affair of the heart but if these are our lessons what do we have to do first we must all reconcile then we must all face the facts of today and finally we must act reconciliation is important not only for those who practice bigotry but for those whose resentment of it lingers for both are prisons from which our spirits if nelson mandela who paid for the freedom of his people with 27 of the best years of his life could invite his jailers to his inauguration and ask even the victims of violence to forgive their oppressors then each of us can seek and give forgiveness and what are the facts it is a fact my fellow americans that there are still too many places where opportunity for education and work are not equal where disintegration of family and neighborhood make it more difficult but it is also a fact that schools and neighborhoods and lives can be turned around if but only if we are prepared to do what it takes it is a fact that there are still too many places where our children die or give up before they bloom where they are trapped in a web of crime and violence and drugs but we know this too can be changed but only if we are prepared to do what it takes today children of every race walk through the same door but then they often walk down different halls not only in this school but across america they sit in different classrooms they eat at different tables they even sit in different parts of the bleachers at the football game far too many communities are all white all black all latino all asian indeed too many americans of all races have actually begun to give up on the idea of integration and the search for common ground for the first time since the 1950s our schools in america are resegregating the rollback of affirmative action is slamming shut the doors of higher education on a new generation while those who oppose it have not yet put forward any other alternative in so many ways we still hold ourselves back we retreat into the comfortable enclaves of ethnic isolation we just don t deal with people who are different from us segregation is no longer the law but too often separation is still the rule and we cannot forget one stubborn fact that has not yet been said as clearly as it should there is still discrimination in america there are still people who can t get over it who can t let it go who can t go through the day unless they have somebody else to look down on and it manifests itself in our streets and in our neighborhoods and in the workplace and in the schools and it is wrong and we have to keep working on it not just with our voices but with our laws and we have to engage each other in it of course we should celebrate our diversity the marvelous blend of cultures and beliefs and races has always enriched america and it is our meal ticket to the 21st century but we also have to remember with the painful lessons of the civil wars and the ethnic cleansing around the world that any nation that indulges itself in destructive separatism will not be able to meet and master these challenges of the 21st century we have to decide all you young people have to decide will we stand as a shining example or a stunning rebuke to the world of tomorrow for the alternative to integration is not isolation or a new separate but equal it is disintegration only the american idea is strong enough to hold us together we believe whether our ancestors came here in slave ships or on the mayflower whether they came through the portals of ellis island or on a plane to san francisco whether they have been here for thousands of years we believe that every individual possesses the spark of possibility born with an equal right to strive and work and rise as far as they can go and born with an equal responsibility to act in a way that obeys the law reflects our values and passes them on to their children we are white and black asian and hispanic christian and jew and muslim italian and vietnamese and polish americans and goodness knows how many more today but above all we are still americans martin luther king said we are woven into a seamless garment of destiny we must be one america the little rock nine taught us that we cannot have one america for free not 40 years ago not today we have to act all of us have to act each of us has to do something especially our young people must seek out people who are different from themselves and speak freely and frankly to discover they share the same dreams all of us should embrace the vision of a colorblind society but recognize the fact that we are not there yet and we cannot slam shut the doors of educational and economic opportunity all of us should embrace ethnic pride and we should revere religious conviction but we must reject separation and isolation all of us should value and practice personal responsibility for ourselves and our families and all americans especially our young people should give something back to their community through citizen service all americans of all races must insist on both equal opportunity and excellence in education that is even more important today than it was for these nine people and look how far they took themselves with their education the true battleground in education today is whether we honestly believe that every child can learn and we have the courage to set high academic standards we expect all our children to meet we must not replace the tyranny of segregation with the tragedy of low expectations i will not rob a single american child of his or her future it is wrong my fellow americans we must be concerned not so much with the sins of our parents as with the success of our children how they will live and live together in years to come if those nine children could walk up those steps 40 years ago all alone if their parents could send them into the storm armed only with school books and the righteousness of their cause then surely together we can build one america an america that makes sure no future generation of our children will have to pay for our mistakes with the loss of their innocence at this schoolhouse door today let us rejoice in the long way we have come these 40 years let us resolve to stand on the shoulders of the little rock nine and press on with confidence in the hard and noble work ahead let us lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring one america today one america tomorrow one america forever god bless the little rock nine and god bless the united states of america thank you dem wjclinton25 9 98 bill_clinton thank you i don t think glenn can hear us but i want to say that if i were a school principal today i would happily give him an excused absence from this lunch because i too wanted him to be in washington finally after almost nine months now eight months of virtual complete inaction some votes are being cast in congress and i think this decision that is before the congress today is terribly important we re quite close to an election in a week we ll have the first balanced budget and surplus we ve had in 29 years and the majority party wants to make everybody happy close to an election by passing a tax cut and believe me i d like to make everybody happy close to an election too even though i m not running i ve got a lot of friends on the ballot but it s not the right thing to do we have a tax cut in our balanced budget for child care for education for the environment but it s paid for but you know we have waited 29 years and we have worked hard for six years to get this country a balanced budget it has been instrument pivotal in bringing the country back economically and before the red ink turns to black and it dries a little bit people now want to turn around and spend it again before we do what i think must be our first priority which is to save social security there are a lot of young people here and i thank you for being here but if you ve looked at the demographics you know that when all the baby boomers retire that s me and everybody 18 years younger people between the ages of 34 and 52 when we retire we ll be the biggest group of retirees ever to pack it in at one time in america and at present rates of work force participation immigration and birth there will only be about two people working for every one person drawing social security now we know that right now we also know right now the social security system alone accounts for taking half the seniors in this country out of poverty and giving them a dignified life and also relieving their children and their grandchildren of the enormous financial burden of supporting them if we act now we can make modest changes in the social security system using the surpluses maybe not all of them but some of them and we can avoid a train wreck if we don t now and we just wait for something bad to happen we ll have one of two choices a few years down the road as a nation number one is we can decide we re going to keep the same system in the same way in which case people like me will be sick because what that will mean is in order to maintain the standard of living of the elderly we will reduce the standard of living of our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren or we can say no we re not going to do that and let the elderly poverty rate go way up again because we ll have to slash social security by a huge amount there is no reason to do that if we start now we can make a sensible modest reform which will reflect the changing composition of our population that s what glenn poshard is up there doing now i know a little bit about being governor i was a governor for 12 years somebody said i could never get a promotion i was a governor forever it seemed like i loved it but i can tell you that if you re sitting there every day making decisions that no one else can make you have to do some things that don t please everyone in the short run because you know that they are right for the long run interest of your state here he is just a few weeks from the election glenn poshard went back to washington d c to vote for the security of our country 20 years down the road in the teeth of an election by saying we have waited 29 long years we have worked for six years we ve got this balanced budget and we re not going to squander this surplus until we save social security first on that alone he deserves to be elected governor i want to thank mike and jim and glenn and all the others who were responsible for selling tickets today i told mike cherry he s been to so many of my fundraisers he s the only guy i can think of that if we get a republican administration in and the stock market goes down his income will go up just being free of the fundraisers i want to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart for coming i want to thank mayor daley for his leadership and friendship and mike madigan thank you for being here and for your leadership and minority leader senator jones and all the members of the legislature i thank you mary lou thank you for running with glenn and for your background in health care which will be i think an enormous asset to this ticket after the election serving because more and more we re going to have to deal with all kinds of complicated health care questions again i say as a governor we can do a lot nationally on health care but there are a lot of questions which will have to be made at the local level i ll just give you one when we passed the balanced budget act in 1997 we put funds aside to provide aid to the states to provide health insurance for 5 million children in the families of lower income working people that is children who are on welfare already get covered by federal health care and people who have good solid jobs usually have health insurance with the job but increasingly more and more people have jobs that don t have any health insurance for their family we put in the balanced budget funds that will give these working families the ability to insure their children 5 million of them throughout america but the programs have to be designed at the state level and implemented at the state level it s another good reason to vote for glenn and mary lou because i know glenn poshard voted for it and i know he s committed to it and he ll do a good job i want to thank jo and all of her family for coming running for governor is a family endeavor and believe me serving is a family endeavor and i thank you for doing it you know i m deeply indebted to the state of illinois and the city of chicago i might well not be president if it hadn t been for illinois and the stunning vote that we received here on st patrick s day in 1992 if you ever come to visit me in the white house i ll take you back to my private office and up there s a picture of hillary and me in chicago on st patrick s day in 1992 with all the confetti coming down and i would just like to say to all of you who had anything to do with this administration but especially to our terrific secretary of commerce bill daley to my friend kevin o keefe who worked with me for many years and to all the others from chicago who participated in our endeavors i am very grateful i also want you to know that i ll have a hard time holding on to this cubs shirt when i get out to california tonight and hillary sees it she s in oregon today campaigning for some of our candidates that we re going to meet tonight in california and spend a day with our daughter tomorrow but we re thrilled with the success of the cubs this year and obviously with sammy sosa you know this home run race has been good for america and it s been great for baseball but it makes us now we re sitting there it s interesting there is a little psychological lesson here though we re all sitting there saying now why haven t they hit another home run they just hit 65 nobody else ever did it now we wake up every day and we expect them to hit a home run but i want to ask you to think about that in terms of this election season if either mark mcgwire or sammy sosa announced that even though there were three games left in the season 65 was enough and get off their back and they were just going to sit out the games we would think they had lost it wouldn t we we would be disappointed we would be a little angry and we would think they were downright foolish but if you think about where we are today as a country and you think about the pattern of democracies when times are good essentially some people are betting on the fact that a lot of americans will sit out the election on the argument that things are doing well and the country is going in the right direction i ve told many people i thank you so many of you said wonderful things to me and through me to hillary today when we visited but the enemy of the forces of progress in this election is not adversity adversity is our friend our enemy is complacency if i told you six years ago that in six years we would have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and 17 million new jobs just under that we would have the lowest crime rate in 25 years that we would have the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years that we would have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years the lowest inflation rate in 32 years the highest home ownership in history the lowest african american poverty rate ever recorded the biggest drop in hispanic poverty in 20 years with the smallest government in 35 years if i told you that you would have said what planet is he from but the american people have achieved that and our policies have supported that it all began i d just like to remind you again one more time with one vote in 1993 for an economic program that did not have a single solitary vote from the other party that drove down interest rates and reduced the deficit by 92 percent before the balanced budget bill passed with bipartisan support last year that bill also contained something called the earned income tax credit we doubled it it s a tax cut for working people who have modest incomes single workers get a little bit of money out of it but most of the money goes to people who have modest incomes who have children in their homes and their taxes now if your income is 27 000 a year or less and you have a couple of kids at home your taxes are about 1 000 lower than they would otherwise be now because of that we learned yesterday from the census bureau that 4 million working americans were lifted out of poverty last year 4 million so we have proved that you can grow the economy have record numbers of billionaires have record numbers of new businesses but that the people who are out there struggling to make ends meet can do well at the same time and i m very proud of that i believe in that and as i said along the way we passed the family and medical leave law gave health insurance to 5 million people gave a 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college and other tax credits for other college education made student loans deductible created more pell grants put 100 000 police on the street cleaned up toxic waste dumps made the food safer the air cleaner and the water purer that s good news it would be a great mistake to say we have hit 65 home runs we think we ll sit out the next few weeks why first of all because the country still has serious challenges this social security challenge is a big challenge another big challenge is to keep the economic recovery going in the midst of all this global financial turmoil when you read in the newspapers or see on the evening news about this debate we re having about the international monetary fund and you never thought about the international monetary fund before just know that that s what we contribute to to help countries that are trying to get on their feet and to help prevent countries that are doing well from getting the financial flu that s sweeping the world so that they in turn can buy our products and keep our people working it s a big issue we just came from the jenner school as the mayor said education is a big issue if there were no other reason to vote for the democrats this year it would be on education we have a program sponsored and conceived by carol moseley braun to modernize repair or build 5 000 schools no action on it yet in the congress we have a program to reduce class size to 18 in the first three grades put 100 000 teachers out there no action we have a program to educate 35 000 bright young people and then let them pay their college loans off by going into the inner cities and teaching no action we have a program to hook up every single classroom to the internet by the year 2000 so that all kids without regard to their backgrounds or their family s incomes have a chance to be a part of the emerging information economy no action but glenn poshard supports it just like he supported all my education bills and it s a big issue so i say to you the country has got a huge choice to make one is will we be apathetic or intense about building our future and building on what we ve got the second is when we make these choices what s going to dominate our thinking are we going to be for partisanship or progress are we going to be for politics or for people you know when i go around the country and i speak for people that i believe in almost none of them agree with me on every single issue i never ask anybody to agree with me on everything i couldn t possibly be right about everything neither could you and neither could they but i do think that we want people in office who wake up every day thinking about what it s like to struggle to make ends meet look at the record of the congress we re a week from a new budget year they pass one of the 13 bills it takes to keep the government going one they re five months late on a budget resolution but they ve killed a lot of things they killed campaign finance reform they killed the tobacco legislation designed to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco they killed a patients bill of rights designed to make sure our medical decisions are made by doctors and not by insurance company accountants and last week with the unemployment at a 28 year low and no inflation they killed an increase in the minimum wage for 12 million workers now i don t believe we should be embracing those policies i believe we ought to say we want everybody to be a part of this we re for saving social security passing the patients bill of rights passing the education agenda protecting the environment even as we grow the economy and we are for doing what it takes to keep this economic growth going and making sure everybody gets to participate everybody gets to participate so i ask you to think about all that and when i talked to glenn on the phone this morning before i came out here he reminded me of some time we spent together way back in 1986 that seems like i still remember 1986 but vaguely now and he and i as you heard him say we re on something called the lower mississippi delta development commission why because the lower mississippi is the poorest area of america and we started in illinois in southern illinois and went all the way to the mouth of the mississippi past new orleans and we went up and down the length of that great river into little towns and to rural areas talking to people about what we needed to do so that they could lift themselves out of poverty so they could educate their children now 12 years later a lot of the things that were nightmares to us then are problems that are being solved this is a better country than it was six years ago and if we bear down and choose progress over partisanship in this election it will be better two years from now but i want you to understand that it requires you to be vigilant it requires you to say we are going to build on what we have done not rest on it and i will say again i served as a governor for 12 years we ve got the smallest federal government we ve had in 35 years i m proud of that but as a result of our policy it is now more important who the state governors are not less because it s education it s health care it s the environment it s the economy it matters so i ask you to go out here in the remaining days of this election we ve got several weeks and first of all send a message to congress that you re tired of the partisan politics and you d like to be considered first you d like for people to think abut everybody outside of washington not everybody inside of washington you d like to think about our future and our children and secondly go out here and talk to your friends and neighbors and tell them that we ve got a good ticket for governor and lieutenant governor and they deserve their consideration they deserve their vote they deserve their support and there s a lot riding on it for the future of your children thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton26 1 95c bill_clinton thank you very much secretary riley before i turn the microphone over to president kelly of tulane i wanted to just emphasize two other points if i might first one of the things our administration is trying to do is to make sure that we all work together to do what was necessary here in washington make sense of our common efforts and tom glynn is here from the labor department and i want to say a special word of appreciation to the cooperation of the partnership that the education and the labor departments have had on all these issues secretary shalala from the department of health and human services who used to be in your line of work and some days wishes she still were joe duffey who used to be in your line of work and who probably almost never wishes he still were because he had such a good job at the usia sheldon hackney who used to be in your line of work and i think it just depends on what day it is done a great job at the national endowment for the humanities and of course our wonderful advisor and leader on science and technology jack gibbons is here carol rasco the domestic policy council chief in the white house and others we re all honored to be here with you there is one other point i wanted to make that none of us mentioned and that is i want to begin by thanking you for responding so well to the call i issued in a letter to all of you last september on national service and i asked you to support the americorps program and the whole concept of service for students and do what you could to enhance that i got hundreds of letters back literally hundreds of letters back it was a very rewarding exchange and there are even three colleges hampshire in massachusetts loyola chicago and earlham in indiana that have agreed to match the 4 725 educational grant that every americorps student earns in a year with a grant from the college to double the impact of it and so doubtless they ll be getting more americorps students in some places but that s a very good thing to do there are those who believe that we ought to eliminate the americorps program i think that would be a terrible mistake because it it again it does all the things that i think we should be doing it promotes education it promotes citizenship it strengthens community bonds and it is totally nonbureaucratic it involves people helping others one on one in established grass roots organizations so we understand that the new congress many of the members came in with a commitment to slash spending and we ve been slashing spending we d like to have some help and we understand that they came in with a commitment to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy we ve been doing that there are 100 000 fewer people here today than there were on the day i became president we d like to have some help doing that we just don t believe that raising the cost of going to college reducing access undermining national service is the way to do it and we want to work with them in good faith but we think we have to have your help in supporting the right kind of tax cuts that raise incomes in the short run and in the long run through education and the right kind of budget cutting that s our those are the two requests we ask of you help us get the right kind of tax cuts the right kind of budget cuttings let s do it in a way that will increase the incomes and the opportunities of the american people so that we really do expand access to the american dream thank you dem wjclinton26 1 99 bill_clinton your holiness archbishop rigali archbishop montalvo governor carnahan mayor harmon county executive westfall ambassador boggs members of congress members of the cabinet our visitors from the vatican my fellow americans your holiness on behalf of all of us gathered here today indeed on behalf of all the people of our beloved nation we welcome you back to america your return brings joy not only to the catholic faithful but to every american who has heard your message of peace and charity toward all god s children and we thank you for first going to mexico and for reaching out to all the people of the americas we greet you and we thank you for 20 years you have lifted our spirits and touched our hearts for 20 years for 20 years you have challenged us to think of life not in terms of what we acquire for ourselves but in terms of what we give of ourselves this is your seventh visit to the united states your 85th visit abroad as the bishop of rome through it all you have given of yourself with a boundless physical energy which can only find its source in limitless faith you have come in the final year of a century that has seen much suffering but which ends with great hope for freedom and reconciliation it is a moment anticipated by countless prayers brought forward by countless hands and shaped very much by you holy father and your 20 year pilgrimage we honor you for helping to lead a revolution of values and spirit in central europe and the former soviet union freeing millions to live by conscience not coercion and freeing all of us from the constant fear of nuclear war we honor you for standing for human dignity human rights and religious freedom and for helping people to find the courage to stand up for themselves from africa to asia to the western hemisphere we honor you for your work to bring peace to nations and peoples divided by old hatreds and suspicions from bosnia and kosovo to central africa to indonesia to the middle east even to our own communities people still need to hear your message that all are god s children all have fallen short of his glory all the injustices of yesterday cannot excuse a single injustice today holy father we are moved by your desire to mark the new millennium with a journey to jerusalem to bring mercy and reconciliation to all those who believe in one god in the holy place where all our faiths began your holiness we honor you too because you have never let those of us who enjoy the blessings of prosperity freedom and peace forget our responsibilities on your last visit to the united states you called on us to build a society truly worthy of the human person a society in which none are so poor they have nothing to give and none are so rich they have nothing to receive today you visit an america that is thriving but also striving striving to include those who do not yet share in our prosperity at home and striving to put a human face on the global economy by advancing the dignity of work the rights of women the well being of children and the help of our common environment you will see an america that is not simply living for today but working for future generations an america working harder to be what you have asked us to be an example of justice and civic virtues freedom fulfilled and goodness at home and abroad the catholic church in america is helping all of us to realize that vision here in st louis catholic charities are helping families conquer violence and drug abuse helping people in need to find work and to finance their first homes helping refugees from war torn lands to build new lives building housing for the elderly including the new pope john paul ii apartments and leading countless other efforts that lift our people s lives all over our country the catholic faithful do this work for the sake of all americans and they are joined in their work by americans of all faiths your holiness every american welcomes you and hopes that you will come to see us again i am nowhere near as gifted a linguist as you are holy father but as they say in your native poland sto lat i wiecej may you live a hundred years and more and may you keep working and teaching and lighting the way for all of us and all the world welcome to the united states dem wjclinton26 11 97 bill_clinton good morning ladies and gentlemen i want to welcome the folks from the national turkey federation here the chairman sonny faisun and the president stuart proctor and a special word of welcome to all the kids who are here from horton s kids in anacostia and all the rest of you who want to see one more turkey for thanksgiving this is a special day in the rose garden every year and let me thank again the national turkey federation on their golden anniversary for donating a thanksgiving turkey to the white house every year for 50 years that s right now this marks the 50th year when we give one more turkey in washington a second chance i want to acknowledge our special guest this fine tom from the tarheel state of north carolina the number one turkey producing state in our nation president truman was the first president to pardon a turkey but in some ways the tradition actually began 83 years earlier when president lincoln received a turkey for christmas holiday his son tad grew so attached to the turkey that he named him jack and president lincoln had no choice but to give jack the full run of the white house jack was here actually for some monumental events on election day in 1864 when mr lincoln was running for reelection a special polling place was actually set up right here on the grounds of the white house so that the soldiers could vote well jack the turkey actually strutted in front of some of the would be voters and broke in line lincoln asked his son why is your turkey at the polls does he vote without hesitation tad said he s not old enough yet tomorrow 45 million turkeys will make the ultimate sacrifice for america s feast but not this one i m granting this turkey a permanent reprieve after many years in the coop he s on his way to a farm in virginia to bask in the sun collect his hard earned pension and enjoy his golden years and that s one less turkey in washington happy thanksgiving she s fine i talked to her this morning she said she was feeling great dem wjclinton26 2 93 bill_clinton thank you very much president duffey distinguished members of the board of trustees and faculty and patrons of american university and members of congress members of the diplomatic corps and my fellow citizens and especially to the students here today i am very honored to be here today at this wonderful school on the occasion of your centennial at the dawn of a new era for our nation and for our world and deeply honored to receive this honorary degree although i almost choked on it here my mind is full of many memories today looking at all of you in your youthful enthusiasm and your hope for the future i d like to say a special word of thanks to all of you for the warm reception you gave to the person to whom i owe more than anybody else in this audience senator fulbright when i was barely 20 years old senator fulbright s administrative assistant called me one morning in arkansas and asked me if i wanted a job working for the senate foreign relations committee as an assistant clerk since i couldn t really afford the cost of my education to georgetown i told him i was interested and he said well you can have a part time job at 3 500 a year or a full time job at 5 000 a year i said how about two part time jobs he replied that i was just the sort of mathematician they were looking for and would i please come the next week literally a day and a half later i was there working for a person i had admired all my life and the rest of it is history but senator fulbright now 88 years young taught me a lot about the important of our connections to the rest of the world and that even in our small land locked state of arkansas we were bound up inextricably with the future with the passions and the promise of people all across this globe and it is about that which i come to speak today i also want to say a special word of thanks to your president joe duffey and to his wonderful wife anne wexler who have been my friends for many years when i was a young man at yale law school i went to work for joe duffey in his campaign for the senate his wife was then his campaign manager i enjoyed working for a woman i learned a lot about equal opportunity which i have tried to live out in my own life well joe duffey didn t win that race for the senate and four years later i went home to arkansas and i ran for congress and i lost my race too and i thought how ironic it is that our failed efforts to get to congress made us both president finally let me say that in my senior year at georgetown in the winter on a day very much like today i had a date with a girl from american university and i thought i didn t think about this until i got in the car to come up here today but it was snowing like crazy that night just like it was today and i creeped along in my car from georgetown to american with this fellow who was in my class and we picked up these two fine women from american university and we went to the movie and then we went we went to dinner we went to a movie we took them home and then we were driving home and as we were driving home it was very slick just like it is today and i put my brakes on when i was almost home as we were driving home it was very slick just like it is today and i put my brakes on when i was almost home and my car went into a huge spin and it missed this massive pole on which the stoplight was by about two inches and i couldn t help thinking after my speech last week how many more people would have been happy in america if i d been a little bit closer to that pole 25 years ago thirty years ago in the last year of his short but brilliant life john kennedy came to this university to address the paramount challenge of that time the imperative of pursuing peace in the face of nuclear confrontation many americans still believe it was the finest speech he ever delivered today i come to this same place to deliver an address about what i consider to be the great challenge of this day the imperative of american leadership in the face of global change over the past year i have tried to speak at some length about what we must do to update our definition of national security and to promote it and to protect it and to foster democracy and human rights around the world today i want to allude to those matters but to focus on the economic leadership we must exert at home and abroad as a new global economy unfolds before our eyes twice before in this century history has asked the united states and other great powers to provide leadership for a world ravaged by war after world war i that call went unheeded britain was too weakened to lead the world to reconstruction the united states was too unwilling the great powers together turned inward as violent totalitarian power emerged we raised trade barriers we sought to humiliate rather than rehabilitate the vanquished and the result was instability inflation then depression and ultimately a second world war after the second war we refused to let history repeat itself led by a great american president harry truman a man of very common roots but uncommon vision we drew together with other western powers to reshape a new era we established nato to oppose the aggression of communism we rebuilt the american economy with investments like the g i bill and a national highway system we carried out the marshall plan to rebuild war ravaged nations abroad general macarthur s vision prevailed in japan which built a massive economy and a remarkable democracy we built new institutions to foster peace and prosperity the united nations the international monetary fund the world bank the general agreement on tariffs and trade and more these actions helped to usher in four decades of robust economic growth and collective security yet the cold war was a draining time we devoted trillions of dollars to it much more than many of our more visionary leaders thought we should have we posted our sons and daughters around the world we lost tens of thousands of them in the defense of freedom and in the pursuit of a containment of communism we my generation grew up going to school assemblies learning about what we would do in the event a nuclear war broke out we were taught to practice ducking under our desks and praying that somehow they might shield us from nuclear radiation we all learned about whether we needed a bomb shelter in our neighborhood to which we could run in the event that two great superpowers rained nuclear weapons on one another and that fate frankly seemed still frighteningly possible just months before president kennedy came here to speak in 1963 now thanks to his leadership and that of every american president since the second world war from harry truman to george bush the cold war is over the soviet union itself has disintegrated the nuclear shadow is receding in the face of the start i and start ii agreements and others that we have made and others yet to come democracy is on the march everywhere in the world it is a new day and a great moment for america yet across america i hear people raising central questions about our place and our prospects in this new world we have done so much to make they ask will we and our children really have good jobs first class opportunities world class education quality affordable health care safe streets after having fully defended freedom s ramparts they want to know if we will share in freedom s bounty one of the young public schools students president duffey just introduced was part of the children s program that i did last saturday with children from around america if you saw their stories so many of them raised troubling questions about our capacity to guarantee the fruits of the american dream to all of our own people i believe we can do that and i believe we must for in a new global economy still recovering from the after effects of the cold war a prosperous america is not only good for americans as the prime minister of great britain reminded me just a couple of days ago it is absolutely essential for the prosperity of the rest of the world washington can no longer remain caught in the death grip of gridlock governed by an outmoded ideology that says change is to be resisted the status quo is to be preserved like king canute ordering the tide to recede we cannot do that and so my fellow americans i submit to you that we stand at the third great moment of decision in the 20th century will we repeat the mistakes of the 1920s or the 1930s by turning inward or will we repeat the successes of the 1940s and the 1950s by reaching outward and improving ourselves as well i say that if we set a new direction at home we can set a new direction for the world as well the change confronting us in the 1990s is in some ways more difficult than previous times because it is less distinct it is more complex and in some ways the path is less clear to most of our people still today even after 20 years of declining relative productivity and a decade or more of stagnant wages and greater effort the world clearly remains a dangerous place ethnic hatreds religious strife the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction the violation of human rights flagrantly in altogether too many places around the world still call on us to have a sense of national security in which our national defense is an integral part and the world still calls on us to promote democracy for even though democracy is on the march in many places in the world you and i know that it has been thwarted in many places too and yet we still face overarching everything else this amorphous but profound challenge in the way humankind conducts its commerce we cannot let these changes in the global economy carry us passively toward a future of insecurity and instability for change is the law of life whether you like it or not the world will change much more rapidly in your lifetime than it has in mine it is absolutely astonishing the speed with which the sheer volume of knowledge in the world is doubling every few years and a critical issue before us and especially before the young people here in this audience is whether you will grow up in a world where change is your friend or your enemy we must challenge the changes now engulfing our world toward america s enduring objectives of peace and prosperity of democracy and human dignity and we must work to do it at home and abroad it is important to understand the monumental scope of these changes when i was growing up business was mostly a local affair most farms and firms were owned locally they borrowed locally they hired locally they shipped most of their products to neighboring communities or states within the united states it was the same for the country as a whole by and large we had a domestic economy but now we are woven inextricably into the fabric of a global economy imports and exports which accounted for about one in 10 dollars when i growing up now represent one dollar in every five nearly three quarters of the things that we make in america are subject to competition at home or abroad from foreign producers and foreign providers of services whether we see it or not our daily lives are touched everywhere by the flows of commerce that cross national borders as inexorably as the weather capital clearly has become global some 3 trillion of capital race around the world every day and when a firm wants to build a new factory it can turn to financial markets now open 24 hours a day from london to tokyo from new york to singapore products have clearly become more global now if you buy an american car it may be an american car built with some parts from taiwan designed by germans sold with british made advertisements or a combination of others in a different mix services have become global the accounting firm that keeps the books for a small business in wichita may also be helping new entrepreneurs in warsaw and the same fast food restaurant that your family goes to or at least that i go to also may well be serving families from manilla to moscow and managing its business globally with information technologies and satellites and most important of all information has become global and has become king of the global economy in earlier history wealth was measured in land in gold in oil in machines today the principal measure of our wealth is information its quality its quantity and the speed with which we acquire it and adapt to it we need more than anything else to measure our wealth and our potential by what we know and what we can learn and what we can do with it the value and volume of information has soared the halflife of new ideas has shrunk just a few days ago i was out in silicon valley at a remarkable company called silicon graphics that has expanded exponentially partly by developing computer software with a life of 12 months to 18 months knowing that it will be obsolete after that and always being ready with a new product to replace it we are in a constant race toward innovation that will not end in the lifetime of anyone in this room what all this means is that the best investment we can make today is in the one resource firmly rooted in our own borders that is in the education the skills the reasoning capacity and the creativity of our own people for all the adventure and opportunity in this global economy an american cannot approach it without mixed feelings we still sometimes wish wistfully that everything we really want particularly those things that produce good wages could be made in america we recall simpler times when one product line would be made to endure and last for years we re angry when we see jobs and factories moving overseas or across the borders or depressing wages here at home when we think there is nothing we can do about it we worry about our own prosperity being so dependent on events and forces beyond our shores could it be that the world s most powerful nation has also given up a significant measure of its sovereignty in the quest to lift the fortunes of people throughout the world it is ironic and even painful that the global village we have worked so hard to create has done so much to be the source of higher unemployment and lower wages for some of our people but that is no wonder for years our leaders have failed to take the steps that would harness the global economy to the benefit of all of our people steps such as investing in our people and their skills enforcing our trade laws helping communities hurt by change in short putting the american people first without withdrawing from the world and people beyond our borders the truth of our age is this and must be this open and competitive commerce will enrich us as a nation it spurs us to innovate it forces us to compete it connects us with new customers it promotes global growth without which no rich country can hope to grow wealthier it enables our producers who are themselves consumers of services and raw materials to prosper and so i say to you in the face of all the pressures to do the reverse we must compete not retreat our exports are especially important to us as bad as the recent recession was it would have gone on for twice long had it not been for what we were able to sell to other nations every billion dollars of our exports creates nearly 20 000 jobs here and we now have over seven million export related jobs in america they tend to involve better work and better pay most are in manufacturing and on average they pay almost 3 500 more per year than the average american job they are exactly the kind of jobs we need for a new generation of americans american jobs and prosperity are reason enough for us to be working at mastering the essentials of the global economy but far more is at stake for this new fabric of commerce will also shape global prosperity or the lack of it and with it the prospects of people around the world for democracy freedom and peace we must remember that even with all our problems today the united states is still the world s strongest engine of growth and progress we remains the world s largest producer and its largest and most open market other nations such as germany and japan are moving rapidly they have done better than we have in certain areas we should respect them for it and where appropriate we should learn from that but we must also say to them you too must act as engines of global prosperity nonetheless the fact is that for now and for the foreseeable future the world looks to us to be the engine of global growth and to be the leaders our leadership is especially important for the world s new and emerging democracies to grow and deepen their legitimacy to foster a middle class and a civic culture they need the ability to tap into a growing global economy and our security and our prosperity will be greatly affected in the years ahead by how many of these nations can become and stay democracies all you have to do to know that is to look at the problems in somalia to look at bosnia to look at the other trouble spots in the world if we could make a garden of democracy and prosperity and free enterprise in every part of this globe the world would be a safer and a better and a more prosperous place for the united states and for all of you to raise your children in let us not minimize the difficulty of this task democracy s prospects are dimmed especially in the developing world by trade barriers and slow global growth even though 60 developing nations have reduced their trade barriers in recent years when you add up the sum of their collective actions 20 of the 24 developed nations have actually increased their trade barriers in recent years this is a powerful testament to the painful difficulty of trying to maintain a high wage economy in a global economy where production is mobile and can quickly fly to a place with low wages we have got to focus on how to help our people adapt to these changes how to maintain a high wage economy in the united states without ourselves adding to the protectionist direction that so many of the developed nations have taken in the last few years these barriers in the end will cost the developing world more in lost exports and incomes than all the foreign assistance that developed nations provide but after that they will begin to undermine our economic prosperity as well it s more than a matter of incomes i remind you it s a matter of culture and stability trade of course cannot ensure the survival of new democracies and we have seen the enduring power of ethnic hatred the incredible power of ethnic divisions even among people literate and allegedly understanding to splinter democracy and to savage the nation s state but as philosophers from thucydides to adam smith have noted the habits of commerce run counter to the habits of war just as neighbors who raise each others barns are less likely to become arsonists people who raise each others living standards through commerce are less likely to become combatants so if we believe in the bonds of democracy we must resolve to strengthen the bonds of commerce our own nation has the greatest potential to benefit from the emerging economy but to do so we have to confront the obstacles that stand in our way many of our trading partners cling to unfair practices protectionist voices here at home and abroad call for new barriers indifferent policies have left too many of our workers in communities exposed to the harsh winds of trade without letting them share in the sheltering prosperity trade has also brought and without helping them in any way to build new ways to work so they can be rewarded for their efforts in global commerce cooperation among the major powers toward world growth is not working well at all today and most of all we simply haven t done enough to prepare our own people and to produce our own resources so that we can face with success the rigors of the new world we can change all that if we have the will to do it leonardo da vinci said that god sells all things at the price of labor our labor must be to make this change i believe there are five steps we can and must take to set a new direction at home and to help create a new direction for the world first we simply have to get our own economic house in order i have outlined a new national economic strategy that will give america the new direction we require to meet our challenges it seeks to do what no generation of americans has ever been called upon to do before to increase investment in our productive future and to reduce our deficit at the same time we must do both a plan that only plays down the deficit without investing in those things that make us more productive will not make us stronger a plan that only invests more money without bringing down the deficit will weaken the fabric of our overall economy such that even educated and productive people cannot succeed in it it is more difficult to do both the challenges are more abrasive you have to cut more other spending and raise more other taxes but it is essential that we do both invest so that we can compete bring down the debt so that we can compete the future of the american dream and the fate of our economy and much of the world s economy hangs in the balance on what happens in this city in the next few months already the voices of inertia and self interest have said well we shouldn t do this or this or that detail is wrong with that plan but almost no one has taken up my original challenge that anyone who has any specific ideas about how we can cut more should simply come forward with them i am genuinely open to new ideas to cut inessential spending and to make the kinds of dramatic changes in the way government works that all of us know we have to make i don t care whether they come from republicans or democrats or i don t even care whether they come from at home or abroad i don t care who gets the credit but i do care that we not vary from our determination to pass a plan that increases investment and reduces the deficit i think every one of you who is a student at this university has a far bigger stake in the future than i do i have lived in all probability more than half my life with benefits far beyond anything i ever dreamed or deserved because my country worked and i want my country to work for you the plan i have offered is assuredly not perfect but it is an honest and bold attempt to honestly confront the challenges before us to secure the foundations of our economic growth to expand the resources the confidence and the moral suasion we need to continue our global leadership into the next century and i plead with all of you to do everything you can to replace the blame game that has dominated this city too long with the bigger game of competing and winning in the global economy second it is time for us to make trade a priority element of american security for too long debates over trade have been dominated by voices from the extremes one says government should build walls to protect firms from competition another says government should do nothing in the face of foreign competition no matter what the dimension and shape of that competition is no matter what the consequences are in terms of job losses trade dislocations or crushed incomes neither view takes on the hard work of creating a more open trading system that enables us and our trading partners to prosper neither steps up to the task of empowering our workers to compete or of ensuring that there is some compact of shared responsibility regarding trade s impact on our people or of guaranteeing a continuous flow of investment into emerging areas of new technology which will create the high wage jobs of the 21st century our administration is now developing a comprehensive trade policy that will step up to those challenges and i want to describe the principles upon which it will rest it will not be a policy of blame but one of responsibility it will say to our trading partners that we value their business but none of us should expect something for nothing we will continue to welcome foreign products and services into our markets but insist that our products and services be able to enter theirs on equal terms we will welcome foreign investment in our businesses knowing that with it come new ideas as well as capital new technologies new management techniques and new opportunities for us to learn from one another and grow but as we welcome that investment we insist that our investors should be equally welcome in other countries we welcome the subsidiaries of foreign companies on our soil we appreciate the jobs they create and the products and services they bring but we do insist simply that they pay the same taxes on the same income that our companies do for doing the same business our trade policy will be part of an integrated economic program not just something we use to compensate for the lack of a domestic agenda we must enforce our trade laws and our agreements with all the tools and energy at our disposal but there is much about our competitive posture that simply cannot be straightened out by trade retaliation better educated and trained workers a lower deficit stable low interest rates a reformed health care system world class technologies revived cities these must be the steel of our competitive edge and there must be a continuing quest by business and labor and yes by government for higher and higher and higher levels of productivity too many of the chains that have hobbled us in world trade have been made in america our trade policy will also bypass the distracting debates over whether efforts should be multilateral regional bilateral unilateral the fact is that each of these efforts has its place certainly we need to seek to open other nations markets and to establish clear and enforceable rules on which to expand trade that is why i m committed to a prompt and successful completion of the uruguay round of the gatt talks that round has dragged on entirely too long but it still holds the potential if other nations do their share and we do ours to boost american wages and living standards significantly and to do the same for other nations around the world we also know that regional and bilateral agreements provide opportunities to explore new kinds of trade concerns such as how trade relates to policies affecting the environment and labor standards and the antitrust laws and these agreements once concluded can act as a magnet including other countries to drop barriers and to open their trading systems the north american free trade agreement is a good example it began as an agreement with canada which i strongly supported which has now led to a pact with mexico as well that agreement holds the potential to create many many jobs in america over the next decade if it is joined with others to ensure that the environment that living standards that working conditions are honored that we can literally know that we are going to raise the condition of people in america and in mexico we have a vested interest in a wealthier stronger mexico but we need to do it on terms that are good for our people and we should work with organizations such as the asian pacific economic cooperation forum to liberalize our trade across the pacific as well and let me just say a moment about this i am proud of the contribution america has made to prosperity in asia and to the march of democracy i have seen it in japan after world war ii i have seen it then in taiwan as the country became more progressive and less repressive at the same time i have seen it in korea as a country has become more progressive and more open and we are now making a major contribution to the astonishing revitalization of the chinese economy now growing at 10 percent a year with the united states buying a huge percentage of those imports and i say i want to continue that partnership but i also think we have a right to expect progress in human rights and democracy and should support that progress third it is time for us to do our best to exercise leadership among the major financial powers to improve our coordination on behalf of global economic growth at a time when capital is mobile and highly fungible we simply cannot afford to work at cross purposes with the other major industrial democracies our major partners must work harder and more closely with us to reduce interest rates stimulate investment reduce structural barriers to trade and to restore robust global growth and we must look anew at institutions we use to chart our way in the global economy and ask whether they are serving our interest in this new world or whether we need to modify them or create others tomorrow our treasury secretary secretary bentsen and the federal reserve board chairman alan greenspan will meet with their counterparts from these group of seven nations to begin that work and i look forward to meeting with the g 7 heads of state and the representatives of the european community at our tokyo summit in july i am especially hopeful that by then our economic package here at home will have been substantially enacted by the congress and if that is so i will be able to say to my counterparts you have been telling us for years that america must reduce its debt and put its own house in order you have been saying to us for years we must increase investment in our own education and technology to improve productivity we have done it we have done it for ourselves we have done it for you now you must work with us in germany and japan and other nations to promote global growth we have to work with these nations none of us are very good at it america doesn t want to give up its prerogatives the japanese don t want to give up theirs the germans don t want to give up theirs there are deep and ingrained traditions in all these nations but the fact is that the world can t grow if america is in recession but it will be difficult for us to grow coming out of this recovery unless we can spark a renewed round of growth in europe and in japan we have got to try to work more closely together fourthly we need to promote the steady expansion of growth in the developing world not only because it s in our interest but because it will help them as well these nations are a rapidly expanding market for our products some three million american jobs flow from exports to the developing world indeed because of unilateral actions taken by mexico over the last few years the volume of our trade has increased dramatically and our trade deficit has disappeared our ability to protect the global environment and our ability to combat the flow of illegal narcotics also rests in large measure on the relationships we develop commercially with the developing world there is a great deal we can do to open the flow of goods and services our aid policies must do more to address population pressures to support environmentally responsible sustainable development to promote more accountable government and to foster a fair distribution of the fruits of growth among an increasingly restive world population where over one billion people still exist on barely a dollar a day these efforts will reap us dividends of trade of friendship and peace the final step we must take my fellow americans is toward the success of democracy in russia and in the world s other new democracies the perils facing russia and other former soviet republics are especially acute and especially important to our future for the reductions in our defense spending that a dem wjclinton26 2 96 bill_clinton thank you very much senator nunn congressman lewis congressman bishop terry mcguirk harvey schiller bill bartholomay stan kasten john schuerholz and to bobby cox and the coaches the staff and of course the atlanta braves let me welcome you all to the white house we are delighted to have you here secretary riley is relocating from south carolina to georgia as a result of the outcome of the world series we re glad to see you here this is a happy day for all of us three years ago shortly after i became president i had occasion to meet the canadian prime minister when he hosted a meeting in vancouver between president yeltsin and me and he wanted to have all this high flowing policy discussion and i said now before anything else i want to tell you that my number one objective in our relations with canada is to win the world series back and i want to thank the atlanta braves for helping my foreign policy with canada to succeed it was a great season and it was a magnificent world series victory since 1990 this team has been the winningest team in baseball with three national league pennants and four division titles and an absolutely extraordinary level of performance which for every baseball fan in america has been a thrilling thing to watch your victory is very well deserved not only because you have been there before but throughout the season you were dogged by doubts and second guessing i can identify with that you proved your critics wrong and you achieved baseball s highest goal by overcoming adversity and criticism casey stengel once said good pitching beats good hitting and vice versa well the braves proved that last year you had great hitting great fielding and great pitching tom glavine and greg maddux have won every cy young award for the past five years you may have an antitrust suit on your hands even with baseball s exemption we were all thrilled by dave justice s play and his solo home run in the final game which put the braves on top and we were i think all of us who grew up around baseball were literally stunned i think stunned is the only word by the success of your entire pitching staff we may never see a performance like that in my lifetime and i want to compliment all of them especially since senator nunn told me on the way in they were all good golfers as well i think the braves have shown us the best side of professional sports perseverance and hard work and commitment and a commitment that has endured over seasons there really does seem to be a spirit of teamwork that has worked for this team at a time when so many people wondered whether the team spirit and the ties to community still characterize professional athletics the braves have demonstrated beyond doubt that in atlanta and with the braves that is still the truth and that it has been richly rewarded by consistent performance year in and year out and finally by the world series victory for all of that i say on behalf of our entire country congratulations welcome to the white house it is an honor to have you here and if you keep doing what you ve been doing i expect you ll be here for several more years and i hope i m around for a few of them to welcome you back thank you very much thank you very much i looked in here hoping i could find out how many strokes i would get from each player let me say again to all of you i welcome you here we re going to take a little picture now and then have a receiving line next door so we can bring everyone in it occurred to me that i ought to make one more point since the team is here and we were forced to delay this once because of the operation in bosnia this room is a good reminder of why teams and why this country should never say die and i think i should tell you this it was in this room in 1814 182 years ago that symbolically the light of liberty in america almost went out this room was all set up for a fancy banquet and unbeknownst to the people who were planning to come in the war of 1812 the british had actually landed a few miles from here and our president james madison was the last president of the united states that actually was the operating commander in chief of the armed forces he was out of the white house and his wife dolly was basically going to host this dinner they were having and so james madison sent his wife word that the british were coming and that she should get out of here before she was killed but she had to save that picture of george washington which was painted in 1797 200 years ago next year by gilbert stewart and we bought it for 500 in 1797 it s worth a dollar or two more today she cut that picture out of a frame rolled it up and just before the british rolled in here she cleared out along with all the party goers they came in and had the gaul to eat all of our food and then they burned the house down and a lot of people thought the next day that america s days were numbered it didn t turn out that way and i think if we all remember that we can do more in our own lives to help our country our team our families and our communities and that s the sort of spirit you have exhibited i hope you ll when times get tough you ll remember that story that was a long time ago and we re still here god bless you and thank you dem wjclinton26 2 99a bill_clinton thank you and good morning mr mayor we re delighted to be here in san francisco we thank you for coming out to welcome us senator boxer representative pelosi representative lofgren members of the california legislature who are here i d like to especially thank two people who had a lot to do with the good things that have happened in the last six years in our administration our former secretary of defense bill perry and mrs perry are here and general john shalikashvili thank you for coming we re delighted to see you i very much appreciate this opportunity to speak with all of you to be joined with secretary albright and mr berger to talk about america s role in that century to come to talk about what we must do to realize the promise of this extraordinary moment in the history of the world for the first time since before the rise of fascism early in this century there is no overriding threat to our survival or our freedom perhaps for the first time in history the world s leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory the world clearly is coming together since 1945 global trade has grown 15 fold raising living standards on every continent freedom is expanding for the first time in history more than half the world s people elect their own leaders access to information by ordinary people the world over is literally exploding because of these developments and the dramatic increase in our own prosperity and confidence in this the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history the united states has the opportunity and i would argue the solemn responsibility to shape a more peaceful prosperous democratic world in the 21st century we must however begin this discussion with a little history and a little humility listen to this quote by another american leader at the dawn of a new century the world s products are exchanged as never before and with increasing transportation comes increasing knowledge and larger trade we travel greater distances in a shorter space of time and with more ease than was ever dreamed of the same important news is read though in different languages the same day in all the world isolation is no longer possible no nation can longer be indifferent to any other that was said by president william mckinley a hundred years ago what we now call globalization was well underway even then we in fact had more diplomatic posts in the world than we have today and foreign investment actually played a larger role in our own economy then than it does today the optimism being expressed about the 20th century by president mckinley and others at that time was not all that much different from the hopes commonly expressed today about the 21st the rising global trade and communications did lift countless lives then just as it does today but it did not stop the world s wealthiest nations from waging world war i and world war ii it did not stop the depression or the holocaust or communism had leading nations acted decisively then perhaps these disasters might have been prevented but the league of nations failed and america well our principal involvement in the world was commercial and cultural unless and until we were attacked after world war ii our leaders took a different course harry truman came to this city and said that to change the world away from a world in which might makes right words are not enough we must once and for all prove by our acts conclusively that right has might he and his allies and their successors built a network of security alliances to preserve the peace and a global financial system to preserve prosperity over the last six years we have been striving to renew those arrangements and to create new ones for the challenges of the next 50 years we have made progress but there is so very much more to do we cannot assume today that globalization alone will wash away the forces of destruction at the dawn of the 21st century any more than it did at the dawn of the 20th century we cannot assume it will bring freedom and prosperity to ordinary citizens around the world who long for them we cannot assume it will assume it will avoid environmental and public health disasters we cannot assume that because we are now secure we americans do not need military strength or alliances or that because we are prosperous we are not vulnerable to financial turmoil half a world away the world we want to leave our children and grandchildren requires us to make the right choices and some of them will be difficult america has always risen to great causes yet we have a tendency still to believe that we can go back to minding our own business when we re done today we must embrace the inexorable logic of globalization that everything from the strength of our economy to the safety of our cities to the health of our people depends on events not only within our borders but half a world away we must see the opportunities and the dangers of the interdependent world in which we are clearly fated to live there is still the potential for major regional wars that would threaten our security the arms race between india and pakistan reminds us that the next big war could still be nuclear there is a risk that our former adversaries will not succeed in their transitions to freedom and free markets there is a danger that deadly weapons will fall into the hands of a terrorist group or an outlaw nation and that those weapons could be chemical or biological there is a danger of deadly alliances among terrorists narco traffickers and organized criminal groups there is a danger of global environmental crises and the spread of deadly diseases there is a danger that global financial turmoil will undermine open markets overwhelm open societies and undercut our own prosperity we must avoid both the temptation to minimize these dangers and the illusion that the proper response to them is to batten down the hatches and protect america against the world the promise of our future lies in the world therefore we must work hard with the world to defeat the dangers we face together and to build this hopeful moment together into a generation of peace prosperity and freedom because of our unique position america must lead with confidence in our strengths and with a clear vision of what we seek to avoid and what we seek to advance our first challenge is to build a more peaceful 21st century world to that end we re renewing alliances that extend the area where wars do not happen and working to stop the conflicts that are claiming lives and threatening our interests right now the century s bloodiest wars began in europe that s why i ve worked hard to build a europe that finally is undivided democratic and at peace we want all of europe to have what america helped build in western europe a community that upholds common standards of human rights where people have the confidence and security to invest in the future where nations cooperate to make war unthinkable that is why i have pushed hard for nato s enlargement and why we must keep nato s doors open to new democratic members so that other nations will have an incentive to deepen their democracies that is why we must forge a partnership between nato and russia between nato and ukraine why we are building a nato capable not only of deterring aggression against its own territory but of meeting challenges to our security beyond its territory the kind of nato we must advance at the 50th anniversary summit in washington this april we are building a stronger alliance with japan and renewing our commitment to deter aggression in korea and intensifying our efforts for a genuine peace there i thank secretary perry for his efforts in that regard we also create a more peaceful world by building new partnerships in asia africa and latin america ten years ago we were shouting at each other across a north south chasm defined by our differences today we are engaged in a new dialogue that speaks the language of common interests of trade and investment of education and health of democracies that deliver not corruption and despair but progress and hope of a common desire that children in all our countries will be free of the scourge of drugs through these efforts to strengthen old alliances and build new partnerships we advance the prospects for peace however the work of actually making peace is harder and often far more contentious it s easy for example to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in bosnia or who owns a strip of brushland in the horn of africa or some piece of parched earth by the jordan river but the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names the question we must ask is what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread we cannot indeed we should not do everything or be everywhere but where are values and our interests are at stake and where we can make a difference we must be prepared to do so and we must remember that the real challenge of foreign policy is to deal with problems before they harm our national interests it s also easy to say that peacemaking is simply doomed where people are embittered by generations of hate where the old animosities of race and religion and ethnic difference raise their hoary heads but i will never forget the day that the leaders of israel and the palestinian authority came to the white house in september of 1993 to sign their peace accord at that moment the question arose and indeed based on the pictures afterward it seemed to be the main question whether if in front of the entire world prime minister rabin and chairman arafat would actually shake hands for the first time it was an interesting and occasionally humorous discussion but it ended when yitzhak rabin a soldier for a lifetime said to me mr president i have been fighting this man for a lifetime 30 years i have buried a lot of my own people in the process but you do not make peace with your friends it is in our interest to be a peacemaker not because we think we can make all these differences go away but because in over 200 years of hard effort here at home and with bitter and good experiences around the world we have learned that the world works better when differences are resolved by the force of argument rather than the force of arms that is why i am proud of the work we have done to support peace in northern ireland and why we will keep pressing the leaders there to observe not just the letter but the spirit of the good friday accord it is also why i intend to use the time i have remaining in this office to push for a comprehensive peace in the middle east to encourage israelis and palestinians to reach a just and final settlement and to stand by our friends for peace such as jordan the people of the middle east can do it but time is precious and they can t afford to waste any more of it in their hearts they know there can be no security or justice for any who live in that small and sacred land until there is security and justice for all who live there if they do their part we must do ours we will also keep working with our allies to build peace in the balkans three years ago we helped to end the war in bosnia a lot of doubters then thought it would soon start again but bosnia is on a steady path toward renewal and democracy we ve been able to reduce our troops there by 75 percent as peace has taken hold and we will continue to bring them home the biggest remaining danger to this progress has been the fighting and the repression in kosovo kosovo is after all where the violence in the former yugoslavia began over a decade ago when they lost the autonomy guaranteed under yugoslav law we have a clear national interest in ensuring that kosovo is where this trouble ends if it continues it almost certainly will draw in albania and macedonia which share borders with kosovo and on which clashes have already occurred potentially it could affect our allies greece and turkey it could spark tensions in bosnia itself jeopardizing the gains made there if the conflict continues there will certainly be more atrocities more refugees more victims crying out for justice and seeking out revenge last fall a quarter of a million displaced people in bosnia were facing cold and hunger in the hills using diplomacy backed by force we brought them home and slowed the fighting for 17 days this month outside paris we sought with our european partners an agreement that would end the fighting for good progress was made toward a common understanding of kosovo s autonomy progress that would not have happened i want to say but for the unity of our allies and the tireless leadership of our secretary of state madeleine albright here s where we are kosovar albanian leaders have agreed in principle to a plan that would protect the rights of their people and give them substantial self government serbia has agreed to much but not all of the conditions of autonomy and has so far not agreed to the necessity of a nato led international force to maintain the peace there serbia s leaders must now accept that only by allowing people in kosovo control over their day to day lives as after all they have been promised under yugoslav law it is only by doing that can they keep their country intact both sides must return to the negotiations on march 15 with clear mandate for peace in the meantime president milosevic should understand that this is a time for restraint not repression and if he does not nato is prepared to act now if there is a peace agreement that is effective nato must also be ready to deploy to kosovo to give both sides the confidence to lay down their arms europeans would provide the great bulk of such a force roughly 85 percent but if there is a real peace america must do its part as well kosovo is not an easy problem but if we don t stop the conflict now it clearly will spread and then we will not be able to stop it except at far greater cost and risk a second challenge we face is to bring our former adversaries russia and china into the international system as open prosperous stable nations the way both countries develop in the coming century will have a lot to do with the future of our planet for 50 years we confronted the challenge of russia s strength today we must confront the risk of a russia weakened by the legacy of communism and also by its inability at the moment to maintain prosperity at home or control the flow of its money weapons and technology across its borders the dimensions of this problem are truly enormous eight years after the soviet collapse the russian people are hurting the economy is shrinking making the future uncertain yet we have as much of a stake today in russia overcoming these challenges as we did in checking its expansion during the cold war this is not a time for complacency or self fulfilling pessimism let s not forget that russia s people have overcome enormous obstacles before and just this decade with no living memory of democracy or freedom to guide them they have built a country more open to the world than ever a country with a free press and a robust even raucous debate a country that should see in the first year of the new millennium the first peaceful democratic transfer of power in its 1 000 year history the russian people will decide their own future but we must work with them for the best possible outcome with realism and with patience if russia does what it must to make its economy work i am ready to do everything i can to mobilize adequate international support for them with the right framework we will also encourage foreign investment in its factories its energy fields its people we will increase our support for small business and for the independent media we will work to continue cutting our two nations nuclear arsenals and help russia prevent both its weapons and its expertise from falling into the wrong hands the budget i have presented to congress will increase funding for this critical threat reduction by 70 percent over the next five years the question china faces is how best to assure its stability and progress will it choose openness and engagement or will it choose to limit the aspirations of its people without fully embracing the global rules of the road in my judgment only the first path can really answer the challenges china faces we cannot minimize them china has made incredible progress in lifting people out of poverty and building a new economy but now its rate of economic growth is declining just as it is needed to create jobs for a growing and increasingly more mobile population most of china s economy is still stifled by state control we can see in china the kinds of problems a society faces when it is moving away from the rule of fear but is not yet rooted in the rule of law china s leaders know more economic reform is needed and they know reform will cause more unemployment and they know that can cause unrest at the same time and perhaps for those reasons they remain unwilling to open up their political system to give people a peaceful outlet for dissent now we americans know that dissent is not always comfortable not always easy and often raucous but i believe that the fact that we have peaceful orderly outlets for dissent is one of the principal reasons we re still around here as the longest lasting freely elected government in the world and i believe sooner or later china will have to come to understand that a society in the world we re living in particularly a country as great and old and rich and full of potential as china simply cannot purchase stability at the expense of freedom on the other hand we have to ask ourselves what is the best thing to do to try to maximize the chance that china will take the right course and that because of that the world will be freer more peaceful more prosperous in the 21st century i do not believe we can hope to bring change to china if we isolate china from the forces of change of course we have our differences and we must press them but we can do that and expand our cooperation through principled and purposeful engagement with china its government and its people our third great challenge is to build a future in which our people are safe from the dangers that arise perhaps halfway around the world dangers from proliferation from terrorism from drugs from the multiple catastrophes that could arise from climate change each generation faces the challenges of not trying to fight the last war in our case that means recognizing that the more likely future threat to our existence is not a strategic nuclear strike from russia or china but the use of weapons of mass destruction by an outlaw nation or a terrorist group in the last six years fighting that threat has become a central priority of american foreign policy here too there is much more to be done we are working to stop weapons from spreading at the source as with russia we are working to keep iraq in check so that it does not threaten the rest of the world or its region with weapons of mass destruction we are using all the means at our disposal to deny terrorists safe havens weapons and funds even if it takes years terrorists must know there is no place to hide recently we tracked down the gunman who killed two of our people outside the cia six years ago we are training and equipping our local fire police and medical personnel to deal with chemical biological and nuclear emergencies and improving our public health surveillance system so that if a biological weapon is released we can detect it and save lives we are working to protect our critical computer systems from sabotage many of these subjects are new and unfamiliar and may be frightening as i said when i gave an address in washington not very long ago about what we were doing on biological and computer security and criminal threats it is important that we have the right attitude about this it is important that we understand that the risks are real and they require therefore neither denial nor panic as long as people organize themselves in human societies there will be organized forces of destruction who seek to take advantage of new means of destroying other people and the whole history of conflict can be seen in part as the race of defensive measures to catch up with offensive capabilities that is what we re doing in dealing with the computer challenges today that is what we are doing in dealing with the biological challenges today it is very important that the american people without panic be serious and deliberate about them because it is the kind of challenge that we have faced repeatedly and as long as our country and the world is around unless there is some completely unforeseen change in human nature our successors will have to do the same we are working to develop a national missile defense system which could if we decide to deploy it be deployed against emerging ballistic missile threats from rogue nations we are bolstering the global agreements that curb proliferation that s the most important thing we can be doing right now this year we hope to achieve an accord to strengthen compliance with the convention against biological weapons it s a perfectly good convention but frankly it has no teeth we have to give it some and we will ask our senate to ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty to stop nations from testing nuclear weapons so they re constrained from developing new ones again i say i implore the united states senate to ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty this year it is very important for the united states and the world our security and our safety also depends upon doing more to protect our people from the scourge of drugs to win this fight we must work with others including and especially mexico mexico has a serious drug problem increasingly affecting more of its own young people no one understands this better than president zedillo he described it as the number one threat to his country s security its people its democracy he is working hard to establish clean government true democracy and the rule of law he is working hard to tackle the corruption traffickers have wrought he cannot win this battle alone and neither can we in any given year the narco traffickers may spend hundreds of millions of dollars to try to suborn mexican law enforcement officials most of whom work for under 10 000 a year as i certified to congress today mexico is cooperating with us in the battle for our lives and i believe the american people will be safer in this as in so many other ways if we fight drugs with mexico rather than walk away another global danger we face is climate change as far as we can tell with all the scientific evidence available the hottest years our planet has ever experienced were 1997 and 1998 the two hottest years recorded in the last several excuse me nine of the ten hottest years recorded in the last several centuries occurred in the last decade now we can wait and hope and do nothing and try to ignore what the vast majority of scientists tell us is a pattern that is fixed and continuing we could ignore the record breaking temperatures the floods the storms the droughts that have caused such misery or we can accept that preventing the disease and destruction climate change can bring will be infinitely cheaper than letting future generations try to clean up the mess especially when you consider that greenhouse gases once emitted into the atmosphere last and have a destructive environmental effect for at least a hundred years we took a giant step forward in 1997 when we helped to forge the kyoto agreement now we re working to persuade developing countries that they too can and must participate meaningfully in this effort without forgoing growth we are also trying to persuade a majority in the united states congress that we can do the same thing the approach i have taken in america is not to rely on a whole raft of new regulations and not to propose big energy taxes but instead to offer tax incentives and dramatic increases in investment in new technologies because we know we know now that we have the technological capacity to break the iron link between industrial age energy use patterns and economic growth you re proving it in california every day with stiffer environmental standards than other states have we know that the technology is just beginning to emerge to allow us to have clean cars and other clean forms of transportation to dramatically increase the capacity of all of our buildings to keep out heat and cold and to let in more light we know that the conservation potential of what we have right now available has only just been scratched and we must convince the world and critical decision makers in the united states to change their minds about a big idea namely that the only way a country can grow is to consume more energy resources in a way that does more to increase global warning one of the most interesting conversations i had when i was in china was with the environmental minister there who thanked me for going there to do an environmental event because he was having trouble convincing the government that they could continue to lift the chinese people out of poverty and still improve the environment this is a central big idea that people all over the world will have to change their minds about before we will be open and free to embrace the technological advances that are lying evident all around us and all of you that can have any impact on that i implore you to do it our fourth challenge is to create a world trading and financial system that will lift the lives of ordinary people on every continent around the world or as it has been stated in other places to put a human face on the global economy over the last six years we ve taken giant steps in opening the global trading system the united states alone has concluded over 270 different trade agreements once again we are the world s largest exporting nation there is a lot more to be done in the first five years of my presidency about 30 percent of our growth came from expanding trade last year we had a good year but we didn t have much growth from expanding trade because of the terrible difficulties of the people in asia in russia and because of the slowdown in growth in latin america and because we did not reach out to seize new possibilities in africa those people are suffering more and our future prospects are being constrained the question is what to do about it some of the folks outside who were protesting when i drove up were saying by their signs that they believe globalization is inherently bad and there s no way in the wide world to put a human face on the global economy but if you look at the facts of the last 30 years hundreds of millions of people have had their economic prospects advanced on every continent because they have finally been able to find a way to express their creativity in positive terms and produce goods and services that could be purchased around the borders of their nation now the question is how do we deal with the evident challenges and problems that we face in high relief today and seize the benefit that we know comes from expanding trade i ve asked for a new round of global trade negotiations to expand exports of services foreign products and manufacturers i am still determined to reach agreement on a free trade area of the americas if it hadn t been for our expansion in latin america from mexico all the way to the southern tip of south america we would have been in much worse shape this last year i have urged congress to give the trade authority the president has traditionally had to advance our prosperity and i ve asked them to approve the caribbean basin initiative and the africa growth and opportunity act because we have special responsibilities and special opportunities in the caribbean and in africa that have gone too long unseized but trade is not an end in itself it has to work for ordinary people it has to contribute to the wealth and fairness of societies it has to reinforce the values that give meaning to life not simply in the united states but in the poorest countries struggling to lift their people to their dreams that s why we re working to build a trading system that upholds the rights of workers and consumers and helps us and them in other countries to protect the environment so that competition among nations is a race to the top not the bottom this year we will lead the international community to conclude a treaty to ban abusive child labor everywhere in the world the gains of global economic exchange have been real and dramatic but when the tides of capital first flood emerging markets and then abruptly recede when bank failures and bankruptcies grip entire economies when millions who have worked their way into the middle class are plunged suddenly into poverty the need for reform of the international financial system is clear i don t want to minimize the complexity of this challenge as nations began to trade more and as investment rules began to permit people to invest in countries other than their own more it became more and more necessary to facilitate the conversion of currencies whenever you do that you will create a market against risk just in the transfer of currencies whenever you do that you will have people that are moving money around because they think the value of the money itself will change and profit might be gained in an independent market of currency exchange it is now true that on any given day there is 1 5 trillion of currency exchange in the world many many many times more than the actual value of the exchange of goods and services and we have got to find a way to facilitate the movement of money without which trade and investment cannot occur in a way that avoids these dramatic cycles of boom and then bust which have led to the collapse of economic activity in so many countries around the world we found a way to do it in the united states after the great depression and thank goodness we have never again had a great depression even though we ve had good times and bad times that is the challenge facing the world financial system today the leading economies have got a lot of work to do we have to do everything we can not just the united states but europe and japan to spur economic growth unless there is a restoration of growth all the changes in the financial rules we make will not get asia latin america countries russia out of their difficulties we have to be ready to provide quick and decisive help to nations committed to sound policies we have to help nations build social safety nets so that when they have inevitable changes in their economic conditions people at least have the basic security they need to continue to embrace change and advance the overall welfare of society we have to encourage nations to maintain open properly regulated financial systems so that decisions are shaped by informed market decisions and not distorted by corruption we also have to take responsible steps to reform the global financial architecture for the 21st century and we ll do some more of that at the g 7 summit in germany in june in the meanwhile we have to recognize that the united states has made a grea dem wjclinton26 2 99b bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you very much for the standing ovation i want to thank janice griffin and joe andrew for their service and their speeches i want to thank trudi loh the women s leadership forum southern california chair and the sax club co chairs laura brown and paul krekorian thank you very much i d like to thank kathleen connell and representatives waters and sanchez for being here and speaker villaraigosa for being here and i d like to thank governor davis and sharon for being here you know governor davis has decided that he will sort of cultivate this gray image and it is so bogus i can t believe it we were standing up here you know what he said to me when i came here i said gray that was a wonderful introduction and i really appreciate it and he said well good you can give me two strokes the next time we play let me say to all of you first of all a profound thanks thank you for the support of the wlf and the saxophone club the saxophone club s been going now for several years and the biggest one we have in the country is right here in southern california and i thank you i thank the people of california for being so wonderful to hillary and to the vice president and to me all along the way it has been an amazing journey i m thinking today about a trip i made almost exactly a week ago i guess it was a week ago yesterday to a place that superficially is very different from california on february 18th i went back to new hampshire on the seventh anniversary of the new hampshire primary in 1992 and everywhere i went it was cold and rainy and just the antithesis of today and new hampshire only has about a million people and california has a few more it has a lot of people living in small towns and in rural areas but on this cold rainy day everywhere i went there were schoolchildren standing out in the rain and people standing there i hadn t been there in a good while they normally vote for republicans they voted for al gore and me twice there and i m very grateful for that but the reason i was thinking about it tonight is that when i traveled around the country beginning in 1991 and throughout 1992 i think the two places that in some ways most clearly embodied the anxiety the difficulty the frustration of america were new hampshire and california because while you were very different both places were used to being on the cutting edge of economic progress both places believed in hard work and opportunity and both places were pretty devastated by what was going on in new hampshire five of the seven biggest banks had failed i met people who had their business loans called even though they weren t delinquent i met children whose parents became seriously depressed clinically depressed simply because they couldn t stand coming home at night to dinner not being able to work and provide for their children and i saw a lot of incredible things but when i came back to see new hampshire with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country and a great deal of self confidence one of the things that touched me because it was such a small state is that all these people said we want you to know mr president we re for you not only because we re doing better but because you did exactly what you said you would do when you ran for president and that meant a great deal to me so increasingly over these next two years as i travel around america to events like this i will be here advocating the agenda that i intend to pursue until the last hour of my last day in office but i will also be reminding the american people of the ideas and the ideals which are bigger than any administration and bigger than any person that we have tried to bring to bear in american public life for the last six years in 1992 i came to california and i said this country needs new ideas we can t stand inaction but these new ideas have to be premised on fulfilling the historic mission of america opportunity for everybody who is responsible enough to work for it a community of all americans not just some and the leadership of the whole world for peace and freedom and prosperity and we have been about that business and guess what it worked it worked and sometimes i think and i say that in all humility i don t take full responsibility for all the good things that have happened neither should anyone else america has produced this this has been an american achievement but i do say this because our administration and because our people from the vice president and the first lady to the cabinet to all of our people because we believe in things that clearly distinguish ourselves from our friends in the other party we have made a difference we believe that every single person deserves a chance to live out his or her dreams and we believe that none of us can be all we would like to be unless we recognize that all of us are part of one community and one family and we have to help each other in order to make the most of our own lives and we believe the purpose of political life is to bring out the best not the worst in people to unite this country not to divide it to lift people up not hold them back that s what we believe and after six years with the longest peacetime economic expansion in history and the lowest unemployment rate in peacetime since 1957 the welfare rolls cut in half home ownership at an all time high record numbers of new businesses every year over 200 000 new jobs in technology areas alone in the last couple of years half in just three years half of all of our classrooms connected to the internet so we re going to make that goal of all of them connected by the year 2000 with over 90 percent of our children getting their basic immunizations for the first time in american history i think we can say america is on the right path to the future and moving in the right direction tonight i want you to remember basically just two things number one i believe that for our party and our supporters the best politics is doing the right thing and that means trying to get as much done as we can this year to take advantage of our prosperity to take advantage of our confidence and not to simply relax and enjoy it california of all places with all the diversity and all the change and people here from everywhere else aware of conflicts and troubles and instability in other parts of the world this state knows that we have to look to the long term challenges facing our country and that is why i have asked the congress to join me now in dealing with the challenges that the baby boomers will present as we age and solve and save social security and medicare for the 21st century that is why i ve asked the congress to join me now to keep this economic recovery going by doing three things number one i have proposed a new markets initiative in recognition of the fact that in los angeles county in new york city in rural areas in the mississippi delta and appalachia on native american reservations all across the country there has been no economic recovery if we cannot through tax incentives and loan guarantees get free enterprise investment into the poorest areas of america and make them part of our prosperity now we will never get around to it now is the time to bring opportunity to all americans the second thing we ought to do is save about three quarters of this surplus of ours for the next 15 years to fix social security and medicare and in the process pay down the debt if you pay down the debt now this is not something any of you ever thought about if i told you in 92 vote for me and i ll come back here in six years and tell you i ll pay down the debt after it had quadrupled you would have said that man is too unstable to be president we can t have him in there but i want the young people here to listen to me you don t know what s going to happen in other parts of the world i am doing my very best to stabilize the global economy to put a human face on the global economy to avoid the kind of churning disruptions we ve had in asia and the threats to latin america so we can continue stable growth but let me tell you this if we pay down that debt in 15 years debt will be the smallest percentage of our income it s been since before we got into world war i we ll only be spending 02 of every dollar you pay in taxes servicing our debt interest rates will be lower business loan rates will be lower home mortgage rates car payments credit card payments student loans will all be less expensive there will be more investment more jobs and higher incomes if we have tough times around the world america will have it better if we have good times america will have it great help me to convince the american people all to tell the congress to secure our economy for the next 15 years a lot of you younger people you ve brought young children here tonight one couple came through about to have their first child maybe before i finish this speech that s not a comment on how long the speech is going to be but one of the things that worries me about the 21st century is one of the things that i joy in and that is that more and more people are going to work more and more people are having the opportunity to work and i want that but the most important work of any society is raising the children well and we have to find a way we have to find a way to do better in the united states in helping people balance the demands of child rearing and work that s why i fought so hard for the family leave law it s why i think it should be expanded it s why i have given a child care initiative to the congress that would help another million children get affordable quality child care while their parents go to work and it s why we need to more vigorously enforce the law when it comes to equal pay for equal work for women and for men i want us in the 21st century to live in real community not only with our neighborhoods in our state but around the world that means we have to protect the environment whether it s dealing with traffic congestion and green space and clean air and clean water or the challenge of climate change it means that we ought to give more people the chance to serve whether in the peace corps or americorps here at home it means that we ought to make sure that no person is subject to unfair discrimination which is why i am determined to pass the employment nondiscrimination act this year these are the kinds of things we need to be pushing that all of you need to support and finally let me say in san francisco this morning the place where the united nations was launched i gave a speech saying that the united states still had to care about peace in kosovo in the middle east and northern ireland that the united states still had to care about the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons even if they were at most risk in other countries far from our shore that the united states still had to care about poverty from africa to the caribbean about democracy in central america that we cannot say we love to get on the internet and talk to people around the world we love to sell our products in asia and latin america and pretend that economic globalization will take care of all the problems in the world the inexorable logic of our growing closer together is that we are in an interdependent world and just as we as americans cannot fulfill our own dreams and destinies unless we work together we cannot fulfill the dream and destiny of america unless we reach out to our friends and neighbors around the world and so i say to you these are the basic ideas for meeting the biggest challenges the united states faces we ve come a long way in the last six years we ve had a good time we ve had a better time year in and year out because there have been fewer people subject to abject anxieties and i want to get off the stage and bring back big bad voodoo daddy and i thank them for playing but if you don t remember anything i say you remember these two things number one the best politics is to do the right thing by the american people that s why we re where we are tonight and we need to take advantage we need to take advantage of these good times to deal with the big long term challenges we face and number two if somebody asks you why you re a democrat why did you come here tonight tell them because that s the party that believes that no matter where you come from and what your circumstances you ought to have an equal chance to live out your dream that s the party that believes that no matter what our differences what unites us is more important than what divides us and we want an american family and that s the party that believes that the purpose of our public life is to elevate the spirits and the vision and the heart of the american people thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton26 4 96 bill_clinton thank you very much come on up congressman give congressman borski a hand for going to his daughter s soccer game give him a hand one of the things you need to know if your in public life is how to make a proper entrance and bob just qualified actually i saw him this morning we were both out running at ft mcnair in washington d c and he said he d be here tonight and i thank him for keeping his word thank you congressman chaka fattah for that powerful introduction and for your great service thank you congressman tom foglietta for your friendship and your support thank you gussie and thank you mina baker knoll and thank you joe kohn thank you mr chairman fowler for all these endless nights that you go back and forth across america in search of the magical chemistry of victory not just for our party and our candidates but for the kind of america we re fighting for and thank you mr mayor for proving that the democratic party can be the party of the future and the party of all the people the party of compassion and competence the party of the mind and the party of the heart thank you all ladies and gentlemen i am deeply moved by this large outpouring as president kennedy used to say i am deeply touched but not so deeply touched as you are tonight i thank you for your support and i thank you for your commitment to your city your state and your country pennsylvania and philadelphia have been very very good to me and as all of you know this state and this part of our state has a special place in my wife s heart and her family history and we re delighted always either one of us to have a chance to come i think you know why we re here or you wouldn t be here but let me just say again very briefly when i ran for president in 1992 and the state of pennsylvania gave bill clinton and al gore its electoral votes when philadelphia gave our ticket a larger margin than president kennedy received here in 1960 we had a very straightforward vision for our country a vision for what we wanted america to look like in the 21st century and what we wanted america to be like for all the children that are here first we wanted a country where every people who is willing to work for it without regard to their race their income or their background could have a chance to live out their dreams second we wanted a country that was coming together not being driven apart that was reaching across the racial and other lines that divide us to find strength in our diversity and our shared values third i wanted to see our country continue to be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity and security so that we could build a framework for the 21st century that would free our children of the worries that two world wars and the cold war imposed upon generation after generation after generation of americans in the 20th century in short i really believed that if we did the right thing the global economy could open up the greatest age of possibility our people have ever known i still believe that and what i come to you to say is that we have a record that we can be proud of together we ve done what we said we d do in 1992 but it is a record to build on not a record to sit on it is a record to go forward from and not a record to take a radical turn away from that is what is at stake here the american people in a way are fortunate in this election year in 1992 there was a big debate about change or the status quo that s not what is at stake in 1996 in 1996 there are two very different visions of change that offer us two roads into the 21st century and the next four years like it or not are going to take us right into the next century the question is which road are we going to walk into the 21st century that is the question the american people will determine will we walk the road of those who say that government is the problem in america and the only thing we need to do is to give the american people freedom from their government or will we walk with those of us who believe that we need a smaller and less bureaucratic government but government has a role to play to make sure that every american has a chance to make it that every family has a chance to make it that every neighborhood and every community has a chance to live up to the fullest of their god given capacities i think those of us who want to go forward together will prevail in 1996 because of you and i know that you know that and we don t have to guess about what will happen you know where i am and what i will do you know where they are and what they will do you know that our approach produced a deficit that is less than half of what it was in 1992 when we took office 8 5 million more jobs a real crime bill instead of six years of talking about it it s putting 100 000 police on the street and helping communities to drive the crime rate down to make our streets safer you know that it produced new and innovative approaches to protect the environment while growing the economy you know that it produced a new commitment to the education of all our children from expanding the head start program to expanding the availability of affordable college loans to the national service program that your former senator harris wofford had today you know what we will do and you know they oppose all those things you also know that i have done my best to reach across party lines to work with republicans of goodwill that i think this intense partisanship the idea that everybody who is not in your party is the enemy of your future and the enemy of your country is crazy the idea that you should never work with people even if you agree with them on a specific issue because there might be some god forbid benefit to somebody in the other party is wrong that is not what made america great there are enough differences that are honest without that kind of accepted partisanship and today i finally signed seven months late a budget for this year that i would have signed seven months ago why it continues the reduction of the deficit it continues to cut spending but it protects education it protects the protection of the environment it protects medicare it protects medicaid it protects our investment in new technologies in the growth of jobs and it protects the 100 000 police and the americorps program all things that the other party tried in an intensely completely partisan way to do away with that was wrong but when we came back and rolled up our sleeves and worked together we did what we should have done keep that deficit coming down continue to reduce the size of unnecessary government but protect our future and protect our children and protect the things that bring us together instead of driving us apart that is the way we ought to do things a couple of days ago i signed an antiterrorism bill the same thing passed in a completely bipartisan way to give us the tools to fight the kind of terrorism that we have seen in oklahoma city at the world trade center in japan in the middle east indeed all over the world the use of murder of innocent civilians to achieve a political end we did that in a bipartisan way by putting america first that is what i represent and that s what our party will represent as long as i am the president of the united states and that is what we ought to do so i ask you to keep these things in mind this is an interesting world we re living in it s full of unpredictable events just in the last few weeks we ve seen the heartbreaking deaths of my friend the commerce secretary ron brown and some of our finest young public servants and some of our finest business leaders going to bosnia to try to put the power of the american economy behind saving the peace and tell those people you have no future if you hate each other because of your religion or your ethnic background and we are determined now to make something positive happen out of that to use it to strengthen our ability to stand for peace we were afraid that the peace was being shattered in the middle east with the fighting in southern lebanon and northern israel but thank god today they reached an agreement to restore the cease fire and to monitor violations and not to resort to that kind of killing again and yesterday the palestinians took out of their constitution the provision that required them to be against the very existence of the state of israel this was a good day a good week for peace in the middle east and moving forward again and on the trip i took to korea and japan and russia let me remind you it may seem like a long way away but when i took office the number one threat to america s security was said to be the development of a nuclear program by north korea and the prospect that they would have nuclear weapons that could be used and could be sold to other countries now that is not even in the headlines anymore because they re keeping their word to build down their nuclear program and we are committed to that in japan we ve had 21 separate trade agreements with japan 21 and in those areas everything from auto parts to cellular telephone to autos to rice in all those areas our exports to japan are up 85 percent and our trade deficit is going down we are creating jobs with free and fair trade doing the right thing by the american people and maintaining our security partnership with japan let me tell you why i went to russia and how it affects you because of the work that has been done with russia as a democracy in the last three years for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there is not a single solitary nuclear missile pointed at an american child tonight and i am proud of that and you should be proud of that but unfortunately not all the dangers of the nuclear age are behind us we have more work to do to reduce nuclear weapons further and the waste that is left behind the waste that is left behind could be used to make small bombs with many times the destructive power of the bomb that blew up the federal building in oklahoma city so we have to work with them to make sure that all that is safe that it cannot be stolen that terrorists cannot get a hold of it so even these things that happen so far from home affect the way your children live on their streets and their neighborhoods and their schools and their future that is why i say again we have to do three things every person without regard to their race their gender their station in life has got to have a chance if they re willing to work for it we have got we have got to fight these impulses that are dividing people all over the world by race by religion by ethnic groups and say no no that s not what america is america is leading our challenges together by sharing our values and working together and we ve got to continue to be the force for peace and freedom and security in the world that only america can be and we have to do it by saying this is what the democrats stand for not big government solving all the problems but a new smaller less bureaucratic government the smallest in 30 years but one still strong enough to help citizens and families and communities make the most of their own lives that is tomorrow s progressivism that s what we stand for and if any republicans or independents want to help us we are not going to be blindly partisan we re going to say come on aboard grab us by the hand and walk into the future together thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton26 4 98 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much let me see we have now seen a magnificent musical rendition of a wonderful novel we heard two fine speeches if i had any sense i would sit down when bob was talking about that obscurity is forever i think the vice president is too sensitive i thought he was talking about being a former president not being a i want to thank the kogod s and the smiths and all their family members for having us in this magnificent home for giving us a chance to look at all the wonderful art for being in this beautiful tent i m delighted with the weather and i m delighted with the company i want to thank the leaders of our party and the co chairs of this event tonight as you leave here and the vice president has already said a lot of the things that i think should be said about what it means for a party to be 150 years old but let me say when hillary and i were in chile recently someone i think on her staff got us a copy of a speech which theodore roosevelt gave in chile after he left the white house in the early part of this century a speech which i have to say i believe the members of his party ignored but it s a brilliant speech about how in politics if you want to really matter you have to be faithful to eternal values but you have to always be willing to lift the dead hand of history off your politics always be willing to do whatever is necessary to advance the expansion of freedom and opportunity for people and never to be paralyzed by what you used to do when it no longer makes sense it s really quite a brilliant speech and i read it when i was in chile thinking that s what i think and that s what i think our party embodies what i would like for you to think about leaving here tonight basically are just three things number one in terms of what we re going to do in the next two and a half years in order to continue to win presidential elections win back the congress and become the dominant party in the country again i think we not only have to continue to win with an aggressive specific agenda i think we have to also keep pushing the big ideas that we do believe in opportunity for everybody we do believe that we should expand the reach of human freedom we do believe that we re stronger as a diverse country and there are two or three really simple things that i would like to mention that to me are quite important and frankly i haven t succeeded yet in convincing huge numbers of the american people that this has to be a part of our thinking the first is that it no longer makes sense to have a clear bright line between what is an american domestic policy and what is a foreign policy now if i had succeeded in doing that we wouldn t have some of the disputes we still have in our country today and there would be more support in our country for paying our u n dues investing in the international monetary fund being responsible citizens in every way i think the american people know we re living in an interdependent world but it s not such a high priority that politicians for their own purposes don t feel they can they still feel free to walk away from some of our responsibilities in the world and i think that s a great mistake because i can tell you you know i believe that every nation i have set foot in as president i was doing something that was good for the american people and their future and our children s future you do not have to be a jewish american or an arab american to know that the children of our country will have a brighter future if there is peace in the middle east you don t have to have come out of central europe to know that the children of our country will have a brighter future if there is peace in bosnia you don t have to be greek or turkish to know that we d be a whole lot better off if we d resolve the problems over cyprus you don t have to be indian or pakistani to know that it would be an ultimate disaster if those two great nations went to war over kashmir when they could go to peace and change the whole future of the 21st century by their numbers and their ingenuity this is elemental and as democrats we have got to continue to push the fact that our children live in a smaller and smaller world and that we cannot any longer just look at the outlines of the united states on a map and say only those events which occur within that border and only the people who live within those borders bear directly on our lives our future and our imagination the other thing i d like to say is that i think that we have got to learn to stop thinking of ourselves as the environmental party and start thinking of the environment as a part of all of our other policies i think we will never have the kind of country we want unless we say we can conquer the problem of climate change as we grow the economy we dare not think of some we can t even have health policy unless we have environmental policy we have to learn think in a more integrated fashion this may be late at night and you may think that s esoteric but i m telling you i m about through with my public service as an elected official most of my service as president is over and i m thinking about the things that will shape what our children have to live with for 30 or 40 years and the last thing i want to say is what the musical was about tonight is still the most important thing we have got to inculcate in our people both the pride in their own heritage beliefs and convictions and a fundamental respect even a celebration of people who are different from them it is a great opportunity for the united states that we are the most diverse democracy in the world now as a factual matter both russia and india also have huge numbers of different ethnic groups languages and religions within their borders but the difference is largely those people live in geographically separate parts of the same country here we re the most mixed up if you will i don t mean addle brained i mean intermixed diverse democracy in all of human history and if there is one thing i have learned as president that i did not really know when i took office in the way i know it now it is that when people fight and kill each other or live in paralyzed isolation because of their ethnic their racial or their religious differences they do not do it because of some dark content of human nature some inevitable hard hand of history they do it because they don t have leaders who stand up and say this is the right thing to do that is wrong to do we must not live apart it is wrong to kill and hurt and maim people so when you go home tonight i hope you ll remember the play for the rest of your life the musical i hope you will always be proud you were here but remember there is a reason we re still hanging around after all these years because we ve still got the same values we started with but we never let the dead hand of history keep us from making the changes necessary to make the american dream more real for more people in a more profound way in each new age and time and if we leave with that and we continue to fight for that and we remember the three specific things i said tonight then 150 years from now a bunch of other people will be having a nice dinner celebrating the 300th birthday of the democratic committee thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton26 7 00 bill_clinton thank you very much let me say to all of you i thank you for being here and i want to thank the organizers of this event for holding it in this wonderful museum it s one of hillary s and my favorite places in all of washington d c and i hope you ll always support it and bring some people back here this is a great thing for the women of america this museum and i m delighted to be here i want to thank governor glendening for what he said and for his sterling leadership maryland in so many ways has led the country in education and health policy and so many other things since parris glendening has been governor and kathleen kennedy townsend has been lieutenant governor i am so proud of them i have been to maryland more than any other state in america the last eight years to highlight reforms at the state level that work and it s a real tribute to him i m grateful to him i also want to thank the members of congress who are here and those who are gone i know steny hoyer was here i heard him with his booming voice speaking when i came in and started taking pictures with a few of you and i thank him and al wynn and thank you jim moran for being here thank you elijah cummings for being here and thank you patrick kennedy for being here out there in the crowd just one of the folks like all the kennedys i appreciate you being here good for you patrick has been the chairman of the democratic congressional campaign committee which means he has to go out and make sure all the house members have enough money to get on television so he s just out here checking you all out he ll probably call you all tomorrow for somebody else but you ve done a great job thank you patrick finally i want to say a word of appreciation and admiration and thanks to senator paul sarbanes i think not only one of the brightest but one of the most wise people in the united states congress you are very lucky to have him as your senator i m glad to see him and christina here tonight thank you and i would like to thank terry and his entire family because this is a family endeavor for their commitment to this race and to the future of our country it is not easy to run for congress today still less to run against an incumbent and to run for a clear reason that over rides his or anyone else s individual interests and i admire him for doing it for taking it on and for doing it with such gusto so i thank you and i thank your family now it is true as all of you know that i ve been up most of the last 15 days this will be the first night in 15 nights that i ve been to bed before 2 00 a m and the most of the nights we were at camp david we went to bed at 3 00 a m or 4 00 a m the last two nights we were all up until 5 00 a m somewhere in the middle i can t remember exactly when i flew to okinawa and back so i m just barely here but i m honored to be here i m very grateful to the people of maryland for voting for me and al gore twice for giving us a chance to serve and i thank you for that i just want to say two or three things first of all this is a profoundly important election ninety two was a big election because the country was in trouble and the people voted for me and gave me a chance even though most of them probably when they first heard about me running had the same reaction abe pollin did i ll never forget president bush referring to me as the governor of a small southern state and when i ran i was so naive i thought it was a compliment and you know something i still do but it didn t take rocket science to figure out we needed to make a change in the country but now it s interesting a lot of these surveys show that people don t know if there is a real difference between the vice president and the republican candidate s economic policy or the two parties what s the deal here and the first thing i have to drum home is that this is a really important election and a lot of people won t believe that because things seem to be going well you say well how can it be so important the economy is strong we ve got a surplus all the social indicators are going well the unemployment rate is the lowest it s been in 30 years the welfare rolls have been cut in half the prime rate is dropping teen pregnancy rate is dropping drug use among young people is dropping what s the big deal here we have no internal crisis or pressing external threat the united states is involved in making peace around the world and all that i ll tell you what the big deal is in my lifetime we have never had a moment where we had this much prosperity this much social progress and this much national self confidence but the world is changing very fast and there are all these huge challenges and opportunities out there and for the first time in my adult lifetime we re actually free to talk about what we might do to meet them to build the future of our dreams for the children here and i m so glad so many kids came to this so the reason it s so important is i don t know when we ll ever have another chance like this it may be another 35 years it may be another 50 years and for a democracy it s normally quite difficult to take on big challenges except when you re under the gun so i honestly believe how a nation deals with this kind of prosperity and all the opportunities it presents in a rapidly changing world is just as stern a test of our character our values and our judgment as how we dealt with adversity eight years ago and it may be harder there is not a person in this audience tonight over 30 years old who can t remember once in your life when you made a big mistake not because things were going so bad but because things were going so well that you thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate but make no mistake this is a huge election the second thing i want to say to you is that there are big differences huge and i ll talk a little about some of them in a minute and the third thing i want to say is only the democrats want you to know what the differences are what does that tell you about who you ought to vote for it beats anything i ever saw my wife s opponent up in new york is running ads with me and senator moynihan in them running ads saying i voted for a patients bill of rights the operative word there is a as opposed to the and it s happening all over the country just blur blur blur take advantage of the era of good feelings out spend them and smile them to death and hope nobody ever figures out what the differences are there are real differences and i ll just start with economic policy today i announced that since this congress began last year the republicans have piece by piece passed tax cuts equal to the whole projected surplus over the next 10 years the whole projected surplus that s before we spend any money over and above bare inflation before we deal with any emergency before they spend any of their spending priorities and let me remind you this is projected and their platform calls for even bigger tax increases now what they want to tell you is hey this economy is so strong you couldn t mess it up with a stick of dynamite it s your money i m going to give it back to you that s their line our line is we got where we are being fiscally responsible we want to keep paying down the debt we want to have enough money to invest in the education of our children in science and technology in the environment and health care and we ll give you a tax cut to educate your kids for child care for long term care for elderly and disabled people to help people save for retirement to help especially lower income working people with a lot of kids but we re not going to tell you even in an election year we can give you more than is prudent because we ve got to keep the economy strong and if you keep interest rates low which we ll do and they won t 1 percent lower interest rates over the next decade is worth 250 billion in lower home mortgages 250 billion and nearly 50 billion more in lower car payments and in college loan payments so here s my pitch to you if you got one of those letters in the mail from ed mcmahon and it says you know how it says on the envelope you may have won 10 million would you go out the next day and spend the 10 million based on the envelope well if you would you ought to be for them if not you better stick with us and keep this economy going there couldn t be any bigger difference in economic policy than there is in this year they actually want to go they think now that we have gotten the budget balanced and now we ve run a surplus and we ve paid 300 billion or 400 billion off the national debt that you ll be willing to go back to what they did for 12 years that s the deal here that s what this election is about on economic policy it could hardly be a starker difference and you have to decide and then you ve got to talk to other people about it then there is a big difference in social policy we want to have a responsible gun safety approach in america we want to strengthen the brady bill and close the gun show loophole we want to stop the importation of large capacity ammunition clips we want child safety locks on all the guns in america like maryland already requires and vice president gore and i believe that people that buy handguns ought to have a photo i d license just like a car license to prove you passed a gun safety check and a background check that s what i believe they honestly don t believe that i m convinced they didn t just sell out to the nra they just agree with them you don t have to say anything bad about them they just don t believe that now we ve tried it their way we ve tried it our way and gun crime has dropped 35 percent since we adopted the brady bill and the assault weapons ban and a half a million people were denied the right to buy handguns because they had a criminal background problem or some other problem in their background that made them manifestly unfit you have to decide the nra says if the other crowd wins the white house they ll have an office there that s what they said that s not a negative campaign ad that s what they said that s another new feature you ll notice in this election this year the republicans who pioneered for 20 years negative campaigns smashing us all to bits and telling everybody how terrible we were and how there was nothing good about us they now have sworn off negative campaigns furthermore their definition of a negative campaign is if you say how they voted if you tell people how they how dare you do such a thing how can you be so mean and unfair as to tell people how we voted and what we said in the primary when we hoped no general election voters were looking it s a big deal look we re laughing having a good time but this is a big deal this is about people s lives yes we ve got the lowest crime rate in a long time and yes i m proud it has dropped every year but this country is not near safe enough you know it s not i know it s not and it s important there is a huge difference in health care policy whether we re going to provide medicare for the baby boom generation without bankrupting our kids whether we re going to provide a real affordable prescription drug benefit for all the seniors in our country who need it the bill that they passed won t work and even if it did it would leave more than half the seniors who need the drug coverage behind it s just crazy it s not right and i could just go on and on and on there are real significant differences here the hate crimes legislation should we have it or not employment and nondiscrimination should we have it or not it s a huge issue the final thing i want to say is that a lot of you talked to me tonight about the middle east peace process and i don t want to say anymore than i ve already said except that it s nowhere near over and i think it was a very important two weeks the parties had never before really come to grips in an official face to face way with the profound differences in the way they imagined their future and the profound similarities but you should not be disheartened but here s what i want to tell you about that it is the most visible and powerful example in the world today about how we define our differences and our commonality you all know that one of the most profound differences is over what the future of jerusalem should be it s interesting isn t it that the three great monotheistic religions of the world basically grew out of the same soil and look at jerusalem as their holy city now if all these people billions of them now in the world that believe there is just one god who created us all and they understand that reality in slightly different ways how can it be that what is different about them is more important than their common humanity as children of god i say that to those of you who saw the accounts over the weekend i m telling you these are very impressive people on these negotiating teams they re very impressive people and you thought well gosh i d wish they d worked out i wonder why they couldn t work that out i wonder why people ever can t get over their differences to what they have in common you know why couldn t the irish and the catholics in northern ireland get over it for so long it s a little bitty place smaller than israel even why did all the orthodox christians and the catholics and the muslims in the balkans bloody themselves in bosnia and kosovo and before in croatia why do these things happen well why do we ever have racial discrimination in america why do we still have hate crimes why does some guy go nuts in the middle west and kill the african american former basketball coach at northwestern and then shoot a young korean christian walking out of church and why did a crazy guy shoot a bunch of jewish kids going to their community center in l a and then kill a filipino postal worker because he was asian and a federal employee why did matthew shepard get strapped out on a ride now the point i m trying to make is this and i m not accusing the republicans of this but one of the things that i m proudest of is that the democratic party is the more inclusive party in america we are i was so proud of a man that i think a lot of actually a republican united states senator who gave a speech for the hate crimes legislation using the parable of what jesus said to the woman who was caught in sin and brought to him for stoning and he said to let he who is among you without sin cast the first stone the whole senate was practically weeping when this guy spoke it was so moving but why is that because they were surprised that a member of his party and his wing of his party would do such a noble thing it was a noble thing he did but why were they surprised because they expect us the american people expect us to stand up for inclusion for people without regard to their background their race their religion their sexual orientation or their income they expect us to stand up for ordinary people and the left behind and the broken and the vulnerable and i m proud of that i tell people this all the time you ought to be for the democrats this year because our economic policy is right and it s no time to reverse it you ought to be for us because we ll try to include everybody including those who aren t part of our economic prosperity you ought to be for us because we will think of the future and we want the baby boomers to be able to retire without bankrupting their children and grandchildren you ought to be for us because we have a good education policy and a good environmental policy but the most important thing of all is we really do want to take everybody along for the ride and in the end as i have just learned over 15 hard days that is the most important thing of all thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton26 7 93 bill_clinton thank you very much senator simon senator moseley braun mayor daley president gross and my friends and colleagues secretaries brown and reich and to all of you in the audience my old colleague governor caperton and the distinguished business and labor leaders from all across america this has already been a little bit of fun for me i never thought i d see carol moseley braun blush but i will say this you can call me anything you want as long as you don t take out after me like you did jesse helms the other day i want to say a special word of appreciation to mayor daley for talking about the chicago laboratory for change because it really is sort of symbolic of what we re trying to do all across the country the kind of partnership between government and business and labor and social service agencies to try to put low income people into the work force into independence and away from dependence and i m very excited about that i talked to president gross before we came in about the history of roosevelt university a very appropriate place to be cosponsoring this event i d also be remiss if i didn t thank adele simons the president of mcarthur foundation for that foundation s support for this conference and the joyce foundation for supporting the conference i d like to acknowledge in the audience i believe he s here the reverend willy barrell the chairwoman of operation push they held a conference on economic empowerment this week here and i want to talk a little more about that later but until we find a way to reward the working poor and to move people from welfare to work and to make it attractive for people to invest in distressed areas of this country our economic recovery is going to be limited finally let me say a special word of appreciation to secretaries brown and reich for their work on this conference and there s one group of american workers i really want to acknowledge today this is the third anniversary of one of our most important civil rights laws the americans with disabilities act for more than 40 million people this law is clearing the barriers to full participation in american life making real the whole pledge that we often say that we don t have a person to waste this morning in washington i ran a 5k race with a group of astonishingly able disabled americans two who raced in their chairs who had raced all over the world one marathon runner who happened to be blind one woman who had ms and made a terrific race around the 5k track kept the pace all the way one amputee who had once run a 62 mile race in one day on a prosthesis and today made the 5k around on his crutches just to prove he could do that too the kinds of achievements that these people have demonstrated athletically are demonstrated even more profoundly in the work force every day we need them and i am proud of that law i am glad to be here in chicago to discuss this subject today the city that works the city of big shoulders all that you need to know why i m glad to be here because in a very real way i would not be here as president if it weren t for chicago and the economic forces that bring us here to discuss this subject today helped to explain that i was once at a meeting here in 1988 over at the south shore development bank and i discovered that three city councilmen two or three democratic ward chairs and a significant portion of the business community in this city came from arkansas and it was no accident if you re ever read al hawkis you ought to read john johnson s autobiography here subtitled how i escaped the abject poverty of arkansas city and came to chicago and became a big cheese it is a story that has millions of replications people in the south who couldn t make a living in the great depression leaving in massive numbers from the farms and small towns coming to chicago coming to detroit finding a way to get into the factories or start a business at the least becoming middle class americans earning a decent wage with a rising paycheck and a good retirement and health care benefits and enough to buy a home and take a vacation and send your kids to college it was the american dream and when i began running for president i found myself deluged with people in chicago who had roots in my hometown in my home state we had two delegates here two who were born in the same little town in arkansas that my chief of staff and i were born in in the chicago delegation there s a whole town in michigan where 90 percent of the people who live in this little town were born in my state they all came looking for a different life and that s what basically worked for us then eventually the industrialization which bloomed first here spread back to the south in the year i was born my home state s per capita income was only 56 percent of the national average mississippi s was only 48 percent the postwar economic boom of america by the late 70 s had taken the entire south to about 87 percent of the national average in per capita income and it was projected that the region would equal or exceed the national average of per capita income by the turn of the century but then the economic slowdown of the last 20 years hit everywhere and hit those who were less well educated more rural less able to compete in the global economy even harder and i say that s what s important to bring us here today because i got to this job by being a governor for 12 years in a state where i focused almost exclusively on the subjects and the triumphs and the tribulations that will be discussed here today on jobs and education and partnerships and productivity and when i became governor for my second term in 1983 my state s unemployment rate was almost three points higher than the national average in every month but one until 1992 we were above the national average in unemployment then in 1992 we were first or second in job creation and in 1993 the state enjoys an unemployment rate that i think is still too high but is well below the national average the point i want to make is this the issues we are discussing today in terms of the big sweeping developments in america have been of at least 20 years in building the policies we need to change have been in place for a good long while nationally you know what works in the workplace you know that partnership works you know that investment in new technology works you know that flexibility works you know that being competitive works you know that treating people like assets instead of something that is expendable is very important we need to figure out how to write that large in national policy and then be better partners with you in what you do and one of the things that i understand very clearly because i have been a governor is that nothing i do as president can be fully successful unless it makes sense and works with what all of you are doing and what i want to talk to you about today is how we can be better partners and what we can do to meet the challenges of this time because it s much more complex than it was after the great depression and after the second war when people at least even though it pained them to do so could leave their little farms in texas and arkansas and alabama and mississippi and come to chicago or come to detroit or go to pittsburgh or go out to california and know they could get a job and hope that when they retire they could come home now the whole country is caught up in a global economy which to be sure is always affecting different states and communities in different ways but essentially has some broad sweeping characterizations that we have to work to reverse and to make it more complicated all over the world the wealthiest countries are having many of the same problems we are i just returned from tokyo from a meeting of the great industrial powers of the world and we find that all of them are having trouble promoting economic growth all of them are having trouble generating new jobs and in the 1980s all of them found an increase in inequality of income and greater difficulty in creating new jobs even when their economies were growing so that it is clear that we are dealing with a very complicated issue and that no one has all the answers still it is clear that some things have to be faced we know that every nation competes in a global marketplace where money management and technology are increasingly mobile we know that increased productivity and new technologies often mean that more output can be produced with fewer people and not always now as was in the case for the last four decades when that happened before it was always new and different jobs waiting for those people so that technology was always a winner productivity was always a winner it always was a net expansionary force we ve always had changes people have always been moving in and out of jobs no one can freeze frame any form of human work and make sure it will always be there in just that way forever but we know now that for the last 20 years we have seen a steady erosion of the security of average middle class people who work hard and play by the rules because we have not been able to make the adjustments necessary in this new and different global economy we know that we can only meet the challenge if we begin with a very basic fact the one that you are here to celebrate today and to elucidate the most precious asset any nation has is the people who live there and that as long as the people who live there are willing to do what it takes to learn more to do better to be smarter to stay ahead of the curve there are going to be opportunities we also know that most jobs in every society now are going to be created by the private sector and by what people do or do not do to be more productive to reach out to new markets to develop new products and services and the third thing we know is that government policy makes a difference at home and abroad it does make a difference for more than two centuries our country has built prosperity by investing in our people and our technology and our future we have in other words followed the policy that i have called putting people first we invested in our skills through a public school system through the land grant colleges through expanding opportunities to the g i bill after the war our investments in canals and in railroads and highway systems and mass transit all of these things have helped to make us more productive we ve developed cutting edge technologies through national defense through the space program and to a lesser extent in the past but it must be more in the future toward civilian partnerships for new technologies but for 20 years we still have seen most americans working harder for less money and we have not developed an adequate response to the new global economy for at least a dozen years our country has pursued policies that are popular in the short run but very limiting in the long run we have to be popular in the short run reduced taxes and increased the deficit in a way that has taken our national debt in 12 years from 1 trillion to 4 trillion and our annual deficit from about 73 billion to a projected 311 billion when i took office at the same time we have miraculously managed to reduce our national investment in the education skills and technology that our people need to grow in the future a mathematical slight of hand that is almost inconceivable when i tell people about it but it s true why because we keep spending more on the same health care and more on interest on the debt so that the people you think of in washington as being to blame for big spending and big deficits because they re spending more on programs are in fact by and large spending less on programs that would help you to do your job better but because there has not been a disciplined effort to bring down the deficit a disciplined effort to bring health care costs in line with inflation which would bring interest rates down there and then reduce what we have to spend servicing the debt we are actually spending more and getting less for it the worst of all worlds this has continued the downward pressure on wages and job growth and every working family in america has felt its impact between 1972 and 1992 while the work year got longer for americans average hourly wages actually dropped by 10 percent the 75 percent of our workers who don t have four year college degrees felt it most profoundly for those who began but didn t complete college wages fell 10 percent from 1979 through 1991 for those who didn t go on to college wages fell 17 percent for those who left high school wages dropped 24 percent it is of course perhaps enough to say to explain this that as we move into a global economy where what you earn depends on what you can learn many of those people could not command more in a global labor marketplace but that is an insufficient response if you want to keep the american dream alive you want to keep the morale and the spirit of america moving forward and those of you who are employers want to be in a workplace where people are productive because they are happy and constructive and an important part of a team in other words it is not enough just to say that we re in this terribly difficult period that it took 20 years to build and that no one know exactly what caused it we simply cannot go gently into a good night of limited economic expectations slow growth no growth in living standards and a lesser future for our children it is not the american way we know that it may take us a good deal of time to work out of this and we know there may be no simple answers or silver bullets but we have got to do better at building a future for ourselves of course we have a rare opportunity to do it because the cold war is over because democracy and free markets are in favor and flower throughout the world because a global economy creates opportunities as well as challenges and hazards for us because there are new things which have to be done we have to find a way for example to make money out of the global environmental crisis and make jobs out of it and i believe we can and in many ways the challenges we face today are ready made for americans with our love of learning our proven genius at innovation our far greater flexibility than any of our competitors and our capacity for communicating with people among different cultures after all we have at least one county in this country with people from 150 different racial and ethnic groups it need not be a weakness it can be an enormous asset for us as we move into a global society but we know we have to stop doing some things and to start doing some other things put simply we have to stop borrowing so much from our future and start investing more to build it again we need fundamental changes and we have to do a lot of things at once and therefore our administration is trying to do a number of things in a short time to reduce the deficit to improve education through our schools through open the doors of college through reforming the system by which we support those of you who want to train your own workers we need to reward work and reform welfare we cannot continue to spend 30 percent more than any other country in the world of our income on health care many of you today here work in companies or represent workers who do not have jobs who would have jobs if we simply had been able for the last 12 years to keep health care costs in line with inflation plus population growth many of you do so all these things are related when people say to me well you know why don t you just reduce the deficit and forget about the rest of it i ll tell you why because five years from now no matter who does what with the deficit it goes up again if you don t bring health costs in line with inflation plus population growth they say well why don t you just not spend a nickel on anything i ll tell you why because look at california if you want to see the consequences of six long years of cutting the defense budget and letting the people who won the cold war go out in the cold and giving no thought to what we re going to do with the scientific and technological base and the workers there and whether there is not some new partnership that would give them something to do so we have to do things in order and we have to begin by bringing the deficit down and putting our financial house in order but we also have to think anew all these partnerships you ve got going in your businesses if somebody came to work one day and said okay we re going to forget about these 12 things and just do this one a lot of you would go broke if you did that you do not have the luxury of ignoring some problems if you have the means at all to deal with them and i would argue that we don t either but there needs to be one overriding purpose for this country and that is returning us to a path in which we can build a high skill high wage high growth society in which people who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with decent work and an opportunity to raise a strong family in a safe neighborhood let me say very briefly that the essentials of the economic plan that the congress is wrestling with and i mean that literally wrestling with i feel i m since i m here in chicago i have to say this chairman rostenkowski and senator moynihan from new york are obviously the lead conferees on our budget and they re working through some very difficult and complex issues today and i compliment them for their enormous labors and for what they re doing but the elements of the plan are clear we want to bring the deficit down by 500 billion over five years we want to make at least as many cuts as we raise taxes if not more there are 200 cuts with more than 250 billion in them if the congress will adopt them we want to restore some fairness to hard working middle class families and we want to reward work over welfare for ever 10 in the plan i presented to the congress and this is true in both the house and senate version 5 comes from spending cuts 4 from new revenues from people in the upper six percent of earning brackets 1 from the middle class families with incomes under 30 000 are held harmless the working poor for the first time are lifted out of poverty by not taxing them into poverty if they work hard this is a very big deal in america eighteen percent of the people who work fulltime in this country are living below the federal poverty line it is hard to lecture people to say well don t be on welfare go to work if you don t reward work that is something the government can do that i think all americans should support now i want to say something else today because we re celebrating partnerships here the tax part of this program does not impose 70 percent of its burden on people with incomes above 200 000 to soak the rich or promote class warfare i want to reward success the tax burden is the way it is because we seek to reverse what happened in the 1980s where taxes went up on the middle class and down on the wealthiest americans payroll taxes went up and the government shoved more and more off on the state and local government and almost all the revenues they adopted hit the middle class disproportionately this has nothing to do with class warfare it has to do with opportunity and fairness and i think it will rebuild a sense of teamwork and a spirit of partnership and cooperation i also want to point out that if we can continue to bring this deficit down you will see the continuation of the last five months of a big drop in long term interest rates which is causing millions of people to refinance their home loans or their business loans or take out other forms of credit in ways that will save them far more money than they will pay in new revenues if we can keep interest rates down for over a year at this level it is estimated from a low side of 50 billion to a high side of 100 billion will be released to be reinvested back into this economy to jump start the economy again i think it is terribly important the second element of this plan in addition to deficit reduction is incentives for people and companies to invest more that is nothing would please me more than if people who would be pushed into higher income brackets by this plan would lower their tax burden by turning around and reinvesting the money in creating jobs here at home and this plan gives the opportunity to do that we double the small business expensing provision we have a new business capital gains that anybody that invests in a company capitalized at 50 million or less and holds the investment for five years or more will cut their tax burden in half we extend the research and development tax credit we do some other things to revitalize the home building industry and the real estate sectors of our economy all these things will give opportunities for people who have funds to invest and to create jobs as they do i think that is very important i want to say i m very grateful for the fact that at least 50 of the 100 biggest companies in this country have endorsed this program partly because the changes in the alternative minimum tax lets them invest in new plant and equipment to mitigate the impact of the taxes and to create more jobs and productivity i m grateful for the support we ve received from the high tech community and i m grateful that finally we re getting out the facts that 90 percent plus that s right over 90 percent of the small businesses in america actually get a tax cut under this plan if they simply invest more money in their business because the expensing provision has been doubled and their income taxes don t go up something that you haven t been reading a lot about in the press but it is true and i am glad to see it coming out and it s very important because most of our jobs are created by smaller firms and that needs to be emphasized the third element of this plan is investments to empower people to compete and win every child born in this country should be able to grow up to be successful but you and i know that we have a far higher percentage of people living in unhealthy disadvantageous environments than most of our wealthy competitors we have proof we have evidence no one disputes it that if you invest in child nutrition immunization and preschool education and they re good programs the programs pay for themselves many times over the taxpayers win productivity goes up and you have people who can learn when they get into school so yes we do spend some more money on that we also have a program of modest cost but enormous impact called goals 2000 coming out of the department of education designed to set national standards by which all schools and students can be evaluated and that is important in a global economy and we have as has already been said by senator simon and others a really ambitious and i think quite wonderful program to open the doors of college education to all americans by lowering the costs of loans making their terms of repayments better and giving thousands of them the opportunity to pay back their college loans through service to their communities rebuilding them and i might say some of those young people in our experimental program for the summer have helped people to try to deal with the aftermath of this terrible flood in the midwest that is just one example of what we can do if we have the right kind of incentives finally we very much want to create a program of training for people who don t get four year college degrees that merge the partnership and efforts of the private sector the education system and the government everybody in this country who doesn t go on to a four year college needs to finish high school and get at least two years of further training either in a school on the workplace or in the service everybody all the demographic figures are clear now from the 1990 census all the people in this country who have high school plus two years if it s good are highly likely to get jobs with growing incomes those who have less are highly likely to get jobs with shrinking incomes you know it doesn t you don t have to be einstein to figure out we should do what is likely to give people jobs with growing incomes and that in the aggregate it s better for you and the workplace and better for the country as a whole so we re trying to do that and lastly let me say we ve got to provide markets for all these people s labor in products or services we simply have to continue to expand the frontiers of the global economy a wealthy country cannot grow richer unless there is a higher rate of global growth we cannot do it by simply drawing within and perhaps the most important thing that happened at the g 7 meeting in tokyo was that the seven industrial powers agreed among themselves to a dramatic reduction in many cases to outright elimination of tariffs that every analyst says will dramatically increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the united states of america between now and the end of the decade if we the larger countries can get the other countries to agree to it by the end of the year in a world trade agreement no analyst has disputed this it has the potential of being the most important thing we ve done in a long time to revitalize manufacturing in america and of course when you rebuild manufacturing we get more service jobs you get a lot of other support jobs it is very very important let me also say that i think it s important that we not forget about the americans who are working hard and are struggling along i mentioned this earlier the most revolutionary social aspect of this economic plan is that instead of spending a lot of money to hire people to work for the government to go out and help people who are in trouble we invest a lot of money in this program in lowering the taxes of people who work 40 hours a week and are still in poverty what better thing could we do to reward work and family than to be able to say for the first time that in this country if you work 40 hours a week and you got a child in your house you re going to be lifted out of poverty not by something the government does but by your own labor we ll just change the tax system to take you out of poverty it is a profoundly significant thing and it should not be watered down in this conference we ought to do enough to be able to say that to all americans let me just say the one thing that s happened in the last four and a half five months is that interest rats have started coming down as it became serious that we were trying to bring the deficit down and there has been a beginning of reinvestment a lot of that is coming out of the private sector last year in the last quarter we had the biggest increase in productivity in 20 years in america thanks to a lot of you in this room those two things together mean that in this economy we have seen in the first part of the year about 150 000 new private sector jobs a month being created that is as compared with 20 000 a month in the previous four years so that we are moving in the right direction but that s all we re doing is moving in the right direction that is nowhere near enough and there is still a great cloud of uncertainty out there so i think today we need to have three challenges one is the government needs to pass this budget and get on with the rest of the business hanging out there debating it dragging it out for weeks and weeks will only make it worse there comes a time when delay to get a slightly better decision is worse than action to get a pretty good decision we have reached that time we don t need to do that we ve got other things to do and you need to know what the rules are going to be what the deal is and we need to go on with our lives the second challenge is to you in business if we can get the cost of capital low if we are doing our part then the savings must be used to put more people first to create jobs to train employees not just the executives but the workers as well to have other companies in this country learn from those of you in this room that you can grow and prosper by treating workers like indispensable partners companies like motorola outside chicago which secretary brown visited recently and l s electro galvanizing in cleveland which secretary reich visited recently and all the many that i have had the privilege to visit over the last several years can show that and the challenge to labor is clearly the same thing this is an opportunity we have to seize there is no way we can ever see wages grow and jobs increase in this country again unless there is an emphasis on education and training flexibility in the workplace partnership and responsibility by everybody for improving quality but if the labor people do it then government ought to do right by them and by business and business should do right by their workers there is no easy answer here but we all know i think that if we treat each other better we re going to come out ahead and that insofar as we drive up unemployment and run people off we also diminish the number of customers with money in their pockets to make the american economy go we are truly in this together now let me just say one more word about this i don t think the fight in washington should be about republicans and democrats i think most of the arguments we have to have are about issues that don t have an easy partisan tent the world is a very different place than it was when most of the party lines were drawn 10 and 20 and 30 years ago this really is about growth against gridlock decision against delay change against the status quo and you have got to demand that we do something i mean you know this gridlock thing is amazing let me just give you an example of how bad it gets sometimes with congress i had my nominee for surgeon general up there in the congress senator braun was sitting with her i appreciated that a woman that grew up in a cotton field in arkansas her brothers and sisters put her through medical school and maybe there were people who don t agree with her and didn t want to vote for her but through some parliamentary maneuver they tried to put off the whole hearing the country needs a surgeon general thanks to senator kennedy the chairman of the committee they went back and had the hearing he told them they were going to stay there till kingdom come till they finished but if somebody wants to vote against her let them vote but let s get on with it let me give you another example there is now a filibuster in the senate against the national service plan we have worked out hearts out with the republicans and the democrats we have lots of republican cosponsors in the house and a few in the senate they just want to delay it why why shouldn t we send a signal to america s young people that we want you to work in your community to make it a better place why shouldn t we say we want to open the doors of college education to everybody look at the figures from the 90 census last week there was even a filibuster or a delay in the house against flood assistance to illinois and to iowa and to kansas and south dakota and north dakota and minnesota and missouri why got me there is ample precedent for emergency action here we do not need to raise a tax to pay for flood relief because interest rates have come down the deficit is already going to be much lower this year than anybody thought it was and here are these people out here up to their ears dem wjclinton26 8 00 bill_clinton thank you very much mr president of the senate the speaker mr deputy president and deputy speaker members of the assembly it is a great honor for me to be here with members of my cabinet and government members of the united states congress mayors of some of our greater cities and my daughter and we re glad to be here i must say this is the first time i have been introduced as president in eight years speaking to parliamentary bodies all over the world where they played a song before i spoke i liked it a lot it got us all in a good frame of mind twenty two years ago president jimmy carter became the first president ever to visit sub saharan africa when he arrived in nigeria saying he had come from a great nation to visit a great nation more than two years ago i came to africa for the longest visit ever by an american president to build a new partnership with your continent but sadly in nigeria an illegitimate government was killing its people and squandering your resources all most americans knew about nigeria then was a sign at their local airport warning them not to fly here a year later nigeria found a transitional leader who kept his promises then nigerians elected a president and a national assembly and entrusted to them to you the hard work of rebuilding your nation and building your democracy now once again americans and people all around the world will know nigeria for its music and art for its nobel prize winners and its super falcons for its commitment to peacekeeping and its leadership in africa and around the world in other words once again people will know nigeria as a great nation you have begun to walk the long road to repair the wrongs and errors of the past and to build bridges to a better future the road is harder and the rewards are slower than all hoped it would be when you began but what is most important is that today you are moving forward not backward and i am here because your fight your fight for democracy and human rights for equity and economic growth for peace and tolerance your fight is america s fight and the world s fight indeed the whole world has a big stake in your success and not simply because of your size or the wealth of your natural resources or even your capacity to help lift this entire continent to peace and prosperity but also because so many of the great human dramas of our time are being played out on the nigerian stage for example can a great country that is home to one in six africans succeed in building a democracy amidst so much diversity and a past of so much trouble can a developing country blessed with enormous human and natural resources thrive in a global economy and lift all its people can a nation so blessed by the verve and vigor of countless traditions and many faiths be enriched by its diversity not enfeebled by it i believe the answer to all those questions can and must be yes there are still those around the world who see democracy as a luxury that people seek only when times are good nigerians have shown us that democracy is a necessity especially when times are hard the dictators of your past hoped the hard times would silence your voices banish your leaders destroy your spirit but even in the darkest days nigeria s people knew they must stand up for freedom the freedom their founders promised achebe championed it sunny ade sang for it journalists like akinwumi adesukar fought for it lawyers like gani fawehinmi testified for it political leaders like yar adua died for it and most important the people of nigeria voted for it now at last you have your country back nigerians are electing their leaders acting to cut corruption and investigate past abuses shedding light on human rights violations turning a fearless press into a free press it is a brave beginning but you know better than i how much more must be done every nation that has struggled to build democracy has found that success depends on leaders who believe government exists to serve people not the other way around president obasanjo is such a leader and the struggle to build democracy depends also on you on legislators who will be both a check on and a balance to executive authority and be a source you know if i said that to my congress they would still be clapping and standing and this is important too let me finish in the constitutional system the legislature provides a check and balance to the executive but it must also be a source of creative responsible leadership for in the end work must be done and progress must be made democracy depends upon a political culture that welcomes spirited debate without letting politics become a blood sport it depends on strong institutions an independent judiciary a military under firm civilian control it requires the contributions of women and men alike i must say i am very glad to see a number of women in this audience today and also i am glad that nigerian women have their own vital voices program a program that my wife has worked very hard for both in africa and all around the world of course in the end successful political change must begin to improve people s daily lives that is the democracy dividend nigerians have waited for but no one should expect that all the damage done over a generation can be undone in a year real change demands perseverance and patience it demands openness to honorable compromise and cooperation it demands support on a constant basis from the people of nigeria and from your friends abroad that does not mean being patient with corruption or injustice but to give up hope because change comes slowly would only be to hand a victory to those who do not want to change at all remember something we americans have learned in over 224 years of experience with democracy it is always and everywhere a work in progress it took my own country almost 90 years and a bitter civil war to set every american free it took another 100 years to give every american the basic rights our constitution promised them from the beginning since the time of our revolution our best minds have debated how to balance the responsibilities of our national and state government what the proper balance is between the president and the congress what is the roll of the courts in our national life and since the very beginning we have worked hard with varying degrees of success and occasional regrettable sometimes painful failures to weave the diverse threads of our nation into a coherent unified tapestry today america has people from over 200 racial ethnic and religious groups we have school districts in america where in one school district the parents of the children speak over 100 different languages it is an interesting challenge but it is one that i am convinced is a great opportunity just as your diversity your religious diversity and your ethnic diversity is a great opportunity in a global society growing ever more intertwined a great opportunity if we can find unity in our common humanity if we can learn not only to tolerate our differences but actually to celebrate our differences if we can believe that how we worship how we speak who our parents were where they came from are terribly important but on this earth the most important thing is our common humanity then there can be no stopping us now no society has every fully solved this problem as you struggle with it you think of the middle east northern ireland the balkans the ongoing tragedy of kashmir and you realize it is a formidable challenge you also know of course that democracy does not answer such questions it simply gives all free people the chance to find the answers that work for them i know that decades of mis rule and deprivation have made your religious and ethnic divisions deeper nobody can wave a hand and make the problems go away but that is no reason to let the idea of one united nigeria slip away after all after all this time if we started trying to redraw the map of africa we would simply be piling new grievances on old even if we could separate all the people of africa by ethnicity and faith would we really rid this continent of strife think of all the things that would be broken up and all the mountains of progress that have been built up that would be taken down if that were the case where there is too much deprivation and too little tolerance differences among people will always seem greater and will always be like open sores waiting to be turned into arrows of hatred by those who will be advantaged by doing so but i think it is worth noting for the entire world that against the background of vast cultural differences a history of repression and ethnic strife the hopeful fact here today is that nigeria s 250 different ethnic groups have stayed together in one nation you have struggled for democracy together you have forged national institutions together all your greatest achievements have come when you have worked together it is not for me to tell you how to resolve all the issues that i follow more closely than you might imagine i do you re a free people an independent people and you must resolve them all i can tell you is what i have seen and experienced these last years as president in the united states and in working with other good people with similar aspirations on every continent of the globe we have to find honorable ways to reconcile our differences on common ground the overwhelming fact of modern life everywhere believe it or not is not the growth of the global economy not the explosion of information technology and the internet but the growing interdependence these changes are bringing whether we like it or not more and more our fates are tied together within nations and beyond national borders even beyond continental borders and across great oceans whether we like it or not it is happening you can think of big examples like our economic interconnections you can think of anecdotal examples like the fact that we now have a phenomenon in the world known as airport malaria where people get malaria in airports in nations where there has never been an single case of malaria because they just pass other people who have it from around the world in the airport whether we like it or not your destiny is tied to mine and mine to yours and the future will only make it more so you can see it in all the positive things we can build together and in the common threats we face from enemies of a nation state from the narco traffickers the gun runners from the terrorists from those who would develop weapons of mass destruction geared to the electronic age very difficult to detect and easy to move now we have to decide what we re going to do with the fundamental fact of modern life our interdependence is it possible for the muslims and the christians here to recognize that and find common ground can we find peace in jerusalem between the muslims the christians and the jews can we find peace in the balkans between the muslims the orthodox christians and the catholics will we ever bring and end to the conflict between the catholics and the protestants in northern ireland i mean finally ever really have it over with completely can the hindus and the muslims learn to live together in kashmir isn t it interesting when i came here in part to help you move into the information revolution more quickly to spread its benefits to more of your people that all over the world in this most modern of ages we are bedeviled by humanity s oldest problem the fear of the other people who are different from us i m sure there was a time in the deep distant mists of memory when everyone had to be afraid of people who were not of their tribe when food was scarce and there was no means of communication but all of us still carry around with us the fear of people who are different from us and it is such a short step from being afraid of someone to distrusting them to disliking them to hating them to oppressing them to using violence against them it is a slippery slippery slope so i say again the biggest challenge for people in the united states where people still i m ashamed to say lose their lives because they are different not nearly as much as it used to be it s a rare occurrence but it still tears at our hearts because we know everyone counts everyone deserves a chance at life and we all do better when we help each other and when we find a way for everyone to follow his or her own path through life guided by their own lights and their own faith so i say to you i come here with that in mind the world needs nigeria to succeed every great nation must become more than the sum of its parts if we are torn by our differences then we become less than the sum of our parts nigeria has within it the seeds of every great development going on in the world today and it has a future worth fighting for you are already a champion of peace democracy and justice last month in tokyo your president reminded leaders of the group of eight very firmly that we are all tenants of the same global village he said and i quote we must deal with the challenges for development not as separate entities but in partnership as members of the same global family with shared interests and responsibilities so today i would like to talk just a few minutes about how our two nations with our shared experience of diversity and our common faith in freedom can work as partners to build a better future i believe we have two broad challenges the first is to work together to help nigeria prepare its economy for success in the 21st century and then to make nigeria the engine of economic growth and renewal across the continent the second is to work together to help build the peace that nigeria and all of africa so desperately need to build stronger economies we must confront the diseases that are draining the life out of africa s cities and villages especially aids but also tb and malaria aids will reduce life expectancy in africa by 20 years it is destroying families and wiping out economic gains as fast as nations can make them it is stealing the future of africa in the long run the only way to wipe out these killer diseases is to provide effective affordable treatments and vaccines just last week i signed into law a new 60 million investment in vaccine research and new support for aids treatment and prevention around the world including nigeria in the meantime however while we wait for the long run we have to face reality i salute president obasanjo for his leadership in recognizing we can t beat aids by denying it we can t beat aids by stigmatizing it right now we can only beat aids by preventing it by changing behavior and changing attitudes and breaking the silence about how the disease is transmitted and how it can be stopped this is a matter of life or death there are nations in africa two that have had a significant reduction in the aids rate because they have acted aggressively on the question of prevention tomorrow the president and i will meet with nigerians on the front line of this fight and i will congratulate them building a stronger economy also means helping all children learn in the old economy a country s economic prospects were limited by its place on the map and its natural resources location was everything in the new economy information education and motivation are everything when i was coming down here today reverend jackson said to me remind everybody that america to help nigeria involves more than the government it s also wall street and silicon valley that s what s growing our economy and it can help to grow yours one of the great minds of the information age is a nigerian american named philip emeagwali he had to leave school because his parents couldn t pay the fees he lived in a refugee camp during your civil war he won a scholarship to university and went on to invent a formula that lets computers make 3 1 billion calculations per second some people call him the bill gates of africa but what i want to say to you is there is another philip emeagwali or hundreds of them or thousands of them growing up in nigeria today i thought about it when i was driving in from the airport and then driving around to my appointments looking into the face of children you never know what potential is in their mind and in their heart what imagination they have what they have already thought of and dreamed of that may be locked in because they don t have the means to take it out that s really what education is it s our responsibility to make sure all your children have the chance to live their dreams so that you don t miss the benefit of their contributions and neither does the rest of the world it s in our interest in america to reach out to the 98 percent of the human race that has never connected to the internet to the 269 of every 270 nigerians who still lack a telephone i am glad to announce that the united states will work with nigeria ngos and universities to set up community resource centers to provide internet access training and support to people in all regions of your country i also discussed with the president earlier today a 300 million initiative we have launched to provide a nutritious meal a free breakfast or a free lunch for children in school enough to feed another 9 million kids in school that aren t in school today including in nigeria we know that if we could offer and i m going to the other developed countries asking them to contribute and then we re going to nation by nation working with governmental groups working with farm groups we don t want to upset any local farm economies we understand their challenges here but we know if we could guarantee every child in every developing nation one nutritious meal a day we could dramatically increase school enrollment among boys and especially among girls we don t have a child to waste i hope we can do this in nigeria and i hope you will work with us to get the job done i have also asked the peace corps to reestablish its partnership with nigeria as soon as possible to help with education health and information technology building a strong economy also means creating strong institutions and above all the rule of law your nobel laureate wole soyinka has written that he imagines a day when nigeria is an unstoppable nation one whose citizens anywhere in the world would be revered simply by the very possession of a nigerian passport i don t need to tell you that the actions of a small group of nigerians took away that possibility took away the pride of carrying the passport stealing the opportunity from every decent and honest citizen of this country but we will bring the pride and prosperity back by cracking down together on crime corruption fraud and drugs our fbi is again working with nigeria to fight international and financial crime our law enforcement agencies are working to say to narco traffickers there should be no safe havens in nigeria as we do these things we will be able to say loud and clear to investors all over the world come to nigeria this is a place of untapped opportunity because it is a place of unlimited potential this year i signed into law our africa trade bill and many of its champions are here with me from our congress it will help us to seize that opportunity creating good jobs and wealth on both sides of the atlantic the challenge is to make sure any foreign involvement in your economy promotes equitable development lifting people and communities that have given much for nigeria s economic progress but so far have gained too little from it neither the people nor the private sector want a future in which investors exist in fortified islands surrounded by seas of misery democracy gives us a chance to avoid that future of course i m thinking especially of the niger delta i hope government and business will forge a partnership with local people to bring real lasting social progress a clean environment and economic opportunity we face of course another obstacle to nigeria s economic development the burden of debt that past governments left on your shoulders the united states has taken the lead in rescheduling nigeria s debt within the paris club and i believe we should do more nigeria shouldn t have to choose between paying interest on debt and meeting basic human needs especially in education and health we are prepared to support a substantial reduction of nigeria s debts on a multilateral basis as long as your economic and financial reforms continue to make progress and you ensure that the benefits of debt reduction go to the people now let me say as we do our part to support your economic growth and economic growth throughout africa we must also work together and build on african efforts to end the conflicts that are bleeding hope from too many places if there s one thing i would want the american people to learn from trip here it is the true extraordinary extent of nigeria s leadership for peace in west africa and around the world i hope our members of congress who are here today will tell this to their colleagues back home over the past decade with all of its problems nigeria has spent 10 billion and sacrificed hundreds of its soldiers lives for peace in west africa nigeria was the first nation with south africa to condemn the recent coup in cote d ivoire and nigerian soldiers and diplomats including general abubakar are trying to restart the peace process in congo in these ways you are building the record of a moral superpower that s a long way to come in just a couple of years and i urge you to stay with it but i know i know from the murmurs in this chamber and from the murmurs i heard in the congressional chamber when i said the united states must go to bosnia the united states must go to kosovo the united states must train an africa crisis response initiative the united states must come here and help you train to deal with the challenges of sierra leone i know that many of you have often felt the burden of your peacekeeping was heavier than the benefit i know you have felt that but there s no one else in west africa with the size the standing the strength of military forces to do it if you don t do it who will do it but you should not have to do it alone that s what s been wrong with what s happened in the last several years you have too heavy a burden because of your size everyone expects you to lead and to do so with enormous sensitivity to the needs of others but despite your size you cannot lead alone and you shouldn t have to pay the enormous price i am determined if you re willing to lead to get you the international support you need and deserve to meet those responsibilities this week the first of five nigerian peacekeeping battalions began working with american military trainers and receiving american equipment with battalions from ghana and other african nations they will receive almost 60 million in support to be a commanding force for peace in sierra leone and an integral part of nigeria s democratization we think the first battalions will be ready to deploy with u n forces early next year we expect them to make an enormous difference in replacing the reign of terror with the rule of law as they do all of west africa will benefit from the promise of peace and stability and the prospect of closer military and economic cooperation and nigeria will take another step toward building a 21st century army that is strong and strongly committed to democracy let me say to the military leaders who are here with us today that the world honors your choice to take the army out of politics and make it a pillar of a democratic state last year president obasanjo came to washington and reminded us that peace is indivisible i have worked to build a new relationship between america and africa because our futures are indivisible it matters to us whether you become and engine of growth and opportunity or a place of unrelieved despair it matters whether we push back the forces of crime corruption and disease together or leave them to divide and conquer us it matters whether we reach out with africans to build peace or leave millions of god s children to suffer alone our common future depends on whether africa s 739 million people gain the chance to live their dreams and nigeria is a pivot point on which all africa s future turns ten years ago a young nigerian named ben okri published a novel the famished road that captured imaginations all over the world he wrote of a spirit child who defies his elders and chooses to be born into the turmoil and struggle of human life the time and place were modern nigeria but the questions the novel poses speak to all of us in a language that is as universal as the human spirit in a time of change and uncertainty okri asks us who can dream a good road and then live to travel on it nigerians as much as any nation on earth have dreamed this road since anthony enahoro stood up in a colonial parliament and demanded your independence in 1953 nigerians have dreamed this road in music and art and literature and political struggle and in your contributions to prosperity and progress among the immigrants to my country and so many others now at the dawn of a new century the road is open at home to all citizens of nigeria you have the chance to build a new nigeria we have the chance to build a lasting network of ties between africa and the united states i know it will not be easy to walk the road but you have already endured such stiff challenges you have beaten such long odds to get this far and after all the road of freedom is the only road worth taking i hope that as president i have helped a little bit to take us a few steps down that road together i am certain that america will walk with you in the years to come and i hope you will remember if nothing else what i said about our interdependence yes you need us today because at this fleeting moment in history we are the world s richest country but over the long run of life and over the long run of a nation s life and over the long run of civilization on this planet the rich and the poor often change places what endures is our common humanity if you can find it amidst all your differences and we can find amidst all ours and then we can reach out across the ocean across the cultures across the different histories with a common future for all of our children freedom s road will prevail thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton26 8 96a bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you thank you so much thank you all for coming out thank you for being in such a wonderful frame of mind thank you for making us feel so welcome and if you get too hot we ve got some water up here raise your hand we don t want anybody to collapse we have doctors we have nurses we have lots of water now let me say before i begin i d like to thank the arlington high school band for doing such a great great job i d like to that the other people whose names i ve been given ms mary gould the piano player the paragon barbershop quartet tom croskey and his band i d like to thank mayor lynn orwick of arlington judge reginald rawsen the mayor of astoria mr jim bailey and paul mcclain the candidate for congress who spoke earlier i think thank you all for being here thank you mary ellen withrow for doing a great job as the treasurer of ohio and the treasurer of the united states i m proud to have you in this administration i want to thank senator john glenn for being here with me on this train trip through the heartland and for his consistent patriotic leadership for our country and for the people of ohio in the senate to build the economy to protect our interests around the world to keep our defense strong and to lead lead our party in the congress and to help our administration in the most dramatic savings of funds in downsizing of government in modern american history we now have the smallest and most efficient federal government since john kennedy was the president of the united states thanks in no small measure to john glenn of ohio thank you david brown for your speech and your passion and your commitment to the families and children of this community everywhere i go and i ve now been in huntington west virginia ashland kentucky chillicothe and columbus and a lot of little places along the way just stopping saying hello to people but wherever we ve had a rally i have been introduced by a citizen a citizen who is either doing something that is consistent with what our administration has pushed for the last four years or who represents what i m trying to have happen in america i m sure a lot of you saw that last week our administration became the first one in history to take very strong action to try to limit the marketing distribution and sales of tobacco to young people we are doing our best but i want to say to you we cannot do this all by ourselves we ve got to have people in every community in this country determined to keep our kids safe from all the influences that are destructive to them they re all our children and with all respect to what was said in the convention in san diego reverend brown here just got up and gave a speech which validates the title of my wife s book it does take a village to raise our children to raise our families and to build a future i want to thank my daughter chelsea for coming with me hillary has gone home to chicago to welcome us so she s not here but chelsea is here we re having a wonderful time on the train ride and we thank all of you for coming where is she she s right back there raise your hand there she is let me tell you that we re on this train this beautiful train recreating a trip that many presidents before me have made because i wanted to go through america s heartland to chicago i wanted to see the people in this country that i ve been working for for the last four years i wanted to see your faces hear your voices and give you a report on where we are and where we re going and i wanted you to see that this train is on track not just to chicago we re on the right track to the 21st century and we re going to stay there four years ago just think about four years ago when i came to the people of ohio on june 2nd i was officially nominated by the democratic party in the primary process when the votes in ohio were announced at the democratic convention in july in new york the delegation from ohio made me the legal nominee of the democratic party and on election night it was when the votes of ohio were announced that all the prognosticators said bill clinton will be the next president of the united states thank you ohio now remember what gave rise to that election unemployment was high wages were stagnant crime was rising a host of unmet social challenges were plaguing us and cynicism was on the rise in america now look where we are after four years we brought the deficit down with a very tough vote in 1993 that our opponents said would wreck the economy and what happened we got interest rates down we got new jobs going the deficit has been reduced 60 percent in four years and my fellow americans there would be a surplus in your national treasury today but for the interest we still have to pay on the debt that was run up in the 12 years before i took office let s don t go back and make that mistake again and what have we gotten out of it we have 10 25 million new jobs 4 5 million new homeowners 10 million families have refinanced their homes at lower interest rates twelve million american families have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law so they can take a little time off when a baby is born or a parent is sick without losing their jobs we have record numbers of new small businesses record numbers of exports 50 million americans are breathing cleaner air we cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than the previous two administrations did in 12 the crime rate has come down for four years in a row we re putting 100 000 police on the street banning assault weapons the brady bill has kept 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers from getting a handgun and not a single ohio hunter has lost a rifle in spite of what the other side told you in the 1994 election after a decade real wages are finally starting to rise again for ordinary working people 15 million american families with the lowest wages who are working full time have gotten a tax cut so we can say in america nobody works full time and has kids at home and lives in poverty anymore that s a very important principle that every american of any income ought to share we want all families to succeed at home and at work we can have no greater objective than to help people be good parents and successful in making a productive country college has been made more affordable with lower cost college loans with better repayment terms we need to do more but i feel good about where we are compared to where we were four years ago what i want you to think about now is where we still need to go the main thing we need to say for the next so many days is we ought to stay on the right track we re in the right track why in the world would we reverse course what we need to do is to lay plainly before the american people what still needs to be done first we know that while the economy has 10 million more jobs not everybody has fully participated in the benefits of this economic recovery we know we know already that the next generation in the 21st century will have more chances to live their dreams than any generation of people who ever lived that america s best days are before us if we do what it takes to make sure all these children can participate in that future that s why i say first of all we ve got to keep the economy going that means balance the budget keep the interest rates down and don t have unnecessary cuts in education the environment technology science research medicare and medicaid protect our people s obligations i also say to you that we know that education is more important than ever before and yes we ve made some strides forward but we have more to do we must make sure that every classroom in this country has access to computers educational programs trained teachers and that by the year 2000 every single classroom in america in the smallest rural village in the poorest inner city neighborhood is hooked up to the information superhighway so every child has the same access to information that every other child has we have to make sure that every american family can afford the education that is critical to our future not just for the children but for the adults who will be going back to school as well and i have proposed that by the year 2000 we will make the first two years of college or a community college education just as universal in four years as a high school education is today by giving american families a 1 500 tax credit for the cost of tuition at their community college a 10 000 tax deduction for any educational cost after high school we ought to let people deduct their cost for four years for medical school for graduate school for whatever we have a vested interest in having the most educated people in the world and we need every family to be able to do that not just those that can afford it i have proposed making it easier for families to save today you can t take out an ira if your income is over 40 000 under our proposal we ll go up to 100 000 for a couple in income and now under a bill just passed by congress if there are two people in the home they can both put aside 2 000 a year and under my proposal you ll be able to withdraw from that without any penalty for a college education to finance a first home to deal with a health care emergency let s save in a way that helps america let s have a tax cut we can pay for balance the budget that s for children and education i also know the reverend was talking about saving our kids one of biggest problems is that a lot of our kids live in families where their parents are working hard and doing the best they can but they re alone too many hours a day our proposal would give a tax cut for people with children under 13 so they can have some more money 500 a year to pay for child care or help their kids be in some other kind of activity after school and we also want to give more funds to school districts around the country so they can be open longer hours if we could keep all the young people in this country involved in positive activities between 3 00 p m and 6 00 p m we d see a lot of reduction in a lot of our problems and we need to do that and i want to do what i can to help i want to see this become a more responsible country yes the crime rate s gone down for four years in a row but we have to finish the job we have voted to put 100 000 more police on the street we ve only funded half of them on the schedule we re on one of the things i intend to do if i am reelected your president is to make sure every single one of those 100 000 police is on the street our friends in the other party in congress disagree with me they voted against the 100 000 police they tried to repeal it in the budget i vetoed now they re trying to restrict again but i m telling you folks we can prevent crime and catch criminals if we have more people serving their communities out there visible who know the kids on the streets who know the neighbors who know the law abiding folks we need to finish the job of putting 100 000 police on the street we need to build on the brady bill i m so proud tonight that when the democratic convention opens one of the people who s going to speak is the wife of jim brady who was president reagan s press secretary until he was almost killed when president reagan was shot and jim and sarah brady have spent their lives not as republicans not switching parties to the democratic party just being americans trying to say this is crazy for us to keep letting felons get guns and when they passed the brady bill i was proud to sign it and i worked hard to pass it i didn t agree with the politicians who were afraid to tell the american people that on this issue the nra was wrong that it wasn t going to kill anybody to wait five days to get a handgun while we checked their records 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers don t have guns today we re safer i m proud of it and sarah brady is going to speak at the democratic convention tonight because we stood for that and i m proud of that but we have to do more more to help our streets be safe more to help our families be strong i just want to mention a couple of things i talked about in columbus today at the police academy the brady bill today covers felons it ought to cover violent misdemeanors specifically domestic violence people that have engaged in domestic violence should not be able to have handguns and we ought to ban cop killer bullets i ve been trying to do this ever since i got there i don t understand why in the world we need bullets that pierce bullet proof vests there is not a deer in the woods in america wearing a kevlar vest we don t need them the police need them we ought to do it finally there are more things we can do for our families and our kids all over america local communities are finding their own solutions i have tried to put the government on the side of helping local communities do whatever they want whether it s school uniforms for junior high schoolers or grade schoolers or tougher curfew laws or truancy laws i ve tried to support the things that gave local communities the sense that they were taking responsibility for their children s lives we need to do more we adopted a law which requires all new televisions to have a v chip in it and the television industry thank god for them agreed to rate television programs so within a couple of years parents will be able to buy a tv guide and buy a television and decide if there is 100 channels on the television what things their young children should not see on television i think that s a good thing we need to finish that we worked hard to get an order from the federal communications commission agreed to by the entertainment industry that will give us three hours of good positive educational television program at nighttime for our kids three hours a week in the next couple of years that s going to be a positive thing but we have to do more and i ask you all to support that we have got to keep working to make childhood special childhood safe childhood have integrity and we all have a responsibility for it let me finally say this i know there is going to be a lot of debate in this election about the tax cut proposal that the other side has made and it sounds good it s bigger than i ll tell you right now it s a whole lot bigger than the tax cut i m promising you i fess up i promise it is but there is a big difference between the one i m promising you and the one they are we can pay for mine i will not propose anything in my speech thursday night to the american people or anything in this campaign that cannot be paid for while we still balance the budget why what s that got to do with you in this great town because that means low interest rates more investment more jobs more small businesses higher wages we have worked too hard for too long with high interest rates nobody getting a raise and unemployment too high we have turned this thing around we can t afford to turn back now we have got to do that it also means if you take a tax cut five times bigger than mine what that means is according to our friends in the other party not me it means your interest rates will be two percent higher on your home mortgage your car payment your credit card payments it also means the economy will slow down it also means they ll have to cut medicare medicaid education and the environment even more than they did in that budget i vetoed and then when they shut the government down i vetoed it again i m not going to put up with it i don t think you should i think we can go forward together we don t need that we can go forward together my fellow americans america is on the right track to the 21st century but we have a lot of work to do we have to be true to our values we have to meet the challenges of the future but i will say again you look at every child in this audience that s what this election is about the best days of america are ahead we just have to have the courage and the vision to seize the future i hope you will help me do that will you do it god bless you thank you dem wjclinton26 8 96b bill_clinton thank you so much thank you for that absolutely wonderful welcome you know hillary left us yesterday to go on to chicago her home town to get things ready for us and we always call chelsea and i do at night and give a report i can tell you what our report tonight will be you should have seen the crowd in bowling green thank you wow i want to thank all of you for being here i want to say a special word of thanks to representative marcy kaptur there is not a more aggressive advocate for the people she represents in the entire united states congress in either party than marcy kaptur she does a great job for you i want to thank john glenn for his many years of service to our country and the marine corps and the space program and the united states senate i want to thank him for the work he s done on the economy on foreign policy on defense i want to thank him for worrying about our children being able to grow up in a safe world and i want to just cite two things it is true as senator glenn said that while some of our friends in the other party would criticize government they did much to downsize it we have the smallest federal government since john kennedy was president it s very efficient and we didn t have to throw a lot of people in the street to do it and we saved billions of dollars of your tax money thanks in no small measure because of the leadership of john glenn i will also tell you when you hear a word like nuclear proliferation it may not sound like a big old word and you can t imagine what it means it means among other things that tonight and in the last two years for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there is not a single nuclear weapon pointed at the children of the united states thanks in no small measure to john glenn i ve got a few folks i d like to recognize i brought a slew of ohioans over here on my right your left but one of them in particular i want to recognize your former state treasurer and now our national treasurer mary ellen withrow she s doing a great job thank you mary ellen for coming with us thank you mayor hoffman for welcoming me here and for your gift sir and thank you city council president joyce kepke for presenting the gift and making me feel so welcome here thank you county chairman al baldwin for your work in getting this magnificent crowd up i want to thank some candidates who are here beginning with annie saunders thank you for running for congress thank you chris redford for running for the state senate thank you alvin perkins wood county commissioner candidate thank you john gadson for running for prosecuting attorney here and now i want all of you to recognize these young people who are here because they won the poster contest they just came up to see me and they re your kids and they re terrific let s give them a big hand thank you i want to say i love all these posters i like all the posters that i see i thank you for the hillary poster and i thank you for the poster back there that says the president cares for kids thank you i like that bill of rights poster but now that i m 50 years old it may not be truth in advertising anymore yesterday chelsea and i started out with hillary in west virginia we went into kentucky then we came into ohio we ve had a wonderful day on this train i wanted to take this train through the heartland to chicago because i wanted to see people like you the people i ve been working for for the last four years on the way to accept for the second time the nomination of my party for president i also i also very much wanted you to see us on this train because it s not only on the right track to chicago this train is on the right track to the 21st century and i want you to keep us on it folks four years ago i came before the american people and it is true what senator glenn said ohio put me over the top in the nomination and put me over the top in the general election and i hope you will do it again but when i came before you i had never before served in office in washington i spent most of my time in places like bowling green i identified with schools like bowling green state and i thank you for the music and the cap and dr ebough and anyone else who s here from the university i thank you for the music the cap the jogging outfit but i thank you most of all for the military aide who s here with me tonight you may know the president gets a distinguished military aide from each branch of the service my coast guard military aide lieutenant commander june ryan is here with me tonight a graduate of bowling green state she s over there somewhere where is she come here june you did a good job didn t you give her a hand thank you she s an iowa farm girl there aren t many oceans bordering iowa but somehow she made it into the coast guard and i know you all gave her a good start here the thing that was bothering me when i ran for president was the economy was stagnant as marcy kaptur never fails to remind me there were and there still are too many blue collar workers people that work hard and never seem to get a raise never seem to get ahead unemployment was high the crime rate was going up there are a host of problems that were going unchallenged cynicism was on the rise in the country and i wanted to do something about it i wanted to bring some hope and direction and movement and progress back into american life and i thought we had to change the way people were thinking in washington away from the kind of intensely partisan rhetoric and intensely stale debate if you listen to things coming out of washington very often it sounded like it was more about who to blame than what to do i m more interested in what to do than who to blame and i think you are too so for the last four years we ve been out there doing i have a vision of the 21st century for america i believe they ll be our best days i believe the children in this audience will have more chances to live their dreams than any generation of americans in history the global economy the information explosion the computer explosion the technology discoveries the medical discoveries it is unbelievable we just commissioned let me give you an example we just commissioned a supercomputer between ibm and the federal government we re going to build one that will do more calculations in a second than a person with a hand held calculator can do in 30 000 years that s how we re growing there is more computer power more computer power in a ford taurus today than there is there was in the first space ship that went to the moon in 1969 that s how fast things are changing but we also know we ve got some problems in this country and what i want to do is to build an america for the 21st century where the american dream is open to everybody who is responsible enough to work for it an america where we re coming together across the lines that divide us not being torn up by race and religion and other things that are just engulfing the world from bosnia to the middle east to northern ireland to africa you name it all over the world people are fighting because of their differences in our country we re not about race and religion if you believe in the constitution the bill of rights and the declaration of independence and you re willing to show up for work tomorrow you re our kind of person you re part of our america and we re going forward together that s what we believe and i wanted our country to continue to be what john glenn has given his life for it to be the leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity in this whole world and i believe we can achieve that and i want to give you a report compared to four years ago we passed a sweeping economic program in 1993 that as senator glenn said cut the deficit 60 percent four years in a row and every year of this administration that s the first time it s happened since the 1840s and if it were not for the interest we re paying on the debt run up in the 12 years before i came here we d have a surplus in the budget today and that s important for you to know now what does that mean in bowling green it means lower interest rates it means lower home mortgage payments more homeowners 4 5 new american homeowners ten million americans have refinanced their mortgage at lower interest rates it means lower car payments it means lower credit card rates and most important of all it means new investment new businesses we ve got a record number of new businesses started and 10 25 million new jobs in three and a half years we re better off than we were four years ago we have worked to deal with the problems we heard americans talking to us about four years ago our administration worked hard to try to deal with the health care problems of ordinary americans we ve worked to contribute to the decline in the medical inflation rate so that the costs wouldn t keep going through the roof and i m proud to say last year health care costs increase was the lowest it s been in 23 years and this year it s running under two percent and last week right before i left i signed a bill the congress passed the kassebaum kennedy health care bill that says no longer can you be denied health insurance because somebody in your family has been sick or lose it because you changed jobs that s a good thing for america twenty five million americans will be helped by that what else have we done i knew that there were a lot of people who were working hard raising their kids and still falling further an further behind in 1993 we tried to create more good jobs by helping small businesses if they invest more in their business they can get a tax cut and then again in 1996 just before i came here we did some very important things we raised the minimum wage for 10 million american workers we preserved the tax cut we won in 1993 for the 15 million americans working hard with children on the most modest income so we could cut their taxes this year that s worth about a 1 000 for a family of four with an income below 28 000 when you get down to those lower wages and there s still people with kids in the home we wanted to say clearly if you work full time and you ve got children in your house the tax system will not put you in poverty it will lift you out of poverty you re entitled to raise your kids in dignity that minimum wage bill did some other things too it gave another tax break to small businesses so now we have increased by two and a half times the tax relief 90 percent of our small businesses can get if they invest more money in their business i m proud of that they re creating most of the new jobs most of us are going to be working for small businesses we better create a climate in america second to none for small businesses to grow and flourish and i know all of you will support that we tried to help families do a better job in raising their kids and working i think it s fair to say that maybe the number one worry of most families in this country is how to raise their kids and do a good job of that and still do a good job at work there s probably not a family in this audience tonight that hadn t had some problem at some time in juggling the demands of school for your kids or health care for your kids or just being with your kids and the responsibility to be at work we passed the family and medical leave law that says you can have a little time off without losing your job if there s a baby born or a sick child or a sick parent marcy kaptur and john glenn voted for that law and strongly supported it and in the last three years 12 million american families have made use of it and our economy is stronger not weaker than it was three years ago it helps to lift up families and support children and people are more productive at work when they can do it and last week in the minimum wage law we did something else that was good for families i signed a bill that gives a 5 000 tax credit to any couple willing to adopt a child and give that child a good home and an even more generous one if the child is disabled and it removed the barriers to cross racial adoption so now we can say there are hundreds of thousands of kids out there trapped in foster care they need loving homes we have now made it more economically feasible for people to really be pro family for those kids too and i m proud of that four years ago a lot of americans talked to me about crime i started off this morning at the ohio police training academy and i talked about the crime problem let me just say i have a simple strategy more police more punishment more prevention take the serious offenders and punish them do what you can to prevent crime from occurring and help to save the kids give them something to say yes to as well as to say no to and put more police officers on the street to catch criminals and prevent crime that s been our strategy for four years in a row the crime rate has been coming down in the united states of america and i m proud of that there s been a lot of talk in the news in the last few weeks about welfare reform because i signed the welfare reform bill it s a little bit longer story than that and i want to talk to you about it nearly every american i talked to for years wanted us to do something about welfare because they felt that it trapped people in dependency the people i met on welfare wanted me to do something about welfare they wanted a path to independence most poor people want what we want for everybody else they want to succeed with their kids and they want to succeed at work they want to be good productive citizens and so we sat about three years working with the states to give people permission to move people from welfare to work on the day i signed the bill already three quarters of the people in american were under such experiments we have reduced the welfare rolls by a million and a half since i became president of the united states moving people out there into the work force and i m proud of that but i signed this bill because we need to do more but let me tell you folks the welfare reform bill is the beginning not the end what it does is to say nationally we re going to protect all these families we re going to protect their medical care we re going to give them child care when the parents go to work we re going to make sure the kids are in the school lunch program and can show up and get extra nutritional help that they need but we re going to give the money that used to be in the welfare check to the states to devise ways to put people to work i want to talk a lot on thursday night about this but let me just say to you if you care about this and you want what i want you want poor people to have the same life that everybody else has having a chance to succeed at home and at work then let s say to everyone in america without regard to party let s don t let welfare reform be a fraud if you re going to make people go to work make sure they have jobs to find when they go to work we have to create more jobs in this country so people can work when i look out at all these children i think about our natural environment and one of the things i think we have to do to be responsible to the future is to find a way to grow the economy and preserve the environment fifty million americans are breathing clean air cleaner air than they were four years ago we have upgraded the standards for meat inspections for putting pesticides on crops that become food we have cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than were cleaned up in the previous 12 we created the biggest national park south of alaska in california we saved yellowstone park our nation s great treasure from a gold mine we are pushing forward to preserve the environment and to promote the economy finally let me say one other thing that i think is important i believe you can have opportunity and responsibility but it has to be for everybody and then we have to treat everybody the same that s why i ve reacted so strongly against the church burnings of black churches and the burnings of white churches and the people who have defaced the mosques and the synagogues in this country this was a country founded in religious liberty that s why i was so angry the other day when african american soldiers in the special forces in north carolina found swastikas painted on their doors let me tell you something folks the special forces are just what they say they re special forces if i call them at midnight tonight and tell them to be halfway around the world by noon tomorrow to defend you and put their lives on the line they ll do it they don t deserve to be discriminated against because of their race that s not america that s not america and so i say to you we have to bring this country together and go forward together the reason i vetoed the budget that passed was not because i didn t want a balanced budget i presented a balanced budget but we can t have a balanced budget if we cut student loans and cut back on head start and cut back on problems that improve education we can t have a balanced budget if we cripple our ability to protect our environment we can t have a balanced budget if we take unnecessary cuts in the medicare program that aren t necessary to save it we can t have a balanced budget if you walk away from our commitment to guaranteed medical care for the elderly for families with persons with disabilities in the family for pregnant women and for poor children we ve got to go forward together that s what that whole thing was all about and as i go forward into chicago i want you to know that s the record we ve made but we ve made a beginning we have more to do what is the task of the next four years we have our economic house in order we ve got to make sure it s possible for every single solitary american to take part in this economic recovery and to live out their dreams and to take care of their families that has to be our task for the next four years that means to me among other things i just want to mention just a couple of things that i want to do in the next four years number one i want to make at least two years of college as universal for americans as a high school education is today now how do we propose to do that by giving a 10 000 tax deduction to families for the cost of college tuition for any kind of education after high school and a 1 500 refundable tax credit for the first two years of college if that helps you more that will get everybody through a community college in any state in the country just about that s a good thing to do and we ought to do it number two i want to make sure that every child in every school in america has the same chance everybody else does to grow and learn which means we not only need computers in every school and classroom and also trained teachers but all those classrooms need to be connected to this vast information superhighway that will give any child anywhere in america in the poorest inner city neighborhood in the most remote mountain village access to the same information that any other child has anywhere in the world we re going to connect all those classrooms by the year 2000 if you ll let us do it and finally let me just say one word about health care we have done a good thing by saying you can t have your health insurance taken away from you if you change jobs and you can t be denied if you ve got somebody in your family who is sick but we still have good hard working people who are unemployed for longer periods than they used to be i want to see us also help those people who are unemployed who are dying to get back in the work force keep their families in health insurance for at least six more months and that s a noble and good thing to do the kids need it it will help them perform in school it will help the families stay together it will make america stronger i hope you ll support it and all these things the last thing i want to say is we can afford a tax cut but we ought to only have the tax cut we can afford remember what i said because we re bringing the deficit down because everybody knows we re going toward a balanced budget your interest rates are lower that s lower mortgage payments lower car payments lower credit card payments more business investment and more jobs and finally for the first time in a decade for the last two years average wages are rising again we can t jeopardize that but we can afford a family friendly tax cut a 500 tax credit for children under 13 the education tax deductions that i just mentioned and an ira available to families making up to 80 000 moving up to 100 000 a year that you can withdraw from without any penalty to buy the first home to deal with a medical emergency and to educate your kids or yourselves that is a program we can afford and that s what we ought to have it will build america and balance the budget well that s the america i want to build for the 21st century will you help will you help for 70 more days will you help for four more years thank you and god bless you hang in there let s go dem wjclinton26 9 96 bill_clinton thank you i want you to save some of that energy for the next five weeks and four days we need your help all the way i thank you for your endorsement your support means a great deal to me as you know it is crucial to our victory i wish i could be there with you to thank you in person but i m glad to have this opportunity to speak to you by satellite you re out there in chicago a city that has always stood for the strength and drive of our working people and a city that was awfully good to our democrats just a couple of weeks ago i want to thank my good friend your president george kourpias for all of his hard work and support george rode with me on the train to chicago and i enjoyed that very much and i missed him on labor day we usually spend that together too i ll see you soon george i also want to thank don wharton your secretary treasurer and the entire executive council of the iam you re all doing a great job the international association of machinists has been going strong for 108 years now and i congratulate you on your plans to unify iam with two other great unions the united steel workers and the united auto workers by the year 2000 when we start that new century you will be the largest union in north america and with leaders like george kourpias steve yokich and george becker i don t have any doubt at all that soon you ll be the largest in the entire world i want to talk to you today for a few minutes about the choice our country is facing in just 40 days a choice that will determine whether we build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past whether we can build a bridge to the 21st century that is strong enough and wide enough for every american to walk across just four years ago our economy was stalled with high unemployment the slowest job growth since the great depression a record budget deficit stagnant wages increasing inequality rampant cynicism our workers were becoming more divided economically and it seemed that americans were working harder and harder just to keep up i took office with a simple strategy opportunity for all responsibility from all and bring us all together in a great american community again that s america s basic bargain we didn t ask who is to blame instead we asked what can we do and our strategy has worked today we have further evidence of just how well it is working according to the census bureau just today we have had the largest decline in the last year in income inequality in 27 years the largest decline the largest decline in the number of americans living in poverty in 27 years since our economic plan passed family incomes are up over 1 600 in the last year after inflation average family incomes are up about 900 that s the biggest jump in a decade now these are remarkable turnarounds from a condition that many people thought was inevitable from america growing apart to america growing together as we go forward together and that s just today s news in the past four years we ve cut unemployment by a third to its lowest level in seven and a half years the combined rates of unemployment and inflation and home mortgages are the lowest in nearly 30 years our economy has produced 10 5 million new jobs 4 4 million new homeowners we ve cut the deficit by 60 percent given 15 million of our hardest working american families a tax cut and now we re going to help 25 million americans get the quality health care access they need by saying in the kennedy kassebaum bill you can no longer have your insurance taken away from you when you move from job to job and you can t be denied coverage simply because someone in your family has been sick the u s aerospace industry which is so critical to our country and its future is on the rebound in a big way last year american aerospace companies captured a record 83 percent of the world market for large commercial aircraft i am committed to supporting the aerospace industry and the hundreds of thousands of good jobs it produces that s why our administration will continue to promote our aerospace industry and our exports all around the world just the way the late ron brown and secretary mickey kantor and i have done for the last four years i know that many of you have been affected by defense downsizing that s why we ve done what we could to ease the transition by developing new applications for defense technology and working to create employment opportunities for former defense workers over the past four years we ve also fought to protect our own values the ones you and i share yes we do have to balance the budget it keeps interest rates down and the economy growing but when the republican congress tried to pass devastating cuts in medicare medicaid education and the environment i stopped them then they shut down the government twice to try and then they shut down the government twice to try to force their cuts on the american people and together we said no again because we want to strengthen families we fought for the family and medical leave act because we honor our parents we worked to secure the pensions of 40 million working and already retired people and we stopped the republicans from letting their corporations raid their workers pension plans again in their budget we learned our lesson in the 80s we don t want to do that again and because we honor work and family we were right to raise the minimum wage for 10 million american workers next tuesday because of that victory those 10 million american workers will get their raise it was a long and difficult fight but when many of our hardest pressed citizens get a raise on tuesday i know you will agree it was worth it and i want to pay a special word of tribute to the iam and to the labor movement in general for its fight for this increase i know your members don t earn the minimum wage but you fought for it anyway because you know how important it is for people who are working hard to support their children and to be productive citizens and to stay off welfare to be able to be rewarded and to have dignity in their work so i thank you you did a great thing for our country we all know that america is on the right track to the 21st century but we ve got more to do i want to build a bridge to the next century where every american family has a chance to benefit from the growing economy a chance to succeed at home with their children and to succeed at work we should expand the family and medical leave act to give parents a little time off to take their children to the doctor and to parent teacher conferences we ought to make the first two years we ought to make the first two years of college as universal as high school is today by giving families tax cuts to pay for college tuition i know that will help a lot of you i ve proposed a 1 500 tax credit for tuition a dollar for dollar reduction from your tax bill for the first two years of college that s the typical cost of tuition at a community college and i ve proposed a 10 000 tax deduction for any tuition after high school for people of any age we also want to expand iras so that families can save for college and then withdraw from the ira tax free to pay for those college costs or for a medical emergency or to buy a first home i also want to streamline the training programs that have been passed to benefit america s workers who are unemployed or underemployed i ve proposed a g i bill for america s workers that will tell every worker in america if you lose your job or you re underemployed and you qualify for a federal training program we ll give you a skill grant worth up to 2 600 a year and you figure out where you want to take it to get the training you most need to go on to a better job i don t want anybody left behind or stuck in this global economy i want us to go forward together we also had a good day for health care here in the nation s capital we said that there are not going to be any more drive by deliveries that insurance companies can t force mothers and their newborn babies out of the hospital in just a day in some cases up to eight hours we began to take some steps to provide some parity for families that have members with mental health problems which i think is terribly important and we said to the vietnam veterans who were exposed to agent orange and whose children therefore were born with the terrible disease of spina bifida we re going to give you the support and the help you deserve these things plus kennedy kassebaum mean we re moving in the right direction now we ve got to take the next step on health care my balanced budget plan would provide for support for people who are between jobs so they can keep their health insurance for six months that will help 5 million americans a year up to 700 000 children a year and i know you re for that and i ask you to keep working with me until we make sure that health care is accessible and affordable to all american working families now that s how we ll build our bridge to the 21st century doing everything we can to strengthen and support working american families soon after i took office i got rid of my predecessor s anti worker anti union executive orders our administration is pro family pro worker and pro union i strongly support collective bargaining it is not a privilege it s the right of all of our workers the recent resolution of the mcdonnell douglas contract dispute at the bargaining table is a great example of why we have to preserve that right always and we re glad to have you back at work i want you to know i ll keep standing up for working americans congress tried to make our workplaces less safe and company unions the law of the land but i wouldn t let them congress tried to gut the national labor relations board and undermine the prevailing wage laws and i said no we can have a stronger economy without sacrificing workers rights workers job security and safe workplaces and i will keep fighting to protect striking workers from being permanently replaced i will also continue to use my veto pen to stop republicans in congress from attacking our working families and the unions that represent them our unequaled progress throughout the entire 20th century would simply not have been possible without the unions that helped to make it happen i know i can count on you to help me build that bridge to the 21st century our best days are still ahead of us but we have to do everything we possibly can to make that promise real for all americans and as we do we ll all be better off so for the next 40 days go out and tell your friends what president kourpias told you your vote matters more than ever for the presidential race for the fight to elect good people to congress for your future your children s future and the future of america thank you god bless you all and on to victory dem wjclinton26 9 97 bill_clinton thank you very much i told tilman he should have just made the speech he s about to get the hang of this i d like to thank tilman and paige for having me back i thank ken and john eddie and all the others who made this night such a success and i thank alan solomont for coming down here to be with us thank you governor richards for being here and thank you gary mauro and bill white and thank you congresswoman sheila jackson lee i had a good day in texas and i ve had a kind of interesting two weeks someone asked me when i got here if i knew what state i was in because i ve been traveling around we took chelsea to college in california last week and then i went back to new york for the opening of the united nations and then i went to pittsburgh to speak to the afl cio and then i came to i went home to arkansas for a magnificent day yesterday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the little rock central high school and then before i came here i went out to san jacinto community college where i got to talk a little bit about the education provisions of the balanced budget act some of the issues we are dealing with in congress now and a little about the whole issue of affirmative action and i understand you ve got a local initiative here you re dealing with on that and so i ve had a very full and fascinating week tomorrow i m going back home and i m going to the town where i graduated from high school and we re trying to save our old high school so i m dealing with issues big and not so big the older i get the so called little issues seem bigger to me i want to save my high school you know i think it s important i was here with many of you exactly one year ago tomorrow and i think we ought to make this an annual thing i don t know and maybe we could have another baby every year too and we could just celebrate a new birth that ends my invitations coming here i m delighted to be back let me make a couple of very brief points first of all i said something at the community college today i d like to reiterate these community colleges work the way i think america ought to work you think about it we re living in a time of dramatic change in the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world the economy is new and emerging with all kinds of possibilities and these community colleges all across our country are open to people of all ages looking for a way to better themselves first of all they re open to everybody and you get treated the same whether you re a man or a woman without regard to your age without regard to your racial or ethnic background or your economic standing when you get in secondly they re very much oriented toward change not the status quo why because if they don t change then they ll be educating people for jobs that don t exist anymore and they ll go out of business thirdly they re oriented toward results not rhetoric something i wish we could have even more of in washington i work on it all the time why because if they don t educate you well no matter how much they exhort people won t be functional and they won t be hired and they ll go out of business and third they re oriented toward partnerships not political division why because there s no republican or democratic way to run a machine tool operation or to understand how sophisticated manufacturing processes work so people have to work together as a result they become the kind of dynamic community organizations that really are taking this country into a new century in good shape and i got to thinking about it because i love the community colleges and as you know one of the major parts of the budget that i was so proud of fulfilled my commitment to open the doors of college to every american for the first time and to make it possible for us to make the 13th and 14th years of education just as universal by the year 2000 as a high school diploma is today because we give a 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college which will cover the average cost of tuition and fees of 90 percent of the community colleges in the country that s very important and we give further tax credits for the junior and senior year for graduate study for older people who come back for job training and ira that people can withdraw from tax free if it s used for education more work study slots the biggest increase in pell grants in 20 years this is a huge deal that is in this budget and i think perhaps the most 30 years from now when people look back at this i think two things will live out of this budget more than anything else one is that we balanced the budget for the first time since president johnson s last budget and the second was that we opened the doors of college to all and gave the american people a chance to make two years of college as universal as a high school education is today and therefore that we made the country far more competitive and i m very proud of that but in general that is the sort of thing i have been trying to do since i went to washington six years ago i can t believe it it s been almost six years since i announced for president i don t know where the time went but a lot of you spent a lot of it with me and i appreciate that and i said then i had a simple but i believe profound vision of what i wanted our country to look like when i leave this office and we start a new century i want every american who is willing to work for it to be able to get the american dream i want our country still to be leading the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and i want us to be one america across all these lines that divide us now to do that we have to sort of be like the community colleges i have said this many times over the last six years but i ll say it again we need to be oriented toward the future not the past toward unity not division toward change not the status quo and we need to lead not follow i believe that and i hope you believe it and that means a lot we also need to be oriented toward people not just existing power institutions let me just give you some examples what does that mean for the democratic party well we gave the country the family and medical leave law everyplace i go some ordinary person comes up and says if it hadn t been for that law my life would have been diminished considerably because i got to take a little time off when my baby was sick when my spouse was sick when my father was dying or whatever and i didn t lose my job we gave the country the economic plan of 1993 completely without any votes from the other side and what that meant was by the time we got ready to pass this balanced budget law the deficit had already been reduced by 87 percent from the level it was when i took office we gave the country the crime bill over the bitter opposition of the republican leadership in 1994 they said it was not going to do any good putting 100 000 people on the street what s happened the crime rate has gone down in virtually every community in america the brady bill kept 250 000 people with criminal or mental health histories from getting handguns and ended a lot of illegal gun trafficking and as far as i know not a single texas hunter lost her rifle when i went up to new hampshire in 96 it was unusual for a democrat to carry new hampshire and they voted for me in 92 then they rebelled in 94 the nra had them all in a lather and i went up there and talked to a bunch of hunters and i said do you remember what they told you in 94 about us coming after your guns i said i want every one of you that lost your gun to vote against me but if you didn t they lied to you and you need to get even it was an interesting experience and we carried again why am i saying this it makes a difference the parties have honestly different views we ought to be free to bring our views to the table in this last session where we had the balanced budget the system worked as it should heavy majorities in both parties honestly wanted a balanced budget and realized that the record of the 80s could not be sustained and we had to go on and balance the budget to keep interest rates down and the economy rolling but we had drastically different ideas about how to do it thank goodness we were able to get it done because we argued and compromised in good faith and on principle in a principled way what was the democratic contribution to this balanced budget i ll give you three number one we made sure that we had a 500 per child tax credit and that it extended even to lower income working people like rookie police officers and beginning teachers and others who have children who needed the tax benefits even if their income tax liability was very low number two we got 24 billion in there to provide health insurance to 5 million half of the children of this country that don t have health insurance 24 billion over the next five years number three we got the biggest increased investment for education since 1965 and all these tax credits and iras and pell grants for college it s the biggest increase in aid for ordinary americans seeking college education since the g i bill 50 years ago that s what our party contributed to that budget agreement i am proud of that and i think that is worth supporting and i feel very good about it so i just say to you this matters and i associate myself with the remarks that mr solomont made i think that our friends in the republican party can stand a fair fight and i d like to see us have a fair fight because i think we can in the end put people ahead of politics and have principled agreement as long as we have both parties able to take their ideas to the people and to make their case to the american people and to put their positions forward you are making that possible and for that i m grateful now as you look ahead i d just like to mention a couple of things let s look into the future short term and long term what it s going to take to make this country work over the long term i think is continued success of the economic policy dramatically improving the quality and reach of our educational efforts figuring out a way to reconcile our obligation to preserve the environment and still grow the economy and continuing to expand american trade and this is one area where i think we have got to make a decision as democrats where we re going to stand on the trade issue and i d like to talk just briefly about each of those and one or two other things one let me just make this case we re having this fast track debate in congress let me tell you if you don t know what it is fast track is simple it sounds strange it s basically normal trade authority for the president or his representative to make an agreement with another country about tearing down trade barriers which then the congress gets to vote on but they have to vote it up or down why well if you were making a business deal with somebody and you signed on the dotted line would you sign on the dotted line and then it was contingent on its approval by the board of directors you might sign that deal if they said everybody this person works for every employee in the company can put an amendment on the deal that you just made if you wanted to you probably wouldn t sign the deal you wouldn t know what it was all fast track is it s just a power that s been given to presidents over the last 20 years mostly from democratic congresses to republican presidents to go meet with other countries make an agreement and then be able to tell the other country my word is good i ll deliver if the congress approves it or if the congress does not disapprove it that s all it is but if you don t have it then other countries don t think you re serious and they re not all that interested in doing business why is it important to america number one as a practical matter our markets are more open than most other countries so nearly anybody we can make a trade agreement with we d wind up ahead because when they dropped their barriers and we dropped ours they d be dropping more than we would in a larger sense what is the economic issue we have 4 percent of the people in the world you can look around this house tonight and tell that most of us have been very fortunate and we as a people have 22 percent of the world s wealth with 4 percent of the world s people the developing countries principally in asia and latin america but also increasingly in africa are going to grow at three times the rate of the wealthy countries europe japan the united states and canada now you tell me if they grow three times as fast as we re going to grow in the next 10 years and we have 4 percent of the world s people and 22 percent of the income i do not believe we can keep 22 percent of the income unless we sell more of what we produce to them and no one has been able to describe to me how we can do that it can t happen furthermore if we want to lead the world for peace and freedom and we want to have more countries that are success stories on their own and fewer countries like bosnia where we have to intervene to stop people from killing each other then we need to be in a position to have political influence and form political partnerships with countries that are democracies and committed to free market economics and you can t do that you can t lead if you are bringing up the rear so this is a big issue in the congress i hope i will prevail i do believe that when we trade with other countries in the right way we help to lift their labor standards i think that if we have to honor environmental standards they should too but the bottom line is we got 4 percent of the folks if we want 22 percent of the income we have to sell to the other 96 percent it is not complicated and i hope that you will all support that position the second big issue we ve got to face is the campaign finance reform issue and there are two issues to campaign finance not one one is how much money we raise and how it s raised the second is how much money you have to spend to get elected and i saw on one of the networks tonight maybe it was cnn a clip where i was asking the students at san jacinto i said most of you have probably thought at some time or another that it was terrible thing that politicians spent so much time raising money and the elections were so expensive i said let me ask you something how many people have you voted for because you thought they had the best television ads how many people have you voted for because you saw more of their ads how many people have you voted against because you saw a negative campaign ad against them and you didn t see them answer it on television so you thought you d better not take a chance on that and you voted for somebody else and they all started laughing as we rocked along you know the fundamental problem in campaigns is the cost of communications has exploded and therefore the demand for the funds to raise that and to keep communicating for political parties and for candidates has been severe so i hope that this debate we re having on the mccain feingold bill will produce a bill that will in effect alleviate some of the pressures that have been on some of you in this room but will also keep you heavily involved in the process and get you to involve other people i personally don t think it s a bad thing for a person who has done well in this country and believes in politics and wants to contribute something back to be able to do that i think it s a good thing you re here tonight not a bad thing and i m proud of you for doing it but i do think we ought to have a system that the american people as a whole have confidence in now we can pass the mccain feingold bill i hope we do but in addition to that i ask you also to recognize we have to cut the cost of the campaign and the only way to do that in our country is to give people the benefit of free or reduced television radio newspaper other communications time in return for cutting the cost of their campaign so when our friends in the media say that we ought to do something to clean up our house i say you re going to have to help us you can t say give me your money on the one hand and stop raising it on the other we have to do both these things and i think we can together the second thing i want to say is we re in a huge debate in washington over education standards nearly everybody says we ve got the best higher education system in the world most people concede we can improve our public education and we have to we are the only advanced country that has no national education standards and therefore no way of measuring whether all our kids are meeting them so i have suggested we start with a reading test for 4th graders and a math test for 8th graders that would be voluntary that could not be used against the children but would tell you how every child every class every school every school district is doing against national standards it is very important that our children be able to read and do basic math if you want them all to go to college and i believe this is a good beginning there are areas of a curious set of opposition to this but i think that lower income kids kids from difficult backgrounds i think they need high educational standards in their schools even more than the rest of us do because they have very few opportunities to make up for it if they don t get it and i am determined to see this fight through but i hope you ll support me it is not right for us not to have national academic standards of excellence so campaign finance academic standards fast track the last point i want to make is i want to encourage those of you in houston who are involved in trying to find a way to bring your community together and not divide it by race what i said in little rock yesterday is true this country is a lot better than it was 40 years ago it s better in terms of less discrimination it s better in terms of more economic opportunity in percentage terms african american family income rose faster than white american family income did in the last four years we are building a middle class of minorities that s the good news the bad news is that the disparities are still profound and access to credit and to being able to build businesses and to being able to be full participants in the american dream still show disparity in our country and we have got to keep working to find fair ways not to give anything to anybody for which they are not qualified but to give everyone who is qualified a chance to fully participate in the american way of life and to give us a chance to work together across racial lines i can t tell you how important i think that is let me just ask you before i sit down you just think about this and think about this when you go home think about how much time i as your president have had to spend these last five years as your president working on your behalf dealing with countries where people could not get along because of their racial religious or ethnic differences in bosnia you have three groups of people who are ethnically biologically indistinguishable who are in different religious and ethnic groups by accident of history think about the middle east think about my people the irish where i m hopeful we will have some real progress this year arguing over what happened 600 years ago in battles think about rwanda where most of us might not be able to tell without being there a while a hutu from a tutsi where hundreds of thousands of people were killed how much time i have to spend on your behalf trying to keep people from literally killing each other because of their differences and here we have our the school district across the river from me that i get up and look at every morning when i get up in the white house fairfax county school district has kids from 182 nations speaking over 100 languages in one school district we have five school districts with people from over 100 countries in it but two years from now we ll have 12 people still believe in this country they re still looking to come here to redeem the promise of america and i think that if we can figure out how to take a charitable but honest and open attitude toward working with people which i must say i have seen more in abundance in texas on questions of immigration and other thing across party lines than i have in a lot of other states if we can figure out how to do that there is no stopping this country we have a sound economic policy everybody gets an education and we all work together then the 21st century will be the time of america s greatest days and that vision i started with six years ago will be protected and if we can keep working together and finding principled compromises in the congress if i can convince the congress and the senate to confirm my judges for example if we can do the things that we ought to do i believe we re going to be fine but don t forget that depends upon having two parties that can fight for what they believe in within honorable bounds and there are differences and i gave you some of them tonight when you go home tonight i hope you will think about it and be glad you came thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton26 9 98a bill_clinton thank you very much well if i had any sense i wouldn t say anything thank you bill thank you starr thank you len and all of you i can t tell you how much i appreciate you being here i m delighted to see lynn schenk and i m delighted to see christine kehoe and we are determined to see her prevail if you want to do something for what you just stood up for send her to congress send her to congress i d also like to thank all of you who have been my friends over the years and some of you who i have just met today i am very grateful to see you here i d like to thank all the people who are responsible for our wonderful meal and the terrific musicians let s give them a hand didn t they do a great job the wayne foster group thank you so much it s nice to be here in this humble little house this is the first place i ve ever been where the fish are worth more than i make in a year listen this is really a magnificent home it s a real tribute to the work that bill has done over the years and to the for the feeling that they have for all of us that they open their home to us and i m very grateful to be here i will be brief i ve had a remarkable couple of days i was in chicago yesterday which most of you know is my wife s hometown and i got my sammy sosa chicago cubs baseball shirt which was promptly taken away from me last night when i met up with hillary and chelsea in northern california hillary has been up in washington and oregon and san francisco campaigning made an appearance last night for barbara boxer up there and i m here and i ll be in los angeles tonight and tomorrow i m going on to el paso and san antonio texas and then i m going back to washington on sunday night to try to bring to a closure this session of congress with some productive action but i cannot tell you how much it means to me not only as your president but as a person what you have said here and what i have seen all across this country and i m grateful and my family is grateful and i thank you but there is something far bigger than all of us at stake here and that is our country our system and where we re going and i tell everybody who comes up to me worrying about this that the real enemy of our party and our principles and our programs and the direction of the country is not adversity adversity is our friend it inspires us to action it gives energy it gives us steel and determination our real enemy is complacency or cynicism you know things are going pretty well for our country now and i m very grateful that i had a chance to be president to implement the policies that i ran on that i talked about six years ago i think this month when i was here with bill and starr at their previous home i m grateful that we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years and in just a few days less than a week now we ll have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years i m grateful for that but the question is what are we going to do with it i m grateful that we ve opened the doors of college to virtually anybody now who will work for it with tax credits and the deductibility of student loans and more scholarships and work study positions and that we added 5 million kids to the ranks of those with health insurance passed the brady bill and the family medical leave act i m grateful for all that but what are we going to do with it what are we going to do with it that s really what s at issue here our friends in the republican party believe they re going to win in the mid terms first of all because they wanted me i don t mind the birds it s just background music believe me i ve had worse background music lately the republicans believe they re going to do well in these elections first of all because in every single election since the civil war with the president in his second term the president s party has always lost seats at mid term the second thing they re banking on is money even though you ve been very generous and you ve come here they always have more money than we do especially now that they re in the majority but we have something that money can t buy and that history can t overcome we are on the right side of the issues for america s future the history we want to make tomorrow and the next day and the next 10 or 20 years is the right history for america and all we have to do is to get enough of our people to understand that to get enough energy out there to get enough people to show up on election day and all the history in the world won t make a difference and all the money in the world they have won t turn the tide because people now know that when it came to the budget vote in 1993 which reduced the deficit by 93 percent before we had the bipartisan balanced budget act we didn t have a single republican vote they know we barely had any votes for the crime bill when we banned assault weapons and put 100 000 police on the street or for the brady bill they know that we had almost all and democratic votes barely any republican votes for the family and medical leave law and if you look at the last year when this country has had lots of challenges and we had the resources to meet them what has happened in this congress in the last year they ve killed the tobacco legislation to which bill alluded they ve killed campaign finance reform they have taken no action on my education program the other night in a breathtaking move the republican leader of the united states senate actually had to shut the senate down and make people go away for four hours because it was the only way to keep them from voting on the patients bill of rights and he knew if we ever got a vote one of two things was going to happen it was either going to pass or they were going to be punished for killing it for the insurance companies that wanted to kill it so what did they do they shut the place down unprecedented now what this is really about this election is not what s going on in washington d c it s what s going to go on in the lives of the people in san diego and el paso and racine wisconsin and the northeast kingdom in vermont and all the places in the country where the people live who send people to washington d c that s what really matters and there is a very clear choice about what to do with this moment and i think if you just think about the things we need to do right now to prepare for america s future i ll just mention five very quickly number one we re going to have a balanced budget and a surplus on october 1st for the first time in 29 years they voted in the house and may vote in the senate for a tax cut to start spending the surplus right away now i remind you we quadrupled the debt of the country between 1981 and 1993 when i took office these surpluses in the years ahead they say oh well we know we re going to have them so we can spend some now and it s four or five weeks before the election and won t that be popular to just dish out a tax cut right here before the election and it s the democratic party that s standing up for fiscal responsibility and saying no and i m saying no and i ll tell you why first of all we have waited for 29 years we have worked for six years to get out of this terrible hole i would just like to see the red ink turn to black and watch the ink dry for a minute or two before we run another deficit wouldn t you like to see that wouldn t you just like to see the ink dry you know they didn t want to wait a day just to enjoy this incredible achievement now why is that important because we ve got a lot of trouble in the world today in the world economy i was up in silicon valley last night where they understand how dynamic how things are they live in a perpetual state of change there but so do we all and we dare not forget it we forget it at our peril we have to set a standard if we want to keep growing this economy that america of all the countries in the world is the most solid the most sensible the strongest country in the world the second reason we shouldn t spend that surplus right now is that before you know it the baby boomers will begin to retire starting in about 10 years i m the oldest of the baby boomers people between the ages of 34 and 52 when we all retire there will only be about two americans working for every american drawing social security unless something totally unforeseen happens to the birth rate or the immigration rate it will be about two to one the social security system today alone keeps half of the seniors in this country out of poverty that is without it 50 percent of the seniors in this country would be in poverty even with their other sources of income now if we begin today and make modest changes we can preserve the universal character of social security in the sense that it s a bottom line safety net for people that don t fall into poverty but we can increase the returns make some other changes and avoid putting an unconscionable burden on our children and grandchildren i m telling you everybody i know my age is worried about this i was home a few months ago and i had a barbecue about 6 00 p m in the evening with about 20 people i grew up most of them are just middle class americans don t make much money every one of them said they were plagued with the thought that their retirement would be a burden to their children and their grandchildren they re not wealthy people they know they re not going to have enough but they are plagued with the thought that they will have to take money away from their children and grandchildren now we have worked for 29 years for this it s the right thing to do anyway right now because of all the instability in the world for us to stay strong and have this strong economy and have this little surplus but secondly it s the right thing to do before we i m not against tax cuts we have some tax cuts in our budget but they re all paid for but before we get into that surplus for tax cuts before we spend a penny of it for new programs we ought to save the social security system for the 21st century so that we do not either run a lot of seniors into poverty or undermine the welfare of their children and grandchildren it is terribly important that s a big issue that affects people who live outside washington d c the second big issue it s very important again related to the economy is i m doing everything i can to limit the financial turmoil in asia now to begin to reverse it and to keep it from spreading to latin america which are our biggest markets our fastest growing markets for american goods and services everything i possibly can to sort of right this instability in the international financial system that you see most pronounced in asia and russia now could affect our welfare alan greenspan said the other day more eloquently than i could america could not forever be an island of prosperity for us to grow over the long run our friends and neighbors all across the world on every continent who are doing the right thing and working hard need to be doing better as well that s what this international monetary fund issue is all about for eight months i have been pleading with congress just to pay our fair share of the international monetary fund so we ll have the money to stop the financial virus before it spreads across the globe and begins to bite us that s a big issue and it hasn t been done yet the third thing i want to say is we will never be permanently secure in this kind of economy until we can say not only that we have the best system of higher education in the world but that every one of our children without regard to race or income or neighborhood has access to a world class elementary and secondary education and for eight months i have had before the congress fully paid for in the balanced budget a bill that would lower class sizes to an average of 18 in the early grades and put another 100 000 teachers out there to teach them that would build or repair another 5 000 schools because the schools are overcrowded that would hook all the classrooms in the country up to the internet by the year 2000 that would build 3 000 more charter schools an issue that california has been on the forefront of that would in short keep us on the forefront of education it would also reward school districts that have poor performance and a lot of kids in trouble if they adopted high standards accountability no social promotion but actually helped the kids and didn t denominate them as failures when they are young and they are no such thing i was in chicago the other day chicago used to be the poster child of a bad failing urban school district i went to the jenner elementary school where every single child lives in cabrini green one of the toughest public housing projects in all of america in the last three years their reading scores have doubled and their math scores have tripled chicago has a no social promotion policy but if you fail they don t just say you re a failure they say you didn t pass the test and you have to go to summer school the chicago summer school now is the sixth biggest school district in america guess what s happened to juvenile crime in chicago there are now 40 000 kids in that city that get three square meals a day in the school so that s also in our plan funds for other troubled districts to follow that model we also have funds for 35 000 young people to pay for their college education and then they can go out and work it off by teaching in under served areas this is a good program that s an issue in this election it matters to you and to your future and to your children s future and to your grandchildren s future whether we can rescue revive and make excellent the public educational opportunities of every child in this country so those are three things saving social security stabilizing the global economy putting education first i ll just mention two others number one one of the biggest fights i have all the time convincing people on both sides is that america has to find a way to protect the environment and grow the economy and that if we have to choose one or the other we re in deep trouble we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars complying with subpoenas from a congressional committee that doesn t want me to give tax incentives and spend research and development dollars to figure out how to grow the economy and reduce co2 emissions and that s out of step with the rest of the world i was in san bernardino county not very long ago with the head of the national association of home builders at a low income housing project where they had solar reflectors on the roof that are so thin now they look like ordinary shingles and glass that keeps out 40 percent of the heat and cold and dramatically reduces the power cost and it improves economic growth it creates jobs and improves the environment big issue but believe me the budget i m about to get unless they change their tune is going to be riddled with things designed to deny that and to weaken our environment and finally to me the thing that embodies as much as anything else the great philosophical difference that s at stake now in washington is the debate over the patients bill of rights now let me set the stage there are 160 million americans in managed care plans i have been a supporter of managed care why because when i became president health care costs were going up at three times the rate of inflation it was unsustainable we were going to bankrupt the country there wouldn t be enough money left to spend on anything else but it s like anything else if the bottom line is just whether you save money rather than the bottom line of saving as much money as you can consistent with the health of the people that are being treated you get in trouble and now many many managed care plans have health care decisions made by insurance company accountants and you have to appeal to two levels up or more until you finally get to a doctor our bill which has the support of 43 managed care companies who are doing this anyway and are being punished for it says this it says simply if you get in an accident you ought to be able to go to the nearest emergency room not one that s five or 10 miles because that s the only one that happens to be covered by your plan number two if your doctor says that he or she can no longer treat your condition and you need to see a specialist you ought to be able to see one number three if you work for a small business who changes providers health care providers at a given time during the year you still shouldn t have to change your doctor if you re in the middle of a critical treatment now let me just graphically demonstrate what that means this happens these things happen you remember when you had your first child how would you feel if you were seven months pregnant and your employer says i m sorry go get another obstetrician if anybody in your family has ever had chemotherapy i ve been through that if your family member needs chemotherapy you sit around you try to figure out ways to make jokes about it my mother stood there thinking well maybe i won t lose my hair or when i do maybe i will finally get a wig i never had to you think you try to be funny about it and then you wonder whether you re going to be too sick to eat right in the middle of a chemotherapy treatment do you think somebody would say i m sorry go get another doctor that s what this is about basic things our bill also protects the privacy of your medical records which i think is very very important and will become more important in the years ahead now the house of representatives the republican majority passed a bill that guarantees none of these rights and leaves 100 million americans out of what little it does cover the senate wouldn t even vote on the bill because they didn t want to be recorded so they shut down business that s what this election is about don t be fooled about a smokescreen this election is are we going to have a patients bill of rights is our policy going to be to grow the economy and preserve the environment are we going to put education first are we going to stabilize the global economy so we can continue to grow are we going to save social security first that s what it s about and if we go out and say we are democrats this is what we re running for we believe elections should be about the people that live outside washington not about who s crawling on whom in washington d c everything is going to be fine so i ask you go out there and make sure that s what it s about thank you very much dem wjclinton26 9 98b bill_clinton thank you very much i hate to begin with a request but if there was any way to turn down some of these lights i would like it i can t see any of you out there can you turn these lights down it s not a nightclub act but i just like to know that you re out there you know thank you let me begin by telling you how very grateful i am for the warm welcome you have given me tonight to those of you whom i saw earlier i thank you especially for the personal messages you had for me and for hillary you know even presidents and their families have to be people too and that means a very great deal to us and i thank you more than you will ever know i want to thank haim and cheryl for having me back in their home and having all of you here in this beautiful beautiful setting i d like to thank michael mcdonald for that wonderful song we were all up there singing but not as well as you i want to thank the staff of our unity events the people who catered this wonderful dinner and the people who served it i thank them all they did a wonderful job i want to thank gray and sharon davis for being such good friends to hillary and me and such good friends to the people of california you have to make sure that on election night they re victorious and i believe they will be i thank you so much for being here i thank my friend phil angelides for being here and for running for office let me say to all the members of congress here i m very proud of this unity event we began to do this in 1996 to work together through the democratic committee and the senate campaign committee and the house campaign committee we found that our contributors were relieved because they were only being hit once instead of three times but we also found that when we pooled our efforts as is always true in life when we work together we do better and nancy pelosi and bob torricelli have done a wonderful wonderful job and a great thing for our country i d like to thank the other members who are here you may have heard through the applause what nancy said about brad sherman that he was on speaker gingrich s top 10 hit list well for whatever it s worth he s on my top 10 protect list and i think he s going to win in november thanks in no small measure to your help and i thank you for that i have a lot of things to be grateful to henry waxman for but one thing stands out above all he has put the public health of the children of this country over the interests of the tobacco industry that has done so much to undermine it and to stop us from passing comprehensive tobacco legislation he fought that battle a long time before it was popular and before we in our administration got into it and henry we re going to win sooner or later sure as the world and when we do it will be in no small measure because of you and i thank you for what you ve done for our children i want to say too that i m very glad barbara boxer is here tonight you know she s in a tough race she s always been in a tough race she was in 92 she is now she has been since the spring but i think she s tougher than her race is and i can say this about to some extent every member of congress who s here but i want you to remember that many of the things for which the american people very generously give our administration credit which flow from the economic prosperity we have on one august night in 1993 hung by the thread of a single vote first in the house and then in the senate and we did not have a vote to spare when we passed the economic plan that brought the deficit down 92 percent before we passed the bipartisan balanced budget act that plan cut taxes for 15 million working families on modest income it invested dramatic new monies in health research as nancy said and education it gave real incentives for people to invest in inner cities that had been left behind in the development we had enjoyed and it hung by a single vote and barbara boxer who had been elected in a narrow race in california in 1992 never blinked she just went up there and did the right thing for america and now the voters of california should never blink they should go to the polls and do the right thing for california and for america and reelect her because we need her in washington d c very very badly i would also like to thank dick gephardt and tom daschle for their sterling leadership of our caucus in the senate and the house through some very very difficult days and tough decisions again i say to you many of the things for which the administration is credited required the support of democrats even in the bipartisan legislation we never would have gotten the money to ensure 5 000 children who don t have health insurance 5 million children we never would have gotten the funds to give a 1 500 tax credit to virtually every family in the country for the first two years of college and tax breaks for the other costs of higher education and to expand dramatically the student loan program and the scholarship programs if it hadn t been for the leadership of tom daschle and dick gephardt so every time you think about the good things that i have been able to achieve if a law was required and a change was required i can tell you that if it hadn t been for those two men sharing the same values the same hopes the same dreams and being willing to pay the same heat it would not have happened and i want to see them and their counterparts rewarded in this election because they have consistently in the majority and the minority done the right thing for the united states they are builders not wreckers they are uniters not dividers and they ought to be the leaders of the united states congress let me just say one final thing of appreciation for the democratic party i want to thank the chairs of this event nationally and the chairs in california i want to thank steve grossman who did the right thing to go back home to his child and len barrack our finance chair we ve had a wonderful couple of days hillary just got back from washington and oregon campaigning for our house candidates she was in northern california with barbara last night and we got to spend the evening with chelsea and the morning until noon and i was in illinois yesterday and in san jose last night in silicon valley i went to san diego earlier today and i m here and i m going on to texas in the morning america knows that it has a decision to make and i want to talk to you pretty seriously about that just for a moment the kind reception you gave me is an indication of a deep feeling that you and millions of other americans have about what s going on in washington but what i desperately want this election to be about is what s going on outside of washington in the lives of the american people you know i ran for this job because i did not believe the country was moving in the right direction and i didn t think we had a vision to get to the new century and i believed that we had some ideas i and the people who were working with me that would first of all make america work for ordinary people again and secondly would bring us together in a spirit of reconciliation and community across this incredible diversity that we have in our country indeed one of the things that i regret the most about so much of the rancor of washington is that it undermines what we so desperately need in this country now which is a deepening spirit of unity and what we have in common with our neighbors and friends no matter what the differences are and i wanted america to be a force for peace and prosperity and freedom throughout the world and in the last six years because of what we were able to do together i m very proud of the fact that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years and we re about to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years i m proud of the fact that we have advanced the cause of peace and freedom around the world and that we banned assault weapons at home and passed the brady bill and passed the family and medical leave law and did a lot of other things to change life for people who can never afford to come to an event like this i m proud of all that but the real issue is what are we going to do with this moment of prosperity and confidence and you showed me once again tonight that adversity is not our enemy adversity is our friend it s a harsh teacher sometimes and i think we ve all experienced that in one way or another in our lives but it animates us to action and it forces us to get to the bottom of ourselves and ask what we really believe in and what we really care about and what we re prepared to work for and to sacrifice for no adversity is not our enemy in this election season but complacency and cynicism are enemies our opponents in the other party believe that they re going to pick up seats in this midterm election and because of what i call the m m syndrome midterms and money even though you re here tonight they ll still have more money than we do for the next few weeks quite a bit more and usually at midterm elections the electorate is older and wealthier and more likely to be republican in order for us to win which i clearly believe we can the american people have to understand what the real choice is and have to believe that just because times are good doesn t mean we can sit on our lead because we can t all you have to do is look around the world today ron burkle and i were talking tonight before i came over here about the troubles in asia the troubles in japan the terrible challenges the people of russia are facing the fear that many of us have that it could spread to our friends in latin america who are actually doing a pretty good job running their economies and what alan greenspan said the other night that america could never remain or at least not forever remain and island of prosperity in a sea of economic distress the world is changing very fast that s why i have said that we ought to be using this time to look at the big problems facing our country and to take action let me just mention a couple very quickly that i think are important and then give you the real comparison of what s going on number one we re going to have this surplus on october 1st we ve been waiting for it for 29 years and every member of congress and i in this room we ve been working on it for six years now i would like to see the red ink turn to black and dry a little i m just waiting for october 1st just to take a deep breath and say that s another thing we did that was good for america the leaders of the other party they want to give an election year tax cut just a few weeks before the election it would be popular it would be great politics but it s wrong it is the wrong thing to do it s wrong for two reasons one is we need to show stability and discipline we quadrupled the debt of this country in the 12 years before i became president and now with so much of the rest of the world in trouble we need to show people we have got our head on straight and we are not going to knee jerk in the management of our economy we re going to be a force of strength and stability for the whole world the second and really the more important issue is that everybody knows the social security system we have now is not sustainable when the baby boomers retire it s fine now and it will be fine for several years in the future but we know right now we cannot maintain the present social security system and take care of the elderly and i remind you that half of the elderly people in this country are lifted out of poverty today because of social security they would be in poverty were it not for social security even those that have other sources of income now i have not said i m against tax cuts we have tax cuts in my budget in the balanced budget for child care for education for the environment all i said is we shouldn t spend the surplus on tax cuts until we save social security for the 21st century and that s very important everybody i know there are some baby boomers here tonight everybody between 34 and 52 is a baby boomer i m the oldest of them though it grieves me to say so but i can tell you not very long ago i was home in arkansas eating barbecue with 20 people i grew up with and very few of them would classify as upper middle class most of them have very modest incomes they re just good hard working americans doing the best they can to raise their kids but every one of them was plagued with the notion that when they got ready to retire and there were only two people working for every one person on social security if we don t do something about this now we would have to take lots more money from our children and undermine their ability to raise our grandchildren just to sustain our retirement now you heard bob torricelli quoting de tocqueville we re going to see because it s a clear choice in this election they re offering everybody a quick fix tax cut that won t amount to a lot of money to most people but it sounds great before and election and we re going into the teeth of the election and we say we would like to tell you this but we re not going to do it we re going to tell you truth america needs to set a financial example and we need to save social security first before we use any of that surplus for spending or for tax cuts that s our position it s a big issue and it s the right thing for america the second big issue i never thought i d even be giving a speech about this within six weeks of an election is whether we re going to fund the international monetary fund most americans probably don t know what it is but i can tell you this if you like the fact that your country has almost 17 million new jobs and you want us to continue to lead the world and you understand that 30 percent of our growth has come from what we sell to our friends around the world and a quarter of the world today is in a serious recession in asia where so much of california s wealth has come from in the growth of our trading with asian markets then you know that america has to do something to lead the way i m doing my best to get all the other wealthy countries in the world to focus on this to try to help asia recover to try to get japan restored to growth to try to help russia not only because it s the morally right thing to do for them but because it s in our interest we can t grow and continue to prosper unless our friends and neighbors grow and for eight months i ve been asking this congress to fund our contribution to the international monetary fund they need the money and i can t do the job without it and we can t possibly be expected to lead if we re the biggest piker on the block and we won t pay our fair share so that s a big issue in this election the third thing i d like to talk to you about is education eight months ago in the state of the union i gave the united states congress an education agenda to try to make sure that all of our children have access to world class elementary and secondary education it was based on the best research available of what we know works the plan paid for in the balanced budget would put 100 000 teachers out there to lower average class size to 18 in the early grades it would build or repair 5 000 schools because a lot of schools are overcrowded or breaking down it would hook up all the classrooms in the country to the internet by the year 2000 it would provide for the development of voluntary national standards exams to measure whether the kids were meeting them and would reward school districts that are in trouble if they end social promotion and adopt tutoring after school and summer school programs for the kids who need it so we don t tell them they re failures because they re in a system that s failed it would provide college scholarships to 35 000 young people that they could pay off by going out into our most troubled school districts and giving a few years of their lives to teach it would provide for 3 000 charter schools over the next few years something that california is leading the way in it is a good program it ought to be passed and i can promise you it will not be passed by this election and it won t be passed in toto unless we have a democratic congress and that s a good reason to fight for the people who are here and all the people they represent throughout this country finally let me just give you one other issue because to me it is sort of the crystal representation of the differences in our parties now for eight months i have been trying to pass a patients bill of rights it sounds good but let me tell you what it really means 160 million of us americans are in managed care plans now i have supported managed care because when i became president inflation costs in health care were going up at three times the rate of inflation and it was going to absolutely bankrupt the country if we didn t do something about it on the other hand i want to manage the health care system as best as possible consistent with the main goal which is keeping people healthy or making them well if they get sick that s the goal it s not managing the system you manage the system so you can use your forces to advance the health of americans but in too many cases health care decisions are being made by accountants not by doctors and in too many cases cruel individual cases the interest of ordinary people are being washed away so let me tell you what our bill does it says that if god forbid you get hit by a car leaving this party tonight and you re in a managed care plan you should be taken to the nearest emergency room not one 10 or 15 miles away just because it s covered by your plan it says if your physician tells you that he or she can t treat you and you need to see a specialist you have a right to see one it says that if you re in the middle of a treatment of some kind and your employer changes health care providers you can stay with your doctor until you finish your treatment just imagine this actually happens in america now most of us some of you have young children here some of us have children that are grown or children who think they are grown but just remember when your first child was born how would you have felt six months into the pregnancy if somebody had said i hope you re all right but you ve got to change obstetricians it happens have you ever had anybody in your family in chemotherapy i have and if you have you ll identify with what i m about to tell you you know it happens and you try to find a way to put on a happy face and be brave and even try to find a way to make jokes about whether your loved one is going to lose their hair or not and then you wonder when you re going to be so sick you can t eat anymore it s tough enough if you re in the middle of a chemotherapy treatment how would you feel to be told that you have to change doctors this is serious business that s all our bill does it gives you these basic human protections and it says your medical records ought to be kept private now for eight months there s been no action on our bill but let me tell you what the majority in the other party has done in the house of representatives they passed a bill which they called the patients bill of rights which did not guarantee a single solitary thing i just described to you and left 100 million americans out of what little it did provide in the senate when senator daschle and his friends attempted to bring up the patients bill of rights the senate republican leader was so frightened of it was so afraid to have his members recorded voting against it that he actually shut down the senate for four hours unheard of he called off business they turned out the lights they ran away and hid under their desk to kill it by stealth because they did not want to be caught voting for the insurance companies instead of for the people of this country forty three managed care plans are endorsing our bill why because they take good care of their people and they re being punished for it now i want you to think about this what do we stand for we stand for saving social security first for putting the education of our children before any other investment priority we stand for america s continued leadership to keep our own growth going and to help the world economy we stand for a patients bill of rights what have they done this year with their year in the congress they have killed the tobacco legislation that would have helped our children they killed campaign finance reform they are killing the patients bill of rights they ve taken no action on the international monetary fund no action on the education program and insofar as they have taken action they ve moved backwards on saving social security first and they re still continuing their stealth attack on the environment now that s what this about it s about what kind of country america is going to be so we have a choice to make it in some ways grieves me to make these speeches i had hoped by the time i d been here six years trying to bring people together that we would have a greater sense of bipartisanship in america that there would be a greater sense of harmony here just as i believe there is a greater sense of understanding across racial and ethnic and religious lines in this country than there was six years ago but you know the truth you knew the truth when you stood up and cheered i wanted you to hear it tonight not in a political rah rah speech but in calm direct but very blunt terms this is a very great country we are blessed to be in this moment but we have a solemn responsibility to our children to our legacy and to the world to make this election about the american people not about the squabbles in washington d c and if you will go out and do that i promise you we ll spend every red cent you have given us tonight to do that but you have friends you have neighbors you have means of communication you need to talk to people about what s really at stake here and you tell them you know what the other guys are for the democrats are for keeping the economy strong saving social security first putting the education of our children above all other investment priorities and passing that patients bill of rights they re for an america coming together they re for progress not partisanship they re for people not progress if you do that we re going to have a stunning victory in november against all the tide of history and against all the money and all the midterm arguments they can make because it s the right thing for our country for our children and for our future thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton27 1 95 bill_clinton thank you very much i m delighted to be here i see that half the cabinet is here i guess they ve already answered all your questions solved all your problems now they can come solve ours mayor ashe and distinguished members of the organization i m delighted to see all of you is mayor grant from east providence here your wife told me this was your birthday happy birthday happy birthday just wanted you to know i was checking up on you let me begin by saying congratulations to all of you on the overwhelming passage of the unfunded mandate legislation by the senate 86 to 10 the bill passed i have not had a chance to look at the final version of the senate bill it just passed a little while ago but i know some very good amendments were added and i want to congratulate senator glenn and senator kempthorne we worked very hard on this bill last year and i was sorry we didn t pass it then both of them did very very good work and i believe the bill is a very strong one as it goes to the house but i have not seen its final form but i heard it was in good shape and i must have been pretty good if it passed 86 to 10 and i think that should be reassuring to you it certainly is to me i want to thank you for the resolution you passed on the baseball strike and the action we are taking we will work very hard on that i know how important that is to you i sometimes think that the full economic implications of this whole thing have not been evaluated not just for the cities that have major league teams but also for the cities that host spring training this is a big deal and we re working on it i want to thank your international committee for the vote you took on the mexican stabilization package that we have offered as you know this is not the most popular issue in america today but it s important and i thank you for your support it s in the interest of our working people and our economy and it s not a gift it s not foreign aid it s not even a loan it s cosigning a note with good collateral so it s in our interests and i thank you for that when i came here two years ago with a mission to restore the american dream for all of the people of this country and to make sure we moved to the next century still the strongest force in the world for freedom and democracy and peace and prosperity i said then and had said all during my campaign that i wanted a new partnership for the american people i called it a new covenant of more opportunity and more responsibility recognizing that unless we had more of both we could not hope to do the things that have to be done i have sought to essentially focus on three things that i think are critical to making sure we succeed in this new economy empowering our people to make the most of their own lives expanding opportunity but shrinking the federal government bureaucracy giving more authority to state and local governments and to the private sector and i have sought to enhance the security of our people at home and abroad and all those things you have been very helpful and supportive both of the specific initiatives of this administration and of your own efforts which fit so well into that framework as all of you know in the last two years we ve had a lot of successes we now have the figures in on 1994 s growth rate we know it was the best economic year our country had since 1984 we know that the combined rates of unemployment and inflation are the lowest they have been in 30 years we know that we have inflation at a 30 year low we know that among other things the africanamerican unemployment rate went into single digits for the first time in 20 years so there is a lot we ve tried to expand more authority to our states and to our cities and we re bringing the federal government down in size and reach where it s appropriate we already have 100 000 fewer people working for the national government than we did when i became president and if nothing else is done it will shrink by another 170 000 and of course in terms of security the most important things we did were to pass the brady bill and the crime bill which you were active in and supportive of and i thank you for all that as we look ahead in this year which promises to be somewhat unpredictable but exciting and i think could be very productive for our country and i must say this passage of this bill today and the reasonable deliberation in the senate and the way the amendments were debated in good faith is quite encouraging to me there are some things that i think we have to do in terms of empowering our people to meet the challenges of this age we have to realize our job is still to expand the middle class and to shrink the underclass and the two main initiatives our administration has this year are the middle class bill of rights and raising the minimum wage we want to pass this middle class bill of rights not only to give tax relief to middle class people who have been working harder for lower wages or for at least no wage increases but to do it in a way that will raise incomes in the short term and in the long term that s why the focus is on tax deduction for all educational expenses after high school and an ira with tax free withdrawal for education expenses or for health care expenses or for the care of a parent or purchasing a first time home and while we seek to consolidate the 70 various training programs into one huge block and let people get directly a voucher that they can use if they re unemployed or if they have a low wage job and they re eligible for training to take to the local community college or wherever else they wish to take it to get the education and training of their choice i think it s important to raise the minimum wage because if we don t next year the buying power of the minimum wage will be at a 40 year low and the evidence is clear that if you raise the minimum wage a modest amount it doesn t cause increased unemployment and indeed may bring people back into the job market who otherwise are not willing to come in and go to work so i would hope you would support both of those things in the area of expanding opportunity and shrinking the bureaucracy we re coming back with a second round of reinventing government proposals and perhaps secretary cisneros has already talked to you about what we re proposing for hud to collapse the 60 programs into 3 i want to emphasize that we re doing this to strengthen the mission of hud and to strengthen the partnership that we have with the cities of this country not to gut the department s partnership or its capacity to help you do your job and so i hope that you will help us as we debate this on both parts say that you want to support a reduction in the size of the federal bureaucracy but you do not want to see the mission of hud as carried out by the mayors of this country undermined and weakened because you have a job to do and finally let me say some things about the crime bill i very much hope that we will be able to work through in this session of congress a good faith carrying forward of the crime bill that was passed last year it became unfortunately embroiled in politics you know that better than i do and i think you also know that the prevention programs that were passed were programs that were recommended to us in the strongest possible terms not only by mayors not only by community leaders but by the leaders of the law enforcement community and that a lot of those prevention programs that were later labeled as pork were cosponsored the first time they came up by people who later said they were pork well all that s behind us now and the only thing that matters now is what is the best thing for the people of this country what will keep our streets safer what will reduce the crime rate more what is the most likely approach to actually make the american people feel more secure we must enhance our security at home at the end of the cold war i think it s fair to say that most americans put their children to bed at night more worried about their security concerns at home than abroad so what we should seek to do without regard to party or region of the country is that which is most likely to make us most safe and to lower the crime rate many of you i ll bet even a majority of you here have recorded declines in the crime rate in the last year or so because of the strategies that mayors are adopting with community policing with prevention programs with using citizens to work with law enforcement to do things that will reach people in ways that will prevent crime as well as catch criminals more quickly we have to take these lessons into account so as we enter into a second round of debate about the crime bill i would say there are two or three things that we ought to keep in mind first as i said in my state of the union address we should not repeal the assault weapons ban we should not do that this issue as you can hear from the response is not a republican democratic issue it is not a liberal conservative issue it is overwhelmingly an urban nonurban issue and what we have to do is to convince all the people i grew up with that we don t we don t want to fool with anybody s hunting rifles we don t want to stop anybody from going to shooting contests we don t want to interfere with anybody s legitimate pursuit of happiness in the exercise of their right to keep and bear arms but there is nothing in the constitution that prevents us from exercising common sense and people who live in urban settings know that the mortality rate in the emergency rooms of urban hospitals from gunshot wounds has gone up dramatically in the last 15 years because the average body has more bullets in it when it s wheeled into the emergency room you do not have to be a genius to figure out what s happening and so i hope that we can put an end to this war this is a phony war among the american people and those of us that respect people s right to hunt and to engage in other appropriate conduct those of us that enjoy it ourselves we ought to be able to ask each other again what s best for america and what good is it to pretend that it s a matter of principle to maintain the right of a bunch of teenagers to have uzis on the streets of our cities so i hope you will talk about this in a nonpartisan nonpolitical way and realize this is one of those cultural problems that s gripping america we got too many of them they re keeping us apart but we need to say to the nonurban folks in our society this is something that we ve got to work this out this is a fair deal this is a balanced bill there are 650 weapons enumerated in this bill that cannot be infringed on by the government in any way shape or form and so let s let this alone and go on about the business of the country i also think we ought to emphasize that at least the attorney general is doing her dead level best to make sure that the administration of the crime bill that passed is non bureaucratic nonpolitical and efficient if you look at what s happened so far in october not even two weeks into the new fiscal year we had already funded 392 policing grants that went unfunded last year last month at your recommendation we gave 631 larger cities the goahead to begin recruiting and training more than 4 600 officers so they know the money will be there when their applications are handed in for the smaller cities we ve streamlined the application process allowing them to apply more quickly for police with a simple one page application i don t know how many one page applications we ve got in the government now but i know you can ask for an sba loan or a policeman with one page you ought to be able to do more things with one page this cops program has now helped more than 1 000 communities to put more than 10 000 more police officers on the street in all 50 states within a week when the announcement is made of the winners of the cops fast program that total will be close to 15 000 well on the way to the 100 000 goal of the crime bill that would be a 20 percent increase of the strength on the streets now the crime bills now being considered in congress have some things that i think may be superficially appealing but need to be thought through if you scrap the 8 8 billion cops initiative as some suggest and replace it with a 10 billion block grant which also has to include prevention programs the good news is you ll have a block grant the bad news is there ll be a lot less money in it than was provided for and keep in mind to all those who say it wasn t funded we did not raise one red cent in taxes to pay for the crime bill we did not take one red cent away from any other program we simply dedicated all the savings to be gained from reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy to giving it back to local communities to use to fund the crime bill that s what was done now to make matters worse some have suggested that the 10 billion block grant to fund police and prevention could only be funded if we first fund 10 billion in new prisons so that s a decision that some would make against the unanimous advice of every police officer in the country who has testified so that if we make that decision that would be like people saying we don t care what lowers crime we don t care what makes people safer we don t care what people in law enforcement who vote republican and democrat say this is what we re going to do it will make us a feel better and we can claim that it was the best thing to do we should not do that this ought not to become a political issue that crime bill had a balance of police and prevention and prisons we shouldn t take all the prevention money away through the back door and put it into prisons and we shouldn t say that the prisons are more important than the police and the prevention i had no objection to getting into the business of helping states with their prison construction even though it was totally unprecedented but there is no evidence that that is the way to lower the crime rate the american people want to be safer at night they want their kids to be safer on the streets and at school and we ought to be driven by what is best for the american people i would also say just parenthetically that even last year i was concerned when the crime bill passed that the conditions on getting that federal money for prison construction were so restrictive and required such a large state match that a lot of that money might never be used we cannot permit a cruel hoax to then be written into the law saying well you can get this block grant for police and prevention but only after the prison money is spent and then have conditions on spending the prison money so strict that it will never be spent in the first place so i urge you to just go up there without regard to your party or region and say look let s do what will lower the crime rate let s do what will keep people safer the american people will figure that out they will trust their local leaders they will trust their local law enforcement people they will trust them we can share responsibility now there need be no characterization that is negative when this process is over there need be no name calling there needs to be no anything we just need to do what is right to lower the crime rate and all of us have worked so hard on this again i would say this is like the assault weapons issue we ve got big issues to deal with this unfunded mandates is one welfare reform is another how we re going to lower the deficit and provide tax relief is another there are major positive issues that we re going to have to face we don t need to reopen an issue and make it worse so i ask you to help us on that now let me say one final thing about the baseball strike if i might i asked bill usery the federal mediator to get the sides back together and report to me by february the 6th anybody know what february the 6th is it s babe ruth s 100th birthday so it struck me as a good day to settle the baseball strike i identify with babe ruth he s a little overweight and he struck out a lot but he hit a lot of home runs because he went to bat you are the people in this county who go to bat you have to deal directly with people you have to be accountable not only for the rhetoric of your speeches but the reality of your actions and so i ask you to take this opportunity to join with us and let s make the decision the american people made last november a good decision by making it one of shared responsibility let s move what we can back to the state and local level let s work to empower people let s reduce the burden of government and increase the opportunity it creates we can do these things but it is very important that we not fix what ain t broke and that we not become diverted by issues that can only divide us when there is so much we can do that will bring us together thank you very much dem wjclinton27 1 98 bill_clinton mr speaker mr vice president members of the 105th congress distinguished guests my fellow americans since the last time we met in this chamber america has lost two patriots and fine public servants though they sat on opposite sides of the aisle representatives walter capps and sonny bono shared a deep love for this house and an unshakable commitment to improving the lives of all our people in the past few weeks they ve both been eulogized tonight i think we should begin by sending a message to their families and their friends that we celebrate their lives and give thanks for their service to our nation for 209 years it has been the president s duty to report to you on the state of the union because of the hard work and high purpose of the american people these are good times for america we have more than 14 million new jobs the lowest unemployment in 24 years the lowest core inflation in 30 years incomes are rising and we have the highest homeownership in history crime has dropped for a record five years in a row and the welfare rolls are at their lowest levels in 27 years our leadership in the world is unrivaled ladies and gentlemen the state of our union is strong with barely 700 days left in the 20th century this is not a time to rest it is a time to build to build the america within reach an america where everybody has a chance to get ahead with hard work where every citizen can live in a safe community where families are strong schools are good and all young people can go to college an america where scientists find cures for diseases from diabetes to alzheimer s to aids an america where every child can stretch a hand across a keyboard and reach every book ever written every painting ever painted every symphony ever composed where government provides opportunity and citizens honor the responsibility to give something back to their communities an america which leads the world to new heights of peace and prosperity this is the america we have begun to build this is the america we can leave to our children if we join together to finish the work at hand let us strengthen our nation for the 21st century rarely have americans lived through so much change in so many ways in so short a time quietly but with gathering force the ground has shifted beneath our feet as we have moved into an information age a global economy a truly new world for five years now we have met the challenge of these changes as americans have at every turning point by renewing the very idea of america widening the circle of opportunity deepening the meaning of our freedom forging a more perfect union we shaped a new kind of government for the information age i thank the vice president for his leadership and the congress for its support in building a government that is leaner more flexible a catalyst for new ideas and most of all a government that gives the american people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives we have moved past the sterile debate between those who say government is the enemy and those who say government is the answer my fellow americans we have found a third way we have the smallest government in 35 years but a more progressive one we have a smaller government but a stronger nation we are moving steadily toward an even stronger america in the 21st century an economy that offers opportunity a society rooted in responsibility and a nation that lives as a community first americans in this chamber and across our nation have pursued a new strategy for prosperity fiscal discipline to cut interest rates and spur growth investments in education and skills in science and technology and transportation to prepare our people for the new economy new markets for american products and american workers when i took office the deficit for 1998 was projected to be 357 billion and heading higher this year our deficit is projected to be 10 billion and heading lower for three decades six presidents have come before you to warn of the damage deficits pose to our nation tonight i come before you to announce that the federal deficit once so incomprehensibly large that it had 11 zeroes will be simply zero i will submit to congress for 1999 the first balanced budget in 30 years and if we hold fast to fiscal discipline we may balance the budget this year four years ahead of schedule you can all be proud of that because turning a sea of red ink into black is no miracle it is the product of hard work by the american people and of two visionary actions in congress the courageous vote in 1993 that led to a cut in the deficit of 90 percent and the truly historic bipartisan balanced budget agreement passed by this congress here s the really good news if we maintain our resolve we will produce balanced budgets as far as the eye can see we must not go back to unwise spending or untargeted tax cuts that risk reopening the deficit last year together we enacted targeted tax cuts so that the typical middle class family will now have the lowest tax rates in 20 years my plan to balance the budget next year includes both new investments and new tax cuts targeted to the needs of working families for education for child care for the environment but whether the issue is tax cuts or spending i ask all of you to meet this test approve only those priorities that can actually be accomplished without adding a dime to the deficit now if we balance the budget for next year it is projected that we ll then have a sizeable surplus in the years that immediately follow what should we do with this projected surplus i have a simple four word answer save social security first thank you tonight i propose that we reserve 100 percent of the surplus that s every penny of any surplus until we have taken all the necessary measures to strengthen the social security system for the 21st century let us say to all americans watching tonight whether you re 70 or 50 or whether you just started paying into the system social security will be there when you need it let us make this commitment social security first let s do that together i also want to say that all the american people who are watching us tonight should be invited to join in this discussion in facing these issues squarely and forming a true consensus on how we should proceed we ll start by conducting nonpartisan forums in every region of the country and i hope that lawmakers of both parties will participate we ll hold a white house conference on social security in december and one year from now i will convene the leaders of congress to craft historic bipartisan legislation to achieve a landmark for our generation a social security system that is strong in the 21st century thank you in an economy that honors opportunity all americans must be able to reap the rewards of prosperity because these times are good we can afford to take one simple sensible step to help millions of workers struggling to provide for their families we should raise the minimum wage the information age is first and foremost an education age in which education must start at birth and continue throughout a lifetime last year from this podium i said that education has to be our highest priority i laid out a 10 point plan to move us forward and urged all of us to let politics stop at the schoolhouse door since then this congress across party lines and the american people have responded in the most important year for education in a generation expanding public school choice opening the way to 3 000 new charter schools working to connect every classroom in the country to the information superhighway committing to expand head start to a million children launching america reads sending literally thousands of college students into our elementary schools to make sure all our 8 year olds can read last year i proposed and you passed 220 000 new pell grant scholarships for deserving students student loans already less expensive and easier to repay now you get to deduct the interest families all over america now can put their savings into new tax free education iras and this year for the first two years of college families will get a 1 500 tax credit a hope scholarship that will cover the cost of most community college tuition and for junior and senior year graduate school and job training there is a lifetime learning credit you did that and you should be very proud of it and because of these actions i have something to say to every family listening to us tonight your children can go on to college if you know a child from a poor family tell her not to give up she can go on to college if you know a young couple struggling with bills worried they won t be able to send their children to college tell them not to give up their children can go on to college if you know somebody who s caught in a dead end job and afraid he can t afford the classes necessary to get better jobs for the rest of his life tell him not to give up he can go on to college because of the things that have been done we can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today and my friends that will change the face and future of america we have opened wide the doors of the world s best system of higher education now we must make our public elementary and secondary schools the world s best as well by raising standards raising expectations and raising accountability thanks to the actions of this congress last year we will soon have for the very first time a voluntary national test based on national standards in 4th grade reading and 8th grade math parents have a right to know whether their children are mastering the basics and every parent already knows the key good teachers and small classes tonight i propose the first ever national effort to reduce class size in the early grades thank you my balanced budget will help to hire 100 000 new teachers who have passed a state competency test now with these teachers listen with these teachers we will actually be able to reduce class size in the 1st 2nd and 3rd grades to an average of 18 students a class all across america if i ve got the math right more teachers teaching smaller classes requires more classrooms so i also propose a school construction tax cut to help communities modernize or build 5 000 schools we must also demand greater accountability when we promote a child from grade to grade who hasn t mastered the work we don t do that child any favors it is time to end social promotion in america s schools last year in chicago they made that decision not to hold our children back but to lift them up chicago stopped social promotion and started mandatory summer school to help students who are behind to catch up i propose i propose to help other communities follow chicago s lead let s say to them stop promoting children who don t learn and we will give you the tools to make sure they do i also ask this congress to support our efforts to enlist colleges and universities to reach out to disadvantaged children starting in the 6th grade so that they can get the guidance and hope they need so they can know that they too will be able to go on to college as we enter the 21st century the global economy requires us to seek opportunity not just at home but in all the markets of the world we must shape this global economy not shrink from it in the last five years we have led the way in opening new markets with 240 trade agreements that remove foreign barriers to products bearing the proud stamp made in the usa today record high exports account for fully one third of our economic growth i want to keep them going because that s the way to keep america growing and to advance a safer more stable world all of you know whatever your views are that i think this a great opportunity for america i know there is opposition to more comprehensive trade agreements i have listened carefully and i believe that the opposition is rooted in two fears first that our trading partners will have lower environmental and labor standards which will give them an unfair advantage in our market and do their own people no favors even if there s more business and second that if we have more trade more of our workers will lose their jobs and have to start over i think we should seek to advance worker and environmental standards around the world i have made it abundantly clear that it should be a part of our trade agenda but we cannot influence other countries decisions if we send them a message that we re backing away from trade with them this year i will send legislation to congress and ask other nations to join us to fight the most intolerable labor practice of all abusive child labor we should also offer help and hope to those americans temporarily left behind by the global marketplace or by the march of technology which may have nothing to do with trade that s why we have more than doubled funding for training dislocated workers since 1993 and if my new budget is adopted we will triple funding that s why we must do more and more quickly to help workers who lose their jobs for whatever reason you know we help communities in a special way when their military base closes we ought to help them in the same way if their factory closes again i ask the congress to continue its bipartisan work to consolidate the tangle of training programs we have today into one single g i bill for workers a simple skills grant so people can on their own move quickly to new jobs to higher incomes and brighter futures we all know in every way in life change is not always easy but we have to decide whether we re going to try to hold it back and hide from it or reap its benefits and remember the big picture here while we ve been entering into hundreds of new trade agreements we ve been creating millions of new jobs so this year we will forge new partnerships with latin america asia and europe and we should pass the new african trade act it has bipartisan support i will also renew my request for the fast track negotiating authority necessary to open more new markets create more new jobs which every president has had for two decades you know whether we like it or not in ways that are mostly positive the world s economies are more and more interconnected and interdependent today an economic crisis anywhere can affect economies everywhere recent months have brought serious financial problems to thailand indonesia south korea and beyond now why should americans be concerned about this first these countries are our customers if they sink into recession they won t be able to buy the goods we d like to sell them second they re also our competitors so if their currencies lose their value and go down then the price of their goods will drop flooding our market and others with much cheaper goods which makes it a lot tougher for our people to compete and finally they are our strategic partners their stability bolsters our security the american economy remains sound and strong and i want to keep it that way but because the turmoil in asia will have an impact on all the world s economies including ours making that negative impact as small as possible is the right thing to do for america and the right thing to do for a safer world our policy is clear no nation can recover if it does not reform itself but when nations are willing to undertake serious economic reform we should help them do it so i call on congress to renew america s commitment to the international monetary fund and i think we should say to all the people we re trying to represent here that preparing for a far off storm that may reach our shores is far wiser than ignoring the thunder until the clouds are just overhead a strong nation rests on the rock of responsibility a society rooted in responsibility must first promote the value of work not welfare we can be proud that after decades of finger pointing and failure together we ended the old welfare system and we re now we replacing welfare checks with paychecks last year after a record four year decline in welfare rolls i challenged our nation to move 2 million more americans off welfare by the year 2000 i m pleased to report we have also met that goal two full years ahead of schedule this is a grand achievement the sum of many acts of individual courage persistence and hope for 13 years elaine kinslow of indianapolis indiana was on and off welfare today she s a dispatcher with the a van company she s saved enough money to move her family into a good neighborhood and she s helping other welfare recipients go to work elaine kinslow and all those like her are the real heroes of the welfare revolution there are millions like her all across america and i m happy she could join the first lady tonight elaine we re very proud of you please stand up we still have a lot more to do all of us to make welfare reform a success providing child care helping families move closer to available jobs challenging more companies to join our welfare to work partnership increasing child support collections from deadbeat parents who have a duty to support their own children i also want to thank congress for restoring some of the benefits to immigrants who are here legally and working hard and i hope you will finish that job this year we have to make it possible for all hard working families to meet their most important responsibilities two years ago we helped guarantee that americans can keep their health insurance when they change jobs last year we extended health care to up to 5 million children this year i challenge congress to take the next historic steps one hundred sixty million of our fellow citizens are in managed care plans these plans save money and they can improve care but medical decisions ought to be made by medical doctors not insurance company accountants i urge this congress to reach across the aisle and write into law a consumer bill of rights that says this you have the right to know all your medical options not just the cheapest you have the right to choose the doctor you want for the care you need you have the right to emergency room care wherever and whenever you need it you have the right to keep your medical records confidential traditional care or managed care every american deserves quality care millions of americans between the ages of 55 and 65 have lost their health insurance some are retired some are laid off some lose their coverage when their spouses retire after a lifetime of work they are left with nowhere to turn so i ask the congress let these hard working americans buy into the medicare system it won t add a dime to the deficit but the peace of mind it will provide will be priceless next we must help parents protect their children from the gravest health threat that they face an epidemic of teen smoking spread by multimillion dollar marketing campaigns i challenge congress let s pass bipartisan comprehensive legislation that improve public health protect our tobacco farmers and change the way tobacco companies do business forever let s do what it takes to bring teen smoking down let s raise the price of cigarettes by up to 1 50 a pack over the next 10 years with penalties on the tobacco industry if it keeps marketing to our children tomorrow like every day 3 000 children will start smoking and 1 000 will die early as a result let this congress be remembered as the congress that saved their lives in the new economy most parents work harder than ever they face a constant struggle to balance their obligations to be good workers and their even more important obligations to be good parents the family and medical leave act was the very first bill i was privileged to sign into law as president in 1993 since then about 15 million people have taken advantage of it and i ve met a lot of them all across this country i ask you to extend that law to cover 10 million more workers and to give parents time off when they have to go see their children s teachers or take them to the doctor child care is the next frontier we must face to enable people to succeed at home and at work last year i co hosted the very first white house conference on child care with one of our foremost experts america s first lady from all corners of america we heard the same message without regard to region or income or political affiliation we ve got to raise the quality of child care we ve got to make it safer we ve got to make it more affordable so here s my plan help families to pay for child care for a million more children scholarships and background checks for child care workers and a new emphasis on early learning tax credits for businesses that provide child care for their employees and a larger child care tax credit for working families now if you pass my plan what this means is that a family of four with an income of 35 000 and high child care costs will no longer pay a single penny of federal income tax i think this is such a big issue with me because of my own personal experience i have often wondered how my mother when she was a young widow would have been able to go away to school and get an education and come back and support me if my grandparents hadn t been able to take care of me she and i were really very lucky how many other families have never had that same opportunity the truth is we don t know the answer to that question but we do know what the answer should be not a single american family should ever have to choose between the job they need and the child they love a society rooted in responsibility must provide safe streets safe schools and safe neighborhoods we pursued a strategy of more police tougher punishment smarter prevention with crime fighting partnerships with local law enforcement and citizen groups where the rubber hits the road i can report to you tonight that it s working violent crime is down robbery is down assault is down burglary is down for five years in a row all across america we need to finish the job of putting 100 000 more police on our streets again i ask congress to pass a juvenile crime bill that provides more prosecutors and probation officers to crack down on gangs and guns and drugs and bar violent juveniles from buying guns for life and i ask you to dramatically expand our support for after school programs i think every american should know that most juvenile crime is committed between the hours of 3 00 in the afternoon and 8 00 at night we can keep so many of our children out of trouble in the first place if we give them someplace to go other than the streets and we ought to do it drug use is on the decline i thank general mccaffrey for his leadership and i thank this congress for passing the largest antidrug budget in history i ask you to join me in a ground breaking effort to hire 1 000 new border patrol agents and to deploy the most sophisticated available new technologies to help close the door on drugs at our borders police prosecutors and prevention programs as good as they are they can t work if our court system doesn t work today there are large number of vacancies in the federal courts here is what the chief justice of the united states wrote judicial vacancies cannot remain at such high levels indefinitely without eroding the quality of justice i simply ask the united states senate to heed this plea and vote on the highly qualified judicial nominees before you up or down we must exercise responsibility not just at home but around the world on the eve of a new century we have the power and the duty to build a new era of peace and security but make no mistake about it today s possibilities are not tomorrow s guarantees america must stand against the poisoned appeals of extreme nationalism we must combat an unholy axis of new threats from terrorists international criminals and drug traffickers these 21st century predators feed on technology and the free flow of information and ideas and people and they will be all the more lethal if weapons of mass destruction fall into their hands to meet these challenges we are helping to write international rules of the road for the 21st century protecting those who join the family of nations and isolating those who do not within days i will ask the senate for its advice and consent to make hungary poland and the czech republic the newest members of nato for 50 years nato contained communism and kept america and europe secure now these three formerly communist countries have said yes to democracy i ask the senate to say yes to them our new allies by taking in new members and working closely with new partners including russia and ukraine nato can help to assure that europe is a stronghold for peace in the 21st century next i will ask congress to continue its support for our troops and their mission in bosnia this christmas hillary and i traveled to sarajevo with senator and mrs dole and a bipartisan congressional delegation we saw children playing in the streets where two years ago they were hiding from snipers and shells the shops are filled with food the cafes were alive with conversation the progress there is unmistakable but it is not yet irreversible to take firm root bosnia s fragile peace still needs the support of american and allied troops when the current nato mission ends in june i think senator dole actually said it best he said this is like being ahead in the 4th quarter of a football game now is not the time to walk off the field and forfeit the victory i wish all of you could have seen our troops in tuzla they re very proud of what they re doing in bosnia and we re all very proud of them one of those brave soldiers is sitting with the first lady tonight army sergeant michael tolbert his father was a decorated vietnam vet after college in colorado he joined the army last year he led an infantry unit that stopped mob of extremists from taking over a radio station that is a voice of democracy and tolerance in bosnia thank you very much sergeant for what you represent in bosnia and around the world our men and women in uniform always do their mission well our mission must be to keep them well trained and ready to improve their quality of life and to provide the 21st century weapons they need to defeat any enemy i ask congress to join me in pursuing an ambitious agenda to reduce the serious threat of weapons of mass destruction this year four decades after it was first proposed by president eisenhower a comprehensive nuclear test ban is within reach by ending nuclear testing we can help to prevent the development of new and more dangerous weapons and make it more difficult for non nuclear states to build them i m pleased to announce four former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff generals john shalikashvili colin powell and david jones and admiral william crowe have endorsed this treaty and i ask the senate to approve it this year together we also must also confront the new hazards of chemical and biological weapons and the outlaw states terrorists and organized criminals seeking to acquire them saddam hussein has spent the better part of this decade and much of his nation s wealth not on providing for the iraqi people but on developing nuclear chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them the united nations weapons inspectors have done a truly remarkable job finding and destroying more of iraq s arsenal than was destroyed during the entire gulf war now saddam hussein wants to stop them from completing their mission i know i speak for everyone in this chamber republicans and democrats when i say to saddam hussein you cannot defy the will of the world and when i say to him you have used weapons of mass destruction before we are determined to deny you the capacity to use them again last year the senate ratified the chemical weapons convention to protect our soldiers and citizens from poison gas now we must act to prevent the use of disease as a weapon of war and terror the biological weapons convention has been in effect for 23 years now the rules are good but the enforcement is weak we must strengthen it with a new international inspection system to detect and deter cheating in the months ahead i will pursue our security strategy with old allies in asia and europe and new partners from africa to india and pakistan from south america to china and from belfast to korea to the middle east america will continue to stand with those who stand for peace finally it s long past time to make good on our debt to the united nations more and more we are working with other nations to achieve common goals if we want america to lead we ve got to set a good example as we see so clearly in bosnia allies who share our goals can also share our burdens in this new era our freedom and independence are actually enriched not weakened by our increasing interdependence with other nations but we have to do our part our founders set america on a permanent course toward a more perfect union to all of you i say it is a journey we can only make together living as one community first we have to continue to reform our government the instrument of our national community everyone knows elections have become too expensive fueling a fundraising arms race this year by march 6th at long last the senate will actually vote on bipartisan campaign finance reform proposed by senators mccain and feingold let s be clear a vote against mccain and feingold is a vote for soft money and for the status quo i ask you to strengthen our democracy and pass campaign finance reform this year at least equally important we have to address the real reason for the explosion in campaign costs the high cost of media advertising to the folks watching at home those were the groans of pain in the audience i will formally request that the federal communications commission act to provide free or reduced cost television time for candidates who observe spending limits voluntarily the airwaves are a public trust and broadcasters also have to help us in this effort to strengthen our democracy under the leadership of vice president gore we ve reduced the federal payroll by 300 000 workers cut 16 000 pages of regulation eliminated hundreds of programs and improved the operations of virtually every government agency but we can do more like every taxpayer i m outraged by the reports of abuses by the irs we need some changes there new citizen advocacy panels a stronger taxpayer advocate phone lines open 24 hours a day relief for innocent taxpayers last year by an overwhelming bipartisan margin the house of representatives passed sweeping irs reforms this bill must not now languish in the senate tonight i ask the senate follow the house pass the bipartisan package as your first order of business i hope to goodness before i finish i can think of something to say follow the senate on so i ll be out of trouble a nation that lives as a community must value all its communities for the past five years we have worked to bring the spark of private enterprise to inner city and poor rural areas with community development banks more commercial loans in the poor neighborhoods cleanup of polluted sites for development under the continue dem wjclinton27 10 02 bill_clinton thank you very much you know when you re not president anymore you always wonder what you re going to do with your time i m here to play backup for larry king and ehud barak ladies and gentlemen i m honored to be here tonight and grateful for the words of my friend ehud barak a lot of nice things have been said about me but i will say what i always said when the irish said such things or the people of sarajevo or kosovo or eritrea and ethiopia or haiti it was america s job to help make peace but the burdens fell on those who led their nations if all it took in the world was the courage of one man to have peace in the middle east because of ehud barak we would have peace in the middle east today he cared not for the cost in personal turmoil or political popularity but he did not waste his time he was simply ahead of his time someday peace will come to israel and when it does it will be along the pathway marked out by yitzbah rabin and ehud barak prime minister barak and i were together at the waldorf when i made my last speech as president on the middle east but it s better tonight first of all there are no consequences to what either one of us says and secondly larry king showed up i am delighted that he s willing to do audiences of less than 15 million and i m glad to be one of them we all have our arguments with people in the press those of us in politics but i ll say one thing throughout his entire career larry king has always given the rest of us our say and he s tried to help all of us be better citizens by giving all different kinds of people their say thank you i want to thank nava barak for being here for her leadership in this cause and for her friendship to hillary and me ehud and i used to laugh that among the many things we had in common was that we were both badly over married i m proud of you nava i thank you i wish hillary could be here but the election is in ten days and as larry said one of us has to work i want to congratulate my friend alan patricof he and susan have been wonderful friends to hillary and me for a good while now i remember the first time alan and i went jogging in central park i think he thought my prospects of becoming president were limited but somewhat better than ever finishing the new york marathon in early 1992 when i was dropping like a rock in the polls and the election was ten days away in new hampshire he led a fundraiser for me here in new york i expected to walk into an empty room but when 700 people were there i said well i m not dead yet and it turned out i wasn t thanks in no small measure to the fact that alan and susan never gave up they are great people and i thank you for honoring alan i want to thank robert ivanhoe and mort zuckerman i also want to thank the others who organized this event and all those here from the rabin medical center who take care of the victims of terror and who care for other patients and those at the center who do research tonight i want to give a relatively brief speech in hopes that those of you who love baseball will get home before the world series is over i was hoping you wouldn t clap when i said that i realize what time i m getting up to speak and it reminds me that the first speech i ever gave as an elected official was almost 26 years ago in january of 1977 i was a 30 year old attorney general from my state i went to a rotary club installation banquet it began at 6 30 500 people were there 497 of them were introduced i got up to speak at a quarter to 10 the only person in the audience more nervous than me was the poor sucker who had to introduce me so he got up there and the first words out of his mouth were you know we could have stopped here and had a very nice evening i knew what he meant he meant something better was coming but that s not the way it came out so i m well aware that we could have stopped before i got up and had a very nice evening i want to talk just a few minutes and i hope it gives you one or two things to think aboutabout the work of making peace of the healing efforts of this medical center of mr oppenheim and mr cohen and others and of the diplomatic efforts of ambassador ayalon ambassador increy the political efforts that ehud and i made for a frustrating cause are so important this medical center was named for yitzhah rabin every november when the anniversary of his death comes around i feel physical pain again it s hard for me to explain to those of you who were not part of those days how much those of us in the white house who worked with prime minister rabin loved him if i had taken a poll on the day he was shot half the people who work with me on the middle east would have taken the bullet for him because they were afraid it would kill the peace process it s hard for me to explain to you how happy we were when ehud won the prime ministership even though i had a good relationship with prime minister netanyahu we did the agreement at the wye river which bought us two and a half years of peace but we knew that ehud had explicitly committed to finish the peace process when you look around the world it is striking to see how many people are willing to take enormous personal risks to inflict pain on other people and how few are willing to take similar risks to make peace you can name them rabin barak mandela the irish leaders pastrana in columbia who went alone into the jungles to face the terrorists and the narco traffickers and a few others somehow we need to make this kind of courage more abundant for in an interdependent world the only final victories come not from beating someone in battle but from making peace when anwar sadat came to jerusalem to speak to the knesset he said these words there is no happiness based on the detriment of others now nearly everyone would say they believe that if i called you all tonight in an anonymous telephone poll the way we endlessly do in america in election season and i said do you agree or disagree with this statement the agreement factor would be ninety percent yet nearly no one is willing to act on it when the chips are down too many of us still think we can win by making our neighbors lose too many people in wealthy countries like ours continue to demand for ourselves what we deny to others in recent years there has been a whole spate of utterly fascinating books exploring the conflicting human impulses to cooperate on the one hand and to have conflict on the other they ve been written by students of primitive isolated societies in the rain forests or the savannah in africa probing whether there s something that goes back as old as human society that causes us to fight with one another they ve been written by students studying chimpanzees bonobos and gorillasstudents who are searching for something about even our pre human ancestors that makes us do this there have been those who have studied the behavior of birds and bats to see if they could learn anything about why we both fight and cooperate with one another there have also been books about the most cooperative of all of the earth s speciesants termites and bees marvelously successful numbering in the billions they re utterly useless on their own and only successful when they cooperate economists have weighed in on this subject calling people who fight others or take advantage of them for short term benefit without regard to their long term consequences rational fools psychologists and psychiatrists have written books about the impulse to cooperate and the impulse to fight theologians have speculated about it as well every major religion has some powerful statement about our common humanity the most interesting enlightening book on this that i ve read lately is a book by matt ridley called the origins of virtue the most hopeful books i ve read were written by robert wright the moral animal and non zero he simply argues that the more interdependent we are the more we have to figure out how to get along the most practical book i ve read is the harvard sociologist robert putnam s book about why northern italy works better than southern italy he says it s because of rules networks trust and what he calls social capital but what has never been resolved if you read all the books by the scientists the anthropologists the psychologists the sociologists the economists and the theologians is whether we are driven by a selfish gene toward conflict or by a truly smart selfish gene toward cooperation whether we are evolving toward cooperation genetically or simply figuring it out in developing a different culture whether the human psychology is such that in the end we ll never trust each other enough to do what needs to be done if you read all the literature the truth is nobody can be sure but i do know one thing from eight years of observing bloodshed and harmony in the middle east and elsewhere when people live in a highly interdependent environment and the middle east is highly interdependent the palestinians blow up a bunch of israeli kids at a discotheque or a pizza parlor the israelis close the border and the palestinians go without jobs when people are in an interdependent environment whether in nations in regions or increasingly across the whole globe as we learned on september 11th we have to find a way to build an integrated community of shared values and benefits and responsibilities or be consigned to endless cycles of tit for tat you treat me right i ll treat you right you do something wrong and i ll hurt you if the world is nothing but tit for tat then at the very best our life is constantly anxious insecure and confined and at the very worst it is full of misery destruction and death when i saw that brave israeli sergeant up here reminding us of what she had endured i thought that the world s current troubles are all the more frustrating against the background of its current possibilities think of the medical center the development of the human genome and the practical applications of super micro technology called nano technology really raise the prospect of both the prevention and the cure of all kinds of cancers and alzheimer s and parkinson s and lots of other diseases the development of science and technology is going to tell us what s in those dark holes in outer space and the deepest regions of the oceans advancements in energy technology are going to enable us to meet the challenge of climate change without economic demise and i hope solve the water shortages in the middle east and elsewhere wealth and our increasing creative knowledge means that if we re smart we can work with people in poorer countries to end poverty ignorance and disease what is needed is a vision of an integrated community based on our common humanity a strategy for getting us there and habits of heart and mind to do the job this is what i believe chairman arafat didn t have when we were at taba habits of heart and mind that tell us when to fight and when to talk when to hold fast and when to give a little when to define the meaning of our lives by standing up for the interests of our crowd today and when to try to build a bigger crowd for tomorrow what does all this mean in practical terms i don t want to be too nave here of course we still need a security strategy we should eradicate al qaeda improve homeland defense help our friends fighting terror and limit the production and spread of weapons of mass destruction in 1994 i actually prepared for war to stop north korea from using its plutonium to build six or seven nuclear weapons a year i won t go into the details but we made a deal with them and they honored that deal if they hadn t they d probably have over 40 nuclear bombs by now we almost made an agreement with them to end their missile program and we did make an agreement with them to end their missile testing program now a few weeks ago as we learned a few days ago north korea admitted that they are trying to make a bomb again i think the bush administration is doing the right thing by demanding that they stop and giving diplomacy a chance first why first of all we have the time to do this and secondly because giving diplomacy a chance might work and because involving other people helps us to build an integrated community of people standing up for the safety of the world that s what i think should be done in iraq i think that saddam hussein s biological and chemical stocks and his nuclear program are dangerous in 1991 the united nations said you have to stop it and set up an inspections and destruction system to end it the inspections uncovered and destroyed more weapons and weapon stocks and missiles and warheads than were destroyed in the gulf war but for four years now there have been no inspections so you have to assume those stocks have been built back up still there s a chance to avoid war and to build this sense of international community by getting rid of the ridiculous 1948 restrictions on the inspections and having all nations support going back in should we make the effort to do that absolutely should we rule out the possibility of force no that s my view we should be moving toward an integrated community but we should realize we re not there yet we should be trying to build up the united nations but we should realize that the united nations itself is an organization that is still in the process of becoming what it ought to be all of us on the security council sometimes cast votes based on our national interest instead of the new world we re trying to build i do think it would be better if we can go through the un and try the inspections first even though if the past is prologue they ll fail i think it s better because we don t want to give him the incentive to use weapons he has today and we don t want to be accused of a unilateral preemptive attack that would give others who might want to do the same thing in the future an excuse to do likewise and finally as all the soldiers here know no matter how precise your weapons and bombs are when they re big and powerful and you fire and drop them innocent people die too but of course we have to have a security strategy yet a security strategy alone will never work because it basically says when you do something bad we ll do something worse it may keep us alive but it won t make peace we also have to have a strategy to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies that s the world i grew up in the world president truman the first leader to recognize israel and general marshall madethe marshall plan the united nations the international financial institutions the global trading system helping germany and japan they built a world with more partners and fewer enemies it s a pretty good world for most of us in the baby boom generation and the logic that underlies the last 50 years applies today with even greater force i just came back from africa where i was working on issues that are central to what i am trying to do todaybringing economic opportunity to poor people bridging the divides of tribal conflicts fighting hiv and aids supporting new democracies it is amazing how far a little effort goes to make people feel closer to america and the rest of the world and i might add we get richly rewarded for it i won t go into the details but i hope for those of you from israel and those of you who helped israel over the last 50 plus years the logic is self evident finally i think we have to build international institutions that work and america has to be willing to cooperate on the comprehensive test ban treaty the criminal court the climate change treaty and the biological weapons convention a lot of americans don t want to do that because we give up flexibility and control but we get credibility and influence in return and if we are trying to make a world tht is an integrated community i also believe we have to keep trying to make peace i worked in haiti northern ireland bosnia kosovo ethiopia eritrea burundi east timor and many other places besides the middle east i tried and failed to get the greeks and turks to resolve the cyprus question but they ll have to do it in order for turkey to be integrated into the community of europe and because of the wonderful cooperation that israel and turkey have had in recent years you can clearly see the importance of a modern secular muslim nation being part of europe a bulwark against fundamentalism and terrorism at worst a door to a new middle east at best i tried and failed to get pakistan and india to end their conflict over kashmir but they talk more and we just had encouraging elections there and i did my best in the middle east i have no responsibilities there anymore i just talk to people and encourage them to do what seems to be the right thing after all that has happened it may be hard to believe that there will ever be peace but there will be because of the logic of the position that prime minister barak took the logic of the position that prime minister rabin took the logic that was behind the agreement at wye river the logic of the offer prime minister barak made to syria the logic that was behind the belated and at the time it came almost revolting admission by the chairman arafat that he would like to have what he turned down at taba someday this will happen maybe there will have to be another interim agreement maybe when it happens now after all the innocents have died there will have to be a big international force there with american forces and security guarantees from the united states and europe and nato and others whatever it takes i would do it we will never have a world at peace until israel is at peace with its neighbors we will never have a secure world until israel is secure with its neighbors we will never have the kind of world we want as long as palestinians and some israelis believe that they can achieve their objectives at the expense of each other s dignity and dreams now let me say in closing in spite of all these dreary things i ve talked about i am on balance quite hopeful and i d like to tell you why people like us first rose up out of africa somewhere between 50 and a 100 000 years ago depending on how you read the archeological evidence civilization has been around if you define the word in terms of the establishment of cities and writings for about 7 000 years for most of that time whether it was genetic or cultural or psychological most people have looked at those who were different who were not in their family their tribe their village their crowd in ways not too different from the way the al qaeda looked at all of us in america on september 11th if you re in our crowd your life has meaning and dignity we will honor you and we ll protect you if you re not you might as well be a non person it is very difficult to read human history without seeing it as one long matter of people finding positive meaning with reference to their own group and negative meaning with reference to the others the french and germans for centuries said thank god i m not french thank god i m not german in northern ireland thank god i m not catholic thank god i m not protestant i could go on and on right across the globe tiny little kosovo thank god i m not a muslim thank god i m not an orthodox christian you can read the whole of human history as a battle of us versus them with the people who had any sensethe rabins the baraks the mandelas the gandhisalways trying to expand the definition of us and shrink the definition of them that is literally what gandhi died for killed by a fellow hindu who thought he was a total heretic because he wanted india for the muslims and the hindus and the buddhists and the sikhs and the jains and the christians and the jews gandhi had a very expansive definition of us and a nearly non existent definition of them but this was not global policy until after world war ii after we nearly destroyed ourselves in the first fifty years of the 20th century we established the united nations and we ratified the international declaration of human rights after the holocaust to say that there were some rights common to us just because we are alive then it was not practically possible to act on the idea of a global community rooted in common humanity because of the cold war then in the 1970 s china started easing over toward the west in 1989 the berlin wall fell then democracy began to sweep cenral and eastern europe the european union began to develop we stopped ethnic cleansing in the balkans russia joined the west in a special relationship with nato china joined the world trade organization and then we began to face these terrorisms and the enemies of the nation state all over the world if you look at the long sweep of history we are coming together whether biology or culture or economics or psychology or a larger sense of spirit is driving it we are coming together what arafat did in walking away from ehud barak s offer at taba is not the wave of the future it is the last gasp of an old worldview that has to be erased from the earth you must believe that you say my god the guy s only 56 years old and he s already in his dotage talking like that but i m not running for anything i say whatever i please now i ll just close with an example from africa i just got back from rwanda where in 1994 over ten percent of the country 700 000 people were killed in a hundred days largely with machetes it was the worst genocide in modern times so i went back and i met with the president and then i went out to visit the memorial to their holocaust on the side of a hill it s just three simple long concrete slabs in tiers with crosses on top and flowers there s one and then a ten foot drop to another one then a ten foot drop to another one they are all mass graves that contain the remains of 260 000 of that 700 000 people every day a grave is left open and rwandans keep bringing the remains of their loved ones to the memorial most of the victims are from the minority tutsi tribe along with people who intermarried with them and people who sympathized with them most of those who did the slaughtering were hutus who are the majority today rwanda has a tutsi president paul kagame first he was vice president because he insisted that a hutu be the first president of post war rwanda after i went to the memorial i went directly to a little village outside the capital called enderas it is a government designatedlisten to thisreconciliation village when you go there to live you know you will be living with people of the other tribe i went to the house of a hutu woman who had adopted two tutsi children one of whom had a rare degenerative disease and couldn t live long she was caring for him in her front yard i met twenty of her neighbors i met a young hutu soldier who has been hiding out in the congo he came home because his president told him that if he hadn t been involved in planning the genocide he would have to confess what he had done to a local court and the local people would decide what he must do to live in harmony with the village and he would go on with his life a local version of what mandela did in south africa the most amazing thing i saw was these two women standing together as neighbors one of them had lost her father her husband and her brother in the genocide her neighbor was a hutu woman whose husband was in prison awaiting war crimes trials they are living together as neighbors then the governor of the state took me out a very articulate young woman she took me to see children dancing together in native costumes a ceremonial dance the girls and boys the hutus and the tutsis she said this dance for you is the first time they ve danced together since 1994 since the killing started they were smiling and laughing and almost young again the africans may live in the poorest countries in the world but they understand something fundamental about the way we have to live the hutus and the tutsis have lived together for five hundred years they cannot escape each other and so they have decided instead to find a way to live together and to go on there s a tribe in central africa that greets strangers in this way if they run into each other and one says hello the other gives a unique response i see you i see you you exist i recognize you i accept you i say all this to ask you not to be discouraged in the face of the madness of these suicides bombings most of the palestinians are not suicide bombers i say all this to tell you that there is no compelling evidence that we are biologically genetically condemned to slaughter each other till the end of time i say all this to remind you of what you already knowthat once we are thrown together bound up together in each other s futures we have no choice but to create out of our interdependence an integrated community rooted in our common humanity therefore do not be discouraged should we defend ourselves absolutely should we give up on peace not on your life the only final victory in an interdependent world is the one for which ehud barak sacrificed his office and yitzhak rabin sacrificed his life thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton27 10 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you i am delighted to be here at the reunion of the vice president s family friends and medical support team i would like to keep this crowd with us for the next several days i m delighted to be back at vanderbilt chancellor wyatt vice chancellor robinson thank you very much for making us feel so welcome here congressman clement thank you for coming with us i d also like to acknowledge our good friend justin dart who leads our national effort to mobilize people with disabilities thank you justin thank you for being here noah liff thank you for your example and for your fine words and for your support of welfare reform and i thank the other business leaders who are here as well governor mcwherter thank you for being my friend and my colleague over all these years you know you tennesseeans can say that he was the best governor tennessee ever had i don t know that because i never lived here but i can tell you this he s the best politician i ever met the first time i ever met him he put that aw shucks deal on me that he does you know i wanted to reach in my pocket and make sure the billfold was still there and if he d wanted it i would have given it to him i think it s fair to say that those of us who served as governors with ned mcwherter thought at the time there was no state that was better run no state more oriented toward the proper balance of continuous change and sensible management and old fashioned common sense and good values and i m honored by his friendship and his support and i m delighted he s here with us today i want to say a special word of thanks as we move to the end of this election season to the vice president i was watching him on the debate the other night and thinking that i knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it and we ve spent so much time together now it s almost like we can begin to speak in code you know two or three words and i can finis the sentence and vice versa i think there has never been a relationship quite like this in american history between the president and the vice president but i must tell you it s been one of the most richly rewarding things of my life and i think it s been very very good for the american people his leadership is the principal reason that we have been able to reduce the government to its smallest size since the kennedy administration eliminate more regulations and government programs and privatize more operations than the previous two administrations combined and no one has noticed a decline in government services in fact our federal employees are doing more with less and doing it better than ever before thanks to the vice president s leadership in reinventing government he was responsible for many of the most important provisions of the landmark telecommunications bill he s helped us devise a budget that would continue to increase our investment in research and technology even while we cut overall spending to balance the budget he has made a major contribution to our efforts to finish the unfinished business of the cold war especially in his work in russia there has never been a vice president with more responsibility who has achieved more and who has done more to advance the cause of america than your native son al gore as all of you know 10 days from now the american people will go to the polls to choose the last president of the 20th century and the first president of the 21st century tonight and over the next several days i will ask the american people not just to come to rallies and cheer although we all need that especially in the last days of a long hard effort but to think again about how we are going to meet the challenges of the 21st century how we are going to seize the opportunities of the 21st century how we are going to preserve our values and the things we hold dear in the next century how we can make it the age of greatest possibility in human history our central goal must be to work together to give our people the tools they need to master the changes that are taking place in the next week i m going to talk about four of the biggest challenges we face how we finish the job of balancing the budget while preserving our values giving our children a world class education opening the doors of college to all americans and making at least two years of education after high school as universal by the dawn of the 21st century as a high school diploma is today and i want to talk about making our families stronger by helping all americans to succeed both at home and at work in safety and security and tonight i want to talk about ending the cycle of welfare dependency family breakdown and crime by carrying on our historic efforts to reform welfare i first came to vanderbilt to give a speech nearly a decade ago now when i was invited to come here and talk about what it was like to be a governor in a time of change in the global economy i remember it very well i expect i m the only person in this audience who remembers it very well but nonetheless i do it was about that time that i was asked to represent the democratic governors along with my colleague the governor of delaware the republican governor of delaware and working with congress and the reagan administration to try to help reform the welfare system those efforts produced the family support act of 1988 which itself was a substantial improvement over the previous law and which gave the president very very broad powers which before i took office were rarely used to work with states and communities to change the rules of welfare to try to develop a system that would move people from dependence to independence four years ago when al gore and i came to nashville i said i wanted an america in which every person responsible enough to work for it has a shot at the american dream an america still the world s strongest force for peace and freedom an america coming together and relishing its diversity through its shared values we have pursued a simple but profound strategy we have worked to expand opportunity for all to demand responsibility from all and to build a stronger american community to make that america s basic bargain four years ago the vice president and i asked you to take us on faith tonight you can look at a record our nation is clearly moving in the right direction we have 10 5 million new jobs over 270 000 of them here in tennessee unemployment here has dropped by about a third to 4 1 percent we have the lowest combined rates of unemployment inflation in home mortgages in 20 years 28 years after inflation household income is up about 1 600 in the last two years there are 4 5 million new homeowners the inequality among working people just declined by the largest amount in 27 years childhood poverty dropped the most it has in 20 years the incomes and poverty of households headed by women had its most dramatic drop in 30 years and we just recorded the lowest poverty rates ever recorded for african americans and all our senior citizens we have 4 5 million new homeowners record numbers of new small businesses record exports we are moving in the right direction we are pushing back the frontiers of knowledge in ways that will benefit all of us here at the medical center in science labs biotech firms and universities all across our nation in millions of homes in the everyday miracle of the internet we see the leaps of science technology that are no less dazzling for being so widespread just today before i came here i met with a lot of people who work with the problems of cancer i met with cancer survivors i met with physicians i met with researchers i met with people in support groups among other things i announced that we will be dedicating 30 million more dollars this year to genetic breast cancer research because and this is just one example we have identified two of the genes in the human structure that cause breast cancer and when you put that with the fact that we are now using the very sophisticated imaging technology we use in our satellites for defense and intelligence purposes on the human body so we can detect prevent or stop early the spread of all kinds of diseases we are literally on the verge of breakthroughs we never could have dreamed of just a couple of years ago not very long ago we had movement for the first time ever in a laboratory animal whose spine has been completely severed the animal had movement in its lower limbs when there were nerve transplants from other parts of the body to the spine we ve developed the first treatment for stroke ever in the last four years the average life expectancy of people with hiv has more than doubled in the last four years with research and more rapid movement of drugs to market it will soon i believe become a manageable chronic disease not a certain death warrant all these things have happened in the last four years but we have much to do and we have to choose a decision about how we re going to walk into the future and one of the major decisions before the american people in this election and not just the race for president but many others as well is what are those things which we should do together to what extent do we believe we re better off on our own to what extent do we believe yes it does take a village to raise our children and build our future to what extent do we think we can find our way on our own into the 21st century to what extent do we need to build a bridge that s clearly marked and big and wide and strong enough for us all to go over together we have tried to define what we think we should do together and what we think the nation s responsibilities are we ve cut the deficit by 60 percent now we can finish the job of balancing the budget and do it in a way that reflects our values that preserves the fundamental structure of medicaid and medicare education and the environment research and technology we have cut taxes for 15 million working families and because our economy is on the right track we can balance the budget with a targeted tax cut for families where they need it the most for education child rearing medical care and buying that first home we ve improved our educational standards expanded college scholarships and loans now we have to reform education at every level raising standards increasing accountability making sure that every 8 year old can read independently every 12 year old can log into the internet in every classroom and library in america every 18 year old can go on to college we re making our families and neighborhoods safer we re in the process of putting 100 000 more police on our streets getting gangs and guns and drugs off the streets now we have to finish the job of putting those police on the street and crack down on teen gangs with the same focus and the same law we are using to break organized crime we now have the lowest crime rate in 10 years four years of declining crime rates but all of you know there is still a long way to go before the american people really feel safe and secure again now is not the time to back up now is the time to bear down with an approach that is working we ve helped to strengthen our families with the family leave law 12 million times families have taken a little time off from work when a baby was born or a family member was sick without losing their jobs and i think america is stronger because of it i thank the vice president and tipper for the work they did to advocate that here in nashville at the family conference now it s time to expand family leave i believe so that parents can take a little time off to go see their children s teachers twice a year or to make regular doctor appointments for their kids and because people are working harder than ever and so many people have trouble juggling the demands of parenting and work i think we ought to give workers the option of using overtime they accumulate and taking it either in cash or in more time with their families at their own discretion that will help us be a stronger country but we also have to finish the job of welfare reform for many reasons most of which have already been explained by previous speakers and especially the vice president our welfare system has failed a lot of people to be frank a lot of people it worked as well as anything would because they were just in a temporary difficult position they got on welfare then they got off again and went on with their lives but year in and year out especially as more and more children are born into single parent homes more and more people became trapped in a permanent cycle of welfare dependency in ways that literally physically isolated generations of people away from communities with mainstream values mainstream opportunities and mainstream futures exiling people from the world of work that gives structure meaning and dignity to the lives of the rest of us the system for those people for whom it did not work the system hurt them a lot more than it did the other taxpayers who often complained about it loudly and publicly children who are born to a life on welfare we know from study after study are more likely to drop out of school fall afoul of the law become teen mothers or teen fathers raise their own children on welfare for too long welfare has been the object of partisan debate rather than collective common effort too many people in politics especially the further you get away from the people on welfare if you get all the way back to washington d c ask who is to blame instead of what to do for too long a lot of other americans assumed there was nothing that could be done about it you simply could not make it any better than it was welfare teen pregnancy crime all seemed destined to go on and grow forever that s why al gore and i pledged to end welfare as we know it four years ago we did not believe that these problems would not yield to sensible persistent human effort as a governor for 16 years 12 years as governor now four years as president i have worked on welfare reform and worked personally face to face with people on welfare i knew better i knew how bad those people wanted a different deal and a better brighter future i knew from the beginning we could change this system for the better the old system yes it wasted taxpayers money but even more tragically it trapped millions into a lifetime of dependency well that system is now over but the question is what are we going to do now we have shown that we can restore our communities and renew our values but the job is not done as the vice president said we gave special permission to 43 states to get out from under a whole variety of federal rules to redesign systems that would help move people from welfare to work more rapidly this has made a real difference we also had some rules including requiring teen mothers to live at home and stay in school or lose their welfare benefits we also recognize that governments can t raise children parents do that one of the main reasons people go on welfare in the first place is that parents run away from their responsibility to support their own children do you know tonight if every parent who is legally obligated to do so paid all the child support they had been legally found able to pay 800 000 people would be off the welfare rolls tomorrow that s why we stiffened federal child support enforcement worked with the states more closely than ever and why i signed an order directing federal employees to pay their child support or have it paid for them i wanted us to set an example we required hospitals to have programs to identify the father at the time of birth insisted that welfare recipients name the father or lose benefits we posted deadbeat parents in post offices in the internet we re going to deny them federal loans we used the irs to collect a record 1 billion in child support worked with states on a new computer system to identify those who switched jobs or moved from their home state to avoid paying child support i might say that 35 percent of all delinquent child support cases involve people who have crossed state lines in the first few months of this new system we identified 60 000 deadbeat parents who now must pay all of these efforts are bearing fruit the welfare rolls are down by nearly 2 million in the last four years tennessee has 75 000 fewer recipients a 25 percent drop just this week new statistics were published showing that all across america child support collections have increased by 50 percent in the last four years up in every single state in america that s 4 billion a year more going to children and parents who otherwise would have to fend for themselves and depend more on the taxpayers to support them another thing you can be proud of in tennessee is that tennessee is one of the top five states in the country over the last four years here child support collections have doubled they re up 100 percent in the last four years and believe it or not while too many young people are still having babies outside marriage even on that front america is making progress teen births have gone down for four years in a row and last year the out of wedlock birth rate declined for the first time in nearly 20 years that brings us to where we are now a people determined to get back to our basic values even as we modernize our economy and face the future this welfare reform law gives us an historic chance but not a guarantee to restore the basic values of work responsibility and families and to end the literal exile of millions of poor people from the mainstream of american life and all of its promise the new law imposes strict time limits on welfare it requires those who can work to go to work it mounts the strictest crackdown ever on child support collections but it also says we will continue to provide as a national guarantee health care and nutrition for poor families and when the welfare recipient goes to work more for child care than ever before so that families will get the help they need when they move from welfare to work the new law gives us a chance to make welfare what it was intended to be a second chance not a way of life but let me say again we say from now on people who can work have to go to work no one who can work can stay on welfare forever we re making work family and responsibility a way of life we are not going back our welfare legislation however is just the beginning that is the important thing that every single american citizen has to understand maybe it s because i was a governor before i became a president but i know that there s a lot of difference between passing a law and changing lives in the neighborhoods and streets of every community in the united states you have to help us change those lives you have to help us implement this welfare reform law and make it work the way it was supposed to we re not going to walk away from these children we re not going to walk away from these families we re going to take them by the hand and walk with them into a bright new future and you re going to help thank you thank you let s look at where you are in tennessee right now you ve heard this talked about before tonight but i want to say again there are 12 000 tennessee families who have signed new personal responsibility contracts now they ve promised to be personally responsible and the people of tennessee through their elected officials and those who work for the state have promised to keep up their end of the bargain to give those people a chance to act on their responsibility like these fine folks who stood up over here and whom we clapped for tonight so as we require people to take responsibility and go to work we have to make sure they have the opportunity to work one of the reasons that i wanted to sign this law so badly maintaining the guarantees of health care and nutrition and child care but giving the welfare money back to the states and ultimately to the local communities was so we could take poverty out of politics and substitute reality for that old rhetoric now everybody who has ever said a bad word about the welfare system has nothing left to cuss there is nothing there any more and now there is no politics in poverty any more there are only people and they are our people they are our children they are our future this law says to them we re not going to keep you on modified life support forever anymore it s a lousy deal for you and a bad deal for us but here s where you come in this is not the new deal in the great depression any more either the government has to balance the budget to keep interest rates down to keep the economy strong so we can keep creating jobs for everybody we cannot have a government created program that hires all these folks you re going to have to do that sure there will be some hired into public jobs and in areas of densely high unemployment we re going to give extra help in the early years to make sure that people have a chance but by and large over the nation people will have to be hired by employers in the private sector in the nonprofit sector churches and great universities like vanderbilt both public and private but that is better it is better that people be hired 10 or 15 or maybe even one or two at a time and given a chance to just be integrated into the normal flow of american life rather than being hired a thousand at a time to do one thing off here to the side we want everybody to walk together into the future but to do it to do it we have to have an upsurge of personal responsibility from the private sector now as i said under the new law states can take this money the federal government used to give for the monthly welfare check and they can use it to help businesses provide paychecks seven hundred people have gone to work in kansas city at the full employment council that i visited in that system that s a good deal for businesses they can create more jobs for less money and it s a good deal for taxpayers they save money every time someone leaves welfare to work it s a good deal for the people on welfare they get a job the national government has tried to make work pay we ve raised the minimum wage we dramatically expanded the earned income tax credit we have made clearly made now work a better deal than welfare that tax credit alone is worth about 10 billion this year and it s reducing the poverty rate among working people dramatically it only goes to people who are working and it is reducing the poverty rate dramatically by saying we re not going to tax people into poverty anymore the vice president has helped us to create a national network of community development banks a 105 empowerment zones and enterprise communities to get more private capital into the areas where there are large numbers of unemployed people including many who are unemployed who are not on welfare a lot of single men for example i have proposed a plan now that will create another million jobs number one we want to give business a new tax credit for every person hired off welfare number two we want to give the same private job placement firms that americans use to get better jobs for themselves when they re already working we want to give those firms a bonus for helping people on welfare find their first job and we want to help states and communities give businesses more incentives to hire welfare recipients these are the things that we can do we can also give greater investments into those areas as i said where there are a whole lot of people who are unemployed including large welfare populations because we may not be able to get enough private sector jobs in the short run but in the end we can do all this we can do every bit of it but if we don t have more people like noah liff we re not going to make it if we don t have more people like the nearly 50 business leaders who have already agreed to participate here in tennessee we re not going to make it so i ask you every one of you just think what would happen if every business every nonprofit every university every school and every church synagogue and religious institution in this country took what used to go to the welfare recipient in the welfare check as a supplement and hired just one person just one person and took responsibility for training that person making sure their kids were okay and going forward just think about it think what we could do we can revolutionize this this would be over just one person i should emphasize governor mcwherter reminded me you know he plays like he s not interested in policy but he s a policy wonk in his rural clothing he said now when you get up there tonight mr president don t forget to tell them that in tennessee we also guarantee that if these people have to go to work in a place that doesn t have health insurance we set it up so they can keep their health insurance under medicaid for a good while and then after a certain amount of time under tenncare they can buy in at a rate they can afford to keep their health insurance even more that s also important you re doing that it s amazing to me the excitement here the governor of north carolina told me he was in charlotte the other day talking to 4 000 people at the charlotte chamber of commerce and he said before he got out the door 25 percent of them had volunteered to help the other day in missouri the ceo of monsanto asked all his division heads to study every aspect of their company to see what they could do to hire as many people off welfare as possible in monsanto and to i hesitate to use the word but lean on their suppliers and other business contacts to ask them to do the same thing the ceo of sprint pledged to provide an 800 number that any employer in america can call to find out how to move people off welfare a few weeks ago in connecticut hundreds of business leaders pledged that their companies would help us to meet this challenge last week in louisiana the ceo of northrop grumman a company that makes a lot of products important to our national defense did the same but this tennessee business partnership is especially impressive from fortune 500 companies to opryland to companies like the recycling business that noah described it represents your whole business community just remember what i said if every company would just hire one person and not just companies but nonprofits and universities and religious institutions we would whip this thing and if every state will form a partnership like the tennessee business partnership we will work with them to get this job done i want to say again we passed a law that s a good thing the law didn t change anybody s lives and if we don t change the lives benefits will someday be cut off but we won t be creating jobs and building future for those people and their children that s the important thing the other day i was in florida where i met with four very impressive women who were working themselves off welfare and it was phenomenal to me i asked them all why are you doing this and they gave all of the obvious answers and i said what s the most important thing about it and all four of them said we want our children to look up to us we want our children to be proud of us and we want to feel good because we know we re supporting our kids all four of them said that and you know more than 10 years ago i ve told this story many times but i was at a governors meeting when we were talking about reforming the welfare system and i brought a woman from arkansas there and i asked her what the best thing about being off welfare was and she said when my boy goes to school and they say what does your mama do for a living he can give an answer he can give an answer now i have kept in touch with that woman for 10 years and she introduced me the day i signed the welfare reform bill she has four children now this lady who was trapped in welfare one of them has a good job one of them is studying to be a doctor one is in a technical school the other one is a high school honor student i d say welfare reform worked for her and it will work for nearly everybody if the rest of us will just create enough opportunity for all of those people who are dying to have it now i want to say finally we have got to take this law and make it live in the lives of our people we can take poverty out of politics we can give it back to the community there will always be a time when the economy is better and the economy is worse there will always be people who will hit a little rough patch in life and have trouble but we do not need to have a nation with a huge number of people who are physically isolated from the rest of us living lives they can never break out of we have all permitted that to happen now it is time for all of us to stop that from happening and chart a bright new future to the 21st century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton27 10 97 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen you see my voice is a little weak you ll be happy i ll be a shorter speech but we re celebrating two other athletic events here today i think i would be remiss if i did not congratulate the florida marlins and the cleveland indians on a magnificent world series and the vice president on finishing his first marathon yesterday i d also like to welcome the lady vols back it s tough to win those back to back championships al gore and i know something about that and there are many benefits about having pat summit come back here year in and year out i m getting to watch her son grow up and i enjoy it very much i want to say a special word of appreciation since the vice president got to talk about his native team you know a lot of you know that i am a fanatic basketball fan and i got hurt last year right before the tournament the only good thing about my agonizing injury incurred under humiliating circumstances i fell six inches and tore my leg off was that i got to see every game in the tournament that was on any channel on television and i must say i was astonished by the performance of the arizona wildcats they were young they were energetic they never quit and i think that it will be a long time before we see another team so young so full of energy so full of depth beat three number one seeds which had never happened before and produce the kind of record they did in that tournament i want to congratulate miles simon who was named the mvp of the tournament michael dickerson a first team all pac 10 michael bibby who was the all tournament team and the pac 10 freshman of the year he didn t look like a freshman on the court i must say and coach olson i want to congratulate you on taking a team to the tournament i think every year since 1985 which is a truly astonishing record i think that i would be remiss if i did not also say that there are many of us in the united states who love basketball who also want basketball to be a good experience for the basketball players and who want them to become fine citizens fine young men and fine young women we talked about pat summit s students all getting their degrees i think everybody who knows anything about lute olson admires him as a person as well as a basketball coach and admires the qualities that he represents and tries to impart to his players so in spite of all the championships i think that s the most important thing of all and we thank you for that as well now i d like to get on with having the two coaches in clear and strong voice and their players presented to all of you so i d like to invite coach summit and coach olson to come up and share a few words dem wjclinton27 3 96 bill_clinton thank you very much governor miller governor thompson lou gerstner thank you for hosting this terribly important event to all of the governors and distinguished guests education leaders and business leaders who are here let me say that i am also delighted to be here with the secretary of education governor dick riley i believe that he and governor hunt and governor branstad and i were actually there for when the nation at risk report was issued as well as when the education summit was held by president bush i want to thank secretary riley for the work that he has done with the states and with educators all across the country and i know that every one of you has worked with him but i m glad to have him here and he s been a wonderful partner for me and i think for you this is an extraordinary meeting of america s business leaders and america s governors i know some have raised some questions about it but let me just say on the front end i think it is a very appropriate and a good thing to do and i applaud those who organized it and those who have attended the governors after all have primary indeed constitutional responsibility for the conditions of our public schools and the business leaders know well perhaps better than any other single group in america what the consequences of our failing to get the most out of our students and achieve real educational excellence will be for our nation so i am very pleased to see you here doing this and i want to thank each and every one of you i also think you have a better chance than perhaps anyone else even in this season to keep the question of education beyond partisanship and to deal with it as an american challenge that all the american people must meet and must meet together all of you know very well that this is a time of a dramatic transformation in the united states i m not sure if any of us fully understands the true implications of the changes through which we are all living and the responsibilities that those changes impose upon us it is clear to most people that the dimensions of economic change now are the greatest that they have been since we moved from farm to factory and from rural areas to cities and towns 100 years ago in his book the road from here bill gates says that the digital chip is leading us to the greatest transformation in communications in 500 years since gutenberg printed the first bible in europe if that is true it is obvious beyond anyone s ability to argue that the educational enterprise which has always been central to the development of good citizens in america as well as to a strong economy is now more important than ever before that means that we need a candid assessment of what is right and what is wrong with our educational system and what we need to do your focus on standards your focus on assessment your focus on technology is all to the good we know that many of our schools do a very good job but some of them don t we know that many of our teachers are great but some don t measure up we know that many of our communities are seizing the opportunities of the present and the future but too many aren t and most important we know that after the emphasis on education which goes back at least until 1983 and the whole country and to my native region to the south to the late 70s when we began to try to catch up economically with the rest of the country we know that while the schools and the students of this country are doing better than they were in 1984 and better than they were in 1983 when the nation at risk was issued and in 1989 when the education summit was held at charlottesville most of them still are not meeting the standards that are necessary and adequate to the challenges of today so that is really what we have to begin with now america has some interesting challenges that i think are somewhat unique to our country in this global environment in which education is important and we might as well just sort of put them out there on the front end not that we can resolve them today the first is that we have a far more diverse group of students in terms of income and race and ethnicity and background and indeed living conditions than almost any other great country in the world second we have a system in which both authority and financing is more fractured than in other countries is typically the case third we know that our schools are burdened by social problems not of their making which make the jobs of principals and teachers more difficult and fourth and i think most important of all our country still has an attitude problem about education that i think we should resolve that is even prior to the standards and assessment issue and that is that too many people in the united states think that the primary determinant of success and learning is either iq or family circumstances instead of effort and i don t and i don t think any of the research supports that so one of the things that i hope you will say is in a positive way that you believe all kids can learn and in a stronger way that you believe that effort is more important than iq or income given the right kind of educational opportunities the right kind of expectations it s often been said that americans from time to time suffer from a revolution of rising expectations this is one area where we need a revolution of rising expectations we ought to all simply and forthrightly say that we believe that school is children s work and play that it can be great joy but that effort matters i see one of our business leaders here a former state senator from arkansas senator joe ford his father was the head of our educational program in arkansas for a long time we had a lot of people in one room schoolhouses 40 and 50 and 60 years ago reading simple readers who believed that effort was more important than iq or income they didn t know what iq was and we have got to change that and governors every governor and every business leader in this country can make a difference i m no einstein and not everybody can do everything but if you stack this up from one to the other all the americans together in order by iq you couldn t stick a straw between one person and the next and you know it as well as i do most people can learn everything they need to know to be good citizens and successful participants in the american economy and in the global economy and i believe that unless you can convince your constituents that that is the truth that all of your efforts to raise standards and all of your efforts to have accountability through tests and other assessments will not be as successful as they ought to be and i think frankly a lot of people even in education need to be reminded of that from time to time now let s get back to the good news thirty or 40 years ago maybe even 20 years ago no one could ever have conceived of a meeting like this taking place governors played little role in education until just a couple of decades ago and business didn t regard it as their responsibility in the late 70s and early 80s this whole wave began to sweep america and one important positive thing that ought never to be overlooked is that the business leadership of america and the governors of this country have been literally obsessed with education for a long time now and that s a very good thing because one of the problems with america is that we tend to be in the grip of serial enthusiasms it s the hula hoop today and something else tomorrow boy that dates me doesn t it in this country the governors have displayed a remarkable consistency of commitment to education and at least since 1983 the business community has displayed that commitment and i think it s fair to say that all of us have learned some things as we have gone along which is what has brought you to this point that there is a you understand now and i ve heard lou gerstner talk about it in his almost his mantra about standards that we understand that the next big step has to be to have some meaningful and appropriately high standards and then hold people accountable for them i think it s worth noting that the 1983 nation at risk report did do some good things almost every state in the country went back and revised its curriculum requirement many revised their class size requirements many did other things to upgrade teacher training or to increase college scholarships or to do a lot of other things in 1989 i was privileged to be in charlottesville working with governor branstad and with governor campbell primarily as we were trying to get all the governors together to develop the statement at the education summit with president bush and that was the first time there had ever been a bipartisan national consensus on educational goals the realization was in 1989 was that six years after a nation at risk all these extra requirements were being put into education but nobody had focused on what the end game was what did we want america to look like it s worth saying that we wanted every child to show up for school ready to learn that we wanted to be proficient in certain core courses and were willing to assess our students to see if we were that we wanted to prepare our people for the world of work that we wanted to be extra good in math and science and to overcome our past deficiencies all the things that were in those educational goals were worth saying another thing that the charlottesville summit did that i think is really worth emphasizing is that it defined for the first time from the governors up what the federal role in education ought to be and what it should not be i went back this morning just on the way up and i read the charlottesville statement about what the governors then unanimously voted that the federal role should be and what it should not be when i became president and i asked dick riley to become secretary of education i said that our legislative agenda ought to be consistent completely consistent with what the governors had said at charlottesville so for example the governors said at charlottesville the federal government has a bigger responsibility to help people show up for school prepared to learn so we emphasized things like more funds for head start and more investment in trying to improve the immunization rates of kids and other health indicators and more responsibility for access to higher education so we tried to reform the student loan program and invest more money in pell grants and national service and things like that and then more responsibility to give greater flexibility to the states in k 12 and to try to promote reform without defining how any of this should be done and so that s what goals 2000 was about we tried to have a system in which states and mostly local school districts could pursue world class standards based on their own plans for grass roots reform and we overhauled the elementary and secondary education act an we redid title i to do one thing that i think is very important we took out of what was then in the law for chapter one which was lower educational expectations for poor children it was an outrage and we took it out of the law i don t believe that poor children should be expected to perform at lower levels than other children and dick riley since he has been secretary of education has cut federal regulations over states and local school districts by more than 50 percent it seems to me that that is consistent with exactly what the governors said at charlottesville they wanted done now the effort to have national standards i think it s fair to say has been less than successful the history standards and the english standards effort did not succeed for reasons that have been well analyzed although i m not sure the debate was entirely worthless i think the debate itself did some good but there are recommended standards that have been widely embraced coming out of the math teachers that most people think are quite good and the preliminary indications for science are encouraging and i want to say again it would be wrong to say that there s been no progress since 1983 the number of young people taking core courses has jumped from 13 percent in 82 to 52 percent in 94 the national math and science scores are up a grade since 1983 half of all the four year olds now attend preschool 86 percent of all our young people are completing high school we re almost up to the 90 percent that was in the national education goals that is progress but what we have learned since charlottesville and what you are here to hammer home to america is that the overall levels of learning are not enough and that there are still significant barriers in various schools to meeting higher standards i accept your premise we can only do better with tougher standards and better assessment and you should set the standards i believe that is absolutely right and that will be the lasting legacy of this conference i also believe along with mr gerstner and the others who are here that it s very important not only for businesses to speak out for reform but for business leaders to be knowledgeable enough to know what reform to speak out for and what to emphasize and how to hammer home the case for higher standards as well as how to help local school districts change some of the things that they are now doing so that they have a reasonable chance at meeting these standards let me just go through now what i think we should do in challenging the country on standards for students as well as for teachers and schools i suppose that i have spent more time in classrooms than any previous president partly because i was a governor for 12 years and partly because i still do it with some frequency i believe the most important thing you can do is to have high expectations for students to make them believe they can learn to tell them they re going to have to learn really difficult challenging things to assess whether they re learning or not and to hold them accountable as well as to reward them most children are very eager to learn those that aren t have probably been convinced they can t we can do better with that i believe that once you have high standards and high expectations there is an unlimited number of things that can be done but i also believe that there have to be consequences i watched your panel last night and i thought the moment of levity on the panel was when al shanker was asked when i was teaching school and i would give students homework they said does it count that s the thing i remember about the panel last night all of you remember too you laughed right does it count and the truth is that in the world we re living in today does it count has to mean something particularly in places where there haven t been any standards for a long time so if the states are going to go back and raise standards so that you re not only trying to increase the enrollment in core courses you re trying to make the core courses themselves mean more i heard governor hunt last night say he d be willing to settle for reading and writing and math and science i think were the ones you said once you have to if you re going to go back and define what s in those core courses and you re going to lift it up you have to be willing then to hold the students accountable for whether they have achieved that or not and again another thing that mr shanker said that i ve always believed we have always downgraded teaching to the test but if you re going to know whether people learn what you expect them to know then you have to test them on what you expect them to know so i believe that if you want the standards movement to work first you have to do the hard work in deciding what it is you expect children to learn but then you have to have an assessment system however you design it in your own best judgment at the state level that says no more social promotions no more free passes if you want people to learn learning has to mean something that s what i believe i don t believe you can succeed unless you are prepared to have an assessment system with consequences in arkansas in 1983 when we redid the educational standards we had a very controversial requirement that young people pass the 8th grade tests to go on to high school and not everybody passed it and we let people take it more than once i think it s fine to do that but even today after 13 years i think there are only five states in the country today which require a promotion for either grade to grade or school to school for its young people to require tests for that i believe that if you have meaningful standards that you have confidence in that you believe if they re met your children will know what they need to know you shouldn t be afraid to find out if they re learning it and you shouldn t be deterred by people saying this is cruel this is unfair or whatever they say the worst thing you can do is send people all the way through school with a diploma they can t read and you re not being unfair to people if you give them more than one chance and if at the same time you improve the teaching and the operation of the schools in which they are if you believe these kids can learn you have to give them a chance to demonstrate it this is only a cruel short sided thing to do if you are convinced that there are limitations on what the american children can do and i just don t believe that so that i think is the most important thing i believe every state if you re going to have meaningful standards must require a test for children to move let s say from elementary to middle school or from middle school to high school or to have a full meaning high school diploma and i don t think they should measure just minimum competency you should measure what you expect these standards to measure you know when we instituted any kind of test at home i was always criticized by the fact that the test wasn t hard enough but i think it takes time to transform a system and you may decide it takes time to transform a system but you will never know whether your standards are being met unless you have some sort of measurement and have some sort of accountability and while i believe they should be set by the states and the testing mechanism should be approved by the states we shouldn t kid ourselves being promoted ought to mean more or less the same thing in pasadena california that it does in palisades new york in a global society it ought to mean more or less the same thing i was always offended by suggestion that the kids who grew up in the mississippi delta in arkansas which is the poorest place in america shouldn t have access to the same learning opportunities that other people should and couldn t learn i don t believe that so i think the idea i heard the way governor engler characterized it last night i thought was pretty good you want a non federal national mechanism to sort of share this information so that you ll at least know how you re doing compared to one another that s a good start that s a good way to begin this i also believe that we shouldn t ignore the progress that s been made by the goals panel since governor romer was first leader of that going through governor engler and by the national assessment on educational progress i know a lot of you talked about that last night they ve done a lot of good things and we can learn a lot from them we don t have to reinvent the wheel here i also would like to go back and emphasize something i heard governor hunt say last night i think we should begin with a concrete standard for reading and writing because the most troubling thing to me is that we ve been through a decade in which math and science scores have risen and reading scores have stayed flat intel recently had to turn away hundreds of applicants because they lacked basic reading and writing skills now that will present you with an immediate problem because if you want to measure reading and writing you will not be able just to have a multiple choice test which can be graded by a machine you ll have to recognize that teachers do real work with kids when they teach them how to write and you have to give them the time and support to do that and then there has to be some way of evaluating that i know that s harder and more expensive but it really matters whether a child can read and write and for all the excitement about the computers in the schools and i am a big proponent of it i would note that when we started with a computer program in our school and i believe when governor caper started in west virginia he started in the early grades for the precise purpose that technology should be used first to give children the proper grounding in basic skills so i think that s quite important secretary riley says that every child should be able to read independently by the end of the third grade and parenthetically that if that were the standard i think we would be more successful in getting parents to read to their children every night which would revolutionize the whole system of education anyway the second thing i think we have to do is to face the fact that if we want to have these standards for children standards and tests we have to have a system that rewards and inspires and demands higher standards of teachers they after all do this work the rest of us talk about it and they do it so that means that first of all you ve got to get the most talented people in there there s been a lot of talk about this for a decade now but most states and school districts still need work on their certification rules we should not bar qualified even brilliant young people from becoming teachers the teach for america group in my home state did a wonderful job and a lot of those young kids wind up staying and teaching even though they can make two and three times as much money doing something else every state should in my view review that i also believe any time you re trying to hold teachers to higher standards they should be rewarded when they perform i know that in south carolina and kentucky if schools markedly improve their performance they get bonuses and the teachers get the benefit that s not a bad thing that s a good thing and we should have more of that i want to thank governor hunt for the work he s done on the national board for professional teaching standards we had the first group of teachers who are board certified in the white house not very long ago every state should have a system in my opinion for encouraging these teachers to become board certified the federal government doesn t have anything to do with that encourage these teachers to become board certified because they have to demonstrate not only knowledge but teaching skills and when they achieve that level they should be rewarded there should be extra rewards when they do that we also need a system that doesn t look the other way if a teacher is burned out or not performing up to standard there ought to be a fair process for removing teachers who aren t competent but the process also has to be much faster and far less costly than it is i read the other day that in new york it can cost as much as 200 000 to dismiss a teacher who is incompetent in glen ellen illinois a school district spent 70 000 to dismiss a high school math teacher who couldn t do basic algebra and let the students sleep in class that is wrong we should do more to reward good teachers we should have a system that is fair to teachers but moves much more expeditiously and much more cheaply in holding teachers accountable so states and school systems and teachers unions need to be working together to make it tougher to get licensed and recertified easier and less costly to get teachers who can t teach out of the classrooms and clearly set rewards for teachers who are performing especially if they become board certified or in some state defined way prove themselves excellent the third thing i think we have to do is to hold schools accountable for results we have known now for a long time we have no excuses for not doing we have known for a long time that the most important player in this drama besides the teachers and the students are the school principals the building principals and yet still not every state has a system for holding the school districts accountable for having good principals in all these schools and then giving the principals the authority they need to do the job getting out of their way and holding them accountable both on the up side and the down side to me that is still the most important thing every school i go into i can stay there about 30 minutes and tell you pretty much what the principal has done to establish a school culture an atmosphere of learning a system of accountability a spirit of adventure you can just feel it and it s still the most important thing secondly the business community can do a lot of work with the governors to help these school districts reinvent their budgets i think there are still too many school districts spending way too much money on administration and too little money on education and instruction and there needs to be some real effort put into that that goes beyond rhetoric i mean i was given these statistics which i assume are true because i had it vetted four different times i hate to use numbers if it is true that new york city spends 8 000 a student on education but only 44 goes to books and other classroom materials that s a disgrace that s wrong and that s true in a lot of other school districts we cannot ask the american people to spend more on education until we do a better job with the money we ve got now that s an area where i think the business community can make a major major contribution a lot of you have had to restructure your own operations a lot of you have had to achieve far higher levels of productivity if we can reduce the federal government by 200 000 people without undermining our essential mission we can do a much better job in the school districts of the country let me also say i think that we ought to encourage every state to do what most states are now doing which is to provide more options for parents you know the terms of the public school choice legislation and the charter schools a lot of you have done a very good job with the charter schools but i m excited about the idea that educators and parents get to actually start schools create and manage them and stay open only if they do a good job within the public school system every charter school i visited was an exciting place today 21 of you allow charter schools there are over 250 schools with are open 100 more are going to open next year freed up from regulation and top down bureaucracy focusing on meeting higher standards the schools have to be able to meet these standards if you impose them secretary riley has helped 11 states to start new schools and in the balanced budget plan i submitted to congress last week there is 40 million in seed money to help start 3 000 more charter schools over the next five years which would be a tenfold increase that may become the order of the day so i believe we need standards and accountability for students for teachers and for schools let me just mention two other things briefly i don t believe you can possibly minimize and a lot of the governors i know have been in these schools you cannot minimize how irrelevant this discussion would seem to a teacher who doesn t feel safe walking the halls of his or her schools or how utterly hopeless it seems to students who have to look over their shoulders when they re walking to and from school so i believe that we have to work together to continue to make our schools safe and our students held to a reasonable standard of conduct as well you know we had a teacher in washington last week who was mugged in a hallway by a gang of intruders not students a gang of intruders who were doing drugs and didn t even belong on the school grounds we have got to keep working on that all the federal government can do is give resources and pass laws that s another thing the business community can help with district after district this entire discussion we have had is completely academic unless there is a safe and a disciplined and a drug free environment in these schools we passed the safe and drug free schools act the gun free schools act we supported random drug testing in schools we have supported the character education movement we ve almost ended lawsuits over religious issues by the guidelines that secretary riley and the attorney general issued showing that our schools don t have to be religion free zones we have worked very hard to help our schools do their job here the next thing i hope we can do all of us in this regard is to help to work our schools stay open longer our budget contains 14 million for helping people set up these community schools to stay open longer hours but remember that 3 00 p m in the afternoon to 6 00 p m in the evening are the peak hours for juvenile crime and all that comes back into the schools so i think that s another thing we really need to look at a lot of these schools do not have the resources today to stay open longer hours but they would if they could and one of the primary targets i would have if i were a local leader trying to redo my district school budget is to reduce the amount spent on administration so that i could invest more money in keeping it open longer hours especially for the latch key kids and the other kids that are in trouble that don t have any other place to go so that s something that i think is very important finally let me just echo what governor miller said about the technology we did have a barn raising in california and we hooked up actually more than 20 percent of the classrooms to the internet on a single day but we need every classroom and every library and every school in america hooked up to the internet as quickly as possible we set a goal as the year 2000 we could actually get there more quickly i propose that in the budget a 2 billion fund to help the communities who don t have the money to meet the challenge but every community every state in america at least has a high tech community that could help get this done the congress passed a very fine telecommunications act that i signed not very long ago which gives preferential treatment to people in isolated rural areas or inner city areas for access to schools and hospitals so the infrastructure the framework is there anything you can do to help do that i think is good if the educators use the technology in the proper way and i ll just close with this example i was in the union city school district in new jersey not very long ago that school district was about to be closed under the state of new jersey s school bankruptcy law which i think by the way is very good holding school districts accountable and they can actually lose their ability to operate as an independent district in new jersey and the state takes them over if they keep failing there are a lot of first generation immigration children in that school it was basically a poor school bell atlantic went in and worked with others they put computers in all the classrooms they also put computer outlets in the homes of a lot of these parents and you had i talked to a man who came here from el salvador 10 years ago who is now e mailing his child s principal and teacher to figure out how the kid s doin dem wjclinton27 4 98 bill_clinton thank you very much mr president director all the officials of hebrew university mr vice president members of the cabinet the administration members of the congress i d like to especially thank dr dunn dr nyang dr schorsch and richard dreyfuss and linda lavin for their wonderful contributions to this day to ambassador and mrs ben elissar thank you for being here to all of our former ambassadors to the united states and other distinguished guests from israel and my fellow americans i d also like to ask that we give a special word of appreciation to the people who provided all that wonderful music which got us in the right frame of mind band thank you very much if you could hang around here for a month or two i think we might get some things done you d keep us all in a very positive frame of mind i am very honored to receive this degree from hebrew university of jerusalem honored because its founders include chaim weizmann martin buber sigmund freud and albert einstein honored because it is now one of the world s leading centers of learning and research i must say i never expected to be doing this here many american universities have satellite campuses where working people like me can obtain degrees at locations near their homes and offices this is more than i ever could have anticipated president magidor thank you for bringing this ceremony here so that those of us who cannot go to israel in a couple of days may share in the celebration of this magnificent 50th birthday i accept this honor today on behalf of my predecessors beginning with harry truman nine american presidents all devoted to israel s security and freedom all committed to peace in the middle east i accept it on behalf of the american people who have formed not just an alliance but a profound friendship with the people of israel over these last 50 years today we celebrate that extraordinary 50 years in 1948 israel arose from the seeds of the diaspora and the ashes of the holocaust the children of abraham and sara survivors of 2 000 years of exile and persecution were home at last and free at last for its founders the israeli state was however about even more than securing a haven for the jewish people after centuries of suffering and wandering isaiah prophesied that israel would become a light unto the nations and david ben gurion and his allies set out to make that prophecy come true by establishing a society of light embracing what ben gurion called the higher virtues of truth justice and compassion ben gurion believed israel could lead the world to a better future by marrying the ethical teachings of the ancients with the discoveries of modern science it is only by the integration of the two he wrote that the blessings of both can flourish of course he also envisioned a third great achievement for israel that with strength and wisdom and skill israel would build a lasting peace with its arab neighbors as we have heard today relations between our two nations were born of another leader s courage and vision harry truman brushed aside the urgings of his advisors as he often did when they said go slow wait and see before offering israel recognition for him supporting a jewish homeland was a moral imperative rooted in his understanding of the sufferings and dreams of the jews from biblical times and as we learned from richard s wonderful reading it occurred just 11 minutes after israel proclaimed independence we in becoming the first country to recognize israel had one of our proudest moments not only that 50 years later old harry truman looks pretty smart look what israel has done under a brilliant blue sky the israelis have built prosperous farms and kibitzes planted forests turned streets of sand into shining boulevards raised families and welcomed the arrival of brothers and sisters from europe and north africa from russia and ethiopia and america israelis have dazzled the world with achievements in science and scholarship in literature and the art they have built a thriving democracy and despite the passage of 50 years israelis seem to love and practice their freedom as if they had only just gained it they never seem to cease challenging themselves about their history their relationship with their neighbors the hard choices for the future if anyone ever wonders whether there is ever a place in the world where you can have freedom and honest vigorous 24 hour a day seven day a week 365 day a year argument go to israel it is truly one of the most pulsating vibrant places on earth alive with thousands of sounds prayers in dozens of languages in the old city young people gathered on the avenues of tel aviv computer keyboards tapping new ventures launched on the internet school children now conversing in hebrew once the language only of sacred text now the voice of an israeli renaissance and the economy has been propelled by all this energy and activity into being one of the most advanced and diversified in the world per capita income now matching nations in europe exports last year were 32 billion dollars 1 000 times their level in 1948 hi tech companies hi tech people you go to israel it looks as if you can t be a citizen of israel unless you have a cell phone glued to your hand yes israelis have gone a very long way toward fulfilling the first two pieces of ben gurion s vision surely they have built an ethical democratic society and a modern science and technology based economy it has endured against great odds by prevailing again and again in battle the valor of citizen soldiers and military and political leaders like golda meir moshe dayan yonni netanyahu but the battle for the third piece of ben gurion s vision a just secure and lasting peace is still being waged and still in blood and tears camp david brought piece between israel and egypt but it cost anwar sadat his life here on this very spot on a brilliant day in september of 1993 yitzhak rabin committed himself not only to an agreement with mr arafat but to a comprehensive peace in the middle east how bravely he pursued it but it cost him his life jews and arabs who have wanted nothing more than to live quiet normal lives are still denied that simple pleasure still as the new century dawns the world is filled with the promise and hope that we can overcome ancient hatreds to build a modern peace for our children from guatemala to mozambique to bosnia and now even to the land of my ancestors in ireland longtime antagonists have left the battleground to find common ground they are weary of war they long for peace for their children they move beyond hatred to hope this is a time for reconciliation around the world it must be a time to deepen freedom and raise up life in the middle east the 21st century can and must be a century of democracy prosperity and justice and of course of peace but it can be only if we learn not only to respect but to honor our differences the middle east can build on the momentous achievements of its nobel prize winners begin and sadat arafat peres and rabin so that all its children may grow up without fear in a land holy to three great religions sacred sites for islam judaism and christianity exist side by side if there is so much history there the children of all that history should be able to live together again and again extremists have sought to derail peace with bullets and bombs again and again they demonstrate the real divisions today are not between jews and arabs but between those stuck in the past and those who long for a better future between those paralyzed by hatred and those energized by hope those who stand with clenched fists and those who reach out with open hands we cannot let the extremists prevail israel can fulfill its full promise by drawing on the courage and vision of its founders to achieve peace with security never has the opportunity been more real and it must not be lost you know i was sitting here on the stage today listening to everything that was said and thinking of all the great gifts that israel has given the united states in 1963 35 years ago this year when israel was still a young nation and president kennedy was killed your then united nations ambassador mr eban gave an enormous gift to the american people in all of our pain by putting in one short terse sentence how we all felt when he said tragedy is the difference between what is and what might have been as we look ahead to tomorrow let us define triumph by turning his formula on its head triumph is when there is no difference between what might have been and what is let us in the united states say that we will stand by israel always foursquare for its security always together in friendship but we want this debate to continue until there is no difference between what might have been and what is we look at hebrew university and see all three pieces of david ben gurion s dream coming to life we see biologists developing techniques to locate a single cancer cell among millions of healthy ones we see the moral commitment to keeping people s health among the scientists there we see hebrew university researchers undertaking efforts in cooperation with palestinian researchers in east jerusalem one of the participants in the project said it s science and peace together we know that much more is possible we must understand that much more is essential fifty years from now the 21st century will near its midpoint and israel will have a 100th birthday celebration sure as the world our grandchildren will be hanging around here on this lawn what do you think they ll be able to say and what will they be celebrating it is my dream that on that 100th anniversary people from every country in the middle east will gather in the holy land and all the land will be holy to all of them as a christian i do not know how god if he were to come to earth would divide the land over which there is dispute now i suspect neither does anyone else in this audience but i know that if we all pray for the wisdom to do god s will chances are we will find a way to close the gap in the next couple of years between what might be and what is i think that is what we owe the founders of israel to finish ben gurion s dream thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton27 4 99 bill_clinton thank you very much carolyn john conyers senator chafee senator feinstein all the many members of congress who are here i thank the attorney general the secretary of the treasury and secretary of education i m glad to see our old friend mayor helmke and bob walker and others here we have i think over 40 members of congress here and two senators who went back to the floor to fight for this issue to be put on the floor today i would like to do two things first i want to tell you specifically what we are proposing and i ll do that but secondly i would like to tie what we are proposing to all these culture arguments and talk about if you will at least two cultures that exist in america and say that i think this in the end is going to come down to what our conception of america as a community is and what our responsibilities to one another are i want to begin by saying a lot of people have made remarkable contributions i think to this effort to get us to look at the violence of our culture and how it makes the most vulnerable of our children without regard to their income or their social status closer to the line of taking violent action and how it complicates family life for everyone i want to thank hillary for what she s done i also want to thank al and tipper gore who have done enormously important work on this for years to try to help us deal with the tv issues the ratings the v chips and now the new efforts we ve been making with the internet community to give parents some more control over that and the efforts we have to make to train the parents to figure out how to do it since their kids all know more about it than they do but this is very important stuff in june tipper gore s going to host our white house conference on mental health and the attorney general and hillary and i were just talking about some of the things we can do to help to make sure all of our schools have the adequate mentoring and mediation and even mental health services our kids need all this is very important and we have to deal with that but if you believe that we have special cultural challenges it seems to me that that s an argument that we ought to bend over backwards to try to remove the opportunities for bad things happening if we have more kids that are vulnerable to doing those things not an argument that we ought to say well we should walk away from that and just try to make sure everybody individually in the whole country never does anything wrong and what s the real problem here the problem is we have another culture in our country that i think has gotten confused about its objectives we have a huge hunting and sport shooting culture in america and unlike many of you i grew up in it i was 12 years old the first time i took a 22 and shot it at a can on a fencepost in the country i know about this we always talk about the nra the nra has been powerful not only because they have a lot of money but because they can influence people who vote and in that culture people believe everybody should be personally responsible for their actions if you just punish people who do wrong more harshly fewer people will do wrong and everybody tells me i ve got a constitutional right to keep and bear arms so don t fool with me and every reasonable restriction is just the camel s nose in the tent and pretty soon they ll come after my shotgun and i ll miss the next duck hunting season and we smile about that but there are some people who would be on this platform today who lost their seats in 1994 because they voted for the brady bill and they voted for the assault weapons ban and they did it in areas where people could be frightened and the voters had not had enough time which they did have within two more years to see that nobody was going to take their gun away so we have more than one cultural problem here and i want to make a plea to everybody who is waiting for the next deer season in my home state to think about this in terms of what our reasonable obligations to the larger community of america are do we know for absolutely certain that if we had every reasonable law and the ones i m going to propose here that none of these school violence things would have happened no but we do know one thing for certain we know there would have been fewer of them and there would have been fewer kids killed in the last several years in america we know that for certain we know that cultures are hard to change and cultures should never be used to avoid individual responsibility but we when we get to where we change then we wonder we look back and we say how could we have ever done it otherwise let me ask you something next time you get on an airplane think about how you d feel if the headline in the morning paper right before you got on the airplane was airport metal detectors and x ray machines abolished as infringement on americans constitutional right to travel think about it that s the headline in the morning paper and right next to it there is another headline terrorist groups expanding operations in the united states and you read the two headlines and you re getting on the airplane exercising your constitutional right to travel which is now no longer infringed by the fact that you might have to go through the metal detector twice and take out your money clip or take off your heavily metaled belt and that somebody is x raying your luggage as it gets on the airplane it s unthinkable now isn t it this will become unthinkable too that we should ever reverse these things if we ever have enough sense to do them but we still have a cultural and a political argument that says to defend americans rights to reasonable hunting and sport shooting you have to defend the indefensible as well this is it doesn t make any sense at all unless you re caught up in this sort of web of distorted logic and denial but carolyn mccarthy may have made the most important point here we re all in here preaching to the saved you wouldn t be here if you didn t agree but somebody needs to call these members that grew up where i grew up that lived in the same culture i did that belonged to both parties and say hey we ve got to make this like airport metal detectors and x ray machines this is about our community this is about our responsibility to our children this is about protecting our children and the vulnerable children themselves from people who are about to go over the line here and this is crazy that we re living in a society that takes no reasonable steps to protect the larger community so it s not just a culture of violence that has to change it s the culture of hunting and sport shooting that has to stop financing efforts to frighten their members who are good god fearing law abiding taxpaying citizens out there into believing that every time we try to save a kid s life it s a camel s nose in the tent i have had to go through those metal detectors as many as three times back when i had a real life and i was traveling around because i had all kinds of stuff in there and every time i start to get a little aggravated i think boy i don t want that plane to blow up you know make me go through a dozen times if you want to and the person behind me now we ve got to think about this in that way these are the folks we have to reach when there are no constituents for this movement the movement will evaporate when people from rural pennsylvania and rural west virginia and rural colorado and idaho start calling their congressmen and saying hey man we can live with this we can live with this this is no big deal you know i mean we re just out there doing what we do we ll gladly put up with an extra hassle a little wait a little this a little that because we want to save several thousand kids a year that is my challenge to you that is what os going on now here are the things we want to do a lot of you won t think they re enough but you remember the culture you change the culture we ll change the laws you change the message we ll do it and none of them have anything to do with anybody s legitimate right to hunt first of all we ought to strengthen the brady law it s kept 250 000 felons fugitives and stalkers the states now have the insta check system which is good the mandatory waiting period has expired that s bad because we need it in addition to the insta check system to give a cooling off period to people who are in a fit of rage it s important the law that we would present the act will also prevent juveniles who commit violent crimes from ever buying a gun it would apply the brady law s prohibition to juvenile violence it would require brady background checks on anyone who wants to buy explosives very important and it would abolish at long last as senator feinstein said a dangerous loophole that was likely exploited in littleton which allows people to buy weapons at gun shows without any background checks at all now you need to go make this case on this gun show deal i don t know how many of you have ever been to one of these gun shows i ve been to gun shows in rural america people walk around and they ve got their cars and they ve got their trunk open and people walk in and say this is nice and that s nice and this is a 100 year old rifle and blah blah blah and then they say this is just too much hassle you know people pay cash and nobody you know so it s going to be a hassle for them it s worth it it s worth it we re sorry it s worth it you don t have to pretend it won t be a hassle tell them you know it will be a hassle it s worth it people s lives are at stake here what these shows started out doing which was a good way for people who live in rural areas it started out primarily in rural ares who enjoy hunting and interested in different kinds of weapons to have an interesting experience on a weekend afternoon has turned out to be a gaping loophole through which criminals and deranged people and other people get guns they could not otherwise get and so we have to say we haven t asked you to abolish your gun shows but we ve asked you to undergo the inconvenience necessary to save more lives we don t have to be insensitive we just have to be determined but i m telling you if we don t do something about this gun show loophole we re going to continue to have serious serious problems and it s very important the second thing we ve got to do is to strengthen the assault weapons ban to close the loophole that allows dealers to sell older high capacity ammunition magazines manufactured abroad now i bet you when senator feinstein was talking about this she thought now who in the world could be against this i actually had a conversation with a member of congress who said to me serious a good person it was a really good person when we were doing this back in a 94 a really good person this person i was talking to who told me let me tell you i just want you to understand what the argument was he said but you ve got to understand we ve got people who use these bigger magazines for certain kinds of sport contests and i said well so what but he said they ll beat me if i vote for this i said they ll beat you if they think all you re doing is making their lives miserable because some washington bureaucrat asked you to do it if you can explain to them that it s worth a minor alteration in their sporting habits to save people s lives they won t beat you but my point is you ve got to help these people you hear this and you think god this is a no brainer this is a hundred to nothing deal who in the wide world could ever be you have to understand there is another culture out there and almost everybody in it is god fearing law abiding taxpaying and they show up when they re needed and they don t like this because they don t understand that if they do what you re asking them to do they can save a lot of lives and we have got to fix this this is just pure mathematics you re going to have fewer people die if you get rid of these magazines so you need to go out there where the problem is and debate your fellow citizens and discuss it with them it s important the third thing the legislation would do is to raise the legal age of handgun possession from 18 to 21 years it would also strengthen our zero tolerance for guns in schools which as one of the previous members said had led us to 6 000 suspensions or expulsions last year by requiring schools to report to the police any student who brings a gun to school and requiring that the student get counseling that i think is very important the provision holding adults criminally responsible would only apply but this is quite important but it would apply if they recklessly failed to keep firearms out of the reach of young people this would mandate a steep increase in penalties for adults who transfer guns illegally to juveniles it would require child safety locks to be sold with all new guns finally it would crack down on illegal gun trafficking doubling the number of cities now working with the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms to trace every gun seized by the police i know this is very important to congresswoman mccarthy it would require that dealers submit information not only on the guns they sell but on used guns which are often very hard for law enforcement agencies to trace it would significantly increase penalties for gun runners caught trafficking large numbers of firearms it would establish a national system as soon as it s feasible to limit handgun purchases to one a month following the lead of virginia you know i ve got to say this is very interesting when we were going over the list of things we wanted to propose some people said well that might be a loser because it sounds to people who care about this like that s too many and what is this you know the states that have had big problems in the past with lost of illegal gun purchases and guns then being used for illegal purposes virginia did this and it really helped them this was a big deal and i just talked to senator robb about this a couple days ago and he said you know all i can tell you is it s working in our state so i would ask you to seriously consider what this might mean for our efforts to control the law enforcement aspects of this so these are the things that i wanted to say but i hope you ll remember what i said to you about the culture we do have to keep working on the culture hillary s right about it al and tipper gore are right about it we ve got a lot of responsibilities we ve got to keep working on the services for kids we ve even got to work on helping parents actually communicate with their children one senator called me the last before last and said he d had a town meeting in his state with children and he asked how many of the schoolchildren had actually talked to their parents about what happened in littleton and only 10 percent of the kids raised their hands and one child said i had to go and turn off the television and tell my parents we were going to talk about it she said they re just scared they re scared they didn t know how to talk about it so there are all these cultural issues and then there s this big cultural issue of the gun and sport hunting culture and i hope that a lot of my folks at home might take offense at what i said today but i m trying to help explain them to you and i felt comfortable taking on these issues and i thought maybe i was in a unique position to take on all these gun issues all these years because of where i grew up and because i understand how people think who don t agree with this but i m telling you we ve got to keep working until people start thinking about this stuff the same way they think about x rays and metal detectors at airports that s the goal we have to redefine the national community so that we have a shared obligation to save children s lives and we ve got to get out of this crazy denial that this won t make a difference it s crazy it won t make just because it won t make all the difference doesn t mean it won t make a difference it will make a difference i implore you to remember what these members have said i implore you to go out and get people going at the grass roots as carolyn mccarthy said we need help we can pass all this if the american people want it bad enough we can pass it all if the american people want it badly enough and we don t need to go through another littleton for the american people to want it badly enough you can help make sure that happens thank you dem wjclinton27 5 02 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you very much jeff and lindsey fletcher thank you for inviting me here prime minister clark it was wonderful to see you again to rekindle our friendship thank you for your work mr mayor and mrs banks to the leader of the opposition ambassador swindles and mrs swindles thank you for your service for america here i d also like to thank the 55 people in new zealand who can afford this new bmw here for coming to dinner tonight i was beginning to think i d come all this long way and wouldn t find them i knew paul holmes could afford a bmw you know when i was a boy actually i my uncle and my step father both owned buick dealerships when i was a little boy the first work i ever did was under the belly of a car i learned how to change the oil and adjust the wheels it was hard dirty work it was really good preparation for politics all the kids in my hometown we sort of thought that our success in life would be measured if we could ever afford a bmw now with this 7 series we re still asking the same question actually this is a great car if you ve ever driven a bmw the only thing is you have the feeling that it s driving itself and you can be a total idiot and still succeed at doing that i want to thank you too seriously jeff and all your people at bmw for the work you do with the cure kids program and the work you re doing on childhood leukemia for personal reasons that means a lot to me and when i was president we put a lot of money into that endeavor so thank you for making another contribution to that endeavor as a result of tonight as well as has already been said i came to new zealand once before back when i had that other job and we had an apec meeting in 1999 actually this asia pacific economic cooperation group has been meeting for years and years and years but when i took office what was that about when i took office in 1993 the leaders had never met so these poor people came together and they worked every year and then everyone ignored what they did so i decided that we should start having the leaders of the asia pacific region meet we met first in seattle washington and hillary accused me of devising a devilish plot to give me an excuse to go to all these countries i wanted to visit because then we never had to host it again and for 7 years i got to go out and see the world in 1989 i got to come to new zealand i had a wonderful trip hillary and chelsea came with me and like all americans i ve ever known i fell in love with the people and with the beauty of the place and i m very glad to be back i learned a lot of things when i was here last we were in queenstown i heard that you originated bungee jumping and several of staff tried it they wanted me to try it too but i told them i didn t want to try it it was too much like being president you know everybody watches you take a flying leap into the unknown and half the people are hoping the strap will break on the way down there are a lot of ups and downs and even the bad jumps are pretty exhilarating so i ve had a good time and if you don t break your back the only thing left to break is your spirit so you just kind of keep going let me say on a more serious note i am very grateful for the decades and decades of friendship and partnership shared by the people of the united states and new zealand the work we have done together in fighting for freedom and working for more open trade and advancing the cause of human rights last week prime minister clark and i were in east timor to celebrate the independence day of the very first new nation of the 21st century i am grateful that new zealand joined australia the other ausion countries and the united states in committing our forces to provide stability and security to the people of east timor so long beleaguered so often bloodied so terribly destroyed and impoverished by the events of the last several years we have given them a chance now to have their freedom and their children their future it could not have been done without the work that was done here and by your neighbors in australia and i am very grateful for it and glad i could play a small role in it i also want to thank you for something else that s a particular favorite of mine and that is for providing us a home base here for our program in antarctica we have a big operation that runs out of christ church and i learned when i was here last time that down on the ross ice shelf the pub at your scott base is occasionally a destination for americans who work nearby at mcmurdough station indeed every thursday night is american night at the south pole now you know when two different nations can have people drinking beer when it s 25 below zero they must have something in common let me say to all of you they do a lot of important things down there and we should be very serious in our support of them just a few months ago an enormous chunk of the ice shelf broke off providing fresh evidence of the reality of global warming and the urgency of crafting an adequate response that will enable us to sustain economic growth and the environment in this new century so i thank you for giving us a chance to do our work down there with you i d also like to thank bmw not only for making the world s greatest cars of today but for trying to make the automobiles of tomorrow in an environmentally responsible way bmw has done a lot of work on hydrogen powered engines and when i was president we sponsored with the big american automakers and the vice president then al gore something called the partnership for the next generation vehicles about a third of all the greenhouse gas omissions in world come out of transportation from cars and trucks we are just on the cusp of developing not simply higher mileage engines blended fuels engines running on electricity and oil compressed natural gas fuel cells hydrogen powered engines all these things together can make a third of this problem go away and this is a big deal so i want to say this because i really appreciate what bmw is doing and i think the united states should have done more than we did when i was president and if i could have persuaded the congress the global warming was real instead of some subversive plot to make us poor we would have done more this is a big deal and all of you should know this you know i think we should support companies that are looking out for our future as well as our present if the climate of the earth warms for the next 50 years at the rate of the last 10 you will lose whole island nations in the pacific we will lose 50 feet of manhattan island where i go to work everyday and the florida everglades i worked so hard to save but most importantly agriculture production will be disrupted in vast expanses of the globe farmers won t be able to grow food anymore in places and that will create tens of millions of food refugees and all kinds of fertile fields for terrorists and disruption so this is a big deal you just remember that when you read in the paper that bmw has created an engine that doesn t omit any greenhouse gas omissions because it uses hydrogen or it gets 80 100 miles to the gallon this is one third of this problem is in transportation it is now no longer true that you have to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to get rich stay rich or grow richer but we re going to have to prove that we can do it in an economic way and i think the auto companies are going to have to lead the way so i thank you for doing that that was an unsolicited statement of support thank you very much now we re all having a good time the music was great the greeting i got was great it was like a lot of things that have happened to me in my life when that fellow approached me i couldn t tell whether he wanted peace or war then i was taking my instructions from the wonderful woman who led me in and participated in the greeting and she said she said it was all about peace and then she said he s going to drop a leaf on the ground and you have to get down and pick it up but don t take your eye off of him i said well that s hardly designed to increase my confidence you know i say that i m going to come back to that in a minute i want you to remember the ceremony we saw tonight what did it mean someone from the tribe of the people who were shouting and carrying the spear looking at me as a stranger vouched for me then i a person to be perhaps feared maybe distrusted and certainly questioned could be accepted what did this ritual tell us about human behavior throughout history the second question i want to ask you is what does the presence of a great german automobile company in new zealand celebrating a new car of global quality and significance being sold in new zealand in a global economy on the one hand what does this event that we re here to celebrate tell us about the modern world as opposed to what happened to america on september the 11th where 3 100 people were killed from 70 countries the answer is they both tell us the same thing that we live in a highly interdependent world where we have collapsed borders and shortened distances and spread information and technology to a degree never before known in history but this world while interdependent is not yet an integrated global community so if you take your barriers down and you claim the benefits of taking the barriers down if you let people move around in a hurry in a way they used to not be able to do if anybody can get on the internet and find out anything or show up at a flight school and find out how to fly a jet airplane if you claim all those benefits but you haven t built a global community then you have to shoulder the risks as well you can t have a world without walls and only claim the benefits and say i don t want the burdens i don t want the risks so these two things tell us the same thing that the world is interdependent but not yet an integrated community i honestly believe the great challenge of the next couple of decades will be to move the world from interdependence to integration to defeat the forces of destruction and chaos i think we can do it but it won t be easy there is clearly a security strategy to all this and i support very strongly this effort to limit terrorism a strategy focused on preventing it and punishing it it s sort of the international organized crime of the day so i think it s important to finish what s being done in afghanistan i think it s important to limit the production and access of chemical biological and small nuclear weapons it s important to stop north korea from building missiles they would sell to people who might send them to you or to us it s important to help other countries from the philippines and indonesia to columbia and our backyard in america or to the african states facing tribal conflicts to defend themselves against terrorism it s important to increase our international cooperation all that is very very important but it will not give you the world you want for your kids prevent and punish has never been enough we also have to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists australia new zealand china and the united states were allies in world war ii at the end of world war ii there were some pretty smart people in the saddle harry truman and george marshall and out in japan douglas macarthur in the united states said we spent the first half of this century fighting and after world war i we just walked away from the world and low and behold what do we get for walking away a global depression and world war ii so why don t we take just a little more money to try to build a world with more friends and avoid world war iii why don t we establish some institutions to give some other people a chance to grow wealthier and more prosperous and more secure and that give us a way of resolving our difficulties peacefully so we had in the year of my birth the marshall plan the united nations nato the international financial institutions and then a global trading system developed not as sexy as winning a war it sounds like if you re young you may not know about this and if you re my age you may have taken it for granted but this was nothing to take for granted all this was revolutionary that people who won a war would actually take some of their taxpayers money and spend it in the countries they had just defeated we re not talking about countries that were ruled by nice people hitler butchered over 6 million jews and god knows how many other people the japanese pow camps were legendary for their ruthlessness macarthur was up here saying spend money build democracy make friends give their children a chance to become friends with our children to be partners with our children this was a radical idea at the time but it made the world that i grew up in and enabled me to live my dreams and build my family and raise my daughter what happened in that world we never had world war iii and the forces of freedom and free markets won the cold war all the enemies in world war ii and the enemies in the cold war were all cooperating with one another again we have to do something like that now to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists because the world is full of paradoxes that feed anger and humiliation and abasement i ll just mention 4 remarkable paradoxes one is the global economy has lifted more people out of poverty in the last 20 years then at any time in history so all these protestors against globalization who say the global economy caused poverty are wrong they re factually wrong countries who have chosen openness to trade and investment have grown at 5 a year for the last 20 years poor countries that have chosen to remain closed have grown at 1 on the other hand the protestors are right that the global economy hasn t solved all the problems half the world s people live on less than 2 00 a day a billion people on less than 1 00 a day a billion people will go to bed hungry tonight think about that when you go home after this wonderful dinner consider the social paradoxes life expectancy is up and infant mortality is down even in the poorest countries but 10 million children will die of preventable childhood diseases this year and 1 in 4 of all the people who die on earth will die of aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea almost all of them little bitty kids that never got a clean glass of water there are more benefits to education than ever before even in poor countries every year of schooling in a poor country adds 10 to the annual income of the boy or girl who gets it and yet there are 130 million kids in this world who never go to school at all consider the political paradoxes i already said all of our political adversaries are cooperating with us now i had the honor of being president when for the first time in all of human history more than half the world s people lived under governments of their own choosing and all democracies of any economic success were growing more diverse as new zealand and america have and yet the biggest threat to the peace of the world is high tech terrorism the marriage of modern weapons to the most ancient hatreds rooted in race religion ethnicity and tribal so what do we do well we have to keep moving from interdependence to integration there should be more trade there should be a new trade ground we should integrate the world more closely we should honor the decisions of the world trade organization panels whether we agree with them or not those of us like america who are wealthy should set a good example secondly there should be more aid my country gives the smallest percentage of its aid of any country in the world any rich country the smallest percentage of its budget in aid but you should know you should not blame the american people for this they think we re giving more than we are every poll shows americans think that we spend between 10 and 15 of our budget on foreign aid and they think we should spend 3 5 i agree with them the problem is we spend less than 1 so this is something that when all of you come to america you could help by just telling us that we actually don t know one of the things i learned when i was in office is even if you re president just because you re talking doesn t mean anybody else is listening if you ve ever raised a child you know that too just because you re talking doesn t mean anybody s listening i talked about this till i was blue in the face and it was a giant yawner for most people before september the 11th now people are ready to listen and learn so most americans think we give more than we do and most people think foreign aid is not effectively spent that s wrong on both counts but you can t blame people for what they don t know now president bush just went to monterey and said we re going to increase from 10 to 15 billion our annual giving over the next 4 years and that s a good first step and i applaud it but we ll still be spending slightly less than we were as a percentage of our income in 95 we have to do better in 2000 we had this big initiative to forgive the debt of the poorest countries in the world 25 of them have qualified it s been a breathtaking success why because they couldn t get the money unless they spent it on education healthcare or development uganda to take one example doubled primary school enrollment and cut their class sizes in one year so we should do more of that and the third thing we should do is continue to be a force for peace and i ll just give 2 examples that are fueling the terrorist problems in the neighborhood of afghanistan and all over the world the first and most important is the problem between the israelis and the palestinians in the middle east a lot of people put a lot of time in trying to make the peace and i think mr arafat made a terrible mistake to turn down the agreement that then prime minister barak agreed to in december of 2000 but that s water under the bridge the united states has to stay involved and everybody else in the world has to want that to be resolved and at least limited in scope i can tell you i just got back from a big tour of asia every place the people are worried about terrorism from the philippines to indonesia any other place in the world the open sore of this continuing conflict is being used to whip up young people around the world into thinking it s okay to kill other people it isn t okay and the more we all try to make peace there in fair and just way the closer we ll come the second big problem is between india and pakistan something which i know gets a lot of publicity out here but it s just crazy you should know that of the 180 plus groups in america indies and pakistanis rank both in the top 10 in per capita education and income they aren t poor anywhere but the indian subcontinent one reason is they persist in spending fabulous amounts of their budgets on defense and building nuclear weapons when they both have a per capita income hovering around 500 it s crazy india a little over 500 pakistan a little over 400 and the rest of us have to do whatever we can to convince people that they shouldn t kill each other or spend a lot of money acting like they re going to in a place that could become a great engine of economic growth in the way that would be a direct benefit to the people of new zealand 20 30 40 years from now so i think it s important that we have a political strategy to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists here s the last point i want to make go back to the ceremony this is harder then it sounds but you shouldn t be discouraged we cannot do this unless the dominant political philosophy of the world is that we should have a global community that operates on basic rules everybody counts everybody s got a role to play we all do better when we work together and one core value our differences are important but our common humanity matters more a simple core value now it s easy for me to say that it s easy for you to say yes i mean look around here we re all here at this nice dinner and we all laughed when we acted like only 55 people could afford a bmw but the truth is compared to most of the people who have ever lived in the whole history of the world we re all doing pretty well we ve been blessed we re the winners in the global economy of the early 21st century but if you look at the whole history of human affairs people have behaved with a worldview that was more like that one the terrorists share depending on how you read the architectural evidence people have been on the earth somewhere between 50 and 100 000 years civilization a little over 6 000 years old people gathering in cities and dividing labor and working together so we make a whole lot of progress but for most of that time we organized ourselves just the way people did when they came out of the caves and clans we love our crowd but we don t love people who aren t in our crowd they probably want to hurt us maybe we ought to hurt them before they hurt us for all the progress of humanity we nearly destroyed ourselves in two world wars and the slaughters of communist governments mostly in the soviet union in the first 50 years of this last century we nearly took ourselves out as a human race the whole idea of a global community was never formalized in the united nations until 1945 that s less than 60 years ago it did not become possible to do until india excuse me until china decided to reach out to the rest of the world in the 1970 s and the soviet union and the berlin wall fell in 1989 so in spite of all this happy talk about global cooperation it has never been a real possibility until 13 years ago humanity has been here tens of thousands of years civilization s been here slightly over 6 000 years we ve had a chance to do what we all say we believe should be done for 13 years now the good news is that means you shouldn t panic when people do stupid things in the world that don t make any sense in the light of a global community because they haven t had a lot of practice at this if you remember the ceremony we saw when i came in these people were at least giving me a chance to demonstrate my good faith but the presumption was that i could not be trusted because i was not in the group we can learn a lot from remembering what we saw here and yet they gave me a chance to prove that i could be a part of a larger community of peace loving people that s what picking up that leaf was all about now what s that got to do with what s going on think about bin laden and his crowd they re actually behaving according to ideas that many people have shared throughout history probably most people we have the truth if you share our truth you re part of our community if you don t you re a legitimate target even if you re just a 6 year old girl going to work with her mother at the world trade center on the morning of september the 11th if you share our truth you re part of our community which is composed of people who think alike and act alike if you re not prepared to think and act like we do it s inconceivable that we have anything in common so either get out of our way or we ll come after you that s the way most of the people have looked at the world throughout most of history they weren t all terrorists sometimes they lived in the cold peace but there was us and them us and them then all of a sudden all these things began to happen as the world got smaller and societies got more diverse you d don t ask anybody in new zealand who s of a different racial or religious or ethnic group to change the color of their skin or their pride and their parents and their grandparents or the way they practice their faith what you say is i honor that but the only way it can work is if you honor my ability to do the same thing and the only way that ever really happens is if you say our differences are really important but our common humanity matters more it sounds self evident but look what s happened in my lifetime the greatest person to live in my lifetime i believe was ghandi ghandi worked for decades in peace was abused imprisoned he could have been killed repeatedly spinning cotton on his little cotton gin finally his little spinning wheel i mean finally india is free and what happens he gets murdered by whom another hindu not a muslim another hindu how come because the young man who killed him thought he was a heretic he thought he was a bad hindu and a bad indian because he wanted india for the muslims too and the jains and the sikhs and the buddhists and the christians and the jews india s got more religions then the rest of us do put together and ghandi thought they should all have a home there so this kid killed him then when i was a senior in college in the space of 3 months in my country the greatest american in my lifetime martin luther king and my favorite politician robert kennedy were both murdered inside of 3 months because they were trying to reconcile the american people to each other and their killers did not want to reconciliation then in the middle east who got killed first sadat why who killed sadat an israeli commando no another egyptian why the kid thought he was a bad egyptian and a bad muslim because he wanted a secular government for egypt and peace with israel and on what was maybe the darkest day of my presidency my friend yitzhak rabin whom i loved as much as i ever loved another man in my whole life was murdered by a young israeli who thought he was a bad jew and a bad israeli because he wanted to lay down a lifetime of fighting and give the palestinian children their homeland and find security for israel by accepting the other by sharing the future and the truth and having a bigger version of community this is harder than it sounds but you shouldn t be discouraged because we haven t been at it very long now let s close with this story i want you to think about this when you see people making a fool of themselves at the world cup it starts in 4 days i want you to think about this the world cup is the greatest media event in the world and yet we have a few soccer riots every year why because people revert to the old way they forget that the thing that makes the world cup possible is that everybody accepts the rules of the game nobody cares where your teammates were born it s about merit it s about cooperation it s about the larger community the community makes the event possible and that s more important than who wins or whether the people out there making the calls make a mistake now and then but you have to understand that is a microcosm of the great debate going on in the world today one of the places i did not make peace and i didn t get to in time was rwanda where 700 000 people were hacked to death with machetes in 100 days in the mid 1990 s so later i went to africa with my wife and i asked the then leader of the rwandan government invited me to come because we tried to help them put things back together and i asked if i could meet with some victims of the genocide in rwanda who were still working for a better country so i was sitting there and there were these 6 people sitting around a little semi circle talking to hillary and me they were all very moving i mean they were really impressive people they had terrible things happen to them i remember this one really great looking young guy had had his arm chopped off above the elbow and he laughed and he referred to himself as a one armed man for peace he said you know they cut my arm off i m doing more good now than i ever did when i had two arms and i was marveling you know this beautiful young man he could be home feeling sorry for himself because he has one arm the only person i didn t understand why she was there was the last person to speak there was this beautiful african woman in this brightly colored dress of the late country in africa with no visible marks on her then she began to talk she explained that she lived in a village where she and her husband and family were in a minority but they lived there for years and they had wonderful relationships with their neighbors their children played together they celebrated holidays together everything was wonderful then one day the people came with the machetes they were looking for people in her tribe and her next door neighbor her friend of 10 years sold her out she said she had no marks on her body because they hacked her all over the back and the neck and they thought they had broken her neck and cut the relevant veins and she would surely bleed to death but she didn t she described how she awoke in a pool of her own blood to look at her husband and her 6 children lying dead around her she said she asked god to tell her why she had been spared then she asked god to kill her too then she said i realized that i had been spared for something and it could not be something as mean as vengeance and so i live my life trying to put my country back together now if that lady can do that what are the indians and pakistanis fighting about why can t the israelis and palestinians figure it out why can t we in countries that are much more blessed come up with the modest amounts of money necessary to resolve these thorny educational and economic and healthcare disparities of the world the answer is we can but we have to get it we have to understand that if we don t want more september the 11ths we have to be really tough with our security but we have to be really wise in building a world with more partners and fewer terrorists and we have to believe that we can do this young people come to me all the time and ask for advice about being president they want to be president they want to be in politics and they ask me for advice i said let me tell you one thing there s a big difference in wanting to do something and believing you can a lot of people want things but they don t believe they can we have to believe we can do this we have built this world without walls it is a joy for most of us but it is full of difficulty and danger the simple task of the next 20 years or so is to make it a home for all the world s children if we do it ll be the most exciting time the most prosperous time the most peaceful time in human history thank you very much dem wjclinton27 5 93 bill_clinton for a long time now the american people have wondered whether their government in washington could ever really work for them again ever really face the tough problems well tonight the house of representatives gave america a victory of growth over gridlock tonight the house showed courage and conviction tonight the house made hard choices to cut a quarter of a billion dollars in spending to ask those most able to pay the wealthy to do more to reduce our deficit to increase incentives to invest and create jobs in the private sector and to provide the incentives to make people at the bottom rungs of the economy prefer work over welfare tonight the house said no to gridlock no to the status quo and no to the special interests who worked so very hard to frighten millions of americans about this program tonight the house said yes to jobs yes to lowering the deficit yes to lower interest rates yes to a brighter future tomorrow we go on to the senate and we go back to the country we have broken the gridlock we are taking responsibility for the future we are dealing with the tough problems i am very very proud of the people who tonight cast a very tough vote in a hard environment for a better tomorrow for america thank you very much dem wjclinton27 6 95a bill_clinton thank you very much mayor katz governor kitzhaber i want to thank the people of portland who have done so much to make us feel at home here secretary pena for cosponsoring the conference all the members of the cabinet and the administration who get to do their jobs in portland in the real world today instead of back in washington president ramaley congresswoman furse governor lowry let me also thank the coast guard for all the work that they have done to help us succeed here let me begin by saying i wanted some heated exchanges here today but i have already overdone it this is a working conference we will not be offended if you take your jackets off roll your sleeves up it would suit me if the gentlemen here present want to take your ties off i won t be offended i think you better stop there i have really looked forward to this for quite some time i had a wonderful experience when we came to portland shortly after i became president for the timber conference and a lot of ideas were generated out of that which clearly affected the work of our administration in terms of getting an aid package through congress to help to pay for economic conversion in disadvantaged communities and a lot of other very specific things when i was governor i used to go out across my state secure in the knowledge that even in every state there is no such thing as a state economy that within each state the regions are dramatically different in their possibilities and their problems and i do not believe that our national government can have a sound economic policy without continuing to establish partnerships and to listen to people who live in various regions of the united states and that s why we re doing this series of conferences today i also think that as all of you know as a former governor that a lot of the best ideas in the country are not in washington and don t get there unless you go out and find them in preparation for this conference i was given a remarkable biography of the remarkable oregon governor tom mccall that was written by a man that works for the oregonian brent walth and now according to i know that no one in the press ever gets it wrong so i m sure this book was right in every respect the most impressive thing about the book to me maybe because of my own experiences with my own mother was that once governor mccall s mother was having trouble getting a hold of him so she called the white house because she heard that the white house could get in touch with anybody and she actually got president johnson on the phone and said that she needed to talk to her son and president johnson called the governor and told him to call his mother now that is the kind of full service federal government i have sought to bring to the american people and that is the tradition we are trying to build on as the vice president said we are here to first of all review the facts about the region s economy the good things and the bad things the barriers to progress and the possibilities we are here to determine the impact of the present policies of our administration on that and to get as many new clear specific suggestions as possible for where we should go together i think it is important to do these things because too often in the further you get away from the grass roots in america the more theoretical and the less practical the debates become and that is especially true now because we re at a historic watershed period in american history we won the cold war but we no longer have a common enemy and a common way of organizing ourselves and thinking about how we should relate to the rest of the world so yesterday i went to san francisco to the 50th anniversary of the united nations to try to talk about why we more than ever should be working with other countries in partnerships to advance our values and our interests and our security and today i say to you that a lot of our economy was organized around our responsibilities in the cold war and today we know it has to be organized around the realities of a global economy the information age and the fact that for many decades before the end of the cold war we financed our continuing leadership in that war and our needs at home with massive deficits which lowered savings rates lowered investment rates and put us into some very difficult circumstances which mean today that we re in the second decade in which most americans are working a longer work week than they were 20 years ago for about the same or lower wages and at which all these wonderful changes that we find thrilling and exciting the global society the rapid movement of money and information the constant downsizing of big organizations but the explosion of new ones because even though we have downsizing of big corporations in 93 and 94 both we set new records for the incorporation of new businesses all these things in the aggregate are quite exciting but if you re just someone caught up in a very new world who has to worry about paying a mortgage and educating your children and taking care of your parents health care they can be very threatening as well and over and over and over again we hear all over the country people say well i know these numbers look good i know we ve got almost seven million new jobs but i m still worried about losing mine or it may be that the economy is growing but i haven t gotten a raise i know we ve got the best health care in the world but i lost my coverage at my job last year i know we have to grow the economy but how can we do it and preserve our precious environmental heritage so that america as we know it will still be around for our grandchildren these questions are coming at us they also come from the other way they say well we re caught in a bind i know we have to preserve the economy but i ve got to feed my family tomorrow i know that we have to advance the environment and i m worried about other people s economic interest but what about mine in other words this is an interesting time in which the clear simple monolithic way we used to look at the world the cold war abroad constant economic progress at home steady slow resolution of our social difficulties all those things are kind of out the window and there are more possibilities than ever before but it s pretty confusing for folks out there and a lot of people are genuinely scared and worried and what we have to do is to chart a new course based on our fundamental values i personally believe that the debate that has gone on in washington is understandable given the national confusion and frustration but it s way too extreme we re debating things that i thought were resolved 70 years ago to me the issue is not would we be better off if the government solved all our problems nobody believes that can be done anymore but it is certainly not wouldn t we be better off if the government did nothing but national defense cut taxes and balance the budget tomorrow without regard to consequences a clear thing it seems to me is we ought to be asking ourselves how do we have to change our government to get the kinds of policies that advance the american dream that grow the middle class shrink the under class enhance our security and our quality of life deal with the issues of the day in practical fashion what kind of partnerships do we need that s the way i tend to look at the world probably because i was a governor before i became president but it s also the thing i think that will work you heard what the vice president said in the last two years we have cut the deficit by a trillion dollars over seven years we have seen a lot of new jobs even in some rural counties in oregon the unemployment rate has gone down notwithstanding the difficulties caused by the timber issues we have tried to expand trade in unprecedented ways we have had more than 80 new trade agreements the big ones like nafta and gatt and others on specific things that permit us to sell everything from washington apples to california rice to software and cellular telephones to japan for the first time and i believe it is clear to everybody that what we have to focus on is reducing a deficit expanding trade but also increasing the capacity of the american people to make the most of their own lives and enhancing our own security so that s why i have also focused on the need to invest more in education training and research and the need to dramatically improve the ability of the government to do its job because if we re going to cut back and cut back and cut back it becomes even more important what we do spend money on that s why we try to support things like the oregon initiative that s why we ve given now 29 states permission to get out from under federal rules to try their own hand at reforming the welfare system to move people from welfare to work that s why we abolished another 1 600 governmental regulations the other day and these are things that are profoundly important to all of you as we look ahead i just want to say a couple of things and then i want to hear from the panel we re going to have a big debate this year about what should be done about our budget deficit i believe it s important to balance the budget i believe it s important to have a clear path to get there and i think it s important for two reasons one is we never had a permanent structural deficit in the united states until 1981 now we ran a deficit all during the 1970s because of the oil price problems and because we had something called stagflation and those of you who were of age in those years understand what happened to our economy so conventional economic theory called for us to try to keep stimulating the economy a little bit in those years but we never had a big permanent deficit until 1981 when there was a sort of unspoken agreement between the major party leaders in washington the republicans didn t want to raise taxes to get rid of the deficit and the democrats didn t want to cut too much spending and besides that both of them knew that economic growth in america fueled by investment and productivity had reached a very low level and the only way to keep the economy going was through a big deficit but we have paid a terrible price for it meanwhile the private sector is much more productive now much more competitive and we cannot afford to continue to run our economic business with a permanent deficit in my opinion on the other hand there is a right way and a wrong way to do it an economic study recently done by the wharton school of business in pennsylvania pointed out that if we reduce the deficit too fast and specifically analyze the senate proposal that it could bring on a recession increase unemployment i proposed balancing the budget over 10 years doing it in a way that increases investment in education medical research and technology not reduces it cuts everything else in the non defense area about 20 percent across the board and reduces medicare and medicaid inflation more moderately than the republican proposals so that we don t have to cut services primarily to elderly people who don t have enough money to live on as it is in order to get to my budget you have to have a much smaller tax cut focus it on education child rearing and the middle class and take 10 years instead of seven but this is the sort of debate i think we ought to be having in other words not some big theoretical debate about what s good and evil in some theory but how is this going to affect the american people same thing i ll just give you one other example about the environment we ll have a chance to talk about this today it seems to me what we ought to be focused on here and what you all most of you at least said you wanted when i came out here to the forest conference is how can we guarantee long term sustainable development that preserves the natural resources that makes people want to live here in the first place but enables the maximum number of people to make a decent living in the most diverse and acceptable ways to sustain the environment in washington the debate often gets so theoretical that you got some people saying i think it s a very nice thing if the environment s preserved but the government would mess up a one car parade so we ought to get it out of it anyway the other day we had a congressional subcommittee actually vote to repeal the ban on off shore oil drilling for every part of america florida new jersey california everybody no analysis no nothing why it was pure ideology yesterday they reversed the vote after they heard from the people but you see what i m saying in other words its one of the things that i really want to come out of this is a practical sense of what we should be doing finally let me say there s one other big issue in the news today that affects the pacific northwest and i want to mention that that of course is the question of our trade talks with japan first let me say that there s nobody who s done more than our administration than try to open opportunities for americans to sell in japan and i have also kept a very open door to japanese products in america we are as i mentioned earlier we re selling apples rice software cellular telephones computer technology previously prohibited by cold war legislation all these things we re selling in japan and the rest of asia many of them for the very first time i supported the gatt trade agreement i supported nafta i believe in this i understand that japanese cars are made now in oregon and sent back to japan for sale i know all that i know that washington state is the most trade sufficient state in the united states in dealing with the pacific rim this is the future i want but you also have to understand in the context of this negotiation we still have a huge and persistent trade deficit with japan more than half of it is in autos and auto parts we have a trade surplus in auto parts with the rest of the world because we are the low cost high quality producer of auto parts in the world but we still have a 12 5 billion trade deficit with japan partly because they make carburetors in japan and sell them for three times as much in japan as they do here the luxury car issue you ve heard talked about that s the sanction that i propose unless we can reach an agreement here of tariffs on luxury cars those cars are selling made in japan selling for 9 000 more there than here we have to seek fair trade no matter how many jobs are created by a country s trade if they have a 100 billion trade surplus by constantly closing the economic channels of access more is lost than gained and this is not good for japan they re awash in cash but they can t have any economic growth they have no inflation no growth and they re moving toward negative interest rates in the japanese economy the average japanese working person looks like they have a huge income but they can t afford housing and their consumer costs are almost 40 percent higher than americans for virtually everything so they are paying a terrible price i want to tell you to the people of the pacific northwest i am not trying to launch a new era of protectionism but we have tried now for two or three decades to open this market and this is the last major block to developing a sensible global economic policy if the united states is going to lower its deficit in ways that promote growth and raise incomes then the rest of the world has to also make their economic adjustments because we can t deficit spend the world into prosperity any more others have to do their part as well that is what this is about the bottom line is we want to open the markets for american products and we will take action if necessary in the form of sanctions we hope it will not be necessary we hope it will not have an adverse effect in the short run on any one but over the long run if we re going to build the kind of global economic system we want everyone must change meanwhile i will get back to basics here it is not enough for this country to produce impressive economic numbers it must be manifest in the lives of the people of america so i ask you to give us your best thoughts about where we are and where we re going and what you think we should do to renew the american dream and to maintain our leadership in a new and exciting world that is full of opportunities and challenges thank you very much dem wjclinton27 6 95b bill_clinton thank you very much first president ramaley thank you for having us here at this wonderful campus you know i used to be a college teacher my wife and i started out our married life teaching at the university of arkansas in the ozark mountains and i was looking at all of you under these beautiful trees thinking there are a lot of days when i might like to be back here working for you here this is a very wonderful place and i thank you for having us here thank you congresswoman elizabeth furse for being here with us today and for your leadership your vision and your conscience i can tell you all you are very very fortunate to be represented by one of the most truly extraordinary individuals in the united states house of representatives in elizabeth furse i want to thank governor kitzhaber and i want to thank mayor katz who i believe is over there thank you vera you ve been great and portland has been wonderful to us i ve never had a bad day in portland oregon and i certainly didn t today this is wonderful and you know the vice president really is funny isn t he you should have seen him back here when elizabeth was introducing him and saying how intelligent he was and how energetic he was and how funny he was and i whispered in his ear right before he came up i said next thing she s going to say is how pretty you are but she restrained herself and he was able to compose himself and give that wonderful speech let me say that our nation has been very lucky because there s no doubt that in the entire history of the republic al gore is the most effective influential person ever to be vice president of the united states let me tell you just for a minute what we were really doing here today at this regional economic conference we were worried about what oregon and what the pacific northwest will be like for all you young people here in the audience we were worried about how we can guarantee a future how we can move into the next century with the american dream alive and well and with the leadership and values of our country secure in a world that is full of possibility and full of uncertainty you know most of us who are my age and older we ve lived most of our lives and our course is pretty well set and we have been very very blessed to grow up in a country and to have the opportunities that america has offered for all the decades since the end of the second world war now at the end of the cold war the dawn of the global economy the information age moving into a new century into a new millennium we look out at a world that is changing so rapidly that is full of untold possibilities but also some pretty troubling developments a world that has left a lot of people feeling robust and secure and hopeful and eager for the future and a world that has left a lot of people feeling at a minimum kind of confused and uncertain and concerned about their future if you go back and ask yourself what is the responsibility of the president and what is the responsibility of the citizenry of the united states you can do no better than to go back to the documents of our founders who believe that we are all created equal and endowed by our creators with the rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that means that at any point in history but particularly at those points of great change our responsibility is to do what is necessary to help us make the most of our lives all of us without regard to race or region or income or background or religion have the right to make the most of our own lives that is the challenge that is facing us here today and i believe that that challenge requires us number one to create more economic opportunity more jobs and higher incomes number two to give people the tools they need to develop their god given abilities number three to promote the security of the united states at home and abroad number four to preserve the natural heritage of the united states that has brought us to this point and that we want to pass on to our children our grandchildren and our grandchildren s grandchildren and finally in a world which is increasingly fast changing and decentralized it requires those of us in the national government to use the vice president s term to literally reinvent the way the government works to set a course to pursue the right priorities but to make sure that people at the grass roots level can make the fundamental decisions affecting their own lives and can look across the table at people who are different from themselves and work out those differences in a spirit of genuine friendship and good citizenship these are the things we have tried to do in the last two and a half years and these are the things that will take america into the 21st century i just want to close by asking you to think about one or two very important issues we re in a big debate in washington now not only about how to balance the budget that s the good news most people agree that we should do it but about the fundamental purposes of government there are those who say today that the government is intrinsically destructive of our way of life and has no role other than national defense tax cuts and eliminating whatever you have to to balance the budget as quickly as possible there are those of us who beg to differ who believe that the government is nothing more than the expression of the american people and that when it works best its fundamental duty is the duty of partnership to help people do things together that they cannot do on their own that is a debate i hope you will side with us on there are those who believe for example that it s a very nice thing if you can preserve the environment but not worth getting the government involved and then there are those of us who believe we have to find the best grass roots way we can to enable the american people to make a decent living for themselves and their children but to do it while preserving the heritage that god has given to oregon to the pacific northwest and to our entire country indeed to our planet there are those who believe that all of our problems are personal and cultural that is if we would just get together and get our act together and do what is right and stop messing up that we wouldn t have any problems in this old world and there are others who believe that our problems are basically economic and political and the government has to step in and do something now if you look at the scouts the vista the mensa all the groups that are here what do all these groups do what are all these young people doing why does national service work because we know at some level unless people are raised with good values and unless they can take responsibility for themselves and do the right things and make the most of their own lives there is nothing anyone else can do to give it to them no one can give you a good life inside no one can give you good values no one can give you the discipline to do the right thing and you have to do that for yourself so we all know that let me tell you i m sure that no one would dispute me when i say that all of us have been given things in life that maybe we didn t even deserve we ve all be given a hand up from time to time no person here today more than me knows that you do not achieve anything completely alone so it is not either or we still need a country that cares about those of us who need a helping hand to do the right thing who need a helping hand to make the most of their own lives who need a sense of partnership to get through the difficult times that our country faces now over the next three or four months you will see a lot of the things that we talked about here today debated in your nation s capital and i want you to think about what i have said and what you have felt today should we balance the budget yes we should why because there s a difference in borrowing money to invest in business or to finance your college education or to buy a home and borrowing money just because you want to go out to dinner at night we ve been borrowing money for both and we ve been so mixed up we couldn t tell the difference for too long and as a result we ve been too dependent on other countries for funds we have saved too little we have invested too little and we have had lower incomes because we have run ourselves into too much debt but there is a right way and a wrong way to balance the budget because the government s deficit is not the only problem in this country there is also an education deficit in this country there s a safe streets deficit in this country there s an adequate affordable health care deficit in this country there s a welfare reform deficit in this country there are other deficits our proposal to balance the budget says don t cut education because that s important to our future as well if we want good jobs and higher incomes we should increase our investment in education from college loans to head start while we balance the budget our proposal says of course we can t continue to increase health care expenditures at two and three times the rate of inflation we have to slow it down but be careful because there are a lot of people the elderly the disabled the poorest children in our country who depend upon medicare and medicaid for their medical care and we dare not put them in a position to have to either give up health care or pay something they can t afford to pay when they don t have enough money to live on in the first place and so we say yes let s have big cuts in other things let s balance the budget but if you balance the budget in 10 years instead of seven if you cut the size of the tax cuts and target them to middle class people for education and raising children and not just give tax cuts to people like me who don t really need it if you do that you can balance the budget and increase our investment in education be kind to the people who need health care help from the smallest children to the disabled to elderly folks who don t have enough to live on and still bring the american economy back and go into the 21st century with good jobs higher incomes and an educated citizenry including all the little children in this audience today you know we all have preconceptions and sometimes preconceptions can be bad things they can be stereotypes about people and places but i always had a preconception about oregon that i think has been confirmed by all my trips out here i always felt that the people of oregon had an astonishing ability to maintain their idealism and be practical to be practical and idealistic at the same time that s why we were pleased to give oregon permission to get out from under all kinds of federal rules and regulations to change its welfare programs to move people to work to change all kinds of other programs because we knew this was a state where people had good values and common sense and so i ask all of you join us in the fight to preserve education and balance the budget join us in the fight to develop the economy and preserve the environment join us in the fight to encourage people to be better citizens and to behave better and to have better values but also to give people who deserve it a helping hand and a hand up in other words keep your idealism intact bring your common sense to the table give power back to communities so that the young people here can have the kind of future can have the kind of american dream that my generation took for granted the 21st century will be the most exciting time in all of human history especially for the american people if we can bring to the task today the compassion the values and the common sense that i believe is at the heart of what it means to be a citizen of this great state thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton27 6 96 bill_clinton mayor de la chapelle mayor bussy prefect ritter to mr mavereaux the president of the local veterans association to henri girousse to all the world war ii veterans who are here to members of parliament especially to the children and the teachers of perouges and meximieux to my fellow americans let me begin by saying that hillary and i and our party are very very pleased to be here in perouges today to be so warmly welcomed by you and especially to be here with all the school children thank you very much i would like to say a special word of thanks to the very large number of members of parliament who are here and to the military band for providing such excellent music today mayor de la chapelle i know that your ancestor pierre fought in our revolutionary war and even advised our first president george washington so mr mayor i m glad to be here with you today and i would be happy to have any advice you might have for me today thank you americans have been at home here since our soldiers trained together during world war i and our people fought together in the final days of world war ii i am glad to be here to renew our friendship with the people of perouges as we stand on the brink of a new century and an age of great possibility for the children who are here as we drove from lyons perouges rose in the distance its great ramparts crowned by your beautiful church tower and tile roofs then we discovered the cobblestone streets the narrow lanes the hand painted signs the sundials the drinking wells the sense of timelessness is so strong in this beautiful place it is easy to forget the story of perouges is also the story of change weavers craftsmen and farmers once made this town a great medieval trading center a century ago the railroads passed you by and people began to leave but then artists historians and ordinary citizens worked with government to establish a community as a historic monument and ever since the history you have preserved here has brought people like me from all around the world and allowed this wonderful community to thrive we should all learn from this lesson today the world we live in is changing faster than ever while more and more people prosper in this new global economy others struggle without the proper education and training while new technologies and rapid movements of information and money and people across national borders bring all of us closer together they also make all of us more open to common dangers crime drug trafficking and terrorism as we saw in saudi arabia where 19 americans were killed and many more were wounded and i thank you mr mayor for that moment of silence in their memory to meet these challenges we must show strength and steadiness and judgment and flexibility we must meet our challenges and protect our values just as you have here that is what this g 7 meeting is all about because i know that if we all work together we can keep the world economy growing so that more and more of our people have the opportunity to make the most of their own lives and if we all work together we can face these terrible new threats to our security successfully terrorism is on our minds today because of the cowardly bombing in saudi arabia so let me repeat what i said yesterday to the american people we will not rest in our efforts to discover who is responsible to track them down and to bring them to justice my friends we must rally the forces of tolerance and freedom everywhere to work against terrorism just as we are working together for peace in bosnia today with the strong leadership of france and president chirac last year the united states launched an international initiative to fight terrorism organized crime drug trafficking and nuclear smuggling here in lyon i expect the g 7 nations to adopt 40 very specific recommendations to combat crime and terror to increase our efforts to prevent terrorists from committing their crimes and our ability to track catch and punish them when they do the future of the children here depend upon our success in this effort fifty two years ago the french resistance worked here in common cause with american gis to win your freedom back now we must join together to face down the new threats to our freedom your unshakable devotion to freedom is literally rooted here in the heart of your town in this mighty linden tree which was planted just over 200 years ago during the french revolution you call it the tree of liberty today s threats to the liberty your tree symbolizes are very different from those of 200 years ago different from the threats of world war ii or the cold war but they are real and we must face them we must face them so that the children here today will enter the 21st century free and secure with the greatest opportunity to live out their dreams of any generation in human history that is my dream it is one i hope we all share thank you very much god bless america and vive la france dem wjclinton27 6 97 bill_clinton let me first of all say to you congressman portman and to congressman levin and congressman hastert and in his absence congressman rangel and the senators who worked on this this is a very important day for this legislation because it does reflect our commitment in washington to behave in the way that people in communities behave when they do what works in fighting the drug problem and i cannot thank you enough this is the fact that we did this in a bipartisan fashion and we did it to use congressman portman s words based on trying to legislate nationally a system not only to empower people to do what we know works in some communities today already but to give them the incentive to do more of it is i think a great thing so i thank the congressmen for being here i thank the members of the cabinet for their support i thank jim kopple the president of the community antidrug coalitions of america dick bonnette the partnership for a drug free america and all the rest of you who are here now before i sign this bill i have to make a couple of comments about this has been a very interesting week of momentous decisions by the supreme court today the supreme court issued a ruling on the brady bill and since i have been so heavily identified with that for several years now i d like to make a few comments the decision struck down the requirement that local police officers conduct background checks but left intact the brady bill s five day waiting period since the brady bill passed 250 000 felons fugitives and mentally unstable persons have been stopped from purchasing handguns i don t think anyone can seriously question that it has made a major contribution to increasing the safety of the american people and i m going to do everything i can to make sure that we continue to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them these criminal background checks make good sense they save lives now 27 states nine more than when the brady bill first passed have state laws requiring them and they will continue to do the background checks even in other states criminal background checks will continue the brady law was drafted by our law enforcement community they wanted it again it was a community based resolution of a difficult problem so i know that these state and local law enforcement officials who asked us to pass the law will continue to do the background checks i ve asked attorney general reno and secretary rubin to contact police departments across our country to make sure they know that the background checks can and should continue to be done by local police on a voluntary basis and then the attorney general and secretary rubin will immediately convene a meeting of law enforcement officers to review and develop recommendations including appropriate legislation to ensure that we can continue to perform these background checks it s my understanding that the supreme court actually made some suggestions about how we might proceed from here my goal is clear no criminal background check no handgun anywhere in america no state should become a safe haven for criminals who want to buy handguns we know that again i say tremendous progress has been made the idea that 250 000 of these sales and transfers have been stopped is a very impressive thing in just a few years and i think it clearly contributed to the largest drop in violent crime in over 35 years last year murders dropping a stunning 11 percent in 1996 so we ve got to keep going on this and even though i wish we didn t have to do this extra work i think the framework of the court decision makes it clear that we have done the right thing that the five day waiting period is legal and let me remind you as the attorney general said by november of 1998 which is not all that far away we expect to have in place the technology and the capacity to do instantaneous background checks is that the date so what we ve got to do is figure out how to keep this system alive between now and november of 98 we are committed to doing it let me just say another couple of words if i might about this legislation today and what it means to us i think the congressmen said it s only a small part of our overall drug budget but it clearly sends a signal that we are shifting emphasis not to diminish what we re doing on interdiction and the other work that we have to do about drugs beyond our borders but to recognize that we will never get ahold of this problem unless we deal with the demand side here in america and we know that while casual drug use has plummeted over the last 15 years among adults it has doubled among young people in just the last five years and among 8th graders it has tripled the fact that the percentage the total of people trying drugs at that age level is small is cold comfort when you look at the trends and you ask yourself how could these trends be running in direct contradiction to the fact that drug use is going down among people between the ages of 18 and 35 that is the real threat to our future that is the problem we face today and the quicker we face up to it the better off we re going to be a study by columbia s center for addiction and substance abuse has shown for example that a young person who tries marijuana is 85 times more likely to try cocaine than peers who don t try marijuana in the first place so a middle schooler or a high schooler who mistakenly decides that it s safe to try cocaine or heroine or lsd or methamphetamine or any of the so called designer drugs along with marijuana is playing a dangerous game and we have to try somehow to do more than we have done in the past to stop this and we know that the broadly based community antidrug coalitions have been successful at driving down casual drug use we know that they ve been more successful than anyone else and than any other approach has been so what we re trying to do here is to find a way to support them to encourage them to do more and to increase the number of such coalitions throughout our country we know that this has got to be done person by person family by family community by community that s what this legislation does more than 4 300 communities in every state in america and our territories have organized themselves to deal with this to help parents to help the teachers the coaches the principals all the others who are fighting for drug free schools and communities and a drug free future for our children so this is the sort of partnership we need more of again let me say i am immensely gratified by the bipartisan nature of this i also would say if you focus on the problem which is why juvenile drug abuse is going up while young adult drug use is going down and the whole impact of the culture on that i think it justifies the policy that general mccaffrey adopted that i have supported him on of having an unprecedented advertising campaign to try to get the message out to these young people and i certainly believe it supports our juvenile crime strategy of having 1 000 after school programs to give our young people positive things to do because we know that a lot of the most difficult hours are those right after school closes for criminal activity and for casual drug use so the drug free communities act of 1997 is not only a good thing but i hope it is an indication of things to come the last point i d like to make just to echo what the vice president said about the smoking issue is i think that this settlement was a terrific achievement it is the result of all the work that was done before then in the public health community and the work that our administration had done but we have to take a quick look i mean a careful look at it and we will take a careful look at it secretary shalala and my domestic policy adviser bruce reed are heading a group that will consult with the public health community will look at it carefully and we will offer our judgments on it my preliminary take is that we do not want to paralyze the capacity of the fda to protect the american people that to me is the critical thing and that in no way minimizes the enormous achievement of the attorneys general and the others who are involved in this in the public health community and i have no final judgment on it i just want to say that secretary shalala is going to take a serious look at it we re going to work hard here in the white house but if we can do more and more of these things together in a bipartisan way as we re doing today i think this country is going to be much better off thank you very much dem wjclinton27 7 00a bill_clinton well ladies and gentlemen first of all on behalf of all of us i want to apologize please be seated for keeping you waiting but these are the closing hours of the congressional session before the august recess and senator daschle and leader gephardt and the other members of congress have come here today to speak with one voice about our position but congress is packing up and preparing to adjourn for the summer recess and the two conventions and i only wish we were late because they d been out there passing our bills let me say we re here because we believe the congressional republican leadership is leaving town with a trunk full of unfinished business vital to the health of our economy and the well being of our people we spent the last seven years charting a course of fiscal discipline and investment in our people and it has paid off with the longest economic expansion in history over 22 million new jobs the lowest minority unemployment rate in our history the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years instead of continuing on that path in the last few weeks indeed for the last year the republican majority has risked squandering our progress they have passed reckless tax cut after reckless tax cut after reckless tax cut to drain away our hard earned surplus and put us back in the red when you add them all up this congress has passed tax bills that would cost nearly 2 trillion over 10 years even by the most optimistic estimates this wouldn t leave a dime for lengthening the life of social security or medicare not one dime not a dime for voluntary and affordable medicare prescription drug benefits or for education and school construction and it would make it impossible for us to get america out of debt by 2012 there is a better way we can do all the things i just mentioned and still give the american people needed targeted tax relief let me be clear we do support the right kind of tax cuts for working americans i have proposed a program of cuts that will give a middle class american family substantially more benefits than the republican plan at less than half the cost two thirds of the relief going to the middle 60 percent of our people including our carefully targeted marriage penalty relief the tax cuts will also help families save up to 2 800 a year on the cost of college by making tuition tax deductible a 3 000 long term care tax credit to help millions of americans shoulder the enormous financial burden of caring for chronically ill family members and a tax cut that will help millions of families pay up to 2 400 a year for child care to expand the eitc providing up to 1 100 of tax relief for millions of hard working families today we have more evidence that our plan will help more of the people who really need it we re releasing a state by state analysis showing that the estate tax repeal recently passed by the republican majority would benefit only about 2 percent of america s families the wealthiest 2 percent of course providing them of an average tax cut of 800 000 and fully half those benefits would go to just one tenth of 1 percent of all americans let me hasten to say the democrats offered an alternative which would have taken two thirds of the people subject to the estate tax out from under it but would have left its progressive character not repealed it entirely and not cost the budget 100 billion over the first 10 years and 750 billion thereafter in contrast to these proposals our medicare prescription drug benefit would provide affordable coverage for 39 million seniors and people with disabilities with average incomes of about 20 000 a year this report clearly shows that our approach put the interest of american families first and ensures that the nation s unprecedented prosperity benefits everyone let me just mention one other thing i never want to talk about this without mentioning we also have a report from the council of economic advisors estimating that if our economic proposals are followed as opposed to theirs giving all this money away with the tax cuts interest rates will be 1 percent lower over the next decade that is the equivalent of a 250 billion tax cut for home mortgages it s the equivalent of a 30 billion tax cut for lower car payments and college loan payments there is a huge difference here that the american people have to understand i think the republican majority ought to go to work in the time we have left this year on the people s business so when they go off on vacation the congressional majority should take a long list of required summer reading a list of what we need to get done when they come back to washington to strengthen and modernize social security and medicare and add that prescription drug benefit to stand up to special interest and pass a strong and enforceable patients bill of rights to pass common sense gun legislation to close the gun show loophole require child safety locks for all handguns ban the importation of large capacity ammunition clips to raise the minimum wage by 1 over two years to continue hiring those hundred thousand teachers to reduce class sizes in the early grades to improve teacher quality to modernize 6 000 of our schools that are literally falling apart and repair another 5 000 a year and to provide after school programs and summer school programs for all the kids in this country who need it so that we can turn around those failing schools and we need to stop the delay and pass strong hate crimes legislation this is not a list to be read it s a list to be acted upon thank you i hope when congress comes back they ll do it again i want to thank all the members that are here and another 40 or 50 or so that wanted to come but because of the way the time table and the voting is unfolding they can t i m going to modify the program just a little bit and ask senator daschle to come forward because he s got to get back to make sure we don t lose any more votes senator daschle dem wjclinton27 7 00b bill_clinton debbie i want to ask your parents and all your siblings and family members to stand everybody that is here from debbie s family stand up isn t that great bless you i just want to make a couple of points in closing if the congress passed only our college opportunity tax cut it would be worth ten times as much to families like debbie s as the entire republican tax cut the second thing i want to say is if interest rates rise 1 percent higher than they otherwise would be because we spend the entire surplus on tax cuts it will cost the average family 270 a year which is more than they ll get in a tax cut the final thing i want to say is this even if you don t think you ll get any benefits out of any of these tax cuts we ve proposed keep in mind all this proposed surplus that they want to spend is just that it s estimated we don t have a dollar of it yet now if you got one of those letters in the mail from ed mcmahon that said you may have won 10 million would you go out and spend 10 million the next day if you would you should support their plan but if you wouldn t you better stick with us and keep the prosperity going and help people like debbie thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton27 7 94a bill_clinton thank you very much it is wonderful to see this sea of americans here at the white house today senator harkin and i were back there talking and he was beaming because he had so much to do with the ada and i was listening to the first lady and to tipper and to the vice president give their fine speeches and they were all so good i was wishing i could just sit there and not have to say anything enjoy the day and welcome you here i thank especially the members of congress who are here congressman hoyer congressman fish congressman major owens and congressman goodling thank you for being here sirs two who are not here because they re on the hill working i want to mention senator kennedy and congressman jack brooks who worked so hard on this i thank former congressman tony coelho who s done a magnificent job as chair of the president s committee on employment of people with disability i thank all the people who are here on this stage and i want to say something today about the spirit of bipartisanship i will say more later but i would remind you that it would be wrong for the day to go by without pointing out that this bill was signed into law by my republican predecessor president bush and i thank him for doing that i d also like to introduce three young people from galludet university who are here who are part of one of our administration s most important initiatives and an illustration of why we have to keep working to open the doors of opportunity to all americans they are jennifer nasukowitz amy hopkins and madeleine frederickson i would ask them to stand they are completing their training to be participants in the first class of our national service program americorps beginning this september they will be part of 20 000 young americans who will be working to help to reclaim our sense of national community they ll be working to help reclaim the natural beauty of the chesapeake bay and together they ll be working to revolutionize our sense of what we can do together and in return they ll get a little bit of help to continue their education you know as the vice president said when we went across this country and sought the opportunity to serve here our slogan was putting people first what that meant to me was pretty simple as we hurtle toward the next century as we come to the end of the cold war we owe it to our people to do some basic things first of all to try to create a world of greater peace and prosperity that s what we ve been about here the last two days with the king of jordan and the prime minister of israel second to restore the american economy third to rebuild our american community with stronger community stronger families fourth to empower all americans to live to the fullest of their god given abilities and to expect them to assume the responsibility to do so we are at a moment in history when our values what we believe is morally right and our interests what is clearly good for us in a tangible material way are one we do not have a person to waste and that is why we are here today to rededicate our selves to an america where every man woman and child can reach the fullest of their god given potential like every civil rights law in our history the americans with disabilities act is just that it s about potential it is not a handout it stands for what s best in our heritage empowering americans to build better lives for themselves and that tradition i pledge as your president to see that this act is fully implemented and aggressively enforced in our schools our workplaces in government and in public places for the benefit of all persons with disabilities the blind and visually impaired the deaf and hard of hearing persons with mental retardation persons with mental illness persons who are mobility impaired all people who have problems that can be overcome that s what this act is about we must move from exclusion to inclusion from dependence to independence from paternalism to empowerment your future and the future of those whom you represent is at the heart of my vision for america in every aspect consider this if our goals here at home are to restore our economy to rebuild our american communities and to empower individuals how can we achieve them unless you are part of all of them look at the progress which has been made and look at where we have to go in the last 18 months we have passed a bill cutting the deficit by record amounts reducing the federal government to its smallest point since john kennedy was president having three years of deficit reduction for the first time since harry truman was president and it s produced 3 8 million jobs and a 1 5 percent drop in the unemployment rate but we ve got a long way to go we ve got a long way to go because millions of americans with disabilities could be working and contributing if this society opened it to them we are working up here to strengthen our american community congressman brooks today is back in the congress working on the crime bill which will put more police officers on our street and ban assault weapons and toughen sentences but also give our children something to say yes to there are billions of dollars there to invest in programs to get kids out of trouble before they are too far gone it will rebuild our american community but how can we be a community if millions of you are isolated from our common life and our common purposes we can never be an american community the secretary of education is working to implement the most important empowerment agenda of all along with the department of health and human services and others we are trying to implement a lifetime education system starting with head start for all children who need it and going through lifetime learning for people when they change jobs in the workplace but how can this work unless you are part of the empowerment agenda of america we will never be fully empowered so i say to you if our job is to put people first to rebuild the economy to strengthen our communities to empower our people we cannot do that job unless you walk every step or ride every step or get there however you can we need you and without you we cannot do it in this global economy as the secretary of labor never tires of telling me the only thing we have that nobody can take away from us is the mind and the heart and spirit of our people that s good news it means the mind of our people and the spirit of our people can be used sometimes without lifting large weights or doing great physical labor it means we can open the possibility of employment to more people but it also means if we really want to win for all americans we must believe and act on the premise that we do not have a person to waste when i was first elected governor it seems like 100 years ago now but back in the late 70s before the americans with disabilities act came along of the 50 or so people that worked in my office three were blind i got to the point where i didn t notice because they were just great employees it struck me as crazy for them not to be part of a workforce they could contribute to today i have had the honor of appointing 44 outstanding people with disabilities to important jobs in our government including judy human who s here with me today the assistant secretary for the office of special education she had to fight for her first job as a teacher she s fought for disability rights for her entire life now she s fighting for the future of every child in america i say that to make this point we have not appointed a single solitary person because of their disability they have all been appointed because of their ability to serve the american people why is this health care issue so important to this agenda there are many reasons we re the only country in the world that s going backwards in health care coverage with an advanced economy a few years ago 88 percent of our people were covered now we re down to 83 percent in the last five years alone over five million americans have lost their health insurance coverage that is very troubling we re spending too much money to get too little throwing billions of dollars away on paperwork and bureaucracy every year so that we don t have the money we need look at this cabinet behind me to fight drugs to take care of veterans health care needs to build a transportation network for the 21st century to spend on education and training programs to spend on the needs of the poor and to fight crime that s just the cabinet members behind me why because we are holding all spending flat while health care spending explodes not for new health care more money for the same health care but most of all it is a human problem the other day in western pennsylvania i was introduced by two women one a mother of five children who had become ill and she and her husband lost their health insurance and all their children the other a 62 yearold woman who had been a dairy farmer all of her life seven day aweek work no slacking in that business and she finally had lost her health insurance at the time in her life when she needed it most and if you look out at this sea of people and all those whom you represent the fact that the health insurance system of america discriminates against millions of people because of their disabilities or because they have had serious illnesses or because they are too old when they switch jobs or when their employer gets in trouble and the fact that it is wildly discriminatory against small business which is creating most of the new jobs in this country but paying 30 or 40 percent more for health insurance than those of us in government or working for big businesses do all these things are keeping us from putting every person s talents to use and especially especially the disabled americans who could be in the workforce if their employers could afford to provide them health insurance the people who fought for the americans with disabilities act understood that they originally had health care reform in the act and it had to be dropped because they knew that this bill would be delayed for years if it had to deal with the difficult and complicated and politically explosive issue of health care reform but i tell you my fellow americans now is the time to act and to go forward and to finish the work that was done in the beginning six years ago now is the time there are those who say well we can just reform the insurance laws and say everybody s entitled to insurance and everybody s entitled to take it from job to job and subsidize the poor more let me tell you if we do that we will cut medicare for the elderly we ll do a little more for the poor in the short run we ll do nothing to help people be part of the working middle class because what will happen is insurance premiums will go up coverage will go down small businesses on the margin will stop covering and people who wish to be part of the working middle class will have fewer not more opportunities to work and live to the fullest of their capacities we do not want to create a system where the only way you can have health care is if you are poor and go on welfare if you go to jail if you go to work for a big employer or the government or you are wealthy we want a system that covers everybody so you can be what you want to be let me tell you that for over a year and in my case as a citizen of this country and when i was a governor for now more than four years we have pursued every avenue we have examined all evidence we have solicited every suggestion for how to provide this kind of opportunity and security for all americans i have seen no one yet who has come up with a better idea than shared responsibility between employers and employees for private health insurance in our private health care system it already works for most families that s the way most families are covered and in the state of hawaii it works for all families in hawaii for 20 years there s been a requirement for shared responsibility for private insurance between employers and employees and whenever i bring this up people say well yes mr president but in hawaii everybody goes there because they want a vacation it s sunny and people are healthier there everything is more expensive there so what difference does it make if health insurance is more expensive everything costs more look at the facts first of all 20 percent of the people in the health system in hawaii are poor native islanders secondly health insurance is the only thing in hawaii that is not more expensive than anyplace else in america it s 30 percent cheaper for small businesses than the average cost of health insurance in america because everybody pays and no one avoids their responsibility and the people are healthier because they have primary and preventive care like the first lady was talking about as has been pointed out somewhat embarrassingly to them there are many american companies now in the forefront of the fight against universal coverage who provide coverage to all their employees when they open businesses in other countries and they do just fine and they can do just fine here too what is different about this moment in history well i ll tell you what s different for the first time ever you have the american medical association thank you thank you somebody was whispering what s different at this moment in history is the president s crazy enough to take on this fight no what is different this time the american medical association the american association of family practice the pediatricians the american nurses association the medical schools of the united states the american association of retired people the afl cio and an association literally literally of hundreds of thousands of small businesses and many of the biggest businesses in the country as well as a majority of the american people all have agreed that the best way to do this is to have employers and employees share the responsibility for buying private insurance now how are we going to do it let me say that i desperately want a bipartisan bill i have reached out to members of the other party this bill passed with a bipartisan majority at one point two dozen republican senators supported senator chafee s bill for universal coverage but every time i have reached out they have moved further away i feel like i keep reaching out i wish we were in a car and they would eventually run up against the door and have to come back to my way because i keep reaching out let me say that 22 years ago 22 years ago a republican president richard nixon and one of the incumbent republican senators from oregon robert packwood offered a bill to require employers and employees to share the responsibility for private health insurance if it was a good idea 22 years ago it is a better idea today when things have gotten more difficult in terms of cost and coverage and we ought to do it now let me say you heard the vice president with that quote from the republican consultants let s send them home empty handed we ve done that a lot you know we ve done that a lot it took five years to pass the ada when i showed up in town here it had taken seven years until we could finally pass the brady bill last year seven years seven years seven years until we could finally pass the family and medical leave law last year very important to you seven years until we could finally get the worldwide trade agreement that will add a half a million jobs in america between now and the end of the decade a lot of times if you want bipartisan consensus on a tough issue it takes forever but i tell you we dare not wait longer for 60 years presidents of both parties have known we should cover all americans we now see health care costs going up and the only government spending going up is in health care while we are desperately trying to bring this deficit down and invest in our future and we know that in only five years 5 million americans have lost their coverage we are at an historic moment for the first time ever there are bills on the floor of both houses of the congress that will give americans health care we must say we don t care about politics there are democrats and republicans and independents in this audience there are people here today who voted for all three people who ran for president last time i do not give a rip what your politics are but i do want you to have health care so you can contribute to america s future that s right let me say this i love these chants but this is what often happens in our society we re all here preaching to the saved and i ask you i ask you to go to the congress with a simple message and to go back home to your communities with a simple message let us discard politics let us put people first and let our focus be simply this what will work i have no pride of authorship nothing would please me more than if somebody else s name 100 names 400 names 500 names in both houses of congress would be on a health care bill but we dare not do something which holds out false hopes let s do what works let s complete the work of the americans with disabilities act let s say to the whole world this is one country that knows we don t have a person to waste and we re going into the next century with all of our people arm in arm god bless you thank you very much dem wjclinton27 7 94b bill_clinton i apologize for being a little late i ve been on the phone with members of the congress which i had to do senator helms congressman valentine congressman lancaster congressman price i think congressman mcmillan s out there somewhere alex it s good to see all of you ladies and gentlemen it s a great honor for me to have this basketball team here if only to see them all looking normal after i watched that incredible end to the championship game the university of north carolina women s basketball team not only won its first national title this year but had the best record in the country and the school record 33 wins coach sylvia hatchell broke the 400 career victories mark and was named national coach of the year but my guess is that actually i wanted to ask her this whether when the team spray painted her hair carolina blue it made it worthwhile or she began to wonder i want to say of course a special word of congratulations to charlotte smith for that three point shot i can tell you i ve been in a lot of tough fights myself around here and there have been a lot of times when i ve looked around for somebody who could take that shot and i want to congratulate tonya sampson who i know has overcome some considerable personal challenges to be the leading scorer in carolina women s basketball history i also want to say something that i have felt for a long time and it s appropriate this year because north carolina women s basketball and soccer teams won the ncaa titles and so often in the past your men s basketball team has done so well the thing i have always admired about the university of north carolina is it s been a place that emphasized both academics and athletics and other extracurricular activities and it s demonstrated to the country that it is not necessary to make a choice and that there s something to be said for learning how to compete to work on a team to put aside your own personal ambitions for what is best for a group and that an institution like the university of north carolina which i had the opportunity to join in celebrating its 200th birthday just a few months ago can really set a standard for the entire country and it s something that i hope not only other colleges and universities will look at but our school systems as well i get very concerned when i travel around the country and i see so many children growing up in difficult circumstances and they re going to schools that are no longer able to finance their team sports programs their athletic programs their music programs the things that give children a chance to get out of themselves and reach beyond themselves and to grow and be part of something important and i don t believe those things should ever be held to be in conflict with or adverse to developing our intellectual faculties that god gave us so the university of north carolina is truly a symbol it seems to me of what our country ought to be striving for in the personal development of all of its students and i m especially glad to see the triumph of the women athletes this year it s something that my wife and my daughter and my beloved mother if she were still living would always be very happy to see me here honoring today i thank you all and i congratulate you dem wjclinton27 7 95a bill_clinton president and mrs kim the members of the delegation from the republic of korea to all of our distinguished guests hillary and i are delighted to have you here in the white house i have especially enjoyed this day that i have spent with president kim a man whose extraordinary resilience is matched only by his commitment to democracy mr president this is our fourth meeting and if you ll permit me just a personal note i am struck by how much we have in common we were both elected to office at an early age you won a seat in your national assembly when you were just 25 you entered the blue house just after i came to the white house or to put it in another way we have both spent the past 20 000 hours or so dealing with our respective congresses and fielding hard questions from the press i m happy to say that president kim is also an enthusiastic jogger who permitted me to jog with him in korea and even in this heat mr president after this meal we may have to run an extra mile together tomorrow mr president for all the things we have in common i must also comment on something that set you apart from most other leaders in the world today and that is the extraordinary hardship you endured and the courage you displayed to bring democracy to your country your many years in opposition were marked by jail terms years of house arrest an assassination attempt and a 23 day hunger strike that almost took your life as you once put it a short life of integrity is better than a long life in disgrace but you persisted and you prevailed at your inauguration you said deep in my heart i have a vision of a new korea a freer and more mature democracy at last we have established a government by the people and of the people of this land now under your leadership korea is taking its rightful place in the world as both a thriving economy and a dynamic democracy mr president the bonds between our people forged in the fires of war upon your land have only grown stronger with time we are united now by a history of shared sacrifice and a future of common purpose these are our common goals lasting peace security and reconciliation on the korean peninsula a stable and prosperous asia pacific region a rising tide of democracy around the world working together the republic of korea and the united states can help to achieve them mr president when i visited you two years ago you presented me with a beautiful work of calligraphy with your favorite saying righteousness overcomes all obstacles mr president tonight in the presence of so many people from your country so many korean americans your wonderful wife and your two daughters who live in our country i ask everyone in this room to raise a glass to a man who through his own righteousness has overcome all obstacles kim yong sam to you mr president and to the enduring friendship between our two great nations dem wjclinton27 7 95b bill_clinton good morning before i sign this bill i d like to thank the congressional leadership from both parties for sticking with this project through thick and thin right before we came in one of the senators said this is the only bill i ve ever seen that was passed 16 different times but i want to thank everyone who worked on this and say a special word of thanks to the appropriations committee members and especially to the senate and house appropriations committee chairs who are here today who burned the midnight oil to get this done the bill i am here to sign is proof that we can put party politics aside and do things that are good for our country we re never going to agree on everything and we shouldn t that s the way our system works but there is so much we do agree upon that if we deal with our disagreements openly and honestly we plainly can make progress on balance i am very pleased with this bill the timber provisions are not exactly what i wanted but they are better than they were and i believe we can and should carry out the timber salvage plans and that we can do it consistent with our forest plan and with existing environmental laws the budget cutting in this bill is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing together we are making a down payment on a balanced budget cutting 16 billion in spending from this year s budget cutting unnecessary spending but maintaining our commitment to education to health care to the environment at the same time the congress has voted for funds that will help the people of california finish the work that has to be done to recover from the earthquake that will help the people in oklahoma city to deal with the financial aspects at least of the terrible tragedy they endured that will help us to step up the fight against terrorism and that will enable us to keep our commitment to the middle east peace process this is how we should work together we agree we should balance the budget we disagree on how but this shows that we can work through those disagreements everyone here just about was raised with the old saying that where there s a will there s a way if we have the will to balance the budget we know we can find the way because of what happened on the rescission bill let me again say a word of thanks to the members who are here to chairman hatfield and chairman livingston and to senator lott and to senator ford i thank you very very much and it s an honor and a pleasure to be able to sign this legislation that you ve provided to the american people thank you dem wjclinton27 8 00a bill_clinton well thank you very much let me say first of all i want to thank your chief for making me feel so welcome and all the elected officials i want to thank the people who danced for us and played for us they were very good yes and i want to thank all those who made the gifts you gave me and my daughter and our family and i want to thank the school children who walked down here with me and sang the beautiful songs i came to nigeria to express the support of the people of the united states we support your democracy we want to help you build your economy educate your children and build a better life in all the villages of this country thank you very very much dem wjclinton27 8 00b bill_clinton thank you thank you very very much i am delighted to be here i want to thank mr moorman and mr ndusa and reverend jackson for their remarks i want to thank the first lady of nigeria for joining us today thank you very much i thank the members of the american delegation who have joined me from the united states congress from local government the leader of our export import bank and our aid operations and many others they re all over here to my right and they are a part of what we are trying to do and i thank the members of the nigerian and american business communities for being here as is usually the case when i get up to speak everything which needs to be said today has already been said by the previous speakers and i might add said very well i would just like to talk a moment about the american response and what i hope will be the nigerian response after working so long to restore democracy and in a way to genuinely have it for the first time there must be a dividend to democracy for the people of nigeria now what will the role of trade and investment be in that dividend what will the role of the explosion in information technology be and communications on the internet be how will this totally new world change what nigeria has been through in the last 30 to 40 years and what things depend entirely on what the nigerian people and business leaders decide to do themselves from the 1970s to the 1990s developing countries that chose growth through trade grew at least twice as fast as those that were not open to the world nonetheless there are clearly new challenges what does all this mean for you that is what i would like to talk very briefly about first what you have to do secondly what we have to do it really is a very different world now for more than 100 years we ve been moving toward more global trade but the information revolution has changed everything in 1993 in january when i became the president of the united states there were in total in the whole world only 50 50 sites on the worldwide web today there are 20 million or so and rising in seven and a half years even when we were having increases in trade they were due largely to old traditional sorts of things you had oil somebody else needed oil and didn t have it so you would take it out of the ground and sell it to them and they would send you the money and the geographic facts dictated that or you made beautiful cloth or pottery and you sold it to somebody near you who made something else and they sold that to you now if you have ideas and imagination the information technology has virtually collapsed the meaning of distance and it s made the human mind and ideas even more important than riches in the ground so what does that mean what does it mean for you what does it mean for us well first of all government policy still matters so your government any government of any nation that wants to grow wealthier has to have the basics right managing the economy well keeping the markets open establishing the rule of law creating a good climate for investment reverend jackson talked about that president obasanjo knows all that look at the record nigeria has turned a fiscal deficit into a surplus its growth is up and it is moving to cut tariffs i also hope it will follow through with planned economic reforms including some privatization that will encourage some investment from abroad and at home and improve services for nigerian citizens now if nigeria does its part then nigeria s trading partners and the wealthier countries of the world especially must do their part as well you are america s important partner and we are your largest trading partner so we have a special responsibility to act i m glad to announce today that we are making your exports eligible for duty free treatment under our gsp program thank you let me say something about this i want all of you to in spite of the fact that nearly everything has been said that needs to be said here s one thing that hasn t been said along with the political tragedy of the last 20 years you have had a colossal economic tragedy you pumped a lot of oil out of the ground got a lot of money for it and somebody besides the people got the benefit of it but let me just say this looking forward that s only one part of the tragedy that s the real significance of what i said about duty free treatment in other words if no one had stolen any money if no one had kept too much to himself you could still be in trouble if you didn t use the oil money to get into some business other than oil that s the main point i want to make to you so it s important yes i know you have to look at the past and you have to have accountability and all that but let s not get too carried away about the impact of the past on the future you have got to not only make sure that the money coming from the oil benefits the people you ve got to invest some of that money in a way that broadens the nature of the nigerian economy if you really want people to get richer you ve got to rebuild the agricultural sector you ve got to broaden the manufacturing sector you can actually have com companies in nigeria you can make money off the internet here just like people do everywhere and there needs to be a lot of thought given to how you re going to diversify the economy i hope the fact that you can sell us things now without paying imports will make it more competitive and that we can help our export import bank and i mentioned mr harmon earlier who s here is signing listen to this 1 2 billion in loan guarantees today our trade and development agency is a beginning feasibility study that could generate projects worth hundreds of millions more we also signed the africa growth and opportunity bill earlier and every member of congress over here voted for it and i m grateful to them for doing that that will provide even broader benefits than our gsp program for countries that are eligible when we fully implement the africa growth and opportunity act africa will have the most liberal access to america s market of any region in the world outside north america i am very very proud of that now so i will say again we re committed to doing our part but we have to reverse the practice that went along with the absence of democracy not only because a lot of the oil money went to the wrong hands but it wasn t reinvested you could go around and just hand money out to everybody in nigeria and be just as fair and equal as possible and it still would all be gone in a month or two we have got to diversify this economy now what does that mean it means among other things you have to rebuild your infrastructure as well as a lot of your basic industries half of the people don t have access to clean water it means that you have to broaden access to education your school enrollment levels need to be made more nearly universal it means you have to dramatically broaden access to information technology only 9 000 people have direct access to the internet let me tell you a story i was in india where the per capita income is not much higher than nigeria in one of the poorest states in the entire nation in a little village not so very different from the lovely little village i visited here this morning you know and the ladies of the village were in their indian costumes and they were very beautiful and they danced the only difference was there they threw petals of flowers all over me and they buried me in a mound of flowers it was nice but anyway i went into meet with the local government and i was stunned in this very old building that was not in very good repair i was stunned to see this brand new computer and i met a lady who lived in the village who had been trying to use the computer and i saw a young mother come in and get on the computer and she dialed in the information for the nation s health department and up it came in two languages hindu and english with pictures of what young mothers should do to care properly for their babies for the first six months it was just as good as anything the wealthiest woman in washington d c could get from the most expensive doctor and she punched a little button and the printer printed it out and she took the information home and because there were so many pictures even if you couldn t read very well you could understand what you were supposed to do i went to another state in india and every citizen could get a license for a car or any other kind of government permit over the internet at common stations in all their cities so that people learn to use the internet who never would have learned to use it before just so they didn t have to go stand in line at a government office the point i m trying to make here is it s not true that poor people in poor countries can t make their lives better or make more money out of information technology or can t have access to better education it is not true you should look at this as an opportunity to move faster by maybe 10 20 30 years than you could have moved otherwise with your economic development but you ve got to spread it out you ve got to do what is now called you have to bridge the digital divide and we have to help you do that now i agree that we should help you with the debt burden as long as you are going to spend the savings of the debt burden on the real human and economic long term needs of the people of nigeria so after all and i think nigeria has a compelling case because it was a very different government that ran up those debts with very different priorities so i think you ve got a compelling case but again debt relief is just like oil money you think about it you could take it and go give it out to everybody and in two or three months it would all be gone your president has promised the whole world as well as the people of nigeria he s going to stay on the path of economic reform and if that happens i believe that we will be able to persuade our partners among the other wealthy nations that we ought to move more aggressively to help alleviate nigeria s debt service programs i believe that you don t have to clap for me i m not running for anything anymore i m not a candidate you can totally ignore me but keep in mind if we take the burden off the government of having to make these debt service payments then you must support the president and you must support your legislators anybody with any influence over how this is done to spend the money in a way that will grow the economy and strengthen the society of nigeria over the long run it is not yes everything must be honest and fair but it s not just a question of being honest and fair it s also a question of being smart about how this money is invested so that you are growing the economy over the long run in ways that benefit all the people we have got to broaden the base of this economy now it has to be done and you have got to support your president and you have to be willing as business people to stand up and say when somebody says well why are we spending this on health care why are we spending this on education why are we spending this on clean water why are we spending this on a road in another part of the country i ll hear that i know about that why are we building those roads in the other part of the country all this stuff the only test you should have is if they do this are we going to have healthier children better educated young people and a stronger economy and a better prospect for a more diverse economy over the future that should be your test and if the answer to those questions is yes you should support it so we have to do that we also have to work together to keep infectious diseases from taking away your democratic dreams and your dreams of recovery we just did an event on this whole issue but one in four people in the world today who die every year die from infectious diseases in spite of all the advances in medicine an enormous percentage of these people are under five years of age aids threatens to lower the life expectancy of some african countries by 20 to 30 years there will be countries on this continent within a few years who will have more people in their 60s than people in their 30s now you re going to have a million people die this year of malaria most of them could be saved by being less careless taking precautions and aids is 100 percent preventable yes we are spending a lot of money now and i m very proud of my congress the republicans and the democrats in our congress for voting to put the united states in the lead of developing a global effort for an aids vaccine because that s the ultimate answer and we re going to spend a lot of money on that i think we should spend more money to give you the drugs that are available today at more affordable prices and i m trying to raise a lot of money from drug companies and others and i m trying to get the congress to give the drug companies in our country a tax cut to make more of these drugs available to you at a lower cost we re trying to do that but we have got to have your help in prevention nobody has to get aids but it s difficult painful as i said at the other meeting it s slightly embarrassing even to have to talk about how you get the disease and how you stop it but it s not nearly as painful as watching another child die who doesn t have to die and i applaud the fact that your president and your government are trying to get ahead of this yes there are 3 million nigerians who have hiv or aids and that s a terrible number but it s nothing compared to the consuming numbers that are gripping other countries and the fact that you are doing so much in an aggressive way on prevention is something that i hope everyone in this room will strongly support the president on and strongly keep working for because otherwise it can take away all these economic things that we re doing and you have to be very serious about it we need to work to invest more in education we are helping to establish some community resource centers in every region of nigeria that will provide internet access and training to student and teachers and small businesses so that we can have more nigerians gain access to information technology and we will try to do more too but you should try to think about anyone in the world you can ask to help you do more you can t do what you want to do with this economy quickly with only 9 000 people with internet access you need 9 million people with internet access and you can do it in no time and we ll help you but you all should understand it collapses time and distance that s what the internet does and you need someone to help you collapse time and distance finally one other issue here that i wanted to mention you don t have enough people in school and one of the things we re trying to do i ve put up 300 million and i m going around the world pleading with other rich countries to give us some money to offer a worldwide program to any country who will take us up on it and president obasanjo said he s very interested to provide one nutritious meal a day in school for every child that will show up for school now i m convinced if we did that we would dramatically increase school enrollment among girls as well as boys where it s very very important we don t want to upset local agricultural economies we have to work with them we know we have delivery difficulties this is not a miracle program but we are committed to it and i m grateful that the president said he was interested in having a pilot program here but again i will say i think you ve got a big interest in getting all your children in school and it will pay rich dividends for your economy as well as having fewer social problems fewer public health problems now the last thing i will say is that it really is important that there be an alliance between the government and the people of nigeria and the business interests that are investing in nigeria including those that are from other countries i want more american investment in nigeria let me just say this but i want it to be good old fashioned honest investment that benefits everybody who s willing to work for a living and i want us to be good partners to this good new democracy you have i think the american companies will do that we are creating a new position in our embassy to work with the nigerian government with the oil companies with local communities to promote democratic and economic development in the niger delta i think that s good this september the united nations foundation and several oil companies are going to launch the new nigeria foundation to be administered jointly by the u n development program and the u s organization citizens international to help nigeria create jobs by diversifying the economy providing health care fighting illiteracy supporting small business it s the first public private partnership of its kind within the united nations system dedicated to the well being now of nigeria s people and i thank the u n and the oil companies that are funding it this is a very very important step i will just close with this point and i want to thank all the americans who are here and those who have been doing business here a long time and those who are thinking about investing here the president and the first lady and my daughter and i and reverend jackson a lot of the americans went to church this morning at the first baptist church here and the minister gave a good sermon even for people who aren t christians he talked about the story in the christian new testament of the good samaritan and many of you maybe know the story but basically there s a poor guy that gets beaten up and robbed on the side of the road and left for dead and a priest of the church then in judea and samaria sees him and averts his eyes and walks on and then a man from a very prominent tribe sees him and diverts his eyes and he walks on and then the samaritan who came from a sort of a outcast people people who were looked down on thought to be alien and not friendly to the dominant peoples of the area he saw him went over to him ministered to his wounds made him better took him to a local inn asked the innkeeper to take the man in paid money out of his own pocket and said i want you to let him stay here until he s well enough to go and the next time i m through town if i owe you more money i ll pay you quite a wonderful story now here s what the preacher said i mean what s this got to do with you you re asking i m getting to that so the minister says now there are three kinds of people in this story the first kind says whatever is yours is mine if i can take it away from you that s the person that beat up the poor man the second kind of person says whatever is mine is mine if i can just keep it that s the priest and the man from the fancy tribe who turned their eyes away and walked away and the third kind of person says whatever is mine is yours if you need it that was the samaritan now the point i want to make to you is from a religious point of view whatever your faith the third kind of person is the only sort of person worth being but from a political and economic point of view there s a fourth sort of person i want you to be i want you to think about this we live in a world which is overwhelmingly more interdependent a bunch of people in nigeria get malaria and they have to travel for a living they re going to give it to americans in airports think about it people are now giving people aids all over the world and yet good things are happening too in partnerships all over the world therefore if i want every child in america to have a future 20 30 40 years from now that will be as bright as possible i should do something to help every child in nigeria have a future that is as bright as possible because it s actually good for the american kids if you have more people making more money by selling products to americans it s good for us because then we ll be able to sell you some things so the good samaritan story is right for another reason it s not just whatever is mine is yours if you need it but if i give you a little of mine now i ll get it back many times over because this old world is like a boat in a sea and sometimes the sea is stormy and sometimes the sea is calm sometimes the winds blow with us and sometimes the winds blow against us sometimes one of us is the captain of the ship and then three or four decades later somebody else may be the captain of the ship you can say all of that but when it s all said and done no matter what we re all still in the same boat i believe that that s really why i m here and that s why i want you to support the president to support economic reform i want the americans to put more money in here but i hope you will remember what i said fairness is important and honesty s important but you have a country to be built here so it s also important that you do the intelligent thing and that we think about the good samaritan and realize that in the end the good samaritan was better off he got a lot more out of life than the priest and the other guy that walked by why because in the end we re all in the same boat so let s sail thank you very much dem wjclinton27 8 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you thank you first of all let me say it is wonderful to be in pontiac i am sorry that it s been since harry truman came here in 1948 since a president has been here but i m glad to be following in harry truman s footsteps with you today let me begin by saying a thank you to jay and to jenna for their work in americorps for the example they set for our young people and for their proof that our young people still care about others and want our country to be a stronger better brighter place thank you mayor moore for your enthusiastic welcome and for your leadership i want to that all the community leaders all the school leaders all the ministers all the other folks from pontiac who are here who ve made us feel so welcome thank you my good friend rosa parks for being here with us and for inspiring so many people thank you congressman kildee for standing up for america and for standing up for the people of this district and standing against what they tried to do in that budget last year when we made our veto stick thank you senator levin thank you for all your many fights on behalf of the people of michigan and the people of the united states i hope you all will send carl levin and dale kildee back to the united states congress i want to thank all the fine people from michigan who came with me including your former governor jim blanchard and your former senator don riegle and a whole bunch of other folks who came here with us and i d like to thank my friend vinnie johnson for being the m c i ve never seen him m c anything and i was wondering if he had as many moves up here as he did on the basketball court did he do well i want to thank alice moore for singing the national anthem the anointed voices of praise the gang god s anointed next generation the pontiac high school band the pontiac northern high school band the fellow that played the saxophone randy scott thank you all thank you ladies and gentlemen i m taking this train through the heartland of america we ve been in west virginia and kentucky all through ohio and now into michigan and i m doing it for two reasons first selfishly at this the beginning of what will be my last campaign to go to chicago to once again accept the nomination of my party for president i wanted to go through america s heartland i wanted to look into the faces into the eyes and into the hearts of the people i have been working and fighting for for four years to make america a better place and second i wanted you to see that not only is this train on the right track america is on the right track for the 21st century i m proud of our convention in chicago i wish hillary and chelsea were with me they started out with me but hillary had to go home to chicago and she s going to speak tonight i hope you ll go home and watch it and give her a cheer and our daughter stayed with me a little while longer but she left me this morning in toledo because she wanted to hear mom give her speech so that s where they are but we ve had a wonderful time on this trip you heard the mayor we started the morning in toledo last night an autoworker from toledo was one of the american citizens speaking at the opening of the democratic convention and he was speaking there because the work we have done with the auto industry to open new markets abroad helped to put 700 jobs in the oldest automobile in america in toledo ohio built in 1910 an automobile plant since 1910 that 1910 auto plant is exporting over 41 000 jeeps overseas this year selling our cars and let me tell you why it happened it happened because the uaw and the management have a partnership it happened because they re working together it happened because 70 percent of the people in that plant are getting continuing education and they made so much money for chrysler last year the workers got an average bonus of 8 000 now why because that s a company that believes that if they make money the workers ought to have their fair share that s good for america it s right for america but guess what it turned out to be good for the company for the first time in 20 years it is the united states that is making and selling the largest number of automobiles of any country in the world then we went on to wyandotte and there we gathered in front of a beautiful old library about 100 years old and a huge crowd turned out and i was introduced by two really young people not grown young people i mean young people about eight years old maybe seven and we built them little platforms and they stood up in front of the library and they read the end of that wonderful little children s book the little engine that could do you know that story the little engine had only been used for switching cars the little engine had never been over the mountain but the toys couldn t get to the boys and girls unless the little engine went over the mountain for the only time in its life and the little engine kept saying i think i can i think i can i still remember reading that book to chelsea over and over and over again but you know what the message gets through and that s a message every child in america without regard to race or income or background ought to have because they can if we give them a chance they can if we give them a chance and there in wyandotte we made a commitment a commitment to make sure that if this administration is returned we are going to put out 30 000 tutors we re going to mobilize a million volunteers we re going to ask americorps to take as its main charge teaching children to read so that by the year 2000 every boy and girl in the 3rd grade in america will be able to read well on their own and then we went to royal oak i didn t see the royal oak but i saw the biggest crowd of folks i ever saw in a long time and there the national association of police officers endorsed bill clinton and al gore in the presidential election because for four years in a row the crime rate has been coming down in america because we re putting 100 000 police on the street because we did pass the brady bill and according to mrs brady last night at our convention 100 000 felons fugitives and stalkers have not been able to get guns but no hunter has lost a gun since we did that and because we have to keep working until all of our children are free and safe i met one young woman police officer up on that platform who was in the dare program chelsea still talks about her 5th grade dare officer one of the things that we did that i was so proud of was to pass the safe and drug free schools law to give our communities the resources to send people into these schools when the children are young and try to help them stay off drugs in the first place it s one thing that isn t going so well in this country teenage drug use is going up but when the congress tried to cut the safe and drug free schools program i said no we ve got a problem we need to do more of that we turned it around and we re going forward and they stayed with us so it s been a wonderful day and it s real nice now i look around here i look in this audience and i see what makes america great i want to lead this country into the 21st century with the american dream alive for every person in america i believe that we ought to have a country where everybody has a chance to live up to their god given abilities everyone has a chance to live out their dreams to do it we have to have opportunity for everybody responsibility from everybody and we have to recognize that we are all one country in spite of all of our differences and we better get used to it and like it and go forward together that s what americorps is about that s what this golden opportunity club is about that s what these scout leaders and the scouts are all about the cheerleaders look at the little kids give them a hand there and where are our veterans leaders we ve got some veterans over here somewhere thank you and here s what this is about i m coming to you oh no no no i m coming to you i ve got a special thing to say about you so here s what i want you to think about i want all of you to think in your own mind what do i want my country to look like when we start this new century what do i want my country to look like when my children are my age what kind of legacy do i want to leave to my grandchildren if we have more opportunity more responsibility and we re one american community there is no stopping this country our best days are ahead that s what i ve been working on number one i knew when i became president we had to get that deficit down to get interest rates down to put people back to work now we ve got over 10 million new jobs and we re just getting warmed up we brought the deficit down four years in a row for the first time in a president s administration since before the civil war we would have a surplus today in our budget a surplus if it weren t for the interest we have to pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before i showed up but i m working on it and i want you to let me finish the job i want you to let me finish the job and we did this and we re going to balance that budget without cutting education cutting environmental protection and breaking the backs of medicare and medicaid and we have to make sure that ordinary americans can benefit from this economy we have got to do that we had a good week for ordinary americans last week we raised the minimum wage for 10 million workers the same bill contained a tax cut for small businesses who create most of our jobs so they can invest more in their businesses and made it easier for them to take out pensions for themselves and their workers and for the workers in small businesses to keep those pensions when they change jobs that was a good thing the same bill gave a 5 000 tax credit to adults who will adopt children and even more if the children have disabilities and it removed the barriers to cross racial adoption there s a lot of kids out there that need a happy home that was a good thing to do that we did and the congress passed the kassebaum kennedy bill that your two members here have been working for for a long time it says to 25 million americans just because somebody in your family has been sick they can t take your insurance away from you anymore it says you don t lose your insurance when you change jobs this is a good thing but we have to do more we have to do more we ought now to say just because you can t lose your insurance doesn t mean you can pay for it we ought to help families that are unemployed keep their health insurance for six months i m for that i want to help people who have someone in their family with alzheimer s and they re trying to care for them get a little respite care that s in my balanced budget plan too so they can keep their families and take care of them we have to do more and i want you to believe that we can do these things the most important thing we have to do is to make sure every child in this country and every adult in this country can get the education they need and i want to say to you i don t know about the rest of you but i wouldn t be standing up here if it weren t for my teachers the people that believed in me and i know that not every school is perfect and not every class is successful but we ve still got a public education system that is doing it s best to take everybody that comes in the door and give all those kids a chance and some of these teachers are laboring under great difficulties and so i say to you i say to you we need to make a commitment that we re going to do what we can to take responsibility for our schools and lift up the people that are trying to make them work not get out here and bash them day in and day out we need to be lifting them up i want to see i want to see every classroom in this country every single one in four years not only have the computers they need not only have teachers trained in the computers but i want every single classroom hooked up to the worldwide information superhighway every one now consider what this means this could mean that for the first time in the history of the united states ever children in the poorest urban classrooms children in the most remote hill or hollow of appalachia would have access to the same information in the same time at the same quality as the children in the wealthiest financed schools in the united states of america it has never happened before then we ll see what happens on those test scores then we ll see what happens i want to see an america where every young person can go to college and every adult can go to college four years from now i want two years of education after high school the equivalent of a community college diploma to be just as universal as a high school diploma is today and i want to give you a tax credit to pay for those two years and a deduction for all college costs to up to 10 000 a year of tuition that s a tax cut that s a tax cut we can pay for and a tax cut that will pay for itself many times over we need to do that there s a lot more i d like to tell you but you get the idea we ve got 10 million more jobs 1 5 million fewer people on welfare 12 million people took advantage of the family and medical leave law and didn t lose their jobs and that s a good thing for america we ve got 4 5 million new homeowners 10 million american families who refinanced their homes at lower interest rates 50 million americans breathing cleaner air we cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than the previous administrations did in 12 you get the picture you get the picture we re on the right track we re moving in the right direction we ve got 10 million people with a minimum wage increase but we ve got to do it will you help us stay on the right track will you help us all the way to november will you stay with us all the way to 2000 will you stand with the children in your community thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton27 8 96a bill_clinton thank you i m glad to see you and i m glad to be here i can t talk with a hat on my brain s not working it s only it s early you know but you ll see me with this on again i ll run in it play golf in it i want to thank dennis pawley for what he said out here a few minutes ago and for the leadership that he s given to chrysler and our partnership i want to thank your plant manager for showing me around and bragging on you i thank my old friend rob livertore for coming from washington for chrysler and lloyd mahaffey and bruce braumhauer and ron conrad and all the people from the uaw and one of your members behind me gave me this very old uaw pin and i ll collect it and it will have a prominent place in the white house in my collection so i m glad to have that i ll tell you i was listening to the mayor talk listening to marcy talk and i thought there s more energy in toledo than any other place in america i never heard such thank you mr mayor for what you said and for the partnerships we ve had both in building up the economy and trying to tear down crime and in both places you ve worked hard when we ve worked together and i thank you for that thank you marcy kaptur for being perhaps the most ferocious defender of middle class economics and middle class values in the congress of the united states thank you john glenn for all you have done for this state and this country for your partnership with me in helping to rebuild our economy and helping to make this a safer world you know i ve heard senator glenn introduce a lot and two things i rarely ever hear one i want to tell you is he said we have downsized the government we had to we wanted to put 100 000 more police on your streets and we had a big government and we had a huge deficit we had to find some way to pay for it we couldn t just pay for it with a tax increase so we reduced the size of government but you never hear about it in america and i m proud of that because we did it in a good way of the 250 000 fewer people that are working for the federal government today fewer than 1 800 were involuntarily separated we gave those folks early retirement we helped them find other jobs they went on to other careers in dignity so they could support their families and go forward into the future and i m proud of that i m proud of that and john glenn was one of the people who found ways for us to save money and to do things so we could do that and treat people humanely he played a major role in that especially in the first two years of my administration and there are families out there who can thank god that he found ways to save money for example in the way the pentagon bought their purchases and deal with the personnel systems all that s real people and it matters and speaking of real people i hope you were proud of todd last night he was great at the democratic convention i ve been asked several times by the press why do we have todd clancy why do we have mike robbins the chicago police officer who was riddled with bullets in an assault weapons hail on the street of chicago after serving our country in vietnam and desert storm and never being wounded why did we have that young puerto rican american woman who was an americorps volunteer and is now going to go on and be a doctor after being a high school dropout why do we have these people talk why do we have the superintendent of schools in seattle washington who is an army general we need a doctor here my doctor is here can we get somebody over here and i want you to we re okay we ve got somebody here now i want you to know why we asked citizens to go to a political convention and kick it off why do we have jim and sarah brady lifelong republicans come and talk why do we ask christopher reeve a man who s not particularly political but is a shining example of the kind of courage never to give up to talk about the importance of government research and the importance of continuing the medicaid program so we don t cut off middle class families who don t have a lot of money to deal with disabled people in their family and keep guaranteeing them their health care so they can keep their good jobs why did we do all that because people lose the connection between what is done in government and what happens in your daily lives it s easy to lose that connection it meant an awful lot to me when dennis pawley talked about how i asked to meet with the representatives of the auto industry soon after my election as president and i said we d put a premium on that i knew that america could not lose its auto industry i knew we could be number one again and i think the best way to say that and to show the connection between what we do in washington and what you do in toledo is to have a person like todd clancy tell a personal story that shows how america s life can be changed if we work together and do the right things and i know you are proud of him and so am i and i was proud to be here today to see the 2 millionth jeep roll off the assembly line i love that you proved one more time that whenever we re given a chance to compete we can be the best in the world we can be the best in the world and you have made us proud that was true in world war ii when that old jeep was made and i want to just tell you i m getting a little sensitive about my age i just became eligible for my aarp card but i am so old that when i was a little boy six years old the first time i ever crawled under a car my stepfather owned a little buick dealership in a little town in arkansas where he came from but we also owned a henry j an old henry j kaiser and we owned a late 1940s model jeep and back then the civilian jeeps look just like the military jeeps just think how rich i d be if i d saved that thing i wish we had never gotten rid of it but i feel real nostalgic here today and i thank you but i also want to thank you for what you re doing because i had the privilege to do something i wish everyone of you could do i went in to the showroom of an auto dealership in japan where they were selling the jeeps that you made here in toledo and i was swelling with pride and i spoke to a japanese family who told me how grateful they were that they had a chance to look around for what they thought was the very best vehicle for their family and believe me these people had looked around they knew more about that jeep than some of us do it was amazing and they said they were grateful they had a chance to buy the product of your hard productive labor i wish everyone of you could have that experience you would have been so proud and i was swelling with pride for you and for our country because of what you did and i thank you for that as well but you know marcy had it right the purpose of politics and the purpose of work is to enable people to live out their dreams to enable them to raise strong families and build strong communities and advance the cause of freedom that s the purpose of all this and that s what we re trying to do we ve had a pretty good week and as i ve been saying on this train we re not only on the right track to chicago we re on the right track to the 21st century and we need to stay right on it before i got on this train last week i signed a bill that raised the minimum wage for 10 million americans people that are working hard and deserve it and while i m at it i d like to pay another compliment to the labor movement not just to the uaw but to the whole labor movement organized labor worked as hard as any group in america to raise the minimum wage there are very few labor union members in any union that make the minimum wage or anything real close to it but the laboring people of this country through their organized leadership labored for the minimum wage because they want all people who work for a living to have the dignity and the reward of work and i think americans should be grateful to the labor movement for standing up for the minimum wage that bill by the way also made it easier for people who work in small businesses to do something that you can do we made it a lot easier for small businesses to take out a retirement plan and for people who work for small businesses to keep that retirement when they move from job to job we made it easier for families to adopt children offering a 5 000 tax credit to anybody who would adopt a child an even bigger on if the child has a disability we remove the barriers to cross racial adoption that bill was pro business pro labor and pro family it was a good day for america when it became the law of the land and i thank congresswoman kaptur and senator glenn for their strong support of it i signed the kennedy kassebaum health care bill a bill that we ve needed a long time a bill that says to 25 million americans who ll be affected by it nobody can deny you insurance anymore if somebody in your family s been sick and it can t be taken away from you if you have to change jobs that is a very very important advance for america so i feel good about what s been happening and i thank you this global market is a tough thing to operate in when i became president i decided that we didn t have an option to walk away from the trading world and we got some benefits from it but if we were going to have free trade it had to be fair it had to be fair to our workers fair to our environment fair to our children fair to our future i was prepared to have us compete on a fair and equal footing with anybody anywhere but it had to be that way and we worked very very hard to enable you to reap the benefits of becoming the most productive auto industry in the world again you know just four years ago this plant exported 17 500 cherokees and this year 41 500 that s what you did that means 700 more good middle class jobs and strong families 700 more americans with a success story to tell and that s why todd clancy went to chicago to talk to america to remind america that there is a connection between what we do or fail to do in washington and how you live in toledo and all across the united states now let me say just one or two other things john glenn talked about what was said or not said by our friends in san diego well that s politics you can t expect them to be out there promoting us i mean i didn t hold it against them but on the other hand it is a fact that today the unemployment rate in ohio is under five percent it is a fact that america has more than 10 million more jobs it is a fact that we ve got 900 000 new construction jobs it s a fact that 4 4 million americans have become homeowners for the first time and 10 million more have refinanced their mortgages at lower interest rates because of what has been done it is a fact that we have negotiated 200 new trade agreements to open new markets and give american workers a fair break it is a fact that for the first time in history we re also exporting in addition to autos and auto parts to japan things like rice which i never thought i d live to see coming from the largest rice producing state in the world and cellular telephones and all manner of other things and in the 21 areas covered by our japanese trade agreements exports are up a total of 85 percent in just four years america can compete and what has happened is that thanks to you and people like you all over this country and especially it s already been noted we have senator riegle governor blanchard a lot of very distinguished citizens from michigan here they know a little something about cars too and thanks to the people of ohio and michigan and the other places where automobiles are produced for the first time since the 1970s america america is the number one producer and seller of automobiles again in the entire world now i want to say to you we need to focus on what we re going to do to keep this going we can t backslide we have to go forward it means that this trade work has got to continue we have got we have got to do what brought you to this point we have to keep opening more markets we have to watch it that markets don t get closed we do have to be prepared to impose sanctions if people don t treat our workers and their families fairly we have to be prepared to be firm in this to keep trying to build an open trading system that is both open and fair not only to us but to other wealthier countries as well we want to lift countries up to our level we don t want to see people dragged down to the lowest level in the global economy we want it to lead to growth everywhere the more other people do well the more they will be able to buy our products and other countries and their leaders need to know that there is nothing in it for them to try to force down the american standard of living they should be trying to lift the standard of living of the people in their own countries and we will help if they will do that let me say this is not a particularly stimulating issue i know but that s why it s so important that we keep bringing this deficit down to balance the budget you need to know that it s not just a question of the debt we would leave to your children it s a question of how you live right now why because from the moment i announced after i was elected president that we were going to have a serious attempt to get rid of this deficit after our national debt had gone up by four times in only 12 years interest rates started to fall in addition to the trade agreements and your efforts it was those falling interest rates that have helped the american economy come back when the interest rates go down what does that mean that means your home mortgage payment goes down that means your credit card payment goes down that means people s monthly car payment goes down that means more people buy cars more people buy homes more people buy other things and they are more stable their income goes further most important it means that interest rates for companies like chrysler go down and companies big and small can borrow money invest it build new businesses hire new people and keep this economy going we ve got average wages finally going up in this country for the first time in a decade in the last year or so we ve got to keep it going we can t turn that around we can t turn that around now that s why every middle class american working family should care about financial responsibility and that s why if we stay on a path and we balance this budget in the right way i say the right way we can have a growing economy the right way is to do it without having crippling cuts in the things that are important to our future and important to our obligations that means we have to balance the budget without cutting back on education from college loans to head start without eroding our protection for the environment without eroding our obligations to people who need help families with disabilities poor children the elderly in nursing homes through the medicaid program and without doing more to medicare than is necessary to balance the budget and stabilize the medicare program i don t support those excessive cuts and we don t have to have them it also means that we can have tax cuts for working families but they need to be tax cuts we can afford because if you have one that s more than you can afford your interest rates will go up and it will turn right back around and take away from you what you were going to get in a tax cut so yes we should give people tax relief for children under 13 a tax credit we should give people like you greater access to an ira and let you withdraw from it with no penalty to buy that first home or educate your kids or deal with a medical emergency we should allow you i have proposed a tax credit that will make community college as universal as a high school education is today a 1 500 tax credit a family for the first two years of education after high school a 10 000 deduction for the cost of all college tuition 10 000 a year that will help a lot of you send your kids to college now we can afford that we can afford that but even though it s election year i m not going to stand up and tell you that you can have something that i don t think we can afford you wouldn t go to the bank and borrow money to give yourself a tax cut and you shouldn t ask me to do the same thing i am going to do what i think is right to keep this economy going i want more stories like toledo and let me say that for all of our talk about the role of government and my administration and my personal commitment the real credit for this today goes to you to you and the american people who are supporting you but you can have the best government policies in the world but if the workers aren t productive it doesn t work you can have the best policies in the world but if labor and management fight all the time instead of working together it doesn t work you re sitting here in the oldest automobile plant in this country more than one story i noted and the first question i asked your folks here in management i said how in the wide world can you make this plant with what do you have 4 5 million square feet in more than one floor i said how can these people do this how can you sell these jeeps all over the world and they said the workers did it they did it they overcame the adversity they did the production that s another thing all that government can do and this is the role of the government the role of the government is to create the conditions and give you the tools to make the most of your own life not a guarantee but a chance there are no guarantees that s what the communist system found out that s why it collapsed not a guarantee but a chance you seized the chance and the company deserves a lot of credit i have challenged other companies to follow this lead 70 percent of you in continuing education courses a generous bonus program sharing the profits every company ought to share the fruits of its progress with the workers who make that progress possible and i honor that i honor that i want everyone in america today who works hard for a living to see the example of what happened in toledo because if every company worked in partnership with its workers if every company made it possible for its workers to continue their education and become more productive if every company were committed to sharing a fair share of the profits with labor as well as management and shareholders this country would be even stronger we would be growing even faster we would be going into the future in even better shape i think that s what we have to do the last thing i want to say is we have to face our common challenges together government can t solve a lot of these problems alone we have had a remarkable partnership on the environment i believe we can grow the economy and protect the environment i think we ve proved that we ve improved the quality of our drinking water 50 million people are breathing cleaner air we have cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than were cleaned up in the previous 12 we ve revolutionized the meat standards so you can have safer meat we just decided we just overhauled the standards for pesticides going into your food so your children will have safer food we can do things to grow the economy and protect the environment and we have to work together and we can find ways actually to create jobs one of the things that marcy kaptur said today that struck home with me the most was that we deserve our people deserve in these city areas with their ethnic diversity their religious diversity all their diversity where so much industry has moved out they deserve the chance to make a living and we have got to find ways to give them that chance as hard working americans i want to leave you with two thoughts about that number one if we do it right the environment gives us a chance to do that the biggest new investment in manufacturing in the last several years is a company making recycled paper products in the bronx what did we do for that company the main thing we did was just i signed an executive order directing the federal government to buy a certain percentage of its products in recycled paper now a lot of those urban folks are working on a way to help the environment and they ve got manufacturing jobs that s an important thing the second thing i want to tell you is this as hard working people i know that all of you support the idea that we ought to reform welfare in a way that enables poor folks to go to work and raise their kids just like you re trying to do now we have reduced the welfare rolls by a million and a half in four years and i m proud of that by moving people from welfare to work and requiring people who can work to go to work now i just signed a bill that changes structurally the way welfare works it says at the national level we re going to guarantee poor families the health care that they need we re going to guarantee poor children the nutrition they need we re going to guarantee that there will be more money put into child care for working poor people because they can t afford to pay it but we re going to take what used to be the welfare check itself the federal portion and the state portion we re going to let the state decide how to spend that money to try to spend it in a way that will move more people from welfare to work and put strict time limits on the limit of time that able bodied people can stay on welfare now that s good but if they re going to do that if you re going to require people to go to work they have to have work they have to have a job to go to so i want you just the way you fought for the minimum wage to say what we want for poor families in the country is what we want for ourselves we want people to have the dignity of work and the success of raising their kids and we are committed to real welfare reform yes require people to work but make sure you require them to do work because the work is there if we will continue to work together to create an america where everybody has a chance to live up to their god given capacities and live out their dreams this country s best days are still ahead if you ever doubt this country s days are still ahead think about your story think about your two millionth jeep think about all the right hand drive vehicles you re selling all over the world think about how far you ve come think about the success stories that you represent any one of you could have done what todd did last night and we want every american to be able to tell that same story thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton27 8 96b bill_clinton thank you thank you thank you first of all let me say it is wonderful to be in pontiac i am sorry that it s been since harry truman came here in 1948 since a president has been here but i m glad to be following in harry truman s footsteps with you today let me begin by saying a thank you to jay and to jenna for their work in americorps for the example they set for our young people and for their proof that our young people still care about others and want our country to be a stronger better brighter place thank you mayor moore for your enthusiastic welcome and for your leadership i want to that all the community leaders all the school leaders all the ministers all the other folks from pontiac who are here who ve made us feel so welcome thank you my good friend rosa parks for being here with us and for inspiring so many people thank you congressman kildee for standing up for america and for standing up for the people of this district and standing against what they tried to do in that budget last year when we made our veto stick thank you senator levin thank you for all your many fights on behalf of the people of michigan and the people of the united states i hope you all will send carl levin and dale kildee back to the united states congress i want to thank all the fine people from michigan who came with me including your former governor jim blanchard and your former senator don riegle and a whole bunch of other folks who came here with us and i d like to thank my friend vinnie johnson for being the m c i ve never seen him m c anything and i was wondering if he had as many moves up here as he did on the basketball court did he do well i want to thank alice moore for singing the national anthem the anointed voices of praise the gang god s anointed next generation the pontiac high school band the pontiac northern high school band the fellow that played the saxophone randy scott thank you all thank you ladies and gentlemen i m taking this train through the heartland of america we ve been in west virginia and kentucky all through ohio and now into michigan and i m doing it for two reasons first selfishly at this the beginning of what will be my last campaign to go to chicago to once again accept the nomination of my party for president i wanted to go through america s heartland i wanted to look into the faces into the eyes and into the hearts of the people i have been working and fighting for for four years to make america a better place and second i wanted you to see that not only is this train on the right track america is on the right track for the 21st century i m proud of our convention in chicago i wish hillary and chelsea were with me they started out with me but hillary had to go home to chicago and she s going to speak tonight i hope you ll go home and watch it and give her a cheer and our daughter stayed with me a little while longer but she left me this morning in toledo because she wanted to hear mom give her speech so that s where they are but we ve had a wonderful time on this trip you heard the mayor we started the morning in toledo last night an autoworker from toledo was one of the american citizens speaking at the opening of the democratic convention and he was speaking there because the work we have done with the auto industry to open new markets abroad helped to put 700 jobs in the oldest automobile in america in toledo ohio built in 1910 an automobile plant since 1910 that 1910 auto plant is exporting over 41 000 jeeps overseas this year selling our cars and let me tell you why it happened it happened because the uaw and the management have a partnership it happened because they re working together it happened because 70 percent of the people in that plant are getting continuing education and they made so much money for chrysler last year the workers got an average bonus of 8 000 now why because that s a company that believes that if they make money the workers ought to have their fair share that s good for america it s right for america but guess what it turned out to be good for the company for the first time in 20 years it is the united states that is making and selling the largest number of automobiles of any country in the world then we went on to wyandotte and there we gathered in front of a beautiful old library about 100 years old and a huge crowd turned out and i was introduced by two really young people not grown young people i mean young people about eight years old maybe seven and we built them little platforms and they stood up in front of the library and they read the end of that wonderful little children s book the little engine that could do you know that story the little engine had only been used for switching cars the little engine had never been over the mountain but the toys couldn t get to the boys and girls unless the little engine went over the mountain for the only time in its life and the little engine kept saying i think i can i think i can i still remember reading that book to chelsea over and over and over again but you know what the message gets through and that s a message every child in america without regard to race or income or background ought to have because they can if we give them a chance they can if we give them a chance and there in wyandotte we made a commitment a commitment to make sure that if this administration is returned we are going to put out 30 000 tutors we re going to mobilize a million volunteers we re going to ask americorps to take as its main charge teaching children to read so that by the year 2000 every boy and girl in the 3rd grade in america will be able to read well on their own and then we went to royal oak i didn t see the royal oak but i saw the biggest crowd of folks i ever saw in a long time and there the national association of police officers endorsed bill clinton and al gore in the presidential election because for four years in a row the crime rate has been coming down in america because we re putting 100 000 police on the street because we did pass the brady bill and according to mrs brady last night at our convention 100 000 felons fugitives and stalkers have not been able to get guns but no hunter has lost a gun since we did that and because we have to keep working until all of our children are free and safe i met one young woman police officer up on that platform who was in the dare program chelsea still talks about her 5th grade dare officer one of the things that we did that i was so proud of was to pass the safe and drug free schools law to give our communities the resources to send people into these schools when the children are young and try to help them stay off drugs in the first place it s one thing that isn t going so well in this country teenage drug use is going up but when the congress tried to cut the safe and drug free schools program i said no we ve got a problem we need to do more of that we turned it around and we re going forward and they stayed with us so it s been a wonderful day and it s real nice now i look around here i look in this audience and i see what makes america great i want to lead this country into the 21st century with the american dream alive for every person in america i believe that we ought to have a country where everybody has a chance to live up to their god given abilities everyone has a chance to live out their dreams to do it we have to have opportunity for everybody responsibility from everybody and we have to recognize that we are all one country in spite of all of our differences and we better get used to it and like it and go forward together that s what americorps is about that s what this golden opportunity club is about that s what these scout leaders and the scouts are all about the cheerleaders look at the little kids give them a hand there and where are our veterans leaders we ve got some veterans over here somewhere thank you and here s what this is about i m coming to you oh no no no i m coming to you i ve got a special thing to say about you so here s what i want you to think about i want all of you to think in your own mind what do i want my country to look like when we start this new century what do i want my country to look like when my children are my age what kind of legacy do i want to leave to my grandchildren if we have more opportunity more responsibility and we re one american community there is no stopping this country our best days are ahead that s what i ve been working on number one i knew when i became president we had to get that deficit down to get interest rates down to put people back to work now we ve got over 10 million new jobs and we re just getting warmed up we brought the deficit down four years in a row for the first time in a president s administration since before the civil war we would have a surplus today in our budget a surplus if it weren t for the interest we have to pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before i showed up but i m working on it and i want you to let me finish the job i want you to let me finish the job and we did this and we re going to balance that budget without cutting education cutting environmental protection and breaking the backs of medicare and medicaid and we have to make sure that ordinary americans can benefit from this economy we have got to do that we had a good week for ordinary americans last week we raised the minimum wage for 10 million workers the same bill contained a tax cut for small businesses who create most of our jobs so they can invest more in their businesses and made it easier for them to take out pensions for themselves and their workers and for the workers in small businesses to keep those pensions when they change jobs that was a good thing the same bill gave a 5 000 tax credit to adults who will adopt children and even more if the children have disabilities and it removed the barriers to cross racial adoption there s a lot of kids out there that need a happy home that was a good thing to do that we did and the congress passed the kassebaum kennedy bill that your two members here have been working for for a long time it says to 25 million americans just because somebody in your family has been sick they can t take your insurance away from you anymore it says you don t lose your insurance when you change jobs this is a good thing but we have to do more we have to do more we ought now to say just because you can t lose your insurance doesn t mean you can pay for it we ought to help families that are unemployed keep their health insurance for six months i m for that i want to help people who have someone in their family with alzheimer s and they re trying to care for them get a little respite care that s in my balanced budget plan too so they can keep their families and take care of them we have to do more and i want you to believe that we can do these things the most important thing we have to do is to make sure every child in this country and every adult in this country can get the education they need and i want to say to you i don t know about the rest of you but i wouldn t be standing up here if it weren t for my teachers the people that believed in me and i know that not every school is perfect and not every class is successful but we ve still got a public education system that is doing it s best to take everybody that comes in the door and give all those kids a chance and some of these teachers are laboring under great difficulties and so i say to you i say to you we need to make a commitment that we re going to do what we can to take responsibility for our schools and lift up the people that are trying to make them work not get out here and bash them day in and day out we need to be lifting them up i want to see i want to see every classroom in this country every single one in four years not only have the computers they need not only have teachers trained in the computers but i want every single classroom hooked up to the worldwide information superhighway every one now consider what this means this could mean that for the first time in the history of the united states ever children in the poorest urban classrooms children in the most remote hill or hollow of appalachia would have access to the same information in the same time at the same quality as the children in the wealthiest financed schools in the united states of america it has never happened before then we ll see what happens on those test scores then we ll see what happens i want to see an america where every young person can go to college and every adult can go to college four years from now i want two years of education after high school the equivalent of a community college diploma to be just as universal as a high school diploma is today and i want to give you a tax credit to pay for those two years and a deduction for all college costs to up to 10 000 a year of tuition that s a tax cut that s a tax cut we can pay for and a tax cut that will pay for itself many times over we need to do that there s a lot more i d like to tell you but you get the idea we ve got 10 million more jobs 1 5 million fewer people on welfare 12 million people took advantage of the family and medical leave law and didn t lose their jobs and that s a good thing for america we ve got 4 5 million new homeowners 10 million american families who refinanced their homes at lower interest rates 50 million americans breathing cleaner air we cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than the previous administrations did in 12 you get the picture you get the picture we re on the right track we re moving in the right direction we ve got 10 million people with a minimum wage increase but we ve got to do it will you help us stay on the right track will you help us all the way to november will you stay with us all the way to 2000 will you stand with the children in your community thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton27 8 96c bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you very much thank you so very very much you have made me feel so welcome i never dreamed when we came to royal oak there would be such a vast crowd i thank you all the way down here back here behind us and when don johnson was up here talking and he said detroit which is near here i thought i bet all the people in royal oak think of that detroit s a town that s near royal oak i bet that s what they think let me begin by thanking my good friend bob scully and don johnson and all the other law enforcement officials who are here and those throughout the nation for their support i m very grateful to them and i m very grateful to them for joining me here today i want to thank congressman sandy levin your congressman and a great congressman i want you to know that he has worked for you for your jobs for your welfare for the strength of your communities and your values relentlessly he talks to me all the time and he wears me out until i finally do what he thinks i should do for you and i hope you ll keep him in the congress i d like to thank all the other law enforcement officials who are here i d like to thank those who performed here the kimball high school madrigal singers the stagecrafters david sign the detroit redwings who are here chris draper and stu grimson jim mcclain the m c thank you all very much i d like to thank some others who came with me congressman dale kildee who s over here on my left congressman john conyers is here attorney general frank kelly former governor jim blanchard senator don riegle i have a lot of other people from michigan that are traveling with me on this train we re having a good time i also have with me an old friend of mine and one of the great american heroes of the civil rights movement mrs rosa parks please give her a great hand thank you rosa god bless you thank you thank you i d also like to acknowledge in the audience a very brave lady the mother of another brave woman who was to visit me in the white house next week but denise marie lazar just passed away from huntington s disease her mother charlene solo is here in the audience i d like for you to give her a hand she s brave lady and she s done a good job charlene where are you thank you folks i ve had a wonderful day we ve had great crowds from west virginia to kentucky all through ohio and now in michigan but i don t have any idea how many folks we have here they re way back down the street there way off down here way off behind us and we re glad to see you we re glad to see you i want to say to all of you that i came through here on this train for two reasons first i wanted to look out into this crowd and see your faces i wanted to see the people that i have worked for for these last four years and i wanted you to know i m still working for you and i m proud to be your president secondly i wanted you to see this train this train is not just on the right track to chicago it s on the right track to the 21st century and we re going to keep it there you know in we need a doctor over here we ve got one here we ll get somebody here in a minute we ve got a doctor with us we need a doctor over here in the crowd we ll be right there let me say here we go we re getting somebody there right now there you go here s my medic he ll be right there done you all can t do anything about that let s go on with the program she s going to do a good job she s terrific four years ago when i came to michigan i was hoping i d do pretty well here because half the people that lived in arkansas in the 1950s moved to michigan to get a job and the dream they had was largely fulfilled the dream of being able to find a good job and educate their children and have a secure retirement and build a good life and a strong community and a strong country four years ago i was afraid that dream was about to be lost we had high unemployment stagnant wages no strategy for meeting our challenges and a rising tide of cynicism among our people four years later it s a lot different we wouldn t have this crowd here if you were cynical today and we thank you and god bless you let me also say that the reason i ran for president four years ago is the reason i seek reelection i wanted to prepare our country for the 21st century i want us to go into that next century only four years away now roaring with the american dream alive for every person a possibility for every person to live up to their god given abilities for every person to live out their dreams no matter where they live what they start with what their racial or their religious background is and we have followed a simple strategy create more opportunity for people expect more responsibility from our people and tell everybody that we have got to go forward together we have got to go forward together we know that this country when we re together never loses and i don t know how you feel but i look around the world today i spent so much time as your president trying to bring peace to places like bosnia the middle east northern ireland dealing with the slaughters in rwanda and burundi why because all over the world there are people who insist upon looking down on each other because of their racial their ethnic their religious or their tribal differences instead of joining together hand in hand to move forward and whenever i see that in america i want to stamp it out that s why i have done everything i could to make us all stand up against the church burnings and whenever a synagogue or a muslim center is defaced it s wrong we have to fight that the america i want for our children is one that says we don t care anything else about you if you believe in the constitution the bill of rights the declaration of independence you work hard pay your taxes obey the law and believe in our country you re our kind of american and we re going with you into the 21st century now this has been a great day for me and last night was a great night when we started our convention but i want to tell you something about our convention last night we did something that had never been done before we just had citizens talk we had an auto worker from toledo that i met with again this morning toledo they work it s the oldest auto plant in america 1910 but they re selling jeeps in japan with right hand drive it s a plant where there s a genuine partnership between workers and management where 70 percent of the workers are in continuing education programs and they got a 8 000 bonus last year because they have people who believe that when a company makes money the workers are entitled to their fair share and i hope that all of you in michigan are justly proud that for the first time since the 1970s it is the united states that is producing more and selling more automobiles than any other country in the entire world we had a police officer named mike robbins from chicago there i don t know if you heard him speak but i ll never forget when i met him and he said i served my country in vietnam in desert storm and by the grace of god i was never harmed i came home to serve my country on the streets of chicago and within 45 seconds i had nine bullets in my body from an assault weapon and when i heard the president say we all had to speak up i decided if i got out of my hospital bed i was going to do my part mike robbins is the kind of person i m fighting for the kind of person we need in uniform today the kind of person that s giving his life for our people there was a young puerto rican american girl an immigrant to our country who dropped out of high school who spoke she got in americorps our national service program she started helping younger children to learn and she decided she was pretty smart herself so she went back and finished high school and she s going to a wonderful school brown university and she s going to be a doctor and give something back to her country because we gave her a chance to earn her way through college through national service there was a retired general who is now the superintendent of schools in seattle washington reminding us that education too is part of our national security and of course there were jim and sarah brady talking about the brady bill and they were perfectly wonderful and then there was christopher reeve and his magnificent performance reminding us that we dare not balance the budget on the backs of the american families with handicapped people and we dare not dare not walk away from our obligations to research to find the answers to the medical and scientific mysteries that still confront us and i tell you i was proud of him and i was proud of him for saying that not everybody who gets hurt like that is an actor with a comfortable income that s why we have to preserve medicaid for middle class families with disabilities who deserve to have that kind of help i say that because folks we want our convention to be about you not about us we want our convention to be about the connection between our nations leaders and the people who really count people who live in places like royal oak michigan all over the united states of america now you think about where we are now compared to where we were four years ago with opportunity responsibility and community 10 million more jobs a 60 percent reduction in the deficit 4 5 million new homeowners 10 million homeowners who have refinanced their homes at lower interest rates a couple a million college students eligible for lower cost college loans with better repayment terms 1 5 million fewer people on welfare and a 40 percent increase in child support payments in the last four years fifty million more americans breathing cleaner air more toxic waste sites cleaned up in three years than in the previous 12 years i am proud of that and you should be too but folks we also want our convention to be about the future the future we have to build together and i want to talk to you about that for a few minutes we ve gotten our economic house in order we have record exports record small business starts and we are in good shape overall but you know as well as i do there are still a lot of people working hard who d like a better chance to fully participate in the american dream there are still these kids coming up that we have to get an education and i want to focus on not what we ve done the last four years but what we re going to do for the next four and let me just give you a few examples number one i agree with that look can i say something wait a minute you know i agree with that get yourself a congress that agrees with me so i want you to think about this number one we ve got to keep this economy going and that means we have to find a way to balance the budget and protect medicare medicaid education and the environment and not raid workers pension funds and not raise taxes on the lowest income working people and all the other things that were in that budget i vetoed last year and i m glad i did but i want you to listen we do have to balance the budget why why have we brought this economy back because for the first time since before the civil war we brought the deficit down four years ago and interest rates have been lower what happens when interest rates go down your home mortgage payment your car payment your credit car payment is lower more important a business person can go to the bank borrow money cheaper and invest to create more jobs and higher incomes for the american people so i say to you i want you to have a tax cut but i want you to have one that we can pay for balance the budget and invest in education and the environment and medicare and medicaid because we have still if we blow this deficit up again after getting it down what will happen higher car payments higher home mortgage payments higher credit card payments fewer jobs a slower economy we ve got to keep this thing going on the right track folks we ve got to have a tax cut that we can afford that helps families to educate their children deal with their health care problems get that first time home but still keeps the economy growing and going the second thing we ve got to do is to make sure we do an even better job of educating our children and our adults in the next four years i intend to spend a great deal of time trying to make sure that every single person in this country gets a world class education and i just let me mention two or three things number one in wyandotte earlier today i said that i want us to have a national goal that by the year 2000 every single child in america in the 3rd grade will be reading well at grade level and not be behind every one and we can do that we can do it number two i want us by the year 2000 to make sure every single classroom in america and every library not only has computers not only has teachers qualified to use the computers and teach the kids but is hooked up to the information superhighway so everybody can know everything every other class can know now you think about this you think about this if we can do this it means in the poorest inner city school in the most remote rural mountain village they will have access to the same information that people in the wealthiest schools do today we can explode learning in america if we just give everybody the same resources finally finally we have to make it possible for everybody to go on after high school and my goal is by the year 2000 to have the 13th and 14th grades at least two years of education after high school as universal as high school is today how are we going to do it we re going to do it with a tax cut we can afford a 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of education after high school a 10 000 tax deduction for all education after high school for middle class families in america to get people back in school and pay for their education folks we also have to recognize that there are other things to be done to help working people constitute their lives strong and good last week we had a good week for america s families i signed the bill that raised the minimum wage for 10 million americans but i want you to know what else it did i want you to know what else it did it also gave a tax break to small businesses that invest more in their business and made it easier for small business people and their employees to take out retirement plans and for those folks to keep those retirement plans when they change from job to job since most people work for small businesses that s important for america we need for those people to be able to have a retirement and finally let me tell you what the minimum wage bill did it also gave a 5 000 tax credit to any family that adopts a child and more if they adopt a child that has a disability and it removed the longstanding prejudice against cross racial adoptions there are lots of kids out there without a home i think we can give more of them homes now that s pro family pro business pro work the other thing that congress did last week that i especially liked was to pass the kennedy kassebaum health reform bill what it says to 25 million americans in this shape nobody can deny you health insurance anymore because somebody in your family has been sick and if you change jobs or you lose your job they can t automatically take your health insurance away from you that s a great thing that s a great thing but we have more to do that s a great first step that was in the health care reform i proposed in 94 i m so proud of the congress for adopting it but now we need to recognize that there are still some things we have to do just because you have a right to keep your health insurance doesn t mean you can afford to pay for it the next step is in the balanced budget plan i have presented give unemployed workers and their families health insurance for six months after they re unemployed help them get and then we have to find a way for small business people to join together in pools and buy good insurance policies like we federal employees have at an affordable price and that s the next step and there was a lady that had a sign back there i want to comment on we also have to find a way to provide access to mental health benefits and health insurance it s a very important thing for our country the vice president s wonderful wife tipper gore has worked so hard on that so there is still a lot to do we passed the welfare reform bill but let me tell you something folks that is the beginning not the end of this process the reason i signed that bill was first of all we ve already reduced the welfare rolls by a million and a half by putting people in programs to move from welfare to work but we need to do more so when the congress said okay i ll give in i had to veto two of those bills first we ll give people on welfare their health care we ll provide more for child care we ll make sure the kids have food to eat i said now we will give what used to be the welfare check to the states the federal and the state money but they then have to decide how to move people from welfare to work that s our next challenge we have to get more jobs in the inner cities more jobs in the isolated rural areas if you re going to tell somebody they have to go to work because they re able bodied they have to have work to find they have to have a job to go to and we ve got to do that so there s a lot to do let me give you another example we worked hard to prove that you could grow the economy and clean up the environment and i believe you can the toxic waste sites the clean air the safe drinking water act we had adopted a revolutionary pesticide protection act so that children s food will be more free of dangerous pesticides we are moving forward we ve changed the meat and poultry inspection system of the country for the first time in 70 years and that s important we have to do more one of the most important things that we re doing that we have to continue is the work we began with the auto industry in 1993 in partnership to develop a new clean car that can get three times the mileage of the present cars clean up the air and save money for the american people and people all over the world so there s lots to do we want to clean up two thirds of the toxic waste dumps that are still out there there s lots to do and i want you to support that we have an interest in america in a clean economy i mean a strong economy and a clean environment and we can do both you can say that i can t i just want to mention a couple of other things these fine police officers have been here in 1994 a lot of the folks that voted with them for the brady bill and the assault weapons ban and the 100 000 police got beat when they ran for reelection they got beat in places like michigan and arkansas because we live in a state i did and you do where probably nearly half the people have a hunting or a fishing license or both i guess i was 12 years old the first time i picked up a 22 and started shooting cans off fence posts but you know i couldn t figure out what they were all saying back in 94 well if this is a terrible thing if we check to see if a person s got a criminal record before we give them a handgun this is a terrible thing that we re not going to keep pedaling these assault weapons that were designed to kill people and a lot of folks said to folks in michigan and arkansas you re going to lose your rifle boy they re coming after you next let me tell you something folks we ve had two deer seasons since then not a single michigan or arkansas hunter has lost the rifle they were hunting with in 1994 not a one not a one not a one but according to what sarah brady said last night 100 000 felons fugitives and stalkers did lose the right to get a handgun and we re a safer country because of that i would never i would never knowingly do anything to interfere with the right of the american people to hunting and sporting use of their weapons but i m telling you folks a lot of those folks who talk about it have never seen the war zone that a lot of american children live in i have looked into the faces of people who live on blocks where 13 year old kids have been shot down on lark drive by shootings i was as as i said last night the convention was opened by a man who fought in vietnam without incident and had his body riddled with nine bullet holes in 45 seconds so we can find a way to hunt and to fish and to shoot in contest and to have a big time and protect people surely we can i want the congress to ban these cop killer bullets they re fighting that too we need a doctor they ll get it we got it the doctor is already there you know i have never seen a deer in a bullet proof vest and if they can show me one i ll reassess my position on this issue but until i find a deer or a duck or a wild turkey wearing a kevlar vest i m going to stick with these folks and be for banning those cop killer bullets one last thing i think one of the biggest dilemmas our people face today i look out here and see all of you need a doctor over there connie can we send we need someone back in the back over here we ll be right there just hold up the signs where you are somebody hold up the sign we ll send somebody right back there one of the biggest problems people face is trying to balance the demands of child rearing and work i bet there is not a family here that can t remember a personal instance where you were torn between the demands of your job and the demands of your children i ll bet you can t think there is not anybody here that hasn t been through that that s why i m so proud that we passed the family and medical leave law twelve million americans got to take some time off from work without losing their job one other thing you know it hasn t hurt the economy we ve got ten and a quarter million new jobs and a record number of new small businesses but 12 million families got to be there when the baby was born or the parent was sick without losing a job and i d like to see that law expanded so that people could have just a little time to make those regular doctor s appointments and regular teacher s appointments with their kids or they re parents i d like to see the provisions of my balanced budget bill passed so that people on medicare that ladies can get regular mammograms who are medicare eligible i d like to see people who have someone in their families with alzheimer s they re trying to take care of be able to access some respite care these things will save us money they will make us a more humane country they will strengthen america s families so i ask you if you agree we re better off than we were four years ago if you agree we ve got to keep working until we create opportunity for all americans make all communities responsible and go forward together i want to ask you if you will at least in your mind and heart will you get on this train with me for 70 days and keep us on the right track will you stay with me to take america into the 21st century do you believe we can do it i know we can thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton27 9 95 bill_clinton thank you all please be seated it is wonderful to be here wonderful to be back i thank congressman and mrs pastor for coming out here with me and i thank ed for that fine introduction to your mistress of ceremonies giselle fernandez members of the congressional hispanic caucus the institute board your executive director rita elizondo and secretary cisneros and mary alice secretary pena and ellen secretary riley and tunkie attorney general reno and all your honored guests i thank you for inviting me to come again this year for 18 years you have held this event and it s become a part of our nation s important hispanic heritage month i have been here for three years running and during these three years my daughter has been studying spanish so i hope you ll keep inviting me back it s getting a little better each year how s this y me gusta hablar espanol is that okay i was thinking tonight coming over here it s not in my prepared remarks but i was thinking of two connected events that shape what i wish to say to you tonight the first was the honor i had to be a part of the premiere here a few months ago of that wonderful movie mi familia and the second was the experience i had just today to be with the governor of the state of oklahoma and mrs keating and the mayor of the city of oklahoma city and mrs norick and a group from oklahoma as they came here on their national tour thanking all the volunteer workers who went to oklahoma city in the aftermath of the horrible bombing of the federal building and what i thought and said there was that in that moment we all became a family the whole country in florida last week governor lawton chiles said that the central question of our time was whether we were going to be a community or a crowd the hispanic community in america has always been a community always tried to live by family values not just talk about them now a crowd is a group that occupies the same piece of land but really has no particular connection to one another and so they elbow and shove and go to and fro until the strongest win and others are left behind a community is a group of people who occupy the same piece of land and recognize their obligations to one another people who believe they re going up or down together people who believe they should help protect children and do honor to the elderly and help people make the most of their own lives people who believe in freedom and responsibility people who believe that we have an obligation to find common ground and sometimes to do the right thing because it s right even if it s unpopular in the short run and in this period of change as we move out of an industrial to an information society out of the cold war into the global economy that is what we need more than ever before the values of your family and your community and your work the work of the hispanic caucus has never been more important than it is today because you have stood for the values that are the very heart of the latino culture and the very best of america some seek to divide us by spreading fear and laying blame but the hispanic caucus has always sought to unite us all in america i have counted on your support literally from everything from a to z from affirmative action to zero tolerance gun policies in our schools the hispanic caucus has been my partner in three years of hard won progress when i became president we had a stagnant and suffering economy when i proposed a remedy to drive down this terrible deficit and increase investment in our people and in our economy and in our future the naysayers who turned away said it would wreck the economy but with the help of the hispanic caucus we passed an economic policy and after three years they were wrong and we were right we have 7 3 million new jobs 2 5 million new homeowners secretary cisneros has a plan that will take homeownership above two thirds of the american people by the year 2000 for the first time in american history we have the largest number of new small businesses incorporated in any two and half year period in american history about two million we have the largest number of new self made millionaires in any two and a half year period in american history and we have the lowest combined rate of unemployment and inflation in nearly three decades the hispanic caucus helped this administration to tackle the problem of crime when i showed up here for six years washington rhetoric had paralyzed the crime bill while everybody made speeches about it we broke through that rhetoric and the partisan discord and passed a crime bill at a time when most americans believed that nothing nothing could really be done about the crime problem our crime bill put more police officers on our street it did punish serious criminals more but it also gave our young people something to say yes to and in every state in the country now in virtually every urban area the crime rate is down the murder rate is down i was in jacksonville florida last week and i saw that for the first time people really believed that crime could go down in their neighborhoods as they saw these police officers that we have put on the street again we did it in the face of intense partisan opposition but you were right and i thank you and america is a safer place tonight because of the leadership of the hispanic caucus last year at the summit of the americas we saw what a vital role hispanic americans can play as we expand trade with all of latin america through nafta and the free trade area we agreed on by the year 2005 when mexico got in trouble so many of you stood by my side in what had the least popular support i think of anything i think i ve done since i ve been president but think what would have happened if we had not gone to mexico s aid look what was happening in mexico look what was happening in argentina look what was happening in brazil look what would have happened in terms of illegal immigration in terms of political discord in terms of economic dislocation maybe those of you who stood with me were part of only 15 percent approval of the policy at the time but when the president of mexico gets here in the next week or in the next couple of weeks for his state visit we will see a mexico coming back in the right direction moving toward constructive partnership with the united states with a future that we can be hopeful about instead of one we can rue because of you and your leadership and i thank you for that i also thank you for your support for our policies designed to improve the security and the prosperity and advance the values of the american people around the world it is no longer possible in this global society to talk about domestic and foreign policy they re all blurred and i thank you for your support in policies that have led to us led us to the point where i can say that for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are now no foreign missiles pointed at the people of the united states of america i thank you for our efforts to make peace in haiti and northern ireland and for the celebration we will have tomorrow on the next step on the road to peace in the middle east i thank you for the work we have done to bring a genuine peace in bosnia and one of your number of course i must thank specifically because through his combination of energy and imagination heart and diplomacy he has helped time and time again to make the world a safer place congressman bill richardson thank you on friday i will have the honor of acknowledging the work of another great american when i present the family of willie velasquez with the presidential medal of freedom the highest civilian honor in the land i wish he could be here tonight to see how much he has helped citizenship to bloom among hispanic americans throughout this country i also want to say a special word of thanks to the hispanic americans who have helped to enrich the work of our administration beginning with henry cisneros and federico pena and the latinos who have been appointed to the federal district and circuit court of appeals those who occupy senior levels in government in both categories considerably more than any previous administration you have proved as i said in my speech on affirmative action that excellence and diversity can go hand in hand they must go hand in hand and if they do that is our ticket to a very very bright future i thank those from my administration who are here tonight including gil casellas norma cantu maria echaveste nelson diaz george munoz aida alvarez fernando torres gil katherine archuleta jack otero the people from the white house who have been wonderful to be part of my family janet murguia suzanna valdez carolyn curiel ray martinez alfred ramirez liz montoya and grace garcia my advance person who got me in here tonight i couldn t get around without her anymore i thank her i also want to thank someone who recently left the white house isabelle rodriguez tapia who was the deputy assistant to the president and director of advance for both the first lady and for me all of these people and so many others are a part of what america is in its government and this is terribly important as we look at this balanced budget i ask you to think about the people the values the vision you have for the future it s really about values should we balance the budget of course we should of course we should we never had a permanent deficit never until the 12 years before i came to washington we never had one before and lest anyone blame any one party or the other i would remind you that in 11 of those 12 years the congress appropriated less money not more than the president asked for this was not a partisan thing but presidents have a responsibility to lead and thanks to the efforts of many of you here we reduced our government deficit from 290 billion to 160 billion a 40 percent reduction in three years the first time since president truman that had been done so should we balance the budget of course we should otherwise we will spend more and more of your money on paying interest on the debt and we ll have less to spend on the things that make us strong and good and give us a better future otherwise we will take too much money at interest rates that are too high away from the business community in america that needs to borrow that money to generate jobs in the private sector which is where we re trying to grow our future but the question is how should we do this and don t we have to do it in a way that is consistent with our most fundamental values with work and family with responsibility with our obligations to the elderly and to our children with our obligations to help those who cannot help themselves through no fault of their own and perhaps to stop helping those who can help themselves just as well without it what are we going to do how are we going to do this let me just offer a few observations i don t think it is consistent with our values to balance the budget by reducing the number of college scholarships and more affordable college loans or by depriving hundreds of thousands of little children who happen to be poor the chance to get off to a good start in school or by depriving schools of the chance to have smaller classes and computers in the classroom and meet the higher standards that we re holding out for them just because the districts happen to be poor why are we trying to balance the budget to strengthen america s future we cannot strengthen america s future in a global economy where what we earn depends on what we can learn by weakening our commitment to education at the moment we should be strengthening that commitment to education and let me say this as an aside neither should we use the balanced budget as an excuse just to go after things that we do not like and cannot find a more open way to do deal with and i want to just say a word in that context about bilingual education of course english is the language of the united states of course it is that is not the issue the issue is whether children who come here while they are learning english should also be able to learn other things the issue is whether american citizens who work hard and pay taxes and are older and haven t mastered english yet should be able to vote like other citizens the issue is whether the issue in short is not whether english is our language it is the issue is whether or not we re going to value the culture the traditions of everybody and also recognize that we have a solemn obligation every day in every way to let these children to live up to the fullest of their god given capacities that s what this is about look at the balanced budget on the tax issue can we afford to reduce taxes and balance the budget i believe we can but we should do it consistent with our values we should not cut taxes more than we can afford to do and provide our other obligations and meet them and we should focus tax relief on the most important and most stressed things in our society the need that middle class families have to get help with raising their children and to get help with financing the cost of education after high school that s what we ought to do and the last thing we ought to do the last thing we ought to do is what is now proposed unbelievably by the congressional majority they want to raise the family tax credit by 40 billion one of the most important things we did in 1993 with our economic proposal was to give over 14 million working families who lived on modest incomes a reduction in their income taxes to send out two very important messages number one this country should never favor welfare over work and number two if someone is working 40 hours a week and they have children in their home they should not live in poverty because of a tax system we must not reverse that how in the world how in the world anyone could justify cutting the taxes of someone in my income group and raising the taxes on working mothers with children who have an income of 11 500 a year is beyond me it is wrong and we must stop it we must not permit it to be done and let me say this there s a lot of budget balancing to be done in the name of welfare reform this administration has given 35 states the right to get out from under various federal rules and regulations to do more to move people from welfare to work but what is our objective with welfare reform it is to see people who are poor who may have made some mistakes in their lives have the chance to live good strong pro work pro family lives our objective is to look at the reality of america where most parents work and most parents have to work and to say what we want is for everybody who can work to work but we also want people to succeed as parents for that is still our most important jobs and we must do both those things with welfare reform therefore i say to you it s all right to be very tough in child support enforcement the congress has adopted my provisions because there aren t any that are tougher it is all right to be strong in saying you must if you can be in school or be in a training program or take a job when it is offered and it is good that the congress seems to be willing now to give some funds for child support so that you don t have to neglect your children if you go to work and you re poor but it is wrong to use this as an excuse to punish people just because they re poor or they made a mistake or they happen to be children who through no fault of their own are in the family they re in democratic republican governors the catholic church they ve all helped us to try to take some of these extreme provisions our the welfare reform debate and i say we have to keep them out and let s remember what we want is for people to be able to work and raise their children with dignity in this country that is the purpose of welfare reform finally let me just give you one last example there s a lot of talk about medicare and medicaid we have to slow the rate of inflation in those programs if we don t if we don t they will soon be taking virtually all the discretionary money of the government we won t have money to invest in education or secretary pena s infrastructure programs that can put people back to work and rebuild communities so we do have to do that it is true that the medicare trust fund needs help but the trustees that are so often cited by the congressional majority say that it costs 90 billion to fix the medicare trust fund for more than a decade that money comes from slowing the reimbursement rates to medical providers their proposal to double the premiums double the deductibles stop giving medicare to anybody under 67 years old to raise three times as much as it takes to bail out the trust fund has nothing to do with saving medicare it has everything to do with funding their budget priorities my priorities say we owe it to the elderly not to do that to them most of them have very limited incomes the average senior lady in the country a women over 65 living alone is living on less than 9 000 a year average in many states 75 percent of those folks are living on less than 7 500 a year they cannot afford to have their premiums and deductibles doubles it is wrong it is not necessary and we should not do it and finally let me say just a word about the medicaid program it s not popular to stand up for poor children anymore but the medicaid program two thirds of that money in medicaid goes to the elderly and the disabled americans of this country it pays for their nursing home care for in home care to avoid the costs of going to nursing homes and for hospital care about a third of the money goes to the poor children of america to pay for their medical bills and a lot of that money goes to hospitals in big cities and isolated rural areas and if you take a third of that money away over the next seven years three times as much as i have recommended in my balanced budget plan there is no way you will not do grievous harm to the elderly the disabled and the poorest most vulnerable children in america and to all those who say well i d rather have mine now i don t care about them just remember those children will be will be the adults of the future and we those in my age group will be depending on those kids to take care of us when we are retired we are a family we better act like a family we cannot afford to do these things that violate our family values lastly let me say how very proud i am that the hispanic caucus mirrors these values every day in their work and let me encourage all of you who may be discouraged by what i have just said and i left a lot of things out they also have proposed for example that if an elderly couple has one of the husband or the wife needs to go into the nursing home they ve proposed letting states require the one that s not in a nursing home to have to sell their house their car and clean out their bank accounts before the one who s in the nursing home can get any kind of help i don t think that s right either my idea of the america of the 21st century is a high opportunity country where everybody has a chance to live up to the fullest of their ability i do not want my child to get ahead by driving elderly people into poverty that is not my idea of family values that is not the right thing to do now i want to ask all of you without regard to your political party or where you live or what your income is in these next few weeks to urge the congress to live by the values of hispanic america to decide by the values of hispanic america to lift up work and family to work for more freedom and responsibility to remember our obligations to our children and to our parents and to remember the future belongs to the united states if we can just remember that we re a community not a crowd look at america and imagine what the world s going to be like in 20 or 25 years the global economy people moving around technology ideas information moving around there is no country in this world as well suited to seize the 21st century as the united states if we will just remember how we got to where we are by being a community not a crowd thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton27 9 97a bill_clinton thank you very much gosh i m glad to see you thank you chairman gibson congressman berry you know marion berry had me in his home and to coon supper so many times i was practically paying part of the property tax down there then i got him to come to washington to work and he thought he d gone to a foreign country now he s going to be there when i m gone and he s still doing that poor country boy routine you know he s just milking it for all it s worth he s a good man and my dear friend and i m proud that he s my congressman and congressman snyder i m glad to be the first constituent i voted for you and i just have one question how come i don t ever get the news letter you know vic snyder is an unusual man he was in the marine corps and sometimes i think he has more courage than is good for him he s always sticking his neck out and he s got a medical degree and a law degree and sometimes i think he knows more than anybody ought to carry around but i am very very proud that we have sent a person of his caliber to the united states congress from this district and you should all be proud of him so i thank you for that and bynum i thank you for organizing this and i thank all of you for being here for the arkansas legislature when we had the tornado down here and i came down to look at arkadelphia and college station and fly over the parts of benton that were hurt so badly afterward i had about an hour and i invited the legislators to come out here and see me at the airport and there was a whole bunch of stuff going on i didn t dream anybody would come and more than half of you showed up those of you who are legislators here and i heard something from the arkansas legislators i never thought i would hear as long as i lived about 30 of them said we really miss you i thought i would never hear it and then i made a mistake i made the mistake they teach you in law school 101 they say never ask a question you don t know the answer to i made a mistake i said why and they said because we could have so much fun when you were here because whenever it got going too far you would always stop us and now we have to be responsible and we have to do the right thing for the state of arkansas but i think our legislators have done the right thing for the state and because of the term limits law all of you know that more than 50 of the seats will turn over and that s really why were all here i tell you i ve learned a lot of things in the last five years and most of them have been utterly wonderful hillary and i have had a magnificent experience our daughter thanks to the media and others was permitted to have about as normal a childhood as you could have in washington living in the white house and she s off at college now and when we took her to stanford the student speaker to the parents got up and made the following remark he said i don t want any of you to worry you ll children will miss you in november for 15 minutes so she s having a great time and our country is in better shape than it was five years ago when we started this odyssey and i guess what i would like to say to you is that the country works best when there are two parties with different views that are both strong that are required by the dynamics of the situation to make principled compromise you heard what vic said that balanced budget we signed is a great thing for america but i want you to know that the democrats made some critical contributions to it without which it never would have happened number one in 1993 without a single republican vote we took the tough vote on our economic plan and the deficit had been reduced by 87 percent before the balanced budget act was passed that s why we could pass one with all the good stuff in it and you should never forget that number two what else did the democrats put in if it hadn t been for us there never would have been 24 billion for children s health to give 5 million children almost all of them in lower income working families whose parents don t have health insurance on the job the coverage of health insurance and the dignity and security their families deserve we put that in there the third thing we did which i think 30 years from now will live along with the fact that we finally balanced the budget for the first time since lyndon johnson was president will live as the enduring legacy we literally can now say because of the hope scholarship the 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college which covers the cost of tuition and fees at most of the community colleges in the country because of the tax credits for the junior and senior year of college and graduate school and adults going back for job training because you can now have an ira you can withdraw from tax free if you spend the money on education or a health insurance policy or to buy a first home because we ve got in the last two years 300 000 more work study positions and because we ve got the biggest increase in pell grants in 20 years we can now say finally this country has opened the doors of college to every person in the country who is willing to work for it and i m proud of that and you should be proud of that and that was what our party put in there and it was our party that overwhelmingly supported the family and medical leave law and that got the minimum wage law raised for the first time in a very long time and in so many other ways and it was our party standing united these members of congress behind me that enabled us to stop the contract on america from going into effect in 1995 even after the government was shut down so it matters there are differences that are honest in these parties and it matters what we did there is another thing that vic snyder said that i don t think we ought to dwell on too much but it bears repeating there s a difference in the way we do our business too there is a difference in the way we do our business too and i came to washington sick and tired of the politics of personal destruction and many times over the last four years it has broken my heart to see how people tried to put all of you on trial and our whole state on trial and i went back in my whole mind to a chilling phone call i got in 1991 from a man who was kind of a friend of mine in the other party who said we can make people believe anything about arkansas you re the only guy that can beat us if you run we ll take it out on them and they were as good as their word but you did not weaken and i kept smiling and hillary kept smiling and the country kept doing better and the people that were doing that just got madder and madder and madder and madder but on the other hand and against all odds after all you ve been through you came through and you voted for me overwhelmingly again last time and i am more grateful than i can say but i want to tell you something else it matters who holds these positions it matters who is in the legislature you know i was a voter i voted against the term limits amendment i used to joke with people that whenever john miller walked in a room i was in if there were 100 people in the room the knowledge of state government doubled when he walked in a room i used to say to people i used to talk about the people that had been around there a long time and we d fight sometimes but i always thought it was a good thing to have elected citizens with the real power reins and now we have to be sensitive because all of our newer members are going to have to rely more on permanent staff people and they re going to have to listen more to the lobbyists because they ll have information they don t have and so we re going to have to work hard to make adjustments there is no such thing as a perfect system but we need good knowledgeable hardworking honest people to present themselves to serve in the legislature more than ever before and if there is any good thing about it we ll have to go to people and say look you know you don t have to take your whole life doing this because we ve got these term limits now but your state needs you to step forward and serve and then i want to see the democrats out there running positive campaigns vic and marion will tell you when i was pleading with all of our democrats to vote for the balanced budget because of the things that were in it because it had integrity it was a good democratic budget and i was sick and tired of saying that democrats were the party of tax and spend when we took the deficit down all by ourselves i argued the following i said look when i became president what did you hear at every election about our party what did they say they said we were weak on national defense they said we didn t really support a strong foreign policy they said we couldn t be trusted to manage the economy they said we were weak on crime and weak on welfare i heard it all like a mantra over and over again well they can t say that five years later because our economy is the strongest it s been in a generation because we have advanced the cause of peace and freedom around the world because we have the lowest biggest drop in welfare in history and the smallest percentage of americans on welfare since 1970 after 20 years of immigration of poor people coming to america we still have the smallest percentage of people on welfare since 1970 and the crime rate s dropped five years in a row so what is the subject the subject is how are we going to organize this country so that everybody has a chance to live up to his or her god given capacities how are we going to organize our lives so that people can work and still do their most important job which is to raise their children properly how are you going to balance the demands of work and family how are we going to grow the economy and preserve the environment those are issues that require people with our kind of values and our kind of interests and our kind of insights and the future depends upon that i pledged when i went to washington i would change the federal government i would make it more active but smaller and give more power to the states and we have done that now if the states have more power on everything from education to welfare and a whole range of other issues it then becomes even more important who is in the legislature so i m telling you i m glad you re here we need the money i m glad you re here and i should point out that this fundraiser is completely consistent with the state law and if we finally get congress off the dime and pass the mccain feingold bill all the limits here would be way under that bill so this is the kind of thing that is good for america i m glad you re here but i need two more things we need number one we need good candidates to come forward and secondly we need you to work to win and let me just ask you for one more thing and i ll be home to help we must not we must not lose the seat now held by senator dale bumpers in the election and it suits me and there are some really wonderful people who have either already made up their mind to run or who may yet decide to run i ask only one thing that they have a good honest positive debate that they bring their best ideas forward that they not cut each other up and when it s all over you remember how you felt and how i felt on the morning after the election when i had won this overwhelming victory and yet for the first time in the history of the state of arkansas a democrat had lost a senate seat i don t want that to happen again and we don t need that to happen again i cannot be effective without a sufficient number of democrats in the senate i want you to be in a good humor about this this country is in better shape and don t worry about us and the tougher it gets up there i always know the better america does the worse they will try to make it it drives them nuts they just hate it you know and i don t understand it i always thought we should be happy when people had jobs i always thought we should be happy when the country was at peace i always thought we should be happy when people were advancing peace and freedom and we were actually marching forward and facing our problems but you know there s a lot of wonderful people in washington and then some of it is like another country and they ll be shed of me soon enough they ought to just relax let us do our job let us go on remember what i said this was not a one shot deal my presidency it was a miracle nobody thought it was going to happen first in the beginning only my mother and my wife thought we were going to win even my daughter and i had doubts but it s part of something bigger it s got to be part of something bigger you have to understand there are fundamental differences about how we view the future so that if you like what we ve done keeping marion and vic in office is a part of it electing people to these vacancies in the legislature is a part of it holding senator bumpers senate seat is a part of it you have to see this as a part of our life s work this is part of what we are is citizens three years from now i m going to come home we re going to have a library we re going to have a lot of fun i m still going to be a citizen i m still going to care about this and i want you to care about it so thank you for being here but hammer em hammer em that s a good idea god bless you dem wjclinton27 9 97b bill_clinton thank you very much what a beautiful day what a beautiful setting i want to thank all of you for being here i thank my dear friend david pryor for his introduction for continuing to play golf with me and i forgive him for leaving washington it is a poorer place for his absence he s served us so well there and he graced the united states thank you congressman dickey for being here today and for reaching across party lines always with personal kindness and i might say always to stick up for our beloved state when it s under assault we thank you for that thank you governor mcmath who was a hero of my childhood a hero of my young manhood and he s still my hero i d like to be able to give a talk like that today i was just over visiting with my 86 year old aunt who graduated a year ahead of sid mcmath at hot springs high school she was class of 1930 and i said aunt janet do you want to come on over to the high school she said no i don t get around all that well and i ve heard you give a lot of speeches and i said well it s not just me it s david pryor and jay dickey and the mayor will be there and i said oh sid mcmath is going to be there and she said my god he s the best looking man and the best speaker i ever heard in my life she said i ll be there i don t know whether she s here or not but she said she was coming i thank governor mcmath i grew up as a child here living on the stories of how the gis came home from world war ii and took over the city government and the county government and cleaned it up and moved it forward and i remember how governor mcmath stuck by harry truman when he was the first president who really advocated equal rights for all americans and he integrated the military and he said we were going to have to get along together and go forward together and it is in that tradition i think that so many of us try to serve so i m glad to see him and i want to say a special word of thanks to helen selig for being willing to run for mayor and serve of mayor of our hometown because you have been unbelievable thank you so much we thank you i thank david and keeley for being willing to co chair this effort asking people for money is always a thankless effort but they ve made it about as attractive as you could make it i think today if you haven t been through here i hope you will go i want to thank all the members of my class who asked me to get involved in this but especially the people who were my leaders so often when we were in high school phil jamison jim french and carolyn staley i want to thank all the former teachers who are here i see mrs spurlin mrs irons mrs leuben a lot of other people i m sure paul roots here see if i make any mistakes he can quote back to me later on but all the former teachers from hot springs high school thank you for being here and i ll bet you we have a very good representation from my class who s here from the class of 64 raise your hands that s the most timid response i ever got judge woods thank you for coming ladies and gentlemen one of the things that has most bothered me as hillary and i have worked in education over the last 20 years now and as i have become president and had the chance to travel around the country and go into schools of all sizes and shapes all across america is the dramatic decline in the offerings in the arts in music in other performing arts in the visual arts we have so much evidence that children who have difficulties in their lives the children who may come from disadvantaged backgrounds but may have a spark of mathematical ability for example do much better if they re given access to a music program we have so much evidence that children who may have been emotionally scarred in some way may find a healthy and positive and wholesome way to get out of it if they re given a chance to be in a theater program or to paint or to do something else that gives some positive outlet to their energies and their feelings and we ought to be raising whole people what we really want since we know that over 90 percent of society s work can be done by over 90 percent of us what we really have to raise are people that are whole that are good that have good values but that are at peace with themselves that are free to make good lives for themselves and therefore make a good future for our country so i think this is important because it s the kind of thing that ought to be done by people everywhere to give our children a chance to have a full life here it s even more important because we have so many people with artistic gifts who come here to live some of them come here to retire when i walked in all the rooms there i saw people of all ages doing all different kinds of things and it will make us an even better magnet it will be a wonderful complement to the music festival to the documentary film festival to the school of math and science it s something that makes again our town special so i thank you for all of that let me also say the only thing i m not sure i like about this is i really don t think i m old enough to have anything named after me i thought you had to have at least one leg in the grave before they would name anything for you but if it helps raise another nickel i accept and i thank you i m profoundly honored let me also say to all of you that if we really want to recover all the resources of this community and you want it to go into the next century with all the things that can happen here if you go back to the 19th century there s hardly a community anywhere within 500 miles that has a more unique history and that has more unique manifestations of that history still around over the last 100 years or so but if we want it to be that way we re going to have to find a way to pay to develop it and david and keeley have stuck their necks out and we need to support them both individually and corporately they need help from our businesses and help from people who can afford to do it in accordance with their ability to pay and i will do what i can to help to raise the funds as well but we also need a large number of small contributions by people who may just be able to give a modest amount but i want this to be the people s house i want you to feel when we get this done that s it s not might name there that it s yours every one of you if you contribute to it when you go through these doors and your children and your grandchildren and your parents and your grandparents may be there that s what we re trying to do finally i can t help saying after what governor mcmath did there are a lot of people i m sure we all wish were here today i know governor mcmath wishes the men who fought in the second world war with him who didn t come home were here all of us wish that our parents were here we wish are teachers who aren t living anymore were here i wish our four classmates who died in vietnam and the others who have died since then were here but i guess most of all i wish johnny mae mackey were here and apparently so does carol wilson so i would like to ask johnny mae s incarnation to come up here and lead us in a little round of hullabaloo thank you all so much god bless you let s make this a success what do you say cheerleaders cheerleaders come on i swear this is living evidence of a comment that i made the other day that our cheerleaders still all can fit in their uniforms here they are come on now for those of us who were here when johnny mae mackey ran this school you know everybody that came out of this high school and went in the marine corps during the period that johnny mae mackey ran the school found that it was a step down in discipline and order so try to visualize those magic days now dem wjclinton27 9 98 bill_clinton thank you very much well ladies and gentlemen you don t have to worry about me giving up thank you garry mauro promised me that if i came to texas in the wake of all this controversy i would get a warm welcome and he nearly overdid it today it s great to be back here i want to thank frank herrera and his whole family for making us feel so welcome at their humble little homestead here we ought to give him a hand thank you i want to thank all the people who provided our music and catered our food and made this such an enjoyable occasion i want to thank the candidates who are here who are running for office jim maddox charlie gonzalez richard raymond is not here joe henderson i want to thank molly beth malcolm your state chair and all the members of the texas house and senate who are here i want to say a special word of appreciation for the life and career of a man who has been my friend for more than 25 years henry b gonzalez you can be really proud of what he has done and i want to thank my friend ann richards for finding ways to say things no one else can say that make a point no one could misunderstand she s unbelievable i want to tell you why i wanted to come here today for reasons other than the fact that garry mauro has been my friend since 1972 and the mango ice cream first of all many of you whom i ve already met have said some wonderful personal things to me about my family and i thank you for that you know it s easy to forget in washington but presidents and their families are still people and it meant more to me than you ll ever know and i thank you for that but i also want to tell you that i desperately want this election year all across america and in texas not to be about what s going on in washington d c but what s going on in san antonio in el paso in lufkin and towns like them all over america you know this is still a democracy you re still in the driver s seat but you have to get behind it and drive if you want to be heard now i ran for president i started almost seven years ago in just about a week it will be the seventh anniversary of my declaration for president when i started nobody but my wife and my mother thought i could win i had a lot of good friends in texas and got two thirds of the vote in the democratic primary here on super tuesday and it catapulted me on now i ran for president because i wanted to make this country work for ordinary citizens again because i wanted us to be a leader for peace and prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world to which we re closer and closer tied and because i wanted to bring this country together in a spirit of harmony and unity across all the lines that divide us and in the last six years garry mentioned it but i just want to reel it off to you we tested the ideas that we brought to washington they re no longer the subject of debate if you believe elections are about ideas ideals and the impact they have on ordinary people in every election in this country and in every election in texas you ought to tell people we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the lowest crime rate in 25 years the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years and wednesday we ll have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years but the real question is what will we do with it i want you to remember what garry said today our enemy is not adversity look at this crowd feel your own enthusiasm remember what many of you said to me today adversity is our friend it forces us to dig deep to ask ourselves what we believe in what kind of people we are what kind of people we want to be where we want to go and what we want to do with our lives adversity is our friend our enemies are complacency and cynicism those are our enemies and don t misunderstand it the biggest problem garry mauro has got in this election is if people think well things are going well why do anything a lot of people think i had a tough time in the 80s and things are going well now and why don t we just relax and let things rock along and i can tell you that s appealing but it s wrong in washington people think things are going well why don t we fight with each other and see who we can hurt and it s tempting but it s wrong it s wrong because the world is changing very fast i just got back from silicon valley where all those computer companies are born you know those people change for a living every day at blinding speed but they understand something a lot of our fellow americans don t which is the world is changing for everyone you pick up the papers you know that we ve got economic problems in japan and the rest of asia there s a real risk that it will spread to our friends in mexico and throughout latin america who are doing a pretty good job managing their economies if that happens it will hurt texas very very badly and our economy you see terrorism throughout the world you see people fight with each other throughout the world because of their racial their ethnic religious differences we have challenges and we have challenges at home and the real question in this election in america and in texas is what are we going to do with this moment of prosperity this is sunday so i ll just make one biblical reference one of the most successful leaders in the bible was joseph and what did he do when egypt was fat and sassy he saved the grain he made all those people go out and work and do things they d just as soon not do and they said this joseph why doesn t he let up on us but when the famine came the people of egypt were all right because a true leader did something in good times understanding change when people ask you about garry mauro you tell them about joseph and tell them what a mistake it would be for texas to say we re just going to stand pat because things are good who cares if anybody does anything as long as i feel good everything is all right let me tell you what s going on in washington i believe as strongly as i can say that we have to use these good times as a responsibility to look to the future and deal with our challenges let me just mention four of them number one and i ll compare the positions of the two parties number one wednesday we re going to have the first balanced budget and surplus for 29 years i ve worked hard for it for the last six years in 1993 we had a vote without a single member of the other party not a one that passed by one vote in both houses that brought the deficit down over 90 percent before we passed the bipartisan budget amendment and that started this recovery now the guys that didn t vote to balance the budget say well we re going to have a surplus for the first time in 29 years let s give everybody an election year tax cut six weeks before the election now it s very popular it s very popular but it s dead wrong and i ll tell you why number one it s wrong because the rest of the world is in economic trouble and we have to set a standard of being strong economically and responsible if we want to keep growing we ve got to help them get back on their feet not make the same mistakes others are making number two the social security system is solid now but it is not sustainable when the baby boomers retire i ought to know i m the oldest of the baby boomers and when we retire you look at all the young people here today when the baby boomers retire there will only be two people working for every one person drawing social security if we start now well ahead of time we can make modest changes that save social security that will not require us to make the horrible choice of either putting seniors back into poverty or taxing our children so that we undermine their ability to raise our grandchildren now people say no one thinks that far ahead but you know that i m telling the truth don t you so i say i want you to support us when the republicans say here s the goodie it s election time and i say no i m not against tax cuts we ve got tax cuts for education for child care and for the environment in our balanced budget bill but i m against using that surplus for tax cuts or for spending programs until we save social security for our parents and our children number two i never thought this would be an election year issue but you know now that 30 percent of our growth comes from our trading with other countries texas knows how important it is that we sell our goods and our products and our services to latin america to asia all over the world we have got to lead the world back from the financial trouble they re in or we will eventually get hurt and it will be sooner rather than later in order for us to lead the world we have to make our fair contribution to something called the international monetary fund that s the fund we use to help the countries that are trying to help themselves and to keep the problems from spreading so we can keep selling our stuff for eight months i ve been begging the congress to do it and they still haven t done it so i say to you if you like this economy and you want to keep it going vote for us and our side because we will pay our fair share and lead the world back to prosperity number three in the balanced budget this year i have given the congress an education agenda there has been no action for eight months here s what it does it puts 100 000 teachers in our classrooms to lower class size to 18 in the early grades it repairs or builds 5 000 schools it provides funds to hook up every classroom in the poorest schools in america to the internet by the year 2000 it helps schools where the kids are poor and the neighborhoods are poor to adopt high standards but to have after school programs and summer school programs so the kids aren t deemed failures just because the system is failing them it gives 35 000 young people college scholarships that they can pay off if they ll go out and teach in hard pressed school districts for a few years after they get out of college it is a good education program it deserves to be passed and our party is for it and they re not number four garry talked about the patients bill of rights i want a national bill that says the following things number one if you get hurt in an accident they ve got to take you to the nearest emergency room not one halfway across town because it s covered by your plan number two if your doctor tells you you need to see a specialist you can number three if you re in the middle of treatment and your company changes health insurance providers they can t make you change doctors now let me tell you what s happening in america today pregnant women six seven months into their pregnancy their employer changes coverage they say get another obstetrician have you ever had anybody in your family on chemotherapy a lot of us have i have and it s pretty tough and if somebody in your family i bet you had the same experience we did when my mother had to do that you sit around and you try to put on a brave face you make a few jokes you say well what are we going to do when you re running around bald and then you say well i ll finally get to wear that wig i ve always wanted you try to make fun of it to keep from the agony and then you sit there and worry down deep inside what s going to happen if you re so sick you can t eat anymore now how would you feel in the middle of the chemotherapy treatment if somebody said i m sorry your employer changed providers you ve got to get another doctor that happens and our bill would protect the privacy of your medical records which is something people ought to care a lot more about today than ever before now in congress the republicans passed a bill that didn t do any of that and left 100 million americans out of what little they did do it is a symbol of the difference in the two parties in washington and throughout the country today so i say to you here s what we re for we re for saving social security first we re for keeping the economy going we re for putting education first among all our investment priorities and we re for a patients bill of rights that s what we re for and they re opposite us on all those issues that is the choice nationally you want to know ann richards if you could think of anything that congress has done let me tell you what they ve done this year what our friends in the republican party have done with their majority they killed campaign finance reform they killed tobacco reform legislation to help us save our kids health they killed an increase in the minimum wage with unemployment and inflation low that would have helped 12 million hard working americans they have gone backwards on saving social security first they have gone backwards in protecting the environment and they have done nothing on helping us to lead the international economy and nothing on the education agenda that s what they have done less than a week before the end of this budget year and that s the difference well what s that got to do with the governor of texas i ll tell you what for years and years and years i heard the republicans talk about how there ought to be more power given to the states how the federal government did too much they talked about it we did something about it we have the smallest federal government in 35 years but what that means is it matters a lot more who the governor is we have given governors more responsibility in education more responsibility in health care more responsibility in managing the environment and more responsibility in growing the economy it matters if garry mauro were not my friend i would be here saying he has a plan for texas and just because you re doing well doesn t mean you can stand pat you need to bear down and think about your children and the future and stand up for what s right now our friends in the other party think they re going to do real well this year because of complacency and cynicism and what i call the m m syndrome money and midterms they always have more money than we do and at midterm elections our folks who work hard have a lot of hassles and it s more trouble for them to vote don t vote in the same numbers their folks do but we can surprise them if the american people know what s really at stake if they understand this is a question about progress over partisanship people over politics unity over division and i m telling you you go out there and they ask you what it s about tell them it s about the economy tell them it s about saving social security tell them it s about the integrity of your health care tell them it s about the education of your children that s what we re for and they know every voter knows what they re for make a decision for your future and our country s future thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton27 9 99 bill_clinton thank you very much first of all like everyone else i want to thank the davises for having us in this magnificent home and thank you for the tour through all the art and all the books and all the history of your life it was fascinating and i didn t steal any books or art work and i can t afford the discount price either but it s really wonderful and we thank you for having us here i m getting there i want to thank the mayor for making me so welcome in new orleans and tell you that he has done a truly magnificent job new orleans has had one of the biggest drops in violent crime of any major city in america under his leadership and i applaud him for that i would like to thank sheriff harry lee who is back there for many things being my friend for a long time but you should know that he came with a group of people from louisiana to the white house and stayed two days this week and provided good cajun cooking for the annual congressional picnic with all the families there and the annual press picnic and while he is a strong supporter of mine he did not taint the food of any of the members of congress of the other party or any of the hostile press members he was totally generous to everybody i want to thank the people who came from out of town here tommy boggs my good friend and my friend mack mclarty the former chief of staff and special envoy to the americas we re all glad to be in new orleans tonight and we only wish we didn t have to go home and i thank bill for running for governor i didn t thank him in the beginning because i didn t want him to leave the congress you know whenever you run for an office like this and you run against an incumbent and times are good you wonder and worry but i have seen myself a marked movement in the polls and enough to justify your investment here tonight so i just want to make some substantive points that have nothing to do with politics first of all they have to do with policy more and people and incidentally a political campaign first of all my handicap on my home course is a 12 and that s what it is and that s what i play even unless i play a strange course from long tees and sometimes i play to a 14 but otherwise i normally play to a 12 and that s about what i shoot secondly i do most of my music in my music room hillary built me a music room on the third floor of the white house in a little end room and i have saxophones there from all over the world from china russia poland the czech republic two magnificent horns from germany two from france three from japan and goodness knows where else then i ve got a bunch of american horn and i play a 1935 selmer and i have a 1915 buescher soprano saxophone so i ve been into this a long time and that s where i play because it s so far away i can t hurt anybody else s ears so i don t take it on that plane with me when i go and i do have one at camp david and if you have any other questions i ll try to answer them but let me make some points very quickly and i want you to know why i m here tonight bill jefferson started with me in 1991 when i was running for president and nobody but my mother thought i could win well my wife did no one else those two and we did it because we thought that the country couldn t go on the way it was with this sort of gridlock in washington where 12 years of the previous administrations had quadrupled the national debt and they basically had reached an accommodation with congress where every year we would embody president reagan s idea that if you cut revenues and increased spending you would balance the budget it defied basic arithmetic it didn t work in 1981 and it didn t work in 1991 and in between we quadrupled the national debt and we got big big increases in interest rates and high unemployment the unemployment rate in louisiana when i took office was about 7 5 percent i think and it s 4 2 percent today so we said we had been involved with this sort of new democratic movement and we thought the democratic party had to prove that you could be pro business and pro labor that you could be for equality and education and for high standards that you could be for growing the economy and improving the environment that you could be for respecting individuals and people of all different races and ethnic groups and religious groups and still believe that what binds us together as americans is more important than what divides us in other words we felt that american politics had fallen into this sort of liberal conservative right left business labor environment economy everything was one way or the other and nobody was ever getting anything done and the country was getting deeper in the ditch and our social divisions were deepening and i know that the previous president with whom i had a very cordial personal relationship vetoed the brady bill to do background checks because the nra wasn t for it and the republicans had to be with them and then vetoed the family and medical leave law because some people in the business community said well that s an anti business measure even though clearly one of the biggest challenges that we have is to balance work and family so i really believed and i had some of the same arguments with my friends in our party if this whole business about having to make choices between these two things we re going to leave america the loser and the evidence was pretty compelling in 1991 we had high unemployment stagnant wages terrible recession and increasing social division and so i asked bill and a number of other people in louisiana to help me run for president when i was in the words of my predecessor just a governor from a small southern state and the people gave us a chance they gave al gore and me a chance and they basically listened to our argument about putting people first and they said we ll try but it was just an argument they didn t know by 1996 we were reelected and with a much bigger margin of victory in louisiana thank you very much because it wasn t an argument anymore it was an established fact you didn t have to argue anymore you knew whether this was working or not and it was now we re nearly seven years into it six and two thirds years and the facts make the case we have almost 19 5 million new jobs the longest peacetime expansion in history the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years the lowest welfare rates in 32 years the lowest crime rates in 26 years this year we announced that this year s budget surplus was going to be 115 billion and it s the first time in 42 years we ve had two years of budget surpluses in a row now those are facts and while the economy has been growing i signed the family and medical leave law and millions of people have taken advantage of it every year we ve had a record number of new small businesses i signed the brady bill and 400 000 people with criminal backgrounds or mental health histories haven t gotten handguns and not a single hunter or sports person has been inconvenienced but a lot of lives have been saved the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we ve tripled the number of toxic waste dump clean ups and the economy has grown not been hurt by strengthening our commitment to the environment ninety percent of our kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases and the hope scholarship gives virtually a universal tax credit that opens the doors of college to anybody who will work hard enough to go this country is moving in the right direction because of the ideas that we shared and one of the reasons that i would go anywhere for him is that none of this would have happened in my judgment if we hadn t enacted the economic plan of 1993 which helped to cost us the congress in 94 because people knew that it was controversial we cut spending and raised taxes both and everybody was mad and nobody felt the benefits yet and it passed by one vote so if he hadn t been there to vote for it or if he has said you know i come from louisiana it s a conservative state and he d taken a dive none of us would be here tonight because i wouldn t have been reelected the economy wouldn t be in good shape and we d all be singing another tune but he was there because he knew it was the right thing to do and he supported our crime package and all the other initiatives so i think his philosophy is right and i know he s got the courage of his convictions that s the first thing the second thing that i would like to say is that every election is about where you re going not where you ve been i love to tell this story but when i was governor i used to go out to the state fair every year and have governor s day and i d just sit there in some little booth in one of the big pavilions anybody that wanted to come up could come up and say whatever they wanted in 1990 i had been governor for 10 years and we had an election coming up so this old boy in overalls who was about 75 years old comes up to me and he says well he said bill are you going to run for governor again i said i don t know if i do will you vote for me he said yeah i guess so i always have and i said well aren t you sick of me after all this time he said no i m not but he said nearly everybody i know is and i got kind of hurt and i said well don t you think i ve done a good job he said sure but you drew a paycheck every two weeks didn t you that s what we hired you to do and it was a stunning insight so every election is not about yesterday it s about tomorrow yesterday is important because it s evidence of what you ll do tomorrow so what are we going to do with all this prosperity and what s still out there and what does that have to do with this governor s race number one i believe with all my heart we need to use this time to deal with the long term challenges of this country what are they the aging of america the baby boomers like me i m the oldest of the baby boomers people between the ages of 35 and 53 are in the baby boom generation we retire we re much bigger than any other group our age except until these kids that are in school today thirty years from now there will be twice as many people over 65 twice as many two people working for every one person drawing social security now with the surpluses now is the time to deal with the challenge of social security and medicare to add a prescription drug coverage to the medicare program we d never start medicare without prescription drugs today to lengthen the life of the social security trust fund until 2050 anyway to get through the lifetimes of the baby boom generation that s what we ve got to do it s the first thing we ought to do the second thing we need to do is to recognize that not everybody has been a part of this economic recovery and we need to keep working to get more investment to people and places that haven t had it yet and to keep this expansion going so i want to do two things number one i want to give the same tax incentives to investors to invest in america we give them to invest in the caribbean or latin america or africa or any other place in the world i like those incentives to invest overseas in poor countries but we ought to give the same incentives to people to invest in poor neighborhoods poor communities the mississippi delta the indian reservations the inner cities in the united states of america that s very important if we can t bring investment and jobs to these places now we will never get around to doing it this country has never had greater prosperity and the other thing that we have to do in my judgment is not to squander this surplus we need to save enough of this surplus to lengthen the life of social security and medicare and to pay down the debt do you realize that this country could be out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835 when andrew jackson was president just think about here in new orleans you think about how long ago that is a guy that got to be president because he won the battle of new orleans in 1814 a guy that got to be president because of a battle he won in 1814 was the last person to have this country out of debt but in a global economy it s a good deal why should liberals be for a debt free america because money moves around the world in a hurry that s what happened to asia you remember a couple years ago when they all went belly up at once and if a government is not borrowing money that means you get to borrow money for lower cost your interest rates are lower lower business rates means more jobs and higher incomes lower personal rates means lower house loans lower car loans lower college loans lower credit card payments a longer more protracted more prosperous future for america that s important and all that could be done entirely by the federal government but the third big challenge cannot be the third big challenge is doing right by the children of this country and specifically giving them all world class education do you believe all kids can learn i do do you believe we need to challenge them to do better i do do you believe we need to identify failing schools and require them to turn around and do better or shut them down and let the kids go to other schools i do i m not for vouchers because we don t put enough money in the schools in the first place so if you give vouchers you take a relatively large amount of money away from the school budget for a relatively small number of people that s why i m not for it but on the other hand i think to just justify the status quo is wrong so i ve offered the congress a plan which would say you can have your federal money for education but if you want it you ve got to have a plan to hold schools accountable for the performance of their students to turn around failing schools or shut them down but we re not going to blame the kids for the failures of the system we re going to give you some money to turn these schools around and we re going to triple the money we give for after school programs which will help you keep the crime rate coming down now this is where we come to the governor s race no matter what i do under the american system and the constitution of every state the primary responsibility for education is vested in the state and most of the money for education is paid by taxpayers to the state or to the local government today in a global economy with modern technology more education is critical and yet it is more difficult than ever in america because our student bodies are more and more diverse i mean today i saw people from at least four different ethnic groups in that little group of school children you had gathered up for me today just looking at the faces of those kids believe it or not in the alexandria school district across the river from the white house in virginia there are kids from 180 different racial and ethnic groups whose parents speak a hundred different languages in one school district now that means we have work to do and there is no more important responsibility for the governor if i were a citizen of louisiana if i were back home just voting in arkansas i hate to ever be a single issue voter but i would be almost completely a single issue voter in a governor s race based on the person i thought was most likely to do the most for the schools of my state because if these kids don t have the education they need nothing else the rest of us do will matter for their future it is the most important thing last point i m the only person here who has been a governor and i did not get tired of it i didn t get bored with it and when i left to go be president i was having more fun being governor before i started running for president than i had ever had in my whole life it s a wonderful job and if you like it if you like people if you like to work hard if you believe in good schools and good jobs and if it thrills you to get things done for your state it s a wonderful job but to be really good at it you need to be passionate about your convictions and you need to have a real vision you ll fight for but you can t be too partisan and mean spirited you ve got to be someone who can get people together work with all kinds of different people and convince people that your vision is the right one and when other people have a good idea then do that too that s the kind of person bill is that s why he was voted the best legislator in the state legislature two different times when he was a state legislator and i can tell you as someone who has done this job for 12 years he has the right temperament he has plenty of sense he has a magnificent wife to keep his head balanced and to help remind him that education is his first priority and he has years and years and years of knowledge and skill in getting things done including in the congress that money can t buy and that you can only get by living the way he has lived so i think what you ought to do is go out there and say listen to everybody he hasn t asked anybody to vote for him because of his race all he has asked is that nobody votes against him because of his race all he said is he wants to treat everybody the same and give every child the chance to live up to his or her god given capacities but i m telling you if you look at a man s life his record his personal skills and what the state needs at this time and how it fits with what we re doing to move america into the 21st century i can hardly think of anybody who is as well qualified remotely as he would be to be the governor not only of this state but any state you re lucky to have him running and i hope you ll keep helping him thank you very much dem wjclinton28 1 00 bill_clinton thank you and good morning and welcome to the white house i hope most of you are more awake than i am but i will try i had some remarks here that said that i wanted to amplify on my remarks last night and i don t think that i will use that word i want to thank my good friend wellington webb talking about getting 81 percent of the vote in denver you know denver has that sort of characteristic western independence i always thought if anybody was in a position to get that much vote there would be enough to say none of the above to keep that from happening so it s quite a tribute to him mayor coles mayor morial i want to thank mayor scholz from quincy illinois he is hosting me when we leave here and there are 20 000 people in the cold out there so you can be sure i ll give a shorter speech today i want to thank the members of the administration who are here secretary slater and secretary cuomo general mccaffrey mickey ibarra i want to thank ben johnson from our office of one america lynn cutler and there may be many others here but we love having the mayors here because this is sort of a grass roots operation and one of the things that i really worked hard to do one of my mayors and my neighbor and friend pat hays from north little rock arkansas is here you know to be governor of arkansas is like being mayor of kind of a nice size city people accept they expect you to run the store and when they show up they expect you to be there and when they call they expect you to return the call and if they ve got a problem they expect you to send somebody to see to it and if you don t pretty soon you re looking for another job we ve really tried to create an atmosphere around here where all the people who work here particularly people who never worked for elected officials before the white house really wouldn t function without all these bright young people that come here and work but many of them have not had the opportunity ever before in their lives to work for elected officials and we try to make sure that they all remember no matter what s going on around here for whom we re working and what our mission is and so when you come here and talk to us it reminds us of that and we re grateful i have so many friends in this group i can t help mentioning one because he was a former member of my cabinet lee brown the mayor of houston i m glad to see you and thank you for all you did for me and all you re doing for houston i wanted to just make a couple of points briefly today first i wanted to mention some of the things that were mentioned in the state of the union secretary slater talked about high speed rail airline traffic you know i am committed more than anything else to improving commercial airline traffic this year because in a year i ll be on it and i want you to know i am on the job here i probe every person who comes to see me about was there a delay was there a cancellation you know i am on this case i want to make in a nutshell the point i tried to make last night when i quoted that wonderful line from president theodore roosevelt at the beginning of the last century that young people with a future always take the long look ahead we have all this good economic news this morning we got some more good news that our economy grew at an annual rate of 5 8 percent in the last three months of 1999 that s the fourth year in a row we ve had growth of over 4 percent with inflation the lowest in 30 years seven years of consecutive double digit business investment growth that s the longest investment growth on record so this unbelievable recovery marches on now for everybody in this room that s more or less my age or a little older you know i was talking to some of my friends last night after the speech and i said look the reason i feel so passionately that we should a take the long look ahead and really say to ourselves this country s in good shape now what do we know now right now are the inevitable challenges and the great opportunities facing us over the next 10 20 30 years and why don t we now set the goal of meeting them and then outline a plan to get there so i was reminding people last night i said you know when i finished high school in 1964 we had the country had been through president kennedy s death and it was very traumatic but we still had very low unemployment we had very good growth we had almost no inflation we still thought we could deal with the civil rights needs and demands and imperatives of our country in an orderly and legal way and the country wouldn t come apart and you know we had this sense that we could get there and within two or three years the country was coming apart at the seams a president lyndon johnson who passionately believed in civil rights found his ability to make advances crippled by the controversies he faced over the war in vietnam abroad and the civil rights crisis at home and our country then went from turmoil to turmoil to turmoil and it s taken us 35 years to get an economy that is frankly even better than it was then to have the advances we have in building our one america and to be in this position again now anybody that s ever lived long enough knows two things number one no condition good or bad in life lasts forever that makes life interesting and challenging the principle of surprise is always there and when you pass an opportunity you don t know how long you re going to have to wait for it to come around again and the second thing that anybody that s over 30 years old has learned one way or another is that sometimes you make the worst mistakes in life when you think things are going along so well you don t have to worry about what you re doing where you re going whether to plan and whether to make hard decisions there s nobody who s lived any length of years who can t remember a time in personal family business or public life when mistakes were made and opportunities were missed because things were going well and that s why i tried to speak to the american people with such passion last night we have waited a long time for our country to be in a position because of our prosperity to reach across party lines and regional and racial and all the other lines that divide us to try to say okay here we go we re starting a new century now it doesn t matter whether you re a republican or a democrat we are going to double the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years and a lot of us hope to be among them you can t avoid that it doesn t matter what your politics are we ve got the largest group of kids we ever had they re from the most diverse backgrounds they ve ever been it s a meal ticket to the future if they all get an education and if we can get rid of poverty among our kids and i could go on and on that s what i was trying to say last night that is what you live every day you get hired to show up and do something but the further away you move from the grass roots the more likely politics is to shift from deeds to words partly because we re such a long way away from the people we re trying to support and to empower so you mayors you can make a difference here we don t want to miss this moment and as i said last night something else that you all know no great goal is reached in a single step but if you take steps toward that goal you make a lot of progress you all remember the story of the guy that had a mild heart attack and it make him kind of goofy and he went to the doctor and the doctor said you think you could walk three miles a day and get well you know you could really help yourself a lot and he said well i ll sure try so he called him in a week and he said well doc i made it for a whole week i walked three miles every day and he said but honestly i don t know what to do and he said why and he said well i m 21 miles from home and i don t know anybody here you get a long way going step by step so i want you to think about that today and very briefly let me ask your help on one or two things i know that you saw the president of colombia who used to be one of your colleagues and i m sure general mccaffrey has talked to you about that so i won t deal with that but let me just mention one or two things we ve got to take this school construction issue seriously now there is some to be fair there s more than politics here some members of the congress are genuinely reluctant to see the united states government get involved in this issue because it has always been a state and local issue and for some of our states including mine when i was governor an entirely local issue and we were i think we had the third highest percentage of our school budget funded at the state of any state in the country when i was governor but the problem is you ve got these kids that are just pouring out of a lot of these schools i ve been to schools with a dozen trailers a dozen outside you ve got all these other schools literally i ve been to schools that were too decrepid to wire for the internet and what i would like to do is to really see us jump start this effort and i know you know what always happens if we put some money in then others are encouraged and more people do it and you get this thing going and basically to be able to do these kind of more urgent repairs on 5 000 schools a year and then actually build or dramatically modernize 6 000 others it would spark a whole wave of this across the country there s lots of evidence that young children especially from disadvantaged backgrounds get a very bad signal if they show up at a school where the windows are broken or they have to be boarded over and it s dark and the paint is always peeling and they can t get what other kids can do i think this is a big deal and i d like to ask you to help us on that i feel very strongly that it s we re going to keep wiring these classrooms and a lot of you have benefitted from the e rate program but we ve got to do more to train the teachers because we ve got to make sure we can make the most of it that s very important i hope you ll help me i know this is quite popular in most of your communities once again double the after school and the summer school programs it makes a big difference and if you have one of these gear up programs in your community you know that it s working quite well we send college students in to mentor middle school kids who are disadvantaged at risk and we not only mentor them we begin to tell them when they re 12 13 14 years old what the present package of student aid is so they all know a lot of these kids have no other earthly idea all the things that have been done in the last five years to increase scholarships and loans and work study programs and all this if we can actually convince them that the money will be there for them to go that s a powerful incentive for them to learn more and to stay in school and begin to aspire to take their own long look ahead so i want to ask you to help us on that secondly i ask you to help us pass this new markets legislation and to increase the number of empowerment zones and to increase the eitc one of the things that i didn t mention last night i think that secretary cuomo has pioneered so many good things but one thing i want to mention in particular are these housing vouchers that we use to help low income people move closer to their place of work we ve now done 110 000 of them in this budget we can more than double that and i d like to ask your help on that now there are a lot of other things and i m sure andrew went over the things in the hud initiative but there are a lot of great things that we can do to be better partners with you but there are some things you can also do to be good partners with us i ll just mention two because again we have a chance to dramatically cut poverty in america among our children child poverty is at a 21 year low we can get it much much lower it s still unconscionably high in america and i d just like to mention two things if i might number one we have a ton of working people in america who are eligible for the earned income tax credit who don t know it and don t claim it mayor daley has launched an outreach program in chicago because last year in illinois he found in the state that 300 million in these credits went unclaimed to low income working people see if you can get the data for your community and let these working people know that they can do it the second thing i d like to say is we set up the children s health insurance program to be designed and run by the states in the 1997 balanced budget act so it took us a while to get it up and going but last year we went from 1 million to 2 million kids enrolled in a year it took us a year and a half to get up to a million and it was very frustrating but now these programs are kicking in and we re up to 2 million the money is there to insure 5 million kids you heard me say last night that i wanted to follow the vice president s suggestion to let the working parents of these low income kids buy into the program but they ll never get there if they don t have their kids enrolled in the first place and they don t know that so anything you can do with all the organization and mechanisms and outreach that you have to help us to get the enrollment in the chip program up i would be profoundly grateful it s very important we ve got to go from 2 million to 5 million kids if we go from 2 million to 5 million kids then you re looking at about 6 5 million parents we estimate that we could enroll and if we got that many enrolled we d have a quarter of all the uninsured in america would be covered by insurance it would be a dramatic achievement but it is in the nature of these things that you ve got to reach out and do the enrollment and because we re a free and open society and a very mobile one these things tend to be difficult i also hope that you can convince we found in state after state that there are a lot of working people who somehow feel that this would signal that they were going on welfare or going back to welfare and they don t want to do that and we need to send the right kind of signal out here about what this is that these things were done by their national government because they want to work and if they want to work they re entitled to raise their children out of poverty and to have these basic supports there s also a bigger problem in enrollment in many places where people whose first language is not english and the mayors are in a unique position to help us with that so i would ask you to when you go home think about whether you can you know get the information from either the federal or the state governments on enrollment in the child health program and in the eitc and whether there s anything you can do to alert more of your people to their eligibility and get them to claim it i think it would be a very good thing third thing i want to say i ve got to do this because i blew it twice last night we are going to build more livable communities that was weird in my whole life i ve never mispronounced that word before last night see what i m saying the element of surprise is always there denver s done a lot of work on the livable community issue with regard to brownfields cleaning up around stapleton airport and this is an issue in different ways for most of you so again i ask you to help us pass this this is the sort of thing that really ought to be not a partisan issue either so many communities are worried about preserving some sense of balance and harmony in transportation and saving some green spaces development proceeds apace or overcoming some environmental eyesore and so i would like to ask you to help i think it s very important last night i also proposed to create a permanent endowment to protect lands across the country as part of our lands legacy initiative half the fund would be dedicated to state and local conservation efforts and we would have a listen to this a tenfold increase in the urban parks and recreation recovery program and a significant increase for our urban and community forestry program this is very important to me when rodney and i were back home in arkansas and we had terrible economic problems in the mississippi delta we picked the eleven hardest hit counties and we spent endless hours out there doing grassroots meetings it was astonishing the number of little towns that said to us yes we re having trouble economically but we re most worried about our kids can t you give us some help with recreation and we developed this sort of basic blueprint plan for little city parks that even very very small towns could build and we set up this what would today look like a tiny grant program and we were flooded with all these i mean little towns 200 people 300 people 500 people you know asking for this money because they had nothing to do for their children so this urban initiative is a very important part of this lands legacy matter to me because in the biggest urban neighborhoods you still have the same issue and parents want their children to have something positive to do even before they want another job in the neighborhood so i hope you ll help me pass this and again this is something that i hope will be way beyond partisanship this year it s a small part of the budget with a big benefit for your folks back home wellington mentioned the crime initiative we know the brady bill works we know it does the gun death rate is at a 30 year low criminal gun death rate 30 year low and we need to extend it to check at the gun shows which occur mostly in rural areas and the urban flea markets where people who couldn t get a gun at a registered store can get it we do need to strengthen enforcement because about one percent of our gun dealers do most of the damage to the law insofar as gun dealers are doing it and we need to add the 50 000 more police you know you all have done a wonderful job with this community policing program and i thank you for it we re coming back with another 50 000 and we re going to try to get the second round of appropriations for it this year and we re trying to concentrate these forces in the areas of highest crime but i will say again you know when i got here and this is not me this is all of you who did this all we tried to do was give you the tools to do it but if i had come here seven years ago and given a speech to you and said look here s what my goal is we re going to make america the safest big country in the world you would have said that poor deluded guy we re in for a long ride because people weren t even sure we could make the crime go down much less stay down but we ve had seven years in a row now and it keeps going down because you know what to do your police departments know what to do you know what to do and if you know what to do and if we ve proved we can get crime down then we don t have any excuse to stop until this country s the safest big country in the world so i ask you to help us with that and finally i want to make a serious remark although i was more serious than you know about the airline remark i made earlier i want you to help us get these investments in advanced transportation technology what i said last night was true a lot of you probably read about the cars at the detroit auto show that are getting 70 and 80 miles a gallon dual fuel cars direct fuel injection engines they re using more and more composite materials to design cars now that are 500 to 1 000 pounds lighter but do the same on damage tests as steel cars it s a remarkable thing and it is true i wanted to explain what i said last night this biofuel issue not just ethanol made from corn but you ll soon see fuels can be made from rice hulls and other agricultural byproducts or even grass fields and essentially what these scientists the problem now is that the conversion ratio is not great it takes seven gallons of gasoline to make eight gallons of ethanol i mean you re ahead but not much and they re working on breaking the chemical barriers to efficient conversion which was how we got gasoline from crude oil it s the same sort of thing the scientists that are working on this estimate that pretty soon they ll have a breakthrough that will allow them to make eight gallons of ethanol or other biofuel with one gallon of gasoline now if you ve got a car getting 70 miles a gallon that means you re getting 560 miles a gallon if it can run on ethanol so we have a chance to completely rewrite the transportation future of america to dramatically reduce the one third of our greenhouse gases that come out of transportation and do it without some crippling regulation or some astronomical tax but we ve got to have the money to do this research we built a well we worked with the homebuilders andrew and with the energy department and others to build a housing development the inland empire in san bernardino right on the rail line coming out of la and we told for very low income working people we said if you buy a house here we will guarantee you that your average power bills will be 40 percent lower than they would in a house of the same size anywhere else and after two years the average power bills are down 65 percent because of the new lighting because of the new windows because of the new insulation i mean this thing is going but we ve got to have the money to do the research so that s a long way from being mayor funding somebody s research but it will change your lives and your ability to do your job if you ll help us and it s especially important in high speed rail i do think for reasons i don t entirely understand maybe people have been caught in traffic jams we ve got a little more support for it than we did when i showed up here i mean i had members of congress come up to me and say you re from arkansas why do you care about high speed rail and i said well i might want to go somewhere else someday i might want to travel around but really we re getting more support and i ask you for your help on this finally let me say a couple of you mentioned this to me going through the line so i just want to reiterate for the last several states of the union i always save whatever i have to say about one america until the end because it s the most important to me and if somebody said to me today well mr president you can t your time is up on this earth and you re not going to get to finish but we ll give you one wish i wouldn t wish for the continued economic expansion i wouldn t wish for even giving everybody health insurance or anything i d wish to make america one america because the american people will figure out how to solve everything else if we can have the right kind of relations toward one another you heard me tell that story i got the congress to laughing last night when i referred to what dr ladner the distinguished geneticist from harvard said about all people being genetically 99 9 percent the same i just want to give you one more thing to think about because we ve got a pretty diverse group here ladner said that not only are we 99 9 percent the same but that if you were to take 100 people each and 4 different race groups like 100 african americans 100 hispanics 100 irish 100 jewish americans the genetic differences among individuals within the group are greater than the genetic differences between the groups as a whole i mean it s really quite stunning the different skin color the different characteristics that we ve all developed over many thousands of years for all kinds of reasons are literally contained in one tenth of 1 percent of our genetic make up and it s a statistic that i ve put out there on purpose because i think you could tell the members of congress a lot of them were shocked to hear that they thought there was a republican gene and a democratic gene and whichever party they were in they were glad they got the right chip you know and so i hope you can make a lot of jokes out of this and you can have a lot of fun with it and the more you laugh the more you laugh the more you get it so i ask you to remember that and to remember that you have people in this white house who believe in you and what you re doing wish you well and want to help thank you very much dem wjclinton28 1 98 bill_clinton thank you very much well i was just sitting here thinking two things first when the vice president got really warmed up i thought to myself first it will become slightly obvious to this audience that he and i come from a little further south in the united states and then i was thinking when he really got going i wish i had people walking the aisles passing the plate it was amazing anyway the second thing i thought in the midst of this wonderful event was that i wish that i could take the pep band with me for the next month or two wherever i go thank you thank you i want to say to chancellor aiken and president stukel and mayor mccullom mayor satterthwaite congressman ewing senator durbin and senator moseley braun secretary riley and mr vice president i am delighted to be here i have spent a lot of time in illinois in the last seven years and this state has been very good to me in many ways the vice president has been here a lot and hillary came and got an honorary degree and was able to speak here and i have heard from also our families friends what a wonderful place this is i don t know how with all my roaming across america i have never lit down here before but i m sure glad i got here today and i thank you for making me feel so welcome if you heard the state of the union last night or just listened to the vice president here today you know there s a reason here because you represent both all of you individually and this great institution what we re trying to build for the future of america last night i talked about all the changes that have occurred just in the last few years we ve had one foot in the 21st century for quite some time the generation living today has lived through more changes in more different areas in a shorter time than virtually any generation in the history of this country and when the vice president and i took office we were committed to trying to make america work again to try to fix the things that just weren t working for ordinary people and then to free us up to sort of imagine the future and take the steps that were necessary to get us to the future we want to build that s really what i talked about last night how can we strengthen this country for the 21st century what do we have to do now i don t want to go over everything that was said and besides that i can t do as well as the vice president he must have gotten 30 more minutes sleep than i did last night he was terrific but i want to talk to you about just two or three things that i think we should be thinking about for tomorrow let me begin with a bit of history and your chancellor mentioned it earlier or the president did shortly after abraham lincoln was elected president congressman justin morrill from vermont asked his colleagues to help him create a system of land grant colleges it was in the middle of the civil war and frankly most of them thought he was nuts you know people were worried about the survival of the union but abraham lincoln was always worrying about other things even in the middle of the civil war at night when i work in the white house i go to an office that i ve had restored to the way it was in the mid 1800s and i remember that that room was abraham lincoln s waiting room during the civil war and all during the civil war at certain appointed hours he kept a time apart to meet with ordinary citizens if you wanted a job in a post office in baltimore in 1862 if you came at the appointed day at the appointed hour you could walk up to the room that i go into every night and sit there and abraham lincoln would see you the president would see you and listen to you tell why you wanted a post office job and when he was asked why he did this he said i have to remember that people are concerned about other things and i want this war to be over so all of us can go back to thinking about things like that so he always thought about what life would be like when the war was over and he was open to this in 1862 morrill s bill passed and president lincoln signed it into law it became one of the wisest investments our nation ever made and the university of illinois here was one of the original land grant colleges under that morrill act it s played a dramatic role in helping to shape our nation you heard and you were cheering about all the nobel prize winners and all that the vice president pointed out that it was here that the transistor was invented jack kilby class of 47 co invented the microchip ncsa headed by larry smarr launched a billion dollar browser industry illinois and other land grant colleges have literally led our way into the information age and it all stemmed from something somebody did in 1862 that no one could have imagined would one day have led to all you see around you i think lincoln would have liked the pep band but he could not have imagined it so that s what we ve been trying to do and you heard the vice president say that basically our view was the first thing we had to do was we had to get rid of the deficit but we had to do it in a way that would enable us to invest in our future we had to shrink the government but we had to do it in a way that would allow us to be more active in the areas that were important to our future that would help to bring us together and widen the circle of opportunity and the strategy is working now as you look ahead i d just like to mention three things today that i think the university can have a major impact on two directly and one indirectly first we should look to the millennium to try to speed the pace of scientific and technological advances in ways that benefit all of us so i proposed last night a huge increase in medical research an increase in the national science foundation a doubling of the national cancer institute because i believe we have enormous opportunities there and you should be a part of that i think it is highly likely that many of you who will be having children in the next three or four years will have children that will live into the 22nd century because of the work that will be done in places like the university of illinois the second thing that i think we should think about is we should reaffirm our commitment to the exploration of outer space i talked a little about the international space station last night and about senator john glenn at 77 years old going back into space it s so thrilling and i know all of you are happy about that but we are learning a lot from our work in space about how our bodies work here on earth and about how our environment works here on earth and how it might be better preserved so i ask all of you to continue to support the work we re doing there and finally i d ask you to support as the vice president said this next generation internet i mean can you really believe that only five years ago there were just 50 web pages on the internet that the internet was the private preserve of physicists five years ago and now most 8 year olds know more about it than their parents i mean that gives you some sense of the speed of change so we re trying to develop the next generation internet and larry smarr is helping us and if it works it will work about a thousand times faster than the present one does i don t know how we can absorb any more speed in information but we have to be able to we have to maintain public support across party lines and regional lines and age lines and race lines and all kinds of lines for investments in the future we always have to be trying to shape the future and we need your help to do that now the second thing that i want to emphasize is that i want all of you to support the proposition that we have to make in the years ahead a college education as universal as a high school education is today now why do i say that already it is perfectly clear from looking at all the census figures that any young people who has at least two years of college or more is likely to get a job with growing income prospects and high stability and the prospect of positive change in the future now a young people with less than two years of college is highly likely to be in a job where income increases don t keep up with inflation subject to changes which may be unstable and not positive we have to create a network of lifetime learning we have to first of all make our elementary and secondary education as excellent as our higher education is today so more people will be prepared to go to college but then we literally we ve got to make sure that college is open to all now as the congressman said 1997 was the best year for education in a generation and i believe clearly the best year since the g i bill was passed if you listen to all the things that were done and i ll just litanize them for you i think you can make a compelling case that the doors of college have been opened to everybody who will work for it now listen to this 220 000 new pell grant scholarships and the maximum amount increase 300 000 new work study positions 50 000 americorps slots for people who do community service work and earn money to go to college as senator moseley braun said she cosponsored the bill to make interest on student loans tax deductible again there are iras now that you can invest in and then withdraw from tax free if the money is used for education the first two years of college virtually all americans are eligible for a 1 500 tax cut to pay for tuition in the first two years of college the hope scholarship and then another tax credit for the third and fourth years of college for graduate school and for further job training a lifetime learning credit now this is an amazing thing but what i want to say to you is all of you who are here i came here to ask you as a great university in whatever service groups you re in in whatever family or neighborhood or church networks you have you need to get this message out to people who are coming on behind you we need every child in this country to know that if he or she works hard and learns what their supposed to learn they can all go to college now and we need them there for our future in the 21st century now the last thing i want to ask your help on in the coming year because we re going to have a big dialogue about it is something that all of you students probably never think about and that is social security and your retirement i don t know about you but when i was your age i never thought about it i thought i would live forever always young and what senator moseley braun said is true the older you get the faster time goes i never will forget once a few years ago i saw a man who was 76 years old at an airport meeting his brother getting ready to go to his sister s funeral and i said what are you thinking about and he said oh i m thinking about when we were five years old how we used to play together he said you know bill it doesn t take long to live a life i say that to say that even the young must care for the future even the young must think about their obligations to generations yet unborn that america must work as a seamless web of community always doing what is best for today and tomorrow now what s that got to do with social security there are polls that say that young people in their 20s think it s more likely that they will see ufos than that they will ever collect social security and all of you know that the social security system is supposed to be in trouble now what does that mean it is not in trouble today nobody today has got any problems drawing their money in fact today we collect more money in social security taxes every year quite a bit more than we pay out the problem is that when the baby boomers retire starting with me i m the oldest of the baby boomers people my age and down about 18 years younger we are the largest group of americans that have ever lived except the group that started first grade last year second grade or third grade whatever it is something in grade school because we ve got more children in schools now public schools than we had during the baby boom generation for the first time but we re going to have 18 20 25 years where there will be a huge number of people on social security in their retirement years compared to the people who are paying in that is the issue now the question is what is the best way to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers in ways that do not either rob those people who need it of their secure retirement or impose intolerable burdens on our children who in turn will be burdened in raising our grandchildren i don t know anybody in my generation who believes that we ought to just take it out on you and put our feet up when we turn 65 and turn away from the obligations we have to contribute to the further growth and vitality of people who are younger than we are so the question is what is the fairest way to change this what s best for people who are on social security now what s best for the baby boomers what s best for young people in their 20s and 30s just starting to pay into the system what s best for the kids that are in high school now who haven t even started we re going to spend a year having forums all across the country completely non partisan trying to bring people in and debate it and then about a year from now i m going to convene the leaders of congress and we re going to try to craft historic bipartisan legislation to reform social security to save it for the 21st century to make sure it s there not just for the baby boomers but for everybody in this audience and all your children too so we ll have a system that works so that people who work hard and do their part will know they ll have elemental retirement security and that we can do it without bankrupting the country i think we can do it i know we can do it but it s going to take your good faith involvement people of all ages and since what we do may affect how you proceed throughout your entire work life we ve got to have people involved in their 20s in their 30s the young people of this country have got to be involved in this debate it will affect you as much as anybody else but if we do it it will be just sort of like balancing the budget you know how people said oh you ll never get that budget balanced you ll never do that that s just something politicians talk about it is a huge thing to do why we spend less money on debt we invest more money in our future we have a stronger economy the same thing will be true of social security once we make the adjustments necessary to fix it the increase in confidence the increase in savings the increase in belief in the future of this country as we go forward together will be absolutely astonishing and we need you to be a part of it the last thing i want to ask about the vice president touched this briefly and he knows more about it than i do but we need young people in this country particularly young people in our university system to convince the rest of america that we must and we can address the challenge of climate change and global warming i have been working on the economics of energy efficiencies for over 20 years now in various guises and i am convinced that the technology is out there right now to do what we need to do to do our part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in factories in power generation systems in homes and office buildings and we re getting very very close in automobiles we can get there but listen this is your future this is your life this is the world your children and your grandchildren will have to live in in the 21st century this is crazy for us not to do this we do not have to take the economy down we will lift the economy up and you have to take the lead in helping us meet this challenge scientific research universal access to university education reforming social security for the 21st century dealing with the challenge of climate change those are just four of the things that are out there keep your eyes on the future believe in this country believe in yourself reach out across the lines that divide us do not let people do not ever let people who are divisive or pessimistic convince you that there is anything this country can t do i can look at you and tell you that this country can do anything we put our minds to thank you and god bless you thank you dem wjclinton28 1 99 bill_clinton thank you very much please be seated everyone commissioner bettman coach bowman denise ilitch general manager holland to the team captain steve yzerman and all the red wings congressmen bonior dingell knollenberg levin stupak mayor archer and other mayors from michigan who are here with us today welcome back to the white house you know this is becoming such a regular thing from time to time we have state days at the white house we ll have a maryland day and bring in people from all over maryland and let them meet with members of the cabinet and talk about issues affecting the state this is becoming so regular we should just have michigan day at the white house when the red wings come vince lombardi who was a pretty good coach himself once said that excellence is not a sometime thing i think it s clear that with your four game sweep for a second straight stanley cup that s what the red wings are living by i ve always found the history of the stanley cup particularly interesting it s the oldest trophy competition by professional athletes in north america the only trophy which bears the names of individual players and coaches and what i admire most is the tradition of the whole team sharing the cup each player getting to take it home to friends and family i think it s a tradition that other sports ought to follow because it recognizes that every person on a team makes a unique and enduring contribution the red wings overcame the capitals as i said our hometown team but we still are impressed with what you did in four decisive games with grit determination and teamwork the series will be remembered as a defensive triumph that spotlighted your goalie chris osgood who allowed seven whole goals amazing and of course it will be remembered for the performance of your team captain steve your teammates have said you have the heart of a champion and that when the chips are down you always made the plays that s something that every leader needs to do and you have certainly done it we all know too that great hockey teams have to have great coaches perhaps the detroit red wings have the greatest coach in the history of hockey this victory with his eighth championship as a head coach scotty bowman became the winningest coach in nhl history maybe an athletic dynasty all to himself but teams win whole teams in the arena and on the sidelines and we re glad to see the whole team here including vladimir sergei thank you all for coming we re glad you re here today thank you last year when you were here and this year again when you were going through the line i sensed a real genuine spirit of not only championship but camaraderie a sense of family of caring for one another and supporting one another in the end that s even more important than winning the game so congratulations i m delighted to have you here and i d like to have commissioner gary bettman come up and say a few words thank you thank you when you gave me the last one i started wearing it around the house and hillary pointed out i wasn t as broad shouldered as she thought i was one wag in my office today said you know they ll probably give you a jersey but i wish they d give you one of those sticks you could really put it to good use around here thank you let me just say in closing to the coach to steve to all the team it is an honor to have you here it s wonderful to have all your friends from michigan and all your fans who live in washington now but have their hearts in michigan this house is truly the people s house every president is a temporary tenant and i think to me the greatest joy of living here is seeing other people come in and share in the history every president since john adams has lived in this house george washington conceived it really but never got a chance to live here the whole history of our country is embodied within these walls this house has been burned down in 1814 the british troops came in here we were having a banquet and everybody had to run and dolley madison whose husband james madison was the last active commander in chief of the armed forces was out with our army and she cut that magnificent picture of george washington down which was purchased in 1797 for 500 it has no price today the british came in and ate our food and then burned the house down but the walls hung on and it s been rebuilt that time and one other time since after all these years whenever i land the helicopter on the back lawn and come in this house i still get a thrill because everything that our country has tried to be is embodied in this house so for your excellence for your spirit of teamwork we re honored to have you here with all of your family and friends and i only hope that it is as enjoyable to you as it is to me every day welcome and god bless you dem wjclinton28 10 93a bill_clinton thank you very much peter and thank you for that wonderfully understated observation that your editorial positions don t always agree with mine i am delighted to be here tonight on a matter in which we both agree i thank you for sponsoring this meeting and i was glad to see you and my longtime acquaintance al hunt who invited me i would say friend but it would destroy his reputation in the circle in which we find ourselves he invited me here only because he had been replaced by alan murray and therefore he knew he could not guarantee me one line of good press for accepting his invitation i thank you i thank william rhodes and karen elliott house and all the others who are responsible for this event ladies and gentlemen i will get right to the point when we concluded the side agreements with mexico and canada in the nafta negotiations and actually had a proposal to take to the congress i really believed that the cause was so self evidently in the interests of the united states that after a little bit of smoke and stirring around that the votes would rather quickly line up in behalf of what was plainly in our short and long term national interests it is no secret that that has not happened and since i have always prided myself on being a fairly good reader of the political tea leaves i have pondered quite a bit about why we are engaged in a great struggle that i think is very much worth making and that i still believe we will win but why has it been so hard and what can all of us who believe that nafta ought to prevail and in a larger sense believe we need to succeed in getting a new gatt round by the end of the year and in promoting a continually more open world trading system what is it that all of us can do to try to give new energy new drive to this vision that we all share for the postcold war world anyway let s begin by why it turned out to be so hard i think it is far more complicated than just saying that the labor movement in america and ross perot s organized group had a lot of time to bash nafta without regard to what would ultimately be in the final agreement it is far more complicated than that and it is at root a reflection of the deep ambivalence the american people now feel as they look toward the future so that in a profound way at this moment in time nafta has become sort of the catch all for the accumulated resentments of the past the anxieties about the future and the frustrations of the present irrelevant are the specific provisions of the agreement which plainly make better all the specific complaints many of the people opposing nafta have about our relationship with mexico i mean plainly if you just read the agreement it will cause the cost of labor and the cost of environmental compliance to go up more rapidly in mexico plainly if you just read the agreement it reduces the requirements of domestic content for production and sale in mexico in ways that will enable americans to export more plainly the main benefit to the mexican people is opening the entire country in a more secure way to american investment not for production back to the american market but to build the mexican market to build jobs and incomes and an infrastructure of a working market economy for more of the 90 million people who are our largest close neighbors so this opposition is in spite of the plain terms of the agreement it is also in spite of the fact that plainly nafta could lead the way to a new partnership with chile with argentina with colombia with venezuela with a whole range of countries in latin america who have embraced democracy and market economics and i say this to my friends who are not from latin america but who are from other nations here tonight we see this not as an exclusive agreement but as part of the building block of a framework of continually expanding global trade so this is not about the letters the words the phrases the terms or the practical impact of this agreement that is not what is bedeviling those of us who are trying so hard to pass this agreement this agreement has become the symbol as i said for the emotional frustrations anxieties and disappointments of the american people feelings that are shared as we now see from the results of the recent canadian elections and other wealthy countries the results of the recent elections in france manifest in the low growth rates in europe and the low growth rates in japan and the recent elections there what we are seeing is a period of global stagnation which comes at the end of several years in which global growth did not necessarily mean more jobs or higher incomes in wealthy countries we are living in a time of great hope where there s more democracy more adherence to market economics when the wonders of technology are providing new areas of economic endeavor and new millions of new successes every year in all continents but where still there is so much frustration for those who cannot figure out how to make these changes friendly to them so that in america for example having nothing whatever to do with nafta or our trade with mexico we are now at the end of a 20 year period when hourly wage workers have seen their incomes remain basically stagnant while their work weeks have lengthened when income plus fringe benefits have gone up modestly but mostly that s been inflation and wage costs when for the last several years we have seen more and more working people subject to the restructuring of industries which means that for the first time since world war ii people who lose their jobs in america now normally don t get the same job back they get a different job after a longer period of time usually with a smaller company usually paying a lower wage with a weaker package of fringe benefits now to be sure though a lot of good things are happening manufacturing and productivity in this country is growing very rapidly and has been for several years we are recapturing part of own automobile market for example this year it s quite astonishing to see what s happened to the american manufacturers share of the american car market that s just one example american productivity in the service sector is beginning to come back and if you give me a couple of years to work with the vice president on this reinventing government we ll give you more productivity in the government sector too which will have private sector impact but the plain fact is there are an awful lot of people in this country who feel that they are working harder caught on a treadmill not moving up who feel quite insecure and uncertain if you look at what has happened basically we live in a world where money management and almost all but not all technology is mobile where productivity and prosperity are largely a function of the skills of the work force the level of appropriate investment and infrastructure and in the private sector the organization of work and a system for maintaining ever new and different skills and the systems that support work and family the systems that support expanding exports and the systems that support dealing with sweeping economic change to whatever extent any nation with a high per capita income lacks those factors people will suffer and there will always be some dislocation simply because of the rapid pace of change what happened today in america is we have a whole lot of people who have dealt with this not very well who feel that they have worked hard and played by the rules and who now are the seed bed of resentment welling up against nafta not because of anything that s in nafta but because it s the flypaper that s catching all the emotion that is a part of the runoff of the last 10 or 12 years in many cases 15 years of experience with the global economy where the united states has not made all the investments we should have made has not made all the changes we should have made has not made the adjustments we should have made therefore what i have tried to do what i tried to do in my speech to the afl cio in san francisco recently was to argue that we needed america to face the future with confidence to believe that we can compete and win not to run away and not to pretend that these global changes had not occurred but also to argue that we ought to have a certain base level of security in this country so we could deal with the future that s why i supported the family leave law because most people who are parents also work so we shouldn t make it impossible in america for a person to be a good parent and a good worker i believe it adds to worker productivity even though it s a little extra cost for employers that s why i think we have to become the last advanced nation to provide health security to all working people because people are going to lose their jobs in this economy it s a dynamic economy one that creates jobs in as many different ways as ours does will also have people losing jobs all the time and if we want that dynamism to be there there has to be a bedrock of security underneath it people cannot feel when they go home tonight to face their families their children over the dinner table that if they have lost their jobs they have put their children s health in danger so we need to build that underneath that s why next year we re going to propose radically changing the unemployment system in this country to a reemployment system where instead of just getting benefits until they run out you immediately begin a job search an analysis of the jobs in a given area the areas of job growth and a retraining program immediately because most people will not get their old job back and that s what the unemployment system is premised on it is taking taxes from employers and dragging down the economy under a false premise because it s no longer relevant to the world we live in what is all that got to do with nafta if we had all this in place we d have a more secure work force and it would be easier to argue to them we must face the future with confidence in that connection i would like to ask those of you here who are americans who are employers here to do one or two things tonight number one i ask that you tell your own employees and publicly commit that you will support a rich full and adequate job retraining program for the people who will be displaced because of this agreement this is a job winner for america we re going to get more jobs than we lose but some will lose one of the more sophisticated opponents of this agreement said to me the other day i know you will create more jobs than you ll lose but the people who will get new jobs won t feel as much joy as the people who lose them will feel pain interesting argument if you were on the losing end you might agree what do we owe those people a far better training and retraining program than we have a far more aggressive reemployment program than we have you should support that so that the people who are at risk will feel that we are moving forward into the future together it is very important the second thing that i ask of all of you is this that you ask your employees who support this to contact their members of congress i ve had as many republican as democratic members of congress that i am lobbying say to me i want to hear from the people who work for the employers not just from the employers i want to hear from the people who know that their jobs will be made more secure not less secure if nafta passes that is very important we have all these wavering members of congress now many of them moderate republicans and moderate to conservative democrats who come from districts where they have both labor union members asking them to vote against this and people who are part of the old parole organization asking them to vote against this and they just want some other real voters to ask them to vote for it they just want another somebody in their district who understands that this is good for america the last thing that i ask you to do is to lift this debate up in the last three weeks i m going to travel this country intensify my contacts with the congress and try to get as many other people enlisted in this battle as possible but we have to realize that the people of america can view this through their personal spectrum but the members of congress must be statesmen and stateswomen they have to realize what is at stake for america in this we have to decide whether we are going to face the future with confidence and with a belief that we can compete and win and with genuine respect for the heroic changes undertaken by our neighbors in mexico to the south and other heroic changes being taken by neighbors to the south of them and engage them in friendship and partnership or whether we re going to turn away from all that and pretend that we can really do well in a world that we no longer try to lead you know the psychological aspect of this whole debate is absolutely fascinating to me the element of isolationism that i see coming into some of our foreign policy debates is equally present in the nafta debate i ve got to worry about myself and i don t have time to worry about anybody else the problem is in the world we re living in worrying about yourself is worrying about somebody else we re too connected we don t have that option and if you think about this in more personal terms every time an individual a family a state or a nation faces a crisis brought on by change you have only two options you can sort of batten down the hatches hunker down and hope it will go away and that works about one time in 100 or you can take a deep breath take your licks figure out what s happening and embrace the future with zest that s what america has done that s why we re still around this is a real test of our character as a country whether we believe that we can compete and win whether we believe that partnership is good global economics and good american economics and whether we really understand that we have to make our people see the rest of the world as an opportunity not a threat so i ask all of you to think about that to our friends here who have operations in both the united states and mexico or other parts of latin america i ask you to explain to members of congress that nothing in this agreement makes it more attractive to invest in mexico to sell in the american market but this agreement does make it more attractive for americans to invest in mexico to help build mexico no longer will maquilladora line be some magic line in the sand now you can invest in mexico city and help to build a strong market of millions of consumers who can be even better partners with the united states i promise you a lot of people who will vote on this agreement and carry its fate still do not understand that elemental principle you need to say if you have experience in both countries that if you don t pass this agrement everything that you don t like about the present situation will get worse and if you do pass it everything you do like will get better these sound like simple things but i tell you i ve been to so many of these meetings where all of us stand up who agree with one another and it s like we re all preaching to the saved as we say at home well there s lots of folks out there who aren t saved yet but they are willing to listen and the members of the united states congress need to understand what the consequences of passing this are and what the consequences of not passing this are not only in mexico but throughout latin america the changes in mexico political and economic in the last several years have been truly astonishing of historic proportions to continue that they need a partner and it ought to be us and in the long run even though i know some of our friends in asia don t like this agreement now it is in the best interest of the asians it is in the best interest of our friends in europe it is in the best interest of the world trading system for latin american and the united states of america and canada to grow more to increase their wealth diversify their activities so that we can embrace our full share of responsibility for a new fully integrated global trading system i think whether we like it or not that nafta has acquired a symbolic significance perhaps out of proportion to its narrow economic impact not only for all those who are agin it but for all of us who are for it too we have to face the fact that it is in our time the debate which enables us to make a statement about what kind of country we are and what kind of partners we are going to be and what kind of future we are going to make and tell you i believe we will win in the end because i have seen congress time and time again go to the brink with the easy choice and make the hard one because they knew it was the right thing to do for america but they need help the two things you can most do to give that help is to say i am an employer i am a taxpayer i know that is to say i am an employer i am a taxpayer i know that people who are disturbed by this who are dislocated by this agreement should have access to the finest training program this country has ever provided and i will support that i will insist that the president and the congress take care of the people who lose out and the second thing you can do is for goodness sakes to tell people how it works we cannot let the legitimate grievances the honest fears the well founded anxieties of people who are not doing very well in this economy stop them from doing better tomorrow we cannot let the american people act in ways that are against their self interests as i said when i was in san francisco talking to the afl cio the truth is that this agreement will create more jobs for labor union members in the united states we have to assert those facts and we can prevail if we do now we have as you know about two and a half weeks a little more before the scheduled vote that is an eternity the congress wants to do the right thing i am convinced about a week or 10 days ago we passed what i always think of as the first threshold in a big struggle in the congress i believe we won the secret battle that is i think if there were no recorded votes we could ratify nafta tomorrow and that is a very good sign it is also not ignoble for people to listen to their constituents so you need to make what we have to do now is move from winning the secret ballot battle to winning the recorded battle we can do it we can do it but i ask you to remember that all those people that are hanging fire all the undecided voters in the congress are carrying with them the accumulated fears resentments and anxieties of a lot of americans who did the very best they could and it still didn t work out for them and i ask you to at least go far enough with those folks to say if anything happens to you we re going to give you a chance to learn a new skill we re going to give you a chance to change as i tell people the average 18 year old is going to change jobs eight times in a lifetime anyway we might as well get used to it the average 60 year old worker in america is going to have to get used to learning a new skill they might as well learn to enjoy it it will make life a lot more interesting nafta can be the beginning of our decision to be a secure nation in a global economy to lead not follow to reach out not hunker down we owe it not just to our friends in mexico and canada and latin america not just to the rest of the world we owe it to the tradition of america and i believe we will do it but it s going to take all hands on deck and i came here tonight to ask for your help as much as you can do in every way that you can in the next three weeks thank you very much dem wjclinton28 10 93b bill_clinton thank you very much senator kennedy for those moving words and for your friendship and your leadership jackie and caroline and john and all the members of the kennedy family here assembled congressman kennedy i thank you for those fine remarks distinguished senators and members of congress and governors here present and all of the rest of you who share a part of this historic day i want you to know that i felt very much at home today when i got out of the car and the harvard band was playing the yale song and it reminded me of the time when president kennedy got a degree from yale and he said he had the best of all worlds a harvard education and a yale degree i had the harvard band and the yale song harvard has higher standards they haven t offered me a degree yet but for some of us music is more important than degrees the great champion of irish mythology was the young warrior cu chulainn according to legend he was a hero without peer among mortals one day a priest told him you will be splendid and renowned but short lived cu chulainn replied it is a wonderful thing if i am but one day and one night in the world provided that my fame and deeds live after me like cu chulainn s legend john kennedy s fleeting time among us remains a singular story in the history of our great nation he was our president for only a thousand days but as has been said so eloquently by members of his family he changed the way we think about our country our world and our own obligations to the future he dared americans to join him on an adventure he called the new frontier listen now to what he said then the new frontier of which i speak is not a set of promises it is a set of challenges it sums up not what i intend to offer the american people but what i intend to ask of them he inspired millions of us to take a very personal responsibility for moving our country forward and for advancing the cause of freedom throughout the world he convinced us that our efforts would be both exciting and rewarding he reminded us that our democracy at its best is a bold and daring adventure three decades have passed since president kennedy s three years in office but his legacy endures in the new frontiers we still explore think of his religious appeal for tolerance his appeal for religious tolerance to the houston baptist ministers and remember that just this week we passed in the senate senator kennedy s religious freedom restoration act and i thank you very much for that think of the appeal he made for basic civil rights and remember that it was just this year that we passed the motor voter act which was the most important piece of civil rights legislation passed in a long time and that we now have i am proud to say the most racially diverse administration in the history of the united states from his creation of the peace corps to the creation of the national service corps which drew inspiration from city year here in his own hometown of boston we see a common thread of challenging our young people to a higher calling from his launching of the space program to the preservation and pursuit of the space station this year we see a continued willingness of americans even in difficult economic time to explore the outer reaches of our universe from his quest for health care security for our elderly americans to the quest for health security for all americans embodied in the bill that the first lady and i presented to the congress this week we see a seamless thread of determination finally dissolve one of the most persistent domestic problems in the history of the united states from his pursuit to a nuclear test ban treaty to our efforts to stem the proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction to actually dismantle much of the world s nuclear arsenal we see a common effort for america to be leading the cause of human preservation against nuclear annihilation john kennedy embodied an expansive can do outlook toward events beyond our shores as well as the challenges at home he believed that billions of lives depended upon our leadership and our ideals and in turn that our own security and prosperity are tied to reaching out to the rest of the world that is why his picture still hangs today in homes not only in the irish wards of boston and chicago but also in villages and towns from africa to latin america john kennedy s early years were a time when most americans did not believe we should be much engaged in the world america turned inward after world war i unwilling to assume the new burdens of the peace a return to normalcy it was called but in truth it was a retreat from the hard won fields of victory no fireman in boston would dare turn off the hose prematurely and leave a smoldering house but that is exactly what america did in the 1920s and the 1930s and we paid the price in a draconian peace and restricted trade and higher tariffs and a great depression and lost jobs ruined lives the rise of fascism abroad and a terrible second world war that took the lives of more american young people than any war except for our own civil war jack kennedy came home from that second world war with a lifelong lesson america could not withdraw from the world unless we work to shape events we will be shaped by them often in ways that put us at great risk a new generation of americans after the second world war learned that lesson with him together they rebuilt japan and europe and contained soviet expansionism they founded the institutions of post war security and prosperity and by choosing to reach out rather than turn inward they brought the american people a period of economic growth and security unparalleled in our history the great middle class was built and the american dream was born in the lives of americans not merely in the eyes of their parents today we stand at a similar moment of high decision the end of the cold war has left a world of change in its wake the soviet empire and the soviet union itself are no more russia once our nuclear adversary is now our partner in reducing the nuclear threat and in expanding democracy ancient animosities in the middle east are yielding to the promise of peace a transformation made tangible to billions of people last month in a simple stunning handshake after decades of apartheid the nobel prize for peace has gone to two leaders of different colors working for one nonracial democracy in south africa these shifts have been accompanied and in many cases pushed by other great changes in the world those brought about by the communications revolution and the new global marketplace entrepreneurial in spirit intensely competitive and as fast moving as light itself we see the consequences all around us here in america in our workplaces our families our cities and towns some of those consequences are not at all promising the promise of peace freedom and democracy is still thwarted in many places in the world the promise of prosperity is an illusion to millions of people not only in poor countries but increasingly in wealthy countries here at home as in all other rich countries we have had our difficulties in creating jobs and raising incomes technology in the moment is not leading to growth and prosperity for millions of our people we see that in rising sets of insecurities all across america people more insecure about their jobs their health care their communities their children s education and their very safety the new global economy is dominated by democracy but marred by wars and oppressions it s expanded by new technologies and vast new horizons but limited by slow growth and stagnant jobs and incomes nonetheless this new global economy is our new frontier our generation must now decide just as john kennedy and his generation had to decide at the end of world war ii whether we will harness the galloping changes of our time in the best tradition of john kennedy and the post war generation to the well being of the american people or withdraw from the world and recoil from our own problems as we did after world war i will we be the americans of the 1920s or will we be the americans of the late 40s and early 5os will we be the americans who lifted john kennedy to the presidency or the americans who turned away from the world and paid the price president kennedy understood these challenges of change he believed in opening the world s trading system but he also believed we needed to help america s workers who did not win from the expansion of trade to adjust to the rigors of that trade and international competition in 1962 to help workers adjust when they lost their jobs because of trade so that they could then get jobs that would be created by an expanded global economy john kennedy proposed and the congress created the trade adjustment assistance program and he said listen to this in 1962 economic isolation and political leadership wholly incompatible the united states has encouraged sweeping changes in free world economic patterns in order to strengthen the forces of freedom but we cannot ourselves stand still we must adapt our own economy to the imperatives of a changing world and once more assert our leadership once again we must make clear to the american people that our success at home relies on our engagement abroad that we must face our problems at home and reach out to the world at the same time even more than in president kennedy s day the line between foreign and domestic interests is rapidly disappearing millions of our best jobs are tied to our ability to trade and sell our products around the world and our ability to create millions more depends clearly on our ability to with our friends and neighbors and partners to expand global economic opportunities that is why we must compete and not retreat why more than ever before a concern for what happens within our borders down to the smallest rural town or the most thriving neighborhood in any city depends upon a concern for what we do beyond our borders over recent months that imperative has been at the core of this administration s agenda we ve worked to support reform in russia and the other states of the former soviet union we ve put our relations with japan on a new foundation that pays more attention to the economic dynamics of the relationship between our two nations we ve pushed for a new worldwide trade accord through the gatt talks but there is no better example of what we have tried to do to reach out to the world than our attempt to secure an agreement for a north american free trade zone with canada and mexico one that can create 200 000 new jobs for this country by 1995 open a vast new market make 90 million friends and set a stage for moving to embrace all of latin america 700 million people strong in a trading unit that will bring prosperity to them and to us last night in new york i told an audience of corporate executives that if they want americans to support free trade instead of oppose it at a time of great insecurity they should support the americans who will not only win but who will be temporarily dislocated that they should support a new more modern version of trade adjustment assistance that will work for this time that they had no right to ask the american people any of them even one of them to sacrifice unless we were going to make a common investment so that we could grow in the spirit of common community interest in this country and with latin america but today i say to you that our choice is about even more than dollars that just as business people must take care of workers and invest in their future americans as a whole without regard of their economic standing must understand that our national destiny depends upon our continuing to reach out that s why here in boston congressman kennedy his predecessor speaker o neill from the congressional seat that john kennedy once occupied have endorsed this new expansion of america s interest and i believe if president kennedy were still representing that seat in congress he would endorse it as well if you remember when president kennedy endorsed the alliance for progress the latin american countries were moving toward more accountable government and more open economies and then a lot of reversals took place and latin america went into a period of real upheaval political oppression economic devastation it is all changing again now their efforts are being rewarded more and more democracies the second fastest growing region of the world and a real desire to be our close friends president roosevelt advocated a good neighbor party policy toward latin america president kennedy called it the alliance for progress we know that we cannot have a bad neighbor policy we know that we cannot have an alliance to protect ourselves at their expense we know that the people who want to buy our products and share our future ought to have a chance to help us to solve our problems at home even as we help them to pursue their own destiny let us not send a signal by defeating this agreement that we are turning our backs on our neighbors and the rest of the world let us reach out to the people here in our home throughout america who do not support these endeavors because they have been ravaged by the economic changes of the last 15 years and they have not had their cries their pains their frustrations heeded by their national government let us heed them but let us not adopt a remedy for their just complaints that makes their problems worse let us extend ourselves in the world and invest in their future here at home we can do both that is the right answer mr justice holmes was quoted by senator kennedy he once said that we must all be involved in the action and passion of our time for fear of being judged not to have lived no one would ever level that indictment against john kennedy this is our decisive moment this is the end of the cold war this is the dawn of the 21st century there are many complex frustrating problems which have very simple and profound and often painful impacts in the lives of the people that we have all struggled to serve but in these moments we have to reach deep into ourselves to our deepest values to our strongest spirit and reach out not shrink back in these moments our character is tested as individuals and as a nation the problems we share today are widely shared by other advanced nations no one has all the answers but we do know one thing we will never find the answer if we don t continue on the journey if we turn back to a proven path of failure we will never know what we might have become in a new and different age where thankfully hopefully my daughter our children and our grandchildren will at least be free to the fear of nuclear destruction and where at least most of the competition we face will be based on what is in our minds not what is in our hands in the forms of weapons i tell you my fellow americans for all the difficulties at this age this is an age many generations of our predecessors would have prayed to live in these are the challenges so many of our predecessors would have longed to embrace how can we turn away from them what we owe john kennedy today at this museum is to make the museum come alive not only in our memories but in our actions let us embrace the future with vigor let us say we can never expect too little of ourselves let us never demand too little of each other let us never walk away from the legacy of generations of americans who themselves have paved the way let us be more like those americans who came home after the second world war and less like those who withdrew after the first world war the 21st century can be our century if we approach it with the vigor the determination the wisdom and the sheer confidence and joy of life that john kennedy brought to america in 1960 thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton28 10 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you thank you so much it is always always good to be back in chicago senator moseley braun thank you so much and mr mayor thank you for your strong support your friendship and your very moving history lesson about the times when your father was here with president kennedy maybe a week from tomorrow we can reclaim a lot of our great hopes and take them into the 21st century with pride and energy and vigor i want to thank congressman bobby rush congresswoman cardiss collins congressman bill lipinski for being here and i know that there are some other congressional candidates other than those that dick durbin mentioned clem balanoff my friend danny davis and rob blagoyevich we re going to win that seat back to congress thank you cook county board president john stroger assessor tom hynes state chair gary lapaille our attorney general candidate dick devine thank you all for being here i want to thank kevin cronin koko taylor the children children s choir the lennox family and perfect harmony who sang for us tonight and performed i also want you to know that in addition to mayor daley we have some other mayors here it s nearly heresy to say there is another mayor besides mayor daley in chicago but we have here a very large number of mayors from all over the midwest who have endorsed al gore and bill clinton for reelection today including the great mayor of the city of detroit dennis archer who is over here mayor carlton finkbeiner of toledo who had a rally with 25 000 people for me late in toledo one night thank you mayor gordon bush from east st louis mayor sharon sayles belton from minneapolis mayor kernan from south bend indiana and many others who are here thank you all the mayors for coming and for your support you know on st patrick s day of 1992 the people of illinois gave me a great victory in the democratic primary for president and sent me on the way to a nomination and to ultimate victory in november again led by the strong support of the people from illinois and the strong support of the people from chicago one week from tomorrow i want to ride home to victory for america on the shoulders of the people from illinois one more time i want to say to you how glad i am tonight that so many of you in this audience are young i thank the young people for coming tonight and i want to say how grateful i am for all the various groups of people who are represented here the labor people the business people the union leaders the veterans leaders the haitian americans the asian americans the african americans the hispanic americans the irish americans the polish americans all of us and then all the rest of us like me and whatever is left i say that because you will have to make two great decisions in that election a week from tomorrow it is the last election of the 20th century and the first presidential election of the 21st century and you must decide whether in that election you believe our best days are before us you believe as i do we are entering a great age of possibility and you are determined to see us build a bridge to the future not a bridge to the past and then you must decide as you look around this great crowd tonight whether we are going forward in that future together how many times have we seen america be put back when we became divided against one another but when all of these different people here show up in one crowd and join hands with shared values shared hopes and shared dreams respecting our differences and cherishing our common values there is nothing that can stop america we re going forward together into that 21st century you know i remember so many things over the last four years and i always get terribly nostalgic when i come to chicago but i want to say a few things about what s happened that affect you and your decision that involve dick durbin you know when i came here four years ago even though hillary was from chicago you sort of took me on faith well now there is a record today we announced that the deficit which was 290 billion when i took office has dropped all four years for the first time in the 20th century and is now going to be 107 billion this year now for you for you that s meant lower interest rates it means more investment and more jobs it means lower car payments lower home mortgage payments it means lower college loan payments that s what that means now when we were debating the economic plan in 1993 all of our friends on the other side all of our friends on the other side voted against it they said it would increase the deficit they said it would wreck the economy they said it was a terrible thing dick durbin voted for it and provided the decisive vote his courage has given us the economy we have today and he deserves your vote for the united states senate not only that this is about more than economics the fbi reported last week that crime is at a 10 year low in america that crime has gone down in each of the last four years now we all know it s still too high but it s moving in the right direction and one reason is our administration has formed a partnership with the city of chicago the other cities represented here we re putting 100 000 more police on the street we re taking assault weapons off the street we passed the brady bill the brady bill has kept 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers from getting handguns and we just said if you beat up your spouse or your child you can t buy a handgun either that s what we did now the leaders of the other party they fought us the toughest crime bill in history with all the law enforcement organizations in the country behind it and they wouldn t help they fought us they said we were going to take people s guns away and they walked away from an historic opportunity to make our children our streets our neighborhoods our schools our homes safer but dick durbin didn t walk away he stood up to bat and helped us hit it out of the park and that s why the crime rate s down and why he has earned your support for the united states senate for the future of illinois will you help him folks you heard senator moseley braun and congressman durbin talking about the budget fight we had before we did have a difficult budget fight they did shut the government down they wanted to cut education on the verge of the 21st century they wanted to paralyze our ability to protect the environment they wanted to remove a 30 year guarantee of health care to poor families to older people in nursing homes to families who have members with disabilities they wanted to take all of it away we said no they shut the government down we said no again but the real reason it worked is that people like dick durbin were there to say we re going to uphold the president s veto we re not going to let them divide our country and take us back so now you have the future out there you have the future out there and you have to decide are we going to balance the budget in a way that protects our investment in our future and our obligations to each other or are we going to adopt their risky tax scheme that would blow a hole in the deficit raise taxes on 9 million people and bring back all those cuts again even more we re going to do the right thing and balance the budget and build that bridge to the 21st century that s what we re going to do are we going to do the right thing and keep going until we put those 100 000 police on the street help the cities take on the gangs ban those bullets whose only purpose is to pierce the bullet proof vests of police officers let s do the right thing and keep building that bridge to the 21st century are we going to do the right thing and keep protecting our environment and clean up all those toxic waste dumps that are threatening our children s future let s don t turn back let s build that bridge to the 21st century are we going to do the right thing and help our families are we going to expand the family leave law so that parents can go their children s parent conferences at the school and take their kids to the doctor i think we re going to do the right thing are we going to do the right thing and open the doors of college education to all americans we want to see all of our children learning in our schools we want to see every 12 year old able to hook up to the internet and we want to see every 18 year old in america able to go to college if you give us a chance that s what we ll do finally are we going to do the right thing about going forward together look around this crowd tonight just look around look around we ve got all kinds of people here tonight we even have some folks here for the other candidates tonight you re welcome we re glad to have you here we re glad you re here look around you just think just think about this world we re moving into the cold war in the background no russian missiles pointed at the children of the united states for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age but what threatens us racial ethnic religious tribal hatred terrorism fueled by those hatreds people all over the world who believe their life only has meaning if they can look down on someone else at least i m not in that racial group that ethnic group that religious group look at the middle east and northern ireland and bosnia and rwanda and burundi and haiti and all these places where the united states has tried to stand up for freedom and human dignity and peace we dare not let that happen here it should be thrilling to you that you can look around this crowd and see americans from every continent it should be thrilling to you that except for the native americans we all come from someplace else and we need to respect each other so i say to you that future out there in the 21st century will be the greatest age of human possibility we have ever known more of our children will have a chance to live out their dreams than anytime in history if we make the right decisions the decision we make a week from tomorrow will have a profound impact on how we go into that new century on whether we say we re going forward together or whether we say you re on your own on whether we say i hope you can make it but we re too busy to help or whether we say we do think it takes a village to raise our children and build our future and we re going to do it and so i say to you probably no person in history who was not a child of illinois has ever loved this state more or owed more to it than i do but i ask you one last time one week from tomorrow let s build that bridge to the 21st century thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton28 11 00 bill_clinton well thank you very much and welcome i want to first of all say how honored we are to have all of you here this is a remarkable assemblage and i want to thank hillary and secretary albright and all the others who have worked so hard to put this meeting together today and i thank those of you who have come from around america and from around the world to be here and i thank especially senator leahy and republican leach and the members of the diplomatic community who have come this is a topic that i care a lot about i think i should begin by saying that secretary albright just spoke to you eloquently wearing a bolo from the navajo nation i was just not very long ago on a navajo reservation in northern new mexico but it represents a very distinctive and important part of america s culture the first americans this conference i think comes at a rather pivotal time in human history because we all think we know what we mean when we talk about cultural diplomacy you know you send your artists to us we send our musicians to you we all make nice and everybody feels better but the truth is that the world is also full of conflict indeed i was seeing mr lithgow out there and he may have thought that in the last two weeks he has returned to the third rock from the sun let me say what i mean by this the end of the cold war bipolar world and the emergence of a global information society have given rise to two apparently contradictory forces and what we came here to talk about sort of falls in the middle first you see as we all get to find our own way at the end of the cold war the emergence of a huge number of different racial religious ethnic and tribal conflicts within and across national lines that might commonly be called culture wars if you use culture in a broader sense and not just the sense that most of us use the word and secondly you see how if they re having a crisis in russia or an earthquake in china immediately we all know about it all around the world because we live in a global information society and that means that our musicians our artists our movies particularly here in america which has been an entertainment capital of the world go across the world rapidly and other countries worry about whether we re going to blur all the distinctions between our various cultures and render them meaningless so that they won t have independent power to inform to enlighten to enrich our own societies and those around the world now these are not exactly new questions but they are being felt with increasing force because of the end of the bipolar cold war world and the emergence of the most globalized society the earth has ever known you can put me as usual in the optimistic camp i still believe that the role of culture in the sense that brings us here today will be fundamentally positive because it will teach us to understand our differences and affirm our common humanity and that is after all the great trick in the world today since we don t have to draw a line in the dust and say you re on one side or the other the way we did for 40 years after the end of world war ii it is very important that we understand and appreciate our differences and then recognize that as important as they are somehow we have to find a way to elevate our common humanity that s where cultural diplomacy comes in and i have certainly benefitted from it in terms of my life as president probably more than any person who ever held this office in no small measure because of the time in which i was privileged to serve but i can think of just in my lifetime a few examples that i might mention that i think are important i think it s not an exaggeration to say that glen miller and other american jazz bands had a pivotal effect on the morale of our european allies in world war ii i think it s probably not wrong to say that elvis presley did more to win the cold war when his music was smuggled into the former soviet union than he did as a gi serving in germany i think it s worth noting that on the morning of poland s first free election in 1989 voters woke up to find their whole country plastered with posters of my favorite movie depicting gary cooper in high noon with a solidarity pin where his sheriff s badge should have been and the gun in his holster airbrushed out one look and the people knew that the time had come to stand for freedom nonviolently when i was on my state visit to the czech republic vaclav havel took me to the jazz club where he used to gather and plot the velvet revolution and i played with some of the czech musicians who had been allies of his in that great struggle a few years ago in bosnia we needed to find a way to teach children how to avoid land mines so we choose the universal medium of superman comics during the darkest days of that war when books were burned and libraries were shelled american artists authors and performers like the conductor charles ansbacher who is in our audience traveled to sarajevo to show their bosnian colleagues that they were not forgotten even then cultural diplomacy was a giant step ahead of traditional diplomacy in 1992 when the time finally came that we could reach out a democratic south africa our path there was forged by the dance theater of harlem so cultural diplomacy does have the power to penetrate our common humanity and i say that not just in terms of the stars but in terms of the way people generally feel and i was recently on our trip to nigeria the first lady of nigeria dragged me out on to the dance floor to dance to nigerian music and when i was in india i went to a little village in rajasthan nilah and the village women got me in the middle of their dancing and they showered me with thousands of petals of flowers and i understood in a way that i never could have read from a book how they related to the world and what role music and the arts had in their lives so i think this is very important i also don t buy the fact that the fact that we know more about each other s culture means that we re all going to be diluted i think that american culture has been enriched by the rest of the world and hopefully we ve been a positive force on the rest of the world in our country we have the architecture of i m pei or the plays of david wong who is with us today and who reminds us that american art in many ways is the art of the rest of the world dr saman sang and his wife chan mulachan have also joined us today they escaped from cambodia during the reign of the khmer rouge and brought to america the gift of cambodian court dance it was threatened in the land of its birth and it is now part of our culture as well with the support of foundations like rockefeller ford and the nea they are now returning home to introduce a new generation of cambodians to their old culture i say this to point out that our country really does benefit from this sort of cultural interchange and i think we can benefit others if from time to time we provide a safe haven for cultural preservation i think this is more important now than it was in the past because of the way the world works as i have said i know there are some people who believe that our culture has become too pervasive in the rest of the world i ve encountered this anxiety in every part of the world from people who don t share our political system s views to those who just worry about the trade impact of american movies or records or cds many people are absolutely sure that because of globalization pretty soon their children will be speaking american english every television will be tuned to mtv and every french movie will have a happy ending and in some parts of the world these kind of fears have fueled a lot of bitterness about the process of globalization but we can t turn this globalization off you know people want to know more about each other and now they have the means to do it the internet is the most powerful means of communication in all of human history and i think that globalization in the end will be a force for diversity not uniformity a week ago i was in vietnam where many people are wondering how to open their doors while protecting their traditions i pointed out that globalization is not just bringing the world into vietnam but it is also bringing vietnam to the rest of the world films about life in vietnam are winning awards over the globe paintings by vietnamese artists command fortunes at international art shows fortunately we were able to find some wonderful ones in vietnam that don t yet require a fortune to buy old vietnamese poems are published in america in english vietnamese and in an ancient script that never before has come off a printing press consider the nobel prize in literature for those who think the world is becoming homogenized of the first 80 prizes given out after 1900 only five went to authors outside europe and north america seven of the last 20 prizes have gone to asian latin american and african authors including our panelist wole soyinka not simply because the good people of the nobel committee are trying to cast a wider net but because we actually do know more about one another than ever before and what about this business about language being homogenized well if you get on the internet you will find people all over the world chatting in welsh downloading fonts in bengali ordering courses in intensive cherokee with advances in translation and voice recognition technology before long it will be possible for people to communicate instantaneously on the internet or even on the telephone in their own languages thanks to the internet people with similar interests and outlooks can now be dispersed around the world and still form a community i tell somebody all the time i ve got a cousin in arkansas who regularly plays chess with a man in australia i don t know how they work out the time change but this is the kind of thing that is happening and it will open the avenues for more cultural even subcultural diplomacy now we have some obligations here we have to do more to close the digital divide so that the poor of the world can participate more readily in this sort of cultural interchange and we are working very hard on that we also have to work hard in america to make sure that our contributions reflect the diversity of our culture we have supported public private partnerships in recent years for example that have sent andy warhol exhibits to the hermitage in st petersburg navajo textiles to latin america and the art exchange between regional museums in america and france that elizabeth rowatan has recently organized and i do want to support the legislation that has been introduced by representative leach who is here and senator biden to create an endowment to support state department cultural exchange programs on top of the funds we re already providing this will become more and more important so i ve already said more than i meant to but i care a lot about this subject i think you should see this for what it is it s an opportunity for us to learn more about each other to understand each other better to reaffirm our common humanity and in so doing not to blur the cultural lines but to highlight them in a way that promote peace and reconciliation and therefore put a real roadblock in the path of those who would like a 21st century dominated by culture wars instead of cultural celebrations thank you very much hillary has to go and we re giving her a cultural excused absence she s going to sign copies of her new book dem wjclinton28 12 00 bill_clinton good morning everyone please be seated first i want to thank senator dole and senator mcgovern for joining me and for their leadership i thank senator dorgan and senator leahy for being here representatives hall and mcgovern catherine bertini the executive director of the un world food program jacque diouf director general of the un food and agriculture organization sven sandstrom the acting president of the world bank representatives of non governmental organizations and all those who have worked to make this global feeding initiative a reality i also want to especially thank secretary summers jack lew and the white house staff who worked so hard on this in what in washington time is a very short period of time to put this all together this morning we gather just three days after christmas the second day of eid al fitr a few hours before the last night of hanukkah a time sacred to men and women of faith who share a belief in the dignity of every human being a time to give thanks for the prosperity so many enjoy today but also a time to remember that much of humanity still lives in astonishing poverty nearly half the human race struggles to survive on less than 2 a day nearly a billion live in chronic hunger half the children in the poorest countries are not in school that is not right necessary or sustainable in the 21st century the most critical building block any nation needs to reap the benefits of the global era is a healthy population with broad based literacy each additional year spent in school increases wages by 10 to 20 percent in the developing world today however 120 million children get no schooling at all 60 percent of them girls so this year in dakar senegal 181 nations joined to set a goal of providing basic education to every child in every country by 2015 at the urging of the united states the g 8 nations later endorsed this goal at our summit in okinawa experience has shown here at home and around the world that one of the best ways to get parents to send their children to school is a healthy meal that s why today i m very pleased that we are announcing the grant recipients who are going to help us put in place our 300 million pilot program to provide nutritious meals to school children in developing countries the program will provide a free breakfast or a free lunch to some 9 million children in 38 developing nations it will work closely with some 14 private volunteer organizations many of whom are represented here with the un world food program and with recipient nations and farm groups so we don t disrupt local farm economies the result will be increased school enrollment and attendance especially among girls and real improvement in these children s nutritional well being and ability to learn we know from experience that this approach works in cameroon for example efforts led by the world food program and usaid are feeding almost 50 000 school children helping to increase school enrollment by over 50 percent and cutting the drop out rate for girls to virtually zero we also know we can take that kind of success and extend it across asia africa the balkans and beyond because a little funding goes a very long way indeed under this pilot program for example we will start providing nutritious food to more than 500 000 children in vietnam we will start providing high protein bread and milk each day to some 60 000 students in 170 schools in eritrea and in kenya we will start giving some 1 4 million elementary school children a nutritious meal every single day of course this initiative by itself is not a solution to the global hunger problem but it s a downpayment and a beginning now it s up to congress the united nations other developed countries the ngos represented here and the next administration to continue this fight we re going to need the world bank to implement its pledge to increase lending for education by 50 percent developing countries need to make basic education a real priority we need to mobilize private sector resources something we ve worked hard to do by raising awareness of this issue among foundations in addition to the 300 million for school feeding we have also fought hard for and won a new 37 million initiative called school works to support basic education in developing countries and an overall 50 percent increase for all international basic education programs including the fine education work being now done at usaid finally we secured 45 million this year for the u s funding for the international program to eliminate child labor a 15 fold increase since 1998 the fight for better education is only part of the battle we must wage to make the global economy work for everyone implementing landmark trade agreements we ve reached with africa and the caribbean is a part of it leading the worldwide fight against infectious diseases like hiv and aids is important removing the crushing burden of debt from impoverished nations that will in turn invest those savings in their people and their future is fundamental we must also continue to offer more micro credit loans and close the digital divide we ve worked hard these last few years to put the battle against abject poverty higher on the world s agenda and america must keep it there this is not just about our moral obligation to help the needy although it is great it s also part of the answer to what kind of world we want our children to inhabit a generation from now what do we want to avoid the world is becoming more and more interdependent and america needs strong and healthy partners we need to invest in future markets and we need to do it in every part of the world we want to avoid a world that is hopelessly and violently divided between the rich and the poor a future in which hundreds of millions of people decide that they have no stake in a peaceful and open global society because there s nothing in it for them and their children if we can prevent that from happening it will be good for our economy for our security and for our souls we are greatly honored today to be joined by two leaders who clearly understand this george mcgovern and bob dole served their country in war and peace with uncommon courage candor and commitment to their principles springing from the soil of our nation s heartland they have long believed that america has global responsibilities and must therefore have a global vision over 30 years ago these two leaders strongly supported the creation of the domestic school lunch program last may they both advanced the idea of an international school feeding program today we re putting that into practice the country will always be strong as long as we have leaders like them leaders with their energy and vision willing to reach across party lines to build a common future following their example i am convinced we can put together the kind of bipartisan and international public private coalition needed to build the global economy in a way that leaves no one behind and in the process creates a new century of unprecedented peace and prosperity it s a great opportunity and a great responsibility now i d like to ask senator mcgovern to say a few worlds let me make two brief comments first of all on the way in here the young man who was advancing this event pulled out a copy of a picture of me escorting senator mcgovern across an airport tarmac in 1972 and senator dole saw it and he knew immediately that if he had had that picture in 1996 the outcome of the entire election would have been changed my hair was rather long and my sideburns look like burnside i look like one of those civil war generals but we were able to cover it up thank goodness let me make a serious point if i might first of all i feel very indebted to all the people who are here senator leahy and senator dorgan have long been advocates of fighting hunger congressman mcgovern came to me with senator mcgovern no relation i might add with this and worded me to death on it and my good friend tony hall has been the foremost advocate of dealing with the problems of the poor and the hungry in the world in congress and all of us acknowledge that but let me just sort of say one thing we did not explicitly say that i think we should say before we leave i was talking to senator mcgovern about it what we would like as senator mcgovern and senator dole said is to prove through this pilot program that a we can make this work and b we can do it without disrupting local farm economies if we can do that then the goal is to provide this sort of meal at breakfast or lunch depending on which works better in each country to every child in the world that needs it and i think senator dole said that we reckon about 400 million the estimate is it would cost between 6 and 7 billion to do that so if we were to go that route and the united states were to pay its fair share it would be about 1 5 billion give or take over the next few years a year but if you think about if you think about being able to give a meal to 300 million kids a year every single day of the year for an aggregate international cost of somewhere between 6 and 7 billion a year and you think about all the hundreds of billions indeed the trillions of dollars that are spent by governments around the world i mean it s just walking around money it s such a tiny amount of money compared to the aggregate expenditures of the governments of the world on everything else they spend money on i wanted just to do this we ve worked very hard this year to get this off i m not trying to saddle the future administration or a future congress with an unbelievable burden this is a relatively small new commitment that i think the united states should embrace in cooperation with its allies and friends and others around the world and one that i hope and pray will be embraced and it can be funded in any number of creative ways but i just wanted to say that i believe 10 years from now this will have been done and i believe when that happens we will be profoundly indebted to these people who have come here today to advance this idea thank you very much dem wjclinton28 12 98 bill_clinton let me say one of the things that she might have told you is that before she volunteered for the national council of senior citizens for 20 years she was an employee until 1972 when she retired of the bureau of engraving and printing therefore she worked for the treasury department and on new year s eve she will be 90 years old ladies and gentlemen before i get into my remarks because this is the only opportunity i will have to appear before the press today i think i should say a few words about an incident early this morning over the skies of iraq where american and british air crews were enforcing a no fly zone in northern iraq they were fired on by iraq surface to air missiles they took evasive action returned fire on the missile site and returned safely to their base in turkey we enforce two no fly zones in iraq one in the north established in 1991 another in the south established in 1992 which now stretches from the southern suburbs of baghdad down to the kuwaiti border the no fly zones have been and will remain an important part of our containment policy because we effectively control the skies over much of iraq saddam has been unable to use air power to repress his own people or to lash out again at his neighbors our pilots have the authority to protect themselves if they re threatened or attacked they took appropriate action today in responding to iraq s actions once again i want to tell you i am very proud of the work they do the risks they take the skill and the professionalism with which they do it they attacked because they were attacked and they did the appropriate thing we will continue to enforce the no fly zones now let me say this is a very happy announcement today and i want to thank secretary rubin who most people associate with saving the economy not saving social security but that s an important part of his job too i want to thank kathy adams who is one of the those people in the government that makes it go and never gets enough credit for it so i m delighted to see her up here and through her all the other people who work every day to make america work i ve already told you about pauline johnson jones and i want to say too i have been very moved by how passionate ken apfel has been about making sure that this problem got solved and today we saw that he has a vested interest in it he doesn t want his father to cut him out of his will and everybody always needs to be in better stead with their in laws you know this y2k problem is a stunning problem oh one other thing i want to acknowledge the presence here in the audience of the member of congress from guam congressman robert underwood his wife and their five children they re here we re delighted to see all of them we re delighted that they re here with us in this cold weather instead of on warm and sunny guam today we just heard that the new millennium is only 368 days away and we want it to be a carefree celebration the reason we re here today is to announce that on new year s day 2000 and on every day that follows people like pauline can rest easy because the millennium bug will not delay the payment of social security checks by a single day the social security system is now 100 percent compliant with our standards and safeguards for the year 2000 to make absolutely certain the system has been tested and validated by a panel of independent experts the system works it is secure and therefore older americans can feel more secure i thank all those who are responsible this is a good day for america thank you very much the social security administration and the financial management service can be proud the social security agency was the very first one to start work on the y2k problem it s been a leader and a model ever since they couldn t have done it these two agencies if they hadn t worked as a team social security generates the social security payments the financial management services issues those payments they are in this together indeed we re all in this together this involves not just federal agencies but every one who depends upon a computer which is every one directly or indirectly federal and state governments and local governments businesses large and small the year 2000 problem reveals the connections between all of us we also i want to point out have been working very hard with other countries sally katzen just told me that there was a meeting at the united nations recently where we met with representatives of 120 other countries who are all now working together to solve this because as all of you know a lot of our economy is tied up with economic endeavors throughout the world so even a problem a long way from our shores can have ramifications within our borders and of course we don t want any of our friends and neighbors hurt by this change either people are meeting this challenge but i think a lot of people can still hardly imagine what caused this i mean computers after all are supposed to save us time right and i was describing this y2k problem to hillary and she got so technophobic that i gave her a little digital alarm clock for christmas and she gave it back to me after i talked to her about it and she said why don t you just go get me one that winds up that i can change in my hand it happened you know because in the older computers the memory put on the chip was precious and much more limited than the phenomenal capacity of computer chips today so that in effect they were all programmed these older computers just to change the last two digits on the four numbers of any date and so what would happen is when you get to the year 2000 it would show 1900 instead of 2000 because there is no provision for the 19 to go to 20 because of the limitations of memory in the older computer chips the problem is obviously that a lot of new computers are also interconnected with older computers and a lot of people can t even be sure what chips are in what computers and what links are there that s what makes this labor saving device of the computer present the most labor intensive problem imaginable retired people have had to come back people with skills in working with the old computers have had to come back to help all kinds of businesses figure out how to unravel this problem it sounds so simple but it is so mammoth because you have to identify what computers and what chips are where and what the interconnections are and so it s an enormous enormous effort and we really all of us are so indebted to these people who have been recognized today with these two agencies and to others all across the country who are working on this problem in the public and in the private sectors i say again the american people don t know who or didn t before today know who kathy adams was they don t know any of the people who are working with her but when they get the checks for the first social security payment in the new millennium it will be because of them and i would just ask the american people today to be very sensitive because there are people like kathy adams working in all these agencies in state and local government and all these businesses throughout the country and they need to be encouraged and those who have not yet undertaken this task need to get on it and get on it now because we just have a little more than a year to get the job done now we have made sure that social security checks will keep coming in the year 2000 i d also like to say that after we got the computer problem behind us we have to continue to focus on the larger issue the policy issue which is to make sure the social security checks keep coming throughout the 21st century all of you know that at present rates of contribution and payment present rates of retirement present rates of aging and birth and immigration we estimate that the social security trust fund will be exhausted in about 34 years we have typically tried to keep the life of the trust fund at about 75 years to make sure it was absolutely stable thirty four years seems like a long time away i suppose the younger you are the further away it seems it doesn t seem so far to me now because things that happened 34 years ago are implanted in my mind as if they occurred only yesterday but we are going to face early next year a great challenge of fashioning a bipartisan solution to save social security for the 21st century i tell everybody it is a formidable problem but it will only get worse if we delay it and it is a high class problem we have this problem because we re living longer the average life expectancy of the american people as reported just a few weeks ago exceeds 76 years and that is a high class problem we should be grateful for this problem when social security was established and there was no early retirement at 62 and you couldn t draw until 65 the average male life expectancy in america was 56 in the 1930s so we ve gone from 56 to over 76 and of course for women it s a couple of years higher and as pauline says women are especially dependent on social security for reasons that i think would be obvious to anyone and therefore have a particularly large stake in our resolving this problem in a prompt and appropriate way now in the last year in this year 1998 i have gone around the country and held these bipartisan forums members of congress in both houses and both parties have taken a special interest and have been very good to attend these forums just a few days ago we had a two day first white house conference on social security the second day i went over to blair house and met with nearly 50 members of congress from both parties and both houses it was an astonishing outpouring of genuine interest now i don t want to minimize the problems and they re different from the y2k problem the y2k problem you know what to do to fix it once you identify it here we ve identified it and there are obvious differences about what should be done to fix social security for the 21st century but we all know that there are basically only three options we can raise taxes again which no one wants to do because the payroll tax is regressive over half the american people who are working pay more payroll tax than income tax today we can cut benefits and it might be all right for someone like me who has a good retirement plan but it s not a very good idea for someone like pauline or we can work together to try to find some way to increase the rate of return and there are a number of options that we are discussing the point i want to make to all of you is that we have the same obligation to fix the system in policy terms for the 21st century that these fine people we honor today have discharged in fixing the y2k problem and if we approach it with the same can do attitude and the same determination to reach a result we can achieve that so today we celebrate and i hope the celebration that we have today will steel our determination to make sure that people like pauline can be making this speech 50 years from now thank you very much and happy new year dem wjclinton28 2 00 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen thank you for the warm welcome thank you for this wonderful book governor patton mrs patton governor davis governor o bannon to bj thornberry and all the officers of the dga and especially my good friend mark weiner i want to acknowledge also the presence mark weiner did a good job tonight and all the rest of you did raising this money i thank you for that i want to acknowledge the presence in this audience of the man who was the executive director of the dga when i was a member my good friend chuck dolan i thank you for being here and for all you did for us and all my colleagues i know there are five or six governors out there who are former governors with whom i served thank you for being here i want to acknowledge the governors who are retiring governor rossello thank you for everything you ve done and governor carper and governor carnahan are going to be members of the united states senate and that will be a good thing for the senate a bad thing for the governors i want to say a special word of thanks to the man who nominated me to be vice chairman of the dga in 1979 governor jim hunt one of the finest people i ever met in my life thank you jim hunt for what you did you know i will treasure this book i have a first edition of profiles in courage but not one signed by john kennedy hillary says that the reason i admire john kennedy so much is he s the only person to ever serve as president whose handwriting was even harder to read than mine but i can recognize the signature and i thank you president kennedy once said the party which in its drive for unity discipline and success ever decides to exclude new ideas independent conduct or insurgent members is in danger well thanks to the democratic governors to your new ideas your independent conduct and your willingness always to try to do better and to be different the democratic party is in no danger we re stronger tonight than we have been in many many years thanks to you as president i have been deeply indebted to my service as governor it has stood me in good stead and i have been deeply indebted to so many of you for the friendship the advice the counsel you have given me and to so many who were members of this organization with me who continue all during these years to call with a helpful word or sometimes just a word of friendship and support thanks to our partnership and the hard work of the american people our country is in good shape at the dawn of the new millennium we have 21 million new jobs the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest crime rates in 25 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the lowest hispanic and african american unemployment rate ever and the longest economic expansion in history we are well positioned for this new century and i am very proud that there is in this country embodied in the service of the democratic governors a new democratic party committed to new ideas and the old principles of opportunity for all responsibility from all and a community of all americans i am proud of what we have done together but you came here tonight because we re raising money for the elections of 2000 and as dearly as i loved every single word paul patton said and i ll treasure it for a lifetime and he ll never be able to get away from it because everywhere i go the white house communications agency captures things on film i ve got a movie a color movie of paul patton and the next time he gets mad at me i m going to play it for him i will treasure everything he said for a lifetime as much as i treasure and as much as i have loved being president elections are about the future and in this election season those of you who are running and those of you who are serving and not running must be very active in defining the choices for the future last night at the dinner at the white house i reminded all the governors that we are now in the longest economic expansion in history and it s easy to feel comfortable and confident maybe even a little complacent but the last time we had the longest economic expansion in history was in the decade of the 1960s between 1961 and 1969 in 1964 when i graduated from high school america was still profoundly sad about the loss of president kennedy but very optimistic and very united behind president johnson absolutely convinced we just have high economic growth with low inflation from now on absolutely convinced that we would solve the civil rights challenges of our age through the congress absolutely convinced that we would prevail in the cold war at the united nations within two years we had riots in the streets and the country was divided within four years martin luther king and robert kennedy had been killed lyndon johnson said he wouldn t run for reelection the country was split right in two we had a presidential election which for the first time in a long time was about the politics of division you remember the election of 1968 vote with the silent majority and it was us and them if you weren t in the silent majority presumably you were in the loud minority i know i was one of them and in just a few months we lost the longest economic expansion in history and we ve had decades of us and them elections and us and them politics in washington d c i ran for president because when i was a governor i could not have survived practicing politics the way it was done here every day and i was sick and tired of people all caught up in the washington political game deaf to the voices of the people like those in appalachia that paul patton introduced me to on that day in hazard kentucky which i ll never forget because it was so hot i saw people like the people i grew up with they don t want much from us they get up every day and go to work and they obey the law and they pay their taxes all they want us to do is to work as hard at our job as they work at theirs and to pay attention to what their concerns are and to think about how their children are going to do better and i came to washington determined to do that i am profoundly indebted to every governor who served with me who helped me and all of you since but what i want you to remember is elections are about the future and so is governance and don t you dare be complacent about this i have waited for 35 years for my country to be in shape again to build the future of our dreams for our children our party can lead the country to do that we re going in the right direction we have the right ideas we have the right values and you have to lead to make sure it happens and you have to be willing to do things that may not grab the headlines all the time we have to take what theodore roosevelt said at the dawn of the century a growing country with a young spirit should always take the long look ahead today some of you came into see me including governor carper and former governor dukakis who is here tonight to talk about my amtrak budget well that s not a headline grabber but it s important to the future that america have a high speed rail system that guarantees our energy security and our safety and our strength it s part of our long look ahead it s part of our long look ahead that we recognize that we ve got the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years that is the good news the challenge is that nearly every family and nearly every income group is having some difficulty balancing the burdens of raising their children and succeeding at work and whenever this country has to make a choice any family we lose and we have to do more to help people to succeed at home and at work we have to do more to bring economic opportunity to the people and places that have been left behind if we can t bring free enterprise to appalachia to the mississippi delta to the inner cities and to the indian reservations of this country now we ll never get around to it and the democrats ought to lead the way everybody deserves a chance to work who is willing to do so jim hunt said something today i want to emphasize we started out together in 1979 and we all wanted especially in the south where we knew we had to do it we all wanted to make education better but we really didn t know how to do it especially with all the kids from all the different backgrounds the different economic and racial and religious and ethnic backgrounds with all their different burdens that they carried from home to school but we don t have an excuse anymore now we know what works we know how to turn around failing schools we know all our kids can learn and we know how to invest in it we know how to demand high standards we know what to do we in the democratic party have to lead america to excellence in education for every single child in this country across all the lines that divide us when i became president there were a lot of people that never thought the crime rate would go down again but we know how to do it we know you ve got to put more police on the street people who are trusted by folks in a community who work with them who know how to prevent crime as well as catch criminals and we know even in the south we know we ve got to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and away from children we know what works the democratic party ought to lead the country to making this the safest big country in the world we owe that to our children we know that in the digital economy the governors came here to talk about you do not have to weaken the environment to improve the economy in fact we know that we can improve the environment and the economy at the same time there is a 1 trillion market in the world today for environmental technologies that avoid the worse consequences of global warming and clean up local air and water systems and preserve the land 1 trillion market we know that and a lot of our friends in the other party don t know that yet the democratic party ought to lead the way to a 21st century economy that proves we can have the strongest economy in history and the cleanest environment in history we ought to lead the way to that sort of future and we know even those of you that come as i do from a land locked state in the middle of the country that there is no more artificial dividing line between foreign policy and domestic policy we know that our welfare is tied to the welfare of people all around the world that s why i ve worked so hard for peace in every region of the world and why i ve worked to expand trade and why i believe we ought to take advantage of an agreement that finally opens china s markets to us the way our markets have been open to china for decades now why i believe we ought to continue to work to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction chemical and biological terrorism why we ought to adopt the test ban treaty even though the senate voted against it last year because we have got to make a safer world if we want our kids to live on safer streets and have a safer future in every state in the united states of america and finally you know i get apprehensive when people start giving me gifts even one like this that i treasure that s the kind of thing that they ought to do for you when you re not around anymore i have to pinch myself i m still alive i m still here i hope to be a useful citizen when i m no longer living in the white house but if the good lord came to me tonight and said i m sorry you can t finish your term you re out of here tomorrow morning and i ll only give you one wish i m not a genie you get one wish not three i would set aside everything i just said to you and pray that america could find a way to overcome the profoundly ingrained tendency of people everywhere to distrust people who are different from them by race by religion people who were gay all these things that are different why you ve been here talking about the internet economy i ve got a cousin in arkansas who plays chess once a week with a guy in australia over the internet people are being drawn together as never before i was in poor villages in africa where the school buildings had maps that still had the soviet union on it but because they re getting computer hookups pretty soon they ll just be able to print out maps that are new and those poor little kids in those little villages will be able to learn the same geography our kids do in our finest schools we are being drawn together as never before and yet we are bedeviled by the oldest problems of humankind sunday i m going to selma to be with governor siegelman and the veterans of the selma march 35 years ago for me particularly because i m from the south it is a signal honor and we will celebrate all the great things that have happened in the last 35 years to bring us together i see governor barnes out there from georgia he went in on a great vote that carried in two african americans to statewide elected office in georgia and there are things like that happening all over america governor locke out there the first chinese american governor our country ever had governor cayetano from hawaii a philippine american but it is still true that even in america we had kids at a jewish community center in california little kids shot at just because they were jewish a filipino postal worker killed just because he was asian and worked for the federal government all those fine people killed in the middle of the country by that man who said he belonged to a church that didn t believe in god but did believe in white supremacy matthew shepard stretched out on a rack in wyoming now most of the news in america is good but i am telling you we re a smart people you can t keep us down no matter what as long as we ve got our heads on straight but the democratic party ought to take the lead in reminding us that one of the things that we have learned as we ve unlocked the mysteries of the human gene is that we are genetically 99 9 percent the same and that the differences among individuals within racial groups are different are greater than the differences from group to group whether we like it or not we re all in this boat together and those of you who have been in the oval office know that i keep on the table there a moon rock that neal armstrong gave me on the 30th anniversary of the landing on the moon it s a lava rock that is 3 6 billion years old and whenever anybody gets all hot and lathered up in the oval office in a meeting and they act like the whole world is about to come down i say time out see that rock it s 3 6 billion years old now we re all just passing through chill out but even though we re all just passing through every minute every hour every day is precious so i ask you all apart from everything you do on all these issues i mentioned model that model one america remind people that if you believe everybody counts and everybody ought to have a chance then you ve got to believe we re all better off when we help each other instead of look down on one another that s another thing the democratic party has stood for we lost a lot of presidential elections because we stood for it but we re coming back now because we stand for it you ve got 13 seats up in 2000 and 36 up in 2002 i m going to help you with the 13 and when i m just a citizen i ll help you with the 36 if you want me to but we will never have a national democratic party that s as strong as it ought to be until we have a majority of the governorships again and until we can prove where people live that we care about them that we can produce for them that we reflect their fondest hopes and deepest values you can do that you have helped me to help america you have immeasurably enriched my life you ve been good to me and hillary and al and tipper and for all that i am profoundly grateful i will treasure this book for the rest of my days and my friendships and seriously what paul patton said but america is always about tomorrow so be proud of what we ve done but keep your eye on tomorrow and lead the american people where we ought to go thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton28 2 95 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president mr secretary madam attorney general commissioner lovitt and my friend jim congratulations happy anniversary you know i d like to begin by saying a special word about jim brady he dedicated his life to public service in no small measure because of that dedication 14 years ago his life was in danger and his life changed forever in spite of all the hardship and the pain that followed he never looked back but instead decided he should fight on determined to do his part to prevent the tragedy that struck him from striking other people more than any other person in the united states we celebrate today the courage and determination of jim brady and we are in his debt thank you sir you know jim and sarah brady represent in so many ways the kind of citizen action i talked about in the state of the union address the new covenant moral responsibility along with more opportunity and people sparking grass roots movements across this country i am committed to this law and committed to what it represents you know our big problems here in washington often stem from the fact that we don t think about what promotes responsibility and what creates opportunity and what enables people to make the most of their own lives the brady bill does all that a crucial part of our job here in washington is to help arm the american people through our police officers to fight crime and violence the brady law in that sense is one of the things that i m proudest of that has happened since i have been president we put an end to seven years of politics as usual of people saying one thing and doing another when the brady law passed it s not a complex piece of legislation but it took seven years seven years to pass the congress and all the naysayers talked about how terrible it would be well now we know that as the secretary said over 40 000 convicted felons fugitives drug dealers gang members stalkers were prevented from purchasing handguns in the brady law s first eleven months i should point out that the real national number is bigger than that because as you know there are some states that have companion laws that go along with that and the estimates are that nationwide in the states with brady like laws and the brady law the total is more like 70 000 a recent study says that as the secretary said that that s only 3 5 percent of all the people who buy handguns and as he said it s kind of like airport metal detectors i think 97 percent of us should be willing to wait a while so that the three percent of us who are trying to buy guns for the wrong reasons can be stopped three percent of the american people buying guns for the wrong reasons can do a phenomenal amount of damage and stopping them can do a phenomenal amount of good can keep a lot of citizens alive and it can keep an awful lot of law enforcement officials alive there are thousands of examples around the country but let me just cite one or two in march of 1994 the brady law stopped a handgun purchase by a man in kansas under a restraining order for allegedly stalking his wife and threatening to kill her in april the law led to the arrest of a suspected drug dealer in texas without standing warrants for possession of cocaine and heroine with intent to distribute in november it helped to catch two gang members both convicted felons who traveled all the way from california to nevada to purchase weapons these are the people the law was meant to stop lawabiding people are those the law was meant to protect the test was simple will it save a life will it protect one child walking home from school so he or she could feel a little safer will it spare one woman from abuse if it could we all thought the law would be a success now we know that it has done that thousands of times over in just one year the brady bill has become the brady law with flying colors after years of the same old politics as usual the last congress stood up to the special interests and stood up for the american people they heard the pleas of the victims and they thought through to the end past all the rhetoric that was in their way when they passed this bill and when they banned 19 deadly assault weapons and their copies many of them paid a terrible price some of them laid down their seats in congress to stand up with the law enforcement officials of this country and with jim brady but america is safer because of their courage and i think now after one year of the brady law s impact the entire american electorate will see that those who attacked it were wrong and those who stood up for it were right you know today there s a lot of concern in our country and a lot of interest in the news media about the balanced budget and next week there will be another issue and the week after that there will be another issue in six months after that there will be another issue and people may forget what jim brady went through for seven years and people may forget why some of those members of congress lost their seats last november but from now until the end of this country s existence every year there will be more people alive because of jim brady and because of what the congress did and so i just want to say this for all the other things that will be debated you can mark my words the brady law and the assault weapons bill are here to stay they will not be repealed thank you jim and thank you ladies and gentlemen dem wjclinton28 2 97 bill_clinton thank you anna santiago for the power of your example and for that very fine introduction i want to thank all the young people who are here the advocates who are here the members of congress who are here who have championed this battle for so long especially i thank the vice president secretary shalala for what they have done and of course i want to have a special word of thanks to david kessler i think he s had a bigger impact on the lives and health and the future of the american people than any person who ever held the job of fda commissioner before him and i thank him very much because of david kessler we have been able to undertake this initiative to protect our young people from tobacco because of your actions over the last six years more aids and cancer patients are getting better drugs faster as well more people are getting better information on their food labels every american can go to bed knowing that the food on their tables the medicines in their cabinets are safe you ve left us a great legacy all americans should be grateful to you and we ll do our best to replace you the vice president and i would like to be invited to yale from time to time to give a speech let me say that the reason we re all here today is to ensure that anna and all the young people behind me and the young people all across america for whom they stand today have a chance to live out their dreams they can only do that if they choose positive and healthy lifestyles and if we give them the support they need to make those choices that s why the number one goal of the drug strategy we announced earlier this week is to motivate our children to reject illegal drugs most of us have an instinctive urge to protect our young people from danger we teach them to look both ways before crossing the street we tell them not to touch a hot stove we make sure they bundle up before going out in the cold we should wrap that same protective arm around them when it comes to resisting smoking and the advertising and marketing of cigarettes more americans die every year from smoking related diseases than from aids car accidents murders suicides and fires combined today it s estimated that 4 5 million of our children and adolescents smoke another 1 million use smokeless tobacco the problem is getting worse smoking rates among 8th graders have risen 50 percent in the last six years one out of every three young people who picks up this deadly habit will have their lives shortened from the terrible diseases caused by smoking as parents as leaders as citizens all of us have a moral obligation to do what we can to protect them that s why last august the fda took bold action to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco we knew it would be a tough battle but the health and well being of our children are worth that we set a goal of reducing tobacco use by children and adolescents by 50 percent over seven years to do that we initiated the nation s first ever comprehensive effort to restrict access and limit the appeal of tobacco to children today is the first day that some of these rules take effect quite appropriately on david kessler s last day on the federal payroll first we re making the law of the land what is already the law in every state no sale of tobacco products to anyone under age 18 second we re now requiring age verification by photo id for anyone under the age of 27 for the purchase of tobacco products from now on in every store in america our children will be told no id no sale by requiring id checks for people under 27 store clerks and managers will no longer have to guess the age of those seeking to by cigarettes studies show that minors succeed in buying cigarettes over the counter nearly 70 percent of the time that simply must stop with these new requirements we ll help to keep cigarettes out of reach for our young people while giving store clerks and managers a tool they need to make sure they re not inadvertently violating the law by selling to minors before we came out here secretary shalala asked anna if all of her efforts and all of these efforts were having any impact in reducing the tendency of her peers to smoke and she said yeah a lot of them are quitting because it s too much hassle now that s the idea that s good over the last three weeks we ve conducted massive education campaigns to let retailers know how they can comply with these new rules we ve even prepared this new guide a retailer s guide to the new federal regulations appealing advertising multi color this has been made available to 500 000 retailers around the country i want every retailer and every community across our nation to join with us in this important effort parents must continue to be the first line of defense but all the rest of us have to make these rules work and the retailers can play a major role i honestly believe the overwhelming majority of them want to do so and most of them are parents too they have children too we have a common interest in doing this job together and we hope this guide will help them to achieve that goal cigarettes are still legal for adults if they want to smoke they can do so but we have now clear as a nation drawn a line where our children are concerned we have done it together we are committed together and now we must make it real together thank you very much dem wjclinton28 3 96 bill_clinton thank you you know when we were walking over here leora said she was nervous i don t think she told the truth i m just glad she s not on the ballot this year didn t she do a great i want to thank leora robinson and lieutenant ramirez they both spoke so well and so passionately and they spoke the truth they spoke on behalf of the mayors the police chiefs the housing administrators and the residents who are here and people all across america and i thank them i thank the members of congress who are here and mr mcgaw the head of the atf and my friends the mayors who are here and especially i know the mayor of toledo is a proud mayor today hearing these two fine people speak i thank the vice president for the work that he has done in our whole community empowerment initiative trying to give people all over america control of their lives again and i want to echo what the vice president said it is literally an inspiration for me to have the opportunity to work with henry cisneros a man who believes that all problems can be solved and goes about proving it day in and day out i thank you sir for what you have done in my state of the union address i challenged local housing authorities and tenant associations to adopt this one strike and you re out policy to restore the rule of law to public housing to simply say if you mess up your community you have to turn in your key if you insist on abusing or intimidating or hurting other people you ll have to live somewhere else it seems so simple it s hard to imagine how we ever went so wrong public housing was created with a simple purpose in mind to provide good inexpensive homes for good hard working people so they could care for their children hold down their jobs and eventually save enough if they chose to move into homes of their own public housing has never been a right it has always been a privilege and it is amazing how far some people in some places have strayed from that original mission i think it is worth saying today again even though you have just seen evidence of it most people who live in public housing work most people who live in public housing are doing their very best to be good parents most people who live in public housing deserve a better deal than they have gotten in the past from the kinds of things that have gone on and we are determined to help the people all across this country change so that everybody will be able to tell the story that leora and lieutenant ramirez told today the only people who deserve to live in public housing are those who live responsibly there and those who honor the rule of law we ve worked hard to protect public housing residents with operation safe home and public housing drug elimination programs we ve made 6 800 arrests seized hundreds of weapons confiscated 3 million worth of illegal drugs and coupled with our other anticrime initiatives we re helping to restore order in our cities to our one stoplight towns and in our public housing but we know we have to do more this policy today is a clear signal to drug dealers and to gangs if you break the law you now longer have a home in public housing one strike and you re out that should be the law everywhere in america to implement this rule we are taking two steps first i will direct secretary cisneros to issue guidelines to public housing and law enforcement officials to spell out with unmistakable clarity how to enforce one strike and you re out these guidelines are essential believe it or not the federal law has actually authorized one strike eviction since 1988 but many public housing authorities have not understood the scope of their legal authority others have problems working with residents or local police or the courts and for a small number enforcement has frankly not been a priority for whatever reason the sad fact is that in most places in this country one strike has not been carried out you see the consequences when it is in what these fine people have said today now there will be no more excuses for these national guidelines tell public housing authorities the steps they must take to evict drug dealers and other criminals they explain how housing authorities must work with tenants with the police with the courts with our government to get the job down they also tell housing authorities how to screen tenants for criminal records with effective screening many of the bad people we re trying hard to remove today won t get into public housing in the first place the second thing we re going to do is to make sure these guidelines don t sit around and gather dust under the new rules hud will propose for the first time there will actually be penalties for housing projects that do not fight crime and enforce one strike and you re out superior housing authorities that live up to their responsibilities will improve their chances for increased funding and for greater flexibility in how the housing authority is run by the local people those that don t will face increased supervision and might lose out on extra financial help i know that for some one strike and you re out sounds like hard ball well it is it is because it s morally wrong for criminals to use up homes that could make a big difference in the lives of decent families and as leora said better than i could have if people aren t going to do anything wrong in public housing they have nothing to fear from one strike and you re out after all it s not as if nobody wants to live there there are three people in line for every one person who has a slot in public housing in many places the waiting list today is up to four years this is a privilege not a right the people who are living there deserve to be protected and the good people who want to live in public housing deserve to have a chance the people who are in the middle doing the wrong thing must be removed there is no reason in the world to put the rights of a criminal before those of a child who wants to grow up safe or a parent who wants to raise that child in an environment where the child is safe in no danger of being shot down in a gang war and can t be stolen away by drug addiction we know this policy works beyond toledo we know that in north carolina at the greensboro housing authority where this policy has been implemented crime is down 55 percent we know that in georgia at the macon housing authority drug related arrests have fallen 91 percent since the policy was implemented in 1989 in both of those cities and in other cities all across the country where one strike has been implemented one statistic is rising the number of residents who feel safe we also know why one strike works because for it to work people have to join together in common cause the leora robinsons have to support the lt ramirezs people have to work together to believe that they can recreate a community when we tell you how to evict a drug dealer therefore you have to take the action the guidelines only point the way we ll make sure that our police have the tools they need to get crime out of public housing but the residents the administrators the neighbors the people that know that they can recreate a sense of community and security and a decent environment for children they have to support the police in taking that action we can work for better housing in washington but only you those of you who are here and your counterparts all across america can make better housing and safer housing a reality where you live for too many years the chaos in some of our public housing units has been a national blind spot and a national disgrace most americans probably think it has to be that way many of them who had had no personal experience with tenants may even believe most people who live in public housing are lawless are not working are not concerned parents all of that is wrong now we are going to give the good decent law abiding citizens in public housing the life they deserve and we re going to give the kids the future they deserve by doing what we should have been doing all along and doing it together i want every american to believe that if he or she works hard and plays by the rules they can share in the american dream i want every parent to believe that if he or she works hard they can do a better job raising their kids in a country that s supporting them not undermining them i want this country to come together across the lines of income and race not be divided surely our dreams of opportunity and decent childhoods and strong families and unity in this country can be furthered by what we re doing here today and surely others will see this and say that they have to do the same i want to now sign this executive order and i d like to invite the people who are here from greensboro and from macon to come up as well deborah shaw and deputy chief david williams from the greensboro housing authority and joann fowler and sergeant richard kory of the macon housing authority and i d like to ask lieutenant ramirez and leora to come up here and also be here when we sign dem wjclinton28 4 00 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen welcome to the white house let me also say that we are very honored to be a part of the opening of this magnificent exhibition at the museum of natural history i am grateful to the nordic council to all the museums and the nations represented in the exhibit and especially grateful to the extraordinary assemblage of dignitaries who have joined us today from all the nordic nations there are quite a few competing answers to the question who discovered america and by the way when and exactly what america was some would say is now italian americans revere columbus and point out the word america comes from the famed map maker amerigo vespucci anglo americans argue for the primacy of jamestown and plymouth as the first colonies in the original united states franco americans remind us to honor champlaign cartier and lasalle alongside all others and of course our native americans consider all these people insignificant latecomers with the opening of this important exhibit we expand the debate and learn more about ourselves the remarkable explorations across the north atlantic at the turn of the last millennium constituted a crucial first step these brave voyages under perilous conditions brought a dawning awareness on both sides of the atlantic that our world is in fact many worlds there was something profoundly heroic about their desire and their ability to make the crossing to go across the atlantic to vinland was as earth shaking and expansive an achievement as the most expansive ambitious space launch today it is indeed fitting that our first expedition to mars in 1976 consisted of two spacecraft called viking 1 and viking 2 all americans should know more about this fascinating early chapter of our history the viking voyages are an essential part of the long process by which all of us in our different ways came to be here the legacy of the vikings has always been with us from scattered archaeological evidence to the legends that thrilled poets like longfellow these legends have been nurtured especially by the descendants of the vikings i don t suppose i can use the term viking americans but i do means people from norway and sweden and finland and denmark and iceland who showed the same courage when they immigrated here in the modern period to build new worlds for themselves the settlers of places like new sweden in delaware oslo minnesota denmark iowa or holland north dakota all brought a deep love of democracy and freedom stemming from their own egalitarian traditions in fact a new national geographic cites a case where the prince of the franks sent an envoy to parlay with a group of invading vikings and came back saying i found no one to talk with they said they were all chiefs now our awareness of our nordic past will go far beyond legends and traditions this exhibition will deepen our knowledge of the rich history we share it will shape our future by strengthening the bonds between americans and their kin in the nordic nations i am grateful for all that we have done together in the last decade from our support for the peaceful expansion of democracy and freedom in central and eastern europe to our concerted actions in bosnia and kosovo europe s future has never looked brighter thanks in no small measure to your contributions when we entered the new millennium a few months ago it was reassuring to dramatize our progress by portraying the year 1000 as a dark time in human history a time then dominated by fear and superstition but this exhibition helps to tell a fuller story that for all the challenges and superstitions men and women faced 1000 years ago they still have the daring and enterprise to look beyond the horizon to begin to build a world that measured up to their imagination this is an old lesson that always offers fresh inspiration it is amazing to me to look at the viking ships and imagine that they made it all this way 1000 years ago and i am so glad that with the leaders of all these nations here today you have clearly decided to make this a tradition and you re welcome back in the year 3000 we are delighted to have you welcome thank you i d like to now invite his majesty the king of norway to come and make a few remarks on behalf of all the nordic nations dem wjclinton28 4 97 bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen i ve had a great time here and i want to thank all of you for being so patient while i lumber around with my temporary disability can you imagine how bad i would look if i had actually jumped out of an airplane i m looking forward to not being president you know if i can jump out of an airplane and look like jerry ford does in 30 years i ll be one happy guy that s a great thing i want to thank president bush for all of the people that he mentioned and thanking them i join with that and especially ray chambers and stewart shapiro and general powell for their extraordinary efforts i d also like to thank the leaders of the corporate and nonprofit sector who are here today including my longtime friend millard fuller bob allen doug watson and gerry greenwald and so many others we ve all been washed in the warm glow of lots of words and music and the powerful examples and i must say i will live with the stories that the young people told last night at that event for the rest of my life i would just like to make two points here because i really want this to make a difference i think there are two keys to whether when people look back on this moment 10 years from now they say these people really did something special they changed america the first is what general powell and ray chambers and others are doing with the follow up on america s promise and everything you can do to support that you should making those promises we re going to try to do our part i said yesterday that the department of defense will tutor or teach a million children in the next four years the department of transportation and the contractors with whom it works have committed to reach another million kids with tutoring or teaching we are going to go from 1 500 to 2 000 schools we ve adopted going back to what eli said we ll have more to say about that later we re going to hire 10 000 people to move from welfare to work so they can support their children better we re going to try to extend health insurance to 5 million kids and try to at least make the first two years of college as available as a high school education is today we ll try to do our part and we ll try to do it in very personal ways the last christmas and the last birthday i had were some of the best i ever had in my life because my gift from the white house staff was a notebook of personal pledges for community service my secret service detail adopted a junior high school in washington d c where those young people are getting the role models that they need we ll try to do our part and the follow up one reason i wanted to do this summit so badly was that i thought we could find a completely nonpartisan way to embrace this issue and then i knew i could trust colin powell and ray chambers and the others to do good follow up that s the first thing here s the second thing let me just tell you a brief story before i came to philadelphia i asked a man in washington d c named kent amos a lot of you know to come in and see me i met him when my friend ron brown died in a plane crash and he was ron s next door neighbor and a lot of you know he and his wife carmen kind of got into this volunteer work by just taking in kids that their children went to school with who came from dysfunctional backgrounds and they wound up having 20 or more at a time that were in effect living with them and now he s tried to take the model that he i thought he perfected in his own home and kind of take it into neighborhoods and communities but i asked him to come see me and i said what do you want me to do now what can i do to help you and what do we have to do now he said go to that summit and tell them the breakout sessions are the most important thing that s going to occur because unless every community gets organized community by community we will not have the maximum benefit of this because essentially the problem is we have an unacceptably high percentage of people living in dysfunctional environments and you can do a number of good things for them sporadically but until you completely change the environment we won t have the success rate we need that s essentially what general powell said in our last conversation before he took his uniform off that all the troubled young people that he knew who came into the military had had had gone from whatever dysfunctional environment they had into a completely functional environment now you can t guarantee that any of you individually but collectively community by community we can so in that sense the governors and the mayors who are here are profoundly important people and the people who run community based nonprofits are important people but the only other thing i would say is let s really pay attention to these breakout sessions and let s promise ourselves that in addition to running up the numbers that we all promised and since i ve got a big organization i can promise big numbers but we re honest to goodness going to promise ourselves that we will try to change the culture in these communities from dysfunctional environments to functional ones you saw these kids they re great they re going to make it they re going to do just fine if we just give them what they need in a systematic way place by place thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton28 4 98 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you shelby and katherine for opening your beautiful home i thank all the senators who are here i thank especially senator kerrey and senator torricelli when bob torricelli goes around the country or bob kerrey goes around the country i know they enjoy it but it still gets hard it still gets hard all these senators are here they re going to go get on a plane and go home tonight so they can be there to vote tomorrow and i thank them for doing this on behalf of others among whom surely are the three candidates we have for the senate in new york tonight and i thank them all for running and for their fidelity to our party and for what they have already done for our country and i thank judith hope for her leadership i also would be remiss if i didn t thank the people of new york for being so good to me and al gore twenty five percent of the total plurality i received in popular votes in the entire country in 1996 came from new york and i m very grateful i was just leaning against the wall back there wondering how much better i might have done if i hadn t interrupted traffic for four years before the election truly the people here are the epitome of tolerance one of you tonight informed me that you had to walk 10 blocks just to get here because of my attendance for that i apologize let me say very briefly i try to do a number of these events to help our candidates for the senate our candidates for the house i believe that the success that our country has enjoyed in the last few years is something that all americans can claim a part of certainly the private sector deserves an enormous amount of credit just ordinary working people deserve an enormous amount of credit but clearly the direction of this country and with it the direction of our party has moved into the future has changed has gone to a different level and the results have been very very satisfactory we are going to have a surplus of some size this year the first time our budget has been in balance in three decades we have been able to dramatically increase our investments in education and in health care for our children in the environment in science and technology to try to prepare for long term growth what i would like to say to you tonight is i think i d like to make just two points about why this coming election is so important because if you re just following events in the papers today or on the evening news you see that there s particularly from the other side there s a little more partisan rhetoric creeping back into their speeches they seem to be sort of lapsing into that it s easier you can be in a semi coma and give that speech because they know how to do it so well but i think that we shouldn t forget as democrats why we re here why the country is in the best shape it s been in a generation and what we re supposed to do with this time you know good times can be very deceptive because even if the times are very good all of us know they re very dynamic things are changing very rapidly you can take any set of circumstances and pick up a magazine and one expert will say the glass is half full and the other will say the glass is half empty a third will say the glass is unbreakable and the fourth will say it s about to be shattered so in a dynamic time it seems to me we need to think about two things number one when people have a lot of confidence because things are going well but leaders know that things are changing and the ground is still moving that is the time when the big issues should be faced and long term problems should be solved now we ve got the sort of basic mechanisms of our society working better now with the budget in balance and the other things that are going on this country has some big long term problems i ll just mention three or four one reform of social security to deal with the baby boomers two reform of medicare to deal with the costs that will come before the baby boom generation we ve cut the long term deficit in medicare by more than half in the last two years but we ve still got some problems three climate change four the biggest public health problem in america is still the fact that 3 000 children a day start to smoke cigarettes and 1 000 of them a day are going to die sooner because of it five we still don t have an adequate network of child care in our country that is truly affordable for working people now those are just five issues i can think of a lot more overshadowing all of them is that we still haven t provided a truly world class education for every child in this country i mention those things to say when times are good you should bear down in dealing with those problems not relax and walk away from them and no political party should let itself sort of just kind of disintegrate into petty bickering and small minded politics this is a time to lift america up energize us on big issues and move us forward that s the first point i want to make that s why these elections are important the second point i want to make is this country for all the change and all the modern things and all the science and technology and everything else is still always about in my opinion three big ideas and at every time of change we have to lay off the dead hand of history and adopt new means to reaffirm and broaden these three big ideas one is we re about freedom and liberty we re about deepening the meaning of freedom that s why i supported the employment nondiscrimination act that s why i ve tried to involve more different kinds of people than any administration ever has in our administration that s why i have tried to push this race initiative and get americans to think about what it s going to be like when we are no longer a bi racial or even a tri racial society but we have the most diverse democracy in the world when more and more places look like the new york city schools do because these are the challenges we ve always faced this is the challenge of our generation the freedom challenge how are we going to get the most out of everybody s life only if everyone is treated with dignity and equality the second thing this country has always been about is widening the circle of opportunity giving everyone not a guarantee but a chance i don t think any serious person would say that everybody in this country has really got the same chance today but there are more people with more chances than they had five years ago and i m proud of that and i m determined to see that we continue to expand those chances that s why we ve supported things at home and abroad like micro credit programs for example to give little people a chance to borrow money to get into business to prove that they can make something of their lives it may sound like a small thing but to someone who has it who didn t have it before it s all the difference in the world and the democratic party is about widening the circle of opportunity and the third thing that i want to say and it s very important that is so easy to lose sight of when the stock market is at 9 000 or even when it drops 160 points is we re also about strengthening the bonds of our union and improving our relationships with people beyond our borders that also has been a constant throughout our 200 year plus history and that s very important if you look at what s eating the world alive today i go to africa and i celebrate all the wonderful things that are happening and then go to rwanda and talk to six people who survived 100 days in which 800 000 people were slaughtered because of their tribal differences we re all sitting on pins and needles especially in new york waiting for the irish to vote in may to see whether they can vote for the next 30 years instead of being imprisoned by the last 30 years or indeed by the last 600 years we re all hanging around now waiting on pins and needles as we celebrate israel s 50th birthday because the secretary of state is going to london to meet with the leader of israel and the leader of the plo hoping to get the peace process going again all over the world in this so called modern world where kids are pecking away on the internet on every continent we are still bedeviled by the most fundamental and primitive of prejudices of all kinds we the american people should be drawing closer together we the democratic party should be the instrument of that union so i say to you there are two reasons that you ought to be here one is more democratic senators and re electing the ones we have means we ll do a better job on the big issues for tomorrow we ve proved it with the deficit we ve proved it with crime we ve proved it with welfare we ve proved it with the environment we ve proved it with a whole host of issues but we ve still got huge challenges out there to face and two and even more important we will carry forward the eternal mission of america in modern times and that matters more than anything else in the end that s what will really matter to your kids are we forming a more perfect union is there more opportunity for everybody does freedom mean more today than it did 30 years ago if we can do our job and you help us the answer to all three of those questions will be a resounding yes thank you very much dem wjclinton28 5 93 bill_clinton thank you very much rosemary greco you know she s the sort of person that i ran for president to support a person who started out as a bank teller and became the president of a bank that s the american dream i want to say how glad i am to be here back in philadelphia a city that has been so good to me for so long now with your mayor and senator wofford and with the members of the house delegation who are up here on the platform with me and with your state treasurer catherine baker knoll i m glad to be here with all of them give them a hand will you my fellow americans since i became president i have been working to break the gridlock in washington to prove that government could work for you again and there have been some impressive examples of success in that regard the congress after eight years of rankling with the president and two vetoes voted to pass the family and medical leave act to guarantee working people a little time off when the baby was born or a parent was sick and eventually after years of haggling voted to pass the motor voter bill to open up the voter registration rolls to millions of americans and bring them into the political process but the real issue was whether we had the courage to come to grips with the economic problems which have paralyzed this country after years and years of years of gridlock after years of leaders talking about economic problems and not doing much about them after years in which we ran our national debt from 1 trillion to 4 trillion and reduced our investment in our people their jobs and their future at the same time last night the house of representatives gave the american people a victory for economic growth over gridlock the plan cuts the deficit by 500 billion cuts 1 trillion a quarter of a 1 trillion in government spending asks the wealthy who can best afford to pay their fair share invests in education and jobs and rewards work instead of welfare let me tell you something wait a minute you know one things that s wrong with this country everybody gets a chance to have their fair say my budget did more to fight aids than any in history and we re having to put up with this tell them to let me talk if you want to give a speech go out there and raise your own crowd we ll be glad to listen to you so there were those i ll make you a deal i ll ignore them if you will there were a lot of people who said we could never change the way things were in washington the same sort of people who picked the phillies to finish last this year by the way i think the phillies are looking pretty good even that big fellow kruk you know is a big bat i wonder who cuts his hair let me tell you something folks make no mistake about it this national capital of yours is beginning to change after years in which our house was coming apart with higher deficits and less investment a government by special interests instead of the national interests middle class working harder for less things are really beginning to change after years of a lot of hot air and no responsibility and no willingness to take the tough decisions yesterday the house began to throw out the economic program that ran our debt to 4 trillion ran the middle class into the ground created a new class of poverty and robbed our country of opportunity and any sense of community we are now moving forward with a plan that reduces the deficit asks the wealthy who can pay their fair share gives the middle class the chance of having a future with real economic growth and provides profound incentives to prefer work over welfare these are the kinds of things you elected me to do and i want to say one of the most rewarding things is the people who supported the program i mean after all this is a program which asks that 75 percent of the money raised in taxes be paid for by people with incomes above 100 000 any yet among the strongest supporters were people who had that income who believe their country was more important than their own pocketbook and we ought to reward that we had not just labor leaders and small businesspeople and mayors of small and big cities and governors for this program there were people who led some of the biggest lead some of the biggest companies in this country out there working to give our country a better chance and a brighter future because they know that we have to stop reducing our investment and running up our debt we need to reverse our priorities and now we re on the way to doing it a lot of these decisions were not easy but they had to be made i tried to set a good example i reduced my own staff we ve had a reduction in this budget in the federal work force by attrition not by laying people off but we re going to reduce the federal government by 150 000 over the next four years that s a lot that s a lot of government spending cuts we cut more than 200 specific programs we cut 2 in spending for every 1 in new investments and education and jobs and technology there were things that had never been really seriously dealt with before the budget s sacred cows everything from agricultural subsidies to the rea to other problems that affect the cities demonstration projects that had never been seriously reviewed cuts in the medicare program that couldn t be justified and the federal employees perhaps took the biggest hit of all foregoing a pay raise and having a budget that lowers their raises below the cost of living for four years because most of them agreed that they couldn t ask any of you to pay more even the wealthiest americans unless they took less that s the kind of spirit it s going to take to turn this country around and move the country forward i ll tell you something else every dollar in taxes and all the budget cuts have to go into a deficit reduction trust fund there will be no taxes without the budget cuts and all the money will go to bringing the debt down and we will have some left over to do things that need to be done here in philadelphia you know because of defense cuts we need to invest some money to help move our country from a defense to a domestic economy new technologies for new jobs and new opportunities in the future because this debt turned out to be bigger even than we knew before the election i did ask the congress to adopt an energy tax some of which will be paid by middle class americans but i want you to know exactly how it works and you ve got to decide whether you think it s worth it first of all we have income tax reductions to protect family incomes below 30 000 from the impact of the energy tax for people above 30 000 up to 100 000 here s what it costs 1 a month next year 7 a month the year after and if you ve got a family of four 17 a month after that but consider this look how much interest rates have gone down if we keep interest rates down and people can refinance their homes get car loans at lower rates get consumer loans at lower rates get lower business loans from good bankers like rosemary you will save more in interest rates than you ll ever pay in the energy tax and you ll have a healthier economy and a lower deficit just for example if someone had 100 000 home mortgage that was financed at 10 percent and they refinanced it at 7 5 percent they d save 175 a month a month not a year this is going to be good economics if we can keep interest rates down by bringing the debt down that will release another 100 billion into this economy this year to put the american people back to work yesterday was a historic day but it was just the beginning now the bill goes onto the senate and we must work to pass the bill that meets these principles the wealthy must pay their fair share we have to reduce the deficit by 500 billion we have to keep the incentives for people to invest in our jobs and in our cities and we ve got to give people incentives to move from welfare to work not the other way around that s the kind of bill that needs to come to my desk there are 80 000 lobbyists in washington many of them don t want washington to change think of that maybe some of you all are in the wrong line of work 80 000 special interests that work in the senate who have now proposed that we cut social security and put more of a burden on the middle class in order to relieve the burden on the wealthiest americans when many of them are leading the crusade for change i think we can do better i think we can do better and we re going to do better in the united states senate with your help the process of changing is not easy not even and not quick but we are moving in the right direction the budget is on the way to being realized there is a program now in the united states congress with broad bipartisan support to fulfill the commitment i made to you to open the doors of college education to all americans and give our young people a chance to pay off their college through national service through their communities here at home very soon the national commission on health care which my wife has chaired will present their plan to provide affordable health care to all americans and bring down the cost of health care that threatens our economic stability how many millions of americans not only lack health insurance but have it and are terrified of losing it because somebody in their family has been sick and they think they ll never be able to change jobs we can do better and we will with your support finally there are bills in the congress which will help to change the very way your national government works a bill that will require every lobbyist to register and to say how much money they spend lobbying all the rest of us and report it to you i think that would be a good thing already passed the senate can pass the house and mayor rendell was talking about the campaign finance reform bill which at long last will lower the cost of congressional campaigns limit the influence of political action committees and open the airwaves to candidates so they can have an honest debate that bill is in the congress and we ought to pass it this year when i was running for president i was profoundly influenced by the series in the philadelphia inquirer by donald bartlett and james steele the stories they made into a book called america what went wrong they said that after 50 years the middle class and small business had been helped for 50 years but things began to change about a dozen years ago about a dozen years ago the national government adopted tax policies and economic policies that rewarded those who shut jobs down in america and sent them somewhere else rewarded those who laid their workers off and bailed out with golden parachutes to better lives we stopped rewarding responsibility and work and rigged the game of economic life against the broad american middle class they were right but we re fighting to change that and americans from all walks of life are helping i will say again to me the most moving thing of all has been how many genuinely successful americans people this country has been good to people who have made a lot of money have come forward and said go ahead and raise my taxes if it will bring the deficit down and put the american people back to work and get this country going again that s the kind of statesmanship we need everywhere in this country yesterday we began the process of saying no to gridlock no to special interests no to the spiraling deficit no to increased unemployment no to the conditions which lead so many of you to work harder for lower wages every year we said yes to a brighter future to america yes to lower deficits yes to more jobs yes to higher incomes yes to a future in which we have a real chance to compete and win things are going in the right direction stay with us fight with us help to lift this country up and believe in its future and we can do it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton28 6 93 bill_clinton thank you so much first let me say a special word of thanks to scott pastrick for this wonderful dinner and all those who worked on it to roy furman for agreeing to take on this enormous responsibility in the democratic party i don t think the first time he came to my attention or rather i came to his he hosted me in his office if he had known then that he d wind up on this stage tonight i m not sure he would have done it and i thank him like so many others he came into the leadership of this party because of the campaign of 1992 i thank my dear friend david wilhelm for his leadership and all of those who work in the vineyards of the democratic party i thank david especially for what he said tonight many of the beneficiaries of the efforts we make today are people who may not even understand entirely what we re doing and they don t have an organized force in the congress i thank the leadership of congress let me say without hesitation that i have literally been awestruck at the demonstration of courage repeatedly by the leadership and by many of the freshman and by many in between in our party in the united states congress you know and you ought to give them a hand tonight you heard that the vice president of course broke the tie the other night in the senate on the economic program what you ought to know is that i was furiously working the phones and a couple of senators senator murray from washington was not well and so we thought we had enough votes to pass the bill and so she stayed home in bed and then two of the people we thought would vote for it said well i won t let it die mr president but if the vice president can break a tie that s okay with me so we were there at the end and right before the vote came down to the end with the time running off the vice president sent a note to senator mitchell our democratic leader and he said george i m wavering but conviction overcame him at the end and so here we are tonight with a big crowd instead of an empty house let me say to all of you that a lot of speeches have already been made tonight and the entertainment was marvelous little texas and whitney houston and my good friend kenny gee who let me play with him in the campaign that was the biggest thrill i got in the whole election i tell you i always liked kenny gee because i was running third in the polls when he agreed to play with me in the campaign this has been a great night for us and a great night for our party i want to remind you that we are engaged on a great struggle to change this country a year and eight months ago i entered the race for president when no one thought the incumbent could be defeated and few thought i could be nominated and i didn t have any idea how it would come out i just knew that i had a couple of simple convictions i felt very strongly then that we were not doing what it takes to compete and win in a global economy i felt very strongly then that we were not facing up to the honest problems we have at home i felt very strongly that too many people in public life were telling people what they wanted to hear today instead of thinking about how we ought to live tomorrow those things drove me into the race and they produced in the end thanks to all of you a remarkable change in the course of american life but the details are always more difficult than the rhetoric governor cuomo used to say frequently that we campaign in poetry but we must govern in prose and as my daughter likes to remind me of that great slogan the kids are all saying today denial is not just a river in egypt so when you move from rhetoric to reality sometimes the going gets tough i couldn t believe it we have been ranted and raved against this administration as you know it s all tax and spend but we ve cut more spending than any administration in history and more than the ones before us and that s a fact and they say well only the democrats are voting for this program but let me tell you look at the alternatives in the house of representatives there was a republican alternative with no taxes which slashed the middle class slashed the working poor slashed the elderly just above the poverty line and more republicans voted against it than democrats voted against our program in the senate there was a republican program four months late which took 100 billion less off the deficit and was tougher on the middle class and the poor and in the finance committee the other party that goes around saying it s spending stupid you know that great slogan of theirs guess how many spending cut amendments were offered by the republicans in the senate finance committee zero not one i say that because it is up to every one of you to go home and tell the people of this country the truth this is not going to be easy but it is working you heard the vice president you heard david wilhelm talk tonight if anybody had told you on election night in november that by the middle of june unemployment would be below seven percent we d have 755 000 new jobs a 20 year low in mortgage rates a six year high in housing sales a nine year high in construction employment the family leave bill the motorvoter bill the biodiversity treaty a new policy on choice the most diverse administration in history an appointment schedule contrary to what you may have heard ahead of the last two administrations you would have felt pretty good about that on election night and you ought to feel pretty good about it tonight because this country is on the move but never forget this that sounds good and compared to the last two administrations it may be but we ve just been here five months and the changes we are trying to make are not in place we still have to do the economic program and health care and national service and welfare reform we still have to pass a program that says to people who work 40 hours a week and have children in their homes you re not in poverty anymore we still have a lot of work to do and the things we re doing have still not affected most americans we still don t have a serious program for defense conversion but we re working on that we ve got an airline industry in trouble we re trying to help resuscitate and move forward we ve got all kinds of jobs in this country we have still got to create we have problems in this country that government has overlooked for so long we pretend they re not even there people say to me i am so glad that the federal government could help to break up the terrorist ring in new york or that once again we stood up for our values last weekend but never forget in this the capital city of this country 24 people were killed last week we have got a lot of work to do my fellow americans and i ll tell you something it may not always be easy and sometimes it may be ragged but you ve got an administration in this town that gets up and goes to work everyday and thinks about the problems and the promise of the average people of this country and we will continue to do it as long as you keep us here thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton28 6 94 bill_clinton thank you very much senator graham and paul and christine and jim and mary i m delighted to be here tonight in your behalf with a lot of old friends i thank all the members of the senate for coming senator graham really is sorry that paul and jim didn t bring their charts when he was governor of florida he spent 80 percent of his time when he wasn t out doing those work days on television with charts showing the people of florida why they should change whatever it was they were doing at the time and i love charts too i was made an honorary member of the senate s wonk caucus chaired by sarbanes and sasser together we put more people to sleep than all the pills designed for that purpose in the history of the country i want to say seriously i appreciate what bob graham said you know i served with i think 150 roughly 150 governors unlike him i never could get a promotion until this job came along so i kept just struggling to hold on to my job and i was a governor for 12 years over a 14 year period and i served literally with 150 governors and if you asked me to go in a private room and write down the five best governors i served with out of 150 bob graham would be on that list and i say that because he had a quality as governor which i have seen paul and jim bring to their work in the senate and of course bob and that is that he had this crazy idea when he got elected really a rather radical idea in today s politics that his job was to accomplish something not to position himself not to blame his opponents not to divide his state but to actually do something that he got hired to show up for work every day with an agenda which would be implemented which would change the lives of the people for the better now you may think that it s self evident but the longer i stay here the more i wonder whether that is the real purpose of politics for many people senator mitchell has labored in the senate oftentimes to try to put together a majority of votes when the real issue is is the purpose here to get something done or is the purpose to just sort of talk about it position it use a lot of rhetoric and spray a lot of blame it s interesting because i think in a state when people get a feel for who you are and what you stand for they will stick with you through tough times and sometimes unpopular decisions if they know that you hired on to do what you honestly think is right and you re working as hard as you can to do it i am really elated at the prospect of paul sarbanes becoming the chairman of the senate banking committee and i frankly can t imagine what my life would be like if jim sasser were not the chairman of the senate budget committee he sort of took all my good lines but it is true you know that the other party spent years and years and years telling us how terrible the government was and how terrible government spending was and how terrible the deficits were and they were able to get away with it even though the evidence was that in every single year the congress whatever you think of its faults always actually spent a little less money that republican presidents asked them to spend so the thing was out of hand now finally we got a little partnership we got in harness we got two budgets passed on time the budget resolutions for the first time in 17 years we re going to have three years of deficit reduction for the first time since harry truman was president of the united states and they re scurrying around to say well they must have done it in the wrong way and it doesn t count well one of the things i want to say to you today is that when you get in a fight and you have difficult decisions to make whether it is in public life business life or personal life there is often no painless alternative every one of us knows some experience we had as a human being growing up as a child in our early adulthood struggling to help our family something where we knew we had to make a decision that would determine whether we would go forward whether we would continue to grow as people whether we d be able to be faithful to our commitments and our values and we looked around oftentimes for a long time for the easy way to get that done but there just was no easy way and if you take the difficult way it turns out to be better than walking away and living with the consequence of that now that s what jim sasser has done in the senate that s what paul sarbanes has done in the senate that s what we are trying to do in this administration i could have written the ads in my head i now see played i m seeing played in all these races about our terrible budget plan and what a terrible tax increase it was well the fact is it raised income taxes on 1 2 percent of the american people including most of the people in this room which says a lot about your devotion to your country it says a lot about your devotion to this country it lowered income taxes on one sixth of our taxpayers about 16 million of them with about 50 million americans all over around 20 percent of our total population and their families working people with families it made 90 percent of the small businesses in this country eligible for a tax cut a lot of those folks are active members of the nfib and they may be involved in the republican party and the democrats gave them a chance to get a tax cut if they reinvested more money in their business most of them may not know it but it s true it happened and it happened because of that economic plan that economic plan gave 20 million college students the chance to borrow money at lower interest rates with better repayment terms so they could continue their education it brought interest rates down it got investment going it started this economy up again we ve now had 3 4 million new jobs since january 3 1 million private sector jobs more than three times as many private sector jobs as were created in the previous four years now i still believe that the purpose of public life is to move our collective ball forward to advance the interest of our people to do things that will bring us together and to move us forward and our system will not work unless there are people in the congress of the united states willing to make the tough decisions even when it is difficult at least in the short run willing to believe that they can still convince their constituents in the oldfashioned way not withstanding the blizzard of 30 second ads not withstanding the palaver content of our public discourse still willing to believe that they can go home and lay it on the line and talk to their folks in the country crossroads in the small civic clubs in the union halls on the factory floors in the sale barns and make the sale and i cannot begin to tell you how much my respect for and appreciation for the members of the congress that are willing to take these kinds of risks and make these kinds of decisions because they know we cannot grow as a country at a time of profound change just like a person can t grow without making tough decisions my respect has grown immeasurably and jim and paul they don t go around saying look at me i m a brave soul they just sort of show up for work every day and they do right by america the other party they talk all the time about how tough they are on crime and the crime bill won t be like the budget where we got zero votes from the other side we re going to get some republican votes and we ve always had some but that bill languished in gridlock for over five years and now we re on the verge of passing it and it s profoundly important we just decided to put aside gridlock and get after it this bill does something that i don t think a lot of americans have focused on since 1965 the violent crime rate has increased sevenfold now the crime rate is kind of tapering off but the irrational rate of crime among younger americans unfortunately is still going up but the crime rate has gone up seven times the violent crime rate sevenfold since 1965 in 1965 america had 500 000 police officers in 1994 america has 550 000 police officers so we spent a fortune expanding our courts a double fortune expanding our prisons when if we had spent some money expanding our police forces we not only would catch more criminals we would prevent more crimes by having police presence out there in the neighborhood knowing the kids knowing the neighbors understanding what can be done this congress with the leadership of these people is going to put 100 000 more police officers on the streets that s very important i could go through issue after issue after issue but if you look at the things that will shape the future for the children of this country whether it s immunizing millions of more kids putting tens of thousands more children in head start securing the kind of future that our children need these two men have been there now let s face facts in addition to the extraordinary nature of the public debate today which so often is completely disconnected with what is actually being done and what will affect the lives of our people we know that historically in the 20th century there s only been one election in which the sitting president s party actually picked up seats in both houses of the congress at midterm why is that that s partly because of what governor cuomo says we always campaign in poetry but we have to govern in prose so at midterm people say well the novel wasn t quite as good as the song was the movie was better than the book the hard work sometimes takes some time not only to bear fruit but to be felt but i say to you that this year given the nature of our national politics that would be a mistake the people say they want change we re giving it them we had an historic first year last year since world war ii our first year was the most productive in partnership between the president and congress of any except president eisenhower s and president johnson s first years the first year in 60 years when there was no presidential veto breaking gridlock seven years for family leave seven years for the brady bill five years on the crime bill seven years on the worldwide trade agreement no one thought we could get the assault weapons ban passed in the house even after the senate passed it this thing is rocking along but we have got to keep people in the congress who have this old fashioned notion that the founders were right that this is not a place where people just position themselves and throw blame grenades across the ramparts of their opponent s defenses it is a place where people are supposed to show up for work every day and do things which will affect the lives of their constituents that is really what is at issue and i implore all of you i thank you for giving this money and i agree with what jim said about roots everybody has got to have them and they ll need the money for the defense to rebut some of the grenades but i ask you to think more deeply about what this election means for the continuation of progress in this country we re doing our best to face the health care issue why we had 100 health care professionals in yesterday to the white house from the academic medical centers we had people from washington state we had people from senator exon s state of nebraska we had people from all over the country and their spokesperson read an agreed upon statement calling for health care coverage for all americans he said a very profound thing he said everybody wants to keep what s best about american medicine and fix what s wrong about our health care system and that s a good thing he said what i don t think people have focused on is we re getting to the point where you can t keep what s best unless you do fix what s wrong and he went on to describe the inordinate pressures our great medical schools are facing keeping their patients and paying for their care and having enough money to train doctors and continue to make progress because medical schools used to be able to pass along the cost of operations to people who would pay it if they took poor patients the government didn t reimburse them at the full cost but they got a little extra program from the government and they passed the rest of it along to wealthy businesses who had wellinsured people coming there and if people showed up without any insurance well they d do the say thing but now all the businesses are becoming much more competitive they have to lower the cost of health care so they re not there and the doctor went on to say they say if we give coverage to everybody well we ll be rationing health care he said we re rationing health care today we decided 39 million can t have it everybody else figured out how to solve this problem all these other nations have but we ration that now the point i want to make is not to give another speech for my health care program the point i want to make is this this is one of those kind of growing pain issues if there were a simple easy answer somebody would have done this before and i would never have been elected president the american people took a chance on me because i said i wanted to move beyond the dogmas the partisan fights to grow the economy to break gridlock to make government work for ordinary people this is one of those growing pain issues we either will decide to do something that is a little difficult today to give ourselves a much better future tomorrow or we will not the chances of america meeting not only this challenge but all the challenges i m telling you for the next 10 or 20 years there are going to be a lot of very tough questions facing this country the chances of our meeting those challenges in the proper way depend as much as anything else on the ability of the people to sort through the high temperature rhetoric to the true reality of the spirit the soul the mind and the courage and the real character of their candidates it depends in other words on whether we will have the capacity to reward people like jim sasser and paul sarbanes for serving well and bravely i hope we will and i believe we will thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton28 6 95 bill_clinton thank you very much chairman fowler for your introduction thank you congressman clyburn for being here tonight and for your leadership i thank our friend truman arnold for his leadership of our finance efforts i thank particularly dan dutko and peter knight and all others who raised funds for this important evening this was the most successful dnc finance dinner ever thanks to you and we thank you for that i don t keep up with this too much you know because i have to spend most of my time being president but i keep reading these stories that those of you who give to our party are threatened with your lives if that s true we appreciate the risk you took in being here we ll try to make it worth your while for the future you are living proof that there are a lot of americans who want to do well themselves and to do good for themselves and for others and we appreciate that i want to thank senator dodd if he d gotten any hotter tonight he d have set off the fire alarm i hope america is listening i also want to thank you all for the response you gave when the mention of our agreement with japan on autos and auto parts was mentioned i thank you for that it occurred in typically dramatic circumstances going up to the 11th hour last night i got home and sort of semi woke hillary up about a quarter to three in the morning i flew in from portland oregon where we had a wonderful economic conference yesterday on the five states of the pacific rim and their future in the 21st century and i was being kind of kept up with a blow by blow description all the way on the airplane going all the way on the across the country about how we were doing with the japanese and was it going to come apart or was it going to be put back together and when i got off the plane in what was for us the middle of the night i was told that it appeared that we were going to be able to do this but i would still have to go to sleep and they would wake me up at some point in the future if it all worked out so this morning they woke me up and i got to make the announcement that the agreement had been reached i start with that because i want to make a point there are some people who say that our message is not clear or they don t know the difference between republicans and democrats i can tell you one thing there are two differences one is they may talk better but we do more we do more the other is we try to do what we do in a way that benefits everybody not just those who are going to do all right if we don t lift a finger anyway and that makes a big difference this is not class warfare i am proud of the fact that under our administration we ve had more new businesses started and more new millionaires than at any previous point in american history we want more and more people to do very well but we want to everyone to do well because the country is being lifted up because we re growing the middle class because we re shrinking the underclass so we do things that are sometimes more difficult because otherwise it won t work out that way and i want to talk to you about that tonight because when you leave here if somebody asks you what does it mean to be a democrat in 1995 i want you to be able to give an answer that s really important it s really important and if you look at this japanese trade agreement you will see one of the answers now today both parties say they re for free trade but in two and a half years we have negotiated 80 trade agreements 15 with japan we re selling apples and rice and cellular telephones and now automobiles and auto parts to japan i m proud of that there is no time in our history when we have had so much expansion of trade in such a short time why because we re living in a global economy we have open markets if we don t expand trade we still get the downside those countries that import into our country where their people are struggling to lift their own living standards and still working for wages our people can t live on but when we open markets and we can sell high quality low cost american products around the world then we create jobs here that pay on average 15 percent above average wages in america we give our people a way to promote the ideals of freedom and democracy and to do well while doing good but in order to do that trade has to become increasingly more free and increasingly more fair therefore when we negotiated the nafta agreement we also wanted a commitment that we would make a long term effort working together with mexico and with canada to protect the environment and to lift labor standards so that ordinary people in mexico as well as ordinary people in the united states would do well if we expanded trade that is the kind of thing that we try to do and we went to the brink with japan because i know that the united states alone in the 21st century cannot lift the global economy it will take a cooperation between the united states and europe and japan and all of those growing economies we have to all work together and i know that a trading system in japan which has made the nation fabulously wealthy but also today has brought it to the brink of financial trouble because their currency is so overvalued because no one is investing in the country their interest rates are almost negative now and most important ordinary people there are paying 40 percent more 40 percent more than they ought to be paying for consumer products those luxury cars we almost had to put tariffs on made in japan cost 9 000 bucks more in japan than in the united states we cannot continue to work toward a global economy unless our great partner in japan is also doing its part and everything i sought to do in opening their markets i believe with all my heart is not only good for our workers but for theirs but it s harder than just saying you re for free trade you also have to be for fair arrangements that create jobs and grow incomes that s what it means to be a democrat in 1995 you ve got to be for jobs and incomes and a fair global system you know the secretary of the treasury and i and the vice president who is by the way in russia tonight and he s sorry that he and tipper can t be here with hillary and me but he s doing very important work we were in the treasury department the other day to announce one of our reinventing government initiatives and this initiative was about how businesses and individuals in 32 states next year are going to be able to file their taxes state and federal at the same time electronically and in the course of that billions of dollars will be saved in compliance costs with the tax systems and eventually of course we ll get to 50 states but we re going to 32 next year and to illustrate this we invited what i would call a real american who happened to be in washington for the white house small business conference to come and talk about his circumstance would be changed and the fellow we invited was a named paul condit from west texas a john deere dealer from west texas and old paul condit showed up with all of his papers that he was going to get to throw in the trash can now that he could file electronically and he looked at me and this is why we re all here tonight and he said mr president he said you and the vice president here have done a great job of reinventing government what you need to do now is reinvent communication because it ain t getting out in the heartland and i think that s true sometimes i feel like that old country song when i watch the evening news remember that country song that said they changed everything about me but my name so tonight i want you to think about this why are you here what will you do tomorrow how do you intend to spend the next year to fulfill the mission that senator dodd and chairman fowler put before us tonight first let s face facts one of the reasons that our friends in the other party tend to do well is that they are great at giving simple answers to complicated questions and this is a confusing time to people why shouldn t people be confused about public issues they re confused about the way their own lives are working out in this world it seems to be the best of times and the worst of times the good news 6 7 million new jobs i m proud of that the good news record numbers of new businesses record numbers of new millionaires that s great but how do you explain the fact that we drove down unemployment drove up jobs have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 30 years have the lowest african american unemployment in 20 years and the median income in america has dropped by one percent in the last two years and more and more people feel insecure in their own jobs with all the downsizing that s coming along so there is this ambivalence about the global economy they say hey this is great america creates jobs but i may not get a raise and more than half of the workers in this country are working for about the same wage they were making 10 years ago and they re working a longer work week and they re feeling more insecure and our nation is the only one they may criticize me until the cows come home for trying to do something about health care hillary and me but i ll tell you one thing we are the only country the only one where there are a smaller percentage of people today under the age of 65 with health insurance than there were 10 years ago you d be insecure too if that happened to you so the good news and the bad news crime look at crime the crime rate is going down in almost every city in the country and our crime bill will help it to go down further but but the crime rate is going up among very young teenagers and random violence among our future citizens going up i ll give you another example technology technology is a blessing beyond all belief i just was home hillary and i went home for two or three days and i got to thinking about it a kid in a rural school district in the ozark mountains with only five or six people in the senior class can get on the internet now and hook into a library in australia and do a research paper on volcanoes thanks to technology incredible utterly incredible but that same technology can expose that child s younger brother or sister to unbelievable pornography and can teach a deranged person who s smart enough to use a computer how to make a bomb just like the one that blew up oklahoma city technology means now that radical groups can develop little vials of sarin gas and walk into a subway in japan and break it open and kill innocent people it means other fanatic groups are now operating secret laboratories where they are searching for the ability to make biological warfare weapons little germ warfare mechanisms that will kill people in the same sort of way so it s a good news bad news story after a while people will just get a headache and say just tell me a simple answer so i can go on with my life so if somebody says well vote for us the government s causing all your problems we re for less government lower taxes we ll be tough on crime welfare and immigration we re your ticket sounds pretty good to me we ll balance the budget and you don t get anything out of the government but an occasional audit and a bad regulation anyway sounds pretty good to me right i mean that s what we re dealing with and then whispered message is besides that contribute enough we ll let you write the legislation we ll just kind of sit there and i think some of you are here tonight because you still want us to do some of the work you don t have to do it all yourselves so it sounds good what s wrong with it first of all for all the joking i m saying we are really we re in a period of such profound change that we are being now asked by our people and forced by the press of events to debate fundamental questions you heard don fowler stand up and say the democratic party rests on two principles middle class economics and mainstream values is essentially what he said we try to grow the middle class help poor people work their way into the middle class we try to offer a society in which people can come together not be divided you say that as if you take that for granted that is not to be taken for granted any more look what we re debating today in washington the first principles of what we are as a people the first principles and let me just give you some examples we used to debate from the end of the cold war until the last few years we debated the difference between republicans and democrats in a range sort of like this now the range is about this big all things are back on the table now why the cold war is over we don t have an organized rationale for how we relate to the rest of the world and the global economy and the information age have all kinds of apparently conflicting impacts it s confusing to people and all these questions are open so let s go back to the basic questions and when you walk out of here tonight you ll either know why you re a democrat or you ll be ready to switch but at least it ll be a matter of principle not convenience now let s think about that issue number 1 there are now a lot of folks in this town and senator dodd had a funny joke about it tonight guns don t kill people movies do there are a lot of people here who believe that all of our problems are personal and cultural as opposed to the old view that most of our common problems were economic and political now if you think all of our problems are personal and cultural that really let s you off the hook you don t have to do much heavy lifting you just say look if everybody would just go out and behave and get up tomorrow and do the right thing we wouldn t have any problems any way take your tax cut and leave town think about it if you believe that if you believe that you don t have to do much you say you can spend all your time exhorting people to behave as individuals and attacking the influence centers in the culture who make movies you don t agree with or music you don t agree with or whatever now let me tell you what i think and what i think has to be the credo of the democratic party at a certain level that is self evidently true that is we know that there is nothing government can do for anybody they re not prepared to do for themselves if people will not take responsibility for their own lives for their children for their education for making the most of their own lives there s nothing we can do that is self evidently true there s not a single soul here tonight who can afford the price of a ticket to be here because somebody just gave you something you all had to do something back that s what the democratic party was founded on hard work and at a certain level we all know that there are influence centers in our culture entertainment sports the media business labor you name it that are beyond government and politics that s true too i d like you to remember however that some of us were raising questions about this long before the presidential election started tipper gore 18 years ago was talking about whether lyrics in music were good for children and how we should discuss this i was dealing with these issues with hillary long before i ever thought i was running for president this should not be an issue for a political season but that s true but you know what if you use that as an excuse to walk away then you don t have to vote for the family and medical leave law let me tell you something it s a lot easier to be a good person and a good parent if you don t lose your job when you have to go home when your baby is born and your parent is sick so there are political and economic issues here as well and all those people that came home from world war ii that built the greatest middle class the world had ever known they did it because they were great patriots and good parents and good workers and they were good citizens they also did it because they had the gi bill so don t let anybody tell you the first thing i would tell you is i believe if you re a democrat you don t agree that all of our problems are exclusively personal and cultural you think there are economic and political dimensions to the challenges we face and you don t want to take a dive on it the second issue flows out of the first what about the role of government what is the role of government if you believe that all the problems are personal and cultural then the role of government is fund the defense balance the budget as quick as you can consistent with giving a big tax cut but if you believe that the role of government is to help people make the most of their own lives and that in every age in time we have common challenges that can best be met in this way then that changes everything then you say yes well we ought to balance the budget but guess what there s an education deficit too and i don t want to cut off my nose to spite my face and i don t believe that we should give tax cuts unless it will grow the economy and raise incomes unless people need it unless it supports education unless it supports the economic challenges we face so let s balance the budget in a way that increases investment in our people so that we get both benefits a balanced budget and helping people make the most of their own lives because the objective is to raise incomes and bring the american people together i ll give you another example look at the crime debate if you believe all the problems are personal and cultural then you couldn t possibly support the brady bill or the assault weapons ban because that represents a minor inconvenience to the law abiding people who for whatever reason want an assault weapon or the far larger number of law abiding people who genuinely want to buy handguns and are somehow discomforted if they have to wait a few days while there s a background check because if all the problems are personal and cultural just catch the wrongdoers throw them in jail throw the key away and forget about it but if you live in the real world instead of the world of ideological extremes and you think and you think that some of our problems are political and that we have an obligation to work together then you say well a law abiding person who wants to buy a handgun really won t object to this minor inconvenience to help a few more police officers and a few more innocent children stay alive you say to yourself that law abiding people will find other ways to satisfy their desire for sporting activities with guns even if they have to give up these assault weapons so we can get the uzis out of the high schools that s the kind of thing you say to yourself now this has i submit to you this has nothing to do with the right to keep and bear arms nothing nothing this has to do with whether you think our problems are just isolated personal things or bad culture or whether you believe that we have to band together to work together to find practical solutions to solve our problems now all the law enforcement people say we live with this problem and it s not just as simple as locking people up and throwing away the key punishment is important please punish bad people but meanwhile please pass the brady bill please pass the assault weapons ban please spend some money on prevention so our kids have something to say yes to as well as something to say no to that s what people in law enforcement say who live with this every day why because they know that our problems are both personal and cultural and they are political and economic and social and if we don t pull together and try to solve them we will never make much progress we ll just have a lot of elections with hot air 30 second ads driving people s emotion through the roof but never really getting down to the business of moving america forward so i say if you re a democrat you say it is both not one let me just give you one final example look at the environment look at the environment look what has happened we even had a subcommittee the other day vote to lift the ban on all offshore oil drilling never mind how small the proven reserves are never mind what it would do to the retirees or the tourists in florida or california or never mind what might happen off the new jersey coast government is bad what is private is good if somebody can get up enough money to sink an oil well anywhere in this country offshore let them do it and even if there are unfortunate consequences we are philosophically opposed to doing anything that would interfere with that these are the people that want to let all the environmental laws be rewritten by those who want to get rid of them and they re doing a pretty good job of that now but to be fair them that s the way they think in other words they think it s a nice enough thing if you can preserve the environment but not if the price of preserving the environment god forbid is having government pass a law this is the debate that s going on you laugh don t tell me you don t know the difference between our party and the other party this is the debate that is going on in washington but let s be fair to them they honestly believe that it is wrong for the government to protect our common heritage because the government would mess up a one car parade the government might interfere with something someone wants to do to make a dollar in the short run and the government being a fallible institution will mess up now and again and do really dumb things now this is a first principle i say you any institution comprised of human beings will err and government should be restrained because it has power and that s why we ve got the constitution we ve got but i ll say this too unless we preserve our fundamental natural environment and find a way to grow the economy while protecting the environment then our grandchildren and their grandchildren will not know the america that we have grown up in and come to love and again so you want to know what the difference is i believe the purpose of government is to help people to make the most of their own lives i believe the purpose of government is to grow the economy in ways that creates more entrepreneurs and more millionaires but also raises incomes for the middle class and shrinks the underclass i believe our business here is to find a way to solve our problems in practical ways that bring us together and don t drive us apart i believe ideological extremism is the vane of america s progress it has been for 200 years and it still is we cannot put political correctness ahead of advancing the lives of the american people that s what i believe you know you take every single one of the other party s themes they say we want less government sounds great our party our administration two and half years has reduced the size of the federal government by 150 000 if we don t pass another budget we ll still have the smallest government we ve had since president kennedy was in office but you know what i also know that downsizing while it is necessary is threatening to real people and so look how we did it we didn t just throw people in the street we gave them good early retirement incentives we tried to take time to do this in a reasoned way because there are people involved and there are practical realities involved i want to cut the size of government i want to cut regulation the other day we cut 16 000 regulations at the white house conference on small business they want to get rid of the department of commerce why because ideologically the government obviously can never do anything to help the private sector never mind the fact that ron brown has created more jobs in the private sector than any secretary of commerce in history with the partnerships and the efforts that have been made i could go on and on and on but if you strip apart take it all away you see an honest huge debate they say all of our problems are personal and cultural private is good public is bad balance the budget as quickly as possible give the biggest tax cut you can don t worry about anything but defense we say in the post cold war world of the global economy in the 21st century the most important thing is whether people can make the most of their own lives whether they can compete and win in the global economy and whether we can do it in a way that keeps the american dream alive where more people are moving into the middle class where people are rewarded for their efforts and where we find a way to make our diversity a strength not a weakness that is the difference that is enough difference for me to stand on until kingdom come i am proud to be here with the democratic party tonight and i hope you are too now let me say these two brief points in closing first of all i have said this so that you would know where i stand and so you could help to determine where you stand but that does not mean that i believe we would be better off if we were more partisan i think the american people are sick of partisanship just for the sake of partisanship the other night i was out in san francisco i want to tell you this story and i ll tell you because i want you to think about this i think these people are pretty representative of our country and i saw a couple about my age having dinner and they said mr president would you come shake hands with us so i did and even though they were about my age they told me they were celebrating their first anniversary celebrating their first anniversary and i said well hillary and i are about to celebrate our 20th anniversary and it was you know people will sometimes tell you anything when you re president so this man in this very touching this man said this man got this sort of faraway look in his eye and he said you know i d be celebrating my 20th anniversary too this year but my wife passed away and i met this wonderful woman and then the woman smiled and she said my husband didn t pass away he was a jerk and she said it s a true story and she said and i met this wonderful man and then they i couldn t believe this i m just standing here you know listening to this this is america this is not washington dc now then they go on this is america so then then they go on to tell me that he is a republican and she is a democrat that he owns a fast food restaurant chain and she s a school teacher that she voted for me and he didn t they tell me all this in about five minutes i m listening to this whole thing but let me tell you what they said here s the point i want to make here s the point i want to make they were just out there in san francisco and they didn t live in california they were out there celebrating their first anniversary and he said to me he said and she said amen he said you know we come from different parties we look at a lot of things in different ways but we think what happened to dr foster as a crying shame that s what they said and they said and they said we just think there s too much partisanship in washington so let me tell you what i m trying to do that s why i went to that wonderful little town in new hampshire where hillary and i fell in love with the folks in 1992 and had that conversation with the speaker of the house a lot of people said this is crazy don t do it whatever i decided that it would be better to try to honestly tell the american people what the real differences are and then see if there is some honest way we can bridge those differences to move forward that s what i decided we ought to do because i believe that the american people will listen and think with their heads and their hearts with their ears open instead of being all torn up and upset by their genuine confusion and uncertainty about the future we will do fine because most people run the rest of their lives the way we believe our country ought to be run and the only reason that things seem so out of whack today is that everything is changing and people are confused and uncertain so they are vulnerable to easy answers to complex problems and what we have to say is when you hear all this stuff will it raise incomes will it generate jobs will it bring people together will us make us a stronger country will it bring us into the future in better shape so when we ask ourselves how should we balance the budget i say if it takes a little longer and you have to have a little smaller tax cut if you can take care of all these old folks on medicare and you can increase education instead of cut it let s do that because that is the kind of america that we ought to have that is the kind of america that we ought to have what i want to say to you is that i am now convinced that we have an enormous opportunity if we can be clear and unambiguous we don t have to even attack we just need to try to honestly explain i have tried tonight to honestly explain to you where i believe many of them are on their issues and where we are i have tried to be as honest as i could but we have an opportunity here oklahoma city as tragic and awful as it was took a lot of the meanness out of this country it made us all think again about what it is that we share as human beings across all the divides and when captain o grady survived those six days in bosnia and came home it gave a little lift back to our country and it made us think about all the things we re proud of about america that brings us together across all the divides and i leave you with this the democrats the democrats believe that we re here to help each other make the most of our own lives that there will never be a time when government can do anything for people they won t do for themselves but that it is simply an evasion of our common responsibility to say our problems are only personal problems only cultural problems and it is self defeating to believe we can move into the 21st century without finding a way to go there together to go there together this is a very great country and the american people are now listening and looking and we have an opportunity to be what we are we are not negative we are not wreckers we are builders do not run away from that because of the power of the negative forces of recent years instead embrace it go out and tell people what you believe why you believe it and why we ought to be returned in 1996 not for our sake but for the future of our country thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton28 6 99 bill_clinton thank you very much diane you can give a speech for me any time that was really wonderful congratulations thank you i want to thank all of you for being here let me also join joe and beth in thanking fran and sandra for being so wonderful to us i thank martha and ronnie and the others who helped to make this a success i also want to say a special word of thanks to fran and sandra for being so wonderful to hillary as well it really means a lot to me and i thank you for that you know i always love to come back to connecticut and only a fool would not love to come to westport i m very happy to see barbara kennelly and my old classmate dick blumenthal who has been so good to me and denise we re very pleased for your success congratulations and congressman gejdenson thank you for being so brave in tough election after tough election you re always there to do the right thing any way and i admire you so much and senator dodd congratulations on having the good sense to marry jackie we re proud of you no matter how much you may like chris dodd if you have not gotten to know his wife your estimation will go way up when you do and we re really happy for you and jessie thank you for coming cicely thank you for coming and i would like to say a special thank you to connecticut for being so good to me and to al gore through two elections now i don t feel that i m on a victory lap or a final lap or you know i expect people to they re beginning to talk to me as if i m there is a sort of ring of eulogy about all of this as far as i can tell i m reasonably healthy i still show up i told fran when you ve got to watch joe andrew you know as being a party chair he hasn t been a party chair as long as ed marcus but he s learned to stretch the truth creatively he said that i got up earlier and went to bed later than anybody else and i told fran i said now the second half of that statement is true i do work late i don t always beat everybody to the office i d like to tell you first of all why i m here and secondly why i hope you re here if anybody wants me to show up at one of these events five years from now or 10 years from now and my party is still doing what i believe is right for america i ll be there then too the fact that i was given the opportunity at a pivotal point in our country s history to serve as president is important to me but it is incidental to my prior and enduring commitment to the ideas and values that i think are necessary to make this country all it ought to be you know when you think back to the condition the country was in in 1991 and 1992 when i was running it s almost unimaginable that we are where we are today this morning before i left to fly up here i was able to make an announcement that at is what is called the mid session review which is when we recalibrate our economic assumptions we now know that our surplus this year will be 20 billion higher than we thought it will be 142 billion next year it will be 500 billion more than we though it was going to be over 10 years and 1 trillion dollars more over the next 15 years that s an amazing thing this year you know we have something called a unified budget which means that we show a surplus even if we re spending more like income and sales taxes and things than we re taking in because of the social security taxes because we re still taking in more than we re paying out this year we will have a surplus without the social security revenues what this means is among other things is that we really can save social security by investing a modest amount of it in something other than government bonds we can do something about elderly women who are more poor than the rest of the elderly population we can take the earnings limit off because we need elderly people to work more if they choose to do so not if they re required to but if they choose to do so as we have relatively fewer young people and relatively more older people and now we can actually pay the debt of the country off and be entirely debt free by 2016 in 15 years this country can be out of debt that s unbelievable the debt of the country quadrupled in the 12 years before i took office just 12 years and there was no end in sight the deficit was 290 billion when i took office we ll have 142 billion surplus in the last year of my presidency why should that matter to people to those of you who are liberals and want the government to spend money why should you care if we re out of debt because if we get out of debt in a global economy it means lower interest rate lower home mortgages lower business loan lower college loan lower car payment loan it means more business investment it means more money for wage increases it means a more stable economy it means the next time there is a world financial crisis like we had in asia a couple of years ago we ll be less affected by it and it means there will be more money out there for poor countries to borrow at lower interest rates or being given because we won t be taking any of it in the global society it is the socially responsible thing for the wealthy countries to be financially responsible it is good for our people but it is good for people around the world and it is good for all income groups within our society so i hope very much that we will be able to persuade the republican majority in congress to work with us to save social security to reform medicare and to pay this debt off it is something that no one could have thought imaginable just a few years ago tomorrow i m going to reveal the details of our plan to strengthen medicare and preserve it for at least another quarter century and add a prescription drug benefit which will be affordable which can be managed but this is a big problem i told those of you who came to airport to meet me that one of the most stunning facts of life if you re over 65 today and you re on medicare is that the average senior citizen is now spending a higher percentage of his or her income out of pocket for health care than they were spending in 1965 before medicare went in why overwhelmingly because of prescription drugs so if we can do something that is financially responsible to help our seniors deal with this burden we ought to do so we can now and we should because of the size of the surplus we ll be able to pay the debt off over the next 15 years and at the same time create a trust fund for children and education of over 150 billion that we can use for after school programs to make sure all our kids have health insurance for a whole host of other things that need to be done now let me come back to the general point i m here not as a candidate because i think it matters that the ideas and the values that we fought for be continued because it s important to me that sam and chris and people like them are in the congress and it s important to me that we know the republicans will always have more money than we do today they ll be saying well who cares if we pay the debt off let s have a bigger tax cut that will be skewed to most of you most of you would be better off in the short run being at a republican fundraiser you would be and you know it but on the other hand if you look at the performance of the stock market if you look at the fact that we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the longest peacetime expansion in history the highest surplus as a percentage of our economy since 1951 there s something to be said for moving us all forward together and there s something to be said for looking to the long run as well as the short run everyone has to balance doing what is most pleasing to everyone today and thinking about what is best for the country over the long run i ve tried to take this country into the 21st century with certain basic ideas that we could balance the budget and increase our investment in children and education health care and the environment that we could grow the economy and continue to improve the environment and we have the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we ve got 90 percent of our children immunized for the first time in history we ve set aside more land in preservation than any administration in the history of america except those of the two roosevelts so because we had good ideas not because bill clinton was president but because our ideas were right i am glad i was given the chance to serve now if my ability to speak communicate work hard and take incoming fire had anything to do with those successes i m grateful but the most important thing is that what we stand for now as a party is a new direction a departure from where either party was in the 70s and 80s and the kind of thing that we ought to embrace going into the 21st century and we have evidence that it works there are lots of issues up there in washington that we re fighting for now sometimes we have agreement we re going to agrees on two things that i think are great i ll give the republicans a little pat on the back here the congress is going to overwhelmingly vote apparently to renew the disability on disabled americans who go in the work force and lose their medicaid coverage and that can enable us to get hundreds of thousands of more workers to grow without inflation there are a lot of disabled people who want to work but their medical bills are 20 000 30 000 a year sometimes more and they re paid by the government if they make x salary anything much above poverty they lose that government health insurance and that s bad for you because they won t take the job and we re still going to pay for their health care as we should so this way we pay for their health care just like we were but they take a job they earn money they pay taxes just like you do and it helps the economy go it s a good thing the other thing that there is apparently unanimous support on at least in the house and i m thrilled about it this is something that hillary cares very much about is continuing support for children who come out of foster care at the age of 18 and today are cut off all support and even though they have no place to go they have no adopted families they have nothing this is a huge problem in new york a bigger problem in new york than anyplace else because new york has the largest number but i told someone the other day the first person besides my wife who ever mentioned this to me was my cousin who runs the hud office in the little town in arkansas where i was born population 11 000 now so this is a national problem and here are two things where we agree i m hoping that we can get more of them to agree with us on some other things that are important if you look at the patients bill of rights the republicans on medicare want me to in effect force more people on medicare into managed care but they re against guaranteeing people in managed care the guarantees of the patients bill of rights i m not against managed care i ve always thought that we ought to manage the health system like every other system as well as we possibly can but every system should be managed to deliver its mission at the lowest possible cost not to compromise the mission the mission is to give people quality health care at the lowest possible cost and if you need to see a specialist and you can t that s bad if you get hit in an accident in a big city and you have to pass three hospitals to get to the hospital with the emergency room that s in the plan that s bad if you work for a small business and they change their health care provider and your husband is in chemotherapy and it s a six month treatment and you re supposed to change providers in the middle of the treatment that s bad if the same thing happens and your wife is six months pregnant and you re supposed to change your ob gyn because there s a different one in your new health care plan that s bad all these things happen today why if it takes you forever and a day to get a decision because of the layers and layers of appeals so that finally you get the right decision but it s too late to save your life that s bad and that s why 200 200 organizations the doctors the nurses health consumer groups everybody endorsed our patients bill of rights there s one organization against it the health insurers and we have the votes to pass this if the republican leadership will give us a clean vote on it but it s a classic example of the difference in the two parties we re not against managed care if we said we re against change and they were for change and they didn t care what happened to people that would be like an old time debate old time we say okay we re for managed care we d just like to have people protected same thing on this gun issue this is a huge issue 13 kids a day get shot and killed thirteen that s a lot of kids you say it s a big country pretty small country if it s one of yours and we had this horrible carnage at littleton the whole country up in arms the senate passes this range of modest gun restraint measures getting rid of the big ammunition clips on assault weapons that come in from other countries saying that if a juvenile commits a serious crime they shouldn t be able to own a handgun when they turn 18 closing the gun show loophole putting the child trigger locks on there and on the gun show loophole which was the most controversial the vice president broke the tie in the senate and we roll into the house and there is this angst so what happens the nra wants the vote put off so they put off the vote until after the recess and during the recess they wear everybody out and they come back and deep six stuff that is very modest and their answer is well we should punish these boys because they broke the law these dead boys you know how would you feel if i gave the following speech i ve served as president for six and a half years i ve done a searching inventory of my record and i have decided that i have been deficient in standing up for the constitutional rights of america in particular we all have a constitutional right to travel and i think it s absolutely terrible that you have to license your cars and have a drivers license and that we regulate travel in any way shape or form it is an unconscionable burden and we re going to get rid of all of it we have eight year olds out there driving cars at 100 miles an hour that s good it s their constitutional right to do it you re laughing that s their position isn t it i mean you would think if a politician stood up and said that you would think they had a screw loose but this is a huge issue now we re not talking about confiscating anybody s guns we re not talking about interfering with anybody s hunting rights or sporting rights when we passed the brady bill chris and sam will remember this their argument against the brady bill was this won t do you any good because no criminal ever goes to a gun store to buy a gun you remember that that was their big argument they re not dumb enough to do that okay five years and 400 000 rejected sales later with a 25 year low in the crime rate and violent crime down even more than non violent crime they no longer can make that argument but now we say okay there are more and more people since we re checking on them who are buying guns at the gun shows and the flea markets we ll give you that much so let s go check them they say oh no goodness no we couldn t do that or if the it s okay if it s over the counter at a gun show but not if it s in the parking lot now you may have this image that there s a sort of a maybe a convention center in hartford where there s a gun show and it s two blocks out to the parking lot and you don t want to make the guy take the automatic check that s not what goes on most of these gun shows they re down little country roads and you turn right and you re in a little field you know you back up on both sides of the lane and you open your trunk and you get down your pickup so if you re out in the parking lot it means you re walking around to the front of the car this is just this is just it just doesn t make any sense but what i want to tell you is we have i think the defining difference between the two parties today is no longer what they used to say about us we proved we re more fiscally responsible than they are we ve got a more fiscally responsible program right here we have proved that we can grow the economy we ve proved that we re for sensible defense spending we ve proved that we can do the things that we re supposed to do in foreign policy that it s really almost the most important thing is how we define community and what our mutual responsibilities are to one another that s what the patients bill of rights is about it s true we ll have to pay out you know it ll be a buck or two a month our estimate is that the federal health insurance program costs less than a dollar a month more now that we have the protections of the patients bill of rights so that means that everybody that doesn t ever need the patients bill of rights who s a federal employee is getting socked for about 10 a year i think it s worth it i think it s worth it as a part of our shared responsibility to protect people so if you close this gun show loophole 90 plus 95 percent maybe more of those people are honest as the day is long and they ll have to hang around and wait for their background checks to be done and sometimes it ll be a little bit of a pain to increase the chances of saving 13 kids a day i think it s worth it this is really what s going on it s no longer it s not a question even about tax cuts we re for tax cuts the question is how big should they be what are our other responsibilities how should they be structured and what i want you to understand is that these ideas matter it matters whether we give out all this federal money in education and tell the locals of the states just do whatever you want to with it or whether we say we think you ought to end social promotion but have mandatory summer schools for kids who fail we shouldn t declare them fit and we think we ought to have every school district that needs an after school program ought to have one and we re going to give you money to help you it s our definition of community it s not us telling them how to run the schools this is what local research shows works so when you leave here i hope you will be able to tell people why you came today and i hope you will be able to tell them why i m doing this even though i m not running for reelection i ve spent my whole life believing that ideas matter it really matters what america does collectively and i have tried to get my party to change we now have the smallest federal government since john kennedy was president we are not the party of defending every big government program that was done yesterday we are not the party that believes government can do everything we are the party that believes the government has the responsibility to give people the tools and to create the conditions so that as a community we can go forward and everybody has a fair chance and every one of these issues embodies that so i thank you for being here and i hope you ll come to more and i hope you will stay with us i m grateful that i ve had the chance to be president and i m nowhere near through i ve got a more ambitious agenda today than i did in my first year but the most important thing is to keep this going the next elections matter the people matter the ideas matter this is a better country than it was in 1992 we tried it their way this is a stronger better country and every time we ve had a fight about whose ideas were right and whose were wrong if you measure up to what was the impact of our economic plan our crime bill the insistence we made in welfare that we not get rid of the guarantees of health care and nutrition for our children all of these things our approach turned out to be right for america and i want you to go out and tell people that when they ask you why you came tell them i gave a pretty good talk but the most important thing was we are right for our children and the 21st century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton28 7 00a bill_clinton you have to be 33 years old to have that kind of energy you know patrick is he celebrated his 33rd birthday but he looks like he s about 23 and he told me that story that he told you remember when he started his remarks and he talked about being grounded he was supposed to go to his birthday party and he was grounded by bad weather the first time he said it i thought one of his parents made him stay home for bad behavior don t pay any attention to this we re all just jealous patrick i want to thank bill and nancy for opening this magnificent home this beautiful beautiful place and for giving me a reason to come to barrington i hope i can come back i really think it s amazingly beautiful i want to thank senator reed for being here with us and for his truly outstanding leadership in the senate i want to thank ted and vicki and joan for being here to support you patrick you deserve it and everything you said about your dad is the truth when patrick was up here bragging on his father i leaned over to bill and i said you know you would be hard pressed to name 10 people who have served in the united states senate in the entire history of america who have done as much good as ted kennedy has and i think that s very important i want to thank your former governor bruce sundlan and your former lieutenant governor bob leese for being here and lieutenant governor and all the mayors and legislative leaders and there are a lot of people here who helped me from the beginning but i want to especially mention joe pellino and mark weiner and ira magaziner and his whole family for being there for me when i was just what then president bush referred to as a governor of a small southern state and i was so naive i thought it was a compliment and i still do i want to thank patrick for giving me the opportunity to come here for him today i don t know anybody in the congress who works as hard as he does i don t know anybody in the congress any more devoted to his or her constituents than he is i don t know anybody in the congress on the good days and the bad and believe me you get your fair share of both down there who is always up always there always focused always doing what he s supposed to do you should be very proud of what he has done with his life for you and the people of rhode island i think it is truly astonishing that one family has produced so many people so devoted to public service his cousin joe did a great job in the congress his cousin kathleen i think is the finest lieutenant governor in the entire united states unbelievable in terms of what she s been able to accomplish but over the long run if you will just stick with him his energy and consistency and dedication will make a unique mark on rhode island and on the united states and i want you to stick with him and besides that he s now raised all this money for these other people in congress and they owe him everything i mean if we get the majority they may move the capital up here for all i know just because of patrick let me just say too on behalf of hillary and myself and al and tipper gore i want to thank the people of rhode island for being so good to us and to me especially for through elections i stopped at a school on the way here and read my radio address for tomorrow morning and on the way i stopped and shook hands with a lot of the folks that were on the street and i turned to one of my aides and i said you know i want to spend the rest of my presidency in places where i got 60 percent of the vote or more i was pretty happy but i m very grateful to you and i guess the remarks that i make today are sort of like what we at home used to call preaching to the saved but i hope you will listen to what i have to say and i know that you have friends not only all over this state but all over this country and i hope you will share it with them some people think i m crazy for doing what patrick said i am i ve never worked harder in an election for myself than i m working for our congressmen and our senators and our vice president and of course there is one particular senate race i have more than a passing interest in but i m doing it for other reasons i come here today a little actually reluctant to speak because the night before last was the first time in two weeks i ve been to bed before 2 00 a m because we were at camp david working on those middle east peace talks and i m not sure i ll remember what i say when i finish because i m still a little tired but let me tell you what i think is most important and what i m concerned about patrick had it right i always tell people there s only three things you need to know about this election it is a big election there are big differences and only the democrats want you to know what the differences are what does that tell you about who you ought to vote for but let me explain what i mean by that we re in the midst of the longest economic expansion in our country s history including those which occurred in wartime and we ve had no war all the social indicators are going in the right direction the welfare rolls are half what they were when i took the oath of office the crime rate is down the teen pregnancy rate is down we have the highest homeownership in our history we have the lowest poverty rate among single parent households in over 40 years the lowest unemployment rate among women in 40 years the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded our country is at peace and we ve been able to be a force for peace from northern ireland to the balkans to the middle east and throughout the world so what s the big deal here well in my lifetime we have never had such an opportunity to build the future of our dreams for our children but we also know that even though things are going very well nothing stays the same forever america is changing rapidly and there are big challenges out there on the horizon so i say to you not in any morose way i mean i m just as happy as the next guy and for my age i m almost as happy as patrick but i want you to listen to this how a nation deals with a unique moment of prosperity a democracy is just as stern a test of our judgment our values our wisdom our character as how we deal with adversity you didn t have to be a genius in 1992 to know we needed a change this country was in trouble we quadrupled the debt of the country in 12 years and reduced our investment in the future we were in trouble the country was becoming more divided socially the politics of washington were stuck in sort of a partisan verbal warfare and we had to change now people think there may be no consequences to change one way or the other well what i want to say to you is this however people vote this year they will be voting for change there is no doubt about that the question is what kind of change will we vote for this is profoundly important and countries are like individuals there s not a person out here who is over 30 at least who can t remember one time at least one time in your life when you made a huge mistake professionally or personally not because things were going so poorly but because things were going so well you thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate it s almost endemic to the human condition and i see a lot of people nodding their heads you know i m telling the truth that s the only thing i m worried about this year people just sort of saying gosh things are going so well you couldn t mess this economy up with a stick of dynamite there doesn t seem to be much difference to me all these people are so nice now that basically is the message of our republican friends near as i can tell the message of the bush campaign is just that i mean how bad could i be i ve been governor of texas my daddy was president i own a baseball team they like me down there everything is rocking along hunky dory their paternity had it for eight years give it to ours for eight years because we re compassionate and humane and we re not like what you think about us from watching the congress for the last five years that s the message isn t it blur blur blur blur all the distinctions well there is a difference and that s what i want you to tell every friend you ve got all over this country whatever decision the american people make i will gladly accept and i ve already had so many gifts in life i could never complain about anything that happens to me but i want my country at least to make this decision knowing what the alternatives are and knowing that there are consequences for whichever choices we make and let me just give you a few there is a huge difference in economic policy massive this year already the republicans have passed not this calendar year but over the last 12 months tax cuts totalling over a trillion dollars they re going to philadelphia to advocate another tax cut way over a trillion dollars in other words they propose to spend 100 percent and more of the projected surplus over the next 10 years on tax cuts all of it and if they enact them in a year which they would do if they had the white house and the congress they would be there but the money may not be let me ask you something did you ever get one of those letters in the mail like from ed mcmahon saying you may have won 10 million now if you got one of those letters and you went out the next day and committed to spend 10 million you ought to be for them if not you had better stick with us you think about that if i ask you what your projected income is for the next 10 years you think hard how much money are you going to make over the next 10 years if i ask you to come up here right now and sign a binding contract to spend 100 percent of it would you do it if you would you ought to support them if not you better stick with us now you re laughing but that s exactly what the deal is now our proposal is different our tax cuts are less than 25 percent of their 2 trillion plus but we give more tax benefits to the 80 percent of the american people that are the first four quintile which means in the short run most of you who can afford to be here today would do better with theirs than with our ours but 80 percent of the american people would actually get more relief under our plan than theirs even though we spend less than a fourth as much and what do we do with the rest well first of all we re not going to spend it because we don t know if it s there yet secondly we think some money should be invested in the education of our children we have the largest number of students in our country s history we have the most diverse number of students in our country s history we have kids in these classrooms bursting at the seams and we want to make them smaller we have school districts who can t afford to build buildings and we want to help them build them we have kids that come from troubled homes and troubled neighborhoods that need after school and summer school programs and we want to give them those opportunities and i ve been working on education seriously now for more than 20 years seriously going to schools talking to teachers talking to principals watching how they work and i can tell you we know more now than we have ever known about how to turn these failing schools around i was in a school in spanish harlem the other day in new york city where two years ago 80 percent of the children were reading and doing math below grade level today 74 percent of the kids are reading and doing math at or above grade level i was in a school in rural kentucky the other day where your national ambitions are being outed patrick you ve got broad bases so i was in this school in rural kentucky over half the kids on the school lunch program four years ago one of the failing schools in kentucky four years they went from 12 percent of the kids who could read at or above grade level to almost 60 percent they went from 5 percent of the kids who could do math at or above grade level to 70 percent they went from zero percent of the kids who could do science at or above grade level to almost two thirds in four years and they re one of the 20 best elementary schools in kentucky we can turn these schools around folks we can do that but you can t say that we care more about our children than anything but we re going to take the money and run you ve got to save some to invest in them and in health care and in the environment and in science and technology and in health research so i think this is very very important and it s not like you hadn t had a test run here we tried it their way for 12 years and we ve tried it our way for eight years and you do have a record here you cannot let this election unfold as if there are no differences in economic policy and no consequences to the decision the american people will make the same thing is true in health care policy we re for a strong patients bill of rights that senator kennedy has led the way on and they re not we re for a medicare prescription drug program that all the seniors in our country who need it can buy into we would never create medicare today never without prescription drugs the only reason it was done that way in 1965 is that health care in 1965 is that health care in 1965 was about doctors and hospitals today if you live to be 65 your life expectancy is 82 or 83 years and it s about keeping people out of the hospital and keeping them healthy and extending the quality as well as the length of their lives we would never create a medicare program without prescription drugs today and patrick s right there are people every week who choose between medicine and food this is a big difference and what kind of country are we going to live in there are big differences on environmental policy you know one of the things i m proudest of is that we have al gore and i have set aside more land for future preservation for all time than any administration in american history except those of the two roosevelts in the continental united states ever now in the primary their nominee said if he were elected he would reverse my order creating 43 million roadless acres in our national forests something that i think would be an environmental terrible mistake so make no mistake about it there are big differences here we believe you can improve the environment and grow the economy and they basically don t and there are big differences in crime policy patrick talked about this the previous president vetoed the brady bill and i signed it and they said and we lost the house of representatives in part because i signed that and the assault weapons ban because they scared all the gun owners in the country into believing we were going to take their guns away and they wouldn t be able to go hunting and i went up to new hampshire i remember in 1996 where they beat one of our congressman and i said i know you beat him because he voted with me on the assault weapons ban and the brady bill and i told all these hunters i said now if you missed a day in the deer woods you ought to vote against me too because he did it for me because i asked him to but if you didn t they didn t tell you the truth and you need to get even and they did and we won but the point i want to make to you is there is a huge philosophical difference the head of the nra said the other day that they would have an office in the white house if the republican nominee won what i want you to know is they won t need an office because they ll do what they want anyway and we just have a difference of opinion there al gore he wants to close the gun show loophole and require child trigger locks and stop the importation of these large capacity ammunition clips and require people when they buy handguns to have a photo id license showing they passed a background check and they know how to use the gun safely i think that s the right thing to do and they don t and they honestly don t but i do and the american people need to know there are consequences here and if they agree with them then they ought to vote for them but at least they have to know there are big differences on our ideas about what it means to be genuinely inclusive we re for the hate crimes legislation some of them are but most of them aren t we re for employment nondiscrimination legislation we can t get it passed senator kennedy has been working on it a long time we re for raising minimum wage and they re not i ll bet they will do that before the election because that s pretty hard to defend but we ve been trying to do it for over a year ted kennedy has worked with them for over a year trying to raise the minimum wage the strongest economy we ve ever had the last time we did it in 96 they said it was a job killer disguised in kindness they said it would cost a terrible number of jobs and that would lead to skyrocketing juvenile crime because we were going to throw all of these kids out of work by raising the minimum wage and since they said that we ve got 11 million more jobs and the lowest juvenile crime rate we ve had in 25 years it s not like we don t have any evidence here so what s the point i m trying to make there are big differences and we have evidence so how could patrick not be successful in his quest if people really believe there are no consequences to their failure to concentrate if they really don t know what the differences are you know we wouldn t be around here after 226 years 224 years if the american people weren t right most of the time that s the whole premise of democracy most of the time the people get it right on most of the issues if they have enough information and enough time so that brings me to this next point i want to make their clear objective is to blur all these differences you don t ever hear them talking about that primary they had for president do you you don t ever hear them talking about the commitments they made in the primary they just want to make like that never happened but it did happen now here s what i want to say to you i think we can have a positive election i m tired of 20 years of politics where people try to convince the voters that their opponents were just one step above car thieves and you re tired of it too aren t you the whole politics of personal destruction we ought not to have that we democrats ought to stand up and say as far as we know from the presidential nominee to the vice presidential nominee to their candidates for senate and the house our opponents are honorable patriotic people who differ with us and we think elections are citizen choices about the differences that s what we ought to do but they have now taken but after basically trying to be the beneficiaries of this torrent of venom we ve seen in american politics over the last 20 years they have now taken the position that we re running a negative campaign if we tell you how they voted we see this in new york all the time if you tell people how i voted you re being negative i ve got a right to hide my voting record from the people how dare you tell them how i voted this is a choice folks it will have consequences i know it s a beautiful place and the economy is doing great we re all in a good humor but i m telling you we might never have another time in our lifetimes when the country s in this kind of shape never have a chance like this to build the future of our dreams for our children and i want to say this about my vice president really quickly i guess he still is i haven t seen him in a while there are four things you need to know about al gore one is there have been a lot of vice presidents who made great presidents i believe president kennedy s vice president lyndon johnson did some magnificent things for this country i believe theodore roosevelt made a great president i know thomas jefferson made a great president i know harry truman made a great president there have been a lot of vice presidents who were great presidents there has never been a person who as vice president did as much for the economy for technology for the environment for economic opportunity for poor people and to help this country to have a foreign policy that promotes peace nobody has ever remotely done what al gore has done as vice president of the united states ever in the history of the country you need to know that and the american people need to know that it s not even close the second thing you need to know is he s got a good economic policy and i already explained that when you talk to people you tell them the ed mcmahon story just tell them you get that letter saying you may have won 10 million if they want to spend it they should support the other side if not they ought to stick with us the third thing that i think is important is is he understands the future and we need somebody in the white house who understands the future the internet the human genome developments that s all great and exciting but your banking and financial records are on somebody s computer don t you think you ought to be able to say yes before somebody gets them your little gene map is going to be out there somewhere don t you think that you ought to know that nobody can use it to deny you a job or a raise or health insurance you need somebody that understands the future the last thing is he wants to take us all along for the ride and i want to be in a country where my president wants us all to go blacks and whites and browns the abled and the disabled straights and gays everybody that will work hard play by the rules obey the law do their part i think we ought to all go along for the ride you ve got your great secretary of state running for the united states congress in part because we now live in a country which says we will not look at people who have physical disabilities as if they are disabled we will look at their abilities and think about what they can do and what they can do and i think that s important and think about what they can do and what they can do and i think that s important let me just i ll close with this i graduated from high school in 1964 and our country was still profoundly sad because of president kennedy s death and i was a white southerner who believed in civil rights we were in the middle of the longest what was then the longest economic expansion in american history and i really believed i was 17 and wide eyed and i really believed that all the civil rights problems would be solved in congress and in the courts and i thought that economy was on automatic and it would go on forever and all the poor people in my native state would be able to get an education and get a job and everything was just going to be fine but we lost our concentration and we got in trouble and by the time i graduated from college we had two years of riots in the streets it was nine weeks after martin luther king was killed about six weeks nine weeks after president johnson said he couldn t run for reelection because the country was so divided and two terrible days after senator kennedy was killed and just a few months later the previous longest economic expansion in american history was history it doesn t take long to life a life nothing ever stays the same we should be happy and thank god every day that we live in this time but the test is what will we do with it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton28 7 00b bill_clinton thank you very much first i want to thank bob and elaine and tess and shane who were with me a few moments ago asking me questions where did shane go he probably thinks he s heard this speech before and i want to thank them as dick did for the example they ve set for all of us in their generosity and their giving this year they re taking off is only the latest example of a lifetime commitment to thinking about other people and drawing meaning from their lives by helping other people to have more meaning in theirs i want to thank all the members of the house who are here my good friend joe moakley i always tell everybody joe is hillary s favorite congressman she thinks that joe moakley will be waiting for her in heaven when she dies thinks he ll be the gatekeeper there i want to thank patrick kennedy for a magnificent job as the head of our congressional campaign committee we just went to barrington rhode island today before we came here for an event for patrick there were several hundred people there including his father and senator reed i think he s all right they haven t been able to find anybody to run against him yet so i believe he ll survive i want to thank congressman markey for his leadership in the congress and his friendship to me over these seven and a half eight years and congressman capuano i thank him for running when joe kennedy left the house and for his service and most of all i want to thank dick gephardt who never got dispirited after we lost the house in 94 understood quite clearly that we lost it because we did the right things and the american people couldn t have known by 1994 whether we were right or not they had been told for 12 years that there was such a thing as a free lunch while we quadrupled the debt got ourselves in a deep hole had high interest rates and a weak economy and we had to change we took a cold shower and we paid for it in 94 we also paid for it because we passed the brady bill and the assault weapons ban and we lost a dozen rural democrats because the nra convinced them we were going to end hunting and sport shooting and everything legal that ever happened and by 96 they knew that they hadn t been told the truth and we began our long climb back and in 98 thanks to dick s strong leadership and the fact that we had a clear and unambiguous message we picked up five more seats in the house of representatives and you should know it was only the second time in the 20th century that the president s party had picked up seats in the house in mid term but the first time since 1822 that it had happened in the sixth year of a president s term and that is a great tribute to dick gephardt to his leadership to the trust and confidence that the men and women in our caucus in the house of representatives has in him i said to myself when he said he wanted to be like tip o neill when he grew up i wonder how many places outside boston he s given that speech i can tell you this i believe he will be the speaker after these elections and no one has ever worked harder been more well prepared had better values or deserved it more and it has been an enormous honor for me to work with him and i only hope when i leave town he ll be holding the gavel and i think he will and i thank you for being here i told the people in rhode island today and i will say again to you i wish i could spend the rest of my presidency only in places where i got over 60 percent of the vote then i would get to spend more time in massachusetts dick already mentioned alan solomont and the schusters and so many others of you who have helped me over the years i am very grateful to all of you grateful for what you have been to hillary and to me and to al and tipper gore but i just want to take a couple of minutes to talk about the future i think the single most important issue in this election is what do we intend to make of this moment of prosperity what are the sager s making of their moment of prosperity they re going around the world and helping other people what are we going to do as a nation to do that i think then what we have to do is to make sure first that we answer it to our own satisfaction and secondly that we make sure that the american people believe that s what the election is about and thirdly they ve got to know what the differences are between the two candidates for president and the house candidates and the senate candidates i cannot even begin to convey the depth of my conviction about the importance of this election it is every bit as important maybe more important than the 1992 election everybody knew then we had to change the country was in the ditch we were in trouble economically we were divided socially we had no clear mission of our responsibilities around the world that was kind of comprehensive and the politics of washington d c was like watching i don t know wayne s world or something to most of us who lived out here in the world the real world so we ve been busy turning it around and i m very grateful for the shape the country s in now that almost all social indicators are going in the right direction that we ve got the strongest economy in history that we ve been a force for peace and freedom throughout the world i am grateful but all the best stuff is still out there if we make the most of this moment of prosperity and in order to do it it is necessary for the american people to choose that s what an election is it s basically democracy is handed back over to the bosses for a day and you choose and in order to choose wisely you have to know what the differences are and i ve got this little mantra i tell everybody all the time it says only three things you really need to know about this election one is it s profoundly important two is there are big differences three is only the democrats want you to know what the differences are what does that tell you about who you ought to vote for and it s really true after giving us 20 years or more of the harshest kind of mean personal attacks right up through this republican presidential primary i might add where they attempted the people who won attempted to perform reverse plastic surgery on senator mccain they did that now all of a sudden they want to be sweetness and light they say they want a positive campaign but what they define as a negative campaign is if we tell people how they voted that s their definition of a negative campaign hillary has already had two ads run against her in new york saying you know oh she s being so mean she s telling people i voted how dare her do that now we re all laughing but you know i m telling the truth don t you they re trying to blur the differences we have to clarify them why because that s what elections are about they are choices and we may never have another chance like this to build the future of our dreams for our kids and there are choices i ll just tell you what some of them are i m convinced first of all there is this huge economic choice they have already passed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts and they re going to philadelphia to advocate another what 1 4 trillion or something all of the projected surplus and then some now they re doing it in salami tactics so you don t know this and they ve got a good argument we ve got this surplus we re going to give it back to you it s your money and we re prosperous and we ll give it back to you our argument s more complicated our argument is well we can t give it all back to you because number one we don t have it yet the surplus hasn t materialized so we want to give about 25 percent of what they do but 80 percent of the people will get more money out of ours than theirs most of you in this room tonight wouldn t but most of the american people would and we ve got to save some because we ve got to invest in education in health care in research and technology and the environment and we have responsibilities around the world that we have to fulfill and not just defense responsibilities responsibilities to help alleviate the burdens of the poorest people around the world and deal with a lot of the problems around the world and so we have to save some of this money because we need to invest in our future because we don t have it yet but our tax cuts are good they re just smaller and better targeted toward education and child care and lower income working people with a lot of kids toward long term care and saving for retirement you see it takes me longer to make our side but here s what i d like to tell you about it did you ever get one of those letters from publishers sweepstakes in the mail ed mcmahon letters you may have won 10 million well if you ever got one of those letters and you went out the very next day and spent that 10 million you should support the republicans but if you didn t you had better help dick gephardt and the democrats and stick with us and we ll keep this economy going thank you now we re all laughing this is a profoundly serious issue it s not like we hadn t had any experience we tried it their way for 12 years we tried it our way for eight years we had the lowest minority unemployment rate in history the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest rate of poverty among single parent households in 45 years the highest homeownership in history 22 million jobs look this is not rocket science we tried it their way and in a very nice way a little slice here a little slice there they re saying let s try it again remember when we told you the government was bad it was your money and we re going to give it all back to you let s try it again the country has been in good shape so long that a lot of voters have forgotten what it was like when we started here this is very important the second thing you need to know is that we just have a totally different philosophy about how society ought to work we believe that we are inter dependent that we have mutual responsibilities to one another that s why we re for the brady bill and the previous republican president vetoed it that s why we were for the family and medical leave bill and the previous republican president vetoed it that s why we want to right now that s why we wanted to ban assault weapons and the congressional majority now they were all against that it s why we re for a patients bill of rights and they re against it why we re for medicare prescription drugs for all the people in the country the seniors that need it and they re not for that kind of program it s why we believe we can grow the economy and improve the environment and basically they don t believe that they don t approve of a lot of the environmental things that i ve done and their nominee promised that one of the things he d do if he got elected president is to reverse my order creating 43 million roadless acres in the national forests so these are important issues now if you want to reverse our environmental policy and if you want to go in that direction then you should do it but you shouldn t let a single soul you know anywhere in american i know i m in massachusetts now but you have got a lot of friends around the country you shouldn t let anybody that you know cast an unknowing vote if the american people my objective in every race i ever ran and i guess i ve run all the ones i m going to now but my objective in every race i ever ran was to make sure everyone who voted against me knew exactly what he or she was doing because i figured if everyone who voted against me knew exactly what he or she was doing i could have no complaint that s democracy if i lost then the people had made a wise and considerate choice and i just lost and if i won i knew i had a mandate to act their objective in this election is to obscure the differences so that people do not understand the implications of the choice you never hear them talking about what they said in the primary do you you never hear any of that again you never hear them explaining that yes we re going to give you this big tax cut but it s going to take away all the projected surplus but you must understand that there are choice here and consequences to those choices the next president is going to have between two and four appointments to the united states supreme court both candidates on the republican ticket believe roe v wade should be repealed if you think it should be repealed you should vote for them if you don t you should think about it but you shouldn t listen to all this sort of syrupy talk about how somehow they will listen i m not saying bad things about them personally i think their convictions are there i think this is an honest disagreement i don t believe in the kind of politics they spawned for 20 years trying to convince people your opponents are just one step above car thieves i don t believe that i think these are honest differences but do not be abused when people get this job i just had for eight years they pretty much do what they say they re going to do in the campaign and they try to do what they think is right now just because they re not talking about it doesn t mean they ve changed so you have to consider these things the republican senate defeated the comprehensive test ban treaty i was the first world leader to sign it and they beat it the first treaty that s been beat since the treaty taking america into the league of nations at the end of world war i unbelievable everybody in the world thought we had slipped a gasket and a lot of the pundits said well they just wanted didn t want to give bill clinton the victory it s not my victory to protect our children from the dangers of nuclear war number one and number two i m telling you a lot of those people don t believe in arms control i m not saying anything bad about them they re good people they honestly don t believe in it but they won t be out there telling you about it i bet you won t hear a speech at the republican national convention about how terrible the comprehensive test ban treaty is but they beat it so what you have to decide is what you want america to be like i know you re all here supporting these but frankly your support is not good enough you ve got to go out and talk to everybody you can reach between now and november and not just in massachusetts but in states we might win or we might not win and congressional districts we might win or we might not win and tell them this and the last thing i want to say is this the most important thing of all the longer i live the more convinced i am that the most important thing in any great society is the sense of community of interdependence that people have the sense of mutual responsibility they have i don t think it s possible to enjoy real freedom without responsibilities to the people in your community and without a sense of responsibility to the larger world community increasingly we re for the hate crimes legislation their leadership isn t we re for the employment nondiscrimination legislation most of them are opposed to it we want stronger civil rights enforcement most of them don t the federal appellate court district with the most african americans in the entire country is the 4th circuit comprising north and south carolina there has never been an african american on that court ever i have tried for seven and a half years to appoint one jesse helms said no and all the republicans said it s fine with me it s never happened we are different we don t have to have a bad campaign i think we should posit it that governor bush and mr cheney and all of their candidates are fine good decent people who just differ with us but we should not let them get away with having this sort of smoke screen to try to play on this era of good feelings to convince people that there are no consequences to this election they are big they are deep and they are profound and i can tell you we lost our majority because we did what was right for america there are republican congressmen now who will go out and campaign for reelection in their districts bragging on all the highway money they got or the things they voted for for the schools or this that and the other thing they could have done none of that if democrats alone hadn t passed the economic plan of 1993 which turned this whole thing around these people deserve to be in the majority it will happen if people understand it s a big election there are real differences and they understand what the differences are we owe that to the kids we owe that to the future we may never have another time in our lifetime when america is in this good a shape we cannot squander it and if we build on it the best is still out there thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton28 7 95 bill_clinton i must say i enjoyed the class being a little rowdy this afternoon i thank you for your welcome i thank you for your support most important of all i thank you for the work you do every day thank you al shanker for the introduction and for being here and for being a consistent and clear voice for opportunity and excellence in education thank you ed mcelroy thank you sandy feldman thanks to all of my friends in the aft and thank you for bringing these children up on the stage today to remind us what this is all about you know if you go in any classroom in america you see the infinite promise of our country in a beautiful essay or a difficult math problem solved or just an act of kindness from one child to another and you come face to face with the terrible challenges confronting this country in children who are old beyond their years because of what they ve had to endure to tired or hurt or closed off from each other and the world to learn you also know that what happens to your students in the classroom depends a lot on what happens to them before they get there and after they leave and i must say in that connection i ve often thought it ironic that some of the people that bewail the loss of family values in our country are all too eager to criticize teachers for the problems in our schools when the truth is that oftentimes the school is the only coherent consistent direction family oriented value time that all of our kids get it is true that this administration has worked hard to be a friend to education secretary riley deputy secretary kunin and all the fine people at the department of education i think have done an excellent job in working with you and in broadening their reach working with secretary reich and the people in the labor department working with the private sector all over the country trying to build a grass roots consensus for what is best about education in our country trying to build this country up instead of using education as yet one more issue to divide the american people and to distract us from our real problems today i want to talk to you really seriously about what happens to the kids in this country mostly before and after school in the context of this big family values debate we re having again this year i don t regret the fact that we re having it and i believe the debate has been too polarized between the opposite sides that i believe have a lot to say to each other and if you want any evidence of that read your own bill of rights and responsibilities i just got a great copy of it it s two sides of the debate raging today about family values there are those who see family problems and children s problems as primarily matters of personal and social morality and they believe that all the government has to do is to encourage good behavior like praying in school or sexual abstinence or to punish bad behavior like criminal conduct or the unwillingness to move from welfare to work even when a job s available then there are others who see family problems primarily as a result of the unbelievable economic and social difficulties facing americans today and they believe the role of government is to develop policies that help all of us make the most of our own abilities and to reward people who are working hard and playing by the rules but on a lot of issues these two sides really aren t as far apart as they may seem again i say read your own bill of rights and responsibilities and you see both sides of that argument coming at you a moral problem can quickly become an economic problem the epidemic rates of teen pregnancy in our country for example mean that an awful lot of kids who are born into poverty and never escape it and an awful lot of parents who don t escape it because they don t have education and child care on the other hand an economic problem can rapidly become a moral problem parents on the whole are working harder today than they were 25 years ago literally more hours at work for about the same or lower wages than they were making 15 years ago that means you don t have much time for your kids to teach them the things that they can only learn from their families so economic problems can spill over into the family area as well and have a moral dimension so i argue to you that what we really need is an american family values agenda kind of like the bill of rights and responsibilities you ve articulated for the schools that basically takes the best of both of these approaches and more importantly lifts this debate up gets it beyond partisan strategies that divide the american people for short term gain because too often these issues are raised in that way if we really want family values we ve really got to value families think about the bewildering array of problems faced by families today young couples both of them working they have a child they desperately want one of the parents to stay home for just a few weeks with the child good solid family values will they lose one of the jobs if that happens you ve got people who look out their windows at playgrounds and wonder if they can let their children play on them because they ll be violating family values if their kid aren t safe you have fathers cooking dinners for children right before they go to work all night and then they have to sleep all day while mother goes to work so it never quite gets worked out that both the family parents get to work with the children the way they wish this happens all the time i never will forget i used to every election in arkansas when i was governor i used to make the earliest factory gate in my state the campbell soup plant in fayetteville arkansas people started going to work at 4 30 a m in the morning and i figured that i d get some votes just for being fool enough to showing up at 4 30 a m and sure enough i did i never will forget one day and i d go there i d stay there from 4 30 a m to 5 30 a m and shake hands with everybody that showed up i never will forget it at a quarter to five one day a pickup pulled up and the door opens the light came on inside the pickup and there was a fine looking young man and his fine looking young wife and three little babies sitting between them in the pickup and she had to be at work punched in at 5 00 a m every morning then he had to be at work at 7 00 a m and they had to figure out somebody that had day care by a quarter to seven in the morning so that he could drop those kids off and get there now we talk about family values that is the typical experiences is earlier in the morning but most families in this country are working their fingers to the bone doing the best they can up against very difficult odds and we need to talk about this in terms of the real experience of real people there are a whole lot of families that are spending their money trying to take care of their elderly parents and keep them out of nursing homes and so they don t think they ll be able to send their kids to college that also stretches family values there are a lot of children who are losing hope and a recent study was published on rising rates of casual drug use among young people pointing out that the ones who tend to get into drugs early are young people who have either no strong religious values or no real hope for their own personal future or no strong relationship with their own parents so there really are serious issues here but we need to see it in the real world how many teachers do we know who have students of exceptional promise that they re afraid will never live up to the promise because of the economic handicaps on the family of the student so i say this to make the following point families do not eat and breathe and sleep political slogans they do not most families couldn t tell you for the life of them whether i m up or down in the polls this week and they couldn t care less they just know whether they re up or down in their real life struggle this week and that s what we ought to think about if you add all these family stories together you see that america is kind of a good news bad news story this is remarkable in the last two and a half years when i came here and i campaigned to you for president i said if you vote for me i will do my best to revive the middle class in this country to give poor people a chance to get into the middle class and to pave the way for a brighter future for all of our people i will emphasize creating more opportunity i will insist on more responsibility to the american people and i ll try to bring the people together without regard to race or region or religion or other things that divide us and in the last two and half years we ve put into effect an aggressive economic program an aggressive education program an aggressive trade program an aggressive anticrime program we have today seven million more jobs a lower unemployment rate a lower inflation rate the crime rate is down in virtually every major urban area of the country we are moving on our problems but with a record business profits a record stock market a record number of new businesses a record number of new millionaires most americans are working harder for the same amount of money they were making two and a half years ago feeling somewhat more insecure on the job a little bit uncertain about their retirement and their family s health care and worried sick they won t be able to educate their kids how did this happen we re moving into a global economy an information society a smaller percentage of the work force are protected by organizations like yours and there is more uncertainty out there so i believe we do need to ask ourselves if we believe that the stability of our society and the strength of our country and the future of our children depend upon our families then what are our family values and how are we going to reward good family conduct how are we going to stabilize life for families who are willing to do the right thing how are we going to attack the real problems how are we going to avoid this kind of phony debate and i ll just give you a short agenda here i m going to give a test on this at the end of this here are 14 things we could do to help families brief one help people care for their elderly parents and for sure don t make it harder two reform the health insurance system so that at least people don t lose their health insurance if they change jobs or if somebody s sick in their family three keep the family and medical leave law and make sure everybody in america knows what it is and knows how to take advantage of it four have tougher national standards for child support enforcement five figure out who s been successful in preventing teen pregnancy and organize a national campaign to do the same thing in every community in the country six build on what works to prevent drug abuse and drug use and do it don t just talk about invest money time and effort in consistent commitment to drug abuse prevention seven if you want to cut health care costs and increase life expectancy do something to stop all these kids who are beginning to smoke at early ages it s killing them eight expose our children to less violence by enforcing the brady law and keeping the ban on assault weapons and passing the ban on cop killer bullets nine if you re concerned about violence and children and the role the media is contributing to it instead of giving a speech about it do something about it when congress passes a telecommunications law that s going to make a bunch of money for a bunch of people and it will be all right if it creates a lot of jobs and helps us get more information tell them to put in the law the simple provision to give everybody that s got a cable hook up a v chip so that the parents can decide what comes across to the television to the kids and by the way don t get rid of public broadcasting at least parents have an alternative ten do something about family incomes for people who are doing the right thing raise the minimum wage to 5 00 an hour eleven if you want to give a tax cut give a family oriented tax cut to help people raise their children and educate their children that s the kind of tax cut we ought to have in this country twelve remember that adults need education too and take all these government programs that were enacted with the best of intentions over a long period of time and consolidate them and instead when somebody loses their job or they re working for a minimum wage and they want to get a new training program send them a check to take to the local community college so they can get a decent education that will lead them to a job thirteen don t get nervous i m saving you for last thirteen every list of civic values ever given to kids in school that i have ever seen says teach young people respect for themselves respect for other people respect for our country and respect for our natural environment thirteen do no harm stop this crazy effort to dismantle all the environmental and public health protection in the united states congress today fourteen education don t cut it don t cut head start don t take a million kids out of chapter 1 don t get rid of goals 2000 which gives teachers the chance to really do something significant do not increase the cost of a college loan that is the dumbest thing i ever heard of in my life it is not necessary to cut education to balance the budget it is only necessary to cut education to balance the budget if you re determined to do it in seven years instead of 10 with a tax cut nobody can justify with a deficit this high and an education deficit at the same time put the money into education and into our future the wealthiest americans support this approach they know it s the right thing to do so i want to amplify on a couple of these not all 14 but i want to say them again help people care for their elderly parents reform the health insurance system so fathers and mothers don t lose the health insurance for themselves and their kids if somebody in the family has been sick or they change jobs keep the enforcement of the family and medical leave law don t support the congress taking out all the funds for enforcement more people need to know about it not fewer not a single business has gone broke since we protected family and medical leave in 1993 tougher child support enforcement prevent teen pregnancy reduce drug abuse among young people prevent teens from starting smoking handgun and assault weapons keep those bills in there on the brady bill and the assault weapons bill and pass the cop killer bullet ban raise the minimum wage have a reform of the family tax system so we give the tax breaks to people raising their kids and educating them put the v chip in the cable tv if you want to do something about culture and violence pass the gi bill for america s workers give people who are unemployed a check not a list of 70 programs they ll find the local community college protect the environment and do not cut education now that is an agenda we can live with i think i left out the minimum wage but i won t forget it when we get to the budget now let me tell you sunday saturday or sunday sometime over the weekend will be the exact day of the 30th anniversary of medicare we need to reform medicare we can t have medical costs going up at two and three and four times the rate of inflation but let s not forget before medicare fewer than half the elderly people in this country had any health insurance and 97 percent of them do and if any of you have been through what i have and i imagine most of you have been if you had as i had your mother and your father in law desperately ill for long periods of time you think my goodness what would we do without medicare and i realize how much better off i am than most americans and it would have bankrupted me what would most americans do what would the elderly do so can we slow the rate of increase sure we can but to pick an arbitrary number just because we ve got to balance the budget in seven years instead of 10 and have this huge tax cut that by the way is about the amount of money we re going to save out of medicare that s wrong instead we ought to reform the system and we could save money over the long run by taking a little of that money and helping states to set up opportunities for people like you to help your parents stay out of nursing homes as well as to pay for them when they go in that is the better way to approach that problem and i d like to see us do it i mentioned family and medical leave i couldn t believe it when i saw there were people in the congress who wanted to strip the government of the ability to enforce the law nobody has gone broke doing this nobody has i want to tell you the most moving personal encounters i think i ve had except with children since i ve been president have come from adults who have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law here is a letter my wife got this week i want to read this to you this is a law some people in congress say we shouldn t enforce anymore dear mrs clinton i am writing to let you know that two months ago my husband died of congestive heart failure after a prolonged period of several years of illness because your husband signed into law the family and medical leave act i was able to transport him to doctor appointments and hospital visits the act enabled me to keep my job and bring him comfort at the end of his life i will be eternally grateful signed lynn wade tomko of highland ranch colorado there s a lot of people out there like that and every one of you deserves it every one of you now there is a bipartisan bill on health insurance reform there s a bipartisan bill in the congress right now a bipartisan bill saying at least if we can t give everybody health insurance if we can t do that at least we ought to be able to say when parents change jobs they and their children don t lose their health care coverage shouldn t be tied to whether somebody in their family s been sick once or twice and people who work for small businesses ought to be able to get in every state in the country they ought to be able to go into a pool that is big so they can buy insurance on the same rates that people like us who work for government or big units do simple basic things and there ought to be a longer period of time where people keep their health insurance if they lose their jobs on the child support enforcement all the governors even the most pro state s rights governors have understood and supported our efforts to have national standards of child support enforcement why because over a third of all the child support orders that are delinquent are for people who have crossed state lines so we need a national approach to this the welfare reform bill i have sent to congress has that we have to have this here are the things that it has and ask yourself if you think it s reasonable employer reporting of new hires to catch deadbeat dads who move from job to job uniform interstate child support laws computerized collection of speeding up payments streamlined efforts to identify the father in every case when the child is born and tough new penalties like professional license revocation for people who repeatedly refuse to pay their child support or driver s license let me tell you i don t think most americans we estimate that if everybody paid the child support they owe there would be 800 000 fewer people in this country off of welfare you have no idea how much money you re paying as taxpayers to support children that their parents could legally be supporting and have the money to support you don t have any idea it s a lot of money money that could be going into head start money that could be going into goals 2000 money that could be going into college loans it s not right i could go on and on i m going to have more to say about the drug abuse prevention and the teen pregnancy issues later on i will say this we d be down the road a little bit if the senate hadn t played politics with dr henry foster s nomination but i m going to bring him back in some way and get him to help us on this because it s so important it s a big issue on the drug issue everybody talks about being tough on drugs but you ve got to do four things if you want to make a difference you have got to work with foreign governments to cut drugs off at the source we are busting a lot of big gangs and we re making some real progress and we re getting more help from foreign governments than the united states has enjoyed in many years we ve worked hard at it and a lot of people in other countries risk their lives every day to keep your kids free of cocaine and crack and you need to know that we say why don t they do more a lot of them put their lives on the line every day to do it and more than ever before we re making progress on it we also have to break the cycle of drugs and crime by providing treatment to people who need it it works it does work it doesn t always work but two thirds of the time the treatment works now would you rather spend a little money to have it work two thirds of the time or put 100 percent of those people behind bars at a greater cost to you it does work we also have to punish people properly who break the law but finally we ve got to do something to try to keep our kids off of drugs in the first place and therefore i think it is a mistake for the congress to eliminate the money we re giving to your schools to promote safe and drug free schools those are good programs and we shouldn t get rid of it i m going to say more in the next several days about this issue of teenage smoking but you just think about the number of people every year in america we lose because of smoking related illnesses and you realize that having a whole lot of young kids get into that pipeline is pretty significant and all the evidence is that if people don t start smoking until they re adults that even if they smoke a little they don t become really hooked they don t do it a lot they quit after a little while and they go on and live normal lives this is a big deal most people who have serious problems with smoking started when they were children it is now illegal to sell children cigarettes but it happens all the time and we have to do more to stop it that s a family values issue cuts the cost of health care helps us meet our budget targets keeps people healthier longer and make for more alert effective students in your classrooms i just want to mention one or two other issues let me just say about the minimum wage you all clapped and i realize you agree with me but a lot of americans every time we raise the minimum wage there s this great hue and cry about how we re going to lose jobs and it has never happened and 40 percent of the people on minimum wage are women who are the sole support of their kids and if we don t raise the minimum wage next year it will reach in real dollar terms a 40 year low that s the problem in america we should be having a high opportunity smart work high wage future not a hard work low wage future there is no percentage in it for us to support those kind of low wages let me just say a couple of words about some specific things in the education area i wouldn t be up here if people hadn t helped me get an education i had college loans i had scholarships i had six jobs never more than three at once all of that was opportunity and responsibility the same kinds of things that are in your bill of rights and responsibility we know now there is a greater difference in the ability of people to earn more successively and to live out the american dream based on their level of education than ever in the entire history of the country we know that we know too that in the 1980s the only item in a family s budget that went up faster than the cost of health care was the cost of college education we know that now our administration has done two things that i m real proud of first of all we started the americorps program which gives people a chance to serve their local communities and earn money to go to college i thought it was sort of a republican like program you know it was a grass roots program there s no bureaucracy we fund preexisting local projects in a highly competitive way it s an empowerment program you can t even get any money from the government unless you work yourself to death for trying to help people solve their problems sounds to me like the kind of thing they re always talking about sometimes i wonder if a republican president had proposed it i don t think it would be a target in this budget cycle but why would you get rid of that more importantly we found i found before i became president when i was governor i met young people who were dropping out of college because they thought that the careers for which they were being trained including many of them who wanted to be school teachers they thought they would not be able to earn enough to meet their college loan repayment obligations and so we did something remarkable secretary riley deputy secretary kunin the education department we discovered that if we set up a system for the federal government to make direct loans that we could loan the money at lower cost to the students and give them four different options to repay the loans so that you could if you chose one option you would always repay it at a certain percentage of your salary whatever it was so there would never be a time when repaying a loan would be a deterrent to taking it out in the first place or finishing your college education or serving the public as a teacher or a police officer or nurse or doing something else that might not pay all the money in the world but was immensely rewarding and immensely important to the rest of society this direct loan program is reducing the cost to the government reducing the deficit increasing the number of people who can have college loans and improving their repayment terms it s also much less hassle for the college administrators who doesn t like it the middle men who were cut out what are they doing they re up in the congress right now trying to get rid of it who wants to get rid of it not the kids who have got them not the college administrators who administer them not the people who are worried about the budget but the special interests that have too much influence in this congress say we lost our money we want it back we don t care what happens to these kids that is wrong and you ought to stand up against it now we don t have to have a partisan divisive fight about family values and we don t have to argue whether we need improvements in personal conduct or political policies and economic policies the truth is we need a whole bunch of both and nobody is smart enough to do everything we need to do politically and economically and nobody will ever be good enough so that they won t be able to stand a little improvement so this is a bogus debate what we must not do is let one group take one side of this debate and use it as an excuse to divide the american people and walk away from our real responsibilities to the real families that are working their hearts out to do the best they can by their children in this country that s what we must not do so let us stand together in fighting for the cause of education the right kind of education your kind of education opportunity and high standards of excellence and accountability the things you have stood for for years and years and years that is a very important part of our nation s family values agenda and let us stand together to do things about the time that the kids have to spend before they come to you and after they leave you this does not have to be a big divide all we have to do is to find the common ground that is already out there in every neighborhood in every community in every city town and rural area in this country all we have to do is bring what people know in their hearts to be true in the heartland here to the halls of government if we do that we can really have a family values agenda thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton28 8 00a bill_clinton mr president secretary slater minister nyanda members of the tanzanian and american delegations ladies and gentlemen first mr president thank you for your warm welcome and will save your speech and thank you for your thoughtful and deep remarks i d like to begin by also thanking you for the warm welcome that you gave to chelsea and to hillary when they were here they both fell in love with your country and hillary asked me to give you her regards since you ve just started a campaign you will understand that she is otherwise occupied i am honored to be here in a place of peace to visit a champion of peace tanzania s story is too often not the stuff of headlines for that i say congratulations think of the headlines you have avoided because you have avoided headlines about repression famine and war and instead focused on the steady progress of democracy and development being generous to your neighbors and being a cause of peace and cooperation across the region too many people in our country do not know enough about your country i hope very much that my visit here with so many members of the united states congress who are here with me will help to change that i look forward mr president to joining you and president mandela and the other regional leaders shortly in your efforts to bring a lasting peace to burundi just the last chapter in the distinguished history that you have already made in such a short time one of the tragic ironies of life is sometimes the most terrible things happen to those who try to do the most good you mentioned it was just over two years ago that the terrorist bombs went off at our american embassies not far north of here in nairobi and not far south in dar es salaam they claimed hundreds of tanzanian kenyan and american lives i believe the terrorists went after tanzania kenya and the united states precisely because we are dedicated to tolerance understanding and cooperation across frontiers and lines of division they took a lot of our loved ones but as you pointed out they failed utterly to deter us from advancing our common principles so two years later i would like to say again to the tanzanian families and the victims who survived we still share your sorrow and your determination to see justice done but we are grateful that your nation has stayed on the course of peace and reconciliation we also want to continue to support you during the current drought we have already provided substantial food assistance and will continue to do what is needed we are also trying to help both tanzania and kenya deal with your significant refugee problems which we had a chance to discuss in our meeting just a moment ago we will keep working with you mr president to promote education and health to bring the benefits of the global information economy to your nation and to the developing world i am glad that we were able to support tanzania as one of the first three african countries to qualify for debt relief under the heavily indebted poor countries initiative so long as these economic reforms continue they will be worth the freeing of 100 million a year which tanzania can now invest in its greatest resource your people and i might say mr president i was very moved by what you said in our meeting about how you intend to invest that money and i hope that the members of our congress will take home the powerful example that you have set as a good reason for us to fully fund our part of the global initiative to relieve the debt of highly indebted poor countries i also want to do more to encourage foreign investment here when i last met with you mr president you were just finishing a very successful tour of the united states to promote american investment here it has doubled in the last five years the open skies agreement just signed will strengthen our economic ties further giving both our countries airlines unrestricted international access from any airport to any airport in either country so that more people can travel and market their products to more places at lower cost it was the first of six such agreements we have negotiated with african nations and i am honored that the first was here in tanzania we will keep working with you mr president on all these issues not only because your success is important in its own right and because your people deserve a chance to live their dreams but because you inspire all those around you who are struggling to achieve freedom and peace and reconciliation i urge you to continue to inspire them i thank you for the power of your example i support the work you do and again let me say on behalf of all the american delegation we are delighted and honored to be here thank you very much dem wjclinton28 8 00b bill_clinton thank you very much president museveni president mkapa distinguished leaders of the oau and various african nations and other nations supporting this peace process it is a great honor for me to be here today with a large delegation from the united states including a significant number of members of our congress and my special envoy to africa reverend jesse jackson and howard wolpe and others who have worked on this for a long time this is a special day in america and for reverend jackson i think i should just mention it in passing this is the 37th anniversary of the most important civil rights meeting we ever had the great march on washington where jesse jackson was present and martin luther king gave his i have a dream speech i say that not because i think the situations are analogous but because everybody needs a dream and i think whether you all decide to sign this or not depends in part on what your dream is i thank my friend president mandela for coming in to replace the marvelous late president nyerere to involve himself in this process after 27 years in prison and four years as president of his country which some people think is another form of prison he could be forgiven if he had pursued other things but he came here because he believes in peace and reconciliation he knows there is no guarantee of success but if you don t try there is a guarantee of failure and failure is not an acceptable option so i thank him i thank the oau and mr president you are here today i thank the regional leaders in addition to presidents museveni and mkapa president moi president kagame prime minister meles for their work i thank the nyerere foundation judge bomani judge warioba and i thank the people of tanzania for hosting us here in a city that has become the geneva of africa thanks to many of you i say again i am honored to be in a place that is a tribute to the memory of president nyerere and i m glad that madam nyerere is here today i met her a few moments ago and i thank her for her presence i thank president buyoya and all the burundians from all the parties who have come to arusha and for the efforts you have made peacemaking requires courage and vision courage because there are risks involved and vision because you have to see beyond the risks to understand that however large they are they are smaller than the price of unending violence that you have come so far suggests you have the courage and vision to finish the job and we pray that you will i confess that i come here with some humility i have spent a great deal of time in the last eight years trying to talk people into laying down their arms and opening their hands to one another from the middle east to northern ireland to the balkans i have had some measure of success and known some enormously painful failures but i have not been here with you all this long time and maybe i have nothing to add to your deliberations but i would like to share some things that i have learned in eight years of seeing people die seeing people fight with one another because they re of different ethnic or racial or tribal or religious groups and of seeing the miracles that come from normal peace first to state the obvious there will be no agreement unless there is a compromise people hate compromise because it requires all those who participate in it to be less than satisfied so it is by definition not completely satisfying and those who don t go along can always point their finger at you and claim that you sold out oh it goes too fast in establishing democracy oh it goes too slow in establishing democracy it has absolutely too many protections for minority rights no it doesn t have enough protections for minority rights and there s always a crowd that never wants a compromise a small group that actually would by their own definition at least benefit from continued turmoil and fighting so if you put the compromise on the table they will use it like salt being rubbed into old wounds and they re always very good they know just where the break points are to strike fear into the hearts of people who have to make the hard decisions i have seen this all over the world but i know that honorable compromise is important and requires people only to acknowledge that no one has the whole truth that they have made a decision to live together and that the basic aspirations of all sides can be fulfilled by simply saying no one will be asked to accept complete defeat now no one ever compromises until they decide it s better than the alternative so i ask you to think about the alternative you re not being asked today to sign a comprehensive agreement you re being asked to sign on to a process which permits you to specify the areas in which you still have disagreements but which will be a process that we all hope is completely irreversible now if you don t do it what is the price if you don t do it what is the chance that the progress you have made will unravel if you come back in five or 10 years will the issues have changed i think not the gulf between you won t narrow but the gulf between burundi and the rest of the world i assure you will grow wider if you let this moment slip away more lives will be lost and i have a few basic questions i admit i am an outsider i admit i have not been here with you but i have studied this situation fairly closely i don t understand how continued violence will build schools of your children bring water to your villages make your crops grow or bring you into the new economy i think it is impossible that that will happen now i do think it is absolutely certain that if you let this moment slip away it will dig the well of bitterness deeper and pile the mountain of grievances higher so that some day when somebody else has to come here and sit at a table like this they will have an even harder job than you do so i urge you to work with president mandela i urge you to work with each other to seize the opportunity that exists right now and i urge those groups including the rebels who are not now part of this process to join it and begin taking your own risks for peace no one can have a free ride here now that there is a process for resolving differences peacefully they should lay down their arms now if you take this step today it is a first step it can t restore the bonds of trust by itself it can t restore the sense of understanding that is necessary for people to live together so i will also acknowledge that success depends not only on what you say or sign in arusha also what you do in the weeks and months and years ahead in burundi the agreements you reach have to be respected and implemented both in letter and spirit again i say if you decide to do this everyone must acknowledge there must be no victors and no vanquished if one side feels defeated it will be likely to fight again and no burundian will be secure and after all security for all is one of the main arguments for doing this now let me say something else of course you must confront the past with honesty there is hardly a burundian family that has not felt the sorrow of losing a loved one to violence the history must be told the causes must be understood those responsible for violence against innocent people must be held accountable but what is the goal here the goal must be to end the cycle of violence not perpetuate it so i plead with you i ve seen this a lot of places and it s always the same you have to help your children remember their history but you must not force them to relive their history they deserve to live in their tomorrows not in your yesterdays let me just make one other point when all is said and done only you can bring an end to the bloodshed and sorrow your country has suffered nelson mandela will be a force for peace the united states will try to be a force for peace but no one can force peace you must choose it now again i say i watched the parties in ireland fight for 30 years i ve watched the parties in the middle east fight for 50 years i ve watched the parties in the balkans now go at it and then quit and then go at it again and then i ve watched saw a million people driven out of kosovo and when we began to talk about peace in bosnia the three different ethnic and religious groups didn t even want to sit down together in the same room but when it s all said and done it always comes down to the same thing you have to find a way to support democracy and respect for the majority and their desires you have to have minority rights including security you have to have shared decision making and there must be shared benefits from your living together now you can walk away from all this and fight some more and worry about it and let somebody come back here 10 years from now no matter how long you take when it comes down to it they ll still be dealing with the same issues and i say if you let anybody else die because you can t bring this together now all you will do is make it harder for people to make the same decisions you re going to have to make here anyway so i will say again if you decide if you choose not because anybody is forcing you but because you know it is right to give your children their tomorrows if you choose peace the united states and the world community will be there to help you make it pay off we will strongly support an appropriate role for the u n in helping to implement it we will support your efforts to demobilize combatants and to integrate them into a national army we will help you bring refugees home and to meet the needs of displaced children and orphans we will help you to create the economic and social conditions essential to a sustainable peace from agricultural development to child immunization to the prevention of aids i know this is hard but i believe you can do it consider the case of mozambique a civil war there took a million lives most of them innocent civilians of every five infants born in mozambique during the civil war three three died before their fifth birthday either murdered or stricken by disease those who survived grew up knowing nothing but war yet today mozambique is at peace it has found a way to include everyone in its political life and out of the devastation last year it had one of the five fastest growing economies in the entire world now you can do that but you have to choose and you have to decide if you re going to embrace that you have to create a lot of room in your mind and heart and spirit for that kind of future so you have to let some things go now mr mandela he s the world s greatest example of letting things go but when we got to be friends i said to him one day in a friendly way i said you know mandela you re a great friend but you re also a great politician it was quite smart to invite your jailers to your inauguration good politics but tell me the truth now when they let you out of jail the last time and you were walking to freedom didn t you have a moment when you were really really angry at them again you know what he said he said yes i did a moment then i realized i had been in prison for 27 years and if i hated them after i got out i would still be their prisoner and i wanted to be free sooner or later hatred vengeance the illusion that power over another group of people will bring security in life these feelings can be just as iron just as confining as the doors of a prison cell i don t ask you to forget what you went through in the bitter years but i hope you will go home to burundi not as prisoners of the past but builders of the future i will say again if you decide america and the world will be with you but you and only you must decide whether to give your children their own tomorrows thank you very much dem wjclinton28 8 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you wow thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you citizens of indiana and michigan and illinois thank you all for being here you know folks last night i called your governor evan bayh to tell him two things the first thing i said is i loved your speech thank you for speaking for america and for what we did but the second thing i said was you know evan i was just in east lansing michigan and we had over 20 000 people there and i knew if i said that we d have 30 000 people in michigan city today and sure enough we did mayor brillson thank you for your welcome to the city and thank you for your leadership the mayor told me on the way in here she d only been mayor eight months but she is not only the mayor she is the mother of six wonderful children who are down here and i figure anybody who can raise six kids can do any job in america including president and i m glad she s here you know i was interested to hear the mayor say it s been 97 years since a president has been to michigan city all i can say is the rest of them didn t know what they were missing i m glad to be here thank you i thank congressman tim roemer for his leadership in the house of representatives to prove that the democratic party can lead america into the future that we can be responsible with your money we can be strong for your economy we can be tough on crime but we can still have a heart for those who need the heart of america that are too often left behind and forgotten thank you tim roemer i want to thank lt governor frank o bannon and his wife judy for being here with me and i want to tell you something folks each year the job of the governor gets a little more important if you watch our convention you know there s a lot of discussion about the welfare reform bill that i signed let me tell you this i want you to understand just how important this decision is for governors and indiana in the welfare reform bill we said look we ve reduced the welfare rolls by a million and a half by working with states to move people from welfare to work we think we can go all the way we can take 800 000 kids and move them from welfare tomorrow if we just got people to pay the child support they owe and so we changed the law to do that and we said so we said here is the new deal we re going to have national protection for the medical care for poor people and their children we re going to have national protection for the nutritional needs of poor people and their children we re going to have a national program that guarantees child care so when people go to work even if they re in lower wage jobs from welfare to work they won t have to worry about their kids they ll be able to pay for child care but we said we re going to take the money that used to be in the check itself the federal and the state money give that money to the states and then the states will have to design a program that will move people from welfare to work within two years now when you make this decision for governor there will be no question more important than who do you trust to really care about giving the people who have been trapped on welfare the same kind of life we want for all american families we want people to succeed as parents and succeed as workers frank o bannon will do that and i want you to give him the chance to do it let me say too with some particular pride that i have two people who work for me in the white house who come from near here my military aide june ryan a lieutenant commander in the coast guard whose parents live near south bend near here that s not very far i think they play football there somebody told me and one of my speechwriters carolyn curiel s parents angela and alex live in hammond so i feel like i m near home at least for them is anybody here from hammond indiana yes that s good finally let me say a special word of thanks to those who have participated to make me feel so welcome there were 2 000 folks i ll bet you who met my train just across the river so i m going to count them in the mayor s crowd or the governor they can fight over who got them here but i was glad to see them and on the way to michigan city rotc high school color guard made me feel very welcome i thank them i want to thank the michigan city high school band who s playing over here what a wonderful job they did thank you i want to thank a teacher who is behind me named stacy rezdor she and her 8th grade class wrote me when i was coming and i want to thank those students back there who made posters and who showed up students from michigan city thank you very much i want to thank the national guard for providing water and if you need water take it i don t want anybody passing out here i want you to be just hot enough to be excited but not any more and let me finally say i know that there was an accident here earlier and i want you to keep those folks in your prayers as far as we know they re okay but we haven t gotten a final report and let me also say to all of you i don t think you can imagine what it means to me to see you out here to see when you read and you hear people say well nobody believes in the political system anymore people are cynical and this that and the other thing i don t see any cynicism here i see america and america s future and i like what i see and while we re talking about the future thank you thank you let me say one thing about the future before i go on i appreciated what governor bayh said about the relationship that he and susan have had with hillary and me it s way beyond politics and beyond the fact that we re in the same party beyond the fact that we served as governors together for years they are our friends and they re two of the finest people i have ever met you have been very fortunate to be served by them i don t know what the future holds for them but i wouldn t be surprised at all if someday evan bayh were to come back here to michigan city as the president of the united states and i d like to see you out here for him folks we ve had a lot of friends at our convention but i ve had just as much fun with america a few days ago hillary and chelsea and i went to huntington west virginia and then hillary went on home to chicago and chelsea and i started this train trip through west virginia and kentucky and ohio and then into michigan and finally here into indiana and i took that train trip for two reasons first of all with an enormous sense of humility i m on my way to chicago to accept the nomination of my party for the presidency for the second time it is you know unless i run for the school board or something some day it will be the last race i ever make and i wanted to take this trip through the heartland to look into the faces the eyes the hearts of the people that i ran for president to help the people i have worked for and fought for for four years and i have loved every mile of the track all the people i have seen but i also wanted the american people to see including all the people in all the little towns that came out to see the train come all the school children standing by the road all the people who put their pennies on the rails so the train would give them flat pennies all the flags even some of the loyal opposition that came i wanted them all to see that we were not only on the right track to chicago we are on the right track to the 21st century and that s the track we re going to stay on you know i told you four years ago if you would hire me as president i would do my best to prepare this country for the next century it s only four years away now and i want us to go into that century with the american dream alive for every single person who is willing to work for it i want us to go into that century with this country still the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity i want to go into that century you look around this crowd today where we can say other people in the world may be in the grips the throes of division other nations may be divided by race by ethnicity by tribe by religion but in america if you believe in the constitution the declaration of independence and the bill of rights and you show up for work every day as a good citizens you re our kind of america and we re all in this together we re going forward together well now you tell me so i wanted to go out and see the people after four years four years ago we had high unemployment stagnant wages a host of unmet social challenges we had enormous growing cynicism and we were afraid the middle class dreams that have always driven america were dying four years later we have 10 million new jobs 4 5 million new homeowners 10 million homeowners with lower mortgage rates a record number of new small businesses record exports record businesses owned by women and minorities we have america is on the move for the first time in a decade wages are on the rise again for the first time in 10 years in the united states the crime rate has come down for four years in a row as we have given police officers and citizens at the local level the tools they need to make the most of their capacity for safe streets we re putting 100 000 more police on the streets we did pass the brady bill and 100 000 felons fugitives and stalkers lost their handguns but no hunters in indiana or arkansas did we did the right thing we re investing more in safe and drug free schools to try to put more of those dare officers in the schools and provide more education more prevention more treatment as well as tougher punishment to keep our kids away from the problems that come with rising drug abuse we have taken stands for the american family 12 million american working families have been able to take a little time off from work for a baby s birth or a sick parent without losing their job that s good for america we have moved aggressively to prove that you can clean up our environment and promote the public health and advance the economy by doing it 50 million americans are breathing cleaner air we cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in three years than were cleaned up in 12 years we are moving to protect the american environment and grow the american economy and we can do both and we have done this in a way that bring the american people together we have faced a lot of tough challenges around the world and i ve had to do some thing that were frankly unpopular with a majority of you but because we went in to bosnia with our allies no soldier has fallen in combat so far there but the slaughter has ended and the people at least are being given a chance to get over the madness of their ethnic hatreds and go on with civilized life and be a part of a free europe and a free world and because we have worked with the russians to be free to promote their democracy to promote their economy to get their troops out of other countries to be a constructive partner for the first time since nuclear weapons were developed in the last four years there is not a single nuclear weapon pointed at an american child anywhere in this country and i am proud of that and let me say again how much i appreciated what tim roemer said and what evan bayh said about that budget battle i had with the congress folks i always wanted to balance the budget i was a governor for 12 years before i was president i had 12 balanced budgets i couldn t believe we quadrupled the debt of this country in just 12 years i want you to know that tonight not only have we cut the deficit by 60 percent your budget would have a surplus tonight if it weren t for the interest we pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before i became president let s don t go back and repeat that mistake again let s keep on going let s keep on going until we finish the job you know every time an election rolls around they say the public doesn t really care about the deficit it s an abstract concept let me tell you something it s not abstract it s not only whether we re going to saddle all these kids with a debt they can t pay if you bring the deficit down the way we have that brings interest rates down what does that mean when interest rates come down it means your house payment your car payment your credit card payment goes down even more important maybe it means business people can go borrow money invest it in businesses and create new jobs that s why we have over 10 million new jobs because we ve got a healthy climate to invest and to grow and to move this country forward now folks that s the record that s the past but we ve got more to do we ve got to keep going until every single citizen in this country who is willing to work for it has a chance to participate in the american dream we ve got to keep going until all our streets are so safe that if you come home at night and turn on the evening news and the lead story is a crime story you are shocked instead of numb to it that s when we ll know we have the crime problem whipped we ve got to keep going until every single one of our children can read well by the 3rd grade until every single one of our teenagers knows that drugs are dangerous they re not only illegal they will kill you we have got to turn that around we ve got to keep going until we solve the problems of america and take everybody into the 21st century everybody we ve got to keep going until every american believes that we cannot afford to look down on one another that s why i took such a strong stand against these church burnings and why i lash out every time a synagogue or an islamic center is defaced and why i was appalled when those african american special forces personnel in north carolina came home to find swastikas painted on their doors i bet you we ve got some former special forces people in this crowd today i ll tell you what they are they re special forces that means tonight at midnight if i wake them up and i tell them to go halfway around the world to put their lives on the line and defend you they will do it and say yes sir and be glad to go they do not deserve to have swastikas put on their doors we ve got to keep going until that is not a problem anymore we ve got to keep going there are 25 million americans who were helped last week when we signed the kennedy kassebaum bill to say you can t lose your health insurance if you got sick or if you change jobs but we ve got to keep going until unemployed families when they lose their jobs get a little help so they can actually afford to keep their health insurance we ve got to keep going until small business people in this country can not only afford to invest in their business because we ve given every single one of them a tax cut if they invest more in their business in the last four years we ve got to keep going so small business people can actually afford those health insurance policies that the rest of us enjoy for their employees and themselves we raised the minimum wage for 10 million americans last week but we ve got to keep going we ve got to keep going until every american has access to a good education that will lift all our income that s why i say we ought to have a family friendly targeted tax cut that we can afford that focuses on giving the american people the ability to take out ira that they can save for with a family income up to 100 000 and then withdraw from to pay for a college education to pay for a first home to pay for medical insurance that s the kind of tax cut we need we ought to give families a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition a tax credit for a community college education for two years so everybody in america can have two years of education after high school we can afford that we can balance the budget it will make us a stronger country i want you to support that i want you to support four more years not just of bill clinton and al gore i want you to support four more years of more opportunity more responsibility and more community i want you to support the idea that when the year 2000 comes around will we go roaring into the 21st century as the greatest nation in the world with our best days before us will you help me for the next 70 days will you stand with us for four more years will you talk to your friends and neighbors and ask them to go forward with us thank you god bless you on to chicago thank you dem wjclinton28 8 99 bill_clinton thank you first of all i would like to thank wyclef and the band they were magnificent weren t they unbelievable let s give them another hand you were up there doing your thing and i was sitting here thinking about what i was going to say and i couldn t concentrate for wishing i was 25 and out there again you were terrific thank you so much i want to thank all the leaders of the democratic party who are here i want to thank judith hope you know people always say well you know hillary is she going to run is she not going to run well she spent all these years in arkansas judith hope was 20 years old before she ever left arkansas we re just following her lead i want to say also how very grateful i am to all the members of congress senator lautenberg senator torricelli congresswoman mccarthy and congressman forbes for being here i think it says a lot about long island and the state of new york that the two most prominent people to switch from the republican to the democratic party in the last couple of years are carolyn mccarthy and michael forbes from long island one switched you know we re having a good time tonight so nobody wants to talk too much about issues but michael forbes switched because the republicans are killing the patients bill of rights and patients are getting the shaft out there in the health care system all across america and because they have a budget and tax plan which will cut education spending when we should be investing more in the education of our children and carolyn mccarthy quit because after her intense personal agony she just got sick and tired of their leadership killing common sense things like closing the loophole that stops us from doing background checks when criminals buy guns at gun shows and flea markets and it s wrong and i say that to make this point i am so profoundly grateful to the people of new york for being so good to me and hillary and to al and tipper gore and two presidential elections and one magnificent convention and one very bracing primary in 1992 the people of new york have been good to me and have made it possible for us to do what we have worked hard to do in the last six and a half years and i want you to think about just a couple of things especially the younger people here i m not running for anything i kind of hate it actually i wish i still could but i can t but i have worked all my life to try to bring people together and move people forward and bring out the best in people and when new york took a chance on me and al gore in 1992 that s exactly what it was we said vote for us we ll take the country in a different direction we ll ask the democrats to be for fiscal responsibility and bringing the crime rate down and changing the welfare culture and having a humane trade policy and we ll ask the republicans to stop bad mouthing the government and dividing people by race and gender and sexual orientation and other things and we ll try to bring this country together and move it forward but you couldn t know you took a chance and we ve been down there working for six and half years now and the first point i want to make is you re not taking a chance anymore you know we have the longest peacetime expansion in history the highest homeownership in history the lowest minority unemployment in history the lowest crime rate in 26 years the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years this country is moving in the right direction you took a chance and you were right and the democratic party has moved this country forward the second thing i want to say is even more important is that we just made the country work again but there are huge questions facing the 21st century the number of people over 65 will double in 30 years we already have the largest number of children in school in history for the first time a group bigger than the baby boomers and they are far far more diverse many more of their first languages are not english and that is a godsend in this great rich textured global economy but it means we have no business at this point of maximum prosperity and confidence walking away from the big challenges how are we going to save medicare and social security so that the children of the baby boomers don t have to support their parents and can support their kids instead how are we going to give every child in this country a world class education how are we going to bring the economic opportunity that so many of you have enjoyed to all the little towns in upstate new york and all the neighborhoods in the inner cities and the mississippi delta and the indian reservations to people who haven t had it and before we go back to the failed economic policies of the past and pass a tax cut that will force us to cut education and cut the environment and cut our investment in the future and put us right back in the hole we were in and raise your interest rates and take your tax cut away from you let s get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 and give the children here a generation of economic prosperity now these are big issues but it s not like 1992 we re not asking you to take us on faith anymore we re asking you to go with what you know works in your mind and in your heart and the last point i want to make is this if i could wave a magic wand and get america just to do one thing just one it wouldn t even be all the things i just said i would have the american people lay down their hatreds and their division their anger and their pettiness their legitimate grievances and their phonied up gripes i would have this country no longer divided by race by religion by sexual orientation by politics by region you know most of the people i ve known in public service over 25 years now have been honest decent hardworking people who tried to do what they thought was right and this is crazy what the leadership of the congress has tried to do in washington these last few years trying to keep the country in a turmoil all the time all torn up and upset telling everybody how terrible their enemies are trying to make sure you could divide the population up first one way and then another and then being in the grip of these interest groups that are keeping us from becoming one community by doing things we know we ought to do in education on the patients bill of rights on sensible gun control measures this is wrong you think of all the time i have spent trying to make peace in the middle east end tribal wars in africa stop the slaughter in bosnia and kosovo bring peace to northern ireland all these things what is at the root of all this people believing that the only way they can get and keep power is to turn people against one another to harden their hearts and i m telling you the democratic party stands for opportunity for facing the big challenges of the future and for one american community where we are united by our common humanity so i am grateful for all those who have joined our cause because they share our values and our ideas and they know the record is incontestable congressman forbes took a big chance doing what he did i wish he had done it a year or two earlier but i was raised a southern baptist we believe in deathbed conversions and he is a long way from the deathbed so you all give him another hand for doing the right thing congresswoman carolyn mccarthy has changed this country for the better and immeasurably enriched our party in the congress because of what she did and i will say as i ve said many times of all the hundreds indeed all the thousands of the people i have known the woman i have shared the last well since we met 27 years with is the most passionate the most committed the most able the most consistent public citizen i have ever known and new york would do well to send her to the united states senate so i thank you i m not running for anything i m going to work hard for you for another year and a half i am grateful that this country is in the shape it s in i am proud of the friendship and partnership i ve shared with al gore the friendship and partnerships i ve shared with the members of congress but most important i am humble and grateful for the kind of support that the people of new york have given and all i ask you in return is to keep on going in this direction you were right when you took a chance on us in 1992 you were right when you ratified what we were doing in 1996 you were right to send chuck schumer to the senate in 1998 just stay on keep leading america into a new century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton28 9 95 bill_clinton thank you very much on behalf of the first lady and myself the vice president and mrs gore and secretary christopher we are delighted to welcome all of our visitors from around the world and especially from the middle east the prime ministers the foreign ministers especially mrs rabin and mrs arafat mrs mubarak and her majesty queen noor we are delighted to be here again with these four great leaders who have just spoken i was looking at his majesty king hussein when he said he was almost 60 thinking that he has been on the throne for more than 40 years what i thought to myself was for myself i don t object to term limits but i m awfully glad he was not subject to them because the middle east is a different place because of the way king hussein has lived his life for peace all these decades i thank president mubarak for the power of his example the constant strength of his determination not so very long ago my family and i were as with many americans praying for his safety we are glad to see him strong leading the world working toward peace i agree with prime minister rabin chairman arafat makes a good speech and a passionate one what an interesting turn of events his life has taken and how fortunate we all are that he decided to take his risks for peace mr prime minister you give a pretty good speech yourself i think you give such a good speech because it is obvious to everyone that every word you utter comes from your heart and your mind together and we thank you and to all my fellow americans and all of you here present we ve heard a lot of wonderful words today i would like to close with three brief points that i believe should be emphasized first i want to recognize the negotiators foreign minister peres mr abu mazin mr uri savir and mr abu alaa and their teams they did this and we should applaud them we should applaud them i watched today in the cabinet room while the prime minister and chairman arafat literally signed initialed the annex to this agreement which included 26 different maps comprising literally thousands and thousands of decisions that these two sides made after long and arduous argument they found common ground it was an astonishing achievement the care the detail the concern that they manifested and the effort it took to reach agreement was truly extraordinary and i do not want that to escape anyone s attention the second thing i want to say is that this agreement embodies for those of us who are americans the things that we believe in the most for this agreement required the acceptance of responsibility along with the assertion of freedom and independence this agreement required people to think about the interests of their children and the sacrifices of their parents this agreement required a real effort to reach principled compromise common ground and higher ground and make no mistake about it this agreement required these decision makers to do things that may be unpopular in the short run because they know that 10 20 30 years from now it is the only course for the future of the people that they love and that brings me to the second point what are our obligations the rest of us we can clap for them but they have to go back to work tomorrow when the glamour is gone and the applause has died out they will be back at the hard work there are two things we can do for them the first thing we have to do is to stand with them against terrorism it is the enemy of peace everywhere now we in america know what it is like to see parents grieving over the bodies of their children and children grieving over the bodies of their parents because people believe that terrorism is simply politics by other means we have had our hearts ripped out and now we know better so we must stand with them against terrorism the second thing we have to do is to work with them to achieve the benefits of peace for the peace has to bring people the opportunity to work with dignity to educate their children to clean up their environment to invest in their future hundreds and hundreds of arab americans and jewish americans have the capacity to work with these people in partnership to transform the future of the middle east and i say again let us do our part finally let me say to all the members of congress here present and those who were there this afternoon i thank you for your presence and your support of this process we know that in this era where we have gone from the bipolar world of the cold war to a global village with all kinds of new and different threats to our security only the united states can stand consistently throughout the world for the cause of freedom and democracy and opportunity we know that and we must continue to do that not simply for the people of the middle east but for ourselves as well for when we work for peace in northern ireland in southern africa in haiti in bosnia when we work to dismantle the threat of nuclear war and fight terrorism we help ourselves and our children s future but i will say again what i said today if we can make peace in the middle east if we can help the people who live there to make their own peace it will have a special meaning for ourselves and for the world in the 21st century for the simple reason that the world s three great religions who believe that one god created us watches over us and ultimately will hold us to account for what we do we all studied through the koran through the torah through the holy bible those lessons surely if those people can resolve all their differences we can bring peace to all the world thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton28 9 96 bill_clinton thank you you know i just was looking at senator kerry giving his speech he gives me a bean pot whoever said he didn t have a sense of humor do you believe that governor weld would have the guts to stand up here and say he couldn t believe that we had all those people from the 60s play and everybody kept their clothes on next thing you know john kerry will be doing the macarena with al gore ladies and gentlemen thank you for the warm and wonderful reception you have given me tonight thank you for being here thank you for being here for john kerry who richly deserves your support for reelection because he has been fighting for your future for the future of massachusetts and the future of the united states for a very long time and he has consistently been on the right side of that future you know i remember in 1993 when we had a stagnant economy and high unemployment and the country was dividing economically and socially and people were becoming more and more cynical and i put an economic plan forward to the congress and not a single person in the other party voted for it and they all tried to terrify our side and say oh this is a terrible plan it will raise the deficit it will increase unemployment bankrupt the country well john kerry and senator ted kennedy stood with the president and now we know 10 5 million jobs later we know that john kerry was right and they were wrong i remember in 1994 after crime had bedeviled so many of our communities and people in washington had talked about the need for a crime bill for six years and i had run on the promise of putting 100 000 more police officers on our streets to prevent crime to make our streets our schools our neighborhoods safer i remember that the leaders of the other party said oh this is a terrible thing and they won a lot of their elections in 94 by convincing hunters in places like my home state they d lose their guns but john kerry stood firm and we got that 100 000 police we got the brady bill we got the assault weapons ban and this is a safer country with four years of declining crime thank you john kerry for being on the right side of history when christopher reeve spoke tonight it reminded me so clearly of everything he said at a time when we were faced last year with the budget take it or leave it or we ll shut the government down it cut education cut the environment cut our investments in research and technology weakened our commitments for medicare and medicaid i said no and so did senator kennedy and so did john kerry and we did get more for medical research because he asked for more for medical research in the spinal cord area and let me tell you folks lest you think that s a pipe dream just a few days before christopher reeve spoke at the democratic national convention for the first time ever a laboratory animal with its spine completely severed got movement back in its lower limbs because of a nerve transplant to the spine we are going to solve that problem and many others if we keep people like john kerry who are the right side of history he deserves the support and i can t let this moment go without saying after all the fights we had over the budget over the last two years it was a wonderful thing to see in the last few weeks after the american people made their voices heard senator kennedy taking the lead in passing a health care reform bill he s worked on for years that says you can t be denied insurance anymore if you change jobs or if someone in your family has been sick twenty five million americans will be better off because of that and that s on the right side of history tuesday october 1st 10 million americans will get a pay raise when the minimum wage goes into effect because senator kennedy worked and senator kerry helped him and we got a minimum wage increase it was the right thing to do well we ve been here a long time and i know you want to go home and i don t want to take a lot of your time but i want to say something especially to the young people here tonight i want to tell you something about being on the right side of history and i want you to think about it seriously just for a minute once in a generation or so our people in our long march of democracy have been confronted with a set of decisions that are so profound that they will affect how we live and how we relate to each other and the rest of the world for a very long time this is that sort of time we are being asked basically because of the differences between ourselves and our opponents to decide two fundamental questions about what we re going to be like when we go roaring into the 21st century no matter what happens those of us that are well prepared especially our young people will have more chances to live out our dreams than any generation of americans has ever had but the two great questions we have to face that will shape what we are as a country and what we look like 50 years from now are number one do we believe that we have to build a bridge to the future that every american is given the ability to walk across i think the answer to that is yes but not everybody does whether you believe that or not determines how you answer questions like whether you re for the family and medical leave act whether you believe it should be preserved and expanded so that people can succeed at home and at work whether you believe that or not depends upon whether you think we should be providing an opportunity for every person who wants to go to college to go through tax credits and tax deductions and savings programs i believe we should and john kerry believes we should and that is the right side of history the other great question we have to face is whether this incredible mosaic of diversity that is america all the differences that you can see here just by looking around this great hall tonight will be a source of strength and sustenance to us that will add to our prosperity and more to the richness and quality of our lives or whether we will be bedeviled divided and weakened by the differences among us look all around the world today how much of your time as president do i have to spend from the middle east to northern ireland to bosnia to rwanda and burundi to so many other places around the world how much time trying to get people to stop defining their lives in terms of who they can hate whom they can look down upon because they are different because of race or religion or region or gender or tribe it is wrong it is wrong and we have to decide we have to decide whether we re going to beat the odds these are the two great questions i don t like bumper stickers much but the truth is it s pretty good to say the question is are we going to build a bridge to the future or try to reach back to the past i think you know the answer to that you can also say as my opponent did in all candor and completely honestly when he spoke at the republican convention he said he really thought that the first lady was wrong that we were better off being left to ourselves and families to make our way but i think she was right i believe it takes a village to make the most of all of our lives and i believe that you think that too and so i ask you i ask those of you especially those of you who are young some of you may have indulged all of us who were singing our old songs here tonight some of you now know them as well as we do and love them as well but all of you i ask you to think about this this great choice is going to affect how you live those of you who have most of your tomorrows in front of you this choice will affect them because of the profound changes going on in our country and in our world whether we decide to build that bridge to the future that enables everyone to make the most of their own lives whether we decide to stay with the idea that we are a village and we have to respect one another and bond together and be stronger and richer because of our differences these things will determine what america looks like when we cross the bridge to the 21st century when our children are our age and in a hundred years when people write back their histories about what we did in our time and do not underestimate the weight of this decision this is a huge decision these are big questions they will define the united states of america for a long time to come this is a decision that comes along once in a generation maybe once every 50 years think how different the world would have been when the founding fathers in massachusetts and the other 12 states had made the other decision they were asked to make don t make this one country make this a club of 13 different states just sort of a social organization you can come and go as you please i wouldn t be here because there would never have been a louisiana purchase and i wouldn t be an american think how different this country would be if abraham lincoln had not been president when the states said well hey we formed this country we ve got the right to get out and abraham lincoln said i don t think so i don t think so and he was willing to give a half a million lives including his own life to keep this country together and then to face the next question well if we re going to stay together don t we have to quit lying about who we are how can we have a constitution that says all of us are created equal and keep slavery so we ve got to get rid of that think how different this country would be if we hadn t made that decision 130 odd years ago think how different would all the other immigrants be here today would this place look like to does today i don t think so think how different this country would have been when theodore roosevelt and woodrow wilson had to manage our transition from being a rural country of small farmers to an urban country of great cities like this one which mayor menino leads so well today think how different it would have been if they had answered these questions differently they had to say okay now we re an industrial country are we going to let a few monopolies run out all the small business people or are we going to preserve free enterprise they voted for free enterprise are we going to let these big countries destroy our natural heritage or are we going to preserve things like the grand canyon and other national parks and keep something for all generations to come are we going to let our children work 70 hours a week in coal mines and sweatshops as they were doing then or are we going to stop that and give our children their childhoods back and their education think how different america would be if we had answered those questions differently these are the questions that are being asked of you and your generation these are the kinds of questions that we are facing when you ask which budget do you want it s really about what kind of people are we are we going together respecting our differences building a bridge or are we going to say it s every person for himself i wish you well i believe i know the answer and i ask those of you who are young you have 38 days john kerry has earned the right to be reelected senator from massachusetts because he has been on the side of your future on the side of your future you do not have to believe one bad thing personally about his opponent you do not have to make this a negative race at all all you have to do is to look at the fundamental choices before you and for those of you who are young especially i say imagine in your mind what you want this country to be like in four years when we go roaring into a new century and a new millennium what you want our country to be like when your own children are your age what do you want the history of america to be 100 years from now what will they say about what we did now i hope they ll say america decided it takes a village and we re going to build a bridge to the 21st century that we can all walk across thank you god bless you bear down and bring a victory for us thank you dem wjclinton28 9 99 bill_clinton thank you very much and good morning i first of all would like to thank you for the invocation and let you know that as with many other americans we have been thinking about you and your people in your church hillary and i welcome you here today as you know the vice president and mrs gore are normally here but he is often otherwise occupied these days and i hope you will forgive their absence they really wanted to be here i would like to thank secretary shalala secretary riley jack lew for being here i would also like to thank barry mccaffrey the director of our office of national drug control policy and to those of you who come nearly every year welcome back to those of you who are here for the first time welcome we are delighted that you are all here i have looked forward to this day every year for as long as i have been president and we have been doing this all of you know that if you ve come to some of the others that each one of these days has been special and as in the 1990s as america has grown more involved with the rest of the world and more diverse because of our history of religious liberty and the way our constitution has worked more and more religious convictions and affiliations have flowered in our country and you can look around this room today see it would be very unusual if you could have this kind of gathering in any other country in the world and for that i am profoundly grateful last year was one of the most difficult years in my life and this occasion because it has come to mean so much to me was a very difficult one for those of you who were part of that i want to express my particular appreciation i d like to say a special word of thanks to my good friend reverend wogaman and to gordon macdonald i think he is here back there and to tony campolo who is not here who have kept their word to meet with me over the last year both to help me and to hold me accountable and i have kept my word to meet with them and to work with them i would like to say only this about that i have been profoundly moved as few people have by the pure power of grace unmerited forgiveness through grace most of all to my wife and daughter but to the people i work with to the legions of american people and to the god in whom i believe and i am very grateful to all of you who have had any role in that and i thank you i also want you to know that we are continuing our work it is interesting and not always comfortable but always rewarding and i hope you will pray for us as we do what i would like to talk about today following up on what hillary said when she welcomed you here is what we can do together to deal with the question of violence particularly against our children and i would like to talk about it first of all to say we ve been trying to work out what the proper relationship is between religious individuals and religious groups and government activity since we got started as a country we ve been working on this for a long time now it probably will always be a work in progress we don t want to discourage people who are in public office from pursuing their own religious convictions and from stating them but we must be aware as those of us who are christians are warned of practicing piety before others in order to be seen by them we must be humble in this endeavor and work together we also must recognize that there will always be differences of opinion honestly held and earnestly pursued about what is the proper role for the government what is the proper relationship between church and state in the well timed and well used american phrase but it seems to me that there is kind of an emerging consensus about the ways in which faith organizations and our government can work together both at the national level and at the state and local levels in a way that reenforce values that are universally held and increase the leverage of the good things that the government is funding i could just mention one or two some of you are involved in faith based organizations that have received funding for americorps slots we now have thousands of young volunteers who have worked in americorps through various faith based organizations rendering community service i don t think that s a violation of the constitution s establishment clause and we sure have helped a lot of people out there and i feel good about that some of you have worked in organizations which have helped poor families move from welfare to work in a way that reenforces not only the value of work but the value of family which is even more important and that s a continuing challenge for us but i m encouraged by the progress that has been made there many of you have been involved with us in our efforts to advance the cause of religious freedom at home and around the world i don t know if bob seiple is here today but i m very pleased about what we re doing in that and i m grateful for the work that you have done those of you who have helped us with that and that continues to be a concern of mine in many places throughout the world and i think it will continue to be something the united states will have to work and work and work on if you have followed and i m sure almost all of you have the recent troubling events in east timor you know that there is a religious as well as an ethnic element to what is going on there and to the difficulties and finally let me say that as we move toward the millennium i have been very moved by the way many faith based organizations have engaged and challenged those of us in public life to reawaken our responsibilities to poor people both within and beyond our borders a couple of people on the way in today mentioned the global initiative to reduce dramatically the debt of the poorest nations in the world and i was very pleased by the recent moves that the imf and the world bank have made in that direction the united states has pushed very hard for it it is an entirely appropriate thing to do but i have to tell you i don t want this to wind up being like our dues to the united nations now that we have advocated this and gotten everybody else to agree to it we have to pay our fair share so i hope all of you will help us pass the legislation through congress to do that there is also much much more we need to do here at home especially for our children and i think one of the most wonderful experiences i ve had as president was taking my so called new markets tour around the country to appalachia to the mississippi delta to the pine ridge indian reservation in south dakota to many of our inner city areas and i intend to continue to do these for the remainder of my term to highlight what we can do what more we can do to try to get investment and opportunity and alleviate poverty among people who have not felt the warm glow of this economic prosperity of ours and there are still altogether too many of them thank you but today i want to just focus just for a few minutes i m going to have breakfast and then we ll have a talk about it but i wanted to ask you to think about this and that s why i m so grateful to our pastor for his invocation and for after what he s been through for coming here and sharing with us today all the rage in washington today is we finally succeeded in getting i think the general public interested in the so called y2k problem you know we live in a world that is dominated by computers and now we re trying to make sure we re y2k ready and everybody just has all these horrible scenarios of what might happen when the computers turn to 2000 and all the old computers revert back to 1900 and what might happen we ve been working on this steadily the united states has worked very hard here and we ve worked very hard to help other countries throughout the world and especially to avoid any disasters in military operations in airline operations things that could really have a profound impact on us but i think at this prayer breakfast today i would like to say that there is more to getting ready for y2k than fixing the computers and when this kind of seminal event occurs it gives us the opportunity to ask ourselves what it would take to be really ready for the year 2000 i don t think it s good enough for us to enter the new century as the most prosperous and powerful country in the world with the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years and the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years and the longest peacetime expansion ever that s all very impressive but i think it s worth noting as i have on occasion before that when alexis de toqueville came here over 150 years ago and traveled around america and he noticed how profoundly religious our people were even though we had no government religion in fact government could not interfere with it he thought we were the most religious people on earth and after he had done a good deal of his tour d toqueville wrote a powerful sentence he said america is great because america is good not rich not powerful certainly not perfect but good and the question i think we ought to focus on today is are we good enough and if we wanted to be better what s the most important place to start i think this is especially important when it comes to children there s too much trouble in too many of their lives even here the trend lines all look good you have teen pregnancy divorce drug abuse poverty all going down in america that s the good news the bad news is that by comparative standards all these problems are still far too rampant and there are too many children with troubled lives we could spend all day talking about those things but today i would like to ask you to focus on this problem of violence which has dominated so many of our headlines in the last two years now even here you could say it s a mixed picture it s true we have the lowest crime rate in 26 years the lowest murder rate in 30 years but it s also true that the crime rate in this country is way too high much higher than virtually anyplace else it is true that we have seen over the last two years a rash of high profile shootings often with children as both the victims and the perpetrators the mass killing of innocent people i think has been the most painful thing that hillary and i and al and tipper gore have had to deal with in the discharge of our public responsibilities the bombing in oklahoma city the school violence at littleton and so many other places the dragging death of james byrd in jasper texas the torture death of matthew shepard in wyoming the murder of won joon yoon outside his church in bloomington indiana on the 4th of july and the other killings in that spree by a deranged young man who had been a member of a so called church of white supremacy there were the office killings in atlanta and the family killings associated with it the shootings at the jewish community center in los angeles the killing of a filipino postal worker in that spree of course the recent murderous rampage at wedgewood baptist church in ft worth now some of these crimes were motivated by hatred of the victims because of their race their religion their homosexuality i think we must do more to prosecute such crimes i hope congress will soon send me the hate crimes legislation but some of these crimes do not fit into the category of hate crimes the murderers were in the grip of some evil force or mental illness and in addition to these high profile crimes where children were involved we should never forget a couple of other things thirteen children die in this country every day from gun violence and because they die in ones and twos in tough neighborhoods and difficult streets sometimes they re not the lead story sometimes they re not any story on the evening news but their numbers add up and some of you minister to the families of those children beyond that children die with truly alarming frequency in this country from accidental gun deaths yesterday i was in new orleans and this whole big neighborhood was just almost groaning with grief over the death of a much beloved four year old child who shot himself to death playing with a loaded gun he found in his own home now can we say america is good enough if we still have the highest murder rate in the world and listen to this the rate of accidental shootings deaths for children under 15 in the united states is nine times higher than the rate for the other 25 industrialized nations in the world combined now if you go back to what de tocqueville said that america is great because america is good and then you realize somehow we ve managed to make the most of this incredibly complex modern economy it seems strange if the murder rate is higher here and the accidental death rate is exponentially higher why is that is that because we re not good but we re evil is it because we re not smart but we re stupid we kind of laugh uncomfortably but it s worth thinking about i say the answer to the those questions is of course not some people say well the reason this happens is we re just not tough enough on offenders whether they commit crimes with guns or let kids get guns or don t take good enough care of their guns that we just ought to punish people more but the truth is we have longer sentences and we keep people in jail longer and we ve got a higher percentage of our people behind bars than i think all the countries in the world but one so that s not a very good explanation and i have concluded long since that the truth is we re in the fix we re in because we don t do enough to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children because we don t do enough to lead our children away from violent paths into positive paths and because we don t do enough to intervene in the lives of people who are disturbed angry unstable and mentally ill before it s too late in all of these areas i believe that people of faith could do more to help those of us in public life to give our children back their childhoods and i will be very brief about that and we ll breakfast and we ll go on with our discussion i say that because to those who say well this is about evil of course that s right but most of you believe that evil is a darkness within us all that just metastasize and explodes in a few if america is to be good at least according to my faith we must do more to prevent and overcome evil with good and so it s not enough to say that shootings in los angeles and atlanta are evil or the rampage in fort worth was evil praying and working for peace is good starting grass roots campaigns against youth violence as we re now trying to do all across the nation that s good putting more uniform community police officers in our most dangerous neighborhoods is good these gun buy back programs that are springing up across the country that we re trying to help finance here they re good and i believe passing common sense gun legislation to keep guns out of the wrong hands is a good thing to do i am convinced that the faith community can play a major role in protecting our children from violence in supporting common sense gun legislation in participating in our campaign against youth violence in forming community partnerships to identify and intervene in the lives of people before it is too late on this last point i had a very good talk with the pastor of the wedgewood baptist church just a few days ago you know so many of your places of worship and your organizations have good counseling and outreach programs but they re not necessarily connected to the mental health networks and the social service networks and the law enforcement networks in your community and i m convinced a lot of these people are known to be profoundly disturbed by others well before they go out and kill people and somehow and also a lot of these people especially this is true of men i think are still really hung up about asking for help i know about that that s a hard thing for men to do i know about that and i think there are a lot of people who would maybe be less reluctant to ask for help from someone like you than to show up at the social service office of the government or walk right through the front door of a psychiatrist s or a psychologist s office and we need to think about this there is no big magic national solution for this but i have examined this there are many of you here from new york city there was a profoundly disturbing article on the cover of the new york times sunday magazine a few months ago about the breakdown of the mental health network it was talking about new york but it could have been a story about any state in america it just happened to be about new york and i think that this is something we need to give serious attention to and something i think we could get strong bipartisan support in congress to work with you on the other day i was talking to mrs gore about this you all know how interested she is and i had senator domenici from new mexico in the white house on a totally other different issue and i talked to him about it and i said you know we ve got to do something about this and he looked at me and said you know a lot of these people are mentally ill but we re not reaching them in time and people know that they re troubled before these things happen so i ask you to think about this i think that we have to do more we ve got to do everything we can and much more than we have to protect our children and to give them back their childhoods if you think about it we can hardly do more to make america s spirit y2k ready thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton29 1 95 bill_clinton good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the white house again for many of you and for the first time for some this is always one of my favorite evenings of the year one of hillary s favorite evenings a chance to see old friends and think about old times and look to the future two years ago when i had the opportunity for the first time to host this dinner after having been on the other end of it for 12 years i pledged to you that i would take the experiences that we had shared together and strive to form a new partnership with the governors and with the states after two years i think it s fair to say that we have made good on that pledge and tonight i want to renew that pledge as we debate the astonishing range of opportunities and challenges that are ahead of us i also want to thank those of you who have gone out of your way to give me the opportunity to make good on the pledge when you thought we were slipping a little and i want to thank those of you who have acknowledged what you thought we were doing right in particular two of the governors not of my party who went through the line tonight and complimented the partnership of the federal government and various agencies i appreciate very much i think every american now wants government to expand opportunity and to shrink bureaucracy to empower people to make the most of their own lives to enhance our security but not to do those things that it ought not to do working in partnership with us many of you have pioneered ways to reform health care and to reform welfare free of federal rules and regulations which had previously encumbered you we have done our part to be good partners we have reduced the deficit we have reduced the size of the government we have reduced regulation in important areas we have also done what we could to improve our performance i cited in the state of the union and i cite again something that those of you who have had the misfortune to have disasters know which is that the federal emergency management agency and all those who work in the disaster area the department of transportation hud and others are no longer a disaster when disaster occurs they are there working in partnership with you and we want to do more of that in that spirit now we begin a new year of debate working on welfare perhaps the most important thing we can do from the point of view of all the people of all of our states without regard to party or region or race or income we had a very good meeting yesterday with a bipartisan group of governors local officials members of congress and i thank those of you who participated the vice president will also be presenting a second round of reinventing government proposals which will cut further spending and reduce the federal role and give more responsibilities to the state and as you know we are proposing a tax relief package which focuses primarily on education and giving people tax reductions in return for educating their children and themselves i hope as we go forward we can agree on the things which we don t think the federal government should be doing and i hope we ll also be agreeing on some things we think we should do there is a plain national interest in protecting the essential needs of the children of this country we clearly can do some things right in a non bureaucratic creative way and i think the best example of that is americorps our national service program which has worked closely with many of you in this room tonight i want to close by saluting your distinguished chair governor dean and judy and all of you for all you have done for those of you who have worked with hillary and with me over the years and with the members of our cabinet particularly those who are former governors and i see governor babbitt and governor riley here let me say that there is no more rewarding experience than being able to reach across the lines that divide us to feel that we are really making a difference in peoples lives that we are giving the american people a government that is leaner but not meaner one that really does help them make the most of their own lives i think that s why we all got into this work and if we ll just keep that in mind i think when we re all done we ll be very proud i d like to propose a toast to the chair of the national governors association and to his fine wife and to all the governors and their spouses tonight to the governors and their families thank you dem wjclinton29 1 98 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you general shelton for those kind remarks and for your little walk through memory lane about our association together my most vivid memory of my association with general shelton is when he walked out of the water and looked down at the haitian dictator and said he thought he would have to go and i thought to myself we should have just sent him down here by himself i thank you for your leadership thank you secretary cohen for your remarks and for your extraordinary leadership of the defense department and for helping us to demonstrate every day that this is not a democratic or a republican effort or a democratic or republican administration when it comes to the defense of this country and the welfare of the american people and our men and women in uniform to the members of the joint chiefs the commanders in chief general chilcoat the students of the national defense university faculty and others i am delighted to be here at a place where education experience and excellence make a common home i m especially pleased to be here with the members of the joint chiefs and our commanders in chief whose 68 stars form a shining constellation of talent and achievement we have just had a wonderful meeting and each of the commanders in chief has shared a few moments with me and we ve had a little conversation discussing the whole range of america s security interests the whole range of the concerns of people who are managing the welfare of our men and women in uniform and i must say that i couldn t help thinking during the course of this meeting i wish every person who wears the uniform of the united states could be watching this on closed circuit television because they d have so much confidence in the leadership of our military and in a larger sense i wish every american citizen could have seen it because they would feel so much more pride even than to do now in the way our military is led the thinking about the future that is going on the innovation that is going on and the profound concern for the people who wear our nation s uniform as well as what i consider to be an enormous sensitivity to the increasing interdependence of our united states with other countries and the necessity of more creative positive partnerships around the world and i know we have people here from other nations in this audience today and i welcome you here twelve of the commanders in chief behind me are graduates of the national defense university they indicate the value of this university to the nation they also indicate that in the not too distant future some of you out there will be sitting up here or will otherwise be helping to shape the future of the united states for that i am very grateful in my state of the union address i talked about what we all have to do together to strengthen america for the 21st century today i wanted to meet with you the future stewards of our national security to talk about the foundation of our strength our military and the essential role it will play in this era of challenge and change you all know that we live in a time of tremendous promise for our nation in the world superpower conflict has ended democracy is on the march revolutions in technology and communications have literally brought a world of information to our doorstep americans are more secure and prosperous than ever and we have a rare opportunity and a profound responsibility to build a new era of peace and cooperation in the world even as we welcome this hopeful new moment we all acknowledge especially those of you who are here studying it that the world is far from free of risk challenges persist often in more complex guises from the spread of weapons of mass destruction to the menace of rogue states to the persistence of religious ethic and regional conflict the openness and freedom of movement that we so cherish about this modern world actually make us more vulnerable to a host of threats terrorists drug cartels international criminals that have no respect for borders and can make very clever use of communications and technology in this new world our global leadership is more important than ever that doesn t mean we can go it alone or respond to every crisis we have to be clear where our national interests are at stake but more than ever the world looks to america to get the job done our nation is leading in building a new network of institutions and arrangements to harness the forces of change while guarding against their dangers we are helping to write the international rules of the road for the 21st century protecting those who ve joined the family of nations and isolating those who do not to advance this strategy we have to preserve and strengthen the tools of our engagement of fully funded diplomacy backed by a strong and modern defense diplomacy and force are two sides of the same coin our diplomacy is effective precisely because it is backed by the finest military in the world nothing illustrates the scope of our interests or the purpose of our power better than our unified commands no other nation in history has achieved a global force presence not through intimidation not through invasion but through invitation that is an extraordinary thing no other nation has acquired mastery of land sea sky and space and use it to help advance world peace instead of to pursue conquest the military commanders who share this stage and the forces they lead know their first mission must be always to be ready to fight and win our nation s wars but day in and day out around the world they are shaping an international environment enhancing the security of america in the world so that peace can endure and prevail in our own hemisphere where elected civilian governments now reign american leadership is spurring greater military cooperation than ever promoting regional confidence working together as peacekeepers supporting law enforcement efforts against drugs through the defense ministerial of the americas with the assistance of the ndu we are finding new ways to advance common goals such as healthy civil military relations and respect for human rights in europe our armed forces are reinforcing the foundations of an undivided democratic continent they ve helped new democracies to restructure their own defenses they have participated in dozens of joint exercises with new partners they stopped a brutal war in bosnia and they re helping to heal it s scars during my meeting with the cincs i talked with general clark our supreme allied commander in europe about our bosnia mission i am very proud of the men and women who are representing all of us in bosnia but perhaps even more important they re pretty proud of them themselves they know that they have stopped the guns enabled free elections made it possible for refugees to come home given the children of bosnia the precious gift of peace yes the progress has been slower than we had hoped but clearly it is moving forward if we walk away it could backslide into war costing the lives of more innocent people jeopardizing europe s stability last month i concluded that our troops should take part in a follow on security presence when the sfor mission leaves in june soon nato will finish its review of what forces are appropriate for the new mission and this spring i will submit funding requests to ensure that we can pay our share without undercutting our readiness i ll be working closely with congress to ensure approval of this important legislation the nato led efforts in bosnia reflect our hope for europe s future as former rivals work together for stability and peace soon i ll ask the senate to give its advice and consent to make hungary poland and the czech republic nato s newest members by enlarging the sphere of security in europe we can secure democracy s roots and help to prevent conflicts like bosnia from happening again we re also working to strengthen democracy and peace in africa by helping africans to help themselves through the africa crisis response initiative we re helping african militaries to improve their peacekeeping capabilities so they can respond to crisis more quickly and effectively and stop trouble from escalating into tragedy and just as our interests span the atlantic so they bridge the pacific in our meeting today admiral prueher the commander in chief of our pacific command and general tilelli the commander of u s forces korea confirmed that the 100 000 troops they lead continue to perform superbly from the soldiers of the korean dmz who sleep in their uniforms ready to stop an invasion at a moment s notice to the marines and the sailors on the ships of the 7th fleet forward deployed in japan our troops provide the bedrock of stability on which asia s peace and america s interests depend in recent years we ve strengthened our treaty alliances with japan with thailand with south korea australia and the philippines we persuaded north korea to halt its dangerous nuclear program we ve launched talks that can bring about a lasting peace on the korean peninsula we re deepening our areas of agreement with china while dealing with out differences frankly and openly we re working with our partners to restore asia s financial stability as we build a secure and prosperous asia pacific community our troops make clear that america is committed to remaining a pacific power and everyday they help the pacific region live up to its name america also has vital interests in a stable persian gulf region it s home to two thirds of the world s oil resources and some of its most hostile regimes general zinni our commander in chief of the central command provided me today with an up to date assessment of saddam s latest challenge to the community of nations since desert storm america has worked steadily and persistently to contain the threat saddam poses through sanctions that deny him billions every year to rebuild his military and where necessary with force we struck iraq s intelligence headquarters after its agents plotted to murder president bush we convinced saddam to pull back his troops from kuwait s border in 1994 we tightened the strategic straightjacket on him by extending the no fly zone when he attacked the kurds in 1996 as i said in the state of the union address we know that saddam has used weapons of mass destruction before we again say he should comply with the unscom regime and the will of the united nations but regardless we are determined to deny him the capacity to use weapons of mass destruction again preventing nuclear chemical and biological weapons from winding up in the wrong hands is among the primary challenges we face in the new security environment nineteen ninety eight will be a decisive year for our arms control and nonproliferation agenda i m very pleased that four chairmen of the joint chiefs general shalikashvili general powell admiral crowe and general jones have just this week announced their support for senate ratification of the comprehensive test ban treaty the treaty will help to prevent the development of new and more dangerous weapons and make it more difficult for non nuclear states to build them the senate should ratify it this year we are also committed to toughen the biological weapons convention by establishing an international inspection system to track down and crack down on cheating and we ll continue to urge the russian duma to ratify start ii paving the way for start iii and even deeper nuclear weapons reduction general habiger commander of america s strategic command understands the importance of arms control and addressing the threat of weapons of mass destruction today he and i reviewed the steps we ve taken to ensure that our nuclear deterrent force remains safe reliable effective and unchallenged well into the 21st century one of the key reasons that all of these efforts can be successful is the skill of our military and one of the greatest privileges of my job as i said earlier has been seeing our military at work at home and abroad from haiti to bosnia from japan to kuwait at sea and on shore it makes no difference where they re stationed the rank they hold or how many ribbons they wear our servicemen and women reflect america s highest standards of skill discipline and service they are the patriots who answer the call whenever our nation needs them heroes who man their stations around the clock so the rest of us can sleep without fear hardship uncertainty and separation from loved ones are a part of the job many have missed the birth of their own sons and daughters to make the rest of our children safer part of the reasons i wanted to come here today to one of our top military educational institutions in the company of our military leadership is to bring home to the american people the extraordinary service of our military men and women and all they do to protect our nation and bear the burden of our global leadership in times of peace it s tempting to ignore that the dangers to that kind of service exist but they do when the guns are silent it s easy to forget that our troops are hard at work but they are we must never never take our nation s security or those who provide it for granted defending our nation is difficult and dangerous work even in peacetime most americans for example have absolutely no idea that we lose about 200 of our servicemen and women in training accidents and in the course of regular duty every single year people like private michael harrington and private first class brenda frederick who were killed just this week in fort leonard wood missouri when their truck rolled over and burst into flames during a night blackout drive training people like captain lynn svoboda who went down with her a 10 fighter while training in arizona last summer the first female air force fighter pilot to die in a military plane crash i think the american people ought to know that and i hope all of you as you go out and you have communications with your family and friends around the country will just say that in passing and ask your family members and your friends to share it with their fellow citizens it is not easy to wear the uniform and it is never a completely safe proposition as president the hardest decision i ever have to make is to put our troops in harm s way force can never be the first answer but sometimes still it is the only answer we must and we will always do everything we can to protect our forces we must and will always make their safety a top priority as i did on the issue of antipersonnel mines but we must be strong and tough and mature as a nation strong and tough and mature enough to recognize that even the best prepared best equipped force will suffer losses in action every casualty is a tragedy all its own for a parent or a child or a friend but when the cause is just and the purpose is clear our military men and women are prepared to face the risk the american people have to be as well as the inscription on the korean war memorial says freedom isn t free our obligation to our servicemen and women is to do all we can to help them succeed in their missions to provide the essential resources they need to get the job done this week i will submit to congress my defense budget request for the coming fiscal year a budget that is fully consistent with the quadrennial defense review readiness remains our number one priority and my budget provides for the readiness we need in a hopeful but still hazardous time it makes the enhancements in quality of life that our service personnel and their families deserve it funds the procurement of sophisticated weapons to make sure our troops can be certain of victory no matter how uncertain the future our military leaders understand that tomorrow s force must be agile effective and lean not only in its personnel but in its operations secretary cohen working with general shelton and general ralston has put together a far reaching defense reform initiative to revolutionize the way we do the business of defense streamlining operations spurring competition emphasizing efficiency if our armed forces are to have the training the readiness the equipment the personnel to man the frontiers of freedom abroad congress must do its part by making tough choices here at home that includes closing down bases we no longer need stripping away excess infrastructure not adding funds for unneeded or lower priority projects let our common commitment be to support our troops let that be the bottom line and let us uphold in the future as well as the past the legacy of our american leadership earlier today as i walked into my meeting with our cincs and members of the joint chiefs i saw emblazoned on the wall a quote from general george marshall it read we are now concerned with the peace of the entire world and the peace can only be maintained by the strong those words are no less true today than the day they were spoken by general marshall america s leadership is no less imperative today than the day general marshall spoke those words our strength is every bit as important but more than just maintaining the peace now we have a chance to shape the future to build a world more secure more prosperous than any we have ever known to give our children a world that our own parents could not even have dreamed of our nation will continue to look to our armed forces to pursue that historic mission and i know because of people like you our armed forces will never let us down thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton29 10 93 bill_clinton thank you very much i ve had a good time here today i m a satisfied customer that s true and i rarely cut myself and when i do it s my fault not yours mr zeien and governor weld senator kennedy senator kerry congressman moakley congressman kennedy and my other friends here today this was a good experience for me for a lot of reasons i ve had a wonderful day today we dedicated the kennedy museum over at the kennedy library i urge you all to go and see it it s wonderful improved accessible it s terrific and they even put a little clip of me in there talking so i like it better and i spoke at the kennedy library about the challenges that president kennedy faced over 30 years ago trying to get america to solve its problems here at home which at that time were largely the problems of civil rights and still to be adventuresome when looking toward the future and he launched the space program which we re trying to keep alive and keep going today when he agreed to establish and push for the establishment of the peace corps and the alliance for progress in latin america and when he started a trade adjustment program for people who lost their jobs in trade because he knew that if we did it right we d always have more winners than losers but people who lost their jobs should be retrained so they could get new and different jobs and this is the kind of replay in some ways of that time with a more complex and difficult set of problems i feel right at home here when before i tell people back when i had a life before i became president i was the governor of what my opponent in the last election called a small southern state that had 22 percent of its work force in manufacturing and my job was essentially schools and jobs that s what i did for a living i was in plants all the time i frequently worked shifts in plants i understand a little bit about machine tools and how they work and how they re adjusted i now know what a bam a cam and a pam is i had some plants when i was the governor of my state that shut down and went to mexico and because it was a small state i knew who they were and what they did for a living i was quite proud of the fact that before i left office i brought one of them back because our people were doing a better job in productivity and product modification just like you are and so i want to talk a little bit today just as briefly as i can because mr zeien has already said how this plant and this company will benefit if nafta passes everybody knows there will be some winners and some losers but there s a lot of sort of fogginess about why this is good for america or why it s bad and i want to go through this because i need your help and the congress needs your help not his help with all due respect to him members of congress know most business people are for nafta but they can figure out that if you re smart and you re running a business you can benefit six and one half dozen of the other that is you could benefit in mexico or in the u s so the members of congress want to know that you re going to win if it passes and you hired them so they should want to know if you re going to win right they work for you just like i do the first think i want to say is i have lived with the manufacturing changes of the last 15 years and i would never knowingly do anything that would cost americans jobs i am for this agreement for quite a few reasons the first and big reason is this there is no evidence whatever that a wealthy country cannot only grow wealthier but can actually create jobs and raise incomes unless it expands trade and promotes the growth of the global economy why because if you have a stagnant economy when as you know you can move money around the world in a millisecond technology can be adapted around the world s management can be moved around the world if you have a stagnant economy and poorer countries are growing with new manufacturing that means that people in richer countries will work harder for less money that is exactly what has happened in the united states for 20 years a lot of hourly wage earners have worked harder for lower wages but guess what it s happening everywhere if you look at europe where there s no growth today if you look at france even when they had growth the unemployment rate in the last five years never going below 9 5 percent it is clear that a wealthy country can only grow wealthier in terms of jobs and income at a time when the global economy is growing and they are selling more of their products and services beyond their borders as well as within their borders nobody has ever been able to demonstrate the contrary to me in the modern world so therefore one of our biggest problems in america today is no growth in europe no growth in japan one of our biggest opportunities is that latin america including mexico is the second fastest growing part of the world and it s right here handy and they like to buy our products the second thing i want to say is this a lot of the problems people have with this nafta agreement they have because they believe that the present relationships we have with mexico have encouraged people because wages and cost of production are lower there to go to what is called the maquilladora area it s right across the american border in mexico if you produce there you can send your product back into our country duty free we created that several years ago since we wanted to help mexico grow but in the 1980s when the global economy got really tough and the screws were tightened on company after company after company a lot of people said okay we ll move down there now here s the second reason i m for nafta all the problems associated with the maquilladora issue will get better if we adopt it and they won t if we don t that is forget about selling razor blades in mexico just imagine what s going on to the plants that have moved down there if this agreement passes labor costs in mexico will go up more rapidly environmental costs will go up more rapidly their requirement that products sold in mexico be produced in mexico will be reduced we ll go from selling one to 50 000 or 60 000 american cars in the first year this agreement goes into effect their tariffs will go down so i understand the resentments the fears the insecurities of people probably a lot of them who work within 20 miles of this plant but we ve got to read the agreement the agreement makes those problems better not worse and that s the other reason i m for it and finally just let me say this there will be some people who will be dislocated there always are if you have a trade agreement just as president kennedy recognized in 1962 there always are i intend to ask the congress to literally revolutionize the unemployment and the training system in this country you know the average person who loses their job today does not get called back to the same company that s the way it was for 40 years it s not true anymore the average person who loses a job today has to go find a job with a different company often it s a very different kind of job i agree with what senator kerry said it s one thing to talk about changing work seven times in a lifetime and another thing to do it if everyone of you stays with gillette until you retire i ll bet you anything you ll have to change what you do if everyone of you stays with this company some of you are quite young for 20 30 40 years you know as well as i do 10 years from now the nature of your work will be different than it is today even if you have the same employer isn t that right i know how different these machines are how long ago was it when there wasn t anybody on an assembly line reading a computer how long ago was it that you had to do all your quality checks visually and it took longer and not as well i mean this is the world is changing so as cruel and tough as it is we can t pretend that it s not going to happen you could if we can t get all our titles straightened out you could give us all we could all shift and take one another s job and we couldn t repeal the changes they re going to happen so we have to decide are we going to make these changes our friend or our enemy or are we going to have more gillettes or more plants close down are we going to find more markets so we can secure the jobs we ve got add more jobs and so companies can afford to give pay raises to their employees or not that is what is at stake there are a lot of misconceptions about mexico a lot of people say well we ve got a trade surplus with them now but only because they re buying our plant and machinery so they can put up plants that five years from now they ll be shipping all this stuff back here and we ll have a trade deficit let me tell you something 40 percent of the dollar value of our export in the entire world are in capital goods that is things that can be used in manufacturing 60 percent in consumer products but in mexico only 33 percent of their purchases of our products are in capital goods two thirds in consumer products like razor blades two thirds more than the global average that country now is the second biggest purchaser of american products there s 90 million people there and they re handy and you say well what do they get out of this deal i ll tell you what they get out of this deal if we adopt this deal it will be safer and more secure and more attractive for americans to invest in mexico but not along the border to export to america but down in mexico city or over in vera cruz or in other places to put them to work making products for themselves and that s good for you too why because if more of them have jobs and the more income they ve got the more products of ours they can buy now we have a trade problem in america today but it s not with mexico and it s not with latin america tiny colombia has increased their purchases of american products 69 and 64 percent in the last two years what s our trade problem 49 billion trade deficit with japan 19 billion trade deficit with china 9 billion trade deficit with taiwan we ve got a 5 7 billion trade surplus with mexico and we re worried about them when they want to buy more of our products look the people that are against this have legitimate fears and resentments and anger there were a lot of workers that were thrown in the streets over the last 15 or 20 years we have gone through two decades when a lot of hourly workers never got a pay raise we are having a tough time creating jobs and income but we don t want to cut off our nose to spite our face we can t let this trade agreement become the flypaper that catches all those fears because it will make it better not worse so i say if you believe that because you know what the experience of this company is i want you to sit down and write a letter not a pressure letter but a nice letter really just two lines to the senators to the congressmen or collect them all up and send them here and let them send them in but they need to know that there s somebody out here in massachusetts somebody out here in south boston somebody in the entire united states that s going to make a living out of this deal that understands that we re going to get more jobs and higher incomes and more opportunities if we do this because if we turn it away it s really going to be a terrible thing you know we actually get a trade advantage over the japanese and the europeans in mexico if this passes and if it fails and they still need the money to develop their country what are we going to do what s gillette going to do in mexico if they turn around and give that trade advantage to somebody else if they offer this same deal to somebody else i ll guarantee you the japanese the european community would take this deal in a heartbeat this is a good deal it is no accident that the ministry of trade in japan has come out against this deal it is a good thing for us so i ask you to talk to your friends and neighbors talk to the people who are worried about it tell them their fears are well founded but they don t have anything to do with this agreement this agreement will make it better and meanwhile we will continue to build the security that americans need we ve already had more private sector jobs come into this economy in nine months than in the previous four years we re tackling the health care issue we re tackling the deficit issues interest rates are at a 30 year low we are moving in the right direction but i m telling you nothing i do as your president within the borders of the united states can create more jobs and higher incomes unless somebody buys the stuff we produce and that requires us to expand our market help us to do that by personally telling the members of congress you d appreciate it if they vote for the nafta agreement thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton29 10 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you philadelphia can you hear us in the back beyond the fence thank you thank you for being here today thank you congressman chaka fattah for your eloquent introduction what s all that music whoever turned it off give them a hand that s great there are a few thousand people out there beyond the fence can you hear us back there welcome we re glad to see you thank you congressman chaka fattah for your leadership thank you mayor rendell for your outstanding leadership of philadelphia it s amazing what you ve accomplished for all of america as you said in your introduction congressman borski congressman foglietta and i d like to introduce a person that i hope will be joining them in the united states congress to fight for you and you future joe hoeffel a congressional candidate very near here thank you sir thank you president of the philadelphia city council john street thank you my good friends grover washington patti labelle boyz 2 men weren t they great thank you rodney peete for what you said and what you do and we all wish you well in your recovery he s in a line of work where he even takes more blows than i do and he s doing very well and thank you holly for being here thank you dr papadakis and thank you dr judith roden thank you chairman brady and thank you catherine baker knowles and i understand that there are students here from 21 different colleges and universities throughout the delaware valley thank you all of you for coming here today thank you secretary riley for being here with me and for being i believe the most outstanding secretary of education in the history of that department ladies and gentlemen we re about to elect the last president of the 20th century the first president of the 21st century you have a lot at stake in that election i wanted to come here today where there would be so many young people to ask you to think about your tomorrows i ask you to go home tonight and before you go to bed to spend just a few moments asking yourself a simple question what do i want my country to be like when we cross that bridge into the 21st century what do i hope my country will be like when my children are my age here we are in philadelphia the birthplace of american democracy when our forefathers gathered here to lead the way into the 19th century over 200 years ago they restored to the earth a form of government called democracy that had been all but forgotten for 2000 years since ancient greece people had given up on the idea that people could be free could freely govern themselves could elect their own leaders and make their own decisions and march into the future as equal children of god it was a revolutionary idea and because they did that they set in motion a whole chain of circumstances that have brought us here today all of us from our different ethnic and racial and religious backgrounds all of us from our different economic circumstances all of us from all over this great country and from all over the world we stand here today freely to debate our opinions and discuss our visions because they did that what i want you to understand is that we are about to begin a new century and a new millennium where we are radically changing the way we work and live and relate to each other where we must find a way to meet our challenges and seize our opportunities while preserving the values that have sustained this country and our families and our lives for over 200 years many of you in this audience today will soon be doing jobs that have not been invented yet many of you will even be doing work that has not been imagined yet i want to say a special word of thanks to those who are here who are pushing the frontiers of knowledge the hundreds of scientists and engineers including many here in pennsylvania who have supported our goals in science and technology and i want to thank especially one of your own who is here today and was a pioneer of the internet and one of the co chairs of scientists and engineers for clinton gore pennsylvania s own david farber thank you for being here today if you just think about the internet four years ago when i took the oath of office as president about the only people who knew about the internet were nuclear physicists today my cat has his own home page and on web site i stop and shake hands with school children they know not very much about me but they have been conversing with socks on the internet before you know it there will be 100 million people on the internet so when we think about this election i think it s good to cheer and shout make a lot of noise and get our emotions running but i also think you ought to take a little time just to ask yourself what do i want this country to be like when we cross that bridge to a new century and a new millennium i have always wanted america to go into this new century with the american dream alive and well for everyone responsible enough to work for it i have always wanted to know that our country would still be the strongest force in the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and i have always wanted to know that we could beat the tide of history driving so many people apart around the world and we could say we love our diversity we relish our diversity we re building a stronger american community with all the different people who come here who share our values and believe in our constitution four years ago when the people of pennsylvania supported me you sort of took me on faith today you don t have to do that entirely there is a record and it is true that we have 10 5 million more jobs that we have the lowest deficit that our country has had once you adjust for inflation in 22 years that our deficit is now the lowest of any advanced country in the world and that in part because of that we have lower interest rates which means lower loan rates for businesses lower car payment rates and student loan rate and home mortgage rates that s what gives you 10 5 million new jobs and record numbers of new businesses we have seen after years and years of decline and stagnation the typical families incomes begin to go up substantially again the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years we have the largest number of businesses owned by women and minorities in the history of america we are moving in the right direction to the 21st century the welfare rolls have dropped by nearly 2 million the crime rate has gone down for four years in a row and is now at a 10 year low ten million americans just got an increase in their minimum wage twenty five million americans may be helped by the kennedy kassebaum bill that says you can t lose your health insurance anymore just because you change jobs or somebody in your family has been sick we ve stopped and made it illegal for insurance companies to kick mothers and their newborn babies out of the hospital after 24 hours there are fewer chemical pollutants in the air our drinking water is safer our food standards have been raised we ve cleaned up more toxic waste sites in three years than the previous administrations did in 12 the environment is cleaner and we have fought off the most vigorous assault on environmental protection since we began to protect the environment in 1970 we are moving in the right direction into the 21st century we have expanded head start created the national service program given our schools the tools they need to meet higher standards we have lowered the cost of college loans and improved the repayment terms so that for 10 million american students today you can pay your college loan back as a percentage of your income and never fear being bankrupted because of the increase in the cost of college i just signed the biggest increase in the pell grant program in 20 years and 200 000 more work study positions for college students throughout america we are moving in the right direction but you have to decide and i want to go through some of the specific issues but i want you to keep the big issues in mind the big issues are what do you believe we have to do together as a people nationally it s not the government versus the people our administration has reduced the size of government the number of regulations the number of programs and privatized more government operations than the last two administrations combined that is not what it is it s whether you believe we d be better off going into the future with the philosophy of you re on your own or whether you think it does take a village to raise our children and invest in our future and move forward into the 21st century it s whether you believe that it s enough for someone to say to you whatever your station in life there is the future out there and there is a lot of mountains to climb and valleys to cross and rivers to ford i hope you make it or whether you want to build a bridge that s strong enough and wide enough for every one of us to walk across together that is the question before you so will we balance the budget while we protect our investments in education research the environment and our obligations to poor children to our families in nursing homes to people with disabilities through medicare and medicaid or will we adopt a risky tax scheme that will blow a hole in the deficit and require bigger cuts than those i vetoed last year when they shut the government down i think i know the answer to that i think you want to balance the budget keep the economy growing and have targeted tax cuts for education and child rearing and health care and buying a first home will you help me build that bridge we have made a beginning on health care reform but our balanced budget plan will go further it will help families keep their insurance when they re between jobs for six months it will add another million children to the ranks of insured it will give free mammograms to women on medicare and for the nearly two million families struggling to care with a family member with alzheimer s we re going to keep them some respite care because they re trying to keep their families together that s what we ought to do will you help us build that bridge we passed the family and medical leave law which has given 12 million families a chance to take a little time off from work when a baby is born or a family member is sick our friends on the other side led the fight against family and medical leave they said it would hurt the economy we have 10 5 million more jobs and the fastest small business growth in american history it does not hurt the economy when you help people succeed at home and at work parenting is our most important work and we re better off i want to expand family and medical leave to say you can have a little time off without losing your job to go see your children s teacher twice a year and when someone in your family needs to go to the doctor to take them and i think when people earn overtime they ought to have the right to decide whether to take the overtime in cash or time with their family if they re needed at home will you help us build that kind of future the crime rate has gone down for four years in a row because we listen to the police in this country and the community activists because we passed a crime bill that had tougher punishment but also had prevention programs to give our children something to say yes to is putting 100 000 police on the street and taking guns and drugs and gangs off the street the brady bill cost no pennsylvania hunter a weapon not a single one but 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers didn t get handguns to terrorize the people here in philadelphia as a result of it and now we have to go further and finish the job of putting those police on the street you know our friends on the other side they still are trying to undermine our commitment to 100 000 police it is bringing the crime rate down i want to keep going until we have eight years of declining crime and everybody in this country feel safe walking on the street outside their house with their children playing in the park down the street feel safe in their schools safe in their homes safe in their neighborhoods from the violence against women act to the domestic violence prevention program to the 100 000 police we are moving in the right direction will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century there are still 10 million children in this country living within four miles of a toxic waste dump i want to close 500 more so we can look every child in the face and say son or daughter you re going to grow up next to a park not poison in america we know the environment can be enhanced as we grow the economy and we will never turn back on that commitment will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century we ve moved almost 2 million people from welfare to work and signed a new bill that says that people who are able bodied have to turn their welfare check into a paycheck within two years that sounds good but passing a law does not change people s lives i say if you require people to go to work you had better make sure there is work for them to do i have a plan to create those jobs and i want you to help me build that bridge to the 21st century will you help us do that most of all my fellow americans your vote will decide whether we go forward together in our common quest to give every person in this country from the smallest children to people way in their later years who need it the opportunity to learn and to keep on learning for a lifetime and to do so at international standards of excellence we have worked hard to improve education but we must do more we have to raise standards define them expect them and measure them and hold people accountable we ought to do more forty percent of the 8 year olds in this country this is important 40 percent of the 8 year olds in this country can still not read independently that s partly because we have so many people coming to our country from other places and their first language isn t english but they need to learn to read so they can grow and learn and someday show up at the university of pennsylvania or drexel and do well that s when they need to learn now we have a plan to mobilize 30 000 americorps volunteers and other trained reading experts to go across the country to generate one million total volunteers to help teach children to read of the 200 000 extra work study slots we just got allocated to college students i want 100 000 of those devoted to young people who say yes if you will help me go through college i will be glad to take some of my time to teach a young child to read will you help us do that will you help us do that we have to keep going with technology until we hook every school and library in the country up to the internet to the information superhighway i want to do it for free every classroom and every library for the first time in history if we do this we can know for the very first time since education began in america that the students in the poorest inner city schools the students in the most remote mountain villages along with students in the wealthiest schools and the middle class schools all of our kids together for the first time ever will have access to the same information in the same way at the same time we are going to revolutionize learning in america if we do it will you help us do that and finally we are determined to open the doors of college education to all americans by passing the hope scholarship and saying within four years we want two years of education after high school to be as universal as a high school diploma is today and we ll help you do it you can deduct dollar for dollar from your tax bill the cost of a typical community college tuition until everybody can go we ll pay the way all you have to do is work hard and make your grades be responsible and we ll give the opportunity to build a new life we want to give every college student undergraduate or graduate in any form of higher education a 10 000 tax deduction a year for the cost of any tuition will you help us do that we want to let families all over america save in iras for college and withdraw the money without tax penalty for education or home buying or medical costs so that we can say we will never tax the money being used for higher education in america because we want everyone to go i want you to help us achieve that we can do it with your help will you do it and finally let me just say this look around this great sea of people today you have people here who come from every continent from many different racial and ethnic and religious groups here we are together as americans you have people here with different political opinions i m glad some of the opposition showed up today reminds us we don t have everything now wait a minute listen that s what makes america america if we all agreed it wouldn t be nearly as interesting as it is because we re all different but you think about the rest of the world congressman fattah mentioned it but you think about bosnia the middle east northern ireland rwanda burundi south africa how many places in the world have people been torn apart because folks are driven by their hatreds rather than their hopes because people define themselves in terms of who they aren t instead of who they are because political leaders are always looking for a wedge to drive into the stake of the spirit of people instead of looking for way to bring us together we have beat that in the reaction to the terrible tragedy in oklahoma city we said we don t hate people just because they work for our government they re our servants and the reaction we had to the terrible church burnings to the desecrations of synagogues and the destruction of islamic centers we said in america we believe in religious freedom and dignity you look around this crowd today that s the last thing i want to say we have got to say if you believe in the constitution the declaration of independence and the bill of rights birthed by our founders here so many years ago if you are willing to show up tomorrow and do the right thing being a good student going to work and doing your best we don t need to know anything else about you you re part of our america part of our future and you re going to walk across that bridge with us into the 21st century will you be there next week will you lead them thank you god bless you we can do it thank you dem wjclinton29 10 98a bill_clinton thank you very much doctor thank you for your remarks and peter and lori and your families and your extended family here let me say at the outset that i had two thoughts when peter was speaking one sort of craven thought i thought i wish i had taped that and the next time i really need a tough vote for him i will play it back my more noble thought was was that i was sitting there looking at peter and thinking about the times we spent together the times lori used to go jogging with me before i hurt my leg now i use it as an excuse not to be humiliated and i was thinking about the times we spent together and i was thinking how fortunate our country is that people like him will do the work that he does and we are very fortunate you know this has been a pretty good six years for the economy and if peter deutsch hadn t been in congress he would have made a lot of money in this economy he would have done well in this economy and our country is blessed by that let me just be very brief here today i came to florida with hillary to see the space shuttle and to see a man who has been a very good personal friend of mine and of my wife s john glenn go into space at the age of 77 it was a thrilling experience i m sure all of you who either saw it from a distance or saw it on television felt the same way and a lot of people came up to me and said gosh you look tired and that s because i still haven t recovered from what i was doing last week at this time which was finally announcing the end of nine days of talks on the middle east peace process which culminated which culminated in a 30 something hour marathon i was up 39 hours in a row and i didn t even do that in college i didn t know i had it in me at my old age and in my declining years but anyway i made it i say that because those two events this space shuttle with john glenn on it and that peace process embody so much of what i ve tried to do as president and so much about what i think is best in our country the idea of giving everybody an opportunity to go as far as his or her dreams will carry them the idea of being adventurous in all and daring to change and being willing to take a risk and always thinking about the future one of you who went through the line and had your picture taken with me tonight quoted back my 1992 campaign theme don t stop thinking about tomorrow that s what that space program is all about and then the peace process embodied not only the peace we would like to bring to the world but the peace we would like to bring to our own country how strongly and earnestly we wish to reach across all the lines that divide us here to make one america and then to bring that spirit of reconciliation to the rest of the world in freedom in democracy and when i became president i really set out to create a country for the 21st century where everyone who would work for it could have opportunity where we would be one community across all our diversity and where we would still be the world s leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity not just for ourselves but for others as well none of the things that i have done that required any act from congress would have been possible without people like peter and when things go well the president gets the credit but very often there are so many others whose work is utterly indispensable and i think you should know that if we hadn t passed that economic plan in 1993 we wouldn t be here celebrating this today if we hadn t passed the crime bill to give 100 000 police to our streets and to finally take on the brady bill issues and the assault weapons ban we wouldn t be here celebrating the lowest crime rate in a generation today so there are lots of things that he and others deserve credit for in this last budget negotiation the reason we got in a hostile congress the reason we got 100 000 teachers and after school programs for kids in trouble and a big increase in our clean water plan and continued support to clean up the florida everglades and restore them was that the congress stayed with me the democrats and our party and we were reunited and i want to thank peter for having this pac and for being willing to not only help himself but help like minded people throughout the country because this election tuesday is no ordinary election this election will have a lot to do with 21st century america and the differences between the parties are quite profound we don t believe that we we waited 29 years for a surplus and we do not believe we should spend it until we have saved social security for the 21st century they disagree with that furthermore i don t think we should do anything that gives the slightest signal of economic instability at a time when there s so much trouble in the rest of the world and florida depends upon trade investment and tourism to do well you have a big interest in our doing the right thing by our economy and trying to stabilize the world economy so that s something we believe the other the leadership of the other party disagrees with that we believe that it s a good thing to have properly managed health care but that the management of a system should not overcome its purpose and that people who are in health plans ought to have a right to see a specialist if the doctor says they should see one that they ought to if they get in an accident they ought to go to the nearest emergency room not one that s 20 miles away because it s covered if they re in the middle of a pregnancy or a chemotherapy treatment they ought not lose their doctor just because their employer changes health plans during that period that s what we believe and they disagree with us on this patients bill of rights it s something that would affect well over 100 million americans it s a huge issue we believe that our children should all have a chance to have a good education that s why we fought for the 100 000 teachers but we did not win thank you but we did not win the classrooms to teach them in we also had a plan fully paid for in the balanced budget to help states build or repair 5 000 schools no state in america needs that more than florida we disagree on that they don t think we should be doing this in washington i think we should so i could go through lots of other issues we tried to raise the minimum wage because unemployment and inflation are low and they didn t think we should and they stopped us we believe that we should act to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco the number one public health problem for kids in america and they stopped us we believe we should pass campaign finance reform and they stopped us there is a huge choice and you may have noticed in the press yesterday that in the last two years not unrelated to the bills that they defeated they were successful in raising 100 million more than we were in the last two years but because of people like peter and because of people like you we are doing quite well in a blizzard of close races in which we re being outspent so you have to understand that your being here too is an act of citizenship and that if you weren t here doing this that no matter how good our ideas are and no matter how big a majority there is in the country for our ideas they wouldn t be heard by the voters the last thing i want to ask you to do is to do everything you can between now and tuesday to ask everyone with whom you come in contact to go and vote everybody who felt patriotic when john glenn went up in the space ship today with his colleagues should carry that feeling through to tuesday because the space program that s the last thing i want to say the space program is a product of a democratic system in which it was under complete assault when i became president and the space program is exhibit a for the idea that government can give you more at less cost they re not spending much more money than they were the day i took office six years ago then they were sending up two launches a year now they re sending eight launches a year at roughly half the cost per launch i know it s important to florida so i ask you thank you for your money thank you for peter deutsch keep him in congress as long as he wants to stay give him a promotion some day but you just remember what i said there s a huge difference in a very clear way about what kind of 21st century america we re going to have and you and everybody you touch between now and tuesday needs to show up thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton29 10 98b bill_clinton thank you very much the first thing i have to say is that meyer berman asked me to make a public service announcement that in the interest of enlightened citizenship he has for everyone here a copy of james carville s latest book let me first of all say to danny and to eva thank you for bringing us into your beautiful home for the wonderful dinner for the music on the balcony i thank all the people who served us tonight i think they did a great job and i think we ought to give them a round of applause i thank you and meyer for co chairing this event i thank all of you for coming some of you my good friends from all around america i d like to say to all the public servants who are here a special word of appreciation florida has been i think particularly blessed to be well served i want to thank lawton chiles for being a great united states senator and a great governor and a great partner for me and a great friend congressman alcee hastings thank you for your support and your friendship congressman peter deutsch and lori congressman rob wexler and his wife laurie thank you for being here senator daryl jones and state representative elaine bloom thank you for being here this state needs good leadership i d like to also say back when i decided to run for president in 1991 i think i mentioned senator graham did i where is he he s here somewhere i want to tell you senator graham and i used to be seat mates he taught me how to be a governor so i served with bob graham and lawton chiles and i finally figured out how to do the job and that s really a big reason i got to be president but i want to come back to 1991 but i want to say that i think both of them would say that we really enjoyed being governors and i was so afraid that bob graham wouldn t run for reelection this year and he s so desperately needed in the senate because to be the governor of a place like florida and there is so much to be done and it s so exciting and it s so vibrant and things are changing so fast and then you go to washington and you see there is so much to be done and there are so many challenges and it s so exciting but nobody really wants to do it or at least a lot of people would rather posture and position and sling words back and forth instead of actually rolling up their sleeves and doing it that s why lawton left the senate and came back to florida and yet i don t think it is wrong to say that it s really what america needs at every level which brings me back to buddy and ann when i wanted to run for president in 1991 really only my wife and my mother thought i had a chance to win and apparently a few people in the republican party but i came down here and i knew actually the first big test of a presidential campaign is now in florida it s the straw poll conducted at the december state convention in florida elaine remembers all the sort of traipsing around and there were people in florida who started with me in 1991 who have been my friends ever since but buddy mackay stood up for me and stood by me and was with me every step of the way now one of the things i think you want in a governor is somebody with a lot of foresight and it looks to me like he qualifies just on that ground alone he joined my mother and my wife in thinking i had a chance to win and i think that s a big quality but let me say in all seriousness i know this man very very well i admire him and his wife very much and i made a i sometimes i guess because i m not running again i can say things that are sort of impolitic so i ll say something that s impolitic it is not rational that he would be behind in the polls at all because he and lawton chiles have done a good job together as partners and this is a better stronger state than it was eight years ago the economy is stronger the education initiatives are stronger there s been an aggressive effort to grow the economy and preserve the environment we re working together on the everglades trying to figure out what to do there to keep this thing going and i can just go through issue after issue after issue and so i will ask everybody i talk to about buddy s race because my staff makes fun of me because i ve just been obsessed with this i don t have any hard feelings about mr bush i just want him to be elected governor because i think he s got the best program and the best record and i think he ll be the best governor for florida that s what i think and as i get older i m sensitive to this there s always going to be one candidate who will be younger and the other one will be a little older and one candidate will have a little more money and the other one won t and sometimes one candidate comes from a more famous family than the other one but let me ask you a question all of you here that know buddy mackay if he wins this election on tuesday do you have any doubt that he will be reelected four years from now no you don t do you why because you know that he d be a great governor now if you believe that then you need to do what you can you owe it to yourselves to go out and make sure he wins on tuesday you owe it to yourselves to the future of this state this is a very good man with an extraordinary record of service who will do this state proud and you have big big big challenges here that require a serious consistent sustained response the education issue is one bob and rob and peter and i we just worked like crazy and we all stayed together and we got enough money in this last budget to make a big down payment on putting 100 000 more teachers in the schools focused in the early grades so that when we get it all done we can take the average class size nationwide down to 18 in the first three grades very important but we can give you all that money in florida and you won t be able to take advantage of it why because in places as big as tampa and as small as jupiter and all places in between everybody is in trailers already so where are you going to put the teachers we have to build more classrooms so no matter what we do even if in this election i get enough help because the voters elect a few more democrats to give a little more balance in the congress which i hope they will and we pass our class size initiative it will support what florida has to do but it won t supplant it because you re growing so fast so it s a huge deal this is a big issue if one candidate is committed to smaller classes and more classrooms and more teachers and building up the system and the other isn t that s a massive issue i ll just give you one other issue we ve got 160 million americans in managed care plans and we were talking around our table tonight about john glenn being 77 and how we re all living longer i certainly hope that s true and i said that i was just reading that if a person lives to be 65 in america then a man at 65 has a life expectancy of 81 a woman has a life expectancy of 85 and the fastest growing group of people in america percentage wise as all floridians probably know are people over 85 and we were talking about strom thurmond who is 96 who came to see me last week and we were joking about that he wanted to jog with me but i couldn t keep up with him this is a huge issue and more and more senior care will be in managed care now i supported the managed care movement when i ran for president and i did when i presented health care plans to the congress because when i became president a lot of people have forgotten this you talked about inflation being down health care costs were going up at three times the rate of inflation it was unsustainable it was going to bankrupt every business every state government the federal budget lawton and bob and i we talked about it a lot it was unsustainable we had to do something to manage the system better but no system can be managed in a way that destroys the purpose for which it s set up in the first place and so we have this patients bill of rights in washington and you want to buddy wants to do a version of it here which simply says some pretty basic things if you re in a health care plan and your doctor says you need to see a specialist you ought to be able to do it if you re in a big city and you get in an accident the ambulance ought to take you to the nearest emergency room not one that s 20 miles away because it happens to be covered if you re in the middle of a treatment chemotherapy or pregnancy or any other sustained treatment and your employer changes your health insurance provider you ought to be able to keep that doctor until you finish your treatment and big issue you should be able to keep your medical records private that s all that does so if one party in washington or in florida is for it and the other is not that s a huge difference that will affect the lives the texture of life for millions and millions of people this is not some casual passing thing i could go on and on and on so i wanted to be here tonight because i am grateful to the florida public servants who served with me to lawton chiles and to bob graham who i ve known now for three decades i guess not for 30 years but parts of three decades to these two fine young congressmen that i think have such a brilliant future to my long time friend congressman hastings who i m trying to take dressing lessons from i love that blue suit and who has really been a champion for what is right in washington in so many ways that i m very grateful for and i wanted to be here for buddy mackay i just want to say one last thing so many of you have been very nice to me tonight you ve talked about what happened at the wye plantation and then you said something about me going without sleep that s true i was up for 39 hours at the end of those peace talks and i never did that in college and now i know why because i m not over it yet but i would like to a lot of you here have been heavily involved in israel and many of you even with the arabs and the middle east and you have a vested you ve got a real oar in the water you have very sophisticated knowledge of this but what i want to ask is just as americans why did you and why did other people feel so good when that was announced what was it about that that made everybody feel so good hope yes you said oh my god here are these two guys they ve been dumping all over each other they all have got problems at home they re going to get grief because they did this both of them are going to be in greater everybody who understands it knows that they re both in greater physical danger because they made this deal and here are these guys that can hardly bear to speak to each other and they get up on this high dive and they hold hands and they jump off together and it made us all feel more alive we felt bigger the possibility that things can change and the possibility that people can be reconciled to one another after all the scars and all the injuries and all the wrongdoing and all the disappointments that there can be both progress and community why did we all love it when old john glenn went up in the space ship today because it was about possibility it was about oh my god i ve got a 77 year old and he still looks good in his clothes he s sharp as a tack and he s doing great gosh maybe i can be like that maybe we can all change the way we are maybe we can push back the frontiers of possibility not just in space but here on earth and so it made us feel bigger what i m trying to say to you is i ve done nearly everything or at least made real progress on nearly everything i told the american people i d try to do when i ran in 1992 we haven t made health care available and affordable for all americans yet every other major commitment i made we ve made real progress on but the one thing i have not been able to do is to make washington a less partisan less negative place i have lord knows i have tried and one of the things that i hope will happen in this election season is that people will say never mind who s got the most money on the ads and all this i am going to choose a course for the future of my country that reflects the same aspirations and the same values that i felt when i was cheering for netanyahu and arafat when i was cheering for john glenn but i believe that what that represents ought to be something that is a part of my everyday life as an american as a floridian as a citizen in my business in my work in my family in everything but especially in our public life that is what i want and i am trying so hard to make that argument to the american people and when you get right down to it the investment you made tonight is going to give the people here in florida who are working for our candidates and our causes and our issues the power to get more people to do that on tuesday i told everybody if you like what i did in the middle east peace talks keep in mind i am a hired hand i was elected to do that by you everything that i did if i had any role in it that was positive i did through the direct authority of the people of the united states who voted on election day in 1996 if you liked what happened when john glenn went up in space keep in mind that is the product of a democratic government that shuttle could not have gone up today but for the votes in the congress to keep the space program alive and to ratify its direction which means that in a profound sense if you supported someone who supported the space program your hand was on john glenn s shoulder when he lifted off today if you voted for me and the direction i wanted to take in the middle east peace you were standing there when we announced the agreement at wye you have to see it this way i do not want to finish my term without knowing that we have not only helped the american people to become more reconciled to one another across racial and other lines that divide us but also without knowing that we have made our best efforts to have our political leaders in washington behave the way most citizens behave in america every day the only way you can get that done is to show up and elect people like buddy mackay next tuesday thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton29 11 99 bill_clinton thank you good afternoon please be seated i want to welcome the members of congress who are here members of the cabinet the police officers and teachers who are shielding me from the cold wind and who represent the big winners in this year s budget i would like to say a special word of thanks to jack lew sylvia mathews larry stein and martha foley for the work that they did on this budget and i know that many members of the senate and the house who are here brought their staff members who worked on the budget i want to thank them for their work as well last january in my state of the union address i asked our congress to use this truly historic time of peace and prosperity to meet our generation s responsibilities to the new century to extend our economic prosperity improve our education system make our streets safer protect our environment move more americans from welfare to work prepare for the aging of our nation and strengthen our leadership in the world the first budget of the 21st century was a long time in coming but it goes a very long way toward fulfilling those historic responsibilities though it leaves some challenges unmet it represents real progress it is a budget for a government that lives within its means and lives up to the values of the american people we value prosperity and this budget will help to extend it it maintains the fiscal discipline that has turned deficits into surpluses and gives us what will be in february the longest economic expansion in the history of the united states it avoids risky tax cuts that would have spent hundreds of billions of dollars from the social security surplus and drained our ability to advance education and other important public purposes the budget keeps us on track toward paying down the debt so that in 15 years our nation will be debt free for the first time since 1835 this will mean lower interest rates and greater growth for a whole generation of americans we value education and this budget truly puts education first continuing our commitment to hire 100 000 highly qualified teachers to lower class size in the early grades which common sense and research both tells us leads to improved learning the budget also helps to fulfill another promise i made last winter to encourage more accountability for results in our nation s schools under this budget for the first time we will help states and school districts turn around or shut down their worst performing schools schools that year after year fail to give our most disadvantaged students the learning they need to escape poverty and reach their full potential and the budget provides further help for students to reach higher standards by doubling funds for after school and summer school programs which will enable us to reach hundreds of thousands of more students and by increasing support for mentoring programs including the gear up program to help students go on to college we value the safety of our families and this budget will make america a safer place it invests in our cops program which already has funded 100 000 community police officers and helped to give us the lowest crime rate in 25 years this agreement will help to hire up to 50 000 more community police officers targeted in neighborhoods where the crime rates still are too high we value the environment and this budget protects the environment and preserves our precious natural heritage it includes our historic lands legacy initiative to set aside more of our magnificent natural areas and vital greenspaces and does not include destructive anti environmental riders we value quality health care and this budget includes historic investments in biomedical research mental health pediatric training and other areas and it ensures that hospitals and other medical providers will have the resources they need to provide the 39 million elderly and disabled medicare beneficiaries with the quality health care that they need and deserve finally we value america s role of leadership in the world and this budget strengthens that role with greater investments in our nation s strong defense and our nation s diplomacy by paying our dues and arrears to the united nations meeting our commitments to the middle east peace process providing debt relief for the poorest countries of the world and funding efforts to safeguard nuclear weapons and expertise in russia let me thank the leaders of both parties for their roles in this agreement we had a lot of late night long phone calls which led to it i thank the leaders of the relevant committees and subcommittees for their special efforts in this regard and of course i want to say a special word of thanks to the leaders and members of my party in both houses who strongly supported my efforts for the 100 000 teachers the 50 000 police the investments in the environment and paying the u n dues as we celebrate what we ve accomplished i ask us all to be humble and mindful of what we still have to accomplish to give all americans in all health plans the protections they need we still need a strong enforceable patients bill of rights to curb gun violence and keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and children we still need sensible gun safety legislation to close the gun show loophole in the brady law to ban the importation of large ammunition clips to include the requirement for child trigger locks in a juvenile brady bill to build one america with freedom and justice for all we should pass the hate crimes prevention act to meet the challenge of the aging of america we must extend the life of the social security trust fund well beyond the years of the baby boomers retirement lift the earnings limitation and alleviate poverty among older women on social security to ensure the health of our seniors in the years to come we must secure and modernize medicare including a voluntary prescription drug benefit to make sure hard working americans have a place at the table of our prosperity we must pass a new markets initiative to give americans the same incentives to invest in poor areas they have to invest in poor areas around the world we must raise the minimum wage and increase our support for quality child care in the weeks and months ahead we can achieve these vital goals if we keep in mind that the disagreements we have are far less important than our shared values and our shared responsibility to the future with this budget we have helped to begin that future again let me thank the leaders and the members in congress in both parties that contributed to a budget that passed with large majorities in both houses and both parties i am proud to sign a bill that i believe will give us a stronger better america in the 21st century i d like to now invite the members of congress to come up and stand with me and then i d like to ask the police officers and the teachers to come in behind the members of congress and we ll sign the budget thank you very much dem wjclinton29 2 00a bill_clinton thank you very much the republicans control the airlines schedule let me say first of all i m delighted to be here i want to thank philip for opening his home and for helping our party i want to thank chris for helping tonight i want to thank our great chairman ed rendell and andy tobias for coming down and i know andy used to live here used to tell me how much better the florida tax system was than most of the places that i lived i want to thank my good friend bill nelson of many years for running for the senate and ask you all to help him and my friend representative elaine bloom one of my first supporters in florida when i ran for president is now a candidate for congress we ve just come from an event for her i hope you will support her and i want to thank congressman peter deutsch and his wife lori for being good friends to me and great supporters over these last several years i ll be very brief because i want to get out here and visit with you and talk and hear what s on your mind i m not running for anything and i m down here and some people think it s just because i m a political junky and can t help it at election time i ve got to get wired and go around but that s not quite all there is to it i appreciate what philip said about how well our country is doing and i m grateful for the chance i ve had to contribute to that but all of you who have paid any attention at all not just to economics but to social problems to world development know that we are living in a very dynamic time things are changing very rapidly if you want to continue to do well we can t just stay in neutral we have to try to do better if you want america to continue to do well let me say it again we have to continue to do better we have to think of the big challenges that are still out there we have to think of the bumps in the road we know are out there here in florida i can say we have to imagine what s it going to be like when we double the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years how are we going to preserve social security how are we going to preserve medicare if people are living loner how can they do it if they don t have access to affordable prescription drugs if our children are more and more diverse than ever before and you want america to continue to do well we have to make our schools better we have to make it possible for more of them to go on to college if you want more and more young people to be able to live the future of their dreams and still be able to raise their children then we have to do a better job of helping people balance work and family if you want america to do well at home we have to do a better job of being a force for peace and freedom around the world if you re doing well and you want to continue to see the economy expand we have to sell more of our products overseas and we have to do more to create opportunity here at home for the people and places that have been left behind we re out here tonight and you clapped when our host said he had done well for the last eight years unemployment on some of our indian reservations is still as high as 70 percent it s still two three times the national average in many of our inner city neighborhoods and small rural towns we ought to bring free enterprise to those people too if we don t do it now we ll never get around to it if you want america to do well we have to continue to do better in making our streets safer and keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and away from children tragic lead story on the news tonight a six year old child kills another six year old child in a school how did the kid get the gun in the first place and take it to school i don t know the facts and i m not criticizing anybody i m just pointing out you forget about this incident the accidental gun death rate in america the accidental gun death rate in america of children is nine time higher than it is in the next 25 largest countries combined we can do better the crime rate s at a 25 year low we can do better i m not going to be satisfied until every little kid can walk safely on every street in this country can play safely in every park until we know we have done all we can to save lives the last thing i d like to say is if you want america to do well we ve got to do better at purging our own society of the continuing bigotry that still exists against people because of their race or because they re gay or because of their religion and sometimes even because of their political views this is a country that ought to be more committed than any other to that kind of reconciliation you know if you want america to be able to make peace from northern ireland to the middle east to the african tribal wars to the balkans if you want us to do good around the world we have to first be good at home and we have to work on this and i often ask myself when i come to a beautiful home like this and i see all of you out there and i m so happy for your success i say don t these people know they get a bigger tax cut from the republicans and i think the answer is yes so why are they here number one i think you really understand economics and you know that it s better to pay the debt down and keep interest rates down and keep capital available for a strong long term economic recovery but i think also you believe as i do that in a funny way we re all in this together and i ll just close with these two thoughts one is the most important fact i learned in 1999 was at a dinner my wife held as a series of her celebrations of the millennium where we had a man named vince cerf who was the first person ever to send an e mail eighteen years ago he had a profoundly deaf wife and it bothered him that he couldn t call his wife when he was at work and he was a computer wiz and one of the real creators of the internet and he discovered he could send her e mail and he could communicate now because of the digital revolution his wife has deeply embedded hearing assistance devices so that when she was 50 years old she heard for the first time in 50 years and the other guy was a guy named eric lander who is a scientist and an expert on the human genome and what they talked about was how the computer revolution and our attempt to decode the human gene go together and how we couldn t have done the genetic work without the computer work but the end of it was lander got up and said let me tell you one thing we ve found already and that is that we re genetically 99 9 percent the same without regard to race and that if you take racial groups say you take in america latinos african americans and asians the differences between individuals within the group would be greater than the differences from group to group that s important to remember when i told that story at the state of the union address the republicans and the democrats looked at each other and they were very uncomfortable to think that they were 99 9 percent the same but it s important to remember the last point i want to make is this i ve got on my table in the oval office people come in to meet with me and they sit on couches you ve seen the couches and the chairs on television look the next time you ll see there s something on the table there a glass triangle shaped figure it s a vacuum packed container within which is a moon rock that was given to me by neal armstrong last year to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his walk on the moon and it s only on loan relax it belongs to nasa but i m a big supporter of the space program so i ve got this moon rock there now this moon rock is 3 6 billion years old so when people come in and they see me and they get all up tight and they re so angry and they re so agitated and everything i say wait a minute time out look at that rock it s 3 6 billion years old chill out we re just passing through we re just passing through and i say that not because what they want to do is unimportant but because it s important the human connection we all share with each other and to maintain a little humility this is a big election folks we ve turned this country around it s moving in the right direction the only way we can continue to do well is if we re committed to do better it really matters whether we win the house whether we win those seats in the senate it matters profoundly whether we hold the white house it matters for all the things i said so if somebody asks you tomorrow why you came remember we re 99 9 percent the same remember the story of the moon rock and remember if we want to continue to do well we have to be committed to doing better thank you very much dem wjclinton29 2 00b bill_clinton thank you well i was looking out at the beautiful vista first i was looking down on you did you see me up there and i was looking at this magnificent home and thinking how fortunate we are all of us to be in this country at this moment to be free citizens to be able to come here to support someone in whom we believe i want to begin by thanking phil and pat frost they have been with me a long time too and i am honored to be here in their magnificent home i want to thank all of you who helped to spearhead this immensely successful event for elaine tonight i want to say that i m glad that her children david and ann are here and i m sorry the judge couldn t come but far be it for us to get him in trouble we want him to stay on the bench and make good decisions i want to say how grateful i am for the friendship and support i have enjoyed from congressman peter deutsch and his wife lori who is here and i thank them so much for their service to the united states and representative sally hayman we re glad you re here and i want to say a special word of thanks to my longtime personal friend bill nelson i am thrilled that he is running for the senate and thrilled he is doing so well i want you to know why i m here tonight besides the fact that i ve been dying to see phil and pat s house i m here for three reasons one is elaine was there for me when only my mother thought i could be elected and she reminded me tonight that when we first met she said now look i m going to ask you some questions but i want you to know in advance i m going to be for you anyway so you don t have to tailor your answers just shoot me straight and we ve been shooting each other straight now for well more than eight years i ll never forget when the first significant victory i won was in the florida democratic convention when they had this straw poll and elaine and some of my other supporters hauled hillary and me from meeting to meeting to meeting i thought new hampshire was tough until i met these people in all these little caucuses you know i had to answer 400 questions when i got through with that caucus i said i hope we did well but i m so tired i don t care whether we win or not anymore it was an amazing experience and we had a lot of opponents a lot of good people running for president in 1992 and we got a majority of the florida democrats at that caucus and i feel profoundly indebted to elaine bloom the second reason i m here is because she embodies the philosophy that we called the new democratic philosophy that is conservative in part but also liberal in part i believed when i ran for president that there was something really wrong with the way things were going in washington i felt that it bore no reasonable relationship to the work i had done for a decade as governor the work that she was trying to do here in the legislature with people like governor chiles and governor now senator gramm before him the work of getting people from different walks of live together defining goals defining opportunities defining problems then figuring out what to do about them washington was a place where maybe because people felt they were so far from their constituents and it was so hard to get that 15 seconds on the evening news at night they seemed to me to be more interested in sort of lobbing rhetorical bombs at one another and putting each other in little boxes and repeating over and over and over again the fights of yesterday as america kept moving into tomorrow i was absolutely convinced then that there was nothing wrong with this country that couldn t be fixed by what was right with it and so with elaine s help with the frosts help with a lot of you in this room i asked the american people to give me and then give me and al gore a chance to see if a unifying philosophy of opportunity for every american and responsibility from every american and a community including all the people of this country could lead us to new ideas and a new direction and now it s worked out pretty well and i am immensely gratified to have been a part of the progress this country has made i m proud of it and i know i am not solely responsible for it if it hadn t been for thank you it wouldn t have been possible if this country weren t the greatest environment for entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the world it wouldn t have been possible if the american people weren t committed to working harder and smarter and as the economy grew they didn t ask for inflationary pay increases they understood they were in a world economy and they ought to be tied to the growth of their enterprises it wouldn t have been possible without the support of the members of my party in congress who without any help from the republicans voted to bring the deficit down in 1993 got interest rates down and started this long job creating boom so i am very grateful but the third reason i m here is the most important of all and that is that in 11 months or so i ll be just another citizen but the work of america goes on we ve turned this country around we re moving in the right direction but if you really think about what you d like america to be there s a great deal yet to be done yes we ve turned deficits to surpluses but i think we ought to take this country completely out of debt for the first time since 1835 to keep interest rates down for a new generation yes the schools are getting better and more of our kids are going to college but i don t think we ought to stop until we ve got the certainty that every child without regard to race or income can get a world class education and every person can go on to college and stay there for four years and not have to drop out because of the cost i don t think we should stop until we find a way for every american to have affordable health care until we find a way to thank you and florida i don t think we should stop until we know that when the baby boom generation retires and i m the oldest of the baby boomers that s everybody born between 1946 and 1964 when we all get into our retirement years there will only be two people working for every one person drawing social security and i don t believe we should stop until we have modernized social security and medicare for the 21st century and secured it so that the baby boomers can retire without the gnawing worry that we will be an awesome burden to our children and our children s ability to raise our grandchildren and i can tell you the people my age we think about this a lot and i m trying to get this congress to lengthen the life of social security to lengthen the life of medicare to add a prescription drug benefit but we can t stop until that s done we can t i m proud of the fact that we ve done a lot to save the everglades but i don t think we should stop until we reverse the tide of global warming and prove we can grow the economy as we improve the environment i m proud of the fact that we ve made progress for peace and freedom around the world but there are still threats from biological and chemical and nuclear weapons there are threats from terrorists and there are still profound problems in every corner of the world that people have because of their racial religious ethnic and tribal differences and we shouldn t stop and i can tell you that it profoundly matters who is in the congress it s a big deal whether bill nelson gets elected to the senate or not more than you can imagine there s going to be somewhere between two and four justices appointed to the supreme court i hope that vice president gore will be making those appointments but the ultimate backstop is the senate that s another reason i m so interested in the senate race from new york one of many and i want to thank so many of you tonight said something nice about hillary or said you were helping her and i m very grateful to you for that it matters because we re going to have to decide whether to follow the path of fiscal responsibility or not whether we have doubled spending on education and training in my term while getting rid of the deficit and we did it by giving you the smallest government in 40 years by eliminating hundreds of programs was that a conservative decision or a liberal decision well it was conservative we got rid of the deficit it was liberal we doubled spending on education and training that s the kind of discipline and values and vision we need it matters and finally i d like to thank all the law enforcement people who are here for supporting elaine bloom one of the reasons i wanted to be identified with her is that she knew you could be a democrat and still believe we ought to drive the crime rate down and that you could be tough and smart about crime that s very important to me i don t know if you had a chance to watch the news tonight but a six year old child near flint michigan shot another six year old child and killed her today now i don t know all the facts yet i thought i had them and i didn t the first version i had wasn t right but anyway somehow what s a six year old kid doing with a gun anyway and what can we do about it i ve supported putting 100 000 police on the street i ve supported more efforts in the drug war i ve supported putting 50 000 more police out there now in high crime areas but we ve got to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and away from children we just do there s a huge difference there is that conservative or liberal the nra crowd says that s liberal i think that i m trying to conserve life i think it s conservative in the best sense and i think it s the right thing to do so i m here because i feel obligated to a woman i love not only because she supported me because when she disagreed with me or was worried about it she d call and chew me out about it and i liked that too many people are afraid to tell presidents what they think and that s what gets presidents in trouble she was a true friend she always told me exactly what she thought i m here because she shares my philosophy but mostly i m here because of you and because when i m just a citizen and i m not president anymore i want my country to do well i said something today at lunch i d just like for you to think about and i ll say it much briefer tonight the last time we had we now have the longest economic expansion in history the last longest economic expansion in history was 1961 to 1969 the years in which i grew up graduated from high school went to college and finished college when i graduated from high school in 64 lyndon johnson was president passing civil rights legislation we thought the economy would boom forever we thought the civil rights problems would be solved in law not in the streets we thought we would prevail in the cold war without any division in our country when i graduated from college four years later it was two days after robert kennedy was killed two months after martin luther king was killed nine weeks after lyndon johnson said he couldn t run for reelection the streets of washington had burned after dr king was killed and this country was divided right down the middle on the vietnam war and we were divided in a presidential election where president nixon said he represented the silent majority which meant those who disagreed were in the loud minority people like me and we ve been having these us and them election ever since us and them politics now the country has been turned around but we have big challenges out there and what i want to say to you is that in 1964 if anybody told us the wheels had run off by 1968 no one would have believed it this is not just a time for celebration this is a time for humility and for resolve as a citizen not as president as an american i have been waiting for 35 years for my country to be in a position to build a future of our dreams for our children that work will have to be done by the people who will be here after the 2000 election that s the most important reason i am here i trust elaine bloom with my daughter s future with my grandchildren s future with the future of america and i ask you all to be vigilant and disciplined and active in this election just because we re doing well doesn t mean you can relax you should feel a heavier obligation and whenever you are tempted to think it doesn t matter you remember this story i told you tonight i have waited 35 years we ve got a second chance and we need to make the most of it thank you very much dem wjclinton29 3 95a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you laura sawyer for your warm and generous introduction thank you president chace for what you said in reminding me of our generation s obligations to the students here present by recalling that day now almost 32 years ago when i met president kennedy i have very much enjoyed this day at emory i thank the university and all responsible for making it possible for us to hold here the first of our conferences on the state of the american economy and where we go from here i wish all of you could have been there today to hear the people who came to tell their stories stories of struggle and triumph stories many of them against all the odds what they had done to make their way in the economy of the 1990s and how they were looking forward to the next century i just have one question about this before i get too serious where is dooley i was told if he showed up you all would get up and leave i hope he waits until the end if that s true let me say that i ran for the office of president because i was concerned about the direction of our country and the future of our children basically because i believe the obligation of every generation of americans is to preserve and nourish and deepen the american idea the idea that if you work hard and play by the rules you can make the most of your god given potential and live the life of your dreams and that you can do it without holding anyone else down and indeed the more people from all walks of life and all races and regions who are lifted up the better off we ll all be that is the american idea when i met john kennedy and when i went off to college i was the first in my generation to go to college i was the son of fairly poor people in the south when i was born in arkansas right at the end of world war ii the per capita income of our entire state was only 56 percent of the national average and for young people who were growing up in the south when i was about your age the great question was whether we could become part of the great american mainstream whether we could overcome our legacy of abject poverty and our legacy of racial discrimination to come together and learn and grow that is not at issue anymore now two southern states georgia and virginia have surpassed the national average in per capita income atlanta is the home to more international companies than any other city in the united states you re doing a lot of things in the southern region that are the envy of the rest of the world thirty percent of america s people live in the south but 40 percent of the new jobs created just since i ve been president have been created in this region so the issue is not what it was a generation ago there is a different issue today which is whether we can keep the american dream alive for all our people in a global economy in the information age which splits people apart based on their level of education and their skills and at a time when the differences in our country and the differences throughout the world in race religion and other areas both serve as ways to unite us and to divide us that is the great question of this time now when i became president i wanted first to get the economy moving again to give people some economic hope and we had a distinct strategy reduce the deficit expand trade increase investment in education and technology reform government give lower income families a tax break so nobody would ever be punished for work instead of welfare encourage small businesses and new businesses reduce regulation and give the states more authority to experiment in tough areas like welfare reform and health care reform that was our agenda after two years we have a reduction in the deficit of 600 billion this is the first time this is the first time since the mid 1960s when your government is running at least an operating surplus that is if it were not for interest on the debt accumulated before we came here we would have a budget surplus today so at least our operations do not exceed our revenues we have expanded trade by more than at any time in a generation we have dramatically reformed the government already 100 000 fewer people working for the federal government if no new changes are made by the new congress which is unlikely but if there were no changes made the government would be reduced in size over a five and a half year period by 270 000 people to its smallest size since i went to washington when john kennedy was president and we have given vast new authority to the states to experiment in important areas we have reduced regulation we are trying to move forward and perhaps most important of all we have cut spending while increasing our investment in education from expanding head start to apprenticeships for young people who don t go to college to the goals 2000 program to help our schools meet tough national standards with grass roots reforms to expansion of the student loan program in ways that make our student loans now less costly with better repayment terms now these are important changes the results are pretty clear in the last two years we ve had 6 1 million new jobs we have the lowest combined rate of unemployment and inflation this country has had in 25 years we had in 1993 the largest number of new business incorporations in the history of the united states in 1994 the unemployment rate in america for african americans dropped below 10 percent for the first time in 20 years the results speak for themselves i must say since i m trying to spark an honest and civil bipartisan discussion of this i was honored to see on the front page of your newspaper today one of your most distinguished alumnuses the speaker of the house acknowledges that the economic program has brought some good results to the united states of america because it has it was the right thing to do and it is moving the country forward now so i ask you if that s true and all that has happened well why isn t everybody happy and why do they keep voting to change the way the government s going if the policies are working well i think there are a number of reasons but let me offer a few because they will affect your lives as americans in the first place the global economy and all the pressures of the global economy and the information revolution and all the dramatic changes it brings means that for the first time even though we are having more jobs coming into this economy wages are stagnant for most americans half of the american people are working longer work weeks for the same or lower wages than they were making 15 years ago and that is unheard of in our history in addition to that there s more inequality among the middle class that s why i say over and over again my mission is to expand the middle class and to shrink the underclass to give poor people a chance to work their way into a good life but today the american middle class is splitting apart based on whether people have the education and training and skills necessary to compete in the global economy for a good job that pays a good wage with a good future the third thing that s happened is that and a lot of your parents have probably been affect by this or at least work in companies that are affected by it there is more instability in the work force today even when there is more prosperity downsizing in government downsizing in big companies reorganizations that are constant so that people are worried about whether they re going to have their job even when we have more jobs and when people do lose their jobs they tend to be unemployed for longer periods of times and they tend to get a new job not their old job back all this is new in your lifetime this will be the pattern you will face but if you described all this to somebody 10 years ago they d say it couldn t happen there s no way you cannot create six million jobs drive down the unemployment rate explode the economy and not have wages go up you can t do it it s impossible well it happened so what is our job economically our job is to lift the incomes and the sights and the aspirations of the american people how are we going to do it you have to get more high wage jobs into this country more trade more focus on technology you have to make sure our people can fill high wage jobs we have to educate everyone better everyone not just the college students everyone and thirdly we have to have the right kind of government the great debate going on in washington today is about what the proper role of our national government is the old view was that there was a big government solution to every big problem and that people who were in need should be helped the new rage in washington is that the government is the source of all the problems and we would have no social problems no economic problems no problems at all if we had no government if the government went away except for national defense everything would be peachy keen now the whole theory is that every problem all the social problems we ve got from teen pregnancy to welfare dependency to the breakdown of life in our cities was all because we had too much government trying to help people now i have a different view from both those views i don t think either one of those views is right my experience as a governor my observation of other countries that are doing well plain common sense and the stories we heard today indicate that we need a limited but effective government that costs less but does what it s supposed to do and here s what i think it s supposed to do i believe the national government is still essential in creating opportunity even while we re shrinking bureaucracy creating opportunity by making sure we ve got a level playing field and creating opportunity by making sure that people can make the most of their own lives we ve got to empower people you can t really help people past a certain point except to put food on their table and to get them through the tough times but you can empower people through education and technology to make more of their own lives that s what we have to do and the third thing we can do is even in a very dynamic economy in a dynamic society we can enhance security in a legitimate way without in any way undermining opportunity we enhance security abroad when we make an agreement with the russians so that for the first time since nuclear weapons were invented there are no nuclear weapons pointed at the people of the united states that enhances our security but if we make progress toward peace in the middle east we are enhancing our own security because of the volatile impact of that area on the whole rest of the world but there are things we can do here at home that enhance our security as well the family and medical leave law which allows people to take a little time off when a baby is born or a parent is sick without losing their job that enhances our security because it makes our families stronger while we keep our jobs the crime bill which puts more police officers on our street and gives our local communities the flexibility in choosing prevention programs that keep young people out of crime and off drugs those things enhance our security if we didn t have 2 million highly dysfunctional drug abusers in this country the crime rate for violent crime would be about half what it is today so it enhances our security when we have a safer society with lower crime rates and that s part of that role is a national responsibility that s what i have tried to do now that leads us and i want you to watch this debate unfold in washington and you ve got to decide where you fit and your old party label may not give you an answer to the present problems that we face because government can t fix it all and government cannot walk away from it all and there are a lot of hard questions that have to be resolved but for example my view is there s a right and a wrong way to cut spending i do think that the agriculture department had to be cut but my view was not to reduce the school lunch program but close 1 200 offices because we didn t need that many when we had fewer farmers and fewer problems i agree that we should have reduced expenditures in the housing and urban development department but what we did was to get rid of a whole layer of regional offices and to consolidate a lot of those various programs that had been kind of encrusted with bureaucracy over the years we didn t want to cut a program for homeless veterans or make it more difficult for poor elderly people to have a roof over their head there is a difference in how you cut spending and these are distinctions that have to be made or in the area of education we offered a way to cut the deficit and increase educational opportunities i had student loans when i went to school and i m not ashamed of it i m proud of it i m grateful that i was able to get it from the previous generation and when i got out of college i paid them off and i think when you get out of college if you ve got one you ought to pay it off so because that s the way we re going to preserve it for the next generation so we have reduced student loan defaults they no longer cost the taxpayers 2 8 billion a year the cost is down to 1 billion a year we ve reduced defaults by nearly two thirds we re doing a better job of collecting now that s a lot better than getting rid of the interest subsidy and raising the cost of student loans that is better that is a better way to do that we found there we so many incentives in the old student loan program toward bureaucracy and paperwork and wasting money because basically you d go to a bank and get the student loan it was a 90 percent guarantee so if you default on the loan does the bank have an incentive to sue no because the government will give you 90 percent and 10 percent will be at least what the lawyers would cost so we went into this direct loan program and we said you can have these loans at a lower interest rate with better repayment terms when you get out of college if you ve got a big loan burden you can pay it off as a percentage of your income and now about oh 40 percent of our universities have already enrolled we just had people there from the university of florida today a man and his wife in medical school saying they would owe 140 000 between them and when they go into residency if they had to start paying off their student loan under the old system it would take one half of their disposable incomes but because of the new program we cut the cost improved the repayment terms and guess what it saves the taxpayers 10 billion over six years so if we can give people more loans at less hassle and save 10 billion why would we instead say no let s keep the old system and save the 10 billion by adding to the cost of going to college our way is better because it s pro education and it makes sense and it will take us into the future i wish i had longer to listen to you and we could ask questions i d like to stay here three or four hours but i ve got to go to florida but i want you to think about this think about this debate every time you see an issue being debated in washington ask yourselves two questions how can i cut through all the political rhetoric to figure out how this is going to affect me and my friends and my generation and the future of this country and the children i hope to have don t think about it in political terms think about it terms of how it s going to affect your life and the future you want for yourselves and your children and the second think you ought to say is now what do i believe my country should be doing about this because we are going through this huge period of what did they say prisons are not shelters i agree with that why are you shouting at me sit down i heard you we heard you we heard you we heard you sit down we heard you i like those guys they believed in their free speech and mine as well i appreciate that thank you very much i ll tell you why we need 100 000 more police now wait a minute let s don t start a flood here free speech we ll listen i ll tell you why i ll tell you why we need 100 000 more police because the violent crime rate in america has tripled and this is a big fight i m in with the congress they just want a block grant they want to cut the amount of money to the crime bill block grant it to the cities and states and say basically spend it however you please i say no we ve got to have 100 000 more police here s why you re entitled to answer to that the violent crime rate has tripled in the last 30 years the number of police officers has increased by 10 percent in every major city where more police officers have been trained not simply to catch criminals but to prevent crime to work with friends and neighbors and help kids on the street the crime rate has gone down one of the little known good things that is happening in america today is that in many many many places the crime rate is going down because of community policing so i say we ought to have a 20 percent increase in the number of police forces not only to catch criminals but to prevent crime from occurring and a 30 percent overall increase in police is still not as much as a 300 percent increase in violent crime i think we made the right decision on that that s exactly the kind of debate that we ought to be having but i also believe i also believe we have to do more for shelter i also believe we have to do more for shelter our administration you look at the record of secretary cisneros and hud we have tried our best to increase that but none of this is answering the big questions and you have to answer that i want you every one of you without regard to where you re from what your family s income is what your race is i want every one of you to believe that your tomorrows will be whatever you want them to be and whatever you re willing to work hard to make them to be i want you to be positively ecstatic at the prospect of bringing your own children into the world and this country and thinking about the 21st century being the most peaceful and prosperous and exciting time the world has ever known that s what i want and that is all that matters in the end is whether we do our part when i was your age i had a professor of western civilization who told me that the united states represented the finest expression of our civilization because it had embodied the two most important ideas first that the future can be better than the present and second that every single one of us has a personal moral obligation to make it so that is what i am trying to do in washington we re having a big debate about what the role of the national government is i want you to answer the debate by determining what is best for you and your future and the other people in this country this country s in better shape than it was two years ago it s going to be in better shape two years from now if i have anything to say about it but you will have more to say about it than anybody else stand up for education and stand up for the future thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton29 3 95b bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen it s about to rain on us but i won t melt and i m glad to be back in florida and glad to be in tallahassee and i thank you i want to thank governor chiles and lieutenant governor mckay and your county commissioner malloy and of course your fine mayor all of them for meeting me and along with my epa director florida s own carol browner i m glad to have here back here ladies and gentlemen i am glad to be back in florida a state that embodies what i am trying to get done all across the country a state that is committed to opportunity committed to building strength out of diversity and committed to our future that s what america needs everywhere i wish you could have been with me in atlanta today we had the first of a number of regional economic conferences i had all kinds of people talking about what s going on in the south and how we re going to get this country into the next century with the american dream alive with opportunity and education and hope for every single citizen of this country that s what i believe in i m sure it has not escaped you that we re having a mild debate in washington dc these days about what our government ought to be doing now on the one side there is people who believe that everything that s been done in the last 25 years is fine and that there s a big government solution for every big problem i disagree with that but now all the rage in washington is that everything the government did was wrong and government is the source of all of our problems and if government would go away everything would be like flowers blooming in the desert i disagree with that too what i believe like lawton chiles believes that we need a government that is limited but effective that is smaller that regulates less but that is committed to the following things creating opportunity empowering people through education to make the most of their own lives and finally enhancing the security of the american people not only abroad as we have but also at home in our streets and in our schools and in our families that is what we need a government for and we have made a good beginning we have reduced the deficit we have expanded trade we have 6 million more jobs in this country we had the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 25 years and i know that you know that florida has grown more rapidly than the rest of the country since i became president the unemployment rate in this state has dropped almost three percent governor chiles whispered in my ear said it s the lowest in 13 years and i appreciate that almost a million families in this state got an income tax cut because they re working hard for modest wages and we don t believe anybody who works full time with a child in the house should be in poverty we want people to leave welfare and go to work and they shouldn t be taxed if they re working we have worked hard to deal with the problems of this state up and down to maintain a strong military and a military presence in northern florida and throughout the state we have worked hard to make florida a showcase of the future with the summit of the americas conference we had down in miami in december and i know that apparently a few hours ago it leaked out that the defense department has just decided to move the command of the southern command for central and south america away from panama as we re required to do under the panama canal treaty to florida to dade county i want you to know that the central command which as i said covers all of central and south america i want you to know how important this is they are working to promote democracy throughout our hemisphere to promote cooperation with these countries to help to defend the panama canal and most important of all now to help to protect the american people and the people of those countries from the scourge of drugs and the illegal thugs that purvey them all across our part of the world and now the center of that effort will be in your state sometimes i ask myself well if things are going this well why aren t we all happy and there s a good reason there is a good reason because for the first time in our history the global economy with all of its competition and the rise in technology with all of its ability to have fewer people do more work means that we have created 6 million jobs but our incomes aren t going up yet this has never happened before where half the american people are working longer without a raise where there is more inequality in the middle class with incomes splitting apart and uncertainty so i say to you we ve had two years to generate more jobs and get the economy going again now we ve got to concentrate on growing the middle class and shrinking the under class and getting the incomes of the american people up again so they can look forward with confidence to the future now thank you but let s about four more days a minute let me ask you this we all know we all know that we need a smaller and less bureaucratic government lawton chiles has got pictures in the paper all over america being hoisted up to get rid of all those regulations but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it i am proud of the fact that carol browner is getting rid of 25 percent of the paperwork of the epa to save 20 million hours for the american people every year i m proud of that i m proud of the fact that a small business person in florida can go to the sba for a loan instead of having to fill out a form an inch thick it s just a page long because we got rid of bureaucracy i m proud of the fact that we threw 10 000 regulations away in the federal personnel manual but i think you still want us to have clean water clean air a safe workplace and a safe country if we re going to raise incomes folks we need a commitment to do things that will raise incomes more good jobs if were going to give tax breaks which i favor let s give them to middle class people to educate their children so that that will lift incomes let s raise the minimum wage it hadn t been raised in years and it will help people s incomes let s reform welfare so that people go to work and raise their children and people who owe child support have to pay that child support to take care of their children and let s get rid of wasteful government but let s don t cut off our nose to spite our face when we wanted to cut money out of the department of agriculture we closed 1 200 offices we did not cut the school lunch program when we wanted to cut money out of our efforts on housing we got rid of all the regional hud offices and consolidated these old bureaucratic programs we didn t try to cut a program for homeless veterans there s a right way and a wrong way to do this and here with all this fine music that s been provided to us by the band and the choir from what from florida a m and florid state right the last thing we need to do is to cut the college loan program and make it more expensive to go to college so i say to you you stay with us you engage in this great debate yes we ll bring the size of the government down yes we ll reduce the burden of regulation but let s remember we ve got to keep our people first we ve got to keep our eye on the future we ve got to invest in education we ve got to grow the economy we ve got to keep the american dream alive i want every young person every young person here tonight to be able to look to a future where you can do anything that your dreams and your efforts will permit you to do i want every one of you young people to look forward with the same anticipation that all of us up here had in having your own children and raising your own families i want you to believe in the promise of america let us commit to that and make sure it s real and alive here in florida thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton29 3 96 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen as you know we re going to have a ceremony over in the east room in just a few moments so i don t want to make my remarks twice let me just say that there is hardly a family in america who has not been touched by cancer we have come a very very long way in the fight against cancer more people are survivors than ever before more people are living longer than ever before but we have a great deal more to do before we can be confident that we have actually done everything possible to give our children and our grandchildren the kind of future they deserve and that s what this day is about and that s what this proclamation declaring april cancer control month is all about and i m glad to sign it especially with these children behind me because they are the embodiment of our common endeavors dem wjclinton29 4 00 bill_clinton good evening ladies and gentlemen president page president elect dillon distinguished guests i am really happy to be here happy to be reunited at long last with the white house press corps if i may let me direct your attention to a photograph taken just moments ago it proves beyond a doubt that i am indeed happy to be here now wait a minute it seems that my hair in that photo is a little longer than it is tonight so maybe i am happy to be here and maybe i m not feel free to speculate admittedly looks and photos can be deceiving now look at this photo it s a recent one of the vice president applauding one of my policy initiatives but look a little closer those are not his real hands now this photo it made all the papers but i have to tell you something i am almost certain this is not the real easter bunny the next one is my favorite i really like it let s see the next photo isn t it grand i thought it was too good to be true but there is one thing beyond dispute tonight this is really me i am really here and the record on that count is clear in good days and bad in times of great confidence or great controversy i have actually shown up here for eight straight years looking back that was probably a mistake in just eight years i ve given you enough material for 20 years this is a special night for me for a lot of reasons jay leno is here now no matter how mean he is to me i just love this guy because together together we give hope to grey haired chunky baby boomers everywhere tonight marks the end of an era the after dinner party hosted by vanity fair as you may have heard it s been cancelled every year for eight years the vanity fair party became more and more and more exclusive so tonight it has arrived at its inevitable conclusion this year no one made the guest list actually i hear the bloomberg party will be even harder to get into than the vanity fair party was but i m not worried i m going with janet reno now the bloomberg party is also a cast party for the stars of the west wing who are celebrating the end of their first season you ll have to forgive me if i m not as excited as everyone else is at the thought of a west wing finale party but i ve got to give them credit their first season got a lot better ratings than mine did not to mention the reviews the critics just hated my travel office episode and that david gergen cameo fell completely flat speaking of real life drama i m so glad that senator mccain is back tonight i welcome him especially as you all know he just made a difficult journey back to a place where he endured unspeakable abuse at the hands of his oppressors the senate republican caucus i am glad to see that senator mccain and governor bush are talking about healing their rift actually they re thinking about talking about healing their rift and you know i would really like to help them i mean i ve got a lot of experience repairing the breach i ve worked with catholics and protestants in northern ireland i ve worked with israelis and palestinians with joe lockhart and david westin but the differences between bush and mccain may be just too vast i mean mccain as bush s running mate hasn t the man suffered enough george w bush has got a brand spanking new campaign strategy he s moving toward the political center distancing himself from his own party stealing ideas from the other party i m so glad dick morris has finally found work again you know the clock is running down on the republicans in congress too i feel for them i do they ve only got seven more months to investigate me that s a lot of pressure so little time so many unanswered questions for example over the last few months i ve lost 10 pounds where did they go why haven t i produced them to the independent counsel how did some of them manage to wind up on tim russert now some of you might think i ve been busy writing my memoirs i m not concerned about my memoirs i m concerned about my resume here s what i ve got so far career objective to stay president but being realistic i would consider an executive position with another country of course i would prefer to stay within the g 8 i m working hard on this resume deal i ve been getting a lot of tips on how to write it mostly from my staff they really seem to be up on this stuff they tell me i have to use the active voice for the resume you know things like commanded u s armed forces ordered air strikes served three terms as president everybody embellishes a little designed built and painted bridge to 21st century supervised vice president s invention of the internet generated attracted heightened and maintained controversy now i know lately i haven t done a very good job at creating controversy and i m sorry for that you all have so much less to report i guess that s why you re covering and commenting on my mood my quiet contemplative moments my feelings during these final months in office in that case you might be interested to know that a film crew has been following me around the white house documenting my remaining time there this is a strange time in the life of any administration but i think this short film will show that i have come to terms with it can we see the film you like me you really like me now you know i may complain about coming here but a year from now i ll have to watch someone else give this speech and i will feel an onset of that rare affliction unique to former presidents agdd attention getting deficit disorder plus which i ll really be burned up when al gore turns out to be funnier than me but let me say to all of you i have loved these eight years you know i read in the history books how other presidents say the white house is like a penitentiary and every motive they have is suspect even george washington complained he was treated like a common thief and they all say they can t wait to get away i don t know what the heck they re talking about i ve had a wonderful time it s been an honor to serve and fun to laugh i only wish that we had even laughed more these last eight years because power is not the most important thing in life and it only counts for what you use it i thank you for what you do every day thank you for all the fun times that hillary and i have had keep at it it s a great country it deserves our best thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton29 4 93 bill_clinton thank you very much when janet reno was confirmed she said she never wanted to be called general but only janet but somehow i feel i should call her general she certainly seemed in command to me yesterday up on the hill i want to say to all of you what an incredible honor it has been for me as a citizen of this country as well as president to be in the justice department for the first time to walk down the halls and to see the wonderful work that was done more than 50 years ago now in building this great building during the great depression when president roosevelt was trying to lift the spirits of the country by putting the people to work that s still a pretty good idea i think to walk into the attorney general s office and see the magnificent portrait of robert kennedy who was my favorite attorney general from my childhood and mostly just to shake hands with all the employees here i think it is so easy for us to forget in the ebb and flow of events when we were so focused on the moment and easy for the american people to forget that every day there are so many americans who could have chosen a different life who get up every day and come to work in this building because they believe in simple justice and fairness and in doing right by the american people and i want you to know that i appreciate that very very much and i thank you for your service after years of taking a different course i am doing my best to turn this government around to change the way things operate here to convince the american people that we are serious about the economy serious about reducing the deficit serious about investing in the real needs of our people serious about providing fairness to the middle class and to others who are willing to work hard and play by the rules in america and serious about trying to bring all the people of this country together again in a great national community in which we all recognize that we are in this together the changes we are making go well beyond policy and particular bills and i hope beyond politics to a whole new idea of hope in this country as we move toward the 21st century the idea that we can keep the american dream alive preserve our basic values and make the new future that all of you and your children deserve i thought about this a lot when i was attorney general that when you work to ensure the full protection of a law for every citizen you help to sustain the most fundamental values of democracy and indeed to provide for the freedom of all i know most of you came here with similar feelings for the law i have enormous respect for your motives i come from a generation that revered the law because we believe it gave us the tools to help people and in my part of the country that it was the only instrument that would ever enable us all black and white together to live as equals i still believe those things today before i came over here i had a whole string of people into my office who i had known for years and years and years and they were laughing about how sometimes i may seem almost naive because i genuinely feel more idealism and hope today than i did in the first day i entered public life than i did on the first day i cast a vote as a young man i still believe that we can make a difference that we can live up to the ideals enshrined in the constitution and that we have the obligation to do so and i asked janet reno to become the attorney general of the united states because i knew she believed that too since i became president i have spent a good deal of time trying to focus on law enforcement issues because i saw all across this land in the last year and a half when i ran for president the enormous amount of insecurity and fear that so many americans felt living in their homes walking on their streets many of you may have heard me tell this story at least in the media before but one of the most gripping things that ever happened to me in the race for president occurred in a hotel in new york it was about a week before the new hampshire primary i looked like i was yesterday s news to say the least i was walking through this corridor to go to a big fundraiser full of people who wondered why they had bought tickets i was feeling sorry for myself and a man who worked in the hotel as a waiter stuck his hand out and grabbed my hand and he said my 10 year old boy studies the presidential race in school and he says you should be president so i will be for you i m an immigrant from greece and he said i will be for you because my boy wants me to be but he said you know where i came from we were so much poorer but at least we were free and he said now when my boy walks outside from our apartment he cannot go across the street and play in the park unless i am with him because he won t be safe we live only two blocks from the school and he cannot walk to his school unless i am with him because he won t be safe so if i do what my boy wants me to do and i vote for you will you make my boy free and all of a sudden i couldn t remember what i was feeling sorry for myself about but i did remember one of the reasons i wanted to be president and one of the solemn duties of the government of the united states and every other law enforcement jurisdiction in this country and i think it s time that we move from the incredible gulf between rhetoric and reality to doing some very specific things that will make the american people safer we ought to pass and sign the brady bill i will propose a major new safe schools program so that children at least can be drug free and safe in their schools i have just appointed lee brown who was the police chief of atlanta houston and new york city to be the director of the drug control office the first police officer ever to hold that position a person who pioneered community policing and actually can show how the crime rate went down in communities where there were enough police officers on the street to walk the beat and know their neighbors and work to prevent crime not just to catch criminals after crimes had occurred i have asked for more resources for drug education programs and treatment programs and i want to increase police presence in our communities so i ve asked for substantial new funding to eventually add up to 100 000 more police officers on our street some of them will come i hope through the crime bill that i hope we can pass this year that was filibustered last year that s a thing institution i ve learned to have less and less respect for as we go along some of them will come from incentives we give from people coming out of the service as we build down our armed services and give people incentives to move into police or teaching some of them will come from the national service corps which we will announce tomorrow in new orleans as people who will pay off their college loans by working as police officers i had hoped that some would come from the jobs program which contained 200 million for more police officers but we are going to work together to do this when i sat in the attorney general s office just a few moments ago it s the second issue she brought up she said we ve still got to deliver for the american people we have to give them the police officers they need and the security they need and we re going to do it i also want our government to set an example i want us to have a tougher child support enforcement program i ve asked my appointees to adhere to the strictest ethics law ever applied to executive branch appointees i have cut my own white house staff and begun a government wide review of every program we operate so that we can show the american people we are trying to be accountable and responsible and effective and that we re trying to make sure that when we do something in washington it s for the good of the people out there who pay the bills and not just four ourselves our country is great because we have succeeded over 200 years in providing opportunity to all freedom of speech and worship and association to all providing equal justice to all we have become the custodian of freedom s dream for the entire world because people like you have decided to give your lives to this great call my goals for this justice department are simple i want it to be free of political controversy and political abuse i want it to be an innovator in crime reduction and in law enforcement i want it to create a genuine partnership with those who work with us in state and local systems of justice i want it to set an example in the practice of law and in the protection of civil rights that will make all americans proud and i want the american people to believe that you are their partners in making our communities our children and our families safe again in closing let me say how very very proud i am to name these seven attorneys general assistant attorneys general to your justice department team some of them are new to me some i have known and admired a very long time at least one of them once sued me shows you how broad minded i am and i can tell you i am very pleased that each of them has agreed to join our administration this may surprise you if you ve been reading the press reports but with these appointments our administration has in 100 days nominated 172 people for consideration by the senate at the same point in their administrations president reagan had named 152 people and president bush had named 99 by any measure we re doing a fairly good job in staffing up this administration with highquality folks and i might add since i look across here i can t resist saying a third of them are women for a change today when i walked through these halls and i went to the attorney general s office i couldn t help but remember that it was 25 years ago in this springtime when robert kennedy by then a senator from new york was running for president and was subsequently killed just two days before i graduated from college with one of my roommates working in his office it s impossible for me still especially now as i think back across those 25 years not to be moved by his memory and his work and the power of the example he set for all americans regardless of their gender or color or station in life my hope 25 years from now another daughter or son of america will walk in here and remember what you have accomplished here and be moved i believe the tradition of greatness here is still very much alive i believe that janet reno and the team that she is assembling can bring it to life for all americans the american people want you to succeed in your work i do too working together we can be proud to honor the tradition of the justice department by ensuring it s great future thank you all and god bless you dem wjclinton29 4 98 bill_clinton thank you and welcome to the white house i am delighted to have all of you here i thank the members of the cabinet for coming and i thank congressman ryun from kansas a former olympian for being here to the president of the olympic committee bill hybl to the executive director dick schultz and to all the other officials and to the members of our olympic team let me say before i get into my remarks i need to make two preliminary comments first of all i want to thank tipper gore for representing our administration at the 1998 winter olympics i wish she could be here with us today i know she would like to be i d also like to thank my good friend mack mclarty for working so hard with the vice president as the co chair of our white house task force on the olympic games the second thing i d like to do before i get into my remarks is to just say for the benefit because this is my only chance to talk to the press today i just finished a very good meeting with the senate republican and democratic leaders trent lott and tom daschle about one of the most important votes that our senate will face this year and that is to expand the alliance of nato to include poland hungary and the czech republic i want to thank them both for their support this is coming at a very important time for america four years after i first proposed that we expand our european security alliance to make us more secure and europe safer and more united and i am very grateful for senator lott and senator daschle senator helms and senator biden and all the others we are seeing a very impressive high level debate in the senate and even among those who don t agree with my position i must say i ve been very impressed by the debate and i m looking forward to a positive vote by the end of this week now let me say i have looked forward to this day for a long time ever since the olympics concluded to see these fine people and those who are not here who are part of their teams i think makes all americans very proud in the mountains the ice rinks the race courses of japan we saw america at its best the young olympians who are here did more than carry our flag in a fundamental way they carried with them the spirit of america i d like to say a special word too of appreciation to the paralympians who brought home 34 medals in the largest winter paralympics ever thank you it s also a great source of pride for us that the winter olympics in 2002 will be in salt lake city when the olympic flag was lowered and passed from the mayor of nagano to mayor corradini it really marked the opening events of the 2002 games so we re very glad that mayor corradini has joined us today along with the chairman of the salt lake olympic committee robert garff and other members of the utah olympic committee we want to help them succeed and i d like to ask them to stand and receive our support mayor corradini and the members of the utah committee there s mr garff thank you all for being here thank you there they are right there i d also like to say one more word to america s olympic teams in 1998 in a fundamental way you have become a part of america s team for the rest of your lives if you choose for the rest of your lives because you were an olympian you can have a profound positive impact on all the people with whom you come in contact but especially on young people even though for many of you the olympic triumphs you had just being a member of the team must have marked the most magic moment in your lives i hope that the future will be even richer for you and i think it can be if you use the fact that you are an olympian to have a positive impact on the lives of young people the lessons of setting your sights high working hard being persistent believing in yourselves playing by the rules supporting your team those are lessons that every child in america needs to learn lessons that every child can see in your eyes and in the power of your example some of you earlier today participated in the champions in life program you can reach out in telling your stories working in communities approaching future endeavors with this kind of drive and commitment and i hope you ll do that because you can really have a positive impact on 21st century america in this century through all its highs and lows we have seen throughout the 20th century a renaissance in the olympic games everybody now knows about the remarkable triumph of jesse owens in the 1936 berlin games what it said about prejudice and hatred what it said about the difference between america and the nazi regime that then governed in germany jesse owens said this in 1936 only an olympian can fully realize the grip the games have on the youth of the world it was true in 1936 it is true today then it was true and people saw a profound good in the midst of a dark time this is a sunlit moment of peace and prosperity but the olympic spirit the spirit of goodwill friendship understanding and unity across all the lines that divide us that can propel us into an even brighter era of respect and success now i would like to introduce the athlete that has been chosen by her teammates to represent the olympians here today a person whose grace and excellence on the ice and i must say even more after the competition must have been a source of enormous joy and pride not only to her teammates but to all americans ladies and gentlemen ms michelle kwan dem wjclinton29 6 95 bill_clinton thank you very much mr mayor thank you for your introduction your support the power of your leadership thank you bill daley for being willing to leave chicago and come to washington which is prima facie evidence of some loss of sanity to help us pass nafta and thank you for your long friendship and your support thank you father wall for getting us off on the right start maybe we ll be a little less partisan little less like the republicans tonight since you prayed over us to start i thank you all for being here and for your support when hillary was making her remarks i was looking at her imagining her here thinking about the first time i ever came to chicago to see my wife before we were married i believe i was in her house three hours before her father came down and said hello to me it was sort of like running for president you just can t get discouraged you have to keep going and you re laughing but that s the truth that story i m telling and i owe so much to this city and to this state last saturday i was home in arkansas in a little town called pine bluff i took dr henry foster back there because he was born there he grew up there and that s still a place where people judge you by what you do instead of what you say and i think we d be better off if the rest of america were more like that but anyway we went home to pine bluff and while we were there it turned out that in this baseball park four blocks from where henry foster was born and where he learned to play baseball there was a phenomenal amateur baseball tournament going on with all the major amateur leagues there in a playoff and it was on espn and two of the players were drafted right out there to the majors and i went to throw out the first pitch since i was there and i was interviewed by other none other than garry the sarge matthews you all remember him he took the cubs to one of those playoffs so he said to me now come on mr president who s your favorite baseball team i said when i married my wife i inherited two things a wonderful family of in laws and the chicago cubs and i expect to get lots of mail after i met the daleys i got to go to white sox games which made me feel very good about that on my private on the wall of my private little office in the white house just off of the oval office i have one of my most treasured pictures a picture of hillary and me on march the 17th st patrick s day 1992 in the confetti in chicago on the night that we won the democratic primary in illinois and virtually assured the nomination victory and for all of that i thank you all very very much since then this administration has had a remarkable partnership with this state and with this city in the ways that the mayor mentioned fighting for the crime bill bringing the democratic convention here chicago winning a fair and open contest to be one of the six cities in america to get one of our empowerment zones to prove that we can have a partnership between government and the private sector to rebuild the poorest parts of america and give people opportunity and free enterprise again in every part of the country and i congratulate chicago on that i have strongly supported the mayor s efforts at school reform something that i care desperately about if we cannot make our schools work we re going to have a very hard time prevailing in the 21st century with the american dream and you know over 90 percent of all the funds for education in america come from the state and local government we can do some things at the national level and our secretary of education dick riley has done a great job but unless there are people at the grass roots who are committed to making the schools work so that children learn they learn things they need to know they are useful they are effective we are going to have a very difficult time there is no more important battle and i congratulate him on waging that battle and finally i d like to say a word of appreciation to the city for being willing to work with us in good faith through secretary cisneros and the department of housing and urban development in an attempt to reform and really improve the chicago public housing we are committed to that the mayor is committed to that we are going to prove some things that most people in america don t think can be done and we are going to do it right here in chicago thanks to you and we appreciate you for that and we are very much looking forward to being here for the convention debra delee is here we ve all got our feet on the ground it was david wilhelm s parting gift to his neighbor state before he left the democratic party in washington with our strong support i thank the mayor for what he said about the things that we had done i just want to say one word about that i ve done a lot of things that were controversial in this last two and a half years but i haven t done anything that i didn t think was right for america what i m trying to do is to test the outer limits of our leadership i think but i think that s important at a time of profound change but i m trying to learn the balance you know like the mayor said balancing the budget in 10 years instead of seven i want to talk more about the other day that in a minute but i heard a story the other day about the limits of leadership which i think about now before i do something really controversial about the famous louisiana governor and later senator huey long who as some of you know was a very great politician and was franklin roosevelt s chief rival for the affections of the democratic party before he was assassinated in the early 30s and when huey long was a governor one day he was out on a country crossroads in the depths of the depression where people had no money nothing no jobs it was terrible particularly in our part of the country and he had a big crowd of people out there in the country and he started giving a speech and his whole platform was share the wealth you know nobody had very much money and we ought to share what we had so he looked at this crowd of people these poor people and farmers in the country and he said you know we have got to share the wealth and he spotted a farmer that he knew out in the crowd and he said farmer jones if you had three cadillacs wouldn t you give up one of them so we could drive it around here in the county and pick up all the kids and take them to school during the week and take them to church on sunday he said of course i would he said and if you had 3 million wouldn t you give up a million dollars so we could put a roof on everybody s house and feed all the children in this country he said of course i would he said and if you had three hogs and the farmer said now wait a minute governor i ve got three hogs so i m trying to learn what the limits of leadership are this has been a good day for america we re celebrating the trade agreement with japan which all of you were kind enough to applaud i want to tell you a little about it it is different from and better than any similar trade agreement we ve ever concluded most of our trade deficit in the world is with japan and 60 percent of our japanese trade deficit is in autos and auto parts we have a big surplus in auto parts in the rest of the world and a big deficit with them this agreement will allow us to improve our position not to guarantee us results but it will give us a chance to compete and to be treated fairly and to create american jobs and coincidentally it will be good for japan because they re more closed economic system has led to the unbelievable anomaly of their being the richest country in the world on paper but not in fact because their working people are paying 40 percent more 40 percent more for basic consumer products than americans are because their markets are closed we lose jobs they get money but they can t do anything with it except spend more for the same stuff this is going to be a good thing for america but it s going to be good for japan and it s going to be good for the world and we were right to be firm and strong and go to the 11th hour because this is one of the kind of difficult changes we re going to have to make if the world is going to be as it should in the next century this was also a good day for america because of the hookup of the soviet the russian and the american space vehicles did you see that on television and you saw them laughing and having a good time together and tumbling around in space you know it s amazing when you think about it all that s happened just from the last five or six years that partnership with russia that you saw in space today is also being mirrored on the ground in russia today the vice president is over there working with the prime minister of russia mr chernomyrdin they have established an unprecedented partnership that has helped us to work to continue to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons to reduce the threat of weapons being stolen or smuggled or nuclear material being smuggled out of russia to try to deal with the whole raft of problems that they have that will help our country to work with them to build their democracy and their economy in the years ahead one of the things that i am proudest of is that during our administration for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no russian missiles pointed at the people of the united states of america so we re celebrating and i also want to talk a little about why we re here when the mayor went through the record that unemployment s down and jobs are up and we passed the crime bill and we passed more trade legislation than anybody in the history of the country and we ve dealt with a lot of important issues we have been able to play a constructive role for peace in the middle east and northern ireland lots of other important places in the world you might ask yourself if that all happened well why isn t everybody happy what happened in the 94 elections what s going to happen in the 96 elections that s what i want to talk to you about tonight i want to talk to you about what i believe about this country and what i hope you believe about this country and why we are having the debate that we are having in washington d c today the truth is that for most americans this exciting new world toward which we are moving that has caught us all up is a mixed bag it is confusing and they are confused and that s why politics seems confusing and it s why sometimes our adversaries do very well because they are great at giving simple answers to hard questions they re usually wrong but it sounds good it sounds good but i want you to think about what the world looks like from the point of view of the average american family let s just take the changes that are going on look at the economy consider this in the last two and a half years we ve had 6 7 million new jobs a big drop in the unemployment rate the african american unemployment rate has gone below 10 percent for the first time in 20 years we have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 30 years that s very very impressive we ve had the biggest expansion of trade ever in a two year period the deficit has been cut using the seven year term now favored by the congressional majority by a trillion dollars over seven years but the median income in the united states has dropped one percent now if anybody had ever told you that jobs would go up trade would go up productivity would go up inflation would go down and the person in the middle would actually have a one percent decline in their income you wouldn t have an increase in income it doesn t seem to compute what happened how did that happen in the last two years we ve had more new businesses formed in 93 and 94 than in any two year period in american history more new people have become millionaires in 93 and 94 than in any comparable period in american history but more than half of the people of this country 60 percent to be exact are working a longer work week today than they were 10 years ago for the same or lower wages once you adjust for inflation it doesn t figure what caused all this it s good news and bad news part of it was the global economy part of it is the information and technology revolution which means fewer people can do more work part of it was wrong headed policies in our government but it s happening so i get letters all the time from people that say i know that things are going well but i don t feel more secure i got a letter the other day from a guy that i went to grade school with came from a very poor family made himself an engineer got a job with a fortune 500 company and now after working there for 25 years was one of three 49 and 50 year old engineers who was laid off and thinks he will never again find another job at remotely the same income or benefits he s very excited for all these good things that are happening to the american economy but how does he send his kids to college so it s like a good news bad news story i ll give you another example the technology revolution do you know what technology means in education it means that a child in a poor mountain hamlet in the hills of the arkansas ozarks can get on the internet and hook into a library in australia to get direct information about volcanoes down there to do a research project it s incredible that s what it means it means that the technology revolution means that all of you if you have a computer can hook into the white house and get all the facts on the budget we were getting 50 000 people an hour for a few hours after we announced our new budget it s incredible what it means it means a lot of other things that all of you know i m sure but let me tell you what it also means it means that our children can get on the internet and now without any paying money can be exposed to hard core porn it also means that a person who s smart enough to work a computer but is slightly deranged and paranoid can hook into the right people and learn how to make a bomb just like the one that blew up the federal building in oklahoma city it also means that clever radical groups in places like japan can have little vials of sarin gas they can go into subway systems and break open and kill a lot of innocent people it means that here in our own country we found radical groups experimenting with biological weapons germ warfare technology good news and bad news foreign policy the good news is no russian missiles pointed at the united states the good news is the cold war is over and there s no serious threat to our security the bad news is that once you strip the veneer of communist control off of russia with nothing to replace it within five years half the banks are run by organized crime hillary and i went to the baltic states to riga latvia and had tens of thousands of people in the streets thanking us for helping to get the russian troops out of there for the first time since before the second world war people weeping in the streets we went inside to a meeting and the first thing the presidents of the country asked us for was an fbi office because now that there was no communism and no soldiers they were worried that the port was going to become a center for drug traffickers the crime problem every major city in the country that s taken aggressive stance against crime sees the crime rate going down and that s the good news but there are so many young people in this country that don t have strong family situations don t have good community situations that the rate of random violence among young teenagers is still going up the rate of random drug use among young teenagers has started going up again which means unless we figure out something to do about it in five or six years there s going to be an awful price to pay so there s all these wonderful things going on and all these troubling things going on is it surprising that people would look at all this and be confused and frustrated and anxiety ridden and feel somewhat insecure now let me tell you i believe with all my heart that the united states is better positioned for the 21st century than any nation in the world i believe that the good news i believe that the good news outweighs the bad and i believe that the future s going to be fine if we will face these challenges but i have spent a lot of time in the last few months thinking about how to explain this to my fellow citizens i ran for president for two reasons i wanted to restore the american dream because i did not want my child to be part of the first generation of americans to do worse than their parents because i did not want to see all these young people in our cities and isolated rural areas growing up in poverty with nothing to look forward to and i wanted to unite the country i wanted to bring us together the diversity of america the diversity of chicago the racial religious ethnic diversity we have in this country unique among all the large countries of the world is our meal ticket to the global economy if we can figure out what to do about it and if you ask me to give myself a grade on the first two and a half years i would say i did a very good job on the first part of that because we have really worked hard on the economy and on crime and on the other major issues facing but now as president i have to work harder on the second part how to bring the american people together how we can understand what it is we are facing because i can tell you right now in washington the members of congress who are here will tell you we are debating fundamental questions that we thought were resolved 50 60 70 years ago now all these changes in the economy and all these changes in the way we live and work have led to a sense of unsettling and it led us to a composition in the congress of people who literally are prepared to debate the first principles of our society and you better be part of the debate if you want it to come out in the way you believe i now believe are ability to restore the american dream and to get this country going economically to grow the middle class and shrink the under class our ability to face all these other problems depends upon our ability to have some understanding about how we relate to each other as a community and what this country s all about and i just want to give you two or three examples of the profound debates going on in washington today and why i come down where i do and why i hope you will understand how important this election is debate number one in washington are the problems we have as americans primarily personal and cultural or are they primarily political and economic there are a whole lot of people in the congress today who believe there s really nothing for the government to do about our problems and nothing for them to do in their private capacity because most of our problems are personal and cultural so if everybody would just wake up every day and do the right thing and stop misbehaving and if people would stop putting out bad movies and cds we would have nirvana everything would be fine now you re laughing but i m serious i am serious there are people who honestly believe that and let us give them their due at a certain level it is true that is there is nothing i can do for you if you re not prepared to do the right thing yourself you will all concede that you didn t have enough money to come to this fundraiser tonight because somebody just gave you something you had to live your life in a certain way so at a certain level that is true it is also true that the influence centers in our culture whether it s entertainment or media or sports or you name it have great influence in our society independent of politics and business and economics that s also true but what bothers me is that if that s all you say about it it s just an excuse to walk away from our common problems and pretend we re not one country what i believe is that our problems are both personal and cultural and political and economic and i don t intend to use the personal and cultural nature of our problems as an excuse to walk away from our common responsibilities to do better and i ll try to give you a simple example of every one example number one the family and medical leave law there were people who opposed the family and medical leave law they said it is wrong to impose any burden on the private sector at all it will be terrible for them and besides that we are philosophically opposed to it i believe that on the personal and cultural side if every kid in this country had two parents taking care of her or him and loving them and giving them discipline and giving them direction we d have about a third of the problems we ve got in this country today most of them would be gone i believe that now i also believe that economically most people who are adults in this country have to work to make a living whether they re live alone or whether they re in a single parent or a two parent family therefore the most important thing we can do arguably is to enable our fellow citizens to succeed as parents and to succeed as workers therefore people ought to be able to take a little time off without losing their job if their child is sick or their parent is sick or a baby is born or something terrible happens to their family so i supported that now that is the kind of fundamental debate we re having you ve got to decide where you stand i say it s both both personal and economic and political and i hope you believe that but a lot of people don t let me give you another example the mayor mentioned the crime bill you know i m the only president sort of maybe this is not a compliment to me but i m the only sitting president as opposed to somebody who gets out of office and does it who has ever opposed the national rifle association in the senate now i want to i hate to say what i m about to say now that you clapped the truth is that i have agreed with them on many things when i was a governor i worked with the nra a lot i like their hunter education programs i liked the fact that they tried to help me resolve some very difficult problems relating to people in rural areas and where you could hunt and where you couldn t and all of that i don t oppose everything they want what i oppose is this world view this is not about the right to keep and bear arms not the brady bill and not the assault weapons ban there is one view that says look the crime problem is a personal problem it is people doing wrong right their slogan guns don t kill people people do right it s a personal problem so find the wrongdoer put him in jail and throw the key away this is politics economics aside has nothing to do with this this is about personal wrongdoing and therefore don t you dare inconvenience me one bit because of something somebody else did i shouldn t have to wait five days to get my handgun because i haven t done anything wrong if i want to carry a tec 9 around i haven t done anything wrong and who are you to judge me if i want to take it to target practice that s what this is about i m not doing just find the people who are doing wrong and punish them this is all individual the problem is if you talk to the police officers of the country if you talk to the prosecutors and the former prosecutors like the mayor they will tell you that this is like all of our other problems if we will all take some responsibility for it we can make progress so i have no objection and i don t think anybody should to saying to the citizens of this country it is your responsibility to go through the minor inconvenience of waiting five days so we can keep people who have got no business buying guns from buying guns it is a minor sacrifice for a major good i don t have any problem telling those guys that you it may break your heart not to have one of these tec 9s but it s worth it to get the uzis out of the high schools sacrifice a little bit for a greater good i ll tell you this may be an unpopular statement here i agree with this decision the supreme court made saying that that school had the right to drug test the kids who wanted to play on the sports teams and i ll tell you why not because i think most kids do drugs they don t not because i think most of our kids are bad they re not they re good but our young people are pretty smart and they know this drug deal is a big problem in our country and i think it s worth saying to them it s a privilege to be on an athletic team it s a privilege to be in music it s a privilege to do extracurricular activities this is something you ought to do for your country help us get rid of the scourge of drugs out schools be willing to be tested as an example and to help us catch the people who are doing it don t cry about having your rights infringed when all we re asking you to do is to band together and assume a little bit of responsibility and go through a little bit of inconvenience to move this country forward and help us deal with our problems that s what we ought to be doing and i come now to the third example the budget let s give the republicans credit first they wanted to do the balanced budget amendment and it failed by a vote because a lot of people thought it was a dodge and because a lot of people feared that sometime we might need to run a deficit in a recession and we couldn t do it but then they came up with a balanced budget and it adds up and it s a credible budget and i want you to know i think they re entitled to credit for that why because i believe it s important to balance the budget now i know a lot of people don t but let me remind you this country never never had a permanent structural deficit before 1981 never we ran we ran rather modest deficits all during the 70s because those of you who were around then will remember that we had something called stagflation and the economy was weak and we needed to do it for sound economic reasons but we never had a permanent huge deficit in 1981 we adopted those big tax cuts we never really got over it and then there was sort of a bipartisan agreement in washington because the democrats were not about to cut spending as much it would take to balance the budget and the republican presidents didn t want to raise anybody s taxes because it violated their ideology so i got to be president two and half years ago with the debt quadrupled in 12 years and i ll tell you how severe it is our budget would be balanced today but for the interest we have to pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before i became president i ll tell how severe it is next year interest payments on the debt will exceed the defense budget you want more money for the chicago schools you want me to help educate more kids you want me to invest in your efforts to clean up the environment and grow the economy we won t have it unless we do something to change our spending priorities so it matters when we brought the deficit down two years ago that s how we got the economy going again because we drove interest rates down and we got this economy spurred so it is important but there s a right way and a wrong way to do it what is the difference between my budget and theirs it rests on a simple philosophical difference they believe this is honest i m not being critical i m telling you what they honestly believe in the heart when you strip it all away they believe that the purpose of the government is national defense tax cuts on capital and balance the budget as quick as possible because the government would mess up a one car parade otherwise it s not good for anything and we don t have any public responsibilities that should be manifest that way that s what they believe that s their honest conviction now i believe that the purpose of government is to help people make the most of their own lives that s what i believe and to meet the challenges of the moment and to provide security for people who have done what they re supposed to do that s what i believe so our budget says look if you balance the budget in 10 years instead of seven if you cut this tax cut by more than half and you don t give it to people who don t really need it and you focus the tax breaks on education and child rearing the two most important jobs in our society then you don t have to gut medicare and medicaid you can shave them in a modest way without worrying about whether you re going to close urban hospitals or close rural hospitals or hurt elderly people who don t have enough money to live on as it is and not only that you don t have to cut education at all you can increase education you can increase head start you can increase apprenticeships for kids that don t go to college you can increase student loans you can increase our investment in technology and research that is the difference my belief is we should balance the budget but we should also grow the economy the purpose of balancing the budget is to raise incomes to create jobs to bring us closer together to enable us to meet our challenges so i think my budget is better but it all rests on a philosophical difference you have to decide which side of the divide you re on i believe our government s purpose is to help people make the most of their own lives and let me just point out there s a lot of people in that congress who are there because we did that the g i bill after world war ii built the greatest middle class in the history of the world because the government tried to help people make the most of their own lives and that s the kind of thing we ought to be doing now so our budget proposes a g i bill for america s workers it proposes the kind of thing that they ought to be for collapsing all the separate training programs of the government putting it in a big voucher if you lose your job you call the government say i m enrolling at the local community college we send 2 600 a year for two years and let people get a re education or retraining program to get a new job and a better income and a new start in life that s the kind of think i think is worth spending money on you have to decide where you stand on that these are the big fundamental issues we re debating in washington today i believe time is on our side now and i believe it for a couple of reasons first of all as hideous and awful and heartbreaking as the bomb in oklahoma city was it took a lot of the meanness out of this country it brought us together it made us all think about the impact of our words and our feelings and how we ve been conducting ourselves and then when captain o grady survived that magnificent terrible six days in bosnia and he was rescued it put a little zip back in our step and made us realize what was best about this country and i think our heads are kind of getting on straighter today as a people but i want you to know i m going to spend the next year determined to continue to move the country forward economically to continue to deal with all these problems we ve talked about but we ve got to get ourselves together i am telling you this is a great country if we can get ourselves together if we can understand we have cer dem wjclinton29 6 98 bill_clinton thank you very much well first let me thank all of you for coming out to see us on such a nice warm day i thank president chen vice president ren professor chi senator akaka and the members of congress who are here and all the members of the university community who have made my wife and our daughter and our whole delegation feel so very welcome today thank you very much now when senator akaka said that some people thought of beida as the harvard of china all of us americans who did not go to harvard were thinking perhaps harvard was the beida of the united states you know political leaders of my generation talk a lot about the future and the 21st century but it is you the students who are here who will live in it and who must build it a child born today will not even remember the 20th century indeed a child born today may think of people like me as relics of an ancient dynasty americans including that one want to work with china to help build this future a future of security and prosperity a future in which we clean up the world s environment instead of destroy it a future in which we advance education and dignity and freedom for all people as a small token of our respect and in honor of your centennial we are donating over 500 reference books to the library of beida thank you xie xie through the u s information agency we have selected some of the best volumes in our history and literature along with encyclopedias and dictionaries on every subject related to the united states and my wife and i have added personally two books which we wrote her book it takes a village and mine between hope and history and i d like to present them to the president at this moment now if you re trying to decide which one to read first i should tell you that in america her book sold a lot more copies than mine did we are proud of our historic relationship with this university i hope these books will help to further our friendship for another generation i hope too that more and more americans will come to china to study and more and more young chinese will go to america to study every day i must be preoccupied with the world s problems but i believe a lot of the world s problems would be quickly solved if the world s young people were permitted to live together and learn together and serve together you can set the standard and i hope you will next week our young country will celebrate its 222nd birthday it is a time of year when we americans stop to reflect on the many blessings we enjoy on the ideals of our founders to provide life liberty and the opportunity to pursue happiness to all people it is a time when we measure our progress and try to honestly assess our continuing problems when we take pride in our history but also resolve to keep working on it for history is not just something to be studied at university history is always unfolding here it is unfolding and i believe a large part of the next chapter in america s history will be its partnership with the new china china too is always rebuilding itself of course your foundations are deeper than ours our entire history could fit into one of your longer dynasties but from different starting points we are working toward a common destiny of peace and prosperity and i hope of lifting the level of freedom and dignity not only for all our own people but for others throughout the world china is a very old country but thanks to you to your idealism to your spirit and to your future it will remain forever young thank you very much dem wjclinton29 7 93a bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen especially to our honorees i want to welcome you to the white house and say i hope you had a wonderful day in washington i know you ve been over to the justice department with the attorney general i want to thank her for her service to america and for her introduction and to recognize some others who are here floyd clarke the acting director of the fbi robert bonner the administrator of the drug enforcement administration henry hudson the director of the u s marshall service s s ashton jr of the office of justice programs and ellen wesley who coordinates this program at the department of justice i d also like to recognize at least four members of the congress who are here senators kent conrad and byron dorgan from north dakota and senator larry pressler from south dakota and congressman tim johnson from south dakota i want to thank you for coming the young american medal for service and the young american medal for bravery are awarded to a young person whose deeds in a very real way represent the best our nation can offer at a time when we hear too much about self interest and not enough about what each of us can do to advance the common good of all americans seven young people here being honored with their families are role models for all the rest of us their selfless acts of service to their neighbors remind us of our own responsibilities to our communities and to our nation as extraordinary as the courage and initiative of all these young people has been we must remember too that every american can contribute look how the american people are responding to the challenge presented by the horrible floods in the middle of the country or how they responded to hurricane andrew last year most americans want to do more and will every day if they re given a chance to do it the medals we award today honor special acts and in the same spirit i have tried to launch in the nation s capital for young people throughout the country a program of national service that will give people the opportunity to help people day in and day out and to earn some money as well against their college education the plan was passed yesterday by the house of representatives and we are one vote shy of ending the filibuster in the senate i hope that will happen tomorrow and millions of young people over the next umpteen years will be given the opportunity to serve in a very real and compelling and human way in their own communities lately we hear a lot about the things like costeffectiveness and efficiency and those are very important things but they sound sort of bureaucratic today we honor things that matter more the potential of the human heart and the courage of even the very young what the great american writer from my part of the country william faulkner called the truths of the heart love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice when an emergency struck the young people we honor today didn t wait they acted when a need arose they didn t question whether they would succeed in the end they simply went to work we have a lot to learn from the young people we honor today and now i d like for each of them to come up on the stage and receive his or her medal as i call their names and then we have a place for them to stand i d also like for their parents and family members to stand as i read a few words about them the young american medal for bravery is presented to waylon dean bertsch of buchanan north dakota i d like the people who are here with waylon to stand up anybody here there they are back there when waylon was 10 years old his five year old sister andrea fell through the ice in a river near their home he sent for his parents and then went to his sister s rescue after falling through the ice himself he kicked to keep his body and his sister above water it worked when their parents arrived they pulled both of them out alive good for you christopher paul erichs rapid city south dakota stand up give him a hand a student at christopher s school entered a classroom with a sawed off shotgun ordered the teacher to leave and took 22 students hostage over a twoand a half hour standoff with professional negotiators as the gunman moved to light a cigarette christopher snatched the shotgun from his hands calmly freed the other hostages and called in the police let s give him another hand jessica ann johnson of ellicott iowa who is here with you look you ve got plenty of folks here with you jessica was just seven years old on her family farm when she heard the screams of her four year old brother he had crawled into a pigpen and was attacked trampled and bitten by 450 pound sows she went into the pen with the sows dragged her brother to a safe spot went back through the pen and went to her mother for help i can only tell you that this is something i have a limited similar experience with when i was six i was attacked by a ram on our farm and i was darn near killed i know how terrifying it is when you re that age to be attacked by an animal that can take your life to think that this young girl at her age to have that amount of courage to save a member of her family is really astonishing let s give her a hand after i got bloodied by that ram i got into politics thinking i wouldn t get knocked around so much i think you ought to stay on the farm the young american medal for service is presented to kelly elizabeth broxton from gaithersburg maryland who s here with you they couldn t contain themselves they started clapping early stand up this is great kelly taught over 300 students about basic first aid certified first aid training and how to get treatment for substance abuse she also organized a youth council that recruited students from 19 other schools to perform community service projects good for you congratulations dennis chisholm jr of winston salem north carolina your family is standing give them a hand dennis volunteered his many talents during the school year and five days a week in the summer to work in a center for children with disabilities he helped other children develop motor skills and build their self esteem through a range of physical and creative activities including music and even computers i think that i should not that we have just celebrated this week the 3rd anniversary of the americans with disabilities act a major piece of civil rights legislation but like every other piece of civil rights legislation we ever signed it can only work if there is change in the hearts and minds of the rest of the american people and this young man has helped other people to see the abilities of people with disabilities we re all in his debt another person who has done much the same is sarah elizabeth greensfelder of baltimore sarah has taken part in all kinds of community service programs at blood drives the special olympics johns hopkins pediatric center in nursing homes or with housebound senior citizens when she was selected for this medal she had volunteered over 900 hours for helping others the equivalent of working full time for half a year let s give her a hand where s your family they should stand too let s give them a hand that s good look at that you ve got a whole back row thank you now i d like to ask i m not going to leave you over there gennie sue sluder of clatskankie oregon did i say it right how do i say it say it clatskankie oregon stand up gennie started a program called help hungry kids she went to the school board and managed a statewide campaign that asked students at all 235 high schools in oregon to donate 1 and two cans of food apiece for needy children now she s at george fox college and she s working at two jobs to put herself through school but when she was in high school she thought of a way to organize a plan for every person her age in the state to help children who were less fortunate a very impressive accomplishment i want to say again on behalf of all the people of the united states it is a great honor to have these fine young people their families friends and supporters in the white house today they ve made us all very proud and they ve reminded us again of what is most important about our citizenship our roles in our families and in our communities and in a very real sense what it means just to be a person they re great let s give them one more hand and thank you all for being here dem wjclinton29 7 93b bill_clinton i don t want them to miss the vote this is what is known is an excused absence for the congress i want to say a warm welcome and a word of thanks to the risners the dorseys and the dikemans all of them for coming here they re not used to being public speakers but i think they did a fine job don t you i d also like to say a special word to mr dorsey when i was a boy i cut lawns for a living too and nobody ever gave me more than i charged you re either a better salesman a better grass cutter or you had better customers i am so glad to have these families here today because they emphasize that a pivotal part of this economic plan is increasing the earned income tax credit which more than anything else we could do will reward work and family and responsibility and make a major down payment on welfare reform you heard robin make that point there are so many americans in this country who want to work who want to be independent who want to support themselves and who find themselves in a position of not being able to make ends meet not being able to cover basic costs the earned income tax credit can help them do that it is a terribly important part of this overall plan which not only reduces the deficit by 500 billion but also does it in a fair way half of the reduction comes from budget cuts of the rest four fifths of the rest comes from taxes on the upper income people in this country the upper six percent one fifth from taxes on families with incomes above 30 000 and below for couples 180 000 but the most important thing of all to reward work is that this will be the first time in the history of our country when we ll be able to say that if you work 40 hours a week and you have children in your home you will be lifted out of poverty it is an elemental powerful and profound principle it is not liberal or conservative it should belong to no party it ought to become part of the american creed it s not about more governmental or social workers or more services it s about more groceries and a car more school clothes for the kids and more encouragement and hope to keep doing the right thing these families have made it clearer than i ever could one of the things that i want to emphasize is that if we ever want to really restore the health of the american economy it won t be enough just to bring down the budget deficit or just to have good economic policies you have to find a way to tell people that if they work hard and play by the rules they ll be able to make it they will be rewarded the incentive system in america has worked against that for too long you know it s amazing to me how many american families still live in poverty about 18 percent of the work force nearly one in five families have a worker and still do not reach the federal poverty line there are 36 million approximately low income americans about 20 million of them live in a family that works with someone working at least part of the year six million live in families where someone works all year round full time and the family is still in poverty and as i said where there is a family of four about one in five or 18 percent have insufficient incomes to lift them above the federal poverty line so in spite of all the pro family rhetoric of our national government for years our policies haven t worked in fact they ve been going in the wrong direction we need every american who can to work if we re going to compete and win in the global economy and more than ever we need strong families this is as you can see not just a pro work policy it is a pro family policy we shouldn t make it harder to work and support a family we ought to make it easier and the people who do it should be lifted up as examples of the american ideal not punished because they re trying to do the right thing that s what the eitc does we ought to have two principles that operate in this country people who can work should work but if they do work their families at home shouldn t be poor today i also want to announce that the irs will begin an aggressive outreach campaign to reach all americans who are entitled to the credit this will make it easier for them to receive benefits they have earned by working it will also help us to educate them about the advantage of getting an advanced eitc rather than having to wait an entire year all these folks figured out how to work the system but there are a lot of people out there just like them who haven t and who deserve the same incentive for work and for family we know that this program works we know it s a lifeline for semi skilled workers who are working to improve their education and training we want robin to get home in time for the test and we want her to make a good grade and we want that also to be a symbol for all the people in this country who are struggling to do the same thing we know that the vast majority of all those who benefit from the eitc work very long hours for a very modest compensation in jobs that very often have inadequate benefits either for themselves or for their children these are just three of the millions of stories we might have heard today from a part of america we almost never see on the evening news every time you see a crime story reported in a tough neighborhood remember that most people in that neighborhood no matter how tough it is work for a living do their best to raise children never break the law and are struggling struggling against odds that are enormous to make it and to make the american dream real for themselves and their children it is time we acted to support those people in some ways they may be the most heroic of all americans today if we really want to rebuild family life in america if we want to recognize the realities that nearly everybody has to work to make ends meet and more and more families have to have both parents working if they re in the home even if they have four children and two of them are as young as those two youngest boys we have got to say to those people we are on your side your country is for you you have done what all of the speech makers talk about and it s time the people who make the speeches had policies that reward you for doing what people have been pleading for americans to do for years and years now that s why i think this is a critical part of this economic package make no mistake about it if the people who favor the no new anything approach as the wall street journal characterized the opponents of our plan prevail americans will lose the pro work pro family pro responsibility element of the earned income tax credits the largest single expansion in an effort to help the working poor in over two decades we can t let this happen this is just one more reason why we have got to act and act now on this economic plan this is not about numbers and digits and accountants gimmicks it s not about arguments about who perceives or feels what about this economic plan this is about how the low interest rates deficit reduction the business incentives and most important today the earned income tax credit will affect the real lives of real people and help them to live and succeed in the way that we always speak as if we want them to be able to live and succeed this is the real world you met it today i hope the congress will make it possible in the next few days to have more families like this with more success stories thank you very much dem wjclinton29 8 02 bill_clinton thank you craig for the wonderful introduction thank you dave duffield for your leadership i thank all the team that came back to meet me i d like to thank all of you for showing up i ve spent a few nights in new orleans and i can t believe you re here i couldn t compete with gladys knight last night and i know that most of you probably didn t go home after she finished i love this place and i thank you for giving me the chance to come back i first came to new orleans when i was 3 years old and my widowed mother was a nursing student here i came back when i was 15 when i was 21 and every time i could possibly come since then the people here have been very good to me they voted for me twice and enabled me to carry louisiana but mostly they are experts in the art of living they work to live not the other way around so it s a great place to come i d also like to thank you for playing my song don t stop thinking about tomorrow i hadn t planned to do this but since you did arrange for me to walk out to that song which was my theme song in 1992 i think i ll begin my remarks with it in 1991 i was in los angeles and i was being driven around as a governor by a young man named sean landres who later became a divinity student and married a young woman from central europe back then we still had tape decks not cd players in cars you remember 1991 so this young man who was 21 years old looks at me and he said governor i think you may run for president and if you do this ought to be your theme song and he puts on fleetwood mac singing don t stop thinking about tomorrow i looked at him and i said you were barely alive when they made that song he said maybe but it resonates with me now so i ran it was my theme song and just a few days before i left the white house for the last time we had a farewell party for all the people who had been in the cabinet and the administration and on the staff and fleetwood mac staged a rare union and came to the south lawn of the white house and sang don t stop thinking about tomorrow i say that because that is essentially the key to your success and what we as americans have to be doing now when i took office in january of 1993 there were only 50 sites on the worldwide web the internet was still largely the province of research physicists when i left office there were 350 million sites with the number going up exponentially now i am writing a personal memoir at our home in chappaqua new york and yesterday i asked my young research assistant justin cooper to check on something for me i d written about going to a movie in dallas in december of 1957 and i said i thought i had gone to see how the west was won but i discovered the movie wasn t made until 1962 so justin said that s no problem so he finds this website that has every movie made in the 20th century in america listed by the month it came out so we pulled up all the ones that came out in september october november and december of 1957 i concluded that it was either raintree county or bridge on the river kwai then the website asked me if i wanted to see the trailer from raintree county 45 years old so i said i did and i watched montgomery cliff and elizabeth taylor and eva marie saint on the internet replaying a movie i had seen when i was 11 when peoplesoft got started 15 years ago i doubt that even your most visionary people knew just how much technology would transform the way we communicate the way we live the way we do business how much our world would change and how much our idea of human potential would expand your company helped to fuel that progress and i am grateful for what you did and are doing it was my great honor to serve as president when we moved into a new century and a new millennium and fully into the global information age most of what happened was quite good for us and much of what happened was quite good for the rest of the world now the world is consumed with two great challenges the challenge of terror with the accompanying danger of weapons of mass destruction and the deep roots that so much terror has and racial ethnic religious and tribal hatred and the challenge of the global economy and the american economy where there has been so much market value lost questions of business ethics and around the world where there s a wholesale assault on globalization by people who say they speak for the world s poor and those of us who support an integrated global economy are hurting them both the security and the economic pictures are much more complex i believe than they are often presented and so i d like to offer a few observations about the economy and about the security issues and then open the floor to questions i feel very strongly that i ought to spend more time answering questions because i m interested in what you want to talk about let s start with the economy the protestors against the global economy always forget to say that this globalizing economy has lifted more people out of poverty in the last 20 years than ever before in human history poor countries that chose growth through openness to trade and investment grew at an average of 5 a year poor countries that are closed grew at an average of 1 a year infant mortality is down life expectancy is up more people than ever are in school even in poor countries so that s a part of the story you don t often hear on the other hand it is also true that the global economy is not working for half the world half the world lives on less than 2 a day a billion people live on less than 1 a day 130 million kids never go to school 10 million children die every year of preventable childhood diseases 1 in 4 of all the people who will die this year will die of aids tb and malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them little children that never got a glass of clean water so the picture is complicated the same thing is true in the american economy when i took office the stock market was at 3 200 it more than tripled while we were there got up above 11 000 now it s lost several trillion dollars in wealth now there s more than one thing going on here yes it s true there was some serious corporate chicanery some bogus accounting and a lot of people who were hurt enron and many other countries deserve to be angry and deserve to be compensated but there were other things that happened we had over capacity in telecom and there was bound to be a correction we had bid up a lot of the dot com stock too high investors anticipating that even non profitable companies would ultimately be bought by somebody that was profitable adding to their productivity and there was bound to be a correction the correction was more severe than it would have been and should have been had it not been for examples of gross misconduct and phony accounting and the feeling that a lot of our friends around the world had that we made a terrible mistake in going from surpluses back to deficits and in remaining disengaged from the economic problems of latin america and other parts of the globe and so as so often happens with markets those who think it was a little too high would have to concede that now it s quite a bit too low what are we going to do in short order i think we should continue to do what we know works we should continue to open more markets to american products and services and open our markets to competition from around the world we should address the fact that we have gone from a projected surplus of 5 7 trillion dollars over the next 10 years to deficits and we should address that i m not running for anything so i can tell you what i think i think it was crazy to have a big tax cut and to give people in my income group a tax cut i think it was wrong it was actually a good thing given the economic slowdown to give middle class and lower middle income working people a tax cut so they could maintain some reasonable consumption patterns and alleviate the impact of the recession it was necessary after september 11th to spend some more money we were going to have a short term deficit but the permanent deficit we have built in is coming because that tax cut is too big i never had a nickel until i left the white house so i always expected it was true i now know what i want is low interest rates a stable economy an opportunity for growth to occur and the people that serve here at this convention center to be able to send their kids to college so we ll have a stable society that s what i think we need you know we ve been told we all have to sacrifice to fight terror and poor people have been asked to give up after school programs and training programs and the middle class has been asked to give up the certainty they had when i left office that when the baby boomers retire social security and medicare would be there and they wouldn t have to bankrupt their kids and their ability to raise their grandkids so they ve been asked to sacrifice a lot what have upper income people like me been asked to sacrifice we ve been asked to expend the energy necessary to open the envelope containing our tax cut it s given us deficits and it s not fair and it s not right it s not necessary it s bad economics that s what i believe so i hope that that will be changed now i also believe we should be much more aggressively involved in the rest of the world there s a conference on sustainable development in south africa now i think we should be committed to the right sort of debt relief and aid for poor nations to make more trading partners and i think we should do much more to try to get all the kids of the world in school i think that we should finally have the right sort of correction with some of the problems we ve seen coming to light in the last few months i think it s important for example to stop the accounting companies from also being management consultants to the same company i think that s an important thing to do my securities exchange commissioner tried to do that in the late 90 s and the congress stopped him there s been a change of heart now in the congress and they re going to do that i think it s important and i have slightly draconian views on this not to let people just engage in an accounting gimmick to move their operations offshore to beat american taxes that imposes too much burden on the rest of you who are left behind and it s wrong it s wrong to take advantage of the opportunities of the american economy and then put money in an offshore subsidiary solely to beat the taxes and leave the rest of you holding the bill we just ought to stop that we ve got to have a very tough unambiguous position on the other hand i think we have to be somewhat more sophisticated about how we handle stock options a lot of people go to work for companies and stay with companies because they can become owners of the company because they can share in the profits and they re willing to take the risk and they don t have management most companies don t have managers who unforgivably take the money and run and leave the employees and the customers and the investors holding the bag most people who run companies are honest people doing good things so there may be an argument for some different expensing treatment or some stock options but when they re designed to be a long term loyalty and participation in the company and genuinely share the wealth by people who aren t about to take the money and run i think that that means that we have to have a very careful approach to this and not throw the baby out with the bath water because i think we want people to continue to want to work for and own part of companies one problem that i think has happened in the last few years is that the raising of capital from wall street has become so important that a fairly significant number of companies have actually hired people to run the companies who knew not about the mission of the company but about how to do well on wall street what happens is that we have created a culture in some parts of our economy where people are under enormous pressure to do well on wall street and almost inevitably neglect why the company was set up in the first place and what it s supposed to do i ll give you a contrary example in 1987 in october the stock market had its biggest drop since 1924 it dropped 500 points in a day back when that was a real drop the then richest man in america sam walton was in my office the governor s office in little rock when the market closed by pure coincidence we were talking about something else now sam walton was a republican as far as i know he never voted for me but we were friends so when the market closed i said sam how much money did you lose today he said oh a little over a billion dollars now he got started in 87 a billion dollars was real money back in 87 you know and i said well how do you feel he said bill i m going to west tennessee tomorrow where i ve got a new store and i m going to fly over it in my little plane if there are pickup trucks in the parking lot i m not going to worry about the market i m not selling my stock i m in the business of being wal mart and i just want my employees and my investors to recover their value and we will recover our value as long as we keep putting pickups in the parking lot and selling people things they want to buy so markets always go up and down the question is what is the primary purpose of the business people who are running the show no one ever thought sam walton would take the money and run i ll give you another example another republican as far as i know never voted for me but he was a friend of mine ken iverson founded a company called nucor they made steel rebar steel all over the they were about the second or third most productive steel company anywhere in the world they have a dozen plants or more in the united states i got one of them for arkansas when i was governor the nucor workers got weekly bonuses a 1 500 a year supplement back in the 80 s for every kid they had in college one man in south carolina educated 11 children working for nucor and a strict no layoff policy which means if they had to cutback everybody took a pay cut across the board so nucor didn t lose any money in 80 s when all the other manufacturers were getting killed in the middle of the country except in one year and iverson sent a letter around to the i still have a copy of it in my file somewhere saying it s terrible what happened to you our revenues are down 20 i ve got to cut your bonus 20 i feel terrible because it s not your problem you did everything you could do everything i asked but the economy s bad you hired me to figure out how to get around a bad economy and i couldn t do it this year so while i m cutting you 20 i m taking a 60 cut needless to say the nucor workers did not quit did not revolt and were willing to walk through hot molten steel for ken iverson because he didn t take the money and run he gave up the money and stayed what s really eating on the american people today are companies that seem to practice what i call reverse titanic economics they throw the women and children overboard and the captain and the crew sail to tahiti with the money but the only point i want to make is you don t work for a company like that and you re here proud to be doing what you re doing most american companies are good and strong and honest look at these certified statements that came out that they re now being required to make not that many people had to restate their earnings so what is it we want to stop we want to stop overstatement of income understatement of liabilities bad accounting practices we want to stop this take the money and run mentality we want to stop people making you pay more taxes so they could pay less by having a phony relocation to some tax haven when they re really operating here we want to do that not only to stop bad behavior but so people will have confidence in our markets again and money will pour back in generating growth and jobs and opportunity what we do not want to do is to over react to the point where people don t want to invest their money don t want to take a chance don t want to give other people the chance to build companies like yours so we have to have a very sensitive nuance view of this and i hope we will but the main thing i want to say to you is this is still a great country with a strong economy and i want to say the same thing about our fight against terror a lot of this stuff should scare you but we haven t been around here over 200 years by accident we ve been around here because more than half the time more than half the people have done what was necessary to keep freedom and security alive and that s exactly what we re going to do now so let me move now just briefly to the security issues when a president leaves office he always has kind of an exit interview with the incoming president and i had two interesting ones one with president bush and another with president bush it was interesting so when i met with former president bush i remember this he was really good and considering the fact that we had a difficult campaign i was very respectful of and never forgot the way he treated me and our people and the way we worked together so he told me what he thought the major security problems were so i did the same thing and i d been thinking a lot about it i said well i think the major problems are terrorism in general and bin laden and the al qaeda network in particular the turmoil in the middle east which was then beginning to build again after 7 or 8 years of real progress toward peace the trouble with india and pakistan over kashmir and the fact they both have nuclear power the fact that north korea still had a missile program which could be used to give missiles to bad people who would hurt us and the continued persistence of racial religious ethnic and tribal hatreds by people who might have access to weapons of mass destruction and it that turned out to be a pretty good list of what the problems were they were all things we had worked very hard on there is a specific security agenda america has to pursue we need to finish the job in afghanistan and stay there until we find bin laden and clean out the entire al qaeda network they re still the most dangerous in the world and that s still the most important thing in my view secondly we need to as soon as these palestinian elections are held in january if we can wait that long but it looks like we re determined to start the peace process up again in the middle east the trouble in the middle east fuels a lot of the turmoil misrepresentation and hatred in other parts of the world it s not just about the israelis and the palestinians and the end of it is clear i mean basically there has to be an absolute guaranty of israel s security there has to be a state for the palestinians for the west bank in gaza there has to be money to develop that area but the united states and our european allies and russia and others have to be willing to give absolute security guarantees both to israel and the new palestinian state because once we have a peace agreement they ll have all the same enemies they ll have terrorists trying to undermine both of them but i don t think that people who have not dealt with this can possibly over estimate you just can t imagine how much this turmoil in the middle east contributes to what people try to do to people we care about and values we share all over asia and some parts of latin america and elsewhere the third thing we need to do is to help our friends from columbia to indonesia to the philippines to defend themselves against terrorists we need to build our domestic defenses and that s i know you ve been discussing this but one of the things that shocked me after september the 11th and i did not know was that after we tripled the funds for counter terrorism for our law enforcement in the wake of oklahoma city in 95 and 96 we hired a lot more people they did a good job but we did nothing to modernize our information systems so that they were not interconnected and they did not have access to things that private companies have for example there are a lot of companies that sell mailing lists and do mass mailings for a living that had all these terrorists in their files before september the 11th one of them is headquartered in arkansas where i used to live and i went up there and found muhammad atta in the computers of the company with 12 addresses now if we had that information the same information that s available on you and me and you say somebody s been here less than year if they ve got 12 addresses they re either really rich or they re up to no good another man had 30 credit cards and 250 000 in debt another one of the al qaeda killers the business community of america helped to finance his murderous behavior he had 30 credit cards and a quarter of a million dollars in debt was on a consolidated payout schedule of 9 800 a month now we ought to be able to do a check on that if a person has more than 5 credit cards and more than 20 000 or 30 000 in debt after being here only 6 months they re either real wealthy or up to no good it ought to be easy to figure out which and there are lots of other information technology issues that need to be addressed which i know that you re all interested in so these are all things that need to be done having said that let me say that just like the global economy there is another side to this the news is not all bleak and terrifying consider this we nearly destroyed ourselves in world war ii and then we had a long cold war now we re getting along with our adversaries in both world war ii and the cold war cooperating on all important fronts we created a world trade organization and bought china into it the nation states of the world in general are moving toward greater cooperation on security and other areas a lot of work has been done and many more terrorist incidents have been stopped in the last 10 years than have occurred mostly they get a minor mention in the press they re what my national security advisor in my first term tony lake called the dogs that don t bark he said you know if you do a good job in foreign policy you can t get any credit because the dogs don t bark but you should know that there are lots and lots of career people who they were there before i got there and they re there now who have worked hard to prevent terrorist incidents from occurring we ve had a serious effort to build our bioterrorism defenses since 1979 there are a lot of things that are going on so while i think we should be alarmed i think we should take this seriously i think we should expect that these will be the set of security threats that we ll have to face for the next several years i don t think you should be despairing the forces of destruction are not going to defeat america or freedom or the growing coming together of the 21st century world unless we give up and give in and i don t think that we or freedom loving people anywhere in the world are about to do that now let me try to put this into some perspective and then i ll answer questions because beyond the economic issues beyond the security issues there are these sort of big philosophical questions if i ask you to describe the world you live in today in a word what would you say most people would use the word globalization you might use the global information age because of what you do i prefer the age of interdependence we are more dependent on one another in ways that are good and bad then ever before we are more vulnerable to one another we live in a world where we ve torn down walls collapsed distances and spread information and technology more widely than ever before on balance that s been really good for you but on september the 11th the al qaeda terrorists used those forces they used open borders easy travel and access to information and technology to murder 3 100 people from 70 countries in the united states so that says to me what we have to do is to take this interdependent world we live in and keep trying to make it an integrated global community of shared values shared responsibilities and shared benefits we have to move from interdependence to integration that s the model i have in my head when i think about every specific thing i tried to do as president and that i advocate today will it make us more of an integrated community and a lot of this is really about ideas are we thinking about today and yesterday or are we thinking about tomorrow the middle east is awash in violence partly because both parties are thinking about yesterday s grievances which make today s problems seem insoluble the most successful arab country in the middle east now is dubai i went to the internet city in dubai a few weeks ago they had nobody there 3 years ago they have 26 000 people working there now average age 28 most of them from other countries i went into the lunchroom they had restaurants from 7 different nations but it s a muslim country with an islamic banking system with no interest for people whose faith requires that they haven t given up their faith they just get up in the morning thinking about tomorrow and keeping about their common humanity and feeling confident that they can celebrate what is unique about them within the context of a community that s integrated it s dramatically different i could give you lots of other examples but that is the single most important thing that i have to say to you people who believe in their common humanity and think about tomorrow have a chance to make the world a safe and a prosperous place and the most interesting place in all of human history people who can t let go of old resentments and negative references to people who have different racial and religious and ethnic groups are destined to give us a world that is awful in its complications because none of us can escape our interdependence so we re either going to have all the vulnerability that goes with interdependence or we re going to have to move to a more integrated global community now i ll say again you shouldn t despair for most of human history and pre history people have defined themselves in positive terms with reference to people in their group and by negative reference to outsiders when people first came out of caves and clans there was probably some reason for that but we just kept on doing it so far all the progress of the world we nearly destroyed civilization in world war ii then we had this long cold war then china decided to move toward the west and the berlin wall fell in 1989 we have not had a chance to make an integrated global community except for the last 13 years your company was 2 years old by the time the possibility of building an integrated global community was really before us for the first time in all of human history so we have to learn how think differently and imagine differently and behave differently we have to have values and ideas and emotions that are consistent with the connections that have brought such prosperity to this company but we can do it i will just close with one story in 1994 we had an awful genocide in rwanda the majority hutus took after the minority tootsies and their supporters and killed somewhere between 500 000 700 000 people in 100 days without high tech weapons mostly with machetes when i went to africa in my second term my wife and i wanted to go to rwanda and see the people there because we had tried to help rebuild the country afterward and because frankly i felt terribly that we were so involved in trying to stop the bosnian war we didn t stop that one and so i asked if they would get me some survivors of the rwandan genocide to talk about the future and they were an interesting lot i had a priest i had this really attractive guy who had lost his arm above the elbow to a machete and said he was a one armed man for peace a lot of interesting people all clearly carrying the marks of this horrible encounter so we got down to the last person who was supposed to speak to us and she had no visible marks on her body she was dressed out in this beautiful bright african dress a costume of the late country of where rwanda is and she said very calmly she said you see no marks on my body because i was cut on the back and around the neck i am a tootsie we lived next door to hutus they were our friends our children played together we observed the holidays together but when the killing start started and they came to our village my neighbors sold us out they told these people that we were of the other tribe and they came for us i thought i would surely be killed but then i awoke in a pool of my own blood to see my husband and 6 children hacked to death in front of me you think about this in the context of what we ve been through now in the world trade center and the middle east and all this she said i awoke in a pool of my own blood to see my husband and my 6 children hacked to death in front of me first i asked god why i had not been killed too because i did not want to live then i realized that i must have been spared for some purpose and it could not be something as mean as vengeance and so i do what i can to help us start again i ll never forget that woman as long as i live all this technology has got to free us to make these human connections we cannot build a global economy and leave half the world out we cannot build a security policy that is only based on defense and is not about winning the battle of hearts and minds and ideas we have a world that is interdependent we have to make it integrated rooted in basic simple concepts everybody counts everybody has a role to play we all do better when we work together our differences are important but our common humanity matters more there s a tribe in africa where the standard greeting that we say hi how are you doing i m fine goes like this when people strangers meet each other walking one says hello and the response is i see you think about it i see you i become more of a person in relation to you you exist i see you the biggest problem we ve got with all these terrorists is they think they can find their redemption in our destruction instead of getting up every morning and thinking about tomorrow they re thinking about yesterday s grievance the biggest problem the rest of the world has with us is they don t resent our success that s not what they resent they resent the fact that they think we don t know enough care enough or do enough to help them share in our success so just as these terrorists can never find their redemption in our destruction we can t succeed in the 21st century if we keep claiming for ourselves opportunities we deny to others we have no choice but to try to move this highly interdependent world that you and people like you have done so much to create into a genuinely integrated global community if we do it the next 50 years will be by far the most interesting prosperous time the world has ever known thank you very much dem wjclinton29 8 99 bill_clinton well thank you very much i must say i thought hillary was going to say if you think it s windy now wait until bill gets up to talk i feel badly about this wind it came up about the time i was explaining the finer points of voodoo around our table and the conviction that haitians and others have that the spirits of light and darkness are more or less in equal balance and they manifest themselves in all kinds of physical ways and all of a sudden the lights started moving and so we ll just have to hope the good guys win tonight let me just say first to craig and jane i m very very grateful to be in their home here i ve also been in their home in new york city thank you brian thank you robert they re quite wonderful people among other things when i came to see them in new york they provided me since i had a little down time with a tenor saxophone and so i played a tune for them so i got here tonight and the horn was here again but i didn t put them through it again but it was very touching and i thank you for that i also want to thank all of those who are here jon thank you and richie for entertaining jon bon jovi has been very good to me he has played for me a number of times over these last six and a half years and i thought they were terrific tonight and i thank them for being here i want to thank the people who prepared the wonderful dinner and all those who served it and all the volunteers who have been part of this tonight and i would like to just make a couple of brief points somebody will ask you tomorrow why you came here tonight and i wonder what you will say i wanted to see their house it looked kind of interesting i wanted to hear the music i hear the food was going to be great the restaurant was closed tonight i d just like to offer a few things that i hope you ll think about first of all new york has been very very good to me and to hillary to al and tipper gore to our whole administration we had a wonderful convention here in 92 i had a very interesting eventful primary here in 92 but it came out okay and then the state voted for us big in 92 and then breathtakingly in 96 and i m very grateful but in 1992 i asked the country and i asked the people of this state to take a chance on me on my family my vice president my administration and on a whole new direction for the country i saw a survey the other day which said that things had been going so well in our country for so many years now nobody could people have no memory of what it was like in 91 and 92 they ve forgotten entirely but the economy was in the tank and the country was divided and the social problems were worsening and we had a lot of challenges around the world that weren t being addressed and you know i lived a long way from washington d c but it seemed to me that we were working on the wrong things and not working on the right things and i asked the american people to give me a chance to create a country in which there was opportunity for all who were responsible in which we could build a community of all americans in which we could be a force for peace and freedom and justice around the world and so you took a chance the first thing i hope you ll say and one of you said this to me tonight when you go home and they ask you why you came is that it was a good chance to take and it worked out all right that we ve got the longest peacetime expansion in history and the lowest crime rate in 26 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years and the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded and the highest homeownership in history that our country has been a force for peace and freedom from northern ireland to the middle east to the balkans that we have tried to include all americans in our future the second thing i hope you ll say because as joe andrew said earlier politics is always about tomorrow is that you think we re right about the things we re talking about for today and tomorrow you know i m not running for anything anymore joe andrew used to have a great line in his speeches bill clinton doesn t have to be here he s not running for anything anymore that s where hillary started running for something now i do have to be here in a different role but i believe this anyway and i want you to think about this once in a lifetime once in a lifetime if you get real lucky maybe twice a country like a person has a moment that is either seized or squandered you may have a lot of wonderful moments but some will be greater than others mr deniro has made a lot of great movies but some were greater than others steven spielberg and kate and i we were talking with hillary and chelsea on the way over about the greatest moments of his movie career countries are like that just like in your personal life a time like this comes along once in a lifetime where we went from having we quadrupled our debt in 12 years and now we ve got the biggest surplus we ever had and we project for 15 years or more we ll have it oh there will be ups and downs in the economy but on average it will be there now what are we going to do with it our friends in the other party they say that all that s not attributable to social security taxes we ought to give it back to you in a tax cut and that s very popular especially in this crowd some of you will say you ought to have your head examined because every one of you should be over there with them tonight we say we ought to face the challenges facing our children and i ll just give you three real quick the aging of america there will be twice as many people over 65 in 2030 as there are now i hope to be one of them so do most of you if we don t save social security and medicare and do it in a way so that the children of the baby boomers don t have to support them so they ll be free to support their children we re going to have an enormous amount of heartache and difficulty in this country but if we do it you ll have people living longer and better than ever before the children of the baby boomers will be free to pursue their own destiny and they ll be free to raise their grandchildren in the best possible way the second thing we ought to do is face the fact that we ve got more kids in this country in school than ever before over 53 million of them more of them come from families whose first language is not english than ever before but it s a godsend in a global society if we can give every single one of them a world class education the third thing we ought to do is figure out how we can keep this economy going and how we can bring it to people who haven t felt it yet because i can tell you in spite of all the prosperity the last six and a half years there are inner city communities there s the mississippi delta there are places in appalachia there are all these indian reservations in america there are small towns in upstate new york which if it were a separate state would rank 49th in job creation in the last five years where the sunshine of all this prosperity has not yet reached we all hope there won t be other interest rate increases we say gosh let s keep interest rates down and keep growth going you want to expand the economy with no inflation invest in the places that haven t had any growth these are big deals now my view is we ought to take most of this surplus the next 15 years and reform and save medicare run social security s life out to about 2053 that ought to take care of all the baby boomers i m the oldest of the baby boomers i don t think i ll be alive in 2053 i d like it awfully well if i was but most of us will be gone by then and we ll return to some more normal population distribution and meanwhile our children will not have to worry about taking care of us in our dotage and our grandchildren will have a better future we ought to invest in education in the things we know that work and recognize that the poorest children in this country need the richest education if we re going to have the kind of future we want we ought to pay this country s debt down you know we could get out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835 and we d have low interest rates for a generation and people like us would do just fine if we did that now we also ought to do things that bring our community together congressman forbes changed parties because he got sick and tired of the leadership of his party turning a deaf ear when he said we re going to have more and more people in managed care and we may have to do it it may not be a bad thing but you ve got all these hospitals going broke you ve got doctors wanting to quit or join unions and you ve got people who are tearing their hair out we ve got to have a patients bill of rights so that we have quality care as well as properly managed care because he thought we ought to be investing in education not cutting it carolyn mccarthy another congresswoman from long island was a republican became a member of our party because she lost her husband had her son subject to grievous injury because this is the only big country in the world that has no sensible restrictions on firearms until we passed the brady bill which was vetoed in the previous administration which kept 400 000 people with criminal backgrounds from getting guns and saved god knows how many people but we still have serious problems in the law that s important to me i supported an increase in the minimum wage because i don t think anybody that works for a living and has kids at home ought to be in poverty and i believe those people should get big tax increases tax cuts i mean people who have modest wages and have children at home they got the biggest tax cuts percentage wise of anybody in this administration in the last seven and a half years because i don t think anybody who works full time and has a child at home should be in poverty and i don t think you do either now these are major issues what kind of a community are we look can you believe this all the good fortune we ve had and just a couple of weeks ago some guy listens to some racist kook and goes out and murders an african american former basketball coach shoots asian students in the street this guy the other day in illinois and indiana going on that shooting spree then we had another shooting of the children at the jewish child center in los angeles and the same guy murdered a filipino american because he was filipino and because he worked for the united states government and the post office we had that young matthew shepard being killed in wyoming the democratic party wants to pass hate crimes legislation we want to pass employment non discrimination legislation we want to have people in our future without regard to their race their sexual orientation their politics or anything else now why because we need all those people because we if you believe in free markets and free societies you have to believe that everyone should freely have the chance to live their dreams and that there ought to be a framework which makes it possible for them to do it i want to close before we get blown away with one story i went to the pine ridge indian reservation in south dakota the other day some of you may have seen it on this new markets tour organized by a man gene sperling my national economic counselor who also happens to be in the audience here before i did that i had the 19 tribal leaders from the northern high plains come to see me from north and south dakota and montana they are probably the poorest of all of our indian tribes and they had this meeting with the president and i had five or six cabinet members there and they went through their little presentation you know and everybody said what they had to say about what their needs were and at the end harold salway stood up who is the president they now call them presidents of the oglala sioux the tribe of crazy horse in south dakota and he was standing there and he said that the chiefs wanted to tell me that they supported what i had done in kosovo in saving the kosovar albanians and he started talking he s not very tall but he s very dignified and you could have heard a pin drop and he said mr president he said my great great grandfather was massacred at wounded knee we know something about ethnic cleansing but he said i had two uncles one was on the beach at normandy the other was the first native american fighter pilot in the history of the united states military he said and now i am here in the white house meeting with the president i have only one son and he means more to me than anything in the world but i would be proud to have him wear a uniform and go fight for the freedom of the people of kosovo to be free from being slaughtered because of their ethnic background or the way they worship god this is america and i m proud of what we re doing here i hope tomorrow if somebody asks you why you were here you ll say because we took a chance and it worked out because we ve got the chance of a lifetime to do the right things for the future and because more than anything else believe me if i could leave office with one wish for america it would be that somehow we would find a way to lay down all these idiotic ways of looking down on one another and find some way to lift each other up and the last thing i want to say is this i have been privileged in my wife to work with thousands of people in public service and notwithstanding the intense partisan rancor of the last few years my experience is that what you have been subject to is atypical most of the people i have known in public life republicans and democrats were honest hard working decent people who had honest differences of opinion and got up every day and tried to make this country a better place but i m telling you of all the people i have ever known in public life the ablest the smartest the most passionately dedicated is the person who wants to be the next united states senator from new york thank you and goodbye thank you dem wjclinton29 9 00 bill_clinton thank you first of all after what richard neal said if i had any sense i would just shut up and sit down i m delighted to be here with you and maureen and the whole clan of your family and thank you senator kennedy for what you said i want you to know one thing about ted kennedy he s a good friend of mine i think in a lot of ways that i could never even describe he s been there for me and for hillary and he s just been wonderful and i ve just got four months to be president right every single time for eight long years i have seen him he says hello he is polite he says hello then within 30 seconds i get a card like this and this card tells me what i haven t done as president that i should have done and that if i would just do these things the whole world would be a much better place i have all these cards i must have done 90 things in the last eight years on ted kennedy s wish list and i m still getting it that ought to tell you something he s been there a long time but he s not tired of the job he is still doing a great job and i m very proud of him and you should be proud of him i d like to thank father leahy the president of boston college for being here you know i m going to be unemployed after january and i m looking for somebody to ask me to come give a talk every now and then they say i ll get lost on the way for three or four months because nobody will play a song when i walk in a room anymore but i m interested in it i m glad that our faa administrator james garvey has come here in support of you congressman neal and your colleague lloyd doggett from texas is either here or was here he and his wife libby they represent austin texas and that s a long way from springfield massachusetts but it s a great place and i want to thank peter king for coming i always wonder whether every time i appear with peter king how long he can use ireland as an excuse to keep from being thrown out of the republican caucus but i want to tell you i love this guy and his family and his mother and these two men have been anchors for america s role in the irish peace process and the support i ve gotten in the house of representatives and of course so has senator kennedy senator dodd and others in the senate but it was to put it mildly a sea change in american foreign policy when i took the position i did and we got involved in the irish peace process and i was mildly unpopular in great britain for a day or two and there are all kinds of crazy theories about it and finally i told the british prime minister who i actually like very much mr major who was mr blair s predecessor i said you know this is going to be good for you because you just can t have this thing going on forever and there are 44 million irish americans catholic and protestant it s the big diaspora and we can help ireland if they can make peace and you should be glad we did this in the end it will be good i think now most people in great britain would tell you that it was a good thing the united states got involved and tried to bring about some first movement and then reconciliation we re not entirely there yet they re having a few minor arguments about the details of the patton report but for those of you who care about it you should be very grateful to the people on this stage including your representative in congress richard neal they were great now i must say the only bad thing about the democrats winning the majority in the house of representatives and increasing his influence is i hate to see peter king cry otherwise it would be a total unmixed blessing for america if we won the majority let me say too how grateful i am to the people of massachusetts for what you ve done and been for me and hillary and al and tipper gore in 1996 i got ted kennedy never tires of telling me the highest percentage of the vote in the country in the state of massachusetts you were good to me and i appreciate it and the second highest in 92 but as he always says massachusetts is bigger than my home state so i got more votes out of massachusetts he s always working an angle ted is that s what i heard when i got the first letter let me say to all of you one of the things i admire about your congressman besides the fact that he s a really good person and wonderful to be around is that he has i think the right kind of balance in a representative he cares about all the local issues there s not a single local issue in your congressional district that can be dealt with in any way shape or form at the federal level that he couldn t stand up here and give a discourse on he cares about national policy and how it affects people who live in his district but he also cares about how america relates to the rest of the world and whether we are a stronger more secure more decent country and he knows that that helps people all over america including the people who live in his district and that s about all you can ask for somebody in congress if everybody thought that way if everybody worked that way if everybody had the same willingness to work with who have good ideas whether they re democrats or republicans and if everybody would rather get something done than have another fight and get 15 more seconds on the evening news we d get more done here and we d move even faster this is the first time in 26 years i haven t been on the ballot most days i m okay about that my party has a new leader my family has a new candidate i m sort of the cheerleader in chief in america now but as i think about all the progress our country has made first i m grateful for whatever role that our ideas and actions had in it and our administration but secondly i d just like to say that to me when the vice president says you ain t seen nothing yet it sounds like a campaign slogan but i actually believe that the country is kind of like a big ocean liner and it s hard to turn it around that s how come the titanic hit the iceberg they saw it but not in time so we ve been working for eight years to turn this thing around and you heard richard gave you all the statistics we re going to pay off 360 billion off the national debt before i leave office not just get rid of the deficit to pay the debt down but the question is before us here in the national races the race for president in every senate race every house rate is now what okay so unemployment is down poverty is down business starts are up home ownership is at an all time high the poverty rate among minorities are the lowest ever recorded the poverty rate among women is the lowest recorded in 46 years unemployment rate among women the lowest in 40 years which is truly astonishing since the participation of women in the work force is so much higher today than it was 40 years ago crime is at a 30 year low welfare is at a 32 year low we ve proved you can improve the economy and the environment because the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we ve set aside more land than any administration except theodore roosevelt s in the history of the country so what are you going to do with that that s really the big issue here i say this all the time but sometimes it s harder to make a good decision in good times than it is to make a good decision in bad times i m sure a lot of people voted for me in 1992 thinking god i m really taking a chance this guy he doesn t look old enough be president i didn t have gray hair then he s from this little state i m not sure i know where it is his opponents all say he s terrible i m really taking a chance here but you really weren t taking much of a chance because the country was in trouble and we had to do something different now the country is in good shape and you have to decide what to do there are a lot of young people here but i think i m competent in saying that maybe even including father leahy there s not a person in this room who s over 30 years of age who hasn t at least on one occasion in your life made a significant mistake not because times were so tough but because times were so good you didn t think you had to concentrate that happens to countries as well as people so the reason i m going around the country trying to help people like your congressman and talking everywhere i can about this i just don t want america to miss this magic moment you heard richard say we can be out of debt in 12 years should we do it i think we should why because if we do if we keep paying that debt down interest rates will stay lower businesses will borrow more money expand more hire more people raise wages more the market will be higher and if you keep interest rates a percent lower it s worth about 390 billion in lower home mortgage payments 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower student loan payments in 10 years that s pretty good money we could revolutionize our schools over the next 10 years we could have every child in a school that s functioning at a national level of educational efficiency and excellence we could have all the kids that need to be in head start in head start we could have all the kids that need to be in after school programs and not on the street in after school programs getting mentoring new computer instruction all that stuff we could do it we could provide health care coverage to all the working families in this country who don t have it we could reverse the tide of global warming and actually increase the rate of economic growth by an explosion of the development of new engines new fuels and new conservation technologies in america we could do it we could use the human genome project to tell every mother what her newborn baby s future health will likely be like what all the problems are by the time she brings the baby home from the hospital it could change child rearing and take life expectancy within 10 to 15 years to 90 years we could do it we could become a much greater force for ending the plagues of aids tb malaria poverty in the world in a way that would actually increase america s wealth because we d have better trading partners and that s just a partial list of what we could do i also think you re going to find out what s in the black holes in outer space and the deepest depths of the ocean which ironically may be even more surprising but you have to decide to do it it means you ve got to make the right decisions in these elections based on economic policy crime you can make america the safest big country in the world gun crime down 35 percent crime has dropped seven years in a row for the first time ever you could make america the safest big country in the world you could do all this stuff but you ve got to decide to do it and i know i m a democrat and i know i m prejudiced but that s the only thing i m prejudiced about but i think you ve got a good person representing you in congress and i think i know now after eight years i know and i also agree with what richard neal said about ted kennedy he is probably the most effective legislator in the congress i think i ve said this before and i like to turn his irish face red but i think that i m something of an american history buff i think i know a little bit about the history of this country and i believe that any historian who is well informed who had to list the 10 greatest united states senators in the history of the republic would have to put his name on that list i want you to know why i said that because every time i say that i earn the right to hand him a little card for something so i want you all to be happy i want you to be happy about this good time but i don t want you to be careless about the election it s not so much a matter of party as it is philosophy i really believe that this country works best when we say everybody counts everybody deserves a chance we all do better when we help each other and i ll just close with this thought there s a new book out which is selling reasonably well called nonzero by a man named robert wright he wrote a book a few years ago some of you probably read called the moral animal and nonzero is a reference to game theory a zero sum game is like the presidential race in order for one person to win somebody has to lose a nonzero sum game is a game in which in order for you to win the other person playing the game also has to win and the argument of the book is that as societies become more and more complicated and we become more and more interdependent both within our nation s borders and beyond our borders humanity has a chance to improve and progress because we are inevitably forced to try to find more and more nonzero sum solutions where we all win you know i never thought i was right about everything and on those important occasions all too few when i could work across party lines i think i ve learned some things and america has been strengthened i ve learned some things about ireland from peter king i think we made a good balanced budget agreement because it was bipartisan i could go through a lot of others but this country does not need dividers this country needs unifiers and it needs people who have enough sense to understand the connection between what goes on in springfield massachusetts connected to washington d c connected not just to ireland but what happens half a world away you re lucky enough to have a person like that in congress i hope you ll leave him there forever and i hope between now and november you will share some of these thoughts with your friends not only in massachusetts but in other states this is a very important opportunity for the american people to make a good decision in my lifetime we ve never had a chance like this to build the future of our dreams for our children never we ve never had so much prosperity and social progress with the absence of internal crisis or external threat it may not roll around again for another 50 years so you make the most of it and meanwhile take care of him thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton29 9 94 bill_clinton thank you so much senator and mrs kennedy the kennedy family senator mitchell and members of the senate congressmen congressman to be patrick kennedy and marvin rosen and all those who made this night possible i thank you so much for your help for our friend chevy chase thank you for making us laugh i ll tell you a story about chevy chase i never told this story in public before don t get that excited it s not that good i had never met chevy chase in my entire life except on a movie screen and in 1988 or 89 i went up to long island in the summertime hillary and i were up there visiting our friend liz robins who s here tonight and every summertime there s a softball game to raise money between the artists and the writers and they asked me if i would be an umpire in this game and once i realized there were some members of the press there and i d be able to give them grades instead of the other way around i eagerly accepted now at that time a lot of you won t remember this i hope at least you won t remember it and i hope you ll forget after i tell you tonight i had given a speech for governor dukakis at the democratic convention which i intend to complete here this evening anyway can t believe i said that the announcer for the ball game was jim brady the guy that does that brady s bits in parade magazine every sunday you know he s a delightful man but when he saw me out there on the mound about ready to call balls and strikes he said he introduced me he said this is governor clinton from arkansas he s up here visiting and if he takes as long to make the calls today as he did to speak in atlanta we ll never get out of here i really appreciated that anyway so the game starts and the next time the sides change i look up in the stands and this tall guy stands up and walks down comes out to the pitcher s mound shakes my hand and says i m chevy chase and he said i may be the only person in america besides your mother who feels this way but i liked that speech tell him to go to hell that s verbatim what he said you just applauded for the next ambassador to great britain ladies and gentlemen you know we all do a lot of these events and a lot of you are the backbone of our party and sometimes we do them with great energy sometimes we do them with interest sometimes we do them because we know it s the right thing to do and we do them i am here tonight because there is no place else in america i would rather be tonight than here in this cause for this good man you know before i got here i really didn t understand how things so often came across in the country so different than they are up here i was another alienated american even though i was the governor of my state and i was terribly worried that this country was going in the wrong direction people that were running our country were just telling the voters what they wanted to hear and avoiding all the tough problems we had had profound social problems building up for 30 years we d had serious economic problems building up for 20 years and we had finally come to the end of the cold war a time when we had an opportunity to take a fresh look at both the opportunities and the difficulties of this country at this time and that we had a window here in which we could either secure the american dream for our children and our grandchildren and the strength of this country as we move into the 21st century or we could walk away from the responsibilities of our generation when i talked to hillary about running for president i in a very personal way i didn t want to do it first of all most of my friends thought it was a fool s errand because the incumbent president was at over 70 percent approval secondly things were going pretty well for us at home with our family our friends and our work but i did it because i thought that we all have an obligation to try to make a difference and that we had to change the direction of the country tonight we come here to honor someone who has always fought to keep us going forward in the right direction who has always fought for hope over fear for reconciliation over division to bring out the best in us instead of to bring out the worst in us well when i came here i knew it wouldn t be easy but i was determined to see that we work together to move this country forward to address our problems to get things done for ordinary americans well it hasn t been easy there have been some tough times and some really brutal fights but you know we ve made a good start and now as always happens in these midterm elections with the issue hanging fire the american people will have to decide whether we will continue this rigorous transition into tomorrow every time we reach a point in history where we re going through big changes and the future is not clear we fight a battle within ourselves in that sense our nation is very much like a person if you think about your own life whenever you did anything really different and took on a new challenge it was always with a mixture of hope and fear when you went to school the first day or first went off to college or had your first job or first sought elective office or married or had your first child no matter how good a thing is if it is really big it is also a little scary countries are the same way a delicate balance always has to be maintained between hope and fear and every day we all get up and we see things that are happening that we don t like or we re unsure what will happen to us and it s almost as if we have a scale inside us with blind justice holding it and hope is one side and fear is on the other and each day it may take a little different balance the job we have between now and election day is to make sure that when people wake up on election day they vote their hopes instead of their fears they vote for tomorrow instead of yesterday they vote to keep going forward and they vote for senator ted kennedy for reelection in massachusetts we still have a lot to do but we ve made a good start and we ve done some very important things by putting our economic house in order giving the american people their first serious attack on crime in a long time and beginning to make this government work for ordinary citizens if you look at the last 20 months this congress i might add without one single solitary vote from a member of the other party the democrats who were so often attacked as being for big government and spending voted for a budget that cut 255 billion in federal spending that reduced the deficit by more than any plan ever adopted in the history of the country that gave us three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since harry truman was president that did it i might add they did it by raising tax rates on only the top 1 2 percent of americans including most of you in this room tonight and we thank you for staying with us this administration and it s a great rebuke to those who think people only vote their own short term self interests all of you are and i honor you for your presence here tonight and for caring about your country and the long term health and discipline and economic direction of what we re trying to do our administration expanded trade by more than any in the comparable time period in the last 30 years exports are up sales are up and jobs are up in export related areas and what has all this produced 4 3 million new jobs 93 percent of them in the private sector unlike the ratio in previous years when it s been mostly government jobs created to try to help people deal with the problems of economic fallout we ve had eight months of manufacturing job growth in a row for the first time in a decade and just last week at the annual vote of international economists for the first time in nine years it was the united states of america that was voted as having the most productive economy in the world we ve got a long way to go but we ve made a good beginning senator biden is here and senator kennedy for years has been interested in this whole crime issue from his service on the judiciary committee but joe biden will tell you they talked about crime around here for six years but we finally passed the crime bill that is tough with punishment tough in terms of putting 100 000 police on the street but also smart in providing prevention and giving people a chance to turn away from lives of crime and giving our young people a chance to have something to say yes to also for the first time in my memory we put together back to back victories with the brady bill and the assault weapons ban in spite of the ferocious opposition of the nra that s a pretty good beginning we ve got a long way to go but it s a pretty good beginning if you look at what was done to make government work for ordinary people in the economic plan we reformed the college loan program the secretary of education is here tonight making 20 million americans including over 840 000 in the state of massachusetts eligible for low interest loans at longer repayment terms a stunning benefit for middle class kids not just poor kids so that no one need ever walk away from the challenge of paying for a college education again you can clap for that ted kennedy was for it two hundred thousand more children in head start hundreds of thousands of people in massachusetts alone affected by the family leave law which says that if you ve got a sick parent or you re about to have a child you can take a little time off without losing your job we are going to have two million more children immunized by 1996 so that all the kids under two will be immunized and parents can go to work not worrying about whether their children are going to be safe from preventable childhood diseases fifteen million working people and their children are going to get income tax cuts because they work hard and they raise their kids but they re hovering just above the poverty line and we do not want them to fall into the poverty line and quit working and go on welfare this is a pro work pro family administration making this government work for ordinary citizens again and it s a good start finally let me say to our friends in the other party i sat out there in the heartland of america as the governor for years and years and years and i heard them talk about how terrible the federal government was and how big and bloated it was but we the democrats voted to reduce the size of the federal government by 272 000 to make it the smallest it s been since president kennedy was in office we have already done over 70 000 of those reductions and every last red cent of reduction in the federal government is going to local government and to local communities to help them fight crime that is the record of the democrats in the last two years now if you compare that to what our opponents have done and what they have said it s a pretty big difference in the name of partisanship they tried to stop the crime bill they voted entirely against the economic program a program that gave college loan breaks to millions of kids a program that made 90 percent of the small businesses in this country eligible for tax cuts and gave tax reductions to 15 million working families they have done everything they could to keep us from addressing the health care reform issue in a serious way you needn t take my word for it only listen to them congressman brandy grandy from iowa saying that they had all been ordered not to cooperate and compromise on health care a republican senator quoted in one of our big newspapers the other day saying we killed health care now if we can just not get our fingerprints on it their political advisor mr kristal telling them the one thing they must not do is to cooperate to bring down health care costs make health insurance secure for those who have it and cover those who don t because that would be a political benefit for the other party that is their record now we know what they wish to do if they get the majority they put out their contract with america and you know what they did it looks like a contract it looks like they took out a contract against the deficit a contract against medicare a contract against paying for the crime bill a contract against all the gains we have made for ordinary americans in the last two years they want to go back to the way they did it before explode the deficit tell people what they want to hear and stick it to ordinary americans we can do better than that we have to go forward we have to reelect the people and elect the people who want to keep going forward if you just look at the things that senator kennedy has been involved in just since i have been president the head start program 200 000 more children reforming the education loans working on changing the whole unemployment system to a reemployment system something we haven t finished yet the goals 2000 bill which for the first time in the history of america commits us as a nation to world class standards of educational excellence and commits the federal government not to have a bureaucracy but to give help to local grass roots efforts at reform the national service program which this year has 20 000 young americans and two years from now will have 100 000 young americans earning their way to a higher education by serving their communities at the grass roots level not in a bureaucracy but in people power that can truly change the course of our country s future he led the way in all of those endeavors and he deserves a lot of credit for it but elections are about the future if we do a good job it s just what we were hired to do so why should he be reelected because if you ever want this country to be able to bring the deficit down without breaking the backs of our senior citizens if you ever want to see a time when working people will be secure in their insurance instead of the situation which exists today this is the only advanced country in the world where working families are losing ground in insurance coverage there are five million americans in working families today who had health insurance five years ago who do not have it today even though we spend 40 percent more of our income than any other country on health care if you want to preserve the integrity of our great medical institutions of higher learning if you want to see health insurance for all americans and stability in our economy long term and in our federal budget long term we have got to address the health care issue so what if we couldn t do it in a year look what s happened since i ve been here it took seven years to pass the brady bill seven years to pass family leave seven years to pass motor voter six years to pass the crime bill i signed a banking reform bill today that they ve been working on longer than anybody can remember we can do this we will do this the people of massachusetts i don t believe want to send a signal to washington d c that they have abandoned health care i think they want to tell us to keep at it until we get it right and the only way to do that is to say senator kennedy stay on the job keep doing it until we get it right my friends you will see this election everywhere in america played out look at patrick kennedy s race in rhode island he s running against someone who signed the contract a contract against health care reform for cutting medicare for exploding the deficit for putting the federal budget in a place where they won t even be able to fund the crime bill the same old promises tell them what they want to hear bad mouth government bad mouth the people who are the instruments of change and hope you don t get caught i think the american people are smarter than that you know ted kennedy said tonight that he was not the youngest man in the senate race he was once the youngest man in the senate for quite a long time well i was once the youngest governor in america by nine years time has a way of curing those problems and of changing your perspective but i would like to say something about senator kennedy and about the united states he s made enemies in his life because he has fought for things but the things he has fought for are things that would help people who are very different from him ninety five percent of the people that would have been given the things that he was given in life never would have spent their life trying to get all that for everybody else in the country most of us given the opportunities he had would have enjoyed them in a very different way they wouldn t have put themselves on the line day in and day out year in and year out this country is also very old as a democracy but it is forever young when people say they worry about whether we ve still got it as a country i say to them why do you think the israelis and the arabs want to come here and have us work with them to end the decades of horrible fighting in the middle east why do you think that after literally hundreds of years of fighting the catholics and the protestants in northern ireland and the british and the irish wish the americans to be involved in the peace process why did mr mandela and mr de klerk want the united states to spend a few million dollars of our tax money to help them develop and election that would really work even in the 11th hour of our crisis in haiti a little over a week ago when the delegation was down there meeting with the military leaders and they realized finally that we meant business one of them said well if the president is determined to do this and the united nations is determined to act at least we want the united states we trust them we know they can be trusted we know what they represent why because the right things my fellow americans never get old and i was sitting here looking at ted kennedy give that speech tonight and i saw it literally moving his entire being and i said to myself let the people who disagree with him disagree let the people who say he s wrong on the issues say that but let no one doubt that he may be the youngest person running for the senate in any state this year because he believes in things that are forever young thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton29 9 99 bill_clinton thank you very much secretary summers president wolfensohn chairman acharya director camdessus vice president fall secretary anjaria let me begin by saying how very grateful i am to be here with all of you i appreciate the generous introduction some of you may have heard me say this before but the introduction of secretary summers just gave me is an illustration of one of my unbending laws of political life whenever possible be introduced by someone you have appointed to high office it is much easier because he s done such a superb job and i thank him let me say all of you know that a year ago we were here in a time of crisis perhaps the most severe financial crisis in the global economy since the end of the second world war a grave challenge to the imf and the world bank thanks to the hard work that you and your countries have done economies that were sliding down are rising again we have also worked hard as secretary summers said in the wake of these crises to prevent future ones to respond more quickly and effectively to lessen the toll they take on ordinary citizens we have intensified our efforts to construct a global financial architecture that is stable and strong in the new conditions of the new economy still those who were hit by this crisis were hit very hard and many are still reeling people lost jobs and businesses and dreams so this can only be considered a continuing challenge for us certainly not a time for complacency we have more to do to restore people s faith in the future and to restore their faith frankly in the global economy and in global markets therefore we have more to do to reform the global financial foundation upon which the future will be built as we approach the 21st century we must also ask ourselves however is it enough just to fix the market that is should we accept the fact that at a time when the people in the united states are enjoying perhaps the strongest economy in their history 1 3 billion of our fellow human beings survive on less than a dollar a day should we accept the fact that nearly 40 million people after the green revolution when most of us discuss agriculture and food as a cause for international trade conflicts because we want to fight over who sells the most food since there are so many places that can produce more than their own people need are we supposed to accept the fact that nearly 40 million people a year die of hunger that s nearly equal to the number of all the people killed in world war ii are we supposed to accept the fact that even though technology has changed the equation of the role of energy in the production of wealth even though technology has changed the distances in time and space necessary for learning and for business as well as educational interchanges are we supposed to face the fact that some people and nations are doomed to be left behind forever i hope we will not accept that i hope we will start the new millennium with a new resolve to give every person in the world through trade and technology through investments in education and health care the chance to be part of a widely shared prosperity in which all the peoples potential can be developed more fully this is the challenge of the second half century of the life of the imf and the world bank and for me it is a personal priority of the highest order open trade already has improved the prospects of hundreds of millions by marketing the fruits of their labors and creativity beyond their borders in this way both the imf and the world bank have played a vital role in helping more nations to thrive we need you to work with the wto to build a rules based framework for global trade we need you to help developing countries provide education and training to lift wages and to establish social safety nets for tough transitions i applaud the strong commitment you ve made at these meetings for concrete manifestations of support we all must work to keep the economies we have influence over open and trade growing for developing and industrial powers alike in two months i want to launch a new type of trade round in seattle at the wto ministerial i want this round to be about jobs and development i want it to raise working conditions for all i want it to advance our shared goal of sustainable development by breaking down barriers to trade leveling the playing field we will give more workers and farmers in those countries that are struggling for tomorrow and in leading industrial nations as well more opportunities to produce for the global marketplace in seattle i hope we will pledge to keep cyberspace tariff free to help developing countries make better and wider use of technology whether biotechnology or the internet i hope we will pledge to open markets in agriculture and industrial products and services creating new activities for growth and development i hope we will also work to advance the admission of the 38 developing countries who ve applied for wto membership and i hope we ll keep working to give the least developed countries greater access to global markets here in the united states i am working hard to persuade our congress to pass my trade proposals for africa and the caribbean basin this year but the wealth of nations depends on more than trade it also depends on the health of nations last week at the united nations i committed the united states to accelerating the development and delivery of vaccines for aids tuberculosis malaria and other diseases which disproportionately afflict poor citizens in the developing world at the same time we must help these nations avert the health cost and pollution of the industrial age using clean technologies that not only improve the environment but grow the economy institutions like the world bank play a special role here your energy strategy is a very good start and i thank you for it i urge the bank to continue setting aggressive targets for lending that promotes clean energy it is no longer necessary to have industrial age energy use patterns to grow a modern powerful economy in fact those economies will emerge more quickly with more sustainable development strategies some of you in this room a minority still are nodding your heads yes as i say this if you believe it we must work together to achieve it these efforts must be part of a broader approach that ensures the integrity and openness of emerging economies last saturday the g 7 finance ministers outlined specific safeguards for russia and called for comprehensive review by the world bank and the imf to make sure that funds are used appropriately in high risk environments the united states will continue to insist on such accountability for many developing countries however there is a greater obstacle in the path to progress for many of them excessive and completely unsustainable debt can halt progress drag down growth drain resources that are needed to meet the most basic human conditions like clean water shelter health care and education debt and debt relief are normally subjects for economists but there is nothing academic about them simply put unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty that is clearly why the pope and so many other world leaders from all walks of life have asked us all to do more to reduce the debt of the poorest nations as a gift to the new millennium not just to them but to all the rest of us as well personally i don t believe we can possibly agree to the idea that these nations that are so terribly poor should always be that way i don t think we can in good conscience say we support the idea that they should choose between making interest payments on their debt and investing in their children s education it is an economic and moral imperative that we use this moment of global consensus to do better i will do everything i can to aid this trend any country committed to reforming its economy to vaccinating and educating its children should be able to make those kinds of commitments and keep them in june at the g 7 summit in cologne the world s wealthiest nations made an historic pledge to help developing nations the debt relief program we agreed upon is a big step in the right direction dedicating faster and deeper debt relief to countries that dedicate themselves to fundamental reform this initiative seeks to tie debt relief to poverty reduction and to make sure that savings are spent where they should be on education on fighting aids and preventing it on other critical needs it will help heavily indebted poor countries to help themselves and help to build a framework to support similar and important efforts by the imf the world bank and international financial institutions more than 430 million people could benefit from this effort in bolivia for example debt relief could help the government nearly double the people s access to clean water by 2004 in uganda it could allow health and education spending to increase by 50 percent between 1998 and 2001 rural development expenditures there would more than double that s why we all must provide our fair share of financing to global debt relief last week to make good on america s commitment i amended my budget request to congress and asked for nearly 1 billion over four years for this purpose we must keep adequate assistance flowing to the developing countries especially through the international development association i m encouraged by the financial commitments made by some of the other donor countries this past week and i call on our congress to respond to the moral and economic urgency of this issue and see to it that america does its part i have asked for the money and shown how it would be paid for and i ask the congress to keep our country shouldering its fair share of the responsibility now let me make one final commitment today i am directing my administration to make it possible to forgive 100 percent of the debt these countries owe to the united states when and this is quite important when needed to help them finance basic human needs and when the money will be used to do so in this context we will work closely with other countries to maximize the benefits of the debt reduction initiative we believe the agreements reached this weekend will make it possible for three quarters of the highly indebted poorest countries committed to implementing poverty and growth strategies to start receiving benefits sometime next year actually receiving the benefits sometime next year if we do these things as nations as international institutions as a global community then we can build a trading system that strengthens our economy and supports our values we can build a global economy and a global society that leaves no one behind that carries all countries into a new century that we hope will be marked by greater peace and greater prosperity for all people we have before us perhaps as great an opportunity as the people of the world have ever seen we will be judged by our children and grandchildren by whether we seize that opportunity i hope and believe that we all will do so thank you very much dem wjclinton3 10 00 bill_clinton well thank you very much for coming and for coming on such short notice in this typically florida sunny day actually on the way over here chris i was speculating about whether this beautiful pond of yours out here would come into the house if the rain came so i want to thank you and thank you irene for opening your home to me once again and i want to thank philip and michael and stuart and alex and all the others who worked on this event today i ll be quite brief i hope you re all going to watch the debate tonight i think it will go well this has been a very interesting election to me because the american people have an unusual decision to make in every one of these senate races and house races and in the white house because things are going very well for the country the economy is moving in the right direction the society is moving in the right direction in every major area of our national life there has been substantial progress in the last eight years and what the people of every state and the people of our nation have to decide is what do we intend to make of this moment and it s very interesting to me that the political rhetoric of our friends in the other party has changed rather dramatically so they re now arguing over whether they or we are the real new thing instead of whether we should take some big move to the right which was their preferred line of rhetoric until the voters decisively rejected it over and over again and i can just tell you i see this everywhere but there are these big issues out there are we going to have a tax cut we can afford that will permit us to save social security and medicare for the baby boom generation continue to invest in the education of the largest number of children in american history in our schools and meet our responsibilities to the future by paying down the debt or are we going to say times are good i want my mine now and have a combination tax cut and social security privatization plan that will throw us back into deficits raise interest rates and get this country in trouble you listen and see if that s adequately debated tonight i am telling you i ve spent a lot i think that i have earned the right to make comments about the state of the american economy i believe i have and people ask me all the time well it s amazing what s happened here what great new innovation did you bring to economic policy making and i always smile and say arithmetic i remember back in 92 when the then presidential candidate george bush used to refer to me in disparaging terms as the governor of a small southern state remember that when he used to say that i was so naive i thought it was a compliment and i still do but i knew something about arithmetic and not having rosy scenarios and not pretending money was there that was wasn t so we brought arithmetic back and made a lot of people mad doing it in 1993 i had an economic plan that raised taxes and cut spending so that it displeased everyone but it got rid of the deficit this year we had a surplus of 230 billion instead of the deficit of 290 billion i inherited when i leave office we will have actually paid the national debt down by 360 billion that s worth about 2 000 a year on a home mortgage average home mortgage it s stunning so all i can tell you is i think that this is a big issue it s a big issue in the new york senate race it s a big issue in the national presidential race second thing i think is a big issue is health care and we re having this huge debate which i think has been muddied our friends in the republican party have desperately tried to muddy up the debate over this medicare prescription drug issue look here s the deal the pharmaceutical companies mostly americans but sometimes the europeans have helped to develop drugs that lengthen and improve the quality of life everybody knows that the older you live the older you get the more likely you are to need medicine everybody knows that right if you get to be 65 in america you have a life expectancy of over 82 years the longest in the world everybody knows that what a lot of people don t know is that more than half the people in this country who are over 65 cannot afford the medicine that their doctors prescribe for them to either lengthen or improve the quality of their life so the question is what are we going to do about it for the most of the time when i was around here our friends in the other party said nothing at one time we had a chance to give drugs at least to poor people when we had a deficit and they said no so now we ve got a surplus and our position is led by the vice president and hillary and others is that we ought to have a medicare based prescription drug benefit that goes to everyone who needs it that the poorest people ought to get it for free and others ought to pay in proportion to their ability to pay a little bit but that we ought to provide it to everyone who needs it their position is that we ought to subsidize the cost for up to 150 percent of the poverty rate after which people ought to buy insurance and their position is therefore with heavy money from the drug companies to attack our position as being a huge expansion of big government now here are the facts did you ever follow this debate and wonder what s really going on it s hard to figure out what s really going on right like why in the wide world would they be against people getting these drug benefits over half the people who can t afford their drug prescriptions have incomes above 150 percent of the poverty line which is about as i remember it s about 16 000 for a couple or something hardly a king s ransom now why would they be against this and why would they call it a big government program since medicare is government financing of private medicine right that s what we propose public financing of private medicine that s what medicare is it has an administrative cost of 1 5 percent as compared with an average administrative cost in private health insurance companies of about 12 percent to 14 percent it is not big government it s private medicine financed by the american people now why are they for what they re for and why are we for what we re for here s the problem you see all these stories about people going to canada to buy drugs and now we may pass legislation which says that you can that our pharmacies in america can re import drugs from canada made in america and sell them cheaper do you ever wonder what that s about here s what that s about we are blessed to have these pharmaceutical companies in america they do great things they hire tens of thousands of people and give them great jobs they uncover medical miracles it costs a lot of money to develop these drugs and then they spend a whole lot of money to advertise them once they develop them while they re still brand named before they become generic and every other place they would like to sell their drugs has price controls which means they have to recover from americans only 100 percent of the cost of developing the drug and advertising the drug once they do that it then becomes profitable for them to sell the same drug a lot cheaper in canada or europe now they are afraid the drug companies are if all the seniors in the country can get their drugs through medicare that medicare as a big buyer will acquire so much power in the market we could buy drugs for our seniors made in america almost as cheaply as seniors in canada can buy drugs made in america and they don t want that to happen why because they re afraid they can t recover all their costs and their profits now they have a legitimate problem because they labor under price controls in europe but the answer to their problem is not to keep seniors in florida and throughout the united states away from the medicine they need to lengthen their lives that s what this whole thing is about you re never going to read that in a newspaper that is what this is about that s why the drug companies are putting millions and millions of dollars into the republican campaigns from president on down now i m not demonizing them i m glad there are american companies i m glad we ve got them in our country i understand they ve got a problem because there are price controls in europe and canada and other places but their idea is it is an acceptable price to pay to maintain the status quo to keep the senior citizens of this country without the medicine they need and they re wrong about that the republicans are with them and al gore hillary and the other democrats are with the people of this country and i think we re right about it what i would do if i were still in office i d go to them and say look this is not a way to solve your problems sticking it to the american senior citizens is not a legitimate way to solve your problem this insurance deal is phoney let me just tell you i ve got to say something nice about the health insurance companies after all the fights i ve had with them the health insurance companies to be absolutely fair to them told the republicans from the get go their idea would not work they told them that they could not write an insurance policy that people could afford to pay the premiums on that would provide adequate drug coverage they told them that nevada the state of nevada a small place a laboratory of democracy that s what our founders said the state should be passed the republican plan you know how many insurance companies have offered the insurance to buy the drugs zero we ve got some state legislators here ask them zero not one why because it doesn t work economically for them and they re not going to do it so this really comes down to the fact that the republicans would help a few of our seniors because we ve moved the debate so far and they don t want to be out there three sheets to the wind lost in it but they don t want to help all of them because they re afraid that if medicare can buy drugs for seniors in the private marketplace they will have so much market power they ll get the price down and it will cut their profit margins because they can t make up any of the cost of production in europe or canada my view is let s take care of the american citizens and then the drug companies will find a way to get all the rest of us to help solve their problem we ll find a way to solve their problem they re not going anywhere and they re not going broke and i m proud they re in america and i m proud of what they do i m not demonizing them but they re wrong about this their idea is the only way to maintain their profit margins is to keep the american people from making sure the senior citizens of this country have the medicine they need they re wrong about it let s solve their problem once we fix the health care needs of the seniors this is a huge issue same thing on the patients bill of rights health insurance companies don t want it because every now and then they ll have a big settlement when somebody gets the shaft well that s the whole point of protecting people but even the republicans admit it will cost less than 2 a month per premium per health insurance premium less than 2 a month to have the protections of the patients bill of rights you get to see a specialist if your doctor says so if you ve got a doctor for cancer treatment or an obstetrician and you re pregnant and you change jobs before the treatment is over you get to keep your doctor if you get hit by a car going out of here you get to go to the nearest emergency room you don t have to pass up three other hospitals to get to the emergency room 40 miles away that your health care plan covers if you get hurt you get tosue otherwise the bill of rights is just a bill of suggestions now that s what we say they say it will add to the cost of health care it will i did it for the federal government you know how much it cost us i put in all these rights for everybody insured by the federal government medicare medicaid the federal employees do you know how much it cost one dollar a month so they say and even the republicans admit it will cost less than 2 a month now would you spend 1 80 a month to make sure that if one of the other people here at this event got hit by a car god forbid on the way out of here could go to the nearest hospital i would and i think most americans would now that s what this debate is about and so the american people have got to decide there are big differences on education there are big differences on all these issues and i want you to watch the debate tonight and i thank you for helping hillary as you know there s a lot of interests that would like to whip her and i think half of them think it s their last chance at me but she s doing well she did well in her debate i m immensely i m so proud of her but it s very important that she not be out spent three to one on the way in in politics you can get out spent but you have to have enough to get your message out and to answer all the incoming fire and you ve helped make that possible today and one thing i have learned is every one of these senate and house seats is important this is not just important to me although obviously it is it s important to you and to the american people the last thing i d like to say is i took a little time today on the economy and on the patients bill of rights and on the drugs to make a point the american people are very oriented toward the issues this year they want to make an intelligent choice clarity of choice is our friend i think our friends in the other party have moderated their rhetoric a lot from the gingrich years but a lot of their policies haven t changed all that much so in order for the american people to make the right decision they need to be quite clear on what their choices are and while most people are very issue oriented how many people do you know who could tell you the real difference in gore s economic plan and bush s in gore s position on medicare drugs and patients bill of rights and bush s it may be more important in florida even than the senior issue and gore s education plan and bush s i read the papers and sometimes i see people writing about it who don t really understand what the differences are so the last thing i d like to ask you i thank you for helping hillary if you know anybody else who s not here and would want to help us in the last month ask them but after this debate tonight every one of you knows people who don t come to events like this who have never been to a political fundraiser who have never been involved in public service i want to thank buddy mackay for being here for doing such a good job let me just say in his service as our special envoy to the americas we passed an historic caribbean trade initiative and we passed the sweeping plan to help colombia and the nations bordering colombia to try to roll back the tide of the narco traffickers and their relationship with others that are trying to bring down democracy in that country so i m very proud of him you all know people chris said that he had somebody mining the store because he didn t like to come to political events but you know people that are going to show up and vote on election day because they re patriotic they love their country they think they ought to be there when the voting comes but they ll never come to an event like this maybe they can t afford to come maybe it doesn t interest them but they will sure vote so the last thing i want to ask you is you know i think that the clinton gore administration has done a good job for florida we moved the southern command here we had the summit of the americas here the first one in 30 years we have worked very hard with all the affected interests to save the everglades and that s just the beginning i think we ve dealt well with all the natural disasters i just wish that you would do what you can every day to make sure people understand where we were in 92 and where we are today what we ve done in florida and what the real differences are and i only dealt with two today on health care and the economy but as i said i could have gone on about the environment and education and nuclear arms control where the differences are breathtaking and i think very troubling very important to our future so i ask you do what you can this is a close race by the nature of things if you look at all of american history when you have this kind of set up unless one candidate can preform reverse plastic surgery on another the way george bush did to michael dukakis in 88 these kinds of races tend to be quite close but the vice president and our party we ve got the record we ve got the ideas we ve got the issues what we need is clarity clarity so please please go out and tell people that and the last point i want to make is this there s an overriding philosophy behind everything that i ve tried to do i like the fact that there are more people than ever that can afford to live in homes like this but i also think the people that are catering this event ought to have the same chance to send their kids to college that chris and irene do and democrats believe that we believe everybody counts everybody has a role to play and we all do better when we help each other so if you can get the issues out and that simple message i think we ll have a good night on election night thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton3 10 93 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you for coming thank you for being here thank you for doing what you have done for the united states it s wonderful to be here it s wonderful to be in sacramento and it s great to be at mcclellan and i thank you for all being here with me today i d like to say a special word of thanks to general phillips and the people at this base for the work they have done and the work they did with your mayor and others to keep this base alive you are a good testimony to the wisdom of that decision and i thank you for that i also want to thank general yates the commander of the air force materiel division for flying all the way across the country to be with us today and i want to tell you one thing he made a real sacrifice because this is his birthday and i thank him for spending it with us today i want to say also a special word of thanks to congressman hamburg congressman matsui and congressman fazio you all ignore them they don t want you to hear but you want to hear this come on most people in this country still believe in free speech that s one of the things worth fighting for i also want to say a very special word of thanks to these members of congress who have supported our efforts to deal with the problems of america i got interested in making that long and challenging race for president because i was worried about three things i thought this country was coming apart when it ought to be coming together i thought we were going in the wrong direction economically and we risked losing the american dream for millions of young people and i thought that politics had become a sideshow of shouting words instead of an instrument by which the american people could forthrightly face their problems and do something about it i am reminded too on this day because of the events in moscow and in somalia that we still live in a dangerous world and i ask you to take just a few moments once again to quietly express your support for the people who are fighting for freedom in russia and for the brave men and women in our armed forces including those in somalia today who lost their lives in a very successful mission against brutality and anarchy my deepest condolences go to the families and the friends of those brave young americans and i know that all of you support them as well one of the hardest things we have had to learn as a people in the last few years is that there is now no longer an easy division between our national security at the end of the cold war abroad and our economic and social security here at home there s no longer an easy division between foreign policy and domestic policy and it is perfectly clear to everyone now that if we are not strong at home we cannot continue to lead the world and so i have done what i could to help us to become stronger at home that means as much as anything else as we attempt to revive this economy we have got to focus on the economy of california the state which has the state which has 12 percent of our nation s people but 25 percent of our nation s unemployed it is clear to me that we must take this problem which has developed for you over a period of years and go after it with a vengeance step by step with discipline and concentration this last week in washington we made several announcements which mean more jobs and a brighter future for california last week the vice president and i announced that the united states in recognition of the end of the cold war would remove export controls on 70 percent of the computers and supercomputers made in the united states that will increase exports by billions and tens of billions of dollars it means more jobs for california in this state that order frees up 30 billion of exports in computers 2 billion in telecommunications and 5 billion in supercomputers in a state where one in 10 jobs depends on exports that is very good news indeed last week i also announced a plan to help our shipbuilders to be more competitive in the global economy there are 124 000 americans employed in shipbuilding many of them in california in places like the nasco plant in san diego this plan will help them get access to foreign markets which they deserve and which they have been denied for too long and last week with so many people in this country desperate for work and knowing we have to find a way to help create jobs through supporting the environment something you ve done here we announced a ground breaking research plan involving our defense labs our military facilities and the big three automakers to triple the fuel efficiency of our automobiles within a decade creating tens of thousand of new jobs for americans earlier this year we announced a project very important to the future of this area a technology reinvestment program to convert defense technology reinvestment program to convert defense technology either to dual uses defense and commercial or purely commercial uses something you are doing here we have received in return for what will soon be about 1 billion in federal matching money over 2 800 proposals and guess what twenty five percent of them came from the state of california that means more jobs for california tomorrow i know that congressman fazio and others will release the details of a new joint partnership between the government and automakers to develop and produce electric cars taking advantage of dual use technology right here at mcclellan that means more jobs for california and a brighter future for america and let me thank you especially here at mcclellan for the partnership you have formed with the environmental protection agency and the california epa by streamlining government and working together you have performed a cleanup that under the old rules would have taken six years and 10 million you did it in eight weeks at a fifth of the cost and we intend to do that all over america copying your leadership let me say to you my fellow americans my biggest task as your president is to try to clearly define the time in which we live point the way to positive change and give the american people the security they need to make those changes we cannot any of us in our personal lives in our family lives and in our communities make changes we need to make unless we are personally secure enough to make them but we cannot deny the changes that are abroad in the world and pretend that they re not there when i leave you and walk back to this hangar i will see some of the work that is being done here in mcclellan to develop dual use technologies that means that the people here have decided that change will be our friend and not our enemy when faced with a time of profound change we can take one of two courses we can hunker down turn away and pretend it s not there and that works about one time in 100 most of the time you know as well as i do when you see profound change and you want to preserve what is most important in your values your family your community you have to find a way to make that change your friend that is what this administration is dedicated to doing both in trying to change the rules of the economic game and in trying to open up a new era of time when americans who work hard and play by the rules have a certain basic security yes i think we ought to change our economic policies we are giving this country the toughest trade policy it s had in years and years demanding access to our markets yes we cannot continue to have massive trade deficits with the far east where 40 percent of our exports are going and yes i favor opening up trade to mexico and ultimately to latin america because we have a trade surplus there and it means more jobs for americans i do favor it but let me say something if you listen to the people who are opposed to the trade deficit they have some very good arguments but they re arguing against things that happened for the last 12 years they re arguing against the insecurity of the times our people have faced and the fact that our government has not responded to them and so we have sought to give the american people more security by bringing this deficit down which threatens our children and grandchildren by changing the tax laws so that working families with children in the home without regard to their incomes will be lifted above poverty so there will never be an excuse to stay on welfare because work will be rewarded for people but by reforming the student loan program so that we lower the interest rates and string out the repayment terms and make college available to every american for the first time by giving tens of thousands of our young people the chance to serve their country in their community through a program of national service that will also enable them to earn credit against a college education or other education and training yes security is important and we have other challenges before us as well if you look at the number of people who have been killed in this country just in the last month in drive by shootings and mindless acts of violence and you consider the fact that this is the only advanced country in the world where children can be in cities with no supervision no support roaming the streets better armed than the police because we refuse to take automatic weapons out of their hands or pass the brady bill or check on it that is wrong and we must change that we must change that but my fellow americans at the root of so much of our security is the fact that we are living in a changing economy where the average young worker will change jobs eight times in a lifetime where more and more when people lose their jobs and they go on unemployment it s not the way it was when i was young where people would go on unemployment for four weeks or eight weeks and then they d get their old job back now most people get another job but it s a different job so we don t need an unemployment system anymore we need a reemployment system to retrain our workers for the jobs that are there and for the future more than anything else if you look to the heart now of our federal budget deficit if you look to the heart now of the economic problems of many of our leading exporters and if you look to the heart of the gnawing insecurity that grips hardworking american families you will find lurking behind it all the most expensive least efficient health care system in the entire western world only in america only in america do we spend over 14 percent of our income on health care canada s at 10 germany and japan below nine going up more rapidly than any other country going up twice as fast as inflation and we still leave 35 million people 35 million permanently without health insurance two million more every month another 100 thousand every month permanently losing their health insurance only in america do we have 1 500 separate insurance companies writing thousands of different policies creating mountains of different paperwork and always always looking for ways not to cover the people who bought their insurance that only happens in this country only in america are the doctors who hired out to keep people well and help people who are sick spending more and more countless hours some of them as much as 25 hours a week now filling out forms and paperwork only in america has that happened only in america have in the last 10 years we seen the work of clerical workers in the hospitals grow at four times the rate of new doctors and health care providers that is not happening anywhere else why because while we have the finest doctors and nurses and technology and research in the world we have a system of financing and delivering health care that is a nightmare it is a nightmare for people who have lost their health insurance it is a nightmare for people who don t get it it s a nightmare for people who have to depend on the government to get theirs when not all the providers will cover medicaid it has been made and guess what it is the primary cause of the exploding federal deficit it is the primary cause of many of our biggest companies inability to compete more overseas it is the primary cause that millions of american workers will not get a raise between now and the end of the decade because all the new profits of the companies that are trying to cover their health care will go into the exploding cost of premiums and only in america do we spend 10 cents on the dollar in a 900 billion health care on paperwork that no other country has i say to you my fellow americans it s time to give the american people health care that is always there health care that can never be taken away health care that is simpler and better now you know we are here since we re here at this magnificent air base let me just ask you something can you think of a single institution in this country in the last 10 years in the midst of all the chaos and social breakdown and violence and family troubles in america is there any institution that has worked better than the united states military to train and educate people to perform missions to continually give people new skills and to provide the coherence that we need and is there any institution that s done a better job of opening opportunities to people without regard to race or gender no why one reason is there is order security and support could the military have done its mission if they had the same health care system the rest of the american people had and half the people in the service could lose their health care on a given day by some accident or because a wife or a husband or a child turned out to have an illness that wasn t covered in the fine print of some policy you know it couldn t have happened we owe the rest of the american people that security in the face of the changing times in which we live let me say people say to me oh you can t slow the growth of health care costs i say to them look at california i want to thank your insurance commissioner for the work he s done with my wife s health care task force to develop a health care system you look at the california experience look at what happened to the health care costs of the people who had the benefit of being in the california public employee system when the people who were providing it knew that the state was broke and didn t have a lot of money and when there were enough people there that they had bargaining power to get high quality health care at an affordable price what happened the inflation rate and the premiums was less than one third the national inflation rate in health care and let me say some other things about this health care system because there s been a lot of misinformation put out there i see all these children here one of the things that is killing this health care system of ours is that so many people have no coverage that when they get health care it s when they re real sick and it s real expensive and they show up at the emergency room under this plan for the first time in history there will be a comprehensive package of benefits which will guarantee preventive and primary health care services to pregnant mothers to little children to women who need mammograms to men who need cholesterol tests those are the things that will lower the cost of health care and strengthen the fabric of our economy look at the burden that california alone pays because of the uninsured cost of caring for aids patients look at that under this system when everybody gets covered and all people are in big pools so that one high risk patients cost is spread across a lot of folks we will have coverage in the regular system and you will not have particular states going broke because they have disproportionate burdens of immigrants of aids patients or anything else this is another important feature of this but finally let me say two other things under this system the american people will have more choice than most americans do now if you have a health care plan that better than the one we re writing into law your company can keep giving it to you and the cost of it won t go up as rapidly but there s a limit for the first time to what can be taken away if you don t have one you will get one and you ll have more choices today only one in three workers in a plant with a health insurance plan has any choice in the way they get their health care every american worker will be guaranteed at least three different options in the health care plan and that s a plus for america to give the consumers of this country more choices and finally i want to say a special word of thanks to the thousands of americans from all across this country who helped us to put this plan together and especially to the literally hundreds and hundreds of doctors and nurses and others who told us their stories so that we found unbelievably we had doctors who were miserable nurses who were unhappy and the people who lost their insurance in the 11th hour when they didn t know what was going to hit them so for the first time in the history we are going to have a health care plan that has significant input on the front end from the people who provide the health care because they know the ones who ve been involved in this process that we cannot go on and finally let me just make this point at some point in life when you have a problem whatever it is you have to ask yourself a pretty simple question because every change involves taking a chance you have to ask yourself which is greater the cost of change or the cost of staying the same it is clear that the greater cost is to keep on doing what we re doing and letting america go bankrupt and breaking the hearts of millions of american families and so i say to you we ve got a lot of work to do to turn the california economy around but we ve taken important steps that were not taken before and there s more to come we ve got a lot of work to do to work through all the complexities of the health care issue we ve got a lot of work to do to convince americans to have the courage and to give americans the security they need to change but i am telling you folks if we do what we ought to do california and this country will walk into the 21st century with their heads held high with the american dream still alive for our children with our diversity a strength not a weakness in a nation that is still leading the world if we have the courage to change and the will to give our people the security they deserve that is what i m dedicated to and i thank you for being here today to support that god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton3 10 94a bill_clinton thank you very much why don t we just vote right now you do that for 30 more days and you re in like flynn that was terrific thank you kathleen and thank you governor bayh for your leadership you know i really resent evan bayh he s young and handsome manages to avoid controversy and stay popular and he s done a lot better as head of the democratic governors than i did when i was there not only that but he s a wonderful tribute to our party and he has a terrific future i came here tonight to speak for kathleen brown i want to thank the members of our administration who are here the members of the cabinet their presence here should tell you how important we think this race is i was listening to kathleen speak a moment ago i want to just tell you a few things from the heart about this first of all i declared for president three years ago today at the time i was governor i had just been reelected to a fifth term two four year terms three two year terms i was happy as a clam at home i got into the race basically because i didn t want to see our victory in the cold war be squandered in the aftermath because i didn t want to see america move to the 21st century not able to compete and win and because i didn t like the fact that our country was coming apart when it ought to be coming together and when i began that race most people thought i needed my head examined because the incumbent president was over 70 percent approval in the polls my mother thought i could win that s about it that s about it i say it to make two points one in the moment the polls are not as important as the public official the candidate and the conviction and secondly the choice that kathleen brown just posed to you is a choice we re going to have to be making over and over and over and over again until we get out of what we got ourselves into over a very long period of time and all along the way at various times the choice will be more difficult for people but when i look at what her opponent s tried to do to her out in california how he s tried to sort of define here it s classic republican politics and they re very good at it let s not kid ourselves they are very good at demonizing their opponents at turning their opponents into aliens and making people at the local kiwanis club think that they wouldn t share a piece of apple pie with their opponents that s what they re good at that s how they stay in they always think that given the contentious and divisive nature of the way people communicate and the way they are communicated to today they can exalt blame over responsibility they can exalt division over unity they can exalt fear over hope that s what they believe once in a while we prove them wrong when we can communicate with discipline and conviction and persistence and when we are not ground down i d have come over here tonight just to hear her give that speech because now she s got me in a better humor too i m telling you so you heard it and it s the same thing everywhere i ran for president because we were in the midst of 30 years of social problems 20 years of economic problems and 12 years of the kind of stuff she s going through now where the leadership of this country would always tell the american people what they thought they wanted to hear they would talk tough and get the image that they are tough presidential national message and they would act weak they would talk like our parent and then act like our child telling us exactly what we wanted to hear as if it were tough medicine and then writing us a check and never worrying about who was going to pay the bill now that is what has happened for 12 years and always escaping responsibility by placing blame now that is exactly what they have done and that s what you see in california i just want to say something personally to the people of california i m going to have an opportunity to say it out there i ve been to california about a dozen times since i ve been president would have been once more if it hadn t been for the events in haiti that kept me away from going out there for kathleen a few days ago i love the place it s a fascinating place and everything that america has everywhere is also there they have had two huge problems one is since they re the biggest state in the country economically when we had a recession they got hit harder with it the second is that with about 12 percent of our population they had 21 percent of our defense investments so that when we cut defense in this country at the end of the cold war starting back in 87 that s when defense peaked it was absolutely predictable that it would have double the impact in california that it would have anywhere else because of the concentration and that the impact might be highly weighted in highwage jobs therefore turning it around takes a little more time because the hit was bigger there and so i went all over california in that election trying to figure out what was going on in southern california what was going on in northern california what was going on for the farmers what was going on in the inland empire what was going on in san diego how were the border problems the immigration problems going to be aggravated and exacerbated and people s sense of insecurity going to be reinforced by all these terrible economic problems if you had 150 different racial and ethnic groups in los angeles county that meant that it could be the beacon of the whole future for the united states but how are they going to get through all the tensions that would be caused by the economic contraction of the moment until we could turn it around i have really given a lot of thought to this and when we put together an economic strategy it was pretty simple it was reduce the deficit increase investment in education training and new technologies expand trade and investment and try to empower individuals and communities to succeed which means that the places that are in the worse shape need some extra help how did that play itself out in california well we removed restrictions on 35 billion worth of high tech exports where california has a decided interest greater than any other state in the country we spent hundreds of millions of dollars as kathleen said on defense conversions helping to turn bases over to local communities so they could get businesses in their there to put people to work and actually investing with companies in new technologies of the future i visited the rockwell plant out there and you were there too the day we went there to talk about that when the earthquake came when the fires came we were there with emergency aid in a hurry we rebuilt the world s busiest highway quicker than anybody thought we could by literally reinventing to use the vice president s term the way we spend the money out there in spite of all this talk about immigration it was our administration that for the first time recommended and got through congress federal assistance to pay for the criminal justice costs of illegal immigrants we increased by 30 percent by 30 percent the amount of aid in a tough time we were reducing spending overall we increased by 30 percent the amount of money going to california to deal with their costs of immigration 30 percent over what happened when the previous president was here and the present governor was a member of the united states senate that s what we did that s our record on that issue we have done a number of other things we are backing senator feinstein s desert bill last weekend we turned the presidio over to you so you folks can do something great with it we are doubling the border guards for enforcement on the border we have worked hard for california we re selling california rice to japan for the first time in history i met a walnut farmer last month from california said it just kills my farmer friends because they re all republicans but they have to admit that you have done more for us than any president in the last 30 years and we are working for california now i say that to make this point and why it s so important that you re here all that can still be washed away by the deliberate concerted effort of our opponents to place blame over responsibility division over unity fear over hope can wipe away all the details and all the facts and what you have to do to help kathleen brown win is to contribute now and then talk and work between now and the election to prove that what really counts is what will build that state i m really proud of the fact that in 20 months we have made a good start on bringing this country back but don t kid yourself it s just a good start i m proud of the fact that we have three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since truman we re going to the smallest federal government john kennedy was president the republicans bad mouth the government but we shrunk it with no help from them that there are 4 3 million new jobs in this economy and that for the first time in nine years the united states was rated a couple of weeks ago by the panel of international economists as the most productive country in the world and i am proud of that but it is just a beginning you look at what is happening in california and you will see the combined impact of 30 years of social problems 20 years of economic problems 12 years of neglect and a disproportionate impact of the defense cutback the people out there cannot be blamed if they are still frustrated and full of anxiety that is not their fault it is our job to tell the people of california that kathleen brown and diane feinstein are builders people who are trying to make things better and that they should not be diverted from the urgent task of building the country and building the state if i might just say a word about crime kathleen s already said that a picture of kathleen brown and jerry brown and rose bird is not worth near as much as the assault weapons ban 100 000 police 100 000 jail cells for criminals thousands and thousands of prevention programs and a tougher approach to crime and i ll tell you something else i know something about this i started out as attorney general of my state i have a different position than she does on capital punishment but our crime bill had 60 different specific statutes on that she supported our crime bill and he didn t who are we kidding with these ads about who s weak on crime or not she had the record when we needed it so i say to you you have to make up your mind you can cheer tonight but tomorrow all those ads will still be out there on television and everybody will be writing about this as if it s a horse race instead of a fight for the spirit and the soul of that state and what happens to the future of little children and you have to decide whether you feel some sort of personal responsibility to affect the outcome i m telling you it is a wonderful place it has enormous potential this country will never fully recover until california recovers and we have work to do and the people out there cannot be blamed for voting on what they know that s the way all the rest of us are too we can only act on what we know we can only see the world through the prism of our own experience and while all of us have been up here working for them the other guys have been out there talking about us so now when the congress goes home the election should be our friend because we can go tell the truth what you have to do is make a personal commitment to do that the economic plan that kathleen brown has outlined will help to do what only the state can do to rebuild california the federal government and a partnership that we are building between the private sector and the federal government cannot do it alone there must be state initiatives there will always be in california things that can only be done by people who know the problems the best who understand the opportunities most clearly the economic strategy that i have outlined cannot fully succeed anywhere without aggressive leadership at the state level to rebuild the economy and believe me we can continue to make progress on education and training we can continue to build this economy we can drive down the crime rate we can make progress on immigration but to do it it s going to require a tough disciplined concerted long term partnership between the white house and washington and the people who live and work in california starting in the state house in sacramento that s what this election is about so the country has a big interest in who wins here not the political system not the political pundits but the welfare of the average man and woman and child all across america you just heard her case for why she should win let us exalt hope over fear let us exalt unity over division let us prove that responsibility still beats blame in common sense america by making sure that no voter goes to the polls in california unaware of the real facts thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton3 10 94b bill_clinton thank you so much for that wonderful welcome thank you senator robb and thank you lynda for the years of friendship and the years of service the years of wise counsel and the years of shared joy and all the rest of it that goes along with this work congressman moran and congressman scott i m delighted to see you here tonight lieutenant governor beyer you gave a magnificent talk and i thank you for what you said about your senator and your president i m sure neither of us will ever forget it thank you mark warner and senator i think one of your colleagues is here i think senator daschle is here from south dakota are you here stand up thank you ladies and gentlemen this is a special day for me and for hillary and for our family and close friends it was three years ago today that i announced my candidacy for president i was trying today in the midst of meeting with the vice premier of china and the foreign minister of israel and the crown prince of jordan and dealing with a lot of our domestic issues i was trying hard to remember exactly how i felt on october the 3rd 1991 in front of the old state house in little rock i know one thing my mama was the only person there who thought i had a chance to win and i don t think she was so sure the incumbent president was at over 70 percent approval in all the polls and most people thought it was a fool s errand but i thought that the race was worth making no matter what the outcome because at least i would never have to explain to my child why i didn t do my part to sound the alarm about what i thought was going on in america it was all part really of what i had been working on for several years before i ran for president part of a political heritage that i shared with people like chuck robb and tom daschle who s from south dakota a place that makes arkansas look like a metropolitan center i say that to make this point several years ago chuck and i and a number of others helped to found a group called the democratic leadership council after the democrats just kept on getting beat in the presidential race we did it with two goals in mind and both of them are important and both of them bear directly on the choices americans face in this elections and especially on the choice americans have here in virginia the first thing we wanted to do was to broaden the base and change the rhetoric and the substance of a lot of the policies of the democratic party we thought we had been typecast too much as the big government pro tax government can solve all the problems party we needed to broaden our base and prove that we could spend tax money with discipline grow the economy be tough on crime and bring the american people together across regional and racial and party lines and move the country forward instead of always having a left right argument in a time of transition you need to be moving ahead the second thing we wanted to do is equally important we wanted to challenge people in the other party to do the same thing we were sick and tired of seeing the other party be rewarded in national elections primarily for their ability to talk rather than to act primarily for their ability to turn us into aliens instead of tell the people of the country what they were for and they are very good at that i know and so we began to work on that and to me that s what the 1992 campaign was all about i knew at the end of the cold war we were in danger of squandering our opportunities of not meeting the challenges of the 21st century of raising the first generation of children not to do better than their parents i also felt then and i feel even more strongly today that the best days of this country are still before us this is by far the strongest country in the world that if we can learn how to live together in harmony and take responsibility for our problems and listen to each other instead of scream at each other we can take our challenges one by one and take this country into the next century with the greatest era of peace and prosperity and opportunity for all our people the world has ever known we face in this election many dilemmas but there are two we can t do anything about except to address the first is one to which senator robb alluded we are living in a time of historic change the cold war is over shimon perez the brilliant foreign minister of israel said to me today he said it is a great challenge you face mr president in foreign policy where the american people have to now stop thinking about the threat of immediate destruction and start thinking responsibly about just dealing with their problems because if you don t deal with your problems then eventually your security will be threatened again similarly here at home we have to deal with the realities of a new global economy where what we earn depends largely on what we learn where the average 18 year old will change jobs six times in a lifetime and where with all of our strengths we still have to confront a bewildering array of problems and whenever a country goes through a period of change it s just like when a person goes through a period of change i ask each of you tonight to think about that when you think about the state of the american people s mind in this election think about the first day you ever went to school or the first day you went to college or the first day you showed up for your first job or the first day you started your first business or the day you got married or the day your first child was born those are all good things but i ll bet you anything you were scared to death if you were really thinking about it and these are good things if you think about the other challenges you face were you going to get fired were you going to go broke what was it like in the line of fire what was it like when you had your first crisis in your family whenever you go through a period of great change inside you hope and fear are at war it s almost as if you had a big scale inside and every day hope and fear hope would be on one side fear would be on the other and every day they d be in a little bit different balance until you actually get through the period of change and things level out that is where we are today and we are at mid course in this term the american people gave me where we have made a terrific start on our country s problems but a lot of people have not felt it yet that is compounded today by the fact that the other party being relieved of power in the presidency has gone back to what it does best which is to talk instead of do to blame instead of to assume responsibility to divide instead of unite to play on fear instead of hope so they try to turn the president or the senator from virginia into an alien in the minds of ordinary voters and hope they can clog the information channels enough so that that will guarantee that in the scales inside us all fear will outweigh hope on election day and we will actually do that which we do not wish to do we will make a choice which will undermine the very path which we wish to walk now i have to tell you folks we have done a lot of things in the last 20 months it doesn t solve all the problems but we ve made a good start we have made a good start and i ask you to see this senate race not just in the terms that mr robb presented them but in these terms we have had 30 years of social problems building up in this country the breakdown of the family the rise of crime the rise of drugs the rise of gangs the loss of opportunity in many of our inner cities and our rural areas a whole generation of children being raised without the kind of discipline and love they needed to grow up to be productive citizens for 30 years that has been coming we have had 20 years of serious economic problems where when the economy was booming or when it was sinking wages of hourly wage earners tended to be stagnant and people had to change jobs more and more and those who would work hard but didn t have high levels of skills were having to struggle just to hold on to their income that has been developing for 20 years we had 12 years where we tried it their way where they talked tough but acted soft where they tried to pretend to be so strong and they were very good at it but they just really told us what we wanted to hear they cursed the deficit and quadrupled the debt they lambasted government but they didn t shrink it they got all their friends in government jobs as quick as they could they talked about investment and free enterprise but they tried to spur economic growth by massive deficit spending instead of by investment and productivity we have had 20 months to deal with 30 years of social problems 20 years of economic problems and 12 years of trickle down and here is what has happened in 20 months we have made a good start on the economy we have made a good start on crime we have made a good start on making government work for ordinary americans our economic strategy involved bringing the deficit down increasing investment in education and training and new technologies expanding trade and trying to empower individuals and communities to grow you tell me how it s worked we ve had more trade expansion in the last year and a half than in any comparable period in 35 years the economic plan for which chuck robb has been criticized for voting had 255 billion in spending cuts the biggest deficit reduction package in history a tax increase a rate increase yes on the top 1 2 percent of the american people including most of you in this room and i thank you for staying here but you can take some pride in knowing that every red cent went to reduce the deficit not for new spending that economic plan also made 90 percent of the small businesses in this country eligible for a tax cut it made 15 million working families including 330 000 working families in virginia who were working hard raising children and still hovering just above the poverty line eligible for an income tax cut so that they would never have any incentive to give up work and go into welfare and so instead we would reward their being good parents and good workers that s what that plan did t hat plan made 20 million americans eligible for lower interest longer repayment on their college loan so that no young person again should ever decline to go to college because of the cost because now if you want you can pay back that loan over 25 years as a percentage of your income with a lower interest rate than used to be available that s what that economic plan did 600 000 people in virginia alone eligible for that that is what chuck robb pleads guilty to voting for now what did they say would happen if we passed our plan they said the sky would fall they said the economy would come to an end all their leaders in the united states senate said the deficit would go up the economy would go down things would be terrible that is what they said and what has happened 4 3 million new jobs in 20 months 93 percent of them in the private sector three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since harry truman was president the united states was rated number one of all the countries in the world in productivity by the annual vote of international economists for the first time in nine years gap in tape cursed the government lo and behold it was the democrats that shrunk the government there are 70 000 fewer people working for the federal establishment than there were on the day i was inaugurated and under our law there will be 270 000 fewer four years from now that is our record and it is a good start and 100 percent of them voted against it that was their response i was told the first week i came here i came here with the philosophy i just explained chuck robb we had this philosophy he lost his position on a budget committee because he was for bigger deficit reduction he wasn t some clone of the democratic establishment he stood up to everybody even when i presented this program he said well i ll vote for it but you ought to cut it more that was our philosophy you know what i was told the first week i got here by the leader of the other party in the senate well you ll have to pass this without a single republican vote in either house you won t get a vote and it doesn t matter how you change it because we want to be in a position to condemn you if you fail and if you succeed we will obscure it by just reminding people that you raised taxes and even if you just raised them on the wealthiest americans we ll convince everybody you did it to everybody that s what i was told the first week i got here i said what happened to all this bipartisan cooperation what happened to this 90 day honeymoon i was promised what happened to all this words that i kept hearing but we did it anyway and we made a good beginning we made a good beginning now we come to the crime bill everybody says it s the biggest problem in america the crime bill puts 100 000 police on the street builds 100 000 jail cells to hold violent criminals has the power to remake communities with community based not bureaucracies community based programs to prevent crime from occurring in the first place that the law enforcement community of this country demanded be in that crime bill it did ban assault weapons and it did pass in spite of the brutal efforts of leaders in the other party to defeat it now here s what you may not remember when they talked about chuck robb and the assault weapons ban let me just remind you of something late last year this crime bill in only a slightly different form passed 95 4 and the republicans voted for it 42 2 in the united states senate it had the assault weapons ban in it it had prevention programs in it the only reason it didn t cost quite as much is it was a four and a half year bill instead of a six year bill but in all the years that this crime bill has in common with the bill that was passed last year they voted for a bill that had more prevention funds per year in it than the one they voted against and they called it pork the funds the programs they had already voted for the programs many of them had cosponsored it went from 42 2 for it to 6 38 against why because they were told that the job they had to do in the senate was no longer to lower the crime rate in america to make the american people safer the job they had to do was to defeat the democratic president and the democrats in congress that is not what i came to washington to do i came to try to help you be safer but we still made a good start on crime and we ve made a good start in making government work for ordinary people i already mentioned we passed a bill to reduce the size of the federal government by 270 000 and give all the money back to local communities to fight crime we re bringing the deficit down we re making government work again in all kinds of interesting ways the small business administration finally has a director in erskine bowles whom i just brought into the white house for the last two years he spent his whole life starting small businesses so lo and behold he wasn t a politician over there like what you usually have he was the guy who was used to starting small businesses so now you can go to the sba and if you want a loan you can fill out a one page form instead of one that s 100 pages long and you get an answer in three days yes or no that s not the government that started it i m about to sign a procurement bill that will put an end to 10 ash trays and 80 hammers and all that stuff you ve been hearing about you may not have heard about it because it passed quietly but we passed a bill that will reform all the purchasing power practices of the government the things in other words that people who were alienated from government and who voted for ross perot wanted we are doing i supported campaign finance reform i supported lobby reform i support the bill that s in the senate now that would require congress to live under the laws it imposes on the private sector it s already passed the house let them pass it in the senate now but you ask senator daschle or senator robb what happened to campaign finance reform people who don t want us to have a bill killed it now so you have a choice we made a good start on economic recovery on crime making government work for ordinary people is there a lot to be done you bet there is is the answer to go back to trickle down economics they now have a plan we now know that in addition to being obstructionists if you give them enough votes they ve got a plan and what s the plan the same thing they did before tell them what they want to hear but act tough doing it so nobody catches you being soft you know the mature thing to do if you re taking responsibility for your family your kids your business or your country is just to tell people what has to be done and take a deep breath and get about doing it and it s never quite as hard or as difficult or as painful as you think it s going to be that is what we are doing now after three years of deficit reduction for the first time since 48 after robust job growth after the weakest job growth since the great depression their crowd has now given us 1 trillion worth of unfunded promises which they call a contract with america folks it s a contract on america they have put out a contract on the deficit they have put out a contract on medicare they have put out a contract on ever paying for the crime bill but they re going to promise you everything we re going to have a balanced budget amendment but we re going to cut everybody s taxes we re going to spend more on defense we re going to start star wars up again don t worry we ll do it hey i heard that before they quadrupled the debt reduced their investment in america and nearly drove this country into the ditch and i don t think we want to do it again so you ve got a clear choice and you have to decide you have to decide what do you believe in and here in virginia you have this stark graphic example of how really good they are at making down up up down square round and turning us into aliens i will tell you they are better than we are at this they are they have turned me into an alien with a lot of voters in virginia so i can be in the ads but that is a true ad that i d rather have robb in the senate i knew if they ran enough ads they d finally run one that was true that s true but what i want to say to you is that the people of this state are good people but they are just like the rest of the country we re going through this period of change and change is hard and we all are for change in general and then we re all against it in particular as soon as it requires any rigor at all or when it takes time to wait for that s another thing that makes politics really hard today look at the way we communicate these pounding messages right the 30 second ads trauma on the news every night the dynamics of how we get our information now don beyer said it the best he said everything that really counts in life takes time everything you really care about in life takes time but we re not given much time to digest here to digest we just have all this stuff crammed at us in a time of uncertainty and change and the other guys are better talkers i ve been busy up here doing and since they gave up all doing and didn t want to work with me they had more time to talk and mercy they re good at it and they ve got plenty of money to do it so we now have a stark choice we re clearly making progress on the economy on crime on making the government work for ordinary people clearly we clearly have a long way to go is the answer to turn around and do what failed us before that is the choice we re being given and here you have a little extra gloss on it here it is more stark so i know how you feel because you showed up and you made this contribution to chuck robb but what i want to tell you is that your contribution as much as i appreciate it is not enough because you cannot give 20 million and the voters in virginia can only vote on what they know just like voters everywhere you don t want them to wake up a year from now saying oh my goodness what have i done there have to be enough who will make the right decision now that s what happened to mr truman in 48 by the way a lot of people have forgotten this you know if you took a poll today everybody wants harry truman on mount rushmore but i came from one of those families who was for him when he was still alive and i m telling you those of you who are old enough to remember that know that he just barely won that race and that he was a figure of positive change in a difficult time and he fought and enough americans listened to him to stay the course and enable our country to be a responsible power in the world to stand up to the cold war to rebuild europe and japan and to build a middle class in this country because we made the right decisions that s the decision you re being called upon to make you cannot walk out of this fundraiser and say i have done my part for chuck robb you cannot do it chuck robb has served you well and honorably as a lieutenant governor as a governor as a senator i have known him a long time he has stood i m proud of what he did in the marine corps and in the war and i can t believe anyone would ever question it but i m really proud of what he s done in public life since he s been back home too and you should be too and i know it is easy when things are tough and you re frustrated to say just throw them out if they re in let me see if i can t find something i don t like about them and x them off but this is a choice this is a choice and i know this man i have seen him work year in and year out with very high standards of discipline and integrity standing up and taking unpopular positions i know what he did as governor i know what he s done as senator and the idea that they could be trying to turn him into some sort of space alien who is from the far left when he has done something that they talked about but never did fight for lower deficits fight for a more responsible economic policy and fight for the future of virginia and america is a travesty and you must not allow it to happen you must not you must not allow it to happen now i m going to tell you something folks just stand right there because i m finishing don t even sit down i m really done and it won t encourage me to go on just stand right there i want you to think about this every one of you know somebody else you can call you know somebody else you can talk to there s somebody at work there s somebody in your civic club there s somebody you spend your time on the weekends with there s somebody you meet at the school meeting there s somebody you can talk to somebody whose scales are going up and down between hope and fear and you can tell them that this is about going forward not going back it s about assuming responsibility not pointing the finger of blame it s about bringing people together not dividing them it s about playing to our hopes not our fears that is what you have to do you cannot let chuck and linda and the people that work in the campaign headquarters do it all and say i ve paid for the television ads i quit that is not enough and i want every one of you to pledge to yourselves tonight that if you want this country to keep turning around and you want your children to reap the benefits of the 21st century and you want to do right by your country in this period of change the way our forebears did at the end of world war ii you will send chuck robb back to the senate thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton3 10 99 bill_clinton thank you very much clarence i d like to spend the night and and we could have quite a bunking party here but you ll have to give me a rain check i want to thank clarence and jackie and their family for having us here and all the other people who helped to sell tickets and make this event possible i d like to thank my good friend maxine waters for being here and for her passionate leadership for our party having maxine for a friend a supporter and an occasional rebuker has been one of the more interesting experiences of my life and i like it i d like to thank governor romer i d like to thank beth dozoretz our national finance chair of the dnc for being here i want to thank all of you you know i was thinking particularly here all of you have to come to so many of these dinners and you listen to so many people give speeches and i m trying to decide what can i do to make this memorable i guess i could give the talk i normally give i remember one time tina turner came to little rock to give a concert when she was just sort of making her comeback it was right after she d come out with that private dancer album you all remember that and she had the big macho saxophone player with chains and everything it made me want to go pump iron and apply for a new job but anyway she sang all these new songs and she was a big hit and everybody loved her and we got to the end of the concert and the band started playing her first hit proud mary playing the introduction to proud mary and she kind of moved up to the microphone everybody cheered and she moved back she moved up and everybody cheered and she said you know i ve been singing this song for 25 years but it gets better every time i do it so maybe this will be a little better but i would like to just ask you to take just a few minutes to be a little serious with me tonight about why you came if somebody asked you tomorrow why you came what are you going to say if somebody asked you tomorrow why you contributed what are you going to say when i came to california as a candidate for president and then later the vice president and i came together this state was in trouble it was in trouble economically it was divided socially there was a great sense of anxiety and frustration maxine took me into her home and we walked down the streets and the neighborhoods that she represented and people were worried about the future and i had this idea that this general idea that there was something wrong with american politics in the early 90s because it was basically all focused on repeating the same old arguments we d been having in america for years and having the same old fights with the same old language and seeing who could divide the pie up and it was all about the politics of division and when you got through slicing the citizens up you just hoped that your share of the pie was bigger than the other person s share of the pie it didn t seem to me to be working very well i mean after all we had high unemployment we had social tension we had no driving vision we had quadrupled the debt of the country in 12 years we had a lot of problems so i said give me a chance to lead the country on a philosophy that there should be a community of all americans and that we should look for unifying ways to do our business together we should look for an economic policy that gets rid of the deficit and continues to invest in the education of our children we should look for an economic policy that helps business and labor we should be able to grow the economy and make the environment cleaner not dirtier we should be able to respect all of our differences and treat everybody with respect and still be more united by our common humanity it sounded kind of pollyanna i m sure to some people but i believe it so i was making an argument to the american people and thankfully the american people said okay we ll give these guys a chance and they did but they didn t know they couldn t know it was my argument in 1996 people thought there was some evidence that it was working and so they renewed by contract if anybody comes to me and talks to me about running for president i say it s the world s biggest job interview you get an employment contract if you win and then you move to a place where everybody who talks to you tries to make you to forget who you really work for and what you re supposed to be doing so here we are now almost seven years into this grand experiment it is not an argument anymore one reason you should be here is the politics of community and progress together work this country has had in the last seven years the longest peacetime expansion in history we now have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years the lowest welfare rates in 32 years the lowest crime rates in 26 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years and the highest home ownership in history this is not an argument there is evidence what we have done has worked for america and i m glad that we have been a part of that but that s not enough we ve got the country working again what i think we have to do now is to look at the great long term challenges of the country once in a lifetime do people get a chance that we have a chance to do now to look around and say if we wanted to paint a picture of tomorrow for our children and our grandchildren if we wanted to celebrate the new millennium not just with the brilliant show that quincy is putting together for me on the mall but with a really different way of living in america where we were working for ourselves and for our neighbors and where things were really working in ways that we could all be proud of what would we do when i got here we couldn t ask these questions we had to get the country working again you know we had as somebody said what s that old saying if you re up to your ears in alligators it s hard to talk to somebody about draining the swamp well now we can drain the swamp now we can look ahead we can imagine what would we really like america to be like in the new millennium and what would we have to do to get there i want us to think about big ideas let me just say some of them are things that i can make some real headway on in the time i m in office and some of them are things that will have to be dealt with when i m not president anymore but the main reason i hope that you will say tomorrow if somebody said well why did you go there last night i hope you ll be able to say well i bought their argument but it works but more importantly i share their vision for tomorrow and i want to be part of it because elections are always about tomorrow i ll just tell you one other little story then i ll go back when i was a governor of what president bush used to call a small southern state every year i would go out to the state fair and i would have governor s day sounds kind of august really what i did was go into this big tin shed and find myself a little booth and i d sit there and any citizen who wanted to come up who was at the fair and talk to me and say anything would do it and so in 1989 in october this month 10 years ago i m having governor s day at the fair and there s another election coming up in 1990 at which time i will have been governor for 10 years and four terms because we went from two to four year terms so this guy comes up to me about 70 years old and overalls and he looks at me and he says bill are you going to run again except he said again and i said well i don t know if i do will you vote for me he said yeah i guess i will i always have and i said well aren t you sick of me after all these years he said no i m not but nearly everybody else i know is and this guy might have won me the election in 1990 so i had this conversation so i got sort of hurt and huffy and i said well don t you think i ve done a good job he said yeah but this is exactly what he said he said yeah i do but he said you did get a paycheck every two weeks didn t you he said that s what we hired you to do he said if you want to win this next election you ll have to tell them what you re going to do next time he said the fact you did a good job doesn t mean much he said we paid we gave you a salary gave you a nice house to live in you know and that s very important but the reason that the achievements of our administration and our party and our members of congress like maxine matter is that they are some evidence that if we re going to change we need to keep changing building on what we ve done that s right rather than changing by taking a u turn and going back to what got us in trouble in the first place neither she nor i should get some sort of gold star the question is is it evidence of whether we re moving in the right direction as a country now here are some of the things that i think we ought to be doing if we want america to look like it should number one we ve got to deal with the aging of america when the baby boomers retire the number of people over 65 will double there will be two people working for every one person drawing social security i am the oldest of the baby boomers tony told me tonight tony robbins that he was the youngest i wish i could switch positions but i can tell you that my people the people i grew up with middle class people people without a lot of money they are plagued by the notion that the retirement of the baby boom generation will impose an intolerable burden on our children and our grandchildren and we have a chance now to take care of social security and medicare so we take care of the elderly but the income of their children is free to raise their grandchildren it s a big deal the second thing we ought to do is to recognize that we have an extra special responsibility to children and families because we ve got more kids in school today than ever before from more diverse backgrounds the school district across the river from me in washington d c in alexandria virginia has people from 180 different national and ethnic groups speaking 100 different languages one school district even slightly more diverse than the los angeles county schools unbelievably enough now this is a godsend in a global economy with a global society if we can figure out how to take our conviction that all these children can learn and turning it into an educational environment in which all of them do learn we ought to have after school and summer school programs for the kids who need it we ought to end social promotion but not blame the kids for the failure of the system so you ve got to give them the support they need there ought to be universal access to the internet we ought to have more teachers for smaller classes and modern schools these things are all terribly important and you should know that there s a big difference in the parties on these two things what to do for the seniors what to do for the children the third thing we ought to do is to do something about poor people who haven t been part of our prosperity it really bothers me that we ve got the greatest economy in the history of america the lowest poverty rate in 20 years the lowest african american poverty rate ever measured we ve only been measuring it about just under 30 years but if you go to any inner city if you go to the mississippi delta if you go to appalachia if you go to the indian reservation unemployment on the pine ridge indian reservation in south dakota is 73 percent you will see that there are people who have not participated in our prosperity and we cannot do it by just government programs alone because we still have to i ll say more about that in a minute but we ve got to find a way to bring enterprise to these people and i ll just give you two examples two ideas i have number one if you want to invest in the caribbean and latin america in africa in poor countries in asia we will give you significant loan guarantees and tax credits to do so i think we ought to give people the same tax incentives to invest in poor areas in america we give them to invest in poor areas around the world let me be very clear i don t want to take away those other things i want americans to help other people work their way out of poverty i m trying to pass an africa trade bill right now that will bring us closer to africa i m trying to pass a caribbean basin initiative right now that will bring us closer to the caribbean and do more to help those people but i want to help people here at home the other thing think about this i was in northern california the night before last with a bunch of people that worked for e bay did you ever buy anything off e bay do you know e bay do you know there are now over 20 000 people who make a living not working for e bay the company but trading on e bay the internet site many of them used to be on welfare they actually make a living trading on e bay now think what we could do for the economy of america for poor people if we could within the next couple of years make access to the internet as universal as access to the telephone is access to the internet as universal as access to the telephone giving investors in america the same incentives to invest in poor areas they have to invest around the world we can do something to bring enterprise and opportunity to people who aren t part of our prosperity a nd i think we ought to do it it s the right thing to do one last economic thing a big idea that i think i ve sold most of my fellow democrats on that no one ever thought the more liberal party in america would advocate if we follow the budget outline that i gave the congress we can actually afford a modest tax cut and still get this country out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835 when andrew jackson was president now everybody in this room who is over 40 years old who studied economics was taught that the country ought to be in debt a little bit a little debt was a healthy thing why do i think we ought to get out of debt because everybody in this room that is in the global economy in any way shape or form whether it s in entertainment investment or anything else you know that there is a world wide market for money every time a country gets in trouble they find out they can t keep their money in if people want to put it somewhere else if we got this country out of debt what would it mean it would mean lower interest rates forever it would mean lower interest rates if barry wants to start a new business in his second childhood it means more jobs it means higher incomes it means you can send your kids to college cheaper it means you can buy a home cheaper it means that our friends around the world who are poorer than we are can borrow money that we used to take away from them this is a big deal we can give our children a generation of prosperity if we make america debt free let me just give you a couple other ideas we ve got the lowest crime rate in 26 years does anybody seriously think that it s low enough don t you think america is still a pretty dangerous place don t you think we re still losing too many of our kids don t we still have too many people in prison okay now we can talk all day about this but i just want to say one thing i think america should adopt as a goal say okay for a long time we didn t think we could get crime down now we know we can drive crime down seven years in a row big deal it is a big deal and it s the lowest it has been in 27 years there are some places where the murder rate is half what it was five years ago this is huge but no one believes this country is safe enough why don t we adopt a big goal and say we re going to make america the safest big country in the world if we re the most prosperous country in the world if we re the freest country in the world why shouldn t we be the safest country in the world well i ll tell you one thing we re going to have to do more to keep kids out of trouble and help them and support them we re going to have to do more to keep guns out of the wrong hands it s crazy you know every time i have a fight with the nra they say guns don t kill people people do they say this is about evil so i said the other day i said okay it s about evil i agree with that i mean this guy shoots this filipino postal worker out here and shoots at these little jewish kids yes that s evil but do you believe america is more evil than any other country in the world because we have a higher murder rate i don t or what about this listen to this the number of children killed accidentally by handguns in america accidentally is nine times greater than the number of children killed accidentally by guns in the next 25 biggest industrial economies combined now do you believe we re more stupid than any other country so are we like nine times more stupid than you see where i m going with this look i grew up i was shooting cans off fence posts with 22s when i was 12 years old i governed a state where we shut factories and schools down on the opening day of deer season because there wouldn t be anybody there anyway but this is madness to let people go to gun shows and buy guns with criminal records and go out and shoot people when you can stop it and don t let anybody tell you we can t do something with reasonable restraints 400 000 people have not been able to get guns because they have criminal backgrounds since the brady bill passed and don t you kid yourself for a minute that s one of the reasons we ve got the lowest crime rate in 26 years let s make america the safest big country in the world and i want to say just two other things one thing that people normally maybe you wouldn t see raised in a group like this but i think environmental issues are too little discussed outside environmental groups you know the economy has gotten better in the last seven years the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we set aside more land than any administration in history except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt but we re still in the grip of a big idea that s not right anymore most of you now believe i think you do that global warming is real i hope you do nine of the 11 hottest years in the last 500 years have been in the last 12 years if this thing happens i just was down in new zealand near the south pole the polar ice cap melting big chunks of it coming off if the planet heats too much the polar ice caps melt the water level rises island nations can be flooded sections of louisiana and florida can be flooded the whole center of agriculture the people who produce our food that we live by will be moved to the north changing and disrupting societies this is a big deal you have malaria now today in places in africa where it has never been before at altitudes it has never been before because the mosquitoes are growing higher because it s hotter up there this is a serious thing now what s that got to do with all of you it s a big deal most for a long time it was true that you could not build a rich country unless you put more greenhouse gases into the air by burning coal and oil it was true but it isn t true anymore and most people still think it is so the indians and the chinese they think they can t get rich and when i tell them they don t have to do this they think old bill clinton s trying to hold us down on the farm in america in congress there are people who think that i have some dark plan to wreck the american economy well if i wanted to wreck the american economy i ve done a poor job of it but i m telling you we now can conserve our way to greater wealth we will be a wealthier country if we are environmentally responsible we will be a wealthier planet if we protect the earth and the young people in this room you mark my words somebody you ll remember i said this 10 years from now if you go to one of these events i ll bet you environmental issues take up 30 percent of the discussion maybe more so why don t we turn it around now while we can why don t we say we ll make america the first country in the world to give up an idea that s not true anymore and embrace the future the last thing i want to say is this the thing i most worry about of all is that we re on the verge of a new millennium with these unbelievable technologies and these unbelievable scientific discoveries a lot of the young women in this room tonight will have babies in the future will have your children after the human genome project is completed and we have decoded all the mysteries of the human gene so literally this might start in five years you have a baby and then you come home from the hospital and you have a road map of your child s future and it s a little scary because it says well your child may be more likely to develop heart disease at an earlier age but it will also say but if you do these five things for the first 10 years of his or her life you ll add another 20 years to their life the average 65 year old person today has a life expectancy of 82 the children quincy said thank you you think about this think about young mothers bringing home their children thinking their kids are going to be 90 or 100 years old and they ll be alert and active and healthy and strong it will be great so you ve got all this and we re all hooked in on the internet and all this stuff is happening and whoop dee do and it s wonderful and there are more rich people than ever before but what is the biggest problem in the world today what do i spend my time worrying about that there are still people who insist upon killing each other and preventing the children of their areas from having a decent future because of their racial their ethnic their religious their tribal differences and what s the biggest problem we re dealing with in america today from the bombing in oklahoma city to stretching poor young matthew shepard out on a rack and killing him a year ago in wyoming this week to dragging james byrd until he came apart literally in texas to what happened out here at the jewish school and with the filipino postal worker to what happened in illinois and indiana with that young may that was a member of a church that said they didn t believe in god but they did believe in white supremacy so he went he murdered a former basketball coach at northwestern and murdered a young korean coming out of church the guy was coming out of a church and he got shot in the back and killed what do all these people have in common they are on the verge of a new millennium that is the most modern of times absolutely in the grip of the most primitive and ancient of hatreds the fear the hatred and the dehumanization of people who are different from them and that s the last thing i want to say to you all these other things i ve said to you are important but they re by and large mental problems this is a spiritual problem but it should be part of the political platform of any group of citizens that really seeks to make the future america s greatest days you have to ask yourself if you really believe that what we share in common is more important than what divides us and if you just think about it i mean here we re i m trying to get this thing done in northern ireland where my people grew up in my family there were both catholics and protestants and they lived on the line between northern ireland and the republic of ireland and this has been going on for a few hundred years now it s not like we re unacquainted with the issues and they ve been fighting for 30 years and now they ve all agreed what to do and everybody s agreed that they all have to do what they re supposed to do and everybody s agreed they all have to do what they re supposed to do by a certain date and a lot of people are prepared to let it all go back to smithereens again because they want to have an argument about who goes first like you used to have when you were six or seven years old on the playground i m just telling you just think about it look we all wake up every day with like little scales inside of hope and fear and light and darkness we all do everybody has bad days but it is unbelievable that we re almost in a new millennium and the world is in a grip of this level of primitive hatred and destruction my party believes that we are one america my party believes that i did the right thing in trying to stop the slaughter of the muslims in bosnia and the albanians in kosovo i believe that when my child is my age she will live in a golden age if but only if we have married all this modern science and technology to a higher level of humanity thank you very much thank you let me say you know one of the things that all this money you give to the democratic party does is to finance a lot of the election activities in 2000 and my wife may be part of those election activities and she has the reason i can t spend the night with clarence and participating in this bunking party is that she has to go on a trip tomorrow and i am going to get home before she leaves because i want to see her before she leaves for a week so i can t stay but i thank you for this and i thank you for your friendship and support i wouldn t take anything for the last seven years warts and all and a lot of you made it possible for me to serve and for us to do what we ve done just don t quit believe me these are big issues and i hope i gave you some things to think about tonight that ll make you want to keep on fighting all the way through next year thanks dem wjclinton3 11 00a bill_clinton thank you very much are you ready to win this election i want to thank the mayor for bringing us all together today and for being my friend for all these years i want to thank the some 2 000 people who are outside the hall today still listening to us i ll be out there to see you in a minute i want to thank california s great governor gray davis who s been with me every step of the way and has been great for al gore right from the start never wavered i want to thank representative barbara lee from oakland who just had a rally for us over there and my good friend congressman tom lantos who went to new york to campaign for my wife for the senate i ll never forget that and most of all i want to thank nancy pelosi who has worked so hard to bring the democrats back she is a leader in the congress a leader in the country and she ll be in the majority after tuesday night i want to thank walter shorenstein for having the guts to stand up here and say he didn t need the tax cut and he wanted you to have it i love him thank you and i want to thank a man who has been a hero of mine for more than 40 years willie mays he s been so wonderful to me all these years i ve been president thank you willie thank you and i want to thank this great choir behind me from glide i love these folks and i want you to sing again for me after i speak okay will you do that now look i would like to just sort of give a speech here and have one applause line after another and you could cheer but we all know that we re all converted or we wouldn t be here so i want to ask you to just for a minute give me about five minutes because i want to ask you to do something else every one of you has lots of friends who have never come to an event like this don t you never came to a rally where the president spoke maybe the governor maybe not even where willie spoke although i think he has spoken to every living person within 150 miles but these folks you know that don t follow this as closely as you do they will vote or they might vote if they know it matters and they would certainly vote with us if they knew what the choice was and what the consequences are and many of you have friends who live outside san francisco live in one of these congressional districts where we re trying to win a democratic seat or maybe you have friends beyond the state of california who live in battleground states where one or two or three or 10 votes could make a difference now you look at this vast crowd today if every one of you decided that every day between now and the election you were going to tell 10 people why you are for al gore and joe lieberman why you want the democrats to win what the stakes are in the election you might have a decisive impact on whether we win the house and on how well we do in some of these other areas of california and in other states so i just want to tell you what i believe this election is about what i think the signal differences are and what the choice is for america i want to begin by thanking the people of san francisco and california for being so good to me and hillary and al and tipper gore these last eight years i can t thank you enough it has been an honor to serve but let s start with this there are a lot of younger people who can vote now and i m the only president they ve ever known and there are a lot of people who literally don t remember what it was like eight years ago when the unemployment rate in california was nearly 10 percent the society was divided crime was going up there were riots in l a the environment was deteriorating the schools were troubled the number of people without health insurance going up every year we had all these problems and the political system in washington was pretty unresponsive and i came here and asked you to give us a chance to put the american people first again now president reagan used to say the test for whether somebody got reelected was or whether a party was continued in office was whether you were better off than you were eight years ago now all of a sudden they have forgotten that test another party they think there ought to be some other test you know or they think if we re better off the democrats had nothing to do with it one of al gore s finest moments in the first debate was when his opponent said i think clinton gore got a lot more out of the economy than the economy got out of clinton gore the american people have been working hard they brought this economy back and al gore said yes the american people have been working hard but they were working hard in 1992 when it was in the dumps and it s different now so i want to say the first big question do you want to keep this prosperity going and give it to the people who aren t a part of it yet if you do you only have one choice al gore joe lieberman and the democrats but you ve got to be able to tell somebody in a couple of minutes why so let me explain that in a couple of minutes here s the gore lieberman democratic program keep paying down the debt why it keeps interest rates low it keeps the economy going take what s left and invest it in education health care and the environment and a tax cut we can afford for average americans for child care long term care college tuition and retirement savings that s the gore plan what s the alternative a tax cut that s three times as big although most of you would do better under the gore plan after i get out of office i might do better under theirs and to privatize social security and promise to spend money on their own here s the problem this is arithmetic people ask me all the time mr president what great new idea did you bring to economic policy and i say arithmetic arithmetic you ve got to make the numbers add up now look everybody can remember this the projected surplus is 2 trillion we ll forget about the zeros 2 they want to spend over three quarters of it on a tax cut that benefits mostly upper income people it costs 1 6 trillion with interest then they want to privatize social security and that costs a trillion dollars why because if the young folks here take your money out of social security and put it in the stock market but people like me get promised we re going to get our money the money has got to come from somewhere it costs a trillion dollars then they want to spend some money they want to spend about half a trillion dollars that s 5 here s the problem the surplus is 2 trillion right 1 6 trillion for the tax cut plus 1 trillion to privatize social security plus 5 to spend is 3 1 trillion three point one is bigger than two this is not rocket science folks if you vote for al gore and joe lieberman and the democrats interest rates will be about a percent lower every year for a decade do you know what that means lower car loans lower college loans lower home mortgages lower credit cards lower business loans more businesses more jobs higher stock market now look this is a big deal this is the first economic recovery in 30 years where we re all going along for the ride it s a democratic recovery big d and small d we re all going along average income up 15 percent average income over 40 000 for the first time poverty among seniors below 10 percent for the first time poverty at a 20 year low a 30 percent drop in child poverty half the people moving from welfare to work this is a different america because we did it to benefit everybody and because the numbers add up so you can remember that if you want to keep the recovery going you ve got to vote for gore why because three point one is bigger than two it doesn t add up number two it s not just a better off country it s a better country what do i mean by that crime at a 26 year low the number of people without health insurance going down for the first time in a dozen years cleaner air cleaner water safer food safer drinking water more toxic waste dumps cleaned up three times as many as they did and more land set aside forever than in any administration since that of theodore roosevelt a hundred years ago but most important of all there is the revival of american education that s why bob chase the president of the national education association is here for al gore and joe lieberman today thank you bob for being here with us now look here are the facts reading math and science scores are up the dropout rate is down the college going rate is at an all time high thanks in part to the biggest expansion of college aid since the g i bill thanks to barbara boxer we are now serving 800 000 kids in after school programs around america we re putting 100 000 teachers in the classroom we re moving in the right direction we have 1 700 charter schools in america we have a program to turn around failing schools or put them under new management we re moving in the right direction so here s the issue if education and health care and the environment and crime are moving in the right direction do you want to build on the progress of the last eight years and even do better well if you do if you do there s only one choice al gore joe lieberman and the democrats why if somebody asks you you have to be able to say why why because the other party has promised promised to do the following things to abolish our program to put 100 000 and more police on the street to abolish our program to put 100 000 teachers in the classroom for smaller classes in the early grades to oppose our program to promote school construction to build new schools and repair old ones they re against our program for a patients bill of rights for medicare drugs for all our seniors to expand coverage to all the children of the country and the parents of children in the children s health program and they are against the tighter clean air standards we have adopted they want to repeal my order setting aside 40 million roadless acres in the national forests now those are commitments right so here s your choice if everything is going in the right direction and one ticket wants to build on it and the other ticket wants to reverse what was done it s not much of a choice but you ve got to be able to say that you ve got to be able to say crime is down the schools are better the environment is cleaner we re making progress in health care and everything that we have done they want to undo instead vote for al gore and joe lieberman they will build on it and do even better that is the second choice so here s the third choice here s the third big question and for me the most important of all yes i want to keep building on the prosperity yes i want to keep building on the progress but most of all i want us to keep building together as one america across all the lines that divide us this country has become more and more diverse california our first state in which americans of european heritage are no longer in the majority there is no majority here we re all just here folks we ve tried for the last eight years to make you feel at home to make you feel that you had friends in the white house people that cared about you whatever your racial or religious background whether you were a man or a woman whether you were young or old whether you were straight or gay we wanted you to feel like you had a friend in the white house now what did that mean in practical terms we fought for family leave the minimum wage we fought to mend but not end affirmative action we fought for fairness for immigrants we re fighting for hate crimes legislation for employment nondiscrimination legislation for equal pay for women enforcement we are fighting for court appointments so that we ll have a supreme court that will defend civil rights human rights and a woman s right to choose that is an issue in every one of those areas the people who are running on the other side have an honest disagreement with the democrats the leadership does not agree with the hate crimes legislation or the employment nondiscrimination legislation or strengthening the equal pay laws and they certainly don t commit themselves to a supreme court and federal courts that will preserve civil rights human rights and a woman s right to choose now they disagree honestly but for people to say there are no differences in these elections you should be happy the country is in great shape and you have choices but it s important to understand what the choices are you don t have to say a bad word about any of their candidates from the president on down you can just say look we have a different view of what s good for america but i m telling you the reason this election is so close is that i think people feel a certain comfort level with how well things are going and you know this one sounds good and that one sounds good and today i like this one today i like the other one but this is an exercise in citizenship and i m telling you i ve been doing this a long time now this is the first time in 26 years i haven t been on the ballot at election time and i m perfectly happy out here campaigning for the democrats for congress and for hillary for senator and for al gore and joe lieberman i m grateful but what you have to do i m telling you you can do this for people you can walk up to people you know you can walk up to people you don t know but i m telling you you cannot let this election unfold unless everybody you know votes and votes as a knowledgeable citizen if you want to build on the prosperity if you want to build on the social progress of the last eight years if you want to keep going forward as one america where we keep coming together across all the lines that divide us those are the three big questions and if you want to do that you only have one choice al gore joe lieberman and the democrats thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton3 11 00b bill_clinton thank you very much are you ready to win this election let me say first to all of you how very glad i am to be back in san jose i want to thank mayor gonzales and all the people here who have always made me feel so welcome i ve had some of my happiest days as a candidate and as a president in this part of the wonderful state of california of course my daughter has lived near here for the last three years i was reminding governor davis that in 1992 we had 10 000 people at san jose state and it was the most exuberant rally in the entire campaign it was an amazing thing i ll never forget it i m delighted to be on the stage with all these folks today our state democratic chair art torres your wonderful representative in congress zoe lofgren i am so proud of her i love being with her secretary norm mineta my great friend what a credit he has been to san jose and all of california you should be so proud of him and it means especially a lot to me that willie mays came here with me today he s been here with me so many times and i m very grateful you know one of the great things about we just had the world series so i want to say this one of the great things about being president is that if you have a particular interest you can pretty much get anybody who is involved in it to come and talk to you i love music and i love sports and i became a friend of hank aaron who as all of you know owns the all time home run record so there was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of hank aaron breaking babe ruth s record in atlanta and hank invited me to go down and i did there were 12 hall of fame baseball players there and so i said to hank aaron who is the greatest player you ever played with he said it s not even close willie mays is the greatest baseball player who ever played i want to say are there any students from san jose state here i want all of you to know that when i landed in my helicopter today i had the enormous honor to meet your young football player neil parry who was injured and lost his foot and his family they re in good spirits they ve got their heads up he told me he was going to play football next year and he wanted me to come watch him and i told him i d have some more time and i d be honored to come back and see him i want to thank gray davis for being a truly astonishing governor he has gotten so much done in so little time you should be very very very proud of him he has also been a true friend to me and a loyal supporter of vice president gore and we re going to celebrate here tuesday night in no small measure because gray davis never blinked when things looked bad and now they look good all over america thank you gray davis and i ll just tell you i am so proud of mike honda we had a talk the last this is the second time i ve been in his district to campaign for him and we were talking about what it was like to be young and japanese in america when we made the terrible mistake of interning japanese americans during the war one of those internment camps was in my home state and i ll never forget when i went back to hawaii to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of world war ii i met a veteran who told me that he was interned in a camp in arkansas and he said i may be the only person who came out ahead because i met my wife across the river in mississippi they were the only family that i knew who were japanese americans where i could get what i thought was good food so our country has come a long way in the last 50 years and mike honda is the embodiment of both that past and the bright future ahead of us and i thank you for helping him look up here on this stage is this america or what you have a latino party chair an african american baseball legend a japanese american secretary of commerce the daughter of a truck driver as she just said in congress they probably make more than people in congress do now zoe lofgren a japanese american candidate for congress and two representatives of the gray haired white guys caucus is this america or what look i want to just take a few minutes you know we re so exuberant we re all feeling good and i could just give you a few applause lines and we could scream for five minutes but i want you to give me a chance to speak with you seriously just for a couple of minutes for the following reasons the presidential race is close even though the vice president has a good lead in california a lot of these congress races are close there are five house seats we could pick up here in california if we won every close one presently held by a republican and one where we have a truly outstanding congressman cal dooley who is in a tough race himself for reelection one of the most outstanding people in the entire united states congress and what i want to say to all of you is that every one of you has friends in this congressional district where mike will be running a little south of here where lois capps is running for reelection one of the most wonderful people i ve ever known and in other places where we have battles here in california most of you have friends in other states where the outcome of the election is not yet clear there are 12 or 15 states where this election is still within two to three points and what i would like to ask you to do is to leave here not only energized and determined to vote but to leave here committed to talking to as many people as you can between now and tuesday in this congressional district throughout the state of california and if you have friends or family in other states because if you look at how many thousand people there are here you could easily touch 100 000 voters between now and election day and those 100 000 voters might make the difference in 1960 when president kennedy who inspired my generation i was barely alive then when president kennedy inspired my generation he was elected by four tenths of 1 percent of the vote 100 000 votes in the entire country now all of you with no effort could touch 100 000 voters with no effort that s less than 10 a day for every person here you could do it easily and here s what i think you ought to say to them number one remember what it was like eight years ago when the economy was in trouble the society was divided there were riots in los angeles the crime rate was going up the welfare rolls were going up the number of people without health insurance were going up people were giving up on the schools the society was divided and the political system in washington seemed absolutely tone deaf to it and you gave al gore and me a chance to go to washington to put the american people first to create opportunity for every responsible citizen in a community of all americans and it worked so what i want to say to you is what s the problem why are the races even close because things have been good for a long time and sometimes when they re good for a long time people forget what they were like before and they think there are no consequences to the decision before them well first one candidate sounds pretty good then the other one sounds pretty good this sounds like a good idea but on the other hand that sounds like a good idea look there are just three big questions in this race and i want to tell you what they are and what the choice is everybody knows we ve had the longest economic expansion in history but what not everybody knows is it s the first one in 30 years where we all got to go along for the ride now what do i mean by that in the last eight years hispanic unemployment has been cut by more than half african american unemployment in half the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment in history poverty is at a 20 year low child poverty is down 30 percent poverty among seniors below 10 percent for the first time in our history average income up 15 percent over 5 000 over the last eight years after inflation we re all going along for the ride so the first question is do you want to keep this prosperity going well if you do there s a choice now if someone asks you to explain it how would you say it this is the answer with al gore and joe lieberman and mike honda you will get to keep the prosperity going why because number one they ll keep paying the debt down which means interest rates will stay down and the economy will stay strong that s very important paying the debt down gives you lower interest rates what does that mean to all of you lower home mortgages lower car payments lower college loan payments lower credit card payments lower business loan payments means more businesses more jobs a higher stock market the rich get richer but so do the rest of you this is very important then with the money that s left we will invest in education health care and the environment and give the american people a tax cut we can afford for child care for long term care for college tuition tax deductions and for retirement that s the democratic plan so what s the choice look at the republican plan they have a tax cut that s three times as big it costs 1 6 trillion and keep in mind now the surplus is estimated to be 2 trillion i ll be surprised if it s that much but that s the estimate today 2 trillion so you can forget about the zeroes and just remember 2 so they ve got this big tax cut 1 6 trillion most of you would be better off under the gore lieberman plan and some of the rest of us you know if i get out and get lucky i would be better off under their plan in the short run but it s not right and here s why it s so big 1 6 trillion then they want to partially privatize social security now that costs another trillion dollars why because if all of you who are young take your payroll tax out and put it in the stock market they ve still got to pay all of us that are 55 or over 100 percent of the benefits they promised you can t spend the money twice so you have to put another trillion in so that s 1 6 plus 1 trillion then they want to spend about a half a trillion dollars 5 but the surplus is only two now one point six plus one plus point five is three point one three point one is bigger than two it s all you have to remember what does that mean that means that even though they spend less money than al gore and joe lieberman and mike honda will they ll be on education on health care and on the environment we ll still be back in deficits it means higher interest rates it means you will pay more for home mortgages more for college loans more for car payments more for credit cards more for business loans it means higher interest rates more inflation and a slower economy this is not complicated but you need to be able to explain to people i get the feeling people think well this one sounds good that one sounds good this is a huge choice we tried it our way for eight years then we tried it the deficit way before for 12 years our way works better go tell the american people if you want to keep the prosperity going you ve got to do this now here s the second point it s not just about prosperity we re not just better off this country is better than it was eight years ago what do i mean by that listen the crime rate has gone down every year to a 26 year low the welfare rolls have been cut in half to a 32 year low teen pregnancy is down teen drug abuse is down the number of people without health insurance is down for the first time in 12 years thanks to the children s health insurance program the environment is up the air is cleaner the water is cleaner we ve cleaned up three times as many toxic waste dumps in eight years as they did in 12 and set aside more land permanently than any administration since theodore roosevelt a hundred years ago now finally the schools are getting better education is getting batter on all the the national test scores show reading scores are up math scores are up science scores are up the dropout rate is down the college going rate is at an all time high thanks in part to the biggest expansion of college aid under our administration in 50 years so we re moving in the right direction so here s the second question do you want to keep the progress of the last eight years going now just like on the economy you have a choice if you vote for al gore and joe lieberman and mike honda in health care you get a patients bill of rights you get a medicare drug benefit for all the seniors who need it you get more health care coverage for children and lower income working families that can t afford it you get a commitment to a clean environment including a clean energy conservation future you get more police on the street you get 100 000 more teachers in the classroom and funds to build or modernize schools all across america where they re in trouble and you get a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition now the other party from top to bottom has committed to do the following to abolish the 100 000 police program and oppose our common sense gun safety measures to abolish the 100 000 teacher program before we finish that they re against the real patients bill of rights and against the medicare drug program that all our seniors can buy into and they don t agree with our clean energy conservation future they think we can drill our way out of the hole we re in now it s not like there s not a choice but if you want to build on the prosperity and the progress of the last eight years you only have one choice al gore joe lieberman and mike honda now here s question number three now here is the third big question and in some ways it s the most important of all although it s not as high on the political radar screen it is whether we re going to continue to build one america where every law abiding citizen feels a part an equal part and feels that the government in washington especially in the white house but also in the congress is on their side and even when i don t agree with you i have a listening ear i have tried to make you feel that the white house was your house these last eight years without regard to your race your religion your gender whether you were straight or gay whether you were native american or european american or whatever i tried to make the american people feel that they had someone in the white house who was looking out for them now what did we do the family leave law mending but not ending affirmative action fighting for fairness for immigrants and for civil rights fighting for americorps which is active here in san jose and all across america now there s a choice here if you vote for al gore and joe lieberman and mike honda in the area of one america you get people who want to pass hate crimes legislation employment nondiscrimination legislation equal pay for women legislation and a supreme court that will defend civil rights human rights and a woman s right to choose in every area in every area our friends in the other party are against the strong hate crimes bill against the employment nondiscrimination bill against the bill to strengthen equal pay for women and they have made it clear that the supreme court they want is a very different one so it s not like there is no choice but you see that s what s so frustrating because if everyone knew what the choice was and understood the consequences we d win that s why i asked you when i started to listen and not just cheer and to spend every moment you can in the next four days talking to your friends who would never come to a rally like this but will vote or would vote if they knew what was at stake not only here but throughout the state and throughout the nation it is worth your time so now you know you can call people and say look there are three big questions here do you want to keep the prosperity going do you want to keep the progress going do you want to keep building one america if you look at california you see a picture of tomorrow s america and believe me if you think about the scientific and technological changes and the demographic changes here these kids that are here in this audience today are going to live in the most exciting prosperous interesting time in the history of the world more than anything else this election is for them and i m glad there are so many young people here today because this is your election and your future and your century so will you do this for the next four days will you go out and call your friends and talk to your friends and just tell them if you want to keep the prosperity going if you want to keep the progress going if you want to keep building one america there is only one choice al gore joe lieberman and mike honda thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton3 11 05 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you thank you very much fran ladies and gentlemen i find it harder to speak after that little film clip i miss my mother every day and you could probably tell in that little excerpt why but i want to begin by thanking fran and the national breast cancer coalition for everything you did with me when i was president and with hillary when we were in the white house thank you for honoring my mother tonight and thank you for what you are doing to try to continue to battle against breast cancer and to battle for better policies and better care i told julianne moore and jack stahl and i want to thank revlon for what they ve done to support this evening but we were outside before we came in and i said you know fran has the greatest characteristic any advocate can have in politics she is almost impossible to say no to if you think about it you just think about how many people you know that it s easy for you to say no to you know they can be too pushy or too soft they can make good sense but be cold blooded or they can be wildly emotional but not make good sense she s pushy and nice rational and passionate i wanted to get signs made up when i was in the white house and whenever you saw her coming we could just hold up yes before she ever had to say a word just save all the trouble all the talk we knew we were going to roll anyway so we might as well just get out of the way on the front end i say that because i am profoundly grateful we were asked to form a national action plan against breast cancer by her and by this group and we did we were asked to do more on breast cancer research and we set up this remarkable peer reviewed program in the department of defense and we had a lot of good research because many women in the military have higher than average rates of breast cancer we increased access to quality clinical trials we increased access to health care for breast and cervical cancer for low income women we increased the availability of mammographies to appropriate groups all because of the work we did with the national breast cancer coalition and so thank you fran for being a friend to me and hillary and all those millions of women and their families and loved ones who are struggling to make it against breast cancer and all those in the future who will live because of what all of you have done thank you so much you know i was always interested in health care issues cause i grew up bumming around the hospital with my mother linda ellerbee who s also a friend of ours did a wonderful job with this little picture one of the kindest things she did was to only show briefly my mother with all those nurses she only showed a picture briefly cause that s me at the bottom in the beanie so fat i could hardly walk in one of my ugly periods of life but anyway i spent a lot of time hanging around hospitals and watching surgery and seeing people who were sick try to get well and i ll never forget when my mother developed breast cancer i thought at that point in my life there was nothing more she could possibly do that would surprise me but she did i mean i knew how much she was hurting i knew how much peril she was in and the level of clarity and courage with which she faced it in grace and good humor the treatments she decided to undertake and the treatments she decided to forego in the end what she decided to do was amazing she died when she was 70 years and six months old exactly on january the 6th 1994 but the background is interesting you may know that barbra streisand agreed to be the honorary co chair of this event there s a reason for that she hadn t performed in a massive public concert for decades when she went to las vegas over new year s eve 1993 1994 and she invited my mother to go because they met during my inauguration and barbra fell in love with her and she called my mother every week for the next year until she died there was never a week that she didn t call my mother and i ll never forget that but anyway so i called mother and it was almost impossible to see how sick she was because by then she was getting blood transfusions every day from like just before thanksgiving on cause the cancer had spread and i said mother don t you want to come up and do our first christmas in the white house she said yeah i guess so and i thought oh she s not feeling good she s going to tell me she s finally given up she said i guess so but you ve got to promise to have me home in time to fly to vegas for new year s eve because i m going to streisand s show as god is my witness she s taking transfusions blood transfusions every single day just to stay alive so we haul her up for christmas and i take her home and she flies off to vegas then on new year s eve i tried to call her she was unavailable i tried for three days to call her so finally i got kind of miffed i left messages on the phone and so on january 6th i got her on the phone and i said have you just quit speaking to me i said did i do something as president to make you mad she said look i m busy i m having a good time and i ve got to go to the concert i got to play the slots and besides i don t want you to be mottling on me we ll get around to talking so we had this wonderful talk and all she did was just chat along and i hung up the phone and we acted like we were both going to live forever and she died that night and that s exactly the way she wanted it last conversation we had one on one was when i let her off in arkansas to go up to vegas and we re sitting on the couch and i said you got anything you want to say to me and she babbled on about chelsea and hillary and i said come on mother you got anything you want to say to me she said yeah i do she said if i don t live long enough to finish my book you have to finish it but don t you forget it s my book not yours and she said you have to promise me faithfully that you will edit it so i look literate but that you will not change a word of the meaning unless you think i have been too mean to somebody who s still alive so anyway that was my mother everybody here who s lost anybody from breast cancer s got a story about the person they loved and i m really a lucky man i mean i ve been healthy as a horse and i ve led a hard life i ve worked like crazy all my life and i barely avoided a serious heart attack but i think those of us who have been especially fortunate and particularly those of us who have had the benefit of a rich life the longer we live the more our obligations to the future grow and i m here tonight partly because my mother would give me a reaming and maybe a spanking if i didn t show up and i think that you should all look at it this way the one thing i didn t mention in that litany of things we did when i was president was the indirect result of something i did which was to put a massive amount of money into the human genome project so that we could sequence the human genome after that all these scientists went to work and on practical applications and you might imagine that i was thrilled that the first significant practical development from the sequencing of the human genome was the identification of the two genetic variances that put even young women at higher risk of breast cancer now some day we are going to be able to send every mother and father home with their newborn from the hospital with a genetic card that will tell them how to maximize the lives of their children and that s another reason why i fought so hard against genetic discrimination based on that information you can t deny people health insurance or jobs or anything but we ll be able to know what to do and some day all this research will lead to preventions and treatments that will make sure we don t lose our loved ones or we don t go through these harrowing years and when it happens it ll be because people like fran and people like you who have memories of their loved ones that i have of my mother that will never die there will always be problems in the world there will always be injustice there will always be misfortune but our obligation is to live as long and as well as we can and to help others to do the same that is our obligation as human beings you have discharged that duty tonight and my mama s up there smiling on you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton3 11 94a bill_clinton thank you first of all i d like to thank you for giving me a drier welcome than i had the last time i came to iowa i want to thank the dowling high school band thank you very much i thank my good friend senator tom harkin for that wonderful speech and for being a constant source of leadership and courage and support in the united states senate i don t know what i would have done without tom harkin in the last two years and since i m in iowa i also want to say that ruth harkin is the best director of the overseas private investment corporation has made more american jobs in that position than anybody who ever held it before she took it i am delighted to be here with all the fine leaders of the democratic party and with your candidates for congress glen winekopf sheila mcguire elaine baxter my old friend dave nagle the second time is the charm for elaine and dave i know it will be with neal smith whom i admire more than i can say i want to say a little more about him later and about this race he is in and with bonnie campbell who ought to be the next governor of the state of iowa ladies and gentlemen this election all over america represents a choice a choice between hope and fear between the mainstream and the meanstream between whether we re going to be together or we re going to be divided between whether we re going forward or we re going to go back i think i know the answer to that you want to keep going forward twenty one months ago with the help of the good people of iowa i moved to washington to assume the presidency now since that time i have kept my commitment to try to put the american people first to make the government work for ordinary people to bring the economy back to empower americans so that everybody could assume the responsibility of living up to the fullest of their capacities to give you a world that is more peaceful and more prosperous for americans to work in and while i know we ve still got problems we ve still got folks who are worried about their jobs and worried they won t get a raise people who still are worried about losing their health care yes there are still problems but i ask you to consider this we went to washington to deal with 30 years of social problems with 20 years of stagnant wages and losing benefits for working people with 12 years of the consequences of trickle down economics with four years of the slowest job growth since the great depression and folks after 21 months we ve still got a good ways to go but this country is in better shape than it was 21 months ago we ve taken a stand to try to help ordinary working people you heard bonnie mention the family and medical leave law let me tell you what that means in iowa it means that 446 000 more iowa working people can take a little time off if there s a baby born or a sick parent without losing their jobs that makes a difference here in iowa it means that in iowa 358 000 people will be eligible for lower costs on their college loans because of our reform of the college loan program it means in iowa that 118 640 working families got income tax reductions because they re working full time they have children in their homes and we don t believe that anybody who does that should be in poverty the tax system should lift them out of poverty not put them in for all their attacks on us 13 times as many people in iowa got an income tax cut as an income tax rate increase that is the record of our administration with our support in congress moving this country forward i think we should keep doing it it means after years of bickering delay we passed the brady bill and the crime bill and i can tell you that iowa iowa is the first state in the united states where the united states attorney has brought an action under our three strikes and you re out law if you commit three serious offenses threatening or taking the lives of others you should not be eligible for parole and the first action under a law i signed two months ago has been taken in iowa the other guys they always told you how bad the federal government was but when they were in charge the government got bigger they always told you that they hated the deficit but they quadrupled the national debt since we ve been in office we have reduced the federal deficit we have shrunk the federal government and we have taken all the savings from the reduction in federal bureaucracy and given it to local communities in iowa and all across the united states to fight crime to make our streets safer to give our kids a better future i think it s been a good bargain when i proposed and the congress adopted our economic program the other fellows said the sky would fall they said the world would come to an end if the president s economic program was passed well folks they were wrong they were wrong you look at the results in this country in the last 21 months our economy has produced 4 6 million new jobs for the first time in a long time and this is very important for iowa more than half the new jobs created in 1994 in america played above the national average in wages and income we had more high wage jobs this year than in the past five years combined we re moving in the right direction we don t need to turn back now i told you if you would send me to washington i would be a president who would remember the farmers in rural america would remember what it s like to live in the small towns in the country crossroads the places that presidents don t visit and that people don t often take notice of well in 21 months in agriculture i think we have plainly kept our commitments we ve increased loan rates we ve reformed the nation s crop insurance system we ve given more crop disaster assistance payments they ve been based on quality not just quantity we ve reduced the paperwork in the farm program we ve changed the farm income reporting system to more accurately reflect the real income of the average american farmer we brought farmers into the policy making process at the department of agriculture we ve reorganized we ve reduced spending we ve taken a 3 6 billion cut in the farm bureaucracy without doing what the republicans say they want to do which is to gut the farm programs this is the friend of the farmer administration and you ought to support it and keep going forward and i want to say something especially about tom harkin and particularly about neal smith when it came to ethanol the republicans said one thing but did another i d come out here in the middle of farm country in iowa and illinois the dakotas particularly in places that cared about ethanol and people would say well we re farmers we usually vote republican and i said well if you ll vote for me i won t just talk about ethanol i ll go to washington and try to do something about it well during the last administration they cultivated all the farmers but they danced around the ethanol issues like a kid around a maypole they ve tippytoe here and then they d go back to washington and they d tippytoe there i couldn t figure out why until i got to washington and all the establishment in washington tried to get me to tippytoe too and i said folks i haven t been here long enough to learn this washington tippy toe i told them in iowa i was for ethanol and i m going to be for ethanol i want you to understand how tough it was tom harkin neal smith led the fight in the congress to approve the promotion of ethanol the vote was close in the united states senate it came down to a tie vote and al gore broke the tie in favor of ethanol we did it to make ourselves more independent of foreign oil we did it to promote the cleanness of our environment we did it to create new jobs for farm families but if it had not been for neal smith i want you to think about this tuesday if it had not been for neal smith we would not have been able to do it and he ought to be sent back to congress to keep fighting for you we tried to help farmers all over america we resolved the wheat dispute with canada for the first time this is a big deal where i come from for the first time ever we opened the japanese market to american rice and the chinese market to american apples twice this year including yesterday something you care about when hog prices were at their lowest mark in decades we approved additional sales to russia and other states of the former soviet union through the export enhancement program we are helping the farmers of america tom and neal and a lot of other people have been talking to me about the record corn harvest you know how it is when you re farming you re either flooded or you re glutted you escaped the flood now you ve got more corn than you know what to do with it s depressed feed grain prices by 10 to 15 percent below the average today i am glad to announce that we will open the farmer owned reserve for 1994 feed grains we will provide no cost extension of the usda loans due next july we ll enable the farmers to store that grain rather than sell it when prices are too low you clap for me but you ought to thank tom harkin and neal smith the chief architect of the farmer owned reserve when i flew over iowa last year when i sat down and i walked through and i saw the flooded fields and the flooded cities it made an indelible impression on me that i will never forget i m proud of the work that our agencies did here last year james lee witt and the emergency management agency secretary espy secretary cisneros all the others in our administration well this year more farmers are hurting from crop losses in texas in the dakotas in kansas in georgia all across the southeast today we re authorizing further disaster payments for them just under a billion dollars from the emergency funds we set aside and you remember what tom harkin said the only reason we can do this is because you have a democratic president working with our friends in congress who restored the cuts made in the disaster assistance program by the previous republican administration and for those who say well that s what the democrats do they just spend money no no no it was the democrats we reduced the deficit we reduced defense and domestic spending this year for the first time in 25 years we did that but because of discipline because of a commitment to root out waste because we changed our buying practices so there wouldn t be anymore 500 hammers and 50 ashtrays we increased our investment in disaster assistance in head start in immunizing all the kids in this country under the age of two by 1996 in college loans we increased our investment in the things that count in this country now what we need to do if you really want to keep going in this direction is to give me partners send these people to congress i need help folks the other guys what did they do they voted no every chance they got every one of them voted against our program to revolutionize the college loan program to provide for more affordable college loans and it saved money it saved the treasury 4 billion it saved borrowers 2 billion they voted against it because the organized interests were against it every one of them voted against our economic program to reduce the debt and give 118 000 families in this state a tax cut because they were just above the poverty line because they didn t like it that we asked 1 percent of our people to pay higher tax rates because they could afford it to reduce the deficit every one of them and there are so many things that a president does that a congress does that have their impact in the states you know i had the privilege of serving my state as governor for quite a long while on the tough days in washington i think that was the best job i ever had and i can tell you that so much that i hope to do for our economy still can t be felt unless you have a governor with an economic strategy for high wage jobs to help small businesses to bring economic opportunity to the rural areas and the places where it has been lost in the last 10 years bonnie campbell will do that i want you to help her get elected this crime bill we passed it is a very important piece of legislation it has more punishment it has more prisons it has more police it also has opportunities for prevention to keep kids out of trouble but the work of fighting crime is done at the state level it is done at the community level we need partners out here in the country you have the tools now to lower the crime rate to make your children safer to make your future safer the leadership of the other party tried to kill the crime bill but we stopped them and we passed it but now you need a governor who understands what it takes to lower the rate of crime reduce violence and give our kids a better future bonnie campbell proves as attorney general she does that she knows that give her a chance to serve now listen when i tell you what the stakes are in congress and why it is so important that you return neal smith and elect these other candidates for congress last sunday on meet the press the republicans top strategist in washington bill kristol said he wanted to end farm subsidies and as soon as the election is over the republican senator from kansas their leader would take the lead in doing just that he said that i didn t now mr kristol you ve probably never heard of him but he s the fellow that tells them what to think up in washington he told them for example to stop cooperating with us on health care i pleaded with him i said you don t like my ideas i ll try yours let s cooperate on health care another million americans in working families lost their health insurance last year farmers in this state and throughout this country pay astronomical rates for their health insurance it isn t right it isn t fair i had a plan so that farmers and small business people could buy health insurance at the same rates that those of us in the federal government and people that work for big corporations do and they refused to cooperate because mr kristol told them it was bad politics he said he released his memo folks in washington one thing i ll say about them they re not humble they ll tell you right what they re up to he released this memo and the memo said you folks cannot cooperate with this president on health care because if this country solves the health care problem the middle class will go back to voting for the democrats so at all costs never mind the consequences kill health care that s what they said in the crime debate they intimidated their members of congress they said whatever you do don t vote for this crime bill our job is not to reduce crime our job is to beat the democrats you don t have to take my word for it you remember what congressman grandy said he said that he was ordered not to cooperate on health care so now they ve got this plan on farm subsidies and they say we re just practicing election year scare tactics well you look at their contract the contract that neal smith s opponent signed and that some of these other folks opponents signed and that they ll all be ordered to vote for over 300 of them here s what the contract says now pay attention the contract says vote for the republicans put us in charge in washington and here is what we will do we ll give everybody a tax cut but mostly people in upper income groups they ll get 70 percent of it we will increase defense we will bring back star wars and we will balance the budget well how much does that cost a trillion dollars how are you going to pay for it we ll tell you after the election that s what i ll tell you how you re going to pay for it we had a study done the house budget committee did a study a trillion dollars there s only one way to pay for it you ve got to cut everything else 20 percent across the board social security medicare farm programs veterans benefits college loans 20 percent 2 000 a social security recipient a year and boy they squealed like a pig under a gate when we said that if you take out social security you know what you have to do cut everything else 30 percent across the board and if they re not serious then what does that mean if they re not serious it means just what tom harkin said we re going right back to where we were in the 80s we re going to explode the deficit again we re going to bury our kids in a mountain of debt we re going to ship our jobs overseas and people will be shipping out of iowa all over again no thank you we tried that we want to go forward we know better than that now i read coming in here they always try to prepare me and i read congressman smith s opponent when neal pointed this out that he d signed this contract and he pointed out what the consequences were and he just went nuts and ran a television ad saying it was a lie well it s not a lie it s the truth i know he is a plastic surgeon but there are some things you cannot make pretty and this contract is one of them this contract will perform reverse plastic surgery on america and we don t want it and you don t want it and you need to send neal smith back to congress so he can fight it you don t have to take my word for it look what mr grandy said about it he said it s the crassest kind of politics how many times i quote how many times does the elixir salesman show up with a hair tonic before people figure out this stuff doesn t work do not be suckered senator warren rudman the former republican senator from new hampshire very prominent in deficit reduction efforts in the congress before he retired a really old fashioned republican who believed in working with democrats and sticking up for what he believed in said the other day i guess you d have to give the democrats the credit for reducing the deficit and managing the economy all the republicans were against it that s what the republicans were saying the mainstream oldfashioned republicans who are also mortified by what is going on today folks we ve got to stand up against this we are going forward in jobs we are going forward in reducing the deficit we are going forward in helping families with things like family leave and immunizations and expanded head start and the tax breaks for working people we are going forward with welfare reform we are going forward with the crime bill we are going forward to make this world a better place we have reduced the nuclear threat for the first time since nuclear weapons were developed there are no missiles pointed at the children of iowa and the united states and north korea has committed itself to be checked and not to become a nuclear state and we are expanding the trade opportunities through nafta through gatt through the trip i m about to take to the far east after the election we are breaking down barriers to american products and american services we are standing up for peace and democracy from south africa to south korea to the persian gulf to the middle east to haiti to northern ireland everywhere this country is leading a movement inside and outside the world toward a more prosperous and a more peaceful level and we are challenging the american people to make the most of their own capacities and to assume responsibility for their lives so you have a choice will you be for the progress that we are making or will you go back will you be for the hope that we are promoting or for the fear that they are pandering to will you be for what is best in us or will you be for their easy promises and their cynicism you know these elections are going to be determined in large measure by the state of mind people are in when they go to the polls next tuesday we re out here telling people this is a great country we can do better we are doing better but we ve dealt with 30 years of social problems 20 years of economic problems 12 years of trickle down economics and in 21 months we re moving things in the right direction they re saying we ve still got problems be mad vote against them vote for us look at our promises those of us who are parents in this audience today we know that one of the first things we have to teach our children when they get old enough to understand it is not to make important decisions when they re made isn t it how many times those of you who are like me who can still remember your childhood just barely did your mama or daddy say to you when you re mad count 10 before you say anything their theory is count one and vote no that s what their theory is they don t want you to think they don t want you to feel they want you to lash out we have to say no we re better than that i just came home from this unbelievable opportunity i had to represent you and our country in the middle east to witness the signing of the peace agreement between israel and jordan because of the role the united states played in making that peace to see our young men and women in uniform in the deserts of kuwait to look into the faces of millions and millions and millions of people from six other countries who saw in me and in them the promise of america and let me tell you something folks outside this country people are not cynical about this country they know america is a very great nation leading the world to a better future and so i as you i ask you to think about that out here today we re all preaching to the saved but tomorrow there will be other voters you can talk to you can talk to for bonnie campbell you can talk to for neal smith you can talk to for these other fine people running for congress they need you and the stakes are high and america needs them we are moving forward we have always been a country moving forward we are taking on problems that the other guys ignored for years and years and years and yes sometimes it s messy and sometimes it s hard and challenges are not as easy to hear as easy promises but you know this is a challenging time and i m telling you the best days of this country are still before us if we take up these challenges stick with these people go forward vote for hope vote for tomorrow thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton3 11 94b bill_clinton boy i like being here when i got off the airplane today and i thanked the people at the airport rally for giving me a drier reception than i had the last time i began to think about all the times i ve been to iowa and how every time i come away with a renewed energy a renewed connection to the people of this country a renewed sense of energy that i can make a difference because of the feelings the spirit the character of the people i sense here and i just want to thank you for that i was listening to tom give a sermon up here and i was thinking you know harkin just has no strong feelings about anything you never know how he stands doesn t have any energy for the task at hand i ll tell you what if the rest of us had half as much energy and conviction as he did this country would have about half as many problems as it has i want every one of you to know that he has been in ways that have been public like the fight on ethanol in ways that haven t been so public like the fight to get more money into health research more money into projects to look into women s health more money into the general development of our educational emphasis in all areas of research he has made a critical difference not only for the people of iowa but for the people of the united states i don t know what i would have done without him last year let me also tell you i am honored to be here with bonnie campbell for many many reasons the first is we do have an affinity for the same kinds of issues and i understand what it takes to be a governor i had the privilege of being elected several times to be governor of my state i loved that job on the really tough days in washington i sometimes think it s the best job i ever had one nice thing about it was that it was a lot harder for people to separate me from my constituents and to sort of turn my positions upside down than it is when you re president you re in washington and you re a long way from the 255 million or so folks you represent but it s a wonderful job a governor has to embody the hopes and the spirit and set the course for a state the economic policies a governor follows make a difference the united states can shape the economy of any state and region but how well it really does depends in part on the decisions that are made state by state she has a strategy that i think is a very good and sensible one to build more high wage jobs here to deal with the problems of rural areas that have been left behind even in times of economic recovery she cares about things that will help families and help people raise their kids she s right i m doing my best to stiffen child support enforcement i m doing my best to radically change the welfare system in this country i m doing my best to have the criminal justice system deal with crime in the streets but also with crimes against women and children where they live i think that s important to be a really great governor you have to have a strong sense of partnership as well as leadership you have to be a leader and a partner your people first and foremost have to feel connected to you they have to feel that you carry their hopes and their dreams and their best values that you re both strong and compassionate then you have to be able to work with people in the legislature who often disagree with you in a spirit of good humor and goodwill and continuing confidence that at least you have the right motivations and it helps if you have a partner in the white house and if you really are working together to take responsibility instead of to place blame and for all those reasons i think she would be an absolutely superb governor for this state you know i was just asked today about i did a little set of television interviews before i came out here and one of the people asked me said well how do you explain this voter alienation that they say is as deep as it s been in 15 years when the economy was spinning out of control and now the economy is doing well and i said well one thing is a lot of people still have a lot of personal problems even though the economy is picking up and we passed the crime bill a lot of people still feel personally insecure in this economy and personally insecure on their streets so they haven t felt the impact of the work we ve done but for another it is just in fashion to be as negative as possible today isn t it we re just bathed with negative information it blows away the positive very often in our communications in the way we get our information we hear it in attack form where people are screaming at each other and down at each other instead of talking to one another about their differences and our common problems and in election times as a matter of survival even the most positive of candidates have to defend themselves from the most negative of ads but what i want to say to you today is that we need more responsibility in this country both from our leaders and from our citizens because cynicism is more than anything else a state of mind most of you probably will remember that it s been almost a year ago now that my mother passed away and i miss her i think most of all in election seasons because this is the first campaign season i ve been involved in in a long time where she hasn t been there my mother was widowed three times including once before i was born and she had a lot of tough problems in her life and honest to goodness if i behaved the way some of these people in public life do today doing nothing but spreading cynicism being negative pointing the finger of blame and she were around she would whip me as old as i am i never saw the like of it all these people in positions of power and responsibility and all they want to do is blame somebody else for their problems this is a great country you heard tom harkin talking about what the united states has done just recently to restore democracy in haiti to work for peace in northern ireland after hundreds of years of the catholics and protestants fighting each other to stand up against aggression in the persian gulf to help to make peace between israel and jordan to facilitate the peace between israel and the plo to work to finish the job in the middle east to work to diffuse the nuclear threat in north korea and for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no russian missiles pointed at the children of iowa this is a great country and while we have reduced the nuclear threat we have expanded trade opportunities through nafta through the gatt agreement when the election is over i have to go all the way to indonesia dead tired to try to meet with the leaders of the asian countries do you know why i m going over there because it s the fastest growing part of the world economically and because i want them to buy more american products and it s important to our future this country for all of our problems is in better shape than it was 21 months ago when i took office every conceivable thing and i ve already told you there are a lot of problems the bible says there will be problems even until the end of time the issue is are we doing our part to go in the right direction to make progress to move forward that is the test we are moving forward on the economy the unemployment rate has dropped across the country we ve got 4 6 million new jobs we have more high wage jobs this year than in the previous five years combined our economy has been rated in the annual vote of international economists as the most productive in the world for the first time in nine years and for the first time in 15 years american auto companies have sold more cars worldwide than japanese companies we are moving forward we re moving forward on the deficit our opponents cursed the deficit and exploded it we have said why don t we quit whining about it and do something about it our opponents cursed the government and put all their political appointments in all the jobs they could get in before i took office they talked bad about the government but they were there when the checks were written we the democrats have reduced the size of the federal government by 70 000 we have reduced federal regulation saving billions of dollars for people and we have taken the money that we got from the savings and given it to you to fight crime in the streets of iowa and every other state in the united states they said they were for family values we said we appreciate that but our government follows the policies that hurt families we passed the family and medical leave law which my opponent vetoed at least once maybe twice i can t remember we passed the bill to immunize all kids under the age of two by 1996 we expanded head start we gave tax cuts to 15 million working families with children in the home because we don t think people who work full time and have kids at home should live in poverty the tax system should lift them out not put them down and yes i tried to solve the health care problem in america and i m proud of it the day after senator mitchell said we couldn t pass a health care bill this year the newspapers were once again filled with the stories more americans are losing their health insurance middle class people are having to pay more for less health care the costs of health care are running through the roof the government deficit will start going up again in a couple of years even if we cut everything else because health care costs are exploding america spends 40 percent more than any other country can t figure out how to keep working people secure this is the fact what i tried to do was give you a private system that would let farmers and small business people buy health insurance on the same terms that people like tom harkin and i can get it from the federal government or people that work for big companies can get it that s what i tried to do and by the time the interest groups that are making a killing out of the present system got through spending a couple of hundred million dollars they had me giving a big government program and a thousand page bill that gave people a headache and convinced them they were going to lose what they got it wasn t true but they did a good job of it so we have to find another way to come back and convince the american people we are not going to have the government take over health care but we do think every american who goes to work should know they re not going to lose their health care they can keep what they ve got they ought to be able to buy it at a fair price and if they don t have it they ought to be able to get it we had a million people in working families not people on welfare people in working families lose their health insurance this is the only country in the whole world with an advanced economy where the percentage of people working with children in their homes with health insurance has gone down for 10 years in a row now the only one i say we can do better than that and we ought to but even there we are making progress never before in the history of the country has a bill to do that even gotten to the floor of both houses of congress so you have to say well people are cynical well they re frustrated well they get a lot of negative information well they still have problems all that is true people will always have problems i say what is the issue we re moving forward on jobs forward on the deficit forward on reducing the government and giving the money back to you to fight crime forward on crime forward on issues that help working families the world is more peaceful it is more prosperous we are moving in the right direction we do not need to turn back we need to stay with the people and the course that is moving this country forward that is what we are doing we are going to decide next tuesday whether we re going to keep going forward or turn back whether we re going to vote for hope over fear whether we re going to vote for responsibility over blame i have challenged the american people to do what is best which means not only having the government do something for you but having people do something for themselves nearly everything i have done simply empowers people to take more responsibility for themselves that s about all the government can do these days and that s what we ought to be doing i don t know anybody who wants a hand out unless they are flat on their back and can t do for themselves that s what we re trying to do we re trying to empower the american people to make the most of their own lives the other side has come out with a contract they talk so tough and they cuss the government but what does their contract do it s nothing but a big government giveaway they want to give a tax cut most of it to real rich people but they ll give the rest of you a pittance they want to get you to vote too they figure if you re cynical enough you ll say oh well rich people always get more i ll get a dollar and a half so they promised everybody a tax cut promised defense increases promised to bring up star wars and balance the budget in five years that s their deal that is the tough strong responsible republican party platform and we say well okay how are you going to pay for it we ll tell you after the election but meanwhile we re going to blame you for the problems we created in the 12 years before you showed up that s their deal that s their deal i ll tell you how this contract is going to go down if they gain in the congress there are only two options if they get their way if they slash taxes with the deficit like it is give 70 percent of the benefits to the wealthiest americans have a big increase in defense big increase in star wars and commit to balance the budget there are only two options first of all if they re telling the truth the only way they can do it is to cut everything 20 percent across the board that s 2 000 per person for everybody in iowa on social security a year if they say oh we never said we d cut social security then they have to cut everything else in the government 30 percent that s a 30 percent cut in medicare for every elderly person that s a 30 percent cut in all the farm programs regardless of what happens to the farmers that s a 30 percent cut in veterans benefits that s a 30 percent cut in middle class college loans the other possibility is that they were kidding right now if they were kidding what you get is exploding the deficit putting a terrible burden on our children shipping our jobs overseas again running people out of iowa running the economy in the ditch putting us right back where we were in the 1980s with trickle down economics those are the options why are they making any headway at all because when people are cynical and mad they don t always think straight and i don t mean this to insult the american people i m just telling you the people of this country this is a great country they almost always do the right thing but it is very important for you not to let people vote just their cynicism and their anger what is the test of our administration have we done everything right no if you make as many decisions as i do you take on as many fights as i do you ll make a mistake now and then have we won every fight no but do you know what the objective so they show that for the third time only since world war ii we ve had two years in which a congress supported a president in more than 80 percent of the initiatives the president asked the congress to pass for the third time since world war ii and people say well it doesn t make a difference don t tell me it doesn t make a difference it does make a difference whether you put the deficit down or up it does make a difference whether we re taking a serious approach to crime it does make a difference whether your policies expand trade and create jobs for america it does make a difference whether people can take a little time off when their babies are born or their parents are sick it doesn t make a difference whether kids in this country are immunized at the same rate other children are in other countries it does make a difference whether poor children get to go to head start or not it does make a difference it matters it matters it matters so i go back to the cynicism issue mrs roosevelt said once that you could spend your whole life battling all the demons in the dark or you could just walk across the room and flip on the light switch what you folks need to do for bonnie campbell for neal smith for dave nagle for all these other candidates is to walk across the room and flip on the light switch in iowa between now and tuesday that s what you need to do i m telling you if my mother were here that s what she d say she d say you re the president you don t have to blame anybody else you re taking responsibility get out there and tell people what you ve done i have reached out my hand to these republicans i have asked them to work with us but what have they done they have constantly said no they have constantly said no i think the republican leader is here today and i don t know if anybody asked him about the comments of mr kristol that he was going to call for eliminating the farm support programs as soon as the election was over that s the way they do it but that s what he said and mr kristol is the same fellow that told them that they shouldn t cooperate with us on health care and then he proudly released the memo and said you can t cooperate with the democrats on health care if you do and you solve the health care crisis the middle class will support the democrats again if you leave it like it is we ll be able to upset the middle class and we ll keep them voting for us but tell them the democrats don t share their values they re aliens and then he was so proud of it they released it they re not even ashamed of it i d feel better if they were a little ashamed of it he s the same fellow that says they re going to gut the farm prices well he did what they told him to they did what he told them to on health care you ask tom harkin at the end of the last session of the congress they killed campaign finance reform they killed lobbying reform they killed the superfund legislation to clean up toxic waste dumps that was amazing wasn t anybody in america against it except slightly more than 40 republican senators and the house leadership we have the chemical companies the labor unions and the sierra club for it you couldn t get them to agree on when the sun s coming up tomorrow but they wanted us to do this but they would have rather left the poison in the ground and let tom harkin and neal smith come home and say we helped to clean it up now folks we have a fundamental choice here whether we re going to vote for people to assume responsibility and roll up their sleeves and do what americans have always done or people that sit around and point the finger whether we re going to vote for hope over fear whether we re going to keep going forward or turn back i want you to imagine on a tuesday every american is sitting at home looking at their television and the movie on the television is the story of america and on election day every american s got the remote control in his or her hand you can push forward you can push fast forward if you want to or you can push reverse now that s what it is and when tom harkin asks you to go out between now and election day and call your friends on the phone i think you ought to go out and find people who haven t made up their mind in this governor s race and these other races and have a cup of coffee with them and sit down and say listen i understand you re mad you re cynical and you re upset the first thing you try to teach your kids as soon as they re old enough to understand it is never to make a decision when you re mad how many parents how many times have you said to your child if you re really mad count ten before you say or do anything how many times have every one of us made a mistake in this room because we said or did something before we got to four what the republicans want is for you to get to one and go out in a snit and vote for them and what you can do as a friend and a neighbor is to say look you ve got the remote control in your hand push forward vote for bonnie campbell vote for your children vote for hope vote for tomorrow this is a great country if we only saw ourselves as others see us we would know that this is a very great country thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton3 11 95 bill_clinton thank you very much scott for your introduction and also for your very impressive remarks and your even more impressive work thank you mr vice president for the work you have done on this project and administrator carol browner the chair of the council of environmental quality katie mcginty to fred hanson the epa deputy administrator who is in charge of project xl thank you and thank you andy lietz i thought you were going to start trying to sell your product up here i must say i was even more impressed when you talked about how you invited us to visit in new hampshire new york and california i thought there s a man with a strategically placed company i want to thank every one of you for being here and for helping us to move a little closer to our vision of the 21st century let me say that i sought the presidency because i had a vision of what i wanted our country to look like in the 21st century i wanted the american dream to be alive for all of our people and i wanted our nation to be the strongest force in the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and we have a simple straightforward but quite comprehensive strategy for achieving that we believe in pro growth economics that rewards entrepreneurs and expands the middle class and shrinks the under class we believe in common sense government that is smaller less bureaucratic more flexible focusing on partnerships with the private sector and empowering communities and citizens and we believe in rooting all this in old fashioned mainstream values rewarding opportunity but insisting on responsibility valuing work but recognizing that helping families to be strong and stay together is even more important and what the vice president referred to we believe in community and common ground not division in the united states the project we announce today reflects all those strategies that s what project xl is all about it will advance our economic agenda it is an example of common sense government and it is rooted in our deepest american values it will help us it will help us to make the american dream available to all americans in the 21st century and it will certainly help america to be the world s strongest nation in the 21st century in march i announced the creation of this project which gives our companies the freedom to meet tough pollution standards in ways that make sense to them instead of following a government rule book today we are announcing the first eight pilot projects for these cutting edge initiatives anheuser busch at amp t hadco intel merck the minnesota pollution control agency 3m and the south coast air quality management district all of them have put together projects which will help us to blaze the way to a new era of environmental protection two of them are represented in the congress by my friend senator robb and congressman vento i thank them for coming today and for their support of this from an economic and an environmental perspective i want to thank all of the companies here and the other organizations for their dedication and i want you to know that we are here to honor your pledge to reduce pollution creatively effectively and in partnership with your neighbors i want to especially commend the department of defense which is committed to undertaking a similar effort at military installations throughout our country and this is very important because of all the base closings and a lot of you are very familiar with our efforts to accelerate our ability to turn these closed bases back to communities and to turn them into community assets it s a huge issue and the environmental difficulties and challenges have slowed that effort and i thank all the representatives from the defense department here for their commitment to this endeavor because it will have a major impact on both the environment and our ability to spark economic opportunity in communities throughout the nation to industry project xl shows that protecting the health and safety of our citizens doesn t have to come at the expense of a bottom line and to those in the environmental community xl shows that strengthening the economy doesn t have to come at the expense of the air we breathe the food we eat the water we drink i hope to our citizens that this will stand as an example of what we can do when we work together and when we look out for one another when we recognize that our obligations to one another when properly fulfilled actually help us to improve our own lot in life i guess there was a time not so long ago that if i said there was a government program named xl everybody would have thought it stood for extra large and was well named i want to say again that not withstanding my own size this does stand for excellence and leadership we want to back our words up by action and we intend to do so much of our effort in developing common sense government has been devoted simply to reducing the sheer size of government our government was organized for a much more sort of top down bureaucratic industrial age than the one in which we are living thanks to the vice president our reinventing government task force and the support we have received in the past from the congress there are now 163 000 fewer people working for the federal government than there were the day i was sworn in as president with next year s already planned down sizing the government next year will be the smallest it s been since mr kennedy was president and as a percentage of the federal the civilian work force of the united states next year the federal government will be the smallest it has been since 1933 that is an astonishing change in a short period of time and i want to say i think we ve done it in the right way like i say that if you want to read about it the vice president s got a little book out here he made me write a forward to it philip howard the author of the wonderful book the death of common sense also wrote an introduction and the vice president gets no money out of the book that s part of reinventing government work harder be poorer but this book reflects what it is we re trying to do the reason i bring it up is that most americans don t know that the government is 163 000 smaller don t know how much smaller it is but there are maybe some bad reasons for that but i think there are two good reasons i d like to mention one reason is that the federal employees were treated properly in the downsizing they weren t just put on the street there were generous early retirement packages approved by the congress there were generous separation packages they were treated with the dignity and respect to which they were entitled so we didn t just have a slash and burn policy the other reason is that the federal employees who stayed were able to dramatically increase their productivity so that people didn t notice it in diminished services and so i think what i d like to do is to say i m very proud of the fact that we have downsized the government more rapidly and to a greater extent than at as far as i know any time in history but the real credit goes to the federal employees who have continued to do the work of america with good humor and increased creativity and i m very proud of that and so the first thing we did was to try to shrink the government the second thing we re doing is getting rid of 16 000 of the 86 000 pages of government regulations i think the most successful talk i ve given since i ve been president was at the white house conference on small business where all i did was simply read them the federal regulation on grits some of you not from the south don t even know what grits are probably but all of us who do found it amazing that there had to be a federal regulation to define it and that it was two pages long and there wasn t a dry eye in the place when i got done reading it most of them were laughing and crying some of them were actually crying to think their government had done such a thing so every department has got a quota a target and we are in the process of getting rid just purely getting rid of 16 000 of the 86 000 pages of federal regulations but that is only part of the vision because common sense government recognizes that there is still a public interest in america that has to be advanced that can only be advanced when the elected representatives of the american people use the power given to them under the constitution of the united states to deal with the problems of the moment in a public way and to do it in the way that is the most efficient the most effective for the moment that is what we are celebrating today the environmental regulations that we are reforming today were designed for a time when the environmental problems were different when there were in some places dark clouds of pollution literally blocking the sun a time when the bald eagle was on the edge of extinction a time when we had a river in america that actually caught fire and for people who think it s been a bad thing this environmental effort i ll ask you to remember that all happened in the lifetime of everybody in this room these laws and regulations have served us well though we ve got a lot more work to do we ve made a lot of progress as a people our environment is the envy of the world compared to other industrial countries but what worked yesterday is not adequate for today and we now know it certainly won t work tomorrow and going through washington is plainly not the only road to ensuring a cleaner or a safer world that s why we have challenged our businesses and our communities to work together to achieve better results where thy live and work at lower cost at the core of this whole approach are the values i mentioned earlier we are saying the government should enhance opportunity but should insist on responsibility the people who are in project xl are saying we want the opportunity to do this in a better more sensible less bureaucratic more hassle free way but we recognize that before opportunity comes responsibility and our commitment is to maintain high standards to understand what we re trying to do the vice president used a see saw analogy which i thought was pretty good by the way i may steal it from him tomorrow think of a high jump competition in this case the government would set the bar in the high jump competition and set it high as high as it takes to ensure that our people have the essential security of knowing that the world that we live in will be vibrant healthy and clean but we wouldn t tell the government how to jump over the bar if you ve ever watched the high jump competition people jump in different ways the way it works today is the government gives you a rule book and if you can t jump over in the prescribed way you just never get over the bar what we want to say is here is the bar if you can figure out how to jump over it any old way the old way the new way a different way forward or backward all you have to do is jump over the bar then you make the grade project xl is built on the simple premise that in many cases companies know their business a whole lot better than the government does that they understand how best to reduce their own pollution that we will all benefit if private enterprise brings its energy its innovation its creativity to the task of reducing pollution and that cost effective ways that are found to clear certain specific goals by certain companies and certain industries will certainly be adopted by others and it will help us to create whole new sectors of economic opportunity by promoting a whole new round of entrepreneurialism in environmental cleanup we also recognize that if companies have the freedom to devise their own strategies they will have the obligation to work with and consult with their neighbors this project marks the end of one size fits all government regulations we know what works for one community and one company simply doesn t necessarily work for others this is real reform it eases the burden of regulation it helps to achieve superior environmental performance it gives each company the chance to find its own way while always always reaffirming the responsibilities that all companies have to their communities you know i look at project xl and i have a hard time understanding those who are still fighting yesterday s regulatory battles today those who still think we re only faced with two choices no regulation at all or more regulation under the banner of regulatory reform some of these would weaken or even abolish previous environmental safeguards the republican majority in congress would deny citizens the right to know what s in the air they breathe and the water they drink they d rob our agencies of the ability to enforce environmental laws at all they d slow the cleanup of toxic waste in our communities i tell you today that i do not intend to let this happen as you know i have been very clear about the 17 special interest provisions the congressional majority put in its epa budget these riders would seriously jeopardize the enforcement of our vital environmental laws and i was very very pleased yesterday to see what i hope is only the beginning of a trend that will sweep this congress when a bipartisan majority in the house sit up for our basic values for common sense government and voted against these 17 riders i hope there will more of this in the future project xl is proof that we can find a better way we don t have to it s also about common ground why should we have a fight about this when we all will be better served if we work together to protect our environment and to promote our economic interests there is clearly a wrong way and a right way to change the regulatory environment of america and to get rid of outdated regulations the wrong way is to toss away our essential health and environmental concerns just because we don t have the patience to sit down and fix them the right way is to roll up our sleeves make regulations work demand responsibility but give opportunity it may take a little longer it may be a little harder but it is the right way to meet the challenges of the next century and i want to say again the most important thing i want to say is i honor these eight projects and the people who are committed to doing it in this way i honor the commitment the defense department has made to do this in its sights if we can prove that this works we can literally change the way americans look with fear either on environmental threats or on the government or on some new economic enterprise we can literally give the future back to the american people at the grass roots level and have the government doing what it ought to do be in the business of defining the public interest making it clear making sure it s advanced but not prescribing every little jot and tiddle detail about how people pursue it in every business in every community in every enterprise all across the land that is our goal project xl is designed to put the focus back where it should be on progress not process on families and businesses not government we have a model here that i think will be good not only for protecting the environment not only as an example of effective regulatory reform i think it s a blueprint for the future i think it s a way we can deal with a whole range of our other economic and social problems a lot is riding on those of you who have agreed to participate in this project i think we can really change the way people look at our common problems is we can prove as i believe you will that this works i am deeply indebted to the vice president and to carol browner and to katie mcginty to all those in our administration who have done this but as i said we really respect more than anything the companies and the people from the department of defense that are prepared to engage in this great endeavor we have to make this work this is the only way to take our country into the 21st century with a growing economy being steadfast to our values with a common sense government that keeps the american dream alive for all let s prove the cynics wrong thank you very much dem wjclinton3 11 96 bill_clinton wow thank you for coming out standing in the cold making me feel warm are you ready for a victory on tuesday are you ready to work until tuesday for the victory let me thank the union high school band for their music let me thank you for your music let me thank christine esclaros was she fabulous or what she did it for the yankees she s doing it for torricelli mayor petty thank you for welcoming us here governor florio mayor delvecchio larry lerner thank you for running for congress thank you both congressman payne to all the other dignitaries who are here let me thank you so much all of you for being here i want to say a special word of thanks to my great friend whoopi goldberg for being there for us through this whole campaign she has always been funny and she has always been wise but she is becoming wiser and funnier and more effective for her country and i m grateful let me thank senator frank lautenberg for his work his support and for standing for you and let me say a special word of thanks to bill bradley we ve known each other a very long time now i remember so well when he first ran for the senate from new jersey i remember so many things about his distinguished career he made a difference for new jersey and a difference for america he was what we want every public official to be we wish you well and we thank you bill bradley godspeed thank you ladies and gentlemen i was trying to think what if anything i might say to all of you who are here to the large number of undecided voters who remain to the young people i know we have people from rutgers and king college here and i thank you both for being here what i might say about bob torricelli that would have any impact after all this decision is new jersey s decision and i am just another citizen when it comes to voting and not even a registered voter here but i know three things i would like you to know you know i think our politics as i have said many times has become too personally negative i think that there is this overwhelming temptation that i see too much in politics to convince the voters that the other people are not only wrong which is a legitimate thing but bad folks i am two days from the end of the last campaign i will ever run i have been more blessed than any american in my lifetime i have received honors from the american people that no person could rightly claim to deserve i have done my best to make this a better country but i have to tell you in those 20 plus years i have learned that most of the people who run for office in both parties are good honest hard working people who love our country who love their families and who want to do what is right i must say i have i can t say i ve enjoyed but i have been awestruck by the protean battle that congressman torricelli and congressman zimmer have waged they remind me of some battles i saw earlier in my youth when i wasn t sure either team would walk off the field but there are three things i want you to know that i know about bob torricelli number one he is a ferocious fighter for what he believes in and he believes in new jersey and you need somebody who will do that number two i have spent a lot of time with him in quiet private moments when there were no cameras no reporters no press no contributors nobody from new jersey no one to impress nothing to say he has an extraordinary mind he has an extraordinary understanding of our country he thinks about the future you need someone in the senate that has the capacity to be a truly great positive force for the united states in the 21st century bob torricelli could become a truly great united states senator and a great positive force for our country and for new jersey in the 21st century i hope you ll give him a chance to do that but third and for the moment most important it has fallen to bob torricelli and those of like mind and to al gore and to me to make the case for america s future that always has to be made at a time of great change we re going through a huge change in the way we work and live and relate to one another and the rest of the world i m sure that you ve seen changes here in union township in the way families live i can just give you one little example when i became president there were 3 million americans making a living by working at home today because of computer technology there are 12 million by the year 2000 there will be 20 million let me give you another example when i because president there was no known medical treatment for stroke medical research has developed one two of the genes that cause breast cancer have been discovered we may be able to eventually cure all cases and to prevent many because of that for the first time ever laboratory animals with their spines completely severed have movement in their lower legs because of nerve transplants from other parts of their bodies to the spine we re about to build a supercomputer with ibm and the united states government that will do more calculations in a second than you can do on your hand held calculator in 30 000 years when hillary and chelsea and i went to the olympics to welcome all the teams from around the world there were people from 197 different racial and ethnic groups there and national groups the united states is the only great country in the world that has people in it from virtually all of those places this is a different world it is new it is exciting it is full of new changes and every time we go through a period like that the great question is will we meet these challenges will we seize these opportunities in a way that helps us to live more closely to those ideals we believe in and to grow as a country together as we go forward together bob torricelli will help us to do that the approach we have taken will help us to do that the great difference here in this election is between those who believe that we re better off on our own and those of us who believe we re better off when all of us work to give each other the tools we need to make the most of our own lives and to build a better future together i do believe as the first lady said it takes a village to raise a child and build a country and build a future i do believe that we re always going to better off when we build a bridge together to the future that s big enough and wide enough for us all to walk across but make no mistake about it in this last presidential election of the 20th century and the first election of the 21st century the decision is more important than ordinarily it is not because of any of us but because of the sheer dimensions of the change through which we are living we must make the right decision this is not an election of party it is an election of nation and people the republican at times past has fulfilled this historic role for us that s why abraham lincoln did when he gave his life to save the union and to end the abominable practice of slavery that s what theodore roosevelt did when he said it s wrong for children to work 70 hours in factories every week it s wrong for them not to be in school it s wrong to destroy our natural heritage it s wrong for monopolies to destroy the free enterprise system he did that but today it is our party it is our administration and it is congressman torricelli who represent the view that we must meet these challenges together and go forward together and that is the central issue in this election if you doubt it i will give you just a few examples the environmental example is an easy one for me we have to prove we can grow the economy and preserve indeed enhance the environment it is wrong what they tried to do in their budget to let polluters off the hook they should pay and we should help to close all these toxic waste dumps that are compromising our children s future we should do this together and they should assume their responsibility look at law enforcement their budget would have abolished our commitment to put 100 000 police on the street but we have had four years of declining crime and the lowest crime rate in 10 years in the united states if we can have four more it might actually be safe for everybody to walk on the streets and play in all the parks and be in all the neighborhoods and we can feel good about america s security again we need to keep going in the direction we re going we don t need to take a u turn you should stand with law enforcement and support our direction because it s right for america and it will make us a better place we need a growing economy to succeed and to do what is best for all of us four years ago you took me on faith in new jersey when i said we could lower the deficit still invest in an education expand trade and grow the economy you took it on faith when i said this liberal conservative debate doesn t make any sense i ll shrink the size of government but i want us to be stronger to grow together now you know the evidence we ve got the smallest federal government since president kennedy we reduced more unnecessary programs and regulations than my two republican predecessors we privatized more government operations than my two republican predecessors but we have a program that continues to invest in education technology and in our future and we have 10 7 million new jobs to show for it a 15 year high in homeownership a 27 year low in the rates of unemployment and inflation combined this country is moving in the right direction help us keep it going we don t need to take a u turn we need to balance the budget and have targeted tax cuts for what people really need and for the people who really need it for education child rearing buying that first home paying for health care we don t need a big tax cut that they won t tell you how they can pay for because it will blow a hole in the deficit raise interest rates and require bigger cuts in education the environment medicare and medicaid than the ones i vetoed so let s balance the budget keep the economy growing and secure the future of new jersey s children that s what s at stake in this election and i want you to help us do it and finally the biggest question of all in a world that is changing like this people will have to keep on learning for a lifetime we have a program to give every child in america world class educational opportunities to open the doors of college to all to hook up every classroom in america to the information superhighway so that every child in new jersey without regard to income or race or region or national background can have access for the first time in the history of america to the same information in the same time in the same way it will revolutionize education our plan is right and their opposition to it is wrong we need your help to build that bridge to the 21st century we need your help we need your help to make sure that we allow families to deduct from their tax bill the cost of a typical community college tuition so everybody can have at least two years of education after high school of any age we need your help to give people a deduction for the cost of college tuition of any kind of college tuition so all people can go to college we need your help to do that and we ll get it paid back we need your help to make sure every 8 year old child in this country can read too i have challenged 100 000 young people to take work study money that we just appropriated to give them to use that money to help teach our 8 year olds to read we can do these things folks but we can t do them if we take the philosophy embodied in the budget they signed they passed that i vetoed and then when i vetoed it they shut the government down not once but twice to try to force it on me and they said they will never the president will never allow the government to be shut down and i said i d rather you be inconvenienced for 30 days than hurt for 30 years i will never let that happen to america you have to decide you have to decide so on this brisk new jersey evening when you see the flags blowing in the breeze those are the winds of change of the 21st century the best days of this country are still ahead of us the young people in this audience will have more opportunities to live out their dreams than any generation of americans in history we will have more opportunity to promote peace and freedom and prosperity for ourselves in the world than any generation of americans in history but we must decide that we really believe down deep inside that there are things we must do together and that we will all be better off if we give our people not a guarantee but a chance to become what god meant them to be and if we re willing to say we don t care anything else about you if you believe in the constitution the declaration of independence and the bill of rights if you re willing to get up and go to work or go to school or do whatever you re supposed to do tomorrow we don t care where you come from we don t care whether you re rich or poor we don t care what your racial or ethnic or religious background is we don t need to know anything else about you you are part of our america and we are going to build an even greater future for the greatest country in all of human history give us a chance on tuesday give bob torricelli a chance on tuesday give yourselves a chance on tuesday we need you new jersey be there thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton3 12 93 bill_clinton you know when bruce said to alice just give the president whatever it is you have i said heck bruce i want the ranch i like the stetson but i mean if i really get a choice ladies and gentlemen i am glad to be here glad to be back in new mexico how many of you were here i just got off the phone with hillary she was working in new hampshire yesterday so she s home tonight i just got off the phone with her how many of you were here when we were here the night of the election all night remember that the press has a way of finding out everything about you if you become president president reagan loved jelly beans and president bush didn t like broccoli and last week the wall street journal reported our dark secret that hillary and i are addicted to salsa and it all happened because of you because we stayed up all night living on that before the election i am so glad to be back in new mexico i m glad to be here with ray powell and with you mr speaker thank you for being such a good emcee i want to thank my longtime friend bruce king i don t know if you remember what he said there are only three living americans who served as governors in the 70s the 80s and the 90s cecil andrus of idaho bruce king and me it was the longest time before any of us could get a promotion we had a lottery and in the beginning we thought i won but sometimes in the last year i wasn t sure i didn t lose i love bruce king the first time i ever met bruce and alice and bruce laid all that you know that aw shucks stuff on me aw shucks you know i checked three times to make sure i still had my billfold in my pocket aw shucks i appreciate the fact that bruce is missing the start of the annual lobo classic basketball tournament tonight i know what a sacrifice it is he did it for the money not me but i m glad he s here anyway you can tell we re friends you can t make fun of your enemies i want to say too how glad i am to be here with bill and barbara richardson bill richardson was the national cochair of the adelanten con clinton movement thank you for bringing your posters there s two there but he never did anything more important for america than in his leadership in the fight for the passage of nafta i can tell you on september the 14th the day after we had the signing of the peace agreement between israel and the plo we formally kicked off the nafta fight after all the side agreements on labor and the environment were done and we had the endorsement of all the living former presidents we had four presidents and former presidents there president ford president carter president bush and myself we were 100 votes behind we were maybe that close a hundred in the house of representatives and bill richardson soldiered on when others were saying well they ought to give up and some of my friends who were on the other side of the issue even suggested maybe we ought not have a vote because they didn t want us embarrassed and richardson and i were too dumb to know we were beat so we just keep on going it worked out all right and the nation is in his debt and new mexico will benefit enormously because of the astonishing national leadership he provided on that issue i gave what did you say i need a vitamin pill tonight i also want to say that jeff bingaman likes me because i brought anne here tonight i gave her the day off at the justice department sometimes being president is just like being a school principal you give people an excused absence and we came back and i want to say bill mentioned the technology reinvestment projects but i want to if i might just take a minute to talk about jeff bingaman and what he did not only for new mexico but for the country there in 1992 when i was running for president the united states congress under the leadership of senator bingaman provided for the expenditure of a few hundred million dollars to help america make the conversion the painful conversion from a high tech defense based economy to a high tech commercial economy and there were a number of things in the bill that they passed and as a candidate for president i strongly supported the bill and it passed before i could be elected president and guess what and i thought well here i am cutting off my nose to spite my face i m out there asking congress to pass this bill which will put a few hundred million dollars into the hands of the president i was running against to put the american people back to work in the way i ve been saying we should do for the last five years and guess what they wouldn t spend any money because they didn t believe in it and so when i became president we went to work on trying to give life to jeff bingaman s idea that a little bit of public money in the context of the hundreds of billions of dollars we ve been spending on defense should be offered to the private sector in matching funds for people who would come up with ideas that could be used to take defense technologies and turn it into domestic jobs and american high tech opportunities for the 21st century so earlier this year we released the first round of grants and in the whole year we wound up with over 400 million worth of funds congress was so astonished by the success of the program that they have come back and voted to spend even more money on it in the year we re now involved in in fiscal year 94 now i want you to understand how important this is in the first round of applications when we put up 400 million we had almost 3 000 projects submitted for funding that with public and private money together would require 8 5 billion that s how hungry american entrepreneurs universities laboratories and big companies are to be part of this defense conversion effort to find ways to create the jobs of the 21st century out of all the work we ve put into defense research over the last 40 years it is a very important thing and none of this would have happened if jeff bingaman of new mexico hadn t been the catalyzing influence the energy behind this idea i also want to say it is true that in the first three rounds of grants that we re now completing today new mexico got a total i think of nine big projects and on a per capita basis you almost certainly led the country in grants but you did it on the merits not just the labs but the university so i m honored to be here tonight with all these friends of mine on this stage and all of you out there to thank you for voting for bill clinton and al gore in 1992 to thank you for providing leadership like bill richardson and jeff bingaman and bruce king to ask you to keep them in and keep them strong and to ask you to keep supporting the direction our country is taking when i became president we had had the four worst years of job creation since the great depression we had had 12 years in which our national debt had quadrupled while our investment in our people had gone down we had had 20 years of the global economy requiring american middle class people to work longer hours every week for the same or lower wages we had outof control health care costs with 100 000 americans a month losing their health coverage so we were paying more for less and almost everybody in this country thought things were going in the wrong direction i said until i was blue in the face even to those who were most enthusiastic about our campaign that we couldn t expect immediate overnight results but we could turn the country around and what i want you to know my friends is after the first year we have turned the country around we are moving in the right direction the economic plan which the congress adopted reduced the deficit had over 356 separate over 350 356 to be exact separate spending cuts now that s not government language for we re cutting the rate of increase in the previous budget there s 356 accounts that have less money this year to spend than they did last year increased investments in things like defense conversion and new technologies and worker training and head start things that build our country over the long run raised taxes on fewer than two percent of the american people earning the largest amounts of money whose taxes had been lowered while their incomes went up in the 80s gave an enormous an enormous boost to the ideas of family and work by providing tax cuts to over 15 million working families whose incomes were 23 000 a year or less because we wanted to say to people we know you ve got kids in your home we know you re working hard for modest incomes we want the tax system to lift you out of poverty not drive you into it we want you to be successful as parents and successful as workers that will affect over 40 million americans who are either the workers the spouses or the children of the families who will get tax relief under this economic plan in april and what are the results what are the results historically low interest rates very low inflation increased investment a 14 year high in housing sales last month a 10 year drop in unemployment this month that is it dropped more in one from month to month than in any time in 10 years almost 50 percent more private sector jobs created in the first 11 months of this year than in the previous four years has it affected most americans yet no are we moving in the right direction you bet we are and we have to keep going until we do see the benefits go to every american family but we are moving in the right direction this congress not only passed the motor voter bill which bill richardson mentioned it also passed the family and medical leave act which gives people the right to take a little time off without losing their jobs when there s a baby born or a sick parent this congress passed the national service bill which three years from now will give 100 000 young americans the chance to earn some money against further education after high school by working in community service projects to rebuild the fabric of our country from the grass roots up this congress passed the brady bill which will require a waiting period for handguns and both houses of congress have passed campaign finance reform they just have to reconcile the two bills and a crime bill which will enable us to put another 100 000 police officers on the streets have boot camps for first time youthful offenders and do other things to make the american people safer in their homes and their schools and on their streets and in their neighborhoods bill richardson was generous in what he said that no one knows that this was the most successful legislative session in history since we ve only been keeping score like this for 40 years but it s not bad since they ve been keeping score i say to you this is a good beginning but it is just the beginning nafta was important but we need to keep going until we ve got all of latin america committed to democracy free market economics and an economic partnership with the united states that s good but we also need a new global trading agreement i spent a good deal of time today working trying to get the nations of the world to conclude this so called gatt agreement by december 15 our deadline because it is estimated that that will add over one million jobs to the american economy within the next decade if we can successfully conclude it why is this important why was it important enough for people like jeff bingaman and bruce king and bill richardson and bill clinton even to argue with some of our friends over it is this simple it is this simple we can t keep any of our businesses in america today unless we become more productive but being more productive means the same person can produce more goods or more services maybe even fewer people can produce more goods and more services well if there s no more demand for the goods and services and fewer people produce them what happens unemployment goes up and you don t have to raise wages because there are all these people who are out there unemployed who are more than happy to work for less so if you want productivity which you have to have to compete with other countries to lead to higher wages and more jobs you must have more customers for american products and american services that s what these trade agreements are all about we have got to expand the rate of growth in the world to find more customers for what we do well and that will enable us not only to have more jobs but to change the job mix to get the higher wage jobs in there to raise peoples incomes for the first time in 20 years it s going to be hard to turn this around but for 20 years most americans have been working harder for less we have got to try to do better than that and the only way to do it is to provide more customers the second thing we have to recognize is that a lot of our people are still not able to compete in that global economy which means we have to have a better system for training our young high schoolers who don t go on to college a better system for giving our working people lifetime education and training opportunities a better system for recognizing that the unemployment now is not like it used to be where people would go on unemployment and then a couple of weeks later they would get called back to their old company most people who are unemployed now have to find a new job with a new employer that means that this coming year we re going to have to totally revise the entire unemployment system and make it a re employment system immediately give people education and training and job placement i challenge all the people who supported us in nafta who wanted america to have more customers to make sure americans can take advantage of that instead of be punished by it by retraining the american work force for the 21st century that is our great challenge that s why the welfare reform program that we re going to deal with next year is so important you have a lot of people out there who had children when they were children who have never been in the work force who have no education they cannot command a living wage in a global economy we owe it to ourselves as well as to them to set up a system where we favor work over idleness but where we give people a chance to succeed in a highly competitive economy we are all going to have to face the fact that we have new challenges if we want our people to succeed as workers we have to let them succeed as parents too because most working people have children and most people with children have to work that means family leave is important that means a tax system that doesn t punish low wage workers is important and that means that it is important to have welfare reform and lifetime training the last thing i want to say is i came here before i was here tonight to go out to a wonderful little community near here to talk about health care if we don t control health care costs and provide health care security to all of our people we will not have the underpinning of social security we need to have the courage to make the changes that the global economy imposes on us next year we are going to do health care welfare reform and revise the education and training program then they ll say well that s a better year than they had last year and it will be for america we can do it together thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton3 12 95 bill_clinton i am delighted to see you here i am delighted to see you here on this what is really the first day of our christmas season it is true that hillary saw these decorations a couple of hours ago but i went up and crashed you saw them all before i did this is a happy time at the white house and this is an appropriate way to begin as all of you know we ve just come home from europe from a trip to london belfast dublin to see our forces in germany and to madrid i was especially moved again as i think every person who goes to ireland is by the incredible power of the art of ireland the irish playwright john milington synge wrote of artists that they know the stars the flowers and the birds and converse with the mountains moors and ferns today we honor five such artists and i am delighted to see so many more in the audience tonight joining us i think all of us know that our nation and our world are in a period of profound change perhaps the most sweeping period of change in the way we work and live and relate to one another in a hundred years we know that there is an enormous amount of possibility in this period and still a great deal to trouble the soul at such a time we have to do everything we can to imagine the right kind of future and to remember what is best and constant about human nature throughout all ages and so at this time we need our artists in a special way in a profound way and so especially at this christmas season i welcome all of you to the white house joseph jacques d amboise was a natural athlete and a tough street kid in new york city he discovered his true gift one day when he took his sister to ballet class and discovered the new sport of dance ever since that day he has taken ballet into the neighborhoods and consciousness of america in a way that no other performer has he has made ballet strong as well as beautiful through his performances in carousel seven brides for seven brothers and stars and stripes a distinctively american ballet created especially for him he danced until he was 50 which may be young in some careers but not in ballet i m not so sure it s young in others as well today we thank you for sharing your talents by teaching dance to a whole new generation of performers we thank you for your work as a performer and choreographer and for giving new dimension to the world of ballet marilyn horne made her professional debut at the age of four when she sang at a fundraiser for president roosevelt that s franklin roosevelt and it was very late in his term of service showing good judgment in art and politics she still had a glitch or two in the road her career didn t exactly take off in a straight line in fact she was rejected from her grade school glee club because her voice was too powerful by age seventeen however she was back on track giving a solo recital in the hollywood bowl and dubbing the music for the title role in the film carmen jones she went on to form a legendary partnership with joan sutherland to record remarkable christmas carols and most of all to light up the opera houses of the world with a spirit as magnificent as her songs and today as she continues to perform she is passing on her sheer love of music and her generous spirit in addition marilyn to thanking you on behalf of the american people let me thank you again for your several years of friendship to me and to hillary and for gracing our inauguration with your beautiful voice thank you riley b king was known during his days on memphis s beale street as the blues boy eventually he became known to all america simply as b b king for generations of americans the music and the man are synonymous like nearly everyone else my age i grew up listening to three o clock blues b b king was a troubadour on the american road he spent decades touring perfecting and inventing the sounds he created became the soul of a new music with jerry garcia eric clapton and the rolling stones all modeling their music after his he has traveled the world to represent our country and set hands clapping from london to lagos he still averages listen to this 275 performances a year music is his life and yes the blues is b b king when sidney poitier left cat island in the bahamas for miami at the age of 15 he was stunned at the signs of segregation signs that read colored and white more than any other person he would remove those signs from the world of film he broke these barriers by sheer force of his powerful presence on screen from the start he was a leading man and his performances have become landmarks in america s consciousness of itself when he filmed cry the beloved country he had to enter south africa as an indentured servant to the director but we are all grateful to him and in his service for the way he has graced the screen with films like to sir with love guess who s coming to dinner a raisin in the sun and many many others he has captivated us with his performances and reminded us that excellence comes in all colors thank you for entertaining and educating america with dignity strength and grace sidney poitier marvin neil simon s humor distills the essence of his life and our lives sometimes whether we like it or not he has written the lines behind the laughs of phil silver victor borge buddy hackett and jackie gleason he collaborated with sid caesar on what many people hailed as the best show ever on television he has written a string of magnificent hit plays unprecedented in the history of the american theater audiences found them so funny that at first that few people noticed the gentle deep and sometimes sharp truths behind the comedy felix and oscar became american archetypes we saw what it was to grow up in brighton beach memoirs and to grow older in the sunshine boys we saw flaws foibles faults but always through them all the indominability of the human spirit neil simon takes his work seriously but he challenges us and himself never to take ourselves too seriously thank you for the wit and the wisdom today we meet at the summit of five lives of artistic grace and greatness jacques d amboise marilyn horne b b king sidney poitier and neil simon we are pleased to honor all of you for your work but more importantly we honor you for your spirit and your hearts thank you and congratulations dem wjclinton3 12 97 bill_clinton thank you very much lew that was so nice i felt almost like it was a eulogy i started to say i m not done yet i m not done yet i want to thank lew and susan for their role in this tonight and thank you phil and thanks to all of the people here at this table and all the rest of you who helped to put together this wonderfully successful evening for our party lew and susan we go back a long time in this and i can t help but just listening to them reminisce i d like to say something i said when gary lapaille and i were down at the other event with senator moseley braun and senator durbin and i don t know if congressman davis and rush are here but they were us at the other event i ll never forget the first conversation i had with al gore after i became a candidate for president now this was when i was the fifth best known candidate in new hampshire and only my mother really thought i had a chance to win and i was over in tennessee with my friend the then governor of tennessee ned ray mcwhorter who is a marvelous old fashioned political leader and was a great governor and he wanted to get me and al gore together and al had run for president in 88 and decided not to run in 92 and so we were sitting alone in this room and he said you know what happened to me i did real well in the south on super tuesday but he said i didn t do so well after that what s your theory about how you re going to become the nominee of the democratic party and i looked at him and i gave him a one word answer i said illinois and he said why and i said well because of hillary because southern illinois is south of richmond and looks just like north arkansas and i ve been there and it feels just like north arkansas and i ve been there and it feels just like north arkansas and i said and besides that half the people who live in chicago are from arkansas danny davis john stroger john johnson need i go on scottie pippin yeah i m not sure he was in the picture in the same way there as he is now but anyway and you know i came here in october of 91 and spoke gary hosted the chairs of the democratic party and i spoke and then we went to navy pier and announced that david wilhelm was going to be my campaign manager and then i just kept getting people from chicago in my operation kevin o keefe rahm emanuel laura and bridgette hardigan minyon moore there s a lot of other people avis lavelle dave and digi both worked for me bill daley s now the secretary of commerce and of course when chicago turned out for hillary s 50th birthday the other day it almost made it bearable for her no one here will every know what it meant to her what was done but i want to say before i get into anything substantive at all you will never know none of you can every know what knowing that illinois would always be there for us has meant to us to al gore and to hillary and to me in two presidential campaigns and the administration and the times when we were down as well as when we were up and how it changed the entire landscape of electoral politics of the last several years knowing that it would always be there i cannot thank you enough i also want to say a special word of thanks to gary lapaille as he ends eight years as head of the democratic party here that s a hard job i can t imagine anybody doing that job for eight years that s what people say to me if i weren t term limited i d probably run again but gary s done a great job and i thank him for what he s done and also for his leadership as the head of all the state party chairs in the country i want to thank steve grossman who spoke so beautifully here earlier for his leadership this was he was not exactly buying high when he agreed to become chairman of the democratic party in america and he s done a superb job and his friend and our good friend alan solomont for being our finance director and i want to thank senator durbin for many things but especially all of you know this but i want to reiterate it i hope and believe that next year even though it s an election year we will pass legislation which will embody the best parts of that settlement in the tobacco case and do some other things which will go beyond what the settlement does to dramatically reduce the exposure of young children to tobacco which is still our number one public health problem and if we are successful in that it will be in no small measure due to the year in and year out dogged determination of dick durbin and i really appreciate that i d also like to say a special word put in a special plug for carol moseley braun i expect to be back here campaigning for her on several occasions in this next year but i could say many things but i d like to ask you to think of three things when you think of this election two in the past and one in the future that are very important one is all the good fortune that has come to our administration because the american people are better off than they were five years ago had at its root the announcement we made after the election and before i took office that we were going to dramatically reduce the deficit we were not going america had quadrupled the debt in 12 years we were choking on debt interest rates were too high investment was too low the economy was stagnant and we were going to turn it around and when we presented a plan to do it we could not get a single person from the other party to vote for it they said it was going to be a terrible thing for the economy it would bring on a recession we passed the bill by one vote in both houses if it hadn t been for carol moseley braun s vote i don t think we d have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years and 13 5 million new jobs and i hope you all will remember that lew mentioned the crime issue maybe it was because i was out there living in the country and not in washington i never knew crime was a republican issue i never knew a policeman who asked a victim of a crime for their party i d before they filled out a report i was unaware of this until i got to washington and i realized that talk too often substituted for action and if you talk long enough you got credit for something whether you did anything or not what we did was to try to give the american people a crime bill that was written in effect by police officers prosecutors and community leaders that worked with kids to try to keep them out of trouble in the first place and that was based on the experiences that i d seen in places that even before i became president where the crime rate was already going down because of community policing and a better distribution in the number of police officers and more work at prevention so we came up with this crime bill we were afraid we couldn t pass it because there was a bitter republican filibuster in the senate and we didn t have a vote to spare when the republicans filibuster you have to get 60 votes and thank goodness there were enough brave republican senators to give us one more vote than we needed but if we hadn t had the democrats we had including carol moseley braun i don t think we d have the lowest crime rate this country has had in 24 years and that s something that i think is worth remembering at some point you know we all have to take responsibility when we re wrong and i ve made some mistakes and i ve tried to assume responsibility for them you take the consequences but when someone is right it ought to be noticed on those two great issues which had a great deal to do with shaping where america is today carol moseley braun was not only right her vote was decisive and the people of illinois should remember and reward i believe at election time the third thing i d like to say is about the future carol was the first member of congress who came to me and said that she thought we ought to reconsider the historic reluctance of the federal government to support any sort of capital expenditures for our public schools any kind of fiscal expenditures there is a good reason for that we only provide about 7 percent of the total funding for our schools in america most of it comes from state and local level and so most of the building has been done from local funds most states don t contribute to school buildings either most states just do it locally but she made a case and i looked into it and i discovered for example in the city of philadelphia the average school building is 65 years old and in many of our cities the percentage of people living in the city and paying taxes in the school district with children has gone down dramatically so that the tax base the effective tax base for maintaining these physical facilities has shrunk i was in a little town called jupiter florida the other day where i counted i believe there were 12 12 trailers full of kids in classrooms supplemental classrooms on the outside of the school building because of the growth of the student population now i want to say a little more about chicago s reforms in a moment but it was because of that that i made a proposal to congress which did not pass last time but i think we still have to keep working on this because if you want these schools to work right they don t have to be modern they can be old buildings but the windows don t need to be broken and the kids don t need to be in danger and they at least need to be clean and fixed up and shiny and adequate so that you send a message to our children that they matter that they re important that they re not some second rate ancillary concern to us so i think there s quite a good chance that we ll be able to do something to support local efforts on school construction in a way that also furthers school reform and i want to say a little more about that in a minute but you just remember when that comes up on the national screen today i was in akron as steve grossman said at our first big national town hall meeting on race relations and building one america for the 21st century three of the people of the 65 people in the audience brought it up to me and said i wish you would do something to help get our broken down or overcrowded schools in a position where they can do the job for the kids without regard to their race carol moseley braun made that a national issue for the first time in the history of the republic and she deserves a lot of credit for it and we ought to keep fighting to make our schools better and i hope the people of illinois will back her up in this coming year on that issue because it s very important and i thank her for it now let me go back to the beginning of this six years ago when i came to illinois for the first time i was convinced that our country had its best days in front of it if but only if we actually tried to prepare for the future i did not think we could simply stumble into the 21st century nor did i think we could get very far by denying the significant challenges we faced by 1992 it had been nearly 20 years since the bottom 60 percent of the work force had had an increase in their real wages because of global competition and because of the premium that had been put on higher skills in the global economy and the growth of technology unemployment was high growth was low interest rates were high and like i said we had quadrupled the debt crime was going up every year the welfare roles were rising and most people didn t think that this country worked very well anymore i believed very strongly that if we had new ideas and we implemented them with discipline we could turn the country around not because i would be president because the president is only one actor in a very big system but because this country had enormous capacity to solve any problem before it if the people make up their mind to go in the right direction and actually do it so i took to the people a new direction and we said it was a new democratic approach not because we were running from the democratic party s values in history but because at every time when there s change you have to change your approach to be relevant to the times you can t stick with an approach that no longer works so what we said was we want new ideas and old fashioned values opportunity for everybody responsibility from everybody a community that includes everybody in america we want a different kind of government we don t pretend that the government can solve all the problems but we don t think it should sit on the sidelines we think we ought to have a government that s primary focus is to create the conditions and give people the tools to solve their own problems and build strong careers strong families and strong communities and that s what we ve done five years later there are 300 000 people fewer working for the federal government it s the smallest it was your federal government today is the same size it was when john kennedy was president and this is a much bigger country the percentage of the economy being taken by the federal government is smaller than it was five years ago of all the advanced economies in the world the percentage of our wealth that goes to taxes at the state national and local level is lower than every other one except japan we re about even with japan and yet we have still been able to invest more in things that are critical to our future like education and environmental technology and cleanup and medical research and the expansion of health care coverage things that bring us together and make us all stronger and the consequence of that is that we not only reduce the debt by 92 percent the deficit by 92 percent before the balanced budget law triggered in because of the 1993 vote but we re now going to balance the budget and at the same time have the biggest increased investment in health care for kids since 65 in public schools since 65 and in helping people go to college since 1945 since the g i bill we are seeing the crime rate drop to a 24 year low and the biggest drop in welfare rolls in history 3 8 million fewer people on welfare than when i took office with a program that is tough in the sense that it requires able bodied people to go to work but compassionate for children because it guarantees medical care and nutrition for the kids and child care for the mothers if they go to work so you don t ask people to choose between their children and their jobs and if i might say i think that s one of the largest questions still facing the united states even upper income people i know who have school aged kids almost every one of them can cite one example in recent in the last few weeks when they felt torn between their obligations to their children and their obligations at work and i think one of the signal achievements the democratic party should make to 21st century america is helping to reconcile the conflict between work and family so that people who do work do not feel that they have to sacrifice being good parents to do it what does that mean that s what the family and medical leave law was about when we doubled the earned income tax credit nobody knows what that is the earned income tax credit it means that if you make less than 30 000 a year and you have one or two children you get a lower income tax as a result it s worth about 1 000 a family over and above the children s tax credit and the other cuts that we ve done in taxes we raised the minimum wage because of it we increased child support collection by 50 percent we reformed the adoption laws and gave a tax credit for people who would adopt children all trying to strengthen families and help people balance the demands of work and family and then hillary and i sponsored the first white house conference ever on child care and we re looking at what our options are within the budget limitations to try to expand the availability of affordable quality safe child care to working families because i think that the most important job any of will ever have and i guess i m more mindful of that now because our daughter just went off to college and i don t sense it every day like i used to but raising kids is the most important work of any society ever in all history it s always the same there is nothing more important so we cannot ask our people to choose between success in the emerging economy and success at home what we have to do is to find a way for us to achieve both and that s something we have to keep working on but i m proud of the progress we ve made i m proud of the fact that the environment is cleaner than it was the air is cleaner the water is cleaner there are fewer toxic waste dumps and the food supply is safer than it was five years ago do we still have new challenges we do but we proved that those who said we should break down environmental regulation and weaken our commitment to a clean environment so we could grow the economy i think we have proved conclusively that they were wrong and that our idea is right that you can protect the environment and grow the economy and we need to keep on doing it and as you look to the future that means among other things taking on the challenge of global warming and climate change the vice president is going to kyoto japan to present our position there and it s somewhat controversial now because a lot of people believe that there is no way to reduce our amount of greenhouse gas emissions caused primarily from burning coal and oil without hurting the economy i do not believe that i think the evidence is all to the contrary and we re determined to find a way to continue to clean the environment while growing the economy let me just remind you that in the last few years we have taken the chlorofluoro carbons out of the air the spray the stuff that s in the spray cans to stop the thinning of the ozone layer everybody said it was going to be a big problem for our economy it all happened while we were having this unprecedented boom we have dramatically reduced sulphur dioxide emissions primarily from powerplants we were told it was going to cost a fortune and take forever we re now running 40 percent ahead of schedule at less than half the predicted cost in the midst of this economic boom cleaning up our air because we did it in a way that supported business supported free markets gave people the incentives to do the right thing but said in the end we ve got to give our children a cleaner environment we still have there are lots of cities in this country where asthma is the number one public health problem for young children because of air pollution so we re doing the right things and we need to keep on doing it in health care we need to find ways to continue to expand health coverage and without sacrificing quality in the name of controlling costs our side has embraced a health care bill of rights that has been endorsed by health care providers by medical professionals not in the business end of it by significant portions of the business and labor community we may have a big argument about it between the parties next year but i think the democratic party should be on the side of quality health care as well as affordable health care and i think that s what people want us to do i know that s what susan wants me to do she was almost clapping there so these are things that i want you to think about there are honest differences i regret sometimes that all the political stories seem to be about you know lew made some remark about the fundraising you have to understand when you contribute to a party if that party advances things that you believe in and there is a difference especially if there is a difference between your party s position and the other one you are doing something that is not only all right it is a good thing because if you don t then your side won t be heard and there is a direct line that will run from this dinner tonight to the actions that we will take and the fights we will be able to make to defend what we do when we try to raise school standards in every city in the country like you re trying to do here in chicago when we try to get every school system to do what you say here more homework more parental involvement more responsibility more accountability no more social promotion the kinds of things you re doing here ought to be done everywhere in america we believe that that s part of our policy we ve got to have somebody sticking up for us and giving us the wherewithal to get that message out there that s what you re doing and you ought to be proud of that and feel good about it today at this town hall meeting on race the one substantive announcement i made was that we were going to create 25 to 30 education opportunity zones to give 25 to 30 other communities a chance to do what chicago s trying to do to put accountability and high standards and high expectations and real effective commitment to excellence into the schools this is important and the last thing i ll say is this one of the reasons that i m very proud to be a democrat is we still believe that we don t have a person to waste we believe that people that don t have as many material resources as we do are as good as we are in the eyes of god and that we need them to develop to the fullest of their abilities and we want everybody to be part of our american future that s what we want and that s what that town hall meeting in akron was al l about i ll just leave you with that thought a lot of americans have thought about what the 21st century will be like in terms of oh biomedical research in 30 years a lot of americans have thought about what s going to happen in terms of the communications technology in 30 years a lot of americans have thought about will there be relatively more people riding on airplanes or more people doing video conferences transatlantic when all the telephones have video screens but what we have not thought enough about is what s it going to be like when there s no majority race in america in 50 years it will happen within the decade in california our biggest state where 13 percent of the people live how are we going to continue to prove that no matter what happens in bosnia or northern ireland or the middle east or all these places where we re trying to help them make progress toward peace that we re going to stay on the side of reconciling ourselves to one another across our racial and religious and ethnic differences so that we will be richer by it how are we going to prove that we understand that the ethnic diversity that you see in cook county is our meal ticket to the 21st century and we are not going to let old fashioned hatred and newfound fears get in the way of that i want our party i want this to be a nonpartisan issue but i want our party to be in the forefront of getting the american people to solve this problem community by community as well as at the national level so these are the things that we stood for i don t think there s any question that america is better off than it was five years ago i don t think there s any question that i could not have done this if it hadn t been for the democratic members of the congress and the voices in the mayor s offices and the governorships around the country who stuck up for what we were trying to do i could not have done this alone we did this together it is an achievement of our party do we have some differences of opinion we sure do we still have a big difference over trade and i think i m right and i think that the people that think that we don t have to expand trade are not right on the other hand i believe that one of the things that all democrats believe that is right is that no country has yet solved the problem no rich country of how do you get the benefits of the global economy trade technology and investment and still help the people that will get displaced from the global economy in an adequate and rapid way so that they can immediately return to the winner s circle no country has solved that problem and i think you should see the debate within our party on trade in those terms that is the positive way to see it because all of us care about that and i believe we ll get it worked out in a way that will enable us to continue to expand the frontiers of trade and prove that we can do a better job of returning hardworking americans to the winner s circle apart from that i think we re completely at one on things that really have made a difference to america so you go home tonight and you think about that you think about that the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years the lowest crime rate in 24 years the biggest drop in welfare in history the family leave law dramatic overhaul of the adoption laws a dramatic overhaul of the food and drug law so we can move drugs into the workplace more quickly and people can get cures for terrible problems the kinds of things we re doing will change the future of america for the better and i want you to stay with us i want you to stay with carol moseley braun i want you to stay with your other candidates here in illinois but most of all i want you to stay with the notion that you have the right and the responsibility to support those things that reflect what you believe are right for america and because you and people like you all over this country have done it we re in better shape than we were five years ago and when we go into the 21st century and i ride off into the sunset we ll be in better shape still thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton3 12 98 bill_clinton thank you first of all i want to thank teri sullivan for her introduction and for her work here for you she s up here with all these politicians i think she did a good job don t you let s give her another hand i d like to thank governor almond senator chafee senator reed senator pell it s great to see you again congressman kennedy congressman weygand and mr mayor thank you for making me feel so welcome here today i met you members of the newport city council i think former governor sundlun is here john devillars is our epa regional administrator and your secretary of state james langevin members of the legislature i thank you all i d also like to say that i have two staff members who are here from rhode island and i brought them home today karen taramontano and marjorie tarmey i thank them for their service thank you all for being here you know when patrick kennedy was up here speaking he said that i had been to rhode island five times president eisenhower came right over there and stayed in that big yellow house and played golf but only president kennedy had been here more times and i told the governor i said if you ll give me president eisenhower s house and access to the golf course i ll break the kennedy record actually i feel compelled to admit since we re here in this setting that when i was a boy growing up my greatest aspiration was to come to rhode island to play in the newport jazz festival and i always thought as a child you know when i was 16 i thought that would be the measure of my success i couldn t have dreamed i d become president i thought if i could just play one time in the newport jazz festival i would know i had arrived it s not too late in a couple of years maybe you ll let me come back when i get practiced up and play on the way in here i thanked senator chafee in particular for his help in trying to sensitize the congress to the great challenge of climate change and global warming but on this magnificent december day in rhode island it s hard to see it as a threat i must say i appreciate this wonderful day i m glad to be in the city by the sea the once and future home of the america s cup i thank you too for being such a vital center of our united states navy and i also thank you for the work done here to save the bay i learned in preparation for this trip there s a documentary on the origin of the star spangled banner airing tonight filmed right here at fort adams overlooking this majestic sweep of the narragansett bay the film obviously is about events which occurred during the war of 1812 in the battle surrounding fort mchenry interestingly enough it was shortly after that that the british came up the potomac and burned the white house completely gutting it inside nearly destroying it totally i think it s very interesting that that film was made here and that s because the narragansett bay looks almost the same today as it did 200 years ago you can be very very proud of that and i hope you are i came here today because i wanted to showcase your remarkable efforts to save this bay i hope this picture will be broadcast all across the united states to people this afternoon and this evening but i also wanted to talk about how your community and all communities across our nation can protect our precious water resources from the tap water to the rivers to the lakes to the ocean last week on thanksgiving all americans had the opportunity and i hope we took it to give thanks for these good times in our country this month our economy will achieve the longest peacetime expansion in american history we have nearly 17 million new jobs the lowest unemployment in 28 years the lowest percentage of our people on welfare in 29 years the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years for the first time in over 20 years the wages of all groups of americans all income groups are on the rise home ownership is the highest in american history in rhode island unemployment is down to five percent there s a lot of construction going on here in newport the navy is building the strategic maritime research center high tech industries are flourishing our country has a lot to be thankful for but i think the question we should be asking ourselves now particularly with all the financial turmoil going on in the rest of the world is what are we to make of the success america has now should we just relax and enjoy it or should we instead say this is a unique moment for us and we need to use this moment of prosperity and confidence to look ahead to this new century to the challenges our children will face and do our best to use the resources we have now to meet the challenges of tomorrow i think it is clearly what we should be doing and i think most americans agree so when you list those challenges giving all of our children a world class education so they compete in the global economy making sure all of our people have access to quality health care and the protections in our patients bill of rights making sure that we have made the changes in the global economy necessary to avert the kind of terrible financial crises we ve seen engulfing asia saving social security for the 21st century in a way that does not bankrupt the children of the baby boomers and finally i will predict to you the challenge of improving the environment from global warming to cleaning up the ocean to preserving our natural heritage to preserving the cleanness of our water and air to dealing with the problems of toxic waste all of these issues i predict to you you look at all the children here will dominate america s public debate for the next 30 years we now know something very important we were talking about your congressional delegation and i were talking about it when we got off the plane today we know something very important we know that for the last several years technological advances have made it possible for us to grow our economy while improving the environment most people who have control over decisions still believe that in order to grow the economy you have to destroy the environment and they just want to destroy it as slowly as possible that is simply not true anymore and i came here to rhode island to say the american people need to lead the way into the 21st century in saving the environment now i also want to say that the only way we re ever going to make it is if we make this commitment as americans across party lines across regional lines and across all the lines of our various occupations and our different perspectives the first great environmental president of the united states was theodore roosevelt a great progressive republican when he launched our nation on the course of conservation at the dawn of our century there were pessimists then who claimed that protecting the environment and expanding the economy were incompatible the american people proved them wrong and theodore roosevelt right then they said cutting pollution from cars would cause our economy to break down by the side of the road when we established air quality measures for automobiles but we now have the most powerful automobile industry in the world again america in the last three years has become number one in auto production again because our people are doing a good job with cleaner cars that are more productive and more efficient it didn t wreck our economy it just helped our environment there were people who said if we ban deadly pesticides it would cause american agriculture to wither and decline but they were wrong the more pure we have made the production of our food the more our farmers have come to dominate worldwide competition in agriculture there were those who said if we acted in new england to curb acid rain it would be the worst economic disaster since noah s flood well they were wrong the last six years proved them wrong and i can give you example after example after example every time americans have tried to clean the air to clean the water to look to the future there have been those who said if you do this it will wreck the economy now let s use our imagination every time you figure out how to make the water cleaner someone has to discover something someone has to make it someone has to adapt all the machinery to use it that creates a lot of jobs every time you figure out how to run a car on natural gas or on electricity you create a whole new set of jobs for people every time you figure out how to advance the cause of clean water when we have to deal with the challenges of cleaning up the ocean which will be a huge challenge that will directly affect the lives and the quality of life of every child in this audience it will create a lot of jobs we have got to get over this idea that protecting our environment and the quality of our lives is somehow bad for the economy it will be one of the cheap generators of high wage jobs in the 21st century and i hope you here in rhode island will lead the way with the strong support of your congressional delegation we have launched an historic plan to help communities clean up our rivers and streams because every river in america should be healthy enough for our children to fish and swim as i think at least one of your members said earlier the balanced budget i signed in october will allow us to protect dozens of more natural and historic sites around the country including the rhode island national wildlife refuge complex the last remaining undeveloped coastal habitat in southern new england and i thank all the officials here and the vice president who also lobbied very strongly for this now we are moving forward we also had as you heard two rhode island rivers and since you pronounced cryptosporidium senator reed i will try to pronounce the woonasquatucket river and the blackstone river as american heritage rivers we re working with you to solve the problems that led to beach closings and to restore critical habitats damaged by the north cape oil spill we must restore your valuable lobster fishery and preserve forever the health of your cherished coast we also have to do more on the water we drink as senator chafee said with his great help and others we strengthened the safe drinking water act two years ago with a virtually unanimous vote in congress to zero in on contaminants that posed the greatest threat to help communities upgrade treatment plants like the fine one i just visited this past summer i announced a new rule requiring utilities across the country to provide their customers regular reports on the quality of their drinking water when it comes to the water our children drink americans cannot be too vigilant today i want to announce three other actions i am taking first we re escalating our attack on the invisible microbes that sometimes creep into the water supply you heard senator reed refer to the tragic episode five years ago early in my presidency in milwaukee when cryptosporidium contaminated the city s drinking water killing dozens of people and literally making more than 400 000 people sick today the new standards we put in place will significantly reduce the risk from cryptosporidium and other microbes to ensure that no community ever has to endure an outbreak like the one the people of milwaukee suffered second we are taking steps to ensure that when we treat our water we do it as safely as possible one of the great health advances to the 20th century is the control of typhoid cholera and other diseases with disinfectants most of the children in this audience have never heard of typhoid or cholera but their grandparents cowered in fear of it and their great grandparents took it as a fact of life that it would take away significant numbers of the young people of their generation but as with so many advances there are trade offs we now see that some of the disinfectants we use to protect our water can actually combine with natural substances to create harmful compounds so today i m announcing new standards to significantly reduce our exposure to these harmful byproducts to give our families greater peace of mind with their water the third thing we are doing today is to help communities meet these higher standards releasing almost 800 million to help communities in all 50 states to upgrade their drinking water systems including more than 7 million for communities right here in rhode island to give 140 million americans safer drinking water now this is the sort of thing that we ought to be doing in america tending to america s business reaching across party lines looking into the future thinking about our children i think it is a very important day let me say that as you think about the future i hope you will think about how america will look in 10 or 20 or 30 years i hope you will tell all your elected representatives with regard to party we re on the edge of a new century and a new millennium we re in a period of unusual economic prosperity we have the confidence we have the resources and we have the knowledge necessary to deal with these big challenges you don t have every every year in life when you can deal with the big challenges how many times in your own lives have you had to worry about just how you were going to put the next meal on the table how you were going to confront the next family emergency how you were going to deal with the issue right in front of you countries are like that too but now we have this chance this precious chance to think about our children and our grandchildren and the big problems that they face the environment is one of them we ought to seize this chance and do it for our children thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton3 12 99 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you secretary herman and council of economic advisors chairman martin baily and especially thank you marvin dawkins for your remarks and for the power of your example this is a very different time than we were experiencing seven years ago this month when i ran for president in 1992 it was a time of economic distress and uncertainty for our country while some people were moving from the industrial to the information economy with optimism and purpose many others felt fear and uncertainty because of the problems in our economy high unemployment big deficits high interest rates low productivity gains falling real wages for average americans too many americans couldn t tell the story that marvin just told they lacked the skills they needed to succeed in the new economy they felt threatened by the changes and they had no access to the tools that would lift them up but when i traveled around the country in 1992 with the vice president we saw a lot of signs of hope we saw a lot of people who were winning and we became even more convinced that our country as a whole could do very well in this new global information economy if we could create the conditions and provide all americans the tools necessary to succeed it seemed to me that there were three absolutely pivotal elements first fiscal discipline we had to get rid of the deficit and get interest rates back down and get investment back up second expanded trade we had 4 percent of the world s people and 22 percent of the world s income even someone technologically challenged like me could figure out we had to sell something to the other 96 percent of the people on the globe and third greater investments in new technologies and in our people in their capacity not only to know what they needed to know but to learn for a lifetime and people like marvin dawkins are exhibit a of the pivotal importance of that now in 1993 we put in place a new economic strategy it cut the deficit and increased investment by eliminating hundreds of inessential programs and putting us on a path that now has given us the smallest federal government in 37 years in 1997 with the balanced budget act we continued the strategy again increasing investment cutting inessential programs first balancing the budget and then providing the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years thank you now that led to lower interest rates which helped ordinary americans in all kinds of ways it cut the price of the average home mortgage by 2 000 the price of the average car payments by 200 a year the average college loan payment by 200 a year but critically it also cut the borrowing costs and the investment costs therefore for new businesses especially for investment in new productivity enhancing technologies at the same time we negotiated over 270 trade agreements including dozens of them involving high technology issues all of which helped americans to increase exports of high technology products services we promoted more competition in telecommunications providing american consumers with the lowest internet access rates in the world and fueling the growth of e commerce and we ve taken actions that have led to the creation of a whole new generation of digital wireless phones you know the kind you hear go off in restaurants movie theaters and presidential press conferences while eliminating hundreds of programs we have almost doubled our investment in education and training everything from preschool to dramatically increasing college access to establishing lifetime access to training and retraining programs for people like marvin now as a result of these actions and most importantly the innovation and the hard work of the american people we are now experiencing an amazing virtuous cycle of progress and prosperity that few could have imagined we are in the midst of the longest peacetime economic expansion in american history if as seems highly likely it goes on through february it will become the longest economic expansion in our history it has given us low inflation the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years also the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the highest homeownership ever recorded the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded the lowest african american poverty rate ever recorded the lowest hispanic poverty rate recorded in a generation the lowest poverty rate among households headed by single adults in over 40 years and the lowest unemployment rate among women in 40 years in other words a good economy has also turned out to be very good social policy more and more americans are mastering the skills and reaping the benefits of this new economy and america itself continues to lead in new technologies from e commerce to biotech that are shaping the future of the entire world now today i want to talk about one more piece of stunningly good economic news that is the direct result of the actions that have been taken and the work that has been done by our people to propel our economy into the new century now we have a high tech animation behind me to illustrate this good economic news i hate to compete with the movies and i ll probably lose but the idea is that i m supposed to be the narrator of this show what you see behind me is a graphic representation of the growth of new jobs in america beginning in 1993 as well as the geographic location of these jobs you can see they have been spread across the country wherever people live virtually no area of our nation has been left out at the bottom you can also see a running tally of how many new jobs have been created and i m ahead of the running tally but the latest figures are being released today come along what did you say filler filler i ve never been at a loss for words with today s new numbers we have truly crossed a remarkable threshold 20 million jobs in fact the specific number behind me is 20 043 000 jobs thanks to the hard work of the american people the economic policies we have pursued to give you some idea of what this means 20 million jobs is a number greater than the population of minneapolis and st paul denver washington san francisco dallas miami buffalo cleveland and little rock combined twenty million people would fill the rose bowl to capacity 200 times over twenty million jobs are a lot of jobs and by and large those jobs are good well paying jobs jobs on which you can support a family buy a home afford a vacation save for college put away a nest egg for retirement this was made clear in a new report being released today by my council of economic advisors and the department of labor the report finally should put to rest the old myths about the new economy the 20 million new jobs we have created mostly are high wage not low wage jobs over 80 percent of them are in job categories that pay above the median wage they are mostly full time not part time in fact the proportion of americans in part time work has actually fallen a bit in the last few years finally those 20 million new jobs have benefitted not just one race or class of americans but all americans unlike the end of the last economic expansion in the 1980s when averages wages went down wages during the last four years of this expansion have gone up across the board in all income categories with some of the biggest gains coming to some of our hardest pressed working families as i said i want to say this again because i think it is worth reiterating this economy is not just 20 million new jobs and a stock market that went above 11 000 again today i never talk about it because it goes down as well as up but it s done pretty well but let me say again the lowest african american unemployment and poverty rates ever recorded and we ve been separating the figures for nearly 30 years now the lowest hispanic unemployment rate on record and the lowest hispanic poverty rate in over 25 years the highest minority homeownership on record the lowest female unemployment rate since 1953 and i don t need to remind the large group of women in this audience that in 1953 there were a lot smaller percentage of women in the work force so this is actually a much more important figure than even that number indicates now technology has been a very important part of this economic performance it has given us big productivity gains the information technology sector alone has been responsible for about a third of our economic growth and jobs in that sector pay nearly 80 percent more than the private sector average if we want our current prosperity to continue into the 21st century we must therefore clearly continue to encourage the creation and the spread of new technologies in our own economy therefore i would like to highlight a couple of things that i think are of real importance in the budget agreement achieved with congress that i signed just a few days ago first the budget i signed contains substantial increases in direct federal investment and long term research and development this is still very important as all the private sector experts tell us it is the kind of investment that allowed the defense department to create the predecessor of today s internet 30 years ago that led marc andreessen working at a federally funded supercomputer center to develop the first graphical web browser we worked hard to get increases not only for biomedical research that had strong support in our congress but for other science and engineering disciplines as well and i would like to make this point very strongly because it s one that i hope to make more progress on next year and hope to see our country embrace as a policy across the board without regard to party it is very important that we have a balanced research portfolio and i don t believe that the national institutes of health has had a stronger supporter than me i believe that but we have to have a balanced research portfolio because the research enterprise is increasingly interdependent advances in health care for example are often dependent on breakthroughs in other disciplines such as the physics needed for medical imaging technology or the computer science needed to develop more drugs more rapidly or to continue the mapping of the human genome just think what these investments could mean today scientists and engineers all over the country have ideas for new technologies they need federal help to explore technologies that could transform our economy and our lives in the future just as dramatically as the internet is doing today and there is really a continuing revolution as we all know in all kinds of computer technology in biomedical research and also in materials development which i ll say a little more about we ll have new materials as strong as steel but 10 times lighter at the detroit auto show this year they were already showing cars 500 to 1 000 pounds lighter that have exactly the same safety tests as the old cars with steel obviously that dramatically increases mileage that reduces greenhouse gas emissions we could have new drugs that might cure spinal cord injuries or new computer chips that might simulate nerve movements that allow people to function without the nerves actually being reconnected just before i walked out here this is ironic just before we walked out here we had cnn on in the little ante room and they pointed out that stevie wonder was about to have experimental surgery to have a computer chip inserted in his retina to see if it can simulate and recreate the functioning that was lost when he was an infant and we obviously all hope it will work but i can tell you this someday such things will work and it won t be very long in the future we already have fuel cells and blended fuel engines for automobiles which will take mileage up to 70 and 80 miles a gallon we will soon have i believe ultra clean fuel cells for cars whose only byproduct will be water clean enough to drink computers that can translate english into foreign languages and vice versa as fast as people can speak all these thing are right around the corner but we have to continue our commitment to research second later this month i will sign a tax measure that extends for five years the life of the vitally important research and experimentation tax credit thank you this is important because this tax credit gives private firms the incentives they need to invest in innovative technologies that often don t show up quickly on the bottom line but that over the long run will be highly profitable and that immediately provide tremendous benefits to society as a whole third last week i signed legislation to help accelerate competition in the telecommunication industry to give consumers more choices and lower prices i also signed a bill to strengthen and streamline our patent and intellectual property system to strengthen the incentives for the next alexander graham bell or steve jobs to create the inventions and innovations that will drive the 21st century economy no one today can say for sure what our economy will look like in 25 or 50 years or what as yet unimagined technologies will transform our lives but we do know that it will be truly amazing and it will happen with breathtaking speed and scope and we know that our nation has always prospered when government has invested in giving people the opportunity to make the most of their vision and their dreams from financing the louisiana purchase and the lewis and clark expedition to the interstate highway system and the space program the american people have always been a bold and innovative bunch we are always drawn to uncharted lands over the next horizon who will pack our bags and head out to the latest gold rush or tinker in our basements for years to invent a product no one else has ever imagined that s what we do today thanks to wise investments made by government and the private sector over many years the american people have before them the unexplored continent of cyberspace and the prospect of discovering what is in the black holes in outer space by continuing these commitments we can celebrate more days like today thank you very much thank you dem wjclinton3 2 96 bill_clinton thank you very much hello thank you very much sergeant robidas for your introduction and for your fine work thank you nancy tessier for your work at the beech street school and for your support of community policing chief favreau to the concord police chief dave walchak who is a great honor for new hampshire he s the president of the international association of police chiefs and we re glad to have you here i want to thank the others who have been with me today your united states attorney paul gagnon the u s marshal ray gagnon the hillsborough county attorney peter mcdonough and i thank father adrian longchamps who met with me today i want to thank the police officers in particular who visited with me just a moment ago at the community station tyron guice and nick willard and i want to say to mr byron the police officer who was standing here to my right right before i came up here he said mr president this is the best job i ever had i love doing this work i want to thank two others who are in our group today pauline coat the executive director of the manchester neighborhood services and in some ways the linchpin of this whole experiment alice septin who is the head of the take back our neighborhood corporation let s give her a big hand thank you alice i thank all the community police officers who are here all those who participated in operation street sweeper i thank the dare students and the people in the dare program who are here let s give them a big hand and i thank the americorp members who are here from salem for their work and their progress thank you very much it is wonderful to be back in new hampshire great to be back in manchester and great to be talking about an issue that i discussed a great deal with the people of new hampshire back in 1992 which is now a reality on the streets of manchester and throughout the united states let me begin by saying that as all of you know in my state of the union address i tried to outline for our country what i believe the challenges are that we face today and those that we will face in the years ahead and what i think we all have to do to meet those challenges and how i see the nation s government s role in working with the american people to meet them this is an age of great possibility there are more good things available to more people here than ever before but it is also an age of very stiff challenge more and more people have to work harder just to keep up in this new economy we still have too much crime and violence we still have a lot of other problems so the great challenge for us is how to expand opportunity to more americans how to bring this country together around our core values how to maintain our country s leadership for freedom and for peace the first thing we have to do is to finish the work of yesterday that means we have to pass the right kind of balanced budget plan that eliminates the deficit but also protects our obligations to our parents to our children and to our future through our investments in the programs of medicare medicaid environmental protection and educational opportunities and let me emphasize again with all the work that i have done with the republican congressional leaders and the democratic congressional leaders there are now more than enough savings that are common to both our plans to pass that kind of balance budget plan and i hope we will do it and do it soon after we do that we will still be left with the challenges we face and i have identified seven that i think are the greatest challenges for our country of which taking back our streets and making america safe is one and in some cases the most fundamental we have to do more to strengthen our families we have to do more to provide educational opportunity for all we have to do more to provide economic security to people who are working hard but aren t getting raises and don t have access to health care and stable pensions and lifetime education and training opportunities we have to do more to clean our environment and protect it and to grow the economy while cleaning up the environment instead of destroying it we have to do more to fight the problems we face to our security terrorism weapons of mass destruction working in concert with others for peace we have to change the way the government works to increase your sense of confidence in it when i ran here in 1994 i identified four things i thought ought to be done to reform the way the government works the congress has done two of those things this year and i applaud them they passed a very tough reform bill on lobbying to limit what congress can take from lobbyists and to require lobbyists to disclose how much money they spend and on what that was a good thing they passed a bill to require congress to live under the laws that are imposed on the private sector that was a good thing i believe your former congressman was one of the original sponsors of that legislation dick swett that s a good thing now there are two other things we need to do this year we need to pass the line item veto that they have pledged to pass for me and we need to pass meaningful campaign finance reform it is very important it can be done it ought to be done but there s one other thing i want to say a great part of this debate in washington is about what the national government s responsibility is and the way you ve heard this debate over the last 15 years has often been big government is getting in the way of the american economy big government is undermining the independence of the american community big government is weakening not strengthening the american family i have to tell you that i think that is the wrong debate the era of big government is over our administration has eliminated 16 000 pages of federal regulations hundreds of programs thousands of unnecessary offices the government is over 200 000 people smaller today than it was the day i took the oath of office as president but the issue is not big government versus small government the issue is what is your responsibility through the national government to work to help people make the most of their own lives to work to help communities solve their own problems and meet their own challenges that is the issue and if you look at the challenge we have to take our streets back to make them safe again i am very gratified at what we are doing but we ve got a long way to go i m gratified that the crime rate is down here i am gratified that the crime rate is down all over america i think it s wonderful that new york city had the biggest drop in crime since 1972 i think it is wonderful that houston has the lowest murder rate it s had in 19 years i think these are good things but we all know that our job will not be over until crime and violence are the exception not the rule until every neighborhood can say what i heard the people in this neighborhood say to me a few moments ago that people now can walk outside and walk down the street and they don t have to be afraid that the police are there at the play yard talking to the kids and they know them by name that people feel secure you can t eliminate the darkness that lurks in human nature there will never be a time when there is absolutely no crime in america when there is absolutely no violence but we can go back to the days when it s the exception not the rule and people have their freedom on the streets of this country now my philosophy has been all along that if we could identify a national challenge and an idea that works it was a legitimate thing for the government in washington your government to define the what what is the challenge and then to help people to meet that challenge but the people at the grass roots level should define how to do it that people in washington should not be telling people how to do it that s what we do here in our education reforms we said okay here are some national standards we ought to meet you figure out how to do it in welfare reform we said we want to move people from welfare to work we want people to be better parents and effective workers and break the cycle of dependence but any state that s got a better idea about how to do it we ought to give you permission to try we did it in health care we said if you can find a way to slow health care costs and expand health coverage to people who are working through the medicaid program we ll give you a chance to determine how to do that and we ve given more permission to more state and local governments to do more things in the last three years than the previous administrations did in 12 years before me i believe in giving states and localities and private citizens the right to determine the how but the what in the case of crime is a national problem crime and violence is a national problem and we know that community policing which you celebrate here in manchester is what is working everywhere just a couple of weeks ago one of our major national news magazines had a cover story on turning the corner in the war against crime and the police commissioner from new york city was featured on the cover as a stand in for all the police officers everywhere and their community supporters who are working to make projects like this work consider what has happened the streets of new hampshire are safer today because under the crime bill that we passed providing for community policing there are 132 new police officers in communities all across this state but they aren t just there as police officers they re also changing what they re doing they are working with community groups like the community groups in this neighborhood they are working not just to catch more criminals but to prevent crime from occurring in the first place and to make streets inhospitable places for the return of crime and drugs and gangs and violence and it is working we need to do more of it i heard the story of a nine year old girl who told an officer working in one of your community substations that her mother now allows her to play outside because the police had made it safe isn t that the story you want every child in america to be able to tell shouldn t every child in america be able to tell that story i was very moved by the grit and the determination of the people that i saw in the community substation today and by their sense that they could make a difference one of the things that i constantly battle as your president is the feeling too many americans have that their efforts won t make a difference anymore too many people seem to believe that we can t do better and if one message comes out of this trip i took to manchester this morning should go out all over america is when it comes to crime and violence we can do better you have done better in manchester people are doing better all over this country we can take our streets and our neighborhoods back but it will require a partnership between people in law enforcement community leaders and grass roots citizens we have to do it together no one can do it alone but together we can all do it and that is the central lesson the united states has to face today i want to be absolutely frank in saying that while i think it would be a disastrous mistake for the congress to reverse course on the crime bill and not to continue until we have put the full complement of 100 000 police officers on our street in just a little over a year and a half we re already a third of the way home congress must not turn around i want to be frank in saying to you that we could put all these police officers out in departments all across america and if we didn t have community leaders who were prepared to take their streets and neighborhoods back if we didn t have schools that were prepared to support the police if we didn t have parents like those that help this substation here get decorated for christmas and support them we could put the police officers out there and we still wouldn t succeed it requires both a commitment to putting the police back on the street and in the neighborhoods and a commitment from citizens to win the war against crime every american should be challenged to join a neighborhood watch group if you see somebody in trouble to pick up a phone and call for help to spend a few hours every week helping out young people who need a helping hand from a caring adult through a boys club a girls club a dare program or some other constructive way to get our kids off to a good start in life neighbors helping neighbors friends sticking up for friends parents teaching children the difference between right and wrong establishing bonds of trust between police officers and people in the communities all these things must also be done but the good news is it can make a difference and what we celebrate today i believe is a model of the kind of partnerships we need in america you have a president and a national government that says here is the problem there is too much crime and violence we know something that works everywhere it s been tried and done right community based policing so we will pass a bill to provide incentives to help communities hire these police officers but they must decide we said the what they have to decide the how we make no judgments about who gets hired about how they get trained about how they re deployed and we can t begin to say whether or not there is a community group supporting or working with them so it never works unless you supply the how you fill in all the blanks you take your communities back you make the most of the potential you give your children a chance to live up their god given abilities that is the model america must adopt for dealing with all the great challenges we face today partnership working together there is no more issue of big government but i am telling you we cannot afford to say we re going to go back to the time when everybody just fends for themselves the only way we re going to solve the problems we ve got today is to work together where everybody plays their role we do it and we make a difference and let me just say a critical component of this is building some trust again between law enforcement officers and people in the community one of the most painful experiences i ve had as president was the loss of trust i felt in a lot of places like new hampshire and my home state of arkansas when the law enforcement officers came to us and they said if you want us to do the job you have got to pass the brady bill and you ve got to give us the ability to get these assault weapons off the street where people can t be sprayed innocently while they re walking up and down the block we ve got to do it but then when we tried to do that we found that in a lot of states like new hampshire and arkansas where half the people have a hunting or a fishing license or both there were a lot of people who said well this is going to take away my gun this is going to be a terrible thing this is going to erode the right to keep and bear arms this is going to undermine our hunting culture and frankly it s hard with as much distrust of government as there was out there to break through that but now i ve been here in new hampshire this is my second day and i ve heard all of these fellas bragging on the deer season we just had and not a single person lost their deer rifle but we ve got 44 000 people with criminal records who did not get handguns last year because of the brady bill so we are trying to help our police officers be safer and keep these assault weapons out of the hands of gang members but no one has lost a weapon a sporting weapon a hunting weapon and maybe now that time has passed we can rebuild the bonds of trust there too because the overwhelming majority of sportsmen in this country sportsmen and women are honest good law abiding people and we need everybody working together to whip this problem of crime and violence and now i saw it today and i heard all of you talking about the bonds of trust increasing in this community that s what we need more of in america you know most people are good people most people get up every day and do the best they can to do the right things and we all look at each other sometimes with too much distrust again i say if we can overcome that we can solve any problem but i hope all americans will look to manchester and we ll look to other communities where the crime rate is going down and i hope they will say number one we don t have to put up with this anymore we don t have to put up with streets where our kids can t walk safely we don t have to put up with neighborhoods where good decent people don t want to live anymore we don t have to move away to feel safe in our own homes there is another way and a better way but secondly that better way requires both more police officers in my community and my neighborhood walking my streets and my personal involvement and my trust and our sense of partnership and community if we have that we can not only take our streets back and make our country safe we can deal with any other challenge the american people face if you look at our whole history there has never been a single solitary time when american failed when america worked together and that s what we have to do today thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton3 3 00a bill_clinton thank you very much the first thing i would like to say to you after thank you for the warm welcome is that this is not the first time i have come here to campaign for senator feinstein s re election in fact i m an old hand at this i came here in 94 to campaign for senator feinstein s re election and she stayed in washington i had to do it all by myself so it s nice to be here with the evidence of my argument i thank you very much i also want to thank senator barbara boxer and stu for being here and representative barbara lee who is also off to a very fast start the women from california in the senate and the house have defied all of the preconceptions about how long it takes to become effective in the congress it could have something to do with that practical instinct of worrying more about what you re doing than where you re sitting and they have really really done a good job i thank the mccarthy s for chairing this event and as you said i can t remember anybody who ever got more done in her first term in the senate than diane feinstein and i want you to know i m here for many reasons and i m not running for anything and on most days i m okay with it but i care a great deal about not whether we re going to change but how we re going to change and where we re going from here and one of the things that i always admired about diane feinstein and her husband dick who s been giving me training in how to be a senate spouse stu boxer and dick and i decided that we would start right now planning for next year we re looking for a fourth for golf for tea for whatever we re open life s funny isn t it i mean really it s great let me say one of the things that i really admire maybe the thing i admire most about diane feinstein is first of all she cares about a lot of things how many conversations have we had about china about tibet about different parts of the world about saving the california redwoods which meant a lot to me too about setting aside the desert now we have two national parks it s meant a lot to me too about taking on this gun issue which i started to try to do with the brady bill concept as governor more than 16 years ago and i backed off to my everlasting regret when i became president i promised myself as long as i was standing i would do it and she s been a great ally and i thank her for that but one thing that diane does that sometimes politicians in both parties especially when you get in washington and you get all caught up in this atmosphere you know and you spend all your time watching talk shows do you realize that if you ve got a halfway good cable selection you don t ever have to watch anything but talk shows anymore and do you realize to get on one all you have to do is take a firm position and never change your mind and it s better if you don t know anything actually if you have any evidence any background any real policy knowledge it s a terrific encumbrance because you re supposed to be shouting to great effect on these programs now we re all laughing but you know it s pretty close to the truth and diane you know she s like me we re still under the illusion that when you elect us to these things they re actually jobs and we re supposed to get up and go to work every day and like your job it yields to effort i mean it really makes a difference if you pass a few days in the headlines to figure out what actually ought to be in the bill and then if you actually pass a law it can really change people s lives now you re laughing but i m telling you you have no idea how hard it is to concentrate on your job if you live in washington today barbara is nodding her head representative lee is nodding her head we live in this sort of constant culture of critiquing and carping and talking and who s up and who s down and who s in and who s out and i wanted to be here tonight i m proud to show up for somebody who still believes being a united states senator is one of the most important jobs in the world and with effort you can get results which change people s lives for the better and that is the measure of public service and she fulfills it and now the second reason i m here is to tell you i want you to go vote on tuesday i can t vote in this primary but i hope you ll vote you ve got a big ballot you ll have an opportunity to vote for things that will affect your future and to send a signal where california is i hope you ll vote as diane said for proposition 26 why because it ll build people up because we re going to have 2 million teachers retire in the next few years as our student bodies get larger because we ve got already untold numbers of kids in schools that are either overcrowded or tumbling down and because california has shown a commitment to turn around failing schools to adopt charter schools to try things that will work and you need to get all the roadblocks out of your way to building your children s future and for me i hope you ll vote against proposition 22 i want to say i ll say more about this in a minute because however you stand on the question of gay marriage and i realize that san francisco is different from the rest of california is different from the rest of america but that s not what is at stake here this initiative will have no practical effect whatever this is a solution in search of a problem that isn t there so people are being asked to vote on this to get everybody in a white heat and to divide people at a time when you know look around folks we just had this little six year old girl killed in michigan by a six year old boy who got a gun that was stolen that he shouldn t have been able to get his hands on that s a problem we ought to be working on you had a guy flip out in western pennsylvania and start shooting people at random apparently out of his imagined grievance that had some racial basis you had a guy in los angeles shoot at jewish kids kids who were going to school just because they were jewish and then he killed a filipino postal worker just because he was a filipino and he worked for the federal government he had double satisfaction you had matthew shepard stretched out on a rack in wyoming you had james byrd dragged to death in texas you had this guy who said he belonged to a church that didn t believe in god but did believe in white supremacy kill a korean christian walking out of his church and the former basketball coach of northwestern an african american last year and i could go on and on we ve had all the turmoil in new york city over this diallo case and i don t want as i said before i don t pretend for a moment to second guess the jury i didn t sit there and listen to the evidence but i know most people in america of all races believe that if it had been a young white man in a young all white neighborhood it probably wouldn t have happened that doesn t mean they were guilty under criminal law and the justice department is looking into that and the civil rights division and that s the way to handle that but what it does mean is there s this huge gulf out there still in too many places where people wonder if they can be treated fairly so what i m trying to do the reason i ran for president was that the country was in trouble california was in real trouble back in 92 and washington was dominated by sort of a talk show mentality and the congress too and in the white house did you get your 10 seconds on the news tonight and the only way you could get it is if you were bombing the other side and there was the liberal position and there was the conservative position there was the democrat position and there was a republican position and we were supposed to get in here and basically fight and it didn t matter if anything ever got done and i thought to myself you know i ve been a governor for 10 years i thought if i ran my state that way we d be in the ditch if you ran your business that way you would be broke and if we ran our homes that way the divorce rate would be 100 percent i mean this is it was crazy and what i want you to think about tonight is this i thank diane and others who have been so generous so many of you said to me tonight kind things about my service for which i am grateful but i want you to think about that tonight elections are about the future america has stayed young by thinking about tomorrow and the point i want to make to you if you like the fact that america is doing well the only way we can continue to do well is to keep striving to do better because the world is changing very rapidly and because there are still unsolved problems and un seized opportunities in this country and that s what this election is about diane mentioned a few of them how are we going to keep the economy going how are we going to bring economic opportunity to people in places that have been left behind the mississippi delta where i come from the rio grande valley where i was last week the pine ridge indian reservation and other reservations where unemployment runs as high as 70 percent the inner city neighborhoods in california and elsewhere where there is still an unemployment rate two three four times the national average what are we going to do to reach them the rest of us need that if you want to keep doing well you ve got to try to do better why because if you invest there you get inflation free growth that benefits everyone else we re living in a time where economically doing the morally right thing happens to be good for you too equal pay for equal work for women is morally right it s good for the economy raising the minimum wage is good for the economy closing the digital divide is good for the economy i was out in northern california a couple of months ago and i was with some ebay executives who informed me that 20 000 americans now make a living on ebay not working for ebay trading on ebay and they ve done a profile of these people and lo and behold they found that a lot of them used to be on welfare so what happened that little computer when the digital divide was bridged i believe intelligence is equally distributed across racial and income lines and i grew up in one of the poorest places in america and some of the smartest people i ever met i had known by the time i was 10 years old i ve always felt that luck had something to do with the fact that i was standing here even though all politicians want you to believe they were born in log cabins they built themselves but anyway consider this what does it mean that 20 000 people are making a living on ebay and some of them used to be on welfare it means if you bridge the digital divide you collapse the distance not only between people who are physically isolated from markets and opportunities but may be isolated from bank loans isolated from education isolated from other things so it s a big question how are you going to educate all these kids i mentioned proposition 26 california is doing better with the most diverse student body in the country but i can tell you we ve got a lot to do but we know what to do i was laughing with some of my old governor friends the other day we didn t always know what to do now we know how to turn failing schools around it s just a question of whether we re prepared to invest the money and the time and the effort and the discipline and the accountability and give the support to the kids in trouble with after school and summer school and mentoring and other programs to do what needs to be done but we know what to do now how are you going to help people to balance work and family are we going to do more about child care or not i could go on and on how are we going to make efforts to continue to grow the economy and improve the environment it is now no longer necessary to degrade the environment to grow the economy this is a digital economy we don t have to do that anymore and for those of you that are younger than me i ll make you a prediction within 20 years it will become clear and probably within a decade that the only way to improve the economy is to continue to improve the environment there is a trillion dollar market out there for people who are committed to new technologies to combat global warming now how are we going to make the most of the scientific technical revolution what does it mean that we re going to sequence the human genome what will it be like when we can cure all kinds of cancers when there are just a few cells forming so there s no possibility of metastasis what will it mean when we can block the defective genes that cause alzheimer s or diabetes or parkinson s what will it mean if you live to be 65 in america your average life expectancy is already 82 diane told me tonight that there were three people that she knew of that were 90 years old in this audience can you imagine just 10 years ago you d never go to a group like this at this hour of the night and find three people who were 90 years old true ten years from now 10 years from now you will come to a meeting like this and there will be 25 people that are 90 years old now what does all this mean to us what does it mean to say we re in a global economy in a global society what are our responsibilities for those poor people that are clinging for life on those trees in mozambique tonight was i right or wrong to send the nato planes the american planes in so that the people could go home in kosovo these are big questions what are our obligations to the peace process in the middle east in northern ireland in the tribal wars in africa what is it that binds us together as a people that s what this election is about you ve got to think about these big things don t get into this sort of old broken record kind of cheap slug mentality in this election this is a big election and it s not about what will get you 15 seconds on the evening news or what makes for a hard punch on a talk show this country is doing well because we have been animated by good ideas new ideas rooted in basic values opportunities for all responsibility from all a community of all americans it s working because we have our crowd does in washington some basic ideas we think everybody is important everyone matters we think everybody ought to get a chance we think everybody s got a role to play we think we all do better when we help each other that s what we believe now the results are pretty encouraging but i am imploring you do not be lulled into a false sense of confidence or think for a moment it does not matter whether you keep looking to tomorrow or whether you exert particular efforts to vote in the elections this year i want to close with a little story which will betray my age over thanksgiving i had the kids of friends of ours over hillary and i had a couple friends and their kids come stay with us and this one beautiful little girl looked up at me she was six years old and she said how old are you anyway and i said well mary i m 53 and she said that s a lot and to those of you who are younger i will say and to those of you who are older you know what i m saying it is a lot but it doesn t take long to live a life no matter how long it is when we passed this milestone this month and we had the longest economic expansion in history i went back and studied the last economic expansion in history do you know when the record was that we broke nineteen sixty one to 1969 now let me tell you a little something from my 53 years of life in 1964 i finished high school our country had been heartbroken by president kennedy s assassination but then we had rallied behind president johnson and he was wildly popular because we had an economy we thought would go on forever high growth low inflation low unemployment we were passing civil rights bills right and left in the united states congress and most people believed we would actually solve the problems of race through the laws through congress and the courts the vietnam war had not yet manifested itself in the way it later did and most people believed that we would prevail in the cold war which we subsequently did but most people thought we would do it without torment turmoil and division so we were feeling pretty cool in the summer of 1964 we thought we d have social justice economic progress and freedom and national security in the world and it would just happen that s what we thought when i graduated from high school not long after that we had the watts riots not long after that the streets of every major city were filled with anti war demonstrations within four years when i graduated from college at georgetown it was two days after robert kennedy had been killed two months after martin luther king had been killed nine weeks after lyndon johnson said he wouldn t run for re election our country was split right down the middle over the vietnam war and in just a couple of months president nixon would be elected president on the first of our campaigns of division you may remember he said he was representing the silent majority which meant the rest of us i guess were in the loud minority but the message was clear america is divided into two camps us and them and anybody who s not with us is them and we ve been us ing and them ing ever since in some way or another and ever since i ran in 1992 i have done my best to heal those breaches and to bring us together and to get us to let go of some of that stuff that poison that venom that need we always seem to have to be divided one from another but i tell you this because when i was 18 in 1964 times were just about like they are now and i thought it would all be fine and in next to no time all the wheels ran off and by 1967 everything was divided and within a few more months in 1968 within a few more months our expansion came to an end i say this to you not as your president but as a citizen i have waited for 35 years for my country to be in a position to build the future of our dreams for our children that all of us could be a part of not just those of us that are wealthy enough to come here but the people that were good enough to serve us tonight not just those of us that are doing great and have lived most of our lives but those of us that are just beginning but i remember don t you be overconfident don t you be overcasual you know in life we re always lucky when we get a second chance and most of us are lucky to have had more than one but a country is indeed graced by god to get a second chance i m glad i helped to build america s second chance these last seven years we ve got it now i ve waited 35 years to see it that s why i m for diane feinstein that s why i m traipsing all over the country trying to get people to think about this and when this political debate goes on don t you get caught in all this little stuff you lift this country up lift the people in your community up tell the people why they ought to vote remind them of how we lost our last expansion think about all the possibilities for the future be big be big and remember we all do better when we help each other and the only way to keep doing well is to be committed to doing better thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton3 3 00b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you very much eric i appreciate your kind remarks except i don t want you telling anybody that i m delighted to be here with my friend reed hundt our former fcc chairman and president johnson thank you for having us here at the aspen institute senator feinstein thank you for coming out with me this morning along with congresswoman tauscher and i thank representative eshoo for coming and representative lofgren for welcoming us to her district governor leavitt thank you for being here governor leavitt is the leader of the governors this year he just spent three days with me in washington i thought he would find something else to do if he spends any more time with me they ll run him out the republican party however being a baptist not a mormon i believe in deathbed conversions you re always welcome over here i want to thank mayor gonzalez for welcoming us and i thank mayor menino for being here and our former governors roy romer and gaston kaperton and former mayor schmoke from baltimore and i thank bill kennard our present fcc chair for coming out with me today i do want to talk a little bit about the meaning of this 50th anniversary of the aspen institute but because this is my only opportunity to speak to the american people through the press today there is a late developing event last night in the congress i d like to comment on related to the gun violence and what our national response should be in the wake of the tragic shootings this week over the last couple of days i have once again asked congress to meet and pass common sense gun safety legislation that they ve been sitting on for eight months let me mention in the aftermath of the columbine shootings i asked the congress to pass legislation that would provide for child trigger locks on all guns close the loophole in the brady law which requires background checks for guns bought at gun shops but not at gun shows or urban flea markets and ban the importation of large capacity ammunition clips which are now illegal under the assault weapons ban that senator feinstein gave us if they re domestic and i asked for also a national law on adult supervision responsibility if children were recklessly allowed to get guns and that s of course exactly what happened in the case the tragic case in michigan well anyway eight months ago the house passed a version and the senate passed a version and from my point of view the senate bill was much better it was much stronger and it passed when the vice president cast the tie breaking vote but for eight months there s been no action on this legislation so i asked for it well last night senator boxer offered a non binding resolution that would put the senate on record as saying we need to pass common sense gun safety legislation now and after all we went through this week the resolution failed on a 49 49 tie with 100 percent of the democratic senators and 10 percent of the republican senators voted for it and 90 percent of the republican senators voted against it now this is not a partisan issue i don t believe anywhere but washington d c again it s a great credit you ve got to give credit where credit is due it s a great credit to the power of the nra in washington just this morning they said they were going to launch a 20 million campaign to target members of congress who do this kind of thing try to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children and right now they re running ads that treat the possibility that we could have technology to develop smart guns that is guns that could only be fired by their owners as some sort of a joke well i don t think it s very funny when a six year old can pick up a gun and go shoot another six year old and a child safety lock would have prevented it smart gun technology would have prevented it we know the brady background check law has kept half a million felons fugitives and stalkers from getting guns and i think that we ought to close the loophole that allows a lot of people to buy at these gun shows and not do the background checks they work and i believe and i know senator feinstein believes that we ought to ask handgun owners to have a license the way we ask drivers to do but the main thing i want to talk about now there is a practical bill before the congress which would deal with the fact that we re losing 12 kids a day to gun violence and in addition to the intentional deaths the accidental death rates of children under 15 by guns is nine times higher in the united states than in the next 24 biggest industrial countries combined so i ask you i know i didn t come here to talk about this and i know the american people may think i m a broken record about it but i think the older you get you said something about when you get to 50 you begin to whatever you said about being 50 i m not so sure the vice president once gave me a birthday present that said that the cherokees believed that people didn t achieve full maturity until they were 51 all i know is that if you ve ever had a child everything else seems small by comparison including the most wonderful job in the world and i think this is crazy what we re doing i come from a state where half the people have a hunting and fishing license i fired my first 22 when i was 10 11 12 years old this has nothing to do with any of this we are a big complex society and we can save more of our children we ve got a 30 year low in the murder rate 30 year low in the gun death rate but we can make this the safest big country in the world and we can do it without undermining the personal liberties of other people so i hope you ll forgive me but i wanted to say that get that off my chest and ask them to send me the bill in the next few days thank you now i think it was interesting i was thinking about what things were like when the aspen institute started 50 years ago the first conference took place as scientists were close to giving us our first glimpse of the double helix and there was a revolution in communications technology color television from that day to this the aspen institute has had a proud tradition of informed and enlightened dialogue on emerging national and global issues and of course i look out on this audience and some of you were referred to by me or by previous speakers that all of you are people on the front lines of change all of you are people who care very much about our future all of you are people who have a greater grasp of what is going on than most people have time to gain given their own lives and responsibilities and that s why it s important that you gather and think about these things there is no question that one of the reasons that and perhaps the primary reason this has been both the longest and the strongest economic expansion in history is because of the explosion of technology the high tech companies alone account for only 8 percent of our employment but they ve been 30 percent of our growth and perhaps even more profound the technological innovations that are the core business of many of the companies represented in this room and certainly in this area are rippling through the whole rest of the economy adding to the overall productivity of the american economy in ways that frankly have not been measurable i ll just give you one example in 1992 after the election when i gathered our economic team around the table at the governor s mansion at home in arkansas i asked these economists many of whom were young and vigorous people i said now how low can we get the unemployment rate before inflation sets in the fed will have to raise interest rates and we ll be back in the tack again how low can it go and a couple of them said 6 percent a couple of them said 5 5 percent they were universal in their belief that if we ever got the unemployment rate down to 5 percent and it stayed there we d have raging inflation and we d have to break it and it would be the end of the recovery and these were people obviously that had a they were members by and large of my party they shared my political philosophy though they had a philosophical predisposition toward believing that low unemployment was a very good thing however it was achieved yet they thought that why is that because economists had no tools as recently as 1992 to measure the impact of technology on this economy something that governor romer s son was pointing out to us before i think before anybody else at least that i know of in the country that no tools to appreciate what the impact on productivity would be and how it would rifle through the economy and lift the whole thing in a way that would enable us to have 4 percent unemployment for a sustained period of time we had the new unemployment figures come out today we had 4 1 percent and we re almost bumping 21 million new jobs now in the last seven years and the biggest concern we ve had about inflation is the rising oil prices which is part of the old economy if you will and something that has to be worked out a different way but it s very interesting and let me give you an example of why we ve had a hard time understanding what the potential of the economy is we the people who do this work started to count software investment as a part of gdp only in october of 1999 it s amazing think about this we began counting retail sales as part of gdp in 1947 and we ve done it about the same way ever since yesterday we got a new benchmark for the new economy when the department of commerce yesterday released its first ever quarterly report on e commerce telling us the internet sales interesting fourth quarter of last year the holiday season were 5 3 billion about 65 of those attributable to the president now that was more than twice the previous year but many believe that e commerce will climb to 1 3 trillion trillion a year within just the next three years when i became president in 1993 there were 50 sites on the worldwide web today there are more than 10 million i visited a company involved in the web last week in northern virginia uunet they did their first contract in 1988 by 1994 they had 40 employees they have 8 000 now so we now know that we have a new and different economy we now are beginning to figure out a how to measure it and b how to assess where tomorrow s growth will come from i also think it s very important that we assess precisely what the role of government should and should not be and i want to commend governor leavitt here for taking on the completely thankless task of trying to figure out how internet sales should be dealt with in the taxation systems of state and local government you talk about a stone dead loser it is a totally thankless i admire him for many reasons but shouldering this burden may be the most compelling example that he really has a good heart and willingness to do what has to be done but if you think about it how this is managed is an example of what will be a whole new set of questions about what the role of government should be and they can t all be answered now because things are developing too fast and let me just suggest that i think that our guideposts ought to be that we should have a government that tries its best to establish the conditions and then to give individual americans the tools necessary to make the most of this emerging economy vice president gore and i have really worked hard on that we negotiated historic trade agreements on information technology to open markets establishing conditions we tried to bring our export control policies up to date and still be sensitive to what our national security people say that s the framework the conditions maybe one of the most important things we did was to fight for the right kind of comprehensive telecommunications reform in the first overhaul of that bill in 60 years and we worked very hard in the white house to make sure that it was a reform that was oriented toward competition toward giving new firms a chance to enter new markets and entrepreneurs a chance to really create wealth and jobs out of their ideas and i think it s clear to me now looking back that the fights we waged to try to be pro competitive pro entrepreneur in that rather herculean legislative battle had even more positive impacts than i had imagined they would those are the conditions what about the tools the e rate which the fcc did and i want to thank both our former and our present chairman of the fcc for their support of this we got discounted internet rates for schools and libraries which increased the percentage of our school classrooms connected to the internet from 3 percent in 1994 when the vice president and i did our first net day in san francisco to 63 percent in 1999 and we re up to over 90 percent of the schools have at least one connection and we ll soon be at a point where the only schools that don t have at least one connection will be schools that are literally too old and decrepit to be wired which is a problem for another day but we have a lot of our urban school systems have school buildings with an average age of 65 or 70 years at the school buildings and it s a very difficult problem but we re on our way to universal student access because of the e rates otherwise without the e rate a lot of these schools could never have afforded to hook up and a lot of these small libraries in rural areas could never have afforded to hook up we ve also worked to accelerate the federal investment in research and development and to conditions to help you extend it by an extension of the research and experimentation tax credit and by expanding our national science and technology budget every year after all government funded research helped to spark everything from the internet to communication satellites this year we have proposed an increase of 600 million in information technology research and almost 500 million for a major new initiative in nanotechnology the ability to manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular level something that will in my view give you a whole new generation of revolutions in this remarkable area now we only know some of the likely developments as a result of this r d we know it is highly likely that soon we ll have technology that will put all the contents in the library of congress in a device the size of a sugar cube and find and treat cancerous tumors when they re just a few cells in size so that you won t have to have the ravages of side effects of cancer treatment and the effectiveness of the treatment will be far greater than it is today and those are only two things there are many other things if this nanotechnology business really works and we can figure out how to in effect use that to develop information storage then what will happen within a reasonably few years is literally beyond the limits of my poor imagination so i will say again but we do know this we know that whatever happens the government s role in my judgment should be to try to establish the conditions in which good people working hard will be rewarded in a way that will be positive for society as a whole and then to give people the tools to make sure that everybody has a chance no matter where they start in life that i think to me will in all probability be the key responsibilities of government for quite a long while to come and if they are well fulfilled whether it s in maintaining fiscal responsibility and paying down the debt so that there is more money available for investment capital to start all these new firms and give life to all these new ideas or investing more in education and in what works and in giving states like california that have pioneered charter schools the right to have more and the support they need to have more or giving every kid who is in a tough neighborhood the right to an after school or a summer school program those things will have to be done so that we have both the conditions and the tools consistent with a society that is both successful and genuinely egalitarian now i know that the forum on communications in society is also working hard to be a catalyst for change and for better and broader use of technology of all the areas where we might work together i would suggest that there are two which are absolutely vital to keep the information economy and all america growing strong the first is internet security and privacy and the second is closing the digital divide the first from our point of view relates to conditions the second relates to giving all americans the tools they need to make the most of their own lives in this remarkable time we know we have to keep cyberspace open and free because it sparks creativity and innovation because its infinite networks can do so much to bring us together but we also know that cyberspace must be a community of shared responsibilities and common values last month i met with high tech leaders to talk about making our networks more secure and resilient they urged the federal government to do something we have committed to do to lead by example to take that responsibility very seriously we have formed a government industry partnership for security i ve requested more than 2 billion from congress to fund cybersecurity initiatives and research today i m ordering a review of every federal agency to determine our vulnerability to denial of service attacks and to make sure that federal computers cannot be used by outsiders to attack others they will be reporting back to my chief of staff john podesta so that we can prepare a strong response and i hope industry will follow that example we must also do more to uphold americans high expectations that their right to privacy will be protected on line that includes making sure that as government works to protect our citizens in cyberspace it does not infringe on our civil liberties we must not undermine freedom in the name of freedom our administration has encouraged internet firms to work together to raise privacy standards the response has been good the share of commercial web sites with privacy policies went from 15 percent to 66 percent in just one year that s a very impressive record but the american people know it s still not enough some subjects are so sensitive i believe they should have legal protection our medical records our financial records any interactions with our children on line business must find ways to give americans the confidence they expect in these and other privacy concerns so today i think we must all ask ourselves and every one in this area do you have privacy policies you can be proud of do you have privacy policies you would be glad to have reported in the media i hope that all of you will work with us and work together among yourselves to maximize the possibilities of an open internet by securing americans fundamental right to privacy i can tell you that i spend you know one of the things i have tried to do as the president is to avoid becoming isolated from the concerns of ordinary citizens and among other things i have a special zip code for old fashioned mail at the white house that i gave to a bunch of people that i grew up with who are just citizens in all walks of life and for seven years now they ve written me about what people were mad at me about they ve written me when people thought i made a mistake they ve written me when they thought the government was totally irrelevant to their lives because they were concerned about other things and i also spend a lot of time just talking to people you know when i go places very often i ll stop and just go down and have an unscheduled stop and get out and shake hands with people and ask them what s on their mind people are worried about this this is a big deal to people you know ordinary folks even people who aren t on line yet are very excited about the prospects of this age so many of you have done so much to create but they are really concerned about this they are afraid they will have no place to hide and so i would argue again that the continuing success of this phenomenal enterprise which has no parallel in history requires us to seriously take into account the core of what makes america a unique place that freedom requires a certain space of privacy now i also would say to go to my second conditions that s about the conditions this is about the tools i think business must work with us to make sure that we close the fault line between those who have access to computers and to the internet and those who do not it has now become known as the digital divide this spring i will take another one of my new markets tours designed to convince the private sector that places in america which have still not fully participated in our economy are great new markets the indian reservations the rural areas the inner city neighborhoods are opportunities for us and we know the only way we can fully maximize them is to bring the information age to every family in every community yes first to make sure all our schools have the technology and then that all our teachers know how to maximize it and use it but also to make sure that adults have access as well i want to congratulate mayor menino on what boston has done opening more than 80 community technology centers in under served areas to serve adults while bringing thousands of computers into schools and setting up training and job training programs with private sector partners we should do this all over the country i ve asked congress for tax incentives for companies that donate computers for technology training for every single new teacher in this country and for funding to establish 1 000 community technology centers so that adults can also have access to the information economy i ve proposed a pilot project with industry to bring computers and the internet to low income families like oakland s clickstart or the program started by governor king of maine yesterday where he s really going to try to get a laptop into the home of every family it s an amazing thing let me say he s going to do it they will start with the 7th graders let me explain what the program is in maine if you didn t see it they re going to start by giving every 7th grader a laptop but the way they re going to do it is to make sure that the 7th grader will also be able to take the computer home and to try to involve the parents in it and that i think is a remarkably good thing i never will forget visiting a program in northern new jersey that lucent did with a school district there where most of the kids were first generation americans and their parents were immigrants whose primary language was not english and because they were just picking one school district they could make sure that there were computers in the home as well so they got all these people who would never dream of using a computer to start using it in a way that enabled them to e mail the teachers e mail the principal and they had a dramatic drop in the school dropout rate and a dramatic increase in the student performance rate because of the connections between the two so it will be interesting to follow how the main program works out i want to give credit where credit is due governor caperton when he was governor of west virginia was the first governor in the country to virtually computerize all of the elementary schools in his state and give all of his kids access to this kind of technology and most of us were just trying to follow in the wake here but this is very exciting stuff but again i will say to you i don t think education is enough here we have a chance to bring the benefits of enterprise to areas that have been left behind we ve got indian reservations in this country where the unemployment rate is 70 percent the unemployment rate in this nation is 4 1 percent today we have lots and lots of urban neighborhoods and rural areas where unemployment is still in double digits where people want to work and can be trained and a part of making people especially those who are physically isolated because they re in rural areas or distant indian reservations or physically isolated in cities because they don t have cars to get around a part of bringing them into this economy is using technology to bridge the distances not only between what they know and what skills they have but actually where they are so i think this is a big deal and as i said in the state of the union address if we don t do this now when we ve got the strongest economy in our lifetime when will we ever get around to it we actually have a chance to let everybody ride along with the american economy doubtless it will slow down some day doubtless we ll have another recession someday but at least people ought to have a chance to take the elevator up since they get to stay on the ground floor when it s down and we ll never have a better chance than we have now to do this so in closing let me just say if i could make one request of every technology whiz in this room it would be this your skills and your ideas and the companies that you have created have the potential for so much good but no sector of the economy can be totally isolated from the health of the overall society so this is a case where what is morally right and what is economically intelligent coincide we have to think about how the networks that you dominate can close the gaps that divide us light the darkness that clouds us and spread the freedom that lets each of us have the chance to live our dreams if we do it right if we can make every american technologically literate if we can make our government wise not only in its own use of technology but in setting those conditions and giving those tools if we keep building the right kind of information economy which respects privacy and has security but is an entrepreneur s dream then what we have achieved in the last seven years will be just a small prologue of what will occur in the years ahead but i m absolutely convinced we ll do it only if we re committed to doing it together if we believe everyone counts if we believe everyone should have chance if we believe everyone has a role to play and if we believe we all do better when we help each other that s a pretty old fashioned statement to end a new economy speech on but it s the very best i can do thank you very much dem wjclinton3 3 05 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you you better kind of cool it a little bit or otherwise i might think i m still in office i want to thank the sponsors of this music center forum for inviting me and my long time friend gloria molina for introducing me she helped me when i ran for president in 1992 and came out early for me when only my mother thought i could win she stayed with me when my mother began to have doubts about whether i could win i know county supervisor yvonne brathwaite burke is also here another long time friend of mine thank you for being here i don t know what to say about john emerson you know when i was president john emerson was known in the white house as the secretary of california you had a seat at the cabinet table every time i turned around he wanted money for something you know the healthcare problems in l a county the too many defense bases were closed in california and we needed to convert them in a hurry and give them to the communities then the northridge earthquake you know to be fair california had a pretty tough time after i got elected i mean everything but the locusts visited you i remember one day you know i just kept writing checks to john i said john what about the other 49 states and he said i don t care i m glad that he when he came home he prospered because believe me he earned it when he was working for you in the white house he really did do a wonderful job and i m i m thrilled to be here at his invitation here s what i d like to do tonight we re going to have a question and answer session at the end which quite often is more interesting to the audience then anything i have to say anyway but i want to try to put the questions in some larger context so what i m going to do is i ll mention a number of things that i won t discuss in detail and we might get into them in the question session but i d like to talk a little bit about where i think america and the world are today and i how i think you should view unfolding events and hopefully give you a framework which will help to explain not only things that are happening that you like but things that are happening that you don t and perhaps give you some guidance about what we ought to do about them first of all if i was asked to describe the 21st century world in one word it would not be globalization for one or two reasons first of all globalization to most people has an economic context and insofar as we mean the globalization of the economy only half the people are caught up in it and benefiting from it one half the world s people still live on less than 2 00 a day a billion people still live on less than 1 00 a day one in four people have no access to clean water so we need a term to describe the world that encovers not only the people that are winning but the people who aren t the word i prefer is interdependence economically politically culturally and in terms of just communication we are truly an interdependent globe we cannot escape each other and i could give you lots of examples in bangladesh the poorest country in south asia the fastest growing small business in rural villages is funded by a bank i know well the graemen bank where they finance a cell phone for one woman per rural village and then she sells time on the cell phone so the bangladeshis can call their kin folks in america and europe and tell them to send money home and it s working wonderfully well it s building small businesses and it s proving the interdependence of the globe the tsunami and the enormous human response to it is an example of our interdependence by the time former president bush and i went to asia on our tour the american people had pledged through their government 950 000 000 in aid but private citizens had already given 700 000 000 in aid to the victims of the tsunami and they weren t mostly in big contributions although there were some very large contributions a friend of mine who works for a new york financial house persuaded all of his folks about 1 800 of them to donate one day s profits to tsunami relief they had a good day that day and we got a 3 000 000 check they probably wished they d picked another day but no really it was wonderful but most of the gifts were very small because one third of american households participated gave something to tsunami relief one third that s stunning over half of them over the internet that s an example of our interdependence so we use the internet to establish our ties to people in south asia we don t know that we learned about because the international media did a brilliant job of telling us not only what the scope of human loss was but what caused the tsunami how the people were blameless and what would be taken to rebuild now here s my premise about this interdependent world it s good it s bad or it s both in the 1990 s when i served as president global interdependence helped us a great deal we got 30 of our job growth out of international trade we got 30 of our income growth from information technology but interdependence can be very bad on september the 11th we had an archetypal example in the attacks on america of global interdependence terrorists who were all born somewhere else used the forces of interdependence they used open borders easy travel easy immigration easy access to information and technology to turn jet airplanes into chemical bombs and murder 3 000 people from 70 countries including over 200 other muslims but it was a perfect example of global interdependence i ll give you another example which is both good and bad look at the middle east for seven years we made progress toward peace in 1998 israel experienced the only year in its history when not a single israeli citizen was killed by a terrorist incident in the eight years in which i served 258 israelis were killed by terrorism with the terrorists trying all the time to interrupt the peace process because we were even though we didn t make a final deal we were positively interdependent the israelis the palestinians the people in the neighborhood the united states and the other friends of peace then mr arafat rejected the peace offer i put on the table the second intifada started and we had four years of negative interdependence during which time 1 100 israelis were killed by terrorist attacks four times as many as in the previous eight years and over 4 000 palestinians the average age of the palestinian dead was about 18 the average age of the israeli dead was about 24 young people continue to die as they often do in the world for the bullheadedness of their elders now then mr arafat passed away and the palestinians elected abu mazen as president or mahmoud abbas and he said as far as he was concerned terror was a thing of the past the war with israel was over and he was ready to get on with building the peace the gaza withdrawal is proceeding there are tons of problems out there but there s no question that we have returned to a period of positive interdependence now the point i want to make to you you just think about it from the time arafat and rabin signed that peace deal on the white house lawn in september of 93 to the present day we went through seven good years four horrible years and it s getting better again but throughout the period the israelis and the palestinians were no less interdependent whether things were going well or poorly they simply could not escape each other so that brings me to the next point interdependence can work for us but it is an inherently unstable condition it is not enough to leave the world in suspended animation where we can t escape each other we have to try to beat back the negative forces and build up the positive forces of interdependence so i believe the great task of the 21st century world is to build stronger local national and global communities that are integrated to move from interdependence to an integrated community that requires three things shared responsibilities shared benefits and simple shared values every person counts deserves a chance and has a responsibility competition is good but we all do better when we work together our differences are important and make life more interesting but out common humanity matters more basic simple values whenever any issue is presented to me whether it s what position should we take after the murder of my friend mr hariri in lebanon or what should we do about social security or is the prescription drug benefit a good deal or what s the long term future of healthcare whatever the issue is now at this point in my life i ask myself will this help to move us from an interdependent world to an integrated community will this enhance either shared responsibilities or shared benefits is it consistent with shared values and i see every issue through this prism if you don t agree with that analysis then you ought to figure out what you think the characteristics of the 21st century world are and how you will view it otherwise you ll go crazy with the complexity and diversity of all the stuff that s going on in the world we all need some way to think about desperate events that allow us to synthesize them and organize them and formulate our response to them now because i believe the job of the 21st century generation is to build an integrated global community i think there are four or five things we americans should be doing one is we do have to have a security position and a strong one to combat terror and weapons of mass destruction second we have to realize that we can t possibly jail kill or occupy all of our enemies so we have to so we also have to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists how do we do that we have to fight poverty and disease and ignorance we have to support democracies not just starting to have elections but helping people make the governments work once they re in place there are lots of places in the world where thy have good elected leaders but where they have no institutions to make free government work for the benefit of ordinary people things that you take for granted every day when i was president every day there were thousands of tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people working for the federal government that made me look like a genius you know they sent out social security checks on time they protected the integrity of the national forest if there was a problem with the water quality or air quality they got on it they made sure there was safety in the workplace an absence of discrimination the fabric of american life most of these people i didn t know but they did things that were consistent with my values and my policies and they made american work and when the terrible government shutdown occurred and people lost some of those services or when the awful bombing of oklahoma city occurred and people saw the personal faces of dead public servants we were all kind of forced to realize how lucky we were that so much stuff in america seemed to operate on automatic done by people we didn t know and took for granted there are so many new democracies in the world that have none of that so we have to try to build mechanisms to help democracies work and to reduce poverty ignorance and disease the third thing we have to do is to have more organized cooperation through the un through institutions that i strongly support like the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty or an international criminal court against war crimes or the international effort to control climate degradation and global warming let me make this point whatever your position on our decision to go into iraq i think we now should all have two conclusions number one is whether you were for or it against it we all should want it to work now 58 of those people showed and voted many of them risked their lives to do it that s why the purple ink on their fingers has become the symbol of liberty and freedom throughout the world because they re trying at least to take control of their own destiny the second conclusion is that whether you think it was a good or bad thing it s obviously not going to become the governing mechanism of american foreign policy because it cost 2 000 000 000 it s tied our military down it s gotten young guardsmen and reservists men and women in the guards and reserves have to go there and stay longer and risk their lives and a lot of them have lost their livelihoods because of their service so we obviously can t go around doing that everywhere something s going on that we don t like so we want it to work but it s not a very good model of how we ll do most things which means we need more cooperation we need a stronger un we need stronger other institutions i could give you lots of examples in afghanistan one of the reasons that mr karzai can succeed as president and we can at least keep a modicum of pressure on al qaeda and the elements of the taliban in rural life afghanistan trying to arise again is that the only 20 000 american forces in afghanistan are supplemented by 20 000 more from nato in lebanon one of the things that has given heart to the lebanese people in the street in overthrowing the lebanese government and telling the syrians to get out of their country is that america s call for lebanese interdependence has been immeasurably strengthened by the fact that france is with us not at odds with us in the negotiations with iran the president has made it absolutely clear that he s going to give the british the germans and the french every chance to succeed diplomatically in convincing iran to turn away from its nuclear program before considering any other options in our efforts to stop north korea from becoming a nuclear wal mart and selling bombs materials and missiles to other countries we have got to have the help of china that s the point i want to make to you we have to find ways to strengthen the mechanisms of cooperation in the 21st century world because whether you like or dislike what was done in iraq it cost 200 000 000 000 by the time it s done we ll spend more in iraq than we did in world war i in constant dollars and it s not a model that we can apply everywhere else so to be generally effective in our foreign policy we have to work with others in patterns of cooperation the fourth thing we need to recognize is that if we really want to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity we have to keep making america a better model for the world we have to make america a place where there are more shared responsibilities shared benefits and shared values and we can talk more about that later but i think that our economic policy undermines that i think going from our balanced budget philosophy to these massive permanent deficits again two thirds of which are caused by tax cuts one half of which go to the top 1 of the american people are not good in a world where we ought to have shared responsibilities i ve got a let me just give you an example i lived with a guy for four years in college whom i still love like a brother and stay in touch with all the time and he was raised in a conservative republican family he s a devote irish catholic and he s one of the most wonderful human beings i ve ever knew he s a career airline pilot and when he was a young man he was a pilot for the united states marine corp both of his sons are marine officers both of his sons have been in combat zones in afghanistan and iraq my friend s kids put their lives on the line just like they were asked to do by their country he doesn t make nearly as much money as i do and a lot of his taxes were spent to support those operations as we spent huge amounts of money on it but me i got four tax cuts in the last four years and i resent the fact that nobody asked me to make a contribution to america s effort against terror and just to expend the energy necessary to open the envelope containing my tax cut that s not consistent with a world of shared responsibility and i think it s wrong i also think it is highly questionable economics for us to have these massive tax cuts for the first time we ve ever been involved in a military conflict that we had not one tax cut but four it s never happened in our history before and how are they paid for every single month they are paid for in two ways we take the social security checks that middle class people turn into the government every month and right now they re paying 150 000 000 000 a year more than we re paying out in social security so they take that 150 000 000 000 and give it to people like me and put an iou in the social security checking account and sometime between now and 2042 that iou will be paid back by the taxes of middle class americans to the social security trust fund with interest so that i could have a tax cut in the first decade of the 21st century while we were sending people into harms way in afghanistan and iraq that s the first way but it s not enough so then every day the united states government goes into the international financial markets and borrows money from countries that have money instead of spend money principally china japan south korea taiwan saudi arabia they re all loaning you money every day to cover my tax cut and last year the deficits of the united states of america last year consumed over 80 of the net new savings of america and 43 of our debt now is in the hands of non americans now you may think that s good policy you may think it s perfectly all right in a world where half the people in the world live on less than 2 00 a day for one of the richest countries in the world to claim 80 of the world s savings to fund bill clinton s tax cut i don t and people act like there s no connection here and these things aren t related brazil or mexico if they had our fiscal policy they d last about a nanosecond before their currency would collapse their economy would be in ruins and this so called conservative economy theory neo conservative economic theory is that everybody has to sell in america they have to sell their products so it doesn t matter how we behave we can behave worse than every other country on earth we can be the bad boy on every street corner because our debt will always be bought by countries who want to keep our interest rates from exploding and our currency from collapsing so we can buy their exports so of course we re making china richer every day and we re getting poorer every day but we ll have a good time while we re going down and it may go on forever you can probably tell i m pretty conservative on these fiscal matters i think if you want to be a social liberal you ve got to a fiscal conservative otherwise you wind up spending all your money subsidizing the things that don t make any sense now when we had when the president faced a recession when he first came in office if he had wanted a bigger tax cut for a temporary period two or three years i would have supported it because it wasn t the president s fault that the telecom market collapsed because there was overbuilding or the nasdaq market collapsed because not all these high tech companies could possibly have high stock values when they never made money just on the assumption that they were going to sold to another company which they would make money for it happened hundreds of times but it couldn t happen 100 of the time and it certainly wasn t his fault that there was an economic downturn after 9 11 but to have big permanent tax cuts while we re expanding military spending expanding homeland security spending and to fund them and have them disproportionately weighted up upscale and to fund them from social security taxes of middle class that have to be repaid into the social security trust fund and from borrowing money from countries that are a lot poorer than we are i don t get it and i don t think it s good economics but i know it doesn t create a world of shared responsibilities and shared benefits it undermines the concept of shared responsibility and shared benefits and other countries are looking at us thinking man if i did that they d put me in jail it reminded me of an old joke about two dogs watching kids break dancing one said to the other you know if i did that they d worm me so i think we need to think about that the final thing i d like to say is this there are things that have happened in the last 10 15 years that make you as an individual more powerful than ever before so whether you re a republican or democrat a conservative or a liberal whatever your politics are or whether you like a governance that s in or out there s something you can do to affect the course of the world to make the interdependent world more integrated there are things that have happened that aren t normally written up in the press the one is the power of the internet i already said that you know that a third of american households gave money to tsunami relief over half over the internet the second is that in the 1990 s more than half the people of the world lived under democracies for the first time in history and now that democratic impulse is spreading throughout the middle east and iraq and lebanon reclaiming its past and the palestinians having an honest election it s been really moving hard ever since the fall of the berlin wall the third thing is the rise of non governmental organizations i had two people come up to me tonight here and say something about my contact when former president bush and i went to the tsunami affected areas our contacts with save the children and some of the other ngo s and what they re doing in sri lanka and indonesia and other places all of these things make you more powerful when the sars epidemic started in hong kong the chinese government denied it for a while then there was an internet revolt among young chinese and the chinese government turned on a dime now my foundation works in china on aids and the chinese government is more committed to it in a more organized way than virtually any other country we work in why because of the citizen power of the internet in a still non democratic country there is no question that people taking to the streets after the murder of mr hariri and the support they received when president bush took our ambassador out of there which is a great thing to do when president sherrock raised cain about it and the people of the world cheered for them have helped to hasten the day that the syrians will be out of lebanon and we ll have a more democratic middle east so people power gives you all something to do the secretary general of the un asked me to coordinate the tsunami relief project over the next two years and it s first of all he just wants me to go raise more money i know that but but you need to know that there s also a massive coordination effort for a good reason you have national governments international organizations and then the donor governments like usaid there all doing a good job but there are now and i m not exaggerating literally hundreds of citizen organizations non governmental organizations in the common parlance of ngo s now on the ground in these tsunami affected areas and it is a shimmering stunning thing to see all over the world everything from the richest one in the world which is bill gates foundation doing unbelievable work in healthcare especially on aids in africa and india to small ones like the self employed women s association in india a small group i work with to help create economic opportunities for poor village women that means there s something you can do you can now give a small check over the internet and know that it will have a compounding impact if other like minded people are moved as you are you can get involved in one of these organizations there s something you can do the democratization of public life has made this interdependent world more like the old greek city states and you can be a world citizen in some way or another and i would urge you to do it the final thing i want to say is i am on balance quite optimistic about the future i know we ve got problems with terror i know there s lots of things going on but the truth is no terrorist movement ever succeeded on its own in dislodging any national government we will defeat terror and we have to do it in a way that doesn t compromise the character of the country or the future of our children we will beat this thing i m obviously concerned about the prospect of some sort of nuclear chemical or biological attack but if it happens the world will survive and we will go on and we ll defeat that and we have a chance to avoid it i m optimistic because the whole history of the world ever since people first walked out of caves and formed clans the whole history of the world has been a story of moving from isolation to interdependence which had both cooperation and conflict as we tried to figure out how to deal with and treat people who are different from us to a cooperative community we nearly got it wrong in the 20th century because even though there was more and more cooperation from the time human beings first stood up on the african savanna somewhere between 100 150 000 years ago all the way through the 20th century there was also an increasing capacity of people to destroy each other with evermore powerful weapons and we nearly got it wrong in the 20th century we had the holocaust two world wars the slaughters in the soviet union and china but we survived and we will continue to cooperate and come together because there is no other sensible alternate we re going to this is going to be all right if we just keep plowing ahead but i think it helps to think about moving from interdependence to an integrated community there will always be room for an honest debate there ll always be room for a more liberal position a more conservative position maybe a zillion in between but at least we ought to know where we re going and i think where we re going we have to go together and i wouldn t worry about whether we re going to get there early in the second world war when britain hadn t won a single battle and america wasn t in the war most people didn t fully understand how much president roosevelt was doing to try to help britain through the lend lease act and some other little sneaky things he was doing to try to keep hitler from running over to europe reporters taunted winston churchill for over a year about why america wasn t in the war and they kept asking him you know what about the united states what about the united states and churchill finally in semi exasperation smiled at a reporter and said the united states always does the right thing after exhausting every other alternative that s sort of where the world is now we re in the process of exhausting alternatives but on climate change and a lot of these but we re also doing a lot of things right let me remind you that you know the in the 2000 campaign president bush didn t like all this nation building stuff and now he s embraced it and that s good you have the republican a conservative republican president with the support of the christian right asking for 3 000 000 000 a year to fight aids that s good that s good there s a lot of good things going on here in this world where we are coming together and if we had a common way of looking at it like going from interdependence to integrated community it would be easier for us to find common ground and make more progress so i hope what i ve had to say tonight is of some help to you in your own lives and understanding and i hope that more of us will follow that path in the future thank you very much dem wjclinton3 4 00 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much you saw me do this with my eyes the lights are so bright in here that we only know when you applaud at the right times that we re talking to a dlc audience let me say first of all how delighted i am to be at the tech museum of innovation and i want to thank all the people from the museum who have made us feel welcome here a lot of them are sitting over here but this is a very appropriate place for us to be meeting and i think we ought to give them a big hand for welcoming us here i want to thank mayor ron gonzalez for welcoming us here and for reminding me of that historic meeting 10 years ago when al from and i came out here some of you here were there then in addition to ron i see larry stone and tony casey out here and steve wesley wasn t there then he was there shortly after there were many others there i m delighted to see because we started something profoundly important then i want to thank the members of congress who are here in addition to zoe lofgren cal dooley and anna eshoo and i think representative martin frost may be here someone said he was from texas he was one of our early members i want to thank state controller kathleen connell who is here and california board of education member reed hastings i want to thank all the ceos who have come today i see my friend dr irwin jacobs and meg whitman and eric benhamou there are many others here and i want to thank one of the people who was the architect of the economic policy that got so many kudos here laura tyson i think she s sitting in the second row there although it s very bright i also want to thank the young people from city year who are sitting in the back when the san jose contingent came in i just happened to be coming into san jose that night and i welcomed them here but they are the manifestation of our commitment to citizen service that grew out of one of our dlc projects we really believed we could build an american community that was stronger and relished its diversity and still extolled its common values if we could get more people involved in citizen service and that s what americorps and city year are all about and i m delighted that san jose has such a strong representation they re actually having their national conference out here in a few weeks and i hope all of you will support them in every way you can let me say most of what needs to be said has been said i do want to say a special word of appreciation too to governor davis he has done so well on education he has done so well on the economy he has done so well on crime but actually gray i was even coming to california before you got elected and chelsea came to stanford actually i think i ve been here more than any president in history i think you know something like 35 or 40 times but one of the things that i really appreciate is that when you say and when zoe lofgren says we can govern from the center i think it s very important that everyone understand that we define that as a dynamic not a static term that we get people together and find a common approach that is oriented toward change not the status quo it would be difficult to look at a period of american history that has had more consistent constructive change in the private as well as in the public sector than we have seen in the last few years so i think that that s something i want to emphasize and while i m here because i don t know when i ll have a chance to come back and say this i want to thank governor davis for the work he s done in education to prove that if you have high standards and genuine accountability and you put your money where your mouth is all our children can learn i believe that i want to thank him and all of you particularly in silicon valley for your support of the charter school movement when i became president there was one charter school in america there are now over 2 000 and i think we ll make our goal of 3 000 by the end of the year and i hope we will continue to see it grow and flourish i want to thank you for being on the cutting edge of change on the issue of gun safety as well governor last year california passed laws to ban junk guns limit handgun sales to one a month and to stiffen the assault weapons ban since then we ve seen similar state action all across america today just today massachusetts is beginning to enforce tougher consumer product safety rules for guns banning junk guns requiring trigger locks and the maryland legislature is considering legislation as we speak on child safety locks next week i m going to colorado to support a citizen ballot initiative in a state that by registration has become more and more republican in the last seven years but they ve got a citizens ballot initiative out there in the aftermath of columbine that would close the gun show loophole and require background checks on all gun sales so i m pleased about that we also announced a landmark agreement with smith and wesson the large gun manufacturer to change for the better the way guns are manufactured marketed and sold and already ten california cities and counties including san matteo county your neighbor have pledged when they buy weapons for their police forces to support manufacturers who have high standards for gun safety and dealer responsibility this is a huge deal and it is appalling the abuse that smith and wesson has taken from people who don t want to have sensible safety measures for recognizing the fact which is an enormous percentage of crimes are committed with guns are committed with guns that come from a very small percentage of dealers and all they ve said is we re going to try to manufacture safer guns and we re going to try to use more responsible dealers and for their trouble they have been subject to enormous abuse smith and wesson s almost up there with me in the abuse we re getting from that crowd but i just want to say you know somebody asked me the other day what i thought about all those mean things charlton heston said about me and i said i still like to watch his movies and i still think he s a nice fellow but i think the american people have decided that we can have our hunting and our sports shooting and still have sensible prevention and this should not be the only area of our life where we don t prevent bad things from happening in the first place once again i hope the united states will be following the lead of california and i hope that we can pass our sensible gun safety legislation before the anniversary of the columbine tragedy on april the 20th but i wanted to thank governor davis for that as well and finally let me say by way of introduction i don t know if al from will ever get the credit he deserves for the political revolution which has been wrought in america over the last decade but whatever contribution i have made through the dlc and i love being in the dlc you know i love ideas and i m sort of a they used to make fun of me for being a policy wonk when i ran for president but we believed ideas mattered he however was willing to devote his life to creating an organization that got people together who believed ideas mattered he believed that the center should be vital not stale he thought the polarizing politics of washington was nuts and destructive to america s future and he gave people like cal dooley and anna eshoo and zoe lofgren and gray davis and me a place from which we could work and proudly embrace our party and its heritage and i just want to thank you al for now over 16 years of service to your country by preserving its oldest political party s heritage and ideas and ideals thank you very much ten years ago when al from and i came out here we figured that if the democratic party had a future it had to be hooked into the future and that you were making the future it wasn t very complicated we did not believe that america could be what it ought to be unless we had sustained economic growth we didn t think that we could tolerate a situation where we had these huge deficits but we also knew we had to be for things not just against things and we wanted to see the future being made so we showed up out here and we just started listening and talking to people and trying to figure out what implications for the way government works we could find in the way the most successful companies here were working we also were trying to figure out whether there was some way we could actually get by the ideological debates that were paralyzing washington and what was then it s amazing but then the democrats were still identifying with the position that the government was a solution to the problem and the republicans were identified with the position that the government was the cause of every problem i thought both were frankly somewhat arrogant since we have a big complicated country in which governments interrelations with the other sectors and actors of our society are important so anyway we worked on this and then in 1992 al gore and i went to the american people and asked them to give us a chance to create opportunity for all and responsibility from all and community of all americans we asked them to give us a chance to create a government which was neither the satan nor the savior of america but a catalyst for new ideas to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives and the american people gave us a chance i think the results speak for themselves the core of it all in the beginning was trying to get our relationship to the new economy right and then trying to bring more people into it we first of all recognized that in a global economy whether you were doing something new or traditional there had to be an availability of capital at affordable interest rates we had to do something about the deficits and so we did it with our crowd alone i told a group last night i never will forget all those guys saying in the republican party when they were saying my economic plan would be a disaster for america and they were not to be held responsible for any of the consequences to be fair to them they did come back in 97 and we had a balanced budget act that passed overwhelmingly with both parties and both houses it was one of the high water marks of the last seven years because it proved that when we get off our high horse we can work together to move forward to make america a better place but we had to first get the deficit in order and now we ve got the first back to back surpluses in 42 years and the consequences are obvious the second thing we had to do was expand trade all this has been said before but america has got 22 percent of the world s income and 4 percent of the world s population you don t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out somehow some way you have to sell something to somebody else and i think it s in a larger sense the world is becoming a different place and if you want america to have a positive impact for peace and freedom and security and prosperity we have to be involved in the kind of networking of the world that you have made a living off of both in america and beyond our borders it s very important the third thing we had to do was to make sure we were investing in the education and training of our people and our scientific and technological capacity so that we could stay on the cutting edge of change and make sure we were preparing more people to participate in it and in that connection there have been some allusions zoe made some allusion to this but we also worked very hard to kind of fix the government s relationship to the emerging high tech economy we worked so hard in the administration on the telecommunications act of 1996 to make sure it was a pro competition bill that would give people a chance to get into business not squeeze them out that would give new ideas and new approaches a chance to flourish not be shriveled by people who were stepping on that and i think the fight it was a huge fight it was very much a fight worth making and i think if you look at all the new firms and all the new successes that have flown out of the 96 telecom act and the developments in the global economy i think it was worth doing we have worked hard to make the other adjustments some of which i ll mention in a minute including being more flexible about exports and other things but we have tried very hard because 30 percent of the growth of america in the last few years has come out of the high tech sector to get this right and a lot of you have played a major role in that and i thank you for that so after seven years i think we can say that this approach works and we ve had the highest percentage of jobs created in the private sector of any modern economic recovery we have the smallest government in 40 years since 1960 we have about 21 million new jobs and as all of you know the longest economic expansion in the history of the country and the social fabric is getting better the crime rate is down to a 25 year low the welfare roll has been cut in half to a 30 year low teen pregnancy is down adoptions are up test scores are up college going is up the country is moving in the right direction and as i said in my state of the union address i just want to say again today i think the main issue in this year s election ought to be now what what are you going to do with this prosperity and i want to come back to the point we re here about today but why are we doing all this and it seems to me that the most important thing the american people have to decide is do they want to use this moment to have a good time or would they like to have a good time by meeting the big long term challenges that are still manifestly out there you know you know what i think i think it s a time for dreaming big dreams and for bridging big divides and for dealing with big challenges and i think that we have now the resources to do things as a nation we ve never had before i think we ought to make america debt free for the first time since 1835 i think we ought to prove that we can bring free enterprise and the information economy to the poorest nooks and crannies of america that have been left behind i think we ought to make america the safest big nation on earth i think we ought to prove we can provide affordable quality health care to all americans i think we ought to prove we can provide world class education to our children that every child can start school ready to learn graduate ready to succeed and go on to college because the means are there i think we ought to prove that we can meet the challenge of the aging of america and take social security out beyond the life of the baby boomers reform medicare add a prescription drug coverage which we never would have left out if medicare were created today instead of in 1965 i think we ought to prove we can reverse the course of climate change while we grow the economy that you the information economy broke the iron chain between economic growth and putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere it is no longer necessary to do that it is scientifically provable it is no longer necessary to do that and we re crazy if we don t get about the business of preserving the global environment as well as dealing with our local environmental challenges i think we ought to prove that we can lead the world toward greater shared peace and security and that we can build one america at home and be an example abroad for people to let go of their ethnic their religious their racial their tribal and other hatreds that s what i think this election ought to be about because that s what i think the future ought to be about you know in my lifetime we ve never had this kind of opportunity but the point i want to make about all of this for today is that we will not be able to have an election about that or a future that s about that unless we can keep the economy growing and you would be amazed how much time we have spent over the last several years figuring out how do you keep this going because even though i think you have changed the nature of the economy i don t believe that the silicon chip has repealed all the economic laws that govern nations i m not sure that you ve repealed the laws of supply and demand or even totally abolished the business cycle but i am quite sure you have made them more elastic less predictable and that there is more potential for sustained growth so we spent a lot of time thinking about what is it that we have to do now to keep this thing going and if i could i d say the first thing i think we need to do is go back over the elements of the strategy we cannot abandon our fiscal discipline now this is an idea that will be tested in this election debate because the republicans now favor a tax cut bigger than the one i vetoed and i believe that if it passes they won t be able to keep their own promises on education and furthermore they will have to have massive cuts in all these things and we ll go back to running deficits but it will be very popular in the short run and we re doing so well a lot of people will want to believe we can do this so it s a big issue the americans will have to face and i hate to sound like the sort of crotchety old schoolmarm but we ought to stick with what brought us to the dance here and the increasing value of the nasdaq is more important than the decreasing burden of taxes if the impact of the decreasing burden of taxes is to go back to deficits high interest rates an uneducated citizenry and lower wealth creation and we need to this is an issue that the american people will just have to deal with the second thing we have to do it seems to me is to redouble our commitment to education and training our own work force and i will just say gray davis has already said a great deal about this but it seems to me the key is we have to have a relentless focus on results we have learned back in the early 80s when i started this and hillary and i redid the education laws in arkansas we had some pretty good ideas about what would work but we weren t sure and now there s really no excuse there s lots and lots of research which shows what works in education and we need a relentless focus on results on standards on accountability i m trying to get the congress to completely change the way we give out federal money and only support things that we know work and stop supporting things we know don t work i think social promotion should be ended but not in a way that blames the kids for the failure of the system therefore i think our proposal would have universal access for every kid in every troubled school in america to after school and summer school programs to mentoring programs because i think it s important that we believe and prove that every child can learn i think these things really matter i think that schools that are failing ought to be turned around or shut down but i think we ought to help them be turned around because we know as a practical matter they can be you heard gray davis talk about this incentive program he s giving when you give a lot once he s given out a number of these bonuses then people will go out and start studying the circumstances that these children were in when they started and it s going to take your breath away when you see the adversity that a lot of these classrooms and schools have overcome and it will reaffirm the notion that i think is broadly shared in this room that intelligence is pretty well universally distributed and that there s a role to be played here in this i also want to say we shouldn t forget the importance of technology we have gone now from about oh 11 percent of our classrooms connected to the internet schools to over 90 percent of our schools connected to the internet today well over half of our classrooms thanks to a lot of you in this room and the program that we ve been working on with the vice president since 94 we shouldn t forget that but i just want to say to you i believed this before i got here i believe it more importantly today i have spent an enormous amount of time in our schools over the last 21 years these schools can be turned around and all of our kids can learn but you have to have high standards and genuine accountability and the right kind of support that s what california represents that s what i believe our national policy represents and i hope you will continue to support them i also think that we re kidding ourselves if we think we can continue to move this economy forward unless we educate our people to a far higher degree with much more flexibility but also as all of you know and as you have been banging on me for years what do we do with the shortages that exist right now our high tech industries do face temporary labor shortages and they have repeatedly at least during my experience so we ve tried to balance the short term need to increase visas for high skilled workers with the long term goal of actually educating our people so that more of them from untraditional backgrounds can fill these high wage positions again i want to thank congresswoman zoe lofgren s leadership it s been quite imaginative here she helped our nation to strike that balance in the past with legislation that dealt with the short term crisis and set aside funds for education and training and now we ve got a similar dilemma and she and anna eshoo and ellen tauscher representing this area have all taken a real leadership role in trying to help us get a bipartisan solution to have more workers here to improve the ins to insure that our children benefit from the technological innovation of the new economy i know you re all interested in this and i wanted to talk about this because we will get a solution here we will work together we will come up with sound legislation we will find the high tech workers you need so that we can keep growing this economy and we will continue to prepare our children and our workers for the information age so thank you zoe and thank you anna and thank you ladies and gentlemen meanwhile you need to keep helping governor davis on this education project now let me talk briefly about the china issue and trade we ve had over 270 trade agreements in the last seven years they have clearly boosted economic growth until the asian financial crisis 30 percent of our growth was attributed to the expansion of exports but they have as zoe lofgren said so eloquently in her remarks the trade issue has become symbolic of people s general unease about globalization and their sense that the world is not about economics alone it s about the fair distribution of gain it s also about the preservation of other values like our values opposing child labor or abusive labor conditions or our desire to see the standing of the entire global economy improve and somehow these trade agreements have become a lightening rod for everybody s dissatisfaction with everything although the evidence is the more we trade with countries and the more wealth they get the more likely they are to eleva te labor standards and improve the environment and i have really tried to be out there on the forefront of arguing for global efforts to integrate an approach to a global society that included labor and the environment along with economic agreements now having said that none of that is an argument for opposing china s entry into the wto and even more specifically for opposing the congress in granting permanent normal trade relations to china i think it s very important that everyone understand exactly what this is i still talk to members who are a little bit i think uncertain about exactly what this legislation does we reached an agreement with china for the terms of their entry into the wto when china concludes similar agreements with other countries it will join the wto but for us to benefit from the agreement that we negotiated china must first be granted permanent normal trading status by congress it s the same arrangement we have with other countries in the wto now there is a lot of controversy in congress about this vote and i ve heard all the arguments but i think that i have to tell you first of all just on the trade terms in the entire history of trade agreements i don t believe there s ever been one this weighted in our favor for one simple reason this is not really a trade agreement it s a membership agreement it s very important that you understand this is a membership agreement this is china saying we don t have a modern open economy we d like to be in this modern open trading system if you will let us in here are the changes we are prepared to make that s what this is about therefore this vote by congress is on an agreement that lowers no american trade barriers lowers no american tariffs grants no greater access to china to any part of the american economy nothing zip zilch nada zero on the other hand chinese tariffs will fall by more than half over five years in every sector from telecommunications to automobiles to agriculture for the first time american companies will be able to sell and distribute products in china without having to transfer technological know how to chinese firms or put manufacturing facilities overseas for the first time china will agree to play by the same trading rules that we follow accordingly the narrow or broad economic consequences are 100 0 in our favor but i believe the moral and national security arguments also favor this decision there is no denying as some of the opponents of this agreement assert that china is a one party state that it does not tolerate opposition that it still denies its citizens fundamental rights of free speech and religious expression that we hold very dear that is not the question the question is what is the most intelligent thing we can do to increase the chances that china will become more open more democratic and a constructive member of the global community in the 21st century i think the answer is to allow them in and to let liberty spread from within under this agreement china will slash the tariffs that protect its inefficient state run industries industries which the communist party has long used to exercise day to day control over people s lives china s leaders feel this step is essential to maintaining their competitiveness and they re not foolish people they know it may unleash forces that the leaders themselves cannot control the late chief justice earl warren from california a former governor of california said that liberty is the most contagious force in the world in the new century liberty will spread in part by cell phone and cable modem in the past year the number of internet addresses in china in one year has gone from 2 million to 9 million this year the number is expected to grow to over 20 million there are 1 2 billion people in china when china joins the wto by 2005 it will eliminate tariffs on information technology products making the tools of communication even cheaper better more widely available american telecommunications firms and service providers are perfectly poised to fill this enormous market we know how much the internet has changed america and we re already an open society imagine how much it will change china of course there s no question china has been trying to crack down on the internet good luck that s like that eds ad you remember that ad where these cowboys are trying to herd cats that s the best ad i saw on television last year the very fact that the chinese government is trying to herd these cats shows you how real the changes are and how much they threaten the old order they are proof that we should keep going in this direction not that we should hold back now of course i recognize that bringing china into the wto is not a human rights policy in and of itself and we have to continue to push china in every way we can to improve and observe human rights we re pressing for a resolution at the u n to condemn human rights abuses in china that we object to we urge other nations to join us but i think it is quite significant that the people with the greatest interest in seeing china change agree with our efforts to bring china into the world trading system there s something almost patronizing in the opposition of some elements in the united states to china coming into the wto when the people they say they re trying to help believe they ll be helped if china does come into the wto the citizens of taiwan despite all their tensions with beijing by and large want to see china in the wto and so does taiwan s newly elected leader it s a very important point so does taiwan s newly elected leader most evangelical christians who have missions in china want china in the wto most human rights organizations want china in the wto i think the more the american people learn about our agreement with china the more they will support it i think the more elected representatives learn about it the more they ll get behind it support is building based on the evidence and we have signs of that today you heard the governor mention the letter he s signing now we have over 40 of our nation s governors republicans and democrats in favor of granting china permanent normal trading status and they say it will create tremendous opportunities for their companies and farmers and more high wage american workers in addition to governor davis i want to thank governor locke of washington and governor schafer of north dakota for their efforts we ve got more members of congress coming on board and i thank zoe lofgren for the brave announcement she made today and today i m pleased to announce that the ceos of over 200 high tech firms from across our country have also signed a letter urging members of congress to support this legislation in their letter the ceos say this vote is an absolute priority for high tech companies and the most critical vote congress will take on high technology this year now here s the clincher i want to explain that i think a lot of people don t understand if we don t vote for permanent normal trading status and china makes its agreement with europe they still get in the wto the only difference is europe and japan get the benefits of the deal that we negotiated opposition to this it reminds me of that old cajun joke i learned when i was a boy i shouldn t be telling this story but i m going to but i mean really this guy pierre comes up to his friend jean and he says jean why do you have dynamite in your suit pocket usually you got those big expensive cigars he said yeah but every time i do that raymond he comes up to me and he says hey jean and he hits me in the pocket he destroys my cigars he said now you got dynamite when you do it now you will kill yourself he said i know but i blow his hand off you think about it we made this deal and now we say we take it back we don t want it we re going to give it to you we made this incredible agreement we ve been working on all these problems with china for years we can t get in the markets we can t distribute our automobiles we can t distribute our auto parts we ve got to have manufacturing and technology transfer it s all gone and now we say dem wjclinton3 5 93 bill_clinton thank you very much let me begin by extending a warm welcome to all of you especially those who have traveled very great distances as many of you have to help celebrate asian pacific american heritage month i m pleased to be joined on the stage by senator dan akaka with whom i played golf last weekend less well than he did i might add and representatives bob matsui norm mineta robert underwood patsy mink eni faleomavaega did i do a good job pretty good and jay kim and let us also honor the memory of the late senator spark matsunaga who left such a wonderful legacy as a true friend of the asian pacific community my campaign and my administration have gained so much from the talents of asian pacific americans and i d like to recognize just a few of them barbara chow my special assistant for legislative affairs neil dhillon at the department of transportation atul gawande who has been working on the health care task force maria haley on our personal staff goody marshall with the vice president s staff doris matsui in public liaison who did such a wonderful job with this event shirley sagawa in legislative affairs debra shon at the united states trade representatives office melinda yee at the department of commerce and many others who are an essential part of our efforts every day fifteen years ago representative frank horton introduced the first resolution proclaiming american asian pacific american heritage week honoring the significant contributions of asian pacific americans in all walks of life in 1990 congress designated and president bush proclaimed the month of may as asian pacific heritage month and last year with the help of representative horton and 106 of his colleagues the designation of may as asian pacific heritage month each year became the law of the land the month of may was chosen because of its significance to asian pacific american history in the first week of may in 1843 the first japanese arrived in america and on may 10 1869 golden spike day the transcontinental railroad built partly with chinese labor was completed today 150 years after these historic events nearly eight million asian pacific americans can trace their roots to asia and the islands of the pacific it is astonishing to realize the breadth of diversity among americans of asian pacific heritage the asian pacific community stretches across thousands of miles and encompasses millions of diverse people in our country the asian pacific american community can trace its roots to at least 25 different nationalities more than 75 different languages and literally hundreds of different ethnic groups now that s diversity and still asian pacific americans have something in common and something to emulate a commitment to strong families to community and to instilling in each new generation a respect for educational opportunity and hard work these values have been an essential part of success in achieving the american dream as so many asian pacific americans know and while we realize all the rich opportunities america has given to all our people we are aware also of how much asian pacific americans have given back to this country immigrants from asia and the pacific helped build our country today their descendants are making us even better they are prominent among our scientists artists doctors teachers and other professionals who have enriched the lives of all of us in america i want to talk for a moment about the importance of education the asian pacific community has demonstrated that a commitment to education is truly the key to bettering our lives among asian pacific americans 25 years old and over 82 percent have had four years of high school or more 39 percent have completed four years of college or more for individuals education is the key to economic parity and social mobility but for america it is the key to our strength and our competitiveness in the global economy i want to thank you all again for coming here today to recognize all the achievements and the contributions that asian pacific americans have made to this great nation i hope that we can continue to come together as we have today to rejoice in our diversity as we renew the bonds of community that bring all americans together i believe that if we embrace those things which we share if we embrace our common values and our common goals we strengthen ourselves our community and our democracy and we make ourselves free to celebrate the richness of our diversity therefore it is with great pride and admiration that i take this opportunity my first one to sign the proclamation proclaiming this asian pacific american heritage month thank you very much the proclamation is signed dem wjclinton3 6 93 bill_clinton thank you very much good morning ladies and gentlemen and good morning boys and girls it s great to be here in frederick today i want to thank roger glunt the president of the national association of home builders for being here and for his support of our economic program as well as the support of homebuilders and realtors all across america who understand what we can do for the american economy if we can get interest rates down and keep them there i want to thank the murrys for giving me a tour of their home before it was finished one of the things i did in my former life back when i had one when i was a young man was engage in a little bit of homebuilding that s hard work and i m glad to see somebody else doing it back there but they did a great job i want to say thanks to the dragers and the fishmans and the taylors the other families here on this circle who showed me their home and talked to me a little bit about their lives i want to thank jim johnson for being here and for the wonderful job that he does at fanny mae to help finance homes and make the american dream come real for americans and i want to say thanks to don meade the construction site supervisor who hasn t spoken today that will make him the most popular person here i thank him for showing me around ladies and gentlemen last year when i was out campaigning for the job i now hold i think all of us realized that our country was in a period of short term recession which it lasted for about three years but of long term economic problems brought on by some economic competition from other countries around the world and from some problems that we had created for ourselves and that it was impossible to point the blame at one person that both parties in washington were to blame but that it was absolutely clear that we couldn t keep going the way we were going where the deficit was going up and up and up every year so our debts were piling higher in 12 years 12 years we went from a 1 trillion to a 4 trillion national debt and the deficit was over 300 billion a year and at the same time we were reducing our investment in the things that make us a rich country in incentives for people to build houses in new technologies to compete with other countries in the education and training of our work force so what i tried to do was to turn that around it seemed to me that the faith we had to begin was to bring down the deficit with a combination of tough spending cuts and tax increases that would be mostly on those who had been more successful whose taxes had gone down and were in higher income groups this plan that i have presented to congress does that but i want to emphasize to you i ll talk a little more about the details in a moment but why would the homebuilders be here supporting it if it were bad for business and bad for america they wouldn t be they re here because all these people building these houses need jobs and we need more people like them working and if people can work we wouldn t have half the problems we ve got in this country six million americans are employed in the housing and related industry homebuilding is critical to our future and critical to the dreams of millions of american families a year ago less than half of the american people under the age of 35 thought they had a good chance to buy a home today over 70 percent of them do and there s one clear reason lower long term interest rates which make mortgage rates as low as they ve been in 20 years if you think about it mortgage rates currently are at about 7 5 percent now if someone had a home mortgage at 10 percent and they refinance that at 7 5 percent in the very first year of the refinancing they d save 2 100 that is way over twice as much in one year as the same family let s say a family with an income of 40 000 to 60 000 would pay in new taxes under the energy tax in four years under our program that is the key to this whole thing a balanced approach cut spending raise money from people who can afford it minimize the burden on the middle class but ask people to pay something but give them back low interest rates more jobs and a growing economy that is the idea and the critical thing is the interest rates every time mortgage rates go down a point an additional 350 000 people are able to buy homes in november shortly after the election our administration announced a serious attempt to reduce the deficit based on spending cuts targeted revenue increases longterm interest rates started to drop they ve dropped almost one full point since the election last week after the house of representatives adopted the economic program they dropped again and the stock market went up again because people who control these decisions began to believe again that we could take control of our destiny and really move america forward you ve already heard some of these specific ideas but let me just reiterate in this bill there aren t just tax increases there are spending cuts 100 billion in the entitlement areas and another 150 billion in 200 specific cuts in other areas including a reduction in the size of the federal government by 150 000 employees over the next four years an across the board cut of 14 percent in the administrative costs of government and hundreds of other specific cuts in spending but there are also some incentives in this program which are important the small business community some of you would be in that have been asking for years to increase the expensing provisions in the tax code so they could write off 25 000 a year not 10 000 a year if they invested in their business to make it more productive that s in this provision larger businesses who invest a lot of money in new plant and new equipment which put people to work have been asking for years for us to change the minimum tax provisions so they won t have to pay taxes on investments they make to put people to work and we did that in this tax bill and that will put people to work people in real estate have been asking for years that they simply be treated on what are called their passive losses like people in every other business in the united states of america and that is in this tax bill and that will put people to work these things will create jobs maybe most important of all for something i care a lot about i ll bet you that more than half the people in this audience from time to time in the last 10 or 15 years have complained about the welfare system and have said sometimes there seems like there are more incentives to stay on welfare than off well let me tell you something else this bill does some people stay on welfare rather than work 40 hours a week because if they take a minimum wage job and go to work they ve got to pay somebody for child care they don t have any health insurance so they go back on welfare you pay it through medicaid and they can stay home with the kids this tax bill it s not because the welfare check is big it s because of the child care and the medical benefits this tax bill says that look we re going to favor work over welfare forever if you go to work you work 40 hours a week you have a child in your house the tax system will lift you out of poverty we re going to favor work over welfare that s a very important thing that this tax bill does now next week the united states senate is coming back into session and we have to pass this bill in the senate many senators and many house members and the president would like to pass the bill with even fewer taxes and more spending cuts and we re going to look for that but let me remind you look at the results already the most important thing is to pass a bill that has real deficit reduction real spending cuts put it all in a trust fund so the money can t go to anything else and no tax increases without the spending cuts and keep the interest rates down that is what is important here i have been overwhelmed yesterday i had lunch again as i do about every week with a lot of business executives who themselves will have to pay the lion s share of the tax bill over 60 percent of this money will come from people with annual incomes in excess of 200 000 over 75 percent of it from people in the top seven percent of the income bracket and most of them are willing to pay as long as they know the interest rates will go down because the deficit is going down so i think it s important to say yes let s shoot for more spending cuts and less taxes but let s pass the bill and get the deficit down i want to just leave you with this new home sales last month reached a seven year high in april seven year high that s worth doing mortgage rates are at a 20 year low that s worth keeping well i ask you let s don t take our eye off the ball it is estimated that in this year alone if we can keep these interest rates down at this level it will put 100 billion back into the american economy in people refinancing their mortgages refinancing business loans lower consumer loans lower college loans lower car rates that s what we ve got to do i ask for your support i ask for your support not on a partisan basis but to rebuild the american economy there is no party label there s just jobs and incomes behind this we ve got to grow this economy i thank the people on this stage and all of you for being here today to make that point thank you very much dem wjclinton3 6 94 bill_clinton thank you very much ambassador and mrs bartholomew ambassador flynn mr secretary hillary ladies and gentlemen we are delighted to be here i want to join my wife in saying i m sure that many of you will be elated when we leave tomorrow because we have caused you so much extra work but on behalf of all the american people i want to thank those of you who work at our embassies in rome and the vatican our mission to the u n food and agriculture organization our consulates out military personnel here for all the work you do always and especially to make this trip a success i ll be back in a month for the g 7 meeting in naples and the prime minister said that they had a little deficit problem here too and if kept coming back we d have to start paying taxes and contribute in italy to the economic recovery here as well i do want to tell you that back at home things are turning around the economy is picking up unemployment is down we have plain evidence that our country is in a process of renewal we re treating a lot of problems seriously we ve ignored for a long time whether it s international trade or the education and training of our work force or the most serious approach on crime in a generation the american people are beginning to come to grips with the challenges before us we still have a lot of work to do we re trying our best and i believe we re going to be very successful in our attempt to pass a comprehensive health reform bill this year our european friends find it difficult to believe that the united states is the only advanced nation in the world that can t find a way to provide health coverage to all of its people so we re going to do that this year and we re going to deal with a lot of our other challenges there is a sense of possibility of movement that those of us in public service are part of a partnership to make america what it ought to be as we move into the 21st century but there is also an awareness at the end of the cold war that we can no longer do what america has so often done in the past which is to withdraw from the world and to make a clear distinction between our policies abroad and our policies at home now we know they are two sides of the same coin and they must be part and parcel of our commitment to renew our country and to move with confidence and success with our friends and neighbors into the 21st century i can say that i have been deeply moved by the reception we ve received here in italy i agree with what ambassador flynn said about my meeting with the holy father yesterday and i must say that all the conversations we ve had with the officials of the italian government have been very satisfactory from my point of view so i think we ve got a lot of good things coming up i look forward to coming back next month i can t wait to come back even if i do become a tax paying quasi citizen of italy i thank you again for all your enormous effort and work you have made us very very proud of the united states by your efforts thank you so much dem wjclinton3 6 98 bill_clinton thank you well since 600 city year members like leslie and casey wrote and invited me i thought the least i could do was to show up i want to thank leslie for that very wonderful introduction and for the terrific letter i thank casey for what he said when he started talking about his mother i almost started to cry too i d like to thank harris wofford and eli segal i d like to thank mayor white and congressman sawyer for coming with me today father glenn thank you for making us feel so welcome here at john carroll i thank the city year board of trustees for their service and the county and city officials and state officials here for their service thanks again leslie and casey and let me also say a special word of thanks to alan khazei and michael brown the founders of city year i found city year you know back in 1991 when it was a much smaller program beginning in boston and i was there as a candidate for president with about a one percent name recognition in massachusetts and so i had a lot of time on my hands and i spent the better part of the day as i recall talking to the young people in city year i wanted to be president because i felt that our country needed to take a new course if we were going to prepare for the 21st century so that for all of you the american dream of opportunity would be alive for everyone who was responsible enough to seize it so that our country would still be a leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity and security in the world and so that we would come together across all the lines that divide us into one america bound in no small measure by citizen service now since 1991 and the election in 1992 my belief that our country could do better has certainly been vindicated i am grateful beyond measure that thanks to people like you and my friends in congress and americans throughout the country we ve been able to change america i m grateful that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years the lowest crime rates in 25 years i m grateful but what i want to say to you today is that all of these achievements basically leave us free to chart the right course for america toward the 21st century part of it must be done in washington part of it must be done in the hearts and minds and lives of our citizens where the greatness of america has always resided one of the things i think i ought to mention today because it s so timely in washington is that we have a chance to pass comprehensive legislation to protect young people from the dangers of tobacco and we ought to do it and do it right away i just came from an elementary school here in cleveland where i met a lot of city year americorps volunteers they had worked with young children in this elementary school the steven howe elementary school to write 1 500 book reports this year to build a new playground but one of the things i d like for every child in that grade school to know is this smoking related illnesses kill more people every year than aids alcohol car accidents murder suicides drugs and fires combined combined and 90 percent of all smokers started before they were 18 even though it s illegal to sell cigarettes to children under 18 three thousand young people start smoking every day a thousand will have their lives shortened because of it so i say again while there are some in congress who seem determined to stall stop or kill the tobacco bill we will never have a better chance to save a thousand lives a day and save a million kids in the next few years and i hope you will help me send a loud message back to washington d c to act and act now there are a lot of other things that we are working on back there that will shape the world you will dominate as adults we re about to have our first balanced budget and a surplus in 29 years and before we spend a penny of it i want us to make sure we know how we re going to save social security so we don t bankrupt your generation when my generation retires it s not right while we re strong and prosperous i want us to do everything we can to invest in education so that not only our colleges but our grade schools our junior high schools our high schools are the best in the country and every child of whatever race or income or station in life will get a world class education starting at kindergarten i want the congress and the country to accept changes in the earth s climate as real and commit ourselves to reduce the problem of global warming even as we continue to grow the economy we have to face the environmental challenges of the 21st century and the sooner that we get at it the better off we re going to be there are many other things i want the congress to do in health care and campaign finance reform and adopting the initiative that the first lady and i have tried to advance for a 21st century fund to put money into research in biomedical research and scientific research to build the next generation of the internet and also to preserve our precious natural heritage but i will tell you this if america hasn t learned anything from you in the last four years since we ve had the americorps program going we should have learned that in the end we will never be the country we ought to be we will never meet the challenges that are there before us we will never fully seize the opportunities that are there until america believes in and practices citizen service as i said when i started running for president in 1991 i had this idea but it was just an idea in my mind that we had two big problems we needed more idealistic energetic young people out there working in our communities helping to solve problems at the grass roots level and touching other children one on one helping people that would otherwise be forgotten going to places where the private economy would not otherwise send them and we also needed to open the doors of college to everyone so i had this general idea and then when i went to city year in boston the lights came on in my mind and i said this is what i want to do you know out of the national service of our soldiers in world war ii came the g i bill which educated a whole generation of my parents and created the great american middle class out of the all too short service of president kennedy came the peace corps which took the idea of citizen service around the world and i still see it as i travel for america our best ideas and our greatest humanity manifest in these peace corps volunteers all across the world i saw them recently when i was in africa out of americorps has come a blending of the two taking the idea of service and the idea of education it s almost like the peace corps comes home in larger numbers with a g i educational bill for citizen service that is what we have done in only four years nearly 90 000 young people have served through americorps in their communities nearly 50 000 have become eligible for the education benefits this year alone more than 40 000 americorps positions are being filled around the country and every young americorps volunteer as anyone else could see from your enthusiasm typically will generate 12 more volunteers helping on whatever the service is last year americorps members taught or tutored 500 000 students mentored 95 000 more recruited 39 000 more volunteers immunized 64 000 children helped with disasters in over 30 states worked with over 3 000 safety patrols with local law enforcement and civilian groups trained 100 000 people in violence prevention built or rehabilitated 5 600 homes helped put 32 000 homeless people in permanent residences worked with people with aids and other serious diseases and did a whole raft of environmental projects because of americorps the seniorcorps learn and serve america america is a better place today i am especially proud of our america reads program which relies on all our national service programs because one of the most important things we can do is to make sure every 8 year old in america and many of them don t have english as their first language now can read independently by the time they leave the 3rd grade it s just terribly important to all other learning we now have i learned this morning just before i came here that we now have over 1 000 colleges and universities that are allocating work study positions or other volunteers to help make sure that by the year 2000 every 8 year old can in fact read and a lot of americorps volunteers have helped to mobilize organize and train those tutors and i am very grateful for that i was also proud of the word used in my introduction enabling that i had enabled service i think that s important because we don t dictate anything about americorps from washington you know that city year is a grass roots community tied organization even though it s a national network we have enabled organizations like the boys and girls clubs the habitat for humanity hundreds of other nonprofit organizations faith based organizations 6 000 young americorps volunteers in faith based organizations this year to select and use americorps members to continue and enlarge the work that they are doing here in cleveland more than 200 citizens of all ages and backgrounds are serving in 14 different americorps programs including those serving with city year cleveland in cleveland americorps does everything from tutoring children to building homes to organizing neighborhood watches to cleaning streams i guess the next message i d want you to help me send back to washington today is that americorps works and it should be extended by congress into the 21st century so more young people have the opportunity to do now i want to make one other point about americorps and citizen service as you bring volunteers to communities in need you also bring people together i mean just look around the first thing i remember blazed in my mind when i first went to americorps and to the city year project in boston was that there was a young person who had been in an ivy league school who dropped out of school for a year to work full time working side by side with a young person who had gotten in trouble in new hampshire and the juvenile authorities said if you ll go work for city year that s the best rehabilitation you could do they learned a lot from each other those two young people and they both did very well in the future as a result of it if you look around at this crowd today it s a pretty good picture of america and i have always believed that in the 21st century america would have its greatest days in no small measure because we are growing more diverse as the world grows smaller so it simply stands to reason that we re better off if we have people who look like people from everywhere in the world who share their cultures their language and their religions but who are bound together by common devotion to american ideals to personal responsibility expressed through constructive citizenship i believe that the key to solving a lot of our racial tensions in america is to make sure we keep living together working together learning together and in some ways most important of all serving together giving together it can unite us across all the lines that divide us it can even unite us across political lines and after spending a few days in washington i sometimes think those are the deepest divides of all last year i was so honored to be with presidents bush and carter and ford mrs reagan and general colin powell at the president s summit on service in philadelphia i believe everybody who was there felt this enormous sense of excitement and also a great sense of possibility as we defined an agenda that we wanted every child to be a part of we wanted every child to have a caring adult in his or her life a safe place to grow up a good school to attend a healthy start in life and a chance to serve the community now since that summit we ve worked to do our part in washington again there s some things the government should do we ve worked to expand health insurance to 5 million children we ve worked to expand access to child care so parents can be more effective at home and at work we ve worked to implement something called the high hopes mentoring program that will involve young people like you with other kids who are younger starting in junior high school for six years and also we ll give you an extra tool you ll be able to tell those 7th graders look if you learn if you stay in school if you live a good life i can tell you right now here s how much college aid you will get to guarantee you can go to college when you get out of high school we ve been helped by corporations by nonprofits by other organizations who ve committed fabulous sums of money to try to implement this agenda under the leadership of general powell around the country we want to do more because in the end you know and i know from what you re doing that the most important thing we can still do in america with a lot of human problems is to make one on one contact and that you can put up all the money in the world but hands build houses hands clean streams hands immunize children people have to do these things so what i want to say today is i d like to do some more to fulfill the goals of the president s summit on service and the corporation for national service is now prepared to commit another additional 1 000 americorps leadership positions targeted only to the goals of the president s summit these americorps volunteers will support these state and local efforts but you think about it 1 000 volunteers trained to be leaders of community efforts wouldn t you like to know that when you finish and when you start your careers that every american child has a safe place to grow up a good school a healthy start a caring adult and a chance to serve just like you re doing i think it s worth our making that effort i hope that one of the legacies of this period at the end of the 20th century will be a renewed spirit of community a renewed sense of idealism a renewed commitment to service i hope in other words that when i finish my work and you finish yours we will have helped to make real the pledge that you take when you join americorps in the lives of all americans indeed i wish every american would take that pledge i think it might be well again to send that message to the country so if you ll help i d like us to conclude with that americorps pledge i ll say it then you say it i will get things done for america to make our people safer smarter and healthier i will bring americans together to strengthen our communities faced with apathy i will take action faced with conflicts i will see common ground faced with adversity i will persevere i will carry this commitment with me this year and beyond i am an americorps member and i am going to get thing done let me say to all of you in every generation young americans are called upon to renew our country to deepen what it means to be free to widen the circle of opportunity to strengthen the bounds of our national community because of the progress that has been made in this time your generation has an incredible opportunity you can finish the work that was done when i was your age by the people you saw in that video thirty years ago this week robert kennedy was killed thirty springtimes ago we lost both robert kennedy and martin luther king their effort to bring america together and lift america to higher ground was delayed by a lot of the things that happened along the way but now that we have regained our sense of confidence that we know we can make our economy work we know we can make our school work we know that we can make our streets safe we know we can take poor people and give them a second chance and give them a chance to work and succeed in raising their children as well as working we know that america can be more and better and that we can live up to our highest ideals your generation will have a chance to make that the history of the 21st century i am so proud of you i can t even convey what it feels like for me to stand here and look into your eyes i know now that one of the best decisions i ever made was to fight to create americorps and to fight to keep others from taking it away and the fight to give you the chance to serve but remember what you promised in the pledge that you will serve now and beyond for when you no longer wear these jackets or t shirts every day if you continue to believe and you continue to service and you continue to have the feelings inside toward your fellow human beings that you have today then you will write a remarkable history for america in the 21st century we need you to do that and i believe you will god bless you and godspeed thank you let s give him a hand he was great i want you to know that i still have steven s sweatshirt and i ll have it with me forever to remember when i first met him and i first met city year you keep it with you forever too god bless you thank you dem wjclinton3 7 96 bill_clinton i want you to understand that if if the budget process this year works out like it did last year i hope it won t i m working hard with the congress but i am not going to tolerate an assault on the fundamental structure of educational opportunity and educational excellence in this country it is wrong it is wrong we have to do more to help you to make schools safe and going to and from school safe we have worked hard but still no teacher should ever fear when he or she is in the classroom or going to and from school no student should be so afraid no student should be so afraid that they cannot learn and we worked very hard to preserve funding for the safe and drug free schools program to enforce our zero tolerance for guns in the schools policy and we will continue to work to help schools deal with the problems that they face every day that teachers face every day and to try to find opportunities to bring people together last year i had the opportunity to work with the secretary of education and the justice department on a set of guidelines to schools to deal with the complex questions that often arise when children seek to practice or at least express their religious convictions we didn t want to turn our schools into religion free zones and we didn t want to violate the 1st amendment because of the work that sec riley and the attorney general did we have heard from schools all over america saying this is not an issue anymore we have resolved this we thank you very much and i hope it has helped you in your school i want to propose today one other thing that i think is quite important that i have cared a lot about for a long time one of the most important things we can do to promote learning and to keep our children safe is the most obvious old fashioned thing that i dealt with when i was in school myself back in the dark ages and that is to insist that children be in school and not on the streets truancy truancy is a warning signal that a child is in trouble and is often a gateway to crime the difference between success and failure in life for our children is whether they re learning on the streets or in the school where they belong the street is not an acceptable alternative to the classroom when i was governor we actually passed a bill which made it possible for local communities to find parents if they refused to show up at parent teacher conferences or permitted their children to be chronically absent i know the nea has called for federal action to crack down on truancy so i want to tell you about two things that we re doing in response to the call that you issued first earlier today i directed the department of education to send this manual i don t know if you can see it it says manual to combat truancy to every school district in america it shows that when parents are held accountable and when communities come together you can do something about this problem yesterday sec riley announced that he would give a total of 10 million to 25 school districts to help them keep their children in school this is a beginning but i want you to know because of what you and others in education have said to me all across the country this will become a national priority and we will keep at it with you until we turn this issue around and i thank you for that now what i want you to think about as i leave we ve had a great time today and i loved all the cheering and the shouting and it made chills run up and down my spine and kind of got me in the humor for the next three or four months and do what we have to do and i thank for that but this is what we used to call back home preaching to the saved and there s something to be said for that but it s not enough we are being given an historic responsibility now you and i to pick which bridge we re going to walk into the 21st century and that will determine what this country will be like when our children and grandchildren reach our age so what i want to ask you to do is to go beyond preaching to the saved i want to ask you to walk out of this hall determined with all your other responsibilities and all your other pressures and all the challenges of the classroom and the schoolhouse to spend whatever time you can between now and november talking to your family your friends people who don t work with you every day people who don t have the same insight you may have into what goes on here about these big questions because i believe with all my heart if the american people are given back this choice if they get to look at the big things not the divisive distracted destructive puny elements that too often dominate our politics the american people will do what they ve been doing for over 200 years they will make the right decision and your children and your grandchildren will be the richer for it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton3 8 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you all for being here today i m delighted to see you i know that a lot of you have come from a very long way away and i know that was an extreme effort but i think in some ways the most extreme effort was made by the members of congress who are here because they finished an exhaustive and very productive week late last night and i can t believe they re still around in washington and i want to thank them for staying chairman bliley chairman roberts congressmen waxman bilirakis condit dooley and richardson and i d like to say a special word of thanks not only to congressman dingell but to congressman fazio who is not here who also worked on this bill and to senator heflin and senator leahy and senator lugar and my friend senator pryor who worked on this bill who is not here and i want to thank the agriculture department deputy secretary rominger is here and the fda commissioner kessler and i d like to thank the members of the administration especially carol browner and katie mcginty i d like to thank the vice president who told me that he held the first hearings on dealing with this issue 15 years ago in the congress this issue has been around a long time and it s a great great day i d also like to say that the happiest person in the administration today is leon panetta because in his other life he is a walnut farmer but i assure you this is not special interest legislation there s nothing in here with a disproportionate impact on italian walnut farmers from northern california that is to the best of my knowledge there is nothing ladies and gentlemen we are here today in celebration and we should be immensely proud of the food quality protection act that will revolutionize the way we protect food from harmful pesticides it proves we don t have to choose between a healthy environment and a healthy economy it shows when we come together across party lines and do the right thing for the american people we can get real results this is important not only for what was done but for how it was done and i want to thank everyone here who has been a part of it from the day i took office i have worked hard to meet what i think is a fundamental promise that we should make to our people people should know that the food they eat and the water they drink will not make them sick we strengthened and expanded the community right to know law which requires industries to tell our citizens what substances are being released into the world around us last year we put in place strong new protections to ensure that seafood is safe last month we announced steps to revamp our meat and poultry inspection system for the first time in 90 years today we add the cornerstone to this solid foundation with the food quality protection act i like to think of it as the peace of mind act because it ll give parents the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the fruits the vegetables the grains that they put down in front of their children are safe it s long overdue the old safeguards that protected our food from pesticides were written with the best of intentions but they weren t up to the job and as you can see from the vast array of support here across every specter of america life nobody liked them very much and no one thought that they really worked as they were supposed to bad pesticides stayed on the market too long good alternatives were kept out in this new provision we deal with the problem of existing law which is that there are strong protections against cancer but not against other health dangers there is simply no uniform standard for what s safe these weaknesses in the present law cause real problems for everyone involved in producing and distributing our food and for most of all the people who consume it especially our children according to the national academy of sciences infants and young people are especially vulnerable to pesticides chemicals can go a long way in a small body this act puts the safety of our children first it sets a clear consistent standard for all pesticide use on all foods for all health risks it sets a standard high if a pesticide poses a danger to our children it won t be in our food period the act will reform the regulatory process for pesticides so that new and safer substitutes will be approved faster and this is also very important the sooner they get on the markets the sooner farmers will be able to use them to replace older pesticides that may pose greater health risks the pesticides will be reviewed regularly using the best science available third this legislation will see to it that consumers get the information they need supermarkets will be required to provide health information to shoppers about the pesticides used on food they re buying a family ought to be able to gather for a summer dinner knowing that the food before them will provide nothing more than nourishment and joy americans have enough on their minds without having to worry about that with this legislation americans will continue to know that the world s most bountiful food supply is also its safest and as i said before to me almost as important as what the law does is how it was done this act comes to our desk to my desk and to our administration with the support of farmers and environmentalists consumer groups and agribusiness and the medical community after more than a decade of work these groups have come together to say with this bill we do not have to choose between a clean environment and a safe food supply and a strong economy if we do it right we can have both it comes with the unanimous backing of every member of congress in both parties and i must say i am gratified to see this because i see this effort to preserve the environment in a way that will permit us to grow the economy as an essential component of our national security in the 21st century last year we were fighting about efforts to weaken our most basic safeguards for clean air clean water safe food now we see a bipartisan public commitment to the public health this is an area where we stand on common ground and as a people we should continue to stand on common ground i want to compliment the congress for the work that was done in this last week moving people from welfare to work raising the minimum wage helping small businesses passing health care reform making this effort to safeguard our food last night congress passed strong legislation to help keep our drinking water safe this has been a very good season of progress turning away from extremism toward common ground around opportunity responsibility and community i am very pleased i thank the members of congress here for their leadership and i thank the american people and especially those here represented for making this day happen we re going to do the bill signing now and i want to invite the children who have come from around the country here to come up and the members of congress to come up for the bill signing thank you dem wjclinton3 9 96 bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen that was a stunning example of clinton s fourth law of politics which is whenever possible be introduced by someone you have known all your life they are prone to exaggerate thank you general thrash and rose for being here and for your service to our nation thank you general freeman my present adjutant general here in washington for escorting me in secretary west general alexander under secretary dorn assistant secretary lee lt general baca thank you for your good work general philbin terry o connell senator akaka representative wicker and i d like to say a happy 73rd birthday to lt general vern webber happy birthday sir on you they look good those years they look good thank you let me begin by thanking you for dedicating this conference to congressman sonny montgomery long before i ever entered public life i knew about sonny montgomery because he represented my neighboring state of mississippi and because one of my best friend s father served with him many years ago and was a close friend of his in the military not the congress in all of his long career he has stood up for many worthy causes i suppose he ll be remembered most as being the author of the montgomery g i bill and as being the best friend the national guard ever had i might say that in this political season when i have said i hope that we can change the direction of the last several years and make this contest one of ideas and not insults sonny montgomery has led an entire distinguished political career able to disagree with people while still being their friends able to be forthright in what he believes in without demeaning those who disagreed with him and i will always honor him for that as well ladies and gentlemen we come here by pure coincidence at a moment when once again our nation s military has shown its extraordinary skill and professionalism in a difficult mission in iraq three days ago despite clear warnings from the united states and the international community saddam hussein s forces attacked and seized the kurdish controlled city of irbil in northern iraq this act is part of a broad pattern of violence and recklessness by saddam against the kurds against other ethnic minorities against iraq s neighbors these actions have threatened the stability of the entire region for some years now this morning i ordered america s armed forces to strike iraq extending the no fly zone and destroying iraqi missile defenses in the south to make sure we could safely extend the no fly zone i want to reaffirm to you what i said to all the american people early this morning our objectives there are limited but our interests are clear to demonstrate once again that reckless acts have consequences to reduce saddam s ability to strike out again at his neighbors to increase america s ability to prevent future acts of violence and aggression these steps are being taken to further all of these objectives and the policy of containing iraq that i have pursued for four years now and it was developed before me under president bush we know that if we do not pursue this policy we might once again be called upon to do more as we had to do more in operations desert shield and desert storm we do not want that to happen and therefore i did what i did today i hope you will support the decision of the united states for the last five years and clearly again over the last week i have had to opportunity to say to the american people that my vision for our country as we stand of the edge of the 21st century is simple but profound i want us to build a bridge to that century that will keep the american dream alive for every single person responsible enough to work for it i want this country to come together across all of our divisions and not be torn apart as so many other nations are today and i want america to maintain its role as the strongest force for peace and freedom for security and prosperity in the entire world well into the 21st century into the indefinite future that is good for us it is also good for the cause of peace and freedom in the world more than anything else i come here tonight to express the gratitude of our nation to the men and women of the national guard for all you have done to help our nation build that bridge as the strongest force for peace and freedom security and prosperity four years ago when i spoke to you in utah i said that one of my proudest duties as governor was to command the arkansas national guard as commander in chief of all of our nation s armed forces now that pride has grown even stronger in all the m en and women who make up our total force from every service branch of the military those on active duty and yes definitely those in the guard and the reserves today america s gratitude to the guard should be greater than ever for not a day has passed this summer that we could not have looked behind the headlines of the moment to find the guard hard at work from enforcing the peace in bosnia to mounting an emergency response to hurricane bertha in the southeast and the virgin islands from building roads in panama to the difficult and heroic work after the twa 800 tragedy the guard has been on the job during the centennial olympics the greatest in the modern history of the olympics the guard was there 11 000 members from 43 states in one of the largest domestic missions ever of course all of us remember the great performances of michael johnson kerri strug and so many others but the unsung performance of the national guard upholding a tradition of service stretching back 360 years enabled america to put its best foot forward and it too deserves a gold medal i have seen for myself in bosnia and haiti as we know from somalia and the gulf war the guard has been an essential part of our military success that is why last month i signed an executive order authorizing the award of a bronze m to all guard and reserve members who serve in support of these operations last thursday secretary perry awarded the first 14 of these well deserved recognitions i understand that there are two of the guard recipients who are here tonight who have received this medal captain drew sullins and sergeant first class susan hurley if they re here i d like to ask them to stand and be recognized thank you very much now there are thank you i am sure there are others in this room who are eligible for this decoration and who will get it so if you re here i d like to ask you to stand and be recognized please all of you who served please stand up thank you very much thank you i know something i suspect most americans don t know and that is that service in the guard also entails real sacrifice since i spoke with you just four years ago more than 200 army and air guard members have died in operational missions and training including the pilot of the pennsylvania air guard a 10 that crashed near here on the eastern shore just a few weeks ago we owe all of them and their families a debt of gratitude we can never repay to honor their memory and the memory of all those who have sacrificed we must continue to build america strong and secure in the 21st century to deepen our alliances to reduce even further the dangers of weapons of mass destruction to adapt our armed forces for the changing times and new missions to stand strong against terrorism four years ago when i met with you i said that as we reduced our forces in the wake of the cold war a strong role for the national guard and the reserve made more sense not less and we kept that promise we kept that promise it began with the 1993 bottom up review initiated by the man who introduced me to you four years ago as the then chairman of the house armed services committee and my first secretary of defense the late les aspin and i thank him for his work there we have kept that promise in the important guard reserve offsite agreement our use of reserve components has been one of the secrets of our success as we decrease the number of our forces but increase their readiness capabilities and technological edge we carried through on our pledge to retain the combat role of the guard and i reaffirm i will not let the guard become a backup force of last resort of course you and i know we all have to work to adapt the guard for the national security demands of the 21st century i want to thank the national guard bureau the adjutants general secretary west the leadership of our active army for their innovative proposal to redesign the role of the eight guard divisions to support our national security strategy and the total force policy while always protecting the guard s historic character and tradition i m pleased to announce that i will request the first funding for this redesigned plan in the defense budget to be submitted next february that is if i get my contract renewed but i think it s important you have kept your commitment to america and so long as i am president i will do everything i can to make sure america keeps its commitment to you our military readiness is at an historic high we ve increased our original defense spending plans three times in three years adding back almost 50 billion to ensure that we have the equipment the training the quality of life our troops deserve we re equipping our forces with the newest technology including the f 22 and the fa 18 e f fighters the v 22 osprey and the crusader artillery system my defense budget increases our funding for weapons modernization 40 percent by the year 2000 our armed forces have won wars in the past they may be called upon to win them in the future and if they are they must be able to win keeping faith with our men and women in uniform entails more than just giving them the means to prevail in battle it also means providing for the quality of life they deserve we ve set aside funds to ensure that military personnel receive the highest pay raises allowed by law through 2001 i fought against a proposal that would have cut military retirement pay we increased housing allowances and expanded programs to support military families who sacrifice for our nation just like their loved ones in uniform i should emphasize here that i have been especially moved by the extra burden on families caused by extra deployments as we have downsized the military and i know that all of you feel for the families of our full time service personnel when they go off on those long missions they deserve all of the support we can give them and i am proud of the fact that the united states military in all of its aspects has been as strongly pro family as it has been but we have to keep working on this because the families should not break apart under the strain of people doing their duty to the united states of america we must continue to support them i m also pleased that two years ago i was able to sign legislation to strengthen your right to return to your civilian job after serving our nation without losing seniority status or pay that is also very important as we move into this new era you know as well as i do that we confront a web of new threats that know no boundaries the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction organized crime ethnic rivalries religious rivalries that quickly descend into murder and can spill across national borders tonight i d like to talk about two of them in particular drug trafficking and terrorism here too our armed forces are on the job especially the national guard i was very proud to appoint general barry mccaffrey a hero of the vietnam and gulf wars who led our military antidrug efforts in south america to coordinate our nation s battle against drugs we have seen to it that the military plays a vital role in this fight and i m proud that as general mccaffrey said to me and i quote the guard is crucial to our campaign to stop drugs from coming into our country and to keep our young people from using them i ask anyone to consider these facts last year the national guard assisted law enforcement officials in seizing hundreds of tons of drugs that resulted in more than 90 000 arrests guard aircraft flew more than 35 000 hours in support of antidrug missions guard members are manning radar systems at remote sites in the andes essential for cutting the flow of drugs from that region and more than 60 000 volunteers in guard programs are working with almost 6 million at risk youth you ve come a long way since you started that program all of you god bless you we need more of it and i thank you just today we announced that the navy and the coast guard recently seized 8 000 pounds of cocaine on a honduran fishing boat headed for america that s one of the largest drug busts in history our military helps confiscate more than 100 tons of cocaine every year cocaine otherwise that would be poisoning our communities and our children we re working to hit the drug suppliers just as hard as we can we ve helped to bust up the cali and gulf cartels in latin america crack down on the ring led by the burmese drug lord khun sa in asia denied assistance to countries such as colombia that failed to cooperate with our counternarcotics efforts in 1994 the crime bill which was passed amid bitter partisan rancor not only put 100 000 new police on the street and provided for banning 19 assault weapons it also provided for the death penalty for drug lords congress is consistently thank you congress has consistently supported these programs but has provided funding at levels less than we requested particularly for the department of defense s counterdrug programs we still have the biggest antidrug budget ever and that s allowed us to do a lot of things like increase border patrols along the southwest border the customs and the guard working together increased drug seizures from commercial cargo 125 percent in 1995 that s the good news it still is painful for me that for all we are doing and in spite of the fact that drug use among young adults is going down drug use among children juveniles people under 18 is still going up no one quite knows why this is true it is also happening in canada and many european countries it appears that every few years a group of young people come along and once again decide that they aren t dangerous or if they are dangerous somehow they can evade the risks because after all they re young and they re going to live forever and that brings me back to the other issue that you work so hard on your work with at risk children it is obvious that every single one of us who care about this is going to have to work even harder to educate our children about the dangers drugs pose we have to do that we have dramatically increased the safe and drug free schools program it s now reaching 40 million students in 97 percent of our districts we have now established drug courts across the country because they ve proved effective in breaking the cycle of drugs and crime we are fighting against any attempts to cut back on the safe and drug free schools program we are working to pass legislation that would require states to test parolees for drugs and send them back to prison if they get back on drugs but we have to stop this from happening in the first place your programs for at risk kids think what it means to a child who has never had a positive role model to see someone in a uniform who looks like them who comes from humble beginnings who has made something of his or her life saying there is a future out there for you this stuff can kill you it is not just illegal it is not just wrong it can kill you it can kill you in a hurry depending on what drug it is or it can just rob you of your ability to concentrate over the long run or rob you if you re a young woman of your ability to have healthy children they re all terribly dangerous you can have a big input on that and so i hope that when we meet again we ll be able to say that the guard has helped not 6 million at risk kids but several million more than that i know you have lots to do but this country s children need you and they will respond to you i d like to say just a word about terrorism and i d like to point out that kind of like the narcotics trade in an ironic and painful way many of the things we love about this new post cold war global society of ours make us more vulnerable to the things we hate we like it that we can travel around the world with such great ease we like it that all borders are more open we like it that we can transfer information ideas technology and money across the globe virtually instantaneously but the more open our society is the more vulnerable we are to the organized forces of destruction and that is why i have said repeatedly finding a way to deal with terrorism terrorism from which no one is immune as you saw it from the attack in the subway in tokyo you ve seen it in great britain you ve seen it on the continent of europe you ve seen it in oklahoma city you saw it at the world trade center and you hear about it and it sends chills up and down your spine when you discover the things that were planned that have been avoided by the diligence of our law enforcement officials we have got to continue to work on this we have got to continue to combat terrorists wherever they are and i believe that we must continue to try to convince others to do the same thing we have followed a three prong strategy first to rally our friends and allies around the world against terror we did that at the g 7 meeting in france last summer and at the summit of the peacemakers at sharm el sheikh in egypt where for the first time arab states a large number of them condemned terrorism in israel or wherever it occurred in the middle east we are increasing the isolation of those who sponsor terrorism by maintaining and strengthening our sanctions against iran iraq libya and sudan second here at home we re working hard to give law enforcement the tools they need to combat modern terrorism through the antiterrorism bill that we pushed through congress after oklahoma city and with new legislation to help us stop money laundering and tighten our borders against terrorists third we re working very hard to increase our security at airports and on airplanes doing more hand searches and machine screening of luggage requiring pre flight inspection for every plane flying to or from the united states examining all standard aviation security practices so that we can make further changes to increase security i might say since most of you probably flew into washington to attend this meeting you may have noticed some delay in air travel i hope you didn t but if you did it s worth that to make all americans safer when they board airplanes and others when they come to our country this will be a long hard struggle it will require discipline concentration flexibility the ability to learn and continuously change but the most important thing it will require is the same level of will that the american people and the american armed forces brought to bear in all of our armed conflicts and through the long twilight struggle of the cold war we have to understand that this may well be the 21st century s curse and we know that as long as human nature is what it is there will be some amount of misconduct in this old world some amount of wrongdoing and some amount of downright evil and as long as that s around the united states will be a target and the united states must take the lead in stamping it out and standing against it let me say in closing i have seen enormous numbers of americans face to face in the last 10 days because of the events that you know well i expect i ve looked into the faces of right around a half a million people riding on the train and on the bus going to the big meetings and passing through the small towns early in the morning and late at night this is a very great country because the citizens of this country are good people and most of our citizens just want to live good decent honorable lives have work that has dignity raise the children the best they can enjoy their places of worship and their associations with their friends and neighbors and their family you have made that possible through your dedication you who are willing to defend our nation make it possible for all those little kids to stand out along the side of the road or railroad tracks and wave the american flag and know even before they re old enough to explain it that it really means something special to be an american about 200 years ago when our nation stood at the dawn of the 19th century john randolph of roanoke virginia one of the great congressional leaders of his time said it best randolph was a great supporter of the militias out of which this organization grew he knew the power of the love of liberty on the floor of the house in january of 1800 john randolph said when citizen and soldier shall be synonymous then you will be safe it was true then it is true now and you have made it true thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton30 1 97 bill_clinton thank you welcome to the white house i would like to begin with a word of thanks to first secretary rubin who became treasury secretary and before that head of the national economic council with a passion rare for someone in his previous line of work rare to bring the benefits of enterprise to people who had been too long denied them and an absolute conviction too rare all across our country that just because people were poor and in distress did not mean they could not do better did not mean that we could not spread the benefits of enterprise to the cities and to the isolated rural areas where they had been too long absent i d also like to thank the first lady for beginning this obsession almost that we have with microenterprise with me i guess i asked her before i came up here and we were laughing you know one of the great burdens of growing older is that you can t remember when something happened even if you remember exactly what happened and i said now when was it that i came home and told you i hope i lived long enough to see mohammed unis win a nobel prize because it was my first exposure through our friends in chicago who brought me in touch with him to the whole idea that microenterprise might be exploded across a nation and she said i think it was 85 but it might have been 86 so to be literally accurate more than 10 years ago we started the long road which we could not have predicted would bring us all to this day these awards for excellence in microenterprise development simply recognize that our country has been and will be built on the enterprise of our people on their ideas their energies their willingness to take risks their willingness to pursue their dreams that is the story of all the new businesses in this country and with the right opportunity those kinds of dreams can become real for countless numbers of people to support their families and strengthen their communities and build our country into the kind of nation we want in a new century indeed it is now a commonplace observance that often the greatest contributions economic contributions in our communities come from the smallest businesses in the aggregate they literally can transform communities offering a path to success for americans who would otherwise not have had it if we can spread the opportunity for microenterprise for making that first beginning across this country we can offer a new path to success for americans who today are left out of the economic mainstream in rural america it may be a person who once worked on a family farm in urban areas it may be a parent who can t juggle an office or a plant job with a family or who s been left out of the work force for childbearing or who is struggling to move from welfare to work it might be older americans who are retired from their previous jobs it might be people with disabilities who aren t mobile but who have a skill an idea a capacity to contribute it might be laid off workers looking for a second chance there are huge numbers of people in our country as all of you know who are literally brimming with initiative and desire who are willing to be responsible and work hard microenterprise helps to put such people on their feet and gives people with courage and genius a chance to reach for the stars to do that they must have opportunity there are people often who need these opportunities who are completely unable to get proper business training or loans or even a hearing from a lender under the established systems but when the opportunity is not there for them make no mistake about it their loss is also our loss for every person whose potential goes unfulfilled there is a problem or the absence of an opportunity that affects the entire nation and when they have an opportunity we move closer together in our common goals for our society for after all all of us want every american to be able to be responsible and to work and to find fulfillment we want to raise the incomes of people who can be fully participating in our society we want to promote the growth of business we want to ensure that everybody has a stake in the success of our communities because we know there are no unsuccessful communities where everybody has a stake in its success as the first lady has said with a lot of her compelling examples today we have seen the value of microenterprise demonstrated in much poorer countries bringing new dignity and better lives for women and children especially but we know it has also worked in america one of the things that we worked to do in our home state was to create a community development bank and a good faith fund microenterprise program since i became president we have tried to go national with this micro idea in a very macro way and again i say it would not have been possible if it hadn t been for the support of secretary rubin and his considerable persuasive powers in convincing other people who had never thought about it that this was in fact a good idea we want microenterprise to take root everywhere we recognize however that our efforts alone are not enough we have to have a partnership between the public and private sectors if we re going to have adequate support of microenterprise development all across the united states i also want to emphasize that microenterprise must be part of a larger strategy to help every american make the most of his or her own life there are many pieces to the strategy and we must all play a role to have the whole strategy succeed we also reformed the community reinvestment act to revive communities in distress and ensure that private sector capital flows to all all credit worthy borrowers without prejudice that is unleashing billions of dollars in private investment in those communities and i am committed to maintaining that effort in 1992 i called for a nationwide network of community development banks while asking the nation s banks and thrifts to make sound investments to expand opportunity enterprise and homeownership in distressed communities last year treasury s community development financial institution fund made its first round of awards to 32 cdfis around the nation this is an initiative with enormous potential to help people who have been left out come in and be lifted up by their own endeavors before recognizing the awardees i want to make two further announcements today in support of these common efforts first we are committed to increase the community development financial institution s fund by a billion dollars over the next five years that is almost triple its current funding thank you and all of you know that properly run these funds can create more jobs with 100 000 than some traditional efforts can with a million so i ask for your support and your continued demonstration that this is a good investment for all americans second i want to announce a bold new effort to help americans in hard hit communities go to work we have finalized a new 10 million welfare to work partnership between chase manhattan bank the rockefeller foundation and the department of housing and urban development this three way partnership will fund two private sector welfare to work projects designed to raise employment rates by as much as 20 percent to 30 percent in high poverty urban neighborhoods more than 15 sites will be funded in both projects three of them brooklyn central harlem and new york city and sandtown winchester and baltimore have already been selected for one project los angeles cleveland san antonio seattle and louisville are among the finalists for the other i d like to ask peter goldmark the president of the rockefeller foundation william harrison the vice president of the chase manhattan corporation and chase bank and michael stegman assistant secretary at hud to stand so we can all thank you for your work in putting together this very amazing and very hopeful project gentlemen would you please stand microenterprise by giving people the tools they need to help themselves will reinforce efforts like this and that s what our award recipients do every day today we recognize them for their successful efforts they are the engineers and the pioneers of potential we need more of them in america i d like to ask each of them to stand as i announce their endeavors and their award first the women s self employment project is a leader in advocating for low income women in chicago and assisting them to pursue self employment to lift themselves from poverty and welfare dependency it trains the women in entrepreneurship marketing and in getting loans it has served more than 3 000 women in the past 10 years most of the clients have household incomes of 15 000 and listen to this their business survival rate is 79 percent accepting for the women s self employment project the award for excellence in program delivery poverty alleviation is connie evans thank you connie accion u s network has made an impact in new york chicago san diego albuquerque san antonio and el paso its name action in spanish translates into opportunity for people it serves through specialized streamlined loans most of its several thousand borrowers are hispanic or low income entrepreneurs of home based businesses it also lends to others who lack access to credit one of its best success stories is that of safaraaz saalim who went from being homeless to running a successful one man salad restaurant in downtown san diego i ll go there next time i m there accion has shown itself to be a model of disciplined management the cascadia revolving fund operates in rural and urban communities of the pacific northwest no no we re going to do them together i know what i m doing providing intensive services to new and young businesses and helping them to stay in business that s a big accomplishment because cascadia specializes in high risk businesses it is focused on helping low income people women owned firms and businesses that locate in economically distressed communities for their work accion and cascadia revolving fund are receiving awards for excellence in program delivery access to credit and the recipients are bill burrus for accion and patricia grossman for the cascadia revolving fund let s give them a hand the north carolina rural economic development center established a microenterprise loan program several years ago to combat the problem of lack of capital to start up businesses in rural areas its solution a highly effective model for statewide delivery of microenterprise services it makes both individual and group loans and provides business training through local community based partners these partners identify potential borrowers and underwrite their loans this is community action at its best growing the economy at the grass roots and we have another winner in this category as well from its base in cambridge massachusetts working capital also provides small loans to groups of business owners who form peer groups to further help the cause working capital created the microenterprise tool kit a step by step guide to starting a microenterprise program this innovation will help spawn a whole new wave of entrepreneurs something all of us can cheer for their leaps in creativity the awards for excellence in program innovation go to billy ray hall of the north carolina rural economic development center and jeffrey ash of working capital let s give them a hand the nebraska microenterprise partnership fund is a model of public private partnership it is an intermediary raising money from public and private sources to build a statewide grassroots network of microfunds in just a short time the partnership fund has sown the seeds of a strong network of microenterprise demonstrating that federal state and local government can in fact work with community based organizations to support the smallest businesses the self employment learning project of washington d c is the preeminent effort to research and evaluate the development of microenterprise and the people it serves in the united states it has been instrumental in setting down the foundation for the growth of microenterprise and promoting its potential as a road to economic opportunity before the learning project was established in 1991 there was little information on microenterprise and well here we are today celebrating them and more information it has been a real engine in our progress and i hope today that we are helping the self employment learning project to get more information out about this around the country for their fine work they receive awards for excellence in public or private support for microenterprise development gene severens of the nebraska microenterprise partnership fund and peggy clark of the self employment learning project again let me thank all of you for being here again i thank secretary rubin i also want to thank brian atwood of aid and phil lader the small business administrator for their intense support of our microenterprise efforts and let me say as all of you know we have only scratched the surface and i hope by our being together here today you will go home reenergized and i hope that because of the publicity this event generates you will all get hundreds of calls asking you how more communities and more neighborhoods can become involved in this great endeavor and i hope that we can depend upon senator kennedy and congressman davis to have yet another good project to become evangelical about thank you all very much and good day thank you dem wjclinton30 1 98 bill_clinton thank you for that wonderful welcome when secretary pena started talking about mayor helmke being on jeopardy i thought he was going to say and i knew we were getting into this law school business i thought he was going to say which two politicians in this room went to the greatest lengths early in their career to cover up the fact that they went to ivy league schools once you get gray headed you can fess up to that i m delighted to be here with you paul and i m very proud of your success and the partnership we ve enjoyed mayor webb good job in the super bowl i want to say to all of you my mayor jim daley is here i want to thank secretary cuomo and secretary pena secretary riley secretary babbitt secretary slater omb director frank raines opm director janice lachance john mccaffrey gene sperling my national economic advisor and i want to thank our whole team there are others who are here i also want to say a special word of thanks to mickey ibarra and lynn cutler who have been working with you on this conference i think they ve done a superb job and i hope you are pleased with it and we have a lot of other members of the administration here from other departments in the white house we all like it when the mayors come to town we get to talk about real people real issues and building a real future for america because that s what you embody earlier this week in the state of the union address i asked the american people to continue working with me to strengthen our nation for the 21st century just 700 days more or less left in this century and in this millennium we can be very grateful for the strength that our country enjoys today we got some new evidence actually this morning of that strength with the new economic report our economy continues to grow steadily and strongly in the fourth quarter of last year our economy expanded at a vigorous 4 3 percent rate with continued low inflation last year economic growth for the entire year was fueled by strong exports and strong business investment it was 3 8 percent on an annual basis that s the highest growth rate for the united states in a decade after years of economic expansion this economic strategy that we have embraced of fiscal discipline expanded trade and investment in our people and our future is working what i want to talk to you about today is that we have to continue that until every american is a part of this success story the next steps we have to make in education in economic development in crime in partnerships with our cities in involving all of our citizens in the work of our cities and nations these next steps will be critical whether we can empower all of our urban areas and our urban citizens to make the most of their own lives will be critical to determining whether we can in fact take all this success that our country has had and reach every neighborhood every block every family every child today thanks to your leadership there is truly an urban renaissance taking place all across america from new york where crime has dropped to record lows to detroit where the unemployment rate has been cut in half to long beach where the downtown is once again bustling with shoppers and students in school uniforms are learning more in safer environments the urban revitalization is one of the most extraordinary successes of the past five years it is a great achievement of america s mayors and the people whom they lead our cities are back because so many of you rolled up your sleeves and went to work i thank you for your leadership and for the extraordinary opportunity that we have had to work together i can tell you for me it s been a lot of fun and we ve done a lot of good and we re going to do even more in the next three years i know we can the other night in the state of the union address i tried to capture for the american people the different direction in government that our administration has pursued for the last five years i said that one of the reasons i came to washington as the governor of a small state sort of like being the mayor of a big city was to break out of this old gridlock between those who said government is the problem and those who said government is the solution it was obvious that if for no reason than the deficit government could not be the solution plus the nature of the problems we have and the nature of the changing economy and society that we re living in and certainly the one toward which we are moving made it impossible to think about the solutions to today s problems in sort of 1930s through 1960s terms so what we said is there has got to be a third way here these two extremes won t work we think government ought to be a catalyst for new ideas to experiment we think government ought to be a partner with the private sector and community groups we think the government ought to focus on creating the conditions and giving people the tools so that people can their own lives and chart their own futures and build this country from the ground up that is what you represent for me you do that all day every day sometimes without even thinking about it you do it because it is the only way to proceed and you do it without regard to party a long time ago mayor laguardia said there s no republican or democratic way to pick up the garbage it either gets picked up or it doesn t now i tried to reflect that third way approach in how we have related a lot of you were terrifically understanding when i came into office and i said you know you re my friends and i care about you but the first thing i ve got to do is get this deficit down otherwise the economy will never come back and you won t have any jobs anyway and we found a way to find some more investments to make some innovative partnerships while we were continuing to follow the discipline necessary that has brought us to the point where we are now where the budget deficit was estimated to be 357 billion for this year when i took office now the estimate is 10 billion that s a pretty big difference we know and i think you can see by the extraordinary presence of cabinet members here today we know that every single part of this federal government has a responsibility to work with you and to be a good partner secretary cuomo s reinvented hud exemplifies the kind of approach we re trying to take to working with the cities all across the federal government we want to be your partner and we want to be a good partner and help you be a good partner with the private sector with community groups with individual citizens now on monday as a part of my balanced budget i ll be proposing one of the broadest strongest and most innovative urban agendas in a generation that will focus on three keys to closing the opportunity gaps in america and building one america for the 21st century education economic development and crime first as i said the other night all americans know i think in the marrow of their bones that we have the finest system of higher education in the world therefore when i was able to announce to the american people the other night all the steps we had taken essentially to open the doors of college to all americans i could hear the cheering in living rooms all across this country you didn t have to say people knew we were giving them a good thing we have to keep working until people have that same level of confidence that their elementary and secondary schools will give their children the best education in america and we can do it if we can build an international space station in the sky if we can put all the telephone calls on mother s day on a single piece of fiber the width of a human hair which will happen just in a couple of years if our scientists can unlock the secrets the genetic secrets of parkinson s disease in nine days all those things i talked about the other night this is not rocket science this is not rocket science we can do this we have never had in the last 20 years when we have known we needed to do it the kind of systematic disciplined approach to giving our children the education they need that we must bring to bear on this problem now but we can do it one thing i know there are some cities where the mayors have direct jurisdiction over the schools and other cities where the mayors seem to have no legal say over the schools but in every city the mayor should be involved in the schools i am thrilled that you re going to have a conference on public schools i thank you for your invitation and i expect to be there i want us to continue to work together on this important issue i am as you know if you heard the speech the other night i m very excited about what s going on in chicago with the schools i have been there twice i have spent a lot of time both in the schools and sitting around tables talking to the people who are part of the restructuring of the way they re operated not only from the district down but from the school level up with parental involvement i think it is a good thing to do end social promotion but i think you have to couple that with second chances and so when they ended social promotion they also had mandatory summer school to give every child a second chance you can stand up and say something like i m ending social promotion and it sounds great and everybody will clap and your popularity will go up but in the end the only thing that really matters is are the children learning or not and the reason we should stop the practice is that it covers up the sins of the system which is not producing an educated citizenry among our children and not preparing them for the future so it s a good thing to do to end it but it s not enough because you have to put something in its place and the thing that s exciting to me about chicago is they have if these children don t perform at grade level then they have a mandatory summer school program and everybody goes by the way it cuts down on juvenile disruption problems as well but it s an exciting thing i went to a school there with a principal and a parent and the parent had a child in the school as a student and a child in the school as a teacher and it was an inner city school and all of these parent groups showed up none of them felt aggrieved because this school had ended social promotion they felt empowered because it had because it was done at the grass roots level and they thought it was a fair system because they were involved in it and because there kids had a positive alternative so it wasn t just that they were going to be held back we have to do things like that all across the country i am proposing new education opportunity zones to help poor school districts close down falling schools promote public school choice remove bad teachers follow the model of the chicago system to try to help to stop social promotion but start learning an opportunity for our kids i also proposed the first ever federal help to help our local schools hire 100 000 more school teachers so that we can have smaller classes in the early grades we can reduce class sizes in the first second and third grade to an average of 18 nationwide if my proposal is adopted and because that will create enormous problems when we have both more teachers and more students we have to have more classrooms i have proposed a school construction tax cut to help communities modernize or build 5 000 schools and that will help a lot of you in this room the second thing we have to do is keep working to extend economic opportunity to every corner of every community over the past five years with the leadership of the vice president we ve created 125 empowerment zones and enterprise communities offered tax cuts to clean up and redevelop brownfields offered a network of community development banks to make loans to people in places where they re not normally made and we have dramatically strengthened the community reinvestment act i don t know if anybody has talked about that here yet but that act has been on the book since 1977 over 80 percent of all the lending done in the 20 plus year history of the community reinvestment act has been done in the last five years since we ve been here and it s made a big difference in communities all across this country to grow the economy and bring opportunity and i m very proud of that our balanced budget will propose as i m sure secretary cuomo has already said new housing vouchers to help people stay off welfare and move closer to jobs an expanded low income housing tax credit new opportunities for homeownership tougher efforts to fight housing discrimination we have created 14 million new jobs here in the last five years just 13 percent of them though have been in the central cities we have to get the message out to our businesses and that s why i went to wall street the other day with jesse jackson and people from wall street to say the most important emerging market for a strong american economy the most important way to continue to grow the economy and keep inflation low is to move into the markets that are right here within the borders of the united states into these neighborhoods that have not been developed that s why i am announcing today that my balanced budget will create a new 400 million community empowerment fund to be run by hud that will help local governments attract more businesses and jobs to poor and underserved neighborhoods the fund will encourage the standardization of economic development lending a first step in creating a secondary market for such loans it will provide capital to businesses who recognize the potential and the possibilities of the inner cities this is the right way to help our cities it is not a handout it will bring new credit new jobs and new hope to the people i thank secretary cuomo for developing it and it s going to bring a lot of economic opportunity to many of you let me also say though one of the things i appreciate about the mayors is that you not only want me to help you do the things you have to do you understand that some of the things we do create the framework within which you proceed so mayors have been very good about supporting my efforts to balance the budget mayors have been very good across party lines in supporting my efforts to expand trade and i was very excited with the focus you put on africa trade you know we ve got an africa trade initiative coming up and i just wanted to say to you one of the things that we have to understand about this new world is that the old dividing line in our mind between a domestic issue and a foreign policy issue has come crashing down and increasingly the dividing lines in our mind between what is a national security issue and an economic issue is coming crashing down yesterday i had my annual meeting with the joint chiefs of staff and our other commanders in chief of our regions around the world of various military functions like space and transportation and other things and what we do every year is we sit around and basically they go around the table and they make a report to me about their area of responsibility and i then i make a comment and we talk a little about it and yesterday at the meeting a big topic of conversation was the financial crisis in asia now you say well what are the military people worried about that for well it affects the ability of those asian countries to modernize their militaries it affects their capacity to cooperate with us it affects the internal stability of their government so all of a sudden if you get to wear four stars around on your shoulder and go to the pacific you got to become an expert in international finance and you have to care about whether the congress will vote to have america do its part in contributing to the international monetary fund and rebuilding the economy so if you re a mayor in indiana or wyoming or wisconsin why should you care about it because you know that the overall health of the american economy will determine the parameters within which you must proceed now you may do a better or worse job on any given day like all of the rest of us but you know that so i would say to you again thank you for your concern for and support for trade but i think the mayors without regard to party and without regard to the particular conditions in each city understand that over the long run we are much better off when we continue to expand trade and when we build good constructive economic partnerships with free countries who share our values around the world so i ask you for your support for the international trade agenda i announced for more open doors to africa and latin america for an extension of the fast track authority and most immediately for the united states doing its part with the international monetary fund to stabilize the situation in asia those are very important markets for us and i ask you for your help in securing that in congress the third thing that we have to do if we really want to bring all the cities back and all the neighborhoods back is make the streets safe people are not going to invest money they re not going to open businesses they re not going to stake their future on the schools of a place where they don t feel safe the greatest thing that s happened in some ways to all of our cities is the capacity that you have developed to dramatically lower crime rates now we have worked with you to empower that strategy to make it work more the crime bill we passed in 94 with the strong support of many of the mayors here was written in effect by local law enforcement officials local elected officials like mayors and local community group leaders who were concerned about making our streets safe you know i wasn t einstein up here coming up with a bunch of ideas i just took what i knew would work based on the experience that was sweeping the country and it has been working more police tougher punishment better prevention those things work working at a neighborhood level where everybody works together to try to keep from happening in the first place now crime is down now for five years in a row in this country so even though we have to balance the budget we have to do more to invest in the fight for two reasons one we have to finish what we started in 94 and finish the work of putting all 100 000 police on the street second we have to recognize that we still have some issues out there that we have to face particularly as all of you know the juvenile crime rate has not dropped as much as the overall crime rate has we have the biggest group of young people in our schools in history finally we ve got a group of kids in our schools more numerous than the baby boom generation and by the time they all start turning 12 13 14 years old we better have found a solution to the juvenile crime problem or we will not be able to continue to say we re lowering the crime rate it will become a new horrible problem for the cities now we have seen from what many of you have done that there are ways to dramatically lower the juvenile crime rate so all we re trying to do here is basically to do a step two in the fight against crime that reflects a national effort to give you the tools to do with juvenile crime what you have already done with the overall crime rate i have proposed a federal effort to help to hire as many as 1 000 neighborhood prosecutors across our country to work closely with police and residents to prevent crime as well as prosecute criminals they ll try to prevent crime with a lot of tools like injunctions to clear playgrounds of drug dealers and other legal strategies to rid neighborhoods of troubled spots you know i ve seen what has happened when we have more prosecutors and more probation officers and they re working in a systematic way i ve seen i see mayor menino back there the experience of boston has become legendary but it is not unique now because so many others are doing this we have to do this everywhere i remember one day i spent with mayor menino in boston my jaw dropped when the people that were sitting at our roundtable said that they young people on probation they had a 70 percent compliance rate with probation orders and i figured that s probably about double what the national average is for any city of any size in america because they were going into homes working in the streets bringing the neighborhoods back into the real life of the community so that s what this juvenile initiative to have more community prosecutors and more probation officers is all about we also are going to strengthen our efforts against illegal gun trafficking helping local police departments and the atf to trace all guns discovered at crime scenes i want to hire over 160 new atf agents to investigate and arrest gun traffickers who sell guns illegally to gangs and to juveniles that s our responsibility we need to do more to help you with that finally on the domestic front here in addition to the prosecutors and the probation officers and the gun efforts i think it s important that the mayors sent a loud and clear nonpartisan message to the congress and to the country that most juvenile crime is not committed by people who don t have anybody in their family who cares about them most juvenile crime is committed by young people who get in trouble when the school is out and mama or daddy aren t home from work between 3 00 and 8 00 p m at night is when most juvenile crime is committed so we ve got to do more to have after school programs either in the schools or in community centers that would do more than anything else now we have some money coming through the justice department for this we have some money coming through the education department for this for community based learning centers i think secretary riley initiative is called 21st century community learning centers or something like that we need your help we really need your help to tell the congress that this is not a political issue this is not a partisan issue and this is not shoveling some old fashioned grant to the cities that some of the members of congress may not want this is children s lives and this is whether you can succeed or not in really building the kind of cities you want for the 21st century you cannot make it unless we can do something about the problem of juvenile crime and we re not going to do it with all those kids when all their juices are flowing and they re out there vulnerable to get in all kinds of trouble unless you give them something positive to do when the schoolhouse door is open for the last time in the day until they can go home and be under proper supervision at night we have got to do this and we need your help to do it and we can do it let me also say that there is something else we have to do more of and general mccaffrey is here i want to mention this we want to do a better job of keeping drugs from coming into this country in the first place not long ago i went to miami with general mccaffrey and we saw the work that the coast guard is doing there to try to interdict drugs the problem is that the better job we do in stopping drugs from coming in in the water and through the air the more pressure it puts on land through mexico i mean these people didn t get rich being stupid they are a very powerful well organized violent and phenomenally wealthy enemy of the children and the future of the united states what we want to try to do is to dramatically increase our capacity to deal with border imports and we proposed to hire another 1 000 border patrol agents to continue our antidrug media campaign which is important to crack down on heroin and methamphetamine trade to boost drug abuse treatment and prevention also very important we re also going and secretary slater is here we re also going to try to bring to bear the latest technologies and really spend some money and we ve reauthorized this new transportation bill and i want all of you to support us whether you live near the border or not because it affects you we need to spend some serious money on the border to have the best available technology to do everything we can to find drugs now it is not possible yet with technology but if i could paint a picture of the future and i could have any technological breakthrough if a genie came down the aisle here and said in the next three months you could have any technological breakthrough you want for your country what would you do i think that if i could pick one for the next three months i would say i would like to have a border patrol system for picking drugs that is as effective as airport metal detectors are from getting weapons away from people i mean that should be our model that s what we should be imagining why because it not only is effective we don t hold up everybody else very long you never hear anybody griping about going through an airport metal detector anymore and every now and then you ve got a money clip in your pocket or something you ve got to go back around and go through again but it s not any kind of a big deal that should be what we are working for we should be working and working and working we shouldn t stop until we basically have the capacity to check every vehicle that crosses our border in a way that doesn t shut commerce down and unduly burden totally innocent people who are just going about their lives and i want you to help us when this transportation bill comes up and i want you to help us when the drug budget comes up to get that kind of structure because you have got to have more help in trying to cut off the drugs at the source in the first place and we re going to do our best to give it to you the last point i want to make is i believe that our cities can embody the image that i have for america in the 21st century because they are the most diverse places in america and as we become more diverse in a funny way we ve got to become more united as we become more diverse we have to learn to celebrate what s different about ourselves but we have to hold even tighter to the things that bind us together at the family and the neighborhood and the community level we re going to reauthorize the national service program americorps this year i hope all of you will support because you have really used it a lot i know general powell is going to speak to you before you end your conference and i hope all of you will support what he s doing that presidents summit on service in philadelphia last april was a remarkable thing the idea that we ought to mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers maybe millions of them to give every child a safe street to grow up on a good school to attend a good health care system so that the child is healthy a mentor and the chance to serve those are five laudable goals and if you think about it in terms of what i just said about the economy and education and crime if we have a country in which in every city across the lines of race people have an equal chance to work together to learn together to serve together we re going to get along together just fine you all show that every day and most of you have a good time doing it i think it s fun to be a mayor these days isn t it i think you re having a good time doing it when i think of one america i think of all the places i ve been in all of your communities where people are living together learning together working together serving together closing those opportunity gaps building one country the best days of this country are ahead of us all we have to do is to bear down and do more of what you have been doing these last few years thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton30 10 96a bill_clinton thank you thank you very much mr mayor mrs webb governor romer congressman fields chairperson vivian stoval and mike beatty old friend norm early i m glad to see him again and i want to say a special word on behalf of diana degette who s trying to make sure that we have a different leadership in the house of representatives and for the i d also like to say a word for our senate nominee tom strickland who is as you know going to another one of his debates with mr allard and you have to be thinking about him you re going to be enjoying a dinner and he won t be able to eat but i think he ll represent us well and i hope you will help him prevail on election day let me also say if you have never heard cleo fields give a speech when i finish you will have not heard the best speaker tonight on the platform and i want to thank him he comes from my neighboring state of louisiana i was elated when he was elected to congress i was downhearted when he was redistricted by a court and i think he has a brilliant future ahead of him and i m glad he s here with you ron brown would be glad he is here with you tonight i would like to talk a little history with you tonight just to bring you to this point so soon so near to our election first i thank you for naming these awards for ron brown and barbara jordan they were both friends of mine and my relationship with each of them though different is something i will treasure all of my life i too remember the first time i ever heard barbara jordan speak and i thought maybe god is a woman after all i always i got to where i wanted to say yes ma am before she ever opened her mouth every time i was ever around her she never lost her love for this country and the more her body became weakened by her condition the stronger her heart and voice became and in her last year she agreed to chair for me a commission looking at what we should do about the issues of immigration in our country how we could remain a nation of immigrants and still take a strong stand that people who come here should do so legally and she did it with a grace a strength a balance a fundamental sense of fairness and common sense that everyone who worked with her marveled about and that was her last great contribution to our nation and i ve done my best to implement the ideas that barbara jordan advanced and i ll always be grateful to her and all of you know of course of my relationship with ron brown i doubt very seriously that i d be standing here as president of the united states tonight if it hadn t been for ron brown and so i m going to keep him smiling from up there the next week i m going to do everything i can to keep that big smile on his face i also want to thank you for honoring wellington and wilma webb i not only like them very much but i admire them very much and hillary and i identify with them we love being around them and i like seeing a strong first lady and i like seeing a mayor who is strong enough to want to be married to a strong first lady so i thank you for that and let me say that colorado has i ve been coming here a lot for the last 15 years a long time before i ever thought i d be here as president i came every chance i could because it represented something very special to me and i think you ve been blessed by the quality of your leaders roy romer i think is clearly both in terms of accomplishment and intellect and vision of the future the most gifted governor in the united states in terms of his contribution to our future and he s like all of us aging warriors he was reluctant to give up on his youth so he broke his leg on a motorcycle and he s left his cane and he s kind of trading up his shoes gradually you know but i am delighted to be here with all of them this election we re going to have will elect the last president of the 20th century and the first president of the 21st century colorado sort of embodies both the promise and the struggles of the present and the future and i was thinking when mayor webb was talking about abraham lincoln and the long talks we had about lincoln when he was staying in the white house that the great thing about america is that there s always been a relentless quest for a better future in a way that would embrace the moment and in doing so not abandon our traditional values and ideals but instead try to perfect them a lot of people have this idea that well if you were really a future oriented person it means you re too material or you re too concerned about ideas and that s very exciting but you must be a little shy on the traditional ideals and values that have kept our country strong but i don t see it that way at all i think that our expanding abundance only gives us the opportunity which we then have to seize to live up more closely to our ideals and our values and this period that we re living in now involves such a remarkable change in the way people are living and working relating to each other the way we re relating to the rest of the world that it has only basically one parallel in american history 100 years ago very interesting when we moved from the farm to the factory when we moved from the country to the city when we then had our first big wave of immigrants coming in and because we did not put aside our racial bigotry after the civil war even though we stayed together as a country and we abolished slavery legally and we adopted the 13th 14th and 15th amendments and we began to move forward we still were a country that said one thing and did another all of us are like that still you know every one of us had a parent at one moment in a lapse said well i still want you to do what i say not what i do but what happened was those immigrants when they came in here a hundred years ago they felt terrible prejudice the italians the irish the poles and then we had the red scare and then we had the ku klux klan rise up in america no more than 50 years after the civil war they were hanging black people again in the south where i grew up because of the civil rights struggle and because of the progress which has been made even though we re a long way from where we ought to be in the relationships between african americans and the white majority we have a chance to deal with this new infusion of immigrants and all the new explosion of diversity of all kinds in our country in a different way than we did 100 years ago and to take advantage of all these technological and other changes to move closer to our ideals we also have a chance it s very important to coloradans to take advantage of these new exploding economic opportunities in a way that preserves and indeed enhances our environment instead of undermining it which is what happened 100 years ago so this is a time of enormous possibility and it s very important that we not be distracted from the big issues here there are two great different philosophies at stake in this election one of them basically says that the main thing about america is that everybody came over here to get a good letting alone and that s true our constitution was constructed to limit the ability of government to oppress people but one of the things we ve learned over the last 100 years is in the world we re living in and in the world we re going to as wellington said none of us get there by ourselves you know i was thinking of wellington s story i was raised by i was born to a widowed mother and my step father didn t graduate from high school and it s inconceivable i think to a lot of my kin folks at home that i ever turned out to be president but i know one thing if i had been born black instead of white i wouldn t be president i know that but i know we re closer to the time when anybody can run for president fulfilling the constitution s requirements and be considered on his or her own merits we re closer and so i still believe that the government in many areas of private life choice religion many other areas should let people as long as they re not hurting other people make their own decisions and go forward one of the proudest moments of my presidency was signing the religious freedom restoration act and most of you probably don t even know i signed it because there was no fight about and if there s not a fight in washington it doesn t get on the news in denver it passed unanimously and then we have vigorously enforced it including in a controversial case out here in colorado where every case i have bent over backwards to make sure that we never interfere with any person s exercise of his or her religious convictions whatever they are unless it s really going to threaten to bring the government down or something terrible and so here we are at this moment and i think what we ve learned is yes we should guarantee first and foremost the individual liberty but to guarantee their security and to give them all the same chance not a guarantee but a chance in live there are some things we have to do together and it is the difference of opinion over how much we should do together and what we should do together that this election is all about it is not about big government our administration has reduced the size of government the number of regulations the number of government programs eliminated and we have privatized more government operations than the previous two republican administrations combined if they had this record they would be saying it s the greatest thing since sliced bread but what i have not been willing to do is to see is walk away from our common obligations to give all of our people educational opportunities to give health care to poor children to families with disabilities to the elderly in nursing homes to preserve the gains of medicare even as we reform the system and to protect the environment and to continue our investment in research and in technology in our endless quest to move into the future so more people can live closer to what we all say we believe that s what this election is about whether you think we re better off being told you re on your own and we hope you make it or whether we think it does take a village to raise our children and build a country that s what the election is about it s about whether we re going to build a bridge to the 21st century that s big enough and wide enough for all of us to walk across and then whether we re going to have in our hearts the capacity to say if you believe in the declaration of independence the bill of rights and the constitution and you re willing to show up for work tomorrow or if you re of that age to show up for school tomorrow if you re willing to do your job as an american we don t need to know anything else about you nothing nothing else matters you re part of our america and we re willing to walk hand in hand with you across that bridge into the future now that is what the election is about i was reading today amusing i thought it was amusing an article in a magazine about my judicial appointments because they pointed out that one of the things that has not been discussed much in the election is the fact that the next president may well get to make a couple more appointments to the supreme court and they were saying that the previous administration imposed two administrations imposed strict ideological litmus tests on a lot of judges and that a lot of my supporters were disappointed because i didn t turn around and do exactly the same thing on the other end but instead i had insisted on two things excellence and diversity and they pointed out that i had appointed more african americans more hispanics more asian americans and more women to the federal bench than any president in history and that in spite of that we had the highest ratings from the american bar association for excellence of any judicial selections in the history of the country since they ve been doing that i think if you have a federal bench that reflects the vast experiences of america with people that are smart enough to figure out the issues that are put before them and they share the experiences of america in all of its permutations chances are pretty good that they ll do what they ought to do and judges aren t like residents or congressmen but they should reflect america i say all that to make this point every election time the election is always decided by those who vote and by those who don t and the people that have the biggest stake in whether we build a bridge that we can all walk across together in whether we adopt my education agenda which is to expand head start to teach every 8 year old to read a book independently to have every classroom in the country even in the poorest school districts in the most remote rural districts hooked up to the information superhighway by the year 2000 to make two years of college as universal as high school is today by giving people a tax credit a dollar for dollar reduction on their tax bill of up to 1 500 a year the cost of a typical community college education to give every family a tax deduction of up to 10 000 for any college tuition undergraduate or graduate for people of any age to let families save in an ira and withdraw from it tax free if the money is used for education or buying a first home or a medical emergency that agenda if you embrace that it means that you think we have a common obligation to help each other live up to the fullest of our abilities and that we ll all be better off if we all have a chance to do well if you support my agenda that i think we have a common obligation to eliminate discrimination of all kinds in the work place to protect the environment to continue to try to expand coverage of health care step by step to people so that people who work have a chance to buy health care you have to believe that it s because we re all going to be better off if we live closer to what we say we believe and we give everybody else a chance to do the same that s what the election is about and the people that have the most at stake are the ones that will have the best excuse not to vote how many mothers do we know out there raising two or three kids working two jobs having to figure out i ve got to figure out how to vote on a work day and i ve got to get my kids somewhere before i go to work and what s going to happen to them after school and i don t have enough money for child care and what have i got to do tonight all the people that may have the biggest stake in this election may have the best excuse not a reason but it s a pretty good excuse because their lives will be crowded with other things and maybe they have or haven t felt it but it makes a difference ten million more americans got an increase in the minimum wage the average income is up 1 600 for the typical family in the last two years after 20 years of wage stagnation last month we found out or just two weeks ago we found out that we had the biggest decline in income inequality among working people in 27 years since this administration came in the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years the biggest drop in poverty in female headed households in 30 years the lowest recorded poverty levels ever for senior citizens and african americans the largest number of new businesses owned by minorities and women in the history of the country the largest number of new small businesses owned by anybody in the history of the country it makes a difference it makes a difference so it makes a difference what policies we pursue and it will change people s lives here and so i ask you to go out and help our senate candidate help diana degette help bill clinton and al gore not as a matter of party now but because it has fallen to our party to embrace a philosophy that the other party embraced briefly under abraham lincoln that they embraced briefly under theodore roosevelt but that they have abandoned and so it has fallen to us to carry this banner not as a matter of party but as a matter of carrying on the great american experiment in a way that will truly realize the era of greatest possibility ever known i honestly believe these kids here in this audience they ll be doing things in 10 or 15 years we couldn t even dream of they ll be doing jobs that haven t been invented some of them will be doing jobs that haven t been imagined it s all out there but we have to make the right decisions and as much as anything else that s why i have fought so hard not only to make the right governmental decisions but to say the right things as your president when the hatred of the government led a demented person to blow up a federal building in oklahoma city allegedly they haven t been tried yet and we can t presume anybody s guilt but we know that government hatred has led people into bands of folks that are paranoid that terrible things are going to happen to them i had to speak against that when the black churches are being burned or white churches are being burned or synagogues are being defaced or islamic centers are being defaced that s not our america but that is the dominant theme of life that causes people to slaughter each other s children in bosnia and it still bedevils northern ireland they re still arguing over things they re my ancestors you know and they re my relatives now so i can talk about them they re still fighting over things that happened 300 years ago and battles that occurred 600 years ago when all the kids want to do is to let it go and go on into the future in the middle east where i have worked so hard the holy land for the three great monotheistic religions in the world if anyplace in the world ought to be a peaceful sanctuary for jews and muslims and christians it ought to be the holy land but so many of them just can t let it go and we re going to beat all that if we do the right things when hillary and chelsea and i went to open the olympics and i looked at those people we had people from 197 different racial and ethnic groups almost every single one of them had people in america and that s because we re not about race or religion or anything else we re about these ideas and trying every every every age to live up closer to them this is a very historic election not because of me but because of what s happening to us and we go through periods of huge change like this only rarely and that s a good thing because nobody can you know any of us can just stand so much change at once one of my laws of politics we re all for change in general but we re against it in particular or as one of my friends said yes i agree with you we ought to change you go first so this is our responsibility now you know what to do and you know how to do it and if ron brown were here giving a speech tonight that s all he d be talking about that s all he d be talking about and barbara jordan if she were here she d make you feel so guilty you wouldn t sleep between now and tuesday until you dragged every human being you knew to the polls now you know that so i want you to think about that and i want you to understand that you carry with you the great burden and opportunity of american history every one of us should be grateful to be alive at this time should be grateful to have this moment in which we have a chance to further break down the walls of discrimination in our minds and hearts explode opportunity for all americans and that these changes that are going on give us this incredible opportunity to really actually enhance the natural environment god has given us and leave it stronger and better for our children and grandchildren even as we prosper that s what i want you to think about i want you to think about tuesday morning when you get up that bridge to tomorrow and how you wouldn t let your child have to go down deep valleys and cross rushing rivers and climb big mountains if they could just get on a bridge and walk straight across and that s what i want for everybody and in order to do it we ve got to show up you know what to do you know how to do it your country needs you i know you ll be there thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton30 10 96b bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen i d like to ask right here at the beginning that we give another round of applause not only to irma elder but to anita bycraft walker and to gail davis the three of them represent the whole range of women businesses in america today let s give them a hand they were great thank you let me say i am delighted to be back at eastern michigan where i prepared for one of my debates in 1992 i had a great time here then and i m glad to be back now i want to thank both the marching band and the concert band for playing for us today thank you very much and just on a purely personal point i first heard of eastern michigan university a long time ago when i hired a young man from one of the poorest counties in america out of the mississippi delta right on the river of the mississippi in my home state to work for me in the attorney general s office and later in the governor s office who told me he had been given his start in life when he got a football scholarship to eastern michigan university and that young man rodney slater is now the administrator of the federal highway administration investing billions of dollars in growing the american economy through infrastructure so you can always be proud of your mission here and what you re doing and the opportunity you ve given to people i d like to thank vice president juanita reid for making me feel so welcome today and michelle vasquez the executive director of the ann arbor community development corporation senator and mrs reigle thank you for coming congressman ford thank you for coming i d like to acknowledge the presence here of the director of the small business administration phil lader and the head of the white house office on women s affairs betsy myers who have both done a wonderful job for the women business owners of america thank you very much thank you senator carl levin for your speech and for your service to michigan and i have a great deal of confidence that you re going to get your service extended in six more days and i was looking at lynn rivers give her speech and i thought i wish everybody in america could see this woman give her talk could hear her story i wish everybody in america could meet her husband who s working down at the uaw that ford plant down the road here and can t be here today that represents what america is all about the story that irma told of her life represents what america s all about the stories that anita and gail told of their lives represent what america s all about i especially want to thank lynn rivers for not forgetting where she came from when she went to congress and for voting to give every other person in america the same chance to make the most of his or her own life that she did i ran for this office four years ago with a vision of what our country should look like when we start the 21st century a simple but profound one i want every person in america without regard to their background to have a chance to live out their dreams if they re responsible enough to work for it i want our country to keep leading the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and i want us and as i look around this room today i feel good about it i want us to defy the trend that is bedeviling the rest of the world and say we are not going to be consumed by our differences we re going to celebrate our diversity and go forward together in an america where everybody has chance to make it as senator levin said we ve had a good run of success in trying to turn the economy around we have cut the deficit by 63 percent we have seen america produce 10 5 million more jobs we have seen an income increase of 1 600 for the typical family in the last two years we know we have the lowest combined rates of unemployment inflation and home mortgages in 28 years the biggest drop in inequality of incomes among working people in 27 years the biggest drop in poverty among female headed households in 30 years the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years we re moving in the right direction and that s a good thing we know that small business has a lot to do with that one of the things that i m proudest of is that this has happened while we have reduced the size of the federal government and increased the percentage of new jobs in america being created by the private sector in each of the last three years the number of new businesses started has reached record levels this has included a surge in businesses owned by all kinds of americans more than 220 000 new hispanic businesses more than 100 000 new african american businesses the highest rate of business ownership in both minority groups ever recorded and a record number of new small businesses owned by women women are establishing businesses and creating new jobs at twice the national rate of business and job growth one third of all the businesses in our country about 8 million companies now are owned by women they employ one in five of american workers here in michigan over a quarter of a million women owned businesses employ over a half million people in 1992 women owned businesses contributed 1 6 trillion to our economy today in only four years that number has grown to 2 3 trillion i might say there are a very very few countries in the world that have an annual output of more than 2 3 trillion in every community in every state the face of our businesses our changing every day it looks more and more like the people in this room men and women people of color increasingly americans with disabilities are becoming business owners more and more people are finding ways to make the free enterprise system work for them that supports stronger families more stable communities and a much much stronger america with a brighter future today we received some more good news our economy is continuing to grow steady and strong with an annual growth rate of nearly 3 percent real incomes for american workers after being stagnant for virtually 20 years are rising at nearly 5 percent with no inflation in this economy and the future in many ways looks even better because in the past three months alone business investment has risen at 18 9 percent and the rate of investment now is the strongest since president kennedy was in office over 30 years ago there is an extreme increase in the expectation that we can keep our free enterprise system growing flourishing growing stronger with rising incomes more businesses more jobs and we cannot turn back on that what we are trying to do of course goes beyond economics but when the economy improves it makes our other common endeavors more likely to succeed i think just in the last four years we ve had four years of declining crime rates four years of declining welfare rolls 1 9 million fewer americans on the welfare rolls than four years ago i think of the fact that we now have a sense that we can actually begin to reform our health care system in a positive way the kennedy kassebaum bill says to 25 million americans you can t lose your health insurance anymore if you change jobs or someone in your family gets sick i just signed a bill which says that mothers and their newborn babies can t be kicked out of the hospital in 24 hours anymore i think that s very important so this thing we re moving this in the right direction but i want to focus today a little bit on small business because we know that increasingly more and more and more of our jobs are coming from our small businesses and i d like to talk a little bit about that when i became president it troubled me that there were certain critical jobs that previous presidents both republicans and democrats had typically given to political appointees without regard to whether they knew anything about the work they were supposed to do one of them was the federal emergency management administration i had been a governor i d dealt with a lot of floods and fires and tornadoes and natural disasters and i can tell you when they hit if you don t have somebody who knows what they re doing you re in a world of hurt so i changed that i put a person in who knew what to do and as you know we ve had a lot of natural disasters in america in the last four years everything but the locust have hit us but people know in all local communities that we now have a competent aggressive strategy for dealing with it and that was true in the small business administration i ve had two administrators in the small business administration erskine bowles and phil lader both of them experienced in starting small businesses and running small businesses and understanding how businesses work we have doubled the loan volume of the sba in the last four years while reducing the budget we have cut the regulations by 50 percent in the sba for loan applications of 100 000 or less we ve gone from an application form that is one inch thick to a form that is one page the white house conference on small business asked us to do a number of things we have now in two different bites in 1993 and 1996 increased the expensing for small businesses who invest more in their own business from 10 000 a year all the way to 25 000 a year the number one recommendation we got out of the white house conference the second thing that we were asked to do was to make it easier for people who own small businesses and for their employees to take out 401k pensions plans and to move those plans when they change from job to job and we have done that and i am very proud of that i signed regulatory reform legislation which will make it more difficult in the future for government to do things that are dumb to small business people without giving small business people a chance to stop it in the first place we established a network of community development banks each with a mission to have a microenterprise loan program like those which many of you have experienced around here if you think about it microenterprise loans have helped to revolutionize the culture of poverty in countries far poorer than america all over the world why couldn t we revolutionize the culture of poverty in our inner cities and other isolated areas with microenterprise loans in america to bring free enterprise woman can lead the way in this and in general i m proud of the fact that we have reduced the size of government by about 250 000 to its smallest point in 30 years we have reduced 16 000 pages of regulations we have eliminated hundreds of programs we have privatized significant chunks of the federal government that belonged in the private sector more reduction in size regulation and programs and more privatization in these four years than in the previous 12 years combined giving you a smaller less bureaucratic government but one still committed to investing in education protecting the environment and moving this country forward together giving everybody a chance to live up to the fullest of their own capacities today we are taking two more steps to extend opportunities that come from small businesses first i want to build on a program that is plainly working we established in 1994 a women s prequalification pilot loan program for loan applications of under 250 000 in 16 sites that s kind of a mouthful you know i wish had some fancy acronym for it but what it meant in basic terms was in these 16 places we worked with women who wanted to start businesses or wanted to expand businesses and needed capital and we worked up the loan application in advance for them so we knew it would have a good chance of being approved at the bank and we gave them a commitment on the front end that the sba would guarantee it now since that happened in just 16 sites 575 separate women businesses have gotten over 58 million in loans we are now going to do that nationwide we will make that service available to women in every state in the united states the second thing we re going to do relates to another request we got out of the white house conference on small businesses for loans above 250 000 there we were told over and over at the white house conference on small business that the biggest problem was finding capital ever for worthy enterprises if the business were small so we are now starting something new that came directly out of the white house conference that does have a catchy acronym i can say that better the angel capital electronic network or acenet a new computer web site that will allow small business owners to put their prospectus on the internet and match small businesses with sophisticated investors that will make it much much easier than ever before for people who are in small business to get money i hope a lot of you can take advantage of it this new web site will allow women business owners to go directly investors to avoid confusing rules lack of information and their lack of access to what we ought to call i guess the old boy networks it will work if you will make it work these are just two more things that are part of our ongoing commitment now let me say there is a lot more to do we have a lot to do to build a bridge that i want to build to the 21st century to realize the vision that i have i hope every one of you tonight whatever your political party or background will take a little time before you turn in to do something that i do on a regular basis take a little time and ask yourself what do i want my country to look like when we start the new century and what would i like my country to look like when my children are my age it s an amazing thing what that does for you when you ask that question and how you answer it but as i said for me it s simple i just want everybody to have the chances that i had that lynn rivers had that so many of us had we wouldn t be here today i think if we had all been told you re on your own most of us are pretty self reliant or we wouldn t be in this room but i still believe that as someone reasonably close to me said it does take a village to raise our children and grow our economy and build our future that s what i believe so i say to you we have to balance the budget and i hope every one of you will help to lead the demand that we continue to do so because that will keep those interest rates down it will keep the economy going it will make that money more available to you but we have to do it while we continue to invest in our future and in medicaid s guarantee of health care to families with members with disabilities or poor children or the elderly in nursing homes and in the medicare program we can reform these programs without wrecking them and we still can invest in our future in education and technology and in research as well when people i hear people say i m me and the government is them i don t know what they re talking about because the government is nothing but the reflection of the collective choices of the american people and the issue is what are these things that we do we ve had a great debate in washington for the last four years that i think has been very healthy for the country what things should we do together at the national level what things can be better done by states and localities what things can be better done in the private sector what things can better be done by families and we ve had huge differences which i think have been healthy i think we did the right thing on family and medical leave we re stronger because you can take a little time off from sizeable employers when a baby is born or somebody in your family is sick without losing your job if you can succeed at home and at work the country is better not worse because of that that makes us stronger it makes us stronger i think it s a better country because we cut the cost of college loans for people that participate in the direct loan program and say you can pay that loan off as a percentage of your income so you never need to be afraid of borrowing money to go to school because now you won t be bankrupted paying it back your limited payments every year will be limited to a certain percentage of your income i think that made us a better stronger country because we made more people eligible to go to college therefore i believe we should go forward in that spirit we should be committed to growing our economy we should be committed to doing it through the free enterprise system we should be committed to continuing to make our government as lean and efficient and as little bureaucratic as possible but there are things we ought to do together and the education thing is so important to me i don t believe we can afford the big tax plan my opponent has proposed because i think it will blow a hole in the deficit and will give it all right back in higher interest rates and a weaker economy and because it will require even bigger cuts than i vetoed last year but i do think we should have targeted tax cuts to help families raise their children to help people afford health care and buying that first time home and especially to pay for the cost of education i believe as strongly as i can say and i want to give michigan another hand here at least one of my friends in michigan i got interested in the idea that we ought to make college available to everyone when governor blanchard started the michigan tuition savings plan here i remember that and so we have given almost 70 000 young people a chance to earn money for college through americorps we ve given the improvements i mentioned the student loan program we re now selling inflation proof savings bonds for people so they can save knowing that inflation won t eat up the gains but i d like to do some more things i believe that we ought to let people save in an ira and withdraw from it without penalty if the money is used for a college education or health care or buying a first home more people i believe even at this distinguished university let me say that we know from the census figures that if people get at least two years of education after high school in a good community college they ve got a good chance to get a job that is a good job with growing prospects almost every american lives within driving distance of one so i have proposed to give americans a 1 500 tax credit the typical cost of community college tuition a dollar for dollar reduction from your taxes for the first two years of college as long as people go make their grades and do what they re supposed to do i think it s a good thing to do and i believe we ought to give everybody a tax deduction of up to 10 000 a year for any tuition at any institution of higher education anywhere in america for undergraduate or graduate studies eastern michigan anyplace else in the country it will change the face of america if we open the doors of college education to all of our people now let me say since one of the women on the stage with me has worked herself off welfare into being a business owner i am very proud of the fact that we ve worked hard with the states to reduce the welfare rolls by nearly two million i signed the welfare reform bill because it now guarantees to poor families health care and nutrition and more for child care than ever if they go to work but it now says to all the states and local communities if you have an able bodied person you have two years to turn the welfare check into a paycheck i like that but if we re going to do it what it meant is we have to create the jobs i have a plan to give those folks the opportunity to go to work investing in our communities with the microenterprise loans with special incentives to employers and every one of you let me just say if you ever criticized the welfare system in your life which includes 100 percent of the american people i think and especially people who have been on it and you re now an employer you ought to think about hiring someone off welfare you ought to think about doing that now under the new law every state in america can give you the welfare check for a year or two while you as a wage subsidy under the new law if my new proposal passes we ll have a special tax credit if we get all the community development banks that i want there will be micro enterprise loans for people to do that we can do this we can break the culture of poverty in america but only if we create opportunity it s one thing to tell somebody in the law they have to go to work and quite another to make sure that there is a job there you have to do that and i will help you and i hope you will again let me say our country is going in the right direction i thank senator carl levin and congresswoman lynn rivers for the votes they cast to put it there some of them were also tough when we were told we were going to bring on a recession and all that but we re better off than we were we re going in the right direction we have made unprecedented gains in the area of helping women to start their businesses to stay in business the expand their businesses and that has helped to lift the rate of growth of the american economy and our capacity to create jobs i was a little amused today my distinguished opponent said that we had the worst economy in 20 years now two weeks ago he said it was the worst economy in 100 years so we re making progress and i feel good about that not everybody can make up 80 years in two weeks and i m proud but he was right in february in february he said we had the best economy we ve had in 30 years and he was right when he said that and i don t deserve all the credit for that no one does but our policies have helped you to create those jobs and we are working together and that s my whole theory of how this country should work and i ll just leave you with that no matter what vision you have for the future one of the things that i know in my bones is that the great meal ticket america has to the 21st century which will clearly be the time of greatest human possibility ever known where more people will have more chances to live out their dreams than any time in history where the young people that are in this audience will be doing jobs that haven t been invented yet many of them will be doing work that has not even been imagined yet our great ticket to that 21st century is our vibrant democracy our vibrant free enterprise system and the fact that in america we can say we will take anybody from anywhere who is here lawfully we don t have to know much about you if you were born in mexico of syrian descent or we don t need to know how much cherokee indian blood you have in you we don t need to know anything about you except that you believe in the constitution the bill of rights and the declaration of independence and you re willing to show up for work or school or do whatever you re supposed to do tomorrow we need to know nothing else we re not going to be like bosnia we re not going to be consumed by religious hatred as they are in the middle east we re not going to be fighting battles 300 and 600 years old as my ancestors people are in ireland we re not going to do that in america and when people try to do it when they blow up federal buildings or burn churches or desecrate synagogues or islamic centers we re going to say we are against that because our america has everybody in it and we re going to build a bridge to the future together thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton30 10 97 bill_clinton now as you can hear i m a little hoarse but i do want to say that was brilliant if you can shift the heat like that you should go to congress i want to thank ricky and mikey and lauren and vanessa thank my good friend steven spielberg thank you general schwarzkopf for your outstanding leadership you ve got a very important battle here on your hands and i m sure you re going to win it i d also like to thank congressman lou stokes and congresswoman pat danner for being here i thought i d take and make a little fun of the congress so they ll go back and tell it and i ll be in trouble again this afternoon i d like to thank ned zeckman and all the people from the children s national medical center here as you can hear i m a little hoarse the chinese state visit and the change in the weather have taken a little of my voice away so i ve asked the vice president to come with me and give the speech and i m going to introduce him in a minute but let me just say i cannot tell you how important i think what starbright is doing is general schwarzkopf and steven spielberg have already talked about it what we re trying to do in the government is to hook up every classroom and library to the internet by year 2000 but we also want to make sure all the children s hospitals are there these children deserve them and we need for them to be a part of this emerging network of learning and playing and growing and as the general said it looks like it s a healthy thing to do as well so we re glad to be here mostly we re here just to say thank you to the foundation to all of you and to say we want to do our part i think it s appropriate that the vice president is here to speak instead of me because he was talking about the information superhighway before i had even gotten a electric typewriter the vice president dem wjclinton30 10 98 bill_clinton thank you very much for the warm welcome thank you monseigneur finnerty for greeting me when i came through the door of st sebastian thank you my longtime friend claire shulman for being here thank you joe crowley for presenting yourself as a candidate for congress he got good marks from chuck schumer as an athlete and you must have noticed that he s quite a large man i told him that next january i d like him to be one of the whips in the congress to get the votes gathered up because i think people would be reluctant to say no to him i love coming to queens i never will forget the first time i came out here when i was running for president in 1992 and harold ickes was helping me and he said we re going to go out to queens and we re going to meet with the queens county democratic committee and congressman tom manton is the chairman of the committee and he said i think we can get them to be for you i said now why in the world would they endorse me most of those people have probably never thought about arkansas much less been there and he said yes but they re a lot like you out there in queens you ll be right at home you ll like that so we got on the subway and there was a television camera or two with me and no one in new york knew who i was at the time so they probably thought we were filming a commercial or something we were on the subway banging everybody around and then we got off and took a beautiful walk to the place where we had the committee meeting and tom had already convened the committee and i walked up the stairs and at length they introduced me and it was a setting sort of like this and i was coming in from the back and we walked down the middle of the aisle and i got about halfway down the aisle and there was this real tall african american man standing there on the aisle a member of the democratic committee in this county and he put his arm around me and he said hey governor he said don t worry about this he said i was born in hope arkansas too you re going to be just fine tom manton has been taking care of me ever since and i want you to know that he has done a wonderful job in congress and i appreciate what he did for you and for new york and for our country and i will miss him very much thank you friend thank you you know on the way out here we were standing out in the hall and i first met gert and we started laughing about john glenn going up in space yesterday and she said she thought that was a fine thing for a young man like him to be doing i want you to hold that thought because i m coming back to it there s a real reason why we re here today and finally let me thank chuck and iris schumer for their friendship to me i was in their home in 1992 over in brooklyn and i met their friends and relatives and the people with whom they worship it was quite an exciting day for me i have been proud of the campaign that they have made together with their family and friends starting out against overwhelming odds bravely soldiering on and i d say doing right well on this eve of another election i d like to ask all of you to think about something as new yorkers as well as americans new york at extraordinary times has given this country extraordinary leadership in the united states senate new york gave the american people robert wagner and herbert layman and jacob javitz and pat moynihan in the united states senate new york gave the american people robert kennedy in the united states senate and once robert kennedy said and i quote there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities i ve worked with chuck schumer a lot he s an idealist who is always struggling to get something done and the longer i serve as your president believe it or not and in spite of everything the more idealistic i am about america what it stands for what it means and what it can do but the more determined i am that every day should be used to turn ideals into action when it comes to education or social security or health care when it comes to all those ideas i can think of no person with whom i have worked in these last six years in the entire congress who i think has more ability to turn ideals into action than chuck schumer and that is one reason i am very proud to be here by his side and in support of him today now let me say also to all of you this is not an ordinary election i want you to go vote tuesday even if you are not going to cast your ballot the way i want you to i hope you will however but i want you to go because in this election we re going to choose the congress of the 21st century really the decisions that will be made a lot of them in the next couple of years will shape the way we as a people will live for far more than the next two years for six years since the people of new york gave the vice president and me and hillary and our whole team a chance to serve we ve turned the country s economic policy around we ve changed our social policy we have essentially tried to make america work again so that we could take advantage of these incredible changes that are going on in the world and have a very strong economy but make sure we kept a human face on it that we gave everybody a chance to benefit from his or her labors and that we took care of those who through no fault of their own needed a little help to get by and that we tried to bring the country together instead of driving it apart and after six years we saw again today that our economy grew at 3 3 percent in the last quarter we ve had the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years nearly 17 million new jobs the lowest percentage of americans on welfare in 29 years the first balanced budget as you heard chuck say in 29 years and a surplus for the first time in history last week thanks in part to the heroic efforts of new york s secretary of housing and urban development andrew cuomo we announced a year and a half ahead of time that we had met our goal now over two thirds of the american people live in their own homes for the first time in the history of the united states so we are moving in the right direction that is a good thing and as i told somebody we had also reduced the size of the federal bureaucracy so that the federal government is now the smallest it was since the last time john glenn went around the earth now i thank tom for what he said our administration has tried to be a force for peace and freedom around the world we ve worked hard to help the irish reconcile with one another we re working hard to promote peace in the middle east and we had a big breakthrough there last week on this day we announced it on this day last week if i seem a little slow of speech today you ll have to forgive me but on that last day i was up 39 hours without sleep and the real way we made the agreement was i was the last one standing and so they finally agreed so they could go to bed i say that because america has unique responsibilities and unique opportunities today i announced a program that i believe will help us to keep the world economy growing and to roll back some of the financial turmoil you read about that s engulfing the rest of the world now that s a big deal because a quarter of our growth in the last six years has come from our ability to sell what we have to sell to other people so that more and more the success of every american business even small businesses here in queens will be indirectly affected at least by the success of our friends and neighbors throughout the world now against that background at this golden moment for our country i think we have to look ahead to the future and say well what are we going to do with the first surplus in 29 years what are we going to do with the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years what are we going to do with this time when we seem to be doing pretty well but a lot of our friends are in trouble around the world what are we going to do with all those neighborhoods in new york city and elsewhere which haven t yet felt the economic recovery of the last six years shall we just sort of relax and enjoy it which means that at midterm elections half the people just stay home or shall we instead look ahead to the future and say you know times like this don t come along very often those of you out here who ve seen a lot of years how many periods in american history have we had like this not many in your lifetime not many and nothing lasts forever so that when you have these times like this it is terribly important that we as americans look to the future and take on our real challenges to me that s the most important decision the american people have to make do you want to think big think about what america should be like for your children your grandchildren your great grandchildren what can we do now when we are strong to give that kind of america to the americans of the 21st century that s what this whole saving social security issue is about when i heard gert talking about it i thought you know social security for us has become even more than a check in the mail even though fully one half the seniors in america would be in poverty today without it even though most people have some other source of income in addition to their social security nonetheless if there were no social security half the seniors in the country would be in poverty without it instead of the 11 percent which is the actual rate today it s a huge deal we re talking about untold millions of lives changed but in addition to the money it is the symbol of our determination to honor family to honor the contributions of those who went before us to honor the proposition that in america we want to reward people who are good at what they re doing we don t begrudge the athletes their success the businesspeople their success but we know that a country is great because of the great mass of people who get up every day work their hearts out obey the law pay their taxes raise their kids and build up neighborhoods and they should be a part of our prosperity we don t believe in leaving people behind who do their part for america and social security symbolizes that now what s the issue here why is social security in trouble first of all if you re getting a check now relax you re going to be fine that s not the issue the issue is this we are living longer the baby boomers are coming up for retirement and those of you who gave birth to baby boomers know that until this crowd started school last year this crowd of children in school the baby boomers were the largest american generation ever and larger than our children so that when we retire the baby boomers there will only be about two people working for every one person drawing social security to give you an idea today there are more than three people working about three and a half people working for every one person drawing social security in addition to that there will be more and more and more women retiring and living on social security because women on balance have a longer life expectancy and they are less likely to have pensions or personal savings for 25 percent of the women on social security it s the only income they receive now when the 75 million baby boomers retire and when there are only two people on social security for every one person two people working for every one person drawing we will in about 20 years start having to pay out of the social security trust fund as provided by law benefits because the annual income won t be enough to cover the annual outgo then in about 34 years even the trust fund won t be enough to cover the benefit here s what this is all about if we start now and make some modest changes now that don t have to affect people on social security at all and if we use this money that we have in the surplus which i think i should add was produced entirely by the social security tax itself then we can make modest changes and preserve social security in the 21st century in a way that will accommodate the changing population patterns and still make sure it s there for the people who need it if we do not do that if we say well heck we waited 29 years for this surplus let s take the money and run let s have a little fun give me a tax cut give me a new program give me this give me that before we know whether we need this money to save social security and keep in mind it was produced by the social security tax and we miss this opportunity then what s going to happen sooner or later within a few years keep in mind every year that goes by the problem is only going to get tougher it s not going to get easier because you have less time to fix a big problem then sooner or later we ll be forced with the choice of either saying well i m sorry we can t do this so we re just going to have to cut benefits 22 percent in which case a lot of seniors will be in deep trouble or we ll say our conscience won t let us live with ourselves so we re going to raise the taxes 22 percent and that s a whopping tax increase and keep in mind the payroll taxes paid by small businesses in years where they make money and years when they don t make any money the payroll taxes paid by people on modest incomes as well as by wealthy people and if we did that we d be saying okay we didn t fix this when we had a chance back in 1999 and because we didn t do it now we re going to have to lower the standard of living of our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren because we didn t do the right thing now the generation that got us through world war ii and built the greatest middle class in history and was educated by the gi bill knows that america should do right by the future this is a huge issue for a long time i thought that this would be a completely bipartisan issue all year long we had forums around the country democrats and republicans together talking about these ideas honestly debating what the options were but then the leadership in the house of the other party wanted to have a huge and permanent tax cut right before the election disproportionately benefitting upper income people like me before we did anything to fix social security and before we knew what it would cost well we beat that thanks to chuck schumer and tom manton and a lot of other people we rolled that back but just the other day they reaffirmed their desire to do that to deplete this surplus before we know how much we need for social security and the majority leader in the senate said that he might not even want to work with me on fixing social security so i say to you i did not come here to trouble you about your social security your social security is okay if we don t do anything you ll be fine but if you believe it s been a good thing and if you want it there for the baby boomers for your children and if you want your children to be able to retire without having to undermine the incomes and the standard of living of your grandchildren then i implore you to speak with a loud and clear voice and say look we have lived a long life and sometimes you can t do the easy thing we shouldn t take the money and run we should save the money save the surplus and fix social security if there s anything left over then we can talk about what to do about it but we cannot endanger this fundamental compact between the generations that has helped to make america what it is today save social security first that s the big reason i wanted to come here the big reason i m proud to stand with chuck schumer there are other things you heard i think it was tom who said we voted in this budget we got one of our most important ideas in this budget to hire 100 000 teachers to take class size down to an average of 18 in the early grades but if you go around new york you will see a lot of school buildings with rooms that can t be used if you go to florida where i was yesterday i went to a little town in florida not very long ago a small town i went to one elementary school there were 12 trailers out back one school 12 trailers to accommodate all the extra kids so one of the things we didn t succeed in doing in this election and again i ask you to think about your grandchildren and your great grandchildren if we re going to have more teachers and smaller classes they have to have someplace to teach that means we have to build schools where we need them and we have to repair schools where we have them we have school buildings in the cities of this country like new york and philadelphia and chicago that are priceless buildings no one could afford to build such buildings today they re great buildings but they ve been allowed to fall into such disrepair that they can t even be hooked up to the internet and all this work we re doing to bring our kids into the modern age is not possible so that s another big issue that i think is important and i thank chuck schumer and tom manton for their support for building and repairing 5 000 schools and we need to do that next year we ve tried to get a patients bill of rights passed for a year and the health insurance companies persuaded the majority in congress to beat us but you know chuck talked about medicare we have the same challenges in medicare by the way we do in social security but one of the things that bothers me is more and more americans are in managed care plans and hmos now that can be good if they just save money that would have otherwise have been wasted don t forget six years ago inflation in health care costs was going up at three times the rate of inflation and for elderly people that was a really troubling thing since you use more health care it was going to bankrupt the country so to manage the system better is a good thing but to manage the system only to save money without regard to whether it s good for health care is not a good thing doctors not accountants should ultimately make health care decisions we re trying to pass this patients bill of rights that simply says look we believe very strongly that we should have a law which says every person should have a right to see a specialist if his or her doctor recommends it that every person in an accident should have a right to go to the nearest emergency room not one halfway across new york city just because that s the one that s covered by the plan that if a person is in a treatment a chemotherapy treatment or a young woman being by an obstetrician who s pregnant and their employer changes health care plans well you ought to be able to keep the doctor you re dealing with until the treatment is over until the baby is born and that your medical records ought to be private now this is something that affects americans of all ages but disproportionately seniors who are in managed care plans a lot of seniors want to go into managed care plans medicaid medicare because they give prescription drugs which otherwise aren t covered there are a lot of good things but in the end everybody ought to have those rights those basic rights and that s a big issue in this election that affects you and your children and your grandchildren so finally let me just say that there are a lot of things out here that you have to think about and i ve been urging the american people to vote and hoping we can get a little more balance in this congress so that we can have people like chuck schumer who will put social security first who will pass a patients bill of rights who will make it possible for us to modernize and build our schools in short who will be thinking about the long term the temptation is great for people just to pass they say gosh things are going so well why is the president so agitated because my job is to think for all the american people about next year and five years and 10 years and 20 years down the road and i would argue that those of you who are senior citizens your job is to think for all the american people about next year and 10 years and 20 years down the road we were sitting here talking about john glenn going up 36 years ago and tom manton said i remember when he went the first time and it seems like it was yesterday doesn t it to you the ones that remember it it seems like it was yesterday i remember once i met a man who is a friend of mine who was 76 at the time at an airport in little rock and he looked terribly sad and i said why are you so sad he said well my sister just died and i m here to meet some family members and he said when you came up to me bill he said i was thinking about when we were five years old he was 75 and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said let me tell you something it doesn t take long to live a life and all of you know that we all are given our share of time here we all try to make the best we can we all try to build our families and build our lives enjoy our friends pursue our faiths america is the greatest country in the world for giving us that chance all we all owe back to america is good citizenship so i ask you please at this golden moment for our country stand up for the proposition that we should save the social security system before we throw this money that we ve worked six years to build up stand up for the proposition that every person ought to have decent integrity in their health care system stand up for the proposition that children you and i may never know should have a world class education in the 21st century i ask you for that and for your help for this good man chuck schumer and for all people who are always thinking about america s tomorrows thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton30 11 93 bill_clinton thank you very much sarah and jim and general reno mr vice president mrs musick thank you for your wonderful remarks there were two members of congress who inadvertently were not introduced i want to recognize them because they ve played a major role in this one of our democratic leaders in the house steny hoyer and senator herb kohl from wisconsin who also sponsored the bill to make it illegal for minors to possess handguns and i thank you for that sir senator metzenbaum congressman schumer senator mitchell and others who gave birth to this great effort to all the law enforcement representatives the governors the mayors the folks from handgun control who are here to the families whose lives would have been changed for the better if the brady bill had been law mrs musick and my friend cathy gould and her children lindsey and christopher who lost a husband and father who would be here today if the brady bill had been law i am honored to have all of you here in the white house i also want to say a special word of thanks to the members of congress who were out there early on this when there was some considerable political risk either attached to it or thought to be attached the brady bill was first introduced almost seven years ago by congressman ed feighan of ohio on february the 4th 1987 i can t resist saying a special word of thanks to the members who come from difficult districts who voted for this bill my good friend and congressman beryl anthony from arkansas lost a tough race in 1992 and part of the reason was that he voted for the brady bill and the nra came after him in an unusual election he said to me on the way in here he said if it cost my seat it was worth it everything that has been that should be said about this has already been said by people whose lives are more profoundly imbued with this issue than mine but there are some things i think we need to think about that we learned from this endeavor as we look ahead to what still needs to be done since jim and sarah began this crusade more than 150 000 americans men women teenagers children even infants have been killed with handguns and many more have been wounded one hundred and fifty thousand people from all walks of life who should have been here to share christmas with us this couple saw through a fight that really never should have had to occur because still when people are confronted with issues of clear common sense and overwhelming evidence too often we are prevented from doing what we know we ought to do by our collective fears whatever they may be the brady bill has finally become law in a fundamental sense not because of any of us but because grass roots america changed its mind and demanded that this congress not leave here without doing something about this and all the rest of us even jim and sarah did was to somehow light that spark that swept across the people of this country and proved once again that democracy can work america won this battle americans are finally fed up with violence that cuts down another citizen with gunfire every 20 minutes and we know that this bill will make a difference as sarah said the washington post pointed out that about 50 000 people have been denied the right to buy a handgun in just four states since 1989 don t let anybody tell you that this won t work i got a friend back home who sold a gun years ago to a guy who had escaped from a mental hospital that he hadn t seen in 10 years and he pulled out that old form from the 1968 act and said have you ever been convicted of a crime have you ever been in a mental hospital the guy said no no and put the form back in the drawer and 12 hours later six people were dead and my friend is not over it to this day don t tell me this bill will not make a difference that is not true it is not true but we all know there is more to be done the crime bill not only has 100 000 new police officers who properly trained and deployed will lower the crime rate by preventing crime not just by catching criminals it also has a ban on several assault weapons long overdue a ban on handgun ownership and restrictions on possession of handguns by minors the beginning of reform of our federal firearms licensing systems and an effort to make our schools safer this is a good beginning and there will be more to be done after that but i ask you to think about what this means and what we can all do to keep this going we cannot stop here i m so proud of what others are doing i m proud of the work that reverend jesse jackson has been doing going back now to the streets and talking to the kids and telling them to stop shooting each other and cutting each up and to turn away from violence i m proud of people like david plaza not so well known a former gang member who has turned his life around and now coordinates a program called gang alternative programs in norwalk california telling gang members they have to take personal responsibility for their actions and turn away from violence reverend william moore who organized parents and educators and other clergy in north philadelphia to provide safety corridors for kids going to and from school one hundred and sixty thousand children stay home every day because they re scared to go to school in this country and all the police officers on the street who have restored confidence in their neighborhoods becoming involved in ways that often are way beyond the call of duty people like officer anthony fuedo of boston who took a tough section of east boston and transformed it from a neighborhood full of fear to one which elderly people now feel safe sitting on benches again we can do this but only if we do it together and i ask you to think about this i come from a state where half the folks have hunting and fishing licenses i can still remember the first day when i was a little boy out in the country putting a can on top of a fencepost and shooting a 22 at it i can still remember the first time i pulled a trigger on a 410 shotgun because i was too little to hold a 12 gauge i can remember these things this is part of the culture of a big part of america but people have taken that culture we just started deer season i live in a place where we still close schools and plants on the first day of deer season nobody is going to show up anyway we just started deer season at home and a lot of other places we have taken this important part of the life of millions of americans and turned it into an instrument of maintaining madness it is crazy would i let anybody change that life in america not on your life has that got anything to do with the brady bill or assault weapons or whether the police have to go out on the street confronting teenagers who are better armed than they are of course not this is the beginning of something truly wonderful in this country if we have learned to separate out all this stuff we ve been hearing all these years trying to make the american people afraid that somehow their quality of life is going to be undermined by doing stuff that people of common sense and goodwill would clearly want to do and every law enforcement official in american telling us to do it so i plead with all of you today when you leave here to be reinvigorated by this to be exhilarated by the triumph of jim and sarah brady and all these other folks who didn t let their personal losses defeat them but instead used it to come out here and push us to do better and each of you in turn take your opportunity not to let people ever again in this country use a legitimate part of our american heritage in ways that blinds us to our obligation to the present and the future if we have broken that then there is nothing we cannot do and when i go and sign this bill in a minute it will be step one in taking our streets back taking our children back reclaiming our families and our future thank you dem wjclinton30 11 95 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much mr mayor mrs kerr mr and mrs hume sir patrick and lady mayhew and to this remarkable crowd let me say there have been many presidents of the united states who had their roots in this soil i can see today how lucky i am to be the first president of the united states to come back to this city to say thank you very much hillary and i are proud to be here in the home of ireland s most tireless champion for civil rights and its most eloquent voice of non violence john hume i know that at least twice already i have had the honor of hosting john and pat in washington and the last time i saw him i said you can t come back to washington one more time until you let me come to derry and here i am i am delighted to be joined here today by a large number of americans including a distinguished delegation of members of our united states congress who have supported peace and reconciliation here and who have supported economic development through the international fund for ireland i m also joined today by members of the o neill family among the last great chieftains of ireland were the o neills of ulster but in america we still have chieftains who are the o neills of boston they came all the way over here to inaugurate the tip o neill chair and peace studies here at the university of ulster this chair will honor the great irish american and late speaker of the house of representatives by furthering his dream of peace in northern ireland and i am honored to be here with his family members today all of you know that this city is a very different place from what a visitor like me would have seen just a year and a half ago before the cease fire crossing the border now is as easy as crossing a speed bump the soldiers are off the streets the city walls are open to civilians there are no more shakedowns as you walk into a store daily life has become more ordinary but this will never be an ordinary city i came here because you are making a home for peace to flourish and endure a local climate responsible this week for the announcement of new business operations that offer significant new opportunities to you as well as new hope let me applaud also the success of the inner city trust and patty dogherty who have put people to work rebuilding bombed out buildings building new ones and building up confidence and civic pride america s connections to this place go back a long long time one of our greatest cities philadelphia was mapped out three centuries ago by a man who was inspired by the layout of the streets behind these walls his name was william penn he was raised a protestant in ireland in a military family he became a warrior and he fought in ulster but he turned away from warfare traded in his armor converted to the quaker faith and became a champion of peace imprisoned for his religious views william penn wrote one of the greatest defenses of religious tolerance in history released from prison he went to america in the 1680s a divisive decade here and founded pennsylvania a colony unique in the new world because it was based on the principle of religious tolerance philadelphia quickly became the main port of entry for immigrants from the north of ireland who made the protestant and catholic traditions valuable parts of our treasured traditions in america today when he travels to the states john hume is fond of reminding us about the phrase that americans established in philadelphia as the motto of our nation e pluribus unum out of many one the belief that back then quakers and catholics anglicans and presbyterians could practice their religion celebrate their culture honor their traditions and live as neighbors in peace in the united states today in just one county los angeles there are representatives of over 150 different racial ethnic and religious groups we are struggling to live out william penn s vision and we pray that you will be able to live out that vision as well over the last three years since i have had the privilege to be the president of the united states i have had occasion to meet with nationalists and to meet with unionists and to listen to their sides of the story i have come to the conclusion that here as in so many other places in the world from the middle east to bosnia the divisions that are most important here are not the divisions between opposing views or opposing interests those divisions can be reconciled the deep divisions the most important ones are those between the peacemakers and the enemies of peace those who deep deep down inside want peace more than anything and those who deep down inside can t bring themselves to reach out for peace those who are in the ship of peace and those who would sink it those who bravely meet on the bridge of reconciliation and those who would blow it up my friends everyone in life at some point has to decide what kind of person he or she is going to be are you going to be someone who defines yourself in terms of what you are against or what you are for will you be someone who defines yourself in terms of who you aren t or who you are the time has come for the peacemakers to triumph in northern ireland and the united states will support them as they do the world renowned playwright from this city brian friel wrote a play called philadelphia here i come and in a character who is about to immigrate from ireland thinks back on his past life and says to himself it s all over but his alter ego reminds him of his future and replies and it s about to begin it s all over and it s about to begin if only change were that easy to leave one way of life behind in search of another takes a strong amount of faith and courage but the world has seen here over the last 15 months that people from londonderry county to county down from antrim to armagh have made the transition from a time of ever present fear to a time of fragile peace the united states applauds the efforts of prime minister major and prime minister bruton who have launched the new twin track initiative and have opened a process that gives the parties to begin a dialogue in which all views are representative and all can be heard not far from this spot stands a statue of reconciliation two figures ten feet tall each reaching out a hand toward the other but neither quite making it across the divide it is a beautiful and powerful symbol of where many people stand today in this great land let it now point people to the handshake of reconciliation life cannot be lived with the stillness of statues life must go on the hands must come closer together or drift further apart your great nobel prize winning poet seamus heaney wrote the following words wrote the following words that some of you must know already but that for me capture this moment he said history says don t hope on this side of the grave but then once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme so hope for a great sea change on the far side of revenge believe that a further shore is reachable from here believe in miracles and cures and healing wells well my friends i believe i believe we live in a time of hope and history rhyming standing here in front of the guild hall looking out over these historic walls i see a peaceful city a safe city a hopeful city full of young people that should have a peaceful and prosperous future here where their roots and families are that is what i see today with you and so i ask you to build on the opportunity you have before you to believe that the future can be better than the past to work together because you have so much more to gain by working together than by drifting apart have the patience to work for a just and lasting peace reach for it the united states will reach with you the further shore of that peace is within your reach thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton30 11 95a bill_clinton thank you very much to the lord mayor and lady mayoress let me begin by saying to all of you hillary and i thank you from the bottom of our hearts for making us feel so very very welcome in belfast and northern ireland we thank you lord mayor for your cooperation and your help in making this trip so successful and we trust that for all of you we haven t inconvenienced you too much but this has been a wonderful way for us to begin the christmas holidays let me also say i understood just what an honor it was to be able to turn on this christmas tree when i realized the competition now to become president of the united states you have to undertake some considerable competition but i have never confronted challengers with the name recognition the understanding of the media and the ability in the martial arts of the mighty morphin power rangers to all of you whose support enabled me to join you tonight and turn the christmas tree on i give you my heartfelt thanks i know here in belfast you ve been lighting the christmas tree for more than 20 years but this year must be especially joyous to you for you are entering your second christmas of peace as i look down these beautiful streets i think how wonderful it will be for people to do their holiday shopping without worry of searches or bombs to visit loved ones on the other side of the border without the burden of checkpoints or roadblocks to enjoy these magnificent christmas lights without any fear of violence peace has brought real change to your lives across the ocean the american people are rejoicing with you we are joined to you by strong ties of community and commerce and culture over the years men and women of both traditions have flourished in our country and helped america to flourish and today of course we are forging new and special bonds belfast s sister city in the united states nashville tennessee was proud to send this christmas tree to friends across the atlantic i want to thank the most prominent present resident of nashville tennessee vice president al gore the mayor phil bredesen and the united states air force for getting this big tree all the way across the atlantic to be here with you tonight in this 50th anniversary year of the end of world war ii many americans still remember the warmth the people of northern ireland showed them when the army was stationed here under general eisenhower the people of belfast named general eisenhower an honorary burgess of the city he viewed that honor and i quote as a token of our common purpose to work together for a better world that mission endures today we remain americans and as people of northern ireland partners for security partners for prosperity and most important partners for peace two years ago at this very spot tens of thousands of you took part in a day for peace as a response to some of the worst violence northern ireland had known in recent years the two morning papers representing both traditions sponsored a telephone poll for peace that generated almost 160 000 calls in the united states for my fellow americans who are here that would be the equivalent of 25 million calls the response left no doubt that all across northern ireland the desire for peace was becoming a demand i am honored to announce today that those same two newspapers the newsletter and the irish news have established the president s prize an annual award to those at the grass roots level who have contributed most to peace and reconciliation the honorees will travel to the united states to exchange experiences on the issues we share including community relations and conflict resolution we have a lot to learn from on another the president s prize will underscore that northern ireland s two traditions have a common interest in peace as you know and as the first lady said i have received thousands of letters from school children all over your remarkable land telling me what peace means to them they poured in from villages and cities from catholic and protestant communities from mixed schools primary schools from schools for children with special needs all the letters in their own way were truly wonderful for their honesty their simple wisdom and their passion many of the children showed tremendous pride in their homeland in its beauty and its true nature i congratulate the winners they were wonderful and i loved hearing their letters but let me tell you about another couple i received eleven year old keith from carrickfergus wrote please tell everyone in america that we re not always fighting here and that it s only a small number of people who make the trouble like many of the children keith did not identify himself as protestant or catholic and did not distinguish between the sources of the violence so many children told me of loved ones they have lost of lives disrupted and opportunities forsaken and families forced to move yet they showed remarkable courage and strength and a commitment to overcome the past as 14 year old sharon of county armagh wrote both sides have been hurt both sides must forgive despite the extraordinary hardships so many of these children have faced their letters were full of hope and love and humor to all of you who took the time to write me you ve brightened my holiday season with your words of faith and courage and i thank you to all of you who asked me to do what i could to help peace take root i pledge you america s support we will stand with you as you take risks for peace and to all of you who have not lost your sense of humor i say thank you i got a letter from 13 year old ryan from belfast now ryan if you re out in the crowd tonight here s the answer to your question no as far as i know an alien spacecraft did not crash in roswell new mexico in 1947 and ryan if the united states air force did recover alien bodies they didn t tell me about it either and i want to know ladies and gentlemen this day that hillary and i have had here in belfast and in derry and londonderry county will long be with us as one of the most remarkable days of our lives i leave you with these thoughts may the christmas spirit of peace and goodwill flourish and grow in you may you remember the words of the lord mayor this is christmas we celebrate the world in a new way because of the birth of emmanuel god with us and when god was with us he said no words more important than these blessed are the peacemakers for they shall inherit the earth merry christmas and god bless you all dem wjclinton30 11 95b bill_clinton well first of all i want to thank all of you all the panelists and mr thompson and your mp for the fine things that have been said and i thank you for quoting the king james version of the bible i read all the more modern ones and sometimes they re easier to understand but they re not nearly as eloquent so king james is still my favorite too i would like to make just three points very briefly first in the presence of the members of congress who are here i want to thank them for funding the international fund for ireland in the united states it was really a congressional initiative for many years the president until i became president no president ever even made a recommendation to spend the money because it was thought to be unusual but i can tell you now even though this connection was never made before we fund programs through the agency for international development around the world in countries much poorer than northern ireland which are essentially trying to do the same things we know now that if you really want to grow jobs in places where there s not a lot of capital you have to set up a mechanism for getting capital into entrepreneurial people who may be in one or two or three or four or five person businesses and if you do it right you can create an enormous enormous number of successful businesses and in so doing create the demand for the products and services that will be produced so i think what you are doing here is really an extraordinary thing and i want to thank the members of congress who have consistently supported the international fund for ireland who are here and to say that i hope frankly that you will become as we move forward down the road to peace and senator mitchell and the others who worked so hard on the investment conference over on our side of the ocean and you enjoy more success i hope you will become a model for a lot of other countries as well who are struggling to build a system of free enterprise and give their energetic people the kinds of opportunities that you have found we see it even in our own country some places that others had given up on thought where there would never be any economic opportunity there again the most successful thing that has been done even in our own country is starting things like the international fund for ireland but it works better here what you are doing through these community groups than almost any other place that i m aware of in the world and you said it yourself sir i think you said you have in this consortium 200 companies with 900 employees that s an average number of employees somewhere between four and five but if you look at the cost what did you say 13 5 million pounds i think i can still do exchange rates even though i ve been presidents are disabled from all practical things they don t get to buy food or drive cars or exchange money but that s pretty low cost per job creation and so i think that s very very important and i applaud all of you for what you re doing the second point i want to make is that the cease fire i m convinced made possible a lot of this growth and some of you have said that and you talked about how it s also changing the whole image of northern ireland one of the things that i hope will come out of my trip here today is that people who have never been here will see the country in a different life we owe that to the media but people all over the world will be seeing this trip tonight and they will see your whole country in a different light they will see people like you they will see on television they will say those are the kind of people i wouldn t mind being involved with and i think that will help but it s a real argument for continuing the peace and the third thing i would say is that you might want to ask senator mitchell to comment on this is the conference we had the washington conference last may i think it s important to do more things like that not just in the united states but elsewhere so that people are aware in a tangible way of the grass roots not only the grass roots commitment to peace but the extraordinary array of competence the abilities the ideas that are coming out of here because i think and i think as you do that you ll become more integrated into the global economy in a positive way and it will be more difficult for anyone to turn the clock back on you dem wjclinton30 3 00a bill_clinton thank you mark thank you jeff and thank you for coming all of you and i wanted to say a special word of appreciation to all of our musicians here thank you for playing tonight you did such a wonderful job and i want to thank luther vandross we ve never had a conversation about evergreen but i think it s the best love song of the last 25 years and so i was very happy when he sang it tonight i want to thank all of you for coming here and i will be quite brief because i want to spend time visiting with you and letting you say whatever you want to say to me or ask questions or whatever but you know i m not running for anything this year and most days i m okay about it i am campaigning to become a member of the senate spouses club however and i m feeling better about that but i want to say just a couple things to you to amplify what my good friend ed rendell said when i came to washington in january of 1993 our country was i thought in quite a bit of trouble we had high unemployment we had high interest rates we had quadrupled the debt of the country in four years we had no real serious technology policy no real serious environmental policy no real serious long term economic policy we certainly had no health care policy and our elections were basically i thought it almost turned into caricature affairs where basically for several years even decades the republicans had succeeded in convincing enough americans that the democrats were weak on defense weak on the economy weak on the budget weak on welfare weak on crime weak on this that and the other thing we couldn t be trusted with the white house and the wheels had to practically come off before any of us could win and i happened to be standing there when the wheels ran off it wasn t quite that simple but i guess what i would like to say to you is that all of you here in your different ways have been immensely successful or you wouldn t be here tonight all of you also are capable of looking beyond your immediate self interest or you wouldn t be here tonight because the other guys would give you a bigger tax cut quicker and yet you re here so the first thing i want to say to you is that all these elections are for people to hold jobs they re not to posture they re to hold jobs it matters what your vision of the country is it matters what your vision of the job is it matters what you know and how you go about your business and whether you care in other words it s a job the presidency you know i want al gore to be elected because i know him better than anybody in this room and most people in the world and i think he s a good man and i know he s a courageous person and i m devoted to him and he s been loyal to me yes that s all true but i also want him to be elected because i think he understands the future and has not only the ideas but the experience and the work habits to get us there this is a job it s not a place just of rhetorical or political posturing and the same thing is true of the congress and i go about doing as much work as i can to try to help all these folks raise enough money to be competitive they re all going to be outspent you know our candidate for president is going to be outspent hillary s going to be outspent they re all no matter how much money we raise they re all going to be outspent but in 1998 we were outspent by 100 million and we gained seats in the house of representatives in the sixth year of a president s for the first time since 1822 why because we had ideas we had a message people thought we were interested in them and they thought the republicans were interested in themselves and playing washington power games and it didn t matter that they had more money all that mattered was we had enough so i thank you for being here but i hope that in addition to being here you ll be able to manifest this commitment throughout this year because this is a profoundly important election this millennial election and there are real differences between us the differences that we have from our nominees for president to the nominees for congress including the big senate race here in new york over the budget alone should determine the outcome of the election we want a tax cut all right but we think it ought to be small enough and targeted enough to help families like those who served us tonight and entertained us tonight to raise their kids provide long term care for their parents get a tax deduction for college tuition afford better child care induce people like you to invest your money in poor areas in america so everybody can be part of this economic recovery and still have enough money left over to pay this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 to save social security and medicare when all the baby boomers retire and there will only be two people working for every one person retired to invest in world class education and stop investing in things that don t work to make major commitments to science and technology and to basic research so many of you tonight are here because of your achievements in health care or in the information revolution the telecommunications revolution or a combination of both and i think you share my conviction that we need to continue basic research to enable us to build a new energy future for america this is a huge deal you know this global warming is not a canard it s not a false threat it s a reality and the good news is that for the last several years it is no longer true that you have to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to grow an economy in fact if we were more diligent about building a different energy future we d be generating even more jobs by far and i won t bore you with a long wonkish solution why but if you want to talk about it i d be glad to it is stunning to me the prospects that we have you know in a few weeks i ll have the privilege of announcing that the sequencing of the human genome has been completed what this means is that i think within ten years the practice of medicine will be totally unrecognizable as we know it and a lot of you who have been on the forefront of trying to get us to live healthier lifestyles and take more preventive action it will be a joyous treasure trove of opportunity that will lead to a lengthening of our lives and the quality of life so what i m trying to say to you is there s big big opportunities out there but there are not big guarantees out there are we going to continue this economic policy that has brought us to this point and continue to pay our debt down and continue to be responsible or not are we going to invest in education and health care and science and technology and a different energy future or not are we going to assume our responsibilities around the world to try to take the world away from a dangerous future of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or are we going to agree with the republican senate their presidential nominee and their nominee here that we shouldn t adopt the comprehensive test ban treaty a historic abandonment by the republican party of their normal bipartisan commitment to disarmament these are big questions so i hope that you will embrace this you know a lot of you here who have done very well are younger than i am by a good stretch so i just want to i ll close with this story i try to tell this story every time i have a meeting like this we celebrated in february the longest economic expansion in american history 21 million new jobs a 30 year low in unemployment a 30 year low in welfare a 20 year low in poverty a 25 year low in crime and i was happy as a clam but i i always try to study the history of my country as well as to think about the future so i we had the council of economic advisors in there and i said well when was the last longest expansion in american history and they said mr president it was the 1960s 1961 to 1969 so for those of you who are my age or older take a walk down memory lane and for those of you who are younger than me listen to this this is a magical moment of opportunity in this country and most of you are completely immersed in the future and imagining all these possibilities and so am i but when the last longest economic expansion occurred in the 1960s i can tell you i graduated from high school in 1964 we thought it would go on forever and we thought it was on automatic we thought we had low inflation we had low unemployment we had high growth we had a civil rights challenge but we thought it would be solved in the congress and the courts not in the street we thought we would win the cold war because of our innate and self evident superiority and never dreamed the country would be divided over vietnam we thought it would just happen 1964 when i finished high school within two years there were riots in the streets over civil rights within four years when i graduated from college it was two days after robert kennedy was killed two months after martin luther king was killed nine weeks after lyndon johnson couldn t run for re election because the country was split right down the middle over the war in vietnam a couple months later president nixon was elected on a campaign of representing the silent majority which means if you weren t for him you were in the loud minority beginning the construct we saw all the way through the 1980s right to the 92 election to the 96 election that you will see in 2000 where the other party tries to divide the american people between us versus them and i m supposed to be one of them because i believe things like we shouldn t discriminate against gay people if they re good god fearing taxpaying citizens and they show up and do their duty i m for hate crimes legislation i m for the employment non discrimination legislation so that makes me one of them instead of one of us i don t think so but that was the portrait of what happened between 1964 and 1968 and within four months after that the longest expansion in american history was history and what i want you to know you young people here is i have waited for 35 years for my country to have the chance to build the future of our dreams for our children and i am determined to see the politics of america focused on how can we make the most of the sequencing of the human genome how can we build a different energy future how can we bring economic opportunity to the people and places that have been left behind how can we be a force for peace and prosperity and unity in troubled places around the world how can we build one america that s what i think politics is about if somebody asks you tomorrow morning why you were here tonight i hope you ll give them that answer this is the best chance you will ever have to build the future of your dreams for your children thank you very much dem wjclinton30 3 00b bill_clinton you know what i want to do i want to tell you this is michael birthday it s also george where are you is that your name george it s his birthday also and he came all the way from alaska to be here so i m trying to think about what i should do when i leave office and i think i ll do birthday parties birthday parties no this is good john and margo have been so good to us and this is going to be such a long arduous campaign and brian snyder said to me when ed rendell was talking about how we just had this wonderful party here brian said well why don t you just stand up and suggest to margo that she just leave the table settings out and we ll be back several more times let me say to all of you i m grateful for your presence here but i m particularly grateful to john and margo for being so good to me and to the vice president and to the dnc and also to hillary it means a lot to me and their son i m grateful to him because he keeps me in pokemon cards which i give to my nephew which raises my status within our family far more important than being president is being able to give your nephew pokemon cards so i am profoundly grateful for that as well let me say to all of you this is my speech see i made my big speech here i know that many of you have come to a lot of these others may be at your first one but i wanted to tell you that i m working very hard in this election and not only because i like and admire and am grateful to my vice president but because i think he understands the future and has the knowledge and experience to lead us there not only because i want desperately to become a member of the senate spouses club but because i believe in what we ve done in the last seven years i didn t run for president the first time i had a chance to run because i didn t think i was ready to run and i had been governor for quite a long time in 1988 when the election was open and it looked like we had a good chance to win and i almost ran and i realized that no one should run for president who does not have a very clear idea not only of what the conditions of the country are and the challenges facing it but of what you would do on the day after the inauguration across a whole broad range of issues all of you in your own ways have been quite successful in life or you wouldn t be here tonight and one of the things that i always tell people when they ask me about this job is i say well i think a lot of folks get in trouble because they forget it is a job i mean it s a job like other jobs and the only difference is you have to completely define to some extent what it is for you that is how you will allocate your time what you believe the priorities are and what you intend to do so i speak to you tonight as someone who is not on the ballot for the first time in nearly a quarter century or more i won t be an active participant in an election as a candidate most days i m okay with it so i m here as much as i m here as president i m here as a citizen of this country who desperately loves america who is grateful for the good fortune that we enjoy at this moment but who has had the unique perspective i believe to know a few things about where we are and where we re going and what s really at stake here so i just want to make a couple of points point number one is there are real differences between these two parties and they re not the differences people used to believe existed one of the things i promised myself when i got elected is when i left nobody would ever be able to say that the democrats were weak on spending weak on deficits weak on taxes weak on defense weak on crime weak on welfare couldn t be trusted to run the country well you don t hear anybody even talking about that in this election but so what are the real differences and i would just like to talk to you about them and i know you understand it but i think it s worth focusing on first of all we have real differences on the budget what we do with your money we believe that we can afford a tax cut but that it has to be targeted and limited so that there is enough money left to keep paying down the debt to save social security and medicare when the baby boomers retire and to continue to invest in what works in education in science and technology in health care in the environment and the other things we have to go forward with together as a people that s what we believe they believe that we should have a tax cut bigger than the one i vetoed last year one which would frankly it speaks well of you that you re here because all of you would come out better with their deal in the short run but what would happen is i mean i think give yourself a few points here for being here you would all come out better with their deal in the short run but what would happen is we would go back to the bad old days of deficits and then they would have to have big cuts in education in health care in the environment science and technology a lot of which is powering this economic boom we re in and in addition to that they would not have the funds to guarantee that when all the baby boomers retire we wouldn t impose an unconscionable burden on our children and grandchildren through the cost of medical care medicaid social security now this is a huge thing and let me say i think it s important because it s not like we don t have any evidence we tried it their way for 12 years and we had high interest rates high unemployment low growth we quadrupled the debt and we were in a terrible fix now we have the longest economic expansion in history 21 million new jobs a 30 year low in unemployment and welfare 20 year low in poverty a 25 year low in crime so it s not like there s not evidence here and yet that is the issue that is the issue in the presidential race that is the issue in the senate race in new york that is the issue who is right on the economy and the budget are they right or are we right to pretend that there are no consequences because things are going well would be the height of folly it s a huge issue now there are other issues we have a different view about america s role in the world we agree on some things my administration and the republican leaders i ll give them credit for that they re trying to help me pass the bill that would permit china to become a member of the world trade organization i think it s important to our national security and real important to our economy and one of the things i want all of you to understand since you may not have been thinking about it is we have to lower no tariffs we have to lower no trade barriers this entire bill involves our letting china into the wto in a way that they lower tariffs they lower trade barriers they let us sell things like automobiles and automobile parts and have distributorships in china they didn t used to do and we don t have to agree to transfer our technology or put manufacturing plants up there or anything it s a one way street it s 100 percent in our favor the only reason they do it is that in turn they get full membership in the world trade organization which is good for us because that means if they violate their trade obligations we have an international body to take it to so the speaker of the house is trying to help me pass a bill that literally could save democracy in colombia by increasing their capacity to fight the drug traffickers and the guerrillas and reducing their ability to import drugs into this country and helping the farmers to find something besides coca to grow but on other areas we re very different i think we ought to support the u n and get people to share our burdens more than they do i believe in the comprehensive test ban treaty and they don t that s a big issue in the senate race here a big issue in the presidential race i think it would be folly for us to walk away from arms control after the united states has led the way not just in my administration but in previous administrations republicans and democrats this is a departure for the republicans to walk away from the comprehensive test ban treaty and say we ll just always be able to build bigger more sophisticated bombs and instead of just a few countries with nuclear weapons there turn out to be a few dozen who cares i care and i think it s a big issue and you ought to care you shouldn t assume that there will never be another nuclear weapon exploded no matter what if instead of a few countries with nuclear weapons you have a few dozen so there are big issues here i think we ought to raise the minimum wage they don t i think we ought to pass a patients bill of rights for the 190 million americans in a managed care system and at least so far they don t i believe that we ought to pass common sense gun safety legislation to protect more kids from violence and i believe we can do it without in any way interfering with the rights of sportspeople and hunters but i got asked in my press conference what i thought about all the mean things charlton heston s saying about me and i said i still liked his movies i still liked his movies and i liked him you know he came to the white house a couple of years go and i thought he was a delightful man i don t care what they say about me that s part of the cost of doing business and being president this being attacked by people who disagree with you this is not about me and the nra this is about whether people stay alive or not this is a big issue huge issue in the presidential race their position the republican position in washington is that guns are the only thing in our national life where there should be no prevention it should all be punishment now if you raised your children on the theory that there should never be any prevention there should only be punishment your kids wouldn t turn out so good even if they had welts across their back from being punished or as i never tire of saying they always say just enforce the laws on the books just punish people when they violate them well we have increased gun law enforcement over what the previous administrations have done and in my budget i ve asked for a lot more people to help us enforce the gun laws more strongly and there s something to be said for that you would be amazed what a small number of gun dealers are responsible for selling guns to such a large number of criminals so there s something to be said for enforcement but one of the reasons that gun crime is at a 30 year low is that the brady bill has kept a half a million felons fugitives and stalkers from getting handguns and they were against that as a party we only had a handful of republicans supporting us in washington and governor bush and the republican congressional leadership they ve been against closing the gun show loophole against banning the importation of large scale ammunition clips which makes a mockery of our law against assault weapons because you just bring them in those clips and then modify the guns and this has a lot to do with whether your kids are safe and again it s the difference in the way they think than we think suppose i said that i agree with the republican philosophy we should abandon all prevention and only do punishment for example i ve been in a lot of airports in my life and nearly everybody i ve ever met is honest in an airport 99 9 percent of the people in airports are perfectly honest they bear me no ill will and they re overcrowded anyway and people are frustrated and they re often late and if you walk through one of those metal detectors and you ve got a big heavy money clip or an elaborate belt or something you re liable to set it off three or four times and you re angry and frustrated and i m just sick of it and so i just think we ought to take those metal detectors out of the airport and the next time somebody blows up an airplane we ought to throw the book at them that s the philosophy this is a big deal here it s a different way of thinking i do not believe it is necessary to demonize them the way some of us have been demonized in the past and still are i don t want us to have our counterpart of richard viguery who represents the hard core far right and does mayor giuliani s fundraising letters you know thinks my wife basically up there with a communist brigade or something we don t have to do that we can talk about the honest differences but i m telling you there are big differences here and it s not like we don t have any evidence what they re saying is don t bother me with the evidence we know where the money is we know where the votes are we know where the intensity is don t bother me with the evidence and to be fair they just disagree i m not willing to let another child die for their theory i think we ought to have a safer country and so and i think it would be a disaster for us to give up the fiscal responsibility that has brought us this far when we can take this country out of debt in a dozen years for the first time since 1835 and guarantee all the young people another generation of prosperity and i could give you lots of other examples but the point i want to make is there are big differences and the record is clear the evidence is in and i hope you will share that with people and i just want to make one other point which i try to say at every turn in february we had this big celebration of beating the longest economic expansion in history now we ve got the longest economic expansion in history and there was not a war in it which i m especially proud of so when this happened being kind of obsessive about american history i asked my council of economic advisors we were in there talking about it and i said when was the last longest economic expansion in history and they said 1961 to 1969 which many of you in this room remember well and participated in now i want to tell you something about that why this election is so important i graduated from high school in 1964 at the highwater mark of that economic expansion president kennedy had just been killed and the country was heartbroken but we united behind president johnson he was wildly popular won an historic victory in 1964 inflation was low unemployment was low growth was high optimism was rampant about the ability of congress and the courts to resolve the civil rights challenge of the country in a peaceful manner everybody thought we were going to win the cold war as a result of the superiority of our system and nobody would have believed that vietnam would tear the heart out of the country 1964 and so we all just went merrily along our way now within a year there was the terrible incident in selma alabama at bloody sunday which i just celebrated the 35th anniversary of within two years there were riots in our cities and the country began to split apart over vietnam four years later in 1968 i graduated from college two days after robert kennedy was killed two months after martin luther king was killed nine weeks after lyndon johnson couldn t run for president anymore because the country was split right down the middle over vietnam then president nixon won the election on one of those divisive campaigns he said he represented the silent majority which by definition meant that the rest of us were in the loud minority and so it was one of those things of us versus them and that s something the republican party was very good at they demonized us real well and quite effectively all during the 80s and they still make a lot of votes making people think that we somehow don t share their values because i m for things like the hate crimes bill and employment nondiscrimination act and i don t think gay people ought to be bashed if they re good citizens but that happened and then shortly after that election in early 1969 the longest economic expansion in american history vanished and we went on to the oil price shocks the inflation of the 70s the stagflation of the late 80s and everything that s happened ever since what s the point of all this the point is that i ve lived long enough to know nothing lasts forever nothing can be taken for granted and i have waited for 35 years for my country to be in a position to build the future of our dreams for our children this is a big election and you cannot let people believe that this is something that they can approach casually just because times are good when times are good you have to look to the next generation we can take this country out of debt we can save social security and medicare for the baby boom generation we can dramatically reform our schools we can provide opportunities in areas that haven t participated in this recovery we can lead the world toward greater peace and freedom but we cannot do it unless we have leadership who understands the future has the knowledge and experience to take us there and is committed to it we dare not risk by our inaction or our cavalier attitudes blowing what is i know the chance of a lifetime i ve worked as hard as i could as president to turn this country around i am grateful for the chance i ve had to serve but i really think as a country we should view this as the beginning not the end that we ve sort of turned this thing around and now we have a chance to paint on a canvas our dreams for tomorrow that s what this whole deal is about so if somebody asks you tomorrow why you were here tonight say there s a difference between the parties i think the last seven years were right and the stakes could hardly be higher and those of you that are about my age you just think about it we ve waited for 35 years and we need to seize the chance thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton30 3 95 bill_clinton thank you very much bill lanthrop for that introduction thank you president poloumpis and thank you ladies and gentlemen for making me feel so very very welcome here today i also want to thank those of you who brought the little children here it s wonderful to see them that little girl back there in her green dress and that little girl there this young man there he looks great thank you i want to thank some of my partners in trying to make your future better who are here with me your governor and lieutenant governor lawton chiles and buddy mckay i thank my friend congressman gibbons for being here the speaker of the house peter wallace and your representative the majority leader of the house jim davis i thank them all for being here i also want to say that i almost got here in time i got here a day ahead of the new mayor s inauguration so i want to thank on the next to the last day of her tenure my longtime friend your mayor sandy friedman for doing such a good job for tampa and i want to wish your new mayor dick greco all the best and i look forward to working with you ladies and gentlemen if i could start on a more serious note i just had the opportunity to meet at the airport with the families of the two tampa police officers mike vigil and kevin howell who were shot and wounded last week i also had the opportunity to meet an hcc student mike meyer who saved one of those officer s lives because he s a certified emergency medical technician he told the police he was a paramedic and they brought him there he grabbed his bag and rushed to the fallen officers and he did a very fine job and i had a chance to thank him for that and it s an encouragement to all of us to learn some of the skills that he knows you never can tell when you will need them i understand that officer vigil remains in critical but stable condition but i was just informed by his family that the doctors say his chances are now better than 50 50 that he s going to make a good recovery i am delighted to be back in florida i had the opportunity to spend the night at the governor s mansion last night and to address the florida legislature today about the challenges facing our country and what we re going to do about it today i want to talk to you about your future i spend a lot of time in community colleges like this one because i think in many ways this is the most important institution in american society as we move toward the next century with all of the challenges we face we basically know what works what works is educating all of our people what works is doing what it takes to generate more jobs what works is bringing people together across racial and income and other lines what works is a commitment to give more people a shot at the american dream to grow the middle class and to shrink the under class and to prepare for the future and that s what community colleges do in a very real sense what i have been trying to do as president is to bring that spirit and those ideas into the national government i ve worked for a dozen years as a governor in which time i had the honor and privilege to spend countless hours in educational institutions from elementary schools to community colleges to vocational training schools to our four year universities and i found when i went to washington that every reason that i worried about the country when i ran for president turned out to be true i ran because i thought this country was on the verge of a new century dominated by the end of the cold war the emergence of the global economy wealth tied more to knowledge than ever before when we had new opportunities but new challenges and that washington was in the grip of old fashioned partisan political rhetoric dividing us when we needed to be united holding us back when we needed to go forward now we are now all engaged in a great debate which you hear every day on the news as you watch events unfold about what your government should be doing at this moment the old view was that there was a government solution in washington for every big problem in the country and that government could actually help people with big problems well we know that that s not exactly right they re not one size fits all government knows best out of washington and we know that there are great limits on how much government can help people to fulfill their abilities the new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all of our problems and if only we had no government we d have no problems i can tell you that contradicts evidence history and common sense now the truth is so the question is what are we going to do i can tell you what my view is and it is different from either extreme i believe we need a government that doesn t pretend to be a savior but that doesn t sit on the sidelines i believe in a partnership i believe that the national government s mission at the end of this century is as follows number one we ought to be creating opportunity and demanding responsibility number two i think we ought to be doing everything we can to empower the american people through education for a lifetime to make the most of their own lives number three i believe we ought to be enhancing the security of the american people not only by making the world a safer place but by making our streets and our schools and our homes and our work places safer places and number four i think we have got to dramatically change the national government to make it smaller less bureaucratic less meddlesome but still helpful to move this country forward now if you look at the record in creating opportunity we have brought down the deficit we have expanded trade we have increased our investments in new technology and in the last two years our nation has produced over six million new jobs the unemployment rate in florida has dropped three percent from 7 4 to 4 3 percent we are clearly moving forward and creating more opportunity if you look at the empowerment issue we have increased investments in education everything from expanding head start to expanding the efforts of states to make apprenticeships for people that don t go to college to dramatically and i mean dramatically increasing the availability of scholarship for middle class people to get a higher education if you ask well what have we done on security well look around the world we are making progress in troublesome areas of the world like the middle east in bringing peace in northern ireland we have made agreements with russia and with other countries in the former soviet union to drastically reduce the number of nuclear weapons and for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no nuclear missiles pointed at the children of the united states of america now if you ask what have we done to reduce the size of government and i want to compliment governor chiles for his leadership in this florida is one of the really the groundbreaking state in america i think in slashing unnecessary regulation and i congratulate him on that what are we doing in washington well we ve reduced the size of the federal bureaucracy by 100 000 we re going to reduce it by 270 000 over five years it ll be the smallest federal government since john kennedy was president of the united states we have reduced the government deficit so much that if it weren t for interest on the debt incurred in the 12 years before i showed up we d have a surplus today not a deficit in the government account we re paying our operating bills we re now giving government regulators the authority not to fine people the first time they make a mistake and carol browner from florida who s the head of the epa has opened up an office in which people good honest business people can go and say look i m afraid i m in violation of some environmental law and instead of getting a fine they ll get six months to fix it we have changed the rules so that now if somebody makes a mistake in good faith our federal agencies have the right not to fine people but to say you keep the fine if you ll spend it in fixing the problem making the work place safer making the environment cleaner so we are moving forward with this new congress we are finding some areas of agreement that are quite important i signed a law that i campaigned for president to support that applies to congress all the laws they put on the private sector i think it s high time i signed a law the other day which limits the ability of the congress to impose on state governments and local governments so called unfunded mandates requiring them to raise your taxes because of some people in washington want instead of what you decided the mayor should do or the governor and the state legislature should do and it s high time and we re about to get agreement we passed a line item veto which most governors have which allows a president to go into a big bill where a lot of pork barrel spending might be hidden with a lot of good things so you can t afford to veto the bill and find the pork and we re going to get that passed soon and that s a good thing but there still are some disagreements and the american people without regard to their party will have to be heard on these disagreements because you have to decide what you think the main mission of our country is is the main mission to make sure there is no federal government or is the main mission to grow the middle class shrink the underclass and support family and community and the future of this country i think that is what the main mission of this country is and let me give you some ideas with all the cutting of the budget we have done and last year i gave the congress the first budget in 25 years that cut defense and domestic spending together only medical costs went up because of inflation everything else was cut but i did not cut within that education we increased our investment in education why because look around you it is the future of america so are we going to grow the middle class shrink the underclass and be a safer country if more poor little kids go through head start i think we are are we going to grow the middle class if more kids who get out of high school but don t want to go college at least get two years of some kind of training afterward in a community college that type of thing i think we are will we be growing the middle class and shrinking the underclass if every person who wants to go to college can get a college loan at a lower cost and a better repayment schedule i think we are so this is a big decision we have to make in washington let me give you a clear explicit example i recommended that we could save some money and do a better job by our young people if we changed the college loan program because it was a big bureaucracy you know it was a guarantee so the government would guarantee a loan a bank would give you the bank charges a fee then if somebody doesn t pay it back the bank gets 90 percent of the money from the government so they never sue because the lawyer fee would cost more than 10 percent right we were spending when i became president 1 8 2 8 billion a year of your money for delinquent loans because people weren t paying their student loans colleges and universities were complaining all over america that the paperwork was driving them bananas to process the student loans the students were complaining that they couldn t get the loans in a hurry and then when they had to repay them on a 10 year schedule if you borrowed a whole bunch of money you couldn t take a job that you might want if it has a salary so low you could never make your loan repayment and it didn t just apply to people in what you call public service jobs yesterday in atlanta i had an economic forum and i had two married medical students a husband and wife from the university of florida come and testify they are fourth year medical students they will owe 140 000 when they get out of medical school you say well doctors make a lot of money they do but not when they re residents right they were going to literally have to spend one half of their income combined paying off their students loans while they re residents working 60 70 80 hours a week under our plan they can pay it off as a percentage of their income so when they start making money they pay more but now they get to make a living and work and become doctors it s a better system so how does this affect you today 40 percent of american institutions are eligible to participate in that what i said is let s let everybody participate we ll cut the fraud rate we ve already taken it from 2 8 billion down to 1 billion a year we ve cut the fraud by nearly two thirds we ll cut the cost of the program we ll loan more money to more students we ll be less trouble to the institutions of higher education and the deficit will go down because we ll save 6 billion that was my proposal now here is the other proposal in the congress the other proposal is leave the banks with the money cap the number of colleges that can participate at 40 percent and instead make students start paying interest on their loans while they re in college add 2 billion a year to the cost of college to me i don t think you have to be einstein to conclude that does not make sense let s stay with our program let s save money and educate people and not go back to charging people more for student loans let me tell you something else there s a lot of talk about tax cuts in washington today there is a limit to how much we can cut taxes because the deficit s big we need to keep bringing the deficit down but i believe we should have a modest tax cut for middle class people targeted to raising incomes and increasing the wealth of the country over the long run don t just write people a check give people who are playing by the rules some incentives to do more that s why my bill says let s give people a tax deduction for the cost of education after high school get more people to get educated and do that why why because it s just like the g i bill after world war ii everybody who goes to school is going to make a higher income and pay more taxes and run the deficit down and run the wealth of the country up and if we keep it disciplined and small we can afford it but we can t afford just to go out here with these tax cuts with a deficit of the country as big as it is the reason the florida economy dropped in unemployment by three percent is that we brought the deficit down and increased our investment and expanded trade so we got interest rates down and business opportunities up and generated more jobs the most important thing is to keep the american people working and get their incomes up and that s what we have to do now you will see these debates over and over and over again i want to mention two more because they affect you we re having a big argument about what to do about crime well we finally passed a tough crime bill last year your mayor helped us pass it your governor your attorney general your law enforcement official helped us pass it and what that crime bill does is to it says first of all it was virtually written by law enforcement officials it says that we should have the national government do three things to help bring the crime rate down help the states build more prisons so we don t let dangerous criminals out too soon help local communities give kids something to say yes to and not just something to say no to so we prevent crime and keep people out of trouble and have a 20 percent increase in the police forces of the country so we can catch criminals and prevent crime those are the three things we did now the congress has proposed to reduce the amount of money we re spending on the crime bill but require the states to spend more on prisons and spend less on police and prevention and tell the communities do whatever you want to with the money and i m opposed to that and i want you to know why violent crime has tripled in the last 30 years and we have to do something about it all kinds of violent crime i just announced last week that the former attorney general of iowa bonnie campbell is going to head the first ever division of the justice department on domestic violence violence against parents and children we have to do something about this now in 30 years violent crime triples but the police forces of the country increased by only 10 percent you don t have to be a genius to figure out that there s some connection between a huge increase in crime and nearly no increase in the police force how are they supposed to do what they re doing not to mention how much better armed the criminals have become right which is part of the problem with these fine police officers now we know also that one of the good news stories that often does not get told in this country is i have seen this with my own eyes there s city after city after city where the crime rate has gone down because of strategies that have been adopted like some of the strategies adopted right here in tampa when you put people out and you deploy police in the proper way and they work with people in the community they not only catch criminals quicker but they also deter crime i have seen it all across america this is a good deal florida has already been awarded funds for more than 960 police officers 18 of them right here in tampa we don t need to tamper with the crime bill we ought to stay with it and implement it i m just going to give you one last example because we have to decide what kind of country we re going to be and what we re going to do together these young people that were introduced over here the americorps volunteers and they clapped and i was glad to see them they re part of our national service program it s a program basically to bring the idea of the peace corps to the streets of america it s a program designed to say if you will work essentially for minimum wage for a year we ll give you about the equivalent college education benefit of the g i bill if you ll help us to deal with our security problems here at home help to volunteer and to rebuild america here at home now there are those who say well we can t afford this it s too expensive we have 20 000 young americans in americorps today thousands of more who want to get in who want to work for minimum wage and earn this education credit and build up our country there are more people in americorps today than ever served in the peace corps in any single year in its history since president kennedy started it because the american people are dying to get out there and do something to lift this country up let me just give you a couple of examples two years ago just 89 of our volunteers immunized 104 000 infants in poor areas in texas believe me they paid for the whole program in that one year here in florida after the hurricane our volunteers working with habitat for humanity built 75 homes and they built them quicker and better because of that these americorps volunteers are from pinellas county they re members of three local law enforcement agencies involved in community police departments the clearwater department the st petersburg department and the county sheriff s office they re working together to make what i just talked to you about community policing a reality to make the streets safer they re out there doing things that uniformed officers don t have to do that lower the crime rate and make people safer that is what we ought to be doing i think it is worth the investment i m cutting spending as quick as i can we ve cut more spending in the last two years than had been cut in a month of sundays and i will cut more and i will work with the congress to cut more but it is not right to cut out americorps we should be lifting up young people like this and giving them a chance to serve i want you to be a part of this america needs to work like the community colleges work people get in and they re just judged based on their merit and everybody gets a fair shot and you know if you conclude the course you ve got a good chance to get a job and a better chance to live out your dreams that s the way this country ought to work it ought to be flexible unbureaucratic changing to meet the needs of a changing society but it requires a partnership between the public sector and the private sector your government in washington i am doing my best to change it to make it more like this but we are creating opportunity we are empowering people we are enhancing our security and we are downsizing this government we are making america a better place together and i urge you to enter this debate and tell everybody that you can we do not need more of the old fashioned hot air partisan political rhetoric we need a strategy to move this country forward just let me say this in closing i got a letter the other day from a guy i went to grade school with and he said you know bill one of the problems that you re having as president is that you re living out your dream but too many people our age are living with broken dreams i ran for this job because i wanted all the people my age to be able to live their dreams and because i want you younger people here to be able to look forward to a life that is as full and rich as the one i ve enjoyed and those of you who are young and don t have any children yet i want you to think about having children with an atmosphere of excitement and hope and conviction that your kids will see america s best days and i m telling you if we will keep our heads on straight and think about how we can pull together instead of how we can be driven apart we will do that god bless you and thank you dem wjclinton30 4 00a bill_clinton thank you well i don t know what to say i will tell you that this magnificent work of african art will be up in our residence at the white house before i go to bed tonight i thank you for it reverend anthony thank you for an introduction the likes i have never had and never will have again thank you for spreading the caring arms of this branch of the naacp from east grand boulevard all the way to africa and thank you for being my true friend thank you all ladies and gentlemen for honoring secretary cuomo i am delighted that he and his wife kerry are here with me and he deserves the honor you gave him you know he and secretary slater make me look good every day and too often i get the credit when they deserve more i thank them for being here i thank thurgood marshall jr for being here maria echaveste all the people from the white house that prove the truth that we have given you an administration that looks like america i thank all your elected representatives who are here for their support and solidarity with the naacp thank you governor engler senator levin senator abraham congressman dingell congresswoman kilpatrick congresswoman stabenow thank you for running and proving that you believe in democracy and thank you thank you thank you my friend john conyers and thank you for giving him the award that he so richly deserves thank you mayor dennis archer and thank you trudy for being hillary s friend and my friend for so many years long before you were a mayor back when you were a judge and above such things as petty politics we were friends i have enjoyed watching the success of detroit and enjoyed helping on occasion you to contribute to it i thank you all i bring you i also want to offer my condolences to the family and many friends of bill beckham who passed away last week who devoted his life to improving the lives of others in this great city and i bring you greetings from two people who are not here the first lady hillary who said she wished she could be here but she is otherwise occupied in new york tonight and the vice president who is otherwise occupied somewhere in america tonight who loved being here now i am told this is the largest sit down dinner anywhere in the whole world and i can honestly say it s the only one i ve ever attended that had four head tables the only one i ve ever attended when i didn t shake hands with everyone at the head tables and i learned tonight that i was the first sitting president ever to attend this great banquet i will say this if this encounter gets anything like the press coverage it deserves i am quite certain i will not be the last president to be at this banquet tonight more than anything else i came tonight to say a simple thank you thank you for being my friends thank you for being there for me in good times and bad thank you for being there in our journey to help american go forward together for more than 90 years now the naacp has been america s friend the conscience of a nation struggling and too often failing to live up to its ideals challenging always all of us to look into the mirror to face our faults and right our wrongs i have proceeded these last seven years and seven months with a simple philosophy that i believe is your philosophy i believe everybody counts everybody should have a chance everybody has a role to play and we all do better when we help each other dr king once said our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter the naacp has never been silent about the things that matter and the life of this organization is just beginning for all the progress we have made together there is still much to do i am grateful for your support and the role you and your work have played in the progress we have made together for america i am grateful that we have the lowest unemployment and welfare rates in 30 year the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded the lowest female unemployment in 40 years the highest home ownership in history and the longest economic expansion in history i am grateful for that i am grateful that under the vice president s leadership we ve created empowerment zones in detroit and many other cities and set up community financial institutions to loan money to people that couldn t get loans otherwise and done so many other things i am grateful for that i am grateful that we have a healing social fabric that the homicide rate is the lowest in 30 years and gun crime s down 35 percent and adoption is up 30 percent i am grateful for all of that i am grateful that 21 million americans have taken family and medical leave and that 5 million families have benefited from our hope scholarship to help pay for college i am grateful that 150 000 young americans including at least one i saw here tonight have served our country in americorps in their communities i am grateful that over 90 percent of our children are immunized for the first time from serious childhood diseases and 95 percent of our schools are hooked up to the internet as compared to 16 percent when the vice president and i set out to hook them all up six years ago i m grateful for all that i m grateful that as wendell said so much more eloquently than i could we have appointed more minorities and women to more positions in the government and on the bench than any administration in history by a good long ways i m grateful for that i am profoundly touched by your prayers your friendship and your support i reminded secretary slater when reverend anthony was up here preaching that i went home with him last week to a memorial service for daisy bates the great arkansas heroine of the civil rights movement who shepherded those nine children through little rock central high school 43 years ago and who just died a few months ago daisy s minister reverend rufus young who is a gentleman way up in his 80s with a frail walk with a strong voice got up and looked up at me and he said mr president the only reason you ve survived is that so many of us black folks were praying for you so hard what i hope now is we will turn our prayers and energies toward tomorrow for when people gather together even though it s important to remember the past in my wife s words it s even more important to imagine the future and i guess what i would like to ask you is in this millennial election season as a citizen forget about party forget about anything else what do you as a human being believe that america should be doing i have waited a long time for my country to be in the position to create the future of our dreams for our children i watched for a long time america just being paralyzed by these assumptions of what we could not do when i got elected president i think most people thought we could never get rid of the deficit much less run a surplus but we have i think most people thought i think most people thought the crime rate would always go up and never go down but it s gone done for seven years in a row now i think most people thought that people on welfare didn t really want to work but that turned out to be wrong almost 7 million have moved out of welfare they were wrong about that i think most people thought a lot of things couldn t get better and now we don t have any excuses because we know when we get together and work together things can get better and so what i want to ask you is what do you propose to do about it a great country can make mistakes not only when times are tough but when times are good i look out here in this sea of faces and i wonder how many thousand stories there are here tonight stories of triumph and heroism and struggle against the odds to overcome some racial or economic or other handicap how many of you have lost a loved one to violence or other tragedies and now what i want to say to you is we know things can be better what do you propose to do about it we have choices to make i believe that we should keep on going with this economic recovery until we have brought economic opportunity to all those neighborhoods all those little rural towns all those indian reservations all those people who have still been left behind and don t know there s been a recovery because they haven t felt it and we can do it now in a way that we ve never been able to do before i believe we should keep going until all of our children understand how to use computers and can make the most of it i believe we should keep going until we find a way to guarantee health care rights to all americans who are willing to work and do the right thing or who need help because they can t i believe we should keep going until every american who wants to can go to college let me tell you something else a lot of people don t know even a lot of african americans don t know this last year for the first time in history the percentage of african americans graduating from high school equaled the percentage of the white majority children graduating from high school now we ought to keep going until the percentage going on to college equals that and then the percentage graduating but we have to open the doors of college to everyone we ve made a lot of progress but we ve got more to do and we ve got more to do in so many other areas i just want to mention two more before i leave one is in this whole business of sharing the bounty of america s public service you know i never thought about this in the way my appointment of people of color and lots of women to important positions in the way most people think about it i always figured we d do a better job if our government was more representative of the rest of the people in the country i always thought we would make better decisions i always thought empowering people and communities was a positive good i never thought it was something i was doing for somebody else i just thought i was trying to make democracy work and we made a lot of progress but i want you to know there s one real problem we ve still got that directly affects michigan when it comes to appointing judges the united states senate is not doing what it ought to be doing especially with regard to women and minority appointees hey i need your help on this a blue ribbon study found that during the 105th congress women and minority judicial nominees took much longer to be considered than white males they found that minority nominations failed at a much higher rate than the nominations of whites last year there was a disgraceful rejection of an african american state supreme court judge from missouri named ronnie white solely on the basis of party politics i have nominated two people from michigan to the 6th circuit and neither one of them have even gotten a hearing so far judge helene white a highly qualified michigan appellate judge has been waiting for a hearing from the senate judiciary committee for three years longer than any other pending nominee my other 6th circuit nominee kathleen mccree lewis the daughter of wade mccree is here tonight she would become the first african american woman ever to serve on the 6th circuit i think the senate ought to give helene white and kathleen mccree lewis hearings vote them up or down tell the american people how you stand let us here from you don t hide behind having no hearing i had to work and work and work to get a distinguished hispanic judge and a female attorney appointed out in california they made him wait four years now why did they do that because they didn t want to put him on the court they just didn t want you to know they didn t want to put him on the court so if you don t want to do something but you don t want the people to know you don t want to do something instead of saying no you just never get around to it now we re going to have a new election in november and we ll have a new president and a new senate and i hope a new house with john as the chairman of the house judiciary committee but i want you to know this i am proud of the fact that my party has never been guilty of delaying nominees to this extent and particularly putting the burden on women and people of color and it s a shame and we ought to do something about it and i hope you ll help me do something about it now let me just mention one other thing because we have lots of choices this year you will have choices about whether to keep on changing in accord with this economic policy and bringing everybody into it while we keep paying down the debt investing in education give families tax cuts we can afford or going back to the economic policy we had before i came in with even bigger tax cuts that once i get out of office would benefit primarily people like me but we won t have any money for education and we ll start running deficits again we ll have choices about education policy health policy environmental policy a lot of other things but i want you to think about the things that we choose that really define us as a community john conyers talked about one i m proud that gun crime is down 35 percent anybody thinks that america is safe enough is free to walk out on my speech right now but we know we can make america safer and we know the best way to do it is by preventing crime in the first place that s why we want to close the gun show loophole and do other things to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals that s why we want more community police on the street that s why we want more after school and summer school programs for our kids to give them something to say yes to but when three quarters of the people in the penitentiary are people of color and they re more likely to be in the penitentiary than they are to go to college there s something wrong still i don t think we ve done as much we can i think we can make america safer and have more of our kids going to college at the same time but we have a choice to make i think we ought to pass the hate crimes legislation there are still people in this country who are shot who are abused who are killed because of their race their religion just because they re gay we ve seen it over and over again tragically we saw it just this week five people in a suburb of pittsburgh shot and killed for no other reason it appears than the color of their skin or the way they worship god now you will hear all kinds of arguments about this hate crime business but i have studied this it is simply not true that we do not need national legislation making hate crimes against people because of race or because of sexual orientation or because of disability or because of religion a federal crime we do and i have looked into the eyes of the brother and the sister of that filipino postal worker that was gunned down in california i have seen one of those little jewish children that was wounded and his family at that community center in los angeles i have talked to the widow of the african american former basketball coach at northwestern who was shot walking in his neighborhood i have put my arms around the parents of matthew shepard who was stretched out on a rack in wyoming because he was gay and i have seen the brother and sister of james byrd who was dragged to death in texas because he was black now if we want to be one america and we don t want any politics in it the easiest way that we can do that is to join hands and unanimously say we can argue about a lot of things but one thing we re never going to argue about again is our common humanity here is this hate crimes bill it is who we are it is what we stand for it is what we believe you know we do have a lot of bridges to cross as long as there are people without economic opportunity and we can give it to them we ought to do it as long as there are people who don t have access to world class education and we can give it to them we ought to do it as long as there are working families who can t take care of their children we ought to do it as long as there we ought to give them child care support and access to health care they can afford we ought to do these things there are so many challenges out there but the main thing i want to tell you is this if the good lord came to me tonight when i walked out of this room and said mr president now i m not going to let you serve the end of your term i m taking you home tonight and i m no genie i m not going to give you three wishes but i will give you one what do you want i would wish for our country to be truly one america i would wish for us to be able you know i have you may have heard me tell this story on television but i m going to tell it one more time i have got on a table in the oval office when you see me there with a world leader and you see two chairs and two big couches and a table there right on that table you look next time standing on that table in a vacuum packed glass container is a rock that neil armstrong took off the moon in 1969 that rock is 3 6 billion years old and when people come in to see me and they get all riled up and they get all mad at each other and they re thinking about little things and they re all torn up and upset ever since i ve got that i say wait a minute look at that rock you see that rock that is 3 6 billion years old now chill out we re all just passing through here and i say that to remind you that whether you re president of the united states or somebody serving us this dinner tonight the most important things about us are not the differences between me and the people serving you dinner but the things we have in common and when life is all said and done the stories we really will be thinking about in our last moments were who liked us and who loved us and what moved us and the springtimes we remember and the moments of personal drama and courage and meaning that came into our lives the purpose of public life the purpose of citizenship the purpose of the naacp is to give people a sense of our common humanity and our common cause you know wendell said that i learned that from my grandparents and that s true but i learn it every day from all the stories of all the people i see you have given me a memory tonight i will never forget your support has meant more to me than i can ever say the people of detroit and the state of michigan have been with me through thick and thin but the only thing that really matters now the only thing that really matters now is what are you going to do tomorrow what do you propose to do with this magic moment let me tell you this the last time we had an economy this good was in the 1960s we broke the record of the 1960s for economic expansions there are a lot of young children here who weren t alive back then but i was and i graduated from high school in 1964 in the middle of that great economic expansion low unemployment low inflation high growth everything booming we thought the civil rights problems would be handled in congress and the courts we never dreamed we d be caught up in vietnam we thought we would win the cold war no sweat we thought we were on automatic marching into the future and what happened what happened within four years when i graduated from college it was two days after senator kennedy was killed two months after martin luther king was killed nine weeks after president johnson the great civil rights president couldn t even run for reelection because the country was so divided over vietnam and within a few months the longest economic expansion in history was itself history life is fleeting things change i have been waiting for 35 years not as president as an american citizen for my country to be in the position you re in tonight to build the future of our dreams for our children that should be the mission of the naacp in this millennial year thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton30 4 00b bill_clinton thank you very much i must say i was very moved by secretary slater s remarks but i realize he was lifted to new heights of eloquence by being back at his alma mater and i also realize he was once again proving the adage of clinton s third law of politics whenever possible be introduced by someone you have appointed to high office they will praise you to the skies true or false i must say i was afraid though rodney was about to commit we have been friends for many years i ve never heard him say anything politically incorrect i ve never heard him utter a curse word i ve never heard him betray a character flaw but i almost heard an ethnic slur today when he said he got me because i look like president shelton all gray haired middle aged scotch irish guys look alike you know i m very proud of secretary slater and you should be too and i m proud of general coburn and his leadership in the army and gene conti who is the assistant secretary for policy at our transportation department with secretary slater we have been richly blessed by this university and president shelton i am grateful for you years of service here and for our friendship in our early years in arkansas when we both had less gray hair and didn t look so much alike i thank mayor archer and former governor and ambassador blanchard and representative kilpatrick and the other michigan officials who are here with me today i thank my longtime friend jim comer i didn t know he was here at emu this year until i saw him right before i came in no american has proven so clearly as professor comer that all children can learn if given the right learning environment and i am very grateful to him i thank all the distinguished board of regents and faculty and staff who are here but most of all i want to recognize the students and their parents of this your first graduating class of the 21st century on the way in rodney was telling me that i would identify with a lot of you a lot of you are first generation college graduates a lot of you had to work your way through school a lot of you needed help in the form of loans and grants and work study positions and every one of you should be very proud of what you have achieved i also identify with your class because i may be the only president of the united states who ever studied here i came here to prepare for my debates in 1992 and like you i passed and i thank you very much for the contribution you made to my education and to my years here you are graduating into a strong economy the strongest in our nation s history you are also graduating into a time of immense possibility here in michigan and throughout the united states and indeed throughout the world one of my speechwriters wrote me a line that said our economy is soaring higher than swoop the eagle he said you would know what that means all i know is that i am grateful for the chance that the vice president and first lady and our administration and i have had to work to create opportunity in america and to bring us closer together in one community i know that a great deal of this is because we are in the midst of a profound revolution the most sweeping since the industrial revolution a century ago information technology alone now gives us about a third of our growth though only 8 percent of our work force is directly involved in it it is bringing growth to every sector of our economy in a way we haven t seen since henry ford s first assembly line and i wanted to come here today to try to give you this graduating class some sense of the world into which you re going you understand the opportunities doubtless better than i i want you to understand the challenges too for economic opportunity is not an end in itself it is a means to an end to further liberty to strengthen the bonds of community to enable you to build families and have children and enrich your lives before you lies a future of unparalleled possibility but i want you to understand today that just as at the dawn of the industrial age a hundred years ago which was symbolized by michigan by mr ford s assembly line and the factories of detroit there are new challenges presented by this new era to our oldest values of freedom and opportunity and community theodore roosevelt came to this campus more than a hundred years ago at the beginning of the industrial era when new rules were required to make sure that the industrial revolution worked for all our people without those rules there would have been a terrible industrial divide between rich and poor strong and weak with those rules with the wage and hour laws the child labor laws the antitrust laws the federal reserve and later the minimum wage workman s compensation unemployment insurance social security with those new rules we built an opportunity society that produced the greatest middle class in human history one that became even more successful and more inclusive throughout this last century with the progress of civil rights women s rights environmental and worker protection i want to say to you today that you are well equipped for the possibilities of this new era but we also need new rules for the information age to protect those old values just as we did for the industrial age for all the possibilities must be measured also against the challenges presented by this new era challenges to our privacy as individuals to our pledge of equal opportunity for every member of our community to our stewardship of the environment as citizens of the planet from our earliest days part of what has made america unique has been our dedication to freedom and the clear understanding that real freedom requires a certain space of personal privacy today as information technology opens new worlds of possibilities it also challenges privacy in ways we might never have imagined just a few years ago for example the same genetic code that offers hope for millions can also be used to deny health insurance the same technology that links distant places can also be used to track our every move on line in this information age we can t let new opportunities erode old fundamental rights we can t let breakthroughs in technology break down walls of privacy our response to this challenge will affect the lives of every single member of this graduating class and the lives of your children we are working with the internet industry to raise privacy standards in the last year alone the share of commercial websites with privacy policies has risen a lot and we will do more but as my wife has said many times some of these privacy issues presented by information technology are so sensitive they must have the protection of law we have taken steps to protect the privacy of children on line preventing websites from collecting information from children without a parent s permission i proposed the first set of national standards to protect the privacy of on line medical records to ensure that your personal health information doesn t fall into the wrong hands you shouldn t have to worry that your employer is looking at the medications you take or the ailments you have today i d like to ask you to think about the challenge to our financial privacy coming out of the information revolution we are moving from cash to electronic transactions a bank is no longer just a bank it s often linked with an insurance firm a broker a travel agency all this helps to give us added convenience lower prices and more choices but it s also forcing us to redefine financial privacy for the information age and to rewrite the rules that go with it there was a time when protecting your financial privacy meant safeguarding your passbook today a financial record isn t just about what you re worth it can paint a picture of who you are every time you write a check use an atm make a purchase with a credit or debit card there is a record a record that technology can sort and track what dish you ordered at a restaurant what clothes you bought at the mall that makes it easier for others to mine all of that information for their own profit we ve taken some historic steps to stop information about your personal spending habits from being shared without your permission but even today the law doesn t prevent firms within a financial conglomerate from sharing information with each other in other words the life insurance company could share information about your medical history with the bank without giving you any choice in the matter the bank could share information from your student loans and your credit cards with its telemarketer or its broker again without giving you any choice i believe that is wrong today i present a plan to protect the privacy of americans financial records i challenge congress to act on it this year because your information doesn t belong to just anyone every consumer and every family deserves choices about how their personal information is shared first before you financial information is shared between two affiliated companies say a credit card company and an insurance company you would get notice and you could say no second for the most sensitive type of information i think there should be an extra level of protection as more banks and insurance companies merge lenders could gain access to private medical information and many insurance records but no one should have to worry that the results of their latest physical exam will be used to deny them a home mortgage or a credit card under my plan you d get to say no third we would add that same safeguard to the information that makes up your personal spending identity such as the list of every purchase you ve ever made by check or debt or credit card everything you buy again that information could be shared only if you say yes and finally to make sure you have control over the comprehensive records that financial institutions may assemble about you we ll make sure you have access to those records and the right to correct mistakes in them we must be able to enjoy the benefits of technology without sacrificing our privacy to maximize the promise of the information age and still protect our individual liberties our national character also requires new rules for the information age that recognize opportunity for all now means access to technology for all just as we closed the industrial divide in the 20th century we must now close the digital divide in the 21st century you know if you re educated for the information age who you are and where you are don t matter as much anymore i have seen that with people in the poorest villages of the world logging onto the internet and getting an education getting information once available only in textbooks learning how to take care of their children learning how to start new businesses but if who and where you are don t matter so much what you know and what you can do matter more than ever that s why this degree and what you learned here is so important that s why technology education is so important technology in this new era will either erase lines that divide us or widen them the internet and computers make it possible for us to lift more people out of poverty faster than at any time in history but it will not happen by accident many of you have learned this lesson in your own lives todd pasquale of the college of arts and sciences wasn t going to let anything stop him from earning his degree today not even navigating his wheelchair through the michigan snows thanks to emu on line he took his winter courses at home now he plans to give back to the community by working as a counselor to people in prisons because he could access technology let s give him a hand randy short went back to school after her husband died leaving her to raise three sons alone today she earns a masters degree with honors in website design she hopes to start her own business and she wants to help teach women to use computers she has already given those women a lesson for all of us about the value of making sure technology education is accessible to every american give her a hand today i ask all of you to join me in reaching out to all the others across america who need these tools to build their future when vice president gore and i started hooking up schools to the internet there were only about 16 percent of our schools who had a connection in 1994 today 95 percent do but i was on an indian reservation in northern new mexico the other day introduced by a brilliant young girl of 13 who had just won a computer in a contest who could not hook it up to the internet because her home did not have a phone seventy percent of the homes on her navajo reservation did not have a phone we have to bring telephone service to everybody and then make the internet as common as telephone usage is in every home every business and every school in the united states of america we owe that to our future we must create incentives for america business to invest in people and places in danger of being left behind left behind in their economies and their education of their children in information infrastructure and special technologies for people with special needs that s what our efforts to build bipartisan support for opening america s new markets and closing the digital divide are all about the third thing i want to mention is that the revolution in technology and communications means our lives are bound up more than ever with people far away from us with whom we now are in instant contact our community of values and interest spans the globe events half a world away can have an impact on us here just as what we do has an impact on people who live thousands of miles from our borders in ways large and small i have a cousin in arkansas who plays chess once a week on the internet with a man in australia doubtless there are many stories like that in this room today we need a new level of international cooperation and new rules that deal with the most significant challenge of our common humanity the environmental challenge posed by global warming scientists tell us scientists tell us the temperature is now rising four degrees a century to anyone who has lived through a michigan winter that might not sound so bad but the scientists also say that a significant degree of this climate change is due to human activity specifically to putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from the burning of coal and oil and if it goes unchecked the consequences will be dramatic rising temperatures can melt polar icecaps which lead to rising oceans that could swallow thousands of miles of our own coastlines and bury island nations changing weather would devastate our farmlands we would have both more droughts and more violent storms and floods hotter weather could both cause more rapid evaporation of inland water systems and a drought which replenishes them less think about the great lakes where water levels are falling faster than ever recorded they have fallen almost three feet in just two years they may fall much more in the next 30 that would be a disaster for industry and for all living things dependent upon the lakes and that is why i ve asked congress to fund our efforts to find out why the water is falling to restore the great lakes waterways to improve our stewardship of this vital resource now for most of the 20th century economic growth did require burning more fossil fuels more coal and more oil which released the greenhouse gases caused the pollution and heated the atmosphere because of that many people still believe that we must choose between two vital values preserving our environment and making our economy grow thankfully in the digital economy that is simply not true anymore it is now possible to grow an economy and improve the environment at the same time new technologies make it possible to reduce harmful emissions as they make the economy more efficient and stronger scientists right here at emu are making environmentally friendly paints out of soybeans michigan the home of the automobile is now the home of cutting edge research into cars and trucks of the 21st century that will get much higher mileage and soon vehicles developed here in partnership with the federal government will use alternative and biofuels which could get the equivalent of 100 miles or more to a gallon of gasoline these technologies are good for the planet and good for the bottom line but we must embrace them and i say this very seriously it takes at least 50 years for greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere to dissipate the class this class graduating today it is your children and your grandchildren that will feel the harshest effects of our neglect in meeting this challenge but if you don t do it your children may not be able to do it for you because of the time delay and it is no good saying that someone else should do it we are the world s largest emitter of greenhouse gases because we re the richest country but soon china and india will surpass us we must show them that they can grow even faster by following a different path but first we must set a good example i have implored the congress to adopt legislation to increase research and development in this area and to give significant tax incentives for people to produce products that emit less greenhouse gases and for people to buy them it is a big challenge for you you can have all the computers and all the money in the world and if we squander god s environment it won t be worth very much i urge you to meet this challenge let my say in closing i am very optimistic about the new century it will bring us more advances and answer more questions than any period in human history we ll be able to store all the information in the halle library in a device the size of a sugar cube we ll have microchips that stimulate the spine in such a way that people now paralyzed will be able to stand up and walk i believe we will even learn what s in the black holes in the universe but we must not be so dazzled by the bright promise of technology that we lose sight of the fundamental lesson we must bring to bear our basic values on each new development in human history in order to assure that it works for the public good and maintains america s values of liberty and community that is the noble challenge that you face henry ford once defined obstacles as those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal i hope your goal will be a 21st century american community that derives every benefit from technology while holding fast to our oldest values i hope you will not take your eyes off of it i hope you will embrace it and work for it if you do you will achieve it and you will live in history s most exciting prosperous and humane era that is what i wish for you congratulations good luck and godspeed dem wjclinton30 4 93 bill_clinton thank you very much i ought to quit while i m ahead it is wonderful to be back in new orleans and in louisiana and to have the first chance i ve had since the election to thank you for your support your electoral votes and the education you gave me on my many trips here during the campaign last year i m glad to be back on this campus i want to thank your student body president robert styron and i thought he gave a good speech i think he s got a future in politics don t you and chancellor o brien i want to thank senator breaux for his kind remarks and for his leadership of the democratic leadership council and i want to acknowledge the presence here of senator johnston and many members of the louisiana house and many other members of the united states congress along with many others who are here with the democratic leadership council including my good friend and former colleague the governor of new mexico bruce king who s here there are two members of my cabinet here the secretary of education dick riley and the secretary of agriculture mike espy also a dlc vice chair i want to thank all the people who are here representing volunteer organizations i met with some young people just before i came in here who are scattered around near me from benjamin franklin high school just across the way absolutely no enthusiasm in that place from the delta service corps from vista from summerbridge from teach for america we also have some students here apart from all of you from uno we have some students here who have worked in service projects at xavier university and at tulane we also have people here who have been involved in service for a long time from action from the older americans volunteer program from the national association of senior companions and foster grandparents and the national association of retired senior volunteers all these people i am very grateful to i d like to just acknowledge in general who are here from law enforcement organizations and firefighters organizations and public employees and teachers groups who have helped us on this national service project and i want to say a special word of thanks to three other people first of all general david jones a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who has worked very hard helping us put together this program who is here general jones thank you for being here secondly a remarkable gentleman from new jersey an immensely successful businessman who retired early and is devoting his entire life to community service to rebuild the lives and the neighborhoods of the people in his community in new jersey and now helping others around the country a founding member of the points of light foundation mr ray chambers who is here and i d like to pay a little special attention to two members of congress who are not here and to one who is for their long work on the whole idea of national service the two in the senate who are not here are senator harris wofford from pennsylvania and senator sam nunn from georgia and then representative dave mccurdy from oklahoma thank you for all of the work you ve done on this over the years i am glad to be here you know when i come down here i always sort of relax i don t know why that is i timed it just in time for the jazz festival but i left my saxophone at the white house this is the 100th day of my administration in washington some say it marks a milestone but in many ways it s just another day at the office for what we re trying to do in changing america in the last 99 days we have worked relentlessly to address the pressing and long ignored needs of the american people and to bring to the government something it has not seen in a long time an acknowledgement that bold action is needed and needed now to secure and enlarge america s future and that in order to do it we not only have to change programs we have to change the way the government works and engage the energies of the american people in the process in the last 100 days i think we have begun to change the direction in which our country has been going for a long time and to go toward a new direction more like the one the american people demanded last november we ve also started an unprecedented debate in our nation s capital about big ideas and better lives across our nation ideas that in many cases were shaped and nurtured by some of the people who are here today as senator breaux said earlier the members of the democratic leadership council of which i am proud to be a founding member the dlc has unlike most organizations the dlc has done more than just talk about the problems in our country it has made an honest effort to develop real ideas about how to restore the american economy and make the government work and rebuild the confidence and the link that exists between the american people and their government when things are at their best here and it s been a laboratory for experimentation and solutions during my years with the dlc we really tried to refine our philosophy of what it would mean to take not only the democratic party but the united states of america in a new direction to make our country work again and to reward work and family to encourage education and enterprise to establish what i have often called a new covenant with the american people creating opportunity but demanding responsibility from all so that once again we could be a true american community where we know and believe and live as if we re all in this together this group has conceived many of the ideas that i ve advocated since i ve been in washington from setting a limit on welfare and putting people to work to police reform and community policing to rewarding work of low income working people by having an earned income tax credit that would lift the working poor with children out of poverty so we could say if you work 40 hours a week in this country you have a child in the house you ought not to be poor these are the kinds of things that this organization has done they helped to develop the idea i want to talk to you today about that has so much to do with the future of the young people here and throughout our country national service this is an organization about ideas now in washington as you might imagine we don t always agree with one another and that is good that s why we ve got a system where the government s divided up and we have two parties and we have people fighting all the time as long as it s about ideas but too often we ve seen that the debate over big ideas gets mired in petty politics i know one thing the american people are tired of gridlock and petty politics if we re going to fight they want us to fight over ideas and the future of this country in the past 99 days we tried to address the problems the american people told me they wanted to be addressed we focused more than anything else on the economy passing the outline of a budget that will reduce the deficit by more than 500 billion increase investment in education and technologies and the things that will create the economy of the 21st century that all of you need so that you ll have good and decent jobs and a decent future laying the groundwork for a more prosperous tomorrow just in 100 days we ve announced a policy to help to convert the defense cutbacks and the economic opportunities for people who are losing their jobs because of the military cutbacks to take a new direction in technology to create more opportunities for our people to be more aggressive in preserving the environment but do it in a way that creates jobs not a way that costs jobs to have a trade policy that will really reflect our common interest with other nations and expanding jobs and opportunities everywhere we ve begun the long overdue renovation of the american economic base the question now unlike 100 days ago the question is now not whether we re going to reduce the deficit but how and how much the question now is not whether the government will have a new partnership with the private sector to shape the economy but exactly what the details will be and how much our part will be we ve also taken on the issue of health care something millions of americans cried out for last year i am so tired of seeing people i got a letter today from a young woman i shook hands with whose literally her life is on the line and she cannot get health insurance it is wrong that in this nation we are the only advanced country in the world with 34 million people without health insurance it is wrong that millions of americans cannot change their jobs without losing their health insurance because they or a child or a spouse has been sick it is wrong that the price of health care goes up 2 5 times the rate of inflation every year and it is wrong that we spend 30 percent more of our income than any other country on earth on health care and have less to show for it but it is also wrong to assume that there is some magic quick answer that s why we ve been working with a task force headed by the first lady and over 400 people from all aspects of health care to do something about this but now for the american people the issue is no longer whether we re going to address the health care crisis whether we re going to provide security to hard working middle class americans whether we re going to cover the people who aren t covered whether we re going to control costs but how are we going to do it and how fast and when are we going to begin i hope the answer is soon and not too soon is soon enough for me we used to debate there was a lot of discussion last year about how bad the government was and it didn t work and it was bloated it needed a change look at the last 100 days i ve tried to set an example by offering a budget to reduce the white house staff by 25 percent by putting the lid on and reducing the federal bureaucratic expenses the administrative expenses of the federal government by over 10 billion by moving dramatically to reduce the influence of special interest on executive branch appointments by having the toughest ethics laws and restrictions on people becoming lobbyists for other interests when they leave the payroll of the president of the united states by asking the vice president to share the most sweeping review of the way the federal government works in a generation with a promise of real reform and reinventing government something else this organization has long believed in we are moving and the congress is moving to join the congress has voted to cut the administrative costs of running the congress something many of you never thought you would see happen they did that the congress the house of representatives voted yesterday to give the president of the united states a modified line item veto and i hope the senate will follow their lead i hope soon they will send to my desk the motor voter bill which will make it easier for young people and other people to vote and participate in their country s political process and there will be campaign finance reform and lobby reform legislation and a crime bill that will put more police on the street and give us the capacity we need to take our communities back these things are going on the question is no longer whether we re going to reform the way government works but how fast and how much and how well and those are the right questions my fellow americans good questions to ask and now i come to the last and in many ways the most important issue that we have tried to address the economy yes health care yes reform in the way the government works yes but also what about the american people how can each american make a contribution how can each american do the work that all americans must taking responsibility for himself or herself and growing up into a vibrant community we have tried to address those issues as well the buzz word now people use is empowerment i used to call it responsibility i often have said and i want to reiterate today the united states government cannot create an opportunity for anyone who will not be responsible enough to seize it opportunity is a two way street and requires responsibility that is the only we ll every rebuild the american community in the days and months ahead you will see the secretary of education talk about his remarkable education program to provide tougher national standards in education but also to give people at the grassroots level more flexibility in making public education work you will see the secretary of agriculture and the secretary of housing and urban development talk about how we can empower even the poorest americans to start their own businesses save their own money and take control of their own future you will see other people talking about how we can reform the welfare system all of these things are at the core of the notion that we ought to make it possible for every american to live up to the fullest of his or her god given ability and that is what in the end national service is all about helping ourselves and helping each other at the same time on this 100th day of my administration i want to recommit myself and those who work with me to the values that have made our nation without peer in all human history those of opportunity responsibility community and respect for one another today i want to propose applying those values to a revolution of opportunity for our hard pressed families and for those who have been left out as a first step we re going to ease the terms of college loans helping students from middle and lower middle income families to clear a major path to the american dream the path of higher education in return we ll demand responsibility from young people we ll make it easier to borrow money and much easier to pay it off but this time you have to pay it off you can t just default on the loan and we will also offer the young people of america the opportunity of paying their loans back by serving their communities in a new program of national service in just a few days i will send to the congress two bills containing our proposals first to strengthen college opportunity and to establish national service together they will revive america s commitment to community and make affordable the cost of a college education for every american it s no secret that over the last 10 or 12 years the cost of a college education is about the only essential thing that s gone up even more rapidly than health care costs and middle class parents and even upper middle class parents not to mention lower income people have borne the burden paying now about five percent of median income just to put one child through a four year in state public college it costs an average of over 5 200 a year for that education that means families are depleting savings and many students are faced with cutting back to a part time course load or having to drop out simply because of the cost of a college education a college dropout is now more than twice the high school dropout rate we cannot afford that and we can do better i propose a new way to finance college for millions of students who seek loans every year we call it an excel account with it students can repay the loans they take out not with a percentage of the loan they borrowed but with a percentage of their actual earnings now think about that for students driven into debt driven by debt into careers with high pay and low satisfaction this can be very liberating take a student torn for example between pursuing a career in teaching and corporate law this student now can at least make the career choice based on what he or she wants to do and not the size of the outstanding student loan because we propose to let everybody have the option of paying the student loan back based on how much they earn not just how much they owe that is an incredible incentive however under the current system as many of you know students faced with big bills or just inconvenient responsibilities have too often taken the irresponsible route and defaulted on their loans or have been found in default because they couldn t find a job often times there s no serious effort to collect the loan because the government guarantees 90 percent of it so if the bank makes the loan it costs more than 10 percent to go collect it what s the result the taxpayers every year pay about 3 billion on other people s loans money that could be spent on your education on the schools here on the future of the children here just for bad loans it isn t right under our system the department of education would engage the internal revenue service we would have the payroll records and you wouldn t be able to beat the bill because you would have to pay the loan back as a percentage of your income if you choose but you d have to pay it because you pay taxes and because we have your records and because you won t be able to get out of it and that is the right thing to do but these excel accounts are just the beginning we hope they will lead more and more americans not only to seize the opportunity of a college education and to exert a stronger sense of responsibility but also to seek to serve their communities through a program of national service it was thomas jefferson who first told the american people in essence that the more you know the more you owe in his words and i quote a debt of service is due from every man to his country proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him this statement reminds us that values never go out of fashion that civic responsibility is as good for democracy today as it was when thomas jefferson said that and that if you really want to be the best citizen of your country you have to give something back to your country with national service we can literally open a new world to a new generation of americans where higher learning goes hand in hand with the higher purpose of addressing our unmet needs our educational our social our environmental needs to secure the future that we all will share national service will mark the start of a new era for america in which every citizen every one of you can become an agent of change armed with the knowledge and experience that a college education brings and ready to transform the world in which we live city by city community by community block by block i say to you we need you you know there s a lot of talk in america today and i spend hours every week worrying about the effect that automation and technology is having on employment indeed as we see the productivity of american enterprises rise their need for workers goes down because they can do more with computers that they used to do with people so people ask me all the time where will we find the jobs for this new generation of americans how can we drive this unemployment rate down but if you look around this country at all the human problems all the homeless people all the environmental waste dumps in our cities and our rural areas all the problems that we ve got in every community in america and see you all the kids that are in trouble 15 million of them at risk and needing somebody to pay attention to you know where the work needs to be late last night when i was preparing to come down here i took a little time off at my desk and i read the letters that my staff had given me and i got a letter from a woman who grew up with me i ve known her since we were in grade school and she said in this letter she said you know someone asked me a couple of days ago how are we going to save all these kids in this country that are in trouble and she said without even thinking i blurted out the same way we lost them one at a time and so today my fellow americans i issue a call to national service to americans young and old democrats and republicans white black hispanic asian and you name it all of us that make up this great nation i call you to national service because it is only that together we can advance a tradition rooted in our people s history helping our people to help themselves and with national service we can rejoin the citizens in communities of this country bonding each to the other with the glue of common purpose and real patriotism we have many young people here today students of this place of higher learning where we re gathered in you i know i see the builders of tomorrow and i say to you as good as the education is here and at the other great institutions represented here today and all across america the power of academic learning is incomplete unless every american can share in it that is the only way we can lift our whole country up i say to you further that our country needs you we need your knowledge and your initiative and your energy we need you because you are still stripped and free of the cynicism that has paralyzed too many of your parents and your grandparents and led us to spend too much time talking about what we can t do instead of seizing what we can you are not afflicted by that and i pray you never will be we need to make sure that we can use your energies and your talents one way is by making sure that the low wages that public service often offers won t be a route to the poorhouse for someone with college loans as i said we re going to make it easier for you to pay off your college loan but also if you engage in national service we ll make it easier for you to pay off a college debt or to earn credits toward it before you got to college of while you re in college for each term of service one or two years participants in national service programs will receive benefits that can be used toward past present or future obligations whether for college or advanced job training you can get a college education and in addition through service perhaps the best experience of your life that s a pretty good investment i ve talked a lot about the students here and they do play a large part in this plan but they re not alone here in new orleans many of you already know what it means to make a difference in your community because you ve just been doing that for a long time and i m very proud as i said i m going to get another cheer about this but one of the models that i had a little something to do with is the delta service corps and i appreciate what they re doing there are people here working to restore housing there are people here working in other ways i just want to mention three lawrence williams a team leader in the corps who has helped to restore housing for low income people with the local habitat for humanity project jane sullivan a retired public schoolteacher and a former vista volunteer who helps rural communities gain better access to health care housing and other assistance and a young person i met just a few moments ago parris moore brown who works with parents in housing programs for drug awareness outreach and now plans to work with the physically challenged she says that she has no tolerance for self pity and she lives what she preaches she hasn t been slowed by what her birth dealt her a brittle bone disorder that has left her as an adult and by her own measure four feet two and a quarter inches tall where are you stand up so we can see you after my meeting with her and the other young people today i d say she stands about 10 feet tall in america today there are tens of thousands of people like parris and jane and lawrence and those of you who are here with these service programs who are dying to be called to a new season of service and we want to do that another part of our plan is to build on the national and community service act that was passed in 1990 and the already flourishing programs that are started and up and going in every state in this country national service is not going to be a federal bureaucracy it s going to operate at the grassroots with the real problems of real people and with the programs that work today it will be locally driven because i trust the communities in this country to make decisions for themselves i also want to say that while we want very much to have young people in this program who are working toward earning credits for college or paying their college loans off through national service we need so many other people in service projects we need our older people who never will go back to college but have a lifetime of experience and energy to give to the young people of this country we need young people who may not be old enough to drive a car or to qualify for this program but can have a dramatic impact on fellow students by helping them learn better study habits or just keeping them out of trouble i ve learned already that as the parent of a teenager that the peers can have a big impact on the shape and quality of a child s life even a child can serve in programs that now begin as early as kindergarten we have no upper age limit in america or lower age limit for being a good public servant to be successful this national program will need the broad based support of all the american people parents and children churches and synagogues colleges and universities and the potential providers and the beneficiaries of our services in this vision of national service everyone is a partner and that includes of course the business community in this country we need businesses to contribute to the effort to match federal money and local programs and to contribute at the national level helping to make sure that the programs we choose are good ones indeed what will set this legislation apart from other similar efforts in the past that rewarded service to our country is that it will totally eliminate the federal government bureaucracy and believe me no one will miss that we re going to set up a national service corporation that will run like a big venture capital outfit not like a bureaucracy and communities as i said will have the flexibility to make their own programs work i think that i ve seen enough today and i ve heard enough of your applause to know that the american people are hungry for a chance to serve their country and to reap the rewards of civic pride and education in the process in answering this call our people are following a proud history more than a century ago president abraham lincoln signed the homestead act and the frontier of this country was settled by countless families who took up the challenge in exchange for 100 acres to call their own in the 1930s president roosevelt enlisted millions of young people to restore the environment through the civilian conservation corps fdr gave others a chance to support themselves through the buildings made possible by the works project administration i was in the united states justice department just yesterday a building built in 1934 by people who were giving service to their country and it s still a beautiful monument to the legacy of that kind of service the parents of the baby boom had the gi bill which was one of the best investments our government ever made a generation ago the young people of my generation saw suffering in latin america asia and africa and many rushed to the challenge laid down by president kennedy when he created the peace corps which became our country s greatest ambassador building bridges of understanding to far off cultures and now three decades later a challenge has been presented to all of you a new challenge and an old one as old as america and as new as your future a year ago when the democratic leadership council met in new orleans i asked the following question i said i want you to think about what kind of citizens you re going to be administration that this was the day the american people were empowered to renew their nation and their communities to seize a better future for themselves and to help all of us to be what the out of helping our fellow citizens and ourselves to become what we ought to be this country will be all right thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton30 5 00 bill_clinton mr president mrs sampaio mr prime minister members of the government members of the diplomatic corps i would like to thank you mr president the government and the people of portugal for the welcome that i and my party have received i d like to thank you for the meeting we had today it has been a pleasure for me to spend time with another president who likes to read detective novels listen to good music and play golf we could have had a two day summit on those three topics alone my staff suggested it so that they could go to the beaches let me say that five centuries ago the vision and courage of portugal helped europe to find its way across the atlantic you were the first to set foot in south america to sail down west africa to cross the equator to round the cape of good hope to reach india by sea from the west to trade with china and japan it is little wonder then that portuguese is now spoken by more than 200 million people in countries throughout the world one of these nations of course is the united states two centuries ago portugal was the very first neutral state to recognize our independence and as you noted yourself mr president the united states has been strengthened by the contributions of portuguese americans from john philip sousa who wrote the music we use to celebrate the fourth of july to john dos passos whose voice helped to define america in the 20th century today we are proud to stand with you as partners allies and friends twenty six years ago portugal turned from dictatorship to democracy ten years ago eastern europe followed your lead today eastern europe is still learning from your example when finally we build a europe that is undivided democratic and at peace for the first time in history there will be a great debt owed by all freedom loving people to portugal today this nation that once brought the four corners of the world together is working with its eu allies and america to bring the world together to advance democracy and human rights portugal has taken a leading role in nato and the eu in kosovo nearly half the sorties that led us to victory flew out of lajes air base in the azores in east timor portugal s leadership rallied the international community in mozambique our two nations are working together to lead the relief effort from the balkans to east timor to africa our troops serve side by side to keep the peace and build a better future here in portugal prime minister guterres has charted new ways to solve old challenges and to make the global economy work for all your people i admire that as well two years ago a portuguese author was awarded the nobel prize for literature a short time later we in the united states had the honor of hosting jose saramago as he received an honorary degree from the university of massachusetts looking out at generations of portuguese who had traveled to america to enrich our culture and our country he said that they are a part of an unremitting human chain that has always been and will continue to be an example of living history that living history links not only past and present but the people of our two countries from lisbon and porto to new bedford fall river providence newark all the places portuguese americans have made their own today we look ahead to a new century we celebrate our friendship and embrace common challenges we hope that the values we share will spread across the earth and bear fruit in more places for more people than ever before we hope that we will always stand together as friends in the defense of those values and in their advance i ask now that all of you join me in a toast to the president of portugal and mrs sampaio to the people of this great nation and to our long friendship dem wjclinton30 5 96a bill_clinton every day our children are bombarded by influences that would turn them from a positive good path you were here this week to talk in real terms about what you can do to build better homes and better communities and better schools and better tomorrows for our children and i have worked hard to help them where government can help i am glad that african american unemployment is in single digits for the first time since the vietnam war that during the past four years more than 100 000 african american businesses have been created i am proud that home ownership is at a 15 year high with record increases in home ownership among african americans but all the homes in the world don t mean a thing if the children can t play outside in the yard or on the street in front of them that s why i ve supported zero tolerance for weapons in our schools and community based programs not only to punish criminals but to prevent crime in the first place to help our kids stay out of trouble to give them something to say yes to as well as something to say no to i think people ought to be able to say yes to jobs in the summertime yes to staying in schools after hours if they don t want to be on the street yes to adult supervised recreation yes to things that will enrich their lives and give them a good group to hang out with i think that is important and yes i am pleased with the progress i am glad that the crime rate is down i m glad the welfare rolls and the food stamp rolls are down i m glad the teen pregnancy rate is finally coming down but the truth is it s not good enough there are a lot of challenges still out there how many mothers i wonder in this country hold their breaths in fear when their kids leave home how many wonder whether their kids will be shot by a gang or pressured to buy drugs or robbed of their money or beat up because of their clothes this is no way to live it has not always been this way we have shown we can make progress it does not have to be this way we do not have to tolerate it but we all have to be willing to do something about it now there are some more things we can do in washington we ought to ban those cop killer bullets that pierce the bullet proof vests our law enforcement officers wear they re not needed to shoot anything in the woods we ought to do more to preserve the safe and drug free school programs so that every school will be able to do things like stay open later or open earlier or bring in the dare officers or others that are helping our children and supporting the work our parents are trying to do we ought to have welfare reform that moves people from welfare to work but there ought to be enough child care support in there so that the kids aren t hurt and supervision of children is not sacrificed today as the summer approaches i want to talk to you about another idea that new orleans has made the most of and that s community based curfews to keep young people off the street these are just like the old fashioned rules most of us had when we were kids when the lights come on be home bill how many of you were told that when the lights come on be home they re designed to help people be better parents they help keep our children out of harm s way they give parents a tool to impart discipline respect and rules at an awkward and difficult time in children s lives i m sure that a lot of the teenagers think this curfew is too strict it was a long time ago but i can still dimly remember what it was like to be that age but they must also know that it s a dangerous world out there and these rules are being set by people who love them and care about them and desperately want them to have good lives and there is one threat that seems to run through all these curfew programs across the country and that is once they are put in the most intense supporters of the curfews are young people who know that they are too often at risk of being victims of violent crime they want our protection and we ought to give it to them ladies and gentlemen of this great church my fellow americans can there be any greater national endeavor than saving our children saving all of our children don t we have to remember you know that a lot of people that in public life love to quote the scripture and all of us probably do it selectively but there are hundreds of admonitions in the bible hundreds to take care of the children especially the poor children even as you have done it under the least of these you have also done it under me if that was true for jesus surely it must be true of america so i say to you i honor your commitment i honor your actions we must honor these actions i have cited today but most of all we must believe that if we will take responsibility for these children and if we will work together it can be done god bless you all and god bless america dem wjclinton30 5 96b bill_clinton thank you very much i always enjoy coming to louisiana and coming to this capitol building i keep thinking i will somehow capture the secret of how you do it here i thank you for that warm welcome governor foster thank you for your introduction mrs foster mr speaker senator ewing to your statewide elected officials senator breaux and congressman jefferson congressman fields members of the supreme court members of the state house and senate and all the guests who are here i am very honored to be invited to speak to the louisiana legislature i thank the governor for coming up here with me it s nice to see republicans and democrats standing together on the same little piece of ground here i hope somebody got a picture of this we re going to show it in washington d c somebody asked me if this was a good idea i said i don t know if it s a good idea for him but anybody that comes to work in a camouflaged hunting outfit is my kind of guy i like it i do want you to know that i have not been in baton rouge all day i started the morning in new orleans and we all went to lunch there and i paid some good sales tax in louisiana had a wonderful meal ate too much food and what i ate was louisiana crawfish not chinese crawfish i m happy to be here in a state i ve spent a lot of time in my neighboring state a state that has shared so many of the challenges that we faced in the dozen years i was governor of arkansas and in the last 20 years i ve been in public life indeed you could argue that we ve made a conscious effort ever since the end of world war ii in our states and in other states throughout the south to catch up to the rest of america in providing opportunity in terms of jobs and education and working together to get beyond the divisions of race to go to a time when we could ask everybody to be responsible and everybody to work together more and put their divisions aside and it s very interesting that now i think you can make a serious case that the whole country has to be on the mission that those of us in southern states have been on for the last 50 years because we know we ve moved from the cold war to the global village we know we ve moved from an information age to one dominated by i mean from an industrial age to one in which industry agriculture and all forms of human endeavor are dominated by information and technology we know that the world is changing economically as much as it has in a hundred years and bill gates the founder of microsoft in his recent book says that in terms of how we communicate with one another and share information we re going through the biggest period of change in 500 years since gutenberg printed the first bible in europe and that means that if we ant to preserve the american dream for our children and our grandchildren that the whole country now has to work on the mission that arguably has been the mission of those who have been in the south for the last 50 years we ve got to have a system of education that is second to none in the world if we want our people to be able to compete and win in the global economy and we have to find ways to create jobs in a competitive way and we have to find ways for everyone to assume more responsibility for our common future and to do it together we can t afford to be divided by race or gender or income or party or anything else anymore if it undermines the fundamental american mission of preserving the american dream for all of our people in a new world and i see that so clearly as i travel around the world i see that americans are still looked up to by people around the world who think that we don t want to control their lives and we want to use our power to help everybody live in peace who think that we are struggling to find ways for all of our folks to live together instead of defining our lives by who we re against and who we re not in the south you know we see it in pretty stark racial terms but it s gotten a lot more complicated than that our largest county in america los angeles county now has over 150 different racial and ethnic groups represented in one county in the united states and the only way we re going to do well is if we all tack the same constitution up on the wall the same bill of rights on the wall and say that s what we re going to live by and if you will stand up and work hard and obey the law and share the same constitutional values and say we re all going to be responsible and do our best and work together this country is going to do fine we re going to do fine but we have to do that i do believe that the most important thing we can be doing today as a nation to create opportunity for our people is to give them the tools they need to succeed in a global economy the government cannot give anybody a guaranteed success story but you can give people the tools to make the most of their own lives and education is the most important of all of those tools i d like to talk just a few minutes about how education fits into building a structure of opportunity for the 21st century and what i believe the nation s role is to the national government what i believe we should be doing through state and local government instead and what we ought to leave to the private sector both to groups like business and labor and just to individual citizens on their own because i think we need in addition to a commitment to education about which i want to say a little more in a minute we need a system which will produce a growing economy safe streets a clean environment and a government in washington that talks a lot more about what we need to do and a lot less about how we need to do it that is leaner and more effective and focuses on those things which only we can do at the national level and then does everything we can do to make it possible for people to do what should be done properly at the state level or the local level or in the private sector now i think it s clear that we re moving in that direction if you look at where we are now compared to three and a half years ago the country was mired in a recession the slowest job growth since the great depression we had quadrupled the national debt in 12 years the deficit was projected to be about 300 billion a year now it is less than half of what it was when i took office and i know you all see us fighting all the time over the balanced budget but let me tell you something we ve now had four years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since harry truman was president we re going to balance the budget we have these big differences about how we should do it and we might still get an agreement this year we can still do that but whatever happens with or without an agreement that deficit is going to keep coming down and we re going to take the burden of debt off of you and off of our children and we re going to stop taking so much money out of the capital accounts of the country so interest rates will stay down and we can grow this economy it is terribly important the second thing we ve been committed to doing is expanding our exports and i know the chinese crawfish story is a sore story and i can tell you i ll do what i can to address it i wasn t just whistling dixie when i said that but if you look at the big picture our exports have gone up more than a third in the last three years they re at an all time high the jobs we have tied to exports on balance tend to pay more if you go down to the port of new orleans and just look at what s happened there just in the last couple of years it is obvious that our ability to trade with other countries is critical to our future we ve had more than 200 separate trade agreements 21 with japan alone we re selling everything from united states rice in japan to telecommunications equipment and cars and in the 21 areas where we ve made deals with them our exports are up 85 percent in three years so america can compete with anybody anywhere in the world if we get not only freer trade but fair trade that has to be our goal that ought to be our goal with china that s our goal with japan that s our goal with our neighbors in latin america that s our goal with everybody we ask for no special treatment but we do want fair rules that everybody follows and we want to keep expanding america s ability to sell its products and services around the world the third thing i believe we have to do is to continue to invest in the technologies of the future you read a lot about the partisan squabbling in washington but i d like to give the congress credit for doing something almost unanimously in a completely bipartisan way in passing the telecommunications bill that we worked on for three years just a couple of months ago that bill will literally create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the united states good jobs over the next few years by making sure that we stay ahead of the curve in the technologies of the future and we have to continue to do that in washington one of our particular responsibilities i believe is in the whole area of biotechnology and how that relates to the whole communications and information revolution we have to continue to invest in medical research for example we know that the 21st century in large measure will be the age of biology we have people seriously telling us that we can raise the average life expectancy of people within a matter of a few decades to 100 years or more if we do it in the proper way and we know that a lot of private enterprise cannot afford to do that unless we lead the way so we have to keep doing that looking to the future expanding frontiers just as we went into space we can t stop before we have explored the full frontiers of our ability to heal people and restore life and the capacity of people to do well and live out the fullest measure of their days so we have to keep doing these things and if we do they ll have good results we ve got 8 5 million more jobs than we had three and a half years ago and we need more but i say to you this proves that we can move forward and do it together and that s a responsibility in washington to keep interest rates low to keep the deficit coming down to balance the budget and then to target the money we do have in the best possible way the other thing we ve got to do as i said is to kind of reform the way the government works one of the things that all of the governors wanted us to do and the state legislators was to pass the unfunded mandates law which i signed a year or so ago which says that we can t pass laws anymore in washington and tell you what to do and by the way we want you to pay for it now i hope that you will feel that in the i hope you re feeling it now i hope you ll feel it in the years ahead i think it s a very important bill i do not believe having served 12 years as a governor longer than i can legally serve as president i will never forget what it was like to put my budget together every year and have to start with the bill i was getting from washington first so we say if washington wants to ask the states to do something we need to help you pay for it we need to pay for our own mandates and not ask you to pick up the tab i think that s important perhaps more important we re also reducing the size and the way the government operates the government in washington is 237 000 to be exact 237 000 people smaller today than it was the day i took the oath of office it s now the smallest federal government in 30 years as a percentage of the national work force the federal government is the smallest it s been since 1933 before the new deal the era of big government has been ended we are reducing the size of government we are eliminating 16 000 of the 80 000 pages of federal regulations outright getting rid of them we are changing a lot of the other regulations in ways that make it easier for people in the private sector to live with we re cutting by 25 percent the total amount of hours businesses are going to have to spend complying with epa paperwork requirements without lowering any environmental standards whatever we have given now about 80 different businesses and state governments permission to throw out the epa rule book if they can prove they re meeting the same clean air and clean water standards that the rules require these are the kinds of things that we need to look at how can we preserve our environment and grow our economy and be more efficient and if there are ways to do it washington ought to be willing to let people do it let me just give you the agency that i m proudest of we know that most new jobs are going to be created by small and middle sized businesses we have cut the budget of the small business administration by 25 percent and doubled the loan volume we have dramatically increased loans to women and minorities with no requirements in advance and without making a single loan to a single unqualified person and without undermining loans available for other people who would get them in the ordinary course of business just by aggressively reaching out and saying to everybody we have to create more small businesses that s the way we ought to grow this country put the programs where the needs are let people meet the needs and do it in a way that is most efficient i m very proud of what the sba is doing and i think 10 years from now we re going to have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs because people like the people who have gotten these loans had a chance to get their start that s how federal express got started intel and a lot of other places let me give you a few more examples if you look at the crime bill we re committed to a national goal of putting 100 000 police on the street but we don t tell the police the law enforcement officers how to do it new orleans has had a big drop in their crime rate jefferson parish had a big drop in their crime rate a huge drop i was with sheriff lee today he said that he had gotten i think 28 new officers the first go around and 21 the second i don t have any idea who they are how they were trained or how they were deployed that s not the business of the federal government we just knew that we tripled violent crime in 30 years and only increased by 10 percent the number of law enforcement officials so police officers were having to drive around in cars more when what we really needed to do was walk on the streets more to be in the neighborhoods more to work with people to stop crime from happening in the first place to deal with the community crime watch groups and the children and try to give them good positive role models so we said here s our goal now you figure out how to meet it and see if it will work and we ve had three years in a row now of declining crime rates all across america because we had the right kind of partnership a national goal of 100 000 more police officers let the people at the local level decide how to do it it is working that is the sort of thing we need more doing and i can t help but say if we can t provide safe streets in this country no one will ever trust government to do anything else people have to feel secure in their homes and on their streets and in their schools so these are the sort of things that i think we need to be doing i want to make just one remark about the whole issue of welfare reform and how we re going to change the medicare and the medicaid programs our administration has also given more freedom from federal rules for states to experiment in the health care areas than previous ones have a lot of states have wanted to go for example to managed care programs for all their low income folks on medicaid and we approved a number of those experiments i have not been for a block grant program for medicaid because i believe it is in the national interest to provide health care to seniors who have to go into nursing homes to families with children with disabilities who might be cut out in hard economic times if we didn t have a national guarantee for them along with national money to pregnant women and to poor children and if something happens and we can t do that i think it would be a problem as a person who was governor of a state with economic challenges not unlike yours i can tell you that it would give me a headache if i had had to go through the awful economic years of the 1980s with medicaid as a block grant i just don t think it s a good idea but i do think it is a good idea for us not to micromanage the program to death and whatever comes out of this you will see there is an enormous willingness to let the states have much more control over how the program is run but to maintain from my point of view a federal guarantee that the populations should be covered and a guarantee that when times are getting tough you will get the money from washington you need because if we block grant it and a big recession comes along and there s not enough money in the so called reserve fund then it will amount to an unfunded mandate or you will be in a position of having to walk away from some of your folks that need it worse or having a mandated tax increase and i just don t think it s right and i don t think we ought to do it in the area of welfare reform i do think we can and i hope we will get a federal bill through that will give states much more flexibility in the area of how to move people from welfare to work we all know what we believe in we think there ought to be strict time limits stiffer child support enforcement requirements to work and help to give parents the child care and health care they need so they can leave welfare behind without worrying that they re leaving their kids in a tight spot you want people on welfare to do what you want the rest of society to do to succeed as parents and as workers and if you talk to any group of working people today you find that that s what they re often worried about if they re working hard and doing well but they re working longer hours at work are they spending enough time with their kids are their kids going to be okay and that s what we want in america i think is for everybody to be able to succeed at home and at work because if we have to choose one over the other we re in a terrible fix if we don t succeed at work we won t be competing and winning and keeping the american dream alive but if we blow it at home it s all for nothing anyway i often say you know if we re lucky enough to know when we lay our head on the pillow for the last time before we leave this earth most of us won t say gee i wish i had spent more time at the office but we might say i wish i had spent more time with my children i wish there had been just a little more time to try to do this that or the other thing right i could have been a better father i could have been a better mother i could have done this better so when you think about this welfare reform issue i ask you only to think about this what we want for every american family is success at work and success at home and our policies ought to be designed to promote responsibility work and good parenting if we do that we re going to do the right things and we ll get a better country out of it i want to compliment senator breaux for the plan that he and the republican senator from rhode island john chafee have introduced if congress would send me a bill like that that is tough on work and fair to our children then i d be happy to sign it and if we get a welfare reform bill it will probably be because john breaux has stayed after it and has been determined to get the republicans and democrats together when it seems so often that there s a determination to fight and i thank him for that and you should be grateful for that as well meanwhile we ll just keep on telling states that they can have permission to get around cumbersome federal rules to fashion their own welfare reform since i ve been president we ve given 38 states a total of 62 separate waivers from the federal rules louisiana got permission to impose a two year time limit and to require minor welfare mothers to stay in school and to have their children immunized two good requirements that i hope every state in the country will follow because that means success at home and success at work that s good for america these 62 waivers let me just give you an idea of what that means that compares with a total of 24 in the previous two administrations and there s more on the way we have 75 percent of the families in america today are living under welfare reform experiments and that s one reason along with the improving economy that there are 1 3 million fewer people on welfare today than there were in 1993 and one million people fewer on food stamps today the poverty rolls are down and that is because of welfare reform and the improving economy so i urge you to continue to work on welfare reform and to continue to do it in a bipartisan fashion now let me again say that we don t always do things in a partisan fashion in washington we passed the bipartisan budget for this year that brings down the deficit continues to invest in education in the environment in medicare and medicaid we passed a tough antiterrorism bill we passed that unfunded mandates bill we passed the line item veto thank goodness after talking about it for 15 years so we are doing some things up there in a bipartisan fashion and i will continue to try that and i hope welfare reform is one of them but meanwhile you keep after it because it is the symbol in america of what is wrong with government but also what could be right about government and i think you can make a real difference at the state level we ll do all we can to help you let me just say a couple of words about education the magic of education obviously is what occurs in the classroom between the teacher and the child supported by the family you need for it to work a good principal you need for it to work a good school district you need for it to work a strong state system that has not only adequate funding but high standards high expectations and then i believe that the national government has a responsibility to help states deal with the populations that are especially troublesome which we do through programs like the chapter one program to help you if you have a disproportionate number of poor children for example through the head start program to get more of our kids in preschool programs through the college loan programs the college scholarship programs which we ve expanded to make college more readily available and through the department of education s efforts to promote reform i appointed a governor to head the department of education dick riley the former governor of south carolina and he has designed an approach that i think is the proper one where we try to encourage and facilitate school reforms but we don t mandate them the goals 2000 program for example only requires that states have a plan to meet high national standards and that they decide how they re going to do it and how they re going to implement it and in return for that they get some help and freedom from a lot of hassle that used to be in federal rules and regulations the school to work program about which i want to say just a little more in a moment is in some ways the most important thing you can be focused on in the short run of your economy because it recognizes that we are one of the few advanced countries in the world that has no system in every state in america to move people who don t go to colleges into the work force with enough skills to get jobs where the incomes will grow instead of going down and every state has got to figure out how to do that the school to work program is just a device in which you can get people together who represent the technical schools the community colleges the private sector people who are interested in this to find a way to deal with it but let me say as i told the speaker of the house and the president of the senate earlier this afternoon if you just look at the 1990 census you will see this issue screaming at you from the 1990 census because it shows you that in the 10 years between 1980 and 1990 the people with a high school degree or less who were younger workers got jobs where their incomes went down the people with four years of college or more got jobs where their incomes went up but you didn t have to have a four year degree what you had to have was the equivalent of two years further training after high school so people who went to a vo tech school a community college into the united states military or got training on the job that amounted to adding to the skill levels by two years got jobs that were more solid more predictable where they had a better path to the future and rising incomes so our school to work program doesn t tell you to do anything it just provides a framework in which you can bring all the people in louisiana to the table and a little bit of money so that you can increase the number of young people who don t just get out of high school and drop through the cracks one of the things we have got to do is to show these young people who are dropping out of the system who aren t voting who feel cynical about it that they can have a positive future if they won t give up on themselves after high school and they ll put themselves in a position where they can get skills and they can continue to learn for a lifetime the last thing i d like to say about that is that i believe that we at the national level should do more to increase access to education after high school not to shrink it that s why i think the most important tax cut we could give the american people is a tax deduction for the cost of all education after high school whether it s by the parent or the child whether it s in a two year program or a one year program or a four year program because we need to set up a system where people can keep learning for a lifetime that is a way that we don t make any decisions the people make all of the decisions the second thing i propose is we take all of these federal training programs 70 or 80 of them and collapse them all and put them in a big pot of money and when somebody loses their job just send them a voucher and let them do what they want to with it go to the local technical college go to the local community college get in whatever program is certified and approved and then send some money to the states for the people that aren t in driving distance of a high class program where you can make a decision on how to deal with those people if they re isolated in rural areas or whatever but these are the kinds of things it seems to me that we can do together meanwhile i just want to commend you for what you re trying to do on teacher salaries i want to commend you for what you re trying to do on the whole issue of higher education i know some people say i was proud to hear the governor say what he said about the regional average some people say you know this education is not a money problem and to some extent it s not but one of clinton s laws of politics is i ll bet you anything when somebody tells you it s not a money problem they re talking about somebody else s problem not theirs money is not a sufficient condition to improve education but it is necessary it is nowhere near enough but it s important and i applaud you for what you re trying to do i also will say again i think this whole issue of high expectations is important and if i might just return for one moment to my governor days i spent i don t know how many hours in hundreds of schools as a governor most of them in my own state but some of them in states all over the country i got to where i could get the feel of a school within 10 minutes after walking in i ve talked and listened to principals and teachers and students and parents and we did something yesterday that i just wanted to mention because louisiana ought to be really proud we honored the blue ribbon schools of 1996 yesterday and there were eight louisiana schools on that list which is higher than your population they were from gretna metairie shreveport abbeville new orleans st joseph s academy right here in baton rouge what i was going to say about these schools is they all have some things in common they all have high standards and they all have high expectations they have systems of accountability and they reward people and they deserve credit for that but the thing that i have been most frustrated about when i was governor and still as president is that we don t seem to have a system in education that you see in other forms of human endeavor where people are dying to learn from the folks that are doing it in a way that works and anything you can do whether it s setting up charter schools or permitting parents to have more judgment about their schools we ve passed a broad public school choice plan in arkansas we re trying to help 3 000 of these charter schools to be set up within public school districts but groups of teachers can establish it on their own anything that you can do that will help these schools at work get copied by others i think that s one of the most important things that any state government could do in america because every problem in public education has been solved by somebody somewhere we could all sit here and tell each other stories until 3 00 a m tomorrow morning about it and some of these stories will bring tears to your eyes i was in a junior high school in i ll never forget as long as i live in chicago in the highest crime rate area in the city before they started bringing the crime rate down the principal of the junior high school was from my home state from the mississippi delta they had a school dress code they had a mandatory attendance policy they had an absolute zero tolerance for weapons they had 150 mothers and 75 fathers volunteering in that school every week they had attendance rates graduation rates and test scores above the state average and they had no violence in the toughest neighborhood in the whole city we could all tell stories about that why can t if that can be done in one place or two places or 100 places or in these eight schools in louisiana or in all the blue ribbon schools why can t we do that everywhere that cannot be done by the federal government but if you wanted to do something that would revolutionize louisiana forever if you can figure out how to take what those eight schools we awarded yesterday those blue ribbons are doing and get it done everywhere you will do something that no state has figured out how to do that i think would make a difference that is profound in the future of the children of this state finally let me say i think that there is one other thing that we ought to help do and that is to add to the basics for the 21st century computer literacy and access to the information superhighway i have asked the congress to give me a small amount of money 2 billion to help us work with the private sector in school districts all across america to make sure that by the year 2000 every classroom and every library in every school in america is connected to the information superhighway and i think that is very very important if you just think about what that would mean and if we do it in a way that guarantees the good software and properly trained teachers the state of west virginia has been hooking up every a grade a yea dem wjclinton30 6 98 bill_clinton thank you very much mr mayor madame xu to museum director ma ladies and gentlemen it is a great honor for my wife and members of our family six members of the united states congress and many members of our cabinet and other american citizens to be here in shanghai tonight this museum is a fitting symbol of what i have seen in china these last few days the magnificence of your ancient past and your brilliant future i have seen a nation rising in its influence in the world with china s leadership for stability in the asian economic crisis and china s leadership for peace on the korean peninsula and in working with us to help to deal with the difficulties caused by the nuclear tests by india and pakistan i have seen the chinese people rising millions of them out of poverty millions more finding interesting work of their own choice pursuing more educational opportunities having more say in their local affairs i saw a great example of that when the mayor and i did a talk radio show this morning here in shanghai and i was especially impressed when one of the callers called in and said don t want to talk to the president i want to talk to the mayor about traffic problems in shanghai shanghai is truly the place where east meets west over the last 150 to 200 years the west has not always been the best of partners in shanghai but now we have a good partnership i am especially pleased that a united states firm rtkl will design the new scienceland museum here i hope that is a symbol of the kinds of positive good things we will do together in the future i also want to say a special word of appreciation to your mayor mr mayor i heard this may not be a true story but don t tell me if it s not i heard that years ago when your predecessor zhu rongji invited you to head shanghai s central planning commission you told him you hated the whole idea of central planning and zhu replied then you re exactly the man i want for the job now we see you unleashing this city s great potential cutting red tape fighting corruption protecting the environment spurring an artistic revival you are making shanghai a place the world looks to for commerce culture and people of different walks of life thriving together mr mayor in 1996 when i asked the american people to give me another term as president of the united states the theme of my campaign was building a bridge to the 21st century in shanghai you are building that bridge to the 21st century and we want to build it with you thank you very much thank you dem wjclinton30 6 99a bill_clinton thank you very much first let me thank the leaders of the democratic national committee who are here joe andrew and beth dozoretz and say to our former chairman and my 1992 campaign manager david wilhelm and deegee i m glad to see you and all my other friends and many of you who were formerly associated with our administration i want to thank lou and susan and lou weisbach and fred eichner for their work on this dinner tonight this has been kind of an emotional day for me i bruce and i and hillary we did drag in here one night about seven years ago and you know i thought i was totally out of gas when i got here and i had virtually forgotten why i was even thinking of running for president i just wanted to go to bed and then i came in here and i got all pumped up i saw all this art that i didn t know anything about and it certainly was interesting and i sort of began to get educated and then i went into the library and went nuts over the books and i certainly approved of their reading taste and then we got to talking about health care and first one thing and then another and before you know it we were sort of off and going and forming a friendship that has stood the test of seven years time and i m very grateful that you had us back tonight and i thank you i want to thank all of the rest of you for being here and i want to thank chicago for being so wonderful to hillary and to me and to al and tipper gore for giving us for me i basically won the democratic nomination on st patrick s day in 1992 and i must say i learned a lot from my friend al gore who did well on super tuesday and then had difficulty going after that in 1998 so i later told him when i asked him to join the ticket i said now don t ever forget what i learned from your campaign i spent enormous amounts of time in illinois and michigan of course it helped that roughly 30 percent of the primary voters in both states were born in arkansas and couldn t make a living there and had to come up here that was of some modest benefit to me at the time but i m very grateful for that and grateful for the way that this city and this state have stayed with us through thick and thin in the life of this administration i appreciate something joe andrews said apart from the fact that the party s out of debt that s good news i m here tonight in a way because i can t run for reelection but i believe in what i ve spent my life doing what hillary and i have spent our lives doing what al gore and i have spent seven years working to do and i believe in what still needs to be done i believe that politics is a good thing for america and not a bad thing it is what makes democracy work and it becomes public service when it is dominated by good values good ideas and the ability to turn those ideas into action i enjoy a good contest if it is a contest of ideas and i don t mind receiving the verdict of the electorate as long as i m absolutely sure that everyone who opposes us actually knows precisely what they re doing and i think that is something that we all ought to have in mind as we approach this election season i say i think i see senator carol moseley braun smiling and i thank her for her loyal support and leadership for her time in the senate the first six years of my administration i m glad to see john schmidt here tonight i thank him for his service in the administration and for still caring enough to be here after having run for office which is by any standard an exhausting enterprise and i thank neil hartigan and the whole hartigan family for being here and always being there for me and billy singer i see all these people who do not presently hold elective office but have participated in this process i m here for the same reason you are and if the democrats want me 10 years from now i ll be there then because i knew when i got into this that it was a temporary job i never had any illusions that i could be president for life although i confess that i love the job even on the worst days but what i want you to focus on just for a minute with me tonight is that i am grateful that time and circumstance and the wonderful help of my friends and a lot of gifts from the good lord and my family gave me the opportunity to serve as president at this time of profound change in our country and if i have contributed in some way to what has happened that is good for america i am grateful for that as well but i have to tell you something i think that good things happen when good people establish good teams and they have a good vision they have a good strategy they have good ideas and they re good at turning their ideas into reality and i used to tell our people all the time in the darkest days in the early days when we were in washington don t worry about what they re saying about you today worry about what it will look like three or four years from now we need the test of what we re doing is whether it improves the lives of the american people whether it makes us a more secure more humane country with a better future for all of our people and that s why i hope you re here because we had certain ideas that our party held to that basically our friends in the other party didn t agree with and one of the reasons i believe i will always believe that there were so much intense effort made in washington to try to sort of go after not just me but many of us personally and try to divert the attention of the american people was they were afraid they couldn t compete with our ideas and they knew they were working and the better the country did sometimes their more partisan members the better we did the madder they got and the better the american people did the madder they got so let s step back from all that now because i won t be a candidate in 2000 what were the ideas that were that drove us and what were the consequences the first thing we decided is that the democratic party had to become the party of fiscal responsibility again we could no longer participate in a kind of unspoken deal with the republicans where we would both allow these intolerable deficits to go on because we wanted to spend money and they didn t want to raise any money and they d let us spend money and we d let them avoid raising it and the deficit would get bigger and bigger and bigger and we were driving the country into the ditch we quadrupled the debt in 12 years and the democrats in congress by the way to their everlasting credit tried to stop it they actually spent less money than the republicans asked them to in the white house and we said we re going to bring the deficit down we re going to cut spending but we re actually going to increase our investment in education and in research environmental protection and things that are fundamental to our future and most people didn t think we could do it well six years later we ve gone from a 290 billion deficit to in 1999 a 99 billion surplus 142 billion next year and we have cut the government to its smallest size since kennedy was president but we have almost doubled investment in education and training for our children it was an idea and it worked and we ve got the strongest economy in a generation maybe ever because the idea was right and we had a lot of members of congress actually lay down their seats in the 94 elections because we didn t have a vote to spare when our party took the lead on that kind of economic policy then we had an idea about crime that the democrats were for law and order we wanted to save streets we wanted to save schools and we knew from what was already beginning to work in a lot of our cities that what we needed was more police on the street and more guns off the street and out of the hands of kids and criminals and we knew we needed to give our children something to say yes to not just something to say no to and so we fought for the brady bill and we fought for the assault weapons ban and we fought for 100 000 police on the street and the leaders of the other party said that it would have no effect on the crime rate that nothing good would happen that we would never see these police on the street that no guns would be kept out of the hands of criminals because criminals didn t buy guns in gun stores anyway i heard all that and one of the reasons that our friends in the other party are in the majority today in the house is that they beat somewhere between 12 and 15 of our house members the nra did in 1994 scaring the living daylights out of rural people saying we were going to take their guns away well six years later we ve got the lowest crime rate in 25 years we finished putting 100 000 police out there under budget and ahead of schedule 400 000 gun sales have been cancelled to criminals felons fugitives and stalkers and this is a safer better stronger country we were right about that and it s an important issue going forward just like the management of the economy is i ll give you just two other examples i could give you 10 where we had different ideas we believed we could grow the economy and not just maintain but improve the environment and a lot of people don t believe that to this day but compared to six years ago the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the drinking water is safer the food supply is purer we have immunized 90 percent of our kids against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of the country and set aside more land in perpetuity than any administration except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt and the economy is stronger we did not hurt the economy we helped the american economy by doing what was right by the environment and we had to fight the other party to do that there was an honest disagreement that is relevant for us going forward in the area of education we fought for tax cuts that would in effect open the doors of college to all americans 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college other tax credits for other years we fought for better student loans and more work study positions we fought to hook up all the classrooms in this country to the internet and now we re fighting to have a national ratification of what you re doing here in chicago with no social promotion by not blaming the children for the failures of the system and instead giving them all access to summer school and after school programs i want to this year say we are only going to give federal aid to education to states and districts that end social promotion but don t dub the children failure and give them the after school or summer school programs and the support they need to succeed i ll just give you one last idea we had an idea that we could best solve our social problems in this country generally not by asking the government to do it and not by leaving the government out of it but by forming new partnerships with the private sector and with individual citizens so we started americorps the national service program we said we ll give young people some money to go to college if they ll give a year or two of their lives to serving in their communities i believe the young people the so called generation x ers were not selfish people as they were caricatured i thought they were passionately committed to the future of this country and in four and a half years we have had 100 000 plus volunteers for americorps it took the peace corps 20 years to get that many and the man who started it eli segal is here with us tonight and i thank him for that then i gave eli another job i said we re going to reform welfare and we re going to say if you re able bodied you ve got to go to work but we don t want to hurt children so we re going to say if you go to work we will give you child care we will give you medical care we will give your kids nutrition but you ve got to go to work and then i realized that not all these people would be able to go to work because they had no real experience no one had ever said here s how you interview for a job here s how you show up here s how you relate to people at work we had some serious problems there so i asked eli if he would help me go out and challenge the business community of this country to actually take personal responsibility for hiring people off welfare we started with five companies then we had 100 then we had 1 000 in three years he has gone from five companies to 12 000 businesses hiring half a million people off welfare and here s a little shameless plug we re coming to celebrate this in chicago on august 3rd and we need more help so what s the point of all this the point of all this is this country is doing well but we all know there are still challenges out there it seems to me that the democratic party is entitled to the benefit of the doubt of the american people when we go to them in the congress races when we go to them in the presidential race we need to make it clear that there is a connection between the values and the ideas and the actions we have taken and the consequences we see in every community in this country and that is why we need your contributions and why we need your voice this is not an accident we cannot see this coming election as just sort of a independent of the reality of the last six years but our party also has a solemn responsibility between now and then in washington to keep trying to get things done for the american people we shouldn t be caught playing politics waiting for the next election our belief is that we get paid by the american people every week not just in the seasons where there is no politics every week they pay us to show up and produce that s why you heard me say yesterday we ve got the new surplus all right here s my plan for medicare we ll make it stable until 2027 we ll provide preventive services for free screenings for everything from osteoporosis to cancer screenings and all kinds of other preventive services we will employ modern means of competition but we will have adequate funding to keep the quality up and we will provide a prescription drug benefit for the first time in history to our seniors i think that s a big idea i also think that it is a big idea to take this surplus and say to our friends in the republican party can you have a tax cut of course you can but first things first first let s save medicare and save social security and pay the debt of the country off by 2015 so that our children and our children s children will have a stronger economy and a stronger society then there will be money left over we can argue about what to do with it and you ll have some that you can give in a tax cut but let us save social security and medicare and deal with the baby boom generation and pay the debt of the country off now these are ideas these things have consequences so when people ask you why did you come tonight i hope you say well you know chicago took bill clinton to raise a long time ago or he made a pretty good talk i hope you say that but i hope you ll be able to tell people look i am a democrat for the 21st century here are my ideas here is why i write checks to do this this is what i believe in and oh by the way it works it makes a difference my children will have a better future and i could go through issue after issue after issue but if you just look at you just look at the issue of social security medicare and paying off the debt why should a liberal democrat be for putting america out of debt here s why because we live in a global economy and if we have no public debt then the government will not be competing not only with you but with every poor blue collar worker of all races in this country for money for a home mortgage for a car payment for a credit card payment for a college loan for a business loan and if we don t have any public debt interest rates will be lower in america which means there will be more investment more jobs higher wages and less debt for ordinary people it means furthermore that the next time we have a global financial crisis like we had in asia two years ago the united states will be less vulnerable and our friends in the developing countries will be able to get more money at a lower cost because we won t be taking any away from them and that s good because as they get richer they can buy more of our stuff so i m making a good republican argument for my position here this is a big deal you need to go tell this is a huge idea do you know when the last time the country was out of debt 1835 this is a big idea and we can do it in a way that saves social security and medicare but liberals as well as conservatives should be for it for the reasons i said big idea matters it matters it matters whether we close this gun show loophole the same crowd that said nobody no crooks bought guns at gun stores and now they know they were wrong because we ve got 400 000 sales were canceled in five years now they say that we shouldn t do background checks where they admit the crooks do buy their guns not just gun shows but also urban flea markets and we re for it and the leaders of the other party are against it this is an important issue this is a big idea kids lives are at stake not just in scenes of carnage like what happened at littleton but every day of the world 13 kids die from gun violence nameless faceless kids you don t know because they die one and two at a time a lot of them are poor kids in inner cities that don t have any votes any influence nobody to speak up for them if we don t do it it matters this is a big idea this is not some trivial thing that oh these parties are having a little dispute this matters and i believe we re right and i think all the evidence is that they re wrong and i could go through the environment and health care and the patients bill of rights and every other issue and make the same case you go home tonight and you just think about the three things i talked about think about the economy think about social security and medicare think about education policy what i said what a difference it s made to chicago that you ve finally got your schools getting juiced up again because somebody believes that all kids can learn and somebody believes that kids should be held to high standards and there are consequences and you don t just get patted on the back whether you know what you re supposed to know or not but we don t point the finger at kids and call them a failure when the system is failing them you just think about this stuff it matters what you do in life politics is no different than your family life no different than your business life no different than your school life this matters and on the great ideas of the age we have been right in preparing america for the 21st century it s not bill clinton being president it is we have a party that is best for all the american people that has become a party of permanent change of restless constructive positive change and this is a better country because of that because people like you are thinking about tomorrow you know nearly everybody here would be better off in the next six months in the next year and a half going to a republican fundraiser i mean they ll give you a bigger tax cut than we will they will you d be better off in the next year and a half going to a republican fundraiser it wouldn t be the house wouldn t be as interesting as this you know the people that were good enough to serve us dinner tonight they re the ones that we re going to help immediately we re trying to make sure their parents can afford to have prescription drugs so they don t have to bankrupt their kids and their ability to raise their grandkids we think we ought to raise the minimum wage we think their kids ought to be able to go to college but most of you who paid to get here tonight would be better off in the short run if you were over with the republicans but you aren t because you know that in the long run and in the not so very long run people who think about what s best for all americans and how we reach across the lines that divide us and how we think about our children s future that is what is best for us if i told you suppose you d all been here with lou and susan back in 1991 and i d said now here folks i want you to vote for me for president just keep in mind 1991 we re in this big old creaking recession and everybody is feeling bad and there s about to be a riot out in los angeles in a few months and i said now i want you to vote for me and in seven years you ll have nearly 19 million jobs and the longest peacetime expansion in history and a 100 billion surplus and trillions expected in the surplus over the next 15 years and we ll be able to solve the problems the baby boomers present to social security and medicare and along the way we ll have a 25 year low in crime and we ll cut the welfare rolls in half and we will be a leading force for peace from bosnia to kosovo to the middle east to northern ireland and we will have extra money to make sure we re working hard to be prepared for the security problems of the future but we will double our investment in education clean up the environment and we ll be moving this country forward if i d told you all that you d have said there s another lying politician if i ever heard one wouldn t you you would have said that kid needs to go home to arkansas he s you know he s not living in the real world we did better than i thought we could why because we didn t do it alone all we did was to unleash the incredible potential of the american people and give everybody a chance so i say to you i thank you for being here i thank you for what you ve done for me for hillary for al and tipper i thank you for what you will do but don t kid yourself part of the reason that we ve done as well as we have is that people like you with good values and good common sense with an ability to see the future had the right ideas and you hired us and we turned them into action and when you go home tonight and you go about your business tomorrow and people ask you why you came and why you re a democrat you tell them because we ve got good ideas and they ve changed america for the better and here s what we want to do tomorrow and next year and in the new century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton30 6 99b bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen and good morning i want to say that it s wonderful for me to be back in chicago most of you know how much i love it here and i am delighted to be here i bring you greetings from the first lady who i left on my way here and who was jealous that i was coming and she wasn t especially since i m also going to see the cubs play this afternoon and i enjoy that and from the vice president and all the members of our administration who have worked so hard on this health care issue i want to thank anne willis for her remarks and her leadership for the aging community here in chicago and i know that with me on the stage and perhaps out in the audience as well are members of the mayor s advisory council on aging the cook county board of commissioners the cook county council the chicago city council i thank them all for being here i d like to thank linda esposito for speaking on behalf of pharmacists who have to live with the consequences of the absence of prescription drug coverage for our seniors every day and who do their best to serve them well under very adverse circumstances and i thought she did a very fine job i thank her for being here and i want to thank hanna bratman for having the courage to get up here and tell her story and introduce me you know i do this all the time it s second nature for me but most people it s pretty scary to get up in front of all of you and all those cameras and talk about your life and talk about your circumstances and i thought she did a fine job and i thank her for doing that i d also like to thank these ladies on my left anne thomas and her daughters lee hamilton and laura peterson because they represent what i think of as the ultimate test of medicare which is whether it s fair and helpful and supportive of families and our intergenerational responsibilities parents to their parents to their children and i ll say more about that but thank you for joining us today as well ladies and gentlemen as is so often the case when i get up to speak the people who spoke before me have said everything that needs to be said one guy got up you know the great story about the last speaker at a long dinner eight people spoke and he got to speak at 10 00 p m and he said well everything that needs to be said has been said but not everyone has said it so relax i m going to talk a little bit let me say to all of you that we have an unprecedented opportunity and an unprecedented responsibility to strengthen medicare and to improve it to modernize it so that no one has to make the choice that you have heard talked about between affording health care and affording other necessities of life between remaining independent or relying on your children and undermining their ability to raise your grandchildren we have this opportunity because our economy is the strongest in a generation perhaps ever because our country is clearly moving in the right direction a leading force for freedom and peace and human rights around the world as our wonderful men and women in uniform demonstrated in kosovo recently our social fabric here is mending the crime rate is down the welfare rolls have been cut in half teen pregnancy is down drug abuse among our young people is down and a record 90 percent of our young people are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of our country our cities which were once thought of as being economically depressed are thriving again chicago is exhibit a look at this beautiful building and this beautiful vista we have here when i became president we had a 290 billion budget deficit the debt of our nation had quadrupled in only 12 years today we are going to be in 1999 99 billion in the black we actually projected yesterday that for the next 15 years the surplus will be 1 trillion more than we thought it was just six months ago now this is a great tribute to the ingenuity and the hard work of the american people and to the disciplined decisions that we have made starting in 1993 to cut that deficit until we balanced the budget and got into surplus if we keep going on the plan i have proposed to save social security and medicare and pay down the debt this country actually can be out of debt out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835 now let me just say since all of you know it s the strength of the economy that has put people to work and raised their incomes and brought in the revenues that enabled us to save medicare the reason it s a good thing for all americans for us to be out of debt is that if we re out of debt it means that the government won t be competing with you and the businesspeople to borrow money it means interest rates will be lower for business loans for car loans for home loans for credit cards for college loans it means therefore there will be more investment more jobs higher incomes it means we will be less dependent on the world for money to come into this country so if there is another financial problem as there was in asia a couple of years ago it will have less impact on us it means people all over the world that we look to to buy products that are produced in illinois and throughout the united states will be able to borrow money more cheaply and have more money to buy our products to help our prosperity as we help theirs if we get this country out of debt so i want to emphasize to you everything i am proposing to do with medicare and with social security can be done in a way that gets the country out of debt for the first time since 1835 and in a global economy it is very very important to our children and our grandchildren that we give them the opportunities they deserve now how are we going to do that we have to set aside the bulk a little more than three quarters of the surplus for saving social security and medicare we need to do that quite apart from this prescription drug benefit let s talk about that why do we need to do that because we have a high class problem in america we re all living longer life expectancy is already over 76 in america for young people growing up their life expectancy will probably be over 80 anybody who lives to be 65 in america today has a life expectancy of 85 people over 80 are the fastest growing group of americans now when you put that life expectancy development up next to the fact that the baby boom generation the biggest generation in american history until the present one in our schools today is getting ready to retire some of them anyway i m the oldest of the baby boomers and i hope i don t have to retire but anyway i m going to retire from this job but generally i think i should keep working but when you look at the fact that with the baby boomers retiring the oldest of the baby boomers that s me we turn 65 in 2011 not that far away there are going to be a lot more people retired relative to the number of people working which means there will be a lot more people drawing social security and a lot more people drawing medicare relative to the number of people working now we can make some changes in the program but i would argue that now that we have this surplus and we project this surplus to last into the future and if we know it s good for us anyway for all americans of all ages to pay the debt down we should save this much money now to stabilize social security and medicare and pay the debt off now i know there are a thousand good uses for this surplus if i gave each of you a piece of paper and i said name 10 things that you would like to see your country do we might have 100 different things on that list and they d all be good but i say we should take care of first things first and we don t have any more important obligation not only to seniors but to their children and their grandchildren than to preserve the integrity of social security and medicare and preserve the long term economic health of this country so i hope that all of you will support that we can talk more about social security later but if my proposal is accepted we ll have social security solid for way more than 50 years already and with a few other changes we could take it out to 75 years we could do something to deal with the fact that elderly women on social security are far more likely to be poor and they need some extra help and we could lift the earnings limitation for people on social security i would like to see those things done but let s talk about medicare we should secure and strengthen and modernize medicare it s been around for 34 years now it s made health care more accessible and more affordable as you heard hanna say it s given millions of american families peace of mind by paying for medical costs that otherwise would have bankrupted families in their later years it has also freed the children of medicare s recipients from the painful choice of mortgaging their children s future to provide a decent health care for their parents but you ve got people living longer and the baby boomers set to retire therefore more people drawing medicare and fewer people paying in what that means is that the trust fund will become insolvent by the year 2015 15 years from now now we ve already done a lot to try to stave that off when i became president in 1993 the trust fund was supposed to become insolvent in 1999 this year we ve made a lot of changes some of them were difficult and somewhat unpopular but we have saved medicare until 2015 but that s not enough keep in mind the baby boom generation won t begin to turn 65 until 2011 then over the next 30 years the number of people who are 65 or over will actually double so we need to lengthen the life of the medicare trust fund and we need to do it now the sooner you deal with these issues the easier it is to deal with them the longer we take to deal with them the more painful and the more expensive it will be to deal with it the plan i announced yesterday to secure and modernize medicare for the 21st century does the following things first of all it extends the solvency of the present medicare program to the year 2027 that is very important changes made today can keep it alive until 2027 that will almost completely take in the baby boom generation not quite but nearly and that gives all of our successors plenty of time to take advantage of all the increases in health care options that i m convinced will allow people to stay healthier even longer in the years ahead to do it i propose that we use 15 percent of the budget surplus over the next 15 years again i say there are a lot of good uses for the surplus a lot of people would like to have more money right now but there is nothing more important than taking care of first things first keeping the economy strong by paying the debt off and saving medicare and social security i think are the most important things we can do and we should do them first now we also plan to modernize the way the program works to introduce more innovations now used in private sector health plans to offer seniors the chance to choose between lower cost managed care plans for medicare and the traditional program without forcing the choice by having unreasonable increases in the premiums in the traditional program to guarantee that our seniors have the information necessary to make informed choices and that all the available plans have certain core medical benefits necessary to preserve the integrity of the program to make sure that as we hold costs down we keep quality up but we also as everybody before me has said need to modernize medicare one of the ways but not the only way is with prescription drugs think of it this way medicine has changed a lot the whole health care system has changed a great deal since 1965 but medicare hasn t changed with it as a consequence the average senior citizen today is paying a larger percent of his or her income out of pocket for health care than they were paying in 1965 before medicare came in primarily because of the prescription drug issue but think of the other challenges a revolution in medical science has brought cures to diseases once thought incurable provided doctors the tools to prevent diseases from starting in the first place and given millions of people the chance to live not only longer but healthier lives once the cure for many illnesses was a surgeon s scalpel now it s just likely to be a pharmacist s prescription drug every day new drug therapies are being developed to treat chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension we have to do more to make sure all seniors can take advantage of this medical revolution we also have to do more to encourage seniors to take advantage of preventive technologies to take advantage of screenings for cancer for diabetes for osteoporosis and other diseases to do that my plan will eliminate the deductible and all co payments for these preventive tests just think of it this way under medicare today very often you can t get medicare to pay for screening and prevention but you can get medicare to pay for the far more expensive hospitalization that would not have occurred in the first place if the screening and prevention had been done so this will actually save us money in the long run as well as making people healthier we also do have to make prescription drugs more available and more affordable they are essential to medical care just a few statistics more than four out of five seniors use at least one prescription a year now for most seniors it s much more than that and for many seniors the proper regimen of pills properly taken at home can spell the difference between maintaining and active and independent life or being hospital or nursing home or home bound for life if we were creating the medicare program today if we were starting from scratch and it didn t exist no one would even consider having a program without a prescription drug benefit for the elderly and the disabled so what are we going to do you heard hanna talk about the cost of her drugs this is a costly issue a month s supply of a popular blood pressure medicine costs more than 70 a month a cholesterol medication probably taken by some of you in this room costs about 100 a month when you consider that some of the newest drugs costs as much as 15 a pill that two thirds listen to this two thirds of all people over 65 suffer from two or more chronic diseases that one in five elderly people takes at least five prescription medications a day the pharmacy bills can be staggering each year more than 2 million seniors spend more than 1 000 on medication people such as our friend anne thomas here to my left whom i mentioned earlier with her daughters she s from oak brook her osteoporosis prescriptions swallow up a sixth of her income almost 17 percent last year she too was diagnosed with asthma but she chose not to fill her prescription because the 300 a month price tag was more than she could afford finding the funds to pay for prescription drugs is a struggle for seniors at many income levels not just the poor indeed of the 15 million seniors in our country that don t have any prescription drug coverage nearly half are middle class americans and that does not count the millions of seniors who have some prescription coverage but the coverage is totally inadequate or far too expensive the number of plans that offer coverage is declining and those that charge high prices and offer modest benefits are increasing forty percent of all older americans without prescription drugs let me say that again 40 percent are middle class nearly half the uninsured live in isolated rural areas and as i said as drug prices rise and more private insurers drop drug coverage altogether about 15 million of our seniors will be uninsured within the year this is not the way to honor people after a lifetime of work and good citizenship no american should have to choose between fighting infections and fighting hunger between skipping doses and skipping meals between staying healthy and paying the rent we can do better than that we are now prosperous enough to do better than that and i say again there are many good uses for the surplus i have my ideas the congress has their ideas but first things first we have to take of this problem and do it now now we want to make sure that this plan is financially responsible that it can be paid for that it won t break the bank here s what we propose to do my plan will make a prescription drug benefit available to all medicare recipients but will provide extra help for those with lower incomes for people up to 135 percent of the poverty rate we will waive the co pay and the monthly premium but people with incomes a little higher than that we will have other subsidies not quite as generous but for everyone for a modest monthly premium medicare will pay for half of all the prescription drug costs over the next few years up to a ceiling of 5 000 in the first year we have to start with a ceiling of 2 000 because it s a big program and we ve got to put it in and prove we can make it work but under my plan i will ask the congress to approve and fund going to a 5 000 ceiling drug benefit half of all the costs now with no deductible this drug benefit is one that virtually all of our seniors can afford and it is constructed in a way america can afford it will help millions and millions of people older and disabled americans will save even more on prescription drugs under our plan because medicare s private contractors will get big volume discounts that seniors could never get on their own so when they pay for half the price that half will be a much smaller amount than would otherwise be the case now what i would like to say not only to those of you in this room where i suppose i m preaching to the saved as we say down home but to all americans including those who are not in this room is that this is something that is important that goes way beyond health care and way beyond money how can you put a price on being able to see the birth of a grandchild or to enjoy them as they grow up or read to them or take them fishing or be active with your friends and family how can you put a price if you are a child on being able to know and spend time with and enjoy your grandparents there is no dollar value we can put on providing the best quality of life we can and i want you all to understand we can afford this if this is not done it is because somebody made a different decision to do something else with the money this is not welfare this is not some blind gift this is something we are doing for the integrity of families through the generations our country is in the best shape it s been economically maybe ever certainly in a long time and what we re going to do now will define what kind of country we will be well into the 21st century are we going to squander this money we worked so hard for after only six years of effort turned around an unbelievable record of fiscal irresponsibility or are we going to pay off our debts in the bank and pay off our debts to our families not only to our parents and grandparents but to future generations that is the question so i want to ask you to join me you know hanna said she didn t know much about politics i thought she made a pretty good political speech myself but she said something that s really important she said you know i don t understand why this should be a political issue you know sometimes when things get real tense in washington you know and some of my friends in the other party get real excited i say hey loosen up you know we re all getting older none of us are going to be here forever people get a chance to vote every election loosen up relax no one escapes time and age republicans age just like democrats people who are independents still get sick every now and then even though they refuse to register in a political party this is not a political issue anywhere in america and it should not be a political issue in washington d c this is something we can do together for the future of america i want you to reach out to your representatives from illinois you are represented in this state by both republicans and democrats in the united states congress more or less fairly apportioned i wish it were different but there it is you can write to them you can call them you can say do this not only for us but do it for our children and our future do it because we re all aging and it s a high class problem that we re living longer but we have to prepare for the day when the baby boomers retire and we should not wait another day to provide the prescription drug benefit and we have the money to do it this is simply a matter of choice i ask you without regard to your party to reach out to the members of your congressional delegation and say this is the right choice for our future thank you very much dem wjclinton30 7 00a bill_clinton well thank you all for being here today i m delighted to be in this beautiful new restaurant one of the owners of this restaurant phil stefano is a good friend of mine and in honor of my coming he went to rome i don t know what it means but it s probably a pretty good choice i want to thank senator dick durbin one of the finest human beings and one of the bravest people and one of the most eloquent people who have served in the united states congress in my adult lifetime since i ve been covering he is an extraordinary human being and i m grateful that he is my friend and i thank him thank you mr president middleton and thank you fred baron leo boyle anthony tarricone all the other members of the atla for being here today i want to thank all the candidates who have come here today and i know fred told me you already introduced them but this is a very interesting group of candidates we have ron klink and debbie stabinow running from the house of representatives for the united states senate and they can both win and they should win if you help them i saw earlier deborah simm and ed bernstein i think brian schwitz is here we have a whole slew of house candidates one of them john kelly from mexico went to college with me so i have a particular interest in seeing him make good but he was also a distinguished u s attorney but we have this incredible group of people running for the house they can win the majority and now we have an extraordinary new senator from the state of georgia zell miller who will be running for election in november and believe me we can win not only the house but the senate as well if you give them enough help and a number of you have helped the senate candidate that i care the most about in new york and i want to thank you for that and if you haven t i hope you will because it s a big old tough state and they re trying to take us out and i think she s going in with your help so i hope you will and i thank you very much for that let me say normally i don t speak from any notes at these events but i want to do it today for a particular reason you make a living making arguments persuading people knowing what s on people s minds understanding the predispositions that they bring to any given circumstance and this is a highly unusual circumstance so i want to talk to you about it today because with the conventions of the republicans in philadelphia the democrats in los angeles we re beginning to have this election in earnest the first thing i want to do is to say a simple thank you you ve been thanking me i want to thank you i want to thank you for being so good to me and hillary and al and tipper gore for these eight years i want to thank you for supporting the civil justice system and when it was threatened the constitution of the united states i want to thank you for supporting ordinary citizens the people who can t afford to come to fundraisers like this but work in places like this people who can t afford to hire lobbyists in washington to plead their case and i want to thank you again for supporting the candidates here and those who are not here who can help to give us a new majority in the congress the second thing i d like to say with some humility i guess is that your support has been validated by the record of the last eight years this country is in better shape than it was eight years ago it s stronger than it was eight years ago and people are better off than they were eight years ago and as senator durbin said yes part of it is economics we have the longest economic expansion in history and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and strongest growth in 40 years the highest home ownership in history all of those statistics but it s more than that as well this is a more just society we have the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest single parent household poverty rate in 46 years we have rising scores among our students in schools the first time in history the african american high school graduation rate is equal to that of the white majority the highest percentage of people going on to college in our history we have cleaner air cleaner water safer food we set aside more land in the lower 48 states than any administration in history except those of the two roosevelts and we proved that you could improve the environment and the economy at the same time the welfare rolls have been cut in half the crime rate is at a 30 year low gun crime has dropped 35 percent in the last seven years so it s about more than money it s about who we are as a people and how we live together many of you who i met earlier mentioned my work in the last couple of weeks on the middle east peace process i ve been very honored to be part of making a more peaceful world from the balkans to the middle east to northern ireland trying to reduce the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and trying to build a positive set of relationships with countries throughout the world and america is better positioned than it was eight years ago now here s the most important thing now what what are we doing with this prosperity that s my answer and your answer but how do we get it to be america s answer what are we going to do with this remarkable moment of prosperity will we use it as a precious once in a lifetime gift to meet the big challenges and seize the big opportunities of this new century or will we do what often happens in democracies when things are going well and break our concentration and sort of wander through this election the outcome of the election who wins depends on what people think the election is really about now on our side we ve got people led by vice president gore who have brought america back and who have great ideas for keeping this positive change going on their side they have people led by their presidential and vice presidential nominees who are speaking in very soothing reassuring ways about compassion and harmony and inclusion gone are these harsh personal attacks that dominated their politics from 92 to 98 you watch their convention i bet butter wouldn t melt in their mouth for the next few days it is appealing as a package and a terrific marketing strategy but that obscures the differences between the candidates for president the candidates for senate and congress and fundamentally the different approaches between the two parties and it is just what they mean to do because on issue after issue this ticket is to the right of the one that al gore and i opposed in 1996 so this election you just need to know three things about it it is a big election there are big differences and only the democrats want you to know what the differences are what does that tell you about who you ought to vote for it is a big election but a lot of people don t think so story after story after story that our friends in the press write indicate that people aren t sure what the differences are between the candidates for president do they have different approaches to crime and gun safety do they have different approaches to the economy do they really have different approaches to health care they both seem like compassionate people who could mess this economy up anyway i mean it s so strong and maybe there aren t any real consequences and so maybe we should give the other side a chance we had it for eight years now how many times in your own life if you re over 30 years old every person in this room over 30 at some point in your life has made a mistake not because your life was so full of difficulty but because things were going along so well you thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate a lot of you nodding your head that s true you know that s true if you life long enough you ll make one of those mistakes and countries are no different than people things are going along well they kind of relax feeling good i m glad everybody is feeling good but wouldn t it be ironic if as a consequence of the good feeling of america now and our yearning to sort of have everything come out all right that the people that made the decisions and paid the price were punished for the error they helped to bring about now that s basically the issue in this election and so i say to you i don t blame our friends in the republican party if i were them i would be trying to obscure the differences between us too because it s the only way they can win i mean it s a good strategy and they re doing it very well and they ve got a great package and they just hope nobody ever unwraps the package to look and see what s inside now this is america and people should do whatever they think they can do to get elected but if that happens and if the electorate goes into the polling place in november without knowing what the real differences are that s our fault not theirs you can t blame them for trying to get elected they want back in in the world s worst way and all those interest groups that are behind them want back in in the world s worst way and you know some of the things they want to do if they could get the white house and the congress don t you and you can t blame them they re just doing what they re supposed to do they re trying to win and the american people almost always get it right almost always for over 220 years now if they have enough time and enough information to make a good choice that s our job and that s your job because you make arguments for a living so you are uniquely positioned to influence the outcome of this election not so much by your money as by your insight and your persuasiveness and understanding and you have to take it on let me just give you an example what you ve got to convince people of is look an election is a decision it s a choice and choices have consequences if you like the consequences of your choice you should vote for that person but let s just look at some of them number one on economic policy the goal ought to be to keep this recovery going and spread its benefits to more people right okay what s our policy our policy is stay with what works keep investing in america s future in education in science and technology and health care keep paying down the debt get us out of debt so the interest rates will stay low save social security and medicare for the baby boom generation and add a drug benefit to medicare and give the people a tax cut we can afford and still do that stuff for college education for long term care for child care for people with a lot of kids to save for retirement have a tax cut but don t let it interfere with our obligation to invest in our children s education to save medicare and social security and get us out of debt what s their side they can say it better their side is hey it s your money we ve got it it s a surplus we want to give it back to you that s the problem with the democrats they never saw a program they didn t like it s your money we re going to give it back to you and they propose to spend at least from the taxes they passed in the last 12 months to the one that their candidate for president is advocating and is in the republican platform over 2 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years and they say well so what we re supposed to have a surplus of 2 trillion now never mind the fact that that number one gives them no money for their own spending promises did you ever get one of those letters in the mail from publishers clearinghouse ed mcmahon you may have won 10 million did you go out and spend the 10 million the next day if you did you should support the republicans this year if not you d better stick with us you better stick with us folks that money is not there yet that money is not there yet if we invest this year in education and we say we want to spend this much next year and the money doesn t come in we don t have to spend it but if once you cut taxes it s gone and it s pretty hard to get a bunch of politicians to come back in and raise them again because the money didn t materialize so you ve got to tell people that look at your friends and say listen if i ask you to sign a contract right now committing to spend every penny of your projected income over the next 10 years would you do it if you would you should support them if not you d better stick with us keep this economy going i got an economic analysis last week from a professional economist that said that vice president gore s economic plan would keep interest rates at least one percent lower at least one percent lower than his opponent s plan over the next decade do you know what that s worth 250 billion in home mortgage savings 30 billion in car payment savings 15 billion in student loan payments that s a pretty good size tax cut and besides you get a health economy and you get america out of debt it s a huge difference people don t know it it s up to you to make sure they do let me just take one or two others in health care we want to lengthen the life of medicare and social security we want to add a medicare drug benefit that all of our seniors can afford we want a patients bill of rights on those three issues they say no no no no lengthening the life of medicare and social security indeed one of the tax cuts they passed this week would take five years off the life of medicare no patients bill of rights with the right to be vindicated if you get hurt no medicare drug benefit that all of our seniors can afford who need it on crime we say put more police out there and do more to take guns out of the hands of criminals and kids specifically close the gun show loophole mandate child trigger locks don t import large capacity ammunition clips to get around the assault weapons ban and the vice president says and i agree with him make people who buy handguns get a photo id license like people who buy cars showing that they passed a background check and they know how to use the gun safely they say no no no no instead have more people carrying concealed weapons in church if necessary that s their record and their position now that s a clear choice people don t know that did you see that survey last week of suburban women voters who care a lot about this issue and they had no idea what the differences were now the chief political argument is that the head of the nra said they d have an office in the white house if the republicans win but what i want to tell you is something more profound they won t need an office in the white house because they ll do what they want to anyway because that s what they believe look i think we have got a chance here to get away from this politics of personal destruction we should say that our opponents are honorable good decent patriotic people and we have honest disagreements with them the only thing we disagree with is they re trying to hide the disagreements so let s tell the american people what the differences are and let them decide and whatever they decide we can all go on about our business and be happy with our lives because democracy is working but we can t if they don t know let s look at the environment we say we should have higher standards for the environment and deal with the problems of climate change and we can improve the environment and the economy at the same time and they don t believe that basically and one of the specific commitments made by their candidate in the primary something they hope all you forget they hope you have selective amnesia about the republican primary but one of the specific commitments made was to reverse my order establishing 43 million acres that are roadless in our national forests something the audobon society said was the most significant conservation move in the last 40 years now they re on record committing to repeal that so there s a difference there people need to know what the differences are and if they agree with them they should vote for them if they agree with us they can vote for us but they ought to know i ll give you a couple other examples hate crimes legislation we re for it their leadership is opposed to it because it also protects gays employment nondiscrimination we re for it they re against it raising the minimum wage we re for it they re against it more vigorous civil rights enforcement and involvement we re for it they re against it now all the big publicity is about in the last few days an amazing vote cast by their nominee for vice president when he was in congress against letting nelson mandela out of jail and that takes your breath away but mr mandela got out of jail in spite of that congressional vote most of the congressmen voted to let him out he became president of south african and the rest is history i m worried about the people now whom i ve tried to put on the court of appeals who are african american and hispanic who are being held in political jail because they can t get a hearing from this republican senate and their nominee won t say a word about it the fourth circuit court of appeals in the southeastern part of the united states has never had an african american but it has more african american citizens than any other one i ve been trying for seven long years to fix it and they ve blocked every one they are so determined to keep an african american off the court that they have allowed a 25 percent vacancy rate on the fourth circuit just to keep an african american off the court there are two now i ve got up there they could prove me wrong give them a hearing and confirm them in texas i nominated a man named enrique moreno from el paso that the texas state trial judges said was one of the best lawyers in west texas a guy that graduated at the top of his class at harvard came out of el paso and did that he got the highest rating from the aba and the texas republican senators said he wasn t qualified and by their likes he s not qualified because he s not a guaranteed ideological purist vote and the leader of the republican party in texas now the leader of the american republican party all he had to do was say give this man a hearing this is wrong but not a peep so let s worry more about moreno mandela took care of himself just fine and the people in the fourth circuit and the other people this is a big issue now i m sure they have principled reasons they really want somebody on the court of appeals they think it would be a better country if people toed the ideological line i have appointed the most diverse and the highest rated group of judges in the last 40 years and i didn t ask them what their party lines were now that leads me to the last point i think the last place where there is a clear choice is choice and civil rights enforcement and the civil justice system the next president will make two to four appointments to the supreme court almost certainly the vice president has said where he stands on this their nominees are both avowed opponents of roe v wade and their nominee for president said the people he admired most in the supreme court were justices thomas and scalia those that are the most conservative now i ll bet you anything nobody gets up and gives a speech about this in philadelphia but it s a relevant thing it will change the shape of america far beyond the lifetime of the next presidency so i say to you and i m not attacking them personally these are differences and i don t even blame them for trying to hide the differences because they know if the folks find out they re toast i don t blame them but i have worked so hard to turn this country around i have done all i could do and i don t want my country to squander the opportunity of a lifetime the opportunity of a generation to build the future of our dreams for our children that s what i want and i think what s best for america is al gore that s what i really believe he s done more good in the office of vice president than anybody who ever held it we ve had some great presidents who were vice president none of them did remotely as much for america as vice president as he has from casting the tie breaking vote on the budget to casting the tie breaking vote for gun safety in this year from managing our downsizing of the government to the smallest size in 40 years to making sure that we pass an e rate in the telecommunications act that can make sure all the poor schools in this country could hook up to the internet from managing a lot of our environmental programs to managing a lot of our foreign policy with russia egypt and other countries there has never been anybody who has had remotely as much influence as vice president as he has and therefore he is by definition then the best qualified person in our lifetime to be president the second thing you need to know is there is a big difference in economic policy i ve already said that but if you want this thing to go on everybody who wants to live like a republican needs to vote democrat this year now if you want it to go on you ve got to do it and the third thing that you need to know about him is he understands the future he understood the potential of the internet to carry the library of congress when it was the private province of defense department physicists don t you want somebody like that in the white house when we have to decide who gets a hold of your medical and financial records that are on the internet he understands the potential of the human genome project and this whole biomedical revolution don t you want someone like that in the white house when we have to decide whether someone can deny you a job or a promotion or health insurance based on your gene map he understands climate change people made fun of him 12 years ago when we ran together in 92 they made fun of him now the oil companies acknowledge that climate change and global warming are real and it s going to change the whole way our children live unless we deal with it wouldn t you like someone in the white house that really understands that you need somebody that understands the future it s going to be here before you know it and the last thing i ll say it s what you already know or you wouldn t be here this is the most diverse interesting country we ve ever had we re going out into a world that s more and more interdependent where we have obligations to people around the world that we must fulfill if we want to do well ourselves and i want someone in the white house that will take us all along for the ride and he will thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton30 7 00b bill_clinton president middleton after your remarks if i had any sense i wouldn t say anything i d just sit down i want to thank you and thank you fred baron my longtime friend for inviting me here there are so many of you here that i ve had the honor of working with over the last seven and a half years sometimes even longer i am proud of the fact that this organization and its members have been standing up for the rights of wronged and injured americans since 1946 now that was before we had the epa or the consumer product safety commission the occupational safety and health administration or the clean air or clean water act it s important to remember that those protections and many others were written into the law after years of lawsuits that highlighted the problems we faced and wrongs that were done what is the lesson of all this that the public interest requires both reasonable access to the courts and responsible action by congress we have done what we could in the last seven and a half years to move toward accountability in the court on three issues tobacco guns and patients rights and to keep the american people s availability of a civil justice system alive and well but only congress can pass laws that will hold tobacco companies gun manufacturers and health plans accountable for the choices they make and the consequences of those choices so i hope congress will also help us because i know that everybody in this room agrees that an ounce of prevention in law is worth a million dollars in curative lawsuits we ve worked for seven and a half years now to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco thanks in large measure to the leadership of vice president gore and senator dick durbin from illinois who has been with me through much of this day now the justice department is leading our efforts to get tobacco companies to repay the government for the costs of tobacco related illnesses but the supreme court has told congress the ball is in its court it must act to give fda tobacco regulations the force of law i have asked congress to do that and to support not undermine the justice department s lawsuit i hope that the congress and especially the republicans in congress will be able to break an addiction to the tobacco lobby and meet their responsibilities to the american people i am grateful beyond measure that the crime rate has dropped in this country to a 25 year low that gun crime is down by 35 percent over the last seven and a half years but i don t think anybody in america believes that we re safe enough as a nation or that there s not more we can do more we can to do to put more police on the street in dangerous neighborhoods more we can do to keep our kids off the streets in after school programs summer school programs summer job programs mentoring programs and more we can do to keep guns out the hands of criminals and children i ve asked congress to give us common sense gun legislation measures to close the gun show loophole and the brady background check law to require child safety locks for all handguns to ban the importation of large capacity ammunition clips i ve also endorsed requiring people who buy handguns to get a photo id license just like a driver s license showing that you passed the background check and you know how to use the gun safely so far no action in congress even on the first three measures we reached a historic agreement with the smith wesson company to build safer guns a truly astonishing step forward and a brave thing for them to do but the rest of the industry and the gun lobby are trying to destroy them for doing it and they re working hard to make sure that they can t keep up their end of the bargain i hope all of them will think again about where their responsibility really lies after all who honestly has an interest in selling a gun to somebody with a criminal record who has an interest in selling a gun that s not protected when it will be put in some place where a little child can find it and cause an accidental death i hope that we ll see a change in attitude there too and i hope the american people will have the opportunity to make their position on these matters crystal clear in november wherever i go i heard heartbreaking stories about patients turned away from the closest emergency room the other day i was in missouri with the governor of that state who signed one of the strongest patients bill of rights in the country at the state level and they still have about a million people in their state who aren t covered because of the way the federal law works and there was this emergency room nurse speaking with us there or it was an emergency nurse who had been also an emergency medical technician it was a man who must have weighed 225 pounds and looked like he could bench press me on a cold day and this big old burly guy got up and practically started crying talking about someone that he had just seen die because they were not permitted to go to the nearest emergency room i had the guy the other day tell me a story about getting hit by a car and saying that this health plan wouldn t approve his going to the nearest emergency room because he hadn t called for permission first he said i was unconscious at the time i didn t know how to make the phone call now all of you know these are if you practice in this area you know that this is not just some set of isolated anecdotes and i believe that health care decisions should be made by health care professionals i believe people ought to be able to go to the nearest emergency room i don t believe that people should be forced to change physicians in the middle of treatment whether it s chemotherapy or having a baby and i think if people get hurt they ought to have the right to seek redress in our courts that s what the patients bill of rights does let me say as i have said over and over again this is not a partisan issue survey after survey after survey has shown that more than 70 percent of the american people whether they identify themselves as republicans or democrats or independents support the passage of a strong enforceable patients bill of rights this is not a partisan issue this is a special interest issue we passed with a bipartisan vote a good number of republicans voted for a bill called the norwood dingel bill in the house of representatives and i am profoundly grateful to everyone who voted for that bill in both parties and then in the senate we came within a vote really of passing it we lost it 51 49 and if it had gotten 50 votes then the vice president could have broken the tie and as he never tires of saying whenever he votes we win he always kids me that he has a much better record of legislative success than i do he never loses whenever he votes we win and so i have some hope that we can do this but this is a huge deal and it goes to the core of what kind of people we are and i feel that i have the right to speak passionately about this because i actually have always supported managed care in general let me remind you of something your president was telling you about what things were like in 1992 in 1992 and for several years before that health care costs had been going up at three times the rate of inflation we were then and are now spending about 4 percent more of our national income which is a huge chunk of change on health care than any other country in the world about 6 percent more than virtually all other advanced countries canada is 4 percent lower than we are and yet we were the only one that basically had tens of millions of people without any health insurance so it was obvious that we needed to manage the system better because a lot of the money was just getting away from us having said that you can not allow the management of the system to overcome its fundamental purpose which is to help people get healthy or stay healthy or deal with them when they re injured or sick let me just emphasize i ve talked to a lot of people about this i ve talked to a lot of nurses and doctors and people who work in insurance companies i ve talked to the representatives of the 14 hmos that endorsed our patients bill of rights because they desperately want to do this but they don t want to be disadvantaged by having all their competitors able to run off and leave them and follow a different set of rules and the fundamental problem is in a lot of these cases particularly on specialist care is that you have to go through three levels before a final decision is made and the people at the first two levels know they ll never get in trouble for saying no and whenever you have a system where someone never gets in trouble for saying no and not get in trouble for saying yes even if yes is plainly the right answer then there needs to be some way people can get redress if they get hurt in a system like that that s the issue so a right without a remedy is just a suggestion and i think we all know that so we ve got to keep working we might get there this year we re chipping away at it if we turn one or maybe two to be safe in the senate we ll be home now let me just say one other thing i couldn t appear before an audience of lawyers without mentioning what i consider to be another threat to our system of equal justice under law and that is the senate slowdown in consideration and confirmation of my nominees to our courts especially to our appellate courts the judges i have appointed have the highest ratings the american bar association has given out in 40 years they are also the most diverse group ever appointed to the federal bench we ve shattered the myth that diversity and quality don t go hand in hand i also have bent over backwards not to appoint people just because i thought that every single ruling would agree with me and i ve probably appointed a person or two that some of you didn t like but i ve tried to find mainstream judges that would follow the constitution and be faithful to the interest of individual litigants who have rights under the law and constitution of the united states and to be fair and balanced to both sides that s what i have tried to do now it is therefore because of that record and there have been lots of legal analyses by respected totally nonpolitical writers saying how i have changed the thrust of the court appointments especially appellate court appointments and my appointees are far less ideological one way or the other than those of the last two administrations now a blue ribbon panel however recently found that during the 105th congress the nominations of women and minorities tended to take two months longer to be considered than those of white males and though they were just as qualified according to the aba they tended to be rejected twice as often i ll give you just exhibit a i ve talked about this all over america i nominated a man named enrique moreno a highly regarded trial lawyer from el paso to the 5th circuit the texas state judges said he was one of the three best trial lawyers in the region the aba unanimously rated him well qualified he had broad support from local law enforcement officials and from local republicans and democrats again it was not a partisan issue the guy came up out of el paso went to harvard made great grades made something of himself everybody said he was qualified everybody except the two senators from texas who said he wasn t qualified no matter what the aba said no matter what the texas state judges said no matter what the local republicans and democrats said he s not qualified nineteen years in practice isn t enough to qualify to make the kind of judgments they have to make and regrettably none of the other leading republicans in texas would even ask for him to have a hearing and so he sits in limbo look at the fourth circuit in the southeast united states the largest percentage of african americans in any federal circuit are in the fourth circuit 25 percent of the judgeships are vacant i ve been trying for seven years to put an african american on that court because there has never been one in the district with the largest number of african americans in the entire country i think it s wrong and they have worked so hard to keep me from doing it that they re willing to tolerate a 25 percent vacancy rate now keep in mind i never sent anybody up there that wasn t qualified we now have two fine well qualified african americans pending for that circuit judge james wynn of north carolina and roger gregory of virginia neither has even gotten a hearing the senate has 37 nominations before it now and 29 of those folks have never gotten a hearing fifteen have been nominated to fill empty seats that the u s courts consider judicial emergencies places where our legal business simply isn t being done 13 of them including well respected litigators like dolly gee and first rate jurists like lagrome davis have been waiting more than a year judge helene white has been waiting for three years now if we want our courts to function properly the senate ought to vote these folks up or down if they don t like them vote them down but is the question can they be competent will they run a fair and effective court if there are criminal trials will the civil cases be tried promptly and fairly do they believe justice delayed is justice denied or is the problem that they are not sufficiently ideological predictable this is a big issue and a serious precedent we all want justice to be blind but we know when we have diversity in our courts just as in other aspects of our society it sharpens our vision and makes us a stronger nation that is a goal atla has always set now i was told that no president had ever addressed the full atla convention before and since you were born in the same year i was i thought i d show up i thank you from the bottom of my heart for the kindness so many of you have shown me the support that so many of you have given to our initiatives to defending the civil courts and defending the constitution this is a year in which the american people will be given a chance to chart the course of the future for a long time to come they ll elect a new president a new vice president senators and members of congress in the course of that if all the predictions are true they will also be shaping a new supreme court because the next president in all probability will make between two and four appointments to the supreme court choices will be made and those choices will have consequences i think it is very important that you make up your mind what you think the choices are and what the consequences will be and that you share them with others the last time a president nearly as i can tell from my research talked to any atla group was when president johnson appeared before your board of directors in 1964 and so i want to tell you a little story about 1964 to emphasize why i think this year is so important to all of us as americans in 1964 i graduated from high school and i therefore have a very clear recollection of that year all of us were still profoundly sad over the death of president kennedy but fundamentally optimistic america was then in the full flow of what was until now the longest economic expansion in history vietnam had not yet blown up and no one really thought it would get as big as it did or claim as many lives as it did or divide the country the way it did there were then we had about 10 years of vigorous activism in civil rights but most people believed given the white house and the composition of the congress that the civil rights problems of this country would be solved in the congress and in the courts not in the streets and nearly everybody thought the economy was on automatic and you couldn t mess it up if you tried we took low unemployment and high growth and low inflation for granted and i was one of those bright eyed idealistic kids that felt just that way two years later we had riots in the streets four years later when i graduated from georgetown it was nine weeks after president johnson said he couldn t run for president again because the country was so divided over vietnam eight weeks after martin luther king was killed in memphis two days after senator kennedy was killed in los angeles the next election had a different outcome within a few months the previous longest economic expansion in history itself was history what s the point of all this i don t know when we ll ever have a time like this again where we have so much economic prosperity and all the social indicators from crime to welfare to teen pregnancy you name it they re all going in the right direction where our country is in a position to be a force for peace and freedom and decency from the middle east to northern ireland to the balkans to africa and latin america where we have the chance to build the future of our dreams for our children and protect the fundamental essence of american citizenship and constitutional liberty even as we build a more united community amidst all of our diversity and i m old enough now to know that nothing stays the same and things change and i say this to you more as a citizen than as a president because i m not a candidate this year but i think it is profoundly important that the american people make up their mind what to do with this moment this magic moment in our history and i think we will not every forgive ourselves if we let it get away from us in 1964 when lbj came here we let it get away from us but the problems were deep and imponderable and difficult to move away from the problem of vietnam and the problem of civil rights we are not burdened to the extent that time was by anything of that magnitude but we know what s coming down the pike we know we have to deal with the retirement of the baby boomers we know we re not giving every kid in this country a world class education we know that we have not done what we should do in terms of safe streets and health care we know we re going to have to deal with the problems of climate change we know this explosion in biotechnology that the human genome project exemplifies will change things forever and require us to rethink our whole notion of health and retirement we know that we have responsibilities to people around the world if we want americans to do as well as they can at home and at the core of it all is what is our fundamental notion about what it means to be a citizen of this country to have rights in the courts and on the streets and in our daily lives yes but also to have responsibilities to one another and to our country and to the future i want you all to think about that i ve done everything i knew to turn this country around to try to get things going in the right direction and now all the great stuff is still out there just waiting for us to build a future of our dreams for our kids that s all that matters not the politics not the injuries not the hurts not the barbs not the bragging not the plaudits there s an old italian proverb that says after the game the king and the pawn go back into the same box it s well to remember all we really have is our common humanity but once in a great long while we get an unbelievable opportunity to make the most of it you ve got it now and i hope you will thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton30 7 94a bill_clinton i m delighted to be here with joel and susan and their two fine sons who spoke so well and really said it all and with joel s mother who must be so proud of him you know if it hadn t been for my mother i would never have been elected president because there were plenty of elections i ran in where she and i were the only two people who thought i had a chance to win unfortunately a time or two they were right and we were wrong but we just kept on going i m delighted to be here with senator and mrs metzenbaum and with all of you i want to say a special word of thanks to attorney general lee fisher for his leadership on the fight against crime and for his leadership on behalf of the clinton gore ticket i also want to say a special word of thanks to the three members of congress that joel mentioned tom sawyer sherrod brown and eric fingerhut without whom our economic program would not have passed and this country s economic direction would not have turned around and i thank them so much you know it s funny i came to the cleveland airport we re a little late because there were 500 people there when i landed so i went around and shook hands with them and i thought what great passionate public issue will they be concerned about i thought i knew america well enough and sure enough the first 15 people i shook hands with said can t you do anything about the baseball strike you know as a life long fanatic baseball fan i threw out the first pitch here and i saw the indians come out of nowhere and they re doing so well and in the other part of the state by the way the cincinnati reds are not doing bad either so for ohio perhaps more than any other place in america this year we re really all happy that we re having the best baseball season in four years and we hope we get a chance to see if those records can be broken and all that progress can be made but you know i want to make a point about that a couple of years ago david letterman had a funny top ten list called suggested slogans of the 1992 democratic convention and one of his allegedly funny slogans was we re the cleveland indians of politics well we got the last laugh and now cleveland might get the last laugh as well i want to say a special word of thanks too to senator metzenbaum al hunt in the wall street journal who is sometimes acerbic said the other day and i quote senator metzenbaum is a persistent pain in the neck now wait wait he said as a result thousands of little kids are likely to have a better life that was an article about senator metzenbaum s adoption bill a bill that i feel very strongly about one of the few things that anybody in congress has done besides given a speech to try to give more little kids a chance at a good life and i really respect it and i have told people who disagree with us on the issue of choice that if they re really concerned about that issue they ought to go see howard metzenbaum and saddle up and pass his bill in the congress so that we can offer real and meaningful adoption for more of our poor children in this country i thank him for that and i know you do too senator biden pointed out last week at a big ceremony at the justice department with hundreds and hundreds of police officers from all over the country as we were celebrating the fact that the senate and the house had agreed to put this crime bill joel talked about on the floor of the congress next week that the final negotiations were snagged in the early hours of the morning and that one man saved the entire bill by being willing to work out a last minute compromise and he said that man was howard metzenbaum the thing i like about him is that he is always fighting he doesn t always win but he always fights and what we need in this country is not people who are always trying to win or at least look like they re winning but people who are willing to fight i first knew about old joel hyatt back in yale law school when he had already begun a program for undergraduates to teach inner city kids it s still going on it s kind of like hyatt legal services it s going to live behind him even after he goes to the senate i m sure it will go on and then when he and susan started hyatt legal services i thought it was a good idea which made me sort of an iconoclast among lawyers but it seemed to me that ordinary people ought to be able to go see a lawyer and get something fairly straightforward done without having to take the shirt off their back or be scared to death and he did that and i think that s important because it s not just a mechanical service it makes people think that the system can work for them and believe me if we could just make more than half the american people believe that this whole country could work for them again we would do a very great deal indeed and that s what joel did with legal services that s what he can help to do with the united states when you send him to the senate hillary and i have had a wonderful day today we went to independence missouri to harry truman s hometown and we celebrated there the final leg of the effort to get national health reform and guaranteed health insurance for all americans we went there for a couple of reasons first of all harry truman tried three times in 1945 1947 and 1949 to get guaranteed health coverage for all americans and it s very interesting all the people that were ought there holding their signs and demonstrating against us today they all think harry truman ought to be on mt rushmore but i come from a family who was for him when he was alive and i know that they re the same folks that tried to kill all of his reform programs back then at the end of the second world war harry truman was at 80 percent in the public opinion polls by the time he sent the health care reform to congress for the second time he had been driven down to 36 percent and was going lower because of all the hatred and venom and misinformation put out about him and his program they said this is socialized government socialized medicine big government run amuck do you know what it was he was asking for private health insurance for all americans and we re going through the same fight today 50 years later in the middle president johnson came 29 years ago this day this exact day president johnson went to independence missouri to sign medicare and to give harry and bess truman medicare cards numbers one and two it took that long to guarantee health care to the elderly of this country and i couldn t help thinking i wonder how many people out there today with their right wing extreme signs and all their harsh slogans have parents who thank god are healthier because of medicare and who have therefore avoided bankrupting their children because of medicare i say that to make this point there is something about this time that matters that is far more important even than the specific things we are about because we have come to the end of one era and we are starting another and we have to decide again what kind of people we are and what we re going to do every time in this country s history and i won t go through the whole thing but i do want to talk about this century and some of you have seen even a little more of it than i have every time we have come to the end of one era and started another we have as a country been just like people are when you have to make a big change you are filled with both hope and fear you want to make the plunge and grow into a bigger better person but you have all kinds of reservations and you wish somehow that you wouldn t have to make these changes at the end of world war i the american people voted for normalcy in a president whatever that is it really meant let s just do nothing let s come home we draw up in the world and do nothing here we are tired we paid a lot in this war we can t think about this stuff anymore and so we had no direction and we just sort of flailed around and what happened the ku klux klan got a big foothold in america went on the rise and promoted a lot of hate and there was the first big red scare alleging that there were communists everywhere trying to run down america and the world came apart at the seams and we found ourselves thrown into a great depression and ultimately another world war and then at the end of world war ii we had a different sort of leader harry truman only four months as vice president when he found himself president he brought the war to a successful conclusion passed the g i bill so that soldiers could come home and get an education buy homes for their families brought the deficit down got the civilian economy going established the marshall plan and rebuilt japan as well as europe and set in motion that whole system that enabled us to stand up to communism and win the cold war and he was still in terrible trouble when he started running for reelection because people said he was a radical he was unfit he was no good why because people were afraid they had to put down one set of glasses through which they had viewed the world and they hadn t been able to pick up another set harry truman was making that set of glasses that framework in which we would all understand the world but the american people did the right thing they reelected him and we enshrined those institutions that kept us going for four and a half decades and made us the great country that we are today now we have won the cold war and we are going into a new era without the great enemy of the soviet union to define our every move and with more competition than we ever thought we d have for jobs and opportunity and the future and we know the future can be bright and wonderful and various and exciting but it s also frightening and we are as a people vulnerable today to the most vicious kind of attacks on our own selfconfidence and our best impulses and you hear it everyday and so we are still unable to escape the almost biological nature of a great democracy at a time of change i ran for president because i believed that the american dream was in danger for my daughter because i believed that the economy was going downhill the deficit was going up jobs were going down investment was going down because i believed that the country was coming apart being divided by race by religion and in other ways when we ought to be coming together and taking great joy in all the diversity of america because i believe that government no longer worked for ordinary people and presidents and other politicians found that they could stay most popular by saying things people wanted to hear and doing absolutely nothing avoiding the tough problems that inevitably cause the kind of conflict we see today and i saw nothing ahead for my country but trouble and so i asked for the chance to serve and i want to thank you for it i have loved every day of it and the rougher it gets the better i like it because that s what we re here to do now but what i want to say to you tonight this is a huge country there are 250 million plus people here there are billions of decisions every day the president cannot do what america needs done alone we need a congress working for change and we need people committed to change at the grass roots level and we need people who keep their heads on straight and their hearts in line working for a better and brighter america you know when i offered up that economic program people in the other party told me for years that they just hated the deficit i couldn t figure out why their presidents kept proposing these big deficits but they talked it down anyway and i figured surely we ll get some help we got zero votes from the congressional republicans for the economic plan they said it would bring the country down they said it was the ruination of america they said it was the extension of tax and spend here s what it was it was 255 billion in spending cuts it was an income tax cut for half a million ohio families and a tax increase for only 47 000 who were asked to pay more to pay down the debt and you know what it brought us it brought us a reduction in federal employment over the next five years of a quarter of a million so that the democrats not the republicans will give you the smallest federal government that has existed in the united states since john kennedy was president and it has brought us three years in a row of reducing the federal deficit for the first time since harry truman was president of the united states that s what it did and what were the results of this 3 8 million new jobs one and a half percent drop in the unemployment rate the largest number of new business starts last year of any year since world war ii with no inflation that s why eric fingerhut sherrod brown and tom sawyer and everybody else in this congressional district and state who represent you in congress who put their necks on the line deserve to be reelected because they gave you this economy they did something about the debt and they did in the midst of a vicious attack on their credibility and unbelievable misinformation where would we be today if we hadn t done it when i travel to other parts of the world when i go to these meetings of the leaders of the big industrial nations and they say your exports are growing faster than ours your investments are growing faster than ours your unemployment rate is lower than ours your growth rate is higher than ours how did you do it how did you do it i think of people like you that put me in and people like congressman brown congressman sawyer congressman fingerhut and the others we won by the narrowest of margins if joel hyatt s opponent had defeated senator glenn last time the entire economic plan would have come crashing down and it would not have passed because we carried it by a single vote this election matters in times of change where people are uncertain the airwaves are full of misinformation and people do not know it matters whether you vote for people who have the courage to change and take on the tough problems and do the tough thing what is in fashion today is talking tough and acting soft i believe in what teddy roosevelt said maybe the last great republican president talk soft act tough that s what we ought to do but there is reason for hope we passed family and medical leave to empower families to be successful workers and successful parents after seven years of gridlock and a couple of vetoes we finally passed the brady bill after seven years seven years in which it could not be passed we passed more legislation and had more agreements to expand our trade to generate jobs for americans and for people in ohio in the last year than in any year in the past 30 years we passed more legislation to help states and localities and private businesses retrain and educate people for more head start international standards of excellence for our schools to apprenticeships for the kids that don t go to college to lower college loans for interest rates on college loans listen to this for 20 million americans so that more people can afford to go to college from working class middle class families now that s what we have been doing there and if you don t know about that it s because others are more interested in other issues but that is what we have been doing there and we need doers in the united states congress there have been some issues on which we have received some bipartisan help and for that i am very grateful i would love it if it happened on every issue but when it comes to pivotal issues like health care i can do no better than the distinguished republican congressman from iowa fred grandy who complained the other day that the republicans had been ordered not to cooperate with the administration to try to achieve our common goal of universal health care for all americans i don t care whether people are republicans or democrats i don t even care how they re going to vote in the next election i think they all ought to have health care even if they ought to change their politics this is not a political issue it s an american issue we cannot solve it without american doers in the united states congress now let me say that i am in spite of everything full of hope look at the week the united states had this week the king of jordan the prime minister of israel with strong support from the united states coming to washington to put an end to the state of war and to commit to create a full decent lasting peace between them after all these years of separation after a year and a half of hard work on our part the president of russia notifies me that yes russian troops will withdraw entirely from central and eastern europe by august 31st for the first time since the end of world war ii there will be no russian troops there we will be a safer place we confirmed a brilliant new justice of the supreme court we learned that our growth rate was 3 7 percent in the second quarter of this year our military swung into action in a courageous and bold way in rwanda to help save the lives of the people there the united states had a good week last week and the congress voted out the crime bill it will be on the floor this week 100 000 police officers three strikes and you re out 8 billion in prevention programs to give something to say yes to not just something to say no to an assault weapons ban a ban on handgun possession by minors unless they re under the supervision of adults and funds to make our schools safe so kids don t have to duck under their desks when the shooting starts that s a big deal and all that happened last week and for the first time in history we will now have we now have on the floor of the congress the first time in history on the floor of both the senate and house there bills that would guarantee health care to all americans and i want to say this just this in closing we have waiting 60 years through presidents of both parties to try to figure out a way to cover every american we are the only major country in the world that not only does not provide coverage for all american working families we are going in reverse ten years ago 88 percent of our people were insured today only 83 percent are five years ago there were 5 million more americans with health insurance than have it today 5 million americans living and working in the united states of america today had health insurance five years ago and do not have it today and what s worse is we know what works we know that the simplest easiest thing to do is to ask employers and employees to share the responsibility of buying private insurance we know it works from looking at other countries i just came back from germany i met with hundreds of military families who are coming home the only issue they said was mr president don t let us come home to an america without health care for our children we ve been covered in the military we see how it works in germany in germany everybody pays everybody s covered it s a world class health care system they ve got world class pharmaceuticals they spend 8 5 percent of their income to cover everybody we spend over 14 percent of our income to cover 83 percent and leave one in six americans uncovered i think we can do better but the best example is close to home for 20 years hawaii hawaii has covered everybody now if you ve ever been to hawaii you know everything in hawaii is more expensive than it is on the mainland except health care where small businesses pay rates that are 30 percent lower than any other place why because if everybody has to pay their fair share if everybody has to pay their fair share then you have everybody doing what s happened in this cleveland business partnership here where small businesses have been able to buy cheaper insurance insurance goes down for everybody and coverage goes up if you just try to reform the insurance system insurance rates go up if you put more sick people in people stop covering the pool gets smaller and the rates go up again why should we not simply do what works and i want to close with this this should not be a political thing in 1971 the president of the united states richard nixon and the man who is now the ranking republican on the senate finance committee senator robert packwood from oregon introduced a bill that required employers and employees to split the cost of health care to cover everybody so i say to the republicans in the congress let s have a bipartisan american solution you go back to where richard nixon was 23 years ago i ll meet you halfway and we ll take care of the american people with people like joel hyatt in the senate thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton30 7 94b bill_clinton well first let me thank all of you for coming out to see hillary and me we are delighted to be back in ohio and glad to be back in cleveland and i know i started the baseball season here so i know you re all really thrilled at how well the indians are doing and i hope there won t be a strike is it working now let me just say a it keeps dying can you hear it now all right we ll try again as you know i m here on behalf of joel hyatt s campaign i m proud to be here helping him i also want to say how delighted i am to be here with congressman louis stokes sherrod brown and eric fingerhut and i want to make just a couple of points when i came here seeking the presidency and ohio gave me the votes first to be nominated and then to be elected i knew that this was a state which was really the heartland of america where people were more or less evenly divided by party but where everybody wanted this country to work again for ordinary americans and i made some commitments to you that i d work on restoring the economy bringing the american people together instead of dividing us making the government work for ordinary people again and strengthening our communities and our families at the grass roots and let me just say that if you look at what has happened we have worked very hard often against bitter bitter opposition to make this country work we adopted a plan to reduce the deficit after the other party had the white house for 12 years and quadrupled the debt without a single solitary vote from the other side we passed the biggest deficit reduction plan in history reduced spending by 255 billion gave tax cuts to 500 000 working families in the state of ohio alone asked 47 000 who can afford it to pay higher taxes to pay the debt down now what has happened we the democrats alone without any help unfortunately from congress from the other party and reduced the federal government to its lowest size since kennedy was president we have taken 700 billion off the national debt that would have been there before we came in and passed our economic plan and what has been the result 3 8 million new jobs a 1 5 percent drop in the unemployment rate the largest number of new businesses in any year since the end of world war ii this plan is working and we need to keep sherrod and eric and lou in the congress and elect joel hyatt to keep america s economy going the other party they always talked about how tough they were on crime but for six years under two administrations there is no crime bill last week the members of the senate and the house voted for to put on the floor of this congress this week the toughest anti crime bill in the history of the united states so those are two reasons that i ran for president on restoring the economy helping to deal with crime i just want to say one last thing this last week was a great week for america the king of jordan and the prime minister of israel came to washington to end their war and to pledge to work for peace and we ve been working hard on that peace for our children after working hard on it for a year and a half the president of russia called me and told me that russian troops would get out of central and eastern europe for the first time since world war ii making the world more peaceful for these children here but i m telling you what we owe these kids is not just peace in the world but peace on our streets and peace of mind that means we need to pass the crime bill we need to provide health care for all americans and we need to do it now let me say to you i went to washington hoping against hope and against all the evidence that i could work with people of both parties to make this country a better place and i have done everything i could to overcome the kind of inertia and opposition we have faced and i just want you to know if you like the fact that the american economy s recovering if you like the fact that we re going to finally do something serious about crime if you like the fact that after years we voted family leave we voted for the brady bill we voted to make the american people safer then you ought to keep these people in congress and send joel hyatt to the senate so we can do things not stop things this is a country that s can do and we re going to do if you put people in the congress who believe in making america a better place thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton30 7 97 bill_clinton thank you very much are those arkansas flags i see back there thank you for waving them let me say to all of you i want to begin by thanking john kates for that introduction congratulations for passing the board of review for the eagle scout rank i didn t notice whether john had a public speaking merit badge on his sash but i d say he earned one tonight standing up in front of all of you to introduce me i think he did a great job let s give him a hand i want to say to jere ratcliffe roy roberts jack creighton to all the officials of the boy scouts here thank you for what you do with our young people i m happy to be joined tonight by the secretary of the navy john dalton the secretary of the air force sheila widnall the under secretary of the army joe reeder and the chief of naval operations the top ranking naval officer in the united states and a proud eagle scout admiral jay johnson they re right over here and we re all glad to be with you tonight again let me say to major general dennis malcor the commander of the national scout jamboree task force to all the scout leaders and to the men and women of the armed forces who are helping with this jamboree i am grateful to you for supporting these fine young americans it s a great privilege for me to be here to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first national scout jamboree a pleasure to serve and an honor to serve as your honorary president as has already been said ever since 1910 when william boyce founded the boy scouts of america every president has proudly served as your honorary president for every president has recognized what a great contribution scouting has made and is making to the character of our young people and therefore to the character and future of the united states of america i like many members of our administration was exposed to scouting at a young age i began as a cub scout in hot springs pack 1 ramble elementary school ouachita area council and those are the guys that are waving those flags back there so don t boo them too hard they re just sticking up for one of their own when i was preparing to come out here to visit you i was reminded of how the boy scouts got its start in our country as the result of a good turn i reviewed once again the classic story of how william d boyce lost his way in a dense london fog and received help from a british scout who refused to accept a tip just think about how that one good turn set in motion millions upon millions of other good turns over the years i know that john kates the scout who introduced me and the other young eagle scouts whom i met before coming up here have done their good turns john his for many older people in his hometown of detroit where he s mobilized more than three dozen volunteers to bring hot meals to elderly folks who don t have families to help them during the holidays just yesterday scout master andrew leahy of brentwood missouri did a good turn on pure instinct and reflex with an impressive tackling form as well surely you have heard that andrew helped the capitol police apprehend a man who almost ran down several pedestrians including a member of the united states congress in his car i believe that he is here tonight and if he is i want to thank him personally for that good turn i don t know if there s a scout merit badge for tackling dangerous people who are violating the law but if there is one i think he ought to get it you may know that last april i and all former presidents and general colin powell sponsored a presidents service summit in philadelphia at that summit we said that we wanted every young person in america every single one to have the benefit of five things a safe childhood a healthy childhood a childhood with a good education a childhood with an adult mentor and the chance for every child himself or herself to serve in every community in the country in other words what we said was we challenged all the adults in america to engage in citizen service another way of doing a good turn the boy scouts of america as much or more than any other organization in this country has answered our call for the boy scouts committed after the presidents service summit to provide 200 million hours of community service through the year 2000 i thank you for that commitment building community and character is what the boy scouts have always been about so today i ask all of you to help spread the word about doing good turns all of you here each in your own way are future leaders of this country when you return home from the jamboree please encourage your classmates and your friends to join you in committing to community service if every young person in america would give back to their community in the way you do just imagine what we could do imagine how many fewer problems we could have so many times i have wished that every young person in america had the chance to be a part of scouting and tonight i see why more clearly than ever so i hope you ll go home and help others to serve and learn the joy that you share by the service you do and the next time you recite the scout oath i hope you will remember that it s not just your fellow scouts your parents and the people you know well but your whole nation that is counting on you we need you to remain focused on the strong values you learned in scouting to remember that character counts and service counts we need you if we re going to build our communities and bring our people together across all the lines that divide us we need you if we re going to lead our country into the 21st century still the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and democracy and prosperity we need you if we re going to have a country where every person without regard to race or station in life who is responsible enough to work for it can live out his or her dreams we need you to keep this country coming together and coming ever closer to the ideals on which we were founded that we are one nation under god all created equal we have to work harder and harder and harder to build that one america strong and united and good over 150 years ago the astute french observer alexis de toqueville said america is great because america is good you help to keep america good and i know you will throughout your lives thank you for what you do thank you for what you are and thank you for what you will become good luck and god bless you all dem wjclinton30 8 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you i want to thank the mayor and everybody who s worked so hard to make this day happen i thank those who sang and performed before especially the egyptian high school band let s give them a hand over there the jerry ford combo i understand helen bishaw made this wonderful long sign beautiful sign thank you very much folks i love to come to southern illinois when i was governor of my state i chaired a study of the lower mississippi valley and i used to come to southern illinois and i know that senator paul simon s home is not far from here and you know he s retiring from the senate and i hope you ll elect dick durbin to take his place because we need him desperately there but paul simon has served you and the united states with dignity and honor and distinction and i want him to come up here and say just two minutes of thanks to you and make a few comments because he is retiring after a great career and you need to express your appreciation to him senator simon but what is at stake here is our future i see young people along the front row here about seven or eight years old when you think about what you re doing don t just think about yourselves think about those young people and their future i have like al gore mentioned all of us have respect for bob dole but the candidate for president the candidate for vice president who will stand for the future of these young people and a better future for our country those candidates are bill clinton and al gore and we have to do the job that needs to be done thank you senator and to congressman costello congressman proshard all these legislative candidates and university officials and others who are up on the stage with me ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to be back here i loved coming in on the bus and i looked at the bean fields and the river bottoms and when i came into town i felt like i was home and i saw the big welcome on the laborers building it even had a billboard up there i appreciated that then their leader was back here saying you know we re closer to arkansas than chicago these people talk like you do you don t have an accent here mr president you don t have an accent here we have had a wonderful week i started off on a train going from west virginia to kentucky to ohio to michigan to indiana to the democratic convention in chicago to prove that we re on the right track to the 21st century but also to see people like you who never see a president and then we came back to our bus so we could come down here i learned today that the last presidents who came to cairo were teddy roosevelt in 1907 and william howard taft in 1909 i don t know what the others were doing but i m glad to be back and it s high time my fellow americans last night i had a chance to talk at the democratic convention about what we were going to do in the next four years to build that bridge to the 21st century and tonight i just want to say again to you the choice here is about more than a choice between two candidates it is a choice between the future and the past a choice between a philosophy that we re all in this together we have an obligation to help each other make the most of our own lives and a theory that you re on your own and we hope you do well it s a choice between people who believe as al gore and i do that we have a responsibility to help you make this a strong community and help give your children the best lives i was asking here right just when i was standing here the congressman said half of the police department in this town was funded by the crime bill i fought hard for it they fought against it we were right we have invested a lot of money in this area in job retraining i think there ought to be more of it they think there ought to be less of it that s a clear signal you cannot expect people to go through the changes we have had in the american economy unless we do more and more quickly to give people immediate access no matter their age to whatever education and training they need to get a new job and a better job it is critical to our future i m told you have the best job corps retraining center in the country right here that s the kind of thing we need to do for everybody and let me just say you re going to have some races for the legislature here i want to talk about how all of these races fit together if we re going to build a bridge to the century we have to keep growing this economy until it reaches every delta town and every inner city neighborhood in the united states it s not enough to say there are 10 million more jobs we want to know there s a job for everybody that lives in the mississippi delta who wants to go to work and a good job last night i said to the american people i say to you again here tonight we changed the welfare laws and we said we re going to have a new bargain with people who are poor and out of work and able bodied with little children we will guarantee health care we will guarantee food we will guarantee child care but now the income has to come from effort well that s fine now i say we have to go out and create the jobs and i outlined a plan last night in chicago to the american people to invest several billion dollars all of it paid for in my balanced budget plan in poor rural areas and small towns in our inner cities to create jobs to give incentives to invest in those areas the best untapped market for the united states today is those parts of the united states which haven t gotten investment which haven t fully recovered which need more jobs that s what we need to do and we have a strategy to do it i want everybody walking across that bridge to the 21st century i don t intend to see the lower mississippi valley left behind i want your children to have the best education your parents to have the best jobs and your people to have the best future that is my commitment to you let me just say a word about education al gore and i in the next four years are committed to seeing that every classroom in america in the remotest mountain village in the poorest city neighborhood up and down this delta every single classroom and library not only has the computers they need with the teachers trained to help use them but is connected to an information superhighway that will give for the first time in the history of this country every child rich or poor immediate access to the highest quality information available on any subject to any child in any school in the united states or in the world that is worth fighting for we are committed to the right kind of tax cuts for working families a tax cut in the form of a 500 credit for young children a tax cut in the form of a 1 500 credit to make two years of education after high school as universal in four years as a high school education is today we ought to make it possible for every family to go to a community college at least and have it paid for and not have to worry about it through tax cuts we ought to give every family with a child in college or a parent in college a deduction for the cost of tuition up to 10 000 a year we ought to educate america and do it now so i say to you if you want that kind of future if you want the feeling you had tonight on this beautiful lawn of this magnificent old library to carry you through if you want to feel on election day the way the vice president says and feel that way all through the next four years you have to help me build that bridge to the 21st century will you do that will you help us for 68 days to talk to your friends and neighbors about going into the future instead of going back will you do that god bless you stay with us and we will make the kind of future you and your children deserve thank you we re delighted to be here dem wjclinton30 9 97 bill_clinton mr vice president secretary cohen secretary albright secretary gober national security advisor burger director tenet general mccaffrey to the service secretaries the joint chiefs the unified commanders in chief members of congress members of our armed forces to all the friends of general shalikashvili who are here today including former secretary perry former chairmen and members of the joint chiefs former officials of the department of defense we all come together in grateful tribute to john and joan shalikashvili this is frankly a bittersweet day for me i am full of pride but also some regret for the last four years i have counted on shali for his wisdom his counsel his leadership he has become an exceptional advisor and a good friend someone i knew i could always depend upon when the lives of our troops or the interests of america were on the line and i will miss him very much general shali is a great american with a great american story a childhood seared by war he has given his life to the cause of peace from an immigrant learning english he has become the shining symbol of what america is all about he s never forgotten what his country gave him nor has he ever stopped giving back to it his service to our nation spanning 39 years rises from the ranks of army private to the highest military office in the land of course the road even for him has not always been smooth i am told that after a grueling first day at officer candidate school private john shali sneaked out of his barracks looking for a place to resign our nation can be very grateful that probably for the only time in his entire career he failed in his mission i am convinced that when future students look upon this time they will rank john shalikashvili as among the greatest chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff america ever had greatness is something that cannot be bestowed like a medal a ribbon a star it cannot be taught or bought it comes in the end only from within general shali has said that the three indispensable traits of a great leader are competence care and character he ought to know he embodies them his competence shines in the sterling record of innovation and achievement managing the downsizing of our forces while upgrading their capability and readiness upholding the most rigorous standards for the use of those forces in the world where threats to our survival have faded but threats to our interests and values have not dramatically improving joint doctrine and training and taking joint planning far into the future for the very first time and of course helping bring europe together at least in liberty democracy and peace one of the proudest moments of my presidency was standing with shali in warsaw as we celebrated nato s enlargement and welcomed the people of his original homeland back home to the family of freedom and if the baseline measure of a chairman s competence is successful military operations shali has filled a resume that would turn others olive drab with envy in the last four years our troops have been tested in more than 40 operations from bosnia to haiti the taiwan straits iraq rwanda liberia and more our armed forces have performed superbly with shali at the helm our troops trust him because they know how much he cares for them they have seen that caring in his constant contact with our servicemen and women in the way he warms their hearts with his pride in them in the humility the honesty the graciousness the respect he always shows to others in the wonderful way he listens even to bearers of bad news our troops know that he never expects their gratitude or applause but he does want to sharpen their capabilities improve their welfare and lift their morale and in his most important duty to make sure that whenever they go into danger the planning is superb the risks are minimized and every reasonable measure is taken to ensure their success and safe return for shali caring transcends our obligations even to one another he believes in america s unique ability to help others around the world sheltering freedom defending democracy relieving fear and despair he knows that what sets our troops apart is not just their courage strength and skills but also the ideals they serve the hope they inspire the spirit they represent as some may recall during the crisis in haiti shali visited with refugees in the camps observing and listening with quiet understanding the quiet understanding of one who had also been in that position and he ordered improvements to make those camps as comfortable as possible to alleviate boredom and brighten hopes and bring toys to children at christmas that story also revealed something about his character a clear sense of what is right and wrong a man whose conscience is always his guide i ll miss a lot of things about shali but perhaps most of all i ll miss the integrity he always displayed in being my closest military advisor in every conversation we ever had he never minced words he never postured or pulled punches he never shied away from tough issues or tough calls and most important he never shied away from doing what he believed was the right thing on more than one occasion many more than one occasion he looked at me and i could see the pain in his eyes that he couldn t tell me what i wanted to hear and what he wished he could say but with a clear and firm voice and a direct piercing gaze he always told me exactly what he thought the truth was no president could ever ask for more shali has had the support of a proud and dedicated family his son brant his brother himself a distinguished green beret veteran his sister and of course there are his dogs i understand they are the only living creatures who have never obeyed his orders and most importantly there is joan joan you have been a terrific support for our men and women in uniform they know you are always looking out for them and their families from around the corner to around the world you were the chairman s personal inspector general when it came to how family are cared for no one had more commitment a better eye or a bigger heart and we thank you general very soon now you and joan will be settling into your new home in washington state you can tuck your uniform into a drawer you can carry an umbrella you can even grow a beard maybe you ll actually even open that hardware store you have been talking about i don t know if you know the first thing about power tools and mixing paint but the brand you have to offer is the top of the line our nation is safer our armed forces are stronger and our world is a better place because of your service thank you for all you have done god bless you and godspeed dem wjclinton30 9 98 bill_clinton thank you very much let me begin by saying to kay mcclure we thank you for being here all of us who have been a part of this effort to tame the deficit and to turn our economy around we did it for people like you and i think you made everybody here proud to be an american and everybody who was part of that project proud of that i d like to thank the members of the cabinet and administration who are here and the former cabinet members i would also like to say that we invited henry fowler who was president johnson s treasury secretary the last time the budget was balanced to come here but he couldn t come because of hip surgery our thoughts are with him and his thoughts are with us today i want to thank senator moynihan and senator robb senator rockefeller senator breaux senator conrad senator dorgan mr sabo who was our chair along with senator moynihan back in 93 and congressmen boyd brown edwards filner congresswoman furse congressman hastings hinojosa markey vento wise and congressman thurmond for being here the vice president also noted that there were several former members of congress here who voted for the budget in 1993 there are quite a number here and since they most of them who are here paid quite a high price for doing what makes it possible for us to be here today i d like to ask them to stand would every member of congress who is no longer a member of congress who was here and voted for that budget in 93 please stand thank you very much thank you mark twain once said that two things nobody should ever have to watch being made are laws and sausages and the aftermath sometimes is not very pretty they and many others had to endure being accused of raising taxes on people they didn t being accused of not lowering taxes for people they did and all manner of other perfidy to try to bring us to this moment to break the spell that had gripped america and led to a quadrupling of the debt of this country in the previous 12 years and a lot of the people who are still here took very significant risks as well and set the stage for what has been done since let me ask you to begin by just thinking about what 29 years means twenty nine years ago neil armstrong walked on the moon bonanza was one of our top rated tv shows and sammy sosa was one year old we have waited a long time for this not quite as long as we waited for roger maris record to be broken but nearly for 29 years the last day of the fiscal year was not a day of celebration but a day we were handed a powerful reminder of our government s inability to live within its means in the 12 years before this administration took office the debt quadrupled partisan gridlock intensified and a crushing debt was being imposed on our children these deficits hobbled economic growth spiked interest rates robbed too many people of their chance at the american dream the end of this fiscal year obviously is different as the flashing sign behind me shows tonight at midnight america puts an end to three decades of deficits and launches a new era of balance budgets and surpluses while the numbers will not be official until the end of the month we expect the 1998 surplus to be about 70 billion thank you this is the largest surplus on record and as a percentage of our economy the largest one since the 1950s our economy is the strongest in a generation that s why we see the deficit clock has become a surplus clock it will tally the growing opportunities of the 21st century it is a landmark achievement not just for those in the room who have played a role in it but indeed for all the american people and it will be a gift giving achievement for generations to come i want you to think about what this means for our democracy and also what it means for our obligations now first and foremost as our previous speaker so eloquently noted balancing the budget has brought tangible economic benefits to the american people in the 1980s high interest rates kept entrepreneurs from starting new businesses tight money made it harder for people to buy a new home when i came to washington six years ago nearly everybody felt our economy was drifting college graduates were having a hard time finding jobs factory workers were seeing their industries fall behind foreign competition the deficit then was 290 billion and projected to be over 350 billion this year alone but even more than the economic problems the deficit seemed to be exhibit a for those who claimed that america was in decline the notion seems preposterous today but it s worth remembering that just a decade ago the idea of america in decline was widely accepted in some circles not only here but around the world there were works of scholarship suggesting we were bound to go the way of other powers who had risen and then fallen there was a little defeatism that became part of the conventional wisdom here in washington symbolized by this national government that was inefficient ineffectual and insolvent and therefore the government became the poster child for what people said was happening to america the two political parties seemed inevitably locked in a series of false choices between old ideas competing in a very new time but a funny thing happened on the road to american decline the american people stepped in just as we have at every critical juncture in our history the people came together once again to become the captains of our fate the commanders of our destiny that is really what we celebrate here today the american people simply demanded a new direction they demanded that our government put its house in order they demanded that america s greatness be reasserted that opportunity be provided again to all who are willing to work for it they demanded that we be able to say with confidence that the greatest days of this country still lie before us and so in 1993 the members of our party in congress some at the cost of their careers took the courageous action which began the road we celebrate today a new economic strategy that reduced the deficit by more than 90 percent then four years later congress put progress over partisanship and passed a bipartisan balanced budget agreement that closed the rest of the deficit gap and will keep us in balance structurally for many years to come the deficit reduction has saved the american people more than a trillion dollars on the national debt the new strategy has helped lead to lower interest rates higher investments unprecedented prosperity we have already heard about that the unemployment rate is the lowest in 28 years the percentage of americans on welfare the lowest in 29 years the inflation rate the lowest in 33 years more than 6 million american families have realized their dreams of owning a first home another 10 million have refinanced the homes they had today home ownership is the highest in history and for millions of americans these lower interest rates have amounted to an unofficial tax cut of tens of billions of dollars making a college education a new car a family vacation more affordable now balancing the budget and increasing our investment in our people is the core of a new vision of government one that lives within its means one that is the smallest in 35 years but with the vice president s leadership has been redesigned to meet the challenges of this new era one that cuts wasteful spending but also makes significant investments in education health and the environment we have done a lot to make this new economy but we now have to do more to see that all of our people can participate in it fully our success has helped to inspire confidence here and around the world six years ago when i went to my first g 7 meeting in tokyo every leader told me that america was holding the rest of the world back and that unless we were willing to get our deficit down we would always be a drag on the world we were taking money away we were keeping interest high that it was unfair well what we have done in the last six years has also helped to spark economic growth elsewhere but now that there is so much turbulence for other reasons in other parts of the world it is important to remember that our growing economy is today serving as a bulwark of stability in the rest of the world and that without it the rest of the world would be in much worse shape indeed now let me just ask you very briefly before we close in this celebration what are we going to do with this moment of celebration of the balanced budget and unprecedented prosperity what exactly are we going to do with it that really is before the american people today we see from troubled economies around the world in my view that this is not a time to simply celebrate and rest it is not a time to be distracted from our mission of strengthening our country for the new century of leading the world toward prosperity peace and freedom of bringing our people together for the sake of our children now that we ve balanced the budget i think the first thing we ought to do is commit ourselves to save social security for the 21st century the system is in very good shape now but everyone knows in its present terms it is not sustainable when the baby boomers retire and that if we do not act now when the baby boomers do retire we will be confronted with two very unpleasant choices one is to lower the standard of living of the baby boomers so that their children can continue on with their business the other is to lower the standard of living of their children and their ability to raise our grandchildren so that we can live in the same manner that seniors today are living neither choice need be made if we act now with discipline and use the fact that we re going to have this surplus to make a down payment and to begin with deliberation to save social security it is a huge issue now i am well aware that it is a popular thing particularly right here just four weeks and change before an election day to serve up a tax cut to say well we ve got a surplus we re going to give you some of your money back but all of us know this surplus was run up over the years or the deficit over the years was made smaller because we actually were taking in more money in social security taxes than we were paying out and all of us know that this problem is looming out there and will need money to fix and so i think the american people have waited 29 years and i think most americans would like to see the ink change from red to black and then just dry a little before we put it at risk but if you think about this issue there is hardly anything that goes to the core of what we are as a people more than our sense that we owe an obligation to both our parents and our children and if we squander this surplus and start spending a little here a little there a little yonder on the tax cuts just because we re a few weeks before an election before we take care of this what are we going to do when times get tough and we still have to take care of it so i say to all of you again i think that s the first thing that we ought to do we are not against tax cuts there are tax cuts in this budget as has already been said for education for child care to help small businesses provide pensions for their employees there are tax cuts for environmental investments that help to cut energy bills but we don t take any money out of the surplus we adopted a disciplined framework for the future in 1997 we ought not to depart from it we had a bipartisan commitment to that framework in 1997 and we ought not to depart from it the second thing we ought to do is to recognize that we have money set aside in the budget to invest in education and we re still a long way from having the ability to say that every american child can get a world class education we ought to fund smaller classes we ought to fund the initiative to revitalize repair or build 5 000 schools to hook up all our classrooms to the internet to give kids in troubled communities mentoring programs that guarantees they can go on to college after school programs summer schools programs the kind of things that don t treat them as failures just because the system they ve been in has failed we ought to pass the patients bill of rights for the 160 million americans that are in managed care to put health care first and make sure you re managing for a healthier america not the other way around we ought to keep the economy going and maintain our leadership in the global economy by funding our fair share of the international monetary fund because as alan greenspan said the other day we cannot forever maintain our position as an island of prosperity in a sea of distress now that s what we ought to be doing so we re here to celebrate but this country is here now after 220 years still again at the top of its game having totally debunked all the defeatists who said we were in decline but let s not forget why it happened don t you ever forget that these seven people back here stood up and a lot like them and laid their jobs on the line for ac s future now when no one has that kind of risk nobody is being asked to cut their throat and give up a job they love and work they believe in to do the right thing no one is being asked to do that how can we possibly walk away from this session of congress when there is no pain in doing the right thing not the kind of pain they had to endure without saying we re going to save social security first put education as our first investment priority pass a patients bill of rights and keep america and the world s economy growing how can we do that we owe it to the people who made the sacrifice that brought us to this day to build for another day we should not sit on or celebrate this balanced budget we should build on it thank you very much dem wjclinton31 1 95 bill_clinton thank you very much you know for a president who has been derided from time to time on the pages of the wall street journal and other places for being too concerned with diversity i feel that i should apologize tonight for giving you such an overconcentration of irish blarney in the last three speeches i hardly know what to say and even if i do i ll just repeat something they were wonderful i want to say first to senator kerry i thank you for your leadership and your wise counsel to me on so many things for your occasional constructive criticism which is always helpful and for always thinking about how we can reach out to people who aren t in this room and who have been vulnerable to the siren s song of the other party we should do more of that because we re working hard to represent them to help them i also want to say that when you introduced theresa tonight i was sitting here thinking that next only to the president of the united states you re about to become the most over married man in the whole country and i congratulate you both and i wish you well and godspeed i want to say how elated i was to be a part of a couple of events for senator kennedy up here in the last campaign whatever labels you put on democrats the truth is that all elections are about two things whether a majority of the people identify with you and think you re on their side and whether you ve got a message for the future in this last election without apology with great energy and gusto and courage when all the national trends were going the other way and when no one could any longer seriously claim that massachusetts was just a different state ted kennedy told the people of this state what he stood for what he had done and most importantly of all why he wanted another term he made the election about the future and the people of massachusetts and he won and if the democrats will make the elections of 1996 about the people of the united states and the future of our country we will win as well i want to thank alan and fred and all the others on the committee they re the only people i know who are more indefatigable than i am when it comes to trying to push our party s agenda and move this country forward they re the sort of energizer bunnies of the national democratic party and i am grateful i wish i could put them on television the way mario cuomo and ann richards were did you all see them on the super bowl i don t know about you but i ve had three dozen bags of doritos since then i can hardly walk and i want them to stay on i mean write doritos and tell them you ate lots of those doritos and that s the only way we can get equal time with the republicans on the air waves i want to thank your party chair joan menard and reverend charles stith my longtime friend your secretary of state president bill bulger speaker flaherty and the attorney general all the others who are here and a special word of thanks to your wonderful mayor tom menino for making me feel so welcome here today you know when senator kerry and senator kennedy and i went with the mayor to meet with that youth council today and they had a young person from every part of this great city from all different ethnic backgrounds and obviously different sets of personal conditions and we were sitting there just having a family conversation about what these young people were interested in and they kept asking me well here s a problem but they didn t ask me what are you going to do about it they said what do you think we can do about it it was astonishing over and over what do you think we can do about it and i thought to myself if we had enough kids like this all over america our country is in pretty good shape and it s a great tribute to boston and to the ethic of citizenship and service which is vibrant and alive and burning here i was so glad to appreciate what senator dodd said about the national service program i know all of you must be very proud of eli segal from boston for the way he has run that program it is a brilliant thing that is lining up possibilities all across our country immunizing children in south texas rebuilding housing projects in detroit helping people in all the natural disasters in california restocking the salmon in the pacific northwest you cannot imagine what those young people are doing all across this country and i have to tell you that if it hadn t been for eli segal i m not sure we ever could have done it the way he conceived it and executed it and the next time he comes home to boston give him a pat on the back because he s been magnificent i want to thank my longtime friend don fowler for agreeing to join this team with senator dodd the real reason don came up here tonight is so there would be two southern rednecks book ending all these irish guys when they were talking don understands what part of our problems are everybody talks about change but clinton s ninth law of politics is everyone is for change in general but against it in particular everybody is for lowering the deficit the problem is when you have to lower it that s what senator kennedy was talking about we didn t get much help when we actually had to do it it s kind of like everybody is for going to the dentist but if i tell you i made you an appointment for 7 30 a m in the morning you have second thoughts so to whatever extent i bear a responsibility for some of our party s difficulties because i had a drill to the tooth of america for the last two years trying to whip this thing back in shape i regret that but i don t regret the fact that we do have the economy back on track we do have the deficit coming down we do have this country in a position now where we can think about how to give tax relief to hardworking americans and invest in education and still continue to bring the deficit down i don t regret that it was tough it was hard and i thank the people of the congress who did it you know don and i come from part of the country where it s been hard to be a democrat for over 20 years now and part of it is this whole deal everybody is for change in general but against it in particular one of my favorite stories from my previous life as governor of arkansas was going to 100th birthday party of somebody with my junior senator david pryor we went up to this guy we were amazed at what good shape he was in astonished i said you know you have all your faculties you hear well you see well you speak well he said yeah and i said you re really just in great shape aren t you he said i am and i said boy i bet you ve seen a lot of changes he said son i sure have and i ve been against every one of them the more you think about that the sadder it ll get but anyway there it is there is some of that out there but our people also really do want change they want us to stick up for the principles of the democratic party but they also want us to reach out a hand of partnership and as your president i have to be the leader of our party and the leader of our country i feel very indebted to chris dodd and to don fowler for being willing to put aside a lot of their other activities to take the time to help to rebuild and reinvigorate and revitalize our party i know i know in my bones i can feel it that if we can stay true to our principles and clarify our vision for the american people and say what we are doing and where we want this country to go that the fact that we honestly represent and care more about the vast majority of the american people will manifest itself not simply in massachusetts but throughout the united states within the next two years and that should be our common commitment and our common cause the whole purpose of politics after all is to improve the life of people read the declaration of independence as i said in the state of the union nobody s really done any better than that we pledge our lives and our fortunes and our sacred honor to the idea that all of us are created equal and endowed by god with the rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness not a guarantee of happiness but the right to pursue it the right to succeed the right to fail for 200 years we ve had to work to refine that phrase like a piece of steel and we reach a certain point and we realize oh we ve got a whole new set of circumstances or our understanding was painfully limited that s what the gettysburg address was all about i don t know if you read gary will s terrific book lincoln at gettysburg but he basically argues that mr lincoln rewrote the constitution with the gettysburg address by making the spirit of the constitution the letter that s what it was all about he said how could we be so dumb to have slavery and say all people are created equal so from now on that s what this means and you look what happened when theodore roosevelt and woodrow wilson tried to redefine the obligations of our national government to protect the american people from the abuses of the industrial age or when franklin roosevelt ran on a platform of limited government and balancing the budget but realized that he couldn t let the country go into the tubes that he had to lift people s spirits and lift their circumstances and give them ways to work together if you look at some of our most difficult times they re the times of transition when we re moving from one arrow to another and people can t give you a clear road map in the middle of the depression i remember my grandfather telling me as poor as people were there was a certain happiness of spirit people felt after roosevelt got in and everybody knew that they were working together and they were going somewhere i told a lot of people over the last month i d just been astonished every time i go to california and i see those poor people they ve had an earthquake they ve had floods they ve had fires some of the happiest people i ve ever met are people in those relief shelters in california they get together all walks of life i was in one of those flood relief shelters the other day in northern california in a little unincorporated town called rio linda where mr limbaugh had his first radio program and i was in a little methodist church talking to all these people and this old gal came up to me and put her arm around me and she said mr president i m a republican but i m sure glad to see you like i was going to fall out or something why because they were there they didn t care what their party was or their philosophy they were there trying to do something good and they felt that they were part of something bigger than themselves in a period of transition like this we re going from the cold war era and the industrial age to the post cold war era and information age we re going through enormous changes in they way work is organized and the way the society works we ve got all these cultural tensions in our country just eating people up in times like this people tend to be disoriented and out of focus and it is difficult for them to do the work of citizenship and to believe that we can come together and do the things we ought to do and we have to find ways to recreate in ordinary normal circumstances the spirit that i see when adversity strikes america that s what the mayor did by bringing those kids into that youth council today and that s what we have to do as americans the democrats need to forthrightly say we believe even in the 21st century even in the information age even when we trade in our mainframes for our pcs there is a role for us working together as a people that the market is a wonderful thing and we want it to work but it won s solve all the problems that we still need the public sector to expand opportunity even as it shrinks bureaucracy to empower people to make the most of their own lives no matter what their circumstances to enhance our security at home and abroad and we don t have all the answers because a lot of the problems are new but we know that if we are guided by what i call the new covenant the idea that we will create opportunity and challenge the american people to be more responsible and that s how we ll build our communities and restore citizenship we can do quite well it s amazing how many things i ve had to do as president that i knew would be unpopular like that economic plan it wasn t unpopular in massachusetts because ted kennedy defended his vote and if everybody else had done that they d have found the results more satisfactory i remember when but we had to do that we couldn t just keep ballooning the deficit we d never have gotten interest rates down in 1993 we would never have gotten this economy going again we had to do it and we have to continue to do things that are unpopular it was unpopular to say that the time had come for the dictators in haiti to go but it had to be done we had to stand up for freedom in our hemisphere we couldn t deal with the consequences of walking away from that and the commitment we had made we had to do it it was unpopular but it had to be done and i know the surveys say that by 80 to 15 or whatever they said the american people either didn t agree or didn t understand what in the world i m up to in mexico but i want to say to you it might be unpopular but in a time of transition it s the right thing to do today two weeks and a few days after the mexican crisis presented itself after meeting with the leaders of both parties in the congress i decided to commit to a loan guarantee of 20 billion not 40 billion from the emergency stabilization fund something within the control of the president with the support of the leaders of congress of both parties we ve now gotten countries other countries through the international monetary fund to kick in about half what we need which is a good thing but we couldn t wait for two more weeks of congressional debate i don t blame the congressmen for wanting to ask questions i don t blame them for not wanting to vote on this it s a hard sell it s pretty hard to explain in south boston or up in dover new hampshire why this is a good deal for people in new england but here s the basic problem those folks got into a little economic trouble but they didn t deserve as much as they got because a lot of the international financial markets today are controlled by a hundred thousand different forces and when a speculative fervor starts in one direction sometimes it s hard for it to stop when there s been some proper economic balance struck but they ve got a good democracy they believe in free market economics they buy tons of our products they re our third biggest trading partner why is this in the interest of the people of new england well new hampshire s unemployment rate was 7 4 percent when i took office and it s 3 8 percent now and a big reason is they re exporting more that s just one example so our third biggest trading partner is in trouble and they didn t ask us for a grant they didn t ask us for a loan they didn t ask us for a bailout they said would you cosign this note and by the way if we get in trouble and can t pay we ve got a whole bunch of oil and we ll give you some you can sell it and put the money in the bank that s pretty good collateral near as i can figure even 10 years from now we ll still be burning oil we ll be able to use it we ll be able to turn it into money it will be worth something at the bank and they said would you help so we got a 40 billion trading arrangement it s jobs for americans folks those who say well clinton is just bailing out rich investors on wall street most of them will do just fine but if we lose markets if we lose possibilities a lot of people here have built factories and shut them down they re hard to start up again when you ve shut them down you ve got to go through up and down times but it s an important thing it s american jobs we share a vast border down there we have problems along that border illegal immigration and narcotics trafficking this government s trying to help us with both if you have an economic and a political collapse we have more illegal immigration more narcotics trafficking more misery on the streets of america more anxiety for american taxpayers this is the right thing to do and i was glad to take responsibility for it and i know it s not popular but in a time of change not all decisions which have to be made when they have to be made can possibly be popular so i hope you will support it anyway it s in the interest of building the future of the united states thank you thank you thank you very much so much has been said tonight there s not much more for me to say but i want to make a couple of points about what i hope to achieve this year in this new environment for all of our people and i d like to begin by telling you a story when my last secretary of the treasury lloyd bentsen was at his last cabinet meeting preparing to go home to texas after more than three decades of public service to a well deserved retirement with the reputation of being not only one of the wealthiest members of my cabinet but one of the most conservative a man who inspired great confidence all over the world for his policies and his personal strength he said to us as he left you know what i m most worried about here i am in my 70s having had the chance to work for my country all these years having enjoyed all the successes america could bring in the private sector and the public sector you know what i m most worried about i m worried about the growing inequality in america in the fact that so many americans are working harder and harder and harder and falling behind and i don t know how we can preserve our country as we know it unless we can figure out a solution to this problem and i wish that i had left you with one before i retired everybody in that cabinet room was just almost dumbstruck what did he mean he meant that something has changed since president kennedy said a rising tide lifts all boats it doesn t i m honored that by the fact that in 1994 we had the best growth in 10 years the best personal income growth in 10 years the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 25 years that is a very good thing we should be proud of that and the economic management and discipline of this administration certainly had something to do with it and the dramatic improvements in productivity of american businesses and working people had the lion s share to do with it and the fact that we re opening new trading opportunities had something to do with it and the fact that our commerce department and others as has been said are trying to sell american products and services it all had something to do with it but the hard cold fact is people say well why doesn t the administration get credit for this senator kennedy alluded to it well one reason is a lot of people are still working a longer work week than they were 15 years ago they re spending more for the essentials of life but their wages haven t kept up with inflation another million americans in working families lost their health insurance last year once again making us the only and i reiterate the only advanced country in the world with a smaller percentage of working families with health insurance today than had health insurance 10 years ago there was even a study last week that said the average working adult is spending an hour a night less at sleep so if you have less time for leisure if you re not sure you can even afford a vacation much less send your kids to college and you keep reading how great the statistics are and all the rest of your information you get from some more negative source it s not hard to understand how people are a little disoriented plus the fundamental fact is we are moving from one time to another and we aren t there yet in our minds and in our experience therefore it should not be surprising and we should not complain if those of us in public life sometimes become the object of resentment when we can t figure out how to explain in clear unambiguous terms that cut through the fog of the national debate what is going on and what we are trying to do about it and what the people have to do about it that is the great challenge we face today but we should be optimistic about it with all my heart i believe the best days of this country are ahead of us but we have to find a way for the american tide to lift every boat in america we have to find a way for everybody willing to work hard to do well we have to find a way to keep the american dream alive for everyone to grow the middle class and shrink the underclass we have to find a way to rebuild our sense of security i can think of no better way to explain it than what i have been trying to say for three years now our job is to create more opportunity and to challenge the american people to assume more responsibility we have tried to do that we are now in a position where it is my judgment that what we need to do in this coming session of congress is first of all to keep the recovery going secondly not to let the deficit explode thirdly not to permit the fever for cutting government and cutting regulation undercut the fundamental social compact in this country one of the reasons people are so torn up and upset is they re not sure what the deal is anymore the harder they work the more insecure they feel so i say you want to cut spending to our friends in the republican party let us have at it we have cut 255 billion in spending i m going to send you another 140 billion in spending cuts i am all for it but let s not cut head start for children or the school to work program for the non college bound kids let s not cut the nutrition programs and the food programs that keep our people alive let s don t do that you want to cut taxes that s all right i m for that but let s not cut more than we can pay for let s not play funny numbers let s not pay for tax cuts by cutting medicare let s cut spending that we can do without we can do that let s do that and more importantly in my judgment is let s not fool people what we re trying to do is to raise incomes a tax cut raises incomes in the short run we ought to do it in a way that raises incomes in the long run that s why i favor in this education state it ought to be popular finally giving the american people a tax deduction for all education expenses after high school why because that lowers taxes and raises income in the short run but far more important it raises income in the long run and not only the incomes of the people claiming a tax deduction but the incomes of every single american because we have to do a better job of getting more education for everybody we also ought to raise the minimum wage senator kennedy is right about that now i just want to say a word about this i know that there s a conventional theory that well most people on the minimum wage are young people in middle class households going home to nice homes at night and they don t need a raise well the statistics show that about 40 percent of the gains of the minimum wage go to people in the middle 60 percent but about 45 percent go to people in the lower 20 percent of our incomes brackets there s a lot of women out there raising children on a minimum wage and people can t live on 4 25 an hour and the other night on our television in washington there was a little snippet on some people who working in a factory in a rural area not very far from washington and a television interviewer went out and interviewed these ladies that working in this operation and this wonderful woman was interviewed and he went through all the economic arguments against raising the minimum wage they say they re going to if raise the minimum wage take your job away and put it into a machine and she looked at the camera and she said honey i ll take my chances and i ll tell you what i ll bet you if anybody in this room were working for 4 25 an hour you d take your chances let s give them the chance what do you say i think we ought to i want welfare reform i met last saturday with republicans and democrats senator kennedy was there we talked about the welfare system people that hate welfare most are the people that are trapped on it i may be the only president that ever had the privilege of spending hours talking to people on welfare it doesn t work but what should our goal be should our goal be to say we are frustrated we think there are a lot of deadbeats on welfare and we want to punish them or should our goal be to say there ought to be a limit to this system we want to move people from welfare to work and we want people to move to the point where they can be good parents and good workers and the system we have has all the wrong incentives let s change them that s what our goal ought to be we can liberate people if we re going to shrink the underclass we have to reform the welfare system but the goal of it ought to be how to train for a job how to get a job how to keep a job and how to be a better parent and that is going to be what drives me in this debate so that s what i hope we ll do go to the middle class bill of rights pass the minimum wage pass welfare reform let s keep cutting the size of the government you know if we don t do anything else i got tickled when senator kennedy was up here talking about it but if we don t pass another law in three years the federal government will be the smallest it s been since john kennedy was president of the united states because of reductions voted by democrats 100 percent and i m proud of that we should never be the party of yesterday s government we should never be the party of undue regulation we should never be the party of things that don t make sense the average person when they pay money in april thinks that they don t get their money s worth when they send their check to the federal government that s what they think and too often they have been absolutely right we shouldn t defend that we should be in the forefront but when we are as we have been for the last two years we shouldn t keep it a secret we need to tell it we need to make sure people know it but i also will tell you that i have challenged the republican leadership in congress to make some move on health care we lost another millions of americans last year the health care costs have moderated thanks to what a lot of you in this room are doing who are in health care but we still have serious problems with the costs going up more rapidly than inflation and we still cannot continue in the face of plain evidence that every year we ll go on being the only successful country in the world to lose working people from the rolls of the health insured we can t continue to walk away from this problem so maybe we did bite off more than we can chew last year but as i said so many times i m still proud of the first lady for trying to give health care to everybody in this country and i don t think we should be ashamed of it so i think we ve got a lot to do let me close with reminding you of this the most important work of all still must be done by citizens you know what we re doing here tonight we re celebrating the right of citizens to have a say in their government that s what this fundraiser is and most of you are unselfish you know darn well if you were at one of their fundraisers it probably would get you a bigger tax cut most of you are here because you believe in your country because you want everything to go better for everybody and because you know you ll do better in the long run if we have the discipline to bring the deficit down to put in sensible economic policies and to take care of the children of this country that s why you re here you re here because your view of your self interest goes beyond tomorrow or the next day you re here because for whatever reason you haven t become so disoriented in this time of change that you re stopping thinking about the long run and i value that i thank you for that what we ve got to do is to spread that to other people the spirit i saw of those young children in the mayor s council today we have to spread that to other people we can t allow resentment to take over i don t know if you saw the i was very gratified by the results of the public opinion survey today about massachusetts voters it was in the press today or yesterday whenever it was but before you clap let me tell the rest of it but that s a fascinating commentary you know my wife took a lot of hits when she fought for health care and a lot of people said well she s got no business doing that and all that stuff you heard and so the survey said there s a dramatic difference between what women and men thought particularly working women thought about what she had done now why is that why would there be such difference because we re going through a period of real change and people are disoriented and it s tough out there and this so called angry white male phenomenon there are objective reasons for that people are working harder for less and they feel like they re not getting what they deserve they worry whether they re letting their own families down and it s easy to play on people s fears and resentments it s easy to build up people s anger the hard work the right thing to do what we have to do is to channel all that frustration and anger into something good and positive what we have to do is to say okay what we say to our children okay be mad be angry scream let off steam but what are you going to do what about tomorrow how are you going to change your life what are we going to do together that is our job every one of our jobs and no president no congress no program nothing can change what citizens can change if we are determined to see one another as fellow citizens instead of enemies even when we re opponents we shouldn t be enemies so i ask you there s enough brain power and education and understanding in this room to move boston all the way to washington there s enough energy and innovation and creativity here and i thank you for being here and i thank you for supporting us but tomorrow and the next day look all your fellow citizens in the eye when you drive to work and drive home when you walk the streets seek out people who are different who have different views imagine what their lives are like this is a difficult time we re moving from one place to another and we need to find our bearings we cannot do it with division we cannot do it with demonization we cannot do it with the politics of destruction we cannot do it just by giving vent to frustration we have to build every time this country has gone through a period like this every time we are simply doing the work that has been done for 200 years we are redefining what we have to do so that all of us can pursue life liberty and happiness we should be proud that we have the chance we shouldn t be deterred by momentary adversity if we keep our eyes on the prize which is the human potential of every single american we re going to do just fine thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton31 10 00a bill_clinton thank you very very much thank you let me say first of all did eleanor give a good speech or what amazing you know i have some passing experience at these kinds of events and i was sitting there thinking this girl is good she is really good i want to say more about her in a moment but i also want to tell you how honored i am to be back in kentucky with your great governor paul patton and his wife judi who have been such good friends of mine my longtime friend who had so much to do with much of the good things that al gore and i were able to accomplish in washington senator wendell ford we miss you thank you with your great mayor who owes some of his success to the fact that he and i were born in the same little town in arkansas hope arkansas thank you so much dave armstrong for doing a good job here i thank your state party chair nikki patton for being here and for all you democrats who have showed up to hear a guy who is not running for anything this year i want to thank our young president of the school young democrats here rashid sheth didn t he do a good job today and i want to thank charlie owen for chairing the gore lieberman campaign but i m especially here as all of you know to support eleanor jordan she represents the best in our party the best in our country and what we need for the future of our congress you know kentucky has been awfully good to me i was standing up here on the stage thinking about the first time i came to kentucky as a governor listen to this in 1979 i served with six kentucky governors counting governor patton who has been with me this whole time in the white house and i love this state and you have been so good to me you ve been so good to me and hillary and al and tipper gore you voted for us twice given us a chance to serve america and you know the temptation in a rally like this where it s hot and we re all committed is just sort of give one of these hallelujah speeches and go on and get out of here you know because we all know that we re for eleanor and we re for al and joe and we know why we re here but let s face it all over america and here in kentucky these races are close and i believe they re close because times are good and people are relaxed and everybody running seems like a nice person and they all sound good we ve taken a lot of the poison out of america s life and i m proud of that and i m glad that we re not having all that poison but nonetheless it is quite important that we acknowledge that not just democrats but republicans are good people who love their country and will do what they think is right and we ought to be in a good humor in this election year because we re a better country and a stronger country and a healthier country than we were eight years ago but that does not mean that just because things are going so well and we re all being nice that there are no differences that there are no consequences and that we don t have to show up on election day so what i would like to ask you to do is just indulge me one more time for a few minutes and let me make the arguments that i hope you will go out across this district and across this great state and to your friends beyond the borders of kentucky and share with them between now and election day why they ought to vote what the stakes are and what the consequences are because i believe in profound ways that this election is every bit as important as the one which sent al gore and me to the white house eight years ago why do i say that because we ve done everything we could do to turn the country around and move it forward to pull it together but all the best things are still out there we have a chance for the first time in my lifetime to conduct a national referendum on our dreams eleanor talked had that wonderful quote about dreams we have never in my lifetime had this much prosperity this much social progress the absence of domestic crisis and foreign threat to our security we can use this election to dream our dreams and decide how to get there but in order to do it we have to be quite clear not on saying our opponents are bad folks but saying we have honest differences and here are the consequences to those decisions so then the people can go and vote and all of us can accept the result happily as democracy working but those of us who have strong convictions about who should be president who should be vice president who should be senator or congressman we can t let the next seven days go by without doing everything we can to make sure that all of our fellow citizens understand how important it is that they go to the polls and how important it is that they understand the real and honest differences now look at eight years ago when you gave al gore and me a chance to go to washington we had an economy in terrible trouble a society profoundly divided a political system that was paralyzed and we asked you to give us a chance to go up there and give the government back to you to provide opportunity for every responsible citizen to create a society in which we were more of a community in which we didn t run our national politics trying to divide one group against another but saying that we all have to go forward together in which we reached out to this amazing new world we re living in and had america as a friend and a supporter of peace and freedom and prosperity everywhere and where it would help us here at home and i think you d all agree it s worked pretty well in 1993 when i took the oath of office unemployment in kentucky was 6 3 percent today it s 3 8 percent as eleanor said we have nationally over 22 million new jobs over 300 000 here in kentucky the lowest poverty rate in 20 years child poverty reduced by a third the lowest unemployment in 30 years the lowest african american unemployment ever recorded the lowest female unemployment in 40 years the longest economic expansion in history and the highest home ownership ever that is the difference in now and eight years ago question number one should we keep this prosperity going and extend it to people in places that are left behind what is the gore lieberman jordan proposal keep paying down the debt keep interest rates low keep the economy going take what s left invest it in education and health care and give the people a tax cut we can afford now eleanor s opponent and the others they say we ve got a surplus we ll give three quarters in a tax cut and spend a lot of money and privatize social security and well so what if we go into deficit a little bit i ll tell you what so what if we keep paying this debt down interest rates will be a percent lower every year for a decade do you know what that s worth to the american people 390 billion in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower college loan payments lower business loans more jobs more growth a stronger economy it s a clear choice if you want to keep the prosperity going vote for eleanor jordan for congress this is about more than money and more than economics we have the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years the lowest crime rates in 26 years teen pregnancy and drug abuse are down there are fewer people without health insurance for the first time in a dozen years thanks to the children s health insurance program that was in the balanced budget law that we fought so hard for our schools are getting better the dropout rate is down math and reading scores are up all over the country with kentucky leading the way i might add failing schools are turning around thank you governor patton we have opened the doors of the first two years of college to everybody with the hope scholarships and the biggest increase in college aid since the g i bill and the college going rate is at an all time high and while we ve had record economic growth the environment has steadily gotten better the air is cleaner the water is cleaner 43 million more americans breathing air that meets federal standards 43 million the drinking water is safer the food is safer we ve cleaned up three times as many toxic dumps as the previous administration did in 12 years and we ve set aside more land than any administration since theodore roosevelt nearly 100 years ago now that s the record so the second big question should we build on this record of progress with on the environmental record with a long term energy strategy that gets us out of the fix we ve been worried about the last few months with new sources of energy and more conservation should we build on the health care strategy by giving health insurance to the children s parents that we ve insured if we ve insured the children shouldn t their parents be able to have insurance shouldn t we have a patients bill of rights shouldn t we have a medicare drug program that all our seniors can afford shouldn t we open the doors of four years of college education shouldn t every state have to do what kentucky does which is to turn around their failing schools or put them under new management so that all of our kids can learn shouldn t we provide more teachers for our classrooms and modern schools in other words should we build on this progress or should we say well who cares if we ve gotten results we re going to change the crime policy we re going to weaken the environmental laws we re going to abandon the education strategy and we re going to abandon the health care strategy this is a clear choice i think we should build on the progress that s why you need eleanor jordan and al gore and joe lieberman then there s a different larger question which is harder to put into words but i thin it s important which is are we going to become a stronger community are we going to keep growing together we have put an end to the idea that there ought to be class divisions or economic divisions or gender divisions or any other kind of divisions in america my whole theory is if somebody shows up and says i m willing to work hard and i m willing to obey the law that s good enough for me i don t have to know anything else you re part of america so every day we get a chance to advance the goal of one america that s why we ought to raise the minimum wage that s why we ought to pass the bill to enforce the equal pay laws for women more strongly that s why we ought to pass the hate crimes legislation i think it s important and end racial now let me tell you what this election is not about it is not about whether the democrats are for big government they all talk about that big government thing let me just tell you that you heard it all in the debates and all that here s the record under al gore s leadership for the reinventing government program we have reduced the size of the bureaucracy by 300 000 it s the smallest it s been since 1960 that s the fact we have reduced yes we re for this ergonomics rule and i ll say more about that in a minute but we ve gotten rid of 16 000 pages of unnecessary government regulations we have reduced by two thirds the number of regulations the states and the school districts have to deal with under the federal aid to education act alone so when you hear people talking about this is big government versus little government man they re talking about something that didn t happen in fact government will be smaller under our proposal than under theirs why because the third biggest item in the federal budget is what interest on the debt there s social security defense interest on the debt we spend more on interest on the debt than we spend on medicare or education or the environment if we get rid of the debt which is what the democrats want to do that s the gore lieberman program you won t be spending that 12 cents on the dollar that leaves a lot of money for education health care tax relief and smaller government the second thing this thing is not about this election is not about whether we re not bipartisan and they are and they want to bring everybody together and we don t look we have you know i m pretty easy to get along with i m an easy going guy after the people elected a republican majority in congress look what we did we adopted a bipartisan welfare reform law we adopted a bipartisan balanced budget we adopted a bipartisan telecommunications law that created thousands of businesses hundreds of thousands of jobs and had the vice president s e rate program which has allowed us to connect 95 percent of the schools even the poorest ones to the internet we ve done a lot of stuff in a bipartisan way we just had a bipartisan bill for the biggest amount of funds ever to buy lands to protect them forever in the history of the country we do a lot of things in a bipartisan way but being bipartisan to me means getting together and making an honorable compromise it doesn t mean being run over by partisan polarizing policies now last night after we made a lot of progress in this session last night i had to veto the bill that funds the congress and the white house and i ll tell you why i did not want to sign a bill that funded the white house and the congress when they won t send me a bill that funds our schools our children our education and our future i want you to play close attention to this because this is what this election is about especially right here in louisville a couple of days ago at 1 00 a m in the morning the democrats and the republicans reached an agreement on an education and a labor budget it was an historic agreement it would have provided the biggest increase ever for more teachers smaller classes modernized schools hooking up the rest of our schools to the internet double the funds for after school programs so that all of our latch key kids can be in school learning and doing something constructive put more funds in to help other states follow kentucky s lead to identify failing schools and turn them around or put them under new management it s a fabulous bill and the republicans wanted some things and we went along with them also had a huge increase in college aid now they had some things in there we didn t like and when the house passed this bill eleanor s opponent put on a proposal to block a worker safety rule that i want to put in that would protect workers from stress related management now they say this is going to cost business a lot of money but the truth is that 600 000 people lose time from work every year because of repetitive stress injuries on the job and that costs business about 50 billion a year who are these people the worker who types on a keyboard eight hours a day the cashier who scans your food in a neighborhood grocery store today there are some workers with us who suffer from repetitive stress injury after years of service as keyboard operators at bell atlantic they re here today raise your hands thank you for being here there s also a cashier who suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome after years at the register now there are 600 000 people like this they re your fellow citizens our proposal which eleanor supports would save these businesses 9 billion a year it wouldn t cost them money it would save them money because with better work rules they wouldn t be injured and they d be there working every day and it would also save workers the pain and suffering associated with 300 000 injuries every single year this is not about money alone it s about a mother who can no longer pick up her child a father who can t toss a baseball with his son anymore so we re fighting for this worker safety rule now here s what happened they come and say you can t have your education money unless you agree to killing this worker safety rule so we said this is ridiculous we re having an election the democrats are for this the republicans are against it we offered an honorable compromise we said if they would give us some more money for education i would put in the rule but we would delay its impact so if they can convince the american people this is a terrible thing they would then have a few months after the beginning of the year to try to undo the rule which they can do but then they have to show evidence that they re right they can t just do it kind of when nobody is looking i said if you re going to undo this do it in the daylight where everybody can see what s going on here and let s hear the argument but look i ll be out of there by january 20th and the republicans will be elated and we re having an election so okay i ll put it in but i know you can undo it so i ll just delay the impact of it for a few months and if you want to undo it you can but do it in the ordinary course of business and the republicans said okay so they said you do this for us we ll give you your school money we shook hands on it at 1 00 a m in the morning everybody was as happy as a clam the next day the republicans go to the republican caucus and mr delay their leader who says says no no no we can t do this our lobbyists are hysterical never mind the 52 million school kids and what they get out of this our lobbyists don t like this and we will not do it we want it exactly like eleanor s opponent put it in and if we can t get what eleanor s opponent wants then the 52 million school kids can t get their help now this is the way it works in washington not the way it works out here and i m not blaming all the republicans the people that negotiated that with us deserve the thanks of their country they did it in good faith and i m telling you we ve got look we ve got a bipartisan agreement on the minimum wage but it s not law yet we got a bipartisan agreement on the patients bill of rights we could get a bipartisan majority for a medicare prescription drug program i could go on and on and on but the leadership won t let it happen the leadership is sticking with eleanor s opponent and says that the 52 million school children of this country including every one of them here in louisville including everyone standing on this stage with me today if they need this help that s too bad you do it our way or no dice after we made an agreement with them so you have to know that s the way it works there so when you vote for eleanor jordan if just six more congressional districts do what you did then we won t have to worry about mr delay anymore running the united states congress and look i want to say again this is not about bipartisanship i won t be there but the democrats will work with the republicans we re not right about everything they re not wrong about everything a lot of americans vote with them too we ve got to work together but you ve got to understand that the leadership in congress is way to the right of republicans in the country that would ever work with the democrats and the independents to get things done and if they get a call from one of those big lobbyists that says i m sorry you can t do this they say i m sorry we can t do this and they said we ve got to have it just like eleanor s opponent wanted it or no dice for the school kids of america now that s what they said so you remember that and you go out i wouldn t keep that a secret from the voters in this congressional district for the next week if i were you i believe you ought to go out there and tell them if you want to protect the worker safety and health and if you want to promote the education of our children you better send eleanor jordan to congress and make sure we have different leaders in the united states congress in the next two years look when vice president gore says in these speeches you ain t seen nothing yet i expect maybe some americans hear that and they think well that sounds political you know he wants to be president but i m not running for anything and i believe that i believe that i believe if you vote to keep the prosperity going and expand it to people who aren t part of it instead of voting to reverse economic course and go back to the bad old days of deficits i believe if you vote to build on this evidence of progress in every area of our society instead of reverse the policies that have helped us achieve it you will be free to think about the big things i think we can save social security and medicare for the baby boom generation and add that prescription drug benefit and not bankrupt the baby boomers children and grandchildren i believe we can give the largest and most diverse group of school kids in american history ever the finest education there need be no more failing schools we now know something we didn t know 20 years ago when i started working on this we know how to turn these schools around i believe that we can provide health insurance to working families in this country and to people who retire at 55 and can t get medicare yet and i believe we can have this medicare drug program i believe we can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 and keep this thing going we can do this we can solve these long term energy and environment problems we can do more to balance work and family we can have a tax cut that helps people with child care and retirement and paying for their kids college education we can continue to build one america we can do these big big things but we have to make the right decisions on the basic questions are we going to build on the prosperity or reverse course are we going to build on the progress or take down the policies that achieved it are we going to continue to grow as one america or are we going to have the policies of division no matter how soothing the rhetoric is these are the big challenges before america you look at eleanor jordan i want to tell you something she d be the second former welfare recipient in the united states congress america we say we re a country that believes in giving everybody a chance she got one and she took it she s got her family members here including her sister who worked in our administration this is a family that proves that america s promise can be alive and real and her great burden for which they called her those bad political names is that she simply believes everybody ought to have the same chance that god gave her in life that america gave her folks i will say again i know i could stand up here and give you all those hoop di doo lines but you need to think about this this is a close race and it s a close race nationally and every one of you has friends that may or may not vote every one of you has lots of friends who have never been to an event like this am i right never been to hear a president talk or a governor talk or somebody running for congress but they love their country they consider themselves patriots if they have a good reason they ll go vote or they re going to vote but they may not know what the differences are yet so you ve got seven days seven good days that every day you can find somebody to say you know why you ought to vote for eleanor jordan and al gore and joe lieberman because we want to keep the prosperity going we don t want to reverse it because we want to build on the progress of the last eight years we don t want to abandon it because we want to go forward together because all the best stuff is still out there but you ve got to make the big decisions right you go tell them those three things she ll be celebrating next week thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton31 10 00b bill_clinton thank you well first let me say that i understand that hillary has already spoken so i really don t have to say much but i want to say first i m late because the radar went out in louisville kentucky today and so it took us a while to get off even air force one needs radar because there are incoming planes so we found some innovative way to get here and i m glad we made it niall thank you and thank you john and i thank all of you for being here a lot of interesting people in this crowd tonight my friend frank mccourt thank you for being here and thank you tom cahill thank you gabriel byrne for being here it s nice not to have to go to the movies to see you and i thank all the rest of you for being here i want to tell you how grateful i am that somehow some way when i first starting running for president the irish in new york found me it happened in other places too my friend neal hartigan former attorney general of illinois is here from cook county chicago but bruce morrison who hillary and i had known since we were in law school and a couple of other people somehow they hooked us all up and we started this odyssey and people thought i was nuts when i said if i got elected president i would try to help in the irish peace process and they said and then i got elected and then all these people who had helped me in other contexts and were steeped in the foreign policy lore of america said you can t do that i said but i told them i would i gave my word i ve got to do this and they said but it will be terrible i said it won t be terrible i said i love great britain i went to college there i said we ll be shoulder to shoulder with britain on a thousand other things but i said within six months they ll be glad we did this and sure enough they now are so i can t thank those of you enough who started out with me who gave me the chance to do this it s been one of the greatest things about being president to know that the united states the home of the largest irish diaspora in the world had played some positive role in bringing that long conflict to an end now we re not out of the woods yet but mr trimble dodged a bullet this week and we still have work to do and all of you know what it is as well as i do but i just want you to know for all of you who have helped me to do this i thank you and the second thing i want to thank you for is when 800 of you showed up on the white house lawn during a rather difficult time for me and said that the irish american community still thought that i should serve as president of the united states which i will never forget i ll never forget that but most important of all to me i want to thank you for what you re doing for hillary because when we started this and this is by the way a big issue in the national election too presidential election when we started this and hillary you know she went to ireland without me in addition to the two times we went together and she was working with all these women in this vital voices group and she said if we can just get all these women together they d figure out a way to get over this problem and i think she made an independent and a significant contribution to the irish peace process for which i am very very grateful and now all over the world she s had these groups of women sort of upsetting apple carts in africa and latin america it turns out there are troublesome women everywhere who don t like it when troglodyte males keep wars going on when it makes no sense anymore and conflicts i mean it s quite interesting and i think it s been wonderful the only other thing i would say is that i think it s quite important that you have come here and contributed but i think it would also be quite important if every day for the last week of this election you tell people why you came and why you support her because people need reasons i think that i m terrifically happy that the country is in such good shape and that we can have an election when there is prosperity when there is social progress when there is the absence of domestic crisis and foreign threat i m happy about that i m glad that there is so much less personal venom in the atmosphere in this election than there have been in times past it never made any sense and it certainly doesn t now maybe we ve just drawn out a full quota over the last eight years there s none left but i m glad for that but that should not obscure the fact that there are serious significant differences between the candidates for the senate the candidates for president and vice president that will have consequences for how we all live and work and relate to each other and the rest of the world so the only other thing i d like to say is that the real problem with events like this is in the parlance of my faith we re always preaching to the saved and every one of you have friends who will never come to an event like this isn t that right you ve all got friends most of your friends are not as political as you they ll never come to an event like this they ll never come to an event like this they ll never hear the president give a speech directly and they ll never do all these things that you do and i just want to ask you in the last week to go out and tell them why you came tonight why it matters that they vote why it matters that they vote for hillary and the vice president and senator lieberman and what the stakes are what the consequences are because i can tell you they re huge you know we re either going to build on this prosperity or reverse our economic policy we re either going to keep the social progress going or take down the education health care crime and environmental policies over the last eight years we re either going to keep coming together across all the lines that divide us or walk away from things like the hate crimes legislation or the employment nondiscrimination legislation the things that the supreme court appointments that will promote civil rights and human rights and bringing us together so these things are big deals i think and i just hope that in addition to coming here tonight you will go out and talk to everybody you can just people you come across that will never come to something like this the last thing i want to say is i m highly prejudiced about this senate race it s not fashionable to admit prejudice in america today i ve tried to make it highly unfashionable to be prejudiced in america but i am completely prejudiced however having said that this is the first time in 26 years i have not been on a ballot somewhere i have had a lot of experience with politics and politicians most of them are better than they got credit for being and i ve enjoyed knowing most of those i ve known but of all the people i ve known she has the best combination of brains compassion determination and ability to get people together and get things done she will be a fabulous senator and you need to tell people that for the next days thank you dem wjclinton31 10 98 bill_clinton thank you good morning first i would like to thank susan fitz fran jackson teachers lori kuzniewski i was in her class ms kristen mullen s class alan leis paula johnson your superintendent john butterfield from the education association jim and molly cameron from the pta all the people who made me feel so welcome at this school today this is the best of our country s future i look around this crowd today and i see people whose roots are all over the world whose languages are very different whose cultures are different whose religions are different who have come together on this school ground in a common endeavor of learning with a promise that our country opens to all people who are willing to work hard and be good citizens and do their part it is thrilling for me to be here and look at you i have a much better view than you do today and i loved being with the children in the classroom the best part of this morning so far for me has been answering the children s questions they ask very good questions some of them i didn t want to answer even they were so good and it gave me a great deal of hope for the future you just heard my weekly radio address so you know that i am very concerned about the overcrowding in our nation s classrooms we have almost suddenly the largest group of school children in our nation s history i was part of the last large group the baby boom generation all of us are now between the ages of 34 and 52 this group in school today is the first group that is larger we have two huge problems one is represented here all the house trailers the other is represented by the dilemma in our largest cities where we have huge numbers of students and wonderful old school buildings that were unoccupied for many years they deteriorated many of them now can t even be hooked up to the internet and we must as a nation face this challenge in the last congress we were able to get a big downpayment on my plan for 100 000 more teachers in the early grades to take the average size of the classes down to 18 across america in the first three grades but we have to have the school buildings as well and i did present a plan to the congress that i will present again early next year that would enable us to build or modernize 5 000 schools if you want the smaller classes the teachers have to have some place to meet with the students and i ask all of you based on your personal experience here and without regard to any political differences you may otherwise have to please please help me convince the congress that it is the right thing for america s children to have the smaller classes to have more teachers and to have modern schools every single child in america deserves them and the united states ought to be in the forefront of helping achieve that and i thank you for that let me also say to all of you i learned when i came here today because i received a little card from one of the students that next week is the week you have student elections at the school here now all the students are going to vote and what i d like to say is i hope that all the parents will be just as good citizens as the students are because tuesday is election day in america as well for nearly six years i have worked hard to bring our country together across all the lines that divide us so that america would work the way this school works so that we could all feel the way i think all of you feel today coming from your different walks of life to this common ground america ought to be a place of common ground where we move forward together i am grateful for the fact that after six years we have nearly 17 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment in 28 years the highest homeownerhsip in history over two thirds of americans in their own homes for the first time ever the smallest percentage of our people on public assistance welfare in 29 years lowest crime rate in 25 years i am proud of that i am also determined that we take this moment of prosperity which has given us the first balanced budget since 1969 and a surplus to meet the long term challenges of america we talked about education today there are other long term challenges those of you who come from the rest of the world and have come here as immigrants who have relatives in other countries know that there is a lot of financial turmoil in the rest of the world i have done my best to try to help stabilize the global economy because america depends upon the success of other people in other countries and their being able to have good jobs and raise their children and do better i have done my best to see america stand on the forefront of world peace a week ago yesterday we announced the latest agreement between the palestinians and the israelis and we hope it will be fully and faithfully implemented and we will continue the work toward peace in the middle east we have to look ahead to what happens when this huge generation of baby boomers retires which is why i have said we should not spend this surplus on anything until we have reformed the social security system and reformed the medicare system to make sure that it can be preserved for the people who need it especially when all the baby boomers retire we have to continue to work on the fact that many of our people literally over half of our people are in hmos or other managed care plans and this can be a good thing because we have to save all the money we can but it is wrong if a person is in a health care plan and the doctor says you need to see a specialist and the plan says no it is wrong if someone is in a car accident and they have to pass three hospitals that are closer on the way to an emergency room that happens to be covered by the plan it is wrong if someone is pregnant and during the pregnancy or someone is sick with cancer and has had chemotherapy and during that treatment an employer changes health care providers and the person has to change doctors all of that is wrong that s why we want a patients bill of rights basically to say okay let s manage the system but let s put the health care of our people first and let medical decisions be made by medical professionals not accountants i think that is very important all these issues are out there issues that will affect the long term stability and strength of the united states and our ability to do what should be done in the world so let me say that i ve been very concerned periodically over the last six years and i was especially concerned last year that in washington d c in national government there are not only different parties with different philosophies and different views that is a good thing we should have different parties different philosophies different views different opinions but there is a great deal of difference in constructive debate and extreme partisanship which keeps things from being done in the last year for eight months we had extreme partisanship which kept things from being done and what we need to do is to put the progress of all of our people over that partisanship we need to put people over politics we need to celebrate our differences but work together that is what i am hoping will come out of this coming election i hope that a congress will be elected on tuesday that will put the education of our children first and build or modernize these 5 000 schools i hope the election will produce a congress that will not spend that surplus until we fix social security first to stabilize our country to stabilize our economy and to avoid a situation where when we retire we will have to either lower our standard of living or lower the standard of living of our children because we refused to take this moment to fix the social security system i hope the next congress will provide the american people with a patients bill of rights i hope the next congress will provide the american people with a bill to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco the number one public health problem in america today it is wrong that 3 000 children start smoking every day 1 000 will die sooner because of this i hope the next congress will reach across partisan lines and raise the minimum wage for 12 million americans the unemployment rate is low the inflation rate is low you cannot support a family on 5 15 an hour we can afford to do it and we should do it and we ought to do it as americans across partisan lines i hope the next congress will produce a genuine and bipartisan system of campaign finance reform so that honest debate instead of big money controls elections all of these things are within your hands so i say to all the adults who are here look at these children look at how fortunate we are that they can come together and learn from each other and have the right kind of disagreements and go have an election next week in which they campaign and make their case and everybody votes we should set a good example this country is still around after 220 years having undergone unbelievable changes in the makeup of our citizenry because more than half the time more than half the people have been right on the big issues this is no ordinary time the world is changing very fast it is therefore no ordinary election the future of these children the future of our country in the 21st century is riding on it so i implore all of you if the education of our children is important to you if the stability of our country and the stability and cause of peace in the world is important to you please set a good example show up on tuesday vote make your voice heard and go home and talk to your children about what you did and how it is at the core of everything that makes our country worth living and fighting for thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton31 12 99 bill_clinton thank you so much good evening it s a real honor for hillary and chelsea and me to welcome all of you to the white house tonight i rise to offer three toasts the first is to all of you it is an honor to turn this page in history with you because so many of you each in your own way have contributed so indelibly to the narrative of this american century the second toast i offer is to my wife for it was she who inspired us all to welcome the new millennium by honoring our past and imagining our future over the past two years leading up to this wonderful night no one has done more to infuse this milestone with national purpose and i am very grateful to her and to all those who have helped the third toast is in a way the most daunting because i m supposed to say something profound to a thousand years of history in two or three minutes in the state of the union i get a whole hour to talk about a single year and usually i run over tonight we rise to the mountaintop of a new millennium behind us we see a great expanse of american experience and before us vast frontiers of possibility still to be explored i think we would all agree that we are most fortunate to be alive at this moment in history we end this century and the millennium with soaring optimism never before has our nation enjoyed at once so much prosperity social progress and national self confidence with so little internal crisis or external threat never before have we had such a blessed opportunity and therefore such a profound responsibility to build the more perfect union of our founders dreams when our children s children look back on this century they will see that this hopeful and promising time was earned by the bravery and hard work of men and women who in the words of our great poet laureate robert pinsky did not merely celebrate our oldest ideals like trophies under glass but kept them bright with use they will see this moment was earned through the hard won fight for freedom from the beachheads of normandy to the buses of montgomery to the villages of kosovo at home and abroad it has been our great privilege to advance the light of human liberty they will see this moment was earned through the drive for discovery at the outset of the century not even the most far sighted of our forebears could have predicted all the miracles of science that have emerged from our labs antibiotics and vaccines silicon chips and the internet microscopes that envision the infinitesimal and telescopes that elucidate the infinite soon to be complete blueprint for human life itself and they will see that this moment was earned through a passion for creativity national power may spring from economic and military might but the greatness of a nation emanates from the life of the mind and the stirrings of the soul so many of you have contributed to that greatness and we are all grateful in this century american artists of the page and the canvas the stage and screen have drawn from our diverse palate of cultural traditions and given the world a great gift of uniquely american creations with universal and timeless appeal the new century and the new millennium will bring a cascade of new triumphs we see new hope for peace in lands bedeviled by ancient hatreds new technologies both opening the storehouse of human knowledge for people across the globe and offering the promise of alleviating the poverty that still haunts so many millions of our children we see scientists rapidly approaching the day when newborns can expect to live past 100 years and children will know cancer only as a constellation of stars but by far my most solemn prayer for this new millennium is that we will find somehow the strength and wisdom in our hearts to keep growing together first as one america and then as one people on this ever smaller planet we all call home if you look at the glowing diversity of race and background that illuminates america s house on this evening a vivid illustration we see that human capacity is distributed equally across the human landscape i cannot help but think how different america is how different history is and how much better because those of you in this room and those you represent were able to imagine to invent to inspire and by the same token i cannot help but dream of how much different and how much better our future can be if we can give every child the same chance to live up to his or her god given potential and to live together as brothers and sisters celebrating our common humanity and our shared destiny this is the future i hope every american will take a moment to imagine on this millennial evening this is the future i pray we can all join together to build so i ask you to join me in a toast to yourselves to the first lady and to our shared future thank you very much dem wjclinton31 3 95a bill_clinton president aristide mr secretary general distinguished guests and citizens of a free and democratic haiti bon jour i am deeply honored by president aristide s invitation to speak with you today in the many months we have known each other i have learned firsthand of president aristide s tremendous courage his strength in the face of great challenge reflects the unbreakable will of the haitian people we respect him as the president you elected freely and fairly and for his leadership of all haitians since his return today we come together as friends today once again we give life to the ideals of democracy justice and freedom today we celebrate the restoration of democracy to your country never never again must it be stolen away for centuries the haitian people have known little more than blood and terror you have been robbed of opportunity and deprived of basic rights your children have grown up with too much violence from cite soleil to the smallest village in the farthest corner of you land you have sacrificed much in your quest for liberty now you stand on the brink of a new and more hopeful time now you have a chance to make real the dreams of those who liberated your nation nearly 200 years ago the tasks ahead will not be easy democracy does not flow naturally like the rivers and prosperity does not spring full grown from the earth justice does not bloom overnight to achieve them you must work hard you must have patience you must move forward together with tolerance openness and cooperation i believe you can do it for as president aristide has said your challenge is great but your will to succeed is greater your democracy will be maintained and strengthened by free elections and respect for the rights and obligations enshrined in your constitution your government the united nations and the united states will do all we can to guarantee free fair and secure elections first in june and then in december we know from experience that when elections are free fair and secure you will participate that is what democracy requires of you and we know you will do it your nation has been stripped bare of many of its natural resources but the most important of these resources you the people have survived with dignity and hope as the proverb says lespwa fe viv now you have a chance to come together to make the rice fields come alive and harvest the corn and millet to build the schools and clinics that promise a better future for your children we your neighbors your allies and your friends will support your efforts to create jobs to attract investment from beyond your borders and to rebuild and repair your injured land in a few months the program will begin to pave the 1 000 kilometers of your roads and later this year i will send the american peace corps here to help to organize the planting of millions of trees as the roads are built and the trees are planted thousands of you will have jobs as you begin this work i urge your countrymen and women who fled the terror to return and to help you to rebuild your land and theirs economic progress will demand much patience but we will stand with you as you tackle the hard and sometimes painful work ahead main anpil chaj pa lou there will be times of great frustration as you build your democracy and move toward prosperity but today haiti has more friends than ever before and so once again i urge each and every citizen of this nation to come together in this spirit of unity that president aristide has so eloquently promoted i can do no better than to repeat his words say no to vengeance no to revenge yes to reconciliation take the law into their own hands each of you must choose as most of you have already chosen to build up not to tear down i congratulate you for the patience you have already shown history records that two centuries ago on the eve of your independence and during my nation s revolutionary war more than 500 of your ancestors came from haiti to my country and died in the fight to bring the united states to life more than 200 years later the united states is proud to have helped to give you a second chance to build your democracy and bring life to the dreams of your liberators i have been told that throughout your land our soldiers our diplomats and our volunteers have been greeted by hand painted signs with three simple words these words go right to their hearts and to mine they are thank you america now it is my turn to say merci a haiti thank you for the warmth of your welcome and your support for all who have joined hands with you thank you for embracing peace for denying despair for holding on to hope because of your courage because of your determination freedom can triumph over fear today we stand in the warm bright light of liberty and together we can say kimbe fem pa laque kimbe fem pa lague merci and thank you dem wjclinton31 5 95 bill_clinton thank you very much general stein that s my home state cheer for those of you unused to foreign languages being spoken here in falcon stadium thank you very much general stein thank you secretary widnall general fogleman governor romer congressman ramstad to the distinguished faculty and staff to the proud parents family and friends to the members of the cadet wing we gather here to celebrate this very important moment in your life and in the life of our nation gentlemen and gentleladies of this class the pride of 95 this is your day and you are only one speech one pretty short speech away from being second lieutenants i am honored to share this day with some exceptionally accomplished alumni of the air force academy general fogleman the first of your graduates to be the air force chief of staff general hopper the first african american graduate of the academy to serve as the commandant of cadets and a member of my staff robert bell who is the first graduate of the air force academy to be the senior director for defense policy and arms control at the national security council as i look out at all of you i imagine it won t be too long before there s a graduate of the air force academy in the oval office if it s all the same to you i d like to delay it for just a few years i also want to congratulate the air force academy on extending its lock on the commander in chief s trophy here i m in your stadium i think i ought to mention that your winning squad came to see me in the white house not very long ago and i said that before i became president i didn t understand that when i heard that the commander in chief s trophy was a traveling trophy that meant it was supposed to go back and forth between washington and colorado springs every year i want to do my part in another longstanding tradition by the power vested in me as commander in chief i hereby grant amnesty to cadets who are marching tours or serving restrictions or confinements for minor misconduct now general stein i have to leave it to you to define which offenses are minor but on this day even in this conservative age i trust you will be fairly liberal in your interpretation of the term members of the class of 1995 you are about to become officers in the united states air force you should be very proud of what you have already accomplished but you should be sobered by the important responsibilities you are about to assume from this day forward every day you must defend our nation protect the lives of the men and women under your command and represent the best of america i want to say here as an aside i have seen something of the debate in the last few days on the question of whether in this time of necessity to cut budgets we ought to close one of the service academies and i just want to say i think that s one of the worst ideas i ever heard of it was general eisenhower who as president along with the congress so long ago now recognized that national defense required a national commitment to education but our commitment through the service academies to the education and preparation of the finest military officers in the world must never wane and i hope your commitment to the cause of education as an important element in what makes our country great and strong and safe will never wane as president my first responsibility is to protect and enhance the safety of the american people and to strengthen our country it is a responsibility that you now have chosen to share so today i thought what we ought to do is talk about the steps that we will have to take together to make the world safer for america in the 21st century our security objectives over the last 50 years have been dictated by straightforward events often beyond our control but at least they were straightforward and clear in world war ii the objective was simple win the war in the cold war the objective was clear contain communism and prevent nuclear war in the post cold war world the objectives are often more complex and it is clear that american security in the 21st century will be determined by forces that are operating both beyond and within our own borders while the world you will face is far from free of danger you must know that you are entering active service in a moment of enormous hope we are dramatically reducing the nuclear threat for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no russian missiles pointed at the people of the united states from the middle east to south africa to northern ireland americans are helping former adversaries turn from conflict to cooperation we are supporting democracies and market economies like haiti and mexico in our own region and others throughout the world we are expanding trade we are working for a europe allied with the united states but unified economically and politically for the first time since nation states appeared on the european continent just yesterday russia s decision to actively participate in nato s partnership for peace helped to lay the groundwork for yet another important step in establishing a secure stable and unified european continent for the next century clearly there are powerful historical forces pulling us together a worldwide thirst for freedom and democracy a growing commitment to market economics a technological revolution that moves information ideas money and people around the globe at record speed all these things are bringing us together and helping to make our future more secure but these same forces have a dark underside which can also lead to more insecurity we understand now that the openness and freedom of society make us even more vulnerable to the organized forces of destruction the forces of terror and organized crime and drug trafficking the technological revolution that is bringing our world closer together can also bring more and more problems to our shores the end of communism has opened the door to the spread of weapons of mass destruction and lifted the lid on age old conflicts rooted in ethnic racial and religious hatreds these forces can be all the more destructive today because they have access to modern technology nowhere are the forces of disintegration more obvious today than in bosnia for the past two and a half years the united states has sought to contain and end the conflict to help to preserve the bosnian nation as a multistate entity multiethnic entity to keep faith with our nato allies and to relieve human suffering to these ends we have led the nato military responses to calls by the united nations for assistance in the protection of its forces and safe areas for the people of bosnia led efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement deployed peacekeeping troops to the former yugoslav republic of macedonia to contain the conflict within the present borders of bosnia and conducted the longest humanitarian airlift to the people there in history two weeks ago the bosnian serbs unleashed 1 400 shells on the civilians of sarajevo the united nations called this attack a return to medieval barbarism they asked for a nato air response which we supported now we have joined our allies to develop a coordinated response to the serbs continued refusal to make peace and their illegal capturing of united nations personnel as hostages we believe still that a strengthened united nations operation is the best insurance against an even worse humanitarian disaster should they leave we have a longstanding commitment to help our nato allies some of whom have troops in the u n operation in bosnia to take part in a nato operation to assist them in a withdrawal if that should ever become necessary and so if necessary and after consultation with congress i believe we should be prepared to assist nato if it decides to meet a request from the united nations troops for help in a withdrawal or a reconfiguration and a strengthening of its forces we have received no such request for any such assistance and we have made no such decision but in any event we must know that we must continue to work for peace there and i still believe that we have made the right decision in not committing our own troops to become embroiled in this conflict in europe nor to join the united nations operations i want to say to you we have obligations to our nato allies and i do not believe we can leave them in the lurch so i must carefully review any requests for an operation involving a temporary use of our ground forces but we have made the right decision in what we have done and what we have not done in bosnia i believe we must look at all of these problems and all these opportunities in new and different ways for example we see today that the clear boundaries between threats to our nation s security from beyond our borders and the challenges to our security from within our borders are being blurred one once was clearly the province of the armed services the other clearly the province of local law enforcement today we see people from overseas coming to our country for terrorist purposes blurring what is our national security we must see the threats for what they are and fashion our response based on their true nature not just where they occur in these new and different times we must pursue three priorities to enhance our security first we have to combat those who would destroy democratic societies including ours through terrorism organized crime and drug trafficking secondly we have to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction whether they re nuclear chemical or biological third we have to provide our military you and people like you with the resources training and strategic direction necessary to protect the american people and our interests around the world the struggle against the forces of terror organized crime and drug trafficking is now uppermost on our minds because of what we have endured as a nation the world trade center bombing the terrible incident in oklahoma city and what we have seen elsewhere the nerve gas attack in tokyo the slaughter of innocent civilians by those who would destroy the peace in the middle east the organized crime now plaguing the former soviet union so much that one of the first requests we get in every one of those countries is send in the fbi we need help the drug cartels in latin america and asia that threaten the open societies and fragile democracies there all these things we know can emerge from without our borders and from within our borders free and open societies are inherently more vulnerable to these kinds of forces therefore we must remain vigilant reduce our vulnerability and constantly renew our efforts to defeat them we work closely with foreign governments we share intelligence we provide military support we initiate anticorruption and money laundering programs to stop drug trafficking at its source we ve opened an fbi office in moscow a training center in hungary to help combat international organized crime over the past two years we ve waged a tough counterterrorism campaign strengthening our laws increasing manpower and training for the cia and the fbi imposing sanctions on states that sponsor terrorism many of these efforts have paid off we were able to arrest and quickly convict those responsible for the world trade center bombing to stop another terrible planned attack in new york as well as a plan to blow up american civilian airliners over the pacific and helped to bring to justice terrorists around the world in the aftermath of oklahoma city our top law enforcement officers told us they needed new tools to fight terrorism and i proposed legislation to provide those tools more than a 1 000 new law enforcement personnel solely working on terrorism a domestic antiterrorism center tough new punishment for trafficking in stolen explosives for attacking the members of the uniform services of federal workers the enabling of law enforcement officials to mark explosive materials so they can be more easily traced the empowering of law enforcement officials with authority to move legal and i emphasize legal wiretaps when terrorists quickly move their bases of operation without having to go back for a new court order and finally in a very limited way the authority to use the unique capacity of our military where chemical or biological weapons are involved here at home just as we now can call on those capabilities to fight nuclear threats i m sure every graduate of this academy knows of the posse comitatus rule the clear line that says members of the uniform military will not be involved in domestic law enforcement that is a good rule we should honor that rule the only narrow exception for it that i know of today is the ability of law enforcement in america to call upon the unique expertise of the military when there is a potential threat of a nuclear weapon in the hands of the wrong people all we are asking for in the aftermath of the terrible incident in the tokyo subway is the same access to the same expertise should chemical and biological weapons be involved the congressional leadership pledged its best efforts to put this bill on my desk by memorial day but memorial day has come and gone and only the senate has taken the bill up and even there in my judgment there are too many amendments that threaten too much delay congress has a full agenda of important issues including passing a responsible budget but all this will take time when it comes to terrorism time is a luxury we don t have some are even now saying we should just go slow on this legislation well congress has a right to review this legislation to make sure the civil liberties of american citizens are not infringed and i encourage them to do that but they should not go slow terrorists do not go slow my fellow americans their agenda is death and destruction on their own timetable and we need to make sure that we can do everything possible to stop them from succeeding six weeks after oklahoma city months before after the first antiterrorism legislation was sent by the white house to congress there is no further excuse for delay fighting terrorism is a big part of our national security today and it will be well into the 21st century and i ask congress to act and act now our obligations to fight these forces of terror is closely related to our efforts to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction all of us i m sure ached and wept with the people of japan when we saw what a small vial of chemical gas could do when unleashed in the subway station and we breathed a sigh of relief when the alert officers there prevented the two chemicals from uniting and forming poison which could have killed hundreds and hundreds of people just a few days after that the breakup of the soviet union left nuclear material scattered throughout the newly independent states and increased the potential for the theft of those materials and for organized criminals to enter the nuclear smuggling business as horrible as the tragedies in oklahoma city and the world trade center were imagine the destruction that could have resulted had there been a small scale nuclear device exploded there the united states will retain as long as necessary an arsenal of nuclear forces to deter any future hostile action by any regime that has nuclear weapons but i will also continue to pursue the most ambitious agenda to dismantle and fight the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction since the dawn of the nuclear age this effort is succeeding and we should support it no russian missiles are pointed at america no american missiles are aimed at russia because we put the start i treaty into force russia is helping us and joining us in dismantling thousands of nuclear weapons our patient determined diplomacy convinced ukraine kazakhstan and belarus to give up their weapons when the soviet union fell apart we are cooperating with these nations and others to safeguard nuclear materials and stop their spread and just last month we got the indefinite and unconditional extension of the nonproliferation treaty which will benefit not only this generation of americans but future generations as well by preventing scores of countries from developing and acquiring nuclear weapons more than 170 nations have signed on to this treaty they vow they will either never acquire nuclear weapons or if they have them that they won t help others obtain them and they will pursue arms control and disarmament we have to now go even further there is no excuse for the senate to go slow on approving two other vital measures the start ii treaty and the chemical weapons convention start ii will enable us to reduce by two thirds the number of strategic warheads deployed at the height of the cold war the chemical weapons convention requires the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles around the world and provides severe penalties for those who sell materials to build these weapons to terrorists or to criminals it would make a chemical terror like the tragic attack in the tokyo subway much much more difficult both start ii and the chemical weapons convention will make every american safer and we need them now there is more to do we are working to complete negotiations on a comprehensive test ban treaty to implement the agreement we reached with north korea to freeze and dismantle that country s nuclear program to strengthen the biological weapons convention it is an ambitious agenda but it is worthy of this moment and it will make your future as officers in the united states air force american citizens and win your parents and grandparents more secure finally let me say that none of this will work unless we also are faithful to our obligation to support a strong and adaptable military for the 21st century the men and women of our armed forces remain the foundation the fundamental foundation of our security you put the steel into our diplomacy you get the job done when all means short of force have been tried and failed we saw your strength on display in haiti where a brutal military regime agreed to step down peacefully only and i emphasize only when it learned that more than sixty c 130s and c 141s loaded with paratroopers were in the air and on the way now the haitian people have a second chance to rebuild their nation we then saw your speed in the persian gulf when iraq massed its troops on the kuwaiti border and threatened regional instability i ordered our planes ships and troops into the gulf you got there in such a hurry that iraq got out of the way in a hurry we saw your compassion in rwanda where you flew tons of supplies medicines and foods into a nation torn apart by violence and saved countless lives all over the world you have met your responsibilities with skill and professionalism keeping peace making peace saving lives protecting american interests in turn your country has a responsibility to make sure you have the resources the flexibility the tools you need to do the job we have sought to make good on that obligation by crafting a defense strategy for our time and i d like to say here today that one of the principal architects of that strategy was our recently deceased former defense secretary les aspin during his many years in the congress as head of the armed services committee as secretary of defense and as head of the president s foreign intelligence advisory board he devoted a lifetime to this country s defense and we will miss him terribly and we are very grateful for the legacy he left a blueprint for reshaping our military to the demands of the 21st century a blueprint that calls on us to make sure that any force reductions we began at the end of the cold war do not jeopardize our strength over the long run that calls on us to provide you with the resources you need to meet the challenges of a world plagued by ancient conflicts and new instabilities all of you know here that after world war ii a major drawdown left us at a major disadvantage when war broke out in korea and just five years after the post vietnam drawdown in 1980 the army chief of staff declared that we had a hollow army a view shared by most experts we have been determined not to repeat those mistakes even as we draw down troops we know we have to be prepared to engage and prevail in two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts some argued that this scenario was unrealistic and excessively demanding recent events have proved that they were wrong and shown that we are pursuing the right strategy and the right force levels for these times last summer just before the north koreans finally agreed to dismantle their nuclear program we were poised to send substantial air naval and ground reinforcements to defend south korea just a few months later we deployed tens of thousands of troops to the gulf and placed thousands more on alert and in between those crises i gave the go ahead to the 25 000 troops engaged in operation uphold democracy in haiti in haiti the operation was especially historic because it was the most fully integrated military plan ever carried out in our history the four services worked together drawing on each other s special abilities more than ever before and for the first time we were ready to launch army infantry and an air assault from a navy aircraft carrier when we decided to send our troops in peacefully we did it in hours not days that kind of innovation and the ability to do that is what your country owes you as you walk out of this stadium today as officers in the united states air force this then will be our common security mission yours and mine and all americans to take on terrorism organized crime and drug trafficking to reduce the nuclear threat and the threat of biological and chemical weapons to keep our military flexible and strong these must be the cornerstones of our program to build a safer america at a time when threats to our security have no respect for boundaries and when the boundaries between those threats are disappearing abroad as at home we must measure the success of our efforts by one simple standard have we made the lives of the american people safer have we made the future for our children more secure let me say to this class i know that the rewards of serving on the front lines of our foreign policy may seem distant and uncertain at times thirty four years ago president kennedy said when there is a visible enemy to fight the tide of patriotism runs high but when there is a long slow struggle with no immediate visible foe your choice will seem hard indeed your choice your choice ladies and gentlemen to take on the problems and possibilities of this time to engage the world not to run from it is the right choice as you have learned here at the academy it demands sacrifice in the years ahead you will be asked to travel a long way from home to be away from your loved ones for long stretches of time to face dangers we perhaps cannot yet even imagine these are the burdens you have willingly agreed to bear for your country its safety and its long term security go forth knowing that the american people support you that they admire your dedication they are grateful for your service they are counting on you the class of 95 to lead us into the 21st century and they believe you truly do represent the best of america good luck and godspeed dem wjclinton31 5 97 bill_clinton thank you very much please be seated relax thank you general christman for those kind introductory remarks and for your truly extraordinary service to your nation throughout your military career here at west point and before when we had more opportunities to work together on a daily basis i have constantly admired your dedication and your ability general reimer secretary west senator reed chairman gilman congressman shimkus congresswoman kelly congressman sessions former congressman bilbray parents and families and friends of the cadets and especially to the class of 1997 i extend my heartfelt congratulations this has been a truly remarkable class as general christman said you wrote an unparalleled record of academic achievement in the classroom i congratulate you all and particularly your number one honor graduate and valedictorian adam ake congratulations to all of you on your accomplishments now general christman also outlined the extraordinary accomplishments of your athletic teams and he mentioned that i had the privilege of seeing army win its first 10 win season in football and reclaim the commander in chief s trophy in philadelphia and he thanked me for that but actually as a lifelong football fan i deserve no thanks it was a terrific game and i m quite sure it was the first time in the field of any endeavor of conflict where the army defeated the navy not on land but on water i know that in spite of all of your achievements as a class and in teams a few of you also upheld west point s enduring tradition of independence it began in 1796 when president adams war department ordered the first classes in fortification and the troops here thought they already knew all about that so they burned the classroom to the ground postponing the start of instruction by five years today i am reliably informed that though your spirits are equably high your infractions are more modest therefore i hereby exercise my prerogative to grant amnesty for minor offenses to the corps of cadets the cheering was a little disconcerting now the operative word there was minor men and women of the class of 97 today you join the long gray line the long gray line that stretches across two centuries of unstinting devotion to america and the freedom that is our greatest treasure from the defense of fort erie in the war of 1812 to the fury of antietam from the trenches of argonne to the anzio and okinawa to heartbreak ridge the mekong delta the fiery dessert of the gulf war the officers of west point have served and sacrificed for our nation in just the four years since i last spoke here your graduates have helped to restore democracy to haiti to save hundreds of thousands of lives from genocide and famine in rwanda to end the bloodshed in bosnia throughout our history whenever duty called the men and women of west point have never failed us and i speak for all americans when i say i know you never will i d like to say a special word of appreciation to west point and a special word of congratulations to the students in this class from other countries we welcome you here we are proud to have you as a part of our military service tradition and we wish you well as you go back home we hope you too can advance freedom s cause for in the 21st century that is something we must do together two days ago i returned from europe on a mission to look back to one of the proudest chapters in america s history and to look forward to the history we all will seek to shape for our children and grandchildren this week is the 50th anniversary of the marshall plan what winston churchill described as the most unsordid act in all history in 1947 americans exhausted by war and anxious to get on with their lives at home were summoned to embrace another leadership role by a generation of remarkable leaders general george marshall senator arthur vandenberg president harry truman leaders who knew there could be no lasting peace and security for an america that withdrew behind its borders and withdrew from the world and its responsibilities they provided the indispensable leadership to create the marshall plan nato and the first global financial institutions they in effect organized america and our allies to meet the challenges of their time to build unparalleled prosperity to stand firm against soviet expansionism until the light of freedom shown all across europe the second purpose of my journey was inextricably tied to the first it was to look to the future to the possibility of achieving what marshall s generation could only dream of a democratic peaceful and undivided europe for the first time in all of history and to the necessity of america and its allies once again organizing ourselves to meet the challenges of our time to secure peace and prosperity for the next 50 years and beyond to build and secure a new europe peaceful democratic and undivided at last there must be a new nato with new missions new members and new partners we have been building that kind of nato for the last three years with new partners in the partnership for peace and nato s first out of area mission in bosnia in paris last week we took another giant stride forward when russia entered a new partnership with nato choosing cooperation over confrontation as both sides affirmed that the world is different now european security is no longer a zero sum contest between russia and nato but a cherished common goal in a little more than a month i will join with other nato leaders in madrid to invite the first of europe s new democracies in central europe to join our alliance with the consent of the senate by 1999 the 50th anniversary of nato s founding i firmly believe nato enlargement is in our national interests but because it is not without cost and risk it is appropriate to have an open full national discussion before proceeding i want to further that discussion here today in no small measure because it is especially important to those of you in this class for after all as the sentinels of our security in the years ahead your work will be easier and safer if we do the right thing and riskier and much more difficult if we do not europe s fate and america s future are joined twice in half a century americans have given their lives to defend liberty and peace in world wars that began in europe and we have stayed in europe in very large numbers for a long time throughout the cold war taking wise steps now to strengthen our common security when we have the opportunity to do so will help to build a future without the mistakes and the divisions of the past and will enable us to organize ourselves to meet the new security challenges of the new century in this task nato should be our sharpest sword and strongest shield some say we no longer need nato because there is no powerful threat to our security now i say there is no powerful threat in part because nato is there and enlargement will help make it stronger i believe we should take in new members to nato for four reasons first it will strengthen our alliance in meeting the security challenges of the 21st century addressing conflicts that threaten the common peace of all consider bosnia already the czech republic poland romania the baltic nations and other central european countries are contributing troops and bases to nato s peacekeeping mission in bosnia we in the united states could not have deployed our troops to bosnia as safely smoothly and swiftly as we did without the help of hungary and our staging ground at taszar which i personally visited the new democracies we invite to join nato are ready and able to share the burdens of defending freedom in no small measure because they know the cost of losing freedom second nato enlargement will help to secure the historic gains of democracy in europe nato can do for europe s east what it did for europe s west at the end of world war ii provide a secure climate where freedom democracy and prosperity can flourish joining nato once helped italy germany and spain to consolidate their democracies now the opening of nato s doors has led the central european nations already already to deepen democratic reform to strengthen civilian control of their military to open their economies membership and its future prospect will give them the confidence to stay the course third enlarging nato will encourage prospective members to resolve their differences peacefully we see all over the world the terrible curse of people who are imprisoned by their own ethnic regional and nationalist hatreds who rob themselves and their children of the lives they might have because of their primitive destructive impulses that they cannot control when he signed the nato treaty in 1949 president truman said that if nato had simply existed in 1914 or 1939 it would have prevented the world wars that tore the world apart the experience of the last 50 years supports that view nato helped to reconcile age old adversaries like france and germany now fast friends and allies and clearly has reduced tensions between greece and turkey over all these decades already the very prospect of nato membership has helped to convince countries in central europe to settle more than half a dozen border and ethnic disputes any one of which could have led to future conflicts that in turn makes it less likely that you will ever be called to fight in another war across the atlantic fourth enlarging nato along with its partnership for peace with many other nations and its special agreement with russia and its soon to be signed partnership with ukraine will erase the artificial line in europe that stalin drew and bring europe together in security not keep it apart in instability nato expansion does not mean a differently divided europe it is part of unifying europe nato s first members should not be its last nato s doors will remain open to all those willing and able to shoulder the responsibilities of membership and we must continue to strengthen our partnerships with non members now let me be clear to all of you these benefits are not cost or risk free enlargement will require the united states to pay an estimated 200 million a year for the next decade our allies in canada and western europe are prepared to do their part so are nato s new members so must we more important enlargement requires that we extend to new members our alliance s most solemn security pledge to treat an attack against one as an attack against all we have always made the pledge credible through the deployment of our troops and the deterrence of our nuclear weapons in the years ahead it means that you could be asked to put your lives on the line for a new nato member just as today you can be called upon to defend the freedom of our allies in western europe in leading nato over the past three years to open its doors to europe s new democracies i weighed these costs very carefully i concluded that the benefits of enlargement strengthening nato for the future locking in democracy s gains in central europe building stability across the atlantic uniting europe not dividing it these gains decisively outweigh the burdens the bottom line to me is clear expanding nato will enhance our security it is the right thing to do we must not fail history s challenge at this moment to build a europe peaceful democratic and undivided allied with us to face the new security threats of the new century a europe that will avoid repeating the darkest moments of the 20th century and fulfill the brilliant possibilities of the 21st this vision for a new europe is central to our larger security strategy which you will be called upon to implement and enforce but our agenda must go beyond it because with all of our power and wealth we are living in a world in which increasingly our influence depends upon our recognizing that our future is interdependent with other nations and we must work with them all across the globe because we see the threats we face tomorrow will cross national boundaries they are amplified by modern technology communication and travel they must be faced by like minded nations working together whether we re talking about terrorism the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or environmental degradation therefore we must pursue five other objectives first we must build a community of asia pacific nations bound by a common commitment to stability and prosperity we fought three wars in asia in half a century asia s stability affects our peace and asia s explosive growth affects our prosperity that s why we ve strengthened our security ties to japan and korea why we now meet every year with the asian pacific leaders why we must work with and not isolate ourselves from china one of the great questions that will define the future for your generation of americans is how china will define its own greatness as a nation we have worked with china because we believe it is important to cooperate in ways that will shape the definition of that great nation in positive not negative ways we need not agree with china on all issues to maintain normal trade relations but we do need normal trade relations to have a chance of eventually reaching agreement with china on matters of vital importance to america and the world second we are building coalitions across the world to confront these new security threats that know no borders weapons proliferation terrorism drug trafficking environmental degradation we have to lead in constructing global arrangements that provide us the tools to deal with these common threats the chemical weapons convention the nonproliferation treaty the comprehensive test ban treaty and our efforts to further reduce nuclear weapons with russia now our great task is also to build these kinds of arrangements fighting terrorism drug traffickers and organized crime three weeks from now in denver i will use the summit of the eight leading nations to press this agenda the third thing we have to do is to build an open trading system our security is tied to the stake other nations have in the prosperity of staying free and open and working with others not working against them in no small measure because of the trade agreements we have negotiated we have not only regained our position as the world s number one exporter we have increased our influence in ways that are good for our security to continue that progress it is important that i have the authority to conclude smart new market opening agreements that every president in 20 years has had some of our fellow americans do not believe that the president should have this authority anymore they believe that somehow the global economy presents a threat to us but i believe it s here to say and i think the evidence is that americans just as we can have the world s strongest and best military we have the strongest and best economy in the world the american people can out work and out compete anyone given a free and fair chance not only that but this is about more than money and jobs this is about security the world especially our democratic neighbors to the south of us are looking to us if we don t build economic bridges to them someone else will we must make it clear that america supports free people and fair open trade fourth we have to embrace our role as the decisive force for peace you cannot and you should not go everywhere but when our values and interests are at stake our mission is crystal clear and achievable america should stand with our allies around the world who seek to bring peace and prevent slaughter from the middle east to bosnia from haiti to northern ireland we have worked to contain conflict to support peace to give children a brighter future and it has enhanced our security finally we have to have the tools to do these jobs those are the most powerful and best trained military in the world and a fully funded diplomacy to minimize the chances that military force will be necessary the long term defense plan we have just completed will increase your readiness capabilities and technological edge in a world of persistent dangers you must and you will be able to dominate the conflicts of the future as you did the battlefields of the past fifty five years ago in the early days of world war ii general george marshall the man we honored this week spoke here at your commencement about the need to organize our nation for the ordeal of war he said we are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle our flag will be recognized as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming power on the other today our flag of freedom and power flies higher than ever but because our nation stands at the pinnacle of its power it also stands at the pinnacle of its responsibility therefore as you carry our flag into this new era we must organize ourselves to meet the challenges of the next 50 years we must shape the peace for a new and better century about to dawn so that you can give your children and your grandchildren the america and the world they deserve god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton31 7 00a bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen thank you for your warm welcome and i want to thank bill nelson for his introduction it s amazing how if you ve sort of got one leg in the political grave people think you re doing a better job let me say how delighted i am to be here i remember well the first time i came to a fundraiser in tampa in 1992 early early early early some of you were there then and i particularly appreciate it because at that time my mother was the only voting american who thought i could win and a lot of things have happened in the last eight years and some odd months and i have been very honored to serve and i thank you all for coming today i first want to acknowledge congressman jim davis he s doing a wonderful job for you in the house and he s a real treasure he s been a stand up guy and for someone without a lot of seniority he has both had a big impact and he s been willing to cast brave votes and i m very grateful to him and even though the light is blinding my weakening eyes i think i see sam gibbons out there and i thank you sir i want to thank mayor grecco for his warm welcome i have loved my visits with him here i m like jim i like to see a person who likes his job if there s anything i can t stand is to hear somebody in public office complain you know nobody makes us take these jobs you ve got to work like crazy to get them and as soon as you give one up somebody else wants it so he never made any pretense of the fact that he loves this city and he loves his job and he s been a dream to work with i d like to thank ben hill griffin and chris hoyer and jim wilkes for chairing this event and for harassing the rest of you to give money to it i d like to thank buddy mackay for coming over here with me today and for the brilliant job he s doing as our envoy to the americas and the leadership that he showed in passing our trade bill on the caribbean basin earlier this year we can be very proud of that i thank the other people here who are running for congress we just need five more seats to win the house and maybe we saw a couple of them here today and i thank bob poe for chairing the democratic party here this is going to be a good state i think for us in november if we do the right things most important of all though i want to say that i m honored to be here for bill nelson i ve known bill for i don t know years and years and years a long time and he and grace have been friends of hilary and mine for years they and their children came other the white house and stayed with us one night and we stayed up later than we should have talking and we ve had the opportunity over the years at various encounters to get to know one another and i think the world of both of them and i think that we need more people like them in washington people who are civil and decent and reasonable and caring and not just in election season not just as a part of a marketing strategy but because they think it s the right thing to do and he s been an absolutely superb insurance commissioner and he would be a superb united states senator let me say to all of you it has been the great obviously the great honor of my life to serve as president i can t believe all the time that s passed when i ran for president i did so against all the odds when no one thought i could win because i believed the country was going in the wrong direction and was coming apart when it ought to be coming together and i thought that the washington political system was never going to serve america well unless it got shaken up and changed and if we have had some measure of success up there i think in no small degree it s because al gore and i went up there with a set of ideas for specific things we wanted to do rooted in the values of creating opportunity for every responsible american and creating a community in which all americans feel a part in a world where we re still the leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity now even though we faced intense partisan opposition at almost every turn of the road it turned out the ideas worked pretty well for america you know when i passed the economic plan in 1993 without a vote to spare only democrats voting for it to bring the deficit down al gore breaking the tie vote in the senate as he says his record since we ve been there is a lot better than mine whenever he votes we win i remember how our friends in the republican party said oh it would be the end of civilization as we knew it my terrible terrible economic program was going to bankrupt the country it was going to weaken the economy we d have a terrible recession the deficit would get worse this was from a crowd that had quadrupled the debt of the country in 12 years telling me how bad i was and then lo and behold it didn t work out the way they said it would by the time we got ready to pass the bipartisan balanced budget amendment in 97 all the hard work had been done and we got more than two thirds of both parties in both houses to vote for that and now we ve had as all of you know the longest economic expansion in history that s given us over 22 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the highest home ownership in history and greater social justice lowest child poverty rate in 20 years lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest rate of single parent household poverty in 46 years so we re moving in the right direction this thing is going as it should but the big question in this election is what do we propose to do with our prosperity that is the big issue and i think that as bill nelson goes out across this state between now and november whether he wins or not and i believe he will depends in no small measure on what people believe the election s about you might ask yourself just quietly what do you think it s about the only trouble we ve got in this election right now anywhere in america is the confusion that exists about what the differences are between the candidates for president senate congress and the two parties there was a big story in one of our major national newspapers the other day the american people are not sure there s much difference in economic policy a big story in one of the other newspapers about four days ago about an interview system with a lot of suburban women who wanted more gun safety legislation had no earthly idea what the difference between the two candidates was and i say that because i think there are three things you need to know about this election one is it s a huge profoundly important election just as important as the election in 1992 why because what a country does with its prosperity is just as stern a test of its judgment its values and its character as what it does with adversity you didn t have to be a genius to know we had to do something different in 92 i ll never forget when hillary gave me that little saying that somebody gave us that said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result so you didn t have to be a genius to figure out we had to change so now we are at the time in our history maybe unique in our history when we had this unique combination of enormous economic prosperity improving social progress welfare rolls cut in half crime at a 25 year low teen pregnancy down every social indicator going in the right direction and we don t have a domestic crisis or a foreign threat sufficiently grave to distract us what are we going to do about it that s a big issue the second thing you need to know about the election is that there are big differences and the decisions the voters make in all these races will have significant consequences in how we live our lives and what we do with our prosperity and what kind of people we are and then the third thing you need to know is that in this election year only the democrats want you to know what the differences are which is a pretty good indicator of who you ought to vote for now what do i mean by that well on our side led by vice president gore we ve got a group of men and women who want to keep our prosperity going by getting this country out of debt continuing to invest in education and in the future of our economy having affordable tax cuts and providing drug coverage for our seniors on medicare on their side their main argument as near as i can tell is we want to be inclusive and compassionate and spend the whole surplus on tax cuts but be nice about it while we re doing it and actually their argument is easier to sell than ours their argument is hey this is your money we re going to give it back to you wouldn t you like to have it now then there are all these issues they don t talk about so what i would like to tell you is what i honestly believe the differences are because i want you to share them with your friends and neighbors who would never come here but it s very important no point in having an election if the people don t know what the differences are and don t understand what the consequences are and i ll just start with the economy their side says we ve got this big projected surplus and we re going to give it back to you in tax cuts and as i said earlier today every one of these tax cuts sounds good and they re doing it they re smarter this year this year s tax cut last year was just one big omnibus bill this year they re doing it salami style passing a little along so they all sound good but when you add them all up and especially you put the new ones they re committing to in philadelphia it s the entire proposed surplus so every one of them looks good but it s kind of like going to a cafeteria every time i go to a cafeteria everything i see looks good but if i eat it all i ll get sick think about it so that s their position their economic policy is let s do what we did before who cares if we go back to deficits and they ll spend it all on tax cuts before they even keep their own spending promises never mind what emergencies come up our position is different it is hey let s remember how we got to this dance today we got here by getting rid of this deficit getting interest rates down getting it where people could invest and grow the economy so let s keep paying down the debt save some money back to invest in education and to lengthen the life of medicare and social security so when the baby boomers retire they don t bankrupt their kids and provide a prescription drug benefit for seniors on medicare let s have a tax cut and focus it on paying for long term care for college for child care helping working people with a lot of kids and helping people with their retirement ours costs 25 percent of what theirs does and does way more good for 80 percent of the people and then we say then let s save several hundred billion dollars of this projected surplus and let the next president and the next congress decide what to do over the next several years as we see whether the money comes in now this i can hardly tell you how important this is we ve worked really hard to get this country turned around to get this economy going and their position is let s spend all the projected surplus did you ever get one of those letters in the mail from ed mcmahon you know from the publisher s clearinghouse you may have won 10 million did you go out and spend that 10 million the next day if you did you should support them in this election but if you didn t you d better stick with us if you want to live like a republican you ve got to vote for the democrats this year this is important this is a big deal now the second issue education what s our program our program is that we should take the limited federal dollars we have and spend it on more teachers in the classrooms training those teachers better modernizing and repairing schools because you know here in florida how many schools you have right here in tampa i ve been to a school a high school right here in tampa just full of house trailers behind back we need to help deal with this issue we want to help people go to college and we want to say to schools all over america school districts you ve got to turn these schools around or shut them down no more failing schools now here s the good news student performance is going up all over america failing schools are turning around i was in spanish harlem in new york city the other day in a school that two years ago had 80 percent of its kids listen to this now 80 percent doing english and math below grade level two years ago today 74 percent of them are doing english and math at or above grade level in two years i ve been in schools in columbus ohio and rural kentucky all over america that were failing that are turned around without regard to the racial or economic backgrounds of the kids in the school we know how to do it that s our position their position is the federal money investment in education should be spent on block grants and vouchers i think we re right you have to decide but we have some evidence that our plan works and in the economy we ve sure got all the evidence we need all you ve got to do we tried it their way for 12 years and our way for eight years compare our eight years to their 12 and make up your mind in crime let s talk about that our position is more police on the street do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and kids and they said when i signed the brady bill and the assault weapons ban they terrified all these hunters and said i was going to take their guns away and how awful it was i heard all that stuff all over america it s one of the reasons we lost the house in 1994 when i went back to new hampshire in 1996 where they beat one of those congressmen i said you know you guys beat your democratic congressman up here because he voted for my crime bill and if a person in this audience and i got all these hunters together i said if one of you missed a day in the deer woods i want you to vote against me too because he did it for me but if you didn t miss a day in the deer woods they didn t tell you the truth and you need to get even and our margin of victory in new hampshire went up by 12 percent in four years this country has a lower crime rate than we ve had in 25 years gun crime has gone down by 35 percent so what do we say we say let s put more police on the street in the high crime neighborhoods let s close the gun show loophole in the background check law which you voted to do in florida overwhelmingly have mandatory child safety locks and stop importing these large capacity ammunition clips which allow the manufacturers to get around the assault weapons ban that s what we say what do they say throw the book at anybody that violates the law and have more people carrying concealed weapons even in church now you have to decide which side you agree with but it s not like you don t have any evidence here we tried it our way and we tried it their way and crime goes down more our way now the third thing i would like to say something about is health care i said we re for adding a voluntary prescription drug benefit to medicare they are for making people buy private insurance and subsidizing it for people up to 150 percent of the poverty line the only problem with their program is even the insurance companies say there is no way to have stand alone health insurance for prescription drugs nevada passed a program just like the ones the republicans in congress passed and not a single solitary insurance company would offer the drugs because it won t work and they didn t want to participate in a fraud now this is a huge deal in florida but it s a big deal all over america for the elderly the disabled our program is for the drug users theirs is for the drug makers it is not a complicated thing you just have to decide how important this is and whether you re willing to pay the price of our seniors never getting it if you don t support the democrats and you need to go tell people in florida we re for a patients bill of rights and they re not let s take the environment i ve worked real hard here on a program that would balance all the interests to save the florida everglades i m really proud of it the vice president worked hard on it we really have labored to try to support you in what you re doing in florida and we saved a lot of yellowstone park from a gold mine and we set aside more land in perpetuity in the lower 48 states than any administration in history except those of the two roosevelts and we proved i think that you could have cleaner air cleaner water and safer food and still have a stronger economy because we raised all the environmental standards we just did it in a sensible way now what s their position their position will be to weaken that direction to repeal one specific commitment they ve already made is to repeal my order setting aside 43 million roadless acres in the national forests the audubon society says it s the most significant conservation move in the last 40 years they say they ll get rid of it and they ll allow oil drilling in some places where we haven t and apparently they re committed to weaker regulations on the chemical industry now i ve done everything i could to create jobs and be pro business but i think we ve got to be pro environment and pro business and you just have to decide which side you want to be on and what you think the best thing is for america and these are the kinds of questions people have to be asked the same thing is true with regard to one america one of the things that i want to do is make sure that we re all going along for the ride here we re for raising the minimum wage for people that can never afford to come to a dinner like this but may be serving it i think it s unconscionable that it s still below what it was in 1982 in purchasing power terms when we ve got 4 percent unemployment it s just wrong nobody ought to work full time for a living and have kids that are still below the poverty line it s wrong but they re not for it now they re sort of being quiet on it now because the last time they fought me on it four years ago they said it would cost jobs and we created 11 million jobs since we passed it so they really don t have a justification anymore they can t they re kind of embarrassed to say they re not for it but they re not for it yet if we turn up the heat between now and election they will get it but it s a big difference we re for hate crimes legislation and they re basically not for it oh a few of them are but the leadership is not and the nominee is not because it protects gays well i think everybody ought to be protected from hate crimes which is a crime an assault on you just because of who you are but you can decide whether you agree with that or not and there will be a big impact on the courts the next president will appoint two to four judges on the supreme court and the senate will have to decide whether to confirm them or reject them this is a huge decision their nominee says his favorite judges are justice thomas and justice scalia by far the most conservative judges on the court that s what he said and so you have to decide because there will be big consequences so if you just go back here we are with this a whole future before us with all these opportunities up there and you should be happy we don t have to have one of these negative campaigns like we used to have for 20 years that mostly brought to us by their side trying to convince you that whoever their opponent was was just one step above a car thief i recommend we just call time out and say everybody running this year is a good patriotic american they are men and women who love their families and love their country and will do what they think is right but they have honest disagreements they disagree over economic policy and educational policy and health care policy and environmental policy and crime policy and civil rights policy and what it means to be an american citizen and what kind of individual rights you should have as guaranteed by the supreme court and we want to have a debate over that now their strategy is to blur all that i ll be very surprised if you hear anybody say this week at their meeting what i just said to you even though i have tried to be exceedingly faithful to the differences between the two parties and their strategy is to talk about compassion and all it s a brilliant strategy it s a pretty package and they re hoping if they wrap it tight enough nobody will open it before christmas and what we ve got to do is try to make sure that the american people open the package in september and october so they will know i trust the american people they almost always get it right otherwise we wouldn t still be here after over 200 years and if everybody understands exactly what the choices are and the vice president doesn t win or bill nelson doesn t win we d be all right about that but the truth is if everybody understands exactly what the choices are bill nelson will be the next senator al gore will be the next president we will win the house of representatives why because our economic policies our educational policies our health care policies are right for the country because the idea of building one america not just with words but with deeds and giving everybody a chance to participate in this brilliant future of science and technology and this global economy is the right thing for the country and the right thing for our children s future that s why i m telling you as much as many good things that have happened in the last eight years believe me all the great stuff is still out there but there are big challenges look at florida s school kids how diverse they are if you want this country to be where it ought to be every one of them has got to be able to get a good education we have to figure out how when all those baby boomers retire and the average 65 year old can look forward to living to be 83 we re going to manage that without bankrupting our kids and grandkids we have to figure out how to make the most of this scientific and technological revolution one of the reasons i want al gore to be president apart from my personal relationship with him is that i have studied very hard the impacts of the information technology revolution the impacts of the genome revolution what s likely to happen over the next 10 years it seems to me that you want somebody that can make the most of the computer revolution and still protect your financial and medical records and not let somebody get at them unless you say okay it seems to me you want somebody who can help make the most of this scientific revolution without letting somebody deny you a job or promotion or raise or health insurance because of your little gene map it seems to me we ought to have somebody in the white house that understands the future and i know we ought to have people in the senate who have the values and the judgment and just the way of operating that bill nelson does believe me i ve done everything i could to turn this country around and the only thing now we have to decide is what is this election about if people really say this election is about what shall we do with this moment of prosperity how can we meet the big challenges and seize the big opportunities out there bill nelson will be just fine thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton31 7 00b bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you very much i am so happy to be here all of you know i love florida a good portion of my wife s family has lived down here for the last 15 years and more i got my start in florida twice once in december of 1991 everyone knows about that when the florida straw poll came out with a majority for me against six opponents and got me started and i m very grateful for that but once maybe only one person in this room remembers and that was in early 1981 when i had the distinction of being the youngest former governor in the history of america when i was defeated in the reagan landslide of 1980 bob graham still invited me to come speak to the florida democratic convention to explain how it was that i got my brains beat out in the hope that others could avoid a similar fate i have never forgotten it never stopped feeling indebted and bob asked me back three more times after that and i think that had a lot to do with what happened in 1991 so i m very grateful to him i m grateful that both bob and adele and bill and grace nelson have been friends of hillary s and friends of mine for a very long time now and bill and grace and their children have spent the night in the white house and bill was making fun of me because his daughter used to call chelsea and from time to time i like every father of a teenage daughter i was the answering service the presidency doesn t alleviate some responsibilities in life we ve had a great relationship all of us all six of us have now for such a long time and i m so honored that bill is running for the senate so grateful i want to just i ll be brief tonight because i know i m preaching to the saved here but florida is very important we have to win the senate race and you have to carry it for the vice president and you can and i believe in 1996 early on election night when i saw that we had carried florida i knew the election was over and in 2000 early on election night if the polls show we have carried florida the election is over and i want you to understand that i have al gore and i have spent a lot of time in florida over the last seven and a half years we worked with many of the people here in south florida to save the everglades to bring the southern command here from panama to bring the summit of the americas here to work to expand trade we just passed the caribbean basin trade bill which will be very good for southern florida and i can t thank bob graham enough for the help and support and wise counsel he s given me over these entire two terms but here s what i want you to think about what about everybody who s not here tonight do you believe that everyone you know who is a friend of yours knows what this election is about do you believe that everyone you know has a clear idea about what the differences are between bill and his opponent between the vice president and governor bush and mr cheney do you believe that you know it s not true don t you they don t why is that and what are we going to do about it there are three things you need to know about this election one is it is a very big election it is every bit as important maybe over the long run of our life more important than the election in 1992 i ll come back to why two there are profound differences between the two candidates for president between the candidates for senate and the house differences that will have real consequences for how we live together in the years ahead and three only the democrats want you to know what the differences are now what does that tell you about who you ought to vote for what do i mean by that first it s a big election because we have an unprecedented moment of prosperity and it s not just economics crime is down welfare is down teen pregnancy is down people are working together and dealing with each other as never before we are a more just society than we were child poverty is down minority unemployment the lowest ever recorded female unemployment the lowest in 40 years poverty among single parent households the lowest in 46 years this is a more just society and we are more full of confidence moreover we have no crippling domestic crisis or foreign threat so it s a big election because we have a chance because of our prosperity to build the future of our dreams for our children but that s not automatic that requires that instead of taking a relaxed view and sort of wandering through the election and wandering through the next couple of years we have to say hey we might not ever have a chance like this again we ve got to seize the big opportunities and take on the big challenges that are out there and there are some big ones out there you know them in florida and i ll just give you two of the biggest that you experience here to a greater degree than almost any other state number one we ve got the largest and most diverse group of students in our schools in history and they re not all getting a world class education yet number two we re living longer than ever before if you live to be 65 your life expectancy is almost 83 now and when all the baby boomers retire there will only be about two people working for every one person drawing social security we have to lengthen the life of social security we have to lengthen the life of medicare and we have to add a prescription drug benefit to the medicare program and i might say nobody has worked harder or more effectively to that end than bob graham and everybody in florida ought to know it and ought to be grateful for it now there are the challenges of the future climate change we worked so hard to save the everglades if we don t turn this global warming around in 30 years a lot of it will be under water we ve now sequenced the human genome that s great there are going to be unbelievable medical discoveries made and pretty soon young women will bring their children home from the hospital with a little gene map and before you know it there are kids in this room whose children will have a life expectancy of 90 years or more when they re born but do you think someone should be able to use your gene map to deny you a job a promotion a raise or health insurance i don t think so we need someone in the white house and people in the congress who understand science and technology the internet revolution people made fun of al gore over who invented the internet but he sponsored the legislation almost 20 years ago that took the internet from being the private province of physicists and people involved in defense work to sweeping the world and if it hadn t been for him we wouldn t have gotten the e rate and the telecommunications bill four years ago which guarantees that every school no matter how poor can afford to have computers for their kids and be part of the internet now there are big challenges out there the outcome of this election will depend upon whether the american people believe what i just said that it s a big election with big challenges and not a time to lay down and relax you can just book it when this is over you read the election analyses the week after the election in november and you remember what i told you tonight the outcome of the election will depend upon what the american people believe the election is about number one and number two whether they understand the differences on our side we ve got people like the vice president and people like bill nelson who did more with that insurance commissioner s job than anybody ever has stopping fraud against seniors enrolling children in the children s health insurance program people who want to build on the progress of the last eight years to make the changes of the future on their side they ve got their nominees for president and vice president and others who basically tell us that these are the best of times that we re all going to have harmony and compassion and get along together and the surplus that we ve accumulated that we re supposed to accumulate over the next 10 years is your money and they re going to give it back to you and otherwise they re kind of blurring the differences bill s talking about how moderate his opponent sounds now they re not bragging about shutting the government down twice anymore or trying to shut the department of education down or having the biggest medicare and education and environmental cuts in history you never hear them talking about it anymore gone is the harsh rhetoric and the mean words of 1992 through 1999 even the mean words of the 2000 primary against senator mccain that s all gone now what are you to make of that it s a very appealing package the first thing i want you to know is i don t think this should be a mean election i think we should say on the front end we think our opponents are good patriotic people that they love their children and they love their country but they have honest differences and this pretty package that they have presented is one they hope nobody will open until christmas and certainly not before the november election but there are real differences and we want you to know what they are and i ll just mention two or three tonight but i want you to remember this because you ve got to talk to people all these news stories that i ve read say people don t know if there is any difference between the democrats and republicans between our nominees for president on economic policy there was a huge article in the press last week surveying lots and lots of suburban women who care a lot about gun safety and they asked the vice president was ahead like six points in this poll among women who cared about this issue then the person doing the poll who doesn t work for either campaign simply read their positions and the numbers went from 45 to 39 to 57 to 29 so you can understand why they wouldn t want you to know what the real differences are but you have to do that let me just mention one or two one on the economy here s our position our position is the american people should get a tax cut but it ought to be one we can afford because we still have to invest in education and health care and science and technology in providing for the future number one number two because we still have to lengthen the life of medicare and social security to get past the baby boomers retirement and we ve got to provide that drug benefit and number three we ve still got to keep paying down this debt and get this country out of debt to keep interest rates low so the economy will keep going now we have tax cuts that we admit they re only about 25 percent 30 percent of what theirs are but they do more good for 80 percent of the people for sending a kid to college for long term care for child care for retirement savings for alleviating the marriage penalty eighty percent of the people or more are better off under ours moreover because we continue to pay down the debt and they can t interest rates will be at least a percent lower do you know what that s worth in tax cuts over a decade 250 billion in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower college loan payments now that took me a while to say didn t it theirs is so much easier hey this surplus is your money and we re going to give it back to you and that s what they do if you take the tax cuts they ve passed in the last year plus the ones that are in their platform that their nominee ran on it takes up the whole surplus the whole projected surplus and then some not a penny even for their own spending promises now quite apart from the obvious problems like how we spend 25 percent as much and give 80 percent of the people more there is this it is a projected surplus projected did you ever get one of those letters in the mail from publisher s clearinghouse ed mcmahon sends you a letter saying you may have won 10 million well if you went out the next day and spent the 10 million you should vote for them but if not you ought to stick with us to keep this prosperity going now this is a big issue no way to paper this over this is a huge gaping difference secondly on health care we re for a patients bill of rights we refor investing i mean a real one that means something we re for investing whatever it takes and it s not that much money to lengthen the life of medicare and to add this medicare prescription drug benefit we re for we re for a not particularly costly tax break to let people between the ages of 55 and 65 buy into medicare if they lose their health insurance and we re for letting the parents of these the low income parents of these kids that are in our children s health insurance program buy into the program if they don t have insurance now what s their program they answer no to all these no no no no and their medicare drug program basically says that they ll help you if you re up to 150 percent of the poverty line but not if you re over and you ve got to buy private insurance what s the problem with that the insurance companies after all the fights we ve had together against each other over health care i ve got to brag on the health insurance companies i want to brag on them they have been up front and honest they say this is a bad idea you cannot offer a stand alone drug policy that anyone will buy nevada passed a plan just like the ones the republicans are backing and not a single solitary insurance company has offered drug coverage under it because they don t want to be labeled frauds now why do they do it because the drug companies don t want us to buy all these drugs for seniors now that seems counter intuitive normally if you re in business you want to sell as much as you can but they fear that because we ll be buying a lot we ll have a lot of bargaining power and it will drive the price down and people will only have to pay 25 percent more than they pay in every other country for american drugs i just don t think it s a good reason but it s a huge difference in education we re for higher standards requirements to turn around failing schools or shut them down more teachers in the schools more money for teacher training more money for building or modernizing schools florida needs that bad right that s what we re for they re for block grants and vouchers that s what their program is in crime we re for more police and closing the gun show loophole in the brady bill right they have never supported the police program even though it s given us the lowest crime rate in 25 years never and in the previous administration the president vetoed the brady bill now this group of people are against closing the gun show loophole their answer is more people carrying concealed weapons even in their houses of worship now that s not demagoguery those are facts that s their answer so the point i m trying to make is you get to make a choice and speaking of choice that may be the biggest consequence of all the next president will appoint two to four members of the supreme court which is why it s important who s in the senate because they have to confirm them al gore is pro choice and mainstream on basically preserving individual liberties and civil rights and our judges are the most diverse group in history but they have the highest ratings of the american bar association in 40 years so they are confident mainstream and diverse both their candidates on the national ticket are against the rowe v wade decision and their nominee says his favorite judges are justices thomas and scalia the two most conservative on the court those are his favorites now you have to these are honorable people i ll say again they will do what they believe how can you you don t expect people to get elected president and not do what they believe you have to assume that you can trust them to follow their conscience and their lifelong positions now there won t be any talk about it probably this week but this is a huge deal the composition of the supreme court will change and that court will shape america well beyond the term of the next president and this is a consequence so what you have to tell your friends and neighbors is look these are just four i ve given you but if you look at or five education health care the economy crime and choice those are five we could talk about the environment i could give you lots of other issues but you get the point elections are choices that have consequences and people must live with the consequences so it is very important that they understand the choice the american people always get it right if they have enough time and enough information that s what you ve got to believe otherwise if they didn t nearly always get it right we wouldn t be around here after 220 years so i say to you this is a profoundly important election there are big differences you have to make sure people understand what their choices are you don t have to say a bad word about our opponents you can say that you too are sick of 20 years of negative politics of trying to convince people that your opponent is just one step above a car thief i know a little something about it i don t like it very much but that cannot be permitted to obscure the differences and i ll just say this in closing i ve lived long enough now to know that nothing stays the same forever in my lifetime we never had a chance like this we can literally build the future of our dreams for our children we can also be a more positive force around the world for peace and freedom and security and prosperity but we can only do it if we make the right choices i want to say just one word about the vice president one of the things that bothers me is that the polls seem to say he gets no credit for our economic policy before i took office we spent two months debating economic policy you may remember i had a big national economic summit when we had to decide whether we were going to make the brutally tough decisions to get that deficit down al gore was the first one to say we ve got to do it let s just take the lumps and go on when he cast the deciding vote on the economic plan of 1993 without which we could not have done any of the things we ve enjoyed since he acted on his conviction he was instrumental in the telecommunications act which had a lot to do with creating hundreds of thousands of high wage jobs he supported all my trade initiatives he has been there an integral member of our economic team he understands the future that s important you want a president who understands the future and finally let me say the most important thing of all to me is he wants to take us all along for the ride he is for a minimum wage they are not he is for employment nondiscrimination legislation they are not he is for hate crimes legislation and their leadership isn t because it also extends protection to gays and i think that we need to be building an america where everybody that works hard plays by the rules and doesn t get in anybody else s way in a defensive way ought to be part of our america that s what we think now people are free to think something else but no one should be confused about the consequences now i m telling you in my lifetime we ve never had a chance like this and i feel so good in spite of all the good things that have happened in america in the last seven years i feel like we ve been turning an ocean liner around in the ocean and now it s headed in the right way and it s about to become a speedboat all the best stuff is still out there if we make the right choice bill nelson is the right choice and so is al gore thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton31 7 00c bill_clinton thank you very much first of all let me say that i m delighted to be back in florida i m glad to be here with jim davis and my longtime friends bill nelson and buddy mackay who is doing a wonderful job for the united states as our special envoy to the americas and he did spearhead the passage in the congress earlier this year the caribbean basin trade initiative which is one of the most important things congress has done this year it is something i know that will be of special benefit to florida i want to just say a few words about this china issue first of all it is part of an overall strategy we have followed for almost eight years now when i became president it was obvious to me that to turn the economy around we had to do three things we had to get rid of the deficit and get interest rates down and get investments up we had to invest in the new technologies of the future and in the educational capacity of our people and to create a whole network of lifetime learning in america and we had to expand trade whether we like it or not the economy of every country will become increasingly global and we have to be in a position to take advantage of it a lot of people who don t agree with my position say that well we ve still got a big trade deficit that s true and the reason we do is because our economy has grown so much more rapidly than that of our major trading partners a five year economic slowdown in japan has contributed to our trade deficit the collapse of the other asian economies for a couple of years and the problems that russia had all contributed to our trade deficit but if you look to the long term future america has got if we want to make things we ve got to sell them to somebody we have 4 percent of the world s population and 22 percent of the world s income so it s not rocket science to figure out that if you re going to produce this much wealth you ve got to sell it to somebody and so i believe that we have now about 300 trade agreements we ve negotiated over eight years under the leadership of charlene barshefsky and before her mickey kantor i think they ve done a great job and as i said buddy mackay has done a great job we have enjoyed strong support in a bipartisan fashion from the florida legislative delegation and senator graham in particular has been very helpful and i m grateful for that but this china issue is something special because it involves huge economics but it goes beyond economics and i d just like to mention and make one or two points here the agreement basically is not like other trade agreements in all the other trade agreements they really are trade we get together and we swap out you give them something they give you something and you work out the best deal you possibly can and not everybody s happy but you do it because you think there will be more good than harm this is really a membership agreement and it s important that it be understood as that that is in order for china to get into the wto the members of the world trading organization have to agree that china will get in on reasonable commercial terms so in order to do that they have to start with the world s largest economy the united states and we work out what the reasonable terms would be since we have a very large trade deficit with china which is typical for a country that s developing like that their markets are more closed to us than our markets are to them this agreement essentially involves opening china s markets for trade and for investment to an extent that would have been unimaginable even a year or a year and a half ago phosphate fertilizer will be affected citrus will be affected automobiles and automobile parts and dealerships will be affected it s all in that sense a one way street in our favor now china will also be able to sell more things to us as it grows more economically diverse and more powerful so it s a good deal for them because they can modernize their economy beyond that i have to tell you that for me while keeping this prosperity going is very important and in some ways and the great underlying issue that the american people have to decide in this election year and i think a big part of it is paying off the debt for example we can be out of debt in 12 years and if we do it interest rates over the next decade will be at least a point lower than they otherwise would be and that s lower business loans 250 billion in lower home mortgage payments 30 billion in car payments 15 billion in college loan payments i think that s very important but this trade issue must be at the heart of that beyond that as important as all the economics is you should understand also that this is a big national security issue for the united states in the last 50 60 years we fought three wars with asia a lot of blood was shed in world war ii and korea and vietnam now we look to the future and we don t know what the next 50 years will hold and no one can guarantee the future but we know this that if we re trading with people and working with them there s a lot better chance that we will find peaceful ways to work out whatever differences we have and the more china is involved in the global economy the global society the more likely it is to change and become more democratic to become more open to become more transparent and to become a better partner instead of a competitor with us in the pacific region and a better neighbor to all the other countries in that area so i really believe that there are lives at stake here i believe our futures at stake and i believe if we can if you look at the two largest countries in the world in population they are china and india and the indian subcontinent together actually has about the same population as china and if we could affect a peaceful transition in both those places that have greater trade at its core and greater communications back and forth the world would be a very different place in the next 50 years and a much better place for all of our children so i want to tell you all although i know your interest properly is in the benefits that will flow directly to your activities in this state and in this region the truth is it s bigger than all that and it s about what kind of future our kids and our grandkids are going to have i just want to make one last point a very practical one jim davis was appropriately modest but the truth is we had to fight like the devil to get things in the house and we carried and we had a pretty good vote as it turned out but it was a very very hard fight and it was a harder fight for members of our party and he showed great courage and great leadership and you should be very grateful to him because he really stuck it out there he was very strong unambiguous saying we should do this and it s the right thing for our country and i m really proud of him for doing it here s the practical issue we got this bill through the house in a timely fashion i had very much hoped that we would pass it through the senate where it s an easier bill to pass we ve got way more votes than we need to pass it but we couldn t get it through all the procedural and substantive business of the senate before the 4th of july and then before the august recess that means that we have to pass it early in september as soon as they come back after both parties have their conventions and the august recess is over we had a very encouraging vote on procedure that got over 80 votes in the senate basically to take it up early but it is absolutely imperative that this bill be voted in early september the longer they take to vote on it the more likely it could be caught up in procedural wrangling in the senate the people who are against the bill and there are people in both parties that are against the bill interestingly though they tend to be ironically the most conservative members of the republican caucus and the most liberal members of the democratic caucus but the senate is set up the senate is set up and was set up by the founders to slow things down and one member can cause a world of trouble if there are a whole lot of other things going on at the same time so this is not a done deal we had 60 people who i think there are probably 70 senators for this and i know that it may be hard for you to imagine that if that s the case that we would have some trouble bringing this up in early september but in fact it is true i am very grateful to senator lott the republican leader in the senate the majority leader for his amendment to bring this up in early september this is really an american issue this should not be a partisan issue it is a very important economic and a national security issue but one of the things that i hope to come out at this meeting is that either as an organization or individually you will make it clear both to your senators senator mack and senator graham but also insofar as you can to the senate hierarchy that it is imperative that this be brought up early the senate the democratic leader senator daschle is also strongly in support of what we re doing but the only worry i have now is that with all the business they still have to do with all the budgetary issues and the controversy that inevitably attends the closing weeks of a congressional session in an election year something procedural could happen that would delay this and you just don t know what s going to happen and i can tell you that it is profoundly important to our country so anything you can do to make your voices heard as ordinary americans on behalf of voting this quickly in september that s the key if they vote it early in september it will pass quick and we will have a better future thank you very much dem wjclinton31 7 00d bill_clinton let s give her another hand didn t she do a great job paul herrera thank you and the barksdale senior golden age club for welcoming me here i m delighted to be here and thank all of you for coming out i want to thank bill nelson your insurance commissioner for joining me here and for the work he s done to protect florida seniors from insurance fraud and also the work he s done to help enroll children in the children s health insurance program i thank him for that mayor grecco it s good to be back in your great city i love it here i d also like to acknowledge the presence in the audience of your former lt governor now our special envoy to latin america buddy mackay thank you for being here this center was founded in 1942 it was then a place where army and air force personnel could enjoy it during off duty hours while the uses of the barksdale center have changed over the years the purpose hasn t it still serves those who served our nation in uniform and in so many other ways as paul herrera has said the barksdale center has become a second home for many of tampa s seniors and disabled citizens a place to take music classes to learn the two step maybe i m not too old to learn that to get a nutritious meal and a bedrock of security a place you can all rely on in good times and bad i appreciate the work that is done here for our nation these are good times remarkably good times virtually without precedent in the history of america like the rest of america florida is on the move when i came to tampa as a candidate in 1992 the unemployment rate was over 7 percent today it s 2 7 percent the nation has created over 22 million jobs with the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the longest economic expansion in history with record deficits turned into record surpluses the question before the american people as the congress deliberates and as the voters deliberate is what are we going to do with this magic moment of prosperity what is the best use of it will we think about short term gains or will we think about what we should do for our country over the long run for people of all ages all races and all backgrounds and all income groups i believe one of the most important things we can do with our prosperity is to strengthen medicare by adding a prescription drug benefit thirty five years ago when president johnson signed medicare into law he created a cornerstone upon which generations of americans could safely rest since then medicare has been a remarkable success and a solid guarantee before medicare more than half of our seniors had no health care coverage at all serious illness often wiped away in an instant all the savings families had put away over a lifetime of hard work today nearly every senior has the security of basic health coverage poverty among elderly has fallen dramatically as a result and americans over 65 have the highest life expectancy of all the world s seniors any american who lives to be 65 today has a life expectancy in excess of 82 years people over 80 are the fastest growing group of people in america in percentage terms i hope to be one of them one of these days yet for all its success as bill nelson made clear medicare simply has not kept pace with the growing miracles of modern medicine the medicare law was created at a time when patients lives were more often saved by a surgeon s scalpel than by pharmaceuticals when many of the lifesaving drugs we now take for granted did not even exist indeed were not even thought of prescription drugs today can accomplish what once was done through expensive surgery and no one if we were creating the medicare program today starting from scratch it would not even occur to anyone to create a medicare program without a prescription drug benefit adding a voluntary prescription drug benefit is the right thing to do but it s also the smart thing to do today fully half of medicare beneficiaries don t have prescription drug coverage for part or all of the year and the cost of prescription drugs is taking too big a bite out of the fixed incomes of too many seniors and people with disabilities you heard that today in the remarks that were made before i came up here in ways more eloquent than i could possibly express sylvia s story is not unique to her i ll bet it s repeated among a lot of you in this audience and i can promise you all across america there are millions and millions and millions just like her too many people literally are forced to choose on a weekly basis between filling their prescriptions and filling their grocery carts a family usa report released today shows that the cost of prescription drugs is continuing to increase according to this report older americans now pay an average of more than 1 200 a year for prescription drugs up from 559 in 1992 the amount is projected to increase to more than listen to this 2 800 over the next decade here in florida hundreds of thousands of seniors like the benefits of dependable prescription drug coverage thousands of others try to get coverage through private medigap insurance plans and managed care some have succeeded only to be dropped later by their private care plans and left with nothing more than an empty medicine chest in fact just this year nearly a million medicare beneficiaries around america more than 85 000 in florida alone were dropped by their managed care plans for most seniors that leaves only one alternative to drug coverage they can buy into a private medigap program which can cost hundreds of dollars a month for a benefit with a 250 deductible and no protections against catastrophic drug costs now most of us tend to think of medicare beneficiaries as seniors but in fact 5 million of them are people with disabilities under the age of 65 a quarter million of them live right here in florida too as difficult as it is for seniors to get affordable and dependable prescription drugs it s an even greater challenge for americans with disabilities today i m releasing another report that documents how medicare beneficiaries with disabilities are in poor health require more prescriptions and are less likely to have private prescription drug coverage the report also shows that people with disabilities purchased 40 percent more drugs than the typical medicare beneficiary and like seniors who lack drug coverage they too pay more for the drugs they do get on average medicare beneficiaries with disabilities who lack coverage spend 50 percent more out of pocket for 50 percent fewer prescriptions than those who have coverage let me say that again people without coverage spend 50 percent more out of pocket for 50 percent fewer prescriptions than those who have coverage these drugs aren t only lifesaving they can help people with disabilities return to work and make even greater contributions to their communities people like patricia fell over here to my right who came up with me on the stage from clearwater she suffers every day from a very painful hip condition she has been a foster mother listen to this to 87 children and her daughter is here with us today and we welcome her she uses her disability check to pay her 4 300 annual prescription drug bill she would work full time but if she did she d lose her disability check that s what pays for the prescription drugs she desperately needs she told me that this is continuing to be an agonizing choice for her now people like her who have done their part for our country and done way more than most people have to help children in need shouldn t have to make a choice between health and work a medicare drug benefit would give pat the chance to be as healthy active and productive as she could possibly be that s why i have proposed a plan to provide a medicare prescription drug benefit that is voluntary and accessible to all seniors and all americans with disabilities a plan that ensures that all older americans and other eligible americans with disabilities no matter where they live or how sick they are will pay the same affordable 25 a month premium a plan that uses price competition not price controls to give seniors and people with disabilities the best price as possible a plan that would cover catastrophic drug costs a plan that provides beneficiaries the prescriptions they need at the pharmacies they trust a plan that is part of an overall effort to strengthen and modernize medicare and lengthen its life so that we will not have to ask our children to shoulder the burden of the baby boom generation when we retire now in response the republican majority in congress has passed a private insurance plan that many seniors and people with disabilities simply will not be able to afford you see that already with the medigap plan it won t offer affordable and accessible coverage to all seniors it relies on a trickle down scheme that provides a subsidy for insurers but not a single dollar for middle class seniors and people with disabilities and let me say this over half the seniors and people with disabilities who lack affordable insurance coverage today have incomes above 150 percent of the poverty line which is about 12 600 for an individual senior about 16 600 for a couple now i m president i m not supposed to say it s a bunch of baloney like sylvia did but you might be surprised to know who agrees with her the insurance companies themselves even the insurance companies concede that a medigap insurance model will not work for prescription drug coverage this is very very important here s what one insurance company had to say and i quote private stand alone prescription drug coverage will not work such coverage would constitute an empty promise to medicare beneficiaries insurance companies are refusing to participate in such a program the state of nevada tried to implement a private insurance model quite similar to the republican plan which passed through congress they could not find one single qualified insurance company even willing to offer the coverage because they knew it couldn t be done at an affordable rate and they didn t want to be accused of perpetrating a fraud on the seniors in the state it s clear that this plan that passed with the votes of the republican majority is basically designed for the pharmaceutical companies who make the drugs not the seniors who take them now why would they do that because they believe that if we have a medicare program we will be able to buy these pharmaceuticals in bulk and get you a better price and because charging higher prices for americans recovers all the research costs of these drugs and that enables them to sell the drugs for a profit at much lower prices in other countries which is why i m sure you ve seen all these stories about people taking buses to canada to buy their drugs unfortunately florida is nowhere near north dakota so that s not an option for most of you but that s what s going on here and it s unbelievable to me what are we going to do with our prosperity this week and you may hear if you turn on the television the republicans when they meet in philadelphia in convention talking about all their tax cut bills and how wonderful they d be for you but what they don t say is that if you take all their tax cut proposals in total it spends the entire projected surplus of the country for the next 10 years congressman davis just came in your congressman he was nodding his head so i want to acknowledge you thank you for being here sir they spent you know they re trying to put the heat on him they re trying to say well people in tampa ought to be mad at him he s not voting for all these tax cuts aren t they good it kind of reminds me of going to a cafeteria when i go to a cafeteria everything i see looks good but if i eat it all i ll get sick now that s what s going on here so they talk about all these wonderful tax cuts if they become the law there will be nothing left from the projected surplus for a medicare prescription drug benefit nothing left to lengthen the life of social security and medicare so when the baby boomers retire we don t break our kids and our grandkids nothing left to invest in the education of our children there s something else i d like to say that all of you can probably identify with this is a projected surplus this is what we think we ll get over the next 10 years did you ever get one of those letters from ed mcmahon you know it probably said you may have won 10 million did you ever get one you may have won 10 million now if you went out and spent the 10 million the next day you should support their plan but if not you ought to think again there when you cut these taxes the money s gone and i think it s wrong to spend it all just this week we released a report that showed that one of their spending proposals the total repeal of the estate tax would benefit only 4 300 families in florida with an average tax cut of 434 000 now i think there ought to be some changes in the estate tax i think the rate s too high i think too many family businesses are burdened by it and i m all for changing it i ve offered to change it but to completely repeal it without taking account of the need here for prescription drugs is a big mistake while 4 300 families in florida would benefit from the estate tax repeal the medicare prescription drug benefit would provide affordable coverage to more than 2 7 million seniors and people with disabilities in florida their average income is 18 600 even by congress s own optimistic efforts i will say again these tax bills leave nothing for medicare for lengthening the life of social security and for the drug program or for education for our children plus which they d make it impossible for us to pay this country out of debt by 2012 one of the things i ve been trying to do is get us out of debt we quadrupled the debt of the country in the 12 years before i took office and we re trying to get rid of it if we get rid of it interest rates will be lower incomes will be higher people will pay less for home mortgages 250 billion over 10 years by our estimates less for car loans less for college loans that s the equivalent of a big tax cut lower interest rates so i think this is very very important now there is a better way the budget that i gave the congress continues our fiscal discipline it would get us out of debt by 2012 for the first time since 1835 and it would put us in great shape for the 21st century it would extend the life of the social security trust fund by more than 50 years it would extend the life of medicare by over 30 years medicare was supposed to go broke last year when i took office it provides believe it or not tax cuts affordable tax cuts to help people send their kids to college pay for long term care for the elderly and disabled a big deal pay for child care pay for retirement savings allow people between the ages of 55 and 65 to buy into medicare and give them a tax benefit to do so because so many of them have lost their insurance and provide marriage penalty tax relief and believe it or not our plan only costs one fourth as much as theirs does but it would provide more benefits to 80 percent of the people so there is a way to have a tax cut here and have the money to pay for the medicare prescription drug program to lengthen the life of medicare and social security to invest in the education of our children and believe it or not i still leave a lot of this projected surplus alone in my budget in case it doesn t materialize or in case it does materialize the next president and the next congress can make a judgment about what to do with it i just don t believe in spending all this money before it comes in we ve tried it before and it didn t work out too well so i hope that all of you will raise your voices this is not a partisan political issue in america when you go to the pharmacist to fill a prescription nobody asks you whether you voted republican or democrat for the last 40 years nobody asks whether you vote at all you re just a person and you need the medicine it should not be a partisan political issue in washington we have the money we can do it provide a tax cut invest in our children and still get the country out of debt all we have to do is decide what our priorities are how much we care about it how much people like the people on this stage and in this room matter to us and what kind of america we want to live in so i ask you all because it s not a partisan issue out here do what you can with your senators and your representatives raise your voices tell them it shouldn t be a partisan issue in washington you ve got a lot of lives depending on it and it s only going to become more and more important you know we re on the verge of breakthroughs for parkinson s for various kinds of cancers with the human genome project which i m sure you read about we ve now sequenced the human gene in its entirety it won t be long in the next 10 years it s going to take your breath away what we learn how to correct in terms of human health problems i believe that these young children here will themselves have children that will have a life expectancy at birth in excess of 90 years but if we want to do this this is a high class problem i believe people with disabilities will find ways to remedy a lot of the disabilities and they will be able to live longer and better lives and have more options but all of that will require us to rely more heavily on medicine not less more we have put this off long enough we finally have the money to do it and i think as a country we re morally obligated to do it so i ask you to raise your voices stick with us let s keep working on it until we get it done thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton31 8 96a bill_clinton thank you wow well i asked you not to leave and you didn t thanks for staying we got here as quick as we could i want to thank the mayor and everyone who worked hard to make this event possible today i thank the two bands for bringing us the music thank you very much i think you can see that tipper and hillary and al and i have a good time when we re out together when we re on the road and when we re with the people who put us in the white house that we ve been working for and fighting for for four years and we thank you for being here today it s wonderful to just to look out here and see you i want to thank congressman tanner and governor mcwherter houston gordon bill purcell lois deberry all the other people in tennessee that are going across tennessee with us it is great to be back here in western tennessee i want to thank my friends from arkansas who came across the border there s a sign over there that says rector arkansas is still clinton country and that s good i ll be home for a barbecue labor day 2001 i hope thank you ladies and gentlemen thursday night i had the enormous honor of addressing the american people from chicago when i accepted the nomination of my party for a second term as president i want to say to you again briefly what i said then the choice in this election is whether we re going to build a bridge to the 21st century or try to build a bridge to the past whether we think we have to go forward together as one people helping each other to make the most of our lives or whether we re going to say well you re on your own and we hope you make it i think the choice is clear look where we were four years ago four years ago when al gore and i came and asked the people of tennessee to give us a chance to lead this country unemployment was higher wages were stagnant crime was rising our problems were being unaddressed we had a rising wave of cynicism in this country and we were literally in danger of losing the middle class dreams that made america great four years later we have 10 million more jobs 4 5 million new home owners 12 million people have taken advantage of the family leave law to have babies or take care of their folks without losing their jobs october 1st 10 million americans are going to get an increase in their minimum wage 25 million americans because of the health reform bill i signed last week are going to be able to change jobs or even to lose a job without having their health insurance taken away from them even if somebody in their family s been sick or is still sick we ve upgraded the standards for food for limiting pesticides that are dangerous on food we ve got 50 million americans breathing cleaner air than we had four years ago i m telling you folks this country is on the right track to the 21st century we don t need to change tracks now we need to keep on going down that track but we all know there is more to do we all know there s more to do the first thing we ve got to do to build the right bridge to the 21st century is to make sure every single american has the chance to live up to his or her god given potential and that means we have to increase educational opportunity and performance in the united states thursday night i proposed a program to put 30 000 tutors together with our americorps volunteers to mobilize a million people to make sure that every single american child can read on his or her own by the time they re in the 3rd grade it will revolutionize their performance later on i propose that by the year 2000 every classroom and library in every school in america will not only have the computers and trained teachers to use the computers we need but will also be hooked up to the information superhighway so that kids in every classroom in dyersburg tennessee for the first time in the history of the country can get the same information in the same time in the same way that children in the wealthiest school districts in the united states do it has never happened before i propose by the year 2000 to make at least two years of education after high school as universal as a high school education is today a tax credit for the cost of community college in every state in america we can do that and make community college education universal i propose to give a 10 000 tax credit for the cost of college tuition and i believe that would be the best money we ever spent if you re old or young or middle aged and you need to go back to school to get more education and training we ought to give you the chance to do it to help your families and build a strong america the second thing we ve got to do to build a bridge is to keep this economy growing and keep it stronger that means we have to balance the budget but do it in the right way without gutting medicare medicaid education the environment or weakening the potential protection of our people as they tried to do when i vetoed their budget last year even after they shut the government down will you stay with me in building that kind of bridge and i do believe you can have tax cuts look the weather is a lot better than if it was so hot people we re falling out when i was on the train trip we took 30 people out of one rally it was so hot they were all fine they just needed a little water so we re going to get a little water in advance crop prices are up this won t hurt them any this is good we can have a tax cut folks but it needs to be targeted to the people who need it for the purposes we need it to child rearing to education to buying that first time home i m for an ira that you can withdraw from without penalty to buy a home to educate a child to deal with a health problem i think you ought to be able to sell your home and never pay any taxes on the gain i think you ought to be able to send yourselves to college or your children to college and never have to pay taxes on that money that s our plan but we pay for it all and balance the budget our friends say we re going to give you more money we ll give you a lot more money they re going to throw money at you that s what they say but what they don t say is in order to pay for their tax cut they have to have much bigger cuts in medicare medicaid education and the environment than i vetoed the last time they still won t pay for it that means a bigger deficit what does that mean in dyersburg tennessee a bigger deficit well look around here it means a higher home mortgage payment because interest rates will go up it means a higher car payment it means higher credit card payments and look at all these little businesses here it means every time they want to borrow money they will have to pay two percent more on their money it means fewer investments in small business and fewer jobs we have to have a healthy small business economy if we re going to grow america especially in the small towns we want to keep interest rates low not up i want to build a bridge to the 21st century that will enable all americans to take care of their families that s why we worked on health care reform and why in our budget plan we re going to be able to help families who lose their jobs to keep their health insurance for at least six months that s why we re helping small businesses to make it simpler to take out pension plans for themselves and their employees and to keep them when you move from job to job that s why we want to change the family and medical leave law to say you ought to be able to take a little time off from work to go to your kid s parent teacher conference or take your child to a regular doctor s appointment that s the kind of thing we need to do to build this country will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century folks i love seeing all of you here i want to get out here and shake a few hands but i want to ask you one more time we want a bridge that s big enough strong enough and wide enough for everybody to walk across together will you help us build it will you help us build it for 68 more days in this campaign will you help us build it for four years after that do you believe our best days are still ahead god bless you let s go bring them home to america thank you bless you dem wjclinton31 8 96b bill_clinton good morning good morning thank you thank you so much first of all i want to thank governor patton and senator ford for making us feel so very welcome in kentucky and my former colleague governor martha lane collins with whom i served and all the other kentuckians that are traveling with us i want to thank them mr mayor i m delighted to be in your city and i m glad to know that i m the first president to come here the others didn t know what they were missing i m glad to see you i m delighted to see you all here i thank you especially for bringing the children it is for them that this election is being fought for them and the values that have made our country great and the future that they deserve i said on thursday night that i wanted to ask the american people to join with me in building a bridge to the 21st century that we can all walk across will you help us build that bridge we have to build a bridge with the world s best education system for all our people whether they live in poor inner cities small rural communities or the wealthiest places in america if you help us for four more years one of the things we intend to do is to make sure that every classroom in america including right here in mayfield not only has the computers our students need and the teachers have the training they need but that they are hooked up to the information superhighway so our children have the same information the same learning resources wherever they live for the first time in the history of america will you help us build that kind of a bridge i want to make sure that we truly have education for a lifetime in america i want the first two years of college in the next four years to become just as universal as a high school education is today with tax credits for the first two years in any community college in the country will you help us do that and build that kind of bridge i want to establish a g i bill for american workers so that whenever a person who s a breadwinner loses a job or is grossly underemployed they can get a skilled grant from the government and take it to the nearest community college or other training facility so that no matter how old you are if you need new training to get a better job or to keep the job you have and to keep supporting your family you ll have it from your government will you help us build that kind of a bridge to the future you know in just the last couple of weeks as the election has gotten closer a lot of the things we democrats have tried to do for the last four years have finally gotten through this congress we raised the minimum wage for 10 million working americans we made 25 million americans including i might say some families we ve met alongside the road here when we started this bus trip in missouri and illinois and coming into kentucky and going on to tennessee we ve met some people alongside the road that have been helped by the kennedy kassebaum bill that says that you don t lose your health insurance anymore just because somebody in your family has been sick or you have to change jobs 25 million americans now we need to say a big part of a strong family is keeping working people s health care in our balanced budget plan we provide assistance to help unemployed families keep their health insurance for their kids for six months that s the next thing we need to do will you help us do that in the next four years we want to build a bridge to the 21st century with a strong economy that means we have to keep bringing down the deficit now our friends in the other party they made a big thing of that but now they don t think it s so important but it is important it s important in mayfield why not only because you don t want to saddle your kids with debt but because if we turn away from our plan to balance the budget it means that interest rates will go up interest rates on your home mortgage your car payment your credit card payments interest rates for the businesses you want to borrow money and hire people and give their employees raise so we can t afford to do that my plan will balance the budget it will give tax cuts to families for children under the age of 13 a 500 credit for a 1 500 credit to go to the first two years of college a 10 000 tax deduction for the cost of college tuition an ira you can withdraw from without penalty to buy a first home to meet a medical emergency or to pay for education but it s all paid for we can still balance the budget without cutting medicare and medicaid education the environment without raiding the pension funds of our workers we can do these things that s the right way to balance the budget now our friends in the opposition will say we re going to give you more money and that s true they do offer more money in their tax cut they offer it to people like me who don t need it they offer it without being able to pay for it and they know i wish you hadn t said amen when i said i didn t need it but it s true and what s going to happen if they had their plan what would they do they d cut medicare medicaid education and the environment more than they did in that budget i vetoed that would divide us and weaken our progress and they still wouldn t be able to pay for it which means a higher deficit higher interest rates and a slower economy do we want to make that same old mistake all over again we want to build a new bridge to the 21st century and that s what we re going to do folks i want us to build that bridge by working together i want us to build that bridge by saying everybody s got a place we worked very hard for example to help our bigger businesses sell their products abroad i was proud just a few days ago at our convention when an autoworker from toledo ohio working in a plant that was opened in 1910 got up and said that he was making jeeps and they were selling 41 000 overseas and we were number one again and 700 people like him had jobs i was proud of that but we also have to have small businesses in places like mayfield i m proud of the fact that we have made every small business in the country eligible for a tax cut if they invest more in their businesses increasing their annual write off from 10 000 to 25 000 a year i m proud of the fact that in that minimum wage bill we made it possible for small businesses made it much easier to take our retirement plans for the owners and employees and then for the employees to keep those retirement savings when they move from job to job people that work for small businesses ought to be able to have a secure retirement too and so should people who change jobs i m proud of that let me say this we have to build a bridge to the 21st century where people can succeed at work and at home can be good parents most of all that does mean health care it does mean retirement security it does mean higher wages and better jobs it also means things like the family and medical leave law the first bill i signed as president 12 million american families got to take a little time off from work without losing their job when a baby was born or a parent was sick i want to expand that to say the parents ought to go to their parent teacher conferences and their regular doctor s appointments i want to expand that to say that when a parent earns overtime the parent should be able to decide to take the overtime in pay or in time with their kids depending on what they need for the family and i m very proud of the fact that in that minimum wage law we also gave a 5 000 tax credit to families who will adopt children and more if the children have disabilities there are tens of thousands of children out there that need a home with stable parents and i hope more people will take advantage of this that s the kind of bridge i want to build to the future will you help us build that bridge it starts in the mayfields all over america it starts in the places the politicians don t visit it starts with the values and the work and the family that you re building i love these signs hillary and tipper and i are delighted to be here we ask for your help your prayers your support for 68 more days and for four years beyond we can build that bridge to the 21st century wide enough for all of us to walk across thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton31 8 96c bill_clinton thank you thank you very much you know not only is al gore the most influential effective vice president in the history of this country he now makes me look stiff but i can deal with it thank you mr vice president i think you can all see that hillary and tipper and al and i love coming across this country and especially coming into western kentucky i want to thank mayor bailey and the people of covington your great native son speaker naifeh and houston gordon and all the other people from western tennessee for making us feel so welcome thank you and god bless you now i know you ve been waiting a long time and i appreciate that but there were so many people alongside the road we had to stop and shake hands with a few of them there were thousands of them they re tennesseeans too and they re americans too i thank congressman tanner and governor mcwherter for being with us all along this way i m glad mr trotter and mr ford are with us lois deberry who has been with us all along the way bill purcell ladies and gentlemen i won t take a lot of your time i spoke to the nation on thursday night from chicago and i said what i had to say but i would like just to ask you a simple question will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century i want to build a bridge that everyone has a chance to walk across which means we ve got to have the best education system in the world for all of our children will you help me build it the vice president said that we do respect not only senator dole for his 35 years in congress and his service to the nation but also mr kemp and mr perot but we have differences in the last four years we worked hard to make college loans more affordable to all of our people we worked hard to give school districts more money for safe and drug free schools and more money to stay open after school to give our kids something to do if they needed it in communities we worked hard to put more children in head start we worked hard in short from beginning to end and the people who led the fight against what we tried to do are the people who are now leading the fight against us in this presidential campaign including the nominee of the other party i believe we were right and they were wrong and i think we re right for the future i want to build a country in which every single 3rd grader in the entire united states can read a book on their own will you help me do that i want us to have an education system in which by the year 2000 in covington kentucky and every now wait a minute in covington kentucky in covington tennessee covington massachusetts in every covington in america every single one every child will have access not only to computers with trained teachers but with computers that are hooked up to the information superhighway so that everybody in america whether in the poorest districts or the richest has access for the first time ever to the same information in the same time at a level of quality never before true in our history will you help me build that bridge to the future i want to build a bridge to the future in which two years of education after high school becomes just as normal as a high school education is today because we give a tax credit worth the tuition cost for the typical community college in every state in america so we will finance two years of community college education for everybody who needs it will you help me build that kind of bridge to the future i want to give the american people a tax deduction for the cost of any college tuition up to 10 000 a year will you help me build that kind of bridge to the future i want to build a bridge to the future built on a strong and growing economy four years ago we had a record deficit it was going higher we had high interest rates high unemployment and stagnant wages four years later we ve had 10 million new jobs 4 5 million new homeowners a record number of new small businesses the lowest rates of unemployment and inflation in home mortgages in 28 years that is something our opponents can t say anything about it s just the truth it happened now it happened because in 1993 we took the hard decisions to bring down the deficit bring down interest rates while protecting education and the environment and our research and medicare and medicaid that s how we did it now what i ask you to do is to help me balance the budget to keep interest rates down to keep your home mortgage payments your car payments and your credit card payments down to make money available for people to start businesses but don t hurt medicare medicaid education the environment protect it can we have a tax cut you bet we can but it ought to be a tax cut targeted to the people who need it and targeted to things that will strengthen families and education a tax cut for children under 13 to help parents care for them a tax cut for college tuition a tax cut in the form of an ira you can take money out of to buy that first home deal with a medical emergency educate your children we can pay for that kind of tax cut and no one should have to pay taxes when they sell a home on the gain they get from selling their homes we can pay for that and we ought to have it now our opponents say we will give you more money vote for us but what they don t say is this if they cut taxes as much as they say let s just assume they could do it if they did they d have to cut medicare medicaid education and the environment more than they did in the budget that senator dole and congressman gingrich passed that i vetoed do you want that and even then they wouldn t pay for it so what would happen bigger deficits we have worked so hard to move toward a balanced budget we re going to throw it all out the window let interest rates go up again let your home payments your car payment your credit card payment go up again let business loan costs go up again i don t think so will you help me build a bridge to the future with the right kind of tax cuts and a balanced budget and a growing economy i want to build a bridge to the future with the crime rate coming down i am sick and tired of going to anyplace in the united states of america and turning on the evening news and the first story is always a crime story i want it to be the last story on the news i want there to be no crime stories on the news folks i m proud of the fact that the crime rate has come down for four years in a row in america i m proud of the fact that we passed a crime bill to put 100 000 police on the street i m proud of the fact that when my opponent and speaker gingrich tried to repeal our commitment to put 100 000 police on the street i vetoed it and we re still putting the police out there and the crime rate is still coming down and i want you to help me keep those 100 000 police going on the street will you help me build a bridge to the future with safe streets and police officers i want to build a bridge to the future where families that work hard and do their best to raise their kids can succeed at home and at work i m proud of the fact that the first bill i signed has now given 12 million american families the chance for the adults to take a little time off when a baby is born or a parent is sick without losing their jobs it was good and i was for it my opponent led the fight against it we were right i want to extend the family leave law to say you can take a little time off without losing your job to go to a parent teacher conference or take your children to a doctor s appointment i want to make it possible for people who earn overtime to make up their own mind about whether to take the overtime in cash or time with their families depending on what that family needs i want to us to succeed at home and at work that s what my commitment is will you help me build an america where we can do that i want us to build an america where we prove we can protect our god given environment and grow our economy we have cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in the last three years than the previous administration did in 12 i want to clean up two thirds more by the year 2000 the worst because 10 million kids live within four miles of a toxic waste dump these children here ought to be growing up next to parks not poison everywhere in the united states will you help me build that kind of bridge to the future finally let me just make one last point i want us to build a bridge to the future that is strong enough and wide enough for everyone of us to walk across on tipper gore s birthday and my birthday and that beautiful three year old girl s birthday over there august 19th we came to west tennessee and we visited a white church and a black church that had been burned and hillary and tipper and al and i worked on rebuilding the african american church and i ve done a lot to try to sensitize the american people about how terrible it is to burn churches or deface synagogues or mosques or any other religious institutions in this country and how terrible it is for us to look down on other people because they are of a different race or religion than we are that s not america i have spent a lot of time as your president dealing with problems that we have as americans around the world because other people refuse to get along with another because other people whether it s in the middle east or northern ireland or bosnia or africa or you name it insist on killing each other because they re of a different race a different tribe a different ethnic group a different religion in america we say all you have to do is believe in the constitution the bill of rights the declaration of independence be willing to work hard and play by the rules you re our kind of person we re going arm in arm with you into the future will you help me build that kind of america will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century will you do it for the next 68 days will you do it for four years after that will you talk to your friends and neighbors and ask them thank you god bless you i m proud to be here in covington thank you dem wjclinton4 1 01 bill_clinton millie john joe tom terry all the family and the grandchildren reverend clergy i want to thank the people who came with us today our leader dick gephardt and his wife jane and senator dodd and congressman coelho hillary and i are here because we really liked jack mcauliffe and i know most people will say well the president came because terry did so much for him truth is i came for joe i thought we ought to have an irish protestant support group here in this church one wonderful nun reached over to me during communion and said thank you so much for what you did for ireland i said i had to do it it s about time we started getting along i want to say just a few things i spent quite a bit of time thinking about what i would say in my couple of minutes most of what i wanted to say has been said but you know when a great human being passes away people search around in their minds for some part of the scripture that captures that person we talked about it a lot already today proverbs says a happy heart doeth good like medicine but a broken spirit drieth the bone that god loves a cheerful giver that s what jack mcauliffe was he knew it was more blessed to give than to receive but nothing is more distasteful than someone who s out there doing good and wants you to know it every minute of the day jack mcauliffe was a cheerful giver whether it was in risking his life in the pacific or leading campaigns here to build a church for his neighbors or schools for the kids or cheering and giving to notre dame or the democratic party or spending time imparting all the lessons to his children that you heard about or just buying a round at the local bar he was a cheerful giver and every time i was around him i felt better and so did you and that s why you re here today he gave more to us than any of us outside his family gave to him and we showed up to say you gave us a lesson in life we loved you for it and we re grateful i have to say a little something about his ties to the democratic party he was the county democratic treasurer here for decades and he started terry out as a political fundraiser when he was six years old i ve heard this story no matter how many times i never get tired of it when terry was six on the night of the onondaga county democratic dinner his dad sat him down at a card table outside the ballroom at the hotel syracuse and said don t let anybody in who hasn t paid terry immediately found his true calling in life and you know when he got up here the first words out of his mouth were that his republican brother paid so thanks jack you did good i ll always be grateful because jack showed me something about going through life and staying young by never losing your enthusiasm you know he didn t take he was very proud of terry s role in politics but he didn t think it meant that he was now too good to do the basic work of politics he was out there putting up yard signs for hillary in this campaign when he was 83 years old and i think he was pretty pleased at the way things came out i also like the fact that he didn t lose his spirit when it didn t all work the way he thought it should i mean he thought notre dame should never lose and he had what in this year turned out to be a bizarre idea he thought all votes should actually be counted but he just kept chugging along you know and he made me even feel better about all of that terry of all the things you ve done for me turns out none of them was better than the chance you gave me to be your father s friend his memory will always bring a smile to the face of all of us who knew him and we ll always miss him but i rejoice in the fact that jack the cheerful giver is in his rightful place where the road is always rising and the wind is always at his back and he is always in the hollow of god s hand thank you jack dem wjclinton4 10 00 bill_clinton thank you you are doing nothing to disabuse people of their stereotypes about irish politicians nothing i want to thank ted and vicky for letting us come to this beautiful place and thank you all for being here for hillary the things that ted says are so brazen it s almost hard to get up and talk after him i mean you ve got to go some to have more of that whatever that is than i do he makes terry mcauliffe look repressed i m having a good time actually going out and campaigning for other people now six years ago i went to massachusetts to campaign for senator kennedy it was more fun then because it was quite bracing he actually had a race then and massachusetts was the only place i was still popular so we needed each other it was wonderful it was great i d like to begin by once again thanking senator kennedy for eight years of support advice friendship prodding and stunning production for being one of those people that didn t go in a whole and feel sorry for himself when we went from being in the majority to the minority in the senate but just got up the next day and tried to figure out a new strategy to get done what we needed to get done and to stop those things from being done that we oppose there is nobody like him in the congress nobody when i was a young man one day in the summer of 1966 i received a call from a man named lee williams who was then the administrative assistant to senator bill fulbright and he said how would you like a job working on the staff of the foreign relations committee i was an undergraduate at georgetown and i frankly as it turned out it was just a few months before i discovered that my father had cancer and we were going to be in terrible financial straights and if i hadn t gotten this job i couldn t finish college it turned out so he offered me a job he said are you interested in a job i said sure i am i had slept about two hours the night before you know i was 19 years old i thought i was going to live forever and he said well you can have a part time job for 3 500 a year or you can have a full time job for 5 000 a year i said i d like two part time jobs which i thought wasn t bad for two hours sleep so he laughed and he said this was a friday morning he said you re just the guy i m looking for be here monday so i packed my bags and i went to washington and i was not quite 20 years old and i was just full of awe for everything and there were some truly great figures in the united states senate then people who argued about civil rights and argued about foreign policy including the war in vietnam and argued about what we ought to do to help the poor and how we were going to deal with the great issues of the day and it made a searing impression on me those two years i worked in the senate in my last two years at georgetown i watched the foreign relations committee hold those great hearings on vietnam on whether there was a domino theory what china s future was going to be and i watched obviously a president that i admired very much president johnson try to push through legislation i believed in and kept getting in deeper and deeper trouble over vietnam i learned a lot about america and american politics and i saw the young and handsome senator edward kennedy inspiring all these young people along with his brother robert to public service in those years it s a long time since then and i want you to know i asked him a question at dinner and everybody around the table heard it i said are you as idealistic today about our country and our system as you were when you entered the senate shortly after your brother was elected president he said more that s why he s one of the eight or ten greatest senators in the history of our country and by the way i said me too i feel i will leave office more idealistic than i was the moment i took my hand off the bible from taking the oath of office on january 20 1993 i will i feel that way about our country just look at the last eight years we ve got a lot of evidence that our challenges as a people yield to intelligent sustained effort in the same way that all other challenges of life do so that brings me to how come you re here and why he threw this party for us when hillary i ll never forget this the last thing in the world i expected to be doing about a year and a half ago was this at this time i mean i thought we were talking about what a great last year we were going to have we were going to take all these trips together we were going to do all this stuff and how great it would be and then senator moynihan announced that he wasn t going to run i can t remember exactly when that was and then a few days later charlie rangel and i don t know several other house members called hillary and said you really ought to think about doing this they knew that we were going to move to new york when we left i think and so they said that she said bill this is crazy i said i don t know you want to do it she said i don t know so she went up and started looking around and talking to people and she came back and she said i think i d like to do this do you think i should i said i ll give you the same advice i give young people fresh out of college that ask me this if you can stand to loose can you stand to loose if the answer to that s yes then you go to question two do you have a reason for wanting the job that s bigger than the fact that you d like the title something that relates to the people you want to represent and not just to the fact that it would be nice to be a senator if the answer to that s yes then the third question is are you prepared to pay the price it takes to win i said you ve got to understand this means that all those trips we were going to take we re not going to take all those relaxing weekends we were going to have at camp david just sitting around with our friends and watching movies we ain t going to have them and i went through a lot of other things i said now if the answer is you re not paralyzed by the thought of defeat you have a reason for wanting the job that s bigger than the fact that you d like to have it that relates to the people you want to represent and you re prepared to do what it takes to win then i think you should do it so i think she wanted me to say yes or no so about a day or so later she said okay i want to do it so here we go i d just like to say a couple things first of all on a purely personal note for 30 years all she s done is helped other people mostly me but she also served on the board of the legal services corporation under president carter and she started the legal services clinic at the law school when she and i were teaching at the law school almost 30 years ago her first job was with what was then called the washington research project now known as the children s defense fund when we got out of law school then she went on the board of that then she helped me get elected attorney general and governor and then when i got elected governor she founded something called the arkansas advocates for families and children and built the state s first neo natal level three nursery so we could keep these tiny little infants alive and now in our little state that children s hospital is the seventh largest children s hospital in america and for 30 years i just watched her do stuff for other people mostly me but also for other people and this is the first time she ever asked anybody to help her so i m trying to do my part and i ll never get even i ll never get caught up but i really appreciate it because what i want you to know is you heard that debate last night so we ll start with that i thought the vice president did a really good job and i was really proud of him i hope that over the course of these three debates i think we made a good start last night that the american people will see two leaders representing two parties that show genuine respect for one another but have clear differences and i hope that these debates will clarify those differences so people will know what the choices are and i think we made a big start last night and i think mr lehrer deserves a lot of credit because he had a little flexibility there and they spent at least three and a half minutes on every topic instead of 90 seconds on this and we ll go to 90 seconds on that 90 seconds on the other thing so we re doing that but i was happy when she decided to do this because i think it s important that we have people in the senate who understand these big issues and understand the big choices and who are capable of clarifying them number one number two one thing i ve learned watching ted is that he s effective because he s both dogged and flexible because he has both passion and organizing ability he stays with stuff and i personally have never worked with anybody that had the same combination of intellectual ability and passionate commitment and organizing ability and doggedness that hillary does and i think she s really well suited for this kind of job and i know how much she cares about this stuff i say this all the time but i m not running for anything i don t have to say this i really do believe when al gore says you ain t seen nothing yet that may be a campaign slogan but i happen to believe it s true i feel like we ve just sort of set the banquet table in the last eight years but we haven t served the meal yet it takes time to turn a country around i mean this country was in a i know people took a big chance on me eight years ago but it wasn t that big a chance because the country was in a ditch and we had to change i ve often wondered late at night how many people strolled into the voting place and said god i just don t know if i can vote for this guy he s just governor of this small southern state and he looks like he s 30 years old and they said terrible terrible things about him but oh heck what the heck i ll give it to him so now it s different and things are going well and the last bad social indicator we had began to bend when we learned a couple days ago that last year for the first time in a dozen years we had 1 7 million fewer people without health insurance thanks to the children s health insurance program that we fought so hard for in 1997 but we ve still got a long way to go so we got things moving in the right direction and the real question is what are we going to do with this are we going to sort of splurge it away saunter through it wait for it to come to an end or build an edifice you know build the future of our dreams for our kids that s what this is all about the reason i wanted hillary to run once she answered yes to the three questions is that we need every good hand we can every stout heart we can every good mind we can and everybody with a steel will we can determined not to squander but instead to make the most of this moment and we need every voice we can bringing clarity to the choice so the american people whatever they decide it s always got to be all right with those of us that are in the arena i mean they usually get it right otherwise we wouldn t be around here after 224 years america would be on the trash heap of history so you ve got to believe in the system every time people get enough information and enough time with the right argument they nearly always get it right otherwise we wouldn t still be here still rocking along still building a more perfect union so we need people with talent and i can just tell you i know i m biased but i ve known hundreds of people who do this stuff and i ve never known any citizen activist who had remotely the combination of qualities that would make the great senator that she does that s what i really believe i always i remember when we were going together i said this is terrible i m going home to arkansas and i m going to try to run for office and i feel terrible that you re going to do this because you ought to be doing it too the only thing that anybody can say anymore after all i ve been through that makes me mad is when somebody suggests that the only reason she can do this is that she s my wife and first lady if she hadn t been my wife and first lady she could have done it 25 years ago now that s the truth so thanks we re in a hard fight we re a little ahead i think she s going to win i think the vice president and senator lieberman are going to win but i think the big problem is making people understand number one this is a gift this moment countries just get a moment like this once every 50 years or so and number two understanding what the nature of the choice and the consequences are i am absolutely convinced if people get the feeling this is a really important election and then have a pretty clear idea of what the choices are and what the consequences are we re going to do great clarity is our friend cloudiness is our foe and you helped us tonight by making sure that she ll be able to hold up her end of the deal in new york i just want to urge you to keep doing whatever you can and not just financially i mean really just talking to people people have got to understand this is a big deal i mean i feel that we spent so much time just trying to get all the things going in the right direction and get the country coming together and giving people a sense of possibility again and i think people have that they have this why do you think the issues are so important one reason al gore got such great ratings out of the speech at the convention and it lasted more than governor bush s did is it was more specific i once said to him i said the presidency the election for president is the world s greatest job interview and sometimes people forget that you re asking people to hire you and unlike a lot of other jobs you get to both interview for the job and tell people at the same time what you think the job is and it changes over time so that s what we re doing you ve done a good thing here helping hillary tonight she won t let you down and we need every great soul we can get in the senate you re doing a good thing by helping our side in this election you ve just got to make sure that we have that people really understand and care about it i ve lived long enough now to see tragedy change things i ve seen senator kennedy go through tragedy after tragedy and keep serving but the times that he had to serve in changed he s going to have the best time to be a senator since the first term he was in the senate if we win the white house if we pick up some senate seats we pick up some house seats it will be the best time you ve had since you started and you have to wait a long time when things go bad to make them just right again and so i say to you not in a maudlin way that this is a gift we have been given a gift if i had any role in it i m grateful i did the best i could and i ve got a few more cards to play before i m done but you ve got to make sure you do this election right because it may be 50 years before we get another chance we ve got to do it right thank you very much dem wjclinton4 10 93 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen it s wonderful to see all of you here i thank you for coming i want to apologize for our lateness but i have as you might imagine had to spend a little extra time this morning on events around the world which have required me to be on the phone and it pushed our schedule back a little bit i thank you all for waiting i d like to particularly acknowledge in the crowd today once again at the beginning the secretary of energy hazel o leary who has done a lot of work on the project that we re here to announce i see congresswoman pelosi congresswoman anna eshoo congressman tom lantos here the mayor of oakland elihu harris and i know speaker brown was here he may have had to leave is he still here i want to thank too some members of congress who are not here who worked very hard on this issue senator boxer and senator feinstein and congressman dellums and congressman stark the president of stanford is here gerhart caspar director burt rickter and the stanford chairman of the board of trustees john friedenrich and the cyprus freeway area council member natalie baten is here and there are others here but i wanted to acknowledge them because they will be affected by some or all of what i have to say today i spent a lot of time in california during the presidential campaign and i said if elected i would come back and that i would remember what i saw and what i learned this is my sixth trip to california as president and around those visits many members of my administration have come here today along with the secretary of energy the secretary of labor bob reich is also here we have tried to work together in what has been an unprecedented effort coordinated by the secretary of commerce ron brown to develop a strategy to revitalize the california economy we have tried to continue to study what the problems are and what the opportunities are given the difficulties of the federal budget we can t underestimate the problems of this state its unemployment rate is about three percent above the national average about 25 percent of the total unemployed people in america are in this state even though the state only has 12 percent of the nation s population many of the people who are out of work in california are people who helped to build the economy engine of america people who worked in high tech industries people who worked in defense industries people with very high levels of skills and major contributions to make to our future it is clear to me that the economy of this nation cannot recover unless the economy of this state recovers and it is also clear to me that if what we are doing here works it will really change the nature of what a president s job is because it is perfectly clear that as we move into the 21st century the sweeping global economic changes which will affect our country will over time affect one area more than another inevitably that has clearly been the case for the last 15 years so that what we try to do today for california is what we may be doing tomorrow for the new england region or for the south where i grew up or for the midwest we are going to have to focus on the fact that not every set of economic changes will affect every part of this country equally and that is what we have tried to do just in the last seven months we ve worked on getting more infrastructure money to southern california the biggest infrastructure announcement that has been made so far in this administration was around 1 billion for a project in the los angeles area we have worked very hard on trying to change the tax laws in the way that will benefit all of america but will especially benefit the high tech industry here increasing of research and development tax credit having a capital gains tax for people who invest their money in new businesses especially in high tech areas changing some of the real estate tax rules in ways that will revitalize the incredible depression that california as well as south florida and new england have had in their real estate industry a lot of these things have been targeted to have a significant long term impact on this state i have to say that as hard as we are working i think that all of you that these problems did not occur overnight and they cannot be turned around overnight and there is no way that there is going to be a single government spending program that will do it we should have strategies that target the investment of our government in ways that are likely to produce other investments and create other jobs and other opportunities that s why i am particularly hopeful that the empowerment zone legislation that was adopted by the congress in the economic program will lead to the selection of one or more sites in california that will prove that we can get private investment capital back into distressed areas in this country both urban and rural there is not enough government money with the kind of debt we ve run up in the last 12 years to solve all these problems but they cannot be solved without government initiative and new and different kinds of partnerships like the ones we re here to announce today we can t be in other words hands off and we can t do it all on our own let me tell you the things i want to focus on today and i want to tie them to some things that we ve announced in the last week or so that will affect this economy it s been said that you can t create genius all you can do is nurture it among the many blessings this state has is a scientific and engineering genius and a high tech infrastructure to support it instead of nurturing if for the last several years we have been denurturing it because you ve seen all these defense cuts since 1987 with no off setting conversion strategy when i became president i found a law on the books that the congress passed in 1992 with my strong support as a presidential candidate to allocate 500 million finally five years too late but finally to defense conversion not a penny of it had been spent because of the ideological opposition of the previous administration we are releasing the money for defense conversion that s important it has to be done we have to find ways for all the people who won the cold war to help to win the aftermath and we have waited too long to begin there is a lot of that genius in california that is being inadequately used today if nurtured it will help to bring about not only an economic turnaround for california but for the entire nation now that is the background to what leads to the first announcement today the secretary of energy hazel o leary who is here and my science advisor jack gibbons have given me their recommendation for the site of a major science project known by the deceptively name of the b factory it doesn t have anything to do with honey the importance of the b factory however is literally universal it may give us critical answers on how the stars the planets and the heavens came to be after much study and serious comparison of all the proposals the secretary and mr gibbons have recommended that the b factory go to the stanford linear accelerator center there were strong competition for this project by scientists who have worked in this area for literally years people whose contributions have and will continue to be outstanding the b factory is a 240 million international project to create an electron positron collider can you say that sounds good for studying the underpinning of all science the relationship of matter and antimatter it will involve hundreds of scientists and build on decades of previous research at the stanford facility in that same spirit of encouraging innovation as a path to prosperity we are also moving forward with the administration s technology reinvestment project this is a part of our general effort to convert from a defense to a domestic economy the program is designed to support defense conversion by taking proposals and providing matching public funds to private funds from all over america when we put out the proposals we had an overwhelming response over 2 800 projects with about 8 billion worth of proposed investments one quarter of them came from the state of california the state with one quarter of the unemployed people in america an interesting parallel soon we will be announcing the winners of the first round of technology reinvestment proposals for about 500 million i m happy to say that not long ago we reached agreement with the congress to add to next year s projects another 300 million which will mean that next year we ll have even more money for these projects than this year the silicon valley has been like a cradle for dualuse technology for example the trimble navigation company developed a technology used to navigate our tanks in the gulf war and now it s adapted to navigate ambulances this month when we announced the matching grants you will see that many of the leading contenders are in california on the merits companies that need to have the opportunity to move from where we were as an economy to where we have to go i m also pleased to be able to announce today some help for california on another front an area we must target for further action urban development the department of housing and urban development today is announcing the awarding of grants totaling more than 100 million to california here in the bay area and in southern california about a fifth of the money is aimed for los angeles county these funds will go towards housing subsidies for the working poor housing for the elderly the disabled and for public housing this country has not had a housing policy in a dozen years and that s one reason in the last dozen years we have seen an explosion of homelessness so this is part of our effort not only to encourage more investment but also to restore the fabric of community in every city in this country it is part of economic recovery it s also a part of redefining who we are as a people i want to pay a special word of compliment to the hud secretary henry cisneros in his absence here today we are desperately trying to find some solutions to the very complex problem of homelessness and we are also trying to use our nation s capital to prove that we can not only find ways to move people off the streets but to move them from the permanent population of the homeless that has grown at such an alarming rate in our nation over the last few years the severity of the economic problems here is very significant but i hope all of you still believe that it s not as significant as the potential for renewed greatness we have to help california rebuild in ways that are mental and ways that are physical today i ve asked congress in addition to the things i mentioned above to provide an additional 315 million to the department of transportation to complete repairs to the cyprus freeway which was destroyed by the earthquake in 1989 this request clears the way for congress to allocate money california needs and in my view is entitled to to restore this vital link to the east bay and it is the kind of thing that we need to be focusing on you can t rebuild unless you have the materials to rebuild finally let me say that in trying to help the california economy we ve also targeted increasing trade opportunities when we can no longer count on the cold war to increase high wage jobs we know that we can count on increased trade to do it a significant percentage of the net new jobs coming into the american economy in the last five years have come from increasing trade increasing trade to the pacific region increasing trade in latin america increasing trade in other parts of the world that s why i believe we should have a new general agreement on tariffs and trade which lowers the tariffs especially that all the advanced countries apply on manufacturing products and why i have fought so hard to persuade the congress to adopt the north american free trade agreement i just had an interesting encounter with my friends at the afl cio who as you know have an opposite position in which i made the following argument which i will make again the objections to nafta are basically objections to the system that has existed for the last 12 years of being to go down just across the border set up a plant have lower wages lower environmental costs export back into america with no tariffs the question the american people should be asking is if we adopt this trade agreement will it make it better or worse it will plainly make it better we will raise environmental and labor costs across the border we will lower requirements to produce things sold in mexico in mexico we will lower their tariffs which are two and a half times as high as ours they are already the second biggest purchasers of american goods and california will be the biggest beneficiary of increased trade both to the pacific and to mexico and to the rest of latin america with the possible exception of texas to the mexican case you must be first or second in any economic scenario so my argument is we ought to adopt this deal because it will make the problems better than they are and it will create vast new opportunities and it also opens the door to expanded trade on similar terms with the whole rest of latin america the second fastest growing part of the world where no one expects investment will lead to renewed trade back to america and the loss of american jobs this is a job winner and an economic opportunity for america but there are other things we can do as well and i want to emphasize them if i might last week i announced two projects which i think could really help this state the first is an effort by the automakers and the uaw and all the government labs to triple the fuel efficiency of american cars by the end of the decade that could create hundreds of thousands of new environmentally based jobs the second is the most sweeping revision of our export control laws in my lifetime we have swept away limitations on the export of american computers supercomputers and telecommunications equipment comprising 70 percent of all that equipment produced in america a potential of 37 billion worth of production now eligible for export all over the world without increasing the dangers of proliferation this will have an incredible impact in the state of california it needed to be done before but we finally got it done every single high tech executive with whom i have talked and we developed this policy in cooperation with a lot of people from your state including people in this room today and every one of them believes a huge economic boost for this state a huge economic boost for this country and more jobs the kind of good jobs that we desperately need companies like hewlitt packard and sun microsystems and silicon graphics have all said explicitly this policy means more jobs for california and therefore a better american economy so this summarizes where we are are we done no have miracles occurred no are we making progress you bet we are is there any precedent for this kind of effort directed toward a single state or a single region no but i want this to set a precedent for my presidency and other presidents to do the same thing when other regions are troubled we have got to bring this national economy back bringing down the deficit keeping interest rates low adopting sensible policies that help everybody that s important but we also have to focus on the real problems whether they re in california or florida or new england or the midwest or the south we have to do it and that is what today is all about i wish you well with the b factory i want you to fix the roads but most important i want you to create new jobs with the economic opportunities we are committed to providing thank you good luck and let s keep working thank you thank you you all wait for me okay i want to come out and shake hands and meet the children you all stand right there but i have to take a couple of questions from the press because of all the events that are unfolding today so just you all will get to watch a mini press conference here we ll do it go ahead dem wjclinton4 10 95 bill_clinton archbishop mccarrick archbishop cacciavillan cardinal keeler father therauv the members of the cabinet the members of the congress governor whitman mayor james honored guests your holiness it is a great pleasure and an honor to welcome you back to the united states you seemed to bring us the rain but we need the rain and we thank you for that your return has been greatly anticipated by the american people and as you have gathered from the welcome of the children and the not so young all americans are very very happy to see you this is our third opportunity to visit i look forward to our discussion and i am grateful that your voice for peace and hope and for the values that support every family and the family of humanity on this your fourth visit to our nation you will see an america striving to build on our ideals of peace and charity justice and tolerance when you visit the united nations and you speak to the general assembly you will be retracing the steps of pope paul vi in his visit to the united states which began 30 years ago this day he became the first pontiff to visit our beloved country when he spoke to the united nations in the name of peace the catholic faithful here in america have always taken an active role in making our country better the catholic church helps the poor the children the elderly the afflicted and our families you will see their handiwork here in the city of newark and throughout your visit the church has given life to the idea that in the human community we all have obligations to one another this idea is rooted in church institutions including thousands of charitable activities the catholic charities the campaign for human development the network of catholic hospitals and other agencies that help all americans and of course it is rooted in the 9 000 catholic elementary and high schools and more than 200 catholic colleges here in the united states and they too thankfully serve all americans as distinct as catholicism is it shares something with many other faiths in our nation the unshakable values that are at the core of our society that hold us together as a country we americans are a people of faith expressed in many ways with the most diverse population on earth our nation counts more religions than any other more than 1 500 and more places of worship than any other indeed even as we gather here now many of our fellow citizens are in their synagogues fasting and observing the holiest day of the jewish calendar yom kippur the day of atonement our great american poet walt whitman who i know is a favorite of yours once wrote about america the real and permanent grandeur of these states must be their religion otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur that is the america that awaits you and your visit your holiness our faith matters to us as individuals and as families our faith supports our families strengthens them and keeps them together your holiness you have written and spoken so eloquently of family rights and women and men everywhere welcomed your recent open letter on the dignity and rights of women the first lady and i thank you especially for the words of support from the holy see regarding her speech on the rights of families women and their children at the recent conference on women in beijing china your words supported the statement she made on behalf of all americans that if women are healthy and educated free from violence if they have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners their families will flourish and when families flourish communities and nations will flourish we know that if we value our families as we must public policy must also support them it must see to it that children live free of poverty with the opportunity of a good and decent education if we value our families we must let them know the dignity of work with decent wages if we value our families we must care for them across the generations from the oldest to the youngest your holiness it is most fitting that you have arrived to be with us today on the feast day of st francis of assisi the champion of the poor the defender of the defenseless his prayer carried to this day in the pockets the purses the billfolds of many american catholics and revered by many who are not catholics is a simple clarion to unity it begins lord make me an instrument of your peace where there is hatred let me so love today these words hold special meaning for us for with god s help we recently celebrated the advance of peace in the middle east and we are trying earnestly with your support to knock on the door of peace in bosnia we see peace advancing in northern ireland in haiti in southern africa all this has been an answer to many many prayers around the world but many of them were led by you holy father and for that you have the gratitude of all the american people on the threshold of a new millennium more than ever we need your message of faith and family community and peace that is what we must work toward for millions of reasons as many reasons as there are children on this earth it has been said that you can see the future by looking into the eyes of a child well we are joined here today by 2 000 children from the archdiocese of newark and surrounding parishes your holiness looking out at them now and into their eyes we can see that the future is very bright indeed for them and for all americans we thank you holy father for coming back to the united states and we welcome you dem wjclinton4 10 97 bill_clinton thank you well don i can say yes to almost everything you asked for i don t know about the car deal we ll have to negotiate that everything else put me down for a yes ladies and gentlemen thank you for the warm welcome and thank you for being here for don and megan thank you for inviting me i want to begin my expressing my enormous admiration and gratitude for the friendships of two people in this audience with whom i served as governor chuck robb and gerry baliles two of the greatest governors virginia ever saw in addition to everything don said i also would be remiss if i did not thank gerry for his leadership of the special commission i established on the future of the airline industry when we started every airline company in america but one was losing money we were in terrible shape but it is a very different situation today thanks in no small measure to the recommendations that gerry baliles made several years ago that we have implemented and the country is in your debt and we thank you sir and i also want you to know from my point of view i m not sure there is a person in the united states senate given his background his constituency the battles he s been through that when he was really needed showed more consistent personal courage as a public figure than chuck robb has these last five years and i am very grateful to him for that i think the most battle hardened veterans of war would tell you that there are many different ways of displaying courage and very few people can display them in every way you should in life everyone knew what a great battlefield record chuck robb has but i have seen him stand up under withering personal attacks i have seen him take votes that people in much safer constituencies than his would not take i have seen him honorably and in a friendly manner disagree with his president when he thought i was wrong and every time i knew he was doing exactly what he thought was right and you should be very very proud of that i want to compliment your whole democratic team i was glad to see bill dolan out there and i miss l f payne but it will be nice seeing him in state office in virginia and thank you both for running and thank you for being a part of this let me say that i have been especially enthusiastic about don beyer s campaign for governor for what i think are good reasons but i think the stakes are also very high everybody knows that in general virginia has been a republican state that able democrats have been able to beat the odds in on occasion in the last 20 years i have enjoyed a lot of friends and a lot of support from this state for which i am very grateful but i want you to understand why i think this governorship is important to the future of the country and if you ll give me a few minutes this is not exactly a political speech but you have just a not very long before the election and i want you to understand what i believe the significance of this election is to the children of this state to the future of this state and perhaps for the message it might send to our whole country as we move into next year when there will be 36 governors races like this throughout the country it was just two days ago marked the 6th anniversary of my formal entry into the race for president on october 3 1991 i can t believe it was so long ago at that time i had been governor for quite a long while and i was democrat by heritage instinct and conviction i was extremely frustrated by the state of play in our national debate because i thought there was too much hot air too much rhetoric too much sort of tired old fights replaying themselves over and over again in washington that had very little to do with the future that i was struggling to build for our people in our state and i said look i have a vision of what our country should be like in the 21st century and i don t we re moving there i believe that we ought to be a nation in which everyone who takes the responsibility for doing so should have an opportunity to make the most of his or her own life i believe we ought to be a country in which we are coming together across the lines that divide us into one america not being divided for short term political gain and i believe we ought to be a country that continues to lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and if we are going to be that kind of country that means we have to take a new direction we have to favor policies that are pushing the future not the past we have to lead not follow we have to work for unity not division we have to work for people not power politics and we have to work in a way that supports progressive change not the status quo and that means that we have to do things very differently it also means that we need a different kind of government a government that doesn t try to do everything but doesn t pretend it can do nothing that s the new republican message basically government is the enemy and people don t need any help my view is that the role of government is to give people the tools to make the most of their own lives and to try to create the conditions in which they can succeed in doing that that s what i believe for almost five years now we ve been implementing that approach and uncomfortably for our opponents there is now a record on which people can make a judgment and i m really proud that america is better off today than it was five years ago much better off we believed that we could have an economic policy that reduced the deficit and balanced the budget and still have money left over to invest in our future in our children in education we believed that we could expand trade in ways that both were free and fair and the results have given us the strongest economy in generations we believed we could fight crime in ways that were tough but also smart to try to keep kids out of trouble as well as punishing those who got into trouble and we believed we ought to put 100 000 police on the street and we ought to take the assault weapons off the street and i saw a lot of good people and we didn t think it would kill anybody if they had to wait a while to buy a handgun until we checked out whether they had a criminal record now the results are in and crime is dropping and i believe that new approach is one of the reasons every single law enforcement group in this state endorsed don beyer for governor because they know we believe we had to end the culture of poverty and welfare dependency in a way that was not just tough but was also pro family but it was one thing to require people to go to work but you had to do it in a way that also supported our fundamental and most important job which is the raising of our children so we could be tough on work but we had to be good to children and that s why we said no when the people in the other party tried to take away the guarantee of health care and nutrition to our children and why we said if you want to require people to go to work make sure they have job training and make sure they ve got child care when they go to work so their kids will be all right and then we ll be successful that approach has given us the biggest drop in welfare rolls in history and the lowest percentage of americans on welfare since 1970 after 20 years of immigration and a lot of people from all over the world who were on low income we still have the lowest percentage of our people on welfare we ve had since 1970 so it worked we also reduced the size of the government by 300 000 people got rid of 16 000 pages of regulation and gave more authority back to state and local government forged more partnerships with the private sector all that worked and now we are looking to facing to future and that s where the governors come in the job of governor is now more important than it was five years ago why because governors have more responsibility and what is their responsibility well if we know what the right path is on crime if we know what the right path is on welfare if we are practicing fiscal responsibility what does it take to create that vision in the lives of the american people to create opportunity for all responsible people what does it take to bring us together across the lines that divide us what does it take to keep america strong leading the world well among other things it takes an unlimited commitment in my judgment to the proposition that we have to preserve our environment while we grow our economy that means don beyer should be governor of virginia our administration has passed the safe drinking water act we ve cleaned up millions of tons of chemicals from the air we re tightening air pollution regulations we are working very hard across a whole broad span of things we have cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in four years than the previous administrations did in the last 12 and we re going to clean up 500 more but there are still some things that the states have to do and that we have to work in partnership with the states on the pfiesteria thing is one issue the chesapeake is another it matters who the governor is i m telling you if you care about the environment it is not enough to vote for members of congress and for the presidency on environmental issues it really matters what the environmental philosophy of the governor of virginia is and it will have a lot to do with your future that s the first thing the second big issue one of the major contributions of the democrats in congress to this balanced budget agreement was the biggest expansion in health care for children since medicaid was enacted in 1965 24 billion to provide enough money to insure 5 million more children in america and almost all of them in working families who don t have health insurance about half the kids in the country don t have health insurance how are we going to do that in a partnership with the states you need a governor who believes that these kids ought to have health insurance and who will be devoted to implementing that program in the proper way virginia has a lot of people who are working hard to raise their children they show up for work every day they pay their taxes they ought to see that their kids have health insurance it will not happen unless this legislation which we passed is actually made real in the lives of the children of virginia and it will matter a very great deal who the governor is that s another reason to be for don beyer for governor of virginia the third reason and in my judgment even though it s not the last point i want to make it is still the overriding point is the question of education virginia has been devoted to the cause of education for a long time perhaps the best system of higher education in the united states certainly one of the four or five best systems in the country in virginia you know that we also know that our system of k through 12 education is not as good as it ought to be and there s a lot of ferment and debate in america about that don asked me to veto any attempt to divert public school money to the private schools that s my speech i agree with that i m all for more choices for people within the public schools and i understand why people make other choices and i like privately funded scholarship programs for private schools but the truth is that most of our public schools today are under funded not over funded you will not make education better for the vast majority of people by further weakening the funding level they should be held accountable standards should be raised we should improve them but what are we going to do there are a lot of things that i could talk about we could stay here until dawn talking about education but i ll just mention two that don has made important one is technology we now know that properly implemented technology in our schools can for example do things we know that it will help the brilliant kids who already know than their parents do about computers we know that but what we now know is that properly implemented in the early grades technology can help children who have learning problems can lift reading levels can lift comprehension levels we know that and in our budget we have funds that would put us on the way toward making sure we hook up every library and school classroom to the internet by the year 2000 he wants to have one computer for every five students that is the future of america that s another good reason to be for don beyer for governor of virginia you already heard don express his opinion about the standards issue whether we should have national standards and a national exam and you know that his opponent is against it let me tell you if there was ever an example of the conflict between ideology and reality this is it there is not a single major country in the world except the united states that does not have national standards for what constitutes adequate knowledge in the dominant language of the country in mathematics in science and a number of other things only the united states now we have said well we don t want to do that because we ve always had local control of the schools we don t want the federal government to engage in some power grab and that s the sort of ideological hit we re taking for doing this let me remind you that the first call for national standards and national exams to measure them came at the university of virginia in charlottesville in 1989 endorsed by president george bush i stayed up all night long writing that national education goals statement endorsed by republican and democratic governors alike the republican governors were insisting on it i got elected we said let s do it all of a sudden they said the federal government is trying to take over the schools mathematics is the same in virginia and vermont language is the same in michigan and maine furthermore our plan simply says that the states can voluntarily participate or not the local school districts can voluntarily participate or not the federal government s sole role in the bill that chuck robb voted for that passed 87 to 12 in the senate is to pay for the development of the test to be supervised by the bipartisan or nonpartisan national board established by congress with republicans and democrats and educators on it already supervising tests given in 40 states but to only selected students so that every 4th grader could take a reading test if the kids have not been here long enough obviously they shouldn t be held to a knowledge in english that they couldn t possibly make so that s not a problem we re not going to unfairly discriminate against the children of immigrants nothing in this test can be used to hold back kids this test is designed to say if you don t know what you need to know here is a roadmap here s what you should know here s what you don t know here s what your teacher here s what your schools can do to make sure you get up to snuff i think the kids that are the most disadvantaged kids in the country have the biggest stake in the success of this national standards program how will we ever get all our public schools up unless there are high standards by which we can measure them now if there was ever an issue which ought to determine with no other issues taken into account the outcome of a governor s race in any state in america it should be the education standards issue and in virginia which is proud of itself from the time of thomas jefferson in leading the country in education surely you ought to send a message to the country that virginia will vote for national standards of excellence for all our children in the next election and not against it surely and there s one last issue i want you to think about because i think it sends a big message to the country we are in the process of becoming a truly multi racial multi ethnic democracy in a way that no other nation is now india is bigger than we are and believe it or not they have even more languages spoken within their border russia has many many different languages spoken many different ethnic groups but the difference is almost all the people who are in different groups live only with their own group on their own piece of land and they re not nearly as blended as we are with all of our problems of segregation we are clearly becoming the most integrated multi racial multi ethnic multi religious democracy in the world and as i m sure virtually everyone in this room knows based on the best evidence we have the most diverse school district in the united states is fairfax county virginia in the entire country look around this room we ve got all different kinds of people all different backgrounds in a global economy in a global society where the real threats to our future are threats that can cross national borders terrorist groups drug traffickers international criminal gangs people robbing accounts through clever uses of computers whether we can work together and live together and solve our problems together will determine our success as a nation i think the person who is elected governor of virginia sends a clear signal about what this state which was at the base of our founding and wants to be in the vanguard of our future believes about whether we can build one america and that s another big reason to be for don beyer for governor of virginia i worked with chuck robb i worked with gerry baliles i worked with doug wilder i want to work in a new way with don beyer but i want you to do it not for me and not because we really want to say our new democratic party is accepted in virginia but because we re building a new america for the 21st century because we have within our hands the capacity to build a future better than any past the united states has ever had able to put all of you in this room and all the people you represent together in an incredible kaleidoscope of opportunity achievement and common endeavor but it really will matter who your governor is what the priorities are whether we are for the future not the past change not the status quo unity not division people not politics that s what don beyer represents you ve got a few weeks to go out and make sure that he wins on election night and i want you to do it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton4 11 00 bill_clinton thank you are you ready to win this election are you ready to make charles rangel the first african american chairman of the house ways and means committee the most power committee in the united states congress i want to say a thank you to everyone here i thank you carl mccall for your great leadership of new york and for your friendship to me and your support of hillary your future is limitless and you have done a great job for the people of this state thank you i want to thank representatives jerry nadler and carolyn maloney they and charlie have been with me all the way i want to thank your borough president virginia fields for being here assemblyman vinny farrell thank you all the others behind me dennis rivera randy weingardner guillermo ramirez adam clayton powell lee saunders thank you all for being here and give a big hand to luther vandross for showing up and being with us you know when charlie was saying that i was your president i leaned over to luther and i said you know luther in another life if i d have been a little better musician i d have been playing jazz at the cotton club instead of running for president more than anything else today i wanted to come by to have this chance to thank you to thank the people of harlem and new york city for being so good to me and to al gore these last eight years and thank you thank you for your support for my wife it means more to me than you will ever know thanks for hanging in there now look the temptation is for us to just shout here for four or five minutes because we re all on the same side and i m preaching to the saved but the truth is that everybody in this great crowd tonight has friends who have never come to hear a president speak or come to any political rally is that right but all those people could vote if they understand what s at stake and if they understand what it means for themselves their families this great city and our nation so i want you to just give me a couple of minutes to tell you what i hope you will tell everybody you can find between now and when the polls close because this race would not be close for president it wouldn t be close for senator it wouldn t be close anywhere in america i believe if people could remember where we were eight years ago and compare it to where we are today and then if people understood where we re going and what the differences are there are three big questions in this election question number one do you want to keep this prosperity going and give it to people who haven t been part of it yet well if you do there is a big choice al gore and joe lieberman and hillary and charlie rangel here s what they say they say we ve got to keep paying down the debt to keep interest rates low because that means lower home mortgages lower car loans lower credit card loans lower college loans lower business loans it means more jobs higher income more jobs for working people and more in the stock market everybody wins that way that s how we made this economy recover then they say let s take what s left and invest it in our kids in health care and education and the environment and a tax cut we can afford for child care for long term care for college education for retirement that s what they say now on the other side our republican friends say hey this is your money and we re going to give it to you we re going to give it all to you right now and here s what they say they say we re going to give you a huge tax cut even though almost everybody in this crowd would be better off under ours and then we re going to privatize social security and let the young people have their payroll tax back and then we re going to spend some money now look here s the problem you all clapped for me when i said the economy was better but people ask me all the time what great new idea did you bring to washington to turn the economy around you know what i answer arithmetic we brought arithmetic back to washington now we made the numbers add up you all can remember this everybody remembers this vice president gore s opponent says we re in an education recession he s wrong about that our schools are getting better i ll say more about that i can tell you everybody can understand this the surplus is supposed to be 2 trillion forget about all the zeroes that s a lot of money two okay they want to give three quarters of it in a tax cut 1 6 trillion one point six then they want to give you if you re young your payroll tax back 2 percent of it but they ve got to promise people that are older like me that we can still get our social security and as the vice president keeps pointing out you can t spend the same dollar on two different people so that costs another trillion dollars one then they want to spend a little money too they want to spend a half a trillion dollars that s point five now you add it up one point six plus one plus point five is three point one three point one is bigger than two now look if you like this economy and you want to keep growing jobs and you want to keep your incomes going up and you want to keep the interest rates down so you can afford to make a car payment afford to make a college loan payment afford credit cards afford home mortgages you can t have three point one being bigger than two this is not rocket science and therefore there is only one choice and the choice is al gore joe lieberman hillary and charlie rangel now the second big question this country is not just better off it s better crime is at a 26 year low the environment is cleaner cleaner air cleaner water three times as many toxic waste dumps cleaned up on our watch as the previous 12 years and we set aside more land forever than anybody since teddy roosevelt a hundred years ago now in addition to that we ve got the number of people without health insurance going down for the first time in a dozen years and i was talking about the schools here are the facts the reading scores the math scores the science scores are up for the first time in the history of the country the african american high school graduation rate is almost equal to the white graduation rate virtually the same we ve got record numbers of people going on to college we ve had a 300 percent increase in the number of latino and african american kids taking advanced placement tests just in the last three years alone and all these schools that everybody said couldn t be turned around turns out they can be i was in a school in harlem just about a month ago that two years ago had 80 percent of the kids doing reading and math below grade level two years later in just two years 74 percent of the kids are doing reading and math at or above grade level don t tell me that our kids can t learn or we can t turn our schools around so here is the second question in addition to building on the prosperity do you want to build on the progress of the last eight years and do even better if you do you have a choice al gore joe lieberman hillary and charlie rangel what s our program put more police on the street and do more to take guns away from criminals and kids in law abiding ways cleaner air safer energy do more to develop other kinds of energy so people of new york don t have to worry sick every winter about whether they ll have enough home heating oil or whether they can afford to pay for it insure all of our kids pass the patients bill of rights pass medicare drug benefits for all of our seniors put a hundred thousand teachers in the schools give new york and the other cities of our country funds to build or repair and modernize schools so these kids have a decent place to go to school and give every family a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition have pre school and after school programs for all the kids who need it now that s our program now look at what the republican program is here s what they say on every issue they want to get rid of the commitment to 100 000 police they want to get rid of the commitment to 100 000 teachers they don t support what we re trying to do to give you school construction funds they want to relax the clean air standards and reverse a lot of the environmental protections i have put in they re against the patients bill of rights they re against medicare drugs for all the seniors who need them and they re not for a type of tax deduction for the cost of college tuition so if you want to build on the progress of the last eight years you just have one choice al gore joe lieberman hillary and charlie rangel now there s one other big choice and to me it s the most important of all charlie rangel talked about the affinity that i ve had with new york city and the people who live in harlem you couldn t have guessed it i guess when i started i remember when my predecessor used to defer to me in a kind of a sneering tone as just the governor of a small southern state and you know i was so naive i thought it was a compliment and i still do i still do but i ll tell you what i thought i thought to myself this country works pretty well when everybody counts everybody has a chance and we all work together and we get in a lot of trouble when we start trying to divide ourselves one against the other old or young black white or hispanic straight or gay people with disabilities and people without rich or poor you know when we start dividing up the country we don t do nearly as well as when we work together so we ve worked hard on bringing people together when they said i had to end affirmative action i said i don t think so let s don t end it let s just fix it and go on when the other party wanted to be really harsh with illegal immigrants or with legal immigrants i said i don t think so this is a country of immigrants heck we re all immigrants from somewhere except the native americans we all came from somewhere and the most important thing i didn t tell you before about this economic recovery is it s the first one in 30 years that included everybody we have the lowest african american and latino unemployment rate ever recorded a 20 year low in poverty the welfare rolls cut in half child poverty down by 30 percent average income up by 5 000 after inflation we take everybody along for the ride that s why we re democrats so here s the third big question do you want to keep building one american community so we all go forward together there s a choice al gore joe lieberman hillary and charlie rangel here s what they want listen to this they re for hate crimes legislation employment nondiscrimination legislation equal pay for women legislation fairness for immigrants an increase in the minimum wage and a united states supreme court that protects civil rights human rights and a woman s right to choose now on every one of these issues our friends in the other party disagree with us it is a choice so i want you to take every opportunity between now and tuesday to go out across this great country and say if you want to keep the prosperity going if you want to build on the progress of the last eight years if you want to keep building one america you just have one choice al gore joe lieberman hillary and charlie rangel now welcome senator schumer we re glad to see you let s give chuck schumer a big hand now listen i want to close on a very personal note i probably know al gore and joe lieberman and hillary better than just about any other voter in america the president has to make decisions for all america you need to feel that the president is pulling for you is working for you and even when he may do something you disagree with you need to feel that at least he was thinking about you too and john kennedy listen john kennedy once said that the presidency was a place of decision making you re hiring somebody tuesday to make decisions and here s what i want you to know about al gore he s done more good for the american people as vice president than anybody that ever held that position including the empowerment zone in harlem that he and charlie rangel have worked on he works harder than anybody else i know he keeps learning he never gets too old or too proud to learn he s curious about the world he understands the future so what i m trying to tell you is he s a good man he ll make good decisions he ll be a great president of the united states what i want you to know about joe lieberman is he s been a friend of mine for 30 years he understands the ideas behind what we ve done in the last eight years as well as anybody in the united states congress and he will be a superb vice president and what i want you to know about hillary is i love her what i want you to know about hillary is that i ve known her for 30 years when it comes to children and families health care and education bringing economic opportunity to people and places left behind she s worked on all those issues at least 20 years and most of them for 30 years she never once in all those years ever asked anybody to do anything for her she just worked to be a good citizen and a good public servant after we came to the white house she worked on children s health and women s health and education she worked on all the things i tried to do to make peace in bosnia in kosovo in northern ireland in the middle east she went to africa to latin america to south asia to east asia to build bridges to people around the world who have kin folks in this country but the united states never paid them much attention before and she put them on our map you couldn t have anybody who is better qualified to represent new york state at the dawn of the new millennium and you will never have anybody who will work harder care more or get more done so i ll say this i know i m biased but i believe what i said to you there s no question who would be the better president there s no question who would be the better senator and i want you to go out here for four days and just do it one more time and tell people here s what this election is about if you want to keep the prosperity going if you want to keep the progress going if you want to keep building one america you just have one choice al gore joe lieberman hillary and charlie rangel thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton4 11 94 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you ann thank you for that wonderful introduction thank you for that good speech if she hadn t made a case for her candidacy before she certainly did in those remarks i want to thank all of you at umd for making me so welcome the students here i want to thank the band for providing our music i want to thank the children in the kid s voting project they re going to take when my daughter was very young i began taking her with me to vote now kids are taking their parents to vote we re going to get up to 100 percent voting if that keeps going i thank you i am honored to be here today i m glad to be here with senator wellstone i was listening to him speak and i was thinking to myself it s too bad paul has no energy no enthusiasm you never know where he stands if he could just loosen up a little bit how much more i ll tell you what he s a great inspiration to all of us he keeps everybody in a good humor and always thinking about positive things and that s pretty tough in washington when all the arrows start flying and people try to be negative paul wellstone will always get up in the morning and try to make something good happen for the people of minnesota and this country i am delighted to be here with all these democrats behind me and especially with our democratic gubernatorial nominee john marty thank you for coming i appreciate many things about the welcome i ve been given by mayor doty but especially i appreciate his taking me to run today we went out and ran three miles i ran the overlook today so i saw all of duluth and i appreciate that it s a beautiful city i want to take a point of personal privilege to say that i m glad to welcome here ann wynia s primary opponent my longtime friend tom foley to thank him for supporting ann in this race and for helping us to win this race and i want to thank congressman jim oberstar for so many things he is a wonderful leader you know yeah you can clap for that he was one of the very few members of the united states congress who always supported our policy of restoring democracy and president aristide to haiti because he understood what was at stake and it did my heart a lot of good to hear you cheering for him a few moments ago to think what a great country america is that here we are in the iron range of northern minnesota where people care about what happens to people as far away as haiti and i thank you for that finally let me thank you chancellor ianni and everyone here at this fine school there you are we appreciate your making this fine facility available for a little old fashioned enthusiasm right before this election you know all of you know that i came here to ask you to vote in record numbers and with great enthusiasm for ann wynia for the united states senate i want to talk to you about why why i feel that and why i think it s so important you all know that she s had a distinguished career in the legislature that unlike a lot of people in politics today she is more of a doer than a talker we ve got a lot of talkers in washington we need a few more doers up there in washington you can almost tell people between those who point their fingers and try to blame others and those who open their arms and try to assume responsibility we ve got enough blamers in washington we need some more people who will take responsibility for the future of this country to get it going again and face our challenges again you don t have to take my word for it or hers you can look at the work she s done to provide health care for 35 000 children in minnesota who did not have it or her work in welfare reform or for education many other areas but i want to talk to you today about what s going on in our country and what we have to do about it ann said that this is a choice between going forward and going back and she s clearly right about that you know 21 months ago i moved to washington with the help of the votes of the state of minnesota to become the president and i set about the work of trying to change this country trying to rebuild america trying to bring the american people together across all the lines that had divided us trying to make us strong what does it take to make a country strong at home and strong abroad it takes strong families good jobs a good education system safe streets it takes a sense of security abroad and growing trade democracy freedom and peace so that americans can work in a world that is coming together not coming apart now friends you know we ve got a lot of problems in this country but the truth is we re in better shape than we were 21 months ago when our administration took office there is this vast attack today on the idea of government and all the surveys show that our adversaries are making gains basically because they re trying to make people cynical and negative to convince them that government is the cause of all of our problems it is inherently bad and that it doesn t matter how outrageous they are what ridiculous things they say you ought to vote for them anyway because they ll bring the government down now that s the essential core of their message they win if the american people give up hope and believe the government is bad well i m here to tell you that the government is neither good nor bad it is a tool that reflects you you control it you re the bosses it is yours the question is what should it do how much should it cost how should it be done those are the questions now if strong families make america strong i happen to think that the government did the right thing when we came in and reversed the position of the previous administration to adopt the family leave law which protects 845 000 minnesota families i think we did the right thing to lower the income taxes of 155 000 minnesota families who are working full time have children in their homes but are hovering just above the poverty line no one should be driven into welfare by the tax system it should lift people out of welfare to reward work and family i believe when our administration asked the congress to approve a plan to immunize all the children in this country under the age of two by 1996 that strengthens families when we expanded head start it strengthens families that s what we ought to do and it s a good thing to do i believe that we have and all the education groups agree with us by the way we have done more in the last two years to help americans improve education than any federal administration has done in the last 30 years why not because people are educated by the federal government not because we are dictating more but because we have changed the nature of the relationship of the national government to the education process and i want to mention three things in addition to head start number one with two major education bills we have said to our public schools there should be national standards of excellence that our children should achieve we believe that all children can achieve them and we are tired of having federal rules and regulations that segregate poor kids in separate classes and separate tracks and tell them by the time they re six or seven or eight years old we already know you re not going to make it because you come from poor backgrounds we reject that we reject that it s wrong so what we have offered is higher standards but less federal rules and regulations fewer requirements and more emphasis on grass roots reform the kind of thing that has been pioneered in the state of minnesota where so many of the interesting reforms in public education have started in the last 10 years we are trying to take that all across america the second thing we ve done is to say that education must be a lifetime process we need apprenticeship programs for young people who don t come to college but want to be in good jobs and we have to make it possible for every single american citizens who is willing to do so to go to college stay in college and pay off their college loans at an affordable rate already 419 000 people in the state of minnesota are eligible for lower cost college loans or better repayment terms and we re going to keep going until all the students in america are eligible for the changes we have made in the college loan program no one should ever stay out of college because no one should no one we have given you the chance to make our streets safer by passing that crime bill why because 100 000 police may not mean much but 10 or 20 more in duluth could mean a lot because we have adopted a balanced approach tougher punishment more prisons where they re needed more police to prevent crime and prevention programs to give our young people something to say yes to as well as something to say no to in this country that is what we are doing and most important of all we know that the best social program is a good job and look at what has happened in the state of minnesota and in the united states we just got the latest unemployment figures today we now know that the unemployment rate in this country is 5 8 percent the lowest it s been in four years it s much lower in minnesota we now know that over five million new jobs have come into this country in the last 21 months and that in 1994 we have had more high wage jobs come into our economy than in the previous five years put together we are moving in the right direction we don t need to turn back on this just in this area look at what has happened with the erie mining company coming out of the ltv bankruptcy look at what s happened yes you can clap for that that s good i heard jim oberstar mention the national steel company you know the steel industry is booming in america today partly because the auto industry is booming in america today for the first time since 1979 american automobile companies will sell more autos around the world than our japanese competitors we are back and we re doing well i was in michigan the other day meeting with the autoworkers you know what the number one complaint there is now they re working too much overtime and they want more people to be hired now folks that is what i would call a high class problem and we need more like that now this is the record strong at home making efforts for stronger families better education safer streets good jobs this is the record ann wynia s opponent joined the republican chorus in unanimously voting against our economic program to reduce the deficit they said all of them that if my program passed the economy would go down and the deficit would explode her opponent said and i quote the clinton budget would have ominous implications for the american economy american jobs and the american people i ll tell you what he was wrong about that and he would have ominous implications for the american economy if his ideas were adopted by the united states congress you look at what s happened here it s the economic equivalent of something you know a lot about a hat trick we ve got unemployment going down jobs being created the deficit going down to its lowest level in a very long time 100 billion lower than predicted three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since president truman was in office our republican opponents say they are against government and vote for them don t pay any attention to what they say because they hate government anyway it doesn t matter what you do that s what they say but when they were in office the federal government got bigger since we have been in office working together we have reduced the size of the federal government we are taking it down to its smallest size since president kennedy was in office and we re giving all the money back to you and your local community to make the streets safer that s what we re doing that s our proposal so you have a clear choice here someone who supports policies that have made us strong and someone who said no no no to deficit reduction no to the tax cuts for the working people on modest incomes no to the other programs immunizations for children no to middle class college loan expansion no no no he even said no to the national service legislation which is giving children and young people all across america the chance to earn some money to go to college by working for a year or two in their communities as the grass roots level to solve the problems of america how could anybody be against that instead they offer this contract now you heard jim oberstar talking about the contract i ve been watching the faces of the people at our rallies when our congressional candidates talk about the republican contract and they go blank they can hardly believe it and that s really what the republicans are hoping they re hoping that you ll hear the sweet parts and when we tell you the bad parts you won t believe it here s what they promise they say we re going to give big tax cuts we ll give you a tax cut most of it will go to the top two percent 70 percent of it but we ll give the rest of you a buck and a half or so everybody gets a tax cut and then we re going to increase defense and we re going to bring back star wars and then we re going to balance the budget and how much does that cost a trillion dollars that s still real money in duluth isn t it that s right we could have a good time tonight on a trillion bucks we could go all weekend long on a trillion bucks a trillion dollars so you say how are you going to pay for this they say we ll tell you after the election well let me tell you something folks here are the options if they mean what they say that they re going to have these tax cuts raise defense as much as they say bring back star wars and balance the budget there are only the following options number one they can cut everything else in government 20 percent across the board including social security which is 2 000 bucks a social security recipient a years number two they can say what they re going to say oh how dare him we didn t say we d cut social security they didn t say they wouldn t either so let s say they don t do that then what do they have to do they have to cut everything else 30 percent across the board a 30 percent cut in medicare for the elderly veterans benefits and student loans and then there s the other possibility which is that they re kidding they don t mean it now what does that mean that s also pretty scary what that means is we re going to explode the deficit ship our jobs overseas again just like we did in the years of trickle down economics and put this economy right back in the ditch now you have the choice when we talk about going forward look at what is happening we are moving forward on jobs we are moving forward by reducing the deficit we are moving forward in reducing the size of the government we are moving forward in head start forward in providing immunization to our kids forward in so many areas we are working for stronger families safer streets better education good jobs we are moving forward and we need to keep moving forward let me close i want you to think about this we re also moving forward overseas no russian missiles are pointed at the children of minnesota and the united states for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age north korea has agreed to be a non nuclear state trade is expanding at a record rate we are standing up for peace and freedom and democracy from northern ireland to south africa in the persian gulf and in the middle east and in haiti we are moving in the right direction we are getting stronger and it s a better world for our kids to grow up in what is the real enemy in this election cynicism negativism lashing out and i want to just finish with this as a parent one of the first things you learn to teach your children is what your parents taught you never make a decision when you re mad how many times did my mother tell me when i was a child bill count to 10 before you say anything and how many times did i get to two say something and wind up regretting it that s what our adversaries want you to do they want you to count to one go vote mad cynical government s bad nothing can happen forget about the facts forget about the record forget about the direction of the country you can change what is likely to happen if they win in cynicism to what is certain to happen if we win with optimism you can say we re in the mainstream in minnesota and they want to create a meanstream for america and we reject it we reject it you can say that you look at this this institution where we are is a monument to hope it is a monument to hope everybody who comes here comes here because they believe that they will have a better life not only a better life economically but a better life personally in terms of the values the understanding the depth the quality of life that will come if you live up to the fullest of your god given potential when you strip away all the details and all the rhetoric that is what we are trying to do we are trying to create an america in which every young person can look forward to living up to the fullest of their potential in which the best days of this country are before us we need ann wynia in the senate to do that will you send her there tuesday will you help us will you do it thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton4 11 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you iowa are you ready to build that bridge to the 21st century tomorrow let me begin by thanking those who have joined us to entertain us tonight and to keep our spirits high the iowa city high school marching band the all city flag and drum corps the co college concert band thank you all very much thank you i want to thank those people who are here too numerous to name who have been so important to me to hillary to our administration and our efforts i want to commend to you our candidates for congress back here i ve gotten to know them i was together with them in indianola not very long ago i believe that leonard boswell and donna smith and bob rush will do a good job for you and i hope you will help them win tomorrow as well you know i have had two incredibly memorable experiences in cedar rapids and they reflect a lot of what i have tried to do as president not very long ago i was here to dedicate the national czech and slovak museum and i brought with me as you remember the president of the czech republic and the president of slovakia and we had a wonderful day here a little cold but we had a great day and we celebrated this mystery that is america that we can meld together people from different ethnic groups and different religions and different races and different tribes and different views and still hold our country together and grow stronger and as we look around the world at the heartbreak of bosnia at the continuing heartbreak in northern ireland where my people are still fighting over what happened 300 or 600 years ago at the heartbreak of the holy land in the middle east the home of the world s three great monotheistic religions as we look on our television news now at the heartbreak of these hundreds of thousands of refugees driven out of their refugee camps because people are still fighting tribal wars even though no one has enough to get along on and if they d work together it would be so much better i thought to myself that cold day in cedar rapids how fortunate we are that we live under a constitution and a system where all of us are created equal accorded equal status and given the chance to live up to our god given abilities and i will always remember cedar rapids for that the other thing i remember is a rally i had here in 1992 at the quaker oats factory i met a remarkable woman in that factory who had led the work of the people there in recycling paper and promoting a clean environment while growing the economy i met a child with an unusual physical problem abnormality from birth who was otherwise a beautiful child and it was before i became president i looked at that child and i saw how much that child s mother loved him and i picked him and held him and i said to myself if i win this race for president i will never rest until we have done everything we can in medical research to make as many people in america whole as possible it is a part of our common obligation and then i remember seeing a woman whom i later got to know quite well she may be here tonight a white woman holding an african american baby and it was interesting because we were being demonstrated against kind of like you re being treated to at the last of this campaign there were people holding signs on both sides of the abortion issue and they were shouting at one another and this woman was just standing there quietly in the crowd holding this child of another race and i said where did you get this baby and she said this is my baby this baby was born hiv positive and no one would take this child in florida so i adopted this child i m doing the very best i can she was already raising another couple of kids on her own and she said i don t mind those people having that debate back there but if we re really going to be pro life and pro child i wish they d all come along with me and adopt some of these kids we need to build a better life and not very long ago i had the honor of signing the minimum wage bill which senator harkin talked about which also did some wonderful things for small business made it easier for small business people to take out pensions on themselves and their employees and for employees to take the pension from job to job and made it easier for self employed people to buy their own health insurance and gave them more tax relief for doing it but that bill had another little known provision which i m particularly proud of and on the day i signed that bill i thought of that woman holding that child because that bill gives a 5 000 tax credit to americans who will adopt children who need a home now i say that to make this point to me that is what our public service is all about to me that is what our public life is all about and i think it is amazing that in so many elections in the eleventh hour with an avalanche of funds and emotions people can be asked to suspend their convictions about issue after issue after issue based on a concerted attempt to convince the voters that somehow their opponent is some sort of an alien to their values and i wanted to be in iowa on the last night of my last campaign in my entire life i wanted to be in iowa because first of all because it s a tight race and i want to carry the state i mean let s be honest but also because this state is a place where i always feel at home and i always have from the very first day i crossed the border and came here and because i always felt that a people who had brought in enough crops and seen enough draughts and seen enough floods you know after that flood you all had before you had everything but a plague of locust visited on you there that had seen all of life s ups and downs all the rational and irrational things that can happen to you and still were bound together in working together and producing the kind of schools iowa is producing producing the kind of economy iowa was producing i always felt that here you could talk sense to people and people could look at you in the eye and tell whether you were supporting and believing in and i always love coming here and i want to say to you tonight i would not presume to tell anyone in iowa for whom to vote in any other race i went home to arkansas to campaign with some of my friends on saturday there wa a big article in the paper it said president s visit mixed blessing and then it had every single time a president comes to arkansas to try to get people to vote for somebody and they had always voted for the other person so i told the people i said this is no surprise to me you didn t let me tell you who to vote for when i was just a governor so i wouldn t say that but i want you to know three things i know about tom harkin and about ruth and their families and you make up your own mind about what you re going to do with that information between now and tomorrow in terms of whether you could go home tonight and still call somebody and change a vote you know when you leave tonight most people won t be in bed even in iowa most people are not going to be in bed you could still do some good tonight and i want you to think about it the first thing i want you to know is this i spent a lot of time with tom and ruth harkin when nobody else was looking when there were no cameras around no reporters around no speech to give no one to impress no gain from anything they are good people they love their children they love their country and they love this state and i want to say i understand i don t normally get involved in local advertising campaigns but i understand that senator harkin s opponent has actually run an ad against ruth they got that you know they started on hillary and now their down to the senate spouses i wish they d just pick on us but anyway saying that ruth harkin really wasn t qualified for the job i gave her she only got it because she was tom s wife if you believe that i ve got some land way out in the ocean i d like to sell you let me tell you something folks one thing i knew i had to do for you is to deliver on the economy i knew that and i made up my mind i was going to do some things that had never been done before i was not going to appoint just someone who was a politician who had supported me at the department of commerce i was going to appoint somebody i thought would be good i was not going to appoint someone that i thought would be a good political appointment but someone who could really produce in the trade office i was going to appoint somebody who was not just a political appointment but someone who had actually created small businesses at the small business administration and at ruth harkin s job the overseas private investment corporation i was going to appoint somebody i thought could help create jobs in america by getting opportunities for us overseas now i know what that ad says but let me tell you like so many of their ads against us they have a huge problem with something called the evidence the evidence the evidence she ruth harkin in spite of the fact that she s married to tom has the finest record of achievement of any person who has ever held that position in the federal government of the united states of america and there are more americans working more businesses profiting and our economy is stronger because i appointed her and i m glad i did and i d do it again tomorrow now i ll tell you something else i m for tom harkin because he ll fight i know i ve been on the other side with him you know once before he ll fight and if he s for you and he believes it s right and he thinks that iowa needs something if he has to stand all by himself in a whirlwind he will stand right there until he is blown away he will not walk away from you and from our country the other night we were on the campaign plane you know and you practically get silly you re so tired on these campaign planes you can just imagine how it is you know how exhausted you get and your conversation wanders off into all kinds of things it s amazing and this was before we scheduled to come here tonight and we were having a talk about politicians and people in public office and who they were and how they were and everything and somebody looked at me and said if you were in a desperate situation with enemies closing in on all sides and you were all by yourself and you had to pick one person who would stand there and fight with you until the very end who would you pick and i did not miss a breath i said tom harkin of iowa tom harkin of iowa you need to think a long time in iowa before you trade in a man that gave you the americans with disabilities act a man that has fought for medical research a man that has fought for education a man that has fought for farmers a man that has fought for this country you need to think a long time before you trade in someone like that for a person who marched to the beat of the speaker gingrich s army in 1995 and threatened to send this country back after all the progress we ve made the second thing i want to say is tom harkin fought for us when it counted when the republicans won the congress in 1994 with their contract on america how many times has mr lightfoot talked about the contract on america in this campaign how many times have they told you what a wonderful thing it was and how they are they pushed it how many times have they bragged on cutting head start and cutting college loans and paralyzing our ability to implement environmental protections how many time have they bragged on stripping a 30 year guarantee of quality medical care through the medicaid programs to middle class families who have family members with disabilities to elderly people in nursing homes to getting rid of the quality standards even the standards of guaranteed quality in our nursing homes to taking the quality of care the guarantee of care away from newborn babies just because they re poor have they talked about that very much in this campaign i m telling you i see it all over america they re praying for amnesia on your part vice president gore who incidentally is jealous that he s not here tonight and i am he told a story today in cleveland that we used to tell each other in arkansas and i d forgotten but it s a good story and you ll appreciate it in iowa he said there was a politician out on the country road running for office and he came upon a farmer who was sitting up on his porch there was an old dog laying out there in the yard he said sir i d like to come ask you for your vote will your dog bite he said no so the guy hiked over the fence went up shook hands with the farmer and just as he was asking for the vote the dog got up and ran up and bit him right in the rear so he ran back and got in his car and rolled the window down and said i thought you said your dog wouldn t bite he said that ain t my dog son now that s what they want you to think about that budget that i vetoed but it is their dog it is their dog and i thought it was a mangy old dog and that s why i vetoed it because i did not want to see our country divided and then they shut the government down not once but twice they shut it down and said you will take these 270 billion in medicare cuts and our attempt to split medicare apart you know we have american senior citizens have the lowest poverty rate ever recorded in history now and the highest life expectancy of any group of seniors in the world in part because of medicare we have to reform it but i m not going to wreck it that s a high class problem having people living longer and well i m proud of that achievement every american should be proud of it and they said we re going to make you take it or we ll shut the government down and i looked around and i counted how many people were going to be on that field with me because the president s veto is no good unless somebody will stand with him and tom harkin was first in line and what we told them was go on and shut the government down we d rather see the american people hurt for 30 days than 30 years and we will not go along we will not go along we will not go along but the third thing i want to say to you is notwithstanding their attempts to sort of distract and divert the american people and divide us here this country is in better shape than it was four years ago and we need to keep going until we build that bridge to the 21st century this is a happy time this is a great time for america of all the countries in the world we ve had the best growth for the last four years we have the lowest deficit if you take the big seven economies we have created by far more jobs in america than all the other countries put together 10 7 million more than we had four years ago we re moving in the right direction we need to bear down and go on farm exports at an all time high we ve opened new markets for all kinds of things and i m telling you we are moving in the right direction and the most important thing is when you vote for president tomorrow when you vote for senator tomorrow when you vote for congress tomorrow you have to ask yourself we re going into the new century things are changing what do i want my country to look like and what do those guys or those women have to do about it now for years since i have been your president i take a little time every day to ask and answer this question what do i want my country to look like when we enter the 21st century what do i want my country to look like when our daughter is our age and for me it s pretty simple i want the american dream to be alive and well for everybody responsible enough to work for it i want america to lead the world indefinitely for peace and freedom and prosperity and i want us to beat the odds when the rest of this old world is being torn apart by their differences i want us to relish and respect our diversity and say we share the same values and we re going forward together that s what i want america to look like now your vote will determine whether that happens in iowa your vote will determine whether we keep on going and balance the budget with a targeted tax cut we can afford for education and child rearing and buying a first time home and dealing with medical costs and not charging people taxes when they sell their home we can pay for that one and still protect medicare and medicaid invest in education the environment and technology and the future of these young people or their plan which is a big old scheme sounds great at a election time a bigger deficit higher interest rates bigger cuts than the ones i vetoed when they shut the government down and they re still trying to raise taxes as tom said on those 8 million working families making modest incomes your vote will decide i think you know which vote will build a bridge to the 21st century will you seize the opportunity tomorrow to help us do it your vote will decide thank you let me ask you this you heard tom harkin talking about the crime bill one of the most troubling things in america has been the high rates of violence among our people especially among our young people now we have four years of declining crime a 10 year low in the crime rate we re halfway through implementing that crime bill tom harkin voted for in 1994 to put 100 000 police on the street they were against it then they killed it in the budget i vetoed then they tried to stop it all over again now why in the wide world they would oppose something that we are doing together that is working is beyond me but they are so if you want to finish the job and you want eight years of declining crime and you want our children to be able to grow up on streets and in neighborhoods and be in schools that are truly safe you got to help us by helping us to build a bridge with tom harkin with these candidates for congress with bill clinton and al gore for safer streets and a brighter tomorrow if you want let me say tom harkin talked a little about health care and so did hillary i d like to brag on them both but you d be here till dawn if i did that we have made a beginning on health care reform but here is another choice i want you to think about it their budget will do nothing to advance the cause of health reform our budget balanced budget adds another million children to the ranks of those with health insurance children of lower income working people gives free mammograms to medicare women free mammograms our budget says to people who are between jobs if you lose your job and your income we ll help your family keep health insurance for six months our budget says we ll help families with respite care the nearly 2 million american families that are courageously caring for family members with alzheimer s and our budget says we re going to spend another billion dollars on medical research over and about what they will because we have uncovered two genes that cause breast cancer we have determined a cure a treatment for the first time for strokes we have seen for the first time movement in the lower limbs of laboratory animals whose spines have been completely severed because of nerve transplants from the legs to the spine we are moving to break down the barriers of knowledge and we are going to keep going until we have reformed the health care system in a way that makes it work for all americans and your vote will decide your vote will decide your vote will decide your vote will decide most important of all in shaping the 21st century what we do about education we know what their program is their program is fewer head start positions cut student loans and eliminate the department of education that s their big deal eliminate the department of education they say it s a big bureaucracy two percent is bureaucracy 98 cents is money we re pumping to your schools your colleges and your students i say we don t want to eliminate the department of education i want to do three things i want to make sure first of all that ever 8 year old in this country can read a book independently by the 3rd grade 40 percent can t now we re going to mobilize an army of a million people to go out and work with teachers and parents to do that a hundred thousand of them will be college students who are going to get new work study slots because of the work that tom harkin and this administration did in the congress this year i want to hook up i want every classroom in iowa and every classroom in america to be hooked up not only with computers but computers that are linked through the internet through the world wide web through the information superhighway what it means is is that people in the smallest school in iowa people in the most remote school district in alaska people in the poorest inner city school district for the first time in history will have access along with all other wealthy middle class and poor districts urban suburban and rural districts all of them together for the first time in the history of america will have access to the same learning in the same way at the same time will you help us do that will you go out for tom harkin tomorrow to do that will you help us and finally let me say to all these young people here one thing we know is that education will no longer be the province of people who are 18 and under we know now that nearly everybody needs to go much further we know now that most people will have to learn for a lifetime we know now that the young people in this audience today many of them within a few years will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet and some of you will be doing jobs that have not been imagined yet and therefore we must open the doors of college education to every single citizen of this country who is willing to work for it it is time let me say to all of you i am proud that we kept our commitment in 1992 to set up a national service program americorps that has allowed 70 000 young people to serve their communities and go to college i am proud that we had the biggest increase in pell grants in 20 years and i am proud that we have increased work study grants by 200 000 and that we reformed the student loan program so people can now borrow money at lower costs and pay it back as a percentage of their income so no one ever need fear going broke by borrowing the money to go to college i m proud of that but we must do more we must do more and if you give us a chance to serve tomorrow we re going to do two things number one we re going to say people ought to be able to take off their tax bill dollar for dollar the cost of a typical community college tuition so we can make two years of education after high school as universal as a high school diploma is today by the year 2000 number two more iowa families ought to be able to save in an individual retirement account and withdraw from it without any penalty if they re using the money for a college education or health care or home buying and thirdly everybody ought to be able to have a tax deduction of up to 10 000 a year for the cost of college tuition undergraduate or graduate will you help us do that tomorrow will you help make that part of our bridge i can t hear you will you do it now let me say i am very grateful to you for the votes that you gave to me and to al gore four years ago i know how hotly contested this state has been i know that the state is more or less evenly divided and that there are a lot of people who are independents who will vote either way but i say to you this is not an election for party this is an election for country and for people remember the stories of the people from iowa i told you at the beginning of my remarks every day for four years i have gotten up and gone into that oval office and tried to do something that would help to create more opportunity to insist upon more responsibility and to bring us closer together in an american community we are better off than we were four years ago we have a better plan for the future our best days are still ahead and the fundamental choice that underlies all these issue differences is as crystal clear as can be we believe that we re better off when we work together to help each other make the most of our own lives they believe you re on your own they believe it s okay to say there s a future out there it will be pretty exciting if you get there and i hope you do i believe every single one of us are better off if we roll up our sleeves and join hands and build that bridge to the 21st century together we need you tomorrow go call someone go ask someone to vote go do your work tonight we ll see you tomorrow thank you god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton4 12 00 bill_clinton thank you president fahey for making us feel so welcome at national geographic secretary mineta under secretary baker to all the members of the coral reef task force and the ocean exploration panel i welcome you i want to say a special word of appreciation to peter benchley for the work that he has done for nearly a lifetime now and for the remarks he made and i thank our two native hawaiians who are here tammy leilani harp who spoke before me and our hawaiian elder who s affectionately known as uncle buzzy thank you very much for being here i want to thank the national geographic for giving us a place to make this announcement and for all the years of helping people to understand the universe and this small planet we are fortunate to live in an age of unprecedented discovery most of it in the biological sciences it seems that almost every day there is another unlocking of a secret of subatomic particles or the complexities of the human genome but we re also discovering more and more evidence every day that our human activity is profoundly affecting and in some cases overwhelming the natural systems that surround and sustain us on our planet for eight years now we have worked to act on this understanding to better protect our natural resources for future generations we have created and expanded national parks established 11 national monuments saved the california redwoods protected the yellowstone national park from gold mining we re restoring the florida everglades and preserving vistas of the grand canyon and we are setting aside over 40 million roadless acres in our national forests all together this amounts to more land protection in the 48 continental states than any administration since that of teddy roosevelt a century ago but we must recognize that just as land is an important part of our legacy in the preservation of our ecosystem so too is our water we launched a nationwide effort to clean up polluted rivers lakes and streams we created new marine sanctuaries in michigan massachusetts florida washington and hawaii we also organized the first national oceans conference to develop a strategy to protect the seas today the department of commerce and secretary mineta i thank you for your leadership on this is releasing a comprehensive report discovering earth s final frontier it charts a bold course for u s ocean exploration in the 21st century and i want to thank secretary mineta dr marsha mcnutt and the other members of the ocean exploration panel for their work we have a lot of work to do many many important ecosystems are disappearing just as we begin to grasp their unique significance their role in regulating our climate their potential for producing lifesaving medicines a lot of people are most familiar with the destruction of the rainforests and worldwide efforts to save them today i want to focus on what we re doing with the people of hawaii to save the rainforests of the sea our coral reefs these remarkable living structures built cell by cell over millions of years are at once irreplaceable and valuable coral reefs are beautiful but more than that they re home to thousands of species of fish and wildlife found nowhere else on earth worldwide reefs generate millions of dollars through fishing and tourism putting food on our tables and sustaining coastal communities coral reefs also protect these same communities from the pounding waves of fierce storms and like the rain forests they re providing us new hope for medical breakthroughs unfortunately the world s reefs are in peril pollution damage from dynamite fishing coral poachers unwise coastal development and global warming already have killed over 25 percent of the world s reefs in some areas such as the central indian ocean 90 percent of the coral reefs have died bleached as white as dead bone now this is not an isolated problem scientists at last month s international coral reef symposium presented strong evidence that unless we take action now half the world s coral reefs will disappear within 25 years recently scientists have shown a strong correlation between global warming and the rising ocean temperatures that contribute to reef destruction recognizing the urgency of this challenge we remain committed to reaching an international agreement to implement the kyoto protocol and to cut the production of greenhouse gases and despite the recent delays i still believe that we will get a good agreement the stakes are too high to let this imperative slip away we have reached the crossroads in the development of our natural world how many times in our lives each of us have we dismissed something that went wrong or that we did wrong with the phrase it s just a drop in the ocean now we have solid proof that millions even billions of these drops in the ocean are having a profound lasting and destructive impact on the oceans and the world around us so we act now to hopefully save our seas and our reefs so that we do not lose their beauty their bounty and their protective qualities forever what can we do to turn the tide what steps can we take well at my direction the secretaries of commerce and interior have been working closely with the scientific environmental fishing and native communities in hawaii to determine what can be done to save the vast majority of our remaining coral reefs at the same time they solicited public comment and received over a thousand comments from concerned citizens ultimately this unprecedented coalition has recommended a bold and visionary initiative today i am proud to protect america s greatest unspoiled reefs by creating the single largest nature preserve ever established in the united states the northwestern hawaiian islands coral reef reserve thank you this pristine largely uninhabited archipelago covers more area than florida and georgia combined integrated into our national marine sanctuary program the new reserve will encompass nearly 70 percent of our nation s coral reefs this area is a special place where the sea is a living rainbow the only voices those of half the world s last remaining monk seals and the cry of sea birds wheeling in the sky in creating this unique preserve we re establishing the strongest level of protection for oceans ever enacted and setting a new global standard for reef and marine wildlife protection together we will safeguard the most sensitive areas permit sustainable fishing and eco tourism and others and enable native hawaiians to honor their age old traditions the islands and reefs we re protecting today have long played an important role in the history of the pacific archaeologists tell us that more than a thousand years ago local islanders drew sustenance from their brilliant turquoise waters centuries later charles darwin marveled at the wildlife there during his historic voyage and none of us can ever forget for four bloody days in 1942 america s bravest heroes drew a line in the sand there winning the battle of midway and changing the course of world war ii and history today we renew our commitment to winning the battle to protect our global environment preserving this natural heritage for a long time i hope forever let me say it was nearly a century ago ironically when president roosevelt recognized the same imperative and created the hawaiian islands national wildlife refuge he knew then that our natural wonders on land or sea form an integral part of who we are as a people and that every generation of americans must do its part to sustain and strengthen this legacy today we do just that incorporating the refuge he created into a new vast and wonderful yellowstone of the sea by any measure creating this coral reserve is a big step forward not just for marine conservation in the united states but for the health of oceans and reefs around the world for thousands of years people have risked their lives to master the ocean now suddenly the ocean s life is at risk we have the resources and responsibility to rescue the sea to renew the very oceans that give us life and thereby to renew ourselves today is an important step on that road but there is much much more to be done in the years ahead and i hope that no matter who becomes president no matter what the partisan divide of congress that those of you who are here in this room will continue this work for the rest of your lives it is profoundly important and how our grandchildren live depends upon how well we do this work thank you very much dem wjclinton4 12 93 bill_clinton thank you very much mr beall mr paster ladies and gentlemen of rockwell and rocketdyne i am very glad to be here i want to thank all of you for coming the workers in this great facility and some of my workers in the last campaign from the inland empire i know came here they re here somewhere over there i thank you for coming i also want you to know that we re all a little embarrassed to be so late here but if you got to watch the meeting that just occurred you know that there were so many people with so many ideas about what we could do together to rebuild the california economy having asked them there i could hardly walk away and not listen to them i was so moved by the people who came and what they said and how very specific they were it made me really have greater faith than ever before that together we can turn this economy around and get things going again for california and for the entire country i also want to say a special word of thanks to you for the sign that i walked under coming out here that said thank you mr president for the space station we worked hard to save it we re going to work hard to keep it it s an important part of our future and so are you i ran for president my fellow americans because i thought this country had two great problems i thought we had to restore the american economy so that it worked again for middle class americans and gave all americans a chance to work their way into the middle class and i thought we had to pull this country together again and make a strength out of our diversity so that we can go into the 21st century as the greatest country in the world and so that every person can live up to the fullest of their ability what is that that s not my hot air for a change if you can hear me i ll talk over it unless we re in some kind of danger when i came to the white house in january i had an economic strategy that i wanted to implement for all the country and i knew there was a special problem here in california the state that is not only our biggest state with our strongest economy but the state that by january was the most economically hurt because of a combination of factors the decline in defense spending the collapse of real estate the stagnation of the economies to the east which trade with california and which were not buying as many of our exports all these problems combined at once to give terrible terrible burdens to the people of california much higher than average unemployment rates and an attitude that was dragging the whole country down and it became clear to me that unless we could turn the economy of california around we would never fully be able to lift the economy of america i came here today a year after i held a national economic summit in my home state to get the best ideas i could about implementing our national economic strategy to have an economic meeting here in california to assess what we have done in the last year and what we need to do in the years ahead i want to tell you first that i am convinced that this economy can recover for four reasons first because the national economy is now experiencing clear and consistent signs of recovery second because many of the things that we have done for the national economy will have a particular impact in california third because we are targeting resources to this state in programs that will help the economy not by hurting other states but by giving california its fair consideration and finally fourthly and most importantly of all for all of you because we have committed ourselves in this administration to fight for a five year 20 billion program of defense conversion so that we don t leave the people who won the cold war out in the cold we invest in technologies for a commercial peacetime economy that can create jobs in california and jobs in this company let me take these issues one by one when i became president i committed to bring the deficit down to get interest rates down to keep inflation down to get investment up and to give people incentives to invest in this economy the congress after a lot of struggling adopted an economic plan which i had pushed very hard and here s what the plan does it does raise taxes on somewhat less than two percent of our people the wealthiest americans whose incomes went up while their taxes went down in the 1980s it also cuts taxes on 15 to 16 million working families who work 40 hours a week have kids in their house and are barely above the poverty line so they ll be working and not on welfare it gives the potential of a tax break to 90 percent of the small businesses in this country if they ll invest more money in their businesses it increases the research and development tax credit to help companies like this one it changes the rules to help people restore the real estate economy in states like california and in a year look what s happened look what s happened we have historically low interest rates over 5 million americans have refinanced their homes we have low inflation rates we have investment up housing sales were at a 14 year high last month and we ve had more jobs come in the private sector in the last 10 months than in the previous four years we are moving in the right direction most americans have not felt it yet but you can t ignore the facts the direction of the economy is good not bad we are coming back and that will benefit the state of california and the people who live here the second thing i want to say is there are a lot of things we re doing that will really help california just because of how the economy is organized here we are focusing on new markets we are focusing on new products we are focusing on new opportunities for the american economy not very long ago we removed from export controls 37 billion worth of hightech products and computers and telecommunications one third of which are manufactured in this state that will create tens of thousands of new jobs by permitting us to sell things abroad that we couldn t sell during the cold war it will make a huge difference we re helping to build a national information superhighway to computerize all kinds of information to facilitate economic transfers california is in a remarkable position to take advantage of that we have a whole new technology initiative that will enable us to do things that will benefit this state disproportionately and finally let me say i know this is one of the more controversial things i ve been involved in but i have strongly supported efforts to increase trade like nafta because you can t keep and generate more high tech jobs unless you have more customers you know in this plant don t you that the american worker under all the economic pressures of the 1980s the american worker once again has become by far the most productive worker in the world now we all know that what else do we know you know it here what does productivity mean that means fewer people can produce more goods and services that means you have to have more customers for your goods and services if you want more jobs and higher incomes so productivity is good it is a precondition of having a strong economy but it is not enough it is not enough unless the world economy is growing unless we are experiencing an opportunity to increase the sales of our products and services we can t have more jobs and higher incomes not in california not in the united states so you betcha i want to sell more to mexico and the rest of latin america i want to sell more to asia that s why i invited the heads of 15 asian nations to come to the united states to meet with me i want to sell more around the world that s why we re working hard to reach agreement by december 15th on a new worldwide trade agreement because i know that s the only way in the long run i can protect good jobs and high incomes and create more jobs and i hope you ll support that we ve also really tried to invest money in this economy the most important thing we ve done is to give american companies the chance to be partners with the united states government in converting from a defense to a domestic economy in the technology reinvestment project which this year alone awarded over 420 million in grants for new technologies for the future yes the things we ve done specifically for california are important 300 million more to deal with the problems of education caused by the influx of immigration another 500 million to help offset the health care costs of the state because of immigration a 1 3 billion for an infrastructure project to extend that red line and create new jobs those things are important but you know as well as i do most of the new jobs in this country have to be created by people like you in the private sector that s why the most important thing we can do is to help build new partnerships to take advantage of this wonderful technological wizardry that came out of all our defense investment and put it to work in the domestic economy building a 21st century economy on high tech commercial purposes based on the investments we ve made in the cold war technology instead of letting them go to waste i m determined we let that happen for too long we started cutting defense in 1987 we didn t start rebuilding our economic base until 1993 but we re not going to let another year go by without doing it i know that you know as part of this technology reinvestment project rocketdyne received an award for several million dollars to design and develop a portable environmental monitor to identify low concentrations of hazardous chemicals this is a big deal we will be able to assess the impact of toxic spills and auto emissions chemical warfare agents on the battlefield we ll be able to do something that is good for defense and something that is good for our domestic economy we ll be able to do something we have all known for years we ought to be able to do which is to create an enormous number of high wage high tech jobs by cleaning up the environment and developing technologies we can then sell to other countries to create jobs in america cleaning up their environment rockwell also led two other winning teams announced yesterday one to improve the fuel efficiency of automobiles and heavy construction equipment at a potential fuel savings listen to this by as much as a billion dollars a year by the year 2000 another to allow medical personnel to monitor and diagnose trauma patients remotely whether they re in rural clinics or far off battlefields again this is a huge deal in america rural health care is confronted with certain inevitable limits whether it s in california or my home state of arkansas or anywhere else you cannot put all the high tech equipment in the world in every rural area but accidents occur there if technology that has been developed to help people on the battlefields deal with the woundeds when only a medic is there and they need some high tech connection can be applied to rural health situations in america it means again more jobs for rockwell a stronger economy for america and a better quality of life that is the sort of thing that this national government should be doing to rebuild the economy of california and the united states and to move us forward let me just say in closing i know it gets frustrating to see how long it takes to make these changes be felt in your lives i know that but just remember just remember if you look at our two biggest problems the economy working americans have been working harder for stagnant wages for 20 years now we cannot turn it around overnight but we can turn it around if you look at what s happening to our society the rising rate of crime the continued breakdown of the family unit the increasing number of children being born to children out of wedlock all these things that are disintegrating our society that has been going on for 30 years it did not start overnight we can turn it around if we begin now it won t happen overnight but we can do it i just ask you to remember what can happen in a year one year ago the deficit was going up not down and interest rates were not dropping as they are now a year ago we didn t have the kind of bipartisan coalition passing bills like the brady bill and a crime bill to put 100 000 police on the street this congress in a bill almost nobody knows about revolutionized the student loan problem to lower interest rates on college loans make the repayment terms easier and they passed the national service bill which will enable 20 000 people this year and 100 000 people three years from now to serve their community at the grass roots level solving problems and to earn their way through college these are big changes that didn t happen a year ago a year ago we did not have a strategy to increase the exports of this country we did not have the north american free trade agreement a new dialogue with japan a real intense effort to turn this whole trading situation around if we can pass by december 15th if we can get the trading nations of the world to agree on a dramatic reduction of tariffs everywhere what that means is that american manufacturing products will lead the creation of over a million new jobs in this country in the next ten years we did not have that and i hope we can get it in the next ten days that is the kind of difference you can make in just a year and it s just the beginning these grants that were just announced to rockwell the idea was approved by the congress a year ago but there was opposition in the pentagon and in the previous administration they did not believe this government had an obligation to help you convert from a defense to a domestic economy i know we do and i believe this money ten years from now 20 years from now we ll look back on this and say this is the best money we ever spent and next year there will be more of it we are just getting warmed up you are our partners in building an america for the 21st century a lot of this may sound real detailed and complicated but to me it s very simple i think my job as your president is to get this country into the next century as the strongest nation in the world i think my job as your president is to do everything i can to see that you have the opportunity and are challenged to assume the responsibility to build a community in this country that will enable every man and woman every boy and girl to live to the fullest of their godgiven capacities that s my job to do it we re going to have to compete and win in the global economy we re going to have to educate and train our people we re going to have to invest in those things that will produce jobs and incomes and opportunities and we re going to have to take our streets our communities our families and our neighborhoods back and do something about the terrible ravages of crime and violence that are consuming this country but we can do it we can do it i ask you always to be impatient with me and with this country push us to do better push us to keep making progress but also recognize we got in the fix we re in 20 years in the decline of wages 12 years in the explosion of the deficit 30 years in the social problems we ve got we can turn it around it won t happen in a day but if we work together and we work hard every year we can see progress we can see progress and we will look ahead to the 21st century as the best years our country ever had because we did our job now to rebuild america thank you for what you re doing i ll stay with you god bless you dem wjclinton4 2 93 bill_clinton good evening thank you i know we re not really but it feels like it s nice to be back in new jersey and i m glad to have you here in the nation s capital you may or may not be able to see this but on the way in tonight bill ferrity gave me a new jersey tie which i have proudly donned they even had a mirror outside for me to be able to tie it in a straight and appropriate fashion i want to tell you how very glad i am to be here tonight with the state chamber how much i want to welcome you to our nation s capital i ve just been here as president two weeks and a day and i m already hoping we can keep an infusion of people from the heartland coming in to keep us in touch with reality i m glad to see all the members of the house here senator bradley and senator lautenberg are voting tonight as the united states senate attempts to work out the family leave bill i do want to say a special word of appreciation to both of them in front of their constituents for not only the support they have given me but for the genuinely good advice across a whole wide range of issues i have the sort of relationship with them which i really respect and which i hope the members of congress here will take to heart either one of them is liable to call me at any time of the day or night from places unknown always all right places but i mean when they re around you know and i m very very grateful to both of them not only for their support in the recent election but for their involvement in the great issues of this time i ve been working hard for the last two weeks to try to be worthy of the trust of the voters of this country who gave me a chance to become president including the people of new jersey who voted for a democrat for the first time in 28 years i have i know you haven t always been able to tell it from the news but i spent virtually all of my time working on the economy the jobs issue the deficit meeting in long periods with my staff with people from around the country who know about these matters with members of the united states congress working with people in both parties to try to end the gridlock and to reach agreement so that we can move forward we ve had as all of you know now an economic upturn in the last few months and we hope that we are coming out firmly of the longest recession we ve had in a good long while there is much to be encouraged about in two or three areas first of all interest rates have been down for a good long while now and millions of americans have refinanced their homes or been able to buy new homes in ways that have generated significant economic activity second and even more encouraging over the long run there has been a big increase in the productivity of american businesses and workplaces that is after all the key to our economic future and finally beginning in december with a little bit in november but a bit increase in december in consumer confidence which has strengthened the consumer market in our country something we hope will carry through for the next few months still there are clear challenges before us with all these good numbers coming in very few new jobs have been created in america yet in this recovery most big businesses that are doing better are still downsizing as a part of their productivity that happened all during the 1980s when in every year of the 1980s the fortune 500 companies reduced employment in total by more than a quarter of a million in the united states but throughout much of the 80s that reduction was more than offset by the creation of jobs in the small business sector in the last couple of years and regrettably even in the last few months small business is not taking up the slack because of the crushing burden of health care cost and because of the credit crunch which is much more severe in some states and regions than others but which is a very serious problem for our economy we also have a deficit that next year is projected to be 50 billion bigger as of december than we were told in august and is growing exponentially even though the congressmen who are here can tell you that they made a good faith effort in 1990 to rein the deficit in with spending cuts and tax increases they thought would do it it didn t happen because the taxes didn t bring in as much money as they thought but even more importantly because health care costs have continued unabated rising at breathtaking rates so that at the end of this year those of you who pay health insurance will know this but we now alone of all the advanced countries in the world are spending 14 percent of our income on health care no other country except canada is over nine that is a terrific competitive disadvantage it is costing you a great deal of money not only as taxpayers for what you pay for government health care but in the private sector and the hemorrhage is such that about 100 000 americans a month are now losing their health insurance many of them finding their way on to the public rolls and leading to explosive increases in the government s health care burden so as we look ahead to our challenges and as i look ahead to this speech i have to give on february 17th to the joint session of congress i still believe in the fundamental themes on which i ran for president we have to increase job growth and income growth without increasing inflation we have to face the serious problem of our urban area and the serious problems of the underclass in ways that liberate the ability of all people to perform at high levels in this economy if we want to continue the increase in productivity that means that we have to shift away in the money that you give us to spend away from consumption more toward investment we have to increase investment in new technologies and education and training in infrastructure and the things that will grow this economy it also means that we have to provide more incentives in our tax code for investment in the private sector and it means we have to act at long last to bring health care costs in line with inflation if we did that it would do more to free up private sector dollars to invest in economic growth than any tax cut i could sign into law or any spending increase that congress and i together can enact so we will begin in earnest as soon as this break is over to do those things that your national government has never had to do simultaneously before we will attempt to increase investment and reduce the deficit at the same time it will require an enormous amount of discipline and a willingness to try some new things and to cut some things in ways that we have not done before i hope you will all wish us well and i hope you will tell every member of your congressional delegation up here without regard to party that you know they re going to have to cast some difficult votes in order for this country to face its problems and if they do it in good conscience and explain to you why you did it you will not hold it against them that s what they were hired to do and you ll stick with them if they can do it you know when i was governor and i did that job for a dozen years and i had a good time doing it there were many times when i had to cut spending five or six times in a given year and people would be a little disconcerted at first but we never got into debt and i was always proud of the fact that my state had such a disciplined system we paid a terrible price for it during the 80s when times were tough but because we rode them out last year we ranked first or second in job growth in virtually every month when i was off running for president not because of anything happened last year but because of the foundations that were laid in investments in being competitive and in fiscal integrity in keeping those books balanced those are the kind of difficult decisions we re going to have to make now not so long ago you elected a governor who had to make some of those decisions and let me say that again without attempting to be too partisan the truth is that if you live in a state you don t get to print your own money you can t get in the mess that your national government is in because you can t run that long without having the brakes come on without throwing people through the collective windshield that keeps us all in the same boat and i have to tell you that for all the pain that the decisions made by governor florio and the legislature then caused him and them the truth is that your house is in order now new jersey is going to have a balanced budget without a tax increase and you even have a rainy day fund at a time when many states are going bankrupt sooner or later we all have to face the music and when we do we are normally rewarded so new jersey is being rewarded look at your credit rating look at the overall health of the economy look at the trends in the state i hope that together with the senate and the house with the republicans and the democrats in this great capital of yours we can come to grips with our problems in ways that the american people will understand and embrace perhaps with less political fallout but i hope at the end with the same sort of stability and success that you have achieved with governor florio and i hope you re proud of it because i am let me just mention one other thing i happened to think of this and i was not it really hadn t occurred to me but i think i ought to mention it i asked governor florio through the trade ambassador mickey kantor to serve on our intergovernmental advisory committee because there s so much relationship now between our national trade policies and the policies followed at the state and local level for growth i think he ll do a good job on that but i wanted to emphasize it because a big part of our economic strength is in our capacity to export and while our administration has found it necessary to take some pretty tough positions on trade issues in the last two weeks i want to emphasize to you i do not take those positions in the hope of provoking a trade war or raising trade barriers in this country but only so that we can have expanded trade on fair terms for ourselves and for all nations we cannot grow this economy and no wealthy nation can grow unless there is global economic growth and i want to pledge to you that i will do my best to help all the world class companies headquartered in new jersey have an environment in which they can grow and flourish in the international economy with a trade system that is constantly expanding but expanding on terms that are genuinely fair not only to ourselves but to our trading partners as well i ask you all without regard to your party to wish us well and i ask you one more time to give the members of congress here a pat on the back at the end of the dinner tonight we re going to have a very challenging few months ahead of us but it is an exciting time and it is a fabulous opportunity for us to put our house in order and to deal with these problems and to move this country ahead we are now positioned better than we have been in more than a decade to reassert the leadership of the united states economically and politically in the world in a way that is very positive if we will ensure future growth get job growth along with economic growth and put our financial house in order i think we can do it if all the american people again without regard to party agree generally on the goal we will disagree on the details but in the end we will come to the people s business with a resolution that s what you need and most importantly it s what your children need we cannot afford to permit the government to go on out of control leaving our children with a legacy of debt and diminished living standards when we can do so much better now and i want to thank you for what you have done all of you in the private sector to restore america s productivity at the breathtaking rates we ve seen in this last quarter we re going to try to give you that kind of productivity in your national government thank you very much i just want to say if i ever heard a chamber of commerce speech in my life it was it said this is a parker pen it s for your wife it s the nicest one they make and then he said and this other one s for you let me say i wish she were here to thank her personally but this is a gift for the white house for the american people and i hope a lot of you from new jersey will see this when you come in and know that it is yours we ll leave it there for all time from the people of new jersey thank you dem wjclinton4 2 99 bill_clinton thank you very much steve distinguished head table guests to the leaders from around the world who are here the members of congress mr speaker and others ladies and gentlemen you know i feel exactly the way i did the first time i ever gave a speech as a public official to the pine bluff rotary club officers installation banquet in january of 1977 the dinner started at 6 30 p m there were 500 people there all but three were introduced they went home mad we d been there since 6 30 p m i was introduced at 9 45 p m the guy that introduced me was so nervous he didn t know what to do and so help me the first words out of his mouth were you know we could stop here and have had a very nice evening he didn t mean it the way it sounded but i do mean it we could stop here and have had a very wonderful breakfast you were magnificent max thank you very much i did want to assure you that one of the things that has been said here today repeatedly is absolutely true senator hutchison was talking about when we come here we set party aside and there is absolutely no politics in this i can tell you that is absolutely so i have had a terrific relationship with steve largent and he has yet to vote with me the first time so i know there is no politics in the prayer breakfast we come here every year hillary and i were staying up kind of late last night talking about what we should say today who would be here i think especially in light of what max lucado has just said i would like to ask you to think about what he said in terms of the world we live in for it is easier to talk about than to do this idea of making peace with those who are different from us we have certain signs of hope of course last good friday in northern ireland the irish protestants and the irish catholics set aside literally centuries of distrust and chose peace for their children last october at the wye plantation in maryland chairman arafat abu mazin and the palestinian delegation and prime minister netanyahu and the israeli delegation went through literally sleepless nights to try to save the peace process in the middle east and put it back on track throughout this year our allies and we have worked to deepen the peace in bosnia and we re delighted to have the leader of the republica srbska here today and we re working today to avoid a new catastrophe in kosovo with some hopeful signs we also have worked to guarantee religious freedom for those who disagree with all of us in this room recognizing that so much of the trouble in the world is rooted in what we believe are the instructions we get form god to do things to people who are different from us and we think the only answer is to promote religious freedom at home and around the world i want to thank all of you who helped us to pass the religious freedom act of 1998 i d like to say a special word of appreciation to dr robert seiple the former head of world vision who is here with us today who is now america s ambassador at large for international religious freedom later this month i have to appoint three members to the united states commission on international religious freedom the congress has already nominated its members we know that s a part of it but respectfully i would suggest it s not enough as we pray for peace as we listen to what max said we say well of course it is god s will but the truth is throughout history people have prayed to god to aid them in war people have claimed repeatedly that it was god s will that they prevail in conflict christians have done it at least since the time of the crusades jews have done it since the times of the old testament muslims have done it from the time of the essene down to the present day no faith is blameless in saying that they have taken up arms against others of other faiths other races because it was god s will that they do so and nearly everybody would agree that from time to time that happens over the long course of history i do believe that even though adolf hitler preached a perverted form of christianity god did not want him to prevail but i also know that when we take up arms or words against one another we must be very careful in invoking the name of our lord abraham lincoln once said that in the great civil war neither side wanted war and both sides prayed to the same god but one side would make war rather than stay in the union and the other side would accept war rather than let it be rent asunder so the war came in other words our great president understood that the almighty has his own designs and all we can do is pray to know god s will what s that got to do with us martin luther king once said we had to be careful taking vengeance in the name of god because the old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind and so today in the spirit in which we have truly been ministered to today i ask you to pray for peace in the middle east in bosnia and kosovo in northern ireland where there are new difficulties i ask you to pray that the young leaders of ethiopia and eritrea will find a way to avoid war i ask you to pray for a resolution of the conflicts between india and pakistan i ask you to pray for the success of the peace process in colombia for the agreement made by the leaders of ecuador and peru for the ongoing struggles to make the peace process work in guatemala i ask you to pray for peace i ask you to pray for the peacemakers for the prime minister of albania who is here for the prime minister of macedonia their region is deeply troubled i ask you to pray for chairman arafat and the palestinians for the government of israel for mrs leah rabin and her children who are here for the awful price they have paid in the loss of prime minister rabin for the cause of peace i ask you to pray for our king hussein a wonderful human being a champion of peace who i promise you today is fighting for his life mostly mostly so he can continue to fight for peace and finally i ask you to pray for all of us including yourselves to pray that our purpose truly will reflect god s will to pray that we can all be purged of the temptation to pretend that our willfulness is somehow equal to god s will to remember that all the great peacemakers in the world in the end have to let go and walk away like christ not from apparent but from genuine grievances if nelson mandela can walk away from 28 years of oppression and a little prison cell we can walk away from whatever is bothering us if leah rabin and her family can continue their struggle for peace after the prime minister s assassination then we can continue to believe in our better selves i remember on september the 19th 1993 when the leaders of israel and the palestinian authority gathered in washington to sign the peace accord the great question arose about whether in front of a billion people on international television for the very first time chairman arafat and prime minister rabin would shake hands now this may seem like a little thing to you but yitzhak rabin and i were sitting in my office talking and he said you know mr president i have been fighting this man for 30 years i have buried a lot of people this is difficult and i started to make an argument and before i could say anything he said but you do not make peace with your friends and so the handshake occurred that was seen around the world then a little while afterward some time passed they came back to washington and they were going to sign these agreements about what the details were of handing over gaza and parts of the west bank and the two of them had to sign on this second signing three copies of these huge maps books of maps there were 27 maps you remember 27 maps there were literally thousands of markings on these maps on each page what would happen at every little crossroad who would be in charge who would do this who would do that who would do the other thing and right before the ceremony there was a hitch and some jurisdictional issue was not resolved and everybody was going around in a tizzy and i opened the door to the little back room where the vice president and i have lunch once a week and i said to these two people who shook hands for the first time not so long ago why don t you guys go in this room and work this out this is not a big deal thirty minutes later they came out no one else was in there they worked it out they signed the copies three times 27 pieces each each page they were signing and it was over you do not make peace with your friends but friendship can come with time and trust and humility when we do not pretend that our willfulness is an expression of god s will i do not know how to put this into words a friend of mine last week sent me a little story out of mother teresa s life when she said she was asked when you pray what do you say to god and she said i don t say anything i listen and then she was asked well when you listen what does god say to you and she said he doesn t say anything either he listens in another way st paul said the same thing we do not know how to pray as we ought but the spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words so i ask you to reflect on all we have seen and heard and felt today i ask you to pray for peace for the peacemakers and for peace within each of our hearts in silence amen dem wjclinton4 3 05 bill_clinton thank you very much dennis ladies and gentlemen thanks again to the marine band you shouldn t have the marine band for an ex president you know you might get to thinking you re still in office this has been a happy day for me when i came backstairs i was in the holding room waiting to be called out and i looked up and darrel hanna was there the man who played me on saturday night live i ve been gone from office long enough i tried to convince him to come out here and give the speech and see if anyone would know the difference the first time i ever came to this hotel they took me upstairs to a suite and i got off the elevator and i thought i said i really am in california i got off the elevator and rodney dangerfield was standing there who lived in this hotel with orchids in his arms for me i was really touched i thought i was going to be invited to the prom or something and he said don t be too touched he said my girlfriend raises these and i m trying to promote her business so i felt like i was the one with no respect then it turned out to be very good preparation for the rest of my presidency anyway if darrel is still back there thanks for coming to say hello and thanks for giving america so many laughs i love saturday night live even when i hated it i know that the format of this program is for me to make a few remarks and then to open the floor to questions i think there are several and you may want to ask some that i wasn t told about but which is okay too i don t have to worry about any kind of scripting now the great thing about being out of office is you can say whatever you want and the tragic thing is no one cares anymore but you can say whatever you want i want to thank the l a chief of police a long time friend of mine bill bratton for being here thank you very much i think you have justices chin and moreno of the california supreme court i thank you for being here i am delighted to be here here s what i d like to do because i know i know there are several questions but seeing the marines here reminded me of the presence of the marine corp and the young men and women of the united states navy that i felt so strongly on my recent trip to asia where former president bush and i toured four of the countries thailand indonesia sri lanka and the maldives that were hit hard by the tsunami and one of the things that was most moving was how grateful the people there were for the rapid help that the united states military forces gave people who were otherwise completely isolated and unable to receive humanitarian supplies they were dropped from american helicopters i never will forget the first time we got to the first stop in thailand we met with a group of orphans who were being given an interesting form of therapy we saw the same thing later in sri lanka these children were asked to instead of to talk about their feelings they were asked to draw pictures of what they were thinking about and in the beginning almost all of them drew pictures of the tragedy and then as time went on almost all of them moved onto other things and those who didn t were the ones that needed special assistance but president bush and i were given two beautiful children s drawings one of them had drawn a picture of his mother drowning along with cars and other things sinking into the ocean and the other had drawn a picture of an american military helicopter dropping humanitarian supplies to children so i raise that because i want you to keep this in mind the main purpose of my talk today is to try to give you some sort of framework within which to evaluate all of the disparate things going on in america and in our country today because one of the things i tried to do as president and one of the things i think every political leader should do is to synthesize information for people and organize it in a way that makes a lot of apparently disconnected events fit into a pattern so just think of the things that have been in the news in recent days the murder of a man who was a friend of mine with whom i spent an hour and a half with 10 days before he was killed rafik harini in lebanon leading to massive demonstrations in the streets and the overthrow of the lebanese government and widespread demands led by the united states and france for the removal of syrian troops from lebanon the work of the tsunami the debate in congress over the bankruptcy bill and i could give you 20 other examples just think of all the public things you ve read about what could they possibly all have in common and how would you go about thinking about it if someone asked me to describe in a word the world of the 21st century the word i would choose clearly is interdependence i would not choose globalization because for most people it has an economic connotation number one and number two half the people aren t part of it half the people on earth still live on less than 2 00 a day a billion people still live on less than 1 00 a day and one in four people don t even have access to clean water so they re not part of this globalized system that was so good to america when i was president it produced 30 of our income gains and job growth through trade and high technology interdependence basically says that we re tied together economically politically culturally and in terms of communication to a greater extent than ever before but interdependence can be positive or negative or both and i will give you some self evident examples when people saw the united states military delivering humanitarian supplies to poor muslims in remote villages in northern sumatra in the province of aceh and indonesia it was an example of positive interdependence and it did a world of good for america s image in a part of the world and with a group of people that often didn t think too well of us on september the 11th 2001 when al qaeda terrorists none of whom were born in america murdered 3 000 people from 70 countries including over 200 other muslims they too reflected almost perfectly the forces of global interdependence why because they used open borders easy immigration easy travel easy access to information and technology to turn jet airplanes into big chemical weapons to destroy a bunch of people in a classic example of global interdependence if you look at the middle east you see how it can be positive and negative both in 1993 the then prime minister of israel yitzhak rabin and yassar arafat signed a peace agreement on the white house lawn and we proceeded to implement it we worked on it for seven years and we had seven years of progress toward peace in those seven years there were always terrorist groups trying to interrupt the peace process in the middle east but about 258 israelis were killed in the whole eight years i was president by terrorist attacks then arafat foolishly walked away from my last peace proposal the second intifada started and the united states withdrew from the middle east peace process for a time and in the next four years until mr arafat died 1 100 israelis died in terrorist incidents three times as many almost as had died no more than four times as many as had died in the previous eight years and over 4 000 palestinians died then mr arafat passed away they had legitimate elections and abu mazen or muhammad i mean mahmoud abbas was elected the new leader of the palestinians said the terror was over as far as he s concerned he s ready to make peace prime minister sharon says he s going to get out of gaza and we re back to working together now there s still negative interdependence there we still have people killed by terrorist events but it s dramatically different the point of that is from the good times to the bad times which included not only all the killing but in 1998 a year in which israel had a change of government and yet it was the only year in the history of the state of israel in which not one person was killed by a terrorist attack not one because we were all working together but the people were just as interdependent in 1998 as they were in 2000 when everything went to pieces again because it simply means they couldn t escape each other so clearly the main work of people as citizens of the 21st century is to build up the positive forces of interdependence and beat down the negative ones and to create a more integrated set of communities at home and around the world to move from interdependence to integration requires three things shared responsibilities shared benefits and a set of simple shared values every person counts deserves a chance and has a responsible role to play in society competition is good but we all do better when we work together our differences are important they matter they make our lives more interesting they aid the search for truth but our common humanity matters more those simple values every issue that comes up that i m asked what s my opinion on social security reform bankruptcy bills the budget education some development in foreign policy every issue i put through that prism i ask myself will this course help us to move from interdependent to an integrated community will this course reinforce shared responsibilities shared benefits and shared values if the answer is yes i m for it if the answer is no i m not and it helps me to think about that so what i want to say to all of you is you don t have to agree with what i just said but if you don t you need to know what you think about the modern world and how you re going to evaluate all these apparently desperate things that are happening within the united states and around the world i think to build a more integrated global community we essentially need to do the following things first we do have to have a security policy to fight terror and the spread of weapons of mass destruction the president now has a full plate trying to deal with the north korea and iran as well as trying to make the iraqi enterprise successful and deal with the fact that mr bin laden is still at large even though al qaeda s reach has been undermined by the destruction of al qaeda cells about 20 when i was in office and more than 20 others since 9 11 it is a problem if countries get more and more countries get nuclear weapons not so much because they re likely to drop bombs on other countries but because every time another country gets a nuclear weapon and says it then somebody else thinks they have to have one and the more of this material you have lying around the more vulnerable it is to be stolen or sold to terrorist organizations who can make small bombs out of it that they wouldn t hesitate to use if you remember when timothy mcveigh blew up the murrah federal building in oklahoma city he did that with a simple fertilizer bomb you can get on the internet and figure out how to build that bomb every one of you can if you can afford a pickup truck and you can go buy fertilizer you can make the same bomb that blew up the murrah building in oklahoma city but if you have a girl scout cookie s worth of fissile material and you put it in that bomb and you know how to detonate it you could take out 25 of washington dc so the reason you should be concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons or biological weapons or chemical weapons is that we have to worry about where these supplies will go and if they go to terrorist groups that aren t countries that don t have targets that aren t easy to retaliate against they re more likely to be used so we need a security system but we can t possibly kill jail or occupy every adversary we have and every potential adversary we have if you live in global interdependent world you can t get rid of all your enemies and there s where politics comes in sooner or later you have to make a deal you have to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists and that means we have to share the load of fighting poverty fighting aids dealing with the fact that 130 million kids never go to school dealing with the fact that one in four people don t have access to clean water dealing with the fact that climate change has already begun to disrupt the economies and societies of many places throughout the world so we need more cooperation the third thing we need is more institutional ways of expressing our cooperation we need to strengthen the un not abandon it we need to strengthen the comprehensive test ban treaty not abandon it i think we shouldn t have abandoned the kyoto protocol on climate change even though it wasn t perfect it helps us to work with other counties to reduce the threat of global warming i think that we should not have abandoned the international criminal court against war criminals the american soldiers were completely protected under the way we finally got it written in 2000 that s what i think i think it s a mistake for america now to be doing research again into whether we should develop two new kinds of nuclear weapons one small one to break deep underground concrete bunkers we already do that with a conventional weapon and one that might be used on the battlefield we say well we may not use it for the first time in american history in the last four years for the first time since the bomb was dropped ending war world ii in japan the united states government has said we are looking into developing smaller scale nuclear weapons which we might use first now how can we say to iran or to north korea or any of these other countries you can t have a nuclear weapon when we re trying to develop new ones everybody understands why we have the ones we have and we ve been reducing our stocks with russia rather dramatically and we can continue that so with a straight face we can try to contain the spread the nuclear chemical and biological weapons with what we ve got because we re reducing it but not if we develop new ones and might add since we re out here in california your senior senator dianne feinstein has been the most vocal member of the united states senate in either party in campaigning against the research and the development of new nuclear weapons and i think she s absolutely right about it and i hope all of you will support her in it it is not necessary for our security but the point is we need we have to cooperative let me give you a couple of other examples whether you agree or disagree with what we did in iraq and launching a preemptive attack on saddam hussein i think two things are now clear number one all americans and people who love freedom throughout the world have a stake in their succeeding because 58 of them showed up to vote a lot of them under threat of death and we were all moved by that purple ink on the fingers of the iraqis it became a symbol of devotion to freedom and self governance the second thing is that this is not something we can do every day that whether you agree or disagree it can t become the primary mode by which we solve problems because we ve already spent 200 billion dollars there we re going to wind up spending more than we did in world war i in inflation adjusted dollars we have men and women of the national guard and reserves have been taken over there and held a long time many of them have lost their livelihoods back home it s put the military resources of the country under great stress you just can t up and do this every time something is going on in the world you don t like that s why president bush recently said that he wanted to support the british and the germans and the french in their diplomatic effort to try to get iran not to develop a nuclear weapon that s why he s working so hard to get china to help solve the north korean nuclear problem that s why we need nato in afghanistan where we only have 20 000 troops and where all the trouble really started for us with al qaeda there are 40 000 troops in afghanistan now because nato is providing half of them and if they weren t our whole enterprise there would be in peril we probably don t have enough troops there as it is but we we and the president there mr karzai are in as good of shape as they re in because of cooperation it s not something we can just do all the time most of the time we re going to have to work with other people in some sort of framework of cooperation the fourth point i want to make is if we want to live in a more integrated world we have to make the united states a better model for that kind of world we have to keep making america better a place where there are more shared responsibilities and shared benefits based on shared values we can t afford to be as divided as we now are over so many things and i ll just give you one example that s my pet peeve i think it was a mistake for us to cut taxes four times and go back to big deficits in the middle of a military conflict for the first time in the history of the republic and to give half of the money to people in the top 1 of the income group including a lot of people in this room i think it s a mistake it violates the principles of shared responsibilities for one thing let s just start there i ve got a college roommate who was when we graduated from college in the 1960 s a pilot in the marine corp he has two sons we ve been like brothers ever since we lived together four years in college i grew up in a democratic family thinking that civil rights was the most important issue he was raised in a conservative republican irish catholic family believing that rolling back communism was the most important issue and we ve been like brothers for 40 years now and he has two sons both of them served in the marine corp and they were in the theater in afghanistan and iraq they both could have given their lives for our country my roommate doesn t make near as much money as i do he s a pilot a commercial pilot it bothers me that his kids were in danger wearing the uniform of this country in a struggle against global terrorism and i was not asked to contribute one red cent to support their sacrifice all they asked me to do was to open four envelopes containing my tax cuts for the first time in american history i was people in my income group were given a total free ride and are supposed to stand up here and spout patriotic slogans and not being asked to do a single thing that bothers me now parenthetically i think it s also terrible economics we ve gone to big deficits we ve got last year a 400 billion dollar deficit which was really a 550 billion dollar deficit and i want just to make sure all you know what happens when you run a government deficit you know i was i suppose one of my liberal critics said when i was president that i was the most conservative democratic on fiscal matters since grover cleveland and i think he thought it was an attack i personally wore it as a badge of honor because i don t believe in a global economy you can be socially liberal or progressive unless you re fiscally responsible because otherwise you re spending all your money paying interest on the debt and you take middle class people s taxes and turn around and give it to wealthy bondholders but basically when you run a deficit and you spend money you ve got to borrow the money from somebody right well here s how we finance the deficit the first thing we do is we take the 150 billion dollars every year that people who are paying social security taxes pay that we re not paying out to beneficiaries we take it right off the top and give it to me in tax cuts and other government expenditures and the government puts a little chip a little iou in the social security trust fund now it ll get paid back don t worry about that it will be paid back but someday it ll be paid back by ordinary taxpayers money being put back in the social security trust fund to pay back 25 years from now so some person can get their social security check money they gave me today but it s not enough because we still had 400 billion dollars more we had to borrow last year on top of the 600 billion dollars we had to borrow to finance our trade deficit so every day the united states government goes into the international currency markets and sells our debt at interest primarily to china japan south korea taiwan and saudi arabia and their theory is that all these countries have got a bunch of money in the bank and they have to buy our debt they have to fund out choices to spend more than we take in because if they don t our currency will collapse our interest rates will explode and we can t buy their exports anymore so we can get away with behaving in a way no other country in the world can i mean if mexico or brazil had our budget policy they d last about a nanosecond before their currency would collapse and they d be out of business if they did it the way we did do they d be history but we have a vibrant strong private sector we have a reputation for repaying our debts the truth is they want americans to keep running up debt on our credit cards buying imports from other countries so they buy our debt because if they buy our debt at reasonable interest rates the dollar doesn t collapse and interest rates don t explode and we don t all go broke but you need to know that every day you re dependent on last week did you see the south koreans just sort of had second thoughts about buying our debt and the value of the dollar plummeted and they had to run back the next day and say no no no we ll keep buying it now the problem is the people who have propagated this economic theory in the 1980 s and again now they just believe that these people are going to buy our stuff forever and that we are the only country in the world that can essentially practice institutional irresponsibility for the benefit of those of us who want lots of government and don t want to pay for it and i just don t believe that all these countries are going to have more and more customers they re going to have other problems that come up for themselves from time to time and there will be a reckoning there s a longer lead time between our misbehavior and having to pay for it than for any other country on earth but sooner or later it ll happen and all building back in institutional deficits to fund tax cuts when we already had the lowest tax burden of any advanced country in the world and to throw them primarily at people at the upper income scale that cannot possibly spawn enough economic growth through reinvestment is a i think a disservice it does not create a world of shared responsibilities and shared benefits it promotes concentrated wealth uneven benefits and grossly uneven responsibilities so that s why i m against it you can disagree with me but you have to ask yourself why you think it s okay for a country like china with a per capita income of depending on how you measure it somewhere between 1 300 and 5 000 a year to fund millionaires tax cuts in america you just have to ask yourself why you think that s a good policy for us to borrow money from them so our children will have to pay it back with interest to pay for my tax cut today when i already live in a country with the lowest aggregate tax burden of any advanced country on earth and when none of my investment decisions are affected by the changes in the tax rates so that s what i think you don t have to agree with me but you have to ask yourself if you don t agree why you think that this program has contributed to an america that s coming together instead of an america that s coming apart the last thing i want to say is whether you agree or disagree with any particular government that s in power whether you re a liberal or a conservative or a republican or a democrat you should feel hopeful because you have more power as a citizen today than ever before and there s something you can do for three reasons one is in the 1990 s for the first time in all human history more people lived under governments they voted in than lived under dictatorships so what you ve seen lately in the growth of democracy is an acceleration of what began in earnest with the fall of the berlin wall it s the first time in history more than half the people lived in democracies number two the people who live in democracies have more power than ever before through the growth of something called non governmental organizations or ngos in the common parlance and that s all the foundations you read about from the biggest and richest in the world bill gates who s done wonderful work in africa and india on healthcare to little bitty ones in rural india like the self employed women s association that takes village women and makes small loans to them and gives them a chance to make a living and everything in between in this tsunami disaster the american people gave a staggering 700 million dollars a third of households in america contributed and they gave most money through unicef the red cross oxfam all these things these are the ngos they re making a big difference the third reason you should feel hopeful is there s more direct citizen power than at any time in recent history because of the internet over half of these small contributions that were given for tsunami relief were given over the internet in the recent presidential campaign 50 years from now when people look back on it the most important characteristic from a political science point of view is that the 2004 campaign was the first campaign since money became important in paying for advertising where small donors in both parties had a decisive impact because of the internet because they could aggregate their small amounts and have a bigger impact than the big money that was given do you remember when the sars epidemic happened a few years ago it started in hong kong it s a part china the chinese government s initial instinct was to deny the problem they were worried it would kill travel to hong kong tourism investment there was a citizen revolt in china over the internet telling the truth about the disease we re talking hundreds of thousands of people emailing banging on the doors of china s government and they turned on a dime within a matter of a week they had a responsible position on sars they were working with the rest of the world and we shut down what could have been a deadly epidemic why because of people using citizen power you should be optimistic about that you should also be optimistic because the whole story of human history basically since people came out of caves and clans and first rose up on the african savanna over 100 000 years ago has been a story of moving from isolation to interdependence where there s both cooperation and conflict to integrated communities and we have continued to do it we nearly destroyed ourselves in the 20th century with two world wars nuclear weaponry slaughters in the holocaust in china and the former soviet union but we kept on going and terrorism is troublesome weapons of mass destruction are troublesome but i think it is unlikely that the 21st century will come as close to the preface of self destruction as the 20th century did i think it is far more likely that it will be a time of unprecedented global cooperation prosperity and peace and i think we ll do it because we don t have any other choice so that s why i look at the issues the way i do again you don t have to agree with me but should figure out how you view these things and you should be optimistic people have a way of stumbling in the right direction in world war ii it was two years after the nazis invaded poland that we finally entered the war after pearl harbor in those two years it was awful for the british and the forces of freedom on the continent they went forever and didn t win any battles and the press kept taunting winston churchill about it about america not being there and they didn t really know all the things roosevelt was trying to do to help them and they just kept taunting him about america not being in the war and finally one day in the midst of all that destruction and facing the loss of everything churchill looked at the reporters and smiled and he said you know the united states of america always does the right thing after exhausting every other alternative we may still have some alternatives to exhaust not only in our country but in the world but on the balance it would be a mistake to bet against the future thank you very much dem wjclinton4 4 00a bill_clinton thank you well first let me say to bobby and solange thank you for having us in your home i actually came to hear you sing emmy lou so you ve got sing for me when i finish i want to thank pat and marcelle for being wonderful friends to me and to hillary during our sojourn here in washington i may have been younger than you when i got here but i ll be older when i leave i want to thank senator reid for being here my great friend and former senator de concini thank you sir for being here i want to thank all of you for being here for pat leahy i have been in public life now for more than 25 years i have among other things when i was a governor i served with over 150 governors i have known hundreds of members of congress and i think that pat leahy is one of the ablest and most visionary legislators and one of the finest people i have ever served with in 25 years of public life and mr axworthy i appreciate you being here but you can t have him and he also by the way tells a pretty good joke now and then i ll be very brief i think the american people are going to be tested this year in this election season and in the years ahead because of our prosperity and because all the social indicators appear to be going in the right direction normally democracies can be summoned to any sacrifice or difficult decision when people are evidently under the gun and sometimes therefore they are most at risk of making foolish choices or going in the wrong direction when things seem to be going very well in that way groups of free people are like individuals most of us who are over 30 anyway can recall at least one time in our lives when we made a serious mistake not because things were going so poorly but because things seemed to be going so well and i say that because i think there really are very clear choices now between the direction that someone like pat leahy would take in his work for peace for the health of our children for the health of our environment for research or a whole range of issues and the choice that the majority in congress would take or their nominee for president would take yet it may seem to many voters that oh well there may not be much difference things are rocking along here the economy is on automatic and i think it s very important that people like you get together to help people like pat leahy i also think it s very important that you be able to tell your friends and neighbors who never come to political events like this why you came and what the stakes are and i m old enough now where i remember things sometimes i wish i didn t remember i was in this city 32 years ago today when martin luther king was killed in memphis and i remember it i was in this city 32 years ago driving down massachusetts avenue 32 years ago five days ago when lyndon johnson told us he couldn t run for reelection because the country was split right down the middle over the vietnam war what does all that have to do with this in february we celebrated the longest economic expansion in american history so i had all my economic team in and we were celebrating and we were happy and we were happy because we also had a 20 year low in poverty a 30 year low in unemployment the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years it was a wonderful time and we were talking about the state of the union address where i kept saying we ve got to do these big things now these big things and i said hey just for my information when was the last longest economic expansion in american history and it turns out it was between 1961 and 1969 and i will go back to what i said in the beginning you re in danger when things seem to be going well breaking your concentration and not making good decisions not just individuals but nations i graduated from high school in 1964 when there was low inflation low unemployment high growth and we thought it would go on forever lyndon johnson had united the country after president kennedy s tragic assassination and we thought then the civil rights challenges of america would be handled in the courts in the congress not in the streets we knew that we had a few people in vietnam but nobody thought we d have over 500 000 or that 58 000 would die or that it would tear the country apart and then four years later all this stuff i just told you started to happen so that by the time i graduated from college at georgetown on june 8th it was two days after robert kennedy was killed two months after martin luther king was killed and the city burned nine weeks after lyndon johnson said he couldn t run for reelection and a few weeks after that president nixon was elected on the first sort of divide and conquer campaign of the modern era he represented the silent majority which means people like me were in the loud minority it was us and them and just a few months after that the longest economic expansion in american history was history now i am very optimistic i m the most optimistic person in this room but what i want to tell you is i have a memory and i have waited for 35 years for my country to be in a position once again to be free to build the future of our dreams for our children to be responsible citizens of the world to lead the world toward peace and freedom and security that s what this is all about and we can t afford to let a single american treat this election in a casual fashion because of the evident responsibilities we have and because of the opportunities we have i know pat leahy is not on the ballot this year but i m glad you re out here helping him because i told you the truth in 25 years he s one of the finest people and one of the ablest most visionary public servants i ve ever known that s what you need to think about all year long and tomorrow if people ask you why you came here you need to be able to give them this answer and if you re around my age you need to remind them of what happened to the last longest economic expansion in american history when we were casual and careless enough to think it was on automatic there s nothing we can t do but we have to work at it and we have to work together thank you very much dem wjclinton4 4 00b bill_clinton thank you well the first thing i would like to say is john podesta told me that he emceed this retirement dinner for bob sunday night and then hillary came over here for breakfast and i just kind of got lonesome nobody had me come over so i just thought i would intrude myself on your meeting and i m glad to be here i want to say i came for two reasons first of all i came to thank you for all the support you ve given me and for all the work you ve done for america and for all the people you represent i have tried too to be a builder and the builders of this country to me embody the best of america so i want to thank you because without your help and your support none of the good things that have happened that our administration that the vice president and i have been part of would have been possible and the second thing i wanted to do was to say a special word of thanks to bob georgine as he retires after 29 years thank you for your leadership on raising the minimum wage on school construction on bringing investment to the new markets of america that have been left out of our prosperity on the patients bill of rights and on all the issues the specifically affect your members and working people and i wanted to also thank you for last labor day where you taught me to use an electric screwdriver now that i m moving into my own home and it s 111 years old i might need that skill again before you know it bob and i are both retiring at least he s doing it voluntarily i m term limited but i tell you as we look back on the last seven years it has been a wonderful experience and again i say we could not have done it without you what i d like for you to do now is just take a few minutes with me and think about why we are where we are and where we need to go i have my politics i suppose partly from the way i was raised by my grandparents and my family partly from what i ve learned as a governor in my home state of arkansas and as president partly from what i ve observed about human affairs and human nature but i have come to believe that there are basically two big approaches here to american politics one is obviously from the bottom up the other is from the top down we re on the bottom up side the other is unite and lift against divide and conquer i think that most of us believe the way we do because we think everyone counts everyone ought to have a chance everyone has a role to play in our society and we all do better when we help each other that s why we think everyone should have opportunity and we should have a community of all americans now if you think about where we are today it seems to me that even though i love to hear you cheer for me and for where we are and what we ve done the real issue is what are we going to do with this moment of prosperity you know people can be tested in adversity but they are also tested when times are good when you build up a great legacy what do you do with it and i ve worked as hard as i could for the last seven years to try to first turn this country around just remember what it was like when we all when al gore and i showed up here we had high deficits we had high interest rates we had no job growth we had social divisions we had political gridlock i ve worked hard to try to turn it around the country is moving in the right direction what are we going to do with it and that is the real issue and i would argue that you have a solemn responsibility in this election season not only to mobilize your members and their families but to reach out to the larger american community to say this is not a time for self indulgence this is a time to concentrate on our unique ability to meet the big long term challenges of america for the most vulnerable among us for the children like those children that are in this audience today and i d just like to begin with one bob alluded to it in the next 30 years all the baby boomers are going to retire and we ll only have about two people working for every one person drawing social security not two people total but two people even i couldn t get that done two people working for every one person drawing social security and so there will be a great question here how are we going to change that how are we going to accommodate the aging of america well i m about to sign a bill which removes the social security earnings limit so people who want to work in their later years can do so and still draw their social security i think that s a good thing to do but we also have to recognize that we re going to have to make some changes in order for social security to mean in the 21st century what it has meant to the 20th century we re also going to have to make some changes in the medicare program which was established when president johnson was here to make it work in the 21st century and i ve asked the congress for example to dedicate the interest savings from paying down the debt to the social security trust fund why because right now we re paying more in social security taxes than we re paying out in social security so as we pay the debt down i want to take the interest savings from paying the debt down put it in the trust fund it would now allow us to add about 54 years to the life of the social security trust fund and take it out beyond the life of the baby boom generation and i hope you ll talk to the members of congress i know a lot of republicans have supported many of your issues and you have relationships with both republicans and democrats this is not a complicated deal the only reason for the republicans not to support this is if they want to privatize social security if they can get the congress and the white house now you need to put the heat on folks to say we ve got the money now let s dedicate it now to saving social security and taking it out beyond the life of the baby boom generation the other thing we have to do is to modernize medicare and add a prescription drug benefit for our seniors on medicare now we just learned last week that medicare which was scheduled to go broke in 1999 last year when i took office they said the trust fund would run out of money in 1999 we have now taken it out to 2023 and i m very proud of that you know if we were designing a medicare program today no one would even think about designing medicare without prescription drug coverage first of all because there s been so many dramatic advances in medication and secondly because again i will say the nature of people over 55 has changed when medicare was originally designed people didn t live much longer than 65 years typically and this was designed for emergency care or for critical care for hospitals and doctors now any american lives to be 65 has got a life expectancy of 83 and more and more we need preventive care and chronic care and more and more of that is prescription medication no one if we were starting all over again today we we d never even think about having a medicare program that didn t provide a prescription drug component now i ve just come from a meeting with the senate democrats and the senate is taking up the budget today and the democrats are going to try to first of all say we should not spend the surplus on risky tax cuts we should first take care of our basic business senator robb is going to offer an amendment today supported by senator daschle that makes this simple statement after we modernize medicare with an affordable broad based voluntary prescription drug benefit then we can move forward with sensible tax cuts that aren t so big they undermine our ability to save social security pay down the debt and invest in the education of our children but first things first so the senate is going to get a resolution by senator robb today that says say yes to medicare and prescription drugs and no to having a big tax cut first so i hope you will support that now interestingly enough a number of people in the republican majority are saying okay well i ll go along with the drug program as long as everybody doesn t get it we ought to stop at the poverty level or 150 percent of the poverty level or maybe at the outer reaches some of them 200 percent of the poverty level let me tell you something they want to say that nobody with an annual income of over 16 700 should get help with this prescription drug benefit i just think that s wrong if you think about it a lot of you have parents uncles aunts maybe your older brothers and sisters that are on medicare if they have a 300 or 400 a month drug bill which is not all that rare then 16 000 is not all that much money and since this benefit is voluntary again i will say i don t think a widow earning 16 000 or even 20 000 a year is less deserving of drug coverage than someone who is below the poverty line so i hope you will stick up for the proposition that all of our seniors should have the option of buying into this insurance program that s what made medicare work in the first place that s what made social security work in the first place it was a universal program that helped middle class people as well as low income people and this is an opportunity to improve the process of aging in america in a way that is humane and decent and completely affordable so we need your help to get prescription drug coverage in the medicare program this year in the right way for all americans i also want to thank you for your devotion to the welfare of people on the other end of life s age line for your support for education and in particular for the work you have done to build bipartisan support for school construction and renovation this year i have sent a budget to the congress which will enable us to build or modernize 6 000 schools and to repair 5 000 schools a year over the next five years this is terrifically important we ve got the largest school population we ve ever had we want to have high standards and high accountability we want to hook all these schools up to the internet but there are schools in new york city that are still being heated with coal with coal the average age of a school building in philadelphia is 65 years i was in a small town in florida visiting an elementary school where there were 12 12 house trailers behind the school to take the overflow of the students one third of our schools are in serious disrepair a lot of them literally too old to be wired for the internet other kids in trailers that need to be in modern classrooms this is a big issue we ve been working on it for three years now this week the department of education released a state by state report telling us that the need has grown and grown enrollment is growing facilities are crumbling every year we fail to act the problem gets worse i am very frustrated by those who say in the majority in congress that this is not a national responsibility that is not true i m not trying to tell people how to build the buildings i m not trying to prescribe the we re not trying to micromanage this program but the school districts of this country do not have the money or the means right now to do what our children need we have finally more people in the schools than we had during the baby boom generation after world war ii and we cannot expect them to learn in facilities that are unbearable and in many cases unwireable so i asked you to work with me with your help we actually have now a strong bipartisan school construction bill in the house and thanks to you largely we have both republicans as well as democrats supporting this legislation in the senate and the house the house bill would allocate 24 8 billion to help communities build or renovate these 6 000 schools so now that you ve gotten us some good republican support we have to get this to a vote once it became obvious on the house floor that we actually had republicans supporting this bill and that we could pass it then efforts were made to keep it from coming to a vote so i say to you there are a lot of people who believe that this year because it s election year should be a year where nothing gets done and i have challenged every member of congress who believes that to relinquish his or her salary for a year because we didn t get to where we are today by taking a year off you don t get to take a year off nobody else gets to take a year off and everybody s drawing a paycheck every two weeks there is no reason not to continue to move forward believe me no matter how much progress we make this year there will still be significant areas of disagreement between our presidential candidates and between the two parties in all the congressional races so let s show up for the american people and do what we can there is no reason no reason not to pass the prescription drug benefit on medicare and not to pass the school construction bill this year and you can help us do it i hope you will now i would like to close with the point with which i began first with a simple thank you and second with a reminder that this year this election year imposes on all of us an historic responsibility we did not get to where we are today with 21 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest minority unemployment rate ever measured highest home ownership in history the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years lowest poverty rates in 20 years lowest crime rates in 25 years this didn t happen by accident it happened because we worked together and we had the right ideas and we were moving in the right direction it happened because we believed in uniting our people and lifting them up and not in divide and conquer it happened because we believed you could be pro business and pro labor pro work and pro family you could grow the economy and improve the environment you could balance the budget and run a surplus and still invest more in education and give tax relief to middle income families a study last week said that the percentage of federal income tax coming out of average families incomes was the lowest in 40 years that s why we had a unite and lift not a divide and conquer theory and because we kept working and the only concern i have about this election year is that people will say well we ve got the first surpluses we ve had in 40 years back to back things are going well why don t we vote for something that makes us feel good in the moment and i just want you all to listen to this particularly those of you that are about my age in february we celebrated the fact that we had the longest economic expansion in american history and so i had all my economic advisors in and we were sitting around talking about it and i said well when was the last longest economic expansion in history before this one you know when it was 1961 to 1969 now let me tell you what happened then in 1964 i graduated from high school at the peak of this economic expansion we had low unemployment low inflation high growth everybody thought the growth would go on forever we had a civil rights challenge at home but lyndon johnson was president he d united the country after president kennedy s assassination and people believed that the civil rights challenge would be met in the congress and the courts not in the streets we were sort of involved in vietnam but people thought that was a long way away and nobody dreamed it would divide the country and people thought that we would win the cold war because our values and our system were superior and things would just rock right along that s what we thought in 1964 four years later in this city i graduated from college on june the 8th it was two days after robert kennedy had been killed two months and four days after martin luther king was killed today is the 32nd anniversary of his death it was nine weeks after lyndon johnson said he couldn t run for president anymore because the country was divided right down the middle over vietnam and there were demonstrations everywhere it was a few weeks before richard nixon was elected president on one of those divide and conquer platforms and i know a lot of you probably voted for him if you were of voting age that age but let me just remind you of what the message was the message was i represent the silent majority which meant that those of us what weren t for him we were in the loud minority so there was us and there was them and then we had all those us and them elections al gore and i came along and said we want to put people first we want to unite not divide but just a few weeks after that election 1968 boom the longest economic expansion in american history was over what s the point of all that i m not trying to get you down i want you to be up there s nobody more optimistic than me in this room today but we need to have a little humility and gratitude for this moment we re in and we need to understand that these things can get away from us and we need to be resolved to make the most of this this is a moment for making tomorrows not a moment for being distracted or indulging ourselves but for making tomorrows we have a chance to build a future of our dreams for our children and the reason i told you that story about the 1960s was not only to remind you that nothing lasts forever and you have to make the most of these things but to tell you that not as your president but as a citizen i have been waiting for 35 years for my country to have this chance and you can make the most of it so in everything you do this year you remember this little story i told you and you remember that we have the chance of a lifetime that we should be grateful for and everyone you talk to and everyone you touch and everything you say remind people this is our moment for making tomorrows thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton4 4 93a bill_clinton i want to thank all of you for being here and for sitting through this long day and all of the participants for everything you ve done i d like to thank the cabinet for coming and participating and the vice president and our staff for all the work they did to put this meeting together one of the things that has come out of this meeting to me loud and clear is that you want us to try to break the paralysis that presently controls the situation to move and to act i hope that as we leave here we are more committed to working together to move forward than perhaps we were when we came i tell you i ll never forget what i ve heard today the stories the pictures the passion from all of you in a funny way even when you were disagreeing everyone of you was a voice for change everyone of you was saying we can t possibly do any worse than to stay within the framework which has now undermined our ability to work together and to build a sense of common community too many people are being hurt and too many resources are being threatened and we re going to do our best to turn this away from at least the short term politics of just trying to avoid the tough decisions i intend to direct the cabinet and the entire administration to begin work immediately to craft a balanced a comprehensive a long tern policy and i will direct the cabinet to report back to me within 60 days to have a plan to end this stalemate meanwhile i want each of our cabinet to look within the departments to determine which policies are at odds with each other it is true as i ve said many times that i was mortified when i began to review the legal documents surrounding this controversy to see how often the departments were at odds with each other so that there was no voice of the united states i want the cabinet members to talk with each other to try to bring these conflicts to an end which at their extreme have had our own agencies suing one another in courts often over issues which are hard to characterize as monumental i want everyone to examine his or her approach to existing legal and administrative proceedings to see if inadvertently any of us are hampering the march toward a solution of the larger issues or even toward the particular ones now in litigation regardless of what we are doing our efforts must be guided it seems to me by five fundamental principles first we must never forget the human and the economic dimensions of these problems where sound management policies can preserve the health of forest lands sales should go forward where this requirement cannot be met we need to do our best to offer new economic opportunities for year round high wage high skill jobs second as we craft a plan we need to protect the long term health of our forests our wildlife and our waterways they are as the last speaker said a gift from god and we hold them in trust for future generations third our efforts must be insofar as we are wise enough to know it scientifically sound ecologically credible and legally responsible fourth the plan should produce a predictable and sustainable level of timber sales and non timber resources that will not degrade our destroy our forest environment and fifth to achieve these goals we will do our best as i said to make the federal government work together and work for you we may make mistakes but we will try to end the gridlock within the federal government and we will insist on collaboration not confrontation we will do our best to do our part we will act with a single purpose and a single agenda once we have a chance to get all these departments working on their respective responsibilities but i want to say too that all of you have demonstrated to me today your willingness to do your part i ask you not to let this be the end of it this conference has established a dialogue even when it was somewhat funny between mr kerr and miss mater it was still a dialogue and it s got to continue between us and you and among yourselves you have got to be a part of this solution even if we make the most enlightened possible decisions under the circumstances they will be all the more resented if they seem to be imposed without a continuing mechanism for people whose lives will be affected here to be involved so when you leave here today i ask you to keep working for a balanced policy that promotes the economy preserves jobs and protects the environment even as you may disagree as mr thomas said over how the word balance should be defined when you hit an impasse i plead with you not to give up and don t turn against your neighbors you don t have to fight in a court of law anymore you can work with us to try to have a long term solution if you feel frustrated at times all of us will i ask you to stay at the table and to keep talking and keep trying to find common ground i don t want this situation to go back to posturing to positioning to the politics of division that has characterized this difficult issue in the past i hope we can stay in the conference room and stay out of the courtroom if we don t give up or give in to deadlock or divisiveness or despair i think we can build a more prosperous and a more secure future for our communities and for our children and i think we ll be proud years from now that we were here today i thank you for caring and for coming for speaking out and for reaching out and i ask you to continue to work with us so that this forest conference is the beginning not the end of a solution but we will move we will move and i will do my best to assume the responsibility the american people have given me to try to break this deadlock in a responsible way i just ask you to remember that this listening cannot be a one shot deal we ve got to continue to work together and i think if we do we ll all be pleased with the results thank you very much dem wjclinton4 5 05 excerpt bill_clinton if we don t do anything until the government approves a plan and then we go in to try to make sure we ve got the trained personnel before we just shoot the medicine in we negotiated agreements with the major indian and south african drug manufacturers for generic antiretrovirals at 139 a person a year i believe it s the cheapest price available on earth and then a lot of the major producers of the equipment for testing which you have to do in order to know whether the medicine is working or not agreed with us to cut the price in the aggregate to 60 a year for the cd4 and viral load test as opposed to 400 600 which is what most people are playing so we can do the whole load now for 200 a person a year just with our little foundation oh in addition to that 30 other countries have been certified by the world health organization as having sufficient medical capacity to buy drugs off our contract so this year in january 110 000 more people were getting medicine in all these countries that were getting them 2 1 2 years ago just under our efforts and so that s 110 plus 130 that s 240 and thanks to the work of the funding that is now beginning to be spent by the bush administration the global funds efforts doctors without borders and others we probably have a total of 500 000 people over and above what were getting the medicine two years ago but we re still at nearly that if you do math it means we still got well over 5 1 2 million people whose very lives depend upon getting care and treatment not now available so this last couple of weeks we ve announced an initiative to try to develop greater care networks in rural areas and paul farmer who many of you know a remarkable man who has spent his life bringing healthcare to rural haiti a medical professor from the boston area who s married a haitian woman and spends 5 or 6 months a year in a thatched hut in haiti serving an area that was supposed to be 20 000 and people from an area of 200 000 to get care he s really the albert schweitzer of our age i think in hemisphere but he agreed to go into rwanda with me which is a small country about 8 000 000 people and try to set up rural healthcare networks and then replicate that throughout the rest of the world and we finally got enough money together to provide pediatric antiretrovirals to 10 000 kids now that is nothing and everything let me tell you how bad the numbers are last year half a million preteens died of aids and in the whole world 25 000 are getting any antiretrovirals of those 25 000 more than half are in two countries brazil and thailand which also has a pharmaceutical industry and gives them to the affected kids so basically we have now doubled the number of we will this year double the number of children getting this medicine outside brazil and thailand and next year we ll go from 10 to 60 000 which will have an exponential affect so the good news is a lot of this is happening and hopefully will happen as more and more american and other pharmaceutical companies provide the medicine at lower costs as the bush administration money flows in as the global fund begins to be funded the bad news is this is nuts this is a disease a viral epidemic that is a a 100 preventable b there s medicine that almost 100 of the time prevents transmission from affected mothers to their children c there s medicine that keeps nearly everybody alive who s reasonably healthy when they start taking it and people are still dying like flies it is the most frustrating thing i have ever dealt with in my life and i m glad we ve had a significant impact but we ve got a long way to go we estimate that just with our foundation within about two years we could be up to 2 000 000 people getting the medicine so if we all got in gear if everybody did it s not so much an issue now as it is how we spend the money and whether the institutional changes can be affected in a lot of these rural areas to get it done but it s been what s the most rewarding and the most frustrating thing i think i ve ever done but when you see it i saw a kid a 16 year old kid who stood with me in the bahamas and the last time i saw him he was barely up to my waist his growth was so stunted and i was sure he was going to die and he s going to live now he ll never be as big as he would have but he s going to have a life the haitian woman who runs the counter at the local drug store where i get my medicine has a niece who s hiv positive in haiti and when we started there she was 13 years old and so weak that she had to be taken by cab to school and then literally carried to her desk and sat down because she could not stand and walk she just sent me a picture of herself in her prom dress a beautiful 16 year old girl looking like my daughter did when she was 16 this is work worth doing and these people don t need to die and whatever everybody s concern is about all this other stuff nothing matters compared to trying to keep them alive in every continent i sat with a young woman from china who was hiv positive and wept because she had a baby before she knew she was hiv positive and her baby died she was infected because she was one of these poor village women who lived in one of those rural villages in china where there are no jobs that s why everybody is moving to the coastal cities and she thought she could improve her and her husband and the children she wanted to have their situation by going to college and the only way she could make any money going to college was by donating blood because rural people were donating blood for the hospitals in the cities because the blood banks couldn t keep up with the population growth and the equipment was contaminated just as it was in america over 20 years ago a friend of mine s mother died of aids because she gave blood through contaminated equipment in this country over 20 years ago and this woman was weeping about the lost of her child and she was getting antiretrovirals that a chinese doctor who d once worked at the cdc just wheedled out of some friends of hers at one of our pharmaceutical companies in america but they d run out of testing money so they no longer had any idea whether the medication was working this is a situation that is nuts and unacceptable and we need to do more to correct it and more quickly the other thing i announced yesterday that everybody s been making fun of my long time penchant for mcdonald s fried food is this effort that the boy doesn t want to get obesity childhood obesity has tripled in america over the last 20 years it s 16 nationwide it s 20 in the south where i grew up and we live on fried food and the basic causes are clear at the very most exercise levels have not gone up among children in most places they ve gone down as schools have dropped their physical education programs middle and upper middle class suburbs have been built without sidewalks a lot of these people families are struggling to work 47 of the food dollar is spent eating out now as opposed to 30 in 1970 over half of that is spent on people driving to fast food establishments this is a function of working people having to work and you get good value for dollar in terms of being filled up and food s still a great bargain in america but the nature of the food that we eat not only have the portions gotten bigger but there s more fat and more sugar in what we re eating and it s not just mcdonald s the school lunch menus in many places are a disgrace from a nutritional point of view they were published the last time i was home in arkansas a couple of weeks ago just coincidentally i happened to be there on a day when there was an article about this problem and they published the school lunches on that day from some of the major schools it was unbelievable unbelievable half of all the vegetables consumed by people between the ages of 2 and 19 are potatoes the literal percentage i think is 46 47 and you know i m irish i like potatoes the vending machines which sadly a lot of vending machine companies you know pay funds and help to fund local pta s and stuff like that but they re full of stuff kids shouldn t be eating and it s not just what you eat a lot of the things you could go on and eat if we prepared them in a different way this is something that i agreed to do with the heart association kind of coming out of my my sense of obligation because i survived and dodged the big bullet and i had wonderful healthcare and because i think most of the changes we need to make here are lifestyle changes we are going to have to have help from the food manufacturers and from the restaurant chains and from the schools i visited a school in the north of harlem yesterday in washington heights that has an exercise program and drastically altered their school menu and the kids in the first grade were writing essays to me when i got there yesterday about the health focus of their school now and why they changed and why it was good we can do this but let me just tell you how bad this in you know i know there s been this big argument because the cdc has to revise now the number of people that died of obesity and so a lot of the food companies have jumped on that and said we re all crying wolf forget about that that s people my age who grew up at an age when the childhood obesity rate was something like 5 or 6 we now have for the first time in american history substantial numbers of children with what most of us call adult onset diabetes about 25 of the medicaid budget is tied to diabetes after i was elected but before i was inaugurated president the man who was the chairman of my first campaign for congress in 1974 who was only a year older than me died of diabetes my chief of staff in the white house erstine bowles two of his children had diabetes inherited but i ve lived with this and worked with this a lot if you can start having a bunch of kids who didn t have to have diabetes with adult onset diabetes i tell you you ve got a serious problem on your hands and i ve partnered in this to make it totally nonpartisan with a republican governor of my native state mike huckerby who two years ago weighed 280 pounds and is about 5 9 10 he s never taken any physical exercise in his life and he s a baptist minister and realized that he was a poor role model so he lost 110 pounds in a year and a few months ago he ran a marathon at 49 he s a very articulate man and he s written a book that will be published next week called stop digging your own grave with a knife and fork it s pretty funny i want to say more about this again in the context of general healthcare but you know you hardly see anybody talk about the healthcare crisis in america and say that americans could take far fewer demands on the system if they made different lifestyle choices and if we did it in a systematic way so i m going to try to do that i think it s a big deal now let me just make a couple of observations about healthcare and then i ll open the floor to questions when i became president we were spending almost 14 of our gdp on healthcare today we re spending over 15 the next nearest countries to us are canada and switzerland they have different systems but they re somewhere between 10 11 now in addition to that there are 4 000 000 more people without health insurance today than there were the day i left office we had finally gotten with a lot of the things that we did and i didn t mention them all but we ve finally gotten the number of people without insurance down by 1997 for the first time since 1987 a lot of that was the improving economy more employers could afford to offer health insurance but the lion s share of the numbers were the children we were insuring i tried to pass a bill through congress that would have helped a lot of companies by the way that would of allowed people who retire early at 55 and lose their health insurance and now only about 1 in 7 or 8 early retirees have any carryover health insurance from their employer i tried to pass a bill that would allow those people to buy into the medicare program on a sliding scale income based basis but it didn t prevail so now we have more people uninsured we re over 15 of gdp what are the causes of this what are the differences in our systems and others that are arguably unrelated to the quality of care i think there are at least five that i think we ought to that we have to start looking at first is the administrative costs the paperwork burden of our system is massively greater than any other system on earth we have a strong preference in our country for a private sector solutions and competition and the more competitors the better and in most cases that s right in this case it s lead to the employment of 2 3 000 000 people in administrative jobs in health insurance companies and health providers whose main job is either try to get the money or try to keep from giving it a little longer and catch the float and as a result of that when we had this crazy quilt pattern of health insurance policies which don t have standardized benefit packages where people argue over what s covered and what s not whether you can lose it and whether you can t none of it has very much to do with the delivery of healthcare all of it adds the cost of the healthcare system let me just give you a few numbers the administrative costs now in the private sector according to the latest figures i ve gotten is 15 the administrative costs of medicare medicaid is less than 4 the aggregate paperwork costs when you count what the doctors and the others have to spend is 34 of our system no other country approaches 20 canada s the highest i ve found at 19 but 15 that is the difference of 19 and 34 is 15 15 of 15 of gdp is over 2 of gdp just run those numbers in your head you know even for some of you that s real money so what can we do about it since obviously we re not going to do what i tried to do what can we do well the first thing we ought to do is to computerize medical records and have uniform systems and every time you go into a health care provider you should add to it or modify it instead of having to reinvent the wheel all over again it would cost about 100 150 000 000 000 in one time costs it would be worth it i could give you a personal example where i just added to the cost of the healthcare system hillary insisted that i stop going to the dentist i was going to and go see her dentist because she thought that he was great and i had a chipped tooth and he was great and it was fascinating i enjoyed it but because i d never been there before they sat me down and took out one of these damn forms and asked me if i d ever had measles and all that stuff they ask you and i m 58 years old i couldn t even remember the answer to some of those questions i m not sure i gave the same answers i did three years ago you know but i added lots to the cost of the healthcare system i sat there for half an hour and answered all those stupid questions and they were sensible questions if they were going to give me you know a certain kind of medication to put me to sleep for the dental work and all that but i answered all those questions that i ve answered a zillion times before and i m almost certain i didn t give the same answers and this happens over and over and over again every time you have to do it and it s almost dangerous when people have emergency situations where do you go to get the information now we ve always been reluctant to do this in our country because of our privacy concerns i get that but i believe 90 of the american people if they were presented with the alternatives and they understood what a burden this was presenting to the system that you were getting more costs worse information and undermining the quality and speed of care would choose to have computerized records with as much privacy protection as we could provide and we d create a market for smart people to figure out how to have that privacy protection i think that s important the second thing i think would really help is even though it would be resisted i think by some of the health insurance industry is we could cut the administrative costs dramatically if we had more standardized benefit package and bigger pools i mean i could get you know a lot of you know these nightmare stories but man if you get stuck in a small pool and you i ll never forget this guy that was going to work for a nonprofit with 20 employees and they were in a little small business pool all he ever wanted to do was work for the non profit and he had his whole family insured and somebody else in the non profit had a child with a severe illness that was going to cost like a quarter of a million dollars to treat and they were all told that if they didn t fire this person that everybody else s premium was going to go up 20 now that don t make any sense and it only happened because they had a small small pool and the administrative costs would go down dramatically if you had a standardized package even if there were a lot of items on the list if you look at the federal employee benefit plan for example there are more than i can t remember because i m not on it anymore directly but i think there were more than two dozen options we had but still you could manage two dozen you can computerize two dozen you can standardize the way you handle it it would substantially cut the cost of paperwork the second thing we spend a lot more money on than anything else is drugs and i want to talk about that and say what i m not for we are the only major country including the major european producers of pharmaceuticals that have no price limits on what can be charged for pharmaceuticals in return for the patent and the monopoly you get i actually don t favor changing that we have a vigorous pharmaceutical industry they ve done a lot of good for america and for the world i think we ought to leave it there but we don t need to make it worse and we don t need to pretend that there aren t some problems there on the average the last five years the return on sales has been about 18 wal mart makes about 6 the average of fortune 500 companies about 3 15 has been spent on research and development 31 has been spent on marketing and administration 68 of the new drugs that have been brought to market in the last decade have been brought to market as a result of government funding through the nih or university discoveries with nih funding then they re licensed to the companies we don t have to go to price controls and i would even favor a larger r d tax credit for real work especially from new companies and biotech companies but we do really dumb things i think this medicare drug bill was an abomination and i think it ought to be repealed first of all the congress was not told the truth about what it cost they knew it was going to cost 5 50 billion dollars and they allowed the congress to vote on it at 400 000 000 000 at least 200 000 000 000 of that is an unjustified subsidiary in prices because they will not let medicare negotiate the way general motors or the veteran s administration or any other large purchaser of drugs can negotiate so they both made buying from canada illegal drugs made in america certified by the fda certified by the canadians that s a crime now and you can t bargain for lower prices it s just an unconscionable subsidy that has added to the financial woes of medicare there s also a huge subsidies in there to corporations to keep on doing what they were doing before which is providing drug benefits as a part of their health coverage i just think it s a mistake we can t afford it look at the deficit look at what we ve got to do and it adds to the cost of healthcare without adding to the quality of care and i think we have to look at that i think we have to look at the fda approval system and ask whether it s a good idea to approve a new drug if it has no advance over an already approved drug i think we ought to encourage the use of the pharmaceuticals where the patent s expired unless the new drug that s in competition with it is actually better you know i know i m going to be old fashioned here i don t think this ll ever be done but you know most of the tv advertisements i see are for new drugs and the last 10 seconds are all the warnings it s the most bizarre thing i ve ever seen i don t know that we re better off it might have been better just to have the pharmaceutical reps go to see the doctors the way they used to and let people do what they were doing you know since a lot of them are products directed at men my age i ought to be for the tv ads but i don t know i just question whether this whole thing is a wise allocation of limited national resources on healthcare and whether it s necessary to maintain financially profitable companies as i said i have no problem i don t think we should go to price fixing like every other country does i don t think we ought to i think we ought to if anything increase the research and development tax credit but i think the fda permitting processes adds to the price of drugs without adding to the quality of healthcare the way it does and i believe that the medicare drug bill was an abomination especially in a country with a big deficit like we ve got it s just not right the third big issue we ve got is we spend more money on the last two months of life than any other country in the world that s a cultural thing we may not be able to do anything about that you saw that in this debate over the schiavo case and whatever side you were on everybody was you had to admit that there were some arguments on the other side that were somewhat appealing i thought it was a hard case i favored letting the exhausting law and the process and the doctors that were on the ground and the people that reviewed it and the family members work it out but it was a hard case and part of the reason it s a hard case is we just don t give up as easy as people do in a lot countries we just hang on till the last drop and i kind of admire that in a way for all kinds of reasons but i do believe that the debate in the schiavo case will lead to a huge increase in the number of living wills we re two for two in my family because of it and i think the more of those we have the more it will help us to moderate future expenses future end of life expenses without undermining the quality of care or the sanctity of life or the integrity of families but i don t think you can blame the insurance companies the doctors the hospitals or anybody else it s a part of our culture they re unresolved questions there are personal decisions that have to be made and i really believe that before we look at other things and other kind of decisions we really ought to push this whole living will thing much harder than it s pushed so far the fourth thing that happens is there is a lot of defensive medicine practice because of the size of the malpractice premiums and the fear of lawsuits my daughter had a very close friend at stanford who is a columbia medical student now so when i was up there laid up in the hospital she d come and see me she said she d really like to be a pediatrician and we need more but she can t afford the malpractice premium i was talking to a doctor who s the administrator of one of the big medical complexes in houston who said that when they began to self insure their doctors they cut their malpractice premiums by 90 but again for a doctor base he had a very large pool so i think that the government ought to look at ways to facilitate the formation of very large pools of physicians with good safety records that can either self insure or get good moderate costs because malpractice is kind of like crime an enormous percentage of violent crimes in this country are committed by a very small percentage of the criminals an enormous percentage of the big malpractice problems in the country are attributable to a very tiny percentage of the doctors but we penalize every young person that gets out of medical school who wants to be a pediatrician for it so some sort tort reform may be warranted and i m not against that as long as we don t cut off the right to sue of people who are genuinely injured by genuinely negligent people but i think we can do a lot to change the market to lower malpractice costs for doctors and it would make a huge difference finally there s where i started this talk there are the lifestyle issues you know we can eat ourselves into the grave if we want to but we re kidding ourselves if we don t think that 1 we re running the risk of this generation of kids being the first one to live shorter lives than their parents 2 we re running the risk that my generation the baby boomers are going to be unconscionably expensive for our children and grandchildren to take care of because of lifestyle choices we made with people over 85 being the fastest growing group in america percentage wise we need more people like my stepfather whose 90th birthday i just celebrated and he can hardly get around now because he just broke his leg almost at the hip but he played golf with me into his late 80 s and if i gave him his handicap he d beat me half the time and he just kind of kept going we need to really do a huge cultural effort here through all of our institutions to make people understand the importance of physical and mental activity the medical journal article three years ago said you decrease your chances of alzheimer s by 50 when you re over 45 if you do a crossword puzzle or a set of math problems everyday so i did my crossword puzzle on the way down here today some people think it s too late for me but i m trying anyway but this is a huge problem i ve got a friend my age with an older brother two years older who s a career navy guy i really like this guy his brother and he can still play par golf but at the end of the hole he can t remember the clubs he used or the score he made and he s so fit he s probably going to live a long time with this so that s important for medical research for the development of new therapies but it s also important if there are any lifestyle changes we can make to reduce the number of people that have mental as well as physical disabilities we have to do that and we can t sit around and blame the drug companies the doctors the hospitals the insurance companies and everybody else for the collective lifestyle choices we made when we know we re going to be living longer and we know what we can do that will change the dynamics of that so for whatever it s worth i think we ve got to deal with paperwork pharmaceuticals end of life defensive medicine and lifestyles that s the sort of low hanging fruit and i think over time we can still have more high tech medicine more advanced drugs more quality specialists and still close the gap between what we re spending and what everybody else is spending now you have to see this in the context of the problems that your government has helping you today we have a deficit that s reported of about 400 billion dollars it s actually more than that it s about 550 billion dollars because we the first 150 billion dollars worth of debt and pay for it with surplus social security taxes every year we buy the bonds and it s fine but some day those bonds will have to be redeemed and unless we change the economics that will mean that the debt payments of the country will go up exponentially at some point in the future look i was i will make full disclosure i was opposed to the 2001 tax cut the 2002 tax cut the 2003 tax cut and the 2004 tax cut and i m opposed to the one in this year s budget i was against them i would have supported a larger tax cut in 2001 if it had had a two year time limit to stimulate the economy the tax cut really didn t cost much in 2001 it was enacted in 2001 it cost a whole lot later on down the road but as a result a series of tax cuts almost half of the benefits of which went to people in the top 1 of the income groups the first of which was adopted before we knew what our income our expenses or our emergencies were going to be then we had 9 11 we had a big emergency right and we have a little recession so our income goes down and our expenses go up we made a mistake but in 2002 2003 20004 we knew we had more spending we knew we had less revenues and we just kept on digging because of an ideological economic theory that has no evidentiary support and i frankly think it did terrible things to the ethical fabric of this community and i ll just close with this one example because this is why your government is hurting to help you with this huge deficit i mean everyday we go into the markets and we ask the chinese government to loan the american government money to pay bill clinton s tax cut that s what happens we re the only country in the world that thinks that countries poorer than us should loan us money to pay rich people like me the richest people in america tax cuts we have never cut taxes in a time of war before we ve been on a war footing with the terror deal the homeland security expenses and the iraq thing we have never done this before ever in our whole history we not only cut it we went and borrowed money from poor countries to give me a tax cut i ll just give you one example this is off the healthcare subject but it s important for what kind of country we are i went to college at georgetown i roomed for four years with an irish catholic from long island whose father was a local judge elected on the conservative ticket because every republican he knew but barry goldwater was too liberal for him it would be hard to imagine two people that were more different politically i show up in 1964 and he s got a goldwater for president sticker on the door i said heck that s what i left arkansas to get away from and we became like brothers and interesting enough as we got older our politics grew together so he graduates from college and he joins the marine corp in the vietnam era and he s a marine pilot then he becomes a commercial pilot he marries a wonderful irish catholic woman has to beautiful irish catholic boys the woman s sister s family disintegrates and they take her sister s daughter who had cerebral palsy and they raise her as their own child and while they re doing that they take every available weekend and go to mexico and build houses for poor people these people are saintly people religious old fashioned conservative wonderful people so i get in the white house and he calls me one day when the republicans won the congress which made him happy he voted me just because he d known me all his life and he said bill i just saw this budget he said you know my daughter s best friend has cerebral palsy her mother is a single mom working at a minimum wage job riding a bus to work one hour a day and these kids with cerebral palsy have to have four or five pairs of really expensive shoes a year he said now if i read this budget right that i got from the cerebral palsy association they re going to give me a tax cut he was a pilot earning about 100 000 a year he said they re going to give me a tax cut and they re dem wjclinton4 5 05 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you you have no idea how awkward it is to be standing by yourself in front of thousands of people who believe this dinner is about strength in numbers and i m up here all alone how could you do this to me i want to thank janelle for the introduction your chairman barry huber and all the officers of the chamber for inviting me i congratulate the award winners and the people that stood in line for a long time to get tickets i read that warren kaufman and his sister stephanie got up at 3 00 to stand in line i just want to tell you a story when i was inaugurated governor in january of 1983 over 22 years ago my father in law had a heart attack during my inaugural address and we rushed him to the university medical center he had a quadruple bypass we were terrified in the beginning and then relieved that he was going to be all right and when he finally came out of it and opened his eyes i looked at him and i said hugh it wasn t that good a speech so i hope when you leave here you think it was worth getting up at 3 00 in the morning for i also want to say that i actually have an acquaintance at least by newspaper articles with one of your businesses as the leader of the mennonite central committee told me tonight ten thousand villages is about to open a store in little rock arkansas near my library so i thank you for that i would also like to thank you for the work as i said that you have done for the tsunami victims that s very important i am delighted to be back here tonight i have had a wonderful time i landed it was still daylight i got to look around there were a few people standing outside the airport i got outside and shook hands with them i love this part of pennsylvania since i m in lancaster it s dangerous to say but when i left the democratic convention as the nominee in 1992 i got on the bus and i spent my first night in york and i thought to myself isn t it interesting that i have two towns 30 minutes away from each other named for the protagonist in the war of the roses and we re talking about the importance of togetherness tonight it s kind of like me and the bushes running around you know people say the darndest things you ought to see all the political cartoons i ve got that people have sent me ever since former president bush and i started working on this tsunami event they re purely newspapers but they were almost x rated they were really funny yesterday i made an announcement and i want to talk about seriously in a minute about work i was going to do to fight childhood obesity and i did it with the republican governor of arkansas and we were talking about that but i want to talk about it seriously in minute but this morning there was this kid on television kind of a heavyset kid he looked just like me when i was his age and they asked him if he saw the announcement and they said yes and they said well what are you going to do he said i m going to change the way i eat because i don t want to catch that obesity deal sometimes we don t quite understand how things work i just went with president bush and former president bush and the first lady and condi rice to the funeral of his holiness john paul ii whom i liked very much it was a moving thing very serious but it reminded me of a hilarious story that made the rounds in my home state of arkansas when john paul became the pope back in the 70 s back in the 70 s arkansas and west virginia had the highest percentage of people living in our state who were born there hardly anybody came but nobody ever left and most of us were southern baptists even guys like me who went to a catholic grade school a catholic university so there was this huge story making the rounds that all my priest friends liked about these two old mountain men sitting up in the ozark mountains on their porch rockers and said you know they re going to have to pick a new pope he says is that right and the other guy said yeah he says who are you for he said well i don t know who s running but he said i kind of hope the catholics don t get it they ve had it long enough so you know lots of times we don t really understand how things work but i ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out one of the great things about being a former president islook here this is my speech i rewrote it on the way down here tonight it s great you can say whatever you want that s the good news the bad news is nobody pays attention anymore so i m just going to talk a little bit and then answer questions but i want to try to explain what i think is going on in the world today whether you live in lancaster pennsylvania or lancaster england or halfway around the world in a country devastated by the tsunami let me begin by saying how i got to where i am when i left office i had to decide what to do i knew i was not a good enough golfer to go on the senior circuit and i didn t play saxophone well enough anymore to play with that band over there who were great tonight thank you very much and i was too much of a calvinist just to lay down and quit you know so i studied what all my predecessors had done and there were six of my predecessors at least as president who made a difference a positive difference when they left office john quincy adams defeated after one term by andrew jackson went back to the house of representatives for eight terms his last term at 81 was abraham lincoln s only term in the house and they dedicated the washington monument together but john quincy adams was the nation s foremost advocate for the abolition of slavery in the congress of the united states he arguably had a bigger impact in congress than he did as president when theodore roosevelt left the white house as the youngest former president in history he was three years younger than me he started a new political movement called the new nationalism and argued that america had to be involved in the world in the short run he helped to elect one of his nemeses woodrow wilson president because he split the vote in three ways in 1912 and he is the only third party candidate ever to run as high as second in a presidential race since the rise of the modern two party system with the republicans going on the ballot in 1856 but theodore roosevelt also essentially defined america s foreign policy goals international policy for most of the 20th century in many ways and had a major role i believe in getting us into world war i in a positive way then his successor william howard taft who got beat after one term was later put on the united states supreme court as chief justice where he served with genuine distinction and was much happier as a judge than he had been as president herbert hoover served one term and he was my age when he left office 54 he lived another 34 years and as part of his public service led a commission that completely reorganized the federal civil service under harry truman a democrat and he really did a good job when president nixon left office in much more difficult circumstances he wound up writing six or seven books which had a real impact on the thinking of people in public life on foreign policy and where the world was going a month to the day before he died he wrote me a letter about russia which remains perhaps the most eloquent and lucid foreign policy document i received in eight years as president and then of course jimmy carter who left office a year older than i was when i left has spent a lifetime building a non public a non governmental organization a philanthropic foundation which has cured guinea worm in africa helped countries to become more self sufficient agriculturally supported good clean elections and advanced human rights and tried to resolve conflicts and he won the nobel prize richly deserved for it so i suppose that in their different ways jimmy carter and john quincy adams have had the biggest impact than any of our former presidents in their post presidential years but it seemed to me that carter s model was more appropriate i think one member of my family in the congress is enough and i don t think i d like it very much anyway so i set up this foundation to build a library in arkansas my home state which would essentially be america s first museum of the 21st century would explain how we changed the way we lived and worked and related to each other in the world and we opened it in november and we ve had about 300 000 people come down there already so i hope if you ever have a chance to go you will because i really tried to make it an educational institution so that people of all ages at different levels of interest could learn from it and then i decided to work on things that i cared about as president where i could still have an influence there are a lot of things i cared about as president that i can t have any impact on anymore but there are some highly relevant to the 21st century where i can and i decided to work for economic opportunity in poor communities at home and around the world for the resolution of religious and racial conflicts for getting young people involved in citizen service and educational opportunities and for health security especially dealing with hiv and aids so now my foundation works in 20 countries all over the world delivering aids medicine and care when i started this work there were only 130 000 people in the entire world in poor countries getting aids medicine outside of brazil where everybody gets it from the government and today two years later we re giving 110 000 more people medicine it s really been very moving and then the president asked his father and me to raise money for the tsunami program and we did tomorrow i m going to texas to make an announcement with former president bush about what we re going to do with the money the american people gave us to help over there i hope that you ll be pleased with it and the united nations asked me to try to coordinate all the efforts over the next three years it s a mind boggling task but i m trying to do it because i ve dealt with these disasters all my life when i was governor arkansas had the highest tornado death rate in the country we had a massive 100 year flood when i was president we had a 500 year flood in the mississippi river valley and we had to relocate whole towns and i know how easy it is to forget about the misery and the suffering and losses of people as soon as they re out of the headlines and as soon as people have been buried and it takes years to get over this so i m doing what i can and it s quite interesting and then yesterday we did have this announcement on fighting childhood obesity and i want to tell you a little about that and why i decided to do it first of all i ve always been interested in health care i m interested in what we can do to improve the quality and slow the increase in cost of health care and it s clear that one of the things that you can t blame on the health insurance companies or doctors or hospitals or trial lawyers or all the various bugaboos for why we have a more expensive system than everybody else s we made different lifestyle choices than other countries and a lot of people are making money out of the lifestyle choices we ve made that aren t necessarily good for our kids now the obesity rate among young children is triple what it was twenty years ago it s now 16 in the south where i m from and where the poverty rate is higher and the penchant for fried foods is greater it s 20 or more in two southern states it s 25 for the first time ever we are seeing a significant number of adolescents diagnosed with adult onset diabetes type ii diabetes we have never had significant numbers of children with diabetes of this type before it s all because of lifestyle choices that they or their parents or their schools or the places they eat made we run the risk of 1 having the first generation of kids not to live as long as their parents did and 2 of imposing staggering extra costs on an already fragile health care system that already costs you over 15 of our gross domestic product when the next most expensive in the world canada and switzerland are still right at about 11 a little under and we could talk about that until the cows come home if you want to ask questions about it i ll be glad to but i don t want to say more about that i want to focus on this on these kids because there are reasons for this reason number one they re getting no more exercise at best than they did 20 years ago most of them are getting less because a lot of schools can t afford to maintain their physical education programs and because a lot of middle class developments have been built without sidewalks or neighborhood parks and so it s easier not to exercise and besides it s more interesting and less trouble to play video games but it matters those are things that parents have to deal with then the nutritional quality of school lunches has gone way down in many schools including in my state and we just have to face it the third thing is we got vending machines in all the schools now something we didn t have when i was a kid and a lot of them are full of high fat or high sugar foods that are designed to add pounds to these kids then this is interesting in 1970 30 of the american food dollar was spent eating out today it s 47 and of that over half is spent at fast food places now i like a lot of those places but let s look at what s really going on here a lot of people don t have many choices you ve got more and more families where both parents are working you ve got people you know getting up early taking their kids to school or to child care and food is one of the few remaining really good bargains in america both food at the grocery store and food in restaurants and fast food places compared to what other countries pay it s a good bargain here but the truth is that if you go to most of these places the portions are bigger and the fat content and the sugar content is higher today than was the case 20 to 25 years ago and the consequences to the bodies of our children are severe now what can we do about it let me tell you first of all i agreed to do this project with the heart association and a bunch of doctors but also with the republican governor of my home state because i wanted to make it clear that this was not a party issue mike huckabee is a friend of mine we were both born in the same little town about a year and a half ago he was 5 10 and weighted 280 pounds he d never done a lick of physical exercise in his life and he lost 110 pounds in a year and a few months ago ran a marathon and he just wrote a book called stop digging your grave with a knife and fork as i said when we did our announcements and i looked at his svelte figure there i said you know i devoted my whole career to trying to shrink the ranks of republicans but this is not how i had in mind here but it s a really brave great thing he did he also required our state to measure the body mass index of every child in the schools and send it home confidentially to the parents along with instructions for how they could eat more healthily and exercise and he got rid of all vending machines in grade school and now we re negotiating what s going to be in the ones in high schools now i say this because you were talking about strength in numbers this is something i recommended yesterday we made these announcements in a school public school 128 in washington heights which for those of you who know new york city is just the neighborhood just north of harlem in this grade school almost all the kids were african american or latino a lot of them were first generation emigrants they do have a little gym in the school but they have totally changed the menus have lots more fresh fruit and vegetables in the school cafeteria than they used to they have totally changed the way they do the curriculum and the exercise program for people generally and when i got there yesterday i went into a first grade class where the kids were writing notes to me about what they were learning about diet and lifestyle and why it was important at six years old and so i said never mind writing it tell me and they were so proud and they were saying things that will really make a difference to the way their lives turn out i say that because this is something we don t have to have the government to do you can make a decision here and every community in america can examine what s being served in the schools examine what s being served in these vending machines talk to people about how food is prepared it s very interesting a lot of the food chains are making a vigorous effort to change not just what they offer not just to have healthy items on the menu but to change the way they prepare everything there were some major food companies last year that all their increased profits when they introduced their healthy food alternatives we can make this good business we don t have to demonize anybody you know nobody made me eat all those french fries i ate that drove me under the knife when i had 90 percent blockage that was a decision i made and even though i wasn t particularly overweight i had a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol but i dodged a big bullet and i was really lucky god gave me a second chance and this is one of the things i m trying to do but i want to say all this to make it clear that i think this strength in numbers idea is a good idea but you ve got to decide what you re going to do with your strength and your numbers and i decided to spend a lot of the rest of my life trying to make sure that nobody younger than me is denied a chance to live their full span of years and live their dreams and i d like to have your help on this project in your community i think you can do it now here s what i want to say about the world we re living in the country we re living in and the community you re living in whenever anybody talks about the 21st century world you won t have to wait long until somebody throws around the word globalization and it s a pretty good word but i don t really like it as a description of the world we live in because 1 it implies an exclusively economic term we do have a global economy and 2 it ignores the changes that are going on in our communities i prefer the word interdependence because interdependence includes economic cultural and information technology and all the other things that draw us closer and closer together and it also implies increased diversity within communities and states and nations as well as across national lines i also like interdependence because it s neither good nor bad necessarily interdependence just means we can t escape each other so we probably ought not to ignore each other that s all it means the middle east is the best example in the seven years i was president when we worked toward peace we had positive interdependence then we had this intafada and all of a sudden in four years four times as many israelis were killed by terrorists as were killed in the eight years i was president and four times that many palestinians were killed but they were no less interdependent when they were fighting than they were when they were working for peace their interdependence was the same it just went from positive to negative if you look at 9 11 it s a classic example of interdependence horrible negative interdependence overlaying a positive story underneath what do i mean by that you had these terrorists from the middle east turn jet airplanes into big chemical weapons that s what they were they took airplanes that were full of jet fuel and turned them into chemical weapons and brought down the world trade center attacked the pentagon and meant to attack another target before brave people brought that plane down here in your state but how did those terrorists get to do that they used the forces of interdependence that we like they used open borders easy immigration easy access to information and technology to build these chemical weapons out of jet airplanes and the people they killed three thousand people from 70 countries including over 200 other muslims who came to america out of a sense of positive interdependence because they believed this was a place where dreams were built so obviously it seems to me when we think about what do you want to do with lancaster pennsylvania america or the world if you believe we re interdependent you can t escape any of those communities so you have to try to build up the forces of positive interdependence and reduce the negative ones to move from simple interdependence which is good and bad and unstable to a more integrated community atmosphere what makes a community now don t worry i m not talking about world government and giving up our sovereignty but what makes a sense of community shared responsibilities first shared benefits second rooted third in a shared sense of values is there any way we can have a shared sense of values in a multi religious multi racial multi ethnic environment i think there are if the values are simple and incontestable enough everyone counts deserves a chance has a responsible role to play competition is good but cooperation is more important our differences matter they make life more interesting and aid the search for truth but our common humanity matters more that s what i think our simple set of values should be now the reason i m saying all this is not necessarily because i think you ought to agree with me i hope you do but that s not the most important thing the most important thing i have to say to you tonight is you should think about this you should say how is lancaster different than it was 20 or 30 years ago how is pennsylvania different how is america different how is the world different how can i describe it in a way that makes sense to me and how can i understand it in a way that enables me to evaluate all this huge mass of information and charges and counter charges and proposals and counter proposals on every issue under the sun that are flying at me all the time you don t have to agree with my formulation but you need to know that s how i do it and i m a citizen now not an office holder i believe we live in an interdependent world i love my country and i want it to be better and strong and last forever and i want its values to spread across the world and i believe the only way to do that is to build up the forces of positive interdependence reduce the negative ones and i think the only way to do that is to work for a world with shared responsibilities most important then shared benefits and acknowledged shared values you cannot ask me about a public issue that i will not see through that prism i will sit here and ask myself which position is most likely to advance a world and a nation in which responsibilities and benefits are shared and those values i mentioned are reflected so it helps me it simplifies my life it enables me to negotiate this mountain of information that we are all confronted with all the time and if you don t like my paradigm then figure out what yours is but if you don t have one life must be pretty confusing because every day you get up and there s something else in the newspaper on some other subject and how are you supposed to keep up with it all and yet we depend in every democracy on well informed citizens making sound judgments and over more than 200 years now the american people have been right more than half the time on the big issues otherwise we wouldn t still be here as the longest lasting democracy in human history and our founders had a framework limited government but powerful enough to do the job what was the job to change over time to do whatever was necessary to make a more perfect union we were talking at the dinner table tonight and i said those guys that started us off were smart they were religious enough to know we could never make a perfect country and they were progressive enough to believe we could always be better than we are so instead of saying our job is to form a perfect union or saying oh what the heck we can t do anything they said no we can always be a more perfect union we can be better tomorrow than we are today so they had a framework that s the way they looked at the world but they said we can t ever do that if we give anybody too much power so that s what you need to do and i think that s the most important thing now how would we go about building a world where we shared responsibilities and benefits more very briefly i want to say this one security is important we have to fight terror in all the ways it s fought and we have to fight the spread of weapons of mass destruction we have to also be for things i liked the president s statement that we ought to be for freedom and democracy because that s been the mission of american from the beginning and since the end of world war ii we ve been the world s beacon for it but i think it s important that we also fess up that we can t go to war with everybody so we need to look like it s not fair to call him a hypocrite because we do business with people who sometimes do things we think conflict with freedom and democracy we have to explain what that means but if you only espoused ideals that you could perfectly live by we d live pretty drab lives wouldn t we all of us have aspirations and hopes and dreams that we can t completely live out in the present moment so we do need that but security is not enough we can t relate to the rest of the world only through a negative prism and only through telling them to do things why because if you live in a world where you can t kill jail or occupy all your enemies security will never be enough you ve got to make a world where you ve got more friends and fewer enemies where you make partners that s where partnership comes in now i say that as someone who believes in the men and women in american military whether you were for the iraq war or not you ought to want it to work now fifty eight percent of those people showed up to vote that s better than we were we didn t have 58 of our people vote we were bragging on ourselves in 2004 and 58 of them had that little purple ink on their hands took their lives in their hands so we ought to want it to work and we ought to try to make it work but we also have to recognize that it has caused enormous strain on our military i am quite sure there are people in this room who they or their family members have been severely strained by extended tours from national guards extended tours from reserves the inordinate pressures from the career military people that were over there so we can t go to war with everybody we get mad at we ve got to have some people some strategy to make more friends and fewer adversaries then let me just give you an example coming out of the tsunami after former president bush and i went to tour the tsunami countries we were invited to the white house to make a report on our tour and our findings and our recommendations for what america should do and when we walked into the oval office i gave the president a poll that i had just gotten that was just conducted in indonesia now indonesia for those of you who don t know is the largest muslim country in the world 200 million people 98 muslim it s not an arab country but it s a muslim country aceh was the hardest hit 140 00 confirmed dead and tens of thousands of bodies still missing the american military was brilliant the only road in the western part of the island was destroyed the military people came and they dropped supplies and basically marine and naval personnel and the pictures were everywhere and everybody knew that we did it for no reason other than that we wanted to help everybody knew there was no politics in it no motive nothing those people were dying they were hurting and we were trying to help so you know what this poll said the favorable opinion of america before the tsunami was 36 afterward 60 the favorable opinion of osama bin laden in indonesia before the tsunami was 58 afterward 28 indonesia became the first muslim country where a plurality of the people by 40 to 36 answered yes to this question do you think america should lead the world s war against terror why not because of anything you did against terror because of the tsunami because they saw all these u s marines and u s naval personnel saving people s lives and helping people out of the mud and lifting people out from under the rubble of their busted houses and comforting these children whose parents had been killed and they did it because it was the right thing to do so i ll tell you there is more than one way to manifest american power they love the american military because of the tsunami now i m not being nave if president bush wanted to double the forces we ve got in afghanistan chasing bin laden i d support it tomorrow i m just telling you that s not the only way to make friends and you can t spend all your time trying to keep bad things from happening you have got to spend some time trying to make good things happen in this life we cannot kill jail or occupy all of our adversaries so that s first point i want to make the second point i want to make is doing that is not free but it s cheaper than going to war there are ample opportunities why because half the world s people live on less than 2 00 a day a billion people live on less than 1 00 a day a billion people go to bed hungry tonight after we had this good meal a billion and a quarter people or one fourth of the world s population never get a clean glass of water of all the people who will die on earth this year of everything the tsunamis the battles everything one in four will perish from aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them will be little kids that never got a clean glass of water now we presently spend one sixth of 1 of our income on foreign assistance it used to be we thought all that money was wasted that s not true we know how to do this now in my last year as president we forgave the debts of the world s poorest nations but only if they put the money into economic development or health care or education in uganda they doubled primary school enrollment and cut class size and increased learning in bolivia they built a whole rural healthcare network and saved countless lives i could give you example after example after example we know how to do that that s like that tsunami every time we do something like that it helps so when president bush wants to spend more money on aids and wants to spend more money to meet the millennium development goals that s good and that s part of our security too because every time we help somebody in a smart way instead of just foolishly throw money trying to buy friends but we do things that actually educate children that we increase health care we make a world with more partners and fewer enemies the third point i d like to make and this is a place where i ve been at odds with the administration i think that we should cooperate with others in an organized way as much as po dem wjclinton4 5 98 bill_clinton thank you very much i want to thank john sweeney for those kind words and for his brilliant leadership in giving new life and energy and direction to the american labor movement thank you doug dougherty and all the other labor leaders who are here i thank ron and jan for opening their home to us and letting us relive the movie fantasies of the last 60 years here in this great old house i d also like to say a special word of appreciation to my longtime friend john garamendi for his distinguished leadership as deputy secretary of the interior and he s now gone to work with ron and i wish him well in private life he also got a daughter married off last weekend he assures me it is survivable but i m not so certain i thank the members of congress who are here and lt governor davis thank you for coming i would like to just say a few words to all of you who have come here to this fundraiser first of all you wouldn t be here if you didn t believe what i think is an elemental truth of the modern economy which is that we can only have a good economy and a good society if we find ways to widen the circle of opportunity and to reward people for their labors and insofar as we reward people for doing the right things then those who are especially well positioned will do even better john mentioned the therma plant up in silicon valley i visited most people think that most of the places that are doing well up there are computer companies or biotech companies but someone has to build all those buildings that they work in and someone has to supply them with what they need and that plant as john said is a family owned business with 1 600 workers most of whom are sheet metal workers a few of whom are in the plumbers union but they re all unionized and yet they have all the things that the enemies of organized labor always say you never see they have a flexible workplace they have incredible partnerships with their owners and the people who run that plant are very very proud with their relationship with the union and with the people on the floor and they have a modern workplace in which no one wants to leave because they think they re getting their fair share of the labor and because they believe their labor is respected we have tried to do that i was very disturbed when i became president that our country had had 20 years of increasing inequality among working people and there were many reasons for it some of them unavoidable because we were changing the nature of the american economy and whenever you change the nature of an economy it happens about once every 50 or 60 years the people that are really in the best positions do that it happened when we went from being agricultural to an industrial economy but a lot of it was because our people weren t well equipped and weren t being treated fairly and that people didn t understand that we had to make extra effort so i want to thank the labor movement and john sweeney and all the other labor leaders for the things they ve supported that their own members were not the primary beneficiaries of most of the people that got the benefit of the family and medical leave act were working people who did not have the benefit of union representation most of the people who got the benefit of the increase in the minimum wage directly or indirectly most if not all were union people were not union workers most of the people who get the benefit of the earned income tax credit which is now worth 1 000 a year to a family of four with an income of under 30 000 and it s lifted 2 2 million children out of poverty were working families that did not belong to unions and so i thank you for being the voice all of you not only for your members but for those who are not members of organized labor now when you look ahead to the future it seems to me one of the great challenges still facing us is how every single person in our country and ultimately in other parts of the world can feel that there is some way they can live out their dreams raise a family live a life that makes sense in this new world we re living in and it s funny because one of the things that has clearly happened with more and more people on the internet more and more kids on the internet at school more and more people being able to individually access information is that there really is a new upsurge in the world today in people s desire to have more individual control over their destiny we re in the process now of reviewing the social security system for example and there s this huge age differential young people all say well we should have not all but a lot of young people say we should have individual accounts and we ll decide how to invest it older people remember that the stock market has not always gone from 3000 to 9 000 in any five year period and so they say well you better have a little bit of protection here for what happens on the days when it s not so good this initiative on the california ballot can be seen against that background the people of california have been very good to me and my family and my administration and i have watched with interest as the state has emerged from its economic recession starting in 1993 and coming forward californians in the most popular state in the country and a state where it s fairly easy to get an initiative on the ballot have been asked to come to grips with issues that are being debated now i think sometimes these ballot initiatives have dealt with real problems but at least from my point of view with the wrong solution for example if you look at this ballot initiative on bilingual education i think there is a significant problem in the i think the way we are handling immigrant children integrating them into our education system integrating them into the mainstream of american life is inadequate i don t think it s working as well as it should but i think the proposal on the ballot will make it worse not better that my only but at least they re debating a real issue and i m hopeful on that issue that the voters of california will be able to think it through and i applaud the speaker of the house here who tried to get an alternative measure through to deal with it in what i believe is a much more positive way this issue dealing with labor unions and the relationship with labor unions to their members i think it s an entirely different one this is an issue in my view which seeks to take a legitimate principle which is that people should not have their money spent against their will and turn it into a ballot initiative that will simply put organizations that represent working people at a significant competitive disadvantage to other organizations in the political marketplace so this is something that sounds good but isn t not something that s dealing with a real problem there is no real problem here and that s what you have to get out to the people of california john and i on the way in he pointed out that again that it is labor union members who do not wish their dues money others who do not wish their voluntary check off money to be spent on political purposes can inform their unions of that and get back a portion of their money i think you said gerry mcentee said 33 000 afscme members got back a portion of their money last year this is not a problem this is being put forth as a problem this is not a problem that exists no one is making labor union members contribute to political campaigns now what this amendment seeks to do is to basically muffle the ability of the collective voices of working people to be heard by putting on them a far far greater administrative burden than corporations face when they spend their own money they don t have to get their shareholders permission every year or other organizations like the chamber of commerce the nfib any other membership organization that spends money either to support candidates or to affect ballot initiatives or other political issues why should labor unions be signaled out when they already give their members a better voice at opting out of the system than a lot of other organizations do why should we have a system where we say let me tell you i ve been in washington now for five years we haven t always agreed on everything john sweeney and i don t agree on every issue but i ll tell you something if it were up to them every american would have health care tonight every child would go to bed tonight not worrying whether or not there would be a doctor there if the baby woke up at 3 00 o clock in the morning we have family and medical leave we have this very different tax system for low income working families we have all these things in our balanced budget agreement we ve got the biggest increase in child health care in 35 years going to provide 5 million children with health insurance we have virtually opened the doors of college to every american in no small measure because american labor was working up there in the congress to try to pass this this is a better country because of them i don t know what the 30 second message is because i m not part of the ad team out here but i can tell you this i believe if the people of california understood clearly that every member of every union in america has a right at any time to say i do not want my money spent my dues money spent to lobby on ballot initiatives or spent for political purposes that that is a far more expensive thing that applies to other organizations as a practical matter and that this is just an attempt to put unions at a disadvantage to other organized groups in the political marketplace and thereby to diminish the voice of working men and women and keep in mind and for people who are not members of unions for whom they speak who would otherwise have no voice who would otherwise have no voice that family and medical leave thing we had 170 other countries that had family and medical leave for goodness sakes and we still have people in the united states congress saying oh if you do this it will cost america jobs and that s what this is about and i honestly believe if you can just tell the people of california the facts that no man or woman in any labor union anywhere in california or in the country is being ripped off that they can reallocate their money when they want to they can say i do not want this to happen and then they understood that this ballot initiative does not apply to business organizations it does not apply to other organizations it does not apply to corporations i think the innate sense of fairness of the people out here will prevail and all of you who are contributing here at this breakfast today are giving the people who are running this campaign a chance to do that but i really believe that it s important that the message get out there that is not like a lot of these other ballot initiatives are dealing with real legitimate problems and then you re just arguing over whether this is the right solution to a real problem this is not a real problem this is an attempt to create the impression that individual members of unions are being put upon when they aren t and it s being done to alter the balance of power in the political debate and so i hope very much you will prevail and i hope my being here helps you a little bit and i hope between now and the time it s voted on enough people will understand the facts this is why we re if they really know the facts i think you ll win good luck and thank you dem wjclinton4 6 96 bill_clinton thank you very much president shapiro members of the faculty alumni to parents and friends of this graduating class especially to the graduates of the class of 1996 let me thank you co presidents george whitesides and susan suh who came to say hello to me this morning and compliment your valedictory address by bryan duff and the latin address by charles stowell i actually took four years of latin in high school and even without being prompted i knew i was supposed to laugh when he was digging me about going to yale i want to also thank princeton for honoring the high school teachers and the faculty members here for teaching for today we celebrate the learning of the graduates and we should be honoring the teachers who made their learning possible i thank you for that it s a great honor to be here in celebrating princeton s 250 years i understand that presidents are only invited to speak here once every 50 years president truman and president cleveland you ve got to say one thing for all the troubles the democrats have had in the 20th century we ve had pretty good timing when it comes to princeton over the last 100 years i want to thank president shapiro for his distinguished service to higher education in our country i thank princeton for its long and noble service to our nation i also am deeply indebted to princeton for the contributions it has made to our administration and my presidency my press secretary mike mccurry sat in these seats in 1976 i m sure that princeton had something to do with the fact that he not only thinks but talks so fast the chair of our national economic council laura tyson was a princeton professor then and mike mccurry s thesis advisor and you got back from me professor alan blinder who was a distinguished member of the council of economic advisors and the vice chairman of the federal reserve and a brilliant contributor to our efforts to improve the economy i want to thank alan blinder here among his colleagues and these students for what he has done i thank tony lake and bruce reed and john hilley and peter bass all members of our staff who graduated from princeton two princeton graduates who are no longer living vic raiser and his son monty were great friends of mine vic s wife molly is here our protocol chief and if it hadn t been for him i might not be here today and i want to recognize their contributions to princeton and princeton s gifts to them i also want to say that one of my youngest staff members is a classmate here jon orszag and when the ceremony is over i d like to have you back at work please i would like to talk to the senior class today about not only the importance of your education but the importance of everyone else s education to your future at every pivotal moment in american history princeton its leadership its students have played a crucial role many of our founding fathers were among your first sons a president of princeton was the only university president to sign the declaration of independence this hall was occupied by the british since 1776 liberated by washington s army in 1777 and as the president said sanctified forever to american history by the deliberations of the continental congress in 1783 in 1896 the last time there was a class of 96 when princeton celebrated its 150th anniversary and as has been said grover cleveland was president professor woodrow wilson gave his very famous speech princeton in the nation s service i read that speech before i came here today and i d like to read just a brief quote from it today we must stand as those who would count their force for the future those who made princeton are dead those who shall keep it and better it still live they are even ourselves what he said about princeton 100 years ago applied then to america and applies to america even more today at the time of that speech 100 years ago america was living as it is living today through a period of enormous change the industrial age brought incredible new opportunities and great new challenges to our people princeton through wilson and his contemporaries was at the center of efforts to master these powerful forces of change in a way that would enable all americans to benefit from them and protect our time honored values less than three years after he left this campus woodrow wilson became president of the united states he followed theodore roosevelt as the leader of america s response to that time of change we now know it as the progressive era today on the edge of a new century all of you our class of 96 are living through another time of great change standing on the threshold of a new progressive era powerful forces are changing forever our jobs our neighborhoods the institutions which shape our lives for many americans this is a time of enormous opportunity but for others it s a time of profound insecurity they wonder whether their old skills and their enduring values will be enough to keep up with the challenges of this new age in 1996 like 1896 we really do stand at the dawn of a profoundly new era i have called it the age of possibility because of the revolution in information and technology and market capitalism sweeping the globe a world no longer divided by the cold war just consider this there s more computer power in a ford taurus every one of you can buy and drive to the supermarket than there was in apollo 11 when neil armstrong took it to the moon nobody who wasn t a high energy physicist had even heard of the world wide web when i became president and now even my cat socks has his own page by the time a child born today is old enough to read over 100 million people will be on the internet this age of possibility means that more americans than ever before will be able to live out their dreams indeed for all of you in the class of 96 this age of possibility is actually an age of high probability in large measure because of the excellent education you celebrate today but we know that not all americans see the future that way we know that about half of our people in this increasingly global economy are working harder and harder without making any more money that about half of the people who lose their jobs today don t ever find another job doing as well as they were doing in their previous one we know that therefore our mission today must be to ensure that all of our people have the opportunity to live out their dreams in a nation that remains the world s strongest force for peace and freedom for prosperity for our commitment that we can respect our diversity and still find unity this is about more than money opportunity is what defines this country for 220 years the idea of opportunity for all and the freedom to seize it have literally been the defining elements of america they were always ideals never perfectly realized but always our history has been a steady march of striving to live up to them having these ideals achievable imaginable for all is an important part of maintaining our sense of democracy and our ability to forge an american community with such disparate elements of race and religion and ethnicity across so many borders that could so easily divide this country and so i say to you creating opportunity for all the opportunity that everyone has that many of you are now exercising dreaming about your future that is what you must do in order to make sure that this age of possibility is really that for all americans when i took office i was concerned about the uncertain steps our country was taking for that future we d let our deficit get out of hand unemployment had exploded job growth was the slowest since the great depression the country seemed to be coming apart when we needed desperately to be coming together i wanted to chart a new course rooted first in growth and opportunity first to put our economic house in order so that our businesses could prosper and create jobs second to tap the full potential of the new global economy third to invest in our people so that they would have the capacity to meet the demands of this new age and to improve their own lives this strategy is in place and it is working the deficit is half of what it was the government is now the smallest it s been in 30 years as a percentage of the federal work force the federal government is the smallest it s been since 1933 before the beginning of the new deal we signed over 200 trade agreements our exports are at an all time high fifteen million of our hardest pressed people have gotten tax cuts most of the small businesses have as well we ve invested in research and defense transformations we ve invested in new technologies and we ve invested in environmental protection and sustainable development and i will say parenthetically the great challenge of your age will be to prove that we can bring prosperity and opportunity to people all across the globe without destroying the environment which is the precondition of our successful existence and all of you will have to meet that challenge and i challenge you to do it our economy while most of the rest of the world was in recession has produced 8 5 million new jobs the lowest combined rates of inflation unemployment and home mortgages in three decades the lowest deficit as a percentage of our income of any advanced economy in the world 3 7 million more american homeowners and record numbers of new small businesses in each of the last three years we are doing well but we must do better if we are going to make the promise of this new age real to all americans that means we have to grow faster how fast can we grow no one knows the exact answer to that but if we look at the long term if we believe in our people and invest in them and their opportunities and our people take responsibility the sky is the limit we must look with the greatest skepticism toward those who promise easy and quick solutions we know that the course that leads to long term growth is in the minds and spirits and ideas and discipline and effort of people like those of you who graduate here today we are on the right course we must accelerate it not veer from it we have to finish the job we started in 1993 and balance the budget not only because we want to free you and your children of the legacy of debt but because that will keep interest rates down increase savings expand companies start new small businesses help more families buy homes and more parents send their children to college we know we have to continue to fight for fair and open trade because we proved now if other markets are as open to our products and services as we are to theirs we ll do just fine we know we have to do more to help all americans deal with the economic changes of the present day in a more positive way by investing in the future and targeting tax cuts to help americans deal with their own problems and build strong families we know we have to continue to invest in the things that a government needs to invest in including research and development and technology and environmental protection we know that since so many people will have to change jobs more often than in the past we have to give families the security to know that if they change jobs they can still carry with them access to health care and pensions and education for a lifetime but finally and most importantly if we really want americans all americans to participate in the future that is now at your fingertips we have got to increase the quality and the level of education not just for the graduates of princeton and georgetown and yale and the state universities of this country but for all the american people it is the only way to achieve that goal the very fact that we have been here or our forebears have for 250 years is testimony to the elemental truth that education has always been important to individual americans and for quite a long time education has been quite important to our whole country fifty years ago when the class of 46 was here coming in after world war ii the g i bill helped to build a great american middle class and a great american economy but today more than ever before in the history of the united states education is the fault line the great continental divide between those who will prosper and those who will not in the new economy if you look at the census data you can see what happens to hard working people who have a high school diploma or who drop out of high school and try to keep up in the job market but fall further and further behind you can also see that if all americans have access to education it is no longer a fault line it is a sturdy bridge that will lead us all together from the old economy to the new now we have to work to give every american that kind of opportunity and we ve worked hard to do it from increasing preschool opportunities to improving the public school years to increasing technology in our schools and this spring the vice president and i helped to kick off a net day in california where schools and businesses and civic leaders hooked up nearly 50 percent of the schools to the internet in a single weekend what i want to see is every schoolroom and every library in every school in america hooked up to the internet by the end of the year 2000 we can do that and i am very proud that i was asked to announce today that a coalition of high tech companies parents teachers and students are launching net day new jersey this week to connect over a thousand schools in new jersey to the internet by this time next year that will make a huge difference in making learning more democratic and information more accessible in this country i thank them for that every single person in new jersey who will be a part of that but we have to face the fact that that is not enough we have to do more just consider the last hundred years at the turn of the century the progressives made it the law of the land for every child to be in school before then there was no such requirement after world war ii we said 10 years are not enough public schools should extend to 12 years and then as i said the g i bill and college loans threw open the doors of college to the sons and daughters of farmers and factory workers and they have powered our economy ever since america knows that higher education is the key to the growth we need to lift our country and today that is more true than ever just listen to these facts over half the new jobs created in the last three years have been managerial and professional jobs the new jobs require higher level skills fifteen years ago the typical worker with a college degree made 38 percent more than a worker with a high school diploma today that figure is 73 percent more two years of college means a 20 percent increase in annual earnings people who finish two years of college earn a quarter of a million dollars more than their high school counterparts over a lifetime now it is clear that america has the best higher education system in the world and that it is a key to a successful future in the 21st century it is also clear that because of cost and other factors not all americans have access to higher education i want to say today that i believe the clear facts of this time make it imperative that our goal must be nothing less than to make the 13th and 14th years of education as universal to all americans as the first 12 are today we have put in place an unprecedented college opportunity strategy student loans can now be given directly to people who need them with a provision to repay them based on the ability of the graduate to pay based on income this is a dramatic change which is making loans more accessible to young people who did not have them before americorps which by next year will have given over 65 000 young people the chance to earn their way through college by serving their country and their communities more pell grants scholarships for deserving students every year now we want to go further we want to expand work study so that a million students can work their way through college by the year 2000 we want to let people use money from their individual retirement accounts to help pay for college we want every honor student in the top five percent of every high school class in america to get a 1 000 scholarship and we also want to do some other things that i believe we must do to make 14 years of education the standard for every american first i have asked congress to pass a 10 000 tax deduction to help families pay for the cost of all education after high school 10 000 a year today i announced one more element to complete our college strategy and make those two years of college as universal as four years of high school a way to do it by giving families a tax credit targeted to achieve that goal and making clear that this opportunity requires responsibility to receive it we should say to americans who want to go to college we will give you a tax credit to pay the cost of tuition at the average community college for your first year or you can apply the same amount to the first year in a four year university or college we will give you the exact same cut for the second year but only if you earn it by getting a b average the first year a tax deduction for families to help them pay for education after high school a tax credit for individuals to guarantee their first year of college and the second year if they earn it this is not just for those individuals this is for america your america will be stronger if all americans have at least two years of higher education think of it we re not only saying to children from very poor families who think they would never be able to go to college people who may not have stellar academic records in high school if you re willing to work hard and take a chance you can at least go to your local community college and we ll pay for the first year if you re in your 20s and you re already working but you can t move ahead on a high school diploma now you can go back to college if you re a mother planning to go to work but you re afraid you don t have the skills to get a good job you can go to college if you re 40 and you re worried that you need more education to support your family now you can go part time you can go at night by all means go to college and we ll pay the tuition i know this will work when i was the governor of my home state we created academic challenge scholarships that helped people who had good grades and who had good behavior to go to college but my proposal today builds mostly on the enormously successful hope scholarships in georgia which guaranteed any student in the state of georgia free college as long as they had a b average this year those scholarships are helping 80 000 students in the state of georgia alone including 70 percent of the freshmen class at the university of georgia in recognition of georgia s leadership i have decided to call this proposal america s hope scholarships and i want to thank the governor of georgia zell miller who developed this idea i also would like to recognize him he came up here with me today and thank him for the contribution that he is now going to make to all of america s future governor miller where are you would you please stand up here he is thank you let me say as all of you know money doesn t grow on trees in washington and we re not financing deficits anymore i m proud to say as a matter of fact for the last two years our budget has been in surplus except for the interest necessary to pay the debt run up in the several years before i became president so we are doing our best to pay for these programs and this program will be paid for by budgeted savings in the balanced budget plan we cannot go back to the days of something for nothing or pretend that in order to invest in education we have to sacrifice fiscal responsibility now this program will do three things it will open the doors of college opportunity to every american regardless of their ability to pay education at the typical community college will now be free and the very few states that have tuition above the amount that we can afford to credit i would challenge those states to close the gap we re going to take care of most of the states the rest of them should help us the last little way second it will offer free tuition and training to every adult willing to work for it nobody now needs to be stuck in a dead end job or in unemployment and finally this plan will work because it will go to people who by definition are willing to work for it it s america s most basic bargain we ll help create opportunity if you ll take responsibility this is the basic bargain that has made us a great nation i know that here at the reunion weekend the class of 46 has celebrated its 50th reunion and i want to just mention them one more time many members of the class of 46 fought in the second world war and they came home and laid down their arms and took up the responsibility of the future with the help of the g i bill that s when our nation did its part simply by giving them the opportunity to make the most of their own lives and in doing that they made america s most golden years the ultimate lesson of the class of 1946 will also apply to the class of 1996 in the 21st century because of the education you have if america does well you will do very well if america is a good country to live in you will be able to build a very good life so i ask you never to be satisfied with an age of probability for only the sons and daughters of princeton you could go your own way in a society that after all seems so often to be coming apart instead of coming together you will of course have the ability to succeed in the global economy even if you have to secede from those americans trapped in the old economy but you should not walk away from our common purpose again i will say this is about far more than economics and money it is about preserving the quality of our democracy the integrity of every person standing as an equal citizen before the law the ability of our country to prove that no matter how diverse we get we can still come together in shared community values to make each of our lives and our family s lives stronger and richer and better this is about more than money the older i get and the more i become aware that i have more yesterdays than tomorrows the more i think that in our final hours which all of us have to face very rarely will we say gosh i wish i d spent more time at the office or if only i d just made a little more money but we will think about the dreams we lived out the wonders we knew when we were most fully alive this is about giving every single solitary soul in this country the chance to be most fully alive and if we do that those of you who have this brilliant education who have been gifted by god with great minds and strong bodies and hearts you will do very well and you will be very happy in 1914 woodrow wilson wrote as president the future is clear and bright with the promise of the best things we are all in the same boat we shall advance and advance together with a new spirit i wish you well and i pray that you will advance and advance together with a new spirit god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton4 6 97 bill_clinton he did a great job didn t he thank you josh for your story thank you judy for your work and the power of your example and thanks to your mom i thank secretary riley i thank all the children who are here with me on the platform who have come to symbolize what this legislation is all about and all the children who are out there in the crowds i thank those of you who have helped me over the years to know and understand what is at stake in this issue more clearly l thank especially the people who deserve the credit for what we re doing today the members of congress the committee chairs senator jeffords and congressman goodling and senator kennedy and senator harkin congressmen clay and martinez and riggs i d like to say a special word of thanks to all the staff people who worked on this but especially to david hoppe senator lott s chief of staff who did such a fine job here thank you david i would like to ask they re all going to come up here later when we sign the bill but there must be 30 members of congress here and this bill as you know received virtual unanimity of support across party lines and regional lines and in addition to the members whose names i mentioned i d like to ask all the members of congress to stand here and be recognized for what they did thank you all i thank all the advocates who are here i dare not start to identify you all but i will say i am glad to see eunice shriver here and thank you for what you have done to help me understand this issue better for 22 years now the idea has been the driving force behind the simple idea we have heard restated and symbolized here today that every american citizen is a person of dignity and worth having a spirit and a soul and having the right to develop his or her full capacities because of idea disabled children all over america have a better chance to reach that capacity and through idea we recognize our common obligation to help them make the most of their god given potential we are here today to reaffirm and to advance that goal education clearly will become even more important to our people in the days ahead that is why i have made it my number one priority as president that is why last month when we announced the bipartisan agreement to balance the budget i was most proud that we could do that and include an historic investment in education the most significant increase in funding for education at the national level in 30 years america reads a massive volunteer effort to help make sure all of our children can read independently by the time they re eight years old millions of families getting a tax cut to help them pay for a college education hundreds of thousands more deserving students getting pell grants tens of thousands of schools across america now will be wired to the internet support for raising academic standards we know that this is the right thing to do for every american but just as we heard from judy for far too long children with disabilities were closed out of those kinds of opportunities trapped in a system without guideposts influenced by stereotypes dominated by assumptions that people like josh couldn t take the courses that he just enumerated in 1975 congress began to change that when the idea was enacted it has meant the right to receive an education that all children deserve it has given children who would never have had it the right to sit in the same classrooms to learn the same skills to dream the same dreams as their fellow americans and for students who sat next to them in those classrooms it has also given them the chance to learn a little something to get rid of the baggage of ignorance and damaging stereotypes and to begin to understand that what we have in common is far more important than what divides us since the passage of the idea 90 percent fewer developmentally disabled children are living in institutions hundreds of thousands of children with disabilities attend public schools and regular classrooms three times as many disabled young people are enrolled in colleges and universities twice as many young americans with disabilities in their twenties are in the american workplace we have to continue to push these trends to do everything we can to encourage our children with disabilities not only to dream of doing great things but to live out their dreams our job is not yet done all of you know that despite this progress young people with disabilities still drop out of high school at twice the rate their peers drop out of high school and into less certain futures for those who stay in school lower expectations and exclusion still are far too common too many parents still find themselves fighting for educational resources and services that are their children s right and their hope for a brighter future today we are taking the next steps to do better the expanded idea reaffirms and strengthens our national commitment to provide a world class education for all our children it ensures that our nation s schools are safe and conducive to learning for children while scrupulously protecting the rights of our disabled students first this bill makes it clear once and for all that children with disabilities have a right to be in the classroom and to be included in school activities like work experience science clubs and field outings it requires states and school districts to help to get disabled children ready to come to school and to accommodate them once they are there with services ranging from pre school therapy to sign language interpreters from mobility instructors to an extended school year second this legislation mandates that with appropriate accommodations children with disabilities learn the same things with the same curricula and the same assessments as all other children we know from every teacher and every principal from every parent and every coach that children rise to expectations when they are set high and children with disabilities are no exception i have asked america to embrace high national academic standards for all our children so far education leaders from california to carolina from michigan to maryland have endorsed this effort i believe very strongly that all children can make progress today i call upon those states to give every child the chance and the expectation of meeting those standards third we know our children s success depends upon the quality of their teachers and the involvement of their parents this legislation will help more regular classroom teachers get the full range of teaching skills they need to teach children with disabilities and it will require regular education teachers to be involved in the development of individual education plans to help disabled children succeed this legislation also gives parents a greater voice in their children s education at long last it will give them something other than what parents have expected from their schools for decades it will give them what we know all parents should be entitled to simply regular report cards on their children s progress high school is a make or break time for all young people but teenagers with disabilities often need more help to succeed as they make the transition from school to work this legislation will require schools to give students that help by developing individual plans that may include independent living skills job training and preparation for higher education and because acquiring these skills may take extra time these plans must begin by the time the students with disabilities reach the age of 14 now that is what the expansion of the legislation these members of congress have passed will achieve in a few moments i will sign it into law as i do i want you to think about what it really accomplishes to the 5 8 million children whose futures are in the balance we are saying we believe in you we believe in your potential and we are going to do everything we can to help you develop it to the millions of families who are depending upon us to help them prepare their children to take their place in the world we are saying we are proud of you for your devotion to your children for your belief in them for your love for them and we are going to do everything we can to help you succeed in preparing them to the teachers and the administrators who make all the difference we are saying we are depending upon you and we are going to do what we can to support you to the american people we are saying that we do not intend to rest until we have conquered the ignorance and prejudice against disabilities that disables us all and to the world we are sending a message the same message that the fdr memorial i was honored to dedicate last month will send in america you are measured by what you are and what you can achieve in america the american dream is alive for all our people in america we recognize that what really counts is the spirit and the soul and the heart and we honor it with this legislation now i would like to ask the children and the people here with me on the platform to join me as i sign the legislation and i would like to ask the members of congress who are here every one of them to come up along with tom hehir the director of the office of special education as we sign into law the individuals with disabilities education act of 1997 dem wjclinton4 6 98 bill_clinton first let me say a special word of thanks to the members of congress who are here and especially those who sponsored the legislation which created this summit i thank governor allen and secretary herman for doing their sort of bipartisan introduction thing i couldn t help wondering what all of us looked like up here to all of you i bet we look like a bunch of school boys in the spelling bee dying for the recess bell but this has actually been better it s been enlightening for me the most encouraging thing of all that was said to me from a purely selfish point of view was when the speaker said if i got to be 50 i could look forward to living another 30 years yesterday i was in cleveland and i went to an elementary school to see some work that some of the americorps volunteers are doing and i was shaking hands with all these little kids and it really is true that they say the darndest things and this young boy was six or seven years old maybe a little bitty boy and he said are you the real president and i said yes and he said and you re not dead yet and i realized i didn t know what he meant first i thought he d been reading the local newspaper here and then i realized that to him the president was george washington or abraham lincoln and he actually thought it was a qualification of the job that you had to be deceased to hold it it was an amazing encounter but now i ve been reminded of the actuarial tables and i m ready to go back to work let me say just a couple of words by way of introduction most of what should be said has already been said and very eloquently and i thank all the previous speakers but i would like to make one point that has been alluded to but i want to try to drive it home we re living in a time where we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the lowest welfare roles in 27 years the lowest crime rates in 25 years the lowest inflation rate in 32 years the smallest government in 35 years and the highest home ownership in history and we re about to have a balanced budget and a surplus for the first time in 29 years this has given this country enormous self confidence we know that when we work together we do get things done we do not know when we ll have a time like this again all of our reading of human history teaches us that nothing ever stays the same forever if we can t deal with this issue now when will we ever deal with it we have an obligation to deal with this challenge and deal with it now and we have an opportunity to do so the balanced budget has freed up capital it s led to an increase in the efforts in fiscal responsibility have led to a significant increase in our national savings rate even as individual savings have gone down and that s been very good to this point because it s enabled us to have lower interest rates higher investment and higher growth and you see here the relationship between savings and investment and growth which has already been alluded to so we ve had an increase in net national savings and a decline in the budget rate and it s led to more growth but the problem is that we have to have more personal savings as well and we have to deal with the problems presented especially by social security and with the fact that there are 50 million americans without private pensions and by the fact that very few people are doing any savings above social security in whatever pension they have or don t have for their own retirement so this is a deeply personal issue that senator lott i thought grippingly discussed and it s also a big issue for our country we have the opportunity and the obligation i believe to deal with a lot of our other long term challenges but a lot of our other long term challenges affect our children and affect children who have a poverty rate much higher almost twice as high as senior citizens unless we deal with this issue unless we nail down social security for the 21st century and stabilize it and unless we deal with the need for more private pension coverage and unless we deal with the need for more savings it will also make no mistake about it it will impair in a direct financial way our ability to fulfill our responsibilities to our children who are living in difficult circumstances and now we can help to chart a different future and eventually it will undermine the self confidence we re now enjoying and it will make people very short sighted again when we could be dealing with these issues that will shape the future 10 20 30 50 years from now so i think it s a very very important thing and the answer to senator lott s question let s begin with social security and i want to thank him for what he said and for what he said to me in private and to both the speaker and senator lott and the other democratic leaders of the congress i believe while i think this savers summit should keep meeting i don t believe we should wait until all of your meetings here in advance to deal with the social security issue the demographics are too clear we now have until 2032 before it starts to run a deficit but that s very misleading with modest changes now we can have huge impacts later if you wait the closer you wait the more dramatic the changes you have to make just to pay the bills so my view is that we should continue to have these forums around the country these bipartisan forums we should continue to solicit advice but our goal ought to be to have the congress take up social security reform as the first order of business early next year and finish in the first half of 1999 saving social security for the 21st century so that we baby boomers do not bankrupt our children in their ability to raise our grandchildren and my commitment is to try to get that done on that timetable in order to do it i have to say i still believe that we have to resist two temptations with the budget surplus the first temptation is to say well it s large and projected to be growing and maybe i ve just been in executive positions too long in public life but those projections don t mean a lot because sometimes they don t pan out now we ve been real lucky for the last five years all our projects have been too conservative and we ve done better than we ve projected but i think the first thing we have to do is to resist the tendency to spend the surplus on spending our tax cuts until we have dealt with the social security issue the second thing i think we have to do is to resist the temptation to take one thing even it seems like a very good thing to a large number of people like the individual accounts and deal with that without knowing how you re going to deal with the whole system so what my view is that we ought to say that we re going to pass comprehensive reform and i don t rule in or out any ideas here on that that s not my purpose and i solicit all of your ideas but i just think it would be a big mistake knowing what the magnitude of the money we re talking about is to miss this chance to say we re going to hold on to this surplus until we pass comprehensive reform then if there is money over and above that after we do this i hope in early 1999 we can have a wonderful old fashioned american political debate about what the best way to proceed is whether we should cut taxes invest the money pay down the debt we can have that debate but i think we should commit ourselves again to the idea that saving social security first is the right policy for america and the right thing for the 21st century and i hope we will do that now let me say in addition to that we have some very specific proposals which i think respond at least in part to the concerns which were raised by earlier speakers on pension matters the vice president mentioned the retirement protection act which passed i believe with an almost unanimous vote in congress in late 1994 to protect the pension benefits of more than 41 million workers but i want to build on that in the balanced budget proposal that i have presented to congress i proposed to offer tax credits to small businesses who start pension plans to help them deal with the problems the costs that you mentioned of starting the programs up and getting the advice it could work i think in the first year about 1 000 for small business which should cover the costs involved in the start up it would encourage employers who don t provide pension plans to give workers the option of contributing to iras through payroll deductions the budget would the budget also cuts the vesting period for 401 k s from five years to three years eventually i ll make a prediction it may not happen in our time here but eventually we will have to figure out how to have people paying investing continuously no matter how frequently they change jobs because if you look at all modern advanced societies you have a higher and higher percentage of people doing part time work you have a higher and higher percentage of people doing more than one job and you have more rapid turnover you have a very high rate of vitality and activity in the business community it means a lot of places being started but the more businesses that start the more you re going to have that also won t go on that won t make it and in the increasingly churning dynamic world we are going to have to focus very carefully on that this is something i believe by the way that i think the saver summit could really work on in the years ahead because of the congressional legislation you know having you meet again in a couple of years and then again in a couple of years after that but for right now we know enough now to know we can preserve financial stability in a responsible way and cut this vesting period from five to three years and i hope very much that we ll be able to do that in the budget discussions with the legislation that passes this year finally there s an easy to administer defined benefit plan that s part of our budget proposal and i hope the congress will pass that also in an effort to encourage more workers to enroll in the 401 k s that are already available to them we have made it clear that employers can automatically enroll workers in the 401 k plan unless the workers themselves choose to opt out now currently most companies require the employees to opt in to the 401 k plans a process that takes some time and some paperwork companies that have cut out the paperwork with automatic enrollment policies that then the employees can opt out of report participation rates of about 90 percent as compared to an overall participation rate of 67 percent for companies offering 401 k s so that s something that you will discuss it sounds like a small thing but it s one thing that can really affect a very large number of people in getting them into the business of saving for their own retirement let me just say lastly we all know we have to do more about personal savings we have worked together in a bipartisan way to expand the availability of iras and the attractiveness of them so that people could invest in iras and then withdraw tax free if the money were used for education purposes or health emergencies or other things of that kind but we need clearly to do more and this is an area where quite apart from the 401 k issues and the pension areas i invite you to give your best ideas to the administration and to the congress because let me just give you an idea of what a difference it could make a person who could afford to save 5 a day for 40 years would have 300 000 by the time he or she retired at just a modest return above and beyond social security and pension young people have a unique opportunity if we can get it into their minds early if you save 2 000 a year beginning at age 25 and you retire at 65 you have 328 000 if you wait until you re 45 to start you only have 78 000 so that really matters and let me finally say that let me end where i began this is a moment of real self confidence for our country people have the emotional space to think about the long term if you just think about your own businesses your own families raising your kids if your child is sick and you re really worried and you re child is 10 years old it s hard to work up the emotional space to think about where your child is going to college and how much it will cost if you think you can t pay the electric bill at your business it s pretty hard to think about whether you re going to buy a piece of expensive equipment next year that will make you productive five years from now events intrude on nations just as they do on people in their individual personal and business lives we have been given a gift and we have to use it this is a wonderful moment but it is a moment of responsibility that we dare not squander some of you probably know this but it makes the point finally that if we have a saving nation it means we have a nation of people who think about the future and who believe in it when benjamin franklin died you know a penny saved is a penny earned he left 2 000 pound sterling to the cities of boston and philadelphia with only one caveat nobody could spend any of it for 200 years by 1990 the 2000 pound sterling had matured into 6 5 million quite conservatively invested by leaving that money to people 200 generations removed from himself and his family i mean 200 years removed benjamin franklin made a simple powerful eloquent statement that he believed in the promise of america he believed in the future of america and he was prepared to contribute to it in a truly astonishing way well we don t have to ask the american people to save for 200 years but we do have to make sure they can think about tomorrow and prepare for it and this is a magic moment to do it thank you very much dem wjclinton4 6 99 bill_clinton first of all i want to say to congressman rahall and his family and congressman wise and mr o neill congressman patrick kennedy was a few moments ago was here with us downstairs i am very honored to be here and glad to have a chance to come here for nick rahall you know he was talking all about the burdens of being 50 i thought it was burdensome too until i carefully considered the alternative and i have enjoyed my advancing years ever since i want to say too a special word of thanks to the people who are here from west virginia a state that has been uncommonly good and generous to me and to vice president gore in two elections and in the times in between a state that has struggled with a lot of economic problems from coal to steel that we have been working hard to address and will continue to do so and i want to thank all of you for being here for nick we both ran for congress when we were 27 the only difference is i got beat and he got elected i ve often wondered what would have happened in my life if i had been elected to congress when i was 27 the one thing i did miss was the chance to serve with tip o neill a man i admire very much and i m very glad that tom is here today there are many things that i appreciate about nick rahall i appreciate the work he s done in transportation i appreciate the fact that he and bob both have stood by me in pursuing an economic strategy that has really brought our country back and given us the biggest surplus in history and given us a chance not only to pay down our debt but to save social security and medicare for the baby boom generation in a way that does not require any tax increases whatever and can in fact enable us to strengthen our economy and i m very grateful for that i m very grateful that he has supported the efforts that i have tried to make to promote peace around the world and like nick and bob i hope that the announcement of the last few hours the last day in kosovo portends a genuine agreement that will be honestly implemented and that will lead to real reversal of the ethnic cleansing there that the refugees will be able to go home in security and self government that the international force will be able to go in that the serb forces will be withdrawn i ask you to be both thankful and cautious i have dealt with the serbian leader now for over six years there have been many agreements and the only one that was kept was the one in bosnia where we had a force on the ground and a specific agreement it has a lot in common with this and we re hopeful but we need to see real action here i also want to thank nick for his work for peace in the middle east and for sensitive and fair treatment for arab americans and in american foreign policy for the legitimate interests of all the people of the middle east he has done a very very good job and i m very proud of him for that i think it s interesting because i come from a state that is demographically very much like west virginia in the 1980 census arkansas and west virginia had the highest percentages of people living in their state who were born there of any two states in america and i believe the highest percentage of people who identified themselves as baptists and we were an awful lot alike we gave when president carter ran for president in 1976 next to his home state of georgia arkansas and west virginia gave him the second and third highest percentages of the vote and west virginia has been in the top five states for me in both elections they re hardworking people that have overcome great difficulties they re not as compared with many other states particularly diverse and i think it s a real tribute to nick rahall that he has spent a lot of time and that his constituents have supported him in spending time trying to make us sensitive to people who come from different racial and ethnic and religious backgrounds because the united states of all the nations in the world is perhaps the most blessed going in to the 21st century because we live in a global economy and a global society and because we are so diverse but if you look around the world today whether it s in the middle east or in the balkans in kosovo and before that in bosnia it is truly amazing that as we contemplate the miracles of the 21st century the spread of technology the breathtaking advances in chemistry and in biology the decoding of the human gene and the dramatic potential for increasing both the length and quality of life that we are bedeviled today by the oldest the oldest demon of human society people s vulnerability to fear those who are different from them who aren t part of their tribe their crowd and fear can turn quickly to hatred hatred can turn quickly to dehumanization dehumanization can turn quickly to justifying killing people who are different from us and we have an obligation to lead the world away from that that s what we ve been trying to do in kosovo but i would also say we have an obligation if we want to do good things around the world to be as good as we can be here at home this morning hillary and i appeared on good morning america with about 40 young people to talk about violence against children in our society what can be done in the aftermath of the terrible events at littleton i will say this i have never in my public life seen as much openness by so many people across party and other lines to try to do something that really will make a difference to give our children a safer future so in the time i have left as president i assure you i will be devoting an enormous amount of effort to that worthy cause again the last point i would like to make is this there is a great deal still to be done in this country that we should do before before the new millennium and before i leave office in 2001 a great deal that i have done and would like to do would be totally impossible without members of congress who share our values and our vision and our ideas for the future and that s another reason i m proud to be here the final thing i want you to know is this maybe most of you know this last year in 1998 we knew we had a chance to make an historic election and it had been since 1822 since 1822 that the party of the president in office that his party had picked up seats in the house of representatives in the second term of the presidency since the civil war even counting first terms it s only happened twice before under theodore and franklin roosevelt we were being outspent last time by 100 million nick rahall stepped forward and gave a substantial contribution from his campaign account to other members and other candidates who were out there running that had a pivotal impact on what is a truly historical election that we had in 1998 because we not only had good candidates and we not only were running on saving social security and the patients bill of rights and building modern schools and keeping our economy going we had to have some way of getting that message out it s unprecedented for members on our side to do that and he did it and i will never forget that as long as i live so for all those reasons i m honored to be here with him and with the next governor of west virginia thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton4 7 00 bill_clinton let me say if seaman rosa norales nunez gets much more practice she can start running for office in her new country someday wasn t she terrific let s give her another hand i thought she was great i would like to also welcome the other new citizens who we swore in a few moments ago and i ask you to give them a hand too they come from all over the world hillary and chelsea and i are honored to be here with all of you secretary and mrs cohen attorney general reno secretary slater ambassador and mrs holbrooke secretary danzig to the members of the congress who are here i know that senator levin and senator dodd and former senator john glenn are back there behind me and i saw senator lautenberg out in the audience and there are a lot of other members of congress here i d like to ask all the members of congress to stand and be recognized i saw a half a dozen representative lowey miller thank you thank you all for being here i d also like to recognize the currently reigning miss america heather french who has made the welfare of our veterans her great cause this year heather stand up and be recognized thank you for being here and i would like to recognize also because president kennedy started this event i would like to thank caroline kennedy schlossberg and ed schlossberg and their three wonderful children for being here today and welcome to all of you and i would like to thank chairman robertson and his wife you know he told me when he got up here and opened this that s the first public speech he had ever made i think he did a pretty good job don t you and besides that he produced all these ships so give him a hand thank you i want to thank all the men and women in uniform who are here and all of those who have come here from other nations to be a part of the international naval review and operation sail i want to thank captain mike miller the officers and the crew of the jfk especially i know they had to turn to to make this day possible for all of you who are not familiar with the exploits of the uss john f kennedy let me tell you that from the atlantic to the red sea to the mediterranean to the arabian gulf this great ship has more than met its mission it has proved truly worthy of its heroic and noble name let me also say today that there is another heroic name we honor today i am especially pleased to announce that the united states navy will designate its newest class of ship the zumwalt class in honor of admiral elmo bud zumwalt and i would like to ask his wife rosa and his son and other family members to stand today and be recognized let s give them a big hand thank you god bless you admiral zumwalt passed away just two days into this new century he was my mentor my friend and a magnificent role model he was a friend and a passionate advocate for every sailor in his beloved navy his deeply profoundly moral leadership will shape the character and conscience of our navy for generations to come and all america salutes him today he deserves to have a class of ships named after him when he passed away one of the naval aides who works for me in the white house who happens to be a filipino american and has been in the united states navy for 30 years looked at me with tears in his eyes and he said admiral zumwalt was our admiral he cared about all of us and today we honor him in this way i just want to say one or two other things about this important day for the navy and for all americans on this day which we commemorate because of what happened at independence hall with the declaration of independence the greatest hero of our revolution was not in philadelphia but instead was here on manhattan island preparing his outnumbered army for battle staring out over the very waters where we sit today general george washington saw the british warships landing at staten island the vanguard of the largest expeditionary force ever launched by the british empire as the armies eyed each other across this channel the declaration of independence arrived from philadelphia george washington ordered it to be read aloud to the troops it was at the tip of manhattan island just to our north where the troops first heard they were actually citizens of a new nation where they first heard the words we hold these truths to be self evident and where they first pledged their lives their fortunes their sacred honor the patriots of 1776 took these colonies and made out of them a country they took a vision of liberty and made it into the law of this land to a world that knew rule only by kings and lords america s creed confounded imagination in the words of one british loyalist if the people be the governors who shall be the governed america s answer was the governors and the governed must be one and the same more than two centuries later for the first time in all of history more than half of the people of this globe live under governments of their own choosing an astonishing long way we have come since this day in 1776 just behind me on ellis island the ancestors of more than 100 million united states citizens took their first steps on america s soil they re the forebears of the immigrants who took the oath of citizenship today pulled by the vision of liberty and opportunity often pushed by forces of intolerance and hopelessness they came and brought with them their skills their knowledge and their hearts for more than a century those who came through this gateway have passed a statue as large as the ideal for which it stands she was beautiful with the early morning light said one young woman fleeing tyranny from eastern europe the whole boat bent toward her because everybody went out everybody was in the same spot and everybody was crying one greek immigrant remembers looking up at the statue of liberty and asking her please give me the chance to become someone in america lady liberty like those whom she welcomed was also an immigrant a gift from france a nation which did so much to help to give us birth perhaps more than any other nation in all history we have drawn our strength and spirit from people from other lands bearing different memories bringing diverse traditions immigrants have enriched our culture enhanced our economy broadened our vision of the world and that is why on this 4th of july standing in the shadow of lady liberty we must resolve never to close the golden door behind us and always not only to welcome people to our borders but to welcome people into our hearts to go beyond the things which divide us race and culture and religion to understand that whether our ancestors came here on immigrant ships or slave ships whether they flew across the pacific or once walked across the bering strait a very long time ago anyone who accepts the rights and responsibilities of citizenship is our fellow citizen equal in the eyes of god entitled to be treated equally and with dignity by all of us that must be our resolution on this and every independence day in 1827 51 years after the declaration of independence was signed the sole surviving signer of the declaration was charles carroll of maryland he wrote the following i recommend to the future generation the principles of the declaration as the best earthly inheritance their ancestors could bequeath all of us are created equal all are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights among them life liberty and the pursuit of happiness you may have noted that last week it was my great honor to announce on behalf of our common endeavors with our british and japanese and other counterparts that the first rough map of the human genome has been decoded we now know that there will be an explosion of scientific discoveries which may give the young children in this audience a life expectancy of 100 years but one thing we have already learned that proved the wisdom of the founders is that genetically without regard to race we are 99 9 percent the same and that the genetic differences of individuals within each racial and ethnic group are greater than the genetic differences of one group to another it is important that we remember that that after all the founding fathers were pretty smart and that science has confirmed what they said so long ago the really difficult thing is to confirm what they said in our everyday lives remember this fine young woman who introduced me today and resolve to make the creed of our declaration the reality in all of our lives thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton4 7 96a bill_clinton thank you very much first of all admiral newson thank you for welcoming us and thank you for the fine work that you and your colleagues do here every day to make our country stronger in so many ways congressman hoyer thank you for your leadership thank you for being with us today on independence day and for what you do every day for this district and for our nation i d like to say a special word of thanks to craig koppe who saved both of our lives out there when the eagle got a little nervous she wanted to be free more even more than we wanted to free her i think and to jaime clark and to all those here who work to conserve our nation s treasures we have federal employees here we have some state employees here from maryland who are devoting their careers to preserving our environment our natural resources and our precious species and i d like to ask all the rest of us on this independence day to thank them for what they do for america thank you very very much i want to thank all the people who are here from the department of the interior i see deputy secretary garamendi and there are many others here from the interior department we ve seeded this crowd today and i want to say a special word of thanks to bruce babbitt he has fought in many ways to try to make sure that america would enhance the quality of its environment and enhance the diversity and strength of its natural resources as we continue to grow the economy and move into the 21st century i said when i sought this position in 1992 that i did not believe that we could march into the 21st century and leave our children and grandchildren the legacy they deserve unless we found a way to grow the america economy and preserve the environment enhance our natural resources bruce babbitt has been the point person in that endeavor he has certainly endured more personal attacks for standing up for america s environment and for our natural resources than any other member of this administration he has fought a long and sometimes lonely battle but in the last year we have seen the american people clearly adopting the position we have fought for all along they know that america s future depends upon the preservation of our natural resources and that will be bruce babbitt s enduring legacy i am very grateful to him and i know all americans are i want to thank the state officials from maryland who are here including maryland state treasurer richard dixon and sen mike miller the president of the maryland senate and other senators and delegates who are here and people from st mary s county the county commissioners who are here i thank all of them for coming i thank john griffin the secretary of the maryland department of natural resources and i d like to ask since jaime recognized him i d like to ask molly beattie s aunt and uncle to please be recognized herb and michelle morris would you all stand up and be recognized thank you so much for being here today thank you i want to say a few words about independence day and american eagles but before i do i d like to take just a moment on our independence day to celebrate and applaud the freedom and independence exercised yesterday in another part of the world as people who cherish the right to choose our leaders and have a say in our nation s destiny we should take just a moment on our independence day and reflect on what happened in russia yesterday when i was a boy growing up it would have been unthinkable that in just a few decades the soviet empire would be no more the soviet union would be a collection of independent countries and the great russia would be a free country with free elections millions and millions of russians well over 60 percent of the eligible voters returned to the polls yesterday and cast a free and open vote for russia s democratic future this is an historic achievement the russian people have turned their back on tyranny they are turning the corner toward freedom they and their leaders have cleared another important hurdle in building a new and enduring democracy while the final results have not yet been announced it is clear that a majority a substantial majority of the russian people voted for president yeltsin and for the path of reform i want to congratulate president yeltsin on his re election has a nice ring to it i want to congratulate the russian people most of all on this milestone they have been consistent in being good citizens turning out in these elections and showing that they are fully capable of exercising the powers of democracy so as we celebrate our freedom and independence we applaud them for their freedom and independence as well that bodes very good news for the future of the entire world as we move together into a new century i think it is altogether appropriate for us to begin the celebration of our democracy on the 4th of july with the celebration of the rebirth of our national symbol after our nation was founded two centuries and two decades ago the founders chose the bald eagle to represent all that america stands for the american president has always carried that symbol everywhere as i have here today since secretary babbitt mentioned it and since benjamin franklin had such a good sense of humor i m sure he would be amused to know that many people identify those of us in public life with turkeys as often as eagles i think on our first independence day listen to this on our first independence day as many as a quarter million bald eagles soared over what is now the continental united states those eagles seemed as enduring as the strength the unity the justice and the freedom upon which our nation was founded and so it didn t seem to matter much in the beginning and for a long time that their treetop habitat was destroyed and that they were shot down from the sky but thomas jefferson warned americans about our environment he wrote for if one link in nature s chain might be lost another might be lost until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal the bald eagle the symbol of jefferson s words in our declaration of independence became a symbol of his warning as well they became the victims of vanishing forests and poisonous pesticides and 25 years ago there remained only 400 pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48 states our noble bird was dying off that made our country take a good look at itself we saw our dirty lakes and streams and we began to clean them we saw soot and began to remove it and other dangerous particles from the air we saw waste sites bordering places where families live and children go to school and we began the work of removing hazards from our soil we banned ddt and both parties came together to pass the endangered species act because america made this commitment to work together we began to make our environment whole we renewed our compact with nature on this independence day let me say to all americans we must not do anything that would weaken our health and safety and environment laws the freedom to breathe clean air drink safe water pass a safe world to our children to share our environment with god s other creatures these are liberties we dare not take for granted and we dare not turn our back on let us rededicate ourselves to our common nonpartisan american commitment to preserve the environment though human deeds almost erased america s symbol from our skies human wisdom and good sense brought it back now the time of the bald eagle has come again now more than 4 500 bald eagle pairs nest in our lower 48 states two years ago molly beattie who was the first woman to serve as the director of the u s fish and wildlife service released a bald eagle to mark a milestone in its reverse the bald eagle was being officially reclassified from endangered to threatened last week molly beattie passed away much too soon but she left us an enduring legacy of passion for our earth and its creatures which she instilled in all who were fortunate enough to know her the bald eagle you saw a few minutes ago has been captive while it was nursed back from a fractured shoulder and you heard craig say when we released it that the bald eagle was named in honor of molly beattie and in her honor today i say let us all on independence day rededicate ourselves to the preservation of this wonderful land and these wonderful creatures which god has given thank you and god bless america dem wjclinton4 7 96b bill_clinton thank you so much thank you what a beautiful day i am so glad to see this great crowd here i want to thank clare maluso excuse me i m having a little trouble with my voice but i hope you can hear me back there i want to thank clare maluso for doing such a fine job with this event i want to thank mayor ungaro and the other members of the city council who are here i want to thank congressman trafficant for what he said and for the work he does for you in washington every day i want to thank the other officials that are here the members of the county commission especially david engler who s plead your case to me on so many occasions i want to thank this wonderful choir for getting us off to a good start weren t they great thank you reverend powell you are the best looking 94 year old woman in the world i was told before we came out here that her husband was a steelworker so long ago that he started the working at 15 cents an hour so she s seen a lot of things happen in this community and hearing her optimism and her hope for the future should be encouraging to all of us i wish that hillary were here with me today but she s representing our country thank you she is representing our country in visiting on our day of freedom a lot of the countries in central and eastern europe that used to be dominated by communism that themselves are now free and they invited her to come for this week and i think it s a good thing to be doing somebody joked with me i don t know if any of you have seen this new movie independence day but somebody said i was coming to youngstown because this is the day the white house got blown away by space aliens i hope it s there when i get back anyway i recommend the movie i got a chance to see it the other night the last time i came here the congressman referred to it it was in 1992 and i almost broke up a wedding party our bus caravan literally ran into the wedding of judy and mario riccardi and i was so impressed by them and i thought she was such a beautiful bride and he was such a lucky fellow that i invited them to get up on stage at our rally and they did and i was just trying to sort of help the marriage get off to a good start that was four years ago and since then they ve had one child and another one s on the way so i hope that our campaign made some contribution to it i understand they re here would they stand up you all stand up give them a hand thank you bless you i also had an opportunity to see a lot of folks from youngstown last year when you brought your national championship football team down and i enjoyed that and they ll be back i wish i could stay all day and stay through the evening and see the fireworks display that i know bruce zoldan s going to do but i just want to thank you for giving me a chance to be a small part of your bicentennial this is a day where all americans put aside their business and their political preconceptions and just celebrate the freedom of our country a day for family and friends for softball and barbecue and music a day to remember that even though we sometimes take the blessings of liberty for granted millions of people around the world would give anything to share them so i wanted to share with you my feelings about some joyous news a long way around the world yesterday the russian people went back to the polls in a free and fair election they had an election then they had a runoff and it was the second election that is they had once elected a president and now we were going to see if democracy would take in a country that was so long dominated by communists and before that by the czars with a decisive voice the russian people chose democracy yesterday even in the runoff election almost two thirds of them showed up to vote to say we want to say we want to control our destiny they deserve enormous credit for the remarkable progress they have made toward democracy and toward a free economy and yesterday they said we want to keep on moving forward we choose freedom we choose democracy we choose hope we choose the future over our own 220 year history we know it s not easy to preserve democracy to meet its own challenges to keep pursuing life liberty and happiness as our founders intended us to do well we ve all got a stake in what happens in other countries that we used to be so far apart from and i hope that all of you today in just a good old fashioned american gesture would join me here in the heartland of america in congratulating president yeltsin and the people of russia for their commitment to the freedom that we love two centuries ago at another time of great challenge and change a group of revolutionary war veterans were given this piece of land in an unchartered wilderness they were told to go take the land cut the path to the west and to the american future take responsibility to seize the opportunities offered by our young democracy they were pathfinders into a new land trailblazers for our new nation their work helped to build us into the greatest strongest most prosperous nation in the world throughout your history youngstown and the mahoning valley have been at the heart of this nation and its life when our great steel mills and factories built the world s greatest industrial power youngstown led the way when the forces of democracy joined to defeat fascism and then to defeat communism youngstown led the way your hard work and your enduring values have been a shining example to all america now those same virtues and values will bring this region back and carry america into the 21st century still the world s strongest force for prosperity and peace and freedom still a place where the american dream is alive for every single american who is willing to work to achieve it two hundred years ago the people of youngstown were pioneers you were then pioneers as you built the world s greatest industrial machine and now again you are pioneers as you make the great transition into a new economy and a new century for many years as the steel industry was battered by a changing economy this city was hit hard but instead of sinking into defeatism you stepped into the future manufacturing specialty steel and aluminum and liquid crystals for computer displays you are becoming a trade and a storage hub for the world youngstown is ready to take off to move into the 21st century more vital and prosperous than ever i know you ve united in an effort to build a world class air cargo facility at the youngstown warren regional airport we will continue to be a strong partner in that effort last april we announced federal assistance to help youngstown plan for this facility and to move forward now our administration has recommended 47 million in federal funds to help to develop the airport and i know with the congressman s help and work we can work together and get it done the challenges you have faced here are really challenges all americans are facing and we have to meet them as you are working to meet them as one community one america reaching out across the lines that divide us pressing forward and never looking back for decades youngstown milled the steel that built the bridges that spanned our great rivers and linked our great cities now your values must build the bridges to carry us all into a new century on this independence day let us resolve to keep our families strong and our children healthy we are all saddened by the deaths yesterday of eight people from the fireworks in southern ohio let us pray for their families and let us resolve to pull all the closer to our own families let us resolve to make sure that all of our people have a chance to be winners in this new economy i am very grateful that in the last three and a half years america has cut its enormous deficit by more than half and generated 9 7 million new jobs but i know i know there are still americans who want to work and who could be good workers who don t have jobs i m very grateful that after 10 long years the average wages in our country are beginning to rise again but i know there are too many people who are working harder and harder without getting those raises so let us resolve to increase incomes and grow together not drift apart i am grateful that we are entering the fourth year in a row when the crime rate is coming down in america that we are putting 100 000 police on the street that we are protecting our people from the real problems that we can protect them from with initiatives like the brady bill that has kept 60 000 fugitives felons and stalkers from buying guns when they should not have been able to do it but we must resolve to keep working at this until we take our streets back from crime and gangs and drugs we can never say we have dealt with the crime problem adequately until you can go home at night and turn on the evening news and be genuinely surprised instead of numbed if the lead story is a crime story that s when we ll know we have restored america to where it ought to be let us resolve to give our children the world s best education i am glad for the progress that has been made in that but i won t be satisfied until we have done more by the year 2000 every schoolroom and library in this entire country should be connected to the internet so that every child has access to the virtues of the computer age and i want every single person in america who needs it to be able to go on to college i want the college tuition of every family to be deductible up to 10 000 a year and i want us to reach the point in america where two years of education after high school are just as universal as those first 12 years we need that guarantee and that s why i ve proposed a tax credit for two years of community college for every american of any age to go back and get the education and training they need to make the most of their own lives it is important i am grateful for the progress we have made in relieving tensions with russia and reducing the nuclear threat and helping to make peace in places like bosnia the middle east northern ireland and haiti but as we mourn the 19 brave young men who gave their lives for our freedom and security in saudi arabia let us resolve to keep working to be a beacon of freedom in the rest of the world and here at home we know that terrorism can strike anywhere whether it s in the world trade center or oklahoma city or tokyo or london or the holy land and we know it can strike from sources within and without but we know almost always it is fueled by religious or ethnic or racial hatreds that make people look down on other human beings as less worthy than themselves that is not the american way and let us resolve to continue to fight it this week i declared officially that this month july would be a month of national unity calling on americans of all faiths from all walks of life to join together to combat and speak against the rash of burnings of african american churches and other houses of worship in this country let s say on this july 4th this is our america here that is not our america we want this america for all americans opportunity and responsibility faith and family freedom and community respect for law and respect for one another these are the bridges across which we must walk to the 21st century these are the bridges you are building here now in 1996 in the 200th year of youngstown s existence our values and our visions are as sturdy as tempered steel if we remember what it means to be americans how blessed our great nation has been how great we are and how great we can be when we come together to meet our challenges and protect our values then the best days of america are still ahead i ask you just to think of this as you wave your flags on the 4th of july what did those people mean in 1776 when they said we hold these truths to be self evident what does it mean to believe that we re all equal that we all have a right but not a guarantee to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness what does it mean to say everybody should have an equal opportunity but everyone should provide equal responsibility what does it mean to say that we are greater together than we can ever be on our own these are the things you must ask and think about this with all the changes you ve been through and all the troubles you ve seen this is still the greatest country in the world and what we have to ask ourselves what we have to ask ourselves is what do we want america to look like when our children grow up to be our age or our grandchildren what do we want it to mean to them when they pledge allegiance to the flag and say they are still pledged to the republic for which our flag stands one nation one nation under god with liberty and justice for all think about that the answer will be clear thank you good luck god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton4 8 94 bill_clinton thank you thank you so much general reno and thank you ladies and gentlemen for being here i would like to thank janet reno for the superb job she has done as the attorney general of the united states and for the human face she has put on law enforcement in this country and the understanding she has brought as a career prosecutor to this work the understanding that really is embodied in these awards today which is that we have a job to do here in washington but what really makes america great and what really makes america work is what happens on the streets in the schools in the neighborhoods in the workplaces of america every day i want to thank the director of our office of drug policy lee brown for being here two congressmen from the areas of two of the honorees today congressman jerry costello of illinois and congressman steve schiff of new mexico thank you for being here i understand the mayor of belleville illinois roger cook is here i thank the members of the young american medals committee the administrator of the dea tom constantine and eduardo gonzalez the director of the marshals service who are also here last year was my first opportunity to engage in this ceremony i just loved it and the attorney general was right this job of mine is an interesting and diverse job and most days it s quite a wonderful job but it rarely is so filled with joy as when you can recognize the wonder of the work of our young people i think of our mission here in our administration at this time as the timeless one of trying to secure a future for our young people so that every person in this country without regard to their region or race or income or background can live up to the fullest of their god given abilities in this time at the end of the cold war and at the beginning of a new era that is not yet fully clear to americans moving into a global economy with new opportunities and to be sure new troubles as well that means as a minimum that here we have to restore economic growth and opportunity we have to help people to rebuild the strength of our communities and our families we have to empower individuals to do more for themselves in short we ve got to make this government work for ordinary citizens in a world we re working to make more peaceful and prosperous now in the last few weeks we ve had some pretty good news on that our economy is clearly coming back for the first time in 10 years it s predicted that all 50 states will have economic growth next year we had a peace agreement signed here between jordan and israel last week which must have brought joy to the hearts of every american that has seen that troubled region torn for so long there are many good things happening the largest toughest smartest crime bill in the history of the united states is in final debating stages and about to be voted on in the congress for the first time in the history of our country both houses of congress are considering a bill to provide health care coverage to all americans but still we have to recognize that in the end it is still true that the strength of this country is what happens on main street what happens in the schools what happens where ordinary americans live and work today we celebrate the best of our young people for their courage and their commitment we know that life requires both to be fully successful and we know that our country is still around now after 218 years because we ve been blessed with an abundance of both i must tell you that when i got up this morning and as is my custom early in the morning i wandered around i did some of my routine and then i sat and read the schedule for the day and i read the stories of these young people i was reminded of a line that i used in my inaugural address but sometimes here in the heat of battle i forget there is nothing wrong with this country that cannot be fixed by what is right with this country today we honor in dramatic and breathtaking fashion what is right with this country the first recipient for the young american medal for bravery is carlo montez clark of bellville illinois he was on his way to a convenience store when he noticed smoke coming from a nearby building he tried twice to get into the building but was overcome by smoke finally on the third try he got into the building risking his own life and saved the life of an elderly woman who suffered from emphysema let s give him a big hand thank you now i would like to recognize for service robin mae davis of albuquerque new mexico she s worked hard to spread the important message of the dangers of alcohol abuse among young people she tried to get the new mexico state fair to refrain from serving alcohol for a day or so they declined so she organized the human chain around the new mexico state fair in protest of their policy as a result for four days the fair was completely alcohol free i wonder if she would like to join my congressional lobbying staff good for you robin and congratulations our second winner of the young american medal for bravery is brandon sisco of texarkana texas when brandon s school bus made a routine stop a young girl got off the bus and was attacked by two ferocious dogs she was bitten many times brandon jumped off the bus and bravely fought off the dogs guided the six year old to safety inside the bus where he comforted her until paramedics arrived at considerable risk to himself he saved the young girl s life let s give him a round of applause our final recipient is amanda stewart of keyes oklahoma in 1990 amanda was paralyzed in a car accident she began a three state campaign to raise consciousness regarding the dangers of drinking and driving she told her peers they should think first about getting into a car with someone who had been drinking she asked them to think before driving off first without fastening a seat belt after an experience which would have crushed the spirits and broken the will of many people even people two or three times her age this brave and beautiful young woman has doubtless inspired countless young people to change their behavior to secure a better future for themselves and in the process she has exercised influence power and goodness far beyond anything that anyone might have imagined thank you amanda for your commitment and your courage ladies and gentlemen let me close with what i always think of at moments like this these young people have reminded us as the attorney general has said of the power of one person to make a difference each of us in our own way have that power and i think we would all admit starting with the president that every day at the end of the day we have done less than we might have done to exercise that power that is within us all divinely inspired and given to us for whatever time we re on this earth let s look at them and remember our obligations to make the most of every day thank you and bless you all dem wjclinton4 8 97 bill_clinton before we start i think it s only fair to note that we are observing another anniversary of helen s 50th birthday we wanted to give you a birthday cake with a tell tale number of comment happy birthday song is sung i m going to make a statement and you get the questions take it to the press room and cut it up you don t make it look that way it s painful for me too i m glad to be joined today by the ceos of 10 fortune 500 companies who have come here to meet with me on climate change these companies represent electric utilities the oil and gas industry finance high technology and heavy industry they are all intimately interested in this issue and will be affected by whatever happens on it in our country and throughout the world we want a responsible approach to climate change we believe that the science makes it clear that the climate is changing i want to proceed based on some fairly straightforward and simple principles first of all as we get ready for the kyoto conference i believe there should be realistic but binding limits to emissions of greenhouse gases i believe that we have to do it in a way that keeps our economy growing and i believe that we ought to embrace flexible market based policies i believe we should reemphasize and reenergize our efforts in research and development to find as many technological solutions to this as possible and to keep our nation in the forefront of what is now a 400 billion market for environmental technologies and finally i believe the agreement has to be a global one i think all nations developed and developing should be a part of this so this is part of an ongoing process that i and our administration have undertaken to try to make sure we re working together with all the people who would be affected by this issue and try to reach hopefully a common position we re going to have a good meeting today and i m looking forward to it and again i want to thank all the executives for coming here and giving vent to their views dem wjclinton5 1 01a bill_clinton thank you very much you guys are all cheating you re just trying to warm up i know what s going on i was told by an elderly conservationist from my home state of arkansas that i had better do a good job with america s natural resources when i became president on pain of feeling the fire of hades i did not realize that our reward is that we would be freezing to death here i want to thank my good friend senator gaylord nelson for a lifetime of leadership in conservation and i am profoundly grateful to secretary glickman and to chief dombeck a career public servant who said it all when he began by saying this is not a political issue for those of us who believe in it i thank jim lyons and the others at the department of agriculture and the forest service i want to thank our epa administrator carol browner who s here with us today just a few days ago she announced her new rule to cut harmful emissions caused by the burning of diesel fuel it will dramatically improve the quality of air in america and we thank her for that i would like to also acknowledge the substantial contributions to this effort particularly in fading the heat and believe it or not even today there was some heat involved in this i want to thank john podesta and george frampton and the others at the white house for their strong support for the course we have followed and i d like to thank dr tom elias for hosting us again and for showing me my bonsai tree when i came up we came here two years ago to launch the lands legacy initiative and i knew this was the place to plant the seeds of success and i thank him that is also another major achievement of this congress this year the largest increase in funding for land conservation in the history of the republic and i thank all those who were involved in that finally i would like to thank congressman mark udall for being here with his bride maggie thank you very much for being here as you know he comes from a family with fairly substantial environmental credentials and he came here and the first thing he said was that we had done the right thing today and we will need his voice in congress this year and we thank him for being here for the first time ever with the lands legacy initiative we established a dedicated continuous fund for protecting and restoring green and open spaces across america today we come to build on that record and one way or another all of us have come here and i now have come to know many of you in this audience and i know we come from different backgrounds and have traveled different paths through life but somehow or another we have in common our view that nature is a priceless but fragile gift an important part of the fabric of our lives and a major part of our responsibility to our children and our children s children i grew up in a state where more than half the land is covered by forest i grew up in a town surrounded by a national park most of the people who enjoy our public lands are like the people i grew up with hard working families who very often could afford no other kind of vacation and can afford nature s bounty because our forebears made sure that it belongs to them and it belongs to us all i am grateful that we can stand here today because of the work done by theodore roosevelt gifford pinchot and john muir i am grateful for all those who have walked in their footsteps for a hundred years i am grateful that for the last eight years i had a vice president who spoke out strongly for these values and these policies and helped us to do what we have done to be good stewards of the land we have saved and restored some of our most glorious natural wonders from florida s everglades to hawaii s coral reefs from the redwoods of california to the red rock canyons of utah we have helped hundreds of communities under the vice president s leadership to protect parks and farms and other green spaces we ve built new partnerships with landowners to restore and preserve the natural values of our private land we ve modernized the management of our national forests to strengthen protections for water quality wildlife and recreation while ensuring a steady and sustainable supply of timber we have greatly expanded our cooperation with other nations to protect endangered species and threatened areas like tropical forests in a larger sense i hope and believe we have helped to put to rest the old debate between economic growth and environmental protection we have the strongest economy in a generation and the cleanest environment in a generation and i might say parenthetically that as we come to grips as inevitably we must with the challenge of climate change and even though it is hard to believe on this day global warming is real those of you who are here today will have to be in the vanguard reminding people that we can break the iron chain between more greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth it is not necessary any longer but we have to be smarter about what we re doing today we take as secretary glickman said a truly historic lead on the path of environmental progress throughout our national forest system there are millions of acres of land that do not have and in most cases have never had roads cut through them these areas represent some of the last best unprotected wild lands anywhere in america these uniquely american landscapes are sanctuaries to hike and hunt and ski and fish they re a source of clean water for millions of our fellow citizens they are havens for wildlife and home to about one quarter of all threatened or endangered species in our nation on a beautiful fall afternoon more than a year ago now secretary glickman and many of you joined me at virginia s washington and jefferson national forest to launch a process to safeguard these lands as secretary glickman just described we reached out to the american people to help us develop the plan more than a million and a half responded i m told that more americans were involved in shaping this policy than any land preservation initiative in the history of the republic thanks to their extraordinary support the process is now complete sometimes progress comes by expanding frontiers but sometimes it s measured by preserving frontiers for our children today we preserve the final frontiers of america s national forests for our children i am proud to announce that we will protect nearly 60 million acres of pristine forest land for future generations that is an area greater in size than all our national parks combined from the appalachian mountains to the sierra nevada forest land in 39 states will be preserved in all its splendor off limits to road building and logging that would destroy its timeless beauty this will include protection for the last great temperate rain forest in america alaska s tongass national forest this initiative will provide strong long term protection for the tongass while honoring our commitment to address the economic concerns of local communities we will work with them to ensure a smooth transition and to build a sound sustainable economic base for the future indeed our entire approach to managing our national forests has been based on striking the right balance for example under this rule the forest service still will be able to build a road or fight a fire or thin an area in an environmentally sensitive way if it is essential to reducing the risk of future fires and even as we strengthen protections the majority of our forests will continue to be responsibly managed for timber production and other activities bear in mind as has already been said only about 4 or 5 percent of our country s timber comes from our national forests and less than 5 percent of that is now being cut in roadless areas surely we can adjust the federal program to replace 5 percent of 5 percent but we can never replace what we might destroy if we don t protect those 58 million acres ultimately this is about preserving the land which the american people own for the american people that are not around yet about safeguarding our magnificent open spaces because not everyone can travel to the great palaces of the world but everyone can enjoy the majesty of our great forests today we free the land so that they will remain unspoiled by bulldozers undisturbed by chain saws and untouched for our children preserving roadless areas puts america on the right road for the future the responsible path of sustainable development the great conservationist aldo leopold who pioneered the protection of wild forest roadless areas said when we see the land as a community to which we belong we may begin to use it with love and respect if there is one thing that should always unite us as a community across the generations across parties across time it is love for the land we keep faith with that tradition today and we must keep faith with it in all the tomorrows to come this is a great day for america i thank all of you who made it happen it is your achievement but it is a gift that you give to all future generations to walk in the woods fish in the streams breathe the air the beauty of our wild lands will now be there for our children and all our children for all time to come and i hope you will always be very proud that you were a part of it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton5 1 01b bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen first i would like to thank secretary cohen for his kind and generous remarks and even more for his outstanding leadership of the department of defense i must say bill when i asked you to become secretary of defense in an attempt to strengthen the bipartisan or indeed nonpartisan support for the defense department among the american people and the congress i didn t know that i was the first president in history to ask an elected official of the opposite party to hold that job shoot i might not have done it if i had known that it s one of those occasions where ignorance was wisdom because you brought to the challenge a sharp mind a fierce integrity a loving heart for the men and women in uniform you wife janet touched people who serve in our military forces all around the world in a unique and special way and i m glad that you believe this is the most important service of your 31 year career but on this sir you gave as good as you got and we thank you and general shelton i want to thank you i will never forget the day when general shelton in his previous command post stepped out of the boat into the water onto the beach in haiti in his boots and his beret i think he could have gone alone and prevailed just as well as he did with the help of the others who went with him i ll never forget the time i came to your office sir in your previous job i looked on the wall and there was a picture of stonewall jackson and i said to myself i wonder if stonewall jackson would be a democrat or a republican if he were alive today i ve often commented to general shelton that we have made he secretary cohen and i an unpredictable but i think quite a successful team and you have been a great chairman of the joint chiefs of staff sir a great chairman and we thank you and we thank carolyn for her leadership as well i thank deputy secretary rudy de leon for the many capacities in which he has served since the first days of this administration thank you secretary slater today for what you have done as secretary of transportation with the coast guard i thank the service secretaries general myers the service chiefs the other officers here and enlisted personnel i thank especially the members of the white house my chief of staff john podesta my national security advisor sandy berger for the work that they have done with me on issues relating to the armed forces and i thank you for the medals you gave to hillary and me we were honored to receive them but far more honored to spend the last eight years in contact with the 1 4 million men and women on active duty the more than 850 000 men and women serving in the guard and reserves those who keep us secure and advance the cause of peace and freedom there is no greater honor in being president than to be commander in chief of these magnificent people so many of them so very young they are at the disposal of the president to defend our interests to advance our values to realize our vision most of the time they do it with all the gusto and fervor of youth all the discipline that long training brings but on occasion they do it at the cost of their all too young lives we saw it most recently in the uss cole but every year in ways that don t make the headlines about 200 of these young people give their lives just doing their jobs no one who has not held this job can possibly understand the awesome sense of humility and honor and the sense of strength and capacity it brings to any president to know that there are people like these who have sworn their lives and fortunes in sacred honor for the united states in july of 1776 our first commander in chief george washington ordered american troops to assemble on manhattan island in new york to hear the declaration of independence read aloud in full view i might add of the british forces then landing in staten island he did it because he knew how important it was that our troops understand that the survival of our new nation depended upon their success for over 220 years now the survival of our nation has depended upon the military s success and for over 220 years our military has succeeded for these last eight years as secretary cohen chronicled in a very different time in a world after the cold war more interdependent than ever before with new conflicts and old demons the american military has again succeeded and succeeded brilliantly thanks to you the world is safer and america stands taller thanks to you working with our korean allies there is peace in the korean peninsula and new hope for reconciliation across the last dividing line in the cold war thanks to you arm in arm with an expanded nato ethnic cleansing and slaughter in the former yugoslavia in bosnia and kosovo has ended refugees have returned to their homes freedom has a chance to flower thanks to you we are closer than ever before to building a europe for the first time in history as peaceful undivided and democratic a europe where it is far less likely that young americans will have to fight and die in this new century thanks to you iraq has not regained the capability that threatened the world or its neighbors with weapons of mass destruction thanks to you haiti is free of dictators east timor free of oppression africa is beginning to prepare itself to solve more of its own problems latin america has been aided in natural disasters and against narco traffickers and the united states has led the world in removing more land mines than any other nation by far without sacrificing the safety and security of our troops in battle and yet those are only the headlines on christmas eve as i do or have done every christmas eve for the last eight years i telephoned a number of our men and women in uniform serving a long way from home doing critical work unknown to most but benefitting all americans i thanked navy petty officer second class mario solares who serves in bahrain making sure we have the piers the bridges the towers our vessels need as they protect peace in the persian gulf i thanked air force staff sergeant erin mckenzie who serves with the 607th air support operations group at osan air base making sure members of the 7th air force get a paycheck every two weeks as they guard the skies over south korea i thanked u s army specialist jeremy kidder who serves on a very remote pacific island an atoll 800 miles west of hawaii working to destroy our cold war stock of chemical weapons i thanked marine staff sergeant robert sheridan who guards our embassy in belarus he was named marine security guard of the year in 2000 and we know how tough the competition is because unfortunately we have been reminded how dangerous that job can be i thanked petty officer michael sandwith who serves in the bering seas on the coast guard cutter midgett and was recently forced to give chase to a vessel illegally fishing in our waters in the middle of a snowstorm with gale force winds and 24 foot swells there are another 1 4 million stories like this americans in uniform with compelling missions serving in places and doing jobs our fellow citizens don t hear much about behind the desk in the oval office i have a now famous rack of coins from the military units commanders and senior enlisted personnel i have visited these past eight years there are almost 500 of them not counting the duplicates whenever i look at them i remember the faces of the service members i ve met men and women of every race creed religion who trace their ancestry to every region on earth yet are still bound together by the common mission of defending freedom and the common faith in the american creed e pluribus unum out of many one it is not only inscribed on our coins it is inscribed in the hearts of america s service men and women and it is the coin of america s moral authority in the world i can tell you after eight years of traveling the world and dealing with the world s problems at the dawn of a new millennium people elsewhere marvel at it our ability to live and work together in the military forces in spite of all those differences is by itself a powerful force for peace and reconciliation throughout the world you are america s finest and america must always be prepared to give you what you need to do your job we can never pay you enough but we can always pay you more i am proud that a year ago we put in place the biggest increase in military pay and retirement in a generation proud that we reversed a decade of decline in defense budgets and now can point to four straight years of growing investment in our future security no one should think for a moment that investing in the strength of our military is less important in times of peace the strength of our military is a major reason for our peace we live in peace in no small measure because your courage and strength makes peace a wiser choice than war for other adversaries history will record triumphs in battle as general shelton said but no one can ever write a full account of the wars that were never fought the losses that were never suffered the tears that were never shed because the men and women of the united states military risked their lives for peace none of us should ever forget that last year i visited a refugee camp in macedonia full of kosovar albanians who had been driven from their homeland as i walked through the camp young children picked up a chant usa usa usa kids everywhere i turned chanting usa children who did not speak english but knew enough with their small voices to thank america for giving them the chance to reclaim their land and their dreams i had the same response when i saw elderly people in normandy in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of d day there american veterans were approached by french citizens who told them that no matter how young they were when it happened or how old they might be then they could never forget what america did for them years from now i hope some of our young veterans who served in the balkans will have a chance to go back and see in person the fruits of their service years from now i hope some of our veterans who served in korea during this period of historic change or in the gulf when nations there were under such stress will have a chance to return and find grateful people i hope some of our veterans who served in africa or asia or latin america or eastern europe will be able to return to where they helped to keep the peace to relieve suffering to set an example for a fledgling democracy if they do i think they will find people who will still be wise and kind enough to say god bless you you gave us a future and i hope that your nation understands whatever you have done to the rest of the world you have done that tenfold for america for by helping to advance the cause of peace and freedom around the world you have made freedom more secure here at home may it always be so i thank you for the honor of doing my part these last eight years god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton5 10 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you for the wonderful welcome thank you president shapiro for your distinguished leadership here and the vital work you did during the course of our common presidencies it occurred to me that this might be the only place in america where people thought woodrow wilson got a demotion when he was elected president of the united states thank you dean rothschild and thank you ruth miller for putting off your retirement so i could come here today i want to thank professor sean wilentz for putting on this conference and for his many acts of generosity and kindness and support for our efforts over the last eight years i d like to thank the congressman from princeton representative rush holt for coming here thank you i know this is not really a political event but i can t help noting that rush holt is the only bona fide scientist in the congress and lord knows we need at least one another member of congress wanted to come here today senator john edwards from north carolina a good friend of mine whose daughter katherine is in the freshman class and i promised to give his excuses to his daughter and the rest of you but they are voting in the senate today and part of the progressive s tradition is showing up and so he s showing up down in washington and i thank you katharine strong gilbert for giving me this whig clio award you know james madison is a very important figure to every american and every president who cares in particular about the framework and history of the constitution but it s interesting to me that he actually participated in debates here in the 18th century including one with aaron burr where madison was the whig and burr was the clio it was that debate that produced a memorable line that is too often attributed to me the era of whig government is over i must say when i first saw the program for this conference i felt some ambivalence the student in me wanted to come here and stay for the whole thing but the politician in me wondered what in the living daylights i was doing here i m supposed to lead off a group of people whose books i have read who know more about the subject i m supposed to address than i ever will i can say that i had some unique experience in carrying on the progressive tradition i always felt that the work we did the last eight years made us the heir of theodore roosevelt and woodrow wilson al gore and me our entire administration and i have a fascination with that period of history i own a lot of theodore roosevelt s books in the first edition including a fascinating account of how he organized the rough riders i ve also got a wonderful book that owen whister the writer of westerns wrote about his friendship with theodore roosevelt when like many of you they were undergraduates together at harvard the other day i acquired joseph tomothy s book he was woodrow wilson s private secretary about his relationship with president wilson both as governor and as president it s a fascinating account of the time by someone who was admittedly biased but still had a unique perspective so i ve thought a lot about this period and i suppose as a politician i should give myself the leeway of quoting theodore roosevelt who said in his speech on the new nationalism i do not speak merely from a historical standpoint it is of little use for us to pay lip service to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply those qualities to the problems of the present it is in that spirit that i would like to say a few words today about the progressive tradition about what it means for today and how it is part i believe of a larger ongoing debate in american history about the whole idea of america what does the nation mean what does it mean to be an american the progressives thought we could only keep faith with the past by keeping faith with the future their time had much in common with ours and therefore our responsibilities have much in common with theirs to preserve what is enduring but to adapt our nation time and again to what is new woodrow wilson said it behooves us once again to stand face to face with our ideals to renew our enthusiasm to reckon again our duties to take fresh views of our aims and fresh courage for their pursuit these words ring with relevance for your time not simply because we stand at the dawn of a new century as wilson and roosevelt did but because this time like theirs is characterized by swift and stunning change like the industrial revolution this information revolution is a true seismic shift it alters forever the way we work live relate to each other and those beyond our borders the consequences of the digital chip nano technology the internet and the sequencing of the human genome will be every bit as profound if not more profound than those of the telephone the assembly line and the vast migration of americans to the cities and the opening of america to its first great wave of immigrants but these are only the most obvious parallels between the progressive era and what i call this time the last time i came to princeton a new progressive era i also believe in a larger sense the progressive era and this time represent two of the five pivotal points in american history when we have been called upon to reaffirm and to redefine not just the role of government for new times but the very idea of the american nation that debate has gone on from the beginning first there was the debate which george washington alexander hamilton and john marshall won over thomas jefferson and his friends about whether we were preeminently going to be one nation or a just a little bit stronger confederation of states i have to say out of deference to mr jefferson that after he became president i suspect he was glad he lost the argument as he sent out lewis and clark imposed the infamous embargo and bought louisiana which at the time cost the equivalent of one full year s budget of the federal government can you imagine what would happen if i came to the congress and said have i got a deal for you just 1 9 trillion what difference does it make the second great debate we had about the idea of the nation occurred obviously in the days leading up to and during and immediately after the civil war when abraham lincoln saved the union by moving it closer to the true ideals of the declaration of independence and as gary wills has so brilliantly argued literally redefining the constitution closer toward those ideals in the gettysburg address the third great point was in the progressive era when woodrow wilson and theodore roosevelt presided over an america fully entering the industrial revolution then the fourth time was during the new deal the second world war and its immediate aftermath with the dawn of the cold war when franklin roosevelt and harry truman gave us our first comprehensive social safety net and an institutionalized commitment to american leadership for peace and freedom in the world now at the dawn of this global information age al gore and i have been working to adapt all of the domestic and foreign policies of the united states to these sweeping changes in science and technology in social diversity and pluralism and in increasing global interdependence history has taught americans not to stand passively in the face of change what the progressive presidents understood so clearly from teddy roosevelt to wilson to fdr and truman to kennedy and johnson is the understanding that america either will shape change or be shaped by it as i ve already said i believe the time in which we live bears the most resemblance to the progressive era but there are also elements of those other great hingepoints in american history in this time too you can see it in the fight we had with the republican congress that led to the shutdown of the government you can see it in our efforts to build one america across all the lines that divide us you can see it in our struggle to end genocide and ethnic cleansing in the balkans and to build binding ties to africa latin american and asian nations with whom we have not been closely aligned in the past the central lesson of the progressive is that you either have to shape change consistent with your values or you will be shaped by it in ways that make it more difficult for you to live by your values to retreat from responsibility is to invite instability to embrace the obligation of leadership has consistently under progressive times led to better lives for all americans wilson and roosevelt made an enemy of outdated orthodoxy replacing them with what teddy s famous cousin franklin roosevelt called bold persistent experimentation as many of the scholars here have argued and doubtless will argue with greater clarity than i can the progressive legacy is not primarily a set of programs that no longer have great relevance to us but a vital set of principles the idea that new conditions demand a new approach to government when teddy roosevelt became president few americans looked to him to his office or even to their government to solve their problems at the end of the 19th century the white house was weak the congress was at the mercy of special interests roosevelt s genius was to redefine the role of government and the role of the president to protect the public interest and to act as an accountable agent of change this is an ideal as old as madison but roosevelt and wilson gave it new meaning for a new era what is its meaning today when i ran for president in 1992 our government was discredited in fact you could hardly run for president unless you had something bad to say about the government indeed part of the political genius of the acendency of president reagan and his associates was to attain power by discrediting the very idea of government they basically were able to say thing like government couldn t run a bake sale the government would mess up a two car parade and they found huge majorities of americans sort of nodding their heads those in the progressive tradition i believe have given them some ammunition by clinging to old programs bureaucracies and approaches that no longer worked then the conservatives used the failures as an excuse to do nothing on the domestic front some of our leaders literally made a virtue of their endless capacity to tell the american people how bad the government was and then when those who were reacting against the progressive tradition took power they seemed determined to prove it by digging us a huge budgetary hole quadrupling the nation s debt in 12 years so our economy sank our society became considerably more divided and predictably public confidence in our democratic government collapsed that s why when i ran in 1992 i said that it would be necessary to change our party change our national leadership and change our nation al gore and i believed that we had to find a new way something now popularly called around the world a third way a way back to enduring values a way beyond a government profoundly indifferent to people s problems a way forward to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow we committed to reinvent government so it could function as it does best in an information society as a catalyst a partner to the private sector in creating opportunity jobs and hope and providing our citizens with the tools they need to make the most of their own lives that too of course is a principle as old as our republic opportunity for all and whether we re talking about the information age the industrial age or the turn from the 18th to the 19th century economic growth and opportunity have always gone hand in hand that s why we set out to build an economic strategy that would work for this time rooted in fiscal discipline investment in our people and our future and expanding our economic ties with the rest of the world well lucky for us or i wouldn t be here talking today it s worked out pretty well we ve gone from record deficits to record surpluses our economy has created 22 million jobs we re in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history but in the progressive tradition to use president kennedy s words the rising economy is lifting all boats the census bureau reports that in the last year typical household income rose to the highest level ever recorded breaking 40 000 for the first time up since 1993 by 6 300 after inflation the poverty rate has fallen to 11 8 percent the lowest in 20 years senior poverty is below 10 percent for the first time ever child poverty dropped by the largest amount since 1966 hispanic and african american poverty are the lowest since separate statistics have been kept since 1993 seven million americans have moved out of poverty over two million last year alone now a century ago economic growth was generated by large industrial organizations popularly called the trust then today economic growth is largely generated by big ideas which is why there are so many young people like you making a fortune in com companies the antitrust provisions and worker provisions that were developed in the progressive era to make the economy work and to give more people a chance to share in it still matters today and they have been built on modified and changed but they still matter today but today we need even more focus on boosting ideas and innovation creating the conditions for prosperity and again giving everybody the tools they need to succeed in a very different and in some ways much less organized world you can see our efforts there just for example in the telecommunications act of 1996 where the vice president and i fought for the e rate so that the poorest schools and hospitals and libraries could all afford to be hooked into the internet and where we fought for a framework that favored competition from new companies over giving all the business of the new information economy to existing big enterprises again it s worked reasonably well there are hundreds of thousands of new jobs thousands of new companies out there and it s an example of how we tried to change the laws and the framework to meet what was best for opportunity for the largest number of americans and to give all of our people especially our young people the tools they need to take advantage of the age in which we live so in that sense the nature of opportunity a constant value is changing at the time our nation was founded opportunity most of all meant the freedom to carve a farm and an existence out of the forest frontier in the industrial age the progressives saw that it meant something different it meant a high school education a vocational training preserving competition protecting american workers from abuses and keeping children out of the workplace when appropriate today it means mastering new tools and technologies being able to think broadly adjust quickly and being able to keep learning for a lifetime this morning for example at the white house i met with house and senate democrats to push the congress again to adopt our educational proposals because i think they are more than ever before at the core of the concept of opportunity and at the core of our ability to keep changing and building an ever more progressive society even though we balanced the budget these last eight years and run a surplus and we ve eliminated hundreds of programs we ve also doubled investment in education and training more than 10 million americans this year will take advantage of the hope scholarship and lifelong learning tax credit we reorganized the student loan program to save students 8 billion in student loan repayments since 1993 we raised the minimum wage an old tool that i think is still very important in new times and i hope we can raise it again before the congress goes home but we took a new tool the earned income tax credit and doubled it so that it s helping this year alone 15 million families to work their way into the middle class we adopted an empowerment zone program that the vice president ran so ably which has enabled thousands of jobs to be created in communities that otherwise would have been totally left behind in this economic recovery because they were remote or poor because they didn t have people with a lot of skills that were well suited to the trends of the times we created community development financial institutions to get capital to people who couldn t go into a normal bank and produce a record that would generate a loan we also did as much as we could to try to help people move from welfare to work and to take maximum advantage of the new economy by investing in education child care and transportation recognizing that we live in a place where very often the pool of available workers is here usually in a city and the pool of available jobs at their skill level is here usually in the suburbs usually with no public transport in between to try to help people balance work and family the united states began to join what most other industrial nations have been doing for years by adopting the family and medical leave law which now over 20 million americans have used to take some time off when a baby is born or when a family member is sick without losing their job and i just predict to you all of you young people out here this will be one of the big debates over the next decade because we re the best country in the world at keeping the hassles of starting a business down providing capital to start businesses providing an environment in which people can flourish but we lag way behind a lot of other nations in the progressive tradition in simply saying that the most important work of any society is raising children and that work will be more productive if people who are working who have kids don t have to worry about the welfare of their children that s why we have to do more for child care that s why we should expand family leave that s why we should work more on flexible leave when i became president only 3 million people were making a living primarily in their own home when i ran for reelection 20 million people were making a living primarily in their own home by the time you vote in november for the first president of the 21st century we may be up to 30 million people i don t have the latest figures but it s stunning part of the reason is technology makes it possible the internet makes it possible but part of the reason is we haven t done as much as we should have to help people succeed at society s enduring work raising children and all the new work we re doing and the fact that more people than ever want to work or have to work and ought to be able to do so i am very glad that more and more americans are sharing in our prosperity but the other thing i want to say is that still a lot of folks have been left behind most of them live in inner cities or small rural towns or on or around native american reservations and one of the big challenges now to sort of perfect this progressive movement is to figure out how to bring those people into the circle of opportunity i hope very much that before i leave office the congress will pass the new markets initiative that i worked on with the speaker of the house in a bipartisan fashion i won t go through all the details but essentially what it says is we ought to give wealthy americans with money the same incentives to invest in poor areas in america we provide to invest in poor areas around the world because we believe that we can do this and we ought to put the infrastructure there for those of you who have never been on an american indian reservation let me tell you just for example at the pine ridge reservation in south dakota one of the most historic parts of american history the home of the lakota sioux who were the tribe led by an indian chief named crazy horse that dispatched general custer in the late 19th century the unemployment rate is 73 percent i was at shiprock in northern new mexico one of the most beautiful places in our country the other day at the navaho reservation where the unemployment rate is over 50 percent 70 percent of the people don t have homes telephones in their homes i was introduced by a young woman who won a contest an academic contest at her school the prize was a computer and she couldn t log onto the internet because there was not a phone line in her home in our country at our level of wealth that is unconscionable and this cannot rightly be called a full progressive era until we have addressed these challenges we still have to be constantly restlessly searching for ways to expand the circle of opportunity this too is a principle rooted firmly in the progressive era but also in our nation s founding remember what the framers said they were committed to forming a more perfect union they never said the union would be perfect that we would ever reach complete harmony in our living with our ideals but that we had a constant endless lifetime obligation to perfect the union and if i could leave any of you with a thought that i hope you will have in your mind as you as citizens go to the polls and then as you as citizens build your own lives it is that we get a chance like we ve got today maybe once every 50 years maybe even more seldom where we have both prosperity social progress coupled with national self confidence and the absence of serious crisis at home or threat abroad to really imagine the future we would like to build and then go about building it and in my view one of the most important things we have achieved is not any of these specific things people always talk about but just giving you the chance to build the future of your dreams and i hope that decision will be made consistent with the values the vision and the record of the progressive era in america theodore roosevelt said the people have emphatically expressed their desire that our principles be kept substantially unchanged although of course applied in a progressive spirit to meet changing conditions that s what you have to do i just want to make one other point that i think is of equal importance i believe that in order to preserve a new progressive era we must go much further than we have in our own national consciousness in understanding that our continued prosperity as well as our security requires us to continue to be involved in the world to lead in the world and to cooperate in the world almost a century ago woodrow wilson described the vision of collective peacekeeping global security the rights of nations against the backdrop of the looming threat and then the fact of a brutal modern all consuming war a war that is difficult for young people to imagine in one european battle in world war i 900 000 people were lost because they had modern technology and they were stuck in old patterns of fighting digging trenches and shooting each other and moving up line after line after line that might have worked fine if they d had bows and arrows or even civil war era rifles and cannons but was an absolute disaster when modern technology was married to old ideas both geopolitical ideas which led to the war and the ideas of military strategy with which it was carried out you should remember that today and try to make sure that the ideas you have are equal to the technology and the realities of modern life when woodrow wilson painted this idealistic vision few of his fellow countrymen and women listened a lot of people thought he was an idealist who passed his prime and after he was no longer on the scene and the reaction prevailed as it always does after periods of progressivism professor schlesinger has told us in his writings on the cycles of history we had to learn in a very hard way that america could not safely or responsibly withdraw from the world now we ve had two cold wars and a long and bitter two world wars excuse me and a long and bitter cold war we live in a time when new democracies are emerging around the world when you walk out of here if you turn on cnn you ll see the emergence i hope in serbia with a lot of young people like you fighting for the future you take for granted more people live under free governments of their own choosing today than ever before for the first time in history more than half of the people on this planet live under governments of their own choosing throwing off the yoke of oppression many of them but not all are also enjoying newfound prosperity we are closer than ever to redeeming the vision of woodrow wilson of reaching his dream of a world full of free markets free elections and free peoples working together but we re still not there and there are a lot of obstacles in the way not least of which is the continuing bedrock of reluctance in our own society to pay our fair share and do our fair part on the part of some conservatives and on the part of some progressives who embrace the change that is the global economy and shape it instead of denying it and pretending that as if we were that we can make it go away and you have to think about that what does it mean to you what wilson said and what roosevelt said they understood at the start of what has been called the american century franklin roosevelt and harry truman understood when they created the u n and nato and the breton woods institution that the united states simply cannot be partly in the world dipping in when it suits our purpose hunkering down when it doesn t that we can t relate to our friends in fits and starts we can t lead just when it suits us and then tell people we re too busy when it doesn t we have not made that decision yet you can see it in the ambivalence the congress has felt when they supported me on nafta and the world trade organization and bringing china into the wto and when they wouldn t go along with giving me the same trade authority that presidents have had for nearly 30 years now to negotiate comprehensive trade agreements with other countries and have them voted up or down you can see it in the fact that a strong conservative bloc in the senate and in the house have actually spent eight years demanding eight years the most prosperous years in our country s history saying that the most important thing to do at the u n is to lower america s share of peacekeeping and lower our percentage of the total dues of the u n you can see it in the breathtaking and i think horribly shortsighted defeat in the u s senate of the comprehensive test ban treaty the first major treaty to be defeated since the senate defeated woodrow wilson with the league of nations treaty i must say for my country s sake i hope it doesn t have a life risk consequence and i don t think it will if the american people decide that these matters are important we live in a time when people have lots of opinions on lots of things they re absolutely flooded with information so if you took a survey in america and you said should america pay its fair share to the u n should america responsibly participate in peacekeeping because other people share the load should we have the comprehensive test ban treaty and have a cooperative approach to reducing the nuclear threats and other threats of weapons of mass destruction in the future you d get big majorities that would say yes but most americans don t understand how important this is and what a significant piece it is of building a new era of progress so it doesn t tend to be a voting issue and whenever important new things are not voting issues in a free society then entrenched old interests tend to prevail and we get in trouble so i ask you all to think about that the challenges of this new century are far more diverse than our predecessors could have foreseen but all the good things that we have don t make all the bad problems go away information technology will not resolve all conflicts between nations indeed it creates some new challenges it enables for example networks of terrorists narco traffickers international criminals to communicate with each other with greater speed clarity and often with less chance of being caught new technology allows people to imagine weapons of mass destruction that are made smaller just like computers encased in small plastic containers that don t show up on airport metal detectors that present new threats in the ongoing historical battles between the organized forces of destruction and the organized and sometimes not so well organized forces of civilization so for all the good things that are happening we can t make all the problems go away therefore the expansion of global commerce the growth of democracy the rise of other centers of economic activity does not diminish our responsibility to lead it heightens it and it requires that we do so in a more cooperative fashion as american interests evolve i believe we can stay rooted to the principles of woodrow wilson and theodore roosevelt i think we stay true to those principles when we change for example i think we re being true to the principles of the progressive era when we provide debt relief to the world s poorest countries it s unconscionable that these countries are making interest payments that are often half or more of their annual government budget instead of spending the money on education and health care and the development of their nation and they can t pay the money back to us anyway why are we doing this it doesn t make any sense so we have a new idea don t just give uncritical debt relief give debt relief to countries that can demonstrate they re not putting the money in swiss bank accounts or building military or other instruments of oppression but only putting the money into education health care and responsible development that is in my judgment a critical component of progressivism in a global age just as i think it s important to fight maladies like aids tb and malaria those three things claim one fourth of the lives that are lost in the world every year today one quarter of all the people who will die in the year 2000 will dies of aids tb or malaria and we have it within our power to do something about it and also to lead the world toward the development of an aids vaccine and to make the drugs more widely available and to do more about tb and malaria we ought to do that in an interdependent world we ll be better off if people who are plagued have their plagues alleviated we ought to do more in my judgment to support poor villagers in remote countries by giving them loans so they can start businesses and build a self sustaining life to reinforce democracy and to build from the grass roots up countries that can be good partners with us in the future we ought to do more to insist that a more open economy also be a more fair one or in the common parlance to put a human face on the global economy we also stay true to the vision of wilson and roosevelt when we do our part to keep the peace and to support brave people struggling for the quiet miracle of a normal life whether they re in the middle east northern ireland in a small place like east timor a long way from here in a poor country like haiti or a country plagued by narco traffickers and civil war like colombia and especially in the balkans where the first world war began there especially the fight for freedom should still be our own freedom has made steady advances in bosnia and croatia and romania and bulgaria a dem wjclinton5 10 94 bill_clinton good afternoon ladies and gentlemen mr president members of congress ladies and gentlemen welcome to the white house welcome to this occasion marking what martin luther king once called a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity most of you in this room through your prayers and your actions helped to keep freedom s flame lit during the dark night of apartheid in south africa now here we are south africa is free nelson mandela is president some dreams really do come true we are also here because of our own ongoing struggle against racism and intolerance and division over the years south africans and americans have shared idea and drawn strength from one another the naacp was founded just a few months before the african national congress and close bonds were forged between two of the greatest leaders our two countries have produced nobel prize winners albert luthuli and dr king over the years americans raised a powerful unified voice for justice and change in south africa that would not go unheard a diverse coalition spread the word churches universities human rights organizations ultimately banks businesses cities and state governments the tools they wielded cultural and economic sanctions divestment international isolation ultimately helped to force the apartheid regime to end more than four decades of repression at the center of this movement stood the congressional black caucus the caucus helped to raise the consciousness of all americans to the terrible injustice of apartheid and it consistently acted upon a deep rooted commitment to south africa s freedom representative ron dellums introduced the first anti apartheid legislation in 1972 the year the cbc was founded it took 14 more years the unbending will of the cbc and ultimately the willingness of congress to override a veto but you persevered you prevailed and today we can say south africa s triumph is your triumph too and we thank you now that freedom and democracy have won they must be nurtured and that is the ultimate purpose of president mandela s visit to us in the united states working with congress and the private sector our administration is helping to promote trade with and investment in south africa not only for the good of south africans but in our own interests as well the private sector which made its weight felt in the fight against apartheid must now lead the effort to build a prosperous south africa this is not i say again about charity it s about opportunity opportunity for south africans opportunity for americans we must also help south africa to create jobs housing and schools to improve health care to fight illiteracy and poverty these are challenges with which the new south africa must contend now and vigorously and rising to meet them south africa will become a model for all of africa let me add that our concern must not end with south africa for all its problems africa is a continent of tremendous promise and progress i reject the afro pessimism as it s been called that is often expressed around this city that s why we ll provide some 3 billion to africa this year directly and through international organizations for economic assistance and humanitarian relief why we ve had the first ever conference on africa recently that many of you have participated in why we re working through sustainable development and debt relief through peacekeeping and conflict resolution through diplomacy and military conversion to take advantage of the opportunities for democracy and development on the african continent we owe our new partnership with south africa to the man i have been privileged to host in washington this week president mandela by the simple justice of your cause and the powerful force of your example you have inspired millions of americans and millions more throughout the world we are in your debt not only for what you have done for south africa but for what you have done for us for what you have made us believe again about what we might become and what we might do here at home let me close with the words of the poet jennifer davis which she wrote in tribute to albert luthuli they apply equally well to you bounded you gave us knowledge of freedom silenced you taught us how to speak president mandela dem wjclinton5 10 95 bill_clinton thank you very much it s an eery feeling being introduced by your wife you never know what s going to be said you re steeling yourself for the discipline not to show any adverse reaction we re having a good time today hillary and i are we love this day we look forward to it and we thank all of you for coming we thank especially senator pell and senator simpson thank you for coming we re glad to see you we thank the members of the administration who are here i see secretary riley and deputy secretary kunin of education and roger johnson the director of the general services administration there may be others here i thank all of you for being here i want to say a special word of thanks for the service of jane alexander and sheldon hackney for the great job that they have done i thank my good friend john brademas the chairman of the president s committee on the arts and humanities and diane frankel the director of the institute for museum services and i thank all the members of the arts and humanities council who are here for their willingness to serve it s a great honor for me to be able to present today the national medal of arts and the charles frankel prize in the humanities to a distinguished group of americans who have lived their lives as builders bringing people enlightenment bringing people enjoyment advancing the cause of human knowledge and human understanding and the joy in life before i do that i think i ought to say we ve had a couple of pieces of good news this morning at the white house which at least are not inconsistent with what so many of these people have given their lives to the president of mexico called me this morning and told me that after all the difficulties this country had faced in recent months that he was making an early repayment of 700 million of the money they borrowed from the united states to keep their economy going and i think that s a good thing you know when you loan money you never know whether it s a good thing or not until it s too late to do anything about it some of you have been in that position but they re our friends they re our allies they re our partners for the future they re fighting for their democracy and they re fighting for the quality of their country s economy they hit a rough spot in the road and they borrowed less money than we authorized them to and they re paying it back more quickly and we re going to have a brighter future as a result of it and a safer more secure future and a better partnership and that s a good thing and perhaps even more importantly i learned early this morning that in five days from now if we can just get a couple of things done the parties in bosnia have agreed to a complete cease fire of all military hostilities they have furthermore agreed to come for what are called proximity peace talks i ll tell you about that in a minute that s a government language word to the united states to actually talk about hammering out a final peace agreement in later october so this is a good day for the cause of peace and prosperity in the world and in the united states proximity peace talks means that they ll all come to the same country to the same town to the same place but they ll let us talk to them and they won t talk to each other until but that s better than it s been and sooner or later we ll all find out we have more in common than we do dividing us and that s the lesson that we hope the american people keep in mind as we go through the next months and years as well i think it s fair to say that no president has ever enjoyed these award ceremonies more than i have because every year i get a chance to recognize the lifetime achievements of people who have been heroes to me in various ways men and women who unbeknownst to them have been my teachers my role models my inspiration because as president i am no different than any other american who enjoys literature or music or art and architecture and i have benefitted as so many of you have for the work of the people we recognize today these awards call attention to the lives of 17 individuals and one organization who have worked to enrich the lives of millions and millions of americans millions of people around the world and have made this country a stronger better richer place they are genuine examples of the american ideal and their work as a whole is a national treasure the arts and humanities have energized the american dream in so many ways the soul of our country has literally been shaped by the vision of our artists and the creativity of those whom we honor here today and many others in the past have helped america to become and to remain the freest most democratic nation in the world through the arts and humanities we assert both our oneness and our diversity and in celebrating this ideal we move forward together human creativity is clearly the most powerful force on earth and these awardees have exercised that power to the fullest they have woven for us a wonderful mosaic of music and dance art and literature to comfort and inspire a troubled world the importance of this work is more important now perhaps than ever before as our country and our world go through a period of unprecedented change changes that are both bringing us together and ripping up the bonds that have united us in the past in a nation as diverse as ours our arts and our humanities are bridges to help us reach out to one another and understand one another better projects like the neh s national conversation are truly helping us to accomplish this in the face of those who would divide us we must remain steadfast in supporting the arts and humanities as a way of coming together while we celebrate our diversity our support for them is not the preservation of some extravagant cultural elite it s the preservation of our cultural tradition for all americans and especially for those who unlike me and so many of us are not part of anybody s elite and they need their country to make sure they have access to the great heritage of america as well for the last 30 years the national endowment for the arts and the national endowment for the humanities have made the arts and humanities accessible to millions of our fellow citizens from schoolchildren to people in our inner cities to citizens in our most isolated rural communities many of whom would never have experienced these gifts had they not been offered so freely by our nation s artists and scholars and by their nation s government for a very small contribution both the nea and the neh have made vital contributions to the life of this nation each of the awardees we recognize here today has been a pioneer sometimes they ve made us laugh sometimes they ve helped us cry sometimes they ve challenged us to see the error of our ways sometimes they ve helped us to celebrate the strength of our goodness but always they have lifted us to higher ground i am honored to confer upon this wonderful group of americans the national medal of the arts and the charles frankel prize first the medal of the arts winners licia albanese the beginning of her career came as something of a surprise when the lead soprano in the milan production of madame butterfly fell ill during the performance this young singer was called upon to finish the opera her performance that evening brought the house down and a career that spanned more than 30 years was launched she went on to leading roles in operas all around the world always creating characters memorable not only for the arias they sang but for their intense vitality she had the rare ability to combine her great talent as a singer with equal talent as an actress it was once said that licia albanese had the two qualities which all great artists have simplicity and sincerity most recently she and her late husband founded the puccini foundation and she has worked tirelessly for the benefit of opera and its survival as an art form please welcome our first honoree licia albanese gwendolyn brooks began writing poetry when she was only 11 and at the age of 13 her first poem was published more than 75 others followed while she was still a teenager for four decades gwendolyn brooks has drawn on the black experience to create poetry that speaks to all of us in a frank and familiar way she served as the poetry consultant to the library of congress and today is the poet laureate of illinois in 1949 she was awarded the pulitzer prize for poetry she has kept alive the culture of her roots through the cultivation of her words gwendolyn brooks each painter performer or thinker here today has in one way or another served to create a legacy in the halls of american art their contributions shall be forever remembered in their fields and beyond but their work might never have seen the light of day were it not for generous committed and visionary citizens like two of those whom we honor iris and bernie cantor they have helped literally countless young artists to succeed they ve introduced countless young people to the joys of art the grants and gifts bestowed by the cantor family have built and filled the galleries and museums across our nation from the rodin sculptures given to new york s metropolitan museum of art to the grants for exhibitions at institutions such as our own arkansas art center to the sculpture exhibit here at the white house the cantor s love for art has known no bounds they ve done much to keep the arts alive in america and we owe them our thanks bernie could not be with us here today but hillary and i are delighted that our good friend iris cantor is here to accept the award on behalf of both of them iris and bernie cantor it s a special honor for me today to honor another husband and wife team that has shown that a commitment to the issues facing the world around us can be just as important a part of their lives and our lives as a commitment to the art one creates ossie davis and ruby dee met in 1946 performing in a broadway version of jeb turner i want to say that again they met in 1946 while performing in a broadway version of jeb turner a play in which she was violating the child labor laws at the time they were married a year later and they have performed individually and together now for almost 50 years while the stage and screen have kept them busy with such projects as a raisin in the sun the jackie robinson story and do the right thing they have continued to fight for others struggle for equality ossie davis and ruby dee have helped groups such as the naacp the urban league the aids projects like housing works in 1986 they produced a pbs tribute entitled martin luther king the dream and the drum their vision and their talent shine as brightly today as they did on that first day when they met on broadway so long ago and our country is very much a better place because of their life and their work having written no fewer than 100 pieces of music by the time he graduated from high school david diamond was well on his way to becoming one of america s most accomplished and disciplined composers very early in his youth his dedicated and commitment throughout his distinguished career has made him a master at the craft of creating music he s a proud adherent to the classical tradition and has made outstanding contributions to the field for more than 60 years now an inspiration both to those within his field as well as those who simply enjoy the music he creates david diamond truly exemplifies the spirit of american creativity mr diamond born in germany james ingo freed came to the united states as a nine year old refugee in 1939 after earning his architectural degree in 1953 he joined the offices of i m pei and partners widely published and respected within the world of architecture he has been the recipient of many major awards and most recently he has been justifiably celebrated for his creation of the magnificent for most of us overwhelming united states holocaust memorial museum an extraordinary structure that houses many painful memories but ultimately inspires its visitors to strive for a better future we re honoring him today for that monumental achievement but also for his lifelong dedication to his craft which continues in this city at this moment as the federal triangle building comes up and moves toward completion let s give him a warm welcome james ingo freed our next awardee obviously needs no introduction he was cited by the guiness book of records as the most honored entertainer in the world maybe we ought not to do this bob hope has more than 1 000 awards and citations for his humanitarian and professional success he s been honored more than i think five times by the motion picture academy including receiving an honorary oscar and the jean hersholt humanitarian award but i know something that some of you probably don t know he would far rather go down in history as a great golfer this morning when i saw him i said bob said well how s your golf game i said it s pretty good but it s too rainy today we can t play he said that s too bad i ll miss taking your money unfortunately that s not as funny as you think it is known the world over for his wonderful wit and sense of humor bob hope has brought laughter and pleasure and a happier outlook on life to generations of american citizens and especially to our troops in uniform all around the world he began entertaining american servicemen and women even before world war ii and he s done it in every conflict since in 1971 bob hope took his commitment to the people of america one step further by applying for a visa to laos to help negotiate the release of our prisoners there when he wasn t performing across oceans bob hope was making films and making people laugh here in america i can honestly say that those films are still making all the members of my family laugh every time they re shown on the television here but even with his busy career bob hope never lost sight of the truly important things in life helping people in need he s helped raise more than 1 billion for hospitals for the disabled the boy scouts and numerous other health and human service causes his annual golf tournament ever year which he still plays in directs and manages is an example of a man whose commitment to doing this kind of work truly is a lifetime endeavor he is perhaps the finest example of a successful american entertainer whose greatest performance is in what he does off stage every day i am so delighted that bob hope and his wonderful wife delores are both here today and i d like to ask bob now to come up and receive his award mr bob hope and i just wanted to thank him right now in person that s it that s it american art is not limited to portraits or landscapes or still lifes the broad range of subjects reflects the diversity of american experience roy lichtenstein is one of the pioneers who challenged convention and opened our eyes to new styles of expression in the early 60s he was one of just a small group to experiment with popular icons as subject material i hope that doesn t make a comeback his works are well known and have appeared in numerous exhibitions all around this country in addition roy was one of several artists commissioned to work on the new york state pavilion for the 1964 world fair i hope that the pioneering spirit exemplified by roy lichtenstein will always always live in the artists of america it s been a real honor for hillary and for me to get to know roy and his wife and his work and we re very grateful for it and glad to honor him here today roy lichtenstein for nearly four decades arthur mitchell has been a pivotal figure of american dance the protege of the great george balanchine he was the first african american dancer to become a principal artist in the new york city ballet after leaving the company in 1966 he went on to a career on broadway and as an artistic director but always always there was the call of his home harlem following the death of martin luther king jr in 1968 the next year arthur mitchell realized a dream by returning to harlem as the founder of the dance theater of harlem it is now recognized as one of the world s premiere dance troupes his dedication to young people and to dance are truly legendary we are honored by his presence here today and by the lifetime of creativity achievement he has demonstrated and most of all that he found a way to go back to his roots and lift people up with their god given talents mr arthur mitchell speaking of roots this next awardee is one from mine bill monroe is heralded as the father of bluegrass music a title that is a fitting tribute to his truly innovative and inventive style bluegrass is known for its free improvisation and in its way it embodies the essence of the american spirit bill s own roots stem from rural kentucky when he was just 10 years old he began to play the guitar and the mandolin along with his two older brothers charlie and birch he made music on the front porch of their family home later bill monroe and his blue grass boys established themselves as more than just a string band by blending different vocal harmonies with instrumental solos and over the years the band continued to gain recognition for its novel combination of instruments bill monroe was inducted into the country music hall of fame in 1970 and joined the international bluegrass music association s hall of honor in 1991 for people who follow and love that music bill monroe is truly an american legend he s added so much through is lifetime career to the rich heritage of this great nation s music mr bill monroe he said i m younger than bob hope but i d still like to say a thing or two thank you god bless you now it is a great honor for me to present the award we give every year to an arts organization as the largest and most comprehensive arts and education program in the entire nation urban gateways has been cited as a model by the national endowment for the arts in 1994 alone urban gateways reached over 1 million people and over 11 000 programs established in chicago area schools armed with the belief that exposure to the arts is crucial to personal development the program helps bridge the gap between chicago s vast cultural wealth and the huge number of children from disadvantaged communities at a time when so many of our children are being lost to the horrors of drugs and violence urban gateways has assumed responsibility for our young people s youth the organization gives them guidance and an important outlet for their creative energies here today to accept the award is urban gateways executive director sandra furey she has led urban gateways to the front lines in the campaign to keep the arts alive and the minds of our children and in so doing to keep our children alive and well and strong for the future of this great nation let s give her a big hand and now it is my honor to introduce the winners of the 1995 charles frankel prize the first winner bill ferris leads the sort of life i d like to lead if i had another one to live i mean he lives in the deep south he writes funny wonderful books and he s still trying to find out if elvis is alive he s probably done more than anyone else to bring national recognition and understanding to the field of southern studies as many of you know he seriously was one of the organizers of the recent highly successful elvis conference at the university of mississippi at oxford since 1979 he has directed the center for the study of southern culture at old miss where he s built southern studies curriculum into the most extensive in the nation he was a consultant to the movie the color purple and for nearly a decade until 1994 as the blues doctor he hosted highway 61 a weekly blues music program that airs on mississippi public radio his scholarship covers the fields of folklore american literature music and photography i want to thank him for bringing the culture and music of my homeland to all americans a remarkable person mr bill ferris too often television overlooks the lives and poignant stories of ordinary americans who may not show up on the evening news but whose extraordinary lives keep our country going charles kuralt recognized this problem nearly 30 years ago in 1967 he asked his boss to let him wander around the country for three months and the critically acclaimed show on the road was born through his travels charles kuralt brought hundreds of courageous americans into the living rooms of our country and in so doing he helped raise issues of social concern such as funding for education the problems of poverty the plight of small businesses but understanding the needs of others comes naturally to charles kuralt his father wallace was a north carolina social worker who worked all his life on programs that provided day care substance abuse counseling and planned parenthood services that spirit is alive and well in his son today the numerous awards and 13 emmys charles kuralt holds are but a small reward for what he has given to all the rest of us it s unfortunate that he was unable to attend today we send him our wishes for a very speedy recovery from surgery that he had earlier this week and we re glad that here to receive his award is his daughter lisa kuralt white david macaulay has written several books detailing the insides of complicated machines he can even explain the way things work we could use him around here in the next couple of weeks he has devoted his professional life to the investigation of architecture and mechanics his books have helped children and adults alike to understand the world s rich history of construction and architecture using detailed illustrations his books help to unfold the mysteries of both man and machine david macaulay s works serve as a bridge between humankind s earliest attempts at building and the most modern techniques of today his painstaking efforts have made knowledge and investigation more accessible to the rest of us who could never have understood them on our own but who s lives were richer and more enlightened and who s citizenship more informed as a result of his work mr david macaulay all of us know that history well written and well learned can be a great teacher it can demonstrate what we are capable of at our best and what we may do wrong at our worst in his remarkable body of work david macualay has shown us the true character of many of our country s most heroic figures and many of its most important events and eras from his wonderfully successful and enlightening biography on president truman to his look at the building of the brooklyn bridge to his work as the voice of the highly regarded pbs series the american experience david mccullough has given us a window into the lives of outstanding americans and important events his work emphasizes the value of history and our place in it along with his research he spends many hours working for the preservation of historic sites of public libraries and of other institutions across america which enable us to preserve and learn about our roots we should never forget what david mccullough has asked us to remember and we should never forget his incredible contribution in helping us to preserve that memory mr david macaulay bernice johnson reagon is perhaps best known as guiding spirit and resonant alto voice of sweet honey in the rock the famous a capella quintet she founded in 1973 singing an eclectic blend of gospel jazz folk and rhythm and blues the group has carried its message of world peace women s rights and racial harmony on tour throughout our nation and throughout the world if that were all she had done professor reagon would be worthy of this award but her creative energy is truly unlimited for nearly 35 years she s helped to preserve celebrate and illuminate the rich heritage of african american music as a civil right activist as a singer composer an author an historian a museum curator since 1993 she s been distinguished professor of history at american university here in washington her latest contribution to public understanding of african american music is the 26 part radio document wade in the water african american sacred music traditions which aired beginning in 1994 on national public radio stations nationwide she is a messenger of peace and i am deeply honored that she is with us today sweet honey in the rock for those of you who haven t heard it is a truly inspiring experience but the work of her life is even more inspiring let me thank again all the honorees and congratulate them thank all of you for coming let me thank all the distinguished saxophonists who came here to be with us today for their work thank you all for your contributions and your devotion to the american way of life god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton5 11 00 bill_clinton thank you very much i m really glad to see you i bring you greetings from hillary and our all grown up daughter who are otherwise occupied in new york today and she s doing very well and i m proud of her i think she s going to win on tuesday i want to talk today about today and tomorrow nostalgia will have to wait i do want to thank people who are up here on this stage for their friendship i thank mark pryor for taking on this campaign and for getting involved in public life in our state carrying on his great family tradition while his daddy becomes an ivy league egghead you notice i was the only one who was dumb enough to do that before i ran for office david waited until afterward i want to thank vic snyder who has been a great friend and supporter of mine in congress and a great representative for this district it s been my honor to vote for him every time he s been on the ballot i want to thank james lee witt and rodney slater they have represented our state so well in the cabinet they have represented our country they have done superb jobs and i m very proud of them we have a few other arkansans in the crowd i can t see everybody because the lights are real bright but i saw ken smith and jim bob baker out there they ve also done very well by our administration and there may be others but i m really and janis kearney i think is here who she keeps up with what i do every day and some day when i want to write my memoirs i ll be able to read what janis said i did and so when you read the book it may be what she said instead of me because i can t remember anything anymore but i want to thank all the people who are here i want to thank carol willis who has been down here working and who has been at the democratic party all these years and has done such a great job and i want to thank my buddy dale bumpers i finally got over being mad at him for leaving the senate you know dale and dave and i couldn t quite calibrate our respective schedules and biological clocks so we could go out together but i sort of envision a remake of the three amigos movie where just get on horses and ride out of washington and thank hallelujah we survived it all look i want to talk about this election a little bit arkansas is close polls say we re a couple points behind the people in this room could carry this state for al gore and joe lieberman if you want to bad enough and i just want to say a few things i appreciate what s been said but our public life is always about tomorrow and yet yesterday is an indicator of tomorrow as near as i can see the case that the other guys are making is well the economy is better crime is down welfare is down the environment is better education is improving more people than ever are going on to college we ve got a decline in the number of people without health insurance for the first time in 12 years so what we need to do is bag all those policies and do something entirely different and among other things now that we ve got this surplus i m going to give it all back to you right now and then some now as nearly as i can see that s the campaign and i don t think people understand that because as vic would say they run these ads on prescription drugs and i ll say more about that in the patients bill of rights and all that why is that because they know that they ve got a lot at stake in this election they know there are big differences and they know that the voters understand what the differences are and what the consequences are that al gore and joe lieberman will be elected and the democrats will win the house and the senate therefore there has to be a lot of muddying of the water and it s a lot easier to muddy things up than it is to clarify them plus which i think a lot of people kind of have forgotten what it was like eight years ago and sometimes it s harder to make a good decision in good times than it is in bad times there are younger voters that will be voting in this presidential election that don t even remember what it was like eight years ago even if they tried to think about it they would have no memory of it so here s what i would like you to say to people for the next three days the people in this room can carry this state for al gore if you want to bad enough and this state could literally determine the outcome of the election there are about 15 to 20 states that are literally within three points one way or the other and no one knows what s going to happen but what will happen is the people that want it bad enough will win that s what s going to happen now you know they want it bad enough because they don t like what we ve done on issues where the majority of the people agree with us and you know that they ll show up because they have been out a long time so you ve just got to decide whether you think this is worth fighting for because if you do we ll win here is what i would like you to say to people first of all the republicans believe that former president reagan is the source of all wisdom he said you should decide whether to continue the party in office based on whether you re better off today than you were eight years ago so by the reagan test al gore wins but the real issue is do you want to continue this prosperity and extend it to people and places that have been left behind now look i want i ve never heard this as clearly explained as i think it needs to be and the previous speakers talked about it a little bit but i want you to think about it people ask me all the time they come up to me and every time i go someplace in the country they say oh mr president you ve had such a nice good eight years and you ve had such a good economy what great new idea that you and bob rubin and lloyd bentsen bring to economic policy in washington and i always answer with one word arithmetic you know when i d normally tell them i was from arkansas and i had been governor 12 years and i always found arithmetic was good i didn t need algebra calculus trigonometry arithmetic we made the numbers add up and what getting rid of the deficit did was to drive interest rates down make it cheaper for people to borrow in the private sector it ballooned the stock market increased investment in business it created over 22 million new jobs and we did it in a way this is the most important thing to me it was good for everybody poverty went down average income went above 40 000 for the first time in the history of the country we all went forward together but it starts with arithmetic now you can argue that governor bush and al gore have different tax plans and which one is better most people in arkansas would be better off under the gore plan in the short run because it s more tilted toward middle class working people but forget about that let s just look at the cost and you can certainly argue about the social security plan about whether it s good or bad to privatize social security let s forget about that for just a minute the projected surplus is 2 trillion that sounds like a lot of money just say two i don t think it will be that big by the way because this congress put a lot of pork barrel spending in to get themselves re elected which i don t think they ll be successful in doing and i certainly hope not but give the republicans their number two now the republican tax cut costs one point three but because you re not paying down the debt as much it has extra interest costs that s another 300 billion so it s really one point six now they have admitted that their privatization of social security plan costs a trillion dollars and as the vice president said you can t spend the same money twice you can t give the same money to young people to put in the stock market and then give it to those of us who are over 50 when our social security checks are do so that s another trillion that has to come out of the surplus so that s one point six and one and then they promise to spend some money about half a trillion dollars that s point five here s the big issue in this election economically one point six plus one plus point five is three point one and three point one is bigger than two now i m telling you this is not rocket science you get by all the romance and all the rhetoric somebody up there has got to have arithmetic we brought arithmetic back to washington the republicans forgot about arithmetic for 12 years they quadrupled the debt and they want to go right back to the same economic policy they had before and it s higher interest rates which means trouble for all of you do you know the average the first people in america would pay on 100 000 mortgage today are saving 2 000 every single year in lower interest rates because we got rid of the deficit it is estimated that al gore s plan will keep interest rates 1 percent lower for a decade why because he pays off the debt now you know what that s worth three hundred and ninety billion dollars in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower college loan payments lower credit card payments lower business loans which means more businesses more jobs higher income and a bigger stock market that s how the rich get richer and the rest of us do too arithmetic now i m telling you you cannot go back to deficits without having higher interest rates and hurting ordinary people and weakening the overall economy so you ve just got to tell people this you can t you know things are going along so well they say it s your money which of course it is the whole deal is yours that s what the election is about so things are going along so well they say let s just take it all now and here is the vice president that they criticize for telling people what they want to hear and he said unh uh we re going to first pay down the debt then we re going to take what s left and we re going to invest in education health care and the environment and give the american people a tax cut we can afford for child care long term care the cost of college tuition and retirement savings that s what we re going to do but why are intelligent and very wealthy people like bob rubin still for al gore because they know they re better off with lower interest rates and working people having jobs and consuming and keeping this economy going now you can explain that to people anybody can understand that you can t have a tax cut this big a social security privatization program this big and promise to spend this kind of money when there is not that much money and the gore lieberman plan is to pay down the debt invest in the education of our children in health care in the environment in national security the things we have to have and give the people a tax cut we can afford we ll all be better off and you ve just got to ask people do you remember where we were eight years ago do you want to build on this prosperity and extend it to others or do you want to reverse it and go back to the previous economic program it s not like we don t have a test here we tried it our way for eight years before that we tried it their way for 12 years our way works better vote for gore you can say that and people will understand what you re saying the second thing i want to say is this country is not just better off this is a better stronger more united country and i think it s worth pointing out that there were specific serious policies of this administration that contributed to that the crime rate is at a 26 year low why because we ve got 100 000 police on the street we re putting another 50 000 on the street the brady bill kept guns out of a half million felons and stalkers and no matter what our friends at the nra say there hasn t been a single hunter miss a day in the deer woods or a single sports shooter miss an event in arkansas not one not one single day it s just all a bunch of hogwash but people are safer the environment the air is cleaner the water is cleaner 43 million more americans breathing clean air we have safer drinking water safer food 90 percent of our kids immunized for the first time and we ve set aside more land for permanent preservation than any administration since theodore roosevelt almost 100 years ago and the economy got better not worse now health care i remember their guy was saying all the time you know you had eight years you didn t do anything on health care and i thought there you go again when we took office al and i medicare was supposed to go broke last year broke out of money kaput busted it s now good for 25 more years and we ve added preventive care for prostate cancer and for breast cancer we have revolutionized care for diabetes the american diabetes association said what we did was the most important thing since the development of insulin we ve got the number of people without health insurance going down for the first time in 12 years because of the children s health insurance program we insisted be in the balanced budget act now there s a difference here and i ll come to that what does gore say pass a real patients bill of rights pass a medicare prescription drug program that all our seniors can afford to buy in to give all our kids health insurance and insure as many of the working parents as we can afford to insure education i notice that the republicans have quit saying there is an education recession so every now and then usually the facts have no impact on them i almost admire that about them never mind the facts they know what their line is and they just say it but they have kind of quit saying that but look at the facts here the dropout rate is down the high school graduation is up the college going rate is at an all time high thanks in part to the biggest expansion in college aid in 50 years but his is important the math the reading and the science scores are up there has been a 300 percent increase in the last three years in african american and hispanic kids taking advanced placement tests we have 800 000 kids now in after school programs that weren t there before we took office we ve got thanks to the leadership of our education secretary dick riley all but one state have academic standards now against which they measure their kids and systems for identifying failing schools and turn them around so the schools are getting better yes the work is done by the schools and yes most of the money comes from the states but the way we have spent this money has made a significant contribution to the continuing improvement of education in america so what s their answer to that change it all it s not like you don t have a choice here people need to know what the choice is on crime they have committed to repeal the 100 000 police program they say never mind the fact we ve got the lowest crime rate in 26 years the federal government has got no business doing that al gore he wants to put 50 000 more police on the street and keep going until america is the safest big country in the world on the environment al gore wants to build on what we ve done and he ll do even better because the economy is stronger they want to repeal my order setting aside 40 million roadless acres in the national forests and to weaken the clean air standards if you want to do that you should vote for them if you really believe that i ve hurt the economy so bad but if i was trying to hurt the economy with the environmental policies i have i ve done a poor job of it i made a pure mess of that if i was trying to mess the economy up with my environmental policy on health care they re against the patients bill of rights against the medicare drug program against our program to expand coverage oh yes they run these ads and they say we re for a patients bill of rights too what they don t say because they can t afford to say we re for as much of a patients bill of rights as the hmo lobby in washington will let us be for which means it s a bill of suggestions because if you get hurt you can t sue on the medicare drugs they say we re for medicare drugs too what they don t say is we re for as broad a plan as the big drug companies will let us be for so they don t lose their monopoly position and who cares if they leave half the seniors out who needs these drugs you need to tell people this they have a choice but if they want every senior in this country to have access to medicine if they want a real patients bill of rights if they want to keep improving the environment as we grow the economy if they believe that we ought to be making for example fuel out of farm products and biomass let me just tell you the reason ethanol never caught on even though we had a plant in arkansas way back in 1980 is that it takes seven gallons of gasoline to make eight gallons of ethanol but the department of agriculture is funding research that i believe will bear fruit in the next couple of years and when it happens they will crack the chemical mystery and it will be just like when you turn crude oil into gasoline then you ll be able to make eight gallons of ethanol and you won t even have to use corn you can use rice hulls you can use hay you can use any kind of biomass fuel with one gallon of gasoline and when that happens we ll all be going around getting 500 miles a gallon now al gore will fund that and push that and they won t you can choose but you talk about something that could revolutionize life for america s farmers change everything in rural america and in rural arkansas that s it so that s what gore wants to do they think we can drill our way out of the energy problem we ve got and in education they want to repeal our commitment to put 100 000 teachers in the classroom they say the federal government shouldn t be doing that all i know is that when we passed class size standards in arkansas in the early grades the achievement of our children went up and it is happening all over america we have the biggest number of kids in the history of our country and we need more teachers in those schools so you ve got a choice if you want to take down the 100 000 police and take down the 100 000 teachers and not have a real patients bill of rights and not have a medicare prescription drug program that helps all of our people and not have a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition and weaken the environmental standards you ve got a choice but if you kind of like having safer streets and a cleaner environment and knowing your national government is supporting school reforms that work and helping more people get access to health care while we grow the economy you ve got to vote for al gore and joe lieberman and you need to tell the american people that we ve got these two big questions do you want to build on the prosperity and keep it going do you want to build on the social progress and keep it going and there s huge choices and the third thing i d like to say is this and james lee said this it really meant a lot to me you know i ve watched rodney and james lee for the last 20 years and now they re maybe the two most popular people in the cabinet you know james lee is from yell county rodney is from lee county and i think you know one of the reasons that they do so well is they came from little towns and they learned to talk to people instead of talking governmentese and they understand human nature and here s james lee witt up here giving you a civil rights speech about how he has changed fema but what he proved is that fema could be both competent and reflective of america and the truth is the more reflective of america it got the more competent it got now that s the third big issue you know i tried to make every american even when they and on many occasions i m sure you disagreed with some particular decision i made i tried to make people feel at home with the white house to know that i was pulling for ordinary americans that everybody everybody in this country interests counted with the white house with the cabinet with the decisions that were made and i think it s really important that we keep moving forward to build one america that s why i m for this hate crimes legislation and for employment nondiscrimination that s why i m for stronger equal pay laws for women that s why i think it s important that the supreme court continue to protect civil rights and human rights this is a big deal in this election they re against the hate crimes legislation they re even against our attempts to strengthen the equal pay laws for women and most people believe the only issue at stake in the supreme court is a woman s right to choose that s not true that s at stake by the way and it will certainly change depending on whether al gore wins or loses this election you can go to the bank on that because there will be at least two appointments in the next four years but something that could have a more profound effect on america is that there is already a majority of 5 4 on that court that is determined to limit the ability of our national government to protect and advance the civil rights and basic public health safety and welfare of the united states of america already they have invalidated a provision of the brady law because it required local folks to help us check criminal backgrounds they invalidated a provision of the violence against women act the violence against women act because it required local government to do something to support our enforcement of that and in the last couple of weeks they invalidated an anti aids discrimination law now these are bills we even got the republicans in washington to vote for the supreme court is to the right of the republican congress already you have got to think about this and you ve got to talk to people about this people need to understand this is a big deal now it ought to be a happy election because nobody has to say anything bad about anybody else near as i can see that the vice president has never one time questioned the character or the integrity of his opponents i wish i could say the same thing for them about him but it still hasn t been too bad an election the only problem is people are fixing to go to the polls and there is still not absolute clarity about what the choice is what the consequences are to real people and their families and look this is a i don t know if we ll have another election in my lifetime where we ve got so much prosperity so much social progress the absence of crisis at home the absence of threats to our security abroad and i just want to echo one or two things that dale bumpers said first let me say a word about joe lieberman i ve known him for 30 years i met him when he was running for state senate and i went to law school in connecticut more than anybody else in the congress i think he clearly understands the approach that we brought to the country in 1992 whether you call it the new democratic approach or the dlc approach or whatever basically it was the idea that we would stop making false choices in washington and try to unify our country we could bring the deficit down and increase investment in education we could be pro business and pro labor we could be for a clean environment and for a growing economy but you ve got to be disciplined to do that and he understands as well as anybody that the real appeal of our opponents in this election is it s your money let s just take it all now even though as dale bumpers said it hasn t materialized yet and they want to talk about spending all this surplus right now it reminds me of those letters we used to get in the mail from ed mcmahon you know the sweepstakes letter you may have won 10 million if you went out and spent the 10 million you should vote for bush and cheney if not you should vote for gore and lieberman and what dale said about the vice president is absolutely right but let me say i think i know something about economic policy and i hope i ve learned something about decision making and about the world at large it matters whether you know about these issues it matters how hard you work you know this is a job it s not just a media event every day it s a job a lot of reasons that these things have piled up these good positive changes is that every day we had all these folks in the white house and all these folks in the cabinet and al gore and i we were working we treated this like a job we showed up and we worked like crazy for eight years i got the gray hair to prove it we worked at it it matters whether you work hard and it matters whether you can learn and whether you re curious and it also matters what kind of experience you have john kennedy said the presidency was preeminently a place of decision making al gore makes good decisions when he had to come off the campaign trail a few days ago we had all that trouble in the middle east and we were sitting in this room and for about 30 minutes he was asking questions from the various members of our national security team i thought to myself i would feel absolutely comfortable under any circumstances with any crisis in the world knowing that this man had to make the call and that s a big deal because it s still a world with real challenges out there so good man good decisions i think he will be a great president and you know as well as i do that if everybody understood the differences and the positions like i just explained them to you today we d win do you have any doubt of that okay so i ll say again you can win this election in arkansas for al gore and joe lieberman if you want to bad enough and you just think about what we ve got we ve got a chance as dale said that at least in my lifetime we ve never had and we may not have it again in our lifetime to literally build the future of our dreams for our kids so you just go ask people three questions do you want to keep this prosperity going and extend it to the people who have been left behind do you want to build on the progress of the last eight years do you want to keep doing it as one america keep bringing people together do you want to vote for somebody who is experienced and solid and proven who will work hard who knows a lot who understands the future you just have one choice it s not close but it needs to be clear you ve got two days to make it clear please go do it you ll be proud you did for the rest of your life thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton5 11 04 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you very much i was wondering whether after the results of tuesday s election the room would be organized into red and blue areas i want to thank john cushman for the introduction and for the work he did for the scouts and the work he s now doing on homeland security i may want to say a little more about that in a moment thank you harry frampton for inviting me thank you rick rosen for your service and thank you ladies and gentlemen of the urban land institute for the work that you do to build communities that people can live in and enjoy and work in and hopefully grow grow closer together in i ve been excited about the progress of the community where my office is up in harlem we ve made a lot of advances there in the last couple of years and i started along with booz allen hamilton the managing partner here reggie van lee of small business initiative up there to try to help make better use of the small businesses there and help them to become more profitable it s worked so well we ve expanded it into brooklyn the bronx centered at the stern school of business at new york university and we re now trying to take it out across the country so i m very very interested in the kinds of things that you do this is the first speech i ve given since the election indeed except for a couple of brief campaign appearances it s the first speech i ve given since i narrowly dodged a heart attack as i was about to leave on a six nation 21 day tour of asia it s a funny thing you know when you i think it s highly unlikely that i could have completed that without having a serious incident so i feel very blessed and when you get a second chance at life you have to decide what in the wide world it means and what you re going to do with it i think that the best i can say is that i have had the most fortunate of lives and i think whatever time i ve got left i need to find a way to give back to my country and to the world in a couple of weeks i m going to dedicate my library down in little rock which will essentially be the first major museum in america chronicling our transformation into the 21st century what were the new threats we faced what were the new opportunities we had how can we best deal with it i tried to make it a genuine educational institution and not just a personal shrine to the eight years that my team and i did our best for america my foundation here as you heard tries to work on essentially on the millennium goals on trying to deal with global and american poverty with the health problems especially with aids where we re now working in china and india and five african countries and all the caribbean we have succeeded in lowering the cost of generic aids medicine by 70 and the testing equipment by 70 so i expect to be full time at this starting in january and i hope we re going to save a couple of million lives in the next few years we re working to promote the education thank you we re working to promote education projects here at home and around the world and as has been said citizen service and associated with my library we ll have a graduate program at the university of arkansas in public service really the first of its kind in the country so i m i hope that more and more young people will believe in the political system and believe in public service whether they get the outcome they want in particular elections or not i m not sure this election didn t raise as many questions as it answered but i thought i would use it as a starting point to talk about where i hope america and the world will go there were two really good things about this election that all americans should take heart in first is we had a really good turnout the first turnout in excess of 50 i think since 1992 and an even bigger one the second is it was basically generated the old fashioned way at the grassroots which i also believe is good i heard ralph reed the republican activist in a television kind of debate interview with my friend harold licky say that we d almost gotten back to pre television style grassroots voter contact i think that s partly true and part of it is due to the explosion of alternative communications options over the internet but for whatever reason that s good we also had an unprecedented number of people for both parties giving small amounts of money repeatedly again over the internet so the political system is alive and well this is the first election in four in which the democrats did not win the popular vote and the election basically was a shift for president bush moved from 49 in 2000 to 51 in 2004 so i don t think there s really been enough time for anybody to offer definitive conclusions but i know a little bit about this and so i thought i would just say a thing or two that i hope will be fair to both of them first of all after 9 11 we were united as never before as a country and had the political climate maintain that sense of national unity in purpose and the focus on the hunt for bin laden and the dismantling of terrorist networks now this probably would not have been an election at all it would have been an election decided somewhere in the 55 to 60 range because we all just wanted to go forward on september 12th at least those of us who were here in new york city we didn t care about party politics or anything else we just wanted our country to be together and go forward a decision was made by the administration to use that moment to try to implement an agenda that pushed the country further to the right and that divided the world and it worked i suppose at least in the short run but it made a competitive race possible in 2004 especially after the 2002 congressional elections in which people like senator max cleveland in georgia who lost two legs and an arm in vietnam were pictured in ads along with saddam hussein as traitors to the country because they wanted minor changes in the homeland security bill so what happened well the republicans had a clear message a good messenger a great organization and a great strategy the democrats had a rough time after senator kerry was in effect won the nomination and were all but finished when both conventions were over and then john kerry bravely i think and almost single handedly put himself back in the race with his performance in the debates so after that we had an election all the polls said the election was close and it turned out to be and no one could quite the reason all those polls were in conflict and the reason the exit polls were confusing is that when you have a close race with a new turnout that is with all these new voters all the polls you read were right the ones that said kerry was ahead the ones that said bush was ahead the ones that said it was even they were all right in other words they correctly measured the people they talked to all the exit polls were right the problem is no one knew exactly what the pool would be and of the new registrants there were more democrats than republicans but in the aggregate turnout of voters the increase was more or less the same which means the republicans did a better job of turning out voters who were already registered who hadn t voted before and when you saw like those maps of ohio or central florida that s by and large what you were seeing and all those little towns in rural areas all across america the strategy was clear and simple basically they worked on turnout on their base and then the president as candidate tried to appear more moderate to win the swing voters if you look at what moved in the last two elections about 1 of the vote change was due to increased performance among hispanic voters who voted on national security and where some of them were culturally conservative and about 2 was due to a big increase in performance among women chiefly white married women who had been the soccer moms of 1992 and 1996 who turned out to be the security moms of 2004 and were basically they were the like undecided voters that swung at the end to president bush because they decided they didn t want to change horses in the middle of the fight against terror and the management of problems in iraq now what you had therefore was it was fascinating and i was going out to in the last days of the campaign you could sense this the people just didn t know what to do and there was so that you had a majority a substantial one who was in theory open to changing presidents and a substantial one that was reluctant to change horses in the middle of a terrorism stream and the people were at odds and the conflict manifested by that 3 or 4 of undecided voters at the end was really something that a lot of people felt who had already made up their mind to vote for president bush or senator kerry as so often happens and you saw of course in this campaign there were kerry got out president bush got his share of bad breaks with bad news coming out of iraq but they weren t nearly as significant in my opinion as the impact adverse impact that senator kerry suffered because of the massachusetts supreme court case on gay marriage and the emergence inexplicable emergence of osama bin laden at the end of the campaign because it sort of made the security issue the issue again whether he did it with any intent whether he was trying to help one or the other who knows i actually finally got the full text of what he said confirming once again to me that he is a brilliant formidable and deeply troubled and twisted adversary but if you re interested in it you can get it off the internet now you ought to get the whole statement of everything he said i think it is by and large a mistake for our party at least to sit around and you know whine about this that or the other thing and worry about the tactics fundamentally we ve had four elections now where we re competitive before that from 1968 until 1992 we only won once and we got beat bad all the other times and we won once in 1976 by one point after watergate so for those of you who are democrats out there you shouldn t be all that discouraged because you might be interested to know the only demographic group that john kerry picked up strength in over al gore and me was white men with college degrees and higher incomes it s really interesting groups that are normally republican but are much more fact based than faith based in their politics they were interested in evidence they were concerned about the deficit they were concerned with the drift in the economy they were concerned about the management of security affairs and they listened to people like all these generals and admirals that endorsed kerry and they thought it made sense so kerry actually had gains among white men with college degrees and higher incomes that s the only demographic group that we held steady in all the ones i didn t mention so basically what you still have is a country that s pretty evenly divided and even more sharply divided over the culture wars than we were in 1968 when they propelled mr nixon to the presidency and so i think that this election presents great opportunities for president bush and great opportunities for the democrats and the two are not necessarily in conflict in fact the country would probably be better off if both of them took advantage of their opportunities the president has a chance to get a lot done in his second term legislatively not simply because he has a republican majority but because he s got an agenda and he ll work at it i had a republican congress my second term and we got an enormous amount done so he can do a lot and some of these things need tending to this is not popular maybe for a democrat to say i think we need some sort of legislation to deal with the medical malpractice problem and i think it s very important to i think it s very important to recognize what the problem is it s not just that the malpractice premiums are 1 or half or whatever they are total healthcare costs they re a huge percentage of most doctors incomes and they affect the way medicine is practiced in a way that s almost certainly bad for the patient they also drive young people get the young people away from certain areas one of my daughter s best friends is a student at columbia medical school and so i see her from time to time with chelsea and i i always get her to tell me about medical school and how it works what they re doing they go around and they do this specialty then that specialty then the other one and you know she s a brilliant young woman and she loves ob gyn but she doesn t think she could possibly afford the malpractice premiums for years after she gets out of medical school that s a travesty and i could give you lots of other examples the question is you know what should we do and the contribution democrats ought to make to this is to make sure that what we re trying to do is to alleviate the real problem and not necessarily do everything the insurance companies want to do which i think would lead to some people who are the genuine victims of gross negligence not being compensated and made whole that could also put bad incentives into the medical system there are ways to do it georgia adopted a tort reform law not too long ago that some of my friends have said is working pretty well to manage bogus lawsuits and bogus defenses so we ought to look at this but this is something that needs to be done we are going to have to do something about social security and the option that i left on the table is no longer available when i left office with the projected surplus the way it was my recommendation but i couldn t get the congress to adopt but we left it out there and we left the money there to pay for it was to use the savings on interest from running a surplus instead of a deficit to put back into the social security trust fund why because from the 80 s until the middle of my second term when we began to run a surplus we had been spending the social security trust fund and basically just giving them government guarantees that we d put it back in so i thought we ought to put it back in plus the interest savings and that would have taken social security out to 2053 beyond the life of all but the most fortunate baby boomers i mean you know now that i had this operation i may live to be 107 but it seems unlikely i so that option was taken off the table by the passage of the two big tax cuts now here s the problem in theory it would be a good thing to give younger social security recipients the option of investing some of their payroll say taking 2 of their payroll investing it in some mutual fund and you could you know you could actually constrain the choices if you re worried about them making imprudent choices you could say like in the federal employee retirement plan we had four options three different mutual fund like options and one standard social security like option invest in government securities where it s a guarantee but a lower return the problem with that is that running the deficit we re running when you start to let people take their 2 out you will diminish the funds we have to pay current retirees and all estimates are it would create about a trillion dollar hole so how will that hole be filled we could just borrow the money the way we re borrowing on the 400 and whatever billion dollar deficit we ve got but if we do it will put further pressure on the dollar and to keep the dollar up it will put further pressure on interest rates which will be bad for all of you but there has to be some way of dealing with this because otherwise we ll start to pay out more than we re taking in in about 15 years and we ll just flat run out of money now by i think 2038 or something i don t think they ve quite lost all the time we had built up but this is an opportunity to do something and to just totally level with the american people and tell them what the actuarial problems are tell them what the money issues are and figure it out i should also remind you though if you take all this money that now is going into buying government securities and you give it back to people and they invest it for their own welfare they may earn a higher return because over time returns from the stock markets are always better than guaranteed return from government securities but then that money will have to be replaced since we re running such huge deficits every year which may mean that we ll have to raise the interest rates on government securities to get people to invest in them which could aggravate our deficit problems i m just trying to say this is not a simple problem therefore it cries out for a bipartisan solution free of rancor and rhetoric and animus and it s an opportunity i think there will be a tremendous opportunity to make progress on the middle east peace in the next four years if mr arafat passes away is permanently incapacitated if the palestinians can settle on a single leader first of the fatah movement the arafat movement maybe even branching out into the other palestinian factions especially if such a person could be democratically elected then the burden would shift to the israelis to figure out how to engage with such a person and they know what a peace deal looks like that s the good news about all the work we did back in 2000 everybody knows more or less what we got to do the question is do they trust each other to keep their word and do they have the capacity to implement their commitments so that s why i say it s important for the palestinians to elect a solid leader you could elect someone who had no swat and he could be absolutely trustworthy but have no capacity so you have to have trustworthiness and capacity for the israelis to give up the land necessary to make a final peace so that they can share the future together but it s an enormous opportunity and it wouldn t surprise me if we didn t have a peace agreement that looked more like more or less like where we were in 2000 somewhere in the next four years and it s really worthy of our best efforts and it ought to be put entirely beyond politics just because it s the right thing for the world it would also take an enormous sting out of the impulse for terror now for the democrats there s a lot of opportunity both political and substantive in the last two years they ve finally for the first time in modern times equaled the republicans in their ability to raise money and in their technological capacity now they have to integrate their grassroots effort with the parties operation the same way the republicans have and they need a clear national message and they have to do this without one big advantage the republicans have which is they won t have a theological message that basically paints the other guys as evil if you read what these people said in these little towns in ohio that went five to one for president bush i mean they think those of us that didn t agree with him are aliens from another planet it s very interesting a friend of mine told me that one of her coworkers was a conservative christian evangelical who canvassed in one of these communities in eastern pennsylvania for john kerry and she was surprised he was for kerry so she said why are you he said because i think his policies are more moral and more pro life but he said i had to talk for 45 minutes to these people before they d even listen to me because they have had decades in which they ve been told that the democrats are anti family anti morality and i said well what you know was it all he says it s abortion gay marriage the whole thing so and this guy told her he said you know it s almost like we re young people and we go to two different schools and the democrats are rich snobby litists and they re not so they got to cheer for their team no matter who s on the field or whether they foul or clip it s like a tribalism almost we can t really go very far in america with that that s what we re trying to combat everywhere else in the world but it is our fault if we let it happen you know if we let people believe that our party doesn t believe in faith and family and doesn t believe in work and freedom and that there is no moral content to policies that aggravate inequality and are not fair and deprive people of opportunity that s our fault i always tell people the republicans are in business to beat us that s their job but if we help them that s our fault and you know we have to be present with a compelling message in those small towns and rural areas maybe i feel more strongly about this because i was born in a small town and i grew up in a state that s now supposed to be a permanent red state they gave me a majority both times i ran for president that wasn t all that long ago there are people who are willing to discuss this but for example this is kind of interesting when i was president we had an office of religious affairs that reached out to muslims jews bahais everybody and also had regular contact with the evangelicals i said that i was pro choice but i wanted to make abortion more rare we had a set of policies designed to do it we made adoption much more attractive we made it we removed the disincentives of young single mothers to leave their parents in order to get aid so they could stay home stay in school raise their kids for those who did we set up these began to set up this network of second chance homes and in welfare we actually started working with faith based initiatives through the welfare system now it might surprise you to know that in the eight years i served the number of abortions went down somewhere between 22 and 25 and they ve gone up again since i left office i bet it would shock people in all those places that think we re anti life to know that but if we don t make the argument we can t complain if we re demonized and cartoonized and turned into two dimensional aliens you know if you don t have a conversation you can t it s like if you lay out a bunch of nails on a kitchen table and you put a big old magnet over here and there s nothing else there all the nails will go to the magnet if you put an even smaller one over here you ll pick up some of the nails and it s just crazy for one party our party to not really have engage people in this conversation on the gay marriage thing i think we had a totally defensible position against the national constitutional amendment marriage has been a matter of religious doctrine in state law for over 200 years ever since the beginning of this republic there has been one one state supreme court to say that gay marriage should be legalized there were 11 measures on the ballot this time i d say at least ten of them passed restoring the traditional definition of marriage and massachusetts will have it on the ballot next year and as far as i know i m almost positive this is right it s the earliest they can have it john kerry said he was going to vote for it but he only said it once or twice not 3 000 times in rural communities all across america the point i m trying to make is and you may be pro gay marriage but whether you re pro or anti we should engage this debate we shouldn t run from like denial is not an option if there s a pink elephant in the living room you shouldn t keep moving the chairs hoping you won t have to sit on its feet you have to be able as a people to discuss this i find that people most people i know are hungry to sit around and talk about this with people who don t necessarily agree with them most americans don t live totally by rationality and don t judge their lives totally by their economic standing i hardly know anybody who does and yet that s the cartoon that s up there on the wall in all those little old towns that buried us in this election so most of those folks still won t vote for us because we have honest disagreements but some will if we engage them finally let me say this i think the most important thing is what is the framework within which we should evaluate all these policy decisions is it a good or bad thing for us to have a 400 billion dollar deficit more or less permanently for example my framework is simple it has basically four or five points one is the fundamental fact of the present moment is that we live in an interdependent world in an increasingly diverse country secondly we do have to have a security system because the nation state is under assault from non state actors primarily from terrorists and affiliated groups organized criminals the people who would seek to make very powerful weapons out of chemical biological and nuclear substances and therefore we need to have a real strategy for dealing with it that s effective and i agree when president bush said we ought to fight it abroad and not just at home i agree with that that you can argue about the details of iraq but that s true i mean one of the things i ll tell you one thing that he and i agreed on and therefore it never got any publicity somebody asked me about anytime we do anything together in this i mean all the democrats and all the republicans agree people ask me all the time about this bracelet this bracelet comes from columbia and it was given to me by a bunch of children who sing and dance for peace they live on the edge of an area dominated by the narco traffickers 35 of the land mass of the oldest democracy in latin america columbia is dominated by the narco traffickers and their terrorist supporters can you imagine how we would feel in america if even one of our states even the least populous had a third of it s land mass dominated in essence by a foreign power and since 2000 on a totally bipartisan basis we ve been helping them with something called plan columbia so we do need to do more of that and there are lots of things we can do in homeland security those of you who come from urban areas you should demand that we don t let another year go by before we re checking a minimum of 10 and preferably 15 of the cargo containers at our ports and airports there s all kinds of security evidence that if you check 15 20 maybe as little as 10 you can have a deterrent affect on people inserting dangerous substances into those cargo containers you can t do it where we are now at 5 so there s lots of stuff to do but the that s the second point the third point is we cannot kill jail or occupy all our adversaries we can t do it in an interdependent world you need open borders you need easy travel you need the mobility of money you need the mobility of technology you need to be able to go someplace else in a hurry you need for people to be able to come see you and not be hassled to the point of being enchained at airports therefore we have to have a world that is not only more secure but a world in which we have more partners and fewer terrorists and we have to work therefore on the whole set of millennium goals on fighting poverty and disease and ignorance and the fact that one in four people don t have access to clean water and the absence of peace in parts of the world and the need for greater cooperation institutionalized cooperation on problems like global warming now in a world like this what is the role of government i would argue you don t need a big bureaucratic top down government in the way we needed in the industrial era but you do need a strong government who s job it is to create the conditions and give people the tools to build their own lives their family lives their work lives their community lives and finally what are the animating values of an interdependent world and a diverse america that there ought to be shared responsibilities shared opportunities a shared sense of community where everybody values work and family and faith and the freedom to have your own faith and to search for the truth as you see it a sense of fairness can only come from real sharing and i think that you know my party has a great opportunity because we ve always believed in this stuff we just need to make it clear and then we can stick our policies in there and it will make some sense you won t just have a laundry list of policies but the point i want to make to all of you is whichever way this election had gone the fundamental realities in the modern world won t change we are an interdependent world we do need greater security but we can t kill jail or occupy all our adversaries therefore we have to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists and while we re doing it we ve got to make america stronger at home and the only way we can possibly do it is to have a country where we share the responsibilities and the benefits and a sense of community so i hope that we ll be able to diminish the culture wars not by getting people to give up what they think is right and wrong but by getting them to listen to one another and look at one another as people again and not cartoons thank you dem wjclinton5 11 98 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen good evening the good news is this is the only speech you have to listen to tonight and i want to first of all welcome all of you back to the white house to all of our honorees and their families and friends who are here today let me say for hillary and me this is a day we look forward to every year but today was an especially wonderful day and as each of our honorees came through the line tonight they all commented on how they felt that they were in quite good company today being honored and i agree with that as i see so often when it comes to maintaining stability in the global economy or working for peace in bosnia or kosovo or northern ireland or the middle east perhaps more than any other time in our over 220 year history the entire world now looks to the united states to exert responsible leadership in technological innovation preventing war promoting peace promoting prosperity and freedom and democracy i think it is worth asking ourselves tonight when the historians and novelists the poets and painters look back on america in the last years of the 20th century on the verge of a new millennium what will they say of that kind of work and that kind of leadership for clearly the world does look to us for cultural leadership the influence of our books our movies our music our plays have never stopped at our borders but now thanks to technology they reach more rapidly into even the remotest corners of the world for example in bhutan a himalayan country so isolated just 5 000 people actually visit it every year you can still find some of this year s most popular hollywood blockbusters for better or worse hillary s book it takes a village has been translated into a myriad of languages not just french or spanish or german but bulgarian even kazakh more than ever before the world is listening to what america has to say as our leading artists and intellectuals you will have to answer it is a tremendous opportunity and an enormous responsibility so tonight i challenge you to rise to this task and to relish it and through your art your music your ideas to make this time not simply a golden age for the united states but a time of greater understanding enlightenment and yes enjoyment for the entire world thank you very much dem wjclinton5 12 99 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you all and welcome to the white house to a wonderful array of artists who are in this room and members of the cabinet and others who have come to be part of this happy evening we share this evening with honorees who have touched our lives and ennobled our nation recently hillary and i went to greece and i had the opportunity early in the morning to go and visit the parthenon a magnificent almost unbelievable architectural creation given what had to be done to make it work and the materials and instruments that were available at the time the parthenon was the brain child of the great statesman pericles pericles said this to his soldiers in the peloponnesian war we shall not be without witness there are mighty monuments to our power which will make us the wonder of this and succeeding ages as the curtain falls on this remarkable century at the dawn of a new millennium it is fitting that we americans should ask ourselves what will be the monuments that we offer up to the gaze of succeeding ages today we are blessed with unprecedented prosperity and military might but i believe it will be true of us as it was pericles athens that the monuments of power that truly define sustain us and last throughout the ages are those that spring from the mind and the spirit just as we remember the great philosophers and playwrights the historians and architects of ancient greece so tonight hillary and i are proud to welcome you here to pay tribute to these five remarkable artists and creators they come from many places their immense talents range over a wide creative landscape in giving the world new ways to understand the human experience and celebrate the human spirit they are all leaving their own enduring monuments for succeeding ages and now to present them four americans and one scotsman who tonight i declare an honorary american citizen it seems appropriate to do on the 10th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall after all we couldn t have won the cold war without you in 1940 borge rosenbaum of copenhagen sought safe passage to america just ahead of the nazi advance the united states consul who had seen his comedy show granted him a visa on one condition he had to promise to continue his career in america with just 20 in his pocket he arrived in the united states changed his name and began to learn english by watching gangster films soon victor borge landed himself a regular gig on bing crosby s radio show eventually this led to the longest running one man show in broadway history and 40 years of travel across america europe and asia perfecting the fine art of playing brilliant piano in the clumsiest possible way who would ever have thought that one person could be both a virtuoso pianist and an ingenious comic combining the two into one mischievous uproarious show perhaps the common link between victor borge s music and his comedy is his uncanny gift for improvisation once when a pesky fly would not leave him alone he so skillfully incorporated the fly into his performance that all the audience were absolutely sure he had trained it to cooperate at age 90 victor borge continues to share his gifts with the world not only through comedy piano and conducting the world s major orchestras but also through the generous scholarship fund he created in gratitude to those who risked their lives to save scandinavia s jews tonight we are deeply grateful to one long forgotten united states consul and to the great dane who has kept america rolling with laughter for so very many years ladies and gentlemen victor borge you know you ought to hang onto that thought in about 14 months people will be asking that question for real steven spielberg once said there are only seven genuine movie stars in the entire world today of course his list includes sean connery one of the most charismatic and commanding actors ever to arch an eyebrow on the silver screen he rose from humble beginnings in working class edinburgh even today under the tux he wears better than any man alive he still sports with pride a scotland forever tatoo on his arm he left school at age 13 helped support his family as a concrete mixer brick layer sailor steel bender coffin polisher and weight lifter all jobs that prepared him for a lifetime of diverse and wonderful roles after making 007 the most famous character in the world sean connery went on to broaden his reach with brilliant performances in movies such as the man who would be king the name of the rose the russia house and the untouchables for which he was hailed as another olivier among his numerous honors he s earned an academy award a british academy fellowship the french legion of honor edinburgh s prestigious freedom of the city award and very important to me a fairly low handicap on the golf course to this distinguished list tonight we add kennedy center honors and we thank him for four decades of unforgettable masterful contributions to the world of film ladies and gentlemen sean connery on may 4 1971 in a 16 minute solo of indescribable beauty and emotional force judith jamison vaulted into the realm of legend the solo was called cry and alvin ailey created it just for her rarely if ever had the artistry of choreographer and dancer come together in such an elemental spiritual way in the chronicle of her career that night was just one in a long list of soaring triumphs for judith jamison after a childhood filled with patient and exacting study of dance her big break came in 1964 i taught a class of ordinary students the famed choreographer agnes de mille reported but there was this one astonishing girl miss de mille brought judith jamison to new york to perform with the american ballet theater a year later alvin ailey asked her to dance with his company for the next 15 years she premiered new roles set new standards of excellence and earned unprecedented global acclaim her achievements as an ailey dancer would be enough to earn judith jamison a place here tonight but she has always sought new ways to stretch and extend herself and those around her from the ailey company she went on to star on broadway choreograph modern dance and opera and found her own dance company in 1989 she returned to the ailey company to take over as artistic director and fulfill her mentor s dying wish in this role she has preserved ailey s legacy while creating transcendent new works cultivating a new generation of stars bringing dance back to the people in her words and i might add greatly inspiring many of our daughters tonight we thank her for a lifetime of breaking down barriers and forever lifting up the grace and beauty of american dance ladies and gentlemen judith jamison after six years in the navy during world war ii a sailor named jason robards jr used the gi bill to enroll in the american academy of dramatic arts he got some parts and drove a cab to support his family then at the age of 33 he auditioned for the lead in the iceman cometh with the esteemed director jose quintero from the moment robards began to read the part simply belonged to him as quintero later remarked i came to see that jason was the greatest young actor in the world jason robard s authority as an artist only grew with age after his chilling performance in iceman he starred in the broadway premier of o neill s long day s journey into night securing his standing as the finest interpreter of our finest playwright he went on to earn the highest honors on the world s great stages including of course the kennedy center where he presided at the groundbreaking and shined in the very first play the center produced of course he has also enjoyed remarkable success as a screen actor and won back to back academy awards but performing under the stage lights of the theater drawing us into the shadows and occasionally even into the sunshine has always been his first love he took possession of the american theater in 1956 and he has worked and reigned there magnificent and vulnerable ever since ladies and gentlemen jason robards jr when stevie wonder was a baby in inner city detroit his mother dreamed of carrying her son to the holy city of jerusalem in hopes that he would gain his sight what she could not yet know was that her child had already been profoundly blessed blessed with prodigious awe inspiring inner vision and musical talents that must have come from the almighty himself by the age of eight stevie was composing for piano and mastering the harmonica and drums at age 13 he got the world clapping and stomping with his breakout single fingertips part 2 his very first record went gold at the ripe old age of 18 he came out with his first album of greatest hits we all know stevie s songs and we all try to sing them even for those of us who sing off key they re all in the key of life at times his songs seem to be in the very air we breathe always part of the sunshine of our lives over these past 30 years as he has composed and performed these songs stevie has also helped to make dr king s birthday into a national holiday to tear down the walls of apartheid to alleviate hunger to stem youth violence and in so many other ways to compose the remaining passages of dr king s unfinished symphony along the way i might add he has also been a perfectly wonderful friend to hillary and to me and to vice president and mrs gore for which we are very grateful so tonight we honor the prodigy who became a prophet for using his divine gifts to move the world to sing and to act ladies and gentlemen mr stevie wonder well there they are ladies and gentlemen victor borge sean connery judith jamison jason robards and stevie wonder in them we find comic invention rugged strength towering grace inner fire and music that flows down like a mighty stream tonight the united states salutes them all god bless you and god bless america thank you very much dem wjclinton5 2 93 bill_clinton let me say first of all welcome to the white house mayor jackson i saw your brother earlier today at the signing of the family and medical leave act and he was bragging on you said you re now as thin as he is i assured him i would still be able to recognize you when i saw you this has been a wonderful day here at the white house congress adjourned but only after passing the family and medical leave act we had a great signing this morning it was a great bipartisan effort about a third of the republicans in the senate voted for it and it was a really good way to start the day i m glad you re here i know you ve been meeting with secretary cisneros who s one of your own there are times when we meet when i can t tell whether he s changed positions or not which i suppose from your point of view is a good thing most of you in this room i know well i ve spent a lot of time in your communities and you have played a major role in my political education i assure you that i think every day about many of the places we ve been and the things we ve seen and the things i have learned from you i think that the time i spent in our country s cities in this last election that was in many ways the most instructive time that i spent and one of the things that impressed me so much is that so many things against all the odds are being done that work and i want you to help me now figure out how to make those things that work the rule rather than the exception in american life i told the governors when they came in here and spent some time with me earlier this week on the subject of health care impressed me so much is that so many things against all the odds are being done that work and i want you to help me now figure out how to make those things that work the rule rather than the exception in american life i told the governors when they came in here and spent some time with me earlier this week on the subject of health care that if somebody asked me to name my greatest failing as a governor after 12 years it was that i never could quite figure out a way to make the exception the rule to take those things that worked and make them work everywhere in that connection i have been working with secretary cisneros and have sent after working it out with him a directive to him today to deal with a number of specific things that i know are important to all of you first to establish a weekly mechanism for communication with the state and local leaders of our country on issues of housing and urban development and i hope we ll have a chance to talk about both of them because they are related but they aren t the same second to try to expedite the programs that are already there now to unclog some 6 billion that have been in inexplicably tied up in the pipeline of the federal government that have already been appropriated to speed up by three to four months the processing of the over 3 billion in public housing funds that are available and to try to accelerate the real implementation of the home program where there s 2 5 billion in largely unmoved funds because of the administrative system of this department has been largely paralyzed i told henry when i asked him to take this position that there was some risk because of the pall which had been cast over hud and the problems of past years and because there had been a lot of rhetoric but not enough action out of the department in recent years we re going to do what we can to marry rhetoric and action we don t promise to shut up but we promise to try to do some things i also want to tell you that i m going to do the best i can in this upcoming stimulus and economic package to do what i said i would do to bring down the deficit but to increase investment at the same time in ways that will make available more funds for the cities i remember mayor white when we were in cleveland with congressman stokes you said you thought we ought to increase the community development block grant funds because you could move those more quickly to create jobs and there will be a fairly sizable increase in that in the proposed stimulus package to try to help you create jobs let me just make a couple of general remarks about where we are on this whole economic approach and then i d like to hear from you and i d like to just be as informal in conversation as possible the economic news is good but mixed and incomplete that is starting in the last quarter we have begun to have two pieces of good economic news one is that productivity is increasing and that s good companies are making more money they re figuring out how to compete in a tough international environment two is that there s a lot more economic activity around housing as low interest rates finally are letting millions of americans refinance their home mortgages others get into buying homes and that s all been good then since the election there have been two good pieces of economic news that i think the election can fairly claim some credit for one is that consumer confidence started going up in november and exploded in december and it s going to be strong in january the second is that the financial markets generally are upbeat about the direction that our administration has outlined which means they take us seriously that we re going to try to do what many say is impossible which is to increase investment and reduce the debt at the same time so that s the good news the bad news is that in this economy the downsizing of big firms is continuing apace it started in the 1980s when every year of the 1980s the fortune 500 together reduced employment in the united states by about 400 000 people per year big big reductions in employment in most years that was offset by job increases in small and medium sized companies now that is not happening even though this recovery is in place so you have this strange thing where the economic indicators are going up in the last quarter like crazy but the unemployment rate is higher than it was at the depth of the recession and for 14 months we ve had a national unemployment rate over 7 percent why is that i think there are several reasons but let me just say there are plainly three one is that small business cannot afford to hire new workers and make up the slack from big business cuts because of the exploding costs of health care two is that small businesses that want to hire workers can t get credit because of the credit crunch which is more heavily concentrated in some places than others and particularly in california and southern florida in texas but generally across the country the third is that the defense cutbacks have accelerated the loss of high wage manufacturing jobs without any offsetting industrial strategy or conversion strategy in america which has been particularly devastating for southern california for connecticut and for one of two other places but has been generally felt across the country so the first thing i ve got to try to figure out how to do is how to keep this economic recovery with all these big numbers going but to actually help real people out of it how are we going to generate some more jobs one way is to put some more money into basic construction which would affect you we re going to try to accelerate the funding of istea which would help you we re going to try to put some money into this stimulus package it will be modest because we don t want to be accused of ignoring the economic indicators but it will be substantial to several areas and the other is to outline a five year investment plan which will increase our investment in infrastructure which will have a defense conversion plan and which will attempt to address these very serious problems that are killing small business namely controlling health costs and providing basic health care to all americans and trying to break open the credit crunch if you think about it two best things i could do for you are both indirect if we could bring health costs in line with inflation and get banks to lending again economic activity would pick up among people who would then pay taxes to your local government and you could take that money and do what you need to do the best thing i could do for the private sector if we could bring health costs in line with inflation between now and the year 2000 we would save the private sector two and a half times as much as the public purse creating freeing hundreds of billions of dollars a year to be reinvested in the economies of this country so what i m going to try to do is just that it s never been done before in this country having to bring down the deficit and increase investment at the same time it s going to require some very tough choices i spent two hours yesterday trying to cut the budget in areas that i thought were inessential in order to free up monies that would be invested and obviously most of our investment money goes to directly back to state and local government i m sure that a lot of you will wish we were spending more but let me say that it is critical i m convinced that we show some discipline in bringing down this deficit because at every point we drop long term interest rates freeze up 50 billion for new investment in this economy so i m going to try to spend more in terms of investment and reduce the deficit which means i m going to have to cut consumption even more and we re working on it and i hope we can work together closely and we can do a very good job together one of the things that i ve been impressed with secretary cisneros s work over at the department is he came back saying what a lot of our secretaries have been saying he said this thing s not working very well we got all this money out there that s not even being spent we ve got 6 billion in the pipeline we got 3 1 billion that s been approved that s going to take four months too long to get out there we ve got this home program nobody can access the money because of the administrative problems so we can keep you busy for a year or so if we just run the department right and we re going to do our best to do that i think the floor is now yours thank you dem wjclinton5 2 97 bill_clinton thank you so much tanya she did a great job didn t she let s give her a hand i thought she was terrific dr bloodworth thank you for making me feel so welcome here at augusta state today i must say when i came in dr bloodworth had his whole family there and you can t say that he s not trying to practice what he preaches his son paul has a georgia hope scholarship and his daughter nicole was an americorps volunteer last year if we could get everybody to follow that lead we d have no problems at all in america in no time that s great i thank mayor sconyers for coming to meet me at the airport and for being here he made a politician s promise he promised that i would get some good barbecue before i left town and i m going to see if he keeps it i thank the many members of the georgia legislature who are here and i know they have a pivotal role in education my good friend commissioner tommy irvin i thank him for being here i thank secretary riley for being willing to serve as education secretary he has established a remarkable record already and we just got started and i thank him i thank senator coverdell and congressman norwood for coming down here with me on air force one today along with senator cleland i have to tell you this i ve known max cleland for a long time i admire him for many things when we go back home on air force one today he will be landing at andrews air force base for the first time since he landed there as a terribly wounded veteran from the vietnam war he has come a long way and we are proud of him i d like to than the other students who are here from the augusta technical institute and its president terry elam dr francis tedesco and the students of the medical college of georgia dr shirley lewis and the students of payne college and of course the students and faculty of augusta state thank you for being here when i arrived today to read the local paper i was wondering if any of you would come because the local paper has a history of presidents coming to augusta and there were so many and they came so often i thought this might just be another day at the office i read that my very first predecessor george washington visited a precursor of your school the richmond school in 1791 and richmond academy and he george washington apparently did not give a speech instead he sat through oral exams i m glad you re letting me talk today after the state of the union last night i m so tired i couldn t pass any exam written or oral but it s certainly good to be a place where no one i hear speaking has an accent in my state of the union address last night i sought to challenge all of you to rise to the moment of preparing america for the 21st century what i want all of you to understand is two things number one we really are moving into a time where more people from more walks of life will have a chance to rise higher and to live out more of their dreams than at any time in history you must believe that that is true not a guarantee but a chance number two we all tend to think that the times we live in are normal if you look at the whole sweep of human history if you look at the whole sweep of american history this is a highly unusual time why because we now enjoy both prosperity and peace but we re living in a time of such change we can t afford to just sit back and enjoy it because the speed at which we re changing the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world is so great and its scope is so profound that we have lots of work to do but this is a blessing not a curse very rarely have our people in this country ever had the freedom just to come together and totally shape our own future unforced by a war unforced by domestic turmoil unforced by depression we can sit here and construct a future for the children of america that is better than any time in all of human history and we had better get at the work of doing it i came here today for some good reasons senator cleland mentioned that president roosevelt used to come to georgia a lot to warm springs when roosevelt came here and saw the plight of so many georgians living in abject poverty he got the inspiration to electrify rural america for us it s hard to imagine today most families are wondering whether they can afford a computer in their home when roosevelt came to georgia a lot of families couldn t turn on a light and he had this inspiration that electricity ought to be given to something besides people who lived in the cities and the rural electrification effort was born out of the inspiration he saw in georgia and now as we prepare for the new century we have to give people another way to turn the lights on we have to give everybody the tools to make the most of their own lives and the most important thing we can do is to give people a good education not just in terms of what they know but to put all of our people in a position that they can keep on learning for a lifetime and that s why i came to georgia because governor miller with the hope scholarship with the pre kindergarten program with the commitment to hook up all your schools to the internet with all the other initiatives has turned the lights on and america is seeing the light it is no secret that i am a great admirer of your governor he spoke for me in new york in 1992 and talked about the house his mother built with her own hands and with his thick georgia accent he pierced the deafest ears of people who never heard anybody talk like that before and no one who heard that speech will ever forget the vivid image of his mother crossing the creek with the rocks in her hand governor miller is the son of a teacher he became a teacher himself he s given his life to bringing education to every child here but he has something else that s very important and embodied in that marine corps pin he wears on his lapel every day whatever he decides to do he does with the same conviction and intensity and doggedness that he showed when he was a member of the united states marines and i m glad he s fighting for you and your future and i m grateful that he s fought for me i also want to say to you something else in the world in which we are living we can do things together that will create the opportunities for people to make a great deal of their lives but you will have to work harder to make more of it than the people did when rural electrification came in we could come together and set up an authority and run those power lines out and then all people had to do was flip a switch and the lights came on now we can come together and create the greatest structure of education in the world but you can t just flip a switch you have to go to work you have to make the most of those opportunities no one can force feed an education people have to want it badly deeply in a way that makes learning not only important but fun but it is work and it is work that every american citizen must be prepared to do for himself or herself and with all of our children every single one of them last year i had the opportunity to speak at princeton university in new jersey it was a great honor for me because they only ask presidents to speak every 50 years when they celebrate a 50th anniversary and i just sort of fell into it but i talked to them about how important it was for people not to believe that america s future rested solely on the young people who would graduate from our most elite institutions of higher education that america s future rested on our ability to give everybody a higher education and i asked governor miller to go up there with me and there we were two southern boys sort of ogling the ivy league and i asked the people of princeton to support taking georgia s hope scholarship national to give hope to all of america with a hope scholarship in every state in every community that s what i asked congress to approve last night 1 500 tax credit to make a typical community college or other two year program available to virtually everyone in the united states and a 10 000 tax deduction for the cost of any tuition after high school at any program undergraduate or graduate and an expanded ira you can withdraw from tax free for education and the biggest increase in pell grants in 20 years we can educate america with that program but i ask you to remember too that last night i said there were 10 principles to this program secretary riley in no time at all given the miracles of modern technology has got them written up for us here we ll be glad to send you a copy if you want one but there are 10 things we have to do even though we re balancing the budget and cutting spending i recommended 51 billion for education by far the biggest amount of money the national government has ever committed to education but it is not enough and briefly let me say to you that there are other things we must do the most important of which is to make up our minds that we are finally going to achieve international excellence in education and that we do believe that all our children can learn a lot of people don t believe that i believe people perform according to their expectations their support and how we treat them and what we offer them we should begin with the proposition that every 8 year old should be able to read every 12 year old should be able to get on to the internet every 18 year old should be able to go on to college every adult should keep on learning for a lifetime we must start with the elemental principle that there should be national standards of excellence in education not federal government standards not something that takes away local control not something that undermines the state s role in leading the way in education but algebra is the same in georgia as it is in utah we have to set up national standards for what every student must learn teachers should be trained to help students meet these standards there should be national tests reflecting the standards all the teachers will understand this when i say it there are lots of standardized tests what we need are tests that reflect standards and they re two very different things every state by 1999 should agree not only to have high standards but to have all their 4th graders take a national test the same one in reading and all their 8th graders take a national test the same one in mathematics if you saw last night if you watched the state of the union you know that there were 20 school districts that did something a lot of school districts wouldn t dare do in northern illinois they agreed to go together to try to achieve international excellence in math and science for their 8th graders and they agreed to take with students from all over the world the third international math and science survey it is truly an international test reflecting what students should know worldwide at that point in their careers and the kids from those 20 school districts who took the test a representative sample of them of all their students they tied for first in science and tied for second in math but what i told them after the speech was over is i d have been proud of them if they had finished dead last because they had the courage to say we want to know how we stand against what we have to know and i want you to support everybody in america doing that a lot of this intellectual work is like every other kind of work we have to set the standards high and then train to meet the standards people who work out can t do 100 pushups the first time they try not every student not every school district not every state will do all that well on these examinations the first time they re given that is not the point the point is to find out what we know and what we need to learn we re not trying to put anybody down we ve got a whole country to lift up to a new century where learning will determine our future the second thing we have to do is to value our teachers more to train them better and support them more many of our finest educators have worked hard to establish a system of national credentials for excellence in teaching five hundred master teachers have been certified by the national board since 1995 i offered a budget to the congress last night that would permit 100 000 more teachers to be certified so we could have at least one teacher in every school in america who had been through a rigorous training program that that teacher could then share with every other teacher in the school to support the teachers who are going to determine the quality of education of our children the third thing i want to do is to do more to help our children read there was a story in the press a couple of days ago which pointed out that we now have four school districts in america where the children in the school districts speak as their native tongue over 100 different languages you want me to say that again that s unbelievable isn t it four atlanta i don t know how many tongues there are but atlanta is the headquarters to more international companies than any other city in the country they must have 50 or 60 there now one consequence of this along with increasing poverty over the last 20 years of young children is that 40 percent of our 8 year olds can t read at grade level and that simply means they can t read a 3rd grade book by themselves four out of 10 how many are capable of doing it with the brain they ve got up there nearly all of them you must believe this otherwise we re just up here talking to ourselves nearly all of them are capable of doing this so we have a lot of work to do and our schools cannot do it all alone we need more help from the parents but we also need more help from the rest of us i am committed to mobilizing a citizen army of a million people to be trained as tutors and to be willing to tutor children in every community in this country so that by the year 2000 every 8 year old can pick up a book and say i can read this book all by myself and i want you to help us do it we re going to use a lot of our americorps volunteers to mobilize the system but we need a million people i have asked that at least 100 000 of the 200 000 new work study slots that we created in last year s budget be devoted to college students who are willing to work as tutors and last night i said 60 presidents have already pledged thousands of their work study students to do that i hope some of you in this room will say i d be honored to try to teach a child to read so that child can have the same opportunity i have today to be a student in a university i hope you will do that your country needs you to do that the fourth point i want to make is that we have to start teaching children very early georgia has what i believe is the most extensive pre kindergarten program in the united states good for you good for you we have extended head start coverage to 3 year olds in the last couple of years and that s a very good thing but we have to begin even earlier we now know that children s brains develop more than half of their capacity not what they know but their capacity to learn within the first four years we now know that a child with parents who have confidence that they can help that child and understand what they re supposed to do will get as many as 700 000 positive contacts from the parents in the first four years of life a child with a parent who feels ill equipped for the job who has no idea what to do who desperately loves her child but just doesn t know may have given that child as few as 150 000 positive contacts in the first four years you tell me which child is going to better when they re 18 given what we know now from these scientists so we have got to support all of us everything we can do to help get out there and convince parents even if they don t have a good education they can do something very important for their children from the day they are born that is my wife s strong commitment and mine we re going to bring together scientists and educators from all over america this spring at a conference on early childhood development and the brain and we re going to try to take all these new discoveries so that when our children do get to school the teachers will be able to do what they want to do with them because they have been given the opportunity to develop in a wholesome positive way in the first three or four years of their lives and i hope you will support everything that is being done here to that end next we want to support more innovation in our public schools and i want to compliment georgia for its magnet schools and for the charter school program you ve just started it s unfamiliar to most americans but basically charter schools are public schools that are free from some of the rules and regulations that other schools have to follow created by teachers parents and others with a certain mission but they can exist only as long as they fulfill the mission if they don t produce educational excellence they don t keep their charter and georgia is leading the way there too last night i asked the congress to give me enough funds to support 3 000 of those schools that s seven times as many as there are in the united states today but that again is an important part of innovation eventually we need to get to the point where every school is just like these charter schools every school is just like these magnet schools they all have their own personality they only have their own culture they have their own standards and they work but the best way to do it is to create models in every school district of the united states and that s what the charter school movement will do and that s another reason i m very proud of the state of georgia for trying to lead the way the next point i want to make is somebody has got a sign up there to say they have a middle school and they wear school uniforms hold that sign up there mr president glen hills middle school wears uniforms thank you very much stand up without the sign stand up there you go good for you now i promise we did not organize this i didn t even know they were going to be there last night i said our schools need to teach character education we need to teach young people to be good citizens and we need to support these schools when they try to find their own way to do that schools that require school uniforms that s one way to do that i ve been in school districts where the crime rate dropped the violence in the school dropped the dropout rate dropped and the wealthier kids as well as the poorer kids liked it better when they adopted their own uniform of their own choosing in a way that helped them preserve order in the schools that s one way of creating school identity it normally works in grade school and junior high better than high school for obvious reasons but it can have a positive impact the point is that we need to recognize that our schools are molding the character of our young people and we should not discourage them one of the best things secretary riley has done of all the wonderful things he s done is to get out here and push teaching of character education and to try to make it clear that we do not have to have a value free environment in schools that is cancerous we should have a valued environment in the schools and i thank him for that and i know you believe that the seventh thing we re trying to do is help the school districts that are absolutely overwhelmed with growth with a lot of buildings that are falling down get out of the hole they re in the national government s never done this before and i wouldn t be doing it now but we have 52 million public school students the largest number in history with more buildings falling down than anytime in history i ve been in school districts where half the kids were going to class in trailers outside the regular building and we need to do what we can to support local efforts so if people at the local level are willing to put up their funds to try to build the buildings and repair the buildings that the schools need we want to be in a position to support what they re doing and we think with a modest expenditure we can help to spark 20 billion more in school construction and repair over the next four years and that s what we intend to do and i hope you ll support that just two other points very quickly learning has got to become a lifetime endeavor ask someone who works in a bank whether it s different being a bank teller than it was 10 years ago go into any working environment and see how different it is now from the way it was just a few years ago i spent a lot of time working with law enforcement do you want to know one reason that the crime rate s dropped in america for five years in a row for the first time in years and years and years is that our law enforcement officers in a lot of our bigger cities where the crime rate s very high have become basically high tech managers of criminal justice resources to support local neighborhoods in new york they had a precipitous drop in the crime rate when they realized that they could have computer reports every single day of every offense in that vast city put it up on a map study the patterns of crime and put the police into the neighborhood working with the people changing it on a daily basis every kind of work is different that s why i have asked the congress to pass what i call a g i bill you heard max cleland talking about the g i bill what i call a g i bill for america s workers we ve got 70 different training programs the federal government has put up for people who are unemployed or underemployed over time every one of them had a good justification today we don t need that anymore nearly every america is within driving distance of a community college or another community based educational institution like this one nearly every america so i say get rid of that put the money in a pot send a skill grant to every adult who s eligible for it and let that man or woman figure out where to get the best education they ll figure it out in no time and it will be a place like augusta state that s what will happen and i hope you will ask your members of congress to support that last thing i want to say is this we have got to do what governor miller plans to do here we have got to harness the full force of technology to every school in the united states now i have this argument all the time with people my age who aren t very good on a computer that includes me i m not saying they aren t and i am but a lot of people come up to me and they say now mr president i like your education program but i think you re overdoing this internet deal i mean you know what good is the internet if people can t read and write the point is that a lot of these kids will be more interested in learning to read and write if they have access to technology and if we hook up all of our schools to the internet it will mean that for the very first time in the entire history of the united states of america the kids in the poorest schools the kids in the most isolated rural schools and the kids in the wealthiest schools will all have access to the same universe of knowledge in the same way at the same time that s never happened in the history of the country before it will revolutionize what it means to be a student and it will also say to all these kids that now feel like nobody cares about them you re just as important as anybody else you matter you can learn whatever you want you can be whatever you want to be this is not about technology this is about unleashing the power of the human mind that resides in every single one of our young people so i say what zell miller is doing here in georgia will put you ahead of the pack but the most important thing is it make everyone in america want to do this even faster than i thought we could do it every class every class every school eventually every home will have a connection to every school through a computer and let me just give you one example i visited a school district in new jersey that was doing so poorly the state was literally going to shut it down and take it over most of the students were lower income many of them were from first generation immigrant families whose parents did not speak english and i saw the bell atlantic phone company along with some other companies go in there put computers in all the classrooms give them to all the kids and to a lot of the children who were having trouble actually put personal computers in the homes and teach the parents the immigrant parents how to e mail the teachers and the principals and you say why are they doing all that these people need to learn to read write count speak basic english all i know is three years later this school district that was going to be shut down had a lower dropout rate a higher graduation rate and higher test scores than the average in the state of new jersey which has the second highest per capita income in the united states of america don t tell me all of our kids can t learn they can learn if we do it right and we help them and we support them but again i say we have a limited amount of time you don t know how long america can go in a state of prosperity and peace where everything looks rosy to the country you don t know how long we can go still tolerating in a passive way the loss of as many kids as we re losing to crime to drugs to all the problems we have we don t have a lot of time there really are just a few days over a thousand days until the year 2000 but very few societies in all human history have had the opportunity we have to have peace prosperity opportunity and the chance to forge our own future this is a call to action i am committed to doing my part you must do yours thank you and god bless you and god bless america dem wjclinton5 2 98 bill_clinton thank you let s give the band a hand are they good or what thank you thank you very much first of all i want to thank elizabeth for her introduction and nikole for her introduction of prime minister blair weren t you proud of your fellow students today they were good governor senator members of congress nancy all the faculty and administration staff here at montgomery blair high school we are very glad to be here i want to paraphrase something president kennedy said when he and his wife went to paris i now will go down into history as the man who accompanied tony blair to montgomery blair high school i want all of you to know that in years to come you will be very glad you were here for many reasons but one of them is that hillary and i are convinced based on our friendship with prime minister blair and his wonderful wife cheri that they are going to make truly historic contributions to the world of the 21st century and you are a part of that because you invited him here today and i thank you for that i want to just say a couple of things very briefly about this whole issue of education you know that we just were in your computer room and we were e mailing students in england and i was thinking about how the first time i went to england 30 years ago this year i went on a ship and it took me six days now people can look at me over a computer and we can communicate in a matter of seconds one of the biggest questions we have to face as a people and one of the great questions they re facing in great britain is whether or not this new technology driven information driven scientifically exploding world all of you will live in will work to the benefit of all of our people without regard to their racial their ethnic their religious background their income or will it just benefit even more people who are privileged by birth to have a high income and then can get a good education i am committed to making sure that every single american child is a part of the 21st century revolution and i just want to say that the first thing that i tried to do was to open the doors of college to everyone who would work for it and i believe i can look at every one of you today and say because of the hope scholarship of 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college because of the lifetime learning credit because of more pell grants and more work study positions and more national service positions and better student loans with better repayment terms if you will work for it you can go to college in america today you can do it and that s important and now what we have to do in our country thank you what we ve got to do is to make sure that every american has access to the best elementary and secondary education in the world and in order to do that we have to do a lot of things if you saw the state of the union the other night i talked about it i want to lower class sizes in the first three grades to 18 i want to help build new classrooms or remodel them in 5 000 schools so we can deal with the problems of overcrowding i want to help to lift standards in the poorest school districts in america and i want to make sure the we hook up every classroom and library in every school in america to the internet by the year 2000 there are two things i want to say about this and one of them you know i m accurate about the first thing is it s one thing to say we can hook up the schools and the classrooms and another thing for the schools to be able to afford it so the federal communications commission and we have some members here from the fcc have given a 2 billion education discount to the schools of america so all our schools can afford to be on the internet by the year 2000 and the second thing i want to say is that a lot of school teachers are like the president they re sort of technologically challenged and there are a lot of classes in america where the kids know a whole lot more about the internet than their teachers do right so now we can laugh about it and have a lot of fun but if our objective is to make sure that every single child can tap the full potential of the information age then every single teacher must be in a position to know all he or she needs to know so we are also investing to make sure that from now on every newly certified teacher will be trained to know at least as much if not more about those computers and the internet and communication as the students in the classroom that is important i want to make this last point prime minister blair complimented you on your school spirit and we loved it when you cheered when we came in and we thank you but look around this room look around look at each other this is a picture of america in the 21st century people from all backgrounds all walks of life all and what you have to believe with all your heart and soul is that if you get an education you can live out your dream and if all of you get an education we can prove that america can accommodate all this diversity and grow stronger by the values we have in common that we will only grow stronger and more prosperous and give more opportunities to more people to live out their dreams if we can give everybody a good education and then we prove that we can get along across the lines that divide us as one america that s the america i want you to help me build for the new century thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton5 2 99a bill_clinton thank you very much tom i want to thank ted and jane and you tom and gerry levin and all the people from cnn and time warner for your role in this magnificent evening all the sponsors all the previous speakers you know the truth is i wanted to come down yesterday just to get ready for this i saw the list of baseball players who were going to be here you know my job is not always the most fun in the world i was interested in this governor barnes told a story about hank aaron appearing with him i want to tell you a story that s even more compelling in 1992 on the weekend before the presidential election i was struggling to prevail in georgia and governor miller said you have to come one more time and if you come i think hank aaron will appear with you i forgot about how many electoral votes we had i forgot you know i just so i came and we went out to this high school football stadium which held 25 000 people it was completely full way over half of them came to see him three days later after hank aaron blessed me in front of 25 000 people we carried georgia by 13 000 votes i have never forgotten it and i never will ladies and gentlemen the essayist jacques barzun once wrote whoever wants to know the heart and mind of america had better learn baseball well probably more than any other sport baseball revels in statistics i wish we could have a contest tonight we d all know that ty cobb has the highest lifetime batting average and cy young the most wins mark mcgwire closely followed by sammy sosa the most home runs in a single season most all of us here know that henry aaron has more baseball records than any other single player most rbis most extra base hits the only player to hit at least 30 home runs in 15 seasons at least 20 homers in 20 seasons first as you heard on the film to reach 300 hits 3 000 hits and 500 home runs he also had an exquisite sense of timing when he broke what appeared to be the most unbreakable record of all he had the presence of mind to do it on opening night so all of us could plan to watch because henry aaron s story is so much the story of baseball and because it is the story of a changing america being manifest in baseball knowing it is necessary to know the mind and heart of modern america all of us honor him tonight not only for the power of his swing but for the power of his spirit not only for breaking records but for breaking barriers not only for chasing his dream but even more for giving children like those we saw tonight the chance to chase theirs from mobile to milwaukee to atlanta through a segregated south in the old saly league where he was the only member of the team that didn t stay in the same motel the only one who couldn t get served at the dinner counter he moved through a changing america and he changed the mind and heart of america when he came here he had an interesting experience many of you have referenced tonight that when hank aaron approached babe ruth s record there was a dark deep undercurrent which led him to get lots of hate letters and death threats so serious the fbi had to watch his home and the pall of violence began to hang over the games but he said that very little of this mail came from atlanta and so as president of this whole country i d like to also take my hat off to atlanta tonight when andy young was up here talking and then i saw the reference on the film by mayor allen i remember as a boy growing up burdened with the awful stain that the crisis in the high school in my state s capital caused us that every one of us who felt as i did envied atlanta because it had a mayor and business leaders who said they were determined to be known as the city too busy to hate and they gave us all of us martin luther king and john lewis leaders like andy young and mayor jackson and so many more too many to mention it was fitting that a son of the south who braved the storms of segregation had come home to break the most important baseball record of all and go indelibly into the mind and heart of america i came here tonight as a baseball fan to remember a golden moment i came as a friend to thank a person who was there for me when i needed him in the worst way i came here as president to honor a great american for courage and decency and dignity for caring about all the kids coming along behind him for giving them a chance to chase those dreams america is a land of dreamers hank aaron has made it even more so so hank and billye we thank you for the path you blazed for the voices you raised for the helping hands you gave we thank you god bless you dem wjclinton5 2 99b bill_clinton thank you carol you better watch it before you know it you ll be running for office what a remarkable statement thank you so much i d like to take a little a few moments more than i normally would by way of introduction today hillary and i and bob rubin are real happy today because this is one of the things that i ran for president to do to see these stories to see the spirit and to see the potential i want to thank secretary rubin you know i used to tell a joke about bob rubin he s been here a long time now and he left this fabulous career on wall street and i used to tell everybody that i asked bob rubin to come to washington in 1993 to help me save the middle class and by the time he leaves he ll be one of them yes i don t know how much it s cost him to stay here these six years but one of the reasons that i really wanted him to come is that when we even in the beginning when we began talking about these matters in 92 he always said you know i d like to get the economy going again and working again and then we could maybe really do something for poor people in this country maybe we could really bring the spirit of enterprise to all these places that have been left behind i don t know how many secretaries of the treasury in our country s history have ever had that sort of driving passion but i know we had one and he s done a magnificent job and i m very grateful to him i want to thank senator harkin senator kennedy senator wellstone congressman oberstar congresswoman eleanor holmes norton for supporting this economic vision so strongly i thank former senator riegle who is here who was the committee chairman who helped us to make this a critical part this whole microenterprise a critical part of our economic strategy way back in 1993 i welcome lieutenant governor sally peterson from iowa we re delighted to have her here with her honorees i want to thank our former omb director frank raines mary ellen withrow our treasurer ellen lazar and others who have supported our efforts here a special word of thanks to aida alvarez and betsy myers and all the other members of her team from sba who are here and to brian atwood and hattie babbitt and the others from aid i believe that under our administration we funded 2 million of these small microenterprise loans from africa to asia to latin america last year there s one group of people who have not been acknowledged and hillary and i were talking about it who were out there ahead of the federal government for years without whom microenterprise never would have really taken off in america and that s all the members of the foundation community i d like to all the representatives of the foundations that are here that have supported microenterprise lending i d like to ask you to stand please and be acknowledged thank you thank you very much and i ll say more about this in a minute but this whole issue has been a passion for the first lady for as she said about 15 years we had a friend who was working at the south shore bank in chicago which had a microenterprise loan program we went there we saw what they were doing then in 1984 i was able to meet here in washington i was here at a governor s meeting i ll never forget it i got up early one morning and had breakfast with muhammad yunus who had been trained as an economist in the united states and then gone to bangladesh and set up the grameen bank hundreds of thousands of loans had been made market interest rates very tiny loans almost all to poor village women the repayment rate was better than the commercial banks in bangladesh and it changed my thinking about this forever and then hillary scrounged up some foundation money and other money and i squeezed some out of the arkansas legislature and we started a development bank with a microenterprise program in arkansas and after i became president she literally has gone all across the world she s been in small villages on every continent where people like her never go and i should tell the rest of the story because i don t think president museveni would object i have the highest regard for the president of uganda he s one of the most intelligent and effective leaders of any developing country anywhere in the world but when we were walking on this little rocky pathway into this village to see all these village women who now had their own businesses he looked at me and he said that s some wife you ve got he said until you showed up here i didn t even know we had these programs in our country so without her we probably wouldn t be here today and i m very very grateful for everything that hillary has done to champion this cause i also want to say a word of appreciation to carol and all the other small business owners here it takes a lot of courage to run a small business hillary and i have talked about this a lot she talked to me about one time when she was a high school girl she worked in a small business in her home town and there were days when no one came in every day if you open a small business you feel like politicians feel on election day i ll never forget i can t remember one of the great old hollywood moguls said you know if you make a bad movie the people will stay away and you cannot stop them which i think is a great so i want to thank all of you for having the spirit of enterprise and the vision and the courage this whole country is basically built by entrepreneurs whether they re in silicon valley or young investment bankers in manhattan or people running the street vending operations out here for the tourists in washington the genius of actually being able to have an idea and act on it and having people respond to it and invest in it and be your customers and as carol said in a way validate your ideas your character and your hard work it s the whole secret of america and because of the strength of our economy i believe we have an obligation to give that opportunity to everyone just this morning we learned that what is now the longest peacetime expansion in american history has grown longer last month our economy created nearly another quarter million jobs and unemployment stayed at 4 3 percent that s the lowest peacetime rate since 1957 wages now rising at over twice the rate of inflation again unemployment rates among hispanic and african americans dropped to their lowest recorded levels ever now if we cannot expand opportunity into every corner of america now we will never get around to it we have an obligation now to spread the spirit and the opportunity for enterprise to all the american people as you ve heard from others we ve been working on this for six years now working to bring opportunities to some of our most distressed communities with an agenda of empowerment that s what we celebrate here not a hand out a hand up this microenterprise program is the embodiment of empowerment we know and i was so glad to hear what carol said about self esteem because sometimes a crisis of economic distress is a crisis of the spirit as well a shortage of confidence that is just as debilitating as a shortage of cash and these stories today i want all of you to imagine not only the economic success but what it has done to these people s lives there are stories like this all over america and all over the world what does it mean to a single mom s life when she goes to the mailbox in the morning and sees a bank statement instead of a welfare check what does it mean to a child when he or she can go to school and say when they ask what does your mother do for a living she owns a beauty shop what does it mean to a neighborhood when all of a sudden an old building that has been vacant for 10 years has a help wanted sign out in front of it this is about more than economics and through our network of community development banks or cdfis as we call them community development financial institutions through the strengthened and streamlined community reinvestment act and i will say that even though that act has been on the books for more than 20 years now 95 percent of all the investment under community reinvestment has been done in the last six years in our administration and i m proud of that and the banks are doing quite well they re doing well by doing good and it s important to remember as the debate develops this year about that and through these empowerment zones we ve seen the steady expansion of opportunity last month as the secretary said i announced this new markets initiative to spur even more private investment in under served areas and we want to reach building a bridge from wall street to harlem to appalachia to the mississippi delta to south texas to pine ridge south dakota everywhere there are opportunities still untapped today i am proud to announce that as a part of our budget we would more than double our support for microenterprise in america we would continue our thank you we also want to continue our efforts to promote microenterprise abroad especially in the nations that have been hardest hit by the global financial crisis or by our neighbors hit by natural disasters and i think that is very important because we are giving courage and awareness to other governments and other countries to do more for their own people in this regard first we recognize that for the vast majority of micro entrepreneurs good ideas and credit are just the beginning a little guidance lessons on accounting billing planning those things are essential for any business to thrive in a complex economy the budget doubles the small business administration s capacity to provide such training through its micro loan program triples support for sba s one stop capital shops which offer micro lending advice and other assistance in disadvantaged communities i m also proud to support the bipartisan program for investments in micro entrepreneurs the prime act sponsored by senator kennedy and senator domenici from new mexico representatives and representatives rush leach and lafalce so that we can expand our technical assistance through the treasury s cdfi fund second we want to make even more credit available to low income americans with good business ideas that s why i m proposing to leverage more than 75 million in new loans by doubling our support for the sba s micro loan program third we want to keep encouraging americans to save some of their own hard earned money to start or expand businesses last year i was proud to sign new individual development accounts into law fulfilling a campaign pledge from 1992 and thanks in no small measure to the leadership of senator tom harkin from iowa and former senator dan coats from indiana we thank you very much senators for that thank you for those of you who don t know these individual development accounts idas are special accounts that provide federal matching funds to low income americans who save money to invest in their business buy a first home pay for a college education i want to double support for these accounts in our budget next we will continue to lead the world through usaid to promote microenterprise for millions of families to get out of poverty in other countries the recent local financial crisis and the hurricanes in central america and the caribbean have literally upended the lives of tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people as you have heard from the first lady s account we have seen firsthand how these loans sometimes in other countries loans as small at 10 15 25 50 can make all the difference in helping families to get back on their feet our balanced budget will target extra microenterprise assistance to the countries that are in trouble and to break down the bureaucratic walls that block microenterprise in some developing countries we ll continue to work with the world bank and other financial institutions to reform the regulatory structures so we can make more of these loans available there is a virtually unlimited potential abroad and at home for this and i keep hoping if we just keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing we will reach a critical mass of investment which will explode it and let the whole world know that this works and this ceremony today is a part of letting the whole world know so we come here not only to honor you with these presidential awards for excellence in microenterprise but to say to the world that these six organizations whose vision and commitment have made such a profound difference in the lives of the business owners their employees and their customers are but a small beginning of what we could achieve together in the united states and throughout the world if we work harder to make the economy work for ordinary citizens and so this too is a part of letting the whole world know and when you come up here and get your awards i hope that you will not only feel enormous pride i hope that you will not only feel an enormous sense of rededication to further success i hope you will feel that you are sending a message to people who will see this all over america or read about it in their newspapers and you may be sparking someone else s conviction either that a they ought to set up one of these funds or b they ought to find one and get a loan and i believe that we will continue to see the steady march of progress here this has the potential to revolutionize not only the lives of ordinary americans but the whole way we organize our economy here and around the world so first for excellence in the category of access to capital the microcredit industry rural organization since 1987 micro has provided some 5 5 million in loans to more than 1 000 entrepreneurs living in rural arizona s poorest hispanic communities accepting this award is executive director frank ballesteros and entrepreneur maria jesus gaxiola a former migrant farm worker who used a 1 500 loan to build her own cosmetics business and i might say she s a remarkable walking advertisement for her success please come up here next for excellence in developing entrepreneurial skills the detroit entrepreneurship institute founded at wayne state university the institute has worked to teach low income clients the full range of business skills clients can also take advantage of a free computer center a tax preparation service and graphic design department to help launch and expand their businesses accepting this award is cathy mcclelland the president and ceo and jackie tucker who started a successful catering business after training at the institute i d like to ask them to come up now also for excellence in developing entrepreneurial skills the northeast entrepreneur fund of virginia minnesota in the iron range north of duluth serving rural communities throughout a 20 000 square mile area the fund offers one on one counseling to clients helping them to tailor their studies to specific needs accepting this award is the fund s president mary mathews and our star speaker today carol willoughby for excellence in poverty alleviation the institute for social and economic development of iowa one of the earliest statewide microenterprise efforts in the nation the institute listen to this has helped 90 percent of its welfare clients free themselves from lives of dependency through self employment accepting this award today is john else founder and president and entrepreneur rhonda auten a former welfare recipient who started her own dance school with help from ised for excellence in private support for microenterprise development the corporation for enterprise development for two decades through research public advocacy and technical assistance to microenterprise organizations the corporation has fostered so much of the progress we see today including the success of three of this year s award winners we are all including all of us in this administration profoundly indebted to the awardee the corporation and its founder and chairman mr robert friedman for excellence in public support for microenterprise development the montana microbusiness finance program as part of the montana department of commerce this program has helped to launch or sustain a dozen microlending organizations serving communities throughout that vast and beautiful state accepting this award are program officer robyn hampton and entrepreneurs kevin and heidi snyder who used a microloan to start their racquetball and fitness centers they are two walking advertisements for what they re doing as you can see come on up now don t you feel better than you did when you got up this morning isn t this great henry ford a small entrepreneur once said that the best americans were those with an infinite capacity to not know what can t be done we honor today those kinds of americans testaments to the power of enterprise and the strength of the human spirit i ask you to leave here committed to work in the years ahead to bring this spirit and this opportunity to every corner of every community in our land and on our globe thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton5 3 00 bill_clinton thank you this is a day the lord has made for this very purpose congressman lewis mrs king reverend jackson reverend harris congressman houghton and congressman hilliard and all the members of congress who are here i thank all the members of my administration who are here especially harris wofford the head of our americorps program who was here with you 35 years ago today i thank young antar breaux didn t he give a fine speech when he was speaking john leaned over to me and he said you know i used to give a speech like that when i was young i thank senator sanders and rose sanders for the work they are doing with this magnificent voting rights museum i thank joe lowrey and andy young and julian bond and all the others who have come here to be with us and i thank you josea williams and mrs boynton and mrs foster and mrs brown and mr doyle and reverend hunter all the heroes of the movement from that day those here on this platform and those in the audience i bring you greetings from three of my partners the first lady hillary and the vice president and mrs gore who wish they could be here today i thank ambassador sisulu for joining us i thank governor siegelman for making us feel welcome and i thank mayor smitheren for the long road he too has traveled in these last 35 years now let me say to you a few things i come today as your president and also as a child of the south the only thing that john lewis said i disagree with is that i could have chosen not to come that is not true i had to be here in selma today thirty five years ago a single day in selma became a seminal moment in the history of our country on this bridge america s long march to freedom met a roadblock of violent resistance but the marchers thank god would not take a detour on the road to freedom by 1965 their will had already been steeled by triumph and tragedy by the breaking of the color line at old miss the historic march on washington the assassinations of medgar evers malcolm x and president kennedy the bombing deaths of four little black girls at the 16th street baptist church in birmingham the mississippi freedom summer the passage of the civil rights act of 1964 on this bloody sunday about 600 foot soldier some of whom thankfully remain with us today absorbed with uncommon dignity the unbridled force of racism putting their lives on the line for that most basic american right the simple right to vote a right which already had been long guaranteed and long denied here in dallas county there were no black elected officials because only one percent of voting age blacks about 250 people were registered they were kept from the polls not by their own indifference or alienation but by systematic exclusion by the poll tax by intimidation by literacy testing that even the testers themselves could not pass and they were kept away from the polls by violence it must be hard for the young people in this audience to believe but just 35 years ago americans both black and white lost their lives in the voting rights crusade some died in selma and marion one of the reasons i came here today is to say to the families and those who remember jimmy lee jackson reverend james reed viola liuzzo and others whose names we may never know we honor them for the patriots they were they did not die in vain just one week after bloody sunday president johnson spoke to the nation in stirring words he said at times history and fate meet in a single time and a single place to shape a turning point in man s unending search for freedom so it was at lexington and concord so it was a century ago at appomattox so it was last week in selma alabama their cause must be our cause two weeks after bloody sunday emboldened by their faith in god and the support of a white southerner in the oval office dr king led 4 000 people across the pettus bridge on the 54 mile trek to montgomery and six months later president johnson signed the voting rights act proclaiming that the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men it has been said that the voting rights act was signed in ink in washington but it first was signed in blood in selma those who walked by faith across this bridge led us all to a better tomorrow in 1964 there were only 300 black elected officials nationwide and just 3 african americans in the congress today those numbers have swelled to nearly 9 000 black elected officials and 39 members of the congressional black caucus today african americans hold the majority in the selma city council and school board because the number of african american registered voters in dallas country has risen from 250 to more than 20 000 there s another point i want to make today just as dr king predicted the rise of black southerners to full citizenship also lifted their white neighbors it is history s wry paradox he said that when negroes win their struggle to be free those who have held them down will themselves be free for the first time after selma free white and black southerners crossed the bridge to the new south leaving hatred and isolation on the far side building vibrant cities thriving economies and great universities a new south still enriched by the old time religion and rhythms and rituals we all love now open to all things modern and people of all races and faiths from all over the world a new south in which whites have gained at least as much as blacks from the march to freedom without selma atlanta would never have had the super bowl or the olympics and without selma jimmy carter and bill clinton would never have been elected president of the united states the advance of freedom and opportunity has taken our entire nation a mighty long way we begin the new millennium with great prosperity and the lowest levels of african american and hispanic unemployment ever recorded with greater diversity in all walks of life and a cherished role in helping those beyond our borders to overcome their own racial and ethnic and tribal and religious conflicts we have built the bridge to the 21st century we can all walk across we come here today to say we could not have done it if brave americans had not first walked across the edmund pettus bridge yes we have come a mighty long way but our journey is not over for despite our unprecedented prosperity and real social progress there are still wide and disturbing disparities that fall along the color line in health and income in educational achievement and perceptions of justice my fellow americans there are still bridges yet to cross as long as there are people in places including neighborhoods here in selma that have not participated in our economic prosperity we have a bridge to cross as long as african american income hovers at nearly half that of white we have another bridge to cross as long as african american and hispanic children are more likely than white children to live in poverty and less likely to attend or graduate from college we have another bridge to cross as long as african americans and other minorities suffer two three even four times the rates of heart disease aids diabetes and cancer we have another bridge to cross as long as our children continue to die as the victims of mindless violence we have another bridge to cross as long as african americans and latinos anywhere in america believe they are unfairly targeted by police because of the color of their skin and police believe they are unfairly judged by their communities because of the color of their uniforms we have another bridge to cross as long as the waving symbol of one american s pride is the shameful symbol of another american s pain we have another bridge to cross as long as the power of america s growing diversity remains diminished by discrimination and stained by acts of violence against people just because they re black or hispanic or asian or gay or jewish or muslim as long as that happens to any american we have another bridge to cross and as long as less than half our eligible voters exercise the right that so many here in selma marched and died for we ve got a very large bridge to cross but the bridges are there to be crossed they stand on the strong foundations of our constitution they were built by our forebears through silent tears and weary years they are waiting to take us to higher ground oh yes the bridges are built we can see them clearly but to get to the other side we too will have to march i ask you to remember dr king s words human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with god my fellow americans this day has a special meaning for me for i too am a son of the south the old segregated south and those of you who marched 35 years ago set me free too on bloody sunday free to know you to work with you to love you to raise my child to celebrate our differences and hallow our common humanity i thank you all for what you did here thank you andy and jesse and joe for the lives you have lived since thank you coretta for giving up your beloved husband and the blessings of a normal life thank you ethel kennedy for giving up your beloved husband and the blessings of a normal life and thank you john lewis for the beatings you took and the heart you kept wide open thank you for walking with the wind hand in hand with your brothers and sisters to hold america s trembling house down thank you for your vision of the beloved community an america at peace with itself i tell you all as long as americans are willing to hold hands we can walk with any wind we can cross any bridge deep in my heart i do believe we shall overcome thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton5 3 06 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you president caputo chairman bianco thank you for the honorary degree and for the award and dean baczko i love saying that when i met joe baczko neither one of us ever thought we would have so distinguished a term in front of our names nor at the time did we deserve it i m very proud of that introduction because it was given by a man i admire i was thrilled when he came here to pace joe and his wife kathy who has worked with our foundation in many ways and worked with me in the white house have been friends of mine for more than 40 years and i was in their wedding almost 39 years ago which is in and of itself an achievement in this day and age and a great tribute to both of them and to their wonderful son so i thank you joe for that introduction because this program calls for some questions to be asked and answered at the end of it the questions that were provided i am reliably informed by the students i certainly hope that s true i will resist my normal penchant to get too mired in the details of policies i would like to advocate for your future and instead try to ask you to just take a little walk with me in your imagination into tomorrow i think the most important thing that any citizen of this country or indeed any responsible citizen of the world can do today is to have a clear understanding of where we are a vision of where we ought to go and the values necessary to make the choices to take us there and it s really important to understand that this is the 100th anniversary of pace university a hundred years ago in 1906 theodore roosevelt was the president of the united states one of my favorite presidents in a time which in all of our history most parallels the present moment why because there were two great questions one was the economic and attendant social change going on in america as we moved from farm to factory from rural areas to cities and to an ever more diverse population with more and more immigrants coming into our cities looking for jobs in those factories and the great question was how can we maximize the value of this incredible engine of industrial capitalism and still make america a decent place to live where our fundamental values of family and equal opportunity and human decency to all were fulfilled theodore roosevelt was the first president to have to confront that and our whole society had to confront that there were people believe it or not who back then said that minimum hour and minimum wage laws and laws to limit the ability of factories to work ten and twelve year old kids 12 and 14 hours a day were unconstitutional encroachment on the property rights of the factory owners we have come a long way immigrants were living in new york city in the most abominable conditions imaginable when young theodore roosevelt was the police commissioner of new york and had to worry about whether you could even fairly enforce the law on people who were living in jungle like conditions today we live in a different sort of global economy but believe it or not we were about as trade dependent then as we are now but we are much more interdependent with the rest of the world today because in addition to economic interdependence our borders are more open our immigration is even more profound and because of information technology and the awareness that we have of what s going on everywhere in the world we are connected in ways even more profoundly psychological than we were 100 years ago but we are going through the same sort of economic shift to a new sort of economy fueled by that information technology fueled by new barriers being broken down in science fueled by a challenge to move from the central engine of the industrial era the burning of fossil fuels to generate economic opportunity and so we re in a new time as we were then and the question is again what do we have to do as a nation and in a larger sense what do we have to do as a world to take advantage of the marvelous engines of economic growth out there in a way that spread the benefits to everybody and preserves the basic social safety net that enables families to raise their children in decency the elderly to retire with a certain level of security and all of us to pull together in this society in a larger world that is growing ever more diverse in terms not only of race and ethnicity but also religion the second great question to face america in 1906 was what is our country s role in the world because we had become an important country we were big geographically we were getting more and more people we were generating more and more wealth and people expected us to take a role in the world s affairs and just as now there were two great conflicts about what we ought to do should we primarily be a peacemaker and a model for other countries or should we use our military power to try to get the results we wanted and we found then as now that on occasion we were required to do both and in both areas we had mixed results sometimes we were successful and sometimes not but 100 years ago the major military issue was the continuation of our war with spain and the philippines and the extension of our military power in our own hemisphere and the major peace issue for which theodore roosevelt became the only president to win the nobel peace prize was his role in brokering the peace between russia and japan in the russo japanese war of 1905 even then the same conflicts you hear today do we get more out of being peacemakers or do we get more out of throwing our weight around were the same kind of conflicts we had 100 years ago but today it s again more complicated we don t have to worry today as we did then about warring nations that might fall out with each other and bring about what became world war i and then bring about what became world war ii and then bring about what became the cold war between the united states the soviet union and china and our european and other allies today we have to worry about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction the availability of chemical biological or nuclear materials not only to states that might be hostile to us but might be deterred from using such weapons because we could retaliate but terrorists groups that may not be deterred because they can hide in mountain caves along the afghan pakistani border and who knows where else across the globe and so once again we are called to say what is america s role in the world what are our responsibilities beyond our borders both to our own people and to future generations of an increasingly interdependent world you need to have an opinion on these things you need to know where you think america is and where you want it to go and what you think should be done what the role of government is and what you can do as a private citizen you need to know where america is in the world in your own mind and where you want to go and how you think we ought to get there you don t have to agree with me but if you can t answer these questions to your own satisfaction you will be constantly frustrated as a citizen and just as a human being you will pick up the newspaper every day or watch the news at night and it will look like the political equivalent of chaos theory in physics all these different things happening that don t seem to relate one to the other unless you have in your mind these things so for whatever it s worth here s what i think i think the fundamental characteristic of the 21st century world is not economic globalization but interdependence that is economics plus immigration economics plus travel economics plus communication economics plus awareness of the real life situations of people all around the world i believe that our major obligations to the rest of the world are to try to do whatever we can to advance the cause of peace and prosperity security and freedom and to build an interdependent world that becomes more integrated because interdependence can be good or bad you know that don t you i mean what was 9 11 but an act of global interdependence where people from another country used the forces of interdependence they used open borders easy travel easy immigration easy access to information and technology to turn three and they hoped four jet airplanes into massive chemical weapons which killed 3 000 people including people from 70 other countries including over 200 other muslims who came to america looking for that integrated cooperative future what s the difference between an interdependent world and an integrated world in an interdependent world it simply means we can t escape each other we re stuck with one another we are caught up together and those of us who are well qualified make the best of it in an integrated world you share responsibilities you share benefits and you re able to do it because you share certain basic values that s what i believe we should be doing and i ll come back to what america should be doing in a minute how would we go about building a world that was more integrated well we do have to have a security policy we can t be nave about that there are some people we can t convert we have got to try to keep all of us alive and our friends and neighbors alive and minimize the killing and the dying so it s important to continually modernize the military it s important to increase our efforts to reduce the threat of chemical biological and nuclear substances being in the wrong hands it s important to increase homeland security i still really can t believe we only check five percent of our containers at all the ports in america when we ve had now for four years a study saying that unless we do ten to twenty percent there s no deterrent effect at all it s important to have a security policy the second thing it s important to do is to realize that a security policy alone will never be enough not for any interdependent country why because if you live in a completely interdependent environment you cannot kill jail or occupy all your actual and potential enemies and if you can t kill jail or occupy everybody who is or might ever be against you you have to make a deal that s where politics comes in we all talk about politics as if it s something slightly seedy but the truth is that our founding fathers that we now love to glorify venerated honorable principled compromise because that is the alternative to insisting that you re in possession of the absolute truth which means that we have to spend a lot of time and money and effort and thought not only having a security policy but having a policy to create more friends and fewer terrorists more partners and fewer adversaries and sometimes you can get a lot more with a lot less by doing this and i ll just give you a few examples half the world s people live on less than 2 a day a billion people live on less than a dollar a day over a billion people have no access to clean water over two and a half billion people have no access to sanitation a billion people will go to bed hungry tonight three billion people will die this year three million people from water born diseases like cholera and diarrhea eighty percent of them will be kids under five years old one in four of all the deaths on earth this year will be from things people don t die of in america very much anymore aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea these people can hardly be blamed if they re poor and they ve living in another country if they vote for people who promise to spread the wealth even if they re hostile to america if we don t give them an alternative so in bolivia a cocoa farmer gets elected president the first native person ever to be president of bolivia why because he said he would keep the riches of the country from being plundered by international corporations that had not improved the plight of ordinary bolivians in the palestinian territories hamas wins an election even though they promised to continue or they said they wouldn t give up terror and they wouldn t recognize israel did the palestinians all of a sudden want to destroy israel here s the interesting thing one week after the hamas victory there was a poll of the palestinians which showed the following seventy three percent said they wanted hamas to renounce violence and terror eighty two percent said they wanted hamas to make a peace agreement with israel why did they vote for them because they re living on less than a dollar a day and the government they had was not delivering the goods and they were desperate and they didn t have any other alternatives they didn t vote to return to terror they didn t vote to give up the path of peace they voted for somebody to clean the streets open the schools and give them a job and run an honest government we have to understand that there s a whole world out there that never saw the inside of a university there are 130 million children in the world who never darken the door of any school not even a poor school with bad textbooks or inadequate maps or anything they just don t go and for a small amount of money we can have a huge impact on our relationship with these people and their future by doing our part to put all the kids in the world in school by doing our part to get affordable aids medicine and prevention strategies out there to all the people who need it and to deal with tb and malaria and the other health challenges the absence of water and sanitation facilities all these things these basic things lest you think i am being nave there was a survey done which i read about in the papers in the last week or so which showed that the only place in the islamic world that america had made permanent gains in approval in the aftermath of our action in iraq were in the tsunami affected countries and in the earthquake affected areas of pakistan where our military and civilian workers our religious and nonreligious private organizations went to help people just because they were people because they were desperate and left behind and left out and they needed help and our standing in those countries rose dramatically and has stayed up over time because all of a sudden people saw us as people because we saw them as people never minimize the importance of what some people call our soft power our ability to relate to people as human beings and the third thing i would like to say is we have to be more willing to work in cooperative ways with other countries we always have to keep the right to act on our own any country does but our preference should be to cooperate with others there are very few things that we can do totally successfully all by ourselves and in so far as we are seen as acting alone around the world a lot of people will react against it because they may not trust our motives but when we re acting with others it works better so i favor a whole lot of these international efforts including the international effort on climate change which i hope our government will rejoin i think that if we walk away from joint efforts others feel free to do so as well and if you just take this climate change issue if you want to talk more about that you can ask the question later but i don t think there s any question that if the world warms for the next 50 years at the rate of the last ten we re going to have disastrous things occur we ll lose 50 feet of manhattan island one of the little countries i worked so hard to help in the tsunami the maldives i won t have to worry about them anymore we ll be evacuating them they ll be history the waters will flood over them we will have very disruptive events we ll have dramatic changes in agricultural production and millions of food refugees a lot more wars and trouble all of which we ll have to pay for because we refuse to stop generating wealth by putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere now 100 years ago when theodore roosevelt was president and for most of the 20th century it was true that a country could not get rich stay rich or get richer without burning more coal and oil and therefore warming the planet it is not true anymore we have with existing technology the ability to be energy efficient and to use clean energy in a way that would make us more energy independent and that would avoid china and india getting rich in the same way we did and literally scorching up the planet and we have got to do it i think we have to do those things security more friends and fewer enemies more international cooperation i think in order to do that brings me back to america we have to keep making america a better place we won t be able to have any influence on anybody else unless people still want to come here because they think we re doing something right besides we have a moral obligation to our own people to help everybody live as long and as well as they can this is where i m going to forego the policy and just be summarizing we need an economic policy that generates good new jobs every five or ten years otherwise we will continue to have more poverty and declining wages wages average wages have been constant in this country since 1973 except for a brief period in the four years of my second term when we had so much job growth it tightened the labor markets and wages rose but there s an enormous global pressure to hold wages down and a lot of people s wealth has gone up because their houses are worth more but if you want a country that continues to create good jobs we ve got to have a sensible economic policy i believe that includes opening the doors of college education to all young people preparing people especially young people at risk to go to college it means that young african american students hispanic students and young women have to enter the science technology and engineering fields at the same rate of white asian and middle eastern males if that happened in this country there would be no shortage in america of scientists engineers and technology workers for the next 20 years it s very important to understand that it means we ve got to see this energy problem as the opportunity these are our jobs for the next decade we can produce wind energy we can produce solar energy we can produce existing technology we can produce bio fuels we can do a ton of things that will all create jobs millions of jobs potentially if we take it seriously and we can save the planet and generate a new generation of economic activity it s the number one economic opportunity this country faces and the last thing i want to say about it is if we expect to have a modern economy and a functioning society we cannot continue to spend almost 50 percent more than anybody else in the world spends on healthcare and get less for it we spend 16 percent of our national income on healthcare the next most expensive systems in the world are canada and switzerland they are at 11 percent the difference in 11 percent and 16 percent is 700 billion a year almost twice the federal budget deficit seven hundred billion dollars a year and we are ranked something like 37th in the overall quality of our health system and the number of uninsured is going up the other problem is we can no longer expect to maintain any kind of manufacturing or export sector if they have to bear the burden of their current and former workers with healthcare so we re going to have to re jigger the way it s financed if you want to be competitive internationally and the government will have to play a role in this almost half of the difference almost half of that 700 billion is in purely administrative costs our administrative costs in healthcare and the people here who work in healthcare will know this are 34 percent of the system for the providers and the payers as opposed to 19 percent in canada which is the next highest i can find everybody else was less than that for medicare and medicaid it s about three percent i don t want to bore you with all this you need to know this we re talking about 300 billion a year that you pay for every year for two million people to go to work in this blizzard of insurance policies and the blizzard of providers and they fight with each other over who gets paid when no other country in the world throws away this kind of money and we can t afford it if we want to compete in the global economy we could more than insure everybody in america that doesn t have insurance if we would quit wasting so much of this money and you have to demand that something be done about it and so that s what i think about america now the last two points i want to make are these the difference between now and 100 years ago the main difference with all these big public problems is that private citizens have more power to do public good than ever before 100 years ago there were a few millionaires in new york who could endow art galleries or museums or something but there was never a time like today 100 years ago when because of the internet and democracy and the rise of nongovernmental organizations like my foundation or the gates foundation or little bitty ones all over the world private people could do public good you ve probably done it whether you know it or not when the tsunami hit south asia one third of american households contributed in the aggregate over a billion dollars over half of them gave money over the internet when i went with hillary to the state fair in new york last summer i had just announced that former president bush and i were raising money for katrina so i have my little nephew with me and i m walking down the midway looking at all the games and waiting for hillary to finish meeting with the farmers and this lady comes out from behind one of the booths now she s working in a fair booth and she had her little uniform on and she gave me 50 bucks in cash and she said this is for the bush clinton katrina fund i hate to give you cash but as you can see i m working i don t have time to send it over the internet this is an inconceivable conversation for me to be having five years ago right this is not some high tech billionaire from silicon valley this a woman working in a fair booth in syracuse apologizing for giving me cash this has revolutionized what every one of us can do and we can t have excuses anymore i m grateful for people who are in public service i m grateful for the mayors that are here and i see representatives of congress like nita lowey who are here thank you for coming i m glad you re here i m grateful that people in new york gave my wife a chance to serve in the senate but you can do things on your own and even if there came a time when everybody you wanted to get elected to everything got elected and did everything you wanted them to do even if that magic day arrives there will still be things that will not be addressed either because of powers of government or the operation of the market there will be a gap into which private citizens will have to stand to do public good and you can do it now more than ever before every single one of you can now the last thing i want to say is this it s easy to give a speech about all this stuff and very hard to live it because all of us have identity conflicts if you think about how you identify yourself i m a republican a democrat a liberal a conservative a man a woman i m jewish i m muslim i m christian i m buddhist i m whatever all the identities of the world are being thrown together and every day we see the global economy being pitted against people s sense of personal security is the trade deal good or bad are the global economies being pitted against people s sense of national security should that chinese company have been able to buy the oil company in america should the current ports controversy that sense of global economics and national security you see the global economics against environmental security with the global warming conflicts this world calls for a little humility and human kindness we are going to get in a lot of trouble if we make decisions based on the supposition that we are in possession of the absolute truth that after all is what s wrong with the terrorists you know no matter how sympathetic you are with what their beef is they don t have a right to just go out and wipe out innocent people why do they think they have a right to do that because they believe they are in possession of the absolute truth and i believe that that is a heresy in any religion after all if you believe you can be in possession of the absolute truth and you can turn it into a political program that s absolutely true what do you need god for you can laugh but i m serious whatever your faith you think about that all of us are taught to be humble because of our frailties because of our imperfections but all of a sudden like a light we re in possession of the whole truth and we have a right to impose it by means of violence on everybody else that s the argument that those terrorists make that s how they justify otherwise how can they live with themselves and so we all need to recognize that we can t resolve all these identity conflicts overnight we may make some mistakes as we go along the way but we have to know that underneath it all there are human beings that aren t so very different from us that s why the people we help in the earthquake and pakistan and in aceh in indonesia think we re okay after all because in that awful moment of reckoning for them we just showed up as folks i spent a lot of time in africa working on my aids work and economic development work and i never ceased to be amazed at how wise and good and optimistic people are there s actually an article today in the paper that says that africa is the poorest continent on earth but of all the continents on earth the people are more optimistic and it may seem counterintuitive until you just sort of grasp their profound wisdom a glimmer of which most americans have gotten through their knowledge of nelson mandela in the hills of the sort of north central africa just below the sahara desert all the tribal groups when they walk along these well trod paths and they meet each other the standard greeting is this translated into english someone will say hello or good day and the answer is not hello how are you the answer is i see you you just think about that next time you see somebody that looks different from you acts different from you walks different from you says something you think is nuts do you see them as people it s not going to be easy for us to bring our minds and our hearts to the point where we ll be wise enough to realize that a global economy is bound to fail without a sense of global social justice without a sense of global environmental responsibility without a shared global security system it will require us to keep our identities and be proud of them and yet broaden them and embrace people who are different it all starts by just being able to say that simple thing i see you thank you very much dem wjclinton5 3 93 bill_clinton i want to thank all of the mayors who spoke and all the ones who are here who have not spoken for their strong support without regard to party or region or the size of the communities from which they come as a matter of fact when i heard the mayor of york pennsylvania speak i was trying to decide whether his tie was a republican or a democratic tie i think it is really an all american tie it s a bold tie the vice president said i want to say a special word of thanks too to the secretary of the department of housing and urban development henry cisneros who is with us who has worked very closely with the mayors i have just a few things i want to say about this first of all any mayor who has served for any length of time has been compelled to make the kinds of choices that are embodied in this economic program if you look at the budgets of the cities of this country or the budgets of the states of this country over the last decade you will see the choices that have been imposed in order to balance books and keep the functions of our cities running in order to deal with relative reductions in federal assistance and all the economic crises that have ripped our communities mayors have learned to cut budgets and to shift funds away from inessential things toward investments in our futures i know that that is one reason that mayors intuitively and without regard to party have responded to my efforts to increase investment and reduce the deficit at the same time we have to do both today there was a report that the unemployment rate in february dropped to seven percent one tenth of one percent and that 365 000 jobs were created an estimated 365 000 jobs that is good news but if you look behind the numbers it also reveals the stark challenges before us for most of those jobs were part time jobs and we are still about three million jobs behind where we would ordinarily be in a recovery indeed we are according to the aggregate economic statistics in a recovery in which ironically the unemployment rate is still higher than it was at the very bottom of the recession that shows you that there is a fundamental restructuring going on in the american economy which requires an extraordinary approach to the creation of jobs in the short and in the long term that s why these investments in repairing our streets and bridges renovating our housing rebuilding our water and sewer lines improving mass transit retooling our industrial parks and protecting our environment are important parts of the larger plan also to invest in our people and their economic educational and technological futures through 3 billion in additional funding for highways airports and mass transit 2 5 billion in community development block grants which can be used to create new jobs and improve the quality of life communities will be able to complete projects they ve needed for years but haven t been able to finance they will create new jobs today but they will also build the foundations for broader economic growth in the private sector tomorrow this plan also will create almost 700 000 new jobs this summer for unemployed young people something that will be profoundly important again in sending the right signals we all know for example that the financial markets as mayor dinkins said respond to the right signals interest rates are down almost one full point now and if we can keep them down for several months we may well put another 100 billion in refinancing back into this economy for investment and growth why because the markets have responded to a signal well people respond to signals too people in san diego where the unemployment has been so high will respond to a signal will this stimulus program give a job to every person in san diego of course not but it will send a signal that america is on the move again will this stimulus program provide a summer job for every young person in south central los angeles that mayor bradley is so concerned about of course not but it will sure send a signal that america is on the move again and coming together again will it in the beginning provide enough funds for everybody to do in every city what mayor lanier and mayor friedman and others have done in parts of their communities with community policing of course not but it will provide a beginning and it will send a signal that we are moving in the right direction and it will actually have an economic impact that is positive these things are very important i also don t want to forget the fact that a significant percentage almost half of this stimulus package is as incentives to the private sector for private investment in these same communities small businesses have created virtually all of the new jobs in our country in the last 10 years their inability to create more jobs than larger employers have been shedding is the central cause of stagnant employment in america so the small business tax credit that we offer the new business long term capital gains tax and the other incentives for businesses both small and large to create new jobs is very important this plan is based on the idea that we all have to work together to build our future the idea that we have to look at the long run needs for the 365 000 or so kids that will be in head start for the millions of young people who we want to provide for education and training for all the people who have lost their jobs because of defense cutbacks or other industrial relocations that they need intense efforts to reinvest in their community as well as to retraining opportunities that we need to couple those long term efforts with the short term stimulus that will send the right signal spark this economy and get some job growth back in to this recovery this is not as so many have said a partisan issue it is not a small town or a large city issue it is something that we all have to face to get the job done and i m very grateful for the support that s been given now before i answer questions i d like to make just a very brief announcement that i think the press here already knows about but i want to formally announce that in vancouver canada on april 3rd and 4th i will meet with president yeltsin of russia to explore what the united states can do to support his efforts to strengthen democracy and to create a vibrant market economy and to support our common interests in solving crises around the world in maintaining a general march toward peace and freedom and democracy i will try to be rather specific at that time in terms of what the united states will be prepared to do and we will try to offer some innovative solutions to the difficulties faced by the president and by the russian people i hope that this will be a very productive thing i look forward to it i ll be glad to answer a few questions about that but i hope too that you recognize that the significance of this action today is that if we can have enough bipartisan support to pass an economic program in the congress that will strengthen america america in turn will be better able to deal with the problems that we face beyond our borders unless we re strong here it s going to be very difficult for us to meet our responsibilities around the world dem wjclinton5 4 94 bill_clinton thank you very much kerry you did a terrific job on the tour and just now with the introduction i do want to say since a lot of you made comments about the basketball game if it had come out the other way i probably would have been in the montgomery county hospital as a patient today rather than just someone trying to learn i want to thank my good friend bob jordan for what he said and for his long friendship and support for me and i thank congressman hefner for representing you so well and faithfully as well as for being fairly restrained last night i brought all my north carolina staff members and all the people that work at the white house who went to duke to the game last night and so in our little box there were more people agin me than for me which is but it was a wonderful occasion this morning before we came here i met with kerry and some other folks who are here who helped to talk to me a little bit about some of the medical problems that you face here in this county and in similar places throughout our country i d just like to ask them to stand and be recognized because i want you to know that i was with them before i came here and a lot of what i have to say responds to what they said jim bernstein the director of the north carolina office of rural health and the president elect of the national rural health care association dr hugh craft is the chief of the pediatrics at community hospital in roanoke virginia beth howell the director of nursing at your local hospital dr deborah mcroberts who is one of your local family physicians the chairman of the board of the memorial hospital hal scott who kind of emceed our event and dr tom townsend who is now at east tennessee state university and has been a family practitioner for many years and just by coincidence his father is probably the dean of pediatric practice in our state and i looked at him today and i said i knew a tom townsend who was a doctor once and he said he was my father but i didn t organize that i get accused of bringing arkansas into everything i didn t do that i d also like to thank the people here at this fine school for taking us in your principal and your superintendent and the mayor of troy and i also know that these benches were constructed especially for this event by jerry holders so i don t know what s going to happen to them but i want to thank jerry for making the benches available to us he did a fine job i ve been working on the issues that we talked about today and the things that you heard about today from the previous speakers for nearly 20 years now since i was first elected attorney general of my state in 1983 or excuse me in 79 when i served as governor for the first time my wife and i started a rural health initiative trying to connect our children s hospital to all of the rural hospitals in the state and deal with a lot of the issues that you ve done so well with here in north carolina in 1990 after years of dealing with the headaches of the medicaid program as a governor i agreed to work with the then republican governor of delaware who is now a congressman from delaware on a governors association project trying to figure out what we could do at the state level to deal with some of the terrible problems of health care the rising costs the strain on state budgets the lack of reimbursement the high infant mortality rates in a lot of rural areas all the and the lack of doctors and after i worked on this for sometime and after i had been involved in this issue for a very long time i came to the conclusion that a lot of the problems of the american health care system simply could not be addressed in the absence of a national effort to reform the way primarily the way we finance health care and the way we provide health care professionals in america there s so much that s good about our health care system and that which is good is the best in the world so the trick is how to fix what s wrong and keep what s right and that has been the great debate in which we have been engaged over the last year or so through the first lady s task force we have asked for the help of literally thousands and thousands of doctors and nurses and other health care providers and consumer groups to try to give us some sort of insights into what we should do but the main point i want to make in the beginning is that my roots are in a county a lot like this one and i sometimes think in washington we lose track of the human face of america s problems and america s promise and i m deeply grateful to be here today to see both of those things first let me say that rural america has a lot of folks who either don t have health insurance or who have very limited health insurance there are a lot of small businesspeople there are a lot of farmers there are a lot of self employed people who have enormous difficulty with insurance policies that often have lifetime limits very high deductibles big copays and premiums that go up every year a lot of citizens i have met around this country have really told me of the decisions that they make on an annual basis about whether they can even afford to insure their family seventeen percent of rural america has no health insurance at all the folks at the hospital today told me that half of all of the emergency room business they do in the hospital are with people who have no insurance who show up at the emergency room when the care was too late when it s too expensive because they didn t have insurance to get it on a regular basis twenty five percent of our farm families have no health insurance in america we have to do something about this if you look at where we are you can see here at any given time in america our population is roughly 255 million people at any given time in a year there will be a total of 58 million every year who don t have health insurance at some time during the year and on any given day we figure somewhere between 37 million and 40 million who don t go uninsured there are 81 million americans who have preexisting conditions you heard bob jordon talking about someone who lost their job with ibm and had a preexisting condition now people with someone in their family with a preexisting condition normally find themselves in one of three positions either they can t get insurance at all or they re paying a whole lot more for it or they re in a job where they got insurance before the preexisting condition that they had or their spouse or their child developed and now they can t ever change their job because if they try to change jobs they won t be able to get insured at a new job that is a huge deal in a country where the average 18 year old is going to change work eight times in a lifetime and in which labor mobility is going to be the key to our future economic growth when big companies are downsizing and small companies are expanding and we already know it s harder for small companies to get affordable insurance then there are 133 million americans who have or a majority of our people who have insurance but have lifetime limits on it which means that if they have serious illnesses they could run out of a lifetime limit i met a family in florida about 10 days ago that had written a letter to my wife about their problem they had two sons with rare forms of cancer that apparently had some sort of genetic connection because both their boys had it they had a daughter that at least to the present time had not developed this kind of cancer they had a lifetime limit on their policy and they felt the lifetime limit would run before the first child was out of the house and eligible to be on medicaid or something and certainly would clearly run before the second child would they had no idea how they were going to get care for their children when that happened so we have to decide whether we re going to do something about this no other advanced country with the kind of national economy as strong as ours has failed to provide for health care security for its people and there are basically only two ways to do that you can do what canada does which is just to abolish the whole private insurance industry and pay for it with a tax we do that with the medicare program today that s how we finance medicare that s how we finance medicaid you have low administrative costs but there are all kinds of cost problems cost control problems there the other thing you can do is to have the mix system that we have and extend it to everybody that is employers can cover their employees employees can pay part of their health care employers can pay part of their health care and then if they are very small businesses with low payrolls you can provide a discount for them but in other words you just extend the system we have now that we re most comfortable with the third thing you can do is to keep on doing what we re doing just talk about it say how terrible it is and figure we re just not smart enough to figure out how to do it now let me just say if we keep on doing what we re doing a lot of bad things will happen more and more hospitals like this one will either will go under or have to really cut back on what they do you won t be able because this hospital doesn t have full reimbursement it restricts the income that can be paid to the nurses it restricts whatever incentives you can offer to the doctors you get fewer doctors and you get doctors like this doctor who told me she s on a hard week worked over 100 hours a week and in a slow week worked an 80 hour week pretty soon the doctors are going to need doctors if you do that so i really don t think doing nothing is an option every year the number of americans we lose about about 100 000 americans a month lose their health insurance permanently so the problem will get worse not better there is a perception today i think in the nation s capital that maybe the problem won t get worse because there s so much managed care that inflation in medical costs overall has gone done well it has it always goes down when there s the threat of real health care reform but for small business people and farmers and a lot of individuals health insurance has not gone down it s still going up quite rapidly and a lot of people are still losing their health insurance so we have to deal with the fact that there is plainly a crisis i think that we ought to make the choice of guaranteed private insurance because as a practical matter i don t think we ought to just shut down all the health insurance companies in the country and figure out what all those people are going to do for a living and the figure out how to substitute a tax for health insurance premiums when most people have health insurance and you could make the health insurance work better for small business people people in government and big business today normally have pretty good health insurance systems and their inflation rates have come down within inflation the inflation rate generally so i think the simplest way is simply to guarantee private health insurance to all americans that s what our plan does it says every american should have health insurance that can never be taken away that if you work employers and employees should make a contribution that health insurance plan if you don t work the government should pay now we re paying anyway if somebody shows up at this emergency room and gets care when it s too late and too expensive you re going to pay one way or the other either the hospital will have to find a way to pass the costs along to the other payers or if the hospital can t do it you pay for it in terms of reduced services fewer doctors and terrible financial strain on the hospital when everyone is covered it reduces all this incentive to shift costs and it provides the funds that you have in medically underserved areas that you need so desperately to hire more doctors and to keep the people that you have i think that is terribly important there s another thing that s important about it and that is when everybody has health insurance then you can use more preventive care and you can have more primary care almost all of us were raised on that old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure we ignore that almost entirely in health care you have here the infant mortality rate in this country is well above the statewide average why because you have a whole lot of pregnant women who only have seven prenatal visits when they ought to have 12 who have low birth weight babies who have problems that has to be addressed because we do not do enough in this country to do enough primary and preventive work in health care we have great high tech medicine if you re really sick we do more in medical research than any other country i don t propose to stop that in fact our plan would invest more in it but where our real shortcoming is is in primary and preventive care so i think that is very important now the second big issue that i think we have to face is this what kind of system are we going to have from the point of view of the patients and should you have or not have a choice of the doctor or a medical plan you buy into this is a big issue i don t know how big an issue it is in montgomery county but i can tell you now that slightly less than half of the american people who are insured at work have a choice of more than one plan now more and more employees are being required to buy into whatever plan that the employers decide it s the only one that he or she can afford and there s less and less choice in these plans of what doctor you visit what hospital you visit and what you do that is a big issue so i think that one of the things that i would like to emphasize is the need to have choice not only insurance that can t be taken away not only comprehensive benefits not only no lifetime limits but under our plan if it passes the way we have proposed it people will be able to have a choice every year of at least three different plans you can join an hmo you can have a fee for service practice and if you re in a rural area that may be the only option you have just to go through the same system that you have now or there will be at least one other kind of plan offered maybe a mix between the two i think that s very important most americans believe that they should have some say over their own health care and most americans believe that the quality of health care will be increased if their choices can be maintained and i can tell you that if we do nothing if we do nothing for a couple of years anyway people who get their insurance through big businesses and through government like i do will continue to get good health care at reasonable prices the price of that will be putting price squeeze on everybody else which means that teaching hospitals for example which are very important in rural areas to support you will find it harder and harder to get adequate money and it means that people who are small businesses and people who are self employed will pay higher and higher premiums one of the great raging debates we re having now is in the small business community about whether it will be terrible for small business to have to insure their employees if the small businesses don t do it now well the director of the small business administration erskine bowles from north carolina is here with me today he spent 20 years helping to organize small businesses get them started help them expand and he s one of the strongest advocates of our health care program because he knows most small businesses already insure their employees don t get the insurance that they want pay higher premiums than they should and that the small business sector is going to be in worse trouble if we don t do something than if we do so i think that this whole issue of having more choice is very very important let me also mention something else if you re going to have comprehensive benefits and the right to choose your own doctor then it seems to me we also have to outlaw some insurance practices let me just talk about this today insurance companies as you just heard the story can drop people for nearly any reason whatever under our plan insurance companies couldn t drop coverage or cut benefits couldn t increase rates just because you ve got somebody in your family who s been sick who s got a preexisting condition couldn t use lifetime limits and couldn t charge older people more than younger people just because they get older now how are we going to do this and not bankrupt the insurance company the answer is you ve got to cover everybody and you ve got to make it possible for insurance companies to make money the way grocery stores do to make a little money on a lot of people instead of a lot of money on a few people that s what community rating you hear this when hear all this talk about community rating you hear all these words that may not mean anything to you that s all community rating means why do you think people in government if you belong to the federal employees health insurance plan why do you think we have a good deal because there s a whole bunch of us it s as simple as that they re just a bunch of us and we can get a good deal and we can get a good deal whether we re the president in washington or whether we are the postmaster in troy if you buy into the federal health insurance plan there s a lot of us so to make it possible for us to cure these insurance abuses and have it really work in a town like troy or for a small business person or a farm family you have to be able to put folks in large pools that s what community rating means that s all community rating means is you make money insurance would make money the way grocery stores do and just the way grocery stores have to allow for a certain amount of broken merchandise or stale bread or people making off with olives or whatever if you ve got a big enough base then if you get a few people who are real sick you can speak it over the base and people can still make a living doing it that s basically what we re trying to do i want to come back to how this affects rural america in a minute one of the programs that does work in the government i think is medicare most people think it works it s very important that the american people know and that the senior citizens in this county know that our plan preserves medicare but it covers two things that are not covered in medicare now one is the prescription drug benefit big problem a lot of older people wind up going to hospitals because they can t afford to buy medicine that they should take to stay out of the hospital under medicare this will save money over the long run there have been a couple of studies showing that it will the second thing is we begin to cover some longterm care coverage through medicare today basically what the government does is if old folks are real poor they can get longterm care under medicaid and mostly it s institutional care nursing home care so we want to support in home care and other community based care i ve already been over this we want to guarantee the benefit that work if small businesses have low payrolls and low profit margins and are strapped we will provide discounts to those small businesses so that they might pay as little as four percent a payroll people say well i can t even afford that but if all of the competitors have to pay you can i want to point this out seventy percent of the small businesses in america today provide some health insurance for their employees seven out of 10 almost 100 percent of the small businesses where jobs are growing in numbers provide health care benefits for their employees health care costs of small business are 35 percent more than they are for big business for the same benefits 35 percent more because they re small under our plan you won t ever be at a competitive disadvantage because all of your competitors would also have to provide for health care coverage you d be able to get a better deal than you can now and here s something else that has received almost no notice our health care plan folds the health care costs of workers compensation and automobile insurance health care cost into this so small businesses that are being killed by workers compensation costs will have their workers comp rates go down because the health care portion of it will be covered in the health care plan so health care the small business community of this country will come out a winner in this not a loser if we do it if we don t do it what will happen is more and more small businesses will lose their health insurance every year or they ll have higher copays higher deductibles and less coverage so let me just make one last comment about the rural areas the biggest problem i heard today here was there are not enough doctors you ve got one doctor for nearly 8 000 people that s not enough you need many more so do most folks in rural america why does this happen well doctors make more money in cities doctors have more support in cities and frankly our medical schools are turning out too many specialists and too few general practitioners for the needs of not just people in rural areas but all over the country what does our plan do about that number one it changes the incentives the federal government spends an enormous amount of money to subsidize the training of doctors as expensive as it is we change our subsidy program over time to subsidize more family practitioners and fewer specialists it s important we ve got to produce more family practitioners if the doctors aren t there no incentive will bring them here number two we will dramatically increase the national health service corps another 7 000 doctors over the next few years to pay people s way through medical school let them come out here and practice for a couple of years and pay their debts number four we give a 1 000 a month tax credit or a 12 000 a year income subsidy to doctors who will go to medically underserved areas for five years and a 500 a month credit to other for five years and a 500 a month credit to other medical professions that will go to underserved areas that will make a huge difference number five we help to hook these doctors up with new medical technical to the medical centers in urban areas far away which is very important and we give certain tax incentives to make it easier for physicians to buy the laboratory and other equipment they need to feel good about their practice in rural areas now all these things will really help the terrible problems i heard about today i ll say again i don t see how your hospital is functioning with doctors where a slow week is an 80 hour week and a fast week is 110 hour week there is a limit to how long you can expect your physicians to do that and function at a high level of efficiency you cannot do it so we have to change that and we re going to so in summary we ve got a plan that would expand the system we ve got guaranteed private insurance keep your choice of doctors provide real insurance reform in a way that will permit the insurance companies to function in our free enterprise economy and still make a profit preserve medicare but add a prescription drug benefit and a long term care benefit and guarantee these health benefits at work and finally there is a very special attention given to the problems of medically underserved areas which are especially rural america to get more doctors out there more nurses out there and keep the connections that physicians and other health care providers feel they need to folks in the big medical center areas so they can get high quality care now we don t have to do any of this but if we don t the problems of this hospital are going to keep getting worse you can organize a local community effort like you are and it can make a real difference you can raise money you can do things you can get some more doctors in here and maybe you will escape the trend but if the number of family practice doctors continues to go down then somebody in rural america is going to be hurt even if you aren t if you escape there are just only so many ways you can cut a pie that gets smaller and even if you do that if you keep having people who don t have insurance not come in here for primary and preventive care showing up when they re real sick at the emergency room and half your emergency room load are people with uncompensated care it s going to get worse so you re doing what you have to do to succeed but your country is not doing what it should do to help you succeed and that s what this health care reform issue is all about and what i want to ask you to do is to take the experience that you have this is the real world out here that s what i heard these folks talking about and support bill hefner and support the other members of the congress and say what bill did this is not a political deal everybody gets sick regardless of their political party and this country needs a health care system where the financing is as good as the medical care that s what we need and if we don t do this we are going to pay a terrible economic and human price you know this and what happens is we get up there in washington we start going to work on this and all we ever hear from are lobbyists then the real world experience what really is going on out here in the heartland of america gets lost in a cloud of hot air i m here today just to ask you to encourage this good congressman and the other members of congress to deal with this issue and to deal with it now and not to fool with it any more sixty years ago we had a chance 60 years ago we had a chance to guarantee health care coverage for all americans and we passed it up twenty years ago under president nixon he proposed guaranteed private health insurance for all americans with employers and employees paying their part and we passed it and every time we have passed it we have let the problem get worse we have put more of a burden on rural america we ve put more of a burden on small business people and farmers and we have really played havoc with a significant percentage of the american people we can do better than that so i m asking you to take what you know in your heart your mind and your life as truth and say to the congress of the united states the time to act is now and we will support you thank you very much dem wjclinton5 4 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you so much reverend alexander governor keating mrs keating mayor senator nickles lieutenant governor fallon congressman brewster congressman istook most of all to the families here of those who lost their lives and those who survived the bombing almost a year ago i come here today as much as anything else to thank you on this verydifficult and painful day for me when i have lost a great and good friend and a lot of gifted employees of the federal government some of them very young and some wonderful members of our armed forces and some of our nation s most able business leaders the power of your example is very much with me and i thank you for that a year ago we were here to join in mourning your loss and praying for your healing today i ask that we not only remember your loss but celebrate the rebuilding you have already done and the work you will still do i have relived the moments of last year many times in my mind since i was here with you i have wondered how you were doing and prayed for your strength i was honored to have two of your citizens at the state of the union address to recognize their unique contributions to our country through their service to you just a few moments ago i was honored to lay a wreath along with the first lady and some children who survived and their parents and then to dedicate the child care center that will be built near the site of the bombing thanks to the remarkable efforts of your public officials and private citizens together you have shown how strong you are and you have given us all an example of the power of faith and community the power of both god s grace and human courage on this good friday what you have done is demonstrated to a watching and often weary and cynical world that good can overcome evil that love can outlast hate that the light of human life can shine on through the most terrible darkness and so i thank you for that and i know that you could not have done it without your faith on this friday i can t help noting that there s a wonderful verse in the book of matthew which says that a person who follows the word of god will be likened unto a wise man who built his house upon a rock and the rains descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house and it fell not for it was founded upon a rock well your building was blown down and many lives were shattered but today i saw again that the spirit of oklahoma city fell not because it is founded upon a rock and i thank you for showing that to america from the early rescue efforts that so many engaged in to the scholarship funds for the children who lost their parents to the current outpouring of support that will enable families to travel to denver for the trial to the dedication ceremony i just attended i see over and over and over again that you have redeemed the promise of essential human nature and human possibility that we celebrate so profoundly in this season and what i want you to know is that in doing that you have renewed the faith of america you have drawn our national family closer together a year ago i was able to come here and say to you that you have lost too much but you have not lost everything you have not lost america in the year since america has stood with you and prayed with you and worked with you as you rebuild but today i come to you to say you have given america something precious a greater sense of our shared humanity our common values our obligations to one another you ve taken some of the meanness out of our nation life and put a little more love and respect into it in ways that you probably cannot even imagine and i thank you for that i will call on all americans to express their solidarity with you when you celebrate the first anniversary of your tragedy earlier today i signed a proclamation calling for a moment of silence across our land on april the 19th at 9 02 a m central daylight time to ask the american people to gather in silent prayer and quiet reflection with their friends and neighbors wherever they live from maine to alaska to southern california to florida and let me say to all of you again we will be there with you but because of what you have felt and what you have endured let me ask you now if you will bow your heads in silent prayer to remember all that this year has meant to you and to pray for those who lost their loved ones on that plane in bosnia only you can know how they feel may we pray amen i would like to say a special word now to some of the people who were involved here a year ago to the federal workers who survived the blast and who are back on the job we are glad and we support you to those who are not yet back on the job we will stand with you until the day you are able to work again to those who lost their lives in the service of their country trying to help america get through every day in the best possible way we thank your families beyond measure before hillary and i left the white house this morning we planted a new dogwood tree on the south lawn to honor the memory of those who died in the crash in bosnia it is very near the one we planted a year ago before we came to be with you for the first time in honor of the loved ones that you lost a year ago i noted that the dogwood tree embodies the lesson of the psalms that the life of a good person is like a tree whose leaves do not wither that just as a tree takes a long time to grow sometimes wounds take a long time to heal well your tree has taken root on the south lawn of the white house in a few weeks it will flower the healing power of our faith has also taken root and must bloom again here you know this easter sunday all over the world the over one and a half billion people who are christians will be able to bear witness to our faith that the miracles of jesus and the miracles of the human spirit in oklahoma city only reflect the larger miracle of human nature that there is something eternal within each of us that we all have to die and that no bomb can blow away even from the littlest child that eternity which is within each of us i know a lot of you are still hurting but i hope as sunday comes you ll be able to find some comfort in that your healing has to go on a lot of you probably still have your doubts about all of this i am sure there s some lingering anger and even some rage in dark and lonely nights for many of the family members i can only say to you that the older i get the more i know that we have to try harder to make the most of each day and accept the fact that things will happen we can never understand or justify we flew over my home state you know coming here and it made me think of an old gospel song that were actually written in arkansas and i thought i would leave you with these words and our love and respect as we move towards easter the hymn goes further along we ll know all about it further along we ll understand why rise up my brothers and walk in the sunshine further along we ll understand why god bless you god bless america dem wjclinton5 5 93a bill_clinton to all of our distinguished guests from all the services to general powell and the joint chiefs secretary aspin mr vice president ladies and gentlemen and especially to general johnston and the men and women of the unified task force in somalia general johnston has just reported to me mission accomplished and so on behalf of all the american people i say to you general and to all whom you brought with you welcome home and thank you for a job very very well done you represent the thousands who served in this crucial operation in the first marine expeditionary force in the army 10th mountain division aboard the navy s tripoli amphibious ready group in the air force and air national guard airlift squadrons and in other units in each of our services over 30 000 american military personnel served at sometime in these last five months in somalia and serving alongside you were thousands of others from 20 nations although your mission was humanitarian and not combat you nonetheless faced difficult and dangerous conditions you sometimes were subjected to abuse and forced to dodge rocks and even bullets you saw firsthand the horror of hunger disease and death but you pressed on with what you set out to do and you were successful you have served in the best tradition of the armed forces of the united states and you have made the american people very very proud in the weeks to come we will formally recognize the contributions of those who participated in operation restore hope but earlier today to honor their accomplishments and that of all who supported that effort i awarded to general johnston the defense distinguished service medal in recognition not only of his extraordinary service but also of all those who served with him so well thank you all for your dedicated work to understand the magnitude of what our forces in somalia accomplished the world need only look back at somalia s condition just six months ago hundreds of thousands of people were starving armed anarchy ruled the land and the streets of every city and town today food is flowing crops are growing schools and hospitals are reopening although there is still much to be done if enduring peace is to prevail one can now envision a day when somalia will be reconstructed as a functioning civil society if all of you who served had not gone it is absolutely certain that tens of thousands would have died by now you saved their lives you gave the people of somalia the opportunity to look beyond starvation and focus on their future and the future of their children although you went on a mission of peace eight americans did not return we salute each of them we thank them and their families america will never forget what they did or what they gave to their loved ones we extend our hearts and our prayers as we honor the service of those who have returned and those who did not it is fitting that we reflect on what the successful mission signifies for the future this the largest humanitarian relief operation in history has written an important new chapter in the international annals of peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance you have shown that the work of the just can prevail over the arms of the warlords you have demonstrated that the world is ready to mobilize its resources in new ways to face the challenges of a new age and you have proved yet again that american leadership can help to mobilize international action to create a better world you also leave behind a u n peacekeeping force with a significant american component this force is a reflection of the new era we have entered for it has americans participating in new ways just hours ago general johnston turned over command to general bir of turkey as untaf become unosom ii you set the stage and made it possible for that force to do its mission and for the somalis to complete the work of rebuilding and creating a peaceful self sustaining and democratic civil society your successful return reminds us that other missions lie ahead for our nation some we can foresee and others we cannot as always we stand ready to defend our interests working with others where possible and by ourselves where necessary but increasingly in this new era we will need to work an array of multinational partners often in new arrangements you have proved again that that is possible you have proved again that our involvement in multilateral efforts need not be open ended or ill defined that we can go abroad and accomplish some distinct objectives and then come home again when the mission is accomplished some will ask why if the cold war ended we must still support the world s greatest military forces the kind that general johnston and his comrades represent i say it is because we still have interests we still face threats we still have responsibilities the world has not seen the end of evil and america can lead other countries to share more of the responsibilities that they ought to be shouldering some will ask why we must so often be the one to lead well of course we cannot be the world s policeman but we are and we must continue to be the world s leader that is the job of the united states of america and so today america opens its arms in a hearty welcome home general to you and all the men and women who served with you you have the admiration of the world and the thanks of your country for continuing the tradition of our armed forces and the values that make us proud to be americans and for proving that we can lead and serve in new ways in a new world in the words of the scriptures blessed are the peacemakers thank you very much dem wjclinton5 5 93b bill_clinton thank you very much ginny for that wonderful statement and the introduction and thank you secretary shalala for everything you said i noticed a few groans in the audience when you pointed out that dorothea dix worked for nothing i don t think she was suggesting that you do that i think she was volunteering to do that don t you think i want to say i knew nurses were miracle workers having been raised by one but i don t see how you staved off the rain today when i first heard 100 nurses were going to be here i thought to myself what else can i do i ve given up junk food i run every day what more do you want of me i m doing my part i want to say a special word of acknowledgement too to the nurses who are in this audience who work here at the white house who care for me and my family and are available to the other people who work here they do a wonderful job and i m very grateful to them and they re here and there and around and i thank them for their presence here i d also like to pay a special word of tribute to your president ginny trotter betts for hanging it out there with us in the election and bringing the support of the american nurses association and also for being such a forceful advocate for sweeping reforms in our health care system hillary and i very much appreciate the work that she and the nurses association have done and i know that she s also an old friend of al and tipper gore s and they re grateful too for her contributions i d also like to recognize some of the other people who are here today including a remarkable nurse whose presence in the congress is a symbol of your political strength congresswoman eddie bernice johnson from dallas and my dear friend she s really a tribute to the practice of good health i ve known her for 20 years and i look much older and she looks younger than she did the first time we met i also want to thank all the nurses who have advised our health care reform task force and brought such a valuable perspective to that effort you ve really made a difference and we re grateful to you we re here today to mark the beginning of national nurses week a time for our country to recognize the services that you and your colleagues provide 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year from inner city hospitals to rural clinics from the red cross to the armed services america s nurses always answer the call today we re reminded that our nation s 1 8 million working nurses are the backbone of a health care system the largest single group of health care providers in america and i might add a group that will have to do more and should do more in primary and preventive care if we re going to bring the cost of medical care down you know better than anyone else what is wrong with this system you see all the people who show up at the emergency room to get the most expensive care too late because they didn t have a basic primary and preventive health care package you see the enormous burden of paperwork squandering more and more hours of nurses and doctors requiring more and more precious health care dollars to be diverted to clerical expenses instead of to investing in the health of our people every day you see these kinds of problems as the nation continues to wait for action on a health care front i m here today on this beginning of your week to reaffirm to you my commitment that now is the time to do something about health care and to do it right one of the most challenging things we have to do in this city at this time is to break a mind set that we have one problem at a time and we ll get on it and we ll only think about that i believe that this country has at least three huge problems that relate one to the other one is there are too many people who are unemployed and too many people who are working harder with no gains in their incomes and it s been that way for a long long time two is the cost of health care is exploding at an unacceptable rate and yet too few people have coverage or their coverage is too limited third is we re absolutely being consumed by a massive national debt and a growing deficit and these things are all related one to the other now people say to me well we just do one thing at a time well look back over time where that s gotten us people say for a long time just say well we ought to just spend money and give it to people and maybe that will work that hasn t worked then for 12 years we heard the worst thing in the world is taxes we ll just cut taxes especially on wealthy people and that will make everything wonderful well that hasn t worked out very well either so the guy said to me yesterday said i know a bunch of people who got tax cuts last year because they used to be making 40 000 a year and now they re making 10 000 they all got a tax cut and what i say to you is that we don t want to just keep trying to give people things in a system that is broken you can t give people government money you can t give people tax cuts if the system is broken what we have to do is to attack all these problems at once and not keep giving people things but give them the means to take care of themselves and to create lives that are productive and good and strong for themselves and their families their children that s what we have to do that s why yes we have to reduce spending and increase taxes mostly on wealthy people who got their taxes cut in the 1980s to bring the deficit down but we also have to invest carefully in programs that will create jobs and raise incomes new technologies for the 21st century and the kind of education and training that will give people work if everybody in this country who wanted a good job had one we wouldn t have half the problems we ve got and then the third thing we have to do is to attack the health care crisis because if we don t we will never get the government deficit under control we will never balance this budget and we will never more importantly we will never provide the security that most families need and deserve in a rapidly changing and increasingly insecure world there are millions of americans today who cannot change jobs because somebody in their family has been sick there are millions of others who have no health insurance there are millions of others who have some health insurance but very little because they work for small businesses who cannot afford a basic package of health care because of the insurance system that we have in this country there are untold billions of dollars being spent that should not be spent by the people who pay the full price and more for health care because they have to pay for somebody else s health care who s not covered when it s too late and too expensive or because they re paying an unbelievable bureaucratic burden for the paperwork burdens of this system so i say to you these are false choices people cannot say to us you must choose between having a healthy country an employed country a country bringing its deficit down we must do all three of those things because that s the only way we can instead of trying to give people something that s not there to give empower people to seize control of their destiny and bring this country back that s what we ve got to do there will always be defenders of the status quo it is easy to say well let s just write somebody a check even easier to say taxes are evil they re out to get you right now you know as well as i do the lobbyists are lining up strategizing about how they re going to pick this health care proposal to death but i ll tell you something the worst thing we could do in my opinion after 400 and something people have worked their hearts out for months and months and months is to take a dive on the health care thing to turn away from it to deal with the inconveniences of it people say well it may cost somebody else some money let me tell you something all those people who don t have health insurance today they re being paid for by everybody else who s paying the bill what about fairness to them who s thinking about them i ll tell you something else we ve been reducing defense spending quite steeply and about all we can for the last five years and all the savings we hope to have in the peace dividend have been exploded away by rising health care costs and interest payments on this deficit so it is all related you ve got to have a job strategy you ve got to have a deficit reduction strategy and you ve got to have a health care strategy because if you don t have a health care strategy the american people can t stay well the american economy can t get well and you cannot reduce the deficit to zero in this decade those things must be done together we cannot be forced to make that false choice and so i ask you you represent 1 8 million people who know the heartache the heartbreak and the problems of this system and who also know that that which is right about our system makes it the best in the world for those who can access it we are determined to come forward to the congress with a plan that keeps the best of america s health care system keeps the private provider system keeps a lot of choice in the system but deals with the awful problems that you know better than anybody and i ask you to commit today not to let the special interests tell us that we can t deal with health care not to let the special interests spook and scare the members of congress away from doing what is our manifest duty to the people of this country who are working hard and playing by the rules and falling further behind and instead to give us all a chance to do the work of a generation and that is really what s being given us in this time in this congress the opportunity to do something that comes along once in a generation to change the whole course of america s future by dealing with these things together providing security and quality and control of cost in this health care system bringing this deficit down and pursuing a long term strategy for a high wage high growth low unemployment economy and they re all together if you ll help me take that message to the congress this will be one of the best years the american people ever had thank you very much no well let s wait and see what they do first i hope they i m waiting for a call from secretary christopher right now let me go take the call and i ll give you well secretary shalala says we re going to get a program that can immunize a lot more people we did the best we could with the money we had i think you know a lot of these things are going to be a function of how much money we have but i feel pretty good about it i talked to her about it she feels good about we think it s a big advance over where we are thank you dem wjclinton5 5 94 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen welcome to all of you last week we watched with wonder as the citizens of south africa went to the polls as voters lined up for miles and miles coming on crutches and in wheelchairs waiting patiently crossing the countryside to exercise their franchise to create a new nation conceived in liberty and empowered by their redemptive suffering i have just spoken with president elect mandela and with president de klerk i congratulated mr mandela on his victory and told president de klerk that he clearly deserves tremendous credit for his leadership their courage their statesmanship along with the leadership of chief buthelezi and others has made this transition smoother than many thought possible south africa is free today because of the choices its leaders and people made their actions have been an inspiration we can also be proud of america s role in this great drama because those of you here today and many others have helped to keep freedom s flame lit during the dark night of apartheid congress enacted sanctions to help squeeze legitimacy from the apartheid regime students marched in solidarity stockholders held their companies to higher ethical standards america s churches both black and white took up the mantle of moral leadership and throughout the fight american civil rights leaders here helped to lead the way throughout south africa s cause has been also an american cause last week s miracle came to pass in part because of america s help and now we must not turn our backs let me begin by saying that we all know south africa faces a task of building a tolerant democracy and a successful market economy and that enabling the citizens of south africa to reach their potential economically is critical to preserving the tolerant democracy to show that reconciliation and democracy can bring tangible benefits others will have to help i m convinced south africa can become a model for the entire continent and america must be a new and full partner with that new government so that it can deliver on its promise as quickly as possible we ve already begun over the past year the united states sent experts to south africa to negotiate a new constitution or to help them negotiate the new constitution we provided considerable assistance to help their elections work we lifted sanctions we sent two trade and investment missions to lay the groundwork for greater economic cooperation and we had a very fine american delegation of election observers there during the recent elections and i d like to especially thank the leader of that delegation reverend jesse jackson for his outstanding contributions to the success of the south african elections thank you sir today i am announcing a substantial increase in our efforts to promote trade aid and investment in south africa over the next three years we will provide and leverage about 600 million in funds to south africa for this fiscal year we have increased assistance from 83 million to 143 million along with guarantees and other means our resources which will be mobilized for next year will exceed 200 million through the programs of 10 u s government agencies we will work with south africans to help meet the needs which they identify to build homes and hospitals to provide better education to promote good governance and economic development i m writing to the leaders of the other g 7 countries and asking them to join us in expanding assistance to south africa and we urge the international financial institutions such as the world bank to do the same next week i m also sending an official delegation to south africa for president mandela s inauguration vice president gore will lead the trip along with mrs gore they ll be joined by the first lady secretary brown secretary espy and many others including those here in the audience today we are taking these actions because we have important interests at stake in the success of south africa s journey we have an economic interest in a thriving south africa that will seek our exports and generate greater prosperity throughout the region we have a security interest in a stable democratic south africa working with its neighbors to restore and secure peace we have a clear moral interest we have had our own difficult struggles over racial division and still we grapple with the challenges of drawing strength from our own diversity that is why the powerful images of south africa s elections resonated so deeply in the souls of all americans whether in south africa or america we know there is no finish line to democracy s work developing habits of tolerance and respect creating opportunity for all our citizens these efforts are never completely done but let us savor the fact that south africa now has the chance to begin that noble and vital work thirty three years ago albert luthuli became the first of four south africans to win the nobel peace prize as he accepted the award he described his people as and i quote living testimony to the unconquerable spirit of mankind down the years they have sought the goal of fuller life and liberty striving with incredible determination and fortitude today that fortitude and the strivings of generations have begun to bear fruit together we must help all south africans build on their newfound freedom thank you very much and now i d like to ask the vice president to come forward to make some acknowledgements and some remarks and to talk a little about the historic trip that the american delegation he will lead is about to make mr vice president dem wjclinton5 5 95 bill_clinton president mcpherson governor engler ambassador blanchard distinguished members of congress and state officials members of the board of trustees distinguished faculty honored guests family members and most importantly members of the class of 1995 i m honored to be your speaker today and to be back on this wonderful campus the site of one of the great presidential debates in 1992 i have fond memories of michigan state and i was sitting there thinking of all the uses to which i might put my honorary degree maybe i will get more respect in washington now regardless now i know who i m supposed to root for in the big 10 speaking of sports i want to take a moment of personal privilege to offer my very best wishes on his retirement to your distinguished basketball coach judd heathcote and as a person who never ever would have had an opportunity to be here today doing what i am doing i want to thank president mcpherson the present and past governors of michigan and all others who have supported the remarkable set of educational opportunities for young people in michigan especially in higher education the tuition guarantee program to keep tuition increases here to the rate of inflation for five years is a standard i wish other universities all across america would follow i also hope that other states will follow the example of the michigan education trust and of michigan state in entering into the direct loan program which will lower the cost of college loans for young people and improve their repayment options so more people can afford to go to college and stay there until they get their degrees i also want to say that i am deeply honored to be joined today by another michigan state alumnist who spoke from this platform last year my friend and fellow arkansan ernest green he was one of the little rock nine a brave group of americans who staked their lives for the cause of school integration and equal opportunity in education in my state almost 40 years ago he made the right choice at the right moment in his life he is a good model for you and i hope you will do the same as i was reminded by your president and others when we gathered just a few moments ago the last sitting president to address this assembly was theodore roosevelt in 1907 there were fewer than 100 graduates in the senior class then but it was a time not unlike this time we are on the edge of a new century they had just begun a new century we are on the edge of a new era they had just begun the dawn of the industrial age like us now they had many many opportunities but profound problems and people were full of hope mixed with fear but president roosevelt and his generation of americans were optimistic aggressive in facing the challenges of the day and determined to solve the problems before them they launched the progressive era using the power of government to free the market forces of our country from the heavy hand of monopoly beginning to protect our environment for future generations to keep our children out of sweatshops to stand strong for america s role in the world theodore roosevelt and the americans of his generation made the right choices at the right moment they met the challenges of the present paved the way for a better future and redeemed the promise of america our journey as a nation has never been an automatic march to freedom and opportunity in every generation there has come a point of challenge in change when critical decisions are made by our people to go forward to turn back to reach out or turn inward to unify or divide to believe or doubt today we stand at the end of the cold war and the industrial age at the onset of the global economy and the information age throughout all 219 years of our republic times of great change like this have unleashed forces of promise and threat forces that uplift us and unsettle us this time is not different you are walking into a future of unlimited possibilities but more than half your fellow citizens are working harder spending less time with their children and earning about the same they did 15 years ago you can look forward to bringing your children into an exciting world freer of the dangers of war and nuclear annihilation but the dangers here at home are still profound too many of our children are not born into stable families our streets are still too violent and new forces threaten the order and security which free people everywhere cherish and so my fellow americans it falls to your generation to make your historic choices for america this is a very new and different time but the basic question before us is as old as our country will we face up to the problems and seize our opportunities with confidence and courage it is our responsibility to make that choice again because you have a fine education with all its power and potential when you leave this stadium your responsibility to your families your community and your country will be greater than ever before with your lives fully before you you too must once again redeem the promise of america on the home front there is reason for optimism though income stagnation and economic uncertainty plague too many of our people unemployment is down inflation is low our deficit is declining trade is up and most importantly of all educational opportunities are increasing though crime and violence drug abuse and welfare dependency and out of wedlock pregnancies are still too high and threaten our social fabric we are making a serious assault on all of them and we can make progress on all of them though government is still too cumbersome and outdated it is growing smaller more flexible less wasteful and more effective in all these endeavors you must demand higher standards and more personal responsibility but you must know that progress is possible beyond our borders there is also reason for hope since the end of the cold war the bonds among nations and the forces of commerce have grown stronger there is now a greater understanding of our world s environmental challenges and a willingness to do something about them freedom democracy and free enterprise are on the march large countries are much less likely to go to war with one another i am very proud to say that for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age no russian missiles are pointed at the people of the united states and i am equally proud to say that next week i will become the first american president in nearly 40 years to visit russia when no american missiles are pointed at the people of russia therefore you who graduate today will have the chance to live in the most exciting the most prosperous the most diverse and interesting world in the entire history of humanity still you must face the fact that no time is free of problems and we have new and grave security challenges in this the 20th century millions of lives were lost in wars between nations and in efforts by totalitarian dictatorships to stamp out the light of liberty among their subjects in the 21st century bloody wars of ethnic and tribal hatred will be fought still in some parts of the world but with freedom and democracy advancing the real threat to our security will be rooted in the fact that all the forces that are lifting us up and opening unparalleled opportunity for us contain a dark underside for open societies are characterized by free and rapid movements of people and technology and information and that very wonder makes them very very vulnerable to the forces of organized destruction and evil so the great security challenge for your future in the 21st century will be to determine how to beat back the dangers while keeping the benefits of this new time the dark possibilities of our age are visible now in the smoke the horror and the heartbreak of oklahoma city as the long and painful search and rescue effort comes to an end with 165 dead 467 injured and two still unaccounted for our prayers are with those who lost their loved ones and with the brave and good people of oklahoma city who have moved with such strength and character to deal with this tragedy but that threat is not isolated and you must not believe it is we see that threat again in the bombing of the world trade center in new york in the nerve gas attack in the tokyo subway in the terrorist assault on innocent civilians in the middle east in the organized crime plaguing the former soviet union now that the heavy hand of communism has been lifted we see it even on the internet where people exchange information about bombs and terrorism even as children learn from sources all around the world my fellow americans we must respond to this threat in ways that preserve both our security and our freedoms appeasement of organized evil is not an option for the next century any more than it was in this century like the vigilant generations that brought us victory in world war ii and the cold war we must stand our ground in this high tech world we must make sure that we have the high tech tools to confront the high tech forces of destruction and evil that is why i have insisted that congress pass strong anti terrorism legislation immediately to provide for more than 1 000 new law enforcement personnel solely to fight terrorism to create a domestic anti terrorism center to make available the most up to date technology to trace the source of any bomb that goes off and to provide tough new punishment for carrying stolen explosives selling those explosives for use in a violent crime and for attacking members of the uniformed services or federal workers to their credit the leaders of congress have promised to put a bill on my desk by memorial day i applaud them for that this is not and must never be a partisan issue this is about america s future it is about your future we can do this without undermining our constitutional rights in fact the failure to act will undermine those rights for no one is free in america where parents have to worry when they drop off their children for day care or when you are the target of assassination simply because you work for our government no one is free in america when large numbers of our fellow citizens must always be looking over their shoulders it is with this in mind that i would like to say something to the paramilitary groups and to others who believe the greatest threat to america comes not from terrorists from within our country or beyond our borders but from our own government i want to say this to the militias and to others who believe this to those nearby and those far away i am well aware that most of you have never violated the law of the land i welcome the comments that some of you have made recently condemning the bombing in oklahoma city i believe you have every right indeed you have the responsibility to question our government when you disagree with its policies and i will do everything in my power to protect your right to do so but i also know there have been lawbreakers among those who espouse your philosophy i know from painful personal experience as a governor of a state who lived through the cold blooded killing of a young sheriff and a young african american state trooper who were friends of mine by people who espouse the view that the government was the biggest problem in america and that peopole had a right to take violence into their own hands so i ask you to hear me now it is one thing to believe that the federal government has too much power and to work within the law to reduce it it is quite another to break the law of the land and threaten to shoot officers of the law if all they do is their duty to uphold it it is one thing to believe we are taxed too much and work to reduce the tax burden it is quite another to refuse to pay your taxes though your neighbor pays his it is one thing to believe we are over regulated and to work to lessen the burden of regulation it is quite another to slander our dedicated public servants our brave police officers even our rescue workers who have been called a hostile army of occupation this is a very free country those of you in the militia movements have broader rights here than you would in any other country in the entire world do people who work for the government sometimes make mistakes of course they do they are human almost every american has some experience with this a rude tax collector an arbitrary regulator an insensitive social worker an abusive law officer as long as human beings make up our government there will be mistakes but our constitution was established by americans determined to limit those abuses and think of the limits the bill of rights the separation of powers access to the courts the right to take your case to the country through the media and the right to vote people in or out of office on a regular basis but there is no right to resort to violence when you don t get your way there is no right to kill people there is no right to kill people who are doing their duty or minding their own business or children who are innocent in every way those are the people who perished in oklahoma city and those who claim such rights are wrong and un american whenever in our history people have believed that violence is a legitimate extension of politics they have been wrong in the 1960s as your distinguished alumni said many good things happened and there was much turmoil but the weathermen of the radical left who resorted to violence in the 1960s were wrong today the gang members who use life on the mean streets of america as terrible as it is to justify taking the law into their own hands and taking innocent life are wrong the people who came to the united states to bomb the world trade center were wrong freedom of political speech will never justify violence never our founding fathers created a system of laws in which reason could prevail over fear without respect for this law there is no freedom so i say this to the militias and all others who believe that the greatest threat to freedom comes from the government instead of from those who would take away our freedom if you say violence is an acceptable way to make change you are wrong if you say that government is in a conspiracy to take your freedom away you are just plain wrong if you treat law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line for your safety every day like some kind of enemy army to be suspected derided and if they should enforce the law against you to be shot you are wrong if you appropriate our sacred symbols for paranoid purposes and compare yourselves to colonial militias who fought for the democracy you now rail against you are wrong how dare you suggest that we in the freest nation on earth live in tyranny how dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes i say to you all of you the members of the class of 1995 there is nothing patriotic about hating your country or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government there is nothing heroic about turning your back on america or ignoring your own responsibilities if you want to preserve your own freedom you must stand up for the freedom of others with whom you disagree but you also must stand up for the rule of law you cannot have one without the other the real american heroes today are the citizens who get up every morning and have the courage to work hard and play by the rules the mother who stays up the extra half hour after a long day s work to read her child a story the rescue worker who digs with his hands in the rubble as the building crumbles about him the neighbor who lives side by side with people different from himself the government worker who quietly and efficiently labors to see to it that the programs we depend on are honestly and properly carried out most of all the parent who works long years for modest pay and sacrifices so that his or her children can have the education that you have had and the chances you are going to have i ask you never to forget that and i would like to say one word to the people of the united states i know you have heard a lot of publicity in recent days about michigan and militias but what you have seen and heard is not the real michigan this is the real michigan this is the real michigan in this stadium today the real michigan is michigan state it s the astonishing revival of the automobile industry with the remarkable partnership between the autoworkers and the management real michigan is kellogg s corn flakes and the best cherries in the world the real michigan is the great lakes and the up and the real michigan most of all the real michigan was presented to me when i got off the plane and one of your local officials told me that here in mid michigan in only five days the people of this area raised 70 000 to pay for the help that people need in oklahoma city and that money is now on its way to oklahoma city in a 27 car caravan led by members of 27 different law enforcement agencies from this part of your wonderful state that is what i want america to know about the real michigan so my fellow americans and members of the class of 1995 let me close by reminding you once again that you live in a very great country when we are united by our humanity and our civic virtue nothing can stop us let me remind you once again that our best days as a nation still lie before us but we must not give in to fear or use the frustrations of the moment as an excuse to walk from the obligations of citizenship remember what our founding fathers built remember the victories won for us in the cold war and in world war ii 50 years ago next week remember the blood and sweat and triumph that enabled us to come to this the greatest moment of possibility in our history go out and make the most of the potential god has given you make the most of the opportunities and freedoms america has given to you be optimistic be strong make the choices that theodore roosevelt made that ernest green made seize your moment build a better future and redeem once again the promise of america thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton5 5 98 bill_clinton thank you very much mrs reagan mr barram secretary daley senator moynihan delegate norton senator dole senator lott all the members of congress and the diplomatic corps who are here mr mayor secretary schultz and general powell and all the former members of the reagan administration who are here and enjoying this great day to maureen and the friends of president and mrs reagan who are here i d like to begin by thanking jim freed and his team for a magnificent building i think we all feel elevated in this building today i also want to say on behalf of hillary and myself a special word of appreciation to mrs reagan for being here from her own pioneering efforts to keep our children safe from drugs to the elegance and charm that were the hallmarks of the reagan white house through her public and brave support for every family facing alzheimer s she has served our nation exceedingly well and we thank her the only thing that could make this day more special is if president reagan could be here himself but if you look at this atrium i think we feel the essence of his presence his unflagging optimism his proud patriotism his unabashed faith in the american people i think every american who walks through this incredible space and lifts his or her eyes to the sky will feel that as senator moynihan just described this building is the completion of a challenge issued 37 years ago by president kennedy i ought to say and doggedly pursued for 37 years by senator moynihan i must say senator there were days when i drove by here week after week after week and saw only that vast hole in the ground when i wondered if the moynihan hole would ever become the reagan building but sure enough it did and we thank you as you have heard this building will house everything from an international trade center to international cultural activities to the agency for international development to the woodrow wilson center for scholars it is fitting that the plaza on which we gather bears the name of president wilson and it is fitting that presidents wilson and reagan are paired for their work and therefore the activities which will be culminated in this building span much of what has become the american century since president reagan left office the freedom and opportunity for which he stood have continued to spread for half century american leaders of both parties waged a cold war against aggression and oppression today freed from the yolk of totalitarianism new democracies are emerging all around the world enjoying newfound prosperity and long awaited peace more nations have claimed the fruits of this victory free markets free election plain freedom and still more are struggling to do so today we joy in that but we cannot indeed we dare not grow complacent today we recall president reagan s resolve to fight for freedom and his understanding that american leadership in the world remains indispensable it is fitting that a piece of the berlin wall is in this building america s resolve and american ideals so clearly articulated by ronald reagan helped to bring that wall down but as we have seen repeatedly in the years since the end of the cold war did not bring the end of the struggle for freedom and democracy for human rights and opportunity if the history of this american century has taught us anything it is that we will either work to shape events or we will be shaped by them we cannot be partly in the world we cannot lead in fits and starts or only when we believe it suits our short term interests we must lead boldly consistently without reservation because as president reagan repeatedly said freedom is always in america s interests our security and prosperity depend upon our willingness to be involved in the world woodrow wilson said that americans were participants in the life of the world like it or not but his countrymen did not listen to him and as a result there came a great depression the rise of fascism the second world war our nation then learned we could not withdraw from the world then a new generation of americans reach outward in the years after world war ii building new alliances of peace and new engines of prosperity nato the united nations the imf the international trading system it is no accident that during this period of great american leadership abroad we experienced unparalleled economic prosperity here at home and it is no accident that freedom s great triumph came on america s watch today on the edge of a new century the challenges we face are more diverse but the values that guide america must remain the same the globalization of commerce and the explosion of communications technology do not resolve all conflicts between nations indeed they create new challenges they do not diminish our responsibility to lead therefore instead they heighten it because today s possibilities are not tomorrow s guarantees we must remain true to the commitment to lead that every american leader of both parties especially ronald reagan and woodrow wilson so clearly articulated in this 20th century for 50 years we fought for a europe undivided and free last week the united states senate took a profoundly important step toward that goal by welcoming poland hungary and the czech republic into nato an achievement i believe that would make ronald reagan proud the alliance that helped to keep the peace for half century now brings us closer than ever to that dream of a europe united democratic and at peace now congress has other opportunities to fulfill the spirit and honor the legacy of the man whose name we affix to this building today congress has the opportunity to maintain our leadership by paying for our support to the imf and settling our dues to the united nations i hope they will do it president reagan once said we had made what he called an unbreakable commitment to the imf one that was unbreakable because in this age of economic interdependence an investment in the imf is simply an investment in american prosperity and we fought for 50 years for peace and security as part of the united nations in 1985 ronald reagan said the u n stands as the symbol of the hopes of all mankind for a more peaceful and productive world we must not he said disappoint those hopes we still must not disappoint those hopes president reagan understood so clearly that america could not stand passively in the face of great change he understood we had to embrace the obligations of leadership to build a better future for all the commerce that will be conducted in this great building will be a testament to the opportunities in a truly global economy america has done so much to create the academic and cultural activities that will be generated from people who work here will bring us closer together as well because the agency for international development will be here we will never forget that the spark of enterprise and opportunity should be brought to the smallest poorest villages in the world for there too there are people of energy intelligence and hunger for freedom this is a great day for our country this is a day of honoring the legacy of president reagan remembering the service of president wilson and rededicating ourselves to the often difficult but ultimately always rewarding work of america as i stand within the reagan building i am confident that we will again make the right choices for america that we will take up where president reagan left off to lead freedom s march boldly into the 21st century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton5 6 00b bill_clinton i believe we should give a round of applause to natalia and kateryna they were fabulous didn t they give a good they are a great representative of the young people of ukraine let me also thank the representatives of your government who came here with me today deputy head of presidential administration rohovyi foreign minister tarasyuk i d like to thank mayor omelchenko and patriarch filaret and all the distinguished representatives of the ukraine government who have joined me and the secretary of energy and my national security advisor and our two ambassadors for a good day of meetings i thank all of you for coming out here on this beautiful day i am honored to be in kiev again to come to the cradle of ukrainian culture to pay respects to ukraine s ancient and glorious past and to tell you america will stand by you as you fight for a free and prosperous future here in this historic and beautiful square you can see for a thousand years before me the magnificent st sophia s cathedral built by prince yaroslav in the 11th century and behind me the beautiful and reborn st michael s monastery built by his grandson with a stunning cathedral built since the last time i was here between them statues of saints olga and andrew cyril and methodius all proof of your extraordinary artistic and cultural accomplishments sadly the people who created and cherished these treasures suffered deeply i am honored to have laid a wreath of flowers at the memorial to the millions who perished in the forced famine of the 1930s ukraine has endured oppressors who carved up your lands banned your books starved your children purged your writers enslaved your workers plundered your art stole your rich soil and forbade you even to talk about the tragedy of the famine today the oppressors are gone stalin is gone the nazis are gone the soviet union is gone russia is working to build a new society but you the people of ukraine you are still here stronger than ever you are reclaiming your land uniting your people restoring your culture and raising your children in freedom and democracy you are fulfilling the longing of your ancestors you are building a free sovereign and independent ukraine i know you have faced disappointments and your dream is not complete you have your vote but you may ask will it lead to have a real positive impact you have your freedom but you may ask will it lead to a better future i ask you to look around you from lithuania to poland to the czech republic those who chose open societies and open markets like you started out with sacrifice but they ended up with success i have not lived what you have lived i am an american not an ukrainian i cannot tell you how to build your future but i do believe this i believe ukraine has the best opportunity in a thousand years to achieve both freedom and prosperity you are on your way president kuchma has helped to pass a strong budget he has moved to give people their own land to reform the old government bureaucracy to privatize new businesses in accord with international standards and he has appointed a strong prime minister but my friends you too must be strong leaders you must encourage the government you must exhort the rada you must build a free and prosperous ukraine do not give up keep on fighting boritesya poborete there will be obstacles i know some in ukraine want to discourage foreign investment they oppose free markets but that thinking is lost in the past but i ask you look around the world today the nations with the highest standards of living the greatest security the lowest poverty are free market democracies people who trade and invest in one another communism has lost in ukraine but a full commitment to free market democracy has not yet won if your children are to live their dreams it must win so again i ask you do not give up keep on fighting boritesya poborete america needs a strong prosperous and democratic ukraine as a partner together we have made the whole world safer from the risk of nuclear war our soldiers are serving together with courage and pride in missions of peace there is so much more we can do together we can explore the frontiers of science and space increase our efforts to protect the environment fight disease defeat terrorism and promote democracy prosperity and peace these are challenges all nations face and no nation can meet alone and so i say again let us meet them together we must not give up we must keep on fighting boritesya poborete america believes ukraine has a right to a place among the nations of europe no one must take that right away from you we reject the idea that the eastern border of europe is the western border of ukraine of course your future is your own choice but we can and we will keep the door to the transatlantic community of democracies open to ukraine ukraine has so much of what it takes to succeed in the global information age strong universities an educated society and partners willing to stand with you all you need now is to stay on course and pick up speed open the economy strengthen the rule of law promote civil society protect the free press break the grip of corruption in ukraine i understand you have a saying he who is an hour late will spend a year catching up people of ukraine seize this moment now for your nation and your children and so i say for the last time boritesya poborete in the cathedrals around me i see ukraine s past in the faces of all the young people before me i see ukraine s future it is a promising future you have kept alive your language your unity your dream of independence for a thousand years you have what it takes to build the future of your dreams your parents battled tyranny to help you win your freedom now you must use your freedom to make sure you and your children prosper in peace america is your friend and your partner again i thank you for coming to be with me today again i say america will be with you all the way god bless you slava ukrainiy dem wjclinton5 6 95 bill_clinton look at it this way jean all your other speeches will be easier now you did very well and i thank you and jim for coming ladies and gentlemen i have looked forward to this day for a long time and i care a lot about this issue i m glad to see so many distinguished americans here i welcome congressman bono who was before he became a congressman a mayor and therefore has an intimate personal experience with this whole issue and i m of course delighted to see my good friend millard fuller here who has done as much to make the dream of homeownership a reality in our country and throughout the world as any living person and we thank you sir for your work before i get into my remarks i think it s important for me to make a brief reference to another subject congress is coming back to work today after a break and the anti terrorism bill that i sent to congress is being considered in the senate it will give law enforcement the tools it needs to crack down on terrorists that they people in law enforcement asked me to seek from congress first a couple of months before the oklahoma city tragedy to deal especially with the problems of international terrorism coming in to the united states and then some more things that were asked for in the wake of oklahoma city this is very very serious legislation the congress not only has the right it has the responsibility to review the bill and to hear those who think that in some ways its law enforcement provisions are too tough there ought to be a full debate but we cannot afford to let scores of unnecessary amendments drag down this process in that i agree with the statements made by majority leader of the senate senator dole so i call upon my fellow democrats and republicans to limit amendments curb politics ignore narrow interests to agree to the simple pact that there should be no excuses no games no delays the time is now to enact this important legislation you can be sure that terrorists around the world are not delaying their plans while we delay the passage of this bill it is within our reach now to dramatically strengthen our law enforcement capabilities and to enhance the ability of people in law enforcement to protect all kinds of americans we have an obligation to do that and so i would urge the congress to take this bill up and to get on with it to limit the number of amendments as soon as possible so that we can go forward now let me get back to the subject at hand i am delighted to be here you might ask why do i care about home ownership after all i live in america s finest public housing the answer is i once had a life and i hope to have one again some day when i was 19 i built a home as part of what i did that summer when i was trying to coax my wife into marrying me we were both living in fayetteville arkansas teaching at the university of arkansas and i had not gotten a definite answer i think that s the most delicate way i can put this and hillary had to go away to somewhere i can t remember where she was going now but anyway she was taking a trip on an airplane so i was driving her to the airport and we drove by this wonderful old house it was an old old very small house and she said boy that s a beautiful house and i noticed that there was a little for sale sign on it so i took her to the airport went back and bought the house and when she came home after the trip i drove by the house i said see that house you liked i bought it while you were gone now you have to marry me and it worked 20 years ago this fall it worked most people do it the other way around but you know i still remember that home cost 20 500 it had about 1 100 square feet and i had about a 17 500 mortgage on it and my payments were about 176 a month as i remember something like that and that was 20 years ago this fall that i signed that fortuitous contract those prices aren t very much available anymore but the objective for young people with their futures before them and their dreams fresh in their minds starting out their families to be able to own their home and to start a family in that way that s a worthy objective just as worthy today and i would argue to you more important today than it was 20 years ago more important today than it was 20 years ago we just had a report come out last week asserting that it may be that up to one third of our children are now born out of wedlock you want to reinforce family values in america encourage two parent households get people to stay home make it easy for people to own their own homes and enjoy the rewards of family life and see their work rewarded this is a big deal this is about more than money and sticks and boards and windows this is about the way we live as a people and what kind of society we re going to have and i cannot say enough in terms of my appreciation to secretary cisneros who is a genuine visionary to the vice president for all the work he and the national performance review have done on this and to all of our partners who are here all the people in public and private life whose work is homeownership since the day i asked secretary cisneros to build this strategy he has done about everything a human being could do and i can say without knowing that i m overstating it that if we succeed in doing this if we succeed in making that number happen it will be one of the most important things that this administration has ever done and we re going to do it without spending more tax money two years ago i met a couple having their own first home dream come true they re here today patty and matt murray had just bought a home in frederick maryland where i was visiting promoting my economic plan along with the realtors to bring down the deficit to bring down interest rates to bring down home mortgage rates so people can afford to buy their own home now they have a stake in a better life and i m glad that they re here today i would like to ask them to stand i would also like to ask now all the other young couples that came here i just want you to see them that s where i was 20 years ago i want all of you to stand here all these first time homebuyers that we invited to come here we have to remember that there are millions of people just like them who believe that homeownership is out of reach they may be paying monthly rents that could cover a mortgage payment they may scrape to save but a downpayment is still out of reach they are locked out by rigid restrictions or by a home buying system just as jean said too difficult or too frightening and that is not right one of the great successes of the united states in this century has been the partnership forged by the national government and the private sector to steadily expand the dream of homeownership to all americans in 1934 president roosevelt created the federal housing administration and made homeownership available to millions of americans who couldn t afford it before that fifty one years ago just this month harry truman rewarded servicemen and women with the g i bill of rights which created the va home loan guarantee program that extended the dream of homeownership to a whole new generation of americans for four decades after that in the greatest period of expansion of middle class dreams any country has ever seen anywhere in human history homeownership expanded as incomes rose jobs increased the educational level of the american people improved but in the 1980s as the vice president said that dream began to slip away i ran for president in large measure because i wanted to restore that dream to grow the middle class shrink the under class promote the mainstream values of work and responsibility family and community and reform government in a way that would enhance opportunity and shrink bureaucracy we ve made good progress but we have to do a lot more i ask all of you just one more time to look at that chart and i wish i had a lot of other charts to show you that would reinforce that homeownership declines then stabilizes at a lower level at the same time more and more american families working harder for the same or lower wages every year under new and difficult stresses it seems to me that we have a serious serious unmet obligation to try to reverse these trends as secretary cisneros says this drop in homeownership means 1 5 million families who would now be in their own homes if the 46 years of homeownership expansion had not been reversed in the 1980s now we have begun to expand it again since 1993 nearly 2 8 million new households have joined the ranks of america s homeowners nearly twice as many as in the previous two years but we have to do a lot better the goal of this strategy to boost homeownership to 67 5 percent by the year 2000 would take us to an all time high helping as many as 8 million american families across that threshold this is the new way home for the american middle class we have got to raise incomes in this country we have got to increase security for people who are doing the right thing and we have got to make people believe that they can have some permanence and stability in their lives even as they deal with all the changing forces that are out there in this global economy no person even the president can look at these young people and say i will guarantee you no matter what happens in the global economy you will always have the job you have today and you ll make more money next year than you did this year you know no one can guarantee that in the global economy that s not the way the world works any more but we can guarantee to people that we re going to empower them to help themselves we ll make homeownership more accessible we ll make lifetime education and training more accessible we ll make the things that make life work for people who are trying to do the best they can for themselves there we have to begin with the basic things that make it worth doing as the vice president and i said in a book we put out in the election campaign in 1992 our economic strategy includes a commitment to work to provide decent safe affordable homes to all americans and to do it with an alliance of the public and private sector i want to say this one more time and i want to thank again all the people here from the private sector who have worked with secretary cisneros on this our homeownership strategy will not cost the taxpayers one extra cent it will not require legislation it will not add more federal programs or grow federal bureaucracy it s 100 specific actions that address the practical needs of people who are trying to build their own personal version of the american dream to help moderate income families who pay high rents but haven t been able to save enough for a downpayment to help lower income working families who are ready to assume the responsibilities of homeownership but held back by mortgage costs that are just out of reach to help families who have historically been excluded from homeownership today all across the country i say to millions of young working couples who are just starting out by the time your children are ready to start the first grade we want you to be able to own your own home all of our country will reap enormous benefits if we achieve this goal homeownership encourages savings and investment when a family buys a home the ripple effect is enormous it means new homeowner consumers they need more durable goods like washers and dryers refrigerators and water heaters and if more families could buy new homes or older homes more hammers will be pounding more saws will be buzzing homebuilders and home fixers will be put to work when the boost the number of homeowners in our country we strengthen our economy create jobs build up the middle class and build better citizens i thank millard fuller especially for the work that habitat for humanity has done in building better citizens i remember the day we dedicated the very first habitat house built in my home state that went to a woman who went to church with me and worked for the state government and still her income was so low she was eligible to be considered there and i was so proud of her because she and her children for the first time felt that all these incredible years of sacrifice and labor she had endured were about to be rewarded and it made her a better citizen and it made everybody that put a hammer to a nail a better citizen and it made all of who saw it unfold better citizens h l mencken once wrote that a home is not a mere transient shelter it s essence lies in its permanence and its quality of representing in all its details the personalities of the people who live in it what we are doing today will allow more homes to be blessed by more families i hope it will start all these young people on a path that will take them to great joys in their personal lives and perhaps to other homes but something they will always know that their country wanted them to have because they were entitled to it as a part of the american dream thank you very much dem wjclinton5 6 98 bill_clinton thank you dr vest i think you re the real thing chairman d arbeloff dr gray members of the corporation the faculty especially to the members of the class of 1998 and your families the class of 1948 and 1973 mayor duahay members of the city council i thank the brass ensemble for the wonderful music before let me say i am profoundly honored to be here on the same platform with dr david ho and grateful for the work he has done for humanity when we met a few moments ago in president vest s office with a number of the students and other officials of the university i said you had a good representation of speakers today the scientists and the scientifically challenged but my administration has been able to carry on in no small measure because of contributions from mit sixteen mit alumni and faculty members have served in important positions in this administration including at least two who are here today the former secretary of the air force sheila widnoll and the deputy secretary of energy ernie monic four of your faculty members and your president have done important work for us i thank them all and i come here today with good news and bad news for the graduates the good news is that this morning we had our latest economic report unemployment is 4 3 percent there have been 16 million new jobs in the last five years there are numerous job openings that pay well the bad news is that you now have no excuse to your parents if you don t go to work mit is admired around the world as a crucible of creative thought a force for progress a place where dreams of generations become reality the remarkable discoveries and inventions of the mit community have transformed america early in your history mit was known for advances in geology and mining by mid century mit pioneered x rays and radar today it s atomic lasers artificial intelligence biotechnology mit has done much to make this the american century and mit will do more to make america and the world a better place in the 21st century as we continue our astonishing journey through the information revolution a revolution that began not as our own did here in massachusetts with a single shot heard around the world but instead was sparked by many catalysts in labs and libraries start ups and blue chips homes and even dorm rooms across america and around the world i come today not to talk about the new marvels of science and engineering you know far more about them than i do instead i come to mit an epicenter of the seismic shifts in our economy and society to talk about how we can and must apply enduring american values to this revolutionary time about the responsibilities we all have as citizens to include every american in the promise of this new age from the start our nation s greatest mission has been the fulfillment of our founders vision opportunity for all best secured by free people working together toward better tomorrows and what they called a more perfect union americans believe the spark of possibility burns deep within every child that ordinary people can do extraordinary things our history can be understood as a constant striving on foreign fields and factory floors in town halls and the corridors of congress to widen that circle of opportunity to deepen the meaning of our freedom to perfect our union to make real the promise of america every previous generation has been called upon to meet this challenge and as we approach a new century and a new millennium your generation must answer the call you enter the world of your tomorrows at a remarkable moment for america our country has the lowest crime rates in 25 years the smallest welfare rolls in 27 years the lowest unemployment in 28 years the lowest inflation in 32 years the smallest national government in 35 years and the highest rate of home ownership in our history such a remarkable time a period of renewal comes along all too rarely in life as you will see it gives us both the opportunity and the profound responsibility to address the larger longer term challenges to your future this spring i am speaking to graduates around the country about three of those challenges last month i went to the naval academy to talk about the new security challenges of the 21st century terrorism organized crime and drug trafficking global climate change the spread of weapons of mass destruction next week at portland state in oregon i will discuss how our nation s third great wave of immigration can either strengthen and unite america or weaken and divide it and i thank dr ho for what he said about immigration and our immigrants today i ask you to focus on the challenges of the information age the dimensions of the information revolution and its limitless possibilities are widely accepted and generally understood even by lay people but to make the most of it we must also acknowledge that there are challenges and we must make important choices we can extend opportunity to all americans or leave many behind we can erase lines of inequity or etch them indelibly we can accelerate the most powerful engine of growth and prosperity the world has ever known or allow the engine to stall history has taught us that choices cannot be deferred they are made by action or inaction there is no such thing as virtual opportunity we cannot point and click our way to a better future if we are to fulfill the complete promise of this new age we must do more already the information age is transforming the way we work the high tech industry employs more people today than the auto industry did at its height in the 1950s auto and steel industries in turn have been revived by new technologies among those making the most use of technology r amp d are traditional american enterprises such as construction transportation and retail stores it s transforming the way we live the typical american home now has much more as much computing power as all of mit did in the year most of the seniors here were born it is transforming the way we communicate on any business day more than 30 times as many messages are delivered by e mail as by the postal service and today this ceremony is being carried live on the internet so that people all over the world can join in it is transforming the way we learn with the dvd technology available today we can store more reference material in a 3 inch stack of disks than in all the stacks of hayden library it is transforming the way our society works giving millions of americans the opportunity to join in the enterprise of building our nation as they fulfill their dreams the tools we develop today are bringing down barriers of race and gender of income and age the disabled are opening long closed doors of school work and human possibility small businesses are competing in worldwide markets once reserved only for powerful corporations before too long our children will be able to stretch a hand across a keyboard and reach every book ever written every painting every painted every symphony ever controlled for the very first time in our history it is now possible for a child in the most isolated inner city neighborhood or rural community to have access to the same world of knowledge at the same instant as the child in the most affluent suburb imagine the revolutionary democratizing potential this can bring imagine the enormous benefits to our economy our society if not just a fraction but all young people can master this set of 21st century skills just a few miles of here is the working class community of east sommerville it has sometimes struggled to meet the needs of population that is growing more diverse by the day but at east sommerville community school well trained technology teachers with equipment and support from time warner cable have begun to give 1st to 8th graders an early and enormous boost in life first graders are producing small books on computers sixth graders are producing documentaries the technology has so motivated them that almost all the 6th graders showed up at school to work on their computer projects over winter break that small miracle can be replicated in every school rich and poor across america yet today affluent schools are almost three times as likely to have internet access in the classroom white students more than twice as likely as black students to have computers in their homes we know from hard experience that unequal education hardens into unequal prospects we know the information age will accelerate this trend the three fastest growing careers in america are all in computer related fields offering far more than average pay happily the digital divide has begun to narrow but it will not disappear of its own accord history teaches us that even as new technologies create growth and new opportunity they can heighten economic inequalities and sharpen social divisions that is after all exactly what happened with the mechanization of agriculture and in the industrial revolution as we move into the information age we have it within our power to avoid these developments we can reap the growth that comes from revolutionary technologies and use them to eliminate not to widen the disparities that exist but until every child has a computer in the classroom and a teacher well trained to help until every student has the skills to tap the enormous resources of the internet until every high tech company can find skilled workers to fill its high wage jobs america will miss the full promise of the information age we cannot allow this age of opportunity to be remembered also for the opportunities that were missed every day we wake up and know that we have a challenge now we must decide how to meet it let me suggest three things first we must help you to ensure that america continues to lead the revolution in science and technology growth is a prerequisite for opportunity and scientific research is a basic prerequisite for growth just yesterday in japan physicists announced a discovery that tiny neutrinos have mass now that may not mean much to most americans but it may change our most fundamental theories from the nature of the smallest subatomic particles to how the universe itself works and indeed how it expands this discovery was made in japan yes but it had the support of the investment of the u s department of energy this discovery calls into question the decision made in washington a couple of years ago to disband the super conducting supercollider and it reaffirms the importance of the work now being done at the fermi national acceleration facility in illinois the larger issue is that these kinds of findings have implications that are not limited to the laboratory they affect the whole of society not only our economy but our very view of life our understanding of our relations with others and our place in time in just the past four years information technology has been responsible for more than a third of our economic expansion without government funded research computers the internet communications satellites wouldn t have gotten started when i became president the internet was the province of physicists funded by a government research project there were only 50 sites in the world now as all of you know we are adding pages to the worldwide web at the rate of over 100 000 an hour and 100 million new users will come on this year it all started with research and we must do more in the budget i submit to congress for the year 2000 i will call for significant increases in computing and communications research i have directed dr neal lane my new advisor for science and technology to work with our nation s research community to prepare a detailed plan for my review over the past 50 years our commitment to science has strengthen this country in countless ways scientific research has created vast new industries millions of jobs allowed america to produce the world s most bountiful food supplies and remarkable tools for fighting disease think of what today s investments will yield dr ho will unravel the agonizing riddles of aids there will be a cure for cancer a flourishing economy that will produce much less pollution and move back from the brink of potentially devastating global warming high speed wireless networks that bring distance learning tele medicine and economic opportunity to every rural community in america that is why even as we balanced our budget for the first time in 29 years we have increased our investments in science this year i asked congress for the largest increase in research funding in history not just for a year but sustained over five years it is a core commitment that must be part of how every american regardless of political party or personal endeavor thinks about our nation and its mission thank you those are the people who received the research grants over there i want you to know that we are also working to address the threat to our prosperity posed by the year 2000 bug i tried and tried to find out what the class hack project was for the class of 98 and i failed but i did learn that in the year 2000 the graduating class is proposing to roll all of our computers back by 100 years and i am determined to thwart you i will do my best the second thing we have to do is to make sure that the opportunities of the information age belong to all our children every young american must have access to these technologies two years ago in my state of the union address i challenged our nation to connect every classroom to the internet by the year 2000 thanks to unprecedented cooperation at national state and local levels an outpouring of support from active citizens and the decreasing costs of computers we re on track to meet this goal four years ago when you came to mit barely three percent of america s classrooms were connected by this time next year we will have connected well over half our classrooms including 100 percent of the classrooms in the nation s 50 largest urban school districts but it is not enough to connect the classrooms the services have to be accessed you may have heard recently about something called the e rate it s the most crucial initiative we ve launched to help connect our schools our libraries and our rural health centers to the internet now some businesses have called on congress to repeal the initiative they say our nation cannot afford to provide discounts to these institutions of learning and health by raising a billion dollars or so a year from service charges on telecommunications companies something that was agreed to in the telecommunications act of 1996 that passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both houses i say we cannot afford not to have an e rate thousands of poor schools and libraries and rural health centers are in desperate need of discounts if we really believed that we all belong in the information age then at this sunlit moment of prosperity we can t leave anyone behind in the dark every one of you who understands this i urge to support the e rate every one of you here who came from a poor inner city neighborhood who came from a small rural school district who came perhaps from another country where this was just a distant dream you know that there are poor children now who may never have a chance to go to mit unless someone reaches out and gives them this kind of opportunity every child in america deserves the chance to participate in the information revolution the third thing we have to do is to make sure that all the computers and the connections in the world don t go to waste because our children actually have 21st century skills for five years now i ve done my best to make education our number one domestic priority creating hope scholarships expanding pell grants to make the 13th and 14th years of education as universal as the first 12 are today we ve passed tax credits reformed the student loan program expanded work study created americorps to open the doors of college to every young person who is willing to work for it we re working to make our public schools the best in the world with smaller classes better facilities more master teachers and charter schools higher standards and end to social promotion but the new economy also demands that our nation commit to technology literacy for every child we shouldn t let a child graduate from middle school anymore without knowing how to use new technologies to learn already 10 states with an eye to the future have made technology literacy a requirement of graduation from high school i believe we should meet this goal in the middle school years i believe every child in every state should leave middle school able to use the most current tools for learning research communication and collaboration and we will help every state to meet this goal if a state commits to adopt a technology literacy requirement then we will help to provide the training that the teachers need i propose to create a team of trained technology experts for every american middle school in every one of these states and to create competitions over the next three years to encourage the development of high quality educational software and educational web sites by students and professors in commercial software companies all students should feel as comfortable with a keyboard as a chalkboard as comfortable with a laptop as a textbook it is critical to ensuring that they all have opportunity in the world of the 21st century today i pledge the resources and unrelenting efforts of our nation to renew our enduring values in the information age but the challenges that we face cannot be met by government alone we can only fulfill the promise of this revolution if we work together in the same way it was launched together with creativity resolve a restless spirit of innovation while this mission requires the efforts of every citizen those who fuel and enjoy the unparalleled prosperity of this moment have special responsibilities the thriving new companies that line route 128 in silicon valley i challenge them to use their power to empower others to invest in a school embrace a community in need endow an eager young mind with opportunity not to rest until every one of our children is technology literate many of you are doing such work already and many of them are but america needs all such companies to participate and finally to the graduates of the class of 1998 i too offer my congratulations and as your president my gratitude for your commitment for challenges conquered for projects completed for goals reached and even surpassed you your parents and your friends should be very proud today and very hopeful for all the possibilities of this new age are open to you you are at the peak of your powers and the world will rightly reward you for the work you do but to make the very most of your life and the opportunities you have been given you too must rise to your responsibility to give something back to america of what you have been given as the years pass your generation will be judged and you will begin to judge yourselves not only on what you do for yourself and your family but on the contributions you make to others to your country your communities your generation of children when you turn your good fortune into a chance for others you then will not only be leaders in science and industry you will become the leaders of america twenty first century america belongs to you take good care of it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton5 8 94 bill_clinton well thank you all we ve established one thing beyond doubt we all have enough sense to come in out of the rain thank you mr quimby and thank all of you we ve had representatives of four fine companies speak here today the head of one of our largest corporations the head of a medium sized hightech company growing and growing into the world economy the head of a small company that s doubled the number of or now a man that s moved from a small job to a large job in a small company that s growing very rapidly and a new employee the vice president and i wanted these folks here for this announcement today because they represent what our efforts are all about i said the other night in my press conference that there are a lot of lobby groups in washington but i wanted the white house to be known as the home office of the american association of ordinary citizens and what i mean by that is that in this time of profound change what we need to be doing is figuring out how we can make the changes necessary together to enable all of our people to live up to their potential to fulfill their dreams to move into the next century with the american dream alive in every family and with american leadership secure and when i sought this job i was convinced that would require some changes in my political party some change in the other political party and some changes in the way we do our work here in washington if you listen to the four stories here that s really what s behind all these arcane arguments and all the political rhetoric over economic policy the simple question of whether people will be able to pursue their destinies and their dreams and live up to the fullest of their abilities i could never hope to say it any better than these four people did and i think we should give them all another round of applause today we celebrate because this morning as the chart to my left shows the labor department reported that since our administration came into office our economy has produced more than four million new jobs almost all of them in the private sector now as we know when i ran for office i said i thought we could produce 8 million new jobs in four years and that we would do four by the end of 94 so we re six months ahead of schedule i do want to correct one thing you know i get criticized sometimes for my attention to detail but i want to show you this where is it i asked for this pen this morning when i looked at this chart because when i looked at the numbers there are actually not four million new jobs but 4 1 million new jobs and now that we re out of the rain i m going to make a correction on it manufacturing jobs have been increasing in this country for seven months in a row now for the first time in 10 years all the jobs created last month 100 percent of them were in the private sector not in government companies like kenlee precision have added those second and third shifts jobs that made it possible for people like charles quimby to get ahead companies like ellicott machine have been able to hire new workers like frankie mclaurin executive like bob eaton and carol bartz are making a good beginning in this remarkable partnership we have to renew america and they described to you perhaps better than i could what the role of the national government is in their agenda for the future what we should be doing and what we should not be doing none of this has been easy indeed i have been mystified since i got here about why some of these things are as hard as they are and why they take as long as they do one of the problems is that in this town sometimes words replace reality in the computer business and in high technology virtual reality is a very good thing it enables you to replicate situations and to avoid future problems in washington i m not sure we have virtual reality i think what we have up here is virtual unreality which is a bad thing because it enables you to almost dehumanize problems and turn them into words and rhetoric and labels and we have all these word battles up here that don t seem to make any sense to ordinary people once in a while i watch the evening news and i m usually working when it s on once in a while i watch it and i see the way we re presented and i look at that and i say well heck if i was still back home i wouldn t be for that guy either just because of the way it all plays out you know it s so it s kind of unreal and what we ve got to do is find ways to bring reality your reality the way you look at the world the way you live with the world every day into the decision making of this town and that s what we did when we passed that economic plan bob eaton had it right he said well he wouldn t have done it in the same way we did but he was glad we got the job done well that s the way i feel about his cars i don t have any idea if i d make the same decisions he makes on everything but they make awful good cars and i m glad they got the job done in the end that s the way we should judge ourselves and we did the best we could with that economic program considering the fact that at the moment of voting we had no help from the other side they said the sky would fall one of them and i quote said taxes will go up the economy will sputter along the deficit will reach another record high it s a recipe for disaster that was wrong that was wrong what did we do we did have a tax increase on the wealthiest americans but it s still the rates are well below where they were in 1980 and all the money went to pay down the deficit and to finance a tax break for 15 million working families who were just above the poverty line and we didn t want them to go back to welfare we wanted to encourage people with low wages to keep working and to keep raising their kids and to stick by the american dream there were too many people who were giving up work for welfare and we wanted it to be the reverse so i plead guilty to that we also cut 255 billion in spending and we passed a tough budget that helped to drive those interest rates down get this economy going again this year we re about to pass another tough budget that eliminates 100 government programs outright contains the first reduction in domestic discretionary spending in 25 years in outright reductions and continues to drive that deficit down while increasing the money we re spending to empower people to succeed in the global economy more for education and training more for head start for little kids the establishment of a lifetime learning system for world class standards in our public schools more apprenticeships for young people who get out of high school and don t want to go to college and our economic program made it possible for 20 million americans to refinance their college loans at lower interest rates and better repayment terms that is the direction in which we ought to be going and finally as you heard carol and bob talking about we re trying to expand the barriers of trade or tear down the barriers and expand the frontiers frankie said that ellicott was doing well largely because of nafta they also said a different group said that the sky would fall if we did that but there we had a bipartisan majority fighting for change we passed it our car sales in mexico were growing five times as fast as they did before nafta was passed mexico is now our fastest growing trading partner even though their economy is in a down period we re still having explosive growth think what it will be like when they start to grow again this is very important we re trying to sell airplanes all around the world we just announced a new shipbuilding initiative the trade ambassador mr kantor has resolved agricultural disputes with canada we re selling rice to japan for the first time we are moving in to the global economy and we are working on these things and i don t know that these things fall very neatly into the kind of words people throw at each other here in this town is it liberal or conservative republican or democrat i don t know and i don t care i just want people to be able to work and to do well and to have this economy grow and i know to do that when we have the deficit coming down for three years in a row for the first time since truman was president when we re moving toward the smallest federal government that we ve had since kennedy was president and when the economy is growing this rapidly last year we had more businesses formed than in any year since world war ii we re not doing bad we ve got to get rid of the rhetoric and go back to reality and i would say this the future looks good fortune magazine predicts for the first time in 10 years the economy in every state in america will grow next year and that is very good most businesses expect to grow next year and to expand and consumer confidence is high but we have to continue to face the tough problems up here and one of the things that i hope very much will happen is that the experience that we had working through these economic problems and the results that have been achieved when you take on a problem risks of unpopularity in the short run even if you win by the narrowest of margins if you actually address a problem you get results that is very good because that proves that washington is not all that unreal after all that there really is some connection to our lives up here and the way you live where you are because if you ignore the problems in these four companies 10 years from now there won t be anybody from your companies to show up here and talk at the white house in the end you have to face the challenges before you we are now seeing that again we have some challenges ahead of us the congress must must approve the worldwide gatt trade agreement that we negotiated that we got agreement on but the congress has to enact it it will mean a tax cut in the form of lower tariffs and lower costs for americans and people all across the world of listen to this 744 billion over the next 10 years it will create hundreds of thousands of high paying american jobs we have got to finish the job on the trade issue the next step is gatt before i close i want to mention two other issues but it s the same point problems you can t run away from we must address the health care situation this year not just for the people who don t have health insurance but for the people who do but who pay too much for it and who could lose it not just for the companies who don t provide health care but for the companies who do and pay too much for it why have the big three automakers supported us in health reform all along because one of the reasons we lost jobs and market share in the automobile industry is that they were paying too much for health care and one of the reasons they were paying too much for health care is they were paying for all the people in this country who don t cover themselves and who don t do their own part now here are some basic facts that nobody can ignore we can all disagree on the solution nobody can ignore these facts of all the countries in the world we spend more than anybody else on health care by a long ways but we re the only major country that doesn t cover everybody with health insurance of all the countries in the world with which we compete we are the only one going in the wrong direction today there are 5 million americans 85 percent of them working people and their kids who are in this country today who do not have health insurance who had it five years ago so we re going in the wrong direction we have problems here with people who have health insurance but could lose it if they change jobs somebody in their family gets sick they have a preexisting condition or the cost of the policy goes through the roof yesterday i gave awards to four young americans who have done heroic things and important community service the united states has been doing this through the justice department for the last 44 years one of these young americans was the daughter of a farmer who happens to be a republican in the panhandle of oklahoma she was injured and paralyzed from here down in a car wreck in 1990 this girl a beautiful girl could have given up on life but instead she decided she would devote herself to try and encourage other young people not to drink and drive and not to ride with people who drink and drive and always put their seatbelts on in a car she was going to try to help other people avoid what had happened to her and her daddy is just a hard working farmer she s got a sister who is a lovely girl she s got a wonderful mother they were paying over 3 000 a year for a limited health insurance policy with very high deductibles all of her costs were a couple of years ago attendant on her wreck this is four years later they were just notified that their insurance premiums were going from 3 100 a year to 9 300 a year and this farmer is going to have to drop his insurance now with these two wonderful kids he s got to figure out how they re going to college what they re going to do living out there in a little town in western oklahoma and like he told me he said you know this is not a political deal he said i m a republican i m a conservative i don t want the government to do anything for me but we need some help here there s something wrong if i can t take care of my family hard as i m working so again i say to the members of congress on this let s just do something about this most small businesses in america are struggling to provide health care and they re paying too much for it because they can t get the same rates that big business and government gets some big businesses like chrysler are paying too much for it because when people who don t have health insurance get sick they still get care they go to the emergency room and then their costs are passed along to everybody else in higher hospital bills and higher insurance premiums we know we know that something works we know what they do in hawaii works it s the only state where employers and employees are required to split the difference and cover health insurance and we know that even though most everything else in hawaii is more expensive than it is on the mainland because it s way out there in the pacific health insurance costs for small business are 30 percent lower there than the national average why because everybody has to pay something but you re only paying for yourself you re not paying for anybody else number one and number two because small and medium sized companies get to band together in big buying groups so they can buy insurance with the same competitive power as chrysler and the federal government so we know that works so i just think i would say again all i ask of any of you is to ask the members of congress to put aside partisanship rhetoric and this sort of word throwing and let s just think about the people of america just like we do here 4 1 americans who have jobs all different races all different religions all different political groups all i know is we re better off that they re in that line and we d be better off if we solved the health care problem and we re going to pay a terrible price if we don t one last issue i want to mention i went to the justice department last week for what was a great celebration we had hundreds of police officers there to celebrate the fact that after six years of bickering the house and the senate had both passed crime bills and had agreed on a common bill through their conference committees to send back so that each one of them could pass identical bills so that i could sign a crime bill into law that would give us 100 000 police officers on the street that s a 20 percent increase that would ban 19 kinds of assault weapons and protect 650 hunting and sporting weapons to make sure that this was not a gun control issue this was an assault weapons issue that would ban handgun ownership by minors provide for safe schools provide for three strikes and you re out tough penalties more prison cells and billions of dollars for prevention programs to give children something to say yes to as well as something to say no to the biggest toughest smartest crime bill this country s ever passed unbelievably after eight days nothing has happened the bills are there we need it the american people know how bad we need it the democratic mayors and the republican mayors have endorsed it the democratic governors and the republican governors have endorsed it every police organization in the country the attorney generals the local prosecutors out there in the country where people know that crime strikes people without regard to race or political party everybody is for this crime bill but here the crime bill is stuck in a web spun by a powerful special interest you see before a bill can come to vote in the house of representatives it has to be voted out of the rules committee and then the house has to vote first on whether the bill s going to actually be brought to a vote not on the bill but whether it s going to be brought to a vote it s a procedure the national rifle association is trying to block the vote on the rule because they are against the assault weapons ban because they know that a majority of the house and the senate will vote for this bill if it gets to a vote so they are trying to block the vote on the rule hoping that people can hide and say well i didn t really vote against the bill but there was something about the way it was coming up i didn t like i got a letter from a kid from new orleans last spring who asked me to do something about the crime problem he said i m nine years old and i m really scared that something s going to happen to me and nine days later that kid was shot dead now we ve been waiting for eight days for a vote on this crime bill we have debated this we fought the assault weapons ban i thought the nra was going to win but we won fair and square we only won by two votes but we won the police officers and those of us who don t want the cops to be outgunned it was a fair and square deal we won and we won in the senate and it s in the bill and i didn t think we could beat them but we did we worked like crazy and we did it is wrong to let the nra and other interest groups too to be fair who have some other bone to pick with this bill but who know it cannot be defeated on the merits to use a procedural vote to keep the american people from getting the police from the kids from getting this prevention money from the people from getting the three strikes and you re out law from the police from getting the help they need with the prisons and all the rest of this this is a good deal and we re not paying for it with a tax increase we re paying for it by reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy by more than a quarter of a million between now and 1999 and i want to plead with you to ask the congress over the weekend not to let procedure get in the way of saving the lives and the future of the united states we showed up here to make decisions if anybody wants to vote against the crime bill let them vote against it there are people who are going to vote against it because they re honestly opposed to capital punishment or because they re honestly opposed to the assault weapons ban or because they re honestly opposed to the prevention funds let them vote against it that s fine but do not let us pull another washington d c game here and let this crime bill go down on some procedural hide and seek if we re going to have a shoot out let s do it in high noon broad daylight where everybody knows what the deal is thank you very much dem wjclinton5 8 97 bill_clinton thank you very much mr speaker mr vice president senator lautenberg members of congress ladies and gentlemen we come here today democrats and republicans congress and president americans of goodwill from all points of view and all walks of life to celebrate a true milestone for our nation in a few moments i will sign into law the first balanced budget in a generation a balanced budget that honors our values puts our fiscal house in order expands vistas of opportunity for all our people and fashions a new government to lead in a new era like every generation of americans before us we have been called upon to renew our nation and to restore its promise for too long huge persistent and growing budget deficits threatened to choke the opportunity that should be every american s birthright for too long it seemed as if america would not be ready for the new century that we would be too divided too wedded to old arrangements and ideas it s hard to believe now but it wasn t so very long ago that some people looked at our nation and saw a setting sun when i became president i determined that we must believe and make sure that america s best days were still ahead after years in which the deficit drained our economy and dampened our spirit in which our ability to lead the world was diminished by our inability to put our own house in order after years in which too many people doubted whether our nation would ever come together again to address this problem we set off on a new economic course to cut the deficit to create the conditions in which business could thrive to open more foreign markets to our goods and services to invest in our people so that all americans would have the tools they need to make the most of their own lives today our budget deficit has been cut by more than 80 percent it is now among the smallest in the industrialized world as a percentage of our economy our businesses once again lead in world markets now made more open more free more fair than ever before through our efforts our workers are clearly the most competitive on earth and we have recast our old government so that a new one can take shape that does give our people the tools to make the most of their god given abilities this year we democrats and republicans alike were given the opportunity and the responsibility to finish the job of balancing the budget for the first time in almost 30 years and to do it in a way that prepares americans to enter the next century stronger than ever by large bipartisan majorities in both houses we have risen to that challenge the balanced budget i sign into law today will continue our successful economic strategy it reflects the most fundamental values that brought us together it will spur growth and spread opportunity even after we pay for tax cuts penny by penny there will still be 900 billion in savings including half a trillion dollars in entitlement savings over the next 10 years it opens the doors of college to a new generation with the largest investment in higher education since the g i bill 50 years ago it makes it possible for the 13th and 14th years of college to become as universal as high school is today it strengthens our families with the largest expansion in health care for children since the medicaid program 32 years ago it modernizes medicare and extends the life of the trust fund for a decade it helps our communities to rebuild to move a million more people from welfare to work to bring the spark of private enterprise back to our most isolated inner city neighborhoods it provides the largest tax relief to help families raise their children save for the children and pass on their home and a dream to the next generation these tax cuts are the equivalent of a 1 000 raise in take home pay for the average family with two children for so many americans what goes on here in washington often seems abstract and remote unrelated to their daily concerns well this balanced budget deals with the big issues of the deficit and long term economic growth in ways that respond to the practical challenges ordinary american citizens face every single day because we have acted millions of children all across this country will be able to get medicine and have their sight and hearing tested and see dentists and doctors for the first time millions of young americans will be able to go on to college millions of americans not so young will be able to go back to school to get the education and training they need to succeed in life millions of families will have more to spend on their own children s needs and upbringing this budget is an investment in their future and in america s today it should be clear to all of us without regard to our party or our differences that in common we were able to transform this era of challenge into an era of unparalleled possibility for the american people i hope we can tap this spirit of cooperation and use it to meet and master the many challenges that remain before us i want to thank in closing the many people whose work made this day possible i want to thank speaker gingrich and senator lott mr armey and the other members of the house and senate leadership especially senator domenici and senator kasich and let me thank chairman archer and chairman roth and the other leaders of the house and senate committees they were dedicated partners they fought hard for their priorities i want to thank senator daschle and congressman bonior and congressman fazio and congressman hoyer and the other members of the house democratic leadership who worked with us i want to thank especially congressman spratt and senator lautenberg congressman rangel and the other members of the house and senate democratic minority leaders in the committees for the work the they did i thank all the members of the congress who are here present and the many whom they represent who are already back home who could not be all of them deserve our thanks and i would like to ask the members of the congress who are here today to stand and be recognized and appreciated by the crowd i d like to thank the members of our budget team erskine bowles secretary rubin john hilley omb director raines gene sperling jane yellen rahm emanuel jack lew larry summers chris jennings and many others especially those who work in our legislative shop too numerous to mention for the enormous work that they did on this agreement i would like to thank the first lady mrs gore the vice president for their concern for the health of our children for the mental health of the american people and the vice president especially who led the fight to protect our urban initiatives and our environmental program and the interests of legal immigrants in america we owe to them a great deal again i say to all i thank you i believe that together we have fulfilled the responsibility of our generation to guarantee opportunity to the next generation the responsibility of our generation to take america into a new century where there is opportunity for all who are responsible enough to work for it where we have a chance to come together across all of our differences as a great american community where we will be able to continue to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity that is worthy work and you have all contributed doing it we can say with pride and certainty that those who saw the sun setting on america were wrong the sun is rising on america again and i thank you all dem wjclinton5 8 98 bill_clinton i know you need a stretch but it s going on too long let me just say the most important words i can say thank you thank you for your support for me and for our administration and for our candidates for senate and congress and for the whole concept of this unity campaign thank you representative pelosi and leader gephardt and senator torricelli and steve grossman all dedicated democrats all dedicated americans thank you mr vice president for the wonderful work that you have done in so many ways and everything we ve done together in the last five and a half years in 1996 when the american people were good enough to give the vice president and me another term and made me the first democratic president in 60 years since franklin roosevelt in 1936 to be reelected we picked up some seats in the house and if we had picked up a few more we would have won the house there was i think one overwhelming reason in the last 10 days even though we had the issues and the direction we were outspent in the 20 closest districts four and a half to one but we did begin this unity concept a little too late but it still did very well all of our contributors liked it because all three committees weren t asking at the same time to give money or raise it but it was the right thing to do because we could work on helping particular candidates targeting particular states going after particular constituencies getting our turnout up this year we re trying to go sooner and do more and i cannot say enough for what i believe is the vision of the leaders of the house the senate and the democratic committee for doing this early and doing it together and in good faith with a good heart the vice president and i and the first lady and tipper we re all committed to making this work the vice president gave that wonderful portrait of what s happened the last six years through chapter six chapter seven is we win if we do the right things if we do the right things we win hillary came up with this great motto for the millennial celebration we re going to have on new year s eve 1999 2000 and between now and then honor the past imagine the future and we started out a couple of weeks ago honoring the past by announcing grants by private citizens to help us save the star spangled banner it s hard to think of anything that embodies our past more and then hillary went to thomas jefferson s home in new jersey to talk about saving that and then to harriet tubman s home then to george washington s revolutionary headquarters then to new york to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the women s movement all honoring the past but we ve also had a lot of interesting lectures at the white house imagining the future stephen hawking the great physicist from cambridge england came and spoke in a very heroic way because he suffers from lou gehrig s disease about what we would learn about the larger world in the future we had poets for the first time in a long time a genuine poetry reading in the white house with our poet laureates and ordinary citizens including children thinking about their future steve said that never at least i quit looking at the civil war because i m not sure before that political trends are indicative but since the civil war the party of the president in the president s second term has always lost some seats at midterm but there is a reason for that which we have determined to erase and these records are made to be changed and that is that generally there is the sense that no matter how well liked the president might be the term is three quarters over so what else is new well when i was reelected the vice president and i sat down one day and i told our people i said look i want us to drive the agenda of this country until the last hour of the last day of my term in january of 2001 that is what we signed on for that is what we owe the american people that is the right thing to do and if you look at what is happening today our party i love what dick gephardt said about when he was the majority leader how he met with the minority leader and how we tried to work together because this election fundamentally is not about the democratic party it s about the american people and it s about our agenda which puts progress over partisanship and people over power and unity over division we believe this country has big challenges we believe first you don t sit on a lead in a global economy and society like the one we re living in you know the temptation is after all the tough years we had things are going so well now why don t we just relax kick back and enjoy it all you have to do is pick up the paper every day to know that it s a reasonably dynamic world we re living in if someone had told you five years ago that japan would have five years of 1 percent growth a year during which time the stock market there would lose half its value would you have believed that is there a person in this room that really thought that would happen if there is i d like to clean out what little i ve got left in my bank account and let you be my investment advisor from now on now they re a very great country and they re going to come back i don t mean that in a negative way i m trying to point out that nothing stays the same the way people work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world is changing at a breathtaking pace nobody is smart enough to understand it all and figure out all of its ramifications but i know this when people have the good fortune of good times they should take their treasure and their confidence and think about tomorrow and deal with the long term challenges of the country there are four big issues that i think will sweep across the country this year and carry us home if our party will advance them number one we waited 29 years to get out of the red let s don t run out and spend this surplus on a tax cut or a spending program until we save the social security system for the 21st century so that the baby boomers don t bankrupt their kids and their ability to raise their grandchildren when we retire number two managed care on balance has been a good thing for america because we couldn t sustain inflation in health care costs at three times the rate of inflation in the economy that was an unsustainable trend that developed in the 1980s but it is just a device and it must not be allowed to block quality care therefore we should have a patients bill of rights that puts quality care back at the center of the health care debate people should have access to the medical care they need decisions should be made by doctors not by accountants people shouldn t be turned away from emergency rooms or specialists if they need them and their privacy should not be violated in the medical arena that s what this patients bill of rights is all about it s a first step toward reconciling the imperative of having better management in the health care system with keeping health care uppermost in the health care system and a lot of you are in the health care business one of the reasons we need legislation is it is simply unfair to all the good people out there in health care today that are already complying with the requirements of the patients bill of rights because they think it is the morally right thing to do it is unfair for them to be at an economic disadvantage with those who don t so we need a patient s bill of rights number three we have succeeded in the last five and a half years in opening the doors of college to just about everybody in america the hope scholarship makes the first two years of college virtually free to most americans it certainly makes community college virtually free to most americans we now have tax credits for the junior and senior year and for graduate school the interest deductibility on student loans is back we ve dramatically increased scholarships and work study positions we had 100 000 young people go through americorps one of you told me you had a child going to california in the americorps program and i thank you for that but no one believes that we still that even after all this we still can t say that we have the best elementary and secondary education in the world for all americans we have an agenda for smaller classes more teachers more well trained teachers modernized schools hooking up all the classrooms to the internet more after school programs more summer school programs for kids in difficult areas with troubled lives things that we know work higher standards greater accountability more charter schools more school choice we ve got an agenda and we think it ought to be supported so we have a better schools agenda number four after this summer i take it no one seriously questions the fact that the climate is genuinely changing the nine hottest years on record have occurred in the last 11 years the five hottest years in history have occurred in the 1990s last year was the hottest year on record this year every month has been hotter than the same month last year this is not a joke we still have 40 percent of our water that s not safe for swimming in spite of all the work since the clean water act passed we still have problems with safe drinking water in some places we still have too many toxic waste dumps in some places if there is one thing america has learned since 1970 it is that we improve the quality of life and the strength of the economy when we clean up the environment in the right way so this old fashioned anti environmental rhetoric doesn t hold much water we ve got to face the environmental challenges of today and tomorrow and do them in a way that promotes new markets new technologies new jobs but a cleaner environment and a growing economy so those i think are the four great national issues save social security pass a patients bill of rights improve the public schools clean up the environment and improve the economy there are lots of local issues in a lot of places our farmers are in trouble in a lot of urban areas where we have a good empowerment agenda still haven t felt the economic recovery but social security first the patients bill of rights the school agenda the environmental agenda those things will help us to move forward and if we can get the congress to face our clear international economic responsibilities which take an awful lot of my time these days then obviously that s something that the new congress won t have to do and i m still hoping and praying that we ll face up to our responsibilities as americans and do the international monetary fund and these other things we have to do but that is an agenda we can win on you win elections with a message with candidates and with the means for the candidate to get the message to the people that s what the unity campaign is all about i believe that i ve gone to more of these events than any person in america in the last six years therefore the happiest citizen in the united states was me when the shays meehan campaign finance reform bill passed the house last week and we democrats have been almost unanimous in support of real campaign finance reform the other party s leadership has been unanimous against it although we have had some of their great renegades we got 51 i think bolted and voted with us last week and i applaud them but until we get that done we ve got the candidates we ve got the message you re giving us the means to get the message out and you re going to have a lot to celebrate this november thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton5 8 99 bill_clinton thank you so much first let me thank senator daschle and leader gephardt for their outstanding passionate eloquence today and their consistent leadership for the best interests of all the american people and i think that all of us on this stage feel that way and i just wish every american could know them as we do could see how hard they ve worked how consistently they ve worked and how steadfast they have been nothing that i have been able to achieve as president would have been possible without their leadership and without the men and women on this platform today and i thank them so much they have already spoken about what we need to do what i want to say to you is that i want to echo something mr gephardt said we are here united as a party but we want to work with the members of the republican caucus to do things that are good for america let s remember that in the past years when we have done that we have been successful last year in the teeth of the election process they eventually did join us to put a down payment on hiring 100 000 teachers to do more to clean up toxic waste to increase our investments in science and technology to set aside a part of the surplus for social security which they have continued to agree to do and we made real progress with our agenda even though we weren t the majority party now what was the result because we made real progress and because in 1998 we said here s our future agenda save social security keep the economy going pass a patients bill of rights continue to invest in our children s education the public responded and we moved closer to being a majority in that historic election in 1998 and now thanks to mr forbes we re quite a bit closer still and i want to thank him i would like to use him to illustrate the point i really wish to make today about our position we are held together by unity of conviction and we don t agree on everything you ought to hear some of the arguments these folks have among each other you don t have to agree on everything to be a member of our party but we have certain core commitments i have letters in my files that mike forbes wrote me when he was a member of the republican caucus about the importance of our education agenda to the children that he represented and i have numerous accounts of his passionate commitment to a patients bill of rights and how frustrated he was with over 200 organizations all the doctors all the nurses groups all the consumer groups pleading for the protections of people in hmos to be able to see a specialist and go to the nearest emergency room and keep their doctor during treatment and enforce those rights how frustrated he was that the leaders of his party would not permit that sort of bill to become law so we are united by what we believe is best for the vast mass of the american people and i think it is important to remember that that is the source of our strength in 1776 thomas paine said it is not in numbers but in unity that our greatest strength lies but our unity must be rooted in conviction we think we ought to keep the commitments we made in 1998 to modernize 6 000 schools and put teachers out there 100 000 of them so the class sizes will be small in the early grades we think we ought to have that strong and forceful patients bill of rights we think we ought to reform campaign finance and we think we ought to raise the minimum raise for the people who are out there working who should not be in poverty because they re willing to go to work we believe that we ought to make common sense efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children and we have lots of evidence that we have work to do so i urge the conferees in both parties to stay here during the recess and do whatever is necessary to get us a good juvenile justice bill to protect our children and we believe it s right to stay with the economic strategy of fiscal discipline and investment in our people that we started in 1993 you know we democrats have a lot of fun reading those quotes that dick and tom read about what the republicans said about our economic plan in 93 but to be fair to them at the time they could argue that it wouldn t work it violated all of their sort of ideological inclinations and they could argue but now there is no argument and that s why this discussion we re having is so important we don t have to debate this anymore now we have six and a half years of evidence we have the longest peacetime expansion in history we turned the biggest deficit into the biggest surplus we ve got 19 million new jobs the highest home ownership in history the lowest minority unemployment in history a 30 year low in the welfare rolls there is nothing more to argue about this economic strategy works and we should not abandon it in this moment you know this is a moment of testing for the generation of leaders represented on this platform and those in the other party as well i think generations as well as individuals have certain moments in their life where they can make a decision that will have profound consequences that go far beyond the moment and this is such a moment a lot of you who are here were in the world war ii generation i had the great honor to go to normandy to represent the united states at the 50th anniversary of d day and say when they were young this generation saved the world well there have been a lot of disparaging remarks made about the baby boom generation over the last 30 years how we were self indulgent and all the things you ve heard well we are about to be tested because we have the opportunity of a lifetime if i d come to you seven years ago and i said vote for me and vote for them seven years later we ll come back and we ll talk about how to spend the surplus after the debt of this country had been quadrupled in 12 years just think about it i d be home doing deeds and things in a law office in arkansas if i had run on that platform vote for me seven years from now we ll come back and how to spend the surplus you d say you know he seems like a nice young fellow but he s totally out of touch but here we are why because these people said we are not going to let america go down the drain we re going to stop this deficit spending we re going to get interest rates down we re going to get the economy going again and we re going to do it in a way that does not require us to walk away from our obligations to our seniors to our children to the environment to the defense we can do it and we have done it now we have perhaps an even bigger test you know when times are tough sometimes people don t have many options so they just take a deep breath and go on and do the hard thing when times are easy we are vulnerable to making our biggest mistakes and that is what this decision before us is about now we have this projected surplus about two thirds of it coming from social security taxes about a third of it coming from the other revenues paid by the american people what are we going to do with it what we do with it will determine the shape of america for decades to come what we say is deal with the big challenges first deal with the aging of america save social security save medicare add a prescription drug benefit add the preventive tests and get america out of debt for the first time since 1835 so our children can have a good economy too now what they have said is let s pass this big tax cut first make everybody happy tomorrow and then we ll talk about these long term challenges and normally that s better politics normally that s better politics everybody knows we ve got a surplus let s give a lot of it back the distributional problems are enormous as senator daschle pointed out but that s what they say here s the problem there will be twice as many people over 65 30 years from now as there are today the medicare trust fund goes broke in 2015 social security trust fund runs out of money in 2034 now those of us who have lived a little know that 15 years passes in the flash of an eye i was talking to somebody yesterday about something i did 15 years ago seemed like it was yesterday and we are the stewards of this country s future we must respond to that we cannot let this opportunity go this is a chance of a lifetime we ve got to take care of medicare now we ve got to extend the life of the social security trust fund now you all know also that medicare benefits have not kept up with medical science today there are preventive tests that can catch diseases like cancer heart disease osteoporosis early and save lives and keep people healthy medicare will pay for you if you get cancer osteoporosis or heart disease and go to the hospital but we don t pay for these preventive tests that will save huge amounts of money but more importantly save lives and save the quality of life and make the later years better so we say let s do something to make it more accessible for people we want more people to take these preventive tests every day millions of seniors pull out their plastic pill boxes each pill with today s ration of medicine don t they medication today that was unknown 35 years ago when medicare was created that keeps you healthy that keeps you out of the hospital that lengthens life and improves the quality of life but today three out of four of our seniors lack dependable affordable prescription drug coverage and the percentage with good coverage goes down as the price of the prescription drug goes up medigap coverage for example gets more expensive for people as they get older and have less money to spend on it so i say we have a chance now because of our economic good fortune and our surplus to extend the life of the medicare trust fund to provide a modest prescription drug benefit so that we can keep more people healthy and out of the hospital and improving their quality of life and to make much more aggressive use of these preventive tests and we ought to do it the drug benefit is totally voluntary it is affordable and it will help a lot of people now rather than respond to the medicare plan i was hoping that the republicans in congress would say well mr president this is your plan this is our plan there are differences let s work it out rather than do that they said before we spend a penny to extend the life of the medicare trust fund we want to pass this tax cut that s so big so bloated and so weighted towards special interest and upper income people that there won t be any money to extend the life of the medicare trust fund not a penny to extend it a year under their plan now they ve decided to vote on this plan today but for some reason they don t want to send it to my desk now i say again we should not be doing this until we figure out how we re going to save medicare save social security and pay the debt off we ought to figure out what is it we have to spend to educate these kids here to provide for the national defense to invest in medical research to do the basic things then we ought to ask ourselves how much is left and whatever it is we ought to give it back to the american people in a tax cut that s the way we ought to do it next month the senate finance committee has promised to take up medicare and i hope they do i hope that they will give me their idea of a plan that will extend the life of the trust fund and deal with the challenge of prescription medicine and preventive tests and say how they re going to pay for it but you know let me just tell you what s going on here on the one hand the congress passes large tax cuts on the other hand they say they want to spend more money for veterans to deal with problems that a lot of our teaching hospitals are having with medicare to deal with the legitimate problems that our farmers are having which is not just a one year thing it needs to be dealt with on a longer term basis but they want to have this big tax cut their plan does nothing to extend the life of the social security trust fund nothing to extend the life of the medicare trust fund it will not pay off the debt and if we do both things one of two things is going to happen we re going to do nothing about medicare we re not going to pay off the debt we re going to have huge cuts in the things they say they re spending more money on or we re going to totally erode this surplus and we re going to squander the opportunity of a generation one of the young men who works for me said the other day that their approach is sort of like a family that sits down at dinner tonight around the table and says you know let s take the vacation of our lifetime let s blow it out let s take the vacation of our dreams and when we get home we ll figure out whether we can make the mortgage payment and send the kids to college now you wouldn t do it you didn t do it and we shouldn t do it so i will say again this is a remarkable moment in history we can t take advantage of it if we don t work with the republicans they have to work with us we are here to say we can t support this tax plan because it squanders the opportunity of a lifetime but we have worked with you before and we will again president johnson who signed medicare said there are no problems we cannot solve together and few we can solve by ourselves we need an american solution here but we say first things first meet the challenge of the aging of america save social security save medicare add that prescription drug benefit meet the challenge of our children s generation by getting us out of debt for the first time since 1835 so we ll have low interest rates high investment more jobs and people will be able to afford to live better invest in our education do the things that we have to do figure out what it costs and then give the rest of it back to the american people but do first things first we will be judged 20 30 50 years from now by whether we use this historic opportunity to think of the twilight years of america to think of the morning years of america to think of how we can bring our country together it is the opportunity of a lifetime and we those of us on this stage intend to use it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton5 9 95 bill_clinton thank you very much it is wonderful to be here today i want to thank cal dooley for his kind remarks and for his remarkable leadership in the congress he does a terrific job for all of you i thank delaine eastin for her commitment to education and for being here with me today i want to thank your school principal lucile king who on next to no notice allowed me to come in here and share some time with some of your students i thank eleanor brown who did a fine job speaking here i said eleanor before she came up i said eleanor are you having a good time or are you nervous she said i m a little nervous so i said well just pretend you re talking to a few people and she did a fine job didn t she let s give her another hand i thought she did a great job i also want to thank the selma high marine corps rotc who posted the colors the high school choir and the black bear brigade band who played very well when i came up here today i thought i d also like to thank the mayor and the members of the city council and the school board who met me one of the school board members gave me this save the children tie to wear in the speech and the mayor told me as the sign said that this is the raisin capital of the world and i said well the only thing i can say is i don t know about raising them but i have probably consumed more raisins than any president who ever held this office and i ve enjoyed every one of them ladies and gentlemen and to all the young people who are here i want to talk about education today this is back to school day but before i do i have to say just a few words about the situation in bosnia you may know that this morning our pilots and crews and their nato allies resumed the bombing of bosnian serb military positions i support that it s appropriate it s necessary because the bosnian serbs failed to comply with the conditions set over the weekend to withdraw their heavy weapons from sarajevo we have to follow through on our commitment to protect sarajevo and those other safe areas we cannot allow more innocent civilians and children to die there this war has to end by negotiation not on the battlefield i m glad to be here in the number one agricultural region in our nation the central valley s orange groves and pistachio trees and the acres of vineyards and cotton and corn and the people who grow the raisins are critical not only to your state s economy but to our nation s economy i wanted to come here to this community today because i think that all of you symbolize in what you re doing here what we have to do as a country we ve got to take responsibility for ourselves and our children we ve got to work together and we ve got to work for the future all of you know that education for individual americans has always been the key to the american dream i have a simple message today at the end of the cold war at the beginning of this period of global economy of the information age the technology age education is more important today to individual americans to families to communities and to our future than it has ever been in the entire history of the united states and we have to act on that fundamental truth as a people thirty months ago i set out to change the economic direction of our country to bring the economy of america back and to help the economy of california recover thirty months later we have over 7 million more jobs 2 5 million more homeowners over 1 5 million more small businesses the jobs you lost in the difficult four years before i took office have been replaced and you re beginning to come back in california but there is one fundamental problem left in america economically and that is for the last 15 years more than half of the hourly wage earners in america are working a longer work week for the same or lower wages and there is a simple clear reason for that in the global economy no matter how hard people work if you don t have the skills that will command high incomes it is difficult to earn those incomes we have simply got to make a commitment as a nation to revolutionizing the availability and quality of education starting with the youngest preschoolers and going through adults who need it to get better jobs or when they re unemployed and we have to do it together it is the fundamental fact of our time when congress comes back from its recession excuse me recession whatever that recess school it s a school day the recess when congress comes back from their recess tomorrow we will have 90 days of decisions about the budget 90 days to choose what direction we re going to take there s some good news for these children in the audience about decisions that have already been made for the first time in over a dozen years we now have a bipartisan commitment to balance the federal budget and remove the burden of debt from our children and our grandchildren that is a very good thing to do the question is how are we going to balance the budget i have given congress a plan which recognizes both these fundamental truths that we have to balance the budget and that we have to provide for education and invest in our young people s future they are working on a plan that balances the budget but by their own estimate only produces weak economic growth in part because it cuts education in california you have had enough of cutting education we need to invest more in education and we can do that i hope as strongly as i can say that you re going to see the most productive 90 days we ve seen in a long time in congress we can balance the budget we can end welfare as we know it and we can invest in education and protect the medical care of our elderly and protect our ability to have a safe and clean food supply and environment we can do all this in a balanced way if we ll work for common ground with common sense that s what we have to do there are some who say that there should be no compromise this autumn but i say that good people of goodwill want us to find common ground want us to find honorable compromise want us to balance the budget and keep faith with the children of america and their educational needs you know i believe that the overwhelming majority of americans of both parties are committed to an agenda of balancing the budget and investing in education when i became president and we increased our investment in head start and added 50 000 more poor children to the head start rolls it had bipartisan support when we passed the goals 2000 program to give schools the chance to reform themselves and to get more computers and other technology in the classroom and to have smaller class sizes and higher standards it had overwhelming bipartisan support when we began to help the states of this country to set up programs for young people who graduate from high school but don t go to four year colleges and still need further education to get good jobs and good wages a school to work program it had bipartisan support when we established the safe and drug free schools program to support the message to our young people that if you want to learn you have a right to learn in safety and you have to learn without drugs it had bipartisan support when we expanded the availability of college loans and scholarships for lower income students and college loans for all students we lowered the cost and improved the repayment terms it had bipartisan support there are young people here with americorps who are working in the communities of the valley and earning money to go to college that was program was created with bipartisan support education is not supposed to be a partisan political football and it should not be when the congress returns tomorrow we ought to all stay on the side of education i will be urging the congress to adopt two new education ideas which will help the working families in this valley to provide for their future number one there s going to be a tax cut the question is who s going to get it and what s it going to be for i believe we ought to give a tax cut for working families to have the cost of their education tax deductible after high school college education training for technicians unemployed people that s the kind of tax cut i think we ought to have the other thing i hope they will do is to recognize that adults need education too i have urged the congress to create a fund which would give to every person who loses a job in the united states the right to get a 2 600 voucher for a year for two years to take to the nearest community college junior college or other educational institution to get retrained if they lose their jobs and they need a brighter future one other thing i d like to say i want to thank the young people who were in that class with me today practicing citizenship asking me tough questions some of which i had never been asked before by anyone i want to thank them for being an example of what i want for all of our young people one of the things that i feel very strongly about is that our schools have to teach good citizenship and good basic character and values fairness and honesty respect for self and others responsibility those things are too often absent in our schools today and i m proud to announce that through our department of education we have been supporting the spread of character education basic principles of citizenship and personal character all across america and today we are releasing four grants to four states including the state of california to make sure that we do everything we can to help our principals our teachers and our parents inculcate the values and character of good citizenship into our young people throughout this country so i ask you my fellow americans without regard to your political party or your philosophy to stand firm on this central principle tell the congress and the president you want the budget balanced but you want us to invest in education and the future we don t want to be penny wise and pound foolish we don t want to weaken our economy by balancing the budget we want to strengthen our children s future by getting the burden of debt off of them there is a plan that balances the budget and increases investment in education and that s what we should do we don t need we don t need to take 45 000 children out of the head start program we don t need to deny every state in the country the right to benefit from smaller classes and more technology and educational excellence in the goals 2000 program we sure don t need to stop helping the schools who need it with the safe and drug free schools program we don t need to stop helping people who want to go on to good jobs with higher skills but aren t going to higher education and four year schools we need the school to work program and we sure don t need to make college loans and college scholarships less available look what s happened in california we need more college scholarships we need more college loans we need more affordable education and higher education i have promised the congress that i would never disagree with them without offering an alternative i have given a balanced budget plan which increases investment in education and on thursday i will talk more about how we can save even more money in this budget to put into reducing the deficit balancing the budget and investing in education but before you leave here today i want to ask every adult american in this audience you look at these children you know they re our future you know we re living in a global economy you know that what you earn depends on what you can learn you know it s more important to our whole country than ever before what do you want this country to look like in the 21st century if you want a high wage high growth high opportunity society if you want every american no matter how humble their background to have a chance to live the american dream if you don t like the fact that too many of our people are trapped in a hard work low wage future then we can change it only if we decide to both balance the budget and invest in the education of our people that is our commitment i ask all of you to make it god bless you and thank you very much dem wjclinton5 9 96 bill_clinton thank you good morning i want to say to all of you how very glad i am to be here i want to thank the big red marching band and the brotherhood who performed earlier thank you very much mr bell and erica thank you for your remarks thank you for your introduction to the chair of your school board doris reddick and dr lennard your superintendent governor chiles lieutenant governor mckay congressman sam gibbons mayor greco and city councilman bob buckhorn most of all to the students here you know i had originally planned to come earlier it was hot then but hurricane bertha had other plans and i decided and so did our emergency people that we didn t need the president in florida messing up the preparations for the hurricane thank goodness it wasn t as bad as we had feared today a lot of you may know there is another hurricane threatening the southeast but not florida hurricane fran is about to deliver what could be a powerful punch in the states of georgia south carolina and north carolina and i want all of you to be thinking about them today our fema director james lee witt is there working with them and we are getting ready for that hurricane and we hope it won t be bad but if it is we ll do our best to be ready let me say i wanted to come here to this high school where you have so much growth and so much energy first to say congratulations to the mayor the school system the tampa bay buccaneers and everybody else who passed that issue that referendum yesterday to improve the schools improve the law enforcement and save the football team i came here because i want america to see all of you tonight i want america to see all of you tonight because you are our future and because unless we give the young people of this country the best educational system in the world you will not have the opportunities you deserve as we move into the 21st century and i know you believe that too and i want you to support me in trying to build a bridge to the 21st century where every child in america has the best educational opportunities in the world for the last four years we ve worked hard to improve education to increase the number of our young people in head start to give schools more opportunities to stay open late if the kids needed to be somewhere besides the street to give schools more flexibility to set high standards and creative ways to meet them and to lower the costs of college loans so that no one ever needs stay away from college because of the burden of repaying them we now have 50 000 young people i see one sign back there 50 000 young people serving their communities solving problems and earning money for college through the americorps program and i m proud of that and thank you for being back there but i want to be president for four more years because there are some other things we need to do in education first of all 40 percent of the young people in this country cannot read on their own by the 3rd grade but 100 percent should be able to be i have a program to put 30 000 more tutors out there use americorps volunteers use young people on work study get a million volunteers and make sure every 8 year old in america can read a book on his or her own by the year 2000 will you help me do that secondly i want to make sure that every classroom and library in the entire united states of america and every school is hooked up to the information superhighway by the year 2000 now let me tell you what this really means this means that for the first time in this history of america every child without regard to their ethnic background without regard to their income kids in the poorest city neighborhoods in the remote mountain villages in america for the first time in the history of the country when we hook up every classroom to the internet with adequate computers and properly trained teachers for the first time all of our children will have access to the same learning the same information in the same time i think all american children deserve that don t you will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century the third thing that i want to say is i want to help everybody do what you re trying to do which is to modernize rehabilitate rebuild and build new school buildings we cannot expect young people to learn if they do not have adequate facilities and for the first time in the history of this country i have proposed a program where the united states government will help communities who are willing to make an extra effort themselves to do more to provide facilities for their young people that are decent and clean and healthy and wholesome and conducive to good learning and i think we want every young person in this country to be in that kind of school don t you finally let me say that i want to build a bridge to the 21st century in which every single young person in america who wants to do it can go to college i want to make a community college education two years of education after high school just as universal in four years as a high school diploma is today and i propose to give every family a tax credit dollar for dollar for the cost of college tuition in the typical community college in america so that everybody will go to a community college will you help me get that done and for everyone who goes on to more college to four years of college or graduate school i believe there ought to be a 10 000 tax deduction for the cost of college tuition for every year anybody is in education if we do that in four years we can have a country where every 8 year old can read every 12 year old can hook into the internet and every 18 year old can go to college and we ll be well on our way to doing our job for you creating an america where there is opportunity for everybody without regard to their gender their race their ethnic background where they start from economically an america where we re growing together not being divided because that s also an important function of education to teach us to live together across our differences half the world is being torn up by racial ethnic and religious differences in america we have people from everywhere and i m proud of that look around this audience today aren t you proud to live in a country which is not defined by race or religion but instead by our devotion to freedom so that s what i came to say a big part of building a bridge to the 21st century is building a bridge big enough to give every single boy and girl in america the chance to live up to their god given abilities that is an important part of building the future you deserve i am committed to it and i want you to be committed to it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton6 1 97 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president and tipper and ladies and gentlemen hillary and i are delighted to welcome you to the white house we look forward to these breakfasts as al said we have been doing them on a regular basis now normally around just after labor day as we sort of rededicate ourselves to the labor of the new year but this year we are doing it now for two reasons one is obviously this is on the brink of the inauguration and a new four year term for the president and for our country the other is we were otherwise occupied last labor day this is a wonderful day to be here we asked father stephanopoulos to pray today because as all of you know this is the celebration of epiphany in the christian faith a time of recognizing christmas in the orthodox tradition i also wanted you to pray so that i could say that we were all very impressed with the size of the book contract that that your son got and we know we can depend upon you to make sure the church gets its 10 percent of that contract we are very proud of him and very grateful to have him here this is the day in the christian tradition when the wise men came bearing gifts for the baby jesus and we have much to be thankful for and much to pray for but i think what i would say today is that i asked you to come here to share with me your thoughts and to share with you some of ours in the hope that we might all become wiser i am very grateful for the progress that our country has made in the last four years grateful that we have been given a chance to play a role in that progress and mindful that whatever has been done which is good has been done by us together one of my college roommates who i think is a really smart guy said to me the other day when we were together and joking about our lost youth he said oh and one other thing as he was leaving he said don t ever forget that great presidents do not do great things great presidents get a lot of other people to do great things and there is over 250 million of us now so that s a lot of greatness if you can get us all to do the right thing which i thought was an interesting way of saying in part what the magic and genius of democracy is all about so we re thinking a lot now about how we re going to build our bridge to the 21st century what we re going to do in this next term i ve listened to all of these experts talk about how hard it is for presidents to be effective in the second term because after all they just got reelected because things went well in their first term not because they had actually thought through what they were going to do in their second term but we ve tried to overcome that disability there are a lot of particulars that we could discuss today but what i d like for you to think about a little bit from your perspective and what you can do two things what are we going to do and secondly and more importantly i think how are we going to do it in what spirit shall we proceed in any great democracy there are always differences about what are we going to do there always have been there always will be and these are altogether healthy it would be america wouldn t last very long i think if 100 percent of the people agreed 100 percent of the time on 100 percent of the issues what keeps us going we all know that none of us has perfect and infinite understanding of these complex matters facing our country and facing the world but we have devised a system we have nurtured and maintained it now for over 200 years in which people can reconcile their differences and come to a consensus and an agreement which will push the country forward so we are enlarged when we come to agreement after honest debate in the right way we are diminished if in the way we treat each other we preclude the possibility of resolution and going forward and at times like this when things are changing so much we need the right spirit more because we have more to decide more to deal with and yet at times like this we are in some ways put at risk by the absence of that spirit of reconciliation and respect there are several specific things i hope we can talk about later that i think we could reach broad agreement on for example some of you think i made a mistake when i signed the welfare reform bill and i don t but one thing that we all ought to be able to agree on is the bill will not succeed the bill does nothing it just changes the rules it doesn t put anybody to work in four years we have reduced by 2 1 million the number of people on welfare the biggest reduction in history by doing the kinds of things that now this bill requires every state to do we just went out and worked with the states and came up with innovative ways to get around old rules and regulations and do them anyway now every state has got to try to do that for every person my objective here is once and for all to take the politics out of poverty and to treat all able bodied people the same at the community level what i long for is a system of community based support for people who are out of work through no fault of their own but a system of community based norms that require people who can work to work when there is work now if you say that everybody who is able bodied can only stay on welfare two years continuously unless the state decides to continue to support them for some other reason and we did give a fund so that hardship cases could be treated in that way then every community has to have a system for putting those people to work now let me pause at this and you can all think about this this new law gives every state the right to give the welfare check to any employer including a church as an employment and training subsidy who will hire someone from welfare if every church in america just hired one family the welfare problem would go way down if every church in america challenged every member of that church who had 25 or more employees to hire another family the problem would go away and we would really have a system in which in times of recession we d have more people unemployed at the community level in good times we d have fewer people but we would always have a community based commitment that crossed party lines and religious lines and every other line to give able bodied people the dignity of work and support them in the most important work they do which is raising their children the second thing i wanted to talk about a little bit is this whole business of immigration the things i don t like about the welfare law have nothing to do with welfare and everything to do with the way we tried to save money i thought unfairly on legal immigrants our administration has done a lot to cut down on illegal immigration but we believe that legal immigration has served nur country well it has however made us more di6e2se and so im igration ir really the touchstone where we deal with not only what are we going to do but how are we going to do it i believe that wehave learned a lot in 220 years really more than 300 years about how hard t is for peo0le of different races to get along we know that that is difficult in all societies and all times and it s something you just have to keep working at but now america is not a white and black america america is a country with scores hundreds of different racial ethnic and religious groups our biggest county los angeles county now has over 160 different racial and ethnic groups within one county but it s all over america wayne county where detroit michigan is has now over 140 different racial and ethnic groups detroit was a place where we used to think of where you basically had white ethnics who immigrated from central and eastern europe and african americans and white southerners who immigrated out of the south because they couldn t make a living in places like my home state in the depression and later now 140 different racial and ethnic groups how are we going to deal with that against the background of what you see in bosnia rwanda northern ireland the middle east all of these things these destructive impulses people have how can we prove in america that we can all get along without giving up our basic beliefs but in finding a ground of mutual respect it seems to me that that may be the single most significant decision facing the united states we have a lot of other things we have to deal with in the next four years the whole question of the entitlements burden when the baby boomers retire and education initiatives that i intend to push and finishing the work of balancing the budget and all that but if we can all find a way to hold up to the world not only the example of our freedom but the example of our freedom in the 21st century global interdependent world in which anybody from anywhere can live here and if you show up for work or you show up for school and you do what you re supposed to do and you re a good citizen you can be part of our country and we ll respect your faith we ll respect your differences and we ll find a way to work together then i believe the preeminence of the united states will be assured throughout the next century and i think you have to think about it in long terms like that what causes a society to rise and fall we clearly are proving that we re getting back to our basic values the crime rate is going down you saw the has gone down for several years in a row for the first time in 25 years we have inequality among working people going down and i m very proud of that for the first time in 20 years we have a lot of our other social problems being ameliorated the teen pregnancy rate dropping substantially for the first time in a good while that drugs alcohol tobacco are still a problem for very young people drug use is going down in society as a whole but still going up among young people so we re on the cusp here maybe of turning a lot of our social problems around we know what we ought to do can we do it in the right way in a spirit of reconciliation and can we recognize that in this exciting new world there s no way in the world for us to know the answer to all these questions that are out there before us and that s the last point i d like to make if we do things in the right way we ll get enough of the right answers to keep moving our country forward and to keep doing the right thing for the rest of the world and we won t be right all the time but that s just because we re human so that s the last thought i would like to leave with you the beginning of wisdom i think is humility and respect for what you may not know now we were talking around the table here about the last speech cardinal bernardin gave in which he said that the precious gift of time should not be wasted on acrimony and division and he said that knowing he had just a little bit of time left the truth is all of us just have a little bit of time left he just knew it and we don t and three weeks or 30 years it s a little bit of time in the life of a country the life of the world so i say to you i ask for your guidance for your prayers for our country for the efforts that all of us are making i ask for you specific involvement particularly in the two issues i ve mentioned on the welfare and immigration issues but most important of all i ask for your help in creating a sense of reconciliation the right sort of spirit in which we can deal with these issues as people of faith on this epiphany i think we should all ask that that be made evident to us thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton6 10 02 bill_clinton thank you very much first that was a remarkable set of comments i thank you for your remarks to my good friend president obasanjo the chairman of ecowas the chairman of this nigerian institute for international affairs board i loved waving that white handkerchief you know in my country and generally in western culture when someone waves a white handkerchief it s a symbol of military surrender i don t believe that s what you meant by that i didn t experience that surrender feeling when you waved that to the ministers of the government the members of the national assembly and our distinguished master of ceremonies it s a great blessing for me to be back in nigeria i love it here i ve come here so often in the last two years i am reliably informed that if i appear again within the next six months i will have to pay taxes the people at the airport don t have to look at my passport anymore and i get to drive into the city on president clinton drive now that i m a former president with no power i wonder if they only put up the street signs when i come in i am delighted to be here with a large delegation of my fellow citizens seated over there including business people former members of my government one former member of my cabinet secretary of transportation rodney slater two american movie stars kevin spacey and chris tucker who i m trying to convince to make movies in nigeria and who also do imitations of me if you want them to give the speech they could do it and if you close your eyes you couldn t tell the difference when i came here in 2000 president obasanjo not only did me the honor of naming a road after me he gave me a new name as well let s see if i can remember how to pronounce it sodangi okora omowale relating to love for the people courage and my homecoming to africa on the same trip i visited a village where the tribal chief gave me another name don masani ushafra which i was told means the knowledgeable one you can t imagine how wonderful these names were to me back in america people call me other names all the time none were favorable and i like these much better it was my honor to make africa a bigger priority for the united states than ever before i did it out of more than sentiment i simply could not imagine how the children of america could grow up and live their dreams in the 21st century unless the children of africa could do the same we worked hard in my years in office for peace in eritrea and ethiopia we promoted the africa crisis response initiative that trained more than 6 000 african peacekeepers during my time in office we supported peacekeeping efforts in liberia and sierra leone i went to tanzania with president mandela for the burundi peace conference we worked for the cease fire in the congo and provided millions to oau for conflict management programs we worked to halt the trade in illegal diamonds and provided about 120 million dollars a year over eight years to support democracy programs across this great continent we gave special attention to democracy to security and human rights issues in angola to the post apartheid political and economic transition in south africa and to democratic transition right here in nigeria as has been said we implemented a new trade policy for america with the africa growth and opportunity act that provides duty free treatment to virtually all products exported to the united states from sub saharan africa we forgave bilateral debt of 500 million dollars for african countries and led the g 8 in establishing the millennium debt relief initiative which already has helped 25 nations many in africa with debt relief savings for health education and development we tripled our overseas aids efforts and supported the south african court case which led to the drug companies commitments to provide cheaper anti retroviral drugs as well as those that prevent the transmission of hiv from mother to child i consider this work that we did in africa among the most important things i did in my eight years as president it is still important and i am still trying to do what i can through my foundation since i left office i have worked with president mandela to co chair the international aids trust to bring all the energy and resources we can along with those of other former heads of state and government to the fight against hiv and aids in a few days president mandela and i are also launching a south african version of america s community service program for young people americorps it will bring young black and white south africans together to work together day by day for at least a year to solve the problems of their local cities towns and villages i just left ghana with the great peruvian economist hernando de soto who is working around the world to create new legal frameworks to allow the poor of the world to use five trillion dollars of assets they have in their homes their businesses and their farms because most of these assets have no legal title they cannot be used as collateral for credit to expand their own livelihoods and the economies of their countries de soto has worked around the world to change this we just came from launching a program appropriately called the foundation for building capital for the poor in ghana i hope this will spread all across africa i believe it to be the single most important idea in the world today for internally generated economic development this is my third visit to nigeria when general abubucar kept his promise to hold free elections and when president obasanjo became the freely democratically leader of this nation i invited him to the white house i told him that on the day he was inaugurated president i was out west and had to rise very early in the morning to hear his inaugural speech as i remember i got up at about a quarter to four but i was not disappointed and i told him in the white house that i would like to come to nigeria because it was important to america s future and that of the world so in august of 2000 we had a wonderful visit one i will always remember for the warmth of the people for the culture and music which i especially loved and for the promise of the future last year i was honored to return when you hosted the african aids conference which was a historic event because of secretary general kofi anan s call for the developed world to contribute 10 billion dollars a year to fighting aids tb malaria and other infectious diseases i am back today because i know nigeria will play a crucial role in shaping the 21st century we live in a world that is highly interdependent but not yet integrated i would like to explain what i mean by that trade open borders easy travel immigration and the spread of technology have brought us closer together than ever before but there are still profound divisions in this world in the economic social political and philosophical realms we saw that on september 11th in the united states when a group with very different values and interests than most of us shareal qaedaused the forces of interdependence they used open borders and easy travel as well as easy access to information and technology to murder 3 100 people from 70 nations including over 200 other muslims in the united states in less obvious ways we see it every day the global economy has lifted more people out of poverty in the last 20 years than ever before yet half the world s people still live on less than two dollars a day education has benefited people in both poor and rich countries more than ever before but 130 million children never go to school at all health advances have led to a decline in infant mortality and a rise in life expectancy even in the world s poorest countries but ten million children die every year of preventable childhood diseases and one in four of all the people who die this year on earth will die of aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them are little children who never got a single clean glass of water in their lives for the first time in history more than half the world s people like nigerians live under governments they elected themselves yet still the world is gripped by ancient conflicts rooted in racial religious ethnic and tribal differences these ancient differences are colored by the awesome prospect that some day these conflicts may be fought with chemical biological and small scale nuclear weapons so we have at the dawn of the 21st century great promise great peril great hope great frustration and a battle between the forces of chaos and cooperation between those of conflict and those of community this is the principle struggle of the early part of the new millennium unlike conflicts of the past which were fought between nations and empires this struggle goes on within every nation and it involves all nations those that enjoy peace stability democracy and prosperity those with dictatorships conflicts and desperate poverty those hovering somewhere in between those with wealth whose people are not yet wealthy those with democracies whose freedoms are not yet secure those who desire peace whose people still live in conflict africa is the central battleground of this new world between the forces of integration and those of disintegration as you said general those of us in the developed world and especially in the united states who have prospered from the age of interdependence have very very heavy responsibilities we are not doing nearly as much as we should to advance the economies of the developing world with aid trade targeted debt relief and constructive plans to foster private investments we are not doing as much as we should to find proven programs to put all the world s children in school or proven programs to fight infectious diseases and provide a decent health system everywhere or proven programs not only to fight terrorism but to cooperate in a way that will build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists but there are also steps that must be taken by the nations that are struggling themselves in the last year there have been many positive developments in africa first and foremost nepad the new partnership for african development a truly african initiative with the responsibilities of african nations defined by africa not demanded by the west there has been significant progress in the congo something that has been very important for the entire continent and there was the launch of the african union with its commitment to self monitoring to ensure openness and the rule of law to open elections and the ending of human rights abuses and to a mechanism for peer review to enforce those commitments as we all know zimbabwe has been an especially stern test of those commitments this is an issue far more difficult for many africans because it is woven into the matter of land reform an issue still alive in several countries in southern africa and as you know better than i sometimes these issues have to be worked more behind the scenes than in the public arena because i know what has happened here over the last couple of days i want to thank president obasanjo for his tireless and often thankless efforts to keep working towards the right results in zimbabwe in the end president mugabe must be held to the african union standard of free and fair elections so that africa can send a clear message across the continent and across the world that no matter how heroic one s past actions no matter how great the solidarity one feels from fighting past battles no matter how much there are legitimate grievances entwined with land reform or any other issue it is simply no longer acceptable to inflame racial divisions to intimidate opponents to rig elections or to manipulate results the essence of democracy is not just winning power legitimately it is also knowing when to let go the situation in zimbabwe is a burden to all of africa including nigeria not only because of the increased interdependence of the nation and peoples but also because of the fact that around the world there are still too many people who engage in what i would call the regrettable practice of continental profiling they hear about something bad happening somewhere in africa and automatically impute it to all of africa it is not fair it is based upon ignorance but it is a fact nonetheless one that has consequences for foreign policy decisions and financial decisions by investors from other parts of the world so i urge nigeria to continue to be a leader for democracy in africa history already has recorded your role in this more than 40 years ago you were among the first on the continent to find liberation you then emerged from a painful civil war to build your future mr president i don t know if i ve ever told you this but when the nigerian civil war ended almost 33 years ago i was a young student traveling in russia on the night the announcement was made i was having dinner fish and rice i still remember what i was eating with nigerian students from warring tribes who went to lumumba university in moscow before the war began and were trapped there during the entire conflict knowing their families were killing each other we were listening to music when all of a sudden the radio was interrupted and the man made an announcement in russian i didn t understand a word of russian but i knew what had happened when these people broke into tears and began to embrace each other i will never forget that as long as i live and today when you have these fights i wish someone could remember the looks that i saw in those young students eyes 21 22 years old given their lives back because for a moment anyway all those people from different tribes decided that their common humanity was more important than whatever differences brought them to kill nigeria was the leading african opponent of white ruled governments in south africa rhodesia and namibia lagos was the headquarters of many african liberation movements you fought for independence in angola and mozambique you did all this and just as you led the move for independence across africa you can lead a second wave of african liberation not from colonial power but from home grown oppression of course as i used to remind my fellow americans when we wanted to give lessons to other people before you can do good elsewhere you must be good at home as an outsider and someone who hasn t been out of office so long i do not forget how hard politics and change can be i am reluctant to offer any advice at all but as your friend i am compelled to make some observations that i hope will help because of your history your size your diversity of region religion language your 250 ethnic groups nigeria is one of the most important and pivotal countries in the entire world all clear thinking people are pulling for you and your future it is a formidable task i was president of a democracy over 200 years old your political ancestors gave you no such inheritance when it comes to freedom they left you in debt i m reminded of something president kennedy once said he had the ability to find humor in almost any situation shortly after he took office he said and i quote what surprised me most after we took office was that we found out things were just as bad as we had been saying they were well the bad news about democracy is that it never brings change fast enough the good news is that without it it s almost impossible to bring any lasting change at all winston churchill once said democracy is the worst of all forms of government except for all the others and so as a friend let me suggest that there are five areas in which i believe nigeria can be a great example to the world first you can show the world how a populist and promising but still struggling nation can halt and reverse the spread of hiv and aids more than 40 million men women and children now have hiv and aids with 15 000 more infected every day 25 million have died with 8 000 more dying every day 14 million boys and girls have lost one or both parents if current trends continue another 65 million people will die of aids by 2020 and well before that over 100 million people around the world will have the disease while two thirds of the cases are still in africa it is no longer anywhere close to an african problem the fastest growing rates of aids are in the nations of the former soviet union on europe s back door the second fastest growing rates of aids are in the 15 nations of the caribbean on america s front door my wife represents 600 000 people from the dominican republic alone in the senate from new york state so we have a global problem on our hand this year or next year india will have as many cases as south africa and i need not remind you it is a country with a billion people if it had the same infection rate as south africa 30 million people in india alone would have aids the world desperately needs models of nations that do not engage in denial and it also needs help from countries like ours with paying for the medicine the health care the education and the prevention programs we cannot lose the war on aids and win our battles to enhance health reduce poverty expand education or promote stability and democracy nigeria has already set a sterling example i will never forget in 2000 when president obasanjo and i had a meeting on aids and two people spoke a young 16 year old girl who was serving as a peer counselor at a time when many other countries were still denying the problem exists she was wonderful and a remarkable man named john ibekwe who married a woman knowing she was hiv positive became hiv positive himself and then nearly destroyed himself trying to find the drugs necessary to prevent mother to child transmission when president obasanjo called john s wife up to the stage and embraced her on national television it was the first time an african leader had done that it sent a remarkable message across the continent and across the world that denial is not an option that people need not lose their jobs and they need not lose their lives if we worked together on this the ibekwes had a beautiful daughter maria who was born without hiv infection and at the end of the recent international conference on aids in barcelona spain president mandela and i closed the program and i ended my speech by showing little maria ibekwe s picture to remind people what this fight against aids is all about you can lead the way and we should help i have said before and i will say again i believe nigeria and other countries any country with an aids infection rate of over 3 percent should be eligible for international debt relief if the savings is put in to fighting aids and i am still fighting a relatively lonely battle around the world trying to convince other people i m right about this we should give south africa debt relief i know it looks like a rich country it doesn t look rich if you re in soweto with all those homeless people with aids it doesn t look rich if you re standing on the border of zimbabwe seeing thousands of people a significant number of which have aids pour over every single week we should give you and every other country with a significant aids problem debt relief if the savings is used to put into the health system to stabilize democracy and enable the economy to grow and society to come together and i hope you will help me with that we also can t forget the other infectious diseases tb malaria polio the polio vaccine was discovered about 50 years ago and yet people continue to die of polio we can employ the vaccine for the disease and use it in a way that helps to build the public health networks also necessary to combat aids so i hope then nigeria will lead and i will do what i can through my foundation to support you second you have an opportunity to show how to build a knowledge based economy not held hostage to the price of oil oil gives you advantages to be sure a guaranteed stream of cash leverage with countries that have big oil import needs but oil can be a trap when the price of oil exploded in the 1970s many of the non oil enterprises in nigeria were abandoned undermining your efforts to diversify the economy it s important to remember that the wealthiest oil nations are not the wealthiest nations japan has the second largest economy of the world and almost no natural resources they must rely on the talent the energy the education of their people and a sound economic strategy even after ten years of real economic difficulty in japan its per capita gdp is nearly 3 and a times that of saudi arabia the world s largest oil producer nigeria needs an economic strategy to build out from oil not to rely on it nigeria needs good governance trade internal development and foreign investment we need an aggressive campaign to enlighten the world about what is really going on here about what the opportunities are here and i believe especially in europe and the united states there needs to be an organized attempt to mobilize the nigerian expatriate community and to help to develop their native lands and that brings me to point three nigeria can prove that by providing all citizens the education they need the country s economy can grow and the society can stabilize the modern economy rests on what is in people s heads not what is under their feet the africa union has dubbed the next ten years the age of capacity building doubtless that age involves the ability of government to function well the right sort of laws for business to function well and doubtless it involves the necessary infrastructure however the most important capacity of all is the capacity of the mind how many of you are sitting in this room today in part because you have a better education than other nigerians your age i was only the second person in the history of america who was the governor of a small state to be elected president and i was the first in my family to graduate from a university you know we have a saying in america that those of us in politics want everyone to believe we were born in a very rural cabin that we built ourselves we all like to pretend that we re self made the truth is most of us are here by the grace of god and the help of others and by a fair measure of good fortune if there s one thing i have learned in my travels around the world it is that intelligence and ability and goodwill are evenly distributed across the planet don t you believe that don t you think that nigerians are as smart as people anywhere i told somebody today every third nigerian i meet in america is a doctor there isn t anything wrong here in nigeria that can t be fixed by nigerians if you develop the human capacity of your people and again i think the west should help there are proven strategies that work ninety eight percent of the children in brazil are enrolled in school why they actually pay the mothers in the poorest 30 percent of families to send their kids to school they do the same thing in mexico we started a feeding program my last year as president where we offered a good meal to people who would send their kids to school to get the meal countries that participated had big increases in enrollment this is not rocket science this is not particularly difficult but it can make all the difference in the world so i hope that nigeria will be the first african country to have a huge increase in the number of its people getting good and relevant education as far as they can go and i think the west should help fourth you can prove that self government works and here i d like to talk a little bit as a friend you know i know a little bit about conflict in politics you may have noticed that not everybody in america in the congress supported me when i was president i understand this but i would like to say this what is the premise of self government in a democracy under a constitution it is that no one has the whole truth no one is all wise no one is all knowing no one is immune from the temptations of power no one therefore we set up a government of laws not men and women we set up a government where there are certain rules we have to empower the government so that public problems can be solved and public opportunities can be seized then we limit that government to avoid abuses to require honorable compromises and to provide a peaceful means of transition of power people who follow those rules are instinctively trusted in america we had a great model we have two generals here that identify with this george washington was our first president he won the revolutionary war nobody bothered to run against him right after the war he went home and told somebody else to be president he literally had to be dragged back to serve then he served two terms and everybody wanted him to run again he said no the country is in good shape i m going home elect someone else then we had an internal military conflict and he was dragged back again briefly to serve as commander in chief even though people knew he was old and not able to be in the field every day because he was the symbol of everything we believed in not just because he exercised power well but gently even though i can talk about that story from over 200 years ago and be proud of it i am not proud of everything that happened in the last 200 years keep in mind thomas jefferson said we re all created equal and then we institutionalized slavery we counted african americans in the beginning as only six tenths of a human being in the census and democracy says all adults should be able to vote a hundred years ago african americans couldn t vote except in a few states and women couldn t vote either in my lifetime we ve had the civil rights movement the women s rights movement and the expansion of constitutional protection to other minority groups we have stumbled time and again over issues of justice and equality but if you take care of your democracy what you find is that you keep stumbling in the right direction no one s life is an uneven march toward a bright light and no nation s life is either a big part of this is criticism one of our founders benjamin franklin once said our critics are our friends for they show us our faults i must say when i was president there were many days when i thought i had too many such friends no one in office has failed to feel this way i used to say politics is the only kind of work in the world where no matter how good a job you re doing about half the people you work for want to fire you there s no good complaining about your problems half the people don t care the other half are glad you have those problems and people citizens know that they have a legal right to criticize the president and the national assembly in america it s a national sport but i will say this to all the young people who are here you are not entitled as a citizen to criticize unless you are prepared to take some responsibility for your own country s future nobody s right all the time so criticize all you want but every time you criticize ask yourself should i be doing something what can i do to improve my life to improve my family to improve my village to improve my nation what can i do democratic politics is not a spectator sport everybody has to play and i would say one other thing i ve made a lot of fun today about political conflict i actually enjoyed most of the fights i had and i tried to give as good as i got but i also tried to remember that the purpose of politics is not seeking and keeping power but using the power for a little while to help the people to advance their values and their interests and that requires compromise with your adversaries democracy only works if you recognize that you don t have the whole truth you couldn t possibly be right about everything and therefore even as you hold fast to your convictions in the end the country has to go on so some decisions have to be made and otherwise politics even in a democracy becomes nothing more than a sort of selfish seeking after power or an attempt to get some grievance vindicated or an attempt to get even with someone who beat you once and i can tell you i know some people who are like that in america and every one of them is unhappy because it is not satisfying to spend your whole life trying to climb up a greasy pole that god in time will make you fall off of anyway sooner or later it only works if in the end you re actually doing something people say to me all the time well aren t you disappointed that now that your party lost the last presidential election so many of your polices are being reversed at home i say well a little bit but one thing i ve learned is in human affairs no victory and no defeat is ever final it s important for everybody to remember that no victory no defeat is ever final in my case we ve won some as well as lost some in the last year or so sometimes my crowd wins sometimes we get a good compromise and when we don t like what s happening we know there s always another election just around the corner the important thing is to keep moving in the right direction the last thing i d like to say is i you clapped over this when i said this before i want to emphasize this the fifth thing nigeria can do is to prove you can make all this diversity work part of it is having a political system that functions but it s deeper than that you clapped when i told you that story of seeing those students embracing each other at the end of the nigerian civil war that s the big issue all over the world today why did those people kill everybody on september the 11th in america because they thought they had the truth tthey thought their differences were more important than our common humanity they thought anyone who did not share their truth was a legitimate target that included over 200 muslims and a six year old child who just wanted to go work with her mother that morning at the world trade center this is the story everywherechildren perish actually this has been the story throughout human history every since people came out of caves in clans most of us have defined the meaning of our life in positive terms within our own group and in negative terms with those outside our group and every one of us in our lives has done that at some time or another well what happens is the more we get involved with other people the more complicated our relationships get the smaller the world gets and the more we realize that the only way to preserve our pride in our race our tribe our religion is to celebrate ours and allow others to celebrate theirsto say that our differences matter a lot they make life much more interesting they make the search for truth possible but they can only be preserved if we say that as important as our differences are our common humanity matters more nigeria can lead the world in learning that lesson you have already done some remarkable things with your own human rights violation investigation commission this kind of thing is really important in healing animosities because people can t let injustices go sometimes they have to go unpunished but not unnoticed once they are noticed some will have to be punished but some things you just have to forgive and let go that s one thing i learned from my friend mandela i asked him i said when you were taking your last walk for freedom didn t you hate your oppressors again walking out the last time he sa dem wjclinton6 10 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you folks let me begin by saying a special word of thanks to the people who played before i came here the steve and mary davis band and let s give a big hand again to the lila wallace youth jazz orchestra they did a great job i want to thank congresswoman barbara kennelly for meeting hillary and me at the airport and for being such a great leader for connecticut and for our country and i also want to tell you that i thought it was interesting at the last democratic convention and the convention our friends had in san diego they were running away from their platform they were claiming they hadn t read their platform barbara kennelly wrote our platform i m proud of it i m running on it and it s a great document i wish every american would read it thank you i want to thank chris dodd for being a powerful effective wonderful chairman of the democratic national committee and a voice for people all over this country thank you now somebody told me i can t see but someone told me that one of connecticut s greatest athletes ever rebecca lobo is in this crowd today somewhere where is she and someone told me hi rebecca she was great in the olympics wasn t she someone told me it s your birthday is that true let s sing happy birthday one two three comment president sings happy birthday ladies and gentlemen tonight is a great night for america tonight we celebrate our democracy tonight we are reminded that the people of this country run the show and that we ve been around for 220 years as a great and free country because almost all the time the people have made the right decision tonight i am going to have a chance to tell the american people what you know we are better off than we were four years ago we are on the right track to the 21st century tonight we ll have a chance to talk about what we have to do in the only four years that are remaining before we start that new century to make sure every child in this audience every child in this state every child in our country has a chance to live out his or her dreams to make sure that we go forward together to say that we think hillary s right it does take a village to raise a child and build a country and make our future and for all of you who have supported me and supported al gore and supported our administration for every one of you that is working hard to build a bridge to the future that we can all walk across together let me say that it s hard for me to imagine that it s been well more than 25 years since i first met my wife in new haven connecticut it s hard for me to imagine that it s been way more than 20 years now since i left connecticut after i finished law school it s hard for me to imagine that it s been almost four years since the people of connecticut gave me their votes in the race for president in 1992 but these last four years have been something i will never forget i thank you for giving me the chance to serve i thank you for supporting the tough decisions we made to move our country forward and i ask you to be there tonight rooting for me but also rooting for you your families and the future of this country because the best days of this country are still ahead thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton6 10 97 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you mr vice president for your remarks and your remarkable leadership to help us keep our earth in the balance thank you father o donovan for letting me come home to georgetown one more time to discuss a matter of immense importance to america and its future i thank the members of congress and the members of the cabinet and the administration who are here all those who have agreed to serve on the panels and all you who have come to be a part of this important day six years ago last friday i can hardly believe it but it was six years ago last friday that i announced my intention to run for president challenging america to embrace and to vigorously pursue a vision of our country for the 21st century to make the american dream alive for every person responsible to work for it to keep our country the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity to bring our people together across all the lines that divide us into one america shortly afterward i came here to georgetown to this great hall to outline specific strategies and new policies to achieve that vision rooted in our values of opportunity and responsibility faith and family and community designed to help americans seize the opportunities and solve the problems of this new age it was clear to me that our new direction had to be rooted in some basic guideposts that we had to be oriented toward the future not the past toward change not the status quo toward partnership not division toward giving all a chance not just the few and finally toward making sure america leads not follows we tried to develop a new approach to government where we didn t claim to do everything and we wouldn t tolerate doing nothing but instead we focused on giving people the tools to make the most of their own lives and creating the conditions that would allow them to succeed and we had new policies the economic policies and trade policies education policy crime and welfare policies toward the working poor policies to bolster families and help them balance work and child rearing policies in health care and foreign policy and yes policies in the environment in the last four years and eight months i think it s fair to say that together we have made real progress toward that vision for the 21st century we stand at the threshold of that century stronger than most people thought was possible back in 1991 with our economy thriving our social fabric mending our leadership in the world strong we have a solid foundation of achievement on which to stand as we take on the remaining challenges to build that bridge to the 21st century we are back here at georgetown today because global climate change clearly is one of the most important of those challenges and also one of the most complex crossing the disciplines of environmental science economics technology business politics international development and global diplomacy affecting how we and all others on this planet will live support our families grow our food produce our energy and realize our dreams in the new century that s why we ve put together this white house conference on climate change bringing together experts and leaders with a wide range of knowledge and a wide range of views people of goodwill bring to this conference many honest disagreements about the nature of the threat we face and how we should respond that is healthy in a democracy like ours my hope is that we will take advantage of this forum to actually talk with each other rather than past each other for it is our responsibility to work together to achieve two vital and compatible goals ensuring the continued vitality of our planet and expanding economic growth and opportunity for our people despite the complexities of these challenges we have good reason to be optimistic beginning with our 220 year record of making all manner of difficult problems solvable and importantly a very good record in the last generation of environmental progress for in the last generation alone we came together to heed rachel carson s warnings and banned ddt and other poisons we cleaned up rivers so filthy they were catching on fire phased out lead in gasoline and chemicals that were eating a hole in the ozone layer we worked with citizens to conserve the headwaters forest of northern california restore the florida everglades protect yellowstone national park from the assaults of mining in each case proving that environmental stewardship does not have to hamstring economic growth indeed in tackling the difficult task of cutting sulphur dioxide emissions with an innovative system of permit trading the united states is well ahead of the schedule we set for ourselves and well below the projected cost in cleaning the environment i believe we can find that same common ground as we address the challenge of climate change before we begin our discussion today i think it s important for me to explain the four principles that will guide my approach to this issue first i m convinced that the science of climate change is real we ll hear more about this today from our first panel but for me the bottom line is that although we do not know everything what we do know is more than enough to warrant responsible action the great majority of the world s climate scientists have concluded if we don t cut our emission of greenhouse gases temperatures will arise and will disrupt the global climate in fact most scientists say this process has already begun i might add that i had nothing to do with scheduling this conference on the day which is predicted to be the hottest october 6th that we have ever had in washington d c i know not everyone agrees on how to interpret the scientific conclusions i know not everyone shares my assessment of the risks but i think we all have to agree that the potential for serious climate disruption is real it would clearly be a grave mistake to bury our heads in the sand and pretend the issue will go away the second principle is that when the nations of the world meet in december in kyoto japan we must be prepared to commit to realistic and binding goals on our emissions of greenhouse gases with 4 percent of the world s population we enjoy more than 20 percent of the world s wealth which helps to explain why we also produce more than 20 percent of the world s greenhouse gases if we expect other nations to act on the problem we must show leadership the third principle is that we must embrace solutions that will allow us to continue to grow our economy as we honor our global responsibilities and our responsibilities to our children we ve worked far too hard to revitalize the american dream to jeopardize our progress now therefore we must emphasize flexible market based approaches we must work with business and industry to find the right ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we must promote technologies that make energy production and consumption more efficient there are many people here today from companies that are addressing the climate change in innovative ways taking steps that will save money for american families even as we reduce the threat of global warming for example a number of leading electric utilities including aep southern company niagara mohawk and northern states power are working with homeowners to promote a new technology called geo exchange using geothermal pumps to heat and cool homes far more cheaply than traditional systems while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent or more ballard power and united technologies are leading pioneers in developing fuel cells that are so clean their only exhaust is distilled water right now ballard is working with chrysler mercedes benz and toyota to introduce fuel cells into new cars both of these technologies represent the kind of creative solutions that will make our job much easier the fourth principle is that we must expect all nations both industrialized and developing to participate in this process in a way that is fair to all it is encouraging that so many nations in so many parts of the world are developing so rapidly that is good news for their people and it is good for america s economic future but as we ve seen right here at home rising energy demands that accompany economic development traditionally have meant large increases in greenhouse gas emissions in fact if current trends continue emissions from the developing world will likely eclipse those from the developed world in the next few decades but they have an opportunity to pursue a different future without sacrificing economic growth the industrialized world alone cannot assume responsibility for reducing emissions otherwise we ll wind up with no reduction in emissions within a matter of a few decades in kyoto therefore we will ask for meaningful but equitable commitments from all nations second we must explore new ways for american businesses to help these rapidly growing countries to meet their developmental needs with cleaner and more efficient energy technologies today i hope we can take a step forward in putting all four of these principles into effect we have studied this issue long enough to know that there are sensible options for action it is our job now to pull them together into a coherent plan nearly three decades ago when the apollo astronauts first went to the moon we gained an entirely new perspective on the global challenge we face today for looking down on earth from the vantage point that revealed no political boundaries or divisions the astronauts had the same chilling sensation they were simply awestruck by how tiny and fragile our planet is protected from the harsh void of space by an atmosphere that looked as thin and delicate as the skin of an onion every astronaut since has experienced the same insight and they ve even given it a name the overview effect it has instilled in each new astronaut a passion to convince people we must work together on earth s behalf rusty schwieckart has said you realize that on that little blue and white thing there is everything that means anything to you all history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love all of it on that little spot out there you can cover with your thumb to the best of my knowledge only one person here has actually experienced the overview effect firsthand dr mae jemison a former shuttle astronaut and current international development expert who will participate in our third panel discussion this afternoon nonetheless i challenge everyone in this room to rise to a vantage point high enough to experience the overview effect it will enable us to reach common ground let me say when the vice president was talking and father o donovan was talking i was looking around this old hall that i have loved for so long and i found it utterly amazing that i first came here 33 years ago i was reading this morning up at camp david the list of people who were going to be here today and i found it utterly amazing that a few of you i first talked to as long as 20 years ago about the need to build an alternative energy future for america and i find it completely amazing that five eighths of my presidency is behind me i make these points for this reason if you think about the benchmarks in your own life it doesn t take long to live your life and what seems at the beginning of your life a very long time seems to have passed in the flash of an eye once you have experienced it these great developments such as the one we re here to talk about today occur over many life spans and popular democracies are far more well organized to take advantage of opportunities or deal with immediate crises than they are to do the responsible thing which is to take a moderate but disciplined approach far enough in advance of a train coming down the track to avoid leaving our children and our grandchildren with a catastrophe so i ask you to think about that we do not want the young people who sat on these steps today for whom 33 years will also pass in the flash of an eye to have to be burdened or to burden their children with our failure to act thank you dem wjclinton6 10 99a bill_clinton thank you very much let me begin by saying a profound word of thanks to senator glenn to general shalikashvili to dr townes and to secretary cohen for what they have said i thank general jones and admiral crowe for being here i thank all the other nobel laureates who are here secretary richardson and general shelton and the members of the joint chiefs of staff mr berger and mr podesta the other people from the white house and i thank senators biden and dorgan for their presence here and their enormous leadership on this issue and other committed american citizens who are in this audience let me say that i was sitting here thinking two things when the previous speakers were speaking one is it made me very proud to be an american to know that our country had been served by people like these four without regard to party the second is that each in their own way represent a different piece of the american experience over the last 50 years and bring a remarkable combination of intellect knowledge experience and humanity to the remarks that they made there s a reason that president eisenhower said we ought to do this and a reason that president kennedy agreed they saw world war ii from slightly different angles and different ranks but they experienced the horror of the atomic era s onset in much the same way i think you could make a compelling argument that this treaty is more needed now than it was when they advocated it when there were only two nuclear powers i think you could make a compelling argument that given the events of the last couple of years this treaty is more needed than it was when i signed it at the united nations three years ago nuclear technology and know how continue to spread the risk that more and more countries will obtain weapons that are nuclear is more serious than ever i said yesterday i d like to just stop here and go off the script i am very worried that the 21st century will see the proliferation of nuclear and chemical and biological weapons that those systems will undergo a process of miniaturization just as almost all other technological events have led us to in good ways and bad and that we will continue to see the mixing and blending of misconduct in the new century by rogue states angry countries and terrorist groups it is therefore essential that the united states stay in the nonproliferation lead in a comprehensive way now if you look at what we re trying to do with the biological weapons convention for example in putting teeth in that while increasing our own ability to protect our own people and protect our friends who want to work with us from biological weaponry you see a good direction if you look at what we did with the chemical weapons convention working in good faith for months with the congress to ask the same question we re asking here are we better off with this or without it and how we added safeguard after safeguard after safeguard both generated out of the administration and generated from leaders of both parties in the congress that s how we ought to look at this but we have to ask ourselves just the same question they all presented because the nuclear threat is still the largest one and are we better off or not if we adopt this treaty i think we start with the fact that the best way to constrain the danger of nuclear proliferation and god forbid the use of a nuclear weapon is to stop other countries from testing nuclear weapons that s what this test ban treaty will do a vote therefore to ratify is a vote to increase the protections of our people and the world from nuclear war by contrast a vote against it risks a much more dangerous future one of the interesting things i ll bet you that people in other parts of the world particularly those that have nuclear technology are watching the current debate with some measure of bewilderment i mean today we enjoy unmatched influence with peace and freedom ascendant in the world with enormous prosperity enormous technical advances and by and large on a bipartisan basis we ve done a pretty good job of dealing with this unique moment in history we ve seen the end of the cold war making possible agreements to cut u s and russian nuclear arsenals by more than 60 percent we have offered the russians the opportunity of further cuts if they will ratify start ii but we know the nuclear peril persists and that there s growing danger that these weapons could spread in the middle east in the persian gulf in asia to areas where our troops are deployed we know that they can be present in areas where there are intense rivalries and unlike at least the latter years of the cold war still very much the possibility of misunderstanding between countries with this capacity now let me say the reason i say that i think other countries will be looking at this one of the concerns that i have had all along is that the countries we need to get involved in this india pakistan all the other countries will say well gosh when we all get in this comprehensive test ban treaty the americans have a big advantage because they re spending 4 5 billion maintaining the integrity of their nuclear stockpile and i always thought that too and i think that s a good thing because people around the world know we re not going to abuse this responsibility we have but it is strange to me and i m sure strange for people in foreign capitals analyzing the debate going on in washington there are people against this treaty who somehow think we will be disadvantaged by it so instead they propose to say well we they don t any of them say we should start testing again so the message of not ratifying this treaty is okay we re not going to test but you guys have a green light now forgive my less than elevated language but i think we ve got to put this down where everybody can get it and i don t think we ought to give a green light to our friends in india and pakistan to the chinese or the russians or to people who would be nuclear powers i think that would be a mistake i think we ought to give them an outstretched hand and say let us show common restraint and see this in the framework of our continuing work with the russians to secure their own nuclear materials to destroy nuclear weapons that are scheduled for destruction and to continue our effort to reduce the nuclear threat the argument it seems to me doesn t hold water this argument that somehow we would be better off even though we re not going to start testing again to walk away from this treaty and give a green light to all these other countries in the world now i sent this test ban treaty up to the senate over two years ago for two years the opponents of the treaty refused to hold any hearings suddenly they say okay you ve got to vote up or down in a week now this is a tough fight without much time and there are lots of technical arguments can be made to confuse the issue but i would like to just reiterate what has already been said by previous speakers and make one other point there are basically three categories of arguments against the treaty two have been dealt with one is well this won t detect every test that anybody could do at every level and general shalikashvili addressed that we will have censors all over the world that will detect far more tests than will be detected if this treaty is not ratified and does not enter into force and our military have repeatedly said that any test of a size that would present any kind of credible threat to what we have to do to protect the american people we would know about and we could respond in an appropriate and timely fashion the second argument is no matter what all these guys say they can find three scientists somewhere who will say or maybe 300 i don t know that they just don t agree and maybe there is some scenario under which the security and reliability of the nuclear deterrent in america can be eroded well i think that at some point with all these nobel laureates and our laboratory heads and the others that have endorsed this say what they say you have to say what is the likelihood that america can maintain the security and reliability of its nuclear deterrent as compared with every other country if they come under the umbrella of this and the treaty enters into force the same people say that we ought to build a national missile defense notwithstanding the technological uncertainties because our skill is so much greater we can always find a technological answer to everything and i would argue that our relative advantage in security even if you have some smidgen of a doubt about the security and reliability issue will be far greater if we get everybody under this tent and we re all living under the same rules than it will be if we re all outside the tent now there s a third sort of grab bag set of arguments against it and i don t mean to deprecate them some of them are actually quite serious and substantial questions that have been raised about various countries activities in particular places and other things the point i want to make about them is go back and look at the process we adopted in the chemical weapons convention every single other objection that has been raised or question that has been raised can be dealt with by adding an appropriately worded safeguard to this treaty it either falls within the six we ve already offered and asked for or could be crafted in a careful negotiation as a result of a serious process so i do not believe that any of these things are serious stumbling blocks to the profound argument that this is in our interest look 154 countries have signed this treaty russia china japan south korea israel iran all our nato allies 51 have already ratified 11 of our nato allies including nuclear powers britain and france but it can t go into effect unless the u s and the other designated nations ratify it and once again we need american leadership to protect american interests and to advance the peace of the world i say again we re spending 4 5 billion a year to protect the security and reliability of the nuclear stockpile there is a reason that secretary cohen and secretary richardson and our laboratory heads believe that we can do this once again i say the u s stopped testing in 1992 what in the world would prevent us from trying to have a regime where we want other people to join us in stopping testing let me just give one example last year the nuclear tests by india and pakistan shook the world after those tests occurred they had a serious confrontation along the line of control in kashmir i spent our independence day the 4th of july meeting with the pakistani prime minister and his senior government officials in an intense effort to try to help defuse the situation now both of these countries have indicated they will sign this treaty if our senate defeats it do you think they ll sign it do you think they ll ratify it do you think for a minute that they will forgo further tests if they believe that the leading force in the world for nuclear nonproliferation has taken a u turn if our senate defeats the treaty will it encourage the russians the chinese and others to refrain from trying to find and test new more sophisticated more destructive nuclear weapons or will it give them a green light now i said earlier we ve been working with congress on missile defense to protect us from a nuclear attack should one ever come i support that work and if we can develop a system we think will work we owe it to the american people to work with the russians and others to figure out a way to give our people the maximum protection but our first line of defense should be preventing countries from having those weapons in the first place it would be the height of irresponsibility to rely on the last line of defense to say we re not going to test you guys test and we re in a race to get up a missile defense and we sure hope it will work if the wheels run off 30 or 40 years from now this argument doesn t hold water people say well but somebody might cheat well that s true somebody might cheat happens all the time in all regimes question is are we more likely to catch them with the treaty or without you all know and i am confident that people on the hill have to know that this test ban treaty will strengthen our ability to determine whether or not nations are involved in weapons activities you ve heard the 300 sensors mentioned let me tell you what that means in practical terms if this treaty goes into effect there will be 31 sensors in russia 11 in china 17 in the middle east alone and the remainder of the 300 plus in other critical places around the world if we can find cheating because it s there then we ll do what s necessary to stop or counter it let me again say i want to thank the former chairs of the joint chiefs who have endorsed this i want to thank the current chair and all the joint chiefs and the previous service chiefs who have been with us in this lawrence eagleburger the secretary of state under president bush paul nitze a top presidential advisor from presidents truman to reagan former senator nancy kassebaum baker many republicans and democrats who have dealt with this issue for years have stayed with us john glenn from mercury to discovery are you going up again john has always been at the cutting edge of technology s promise but he s also flown fighter planes and seen war the nobel laureates who are here dr ramsey dr fitch both part of the manhattan project dr ramsey a young scientist dr fitch a teenage soldier witnessed the very first nuclear test 54 years ago in the new mexico desert their letter says it is imperative underline imperative that the test ban treaty be ratified let me just say one other thing there may be a suggestion here that our heart is overcoming our head and all that i d like to give you one example that i think refutes that on another topic one of the biggest disappointments i ve had as president a bitter disappointment for me is that i could not sign in good conscience the treaty banning land mines because we have done more since i ve been president to get rid of land mines than any country in the world by far we spend half the money the world spends on de mining we have destroyed over a million of our own mines i couldn t do it because the way the treaty was worded was unfair to the united states and to our korean allies in meeting our responsibilities along the dmz in south korea and because it outlawed our anti tank mines while leaving every other country intact and i thought it was unfair but it just killed me but all of us who are in charge of the nation s security engage our heads as well as our hearts thinking and feeling lead you to the conclusion that this treaty should be ratified every single serious question that can be raised about this kind of bomb that kind of bomb what this country has what s going on here and yonder every single one of them can be dealt with in the safeguard structure that is normally a product of every serious treaty deliberation in the united states senate and i say again from the time of president eisenhower the united states has led the world in the cause of nonproliferation we have new serious proliferation threats that our predecessors have not faced and it is all the more imperative that we do everything we possibly can to minimize the risks our children will face that is what you were trying to do i thank the senators who are here with us today and pray that they can swell their ranks by next week thank you very much dem wjclinton6 10 99b bill_clinton i hope i have joe lieberman s remarks on the white house television camera back there somewhere thank you so much senator lieberman for we re about to start our 30th year of acquaintance senator lieberman and i are when i first met him i had no gray hair now i have more gray hair than he does i thank joe lieberman and cal dooley for their leadership of this organization my friend simon rosenberg who has come a long way since he was in the clinton gore war room in 1992 and he did a great job there and i too want to acknowledge al from and thank him for the inspiration he s given all of us i want to thank all the members of congress who are here and the candidates here who aspire to be in the house or the senate i want to reiterate what joe lieberman said and i didn t think i could say this six months ago but we now have i believe a reasonable chance to pick up enough seats not only to have a majority in the house which everybody knows and even our adversaries acknowledge but even in the senate thanks in no small measure to the extraordinary people who are running for the senate seats on our side now let me say i suppose i don t have to say much tonight because i ll be preaching to the saved but i think it s worth analyzing where we are and where we re going and why the new democratic coalition is important and why it s important to us to keep faith with the ideas that got this group started with the ideals and to keep always pushing to tomorrow you know there are a lot of people who say well this election is going to be about change even if they think the clinton gore team has done a good job or the democrats have done a good job this election is about change well i think it ought to be about change too the question is what kind i was educated about this issue very well about 10 years ago some of you have heard me tell this story before but it s one of my favorite and most instructive political stories when i was governor of my state every year in october this month we d have a state fair and i always had governor s day at the state fair and i d go out there and give an award to the oldest person there and the couple that had been married the longest and the person with the largest number of great grandchildren and then i d go in this big old shed and get me a little booth and i d sit there and anybody who wanted to come by could talk and in october of not it was 89 and there was a governor s race the next year and i had been governor by then for 10 years and this old guy in overalls came up to the governor s booth and he said bill are you going to run next year again and i said i don t know but if i do will you vote for me he said oh yeah i will he said i always have and i guess i ll keep on doing it and i said well aren t you tired of me after all these years he said no i m not but everybody else i know is and i said you know how politicians are we something like that so i got kind of hurt and i said well gosh i mean don t you think i ve done a good job he said oh yeah you ve done a good job but you got a paycheck every two weeks didn t you he said that s what we hired you to do what we ve got to figure out is whether you ve got anything left to do very instructive no matter how good a job you do elections are always about tomorrow and they should be america has been changing and sort of reinventing itself on the great pillars of the constitution and the bill of rights and the declaration of independence for over 200 years and that s why we re still here and this coalition came into being and the whole sort of new democrat third way movement came into being because we thought not that our party should abandon its principles but that we should break out of a shell and adopt policies that would bring us together and move into the future i just want to make a few points as we look to that future first of all in 1992 when i went out to the people in new hampshire and all these other states and into the country and asked then senator gore to join me and we said look we ve got this vision of america in the 21st century we want this to be a country where everybody who is responsible enough to work for it has opportunity where no matter how diverse we get we re still coming together in one community where we re still the world s leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity we want to take this opportunity responsibility community agenda and come up with concrete policies and ideas to get the economy moving again to bring the crime rate down to bring the welfare rolls down to empower poor people to get more young people into college to raise the standards of our schools and have more choice and competition there we ve got some ideas give us a chance and all we were doing is making an argument and against our argument what the republicans said was what they ve been saying about democrats for 30 years you know they re too liberal you can t trust them with your money they ll raise your taxes they never met a government program they didn t like they sleep next to a bureaucratic pile of rules at night you know they wouldn t defend the country if their life depended on it you know you ve heard all that stuff they had this sort of cardboard cutout image of democrats that they tried to paste on every candidate s face at election time but all we had was an argument and things were sufficiently bad in this country the economy was in terrible shape the society was divided the crime rate and the welfare rolls were exploding and people decided to take a chance on the argument and then we set about trying to turn this country around and make some very tough decisions and some of our members paid very dearly for it for the 93 economic plan to turn this country around for voting for the brady bill and the crime bill to bring the crime rate down they paid dearly but we kept chugging along and about four years later the people decided to give us a they renewed our lease because they could feel things were beginning to change and then in 98 we had an historic victory in the congressional elections because we had an agenda to keep building on we said now give us a chance to save social security and pass a patients bill of rights and build and modernize schools give us a chance to do some things that will really make a difference here and now we come up to 2000 and i want to make the following points some of them have been made before you need to memorize this this is not an argument anymore and the members of the other party unanimously opposed our economic policy almost all of them are against our crime policy we finally thank goodness reached an accord on welfare policy after two vetoes and that s good but still there is this sort of partisan rancor when we have evidence that the direction we ve taken is right this is not an argument anymore the people in this room have been part the members of congress in this room have been part of the longest peacetime economic expansion in history the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years the lowest poverty rate in 20 years the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years and the lowest crime rate in 26 years this is not an argument anymore and along the way we ve brought some real new ideas into american politics the family and medical leave law which the previous administration vetoed doubling the earned income tax credit the empowerment zone program which the vice president has done so ably the community financial institutions that are making loans to people who couldn t get money otherwise the charter schools we re up to 1 700 from one when i took office the hope scholarships that have opened the doors of college at least the first two years virtually to every person in this country now americorps which has given over 100 000 young people in its first five years a chance to serve their communities something it took the peace corps 20 years to do so we have been full all of us of these ideas and we ve worked along and it s been exciting it s not an argument anymore so when we go into this election cycle i want you to say with all respect you have to make a decision about not whether to change things are changing so fast that s not an option since i signed the telecommunications bill over 300 000 new high tech jobs have been created when we got this we got this e rate so we could provide discounts to rural schools and poor schools in the inner cities so we could hook up all of our classrooms and libraries to the internet by the year 2000 and it looks like we re going to make it i was out in california last weekend doing some work for our congressional and senate candidates in our party and i was with a lot of people this great company e bay you all ever buy anything on e bay on the site it s interesting it s an interesting thing now working for the company over 20 000 americans are now making a living doing business on e bay they don t work for e bay they re just doing business on e bay over 20 000 people making a living including a substantial number of former welfare recipients so what we ve tried to do is to come with new ideas and policies that will really work and it s not an argument anymore that s the first thing i want to say so say to people we re for change the question is what kind of change are you for and the way i look at it we ve spent the last six and a half years trying to turn the country around and get it going in the right direction and things are going well now but i would like to suggest that the change we need is to say okay now we re moving in the right direction let s reach for the stars let s write the future of the 21st century let s imagine every challenge and every opportunity we ve got out there that s really big and go get it let s don t change by taking a u turn and going back to what got us in trouble in the first place that is the issue you can trust this coalition of people to deal with the aging of america we re going to double the number of seniors in 30 years i hope to still be one of them the baby boomers will then be with us for at least another 20 years we may or may not ever get an agreement with the republicans on social security reform but in good conscience with this surplus we must at least take the life of social security out beyond the reach of the baby boom generation we have to do that if we don t agree on anything else all it takes to take the life of the social security trust fund beyond the life of the baby boom generation is to commit to take five years of interest savings from saving the social security taxes sometime in the next 15 years and put them in a social security trust fund we don t do anything else it ll take us out to 2050 and we ought to do it we ought to modernize medicare we ought to employ the most modern practices that you find in the private sector and i think we ought to add a prescription drug coverage because if we were creating that program today we would never create it without drug coverage and 75 percent of the seniors in this country don t have affordable drug coverage it will keep a lot of them out of hospitals it will lengthen and improve the quality of their lives it is the right and decent thing to do and we can do it if we re also prepared to have some savings in the traditional program we ought to take the lead in this we should do it the second thing we ought to do is to keep working on the schools we ought to have more charter schools we ought to have a no social promotion policy but we ought to give every kid who needs it an after school program or a summer school program we ought to modernize these schools and we ought to hire the 100 000 teachers you know if you ever wonder what the difference in the parties is you ought to look at the debate going on in education now in the house of representatives now when the electorate was breathing down their throat in 1998 at the end of the congressional session the republicans worked with us to make a huge down payment on 100 000 teachers to lower class size and we gave the states money for 30 000 of them and you ought to read the glowing statements made by such democratic sympathizers as dick armey in 1998 just last year the chairman of the house education committee lots of other this could have been a republican program there is no bureaucracy here this is a wonderful thing we re helping these teachers they thought it was a great idea at election time no electorate breathing down their throat they have refused to fund the program anymore and taken out the dedicated funding for the teachers that s already there this is about big ideas we ve got the largest student population the most diverse student population in history they need more and better trained teachers they need higher standards they need accountability and they need options so that the kids who aren t cutting it don t fail but find a way to succeed it s a huge issue we have the crime rate the lowest rate in 26 years that s very good does anybody think it s low enough why don t we have a real goal now why don t we adopt as a national goal that we re going to be the safest big country in the world if we have we ve got you may think that s crazy but everybody thought it was crazy when we said we d balance the budget too i could never have been elected president if i said if you will vote for me within six years i ll give you two surpluses in a row he seems like a nice young fella we d better send him home and get him a little help he s disturbed he s out of his mind if you don t envision this it won t happen why should we say we ve got the lowest crime rate in 26 years it s good enough it s not good enough it s nowhere near good enough but if we re serious about it we re going to have to do more in prevention we already have the highest percentage of people behind bars of any country in the world we re going to have to say there s no rational distinction between a flea market and a gun show and a gun shop we re going to have to put 50 000 more police out there in the neighborhoods where the crime rate is still too high we re going to have to do things that help communities that are driving their crime rates down do it everywhere but i think the democrats ought to say we re not satisfied with the lowest crime rate in 26 years we ll never be satisfied until america is the safest big country in the world and we think we can help to make it that way i think this is important let s talk about the economy it s probably the best economy we ve ever had but i m not satisfied with it for two reasons number one not everybody is a part of it and number two it s changing so fast if we don t keep working we can t keep the growth going so let me just offer you a few ideas that i think are important i think our new markets ideas are important these empowerment zones are wonderful and i want to get more of them but it isn t fair for all the places that aren t part of it not to have some help from us to bring enterprise there if we ve learned one thing we ve got the strongest recovery of the last 30 years also the highest percentage of private sector jobs we have the smallest federal government since president kennedy was here but we have not yet figured out how to bring enterprise to every community that hasn t been part of this recovery so for those of us who represent and live in the mississippi delta or in appalachia or in represent many of the inner city areas or a lot of the small towns and rural areas all over this country or the native american reservation i have proposed a modest but i think important plan what i want the congress to do is to pass laws that give us the same incentives to americans with money to invest in poor areas in america we give them to invest in poor areas in central america and the caribbean and africa and asia and throughout the world i think it is a very very good thing to do the second thing i d like to say is that i like what we re doing hooking up all these classrooms to the internet and the e rate allows us to hook them up in rural areas and poor urban areas but if you think about it i believe we could revolutionize the economy of these left behind places if access to the internet were as pervasive as access to telephones so why don t we adopt that as a goal study it figure out how to achieve it say we will not permit there to be any digital divide that s the policy we ve taken with regard to our schools that s what the e rate s all about no digital divide for our kids in the schools but what if their parents all had it too what if their parents had access to that what if we why should we be content with the economy we have if we don t reach our goal it will be a lot better than it would otherwise and we ll keep things going i think we ought to think of that let me just mention two other things first of all i want to mention something that may be sort of politically impolite but one issue in which our caucus in my view is still divided too often in the wrong way and that s the issue of trade here s what i think but there s a reason for that you see it all over the world today there is a move toward protectionism all over the world today even in places that are doing well why because we have not figured out how to put a human face on the global economy because we haven t figured out how to tell people that sure there will be more dynamism in this economy but here s what we re doing to protect the basic rights of working families here s what we re doing to try to protect the basic integrity of the environment here s what we re trying to do to make sure everyone can benefit from this so our party needs to take the lead in pushing for trade but for doing it in a way that says we re determined to put a human face on the global economy because if we don t it s not just in america you see this everywhere i see it in the europeans i see it in asia again i see it the economy is now the strongest here it s been in a long time and yet the impetus for continuing to trade is not there yet you don t have to be a rocket scientist we ve got four percent of the people and 22 percent of the wealth so if we want to keep strong and wealthy and growing we ve got to do something with the other 96 percent of the people out there and i think it s very important i ve got this big trade meeting coming up we all do in washington state in seattle in december and i hope we can try to break down some barriers in other countries but why should people break their barriers down if they think america s trying to have it both ways so i think we have to go back at this and lastly and i think maybe the most important thing of all for the next generation i vetoed that tax bill that the congress passed the republicans in congress passed because i was convinced that if i signed it we not only could never meet our obligations to our children and to our seniors and to our future in our investments in science and technology i was convinced we would never finish the work of paying down our debt and we re paying down our debt now and if we stay on the plain that i asked congress to adopt in the budget we will be debt free in 15 years for the first time since andrew jackson was president in 1835 now why should the democratic party be for that in conventional terms we re the more liberal party why should we be for that everybody in this room who is 40 years of age or older who studied economics in college was told that a government should always carry some debt we were all taught that why because we re living in a global economy you look at what happens to these countries that try to hide their money people still get it out interest rates are set in a global economy if we get america out of debt it means that all the americans can borrow more cheaply if the government is out of debt it means lower interest rates for businesses in this country for home loans for car loans for college loans it means more jobs and higher incomes it means when our friends overseas who aren t as fortunate as we are get in trouble the way the asians did in the last two years they can get out of trouble at lower cost and we ll start growing again more quickly i believe if we do this it would do more than anything else we could do to guarantee a whole generation of prosperity whatever happens in the future we know not every day of every month of every year from now on will be as good as the last six and a half years have been but whatever happens in the future it won t be as bad as it would have been if we keep getting this country out of debt so i hope all of you will support that we should not do anything that undermines our ability to shoot for that big idea a debt free america an america with its lowest crime rate an america where everybody has economic opportunity these are big ideas and they re worth fighting for so yes we ought to be changing but just remember you don t have to make an argument with anybody anymore you have the evidence on your side we were right so tell them if we re going to change don t make a u turn reach for the stars thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton6 10 99c bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen secretary daley thank you for your comments and your extraordinary leadership i thank secretary and mrs glickman secretary richardson ambassador barshefsky john podesta ambassador zuzul from croatia for being here and the many friends and family members of mickey kantor but especially heidi and leslie and bruce and doug and allison and alix and of course ryan and zachary i think that when they re old enough to watch the videotape of this ceremony they will enjoy it a lot they will see that their father was one of america s greatest public their grandfather was one of america s greatest public servants they also because of what i am about to say will know that he s known for something other than cuddles and hugs after all you don t earn the title he actually earned in a poll once there of the third most hated man in south korea by being mr nice guy all the time i went to south korea and i gave a speech to the south korean parliament and it s always a big deal the american president goes to a foreign parliament i spoke to the french parliament i ve spoke to parliaments all over the world and they re always so excited and happy not because of me but because it s the united states not in korea they all sat there glumly with and they held up little protest signs that said rice thanks a lot mickey it was great secretary daley has already alluded to this and i just want to say briefly in april of 1996 after ron brown and the other fine people from the department of commerce died in that terrible plane crash i really thought there was no one else i could turn to to run this department i hesitated to ask mickey to do it i thought that he had been one of the truly most outstanding and effective trade ambassadors we had ever had but when i did ask him without a moment s hesitation even though he d rather carry his own scheduling book and make his own deals he came over here to this massive government department to do the nation s work again and he did it out of loyalty to me to ron to the thousands of grieving commerce department employees and to the united states and i am very grateful i like this portrait an awful lot mr polson you did a remarkable job but on the way over here i was sort of hoping that you d break the mold and you would lift this curtain and i would see mickey in his speedo bathing suit flexing his biceps but instead he s got that double breasted suit on he can afford now that he s left government service i want to thank mickey for many things i ve been a close friend of his for what seems like forever now more than 20 years bill mentioned his service in the navy i think it s worth for the record to point out that he served on an aircraft carrier what you may not know is that he and the rest of the crew of the uss wasp were on the frontlines of the cuban missile crisis locked eyeball to eyeball with russian sailors for those 14 harrowing days i think it was good preparation for the rest of his life and the constant constant occasions he has had to call upon his steel nerves this has served mickey well in everything he s ever done in turning 9th inning double plays at vanderbilt to dealing with 11th hour crises in our 92 campaign to closing the deal on some of the largest trade negotiations in america s history back in 1993 when mickey was using those nerves of steel in a series of complex negotiations with the japanese some teenagers were spotted at japanese disneyland with a tee shirt that sums it up well mickey kantor was drawn to look like mickey mouse calmly beating the dickens out of sumo wrestlers ten times his size we all like watching mickey work if we want to watch mickey at all we have to like to watch mickey work we ve all seen him up for days and nights at a time on some difficult negotiation instead of just throwing in the towel or throwing a chair he sort of does that i m just a country lawyer from tennessee routine and you turn around and you ve lost your wallet we all know that mickey has on occasion shown displays of temper at least he has to me but i deserved it and it served the conversation well at the time but let me say to all of you the thing that i like about him so much is that he does have passion and he does have nerves of steel he has courage and a good mind but he also most importantly has the right kind of heart when he was a teenager he was profoundly moved when his father lost his job on the nashville school board because he had the temerity to believe that nashville ought to abide by the supreme court s order to desegregate our schools later he was inspired by the activism of caesar chavez and went down to florida to defend poor farm workers against labor abuses as secretary daley mentioned mickey worked with hillary on the board of the legal services corporation when president carter served here helping to secure every american s right to equal justice under the law he also served on the board of the mexican american legal defense and education fund and created an award and scholarship in valerie s name he created the los angeles conservation corps giving hundreds of young people a chance to make a difference in their communities and exposing me to the corps in 1991 and 1992 which was along with city year in boston for me the model that led to americorps and has now given over 100 000 young americans the chance to serve in their communities and earn some funds to go on to college in just five years more people than served in the first 20 years of the peace corps i am very proud of that and very grateful to mickey for giving me the inspiration mickey has done things that i think are important for america s politics beyond the jobs that he s held he s always believed we could fight for the underdog and make life good for everyone else he was the prototypical new democrat before the phrase became popular when we were working on this campaign in 91 and 92 whenever he sensed the message of the campaign drifting he would always say we have to prove that our party can grow the economy can get the deficit down is committed to expanding trade not running away from the globalized future we all face we have to prove that we believe in welfare reform that able bodied people can work and raise their children and succeed and he used to talk all the time about how important it was for us to follow policies that would drive down the crime rate and make america safer things that didn t always fall within the direct ambit of his work in the campaign and later as trade negotiator and whenever he felt we were drifting away he would call me on the phone and say remember what we ran remember what we promised remember what we ve got to do and still even though he s not in public service and now that he s not in my employ sometimes with greater color he calls and reminds me of that if he ever senses any drift so mickey before i turn the program over to you and give you a chance to rebut the charges of the koreans the japanese kids and your president let me say thank you for 21 or more remarkable years of genuine friendship thank you for astonishing public service thank you for being a good model as father and husband and citizen and thank you for believing in things and people enough to fight for what you believe in our country is much better because you have served it thank you dem wjclinton6 11 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you let me join tipper and hillary and al in telling you how glad i am to see all of you i m sorry we couldn t get everybody into the limited hotel space in little rock although somehow or another we had about 50 000 people in the street it s been a wonderful day and i am full of gratitude to all of you and to all those whom you represent i thank my cabinet i know that at least secretaries riley o leary and brown are here but all of them worked very very hard i thank don fowler and along with hillary and tipper and al and all of you i send our prayers and best wishes to don and his wife tomorrow and i thank chris dodd for speaking out in his brave and aggressive and incredibly articulate way and we did pretty well in connecticut last night i think that the people there agreed with him instead of all those that were attacking us and running us down i thank marvin rosen for taking on this hard job and doing it well and peter knight and all of our wonderful campaign staff and richard sullivan all the people at the dnc i thank terry mcauliffe and laura hardigan they worked so hard with all of their people to make sure our campaign was financed early and well i want to thank those who entertained us tonight and thank all of you there are a lot of people in this audience and around this country who played a major role in this campaign i feel i have to say a special word of thanks to the mayors that are here i know that dennis archer and also mayor ed randall of philadelphia are here i don t know if there are any other mayors but if there are mayors or governors here i don t know about i still i thank you very much for what you ve done thank you reverend jesse jackson for what you did in this campaign and what you do in every campaign all the miles you traveled all the speeches you gave thank you for going to california and standing up as i did for what we believe we don t always win when we stand up for what we believe but we always come out ahead and i thank you sir for that let me say that a campaign is a fascinating thing the people who give and give and give of their time their money their heart this was an unusual campaign for me in terms of the difference from the one before because this time everywhere i went i could actually see the evidence of our collective endeavors i was in denver the other night and we had a nice little crowd and then folks were standing by the ropeline the way you are i just was walking down the ropeline and i started shaking hand with people and within five minutes i met a young women who had obviously been a victim of domestic violence who thanked me for the violence against women act the hotline the fact that we were moving to bring down domestic violence then there were three women standing there with a little sign that said thank you for putting more money into breast cancer research who knew that we had uncovered now two of the genes which cause breast cancer and may someday be able to not only actually cure those cancers early but even to find out enough to prevent them in the first place and then i met a man a big big man who reached across four or five folks and shook hands with me and said i wish my wife were tonight but we adopted a baby two months ago and because of the family leave law she s able to take a little time off from work to integrate that baby into our home life without losing her job and then i met a young man who said he had dropped out but when we passed this new law to reform the college loan process so that he could pay the loan back as a percentage of his income and he didn t have to worry about going broke anymore he had gone from being a college dropout to a good student in microbiology and then i met a lovely young women who happened to be the daughter of one of the federal agents who was there who was a police officer in a smaller community in colorado who thanked me for the law enforcement part of the crime bill because her community was about to get five more police and she thought the children of her community would be safer and she would be safer doing her job because she was going to have help that was in five minutes i was in longview texas the other day we had 13 000 people at 8 00 a m in the morning and that s hardly a hotbed of liberalism i met a young single mother with two children who had gone back through the americorps program to serve in her community get off public assistance and was now going to the kilgore junior college there and i met another women whose husband had cancer who got to save her job while she took care of her husband because of family leave and i met a man who was vietnam veteran there with his wife and he asked me he said what did you all ever do with that bill to help the veterans who were exposed to agent orange whose children got spina bifida and i looked at him and i said i signed it yesterday and now those people will get disability as well as medical benefits for the first time and he was real tall so i was looking up at him he was a head taller than i was and he said well thank you very much for her and i looked down at his little girl who was 12 years old in a wheelchair who had 12 operations because she contracted a condition that almost certainly she got because her husband served our country 20 years ago this is what this whole deal s about to me you know all this political business that you read in the newspaper who s doing what and all that and let me say something else a lot of you contributed to our campaigns a lot of you really stretched the limit a lot of you went out and raised money for our campaigns and you knew good and well you could have gotten a more direct benefit if you had put your money into the other side i mean they told you you d get a big tax cut and you maybe could have had other things and you did it because you wanted your country to grow together as you know i have said for five years i think we ought to find a different system of financing our campaigns but i want you to know that i appreciate the fact that you helped us stay competitive even though the republicans still raised 150 million or more more than we did we were able to stay competitive because people like you believed in the common ground of america and i thank you for that and i thank all of you for that we had unprecedented financial support from the african american community from the hispanic community and i want to say as an irish american i appreciate the support we got from every ethnic group from the jewish americans from the greek americans and yes from the asian americans i m proud to have your support and i thank you very much for it and let me say also there are lots of other people who worked in our campaign i went back to new hampshire i started my last day of my last campaign where we began our quest for the presidency and early in the morning in new hampshire on that last day the 60 people who started out with me in 1991 and stayed with me when my death warrant was pronounced by the experts gathered in a little restaurant and they had all these pictures up everywhere one of them was a young boy named mike morrison who was only a high school junior when i ran the last time and is now in college and was finally able to vote for me and he said mr president he said i m in college now and i m a straight a student and i said well mike what do you like what s your favorite courses and he said i like creative writing and critical thinking and i m writing essays and he said you know my teachers at our school they think i should submit my essays to magazines readers digest and some others and we talked about it a while and i thought about the first time i saw that boy joining with his high school classmates carrying my banner down the middle of the aisle at new hampshire democratic convention mike morrison gets up every day and gets into a wheelchair and he s a big strong boy and he was raised by his mother on a very modest income he worked hard for me in 1992 and on election day he promised to be a poll worker but his mother s car broke down it was a cold winter day in new hampshire and mike morrison took his wheelchair two miles along the side of a highway from his home to the polling place to be there to give us a chance to do what we have done these last four years and the thing i m so proud of about our campaign is that we ve got all kinds of people with all kinds of abilities and all of us have some disabilities and we have together made a difference partly because we decided we were going to do what we were doing together justin dart went to every state in america to organize americans with disabilities for the clinton gore campaign that s one reason we won some of those states god bless you and thank you there are people here who organized republicans for clinton gore and i thank you for that and i thank you for what you did your numbers were significant and last night when the vote came in and all across the country i thought of all the people i had met along this journey and all the people s whose lives have been touched and how much better off we all are when we work to give everybody not a guarantee but at least a chance a real chance to be what god meant them to be i am very proud of you i want you to be very proud of this campaign i want you to be very proud of what has happened there are millions and millions and millions of people whose lives have been directly touched by the fact that we offered them a chance to have a second chance to have their main chance to be what they ought to be and there s lots more to do but we should be very grateful we happen to be here in america at the time that i m convinced it is more possible for more people to live out their dreams than ever before if we simply meet our challenges and move ourselves closer to our ideals and it has fallen to us now to do that the people decided to leave the congress in the hands of the republicans but they sent a very strong message a lot of the offices they won they won by less than 1 000 votes they don t want meanness they don t want the politics of personal destruction they want us to put the people first the future first and work together all of that too you contributed to making happen the whole feeling in this country is so different from what it was just a couple of years ago and you helped to make that happen so i ask you tonight i ask you tonight to sort of hold back your shoulders and take a deep breath and be very proud because you helped to make our democracy work and of course all of us believe to make the right decision and i ask you to wake up tomorrow i hope like me you ll be a little less tired than you are tonight but i ask you to wake up tomorrow with a new sense of optimism about your country a new sense of belief in the future and a new determination to continue the work of citizenship we are making a difference we re going to make a big difference in the next four years and everybody s got a role to play and everybody has something to do in closing let me say a special word of thanks to tipper and to al and to hillary we four have had an unusual partnership i doubt that there s been anything quite like it in the history of the presidency and the vice presidency but it has served america well and if i had served out my term as governor and had been elected to another term as governor instead of running for president george clinton and bill clinton would have been the two longest serving governors in american history and we could have been on a different list so i think it s a pretty distinguished list mr vice president myself let s have a good time tonight let s wake up tomorrow proud that we won and let s think about what we can do to build that bridge to the 21st century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton6 11 98 bill_clinton thank you very much you know when ernie was up here introducing me i remembered that he was the only senior among the little rock nine he graduated in the spring in 1958 and when they called him up to receive his diploma the whole auditorium was quiet not a single person clapped but we re all clapping for you today i would like to thank all the members of the little rock nine who are here including elizabeth eckford carlotta lanier jefferson thomas minnijean trickey terrence roberts melba pattillo beals is not here gloria ray karlmark is not here thelma mothershed wair is not here i think we should give all of them another hand i would like to thank congressman elijah cummings congressman gregory meeks for coming mayor woodrow stanley of flint michigan commissioner edna bell the president of the national association of black county officials from wayne county michigan i d like to thank and welcome the mayor elect of washington d c anthony williams i told him i d be for more federal aid if he d teach me how to tie a bow tie i never learned how to do that i would like to thank secretary of transportation rodney slater and the secretary of the interior bruce babbitt for their presence and leadership and i would like to say a special word of welcome and profound appreciation for his historic role in tuesday s historic turnout of voters to reverend jesse jackson welcome sir we re delighted to have you here i thank the united states marine band as always for their great performance on the occasion of john philip sousa s birth anniversary and let me say a special word of welcome again to the white house to the magnificent young people of eastern high school choir from washington d c thank you let me say since we are here to talk about our reconciliation i hope you will forgive me for taking just a moment and i know i speak for all americans who are here to express my sympathy to the people of israel who this morning were once again the target of a vicious terrorist attack no nation should live under the threat of violence and terror that they live under every day when prime minister netanyahu and chairman arafat signed the wye river agreement they knew they would face this moment they knew when they went home both of them would be under more danger and the terrorists would target innocent civilians they knew they would have to muster a lot of courage in their people to stick to the path of peace in the face of repeated acts of provocation there are some people you know who have a big stake in the continuing misery and hatred in the middle east and indeed everywhere else in this whole world just like some people had a big stake in continuing it in little rock over 40 years ago i ask for your prayers and support today for the israelis and the palestinians who believe in this agreement and who are determined to carry out their responsibilities and who understand that the agreement is the best way to protect the safety of the israeli people it was tenaciously negotiated hard fought but it is the best way to safety for the israelis the best way to achieve the aspirations of the palestinians and in the end the only answer to today s act of criminal terror i hope you will all feel that in your heart let me say this is a very very happy day for the people who were part of the little rock nine experience for the people of little rock all the arkansans who are here african americans from throughout our country there was an earlier reference made by congressman bennie thompson and i thank him for his outstanding leadership in this endeavor and for his fine remarks today about the election now most of the publicity about the election has been the enormous turnout of african american citizens in a midterm election that resulted in the victories that have been well publicized for non african american elected officials and having been one of those on several occasions i am immensely grateful but what has received less publicity that i would like to point out because this too was a part of the road that the little rock nine began to walk for us is that on tuesday in the state of georgia an african american was elected the attorney general of the state an african american was elected to the labor commission of the state and in the south on tuesday african american congressmen were reelected in majority white districts with large majorities large majorities that is a part of the road we have walked together a part of what we celebrate today there are so many here who played a role in it one more person i would be remiss if i did not recognize that hillary and i love so much and are so grateful to is the wonderful dr dorothy height thank you for being here let s give her a big hand thank you and bless you ladies and gentlemen there is only one bittersweet element in this magnificent moment for hillary and for me and that is that we are celebrating the last piece of legislation passed by our good friend dale bumpers we have walked a lot of steps together since i first met dale bumpers about 25 years ago when he was governor and we ve had a lot of laughs at each other s expense after i became president just to make sure that i didn t get a big head he went around washington introducing me to people as the second best governor arkansas ever had today i told him that i hadn t much time to review my remarks and therefore hadn t had the opportunity to delete all the nice things that had been written for me to say about him but i do want to tell you that this is a truly astonishing public servant hillary and i admire him admire his wife betty admire the things that he s stood for and she s stood for and we will miss them last month in a final and as always brilliant speech on the senate floor dale mentioned an inspiring teacher who once stopped him when he was reading out loud and said to the whole class doesn t he have a nice voice wouldn t it be tragic if he didn t use that talent i think it s fair to say that dale bumpers has done his teacher proud because he used that eloquent impassioned voice to make sure that all the children of his state and our nation could make use of their god given talents we owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his nearly five decades of caring often courageous public service and i cannot thank him enough the bill that senator bumpers and congressman thompson have presented to me for signature today recognizes the courage of the little rock nine and that of their parents their leaders their community leaders especially our great friend daisy bates who could not be here today because of all of them central high has become a hallowed place a place every bit as sacred as gettysburg and independence hall interestingly enough back in the 1920s it was voted the most beautiful school in america it is still a functioning school very much so there are some years when its students comprise 25 percent of our state s entire roster of national merit scholars it s a place where children can still go and study greek and latin something that s rare in all school districts throughout america it is i believe about to become the only open fully operating school that is a national historic site as ernie said hillary and i welcomed the little rock nine back to little rock on the 30th anniversary of the integration of little rock central high school then i was profoundly honored to hold open the door of the school so they could walk through on the 40th anniversary today i was able to welcome them all to the white house to the oval office and now on the south lawn on the fateful day they stepped into central high school and were removed by the police president eisenhower was on vacation in newport when he learned what had happened to them and that governor faubus had turned over the streets to the mob he realized that even as a conservative the federal government had to act the next day he flew back to the white house his helicopter landed just a few steps from here he had just ordered general maxwell taylor to put the might of the 101st airborne division behind their righteous march through the doors of central high now thanks to senator bumpers and congressman thompson and many others as they said our nation has found two very fitting ways to honor that march to ensure that the memory of the little rock nine and all they represent remains alive long after those of us with living memories are gone as part of the budget i signed two weeks ago i was authorized to confer congressional gold medals the highest civilian honor the congress can bestow on each and every member of the little rock nine it was only a few months ago that we presented president nelson mandela with that same award and he spoke so movingly of his long struggle to tear down the walls of apartheid the little rock nine broke through the doors of apartheid i can t wait until the artists finish creating your medals and we can bestow them upon you an honor you richly deserve and then of course the main reason we re here today is to make a living monument forever out of the setting of your struggle again i thank senator bumpers and all the others the bill will allow the national park service to work with the community to maintain and protect central high s magnificent building it will also allow the park service to start acquiring land in the surrounding neighborhood to create new facilities where people can learn about the origins and the aftermath of the 1957 crisis topics that simply can t be fully explored in the existing visitor center s limited space children will never fully understand what you experienced in 1957 maybe that s not such a bad thing but they need to know and now for all time to come children will have an opportunity to walk the stairs you walked to see the angry faces you braved to learn of your sacrifice and about what as a result of your sacrifice you your fellow arkansans and your nation have become perhaps they will even see what it was about the little rock confrontation that made racial equality a driving obsession for so many of us who were young at the time and seared by it again i want to thank you for staying together over these 40 plus years now for being willing to show up and be counted and to remind us for showing us the shining example of your lives so that we could never forget all those who went before you who never had the chance that you gave to all who came after monuments and medals are important reminders of how far we have come but it is not enough the doors of our schools are open but some of them are falling off their rusty hinges and many of them are failing the students inside the economy has never been stronger but there are still striking disparities in jobs in investments in neighborhoods in education and criminal justice still too many break down along what w e b du bois first called the color line and while the little rock nine have enjoyed great success in business in the media in education they can tell you that in spite of what we celebrated on tuesday there is still discrimination and hatred in the hearts of some americans all of that we found in our presidential initiative on race and we must never forget that it is our continuing obligation to the little rock nine and all others who brought us to this point to fight this battle the last point i want to make to you is that the face of america is changing and changing fast i went to an elementary school last saturday to talk about the need to build and modernize our schools there were children from 24 nations there the principal said mr president we re so glad to have you here with all the parents here i only wish that we could have translated your talk into spanish and arabic america is changing and it is a good thing if we remember to live by the ideals on which this country was founded if we remember the sacrifices of the little rock nine if we listen to our teachers like dr john hope franklin we in other words have a whole new chapter in the nation s march to equality to write remember what senator bumpers teacher said wouldn t it be tragic if he didn t use that talent that s exactly what the struggle for one america is all about because that is a question that should be asked of every single child in our country when we ask that question with the little rock nine in mind it helps us to keep our eyes on the prize the prize of true equality and true freedom that ever elusive always worth seeking more perfect union these people that we honor today in the school we save today for all time have given us all a great and treasured gift may god bless them and the united states thank you very much dem wjclinton6 12 00 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen and good morning let me begin by thanking secretary albright for her remarks and her eight years of leadership first at the united nations and then at the state department always standing up and speaking out for human rights and my friend of so many years john lewis whom i knew before i ever decided to run for president who started with me and as you can hear is going out with me finishing in my private office on the second floor of the white house residence i have a picture of a very young john lewis being beaten at the edmund pettus bridge in selma that i was given when we went back there on the 35th anniversary of the voting rights act and he has worked now for more than 35 years i can t help noting that he s still at it he had a piece in the new york times the other day making the simple but apparently controversial point that the right to vote includes not only the right to cast the vote but the right to have it counted thank you john i also want to welcome james roosevelt and his wife ann here and members of the congress congressman ben gilman donald payne and ed pastor i want to thank sandy berger and eric schwartz who have worked at the white house on human rights since the day we got here in 1993 i want to thank in his absence assistant secretary of state harold koh who tried to come back from africa today to be here but couldn t make it and our ambassador to the u n human rights commission nancy rubin we re here today to honor six extraordinary people like madeleine i also want to say that i wish hillary could be here but she s at senator school today it s been a great two days at our house going to senator school i had to make sure that i said yesterday i said this is your first day of school and so you have to go to bed early get a good night s sleep wear a nice dress it s the first day of school so today is the second day of school and i m sorry she couldn t be here but i will always be grateful that part of our service involved the opportunity she had to go to beijing five years ago to say that women s rights are human rights and i m grateful that she ll have a chance to continue that fight in the united states senate i d also like to thank melanne verveer who worked with us every day for eight years and for bonnie campbell at the department of justice and theresa loar at the department of state thanks to so many of you in this room for eight years i ve had the privilege of trying to bring americans actions more in line with america s beliefs secretary albright and john lewis both said they have made support for democracy and freedom of religion an important part of our foreign policy we stood up for civil rights and against discrimination at home and abroad and made it clear that america cannot simply stand by when human rights are trampled dr king once said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere this is a lesson we can never afford to forget especially in this fast forward century when satellites e mail and jet planes expand the frontiers of human contact and human awareness and bring pain and suffering instantly home to us globalization is bringing us closer together with many benefits but as with all new benefits new responsibilities accompany them and we have both the moral imperative and a practical incentive to do even more to recognize the rights and dignity of every person everywhere in spite of what we have accomplished which the secretary of state articulated so clearly major challenges lie ahead we can never stop striving at home to become the more perfect union of our founders dreams that means we cannot abandon the struggle against discrimination and injustice here specifically let me say i hope that in this abbreviated session of the congress that congress will send me the hate crimes legislation that we worked so hard for and which both houses have voted for but which a minority may yet be able to prevent if we don t get it i certainly hope it s one of the first pieces of legislation the next administration will ask for and sign into law we also must continue to support emerging democracies abroad that means of course support for free and fair elections but also support for strong democratic institutions good governance in the fight against corruption speaking out when the progress of democracy or the most basic human rights are under threat whether it s the scourge of slavery in sudan the denial of rights to women and girls in afghanistan curtailing religious freedom in china and let me say especially to the students religious communities and human rights activists who have done so much to publicize the atrocities of sudan america must continue to press for an end to these egregious practices and make clear that the sudanese government cannot join the community of nations until fundamental changes are made on these fronts ultimately the support for human rights means preparing to act to stop suffering and violence when our values and our interests demand it we cannot right every wrong of course but we cannot choose inaction either i have been reminded again and again that much of the best work in promoting human rights and defending freedom is done by people outside government students activists religious leaders from all walks of life sharing an unshakable belief in the simple message of the universal declaration of human rights that all humans are free and equal in dignity and rights ten years after the signing of the universal declaration eleanor roosevelt reminded us that the destiny of human rights is in the hands of all our citizens and all our communities i established the eleanor roosevelt human rights awards to honor men and women who have taken the future of human rights into their committed hands i have had the honor of working closely with several of this year s honorees and the equal honor of receiving advice and on occasion criticism from them as well so i would like to say a few words about each to the lakota sioux the birth of the white buffalo calf is a sign of peace and harmony to come a prophecy of the end of war and especially of the suffering of children when tillie black bear founded the white buffalo calf women s society more than 20 years ago she sought to end the suffering of women and children who were victims of domestic violence she founded the first women s shelter on an indian reservation and then went on to help found two more a survivor of domestic violence herself she has taught and counseled victims batterers and law enforcement officials alike she is a founder and former president of the national coalition against domestic violence and sexual assault and known around the nation as a leading advocate for battered women i want to add that fittingly tillie was born on human rights day december the 10th we thank her for her courage and a lifetime of commitment from the tall tales he loved to tell to the size of his ambitions fred cuny was larger than life in every sense but the biggest thing about him was his heart and his devotion to saving lives anywhere he could he participated in more than 70 relief missions to some of the world s most desolate places and wherever he went he made a lasting difference in bosnia he smuggled in enough equipment to build two water purification plants under snipers noses providing clean drinking water for 60 percent of the city during the worst days of the siege general shalikashvili called him the hero of our operations to help starving kurds in northern iraq his last mission like so many others was to a remote and dangerous place where outsiders rarely go but where help was desperately needed that place was chechnya and fred cuny was killed there five years ago his son craig is here today to accept his father s award and we thank him and all the cuny family and there are lots of them here thank goodness for the life of one of america s and the world s great humanitarians thank you the story i am about to tell will not surprise anyone who has ever had any contact with elaine jones she argued her first court case at the tender age of 11 she visited a dentist without getting her parents permission and when she couldn t pay the bill the dentist decided to sue her parents had to work so elaine went to court alone and convinced the judge to dismiss the case i wonder what the argument was that s when she decided she wanted to be a lawyer and she s been speaking truth to power ever since she was the first african american woman to graduate from the university of virginia law school later the first african american to sit on the american bar association board of governors with a brief interruption for government service she s been a leader in the naapc s fight for equal justice for almost 25 years now she is an ardent advocate before congress a skillful litigator before the supreme court a constant voice for people in need thank you elaine for being a champion of human rights for all americans in the spring of 1954 a young army lieutenant named norman dorsen found himself on the front lines of justice in his very first job out of law school defending civil liberties from the attacks of senator joe mccarthy now norman has had other jobs and responsibilities but he never abandoned his post in the struggle to preserve the rights and liberties of every american he argued and prepared briefs for landmark supreme court cases such as gideon v wainright which established an accused person s right to legal counsel he was for 15 years the president of the american civil liberties union he is now chairman of the board of the lawyers committee for human rights for almost 40 years he s inspired law students as a professor at new york university law school and director of its program in civil liberties i ve gotten to know him through our discussions of a political third way but today we thank him for reminding us that in every age respect for civil liberties is the american way thank you norman in tough places where civilians are struggling to get out chances are you will find archbishop theodore mccarrick working hard to get in and to help them the litany of countries he has visited sounds more suited to a diplomat than an archbishop the former soviet union the balkans the countries devastated by hurricane mitch east timor ethiopia burundi cuba haiti colombia two years ago i was honored to send him as one of my representatives on a ground breaking trip to discuss religious freedom with china s leaders this year he has been a tireless and effective leader in promoting debt relief for poor countries i might say one of the truly outstanding accomplishments that we have achieved in a bipartisan fashion in this town in the last five years it s an amazing thing at the same time the archbishop is much beloved for practicing at home what he preaches around the world this year as he pressed the united states to fund debt relief he forgave the 10 million in debt of poor parishes in his newark diocese archbishop we thank you for your devotion to all god s children and we welcome you to your new home in the diocese of washington d c these five americans have made our nation and the world a better place may they continue to inspire and guide us all for years to come major read the citations do you want to know what elaine said to me so i said well what argument did you make when you were 11 years old she said i said he didn t have permission to take all those x rays i mean i was just 11 years old so this guy was supposed to be the only person on earth who could have said no to her we need you now girl that s good that s good the presidential medal of freedom was created by president truman to honor noble service in times of war it was expanded by president kennedy to honor service in times of peace i have been privileged to award the medal to many champions of liberty today we continue that tradition with a difference the person we honor aung san suu kyi of burma cannot be with us in fact she doesn t even know we re here today thinking of her and her struggle in her country she sits confined as we speak here in her home in rangoon unable to speak to her people or the world but her struggle continues and her spirit still inspires us twelve years ago she went home to burma to visit her ailing mother and found herself at the helm of a popular movement for democracy and human rights a decade ago she led her persecuted party in parliamentary elections that were neither free nor fair yet they still won 80 percent of the seats her victory has never been recognized by the government of burma but her hold on the hearts of the people in burma has never been broken in the years since she had seen her supporters beaten tortured and killed yet she has never responded to hatred and violence in kind all she has ever asked for is peaceful dialogue she has been treated without mercy yet she has preached forgiveness promising that in a democratic burma there will be no retribution and nothing but honor and respect for the military no one has done more than she to teach us that the desire for liberty is universal that it is a matter of conscience not culture when her son alexander accepted her nobel peace prize he said she would never accept such an honor in her name but only in the name of all the people of burma i imagine she would say the same thing today that she would tell us that for all she has suffered the separation from her family the loss of her beloved husband nothing compares to what the burmese people themselves have endured years of tyranny and poverty in a land of such inherent promise our thoughts are with them this medal stands for our determination to help them see a better day the only weapons the burmese people have are words reason and the example of this astonishing brave woman let us add our voices to their peaceful arsenal keep using every instrument of influence to support aung san suu kyi s quest for democracy through dialogue those who rule burma should know that they can regain their place in the world and only when they regain the trust of their own people and respect their chosen leaders and the woman we honor today should know america will also be a friend to freedom in burma a friend for as long as it takes to reach the goal for which she has sacrificed so very much i would like to ask alexander to come up here and i d like to ask the major to read the citation thank you all for coming today we are adjourned dem wjclinton6 12 94 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you congressman mccurdy thank you thank you thank you congressman mccurdy hillary and i are delighted to be here i was so glad when michael steinhardt and al from and will marshall came up on the stage i thought we were occupying the right wing all by ourselves here tonight i want to it ll get funnier as you think about it i want to thank everybody on this stage my wonderful and longtime friend lindy boggs who had me in her home in the presidential campaign and who has been such great inspiration to us and i thank senator lieberman and senator breaux for whatever they said they were doing their kosher cajun partnership they have been wonderful i thank dave mccurdy for the courageous battle that he waged in oklahoma against some forces that i want to talk about more in a moment and for going to new hampshire for me and for being the embodiment of what the dlc is all about he is very young i have lost two elections i will make a prediction about which i know quite a bit he will be back i want to thank my friend of many years senator chuck robb for waging what may have been the most courageous campaign in america twenty million dollars and all they could throw at him he s still standing and well and proud and we re proud of him i want to thank al from and will marshall and michael steinhardt for believing in the dlc and the ppi for believing in the power of ideas in public life you know i was trying to think of what i ought to say here tonight i ve gotten all these good and bad in in the middle reports about all these deliberations here they gave me some remarks at the office i didn t like them so i wrote some down so no one is to blame for what i say but me but the problem is i m hurdling into middle age and i can no longer read my own writing from this distance but i m going to do the best i can i ve heard all these no i brought my glasses but i m too vain to wear them while i talk i got to thinking about you know how i could describe this election and was it one of these situations where well they just didn t know what we ve done they didn t recognize what we d done the democrats there s some of that it reminded me of the story of the fellow that ran a cleaners in new york city for 40 years and his wife passed away and his children were all grown and educated so he just cashed in he had a million dollars he went out and had a hair transplant joined a spa and lost 30 pounds married a lady 40 years younger than he was and went to florida on his honeymoon where a storm came up when he was walking on the beach lightning struck him dead and he was taken to heaven immediately and he looked in the face of god and he said i don t want to be blasphemous but how could you do this to me i mean for 40 years i was faithful to my family i educated all my children i worked six days a week i payed every nickel i ever owed in taxes finally i have a chance to have a little fun how could you do this to me and god said oh jake i m sorry i didn t recognize you maybe you know there was a little of bit of that in this election then i thought well maybe what we did was good but they just didn t appreciate it and i thought about the story of the elderly couple rocking on the porch and they were way up in their 70s and they d been married over 50 years the husband was a man of few words and he looked at his wife and he said sarah you know before we run out of time there are some things i have never said to you in our married life together and i d feel remiss if i didn t we got married and i didn t have a nickel to my name and we worked hard but the great depression came along and as soon as i built my business it broke me and i was absolutely devastated but you never flinched and you never left me you were so wonderful and she said yeah that s right he said then i had to go to world war ii and i got that terrible wound it took me a year to recuperate but you were there by my said every step of the way and she said yeah he said then finally in 1952 we finally saved up enough money to move in our own home we weren t there six weeks before a tornado came and blew it down we didn t have any insurance or anything it took us another 10 years to get a house but you stayed with me all the way through she said yeah i sure did he said well before it s too late i want to say one thing to you sarah you re bad luck well there was some also some real things i want to talk about them but since one of their leaders was quoting roosevelt the other day i ought to say i think we re a lot more like lincoln than they are like roosevelt and it reminded me of when lincoln sustained a defeat he said that it hurt too much to laugh and he was too old to cry but it was a slip and not a fall and what i want to talk to you tonight about is what s really going on in this country not about the democrats and republicans and who loses and who wins but who loses and who wins out in america in 1992 late 91 really i got into the race for president basically because i was convinced deep down inside that there was something amiss in this country that we were in danger of losing the american dream that more people were working harder for less that people who were poor but wanted to work themselves into the middle class weren t able to do so that we were coming apart when we ought to be coming together and that the political system had reached the point where it was almost incapable of dealing with fundamental problems i ran out of a conviction that as a citizen i ought to try to do something about it i ran because my experience as a governor made me believe that you really could roll up your sleeves and reach across party lines and other lines and solve real problems that real people have i ran because the dlc made me believe that ideas could matter in national politics just like they do in other forms of public endeavor and when i started this campaign nobody but my mother gave me much chance to win but you know what i was afraid of was that i would win and people wouldn t understand how hard it would be to really change not only to change things on their merits but to deal with the culture of washington and to communicate through the fog and the blizzard to folks out in the country and also to have communication be two way never to lose touch with people never to sever that mystic chord that has to exist between a president and a government and the people i knew that there were many dangers one is just taking on tough issues is taking on tough issues if they were easy issues somebody else would have done them because a poll would say it was popular to do the second is if you try to do a lot of things in a short time you re going to make some mistakes and i ve made my fair share and i accept that the third is that it is easy to be misunderstood in a difficult time when you re a long way from where people live ask mr mccurdy and senator robb it s easy to be demonized when you re a long way from where people live so that the very people you try hardest to help are those who turn away that s the thing i regret about this election more than anything else all the people who are working harder for lower wages and less security than they were 10 years ago they re the people i ran to help all the people who are trying to follow the rules and are sick and tired of people benefitting who don t who take advantage of the system whether they re rich or poor or somewhere in between those are the folks that the democratic party ought to be championing and the ones who ultimately will benefit if we stay on the right course well we did a lot of things that they didn t like very much especially after it got explained to them as we say at home i think i was right when i opposed discrimination and intolerance but a lot of folks thought i was just more concerned about minorities than the problems for the majority i believe we were right when we stood up to the nra and said we ought to take these military assault weapons off the street but a long way from the battlegrounds of the inner cities a lot of folks out in the country said my lord i m paying too much in taxes i can t hold my job and now they re coming after my gun why won t they just let me alone i believe we were right when we fought to bring this terrible deficit down let me tell you something folks the budget would be in balance this year were it not for interest payments on the debt accumulated when they had control and they ran this country into the ditch and before you listen to the siren s songs that will be offered in the next year you just remember this next time you make out your federal income tax check 28 percent of it s going to pay interest on the debt accumulated in the last 12 years before we took over so i think we were right to do that and yes i think we were right to try to find a way to stop health care costs from going up three times the rate of inflation to stop people from losing their health care or having it explode if they have a kid sick or if they try to change jobs to try to find an affordable way for small businesspeople and self employed people to buy private health insurance but by the time it got to the american people in both cases it was characterized as the democrats are the party of government and taxes and they don t have a lot of trust or faith in government because they re working harder for less less money males in this country without a college degree are making 12 percent less than they were making 10 years ago working a longer work week we are the only country in the world with an advanced economy where the percentage of people with health insurance under 65 is lower today than it was 10 years ago that s why these numbers don t mean a lot that s why the story i told about john and martha don t mean a lot that may be a good story sometimes you re not happy even if somebody does something good if you don t like the result there are still people out there just killing themselves thinking i m doing everything i can i m working a longer work week i can t afford a vacation anymore i m paying more for health care i may lose my job tomorrow my kid could get shot on the way to school and all my money is going to people who misbehave now that s what a lot of people think and they re the very people i ve been up here killing myself for two years trying to help and the people they ve been trying to help can we get them back you bet we can but they have to know we heard the lesson in the election they have to know we got the message but we cannot tell them we will always agree we cannot tell them we will always agree and we cannot tell them even if the cost is very great sometimes people make decisions when they are very very angry and sometimes those decisions are good sometimes they re not so good one of the first lessons i was ever given at my mama s knee was count to 10 bill before you say something i still don t do it all the time and every time i don t i m sorry every time i don t i m sorry there is no prescription for a perfect world in a difficult time of change where every election works out and everybody is happy but we ve got to let these folks know that we heard them because they re the very people that i ran for president to help now all my life ever since i was a little boy i have seen people like that mistreated disadvantaged and then i have seen them inflamed with anger and enraged and taken advantage of so i m telling you forget about us we owe it to them to let them know we heard and we re fighting for them and we re going to deliver you know i ve got three things i want to say i think we ve got reaffirm our convictions with clarity we ve to say what we did and be proud of it and we ve got to engage the republicans in a spirit of genuine partnership and say you have some new ideas we do too let s have a contest of ideas but stop all this demonization and get on with the business of helping america to build this country sometime in the next two or three days if you want to know how to state our principles with clarity go back and read the new orleans declaration five years ago it s just a good as it gets we believe the promise of america is equal opportunity not equal outcome the democratic party s fundamental mission is to expand opportunity not government america must remain energetically engaged in the world not retreat from it the united states must maintain a strong and capable defense the right way to rebuild america s economic security is to invest in our people and to expand trade not to restrict it we believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals not explaining away their behavior the purpose of social welfare is to bring the poor into the economic mainstream not to maintain them in dependence government should respect individual liberty and stay out of our private lives and personal decisions we believe in the moral and cultural values most americans share individual responsibility tolerance work faith and family we believe american citizenship entails responsibilities as well as rights and we mean to ask our citizens to give something back to their communities and their country i believe that and if you do we ve got a great future now this is what i want to say to you you have to decide what your mission is in this new world because the truth is we are already making a difference in the new democratic party in the last two years despite the atmosphere of contentiousness and all the difficulty more of the dlc agenda was enacted into law and will make a difference in the lives of the american people than almost any political movement in any similar time period in the history of the united states and you ought to be proud of that you should not ask for a medal and we shouldn t ask for a medal because wages are still stagnant and the future is still too uncertain for too many millions of americans because the country is still coming apart at the seams in many places because of family breakdown and crime and because government is still too much of a burden on a lot of people but you sure ought to be proud of the start that has been made and if you don t tell it nobody else will so stand up and say here is what we have done we re going to build on it we re going to go forward we heard the message in the election but let s don t tear down what has been done that s good for the people who control the future of this country you go back and read go back and read what the dlc specifically advocated principles are fine but sooner or later you ve got to do something too it really does matter you know one of the great political thinkers who is here in this audience tonight whom i will not embarrass said to me you know one of the problems mr president is you ve been trying to do something and he told me he mentioned another political leader and he said you know his popularity is very great in this country because he has talked a lot but he hasn t tried to do anything so he hasn t upset anybody very much we have tried to do things you should be proud of that it was not easy to bring the deficit down three years in a row for the first time since truman the dlc said we ought to do it and we did it it was not easy it was not easy to figure out how to do that and provide tax reduction the first step in the middle class tax relief to 15 million working families with 40 million americans in it people who work hard have children at the house are on modest wages we don t want them to go into welfare we want them to be out we don t want to tax anyone into poverty that s what the earned income tax credit was that was a dlc idea we did it it provided more tax fairness than any time in 20 years we should be proud of it it changed people s lives they talked about less government there are 70 000 fewer people working for the federal government today than there were on the day i was inaugurated we are reducing the size of the federal government by more than a quarter of a million if not one other thing is done because of what the members of congress here present have already voted for we will have the smallest federal government since john kennedy was president at the end of this budget cycle that is what we have already done the republicans want to do more come on let s do it let s have a partnership let s have a contest let s have at it we re not through reducing government but don t deny the fact that we have started it we led the way they didn t begin it we did ask them to join us let s go forward and a dramatic thing happened that mr mccurdy mentioned a minute ago the democratic party moved away markedly from protectionism into gatt into nafta into reaching out to the asian countries into this summit of the americas with all the countries in our region that our democracies we did that it was a fundamental break with the past and it is opening up new vistas of opportunity and we did it for one simple reason all the pressures we have to keep wages and down and to displace low wage workers from trade are there no matter what we do but because we demanded access to markets and a fairer deal for american workers and for american companies we re going to create new high wage jobs for america that was the dlc position we have done it more trade advancement than at any time in a generation you ought to be proud of it and you ought to stand up there and defend it and talk about it and what are the results over 5 million new jobs more construction jobs this year than in the last nine years combined 11 months of manufacturing job growth rate for the first time in a decade those are the results and finally we re beginning to see some high wage job growth more high wage jobs this year than the previous five years combined what is the challenge how to get incomes up and how to help people when they change jobs not be riven with insecurity that is the challenge so how are we going to do that the first thing we ve got to do is to provide a system of lifetime education and training you want to reverse income inequality in this country there is an education premium and we had better give it to every american who s willing to take it that is the only way to do it look at the education agenda the best year for education in 30 years expanded head start national standards with grass roots reforms like charter schools and character education programs advocated by the dlc apprenticeship programs for young people who don t go to college i had 13 ceos of the biggest companies in this country today into the white house to talk to me about how we could get all the companies in the country to participate in our school to work program how we can get 2 million more young people getting out of high school not going on to college getting decent jobs and the middle class college loan program that we had to face down enormous vested interests to pass making millions of young people eligible for lower interest college loans and able to pay it back as a percentage of their income so that nobody need walk away from college that was all dlc advocacy we did it the american people should know it and you should be proud of it the family leave law immunizing all the kids in this country under two tougher child support enforcement the welfare reform bill has been in the congress since last march these things are good for america this administration has also tried to give power back to the states something the dlc has always been for twenty states 20 have already received permission to cut through federal rules and regulations to have their own welfare reform proposal nine states health care reform proposal these are things that you have advocated that we ve already done the republicans say they want to give more power back to the states more power back to the cities tell them to come on let s contest their ideas let s do it let s do it together but don t you walk away from the fact that we started it and we intend to finish it and we want them to go with us and we still have to implement that crime bill folks a hundred thousand police means that cities will get an average in small towns and rural areas of 20 percent more police we know if they re deployed properly that it will lower the crime rate community policing a dlc idea we ve been advocating it for years and we believe in the prevention programs read our record they don t we re right the police are on our side let s fight to save those prevention programs let s get those police in place let s have the tougher punishment if they have more ideas on crime let s have at it but let s not stop implementing the crime bill until we lower the crime rate and make streets safe for american families and their children again and don t forget that we passed it you know finally let me say that i want to you to see national service as the embodiment of what we want to do it has been attacked by some who are coming into this new congress it is not a government program it s a corporation with republicans and democrats on the board it is not a bureaucracy it s totally grass roots oriented it is designed to promote the concept of service in america and to reward it with educational credits there are already more people in national service solving the problems of americas at the grass roots level than there were in the peace corps in its largest year there are 20 000 this year year after next if by cutting and investing we can get the money we will have 100 000 so let us say that s where we are that s where the new democratic party is that s where the dlc is let s ask the republicans to support national service not to tear it up to go forward to build this country and make it what it ought to be the best thing you can do is what you have done put out ten new ideas as a counterpoint to the republican contract that is the best thing you can do let s stand on that let s fight for those ideas next week and the week after i ll be announcing some more of my new ideas let s do this with vision let s do it with conviction let s make the effort it takes let s put country over party and challenge the republicans to do the same let s say we do not want to roll back the gains that the dlc fought so hard for they re not liberal or conservative they brought our party together they ll bring our country together and the more the american people know about it the better they will like it the answer is not to reverse what we have done but to build on it the answer is to reach out to the middle class and say we know why you re angry we know why you re frustrated we got the message in the election we re not going back on our principles but we re coming right at you because we were hired to help you build a better future for ourselves that is our only purpose if we do these things their prediction of our demise will be entirely premature but i ask you now once again to think about what your responsibility is we always talk about what other people s responsibilities are what s your responsibility it s to join me in the arena not in the peanut gallery in the arena and fight and roll up your sleeves and be willing to make a mistake now and then and be willing to put your shoulder to the wheel be willing to engage be willing to struggle be willing to debate and enjoy this the american people are going through a great period of change but let me tell you something folks this is a very great country we can stand this conflict this can be good for us it can be good for our party but more importantly it can be good for the american people never forget that it is not accident that it was the united states that was asked to be involved in putting an end to all this conflict that s gone on in northern ireland the united states that was asked to stand up to aggression in the gulf or work on peace in the middle east or restore democracy to haiti we are committed to the rest of the world but we should see ourselves sometimes a little more the way they see us this is a very great country the responsibility we have is not to win elections it is to fight for the people about whom elections are fought if we fight for them and their children then the elections will take care of themselves and if they don t we ll still be doing what s right that s my commitment and it ought to be yours thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton6 12 95 bill_clinton throughout our history american presidents have used the power of the veto to protect our values as a country in that spirit today i am acting to protect the values that bind us together in our national community my goals as president have been to preserve the american dream for all of our people to bring the american people together and to keep america the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity in pursuit of that strategy i have sought to grow the economy to shrink the government but leave it strong enough to do the job and most important to elevate mainstream values that all americans share opportunity and responsibility work and family and bringing our community together so that we can be stronger i have consistently said that if congress sends me a budget that violates our values i ll veto it three decades ago this pen you see here was used to honor our values when president johnson used it to sign medicare into law today i am vetoing the biggest medicare and medicaid cuts in history deep cuts in education a rollback in environmental protection and a tax increase on working families i am using this pen to preserve our commitment to our parents to protect opportunity for our children to defend the public health and our natural resources and natural beauty and to stop a tax increase that actually undercuts the value of work we must balance the budget but we must do it in a way that honors the commitments that we all have and that keeps our people together therefore today i am vetoing this republican budget because it would break those commitments and would lead us toward weakness and division when we must move toward strength and unity can you bring me some ink boys here todd i knew you had some it s a small well leave it here and see if i need it i m about to say as i have said repeatedly america must balance its budget it s wrong to pass a legacy of debt onto our children our long term growth depends on it but we must do it in a way that is good for economic growth and for our values the budget i have vetoed in a very real sense in very concrete ways undermines our values and would restrict the future of families like the ones that are here with me today american families want to make the most of their own lives and to pass opportunity onto their children they deserve our respect and our support above all we shouldn t make it harder for them to fulfill their dreams when it comes to health care we owe a duty to our parents we have to secure medicare and i ve spelled out how to do that but the budget i just vetoed would turn medicare into a second class system the medicare system has served all senior citizens well for 30 years it would be over this budget would end medicaid s guarantee that no senior citizen and no american in need would be denied medical care including poor children and children with disabilities it would deny care for hundreds of thousands of pregnant women and disabled children it would repeal standards that ensure quality for nursing homes education means opportunity and opportunity is the key to the american dream but this budget cuts education by 30 billion even in this high technology age when education is more important than ever before it would essentially end the direct student loan program it would deny college scholarships to 360 000 deserving students it would deny preschool opportunities to 180 000 children in the head start program we must protect the earth that god gave us and guarantee our children safe food and clean water this budget would give oil companies the right to drill in the last unspoiled arctic wilderness in alaska and it is loaded with special interest provisions that squander our natural resources already short term budget cuts have forced us to pull back enforcement of clean air clean water even inspections of toxic waste sites in our neighborhoods people who work hard and save for retirement ought to be able to retire with dignity we worked hard last year to secure the pension benefits of 40 million americans with landmark reform legislation this bill would give companies the green light to raid pension funds and put those retirements at risk again americans know we have to reform the broken welfare system but cutting child care that helps mothers move from welfare to work cutting help for abused and disabled children cutting school lunch that s not welfare reform real welfare reform should be tough on work and tough on responsibility but not tough on children or tough on parents who are responsible and who want to work we shouldn t lose this historic chance to end welfare as we know it by using the words welfare reform as just another cover to violate our values no one who works hard should be taxed into poverty in 1993 we nearly doubled the earned income tax credits so that we could say if you work 40 hours a week you ve got children in the home you won t be taxed into poverty the tax system will help lift you out of poverty but this budget raises taxes on our hardest pressed working people even as it gives unnecessarily large income tax relief and other tax relief to those who need it least nearly 8 million working families would pay more in new taxes than they would receive from any tax cut in this bill beyond our principles let me just say this budget is bad for the economy no business on the edge of the 21st century would cut its investment in education and training in research no business would do that no business would cut back on technology on the edge of the 21st century the japanese are in a recession and they recently doubled their research budget we are voting in this budget if i were to allow it to become law to cut our research budget by a year when we re in a period of economic growth while another country looking to the future in a recession is doubling theirs so this not only violates our values it is bad bad economics now with this veto the extreme republican effort to balance the budget through wrongheaded cuts and misplaced priorities is over now it s up to all of us to go back to work together to show we can balance the budget and be true to our values and our economic interests tomorrow i will present to the congressional leadership a plan that does balance the budget in seven years but it also protects health care education and the environment and it does not raise taxes on working families it is up to the republicans now to show that they too want to protect these principles as they pledged to do let me say again our country is on the move our economy is growing many of our most difficult social problems are beginning to yield to the effort and common sense values of the american people we have proved again that we are a model for the entire world of peace and reconciliation with all of our difficult problems we are moving in the right direction now is not the time to derail this movement i have vetoed the budget now the question is will we get together and balance the budget in a way that is consistent with our values it s time to finish the job of balancing the budget and do it in the right way thank you dem wjclinton6 12 95a bill_clinton thank you very much first let me say to all of you dubliners and all ireland hillary and i have loved our trip to your wonderful country to the taoiseach and mrs bruton lord mayor loftus and lady loftus city manager frank feely to all the aldermen who conferred this great honor on me to the americans in the audience welcome to all of you are there any irish in the audience i want to say also how pleased i am to be here with a number of irish american members of the united states congress and the irish american director of the peace corps mark gearan the irish american secretary of education richard riley and the secretary of commerce ron brown who wishes today he were irish american thank you all for being here i was on this college green once before yes in 1968 when i was almost as young as some of the young students over there lord mayor i never dreamed i would be back here on this college green in this capacity but i am delighted to be here and i thank you i am told that in earlier times the honor i have just received being awarded the freedom of the city meant you no longer had to pay tolls to the vikings i m going to try that on the internal revenue service when i get home i hope it will work whether it does or not i am proud to say that i am now a free man of dublin to look out into this wonderful sea of irish faces on this beautiful irish day i feel like a real dub today is that what i m supposed to say not only that i know we have a handy football team let me say that as a lot of you know because of events developing in bosnia and the prospect of peace there i had to cut short my trip but there are a few signs out there i want to respond to i will return to ballybunion for my golf game i am also pleased to announce that president robinson has accepted my invitation to come to the united states next june to continue our friendship there s another special irish american i want to mention today and that is our distinguished ambassador to ireland jean kennedy smith who came here with her brother president kennedy 32 years ago and who has worked very hard also for the cause of peace in northern ireland years ago americans learned about dublin from the stories of james joyce and sean o casey today america and the world still learn about dublin and ireland through the words of sebastian barry paula meehin roddy doyle through the films of jim sheridan neil jordan through the voices of mary black and the delores keane and yes through the cranberries and u 2 i hear all about how america s global the world s global culture is becoming more american but i believe if you want to grasp the global culture you need to come to ireland all of you know that i have family ties here my mother was a cassidy and how i wish she were alive to be here with me today she would have loved the small towns and she would have loved dublin most of all she would have loved the fact that in ireland you have nearly 300 racing days a year she loved the horses i understand that there are some cassidys out in the audience today and if they are i want to say in my best arkansas accent cead mile failte beatha saol agus slainte one hundred and fifty years ago the crops of this gorgeous island turned black in the ground and one fourth of your people either starved from the hunger or were lost to emigration that famine was the greatest tragedy in irish history but out of that horrible curse came the most bittersweet of blessings the arrival in my country of millions of new americans who built the united states and climbed to the top of its best works for every person here in ireland today 12 more in the united states have proud roots in irish soil perhaps the memory of the famine explains in part the extraordinary generosity of the irish people not just to needy neighbors in the local parish but to strangers all around the globe you do not forget those who still go hungry in the world today who yearn simply to put food on the table and clothes on their backs in places as far away as the holy land asia and africa the irish are helping people to build a future of hope your sons and daughters in the gardai and the defense forces take part in some of the most demanding missions of goodwill keeping the peace helping people in war torn lands turn from conflict to cooperation whenever the troubled places of the earth call out for help from haiti to lebanon the irish are always among the very first to answer the call your commitment to peace helps conquer foes that threaten us all and on behalf of the people of the united states i say to the people of ireland we thank you for that from the bottom of our hearts ireland is helping beat back the forces of hatred and destruction all around the world the spread of weapons of mass destruction terrorism ethnic hatreds religious fanaticism the international drug trade ireland is helping to beat back these forces that wage war against all humanity you are an inspiration to people around the world you have made peace heroic nowhere are the people of ireland more important in the cause of peace today than right here at home tuesday night before i left the united states to come here i received the happy word that the taoiseach and prime minister major had opened a gateway to a just and lasting peace a peace that will lift the lives of your neighbors in northern ireland and their neighbors in the towns and counties that share the northern border that was the greatest welcome anyone could have asked for i applaud the taoiseach for his courage but i know that the courage and the heart of the irish people made it possible and i thank you for what you did waging peace is risky it takes courage and strength that is a hard road it is easier as i said yesterday to stay with the old grudges and the old habits but the right thing to do is to reach for a new future of peace not because peace is a document on paper or even a handshake among leaders but because it changes people s lives in fundamental and good ways yesterday in northern ireland i saw that for myself i saw it on the floor of the mackie plant in belfast with catholics and protestants working side by side to build a better future for their families i heard it in the voices of the two extraordinary children you may have seen on your television one a catholic girl the other a protestant boy who introduced me to the people of belfast with their hands joined telling the world of their hopes for the future a future without bullets or bombs in which the only barriers they face are the limits to their dreams as i look out on this sea of people today i tell you that the thing that moved me most in that extraordinary day in northern ireland yesterday was that the young people catholic and protestant alike made it clear to me not only with their words but by the expressions on their faces that they want peace and decency among all people i know well that the immigration from your country to the shores of mine helped to make america great but i want more than anything for the young people of ireland wherever they live on this island to be able to grow up and live out their dreams close to their roots in peace and honor and freedom and equality i could not say it better than your nobel prize winning poet seamus heany has said we are living in a moment where hope and history rhyme in dublin if there is peace in northern ireland it is your victory too and i ask all of you to think about the next steps we must take stand with the taoiseach as he takes risks for peace realize how difficult it is for them having been in their patterns of opposition for so long to the north of you and realize that those of you who have more emotional and physical space must reach out and help them to take those next hard steps it is worth doing and to you this vast wonderful throng of people here and all of the people of ireland i say america will be with you as you walk the road of peace we know from our own experience that making peace among people of different cultures is the work of a lifetime it is a constant challenge to find strength amid diversity to learn to respect differences instead of run from them every one of us must fight the struggle within our own spirit we have to decide whether we will define our lives primarily based on who we are or who we are not based on what we are for or what we are against there are always things to be against in life and we have to stand against the bad things we should stand against but the most important thing is that we have more in common with people who appear on the surface to be different from us than most of us know and we have more to gain by reaching out in the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood to those people than we can possibly know that is the challenge the young people of this generation face when president kennedy came here a generation ago and spoke in this city he said that he sincerely believed and i quote that your future is as promising as your past is proud that your destiny lies not as a peaceful island in a sea of troubles but as a maker and shaper of world peace a generation later ireland has claimed that destiny yours is a more peaceful land in a world that is ever more peaceful in significant measure because of the efforts of the citizens of ireland for touching the hearts and minds of peace loving people in every corner of the world for the risk you must now continue to take for peace for inspiring the nations of the world by your example and for giving so much to make america great america says thank you thank you ireland and god bless you all dem wjclinton6 12 95b bill_clinton thank you so much to john betchkal the pageant of peace chairman reverend john tavlarides to the sherando high school choir congratulations you guys were great tonight to brendan and bridget walsh the washington ballet to denise graves and jack jones and kathy lee gifford and the navy band and of course to santa claus i would come here every year just to see santa claus we gather to begin our nation s celebration of the christmas season with the lighting of this magnificent tree a symbol as evergreens have always been of the infinite capacity of nature and people to renew themselves we give gifts and we count our blessings my fellow americans i have just returned from a very moving trip to europe to england and to northern ireland and the republic of ireland to germany to see our troops and to spain and i can tell you that among the things that i feel most grateful for at this christmastime is the way people around the world look at our america they see a nation graced by peace and prosperity a land of freedom and fairness and even though it imposes extra burdens on us they trust us to work with them to share the blessings of peace this is my second christmas tree lighting of the season for just a few days ago i was in belfast with the people of northern ireland protestant and catholic alike searching yearning longing for peace celebrating their second christmas of peace i m proud that i was introduced there by two children a little catholic girl named catherine hamill and a young protestant boy named david sterrett who joined hands and told the world of their hopes of the future a future in which the only barriers they face are the limits of their dreams that is the future we should want for our children and for all the children of the world i m very pleased that catherine hamill who touched the whole world with the story of her suffering and her family s losses in northern ireland and her family are here with us tonight to celebrate this lighting of the christmas tree and i d like to ask her to stand up right down here and ask all of you to give her a fine hand she has come all the way from northern ireland remember at this christmastime we celebrate the birth of a homeless child whose only shelter was the straw of a manager but who grew to become the prince of peace the prince of peace said blessed are the peacemakers let us bless the peacemakers at this christmastime from the middle east to northern ireland to our own troops in bosnia let us pray especially for our peacemakers those who will go to bosnia and those who are soon to come home from haiti and let us resolve my fellow americans to be peacemakers for just as so many nations around the world and so many children around the world cry for peace so do we need peace here at home in our toughest neighborhoods where there are children so many children who deserve to have their childhood and their future free and peaceful and let us remember from the example of the prince of peace how even the humblest of us can do through acts of goodness and reconciliation extraordinary things and as we light this wonderful christmas tree let us all remember that together a million small lights add up to make a great blaze of glory not for ourselves but for our families our nation and the world and for the future of our children merry christmas and blessed are the peacemakers dem wjclinton6 2 94 bill_clinton thank you very much my longtime friend garry mauro and chairman and mrs wilhelm mayor and mrs lanier secretary and mrs bentsen i want to say that i have a lot to be grateful to texas for big victory in the primaries here an enormous amount of support a lot of friends but i think i probably owe you most for lloyd bentsen and henry cisneros i want to say also how much i appreciate two other texans in my administration one of whom is here and one who is not the secretary of the navy john dalton from san antonio and my good friend my good friend the assistant secretary of the interior bob armstrong who has done a wonderful job for you and for us when we had that terrible earthquake recently in california henry cisneros was there before the aftershocks stopped and people told me over and over again the last time this happened to us we had to go to washington to find the cabinet now you ve got a secretary who came to us who is committed to us that s the kind of job he s doing up there it s been a long time since an american treasury secretary has enjoyed anything approaching the prestige that lloyd bentsen has earned all over the world in asia in europe in latin america and of course here in the united states and in the congress i cannot say enough about him in front of you his constituents for all the advice he s given all the leadership he s shown and all the trouble he s kept me out of i want to thank him so much i also want to say a special word of acknowledgement to your state democratic chairman bob slagle and to governor ann richards who i just left and to all these members of congress who are here and those who aren t here i want to say too that there are several points i want to make tonight without giving much of a speech i just want to talk to you as one american to another when i became president people had pretty much given up on the government doing anything right the economy was going in the wrong direction and the country was coming apart when we needed to be coming together and a lot of people frankly including probably a majority of people in this state had all these preconceptions lloyd bentsen referred to them in his introduction about what democrats were for and you know i looked for 12 years i listened to republicans talk about reducing the deficit and it just went up we quadrupled the debt well we didn t just talk about it we did something about it last week it was estimated that the deficit would be 40 percent lower next year than it was going to be when i took office 40 percent lower and because of that interest rates are down inflation is down home sales are up car sales are up and we got more new jobs in one year than we had in the previous four years now that s not republican rhetoric that s democratic record performance and work i heard them talk about family values and about how people should not be on welfare they ought to work but i never saw much happen and one year after seven years of trying we passed the family and medical leave act so that people could take a little time off when their children were born or their parents were sick without losing their jobs we took the first big step toward welfare reform by giving income tax relief to 15 million families that hover right around the poverty line even though the people work full time so that there would never be any more incentive to leave work and go on welfare so that all the incentives would be the other way around and we would reward work and family so it wasn t just the other party s rhetoric it was our reality and we ve just begun and i heard them for years talk about being tough on crime and after seven years of flailing around we finally passed the brady bill and now we ve got a tough crime bill before the congress we ve got a tough crime bill before the congress which says no to the things we ought to say no to and begins to say yes to the things we ought to say yes to that is it does provide for tougher penalties especially for repeat violent offenders but it also puts another 100 000 police officers on the street because we learned from mayor lanier that if you have more police in the right place you ll lower the crime rate and it provides drug treatment and education and alternative imprisonment for young people to give them a chance to put their lives back together you can t just say no to people you also have to say yes to the people that are going to be on your streets in your neighborhoods and a part of your future it s time to stop turning away from them and start giving them a way to be a part of our common future that is what it also does i heard all this talk for years about how the other party was for business and for trade and for small business but it was our administration that passed an economic plan that gave as they ll find this april 15th 90 percent of the small businesses in this country a chance to get a tax cut if they invest more in their businesses 90 percent that gave incentives for people to incentives for people to invest in new business this year we had the biggest increase in entrepreneurial investments in new business in american history number one that is the record of this administration not rhetoric and yes we have taken on health care you know why because we re the only country in the advanced world that doesn t provide a basic package of health care to all of its citizens and as a result some of the people of the families i saw you know i went to a party tonight of children with cancer and their families and i looked out there and i said i know i m looking at people who now can never change their job because they had a sick child i know i m looking at people who run up against those lifetime limits on insurance so now that their kids really need the health care they ve blown it out and they can t get any more i know i m looking at people who may lose their coverage or lose their jobs and never get health insurance again now i don t believe we can t do that and help our economy not hurt it why because today in america businesses that are small are paying insurance premiums 35 percent above the national average i think we can do better than that i don t believe that we can t do better they talk about choice do you know that today only one in three only one in three workers with health insurance from their employer has any real choice in their doctors under our plan every american will have at least three different choices of health care plans at a minimum there will be more choice not less and it will all be private private health care and private insurance in spite of the rhetoric of our opponents in the other party do i think we can do it is it easy no if it s easy somebody would have done it already is it free of complexity no i know one thing you cannot justify a system in this country in the shape a lot of people are in where we spend 10 cents on a dollar more on paperwork insurance premiums and bureaucracy more than any other country in the world and we still can t figure out how to cover people and another 100 000 americans a month are losing their health insurance for good i believe we can do better and we are going to and finally let me say this i heard the other side talk about free trade and economic growth and especially in texas being good to texas i heard all that but this administration fought for nafta and we were 100 votes for down and we came back and we passed it this administration fought to get rid of export controls that are allowing texas businesses to do business all around the world today i had a man in a meeting that i came to before i came down here he said your administration has done more in one year to promote international business opportunities for american businesspeople than the previous administration did in the last 12 years that is the rhetoric of success that is reality that s not just something we re talking about let me tell you something else i know i didn t carry texas in the last election i know that some think i may not carry it again but i ll tell you one thing when the space station was going down we fought for it and we lifted it up and we saved it we now have a project that is at the core of our partnership with russia and our hope for a better world there is example after example after example in our new energy policy garry mauro s alternative fleet conversion policy to use more natural gas to burn in federal cars and all the things we have done that show that this administration is not just talking about texas and telling people things they want to hear we re actually doing things to help this state move into the 21st century one of the people i neglected to introduce earlier that i d be remiss if i didn t is the deputy secretary of energy who is from here in houston bill white where is he bill s here somewhere we have an energy policy that really is pro natural gas pro american producer good for america and good for texas i say these things because we re going to have some elections in 1994 and we re going to have all that old rhetoric again and the republicans are going to tell you exactly what they think you want to hear i saw them the other day they were complaining that i had stolen their themes as if they own fiscal responsibility what they own was quadrupling the deficit what we own is a budget this year that eliminates 100 programs and cuts three hundred more that s our issue not their s they act like they own the crime issue but what they did was to fiddle around with crime for years while it got worse and what we did was to pass the beady bill and put a crime bill on the floor of the congress that offers the promise of lowering the crime rate i say that because i want you here in texas to remember that if you want something done instead of to be told what you want to hear you need to help us you need to keep these seats in congress go after that senate seat keep ann richards in the governor s office give us a partnership to move america forward thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton6 2 97 bill_clinton thank you very much congressman barrett i want to thank you for making it possible for me to follow dr carson and that business about worrying about whether the secret service would take you away if you talked too long if that were true i wouldn t be here today i d be long gone that biochemical description of i got a real problem i can t remember my home phone number anymore senator akaka and mr speaker congressman gephardt to all the members of congress and the governors who are here and our leaders and visitors from other lands and ministers and citizens from the united states i ve had a wonderful day today i would like not to pour cold water on the day but just as you go through the day i would like to ask all of you to remember the heartbreaking loss that our friends in israel have sustained in the last couple of days with 73 of their finest young soldiers dying in that horrible accident in the air i would like to also say that like all of you i was very elevated by this experience as i always am i thought dr carson was wonderful i thought the scriptures were well chosen i appreciate doug coe and all the people who work on the prayer breakfast so much i would like to just say a couple of things very briefly in my inaugural address and again in my state of the union i quoted isaiah 58 12 which reverend robert schuller sent to me a few days before i started my second term to remind us that we should all be repairers of the breach and it s a very moving thing and basically the political press here read it in the proper way they said clinton wants the republicans and democrats to make nice to each other and do constructive things but then i got to thinking about who is it that s in the breach who has fallen between the cracks what is if we repaired the breach who would we be lifting out of the hole and very briefly i d like to just mention three things and to ask you not only to pray for these three groups of people but also to do something about it i don t know about you but whenever i hear somebody like dr carson speak i can clap better than anybody in the audience then the next day when i get up and try to live by what he said i was supposed to do it turned out to be harder than it was to clap so i would like to ask you to think about who is in the breech if we re supposed to be repairers of the breech the first group of people that are in the breach are the poor in america and they re different than they used to be when i was a boy most poor people were old in 1995 we learned last year we had the lowest rate of poverty among older americans in the history of the country we have succeeded in taking them out of poverty virtually all of them we should be proud of that and grateful today almost all the poor are young very young people without much education a lot of mothers like dr carson s mother struggling doing the best they can to raise their kids we just passed this welfare reform bill which i signed and voted for because i believed it and we did it because we believed that the welfare system had gone from being a system that helped the poor to help themselves to move off welfare to a system that trapped people because the family unit has changed and there are some many single parents out there having children and there isn t the stigma on it there used to be and a lot of people now seem to be stuck on that system from generation to generation so we changed it we didn t change it we tore it down we threw it away we said there s no longer a national guarantee that you can always get a check from the government just because you re poor and you ve got little babies in your home now the kids can have health care and we ll give them food but you don t get an income check every month and you ve got to go to work if you re able to so the people that are in the breach are the people that we say have to go to work who want to go to work who can t go to work and you have to help us repair the breach two and a quarter million people moved off the welfare rolls in the last four years a million of them more or less were adults who went to work the others were their children a million out of 11 million new jobs created in the next four years there s about more or less 10 million more people left on welfare about 3 5 million adults maybe 4 million most of them able bodied and all of them are supposed to lose their benefits if they re able bodied after two years unless they go to work where are they going to get the jobs you re going to have to give them private employers churches community nonprofits i see the governor of michigan the governor of north dakota here they can actually take the welfare check and give it to you now as an employment or a training subsidy or to help you deal with transportation or child care or whatever but you had better hire them and if you don t this whole thing will be a fraud and we will not have repaired the breach and all that we dreamed of doing which is to create more dr carsons out of those children of welfare recipients will go down the drain because we come to places like this and clap for people like him and then we get up tomorrow morning and we don t repair the breach and do what we re supposed to do and i need you to help the second people who have fallen between the cracks are people around the world who are in trouble that we could help without troubling ourselves very much i m proud of what our country has done in bosnia and the balkans you should be too in the middle east in haiti to help our neighbors in mexico impulses the american people are generous i want to thank the speaker for supporting me when only 15 percent of the american people thought we were right when we tried to help our friends in mexico thank goodness they proved us right mr speaker otherwise we might be out in the south 40 somewhere today but still our country has this idea that somehow it demeans us to pay our dues to the united nations or to participate in the world bank or there s lots of things more important than that or just to give secretary albright who s here the basic tools of diplomacy this is an interdependent world we can get a long way with having the finest defense in the world but we also have to help people become what they can be so i ask you to think about that we re not talking about spending a lot of money here it s only one percent of our budget but we can t walk away from our obligations to the rest of the world we can be a model for the rest of the world but we also know that we have to model the behavior we advocate which is to give a helping hand when we can the third people who are in the breach and are in a deep hole and need to be lifted up are the politicians and we need your help we need your help and some members of the press they re in that breach with us too and they need your help this is funny but i m serious now and tomorrow i want you to wake i want you to laugh today and wake up and be serious tomorrow this town is gripped with people who are self righteous sanctimonious and hypocritical all of us are that way sometimes i plead guilty from time to time we also tend to get we spend an enormous amount of time here in washington trying to get even and it doesn t matter who started it i remember when i came here one time i got so mad at our friends in the congress and the republican party because they were real mean to me over something i went back to the white house and i asked somebody who had been there a while in washington and i said now why in the world did they do that they said it s payback time i said what do you mean they said well they think the democrats in congress did this to republican presidents i said i didn t even live here then why are they paying me back they said oh you don t understand you ve just got to pay back so then pretty soon i was behaving that way i d wake up in the morning and my heart was getting a little harder now who can i get even with you think this happens to you doesn t it who can i get even with and sometimes you can t get even with the person that really did it to you so you just go find somebody else because you ve got to get even with somebody pretty soon everybody s involved in this great act you know how cynical the press is about the politicians you know they think we re all whatever they think what you should know is that the politicians have now become just as cynical about the press because cynicism breeds cynicism we re in a world of hurt we need help we are in the breach we are in the hole here this country has the most astonishing opportunity we have ever had we happen to be faced with this time of great change and challenge we re going into this enormous new world and instead of going into it hobbled with economic distress or foreign pressures we are free of any threat to our existence and our economy is booming and it s like somebody said here s this brave new world and i m going to let you prepare for it and walk into it in the best shape you ve ever been in and instead of doing that half of us want to sit down and the other half of us want to get in a fight with each other we are in the breach and we need you to help us get out of it the united states is better than that we owe more than that to our people to our future and to the world we owe more than that to our heritage to everybody from george washington on that made us what we are today and cynicism and all this negative stuff is just sort of a cheap excuse for not doing your best with your life and it s not a very pleasant way to live frankly not even any fun i try to tell everybody around the white house all the time i have concluded a few things in my life and one of them is that you don t ever get even the harder you try the more frustrated you re going to be because nobody ever gets even and when you do you re not really happy you don t feel fulfilled so i ask you to pray for us i went to church last sunday where hillary and i always go at the foundry methodist church and the pastor gave a sermon on romans 12 16 21 and a few other verses but i m going to quote the relevant chapters do not be wise in your own estimation it s hard to find anybody here that can fit that never pay back evil for evil to anyone if possible so far as it depends upon you be at peace with all men never take your own vengeance if your enemy is hungry feed him if he is thirsty give him a drink do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good pray for the people in public office that we can rid ourselves of this toxic atmosphere of cynicism and embrace with joy and gratitude this phenomenal opportunity and responsibility before us do not forget people in the rest of the world who depend upon the united states for more than exhortation and most of all remember that in every scripture of every faith there are hundreds and hundreds of admonitions not forget those among us who are poor they are not longer entitled to a handout but they surely deserve and we are ordered to give them a hand up thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton6 3 98 bill_clinton thank you very much and dr hawking you ll have to forgive me i m a little hoarse i hope for some genetic improvement sometime in the next year or so ladies and gentlemen this was a stunning event for me and i hope for all of you yesterday stephen and elaine came by the white house to see hillary and me and as you can imagine like hillary i had reread a brief history of time and i was utterly terrified that he would say something like you know i went to university college oxford too and then he would ask me some incredible comparative academic question about our experiences there instead he said was the food just as bad when you were there which was a wonderful relief albert einstein once said because politics is for the present but an equation is something for eternity equations were more important than politics i don t know about the politics part but professor hawking s insights into equations have altered our notions of time and the very nature of eternity itself tonight he s given us a lot to think about even the ability to imagine a future in which we as humans will have finally captured the holy grail of physics reconciling the infinitesimal with the infinite presenting the world with the ultimate theory of everything now when a physicist does that he can totally ignore politics and buy a newspaper the one thing i liked most about thinking about the future in professor hawking s term is that even when we reach the era of star trek which will make a lot of our children very happy it won t be so static it will still be human and dynamic and according to the visuals accompanying the lecture it will still matter whether you can bluff at poker which is encouraging i want to get on with the questions now and again i want to thank professor hawking for the extraordinary clarity and vigor of his presentation and for sharing his time with us tonight and for placing this particular moment in the larger spectrum of time which i think if we all could do more and more clearly every day we would live happier more productive lives thank you professor ellen would you like to take over and bring in the questions dem wjclinton6 4 98 bill_clinton thank you very much welcome to the rose garden on this beautiful spring afternoon congresswoman norton mrs barry councilman evans in addition to being a magnificent spring day this is also national student athlete day so i want to give a special welcome to those who have joined us to celebrate the achievements of students across the country i want to thank richard lapchick the director of the center for the study of sport in society at northeastern university and ron stratten of the ncaa for your work to promote academics athletics and community service among our nation s youth i also want to welcome kevin payne the president and general manager of dc united and coach bruce arena and the members and the staff of this very talented team you ve all worked hard to make dc united the most successful team in major league soccer history winners of the 1996 and 1997 mls cups each year despite torrential rains during the championship games you ve shown us you are strongly united and with a great record this season you re well on your way to a threepeat something the law prevents me from trying to equal dc united and major league soccer are making soccer more and more popular in the united states especially among young people last year a record 3 2 million children across our nation played youth soccer more than any other sport my daughter taught me all i know about soccer it was a great experience for me to watch her grow up in her soccer league and i know it s making a difference in the lives of millions of children all across this country dc united is linking america to the world and the love of soccer in bringing americans of all backgrounds together and unless my ears have given out on me entirely bringing some people beyond america together on this team last year despite those rains over 57 000 fans went to rfk stadium to watch you win the championship the dc united fans come from nearly every country on earth their diversity and spirit add to the life of this our capital city as i m sure the representatives here would attest kevin payne says that the fans are the twelfth man in your winning efforts we can also all be proud of how united you are with the community of washington d c your partnership with dc scores supports after school reading and writing programs combined with the joys of playing soccer and i d like to give you a special thanks for that i also want to acknowledge the winners of that programs essays contest who are here with us today and they re standing over here anoa hunter and aton kent trout who wrote outstanding essays on what united means to me i just read their essays i wish all of you could read them i think it s an inspiring and important question for all of us to think about congratulations to all of you and now i d like to turn it over to dc united s president kevin payne thank you very much let me before we close and i walk over here and we take a formal picture with the team again thank the first lady of washington d c and congresswoman eleanor holmes norton and all the d c city council members i see at least three that i overlooked the first time would all the members of the dc city council who are here stand up i think they re all here thank you we have a quorum in case any of you have a particular problem you d like solved and i d also like to ask the student athletes and the coaches that i just honored in the oval office who have come here from around the country who have done outstanding things many of them have overcome considerable personal obstacles to be outstanding athletes outstanding students and servants in their communities i d like to ask them to all stand please thank you very much we re going to take a quick picture and then we ll be adjourned you can all stand up we ll visit a little have a little fun come on we re working on it dem wjclinton6 5 05 bill_clinton first thank you for the wonderful welcome i thank my friend al moses and the leaders of the american jewish committee my fellow americans and our guests from all over the world who are here that moving eloquent introduction was an example of one of my unbending laws of politics whenever possible be introduced by someone whom you have appointed to an important position they will lie about you shamelessly with no limits and no remorse so let me return the favor al moses thank you for the wonderful job you did as the american ambassador to romania i m very grateful to you for that thank you i am i m gratified to be here today and thankful for your recognition grateful that the children of yitzhak and leah rabin are here my friends yuval dalia thank you for being here when i left the white house i had to decide what to do i didn t play my saxophone well enough to become a professional musician i didn t play golf well enough to go on the professional tour even for older people like me i was too much of a calvinist to lay down and just kind of while away my time so i looked at what all my predecessors had done and eventually i decided that what i should do is to try to work in areas where i had labored as president but where i could still have an influence as a former president there many things i cared about as president where i have no more influence and no power that s most things i think the great thing about being out of office is i can say whatever i wish the sad thing is no one has to pay attention anymore but i decided to work on the economic empowerment of poor communities in the united states and around the world on trying to increase education and citizen service among young people in the united states and around the world on health security primarily the problem of aids in the poor countries of the world where shamefully there are over 40 million people who are infected with hiv over 6 million people with full blown aids at death s door everyone with the disease gets the antiretroviral medicine here and in europe and anyplace else where it s a significant problem but in the developing world when i started this project two years ago only 300 000 people were getting the medicine out of over 6 million who needed it and the cost in the united states was over 10 000 the cheapest price in the rest of the world was 500 and a lot of countries couldn t even pay that and i decided to work on my continuing efforts at the reconciliation of people across religious and ethnic and racial lines i have a peace center in northern ireland and i work still a little bit in the balkans and elsewhere once in a while i even dabble around in secret in your business you d like it what i do what i wanted to say today is that the work that the american jewish committee does the work that israaid s doing now in the tsunami affected areas the work that i do with my foundation is representative of one of the two most important things that happened when i was president that i had nothing to do with so i can brag about it in the 1990s for the first time in human history more than half the world s people lived under governments they elected stunning statistic when you consider that a quarter of the world s people still live in china and even there they have genuine elections in over 900 000 villages only the larger cities still have mayors appointed by the government and that s a very important thing so when the election was held in iraq when the halting movements towards elections were made in saudi arabia and a lot of the things that are happening to spawn democracy in some of the middle eastern countries that have long resisted it it s basically the last bastion of anti democracy in the world being shaken because the whole world has been moving toward elections that s a profoundly important thing a less noticed development perhaps of equal importance to the way real people live their lives is the explosion of nongovernmental organizations people like you now commonly called in the parlance all over the world as ngos whenever i went to new countries newly democratized countries or countries where there was an improvement in the democratic climate i often tried to meet with ngo leaders and sometimes to the consternation of the elected officials of the country who found them pesky and i met with them i think on every continent i have seen whole african villages and latin american hillside towns transformed by microcredit loans given by the united states government to local community leaders and to ngos and to self employed women s association in india i have seen them empower women to run their own businesses and change the course of not only their families lives but their community s lives and many many other things it s a truly astonishing thing and sometimes this nongovernmental organization is an ad hoc thing it just happens overnight and the internet has made that even more possible the sars epidemic which started in hong kong and quickly spread to actually started in rural china but was took hold in hong kong and quickly spread to canada was stopped dead in its tracks by a spontaneously organized nongovernmental uprising of chinese citizens on the internet who demanded that their country stop denying the existence and severity of the sars virus and immediately take steps to stop it and we could have had an epidemic in the world that rivaled the great influenza at the end of world war i but instead what happened is the chinese government heard the voices of all these citizens screaming over the internet turned on a dime immediately said what had happened immediately set to work with the canadians with the centers for disease control in america and other places and shut down an epidemic in its tracks that could ve spread to every country represented in this room with fatal consequences to people so people like you and me and my foundation we now have more power to do good than ever before within and across national lines because of the explosion of information because of the greater openness of societies because there are more and more people all across the world willing to contribute their funds to pursue these objectives jewish groups all around the world and specifically in israel have understood this for decades indeed since the founding of the country when a lot of work had to be done by private citizens supporting public works through private organizations but you should take heart that this movement has literally now swept the world and in every country that i visit you see this sort of thing happening i met two people from colombia over there i wear this colombian welcome bracelet every day i have worn it now almost three years it was given to me by children in colombia who have come their own movement they sing and dance against the narcotraffickers and their terrorist supporters and these children have become my friends they were sponsored by the culture minister of colombia i brought them to the white house during the holiday season in december of 2000 the only non american group i ever asked to sing there because i thought they were so brave and the culture minister was brave too because the narcotraffickers and the terrorists hated the children but couldn t kill them they murdered the culture minister she was a great friend of mine and a great friend of humanity everywhere and they took her up in the mountains in the colombian rain forest and murdered her her memorial service was held in the bogata soccer stadium and they filled it and i spoke by satellite to it and now when i went back to colombia on june the 27th 2002 i met the new culture minister and the children were singing at the cartagena airport the new minister was the niece of the murdered woman they re very brave people the colombians and but their symbol is not a government program but these children and the people who support the children in singing around the country and around the world prove that even little children can stand against terror and greed and madness so all i have done with this tsunami relief or with the aids project is basically learn from what i saw as president i ll never forget the day one day up in new york i was i got up one morning and i was shaving and i was looking in the mirror and i said my god i have become an ngo i didn t really you know i d never objectified myself in such a fashion before we all have these little ways of self definition but i say that i want to talk about a little more about what i m doing but i say that to thank you for what you do to encourage you on the way if we ever get through the thicket of problems political and otherwise to the end of a just and lasting peace in the middle east i m convinced that a lot of it will come because of efforts of israelis and others working in their private capacity as well as from government policy and at the end of my remarks i d like to say just one or two things about that but i ask you to consider this i mean every year in the world one in four people die from only four things one in four of all deaths aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhea most of them are little children who never get a clean glass of water which 25 percent of the world s people never get so when i started this aids project and there were only 300 000 people getting medicine out of over 6 million who needed it and 170 000 of them were in brazil because they have a pharmaceutical industry and the government gives it to people who needed it so there were basically in the whole rest of the poor world 130 000 people two and a half years later we have just in our little foundation we re providing medicine at 140 a person a year all the testing at 60 a year instead of the 400 to 600 the rich countries pay and we re serving 110 000 more people working in over 20 countries with another 30 countries approved by the world health organization to buy medicine off our contract we think we ll be at 2 million people just with our efforts in a couple of years that sounds good but it s not good when you think about 6 million people facing death only because they can t get medicine and care that americans take for granted that europeans take for granted that people in other parts of the world take for granted but it shows you what you can do apart from the government we take no money from any government all the funds that i have were given to me by generous individuals the governments of ireland and canada and france and britain norway and sweden have appropriated money which they give to the countries i m helping when i say they re ready to receive it but it s really i was stunned that we could essentially start from nothing and do this such is the power of the ngo such is our power such is the power of all the other organizations you re with and when the tsunami came up really i got involved in it because former president bush and i were asked by the president to help increase the rate of giving in america and it was an unbelievable thing we have anywhere between a quarter of a million and 300 000 people dead there are so many unaccounted for and the numbers aren t really good but it s a staggering loss over a million people lost their homes over a million people lost their livelihood the damage was most concentrated in indonesia in the province of aceh in sri lanka in thailand in the maldives then india but several other countries were damaged quite severely including somalia and myanmar and others in southeast asia so we set about raising funds we did two things former president bush and i did we created two separate accounts and then we just tried to get people to give to existing charitable efforts that were active over there then we tried to set up a water and sanitation fund because that s not a very sexy subject and people don t think about it but it s really one of the biggest problems after you have this kind of flood it takes out all the wells it puts salt sea water salt into the freshwater wells and the absence of water and sanitation can lead to later outbreaks of dysentery diarrhea cholera and other problems which can cause severe severe losses so we did that and we also set up another fund which was sort of which was unrestricted we asked people to trust us to figure out what countries needed most immediately that we could do in the short run i just went to houston yesterday and president bush and i announced that we were going to build about 200 new fishing boats in the village we had visited in thailand and we were and put people to work there we were going to build a hundred playgrounds in sri lanka for children who d lost all their parents and all their means of you know enjoying life one of the biggest challenges we re facing in these tsunami affected countries is the staggering number of orphans it was also interesting enough a bunch of parents who lost their children there s one visit one village we visited in aceh where there were 6 500 people living and only 700 survived and every single building collapsed except interestingly enough the mosque which survived only because in hot countries they often don t have walls in the mosque so the water could fall through but they do have decorative roofs which means you have to have heavier columns and foundations below the ground so it was the only building in the village with any foundations below the ground plus open walls so it survived otherwise it looked like a bomb had been dropped there so anyway we re doing the playgrounds in sri lanka because we saw in sri lanka and thailand the kind of therapy that people were doing in these villages instead of asking the children to talk about how they felt about their losses and their lives they asked them to draw pictures of how they were feeling and it s fascinating to watch these pictures go through various incarnations the first round of pictures were very dark from almost all the children then the second time some of the children drew pictures of the relief workers coming to their aid the helicopters dropping supplies then by the third or fourth time some of the children were drawing children s pictures just things that you d expect children in any country in the world to draw but some countries some children were still drawing the dark pictures and it s been very instructive to me to see how these people over there working with none of the resources we take for granted here in the united states are doing marvelous work on therapy with these kids and bringing them out but anyway a lot of them asked us to provide playground equipment for them so we re doing that and in indonesia we re going to try to rebuild the little village we visited the houses the health centers the schools the whole thing just with this small fund and so i got myself into this and then kofi annan asked me to be the u n coordinator for the long term tsunami assistance and it s i m used to this i have no money and no power and the only staff i have is people that other u n agencies give me and i don t know how much you know about the way the u n s organized but a lot of the united nations agencies are agencies over which the secretary general himself as no control directly they re completely independent financially and in terms of governance so i m i m once removed from that so my job has now been reduced to what harry truman once said of the united states presidency he said most of what he did was to try to talk people into doing things they should have done without his asking them in the first place but and when i leave you i m flying to new york to the u n to meet with some of the ngos but essentially let me tell you for those of you who are interested in this what we re trying to do we are trying to get every country to come up with a plan for their reconstruction which breaks down by category and place everything they re going to do in housing education health care livelihoods disaster mitigation all the things they re going to do and then by category what the cost is so that we can fill in the blanks the maldives is the only country that s done this it s amazing they re just a small country if i told you the dollar loss it wouldn t seem like much to you but they lost two thirds of their annual gdp and they re heavily dependent on tourism and a lot of people are scared to go back now even though there s nothing to worry about and 70 percent of their islands were not damaged and a lot of the tourism is open for business now same in thailand same in sri lanka but a lot of people are afraid to go back so what the maldives has done is for every single island they have categories and you can read it it says german red cross french red cross japanese government chinese government and all the blank spaces but it makes it very easy for a if you think about the nature of my job now that s what i need from everybody because then i can you know i can meet with people and show it to them and they can say okay i can afford that and it s got a price tag by everything and maldives has the cost now broken down in units as low as 100 000 and so we re trying to get that for all these other countries india did not want or need any assistance in the immediate aftermath but i have met with the indian ambassador and been told that we should be working on some of the longer term reconstruction needs and maybe some help for some of the temporary housing in the tamilnadu area where some of it had to be built with tin roofs and it s summertime or getting summertime now and you know it s hot and the monsoon season is coming so we re concerned about that anyway i say that to say to all of you i thank you for this award but i think i m doing what i should be doing after all i was given the most fortunate of lives i got to live my dreams i never thought i d be able to do this i lived it s an almost accidental life i ve had and so i m doing this because i should and because i like it and the same reason you do a lot of the things that you do but i would like to make one final point a lot of what we re doing in these tsunami affected countries could be done for poor people everywhere in the world and the whole goal is to help them we can t replace the lives they ve lost but we can honor the sacrifices they ve made by helping them to build their areas back better to have better housing better education better health care stronger communities and a more diversified economy and so we re bringing in people all around trying to figure out how we make sure we do that so that when we re done they have a chance to participate in the world s prosperity this is a big challenge everywhere and one that i think the members of the american jewish community and the members of the jewish community worldwide are uniquely qualified to help people meet because of how well you ve done in all the countries in which you live and because of the remarkable story of israel s rise so i intend to spend a lot of time trying to help poor countries throughout the world meet the millennium development goals and to try to get the private sector involved in it there are a lot of strategies for not only funding microenterprises but having other debenture capital development other direct investment and i think if you look at where we are in the middle east now i ll only venture this because i try to stay out of this since i have one member of my family in the senate and somebody else should be speaking about most contemporary political issues although i did like what you said about the surplus i still can t figure out why it s a good thing for us to be at war with iraq and have all these middle class people over there sacrificing and i get four tax cuts which my government pays for by going to the chinese every day and borrowing money to cover bill clinton s tax cuts you know maybe that s it might be good economic policy and it might be moral but i can t figure it out to save my life but anyway on this other issue it is obvious if i could be candid that we got a new chance at peace in the middle east because yasser arafat died and because the new because abu mazen wants to do it and has been more forthright in renouncing terror than anyone else yes there are difficulties daily which he faces and the israeli government faces it is also obvious that the palestinians are younger and poorer than they were on the day that prime minister rabin and arafat signed the peace agreement on the white house lawn in september of 93 so and it s obvious that even if the israeli people settle on a peace plan that they would vote for that the palestinians would also accept embrace and honor it might be difficult a for the palestinians to have the capacity to do what they re supposed to do and b for the israelis to produce a government that would support what the people do because as all of you know people get elected to the knesset for all different kinds of reasons that have nothing whatever to do with the peace process so which is the way politics is everywhere that s just that s normal but it means that this is complicated it s not as simple as saying well now we got a genuinely elected leader in the palestinian territories and now he s rejected terror and oh let s go make peace and live happily ever after as all of you know it s going to be still a very tough slog and it won t happen overnight therefore having economic opportunity in the areas where the palestinians are concentrated where the authority is now in control of their people is i think critical to buying the time necessary to allow the conditions to mature to make peace possible and i tried to do this some people in this room were there a few of you the day after we had the peace signing in september 93 there were 600 jewish american and arab american business people that i called into the white house we met in the old executive office building everybody wanted to go invest in the palestinian areas we were much more hopeful and maybe naive then than we are now and it never happened by and large it happened in a handful of instances because every time we got close a bomb would blow up and it would look like a bad investment and the arab americans were no more willing than the jewish americans were to put their money down a rat hole that would disappear in the ashes of a bomb but the bottom line was they got younger and poorer presenting far more political problems to anybody governing them in terms of making the compromises and imposing the discipline and asking people to look ahead to the future in a way that will be necessary to work out any kind of peace so i think you should really think about that we need to buy both sides some time here and recognize that while it s way too simple to say terror is caused by poverty neglect and distress because a lot of terrorists are well educated from rather well to do families that s too simple on the other hand in order to sustain a movement you have to have a field of support of people who feel dispossessed in order to sustain it over the long run you have to have that so the more people in your region who feel they ve got something to look forward to when they get up in the morning the more likely it is that we will be able to buy the time necessary for the politics to catch up with the possibilities here and i say that because i think it s very important the strategies we re employing in these tsunami areas can be employed in every african country and every poor southeast asian country and every poor country in latin america anywhere in the world and a lot of them will work in the middle east since we re in washington d c i always say i know no poor palestinians outside the territories every palestinian i know in america is a millionaire or a college professor and they control the flower trade in chile they have the highest per capita income in ecuador surely there s some way we can find in this new moment of hope to generate a little more opportunity there i think president bush has asked the congress for 350 million which i heartily endorse but a lot of that money is going to be spent on security related measures that s a good thing it s good for israel and doubtless the representatives of the israeli defense forces who are here will support that but we also have to have some investment in areas that make tomorrow better than today to buy some time for this thing to get in alignment so anyway i thank you for what you do i ask you to recognize that this really is a unique moment in history groups like yours that helped to make modern israel now have a global power never before enjoyed by citizen groups whether it s the biggest foundation in the world like bill and melinda gates foundation the work they re doing in india and africa on aids or tiny ones that work in a few villages with the poorest women on earth giving them loans so they can make a living to all the ones in between which includes you and me we have the capacity to change the future for the better to an extent never before known i m going to do that as much as i can on the aids problem on the economic problem and on the tsunami problem and any of you want to help in any of those countries i would be very grateful for it but think about how we can give the 21st century the cast that we dream of for our children and realize that whether you like the government that s in your country or my country whether you consider yourself on the left or the right whatever you consider yourself for the first time in history your disappointment at the last election is no longer an excuse not to act because whether we like how the elections come out or not we can change the future thank you and god bless you thank you very much i know we re at the end of the morning s events but i thank you for first of all giving what you gave to the tsunamis i didn t want to talk much about it in my remarks because i knew former president bush and i cut that spot yesterday we were in houston thank you so bob thank you and david thank you i was looking at david thinking you know i might be the second best speaker in chappaqua i was or should or should given our relative positions at home maybe i should say the third i just want to say one other thing you know i just went with former president bush and the present mrs bush to the pope s funeral and i was thinking about how many people when we were talking about all this and you mentioned it al in your introduction what my beloved pastor said to me about israel i was thinking about how many people don t know much about comparative religion and learn about people s faith through their deeds and i had i really had a great admiration for this pope partly because he reached out to jews and muslims and people orthodox christians and others around the world but when he was installed back in the 70s i was a young man starting out in politics and i arkansas my home state still had the largest percentage of people living in the state who were born there in other words it was the most insular state in america right and everybody was a southern baptist so this story made the rounds that these two old men sitting up in the mountains of the arkansas ozarks on their porch rocking in their chairs saying well they re going to pick a new pope the other one says they are and he says yeah he says well have you got a candidate and the guy says no but i kinda hope the catholics don t get it they ve had it long enough and and they so and you can tell several jokes about judaism and i could you know when i was a boy there were all kinds of jokes about baptists which are you know i have to wait until after 5 00 to tell but the point i want to make is sometimes they know us only by our works what we believe who we are whether the spirit of god is within us so i thank you for this award but i thank you for giving people a chance to know you by your works thank you dem wjclinton6 5 97 bill_clinton mr president mrs zedillo members of the mexican cabinet and other distinguished public servants citizens of mexico on behalf of hillary on all the members of our delegation from the administration and the congress i first thank you for the graciousness and warmth with which you have welcomed us we live side by side as neighbors we work together day in and day out as partners but the warmth of your reception has reminded us today that we are also close friends just before the dinner began president and mrs zedillo took hillary and me to see the magnificent murals of diego rivera that adorn this great palace they are very moving works along with the paintings of orozco and siqueiros they represent the peak of artistic achievement in this century and one of the many contributions of mexico to the culture of the world anyone who has seen it knows that the power of rivera s epic of the mexico people in their struggle for freedom and independence comes from more than mere technical skill in this grand work we see the proud spirit of mexico s revolution and mexico s heart instantly i saw rivera s extraordinary love of the mexican people the same passion which then and now inspires mexico s journey toward a better and freer society rivera never actually finished his epic and perhaps that is fitting because the journey of every nation to increase the freedom of its people the labor at the very heart of democracy never ends i am delighted to be in mexico at another time when this struggle is making a dramatic stride forward mexico s leaders and political parties are opening the doors of democracy wider than ever new citizen groups have sown the seeds of a vibrant civil society that promises to deliver to all mexicans a better and freer future mr president you reminded us that it was in this palace where benito juarez corresponded with abraham lincoln our president mr lincoln who many of us consider to be our greatest president called in the united states in his time for a new birth of freedom the murals here remind us here that the birth of freedom is more than a matter of improving our political systems we must also strive to see that our citizens are free from want and hunger free from the dangers our new age brings and free to make the most of their own lives the partnership we seek with mexico is one that will advance that kind of freedom here and throughout the americas we want to work together to lay the foundation of an enduring prosperity we want to join together to improve the air and water we share we want to work to turn our border into a region of growth to defeat disease to defeat the threat of drugs organized crime and corruption mr president we can succeed because we have forged a relationship as broad and deep as that which exists between any two nations and today we have made important progress we are answering the demands of our time advancing the common goals of our people serving a friendship that is at the heart of what we all want for our future in so doing we honor the legacy of benito juarez and abraham lincoln and the constant quest for a new birth of freedom ladies and gentlemen i ask you now to join with me in toasting president and mrs zedillo and their family to partnership of our nations and the new day of freedom it will bring to the friends and neighbors of our shared continent dem wjclinton6 5 99 bill_clinton good afternoon let me begin by thanking chancellor schroeder the representatives of his government who are here and all the people of germany for their strong strong leadership in nato in defense of the people of kosovo and for making this place of refuge and shelter for people in need i thank minister president beck and the government of rheinland pfalz and the townspeople of ingelheim for making this center available as well and for supporting your presence here most of all i would like to express my respect to the families who are here today from kosovo and my very special thanks for those who met earlier with chancellor schroeder and me to those of you who told us the stories of your lives the heartbreak the nightmare the cruelty the uncertainty those who are young those who are old and those who are in the middle of their lives i listened very carefully to all of you i hope that as you mustered the courage to meet with us you know that because you have done so the world will hear your stories it is very important that every freedom loving person in the entire world know the story of kosovo it is important that people not forget that what is called ethnic cleansing is not some abstract idea it is real people with real families and real dreams being uprooted from their homes their schools their work their children their parents their husbands and wives nato has acted in kosovo because we believe ethnic cleansing must be opposed resisted reversed we are doing all we can to bring aid to the victims of the violence we are helping as many as we can in albania and macedonia both germany and the united states and our other allies are taking refugees out of the camps in macedonia into our nations we are helping relief groups to improve their registration systems so those of you who have missing family members can find them and so that we can restore identity papers i know you will understand what a difficult task this is more people are pouring into macedonia every day more people are pouring into albania every day and then we are taking some people from the camps into germany into the united states into other countries but we know this is an agony for those of you who do not know what has happened to your family members and we are working on it just this week we will begin to put in computer terminals here and in other refugee centers so that you can constantly get news in your own language on the situation in kosovo and the status of the nato campaign let me say on a very personal level chancellor schroeder and i understand that what has been done to you and your children and your homeland cannot be undone but you must know that you have not been forgotten or abandoned mr milosevic has not succeeded in erasing your identity from the pages of history and he will not succeed in erasing your presence from the land of your parents and grandparents you will go home again in safety and in freedom now in closing i would like to ask of all of you something i asked of the smaller group with whom i just met when you have gone through something as awful as this it is very easy to have your spirit broken to spend the rest of your life obsessed with anger and resentment but if you do that you have already given those who oppressed you a victory i am of irish heritage the great irish poet william butler yeats once said this i hope you can remember this he said too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart i ask you all to work with each other to support each other not to let your hearts turn to stone to be determined to go home to a kosovo where all the children can go to school and all the children can laugh and play and we can have a future that is not only free of the bad things that have happened to you but is full of hope and opportunity where you re a part of europe and a free world where all the children can pursue their faith their religion and their dreams we are working hard for that day god bless you and thank you very much dem wjclinton6 6 94 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much general talbott secretary perry secretary brown let me begin by asking all the veterans here present their families their friends the people from france who have been wonderful hosts to us to acknowledge those who worked so hard to make these d day ceremonies a great success general joulwan the sac here and his european command 2 700 members of armed forces who worked to put these events together and the secretary of the army s world war ii commemorative committee general mick kicklighter and all of his committee let s give them a big hand they have done a wonderful job my fellow americans we have gathered to remember those who stormed this beach for freedom who never came home we pay tribute to what a whole generation of heroes won here but let us also recall what was lost here we must never forget that thousands of people gave everything they were or what they might have become so that freedom might live the loss along this coastline numbs us still in one u s company alone 197 of 205 men were slaughtered in just 10 minutes hundreds of young men died before they could struggle 20 feet into the red tinged tide thousands upon thousands of american canadian and british troops were killed or wounded on one brutal day but in the face of that mayhem emerged the confident clarity borne of relentless training and the guiding light of a just cause here at utah beach with the army s 4th division in the lead the allies unleashed their democratic fury on the nazi armies so many of them landed in the wrong place they found their way when one commanding officer russell red reeder discovered the error he said it doesn t matter we know where to go here to help point the way were the fighters of the french resistance we must never forget how much those who lived under the nazi fist did to make d day possible for the french d day was the 1 453rd day of their occupation throughout all those terrible days people along this coast kept faith whether gathering intelligence carving out escape routes for allied soldiers or destroying enemy supply lines they too kept freedom s flame alive with a terrible price thousands were executed thousands more died in concentration camps oh the loved ones of all who died no matter what their nationality they all feel a loss that cannot be captured in these statistics only one number matters the husband who can never be replaced the best friend who never came home the father who never played with his child again one of those fathers who died on d day had written a letter home to his wife and their daughter barely a month before the invasion he said i sincerely pray that if you fail to hear from me for a while you will recall the words of the gospel a little while and you shall not see me and again a little while and you shall see me but in your thoughts i shall always be and you in mine he was right they must always be in our thoughts to honor them we must remember the people of this coast understand just beyond this beach is the town of st mere eglise there brave american paratroopers floated into a tragic ambush on d day and there the survivors rallied to complete their mission the mayor s wife simone renaud wrote the families of the americans who had fought and died to free her village and she kept on writing them every week for the rest of her life until she died just six years ago her son henri jean renaud carries on her vigil now and he has vowed never to forget saying i will dedicate myself to the memory of their sacrifice for as long as i live we must do no less we must carry on the work of those who did not return and those who did we must turn the pain of loss into the power of redemption so that 50 or 100 or 1 000 years from now those who bought our liberty with their lives will never be forgotten to those of you who have survived and come back to this hallowed ground let me say that the rest of us know that the most difficult days of your life brought us 50 years of freedom thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton6 6 97 bill_clinton well mr bryant i may not hit a homerun today but i won t be quite as off as teddy roosevelt was even good people have bad days mr harrison mr noe friends family and guests members of the class of 1997 thank you for inviting me hillary and i especially want to thank sidwell s faculty and staff students and families for making our family feel so at home here when we came under somewhat unusual circumstances also i thank the school for its superlative commitments to academic excellence to diversity and to service to the welfare of all students here to the maintenance of good character good citizenship and good spirits in particular i have come to appreciate the school s observance of the quaker practice of meaningful worship an hour spent in reflective silence broken only when someone has something truly meaningful to say in a respectful way after the parents had a chance to participate in meaningful worship this week i left wishing that congress were in control of the quakers i ask the senior in this class i know best what i should say today her reply was dad i want you to be wise briefly last night she amended her advise dad the girls want you to be wise the boys just want you to be funny that s what i get for asking members of the class of 97 you are not the only graduates here today even though we re staying home your parents are graduating too just as your pride and joy in this day must be tempered by the separation from sidwell and of daily contact with the wonderful friends you have made here our pride and joy are tempered by our coming separation from you so i ask you at the beginning to indulge your folks if we seem a little sad or we act a little weird you see today we are remembering your first day in school and all the triumphs and travails between then and now though we have raised you for this moment of departure and we are very proud of you a part of us longs to hold you once more as we did when you could barely walk to read to you just one more time good night moon or curious george or the little engine that could we hope someday that you will have children of your own to bring to this happy day and know how we feel remember that we love you and no matter what anybody says you can come home again we celebrate your passage into the world in a hopeful time for our nation and for people throughout the world for the first time in history more than half of all the world s people live free under governments of their own choosing the cold war has given way to information age with its revolutions in technology and communications and increasingly integrated economies and societies scientific advances and a growing global determination to preserve our environment give us hope that the challenges of the 21st century can be met in ways that will permit us to continue the advance of peace and freedom and prosperity throughout your entire lives admittedly we face serious threats to humanity s forward march threats that go beyond the possible outbreak of disease or environmental catastrophe they include the spread of weapons of mass destruction terrorism the worldwide network of crime and drug trafficking awful ethnic racial tribal and religious rivalries that unfortunately are most appealing to people your age throughout the world who feel poor and dispossessed with vision discipline and patience we can meet these challenges as well here at home our economy is strong crime and welfare rolls have dropped steeply we are on the leading edge of emerging technologies people are living longer fuller lives america is leading the world toward peace and freedom and progress but you know well that we too have our challenges we still have yet to give all our children the chance you have had to develop their god given capacities we still have to deal with the coming retirement of your parents very large generation and the appalling rates of poverty among young children we have to develop the proper balance of discipline and freedom of creativity and stability necessary to keep our economy growing to make our society less crippled by crime and drugs to help our families and communities to become stronger and perhaps most important as you look around this class today we have to make out of our rich diversity the world s first truly great multiracial multiethnic multireligious democracy no one has ever done it before and i hope our country can do as well as you have done with each other now all these are formidable tasks but we are moving in the right direction what i want to say to you is that now that you re adults you have to do your part to keep it going there are decisions to be made by americans and in a democracy citizenship is not a spectator sport but what an exciting world awaits you from cyberspace to the frontiers of artificial intelligence from mapping our genetic structures to exploring other galaxies with your ability and your education your choices seem limitless but you will have to choose and you will have to choose not just what you will do but how you will live no one else can make your decisions for you and they will make all the difference for you for your country and for the world to make the right ones you will need a lot more than knowledge and access to the internet you will need wisdom and resolve for what it s worth here is my advice first be brave dream big and chase your dreams you will have your failures but you will grow from every honest effort over three decades ago i sat where you are i can tell you without any doubt that in the years since my high school classmates who chased their dreams and failed are far less disappointed than those who left their dreams on the shelf for fear of failure so chase on even if you don t get what you think you want amazing things will happen second be optimistic and be grateful some bad things are going to happen to you to some of you unfair things perhaps even tragic things some of you have faced tragedy already when these things happen try to remember that each new day is still a gift full of the mystery and magic of life try not to waste even one of those days trapped by hatred the desire to get even self pity despair or cynicism we all give in to them now and then of course but you need to work at snapping out of it and going on hatred and self pity give victory to the very dark forces we deplore despair guarantees defeat cynicism is a cowardly cop out and no ever really gets even in life that is god s work no matter how bad it gets don t forget there s someone who s endured more pain than you have no matter how unfair it gets remember that most of us are far better off than we would be if we only got what we deserve and don t stop at admiring a mandela or a cardinal bernardin strive to be more like them keep your spirits up there is profound truth in the proverb a happy heart maketh good medicine but a broken spirit dryeth the bones third be of service to others much has been given to you already and a lot more is coming your way you owe it to yourself to give something back to help to build a society and a world in which more people have your chance to live out their dreams and all people in need at least know the touch of a caring hand and the embrace of a kind heart from your service here many of you already know that it not only gives more joy to others it will bring more joy to you than you can even imagine fourth be both humble and proud be humble because you re human subject to error and frailty incapable no matter how intelligent you are of ever knowing the whole truth show mercy as well as judgment to those with whom you disagree in life keep in mind benjamin franklin s adage that even our enemies are our friends for they show us our faults be proud because your life is god s unique creation worthy of its journey graced with a soul the equal of every other person s eleanor roosevelt once said that no one can make you feel inferior without your permission do not give them permission i regret that in our time the essential role of constructive criticism often degenerates into what deborah tannen has called the culture of critique where too many brilliant minds and prodigious energies are spent simply putting people down do not be put down thirty seven years ago i was a student in vernon dokey s 8th grade science class on first impression vernon dokey to put it charitably was a very physically unattractive man he knew it he laughed about it and he used it to teach us a valuable lesson in life i still remember he told us that every morning when he woke up he went to the bathroom and he shaved and then he looked at himself in the mirror and he said vernon you re beautiful well class of 97 you re beautiful go out and live like it be humble and be proud be of service be optimistic and grateful be brave and dream your dreams god bless you dem wjclinton6 7 94 bill_clinton president and mrs walesa ladies and gentlemen it is a tremendous honor for me and for our party of americans and for my family to be here with you in poland in this short time we have felt already your hospitality and friendship and we see that just as you rebuilt this wonderful city after world war ii you are now rebuilding this magnificent country after communism you have enshrined freedom and democracy and after a difficult beginning you have achieved a high rate of economic growth these are tributes to both your people and your leaders mr president your personal struggle ever since the events in gdansk more than a decade ago have inspired people everywhere in the world in a very real sense poland is the birthplace of the new europe and in so many ways you are the father of that wonderful child you and many other of your countrymen and women have proved that individual acts of courage can change the world and in a time when ordinary people all over the world feel helpless in the face of forces shaping and changing their lives you have proved that ordinary working people can transform their own lives poland has the moral support of all the american people but of two groups especially first the millions of polish americans who share your heritage and the love of your soil and your history and second the members of the american labor movement who have supported your struggle from the beginning and i might say we are especially glad tonight to have the leader of our labor movement who has been your supporter from the beginning mr lane kirkland with us welcome sir as you said mr president it is now for us to build on what has been done in poland that means a stronger economy and greater security and more concern for those who have been left behind we know the path of reform is difficult and special steps must be taken to help those who have not yet seen its benefits beyond poland it means building a truly united europe a europe united economically and in its common support for democracy and freedom and territorial integrity these things are important to the united states for many reasons we are on our own journey of renewal at home but we know that in the end our success depends upon your success we seek to be free in a world more free we know to be prosperous the world must be more prosperous we know to be secure those who believe in the things that we believe in must also be secure so tonight i urge the people of poland to take pride in your achievements and not to lose hope the road to the future is not smooth but you have known difficulties in the past far greater the united states will stand with you our partnership will grow and poland will triumph and so i raise my glass mr president in a toast to you and mrs walesa and to the people of poland dem wjclinton6 7 99 bill_clinton i will be very brief it s hot you ve waited for me a long time and i appreciate it i m glad to be back here i m glad to be in the delta i m glad to have brought business leaders from all over the country here today we are trying to send a message to america that good people live here they have not fully participated in this economic recovery that has swept our country and lifted up america s economy as strong as it s ever been and we can t rest until every american who wants to work has a chance to get a good education a good job and raise a family in a strong community and what we re proposing to do is simply to say to the investors of the country take a look at the delta take a look at these other places in america that haven t grown as they should have and we will give you the same tax and other incentives to invest in american new markets that we give you today to invest around the world i think we ought to give people the same incentive to go to the delta that s the message you help us get the message out good luck god bless you and thank you for making me feel welcome thank you dem wjclinton6 8 99 bill_clinton thank you very much congratulations on your 50th anniversary and thank you for honoring my friend and my partner james lee witt you know bobby i was wondering what bobby would say i thought he would say you know i knew i could guilt bill clinton into coming to this dinner once i found out he was going to be in arkansas and i reminded him how many early morning radio interviews i d given him over the last 20 years and i want to thank bobby caldwell who is my longtime friend and all of you for the work that you do as well as for honoring a wonderful man tonight i am honored to be joined by rodney slater and i know there are others here in our administration kay goss buddy young and people who were in our administration in arkansas like bill and judy gaddy are here and many others who i haven t had a chance to see i thank the members of the legislature who are here steve ferris and don haus and bud harper who has the job that james lee used to have and like james lee used to be a county judge and therefore was prepared for it and i want to acknowledge my good friend john paul katz who served as speaker of the house when i was governor and also james lee s family james lee and lea ellen have done a great job and you know they re building a political dynasty in yell county and if you re last name is not witt you can t be county judge in yell county anymore not ever let me say that i know most of this has been said i want to say a few things about james lee and what he represents in terms of what i ve tried to do as your president this is one of the best times in american history but when it comes to weather it s been one of the worst since 1993 we ve had the worst flood of the century in the midwest the worst earthquake in northridge california weather disasters in places they weren t supposed to happen we ve had tornadoes in minnesota ice storms in florida and now the farm crops are burning up not in the south but in the east and the northeast where today we acknowledged the worst drought ever for the farmers from maryland to new jersey to rhode island we have had in total more than 250 natural disasters in all 50 states and territories and many of them have cost a lot of human lives well the old saying that god doesn t send you anything you can t handle was made true from the point of view of my administration and millions of americans because james lee witt agreed to be head of the federal emergency management agency i got this idea i have to tell you when i went to florida as a candidate for president and i saw the enormous anxiety that people felt in the aftermath of the terrible hurricane where their whole lives have been wrecked and i talked to senator pryor about this i remember this very clearly that people kept saying the federal government is not working they re not helping i don t know what they re doing they re taking too long they act bureaucratic you know just one thing after another and i realized what the problem was and that is that for decades through democrat and republican administrations alike the federal emergency management agency was treated like a political appointment and normally the person who got it was somebody who wanted something else who was a big supporter of the president but couldn t quite become an ambassador to a european country or couldn t quite get a position in the cabinet i took care of that by putting fema in the cabinet and all these people that had this job were good people they were not bad people they were good people and there were all these dedicated professionals who were working day in and day out but there was no one at the helm who wanted the job and who had experience in what the job was and who could put every fiber of his being into dealing with people in the most difficult times imaginable and you know when i was governor and james lee was head of the office of emergency services here we had horrible floods we had tornados that leveled little towns i remember going over to west memphis when the whole place was decked and the glass had been shattered at the dog track and glass was flying through the air over there at more than 100 miles an hour just a miracle that we didn t have lots of people killed by something that was just like a hail of bullets and i knew that he cared what happened to people when they were running tight and i knew he knew that people were frustrated they were angry they were disoriented when they d lost everything in the world and we needed somebody who actually had that kind of experience and that kind of ability doing this job you know when everything is going along all right most people think of the cabinet of the president as the secretary of state secretary of defense and the attorney general and maybe if you re from arkansas you think about the secretary of agriculture but when your house is blown away and when your community is buried in water the most important person in the federal government is the person that heads the federal emergency management agency and because of all the things we ve been through as a nation in natural disasters in the last six years james lee witt has very often been the most important person in the federal government to tens of millions of americans i kid him every time we have a disaster someplace three weeks later there s another state he could be elected to state office in when we went through all this terrible thing in southern california with that earthquake they think of themselves as a big modern place and a lot of them actually are from places like arkansas but they forget it from time to time and he gave them a whole new take on what it was to have a grass roots sense of common sense and compassion so i can just tell you that i think we re going to have more of these difficult natural problems and i think we re going to have a lot of challenges to meet but it will be a long long time before any federal official ever has this position who can remotely equal james lee for his experience his knowledge his ability and his compassion he has served america well and he has done arkansas proud i d just like to take advantage of the fact that you gave me this podium to give you a brief report on a couple of other things by using if i might james lee the way he runs fema and the way he conducts his business is the way i believe the federal government as a whole should be run that we should basically put people ahead of politics and power now all you ve got to do is read the paper every day or listen to the news to know that that s not the way washington works and that s not the way some people who report about washington want it to work because they think it would be immensely boring if it did i think but james lee is exhibit a of the kind of government we ve tried to bring to washington so is rodney i might add you have these two arkansans serving with great distinction by the way who are quite popular with both republicans and democrats in the united states congress both of them because they treat people decently they give them a quick answer they shoot straight they don t say yes when the answer is no but they try to say yes whenever they can and they re are very well thought of and they don t become the kind of lightning rods that normally just titillate the day to day coverage of politics in washington i believe out here in the country there is a national consensus around a vital center for america moving forward it crosses party lines on nearly everything i believe it exists nearly everywhere except in washington i ll just give you one example this debate we re having over the patients bill of rights i have supported health maintenance organizations i have supported managed care as a way of holding down the costs of health care let s not forget in 1993 when i took office health care costs for several years had been going up at three times the rate of inflation and they threatened to absolutely engulf the budgets of businesses and of families but i also believe that you can t manage a system if you forget what the primary mission of the system is in this case it is to improve the health care of the american people now i believe if you went out to anyplace in arkansas i think if you took an exhaustive survey if you polled 20 000 people here in pulaski county or in any part of our state and you divided them properly among the parties you would find overwhelming support for the idea that every american in an hmo ought to have the right to see a specialist if their doctor tells them they need to see a specialist and in a lot of big cities believe it or not when people have accidents when the ambulance picks them up they have to go by two or three emergency rooms until they get to one in a hospital that s covered well if it s you in the back of that ambulance you want to go to the first emergency room you come to you don t want to have to bump two or three until you get to one that just happens to be in a plan and a lot of you run small businesses and small businesses that do provide health insurance for their employees often have to change providers and they have to look around from time to time for the most cost effective provider but if there s an employee in that business who s in the sixth month of a difficult pregnancy or in the middle of a chemotherapy treatment i think that those people ought to be able to keep their doctors until the treatment is finished these are just basic simple things and i think 70 percent of the american people agree now there is a glimmer of good news about 20 republicans in the house of representatives including all of their doctors about a half dozen of them have said they want to help us pass this and i hope we can get it done but the fact that we ve been fighting for it for nearly two years is an example we d never have a two year fight over this in the arkansas legislature we just wouldn t do it because it would be such a clear human basic thing that we d figure out how to get it done without imposing undue burdens on the businesses involved and that s what we have to do in washington if you take the debate we re having over the surplus today i know it just may seem like politics to you but believe me it is not to me it s about everything i ve tried to stand for and do since i went up there just remember when i went to washington we d been running on a balanced budget down here for 12 years and they had quadrupled the debt in 12 years and we had the deficit was 290 billion and projected to be 390 billion this year and we were able to turn it around by arithmetic which meant we had to make hard and controversial decisions and a lot of members of my party lost their seats in congress in the 94 election because they voted to reduce the deficit but just today before i came down here we announced that we have gone over 19 million new jobs since january of 1993 19 million the longest peacetime expansion in history the highest home ownership in history the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded 1 5 million fewer children in poverty we have record numbers of new small businesses have started in every single year the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer there are fewer toxic waste dumps we ve got 90 percent of our kids immunized against serious childhood illnesses for the first time in the history of the united states we ve set aside more land to be preserved forever than any administration except those of the two roosevelts we ve got 100 000 young people that have served their country in americorps in their communities earned money for college the hope scholarship essentially guarantees that everybody can have at least two years of college and already 15 million people have taken advantage of it 12 5 million people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law this country is a stronger country because we have looked to the future and tried to put people first tried to keep thinking about what s best for tomorrow and that s what this whole debate is about but i just want to give you my take on it and it s exactly the same attitude i d have if i were still governor sitting here watching it go on this country quadrupled our debt in the 12 years before i took office we have turned that around but we re looking toward a 21st century in which among other things the following will happen i ll just give you two things number one the number of people over 65 is going to double in 30 years when the baby boomers all get into the retirement age right now medicare is supposed to go broke in 15 years social security is supposed to go broke in 33 years 34 years we are not prepared for the aging of america number two we ve got the largest number of children in our school system we have ever had bigger than the baby boom generation and we have the largest percentage of them who come from all different kinds of backgrounds i saw an article in the christian science monitor the other day that said arkansas was one of the two states in the country with the fastest growing hispanic populations and nobody really believes seriously that we re giving every one of our children a world class education but our future as a nation and those of us who are baby boomers the security of our retirement depends on our ability to educate all of our children now here s what i think about this surplus first of all it s only going to materialize if we have a good economic policy and secondly only if we have a good economic policy will any tax cut be worth a plug nickel to anybody so what i think we ought to do is meet the big challenges of the country and i ll just mention three number one we ought to save social security and strengthen medicare and provide a modest prescription drug benefit to the three quarters of the seniors in this country that don t have access to it two we ought to decide how much money we have to invest in our future in everything from education to national defense the environment two things that are important in arkansas veterans health care we have to put some more money into the university teaching hospitals everybody agrees with this up there and we ve got to do something about the farm problem it s about time that we admitted that 95 farm bill as i said when i signed it reluctantly had no safety net and will not work in bad economic times it doesn t work and we ought to fix that but it costs money so we need to figure out how many other things we have to invest in and then the third thing we ought to do in my opinion is to save enough of this surplus for social security and medicare that we actually pay this country s debt off we can be out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835 and if we do that that means in every community represented in this room lower interest rates for businesses for home mortgages for college loans for credit cards for car payments it means that the children in this room will grow up into an economy that is much stronger than it otherwise would have been now can you imagine what people would have said and thought of me if i had gone out in 1992 and said now i want you to vote for me and seven years later i ll come back and we ll have a little talk about what to do with the surplus and getting america out of debt they would have said you know that young fellow from arkansas is a nice young man but he s deluded and we need to send him home but that s where we are today because people like david pryor put their political necks on the line and stood up and did the right thing and i m just telling you i see this now in the broad history of our country a generation gets a chance like this maybe once in a lifetime the world war ii generation they did for us by getting us through the depression and winning the war and saving the world for freedom and now what we re being asked to do is to look down the road and think of the long term interest of america and the strength of our country in good times and bad and do what s right for our children if you save social security and medicare when those of us in the baby boom retire we won t have to burden our children with our retirement and undermine their ability to invest in our grandchildren if you invest in education we ll have a stronger economy and if you pay the debt off we ll sure have a stronger economy by far than we otherwise would have so here s my simple idea i know this sounds simple but why don t we figure out what we ve got to do for social security and medicare why don t we figure out what even the republicans they re up there spending all the money what they want to spend on everything from education to agriculture and veterans and what it takes to pay the debt off there will be some money left and give it back to the american people in a tax cut but this debate it s all backwards you know they re up there giving the money away with no medicare plan nothing to extend the life of the social security trust fund ignoring the commitments that they want to make in everything from defense to veterans to agriculture with no prospect of paying the debt off it is one of the young men that works for me said this is kind of like a family sitting down at dinner and talking about what they re going to do for the summer and deciding they re going to have the vacation of their lifetimes they re going to just blow it out and when they get home from this month long vacation they ll see if they can pay the home mortgage and send the kids to college that s exactly what is going on here and it is not partisan from my point of view i m not running for anything but when i come home here and we put that library up down on the river and i m looking at the next generation of young people and trying to bring people from all over the world here to see our state and to talk about what we did and what we still need to do in our country and in our world i want to go to bed every night knowing that we did everything we could to give the children in this room the 21st century they deserve so i ask all of you as you watch this debate unfold we can t even have this argument about how big the tax cut should be until we have met our fundamental obligations to you and to our future i will work with the republicans keep in mind we passed the balanced budget act in 97 we passed welfare reform in 1996 in the teeth of the election and i would remind you that we have now cut the welfare rolls in half they re the lowest they ve been in 32 years so we are capable of working together up there across party lines but we can t forget about common sense and basic arithmetic and we need to maintain the spirit of kindness and concern and humility that james lee witt has brought to that fema office every day he s been there and i hope that in whatever way you can you will get that message out to the people who listen to you because a lot of people do and we ve got an awful lot riding on it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton6 9 00b bill_clinton mr secretary general mr security council president to the presidents of finland and namibia the co presidents of this remarkable millennial summit first let me say again on behalf of the american people we are deeply honored to host each and every one of you in this largest ever gathering of world leaders for many of you this has been a long and difficult journey and i thank you for coming mr secretary general i think i speak for all here when i thank you for your hospitality your leadership your vision and your inspiration a year ago at this luncheon you looked ahead to the millennial summit and said the following it must go beyond a series of statements it must make decisions setting the agenda for the united nations in the new century you have helped to set that agenda by publishing your millennium report and the report on u n peace operations you have raised the hardest questions about the u n s responsibilities in this new era and given some of the hard answers and you have reminded us that the final answers must come from those with the authority and the resources to help the united nations fulfill its mission in the final analysis all of us in this room and those whom we represent must be up to the challenge if the u n is to succeed this morning i had the opportunity to address the assembly in terms of the challenge of making peace and of making the u n a more effective instrument of peace peace always needs champions who will stand for it because it will always have enemies who will stand against it cervantes once said every man is as heaven made him and sometimes a great deal worse mr secretary general you are a man as heaven made you and sometimes a great deal better you have made the united nations a trusted champion of the values it was founded to defend on the rough terrain of the real world some have called your hope and optimism your lofty goals idealistic i say good for you unless we first imagine the world we want to build we cannot achieve it and so mr secretary general we thank you for your idealism we are glad you are here in this position at this important time in history the world needs you i ask all here to join me in a toast to the secretary general of our united nations dem wjclinton6 9 96 bill_clinton thank you wow well on the way up here governor chiles told me that can you hear we lost our sound can you hear me in the back i ll just there it is on the way up here governor chiles told me that as nearly as they could determine i am the first sitting president ever to come to panama city based on what i saw along the road coming in and the reception you ve given us i d say the others don t know what they re missing i m glad to be here thank you i d like to thank president mcspadden and all the others here at the community college for making me feel so welcome i d like to thank these excellent young musicians who played for us called the optimistics they were great weren t they thank you very much thank you dawn for the power of your example and for your fine introduction but mostly because you embody what the american dream is all about and the role of education in the american dream i know all of you here who are students must have been very proud when dawn roberts was up here speaking but i was proud just to be an american to know that we have people like this and that there are opportunities like this school has given her to make the most of her own life i d like to thank all the military people who serve our country who live in this area and i d like to thank all the people who work for sallie mae here who have worked so hard to make college education affordable i want to thank governor lawton chiles for being my friend of many years and for what he said today a lot of people say well why are you going up there they never vote for democrats and i said well i remember when lawton chiles ran for governor in 1994 the republicans said it was their year and that people in florida would never reelect him he kept coming up here and saying that he was going to remind everybody that the hecoon walked just before the light of dawn and i figured if i came up here maybe i could find myself a hecoon so i m looking around trying to find one i thought i had personally used every down home expression known to man until he said that and i m still learning things from lawton chiles after all of these years i want to say a special word of thanks and honor to your retiring congressman pete peterson he has as all of you know he has served his country magnificently and at great sacrifice to himself and his family for a very long time and i honor him and i was honored to be able to nominate him to be our nation s first ambassador to vietnam since the end of the vietnam war he will be terrific at it now in order for me to see his nomination through i have to get my contract renewed but if i do that s a campaign commitment you can put in the bank he will be the next ambassador to vietnam ladies and gentlemen it s hot in here and i m proud you came to see me and most of what i have to say is preaching to the saved i realize that but i want to emphasize to you why we are here not in panama city but why we are here at this community college because i believe america ought to work the way the community colleges in america work i believe they are the ultimate democratic institution small d open to everybody where everybody has a chance results oriented flexible not bureaucratic working in partnership with the private sector guaranteeing opportunity for everybody who is responsible enough to seek it this is the way america ought to work and this is what i have tried to work on for four years as president i was sick and tired of seeing washington politics dominated by hot air negative charges and i sought to bring an end to the politics of who s to blame and to substitute for that what are we going to do to make america a better place i think it s plain that america is on the right track to the 21st century we got some more information today last month our economy created another 250 000 jobs our unemployment rate as a nation our unemployment rate dropped to 5 1 percent the lowest in seven and a half years wages are going up again for the first time in a decade we have record numbers of new small businesses record numbers of american exports all over the world our auto production is number one again in the world for the first time since the 1970s homeownership at a 15 year high the minimum wage will go into effect the increase in october and it will raise wages for 10 million of the hardest working people in this country i think that s a good thing twenty five million americans including some of you in this audience i ll bet will be helped by the passage of the kennedy kassebaum health care reform bill which says to americans you cannot lose your health insurance or be denied it if you change jobs or just because someone in your family has been sick that s what insurance is for for the first time since before the civil war in the 1840s we have reduced the government s enormous budget deficit in all four years a total of 60 percent for the first time in well over a hundred years we can be proud of that we are moving in the right direction we re on the right track there are 1 8 million fewer people on welfare than there were the day i took the oath of office child support collections are up 40 percent and up 48 percent in florida thank you governor and thank you florida you re doing a good job we have worked hard to make sure that america would be the strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world we have undertaken what anyone would say is the most successful restructuring of military forces in history we have maintained the capabilities the readiness the qualitative edge of our armed forces you heard governor chiles say it but i want to say it again i m glad that the f 22s are going to be headquartered here and i know you will do a good job of helping to maintain america s defense but we still have more to do if we re going to build a bridge to the 21st century that everybody can walk across we ve got to keep economic growth going which means we have to balance the budget without unfair cuts in education in environmental protection in research and technology in medicare and medicaid we ve got to go forward together investing in the things that will make us stronger we have to give the right kind of tax cuts to america s families they ought to be focused on raising children on education on emergency needs like health care on buying that first home and we ought to pay for our tax cuts and not have to cut medicare medicaid or education the environment more and we ought not to let that deficit go up last year before they changed their position our friends in the republican party put out one piece of paper that i agree with they said if we get off this plan to balance the budget and we send a signal that we don t care about it anymore interest rates will go up two percent now people always tell me don t ever talk about balancing the budget when the economy is good people get bored by it they only care about it when the economy is bad you should care about it if interest rates go up two percent because the government is borrowing money when you re trying to borrow it that means two percent on a home mortgage on a car payment on a credit card payment even more important than that it means two percent for every businessperson that wants to borrow money to start a new business to expand a business to become more productive so that more people can be hired and more can get a raise we ve go to keep working to balance the budget in the right way to grow the economy we passed a welfare reform bill that says to everybody on welfare now we ll take care of your children with health care with nutrition with child care but if you re able bodied you have to go to work we ve got to make sure there s work to do for those people we have to create those jobs so they can go to work the crime rate has come down in america for four years in a row but we have to finish the work of putting 100 000 police on the street and we have to continue to work to protect those who are trying to protect us you know places like this part of florida and nearly everyplace in my home state of arkansas when we passed the brady bill and the assault weapons ban the awfulest hue and cry you ever heard went up and all of these hunters were told that we were coming after their rifles the truth is for the first time in american history we ve protected 650 hunting and sporting weapons from any infringement by the government they ve neglected to say that in the political rhetoric two years ago but here we are two years later and every hunting season every hunter in florida and arkansas still using the same rifle unless they told you to get another one but to be fair and completely honest there were some people who couldn t get guns anymore sixty thousand felons fugitives and stalkers could not get them because of the brady bill we were right and they were wrong now for reasons i will never understand our friends in the opposition not only oppose us on that they oppose putting 100 000 police officers on the street folks when hillary and i and al and tipper gore took our bus trip after the convention through all of those little towns in missouri in illinois in kentucky in tennessee i went to some little towns where the police chief came up to me and said mr president because of that 100 000 police program in our little town we ve doubled the size of our police department and we cut the crime rate in half don t let them stop this program this is something that s protecting all americans from the biggest cities to the smallest towns so if you want to build a bridge to the 21st century for everybody then our children have a right to be safe in their homes on their streets in their schools in their future we ve got to build a bridge to the 21st century that enables us to grow the economy and protect the environment at the same time ten million american children still live within four miles of a toxic waste site that s wrong we ve cleaned up more in three years than the previous administrations did in 12 but if you ll give me four more years we ll clean up two thirds of the rest the worst so that our kids will be growing up next to parks not poison and let me say this this is so important to florida you re growing so fast but people come here because it s a beautiful place because they love it you have to find a way to grow and preserve the environment whether it s the quality of water the florida everglades all of the resources you have florida has as big a stake in america finding a way to balance environmental preservation and restoration and economic growth than any other state in america and that is my solemn commitment to you that s what we ve done and we re going to do more of it to build that bridge to the 21st century let me just mention something else when dawn introduced me and talked a little bit about herself i thought to myself i wonder how many nontraditional students there are who have to balance work and school and taking care of kids i bet a lot of you do i never go into a crowd of ordinary americans that i don t hear somebody talk to me about how one of their biggest concerns is how they can succeed in their work life and succeed in raising their children in their home life since most american parents whether they re single parents or in two parent households are both working and parenting i think you can make a compelling case that our country has no more important responsibility than doing everything in our power to help the american people succeed with their first and most important job raising their children and their work both of them now when we pass when the first bill i signed was the family and medical leave law our friends in the other party the leader said oh this is terrible for the economy you will bankrupt the economy this is awful there won t be any small businesses that can live with this well four years later 12 million american families have been able to take a little time off for the birth of a child or a parent s illness without losing their jobs and we have in every single one of these four years started a record number of new small businesses in america and the job growth rate in these four years has been faster than in any republican administration in over 70 years i think that we were right about that so i d like to see us expand the family leave law just a little so that parents could have a little time off to go to regular parent teacher conferences and regular doctor s appointments with their children i think it would be a good thing to do i d like to see parents who have to work and get overtime have the choice of taking that overtime in cash if that s what s best in their family or in time if that s what s best for their family to support work and family and finally let me say the most important thing and the reason i m here today is that we ve got to build a bridge to the 21st century that everyone can walk across to a century where everybody who is responsible and willing to work has a chance to live their own version of the american dream and live up to their god given capacities and there is no way to do it unless we provide in this tough competitive global economy the finest educational opportunities of any nation in the world to every single person who lives in the united states now as lawton chiles will tell you i could keep you here until dawn and then we d see that hecoon talking about education i don t want to do that but i want to tell you just three or four things that i think it s important that we do some of them affect you directly some of them affect you indirectly forty percent of the 8 year olds in this country cannot read a book on their own 40 percent every child needs to be able to read a book by the time they re 8 and in the third grade i propose i propose to support our schools with 30 000 more mentors americorps volunteers college students on work study other volunteers to mobilize a million citizens to help children to read one on one so that by the year 2000 we can say we built a bridge to the future every 8 year old can read a book every 8 year old by himself i believe i bet a lot of you are a lot more proficient on your computer than i am and hook into the internet all the time we re working hard not only to provide every classroom and library in america with adequate computers adequate educational programming and properly trained teachers this summer we started a program with 100 000 teachers to train 500 000 more to make sure the teachers could actually teach the kids and a little bit of it will be the other way around in how to make the most of computers for educational purposes but the real key is hooking all these computers up to the information superhighway to the internet to the worldwide web you think about it this is the first time in the history of the country when kids in the smallest towns in florida and in the poorest inner city neighborhoods anywhere in america can be able to get the same information at the same quality in the same time in the same way as children in the wealthiest school districts in this country it will revolutionize education and lift our entire country and we have to build that bridge to the 21st century and finally i believe we have to make it possible for every single american of any age to go back to school at any time when they need to go back to school starting with making two years of college a community college degree just as universal in four years as a high school diploma is today and we can do that we can do that because thank goodness almost every american is within driving distance of a community college it won t be that hard what we ought to do is to give every family up to two years of a 1 500 refundable tax credit which will cover the typical tuition cost at any community college in the country and that will help us to say to everybody it doesn t matter what age you are it doesn t matter whether other people in your family are going to college doesn t matter what your other problems are through the tax system we ll pay you to go back to a community college if you ll do a good job while you re there work hard learn and go forward and for people that go further i think we ought to give families a tax deduction worth up to 10 000 a year for the cost of tuition at any form of higher education undergraduate graduate you name it we ought to do that as well and encourage people go forward again i say you can only believe in this if you really believe not only in your own potential but the potential of every other american this is a great country not because we are committed to one particular religious view one particular racial view one particular ethnic group this is a country now where everybody can come and we say if you believe in the constitution the bill of rights the declaration of independence if you re willing to work hard and show up tomorrow and play by the rules you re our kind of american you re part of our future we want to build a bridge that you can walk across because we ll be stronger too we ll be stronger too so i want to ask you that s what this election is all about a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past a bridge to the future wide enough that we can all walk across or everybody trying to build their own little bridge and say we re on our own i believe that my wife was right i think it does take a village we re better of when we help each other i believe that there is no country in the world i don t just believe it i know this there is no country in the world as well positioned for the 21st century as the united states but we have to make some fundamental decisions do we really believe in opportunity for all responsibility from all do we really believe that everybody who is willing to work hard has a part in our american community if we believe that and we re willing to build that bridge america s greatest days are still ahead will you help me build that bridge thank you and god bless you thank you dem wjclinton6 9 99 bill_clinton thank you very much let me just begin by saying how grateful i am for the wonderful reception you have given me you know i can t tell you how much i appreciate the kindness and friendship that you have given to me and my family my vice president and his family and our administration through two presidential elections and six and a half years of our 8 year term i thank you i want to thank congressman sisisky and delegate crittendon here who gave a pretty good reason for keeping senator robb in office and i hope you listened to her i want you to know what we were doing before we came here we were actually working on a school to highlight one of the things i m trying to get this congress to do which is to pass a bill which would help us to build or modernize 6 000 new schools so our kids whether they re rich or poor will have world class places to go to school in so i want to thank the secretary of education the national head of the afl cio john sweeney and secretary riley and the leaders of our two great teachers organizations the nea and the aft bob chase and sandy feldman they re all over here with me give them a hand now you know somebody asked me the day before yesterday why i was coming down here they say you re not running for anything anymore you can t and i said well yes but i haven t lost my memory and those people gave me two great terms as president i wanted to go down and thank them and these two guys are i want you to take care of bobby scott he is a great resource for you and for the country i want you you know every time senator robb runs he has a challenging race you know why because he sticks up for you that s why because he makes the hard decisions for the long run because he was one of those guys who stood up in 1993 we didn t have a vote to spare if he had changed his vote i would have lost that economic plan that s given us 19 4 million jobs and the biggest surplus in history and they tried to beat him two years later because he stood up for you because he believes we all ought to go forward together and i ve known him for nearly 20 years now and he s always standing up so next time the election comes around i want you to stand up for him will you do it now let me say this this is labor day so i want to make some remarks about labor there are a lot of big issues in this country today but when i got elected president it was after 12 years of people in the other party running the white house saying they were pro business and good for the economy and we had the worst recession since the great depression and the biggest deficit in history and we quadrupled the debt in 12 years i said i m pro business but i m pro labor too i don t think you can help the economy if you hurt the working people guess what we beat off all their efforts to weaken unions we beat back all their efforts to hurt the fundamental interests of working people we passed the family and medical leave act we raised the minimum wage once we helped people with child care who were working more and we got 19 4 million jobs record numbers of new small businesses every year the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded it works if you take care of ordinary people it works so on this labor day as we go back to work i d like to just mention some things that relate to you number one we ought to raise the minimum wage again number two we ought to do a better job of enforcing the law that says there should be equal pay for equal work between men and women number three we ought to do more to help workers with children at home working full time succeed by helping them with their child care expenses more number four we ought to give investors people with money the same tax incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods in america we give them to invest overseas in poor neighborhoods because we all know that not every neighborhood has been fully benefitted by this economic expansion i ve been out there across the country in the cities in the small towns in the rural areas on the indian reservations up and down the mississippi river you know as well as i do that in every part of america there are still people in places who would work or work harder and better if they had a chance to do so and i am determined to see that we don t stop this until everybody s involved number four we ought before we have this big tax cut the republicans have proposed we ought to take care of the big challenges facing america we ought to make sure social security and medicare are going to be all right when all the baby boomers retire we ve got the largest number of children in our schools in history and they re more diverse than ever before we ought to make sure they ve got a world class education before we give the money away and i think that we ought to get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 before we give the money away now let me tell you why that ought to matter to you because if the government is not borrowing money that means that you re not in competition with the government that means you can borrow cheaper that means home mortgages are lower that means car payments are lower that means credit card payments are lower that means college loan payments are lower that means more businesses more jobs a stronger economy for the future that s why i want to get america out of debt because it s good for little people you know i ll be retired pretty soon debt will be good for me i ve got a good pension i can buy those government bonds all day long i can make money out of debt you ll make money if we get out of debt and your interest rates are lower and the economy grows more and i want these children to have a good economy to grow up into so you just remember this nothing that has happened in this country in the last six and a half years that i have achieved as president could have been possible without others beginning with the people that work with me starting with the vice president going to the people in congress like senator robb and bobby scott and norm sisisky and going all the way down to the grass roots in america the people like you that voted for us so on this labor day as you leave here if somebody asks you what did the president say tell them he said we had an idea and it works that helping ordinary people works and it requires people like you to be good citizens and keep people like them in office and if you do it will keep right on working thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton7 1 01 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen first let me say what a wonderful thing it is for hillary and chelsea and me to be here with al and tipper and with all of you i want to be brief today because this is hillary s day and it s also a day when she very much wanted the vice president and mrs gore to come here and receive from you the kind of welcome that i knew you d give them and that they deserved i m so proud of them you know i m kind of tickled about living in new york i feel the way garrison keillor does about lake wobegone i was up here listening to that great church choir and then our friends jessye norman and toni morrison and billy joel and how magnificent they were then we got the score in the ball game and i thought here i am in new york where all the artists writers and athletic teams are above average and all the voters get their votes counted so i thank you i thank judith hope for her strong leadership i thank charlie rangel for eight years of wonderful partnership i thank chuck schumer for taking me into his home in 1992 when i was running the first time with his wonderful wife and then for taking me through queens letting me see people and places i might never have otherwise seen and for running in 1998 which everybody thought would be a bad year it turned out to be a pretty good one thanks to chuck schumer s guts and drive and he is great i m looking forward i hate it that i ve got to wait two more years but i m looking forward to charlie rangel being the chairman of the ways and means committee when that happens you mark my words it ll be the best show in america off broadway i do want to say just very briefly a serious word of appreciation to the vice president and to mrs gore i thank her for from the time of the first bus ride that as al said we took here keeping the rest of us in a good humor always seeing the glass as half full always caring about our families as well as our politics and always sticking up for people who others had forgotten whether they were people with mental illnesses or homeless people or others reminding me always that i had to be their president too i am grateful to her and as i ve said many times and as has already been said here today there s no question that in the history of the republic no person has had such a positive impact on the american people from the office of vice president that al gore has had it s not even close not even close i told somebody he has more influence and did more things whether it was manage our technology policy our environmental policy giving all the poor schools the opportunity to hook up to the internet helping to supervise our reorganization of the space program trying to do something about all the terrible congestion at the airports dealing with big chunks of our foreign policy nobody ever had so much responsibility before and i was showing up for work every day too i m really proud of him in ways that you will never know he has shown us all in the last two months under circumstances which have never before existed in our country and i pray to god never will again how we should all behave as americans and patriots i honor him for my friendship for his advice for his leadership for what he s done for america for eight years but in the last eight weeks he s shown us the strength of character that very few of us could emulate if we were in the same circumstances now i would also like to thank the people of new york who helped hillary to win this race she did as chuck schumer said win it the old fashioned way she earned it but she wouldn t have earned it if you hadn t helped her if you had shut her out and shut her down and turned away from her i d like to thank the people who helped her on long island where the going was toughest i d like to thank the people who helped her in upstate new york and proved it wasn t so republican after all i d like to thank those of you who had me to your counties in upstate new york i had a lot of fun being there and i hope we all did some good together i want to thank the people in this magnificent city for how good you have been to hillary and to all of us i want to thank you for making chelsea feel welcome she did a pretty good job for her mother too up here campaigning i think made a lot of votes i think and i want to thank you for making it possible for me to give my wife good advice about how to run in new york everybody said how mean it was going to be do you remember what you did to me in the democratic primary here in 1992 i said hillary look these people are really good but they just want to see how bad you can take a beating and they will beat you up and beat up you and beat you up and take off your shoes and make you walk on coals make you lie down on a bed of pins and needles but if you just keep smiling they ll know you got it and they will come i m so proud of her because she not only laid out a vision for what she wanted to do she did it in a way that was consistently big and generous that didn t descend to the level of her attackers and when new york did to her what new york does and she passed then you came and i told her all along she can tell you i told her for 16 months i said trust me if you are just even on the weekend before the election you re going to win big they will come to you in droves if you just be big and stay right and you proved that i was right about you and i am grateful but i had that awful primary experience to shore up my gratitude and know what was going to happen now the last thing i d like to say is this in 13 days at high noon i m going to give up being president wait a minute hey you can boo about the nature of the transfer but not about me giving it up i ve had my time and i had a very good time and what i want to remind you of is that politics is not about the politicians it s about the people and i am honored to become a citizen of new york i will do my best to be a good one and if you need to call me sort of a de facto case worker for your senator here i want to get around the state and go upstate and do what i can to help hillary fulfill the commitments that she and chuck have made to help the upstate economy and to help the neighborhoods here and i want to thank senator schumer and congressman rangel for passing the new markets initiative al gore and i worked so hard on to build on the empowerment zone proposal that al ran so well for nearly eight years to keep the economy going so we want to work i want to be a good citizen to you but i want you to remember that hillary ran and won because of you not because of her because of your children and your future and what we want to do together so the last thing i want to ask you to do is i want you to keep your heart burning for two years to make charlie the chairman of the ways and means committee i want you to remember not only for four years but for the rest of your life what happened in the elections 2000 and what al gore did in the eight weeks afterwards but i want most of all for you to remember that america s work and new york s work is never done and i want you to help my wife do a good job at what she ran for which was to give people like you and people outside this hall who will never be in a meeting like this the chance to make the most of their lives and their children s lives that s what i want to ask you more you ve given her a great gift now help her use it for the purpose it was intended last wednesday when hillary was sworn into the senate i believe that chelsea and i were the two happiest people on the planet chelsea because she loves her mother and she s proud of her me for the same reasons but also because when i met hillary nearly 30 years ago now two more months 30 years ago i thought that she had more capacity and more heart for public service than anybody i had ever met and i worried when we started our lives together that somehow i would limit her service your giving her this chance in my mind has reaffirmed the wisdom she made in moving to be with me so long ago and all the many roles she s played in giving to others and never asking for anything for herself until she made this race and i can tell you this you will not be disappointed because i was right about her 30 years ago thank you god bless you now mr vice president please reenact the ceremony dem wjclinton7 1 01a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you i want to thank all of you for making me feel so welcome tonight and also for making hillary and chelsea feel welcome i thank michael sonnenfeldt who like me is going out after eight years and will doubtless find some other useful activity but he has done a superb job and i m very grateful to him i thank my friend jack bendheim for his many kindnesses to me and to hillary yesterday he had a birthday and now like me he s 54 unlike me he has enough children to be elected president of the united states and he s had a wonderful family and a wonderful life and i m delighted that he s so active in the israel policy forum i d like to thank judith stern peck for making me feel so welcome and for her leadership i thank lesley stahl it s good to see you and thank you for your kind remarks i thank the many members of congress who are here and also the members of my middle east peace team secretary albright and sandy berger and others have been introduced but secretary dan glickman is here and kerry kennedy cuomo is here and i thank them for being here i want to thank the new york officials who are here carl mccall mark green and any others who may be in the crowd for your many kindnesses to me over the last eight years new york has been great to me and al gore and even greater to my wife on election day so i thank you for that we just reenacted her swearing in at madison square garden and i was reminded of one of the many advantages of living in new york jessye norman sang toni morrison read and billy joel sang meanwhile at least at half time the giants were ahead and so i said i felt sort of like garrison keillor did about lake wobegone i was glad to be in new york where all the writers artists and sports teams were above average and all the votes were always counted let me also say a word of warm welcome and profound respect to the speaker of the knesset speaker burg for his wonderful and kind comments to me and to cabinet secretary herzog for his message from the government of israel i want to say a little more about that in a moment i want to congratulate dwayne andreas my good friend i wish he were here tonight and thank him for his many kindnesses to me congratulations louis perlmutter susan stern who has been such a great friend to hillary and you gave a good talk tonight i think you ve got a real future in this business and your mother sat by me and she gave you a good grade too and alan solomont who has done as much for me as i suppose any american and he and susan and their children have been great friends and i thank you for what you ve done sir i thank all of you i d also like to say how much i appreciated and was moved by the words of prime minister barak he was dealt the hard hand by history and he came to office with absolute conviction that in the end israel could not be secure unless a just and lasting peace could be reached with its neighbors beginning with the palestinians that if that turned out not to be possible then the next best thing was to be as strong as possible and as effective in the use of that strength but his knowledge of war has fed a passion for peace and his understanding of the changing technology of war has made him more passionate not because he thinks the existence of israel is less secure if anything it s more secure but because the sophisticated weapons available to terrorists today mean even though they still lose they can exact a higher price along the way i ve been in enough political fights in my life to know that sometimes you just have to do the right thing and it may work out and it may not most people thought i had lost my mind when we passed the economic plan to get rid of the deficit in 1993 and no one in the other party voted for it and they just talked about how it would bring the world to an end and america s economy would be a disaster i think the only republican who thought it would work was alan greenspan he was relieved of the burden of having to say anything about it but no dilemma i have ever faced approximates in difficulty or comes close to the choice that prime minister barak had to make when he took office he realized that he couldn t know for sure what the final intentions of the palestinian leadership were without testing them he further realized that even if the intentions were there there was a lot of competition among the palestinians and from outside forces from people who are enemies of peace because they don t give a rip how the ordinary palestinians have to live and they re pursuing a whole different agenda he knew nine things could go wrong and only one thing could go right but he promised himself that he would have to try and as long as he knew israel in the end could defend itself and maintain its security he would keep taking risks and that s what he s done down to these days there may be those who disagree with him but he has demonstrated as much bravery in the office of prime minister as he ever did on the field of battle and no one should ever question that now i imagine this has been a tough time for those of you who have been supporting the ipf out of conviction for a long time all the dreams we had in 93 that were revived when we had the peace with jordan revived again when we had the wye river accords that was i think the most interesting peace talks i was ever involved in my strategy was the same used to break prisoners of war i just didn t let anybody sleep for nine days and finally out of exhaustion we made a deal just so people could go home and go to bed i ve been looking for an opportunity to employ it again ever since there have been a lot of positive things and i think it s worth remembering that there have been positive developments along the way but this is heartbreaking what we ve been through these last few months for all of you who have believed for eight years in the oslo process all of you who s hearts soared on september 13 1993 when yasser arafat and yitzhak rabin signed that agreement for over three months we have lived through a tragic cycle of violence that has cost hundreds of lives it has shattered the confidence in the peace process it has raised questions in some people s minds about whether palestinians and israelis could ever really live and work together support each other s peace and prosperity and security it s been a heartbreaking time for me too but we have done our best to work with the parties to restore calm to end the bloodshed and to get back to working on an agreement to address the underlying causes that continuously erupt in conflicts whatever happens in the next two weeks i ve got to serve i think it s appropriate for me tonight before a group of americans and friends from the middle east who believe profoundly in the peace process and have put their time and heart and money where their words are to reflect on the lessons i believe we ve all learned over the last eight years and how we can achieve the long sought peace from my first day as president we have worked to advance interests in the middle east that are long standing and historically bipartisan i was glad to hear of senator hagel s recitation of president elect bush s commitment to peace in the middle east those historic commitments include an ironclad commitment to israel s security and a just comprehensive and lasting agreement between the palestinians and israelis along the way since 93 through the positive agreements that have been reached between those two sides through the peace between israel and jordan through last summer s withdrawal from lebanon in which israel fulfilled its part of implementing u n security counsel resolution 425 along this way we have learned some important lessons not only because of the benchmarks of progress because of the occasional eruption of terrorism bombing death and then these months of conflict i think these lessons have to guide any effort now or in the future to reach a comprehensive peace here s what i think they are most of you probably believed in them up to the last three months i still do first the arab israeli conflict is not just a morality play between good and evil it is a conflict with a complex history whose resolution requires balancing the needs of both sides including respect for their national identities and religious beliefs second there is no place for violence and no military solution to this conflict the only path to a just and durable resolution is through negotiation third there will be no lasting peace or regional stability without a strong and secure israel secure enough to make peace strong enough to deter the adversaries which will still be there even if a peace is made in complete good faith and clearly that is why the united states must maintain its commitment to preserving israel s qualitative edge in military superiority fourth talks must be accompanied by acts acts which show trust and partnership for goodwill at the negotiating table cannot survive forever ill intent on the ground and it is important that each side understands how the other reads actions for example on the one hand the tolerance of violence and incitement of hatred in classrooms and the media in the palestinian communities or on the other hand humiliating treatment on the streets or at checkpoints by israelis are real obstacles to even getting people to talk about building a genuine peace fifth in the resolution of remaining differences whether they come today or after several years of heartbreak and bloodshed the fundamental painful but necessary choices will almost certainly remain the same whenever the decision is made the parties will face the same history the same geography the same neighbors the same passions the same hatreds this is not a problem time will take care of and i would just like to go off the script here because a lot of you have more personal contacts than i do with people that will be dealing with this for a long time to come whatever happens in the next two weeks among the really profound and difficult problems of the world that i have dealt with i find that they tend to fall into two categories and if i could use sort of a medical analogy some are like old wounds with scabs on them and some are like abscessed teeth what do i mean by that old wounds with scabs eventually will heal if you just leave them alone and if you fool with them too much you might open the scab and make them worse abscessed teeth however will only get worse if you leave them alone and if you wait and wait and wait they ll just infect the whole rest of your mouth northern ireland i believe is becoming more like the scab there are very difficult things if you followed my trip over there you know i was trying to help them resolve some of their outstanding problems and we didn t get it all done but what i really wanted to do was to remind people of the benefits of peace and to keep everybody in a good frame of mind and going on so that all the politicians know that if they really let the wheel run off over there the people will throw them out on their ears now why is that because the irish republic is now the fastest growing economy in europe and northern ireland is the fastest growing economy within the united kingdom so the people are benefitting from peace and they can live with the fact that they can t quite figure out what to do about the police force and the reconciliation of the various interests and passions of the protestants and catholics and the other three or four things because the underlying reality has changed their lives so even though i wish i could solve it all eventually it will heal if it just keeps going in the same direction the middle east is not like that why because there are all these independent actors that is independent of the palestinian authority and not under the direct control of any international legal body who don t want this peace to work so that even if we can get an agreement and the palestinian authority works as hard as they can and the israelis works as hard as they can we re all going to have to pitch in send in an international force like we did in the sinai and hang tough because there are enemies of peace out there number one number two because the enemies of peace know they can drive the israelis to close the borders if they can blow up enough bombs they do it periodically to make sure that the palestinians in the street cannot enjoy the benefits of peace that have come to the people in northern ireland so as long as they can keep the people miserable and they can keep the fundamental decisions from being made they still have a hope the enemies of peace of derailing the whole thing that s why it s more like an abscessed tooth the fundamental realities are not going to be changed by delays and that s why i said what i did about ehud barak i know that i don t think it s appropriate for the united states to deal with anybody else s politics but i know why you can t expect poll ratings to be very good when the voters in the moment wonder if they re going to get peace or security and think they can no longer have both and may have to choose one i understand that but i m telling you the reason he has continued to push ahead on this is that he has figured out this is one of those political problems that is like the abscessed tooth the realities are not going to change we can wait until all these handsome young people at this table are the same age as the honorees tonight and me we can wait until they ve got kids their age and we ve got a whole lot more bodies and a lot more funerals a lot more crying and a lot more hatred and i ll swear the decisions will still be the same ones that will have to be made that have to be made today that s the fundamental deal here and this is a speech i have given i might add to all my israeli friends who question what we have done and to the palestinians and in private god forgive me my language is sometimes somewhat more graphic than it has been tonight but anybody that ever kneeled at the grave of a person who died in the middle east knows that what we ve been through these last three months is not what yitzhak rabin died for and not what i went to gaza two years ago to speak to the palestinian national council for either for that matter so those are the lessons i think are still operative and i m a little concerned that we could draw the wrong lessons from this tragic still relatively brief chapter in the history of the middle east the violence does not demonstrate that the quest for peace has gone too far or too fast it demonstrates what happens when you ve got a problem that is profoundly difficult and you never quite get to the end so there is no settlement no resolution anxiety prevailed and at least some people never get any concrete benefits out of it and i believe that the last few months demonstrate the futility of force or terrorism as an ultimate solution that s what i believe i think the last few months show that unilateralism will exacerbate not abate mutual hostility i believe that the violence confirms the need to do more to prepare both publics for the requirements of peace not to condition people for the so called glory of further conflict now what are we going to do now the first priority obviously has got to be to drastically reduce the current cycle of violence but beyond that on the palestinian side there must be an end to the culture of violence and the culture of incitement that since oslo has not gone unchecked young children still are being educated to believe in confrontation with israel and multiple militia like groups carry and use weapons with impunity voices of reason in that kind of environment will be drowned out too often by voices of revenge such conduct is inconsistent with the palestinian leadership s commitment to oslo s nonviolent path to peace and its persistence sends the wrong message to the israeli people and makes it much more difficult for them to support their leaders in making the compromises necessary to get a lasting agreement for their part the israeli people also must understand that they re creating a few problems too that the settlement enterprise and building bypass roads in the heart of what they already know will one day be part of a palestinian state is inconsistent with the oslo commitment that both sides negotiate a compromise and restoring confidence requires the palestinians being able to lead a normal existence and not be subject to daily often humiliating reminders that they lack basic freedom and control over their lives these too make it harder for the palestinians to believe the commitments made to them will be kept can two peoples with this kind of present trouble and troubling history still conclude a genuine and lasting peace i mean if i gave you this as a soap opera you would say they re going to divorce court but they can t because they share such a small piece of land with such a profound history of importance to more than a billion people around the world so i believe with all my heart not only that they can but that they must at camp david i saw israeli and palestinian negotiators who knew how many children each other had who knew how many grandchildren each other had who knew how they met their spouses who knew what their family tragedies were who trusted each other in their word it was almost shocking to see what could happen and how people still felt on the ground when i saw how their leaders felt about each other and the respect and the confidence they had in each other when they were talking the alternative to getting this peace done is being played out before our very eyes but amidst the agony i will say again there are signs of hope and let me try to put this into what i think is a realistic context camp david was a transformative event because the two sides faced the core issue of their dispute in a forum that was official for the first time and they had to debate the tradeoffs required to resolve the issues just as oslo forced israelis and palestinians to come to terms with each other s existence the discussions of the past six months have forced them to come to terms with each other s needs and the contours of a peace that ultimately they will have to reach that s why prime minister barak i think has demonstrated real courage and vision in moving toward peace in difficult circumstances while trying to find a way to continue to protect israel s security and vital interests so that s a fancy way of saying we know what we have to do and we ve got a mess on our hands so where do we go from here given the impasse and the tragic deterioration on the ground a couple of weeks ago both sides asked me to present my ideas so i put forward parameters that i wanted to be guide toward a comprehensive agreement parameters based on eight years of listening carefully to both sides and hearing them describe with increasing clarity their respective grievances and needs both prime minister barak and chairman arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts both have expressed some reservations at their request i am using my remaining time in office to narrow the differences between the parties to the greatest degree possible for which i deserve no applause believe me it beats packing up all my old books the parameters i put forward contemplate a settlement in response to each side s essential needs if not to their utmost desires a settlement based on sovereign homelands security peace and dignity for both israelis and palestinians these parameters don t begin to answer every question they just narrow the questions that have to be answered here they are first i think there can be no genuine resolution to the conflict without a sovereign viable palestinian state that accommodates israeli s security requirements and the demographic realities that suggests palestinian sovereignty over gaza the vast majority of the west bank the incorporation into israel of settlement blocks with the goal of maximizing the number of settlers in israel while minimizing the land annex for palestine to be viable it must be a geographically contiguous state now the land annexed into israel into settlement blocks should include as few palestinians as possible consistent with the logic of two separate homelands and to make the agreement durable i think there will have to be some territorial swaps and other arrangements second a solution will have to be found for the palestinian refugees who have suffered a great deal particularly some of them a solution that allows them to return to a palestinian state that will provide all palestinians with a place they can safely and proudly call home all palestinian refugees who wish to live in this homeland should have the right to do so all others who want to find new homes whether in their current locations or in third countries should be able to do so consistent with those countries sovereign decisions and that includes israel all refugees should receive compensation from the international community for their losses and assistance in building new lives now you all know what the rub is that was a lot of artful language for saying that you cannot expect israel to acknowledge an unlimited right of return to present day israel and at the same time to give up gaza and the west bank and have the settlement blocks as compact as possible because of where a lot of these refugees came from we cannot expect israel to make a decision that would threaten the very foundations of the state of israel and would undermine the whole logic of peace and it shouldn t be done but i have made it very clear that the refugees will be a high priority and that the united states will take a lead in raising the money necessary to relocate them in the most appropriate manner if the government of israel or a subsequent government of israel ever will be in charge of their immigration policy just as we and the canadians and the europeans and others who would offer palestinians a home would be they would be obviously free to do that and i think they ve indicated that they would do that to some extent but there cannot be an unlimited language in an agreement that would undermine the very foundations of the israeli state or the whole reason for creating the palestinian state so that s what we re working on third there will be no peace and no peace agreement unless the israeli people have lasting security guarantees these need not and should not come at the expense of palestinian sovereignty or interfere with palestinian territorial integrity so my parameters rely on an international presence in palestine to provide border security along the jordan valley and to monitor implementation of the final agreement they rely on a non militarized palestine a phased israeli withdrawal to address israeli security needs in the jordan valley and other essential arrangements to ensure israel s ability to defend itself fourth i come to the issue of jerusalem perhaps the most emotional and sensitive of all it is a historic cultural and political center for both israelis and palestinians a unique city sacred to all three monotheistic religions and i believe the parameters i have established flow from four fair and logical propositions first jerusalem should be an open and undivided city with assured freedom of access and worship for all it should encompass the internationally recognized capitals of two states israel and palestine second what is arab should be palestinian for why would israel want to govern in perpetuity the lives of hundreds of thousands of palestinians third what is jewish should be israeli that would give rise to a jewish jerusalem larger and more vibrant than any in history fourth what is holy to both requires a special care to meet the needs of all i was glad to hear what the speaker said about that no peace agreement will last if not premised on mutual respect for the religious beliefs and holy shrines of jews muslims and christians i have offered formulations on the haram ash shareef and the area holy to the jewish people an area which for 2 000 years as i said at camp david has been the focus of jewish yearning that i believed fairly addressed the concerns of both sides fifth and finally any agreement will have to mark the decision to end the conflict for neither side can afford to make these painful compromises only to be subjected to further demands they are both entitled to know that if they take the last drop of blood out of each other s turnip that s it it really will have to be the end of the struggle that has pitted palestinians and israelis against one another for too long and the end of the conflict must manifest itself with concrete acts that demonstrate a new attitude and a new approach by palestinians and israelis toward each other and by other states in the region toward israel and by the entire region toward palestine to help it get off to a good start the parties experience with interim accords has not always been happy too many deadlines missed too many commitments unfulfilled on both sides so for this to signify a real end of the conflict there must be effective mechanisms to provide guarantees of implementation that s a lot of stuff isn t it it s what i think is the outline of a fair agreement let me say this i am well aware that it will entail real pain and sacrifices for both sides i am well aware that i don t even have to run for reelection in the united states on the basis of these ideas i have worked for eight years without laying such ideas down i did it only when both sides asked me to and when it was obvious that we had come to the end of the road and somebody had to do something to break out of the impasse now i still think the benefits of the agreement based on these parameters far outweigh the burdens for the people of israel they are an end to conflict secure and defensible borders the incorporation of most of the settlers into israel and the jewish capital of jerusalaem recognized by all not just the united states by everybody in the world it s a big deal and it needs to be done for the palestinian people it means the freedom to determine their own future on their own land a new life for the refugees an independent and sovereign state with al quds as its capital recognized by all and for america it means that we could have new flags flying over new embassies in both these capitals now that the sides have accepted the parameters with reservations what s going to happen well each side will try to do a little better than i did you know that s just natural but a peace viewed as imposed by one party upon the other that puts one side up and the other down rather than both ahead contains the seeds of its own destruction let me say those who believe that my ideas can be altered to one party s exclusive benefit are mistaken i think to press for more will produce less there can be no peace without compromise now i don t ask israelis or palestinians to agree with everything i said if they can come up with a completely different agreement it would suit me just fine but i doubt it i have said what i have out of a profound lifetime commitment to and love for the state of israel out of a conviction that the palestinian people have been ignored or used as political footballs by others for long enough and they ought to have a chance to make their own life with dignity and out of a belief that in the homeland of the world s three great religions that believe we are all the creatures of one god we ought to be able to prove that one person s win is not by definition another s loss that one person s dignity is not by definition another s humiliation that one person s work of god is not by definition another s heresy there has to be a way for us to find a truth we can share there has to be a way for us to reach those young palestinian kids who unlike the young people in this audience don t imagine a future in which they would ever put on clothes like this and sit at a dinner like this there has to be a way for us to say to them struggle and pain and destruction and self destruction are way overrated and not the only option there has to be a way for us to reach those people in israel who have paid such a high price and believe frankly that people who embrace the ideas i just outlined are nuts because israel is a little country and this agreement would make it smaller to understand that the world in which we live and the technology of modern weaponry no longer make defense primarily a matter of geography and of politics and the human feeling and the interdependence and the cooperation and the shared values and the shared interests are more important and worth the considered risk especially if the united states remains committed to the military capacity of the state of israel so i say to the palestinians there will always be those who are sitting outside in the peanut gallery of the middle east urging you to hold out for more or to plant one more bomb but all the people who do that they re not the refugees languishing in those camps you are they re not the ones with children growing up in poverty whose income is lower today than it was the day we had the signing on the white house lawn in 1993 you are all the people that are saying to the palestinian people stay on the path of no are people that have a vested interest in the failure of the peace process that has nothing to do with how those kids in gaza and the west bank are going to grow up and live and raise their own children to the citizens of israel who have returned to an ancient homeland after 2 000 years whose hopes and dreams almost vanished in the holocaust who have hardly had one day of peace and quiet since the state of israel was created i understand i believe something of the disillusionment the anger the frustration that so many feel when just at the moment peace seemed within reach all this violence broke out and raised the question of whether it is ever possible the fact is that the people of israel dreamed of a homeland the dream came through but when they came home the land was not all vacant your land is also their land it is the homeland of two people and therefore there is no choice but to create two states and make the best of it if it happens today it will be better than if it happens tomorrow because fewer people will die and after it happens the motives of those who continue the violence will be clearer to all than they are today today israel is closer than ever to ending a 100 year long era of struggle it could be israel s finest hour and i hope and pray that the people of israel will not give up the hope of peace now i ve got 13 days and i ll do what i can we re working with egypt and the parties to try to end the violence i m sending dennis ross to the region this week i met with both sides this week i hope we can really do something and i appreciate more than i can say the kind personal things that you said about me but here s what i want you to think about new york has its own high tech corridor called silicon alley the number one foreign recipient of venture capital from silicon alley is israel palestinians who have come to the united states to chile to canada to europe have done fabulously well dem wjclinton7 1 01b bill_clinton reverend wogaman staff choir congregation of this wonderful church i would like to thank many people in this audience but if i might a few by name my good friend bishop may and mrs may thank you for being here my councilman mr evans and mrs evans thank you so much for your friendship and for being here senator max cleland my friend of many years before either one of us were in our present positions surprising all but our mothers by our success i am so proud of you sir and i thank you for all you have done i think of this church when reading the words of paul that hillary cited earlier speaking of his gratitude to the thessalonians or constantly remembering their work of faith their labor of love their steadfastness of hope i thank foundry for all that and for being a church home to my family these last eight years i thank especially those of you who were so kind to chelsea over the years who provided her opportunities to participate in the life of the church especially in the appalachia service project from which she learned so much i thank those of you who have taken special care to befriend hillary and to support her and i thank you especially for the wonderful welcome you gave her last week when she came back here for the first time as a senator to be i thank you all for your prayers and your welcome to all of us in the storm and sunshine of these last eight years i will always have wonderful memories of every occasion where we passed the peace for all the people young and old who came up to me and said a kind word of welcome to remind me that no matter what was going on in washington d c at the moment there was a real world out there with real people and real hearts and minds reaffirming the timeless wisdom of de tocqueville s observation so long ago that america is great because america is good you cannot imagine the peace the comfort the strength i have drawn from my sundays here i want to thank you for a few other things for the social mission of this church especially for your outreach to the homeless which i have been honored to support and for your constant support of my efforts to bring peace in the middle east and kosovo and northern ireland and the other trouble spots of the world where there are people suffering who have no money or power too often overlooked by great nations with great interests i want to thank you for making foundry a true community church welcoming christians from all races and all nations with all kinds of abilities and disabilities some seen and some not i thank you especially for the kindness and courage of foundry s welcome to gay and lesbian christians people who should not feel outside the family of god i thank you for your support for the city of washington for its economic and social revitalization which i have done my best to speed and for giving its citizens the political equality and statehood i have always believed they deserve as my license plate shows and will for at least a couple more weeks especially i would like to thank reverend wogaman for being my pastor and friend my counselor and teacher most of you know that for more than two years now he and two other minister friends of mine have shared the burden of meeting with me on a weekly basis it has been an immense blessing to me and to my service as president two weeks from yesterday at high noon i will relinquish my office doing so with a heart filled with gratitude gratitude to the american people for the chance to serve and to leave our country with more opportunity stronger bonds of community and a more positive impact in the larger world at the dawn of a new century and a whole new aspect of human affairs our nation has come a long way together these last eight years and i am profoundly grateful to have had the opportunity to play a part in it in the years ahead america may have presidents who do this job better than i have but i really doubt we ll ever have another one who enjoyed it more than i have well those are my reflections i didn t know what the title of my sermon was until i picked up the program as i walked into church what do i anticipate i anticipate that my christian bearing will be tested by a return to commercial air travel where i will reap the rewards of not having succeeded in one of the things i tried very hard to do which was to end all those backlogs i anticipate that for some several months i will be disoriented when i walk into large rooms because no one will be playing a song anymore i look forward to finding out whether john quincy adams was right when he said there is nothing so pathetic in life as an ex president or whether instead of his words the life of john quincy adams and the life of jimmy carter prove exactly the reverse in the next chapter of my life i will do my best to use the incredible opportunities my country has given me to be a good citizen here at home and around the world to advance the causes i believe in and to lift the fortunes and hopes of those who deserve a better hand than they have been dealt whether in africa asia latin america or appalachia the mississippi delta the inner cities or the native american reservations i will try every day to remember as apparently for the first time in my life i will be able to earn a sizeable income that christ admonished us that our lives will be judged by how we do unto the least of our neighbors i will also do my best to keep working for peace and reconciliation among people across their differences to find ways to get people to move beyond tolerance to celebration of those differences i know it s sort of out of fashion but i ve kind of grown impatient with the word tolerance because tolerance implies that someone who s better than someone else is decent enough to put up with them and i think we need to move beyond that we are moving into the most incredible era of human affairs the world has ever known in terms of our interdependence our capacity to relate to people across national and cultural and religious lines and our ability to use these breathtaking advances in technology with advances in bio medical sciences to lengthen and improve lives in ways that previously are literally unimaginable and yet the biggest threat we face is the oldest problem of humankind the fear of the other which can so easily lead to hatred and de humanization and violence but even if it doesn t go that far limits the lives all of us might otherwise live and i have spent a lot of time as you might have noticed in a reasonably combative arena i am not without my competitive instincts a lot of days i thought just showing up was an act of competition but i do believe in the end when all is said and done what matters most is what we did that was common to our humanity and somehow i will do everything i can to advance that simple but powerful idea at home and around the world i will also do my best to support my senator and our daughter and i will try to keep learning and growing working to follow the example of the mythic parsifal a good man slowly wise thanks to the good people of new york as phil said this is not really a goodbye but the beginning of a new chapter in our lives with foundry but it is a new chapter so let me thank you again for letting all of us hillary chelsea and me make this part of our life s journey with you for your constant reminder in ways large and small that though we have all fallen short of the glory we are all redeemed by faith in a loving god god bless you dem wjclinton7 1 98 bill_clinton thank you very much welcome to the white house you know i was listening to the vice president and tipper and hillary speak and i was looking at all these people out here and i was thinking about all the great joys of being president and one of the greatest joys of being president is that you get to stand up and make an announcement on which other people have done all the work i want to begin by thanking the cabinet especially secretary shalala who has done so much work on this but i thank them all i thank the congress not only the women s caucus of republican and democratic women in the congress but the few errant men who are here and those who are not here who care so passionately about this issue in the senate and in the house i thank the children and families who are here and the child advocates who are here i was looking around this room there are some people in this room that i have been listening to on this issue for way over 20 years now they have waited a long time for this day i thank the gores you know they started their family conference every year in nashville even before we began our partnership together and it was a brilliant and unique idea the idea of every year focusing on the american family in some aspect of challenge or opportunity and bringing people in from all over america to talk about it there s really no precedent for it as far as i know in our public policy and it s a remarkable contribution that they have made and of course i thank my wife who has been talking to me about all these things for more than 25 years now and is sitting there thinking that i finally got around to doing what she has been telling me to do i was thinking it would be nice to have something new to talk about for the next 25 years that s one of the major reasons for this event today and even if the rest of you can t appreciate it as much as i can you ll just have to live with the truth but mostly i thank these children for they remind us of our fundamental obligations as americans and as human beings you know throughout our history our founders told us that they organized our country in order to form a more perfect union and one of the most important ways we have done that now for more than 220 years is to always apply our most fundamental values to the circumstances and challenges of each new age and the reason we have made it is that we have never forgotten that there is no more fundamental value than the american family than its strength and its integrity there is no more important job than raising a child there is no more important responsibility than to create the conditions and give people the tools to succeed at raising their children but i think we would all have to admit that as a nation we have not done what we should have done to enable all of our families to meet the challenge of the era in which we live for some time now we have been at least with one foot in the 21st century we know that the 21st century will be dominated by globalization and by information and technological revolutions and we know that it has brought us many great benefits we as americans should be very grateful today for the prosperity we enjoy even though all of you and your fellow americans have worked hard to earn it and we ve made some tough decisions in washington to help bring it about we should still be grateful for it but we know that this new economy with all the unprecedented prosperity it has brought us has also imposed some significant new challenges we know for example that the average working family is spending more hours a week in the workplace than 25 or 30 years ago with all the benefits of technology and we know that more and more parents of young children are in the workplace either because they re single parent households or because both parents have to work to make ends meet or because both parents choose to work and they ought to have that choice but there is no more important responsibility on us to apply the values of america the timeless values of america to modern conditions none is more important than making sure every american can balance the dual responsibilities succeeding as parents and succeeding at work there is no more significant challenge indeed one of the biggest debates we had when we were working through the welfare reform issue was how we could require people to be responsible and go to work without creating conditions which would require them to abandon their first responsibility to be good parents that is the universal obligation of every parent and it should be the dominant concern of our government that s what this is about i don t believe i have ever talked to a parent who was also in the workplace who has not been able to cite at least one example and oftentimes many many more of a conflict between that he or she felt between the obligations of parenthood and the obligations to the job and that includes of course people who work in the white house when the president makes them work too late at night but you just you know that everyone i saw a lot of you nodding your heads you just know that it s part of the fabric of american life we know that the government cannot raise or love a child but that is not what we re supposed to do what the government is supposed to do is to help to create the conditions and give people the tools that will enable them to raise and love their children while successfully participating in the american workplace today i am proud to propose the single largest national commitment to child care in the history of the united states it is a comprehensive and fiscally responsible plan to make child care more affordable and accessible to raise the quality of child care to assure the safety of care for millions of american children this is an issue that touches nearly every family and i believe it must rise above politics and partisan interests i welcome the bipartisan effort to improve child care that is already going on in the congress i thank the members who are here and many who could not come today for their leadership and for demonstrating that this is an american issue that both democrats and republicans are embracing this proposal will be an important part of the budget i send to congress next month it will be the first balanced budget in 30 years it will build on the achievements of the year just passed one that was very good for working families as has already been mentioned last summer s historic balanced budget agreement provided working families with a 500 per child tax credit it made the first two years of college community college virtually free for almost every american family made college more affordable for american families expanded health coverage to 5 million uninsured people advanced the cause of placing more children into solid adoptive homes and continued our efforts to collect more child support over the past five years we have worked hard to abandon the false choices of the past including the false choice of having to choose between responsibilities at work and responsibilities at home our new economic strategy is designed in no small measure to get over that divide from the family and medical leave act to the earned income tax credit to the minimum wage increase we have tried to demonstration that it is not only possible but imperative to the survival of the american dream to help people meet their responsibilities at home and at work strengthening child care has always been a part of this strategy since we came here we ve helped a million children and their families to afford that child that they need but we have to do a lot more now this new proposal has three fundamental goals first to make child care more affordable and available to all americans with increased block grants to states we will double the number of children receiving child care subsidies to more than 2 million one of the reasons welfare reform has worked as well as it has is because of the increased investment in child care now we have to help the lower income families who have never been on welfare in the first place but still struggle to pay for child care we also will help more than 3 million working families to meet their child care expenses by dramatically expanding the child care tax credit these tax credits will mean that a family of four making 35 000 and saddled with high child care bills will no longer pay one penny in federal income taxes i m also supporting new tax credits to encourage more businesses to provide child care for their employees when i met the members of congress before coming in here that s the first thing congresswoman delauro said she had just come from the opening of a corporate child care center we need more businesses to do more and we need to help the smaller businesses who can use this tax credit and cannot afford to do it on their own without a little help from the public second we must make sure that every child has a safe and enriching place to go after school as the vice president said there are simply too many children who through no fault of their parents are left to fend for themselves in the hours between 2 00 p m and 6 00 p m too many children roaming the streets idling in front of a television or getting into trouble i cannot emphasize the importance of this too much the crime rate in this country has dropped dramatically in the last five years all americans should be proud of that the juvenile crime rate has not dropped so much and where it has dropped almost without exception it has dropped because people have found something positive for children to do in the hours between the time school ends and the time their parents come home at night we do not need to keep building jail after jail after jail to house children who wouldn t be there in the first place if we took care of them while they re out free and able to build constructive law abiding positive lives i am proposing the expansion of before and after school programs to help some 500 000 children say no to drugs and alcohol and crime and yes to reading soccer computers and a brighter future for themselves i thank the vice president especially for his hard work on this issue third we have to improve the safety and quality of child care and make sure that child care advances early childhood development i am proposing an early learning fund to help to reduce child to staff ratios in child care centers train child care workers and educate parents we have to also strengthen the enforcement of state codes and licensing requirements weed out bad providers and through tougher criminal background checks make sure that the wrong people aren t doing the right mission that we all need done properly finally we ought to offer scholarships to talented care givers now let me take a minute to thank our state leaders from north carolina to washington state from rhode island to minnesota for their efforts at improving child care and promoting early learning across america i know governor almond of rhode island is here and i want to especially thank him for rhode island s child opportunity zone program it is a national model we are living in what may well be the most exciting era of human history but the globalization the information and technology revolution they continue to alter the way we live and work the way we do business and the way we relate to each other and the rest of the world they make some jobs easier they render others obsolete but nothing must be permitted to undermine the first responsibilities of parenthood no raise or promotion will ever top the joy of hugging a child after work nothing can be more bittersweet than sending a child you once cradled off in your arms off to college for the first time nothing weighs more heavily on a parent s mind than the well being of a child in the care of others no issue is more important to any family you know a lot of us have had our own experiences with child care i ve often wondered how my mother when she was widowed would have been able to go back to school if i hadn t been able to move in with my grandparents i was lucky and it turned out reasonably well for me but how many children are out there with exactly the same potential who never got the same break by pure accident of family circumstance you don t know the answer to that and neither do i but we know what the answer should be the answer should be not a single one thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton7 10 00 bill_clinton let me say first of all i m just sick i can t be there but i think you know that for the last two days i m been up day and night literally i was up all night last night because of the continuing violence in the middle east and the responsibility the united states has to do everything we can to get things calmed down and get back to the peace process nothing else would keep me away i want to say to all my friends in indiana you ought to be very proud of joe andrew he has done a great job with the dnc and i think i can speak for every democrat outside indiana we are proud of bart peterson and thrilled that he is the mayor of indianapolis i want to thank governor frank o bannon for working so closely with me and lieutenant governor kernan and your attorney general and i want to tell you that i ve known evan bayh since he replaced me as the youngest governor in america and he and susan do you great credit in washington every single day i have no doubt that the future is unlimited for him most of all i want to tell you that there is nobody in congress i like any better than julia carson she is one of a kind and when she kind of sidles into a room and takes a stand for education or children or moving people from welfare and poverty into work everybody listens to her and she s acquired an unusual amount of influence in congress in a very short time because she deals with people so effectively and she has such credibility and she s so compelling when she makes a point i ve just sort of learned to do what she asks me to do without her having to argue it now i d like to just make a simple argument tonight in indiana because you ve got a lot of republicans there but the democrats are doing better why are the democrats doing better because you deliver and i just want to say to you that you know this is the first time in 26 years i haven t been on a ballot at election time so i m telling you this as a person who within a matter of four months will be like most of you out there just another american citizen this country is in good shape we are moving in the right direction we are better off than we were eight years ago and we need to keep changing in the right direction that is the strongest argument for why every election this year is important every senate seat every house seat every governorship and of course most important of all the election for president and vice president now in indiana you ve done well because people have seen you produce results and i want you to go out there between now and election day and ask everybody you know in indiana and in the states bordering indiana all of which are critical to our success to remember what it was like eight years ago look at what it s like now that s because we changed the direction of the country we ve got a better economic policy a better education policy a better health care policy a better environmental policy a better foreign policy and we need to keep changing in that direction and people need to understand that once in a lifetime maybe once in 50 or 60 years a country gets a chance to do what we ve got to do now with all this prosperity and progress and confidence with no crisis at home and no threat to our security abroad we ve got a chance and a responsibility to build the future of our dreams for our kids and we need to put in office people who are committed to that every voter needs to understand there are real differences between our party and theirs and our candidates and theirs starting at the top and going all the way through we ve got a different economic policy we want to keep paying down the debt give people a tax cut we can afford to send their kids to college to save for retirement for child care when they re working for long term care when they ve got their folks or disabled children living at home with them but we ve got to have enough money to invest in education and pay down the debt they offer everybody a bigger tax cut but that and their privatization of social security plan and their promise to suspend will put us right back in deficits the democratic party is the fiscally responsible party in america today that will keep interest rates lower and every american will have lower home mortgages car payments credit card payments college loan payments businesses will borrow money for less and they ll create more jobs and higher incomes if you want to keep this prosperity going vote for the democrats that s the message that you ve got to get out there all over america but if you look at all the other areas where we re different we re for a real patients bill of rights and they re not we re for a medicare prescription drug program that every senior who needs it can buy into on a voluntary basis and they only want to help half the people who need the medicine their plan won t work it has already been tried in one state and they keep on doing it it s wrong we are the party that wants to help provide the medicine that our seniors need and deserve and every american needs to understand that every american needs to understand that we are the party for smaller class sizes and modern schools and after school and summer school and pre school programs for the kids who need it and a tax deduction to pay for the cost of college tuition so that everybody s child can have four years of college that s the democratic party and people need to know that and i want you to help them know that and for all of you there the most important thing i want you to do is make sure julia carson wins an overwhelming reelection she s a wonderful woman and a great representative in congress thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton7 10 98 bill_clinton thank you very much for that wonderful welcome let me say first of all i want to thank deb callahan for her opening remarks and her leadership i thank your chairman mike hayden i d like to thank my epa administrator carol browner for being here and for the good job she does i d like to say a special word of appreciation to the members of congress who are here tonight without whom i could have accomplished very little over these last six years thank you george miller norm dicks maurice henshey thank you for what you have done for our country and i d also like to just express my appreciation to three people here who aren t here who have been a real inspiration to me and a constant source of support in a lot of these fights we have taken on first and foremost the vice president second the first lady and third secretary babbitt they have all in ways none of you will ever know as well as all those you re aware of had countless countless conversations with me about a lot of the issues that i will mention tonight and some i will forget but in an administration the president often gets the credit when the inspiration the ideas the energy and sometimes the constructive nagging comes from other people now carol browner for example constructively nagged me to make sure we stood up for clean air congressman boehlert is that you back there i didn t see you thank you sir i m glad to see you thank you very much but anyway everybody said the sky was falling and carol said the kids need to breathe and so we wound up doing it her way and we re still rocking along pretty well and tonight i hope you ll permit me to say a very special word of appreciation to one of your honorees who is about to leave our administration the chair of the ceq katie mcginty i just was informed i missed another member of congress and another friend of the environment congresswoman connie morello where are you connie there you are thank very much thank you we ve had a lot of exceedingly complex as well as difficult politically difficult but also intellectually complex decisions we ve had to make working out our position on climate change on how to deal with the northwest forest challenge on whether we could figure out a way to save yellowstone on figuring out the genuine equities that lay underneath the big decision on grand staircase escalante and in all of those cases katie mcginty has been there working with all the various people affected and concerned trying to make sure we did the right thing by the environment and to make sure we did it increasingly i believe in the right way and i am very very much indebted to her i ll miss her and we wish her well thank you she s actually going to india for a while and i told her i expect by the time i get there there will be no longer any nuclear issues between the united states and india if she can solve all these other problems deal with all this other contention this ought to be just another drop in the bucket let me begin tonight where deb callahan left off i agree that our job is not simply to convince people of the importance of environmental stewardship the harder part is to convince people of the power they have not only to stand up for what they believe in but to change what they disagree with we have seen that over and over and over again for too many years the champions of the environment have been in the clear majority in america but have been insufficiently organized across economic and regional and party lines to bring their force to bear with their friends in the congress now we still have that task in the next 30 days because the next 30 days will be critical to the future of the environment indeed we have that task in the next few days the last days of this congressional session before the election and i ll have more to say about that in a moment one of the best illustrations of citizen power to change what is wrong is actually here under our noses just before america celebrated its first earth day a wide eyed but fairly low level congressional staffer recently out of college had a great democratic idea to create an environmental scorecard for members of congress and empower voters to make a more informed choice with that idea that young women launched the league of conservation voters and had enormous influence ever since marian edey thank you very much where are you stand up where are you thank you over the past generation when we have faced clear common threats our citizens often have joined together in common resolve america came together to heed rachel carson s warnings by banning ddt and other poisons america cleaned up rivers so filthy they were catching on fire america phased out lead and gasoline and the chemicals that deplete our protective ozone layer america achieved all these things in no small measure because of the broad bipartisan citizen power mobilized by groups like the lcv over the past six years we have worked together to build on these accomplishments to preserve our national treasures like florida s everglades california s ancient redwoods the spectacular red rock canyons of utah just last month katie mcginty was out in yellowstone commemorating our success in protecting the park from the new world mine we are doing our best to lead the way on the global environment we made sure the kyoto agreement was strong and realistic and we re determined that america must do its part to reverse global warming we re protecting the health of our families and communities we ve accelerated superfund clean ups issued the toughest air quality standards ever dramatically reduced toxic pollution not through the heavy hand of regulation but by giving communities access to the information they deserve these efforts reflect not only our yours and mine our common commitment to protecting the environment but to doing it in the right way innovative common sense solutions that achieve the greatest protection at the least cost that means rejecting the false choice that pits the economy against the environment i want to say a little more about that in a moment but i have to tell you that the largest obstacle we face in our congress in our country and in the world in getting a united serious approach to climate change is the deeply imbedded almost psychic dependence that so many decision makers in our country and all over the world have to the elemental notion that economic growth is still not possible without industrial era energy use patterns people simply don t believe it so that when i talk to people in developing countries and when i talk to people in the still developing congress we have these i say that in a that s a compliment as i will say more about it in a moment we still have the people that are literally obsessed with the notion that seriously addressing climate change is somehow a plot to wreck america s economic future and political sovereignty i asked somebody today how much time we had spent complying and most of you don t think i did enough on climate change right is that right let s put it out here on the table most of you don t think i did enough on climate change i proposed a series of very i think effective tax incentives to get people to do the right things and make them economically efficient and a major increase in research and development and there is a committee in the house of representatives that acts like i m right up there with the black helicopter crowd it s true i asked today we believe that we have spent 10 000 hours complying with subpoenas from a committee who believes we are subverting the future of america with these modest proposals on climate change hundreds of thousands of dollars in compliance costs over and above the salaries of the people involved why is that are these bad people who don t love their country do they really want to destroy our environment do they believe their grandchildren don t need to deal with this absolutely not they honestly still believe that economic growth is not possible without industrial age energy use patterns don t show me those solar reflectors that go on roofs now that look just like ordinary shingles don t bother me with those windows that let in twice as much light and keep out twice as much heat and cold i don t want to hear about the economics of insulation or the lights that will save themselves a ton of greenhouse emissions during the life of the lamp so i say to you we have still a huge intellectual battle to fight a way of looking at the world and the future that helps to bring us together instead of drive us apart and one of the central ideas is the honest belief that you cannot only grow the economy and preserve the environment you can actually grow the economy and improve the environment this country has the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the fastest wage growth in 20 years the smallest percentage of the people on welfare in 29 years the first surplus in 29 years the highest home ownership ever but compared to six years ago the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer there are fewer toxic waste dumps and we have done quite a lot of other things to protect the environment it is simply not true that you can t grow the economy and improve the environment and vast vast technological and conservation and alternative energy source opportunities have been completely untapped compared to their economically available potential in our country today so we have a lot more work to do but i will say again sometimes you have to win the battle of the big ideas even if it s with simple small examples before you can really move our vast country in one direction without interruption so i would like to make here a point i have tried to make to our fellow citizens in every forum i could since it became obvious that we were going to have a balanced budget and a surplus the temptation is to be diverted or just relaxed in a good economic time that would be an error these times are first of all highly dynamic we have enormous challenges of which you are well aware the global financial challenge the global environmental challenge it would be a terrible mistake for us to squander this moment of opportunity when so much good is happening for america and we have a level of confidence about our ability to meet challenges that we have not had in decades by being either diverted or relaxed we need to face the challenges we have and think about how we can best use this prosperity to build the kind of future we want tonight i ll give you an example of one thing we re trying to do to use this time of prosperity adding vital new protections for our nation s wetlands earlier this year as part of our clean water action plan i set a goal of restoring 100 000 acres of wetlands a year by 2005 today the army corps of engineers is proposing changes to ensure that we think twice before building in our most sensitive wetlands twenty years ago if you d told me i d see this day and this initiative from that august body i never would have believed it and i congratulate them on it and honor them for it from now on we will require a full environmental review with full public participation of all projects in critical wetland areas particularly floodplains in a typical year 140 americans die in floods and 4 billion in property is destroyed just in this past week nine people have died in floods in missouri and kansas that s why fema director james lee witt felt so strongly about strengthening protections for the floodplains by thinking twice we can prevent tragedy and save taxpayer dollars while protecting the environment and as we all know if we are going to do this make the most of this moment we have to do it together for years and years protecting the environment was a matter of bipartisan concern and frankly for a lot of people it still is you have three good democrats and two fine republicans here tonight unless i missed someone else but in the last congress it seemed not to be the case there was a direct frontal assault on the environment a rollback of or an attempted rollback of 30 years of hard won gains and as lcv ably documented more than a third of the members of the 104th congress scored a zero on the environment the group tried to force me to sign a budget with unconscionable cuts in environmental protections twice the government was shut down in no small measure budget of environmental controversies but because together we decided not to give in and fought back it came out all right now a lot of the same folks are back with a different tactic here in the waning days of the congressional session a sneak attack not only are they refusing to fully fund environmental priorities the clean water action plan to help clean up waterways too polluted for fishing and swimming an extraordinary percentage of the waterways in america the land and water conservation fund to protect precious lands in danger of development the climate change technology initiative to take common sense steps to reverse global warming not only would they keep us from moving forward in these areas but they re pushing once again in the opposite direction as all of you know all too well by loading appropriations bills up with a slew of anti environmental riders really that rider word is really well chosen because it s sort of an unrelated passenger riding along on a piece of legislation that otherwise looks pretty good these special interest riders among other things would carve roads through the alaskan wilderness force overcutting in our national forests cripple wildlife protections and sell the taxpayers short now the sponsors of these riders know that the proposals could not stand on their own they know that therefore they have to resort to a stealth tactic to get this done i personally believe this unrelated rider strategy unless it s something that has broad bipartisan support necessary to preserve some immediate national need is bad for the democratic process as well as bad for the environment so tonight let me say again to you and to the congress i will veto any bill that will do unacceptable harm to our environment thank you let me say to all of you there is hope that we can do better this afternoon or this morning i guess time flies when you re having fun anyway sometime today we had a marvelous ceremony at the white house with over 30 members of congress signing a higher education bill that had enormous republican and democratic support that among other things gave us the lowest interest rates on student loans in nearly 20 years will save 11 billion to students with existing student loans about 700 a student for college students perhaps even more important over the long run this bill with an idea inspired by congressman chaka fattah from philadelphia provides support to set up mentoring programs for middle school children in tough inner city and other poor school districts and enables the mentors to tell the kids when they re 12 or 13 if you stay in school and you keep learning here is how much college aid you are going to be able to get and i can tell you that right now and it provides for partnerships so that universities and private donors can give more to the kids in those years and guarantee them it was an extraordinary day and then this afternoon the house of representatives rejected a parks bill that would have done a lot more harm than good listen to this by the bipartisan overwhelming margin of 301 123 thank you thank you that is the kind of bipartisan spirit the modern environmental movement started with in 1970 you know i ve never met anybody walking on a trail in a national park never that i knew when i saw them coming toward me what their party affiliation was except on the rare occasions when i actually knew them when you go into one of our wilderness areas nobody asks you to declare your affiliation we all assume that we drink the same water we swim in the same lakes we breathe the same air we eat the same food we love the same natural surroundings we have the same common stake in preserving the same environment for our children and our grandchildren and i hope this vote today indicates that we have several more days coming in the time between now and when the congress goes home at the end of the week for this sort of spirit of coming together and then in the next 30 days during this election season i hope that ordinary citizens who care deeply about these issues will bring their voices to bear in the election just think what would happen if people of both parties and independents simply said we re going to do better we re going to change at last and forever the idea that we have to have old fashioned destructive energy use patterns to grow the economy we will not give in to those who want to put the sacred up for sale the decisions we make today on climate change water wetlands and air will have implications for decades if not centuries to come and we want a unifying vision that embraces people who may differ on many other things to embrace our common home and our common future i think the american people for all kinds of reasons are open to that sort of message in the next 30 days we are reminded by every event which occurs that we are living in a world in which we are ever more interdependent not only with each other as americans but with those who live beyond our borders and with the earth we all share we see it when there s a reverberation in our stock market because of what happens in russia or latin america or asia we see it when we understand some big chunk of antarctica has broken off and is floating and indicates that the water level may be rising more rapidly because the climate is warming we see it when we understand our common responsibility to try to stop people of different ethnic groups from killing each other in the baltics and the balkans and to try to get people of different racial and ethnic and religious groups to embrace what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences at home the environmental movement and its leaders are probably better positioned because of your general orientation of these issues than virtually any other group in america to get the american people to rethink these big ideas to think about how we can be reconciled to ourselves to our environment and committed to our future to think about how we can appreciate not only our independence but our interdependence with one another and with our fellow human beings throughout the world on the edge of a new millennium i really believe the development of that kind of approach and whether we can do it and reconcile it as i believe we can in a very rich and wonderful way with our own tradition of individual rights and individuality and autonomy if we can do that i believe that will do more to ensure that we make the right decisions as a people across party and regional and income and other lines on the most profound decisions of our future than anything else you you are uniquely positioned to change our people s way of thinking about this and you could hardly give a greater gift to your country at the end of one century and the dawn of another thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton7 10 99 bill_clinton thank you please be seated let me first of all thank dennis and all of you for this event and for your support for the democratic senate campaign committee senator shumer was supposed to be here tonight but they re voting late so he s working for you and i m filling in for him that s sort of getting prepared for my life after the presidency i m sort of the stand in speaker tonight for chuck shumer i d like to thank you again for your support for the senators and i d like to thank as i always try to do the people of new york city and new york state for being so very good to me and the vice president and our whole administration over these last six and a half years i would like to just make a brief statement about the event that we re here for i think all of you know that we democrats have maintained a constant commitment to the health care of our people and to the well being of the health care network we all are very well aware that as hillary warned us back in 1994 the number of uninsured people continues to rise and will continue to do so until we do things that cover more people and stem the hemorrhaging of loss of coverage i will say this we ve got some specific proposals out there that i think will begin to make a dent in that this year this is the first year that all the states are enrolled in the children s health insurance program now what we have to do is go out and get the children enrolled the states are enrolled we have to get the children enrolled as all of you know i see a lot of you nodding your heads it s easier to say than to do to find these people to tell them that even though they may be medicaid eligible they are eligible for this please come enroll but we need to make a huge herculean effort over the next six months to get every single eligible child in america enrolled in these programs it will also help to alleviate the financial problems of a lot of our health care providers and we need to do it the second thing i would note is that in my medicare reform this year i have asked the congress to allow people between the ages of 55 and 65 to buy into the medicare program a lot of the people without health insurance between 55 and 65 can t get health insurance from anybody else but they re middle class people and they do have the funds to afford a medicare buy in we can do that with the present budget i ve given the congress and i hope we will do it the third thing i would note is i do believe that some time before the congress goes home they will pass what is known as the kennedy jeffords bill which will allow disabled people on medicaid to go into the workplace and keep their medicaid which will put more people in the workplace and continue the flow of funds to the health care system and enables them to keep their health care there will doubtless be more to be debated about now let me say a word about what happened in 1997 i am not at all surprised that the 1997 balanced budget act imposed greater burdens on the health care system than were estimated and some of you were involved in that and know that we we had a figure of the savings we wanted to achieve and we in the administration having good data from all of you gave the congress a set of changes we thought would be necessary to meet that figure the congressional budget office did not believe we would achieve those savings and therefore said we had to do more things so we did everything that the cbo said we had to do and we had more savings than we needed to meet the original budget targets and it came right out of the teaching hospitals a lot of the therapeutic services people a lot of all of you know this we are working hard now i ve had a conversation every time they come back from new york or anywhere else hillary and the vice president ask me when are we going to do something about this medicaid problem we ve got to deal with this we understand that i think that there is now a consensus in the congress in both houses and i think increasingly in both parties that part of the last budget negotiations will require funds flowing back to deal with this problem and i will do the best i can with that let me just make some general points here when i came to new york in 1992 as the nominee with my family and my then very new vice presidential partner and his family and asked the american people and the people of this state to take a chance on us because we thought we could turn the country around and it s been so long since things were bad people had forgotten how bad they were in 1992 but they were quite bad indeed i asked you to take a chance based on an argument i made i said you know i think that the politics of division in washington are hurting america you ve either got to be pro business or pro labor you ve got to be pro growth or pro environment all these things have to be opposed to one another you have to be for big deficits or cutting spending on education and i just don t believe that s the way the world works i never have believed that all of us in our own lives try to find ways to unify our objectives and pull things together to go forward and so i said to the american people look give me a chance to try to push a policy that will provide opportunity to every responsible citizen and will bring all people together in one community that will allow us to be pro business and pro labor pro environment and pro growth get rid of the deficit but continue to invest in education and it was just an argument but the american people decided to give us a chance probably frankly because the country was in such tough shape it was really tough well after six years it s not an argument anymore there is now evidence and i m very proud that with the help of the democratic members of the senate without whom none of this would have been possible we now have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the highest home ownership in history the first back to back balanced budget surpluses in 42 years and the longest economic expansion in peacetime in our history with over 19 million new jobs it s not an argument anymore now the issue before the american people is some say whether we should change that is not the question we are going to change this country s been changing for over 200 years that s why we re still here we re adaptable we always have new challenges we always have new opportunities the question is not whether we ll change the question is how we re going to change we can take a u turn and go back to the policies that got us in trouble in the first place i ve tried to stop those some of the most important achievements of the last six years involved stopping the contract with america stopping this ill advised huge tax cut that i vetoed which by the way would have made it utterly impossible to do what we ought to do in medicare but i would just ask you as citizens to think about the big things we can do now because of the country s prosperity and let me just mention three and it s time to think about the big things big thing number one that all of you deal with in health care we ve got to deal with the aging of america people are living longer and the number of people over 65 will double in 30 years i hope to be one of them and we have a chance and i would argue an obligation to save social security and push the life of social security out beyond the life expectancy of the whole baby boom generation we can do that now we have an obligation not only to properly fund medicare but to extend the life of it and to add a prescription drug benefit i was just asked again today about all these people who live in new york vermont maine along the canadian border going across the border to canada to buy american drugs much cheaper than they can buy them in america if we would give people on medicare the option purely the option to buy in to a prescription drug program that could use market power to get discount prices we could deal with the problems of 75 percent of the seniors in this country that don t have access to those pharmaceuticals now i think it s important that s big challenge number one big challenge number two as new york knows we have the largest and most diverse student population in our schools in history we have done everything we could with the hope scholarships and other aids to give everybody who can go access to college but no one believes that we re giving a world class education to every child in k through 12 yet so it s time to build them modern schools and give them more teachers and have high standards but give them access to summer school and after school and mentoring programs so you don t declare the kids failures when the system is failing them this is important we ought to say we re not going to rest until the children in our public schools have the same access to quality education that children in our institutions of higher education do that s a big idea worth fighting for the third thing i d like to say is we need to think about the 21st century economy as you know here from upstate new york to some neighborhoods in new york city not everybody has participated in our prosperity as a matter of fact part of the problems are hospitals have today is that not everybody has participated in our prosperity you still have a lot of poor people who can t afford to pay who have to have care i have offered the american people from the empowerment zone program in 1993 to our new markets initiative now a way to bring more people into our enterprise system i think people with money in america ought to get the same tax breaks and other incentives to invest in poor areas in america we today give them to invest in latin america and the caribbean and africa i don t want to take those other incentives away but i think you ought to have the same option to grow a business here you do in our poor countries to the south and around the world and finally i think we ought to get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 we can do that in 15 years now anybody in this room over 40 who took economics in college was taught that a country should always be a little bit in debt that somehow that s healthy and when we learned it it was true it s not true anymore for a rich countries because interest rates are set globally and if we can make america debt free over the next 15 years it means lower interest rates for business loans for hospital construction for college loans for home loans for car loans it means more jobs and higher incomes it means when our friends around the world that have to buy the things we produce get in trouble they can borrow money to get out of trouble at a lower cost it could ensure a generation of prosperity we can do it now we should think big now let me just mention one final issue i can talk about this all night because i want america to start thinking big about it we have the lowest crime rate in 26 years and i m proud of that and it s nationwide in every big city we re seeing with the same strategies there that have worked here community policing and careful targeting of certain kinds of crime in certain areas but no one thinks it s as low as it ought to be no one thinks america is as safe as it ought to be so i would like to see people stand up and say okay we ve got the lowest crime rate in 26 years now we need a real goal let s make america the safest big country in the world if we re the most prosperous big country in the world if we have more freedom than anybody else in the world we ought to be able to make it the safest big country in the world we have to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals we have to do more to keep guns out of the hands of children who die at an accidental rate listen to this accidental rate from gun deaths in america nine time higher than the next 25 industrial countries in the world combined but we can do it if we make up our mind to do it in closing let me say the other thing that i m proud to be a democrat about besides these big ideas is that we stand for the idea that we can be one america across all the racial religious gender sexual orientation and other lines that divide us we believe our common humanity is more important than our differences which make life interesting but which are not fundamental to our common cause if you look at all the trouble we ve had in the world in the last 20 years just the trouble we ve had in the world in the last six and a half years since i ve been president from the middle east to northern ireland to bosnia and kosovo to the tribal wars in africa our continuing inability to get over our fear loathing and dehumanization of people who are different from us is the number one problem the world has and it is quite interesting as we deal with the miracles of modern medicine the miracles of the modern internet we look forward to the human genome project giving every mother a map of her baby s life when she goes home from the hospital we are beset by the most primitive of all human problems the continuing fear of people who are different from us i can just tell you that the people that we re running and the policies that will be followed and you know i m not running for anything i m selling this as a prospective citizen and what i want for my daughter and my grandchildren s generation we ll stand up for one america and we ll change but we don t want a u turn we ve got this country going in the right direction and we want to reach for the stars thank you very much dem wjclinton7 11 94 bill_clinton i m glad to be back in flint glad to be back in michigan glad to here for bob carr ladies and gentlemen hillary and i are delighted to be here today with all of you i want to begin by thanking the nominees who are here behind me the wonderful members of the labor movement the educators who are here and others who are doing their best to see that michigan makes a good decision for the future tomorrow i also want to say a special word of thanks out of my own history to the davison high school band for playing for us thank you very much you know the chancellor at this distinguished institution dr charlie nelms we ve got another band up there what northern high school up here give them a hand folks the chancellor of this fine institution dr charlie nelms grew up in my home state and he just got back from his college reunion i won t tell you which one he was one of 11 children and i say this not to embarrass him but to tell you that right before we came out here he said i want you to know something mr president if it hadn t been for people believing in me giving me a chance and providing programs like these college loans that get so many students into this institution i wouldn t be here today i want to stick with the people who believe in education who believe in ordinary citizens who believe in the future of this country i want to thank mayor woodrow stanley for being my friend and my supporter and your great leader they used to call me the comeback kid you ought to call flint the comeback city under woodrow stanley and the thing i like about woodrow stanley i want to say more about this in a minute because it goes to your choice in this election is that he is a builder not a blamer i want to thank your senators senator carl levin and senator don riegle we wish you well in your retirement and we thank you for representing flint michigan and the united states i want to welcome the democratic nominees for governor and lieutenant governor howard wolpe and debbie stabenow and ask you to help them tomorrow and support them i just have to say this the unemployment figures came out last week and we had a four year low in unemployment and the governor here always says well the michigan economy is getting better that s true but did you ever notice that it didn t get very much better when the republicans had the white house and the economic policy and even though i think an enormous amount of credit goes to the automobile industry for their incredible efforts at partnership labor and management bringing us back to number one in automobiles in the entire world the rest of the states are doing pretty well too we re going up or down together that is my message i want you to help these people and especially i want you to help bob carr because if nothing else you know if you look at this fine institution of higher education if you look at this city if you look at this state if you think of our country we are going up or down together and you only have one choice who is clearly 100 percent on your side bob carr is 100 percent on your side i also want to echo what hillary said about congressman dale kildee i want to say a special word of thanks to him for his leadership in the most productive congressional session for education in 30 years we expanded head start we changed the federal law on aid to our public schools so that we will emphasize grass roots reform and get rid of this ridiculous assumption that just because kids are poor from disadvantaged backgrounds they can t learn from now on the same expectations the same opportunity the same achievement for children without regard to their background and you heard him talking about the school to work opportunity act i signed that s a bill for young people who don t go on to college but don t want to be in dead end jobs who want training and are willing to engage in a lifetime of learning and i did sign that bill on a desk built by the students at the manufacturing technology project right here in flint michigan who will benefit from that sort of effort i also want to thank congressman jim barcia and our candidate bob mitchell for being here send them back to washington so we ll have partners for progress you know folks this has really turned out to be an amazing election in ways that are both wonderful and troubling the american people know that there are still things that need fixing in washington and they know there are things that need fixing back here at home they know that in spite of the fact that we ve got an enormous amount of job growth over five million jobs in the last 21 months in spite of the fact that we ve got more high wage jobs coming back into america this year than in the previous five years combined in spite of the fact that the biggest problem in the auto industry is not no time it s now overtime a high class problem they know that there are still a lot of people who are worried about losing their jobs a lot of people who are afraid they ll never get a raise a lot of people who are worried about losing their health insurance as one million people in working families did last year a lot of people who still want work in some of our cities and isolated rural areas who don t have jobs this country has problems they know that we ve still got too much crime and violence and too much disintegration of our families and our communities that make people feel personally insecure or at least violate their sense of values that s all true now the question is what are we going to do about it and what these guys say is our opponents they say be mad about it be frustrated about it be cynical about it and put us in because we are going to play on your fears your frustrations and your cynicism that s their argument their argument is look nothing good has happened and if you find something good that happened it did not happen because the president was there it did not happen because he had partners in the congress it happened in spite of that it was irrelevant to that that s their argument you listen to them well you know what folks where i come from people say if you find a turtle on the fencepost it did not get their by accident and so i say to you don t let a frustrated electorate wind up voting for what you re against and against what you re for that s what they want look what they say they re for they say they are for a new plan that will give a huge tax cut to the wealthy that will bring back big increases in defense and revive star wars and will balance the budget does that sound familiar to you they say ignore what happened in the last 21 months it doesn t matter ignore the jobs the growth the help for ordinary working americans the fact that the world is growing more prosperous and more peaceful ignore all that take our new set of promises now i want you to think about this there are really only two possibilities with these republican promises they re either serious or they re kidding now listen to me if they re serious they have made you 1 trillion worth of promises we re going to cut taxes on the wealthy bring back defense and star wars and balance the budget what does it cost a trillion dollars when you ask them how will you pay for it they say we ll tell you after the election do you know why because the only way to pay for it is to cut everything else in the budget 20 percent across the board 2 000 a person in social security cut medicare 20 percent cut the student loans 20 percent cut the aids prevention 20 percent cut the head start 20 percent that is their program then they say well we didn t say we would cut social security they didn t say they wouldn t but if you take out social security then our opponents in the senate and the house have committed to a set of promises that mean 30 percent cuts across the board in all those things of course there s always the chance that they didn t mean it they re kidding if they re kidding what does it mean we will give you the goodies without the price and what does that mean we re going to explode the deficit we re going to ship our jobs overseas we re going to put our economy back in the same mess that this same crowd with these same policies put it in in the trickle down economics years of the 1980s tell them no we want bob carr we want dale kildee we want jim barcia we want mitchell those are the people we want tell them no tell them no you know folks one of the most amazing things to me is this effort that they are making to take a frustrated electorate and say it does not matter what we say it does not matter what we do anything the government does is either irrelevant or makes it worse can you imagine can you imagine entering into any other human endeavor with that attitude can you imagine going to school with that attitude can you imagine building a business with that attitude can you imagine going to work with that attitude can you imagine building a house with that attitude can you imagine building a family with that attitude no well why would we want to build a congress with that attitude you know folks i don t know about you but when i showed up in washington i wanted to rebuild the american dream i wanted to bring this country together i wanted to make america strong i don t mean i wanted to talk strong i wanted to be strong and to be strong you need stronger families better schools safer streets more jobs a safer and more prosperous world well i don t know about you but i believe it made a difference when we gave 1 5 million michigan families the protection of the family and medical leave act so they could take a little time off from work and keep their jobs and i believe it made a difference when almost 400 000 michigan families that work full time with kids in the house and are hovering above the poverty line got an income tax cut under our administration so you could succeed at work and at home being a parent and a worker i think it made a difference i think it made a difference when we made almost 600 000 people in michigan eligible for lower costs and better repayment college loans so more people could go to college and no one need ever turn away i think that makes a difference and i think it made a difference when we lowered the deficit and increased our investment in our future and got this economy going again and that s why the unemployment rate in america is at a four year low and it s dropped 2 percent in michigan in the last 21 months i think that matters and i think you think it matters so i think it matters that for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no russian missiles pointing at these children here i think it matters that north korea has agreed not to become a nuclear power i think it matters that the united states is expanding trade and opportunity for high wage jobs i think it matters that we are making peace and helping peace come about and standing up for freedom from the persian gulf to northern ireland to haiti to the middle east i think that matters i think that matters and so i ask you my fellow americans why would we want to go back this election is more than anything else an election about the state of mind of our voters if people are thinking about the issues and what s in their issues and who s on their side and what s best for our future they will have to vote for bob carr over his opponent their great hope is that everybody wakes up tomorrow mad the democrats stay home the extremists go vote the people that want a bunch of easy promises the people that want a lot of tough talk that will need not to strength but to weakness for most of us that that will prevail my great belief is that tomorrow whatever the weather you re going to wake up with the sun shining in your mind seeing clearly thinking about tomorrow thinking about tomorrow folks you just think about this you think about what really counts when you go to work when you build a business when you get an education when you rear a family it is a positive building unifying compassionate idea of what you are as a person and what you can become that is what we represent we ve still got a lot of problems in this country folks but this country is in better shape than it was 21 months ago we are stronger than we were 21 months ago we are moving forward don t turn back go forward elect bob carr and dale kildee and jim barcia and bob mitchell and howard wolpe and debbie sabenow help these people lift michigan go forward come on we can do it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton7 11 96 bill_clinton we are truly about to make a new beginning yesterday at the wonderful welcome home that hillary and al and tipper and i had at the white house i saw a remarkable sight warren christopher was wearing a t shirt he did have it on underneath his saville row suit nonetheless it was there this is the same warren christopher i would remind you all who made people magazine s best dressed list the only man ever to eat presidential m ms with a knife and fork yesterday secretary christopher gave new meaning to my conviction that we are entering an age of new and remarkable possibility today it is with great regret at his departure but deep gratitude for his service to our administration and to our country that i have accepted warren christopher s decision to step down as secretary of state he has left the mark of his hand on history not in some theoretical intangible fashion but in concrete ways that have made a real difference in the lives of the american people and people around the world he has served three previous democratic administration as a trade negotiator a deputy attorney general a deputy secretary of state when he brought home our hostages from iran these past four years i have been proud and privileged to have him by my side as secretary of state today if the children of the middle east can imagine a future of cooperation not conflict if bosnia s killing fields are once again playing fields if the people of haiti now live in democracy instead of under dictators in no small measure it is because of warren christopher the cause of peace and freedom and decency have never had a more tireless or tenacious advocate those of us who have worked with chris know that his quiet dignity masks a steely determination let me cite just one example history will record that bosnia s peace was secured at dayton it will also recall that literally until the last minute the outcome was in doubt our negotiators had their bags packed and were ready to head home without an agreement but chris refused to give up and the force of his will finally convinced the balkan leaders to give into the logic of peace for all secretary christopher s skill at diffusing crises i believe his lasting legacy was built behind the headlines laying the foundations for our future under his leadership we ve taken on new threats like terrorism the spread of weapons of mass destruction and environment degradation we re seizing the opportunities to make the 21st century more secure and prosperous for every american working toward a europe that is undivided democratic and at peace building a new partnership with a strong and open russia meeting the challenges of change in asia with strength and steadiness opening more markets abroad and helping american businesses to take advantage of these new opportunities perhaps most important warren christopher s life provides powerful proof that america has a unique responsibility and a unique privilege to lead he has helped the american people to understand that we cannot lead on the cheap it takes time energy and resources and as we go forward i pledge to protect and preserve the resources for our diplomacy that warren christopher has put to such good use finally let me say as all of you know i owe warren christopher a debt that extends far beyond the broad range of his responsibilities few individuals did more to shape my first administration he chaired our vice presidential search committee and i d say he came up with a pretty good recommendation the american people have him to thank for my selection of al gore and the subsequent development of the most unique partnership in the history of the presidency and the vice presidency and i think it is clear that the vice president has been the most influential and constructive force ever to occupy the vice presidency s office warren christopher directed the 1992 transition in particular in building a cabinet team that helped to put america on track as we enter the 21st century one which a scholar of the presidency wrote me and said was the most loyal cabinet since thomas jefferson s first administration these past four years time and again i have reached out to my friend for his counsel his judgment and his support it is no exaggeration to say that warren christopher has literally been america s elder statesman it s also no exaggeration today that he retains the energy the vigor and the capacity of a person half his age i thank secretary christopher for agreeing to stay on until we select a successor i will consult closely with him in that process in the weeks ahead i may have a hard time finding him however the secretary is continuing to do the vital business of our nation participating next week in the cairo conference traveling to china and throughout asia moving on to europe to work on bosnia and adapting nato to the future secretary christopher already has set a four year record as america s most traveled diplomat in chief if you could earn frequent flyer miles for government travel we would owe him at least a round trip on the space shuttle and the vice president says that with the travel he s already logged in he could go to the moon and back and back to the moon again i want him to travel a few more miles so he will finish on the right planet through dignity determination hard work and skill through an unbelievable powerful collection and combination of his intellect his integrity and his good heart warren christopher has earned our nation s admiration and a debt that can never be fully repaid from the bottom of my heart i thank him for his service to the nation and his unique friendship to the president mr secretary dem wjclinton7 12 00 bill_clinton well keith thank you for telling everybody why i m trying so hard to get something done about this thank you very much for the work you do and for being here with us today as exhibit a i want to thank secretary slater and our administrator jane garvey for all they have done in these last several years and i want to thank john cullinane and sharon patrick for being here and our ntbs chairman jim hall thank you very much jim for your work as secretary slater said when the vice president and i took office in 1993 among other things that were troubled in this economy we found a very troubled airline industry and in my first rodney mentioned the trip i made to everett washington to meet with the leaders of the airline industry at the boeing plant near seattle that was the first trip i took outside washington as president i did it because i knew that we had to turn the airline industry around if we wanted to turn the american economy around out of that meeting was born the baliles commission headed by the former governor of virginia governor jerry baliles and a set of recommendations that helped to power the airline industry back to health thanks to those recommendations and to a booming economy the airline industry is strong again and i think have benefitted from the work that has been done in this administration by the vice president and secretary slater and administrator garvey we have basically pursued a three pronged approach first we want to preserve and enhance domestic competition so that our people continue to reap the benefits of deregulation second we want to open more foreign markets so that our airlines can compete better internationally and third we want to improve the efficiency of our infrastructure particularly air traffic control to keep pace with the phenomenal growth in air travel now that s what were here to talk about today because frankly we haven t been able to do it our infrastructure is just as important to us today as the railroads were in the 1800s or the interstate highway system was in the second half of the 20th century just as those advancements made us competitive in the 19th and 20th century economies a modernized air traffic control system will help determine our ability to compete in the 21st century the fact is the faa s 20 year effort to modernize its air traffic control technology simply has not been able to keep pace with either the emergence of new technology or the growth and demand for air travel and while we ve made significant progress as the horrendous and i don t know how else to say it just the horrendous flight delay statistics demonstrate we have not done nearly enough this is no reflection i don t hesitate to say on the leadership of the faa or the dedication of its employees they are very very good they operate the largest busiest and safest air travel system in the world it orchestrates 93 000 flights every day more than one every second they also oversee the safety of the entire system which has a remarkable record as all of you who are involved in it knows despite the extraordinary efforts of these people however the rapid growth in air travel is simply racing ahead of the limits of the faa s aging infrastructure flight delays have increased by more than 58 percent in the last five years cancellations by 68 percent in addition to widespread passenger frustration and anger which i hear about wherever i go these delays are costing airlines and passengers more than 5 billion ever year part of the problem is due to outdated technology we re working with congress to speed up the upgrade of facilities and equipment at airports and air traffic control centers but a more fundamental problem is also how the faa operates it must be better structured to manage the high tech high demand operations of a 21st century air traffic control system david osborne who popularized the phrase reinventing government when he wrote a book by that title sums up the problem in his new book the reinventor s field book in it he says and i quote air traffic control is a massive complex technology intensive service business operating within a conventional u s government bureaucracy it s like putting a ferrari engine into a dump truck body and still expecting it to win races we need to put the ferrari engine of faa excellence into a new more streamlined more efficient body to accelerate our efforts to reduce passenger delays and improve air traffic control efficiency i am taking therefore the following actions first i am directing the faa to create a performance based organization the air traffic services organization to manage the operation of air traffic control this semiautonomous organization located within the faa will have the incentives and tools necessary to operate more effectively and efficiently second secretary slater is designating five outstanding business and management leaders for appointment to the air traffic services sub committee the group will function as a board of directors to oversee the management of the faa s air traffic control organization to make sure it operates more efficiently they are former united states senator and chairperson of the sub committee on aviation nancy kassebaum baker john cullinane who s here with us today president of the cullinane group and a pioneer in the computer software industry leon lynch the international vice president for human affairs at the united steel workers sharon patrick president and chief operating officer of martha stewart living omnimedia inc is here with us and john snow a former department of transportation administrator and current chairman president and chief executive officer of csx corporation it is a distinguished group and i think they ll do a fine job i am also directing the department of transportation and the faa to review the impediments to the use of airport congestion pricing and other market mechanisms to reduce airport delays let me say i asked about this years ago and it turns out there are a couple of federal laws which make it hard to do but if you think about how much business travel there is and how much travel travel there is and how much flexibility we might build in the system if we just had some market mechanisms to more uniformly use the airplane and airport infrastructure that we have out there i think that we really missed a big opportunity not to try to take more advantage of this and i think we could rather quickly level out and maximize the use of our facilities and our planes in ways that would dramatically reduce delays and cancellations but there are some apparently some actual statutory impediments to doing it so we re going to do what we can to identify them and leave them in good shape for the next administration and given the level of anxiety about this in the country i think we could get some pretty quick action i hope it will happen next year i hope that all these actions will accelerate much needed reform of the air traffic control system but they are not enough congress still has to reform the way air traffic control service is financed and move from a system financed by passenger taxes to one in which commercial users pay the costs of the services they use the airline industry is at a crossroads we can continue on the current course and continue to experience crowded airports flight delays and even higher passenger frustration but if we act decisively now to improve our infrastructure we can ensure that air travel in the 21st century is the safest most cost effective most efficient in the world i can hardly think of anything else the government does now that the consumers feel more directly and i certainly hope that what we re doing today will help i believe it will and i will try to wait patiently in those lines next year for congress to do its part thank you very much dem wjclinton7 12 97 bill_clinton thank you thank you reverend hicks mrs hicks members of the ministry thank you congresswoman eleanor holmes norton for telling me i should come here today thank you i must say i would rather be in the choir than in the pulpit they were wonderful thank you mr mayor city council chair cropp and members of the council dr swygert and mrs swygert my good friend maya angelou thank you for being here david dubois i thank three members of my cabinet secretary of labor alexis herman the secretary of transportation rodney slater and the director of the office of management and budget frank raines for coming with me and many members of the white house staff and friends we re all glad to be here and we have a happy heart after hearing all the wonderful music and seeing the people here and especially the children sean and ahjah and the other children gave me the letters and the drawings i was back there reading them one letter said can project spirit come and visit the white house and see the christmas tree yes as a matter of fact dr hicks anybody any of these children in your youth group you want to bring just bus them on in we d be glad to see them and we ll arrange it i d like that now the letters contain some interesting things one young man wrote i m not trying to get myself in trouble but i ve always had a crush on hillary now i can certainly understand that a lot of the letters were serious they said can i do more to get rid of violence guns a lot of them said very specific things about what they d like to do to make their schools better why are we here today or at least why am i here today instead of down the street at the foundry where i normally am on sunday ephesians says we should speak the truth with our neighbors for we are members one of another i believe that i think that is the single most important political insight or social insight in the bible and i think it is what should drive us as we behave together we have to decide whether we are members one of the other is my destiny caught up in yours are your children my children do you care about my daughter are we part of the same family of god it s not enough to say that we are all equal in the eyes of god we are all also connected in the eyes of god now just because we have responsibilities one to another doesn t mean we don t have a primary responsibility to ourselves god helps those who help themselves one great athlete once said you know it s amazing the more i practice the luckier i get so we have responsibilities to ourselves but we owe a lot to each other i come here to say that i don t believe our national government has always been the best neighbor to the city of washington mr mayor ms cropp congresswoman norton but we are committed to becoming a better neighbor washington has gotten a lot of lectures from people in national politics about being more responsible from making the schools work better to the streets become safer to the neighborhoods having more hope and economic opportunity but in the essence of our constitution is the idea that responsibility requires freedom and so i believe in the independence of washington d c i want washington d c to be able to run its own affairs i want the crime to go down and the schools to go up and the neighborhoods to be strong and full we are trying to do better in this last meeting of congress we did more things to take loads off of washington that it should not have and to give washington responsibilities that it should have and we must do more i met with the mayor the city council the control board and a lot of community leaders just a few days ago a meeting that the congresswoman requested and we talked about what we could do together but i want to say to you that i come here at this christmas season to say that i hope one of the gifts that i and our administration can leave for the 21st century is a national capital that is a shining city on the hill for all america that every american is proud of i want a national capital where every child looks like the children that i heard sing and who brought me those letters today where they re all filled with a spirit of their own goodness where they all believe they are children of god where they all are animated to believe that they can have hope to live out their dreams and this place symbolizes that wouldn t you like it if your city and your country worked the way this church did wouldn t you like that and i m not violating the first amendment by saying that this has nothing to do with the separation of church and state this has to do with the values we all share most people who are not even christians who are jewish people who are muslims who are buddhist who are all the different religions we have in our country today they d still like it if our country worked more the way this church does and often the way their houses of worship do and so i say to you it begins when we speak the truth to one another when we feel free to disagree when we don t hide what we feel but if you go on down in that chapter when we don t let the sun go down on our anger when we are genuinely kind to one another for we are members one of another now on christmas we celebrate the birth of a child born in poverty who never got elected to anything never had a nickel to his name and has more followers than any politician who ever lived for simply reminding us that we are all children of god and that we are members one of another so let us go out of here resolved to keep working together until every child is in a good school until every family can be safe in their neighborhoods until every grownup has a place to go to work in the morning and we ll all be better off when we are selfishly selfless recognizing that we are members one of another thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton7 12 99 bill_clinton thank you so much mark thank you for this evening reverend meeks dennis all the distinguished business and labor leaders in the audience and my many friends berry willie so many others thank you smokey for being here and for singing for stevie at the kennedy center honors the other night you were magnificent thank you so much reverend thanks for bringing your whole family here except for those who had to have babies and read books tonight stan peda thanks for the music it was magnificent as always and jackie thank you for being my friend and my inspiration and i want to thank your mother for all the things that jesse said but i want you to know i ve been in public life now well i started running for i ran for my first office almost 26 years ago i have talked to tens of thousands of people i ve shaken hundreds of thousands maybe over a million hands now and grandma you re the only person ever who came up and complimented me on quoting machiavelli in a speech in my whole life ever she said every smart politician reads that fellow and that brings me to jesse because the quote from machiavelli that she liked so well now a quote that s well over 500 years old said there is nothing so difficult in all of human affairs than to change the established order of things for those who will benefit are uncertain of their gain but those who will lose are absolutely certain of their loss now i m honored to be here with minyon moore my political director gene sperling my national economic advisor just walked in he works with reverend jackson because jesse jackson has been my friend for many years long before either one of us could have known we d be standing on this stage together and because he has done that most difficult thing in all of human affairs he has changed the established order of things and america is a better place i think about what he did to help save the community reinvestment act and what he s done to help me enforce it we now have over 95 percent of all the money ever loaned under the law has been loaned since i ve been president thanks in no small measure to him and to you i think about all the wonderful things he s done as my special envoy to africa most recently in sierra leone but in so many other places i think about all those years with the civil rights movement and with rainbow push all the voter education drives all the long campaigns always sticking up for issues bigger than himself and for people in difficult situations i was thinking tonight when jesse was talking about a night many many years ago when he gave a speech in little rock and i brought him back home to the governor s mansion and we got hillary to come down to the kitchen and we sat in the kitchen and we cleaned out the refrigerator we just kept on talking and we kept on eating and we kept on talking and kept on eating until finally hillary reminded me that i had to go to work in the morning and kicked him out of the house i was thinking something else too in the gripping story of jesse s past you ve got to make allowance for us you know i think people from the south generally tend to be more obsessed with the past than other people in ways that are beautiful and burdensome and maybe boring to other people but we are but tonight i want to ask you to just take on board everything jesse said and i want to ask you this question so what now if you think about it almost every major big thing we have ever done in this country we have done in the throes of difficulty or threat this great country of ours was born out of the pangs of war by people who were smart enough to say all of us are created equal and then to say but oh these slaves count as 60 percent of a person for purposes of the census and then say we re all created equal but you can t vote unless you re a white b male and c you have to own property which means that if i d been around back then i probably couldn t have voted either because i d have been one of the hired hands so then we were born in the pangs of a great war and mr lincoln comes along and we finally got rid of slavery after the bloodiest war in all of our history when we were a much much smaller country we lost more people in the civil war than any other one just over the proposition that we were going to hang together and free people it happened out of war and then in the industrial revolution we had some real social progress in the absence of war but people were really suffering i mean little children 10 years old were working in factories 70 hours a week women with little children were working on saturdays and way up into the night and there was abject human suffering and then the depression came and we had our first real comprehensive wave of social legislation and we overcame the war as jesse said and got out of the depression and then we had the great civil rights movement of the 60s because of martin luther king and all the others because the supreme court was visionary and brave and let s be honest because the congress and the country were conscience stricken after president kennedy was murdered now in my lifetime and maybe in the lifetime of this country we have never had so much economic prosperity so broadly shared with the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the lowest poverty rate in 20 years and the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded and the highest rate of business and homeownership among minorities as well as the majority population ever recorded the lowest female unemployment in 40 years so broadly shared with the absence of either an internal threat or an external threat to our security crime rate is the lowest in 30 years teen pregnancy rate is the lowest in 30 years welfare rolls are the lowest in 30 years so what i want to ask you is what now and i want to ask you even if you re not from the south not to lose your memory i came here tonight not only because i owe jesse and because i love him and because mark told me i had to and because i want dennis and bill to help hillary i also came here because i m not running for anything i want to spend the rest of my life as a good citizen but i m telling you in my lifetime in my lifetime this country has never had not one time the same level of economic prosperity social progress and national self confidence in the absence of domestic crisis or international threat never not once and my lifetime unfortunately is getting longer i was talking to a six year old girl over thanksgiving she looked up at me and she said how old are you and i said i m 53 she said oh that s a lot so what are we going to do about it so what that s what i want you to think about because we ve done real well when we were under the gun in this country you know we had abraham lincoln and people fought and bled and died finally we got rid of slavery we had franklin roosevelt unemployment was 25 percent got ourselves in a war we whipped the depression and won the war we had martin luther king and people in the streets and it took a few riots and like i said president kennedy got killed but we had president johnson s great record in civil rights which many of you contributed to what are we going to do with this because what i want to say to you is the great english writer samuel johnson said that the prospect of a person s own destruction wonderfully concentrates the mind the flip side is true when you think things are peachy keen and can t get bad it distracts the mind it makes people short sighted it makes people selfish it makes people distracted and what i want to say is we ve still got some huge challenges out there and we have the opportunity that no generation of americans has ever had to take our kids out of poverty to give them all health care to bring genuine economic opportunity to the people and places that have been left behind to bring genuine educational opportunities to all of our kids and to build one america without regard to race or region or income or sexual orientation we ve got this chance and we d better not blow it if we don t shoulder our responsibility to deal with this our children and our grandchildren will never forgive us because the country has never had this chance before and believe me nothing lasts forever that kind of keeps you going in the tough times but it s well to remember in the good times so i say to you that s the main reason i m here yes jesse started this wall street project because he wanted to create more empowerment for individuals who were talented but left behind but we also know that there are whole peoples and places the indian reservations appalachia the mississippi delta big neighborhoods in our cities who haven t felt this economic prosperity if we can t get it to them now we will never get around to it if we can t bring the benefits of free enterprise to the people and places that don t have it now with the lowest unemployment in 30 years and the highest growth rate we will never get around to it if we can t save social security and take it way out beyond the baby boom generation and do something about elderly women who are too poor compared to the other retirees elderly women living alone if we don t do that now when are we going to get around to it if we don t extend the life of medicare and provide some prescription drug coverage to the three quarters of our seniors that can t afford what they need when will we ever get around to it if we re not going to give all of our kids since we now know how to turn around failing schools we don t have any excuse anymore it s not a matter of some sort of scientific project if we re not going to bridge the digital divide and make sure all of our kids have access to the internet world of tomorrow if we re not going to do it now when will we get around to it if we re not going to shoulder our responsibilities to our friends and neighbors from the caribbean to africa to the world s most indebted countries so that they too can be our partners and be a part of tomorrow when are we ever going to get around to it now you can have your own list but i m telling you one of the things i think we ve proved is that you can take good social policy and good economic policy and prove they go hand in hand the progressives we lost a lot of elections because people said well those people have a good heart but a soft head and if you put them in they ll spend us in the ditch and tax us until we bleed and they won t be able to run the economy they can t say that anymore we have the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years and we cut taxes on millions of working people with the earned income tax credit we raised the minimum wage and we ought to raise it again and we passed the family and medical leave act and we ought to make it broader we ought to do things to prove that good social policy and good economic policy go hand in hand you know if you go into city after city after city you will see as my good friend congressman john lewis says that environmental justice can be a civil rights issue how many people do you know in urban areas living by toxic waste dumps that we could turn into economic gold mines if we cleaned them up that s what we re trying to do but you make your own list when you go home tonight just write down the five things that you think are the biggest challenges facing america and then you ask yourself if we can t do it now when will we ever get around to doing it when i think if rainbow push i think of two things rainbow means we re all in it together and we all have a place at the table push is what jesse does to me when he thinks i m not doing right and both those things are good and you know 14 or 15 months from now when i become a citizen again then i can be a pusher we ll all do that but this is a great country you remember the history of it remember the stories jesse told think about his mother in law i got my pin think about his mother in law but you think about this whole deal and i m telling you i defy you to cite a time in your lifetime which has been like this and i say it not to be self serving look i m grateful i got to serve i m grateful that i got to serve at a time when the challenges of the country fit my experience and what i knew and what i felt in my heart but it s like turning a big old ocean liner around in the middle of the pacific you can t do it overnight so we ve turned this country around we re going full steam ahead in the right direction but i am telling you it s no different from a person a family or a business a nation when things are going well has to make a decision and we have a responsibility to reach out to all those who have been left behind to create one america and to build the future of our dreams for our children if not now we will never get around to it so you go home tonight and make your list and keep supporting rainbow push and demand that your leaders take this historic opportunity to be worthy of the sacrifices that jesse talked about tonight thank you and god bless you wait wait now before you all leave we re going to do one more thing jesse and i we ve got a little friend here that i want to sing for us we re going to have one more song come on joshua come up here come on josh i know we ve all got to go i just want to say amen to this we had a vh 1 concert at the white house the other night because john sykes the head of vh 1 is collecting instruments he s collected i think almost 1 million now around america to give to schools so they could have music programs but all over the country these music programs these art programs have been cancelled out and we know that there are poor children out there who will learn better and find ways to express themselves better stay out of trouble and stay in love with education if they have access to these things this is a huge deal and i want to thank you for saying that it s a big deal thank you dem wjclinton7 2 96 bill_clinton thank you very much i assure you when i was attempting to help anne s institution get that foundation grant i had not imagined that one day i would reap this benefit of that fine introduction let me congratulate mike adams on his successful term as chairman and for his kind remarks and for recognizing the brilliant work of our education secretary dick riley i know of no person who has had that job who has done so much in so many areas to have a positive impact on the education of the american people and we are all in his debt most of all the president but all of us are in his debt for the fine job he has done and i do want to thank anne die again for that wonderful introduction and for the kind remarks she had about hillary and about me and what we did together i must say as i said in the state of the union address after three years the central lesson that i have learned as president is that in meeting our challenges we have to do what we did instinctively at home we have to work together more and the role of government should be seen in the context of an instrument of helping us work together to meet our common challenges i enjoyed doing that then and when it s possible i like doing it here i m also delighted to see david warren again we first met as he may have said publicly before in 1970 about 26 years ago when we both worked on the senate campaign of joseph duffy in connecticut and neither one of us had any gray hair then now joe duffy is doing a fabulous job for the united states as head of the usia and he has less gray hair than either one of us our only consolation is he also has less hair than either one of us anyway it s been a busy 26 years for both of us and i m proud of the work that he does for you for 20 years this association has given voice to the concerns of higher education you have demonstrated something that america knows about itself but sometimes forgets and that is that there is strength in diversity you come from every corner of our nation you represent every field from the sciences to the liberal arts to businesses and all kinds of institutions from church related schools to historically black colleges to women s colleges you have shown enormous strength and perseverance in our common efforts to keep the doors to college education to all americans your alliance to save student aid is doing wonderful work and i may be preaching to the choir but every now and then even the choir needs to hear that it is doing wonderful work i know how hard you have fought to save the right to choose the direct lending program and i tell you what i have told the members of congress this is no time for whatever reason under whatever circumstances to cut back on any kind of student aid we need more of it not less of it if i might i would like to take just a few moments today to try to put the struggles that you and i are engaged in to not only keep open the doors of college for all americans but to widen those doors in a larger historic context in my state of the union address i said i thought that america had entered a great age of possibility and i believe that i believe that the american people who are poised to take advantage of it will have more opportunities to live out their dreams than any generation of americans every has we also know perplexingly that this is an age of great challenge in which huge numbers of americans feel deeply frustrated and worried that not only they but their children will not have the chance to live out their dreams how could both these things coexist at the same time how could there be so much good economic news and so much troubling economic news how could there be good news on the social front and troubling news on the social front it is i am convinced endemic to the nature of this moment in our history which i believe is most like what happened to us more or less a hundred years ago when we went through the transformation from being a rural and agricultural society into a more urbanized more industrial society and now we re moving into an age dominated by information and technology and the markets of the global village the nature of work has changed and that helps you in your enterprise because we now have almost all work contains more mind and less body more information and more technology and is changing more rapidly so you not only need to know more you need to be able to learn more the nature of work is changing and there is no sign that the rate of change and the direction of change will do anything but speed up the nature of work organizations are also changing you have more and more people who are self employed more and more people who can now work at home because there are computer hook ups the largest and most bureaucratic and most top down organizations tend to be swimming down pushing decisions down and getting rid of a lot of people in the middle of the organizations that used to hand orders and information up and down the food chain of the enterprise and again that can be good but it can be severely disruptive if you re 50 years old and you ve got three kids to send to college and you ve just been told that your fortune 500 company doesn t need you anymore we see the change in the nature of work the encouraging thing is that in the last three years more jobs have been created by businesses owned by women alone than have been eliminated by the fortune 500 companies but they re different they re smaller they re more scattered about they are less secure in a traditional sense so work is changing and work organizations are changing and finally the nature of our markets are changing the markets for financing and the markets for goods and services are increasingly global increasingly rapid and on occasion ruthless because of their ability to seek the area of greatest opportunity in a split second and all of these things have opened up vast new opportunities but impose great new challenges on our ability to maintain old fashioned values and to maintain a sense of national community as all these changes proliferate and put pressures on all of our institutions to pull apart and break down and leave people feeling more isolated you see for example in the united states right now in the last three years we have enjoyed the lowest unemployment and inflation rates combined in 27 years we have about 8 million new jobs homeownership is at a 15 year high exports are at an all time high as the congress debates the farm bill today we see soybeans at a 17 year high wheat at a 15 year high and corn is about 3 60 and i don t know how long it s been since it s been that high but a while partly because of technology in agriculture and the sophistication of the markets by which agriculture is traded and moved around the world we have in each of the last three years had the largest number of new businesses formed in our history each year breaking a record and the largest number of new self made millionaires in our history not people who inherited their wealth but people who lived the american dream who went by their own efforts and put something together in the private sector and made themselves a million dollars doing it and that is all very encouraging and of course you have enjoyed it because knowledge is at a greater premium than ever before and it s exciting for you now the other side of that is more than half the people in the workplace are working in real terms for the same or lower wages they were making more than a decade ago the average working family is spending more hours on the job today than they were in 1969 that s very important and as more and more people work for smaller and smaller units and more and more shifting patterns and there s more and more downsizing over and over and over again more people feel insecurity about not only their job but their health care their retirement and their ability to educate their own children i went to the typical little red brick schoolhouse when i was in grade school in my hometown in arkansas with a man who grew up in very humble circumstances who was the first person in his family to go to college who was an engineer with a fortune 500 company and when he was 49 the company came to him and two other 49 year old white male engineers and said we don t need you anymore right when all their kids were ready to go to college and the company was making more profits and for nine months he worked to try to find another position this story has a happy ending he got another one he s doing all right and he had a lot of high tech help he had a sophisticated computer program where he had identified 250 contacts all across america of any possible employers who could hire someone like him making about what he had made doing about what he had done and he churned that network with all of its high tech glory for eight or nine hours a day but it still took him nine months to find a job that is the other side of this the other day i had coffee with a friend of mine from out west who is an immensely successful man who by pure blind irony was also in that little red brick schoolhouse with me 40 years ago in arkansas along with his brother his brother was also immensely successful but he happened to work for two companies in a row that were bought out in one of these leverage buy outs and in the downsizing he lost his job he didn t do anything wrong he was perfectly productive but he just was in the wrong place at the wrong time not once but twice so our big question here is how can we keep the dynamism of this new economy how can we keep it going and growing and offering these opportunities but make the opportunities available to all americans and give us a chance to preserve a sense of community in this country that anybody who works hard and plays by the rules should have a chance to be rewarded for it you see the same thing on the social front where the american people really are beginning to get their act together not only in terms of their values but in terms of adopting strategies that work you see the crime rate down the welfare rolls the food stamp rolls down the poverty rolls down the teen pregnancy rate down for the last two years that s the good news the bad news is i could tell you the crime rate was down and i could show you the statistics and there is still a zillion streets in this country you wouldn t feel comfortable walking in after dark so all those problems are still far too great for a great country like ours to tolerate and we are wasting too many of our children s lives and too much of our fortune dealing with the fallout of our inability to organize ourselves in constructive ways so that we raise our children properly and we all behave right and we are paying a terrible price for it we re not putting all of our players on the field we still have whole chunks of areas of our cities and isolated rural areas which have been completely untouched by this economic recovery but they have plenty of the dark side of our social fallout so the challenge i will say again is how can we make the american dream available to all americans and how can we pull this country together when there are so many forces working to divide it i believe the first thing we have to do is to get beyond the partisan bickering here and pass the seven year balanced budget plan that protects education and the environment and medicare and medicaid we have identified now in common common to both the republican and democratic approaches 700 billion in savings that is more than enough to pass a balanced budget plan in seven years that meets the criteria that i ve laid out there is no excuse for not doing it we ought to just do it and put it behind us and stop having the newspapers filled with it every day we ought to give the american people a balanced budget then as i said in the state of the union so then what the question is how are we going to meet these challenges how are we going to help people to make the most of their lives how are we going to help families and communities to solve their problems at the grassroots level i am convinced that we have to do it together and i am convinced there are seven major things we have to do and i will just repeat them briefly and then focus on education first and foremost we have to enable ourselves our friends and our neighbors to do a better job raising our children and strengthening our families sometimes the time young people are old enough to go to college it s already too late for too many of them and let me just mention one example today a comprehensive scientific study is being released on the impact of television violence on young people and it concludes what we all know in our instinctive selves that television violence is pervasive numbing and can have a lasting and corrosive effect on young people if they re exposed to too much of it for too long it distorts their perspective and later changes their attitudes and for some of them their behavior in my state of the union address i called upon congress to pass the telecommunications legislation but to pass it with the v chip requirement in it so that all the new cable television sets would give parents the right to select out programs with excessive violence or other objectionable content they didn t want their children to see i am proud to say that tomorrow at the library of congress i will sign the telecommunications bill into law with the v chip requirement in it and i think it will make a difference it s an example of what we ought to do though the telecommunications part of this legislation because of the changes there would enable our country to generate tens of thousands of more high wage high tech exciting jobs to offer consumers vast new opportunities in telecommunications but we can do it in a way that still reinforces instead of undermines our basic values that doesn t say anything goes whatever looks like a market opportunity in this millisecond should govern and overcome whatever your enduring sense of values is but that s what i like about it and that s the sort of thing i think we need to be looking for in other areas of our lives our second challenge obviously is to try to provide an educational opportunity for every american for a lifetime third to provide a new sense of economic security in a dynamic economy by giving people access to education for a lifetime access to health care and access to a pension you can take with you when you move from job to job our fourth challenge is to continue the fight against crime and gangs and drugs until we meet what we all know instinctively is the real test the real test is when all of us feel that crime is the exception rather than the rule we ll be back to where we ought to be in america again and we can t stop fighting until that is how we all feel fifth we have a serious challenge still as we see from all the weather we ve endured just in the last few years to deal with the fundamental and pervasive impacts of environmental degradation and to change the whole mind set in america away from the idea that you have to accept a certain amount of environmental despoliation to grow the economy to the idea that you can actually reinforce economic growth if you have the right kind of environmental protection policies and unless we make a commitment as a nation to do that we and the rest of the world are going to pay a terrible terrible price i told the prime minister of china i mean the president of china when we were in our last meeting that the biggest threat to our security from china had nothing to do with what everybody reads in the paper all the time it had to do with the fact that they might get as rich as we are and they d have the same percentage of their people as we do driving automobiles and we haven t figured out how to deal with the greenhouse gases and the global warming in which case they would present a real threat to our security because we wouldn t be able to breathe since they have 1 200 000 000 people and we only have 260 million this is a very serious thing and it needs to be a bipartisan or nonpartisan issue the sixth great challenge is to maintain our leadership for peace and freedom this is a time when a lot of americans think we can afford to be isolationist because we have so many challenges at home we paid a terrible price to win the cold war and who is at our borders now that s a very simple but wrong attitude if we want people to buy our goods and services we have to be willing to cooperate with them to advance peace and freedom if we want countries to cooperate with us in stopping drugs from coming into our country we have to work with them to get that done and you d only have to think about a few examples the world trade center and the sarin gas breaking open in japan killing all those people in the subway to know that high tech terrorism is a global phenomenon that can only be engaged if you are involved with other countries finally we have to change the way our government works so it inspires more confidence does more good and can still meet the demands of the modern era now having said that if you ask me which one of these things is most likely to meet my objective which is to help people make the most of their own lives and to give people the tools to solve their problems together you would have to say that creating a system of excellent education with access to everybody for a lifetime is the most likely thing to do that because the more educated people you have the more they re likely to see these connections that i m talking about and to make the right decisions community by community state by state and in our nation as a whole and unless we do that we re going to be in real trouble but if we do it then the age of possibility will be for everyone and the 21st century will probably be known as the american century too that s why higher education is so important that s why i have worked so hard to protect these student aid programs and indeed to advance a lot of what we are doing you know these statistics but i think a couple of them are worth repeating in 1979 a worker with a college education earned about 40 percent more than a worker with a high school degree today the gap is about 75 percent and rising when i studied the 1990 census figures i noticed that the only group of younger people that had incomes that were rising were those that had at least two years of post high school education as a group those with under two years or less had declining incomes from the beginning of their experience in the work force they had committed themselves to a treadmill from the beginning which would get harder and harder and harder to stay on so i say you know that now if we all know that why in the world would we ever do anything to make it harder to go on to college or to stay in college or to discourage people from taking out college loans this is not rocket science i may be talking to a lot of college presidents but this is simple this is a b c this is first grade second grade third grade why would we do anything ever to make it harder to go on to college and to stay there on this issue we must all stand firm and i know i can depend upon you to do it this is not a question of what the government does the federal student loan guarantee program the pell grant scholarships all these things are these are not big government programs these are programs designed to help individuals make the most of their own lives and to help you succeed in operating your institutions that is the role of the national government and this is not soft headed we have i m proud of the fact that since we ve been here secretary riley and i have overseen almost a 50 percent reduction in the student loan default rate i m proud of that and i know a lot of you support that it would seem to me that that would be evidence that we know also what we re doing when we say we ought to make more loan options available to more people i like the direct loan program because it s less hassle for you and less hassle for the students but i really like it because as long as you even have the option to do it it ll be more pressure on all the competition to cut the costs and increase the quality of service and i ve seen that happen as well we ve increased the pell grants and we should do that some more we still haven t gotten back to where they used to be we ought to do it some more this year 25 000 young people will earn some money to go to college by their americorps service in communities all across the country and we ought to maintain that program i feel strongly about it and i m sure you remember that in the state of the union i proposed three further steps first of all that we should award a 1 000 scholarship to every student in the top 5 percent of every graduating class in america that s 128 000 graduating seniors we could give a little more money to go to college on i think we ought to do it second one thing that i think that we have not done as good a job as we should have in the last three years and we re trying to catch up in a big way the secretary of education and i want to expand the work study program so that by the year 2000 one million american students will be working their way through college with work study and thirdly and most important of all we believe that families with incomes of under 100 000 should be able to deduct as much as 10 000 in post secondary education costs from their taxes including tuition and fees at any eligible institution university or college private or public or vocational school that would benefit 16 5 million americans the best kind of tax cut we could have we give tax relief for businesses that invest in new plant and equipment if we know we re running on brain power why shouldn t we give tax relief to families that invest in education we ought to do that i know that all of you agree with all this i also know that all of you are trying to come to grips with your part of this equation which is to do whatever you can to hold down college costs i was reviewing in my own mind being the father of a high school junior i have to learn to think about this now one of you will have a chance to make me much poorer before long perhaps but i got to thinking about it when i went to college i had a job and a scholarship and then i went to law school i had a scholarship a loan and in three years six different jobs and i enjoyed it all i not only didn t mind working i was grateful to have a chance to have the jobs and i enjoyed being able to support myself and i was proud when i was able to pay off the last of my loans but we know that from that time when i was in school nearly 30 years ago now when i finished to this time the cost of college as a percentage of a family s income has increased dramatically that more and more people need more college aid and i sometimes wonder whether colleges don t get more and more behind by raising tuition costs because you have to keep recycling it in scholarships and loans they re about double what they were 10 years ago and of course as i said the most significant thing is that the college costs have gone up so much more than middle class incomes have and much much more than lower middle class incomes have which and that s evidenced in the fact that in the last five years you see a decline in enrollments among a lot of people in the bottom 20 percent of the income group in america the very group that used to live the american dream with the greatest pride so you ve got increasing enrollments as you go up the income scale which is good but decreasing enrollment as you go down the income scale which is bad we we will do what we can to keep up with the scholarships and loans but anything that can be done to ratchet down the burdens on deserving students is a good thing to do i noticed that in muskingham college in oklahoma i mean in ohio actually lowered its tuition by 4 000 and these notes i have say that north carolina wesleyan cut its tuition by 23 percent i don t know whether they did it by containing costs or praying to god or both but i think it is a good thing to do wherever possible again i say to you we cannot do what we ought to do for america if we increase college enrollment overall but children who would be disproportionately minority children but not all in the bottom 20 percent of the bottom 30 percent of our income families are seeing their enrollments decline drake university in des moines is holding its increase to the rate of inflation i know that others are giving discounts to certain people the university of rio grande is giving free tuition to high school valedictorians and salutatorians this kind of innovation and leadership is something i think ought to be encouraged but i would ask you all to think especially about those kids that are coming out of homes from the bottom 20 percent who are afraid that they can t make it the main reason i wanted the direct loan program has nothing to do with all the stuff that i just talked about about it i wanted it because i thought that every person ought to have the option to borrow money for college and pay it back as a percentage of their income so that if they came from a poor family or if they decided to do jobs that were public service jobs for example if they decided to be police officers or school teachers or do something else where they would never get rich they would know that there would never be a single solitary year when they would be in need because of the payment schedule of their college loans and i think that s important but i say to you again anything you can do to try to bring down the college burden especially on that group of our young people so that all income groups increase their enrollment again is something that we could do together that would make a real difference for america the last point i want to make is this a lot of you have americorps projects on your campuses a lot of you who don t have that have some sort of community service project i think it is very important that the young people of this country have the opportunity to serve while they re in college in some meaningful community service i think it is very important that when they leave their colleges and universities they have the idea that they have an obligation to give something back to their country and they understand that the only way we ever get anything done in america is to bridge our differences and work together and to learn by doing in that way so i would urge you all to do everything you can to increase the involvement of your students in community service projects we can change the character of america by changing the attitudes the approach the intuitive responses of this young generation this brilliant aggressive intelligent and energetic group of people toward the idea of community i see all these surveys that talk about how pessimistic or cynical people are but the truth is cynicism is an excuse for inaction and an awful poor one it s a poor rationalization for believing that nothing you do makes any difference and so i ask you all to remember that you have these people even though the age of college students is getting increasingly higher none of us are too old to give a little something back and to be given an opportunity to give something to our community and you can do that in a unique way that opens up the way people think about america and its future i believe i will say again i believe that the younger generation today will live in a time of greatest possibility america has every known but in order to make it really work those possibilities have to be available to all americans who are willing to work for them and they have to be available in a country that is coming together across its divisions not drifting apart the changing nature of work the changing nature of work organizations the changing nature of markets are all putting pressures to divide to split up to splinter off an american community that still needs very much to move closer together to open opportunity to everybody to tackle our social problems and to make this country what it ought to be there are no people in america better positioned to lead this country in the right direction than you are thank you in your fight for higher education thank you for your fight for student aid please please take on these other challenges and let s give this country the kind of future it deserves thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton7 3 96 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you mark for your fine introduction and for your fine example and for reminding us about why this is an important day for the united states thank you dr boarman for recalling my previous trip to eleanor roosevelt that was a great day i must say when i was there then talking about the national education goals i didn t have any idea i d be back here a few years later in this role to discuss this issue i d like to thank the members of congress who are here and my good friend secretary cisneros governor glendening and lt governor townsend your county executive wayne curry who was with me just yesterday in the white house telling me about how this is the best county in america i thank reverend jackson and all the people from the entertainment community and the other leaders who are here from across america today at this national conference i also want you to know that there are two graduates of this high school who work in the white house one of my associate counsels cheryl mills and andy blocker who works in legislative affairs so i am a direct beneficiary of eleanor roosevelt high school and i thank you for that when i leave you here we re going over to the conference with the delegates but i wanted to come here with the vice president and with general mccaffrey because really this conference is about you and frankly this is a day when i wish that as president it weren t my job to give a speech that i could just spend the next hour or two sitting around visiting with a number of you and listening to you and talking with you about your future because we re here to try to do what we can to make your lives safer and your future stronger you probably don t think about this very much but already in your lives you have acquired different roles and different responsibilities and they give you different perspectives you are students and you re still children you re sons or daughters you may be brothers or sisters if you have an association with organizations you re in the rotc or in an athletic club or in the band you have obligations doubtless to your friends that have become more and more important to you as you get older that s the position that i find myself in today i want to speak with you about this whole issue of crime and violence and drugs from the perspective of a president the head of our nation s government a citizen who understands that much of this work needs to be done in grass roots citizens community based organizations and the father of a high school aged daughter i see this whole issue in terms of what s good for families and what s good for the country you re old enough now that you re being confronted on a regular basis with tough decisions where you have to choose right from wrong dangerous from safe what you may not know is that the decisions that you make also may be good or bad not only for this community but for your entire country that s what i want to talk to you about today the decisions that i have to make as president to try to create more opportunity for you and a more secure environment the decisions that we all have to make as citizens to try to improve your future and your present and most important the decisions that i hope you will make to choose life over death to choose what is right for you over plainly what is wrong you are coming of age at the moment of greatest possibility in all of american history where young people who are prepared for it will be able to have more options to live out the future of their dreams than any previous generation and the technological revolution which is still a mystery to me is something that many of you just take for granted it can be the most democratic instrument in our history it can offer enormous opportunities to children who not so many years ago could never had had them just because they came up in poor households the other day the vice president and i were in a school district in new jersey that is in a poor neighborhood where most of the children come from immigrant families the per capita income is way below the state average and new jersey is one of the two or three richest states in america the school district was performing so poorly a few years ago that the state almost had to come in and close it and take it over but they got new leadership major companies came in with a commitment to help they put computers in all the classrooms for the kids and then they even had computer hook ups in the homes of these poor parents many of whom had only been in our country for a few years within a matter of weeks immigrant parents were e mailing the principal to see how their kids were doing and whether they were doing their homework within two or three years this district that was on the verge of failure and all these poor children on the verge of being denied the american dream had attendance rates and graduation rates and most important of all test scores above the state average in one of the wealthiest states in this country that can happen to america that is the technological age were are living in but the interesting thing about it and the perplexing thing about it is that technology is like every other tool of human beings that s all it is and in order for technology to work it still has to be used by people who have good values a strong background and who choose life who choose their future who choose what is right for themselves and their country our nation has a lot of challenges that we have to meet together if we re going to make sure the american dream is available for all young people without regard to their background if we re going to see that our country remains the strongest country in the world if we re going to see this country come together instead of being divided by race by region by income we ve got a lot of challenges to meet some of them are obvious we have to do a better job of strengthening all families and giving all children a chance of a good childhood through things like better nutrition programs and immunization programs and head start for kids who need it we have to provide excellence in educational opportunities for a lifetime now not even just for children kindergarten through 12th grade through things like a better student loan program and more college scholarships and the national service program and the program that first brought me here the national education goals giving schools the grass roots tools they need to meet high national standards of educational attainment for all of our young people through economic strategies to create more high wage jobs in the places that don t have them we ve got a lot of work to do but in the end if you think about it we cannot succeed in any of these challenges unless first we deal with the problems of crime and violence and gangs and drugs for in the absence of safety people are not free i don t know how many of you saw i m sure many of you did the gripping painful pictures coming across our airwaves from the middle east in the last few days where innocent children were killed by suicide bombers bent on destroying the peace process in the middle east but i couldn t help i was so moved by the interviews with children with young people and it struck me just so clearly there that israel is a very great democracy but if every child goes to bed at night afraid it is not a free country and the same thing is true here if you are imprisoned from within by drugs or from without by a fear that you can t even walk down the street without looking over your shoulder this is not a free country and you are not a free person and you can never be everything that you ought to believe unless you are free part of it involves your choice to choose life and a future part of it involves what we can all do together to make sure that nothing takes that future nothing takes that life away from you and that is in many ways our most fundamental mission because from it all else flows your mission to decide what kind of person you re going to be our mission to decide what we re going to do to make sure you get the chance to become that person and in our country it still means even though the crime rate is down even though drug use is way down from where it was at its peak we still have a lot of work to do we have to get rid of the guns that turn arguments into terrible tragedies like the one that took the life of c j brown we have to take back our streets so that mothers and fathers don t have to be afraid when a son or daughter is waiting for a ride after work like julie ferguson was on the night she was killed so that s why i want to talk to you about this and i have a real perspective i think about the whole drug and crime and violence problem i grew up in the 60s when most people your age when i was your age they just sort of got into this business they didn t really believe drugs were dangerous until it nearly destroyed our generation i heard general mccaffrey who served with great distinction and valor in vietnam talking about yesterday how in our generation when we were younger the united states military was nearly destroyed by it i had a brother who nearly lost his life because of a drug problem i know a lot about this and we have seen this incredible progress in the drug issue in the last several years where drug usage has gone way done still going down among people 18 to 34 but now casual drug use going up again among people under 18 we have to stop that we see the crime rate going down in america the murder rate going down the violence rate going down but casual violence among people under 18 going up again there are people in this conference with me today who became friends of mine who were once members of gangs and devoted the rest of their lives to stopping young people from making that mistake trying to get them to choose life and we have to do that i tell you today the most perplexing challenge facing us is how to make sure that drug use goes down among people who are under 18 that violence continues to go down among people who are under 18 we do not want to lose any more children we don t want to rob any more people of their future we have to fight these things whenever and wherever we see them let me begin by saying that one of the most disturbing findings in a lot of the national surveys is that more and more young people in your age group and maybe you re among them seem to believe that drugs are not dangerous anymore that is factually wrong it s not only wrong about cocaine it s not only wrong about methamphetamine it s wrong about marijuana it is just wrong we know that the toxic content of marijuana alone for example is roughly three times greater than it was 30 years ago it is not true that they are not dangerous they are illegal and therefore wrong but they are also dangerous and i ll say again i nearly lost my only brother i m not just telling you as a president this is not a political speech this is a personal statement and there is no reason for the people of this country who happen to be under 18 to start seeing drug use go up again and violence go up again when the future for you is the brightest future any group of americans have ever known if you can make the transition into this new high tech age so no matter what we do with the laws and all the things that we should be doing you have to make the right decision first and i want to say one of the reasons that we wanted to come here to have this conference at roosevelt instead of some hotel or government building is because of what you have done at this school because the students the teachers and the parents of this school are doing such a remarkable job of fighting drugs and violence they re not a perfect stranger here drugs and violence but this community has come together to send them packing and i thank you for that the way you re doing it is a lesson for all of america i ve spent a lot of time saying what the government can do and what the government cannot do we cannot solve the drug problem from washington we can t stamp out youth violence just by passing laws we can t even do it by giving resources to local communities unless they are properly used each of us has our own role to play our government has a responsibility which we have tried to fulfill the crime bill we fought for in 1994 is helping to put 100 000 more police officers on the street that helps to deter crime and it is working everywhere it s being used aggressively we banned 19 kinds of assault weapons and you ve already heard that we passed the brady bill to require a five day waiting period before people can buy handguns and tens of thousands of people who have criminal records now have failed to get guns this is a safer country because of that we passed the three strikes and you re out law to put the most dangerous criminals behind bars for life we are fighting against domestic violence as never before because of that crime bill and we re trying to help thousands of schools to fight drugs and violence with drug education and gang prevention and increased security we re supporting programs like the dare program which i think is doing a wonderful amount of good in elementary schools throughout our country i know that that can work we also made it a national federal crime for any person under the age of 18 to carry a handgun except when supervised by an adult last year i fought for a law requiring every state to expel any student who brings a gun to a school for a year no excuses you have a zero tolerance policy for guns here at roosevelt we ought to have a zero tolerance for guns in every school in america you should never worry about your safety when you re in school we ve launched an aggressive campaign to crack down on advertising to convince young people to begin smoking cigarette smoking is now rapidly becoming the greatest cause of future health dangers to young people in america three thousand children start smoking every day even though it s illegal in every state 1 000 will have there lives shortened as a result don t let that happen to you if you don t smoke don t start if you started stop it could be the best thing you ever do for your health you heard general mccaffrey a few moments ago the national government has a responsibility that is embodied by general mccaffrey to do everything we can to try to stop the flow of drugs into our country and to try to deal with it after it comes in our country to try to help people who have already fallen victims to drug abuse we re doing everything we can in that regard we also in the crime bill gave communities some funds that i m struggling with the congress to preserve now not only to tell our young people they should say no to drugs but to give young people in difficult circumstances more things to say yes to more opportunities to be involved in positive activities and engaged in things that will help to build their lives that is all our responsibility but general mccaffrey cannot do this alone the president cannot do this alone the government cannot do this alone that s why i say the things you ve done here may count for more than anything else i was given some notes before i came over here about your grad night program which i think is a remarkable thing every school in the country ought to do that your parents know that peer pressure to use drugs and alcohol is always strong especially on graduation night but they want you to celebrate your achievement not end your life and i think it s a very impressive thing that businesses have supported this parents have supported it every year they throw you an all night party i don t think it s advisable every week but i think once a year it s a pretty good idea for the benefit of the press and the others who are here the seniors come to school at 11 00 p m give their keys and bags to their parents load up the buses they don t come back until 6 00 a m in the morning they can spend the night swimming playing basketball dancing eating all kinds of food they even have a chance to win a car i wonder if that gets the participation rate up last year listen to this 622 seniors here 597 showed up to celebrate that s an amazing thing that s an amazing thing that s the kind of community spirit and commitment we need all across this country and today i want you to know that we re getting that kind of community spirit in other ways as well working with the drug czar s office the leaders of a major american industry have come together to try to do their part we know the fight against youth drug abuse has to begin at home we also know that a lot of parents don t always recognize the warning signs of drug abuse and they re unsure about how they should approach their children when they do well what can we do about this we know that america can do a lot when people need health advice they normally turn to their family doctor we know that the pharmaceutical industry sends sales representatives to see every doctor in his or her office in the entire country today i am proud to announce that the 15 major pharmaceutical companies in america are launching a 33 million campaign to put the kind of drug education material that parents need in the hands of 400 000 doctors so that they can give it to parents and we can work to stop this problem earlier we have some pharmaceutical executives who are here with us today i d like to ask them to stand up and be recognized where are they here they are let s give them a hand thank you very much gentlemen thank you all of us who are parents have a big role to play we are the beginning of how children learn right from wrong we are the beginning of what children believe about drugs and whether they re safe or unsafe how wrong it is to break the law but in the end it still comes down to all of you and your counterparts all across america i will say again you have a lot of responsibilities you have responsibilities to students you have responsibilities as children responsibilities as members of various organizations your most important responsibility is still to you your most import responsibility is to choose life your most important responsibility is to make the most of your own life as my wife always says when we have a big argument around our house life is not a dress rehearsal that is your most important responsibility i know a lot of you have been pressured to do drugs before and you will be again and when i tell you you shouldn t do it you look at me and say look at that he may be president but he s still 50 years old and has gray hair it s easy for him to say i know that s what you must be thinking and you re right it is easy for me to say but believe it or not all of us who adults who are here today were once young and we re not entirely without our memories we understand what you re going through and if we re lucky enough to be parents we see it firsthand up close there are things we can do things i can do as president things these pharmaceutical executives can do things general mccaffrey and the vice president can do things the schools can do but in the end when you look at this from my perspective when what i really want to do with the presidency is to make sure every american has a chance to live out their dreams i realize that if large numbers of our young people give up on their dreams nothing i do will permit me to succeed and i know there are other people that have a lot more influence than i do a lot of these entertainers that you cheered for you may listen to them more my friend charles rayoff from los angeles he used to be in a gang now spends his life telling kids they shouldn t do that anymore maybe he s got more influence over the people on his street than i do i know this in the end you re going to make the decisions about what happens to you i m not and neither is anybody between me and you in the chain of command in our society so i say to you in closing i believe that your future can be the brightest future any generation of americans have ever enjoyed i believe that the kinds of things you re going to be able to do because of the explosion of information and technology because the world is drawing closer together because america is look around this room here this is the most successful multiracial multiethnic democracy in all of human history this is a great thing the rest of us we ll keep doing our part i want to say a word about reverend jackson you clapped when he was introduced a long time before either one of us knew we d be sitting here 20 years ago 20 years ago next year was the first time i went with jesse jackson into a school to hear him give a speech to young people about staying off drugs twenty years ago long before it was the fashionable thing to do he was out there doing it i thank you for that twenty years ago this year thank you general mccaffrey will keep doing his part he ll be a great role model and a great leader but in the end you have to do it and let me say i know most of you are doing the right thing i get tired of hearing only the bad things about america s younger generation most of the younger generation is pretty great and that s why we re doing as well as we are i understand that but if you re in doubt don t do it if you re in trouble get help if you re doing the right thing don t be afraid to be a role model don t be afraid to be a friend this country will be the greatest country in human history 50 years from now if we whip the problems that are afflicting childhood if we give our children back their childhood if when you turn on the television at night and you see some act of violence on the news you are surprised instead of just deadened well that s what i always see we ve got to make violence the exception not the rule we ve got to make drug abuse the exception not the rule we ve got to make the rule what i see out here when i look in your faces young people who are committed to themselves committed to their families committed to their communities committed to their own future choose life and we ll be all right thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton7 3 99 bill_clinton i want to first of all acknowledge the presence here of senators mitchell moynihan riegle sarbanes sasser hatfield and durenberger the speaker and congressman matsui and congressman fish i would also like to acknowledge the labor secretary and two of his employees whom i will recognize formally in just a moment today i am signing important legislation to extend unemployment benefits long term i want to thank the congress for passing this bill which is the first provision in the economic package i recommended to them in my joint address the bill reforms existing law it symbolizes the success of a new management style we are bringing to the government and it reminds us of how critical it is to adopt the rest of our economic plan to increase investment reduce the deficit create private sector jobs and increase the incomes of working americans we have extended unemployment benefits now it s time to extend jobs it s been less than a month since i asked the secretary of labor to prepare the emergency legislation i want to commend the leadership of the congress of those who are here and those who are not who made rapid action possible thanks to them the benefits of millions of americans will proceed without interruption more important this legislation takes an existing pilot program and applies it nationally in ways that i am convinced will help tens of thousands of workers immediately this reform was brought to the attention of secretary reich by line workers at the department of labor and it reflects the kind of innovation and imagination we must bring to the entire federal government it is at the core of the national performance review initiative that the vice president and i announced yesterday the department of labor funds a demonstration project in new jersey that matches up workers who are permanently displaced with training and reemployment services they use existing data to provide services to people in need once they re identified the workers receive the kind of counseling training and retraining that gets them back to work faster and often at higher wages than would have otherwise been the case secretary of labor reich held a town meeting in his department of labor to break down the walls that too often have existed between senior management and federal employees because two dedicated public employees brought this successful innovation to his attention today it is becoming the law of the land everywhere thanks to the congress it s a great example of what we can and must do throughout the government and the people who made it happen have joined us here for this important moment with this bill becoming law one and a half million unemployed americans who need help making the rent and buying groceries and paying for school clothes will receive it i hope they will also recognize the efforts of the two gentlemen to my left with the secretary of labor steve wandner and steve marler the labor department employees who brought the profiling reform to the secretary s attention thank you very much some of the indicators are that we are coming out of a long and deep recession but as all of you know this has been a slow anemic recovery when it comes to job growth especially it is time now to get on to the important work of stimulating our economy and putting the american people back to work to creating the conditions that will allow the private sector to create jobs and to create jobs at good wages i hope that this is a good first step there are those who say we don t need to do anything else to our economy but i would remind you all that we are three million jobs behind where we would be at this point in an ordinary american recovery claims for unemployment benefits are up again this week and there are still deep structural changes going on in this economy as well as a recession in europe and a very difficult economic problem in japan all of these things affecting our future prospects i think we can grow our economy and we can create jobs but we have to be committed as i said to a long term program to create jobs and raise incomes that is what our economic plan seeks to do as i said we re now extending unemployment benefits and that s a good thing to do we are recognizing the fact that more and more americans who lose their jobs now don t expect to go back to those old jobs there s been a stunning increase in the number of people who say when they lose their jobs today i don t expect to get this jobs back and the reform brought to our attention by these two fine gentlemen will help us to help those people but in the end what we have to do is to extend jobs and not unemployment that is our next great test and i think we re off to a good beginning today dem wjclinton7 4 94 bill_clinton thank you governor finney for your friendship your leadership and your kind remarks and for your belief that every american and every kansan ought to have health care that can never be taken away thank you congressman slattery for your long personal friendship and your support and for being such a strong voice in the congress not only for fiscal responsibility but for basic sanity in our national policies ladies and gentlemen i m glad to be back in kansas i want to thank major general rueger for welcoming me and colonel dewayne ellinger i want to thank the people who helped to put this event together today the carpenters local the floorlayers local i want to thank the topeka high school band over there and the cheerleaders and all those who are cheering the people who are here from pauline south elementary school thank you for coming i want to thank the members of the national guard and the police officers and others who made this day possible i also want to acknowledge in the audience today the presence of the first american woman to be the treasurer of the united states georgia neese gray how are you ma am god bless you for being here i want to thank your lieutenant governor your attorney general your state treasurer your local mayor and the chairman of the democratic party for meeting me here at the airport but mostly i just want to tell you it s nice to be back in kansas you know since jim was kind enough to mention the basketball game you all know that for most of my public life i didn t live in washington d c i was the governor of one of your neighboring states i lived and worked in an atmosphere very much like the way you all live and work and i didn t understand what i often saw in washington where ever position was pushed to its logical extreme whether left or right where it seemed that every debate took on more rhetoric than reality and shed more heat than light where people seemed to be debating whether the government could do everything or the government had to do nothing where people were either told they were on their own or not challenged to assume any responsibility for their own future i ran for president because that didn t make much sense to me because i thought we ought to come together as a people we ought to bridge the lines that are dividing us and we ought to move to the 21st century together recognizing that government cannot solve all the problems but that we have a government to discharge those responsibilities which have to be done by all of us together through our elected officials i believed then and i believe even more strongly today that instead of paralyzing extremism what this country needs is moderate aggressive progressivism of people who are dedicated to getting together and getting things done cut down on the rhetoric turn up the action put people first and move the country forward now there has been a lot of rhetoric about the deficit and how terrible it was but it tripled in the last three years instead of that we have adopted an aggressive economic program designed to reduce the deficit hold down interest rates increase investment and get growth back into this economy in the past 14 months the american economy has produced 2 5 million private sector jobs twice as many as were produced in the previous four years that s the kind of action i went to washington to take i have asked the united states congress to pass a new budget that cuts spending in 300 different areas eliminates 100 different government programs still invests more in education in high technology jobs in defense transitions to help the people who won the cold war to win in the face of defense cutbacks in health research and the things that will help us to win in the 21st century and if it is adopted it will mark the first time since 1969 that the president has proposed and the congress has adopted an actual decrease in domestic spending exclusive of health care and social security and it will mark the first time since harry truman was president of the united states that we reduced the government s deficit three years in a row that s action not rhetoric we also have many challenges to face the united states congress has already done some things in the area of education and training which will be important for the future of kansas and more are on the way last year we reformed the college loan program so that more young people could borrow the money to go to college at lower interest rates and pay the money back on better terms and so that tens of thousands of our young people could work in their communities solving problems at the grass roots level in the national service program and earn money to invest in a college education or further education and training that will move our country forward just a couple of days ago i signed out in california a bill called goals 2000 which for the first time in the history of america will write into our laws world class education standards for all our schools and all our students and support grass roots reform not government mandates but grass roots reform in every community in america to meet those world class standards soon the congress will pass a bill we call school to work for all the young people in kansas and throughout the country who know they need more training after high school but don t want to go to four year colleges we know from the census data that every one of our young people needs to finish high school and should get at least two years more of some sort of training if they want to get a good job with a growing income we don t have a system to move people from school to work but at the end of four years if this bill passes and i get to sign it we will moving our people to the 21st century by making sure that they can change jobs learn new skills and always be able to compete and win this is the kind of thing that i wanted to be president to do it s a real thing not a rhetorical thing that will change the lives of the american people and finally in this area i have asked the united states congress to completely change the unemployment system you know and i know that even in the months when we create a lot of jobs in america a lot of jobs go away all over america today small businesses are creating jobs big businesses are still downsizing we know that the average 18 year old you look at those young people out there from this high school the average one of these young people will change work eight times in a lifetime we do not need to have an unemployment system that says you can live on unemployment payments for several months and then your unemployment will run out and you still won t have a job that s what s happening today most people do not get called back to their old job we need a reemployment system so that the first day people are unemployed they immediately begin to train for look for and have help in finding a new job to build a new american economy and we are going to do that this year in washington we re also trying to make your government more responsive to you the house of representatives has before it historic legislation limiting the influence of lobbyists in washington increasing the influence of ordinary citizens and i urge them to pass the lobby reform legislation soon when they come back in addition to that this congress adopted last year an economic plan which as you will find out on april 15th raised the income taxes of the top 1 2 percent of the american people and devoted 100 percent of that money to deficit reduction every last red cent and lowered the income taxes of onesixth of the american people who are working 40 hours a week who have children in the home who are hovering just above the poverty line we don t want them to go into welfare we want them to stay in the work force so we say lower the taxes of the people who are working hard and playing by the rules reward work over welfare and make it possible for people to be successful workers and successful parents and we did that for one sixth of the american tax paying families and i am proud of that i do want to thank governor finney for what she said about the response of our administration during the flood we did everything we could to try to help people all over this country but especially here who were devastated by that flood during the flood when the missouri river inundated the town of elwood about 100 miles from here fema responded with disaster relief and the corps of engineers already today is guarding elwood against the flooding in the future by helping to rebuild the levy it s just one town but there are hundreds of towns like that every time we had a disaster we had tried to say to the american people this is about people this is not about ideology it s not about political party it s about delivering the goods what i want is to see the government work all day every day the way we work when we ve got a disaster why should we wait for a disaster to do the right thing we ought to get together and do the right thing all day every day to move this country forward that brings me to the last two things i want to say to you today the first business congress will face when it comes back is action on the crime bill i think all of you know that over the last 20 years we ve had a big increase in violent crime and that even though many of our major cities are beginning to see small declines in the overall crime rate we still have a higher rate of violent crime than any other major nation we already have by far the highest percentage of our people in prison of any major nation and still there seems to be no end in sight some people say the answer is tougher punishment other people say the answer is to reach these young people before they get in trouble and try to give them a better life i say both are right and we must do both we have to be tough but we have to be smart i started out my career in public life as an attorney general almost 20 years ago and i thought crime was bad then but i never dreamed that i would live to see the time when children would actually stay home from school over 150 00 every day because they were afraid to walk to school or afraid to sit in a classroom or afraid to walk in a hall i never dreamed i would see towns even towns in my home state of arkansas where gang initiations would require people to go in and pull robberies with guns that could turn into murders i never dreamed i would see young people better armed than police officers with semiautomatic weapons shooting people at random i never dreamed i would see that and i tell you we have got to do something about it our crime bill our crime bill will do the following things number one it will put 100 000 more police officers on the street working the streets working the neighborhoods knowing the people who live there in community policing and it will lower the crime rate if there are those of you here who don t believe that you can do it let me say all you have to do is look at the examples all over america in the city of houston texas which had one of the highest crime rates one of the highest murder rates in the entire country when the mayor got elected and put 660 more police officers on the street and they started working with the communities the crime rate went down 22 percent in 15 months the murder rate went down 25 percent and the mayor got reelected with 91 percent and i think the two things were connected we can do better we need more police officers on the street helping to make our young people and our families safer the bill also toughens sentences for a lot of crimes and says if you commit three crimes which cause violence or are reasonably likely to cause serious violence you are not eligible for parole a small percentage of criminals do a large percentage of the violent harm in this country we should identify them and isolate them and that is very important finally the bill provides funds to give drug treatment to young people to have community recreation for young people to provide young people a place to go after school or before school to give communities the means to deal with all these kids that are coming from broken families in difficult neighborhoods and troubled circumstances to keep these things from happening in the first place and ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure my mother told me that when i was six years old and it s a whole lot more true today than it was 40 years ago we are trying to give you an ounce of prevention and i hope you in kansas will take full advantage of it when the crime bill passes now the last thing i want to say is when we leave here congressman slattery s going to take me over to a forum we re going to hear from a bunch of small business people and talk about whether we can provide health security for all americans let me just tell you what the stakes are we are the only country in the world with an advanced economy that doesn t provide health care security to all its citizens all of our competitors have figured out how to do it we are spending 40 to 50 percent more of our income on health care than any of our competitors we are spending about 90 billion a year and that s real money everywhere folks on paperwork and rules and regulation because of the way we organize the financing of health care that nobody else does on any given week in america 58 million americans have no health insurance 81 million americans live in families where somebody has a preexisting condition a child with diabetes a father who s had a heart attack a mother who s had cancer they either can t get health insurance or they pay more than they can afford or they can never change the job they re in because their new employer will not insure them three quarters of the american people have lifetime limits on their insurance policy so that god forbid if they should have one child with a terrible illness that drags on for 10 or 15 years they could lose all their insurance at the time they most need it that is the reality of the world in which we live no other nation permits this to happen only the united states the result of all this is small business is paying 35 percent more for health insurance than big business and government today every day more and more people lose their health insurance about 100 000 a month lose it forever the government as congressman slattery will tell you is cutting defense spending cutting domestic spending cutting everything but health care costs are still going up at two to three times the rate of inflation so that we can pay more for the same health care this system is not working we have the best doctors the best nurses the best health care providers the best medical research the best technology in the world and the worst system of financing health care and we have to do something about it now those who like the system the way they have it now say that i want to give this country some sort of government program of health care i don t you have one though it s medicare the government program for older people and most older people feel pretty secure with it but i don t propose to do that what i want to do is to extend the system we have now guaranteed private health insurance for all americans and to extend the choices we have now give every american family at least three choices every year of doctors and health care plans i want to protect people from unfair insurance practices just as governor finney is trying to do here i don t think people should pay more because they are older or pay an unreasonable amount because somebody in their family has been sick i don t think people should be able to be cut off of health insurance i want to have these benefits guaranteed at work why because 80 percent of the people who are uninsured are in working families and 90 percent of the health insurance in america today is covered at work where the employer and the employee share the costs can we do it without bankrupting small business of course we can you have to give discounts to really small businesses that operate on limited profit margins of course we can can we do it and be fair if everybody does it so no competitor has an advantage yes we can will we continue to be the only country in the world that shovels more of our health care dollars into paperwork and less into health care will we continue to be the only advanced country that has another 100 000 americans a month lose their health insurance will we continue to discriminate against small business people and self employed people and let them pay 35 to 40 percent more will we continue to have a situation where rural folks don t have access to doctors i don t think so i believe we can do better i think you think we can do better and if we cool the rhetoric and talk about the facts and have practical and compassionate approaches to this we will solve this problem i m here in kansas to try to do it today thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton7 4 95a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you congressman fazio congressman matsui general yates general phillips thanks for having me back you ll have to start charging me rent if i don t quit coming out here lt governor davis mayor serna supervisor dickinson mr sherman to all the others who are here let me say i love coming here i ve been in this hangar before but i ve never had so many young people and students here i m delighted to see all of you thank you for coming i m glad to see the college students the rotc students the city year students here the elementary school students i d also like to say it is quite wonderful to come to california when there is no flood no fire no earthquake i just want to be here i just wanted to come and when i was here not very long ago i went out to roseville and i had a meeting in a home that had been totally destroyed and the people who hosted me are here and i understand they re rebuilding their home i d like to ask them to be recognized they re brave people rick mirenda and his wife stand up there and let s give them a hand that was really ungracious of congressman fazio to mention the basketball game but since he brought it up i don t think i m so brave for coming out if we had won it would really take courage for me to show up here i am delighted to be here at mcclellan vic said this is my west coast home we couldn t very well close this air force base i wouldn t have anyplace to park when i fly out i don t know what i would do i m delighted to be joined here by the wonderful secretary of education richard riley i thank him for coming out west with me and i have a lot of californians on my staff and a bunch of them came back with me my chief of staff leon panetta who in his former life or as he likes to say back when he had a life was a congressman from northern california and of course doris matsui congressman matsui in our white house is known as doris s husband because she s a valuable member of our staff and many others we have tried to be closely in touch with california for the benefit of the air force base i want to make one announcement today i m happy to report that congress has passed my requested defense supplemental appropriations bill which will give us the funds we need to make sure we are adequately training and preparing our personnel in all the armed services and i know that mcclellan and its families are happy about the passage of the defense appropriations bill with all these young people here i want to take just a few moments to talk about their future and ours and how they are bound up together i ran for president in 1992 because i strongly felt that our national government was not doing enough to invest in our future and to strengthen the future prospects of america s working families and our children i believed then and i still believe it was right that we were exploding our deficit but reducing our investment in our people i believed then and i believe more strongly today that the global economy in a technological information age will reward what we know and what we are capable of learning and conversely will punish us for what we refuse to learn and for the people whose skills and abilities we refuse to develop now there is a great debate going on today about what our mission should be as a nation in the aftermath of the cold war and what the role of the national government should be in that mission but to me it is crystal clear our mission should be to ensure that the american dream is alive and well for every child in this country and every child in this hangar well into the next century our mission should be that we maintain our position as the world s strongest nation and greatest force for peace and freedom and democracy and that we use that to help our own people develop their human capacities and the role of the national government it seems to me is clear we must first strengthen our security around the world and here at home that s why i have worked so hard to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons to be a force for peace from the middle east to northern ireland to southern africa but also to pass a crime bill here that will stiffen sentences put more police on the street have more prevention funds and do everything we can to bring down the crime rate and make our streets and our neighborhoods and our school safer places the role of the government should be to change the government it should be smaller and less bureaucratic and less cumbersome and burdensome and more efficient and more flexible for the information age we have done that the congress in the last two years has voted for budgets that will reduce the size of the government by 272 000 to its smallest size since president kennedy was in office to deregulate great portions of activity the federal government used to do to give more responsibilities back to the states we are giving the american people a government that is less bureaucratic but the last two things in some ways are the most important of all government s role is also to create economic opportunity and to help people who through no fault of their own have sustained economic burdens the recommendation from the secretary of defense for mcclellan is that the airbase should stay open because of the important mission you are pursuing but you know that california has been very hard hit by base closings in the aftermath of the cold war s end i took the position which i here reaffirm today that when the united states asked the people of california and the people of the united states all across this country to host our bases to host our military families to play a role in winning the cold war if we have to downsize the military we have an affirmative obligation to help the communities and the people rebuild their lives and to have prosperity and strength in the future that is a part of building economic opportunity that s why i fought so hard to have conversion funds to help people move from a defense based to a civilian based economy and why i have supported bases like mcclellan which have used their military technology for civilian purposes to help to strengthen us in the years ahead that s what the general was talking about when he mentioned the intelligent tutor program military technology being made available to school districts all across america to teach children as people in the military are taught to develop their skills more rapidly and more deeply than ever before that is part of our obligation to give people a chance to make the most of their god given abilities by creating economic opportunity if you look you have an example right here in sacramento look at what happened with the army depot and packard bell the world s third largest computer manufacturer has moved on to large portions of the closed base and plans to employ more than 3 000 californians there are many other things we have worked to do to sell more of your high tech products abroad to sell your agriculture products abroad to open up the california economy in a positive way and the unemployment rate has dropped almost two percent in the last two years we have a long way to go but we are moving in the right direction it is the affirmative responsibility of the united states government to do everything we can in partnership with people to create those kinds of economic opportunities if everybody has a good job and a bright future this country s future as a whole will be more secure now the last thing that i want to say is perhaps the most important of all i believe it is our responsibility to do everything we can through education to give the people of this country and especially the young people of this country the knowledge and the skills they need to compete and win in a tough global economy we cannot guarantee people a job for life but we can guarantee them access to education for life and we ought to do it nothing is more important when i ran for president i thought there were too many people in washington who had rhetorical debates and didn t work on the real people s problems i thought to myself if i were living out in sacramento for example and i listened to what i see on television at night i might wonder if those folks were really talking about me and my family and my children you know we had trickle down economics and tax and spend economics and what we really needed was invest and grow economics we once had people who thought the answer to our economic problems was to spend more money on everything now we have people who think the answer is to spend less money on everything the answer is to spend less money on the wrong things and more money on the right things and the most important right thing is education for our young people and for our adults you know i am very proud of the fact that these members of congress behind me have been part of a group of people who supported my initiatives to expand educational opportunities from head start to preschoolers for preschoolers to more investment so our schools could meet national standards of excellence to apprenticeship programs for young people who don t go on to college more affordable college loans for young people on better repayment terms to lifetime training for adult workers that must be our mission we must make it clear that in the united states we will tolerate nothing less than the most excellent educational opportunities and the highest standards for all our people for a lifetime you know i see these young americorps people behind me who are cheering when i called their name there are some people who believe we ought to get rid of americorps they say it costs a lot of money and besides that why pay people to volunteer so let me tell you what these young people do if you don t know they can earn minimum wage and work for one or two years and for each year they work they can earn money for their college education they don t work in big national bureaucracies they work in community service projects they work side by side with other people they help in floods and fires they help to rebuild homes they help to immunize children they work with police on the beat they do a lot of different things all across the country not based on what someone in washington tells them to do but based on what community leaders say they should do and in so doing they earn money and help build up their communities i just came from dallas texas where i met with an americorps volunteer who was 52 years old that was going back working in the community to earn money to go to a local community college to get a degree in college i met a young woman who got off welfare because they gave her a chance to work in americorps and she got her ged and now she s going to use the money to go to college i met a young woman who was a graduate of one of our finest state universities but she was born to a mother on welfare and she thought she owed it to her country since she had moved from welfare to a university degree to give up a couple years of her life working in the community to help lift the prospects of other people that is what americorps is all about it is working to educate america the other day i was in florida talking to people about college education many of you who have sent or are preparing to send a child to college know that it can be a pretty expensive proposition and that it s gone up quite a lot there are some in congress who believe that the way to reduce the deficit is to increase the cost of the student loans i disagree with that i don t think we ought to increase the cost of student loans at a time when we want more people to go to college our proposal is different our proposal is to let more people borrow money on better repayment terms but to have tougher requirements to repay the loans if everybody who borrowed money repaid it we wouldn t have a budgetary problem with the student loan program so what have we done we ve loaned money to more people at lower interest rates but we re making more people repay the loans that s the way to save money in the student loan program not to cut the program get the loans repaid and finally to all of you let me say this there is a lot of talk in washington about cutting taxes now nothing is more popular but i would remind you of this number one we still have a sizable deficit even though i have cut it by 600 billion and we now have a government that except for the interest on the debt that was piled up in previous years your government has an operating surplus for the first time in 30 years we do that but our interest payments on our debt are so great we have to keep bringing this deficit down that limits the size of any tax cut we have to continue to finance a strong national defense that limits the size of any tax cut we have to continue to invest in education that will limit the size of a tax cut so we have to ask ourselves what kind of tax cut do we need and who ought to get it my view is we shouldn t give a tax cut to people like me in upper income groups who did just fine in the 80s and the 90s we ought to give it to middle class people whose incomes stagnated in the 80s and 90s who need the money that s who ought to get it and we ought to give it to people and not just give them a check that they can spend and then the money s gone the money should be devoted to helping strengthen our families and to support education so that we raise people s income in the short run with a tax cut and in the long run by improving their earning skills that s why i think the best tax would be giving the american people a tax deduction for the cost of themselves and their children for all education after high school that is the best investment in our future now i also believe that we ought to have the individual retirement accounts the iras available to more americans and people ought to be able to withdraw from them tax free to use money for education or for health care emergencies or for a first home or for the care of an elderly parent that s the sort of tax cut we ought to have now believe me my fellow americans we can afford that and still reduce the deficit still increase our investment in education and still have a strong defense that is a responsible approach so i say to you without regard to your political party this is a time of great change in our country i want to work with this new congress i agree with them about a lot of things they want to do but we can t go too far we can t say that there s no difference in government spending education is different national defense is different things are different some things matter more than others we can t say that everything the government does is bad and everything that happens in the private sector is good we need a partnership and we know if california s economy is going to come back we ought to invest in defense conversion we ought to do what we can to help the people in this state who have great talents and great resources who can no longer use them in the defense plants but can use them in the economy of tomorrow and most importantly of all we ought to look around at all these young people and say they deserve to believe in the american dream in the promise of tomorrow they deserve to be able to do whatever their god given capacities and their willingness to work will let them do nothing nothing nothing is more important than that so to all of you who have been at this base who have worn the uniform of our country who have stood up for the security of the united states what did you do it for so that freedom and opportunity might be passed on forever in this country this is a very great country there is nothing we cannot do if we do the best we can to do right by the young people who are here and all over america that must be our mission it is mine and i believe it is yours thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton7 4 95b bill_clinton thank you very much fishbait fog it s got kind of a nice ring doesn t it i knew he was born in new orleans before he ever said it i love to listen to people from new orleans talk i thank you for that kind introduction your convention program chair bob hayman and your incoming president bill ketler ladies and gentlemen i m very glad to be here i thought that in addition to me you were going to hear from three people who had run are running and were about to run for president but only bill weld showed up i hope he stays in the about to run he and steve barrel are very impressive men and i m glad that they came here and gave the republican point of view it s a privilege to be here i d like to begin by saying that i am very proud and i know you are for the work that the interamerican press association has done in its declaration of chapultepec i know that you and the newspaper association of america have worked tirelessly for press freedoms all throughout the americas and just before i came out here i was proud to sign a charter of endorsement for the declaration of chapultepec and i thank you for giving me that opportunity and what you have done to advance the cause of a free press i was talking to a friend of mine the other day who said well in the 94 election we discovered the limits of liberalism and now we re about to discover the limits of conservatism and it put me in mind of a story i once heard about the and actually i thought about it because i met mr favre about the late huey long who when he was governor and he was preaching his share the wealth plan was out in the country one day at a little country crossroads and he had all the people gathered up and he was going on about how the people were being plundered by the organized wealthy interests in louisiana and he saw a guy out in the crowd that he knew and he said brother jones if you had three cadillacs wouldn t you give up one of them so we could gather up the kids and take them to school during the week and take them to church on the weekend he said sure i would he said and if you had 3 million wouldn t you give up just a million of it so we could put a roof over everybody s head and make sure everybody had food to eat he said well of course i would he said and if you had three hogs he said wait a minute governor i ve got three hogs anyway that s the limits of liberalism now we re about to discover the limits of conservatism ladies and gentlemen we are at an historic moment in our country s history on the verge of a new century living in a very different kind of economy with a bewildering way of challenges and opportunities in 1992 and in 1994 the voters spoke out and demanded bold changes in the way we govern and the policies we pursue they know better than anyone else that they are living in a time with new challenges that demand new answers in the last two years my administration has begun to meet those challenges i ran for president because i felt we were being victimized by 12 years of gridlock in which the deficit had gone up the wealthiest americans had done quite well the middle class had stagnated and the poor were in trouble in which the american dream was really at risk because half of the american people were working for the same or lower wages that they had made 15 years earlier i had a clear mission i wanted to grow the middle class shrink the underclass and speed up the opportunities for entrepreneurs i wanted to promote the mainstream values of responsibility and work family and community i wanted to reform the government so that we could enhance opportunity shrink bureaucracy increase our security and most important of all empower people through education to make the most of their own lives in the first two years we ve made good progress the economy is up and the deficit is down we ve expanded educational opportunities from head start through more college loans that are more affordable the american people are marching toward more security because there are no russian missiles pointed at the children of our country for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age because we passed a serious crime bill that will lower the crime rate in many of our communities throughout the country and because we ve begun to address some of the problems of family security with the family and medical leave act and certainly we have done a lot to shrink and reform the government s bureaucracy but it is not enough too many americans don t yet feel any of those benefits too many americans don t yet feel any of those benefits too many still feel uncertain about their own future and too many people are overwhelmingly concerned about the social and the underlying moral problems of our society and so in 1994 they voted to give the republicans a chance to run the congress in the last 100 days the house of representatives has passed a series of bold initiatives we will soon begin the second 100 days of this congress in the first 100 days the mission of the house republicans was to suggest ways in which we should change our government and our society in the second 100 days and beyond our mission together must be to decide which of these house proposals should be adopted which should be modified and which should be stopped in the first 100 days it fell to the house of representatives to propose in the next 100 days and beyond the president has to lead the quiet reasoned forces of both parties in both houses to sift through the rhetoric and decide what is really best for america in making these decisions it is absolutely vital that we keep alive the spirit and the momentum of change but the momentum must not carry us so far that we betray our legacy of compassion decency and common sense we have entered a new era for years out here in the country the old political categories have basically been defunct and a new political discussion has been begging to be born it must be now so in washington as well the old labels of liberal and conservative spender and cutter even democrat and republican are not what matter most anymore what matters most is finding practical pragmatic solutions based on what we know works in our lives and our shared experiences so that we can go forward together as a nation ideological purity is for partisan extremists practical solution based on real experience hard evidence and common sense that s what this country needs we ve been saddled too long for a political debate with a political debate that doesn t tell us what we ought to do just who we out to blame and we have got to stop pointing fingers at each other so that we can join hands you know our country has often moved forward spurred on by purists reformists populist agendas which articulated grievances and proposed radical departures but if you think about our most successful periods of reform these initiatives have been shaped by presidents who incorporated what was good smoothed out what was rough and discarded what would hurt that was the role of theodore roosevelt and woodrow wilson in the aftermath of the populist era that was the role of franklin roosevelt in the aftermath of the la follette progressive movement and that is my job in the next 100 days and for all the days i serve as president we stand at a crossroads in one direction lies confrontation and gridlock in the other lies achievement and progress i was not elected president to pile up a stack of vetoes i was elected president to change the direction of america that s what i have spent the last two years doing and that s what i want to spend the next 100 days and beyond doing whether we can do that depends upon what all of us in washington do from here on out so i appeal today to republicans and to democrats alike to get together to keep the momentum for change going not to allow the energy and longing for change now to be dissipated amid a partisan clutter of accusations after all we share much common ground for example in 1992 i was elected to end welfare as we know it that was part of my new covenant of opportunity and responsibility in 1994 the republicans made the same demand with their contract in the last two years i have already given 25 states one half of the country the opportunity to do just that on their own and i introduced the most sweeping welfare reform the country had ever seen i want to work with the congress to get real welfare reform in 1992 i was elected to slash the deficit that also was part of my new covenant in 1994 the republican contract called for a continuing deficit reduction and movement toward a balanced budget well i cut the deficit by 600 billion cut 300 programs i proposed to consolidate or eliminate 400 more i want to cut the deficit except for the interest run up between 1981 and 1992 our budget would be in balance today my administration is the only one in 30 years to run an operating surplus i will work with the republicans to reduce the deficit in 1992 i was elected to shrink the size of the federal government which i have done that too was a part of my new covenant in 1994 the republican contract said we should shrink the government i have already cut 100 000 bureaucratic positions and we are on the way under budgets already passed to reducing the government by 270 000 to its smallest size since president kennedy occupied this office i want to work with congress to reduce the size of government we both want tax cuts less intrusive government regulations the line item veto the toughest possible fight against crime these were a part of the new covenant and a part of the republican contract in two years we have made real progress on all these fronts but we can and we should do more we are near many breakthroughs the real issue is whether we will have the wisdom and the courage to see our common ground and walk on it to do that we must abandon extreme positions and work together this is no time for ideological extremism good faith compromising negotiating our differences actually listening to one another for a change these are the currency of a healthy democracy in that spirit i come here today to outline where i stand on the remaining items in the republican contract and the unfinished business of my new covenant let s begin with taxes in 1993 i made a down payment on the middle class tax cut i advocated when i ran for president we cut taxes for 15 million working families what that means on average is that this year a family of four with an income of 25 000 or less will have about 1 000 in lower tax bills we did this to ensure that nobody who works full time and has children should live in poverty if you want to reform the welfare system you must reward work and parenting so i want a tax cut to expand to include more members of the middle class why because half the american people are working for the same or lower incomes they were making 15 years ago and we ve had a recovery that s produced 6 3 million new jobs the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 25 years and we need to spread the benefits of the recovery but this 200 billion tax cut which is really more than three times that if you look at it over a 10 year period is a fantasy it s too much it s not going to happen we can t afford it a realistic cut would be somewhere around a third of that that s something we can afford in the world we re living in up there if we go beyond that what you re going to see is no success at deficit reduction or horrible injustice to the most vulnerable people in our country so we can t pass that let s get over it and talk about what we can pass and work on doing it let s target a tax cut to the right people and for the right purpose we have to choose do you want a tax cut for the wealthy or for the middle class the republican plan gives half of the benefits to the 10 percent of our people who are best off and most importantly to the 10 percent of our people who have done very very well in the last 15 years twenty percent of the benefits go to the top one percent of our people they have done very well in the new global economy the middle class has suffered the stagnant incomes let s direct the tax benefits to those people but we also have to choose what kind of tax break shall we just put money in people s pockets or shouldn t we do something that will strengthen families and increase the whole wealth and success of the united states over the long run let s help our people get the education and job training they need the technology revolution the global economy these are dividing opportunity at home and abroad the middle class is splitting apart and the fault line is education those who have it do well those who don t are in trouble so let s use the tax cut as i propose in the middle class bill of rights as sort of a scholarship given by america to people for their cost of education after high school and let s provide for an ira that people can withdraw from tax free to meet the exigencies that their families face college education health care costs first time home care of an elderly parent these things will strengthen our country and we can afford it let s take welfare reform as i said both of us both the republican contract and my new covenant have focused heavily on welfare reform what do we agree on that there ought to be a limit to welfare that there ought to be flexibility for the states that we ought to have the toughest possible child support enforcement and that people have to take more responsibility for their own lives and for the children they bring into this world but the current house bill focuses primarily on cutting costs it s weak on work and tough on kids it punishes young people for past mistakes we must require them instead to look to the future and in the future to be responsible parents to be responsible workers to be responsible students and then give them the opportunity to do that the house bill also punishes young children for the sins of their parents i think that s wrong rich or poor black white or brown in or out of wedlock a baby is a baby a child is a child it s part of our future and we have an obligation to those children not to punish them for something over which they had absolutely no control now that s where i disagree but look what we agree on we are near historic change we can do this we can make a difference we can break the culture of welfare and we can do something good for our country to support the values we all believe in and we can give these children a better future but to do it we re going to have to talk through our differences and get beyond the rhetoric to how these real lives work and not stand on the sidelines posturing for political gain let s take cutting the deficit the balanced budget amendment is dead but now we have to get specific how are we going to cut the deficit and move this budget toward balance if we can focus on cuts not making partisan points that s the first step there are cuts i can t live with there are cuts the republicans can t live with let s avoid them and make cuts we can all live with we shouldn t cut help for our children that builds our future we shouldn t cut their education their immunization their school lunches the infant formulas or the nutrition programs there s no need to cut them so far based on the action they ve taken the republicans want the poor in this country to bear the burden of two thirds of their proposed cuts and only get five percent of the benefit of the tax cuts it is not right it is wrong but that doesn t mean we don t have to cut the budget and reduce the deficit the rescission package that passed the senate last night gives us a model about how we should proceed the house passed a rescission package with completely unacceptable cuts in education child nutrition environment housing and national service the senate republicans to their credit restored several of these cuts i insisted on restoring even more and replacing them with better cuts and almost every one of the democrats in the senate agreed so yesterday over the course of the debate they worked that out those cuts were restored as well there will still be a 16 billion reduction in the deficit this year the bill passed 99 0 in the senate and i will sign the senate bill if the house and the senate will send it to me that s how we should be doing the business of america let s talk about the line item veto as i said before that was in the republican contract and i campaigned for president on it in 1992 i appeal to congress to pass it in its strongest form i appeal to members of my own party who have reservations about it to support it as well the line item veto has passed both the senate and the house if you look at how it passed the senate that s an example of how we can make this system work i strongly supported it i campaigned to democratic senators and asked them to support it they worked out their differences and it passed overwhelmingly in the senate the president and the congress both need the power to cut spending if you doubt it if you doubt it look at the bill that congress recently passed to restore to 3 2 million self employed americans farmers small businesspeople professionals and all their family members the 25 percent deduction for the cost of their health insurance that was a part of my health care plan i desperately want to do that we ought to do more they ought to be treated just like corporations it is imperative to sign it but hidden in that bill was a special tax break for people who did not need it if i had the senate version of the line item veto i could sign the bill and help the people who are entitled to it and veto the special break this is the kind of thing that s been hidden in bills of congress forever we can now do something about it and we ought to do it political reform something that was also in the republican contract two of the 10 items in the republican contract have actually become law and two term limits and the balanced budget amendment have been defeated of the two that have become law they were both about political reform and they were also both part of my 1992 commitments to the american people one applies to congress the laws they impose on the private sector the other limits the ability of congress to impose unfunded mandates on state and local government i was proud to sign them both they will advance the cause of responsible government in this country but political reform means more it must include i believe both lobbying reform and campaign finance reform if you doubt how much we need lobby reform just go back and refer to the story that was rightly printed just a few days ago about how in this session of congress you have lobbyists actually sitting at the table with congressmen writing bills for them and then explaining to them what the bills mean it seems to me that since these bills help the people the lobbyists represent but drastically restrict the ability of the government to act in the areas of the environment in protecting our people we need some significant reform in our lobbying laws so i don t think we should stop there regulatory reform another big item in the republican contract there are lots of horror stories every one of you probably knows a story that shows where a bureaucrat overreached or there were too many regulations or there was too little common sense i am committed to changing the culture of regulation that has dominated our country for a long time i have gone around espousing to everybody that they ought to read mr howard s book the death of common sense but for two years we have been working through the reinventing government initiative that the vice president has headed to change the culture of regulation we deregulated banking we deregulated intrastate trucking we have reformed the procedures of the sba we scrapped the 10 000 page federal personnel manual we have dramatically changed the way the general services administration operates in ways that have saved hundreds of millions of dollars for the taxpayers and put more competition into the process thanks to the bsa director roger johnson who happens to be here with me today we are working on these things to move forward but we must do more and yet surely the answer is not to stop the government from regulating what it needs to regulate if the republicans send me a bill that would let unsafe planes fly or contaminated meat be sold or contaminated water continue to find itself into city water systems i will veto it i will veto it but if congress will just sit down with me and work out a reasonable solution for more flexible regulatory reform we can create an historic achievement i agree that congress has a role to play i agree that congress sometimes hears things about the way regulations work that people in the executive branch don t congresswoman johnson and congressman bryant and congressman geren flew down here with me today they re out there all the time talking to their members they may hear things we don t that s why i approve of the senate s 45 day override legislation but i will veto any bill that lets a bunch of lawyers tie up regulation for years we ve got too much of that as it is so i say flexibility yes reform yes but paralysis and straightjacketing no let s talk about legal reform are there too many lawsuits of course there are do jury awards once in a while get out of hand yes they do does this affect the insurance system in the country it has an impact on it but at a time when we re giving more and more responsibility to the states in which one of the signal ideas of the republican contract that i largely agree with is that the state and local governments should have more responsibility do we really want to take the entire civil justice system away from the states for the first time in 200 years i don t think so let me give you a couple of examples should we put justice out of the reach of ordinary people with a loser pay rule no think about it this way loser pays will keep ordinary citizens from exercising their rights in court just as a poll tax used to keep ordinary people of color and poverty from exercising their right to vote i will veto any bill with a loser pay requirement such as that that was in the house bill i don t think it s right punitive damages they could stand some reform but not artificial ceilings punitive damages are designed to deter bad future conduct now if you have a national ceiling of 250 000 think what that means 250 000 may be too burdensome for a small businessperson who loses a lawsuit you don t want to put them out of business unless they re malicious but does anybody seriously believe that 250 000 will have any kind of significant deterrent impact on a giant multinational corporation so let s negotiate realistic reforms that improve the system but don t wreck it crime crime was a big part of the new covenant a big part of why i ran for president the personal security of the american people should be our first concern and we delivered after six years we broke gridlock and i signed a crime bill that was endorsed by all the major law enforcement organizations in the country the cities the counties the prosecutors the attorneys general everybody and it had bipartisan support too until we got close to the last election republicans and democrats cosponsoring all major provisions what was in the crime bill it had more punishment three strikes and you re out expansion of capital punishment it had more police 100 000 police on our street and i might say that over half of the communities in this country have already received grants under the police program just since last october we re ahead of schedule and under budget there are already about 17 000 police officers authorized and funded to be hired it had more prisons something the republicans very much wanted as long as the states agreed to change their sentencing procedures and it had more prevention programs something the police demanded the police said you cannot police and punish and imprison your way out of the crime crisis you have got to give these children in our country something to say yes to you ve got to give them a reason to stay off drugs a reason to stay in school a reason to believe they can have a future so it had all those things now if the republicans wish to continue to try to repeal the commitment to 100 000 police or to repeal the assault weapons ban they have a perfect right to do it but if they send me those provisions i will veto them on the other hand while the rest of their crime bill needs some work and i disagree with some provisions of it it has some good points if we can build on the 94 crime bill instead of tear it down we can continue our efforts to make the american people more secure so let s do that let s pass a crime bill we can be proud of that builds the country up and makes our citizens safer the environmental protection area a big part of my new covenant was protecting our environment and promoting our natural resources it s something we can all give to our children whether we die rich or poor and it is our obligation to our future economic health because no nation over the long run succeeds economically unless you preserve your environment i just got back from haiti and i can tell you one of the biggest obstacles to the survival of democracy in that country is they have ripped all the trees off every hill in the country and we need to plant tens of millions of trees we could put half the young people in the country to work for a year just trying to undo the environmental devastation and unless we do it they re not going to be able to regain their economic footing i cannot and i will not compromise any clean water any clean air any protection against toxic waste the environment cannot protect itself and if it requires a presidential veto to protect it then that s what i ll provide i will also veto the house passed requirement that government pay property owners billions of dollars every time we act to defend our national heritage of seashores or wetlands or open spaces if that law were on the books in every state in the country today then local governments would completely have to give up zoning or be bankrupt every time they try to change a zoning law that is why every time it s been on the ballot in a state and it s been on the ballot 20 times including in conservative republican states it has been defeated the people of arizona voted against it by a 20 point margin last november well the people do not have to vote do not have a vote on this issue in congress but i do and i ll use it this is not a good law peacekeeping decades from now when we have our next republican president he or she will be very grateful that i refused to approve the so called peacekeeping legislation passed by the house the united nations and the world community did not struggle through 45 years of stagnation because of soviet vetoes to have to deal with a new stagnation because of an american congressional veto the united nations is 50 years old this year but it s only four or five years old as a real force for international stability and security as it was imagined by woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt and dwight eisenhower and arthur vandenberg responsible republicans and democrats so let us learn from the united nations mistakes in somalia and the united nations successes in haiti and throughout the world about how we can best keep the peace in partnership with our neighbors throughout the world in haiti there were almost 30 countries in there with us and the multinational force and under the u n mission there now well over 30 countries people who came from a long way away because they know the world must work together to promote humanity and peace and democracy and decency let us not walk away from the united nations and isolate america from the world there s some other things i want to talk about those are the items in the republican contract many of which were also in my new covenant and where i stand on them but i want to talk about some other items as well the unfinished business of the agenda that i ran for president on i was elected to fix a broken government to relight the dormant fires of the economy to make sure that working families reap the just reward of their effort and are able to pass their children the same dream they had and to end the sort of something for nothing mentality that had crept into our country by restoring the values of responsibility and work and family and community the republican contract even where i agree with it does not deal with much of what is really at the heart of america s challenges today opportunity and security for working americans so let me talk about these issues health care in the state of the union i said i had learned that i bit off more than i could chew last year and we have to reform health care a step at a time but i haven t forgotten the need to reform health care everybody knows we still have problems it costs too much there are a lot of people who have inadequate coverage there are a lot of people who have no coverage at all and there are millions of americans who could lose their coverage at any time so i call on republicans to join me in taking this one step at a time beginning with things the majority of them have long endorsed first making benefits portable so you don t lose your health care when you change jobs second requiring coverage for families with a preexisting condition so the whole family doesn t lose health care just because there s been one sick child i saw a couple from delaware on the street in washington a couple of months ago when i was taking my jog the best looking family you ever saw the young man and woman looked to be in their late 30s they had five children their fourth child had a birth defect and he was a small businessman none of them had any health insurance that s an intolerable situation in this country and we shouldn t put up with it the third thing we ought to do is to establish voluntary pools such as those established in florida and many other states which allow small businesses and self employed people to buy health care on the same terms as those of us who work for government or big corporations can buy it to put some competitive power behind their need the fourth thing we should do is to expand home care for the elderly so that families who are struggling to keep their elderly parents and grandparents at home in a more independent living setting have some alternative before putting them into a nursing home when it will almost certainly cost the government much much more money and finally we ought to do our best in the way of coverage to help families keep their coverage when they re unemployed for an extended period of time and we should do all this within the context of a determination to hold down the costs of health care still the biggest problem for most americans we can do this without a tax increase and while working to bring the deficit down we have been working very hard on this the numbers clearly make that apparent the second issue i want to raise on our unfinished agenda is the minimum wage the minimum wage is the key first to welfare reform unl dem wjclinton7 4 98a bill_clinton good afternoon thank you ken as ken said i m speaking to you from kansas city where we re talking about what we must do as a nation to strengthen social security for the 21st century and i m looking forward to continuing to talk with you today let me begin by thanking representatives bob borski ben cardin nancy johnson jim kolbe and jerry weller for holding these town meetings across our nation for each of you lawmakers these forums are not the only way you ve worked to strengthen social security representatives borski and cardin are cosponsors of key legislation to establish the save social security first reserve fund representative borski supports saving any budgetary surplus for investment in social security and i know representative cardin does as well now representative johnson has been a strong advocate for social security beneficiaries she has urged her fellow members of congress to continue to act with fiscal restraint as they debate what to do with the budget surplus representative kolbe is one of our foremost experts on retirement and pension policy and is the sponsor of a resolution to establish a joint commission on social security reform and representative weller has been a powerful voice for protecting the social security trust fund and was an original cosponsor of the social security preservation act together all of you are proving that we can work in a bipartisan way to make sure that social security is as solid for our children as it was for our parents and i thank you for that as you know this year working together with congress we ll be balancing the budget for the first time in 30 years we have a right to be proud of that achievement but we must also build on it in the state of the union i called on congress to set aside every penny of any budget surplus until we save social security first social security is deeply woven into our nation s social fabric for 60 years it s meant more than an id number on a tax form even more than a monthly check in the mail it reflects our deepest values and the duties we owe to one another today 44 million americans depend upon social security for two thirds of our seniors it s the main source of income and one in three beneficiaries are non retirees social security is life insurance and disability benefits as well as a rock solid foundation of retirement security today social security is sound but a demographic crisis looms if we fail to act for over the next 30 years 76 million baby boomers will retire by 2030 there will be twice as many elderly americans as there are today if we don t act now by then payroll contributions will only cover 75 percent of benefits that s why i ve challenged our nation to act now to strengthen social security for the 21st century here are the principles i want to follow for meeting this challenge first any reform should strengthen and protect social security for the 21st century we can t abandon the basic core program that s been one of the great successes of our nation s history second we must maintain the universality and the fairness of social security for a half century this program has been a progressive guarantee for citizens we have to keep it that way third social security must provide a benefit people can count on regardless of the ups and downs of the economy or the financial markets we must make certain that social security will provide a foundation of retirement security fourth social security must continue to provide financial security for disabled and low income beneficiaries we can never forget the one out of three social security beneficiaries who aren t retirees and fifth any strengthening of social security must maintain america s hard won fiscal discipline one of the main reasons we re enjoying our prosperity today these are the five principles that will guide me on social security principles by which i ll judge all possible proposals they re principles i believe can and should guide us all as we work to forge a national consensus for reform above all i know that we can strengthen social security only if we reach across the lines of party philosophy and generation with open minds and generous spirits for too long politicians have called social security the third rail of american politics that s washington language for you can t really discuss any changes seriously this year we have to prove them wrong i know that on the political calendar 1998 is an election year but on the social security calendar let s all resolve to make 1998 an education year a year we come to grips with the problems of the system and come together to find the answers these forums are a very hopeful beginning and i m pleased to have had this chance to start this vitally important dialogue with all of you today this december we ll host a white house conference on social security and in january i ll convene the leaders of congress to draft a plan to save social security for the 21st century i m confident we ll meet this challenge as americans always do by working together honoring our values and preserving the solemn compact between generations that helped to build our nation now i d like to turn the discussion over to congressman borski bob take it away thank you very much congressman let me try to go back over some of what all of you said first of all congressman cardin talked about the need to increase private saving some others did congressman borski talked about the fact that there were still some people on social security living in poverty let me try to address those things together along with some of the other concerns which were mentioned it is true that there are still about 11 percent of our elderly people in america living in poverty but it s important to recognize that that s a lower percentage than in the overall population in america and that it s just been since 1985 that the poverty rate among seniors was lower than the overall poverty rate now what can we do to make it better there have to be other sources of income there have to be other sources of private savings and that is of course the possibility that some part of that could come out of social security reform is one of the things were discussing but over and above that i d like to point out that congress has done a lot of work with our administration over the last five years first of all to save 8 5 million pensions that were underwater when i took office to stabilize 40 million others and to make it increasingly more attractive for employees on modest wages and for small business employers to take out 401 plans and then to make it easier for people to move from job to job and take their 401 with them we ve also dramatically expanded the availability of iras so we ve tried to do some things already to help increase the ability and the attractiveness of saving over and above social security i don t think no matter what we do with social security the american people are going to have to be sensitized the younger generation is to do more to save for their own retirement on the other hand i think it would be a great mistake even for the youngest members of these audiences today to believe that we shouldn t preserve social security as a universal guarantee because without social security today almost half the seniors in america would be living in poverty even though most seniors have income over and above that so the trick is to save social security but also to have more income coming to people from private savings now let me mention just one or two other things nancy johnson talked about wanting made one medicare statement about annual physicals i believe that more and more as people live to older ages and are healthier we ll have to do more preventive care within the medicare program nancy you know we ve worked hard to deal with to have more mammographies for example we re doing other preventive screening now i think the more of that we do the more we re going to save over the long run and more importantly we ll improve the length and the quality of life and she said people want to know whether the seniors can count on social security the answer to that is absolutely yes the social security trust fund according to mr apfel who has got a legal responsibility to tell the truth about it is stable until 2029 in 2029 shortly thereafter the taxes coming in will only cover about 75 percent of our obligations one of the reasons we want to move now is that by making relatively modest changes now we can extend the life of the social security trust way out beyond 2029 can young people the high school students here look forward to drawing social security the answer to that is they certainly can if we do our jobs here in the next several months you know a few years ago i can understand your skepticism because we were running huge deficits we were projected to have 300 billion a year deficits as far as the eye can see now we re going to have a balanced budget sometime in the next year and it s projected we ll have a trillion dollars in surpluses over the next decade more than enough money if we do some other things to fix the social security system for the younger people listening here today but i want to say again no matter what we do to social security those of you who are 16 17 20 and 21 i know it s hard to think about the end of your life your later years when you re that age but you will have to do more through your employer or through your own individual efforts to save for your own retirement over and above social security if you want to maintain your standard of living when you retire now mr kolbe asked a couple of questions about rasing the retirement age and then mr weller asked about specific plans let me say i don t want to dodge any of that but i think all those proposals should be out there on the table and i think that the most important thing now is if i advocate a specific plan right now then all the debate will be about that the first thing we ve got to do is to get the american people solidly lined up behind change let s stick with these basic principles i ve outlined and i want to encourage other people to come forward with their ideas in december we ll all sit down come up with our we ll all put our various ideas on the table and we ll begin hammering out a plan that we can present in january i still hear some new ideas almost every week coming from democratic and republican members of congress and private citizens that i think should be aired if i put a specific plan on the table now it will undermine and weaken debate not strengthen it i do agree with those of you who say it ought to be possible for us to save social security without a payroll tax increase i don t think we ought to automatically rule out any ideas over the next 30 to 50 years as some would do but i think that we plainly know that we can do this and provide for increased strength of the system without a payroll tax increase given current assumptions so i believe that will be possible now let me just answer one last question you asked about rating the social security fund let me say that that just depends on how you look at the social security trust fund is basically a guarantee that certain obligations will be paid out to retirees including the cola as well as to the disabled and to those who are the survivors who are eligible to be paid under it now in 1983 when the social security reforms were passed it is true that the government was collecting more in social security taxes than were needed in any given year to pay for that so rather than raise other taxes to pay for other governmental expenses the rest of the government borrowed and gave a bond to the social security trust fund with the full faith and credit of the united states behind it a legal obligation to pay back the money with interest to the social security trust fund when it was needed to pay out and so there is no reason to believe that all the money that s been taken out since 1983 will not be paid back in as soon as it s needed to meet the legal obligations of the social security trust fund by doing that by borrowing that money and paying it back we didn t do anything to affect the obligations of the fund to pay social security recipients in the future but we did keep the government from borrowing more money out in the private sector competing with the private sector for money and running interest rates up so i think on balance it s been a safe and sound thing to do and i do not believe that the raid has occurred on the social security trust fund it would be a raid if the money were not paid back when it s due to be paid to you but the money will be paid back when it s due to be paid to you and that s one of the things that we have to make sure is never interfered with the legal obligation of the united states government to replenish that trust fund and pay back the money when it s needed for the recipients thank you very much dem wjclinton7 4 98b bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen good morning thank you governor carnahan for your leadership on so many areas and your friendship i d like to thank the leaders of this fine institution for welcoming us here and for the mission they perform every day i thank senators kerrey and santorum for their concern longstanding for social security reform and their presence here and representatives hulshof and pomeroy who are participating in the program and representative mccarthy and also representative david dreier from california who is a native of kansas city who are here i thank the members of our administration who have come who will be participating the director of the office of management and budget frank raines the deputy secretary of the treasury larry summers the director of the national economic council gene sperling and the administrator of social security ken apfel attorney general nixon treasurer graeber insurance commissioner sebelius thank you all for being here mayor cleaver thank you for hosting us i don t know if mayor marinovich is here or not but if she is hello i d also like to thank the leaders of the aarp including horace deets and the leaders of the concord coalition including martha phillips for their hosting of this forum the aarp has long been a leading voice for the elderly the concord coalition long a leading voice for fiscal responsibility over the long run and their willingness to work together is very important i d also like to thank the speaker of the house the senate majority leader and the house and senate democratic leaders for nominating and being represented here today by the members of congress who are on the program as the governor said this is a good time for america and a time of great hope our economy is the strongest in a generation many of our social problems are on the mend our leadership in the world is unrivalled within the next year we will have a balanced budget and where once there were deficits projected as far as the eye can see we now have projected surpluses as far as the eye can see a trillion dollars worth over the next decade but this sunlit moment is not a time to rest instead it is a rare opportunity to prepare our nation for the challenges and the opportunities of the 21st century or in the words of the old saying to fix the roof while the sun is shining in the coming century the aging of our society will present both great challenges and great opportunities i hope to live to be one of those people and so to me it s a high class problem but because a higher percentage of our people will be both older and retired perhaps our greatest opportunity and our greatest obligation at this moment is to save social security in the state of the union address i called on congress to set aside every penny of any surplus until we had dealt with social security first both parties in both chambers of congress have joined in this call that is the good news today we turn to the business at hand building public awareness of the nature and scope of the problem and building public consensus for the best changes clearly we will strengthen social security and reform it only if we reach across lines of party philosophy and generation and that is one reason for the broad representation of age groups in this audience today we have to have open minds and generous spirits and we all have to be willing to listen and to learn for too long politicians have called social security the third rail of american politics that s washington language for it s above serious debate this year we must prove them wrong this conference with its wide participation is a good start on the political calendar 1998 is an election year but on the social security calendar we must resolve to make it an education year when we come to grips with the problems of the system and come together to find the answers this issues is complicated so we need the best ideas whatever their source the issue is controversial so we have to have a national consensus on both the nature of the problem and the direction we must take that s why i ve asked all the members of congress to also host town hall meetings in their own districts i ll be talking with several of them by satellite later today and we ll hold more additional forums like this one around the country in december there will be a white house conference on social security in january i intend to convene the leaders of congress to draft a plan to save it with this effort we can forge a national consensus and we must for 60 years social security has meant more than an id number on a tax form more than even a monthly check in the mail it reflects our deepest values the duties we owe to our parents to each other to our children and grandchildren to those who misfortune strikes to our ideals as one america missouri s native son mark twain once said i ve come loaded with statistics for i ve noticed a man can t prove anything without statistics so i thought we would begin today with a few statistics today as the first chart shows 44 million americans depend upon social security and for two thirds of our senior citizens it is the main source of income for 18 percent of our seniors it is the only source of income but social security is more than just a retirement program today you can see that more than one in three of the beneficiaries are not retirees they are children and spouses of working people who die in their prime they are men and women who become disabled or their children so social security is also a life insurance policy and a disability policy as well as a rock solid guarantee of support and old age that is why we have to act with care as we make needed repairs to the program occasioned by the huge growth in retirees since its enactment over 60 years ago social security has changed the face of america when president roosevelt signed the bill creating the social security system most seniors in america were poor a typical elderly person sent a letter to fdr begging him to eliminate the stark terror of penniless old age since then the elderly poverty rate has dropped sharply you can look here and see that in 1959 the poverty rate was over 35 percent for retirees in 1979 it had dropped to 15 2 percent in 1996 the poverty rate is down below 11 percent now there s something else i want to say about this even though most seniors need other sources of income in addition to social security to maintain a comfortable lifestyle if social security did not exist today half of all american retirees would be living in poverty 60 percent of all women fifteen million american seniors have been lifted out of poverty through the social security system today the system is sound but the demographic crisis looming is clear the baby boomers 76 million of us are now looking ahead to their retirement and people clearly are living longer so that by 2030 there will be twice as many elderly as there are today all these trends will impose heavy strains on the system let s look at the next chart here you can see that in 1960 which wasn t so long ago there were over five people working for every person drawing social security in 1997 last year there were over three people 3 3 people working for every person drawing but by 2030 because of the increasing average age if present birthrates and immigration rates and retirement rates continue there will be only two people working for every person drawing social security now here s the bottom line the social security trust fund is sufficient to pay all the obligations of social security both retirement and disability until 2029 after which it will no longer cover those obligations payroll contributions will only be enough to cover 75 cents on the dollar of current benefits if we act now we can ensure strong retirement benefits for the baby boom generation without placing an undue burden on our children and grandchildren and we can do it if we act now with changes that will be far simpler and easier than if we wait until the problem is closer at hand for example a 100 billion of the budget surplus if used for social security would add a year or more to the solvency of the trust fund with no other changes being made other changes which could be made can be phased in over time and keep in mind small changes decided on now can have huge impacts 30 years from now so how should we judge the proposals to change the social security system here are principles that i believe we should follow and they re on the next chart here i believe first of all we have to reform social security in a way that strengthens and protects a guarantee for the 21st century we should not abandon a basic program that has been one of the greatest successes in our country s history second we should maintain universality and fairness for half a century this has been a progressive guarantee for citizens we have to keep it that way it was not until 1985 that the poverty rate among seniors was lower than the poverty rate for the population of america as a whole it is an astonishing achievement of our society that it is now so much lower and we should not give it up third social security must provide a benefit that people can count on regardless of the ups and downs of the economy or the financial markets we have to provide a solid and dependable foundation of retirement security fourth social security must continue to provide financial security for disabled and low income beneficiaries we can never forget the one in three social security beneficiaries who are not retirees and fifth anything we do to strengthen social security now must maintain our hard won fiscal discipline it is the source of much of the prosperity we enjoy today now these are the principles that will guide me as we work to forge a consensus i hope they re ones that all of you can also embrace this national effort will call on the best of our people it will require us to rise above partisanship it will require us to plan for the future to consider new ideas to engage in what president roosevelt once called bold persistent experimentation it will remind us that there are some challenges that we can only meet as one nation acting through our national government just as there are others we can better meet as individuals families communities this is also a challenge for every generation to the older americans here today let me say you have nothing to worry about for you social security is as strong as every to the younger people here today who may believe that you will never see a social security check indeed i saw a poll which purported to be serious that said that americans in their twenties thought it was more likely they would see a u f o than that they would every draw social security that skepticism may have been well founded in the past but just as we put our fiscal house in order we can and must put social security in order and above all to my fellow baby boomers let me say that none of us wants our own retirement to be a burden to our children and to their efforts to raise our grandchildren it would be unconscionable if we failed to act and act now as one nation renewing the ties that bind us across the generations thank you very much dem wjclinton7 5 97a bill_clinton buenos dias tlaxcala president and mrs zedillo governor and mrs alvarez lima to all of our friends from mexico and the united states mayor teroba thank you for welcoming us to this wonderful city it is great to be here i thank you for coming out to say hello president zedillo and i have been working hard as he said and now we have come just to celebrate mexico s people and culture with you this is an especially important day for my wife and for me because we were married about 22 years ago and we came to mexico on our honeymoon and so we always love to come back and this is a very romantic setting to be in today and we thank you for that the partnership between mexico and the united states the friendship between mexico and the united states is important to the future of the american people and the mexican people it must be pursued in a genuine spirit of respect equality and dignity we are moving into a world with great changes in the way we work and live and the world grows smaller because of technology and rapid communications but some things do not change this beautiful city founded nearly 500 years ago reminds us that even in times of great change some things are meant to last our heritage our love of family community our devotion to work our respect for the land we are blessed to inhabit it is my purpose to work with you to preserve the things that we want to preserve to change as we must so that the people of mexico and the people of the united states will have more and better jobs good health care all our children boys and girls alike will have good education and we will be able together to beat back our common enemies of drugs and crime so that as we move into the new century we will know we have preserved our community our values our integrity and we have prepared the way for our children s future in closing i would like to say a special thank you to the mexican people for the many contributions that mexican americans have made to our life in the united states two members of my presidential cabinet many people in my administration many members of our congress people successful in all walks of life have their roots here in mexico they are proud of it and so am i and we are going to work hard to make sure that in the years ahead we draw closer together we work together we maintain a spirit of pride in our own heritage but a genuine partnership for a better future thank you thank you mexico thank you for a wonderful visit dem wjclinton7 5 97b bill_clinton thank you mr president for the wisdom of your words for the warmth of your personal expression and for the great generosity with which the people of mexico have received my wife and our delegation the members of the administration and the members of congress we thank all those who have been a part of that in the mexican government throughout the political system and citizens at large i am honored to speak today in the heart of this magnificent capital where teotihuacan and aztec civilizations flourished where one of the world s greatest cities grew up centuries before the first english tents were pitched in jamestown virginia or plymouth massachusetts i m frankly a little envious that hillary got to spend an extra day here and i want to thank those who are responsible for the wonderful welcome she received in the yucatan almost 22 years ago now hillary and i came to mexico for our honeymoon mexico won our hearts then but now as then me encanta mexico i come here today to celebrate the ties that bind the united states and mexico and to help set a course to strengthen them for the age of possibility before us as we enter the 21st century our nations and our hemisphere stand at a crossroads as hopeful as the time when hidalgo and morelos lit the torch of liberty for mexico almost two centuries ago democracy has swept every country but one in the americas giving people a vote and a voice in their future decades of coups and civil wars have given way to stability to peace to free markets and to the search for social justice and a cleaner environment the electricity of change is surging throughout our hemisphere and nowhere more hopefully than mexico i congratulate the mexican people for carrying forward bold political reforms that will lead in july to the most intensely contested elections in your history we know from our own 220 year experiment that democracy is hard work it must be defended every day but it is worth the effort for it has produced more opportunity for people to make the most of their own lives than all its rivals four years ago in this very place we began a grand common effort to secure democracies gains in our hemisphere for all our people on behalf of my administration vice president gore here invited the nations of our hemisphere to the summit of the americas in miami there we set an ambitious agenda to create free trade throughout the hemisphere and to cooperate on a host of other issues with the goal of fulfilling the age old dream of building a truly democratic and prosperous family of the americas in the 21st century revolutionary forces of integration and technology and trade and travel and communications are shaping our times and bringing us all closer together the stroke of a computer key sends ideas information and money across the planet at lightening speed every day we use products that are dreamed up in one country financed in another manufactured in a third with parts made in still other countries and then sold all over the world like it or not we are becoming more interdependent and we see that too on the negative side as when a stock market crash an environmental disaster or a dread disease in one country sends shock waves deeply felt far beyond its borders while economic integration is inevitable its shape and its reach depend upon our response to it in both our countries there are some who throw up walls of protection to ward off the challenge of change but more and more people here and the united states and throughout the americas understand that openness competition and the flow of ideas and culture can improve the lives of all our people if we ensure that these forces work for and not against all our people with our long border rich history and complex challenges mexico and the united states have a special responsibility to work together to seize the opportunities and defeat the dangers of this time our partnership for freedom and democracy and for prosperity and our partnership against drugs organized crime environmental decay and social injustice is fundamental to the future of the american people and to the future of the mexican people to succeed this partnership must be rooted in a spirit of mutual respect your great leader benito juarez whose statue stands not far from the white house in washington said respect for the rights of others is peace today i reaffirm to the people of mexico we embrace the wisdom of juarez we seek a peaceful prosperous partnership filled with respect and dignity four years ago together we led the fight for nafta many people in both our countries painted a dark picture of lost jobs and boarded up factories should nafta prevail well they were wrong nafta is working working for you and working for the american people in three short years and despite mexico s worst recession in this century trade between our nations has grown nearly 60 percent as president zedillo said mexico is our third largest trading partner just behind japan which has an economy 15 times larger our exports to mexico are 37 percent higher than before nafta an all time high in spite of the economic difficulties here but for mexico nafta s benefits are just as great two and a half years ago the financial crisis that struck mexico wrought real and profound hardship to your people as jobs vanished and inflation skyrocketed the storm hit only days after president zedillo took office he might have simply complained that he got a big dose of bad luck but instead he responded with vision and courage by keeping to the path of reform and the blueprint of nafta he lessened the impact of the recession the real hardships remain mexico has made a remarkable turnaround since the crisis you have created one million new jobs cut inflation by more than half and regained the confidence of international investors now compare this with the economic crisis of 1981 and 82 when mexico sharply raised its tariffs and followed a different course then it took seven long years for mexico to return to the financial markets this time only seven months then it took four years for your economy to recover the lost ground this time only a year after the crisis mexico grew by more than five percent and is expected to grow strongly this year too you have endured punishing setbacks but america is proud to have worked with you from the very beginning enlisting international support for a loan package that safeguarded hundreds of thousands of jobs in both our countries calmed emerging markets throughout latin america and the world and when mexico paid the loan back earned the respect and admiration of the entire world i congratulate you on this course of course the ultimate test of our economic partnership is not in big numbers but in human impact the electronic workers of mexico s baja peninsula whose new jobs mean better health care and pensions and more education for their children the hundreds of thousands of mexican women who now have mammograms because american made diagnostic equipment has become more affordable to you and all the american workers with good high wage jobs based on our trade with you nafta has also become an important tool for improving the environment and the well being of workers its institutions are working to clean up pollution in the border region with four treatment plants already under construction and more to come its labor agreements have created a new awareness of workers rights and labor conditions in both our countries we must accelerate the pace of these efforts to reach more people and more communities and we must include more nations in our partnership so that we can achieve the goal we set out at the summit of the americas of a free trade area of the americas that is why i m working with congress to gain support for fast track authority and why i m coming back to latin america twice in the next few months as we celebrate these accomplishments we must also do everything in our power to assure that the benefits and the burdens of change are fairly shared the most powerful tool for doing that plainly is education giving our people the skills they need to compete and succeed at the miami summit mexico took the responsibility of leading a hemispheric education initiative working with brazil chile and the united states you have set our sights on lifting standards and bringing new methods and technologies to classroom throughout the hemisphere we can rekindle the passion for education that swept this country after your revolution your great poet alfonso reyes described that moment as a grand crusade for learning that electrified the people nothing equal to it has ever been seen in the americas let us see something equal to it and greater let us renew this crusade and let us remember as my wife has said the citizens on every continent in distant villages and large cities this crusade for education must include young women as well as young men on equal terms and let us resolve to make this crusade a shining light of our next summit of the americas next year in santiago in miami at the first summit we also reaffirmed that we cannot be responsible stewards of freedom unless we are also responsible stewards of our natural resources our hemisphere s land and air and water as well as the rich texture of plant and animal life they support over the long run the development of democracy and a prosperous economy requires the sustainable development of our natural resources that is why we have put the protection of the environment right where it belongs at the heart of our hemispheric agenda that is the course we charted together in rio in miami in santa cruz and one we must pursue further in santiago trade education and the environment are critical pieces of the greater mosaic of our relationship designed to turn our 2 000 mile border into a vibrant source of growth and jobs and open exchange we re also building a bridge between brownsville and matamoros and roads to connect our people streamlining cargo transit with high tech scanners improving water supplies for the areas inhabitants and through our border 21 initiative giving local communities a strong voice in the future of the dynamic living space they share as our cooperation grows closer so do our people for america that means pride in the fact that we are one of the most diverse democracies in the world that diversity will be one of our great strengths in the global society of the 21st century and mexican americans are a crucial part of our diversity and our national pride now more than 12 million strong they have helped to make the united states the fifth largest hispanic nation in the world mexican americans are contributing to every dimension of american life in congress they have written the laws of our land just yesterday ambassador bill richardson whose mother came from this city was working to bring peace in central africa and every day he is america s voice at the united nations our administration draws strength from many other remarkable mexican americans including several who are here with me our energy secretary federico pena my director of public liaison maria echaveste my congressional liaison janet murguia i am also pleased to have in our party two distinguished members of congress who are mexican americans javier becerra of california and silvestre reyes of texas and four other distinguished elected officials who represent large numbers of mexican americans and who care deeply about our partnership senator kay bailey hutchison of texas senator jeff bingaman of new mexico representative jim kolbe of arizona and governor robert miller of nevada last year nearly 160 000 mexicans immigrated legally to america bringing their talents their energies their aspirations they ve played by the rules and we for our part must make sure that the system treats them fairly and gives them the chance to live up to their hopes and dreams but to maintain an immigration policy that is generous fair safe and orderly we must also take effective action to stop illegal immigration we are a nation of immigrants and of laws just as those who obey are laws are welcome those who break them must face the consequences our new immigration law will help us to achieve these goals in applying it and in our overall approach to immigration we will balance control with common sense and compassion i am very pleased that the balanced budget agreement i reached with our congress last week includes a significant restoration of welfare benefits to legal immigrants i will continue to work with congress to correct some aspects of our immigration law we will ensure respect for human rights and seek to apply the law humanely with special concern for children and families there will be no mass deportations or no discrimination and we will continue to support mexico s efforts to create new opportunities here so that no one feels compelled to leave home just to earn a living for his or her family in the end that is the answer but i ask you to remember and work with us on the central premise we have a generous immigration policy perhaps the most generous in the world but to make it work we must be a nation of laws this moment of great promise for us is frankly also one of peril the great irony of this time is that the forces of global integration have also unleashed powerful sources of disintegration that use open borders and technology and modern communications to strike at the very heart of civilized societies our families our institutions our very lives for us the greatest of these scourges is that of illegal drug trafficking the cost to both of us of illegal drugs are staggering in america every year drugs kill 14 000 people and cost our country almost 70 billion for crime prisons lost work wounded bodies and ruined lives every year our law enforcement officials arrest one million people on drug charges in mexico president zedillo has called narcotics trafficking the greatest threat to national security the biggest hazard to social health and the bloodiest source of violence throughout our hemisphere we see how drug cartels threaten the fabric of entire societies they corrupt or murder law enforcement officials and the judiciary take over legitimate businesses and banks spread violence to offices and homes to streets and to playgrounds drugs are not simply a mexican problem or an american problem they are our common problem the enormous demand for drugs in america must be stemmed we have just a little less than five percent of the world s population yet we consume one third of the world s cocaine most of which comes from mexico the money we spend on illegal drugs fuels narco traffickers who in turn attack your police and prosecutors and prey on your institutions we must face this curse together because we cannot defeat it alone my friends the battle against drugs must unite our people not divide them we must fight back together and we must prevail in the united states we have begun the largest antidrug effort in our history more than two thirds of its 16 billion budget will go to attacking our domestic drug problem we ve cut casual drug use by 50 percent in america but tragically among young people under 18 has doubled we re reaching out to young people with an unprecedented effort a public education campaign to teach that drugs are wrong illegal and deadly we re supporting successful neighborhood strategies like community policing that are making our streets and schools safer and more drug free we re punishing drug pushers with tougher sentences and working with our partners abroad to destroy drugs at the source or stop them in transit here in mexico you must continue your brave fight against illegal drugs already you have shown real advances in drug eradication you ve enacted strong new measures to combat money laundering and organized crime you ve destroyed more drug labs and landing strips and seized more drugs including more than 10 tons of cocaine just days ago and last week you resolved to rebuild your drug enforcement agency on a firmer foundation i know the hardship and sacrifice this has caused more than 200 mexican police officers died last year because of drug violence as terrible as this toll is the price of giving up and giving in would be higher let us resolve to redouble our efforts not by pointing fingers but by joining hands yesterday president zedillo and i took an important step forward when we declared the u s mexican alliance against drugs based on mutual respect and common sense will strengthen our attack on drug production trafficking and consumption we will crack down harder on the key problems of money laundering and arms trafficking the future of our children depends upon these efforts and depends more on our determination to continue the fight we must not let our children down our alliance against drugs is but one of many elements in our cooperation for the coming century yesterday the president and i received a report of our binational commission from wiping out tuberculosis in our border states to protecting endangered species in the pacific to increasing educational opportunity with more fulbright scholarships the scope of our joint efforts has become as large as the continent we share fifty years ago president harry truman came to mexico his visit was a turning point between our people he spoke of the difficulties in our past and of the need for us to work more closely he said i refuse to be discouraged by apparent difficulties difficulties are a challenge to men of determination in the face of our difficulties we must be men and women of determination we can bridge the divides of culture history and geography to achieve juarez noble vision of respect and peace rooted in the rule of law rooted in prosperity for all who will work for it rooted in good health and a clean environment rooted in modern education and timeless values the bright promise of a new century lies before us let us embrace it together thank you dem wjclinton7 5 99a bill_clinton thank you very much you know when roy was doing that riff you know before he came i didn t know i needed new furniture i didn t know i needed new art work i didn t know i needed mary kept getting redder and redder and finally she says he may not know he needs another place to spend the night tonight i must say this is a lot better than the last hovel we spent the night in let me say to all of you i ve had a wonderful time here tonight seeing so many of my old friends there are a lot of people here the ones roy mentioned and also carlos trujan gonzalo barrientos a lot of other people who were with roy and gary and judy and nancy and tom all the rest of us way back in 1972 and we have remained friends for a long time and during most of that time with the odd interruption sometimes the odd wonderful interruption like the reign of governor richards the election of lloyd doggett we ve been in the minority and i want to talk tonight a little bit about i want to have kind of a serious conversation tonight about why i really came here because what joe said is right i m not running for anything and i would seize any excuse to come here to austin because i had some of the happiest days of my life here and i have a very jealous wife who wishes she were here today but for the next two years i m helping the democratic party because i believe it s the right thing to do for america i hear a lot of folks on the other side kind of licking their lips and saying well wait until the next election and we ll have clinton out of the way maybe it will be better what i want to say to you is that i am very grateful that i ve had the chance to serve you and i am profoundly grateful that we have the lowest unemployment in 30 years and the lowest welfare rolls in forever and a day they re half the size they were before and the lowest crime rate in 25 years roy was saying that we ve got 90 percent of our children immunized against serious diseases for the first time in history the doors of college are virtually open to every american now because of our hope tax credit and the student loan changes we ve made we ve set aside more land in perpetuity than any administration except for the two roosevelts in american history i m grateful for all that but what i want you to understand is that i m grateful because i got a chance to implement a set of ideas that now represent the governing philosophy of the democratic party and it is very different from the driving philosophy of the other party and if the american people like the results that have been achieved then we need to support those people running for the congress and the white house who believe in these ideas in 1991 when the incumbent president was at 75 percent approval and i decided to make this race when nobody but my mother and my wife thought i could win i did it because i was worried about my country and my capital because it seemed to me that there was nothing particularly wrong with america that couldn t be fixed if we would just open our eyes and go to work the unemployment rate was high inequality was increasing the social problems were worsening and we had a lot of problems around the world that we didn t seem to have any governing idea of dealing with but i felt great about america i just thought we had to change the way washington worked just go back in your mind to that period and that long period where the other party spent 12 years telling us how terrible the government was and a lot of our guys were sort of fighting a rear guard action defending it but most of the ideological battles which took place in washington were about yesterday instead of about tomorrow and so i set off on this crazy journey with a lot of you based on a few simple ideas first of all i asked myself what is the problem the problem is that we have not thought about how to take full advantage of this explosion in technology and the globalization of the economy in society and at the same time figure out how not to leave anybody behind and make our families and our communities stronger and maintain our push for peace and prosperity around the world we haven t thought about how to make the transition in a way that not only provides vast opportunities for people like those of us in this beautiful setting tonight but makes america as a nation stronger and it seemed to me that what we had to do is to go back to some very basic things that we had an obligation to try to have opportunity for every person who was responsible enough to deserve it that we had to try to build a community made up of every law abiding citizen without regard to what other differences they had that we had to commit ourselves to be more involved in the rest of the world not less involved because the world is growing smaller and smaller and that we needed a different sort of government that could be much smaller and it is today by the way it s the same size it was in 1962 that s the size of your federal government today and i m proud of that but what we need to know we made it smaller but more active focused not so much on telling people what to do or maintaining old bureaucracies but giving people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives those were my ideas opportunity responsibility community a government that gives people the tools to make the most of their own lives and i thought to myself there are a whole lot of things people believe that i don t think are true i believed if we work at it we could reduce the deficit and still increase our spending in education and health care if we did it right well six years later we ve got a huge surplus and we ve nearly doubled spending in education and health care i believed we could improve the economy and improve the environment the air is cleaner and the water is cleaner than it was six years ago we ve reduced chemicals in the atmosphere from chemical plant emissions by 90 percent in the last six years i believed that we could help people succeed at work and at home and i still think that s one of the biggest problems we ve got in this country people trying to be good parents and trying to meet their obligations at work at the same time i believed that we could promote entrepreneurialism and trade around the world and still help people who because of their education or where they live are at risk of being left behind those are the things that i believed i believed that we can be a force for peace and recognize that there are some times when we have to use our overwhelming military force i believed that in welfare we could reduce the welfare rolls get more people to work and at the same time help people who were on welfare to do a better job of raising their children that we didn t have to hurt people in their responsibilities as parents to say if you re able bodied you ought to work if you can i didn t believe all those choices and all those debates that i kept hearing in washington and so we set out to do it and the public responded and the people gave me a chance to serve and then in 96 another chance and then in 96 and 98 kept returning more of our people to the congress so that we re at the point where we can almost reverse the election of 94 i think the election of 94 happened by the way because we made the tough decisions as a party all alone to reduce the deficit without a single vote from the other party and increase our investment in education we made the tough decision almost all alone to pass a crime bill that put 100 000 police on the street banned assault weapons and required the brady bill s waiting period and by the election of 94 and we tried to provide more health insurance all alone and didn t have enough votes to do it and by 94 what happened was people knew what we d done on the economic plan but they didn t feel the economy was getting better they knew what we d done on the crime bill but the nra convinced a bunch of hunters we were going to take their rifles by 96 everybody still had their rifles and the crime rate had gone down and the economy had gone up and we got reelected and the congress is doing better ever since our elections so now we re poised for this election in 2000 and what i want to say to you is i appreciate what roy said about me and it s nice to be introduced by your old friends they ll lie about you a little now and then but the truth is you must believe this this administration has succeeded because we had the right ideas and the right approach and we re grounded in the right values and it s what represents the heart and soul of the democratic party today and that s why i m here we ve got a lot of big decisions to make and you have to decide who is going to make them we have to deal with the aging crisis twice as many people over 65 by 2030 i hope to live to be one of them i ve given the congress a plan that will save social security save medicare provide help for people taking care of their parents and long term care allow middle income people and lower income people to save for their own retirement for the first time and do it in a way that pays down the national debt by 2015 to the lowest point it has been since before world war i and that s really important to keep the economy going because we ll be less dependent on the vagaries of the global financial system i ve given the congress a plan that will improve the quality of education by ending social promotion by providing after school and summer school programs for our kids by finishing the work of hooking all our classrooms up to the internet by modernizing a lot of these old school buildings and helping the school districts that are having kids in house trailers by supporting better teaching and by having national academic standards which i hope our whole party will embrace and help us in this great battle we re in because i think you should have local control of the school about how to implement national academic standards there s an international standard that all of our children need to meet if we want them to make a good living and we re about the only advanced country in the world that doesn t have that as a result we ve got the finest system of higher education in the world no one believes that our system of elementary and secondary education is uniformly the finest in the world and yet it can be and all the diversity we have in our schools is a great asset in a global society but every one of those kids deserves a chance at the brass ring i was in the alexandria school system the other day across the river from the capitol and the white house there are kids from a hundred different racial and ethnic groups there nearly a hundred different native languages every one of them can make a contribution to america if he or she gets a world class education and to pretend that it ought to be a local option whether they get it is i think obscuring what is plainly real here so we democrats stand for more flexibility about how to do things but for national standards of excellence based on international standards of what our children need to know and i think the american people are with us on that i could talk about a lot of other issues i d just like to mention one or two more the vice president is coming down here to south texas in a couple of weeks to our annual empowerment zone conference since 1993 we ve been trying to figure out ways to get more investment into poor urban neighborhoods and poor rural areas and poor native american reservations because there are still a lot of people that haven t participated in this economic recovery and i worry a lot about how we re going to keep america s growth going and our unemployment low without any inflation especially if we have trouble overseas one way is to make more markets here at home and there are lots of places right here in texas where unemployment is still too high too many hardworking people still don t have the skills they need and where if we could attract the right investment in the right way we could have dramatic growth so this is going to be a big challenge if we can t get around now to giving poor rural areas and urban areas that have been left behind the chances they need we ll never get around to it let me just mention one or two other things i am very interested in this whole issue of balancing work and family and i think there s some things we ought to do i think we ought to raise the minimum wage again i think we ought to strengthen the family and medical leave law i think we ought to pass the patients bill of rights i think we ought to pass our child care plan to help lower income people with their child care costs we have to realize that most parents have to work and every parent ought to have the option to do it but no parent should have to sacrifice the most important job any woman or man has which is to raise strong good kids there are lot of things out there we have to do we ve got a big job to do in the world you can see it today with some of the problems we have now i d like to close by just asking you to think about three things and giving you examples of what my philosophy is that i think is our party s philosophy these are the best of times for americans but we re all pretty sobered up right now because of three events of the recent days one are the terrible tornados in oklahoma and kansas and to a lesser extent but still sad in texas and tennessee two is the heartbreaking incident in littleton colorado and third is the continuing conflict in kosovo now let me tell you what they mean to me first the tornados mean that none of us should get too big for our britches we re not in control we have to maintain a certain humility when thinking about all the problems of the world but as our hearts go out to those people i m going up to oklahoma city tomorrow to tour the damage and talk about what we can do to help them put their lives back together i m thinking about what we can do to try to prepare better for the next one i m thinking about what we can do if we know we re going to grow and expand in areas that have been tornado alleys what we ought to do to build houses that will do a better job of withstanding them or have quicker escapes to places that will be safer in other words i think what we always should be thinking about is how can we make it better how can we deal with what is going to come in the case of littleton on monday hillary and i and al and tipper gore are going to sponsor a big meeting at the white house with people from the entertainment and internet communities people from the gun manufacturers people from the religious communities people who work in schools on problems of violence students a lot of other segments of our society coming together to talk about how we can start a national campaign to reduce the likelihood of violence against our children now i think it is important that you know how i look at this i think the world s worst thing we can do is to use this awful heartbreak to get into a finger pointing session because the truth is that not a single soul here knows exactly what triggered those kids and we all know that in any given time there will be people who are more vulnerable than others to whatever influences to which they re exposed to but i do think we would all admit if we sort of take our defenses down that the society in which our children grow up today number one throws things at them faster number two gives them even more opportunities to be isolated from their parents and from their peers number three exposes them at an earlier age and in greater volume and intensity to more violence and the coarsening of human relationships and number four it s way too easy for them to get things like tech 9 assault pistols and i think we can all sort of admit that and what i m trying to do is to figure out what we should all do here to launch a genuine grass roots national campaign where i try to pass the laws i should pass the gun manufacturers come forward and do what they ought to do to try to protect our kids the entertainment community makes a contribution the internet community makes a contribution they ve worked hard by the way with the vice president to try to give parents more screening technologies and the religious community comes forward the mental health community comes forward the schools provide more adequate counseling services and peer mediation for the kids and what some of our schools are doing now providing a hotline so kids who know what s going on in the school can call and tell somebody without being subject to abuse there are lots of things to be done here but there s also something to be said here for recognizing the incredible pressures that parents and children are under because life is so fast and so crowded and it is easy for all us if we re not careful to wind up being strangers in our own homes and our children need to understand also that no matter how sold and rooted they are childhood is a fragile and difficult time every school will always have its clicks every school will always have its groups but we ve got to teach our kids that they can enjoy being in their crowd without looking down on the others because people who are constantly subject to ridicule and abuse are going to have their lives twisted or distorted in some ways unless they are really superhuman so i m looking forward to this and all the cynics who say it can t be done i would remind you that teen pregnancy s now down five years in a row because of a national grassroots movement not because of any law we passed in washington drunk driving s down because of mothers and students against drunk driving we now have 10 000 companies that have voluntarily joined an alliance that we organized a couple years ago to hire people from welfare to work and they ve hired over 400 000 people without a single law being passed we can do this and i believe we can do it but only if our political public life brings us together and not drives us apart and the last thing i d like to say is about kosovo i know this is a difficult issue i saw the people with their signs on the way in saying we ought to end the fighting nobody wants to do it more than me i think those of you who have known me for 30 years know that the most difficult thing that i ever have to do is use a superior position to put pressure on somebody else particularly if it involves the use of violence i m not that sort of person but let me tell you since the end of communism we have seen the inevitable rise of national aspirations and ethnic aspirations especially in central and eastern europe in one place only the former yugoslavia we have seen that turned into a credo that says it is all right to burn the homes destroy the records destroy the churches the mosques in this case and the museums and the libraries and the very lives of families it s all right to rape the daughters it s all right to shoot the sons it s all right to do this and for three years we worked through the united nations and negotiations and everything else to end the war in bosnia and finally we ended the war in bosnia when nato bombed and when the opposition forces started winning some battles on the ground and we ve been able to maintain a peace there people don t have to like each other people may have legitimate grievances but ethnic cleansing and killing people wholesale because of their race or religion is wrong and the united states is in a position to stand against it and we ought to i know there are a lot of people who disagree with me they say well we don t have any vital national interest i would argue to you that we do it s not only a moral humanitarian issue we ll be better off if our best allies in the world in europe live in a continent that is whole and democratic and at peace and free of this sort of thing first of all they won t be wasting their money tearing each other up secondly they ll be better trading partners thirdly they ll be better partners in helping us solve problems in other parts of the world and if we can put an end to ethnic cleansing in europe then we can put an end to it in africa and we can put an end to it wherever else it rears its ugly head if we can t solve this problem it s very difficult to understand how our children are going to live in peace in a world where every radical terrorist group can get on the internet and figure out how to build a bomb or get weapons or do anything else they want to do we have got at least to tell people that in the world of the 21st century it is not okay to kill people just because they re of a different race or ethnicity or religion that s why i must say i want to applaud the senators who are here who are trying to pass that hate crimes act in the legislature in honor of james bird i think it s very important it makes a statement this is the last thing i ll say about this i ve already talked longer than i meant to but if you don t remember anything else i say remember this it is one thing to say that we all ought to get along together and quite another to do what is necessary for us to do so in decency and honor the differences among us are a part of what makes life more interesting and makes this country so successful as long as they are contained when the differences among us are used as they are in kosovo today as they were in bosnia before as an instrument of human destruction they can quickly make life unbearable now we can t force anybody to like anybody else maybe not everybody in this place tonight likes everybody else but we live according to certain rules and we do it not only because it is morally right but because we do better when other people do well when we do the right thing or as hillary says when we act like we re in a village we all are better off so i ask you to think about this the democratic party has stood for community and for opportunity and for citizen responsibility we have refused to accept all these phony choices we were presented with between economic growth and the environment between accountability and help in education and all the other things these ideas have led america to a better place that s why i m here i m glad i was president i hope i was the instrument of a lot of the good things that have happened in this country but the most important thing is that we continue in this direction that we stay on this course that we embrace these ideas and that is why it is important to support this party i m very grateful to you thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton7 5 99b bill_clinton thank you very much mr mayor i want you to know folks i spent some of the best days of my life in austin texas and when lloyd went up to make his remarks i looked at the mayor and i said being mayor of austin may be the best elected job in the united states and he didn t dispute me i also want to thank lloyd doggett for his leadership on this and so many other projects we ve been friends for many many years i was elated when he was elected to the congress and i can tell you he does a terrific jobs for all the constituents of this district in washington d c ladies and gentlemen i m very very sorry i had to miss the dedication you know why the events in littleton colorado compelled me to cancel i do want to tell you on monday hillary and al and tipper gore and i are going to have a very distinguished array of people from all over the country to meet in washington to organize a national campaign against violence involving our children and i know it will have the support of every person here but i want to ask you to think a little bit about the significance of this airport not only in terms of what it means to all of you but in terms of what it means to the future of america and how we ought to do all of our business six years ago when your air base was closed you saw that it did not have to be an economic setback in fact it could be an enormous opportunity austin bergstrom international airport today is a testament to your unwavering commitment and vision for years this airport had the following motto bergstrom air force base global power for america today this airport is still a symbol of global power for america it s a different kind of power where military aircraft essential to our victory in the cold war once landed here now boxes of software take off for markets around the world fueling our success in the new global economy where once pilots flew reconnaissance missions to survey cold war enemies now they fly planes that ferry high tech visionaries between silicon valley and these silicon hills this airport will be your gateway to prosperity in the 21st century and i especially appreciate something that s already been mentioned that you pay tribute to some of texas finest citizens i hope every visitor will be inspired by captain bergstrom s courage and sacrifice by my good friend jake pickle s life of service and compassion by president johnson s bold vision and commitment to progress for all americans together and by barbara jordan s incomparable voice for justice on common ground since i m here today i cannot help noting that the work of lyndon johnson and barbara jordan is being carried on today here in austin by the state legislators who are trying to pass hate crimes legislation in the name of james bird as you probably saw on the tarmac i was honored to meet with members of mr bird s family i know that what happened to him was anathema to every good citizen in texas as well as the united states and i ask you as our men and women in uniform today struggle against the killing the rape the looting the uprooting of people based solely on their ethnic and religious background in kosovo as they did in bosnia as we fight to reconcile people around from the middle east to northern ireland here in america if we want to do good abroad we have to be good at home we have to stand up for what is right we have to acknowledge that there are differences among us that we celebrate there are differences among us that are real differences and we are compelled to disagree but underneath it all as the founders of our republic recognized there is our common humanity and our equal dignity and we must always stand for it if we want to be a force against ethnic cleansing and genocide around the world we have to be a force for harmony and community here at home in every place in the united states and so i close with the point i tried to make at the beginning i want you to think about what this represents and how you did it what it represents is a commitment to a common future where no one is left behind and everybody has a chance how you did it is by working together across all the elements of this richly textured community if you think about it we could solve all of our problems that way thanks for the model good luck and god bless you wait a minute i want to do one other thing i want to thank the barbara jordan elementary choir and the pflugerville high school band thank you very much how about a little more music let s go dem wjclinton7 6 93 bill_clinton thank you very much becky for that wonderful introduction i want to thank you and gracia hillman and all the leaders of the state and local chapters of the league of women voters from around the country who are here i know there are at least three members from my home state here i m glad to see you all karen stevens bobbie hill and linda polk i thank them for coming this is your house and i m glad to have you back here when i ran for president i did so with the conviction that we had to create a new season of opportunity and a new climate of responsibility in america so that together we could rebuild the american community and there were some very specific commitments that i made in that regard an economic program that would be 2good for america s families and working people a health care program that would control cost and provide basic coverage to all americans a program of national service and reform of the student loan program to open the doors of college education to all americans a program to change the welfare system to move families from dependence to independence and a program of political reform to open the system of this country so that ordinary americans could pull the levers of power and have their voices heard your presence here today for the first time since 1980 after decades and decades the league of women voters coming to the white house without regard to party in a bipartisan fashion coming back here for the first time since 1980 is a symbol of the importance of opening the political system to informed citizens to let them have influence over the decisions that are made affecting the lives of ordinary americans and i welcome you here today not long ago as becky said we gathered here to sign the motor voter bill again a strong priority of the league of women voters without regard to party opening the franchise more to all americans and especially to many younger americans who were so terribly interested in this issue that was a very very important day for all of us it was not only good for voter registration it was in a very fundamental sense a civil rights law and a real advance for all the people of the united states not long before that i gathered here with other americans to sign the family leave bill into law which is a very important thing because it attempts to unite two of our most important values work and family guaranteeing ordinary citizens that if they have to take a little time off for a baby to be born or a parent to be cared for they won t lose their jobs these are the kinds of things that government ought to do with the american people not to just do things for people but to empower people to take care of their own business that s what motor voter does that s what family leave does that s what we ought to be about in this country now we are moving ahead in the congress with the economic plan soon to be followed by the health care plan and there is a very ambitious agenda of political reform before the congress i know that s what you re here about so i d like to say just a word about that if i might there are actually two important political reform bills in the united states congress today and i urge you to embrace them both the first one you know about and that is the campaign finance reform bill in the united states senate the bill does exactly what we ought to do it lowers the cost of campaign reduces the influence of special interest groups and opens the airwaves to more honest debates so that incumbents are not unduly protected and wealth is not the primary determinant of whether a person can wage a credible campaign it is a very very important advance and we have proposed to you can clap for that i like that we have proposed to pay for this by repealing a tax deduction that is only 30 years old and that is the tax deduction for lobbying we ve proposed to repeal it and pay for campaign finance reform no other money will go into campaign finance reform except that which is voluntarily contributed by the american taxpayers if this bill passes as it has been proposed so i urge you to go up there and plead with the united states senate and talk to the house members while you re at it and say give us a bill we can be proud of to give the election process back to the american people one of the reasons more people voted in the presidential election in 1992 that hadn t voted in a long time is because of all the debates all the town meetings all the open forums all the ways that people found to say this is your place not the politicians place this is your country this is your government take it back and campaign finance reform will help us to do that the second bill has already been passed by the senate and is now in the house it is a bill long overdue which will require all people who lobby the united states congress to register and report and will require the reporting of virtually all funds expended on members of congress by lobbyists it is a very important bill and i urge you to support that secondly i appreciate your support for health care reform let me say that the first lady and the hundreds of people who worked on the task force and the people in the administration who are still reaching out over america to the health care providers and the health care consumers and the business community the labor community everybody affected by this deserve a lot of credit they have done more complex exhaustive work in less time than any other group like this i think in the entire history of the united states and i m very grateful to them for that and soon we will have a health care proposal that i believe will be self evidently in the interest of the vast majority of the american people not only to provide universal coverage but to do it in a way which preserves what is best about american health care and brings these costs down before we bankrupt the united states with health care costs and without universal coverage let me say before we do that we have got to get the government s house in order in 12 years the 12 years you weren t here it may be because you weren t here in the 12 years you weren t here the debt of this country went from 1 trillion to 4 trillion our national deficit was over 300 billion this year we have got to do something about it but the most frustrating thing of all it s like health care we spend 35 percent more than anybody else in the world and do less with it with our government s deficit soaring with our debt exploding we have reduced our investments in the things that make us a richer stronger more productive country and that offer our children the chance to seize the american dream we have to put our house in order and reverse a lot of those practices practices that have to be sure the stamp of not only republican presidents but also democratic congresses practices born of taking the path of least resistance and telling people what they want to hear it is always more popular to cut people s taxes and send them more money and deplore the government every step of the way but in the end you have to live with the consequences of what you have wrought and that is what we are doing today and we are determined in this administration to change those consequences the house of representatives acted very courageously to pass the largest deficit reduction program ever proposed by an administration at the same time they did it i pledged to review the budget to ensure that we maximized our reliance on spending cuts minimized our reliance on new taxes and kept the burden on middle class working americans as light as possible as we move into the senate this week we will fight for all the 250 billion in spending cuts contained in this program including 100 billion in reduction in entitlements already in this program we will fight for the fairness of the program which has over 60 percent of the new taxes coming from people with incomes above 200 000 over 74 percent coming above 100 000 which costs the average family with a 40 000 or 50 000 income 1 a month next year 7 a month the year after and 17 a month at a maximum rate and which holds harmless working families under 30 000 a year and which has the first incentive in the history of the united states of america to lift the working poor out of poverty by using the tax system to say if you work 40 hours a week and you have a child in the house you will not be below the poverty line if you want welfare reform that s it now later today i will meet with senator mitchell the senate majority leader and senator moynihan the chairman of the finance committee and i will tell them that i intend to designate the treasury secretary secretary bentsen to work with them to come up with a budget that the american people will accept and that the congress will pass as we complete work on this growth plan i intend to do everything i can to say i welcome additional cuts but i will fight to protect the most vulnerable people in this country and i will fight to protect our investments to create jobs for in the end this cannot be about passing budgets or reducing deficits it certainly can t be about raising taxes or even cutting spending what it is in the end is about giving us control over our destiny again giving us the ability to create jobs and opportunity and increase incomes for the american people and let s not lose sight of what has been done this program which cuts spending raises revenues cuts the deficit and invests in jobs and technology for the future has already by its advocacy and passing dramatically contributed to bringing interest rates to their lowest point in 20 years so that you ve got a sevenyear high in home buying unemployment below seven percent for the first time in a year and a half and 755 000 new jobs in this economy in the last four months i think that s something to be proud of and i don t understand why people are not glad that those consequences are flowing from these efforts i believe the american people want us to move in this direction last week the home builders association endorsed the economic program not a traditionally democratic group the realtors association has endorsed it more than half the 100 biggest companies in the united states have endorsed it along with the largest labor organizations in america this is a program that s good for jobs the congressional black caucus voted for it unanimously because of the empowerment zones in the program which gives the private sector incentives to invest in putting people back to work in the most depressed areas in america the business community is please because of the incentives for starting new business and for helping small businesses if you will look at this program you will see it is no accident why the interest rates are down the jobs are up and investment is coming back into america if we can keep interest rates down then all this debt that has piled up in the last 12 years at least can be refinanced in terms of home mortgages business loans college loans consumer loans car loans and all that lower interest rate will then free up money to invest that is what is creating these jobs now and we cannot turn our backs on it so i say let s move onto the senate let s pass the economic program then let s move onto health care and let s never forget that it will all work better over the long run if we pass campaign finance reform and lobbying reform and continue to fight to open this system to the american people thank you very much dem wjclinton7 6 94 bill_clinton mr president madame mitterrand distinguished citizens of france my fellow americans and honored guests this week as our two nations mark the 50th anniversary of d day and the battles of world war ii i m glad to have this chance to note the special place france will always have in america s heart so many of our greatest sons and daughters have shared that attachment our first two ministers to this great land were benjamin franklin and thomas jefferson franklin roosevelt loved france so did john and jacqueline kennedy as president every day as i go to work i am reminded of the bonds between our two nations the park across the street from the white house is lafayette park no statue in all of washington stands closer to the oval office itself than that of rochambeau today we re building new bonds between our republics as we work together to address the great endeavors of our time many of which the president has already outlined building bridges toward the east opening the world markets doing what we can to support democracy working to strengthen the nato alliance and to unify europe through the partnership for peace cooperating to address the most difficult and painful conflicts of this era mr president the united states supports a strong europe an integrated europe a europe with political and economic and security unity and singleness of purpose with its appreciation of diversity we wish to be partners with you in the common struggles of the 21st century the fact that we have sometimes a difficult partnership makes it all the more interesting and also makes some things in life less necessary our wonderful founding father benjamin franklin once said our enemies are our friends for they show us our faults sometimes with the french and the americans we no longer need enemies but it is always in the spirit of goodwill and brotherhood i can honestly say that with every passing day of my presidency i come to appreciate france more the strength the will the vision the possibilities of genuine partnership i think it is our common destiny as you alluded mr president to see that our countries remain forever young forever restless forever questing forever looking for new hills to climb new challenges to meet new problems to solve as i was preparing for this visit i was given something by another of america s greatest admirers of your nation our ambassador mrs harriman she sent me a poem composed in memory of the gallant soldiers who died on d day from the members of the allied effort to storm the beaches of normandy to the shadow warriors of the french resistance and the free french army without whom europe would not be free today here it is went the day well we died and never knew but well or ill freedom we died for you mr president the united states and france are destined forever to be the beacons of freedom for the entire world please join me now in a toast to the democratic spirit of our beloved nations to the heroes of d day whose sacrifices we came to honor and to the proposition that the spirit of liberty should burn forever brightly in the hearts of all the people of france and the united states of america dem wjclinton7 7 93 bill_clinton thank you very much mr president thank you for that introduction i foolishly came out here without my earphones so i don t know what he said to make you laugh or what he said about robert kennedy so i should give a speech about how we need to train more americans to speak good japanese perhaps someday an american president will come here and give a speech to you in your native language then i will know we are really making progress in reaching across the barriers that divide us it is a great pleasure for me and for the first lady to be here at this distinguished university today waseda is a center of true academic excellence and a training ground for many of japan s most distinguished leaders i am proud to be the first american president to visit here but as has already been said 31 years ago another american whom i admired very much robert kennedy spoke in this hall it was a very different time the modern economies of japan and asia were just emerging it was the middle of the cold war fierce arguments raged here as in other nations about where the future lay with communism or democracy with socialism or capitalism on that evening in 1962 those arguments spilled onto this stage when members of the student communist movement heckled robert kennedy he challenged their leader to come up and join him in his characteristic way kennedy transformed a diatribe into a dialogue and coldmindedness into an open debate that is what i hope we will have here today the exchange that followed was heated but it demonstrated the best of the values of freedom and democracy that our two nations share three decades later on this day in this place the times are very different but no less challenging the need for vigorous and open dialogue remains the time has come for america to join with japan and others in this region to create a new pacific community and this to be sure will require both of our nations to lead and both of our nations to change the new pacific community will rest on a revived partnership between the united states and japan on progress toward more open economies and greater trade and on support for democracy our community must also rest on the firm and continuing commitment of the united states to maintain its treaty alliances and its forward military presence in japan and korea and throughout this region is it appropriate i believe it is to address these issues here in japan the post cold war relationship between our two nations is one of the great success stories of the latter half of the 20th century we have built a vital friendship we continue to anchor this region s security and to fuel its development japan is an increasingly important global partner in peacekeeping in promoting democracy in protecting the environment in addressing major challenges in this region and throughout the world because our relationship has been built on enduring common interests and genuine friendship it has transcended particular leaders in each country and it will continue to do history has decided the debate that raged here in 1962 a debate over whether communism works it didn t its ruins litter the world stage our two nations have proved that capitalism works that democracy works that freedom works still no system is perfect new problems and challenges constantly arise old problems deeply rooted in cultures and prejudices remain to make the most of this new world we both must change as robert kennedy once noted progress is a nice word but its motivator is change and change has its enemies the cold war passed from the world stage as the global flow of information pierced the iron curtain with news of other ways of living and the world moved steadily toward a more integrated global economy money management and technology are increasingly mobil today trillions of dollars in capital traverse the globe every day in one generation international trade has nearly tripled as a percentage of global output in the late 1980s increased trade accounted for well over half of the new job in the united states meanwhile there have been huge changes in the organization and the nature of work itself we are moving away from an economy based on standardized mass production to one dominated by an explosion of customized production and services the volume of information is increasing at an astonishing rate change has become the only constant of life and only firms that are flexible and innovative with very well trained people are doing very well the new global economy requires little explanation here in japan you have pioneered the modernization of asia now from taipei to seoul from bangkok to shanghai asian economies are growing at dramatic rates providing jobs and incomes providing consumer goods and services to people who could not have even dreamed of them just a generation ago to be sure asia s progress is uneven there are still millions in abject poverty four of the world s last five communist regimes and other repressive regimes continue to defy the clear laws of human nature and the future but the scenes of life in this region paint an unmistakable picture of change and vitality and opportunity and growth a generation ago in singapore bumboats floated up to boat quay to unload their cargoes of produce and cloth which were sent out into a labyrinth of smoky shophouses and small family markets today such scenes are joined by those of container ships steaming into singapore s modern port one every six minutes disgorging their goods into mechanized warehouses and modern supermarkets in china s guangdong province young entrepreneurs are leaving safe jobs in stateowned enterprises to start their own companies to describe their daring spirit the chinese have coined a phrase that literally means to plunge into the sea such images help to explain why asia likely will remain the world s fastest growing region for some time it s imports will exceed 2 trillion u s dollars this growth will help to make a tripolar world driven by the americas by europe and by asia in years past frankly some americans viewed asia s vibrancy and particularly japan s success as a threat i see it very differently i believe the pacific region can and will be a vast source of jobs of income of partnerships of ideas of growth for our own people in the unites states if we have the courage to deal with the problems both of our nations have within and beyond our borders already over 40 percent of american trade is with this region last year over 2 3 million american jobs were related to the 120 billion we exported to asia millions of asian americans in the united states today embody our nation s devotion to family values to hard work to education in so doing they have helped to strengthen our cultural ties and our economic ties to this region today our nation is ready to be a full partner in asian growth after years of difficult transition our private sector is embracing the opportunities and meeting the challenges of the global economy productivity is on the rise attempts to pierce overseas markets are more intense than ever many of our manufacturing service and financial firms are now the highquality low cost producers in their fields at last our governmental sector in the united states is also moving in the right direction after years of being urged by japan and by other nations to do something about the massive american budget deficit we are on the brink of doing something about it after years of being urged to do something about improving our education system and making our manufacturing and other sectors more productive and more competitive we are doing something about it we are nearing the adoption of a bold plan to reduce our public deficit by 500 billion over the next five years and to increase our investments in education in technology and in new jobs for the american people we are moving to reform our health care system the world s most expensive to control costs and provide quality care to all of our people we are moving to give incentives to the millions of americans who live in poverty so they will move from poverty into middle class working lives we too are moving to reform our political system to reduce the cost of our political campaigns and the influence of lobbyists on our lawmakers we are moving to face one of our most painful social problems high rates of crime and violence with new initiatives to put more police officers on our streets give better futures to our young people in depressed areas and keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals but it is not enough for the united states to change within to increase the jobs raise the incomes and improve the quality of life of the american people we must also change our relationships with our partners and ask them to do the same our first international economic priority must be to create a new and stronger partnership between the united states and japan our relationship with japan is the centerpiece of our policy toward the pacific community our two nations account for nearly 40 percent of the world s output neither of us could thrive without the other producers in each of our countries are consumers for firms in the other we are also joined in our efforts to address global economic problems we work closely in an effort to move toward a new trade agreement and i hope japan will join in the initiative i proposed just two days ago in san francisco a meeting of the senior g 7 economics and labor and education advisors to look into a new problem with the global economy stubbornly persistent unemployment in the richest nations of the world even where there is economic growth rooted in the inability of so many of these nations to create new jobs the economic relationship we have has always benefited both our nations americans buy huge volumes of japanese products american companies in japan employ thousands of your citizens joint ventures between japanese and american enterprises advance the economic and other interests of people in both nations japanese companies have opened many manufacturing firms sales offices and other facilities in the united states in the 1980s when my country went on a huge debt binge massively increasing public and private debt japanese purchases of much of that debt helped to keep our economy going and helped to prevent our interest rates from exploding still our economic relationship is not in balance unlike our relations with all other wealthy nations we have a huge and persistent trade deficit with japan it usually exceeds 40 billion with a deficit in manufacturing products in excess of 60 billion in spite of the fact that in recent years our manufacturing productivity has increased very greatly it is impossible to attribute this trade imbalance solely to unfair japanese barriers from governmental policies to a unique distribution system indeed it is in part simply a tribute to japanese abilities to produce high quality competitively priced goods and to the skill of japanese businesses in piercing so many overseas markets including our own yet it is clear that our markets are more open to your products and your investments than yours are to ours and it is clear that governmental policies consistently promoting production over consumption exports over domestic sales and protections of the home market contribute to this problem the trade deficit is on the rise this year even with the market rise of the yen against the dollar though american purchases of japanese products have remained fairly constant japanese purchases of american products have dropped markedly as a consequence of slow growth here in your economy with no offsetting government policies to stimulate demand this problem has as all of you know fueled resentment in our country both from workers and from businesses who have worked hard to streamline their operations reduce labor costs and increase productivity and now want the benefits that can only come from being able to compete and win in a global economy our people understand when our nation has a huge trade deficit with an emerging economy like china the same was true just a few years ago with korea and taiwan but both those nations have moved closer to trade balance with the u s as they have become more prosperous the same has not happened with japan this persistent trade imbalance has not just hurt american workers and businesses it has hurt the japanese people it has deprived you as consumers of the full benefit of your hard and productive work for example partly because of restrictive economic policies the average japanese family pays more than twice as much of your income for food as the average american family and many other consumer products are far far more expensive here than elsewhere with these differentials going far beyond what can be accounted for by the transportation costs of bringing products to this market our relationships with japan have been durable not only because of our security alliance and our political partnership but because our economic relationship has actually served our interests and yours i believe we must change this economic interest to improve the lives not just of the american people but of the japanese people as well it would be wrong for me to come here as president to ask you to embrace changes that would only benefit the people who live in my country i believe that the changes i advocate will benefit both of us or i would not be here pushing them during my april meeting with prime minister miyazawa we agreed to build a new framework for trade on macroeconomic sectoral and structural issues now i don t know how that translates into japanese but the average american has no idea what that means what it means is that we are going to try to deal honestly with the differences we have over our nation s economic policies we want to talk about the specific sectors of the economy where we believe that more trade is warranted we want to talk about structural differences between our two countries that operate as effective barriers to finding greater balance and greater volume of trade our governments have made progress in these last few days in crafting the basic principles of this new framework and we will persist until we can produce a sound agreement that is in the interests of people in both countries what the united states seeks let me make clear is not managed trade or so called trade by the numbers but better results from better rules of trade openness like this cannot simply come from pressure from the united states that is one reason i wanted so much to be here with you today a new openness can only come ultimately when japanese leaders and japanese citizens recognize that it is in your interests to pursue this course so today i would send this message to all of you and to the people beyond the walls here in this hall you have a common cause with the people of america a common cause against outdated practices that undermine our relationship and diminish the quality of your lives the ideas i propose are beneficial to both of us because they will increase the number and lower the costs of the products you are able to buy the services you are able to access and they will thereby reward the work the education and the skills that you bring to daily life here in japan you are entitled to no less and it will be a part of your role as a great nation for the foreseeable future to have that sort of open relationship we should take these steps together for ourselves and for future generations i am optimistic that the people of japan and the people of the united states can hear the same message and move toward the same goal japan has after all a proud heritage of embracing bold change when the times call for it much of the success you have enjoyed in recent years comes from a phenomenal ability to adapt to the changing contours of the global economy and over 120 years ago the leaders of the meiji restoration embarked on a series of rapid and successful initiatives that transformed a feudal japan into a modern society making it more open to the west and the broader world without sacrificing the uniqueness of the japanese culture on this campus today there is a statue honoring one of the great statesmen of that period this school s founder count okuma in his exhaustive narrative of the meiji restoration okuma attributes the period s reforms and i quote to thoughtful and farsighted japanese leaders and he concludes even as the spirit of liberality has animated the japanese race during the past half century of its remarkable progress so it will ever impel its march along the paths of civilization and humanity to keep the country s doors wide open is a national principle to which japan has attached the greatest importance from its earliest days i believe and hope that spirit still prevails and that a stronger japan u s economic relationship driven by mutual wisdom can power our new pacific community well into the next century the second building block of that community must be a more open regional and global economy that means that together we must resist the pressures that are now apparent in all wealthy countries to put up walls and to protect specific markets and constituencies in times of slow growth we must resist them because the only way wealthy countries can grow richer is if there is global economic growth and we can increase trade with people who themselves are growing more prosperous an essential starting point is the successful completion of the uruguay round of the general agreement on tariffs and trade i am committed to doing that by the end of this year and i hope that your government is also i believe we should also work to reduce regional trade barriers that is what we in the united states are attempting to do in negotiating an agreement with mexico and canada not to close north america to the rest of the world but to open it up and perhaps we should consider asian pacific trading areas as well the most promising economic forum we have for debating a lot of these issues in the new pacific community is the organization for asian pacific economic cooperation apec the 15 members of apec account for nearly half of the world s output and most of the fastest growing economies this fall we will host the apec ministerial meeting in seattle i will speak at that meeting to signal america s engagement in the region but i hope we can go beyond it i am consulting with the leaders of apec at this moment on a proposal that they join me in seattle in an informal leadership conference to discuss what we can do to continue to bring down the barriers that divide us and to create more opportunities for all of our people in addressing common economic challenges we can begin to chart a course toward prosperity and opportunity for the entire region of course the purpose of meetings like this is not simply more meetings and communiques it is to improve our people s lives not just the lives of those who dash around financial districts in tokyo or new york with cellular telephones in their pockets but the millions of people in my country and the billions of people on the earth who work hard every day in factories and on farms simply to feed their families and to give their children a better life than they have enjoyed it will make a world of difference to them if our leaders can set pro grow policies dismantle trade barriers and get government out of the way expanded trade and more open economies will not only enrich people they also empower them trade is revolutionary force that wears down the foundations of despotic rule the experiences of the philippines taiwan korea and others prove that the move toward more open economies also feeds people s hunger for democracy and freedom and more open political systems this then should be our third priority in building a new pacific community to support the wave of democratic reform sweeping across this region economic growth of course can occur in close societies even in repressive ones but in an information age it cannot ultimately be maintained people with prosperity simply crave more freedom open societies are better able to address the frictions that economic growth creates and to assure the continuance of prosperity a free press roots out corruption even though it sometimes aggravates political leaders the rule of law encourages and protects investments this spread of democracy is one of the best guarantees of regional peace and prosperity and stability that we could ever have in this region democracies make better neighbors they don t wage war on each other engage in terrorism or generate refugees democracy makes it possible for allies to continue their close relations despite changes in leadership democracies virtues are at the core of why we have worked so hard to support the reforms and the reformers in russia which is now on a path toward becoming one of the pacific s great democratic powers the movement toward democracy is the best guarantor of human rights some have argued that democracy is somehow unsuited for asia or at least for some nations in asia that human rights are relative and that they simply mask western cultural imperialism i believe those voices are wrong it is not western urging or western imperialism but the aspiration of asian peoples themselves that explain the growing number of democracies and democratic movements in this region and it is an insult to the spirit and hopes and dreams of the people who live here to assert that anything else is true each of our pacific nations must pursue progress while maintaining the best of their unique cultures but there is no cultural justification for torture or tyranny we refuse to let repression cloak itself in moral relativism for democracy and human rights are not occidental yearnings they are universal yearnings these then are the economic essentials for this new pacific community one in which most of you being so much younger than i am will spend far more of your lives in than will i a better u s japan relationship more open economies and trade more democratic governments these things will make your lives better i will pursue these goals vigorously you will see that commitment reflected in what our administration does together we can make this decade and the coming century a time of greater security democracy prosperity and personal family community and nation empowerment so today on this holiday of tanabata a holiday of joining together and hopeful wishes let us wish for a new pacific community built on shared effort shared benefit and a shared destiny let us write out our brightest dreams for our children on pieces of paper as bright and differently colored and numberless as are the peoples of the asian pacific region in the spirit of this holiday let us fly those dreams from bamboo poles that are as high as our hopes for the era and then together let us dedicate ourselves to the hard work of making those dreams come true senator kennedy was right when he said that change has its enemies but my friends we can make change our friend thank you very much now i m going to take some questions and i think i m supposed to go down here so i will try to go down there without breaking my leg and then we ll take some questions dem wjclinton7 7 99a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you mr president and thank you to all of you here from pine ridge and all the other tribal leaders who are here for hud s shared vision conference i am profoundly honored to be in pine ridge and in the lakota nation in fact to try to demonstrate my appreciation and respect i would like to try to try to say something in lakota mitakuye oyasin my neighbors my friends we are all related consider those who have come here today to join hands with you along with secretary cuomo secretary glickman your great congressional delegation our democratic leader tom daschle in the united states senate and senator johnson congressman thune you don t know this but we have members of congress from all over america who have come here to express their support and their commitment to join you in building a better tomorrow congressman ed pastor from arizona congressman dale kildee from the state of michigan congressman jim clyburn from south carolina and congressman paul kanjorski from pennsylvania he has come all the way from pennsylvania to be here i want to thank the other people from the administration especially assistant secretary of the interior kevin gover and lynn cutler in the white house who work with all of our native american leaders around america for what they do i want to thank the ceo of fannie mae frank raines the ceo of northwest mark omen the pmi president roger horton mortgage bankers association president don lang champion homes ceo walter young for all the work that they are prepared to do in building a better future and they re here today i want to thank my good friend jesse jackson for never letting us forget our common obligations i thank the other members of our delegation today bart harvey from enterprise al from from the democratic leadership council i d like to thank the young americorps volunteers who are here today for all the work they do i would like to finally say a word of appreciation to all the people who live here on this reservation who welcomed me into their homes who talked to me today as i walked down their streets i thank especially geraldine bluebird who secretary cuomo mentioned she let me sit on her porch and she told me how she tries to make ends meet for the 28 people that share her small home and the house trailer adjoining i thank the children who stopped their playing and shook hands with me and listened to me while i encouraged them to stay in school and to go onto college and to live out their dreams i want to bring you greetings from two people who are not here first from vice president gore who has headed our empowerment zone effort that pine ridge became a part of today and second just a little over an hour ago i talked to the first lady and hillary has spent more time in indian country than any first lady in history she is intensely committed to this effort and she asked me to say hello to you president saulway said today i was the only president ever to come to an indian reservation for a nation to nation business meeting i remember back in 1994 i invited all the tribal leaders in america to the white house and it was the first such gathering since the presidency of james monroe in the 1820s now i know that calvin coolidge came to pine ridge in the 1920s and that president roosevelt visited another native american reservation but no american president has been anywhere in indian country since franklin roosevelt was president that is wrong and we re trying to fix it today i was profoundly moved by the pipe ceremony just as i was when your congressional delegation took me last night not only to mount rushmore but to the crazy horse memorial and to the museum that is there with it but i ask you today even as we remember the past to think more about the future we know well what the failings of the present and the past are we know well the imperfect relationship that the united states and its government has enjoyed with the tribal nations but i have seen today not only poverty but promise and i have seen enormous courage i came here today for three reasons first of all to celebrate the empowerment zone and the housing projects that are going on here now second to talk about my new markets initiative and what else we can do but third with the business leaders who are here and i ve already introduced them but i d like to ask the business leaders i just mentioned to stand up we want to send a message to america that this is a good place to invest good people live here good people live in indian country they deserve a chance to go to work thank you thank you you ve already heard president saulway and secretary cuomo recite the statistics it s a hot day out here and i know you re suffering in the sun but i want to send a message to america so i just want to say a few things and i want you to think about this think about the irony of this we are in the longest period of economic growth in peacetime in our history we have in america almost 19 million new jobs we have the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for african americans and hispanics for over two years our country has had an unemployment rate below 5 percent but here on this reservation the unemployment rate is nearly 75 percent that is wrong and we have to do something to change it and do it now when we are on the verge of a new century and a new millennium where people are celebrating the miracles of technology and the world growing closer and closer together and our ability to learn from and with each other and make business partnerships with each other all across our globe and there are still reservations with few phones and no banks when still three or four families are forced to share two simple rooms where communities where native americans live have deadly disease and infant mortality rates at many times the national rate when these things still persist we cannot rest until we do better and trying is not enough we have to have results we can do better our nation will never have a better chance when will we ever have this kind of opportunity where unemployment is low inflation is low there s a lot of money in our country the value of our stock market has tripled and then some business people are looking for new places to invest and people who have done well feel a moral obligation to try to help those who are less fortunate who have not fully participated and we see it from appalachia to the mississippi delta to the inner cities of our country to the native american communities if we can t do this now we will never get around to doing it so let us give ourselves a gift for the 21st century an america where no one is left behind and everyone has a chance we will do our part you have suffered from neglect and you know that doesn t work you have also suffered from the tyranny of patronizing inadequately funded government programs and you know that doesn t work we have tried to have a more respectful more proper relationship with the tribal governments of this country to promote more genuine independence but also to give more genuine support and the empowerment zone program as the vice president and i designed it six years ago is designed to treat all communities that way we re not coming from washington to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it we re coming from washington to ask you what you want to do and tell you we will give you the tools and the support to get done what you want to do for your children and their future president saulway and a number of tribal leaders came to me at the white house a couple of months ago you may have heard in the national press that i repeatedly referred to this profoundly emotional meeting i have given a great deal of thought to what was said then and what i heard now we can do better i would like to mention just a few specific things for you have all heard years of pretty words there is no more crucial building block for a strong community and a promising future than a solid home today i want to talk about a number of things the government and the private sector are going to do to increase homeownership our whole team visited those new homes that are being built not far from here we talked to the families that are moving into those homes i had a little boy take me through every room in the home tell me exactly where every closet was tell me what his sister s room had that he didn t have and why it was all right because she was older and she needed such things this is important so what are we going to do private lenders like bank of america northwest bank one washington mutual are going to work with the mortgage bankers association and hud to more than double the number of government insured or guaranteed home mortgages in indian country in each of the next three years right here in pine ridge fannie mae under frank raines leadership has set aside millions of dollars to help you buy those homes at below market rates and they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars all across this country to help people just like you become homeowners for the first time and secretary cuomo s partnership for housing is giving financial incentives and counseling to help families figure out how to actually get this done how to buy their own homes and pay for them but as i heard over and over today even if we went in and tried to repair or rebuild or build new homes for every family here and in every indian community throughout the united states we must have jobs if we want these communities to work adults need to have something to look forward to every morning when they get up and if they want their kids to stay in school and stay out of trouble and look to tomorrow their lives have to be evidence that looking to tomorrow pays off it is appalling that we have the highest growth rate in peacetime in our history that we have an unemployment rate below 5 percent for two years and the unemployment rate on this hallowed reservation is almost 75 percent that is appalling and we can do better no community in america can grow however without basic blocks no community in america should be without safe running water and sewer systems so the department of agriculture will put nearly 16 million in water projects throughout indian country including two right here in pine ridge that will also help you get jobs as well as improve the quality of life as you can see in this big sky country it is rather warm and it gets windy from time to time as the natives will attest the department of energy will help you harness the power and profits of wind and solar energy to save money and make money owens corning and north american steel framing alliance will provide skills training and the promise of quality jobs and citibank and gateway computer company will work with oglala lakota college and other schools to help native american students get the computer skills that will allow them to get 21st century jobs and our federal communications commission will work with you to improve telephone service throughout indian country an absolute prerequisite for getting any new business in here let me just say that one of the things that we have learned is that the computer and the internet make it possible for many people to do many kinds of work in any community anywhere in the united states indeed increasingly anywhere in the world the fact that this reservation is a long way from an urban center would have been an absolute prohibitive barrier to a lot of economic development just 10 or 15 years ago the explosion of computer technology and the internet if you know how to use it and you know how to deliver for others with it has literally made the distance barrier almost insignificant for many kinds of economic activity so i want to implore you to use your tribal college and work with these companies and make the most of the skills they are offering and we can get the jobs to come here once you can do them finally we must seize the vast potential of tourism right here in pine ridge by building a lakota sioux heritage cultural center every year millions of families travel long long distances to see mt rushmore 2 7 million last year the crazy horse memorial about a million and a half even though only the head has been finished the crazy horse memorial last year had 1 5 million visitors only the head has been finished i went there late last night and the badlands national park now if you look at that you have to ask yourself how can you have how many people if you did everything right down here if we built this cultural center of all the people that go to see crazy horse of all the people that go to see mt rushmore of all the people that go to badlands national park how many would come here i ll tell you a whole lot an enormous percentage if you give them something to come and see that is nothing more than the simple profound powerful story of your eloquent past and your present of your skills and your heritage and your culture and your faith these commitments that we are making today are just the beginning thirty one years ago this spring senator robert kennedy came to pine ridge many of you probably still remember that visit senator kennedy seeking medical care for his child lying sick in the back of an abandoned car refusing to sit and begin an important meeting until all of the tribal leaders had their proper seats you may remember his message of hope let me say that all across america people were watching that i have to say on a purely personal note one of the most touching things about this day for me is that the wife of our hud secretary is robert kennedy s daughter and she is here today and this is a proud day i d like to ask her to stand kerry please stand thank you we lost all those years there were a lot of reasons and a lot of things are better than they were 30 years ago but this is the first time since the early 1960s when we had this kind of strong american economy and we have no excuse for walking away from our responsibilities to the new markets of america i have asked the members of congress to go back and pass legislation that will give major tax breaks and government guaranteed loans to people who will put their money in indian country to lower the risk of taking this chance we are going to do everything we can to make your empowerment zone work but remember there is nothing that we can do except to help you to realize your own dreams so i say to every tribal leader here the name of the conference you are attending is shared visions we must share the vision and it must be fundamentally yours for your children and their future if you will give us that vision and work with us we will achieve it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton7 7 99b bill_clinton thank you very much first i want to thank ed pastor for making me feel so welcome and for being my friend and doing a wonderful job for you back in washington d c he has the respect of every member of congress and when he talks we all listen i want to say to all of you that i am honored to be back in phoenix arizona has been very good to hillary and to me and to the vice president and mrs gore not only in voting for us in the last election but in proving that the philosophy of government and the policies we ve followed can bring us together and make us a stronger country so i want to begin by saying a simple thank you i d like to thank the people who have come here with me today congressman pastor mentioned congressman kanjorski from pennsylvania congressman clyburn from south carolina our small business administrator aida alvarez and my deputy chief of staff maria echaveste they are all here and others i thank them i d like to thank the reverend jesse jackson for coming on this tour with me along with the business leaders i know there are some public officials here i think janet napolitano your attorney general is here she met me at the airport jim hill the state treasurer of oregon is here thank you both i d like to thank the business leaders here with me leo guzman mary ann spraggins gene humphries of enron stephen burd of safeway john corella of corella electric myrna sonora of ktvw 33 some of you probably watch that mike welburn of bank one andy gordon of arizona multibank frank ballasteros of micro leonard mareno of mareno welding yolanda kaiser of builder s book depot and obviously i d like to thank our host josie ippolito and all the other wonderful women in this remarkable family that own this ed already said why we re here and i m here mostly to listen to the people here but i want to make a very important point i want you to know why we are here we are here because we have the longest peacetime expansion in history almost 18 million new jobs since i took office the lowest unemployment rates among hispanic americans and african americans ever recorded our country has been really blessed by these good economic times it has contributed to giving us the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years declining rates of teen pregnancy and drug abuse we have 90 percent of our little children immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of our country but we know as blessed as america has been not every american has been blessed by this recovery all you ve got to do is drive down the streets here in south phoenix to see that so what we are doing is going around the country to say we can do better that morally now that we re doing so well we have an obligation to give every american who is willing to work for it a chance to walk across that bridge into the 21st century with us so we go forward together leaving no one behind and not only that it s good economics a long way from south phoenix i have to worry every day about how i can keep creating jobs so you have more people to buy these wonderful products you are producing i mean 840 000 a day that s a lot of people you know of course not everybody eats as many at one sitting as i do so i mean it s a lot of people so i think about that how can i do that well we can sell more of our products overseas which we re trying to do we can take more people off welfare disabled people and help them get in the work force which we re trying to do but the easiest way to keep america s economy going strong is to get more investment create more jobs and create more consumers in the neighborhoods in the cities and in the rural areas and on the indian reservations which have not yet felt this recovery that s what this whole thing is about how we can do this together and i m here to make three points number one and i want to give some specifics in a minute we ve been working at this for six and a half years with our empowerment zones and our enterprise communities and our community development banks you have one here with the vigorous support of the community reinvestment act number two therefore american business needs to know that there are good opportunities right now in inner cities and in rural america this is not about charity this is about how to make money by helping people who are willing to work for themselves get the chance to do it to start those businesses or become good employees that s what this is about finally it s about supporting our new markets initiative which seeks to make it easier for people to get equity capital to start or expand their businesses in any poor neighborhood or underdeveloped area anywhere in the united states of america so that s why we re here and that s the message you re sending out here in south phoenix to every community in america where there are good people who need investment and jobs now let me say that there are a lot of good things that are happening and i want to thank some of the people who are here i want to thank safeway for the new store at 16th street and southern avenue and the new shopping center that it will anchor that will create a lot of jobs and interestingly enough we re trying to highlight this everywhere because in almost every city in america even with high unemployment there are obviously a lot more people working than not working and there is more purchasing power in our cities than there are stores to take it up so we thank safeway i also want to thank univison because they are about to build a new multimillion dollar broadcast facility for its local station ktbw 33 and they re going to build it right here in south phoenix and that will help your economy to grow thank you thank you i want to thank the community development institutions like arizona multibank the microenterprise organizations like micro that s a fancy way of saying they loan small amounts of money to people to start small businesses who couldn t get the money anywhere else and guess what they usually make good loans and they make money doing it by giving people a chance who couldn t get a chance anywhere else i want to thank arizona multibank for launching magnet capital which is a new venture capital fund backed by the small business administration that will give lower income entrepreneurs the equity they need to grow and expand so thank you very much mr gordon now there s lots of other things that all you have to say just remember we came here for three reasons one is to show the business community of this country that we have the kind of partnership between government and the private sector that makes it more attractive to invest in places with higher unemployment and with too few businesses two to make the point that there is a huge amount of opportunity out here right now and the more american business knows about it and the more they invest in it the better they ll do and three we have a proposal before the congress to go nationwide to give big tax breaks to people to help provide equity capital and i want you to know what i m doing i m basically asking the congress to give investors like those on this stage with me today the same incentives to invest in south phoenix that we give them right now to invest in the developing countries of latin america and africa and the caribbean i want to do that but you should have the same incentives here so thank you all for coming and congressman the floor is yours you want to introduce the folks who are going to talk i think maybe you re going next our hostess thank you very much let s give him a hand i thought that was good if i could if i could just make one point one of the things that i learned traveling around the country in 1990 and 1991 before i decided to run for president was that the crime rate was going down in areas where more police were on the street and in the communities and working with their neighbors not just because they were catching people quicker but because it was actually preventing crime from occurring in the first place in the last six and a half years we have funded 100 000 more police officers for our streets in small towns and rural areas as well as big cities and in the budget i now have before the congress we re trying to get another 50 000 targeted at the highest crime areas in the country so that will help that s something that we didn t come here to talk about today but if i can persuade the congress to do that that will obviously help you and others like you to locate more stores and to have more sub stations and it will also bring the police in closer contact with the community and increase confidence and good feeling so i thank you very much for that i want to thank you for the work that you have done you know we were just together over at chicano s porlacasa and the work you did to help them set up their micro lending program the vice president who has supervised all of our community economic development efforts for the last six years announced this new sba initiative with aida not very long ago but i just want to emphasize to you we were in the mississippi delta yesterday it was also 100 degrees there and we were in a little factory that makes picture frames that had been gone into bankruptcy and we met a young man that thought he could turn it around and he had opened the place back up a place with terribly high unemployment but one of the people i met there was a woman who had worked for a small business that was doing okay but the person running it in this little town for family reasons couldn t go on and she was the only person qualified to take over this business otherwise it was just going to disappear but she made very low wages for a person who owns a business and she had no money in the bank and because she was able to get some equity capital from someone as farsighted as you her little business in a year went from five employees to 11 employees instead of five people losing their jobs and a woman that never made more than a few dollars an hour in her life is now a successful small business owner that is that sort of thing we ought to be doing more of and if we did more of it in places like south phoenix the unemployment here would not be higher than the national average and the incomes would not be lower so i thank you very much for what you re doing i d just like to make two points if i might by way of completely agreeing with what you just said first of all for people who think we don t need these sba programs anymore because the economy s doing so well i would remind you that the sba is a permanent example of the kind of approach that i believe we should be taking in the government the sba basically gives people the tools to make the most of their own lives they make the market more likely to work in places where it otherwise wouldn t work and for people who don t think it matters you know how much all these telecommunications companies are worth now and what s happened to the stock market in the last six years it s more than tripled thirty percent of our growth coming out of high tech intel and america online huge companies worth billions upon billions of dollars started with sba loans and so i think you know that s enough to rest our case the second thing i would say is there are not all the business people that have been on this trip are right here in phoenix and not all the business people who wanted to go on this trip can go but there is a phenomenal amount of interest in this and i must i want to give credit to reverend jesse jackson his wall street project has been working on this for years i mean there is a much higher level of awareness among american business leaders that there is money to be made and a better society to be made at the same time in these neighborhoods so i don t think you have to worry i think when we can finish this tomorrow afternoon in east la you will see a much higher level of commitment and interest in corporate america than we had before thank you mr corella you re great first of all i want to thank gene because really texas is a classic example it s almost exactly like arizona and phoenix the unemployment rate in phoenix as a whole is less than 3 percent the unemployment rate in this section of phoenix is twice the national average maybe a little more you have the same thing in houston i just want to illustrate use enron which is a fabulous and very large energy company to illustrate a point that he made that i think we should emphasize because it goes back to something john made one of the reasons we re taking this trip here is that one of the is that even in business even with a market economy where people are always supposed to act in their own self interest people cannot do what they don t know and people cannot have a relationship with people with whom they are not acquainted and one of the things that enron did saying that he worked through a local community investment group is to have to literally build networks of relationships between big businesses and people that they would otherwise never ever ever come in contact with and so i say again i think you heard what steve said about safeway figuring out there was a market here once you begin to establish these networks of relationships and once they become a part of the fabric of american life then we can build an economic a normal economic infrastructure in these distressed areas so that the next time a recession comes along we won t be hurt so badly here and then when the pickup comes everybody will benefit instead of just a few so i can t thank you enough but i do want to emphasize what gene humphries was a little too modest here we do have a substantial number of business leaders heading companies more or less in the size range of enron who are helping but we are nowhere near where we need to be we need hundreds we need thousands of people with the kind of commitment that he s manifested because without these relationships the decisions cannot be made to put the money there thank you dem wjclinton7 8 97b bill_clinton thank you very much governor romer tom thank you thank you alan solomont i want to thank all the members of the administration who came to be with us tonight and i thank all of you for your presence here and for your support i was a little insight on presidential decision making here are the notes my staff gave me here are the notes i made at dinner you can have either speech which one do you like two two i d like to talk to you a little bit about how i think you fit into all this and what we ve been trying to do and where we re going when i ran for president first beginning in 1991 i was obsessed with the idea that we had to prepare this country for a new century and a completely different economy and a whole different way of living and relating to each other and the rest of the world and that we didn t have any strategy to do it and i believed that if we were going to succeed we had to create a country where as you ve heard me say a thousand times there was opportunity for everyone responsible enough to work for it where we were coming together instead of being driven apart and where we maintained our world leadership for peace and prosperity and freedom i thought to do that it would be necessary to save progressive government and to save the progressive political party to be vital forces as a part of that future i thought it was necessary to break through a lot of these dichotomies that seem to me to be false that you were either for growing the economy or preserving the environment if you have to choose we re in trouble that you couldn t be pro business and pro labor if you have to choose i think in the end the country loses that you couldn t be tough on crime where it was appropriate and still be smart and compassionate where it made sense and where it was the right thing to do that you couldn t be for respecting our diversity and still believe the most important thing is that we wind up being one america i just think a lot of these dichotomies that have always been set up for us to argue about and take sides over are choices that we would never make in our own lives and that we should not make in the life of our nation and you heard tom talking about a little of it and roy talking about a little of it it seemed to me that the right thing to do for our country also in the end would wind up being the right thing to do for the progressive cause in america and for the democratic party the progressive party in america we almost had to save ourselves from a legacy in some ways that was not entirely of the democrats own making it was obvious to me that if we didn t do something about the deficit there would be no more progressives in america because the middle class would always be completely insecure we had a meeting today at the white house and my distinguished treasury secretary from new york city mr rubin was making a comment about how people viewed a certain economic situation and erskine bowles said did i say north carolina i meant new york erskine bowles is from north carolina so erskine bowles says mr president tell bob that that s like the farmer from louisiana with three hogs and bob rubin doesn t know many farmers from louisiana so i told him some of you may have heard me tell this story before but when huey long was governor of louisiana in the middle of the depression he was out on a country crossroads one day making a speech to all of these farmers and he was railing against people that had too much and how it ought to be spread around and he saw a farmer in overalls and he said now farmer jones if you had a million dollars wouldn t you give up about a third of it and go out here on these crossroads and spread that money around so all the little kids could have plenty to eat and people would have a roof over their heads at night he said of course i would and he said if you had a brand new cadillac car wouldn t you ride up and down these roads and take the old folks to the hospital and the young people to school that couldn t afford to get there themselves he said you bet i would he said and farmer if you had three hogs and he said now wait a minute governor i ve got three hogs it seemed to me that we had to restore some economic discipline to this country so that people would know that their three hogs would be all right so that people would know that at least they would not be robbed of the benefits of their own labor by the defects of the system in which they lived and so i proposed what at the time was a controversial and very difficult budget in 1993 that only members of our party voted for that was predicted to drive us into a recession and instead in four and a half years it cut the deficit by 80 percent before this last budget even passed and i m proud of that but no one doubts the ability of democrats to manage the economy now i fought for expanded trade and we had 200 trade agreements and a lot of it was controversial even within our own party but it is clear from all the economic analysis that 25 percent of the growth that we have enjoyed in the united states in the last four and a half years has come from expanded trade selling more american products and services around the world it is also clear that we have on matters of principle have always kept a more open market so we don t continue to open other people s markets who are just going to take advantage of us it was clear to me that if people felt insecure on their streets in their homes and their schools that we would never feel fully free and prosperous even if the economy returned so we tried to join what was already a developing movement toward community policing and other proven strategies to fight crime and i determined that ours would be the first administration that would ever take on the issue of the irresponsible use of handguns in this country and i come from a state where more than half the people have a hunting or a fishing license or both and i figured if i can t take this one and talk to people and talk sense to people who can and so we did the brady bill we did the assault weapons ban i still want trigger locks on these guns that children can get their hands on i think that these are responsible things but we ve had a drop in serious crime in every single year and last year we had the biggest drop in violent crime in 35 years and the american people are safer and they know it and no one seriously doubts the ability of our party to be a responsible partner in keeping our streets safer and giving our children a more secure future and i think that s important i had to fight a very difficult battle on welfare i did not want the welfare reform bill to be an excuse to hurt children and i vetoed two bills that i thought were but it seemed to me that since there was already no uniform national benefit that the states were already in effective control over what the size of a welfare check was but they didn t have any real responsibility because the authority was divided between the states and the federal government and it seemed to me the responsible thing to do was to set up a uniform set of standards about how we thought the welfare program ought to work to put guidelines and limits on people who could go to work if there were jobs available and required them to do so or to be in education and training programs but to take better care of the children with adequate child care and other supports and nutrition and medical care and that s what the welfare reform bill was all about there were a lot of things in it i didn t like cutting benefits to legal immigrants but as you see we ve largely restored all the things that we didn t like and we now have a bill that is contributing to by far the largest drop in the welfare rolls this country has ever seen and we now have the smallest percentage of americans receiving public assistance since 1970 smallest percentage since 1970 now i thought that was important i thought it was important that we prove that we can conduct the defense and the foreign policy operations of this country i no longer think that s open to serious doubt this country is stronger more secure and is helping to build the world of the 21st century in the aftermath of the cold war and i feel good about that i also wanted to do things to increase people s sense of obligation to serve that s what the americorps program was about that s what the president s service summit was all about and finally let me say in the democratic party what i tried to do is to bring in people who had previously not been active before and the most important things we ve done in our party is the women s leadership forum the saxophone club and your group your group because we want people in this party to feel that they have a home they have a role and they have a contribution to make and that their voices will be heard now we ve had a very good first seven months of this year the budget is a good budget and it is a progressive one the tax cuts are confined some of us have received some criticism from people who believe that i should not have signed the tax bill because it had a capital gains tax cut and an increase in the estate tax but let me just remind you that republicans are still in the majority in the congress i hope it won t be so after 98 but they are now but 80 percent of that tax bill went to the children s tax credit to education and to a whole array of urban and poor rural redevelopment initiatives designed to bring the areas that are still isolated from our prosperity into the mainstream 80 percent secondly there are strict caps on how much money can be spent in the first five years and in the second five years of this tax program and even with the little we added on to the size of the tax package it s still about one eighth one eighth the size of the tax bill adopted in 1981 which led to these permanent deficits we did not go off in some sort of tax cutting binge designed to erode the future stability of this country and we now estimate with conservative estimates that this budget will produce a surplus by 2002 at the latest and a surplus for several years thereafter so we are doing the right things and we ve had a good fall we ve also invited the first new members to join nato we ve established alliance with russia and ukraine we have worked very hard to get the country for the very first time to embrace national education standards and i hope all of you will help us get every state in the country to do that we had the summit of service that i mentioned and i launched a very important initiative on race relations which will last for at least a year as we examine for the first time in a non crisis way not only what the unfinished business is in america between the white majority and african americans or hispanic americans but an equally perhaps even more important question over the long run which is what are we going to be like as a nation in 30 years when unless something happens there will be no majority race in america and we will become the world s first truly great multiracial multiethnic democracy and unlike there are many ethnic groups for example in a nation like russia but most of them live in discreet parts of the country in our country we re going to have 150 actually more than 150 different racial and ethnic groups largely sharing the future together so it s been an exciting time in the fall we have a lot of other agendas coming up and let me just mention some of the things that i hope to get done in the remainder of this year i think it s important that we continue our work to expand trade this year we have already concluded an agreement on information technology and telecommunication services that will amount to a 5 billion tax reduction on american products in these areas sold around world that will open up 90 percent of the world markets to american products in a area where we lead the world and we are creating very good jobs we need more of this i know there s going to be a great controversy over this trade debate but let me put it to you this way we have four percent of the world s population we have 20 percent of the world s wealth the rest of the world s economy even though it s on a lower base is growing at three times the rate of the american economy even under the astute management of our administration because if you start from a lower base you grow faster now if you want your children to live in a country that may have even less than four percent of the world s population and still around 20 percent of the world s wealth because of how hard we work and our skills and our ability there are only two things we can do the first is to go into our cities and our isolated rural areas and make markets and taxpayers and successful employers and employees and businesspeople out of the people that haven t been reached in our own country number one and the second is to sell to the other 96 percent of the people in the world this is not rocket science we don t have an option and the things that we sell by and large are higher value added products that create good jobs in america are there issues of trade fairness of course there are we have relatively more open markets than other countries we have done it for years as a matter of responsibility to try to help poor countries lift themselves up also keeps us on our toes more and makes us more competitive and that s one reason we re in the shape we re in today should we fight for a fair deal for our workers of course we should should we fight to improve the global environment as we increase trade of course we should but we can t walk away from this i m going to latin america in the fall about a year after i took office we had this great summit of the americas and all the countries in the americas said we want to have a free trade area that america and that canada are a part of we want our future to be with you there will soon be a billion people in latin america the second fastest growing area of the world when i go down there i want them to believe america is still leading the way toward greater prosperity the rest of the world economy is on a fast track the only question is whether we re going to be leading it or dragging up the rear and i hope we can prevail upon the congress to work through this in a way that is as satisfactory as possible to the people who have legitimate concerns about the disruptions that the global economy can cause the second thing we re going to try to do is pass the mccain feingold campaign finance reform bill now the good news from my point of view is not such good news for you we can still have the democratic business council with its price of entry under mccain feingold but it will eliminate most of the serious questions people have about the campaign finance system as present and it will put more pressure on both the democrats and the republicans to go out and get more people to contribute to make more people feel like they re a part of the system and that will be a very good thing it will require us to involve more and more and more people but let me finally say this is very important if it s going to work we have to lower the cost of campaigns and the only way you can lower the cost of modern campaigns is to provide free air time or drastically reduced air time which is why i have also worked so hard on that we re going to try to pass the juvenile justice bill modeled on what has happened in a number of cities but especially in boston where this may surprise you if you don t live in boston it has been almost two full years since a single child has lost his or her life to a handgun almost two full years and again it s not rocket science they have good community policing they have good neighborhood block watch groups the neighbors and the police work together the police and the probation officers work together they make house calls in boston just like doctors used to the kids in trouble they go to the child s home and they sit on the couch in the living room and they talk to the parents and unbelievably enough they have a 70 percent compliance rate with probation orders there s no city in the country that s even close to that why old fashioned human contact in an organized disciplined way doing what is smart as well as being tough we want to do that everywhere we want to begin the work of dealing with entitlement reform and people say well there s no an emergency now social security is all right until 2029 you just put another decade on the medicare trust fund that s true but when the baby boomers retire there will be almost just about two people working for one person in his or her retirement years a lot of us will work longer by choice but the ratio will be awesome by making modest changes now we can avoid imposing severe changes that will have to be made by our children and for those of us that are part of that baby boom generation which are basically everybody between the ages of 34 and 50 it seems to me that we owe it to our children and to the strength and long term health of our economy and our society to deal with the long term entitlement issues now when by making modest changes we can avoid more severe changes later we re going to have to deal with the issue of climate change in a responsible way no one seriously questions anymore that the climate is warming and that it is going to have some adverse consequences the question is how do you do that and grow the economy is there a way to do it of course there is if we would change our habits tomorrow just some of our habits we could with no extra charge no cost at all on society get rid of 20 percent of the greenhouse gases with presently available technology tomorrow so what we have to do is to try to find a way to organize ourselves increase our awareness and do this in a way that doesn t cripple the economy i think we can do that finally the first lady and i are going to have a conference on child care in late october it is still the number one concern of many many many working people who believe that they cannot afford or find or have access to quality affordable child care now those are the things we re going to be doing in addition to that eli segal who s here tonight heads my national organization where we are mobilizing employers who will agree to hire people from welfare to work next week we re going to st louis to announce several hundred businesses that have joined us in that endeavor we ve still got a long way to go we only have about 22 percent of the schoolchildren in the country committed whose leaders have committed to take the national test 4th grade reading test the 8th grade math test by 1999 we re going to keep working on that but the point i want to make is every single one of these things is something that i hope you are proud of that is part of a dynamic mainstream political movement in america that your contributions and your support have made possible and this is a better country because of it it s a better country because we re not out there trying to split everybody all up and divide people every day and keep people full of hot air instead of trying to get people together and keep working forward and moving forward and that s what i m trying to build for the future and what i want you to be a part of let me just say this in closing every day i try to imagine what i hope the country will be like 30 years from now and if that guides a president and you work back from there you ll be amazed how much easier that makes the decision making process and when i think of the young people that are here tonight all these fine young people that are working for the democratic party and did all the work to make this possible tonight what will determine what kind of america they live in number one will we succeed in being a truly multiracial multiethnic democracy where we not only respect but celebrate our diversity and still say the most thing is we re one america number two will we stop making excuses for ourselves and finally embrace the idea that all children can learn and we re going to see that they learn at internationally accepted levels of excellence number three will we reach into the areas that have not been touched by our prosperity and figure out a way to hook them into the future number four will we figure out a way to grow the economy while enhancing the environment and finally will we continue to do what it takes to lead the world when it comes to peace and freedom and prosperity if we do those things the best days of this country are still ahead and when we are all much older we can look back on this moment and say because we were here then and because we did what we did we did prepare our country for the 21st century we saved progressive government for its higher purposes and we revitalized america s progressive party to make it go on thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton7 9 93 bill_clinton mr vice president and members of the cabinet distinguished guests mrs gore senator gore thank you for coming to all of you from the federal government and from the private sector who worked on this report and all of you who care about seeing it implemented i think we all owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the vice president for the difficult and thorough work which has been done and for the outstanding product which has been produced my gratitude is great also to the staff of the national performance review and to the employees of the federal government and the people in the private sector who helped us to do this and to the cabinet members who have supported it i will say i had the opportunity to read this report in draft over the weekend i read it very carefully i read some sections of it more than once and if the report is any indication of where we re going then the future looks bright indeed because this is an oxymoron this is a government report that s fun to read it s well written it s interesting it s compelling and it is hopeful i ran for president because i wanted to get america on the move and i wanted to pull our country together and it became quickly apparent to me in the campaign that the feelings i had developed not only as a citizen but as a governor over the previous 12 years were widely shared by others it s hard for the national government to take a leadership role even a partnership role in bringing america together and putting america on the move when people have no confidence in the operations of the government when they don t believe they get good value for the dollars they give to the government in taxes when they don t believe that they re being treated like customers when they don t really feel that they are the bosses in this great democratic enterprise and so six months ago i asked the vice president to embark on a risky adventure to see if we could make the government work better and cost less to serve our people better and to important as anything else rebuild the confidence of the american people in this great public enterprise our founders clearly understood that every generation would have to reinvent the government and they knew that long before the government was nearly as big or cumbersome or bureaucratic or far reaching as it is today thomas jefferson said laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of human mind as that become more developed more enlightened as new discoveries are made and new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances institutions must advance also to keep pace with the time that is what the vice president and this group had to do to listen and to learn from people who best understand how to make government work better this report reflects the practical experiences of federal employees whose best efforts have too often been smothered in red tape businesspeople who have streamlined their own companies state and local officials who are reinventing government at the grass roots and concerned citizens who deserve and demand more value for their tax dollars to meet the challenges of the global economy and to better use new technology our most successful companies have been through this process many times starting more than a decade ago eliminating unnecessary layers of management empowering front line workers becoming more responsive to their customers and seeking constantly to improve the products they make the services they provide and the people they employ meanwhile i have seen too little of this happen nationally i do want to say that there are many reasons for this government as we all know has too often a monopoly on the money of the american people and those who have to be its customers government also does not have the pressure from time to time to change that the private sector does so that what we have today as the vice president said is a lot of good people trapped in bad systems we still have a government that s largely organized on a top down bureaucratic industrial model when we re in an information age and very often it is just easier to keep on doing what you have been doing i want to say though that we not only have the models that the vice president mentioned the terrific work done in texas by governor richards and the comptroller john sharp who s here with us today the work that i started when i was governor of my state and we had the first comprehensive statewide quality management program in the country but also we have something else to be even more hopeful for and that is that in spite of all the obstacles there are stunning examples of federal employees succeeding in this environment the thing i want to encourage all of you to do is to actually read this report it s not very long it is fun to read and it will reassure you that there are people out here who are making productivity improvements who are giving you value for dollar who are trying to save money and who are proving most important of all that we can do this on a sweeping basis all across the government make no mistake about this this is one report that will not gather dust in a warehouse i will challenge every concerned american to read it i will discuss it in great detail with the members of the congress i will ask people to help us to pass those programs which have to be passed through congress and to implement those things which must be done by the executive branch this program makes sense it s going to work we re going to do it there are a lot of places in this program where in this report where it says the president should the president should the president should well let me tell you something i ve read it and where it says the president should the president will you know everybody knows that we ve got a big budget deficit most of us know we ironically also have got an investment deficit the two are not unrelated we don t have enough money to invest in the growth of the economy and the development of our people because we ve spent too much money on other things and because we have refused to change the key to remedying both the budget deficit and the investment deficit is to overcome the performance deficit in the federal government and we intend to make a beginning on that there s no reason that we can t have a post office where you always get served within five minutes of the time you walk up to the counter where you can get why you can t have an irs that always gives you the right answer and takes your phone call why you can t have a government that pays no more for a hammer or a pair of pliers or more importantly for a personal computer than you d pay at a local commercial outlet the vice president and i are going to work with the cabinet to find ways to make the government more responsive and to implement this report we re going to rely on the innovations of our leaders in the cabinet for example under secretary cisneros s leadership the department of housing and urban development is finding new ways to empower citizens not to expand bureaucracy the department is determined to eliminate 75 different rules and statutes that make it more difficult to build housing and to redevelop communities and determined to do more to help people who live in public housing have control over their own destinies instead of being controlled by mindless rules and regulations and decisions made by people an awful long way from where they live we have other community initiatives that we are supporting for states and cities and towns community policing citizens patrols and other special programs to keep young people out of trouble all those things have to spring up from the local level and there shouldn t be federal rules and regulations getting in the way states and cities and towns applying for funds for community development and assistance to the homeless will be required now to submit only one application and one report not the seven that have been required under the attorney general s leadership the justice department is finding new ways to collect more than 14 billion that delinquent debtors owe the government those who are able to pay should about 20 percent of the money owed the federal government today is delinquent it s time we collected on the bills under secretary bob reich s leadership the labor department will offer one stop career service centers to help their customers make better use of the presently bewildering array of 150 different employment and training programs there is a gripping story in this report of someone who lost their job in a company because of global competition then got hired again by the same company and lost this job a second time because of cutbacks in the defense budget if the person had quit the first time they could have gotten job training under the trade adjustment assistance act but because they quit and went back to work which was the right thing to do and lost their jobs a second time before there was a defense conversion plan in place to train people who lost their jobs the second time the same guy couldn t get any job training i could give you lots of examples of that we are going to fix that we re going to put these programs together and recognize that all americans need job training the labor department ought to provide it instead of providing people to push papers around to figure out how to keep people out of 150 different programs there ought to be one that all americans can participate in under secretary mike espy s leadership the agriculture department is concentrating on six key functions commodity programs rural development nutrition conservation food quality and research this will allow the agriculture department to consolidate from 42 to 30 agencies and cut administrative costs by more than 200 million a year this just isn t about changing our government it s about changing our country we reinvent the government we re doing something that is essential to reviving our economy restoring our confidence in government and therefore permitting us once again to be one american community last month we passed an important mile post when congress passed the economic plan that will begin to pay down an enormous deficit we inherited cut wasteful spending and make investments we need in our people our jobs our educational and technological future in the weeks ahead we have other challenges to face from reforming our health care system to provide security for every family to opening new markets for our products and services abroad so that we can start creating jobs again but to accomplish any of these goals we have to revolutionize the government itself so that the american people trust the decisions that are made and trust us to do the work that government has to do the entire agenda of change depends upon our ability to change the way we do our own business with the people s money that is the only way we can restore the faith of our citizens an effective government can offer people opportunities they need to take greater responsibilities for their own lives and to rebuild their families their communities and our beloved country we ask the support of americans from every walk of life from every party from every region the government is broken and we intend to fix it but we can t do it unless we all understand that this isn t a democratic goal or a republican goal this is an american imperative and we all need to be a part of it i look forward to the day when every american can cite some example that he or she has personally experienced in this revolution in the way government works a program that is paid for not by stopping something worthy or raising new money or increasing the deficit but by stopping something that didn t need to be done anymore i look forward to a day when you call the irs and ask a question and they give you an answer and you know it s the right one when you ask your children what they think about the government and they can all cite something the government has done to make their lives better and done in a good and efficient way if that happens we ll all be in debt for a long time to the vice president and his staff and to all the others who participated in this report i think they did a great job now it s time for the rest of us to do a great job and implement the recommendations so that we can change the way the american people feel about their government and change the role that the government plays in our lives for the better thank you very much god bless you dem wjclinton8 1 01a bill_clinton thank you well first of all i want to say to all of you i m sorry i kept you waiting but i promised you i was going to work until the last day and that s what i m doing i spent a little time today working on the middle east and a little time today rededicating the afl cio building and rededicating myself to their issues and their cause and to not letting the progress they ve made in the last eight years be reversed and a number of other things i have my chief of staff john podesta and maria echaveste and my political director minyon moore lynn cutler a lot of people came over from the white house they love you guys they wanted to be here with me i want to thank my friend ed rendell who even went to the point of shooting baskets with me in a neighborhood in philadelphia in 92 to make sure i could get plenty of votes and win pennsylvania for all the trips that we made together i want to thank the indefatigable joe andrew for leaving his home in indiana and coming here and working so hard i want to thank dennis archer and loretta sanchez who aren t here and senator torricelli and representative kennedy who worked with me and gave me the opportunity to do a gazillion events martin frost and paul patton and my dear friend state senator mike miller from maryland thank you rob thank you to all the staff members i also want to express my appreciation for those of you who are here day in and day out i think it was joe who said some of you go back to president carter s administration one person who has been here a long time who passed away today is elber suggs and i want to say how grateful i am i know a lot of you knew him he not only was a long time employee of the dnc but he was a long time member of the uaw so he was a two fer in more ways than one and i know that we all send our prayers and thoughts to his family and our gratitude for all he did for the dnc and for the causes we believe in i wanted to come by before i left office to thank you for what you did in this election you know i tell everybody as i m sort of dwindling into irrelevancy the only way i can really get any big headlines is to say what i really think but i think i ll show some restraint tonight since i m preaching to the saved i want to thank you for what you did in the year 2000 it was an election in which a lot of forces were arrayed against us and a lot of money was spent we had to work hard to raise a lot and all of you in these various organizations you gave me the opportunity to do 169 different phone messages and radio spots at the end of the campaign and on the day before and the day of the election i did 66 radio interviews so for all of you who were personally responsible for practically working me into an early grave i want to thank you because that s what we all hired on to do and when you re in this sort of struggle you want to leave it all out there on the floor you don t want to wonder when it s all said and done if there s just one more thing you could have done one more phone call you could have made i believe you ve done everything you could do and i m proud of you and grateful to you you know one other thing i want to say is that i think that the dividing line between politics and policy is not very clear and most people say that in a pejorative way i say it in a proud way this is a political system we live in the framers of the constitution expected it to be and didn t think politics was a bad word they thought it was a good word and so do i i am proud that i have spent my life in the american political system so even though you have to worry about recruiting candidates and raising money and getting the talking points out there and answering the charges and doing all the things you have to do the sort of nitty gritty work of political life you should never forget that it bears a direct relationship to the way the american people live our friend terry mcauliffe buried his father a few days ago and i went to syracuse to the funeral he was a great friend of mine he was the treasurer of the onondaga democratic party for 27 years and at 83 he was putting out yard signs for hillary in this senate race because he knew that there was a direct connection between putting up the yard signs and the kind of economy and kind of life the people in the community in which he had spent his life would have and you should never lose sight of that when you go home tonight and people ask you for the rest of your life why did you do this tell them well there are 22 5 million reasons in the people who have jobs that didn t have them when we took over eight years ago there are roughly 25 million reasons in the people who have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law which was vetoed when the other party had the white house there are 600 000 reasons in the people who had a criminal record and couldn t get handguns and lots of people are alive because of that because we passed the brady bill there are over 10 million reasons in the people who have taken advantage of the hope scholarship tax credit and the other college tax reductions and benefits that have been increased under this administration there are 8 billion worth of savings to college students in the direct college loan program ninety percent of the kids in this country under two are immunized against serious diseases for the first time in history and you did that the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer more land has been set aside bruce babbitt says by the time we finish we ll finally eclipse teddy roosevelt s record that stood for a hundred years in preserving land and natural resources for all time to come you were a part of that don t ever forget that why because if i hadn t won those two elections with al gore and if we hadn t had help in the senate and the house and we hadn t had governors and mayors and others willing to stick up for us none of it would have happened last year we had the biggest drop in child poverty in a generation the lowest poverty rate overall in 20 years last year people in the lowest 20 percent of the working people in this country had the biggest percentage increase in their income of any group of americans this was a recovery that didn t just help wealthy people it made more millionaires and more billionaires but it also let more people work their way in the middle class too you did that and you should be proud of that we mended affirmative action instead of throwing it away because of politics because of what you did because we had enough people in the congress who would support me to do that i could go on and on and on but you just remember every single decision that advanced the cause of the american people for the last eight years grew out of a political decision made by voters on election day all across this country and this country is going to be just fine as long as we get all the votes counted and don t you ever forget it the other thing i want to tell you is that you can t be discouraged when you lose my chief of staff mr podesta celebrated his 52nd birthday today it looks good on him he s more than two years younger than i am we met in a senate campaign in 1970 which we lost and those of us who are about our age we went for the longest time we thought we d never win anything and we finally won the white house in 1976 and we didn t hold it but you know when you look back jimmy carter looks pretty good in the light of history and the campaign for human rights and the campaign for a sensible energy policy the things that he stood for it looks awful good in the light of history and the life that he s made since then which would not have been possible if he hadn t been elected president in the first place looks awfully good in the light of history so i want you to feel good about it and i don t want you to be discouraged because we didn t win every fight we were in and i don t want you to be cynical because of the decision of the supreme court i want you to be invigorated i want you to look ahead to the races two years from now to the races next year for governor and i want you to remember in this country nobody gets a guarantee you just get a chance that s what an election is it s a chance but there are people all over this country that wouldn t have a chance if you hadn t been here doing what you ve done the last eight years and i hope when you are as old as i am or even older you will look back on this period and be very very proud and remember those numbers i gave you tonight those people in this country all kinds of people of all races all religions all backgrounds have a more decent a more united a more forward looking country because you stood here and did your job these eight years thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton8 1 01b bill_clinton thank you and good afternoon i would like to thank all of you for coming and welcome you to the white house but especially the members of congress who either are or have been here senator cleland welcome sir senator kennedy representative gilman mr chairman gilman representative eleanor holmes norton representative sununu and mr justice souter we re delighted to see you here today we thank you for coming i won t have many more chances to do this so i d also like to thank the united states marine band for being here and for all their work yesterday hillary and chelsea and i went to foundry methodist church which has been our home church since we ve been in washington and they asked me to speak on reflections and anticipations and i said i had many anticipations i anticipated for example that my religious bearing would be severely tested when i returned to commercial air travel and i further anticipated that whenever i walked into a large room for the next six months i would be lost because the marine band wouldn t be there to play a song anymore so i thank them so much for all they ve done this last eight years one of the greatest honors i have had as president has been the opportunity to recognize and to honor on behalf of the american people the rich and diverse accomplishments of our fellow citizens this ceremony marks the last time i will honor such a remarkable group at the white house and i am profoundly grateful for this opportunity more than two centuries ago our founders staked their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor on a revolutionary proposition that people of competing ideas but common ideals could form a more perfect union a democracy built solely on the strength of its citizens they felt it essential that america honor both the individual and the idea that a free people can accomplish their greatest work only by doing so together for a common good today we honor citizens whose individual contributions to the common good embody this ideal in its purest essence we honor them with the president s citizens medal among our nation s highest civilian honors the citizens medal is a symbol of our gratitude as a people for those who have in particular performed exemplary deeds of service to others now let me say a few words about each of those who we honor and i will ask my military aide to present me with a medal and then i will present the medals every baseball fan knows hank aaron holds more records than any other single ball player indeed one of the truly great experiences of my presidency was going to atlanta for the 25th anniversary of the night hank aaron broke babe ruth s home run record but his courage and dignity have left a lasting mark on far more than baseball we honor him today not only for the power of his swing but for the power of his spirit for breaking down barriers not just on the baseball field or in the front office but also within america s heart in the spotlight and under pressure he always answered bigotry and brutality with poise and purpose in chasing his dream hank aaron gave others the inspiration to chase their own and after he left baseball he and his wonderful wife billye have done what they could to give young people more tools to win their own chase hank aaron you are an american hero and we salute you for your life because he could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee mohhamed ali became the first boxer in history to capture the heavyweight title three separate times along the way he captured the world s imagination and its heart outside the ring mohammed ali has dedicated his life to working for children feeding the hungry supporting his faith and standing up for racial equality he has always fought for a just and more humane world breaking down barriers here in america and around the world there are no telling how many tens of millions of people had their hearts swell with pride and their eyes swell with tears in 1996 when mohammed ali lit the olympic torch because we know now and forever he is the greatest as a civics teacher fresh out of college juan andrade showed up for the first day of class eager to teach his students the fundamentals of american democracy two days later he was under arrest what was his terrible crime he was teaching his students in his native tongue spanish which was at the time a violation of texas law that early injustice helped to spark juan s life long crusade for hispanic american civil rights including the founding of the united states hispanic leadership institute and nearly a thousand registration drives that have enfranchised over 1 million new voters today we honor juan andrade for his courage his commitment to both democracy and diversity and for giving so many more americans a voice in their own destiny ruby bridges was born in 1954 the year the supreme court decided brown v board of education six years later when she entered the 1st grade the schools in her home town of new orleans were still separate and unequal ruby was chosed in integrate william france public school single handedly so when mobs gathered and shouted around this six year old girl she knelt and prayed she had two u s marshals ahead of her and two behind but prayer she later said was my protection today in lectures and books ruby is telling younger generations her story of strength and faith and through the ruby bridges foundation she is helping schools to establish diversity programs to achieve without the struggle and pain what she did four and a half decades ago today we pay tribute to the courage of a little girl and to the commitment of a lifetime one of ron brown s favorite bible passages came from the 40th chapter of isaiah those who wait upon the lord shall have their strength renewed they shall mount up with wings as eagles they shall run and not grow weary they shall walk and not faint well ron walked ran and soared through life and i can personally testify never grew weary as the chairman of my party he inspired people to believe in our democratic system and to get involved as secretary of commerce he opened up new markets at home and abroad so that people throughout the world and here in america might through work have better lives for their families his legacy still burns brightly not only in the hearts of those who knew him but also in the work of his daughter tracey who wrote a wonderful biography of her father the work of his son michael who runs the ron brown foundation and the living testimony of all the young people who even now walk through doors he opened and cross bridges he built we honor his memory today and alma i am glad you could be with us to share the moment for nearly 20 years don cameron has served as the executive director of the national education association but his career began long before that as a michigan junior high school teacher in the early 60s his starting salary was a handsome 5 100 a year hardly enough to support a family so while teaching he worked odd jobs pumping gas selling hardware driving a truck even digging graves all for the love of teaching let no one say this man was not deadly serious about his job his enthusiasm has never wavered during his remarkable tenure the national education association grew by more than a million members it nearly doubled in size he has always fought for quality schools smaller classes making sure that teachers are meeting high professional standards and in turn are treated as the professionals they are our schools are stronger and our children s future brighter because of his decades of dedicated leadership thank you don cameron when pope john the 23rd urged catholics to engage in the world and address the needs of the poor sister carol coston an adrian dominican nun answered the call she left the security of her convent to live and work in a public housing project then she helped to create network a national catholic lobby that has mobilized thousands of nuns and lay people to fight for social progress in south africa for women s rights and for economic justice she helped to win passage of the community reinvestment act which has led to billions of dollars in investment in our inner cities i am proud to say sister 95 percent of it in the last eight years and she founded partners for the common good a fund that invests in housing and entrepreneurship in low income neighborhoods for your work as an agent of change rooted in the values of your faith sister carol a grateful nation honors you today as a young government lawyer during world war ii archibald cox helped to get labor unions and corporations to stop fighting each other a work that s still going on today and to start working together for an allied victory that same steely resolve and sense of high purpose have marked his entire astonishing career fighting for labor rights in the 50s civil rights in the 60s and during watergate rising that fateful night to defend our constitution he has come to embody the highest ideals of integrity and courage in public life archibald cox every american whether he or she knows your name or not owes you a profound debt of thanks for a lifetime of your service to your country and its constitution just as lewis and clark set forth to explore a continent shrouded in mysterious possibility charles delisi pioneered the exploration of a modern day frontier the human genome as an administrator and researcher in the department of energy in the mid 1980s he worked in close partnership with senator pete domenici along with others who supported his efforts to marshal federal resources and secure funding for this groundbreaking research charles delisi s imagination and determination helped to ignite the revoution in sequencing that would ultimately unravel the code of human life itself thanks to charles delisis s vision and leadership in the year 2000 we announced the complete sequencing of the human genome and researchers are now closer than ever to finding therapies and cures for ailments once thought untreatable at once scientist entrepeneur and teacher charles delisi is also in the truest sense a humanitarian a man whose life work has been life itself we honor you today sir along with the members of the united states congress including your friend senator domenici who had the vision to support you when you began before we could see this great turn in the road thank you the spread of civil and human rights throughout america and across the globe has been one of the great dramas and triumphs of the last half century jack greenberg has been at the center of the action as a young lawyer he helped thurgood marshall argue brown versus board of education before the supreme court as head of the naacp legal defense fund for 23 years he himself argued dozens of key racial discrimination cases before the high court through his early involvment with organizations such as asia watch he aided the expansion of human rights around the world oliver wendal holmes once said that to truly live one must share the action and passion of one s time if that remains the standard jack greenberg has truly lived and in the process has lifted the lives of countless others when david ho was a boy he used puppets to act out stories about heroes who used supernatural powers to defend the weak everyone knew young david was uncommonly bright but few could have imagined that one day he would harness the unimagined powers of science to defend patients whose immune systems were fatally weakened by aids by demonstrating the ways hiv attacks the human body he fundamentally changed the way we understand and treat this devastating disease his groundbreaking work using proteus inhibitors in combination with standard therapies has offered a longer life to countless people living with aids and so we thank you daivd ho for giving us new hope that aids can be treated and one day cured and for reminding us that a child s dream can lead to miracles for others in 1988 the students at gallaudet university rose up to demand a university president who was like them deaf or hard of hearing gallaudet the only university in the world designed entirely for students who are deaf or hard of hearing never had had a deaf president that is not until i king jordan his appointment was not only a triumph for the students of gallaudet but a historic breakthrough for all people with disabilities and a powerful reminder for the rest of our nation that deaf people like i king jordan can excel and lead as well as any other americans moved by his example and the efforts of the entire disability community congress soon passed the americans with disabilities act the most important civil rights legislation in the last quarter century i king jordan has been a great teacher a great university president a great inspiration to millions of people around the world along the way he s found time to be a not inconsiderable athlete i might add running great distances at more than reasonable speeds and he has been a very good friend to this president for the last eight years thank you president jordan for your example and your leadership franklin roosevelt once said we must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens whatever their background in the decades since america has had few guardians of liberty more scrupulous or staunch than anthony lewis reporter columnist professor author tony lewis in every role has been a clear and courageous voice for the values at the core of our constitution in books like gideon s trumpet he has deepened our understanding of freedom of speech and our continuing battle for civil rights twice his reporting has won the pulitzer prize perhaps even more important throughout a lifetime all his writings including his column have shown a commitment and a passion with a civil tone and a careful thoughtful reasoning that have been more powerful than the forces of brute power and injustice thank you tony lewis for the values you have espoused for the way you have espoused them and for never growing weary it was 1944 war time and african american soldiers were fighting and dying to protect freedom around the world unfortunately african americans were also battling an insidious enemy here at home jim crow it was then that a young mother named irene morgan took up that fight with dignity and determination on her way to a doctor s appointment she refused to give up her seat on a segregated greyhound bus and appealed her subsequent arrest all the way to the u s supreme court the court s 1946 ruling banning segregation on interstate transportation was an early victory in the struggle for civil rights it signaled the beginning of the end for jim crow over all the decades since irene morgan has never asked for accolades but today we honor her we acknowledge our debt to her quiet and brave fight for freedom and we acknowledge the fact that she was there before just about anybody else and in spite of that she still looks like a beautiful young woman irene morgan when constance baker motley joined the naacp legal defense and education fund she set out to do nothing less than remake american law along the way she herself made history a key strategist in the civil rights movement she argued nine winning cases before the supreme court she went on to become the first african american woman elected to the new york state senate the first woman and the first african american to be borough president of manhattan the first african american woman to be named a federal court judge once she said she sought to prove in everything i do that blacks and women are as capable as anyone as advocate lawyer public servant and judge she has been far more than capable she has been superb and constance baker motley we are all in your debt in the 1960s dr helen rodriguez trias grew outraged at the poor quality of pediatric health care in her native puerto rico so she created the island s first center for newborn babies at the university of puerto rico medical center and cut the hospital s infant death rate in half ever since in new york in california all across america dr rodriguez trias has been working for better patient care for better treatment and prevention of aids for women s health rights for fighting the good fight and saving countless lives mostly among poor people that are too often forgotten by others i am proud to present this medal to dr helen rodriguez trias when edward roybal joined the civilian conservation corps in 1934 he didn t know he was embarking on a lifetime of service to his country but it turned out that way in world war ii he served in the army in the 1950s on the los angeles city council in 1962 he became the first hispanic elected to congress from california in almost a century paving the way for a whole generation of latino lawmakers during his 30 years in congress he championed veterans the elderly the mentally ill education health care and minority rights for a lifetime of work that has improved the lives of millions and for lighting the path for other latino office holders we honor today edward roybal he is unable to join us but it is a particular pleasure for me to present this award to his daughter now a member of the united states congress representative lucille roybal allard eight years ago in a very troubled time for the american economy i asked bob rubin to head my economic team and to establish for the first time a national economic council in the white house and involving all the economic agencies of the government i did it not because he had been immensely successful in making money and knew a lot about the economy but because he also understood the very real impact decisions in washington have on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary americans all across this nation as my national economic advisor and later as a superb secretary of the treasury bob balanced a commitment to fiscal prudence and social progress he understood that good economics and a generous progressive social policy could go hand in hand he helped to balance the nation s books and to balance the nation s priorities and it is no accident that his leadership in economic policy accompanied not only the longest economic expansion in history but last year the biggest drop in child poverty in 34 years the biggest increase in personal income among the lowest 20 percent of working americans in a very long time and a general growth in the equality and harmony we all seek from all our people he also never let me forget our special responsibilities to the inner cities of america which is why i mentioned earlier that even though the community reinvestment act has been on the books for over 20 years 95 percent of all the investment occurred during the last eight years thank you bob rubin for helping make america a better place as a combat platoon leader in the korean war warren rudman never worried about the race or background of the men with whom he fought as a united states senator he never let his party affiliation keep him from speaking his mind or building alliances to fight the great legislative battles he fought to strengthen and modernize our national defense and to put our fiscal house in order as a private citizen he has continued to champion those causes with bipartisan zeal as co founder of the concord coalition and as the leader of my foreign intelligence advisory board he has repeatedly during these eight years of my presidency undertaken difficult thankless inherently controversial tasks with an honesty and candor that showed a support for our nation and a willingness to call them as he saw them for his wise counsel and his faithful service to our nation i am grateful and proud to present senator warren rudman with the citizens medal soon after graduating from law school charles ruff volunteered to go to liberia to teach law there he contracted an illness that left him in a wheelchair for life but this obstacle nor any other could ever keep him from doing good he went on to serve in the justice department as united states attorney and the chief lawyer for the district of columbia the town he loved so well i chose him as my white house counsel because of his unmatched ability as a legal advocate and his even deeper devotion to the constitution and the rule of law not long ago he agreed to lead the fair labor association to help end sweat shops and improve the lives of the world s poorest people a few weeks ago chuck ruff left our lives far too soon but his determined spirit continues to inspire us and to call on us to do more to do right to do good we at the white house loved him very much but so did countless others far beyond the walls of this hallowed place his secretary of 21 years ora theard will accept the medal in his memory and we thank him for the memories as a young man arthur schneier fled his homeland and survived the holocaust as a refugee he knows therefore firsthand the consequences of hatred and intolerance and has devoted his life to fighting them as founder and president of the appeal of conscience foundation he has encouraged inter faith dialogue inter cultural understanding and the cause of religious freedom around the world he has served as international envoy for four administrations including my own as chairman of the u s commission for the preservation of america s heritage abroad and as the long time rabbi of park east synagogue in new york city rabbi i thank you for all the many things you have done here with me the last eight years to promote religious liberty around the world and i thank you for a lifetime of good work and good examples i look forward to seeing you in new york where perhaps you will become my rabbi thank you before he was 40 years old eli segal had already built a string of successful businesses he had also had a string of successful friends in 1992 by blind accident i wound up being one of them and i asked my old friend eli segal to join my administration where he built from scratch two of our most successful programs eli began americorps which has already given more than 150 000 young people a chance to serve in their communities and in so doing earn some money for college indeed more people served in americorps in the first five years of its existence than in the first 25 years of the peace corps existence and after he returned briefly to private life and his great affinity for making money i called him back and i said we needed some more help he then built our welfare to work partnership which enlisted in the space of about three years over 20 000 businesses in hiring more than 1 million people from the welfare rolls these efforts have both widened the circle of opportunity in america and strengthened the tradition of service to country for this all americans owe eli segal a special debt of gratitude if you have ever seen the faces of those young americorps kids or the pride of people who have moved from welfare to work you know why we re in eli s debt thank you very much john seiberling has worn many hats and won many accolades as a soldier in world war ii as a lawyer for the new york legal aids society a community planner for his beloved city of akron a congressman from ohio fighting for civil rights and arms control in all arenas he has contributed to community and country but his greatest achievement was crafting and winning passage of the alaska lands act of 1980 which doubled the size of our inventory of national parks and wildlife refugees and tripled the area of federally designated wilderness with that legislation john seiberling singlehandedly saved more of our wilderness than any previous american a legacy that will last for generations unfortunately this environmental hero is unable to join us today but we are very glad that his son john will accept the medal on his behalf few newspaper publishers in american history have been more effective crusaders for justice than the late john sengstake as owner and editor of the legendary chicago defender for almost 60 years he provided a national forum for african american issues and voices that otherwise would have gone unheard he nurtured the talents of countless black journalists and as a confidant of presidents plaid a key roll in integrating the armed services the postal service major league baseball and the white house press corps on behalf of a grateful nation i offer this medal posthumously to his son bobby when bigots blew up his house with dynamite the reverend fred shuttlesworth stood in front of the smoking rubble and renewed his call for an integrated birmingham when the city fathers had him arrested for civil disobedience he filled the jails with so many sympathetic protesters there was no room to hold them all when angry authorities blasted him with a fire hose he told them they could knock him down but they could not extinguish the torch of justice fred shuttlesworth risked his life so that every american no matter the color of his or her skin might live in a nation of dignity opportunity and equal justice under law we thank him for a lifetime of leadership and for an unextinguished spirit she was born in england but elizabeth taylor became thoroughly american royalty for more than a generation she has reigned over the silver screen stirring hearts and capturing imaginations she earned two oscars and countless other honors as an actress but perhaps her greatest role has been off the screen as a relentless and very very early crusader for aids research and care she raised millions and millions of dollars in this fight and raised awareness about the human impact of this dreaded disease before many many others were on the bandwagon elizabeth taylor has brought to life unforgettable characters on film but she has brought even more hope to millions around the world we thank her for sharing her talent and her heart thank you elizabeth taylor when the nazis marched on vienna a six year old girl fled with her mother across europe only to wind up in an internment camp rife with starvation disease and death out of that searing experience marion wiesel summoned the courage to commit her life to teaching others especially children about the human cost of hatred intolerance and racism she has written a documentary about the 1 3 million children murdered in the holocaust and has translated the books of her husband eli wiesel so that countless more people can read and learn their lessons with the money from his nobel prize she and eli established the wiesel foundation to educate children against indifference to the suffering of others marion for your mission of hope against hate of life against death of good over evil it is an honor to award you this citizens medal patrisha wright was training to be an orthopedic surgeon when a degenerative muscle disease left her with double vision instead of fixing broken bones she set about to fix what was broken in our system and dedicated her life to ending discrimination against people with disabilities as founder of the disability rights education and defense fund she joined forces with the wider civil rights community her strategic brilliance and no nonsense approach during passage of the americans with disabilities act earned her the title of the general now she works to empower people and families with disabilities throughout the entire world ever since a visual impairment changed the path of her career her dedication to civil rights has changed the path of america and helped more of us to see clearly today we salute you the general patrisha wright ladies and gentlemen we thank you for joining us to honor these remarkable people some of them are famous and some were not at least until today some of them had their service thrust upon them by circumstances others chose the path whatever their stories together they form a remarkable fabric of what is best about our country what is best about its history and what is most encouraging when we look to the future they remind us once again something that i need to remember in these days that the greatest title any one of us can ever hold is that of citizen thank you and goodbye dem wjclinton8 1 98a bill_clinton thank you very much the good news is this is the only speech i have and i wrote it in the car on the way over from the airport i want to thank steve for what he said and for the extraordinary effort he s put in in a very difficult and challenging year as head of our national democratic party i thank craig and jane for having us in their home i have not been in this magnificent historic old building in oh about 10 or 11 years and i m a very schmaltzy person so i get all choked up when i come here i keep imagining whether i m standing someplace where john lennon was and all that so thank you very much for letting us come here thank you judith hope for leading the new york democratic party and i think what i would like to do today is just talk in kind of a larger sense about where i think we are at this moment in history and why what you re doing here matters and i d like to begin with two maybe apparently unrelated things the first is you know we re two years from a new century in a new millennium something that only happens every thousand years i expect all the predictions of doom and the end of time to be rising up and maybe there will be a lot of wonderful glowing predictions as well but the time just begs for historic drama and the good news is you have it because of the globalization of the world economy and society because of the explosion in information and science and technology people are fundamentally changing the way they work the way they live the way they relate to each other and the rest of the world and that is changing everything else in ways that are more often than not quite positive but sometimes quite troubling we have a lot of people in the finance community here today everybody is trying to calculate what is going on in asia is it going to keep going on is it going to stop is there something the united states can do to stop it regardless what impact will it have on us there is a level of inter dependence in the world today and a scope and speed of change in the world today that has hitherto been unknown to the american people and that is changing things and that will shape the new in that sense we already have a foot in the 21st century the second thing i d like you to think about is that we have a lot of very distinguished actors here today hillary and i went to the premiere in washington the other night of amistad the new movie about the slave ship it culminates in the work of john quincy adams helping a young american lawyer to get these slaves freed so they could be free to go back home to africa before the civil war and they won a case in the supreme court on a unique point of property law but it s a very moving picture i think why do i mention that because at that moment in our history john quincy adams a man who was a one term president got the living daylights beat out of him for reelection by andrew jackson an american hero and then was humble enough and dedicated enough to go back and serve nine terms in the house of representatives where he died in service in his early 80s a unique american story john quincy adams was the embodiment of the nation s opposition to slavery and to something called the gag rule which believe it or not was imposed by the southerners on the congress before the civil war so that you weren t even supposed to be able to bring up petitions opposing slavery on the floor of congress now at that moment adams was the symbol for our country of the idea that the national government ought to take a stand against slavery to strengthen the union and to in effect apply the guarantees of the constitution to the present moment in other words to acknowledge that we were wrong when we started as a country and we said that black people were only three fifths human and they didn t really count as citizens what s that got to do with this time in every period of profound change in the whole history of the country the debate is always the same the debate is between those who believe that the period of change requires us to come closer together as one nation and to extend the fundamental principles on which we were founded to the new moment and there have been four or five moments in american history which were literally break points where we were being tested first we got started we had to decide are we going to be one country or just a collection of states kind of like an eating club and every now and then we ll get together and we decided to be one country and then in the civil war when slavery and sectionalism threatened one nation and abraham lincoln literally gave his life first for the union and second to get rid of slavery then in the industrial revolution where first theodore roosevelt and then woodrow wilson s administration and all the way through fdr had to deal with the consequences of america moving from an agricultural to an industrial society most of them were good but not all of them were how do you get the benefit of all this new wealth and say it s still not okay to work children 15 hours a day six days a week in coal mines how do you do that how do you deal with all these people teeming into the cities of america from all over the world and how do you assimilate them into our country and how do you make immigrants a part of the american fabric of life if the whole system breaks down as it did in the great depression how do you get it back up and throughout there was a debate between going from lincoln to roosevelt and wilson to fdr between those who say we have to strengthen the union in order to preserve and enhance liberty and those who said ah the government it will screw it up they will mess up a one car parade and this country was founded on the principle that we ve got to limit it and just let the market take its course then we had world war ii and the cold war which was a 50 year battle against totalitarianism when there was much more of a consensus among the conservatives and the liberals for united policies to make the nation strong because our very existence was at stake now we literally are facing an era of globalization and information revolution which is upsetting the established patterns of life to an extent never before known most of it s positive some of it s not what are the problems we re facing well first of all we ve got more people in the work force than ever before more women in the work force than ever before and nearly every family with children has trouble balancing the demands of work and family even wealth people i don t know a single couple with young children that hasn t felt a moment of guilt at some time in the conflict between the demands of work and the demands of child rearing that s fundamentally different and rampant second there is the question of the perennial question how do you get the benefits of these new changes but make them available to everybody give everyone a chance to participate america has the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years new york city has an unemployment rate of 9 percent how do you bring the benefits of the new market to the neighborhoods that it hasn t reached we have children who know more about computers than their parents but not every child has access to a computer how do you make sure that the benefits of technology are made more universal third question that you saw debated at kyoto in the climate change conference how do you continue to grow the economy and bring all these vast new countries like china and india the two biggest countries in the world into the mainstream of economic life to stabilize the lives of the people there and still not only preserve but indeed restore the economy last question big question how do you accept the fact that the global marketplace is dominant and the cold war is over and say we re not going to disintegrate into chaos and anarchy that is how can you have a social contract where everybody has a chance at least and where people who deserve a hand up get it and where people learn to live with each other amidst all their diversity and localism you said your daughter said it was not necessary for socks and buddy to like each other but they did have to get along maybe that should be my policy in bosnia i mean you laugh but you think about it this is a significant thing how do we deal with the fact that the old structures that people used as magnets for identity in the world are breaking down giving vast new freedoms and still find ways for people to integrate and make sense of their lives these are huge challenges i believe and the reason i ran for president in 1991 and 1992 is that we had to take a new direction the progressive party my party i thought had the right idea about trying to hold the country together but they didn t seem too willing to change to develop new approaches to deal with the new challenges the republicans had basically abandoned what might have been a basis for being a very successful modern party if they had essentially been like traditional northeast republicans and modified their position and instead they adopted the reagan position which was the government is always the problem is inherently bad and is oppressing people and what we really need to do is just to get it out of the way and everything will be fine it seems to me that that is self evidently untrue so what we tried to do was to take an approach that said that government could not do everything but it couldn t sit on the sidelines and what we really should focus on is to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives and to build successful families and communities and to enable america to reach out to the rest of the world in a positive way that s why we focused on an economic policy that works that s why we supported local crime policies that work that s why we ve moved historic numbers of people from welfare to work and i think we ve had a fair measure of success in meeting the new security challenges of our world beyond our borders and after five years as i said we have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years the lowest crime rate in 24 years the biggest drop in welfare rolls in history the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we have cleaned up record numbers of toxic waste dumps and we re tackling the big challenges of our time so i think we re moving in the right direction now what are we about to do in washington congress is about to come back to town and i have to give the state of the union address and i will very briefly tell you what i think is still out there to be done first of all we have got to find a way to bring economic opportunity to the areas in this country which haven t received it we ve got to bring economic empowerment and enterprise into isolated inner city and rural communities and i won t bore you with the details you may have better ideas than i do but we re going to have an agenda to do that secondly in the area of crime the crime rate is dropping but the juvenile crime rate is not dropping as fast kids get in trouble almost all juvenile crime is committed between 2 00 p m and 6 00 p m almost 100 percent of it it is a very foolish thing for us to keep building prisons to put young people in to become permanent criminals as a strategy to lower the crime rate when for much less money we could leave the schools open give them something to say yes to and build their lives around and so we re going to try to deal with that in the area of welfare reform the fundamental issue is we ve reduced the welfare rolls by 3 8 million all the people that are left are going to be harder to place therefore there needs to be more training more child care but also jobs that are created if necessary in community service work so that people aren t just cut off welfare the other thing we have to examine is how do we make sure that people aren t required to give up their educational programs if they re actually going to school there s been a lot of publicity about that here in new york and one of the things we re trying to do there is to make sure that people on welfare can qualify for work study while they re going to college and they can work their way through school like everybody else does who has to work their way through school so we re trying to work through that on the issue of balancing family and work the most single meaningful action that i ve taken as president i think if you took a poll most people would say i like the family and medical leave act probably around 15 million people have been able to take some time off from work when a baby was born or a parent was sick yesterday hillary and i and the vice president and mrs gore announced the largest child care initiative in the history of the country to try to make child care more affordable more available and of a higher quality and safer than ever before to millions more americans the next big challenge we have to face is all of us here in this room who are baby boomers some of you are not some of you are a little older some of you are a little younger but the baby boom generation until this generation now in the public schools is the biggest we ve ever had but until they were in the public schools we were the largest generation if we don t make some changes in social security and medicare when we retire we either won t be able to draw them in the way that they re now being enjoyed by seniors or we will impose incredible tax burdens on our children to do it in ways that i think are morally unacceptable so we have to undertake in the next two years a significant review of social security and medicare and they have to be modernized so that the baby boom generation can actually access them in a way that is universal and fair but so that they actually work for the 21st century over and above that we have to recognize that half the people in this country have no retirement savings and almost no one can maintain their standard of living on social security alone there are very few people living on that little money so we have to do more to get people to save for their own retirement we ve done a lot of work on that in the last five years we must do more the next issue i d like to mention is education i spent in my years in public life more time on this than any other issue in the end a lot of americans a lot of you in this room over the last five years have told me that you re very glad you ve done well in life but you re very concerned about the increasing inequality of wealth in america because people in the lower 40 percent of our work force have not had their earnings increase in a proportionate way for 20 years now now there s some indication by the way that that s turning around the last two or three years and we ve worked very hard on it what can a country do if it has great inequality and you don t believe in the punishing the successful what can you do well in 1993 we asked upper income people to pay more and gave lower income working families a tax break as part of our strategy to bring down the deficit but that s a one time deal we can expand trade and try to change the job mix in america and we re doing that for the last two years more than half the new jobs in this country paid above average wages that s a slow process since most people are not in jobs that were created last year the only other thing you can do is to set up a system of lifetime education and training which starts with an excellent primary and secondary education and gives people the chance always to continuously upgrade their skills so their on the cutting edge of change in the end that is the only answer to this and therefore it is imperative that we do that history will record that the best thing about the balanced budget bill we passed last august was that we made community college free for all americans that we gave tax breaks for any kind of education after high school from graduate school to workers in factories who have to go back to school to upgrade their skills the second thing we did was to launch the debate on whether americans should have high national standards and i want to talk about that a little bit fifteen big city school districts including new york city said we support the president s desire to have national standards and national tests and measure kids by how well they do and tell their parents but there is still an enormous resistance to that in this country now there was a study that s in the paper today you may have seen it showing that big city school districts perform at significantly lower levels by any measure than non city school districts in america you can say well what do you expect the kids there are poorer they may be poorer but we spend more money on average on them and i say that to make this point we cannot pretend if we have a truly progressive vision of the future that we can ever achieve what we want to achieve unless we hold our children all of our children without regard to their race their income or their background to high standards of learning and then give them the support they need to meet those standards and measure whether they do or not and if they don t keep on working at it until they do chicago has just undertaken a complete overhaul of its school system in which local parent councils are involved in local school districts and they have ended social promotion you have to pass an exam to go on to the next grade if you don t you have to go to summer school if you get through summer school and you pass the exam you can go on if you don t you have to stay back but because it s a community based parent based thing you don t hear one word about it being discriminatory about it being unfair about anything else why because people have taken control of their children s education they say our kids have got to learn something in the end when they re 50 their self esteem will be more harmed by not being able to read and write and learn new skills than it will by having been held back one year in school when they were 10 and we have got to have that kind of commitment to national standards to rigorous standards the survey also reported that children in virginia for example in urban school districts let me i live across the river from one from the most diverse school district in america fairfax county virginia children from 180 different national and ethnic groups in one school district and the survey concluded that the reason that the urban students in virginia scored better was because they had specific rigorous standards to which they were held and consequences for failure so i say to you i hope you will all support that finally let me say in this old world we ve got a lot of challenges i just want to mention two we need a national consensus to do something on global warming it is real it is significant and what we need is an understanding that we can grow the economy and still preserve the environment just with the pressures that public pressure that has been created in the last few months look at all the new announcements that detroit has made about cars that no one had anticipated before we can do this but we will pay a terrible price if we do not the second issue i d like to raise is that the wonderful explosions in science and technology and information that allow kids in new york city to get on the internet and talk to kids in australia about school projects also mean that crazy people in new york can talk to crazy people somewhere else about how to make chemical weapons or biological weapons you remember when we had the oklahoma city bombing trial the publicity came out that there was a web page where if you could hook into it you could figure out how to make the bomb i say that simply to make the point that when you see me on behalf of the united states trying to stand up against the spread of chemical and biological weapons or trying to devise ways to stop the spread of disease or more rigorous standards to preserve the quality of our food supply as we import more food and more food goes across national borders see that as part of this larger issue we want all the benefits of globalization but we have to preserve the integrity and the value of our life and that of people around the world and since we re in new york i ll make my last pitch i need your support for convincing the congress that they should support and we should pay our way in the united nations in the world bank in the international monetary fund and all the other international institutions we live in an era of interdependence and we have richly benefited from it we were able to do what we did in bosnia because others would help us and i could give you lots of other examples now why should you be here and why are you doing this because we believe that government is not the enemy but it has to be an agent of change because we believe this is an age in which we have to form a more perfect union by giving people the tools to make the most of their own lives to serve in their communities and to build a strong country and because the evidence is after five years that this approach is right for america you ve made it possible for it to continue and i very much appreciate it thank you very much dem wjclinton8 1 98b bill_clinton thank you what do you think mom she did a good job didn t she i thought she was great when susan said they would collectively bargain for ice cream i thought to myself it is only in large families that even john sweeney would be against unionizing no parents can stand against their united children if there are enough of them thank you susan thank you john for your friendship your support for bringing such incredible energy and direction to the labor movement to all the officers of the afl cio and maureen thank you for your friendship mrs kirkland monsignor i would like to thank all the members of the labor movement and i d like to thank all the members of my administration who support labor john said there were too many to mention and he d get in trouble but i want to also say a special thank you to secretary alexis herman for being labor s friend and partner thank you i think it would be interesting you know maybe it s just that we don t have as much to do at the white house these days but we have the largest turn out here of senior members of the administration for any event outside the white house we have ever held so i would like to ask mr podesta and martin baily and kathy shaw from the cea and bruce reed and steve ricchetti and gene and janice lachance and aida everybody here who is part of the administration stand up karen stand up everybody stand up chuck thank you you know john karen tramontano is going with me and we re exploring whether you can unionize a former president s office we re ripe for organizing here i have so much to thank you for i thank you for the work you did for the vice president for your pivotal roles in the victories in michigan pennsylvania and so many other places and florida and the victory in florida yes you re taking my good joke away i also want to thank you those of you from new york for all you did for hillary i am very grateful to you for that when she was sworn in last wednesday i can honestly say it was one of the happiest days of my life i don t know when i ve been that happy since chelsea was born and it wouldn t have happened if it hadn t been for so many of you who stuck with her and supported her and i am very very grateful senator kennedy i would like to thank you for your friendship and your support in ways that will probably never be a part of the public record you have been my true friend for a long time and i thank you this is a very emotional moment for me we re thinking about the last eight years that s what you re thinking about i m thinking about the last 26 years in 1974 i ran for congress in a district where in 1972 president nixon had defeated senator mcgovern 74 26 i ran against a member of congress who had an 85 percent approval rating when i started and obviously a 99 percent name recognition i was zero zero i raised in this campaign about 160 000 which was a fortune in 1974 and over 40 000 of it came from the labor movement which was a fortune in 1974 and i was one of the top 10 recipients of all house candidates of help from labor i was 28 years old and nobody thought i had a chance it turned out i didn t but the truth is i nearly won the race we made it part of an overall referendum on the policies and direction of the national republican it basically made the rest of my career possible and it could not have happened without the labor movement and i was sitting here thinking that people that really helped me then most of them aren t around anymore a man named dan powell that a lot of you knew who was then the head of the afl cio region in memphis the arkansas president bill becker the guy that ran the labor movement in west arkansas a guy named dale dee porter one of them is still here though wayne glenn thank you he was there with me 26 years ago and every day for 26 years almost well 27 years now i started in january of 74 i have been profoundly grateful to the working people of my native state and this country for what you represent and what you stand for and for the fact that you not only have tried to help your own members but you ve also cared about the larger society when susan was talking about her family and then she kind of morphed her remarks into her union i thought it was a beautiful thing because we all really believe that our country and our unions and our work places ought to work the way our families do when they work best all worthy endeavors including politics are team sports and it doesn t matter how good the quarterback is or the best player on the team if you don t have a team you can t win and i will say again i don t even have the words to tell you how profoundly grateful i am for more than a quarter century of being able to be your teammate john quoted from george meany s speech and there were a few moments there when he started talking about court decisions i wondered if it was really john changing the words then i realized that mr meany was defending a court decision not attacking one the mission that was articulated by george meany in 1955 has endured the afl cio still leads the country in its efforts to improve the lives of its members and all working americans as well to bring economic social and political justice to the work place but also to the nation and increasingly to the world beyond our borders thanks to vigorous leadership rejuvenated organizing efforts and strong grass roots support you are on a roll this building is a symbol of today s labor movement it s on the same foundations you started but you ve modernized it for a new age you ve adapted to the new challenges and new opportunities you re looking to the future and i hope we can be part of that future together you know i got tickled when susan said she thought she was going to introduce hillary i thought for gosh sakes i ve only got 12 days until i m a has been just 12 days to being a has been let me enjoy my 12 days the truth is that we re all going to do fine in this new century if we stick with what we ve done these last eight years if we keep having open and honest debates what john called differences of the head but we focus on the basic mission empowering workers strengthening families and communities embracing change but in a way that is consistent with our values we ve been working on this for some time now it turns out it worked pretty well in october 1992 when i spoke to you as a candidate for president i said i wanted us to build an america where labor and management business and government and education worked together to create a high wage high growth society that s the america we worked to build for eight years now and along the way we disproved an idea that the other side had relentlessly promoted for a dozen years which is that when labor is at the table the economy is weakened and the only way america would have a healthy business environment is if government was regularly condemned and labor was regularly weakened it turned out not to be true now it s going to be interesting to see now that they have a certain influence over the course of america s affairs whether they acknowledge that in the last eight years we proved that america is better off when labor and business and government work together for the welfare of all americans today we have a stronger labor movement and more partnership and if we were trying to hurt the economy we did a poor job of it we have 22 5 million new jobs we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest hispanic and african american unemployment rate in history and the difference in this recovery and so many others is that everybody was doing better every sector of our economy had about the same percentage increase in its income over the last four years with the bottom 20 percent having a slightly higher percentage increase since 1993 the yearly income of the typical family is up 6 300 hourly wages up by more than 9 percent in real terms so this rising tide has truly lifted all boats we also have the lowest poverty rate in 20 years and last year we had the biggest drop in child poverty in 34 years and it is no accident that these things have happened at a time when the labor movement was a bigger partner in the policymaking direction of the united states because you cared about not only your own members but the working poor as well and the family members of people who were in the american work place for example in 1993 when the deficit was high and we had to turn it around you supported giving the tax cut that we could afford to the 15 million american families that were working 40 hours a week for the most modest wages nearly none of them were union members but you wanted them to have the first tax cut because most of all they had children in the home and you felt that nobody should work 40 hours a week and raise their kids in poverty and because you did that over 2 million people have been lifted out of poverty because of the earned income tax credit and you should be very very proud of that we have provided now various tuition tax cuts the hope scholarships and others that 10 million americans are using to go to colleges and community colleges around this country the direct loan program has saved 8 billion for students and 5 billion for colleges of higher education because you supported the right kind of tax relief targeted toward education family and medical leave something that we were told would be just terrible for the economy has now given over 20 million americans the chance to take some time off from work when there s a sick parent or a newborn baby and the american economy is stronger than it s ever been and its been good for business because you have more and more and more people who feel comfortable at work because they re not having their insides torn up worrying about their children or their parents at home we passed senator kennedy s kennedy kassebaum law to let millions of americans keep their health insurance when they change jobs we strengthened pension protection for tens of millions of americans we ve got 90 percent of our kids immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time the life of the medicare trust fund has been extended to 2025 we have the cleanest environment we have ever had the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer we set aside more land secretary babbitt says if it will get done will surpass teddy roosevelt and we ll have set aside more land than any administration in history and it hasn t been bad for the economy but i want to say something else too as in every new progressive era we sparked a pretty severe reaction from the forces that didn t like the changes we were trying to make and when they won the congress they tried among other things to weaken the labor movement so we defeated their attempts to repeal the prevailing wage to bring back company union to weaken occupational safety laws instead we cracked down on sweatshops protected pension funds passed tough new worker s safety rules to prevent repetitive stress injuries and at least once we did succeed in raising the minimum wage now we were told when we raised the minimum wage it was a terrible thing for the economy and particularly rough on small business well let s look at the record since the last time the minimum wage was increased america has created almost 12 million new jobs the unemployment rate has dropped from 5 2 to 4 percent and in every single year we have set a record for the number of new small business in america so the next four years are going to be challenging for you but at least you ll have one solace you ll have all the evidence on your side i must say there have been times in the last few years when i ve almost admired our opponents in the political arena because they are never fazed by evidence you know don t bother me with the facts i know what i think and i know who s greasing these wheels and the facts are absolutely irrelevant but at least you have it and you know most americans care about them so don t forget the evidence you ve built a record that proves that america is better off when we are pro business and pro labor when we all work together and everybody has a seat at the table when everybody s concerns are heard and individuals are empowered don t forget it fall back on the evidence and you will prevail what does that mean well it means that you ve got to keep winning new members as the work force has changed your membership has gone down now it s going back up you have to be geared to the future of the economy john and rich trumpka and our linda chavez thompson i have all these jokes i want to tell and my staff told me i could not tell any of them they say that i have to assume the appropriate role for a former president and i cannot say any of the things that i want to say which would leave you howling in the aisle and the only thing that could get me a headline in my increasing irrelevancy from my friends in the press but just use your imagination i want to focus on the future now and as a citizen i want to help you build that future you ve got to get the minimum wage increase this year number one one of the reasons our economic team is here is that we re releasing a report today from the national economic council which highlights the challenges facing workers who are working full time for the lowest wages it shows listen to this more than 2 6 million americans earn at or near the minimum wage another 6 9 million americans earn less than the 6 15 an hour that we would have raised the minimum wage to so that it would affect 10 million people almost and all their family members now these are people who work every day to stock store shelves who wash dishes at restaurants who care for our kids they re in every town and city and of every racial and ethnic group they are not as the caricatures often would have it mostly middle class teenagers working for money to go out on the weekends nearly 70 percent of them are adults more than 60 percent are women almost half work full time and many are the sole breadwinners struggling to raise their kids on 10 300 a year they need and they deserve a raise and they have waited for it for far too long senator kennedy did everything he could to get it passed at the end of the last session of congress and i thought we were going to get it but in the end our friends on the other side decided that they could get an even bigger tax cut out of milking the minimum wage if they waited until the new session of congress now these families should not be punished for the failure of congress to act for the last two years since i first called for an increase in the minimum wage we ought to make up for lost time and lost wages by raising the minimum wage above what i originally proposed two years ago because they ve lost more time and i want to thank senator kennedy congressman bonior and the others who are working with you on this but i would like to say something else you ve got to make it clear to the american people what you will and what you won t trade for raising the minimum wage raising the minimum wage should never be conditioned on taking away overtime or other labor protections that workers have and again you have something you didn t have eight years ago no serious person can say that it is necessary to take these things away to have a strong economy or to have a vibrant small business economy it s a dog that won t hunt anymore use the facts as your shield and keep working let me say that i hope that you will continue to swell the ranks of your members and i hope you will continue to be on the cutting edge of change there s a lot of other things that need to be done and i think you ll be surprised how many of them you can get done the next four years if you re smart and careful i think it s clear that we have the money now to add a comprehensive prescription drug benefit to the medicare program and i hope you ll do it it s clear that the children s health insurance program has now added over 3 3 million people to the ranks of people with health insurance and we ve got the number of people without health insurance going down for the first time in a dozen years it s time to add the parents of those children to the ranks of those with health insurance it s clear that we can do more to balance work and family without hurting the economy i hope they ll be an expansion of family and medical leave i hope there will be a strengthening of the equal pay for women laws i hope we ll pass the employment non discrimination act and i hope we will increase our support for child care for working families there are many many people huge numbers who are eligible by law for federal assistance in paying their child care bills that we have never come close to funding i hope that you will continue to work to empower poor people in poor communities whether in inner cities appalachia the mississippi delta or on native american reservations i hope you ll continue to work to make america the safest big country in the world i hope you ll continue let me be more explicit here in michigan and pennsylvania you had to fight against a lot of your members who were nra members who believed that al gore was going to take your guns away and you did a brilliant job saying no he won t take your guns away but the other guys will take your union away if they can and you won a ground war now let me be serious here the truth is most of your people who are nra members are good god fearing americans who wouldn t break the law for anything on earth and they get spooked by these fear campaigns now we re in a i want to make a suggestion in a non election year when there s not the kind of pressure that we saw last year and let s don t kid ourselves the reason that our party didn t win the congress in my judgment more than anything else is what they did in those rural districts to us again just like they did in 1994 on guns now it didn t work at all in new york why new york even has a you have to get a license to carry a gun in new york and there s lots of sporting clubs nobody has missed a day in the woods in a hunting season nobody has missed a single sports shooting event so all those fear tactics didn t work in new york because all the hunters and sportsmen could see from their own personal experience that it was not true but i believe that you we ve all got a big interest here in keeping america going in the right direction on crime we ve all got a big interest in keeping guns out of the hands of kids and criminals and we don t need to wait for an election where we re all torn up and upset and you have to win a ground war against your own members just to have an election come out all right over an issue that we shouldn t be debating in the first place at election time so i regret that i have not been more persuasive because i came out of that culture but i m telling you you need to use this next year when there s no election going on to go out there and sit down and talk about where we re going because we ve got to keep working to make america a safer place and nobody wants to end the sporting and hunting culture that has meant so much to so many of your members and i implore you you can do this maybe nobody else in america can do this and you can do it but you have to do it in a non election year in my opinion where people aren t fighting against you and you don t feel like you re pushing a rock up a hill and i ll help you if i can this is a big deal for america we re still not near safe enough as a country i m glad the crime rate has gone down for eight years it s a gift you can give the children of your members and the communities in which you live and finally let me say i hope you will continue on some of the things we disagreed with over the years we ve got to figure out how to put a human face on the global economy we are becoming more interdependent we are becoming more and more interdependent there is going to be more trade whether we like it or not a trillion dollars a day in pure just money transactions across national lines we have got to figure out how to be on the side of making sure that the little folks in every country in the world are not trampled on by the increasing power of financial transactions and international economic transactions instead we have to prove that we can lift up the fortunes of all people we have to have good labor rights we have to have good environmental standards we have to have fair and open financial rules so that people don t get ripped off we ve got to do this together and you ve got to be part of the debate whenever you re part of the debate america wins and americans win and i ll tell you i ve had a great time i said yesterday in my church they may find somebody who can do this job better than me they will never find anybody that had any more fun doing it than i had i have had a great time but america is always about tomorrow and i will end where i began this building should be a metaphor for the future of the afl and the future of america you built a new building with new technology for new times on old foundations you stayed with what was best about the past and embraced what was necessary and attractive about the future so whenever you come in the front door of this building think about that as a road map for your future and remember what susan said about a union being like a family and a work place being like a family and a nation being like a family and remember that great line from george meany s speech we should never forget our obligation to do unto others as we would like to be treated ourselves we should never forget that politics work and life are all team sports it s been an honor to be on your team thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton8 10 93 bill_clinton thank you thank you very much for that wonderful welcome this is the first time we ve all been together since the day after the inauguration at the white house what a happy day that was but this is a happy day too and in some ways a more meaningful one because thanks to you and with your help we have begun to fulfill the promise of the long campaign of 1992 and the commitment of our party to change america for the better i want to say a special word of thanks to my longtime friend david wilhelm for all the work that he has done even if he didn t have a top 10 list for me after al gore went on david letterman i had a top 10 list for him i said the top 10 reasons i m glad al gore is vice president no 10 is that he has educated me in enormous detail on matters of great importance and matters entirely trivial and reasons nine through one are that he has a vote in the united states senate i told the vice president that without blinking an eye and he looked at me and he said yeah and every time i vote i m on the winning side i want to just think about that for a while i want to thank lottie shackelford who has been my friend as all of you know for many years your vice chair jim brady who when i was running for president was head of the state chair s association my neighbor and friend kathy vick also from louisiana there is probably some monopoly rule they re violating but they voted right in 1992 i want to thank my friend roy furman for agreeing to become the national finance chair of this party he is doing a wonderful job and he is wearing me out which i guess is the test of a good job congressman bob matsui our treasurer is not here today but i do want to mention him because he s been such a good friend to me and is such a good man and i also want to thank my good friend congressman bill richardson who helped me to carry new mexico and organized hispanic voters all across america and now is one of the great leaders in the united states house and i want to say this in spite of people always talk about all these tough fights we re in well i didn t get hired to do easy things and so if you do hard things they re going to be tough but the national journal or one of these washington periodicals did a survey a couple of weeks ago which said that so far our first year success rate in congress was second in the last 40 years only to the first year of dwight eisenhower s presidency and we ve got a chance to top it if we can pass the crime bill and campaign reform before the end of the year thanks to bill richardson and others like him and i thank him i thank martha love and i thank debra delee bob reich s favorite dnc officer for that was really funny what she said you know if you stay in this job long enough you get to appreciate every little bit of humor you can squeeze out of the day i told yesterday we had a group of people in who won arts and humanities award and i told them a story that they thought was apocryphal but it was actually true after i was sort of humbled anyway last week by first of all having al gore go on at david letterman and become sort of a you know a slick magazine model again and then hillary became you know justifiably the rage of the country with her wonderful performance on health care before all those committees then usa today had the bad taste to do a poll and ask people whether they thought she was smarter than me and 40 percent said yes and of course they were right which is what made it really hurt so i went to california as i always do when i need a real boost because california has been so wonderful to me and they ve got so many problems now and they re struggling so bravely to overcome them and we re working very hard to help them and so i thought this is going to be great so i get there i went to sacramento and san francisco and had a wonderful time with the afl cio there and then i came down to l a and i stayed at the beverly hilton because we were going to have a couple of events there and i thought this is an exciting hotel it s got a little you know glamour to it and merv griffin owns it and i used to watch him on tv and when i walked into the hotel and there was merv griffin to welcome me and i was beginning to feel like a president again you know i was getting over the fact that gore was on television and hillary was smarter than me and i was just about to get over it and then they took me up to the floor and i noticed it was a high floor which made me feel more important we were going up and they said you know we put you on this floor because there is one person in california who is a permanent resident of that floor and we thought this is the floor you ought to be on so i get off the elevator and standing there to greet me is rodney dangerfield he had given me a dozen jungle roses and written a little respect on it a little respect so let me say to all of you this has been a remarkable time if you look at what has been accomplished just in the last few months we passed the largest deficit reduction program in history and long term interest rates are still below six percent today s economic report indicates that this economy even though it has been slower than we thought it would be has been creating new jobs at a rate of about 152 000 jobs a month which means that as of last month there has now been more private sector job creation in the first portion of this year the first nine months than in the previous four years the budget package also contained a sweeping reform of college loans which lowered the interest rates for college loans and let people pay them back on easier terms of a percentage of their income as well as stiffening measures for collection something that will open the doors of college education to all americans there will never be an incentive not to borrow money for college now because you can get it if you need it at a lower interest rate and you can pay it back as a percentage of your income no matter how much you borrow it s a dramatic change that budget reconciliation package had the most significant piece of reform in 20 years for lower income working families families with incomes of under 27 000 with children in the home will get tax relief from that bill and we will now be able to say because of the way the earned income tax credit was expanded in this bill that if you work 40 hours a week in america and you have a child in the home you will no longer be in poverty it is a dramatic advance to the values that the democratic party holds dear work and family we passed the family leave bill the motor voter bill we ve got a major initiative for reform in defense conversion we re about to announce the first winners of our technology reinvestment project where we put up 500 million this year and we ll put up a little more than that next year we ve already gotten 2800 proposals from people who have ideas to convert defense technologies to domestic uses to build the economy of the 21st century we announced last week that we were removing 37 billion worth of high tech computer supercomputer and telecommunications equipment from cold war trade restrictions which will create many many new jobs in our country we announced a proposal with the uaw and the auto companies and all the defense labs and all the other research labs of the federal government to try to triple the car mileage that our automobiles get by the end of the decade if we do that we ll have sweeping gains in international markets for american produced automobiles we have reversed the environmental policies of the previous 12 years in ways that will be good for the economy as well as good for the environment we have appointed unprecedented numbers of women and members of different racial minorities to high positions in the national government this administration is in the process of changing this country and you have made a profound difference you know i ve been a democratic party activist for a long time now and i know that one of the things that gets us all into this is that we like elections and we want to win and one of the things that burns a lot of us out of it is that we sometimes think it s only about elections and you can t keep doing elections after so many years unless you really believe there are some consequences to it so i wanted to say this to you today to remind you that there are consequences to all the work you did and to the election that we won and in addition to that litany i just gave you maybe i could just tell you one story that would illustrate it better a couple of sundays ago i came in from my morning run i was on the ground floor at the white house and i looked over down the hall and there was a family there taking a tour of the white house which is quite unusual on a sunday morning but i noticed one of my staff members there had this family and i went over to shake hands with them a father and a mother and three daughters the middle daughter was in a wheelchair and my staff member said mr president this is one of those make awish families and this little girl is desperately ill and her wish was to come to the white house take a tour and meet the president so i went over and shook hands with the little girl and the family and we talked a while and i apologized for being in my running clothes i went upstairs to change came back down and looking more like my job i then had a proper picture with them and again a nice visit with the wonderful child and as i was walking off her father grabbed me by the arm and i turned around and he said you know my daughter is probably not going to make it and because of that these last weeks i ve spent with her are the most important times of my whole life and because of that family leave bill i didn t have to lose my job to spend that time but if you hadn t passed that law and signed it i literally would have had to choose between losing my job and spending this time or supporting my family and giving up what was the most important time of my life don t you ever think it doesn t make a difference who wins elections and what they do as you know i believe have believed and preached throughout the campaign of 1992 that most of the problems of america are rooted in our inability to adjust to the sweeping changes of this age we now know that this is the 20th year 1993 since real hourly wages peaked for wage earners and that for 20 years most americans have been working harder for less money to pay more for health care education housing the basics of life we know that that has been true through times when the economy was growing and times when it was in recession but there have been profound structural changes at work in this economy which have put enormous pressures on the great american middle class which was built in the 20th century and which exploded at the end of world war ii and which helped to keep the american dream that each generation could do better than their parents if they work hard and played by the rules alive when you put that with the fact that we have also seen great internal changes in the structure of our society enormous movements from one place to another the average in america is about 20 percent of our people move every year or so now from one place to another extraordinary mobility dramatic changes in the family unit alarming pockets of profound depression where investment is not made huge increases in the number of children born to one parent only often to children themselves a dramatic breathtaking increase in arbitrary violence among young people when you put that together with these internationally compelling economic changes you see that if we just keep on doing what we re doing we re in for deep trouble then if you look outside our borders you see also sweeping changes many good some troubling the end of the cold war the emergence of new great economic powers china now growing at 10 to 14 percent per year the emergence of a whole range of new democracies and most of them hoping that they can have better relationships with us and trade with us and do business with us the continuing difficulty of other rich countries not just the united states in creating jobs europe doing not as well as we are in creating new jobs japan now having trouble even with its closed economy creating new jobs and then we now know at the end of the cold war it certainly didn t mean the end of troubles and misery in the world we ve done our best to support democracy in russia and to stick by president yeltsin because i believe it s important that we have freedom and democracy in russia that we continue to denuclearize the world and work hard on helping russia to do what they re trying to do and the other republics of the former soviet union we see that there is still an enormous amount of chaos and once the cold war was over and the communist empire collapsed it sort of stripped the veneer off long simmering ethnic and religious hatreds and tensions in bosnia and georgia and lots of other places in the world we know that there are countries in africa which are not only embroiled in war but which are suffering mass famine somalia where we are trying to conclude our mission and leave those people a fighting chance not to go back to times when hundreds of thousands of children died like flies in the streets but we know that there are also troubles in other nations there in angola there have been as many children have their legs blown off by land mines arbitrarily planted as in any war in history that we know of so this is both a troubled and a hopeful world and the old rules we had for looking at the world beyond our borders were pretty simple there was a cold war our policy was to contain communism our policy was to promote countries within our sphere of influence we preferred democracy but as long as they were anti communist we d normally stick with somebody anyway and even if they were pro communist and democratic we d normally shy away from them the necessity of surviving in a bipolar world gave an organizing principle to what we did and didn t do to be sure we had troubles and difficulties but we knew how to do that now we re having to define our purposes in the world and our leadership in the world in terms of more partnership with other nations in promoting democracy and freedom and market opportunities for people that we have here we want elsewhere it s not easy there but the thing i have tried to say with all the time that i have spent on foreign policy and military policy and trade policy that i must say it s an absolutely fascinating time to be president and a great honor actually to be president in this difficult time to try to construct the framework for the post cold war world i spend an enormous amount of time on that but i usually talk about what we re doing in this country because i believe you cannot be strong abroad unless you are strong at home it is difficult to promote a concept of national security that has nothing to do with the economic strength of our nation that is what permits us to pay for not only defense but the other things which make us more secure and when we think of all these changes we need to cope with the first thing i think we have to say that i ve been trying to hammer home now ever since the and in clear explicit terms ever since the health care speech is that there has to be a level of security accorded to americans if they re going to be able to change if you think about your own life those of you who have the privilege of raising children on most days it s a privilege you can watch in individual lives how difficult it is for people to change their habits even when they know they should if they are insecure personally the same is true of a family or a community or a nation if you spend all your time waiting for the other shoe to drop expecting something bad to happen not expecting something good to happen feeling that what you now have can be taken away from you by some arbitrary force it is very difficult to have the space the mental space and the emotional space to think about the changes that are bearing in and what initiatives you should take and so an enormous part of my job as your president is not only to keep pushing this agenda of change and getting you to help me do it as you have so well but to be able to explain to the american people what it is we have to change and why and then to be able to advocate those things that will give people more personal and family and community and national security so that we can have the courage and the space to change and if we don t do that even our incremental progress will not satisfy people because they will be disoriented i m really proud of the fact that we ve been creating more than 150 000 jobs a month in a tough time and that there are more new jobs now since january than there were in the previous four years and when i say we i don t mean the government i mean we the american people working together although we have played a role in it in drastically bringing the deficit down and keeping the interest rates down and targeting some investment i m proud of the fact that cars are selling at their highest rates since 89 and business investment is expanding at its fastest rate since 84 and all of those things i m proud of that but unless people understand this in a bigger framework there will always be places that are behind and places that are ahead ten years ago my part of the country was behind and we had an unemployment rate three points higher than the national average today california is behind they have three points higher than the national average the center of a lot of our high tech base 12 percent of our population 25 percent of our unemployed people this is a big problem for the rest of us so we have to understand these things how does it all fit together what kind of changes do we have to make what kind of security do we have to have how does the change in the student loan program or passing national service and giving all these kids a chance to earn money for college by rebuilding this country at the grassroots level or going to tokyo and working with the japanese and the europeans and the canadians to open markets how does that all fit together what difference will it make if we reform the welfare system early next year how does this work my goal is to make individuals in this country and families in this country secure enough and strong enough to be able to face and make the changes that we must make in order to do what david wilhelm said i talked to him about so long ago give every american a chance to live up to his or her god given capacity to do it we simply have to be able to rebuild the great middle class in this country we can t continue to have a few people doing very well and the bottom dropping out not just from people who are unemployed but from people who are employed there are a lot of changes we have to make we ve begun to make some and some i ve talked about first of all we ve got to make a lot of economic changes we have got to face the fact that the basis of our prosperity can no longer be an insular economy where we don t have foreign competition and can no longer be at least buoyed by very high levels of defense spending in high tech because of the end of the cold war so what do we have to do first of all we have to have an investment strategy that s why when we changed the tax code this year we provided for a new venture capital gains tax which will give people a 50 percent break if they invest for five year not a year but five years in new businesses or smaller businesses that are growing jobs we provided more incentives for research and development we provided more incentives to lift off the depressed real estate market in the country we had a theory about that an investment theory because there will never be enough government money to get this country going again alone secondly we need to recognize that there are some places in this country that are profoundly depressed and we have to do more there so we passed some empowerment zone legislation to see whether or not with extreme incentives we could revitalize some of the really distressed areas of the country we have a community development bank bill moving through the congress which will set up banks that are designed to loan money to people to start self employed businesses or very small businesses loan money to people who live in places who ordinarily wouldn t be able to get it we know from our experience at home and from the south shore bank in chicago that banks can make money loaning to poor folks if they know what they re doing and they can make money loaning in low income areas if they know what they re doing these are structural changes we have to make we have to change the entire unemployment system you know when i was a kid and somebody lost their job they lost their job for four weeks five weeks six weeks in an economic downturn they would get hired back at the same job that s the system that the unemployment system was designed to support what are so called cyclical unemployment so you ve got unemployment payments for a period of months and then you got your job back today most unemployment is structural for example we continue to lose manufacturing jobs when the economy is growing like crazy why because manufacturing productivity is going up so fast and because we haven t gotten into enough new manufacturing areas so if you want we have either one of two things we have to do we either have to train people that are manufacturing workers to do non manufacturing work or we ve got to make a whole lot of different things if we want to keep the employment up because there will be an almost unlimited trend to be able to produce more with fewer people of whatever particular product you re talking about what does that mean that means that instead of an unemployment system we now need a re employment system because people need different jobs because they re not going to get the old job back by and large it means that the day somebody goes on unemployment and even before if they know they re going to go they should know what jobs will be available within driving distance of their home they should be able to match their skills for those jobs and where the deficiencies are they should be able to choose a training program that goes right along with that unemployment check and it should commence immediately so that you shorten the time in which people are unemployed we have to look more to a lot of other problems in our economy we cannot avoid the responsibility to be responsible stewards of this country and this planet so we re going to have to become more environmentally sensitive but we have to do it in a way that creates jobs and doesn t just cost jobs we can do that but we have to be very creative that requires change we have to change the way we operate the government if we invest too much money in doing things in the same old way in the government then we don t have the money left to invest in education and training and the future that s why the vice president s report on reinventing government is so important and democrats have to prove they can do that you know if we don t hate government we ought to have the courage to change it if we think government has a critical role as partners for the private sector as we move toward the 21st century then we have to have the courage to change it that s really important we can do more with less in a whole range of areas and that s very very important so all these changes need to be made i cannot tell you how important i think it is for us to continue to push on defense conversion and invest massive amounts of money in the civilian technology possibilities of the future we have been cutting defense since 1987 but we did not seriously begin to invest in defense conversion until 1993 the congress last year passed a 500 million bill for defense conversion as congressman richardson will tell you and there was an ideological opposition in the previous administration to spending the money so all the people the scientists the engineers the technology workers who had lost their jobs had to wait another year just to get these programs started we have got to do better on that we have all these defense labs we have all this research we have all these resources i was at mcclellan air force base and at mcclellan air force base in california they have worked with private sector people there to produce an electric car that gets 80 miles to the gallon at 55 miles an hour it operates alternatively on electricity and gasoline and can go from zero to 60 in 12 seconds and has a maximum speed of 100 miles an hour if we can just figure out how to produce it at an affordable price we ll be in great shape but that s the way these things are done so i could keep you here until tomorrow morning at this time talking about the changes we need to make but let s first talk about what the security is what s the deal we have to make with the american working people in order to make these changes to get them to the point where they will have to make the changes because these things you think about everything i just said requires the concurrence of millions and tens of millions of people you change a country now you can t just pass a law and change it you can t just write a bill and change it you have to change the behavior of the whole country people have to change their lives so we can t do that unless people feel a high level of security i think that s self evident the first kind of security people need is to know that in an america where the economy is tough and where most people have to work for a living you can work and still be a good parent that s what the earned income tax credit was all about to give working people with kids a break that s what the family and medical leave act was all about we ve still got work to do to make adequate childcare supports available to people around the country we have got to say that there has got to be a way where every american can be a good mother a good father and a good worker that s the first thing the second thing we have to do i would argue to you is to give people basic security i mean more freedom from fear when i did my town meeting in california there was a fine looking young korean man who told me about how his brother had been shot and killed an arbitrary shooting and he asked me about it told me the circumstances then there was a fine young junior high school student a young african american man he told me that he and his brother just wanted to go to school they said we don t want to be in a gang we don t want a knife we don t want a gun we want to study that s what we want to do and we changed schools because we didn t think our old school was safe so we showed up at our new school on the first day and were standing in line to register and my brother gets shot standing in front of me because he s in a crossfire and this is not just california and new york and big cities folks this is my state and yours now look i live in a state where half the people got a hunting or fishing license or both and where we have to close down whole towns on the opening day of deer season because nobody shows up at school nobody shows up at the factory but i think that even in my state people think its nuts that there are places in this country where teenagers are better armed than police and people are scared to walk down the street to go to school and so we just have to decide you know are we going to let all this rhetoric we you know this country we get all there s a lot of great things about america but we re bad to say one thing and do another we re pretty bad about that we all deplore violence and we say punish people who do it we are punishing people who do it our jails are full we have a higher percentage of people behind bars than any country in the world today but we won t pass the brady bill now let me say why that matters that sounds like sort of a tepid bill now given what else is being called for but let me tell you why that matters in new york city last year they confiscated something like 19 000 guns whatever the figure is 85 percent of them were from other states so a state waiting period doesn t amount to a hill of beans when you ve got the constitutional right to travel we ve got to know how old are these people buying these guns who are they do they have a criminal record do they have a mental health history it s a big deal the states can do something 17 states have said kids can t own handguns unless they re out with their parents on a hunting trip or a target practice a lot of states have tried to set up laws licensing gun dealers but the federal law will give you a license for ten bucks and the states can t overturn it yet you got hundreds of gun dealers out there and there s no system about it and maybe the most important thing of all is you ve got a lot of these people most of them very young a lot of them with drug problems nearly all of them with no real connection to the rest of society who have easy access to rapidfire assault weapons the sole purpose of which is to kill people quicker in greater numbers and we have lots of bills in congress to do something about it and we ought to do something about it we ought to pass one of them and do something about it and take a stand we have a crime bill which would put 50 000 more police officers on the street it matters how many police officers are on the street not and i say to you not so much for catching criminals quickly although that is a big deal but for preventing crime i ll just give you first of all look at new york one of the few big cities in the country where for two years running there s been a decline in the crime rate in all seven major fbi categories because they went to a community policing system look at houston where the mayor there bob lanier got elected on a commitment to put the equivalent of 655 more police officers on the street and to concentrate them in areas of high crime and they had a 17 percent drop in the crime rate the first year they did it you can do this and we ought to be about the business of helping our places become more safe this is a huge deal and the democratic party ought to do it if we were the party of social security why can t we be the party of health security and personal security and freedom from fear and finally let me say about the health care issue i feel very strongly that this issue will define us not only as a party but as a people every day and i don t mind a lot of this but every day i read something about somebody saying why can t we do this that or the other thing again we have to look at what we are doing what we are doing we are spending 14 and a half percent of our income on health care it ll be about 900 billion this year canada spends a dime or ten percent of its income on health care ten percent of every dollar germany and japan spend about 8 8 percent of every dollar nearly all of our major competitors are below that now there are some things that make the american health care system more costly that we wouldn t want to do anything about and some things that we can t do anythin dem wjclinton8 10 97a bill_clinton thank you all for that warm welcome thank you reverend and mrs jefferson for making us feel at home in the metropolitan baptist church thank you senator mcgreevey for your introduction and your passionate commitment to the families and the children and the future of this state thank you mayor james thank you my great friend congressman donald payne thank you audrey west for your work here in the head start program and thank you linda lopez for having the courage to get up here and give a speech today you did very well i thought you did very well mr mayor and congressman i m delighted to be back in newark a city that is earning its reputation as a renaissance city every day i hear story after story of newark s coming back a new performing arts center a new sports complex in the historic ironbound district most importantly a new spirit that i sense in this room and that i saw in this church and its facilities for caring for children when i walked in the door you know i have been in a lot of buildings in my life sometimes i think the job of a president or a governor is going into buildings of all kinds and after you have a little experience with walking into buildings you get the feel of what s going on there before anybody tells you when i walked in this building and i saw the posters of the children on the walls i saw the pride people take in maintaining it i saw the care that had gone into designing it i knew that the spirit of the lord had moved you to do the right thing for our children and i thank you for that i m feeling a little nostalgic now not only because my daughter just went off to college because this is the 20th anniversary of my first public office when i was attorney general of my state but also because last week it was six years ago that i first announced for president now sometimes young people come up to me all the time and they say i want a career in public life should i do it and i always encourage them i tell them that no matter what they may read or hear from time to time the overwhelming majority of people in public life from both parties and all philosophies are honorable good people who work hard to do what they believe is right and it is a noble endeavor and we spend sometimes so much time finding fault with ourselves we forget that we wouldn t be around here after 220 years if we didn t have a pretty good political system supported by a wise and caring citizenry but i always tell them the most important thing before you run for office is not to decide what office you want but what you would do if you got it you remember there was a about 20 years ago robert redford was in that great movie the candidate you remember that and he won and said now what if that s going to happen to you don t run i was encouraged i was listening to senator mcgreevey talk and i thought it s the first time i ve heard him speak since he s been officially nominated by our party i thought that man knows what he wants to do and that s the beginning of wisdom and the prospect of success if you just want the job for the honor of the thing it s not worth the pain of getting there it s only worth it if you have an idea about what you re going to do and all of us are living on the vision of those who went before us i m sure that reverend jefferson is grateful for the vision of all of his predecessors reverend johnson and others who conceived of what this might be the scripture says where there is no vision the people perish and what i want you to think about today is as you celebrate what goes on in this building for our children and you imagine what could go on in this entire state and nation what is your vision for what america should look like when your children or your grandchildren are your age that s a question i ask myself and try to answer every single day it keeps me centered keeps me focused keeps me going in the tough days when i started this odyssey six years ago i had a vision that i was afraid might not be realized unless we changed what we were doing i knew we were about to start a new century and a new millennium and i had a very clear idea of what i wanted i wanted to see three things out of which i thought all else would flow i wanted our country to be a place where the american dream was alive for every person without regard to race or color or creed or where they lived if they were willing to work for it i wanted our country to continue to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity and security even though the cold war is over and we no longer totally dominate the economy of the world the way we did at the end of world war ii and i wanted our country to embrace and celebrate our increasing diversity but not be divided by it instead to come together as one america the american dream for everybody willing to work for it america leading the world for peace and freedom and security and prosperity america coming together as one america that s what i want and everything i do in the limited time available to me as your president i try to make sure is advancing that vision now we have therefore tried to follow certain polices policies that favor the future not the past policies that favor change not the status quo policies that favor unity not division policies that help everybody not just a few people and policies that enable us to lead not follow you know that old joke they used to tell me that unless your the lead dog on the sled the view is always the same we ve got to be leading we ve got to be leading now we have come a long way in the last four years and eight months as a people over 13 million more jobs lower crime the biggest drop in welfare rolls in our history a cleaner environment advances in the safety of our food and the public health generally breakthroughs in science and technology and especially in medical research advancing the cause of peace and freedom and prosperity and security all around the world and with more energy than ever before in africa thanks largely to the leadership of your congressman donald payne in 1996 i tried to characterize all this as building a bridge to a new century and we have a strong foundation of success on which to build that bridge but we all know that there s more to do there are still people in newark who don t have a job even though we ve created more jobs in less time than our country ever did before there are still people in newark who get up and work hard every day but they and their children are still living at or below the poverty line there are still children who are losing their childhoods to crime and gangs and drugs and guns even though we ve tried to reduce those problems and they are not as bad as they were but if you re one of the victims or one of the people caught up in it it s just as bad as it ever was so we still have things to do but we know this we know that if everybody has got a good job and everybody has got a good education and everybody can raise their children properly most of our problems will go away don t you believe that don t you believe that and the reason i wanted to come here today and celebrate what you have done and then look to the future is that it seems to me that with more and more and more people in the work force with more two parent families having to have both incomes to make ends meet and more and more single parent families we can t ever forget that the most important job any of us ever have on this earth if we bring children into the world is raising those children right i used to tell my daughter after i got elected president the first time she said you re too busy for this that or the other thing i said let me tell you something until you leave here you are still my most important job and don t you ever forget it and i believe everybody everybody should feel that way if we fail with our children since we ll be gone and they ll be left what will we leave not very long ago senator paul tsongas tragically died too early in life after a long battle with cancer i remember when he left the united states senate the first time he had to deal with his cancer he wrote a book called going home i was governor when it came out i took it home one day and laid down on the couch and read it straight through one afternoon played hookey from school from work that s one nice thing about being governor you can give yourself an excused absence and i was laying there reading paul tsongas book and here was this man i had admired from before i thought he was such a creative united states senator i was sick that he was leaving i knew he had a reasonable chance to live quite a few more years and i couldn t figure out why this guy would leave because he was not a quitter in any way and there was a section in this book where he was talking about his children and where he was saying i m determined to fight this i hope i ll live a long time and he did he lived more than 15 more years he said i hope i ll live a long time but he said one of the wisest things i ever heard it never meant anything to me until i was diagnosed is that no person on his death bed ever says i wish i d spent more time at the office these kids they re our most important job they are the only manifestation of the immortality of the human spirit on this earth and i think it s great that everybody i hope will want to have a good education and have the ability to work and i will never rest until the work we ve done to bring the economy back embraces everyone but we should never forget that there are conflicts between work and child rearing which we all have to help people resolve there is no more important responsibility than helping people balance the demands of work and family because think about it if americans fail at work then the economy craters and our country has all these problems and all the social problems get worse if america fails at home the economy might be strong and our social problems will still get worse and more importantly our legacy will be a destructive one we must find a way for people to succeed in the work place and succeed in raising their children and do both and there is a role for all of us in that that is a community responsibility for us to pretend that that is everybody s problem and they ve got to work it out ignores the fact number one that people can t do it and number two that i m stronger and my child will have a better future if your children have a better future that we are in this together whether we acknowledge it or not so we better acknowledge it and reach out and make ourselves one community hillary has said many times that governments don t raise children parents do but that every one of us has a special responsibility to help parents succeed to create the conditions to give parents the tools to make their lives successful or in my wife s words it really does take a village to have the kind of child rearing we want for all of our children that s what this church and this head start program mean it s the living embodiment of our shared responsibility for our children and for nearly five years we have worked very hard to help parents raise their children we fought for the v chip and the rating system on television programs because i think there is too much inappropriate material on television for young children at times when they re watching it and i think you ought to have more opportunity to see it we ve worked very hard to put tobacco out of the reach of children because it s still the largest killer of our young children we re fighting every day to make our streets and our schools safer and more drug free and to hold up those examples of fighting juvenile crime that not only punishes people who should be punished but saves kids from getting in trouble in the first place it s been nearly two years now since a single child under the age of 18 has been killed by a gun in the city of boston where the police and the probation officers make house calls and the parents walk the streets and the compliance with the probation officers orders is 70 percent i feel quite sure it s higher than most places in the world and in america why because they said it takes a village to keep kids out of jail better send the kids to college than to jail we have made it easier for millions of parents to take some time off if their children are sick without losing their jobs and to keep their health insurance when they move from job to job we raised the minimum wage and we lowered taxes on families with children with incomes of under 30 000 it s worth about 1 000 a year now to families of four with incomes less than that and this summer when i signed the new balanced budget law it s the biggest increase in aid to children s health and in aid to education since 1965 in that law 5 million more children almost all of them in low income working families will be able to get health insurance under that bill and the bill really does go a very long way toward creating that system of lifetime learning that senator mcgreevey talked about a 500 per child tax credit for working families a big increase in head start the america reads program to mobilize a million volunteers to teach all the 8 year olds in this country to read so that every 3rd grader can read independently the great effort to wire all of our classrooms and libraries to the internet by the year 2000 have computers within the reach of all children and i must say thanks to at t which was complimented earlier and others new jersey has had the gift of private sector support there that i want to see in every state in this country we re going to do our part we need others to do their part technology can be a great liberation for children particularly in poorer neighborhoods and if properly used for children that are having learning problems and if properly used children who need to become fully fluent in english as well as whatever their native tongue is we have to do this and we have done more to open the doors of college to all americans than ever before i think we can really say when these programs are fully implemented anybody who s willing to work for it can get a college education because we had the biggest increase in pell grants in 20 years we re up to a million work study positions now in our schools more and more young people going through the national service program americorps and serving in their communities earning the right to go to college an ira you can save in and withdraw from tax free if you re paying for college for your children and the hope scholarship and other tax credits so that you can get a 1 500 tax credit to pay for the first two years of college and other tax reductions for the junior and senior year for graduate school or if you re an adult and you have to go back and get training we are trying to set up a system where people of any age can be educated at any time whenever they need it and we will help them but we still have to make sure that our parents have access to quality affordable child care that s the great big hurdle left to be crossed if we can get all the children insured for health care then the great hurdle for families will be making sure that we can solve this last great obstacle as head start parents and personnel those of you involved in this program know how important it is and your director has already spoken eloquently about it that s why i worked hard to create early head start so we could bring in kids even earlier and why i fought to make sure that in this budget we ll have a million children in head start every year by the end of the budget period but as hard as we ve worked on that we ve got to do more we ve got to keep going until we literally can say every parent and child in this country can have access to quality affordable child care which includes for the reasons senator mcgreevey said an educational component an appropriate stimulating educational component for the youngest of our children our brains we know now are like computers that we re building ourselves and they get wired in a certain way by the time we re about four years old and it s hard to rewire them after that we know for example and i don t want to get into numbers but let me just give you an example of the significance of what goes on in this building the newest scientific research shows that a child who has loving involved parents and a big part of this by the way is helping parents who almost 100 percent of parents want to do a good job one of the things we ve got to do is make sure they all know how to do a good job but a child with loving involved parents and an appropriate pre school or other child care program that has an appropriate educational component and i mean basic things for infants singing to people showing colors and sights and sounds all that will have about 700 000 positive interactions with that developing computer up here by the time their four years old 700 000 a child who is left essentially isolated with a parent who has never been trained to do that work may have as few as 150 000 positive interactions or less than one fourth now you tell me which child has got a better chance to make it at 17 at 21 at 30 at 40 at 50 you can literally reduce it therefore almost to a matter of science fundamentally it s an affair of the heart but you have to understand there is a fact basis behind this now and this new scientific research is just stunning it s breathtaking and we cannot knowingly permit huge numbers of our children to be at that kind of input disadvantage while their own little computers are being built it isn t right and it isn t smart and we pay every day today for the mistakes that were made 10 15 20 years ago and so that s why i say that we have to do this one of the things we were worried about when we started moving all these folks from welfare to work is what would they do for child care so we put 4 billion dollars more into the child care program because the worst thing in the world we could do is to have someone who had been gripped by welfare feel good about being at work and then be racked with worry about what was happening tot the child at home we ve now this morning we learned that last month another 250 000 people went to work from welfare that s a stunning number now in four years and eight months 3 6 million people who were living in families on welfare now live in families at work drawing a paycheck that s good that s good but we ve got to make sure their kids are okay because most of those jobs when you move from welfare to work if you don t have a lot of education most of those jobs don t pay very much and we know that child care can cost as much as 25 percent of a person s paycheck if they live on a modest income so one of the things that i m encouraging all the states to do as your welfare rolls drop is to task the money that you ve got left because the federal government gives you the same amount of money now whatever your welfare rolls are is take that money put into child care and make sure the kids are going to be okay you help the parents and they go to work help the kids when the go to child care listen to this over half of the children under the age of one are already in some kind of day care but 12 million children under the age of six 17 million children between the ages of six and thirteen have one or both parents in the workforce so in spite of the numbers and the great efforts and the stunning success of facilities like this one the hard truth is there are still too few child care facilities to meet our growing demands and again i say that remember the findings that senator mcgreevey referred to that we had people testify when hillary and i sponsored that white house conference on early childhood and the development of the brain we can t let this happen there are also too many facilities in operation that are doing the best they can on the money they ve got but they re just not adequate for what the children need what every child needs is what you provide here education if they need to be there all day let them stay all day we ve got to find a way to do this if you take any survey of parents and experts in the country they ll say that child care is in short supply especially in our hardest pressed communities studies tell us that more than half of the child care centers that are in operation don t provide adequate child care including the educational component for their children one out of three children in child care programs that are running out of private homes receive care that may actually retard their development according to the studies but what can the parents do if it takes 25 percent of their income not enough at any rate to pay the expenses to be in a proper child care facility so i say to you our vision cannot be realized until we face this and every american should be concerned about it because every american or our children will be affected by it and we pay now or pay later we either act like a community now to lift these children up or we will be punished as a community later for our collective neglect this is a big challenge for our future i m delighted that so many people at the state and local level and now increasingly in congress are taking up this issue and giving it the attention it deserves on the 23rd of this month the first lady and i will host the first ever white house conference on child care with parents and child care providers and experts and business leaders and economists to talk about what we can do to learn from promising efforts like yours but i ask you to think about this today as you walk out of this building and you think about what everyone has said what the pastor said what senator mcgreevey said what the satisfied parent said and the dedicated head start provider said think about what we can do together to make sure that what was said here about the children in this place can become real for all the children of our country it is the next great frontier in bringing our community together so that we can realize that grand vision for the new century thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton8 10 97b bill_clinton thank you very much thank you jim and thank you ladies and gentlemen for being here for him and for our party and for what we re fighting for i want to thank my longtime friend alan solomont for being here and for being the finance chair of our democratic party yes you can clap for him that s a nice why don t you do that he has a thankless job when he calls people you know even when he calls me i think he s going to call and hit me up for a contribution any day but most of all i d like to thank the kushners charles and seryl and thank you rae kushner and thank you mrs felsen and i thank the children who gave me the shofar joshua and nicole dara and miryam thank you and i m glad we ve got a long distance connection to israel in a way i always have a long distance connection to israel president weizman was just here and we had a great visit and of course mr arafat and prime minister netanyahu had a visit of their own and we re hopeful that the peace process is back on track and so is the that the security process is back on track and i know all of you hope that as well but we re working hard on it let me just briefly say that i came to new jersey today for jim mcgreevey for what i think is a very good reason it is entirely positive there s nothing negative about it and that is that in the next several years for the foreseeable future in the 21st century who happens to be governor of any state and what decisions they make will have a bigger impact on how people live than in the previous 20 years as an inevitable outgrowth of the way the world is changing the way we change how we govern ourselves how we make decisions and how we go forward and i think it s very important let me say that a lot of you have helped me a lot over the last several years and for that i am very grateful i think we are much closer than we were five years ago to realizing the vision that i started out with when i announced for governor for president and i was a governor i m going to talk about that in a moment that is i think we re closer to the time when every american has a chance to live out the american dream if he or she will work for it i think we re closer to the time when our country has articulated a vision that will maintain our world leadership for peace and freedom and prosperity and security and i think we re closer to a time although we still have a lot of challenges in which we can reach across all the racial the ethnic the cultural the religious lines that divide us and stand in stark contrast to what is going on in so much of the world today and to the terrible story that charles told us that had such a wonderful ending of his family by being a country that really can embrace all this diversity celebrate it respect it honor it and say we re still bound together as one america and i feel very good about that there is still a lot to do there is a lot going on in washington i m still trying for the fifth year in a row to pass campaign finance reform and the opponents thought they had killed it yesterday but we ve got a little life left in us up there and if you can influence anybody i hope you will although i want to say that senator torricelli and senator lautenberg are part of the unanimous vote in our caucus for the mccain feingold bill and for campaign finance reform which i very much appreciate we re dealing with the trade issue and the question of the extension of the president s authority to conduct trade negotiations with other countries and then have the congress vote up or down on the bill which is essential for me to make those agreements and to continue to expand trade otherwise no one wants to negotiate with 535 people they want to negotiate with one person and there s a lot of debate and it s a healthy thing because what we really want in the global economy is more involvement in the world economy in a way that benefits america but also having our communities make the appropriate response for people who have or will suffer as a result of dislocations in that economy we owe that to them that s what we re trying to achieve we had a fascinating conference this week on climate change i m convinced the climate is warming at an alarming rate and that we have to do the responsible thing to lower our emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere but it s a difficult problem for a democracy to address because it s not on anybody s back right now it s something that s out there ahead of us but if we do a little bit now we can avoid disastrous consequences and much more burdensome actions later hillary and i are going to have the first white house conference on child care at the end of the month and that s a huge problem we have more people in the work force than ever before a higher percentage of people in the work force than ever before but the most important job any of us has is our job to raise our children well i know you believe that i had more people we just all took our picture i had a higher percentage of people in the line that i just stood in ask me about my family and my daughter than any photograph line i have ever stood in in my whole life and that s a great tribute to you and your values and i thank you for that but this child care issue is really about whether all these people who have to work who also have children can succeed at work and at home and we shouldn t have our country making a choice there we don t want to crater to the economy but our most important job is to raise our children well so we re full of all these challenges and it s exciting but we have to when i took office we had this huge deficit and basically a yesterday s government and i made a commitment as i ve said many times to policies that favored the future over the past change over the status quo unity over division and things that benefit everybody instead of just a few people and that required changes so we down sized the government we shared more responsibility with state and local government and the private sector and state governments anyway have primary responsibility for things like auto insurance rates and constitutionally education so i could go out here and talk until i m blue in the face about the importance of embracing national education standards the united states is the only great country in the world that has no national standards of academic achievement that guarantees international capacity in terms of operating the economy that everybody has to follow we re not talking about federal government standards we re not talking about imposing anything on anybody it s totally voluntary but that means that every governor may will decide whether to participate in the standards movement so the decisions made by the governor of new jersey in the next 20 years almost certainly will range over a wider scope and have a deeper impact on the lives of the people of new jersey than in the previous 20 years and if my vision is going to be fulfilled we have to have a partnership that really works to grow the economy to fight crime to preserve the environment to deal with social problems and most importantly to make sure that every child in this country has a chance to live out his or her dreams with a decent education that s why i showed up here today because this young man actually has an idea of what he will do if he gets elected he s not running for governor because he wants to live in that magnificent old house new jersey i think has the oldest and perhaps the most beautiful old governor s mansion in the country he actually has an idea of what he wants to do and i think it s the right idea and i hope you ll help me achieve it thank you bless you dem wjclinton8 10 97c bill_clinton well he looks like a governor he sounds like a governor he s got a good plan about what he would do if he were governor and he s got something else just magical we were a couple of hours ago in a wonderful head start program at a church near here and when mcgreevey walked in the room the fire alarm went off if you ve got that kind of heat and electricity you ought to be governor i am delighted to be here with all of you i thank the legislative leaders who are here senator lynch assemblyman doria state democratic party chair tom giblin if i forget somebody complain assemblywoman buono state senator bryant hudson county executive bob janiszewski cherry hill mayor susan bass levin sheriff fontura mayor about to be bob bowser mayor spina and all other officials who are here i d like to say a special word of thanks to a former colleague of mine brendan byrne who is the audience governor byrne thank you i m glad to see you here after he left the governor s office it was never the same at the national governors meeting he s been gone a long time and we haven t produced a single governor who had the one liner gift that brendan byrne had we only laugh about half as much i m glad to see you all this is perhaps the first opportunity i ve had in this sort of setting anyway to say something i would like to say really to all the people of new jersey which is i want to thank you for the enormous vote of confidence that was given to me and to al gore and to our team in the election of 1996 i was overwhelmed by it and i thank you for it thank you very much i d like to talk for a few minutes in maybe an almost conversational way to try to explain to you what i know both as president and as someone who was a governor for 12 years before i became president and served with 150 other governors about the importance of this election at this moment in time i d like to thank the lieutenant governor of new york who s also here betsy stand up thank you for becoming a democrat and coming across the river to be with us thank you i think it s important that you understand because you have to go out of here and talk to people about this election and you want it to be fundamentally a positive election of choices about the future i promise you that s the way the voters will look at it they ll be trying to figure out if i make this choice what difference will it make to my life my child s life the future of our state and there are some things you need to really focus on about this particular moment in our country s history and what the role of governor any governor would be at this moment in history and therefore what kind of things you should be looking for when i ran for president and i announced six years ago last week i did it against all the odds when no one but my mother really thought i could win he said he knows the feeling i ll tell you there are a lot more who think you can win today senator than when you started a lot more today than when you started i had a very clear reason i did not think my country was moving in the direction that would take it where i thought we ought to go in the century that was upon us and i have said all over america repeatedly like a broken record and the poor folks that have to follow me around get sick of me saying i apologize to them but i actually think about it every day what is it that you want and i said what i want is an america where everybody who is responsible enough to work for it has a shot at the american dream what i want is an america that thank you what i want is an america that is no longer staving off the nuclear threat and the cold war and no longer controls 40 percent of the world s wealth like we did at the end of world war ii but still because of our values and our successes and our willingness to serve still can lead the world toward peace and freedom and security and prosperity and is interested in all kinds of people all over the world and what they can do to help us build a better future for our children and finally what i want is an america that embraces all the diversities you see if you look around this room and celebrates it and says we love all this diversity it s our meal ticket to the future but the most important thing is we are still bound together as one america across all the lines that divide us every day i still say to myself what do you want for america when you re gone and what have you done to advance it today every single day and then it seemed to me obvious that we had to change course so i made a few notes and i said well what kind of policies would you change i said i want policies that basically look to the future not to the past that embrace change not the status quo that promote unity not division we ve got enough of that goodness knows in our country that give everybody a chance not just a few people and that promote us as leaders not followers and i advocated a whole lot of things and we ve done virtually everything that i said i wanted to do in 92 and the vast majority of things now that i advocated in the 96 election and what are the consequences the strongest economy in a generation over 13 million new jobs even a lot of our poorest areas finally beginning to revitalize a declining crime rate an improving environment we learned that last month another 250 000 people moved from the welfare rolls to families that are living off of payrolls and now we ve had a drop of 3 6 million people moving from homes living on public assistance to homes living on payrolls since i took office i m very proud of that it s the biggest drop in the history of the country i want that but in addition to all the policies it also was clear to me we needed a different kind of government not a government that would do everything or a government that would do nothing but a government that would focus on getting our country in good shape creating good conditions and then giving people the tools to make the most of their own lives so for example in the beginning of our term we adopted a budget in 1993 that helped us to cut thousands of governmental programs out that we ve eliminated over the last nearly five years 16 000 pages of federal regulation the federal government is 300 000 people smaller than it was the day i took office but we re not doing everything we were doing before neither are we doing nothing that was my big fight with the republican contract on america i didn t want to see us walk away from our guarantee of health care to the poorest children of our guarantee of a clean environment of our commitment to giving everybody a chance at educational opportunity and of our obligation to take on new challenges as a people through our government when it was necessary so i think we made the right decision you can t do everything you can t do nothing you ve got to balance the budget but you also have to invest in our future and our people that s the path we took the results have been quite good but there is still an awful lot of work to do we have a lot of work to do at the national level we were talking about the lack of affordable child care before i came over here and what a terrible problem it is since we know that the vast majority of children s mental wiring occurs in their first four years of life we were talking a couple of days ago in washington about the need to come to grips with the challenge of the climate changing and the globe and how it could change our lives but how we have to do it in a way that doesn t throw large numbers of people out of work or disrupt our economic progress we are working this week on peace in middle east again hoping that we re making some progress and yesterday i had a meeting to try to further the peace process in northern ireland so there are a lot of things to do but what i want to tell you is this new approach to government and this new way of doing business has made the governor s office even more important today and looking to the 21st century than it has ever been before and it s very important that everybody understands that we have given huge new responsibilities to the state for example all the states now have to move a lot more people from welfare to work but i promise you the easiest work has already been done it s not that the people that are still on welfare don t want to go to work but the ones that are still there may have mr difficulty going to work may need more training may need work in this budget we gave the private sector incentives tax incentives to hire people we ve provided 3 billion more to flow into states and local communities to help create jobs for people for whom the market did not produce jobs but this is something you have to have a governor to tend to and you want people to succeed at home and at work which means you don t want to take a poor person and say i m going to feel better about you when you re drawing a payroll and then say but i feel worse about your child because you can t afford child care which means that if new jersey has reduced its welfare rolls and you ve got a surplus in the welfare account you ought to first of all make sure that those people that are going to work can take of their children with affordable child care they can get a good head start program or some other program that s a big deal we said in washington we can t micromanage this you ve got to figure it out but it makes the governor more important there are a lot of big environmental issues we re trying to face our budget now should allow us to clean up another 500 toxic waste dumps in the next four years remember i came to new jersey in 1996 and pledged to support just that and we got it into the budget and we re going to do it but there are all kinds of other issues that have to be dealt with by you here the whole issue of fiscal responsibility is very important when i became president the deficit was 290 billion projected to go higher now it s going to be under 30 billion this year and 85 percent of it was cut even before we passed the last balanced budget bill we haven t balanced the budget since 1969 and don t let me just say everybody who works for a living who pays a home mortgage or a car payment or makes any kind of payment on credit is better off because we ve reduced this deficit because the interest rates are lower because of it every single person who makes any kind of payment any month on interest is better off and the whole country is better off because the private sector has had more money to invest and that s why we ve got over 13 million more jobs now i ve got people in washington now including our friends in the republican party who said they were fiscal conservatives they re all talking about how they re going to spend the surplus we still have a deficit most people think 30 billion is real money or 28 billion where i come from that s still a nickel or two i m just saying jim mcgreevey has a record here he s got a record of proving that he cares about people he s concerned about people but in every job he s ever held he s shown discipline and fiscal responsibility and the willingness to resist the sort of siren song of the easy moment to look down the road to make sure that first of all the ship of state is being run in a responsible manner every person liberal or conservative black white brown or whatever republican or democrat every person has a vested interest in that in new jersey it s part of what enables us to be a community knowing that our fundamental institutions are properly run with real discipline it s a big issue and sometimes when you re the guy making the decision you have to make decisions that make people mad if you do it but it s important there are lots of other examples i could give but let me just give you one that to me dwarfs all the others the insurance plan by the way i think is important because one of the problems that people that we have with the legitimacy of public officials is that most people think that they don t count they think in the end the big guys always win and i ve done everything i could to try to change that perception in 1993 we cut income taxes on the poorest working people and now it s worth about 30 000 a year to a family of four with an income of 26 000 28 000 or less and we raised the minimum wage and we passed the family leave law and we passed the tv rating system we ve done these things trying to make ordinary people think that they were being given more authority but this insurance thing this auto insurance thing is a big issue because it relates not only to how much money is going out of people s pocket if they re feeling that something has gone wrong and they don t have any power to do anything about it and if you re going to bring people together people have to believe that you re on their side and that when the chips are down something can be done to put things right and make things better so this is about more than money the last thing i want to say to you that i think is terribly important is i cannot tell you how important i believe it is that every single governor have a passionate uncompromising commitment to excellence in education for every single person in the state now part of this is a money problem but a lot of it is not we ve worked hard to promote all kinds of reforms to sort of shake things up in stodgy bureaucracies and put more power down to parents and teachers and principals at the school level and at the same time to raise standards we re supporting programs to put computers and to hook up computers to the internet every classroom and library in the entire united states by the year 2000 we are i think perhaps most importantly this budget i believe that we just passed this balanced budget 30 years from now people will look back on it and say there were two things that were interesting about it and profoundly important one is they balanced the budget for the first time in a generation the second is america finally opened the doors of college to every person who will work for a college education that is in this budget through the tax credits the pell grants the work study positions all of these things are going to literally make it possible so that no one can say i can t go to college because of the money anymore no one of any age even when older people have to go back and get retraining there are tax benefits available but in the end we all know something that we ought to face the united states has the best system of higher education in the world no one believes we have the best system of kindergarten through 12th grade education in the world we have been challenged i want to just state some facts we ve been challenged we have far more diversity by income by race by culture than any other country trying to do what we re doing number one number two you need to know that on the whole american education is better than it was a decade ago our educators have made it better our parents have made it better it s getting better but it s nowhere near where it needs to be we are the only major country in the world that does not have national education standards and some way of measuring whether our children are meeting them not to punish the children but so the parents and the taxpayers in every school district can know how the schools how the district and how the children are doing and i can t do this alone this is not something i m trying to impose on people my proposal which many governors in the other party now oppose although when i wrote it back in 1989 all the governors but one were for it my proposal is very simple that the federal government should pay for but not develop should pay for the development of national exams that reflect the standards that every child should meet in language in the 4th grade and math in the 8th grade start there and then make it voluntarily available to every state and school district and they then can give it to the children but the tests cannot be used to punish the children to hold them back to put them down to do anything it is a measurement so we can finally know the truth now i believe all our kids can learn i could take you into schools in every state in this country that against all the odds are proving that all children can learn therefore it is unacceptable for us to continue to tolerate a system under the guise of local control or state responsibility or anything else that hides from the clear light of day to do better we re not trying to punish anybody we re trying to get better every weekend tens of millions of american are glued to the television set watching football games now we re all glued to the tv set watching the pennant race suppose someone came on television and said i m sorry but due to the sensitivities of the players we re not going to keep score tonight we re going to play for three hours and every now and then we ll change sides and let somebody else bat and i hope you all enjoy it the only difference is the game i m trying to play in education they re doesn t have to be any losers no one has to lose the difference is in the exam we re trying to we re trying to say this is the threshold this is what everybody should know but this is a fence over which everyone can jump we re not trying to rank people first to last we re trying to say 100 percent of the people need to be over this threshold so they can have the kind of future for themselves their own families and this country that we need that is a huge issue and the governors will determine whether it s done and this man is for the proposition that all our children can learn and that every child is entitled to high national standards and an adequate measurement of them and on that issue alone he has the right to claim your support for governor of new jersey the point is when i became president i said we ought to give more power to state government more power to local government we ought to do more things with the private sector we even privatized some government operations i think had been in the federal sector too long but when we do these things and if you like having a smaller leaner more focused national government and you like the results we ve achieved you have to understand it makes everybody else more important it makes all the mayors here more important and it means when you elect a county official or a local official and especially when you elect a governor you are voting whether people know it or not they are voting to give them a wider range of decision making and a bigger impact over their lives than was the case 4 or 8 or 12 years ago and it s very important and i want you to go out there and talk to the people in new jersey about this you don t have to be intensely partisan you can just take these issues one after the other and ask people what they want for the future of their families and this state and conduct your own little mini town hall meeting and tell people first of all they ve got to vote and here s why you are for senator mcgreevey and what you think the issues are i believe you can have a huge impact but i m just telling you it is a big deal don t be under any illusion this is not just about who gets this appointment or that appointment or who gets along with whom in the legislature this is huge now and we have given very much more responsibility and your future is on the line this is a magnificent state with unbelievable assets and challenges that are well within the ability of the people of new jersey to confront them but it matters who the leader is and what the direction is thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton8 11 94 bill_clinton thank you so very much thank you it is great to be with all of you it s especially great to be with you on election day i hope all of you have had a chance to go to the polls and if you haven t i hope you ll go before they close tonight this is a fitting time for the event honoring the white house volunteers because as people all around our country go out and exercise right to vote they re exercising their full right and their full responsibility as an american just as all of you do through you service in the white house at these midterm elections it is critical that people understand that there are clear choices between going forward and going back between a government that works for ordinary families and one that works for organized interests between a government that does something about our great national problems like crime and one that just tries to talk them to death it is very important in this election season that the american people not vote in anger or cynicism you know these last eight days i had the opportunity to go out and make our case to the american people have been bracketed by two events that ought to deny that first the opportunity i had to represent you in the middle east seeing our young men and women in uniform in the gulf going to the signing of the peace treaty i looked in the eyes of millions of people i saw how they viewed our country they know this is a great country they know we have a strong defense a strong economy and we are now also number one in making peace around the world they think this is a good country and so should we and now at the end of this season i look at you and i think of the hours you have worked how you have made even more sacrifices this year than last i do not know how the american people could say anybody just because we ve got some difficult problems and some unresolved challenges which we have always had and we always will have that there is something inherently wrong with america s government if they could see you they would know that we are a good people with a good government working hard to help the american people realize their dreams and to respond to their hopes and their needs i just want to say for the benefit of all of you and of course our friends who are covering this event i wish i could thank all of you by name but i don t want to keep you here all day and into the night i do want to say that i think i should represent name a few representative people we are fortunate to call white house volunteers jeffrey cohelan a former member of the house of representatives and his wife evelyn are loyal volunteers in hillary s correspondence office we thank you for continuing to serve the united states jenny lou dodson lives in charlotte north carolina she works for an airline and she flies to washington every wednesday to work in the white house personnel office let s give her a hand al carpenter worked at the white house from 1947 to 1950 now he s volunteering his time to take calls on the comment line he used to work on the presidential yacht for the voters who haven t voted we don t have one anymore he traveled to key west and the caribbean with president truman now he travels the white house to talk to people over the phone all over the united states eddymarie mccoy worked on capitol hill and has been part of several campaigns like the one that s culminating today now she s sharing her experience with the office of legislative affairs some of you have been through several administrations evelyn and ward russell first volunteered at the white house in 1953 we also have dedicated volunteers from many universities and local colleges like georgetown american george washington howard and george mason we thank you all we have members of the shiloh baptist church here we have students from stone ridge school of the sacred heart and last but not least we have the hardworking ever faithful residents of the u s soldiers and servicemen s home we thank all of you for being here if it weren t for you we literally couldn t do the job we were sent here to do but with your help we can not only continue to make progress for our country continue to keep moving forward with confidence into the future but we can do it in a way that responds to the hopes and the dreams and the real problems of the thousands and thousands and thousands of americans who write this white house who call us and ask for help who send a gesture of their concern a gesture of their friendship a gesture of their hope to this white house all of them deserve to be recognized all of them deserve to be heard all of them deserve to be treated with courtesy with respect and with dignity you have permitted the united states in this administration to do that we could not do it without you and i only hope america knows that the white house like so much of america runs not on requirements but on the volunteer spirit that is represented in this great audience today thank you all and god bless you thank you dem wjclinton8 11 96 bill_clinton good afternoon please be seated before i begin i d like to ask the vice president and leon panetta and erskine bowles to join me up here in no particular order let me begin by once again thanking the american people for the honor they have bestowed upon me and the responsibility they have once again placed in my hands i will work hard over the next four years to uphold their trust to protect our shared values and to meet our common challenges to do that i want our administration to be able to serve the american people as well in the next four years as we have in the past four i must therefore begin by announcing that leon panetta who has been my chief of staff since 1994 will be resigning to return to california i understand why he wants to return home after so many long years and long hours but that doesn t make it any easier for me to see him go no one in recent memory has better served the administration any administration or the american people than leon panetta in what is perhaps the most difficult of all the jobs in public service in washington today as a civil rights official a distinguished member of congress an omb director leon panetta brought his sharp mind and his huge heart to bear on every task he ever undertook he became my chief of staff at a difficult time he leaves with a remarkable record deep reduction in the deficit millions of new jobs a strong defense of programs for those in need including food stamps all these bear leon s stamp just as important as the work he did was the way he did it he saw our white house staff as a family they returned his devotion his easy laugh and his level head kept our priorities straight and our spirits up he and i have often had the opportunity to wonder at the miracle of america that took us this far he is a child of immigrants who came to this country in search of a better life and found it in the walnut groves of california he has become my great friend more than my countryman more than my fellow democrat more even than my fellow worker in the language of his people he is my paison and i love him very much to sylvia christopher carmelo jim elizabeth christina and the grandchildren michael and elizabeth i know how proud he is of you and you must be very proud of him to succeed leon panetta i wanted someone of stature intellect dedication drive and the capacity to do this virtually impossible job both a manager and a leader i m proud to announce that i am naming erskine bowles as the next white house chief of staff he s combined brilliant business success and dedicated public service as an investment banker he recognized that our success come not just from our big firms but from small and medium size ones entrepreneurs with energy and ideas he worked hard to give the opportunity to start new businesses and to expand the ones they were running when i became president i wanted to transform the small business administration from a political backwater to an engine of economic growth erskine bowles did it beyond my wildest expectations he revitalized the sba he doubled the loan volume he dramatically increased loans to women and minority business owners even as he cut paperwork and trimmed bureaucracy i then asked him to serve as the deputy chief of staff he was one of those most responsible for bringing focus and direction to our efforts quietly behind the scenes he led our effort to educate the public on what was at stake in last year s budget fight through it all he became my close friend and trusted adviser he returned to north carolina to be with his family to start a new business and continue his work for the juvenile diabetes foundation which he had previously served as president i know how much erskine bowles loves private life i know that i have asked from him a real sacrifice and not only from him but also from his wife crandall and his children sam anne and bill but his country needs him and i need him i have absolute faith in his ability to do this job he will bring discipline focus and deep values to the work he will help us finish the job the american people sent us here to do in a sense this is a homecoming for him for erskine is a part of our family here and i m happy to have him back as leon will tell you i expect a lot of the chief of staff i kept leon panetta up until 6 00 a m in the election morning playing hearts yes erskine bowles can play hearts he also plays golf but he plays golf better than he plays hearts i prefer to focus on his hearts playing it has become more apparent than ever that our country is moving forward with confidence and vigor toward the 21st century it has become more apparent than ever since the election that the american people want us to fulfill our responsibilities as democrats republicans and independents second and americans first to set aside our differences and join hands to make the most of this moment of possibility that s how we achieved so much at the end of the past congress just think of what happened historic welfare reform a minimum wage increase dramatic expansion of pension opportunities for people in small businesses the adoption tax credit the extension of the brady bill to cover incidences of domestic violence the kennedy kassebaum health care reform bill that let s people keep their health insurance as they change jobs or when someone in the family has been sick an end to the drive by pregnancies and deliveries where people are kicked out of the hospital after only 24 hours help for families with mental health needs and assistance to vietnam veterans children with spina bifida all this happened and shows you what we can do if we work together to give our people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives it s a good sign for america that all parties now say they want to reach common ground and i want us to forge a partnership to produce results for the american people on tuesday our people voted for the ideas of the vital american center now let us make that vital center the place for the vigorous actions to move us into the 21st century we should begin with our most pressing challenges balancing the budget giving our children the world s best education opening wide the doors of college to everyone willing to work for them finishing the job of welfare reform passing real campaign finance reform nothing is more fundamental than balancing the budget our progress has already produced lower interest rates steady growth expanded homeownership now we must keep our economy going steady and strong by finishing the job of balancing the budget in a way that truly reflects our values i am inviting the bipartisan leadership of congress to meet with me next week here at the white house to discuss how we can develop a plan together to pass a balanced budget and to keep our economy going i ve asked leon panetta and omb director frank raines to coordinate this effort i want these negotiations to cover a broad range of issues involved in balancing the budget including strengthening the medicare trust fund cuts in spending and a tax cut i believe our highest priority must be education especially college opportunities as i told the american people we should make the 13th and 14th years of education as universal as a high school diploma is today so will work to see to it that this balanced budget includes the education tax cuts i outlined during the campaign which had very broad and overwhelming support among the american people i will also discuss with the congressional leadership how we can enact bipartisan campaign finance reform as soon as possible we clearly have a unique moment of opportunity now when the public and you in the press are focused on this issue now is the time to seize it before the moment fades the american people will be watching to see whether our deeds match our words the lesson of our history is clear when we put aside partisanship embrace the best ideas regardless of where they come from and work for principled compromise we can move america not left or right but forward that is what i am determined to do dem wjclinton8 11 97 bill_clinton thank you well you have just made me feel the way i did thank you i sort of feel the way i did when i made my very first speech as a public official more than 20 years ago now you know elizabeth just stood up here and gave that magnificent speech wasn t she great and she actually said about everything that could be said and then you gave me this wonderful welcome which makes me reluctant to say anything and i was sitting up here i was thinking somehow flashing back to my mind this reminded me of a rotary club banquet i spoke at and i ll tell you why here s what happened only the punch line is the same but you ll have to listen to this i had just taken office as attorney general almost 21 years ago and they asked me to speak to this rotary club banquet and there were 500 people there the dinner started at 6 30 i didn t get up to speak till a quarter to 10 00 everybody that was at this banquet got introduced but three people and they went home mad the guy who got up to introduce me was so nervous he didn t know what to do and we had been there forever and he finally said and he didn t mean it this way but here s what he said he said in my introduction he said you know we could have stopped here and have had a very nice evening and we could have stopped with the applause and elizabeth s speech and had a great evening i m delighted to be here i thank the members of congress who are here i congratulate your honorees i know that a number of my recent appointees are here including virginia apuzzo our new assistant for management and administration fred hochberg john berry jim hormel where s jim hormel he s here jesse white hal creal now hal creal is now the most popular person i have appointed in the congress because the maritime commission broke the impasse on the japanese ports which destroys another stereotype here i am so grateful for what they did and a lot of americans are going to have a decent income because of it and i want to thank him for that we have a lot of people here from the white house as well i want to thank richard socarides marsha scott karen tramantano sean maloney tom shea and our aids czar sandy thurman for all their work and because it s dark here i would like to ask everyone who works for this administration in any department of the federal government or who has an appointment in any way to please stand including the white house thank you a little more than six years ago i had this crazy idea that i ought to run for president only my mother thought i could win and at the time i was so obsessed with what i thought had to be done i thought winning would take care of itself what bothered me was that our country seemed to be drifting and divided as we moved into a new and exciting and challenging area where we were living differently working differently relating to each other and the rest of the world in very different ways on the edge of a new century and i sat down alone before i decided to do this and asked myself what is it that you want america to look like when you re done if you win my vision for the 21st century now i have said hundreds and hundreds of times but i still think about it every day i want this to be a country where every child and every person who is responsible enough to work for it can live the american dream i want this country to embrace the wider world and continue to be the strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity and i want us to come together across all our lines of difference into one america that is my vision it drives me every day i think if we really could create a society where there is opportunity for all and responsibility from all and we believed in a community of all americans we could truly meet every problem we have and seize every opportunity we have for more than two centuries now our country has had to meet challenge after challenge after challenge we have had to continue to lift ourselves beyond what we thought america meant our ideals were never meant to be frozen in stone or time keep in mind when we started out with thomas jefferson s credo that all of us are created equal by god what that really meant in civic political terms was that you had to be white you had to be male and that wasn t enough you had to own property which would have left my crowd out when i was a boy over time we have had to redefine the words that we started with not because there was anything wrong with them and their universal power and strength of liberty and justice but because we were limited in our imaginations about how we could live and what we were capable of and how we should live indeed the story of how we kept going higher and higher and higher to new and higher definitions and more meaningful definitions of equality and dignity and freedom is in its essence the fundamental story of our country fifty years ago president truman stood at a new frontier in our defining struggle on civil rights slavery had ended a long time before but segregation remained harry truman stood before the lincoln memorial and said it is more important today than ever to ensure that all americans enjoy the rights of freedom and equality when i say all americans i mean all americans well my friends all americans still means all americans we all know that it is an ideal and not perfectly real now we all know that some of the old kinds of discrimination we have sought to rid ourselves of by law and purge our spirits of still exist in america today we all know that there is continuing discrimination against gays and lesbians but we also know that if we re ever going to build one america then all americans including you and those whom you represent have got to be a part of it to be sure no president can grant rights our ideals and our history hold that they are inalienable embedded in our constitution amplified over time by our courts and legislature i cannot grant them but i am bound by my oath of office and the burden of history to reaffirm them all america loses if we let prejudice and discrimination stifle the hopes or deny the potential of a single american all america loses when any person is denied or forced out of a job because of sexual orientation being gay the last time i thought about it seemed to have nothing to do with the ability to read a balance book fix a broken bone or change a spark plug for generations the american dream has represented a fundamental compact among our people if you take responsibility and work hard you have the right to achieve a better life for yourself and a better future for your family equal opportunity for all special privileges for none a fate shared by americans regardless of political views we believe or we all say we believe that all citizens should have the chance to rise as far as their god given talents will take them what counts is energy and honesty and talent no arbitrary distinctions should bar the way so when we deny opportunity because of ancestry or religion race or gender disability or sexual orientation we break the compact it is wrong and it should be illegal once again i call upon congress to honor our most cherished principles and make the employment non discrimination act the law of the land i also come here tonight to ask you for another favor protecting the civil rights of all americans wait wait wait i would have been disappointed if you hadn t been here tonight i m kind of used to this people with aids are dying but since i ve become president we re spending 10 times as much per fatality on people with aids as people with breast cancer or prostate cancer and the drugs are being approved more quickly and a lot of people are living normal lives we just have to keep working on it i thank you but this too is part of what makes america great we all have our say and nobody has to be afraid when he or she screams at the president that s a good thing that s a good thing and at a time when so many people feel their voices will never be heard that s a good thing what is not a good thing however is when people believe their free speech rights trump yours that s not good that s not now i want to ask you for a favor you want us to pass the employment non discrimination act you know when we do and i believe it will pass you know when we do it will have to be enforced the law on the books only works if it is also a law in the life of america let me say i thank you very much for your support of my nominee for the office of civil rights bill lee i thank you for that but he too comes from a family that has known discrimination and now he is being discriminated against not because there is anything wrong with his qualifications not because anybody believes he is not even tempered but because some members of the senate disagree with his views on affirmative action now if i have to appoint a head of the office of civil rights who is against affirmative action it s going to be vacant a long time that office is not there to advocate or promote primarily to advocate or promote the policies of the government when it comes to affirmative action it s there to enforce the existing laws against discrimination you hope someday you will have one of those existing laws we need somebody to enforce the laws and bill lee should be confirmed and i ask you to help me to get him confirmed i d like to say just one more word there are some people who aren t in this room tonight who aren t comfortable yet with you and won t be comfortable with me for being here wait a minute this is serious on issue after issue involving gays and lesbians survey after survey shows that the most important determinant of people s attitudes is whether they are aware whether they knowingly have had a family or a friendship or a work relation with a gay person now i hope that we will embrace good people who are trying to overcome their fears after all all of us can look back in history and see what the right thing to do was it is quite another thing to look ahead and light the way most people are preoccupied with the burdens of daily living most of us as we grow older become whether we like it or not somewhat more limited in our imaginations so i think one of the greatest things we have to do still is just to increase the ability of americans who do not yet know that gays and lesbians are their fellow americans in every sense of the word to feel that way i think it s very important when i say i believe all americans means all americans i see the faces of the friends of 35 years when i say all americans means all americans i see the faces of the people who stood up when i asked the people who are part of our administration to stand tonight when i say all americans means all americans i see kind unbelievably generous giving people back in my home state who helped my family and my friends when they were in need it is a different story when you know what you are seeing so i say to you tonight should we change the law you bet should we keep fighting discrimination absolutely is this hate crimes conference important it is terribly important but we have to broaden the imagination of america we are redefining in practical terms the immutable ideals that have guided us from the beginning again i say we have to make sure that for every single person in our country all americans means all americans after experiencing the horrors of the civil war and witnessing the transformation of the previous century walt whitman said that our greatest strength was that we are an embracing nation in his words a union holding all fusing absorbing tolerating all let us move forward in the spirit of that one america let us realize that this is a good obligation that has been imposed upon our generation and a grand opportunity once again to lift america to a higher level of unity once again to redefine and to strengthen and to ensure one america for a new century and a new generation of our precious children thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton8 12 00 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you one of my critics once said it would be a cold day when i came to nebraska but i think i got a pretty warm welcome here today and i thank you very very much i want to thank all of those who welcomed me but especially thank you brigadier general power thank you admiral mies i thank the officers and enlisted personnel here i want to thank senator bob kerrey for being first my colleague we were governors together and we have been friends for a long time and he has superbly served the people of nebraska and the united states in the senate i know you ll miss him and i thank him i also want to congratulate his successor with whom i also served as governor thank you very much for running and serving senator elect ben nelson and mrs nelson thank you very much i brought with me today former nebraska congressman peter hoagland and i thank him secretary of state moore mayor daub acting mayor sorensen of bellevue and the other elected officials who are here you know earlier today i went to kearney to speak at the university of nebraska there to the young people about an american foreign policy for the 21st century and i made a pretty simple argument that the world is getting smaller and smaller that people and goods and ideas and information are crossing national borders more freely and faster than ever before and that therefore it was quite necessary even here in the heartland of america that every citizen of our country care about what goes on beyond our borders and support the next president and the next congress across party lines in making the kinds of decisions that will make america safer and more prosperous and a better partner in an interdependent world now one of the things that i wanted to do in coming here is to say that none of that would be possible if our foreign policy was not backed by the finest military in the entire world i was told a couple of weeks ago you know since i m a short termer as you might say all the statisticians are coming up to me and saying well did you know this did you know that did you know the other thing and i was told a couple of weeks ago by one of the people who is supposed to look at all the white house records that i have now visited more military units than any president in the history of the country having said that i do not believe my service in that regard would have been complete if i hadn t come to offutt air force base to see the people of the fighting 55th and the strategic command many of those serving in the 55th couldn t be with us today you heard the general say the sun never sets on the 55th they are now serving on this day from okinawa to mildenhall to saudi arabia keeping a watchful eye so the rest of us can be secure for decades now for a full decade in the persian gulf the 55th has helped check the ambitions of saddam hussein and guard peace in the region in bosnia in kosovo you risk your lives to help stop genocide the days of winter may be short here but it is really true that the sun never sets on you and your work i also want to honor the men and women of the strategic command for every minute of every day during the past 50 years you and your predecessors at the strategic air command have never let down our guard the cold war may be over but we still need you you are the cornerstone of our deterrence and our security i also want to recognize the other units who serve here the defense finance and accounting service out of omaha the u s air force heartland of america band the 311th airlift flight the 343rd air force recruiting squadron and the u s air force weather agency would someone please ask them to turn up the heat a little bit let me just say one other thing these last eight years have been a great honor for me and it has been a joy to serve but the one thing that i will leave office feeling more strongly than i did even on the day i took the oath of office almost eight years ago is that the true greatness of america resides not in its leaders but in its citizens and yes it s important who wins and yes it s important that we all believe that the system is truly democratic and fair but our system is premised on the hard work the innovation the values and the devotion to freedom of our citizens and especially of course those who serve us in uniform america is a different and better place than it was eight years ago we ve had all kinds of economic progress but a lot of social progress as well and i would just like to say to you that as you look ahead in this new century we will become more and more interdependent on each other and on people beyond our borders it will become more and more important therefore that every person has a chance that every person carries his or her own load and that we always remember we do better when we work together we have a great future out there but we ve got some challenges if you look at where we are now compared to where we were eight years ago we re here because as a people we worked hard we worked more closely together we thought about the future and we decided to pay the price for that future that s why we re still around here after over 224 years so you stay with it stay with it here at offutt stay with it here in nebraska keep looking toward tomorrow and remember that i may have been late but i sure was glad when i got here thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton8 12 00a bill_clinton thank you very much didn t casey do a good job she was great i d like to thank chancellor johnston for her kind remarks and the honorary degree and thank you president smith and members of the board of trustees to both the students and the other members thank you governor for your welcome and i thank the other state officials who are here i am especially grateful that my long time friend and former colleague as governor your retiring senator bob kerrey flew down here with me today thank you bob for your service along with our former nebraska congressman peter hoagland thank you for coming with me i congratulate ben nelson on his election to the united states senate governor morrison thank you for being here today and i want to say a special word of thanks to my great friend your former senator jim exon who persuaded me to come here and to come to kearney he said should be here when i came in here and i looked at this crowd one of my staff members joked that we had found a building in nebraska that would hold every single democrat and a few charitable republicans to boot let me say i m glad that i finally made it to nebraska there were a lot of signs outside that said you saved the best until last and i saw the patriotism and the spirit of the people all the children holding the american flags it was very very moving coming in all the schools were let out and there were hundreds and hundreds of people along the way and it made us a little bit late and for that i m sorry but i did actually stop and we got out and shook hands with one group of schoolchildren there just to thank them for being in the cold so i thank them for that i was also reminded at the airport that we are literally in the heartland of america a gentleman at the airport gave me a sweatshirt that had a little map of nebraska with kearney and it had a line and it said 1 300 miles to new york and 1 300 miles to san francisco most americans have probably forgotten this but back in the 1870s there was actually talk of relocating our nation s capital away from washington d c to a more central location and a local publisher in this community named moses henry sydenham launched a national campaign to nominate kearney for the nation s capital he promised to rename it new washington and to use the real estate profits to pay off the national debt critics of his proposal asked him what in the world he would do with all those big fancy buildings in old washington he said it was simple he would turn them into asylums well history took a different course except for that part about turning those buildings into asylums i have occupied one for the last eight years and we are finally paying off the national debt which is good thank you but since half of washington is in kearney today maybe we should think again about moving the capital i rather like it here i want to say again i thank the people of this community for a wonderful welcome and all of you in the university community especially i also want to say again how impressed i was by what casey had to say because i came here today not just to keep my promise to visit nebraska but to keep working on something at the very end of my term i have been trying for eight years to do which is to persuade ordinary hard working american citizens in the heartland of america that you should be concerned about what goes on beyond our nation s borders and what our role in the rest of the world is because the world is growing smaller and smaller and more interdependent every nebraska farmer knows that and indeed when senator kerrey and i visited the units of the nebraska air national guard out there we asked them where the guardsmen were we found out that you have some nebraska guardsman now still in kosovo so we are personally affected by it but i don t think i have still people say i m a pretty good talker but i still don t think i ve persuaded the american people by big majorities that you really ought to care a lot about foreign policy about our relationship to the rest of the world about what we re doing and the reason is in an interdependent world we are all directly affected by what goes on beyond our borders sure in economics but in other ways as well and by what we decide to do or not do about it this is an immensely patriotic community that s one thing bob kerrey kept saying over and over again look at all those people holding the flag these people love their country but what we have to do is be wise patriots this country is still around after 224 years because our founders not only loved our country they were smart they were smart enough to figure out how to give us a system that as we have seen in the last few weeks can survive just about anything and i want to ask you again today just give me a few minutes to make the case in the heartland about why there is no longer a clear bright line dividing america s domestic concerns and america s foreign policy concerns and why every american who wants to be a good citizen who wants to vote in every election should know more about the rest of the world and have a clearer idea about what we re supposed to be doing out there and how it affects how you live in kearney because i think it is profoundly important let s start with a few basics never before have we enjoyed at the same time so much prosperity and social progress with the absence of domestic crisis or overwhelming foreign threats we re in the midst of the longest economic expansion in our history with the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years the lowest crime rates in 27 years three years of surpluses in a row and three years of paying down the national debt for the first time in 50 years the highest homeownership and college going rate in history today we learned that the november unemployment rate was 4 percent staying at that 30 year low now this is good news for america but there is good news beyond our borders for our values and our interests in the last few years for the first time in all human history more than half the people on the face of the earth live under governments that they voted for that they chose and more and more even in nations that have not yet completely embraced democracy more and more people especially young people see our creative entrepreneurial society with more and more personal freedom as the model for the success they want last month i went to vietnam where america fought in a very difficult war for a long time where senator kerrey earned the medal of honor and nearly 60 000 americans died and 3 million vietnamese died on both sides of the conflict so i was interested to see what sort of a reception that i would get and the united states would get because the government there remains in the hands of a communist leadership and frankly some of them didn t know what to make about america showing up but everywhere i went from hanoi to ho chi minh city formerly saigon tens of thousands of people appeared out of nowhere not for me for america for the idea of america sixty percent of the people who live in vietnam are under 30 because of the tragedy of the war only 5 percent are over 60 but the ones under 30 like what they know about america they want to be our partners in the future and they want to have the chance to build the kind of future they think young people in this country have that is a priceless gift so the first thing i want to say especially to the young people here is that we should all be grateful that we are so fortunate to be alive at this moment of prosperity military and political power social progress and prestige for america but the really important question is what do we intend to make of this moment will we be grateful but basically complacent being the political equivalent of couch potatoes will we assume that in this era of the internet freedom peace and prosperity will just spread that all we have to do is kind of sit back hook the world up to aol and wait for people to beat their swords into shares on the nasdaq or will we understand that no change is inevitable change is inevitable but the particular change is not and we have to actually make some decisions if we re going to seize the opportunities and meet the challenges before us to put it in another way the train of globalization cannot be reversed but it has more than one possible destination if we want america to stay on the right track if we want other people to be on that track and have the chance to enjoy peace and prosperity we have no choice but to try to lead the train for example you all applauded when i said more than half the people in the world live under governments of their own choosing for the first time in history we d like to keep that process going but we know that democracy in some places is fragile and it could be reversed we want more nations to see ethnic and religious diversity as a source of strength you know what the chancellor said when the choir was singing i said boy they re good she said they got a lot more rhythm since i came here we re laughing casey talked about her hispanic heritage i was shaking hands with these kids out on the street and about the third young boy i shook hands with was of asian descent this is a more interesting country than it has ever been everywhere i go i mean you can t be president anymore unless you understand the concerns of at least 50 different groups it s an interesting thing for us this is a big plus even though we still have our problems with hate crimes and racial or religious or other instances but basically our diversity has come to be something that makes life more interesting in america because we realize that what unites us is more important than what divides us that our common humanity anchors us in a way that allows us to feel secure about our differences so we can celebrate them and this is important i don t like to use the word tolerance in this context because tolerance implies that there s a dominant culture putting up with a subordinate one i don t really think that s where we re going as america i think we re going to the point where we say here are our common values and if you sign on to those we respect you we treat you as an equal and we celebrate and find interesting the differences now that s what we would like for every place and we know that if everybody deals that way that america s going to do very well in the global society of the 21st century because there s somebody here from everywhere else and that s good you know we re going to do very very well as the world becomes more interdependent so that s the outcome we want but all we have to do is read the paper everyday to know that old hatreds die hard and their persistence from bosnia and kosovo to the middle east to northern ireland to the african tribal wars to places like east timor have in our time led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and countries being impoverished for 10 years or more because people couldn t give up their old hatreds to build a new future together so how this comes out is not at all inevitable we want global trade to keep our economy growing nebraska farmers like it when people open their markets and the most efficient farmers in the world can sell their food to people who need to buy it but it is possible that financial crisis abroad could wreck that system as farmers here found out when the asian financial crisis hit a couple years ago or that alienation from global capitalism by people who aren t a part of it will drive whole countries away we want global trade to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty from india to china to africa we know if it happens it will create a big market for everything american from corn to cars to computers and it will give all of us new ideas and new innovation and we ll all help each other in constructive competition but the gap between rich and poor nations could continue to widen and bring more misery more environmental destruction more health problems more and more young people in poor countries just checking out of wanting to be part of a global system because they think there is nothing in it for them we want advances in technology to keep making our lives better i went last year to that annual show in chicago of all the latest high tech gadgets and i held in my hand in my palm a little plastic computer with a complete keyboard that i held in my hand that also was connected to the internet and i was getting cnn on those tiny little i don t see well enough in my old age to even use the thing it s so small and my hands were too big to effectively use the keyboard it was so small very exciting but the same technological breakthroughs that put that computer in the palm of my hand could end up making it possible to create smaller and smaller chemical or biological or nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists and all the things we re learning about computers will be learned by people who because they belong to organized crime units or narco traffickers or terrorists would like to pierce our secure networks and get information or spread viruses that wreck our most vital systems so i m a wild eyed optimist but i ve lived long enough to know that things can happen that are not necessarily what you want and that every opportunity brings with it new responsibilities because the organized forces of destruction can take advantage of them all these opportunities too a long time ago one of your citizens william jennings bryan said our destiny is a matter of choice it is not a thing to be waited for it is a thing to be achieved we have to continue to achieve america s destiny and the point i want to make is that it cannot be achieved in the 21st century without american citizens who care about know about and understand what is going on beyond our borders and what we re supposed to do about it now for the last eight years i ve had the honor of working with people in congress principled people of both parties like both your senators bob kerrey and chuck hagel to try to make a choice for american leadership in the post cold war global information age i think it s been good for america and for people around the world and as i leave office i think america should continue to build a foreign policy for the global age based on five broad principles which i would like to briefly state and explain first everything we want to achieve in the world just about depends upon maintaining strong alliances with people who share our interests and our values and adapting those alliances to meet today s and tomorrow s challenges for example our most important alliance with europe is the north atlantic treaty organization nato it was organized to defend europe against the soviet union in the cold war when i became president the cold war was over and the alliance was in doubt what s it for anyway who s going to be in it what s it supposed to do but the values that we shared with europe and the interest we shared were very much threatened when i became president by a vicious genocidal war in bosnia our european allies were aiding the victims heroically but unintentionally shielding the victimizers by not stopping them and for the first time since world war ii america was refusing to help to defeat a serious threat to peace in europe but all that s changed america decided to lead our european allies decided to work with us we revitalized the nato alliance we gave it new missions new members from behind the old iron curtain a new partnership with russia we finally ended the war in bosnia we negotiated a peace that grows stronger steadily when ethnic cleansing erupted in kosovo we acted decisively to stop that and send almost a million people back home today the serbian leader who began the balkan wars slobodan milosevic has been deposed by his own people and instead of fighting something bad we re trying to finish something worthy a europe that is united democratic and peaceful completely for the first time in all human history that takes a big burden off america in the future and give us a big big set of economic and political partners to deal with the world s challenges now here s the decision for today do we believe that we did the right thing or not if we do we have to stay the course keep expanding nato keep working with the russians keep burden sharing to do what needs to be done i don t think most people know this but in kosovo today we provide less than 20 percent of the troops and the funds but we would not be there as an alliance if the united states had not agreed to do its part america cannot lead if we walk away from our friends and our neighbors the same thing is true in asia we fought three wars in asia in the 20th century huge numbers of americans died there from world war ii through korea through vietnam what should we do now that the cold war is over but the future is uncertain what we have done is to decide to keep our troops in the pacific to renew our alliance with japan we sent ships to keep tensions from escalating between china and taiwan we stood by south korea and diminished the nuclear threat from north korea and we supported the south korean president s decision to seek to end 50 years of tension on the korean peninsula for which he justifiably won the nobel peace prize should we withdraw from asia i don t think so i think we ought to stay there modernize our alliances and keep the peace so we don t have to fight any more wars in the 21st century the third thing i want to say about the alliances is that the 21st century world is going to be about more than great power politics which means we can t just think about east asia and europe we need a systematic committed long term relationship with our neighbors in latin america and the caribbean with south asia next to china the most populous place on earth and with africa where 800 million people live one of the most yes you can clap for that that s all right so i think that s important we ve been estranged from india for 50 years do you know how many people live in india nine hundred and eighty million in 30 years india will be more populous than china in silicon valley today there are 700 high tech companies headed by indians 700 in one place this is totally off the radar screen of american policy during the cold war so i would encourage all of you who like casey are involved in some sort of international studies not to just think about america s traditional concerns but to think about what we re going to do with latin america and the caribbean with sub saharan africa and with south asia because a lot of our future will be there so beyond alliances the second principle is that we have to build if we can constructive relationships with our former adversaries russia and china one of the big questions that will define the world for the next 10 years is how will russia and china define their greatness in the 21st century will they define it as their ability to dominate their neighbors or to control their own people or will they define it in a more modern sense in their ability to develop their people s capacity to cooperate with their neighbors to compete and win in a global economy and a global society what decision they make will have a huge impact on how every young person in this audience lives it will define what kind of defense budget we have to have how many folks we have to enroll in the armed services where we have to send them what we have to do it s huge now we cannot make that decision for russia or for china they ll make that decision for themselves but we can control what we do and what we do will have some impact on what they decide so we should say to them what we ve been trying to say for eight years if you will accept the rules and the responsibilities of membership in the world community we want to make sure you get the full benefits and be a full partner not a junior partner we also have to say we have to feel free to speak firmly and honestly when we think what you do is wrong by international standards when we ve worked together with russia in a positive way we ve made real progress russia took its troops out of estonia lithuania and latvia and put them in joint missions with nato something nobody ever thought would happen we re serving together in bosnia and kosovo russia helped us find a just end to the war in kosovo they worked with us to eliminate 5 000 nuclear warheads from the old soviet union and safeguard those that are still there now do we agree with everything in russia no we think there has been too much corruption at times we don t agree with wars in chechnya we think were cruel and self defeating we don t agree with backsliding on the free press that we see but we need a little perspective here when i went to moscow for the first time as president in 1993 people were still lining up for bread recovering from inflation that got to 2 500 percent many people were predicting that an impoverished russia would go back to communism or turn to fascism since then russia has had five five free elections and every time people have voted to deepen democracy not to weaken it the economy is growing now are the positive trends inevitable no but they are more than possible and it s in our interests to encourage them the same thing is true in china we have tried to encourage change by bringing china into international systems where there are rules and responsibilities from non proliferation to trade that s what i think will happen with china coming into the world trade organization it is a statement by them by agreeing to the conditions of membership that they can t succeed over the long run without opening to the world it is a declaration of interdependence it increases the chance that they ll make a good decision rather than a negative one about what they re going to do in the 21st century world and if china goes on and follows through with this they ll have to dismantle a lot of their old command and control economy which gave the communist party so much power they ll open their doors to more foreign investment and more foreign information and the internet revolution will it inevitably bring freedom no but it will increase the chances of china taking the right course so i believe if we stay with this course one of the most profoundly positive changes the generation of young people in this audience will see could be the change that ultimately comes to china and i told you the vietnam story i felt the same thing in shanghai i felt the same thing walking in little villages and talking to people who were electing their mayors for the first time in china where there are at least now a million local villages electing their local officials so alliances constructive relations with russia and china the third thing we have to recognize is that local conflicts can become world wide headaches if they re allowed to fester therefore whenever possible we should stop them before they get out of hand that s why we ve worked for peace in the balkans between greece and turkey on cyprus between india and pakistan ethiopia and eritrea that s why i m going back to northern ireland next week the land of my ancestors and it s why we ve worked so hard to make america a force for peace in the middle east the home of the world s three great monotheistic religions where god is reminding us every day that we are not in control but we have made a lot of progress we ve seen a peace treaty between israel and jordan we saw a sweeping agreement between the israelis and the palestinians and progress toward implementing it over the last eight years but what s happened is they re down to the hedgerows now and the hard decisions and they ve gotten to those fundamental identity questions where they have to decide what i was talking about earlier is it possible for them to look at each other and see their common humanity and find a solution in which neither side can say i have vanquished the other or have there been so many years of history welling up inside them that neither side can let go that is the issue and we will continue to work on it but the main point i want to make to you is you should want your president and your government involved in these things and you should support your congress if they invest some of your money in the cause of peace and development in these hot spots in the world and let me say again this is not inconsistent with saying that people ought to take the lead in their own backyard i think most americans feel if the europeans can take the lead in europe they ought to do it the same thing with the asians in asia and the africans in africa what i want you to understand is that we have unique capabilities and unique confidence building capacity in so many parts of the world that if we re just involved a little bit we can make a huge difference our role was critical in the balkans but it was also critical in east timor do you remember when all those people were getting killed in east timor you saw it on television every night and people that couldn t find it on a map all of a sudden were living with it every single night we provided about 500 troops to provide support for the international operations the australians led there but it made all the difference we re training peacekeepers in sierra leone they don t want us to go there and fight but they want us to train the peacekeepers we ve been involved in trying to settle a war between ethiopia and eritrea that has claimed over 60 000 lives that most people don t know much about but could cause us a world of trouble and besides it s just tragic we had 10 people 10 total in the jungle when we settled the conflict between east ecuador and peru and got them to agree but they couldn t agree to let it go unless we america agreed to send 10 people into a remote place on the border of these two countries because they knew we could be trusted to do what they had agreed ought to be done now you ought to be proud of that for your country but the only point i want to make is we should do things with other people and they ought to do their part in their own backyard but we re in a unique position in history now there is no other military superpower or economic superpower and we can do some things because we ve maintained a strong military nobody else can do and i ll be gone in a few weeks and america will have a new president and a new congress but you ought to support them when they want to do these things because it s very very important to the stability and future of the world one other thing i want to say we ought to pay our u n dues and pay our fair share of peacekeeping operations now nobody in the world benefits from stability more than we do nobody nobody makes more money out of it just think about pure naked self interest nobody and when we pay for this peacekeeping i ll say more about it in a minute but we get more than our money s worth out of it and when we walk away from our responsibilities people resent us they resent our prosperity they resent our power and in the end when a whole lot of people resent you sooner or later they find some way to manifest it when we work with each other and do things that we don t just have to do in the moment we build a common future the fourth point i would like to make to you is that this growing openness of borders and technology is changing our national security priorities people information ideas and goods move around more freely and faster than ever before that makes us more vulnerable first to the organized forces of destruction narco traffickers terrorists organized criminals they are going to work more and more together with growing access to more and more sophisticated technology part of the challenge is just to get rid of as many weapons of mass destruction as possible that s why we got the states of the former soviet union outside russia to give up their nuclear arsenals and we negotiated a world wide treaty to ban chemical weapons that s why we forced iraq to sell its oil for money that can go to food and medicine but not to rebuilding its weapons and i think the other countries of the world that are willing to let them spend that money rebuilding their weapons systems are wrong and i hope that we can strengthen the resolve of the world not to let saddam hussein rebuild the chemical weapons network and other weapons systems that are bad it s why we negotiated a freeze on plutonium production with north korea now dealing with terrorists is harder as we have seen in the tragedy of the uss cole why because terrorists unlike countries cannot be contained as easily and it s harder to deter them through threats of retaliation they operate across borders so we have got to strengthen our cooperation across borders we have succeeded in preventing a lot of terrorist attacks there were many planned during the millennium celebration that we prevented we have arrested a lot of terrorists including those who bombed the world trade center and those who were involved in several other killings in this country and make no mistake about it we will do the same for those who killed our brave navy personnel on the uss cole but the most important thing is to prevent bad things from happening and one of the biggest threats to the future is going to be cyberterrorism people fooling with your computer networks trying to shut down your phones erase bank records mess up airline schedules do things to interrupt the fabric of life now we have the first national strategy to protect america s computer systems and critical infrastructure against that kind of sabotage it includes interestingly enough a scholarship for service program to help students who are studying information security and technology pay for their education if they will give us a couple of years service in the government it s really hard to get talented people in the government because we can t pay them enough you ve got 27 year old young people worth 200 or 300 million if they start the right kind of com company it s pretty hard to say come be a gs 13 you know but if we can educate enough people we can at least get them in their early years and that s important we funded this program for the very first time this year thanks to bipartisan support and let me say i d also like to congratulate the university of nebraska some of you perhaps know this but nebraska has set up a new information assurance center which is dedicated to the same exact goal we need more universities to follow your lead this is going to be a big deal in the future a big deal there are other new things you need to think about in national security terms climate change could become a national security issue the last decade was the warmest in a thousand years if the next 50 years are as warm as the last decade you will see the beginning of flooding of the sugar cane fields in louisiana and the florida everglades you will see the patterns of agricultural production in america begin to shift it s still cold enough in nebraska you ll probably be all right for another 50 years i mean we l dem wjclinton8 12 00b bill_clinton thank you very much first let me say to my great friend vin to laurel thank you for having me here it took me a little while to get to nebraska i was at offutt and i told the crowd i said one of my sort of critics said it ll be a cold day when the president comes to nebraska so i just picked a cold day and showed up and i m very glad all of you came and i m glad that this wonderful home has been opened to us and previously a few months ago to hillary something for which i m very grateful i expect some of you where here that night and i m very grateful for that i want to say congratulations to ben and to dianne it s great news for me you know i served with both ben nelson and bob kerrey when i was a governor i had a hard time getting a promotion i was a governor for 12 years and i never got bored with it i d be happy if i were doing it still but we served together and i was thrilled when ben genuinely mustered the courage both of them together to run i ve been through that deal where you run for something and it doesn t work out and then it s all very well everybody else is telling you run to again but they don t know how bad it hurts when it doesn t work and the sort of pain threshold you have to cross to gather yourself together again and they did it and i really believe he ll be an excellent senator and we need people representing our party in congress who have a sense of compassion and who are progressive but who can be trusted to manage the economy as well because the thing that we have proved i think in the last eight years and i m coming to bob kerrey on this is that the most progressive social policy begins with a good economic policy that keeps interest rates down lets the private sector grow creates jobs with low unemployment makes it possible for people to borrow money to start or expand businesses to pay for college loans or car loans or credit cards or home mortgages that s why we ve got over two thirds of the american people in their own homes over 70 percent in nebraska for the first time in the history of the country because we ve had a combination of we had a good progressive policy on health care on education we had a balanced policy on crime but it started with an economic policy that would work and when you put it all together we wound up with more economic progress and social progress than the country has had certainly in our lifetime so i m very grateful for that but in order to do it you have to have the right balance of people in the congress and certainly representing our party so i m glad he s going to congress to the senate and he s going to have a partner in the new senator from new york which i m also very proud of bob kerrey and i served together a long time ago we ve been together in a lot of places we were even at the indianapolis 500 once you remember that nineteen eighty six or 87 a long time ago and we ve been friends a long time i had very mixed feelings when he announced that he wanted to retire from the senate i was happy for him because i think he s got a truly exciting opportunity which i believe will still keep him in the spotlight in national political life at least i hope it does i was sorry for the people of nebraska and sorry for the united states senate because the senate will be a poorer place when i was a young man in college i worked in the united states senate and it was a time that was very contentious and quite partisan in some ways we were having all the civil rights and the vietnam war battles of the late johnson years when i went to work in the senate but the senate was a place where there were eight or 10 or 15 people that everybody without regard to their party respected and thought you know these people talk they weren t carrying the party line they weren t just trying to hurt somebody they were standing up there saying something that they really believed would make america a better place even if they didn t agree no one really believed that they were just motivated by kind of blind partisanship or power grabbing or manipulation they believed it was right and i think bob kerrey has been that kind of senator he s been willing to disagree with everybody including me if he thought it was right but the main thing is he s kept us debating issues that we ought to be talking about and the real problem with all this intense partisanship and by the way with the exponential cost of campaigns and what it does to both sides is that it tends to freeze people into yesterday s position at the very time they should be debating what tomorrow s position ought to be well bob was always thinking about what tomorrow s position ought to be and america is always about tomorrow and that s the last point i want to make you know it s gratifying for me for people to come up and say oh i feel like i got a leg in the grave and people say oh i m going to miss you and all this and thank you for it but it s been an honor to serve i ve loved it even the bad days were good i would do it all again tomorrow in a heartbeat but what i want to say to you is the most important thing is that we do the right things that we have good ideas good values work together do the right thing if we hadn t been doing the right things in the last eight years i could have given the same speeches and the results would not be the same it s not about talking it s about doing the right thing so that s another reason i m glad you re here today and i want to ask you to keep supporting the direction that our party has taken generally represented by those of us who are standing up here because the country desperately needs and basically even people who don t know they do agree with the direction that we ve taken in the last eight years about two thirds of the people support what we re trying to do they just can t bring themselves to vote for us in an election that s the truth that s the truth and so this is very important because i ve worked as hard as i could to get the country turned around it s been 50 years since we ve paid down the debt three years in a row if we keep going if we keep going in somewhere between nine and 12 years depending on what judgments are made by my successors in the congress and the white house america could be out of debt for the first time since 1835 and i can t tell you what that means in a global economy where we compete for every dollar with people all over the world and where so far we ve been doing so much better than everybody else we keep buying more than we re selling to pay that debt off guarantees a whole all these young people here we ll give them 20 years of lower interest rates a stronger economy higher productivity a whole different future that s just one example so i m going to try to be a good citizen and i m going to try to help work on the things that i worked on as president as a private citizen but to do it in a way that doesn t get under foot of the next president and i have loved doing this but the most important thing is that people like you stay active in our party and keep pushing us to be thinking about tomorrow just keep pushing us toward the future keep moving and keep reaching out like a magnet and again i would like to thank ben i would like to thank bob kerrey for the eight years that we have worked together president and senator and the many years of friendship before that i want to thank peter hoagland who came down from washington with us today for the years that we worked together when he was a congressman from nebraska i want to say to you that the best days of this country are still out here we ve had eight good years but if we build on it instead of reverse it it s just going to get better but keep in mind i will say again it s more important that the people be pushing toward tomorrow than who has a particular office as long as we re open to the proposition we have to keep working and we have to keep working together everybody counts everybody deserves a chance we all do better when we work together that s what the democrats believe and if we keep doing it we re going to be just fine thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton8 12 00c bill_clinton thank you very much thank you one of my critics once said it would be a cold day when i came to nebraska but i think i got a pretty warm welcome here today and i thank you very very much i want to thank all of those who welcomed me but especially thank you brigadier general power thank you admiral mies i thank the officers and enlisted personnel here i want to thank senator bob kerrey for being first my colleague we were governors together and we have been friends for a long time and he has superbly served the people of nebraska and the united states in the senate i know you ll miss him and i thank him i also want to congratulate his successor with whom i also served as governor thank you very much for running and serving senator elect ben nelson and mrs nelson thank you very much i brought with me today former nebraska congressman peter hoagland and i thank him secretary of state moore mayor daub acting mayor sorensen of bellevue and the other elected officials who are here you know earlier today i went to kearney to speak at the university of nebraska there to the young people about an american foreign policy for the 21st century and i made a pretty simple argument that the world is getting smaller and smaller that people and goods and ideas and information are crossing national borders more freely and faster than ever before and that therefore it was quite necessary even here in the heartland of america that every citizen of our country care about what goes on beyond our borders and support the next president and the next congress across party lines in making the kinds of decisions that will make america safer and more prosperous and a better partner in an interdependent world now one of the things that i wanted to do in coming here is to say that none of that would be possible if our foreign policy was not backed by the finest military in the entire world i was told a couple of weeks ago you know since i m a short termer as you might say all the statisticians are coming up to me and saying well did you know this did you know that did you know the other thing and i was told a couple of weeks ago by one of the people who is supposed to look at all the white house records that i have now visited more military units than any president in the history of the country having said that i do not believe my service in that regard would have been complete if i hadn t come to offutt air force base to see the people of the fighting 55th and the strategic command many of those serving in the 55th couldn t be with us today you heard the general say the sun never sets on the 55th they are now serving on this day from okinawa to mildenhall to saudi arabia keeping a watchful eye so the rest of us can be secure for decades now for a full decade in the persian gulf the 55th has helped check the ambitions of saddam hussein and guard peace in the region in bosnia in kosovo you risk your lives to help stop genocide the days of winter may be short here but it is really true that the sun never sets on you and your work i also want to honor the men and women of the strategic command for every minute of every day during the past 50 years you and your predecessors at the strategic air command have never let down our guard the cold war may be over but we still need you you are the cornerstone of our deterrence and our security i also want to recognize the other units who serve here the defense finance and accounting service out of omaha the u s air force heartland of america band the 311th airlift flight the 343rd air force recruiting squadron and the u s air force weather agency would someone please ask them to turn up the heat a little bit let me just say one other thing these last eight years have been a great honor for me and it has been a joy to serve but the one thing that i will leave office feeling more strongly than i did even on the day i took the oath of office almost eight years ago is that the true greatness of america resides not in its leaders but in its citizens and yes it s important who wins and yes it s important that we all believe that the system is truly democratic and fair but our system is premised on the hard work the innovation the values and the devotion to freedom of our citizens and especially of course those who serve us in uniform america is a different and better place than it was eight years ago we ve had all kinds of economic progress but a lot of social progress as well and i would just like to say to you that as you look ahead in this new century we will become more and more interdependent on each other and on people beyond our borders it will become more and more important therefore that every person has a chance that every person carries his or her own load and that we always remember we do better when we work together we have a great future out there but we ve got some challenges if you look at where we are now compared to where we were eight years ago we re here because as a people we worked hard we worked more closely together we thought about the future and we decided to pay the price for that future that s why we re still around here after over 224 years so you stay with it stay with it here at offutt stay with it here in nebraska keep looking toward tomorrow and remember that i may have been late but i sure was glad when i got here thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton8 12 01 bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you very much good evening ladies and gentlemen john thank you for that introduction that s one of the briefest and most effective introductions i ve ever had i wish hillary would have been here to hear that because she s always saying that the problem with washington is it s an evidence free zone and think about that how many times have you ever been in one of those so i m very grateful for that i want to thank john and dana for being such good friends to hillary and to me and for giving me the chance to come by and visit with you i thank all the many people i ve had a chance to visit with earlier tonight and many kind things were said and a lot of shared experiences and i m delighted to be here i want to thank senator dick durbin for being here and tell you that i think that he is one of the finest public servants in america today and one of the greatest members of the u s senate i m delighted to see him it was a joy for me to serve with him and to work with him and to know that if he was on your side you didn t have to worry about someone wilting in the stretch and illinois is very very fortunate to have him i m glad to see my old friend roland burris here and congressman blagojevich who was here earlier thank you very much for being here thank you earlier today i saw another chicagoan that i m very grateful to bill daley came and introduced me at a lunch that some of you were here for and he was a great secretary of commerce and now he s the president of southwestern bell which serves arkansas in telephone coverage i accuse him of changing places with me entirely he came to new york and he didn t want to be a big time financier so he left new york for me and went to provide my kinfolks telephone service where he will become much wealthier than almost everyone in new york you all look beautiful in your black ties and ball gowns i half expected here to see at least 50 people in war paint for the packer s game tomorrow but i wish you well i was for the bears when they were losing so this is a very happy time for me i see some you got some green bay people over there i heard since john was kind enough to talk a little about the economic statistics of the country i think that i should acknowledge that while there are a lot of companies who meet every year and celebrate their successes there aren t too many that have as much to celebrate as you do over the past 8 years during the longest economic expansion in american history you grew faster than any management consulting company in history and i congratulate you for that and the small and medium sized businesses that you helped to flourish fueled america s economic growth during my years as president more than half the employees were in small and medium sized businesses but three quarters of the 22 1 2 million new jobs in america had come in that sector these businesses will be as viable to our economic recovery as they were to our expansion because of their initiative innovation and faith in the future and i m glad you re helping them i think i should begin tonight by saying that the work you do and the people with whom you work represent in america is very different from the one the terrorists thought they were striking on september 11th they completely misunderstood the meaning of our success and the values that underlie it when they looked at the world trade center and the pentagon why did they pick them as targets because they didn t see them as i do as symbols of american ingenuity and effort of peace and freedom instead they saw them as symbols of corrupt materialism and power but i live and work in new york and all of you know hillary is the junior senator from that state i was commander in chief of the people who go to work in the pentagon every day so to hillary and me the people who died represent not only the best in america but the best of the world i worked hard as president to create a world with more freedom and opportunity more citizen responsibility of both growing diversity and deeper bonds of community it s worth noting that people from 80 nations died at the world trade center irish and italian catholic firefighters died to save people very different from them that the terrorists tried to kill 500 of those who died were muslims those who were killed in new york at the pentagon and on that plane in pennsylvania are part of a very different world than those who killed them those who killed them believe that our differences are the most important thing in life most of the rest of us think our common humanity is more important i say this because i m going to try to take you through what i believe is the meaning of all this but when it comes right down to it it is the clash between those two views whether you think our differences or our common humanity is more important that debate will define the shape and the soul of this new century victory for our vision depends upon 4 things first wining the fight we re in in afghanistan and improving our defenses against terrorism at home second spreading the benefits and reducing the burdens of the modern world third changing conditions in poor nations to make progress more possible and fourth developing a level of consciousness adequate to the present time about what our responsibilities to each other are and what our relationships ought to be let me just go through each of these in turn first of all with regard to the fight we re in i would urge you to keep 3 things in mind first terror the killing of non combatants for political religious or economic reasons has a very long history as long as combat itself no region of the world has been spared it and few people have entirely clean hands for example in 1095 pope urban ii urged the christian soldiers to embark on the first crusade to capture jerusalem when they did so the first thing they did was to burn a synagogue with 300 jews in it they then proceeded to kill every muslim woman and child on the temple mount and i can assure you that story is still being told today in the middle east right down to the present day throughout the 20th century people continued to be terrorized and killed because of their race or their religion even in the west and though we americans have come a very long way from the days when people could kill black slaves and native americans with impunity still we have the occasional hate crime rooted in race religion or sexual orientation the second point i want to make is that in spite of its long history no terror campaign has ever prevailed and this one won t the purpose of terror is not military victory but a change in behavior by its targets by making them afraid of today afraid of tomorrow and afraid of each other instead terror usually backfires leaving bitter memories and it cannot ever win unless the targets in this case us become its unwitting accomplices by letting it change the way we think and feel and live the third point i want to make about the present moment both what happened on september 11th and the anthrax scare and all the other things you re reading about is that in any new arena of conflict the offensive action always prevails first then good people get together and devise defenses that are effective and civilization goes on otherwise we wouldn t be around here ever since the first person walked out of a cave with a club and began to beat people up there was a time lag between that and the time when somebody figured out hey i could put two sticks together and stretch an animal skin over it and i would have a shield and the club wouldn t work any more keep that in mind you think about it first people then people had spears then they had big shields then people rode on horseback so people built castles with moats around them so the horses couldn t cross then people developed catapults to go over the castle walls and so on and on and on first the club then the shield but the more dangerous the club is the more important it is to close the time gap between the time it s used and the development of effective defenses and that s the point that has special relevance today when we consider the potential of weapons of mass destruction and powerful traditional weapons there are things like airplanes that can be turned into weapons the modern world has known quite a lot of terror just since 1995 there have been 2 100 terrorists acts but fewer than 20 in the united states and until september 11th only oklahoma city a homegrown terrorist incident had claimed any significant number of lives the europeans have been living with it for 3 decades and america has been fighting it at least since 1983 when 241 of our marines were murdered in a suicide attack in beirut lebanon in the years that i served as president career law enforcement officials worked very hard to improve our defenses to bring terrorists to justice to get better intelligence all in the hope that a day like september 11th would never come they thwarted attempts to blow up the holland tunnel the lincoln tunnel the los angeles airport several planes flying from los angeles to the philippines all thwarted they thwarted an attempt on the pope s life they thwarted attempts to plant bombs in cities in the northeast in the northwest to destroy the largest hotel in aman jordan and a christian site in the holy land all just over the millennium weekend alone during that time the people who did oklahoma city pan am 103 the cia attacks the african embassy bombings all were indicted tried and convicted in the united states we ratified the chemical weapons convention to control better the development of chemical weapons and the spread of chemicals that can be used by terrorists to make weapons we tried to strengthen the biological weapons convention we hugely increased thanks to congress senator durbin the counter terrorism budgets we began funding civil response teams in 130 of our largest cities including chicago we began to stockpile vaccines and antibiotics and researching what could be a very important question in the years ahead which is how to quickly develop an antidote to a variant toxin if somebody comes up with smallpox b or anthrax g that will do as much damage and the traditional antidote doesn t work any more the main point i want to make is that good people have been working on this a long time they prevented more attacks than have prevailed they are getting better at it and we will continue to improve but obviously we have a lot more to do to improve our defenses for all forms of transportation and other critical infrastructure the airline security legislation that congress just passed is a very good step we also have to keep strengthening our defenses against cyber terrorism people that would break into our computer networks and take down the financial infrastructure of america we need to strengthen our capacity to chase the money that keeps the terrorists running last year we tried to pass tougher money laundering legislation and our regulations were strengthened just a handful of senators defeated it and i hope it ll be passed this year we must improve our computer tracking capacity this is something a lot of you will find interesting because you deal with data processing and we have to integrate the information systems of our domestic law enforcement agencies and our intelligence agencies believe it or not private companies who do mostly mass mailing for a living have a greater capacity to track the whereabouts and activities of americans and immigrants including potential terrorists using public information long available than the government has that s an area where we have to catch up and catch up in a hurry and finally we ve got to do more work to secure the stocks of weapons of mass destruction where there are chemical or biological agents or nuclear material that can be made into a bomb we have got to do everything we can to make sure that material is secure and the people who are dealing with it are trustworthy not long before i became president in 1991 two united states senators senator nunn sam nunn from georgia and senator dick lugar from indiana passed a landmark piece of legislation which has become known as nunn lugar they provided funds which we used in my time among other things to bring in all the nuclear weapons that the former soviet union had outside russia we brought them back to russia and begin to destroy them and in the process to pay for a lot of these scientists who otherwise would have had no way to make a living and might have been hired by nations that are hostile to us or terrorists units we also hired some people who were working in the biological weapons field and we made a lot of progress but it s i m sure any member of congress can tell you who s been following this we still have a lot to do on that and so i recommended right before i left office another big increase in nunn lugar spending we can double it for less than it cost us to fight the war in afghanistan for one month so we re not talking about big money here but there are 40 000 people who work in the former soviet union who when they were our adversaries worked in the chemical biological or nuclear fields they need to be able to make a living doing something that s good and it s a lot cheaper than going to war so one of the things that i very much hope congress will do this year is to put much more money into that it s easier to prevent one of these things than it is to clean up after it happens so we need to do all that but let s not forget the larger point in all of human history no terror campaign has ever worked the campaign in afghanistan is succeeding our military is doing a terrific job and you should all be very proud of them our efforts to organize the defense of our homeland have to be more various and more complex but they are getting better and they will continue to improve now i can t say there ll be no more terrorist attacks there probably will be but they will not weaken or change america unless we give in unless we help them unless we change the way we think and feel and live so that part of this is going to be okay but that brings me to the second point winning the fight we re in and improving our defenses at home are absolutely necessary but they are not sufficient to build the kind of world that i believe we want for our children and grandchildren a world where we don t have to live behind gated fences and all of us don t need a security guard and we don t have to look under the car every time we start it to see if we re going to blow up if you want that kind of a world we have to have more partners and fewer terrorists and that will require a much more sustained effort again one that we tried to begin and i ll say again congressman and senator i m very grateful for the help that you gave me in that but i want to talk a little about that let me just begin with what i think this is all about try to think about where you were on september 10th and what you were thinking about if somebody just come up to you and said what do you think is the driving force of the early 21st century world what s the most important factor of this new world we re living in on september 10th what would you have answered now if you live in a wealthy country and your company has been doing well and you were optimistic you might have said oh the global economy of course it s given america 22 1 2 million new jobs and lifted more people around the world out of poverty than in the last 20 years than in any period in history or you might have said if you re into technology no no no it s the information technology revolution because that gave us the productivity figures john talked about and it was the productivity that drove the economy when i became president there were only 50 sites on the world wide web in 1993 when i left office there were 350 million and rising amazing in 1994 we only had about 11 of our schools and 3 of our classrooms connected to the internet when i left office we had 95 of our schools and almost 70 of our classrooms connected they even before the anthrax scare slowed the mails 30 times as many messages were transmitted by e mail every day as by the postal service or what my daughter s generation calls snail mail so you could have said the information technology revolution or you might have said no even more important than that will be the advances in sciences especially the biological sciences they will rival in significance the discovery of dna or newtonian physics for example we are developing microscopic testing mechanisms with something called nano technology super micro technology that will enable soon people to go in for cancer tests and find tumors that are just a few cells in size a few sells in size totally undetectable today raising the prospect that all cancer will become curable researchers are working now on digital chips to replicate sophisticated spinal nerve movements with a view toward developing a chip that can work for a severed spine the way a pacemaker works for a heart raising the prospect that people long paralyzed will stand up and walk young mothers soon will come home from the hospital with a little gene card now that we have sequenced the human genome and already identified the two variants that are the highest predictors of breast cancer and getting very close on parkinson s and alzheimer s soon the young women in this audience that are in their child bearing years will be able to come home with babies from the hospital with a little gene card and that ll be good news and bad news it ll say okay here are your child s problems your child has a 2 in 5 chance of developing breast cancer between the ages of 35 and 45 but if you do the following 5 things you ll cut it to 1 in 10 and when that happens our children will have very quickly just in the next few years young children in america will be born with a life expectancy in excess of 90 years something totally inconceivable just a few years ago so you might have said that or if like some of us at this table you re into politics you might have said no the most important thing in the modern world is the spread of democracy and diversity within democratic societies because that has created the environment that has made the economic growth the technological progress and the scientific advances all possible i was honored to be president at the first time in all of human history when more than half the world s people lived under governments that they chose with elections and when democracies became more and more diverse just look around this room if this company had had this meeting 40 years ago do you think that this room would look like it does tonight i don t think so so you might have said one of those 4 positive answers on the other hand if i d asked you this and you just filed for bankruptcy or you came from a poor country or you were profoundly alienated or you just happened to be what hillary calls your family s designated worrier every family s got one i think you might have given 1 of 4 negative answers you might have answered the question in this way you might have said no you ve got it all wrong about the economy the real problem is global poverty because half the people aren t part of this new economy half the people think about this when you go home tonight half the people live on less than 2 a day in the world today a billion people live on less than 1 a day a billion people go to bed hungry every night a billion and a half people never get a clean glass of water and 1 woman dies every minute in childbirth all because of global poverty or you might have said no the biggest problem is the deterioration of the environment under the combined pressures of economic growth and population growth the oceans which provide most of our oxygen are deteriorating i ve already said there s a terrific water shortage and most important there s global warming if the world warms at for the next 50 years at the rate of the next 10 we will lose the florida everglades that i worked so hard to save with rising water tables we will lose 50 feet of manhattan island whole island nations in the pacific will be flooded agricultural production patterns will be completely disrupted and there will be millions of food refugees causing more war and disruption or you might have said but even before global warming gets us the global health crisis will all over the world you see public health systems breaking down and epidemics rising up today we had a luncheon that john and dana and many of you attended to raise funds for and to support the international association of physicians who go around the world fighting aids but if you just take aids we have 40 million aids cases 25 million people have died of aids 70 of the cases are in africa but the fastest growing rates of aids are in the former soviet union on europe s back door the second fastest growing rates are in the caribbean on american s front door my wife represents a million dominicans just in new york alone the third fastest growing rates are in india the biggest democracy in the world which has about 10 million cases now more than any other country outside africa the fourth big rate and problem is in china the world s biggest country which just admitted they have twice as many cases as they had previously thought and only 4 of the adults have any idea how aids is contracted and spread now if these trends continue we ll have 100 million aids cases in 2005 again what fragile democracies will fall you have a lot more wars and you have a lot of young people in poor countries thinking they re not going to live more than another year anyway why shouldn t they go get a gun and shoot each other it s a very profoundly serious problem or you might have said even on september 10th before poverty before aids before global warming gets us the world will be consumed by high tech terrorism the marriage of modern weapons of destruction to ancient religious racial ethnic and tribal hatreds if you look at in recent years rwanda sierra leon the balkans east tambour the middle east or northern ireland until god bless them my people finally did the right thing a few weeks ago it is ironic that in this most modern of ages we are still bedeviled by the oldest demon of human society we re just afraid of people who are different from us and it s a short step from being afraid to hating people to dehumanizing them to killing them and if you think that people who are different from you are so different that they re basically evil they re outside god s grace then how do you compromise with them you have to make exclusive claims and fight to the death now i just painted a picture of the modern world and i hope that everything i said had some resonance with you but i said 4 good things right the economy technology science democracy and 4 troubling things poverty global warming the health epidemic and terrorism what do they all have in common because they re all true they all reflect a most astonishing increase in global interdependence in human history philosophers and theologians have talked about how we re all part of the seamless web for millennia the new testament and jesus say you should love your neighbor as yourself the torah says he who turns away from a stranger might as well turn away from the most high god the koran says ala put different peoples on the earth not that they might despise one another but that they might come to know one another and learn from one another so we ve been talking about this a long time but it s one thing to talk it and another to believe it for 50 years politicians have been talking seriously about our interdependence ever since world war ii the holocaust the dropping of the atomic bomb and then afterward the growth of the cold war and the establishment of global financial institutions in the united nations we sort of understood this as a fact but today our interdependence is a fact no ordinary citizen anywhere in the world can escape the truth is we live in a world without effective borders borders don t stop much good or bad any more where technology and information are wildly spread and we can all get around in a terrific hurry now we can t claim the benefits of that world without shouldering the increased risks this is a central point i m trying to make and one i think you have to understand september 11th was shattering to us because americans didn t die in nice uniforms on a distant shore people died at home on television and we knew a lot of them and it wasn t supposed to happen here because we were a big country protected by two oceans but september 11th is the dark side of the age of interdependence that s why we can win the fight against terrorism and we have to we can improve our defenses and we have to but it isn t enough if you want your children and your grandchildren and their grandchildren to have a free and open life to have the kind of life we ve enjoyed the last decade in america to do that you gotta make a world that has far fewer terrorists and a whole lot more partners to do that you have to spread the benefits of this world to people who don t have them reduce the burdens and then help people help themselves because there s some places you can t help to save your life because progress is not possible they haven t done what they have to do that s what you do in consulting is that you go out and help people help themselves so we have to think about that and you know i i won t go into any great detail here but just let me say that there are at least 4 things that we can do to help spread the benefits and shrink the burdens we have to reduce global poverty last year one of the proudest achievements i had in 8 years as president was the overwhelming bipartisan consensus to reduce the debt of the poorest countries in the world if they put all the money into education healthcare and economic development and the countries that did that it s amazing what they ve done uganda took their debt release savings in one year and doubled primary school enrollment and cut class size that s just one example there are lots of proven strategies for that but we need to do more of that it costs money but it s a lot cheaper than going to war we need to respond to the secretary general of the u n kofi annan s call for 7 to 10 billion a year to fight aids and other infectious diseases one in four of all the people who will die on earth this year 1 in 4 will die of aids tb malaria or infections related to diarrhea most of them are with kids who never got a clean glass of water 7 to 10 billion our share of that will be 2 2 billion it s a lot of money a lot cheaper than going to war that s about 2 months of the war in afghanistan to help hundreds of millions of people there are 100 million children in the world who never go to school or in the case of pakistan they wound up going to these madras s run by radical fundamentalists who indoctrinated rather than educated them in my last year as president we got 300 million and a 1 8 trillion budget 300 million to give to poor countries to provide a nutritious meal in school to kids but only if the parents sent the child to school to get it i just got the reports enrollments are exploding in these countries do you know how much 300 million will feed you know what it will do let me just give you an example 300 million will provide a nutritious meal in school every day of the school year for 6 million children now i ll give you just one other example brazil is the only developing country that has 97 of its kids in school why because the government of brazil pays the mother not the fathers the mothers in the 30 of the poorest families if they send their kids to school 85 of the time they give you 15 bucks a month a kid and they cap it at 3 kids so if you get if you have more kids you can only get 45 bucks a month but they all have to come they get a little certificate that they were there 85 of the time and they cash out now i think that s pretty cheap to get 97 of your kids in school and 10 years from now every year of schooling that a child in a poor country gets ads 10 to 20 to his or her income every year so 10 years from now brazil s going to be a lot richer because they spent a little money america japan europe we ought to put the rest of those kids in school same argument applies to global warming there s a trillion dollar market out there that a lot of businesses in america and around the world could tap into of already available alternative energy and energy conservation technologies that would clean up the environment not put so many greenhouse gases in the air and actually create jobs and we got to get out of denial about that and instead go do it if you if we have 20 you know it was a warm day in chicago today it s been 70 in new york you can still play golf in new york in december which is unheard of global warming is wonderful in particular but still in general it s terrible and we have got to do something about it and we can do something about it in a way that helps the american economy and the economy of these other countries so that s the first point i want to make the second point is there are some countries that can t be helped because they re not organized there are countries for example that are well organized to drive their aids rates down so uganda cuts their rate in half in 5 years with prevention programs in other countries that are in denial like botswana was for years the richest country in sub sahara in africa has almost a third of its people who are hiv positive now why because there were cultural inhibitions about talking about this and they didn t deal with it the same thing is true of the economy the education anything else where there must be conditions in these countries that make progress possible for america that means primarily we have to keep advancing democracy and human rights especially true in the middle east it is no accident that most of these terrorists come from places where they never got to vote for anybody for mayor and i ll tell you why if if you never get to take responsibility for yourselves then a country can become like a child you think of your children those of you who have grown children how scared were you the first time they went to school the first time they got on a bicycle the first time god forbid they went on a car date when they went off to college and you knew that every step along the way or when they joined the military you knew every step along the way something terrible could happen to them and nothing none of that would happen if you just kept them in the closet and shoved food under the door on the other hand when they were 25 they d still be 6 years old right so we let our children go and we hope to god that they have good fortune and and blessings and hope they and they make mistakes and they learn from them and that s what life is like that s what democracy s like and it is easier to blame people s distress on america s success if they never had to take any responsibility fo dem wjclinton8 12 93 bill_clinton thank you very much i m delighted to see all of you here i thank speaker foley and the republican leader bob michel for joining us today there are so many people to thank and the vice president did a marvelous job i do want to mention if i might just three others laura tyson the chair of the council of economic advisors bob rubin head of my national economic team and one republican member of the house that wasn t mentioned congressman david dreier who went with me on a rainy day to louisiana to campaign for nafta there are many others that i might mention but i thank all of you for what you have done i also can t help but note that in spite of all the rest of our efforts there was a that magic moment on larry king which made a lot of difference and i thank the vice president for that and for so much else in the campaign when we decided to come out for nafta he was a strong supporter of that position in our personal meetings long before we knew whether we would even be here or not i also would be remiss if i did not personally thank both mickey kantor and mack mclarty for the work they did especially in the closing days with the mexican trade representatives and the mexican government i d also like to welcome here the representatives from mexico and canada and tell them they are in fact welcome here they are our partners in the future that we are trying to make together i want to say a special word of thanks to the cabinet because we have tried to do something that i have not always seen in the past and we try to get all of our departments and all of our cabinet leaders to work together on all the things that we all care about and a lot of them therefore had to take a lot of personal time and business time away from their very busy schedules to do this i thank the former leaders of our government that were mentioned and our military i can t help but noting since general powell is here that every senior military officer with whom i spoke about nafta was perhaps they were as a group perhaps the most intensely supportive of any group i spoke with and i think it is because they have in their bones the experience of the world of the last several decades and they knew we could not afford to turn away from our leadership responsibilities and our constructive involvement in the world and many of them of course still in uniform were not permitted to say that in public and should not have been but i think i can say that today i was profoundly personally moved by the remarks that they made i do want to say also a special word of thanks to all the citizens who helped us the business leaders the labor folks the environmental people who came out and worked through this many of them at great criticism particularly in the environmental movement and some of the working people who helped it and a group that was quite pivotal to our success that i want to acknowledge specifically are the small business people many of whom got themselves organized and came forward and tried to help us they made a real difference and they ve been mentioned but i couldn t let this moment go by without thanking my good friend bill daley and congressman bill frenzel for their work in helping to mobilize this effort congressman frenzel wrote me a great letter the other day and sent me one of his famous doodles that he doodled around the nafta legislation which i am now having framed but they sort of represented the bipartisan spirit that encaptured the congress encaptured the country in the call to change i hope that we can have more than that in the days and months and years ahead it was a very fine thing this whole issue turned out to be a defining moment for our nation i spoke with one of the folks who was in the reception just a few moments ago who told me that he was in china watching the vote on international television when it was taken and he said you would have had to be there to understand how important this was to the rest of the world not because of the terms of nafta which basically is trade agreement between the united states mexico and canada but because it became a symbolic struggle for the spirit of our country and for how we would approach this very difficult and rapidly changing world dealing with our own considerable challenges here at home i believe we have made a decision now that will permit us to create an economic order in the world that will promote more growth more equality better preservation of the environment and a greater possibility of world peace we are on the verge of a global economic expansion that is sparked by the fact that the united states at this critical moment decided that we would compete not retreat in a few moments i will sign the north american free trade act into law nafta will tear down trade barriers between our three nations it will create the world s largest trade zone and create 200 000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone the environmental and labor side agreements negotiated by our administration will make this agreement a force for social progress as well as economic growth already the confidence we ve displayed by ratifying nafta has begun to bear fruit we are now making real progress toward a worldwide trade agreement so significant that it could make the material gains of nafta for our country look small by comparison today we have the chance to do what our parents did before us we have the opportunity to remake the world for this new era our national security we now know will be determined as much by our ability to pull down foreign trade barriers as by our ability to breach distant ramparts once again we are leading and in so doing we are rediscovering a fundamental truth about ourselves when we lead we build security we build prosperity for our own people we ve learned this lesson the hard way twice before in this century we have been forced to define our role in the world after world war i we turned inward building walls of protectionism around our nation the result was a great depression and ultimately another horrible world war after the second world war we took a different course we reached outward gifted leaders of both political parties built a new order based on collective security and expanded trade they created a foundation of stability and created in the process the conditions which led to the explosion of the great american middle class one of the true economic miracles in the whole history of civilization their statecraft stands to this day the imf and the world bank gatt and nato in this very auditorium in 1949 president harry truman signed one of the charter documents of this golden era of american leadership the north atlantic treaty that created nato in this pact we hope to create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression truman told his audience a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for our citizens now the institutions built by truman and acheson by marshall and vandenberg have accomplished their task the cold war is over the grim certitude of the contest with communism has been replaced by the exuberant uncertainty of international economic competition and the great question of this day is how to ensure security for our people at a time when change is the only constant make no mistake the global economy with all of its promise and perils is now the central fact of life for hardworking americans it has enriched the lives of millions of americans but for too many those same winds of change have worn away at the basis of their security for two decades most people have worked harder for less seemingly secure jobs have been lost and while america once again is the most productive nation on earth this productivity itself holds the seeds of further insecurity after all productivity means the same people can produce more or very often that fewer people can produce more this is the world we face we cannot stop global change we cannot repeal the international economic competition that is everywhere we can only harness the energy to our benefit now we must recognize that the only way for a wealthy nation to grow richer is to export to simply find new customers for the products and services it makes that my fellow americans is the decision the congress made when they voted to ratify nafta i am gratified with the work that congress has done this year bringing the deficit down and keeping interest rates down getting housing starts and new jobs going upward but we know that over the long run our ability to have our internal economic policies work for the benefit of our people requires us to have external economic policies that permit productivity to find expression not simply in higher incomes for our businesses but in more jobs and higher incomes for our people that means more customers there is no other way not for the united states or for europe or for japan or for any other wealthy nation in the world that is why i am gratified that we had such a good meeting after the nafta vote in the house with the asian pacific leaders in washington i am gratified that as vice president gore and chief of staff mack mclarty announced two weeks ago when they met with president salinas next year the nations of this hemisphere will gather in an economic summit that will plan how to extend the benefits of trade to the emerging market democracies of all the americas and now i am pleased that we have the opportunity to secure the biggest breakthrough of all negotiators from 112 nations are seeking to conclude negotiations on a new round of the general agreement on tariffs and trade a historic worldwide trade pact one that would spur a global economic boon is now within our grasp let me be clear we cannot nor should we settle for a bad gatt agreement but we will not flag in our efforts to secure a good one in these closing days we are prepared to make our contributions to the success of this negotiation but we insist that other nations do their part as well we must not squander this opportunity i call on all the nations of the world to seize this moment and close the deal on a strong gatt agreement within the next week i say to everyone even to our negotiators don t rest don t sleep close the deal i told mickey kantor the other day that we rewarded his laborious effort on nafta with a vacation at the gatt talks my fellow americans bit by bit all these things are creating the conditions of a sustained global expansion as significant as they are our goals must be more ambitious the united states must seek nothing less than a new trading system that benefits all nations through robust commerce but that protects our middle class and gives other nations a chance to grow one that lifts workers and the environment up without dragging people down that seeks to ensure that our policies reflect our values our agenda must therefore be far reaching we are determining that dynamic trade cannot lead to environmental despoliation we will seek new institutional arrangements to ensure that trade leaves the world cleaner than before we will press for workers in all countries to secure rights that we now take for granted to organize and earn a decent living we will insist that expanded trade be fair to our businesses and to our regions no country should use cartels subsidies or rules of entry to keep our products off its shelves and we must see to it that our citizens have the personal security to confidently participate in this new era every worker must receive the education and training he or she needs to reap the rewards of international competition rather than to bear its burdens next year our administration will propose comprehensive legislation to transform our unemployment system into a reemployment and job retraining system for the 21st century and above all i say to you we must seek to reconstruct the broadbased political coalition for expanded trade for decades working men and women and their representatives supported policies that brought us prosperity and security that was because we recognized that expanded trade benefitted all of us but that we have an obligation to protect those workers who do bear the brunt of competition by giving them a chance to be retrained and to go on to a new and different and ultimately more secure and more rewarding way of work in recent years this social contract has been sundered it cannot continue when i affix my signature to the nafta legislation a few moments from now i do so with this pledge to the men and women of our country who were afraid of these changes and found in their opposition to nafta an expression of that fear what i thought was a wrong expression and what i know was a wrong expression but nonetheless represented legitimate fears the gains from this agreement will be your gains too i ask those who opposed nafta to work with us to guarantee that the labor and side agreements are enforced and i call on all of us who believe in nafta to join with me to urge the congress to create the world s best worker training and retraining system we owe it to the business community as well as to the working men and women of this country it means greater productivity lower unemployment greater worker efficiency and higher wages and greater security for our people we have to do that we seek a new and more open global trading system not for its own sake but for our own sake good jobs rewarding careers broadened horizons for the middle class americans can only be secured by expanding exports and global growth for too long our step has been unsteady as the ground has shifted beneath our feet today as i sign the north american free trade agreement into law and call for further progress on gatt i believe we have found our footing and i ask all of you to be steady to recognize that there is no turning back from the world of today and tomorrow we must face the challenges embrace them with confidence deal with the problems honestly and openly and make this world work for all of us america is where it should be in the lead setting the pace showing the confidence that all of us need to face tomorrow we are ready to compete and we can win thank you very much dem wjclinton8 12 94 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president as usual you did a generous and magnificent job of recognizing the contributions of all these people who made this day possible you did however leave one very important person out if you hadn t gone on television in that national debate on nafta and refuted the theory of the giant sucking sound i m not sure we would be here today and we thank you for that i thank the members of congress who are here and those who are not who have been acknowledged i thank the members of our administration i am so proud of all of them i want to say a special word of thanks to secretary espy for helping us resolve these terribly difficult agricultural issues without which we would not have been able to get this agreement i thank mickey kantor and rufus yerxa and john schmidt and john emerson all the people who worked on our team i thank the business community a bipartisan group a remarkably diverse group for standing up and being counted and working hard on this and our other trade initiatives i thank the vice president for what he said about trade in the last two years we ve not only had nafta and gatt but we have done our outreach to asia through the asian pacific economic cooperation group we ve had two meetings of the leaders of the apec countries now we have reached a new agreement with japan which i believe is a very good one and we continue our efforts there and this evening i am leaving for the summit of the americas in miami which mr mcclarty and others have done so much work on to make a success two days ago when i regrettably accepted his resignation secretary bentsen said that history would show that the economic future of our children and grandchildren will be more secure because of the politically difficult decisions taken in the last two years i appreciate his saying that he had a lot to do with them and he s earned a well deserved rest but i want to emphasize again how important i think this trade issue is and why i think it s important for the people who are not on the program today the people who are working in our factories and working in our offices and trying to raise their children and having a difficult time when this administration and our economic team took office we were rightly concerned about economic problems gripping every advanced country in the globe and certainly affecting the united states the problems of low growth high unemployment stagnant incomes declining benefits for working people increasing insecurity it seemed to me then and it seems to me now that we had to have a serious discipline strategy to reverse these trends that if we continue to see increasing inequality and loss of opportunity not among the working and the nonworking but among people who are all working full time and longer work weeks today than they were working 20 years ago that it is going to be very difficult for us to preserve the essence of what america is the whole core of the america dream that people here who work hard and obey the law and play by the rules are going to be given a chance to do better going to be given a chance to build a better world for their children there were those two years ago and certainly there were those even in this debate on gatt who believe the only way we can do that is to try to create a world that used to be i wonder sometimes about that world that used to be i remember what will rogers used to say don t tell me about the good old days i lived through them they never was well that s somewhat true but it is also true that for the last 10 or 15 years we have been struggling with longer work weeks declining security increasing inequality and a lot of people who literally have worked harder for less some say the answer is to try to just hunker down within our borders that is clearly not an option no country can escape the global economy and the greatest largest most powerful country in the world cannot escape the global economy we must lead it in a direction that is consistent with our values consistent with our interests consistent with what is necessary to keep the american dream alive that s really what gatt is all about we ve worked hard here these folks and a lot of our friends from the congress and a lot of you in this room have helped us to try to bring the deficit down to try to reduce what i call yesterday s government to try to reduce destructive regulation and unleash the forces of creativity and enterprise to try to increase investment in the education and training of our work force and in the technologies of the future but no matter what we do unless we can expand the markets for america s products and services we will ultimately fail in our economic mission yes it is true that one of the reasons for stagnant wages in the united states is intense competition in our own markets and in other markets from people who work for wages our folks couldn t live on that will happen if there is never another trade agreement in the history of the united states the reason nafta was important the reason gatt s important the reason our outreach in asia is important the reason this summit of the americas is phenomenally important and why i want it to be in this building today with the fine secretary general we re very proud to see in this leadership position is because america cannot and will not succeed and we will never restore stability to the lives of the working people of our country until we have more folks buying what we sell until the work of our people is rewarded more and that can only happen if we have a fair and increasingly open world trading system that allows the free market to work and rewards the most productive people in the world not many of them here today maybe but the real victors in gatt are the autoworkers the accountants the engineers the farmers the communications workers the people who will now have a chance to be more rewarded for their labors ultimately that is what the purpose of any country is about so i am very very happy to be here all of you know what s in this agreement let s never forget what s behind it and let s never forget too that this is ultimately a victory for a couple of simple ideas that people ought to be able to relate more and more and more every year now to people beyond their borders to work in harmony the end of the cold war imposes more than relief it gives us a responsibility to finally take advantage of the interconnections that exist in the world today it s a victory for the idea that america can lead in the 21st century that we need not fear competition that we want our neighbors to do better than they have been doing and when they do better we will do better oldfashioned simple ideas we must never run away from the world we must go into the 21st century convinced that the only way to preserve the american dream is to be involved with the rest of the world to be willing to compete to be determined to win to be serious about overcoming our problems but to realize that the only way you can ever do it is to see the opportunities that are plainly there i want to thank every republican and every democrat here i thank my predecessors for the work they did on this treaty i thank especially presidents carter ford and bush for their lobbying here for the votes we needed at the last minute most of all i am very pleased to see in recent days evidence in public opinion surveys that for the first time in history the american people see trade as more of an opportunity than a threat that is of course the ultimately critical factor because we all serve at the sufferance of the people they have to believe in themselves and their future and in an open world and i think that all of you who fought these battles and especially this last debate on gatt played a major role in persuading the american people that the future is bright that our best days are ahead and that we are going forward with confidence that ultimately may be the most important significance of the bill i am not proud to sign thank you very much dem wjclinton8 12 98 bill_clinton good morning ladies and gentlemen let me begin by welcoming all of you and acknowledging senators daschle and santorum congressman gephardt and congressman shaw who will speak and the very very large delegation we have from the united states congress members of both parties right out here to my left i thank you all for coming i think the fact that we have such a large representation from the congress as well as leaders of various organizations of people throughout the united states and people concerned about the social security issue is a testament to the profound importance of this issue and the commitment of the american people to do something about it i thank secretary rubin secretary herman secretary daley and gene sperling jack lew ken apfel and john podesta representing the administration for their presence here this is the first ever white house conference on social security there are all of you here in washington plus thousands of people watching at 60 satellite sites in all 50 states i d also like to apologize for my early departure i had hoped to be here for as much of this conference as i could but as all of you know there is a service in tennessee today for the father of our vice president former united states senator albert gore sr who was a true great public servant he and his generation built the entire postwar order from medicare to the interstate highway system both of which he himself had a personal role in creating they were civic institutions that have helped save our nation and our world in the half century since now it is our turn to be builders to renew the institutions that have made america strong in this time america faces no more important challenge than the need to save social security for the 21st century social security is and must remain a rock solid guarantee it is a sacred trust among the generations between parents and children grandparents and grandchildren between those in retirement and those at work between the able bodied and the disabled it embodies our obligations to one another and our deepest values as americans this year i and a lot of people in this room a lot of members of congress have spent a lot of time listening to the american people and speaking with them about social security this white house conference a gathering of lawmakers experts americans from all walks of life marks an important step in the direction of saving social security for the 21st century we ll hear a lot of ideas expressed about what course we should take let me shock you by saying i think there will be some differences of opinion expressed in this room but we should begin this process on common ground agreeing above all on the importance of acting and acting now while we can during prosperous and productive times that americans have worked so hard to achieve our economy is indeed a powerful engine of prosperity in its wide wake it creates something every bit as important as jobs and growth the opportunity to do something meaningful for america s future and the confidence that we can actually do it an opportunity to save social security for the 21st century i hope history will record that we seized this opportunity earlier this year i said we should reserve any surplus until we save social security first we have done so we should take the next step and act now it is more than an opportunity it is a solemn responsibility to take the achievement of past generations the americans who according to president roosevelt had a rendezvous with destiny and to renew the social contract for a new era through war and peace from recession to expansion our nation has fulfilled its obligation to older americans it is hard thankfully to remember the time when growing old often meant growing poor it seems impossible to believe but in many cases retirement meant being relegated to a rest home and the degradation of dependence the normal aches and pains were accompanied by the unbearable pain of becoming a burden to one s children that s why social security continues to offer much hope much confidence much peace of mind it is one of the most important and ambitious undertakings in our nation s entire lifetime president roosevelt said there is no tragedy in growing old but there is tragedy in growing old without means of support soon we will face a rising challenge in providing that support as every one of you knows before too long there will only be about two people working for every one person eligible to draw social security as our panelists will discuss we are actually going to have many many older americans just last night hillary and i were discussing a recent health report that infant mortality last year dropped to an all time low and the life expectancy of americans rose to an all time high over 76 years some would argue that this problem we have with social security is therefore a high class problem i know that the older i get the more high class the problem looks to me it is nonetheless a significant challenge 75 million baby boomers retiring during the next two decades by 2013 what social security takes in will no longer be enough to fund what it pays out that s just 15 years away then we ll have to use the proceeds from the trust fund by 2032 just 34 years away the money social security takes in will only be enough to pay 72 percent of benefits now there are many ways to deal with this but there is only one way to get it done let me say to all the people on all sides of this debate the only way we can save social security and avoid what i think is a result that none of us want which is either a dramatic cut in the standard of living of retirees in america a dramatic increase in the taxes on working americans and the lowering of the standard of living of the children and grandchildren of the baby boomers the only way we can avoid that is by working together putting progress ahead of partisanship placing the long term interest of the nation first already some are predicting that we are simply incapable of doing this in washington i am determined to prove them wrong i hope everyone of you are determined to do so as well what does this mean it means first of all not that we should forget about what we think is right it means each of us should articulate what we think is right and those who believe they disagree should listen to them we should all listen to people who have different opinions they might be right and we might be wrong secondly it means that our differences cannot take the form of personal attacks this is a complex issue and i have found that on this issue most people believe what they really believe we do not need to let our differences disintegrate into personal attacks third in the end all of us in some sense will have to sacrifice our sense of the perfect to work together for the common good there is in this process no room for rancor the stakes are too high the issues far too important it s not about politics it s about doing right by young americans and older americans and the future of america the whole point of this conference is to open honest debate and to build consensus not to shoot down ideas or insist that one side or the other has to go first secretary riley our secretary of education said that one of his greatest lessons from south carolina politics was the old saying that i m for change and you are too you go first i m prepared to do whatever it takes to move us forward but let s agree we have to march together that s the only path to the finish line our ears our minds must remain open to any good idea and to any person of goodwill in judging any proposal i believe we should be guided by five principles first as i have said we must strengthen and protect the guarantee of social security for the 21st century second we must maintain universality and fairness later panelists will discuss the impact of reform on different groups the first lady was scheduled to discuss the special impact on women who on average live longer than men so depend on social security more now keep in mind that only 4 6 percent of elderly married women are living in poverty for elderly single women the number is about 20 percent those who think we can wait should never forget that fact either when we judge any plan to save social security we need to ask whether it cuts the poverty rate among single elderly women and other groups in our population that are still at significant risk i must say i have been quite impressed that proposals that span the conventional ideological spectrum have shown a sensitivity to this and to taking vulnerable people out of poverty and giving them the secure retirement they deserve third i believe we must construct a system where social security can be counted on regardless of the ups and downs of the economy or the markets fourth social security must continue to provide financial security for disabled and low income beneficiaries one in three social security beneficiaries are not retirees and we must never forget that and fifth any proposal must maintain our hard won fiscal discipline it has helped to fuel the prosperity americans enjoy today that is after all what gives us the chance to do this in at least a less painful manner i look forward to transforming these ideas into action let us begin firm in our faith that social security can bind our people not only across generational divides but across party lines let me say too in that regard i am grateful for the presence here of senator santorum and congressman shaw from the republican majority and the minority leader senator daschle and congressman gephardt i thank you very much for your presence here and now i d like to turn it over to them to make some opening remarks so we can get on with the work of this conference let me say this before i sit down you have to decide that we are going to do this you have to tell these members of congress that you will support them if they act if you come here representing a particular point of view and you know these members of congress agree with you you should ask them to defend your point of view but to be willing in the end to make a decision that will deal with the problem this will only get harder every single year we avoid resolving this it will get harder and harder and harder and everybody s favorite idea will have a less beneficial impact the longer we wait now is the time to do this thank you very much dem wjclinton8 2 00a bill_clinton thank you very much and good afternoon i want to begin by thanking all the people at aaas for having us here today my longtime friend dr shirley malcolm thank you and thank you dr richard nicholson i thank dr francis collins what a remarkable statement he made i was thinking when he said that line that i m beating to death now that we re all genetically 99 9 percent the same that the one tenth of 1 percent difference between him and me is all the intellectual capacity for the sciences regrettably that s a great thing for people who care about the future of the human genome i m delighted to be joined here by several members of our administration and by three members of congress showing that this is a bipartisan issue it s an american issue i thank representative louise slaughter from new york who was with me yesterday talking to me about this and representative fred upton from michigan and representative and dr greg ganske from iowa thank you all for being here we appreciate you very much and your concern for this i thank again all the people in the administration who worked on this my science advisor dr neal lane and all the people from opm and the eeoc and others this is really a happy day for me for years in our administration i was a sort of political front person and now we ve got the first election in a quarter century that i can t be a part of and people are always coming to me saying oh this must be a real downer for you you know that the vice president and hillary they re out there 7 00 a m in the morning hitting all these coffee shops you must be how are you dealing with this terrible deprivation and i went out to cal tech the other day to talk about my science and technology budget and i said well i m using this opportunity to get in touch with my inner nerd and to really sort of deal with these things that i have repressed all these years that i m really trying to get into this we re laughing about this but you know it is truly astonishing that we are all privileged enough to be alive at this moment in history and to be some of us even a small part of this remarkable explosion in human discovery to contemplate not only what it might mean for us and our contemporaries in terms of lengthening our lives and improving the quality of them and improving the reach of our understanding of what is going on both within our bodies and in the far reaches of space but what particularly it will mean for the whole structure of life for our children and grandchildren and i am profoundly grateful to all of you who have been involved and who will be involved in that march of human advance in any way that quest for knowledge has defined what the aaas has done for now more than 150 years we are here today as the previous speakers have said to recognize that this extraordinary march of human understanding imposes on us profound responsibilities to make sure that the age of discovery can continue to reflect our most cherished values and i want to talk just a little about that in somewhat more detail than dr collins did first and foremost we must protect our citizens privacy the bulwark of personal liberty the safeguard of individual creativity more than 100 years ago now justice brandeis recognized that technological advances would require us to be ever vigilant in protecting what he said was civilization s most valued right the fundamental right to privacy new conditions he said would often require us to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection and indeed much of the 20th century jurisprudence of the supreme court has dealt with that continuing challenge in various contexts so once again justice brandeis has proved prophetic for a new century today powerful ways of technological change threaten to erode our sacred walls of privacy in ways we could not have envisioned a generation ago not just the ways by the way we re discussing here today will you ever have a private telephone conversation on a cell phone again can you even go in your own home and know that the conversation is private if you become important enough for people to put devices in your walls what is the nature of privacy in the 21st century and how can we continue to protect it but clearly people s medical records their financial records and their genetic records are among the most important things that we have to protect last year we proposed rules to protect the sanctity of medical records we ll finalize them this year soon i will send legislation to complete the job we started in protecting citizen s financial records today we move forward to try to make sure we do what we can to protect in an important way genetic privacy clearly there is no more exciting frontier in modern scientific research than genome research dr collins did a good job of telling us why and when this human genome project is completed we can now only barely imagine i believe the full implications of what we will learn for the detection treatment and prevention of serious diseases it will transform medical care more profoundly than anything since the discovery of antibiotics and the polio vaccine i believe far more profoundly than that but it will also impose upon us new responsibilities and i would argue only some of which we now know only some of which we now know to ensure that the new discoveries do not pry open the protective doors of privacy the fear of misuse of private genetic information is already very widespread in our nation americans are genuinely worried that their genetic information will not be kept secret that this information will be used against them as a result they re often reluctant to take advantage of new breakthroughs in genetic testing making a point i think we cannot make too often if we do not protect the right to privacy we may actually impede the reach of these breakthroughs in the lives of ordinary people which would be a profound tragedy a pennsylvania study for example showed that nearly a third of women at high risk for inherited forms of breast cancer refused to be tested to determine whether they carry either of the two known breast cancer genes because they feared discrimination based on the results that is simply wrong we must not allow advances in genetics to become the basis of discrimination against any individual or any group we must never allow these discoveries to change the basic belief upon which our government our society and our system of ethics is founded that all of us are created equal entitled to equal treatment under the law the executive order i will sign in just a couple of minutes will be the first executive order of the 21st century to help meet this great 21st century challenge it prohibits the federal government and its agencies from using genetic testing in any employment decision it prevents federal employers from requesting or requiring that employees undergo genetic tests of any kind it strictly forbids employers from using genetic information to classify employees in such a way that deprives them of advancement opportunities such as promotion for overseas posts by signing this executive order my goal is to set an example and pose a challenge for every employer in america because i believe no employer should ever review your genetic records along with your resume because by executive order i can only do so much we also need congressional action this year in 1996 the congress passed and i signed the kassebaum kennedy bill the health insurance portability law which made it illegal for group health insurers to deny coverage to any individual based on genetic information that was an important first step but we must go further now i ask congress to pass the genetic non discrimination in health insurance and employment act introduced in the senate by senator daschle and in the house by congresswoman louise slaughter who is with us today what this legislation does is to extend the employment protections contained in the executive order that i will sign today to all private sector employees as well and to ensure that people in all health plans not just group plans will have the full confidence that the fruits of genetic research will be used solely to improve their care and never to deny them care there is something else we should do right away we must make absolutely sure that we do not allow the race for genetic cures to undermine vital patient protections like many americans i have been extremely concerned about reports that some families involved in trials of experimental gene therapies have not been fully informed of the risks and that some scientists have failed to report serious side effects from these trials i support the recent action by fda and nih to enforce reporting in patient safety requirements today i m asking secretary shalala to instruct fda and nih to accelerate their review of gene therapy guidelines and regulations i want to know how we can better ensure that this information about the trials is shared with the public i want to know whether we need to strengthen requirements on informed consent if we don t have full confidence in these trials people won t participate and then the true promise of genetic medicine will be put on hold we cannot allow our remarkable progress in genomic research to be undermined by concerns over the privacy of genetic data or the safety of gene therapies instead we must do whatever it takes to address these legitimate concerns we know if we do the positive possibilities are absolutely endless i said this the other day but i would like to reiterate i think maybe i am so excited about this because of my age i was in the generation of children who were the first treated with the polio vaccine and for those of you who are much younger than me you can t imagine what it was like for our parents to see the literal terror in our parent s eyes when we were children paralyzed with fear that somehow we would be afflicted by what was then called infantile paralysis and the sense of hope the eagerness the sort of nail biting anticipation when we learned about the salk vaccine and all of us were lined up to get our shots unless you were in our generation you cannot imagine and the thought that every other problem that could affect the generation of my grandchildren could be visited with that level of relief and hope and exhilaration by the parents of our children s generation is something that is almost inexpressible we have to make the most of this and we know we have learned from over 200 years of experience as a nation knocking down physical and intellectual frontiers that we can only spread the benefits of new discoveries when we proceed in a manner that is consistent with our most ancient and cherished values that is what this day is all about so to all of you who have contributed to it i thank you very very much now i would like to ask the members of congress who are here and members of the administration who are here who have been involved in this to come up with me and all i have to do is write my name that s a pretty good deal you can write the human genome code and i ll write my name and that takes full account of the one tenth of one percent difference in our genetic makeup thank you very much dem wjclinton8 2 00b bill_clinton colonel thank you for that prayer general hicks secretary cohen secretary webb secretary richardson secretary caldera general shelton general ralston members of the joint chiefs all the members of congress who are here and we have quite a distinguished array of them we thank them all for coming i d like to ask the members of congress who are here to stand so you ll see how many we have we re very grateful to you when the medal of honor was conceived in 1861 some americans actually worried that it might be a bad thing that the medals would be seen as somehow too aristocratic and that there was no need for them in a genuinely democratic society today we award the medal of honor secure in the knowledge that people like alfred rascon have kept our democracy alive all these years we bestow the medal knowing the america would not have survived were it not for people like him who generation after generation have always renewed the extraordinary gift of freedom for their fellow citizens under any circumstances a medal of honor ceremony is an event of great importance today it is especially so for the rare quality of heroism on display that long ago day in 1966 for the long patient wait for recognition for alfred s decision to devote his life both before and after 1966 to a nation he was not born in alfred rascon was born in mexico on september 10 1945 just eight days after the formal surrender ending world war ii when he was very young his parents came to america for a better chance they ended up in oxnard north of los angeles and when alfred started grade school he still spoke not a word of english he grew up near three military bases and fell in love with the armed forces at the advanced age of seven wanting to do his part to defend america he built a homemade parachute and jumped off the roof of his house unfortunately in his own words the chute had a total malfunction and he broke his wrist but as usual he was undeterred soon he graduated from high school and enlisted in the united states army appropriately he became a medic for a platoon of paratroopers the first of the 503rd airborne battalion of the 173rd airborne brigade he explained i wanted to give back something to this country and its citizens for the opportunities it had given me and my parents those paratroopers who served with me in the reconnaissance platoon knew nothing of my immigrant status it was never an issue they simply knew me as doc alfred s platoon was sent to vietnam in may of 1965 part of the first army combat unit there on march the 16th 1966 they were in long khanh province helping another platoon that was pinned down by the enemy in his words it was ten minutes of pure hell in the middle of an intense firefight alfred was everywhere while attending to a fatally wounded machine gunner private william thompson he was hit with shrapnel and shot in the hip the bullet went parallel to his spine and came out by his shoulder ignoring his own wounds he then brought desperately needed ammo to another machine gunner private larry gibson several grenades then landed nearby one of them ripped his mouth open when he saw another land near private neil haffey he covered him with his body absorbing the brunt of the blast yet another grenade landed near sergeant ray compton and alfred covered him too then barely able to walk bleeding from his ears and nose he ran to recover a machine gun that the enemy was about to capture the extra firepower kept the enemy from advancing and alfred rascon saved his platoon through this extraordinary succession of courageous acts he never gave a single thought to himself except he admits for the instant when the grenade exploded near his face and he thought oh god my good looks are gone i m not much of an expert but i would say you were wrong about that captain you look just fine here today on that distant day in that faraway place this man gave everything he had utterly and selflessly to protect his platoon mates and the nation he was still not yet a citizen of later he said with characteristic modesty i did it because i had to do it and that s all there is to it he said i don t consider myself a hero anybody in combat would do the same thing for their buddies and friends we were all colorblind we were all different nationalities the important thing is that we were americans fighting for america i want to stop just for a moment to salute all the other americans who did that in vietnam we want to honor you today along with alfred many of you were there with him and i d like for all of you to stand or if you can t stand lift your arms and be recognized we want to acknowledge you today please alfred rascon was so badly wounded that day he was actually given last rites after a long convalescence he pulled through and he continued to serve his country he became a citizen in 1967 he rejoined the army as an officer in 1972 he volunteered for a second tour in vietnam and in 1983 he began working for the justice department today he is the inspector general of the selective service system helping to make sure that others will be there to defend america as he did looking at his lifetime of service to our nation it would be hard to imagine a better definition of citizenship so i would like to also take a moment sir to thank your parents alfredo and andrea for teaching their son the values of good citizenship and we would all like to welcome your wife carol and your children amanda and alan they must be so very proud of you today we welcome you here now here s the story of how we all came here alfred rascon was given a silver star for his valor that day in 1966 but the request for his medal of honor somehow got lost in a thicket of red tape his platoon mates persisted showing as much loyalty to him as he had shown to them thanks to them after 34 years i am proud to present you with our nation s highest honor since the creation of the medal of honor roughly one in five of them have been awarded to immigrants today there are over 60 000 immigrants protecting the united states in our military alfred was once asked why he volunteered to join and to go to vietnam when he was not even a citizen and he said i was always an american in my heart alfred rascon today we honor you as you have honored us by your choice to become an american and your courage in reflecting the best of america you said that you summoned your courage for your platoon because you ve got to take care of your people that s a pretty good credo for all the rest of us as well on behalf of all americans and especially on behalf of your platoon members who are here today i thank you for what you mean to our country thank you for what you gave that day and what you have given every day since thank you for reminding us that being american has nothing to do with the place of your birth the color of your skin the language of your parents or the way you worship god thank you for living the enduring american values every day thank you for doing something that was hard because no one else was there to do it thank you for looking out for people when no one else could be there for them you have taught us once again that being american has nothing to do with place of birth racial ethnic origin or religious faith it comes straight from the heart and your heart sir is an extraordinary gift to your country commander please read the citation mr president thank you very much for giving me at least a couple of seconds to thank those who were with me that day would my recon platoon please stand up i want to thank you all again for being here today and invite you to join our honoree and his family in a reception in the state dining room at the end of the hall thank you very much and welcome but don t leave until we have the benediction general hicks dem wjclinton8 2 94 bill_clinton thank you very much jack thank you for the introduction even from such a distance you look good on this movie screen although it s cut up in 16 parts it looks like a lot of the bills i have to deal with in congress but you still look like a whole person i want to thank jack smith and my good friend owen bieber i want to thank guy briggs and steve yokich for being here with me today and i want to thank all of you for welcoming me to this plant and to the world of general motors i was delighted that people all over the country will be able to watch this in other plants i want to say a special word of thanks to the people at the gm plant in baltimore maryland i was supposed to visit them last week and i lost my voice after the state of the union so if i had come they might have loved it i couldn t have said a word i just would have had to listen to them but anyway i didn t i also want to thank the grambling band for the music today that was great and i thank you what what high school airline high school i d also like to say that i ve been trying to think of a diplomatic way to ask for one of these pickups behind me i owned when i was a younger man and had a life i owned an el camino pickup in the 70s it was a real sort of southern deal i had astroturf in the back you don t want to know why but i did and i drove it literally until the blocks broke i drove it until it just wouldn t go anymore and you know when i retire maybe i can have another pickup i want to say a special word of thanks to the presence here with me of some people who are going to have to help make these health care decisions and other decisions we re making this year senator breaux and senator johnston from louisiana congressman jimmy hayes congressman cleo fields congressman bill jefferson and mrs mccrery the wife congressman mccrery they re all here and i also want to thank lieutenant governor melinda scchwegman for joining us today all of them have come to be with me and i thank them for that i want to begin by talking about a few things besides health care just real quickly i listened to what was said up here on this platform before i got here the way that people talked about the teamwork that you have here at this plant the product that you produce the fact that you re going to be able to sell them not only in america but beyond america s borders you know when i was the governor of your neighboring state to the north that s what i thought public life was about i thought my job was to get people together and to get things done i thought it was pretty simple and i was supposed to get people together and get things done and i ran for president because i looked at washington and i saw 12 years in which we were coming apart when we ought to be coming together when i didn t think anything was getting done when we quadrupled the deficit had low job growth nobody s income was going up and the middle class was getting socked that s what i thought was going on and i still believe that was what was going on and i ran for president because i wanted to try to help bring the economy back bring the country together and make the government work for ordinary people again i have always believed that if you give ordinary americans the ability to succeed they ll do extraordinary things i don t think this is very complicated i think if you give people a fair shot at the american dream they will do extraordinary things thanks to the u a w and others we made a good beginning on that last year we passed the family and medical leave law so that workers all over america could be successful workers and good parents they could take a little time off if a baby was born or a parent was sick without losing their job in the economic plan we rewrote the student loan bill so that the children of working class people can borrow money to go to college at lower interest rates and have longer repayment terms tied to the jobs they have so they won t ever be discouraged from going to college for fear they won t be able to repay their loans and we passed the national service bill to give 100 000 young people year after next the chance to pay off their college education by working for their communities to solve problems here at home things that help ordinary people deal with their lives we passed a bill that begins to reduce the deficit next year the deficit is going to be 40 percent less than it was projected to be when i came into office i heard all this talk from others about it we did something about it we did it by cutting spending and by asking only the top 1 2 percent of american earners to pay an increase in their income tax to bring the debt down but look what we got for it low interest rates low inflation high investment car sales up home sales up millions of americans including people in this room i bet have refinanced their homes in the last year we had 1 9 million new jobs 90 percent of them in the private sector not in the government which had provided a lot of the job growth in the 80s state and local government we have begun to turn this thing around now i know a lot of people still haven t felt it but we are moving in the right direction basically by putting the people of this country first yesterday i offered another budget it eliminates over 100 government programs entirely cuts over 300 government programs so we can save the money to bring the deficit down and to spend more on the things that count what are we going to spend more on redoing the unemployment system to make it a reemployment system so people can be trained for the jobs of the 21st century we re going to spend more helping states set up systems to move young people who don t go to college into jobs with one or two years of further training so they will be well trained and they can get good jobs not dead end jobs that s worth more money we re going to spend more to help our schools meet world class standards and support local reforms to meet the standards that will guarantee that when young people get out of high school they ll actually know enough to learn the skills they need to know to work in places like this these are things that it is worth spending some more money on this year we re also going to move forward on a crime bill most americans i think have finally become aroused at the level of violence in this country and they re ready to do something about it last year after seven years of fooling around we finally passed the brady bill which at least gives us a chance to check into the criminal records of people who seek to buy guns let me tell you what this crime bill does this crime bill will say number one if you commit three violent crimes you shouldn t be paroled ever three strikes and you re out number two this crime bill acknowledges the fact that we actually know how to reduce the crime rate i came from houston yesterday the crime rate in houston today is 22 percent lower than it was a year and a half ago the murder rate is 27 percent lower than it was a year and a half ago you know why they put another 655 police officers on the street in the high crime areas working with the law abiding citizens who live there they know their neighbors they know the kids they help get the kids out of trouble they help get them out of gangs and into good productive activities and they are working not only to catch criminals but to lower the crime rate this bill would put another 100 000 police officers on the street and i hope you will support it the last thing we re going to do in addition to health care this year i hope is to continue the work of reforming the welfare system there are millions of americans trapped in welfare who want to go to work who want to be good parents and good workers most of them are young women with little children most of them have almost no education most of them are part of a 30 year decline in the american family and in the communities they live in and the loss of jobs you know it as well as i do and many of them live and raise these children in neighborhoods where because the families are weak the communities are weak and there aren t any jobs gangs and guns and drugs and violence have moved into the vacuum we have got to help them turn their lives around we took a big step this year this april 15th when the taxes come due 15 million working americans with children who are hovering right around the poverty line even though they work full time will get a tax cut so that they will never be encouraged to choose welfare over work they will choose work over welfare the welfare reform bill will say we re going to give you education and training and child support and health care but after two years if you don t have a job you ve got to go to work once you get these services you do it and others should too but so many of these things we want to do bringing back the economy bringing down the deficit reforming the health care system require addressing reforming the welfare system require addressing the health care problem and i want to explain to you how all these things are related first of all you know you ve got great health care benefits and good security but you know most working people in the last several years who have good health care benefits have had to give up wages to keep the health care benefits and one reason is that general motors and people like you all over the country are paying too much for your health care because other people don t pay anything for their health care so when they get it they get it when it s too late too expensive at the emergency room they pass the cost on to you you know that one reason people don t leave welfare is if you re really poor your children get health care through the medicaid program if you take work at an entry level job with no health care you ve got to stick it to your kids you ve got to give up the health care go to work so you ve got this crazy system in american where you ve got working people paying income taxes who don t have health care for their children and they re paying income taxes to pay for health care for people who don t work it s a crazy system we re working to bring this deficit down you ve got a base here in this area i m telling you we have cut defense a lot but we can t cut defense any more and take care of this country we are cutting it a lot we shouldn t cut it any more we have frozen domestic spending which means i have to cut things in order to increase the job training programs i talked to you about the only thing that is increasing in this budget is the cost of health care why is it going up so much because we don t have a system in america in which everybody is covered in which people get primary and preventive health care and in which there is some limit on how much the insurance companies can do to decide who s got insurance and who doesn t it s a terrible terrible problem so all of these things we want to do seventy percent of the small businesses you will hear a lot of talk about how my health care plan is unfair to small business seventy percent of the small businesses in this country do offer health care to their employees and you know what their premiums are 35 to 40 percent higher than people in big business and the government pay because they are so small and more of them every month either go bankrupt or have to give up covering their employees one hundred thousand people a month lose their health insurance for good thirty nine million americans every month now have no health care and sometime during every year 58 million americans out of a country of 250 million 58 million have no health care so all of these things are related and i say to you it is time for us to listen to the enlightened business leaders like jack smith and the enlightened labor leaders like owen bieber who say that the time has come for everybody to take some responsibility for health care everyone should have health care security that can never be taken away so we can control the costs people pay their fair share and every family and every child in this country s got health care let me tell you i m going to do something today that violates every political poll you ever take politicians in both parties have been taking polls for years and you know what one thing we always find out when we take poll is that most americans don t give a rip what they are doing in other countries they don t want to hear what s going on in other countries they don t believe that but i think general motors does because you have to compete in a global economy it matters to you whether japan has a fair trade policy it matters to you it matters to you how much health care goes in every car in germany or japan doesn t it so you know we have to think about this now let me tell you something in america we spent 14 5 percent of our income on health care in canada they spend 10 percent in germany and japan they spend under nine there is no evidence that we get better health outcomes now i think all of us would say if all that money was going to the health care of our families and our children to have access to our doctors and our health care system we would all gladly pay it if that s what it was going to but it isn t we re paying more than anybody else and most of the difference is going to pay for paperwork bureaucracy and rulemaking because this is the only country in the world with an advanced economy that doesn t provide some health care for everybody and permits itself to spend another dime on the dollar for paperwork bureaucracy and rulemaking because we ve got 1 500 separate health insurance companies writing thousands and thousands of different policies charging old people more than young people and saying who cannot get health insurance we ought to stop it let me tell you something if you work here and you ve got a kid with asthma you ve still got a health insurance policy because your company gives you a health insurance policy that doesn t eliminate you for what s called preexisting conditions but i got a letter from jeanette windham of shreveport and i had her come to the airport to meet me last night a woman who works for an insurance company who had a brain aneurism her doctor said she was totally healed she was just fine everything was all right and she works for a company that allegedly has no preexisting conditions and they still won t give her health insurance there are people like that all over the country what if you had a dream of starting a small business and you were willing to risk giving up working here with all the security that it has if you had a sick kid and you did that you couldn t insure your family there are millions of americans today listen to this there are 81 million americans in a country of 250 million who either have the worker or somebody in the family has once been sick and as a result of that they re either paying higher insurance premiums or they don t have health insurance or they can never change the job they have they can t hope to move up because if they move up they ll lose their health insurance i m tell you we can do better than that all these other countries we compete with that put less money in health care than we have to are still solving those problems i m tired of hearing we can t solve those problems i believe we can and the time has come to do it on monday i was in houston and i went to a party of children with cancer and their parents little kids fighting for their lives and i looked out there in that sea of parents so grateful to be in houston which is the largest medical center in america having access to wonderful care but a bunch of them were scared to death because they were part of the three out of four american families that have lifetime limits on their policies you don t have that thank goodness but what if you did they re sitting there thinking my kid s got care today but what s going to happen when i hit the lifetime limits will i go bankrupt will something happen to the care other countries don t do that i think we can do better i could give you so many example of this and most of the propaganda you re going to hear i had a doctor in my office saturday who said to me he said mr president he said i m a republican i have organized hundreds of doctors in a group to practice medicine i have made more money than i ever dreamed and i showed up here to tell you i want to try to pass health care reform i hear all these attacks on your program while the people who are saying it don t have any idea what they re talking about what medicine s really like out there in america most workers don t have a choice of doctors anymore you know you ve got three choices in your health care plan my plan gives people three choices you know more than half the americans don t have those choices anymore in their health care plan and i m telling you folks when we go back to work in the congress i want you to help us pass this health care reform plan i want you to urge the members of congress to debate all the tough issues there are some hard questions and i ll tell you what they are in a minute there are some hard questions but we have got to stop making excuses for ourselves and why we can t do it if we don t do something to control health care costs it s going to cost every american working family another 600 a year by the end of this decade we cannot continue to do what we are doing i got a letter from a woman from louisiana that came to see me yesterday at the airport whose husband came down with lung cancer and they wouldn t even treat him because he didn t have health insurance they wouldn t even treat him and he died in five weeks how would you feel if that was one of your family how would you feel i got a letter from a man from shreveport who came out to meet me named don marks he s a sales representative he pays for his own health insurance his wife got sick his deductible went from 250 to 2 500 2 500 he had a 120 a month drug bill that wasn t covered other countries cover prescription medicine for everybody and if you have it you know that a lot of people stay out of the hospital and cost the system less if they can get proper medication especially true for older people if our seniors had access to properly prescribed prescription drugs their hospital bills would be lower it would cost you less in maintaining the health system but people don t want to put up the up front cost because the way it works now it doesn t come out of insurance premiums the government picks up the tab or somebody else picks up the tab it gets bumped along we can do better than this we can do better than this here i am at this plant a world class plant and the world s biggest company do you believe for a minute that you would be as productive as you are if you had a lousy health care policy and you had worry about your kids every day on the job you wouldn t would you yes it costs some money but you wouldn t you wouldn t do as good a job as you do all over america we are paying today for the fact that we can t figure out what every other advanced country s figured out how to do how to provide basic health care security that can never be taken away and i think it s time to do it our plan our plan does it by building on what works now one of the things that you ll be hearing about i get tickled i read these ads of these folks that are so desperate to keep the system we have now and they say oh the president wants to have the government take over the health care system it isn t true what the president wants to do is to keep the system we got now and give it to everybody guaranteed private health insurance private doctors private providers a private system that s what i want and that s what our bill would require our approach guarantees people the right to choose their health care plan like i said you ve got three choices in your plan that s what our plan does most american workers don t have three choices anymore and you know it as well as i do so what is this big myth that we re doing and a lot of the plans competing with us would drive workers down to one choice the least expensive hmo that may be a good plan a lot of the hmos give great care at low cost but one of the reasons is they have some competition they have an incentive to do it so if you have a choice you will be more likely to choose that and have good quality health care our approach protects the early retirees and finds a way to help companies pay for it to spread the cost of that to make general motors our steel companies a lot of our other companies far more competitive our approach reinvests savings from the medicare program into drug benefits and long term care benefits for elderly people it doesn t just take them away the way some others do and our approach completely outlaws insurance company discrimination other say well we make insurance companies cover everybody yes well you can get insurance now we have universal access now if you ve got 10 000 or 15 000 there s universal access to this truck but only people with the money can pay it right there s universal access to the truck right now right so don t fall for all this rhetoric about universal access everybody in america has access to this truck right here but they can t make it our approach says it is wrong to charge old people more than young people for health care just because they re older look the number of young people is going down the number of old people is going up people are going to want to work longer the fastest growing group of americans are people over 80 we cannot afford to set up a system where people can t afford to hire older workers we can t do it we need it for america s productivity we have got to have that so this is really not about whether we re going to put the government in charge of health care the government is involved in health care that s what the medicare program is all about and most of you would hang me from the highest tree if you thought we were going to repeal it wouldn t you i mean right it s not about that the government is involved in health care our plan does not put the government in control of health care what it does is to reduce the control of the insurance companies and give more influence to workers and businesses that s what our plan does and that s what i think we ought to do now let s face facts there are some tough choices if you have 39 million people without any health insurance and you re going to require people who are working who have no health insurance and their businesses to pay well they re going to be paying something they weren t paying and then if you have to find a way to cover people who aren t working but who aren t poor enough to be on medicaid we have to find some money for that so it s not easy how do we propose to pay for it we believe the fairest way is to ask every employer and every employee without health insurance to make some contribution we think that s fair we know that small businesses have a tougher time and there are limits on how much small businesses can pay under our plan we understand that that is the most controversial issue but i don t see how you can possibly cover everyone unless you are going to tax people who are already paying too much for their health care to pay for people who ought to be paying something or unless you require them to cover themselves now i think that s the fairest way to do it and if you don t cover everybody your heard mr smith say it if you don t find a way to cover everybody general motors will repeatedly be paying too much because the people who don t have health insurance will get health care when it s too late and too expensive they ll show up at the emergency room they ll show up at the hospital and then the cost will be passed on to you and meanwhile untold misery will be reaped in the lives of people all across the country but now that is a tough issue and that is the toughest issue what should the benefits be our bill prescribes the benefits and they are similar to the ones you have we emphasize preventive care so people can get annual checkups and things like that other approaches say well let somebody else decide the benefits i don t believe the only choice in this country for workers who have no health care should the be least expensive hmo because if that s true they won t have the competition necessary to maintain high quality care so i think we should have choices in the benefit package i don t think that we can do it without limiting the payroll contributions that some small businesses have to pay and that others should pay and i don t believe we can do it without giving small business the power to ban together so they can buy insurance on terms as good as general motors or the federal government can buy it they ve got a legitimate gripe there and we re trying to address that but what i want you to know most of all is most of what you hear in this debate is about a world that doesn t exist they say oh bill clinton is going to take choices away that s not true we re going to guarantee more choices to most workers you ve got three choices today most workers don t and you know it so don t let people put that kind of smoke out there they are saying we are getting the government into health care that s not true we re moving the insurance companies out of the driver s seat and letting the people and the businesses have more influence and that s what we ought to do look i know there s a lot of money in this and there are a lot of good people who work for those companies but you just have to ask yourself whether we can afford to continue to spend 40 percent more than everybody else and not cover everybody you re going to hear how well inflation and health care costs has gone way down because of the competition it has it goes down every time there s a serious threat to reform the health care system and you let them kill my bill and you watch what happens to medical inflation for the rest of this century it will go right back up again just like it has every time in the last 50 years as soon as the interest groups could kill a serious plan at health care reform folks we have involved hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of doctors and nurses and business people and even folks from the insurance industry in trying to put this plan together is it perfect of course not is it complicated it has to be this is 14 percent of our income how many of you have complicated health care circumstances this is a complicated issue but the basic issue is simple should every family have health insurance that can never be taken away should we keep the great american system of private health care providers and even private insurance should we make sure that we do what we can to emphasize primary and preventive care and should we pay for it by asking people who don t pay anything to pay something for their own health care you know how other plans pay for covering people without insurance they want to tax the benefits of people with good health care plans and their companies you re already paying too much for health care why should you pay more in taxes to pay for people who haven t paid anything for their own health care i don t get that and i don t think it makes sense we re going to go back to washington and we re going to have a debate on this we re going to pass the crime bill but don t forget crime is also a health care issue that s what filling the emergency rooms on the weekends we re going to work on welfare reform but don t forget if you want people to stay off welfare they ve got to be able to have health care for their children we re going to keep bringing the deficit down but don t forget someday we ll be spending money we ought to be spending on education and training on health care because inflation is destroying the federal budget all on health care costs i am telling you if you want us to do what you do here if you want us to get together and get things done if you want partnership not partisanship if you want progress not petty politics if you want us oriented on the future and not the past we have got to deal with the health care crisis in america and we re going to have to have your help to do it thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton8 2 95 bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen i m delighted to see you all here i thank the members of congress especially for being here senator thurmond senator specter senator leahy congressman dicks is congressman gilman here it is my pleasure and honor today to announce my intention to nominate general michael carns to be the next director of central intelligence general carns will face a challenge whose difficulty is matched only by its importance the cold war is over but many new dangers have taken its place regional security threats the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction terrorists who as we have seen can strike at the very heart of our own major cities drug trafficking and international crime the decisive advantage united states intelligence provides this country is therefore as important as it has ever been as president i ve had the opportunity to appreciate just how important that intelligence is to our national security most americans never know the victories our intelligence provides or the crisis it helps us to avoid but they do learn about its occasional setbacks and as we prepare our intelligence community to face new challenges we must not forget its many successes general carns broad experience and exceptional qualities make him the right leader for our intelligence community in this time of challenge and change he s distinguished himself as a fighter pilot a military commander and a manager he s a proven innovator open to new ways of doing business and skeptical of conventional wisdom he understands the critical importance of intelligence because he s had to rely on it when the lives of americans and the security of our country were on the line he s taking this critical assignment after having already dedicated a whole lifetime of outstanding service to our country i thank him and his wife for that decision after graduating from the air force academy in 1959 he went on to fly over 200 combat missions in vietnam where his heroism earned him the silver star and the distinguished flying cross he served as director of operations for the rapid deployment task force deputy commander in chief of the united state pacific command vice chief of staff of the air force the office he held before entering a very short lived retirement last september and somewhere along the line he even found time to get an mba from harvard something for which i have already forgiven him general carns also served as director of the joint staff during operations desert shield and desert storm both admiral william crowe and general colin powell who relied on general carns to get the job done when our nation was at war know and appreciate the full measure of this fine man his exceptional accomplishments are rooted in a tradition of patriotism and service instilled in him by his father major general edwin carns of the army and by his mother jan whom i had the privilege of speaking with yesterday mike and his wife victoria have carried on this tradition and passed it along to their own children michelle a cadet at the united states air force academy and mark who serves in the air force let me say to their entire family the country is proud of your service and i am i say again especially grateful to you victoria for supporting this move today general your mission will be greatly helped by the distinguished commission led by our former secretary of defense les aspin and former senator warren rudman that i have asked to review the missions and structure of our intelligence community together and with the help of the congress you can build a strong consensus for reinvigorating u s intelligence so that it pursues clear priorities and puts its resources behind the core missions that will continue to give our nation the most timely relevant and honest intelligence in the world as we look to the future i also want to thank the outgoing director of central intelligence jim woolsey for his service thank you jim and we re delighted to see you here today no one has been a more forceful advocate for the intelligence community in my own case beginning long before i became president his efforts to streamline collection systems and improve the quality of analysis will pay off for our country for many years to come i d also like to express my deep appreciation to our acting director bill studeman who has served our nation admirably for 32 years now both of you have earned out nation s gratitude finally to the men and women of our intelligence community whose work often goes unheralded let me say on behalf of all of us and all americans your country owes you a debt which can never be fully repaid but we respect it and we appreciate it what we can do and what general mike carns and i will vow to do is to work with you to support you and to challenge you as we build an intelligence community for the next century general carns dem wjclinton8 2 99 bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen i would like to begin if i might by thanking president bush president carter and president ford and this congressional delegation for coming on very short notice all the way to jordan to make a clear and unambiguous statement about our regard and respect and gratitude to king hussein and the people of jordan i thank them very very much i want to thank ambassador burns and all of you in the embassy community for representing us in a difficult and challenging part of the world in a wonderful country i thank all the jordanian nationals who work for the united states we are honored by your efforts and when jordanians and americans work together in our embassy here in amman they symbolize the partnership that we hope will always exist between the united states and jordan most of what i would have said has already been said so eloquently by those who have spoken before i would just like to make a couple of points about king hussein and about king abdullah first of all hussein really did bring people together you know i was looking at the four of us here we are two democrats two republicans we ve agreed on many things we ve disagreed on a thing or two over time but we know that america s interest and america s heart were close to this king and this country i looked at the israeli delegation today i could hardly believe my eyes all the candidates for prime minister were there they were all walking together i don t know if they talk at home but they were all talking here i thought it was as if hussein was hugging them all you know it was really a beautiful sight people coming from all around the world countries that are at each other s throat here meeting in peace and friendship and the sanctity of the umbrella of this great man he worked with every american president since president eisenhower amazing thing the second thing i would like to say is that he really was driven not by the title he had but by the responsibilities it bore and he was ennobled not by the title but by the strength of his own character and his vision and his spirit it was unbelievable to me when we talked right before we started this last round of peace negotiations at wye and i knew how ill he was he said well i would be willing to come down there if you think it would help i said if i think it would help this whole thing is about to come apart of course it would help i said if you come down they won t have the courage to walk away here without an agreement and so he did and he took a house and some days he could only work 30 minutes or an hour but every day we needed him in that long wye peace accord he was there every day he was needed he was there no matter how sick he was no matter how bad he felt and his son the new king told me tonight he said you know the truth is it put some days on his life because he was doing what he believed in and all the icy atmosphere of those tense talks would immediately disappear when hussein walked in the room because all the differences and animosities and grievances seemed small in the face of this very large presence and it was almost as if the more frail his body became the more powerful the essence of his spirit was every jordanian citizen can be proud of that can be proud that on every continent in every country of the world people said that is the sort of person we all ought to be the last point i would like to make is that i would like to join the previous speakers in saying that i have great confidence in the young king of jordan i had a very good meeting with him today he clearly understands his mission he said in the most moving way he said i and all of my brothers and sisters have absorbed our father s teaching we know what we are supposed to do and i intend to do it and he said it in a way that exuded the quiet humble confidence that i saw so often in his father and finally just on a purely personal note i was deeply honored to be able to bring queen noor s mother and father over on the airplane with me they are in this audience tonight because we are leaving from here and i think we should let them know that our prayers and support are with them and we are grateful that their daughter a daughter of america has been a magnificent queen of jordan and a great friend to the people of both countries hillary and i have had so many unbelievable experiences as a result of the great honor of serving in the white house but among those i will treasure most every day of my life are the times we had with the king of jordan he made us all a little better and he always will thank you very much dem wjclinton8 3 00 bill_clinton i don t think the rest of us need to say much i want to thank senator kennedy and congressman gephardt congressman bonior and all the members of the house who are here with us today i want to thank the members of the administration who are here in addition to mr podesta treasury secretary larry summers gene sperling deputy labor secretary ed montgomery i thank the religious leaders who are here including reverend paul sherry the former president of the united church of christ the reverend david beckmann the president of bread for the world and the other community leaders but most important of all i want to thank cheryl costas for being here because we re here today on behalf of her and so many people like her all across our country people who work for the minimum wage often don t get a chance to see the white house they don t have time to come even for the public tours they work hard every day they stock our store shelves wash dishes at our restaurants clean our offices at night care for our kids during the day they re in every town and every city in our country they re of every racial and ethnic and religious group they have in common the minimum wage and they need a raise and as you saw they deserve a raise we are here today to ask congress to give it to them ever since i ran for president in 1992 i ve had a vision of making our nation a place where everyone everyone responsible enough to work for it could have a share of the american dream over the last seven years with the help of a lot of you here today we ve made a lot of headway toward that goal turning the economy around and continuing the longest economic expansion in our history i want to continue doing that i want us not to squander the surplus but to save social security and medicare to invest in education and to pay our debt down i also have tried very hard not just to generate jobs but to help people who are working hard for less that s why we expanded the earned income tax credit and i ve asked congress to expand it again that s why we passed the family and medical leave law and i ve asked congress to expand it again and that s why with bipartisan support in 1996 we raised the minimum wage to 5 15 an hour over two years and now it s time to do it again to 6 15 an hour we have bipartisan support again in congress but once again the republican leadership is trying to stop us they know they can t win on the facts back in 1996 listen to what was said the last time we tried to raise the minimum wage in 1996 republican leaders said that a higher minimum wage and i quote was a job killer cloaked in kindness they warned that it would throw young minorities out of work and lead to listen to this a juvenile crime wave of epic proportions time has not been kind to their predictions today i release a report from the national economic council that puts to rest any of the lingering myths about the minimum wage since the minimum wage was raised in 1996 our economy has created over 10 million new jobs the unemployment rate is at its lowest point in 30 years the employment of minority youth has gone up juvenile crime has gone down we now have the lowest poverty rates in 20 years and the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded we ve cut the welfare rolls in half and thanks in part to the minimum wage increase millions have moved from welfare to work and incomes for even the poorest americans are rising for the first time in decades now that s what happened the last time we raised the minimum wage there are no facts on which to base this opposition anymore the new report i release today also dispels another myth about the minimum wage that those who benefit are mostly middle class teenagers working for gas money cheryl probably feels a lot like me i wish i were still a middle class teenager working for gas money but the fact is that 70 percent of the people on the minimum wage are adults 60 percent are women and almost half work full time many are the sole breadwinners struggling to raise their children on 10 700 a year and i think congress ought to think about them when this vote comes up today there are more than 10 million americans like cheryl working for 5 15 an hour you heard her say it s hard to live on that especially if you have children but no americans who work full time should raise their children in poverty this modest increase would simply restore the minimum wage to what it was in real dollar terms in 1982 people who are against this should have to confront that fact for a full time worker however this would mean another 2 000 a year and if you re on the minimum wage that s real money enough money for a family of four to buy groceries for seven months or pay rent for five months this is the right thing to do for working families the right thing to do for our economy at a time when we ve got labor shortages that will draw more people back into the labor market studies from princeton to my own council of economic advisors show that s exactly what happens when you raise the minimum wage increase the reward for work and people who weren t looking for jobs decide to look and go to work there are a dozen good reasons to raise the minimum wage and not a single good argument against it even the republican leadership understands that so instead of arguing the facts they re playing legislative sleight of hand for example they re now using the minimum wage as a vehicle to repeal worker protections and pass irresponsible tax cuts that would threaten our fiscal discipline and jeopardize our ability to save social security and medicare and pay the debt down by 2013 they also say they want to put this in over three years not two that would mean 900 less in wages for a full time minimum wage worker if republican leaders send me a bill that make workers wait for another year for their full pay raise and holds the minimum wage hostage for risky tax cuts that threaten our prosperity i ll veto it it is time to stop nickel and diming the american working people out of the money that they need and deserve this is just wrong this is wrong we have destroyed every single argument against raising the minimum wage they re gone all you ve got now is legislative game playing and it s wrong i want a clean straightforward bill to raise the minimum wage by a dollar over two years and i intend to sign it let me say to all of you i am profoundly grateful for the prosperity our nation enjoys today grateful for the opportunity that our administration has had to play a role in it but i will never be satisfied as long as there are people like cherly out there i mean what else can you ask this woman to do she s kept her family together her husband has a disability she s supporting four kids she s going to school full time now how can congress justify saying no to her that s what i want to know let s play games on another bill they re going to pass a lot of other bills can t we put the working people of this country first for a change here put political games second i d like to now introduce to speak the first of a series of members of congress without whom this fight could never be waged and i am profoundly grateful to representative david bonior for nearly 25 years of fighting for people like cheryl costas congressman bonior ladies and gentlemen all that needs to be said has been said but what needs to be done has not been done so i ask you to leave here remembering the stirring words of our leaders in congress and the profoundly moving story of cheryl costas and just remember there s a lot more people like her out there remember what dick gephardt told you just ask every member of congress to imagine how long they could live on the minimum wage this is the right thing to do we re still here after over 220 years because when the chips are down we mostly do the right thing in spite of ourselves ask them to do the right thing thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton8 3 03 bill_clinton thank you very much i thank the duke of marlborough for his wonderful introduction and for welcoming us all into this magnificent home the last time i was here was thirty three years ago as a student a dutiful tourist i never imagined then i would come back today and have this opportunity lady mary soames it s delightful to see you again i thank you for being here and for reminding us who were born too late or too far away to have met winston churchill that he is not quite lost in the mists of history and is nearer than we think i want to also acknowledge the honourable nicholas soames who like his grandfather and great grandfather is a child of the house of commons and the other members of the churchill family who are here tonight i thank the committee for making this night successful and i thank our ambassador farish and mrs farish for being here and our former ambassador phil lader and his wife linda who have been my friends for twenty years and who called me and said i ought to show up here tonight for this event i would like to thank the wonderful organist and the choir i felt that i was right at home i thought you had arranged the music for me the fact that there is a saxophone quartet later makes me want to talk for three minutes and sit down on his very first trip to the united states sir winston churchill said what an extraordinary people they are they make you feel at home and at ease in a way i have never before experienced i always felt that way when i came to your country it is difficult to speak in the shadow of churchill one always feels slightly inadequate even if like me you ve talked for thirty years for a living when i was president i gave a few speeches within earshot of the famous joseph epstein bust of sir winston that was given to the white house in president johnson s last year in 1968 and even when i thought i had given a pretty good speech i could always swear that bust was shaking its head in mild disapproval prime minister blair gave another copy of the epstein bust to president bush who actually had the courage to put it in the oval office i could never stand such close scrutiny i have been told that i am the first member of the post war generation invited to give this lecture i was only eighteen when winston churchill died but it is perhaps my generation of americans indeed my generation of free citizens everywhere in the world who owe more to his life and legacy than anyone else for we grew up in a world that his determination and leadership made possible when i was in the white house i often felt that i was living with winston churchill hanging round he spent three weeks with president roosevelt in the white house during world war ii when travel was not so rapid and people didn t frown on you if you went some place and stayed i never had anything as important as world war ii and it was unthinkable that i could go any place for three weeks the white house was full of churchill stories how he refused to stay in the lincoln bedroom because he liked the so called queens bedroom better since he liked to stay in bed late and work and the light was better there in the morning how president roosevelt inadvertently wheeled in on him one day when he was still undressed from his morning bath and he said come in i have nothing to hide from the president of the united states i kept a wonderful picture in my private office of sir winston walking with president harry truman to give his famous iron curtain speech in fulton missouri and near that an even more wonderful picture of president roosevelt and prime minister churchill in a tower looking at the sunset over the atlas mountains when they met in casablanca roosevelt was going to hurry home and churchill said you can t go home until you have seen the sunset over the atlas mountains i thought what a wonderful thing that a man with all the cares in the world took a little time to remember the things that matter in life no matter what adversity brings i had a print of sir winston in my private office a wonderful picture with a a mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb in the background and a gripping quote about the fears he had if the world was not wise enough to manage the nuclear age i even have a portrait of sir winston which is now in my office in harlem in new york painted by another amateur painter i wanted to keep it so much because like him my friend who painted it took it up as recreation and painted a marvellous picture when the great recently deceased photographer from canada mr karsch came to take the picture of me and my wife and he gave me his famous portrait which all the world thought was churchill contemplating all the gravity before him and in fact was simply a peeved prime minister because karsch had jerked the cigar away from him right before he took the picture so even though i just sort of rattled around here as a student i felt by the time i became president that i had some acquaintance with winston churchill tonight i would like to say in a few moments what his life and legacy mean today in a very different world like every public figure of the baby boom generation i was heavily influenced by his speaking style and leadership qualities now as i write my memoirs i am trying to learn more about his skill as a writer he was perhaps the most prolific writer in the english language since charles dickens and dickens didn t have another day job it s harder for me i write everything longhand i am not sufficiently adept on the computer and besides i can t think that fast sir winston had a better idea sometimes he dictated prose from his seat in the bath tub after all he was first lord of the admiralty but at other times in the words of his secretary mrs hill his creative process involved sir winston dashing around in shorts and under shirt and a bright red cummerbund while i trotted behind him from room to room with a pad and pencil struggling to keep pace with the torrential flow of words he could dictate four or five thousand words a night ten thousand on weekends at that rate my book would be available here in british bookstores next week i have enjoyed the books of churchill on the way over here today i re read a collection of his journalistic articles published in the early 30 s and republished under the title thoughts and adventures it was fascinating i thought the one thing that people never say about churchill and his legacy they say oh he means this he means that he means the other thing but they don t say he told everyone to think i read all these little essays and i thought the man was always thinking and defending by the way the necessity of changing your position if thinking and circumstance required it on this trip i brought as a cherished memory the wonderful biography written by my good friend the late lord jenkins whom i miss very much and to whom all of us third way politicians owe a very great debt in america churchill remains popular even among people who never read his words or read words about him still americans have a kind of intuitive idea that they get churchill that they know what he was about so across america there are churchill high schools and churchill streets in new york city alone there is a churchill restaurant a churchill communications firm even a churchill luxury stretch limousine service i see the family solicitors are taking notes i understand that not all these tributes are welcome news to the churchill family but they do reflect the deep hold churchill has on the american imagination one which begins with the fact that he had an american mother and an english father mark twain in introducing him once said it was a blend that makes the perfect man even with his healthy ego i doubt that sir winston would have asserted his perfection after all he drank his whisky he had his foibles even dare i say it made a mistake or two along the way americans have an affinity for churchill that is deep not because of perfection but because of the lasting power of his words his ideals his leadership and his spirit the words powerfully spoken written with clarity and conviction the ideals of human progress and the pursuit of happiness the leadership in war and peace against nazism and communism before the united nations the spirit to rally the english people at the edge of destruction to their finest hour in the seventh decade of his life a life whose setbacks would have broken a lesser man i thought today that churchill must have viewed a lot of his adversity in life in much the terms that mark twain who admired him so much said when he noted that it does a dog good to have a few fleas it keeps him from worrying so much about being a dog churchill looms so large it is tempting to find in his life and labours easy analogies easy answers to the new and vexing problems we face today as a first rate reporter and historian churchill would caution us as his grandson has in the last several months to proceed down this road with caution to look at the past history and the peculiar facts of our present situation to apply the lessons of history with the understanding that exact parallels rarely exist because human flaws and failures vary too much for that that said churchill did inspire us with insights that are clearly relevant today first there is the powerful truth he articulated more and more clearly after the war in 1950 he told the house of commons the whole movement of the world is towards an inter dependence of nations we feel all around us the belief that it is our best hope as in his early warning against hitler again churchill was ahead of his time what he saw the inklings of in 1950 and described with optimism and certainty would not be true for much of the world until the cold war was over the berlin wall had come down and barriers of so many kinds had begun to crumble along towards the end of the 20th century people have now come to rely on the term globalization to describe the present conditions but i prefer churchill s term inter dependence because it more clearly captures the non economic meaning of our relations with other people on this planet the incredible connections wrought by information technology travel and immigration shared scientific endeavours shared security and shared vulnerability simply put inter dependence means that for good or ill we cannot escape each other september 11th 2001 showed us that a world that is inter dependent but not yet an integrated community can be perilous indeed in the united states 3100 people from seventy countries including over 200 citizens of this great nation were killed by people who use the forces of inter dependence they used open borders easy travel easy immigration easy access to information and technology so if sir winston were here with us tonight in body as well as in spirit i believe he would tell us the great business of the 21st century is to build a world of positive inter dependence a world of shared benefits shared responsibilities shared community shared values shared security and freedom and i believe he would say that the vaunted special relationship he and roosevelt did so much to build and that many of us who followed him worked hard to strengthen is essential to building that kind of world i believe it is a mistake to attribute churchill s special relationship either to sheer pragmatism created only for the sake of defeating hitler and containing the soviet union or to gauzy sentiment based merely on shared language and culture and his enormous admiration for president roosevelt it was far more than that as churchill made clear yes the relationship between the united states and britain was special in its own right but for churchill it had to be viewed in the context of the expanding family of nations in that famous speech in fulton missouri the iron curtain warning has received all the attention but one of the ideas of that speech soon to be expanded in the zurich speech was that not only did the united states and britain have to stick together but europe had to come together and all the while our constant aim must be to build and fortify the strength of the united nations organisation so he saw our special relationship as a part of a web of special relationships he did not see these three goals the atlantic alliance a united europe a strong un as contradictory just the opposite he felt the only way the un would survive was through strong partnerships among its members this as many of you will recall is what he said in 1963 when president kennedy made him an honorary citizen of the united states in a note that his son randolph read aloud at the white house churchill wrote our partnership does not have any exclusive nature the atlantic community is a dream that can well be fulfilled to the detriment of none and to the enduring benefit and honour of great democracies when i was president i tried to take mr churchill s advice to heart supporting the establishment of the world trade organisation expanding nato to include former communist countries establishing new forms of co operation with the asian pacific countries committing to a free trade area of the americas supporting the kyoto accord on climate change the international criminal court the comprehensive test ban treaty and a stronger and larger european union which i hope will grow stronger and larger even though it will be bigger and richer than the united states we worked for peace and reconciliation in northern ireland bosnia kosovo the middle east the indian sub continent in african conflicts between north and south korea we worked for a united front to contain reduce and destroy weapons of mass destruction to fight terror to reduce the sources of global misery poverty ignorance disease environmental destruction the us and the uk have such economic military and political power and set such a powerful example as prosperous free multi religious multi racial democracies that the present moment imposes upon us a responsibility as heavy as at any time in the past to build the kind of world of which mr churchill dreamed sixty years ago in 1943 in a speech at harvard he famously said that the price of greatness is responsibility one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilised world without being involved in its problems without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes the agonies and causes of the world are different today but our responsibility remains in both our nations and in the watching world there is today a very great debate about what exactly our responsibilities require of us in 1943 the responsibilities of churchill and roosevelt were massive but fairly straightforward crush hitler liberate france win the war in the pacific in a couple of years they were equally clear re build europe contain communism today the threats we face are more varied and in their variety may seem more resistant to change but our responsibilities are clear enough fight terror contain reduce and destroy weapons of mass destruction reverse climate change reduce poverty in a world where half the world s people still live on less than two dollars a day a billion people will go to bed hungry tonight and a billion and a half will never have a clean glass of water put the 130 million children who never go to school in school combat aids tb malaria and infections related to diarrhoea these four will cause one in four of all the deaths on earth this year resolve the great religious and racial conflicts strengthen the power and reach of the united nations and other international organisations and make the dominant idea of the 21st century a simple one that our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences i have no idea exactly what sir winston would say about the particular problems before us but i imagine he would say think think think and try to fashion solutions consistent with the over riding goal to build a world of positive inter dependence in combating poverty disease and ignorance i think he would say they are the breeding grounds of terror and war and discontent we know how to reduce poverty fight aids and get children in school and doing it all is far far cheaper than cleaning up the mess not doing so will bring so spend the money about north korea i think he would say something like this it is a small isolated nation unique in its inability to feed itself and in its stunning capacity to build bombs and missiles it does not wish to use them but left to its own devices it will have to sell them for food and energy and prestige its real objectives are number one not to follow east germany into oblivion number two to be accepted by its neighbours number three to be dealt with by the united states and other great powers so offer them a final deal if they ll end their nuclear and missile programs and subject that to testing we will give them food and energy more important we will show them how to grow food and make things we will give them an non aggression pact because we ll never be aggressive unless they do something to violate the pact but don t give up the option of taking out the nuclear facilities on iraq i hesitate to say much so much has been said and i have been around long enough to know it is easier to talk when you no longer have any responsibility but i think he would remind us that saddam hussein is a ruthless tyrant who has governed by murder and intimidation and the iraqi people would be better off without him he has ignored the united nation s call to disarm the past twelve years i think that he would remind us that the inspections however have worked when they were in place in destroying more weapons of mass destruction than were destroyed in the gulf war that the sanctions have worked in the sense that his military has now less than one half of the capacity it had during the gulf war i think he would say our objective should be to disarm iraq because even though he is not about to use or give these things away while the inspectors are there and the world is watching given the nature of that regime it is hard to believe that you could have that volume of chemical and biological stocks around for ever without any of it ever falling into the wrong hands and just a little vx or aflatoxin just a little anthrax or ricin can kill a lot of people shatter confidence crush economies so our objective should be to disarm iraq if possible to do it in a way that strengthens the united nations and keeps the united states european alliance strong today it seems that that is impossible france and germany can be accused of minimising the dangers of disarming iraq america has been criticised for minimising the importance of working through the un and maintaining the alliance is there a response i am sort of with prime minister blair on this he has tried to have three objectives to maintain the alliance strengthen the un and disarm iraq so i would like to see them get a final schedule they are disarming the missiles now and it would seem a little unseemly for us to attack them after we made them even weaker in defending themselves than they were before but the missiles go 120 miles instead of 90 the north koreans make missiles that reach the united states the real issue is the chemical and the biological stocks that are there so i think there ought to be a reasonable timetable finish the missiles do the chemical and the biological work if our european friends are serious about disarming iraq and if our american friends are serious about trying to preserve the unity of the united nations and the relationships with the alliance we can wait a bit the military issue is not in question we are stronger militarily than we were in 91 and they are weaker much weaker the question is can we find a way to do this and if saddam disarms under the united nations resolution then we have to be prepared to work for regime change in ways short of invasion but i would say and i think mr churchill would say don t give up the force option because there is a lot of chemical and biological material there you can always kill someone tomorrow or next week or next month we can t bring them back to life we can try one more time to get a schedule for disarmament on al qaeda and afghanistan i think he would just say please don t make the mistake that the world made in the 1980 s and walk away from afghanistan and leave it to become in ten or fifteen years another terrible problem where women are abused where huge amounts of opium are grown and where the next generation s bin laden flourishes on the middle east i think he would tell us to get on about the business of making peace they will have to share the land the economy the security and respect for their holy sites and so much damage has been done these last two years that the united states and europe will have to guarantee any agreement that is made and if so we ought to do it will an inter dependent global community come to pass yes it will because we have no other choice at worst the lack of it is deadly and terrifying at best it is confining and insecure it will come we have no other choice will we make mistakes along the way in trying to build it doubtless we will will we disagree about exactly how we ought to go about building i certainly hope so since we are doing something that has never been done before and nobody has a corner on truth and wisdom i hope we will disagree and churchill would be the first to say stand up and express your opinions think think think and speak the most important thing is that we have a common goal rooted in shared values at that speech sixty years ago sir winston told the harvard students you cannot stop we have now reached the stage in the journey where there can be no pause we must go on it must be world anarchy or world order i would like to close with this personal note like churchill i have known a fair amount of political and personal adversity more of mine than his was self inflicted but i drew no small inspiration from his unbending will to go on so i close with these words for the united states and the united kingdom our political creed in the new century might be found in paraphrasing his shortest and one of his grandest speeches never give in never never never never never give in in matters great or small except to convictions of honour and good sense but never forget you share the whole world with neighbours great and small they too have their dreams and nightmares you must make them yours so never give in but never withdraw the outstretched hand thank you very much dem wjclinton8 3 94 bill_clinton thank you very much bob for that fine introduction thank you ladies and gentlemen for the warm welcome this is the biggest stage i ve been on in quite a while i m told it s so big because you re having the oak ridge boys tonight that made me wish i d been invited later instead of earlier i want to thank your president bill taylor for the invitation to come here and bob elsner for that fine introduction especially what he said about health care i guess if it were easy it would have been done a long time ago i look out in this crowd and see many friends of mine from across the country i saw my good friend neil offen the president of the direct selling association a minute ago and i ve already spotted five or six people in the audience that i ve known for years i thank you all for inviting me here and for giving me a chance to talk about health care today i d like to just begin by trying to put this very briefly in the context in which i view it as your president i think my job is to do everything i can to help every american reach his or her god given potential and to try to bring the american people together to make our country stronger in other words even though you often don t read about it in these terms the real purpose of our political system when it s working properly is to get people together and to get things done in the last year we have been able to bring the deficit down keep interests rates down see economic growth come back into this country in the last three months of last year we had the highest growth rate in a decade the biggest increase in productivity from american workers in eight years if our budget is adopted the one i have presented to the congress we ll have three years of decline in the federal deficit for the first time since harry truman was president and the first real reduction in descretionary nondefense spending since 1969 if this budget is adopted at the same time we re moving the money around so we ll be investing more in head start more in medical research more in new technologies to support defense conversion and to rebuild the american economy we are beginning to turn this situation around and to make this government work for the american people but this year we have a lot of other challenges we are facing the congress is working on a very important crime bill to put more police officers on the street to stiffen penalties appropriately to provide alterative punishments to first time youthful offenders to provide some ways for kids to stay out of jail to take assault weapons off the street they re doing a lot of important things that s a big issue and the congress is dealing with that as we speak the congress will take up welfare reform a subject on which i have worked for well over a decade now and i hope they finally will make welfare a second chance not a way of life for all americans and enable us to bring children up in a better fashion the congress is going to have a chance now to finally pass a campaign finance reform bill which will increase the confidence of the american people in the way we do our business here and a lobby reform bill there are a lot of issues out there but i can tell you that if over the long run we expect the american people to be a stronger community if we expect our economy to have the funds necessary to invest in the growth opportunities of the 21st century and if you want your federal government to be able to respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow we must address the health care crisis it is not just a problem for individual american workers and families it is a problem for the federal budget and for the national investment patterns i can tell you just to give you two examples in addition to the fact that almost every american at least those who don t work for larger businesses or for the government is at some risk of losing his or her health insurance or of having the inability to change jobs because someone in the family got sick and almost every small business is at risk of having their premiums explode or their deductibles and copays explode you also should know that this is a serious competitive problem for us we are spending 14 5 percent of our income on health care the germans are just a little bit over 8 percent of their income that s about where the japanese are only the canadians are at 10 percent of their income if you think about spotting our competitors five and a half cents on every dollar spent that is a significant issue and almost all of you represent a group of business people who have personally experienced that and as this economy becomes more global that will become more relevant now should we spend more money than other countries on health care i would argue we should and we must because we invest more in medical research and technology and we lead the world in that and that generates jobs opportunities and incomes we have these great academic health centers every american just about would be happy to pay a premium for that must we spend more the answer to that is yes we must as long as we have higher rates of violence and aids and teen pregnancy than other countries we ll have higher bills does that account for all of the difference not even close not even close a lot of it is directly related to the way we finance health care the second big problem you should know is this in the budgets we are adopting we are cutting defense this year for the first time since 1969 that my budget s adopted we ll cut nondefense spending social security will go up but only by the rate of inflation and it s paid for by the social security taxes which are in surplus we ll have to pay more on interest on the debt as it accumulates although not as much as we would if interest rates weren t low the only thing in this whole budget that is really going up by more than the rate of inflation in the federal budget is health care costs two and three times the rate of inflation and if we don t do something about it then the rising cost of medicare and medicaid will mean that two or three or four years from now none of you no matter whom you represent will be able to come to washington and say how about a new airport how about a new port how about a new highway program how about a new technology investment how are you going to keep up with our foreign competitors in the seven eight areas of new technology that will control the future because we will be spending all of the money you give us in revenues on health care while we cut everything else this is a huge problem and i believe that after 60 years of false starts we actually have an opportunity to do the right thing that is to give every american and every american family health security and have it be the right thing for the american economy and for the future of the united states for individuals health security means freedom from fear and the freedom to prosper and the freedom to make choices that now are becoming narrower and narrower for most americans in health care for the nation it means the ability to bring health care costs within inflation to have the chance finally to control the deficit and to allow many businesses now struggling with this problem to be able to invest to become more productive without having to make the decision to basically terrify their own employees by cutting back health care so much is this an easy problem no does anybody have all the answers no if it were easy and someone had all of the answers it would have been done before you represent more than 22 000 members who serve millions of americans tens of millions of americans engineers and teachers pharmacists and farmers and bankers and red cross volunteers those are the kind of people served by the american society of association executives next year you will turn 75 and for three quarters of a century you have shown the importance of representation of what can be done when people honestly seek to represent the genuine interest and feelings of their members and come together in a spirit of fairness and openness and try to achieve a common goal well i feel that i ve been i almost ought to be a member of this group i could have a little tag that said the association of all the american people and the members of my group want us to deal with the health care problem and we re trying to do it the american people want health care to be there when they need it and they want it to be there at a reasonable price that s what health insurance used to mean what it can mean again i know that because of the opposition of various interest groups and because some of them have changed their position under withering political heat there are some who have already said well we won t get health care reform yet again the people against it will prevail well i say to the naysayers and the pessimists that not quite so fast i have seen a lot of endeavors in which i was involved over the last 15 years given up for dead including my own endeavors political endeavors but it s a funny thing about our system here in america the american people and their representatives in the end more than half the time do the right thing when given the chance congress is starting today i don t know how many members of the congress i ve had to tell me privately in the last week that they are actually becoming more optimistic that we will get a genuine health reform bill out that will provide health security to all americans the reality is and everyone knows this that while we have the best health care in the world people who have health insurance today might not have it tomorrow people who can afford it today might not be able to afford it tomorrow people who have choices with which they are satisfied today might lose all those choices tomorrow pre existing conditions today leave 81 million americans at risk it means they can be denied coverage or their rates can be raised or they can t leave the job they ve got for a new one because they won t be able to carry insurance with them a lot of you represent small businesses a lot of people would like to leave a bigger business and start their own business or might want to seek a better career opportunity that is in a smaller business than the one in which they are in but if they have some member of their family that s been sick they re literally trapped where they are and they cannot do that three out of four americans have lifetime limits on their policies which means that for many of them they can lose their coverage just when they need it in the most two million families lose their health insurance every month 100 000 of them permanently we ve seen an increase in the number of americans without health insurance from 37 million to 39 million just in the last two years the health care we have is good if we can get it but the health care financing system does not serve the american people well it is broken it is unfair it leads to massive cost shifting it leads to by far the biggest paperwork burden of any health care system in the world and i would like to say in simple terms what i believe we should do to fix it first we should guarantee private insurance to every american second we should guard the right to choose a doctor and improve the quality of health care plans third we should limit how much insurance companies can raise rates based on whether your business is large or small or you work for the government whether you re older or younger or whether someone in your family has been sick and we should make it illegal for people to drop others but we must set up a system in which insurance companies themselves will not be forced into bankruptcy if we make it illegal to drop them which is why it is important for people to be able to be insured in large pools third we want to protect and improve medicare and health care for older americans fourth we want to provide benefits through the workplace because that s where nine of 10 americans who have insurance already get it now that s the approach it s not complicated although millions have been spent to make people think it is complicated it is not all that complicated it uses what works today to fix what s wrong today i know that a lot of people have seen this health security card don t leave home without it but if you know how to use a credit card or a bank card or a social security card people can figure this out under the system we have proposed every american would get a card which stands for not a government program but guaranteed private insurance and private health providers the card would permit every american to choose a health care plan to choose a doctor to fill out one simple form and to get health care for a whole year and at the end of the year americans would be able to pick another plan or stay with the same plan or make a different decision it would not stop any american over and above that from paying another private physician for some other service if that was desired it would in other words give more choice than half the american work force has today in their health care plan beginning by guaranteeing private insurance for all means that everyone must be covered that s not only the only way to guarantee security it s the only way to stop cost shifting as long as an insurance company can deny coverage or drop from coverage then no one is really secure and some americans will have to pay the price for other americans health care because those who don t have insurance will eventually get health care when it is too late and too expensive often at an emergency room and then the cost will be passed on to all the rest of you who are paying for your health care right now in the usual way that is why i have said that i cannot sign and indeed would have to veto a bill that pretended to reform the health care system without providing a system by which everyone is covered because unless everyone is covered this is no cost control there is no end to cost shifting there is no real security and there is no balance in the system we are the only country in the world that hasn t figured out how to do this with an advanced economy and we ought to be smart enough to do it i mean basically when i see all these ads that say we can t do it i say these people are telling me my country is dumber than these other countries i don t believe that or they are telling me that the price of having great health care and great teaching hospitals and great medical research and extraordinary technology is that you have to have some people who don t have anything and all the rest of us have to pay for that besides i don t believe that that cannot be true the benefits package ought to be comprehensive enough to encourage primary and preventive health care because that saves money over the long run that s a very important part of this you think about it immunizations mammograms physicals prescription drugs all those things actually avert our health care costs when properly done and keep us healthier we spend too much time in america treating people when they are sick and not enough time keeping people healthy in the first place secondly we want to preserve and enhance choice as the best guarantee that the quality of american medicine will remain the best in the world people should be able to choose on their doctors and their health care plans it guarantees quality under our proposal now everyone would have a chance to make at least one from among three choices at a minimum every year you could choose traditional fee for service medicine you could choose an hmo for example you could choose a preferred provider organization that physicians and others organized themselves but every year you would be given the chance once again to make that choice under our proposal this is important more and more people under the pressures of the present system are living with shrinking choices and a lot of people are quite properly worried that those shrinking choices will not only interfere with their choice but will interfere with the quality of health care there have been a lot of articles written in thoughtful publications in the last few months pointing out that choice is a rapidly vanishing facet of american health care today and that in fact the attack on our plan is limiting choice is simply not true that by guaranteeing at least three choices and that you get to make a decision every year again that we are building into this system a higher level of choice and therefore a guarantee of competition and quality that otherwise would not be the case now the other thing that i want to say about this system is that affordable insurance should be there and should not be able to be taken away that s why we want to make it illegal for rates to be raised unreasonably or for coverage to be dropped based on age or previous condition of illness and we know that in order to do that and be fair to the private insurance companies we have to let people be in large pools that is this is what all of you know as community rating that s the only way you can guarantee that small businesses and self employed people and farmers for example through some sort of cooperative system can have access to the same good rates that the people in big business and government do still have community rating not discriminate against the old not discriminate against the worker who s had a sick child or a spouse with cancer and not bankrupt the insurance companies if they re going to be able to be a part of this you have to have some system of community rating these steps are very important they put the control of the health care system of america back into the hands of the american people on the one hand and health care providers on the other today the control is determined by the financing and it is in the hands of the insurance companies and very often they do what they do because of the way we are all organized and divided so that even if they don t want to do something that has a harmful effect the economics of their business dictate it because of the way the system is set up we can t permit that to go on anymore the american people should have the power to choose the american health care providers should have the power to deliver there should be incentives to control cost through competition and requiring people to take some responsibility for their own health care but it should not be organized the way it is now so that the people who are providing the financing in the middle have all the control and themselves are in a position not to make it fairer for many people we cannot have the security of millions of our people in jeopardy with the system that they are basically satisfies with when they have it but which could vanish overnight another thing i want to say because there have been a lot of questions about this is that there s another part of our system we shouldn t mess up medicare is one of the best things about american health care because it works and has very low administrative costs providing health security for millions of older americans the question is how do we keep medicare healthy as our population gets older the faster growing group of americans in percentage terms are people over 80 hope to be one of them before long but how are we going to do that how are we going to take care of our own as health care costs keep rising we believe that we have to keep medicare but that we have to recognize that the present system is heavily tilted toward institutionalized care which will a not be necessary for some people and b which will be explosively expensive as the percentage of our people living in higher age brackets goes higher and higher and higher so our system number one covers prescription medicine along with medicare which medicare doesn t do now because we believe there is ample evidence that that keeps people healthier and will save money over the long run a year s worth of medicine might cost the same thing as a day or two in a hospital and secondly by beginning to phase in a long term care system where we give people some help for making noninstitutional choices for keeping their parents at home or finding adult day care centers or having in home care because otherwise you re looking at a population by the turn of the century and the end of the first decade of the next century which we simply cannot afford to maintain and would be bad for our country unless we have more different options to deal with this rapidly aging population so under our proposal if you get medicare you keep it which also includes the doctor of your choice and medical security we achieve some savings in the medicare program by bringing the rate of inflation and medicare down to twice the rate of normal inflation when you hear there are all these cuts in medicare don t believe it we re just going to bring the rate of inflation down to twice the normal rate of inflation and take those savings to pay for prescription medicine and to pay for the beginnings of a new and more comprehensive long term care system this is again terribly important we cannot do anything to mess up health care security for older people but we must strengthen it finally i think we should guarantee these benefits at work and this is after all among the organized folks the most controversial decision of all nine out of 10 americans who have private insurance get it at work eight out of 10 americans who don t have any insurance have someone in their family who works expanding the present system lets us reach out to most of the uninsured and is based on shared responsibility it is the easiest and simplest way to accomplish the goal it s also the right thing to do you can never stop cost shifting until everybody s got insurance consider this i just mentioned welfare reform earlier if we take a welfare mother with two little kids who says i hate welfare and i want to get off of it and i want to support my children and you give that fine person job training and then the woman finds a job and she goes to work for a small business at an entry level pay slot because there has been no she got a very limited education then and no health care benefits at the office and that woman goes from getting a welfare check to getting a paycheck she begins to pay taxes she is now paying taxes for someone who made a different decision who stayed on welfare to keep getting medicaid the government funded health care program for poor people which she has given up to go to work that by the way is the central reason that we re having some difficulty moving people from welfare to work people don t want to hurt their children again this is a system that no other country has so we have to find a way to do it now you say well but it s really tough on restaurants who have a lot of young people who are healthy and who don t want to pay for health insurance anyway or it s tough on people who have a lot of part time workers some do and some don t ups has over 100 000 part time workers and insures them all but you say it s tough on businesses with part time workers and it s certainly tough on small businesses that are eking by but that is why we reasoned that if we do this we have to give substantial discounts for small businesses with low average payrolls low profit margins difficult times there are big discounts written into this bill for just that purpose and the self employed for the first time under our bill get 100 percent tax deductibility not limited tax deductibility as they do now these things will make this insurance more affordable plus which if small businesses and self employed people are in larger pools they will not be paying higher rates as they do now one reason small businesspeople have to keep either not cover their folks or reduce coverage every year is that the average small business premium is 35 percent higher than the average government premium or big business premium and you can t blame people for doing something in the face of those kinds of economics another reason is as a restaurant owner told me the other day i was in columbus ohio and this restaurant owner said to me look i m getting the worst of all worlds i have 20 employees full time and 20 part time and i was sick five years ago so our rates went up i cover my 20 it was an eating establishment she says i cover by 20 full time employees i don t cover the part time employees i feel guilty that i don t cover the part time employees and mad that my competitors don t cover the full time employees and i m having to pay higher rates because we had one person me in our group of 20 that was sick so the rates go up and the deductibles go up she said i m getting the worst of all worlds too high insurance my competitors have an advantage because i m covering my employees and they aren t covering theirs and i feel just terrible that the parttimers don t get any insurance at all and she said i would gladly do it all if everybody were treated the same way and we had access to competitive rates so i would argue that this is still the fairest and best way to make sure everyone is covered discounts for smaller business full deductibility for the self employed and a system which permits us to overcome the discrimination in rates that small business endure today so again this is a private health care system it builds on what s worth it is not more government and more bureaucracy it uses what s right about the american system the health care and fixes what is wrong the financing it guarantees permanent private insurance safeguards the right to choose a doctor and a plan limits how much rates can be raised because of categories and makes it illegal for people to be dropped protects and improves medicare and the health care of senior citizens and provides health benefits to the workplace now the largest associations of america s family physicians pediatricians nurses and pharmacists have supported this health care plan our approach was not designed to hurt anyone it did have to make some difficult choices it was designed for the american people it was about giving life to our best values and dealing with one of our biggest problems it was about giving families who work hard and do their best to raise their kids the security they deserve stopping people from paying more because of the irresponsibility of others stopping a situation in which eight million older americans every month who are not poor enough to be on the medicaid program but are on medicare and have to have medicine every month 8 million choosing between food and medicine it was in short about dealing with a problem that is only going to get worse unless we fix it now and doing it in a way that does not interfere with what is finest about our health care system it s about ultimately the freedom of the american people to be free from fear the freedom to preserve choice the freedom to preserve quality and the freedom to grow and prosper into the 21st century putting our values to work and believing that it is irrational to say that we can t do something that our competitors have figured out how to do that s why i think this year we will give every americans the freedom that only real health care security can mean i would encourage you to participate in this outreach to respond to your communities the people you honorably represent not to agree with every jot and tittle of everything in the plan we have presented if we involve thousands of people and work for months and we know how complicated this is but the basic things we have to do are fairly simple and straightforward and we ought not to be in a great political campaign to maneuver symbols here we ought to be involved in a great national debate of the american family to produce results that will genuinely solve this problem and so my fellow americans let me end where i began you represent an awful lot of the american family you know how the people you represent would be affected by certain changes that were made the congress is beginning to debate in earnest i ask you to support health security for all americans i ask you to support doing it through the workplace i ask you to support preserving medicare and preserving choice in giving small business people and self employed people a break i ask you to support those things i ask you to enter into this debate and help us to fashion a plan that will meet those objectives i ask you to do it with a good spirit with a fair heart with a sense of commitment to this because you cannot succeed over the long run with the particular objectives of your group and we cannot succeed over the long run as a whole people unless we face this if we had done it earlier it would have been less complex and easier we d still have problems with the health care system the problems with this never go away in any country but at least it would not have us by the throat financially and emotionally we can do this we can do it this year and we ought to do it people like you will speak not with one voice on the details but with one voice on the urgency of the mission thank you very much dem wjclinton8 3 99 bill_clinton thank you very much president aleman mayor zeledon mayor palcio bishop vivas to our school director julio martinez toruno and all the children who are here to the members of the government of nicaragua and the national assembly to the chinandaga boys choir and to the young woman who sang the national anthems of both nations the granddaughter of former president violeta chamorro and to all the people of nicaragua thank you for making us feel so very welcome today my fellow americans and i are moved and humbled to be here in posoltega where the terrible mudslide took so many sons and daughters mothers and fathers neighbors and friends i have come to pay my respects to those who lost their lives and to reaffirm the support of the american people for those who were spared and for your rebuilding in this decade with courage and strength you have created a new nicaragua you have earned the world s admiration and now you deserve the world s support in this moment of need somos humanos nos ayudamos we are brothers and sisters neighbors and friends we must help each other i thank president aleman for recognizing the work of the united states to provide food shelter and health care to renew the farms and small businesses to rebuild the roads and bridges and homes i thank our armed forces for all they have done including building a new health center in wiwili north of here now our agency for international development will provide equipment training and immunizations for this health center and others in nicaragua so that your people can get back on their feet and stay healthy as they rebuild their lives today we have brought 3 000 pounds of school supplies for the children of posoltega donated by organizations all across america and by our own workers at the white house i know that you need more temporary shelters until permanent homes can be built i know you need to speed the discovery and removal of land mines left from the war because the hurricanes may have moved them and made them more dangerous with these tasks too we will help i know that more is needed and urgently i have asked our congress for 956 million to support our reconstruction effort here i am grateful that leaders in our congress from both political parties have expressed support and i thank the members of the united states congress who have come to nicaragua with me and are sitting over here senator graham and congressman becerra deutsch and reyes this aid will help to speed the rebuilding of homes farms businesses and roads it will help your government to deliver aid better it will allow us to send more peace corps volunteers and i would like to thank the peace corps volunteers and i would like to thank the peace corps volunteers who are here today for their service in nicaragua as we see the dust in the wind today it reminds us that you must rebuild in a way that helps you to manage the environment better by preserving trees that can help prevent a mudslide or curbing pollution that can cause temperatures to rise we can avoid or lessen future catastrophes we can manage the land and water and grow your economy and i know you want to do that to help you focus on reviving your economy my aid package would also defer or forgive much of nicaragua s and honduras s debts to our government and i have asked our congress to reduce trade barriers between the two of us so that all the people of central america can work and grow their way back to prosperity and normal life we have provided temporary immigration protection for central americans in our country and i will seek a fair solution to all the immigration issues this tragedy has heightened in times past there was conflict turbulence and distrust between our two nations but now we are bound together in our common commitment to democracy and democracy will light the way to a brighter future for nicaragua through government through voluntary organizations through local officials working with citizens who are participating in decisions that affect their lives through leaders working to see that no one exploits this tragedy for personal gain and no one is left behind and we will work with you every step of the way a hurricane a mudslide they can destroy lives they can destroy homes they can destroy a life s work but they must not be allowed to destroy hope not so long ago your country overcame a terrible war and emerged even stronger you will overcome this adversity as well and we will work with you every day until the task is done thank you god bless you muchas gracias dem wjclinton8 4 94 bill_clinton wow what a crowd thank you for coming this morning thank you for supporting health care i want to thank mary ellen for that wonderful speech she really left nothing for me to say but she and the nurses of minnesota have my undying gratitude for this wonderful rally and for their commitment to your health care and to the future of american health care i want to thank senator wellstone and congressman sabo who s done a wonderful job in his new leadership position helping us to get a budget through that will drive down the deficit and still increase investment in the things that help america to grow and prosper i thank you mayor sayles for being here and i want to thank the others in the audience who are good friends and supporters of mine especially congressman bruce vento who is also a strong supporter of health care reform your secretary of state joan crowe your state treasurer mike mcgrath my good friend skip humphrey your attorney general and the mayor of st paul norm coleman thank you all for being here i also couldn t come to minneapolis today without saying a special word of gratitude for the extraordinary service being rendered to the united states of america under what you now know are difficult circumstances by our ambassador to japan vice president fritz mondale i am honored to be here today under the sponsorship of the nurses of minnesota i thank them for doing this i also want to say that i m very grateful for the people from heightman properties who made it possible for us to meet inside instead of outside today at least for me it s not springtime yet the remarks that mary ellen made in introducing me speak more eloquently than i ever could to what millions of american nurses know are the facts of life in health care in this country i ran for president because i thought that washington had become a place where there was too much rhetoric and too little reality where every statement that every person made was automatically pushed to its ultimate extreme the government can do nothing you re on your own or the government can do everything there s nothing for you to do but real people and real life want us to come together as a people and figure out how to deal with our problems and seize our opportunities and we have done our best there in other words to give the care to america s public life that the nurses of minnesota give to their patients every day if you look at what s happened in the last year there has been a pretty big change in the way things work in washington for a dozen years people talked about the deficit and the national debt tripled well last year this congress working with me adopted a budget that brought the deficits down interest rates down has helped to create 2 5 million new jobs in this economy more than were created in the previous four years we re on the way the congress is on a record pace to adopt a new budget which if it is adopted will eliminate 100 government programs cut 200 others but increase spending in education in head start in defense conversion in the new technologies for the 21st century in educating and training our people and give us the first three years of declining government deficits since harry s truman was the president of the united states of america already this year the congress has passed an education bill called goals 2000 which for the very first time in the history of this country establishes national standards for world class education and promotes the kind of grass roots reforms that minnesotans have been experimenting with for a decade to see that we meet those standards everywhere in the country for all of our children and when the congress comes back they will take up a bill designed to help all the young people who don t go to college to at least get a year or two of further training after high school so they too can have good jobs and good skills in the global economy and they will take up a bill that will completely reorder the unemployment system to make it a reemployment system because people often don t get the job they lose back anymore they have to find new jobs and now from the first day an american is unemployed he or she should be eligible from day one for new training and new job search and new opportunities we re going to change that unemployment system this year the congress will take up a crime bill designed to make us not only tough but smart for a change with crime it puts another 100 000 police officers on the street in community policing in models that have proven proven effective at lowering the crime rate it takes 28 kinds of assault weapons off the streets and out of the hands of gangs and if we do it the right way instead of the wrong way the congress will pass a bill increasing penalties for violent offenders so that we recognize that a relatively small number of our fellow citizens create a very high percentage of the seriously violent crimes we have more people behind bars as a percentage of our population than any country in the world and yet we continue to let the wrong people out from time to time it s time we found alternatives to imprisonment for young people and kept the people behind bars who should stay there we can do that if we do it intelligently now why is this happening it s happening partly because people like paul wellstone and martin sabo and bruce vento last year were willing to risk their political necks to make tough decisions to stop talking about problems and start doing something about them but it s happening also because the american people say look we are tired of gridlock we are tired of paralysis we are tired of rhetoric over reality we want you all in washington to conduct your business the way we conduct our business at home identify the problems identify the opportunities seize the opportunities and beat back the problems show up for work every day it s pretty simple what our strategy is get people together get things done move the country forward give people the chance to live up to their potential and now we are being called upon to face one of the greatest challenges of this age for decades and decades the american people have been denied something that every other advanced country provides to its citizens the security of knowing that they have good health care that is always there every other country with which we compete with an advanced economy has solved this problem only the united states time after time after time after time has found it impossible to do for 60 years whenever we came to the point where it looked like we could deal with the health care problems at times when it was much simpler than it is today when the money at stake was much lower than is at stake today always always fear overcame hope entrenched interest overcame the public interest today i can tell you that we are going to make 1994 different we can provide health security for all americans this year and i believe that we will my fellow americans in washington this may look like a partisan issue but out here on maine street it isn t democrats and republicans and independents all get sick they all lose their jobs they all lose their health insurance there are 39 million americans who don t have any health insurance now for a whole year in any given year there are 58 million americans at sometime during the year more than one in five of us who will be without health insurance there are 81 million of us more than one in four who are in families where we ve had someone with what the insurance companies call a preexisting condition a child with diabetes a mother with breast cancer a father who had a premature heart attack people who have to continue working but who either can t get insurance pay more than they should or can never change the job they re in because someone in their family has been sick there are 133 million americans who have lifetime limits on their insurance policies so if god forbid they should give birth to a child with a serious illness they could run out of health care at the very time they need it the most there are people who change jobs in an era when look at all these young people in this audience today the average 18 year old will change work seven or eight times in a lifetime and yet it is usual in america for people to have to wait months and months and months to get health insurance coverage the good people of minnesota know we can do better you know that if there is a mayo clinic which can provide worldclass health care at lower cost than many americans pay for something which at least you could say is not better and they wish were as good we can do better you know that there is no reason in the wide world to permit americans to be in this condition to permit most americans those who don t work for secure big companies or the government i don t care who they are are just an illness or an economic failure away from losing their health care and we now have an economy in which we re desperately trying to preserve life in rural america and more and more and more there are no doctors in rural america i was in rural north carolina the other day and i met a woman physician who told me she had worked for months on end over 100 hours a week and she was now in her slow season where she was down to 80 hours a week because there are no doctors we know we can do better than that we know we can so the question is why haven t we done it well there are a lot of people who don t trust the government in america to do anything they think we d mess up a one car parade and frankly from time to time i ve been in that crowd and so have you we do not propose there s not a single solitary proposal in the congress that would have the government take over the health care providers of this country and don t you believe that we ve got the best doctors the best nurses the best health care providers the best medical research the best medical technology in the world what we also have is the absolutely worst financing system for health care in the world it is the way it is financed that is killing us for all the people who tell you that if we reform health care it will make it more bureaucratic let me just ask you go talk to one doctor and ask a doctor how much time the people in his or her clinic spend on the telephone to insurance companies talking to employees who don t know a lick about health care trying to get approval for a procedure which is obvious and clear ask a nurse ask any trained nurse who works in a clinic or a hospital how much time he or she spends filling out paper instead of taking care of patients because of the system we have it is conservatively estimated that we spend at least a dime on a dollar more on the administrative cost of health care than any other nation in the world that is 90 billion we spend because we have 1 500 separate companies doing insurance plus the government doing medicare for the elderly and medicaid for the poor writing thousands and thousands of different policies insuring zillions of small groups of people finding out with all these hundreds of thousands of paperworkers in insurance companies and hospitals and in clinics who s not qualified who s not covered what you can and can t reimburse for nobody else does this so we can t figure out how to cover all of our people how to give people job security through health care security when we know they re going to have to change jobs but we can figure out how to spend 90 billion to hire people for the very frustrating work of second guessing every decision the doctor and nurse makes and pushing paper around all day long it is wrong and we can do better you heard senator wellstone say so eloquently that what we have to do is provide coverage for all americans he favors a single payer system i favor guaranteed insurance you can argue it flat around depending on the experience of the two main models we have canada and germany but i ll tell you one thing both of them have lower administrative costs less paperwork more freedom to practice medicine more efficiency and people have health care people should have insurance that they can never lose not when they change jobs not when they get sick not when they re self employed and not when they get older and they should have insurance that provides the right to choose their health care providers i get tickled when these people attack all of us that are trying to change the health care system they say oh they re going to ration health care oh they re going to take your choices away my fellow americans more than half the people in american today who are insured in the workplace don t have a choice about their health care plan or their doctor ninety percent of the businesses that are providing health insurance who have 25 employees or less have no choice and be fair to them and to the insurance companies they can t afford it under the present system they re doing the very best they can under the present system it is not a bunch of evil doers out there trying to keep people sick and insecure it is a badly broken system that is what is wrong and we can do better under our proposal every american family every year every year would have access to at least three choices you could have access to an hmo of your choice or a professional provider organization of your choice or the right to choose your own doctor and continue fee for service medicine or the right to have a guaranteed health managed plan and still have the right to opt out when you want it for a specialist of your choice or your own doctor everybody would have those choices and they would all be more affordable for most americans than what they re stuck with now we can do that if we had a system that was rational choice is important but you can t get there unless you change the rules of health care finance if you want to have a system that works you can t have people denied coverage or charged more because of preexisting conditions what difference does it make i have a stake as an american citizen in seeing you as a successful effective worker able to change jobs able to grow in your job even if god forbid your spouse should get cancer or your kid should have a serious illness that is my interest in your future we all share that insurance used to be that way everybody threw in everybody paid the risk was broadly spread we can t have waiting periods anymore before there s coverage we shouldn t have lifetime limits we shouldn t deny coverage to people who need it most and we shouldn t deny coverage by charging more for older people rather than younger people let me tell you we live in a world today where people are going to be losing their jobs well into their 50s and 60s and still have to find new jobs i met a 59 year old man the other day who worked for over 30 years in the defense industry and because of the end of the cold war and the reduction of defense spending which virtually all of us support and thank god for the opportunity to have a more peaceful world this good man lost his job he had to find a new job he needed retraining he was thankfully hired by a hospital for a rewarding job but there are lots of people like him who will not be hired because the small businesses who could hire them who know they re reliable workers because they re older they re settled they re experienced also know that they will drive up their health insurance premiums because of their age we do not need that we cannot afford that we have a bizarre system in this country when because of certain training and other problems a lot of young people are discriminated against in the job market they re told well you ve got to have experience before we hire you how do you ever get experience if you don t get a job and then you have a lot of older people who don t get hired because even though they ve got worlds of experience their insurance is too high we can overcome both of those things another big problem for insurance is that small businesses and self employed people pay on average 35 percent more than larger businesses and governments do because they have no bargaining power so we have to reform that too we have to go back to what is called community rating old fashioned insurance put people in big pools spread the risk broadly let us all share that and then small businesses and self employed people have to have the right to ban together in buying co ops so that they can get the same deal that those of us who work for the federal government do i want for you what i ve got and what we take for granted in washington now there are a lot of people who say it s not fair to require all employers and employees to contribute to their own health care if they don t do it now they say they can t afford it but let me just remind you of this when people in this country get real sick they do get health care it s too late it s too expensive they show up at the emergency room then they pass the cost along to all the rest of us and our health care bills go up what about the small businesses all over this country who are in competition with other small businesses they cover their employees and their competitors don t nine of ten americans who have health insurance that is private get it at work eight in ten americans who don t have any health insurance at all are in working families i think everybody should do their part and i know we can do it without hurting small business our plan has discounts for small businesses recognizing that not all can afford to pay as much as others we know that that happens our plan gives 100 percent deductibility for self employed people did you know that if you re self employed in this country today you can t deduct the entire cost of your health policy but if you work for somebody else you can that s crazy we fix that we are not going to hurt small business we re going to help small business by controlling the exploding cost of health care and giving people a chance to get affordable health insurance and finally let me say i saw this up here on the one of the wonderful signs our plan protects and preserves medicare but it also provides a prescription drug benefit and long term drug benefits to elderly people and that is also very important let me tell you folks the fastest growing group of americans are people over 80 the fastest growing group of americans are people over 80 many of them are bright active and vigorous they don t want to be forced into a nursing home just because they may not be able to get along all on their own we ought to reward their children who are willing to care for them at home and help them to get some respite care help them to deal with these crises we ought to reward the community providers who are willing to help elderly people stay in their communities and there is ample evidence that providing help for prescription medicine will save money immediately in the health care system by reducing hospitalization especially for elderly people but also for the nonelderly and strong evidence based on population trends that over the long run we are going to have to do something to help people deal with this long term care crisis within the family and within the community we cannot afford only to have nursing homes as an option even though we need them where they are appropriate we have to think of other things as well now i have been in the last week in north carolina doing a health care forum in which i talked to people about health care and crime and other issues in virginia and tennessee and in texas then yesterday i was down in kansas city and we talked to people in kansas missouri oklahoma and i m here tonight to do one of these let me tell you what i find i find that people really would like to know more about all these programs they d like to know honestly what the problems are they know that there are tough decisions to be made if this were an easy issue somebody would have done it already and said hey vote for me i solved this problem this is a hard problem that s why it s been pushed to the back but i think you hired me to deal with the hard problems so we re trying to deal with them and what i want to ask you today all of you here these fine nurses who have endorsed what we re trying to do and all the rest of you tell the members of your congressional delegation to tone down the rhetoric and open their hearts and their eyes and their ears and listen and talk and explain this thing and work through the problems and don t use this as yet another opportunity to take a proposal and push it to the ideological extremes forgetting all about the reality of the tens of millions of people s lives that are at stake here i plead with you your wonderful state has been very good to me from the time i came here in the primary when i just had a handful of friends all the way through the general election you ve been wonderful to my wife when she s been out here on her health care crusade you have been good to us and i thank you for that but i ask you tell the members of your congressional delegation without regard to their party that you want this dealt with and you want it done now we know enough we know as much as we re ever going to know and the longer we put it off the worse it s going to be it s going to be like an ingrown toenail it will not get better this is a part of our growing and maturing as a nation deal with the problems while we can deal with them don t just let them get worse and worse and worse this is an opportunity for us to come together across regional and racial and income and party lines to do something that is good for america all of our jobs are at stake all of our health care at stake our children are at stake our parents are at stake this need not be an issue that divides us but we are going to have to have a clear message from the american people that it will not be tolerated to do nothing to walk away to be divided to have hot air to turn it into a political issue tell the american people tell the congress you want us to act and act now thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton8 5 00 bill_clinton thank you so much well i want to thank first of all joe and anne for having us in their beautiful home on this beautiful spring night and i want to thank baron s colleagues charlie stenholm from texas and stenny hoyer from maryland for coming they represent i think the future of the democratic party and where we have to go and they ve proved that you can get elected in places where sometimes we don t get elected i also want to thank your predecessor lee hamilton for being here he s one of the greatest house members in my lifetime and i thank him for what he is doing and i want to thank in his absence senator bayh evan met me at the door and he said susan was out of town and he had two choices he could stay and here me give this speech or he could go home and tuck his kids in bed and i said you ve heard the speech and you ll never regret a minute you stay with your children my daughter is about to be a senior in college and i can still remember all the nights i tucked her in bed and she can remember anything she ever did that i missed even though she can count them on one hand and have fingers left over at 20 years old she can still remember so he went home as he should have and since he s not here i won t be embarrassing him when i tell you that i hope and expect some day i ll be voting for evan bayh for president of the united states i want to say just a few things and i won t keep you long i want to get out and say hello to the people i haven t seen yet the country is in good shape and i m grateful for that and i m grateful for the time i ve had to serve and the opportunities we ve had and certainly not in my lifetime and maybe never in the history of america have we had at the same time such a strong economy with benefits more evenly distributed we have inequality coming down in the last two years for the first time in over 20 years the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest single parent poverty rate in 46 years we ve got the crime rate we just said yesterday has come down now eight years in a row we ve got the lowest crime rate in over a quarter century the lowest murder rate in 30 years we have almost the welfare rolls are about half the size they were when i took office things are moving in the right direction 90 percent of our children immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time i thank you for the applause you gave when baron talked about the economy and our role in it but what i would like to say is people come up to me all the time and they say well thank you and i wish you could run again half the country is probably elated that i can t but it s nice when the people that say it say it but here s what i want to say to you a president is important it s important to be able to articulate what you believe it s important to be able to touch people where they live it s important for people to think that the person in the oval office cares about them it s important that you fight hard for the things you believe in but if you don t believe in the right things you still won t get good results that s why i m here tonight i like baron hill i ve liked him from the first time i met him i admire him but i think that the direction that we took first our party and then our country beginning in the 92 election is profoundly important and the major question before the american people this year is what are we going to do with our good fortune yes the surplus but generally what are we going to do with our good fortune and normally the question asked in a campaign determines who wins that is what people think the election is about very often determines the outcome of the election and i believe with all my heart the answer to that question is not that we should indulge ourselves but that we should take on the big challenges and the big opportunities that are still out there because most of what i ve had to do the last seven years and some odd months is to try to turn the ship the state around and get us going in the right direction and to use the metaphor i used in the 96 campaign build our bridge to the 21st century now the country has a chance that we ve never had before to literally build the future of our dreams for our children we almost had it in the 1960s and it came apart over the combined impacts of the civil rights struggle and the vietnam war and the divisions that ensued in the country and the collapse of the economic recovery of that decade so if the question is what are we going to do with the good times and the answer is take on the big challenges and the big opportunities then the issue is how and i would argue that what we need to do is to continue to change based on what we call the new democratic philosophy we believe that you can be pro business and pro labor we believe you can be pro growth and pro environment we believe you can be pro work and pro family we believe you can be pro trade and pro labor and human rights and i don t want to give a long speech about that but i would like to cite two examples because they reflect baron hill s career brief as it is already distinguished in congress one is this trade issue i believe that any fair reading of the record would say that i m the most pro labor president at least since lyndon johnson i believe that is fair but my belief in trade is rooted in two things number one we ve got 4 percent of the world s people and 22 percent of the world s income and i don t think you have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if you want to keep over 20 percent of the world s income you ve got to sell something to the other 96 percent of the people and you have responsibilities to them you want them to do better so you have to let them sell stuff to you secondly i think it s good for us in other ways imports nobody ever talks about that but because we ve had open markets we ve been able to grow without inflation when i was elected president after the election we had a big economic parlay down in little rock and i had a private meeting in the governor s mansion and i had democratic economists that is they were more progressive they wanted to believe we could have low unemployment without inflation so i said how low can unemployment get on a sustained basis without inflation and the consensus was 6 percent maybe 5 8 percent if you get below that you re going to have inflation it was 3 9 percent last month with core inflation at 2 4 percent now if you want growth without inflation you have to keep your markets open so there is some pressure on keeping the prices down in a larger sense because we re the most prosperous country in the world now when we trade with others it helps us to build friends and allies and promote democracy and stability and keep our kids from ever having to go to war again and that s really what this china issue is all about a lot of you are here because you know that it s a lay down economically in the short run because we don t have to give china any more access to our markets and they give us lots of access to theirs we can put up car dealerships there for the first time we can sell american cars without having to let them manufacture them in china or transfer technology we have all kinds of agricultural access we never had before but in a larger sense what this is really about to me having focused on the economy like a laser beam is national security because china is the biggest country in the world and in somewhere between 30 and 50 years it ll have the biggest economy unless india outstrips it which is conceivable and when that happens are we going to have a working relationship with them or is it going to be a new cold war meanwhile we want them to grow more open i don t like the human rights abuses that exist there but if we say no to them we ll have no influence on their policies because they think we re trying to stiff them they ll get in the world trade organization anyway but the europeans will get all the trade benefits we negotiated and i fought for a year for and i think the chances that there will be trouble between china and taiwan will go up exponentially if the united states says no i ve already had to send carrier groups to the taiwan straits once and i don t want to do it again i will if i have to but i don t want to do it again if somebody were to ask people are always asking me now what have you learned as president what can you tell somebody else the one thing i learned about foreign policy is it s a lot more like real life than i thought it was i mean if you hear people talk about it they always use these complicated words and all that it s a lot more like real life nine times out of 10 you can get more with an outstretched hand than you can with a clenched fist just like in real life you never want to let your guard down but you want to give people a chance to do the right thing just like real life and this is a big issue and he took a brave position and i want to be here to support him for it and a decade from now if we prevail we ll wonder why we had the debate and if we don t we ll still be paying the price one of the terrible things about public life is that sometimes you have to make tough decisions i got so tickled i read an article yesterday saying that i had real good approval ratings and if it hadn t been for the bad approval ratings i had in 93 and 94 i d have the highest average approval ratings of any president since they ve been taking polls and i thought well i showed it to hillary and she said sure in 93 and 94 we made all the hard decisions that gave us the good approval ratings later you know even in good economic times life doesn t give you 100 percent easy decisions so he s taking a tough decision it s the right decision for america and i respect it the second thing i want to mention is education because education will be a big subject of debate as it should be in this election and education has now become like god motherhood and apple pie everybody is for it but we had a strategy and baron hill has come in to support a very part of that our strategy was set high standards have accountability identify schools that are failing require them to turn around or shut down stop social promotion but don t blame the kids for the failure of the system give them the help they need to succeed and he s been especially active in promoting small effective schools i just want to tell you just two points about this and why it s so important the republicans from governor bush on down they re going to say they re for education and they re going to say a lot of good things and he ll be able to cite some things that happened in texas but here s the problem with their proposal their tax cut is so big and their defense increases are even bigger than the ones i proposed and if you put those two things with their voucher proposal there won t be any money left to do what they say they re going to do in education and somehow we ve got to get that out to the american people the other point i want to make to you is this when i became president one of the things that frustrated me was a lot of people just didn t think things could get better i mean if i had run for president and i said now you vote for me and sometime in my second term instead of having a 300 billion deficit we ll be paying down the debt the voters would have said in 92 he seems like such a nice young man but he s slightly deranged we better send him home when i leave office we will have paid off 355 billion of the national debt so if i said to you crime will go down every year in my administration you would have said the same thing if i said i ll cut the welfare rolls in half or we will together you would have said the same thing what s the point of this we now know it can get better what i want you to understand is that public education can get better i ve been working on this over 20 years now and hillary and i put through this big education reform program in 1983 and we thought we knew what we were doing but i can tell you that we now know more than we have ever known and i just want to cite three things that are important to our philosophy in the education tour i took last week i went to st paul minnesota to the nation s first charter school it s a public school with public funds set up outside the normal bureaucratic rules of a school system so that it can serve a specific population or have a special mission the first charter school in the country in st paul was the only one that existed when i started running for president promoting charter schools and nobody in america knew what i was talking about but i went to that school there are over 100 kids in this high school they all showed up they were all kids that had not done well in other schools a lot of them had had terrible terrible problems in their personal lives the kind of things that most of us would find it difficult to overcome they re in school there s no drop out rate there is no violence in the school there are no weapons in the school the kids are learning an extraordinary percentage of them are going on to college it is working and there are now 1 700 of those schools in america today there are long waiting lists some of them have failed but unlike other schools that have failed they can be just shut down you just revoke the charter and i ll give you just two other examples i went to columbus ohio and columbus has gotten 55 of our teachers under our 100 000 teachers program to lower class size in the early grades they took class size from 24 to 15 in the first three grades and i went to this very poor neighborhood to this elementary school where in one year one year they went from 10 percent of their kids reading at or above grade level to 45 percent from 10 percent of their kids doing math at or above grade level to 33 percent from 10 percent of their kids doing science at or above grade level to 30 percent in one year i went to owensboro kentucky where in 1996 kentucky was one of the first states to implement the requirement we got the congress to pass that anybody got federal aid the states had to identify their failing schools they identified 170 within two years 91 percent of them weren t failing anymore now today in this owensboro school in three years here s what they did they went from 12 percent of their kids reading at or above grade level to 57 percent 5 percent doing math at or above grade level to 70 percent 0 percent doing science at or above grade level to 64 percent they re the 18th best grade school in the state of kentucky and two thirds of the kids are eligible for free or reduced lunch of the 20 grade schools in that state that scored highest on the test 10 of them 10 of them have kids where at least half of them are eligible for free or reduced lunch race and income and location are not destiny if you have good schools that s what we believe that s the second reason i m here because i think if our crowd stays in control of the education policy of this country we will have further excellence and al gore has laid out an education plan that will enable us to hire more teachers and there are going to be 700 000 retiring in the next few years with the biggest student population we ever had and have higher standards and put every kid who needs it in pre school and every child who needs it will have access to an after school program and a summer school program that is worth fighting an election on that is the whole history of the country and what americans must believe is just like we got the deficit gone and we re paying down the debt just like we have got the crime rate down just like we have got the welfare rolls down all of our schools can become excellent schools and all of our kids can learn that s the second reason i m here and that s worth fighting this election on that s what our party ought to be standing for so if somebody asks you why you came say because the election ought to be fought out over what are we going to do with the good times the answer is we re going to take on the big challenges and the way to do it is to keep changing based on the philosophy that has brought us to this point and no person in the house of representatives in my judgment better embodies that than baron hill thank you very much dem wjclinton8 5 94 bill_clinton good afternoon ladies and gentlemen i want to speak for a few moments about the crisis in haiti the challenge it poses to our national interests and the new steps i am taking to respond three and one half years ago in free and fair elections the people of haiti chose jean bertrand aristide as their president just nine months later their hopes were dashed when haiti s military leaders overthrew democracy by force since then the military has murdered innocent civilians crushed political freedom and plundered haiti s economy from the start of this administration my goal has been to restore democracy and president aristide last year we helped the parties to negotiate the governors island accord a fair and balanced agreement which laid out a road map for a peaceful resolution to the crisis but late last year the haitian military abrogated the agreement and since then they have rejected every effort to achieve a political settlement at the same time the repression and bloodshed in haiti have reached alarming new proportions supporters of president aristide and many other haitians are being killed and mutilated that is why six weeks ago i ordered a review of our policy towards haiti as a result of this review we are taking several steps to increase pressure on haiti s military while addressing the suffering caused by their brutal misrule we are stepping up our diplomatic efforts we are intensifying sanctions and we are adapting our migration policy let me describe these steps first to bring new vigor to our diplomacy i am pleased to announce that bill gray the president of the united negro college fund former house majority whip and chair of the house budget committee has accepted my invitation to serve as special advisor to me and to the secretary of state on haiti bill is here with his wife on his way to the inauguration of president mandela in south africa and i will ask him to speak in just a few moments but let me just say that he is a man of vision and determination of real strength and real creativity and i appreciate his willingness to accept this difficult and challenging assignment he will be the point man in our diplomacy and a central figure in our future policy deliberations as part of our diplomatic efforts we will work with the united nations to examine the changes in the proposed u n military and police mission in haiti we want to ensure that once haiti s military leaders have left this mission can do its job effectively and safely second the u s is leading the international community in a drive to impose tougher sanctions on haiti on friday the u n security council unanimously adopted a resolution we had proposed to tighten sanctions on everything but humanitarian supplies to prevent haiti s military leaders and their civilians allies from leaving the country to promote a freeze of their assets worldwide and to ban nonscheduled flights in and out of haiti u s naval vessels will continue to enforce these sanctions vigorously we are also working with the dominican republic to improve sanctions enforcement along that nation s border with haiti to shield the most vulnerable haitians from the worst effects of the sanctions we will increase both humanitarian aid and the number of u n and oas human rights monitors in haiti while these stronger sanctions will cause more hardships for innocent haitians we must be clear the military leaders bear full responsibility for this action they can stop the suffering of their people by giving up power as they themselves agreed to do and allowing the restoration of democracy and the return of president aristide third i am announcing certain changes in our migration policy towards haiti currently haitians seeking refugee status including those interdicted at sea are interviewed only in haiti and not beyond its shores our processing centers which have been dramatically expanded in this administration are doing a good job under bad circumstances in 1993 we processed and approved about 10 times the number of refugee applicants as in 1992 in recent months however i have become increasingly concerned that haiti s declining human rights situation may endanger the safety of those who have valid fears of political persecution who flee by boat and who are then returned to haiti where they are met at the docks by haitian authorities before they can be referred to in country processing therefore i have decided to modify our procedures we will continue to interdict all haitian migrants at sea but we will determine aboard ship or in other countries which ones are bona fide political refugees those who are not will still be returned to haiti but those who are will be provided refuge we will also approach other countries to seek their participation in this humanitarian endeavour the new procedures will begin once we have the necessary arrangements in place this will take some weeks until then the haitians must understand that we will continue to return all boat migrants to haiti even under the new procedures there will be no advantage for haitians with fears of persecution to risk their lives at sea if and when they can assert their claims more safely at a processing center in haiti the ultimate solution to this crisis however is for the military leaders to keep their own commitment to leave so that haiti s people can build a peaceful and prosperous future in their own country i am committed to making these new international sanctions work at the same time i cannot and should not rule out other options the united states has clear interests at stake in ending this crisis we have an interest in bolstering the cause of democracy in the americas we have an interest in ensuring the security of our citizens living and working in haiti we have an interest in stopping the gross human rights violations and abuses of the military and their accomplices and we clearly have a humanitarian interest in preventing a massive and dangerous exodus of haitians by sea the steps i have announced today are designed to relieve suffering redouble pressure and restore democracy working with the haitian people and the world community we will try to advance our interests and give haiti an opportunity to build a future of freedom and hope they voted for it and they deserve the chance to have it mr gray in accepting this assignment i want to stress publicly as i have stressed to you mr president that i am a private citizen and will remain a private citizen during this work i have also insisted on serving without pay my reason for taking on this work is straightforward and very simple for me it is an article of faith that when a person is asked by his president to be of service to the nation he should do so and today i respond to that request to serve from my president in the months ahead i look forward to working with you mr president and your national security team to carry out your policy promote our nation s interests and restore freedom and democracy and above all hope to the people of haiti before when they were tried the circumstances were somewhat different first of all let me answer the question about why we would undertake to change the policy even though there is clearly some logistical challenge involved in doing so i ordered the review of this policy six weeks ago when we began first to get intelligence reports and then clear news reports that there was increasing violence against citizens of haiti who did not agree with the policies of the military regime and indeed some of them seem to not be political at all of people not only being killed but being mutilated it seems to me reasonable to assume that some of the people who were fleeing by boat are in that group of people who also are fearful of their lives and the way the boat return has worked so far is that we take the people back let them off at the dock at port au prince they are then by and large they have been free to go to the in country processing but they are subject to the authority of the haitian police at that moment and i simply think that the risks of that cannot be justified given the increased level of political violence in the country therefore i think we have to change the policy now why do i think it will work first we ve studied what happened before when the policy of inspection of people at sea occurred and we have determined that two things ought to be done first we ought to look for a third country processing center and second if we do it at sea we ought not to do it on the coast guard cutters which can be quickly overrun in their capacity but to do it on bigger ships we believe if we can given a little time to organize this logistically we can handle it also it will be clear that we are not changing our policy which is the law of the united states with regard to economic refugees people who seek to come to the united states for economic reasons only are not eligible for this kind of status so we will do these reviews we think we can do them fairly quickly in a matter of a few days and then return those who should be returned and take those who should be taken into the united states ron first let me answer your first question i hope that we will not have a flood of refugees but we are increasing our naval resources to deal with them we are not changing our policy about who can come and who cannot that is a matter of american law we are not able to do that nor should we do that but i don t believe the policy we have now is sustainable given the level of political violence against innocent civilians in haiti we have to try to implement this policy i believe we can and i think as we do it firmly the haitian people will see we are not opening the floodgates for indiscriminate refugee migration into the united states but that we are going to try to find those people who have left because they have a genuine fear the review of this policy began before mr robinson s fast but if you will go back and when i was first asked about it i said that i did not mind his criticism of our policy it obviously had not worked i said that from day one and i respect his conviction and his courage and his conscience and i was gratified by the comments that he said today and i m glad that on this mother s day he s going to be having dinner with his wife tonight well i think the economic sanctions will have to be coupled with a vigorous and aggressive and broadbased diplomatic effort and we are exploring all alternatives as you know we have been reluctant to impose the more severe sanctions although president aristide and many of the friends of haiti group the french the canadians others who have worked with us on this for a long time since have advocated this course in my view we must exhaust all available alternatives as we try to resolve this diplomatically and i think it is an appropriate thing to do now if we are successful in trying to bring back democracy and to restore not only president aristide but the concept the spirit that was in the governors island accord that is a broadbased functioning representative government that can relate to the business community as well as to the ordinary citizens of haiti then we will have to get ourselves in gear to try to make sure that that economy comes back as quickly as possible we re trying to do that with south africa and others i think we ll be able to do it no i m saying i think there will be more some more people in the sense that we will be reviewing more people simultaneously that is we will be reviewing people not only in the in country processing centers but we ll be interviewing people either on boats or in a third country but what i m saying is that we have not broadened the criteria of eligibility for coming to the united states i want to make this very clear the problem with the present policy is the present policy worked in 1993 up through the abrogation of the governors island accord and for sometime thereafter in the sense that we did not have evidence of widespread indiscriminate killing of civilians and we increased by tenfold by tenfold the number of people processed and the number of people approved for refuge in this country for 1993 over 1992 but when all this killing started when it became obvious that the military leaders had no earthly intention of honoring governors island or anything approaching it or keeping their commitments but instead were going to tolerate organize and abet increased killing in haiti it is logical to assume that some of those who get on the boats include not only economic refugees who are the vast majority of them but also some who genuinely fear for their lives the only way we can get those people to the in country processing is to let them off at the dock in port au prince where the police have jurisdiction i do not believe that is a sustainable policy either practically or morally given the level of indiscriminate violence so there may be some more people who get in because we ll be reviewing even more people but it would be a great mistake for haitians who want to come here for economic reasons to just take to the boats because we are not changing the standard by which we admit people gwen well i think we are going to have we do have an equivalency in terms of people who get here but we have an obligation to try to let the people who genuinely fear for their lives into this country we are now going to do that without regard to whether they re processed in country or on boats therefore the legal standard is what it ought to be the cuban situation is unique in the sense that there is an act of congress which has certain specifics about the cuban situation which changes our relationship with cuba to some extent but this will alleviate the legitimate concern with regard to the haitians and i hope will minimize the likelihood that hundreds of people will die at sea innocently well of course he s going to say that that s what he s been saying ever since that s what he told us when he abrogated the governors island accord i gave my word i never expect president aristide to keep his word president aristide called my bluff kept his word and so i m going to shaft the agreement that s what he said on september 30th so he hasn t changed his mind since then but we may be able to do better now and i think the gentleman to my right is a person of extraordinary ability maybe he can do some things we haven t done yet we re going to give it our best shot however it is a reality that in 1779 and 1781 1 100 cubans came here and made this country free now in this situation i congratulate you thanks one more i think i have to let mr gray do a little work before i can answer that question thank you very much dem wjclinton8 5 98a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you mr secretary for your wonderful remarks and your sterling leadership of the department of defense to governor carper and congressman castle colonel grieder colonel keitel mayor hutchinson to the secretary of education dick riley who is here with me today to all the members of the united states air force their families their friends and thank you especially for bringing the children today and i d like to say a special word of thanks to the dover high school band for their welcome and their music i don t know if the recruiting officer has been to see them but they have sufficient enthusiasm to be in our military service great job i am delighted to be here back at dover air force base home of the 436th military airlift wing and the 512th reserve wing those of you who work around the clock to support and defend our freedom i ve already had a chance to be on a c 5 and speak with some of you individually i d like now to say a few words to all of you delaware calls itself small wonder it s not too small however to have two leading united states senators bill roth and joe biden who play very important roles in our national security most recently in leading the struggle in the senate to make europe a safer place by guiding nato and offering membership to poland hungary and the czech republic the people of delaware can be very proud that they have two senators playing a leading role in such an important national security area and delaware is not too small to house these mammoth c 5s who do so much of america s heavy lifting not too small for a new 60 000 pound tunner loader moving heavy cargo on and off the giant planes i know it s hard for the logistics people here to wrestle with those pallets but hopefully the new loader will make things just a little easier your efforts are essential we live in a time of enormous promise but you know from your own work that there is also a tremendous responsibility for the united states out there both to take advantage of the promise and to meet the challenges of the post cold war era from guatemala to mozambique from bosnia and now to ireland peace is taking hold in countries and regions that have endured terrible violence revolutions in technology and communications are spurring enterprise and opportunity all across the globe today we saw that the unemployment rate in america has dropped to 4 3 percent the lowest since 1970 and that s good news for america but one third of our growth one third of the over 15 2 million jobs the american people have enjoyed new jobs since 1993 comes from our trading relations with other countries like it or not our future and the future of every child in this audience today is bound up with our ability to maintain leadership for peace and freedom and security and opportunity throughout the world in march i was in africa i visited uganda not so long ago run by a brutal dictator now a country with strong economic growth and a commitment to educating all its children i was in senegal where american soldiers are working with african soldiers to establish new peacekeeping units run by africans in africa to support their continent s security i was in south africa where citizens are building a strong multiracial democracy and guess what on my whole trip you provided the transportation you provided the helicopters and you provided the communications i thank you the trip to africa was good for america last month i was in chile once ruled by terror now a thriving open society at the second summit of the americas after the first one i convened in 1994 in miami thirty four of the thirty five nations of the americas are now democracies and we plotted a common future in the area where our trade is growing the most and where freedom has taken deepest hold and guess what you provided my transportation and communication and i thank you in a few days i will leave for europe where the powerful yearning of the people for liberty has provided the chance not only to end the war in bosnia but through expanding nato and making an agreement between nato and russia and nato and ukraine we ve now got the chance to build a europe that is peaceful undivided and free for the first time in all of history it will be a very important meeting and if nothing happens to the chain of command you re going to provide my transportation and communication and i thank you for that because freedom is on the march and because of all the changes going on in the world the 21st century in which these children will grow up will be america s greatest time if we do our part to protect freedom and security to stand for human rights and to stand for our interests and our values around the world for the world is still not free of dangers not by a long shot all of you know that clearly in fact all of the openness the communications revolution what all you can find on the internet all of the things that have given so much opportunity in the world and brought us so much closer together have created a new vulnerability to the organized forces of destruction to the terrorists the organized criminals the narco traffickers we still see the incredible power the flaming power of religious ethnic and regional conflicts and hatreds we know that not all of our democracies are solid we know that natural disasters environmental destruction the spread of disease can cross national borders and threaten the lives and welfare of the american people in this environment our leadership is more important than ever in order to make the american people safe at home and give them all a brighter future the united states must continue to lead in the world and that means we need you more than ever here at dover you are leading the way a strategic airlift capacity is crucial to our strategy of global engagement and you are responsible for a full 25 percent of america s strategic airlift you supply our troops in the persian gulf and saddam hussein knows we re serious because our diplomacy is backed by the finest military in the world we could not send them there and keep them there if you couldn t supply them you lead the way by helping to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction just three weeks ago two of your c 5s and their crews secured dangerous nuclear material in the republic of georgia and transported it for safekeeping to the united kingdom the material could have posed a tremendous risk if it had come into the wrong hands you made sure that it didn t and now you know it s someplace safe and we re all more secure because of it i thank you for that you supply our troops in bosnia where with a remarkable lack of violence we have been able to see the end of a conflict and the beginning of a peace taking hold if our troops hadn t been there the war would still be raging they couldn t be there without you and you should be very very proud of helping to end the bloodiest conflict in europe since the end of world war ii i hope you are you lead the way in providing humanitarian relief to people in the former soviet union when a ferocious typhoon struck guam you brought water and blankets and electricity to people there when flooding destroyed or damaged 90 percent of the homes around grand forks north dakota you brought relief and comfort to the victims there for all that for the many sacrifices you make i want to say a profound thank you as most of you know this tunner loader that everybody talked to me about today is not called a tunner because it lifts a lot of tons it was named for the late general william tunner who commanded three historic airlifts the airlift of supplies and personnel over the himalayan hump from india to china in world war ii the massive berlin airlift in 1948 and 49 277 000 flights that supplied food and fuel to the people of west berlin during stalin s blockade and the korean war combat cargo command which airdropped supplies to our troops trapped in north korea general tunner said we can carry anything anywhere anytime now next week by coincidence i will be in germany to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the berlin airlift like you the people who were involved in that effort used airlifts to protect freedom when the soviet leaders finally abandoned the blockade it might have been because they had witnessed our staggering capabilities to airlift supplies to the people in west berlin perhaps it was because they read what general tunner said about his supply line we can keep pouring it on for 20 years if we have to that kind of confidence i know invigorates the work you do here i know you are ready for any challenge anytime whenever america calls for your help so let me just say this in closing when your joints ache from muscling pallets when you ve stared at one load plan too many when you fly all night through turbulent skies when you re too far from home and you wonder sometimes what you are doing it for please remember in ways large and small you are making a huge difference in making the world a better place for the children that share this roof with us today children all over the world have food to eat clothes to wear safe streets to walk all because you at dover make it happen you deliver you are essential to america s security you make this a better country and you make us all very proud thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton8 5 98b bill_clinton thank you governor i took good notes no children on a child care waiting list all poor four year olds in head start every classroom wired i ll be saying that now every time i go to another city or another state i ll be saying if delaware can do it why can t you and i thank you i want to thank the governor and senator sharp speaker spence lt governor minner the members of the legislature the judiciary the state officials who are here former governors peterson and tribbitt and other distinguished citizens of this state mr mayor i m delighted to be joined today by the secretary of defense who is going with me to dover air base when we finish here to thank our airmen and women there for their distinguished service and who has also been a leader in education because the department of defense run schools all over the world for american children by our wonderful secretary of education dick riley by mickey ibarra the director of our office of inter governmental affairs and others we are all delighted to be here and i d like to say a special word of appreciation to congressman castle for coming up here with me he s an old friend of mine we worked together on welfare reform more than a decade ago now i have been trying to decide when mike and tom changed jobs which one really got the promotion i am delighted to be the first president ever to speak here the others did not know what they were missing i love your capitol building i like the feel of your legislature i like the size of your legislature i wonder if it would take a constitutional amendment to reduce congress to this size it s a wonderful idea and i like the fact that the first state in the nation is leading in doing the nation s first business of educating our children i ve come here to talk about that work why it is in the states and in many communities around the country and must be in washington the work of both republicans and democrats why it must be a national crusade to give our children the world s best education we have a history of putting nation above party when the nation s security and future are at issue we did it for 50 years which is why the cold war turned out the way it did the tradition was deeply honored by secretary cohen who left a distinguished career in the united states senate as a republican senator from maine to join our administration and he is performing well for the american people as secretary of defense it is a tradition embodied by your senators bill roth and joe biden who led the recent stunningly successful effort to expand nato to include hungary poland and the czech republic and you should be very proud of both of them and i have seen it having had the opportunity to work for years now with mike castle and tom carper when they were in those jobs in succession on welfare reform on child care on the education of our children and you can be very proud of both of them and delaware maybe because it s a small state and maybe because i came from a small state and was often ridiculed for it in national politics my experience is that maybe because we re smaller people learn to treat each other as people they learn to listen to people on opposite sides of the aisle they learn that they don t have all the answers and that everybody s got a valuable perspective and that in the end we all have to get together and do something that moves our country or our state or our community forward and for all of that i am very grateful to the state of delaware thomas jefferson once said of your state that delaware is like a diamond small but having within it inherent value if he were today here giving this speech he might say being as he was a modern thinker delaware is like a silicon chip small but having within it enormous inherent value namely the power to shape the future you have always looked to the future from the time you did become the first state to ratify the constitution it was the beginning of many firsts delaware was the first state to produce a transatlantic iron steamship then there was the first commercial telephone call between an airplane and a moving car 100 years later some of us would probably like it if telephone calls on airplanes and cars were not possible all the way to the remarkable innovations now being dreamed up in the dupont labs all of this is dramatically changing the world the chairman of the federal reserve alan greenspan came by the white house for one of our periodic meetings a few days ago and we were talking about this incredible economy and he said you know we really are living in an economy of ideas he said there is a measure of a nation s output in wealth compared to its physical output the literal physical density of all the goods that are produced he said the measure is more skewed now than ever before there is hardly any increase in the mass of what we re producing but the wealth of what we re producing is exploding why because ideas are driving the increase in the wealth of the nation today we learned that our unemployment rate has dropped to 4 3 percent the lowest since 1970 that is particularly impressive in light of the fact that inflation now is the lowest in more than 30 years homeownership is at an all time high the welfare rolls are the lowest in 27 years the crime rate is the lowest in 24 years our social fabric is mending we saw that teen pregnancy had had a substantial drop for the second years in a row something i know that the governor has been passionately committed to our leadership in the world is still unrivaled although we seem sometimes to be in some doubt about it here at home in delaware your unemployment is all the way down to 3 4 percent you ve had tens of thousands of new jobs twice the rate of new business growth as five years ago the thing i would like to say about all this is no one can claim full responsibility for it there was not a totally coordinated strategy but it did not happen by accident america has been on the same page from our strategy in washington to balance the budget invest in our people and expand trade to the entrepreneurs to the scientists and technicians to the teachers in our schools and the people who run our business and the folks who work in our factories we have been on the same page good things don t happen by accident even when millions even hundreds of millions of people are responsible and we must be on the same page when it comes to education before i get into what i want to say about education i want to make a point i tried to make in the state of the union i ve had a lot of people people who are primarily political people good people but people who normally think about things in political terms say to me well you know why don t you just relax and start playing golf three times a week i mean you ve got low unemployment low inflation people are suspicious of government why don t just don t do much and everybody will be happy there is an answer to that and the answer is that might be a decent prescription for a static time but in a dynamic time where things are changing very rapidly the fact that things are good in the moment does not guarantee they will be good five months or five years from now because they re changing so you have to keep working to stay ahead of the curve and those of us in public life have to work no less than entrepreneurs do if you go to silicon valley you don t see anybody out there sort of laying down on the job just because the stock prices are high because they know how dynamic the world is and there is a second answer which is that we still have some very profound challenges that if left unmet will come back to haunt us in the 21st century what are they i can only tell you what i think they are i think first of all in washington we have to reform our major programs of social cohesion social security and medicare for the needs of the 21st century and for the reality that the baby boomers are going to retire and when they do there will only be about two people working for every one person drawing social security the present systems are unsustainable as they are we have to change them consistent with our values and the real facts two we have to prove that you can grow the economy without destroying the environment and we have to convince people in developing countries that they can and to embrace new technologies to do that just a few days ago i was out in california at a low income moderate income housing development which is cutting by 40 percent the energy usage on low income housing using solar panels that are now those big heavy things you ve seen on the roof but that look just like ordinary shingles using windows that keep over half the heat in in the wintertime and over half the heat out in the summertime and still let more light in and other basic things like that we have to prove that we can make environmental preservation and economic growth go hand in hand the third thing we ve got to do is to bring the spark of enterprise to poor inner city communities and rural communities including native american ones that haven t felt it the fourth thing we have to do is to prove that we can live together as one america in an increasingly diverse society the fifth thing we have to do i would argue is to prove that we can lead the world after the cold war in a consistent firm way toward peace and prosperity and freedom and democracy but none of that will matter if we don t save our children and that s what i want to talk about today only one aspect of it but in some ways the most important one and delaware again is leading the nation so i may be preaching to the choir but that s not all bad i ll polish the sermon and see if i do better in other places the condition of education in america and the importance of it and the impact it s going to have on all our futures as well as all our children demands action from all of us in washington in state capitals in communities all across the country many of our greatest challenges don t fall under the authority of washington nor should they i have supported giving states more authority in the area of welfare reform and in many other areas secretary riley has cut by two thirds the burden of regulations coming out of federal education aid we started two new programs goals 2000 and school to work without a single new federal regulation the federal government can t do all this some of our major challenges don t even fall primarily under state government nor should they the power and the responsibility of america to meet the challenges of the 21st century rests with all levels of government and with all sectors of society sometimes more with the private sector sometimes more with its most fundamental unit the american family and that is as it should be but just because responsibility and power are dispersed doesn t mean that we don t all have to ask ourselves what power do we have to have a positive impact what is our responsibility and then we have to move because a revolution in education will not occur by accident anymore than the revolution in the american economy has occurred by accident even though there will be millions of people working on it and we may not all be calling each other on the phone every day yesterday i talked to mayors from all over the country i received their report on what they think should be done their agenda is very much like yours and very much like mine i suppose that i ve spent more time on education than any other thing in my 20 years and more in public life now nearly 10 years ago when i was a governor of my state i stayed up almost all night down at the university of virginia at president bush s education summit working with republican governors to write goals for education for the year 2000 it was clear then it was clear way back in 1983 when the nation at risk report was issued and it is certainly clear today that if we are going to prepare our children for the 21st century we cannot hope to do it unless we can say with a straight face we are giving them the best education in the world not just a few of them but all of them and we can all say well we can t be responsible for every teacher we can t be responsible for every principal we can t be responsible for every home we can t be responsible for every unmotivated child that s all true but we can play the odds secretary cohen runs arguably the most effective organization in the entire united states not every soldier not every airman not every marine not every sailor is a stunning success but they ve got a pretty good system and it didn t happen by accident and we should take that as our responsibility it seems to me the keys are high expectations high standards and high performance fueled by more opportunity more accountability and more choice secretary riley and i have worked at this for more than five years in one area we have been especially successful and widely supportive across partisan lines and in states and local communities we ve opened the doors to higher education wider than ever before the balanced budget act i signed last year represented the greatest expansion of college opportunity since the g i bill was passed 50 years ago with college tuition tax credits including the 1500 a year hope scholarship for the first two years of college education iras expanded pell grants deductibility of interest on student loans 300 000 more work study slots another 100 000 young people earning education credits by serving in the national service program americorps and lifetime learning credits for adults who have to go back to school all of these things together mean that any american who is willing to study and work hard can get an education in college and that is very important it will change the face and the future of america we learned in the 1990 census that americans younger american workers who were high school dropouts high school graduates or who had less than two years of post high school education were likely to get jobs where their incomes went down over time compared to inflation those that had at least two years of post high school training were likely to get and keep jobs where their incomes went up so that was fundamentally important and we can all be proud of it and many states have done more to try to give scholarships and make college more affordable and that s important the senate just this week and i want to compliment them passed 91 7 what i have called the g i bill for workers it basically consolidates this incredible tangle of federal training programs into a skills grant so that if a person is unemployed or underemployed and eligible you just get basically the skills grant and then you decide where to take it since nearly every american lives within driving distance of a community college or some other very efficient institution we no longer need the federal government micromanaging the definition of all these training programs and we don t need anybody in the way of it now we have some provision particularly that the governors wanted who live in rural areas who have lots of people in rural areas that may not have readily available services but this is very important and we ve got to resolve the differences now in the house and the senate bill and pass it this is a huge thing and the congress can be proud of it and the country can be proud of it but with all that said and done i don t think there is a person here who would dispute the following two statements we have the best system of higher education in the world we do not have the best system of elementary and secondary education in the world you don t have to criticize your favorite teacher you can honor the pta leaders and the school board members no one believes it s the best in the world and until it is we can t rest that is the bottom line the budget that i have presented which is a balanced budget has the biggest commitment in history from the federal government to k through 12 education but we all know that s less than 10 percent of the total still i think it s important that the national government focus on results because things don t happen by accident i think we should focus on high standards real accountability more choice and finally i d like to say a word about safe schools because that is a problem in some parts of our country first there s no substitute for standards i want to compliment delaware for what you re doing this week 3rd 5th 8th and 10th graders all over the state are participating in your new assessment process to see how well they re doing in reading writing and math and you re going to add other subjects the governor told me in the next couple of years you also have done something that may give us a key to how to solve the national issue which is that about a quarter of your exam questions are apparently taken from the national assessment of education progress which is a national test most states participate in but by definition it s only given to a representative sample of students not all students i compliment you on that i think that is a brilliant reform and i think it s important that we find a way to have national standards and exams at least in the basics it is very important secretary riley and i were talking on the way out he was talking about south carolina still have quite an old state test we had some old state tests when i was governor of arkansas our kids just knocked the top off of them the same test we d been giving for years and then when we took a national test that was current we didn t do so well so without in any way undermining local control of the schools or the constitutional responsibility of the states for education we need to have a set of national standards and an accountability system which tell us all honestly how we re doing we re working hard now with an independent nonpartisan board the acronym known to all the education experts in the audience is the nagb board we ve got republicans and democrats on the board and people i don t even have any idea what their political affiliation is all of whom are simply committed to educational excellence and we want to find ways to coordinate with the states and the state tests to avoid unnecessary costs and burdens you may have found a way to do it in delaware by having a test that is both rooted in your state standards and encompassing national questions but it s a very good start the second thing we have to do and i understand the governor said you were debating that that may be tougher is figure out what the accountability system is now a lot of these questions should definitely be decided by people at the state and the local level but let me first of all say that no test is worth a flip unless there is some consequences not just negative ones but positive ones not just what you do to the students but what the rest of us have to do for the education system based on the consequences of the test we have to start by demanding accountability from the students and i strongly believe that we should end the practice of so called social promotion everywhere in the country for many years there was a current theory in america that well it hurt a child s self esteem too much to be held back and the child could maybe pick it up next year and besides that children do learn at different paces that is absolutely true especially in the early years the dramatically different learning patterns of children in the early years then sooner or later somehow parents figured out that one reason kids dropped out of school in the 9th or 10th grade is because the material was going over their heads it didn t mean anything to them so why should they sit around because they weren t able to do the work and then even the kids figured out that being 20 years old and not being able to fill out an employment application and not being able to even read your high school diploma was far more destructive of self esteem than spending another year in some grade along the way then school districts began to figure out that they didn t necessarily have to hold people back if they had proper after school help and a little help in the summer where a lot of kids having learning problems forget huge chunks of what they learned the year before so we re now kind of coming to grips with this i have often talked about the chicago system it probably had the most widely condemned school system in the country because they had a strike every year whether they needed it or not for one thing and because they weren t producing results now the chicago summer school system they ve ended social promotion you have to go to summer school if you fail the test and you want to go on to the next grade their summer school is the fifth biggest school district in america the summer school they have thousands of children going to school after school so many hours that thousands of them actually take three hot meals a day in the schools in an inner city environment where they re safe they re not getting in trouble and nobody s hurting them now if a place that has those kinds of challenges can take them on everyplace in america can take them on i ve asked congress to pass what we call education opportunity zone legislation that will basically give extra resources to schools in poor communities if they will insist on high standards in social promotion demand performance from students and teachers and actually support the kids that are in trouble and give them the extra help they need i hope congress will pass it again i say in many ways we re following your lead and i urge you to have a big vigorous debate on this what are the consequences of this exam and i wouldn t presume to tell you what to do but i can make two observations based on 20 years of working and hours and hours and hours spent in classrooms listening to teachers and watching things unfold one is nobody will take your system seriously unless there are consequences two is if there are consequences whatever you decide they are they cannot be exclusively negative ones they must also be positive ones because you have to believe that in order to believe in democracy you have to believe that almost everybody can learn almost everything they need to know to make this country run right which means almost everybody in the world can succeed in school and if they re not it s probably not entirely their fault so there should be consequences some of them should be negative but there must be positive ones as well and i wish you well and i can assure you the rest of us are going to be watching the next thing i think we have to do is to develop and demand accountability and performance from teachers but also support them i had the great pleasure this week or last week of hosting the teachers of the year at the white house and that s one of the happiest days of the year you ll never find 50 more upbeat people than the teachers that are selected teachers of the year and you talk to these people and you can t imagine that there s ever been a problem in american education the man who was named national teacher of the year is a teacher from virginia who teaches history and social studies and who makes his kids role play so they play ancient athenians and spartans debating the greek wars they play jefferson and adams debating each other about fundamental questions of what the real nation of the union that we all belong to is i mean it was exhilarating those are the kind of teachers that we wish all our children had all the time and i think we need to do more to reward teachers who strive for excellence one of the things that we can do at the national level that i hope you will support that tom and mike s former colleague governor jim hunt has worked his whole career on is to support the master teacher program the national board for professional teacher certification it s a completely voluntary thing which qualifies teachers based on number one their complete academic preparation for the course they re teaching and number two their success in teaching and thirdly i might add their ability to help other teachers improve their teaching skills now today there are only a few hundred master teachers in america my balanced budget contains enough funds to certify 100 000 master teachers when we get one of these teachers in every school building in america every school building in america going to the teachers lounge going to the faculty meetings talking to the principals it will change the culture of education in america every other profession in the country just about has national board certification and believe me this is a good thing that is a worthy investment finally let me say i because that if teachers don t measure up after getting all the support and help they need there ought to be a swift process fair but swift it should not be endless to resolve the matter in a satisfactory way because you re not doing anybody any favors no one fundamentally nobody is happy doing something they re not good at you can never make me believe anybody is really happy when they know deep down inside they re not doing the job so there has to be some system that is perfectly fair to every teacher but doesn t take from now to kingdom come to resolve the matter in a way that allows the education system to go forward now i also think as we demand responsibility for results from the schools we have to give the tools they need to the students and the teachers i ve said that and i will say it again let me just mention one or two things first smaller class sizes children in some classes in america are in classes that are so big and crowded there is no way any teacher i don t care how good he or she is can deal with all the challenges that are presented where classes are so big where the students are barely known by name to the teacher much less the particular circumstances of their lives given the fact that so many kids have so many troubles today it s very very important in classrooms like this teachers are often forced to teach to the middle leaving both the best kids and the most troubled kids behind the department of education and secretary riley today are releasing a report on class size and learning basically reaffirming what hillary and i have long believed we adopted very rigorous class sizes for our state 15 years ago when class sizes go down enough learning goes up that s what the report shows especially in the early years and when children come from disadvantaged backgrounds small classes can make an even greater difference let me just give you a few examples from the study in tennessee test scores were consistently higher among students that were in classes of fewer than 20 students these children kept the edge even when they moved into larger classes in their later years of schooling from wisconsin north carolina and classrooms across the country other studies confirmed the same findings governor carper and many of you here today are trying to reduce class size i just want to encourage you and tell you that i have presented to the congress a plan to do the same thing which would not in any way conflict with what you re doing but will enable you to get some funds to support it today i m sending legislation to congress cosponsored by senators murray and kennedy and congressman clay that will make class size reduction a national goal and if enacted would help school districts to hire another 100 000 teachers which is about the number necessary properly distributed across the country to give us average class size of 18 in the first three grades it would also require the new teachers to pass competency exams to make sure they have the training and preparation they need many states now require this anyway the second thing i d like to say is delaware may be the only state now where every classroom is wired but every classroom should be wired you remember i m sure a few years ago the vice president and i went to san francisco and got with a lot of people from the big computer companies and said that we wanted to try to wire every classroom and library by the year 2000 and we are making great headway we ve got more than twice as many classrooms and libraries wired today as we did just three and half years ago when we did that we have in the budget now funds to continue this urgent national priority i hope that will pass but finally let me say believe it or not we ve got an enormous percentage of the school buildings in this country are ill equipped to take the wiring because they re so old we have cities in this countries with average school buildings average school buildings over 65 years old and in terrible shape i was in a small growing district in florida the other day where there were not one not five but 17 trailers outside the main school building there for the kids now when you come to work here every day in this capitol it makes you feel good doesn t it it s a beautiful building and you ve obviously put a lot of funds into restoring it and it makes you feel good it say you re important it matters to be a member of the delaware legislature one of the ways you know without anybody telling you is you come into this nice building and it s important and if grown ups are affected by their surroundings children are even more so what does it say to an inner city kid from a poor family if they go to a school building every day and one of the whole floors is closed because for want of repair what does it say about how important those children are if every day they walk through the front door and they look up and see three or four broken windows what does it say if the blackboard is only half there because it s been cracked what about the kids in the crowded school districts you know the first year or two if you show up and there are a lot of house trailers it s kind of exciting because it means you ve got a growing district and a lot of stuff going on after five or six years it means things aren t getting better it s a very different message and the important thing is not whether the buildings are old or not it is whether they are safe clean light whether they send the message that this is a place where learning can occur and this is a place where children are important now i think education is a part of the national infrastructure that s why i wanted the federal government to help places who need it wire all the classrooms and libraries and i have proposed for the first time that we help with the infrastructure needs of school districts again not in any way that would conflict with what any state or local school district is doing but instead to reinforce it this budget contains funds that would help us to modernize 5 000 schools and build 1 000 new ones it would be a very good start on the incredible infrastructure needs of america s schools and for people who say it doesn t matter just think how you feel when you come through these doors every day it does matter and i hope we can pass it the third thing i d like to emphasize very briefly is that we need greater choice in our schools we do need more competition you mentioned the charter school of wilmington governor and other charter schools in your state when i was elected p dem wjclinton8 6 95 bill_clinton thank you attorney general reno for your outstanding work thank you mayor rendell senator biden senator kennedy senator kerry congressman foglietta ladies and gentlemen from all across our country who are here today these 263 new police officers are living proof that our crime bill will help to make your communities safer and help to make america safer i want to thank the attorney general for the work she has done to cut through the red tape and the bureaucracy to turn the crime bill into a reality the congress passed it and i did push hard for it but in no small measure because of the attorney general and the dedicated people at the justice department we have already awarded almost 17 000 new police officers to over half the police departments in the united states we are under budget and ahead of schedule and most important i want to thank all of you who are with us today who are dedicating your lives to law enforcement i know i speak for all americans when i say thank you i want to take a moment if i might to speak about another person to whom we all want to say thank you today an american hero who risked his life and service to our country i know all of you and all of our fellow citizens join me in rejoicing at the rescue of captain scott o grady late last night we share the relief of his family his friends and his loved ones that he is now safe and sound i can tell you that he s now on a united states aircraft carrier and we re looking forward to having him back home on american soil his bravery in the face of great danger and uncertainty is an inspiration to all of us i can tell you having followed this almost hour by hour for the last six days when he gets back here and tells the whole story it will be an astonishing story indeed he was well trained and well prepared but he also rose to an extraordinary challenge i also want to say how very proud i am of the skill of all of those who took part in the operation to rescue him and those who supported them yesterday evening when it became clear that captain o grady had been located in general and that a rescue operation was possible and we began to get regular reports and then it became obvious that he could be rescued but that the group could not get in and out before daylight in bosnia there was no doubt in the minds of either the commanders or our people in uniform that even though that entailed some increased risk they had to go and get him out that he had survived for six days and six days was long enough and they did their job and last night when i talked to captain o grady s parents after 1 00 o clock in the morning they and all of his siblings were full of joy and pride and gratitude let me tell you that they proved once again all these people that our country has the finest armed forces in the world and we are very very proud of them and ecstatically happy today i want to say to all of you here in uniform you too are our country s heroes each and every one of you will make our streets a little safer at more risk to yourselves there is nothing more effective in the fight against crime than more police officers on the beat this is not a partisan issue this is an issue on which all americans can be on the solution side we know that we owe it to our children to give them back the freedom to walk to school in safety i have said this before and i want to say it one more time i intend to keep my promise to the american people to put 100 000 more of you on the streets and i will fight and veto if necessary any attempt to stop us until there are 100 000 of you out there protecting the american people we need more police on the street we need to get our children and our assault weapons off the streets our neighborhoods are not a place for military assault weapons violent criminals or gangs in recent months we have seen all too clearly that keeping our country safe and secure requires new efforts by both our government and our people the crime bill provides law enforcement the tools they ask for after the tragedy in oklahoma city and what we endured in the world trade center law enforcement needs additional tools to crack down on terrorists wherever they may come from from within or beyond our borders i am very pleased that last night the senate passed my anti terrorism legislation i thank senator dole and the republicans who voted for it i thank senator daschle and the democrats who voted for it i thank them for working together that s what america expects us to do after all now i want to urge the house of representatives to act as quickly as possible some there have said maybe they ought to slow this up well i assure you that the people who work in terrorism operate on their own timetable and they will not pause for an extended debate in the united states congress so let this bill be reviewed let it be examined that is the job of the legislative body but let us act quickly the safety and security of our people is not now and must never become a partisan issue now let me say one other thing the budget passed in the house of representatives as distinct from the one passed in the senate reduces the crime bill by about 5 billion we do need to cut spending further we can move toward a balanced budget but i don t think that is a good idea the crime bill was carefully balanced it was worked on for six years senator biden gave a major portion of his entire life s energy to it and it was calibrated to fight crime in several ways it had more police more punishment more prisons and more prevention and it had all those elements because the law enforcement community told us that we needed to have those elements i believe as strongly as i can say that we can continue to reduce the deficit we can balance the budget without undermining the crime bill and that is exactly what we ought to do in the next few months as we get into this budget debate and we argue about what to cut and where to spend how soon we need to balance the budget and what other objectives we need to pursue i want to tell you that underneath all this there will be a huge debate that you will see played out in a lot of ways and it s a debate that i strongly believe is a false one those who argue that we can cut anything except national defense anything else at all to balance the budget as quickly as possible basically believe that most of the problems of this country are cultural in nature that if people would simply behave themselves and take responsibility for their own lives and tend to their families and show up for work everyday we wouldn t have the problems we ve got and therefore it is not necessary to make these investments others will argue that the first responsibility of government is law and order that another responsibility of our government in this time with this global economy just beating the living daylights out of working americans so that they never get a pay raise even though they work harder there is a responsibility to help people make more of their own lives to get the education and training they need to compete and win in a global economy there are others who will argue that there are people who through no fault of their own because they re very young children or elderly or disabled cannot take care of themselves and deserve some support from our government and so you ll see this big argument the cultural side and the economic and political side i personally believe it s a phony argument now i know from my own family s experience i had a brother who was addicted to drugs and who did time because of that i know that there is no program in the world that can make people do the right thing if they re not prepared to take responsibility for themselves i am well aware of that i know that but i also know that unless we take responsibility collectively for doing what we can we will have people killed on the streets that don t need to be killed we will have young people who lose their futures who don t need to lose them we will have people whose incomes never get better because we don t invest in them and give them a chance to succeed we will hurt the elderly and the defenseless because we don t recognize our common responsibilities we have cultural problems and economic and political challenges in this country and we should not permit washington to be divided over what is essentially a phony choice keep in mind often when we talk about cultural problems up here we re looking for an excuse not to do our part and assume our responsibility so let s say there are both kinds of challenges in america let s get everybody on the solution side of dealing with them and don t you let for a minute anybody try to push you into one camp or another life is all about personal responsibility and our actions together as families communities and as a nation captain o grady triumphed because he was personally responsible personally able personally courageous he also got the finest military training in the world from the united states of america you will do well as police officers if you are personally dedicated not to abusing your authority but to using it to the maximum extent to protect people and to stop crimes from occurring and to punishing people when they do commit crimes but it matters if you re well trained it matters if you re well supported it matters if you re properly funded do not let america be divided over this debate we have our responsibilities here in washington you have your responsibilities on the streets and in your own homes if we all do our job we can move america forward if we get caught up in a bogus debate about whether our problems are cultural or economic and political we will never get to the end of the road they are both and we must act that way let me just say one thing in closing the crime rate is going down all over america in most major cities the crime rate has dropped substantially in the last couple of years a lot of that is because of able and visionary mayors like the mayors that we honor here today because of the reforms that have been undertaken in cities like those that i saw when mayor rendell and i walked in his neighborhood streets in 1992 and as i have done since then in the city of philadelphia but let s don t forget one thing the crime rate especially random violence among very young people is still going up which means that the long run battle to recover our children and to turn them away from mindless violence and to protect those who are not violent from that is still hanging in the balance so i honor you today for your contribution i tell you that for the next 10 years you may be involved in the most important national security battle in the united states and i ask you when you go home to ask every single citizen in your communities to help you win this fight it is truly the fight for america s future thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton8 7 98 bill_clinton i would like to begin by thanking suzanne wilson for making the long trip up here from arkansas with her sister to be with us today so soon after that terrible tragedy most people wouldn t feel like going out of the house much less coming all the way to washington and i think it is a real credit to her and to her devotion to her daughter that she is here today i want to thank colonel mitchell and lt governor kathleen kennedy townsend and in his absence governor glendening for the path breaking work being done in maryland on this important issue i thank secretary rubin and mr johnson and mr magaw for being here and the work the treasury department is doing thank you secretary riley for the work you ve done to have zero tolerance for guns in schools thank you attorney general reno for the steady work now we have done for six years to try to bring this issue to the american people i thank senator durbin senator chafee senator kohl and a special word of thanks to representative carolyn mccarthy and to all the advocates out here i welcome you here and i thank you and especially to the law enforcement officers i think that this recent series of killings in our schools has seared the heart of america about as much as anything i can remember in a long long time i will always personally remember receiving the news from jonesboro because it s a town i know well i know the local officials i know the school officials i ve spent large numbers of days there i ve been in all the schools and answered the children s questions and once you know a place like that you can t possibly imagine something like this occurring but it s happened all over the country i was in springfield oregon as you know in the last couple of weeks meeting with the families there i think every american has sent out prayers to suzanne and the other parents and the other spouses and people who were so wounded by this but in a fundamental way our entire nation has been wounded by these troubled children with their guns as has already been said these events have been even more difficult for us to understand because they re occurring at a time when we ve had the lowest crime rate in america in 25 years and for the first time in a decade a steady drop in the juvenile crime rate so we struggle for answers we say well does the popular culture have anything to do with this does good parenting have anything to do with this and we know that probably everything we consider has something to do with this but no matter how you analyze this it is clear that the combination of children and firearms is deadly as parents public officials citizens we simply cannot allow easy access to weapons that kill for five years now our administration has worked to protect our children and we are making progress as has been said a great deal of the credit goes to far sighted leaders at the city level and at the state level people like lt governor kathleen kennedy townsend and superintendent mitchell governor glendening we re well on our way toward putting 100 000 police on the street about a quarter of a million people have not been able to buy guns in the first place because of the brady law because of their criminal background or their mental health history we have banned several types of assault weapons and have struggled to preserve the integrity of that law against a commercial assault from importers school security is tighter anti gang prevention is better penalties are stronger we promoted discipline in schools with anti truancy and curfew and school uniform policies and in various ways they have worked marvelously in many communities and we have a national policy now in all our schools of zero tolerance for guns in schools over 6 000 students with guns were disarmed and sent home last year doubtless preventing even more terrible acts of violence but it is not enough if children have access to guns in springfield oregon the young man in custody was sent home the day before because he had a gun in the school so yes our laws must be strong our enforcement resolute at home parents must teach their children the difference between right and wrong and lead them away from violence but recent events remind us that even if all this is done it is still too easy for deadly weapons to wind up in the hands of children by intent or by accident and then to lead to tragedy by intent or by accident we can t shrug our shoulders and say well accidents will happen or some kids are just beyond hope that is a cop out instead every one of us must step up to our responsibility that certainly includes gun owners gun purchasers and gun dealers today we say to them protecting children is your responsibility too and there are penalties for the failure to fulfill it in response to the directive i issued to secretary rubin in june of last year all federal gun dealers will now be required to issue written warnings and post signs like that one over there the sign makes it plain for all to see in simple direct language that it s illegal to sell deliver or transfer a handgun to a minor period from now on no customer or employee can avoid personal responsibility by pleading ignorance of the law responsibility at gun shops of course must be matched by responsibility at home suzanne talked movingly about that guns are kept in the home for many purposes from hunting to self defense that is every family s right and as she said more eloquently than i that is not in question the real question is every parent s responsibility every adult s responsibility to make sure that unsupervised children cannot get a hold of the guns when guns are stored carelessly children can find them pick them up court danger most will put them back where they found them others as we know now from hard experience will touch the trigger by accident a troubled few will take guns to school with violence in mind too many guns wielded in rage by troubled adolescents can be traced back to an irresponsible adult as has been previously said in maryland now and now in 14 other states parents have a legal responsibility to keep guns locked and out of reach of young hands that should be the law in all 50 states there are 35 more that ought to follow maryland s lead it should be the practice in every home there is also a proper federal role in preventing children s access to firearms and congress should pass a tough targeted child access prevention law with new penalties to punish the most egregious offenders i applaud senators chafee and durbin for their legislation starting us down the road toward making this the law of the land i thank senator kohl and representative mccarthy for their strong support they are doing the right thing and during the last days of this legislative session this is how we should move forward again i say with progress not partisanship there is much we must do in public life to fulfill our obligation to our children more than a year ago we directed all federal law enforcement agencies to issue child safety locks to federal officers so that their guns could not be misused a majority of our gun manufacturers have joined us voluntarily in this effort and that has been successful i hope all other gun manufacturers will follow suit the real work of course must still be done in our homes beyond law and policy to the most basic values of respect right and wrong conscience and community and violence rejected in favor of nonviolence and communication only parents can remedy what ails children in their heart of hearts but the rest of us must do our part to help and must do our part to contain the potential for destructive violence when things fail at home so i say again this is an issue that has wounded every american in one way or the other of the four women standing to my right three have lost members of their immediate family because of gun violence all of us have grieved with them we can do better this is one big first step thank you very much dem wjclinton8 7 99 bill_clinton you know hazel you might consider just skipping that hotel business and going right into politics i want to thank all of you for your welcome and i thank hazel and her fellow winners behind us for reminding us of why we re here mayor daley thank you of making me feel welcome and secretary daley secretary slater representative sanchez we re delighted to be in your district and to be here with other members of congress who are here i d like to say a special word of appreciation to my wonderful friend our former secretary of state warren christopher who is here with us today and supporting this endeavor since this is the last event for me in this week long odyssey across america to our what we called america s new markets i d like to say a special word of thanks to the folks on the white house staff who made it possible including my national economic advisor gene sperling without whom this never would have occurred and i want to say a special word of thanks to reverend jesse jackson who worked with sandy weil on the wall street project went to appalachia before it was fashionable who always believed that poor people were smart wanted to work and had a right a moral right to be part of america s future thank you jesse jackson and thank you sandy weil for the wall street project which attempts to marry the investment capacity of wall street with the human capacity of all those places we ve been visiting thank you for the national academy foundation thank you for being a good friend to me and to all these young people and so many others and thank you for inviting me to this annual conference this is really quite an appropriate place for me and those who have traveled with me this last week on our new markets trip to end our journey reaffirming your commitment and ours to prepare all our children for the new century over the past four days as i have traveled across america we have sought to shine the spotlight on places still unlit by the sunshine of our present prosperity a number of you have been along for what has truly been a remarkable ride we ve seen the power of people in public and private life to work together in the appalachians and in the mississippi delta we ve seen the spark that retail investment can bring in the first shopping center built in decades in east st louis illinois we ve seen the impact in the most basic infrastructure and housing opportunities even in the remote regions of indian country in south dakota still the most left behind part of america in south phoenix yesterday in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees we saw the enormous benefits of community reinvestment initiatives and here earlier today we saw what education and job training can bring to young people in watts people who are normally identified with distressed neighborhoods showing me how do design automobiles on a computer or to conduct sophisticated business transactions between two different countries with young americans 17 years old picking up a commission for being the middleman i took this trip for three reasons first i wanted every american businessperson every american investor to see that there are enormous opportunities out there today in the areas that have been left behind by our economic recovery second because i wanted to highlight the tools that have already been put in place to encourage more people to invest in those communities the empowerment zones and the enterprise communities which vice president gore has so ably led for six years now the community development financial institutinos that we have supported the community reinvestment act which has led to billions of dollars of reinvestment in our developing neighborhods the education and training initiatives desigend to give all of our people a chance not only to have good basic skills but to keep on learning for a lifetime and third i wanted to highlight our new markets initiative a piece of legislation simply designed to give american investors who are willing to take a chance on new and expanded businesses in distressed urban and rural communities access to the same kind of tax credits and loan guarantees to lower the relative risk of their investment in america that they can get to invest in poor communities from africa to asia to latin america to the caribbean i m for those investments but i think america s communities should have access to the same capital with the same incentives the idea behind this obviously is that the government cannot do this alone but business cannot be expected to go it alone when government provides the conditions and tools acts as a catalyst to bring the power of the private sector to benefit all of our citizens and provides the investment and the education and training of our young people this is not only good economics it is the right thing to do we can build one america where nobody is left behind when we cross that bridge into a new century and if we do we ll all be better off the ceos and national leaders i have traveled with we ve heard it every stop look we just need a chance our kids need education our adults need training and we need somebody who believes in us enough to give us a chance i ll never forget the woman we met in the mississippi delta who was working for a very small business in a depressed community that had five employees she made a very modest wage and the owner of the business just decided to close up he said to her she was the only person capable of running the business but nobody would give her a loan because she d never had any money in her life she had only worked for modest hourly wages because there was a community investor willing to take a chance on her she got investment capital she bought the business two years later she went from five to 11 employees and she has just about paid her loan off there are thousands of stories like that waiting to be written in america in every community that is still depressed so we want to encourage that and that s why so much of this trip is focused on how to get financing a remarkable businesswoman from new york mary ann spraggins went on this trip she s trying to set up a vision fund with 250 million in private sector capital to give venture capital to these kinds of places if we get our way the people who invest in that fund will be eligible for a 25 percent tax credit for putting that money into high unemployment areas and they ll be eligible to borrow 2 for every 1 they put up in that fund and have it guaranteed by the government so we lower the interest rate that s the government s contribution but somebody still has to make the investment to put these people to work so most of the capital we ve been talking about these last several days has been money we see in the pine ridge reservation in south dakota a remarkable grandmother providing school clothes for her grandchildren having to literally buy the tennis shoes her grandchildren wear to school on the installment plan all summer long while the shoes are kept in layaway so the kids will have them when there were 11 people living in a house with about 800 square feet another 17 in an adjoining house trailer with about 900 square feet we need money those people need housing we also saw american indians that have been waiting for nine years moving into their first homes a little five year old boy six year old boy took me by the hand and led me all through his new home and showed me his sister s room and explained why it was okay that she had a bigger room than he did she was a teenager and teenagers needed things like that the pride that they felt these people this mother who had worked all her life and finally getting a decent home for her children to live in so a lot of this is a money problem i used to joke with a lot of my friends i still say this that i had about nine or 10 rules of politics that i kept in my mind all during my career running for office and rule number two was when anybody stands up and tells you it s not a money problem they re talking about somebody else s problem not theirs so money is a big issue here but there s another kind of capital that in some ways is even more fundamental human capital people when hazel stood up here and you clapped for her you were clapping for the astonishing development of human capital of what she has done with her life and the chance that her mother took in going to hawaii the risks and the heartache and the difficulties her family went through it made you feel good and what i want to say to you today is that there are people just like these young people we re honoring back here on every indian reservation in every hill and hollow of appalachia up and down the mississippi delta in every inner city and they deserve they deserve the chance to be whatever they re willing to work hard to be and unless we re prepared to do that even our best efforts to bring new investment to these distressed communities will be less than fully successful now we have a better opportunity and a better reason to do that now than ever before as i tell people i spend a lot of time in washington sandy s always saying that i ve done a good job as a democrat with the economy so more people can live like republicans and i ve done my best to do that but you should know that one of the things that we seriously debate back in washington d c a long way from anaheim is how can we keep this going we already have the longest economic expansion in peacetime in our history we have the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded we have almost 19 million new jobs and we have very low inflation and we ve had unemployment rate below five percent for two years so a big question is how much longer can this go on and how can we keep it going without having inflation build up then having interest rates go up and having the recovery stop this is not an academic issue if you re about to get your first job of if you re sitting there trying to make up your mind whether to take out a huge bank loan to expand your business you want to know if we can keep this going my answer is we can keep it going if we can find non inflationary ways to promote growth now what are those well we can sell more american goods and services around the world why i hope the congress will agree to help us expand our trade with other countries we can also bring populations that are outside the work force into the work force with the welfare rolls are now the lowest they ve been in 30 years and there are a lot of people still on welfare that are able bodied but they have limited skills we could bring more people from welfare into the work force you can bring hundreds of thousands of disabled people who are capable of doing more and more kinds of jobs thanks to technology now into the work force and the congress i believe will soon send me a bill that will enable those that have high health care costs that are now being paid by the government to keep that health care coverage so private employers can afford to hire them but by far the biggest opportunity by far in keeping this economy going without inflation is to get more investments more jobs more new business owners more new workers and therefore more new consumers into the rural and urban areas that have not yet been blessed by this recovery that s why every single american actually has a vested interest in our success here and more and more businesses are looking for young people like those we celebrate because there s a shortage of skilled workers even though there are people who are still looking for jobs in some job categories a shortage of hundreds of thousands therefore if americans are willing to look a few exits off the beaten path we can continue to grow this economy and we can continue to have more of the kind of stories we just heard let me also say to you if we can t do this now with the strongest economy we have ever had when it is manifestly in the self interest of every enlightened decision maker in the country when will ever get around to doing it let me tell you some of the things that we saw on the human capital front we walked down the dusty streets on an indian reservation we saw the boarded up storefronts in a town in the mississippi delta famous for its role in the civil rights struggle we saw desperate living conditions in a little hollow in appalachia where everybody had a job and they still couldn t afford a decent house to live in but every place we went nobody wanted charity nobody wanted a handout what they wanted was a hand up that s why this will work what people want is a good private sector job the simple dignity of a paycheck the ability to house and educate their children and provide health care for them and what you know here what these young people behind me demonstrate is that intelligence and ability and drive and dreams are equally distributed in this country among the poor and the non poor i ve often said things happen to people that derail their lives and then they have to work hard to get them back on track things happen to places like that too i know the mississippi delta which includes a big part of my own home state the economy that once sustained that area has been gone a long time nobody was ever able to figure out how to put a new economy in its place but there s a new economy out there that could fit in that place there are new economies that could fit in the most remote villages of the appalachian mountains there are new economies that could go into the native american reservations how many data processing jobs do american companies ship overseas on airplanes every night to go to poor countries and other places they could be done on indian reservations for example we have got to think about that we all can identify with a human story if hazel stands up here and tells us the story of her family it grips us and we pull for her but what you need to know is all these places have stories like that we got the land and the mineral rights away from the indians and we said oh we ll make a deal we ll have a nation to nation relationship with you and we will provide for the education and health care and housing of your people but we ll do a poor job of it and we ll spend just as little as we can get away with and then we ll say you must not really want to do any better we have to write new stories for these places and it takes a commitment to money capital and the human capital and what sandy and all of you who have been involved in this magnificent project show this is exhibit a that we can do it now let me say on a very positive note i m quite optimistic that i am quite sure that one answer to this in the united states and all across the world is better dispersal of technology when i went to africa i went to these little villages where people had maps these children were in these little village schools that had maps that still showed the soviet union and other nations that haven t existed in a long time but if those kids just had one computer for the school and a printer they would never have to worry about that we could change the map of the world every day and all those little kids would have an updated map right technology will enable some of these areas to skip a whole generation of development if it is broadly dispersed secretary daley referred to the department of commerce report today on technology let me tell you what it says it confirms what you already know more and more americans than ever are connected to the internet it is the fastest growing method of human communication in all of history by far but it also shows this report that there is a growing digital divide between those who have access to the digital economy and the internet and those who don t and that the divide exists along the lines of education income region and race it might have pointed out of course that all of us parents are not as good as our kids that divide s not so serious but the real one is and yet we know i will say again that the very information technology driving this new economy gives us the tools to ensure that no one gets left behind that gives us the tools to provide a story for these communities to literally provide a self sustaining economic infrastructure for the 21st century millions of americans now on the economic margins can join the mainstream in the enterprise of building our nation a child in south central l a in the most remote part of indian country can have access to the same world of knowledge in an instant as a child in the wealthiest suburban school in this country now just imagine if not simply a fraction but all of our young people entered the work force had access to the internet always and had mastered the skills of the new information economy so if we want to unlock the potential of our workers we have to close that gap we ve done what we could we have provide the hope scholarship and other tax credits so that we ve literally opened the doors of college to all americans we have emphasized higher standards smaller classes more teachers we re connecting every american classroom to the internet and i think we ll make our goal that the vice president and i established here in california in 1994 of having all the classrooms connected by the year 2000 the 8 million in corporate commitments made today by this group are so very important as are the information technology academies to which sandy referred earlier sandy has said often that today s students are tomorrow s employees today s students are tomorrow s economy they re not just somebody else s employees they are tomorrow s economy so bringing these skills to distressed families in distressed communities can have more to do with our ability to restructure the economy in these areas than perhaps anything else i also want to thank at t and i think ann hesse the ceo of at t wireless is here for committing more than 1 4 million to increase access to the tools of the high tech economy i want to thank america online george franberg of aol is here for providing more than 1 million in grants to help narrow the digital divide i want to thank oxygen media on the cable network it will launch next year they will offer high tech training on tv so more embarrassed adults can learn what their kids already know this is the kind of thing we have to do if we have money capital and human capital we can bring hope to the places that have been left behind the last thing i want to say to you is this this tour this last four days that we have all spent together has been a significant step toward opening america s new markets but it can t be the end of the journey it has to be instead the opening salvo of a battle to build a real economy in every community in this country the real measure of our success is not whether ceos join the president on a trip like this which moved the nation but whether the same ceos and others will return to those markets and move the lives of the people there so i say to you you have to do that the real test of the success is not whether i ve got a great legislative idea but whether congress will set aside its partisan differences and put that idea into law so we can have more investments in these communities next week i will send our new markets legislation to congress over the next several weeks we ll announce a new national effort to promote the business link partnerships pairing big businesses with smaller often disadvantaged companies an idea the vice president has so strongly championed and this fall we re going to take another tour i am going to start in newark to challenge the owners of professional sports teams and professional athletes to follow the example set by the owners of the new jersey nets ray chambers and lou katz who set up the ownership of the nets in a way that 35 percent of the profits of the franchise are reinvested in downtown newark to give to the people i must say you might know that the nets those gentlemen have joined in a joint partnership with the new york yankees they now have a big partnership and they have dedicated a significant percentage of the profits of the joint venture to reinvest in inner city new york in the bronx and in newark so i m going to go up there i m going to highlight what they re doing i m going to see what we can do to help and we re going to make another round here to show people that there are things that we can do together that are both morally right and good business often on this trip reverend jackson has referred to the fact that dr martin luther king just before he was killed thought that he had done about all he could do to get the legal changes necessary to get rid of the stain of racial segregation and that the great disadvantages and discrimination still alive in america could only be eliminated if there were a new alliance of people across racial lines to create genuine economic opportunity for all americans it s hard to believe to somebody like me anyway at my age that it s now been more than 30 years since dr king was killed and his dream was put on hold one of the lesser known passages in his famous speech at the lincoln memorial in august of 1963 involved language in which he challenged america and i quote to refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation well my fellow americans today those vaults of opportunity are more full than they have ever been in the entire history of this country and we have more evidence than we have ever had that when children like those that we talked about today and when young people like those we celebrate today hazel and her peers behind me do well we are all strengthened that there is a fundamental sense in which our futures are bound up together from appalachia to the mississippi delta to the native american reservations to the inner cities to the wealthiest corners of our land all our kids need a chance to live their dreams and the american dream needs for all americans to be blessed by the opportunity that has given so much to us thank you for what you do to achieve that goal and god bless you dem wjclinton8 8 00 bill_clinton scott i want to thank you for this and i want to thank dave alexander for making me feel welcome here and i just want to say i appreciate what you re doing i could have used this about seven and a half years ago i think when i got to washington there was a lot of underbrush that needed cutting there i will treasure this for the rest of my life thank you i wanted to begin today if i might by thanking your governor dirk kempthorne for coming out here with me and senator larry craig and helen chenoweth hage both your members of congress are here from idaho and i m very grateful to them for that let s give them a hand for being here and for the support they ve given you and of course as secretary glickman said our secretary of interior bruce babbitt came today along with louis caldera the secretary of the army and mike dombeck who is your chief of the forest service and mostly we came here to say thanks i got to fly over at least some of the fires and it was early morning and i know they haven t reared their ugly heads yet but i have some sense of what you re doing i also got to see some places where you had succeeded in changing the course of the fire and limiting its reach and i appreciate that very much i know that mother nature will burn in our forests one way or the other but it matters how it happens it matters that people don t die it matters that property is saved it matters that precious and irreplaceable things are saved and you re doing that i know a lot of the firefighters have been working here for weeks and weeks and probably for months given all the problems we ve had with wild fires this summer you probably know we ve already lost 4 million acres which is about twice the 10 year average before this so we re in for a rough summer and i know how hard it is on you i d also like to say a special word of appreciation to the people from the military who have come up from fort hood to teach you that one loud word in the english language and i heard there are some marines here too somewhere doing some work in this area and i thank them but obviously i m especially proud of this group from fort hood because their leader lt colonel dell williams was my army military aide before he got a real job with you guys i told him today i was glad to see him having to do real work after having that white house job for a good while but it didn t do him any permanent harm so i thank you for your service and i thank you for the work you re doing together we re going to release today about 150 million in emergency funds to help continue to fight the fire and to help restore the area afterward and i hope that restoration work will also lead to some jobs for the people in this area who have been disadvantaged by this fire and i have asked the secretaries of agriculture and interior to undertake an intensive 90 day study and report back to me about what can be done to minimize the impact of wildfires like this because this thing was pretty well thanks to most of you who have been doing this for years this whole issue was much more in hand over the last 10 years and this has been a difficult year and most of the people i talk to think that the next two or three years could also be difficult years and we want to do whatever we can to make sure that we take care of the people as well as the natural resource but the main thing i did i just wanted to get in the plane this morning and fly here and say thanks i know this is hard and i know a lot of you are a long way from home i know some of you have to get almost permission to go back to where you come from just so you can pay the bills and keep them from turning off the water and the electricity but i want you to know that your fellow americans appreciate it these fires have been very well publicized and the american people know how they re being fought and who is fighting them and you need to know that we re proud of you and we re grateful to you i know there was a terrible fatality and there is a funeral today and our prayers are with the family of the man who lost his life this is hard and i know it and the main thing i want to do was just hop on air force one this morning at 6 00 a m so i could come over here and say thanks you ve done a good thing for your country and a good thing for your fellow americans thank you very much dem wjclinton8 8 94 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen welcome to the white house as you might imagine one of the great pleasures of the presidency is selecting recipients of the presidential medal of freedom the highest honor given to civilians by the united states of america if i might begin on a very personal and immediate note last fall this annual ceremony was held on a very happy day for me and for those of us who want a safer and more humane united states it was the day we made the brady bill the law of the land today as we gather here congress is on the verge of voting on the most comprehensive anticrime bill in history but that bill has been held hostage for 11 days by certain special interest groups so as we recognize the contributions of civilians to our country s way of life i d like to take this opportunity to call on those groups who are blocking the crime bill to let it come to a vote and ask the other citizens of the united states to ask the congress for the same thing many people we honor here today have given their whole lives to enriching the fabric of the future and we can do no less this afternoon we will present the presidential medal of freedom to nine remarkable individuals whose service to our democracy and to humanity has advanced the common interest of freedom loving people not only here at home but throughout the world herbert block the late cesar chavez arthur flemming dorothy height barbara jordan lane kirkland robert michel and sargent shriver the medals these americans receive today has a special history it was established by president truman in 1945 at first reward notable service in the war in 1963 president kennedy amended the award for distinguished civilian service in peace time the honorees that year included the singer marian anderson justice felix frankfurter diplomat john mccloy labor leader george meany the writer e b white playwright thornton wilder and the artist andrew wyeth by the time that first ceremony was held here in the white house in december of 1963 president johnson had added to the roll of names president kennedy and his holiness pope john xxiii listen to this at that time under secretary of state george ball said that the president is establishing what we can proudly call an american civil honors list how many of our greatest citizens who went on to achieve other things said that the greatest thing that could ever be said about them was that they were good citizens that is true in every way of those we honor today herbert block or herblock as we know him became an editorial cartoonist with the chicago daily news in 1929 not a very good year to begin writing funny cartoons his long and prolific career has spanned the presidencies of 11 different presidents the fact that he gets to choose the targets in cartoons may have something to do with the longevity of his career his cartoons have appeared in the washington post since 1946 the year i was born he educates and persuades public opinion with effectiveness artistry warmth and great good humor he has a big heart he sides with the little guy people of common sense and all who hold healthy irreverence for any sort of pretensions cesar chavez before his death in april of last year had become a champion of working people everywhere born into depression era poverty in arizona in 1927 he served in the united states navy in the second world war and rose to become one of our greatest advocates of nonviolent change he was for his own people a moses figure the farm workers who labored in the fields and yearned for respect and self sufficiency pinned their hopes on this remarkable man who with faith and discipline with soft spoken humility and amazing inner strength led a very courageous life and in so doing brought dignity to the lives of so many others and provided for us inspiration for the rest of our nation s history we are honored to have his wife friend and long time working partner helen chavez to be with us today to receive the award arthur flemming served every president from franklin roosevelt to ronald reagan as the republican member of the civil service commission as a member of the hoover commission on the executive branch established by president truman as director of defense mobilization and a member of president eisenhower s national security council and as secretary of health education and welfare in addition to being an able administrator dr flemming is also a respected educator and former journalist over the course of his long and eminent career in public service he contributed to the struggles for social security civil rights and most recently health care reform something for which the first lady and i are particularly in his debt these three struggles he calls the greatest domestic crusades of his lifetime james grant is the remarkable executive director of the united nations childrens fund unicef where he has tirelessly waged a global crusade on behalf of the world s children like his father before him he was born and raised in china where he took up his family s tradition of offering assistance abroad and first went to work for the united nations at the end of world war ii in the fall of 1992 he helped to broker a brief ceasefire during the siege of sarajevo and personally directed the safe passage of a convoy carrying winter supplies of clothing blankets and food as the international community s guardian of innocent children in troubled regions he oversees the delivery of humanitarian assistance that without him might otherwise never reach those in need dorothy height is one of the world s most tireless and accomplished advocates of civil rights the rights of women and the health and stability of family and community life from the days when she helped eleanor roosevelt to organize the world youth conference in 1938 she has remained engaged in the public arena for 60 years and more as a leader of the national council of negro women and the young women s christian association she s been a powerful voice for equal opportunity here and in developing nations around the world in recent years her black family reunion celebrations have reminded our society that self help and self reliance within loving extended families are the dominant cultural traditions of the african american community for 20 years barbara jordan has been the most outspoken moral voice of the american political system a position she reached soon after becoming the first black congresswoman elected from the deep south from her native texas in 1972 from national platforms she has captured the nation s attention and awakened its conscience in defense of our constitution the american dream and the commonality we share as american citizens as professor of ethics and public policy at the lyndon b johnson school of public affairs she ensures that the next generation of our public servants will be worthy of the legacy she has done so much to build lane kirkland has been at the center of the american labor movement for almost 50 years after serving in the merchant marine during the second world war and his subsequent graduation from the school of foreign service at georgetown university he became a researcher for organized labor in the same year that he worked as a 26 year old speechwriter in the 1948 campaign of harry truman and his running mate alben barkley throughout the cold war when some leaders saw only the threats to our freedom overseas and neglected the barriers to freedom and inequality within our own land kirkland showed america that you can stand up to communism abroad just as forcefully as you can stand up for working men and women here at home as president of the afl cio for the last 15 years he has helped to teach us that solidarity is a powerful word in any language and that a vibrant labor movement is essential to every free society robert michel has served in the united states house of representatives since 1957 that is the second longest tenure of any republican in american history as minority leader in the house for the last 13 years he has served his party well but he has also served our nation well choosing the pragmatic but harder course of conciliation more often than the divisive but easier course of confrontation in the best sense he is a gentleman legislator who in spite of the great swings in public opinion from year to year has remained always true to the midwestern values he represents so faithfully in the house he retires at the end of this year generally regarded by democrats and republicans alike as one of the most decent and respected leaders with which any president has had the privilege to work sargent shriver is the man who launched the peace corps 33 years ago because of his creativity his idealism his brilliance the peace corps remains one of the most popular government initiatives ever undertaken from the time he and his wife eunice helped to organize a conference on juvenile delinquency for the attorney general in 1947 to his efforts for public education in chicago in the 1950s to his leadership of head start and legal services and now the special olympics sargent shriver has awakened millions of americans including many in this administration to the responsibilities of service the possibilities of change and the sheer joy of making the effort these recipients of the presidential medal of freedom represent different political parties different ideologies different professions indeed different ages their different eras different races different generations in american history cannot be permitted to obscure the fact of what they share in common an unusually profound sense of responsibility to improve the lives of their fellow men and women to improve the future for our children to embody the best of what we mean by the term american citizen by their remarkable records of service and by their incredible spirit we have all been enriched and now i would ask the military aide to read the citations as i present the medal of freedom ladies and gentlemen in closing let me say that i couldn t help thinking as the citations were read and i looked into the faces of our honorees and their families friends and admirers here that we too often reserve our greatest accolades for our citizens when they are gone i wish that cesar chavez could be here today i am grateful that his wife is here and i am so grateful that all these others are here let us remember today that the greatest gift any of us can give the founders of this constitution and this republic is to emulate the work of these citizens whom we honor today every day each in our own way thank you for being here god bless you all dem wjclinton8 8 96 bill_clinton thank you ladies and gentlemen leon panetta did not make me come here i wanted to be here and i am glad to be here today i love looking at this crowd mayor styles thank you for your welcome and thank you for that wonderful plaque with the beautiful drawing by a young child on it chief nelson thank you for what you said and for the leadership you give ana caballero thank you so much for your wonderful introduction i was sitting listening to her speak i thought you know she speaks better than most of us do she ought to run for higher office someday she was very good simon salinas thank you for being here today congressman farr thank you for doing such a fine job you know he was talking about all these programs we supported what you need to know is that sam farr voted for every one of them and every one of them was hard to pass there were people who were actually trying to keep us from putting 100 000 police on the street and doing those other things and sam farr was there with me every step of the way and i thank him for that sam cabrel and the international union of police associations i thank you for your endorsement i thank you especially this year because it means something for years and years as a governor and as attorney general working with communities like salinas in my home state when i was struggling to deal with the problems of crime i always heard the politicians in washington talk about crime and i never heard anybody come out for it i mean all people in public life are against crime you never hear somebody stand up and give a speech for crime but nobody ever did anything about it in washington and i was determined that we would change the direction of our nation in dealing with the crime problem at the grass roots level with local communities and i thank you for validating that today ladies and gentlemen there s someone else i want to introduce in the audience i just saw him sitting out there a man who has done as much as any individual citizen i can think of in the last few years to try to make our children safer a man who lives not very far from you and who went through the unimaginable agony of having his own child abducted and killed her murderer was just convicted and sentenced but in all these years he has borne his grief with dignity and worked to help us pass laws and adopt policies that would make other children safer in their homes and i d like you to welcome mr mark klaas mark stand up thank you god bless you sir i d also like to say just one more word about mr panetta we were supposed to come here in a helicopter today and believe it or not it was too foggy for us in san jose to take off so we had to drive so we drove over from san jose and leon and bruce lindsey and i were sitting in the car together and the closer we got to salinas the happier leon got he was like a kid with a new toy when we drove into town and he was talking about where he used to have an office here we got out of the car and the first think sam farr said is i got a better office than you did i got another room and he began to talk about you and about his life as a congressman and about his friendships here and about what kind of community this was and as we walked down the streets and people waved to us this sort of flood of memories came out and i don t know that there s a harder job in public life than being chief of staff to the president he s responsible for whatever mistakes he makes and all of mine too he has to defend me on the bad days as well as brag about the good days you know you ve got to deal with congress run the white house try to manage what s going on in the cabinet deal with the press and just wait for another tire to go flat on you it is an unimaginably difficult job he has been magnificent and you should be very proud of him but i think the ultimate reason for his success is he never forgets what the purpose of the job is washington is a long way from salinas and i know a lot of times the debates up there seem very far and almost alien almost unreal and excessively political and leon panetta has never forgotten his roots every day when he goes to work he imagines what we re doing in terms of how it will impact people like you and how you will receive it and whether it will help us to raise our children and other things being equal he d just as soon be back home and we need more folks like that serving the public in our nation s capital finally i would like to congratulate alvin harrison and his teammates on their great 1600 meter relay they were magnificent thank you you know hillary and chelsea and i had the privilege of going to the olympics chelsea spent a week there and hillary went three times i went twice we got to speak to the team before the games began and then welcome all those who could come to the white house there yesterday and i was trying to think to myself all during this whole thing and especially after the terrible bombing and then wondering how people would respond and all the athletes showed up the next day and all the spectators did too and people said we re going on and i was thinking to myself what is it that we really love about the olympics i mean americans love all sports and we re thrilled by sports achievements but i think that we love the olympics in part because we think it works the way we want the world to work i mean if you think about it there they are people from 197 different nations there s a small isolated little island like nauru that sends four or five people and a large vast country like russia or australia a country with only 18 million people had the third biggest delegation all these countries participating people that give expression to their national pride and more than ever before but they all come together and play by the same rules in an atmosphere of mutual respect and they have to win by doing something good not by doing something bad to their opponents nobody wins by breaking their opponent s bones or by standing up in a public forum and saying how terrible their opponents are they win by doing well and they win by working together and accepting these rules and i think that we think the world would be better if it worked that way the thing that made me so proud of the america team as i looked at them i thought to myself you know if the american team were to disperse and walk out in the olympic village but for their uniforms nobody would have any idea where they were from they could be from africa or latin america they could be from mexico or india or pakistan they could be from any number of countries in the middle east they could be from china or japan they could be from scandinavia they could be from anywhere because we are bound together not by our race but by our common commitment to this country and to the constitution the bill of rights and the declaration of independence i was gratified that sam said one of your community groups here had as its motto the title of my wife s book from that old african proverb it takes a village to raise a child i want to talk to you about that today because that s really why i came here because i think salinas is a wonderful model of what has to be done by people in their communities if we re going to get this country in the shape it needs to be in to move into the 21st century yes there are things we must do in washington yes there are things that others must do but where it matters is where people s lives are changed in their homes in their schools in their communities in their places of worship with civic groups with the local media with other people who are involved in giving people the chance to make the most of their own lives i know because some other people were telling me before i came out here of the very moving story of your gold medal winner and his twin brother that s an american story and what we need to do is to make sure that there are a thousand stories like that for every child we lose instead of the other way around we don t have a child to spare not a child to i have worked very hard in the last three and a half years to achieve my vision of what our country would be like when we move into the 21st century and it s very simple i want america to be a place where everybody regardless of their race their income their background their gender has a chance to live out their dreams if they re responsible enough to work for it if they re responsible enough to work for it i want this country to stand as a brilliant rebuke to all the places in the world that are consumed by racial and religious and ethnic and tribal hatred where people are killing each other around the world because of their differences i want us to embrace our differences with respect and affection and reach across the lines that divide us and say we are stronger because of our differences because we share the same values and we share the same visions of the future and i want our country and this requires me to do some things that everybody doesn t like from time to time but i want our country to continue to be the strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world because increasingly threats to our security that seem a long way away can come right home whether it s terrorism or drugs or shipping weapons or organized crime we have to stand as a force for peace and freedom and prosperity throughout the world so that we can guarantee that future to our children here at home so we worked very hard to do that first to create opportunity by bringing our economy back i m grateful that the deficit has been cut in half that trade is at an all time high that we re selling california agricultural products in markets they were never sold before that we have over 10 million new jobs that the california economy is coming back we ve got a lot more to do but we re moving in the right direction and i m grateful for that we ve tried to expand educational opportunity one of my goals is to make sure every classroom and every library in america is connected to the information superhighway by the year 2000 and california is leading the way we re moving to improve performance to set higher standards to support our schools to help our schools support this by being able to stay open later hours for example and give children something to say yes to as well as something to say no to we re working to open up the doors of college education to all americans so that no young person should ever decline to go to school after high school just because of the cost of it i tell you there s a lot of talk there s a lot of talk you ll hear a lot of talk between now and november about tax cuts and how much we should have and whether we can afford them and they all sound good it s like going to the candy store you know i ll have some of that and some of that and some of that and some of that but if you eat it all at once you might get sick so i say to you it may not be popular but i will not advocate any cut in taxes in this election that cannot be paid for in our attempts to balance the budget invest in education protect medicare and medicaid and the environment but we have to do that but we can afford some targeted tax cuts i m about to sign one when we raise the minimum wage that will give people a 500 tax credit if they ll adopt children because we want to encourage more children to be adopted into stable families to be given a good start in life that s an important thing i want to see tax relief for families when they re rearing their children and the most important thing we could do and i think the most significant tax cut we could give america s families is a deduction for the cost of college tuition and and i want to make two years of education after high school as universal and available as public education through the 12th grade is today by giving people a tax credit for the cost of a community college for two years after high school everybody should have that everyone in america it should be universal but all this opportunity will not mean much to children who cannot play and learn and grow in safety all this activity and opportunity will not mean much if children spend their whole childhood looking over their shoulder when they re walking too and from school to see if somebody is going to shoot them all this activity and opportunity will not mean much to children who are lost in a fog of drug addiction or captured in a web of crime from which they cannot escape and so i say to you i came here today to honor your efforts in fighting crime and rescuing our children and i just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you have done and i want to make a couple of points here have we got a doctor here is there a doctor in the house we need a doctor up here all this hot air is difficult okay we re doing a good job we have one doctor here and one in the crowd coming up come on up sir that s fine we ve got one already on the site there now let me ask you to think about something that to me is very important if i had told you you heard all these people say all these good things we ve done to fight crime but the truth is that four years in a row the crime rate has come down in america but until this year it had been going up among juveniles so we were winning the battle against crime and losing it with our kids it seems inconceivable cocaine use dropped by a third in america in three years but casual drug use has been going up among people under 18 since 1991 now we all know there are a lot of reasons for that but the fundamental reason i think is that too many of these kids are growing up in chaotic circumstances where they re being left to raise themselves and salinas said we are not going to do that anymore we re going to rescue every single one of our children we can create all the jobs in the world and all the opportunity in the world but if we go into the 21st century with too many children killing children too many children having children too many children raising children and too many children raising themselves on the street this country will not be what it ought to be and the only way we can turn that around is if communities say we re going to take all the resources we have and we re going to go after every single child they re all our children so i thank the chief and the mayor for pointing out that we have put funds into this community to hire police officers we ve put funds in this community to help you with your special projects but if you hadn t used it properly it would not amount to a hill of beans nothing we do in washington to try to rescue the children of america will work unless it is given life in the commitment of people in every community in america you are doing that in salinas that s what i want every community in america to do i do have some good news to tell you today for the first time in seven years violent crime arrests of juveniles went down last year for the first time in seven years arrests for murder by juveniles went down for the second year in a row by over 15 percent we are moving in the right direction we have to do more of what we are doing all over this country people like you are coming alive to the fact that unless we do some things together we re not going to rescue our children and i have tried to go around this country to places where things are working to highlight them to urge every other american community to do the same and to say what we in washington can and will do to help we can break the backs of gangs and youth violence but we cannot do it unless the efforts we make in washington find expression in the efforts you make on the streets of salinas parents have to work with police neighbors have to look out for each other the schools the community groups everybody has to do it everyone has a role to play everyone has a responsibility to fulfill but we know if we do it we can win you don t have to give up on our kids anymore you don t have to give up on crime you don t have to accept unacceptable rates of violence you don t have to say that we re going to lose a large number of our children every year because they happen to be poor or they happen to be isolated or they happen to have been picked up by a gang you can say no to all that and you are proving it in salinas and i want you to keep doing it until you eradicate the problem entirely don t forget that not so long ago this community was literally invaded by an army of 20 gangs with 1 500 members and don t forget that that led to drugs and drive by murders and that a lot of kids wound up in those gangs just because they didn t have any other thing to belong to you think about it we all want to belong to a gang we just want to be in good gangs alvin s relay team is a gang it s a good gang right every church every synagogue that s a good gang if you like your school it s a good gang people have a need we are not destined to live isolated lives and a lot of these kids who wound up in gangs are living in a vacuum alone raising themselves and they are drawn to the first magnet that makes them feel like they re more important we all have that need every single one of us we need to know that we are a part of things that are bigger and better than ourselves that we can find expression and meaning and force and direction in life by joining with other people and when you have things like peace builders and when you tell kids that they matter and you tell them they can belong and that they can amount to something and they can live out their dreams and no matter where they start out they might wind up with a gold medal and at least they can win a gold medal in the race of life if they do the right things then you can change this so you have had these breathtaking reductions in violent crime by juveniles associated with gangs the numbers are staggering and what i want to ask everyone in america is if your community hasn t done what they have done in salinas what s your excuse get off the dime go to work and we ll help you every child counts in every community in america we need more of this i also want to brag on the alisal union school district where an antitruancy initiative is keeping children in school every school district in this country that has cracked down on truancy has reduced juvenile crime reduced the dropout rate increased learning and given more kids a better chance uniforms for elementary and middle school students keep them focused on what s inside not what s outside that also helps curfews keep the kids off the street and in a safe and secure place and that s good and finally let me just say one other thing the thing i liked about what you have done here is that you have not only cracked down on what s going wrong you ve tried to make things go right you know it s easy for anybody to stand up at a microphone and tell kids what they ought not to do that s easy to do and it s important to do it s really important what people should not do but every human being needs something to say yes to and too many of our children have not had enough things to say yes to you are also giving them something to say yet to and i encourage you as you teach people right from wrong to never to forget you not only need to suppress the wrong you need to lift up the right and give people something to live for and to shoot for and to strive for i believe the most important thing we can do in washington today at a time when we have reduced the size of the bureaucracy we are moving to balance the budget is to say that we still have to have a government that is strong enough to help people when they re flat on their back as you are if you have a flood or a base closing and you need to change the whole direction of your economy or recover from a disaster and also to help people make the most of their own lives to build strong families strong communities strong workplaces and a strong nation you are a building block of that i hope everyone in america will see somewhere tonight on a news report this great vast sea of faces in this wonderful farming area from all walks of life and all different backgrounds who said simply we are not giving up on our children we are lifting up our children thank you and god bless you all dem wjclinton8 9 94 bill_clinton thank you very much and welcome to the rose garden on this beautiful day i want to acknowledge the presence of secretary cisneros who was once director of the national civic league and whose city san antonio a few years ago was an allamerican city under his leadership congresswoman johnson congressman borski congressman blackwell congressman thomas and congressman sharp are here i also want to say a word of special appreciation for the national civic league because this is its centennial year when the league was founded theodore roosevelt said there are many ways in which a man or a woman can work for the higher life of american cities well judging by what the mayors here and their citizens have shown us that is just as true if not more true today than it was 100 years ago we know given the complex challenges that our cities face we need that kind of commitment now even more than we needed it 100 years ago we are here to celebrate success on many fronts some of the cities are being honored for designing programs to get our children off the streets and into better lives others have expanded downtown business areas opened free health clinics for the poor smoothed the economic impact of a base closure these 10 cities represent regions all over america and they re of different sizes with different problems and different challenges and different opportunities they do teach us however one thing in common when our citizens work in partnership when they work business and labor and government when they find ways to come together instead of being divided they can do miraculous things the partnerships we celebrate here are a reminder that government can and must help that businesses and volunteer organizations working with citizens themselves must do the hard work of restoring america s communities each and every one of us must be personally responsible for working in our communities and making a difference no one else will ever care about a community half as much as those who live there and raise their children there who look forward to growing old there and being remembered there and who knows how to solve the problems of a place better than those who call it home that s not to say that you should do all the work on your own our federal government must and will continue to help everything we do even here should ultimately be about empowering people at the grass roots to assume responsibility for their own lives their own communities their own families to be able to compete and win to succeed in the complicated but exhilarating world toward which we are moving in the next century we ve worked hard over the last 19 months to create that kind of framework in strengthening our economy in reforming our education system in following some of the initiatives secretary cisneros has set out for cities and for communities within cities all across america we have another great opportunity for partnership now that the crime bill has at last passed if ever there was an example of the federal government reaching out to empower people at the grass roots level the crime bill is it it s paid for by reducing the size of the national government by 270 000 over the next six years giving all the money back to local communities to hire police to build prisons to build prevention programs to reach out to young people to give people something to say yes to to put people to work and put people in responsible play as well these things can work in miraculous ways but we re going to depend upon you to make them work getting the crime bill through congress was difficult all right it took six years but you don t have six years to make it work at the grass roots the money is flowing in this fiscal year and we have to depend upon all of you to reduce crime and violence and to increase the number of young people who have a better future the partnerships that we celebrate today and the ones our administration is committed to creating tomorrow all of them are the backbone of our future the cities are leading the way and those of you who are being honored today are truly outstanding i can t wait to present the awards i have already read the reasons why all of you are being acknowledged it reminded me of a lot of the things that i did as a governor it reminds me too here in washington that very often the most important things we do receive the least publicity especially if we do them hand in hand instead of fist against fist but you keep on doing it because in the end the results will be the ultimate reward now i d like to introduce a person that it s my great honor to present one of our country s most distinguished citizens the chairman of the national civic league john gardner dem wjclinton9 1 01a bill_clinton let me ask you a question did you hear what went on upstairs this is troubling half are saying yes half are saying no let me say to all of you i ll give you a brief version of what i said there first i want to thank chicago and the state of illinois for being so good to me i thank mayor daley for his leadership and partnership and for making it possible to prove that our crime policies and our welfare policies and our economic policies would all work because they worked here in chicago i thank bobby rush for helping me in 92 i thank bobby and dick durbin and the entire crowd in your congressional delegation who have been so good to me but senator durbin i especially thank you for all the things you ve done thank you i thank bill daley for being a superb secretary of commerce and a brilliant campaign manager what i told them upstairs was bill daley ran the first presidential campaign in history that was so clearly winning a court had to stop the vote in order to change the outcome it was brilliant now i want to say two other things upstairs i said that this hotel was very important in my life i spoke to the democratic chairs here in december of 91 i had my party here on st patrick s day in 1992 when we won the primary were you there some of you were there and i still have a picture in my little office off the oval office of hillary and me standing here in this lobby with the confetti coming down on st patrick s day i ve had it there every single day for eight years to remind me that chicago and illinois made me president i thank you for voting for us overwhelmingly in 92 in 96 i thank you for a fabulous convention in 1996 which was a joy and i thank you for sticking with us in the year 2000 which you did i thank you for that i thought it was really important to me to come here before i leave office to say thank you and i also want to bring you greetings from the new senator from the state of new york hillary said to tell you hello and i told senator durbin that you should just sort of consider that illinois also has two democratic senators again i am honored to have been president at a time when a lot of changes were going on in america and in the world and as i look back i am profoundly grateful that our country is so much stronger and more united and more successful and so much more future oriented and self confident today than it was eight years ago when we started and you had a lot to do with that i believe politics and public service is a team sport and you can have a great quarterback you can have a great captain but if you don t have a team you re going to lose every time so you were my team and we won for america together so when you think about the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years or the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded or 22 5 million new jobs or 25 million people taking advantage of the family leave law or 13 million more people getting college tax aid through the hope scholarship tax credit or over 3 million more kids with health insurance or 90 percent of our little kids with immunization against serious diseases for the first time or more land set aside for protection for all time than any time in 100 years when you say all those things that wasn t just me it wasn t just us with the democrats and the congress it was you too we did it together we were a team and i thank you for that the last thing i want to say is this i want you to keep fighting for the future and i ll be there with you i ll just be a citizen but i can serve well i ve still got a voice i ve still got a heart and i ve got a mind to spend the rest of my life trying to pay america back for all the good things the american people gave me these last 25 years so don t get discouraged don t be frustrated by what happened in november but don t be passive just take a breath and keep looking forward and keep doing what will come naturally to fight for the things we believe in to build the future we want for all of our children together i can honestly tell you that 11 days at high noon when i walk out of the white house for the last time as president i will leave more optimistic and more idealistic about the people of this country and their potential and especially about the young people of this country than i was the day i took the oath of office in 1993 i love you thank you god bless you good bye dem wjclinton9 1 01b bill_clinton thank you you know i thought we should come over here to sort of finish the circle of my political history in illinois and i didn t know if anybody would show up apparently the lobby s full too let me say to all of you how grateful i am to the people of chicago and illinois i thank the mayor for his great leadership and for giving me a chance to be a good president for chicago if i didn t have a great mayor i couldn t have been i asked rich when bill was up here talking i said you get your brother to introduce you very often he said no but i love it every time he does it i want to thank bill daley for his exemplary service as secretary of commerce he was brilliant i think he did a brilliant job in leading vice president gore to victory myself let me just remind you when he went over there as the chairman of that campaign we were way behind and then we had a great convention and we got a head a little bit then they got ahead again daley kept them on track we started out they were whizzing we were way behind when daley took over they thought the election was over the republicans did by the time it was over our candidate had won the popular vote and the only way they could win the election was to stop the voting in florida he did a great job i want to thank my great friend alexis herman i did not know until she started talking that her grandfather once worked here but i appreciate it and since she said that in a minute i m going to tell a family story i want to thank bobby rush and your great senator dick durbin what a great job he s done our treasurer mr hynes and his daddy mr hynes thank you for being here tom good to see you and secretary riley our secretary of education and the best secretary of education we ever had thank you and if i have forgotten anybody i apologize i also bring you greetings from the newest united states senator from new york hillary i told dick ever since hillary won that election in new york you should just consider that illinois has two democratic senators again she told me to tell everybody hello you know this place has a special place in my heart and i just want to briefly review the history for you when i ran for president in 1992 i knew i had to do pretty well in new hampshire and when i started out i was running fifth but it was a small state of tough minded but fair minded people and i thought if i could just get up there and stir around i could do all right they were good to me and i love them and they voted for me twice so i got out of it alive anyway then i got through all the rest of that stuff then we had super tuesday and i won them but i was supposed to because it was in the south but i knew that to be nominated i had to do well on st patrick s day in illinois and michigan and i knew some things about illinois other people didn t know first i had a wife from chicago that didn t hurt second i knew southern illinois was south of richmond and i spent a lot of time down there which other guys didn t know but when i was a governor and the third thing i knew was that half the people from chicago had kinfolks in arkansas which nobody knew but me so i figured if i sort of sidled around here i could do pretty good so i showed up here in 1991 and in this very room we had a meeting of all the state democratic chairs and i tried to make a fairly presentable impression and i had been thinking about what we ought to do as a country for a long time and i put my ideas out and then we went over to the navy pier and i announced that david wilhelm of chicago would be my national campaign manager he did a great job and you should be very proud of him and then so we rocked along and everything went according to plan and it was time to stand and deliver in illinois and on the election night and the primary it was st patrick s day 1992 now i remember marching in the st patrick s day parade in chicago it was an interesting experience most people were waving all five fingers think about it and on election night a majority of the people in illinois gave me their votes in the primary over my opponents and i knew then it was just a matter of time and the people in michigan were very good to me we won there by 10 points but by more in illinois and ever since then i have known that i could count on illinois that when the chips were down chicago and the state of illinois would be there for the clinton gore ticket and i am profoundly grateful we had the party that election night downstairs in the lobby where the overflow crowd is and i m going to go down there and see them in a minute and every day for eight years in my little private office right off the oval office every single day for eight years i have looked at the picture of hillary and me standing with the confetti the green confetti coming down in the lobby of this grand old hotel on st patrick s day so i wanted to come here to say good bye and to say thank you but let me tell you what else i want you to know i have a look i ve got a senator to support that s what i ve got and i m not really saying good bye i m just saying good bye as president but let me tell you i also have another picture of this hotel which i don t think i ve ever told anybody in illinois i have another picture that i have seen every night for the last four years for the last eight years excuse me it is a picture of my mother in early 1946 and my father who were living here when my mother went home to arkansas to have me and my father was killed in a car wreck driving home and right before that happened they were here in this hotel with another young couple having what my mother told me was one of the happiest nights of her life and she gave me that picture when i was a young man and i put it up on my desk in the white house in the residence and i look at this hotel in that picture twice every day for eight years once in st patrick s day 1992 and once when my mother and father were here before i was born this is an important place for me and you re important people to me and i thank you from the bottom of my heart now here s the second thing i want to say now i want to say two things seriously number one this is a different a stronger a more united and a better country than it was eight years ago the ideas we had worked they worked and let me just take you on a little walk down memory lane here eight years ago we had high unemployment the deficit was 290 billion the debt of the country had been quadrupled in the previous 12 years now we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded 22 5 million new jobs the deficit has been turned into the biggest surpluses in history and when this year is over my last budget will have paid down 500 billion on the national debt we can be out of debt in 10 years for the first time since 1835 now in addition to that bobby rush said i wanted to be president for the little people i did i didn t know the difference in little and big people i was so naive when my predecessor referred to me in rather derisive terms as the governor of a small southern state i was so naive i thought he was paying me a compliment and i still do people ask me what was my presidency about it was about those 22 5 million people that have jobs now that didn t about the 25 million people that took advantage of the family and medical leave law about the 13 million people that took advantage of the hope scholarship tax credit and the other tax credits to go on and have family members in college about the 90 percent of kids under 2 who are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time about the 3 3 million children who have been covered with health insurance for the first time under the children s health insurance program we got the uninsured population going down for the first time in 12 years that s what it s about about the 1 3 million kids in after school programs with federal funds for the first time and i could go on and on it s about people 600 000 felons fugitives and stalkers couldn t get handguns because of the brady bill how many people are alive because of that because of the 100 000 police on the street that s what this was about it was about trying to bring america together to create more opportunity for every responsible citizen to make our diversity a blessing instead of a source of division to be a force for peace and freedom and democracy and decency around the world and i am proud of where america is today i m also proud that we did have an urban policy an urban policy that gave 15 million families a family tax cut because the people weren t making enough money working full time to get their kids out of poverty and now they can because of the earned income tax credit an urban policy in which the vice president ran an empowerment zone program that brought billions of dollars of new investment into cities all across america an urban policy which cut the welfare rolls in half which diversified public housing and chicago is leading the way in that which gave people a sense that we could go forward together again now this was about people putting them first preparing them for a new century and a whole new era in human affairs look how much more diverse chicago is now then it was 10 years ago racially religiously look how we re learning to live together across all the lines that have previously divided us that s what i want for america one america going forward together helping each other making the most of what we can do you know politics and public life is a lot like athletics it s a team sport i don t care how good the quarterback is or the center if you don t have a good team you re no where you were my team and we won for america so whether you re old or young white black or brown or whatever straight or gay able or disabled we re all disabled some way or another i thank you because you were my team and we won for america and i want you to know the second thing i want to say is this america is always about becoming it s always about new beginnings it s always about tomorrow the reason we re still around here after over 220 years is that we ve always had a focus on the future we always thought we could do better we always thought we had a moral obligation to do better we always thought we could widen the circle of opportunity and deepen the meaning of freedom and strengthen the bonds of our community and be better neighbors around the world we always thought that i still believe that and you cannot let any disappointment you may feel in this last election take away any pride you feel in what al gore and i and our team were able to accomplish with you these last eight years and you cannot let you cannot let anything deter you from your determination to be the best citizen you can be to make chicago and illinois and america as great as they can be i m telling you there are still a lot of big challenges out there but i m leaving this country in good shape and the best is still to be you just rear back stay together and keep fighting for tomorrow god bless you thank you very much dem wjclinton9 1 01c bill_clinton we had a rally upstairs you heard them didn t you in the ballroom a little loud and i hope we didn t interrupt you so there s an overflow crowd in the lobby and they said they have to go through the edge of another ballroom so here i am so i ve invaded your dinner well thank you for the wonderful warm welcome i m in chicago today to basically say goodbye to the people of chicago and illinois as president it s a very happy day for me in many ways this hotel since you re here for that i should tell you this hotel plays a huge role in my life and i have two pictures of this hotel that s what i told them upstairs i have two pictures of this hotel which i look at every day of my life one is of the lobby on st patrick s day of 1992 hillary and i are standing there with green graffiti not graffiti what do you call it confetti not graffiti confetti it s been a long day and a long eight years confetti coming down because that s the night that we won the democratic primary in illinois which basically sealed my nomination the second picture was my mother and my father dining here in 1946 and that s in my private office in the residence of the white house i look at it every night every single night so i ve seen those two pictures of this place every day for eight years this is also where i basically kicked off my campaign in illinois in december of 1991 and so i m very happy to be here and i wanted to come here for my last appearance in chicago as president and i want to tell all of you that it s been an honor to serve i m glad my country is in better shape than it was eight years ago i thank all of you for the role that you ve played in revitalizing our country and i wish only the best for the future i ve said many times and i ll say again america may find people who do this job better than i have but you will never find anybody who loved doing it any more thank you very much dem wjclinton9 1 01d bill_clinton thank you very very much i want to say first of all i realize now that i m in an elementary school that i should get a tardy slip today but even in these closing days of my presidency i can t stop doing my job and i was unavoidably detained i m sorry one thing i have learned in over 20 years of visiting schools is that you almost never have a good school without a great principal and i want to thank sharon wilcher for her introduction and for her leadership i want to thank secretary riley who has been my friend since the 1970s and we go back a long way our families have been friends we ve shared the joys of our children and the stories of our respected governorships and i knew he would be a good secretary of education but i think after eight years the record will reflect that he is clearly the finest secretary of education this country ever had and i m very grateful to him i want to thank secretary alexis herman our secretary of labor for joining us today i brought the deputy attorney general eric holder all the way from washington he had never been on one of these trips for me and he s been working like a dog for years so i asked him to come to continue our school analogy this is recess for him today i want to thank senator dick durbin for his friendship and his leadership over all these years congressman bobby rush who worked in my campaign for president in 1992 i m proud of what you have done sir thank you treasurer dan hynes the president of the chicago teachers union tom reese gery chico paul vallas and let me say a special word of thanks to your mayor for the partnership that we have enjoyed for education for economic development and housing and so many other areas i have constantly looked to chicago for leadership i tell people all the time it s probably one of the best organized big cities in the entire world and the work that has been done by all of you in education in reviving the system here over the last six years is exhibit a thank you mayor daley i came to chicago today in the closing days of my presidency for two reasons first of all as i ll say more about in a few moments in another setting it s doubtful that i could have become president without the support i received from the people of chicago and the state of illinois it began over nine years ago way back in 1991 when only my mother thought i could be elected president and through the elections of 1992 and 1996 starting with the democratic primary and then the election of 2000 you ve been very good to hillary and bill clinton and to al and tipper gore and i thank you very much for that i also wanted to come because one of the primary reasons i ran for president is to do what i could in the white house to make a positive difference in the schools of america i wanted to come to james ward elementary because i want people all across this country to know that there are schools like this where teachers and parents and administrators and community leaders are succeeding sometimes against great odds in bringing educational excellence to our children it is important that people know it can be done i came because i have so often told anyone who would listen about chicago and the accomplishments of your school reform effort indeed you have been very very good to me today i asked paul vallas when i came in i said how many times since you ve been in office have i been in your school system in your school he said six six so the way i figure it i m either entitled to a diploma or to a property tax bill i can t figure out which you have raised standards and accountability and ended social promotion in the right way by giving students in schools the tools they need to meet high standards and succeed higher pay and better training for teachers and principals after school and summer school programs better quality facilities the results are clear in this entire huge increasingly diverse school district the test scores of third through eighth graders have risen in every single year since 1994 and you heard the results about james ward what i want the members of the traveling press corps to know who are here with me is every year this school gets students coming from china croatia central america this school has a large asian american population and a very substantial african american population a very substantial hispanic population and a very substantial white ethnic population it is a picture of america s future we have to make education work here if we want america s future to work using almost every proven educational strategy this school is demonstrating dramatically what we could accomplish in every school in america if every school would work together the way your people work together based on a common conviction that all children can learn and a common devotion to the proven best practices in education now for the past eight years our administration has worked hard to make education our number one domestic priority we started out early doing more to help early childhood education doing a lot to expand and improve the quality of head start and i m very proud that in our very last education budget achieved after the election this year we had the largest increase in head start in the entire history of the program i think that s a very good sign but we have then focused on a proven strategy in schools higher standards more accountability greater investment equal opportunity simple ideas higher standards more accountability greater investment equal opportunity in 1992 believe it or not only 14 states in this entire country had academic standards for core subjects and not surprisingly test scores were dropping as a result as more and more kids came into the school the student bodies were more and more diverse more and more schools had children whose first language was not english more and more kids whose parents could not speak english and as more and more kids came into the schools ironically a smaller percentage of the kids had parents who themselves were property taxpayers who were property owners so that the tax base of many of our districts were severely stressed and so we came in with a commitment to higher standards and we passed legislation to encourage and support states in setting those standards in 1992 there were 14 states with core academic standards today there are 49 states with statewide core academic standards we also wanted to increase accountability we asked the states indeed we required the states to identify schools that were failing and then develop strategies to turn them around we then gave them funds to help turn around or shut down failing schools this year 225 million in this year s budget alone to help schools identify try to turn around or shut down and put under new management schools that are not giving our children the education they deserve we also said like chicago that we should end social promotion but like chicago we said it s not fair to hold the kids accountable if the system is failing them so for the very first time we put the federal government on the side of the after school programs and the summer school programs i was so glad you mentioned that four years ago we had a 1 million demonstration project this year in this education budget we have 850 million for after school programs they will serve 1 3 million kids like the children in this school and i am very proud of that more than half the students here participate in federal and state funded after school programs and i understand there would be even more of them if you had the transportation to get them home which is something that i would like to see addressed in the next administration i might also say something that won t surprise you in every community where there are comprehensive after school programs with real meaningful substance like the ones described by your principal every community in the country where this is the case the juvenile crime rate goes down the juvenile delinquency rate goes down the school attendance rate goes up the on time graduation rate goes up this is a big deal i m glad we ve got 1 3 million kids in these programs but there are basically 6 million kids in america who don t have anyplace to go under supervision when they get out of school so we re barely meeting we re right at a quarter of the national need being funded by the federal government and of course some places like chicago are using their own funds but we need if i were going to be around four more years one of the things i d do is figure out how many people wait a minute you are going to be around so you can participate in this one of the things we need to do is to figure out how many kids are being served with all the federal and the state and local funds how many still need to be served and we need to fill the gap we ve got the money we need to fill the gap this is a huge huge opportunity and responsibility to further support young students another thing we did was to start the america reads program which now has involved 1 000 universities and colleges in sending out student mentors to help make sure kids can read by the time they get out of the 3rd grade and there are also countless other religious and other community organizations presenting doing it and supporting schools eight years ago only 35 percent of our schools and listen to this 3 percent of our classrooms were connected to the internet i said 8 the truth is it was 1994 six years ago today with the help of new federal dollars to support internet hook ups and the e rate program which was pioneered and supported by the vice president the e rate basically guarantees that every school can afford to log on to the internet and hook up to access it no matter how limited their resources are we have gone from 3 percent of our classrooms to 65 percent of our classrooms connected from 35 percent of our schools to 95 percent of our schools connected to the internet including this one and you just heard your principal say before you had this last remodeling even if you had the money you couldn t do it because the wiring wouldn t support it you d be amazed how many schools i ve been in that can t be connected to the internet because the wiring in the school won t support it i was at an old school in virginia about a year ago and they kept laughing about how the whole place shorted out every time the classrooms tried to log on i was in philadelphia where the average school building is 65 years old the average school building and i couldn t i can t tell you how many school buildings i ve been in just in that one city that couldn t be wired on the other hand as you see in this facility there s another thing we have in common this building was built when grant was president every night in my private office i work on grant s cabinet table it was built in 1869 and it served me quite well but i don t have to wire it i don t have to air condition it i don t have to put heating in it all it has to do is stand up but as you see from this building a lot of these old school buildings are fantastic in their construction and things were done then that you couldn t afford to do now but they have to be modernized now in 1995 the city of chicago found the resources to make this school safe warm beautiful and useable that makes a big difference but across this country there are 3 5 million students who attend schools that need extensive repairs or should be replaced there are millions of other students going to schools in house trailers i ve been to one elementary school in florida in a little community in florida an elementary school like this one that had 12 trailers outside it used for classes now again i will say we ve got the biggest and most diverse student body in history more important to educate them then ever before but a smaller percentage of the property taxpayers in most of our school districts are parents in the school then ever before more people are renters you know all the reasons why this is so i have believed for four years that the national government should give both tax incentives and direct cash investment to the repair the modernization and the building of school facilities i ve also been in one of the mayor s new school buildings here to highlight this we ve done this did you ever see that movie groundhog day where every day is the same thing over and over again every time i mayor daley thought i was casting him in groundhog day i think for a long time because every time i d come back here we d have to talk about the same thing because we could never get anything done but i m happy to report that this year for the first time we have finally secured 1 2 billion to help repair schools like this one across america where the need is greatest now let me say to you one of your former united states senators everett dirksen once said in his droll way that when you mentioned a billion here and a billion there pretty soon you re talking about real money and that sounds like an enormous amount of money but the truth is that the aggregate net need for school construction and school repair in the united states of america is over 100 billion that s why i think it is so important for the congress to continue to try to get the tax relief that i have suggested which would in effect cut the cost of school financing so that if school districts went out and floated their own bonds or cities floated their bonds for school construction or school repair the cost would be dramatically reduced to the taxpayers making it easier to sell such issues to taxpayers whose kids are not in the schools and i think we should continue to invest direct resources from the federal government but this is a big beginning and i predict that that this program will be wildly popular throughout america because i can see how you feel about this school building today and i can only imagine how different it was before it was fixed five years ago eight years ago we knew that children learn best in smaller classes but classes were getting larger for the same reason school buildings were deteriorating more kids limited tax base today we are in the third year of hiring 100 000 teachers for smaller classes in the early grades if we can get them all hired we ll be able to bring down average class size to 18 in grades k through 3 all across america again i m really grateful to the congress in the last education budget concluded after the election we went from a budget which hired about 29 000 teachers last year to one that will hire 37 000 this coming year so we ll be more than a third of the way home in a six year program and i hope and pray that the congress will continue to do this we ve also funded initiatives to help recruit new teachers retain the best teachers train and certify more board certified national teachers and let every teacher keep learning on the job and one of the things that i think sharon wilcher should be commended for i understand is giving her staff every chance to continue to learn and grow staff development is a big important part of keeping the school going in the right direction eight years ago there was one charter school in america a public school which has the freedom to chart its own mission if every school were like james ward we might not need them but the truth is it both gives more choices to parents and provides more competition when the school system is not working without draining resources away from the public schools there was one eight years ago there are 2 000 today in this budget we re going to be well on our way to 3 000 by the end of the year eight years ago we said we wanted our kids to be safe in school and we wanted them to have an orderly disciplined environment secretary riley has used federal funds to help build partnerships between school districts and local police departments to support things like character education and voluntary uniform policies and zero tolerance for guns in schools and violent crime in the schools notwithstanding the tragic and heartbreaking incidents which have been widely reported violent crime in our schools has fallen steadily since 1993 it is much lower today than it was eight years ago eight years ago college was priced out of reach for a lot of students i ll never forget one night when i was governor in the early 90s i was in fayetteville arkansas the home of the university of arkansas and i went to a cafe to have a cup of coffee with a friend of mine and i was doing what i always do i went out and shook hands with everybody there and there were four students there and two of them told me they were dropping out of schools and i said why and they said well we ll never be able to pay our student loans off never so we ve got to drop out of school make some money hope we can save enough to come back and somehow get out someday i also met a lot of students who thought they were going to not be able to find very good jobs if they got out one of the things that i committed myself to do when i ran for president is to open the doors of college to all americans so what have we done with the hope scholarship tax credit 1 500 a year off the tax bill directly in the first two years of college the lifetime learning credit for junior and senior year and graduate school and for adults to go back and get training which can be worth even more we are now helping 13 million americans to go on to higher education we also have more affordable student loans we ve saved students 9 billion by directly loaning them the money from the government 9 billion the average student on a 10 000 loan today is saving 1 300 in repayment costs over what they were eight years ago and it makes it a lot easier they also have the option to pay back the loans as a percentage of their income which means if you want to be a schoolteacher and you know you ll never get rich you can still borrow whatever you need to go to college because you can pay your loan back as a percentage of your income and if you strike oil in your backyard you have the option to go out and pay it off the next year anyway it s a very good deal we also have had a big increase in work study slots a big increase in pell grants another big one this year up to 3 700 a year now the maximum grant and 150 000 of our young people have earned money for college while serving in americorps i just met one of them outside on the way in 150 000 in six years it took the peace corps 30 years to amass 150 000 volunteers and i might just say to the side so much for those who say this generation of young people is self seeking it is the most stunning example of community service in modern american history and it s also helping a lot of people that are going to college we started a program called gear up which is now serving 1 2 million disadvantaged middle school students we send college students out to help mentor them and convince them they can go on to college come up with a plan for the rest of their academic career until they get out of high school and tell them right then in middle school what kinds of financial aid they can get where so they will know from the time they re in the 6th or 7th or 8th grade that they can actually go to college and the promise will be kept all told we have doubled education funding in eight years more investment provided the largest expansion of college opportunity in 50 years since the g i bill and gotten the results for more accountability test scores are up the dropout rate is down advanced placement courses in high school are being taken by 50 percent more kids in the last five years 50 percent more three hundred percent more hispanic kids 500 percent more african american kids are taking advanced placement courses not surprisingly the sat scores are at a 30 year high in america and the college going rate has gone up 10 percent this strategy works higher standards great accountability more investment equal opportunity it works and we have come a long way toward an america in which every child enters school ready to learn graduates ready to succeed and has the opportunity to go on to college of course the lion s share of the credit belongs to people like you to the teachers the principals the parents the community leaders but it is up to the rest of us to create a framework in which those four objectives can be pursued we will hear a lot of talk in the future i m sure about education reform and i applaud it i hope that education reform all across america will become more and more a bipartisan issue in the last four budgets that we had we had a bipartisan budget we fought about it we argued about it i had to threaten a bunch of vetoes but in the end we had a bipartisan majority for every single thing that i talked about here today and we ought to give credit where credit is due this should not be a partisan issue when my wife was growing up in a suburb of chicago i ll never forget my father in law and my mother in law talking about how it was an overwhelmingly republican place goldwater carried it four to one in 64 and the other 20 percent thought he was too liberal it was a big republican place they never voted down a school bond issue ever the difference in the republicans and the democrats on education was where the money ought to come from and we ought to go back we need to look at the reality here of who are the children in our schools who are the leaders of our future what strategies have been proven it s not like there s no evidence here all we tried to do was to take what you proved worked it is not true that we tried to rewrite every local school s education policy dick riley cut government regulation in the department of education by two thirds we just took what works and i hope that in the future there will continue to be a passion coming out of people in washington and in every state capital and every community in this country of both parties but every proposal should be measured against what we now know works what you have proven works here and if it works whoever has got the idea we ought to put it in but it s not like i remember when i started this when hillary and i started going into classes in the late 70s and we started trying to write new standards for our state in the late 80s we had hunches educators thought they knew there was a little evidence here and a little evidence there but we were kind of making it up as we went along and it was happening all over america we ve now had 15 years of solid evidence you have given us that in schools like this one and so i would just say i wanted to come here because chicago has been good to me and chicago has been very good to its children these last six years i wanted to come here because as i leave office i don t want america to let its concern for education reform and improvement abate i want it to increase i want more people to believe that every child can learn and that in this global economy every child must learn not only for himself or herself but for the rest of us as well of course there are big challenges that remain but your school like so many i visited over the past eight years teaches us all the most important lesson we can do it thank you very much and god bless you dem wjclinton9 1 01e bill_clinton thank you very much let me say first of all how delighted i am to be here to be back at michigan state i thank president mcpherson and the board of trustees for letting me come back i think if i were to come back one more time as president i ve been here so many times i d owe partial tuition at least i always love coming here and i m delighted to be here i also want to thank ed foy for coming out to meet me in 1992 and sticking with me all the way to the end he gave a great speech and he was a great representative of the working people of michigan and the united states and i thank him i want to thank senator carl levin for being my friend and being a friend to the people of michigan there is no member of the united states senate today who is more respected than carl levin and you should be very proud of him now your new senator debbie stabenow got her start she got her start in politics when she was still a student and was elected county commissioner so some of the rest of you might get a few ideas from that i am delighted to welcome her to the senate i m so pleased she was elected before i left office and she s in a class of senators which includes some other women that i m i told debbie on the way in she and hillary and the other senators who were elected in this last cycle were sworn in last wednesday and when our daughter chelsea and i were just sitting up there like all the other families in the senate gallery being cautioned not to lean over and put our hands on the rail i was trying to be on my best behavior i didn t whistle shout or jump but it was for me the happiest day of my life since the day my daughter was born and so i ll always have a special feeling about this election i think that debbie stabenow showed a great deal of courage and character in this election and she kept on going when a lot of people thought she couldn t win and she ll do you proud there i ve watched her in congress and she ll be great i would like to thank so many other members of the michigan congressional delegation who aren t here congressman levin and conyers and bonior who lost his father in the last couple of days and especially my good friend congressman john dingell who s recuperating and is still up and around all the other members of the delegation that helped me i m very grateful i thank attorney general jennifer granholm for being here and all the people from the michigan legislature who are here but especially representative kilpatrick who s been such a good friend of mine thank you and mayor archer thank you mayor hollister thank you and i want to say a special word of appreciation to a man who s been one of my closest allies and best friends in political life for way over a decade now your former governor and a man who served as a great ambassador to canada in our administration jim blanchard and his wife janet thank you very much i d also like to say that when word got out i was coming here everybody in my administration wanted to come with me i keep telling them we promised to work until the last day in office i ve still got some environmental initiatives i want to take i ve still got some other things i want to do but because i came today to talk about the economy what happened over the last eight years and where we re going and the relationship of the economy to education i brought two people who have been with me every day since i became president the secretary of education dick riley and the secretary of labor alexis herman give them a big hand we thank you believe it or not there s one person in this audience with whom i served 24 years ago in my first elected position as attorney general of my state your former attorney general frank kelly thanks for being here for 24 years of friendship thank you now most of all i want to thank tom izzo and the michigan state spartans for being up here with me usually the national championship team comes to washington but i m sort of a short termer you know and nothing beats recognizing the team before 14 000 cheering fans also there s a lot of sense of humor and kidding in my family and you may know that my daughter is a senior of stanford so i m going to wear that spartan jersey tonight when i go home and see if i can provoke some conversation around the dinner table one of the things that i admire about this team and i followed it very closely last year is that there is no quit in it i know you i know you had a tough game last weekend but let me tell you if you play any game in life long enough once in a while somebody will sink a three point shot falling backwards with your hand in their face it will happen if you play any game long enough the equivalent will happen to you it is not fatal the only thing that s fatal is quitting and you ve got no quit in that team back there and that s good the most important thing i want to do today is to say a simple thank you to the people of michigan state lansing and the state of michigan for supporting me and hillary and al and tipper gore these last eight years you know my history with michigan is profoundly important to the opportunity i ve had to serve as president it began with the primary victory here on st patrick s day in 1992 it included two general elections in which the people of michigan were kind enough to give me their electoral votes and thanks for making it three in a row last november i first visited this campus in 1992 i ve come here for debates rallies and whistle stop tours i was the first president since theodore roosevelt to speak here while in office i imagine i m the only one to speak here twice let me tell you every time i ve come here i ve learned something and even though eight years is longer than it takes most of you to get a degree my michigan state education is just about complete when i came here unbelievably almost nine years ago now our economy was profoundly troubled and our society was divided in 1992 there were riots in los angeles and troubling signs of social division elsewhere i talked to college students in my home state of arkansas who said they were dropping out of school because they couldn t afford to borrow any more money and they didn t believe they could get a good job when they got out and pay their loans back i met college students in every state in the country including michigan who were afraid they wouldn t get a job even with their diploma i met union workers who thought they would either never work again or if they did they d never in their lives get a job paying the same amount that they were making before they lost their previous job industrial production had actually declined that year for the first time in the history of the united states average family income fell by 1 600 in just two years the federal deficit was 290 billion and rising the national debt had quadrupled over the previous 12 years interest rates were high growth was low the confidence of the american people was shaken and just as bad it had been 13 years since the spartans had won a national championship it was not the best of times and i asked the american people to send me to washington for a little while on a mission a mission to build a 21st century america with opportunity for all responsibility from all citizens and a community of all americans i committed to do my best to build a new kind of national government one that would focus on the future and on providing all of our citizens with the conditions and tools necessary to build their own lives and make the most of america s future well thanks to the good people of michigan and people like you across this country al gore and i got the precious chance to spend eight years in washington putting people first getting the economy going again improving social and environmental conditions advancing peace freedom and prosperity around the world and building a government ready to make the most of this new century now i want to talk just a little about what happened because it s important when you look to the future to know what happened in the recent past and how it brought us to this present we began with a clear strategy to get the economy going it had three elements get the deficit down and get rid of it in vest more in our people sell more american goods and services around the world the american people did the rest we are still experiencing the longest economic expansion in our history our economy is 50 percent bigger than it was eight years ago when i took office the national unemployment rate was 7 3 percent 7 4 here in michigan now it is 4 percent it s been below 5 percent for three years and it s 3 7 percent in michigan we have that s the lowest overall unemployment rate in 30 years even though we ve got more of our people participating in the work force the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded and unlike some of our previous recoveries this rising tide is lifting all boats in the last three years people at all income levels have done better and the highest percentage increase in income has come in the lowest 20 percent of the working population of america in the last three years poverty is at a 20 year low home ownership at an all time high in 1992 michigan state graduates who found jobs had an average starting salary of just under 26 000 the average salary for last year s graduate was over 36 000 now how did this happen well first we said we would get rid of the deficits and begin to attack the debt and keep in mind let me just say this again in the entire history of the country going back to 1776 the debt of america quadrupled in the 12 years before we began to work what s happened since we started with a 290 billion deficit this year we had a 240 billion surplus we ve had the biggest back to back surpluses in history by the end of this fiscal year we will have paid down more than 500 billion in our national debt we re on track to be debt free by the end of the decade for the first time since 1835 why should you care whether your government s out of debt here s why two reasons first economically if the government is paying down its debt instead of borrowing money that means there is more money left for you at lower interest rates for college loans car loans home loans more money for business loans at lower interest rates means more businesses more jobs higher pay raises and a higher stock market the average american homeowner in america is now saving 2 000 a year in lower home mortgages because we re paying down the debt instead of running it up it makes a huge difference to your future which way we re going the second reason very important to michigan state where you ve got a lot of people who depend on student aid where you compete for research funds from the federal government we spend over 11 cents on the dollar nearly 12 cents and it was headed to 15 cents when i took office we spent almost 12 cents on the dollar of every tax dollar you pay to the federal government in interest on the debt it is the third biggest item in the federal budget behind social security and defense if we get rid of that 12 percent 12 percent of the federal deficit is a huge amount of money in the federal budget that s 12 cents on the tax dollar we can either give back to you in tax cuts or invest in our common future in education in health care in the environment in national defense in biomedical research in building a better future so the first thing we say we do is do something about the deficit and we did and america should keep going until we re debt free the second thing we said we would do is to increase investment in the american people that s pretty hard when you re cutting spending we had to get rid of hundreds of government programs we reduced the federal work force by 300 000 to its smallest size since 1960 when dwight eisenhower was president but we have with the passing of this budget more than doubled our investment in education and training in the last eight years and i m very proud of that we ve had the biggest increase in head start in history we ve helped michigan hire more than 1 300 teachers to have smaller classes in the early grades of school we ll have 1 6 million children in after school programs this year we ll have 3 3 million children in the children s health insurance program leading to the first decline in the number of people without health insurance in a dozen years we ll have 13 million americans taking advantage of the college tuition tax credits the hope scholarship and the lifetime learning tax credits expanded pell grants and work study programs for helping millions more including listen to this more than 115 000 in michigan including some of you in this audience today i also want to thank secretary riley for something else the direct student loan program michigan state was one of the earliest participants in the direct student loan program it helps students get college loans more quickly more cheaply and gives them more options for paying it back as a percentage of their income since 1993 college students have saved 8 billion on their college loans because of the direct loan program and college and universities have saved 5 billion we said that we believed an administration could be pro business and pro worker and we ve tried to do that in the last eight years we defeated attempts to repeal prevailing wage laws to bring back company unions to weaken occupational safety standards we cracked down on sweat shops protected pension funds passed tough new worker safety rules against repetitive stress injuries and raised the minimum wage and every time we did that somebody said this is really bad for business every year for the last eight years the united states has set a record for new small business formations and we have more jobs in this eight year period than ever before in history we said we believed that the modern economy must be pro work and pro family and that s something a lot of the students here probably haven t thought of very much but i can tell you one of the things that i hear all the time and i used to hear it even more from people at all income levels including quite high income levels is that they are desperately afraid that they cannot meet their responsibilities at work and their responsibilities at home i hardly know anybody with young kids who doesn t have at least one or two searing examples every year where they re worried about whether they ve neglected their work or neglected their kids now bringing up children is the most important work of any society in any time by far if we have to make a choice between work and family our economic objectives are defeated before we start i can tell you i ve reached the age now when i can tell you from personal experience knowing hundreds of people my age if your kids if life doesn t work out for them it doesn t make a rip how much money you have it doesn t matter how well you ve done in business nothing else matters so this is very very important what do we do about it that s why we gave a tax cut even when we were reducing the deficit to 15 million working families at the lowest levels of income so anybody that worked 40 hours a week could use the tax system to get out of poverty not be driven in to it that s why we raised the minimum wage that s why we passed the family and medical leave law which 25 million americans have been able to use to take some time off when there was a sick child or a sick parent of a baby was born without loosing their job it s been good for the american economy now we said we would cut crime and we did we put over 100 000 police on the street working toward 150 000 we banned assault weapons the brady law background checks have kept 600 000 felons fugitives and stalkers from getting guns crime is at a 25 year low violent crime in michigan down 21 percent and i know it was controversial here in michigan but i want to say again i m on the way out and i m not running for anything but let me tell you something i have in my closet an honorary jacket with a lifetime membership from the nra which i got from working with them listen to this when i was governor of arkansas on hunter education programs and trying to resolve disputes between retired people who retired into unincorporated areas and hunters i did a lot of work with them but i think this business of trying to convince the voters of any state in our nation that somebody who wants to keep guns away from criminals and kids is threatening their right to hunt or their right to engage in sport shooting is just not so it s not so and i m telling you something it s not so now you cannot there is not a single law abiding hunter in the state of michigan who missed a day in the woods because of these initiatives we ve taken nor a single sport shooter that missed a single contest but there s a lot of people alive today because those 600 000 felons fugitives and stalkers could not get their handguns we believe and it was somewhat controversial even in michigan when i said this that we not only could but we had to grow the economy and improve the environment we believed we could break the iron link between putting more greenhouse gases into the air and increasing the world s temperature and growing the economy we believed that new sources of energy and new means of energy conservation could provide a whole new future not just for the united states but for the rest of the world now what have we done the air is cleaner the water is cleaner we cleaned up 42 toxic waste dumps in michigan alone five times as many as the two previous administrations in 12 years we re investing your money in research in clean technology to make homes cars and offices more efficient to create thousands of new high tech jobs just last friday ford unveiled an suv that gets the equivalent of 40 miles per gallon of gas and at the detroit auto show right now right now gm is showing a family sedan that uses electric hybrid technology that is electricity plus fuel to get the equivalent of 80 miles a gallon these kinds of vehicles will be rolling off the assembly line soon i am proud we supported their development through the partnership for the next generation of vehicles that we established with the uaw and the auto makers back in 93 that the vice president oversaw for us for eight years but it s going to get better we are also funding research at the department of agriculture into biofuels which most of you know as ethanol but you can make fuel out of anything you can make it out of grasses out of rice hulls out of any kind of waste product from farms the real problems with it today it takes seven gallons of gasoline to make eight gallons of biofuel but we are doing research to try to crack the chemical mystery that is the equivalent of how we made gasoline from unrefined petroleum from oil and when we do and they re getting very close you will be able to make eight gallons of biofuel with one gallon of gasoline which means everybody will be able to get the equivalent of 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline and this environmental issue will me much less formidable than it is today and we will guarantee the future of the auto industry in michigan by doing what is right for the environment not pretending there is no challenge that s what we ve got to do now let me say to all of you i love all these statistics it s just nice to have a good story to tell but this is about more than the statistics it s about more than money i think there is a new feeling in america of possibility that we are prepared for the 21st century that we can meet the big challenges that are still out there that we can seize the opportunities that are still out there and i hope one reason is that we understand that we need each other more and we have to work together more one of the things that really bothered me when i ran for president in 1992 is how much politics had become a matter of subtraction and division rather than addition and multiplication what do i mean by that politicians always assume that they need a wedge issue to divide people and then they wanted their supporters to be more inflamed and madder than the other people s supporters and they hoped that the other people s supporters if you could attack your opponent enough would get disillusioned and wouldn t show up for votes so they were trying to divide and subtract i always thought life worked better when you were trying to add and multiply and i still believe that i believe that one of the fundamental facts of the modern world is that we are growing more and more interdependent within our communities our nation and beyond our borders i believe that therefore successful social work including economics is becoming more and more like winning a national basketball championship it s a team sport i don t care how good a star you are if the other four walk off the court you re whipped i don t care how good you are five on one the five win now we have to think about this more i am immensely gratified that this generation of young people i think understands that better than they ve gotten credit for i ve never understood all this generation x talk and how young people are selfish and self seeking in michigan state alone 150 students have participated in americorps since we ve had that program out of 150 000 nationwide we ve had more young people do community service in americorps and earn some money to go on to college in six years than we had in the first 30 years of the peace corps the young people of this country understand that they have to build a common future together they understand that we have to find what s common about us across all the racial and religious and other lines that divide us and that s the last thought i want to leave with you i ve just given you a speech mostly about economics today and about the related progress we ve made in other areas but if somebody said to me you ve got to just leave america with one wish believe it or not more than wanting us to be continually successful economically i would say we have to be one america we have to reach out across all these lines that divide us we have to celebrate our differences and i hope you will do that now one thing i will not claim is to have solved all the problems you ve got big problems out there or challenges you ve got to deal with the aging of america when the baby boomers like me retire there s going to be a bunch of us and you can t have social security and medicare and the cost of our retirement bankrupt our children s ability to raise their grandchildren we didn t finish that work but we made it easier by putting 25 years on medicare and putting we re up to 54 years with social security now we did a good job if we save the money that we re piling up on social security we save 54 years on social security so we didn t solve global warming but we made a good dent in it we haven t solved all the economic problems of the inner cities the indian reservations the rural communities that have been left behind but we left america with the tools to do it and what i want to ask all of you to do is to think about where we are now and where we were eight years ago and then imagine in your own mind do what i did eight years ago especially the young people imagine where you would like america to be 10 years from now where would you like michigan to be 10 years from now what do you think it would take to get you there i can tell you that no matter what strategy you adopt you will have to continue to invest in people to put education first to care about balancing work and family to care about balancing business and labor to care about balancing the economy and the environment and if we think about the future with those sorts of basic values and never forgetting our mutual need for one another and that america wins when we treat every single endeavor like a team sport the best days of this country are still ahead thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 1 96 bill_clinton thank you i needed that thank you very much thank you thanks i said that because you know i just needed a democratic fix i ve spent more time with senator dole and speaker gingrich than i have with hillary and chelsea in the last three weeks and it s nice to sort of be home i want to thank dawson mathis and pat risler and bill long barbara boggs and all the others who have made me feel so welcome tonight i m glad to be here with congressman bonior and mrs bonior i want to tell you if we had a hundred people in the congress like david bonior this would be a better country this would be a better country he is a great man thank you and if we had 218 we d be in the majority all of you know this is a very interesting time to be in washington d c to be in public life indeed to be an american those of you who i m glad to see so many young people here tonight i m glad to see that anybody showed up i was afraid that only the president could navigate the roads i figured this was going to be like my early campaign rallies in new hampshire there would be wherever two or more are gathered you know i just showed up and i figured that so i m glad you made it tonight but particularly for the young people i would say to you that you are living through an era of more profound change than any the united states has experienced in a hundred years in terms of the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world trading the cold war for the global village trading the industrial age for an information and technology age trading a lot of yesterday s problems for tomorrow s problems and i believe for the young people who are here if we do our job now it will also be an age of immense possibility beyond things that even we can imagine now but it s also a time of great difficulty and as with every period of great change we have to reaffirm what it means to be an american and also make the right kinds of decisions that s really what s going on here and this great debate in washington about the budget is not about balancing the budget at all really as i announced today we have now both sides agreed on far more than enough savings to bring the budget into balance already we could do that tomorrow in an hour we could draw it up and put it out and have a balanced budget that s not what we re debating we re really debating what kind of country we re going to be and what our common obligations to each other are what our obligations to the future are and tonight i just want to take just a few minutes to ask you to think about that in terms of where we are now and what this country has always been about if you go back to the founding fathers and you go through the civil war the period of reconstruction the progressive era with theodore roosevelt and woodrow wilson the great depression the second world war the cold war and the great explosion of opportunity in the united states afterward in everything that has happened you will see that there have always been three great constant themes in american life our love of liberty our belief in progress and our struggle to find common ground and sooner or later we have always understood that each of them depended upon the other our constitution enshrined liberty in a bill of rights that said that black people only counted as three fifths of human beings though sooner or later we realized we couldn t really preserve everybody s liberty until all people were free and we found some common ground progress was largely an individual thing until we came to understand that in an industrial economy the government had a role to play to create a framework in which everybody could get ahead who was willing to work and make the most of their god given abilities and now as we move out of the industrial age into a time that will be far less centralized far less dominated by large organizations at least in terms of employment and far more dominated by new forms of communications and technology we have to once again examine these three questions and ask ourselves how will we preserve our liberty do we have to stand up for people s liberty beyond our borders how will we preserve the idea of progress in an age in which we have more new millionaires every year than the year before for the last three years but more than half the people are working harder for the same or lower wages they were making 20 years ago and a million people a year losing their health insurance how can we preserve the idea of progress for everyone and how can we continue the struggle for common ground when i ran for president in 1992 i thought that the real problem with the country was that our leaders had no strategy for dealing with these three challenges and i said i want you to vote for me because i want to restore the american dream for all people in the 21st century i want to bring our country together and i want to preserve the leadership of america as the world s greatest force for peace and freedom and democracy and here s how i will do it in 1995 and 1996 we see that now the issue is not one strategy for getting into the future as against no strategy it is too very different ideas of change and what our country ought to be about we now have about three years of experience with the strategy that our administration brought to the white house a strategy based on economic growth based on a reaffirmation of our traditional values based on radically changing the way the government operates and based on reasserting the vigor and leadership of the united states as a force for peace and freedom and security so in this budget fight one of the things that i want the democrats to help remind the american people of is we have their theory is unproven at best you have three years of experience with the way we think it ought to be done what was our economic strategy bring the deficit down expand trade on not only free terms but fairer terms and invest in the american people in their education in their technology in their research in their capacity in their infrastructure we did it what s happened in the last three years don t forget to remind people who are debating this budget that the deficit has already been cut in half in the last three years don t forget to remind people that we cut it in half and still invested more in education in training in technology in research in expanding the frontiers of possibility in america and what have the results been in three years almost 8 million new jobs each year a record number of new business formations after three years the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 years a 15 year high in home ownership an all time record in american exports why would you change that policy so the first question to be asked is why would you change an economic policy that is working it is not perfect we still have one enormous economic problem as in every single instance that i am aware of in history you can see it in china today you could see it in the united states 100 years ago whenever you change the whole economic structure of a country you open up new possibilities and you make a lot of new millionaires but you disturb the established order of things so much that a lot of people fall through the cracks and there are too many people today who are working hard but never getting ahead there are too many people today my age who are white collar workers who are told one day that 30 days from now you won t have a job in a year from now you won t b able to find another job paying anything like what you ve been making and you ve got three kids and i don t know how you re going to send them to college that s not my problem i got a letter the other day from a guy i went to grade school with he came up in a family that was far worse off than mine we were just two little kids on a play yard in a little public school in a little town in arkansas he was the first person in his family like me ever to get a college degree he became an engineer he went to work for a fortune 500 company one day about a year ago he and two other white male 50 year old men were told that they wouldn t be needed any more that two younger people were going to get the jobs that those three used to do in a year when the company was experiencing very strong profit now maybe they needed to downsize and maybe they didn t need them anymore but the point is that fellow has been out there for nearly a year now working hour after hour every day on a computer program with 250 different contacts around america everybody who could possibly hire anyone who did the kind of job he did for anything remotely approximating the pay that he used to make and he still hasn t found anything and he has two children like these young people he s trying to send to college so it s not just lower income workers it s also white collar workers that are afflicted by this insecurity now we can t stop these changes that technology and global competition are driving but we can ask ourselves what are those challenges i think the great challenge that we face is how to define a new security for families in the 21st century if you don t have a guaranteed job you ought to have access to education access to health care and a pension that you can tote around with you that nobody can take away from you at least that so in the debate over this over which way to balance the budget is better you should ask yourself what is the evidence we have about which path works and what are the problems that the clinton administration still has not been able to solve and which policy will make it better or worse more or less likely we can solve them you look at the record you can be proud of that if you look at the challenges you know we need to do more of what we ve been doing not less if you look at the reaffirmation of our basic values of respect for one another and for our diversity and for the integrity of people and their safety in the last three years we have some pretty good evidence of that we passed a crime bill that s helping to put 100 000 more police officers on the street new york city just reported the biggest drop in crime since 1972 my hometown little rock arkansas a seven year low in crime all over america the crime rate is down we ve given 35 states pretty much the freedom to do whatever they wanted to change their welfare programs to move people from welfare to work as long as they took care of the little children and didn t hurt children but strengthened families while they were promoting work and we passed the family and medical leave law and the national service law and these things were consistent with our national values well what s happened in the last three years the crime rate s down the welfare rolls are down the food stamp rolls are down the poverty rate is down for two years the teen pregnancy rate has dropped did we cause all that no the american people caused it but our policies supported it they helped it why would you then change why would you scrap the police program and just send a check to cities and say spend the money however you want is the crime rate low enough no so what we should do is to keep on doing what we re doing it s working same thing is true in welfare reform i worked on that before the republican contract was a gleam in anybody s eye i m all for that but welfare reform should be that should be welfare reform it should liberate people and hold them to high standards and have high expectations and it should make it possible for people to succeed as parents and as workers the same problem we ve got with blue collar people around this country and white collar people around this country most people who have children work most people who have children have to work since we want people to have children most workers we should want to have children therefore it follows one of our great national goals should be to help people succeed as parents and in the work place that ought to be welfare reform s goal that ought to be our work program today so i say to you should we reform the welfare system should we find ways to be more effective in lowering the crime rate absolutely but we shouldn t reverse policies that work we should build on them and go in the same direction if you look at the whole area of government the republican majority in congress they rail about big government all the time you know how big your government is there are 200 000 fewer people working for the government today than there were the day i became president actually now about 205 000 fewer the last time the government was this size was when lyndon johnson was president of the united states in 1965 as a percentage of the civilian work force your federal government is now the smallest it has been since 1933 before the new deal don t let the republicans say they are ending big government that is done and the democrats did that for you and nobody even noticed because we did it in the right way with no suffering of government services and without putting good public employees out on the street and treating them like they were disposable products so there is a right way and a wrong way to do that when we downsized the federal government we had generous early retirement system we had generous severance pay we gave people time to find other jobs we made sure when they left they had enough money to build another life and we ve had very few complaints and we also did it in a planned and disciplined way so that all the work that the public needed done could be done so no one in america knows that there are 200 000 fewer people working for the federal government today than there were before i took office and that is a good thing that means we did our job and that means the federal employees did their job one of the reasons that i was so angry in the last government shutdown was that here these people are working with 200 000 fewer people putting out more work than they were three years ago never even getting so much as a thank you and now they re being thrown out of work against their will so we can t let that happen again but we ought to recognize that a remarkable transformation has happened in the federal government we re working on getting rid of 16 000 of the 86 000 pages of federal regulation and improving the quality of environmental protection and public health not weakening it now that is the right way to do that not with some uncritical condemnation of the government but by defining in modern terms what it is we need our government to do and finally let me say that and i owe a special word of thanks to mr bonior for the last item on this list i am profoundly proud that our country has been a great source of peace and freedom from haiti to northern ireland to the middle east and to bosnia in the last three years and i want to thank those in congress who have stood by me in this the truth is that at the end of the cold war the world is still a little unsettled and the new security patterns are not there and the united states has to lead i am proud of the fact there are no russian missiles pointed at any americans during this administration for the first time since the end of the cold war and i m proud of the fact that we ve got nearly 180 countries to say that they wouldn t engage in nuclear proliferation and i m proud of the fact that our anti narcotics anti drug ring strategy using the military and our civilian law enforcement authorities have helped to result in the arrest of most of the leaders of the notorious cali drug cartel in colombia i am proud of the fact that we are making progress on these things now do we have problems at home and abroad you bet we do what s the biggest violation of our values we already talked about our biggest economic problem our biggest social problem is that the crime rate s going down but crime among young juveniles people under 18 is going up drug use among young adults 18 to 34 is going down drug use among young people 12 to 17 is going up why there are too many of those kids out there raising themselves there are too many kids who have been abandoned in inner cities and isolated rural areas that think they have no future is the answer to do less for them or is the answer to try to build on the progress of the last three years and be honest and say you know if you want people to choose a good future you have to tell them what they should say no to but you ve got to make sure there s something for them to say yes to as well there has to be a future out there for all of our children and one other thing i want to say about that the other big issue that i think we as democrats ought to be proud to embrace is the idea that we will draw strength from our diversity we have always drawn strength from our diversity every time we have broadened opportunity in this country we ve been stronger for it we re a better country than we would have been if we d tried to hold on to slavery longer we re a better country than we would have been if we d never had the civil rights revolution we re a better country than we would have been if we d never given women the opportunity to do the things that they can do and that they want to do and that their imagination would lead them to do we are a better country when we open opportunities to people there will always be great difficulty in a country full of great conviction when a lot of those convictions collide i gave a speech about affirmative action at the national archives not very long ago saying that i thought it should be ended some day but not until we knew there was no longer any institutional and pattern of racism in the country it was time to change it but not to end it i was able to go out to james madison high school in virginia a few months ago to talk about prayer in the schools and religious observance in the schools no matter what religion people have and explain to the american people it is not true that there can be no expression of religious conviction in the schools it is simply true that the state may not sanction one particular form or another so our secretary of education who is doing a magnificent job by the way sent out a list of guidelines to schools all over america and we have been deluged with gratitude from fundamentalist ministers from rabbis from ordinary citizens from confused teachers from people all over the country who simply did not know what the rules were because now they do i spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we can make this diversity work for us but i ll tell you something wedge politics is not one way to do it pitting one group of americans against another is not a way to do it you may win a lot of elections getting one group of americans to be frightened of another but you won t win many hearts and minds and futures and you won t win many battles for america doing it that way i don t believe it works and if you look at where we have to go in the world i am telling you if you i don t know how may of you saw the i guess a lot of you did the coverage of the trip i took to ireland and to england and then later to germany to see our troops and to madrid to meet with the leaders of europe but on the street everywhere it was amazing the response that people gave not to me to the united states of america because they thought america was still there trying to lead trying to fulfill a role that only we can fulfill now maybe 10 20 years from now all the security problems in the world will be handled by groups of democracies dealing with the problems in their own backyard and that all we ll have to do is to cooperate through the united nations to help solve problems in distant lands where there is no structure to deal with them at a time or place in the future but today whether we like it or not america is still needed america still matters in the middle east america still matters in northern ireland america still matters in bosnia america still matters i do not believe the answer is to walk away from those responsibilities so that s the context in which i think you should see this debate over the budget if you are a young person and most of your life is still ahead of you you ve got a lot more at stake in this debate than the people who right now are drawing medicare but you should care about those people because if you re 20 years old and you have a grandparent who is 75 years old and you have parents in the middle i can tell you that if it weren t for the medicare program a lot of middle class parents wouldn t be able to send their children to college because they d have to spend every last dime they have taking care of their parents you should care about the medicaid program even if you re an upper income person because the medicaid program gives health care to 4 million children who wouldn t get it otherwise and they are a part of our future too and everyday we neglect them is a day we will pay back for it sure as the world before it s over you may never draw a pell grant because you may be so fortunate you don t need it but you should care whether this budget eliminates 360 000 pell grant scholarships america will pay for that we already have a problem getting poor kids to go on to college and to stay in college because the cost of a college education has gone up so much and we should not cut back on those college scholarships you ought to care if we eliminate the direct student loan program which gives people lower cost more hassle free loans with better terms of repayment because we need more young people going on to college if you look at the 1990 census it is absolutely chilling to see what has happened to young people who don t have at least two years of education after high school what happens to their job prospects their earnings their prospects for health care for retirement for continuing education for stability in their lives it is chilling so it matters that s what this whole debate is about let me tell you again we have already identified enough cuts in the budget that both the leaders of the democratic party not just the president but the congressional leaders and the republican congressional leaders that we all agreed had to be made that we could balance the budget like that this is about how we will do it and to me it is not about this dollar or that dollar it s how i imagine your country will look 10 20 30 years from now i m asking myself will this make america stronger in the future will we honor our responsibilities to our parents as well as to our children what kind of country will we be what are our common responsibilities and there s a huge debate let me just give you two examples in closing first major piece of legislation i signed in 1993 was the family and medical leave act basically it said that if you worked for a company of 50 or more employees you can have a little time off unpaid if you re having a baby born or you ve got a sick child or a sick parent and you can t be fired for it a hundred and seventy countries had that law before we did because the business interests in our country said oh it will kill us it will cost a lot of jobs it will break businesses i have no evidence that any business has closed because of the family leave law not any but the people who now lead the congress in both houses opposed that three years ago because they said oh this is a terrible government infringement on the private sector let me tell you not very long ago i went out to the national institute of health and i met with a lot of sick children a lot of them probably won t live and i met with their parents and i met with couple after couple after couple who would have lost their health insurance had it not been for the family leave law who would not have been able to be with their sick children had it not been for the family leave law and who still have jobs because of the family leave law and this is a better country and the people are better stronger employees and their businesses are more successful because we passed that little law but it was a big thing because of the differences in our philosophy i ll just close with this story i got a call the other night in the middle of this debate from a man i went to college with who is the model of what the republican party says we ought to have for citizens he is a pro life irish catholic who married an irish catholic girl and raised two beautiful irish catholic boys and when we got out of college he went into the marine corps and served with great distinction and when he got out of the marine corps he became a pilot and he s worked hard all his life and when a relative of his wife had a child with cerebral palsy and their family fell apart and they couldn t raise the child this man and his wife adopted that child as their own and they raised that child and while they were raising these three children one of whom had cerebral palsy they spent all their free time with their church and twice a year because they lived in southern california they went to mexico to build houses for poor people and they didn t ask anything from the government they paid their taxes they did their work they gave their lives to their family when one member of their family needed a little help they adopted a child with difficulties and raised her to be a wonderful young woman they are a model of what the people who say the government is not needed ought to be this man called me on the phone the other night he said i ve been following this budget debate and i m sitting here with a catalog buying my daughter another wheelchair and i don t need any help from the government and i m grateful that i ve got a good job and i can afford to do it but he said you know when we lived in california one of my daughter s best friends was a child with spina bifida and she lived with her mother a single parent who worked for about 6 an hour and rode a bus an hour a day each way to work he said now the way i got it figured this budget proposal if you let it become law would hit that woman in three ways he said i m going to get a tax cut right i said that s right i think so i mean i don t exactly know what his income is but i think he will and he said now she s going to get hit three ways they re going to reduce her transportation subsidy so the cost of her bus fare is going to rise they re going to cut back on the earned income tax credit so her tax bill is going to go up when mine goes down and then they re going to cut back on aid to disabled children so she won t get the help that she now gets or won t get as much of it to help her buy a wheelchair or new shoes for her child who drags her shoes and ruins them every few weeks is that right i said that s about it he said you ve got to stop that you ve got to stop that that s what we ve been trying to stop now what i want you to understand is that and let me say this and with all respect to the people whom i ve spent the last several weeks with and don t laugh about this a lot of these people are very well meaning very sincere they just look at the world different than we do they really believe that nearly any government spending is worse than nearly any kind of tax cut they really believe that nearly every interruption of the market is a bad thing and that whenever government tries to define the public interest something bad will happen which will be worse than all the good can offset and i have a lot more respect frankly for all of them and for the debates we ve had and i think we understand each other s position and i hope more than anything we can get agreement and i still think we probably can but i just want you to know what i have been fighting for because i can remember what it was like i m almost 50 now i m old enough to remember what it was like when there were no regulations in nursing homes i was in chicken plants before there were any health regulations for people who worked in chicken plants i walked in factories before osha came there and i saw men working in factories with three of their fingers gone i can remember i don t believe we re a weaker country because of medicare if you live to be over 70 in america today people over 70 have a longer life expectancy in america than in any other country in the world because of medicare i believe that the government needs to invest in research one of the biggest there s no votes in this one way or the other but one of these budgets would cut our research budget 30 percent over the next seven years the japanese just voted to double theirs we just had america s nobel prize winners in nine of them into the white house seven of them had government research that s the way it s done in the world so those are the debates we re having there s some very good people on the other side of this debate and they have some good points but fundamentally i believe that we re better off if we say what do our values require us to do what will be good economic policy what will preserve our leadership into the 21st century how can we fight for liberty reassure the availability of progress to everybody and struggle for common ground those are the questions and i think about the children and the young people much more than i do people my age you know most of us who have already lived most of our lives have been given great gifts by america it is our job to pass on to you a future that will be worthy of our past and that will meet the challenges of the moment that is what this debate is about it is not about balancing the budget and you have two huge competing world views both have their points but let me tell you something the democratic party has been pronounced dead over and over and over again in the last few years but tonight when i finish my work i was never more proud to be a democrat thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 1 98a bill_clinton thank you very much thank you thank you i believe that we should begin by giving alma another hand she did a great job didn t she thank you i want to thank secretary riley for his work and for coming here with me today i want to say a very special word of thanks to your fine congressman solomon ortiz thanks to his leadership you are finally going to have the port of brownsville bridge you need so much thank you congressman ortiz i d like to thank the state legislators who are here representatives oliveira and solis judge hinojosa the city commissioners the city managers president juliet garcia ut brownsville mayor gonzalez i d like to thank congressman ruben hinojosa for coming over with me and congresswoman sheila jackson lee i d like to say too that my family and our administration feel that we owe a lot to brownsville the first lady was here about a year ago and hillary told me that she kind of resented my coming back without her today this community has given two of our real stars to the clinton gore administration first of all the president of the overseas private investment corporation one of 12 children here george munoz and his parents are both here thank you george and thank you mr and mrs munoz and second our secretary of energy federico pena whose parents gustavo and lucila pena are here thank you for a fine son and a fine cabinet member i d like to thank your land commissioner garry mauro for joining me today and also thank the white house aides who helped to do so much work on this trip mickey ibarra janet murgia cynthia jasso rottunno i am very proud of the fact that i have appointed far more hispanic americans than any previous president to important positions in my administration i m even prouder of the fact that they re doing a very good job for all americans i d like to welcome all the students and teachers and head start teachers here today thank you for coming and i d like to thank the bands that provided our music today thank you very much i d also like to say a special word of thanks for that plane back there i don t know if you ve looked at it and probably those of you who have live here doubtless been to see this plane before but the confederate air force preserved this bt 13 so thousands of people can come and learn about an aircraft that helped our country to fight and win world war ii it reminds me of one of the wisest decisions that president roosevelt made after world war ii and that was to give every returning soldier the chance to go on to college through the g i bill the g i bill revolutionized educational opportunity in america it made millions and millions of middle class families and better futures for their children i am exceedingly proud that last year when we passed the balanced budget agreement last year we passed an education program that opened the doors to college wider than ever before the biggest increase in college aid since the g i bill 50 years ago we learned the lesson from president roosevelt it s the right thing to do you know all of you know you live with this every day that we are living in an age characterized by increasing communication across national borders and revolutions in technology and information it s changing the way we work and live and relate to each other and it will dramatically change the lives of these children who are here what i have tried to do as i have said repeatedly is to build a bridge to this new world and the 21st century so that there is opportunity for every american child responsible enough to work for it so that we all work together as one america united across all the racial and ethnic and religious lines of diversity in this country and so that america is still the world s best hope for peace and freedom now there are a lot of things that we can do to help to grow the economy we have to do some more here in south texas and i met this morning with community leaders from the whole region to talk about that but let me tell you nothing we can do will equip our young people for the modern world unless all of our young people have a very good education and are able to keep on learning for a lifetime this week i announced that i will soon submit to congress the first balanced budget the united states has had in 30 years here s what it will do for going on to college within the context of balancing the budget there will be a hope scholarship a 1 500 credit for the first two years of college enough to make community college free for virtually every person in the united states there will be lifetime learning credits another 1 000 a year tax credit for the third and fourth years of college for graduate school and for older people who have to go back to upgrade their skills there will be education iras so that if parents save for their children s college education when they want to withdraw the money plus the interest it s earned they can do it without any tax penalty because we don t want to tax savings for education we have expanded the pell grant program to cover millions of eligible americans so that the scholarship is larger and the number of people who are eligible are more we now have had 100 000 young people including quite a number from texas serve in our national service program americorps serving their community and earning money to go to college and today a little earlier i announced that our budget will also include for the first time a request for 1 million work study positions for young people who want to work their way through college what that means is that people literally will not be able to say anymore i can t go to college because i can t afford it we also reformed the student loan program so that you can pay the money back as a percentage of your income you don t ever have to worry about being bankrupted if you have to borrow the money there is no financial excuse but we must make sure that more of our young people stay in school graduate from high school and when they graduate they know what they re supposed to know there are still too many of our children who graduate from high school not knowing that that s why i have pushed our national goals of making sure every 8 year old can read every 12 year old can log on to the internet and every 18 year old can go on to college with high standards proven reforms hooking up every classroom and library to the internet by the year 2000 making sure that every eligible child has a chance to be in a head start program or another good preschool program we have to do these things so that all of our children can learn let me also say that one of the most troubling things to me is that the high school graduation rates in america now are getting quite high they re well above 80 percent moving toward the 90 percent level they should reach for every ethnic group in america except hispanic young people too many of our hispanic young people still drop out of high school very often out of good motivation they think i ought to drop out i ought to go to work i can support myself i won t be a burden on my family i can help my family make a living that has been true for generations that is simply not true anymore and we have to change that attitude it is not true anymore it has been clear now for at least 10 years that there is a huge and growing gap in the job prospects and the earning prospects of people who have two years or more of college and people who drop out of high school it is imperative that we get 100 percent of our kids to stay in school get their high school diploma go back and get their ged if they have already dropped out and then go on to at least two years of college the financial obstacles have been removed we have to tear down the walls in the minds of people that are keeping them from doing this i have asked secretary riley to work with mickey ibarra and maria echaveste two assistants to the president and gene sperling director of my national economic council to help us do everything we can do to deal with this i have talked to representative hinojosa and representative ortiz about this but i m telling you you folks have got to change this at the grass roots level every single child has got to stay in school graduate and they need to know what they re supposed to know when they get their high school diploma you can make it happen we can open the doors we can have the opportunity we can set the standards you have to make it happen that s the way we can build a bridge to the 21st century that every single american can walk across i want you to help me thank you god bless me it s great to be back dem wjclinton9 1 98b bill_clinton thank you thank you very much thank you ruben thank you very much to the cantus alonzo and yoli for having us in their modest little home here is this a beautiful place or what it s really wonderful i m so glad to be here i want to thank the congressman and marty and their entire family for making me feel so welcome down here i thank congressman solomon ortiz and congressman ciro rodriquez who are also here and have been good friends of our administration and good for this country i m glad to be joined here today by the secretary of education in my administration dick riley our land commissioner garry mauro our state democratic chair bill white the county democratic chair ramon garcia mcallen s mayor leo montalvo and all the other local elected officials i d also like to thank alfonso hinostroza who created those beautiful wooden chairs inside i don t know if you ve seen them but they commemorate my visit and i said when i sat down in one that it actually made me feel like a real president i felt actually i almost felt like a monarch sitting in that chair it s a little too highfalutin for me on a daily basis hector reyna sr i thank you for creating the stain glassed arkansas state bird and flower and i d also like to welcome state representative richard raymond who is a candidate for land commissioner thank you all for being here and i m very glad to see you let me say that i m honored to be here to help this congressman mobilize his district to sit down this morning early with a lot of community leaders and talk about the economic challenges still facing the valley what should be done to generate more jobs more investment to rebuild the transportation system and improve the quality and supply of water all the issues we discussed this morning i loved going over to the school and seeing the children and telling them that starting this january we could honestly say we had opened the doors of college to all americans we ve made community college virtually free to nearly everybody in this country now with tax credits called the hope scholarship we ve given a 1 000 tax credit for the junior and senior year of college for graduate schools for adults that have to go back to school we ve got an education ira now that allows people to save for their kids education and withdraw from it tax free we have dramatically expanded pell grants we have dramatically expanded work study positions i love talking about all that but when the congressman was talking about the two people that i met in the handicapped section of the rally it reminded me of something i ve been thinking a lot about lately as i try to ponder how i should spend every remaining day in this term i must say when i saw that crowd out there today congressman i thought it was a good thing we had the 22nd amendment which limited my ability to run again because i d do it again after today if i could here s what i want to tell you he saw a great crowd and he remembered the stories in washington we tend to talk with statistics today it came out that in december our economy created another 370 000 jobs now 14 3 million jobs in the first five years of our administration 14 3 million well that s a statistic but behind that statistic there are over 14 million stories there are people who have the dignity of work who can support their children who can create a different future because of that statistic the statistics say there are about 14 million people maybe more now who have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law so they could get a little time off from work when there s a sick family member or a new baby born that s the statistic the story is it strengthens family life one of the great challenges in this country is how to people balance the demands of being parents and the demands of work there is no more important job for americans than taking care of their kids and raising them well so how are we going to balance that those are stories they re not statistics the other day something over a quarter of a million i can t remember but something over a quarter million people who had criminal or mental health histories were not able to buy handguns because of the brady law how many people didn t get killed didn t get wounded didn t get injured because of that we don t know but every one of them has got a different story because of that how many million people will now go on to college or stay in longer because we have opened the doors of college to everyone that s the biggest that list i just mentioned to you the biggest increase in aid to college education since the g i bill was passed when our soldiers came home 50 years ago from world war ii that will create millions of different stories the reason i undertook this race initiative this year to try to get people together across all the racial and ethnic and religious lines that divide america is because i know that when we can celebrate our differences and then say what binds us together as americans is even more important then there is no stopping the united states and the 21st century but you can t take that for granted look at the problems we see in the world from the tribal wars in africa to the ethnic fight in bosnia from the longstanding religious conflict in ireland to the religious and ethnic conflict that endures in the middle east you look all over the world people have a hard time getting a long with those that either look different or believe differently than they do about the nature of god and humanity s relationship to god it s fascinating but we in america have always said if you believe in freedom if you believe in the rule of law if you believe in our constitution and if you show up for work every day or you show up for school if you re a kid that s all you ve got to do you can be part of our america if you respect other people and their right to live just as they respect you and your right to live that is the fundamental lesson that if we can embody we will continue to grow and prosper in the 21st century and we will be able to lead the world toward greater peace and freedom finally i want to say a special personal word of thanks to ruben for taking all the heat to stick with me on the fast track issue and trying to continue to expand america s outreach to the rest of the world i can tell you that i do not believe that there is a majority in the house just like there is clearly not one we had almost 70 percent of the senate with us last year there is not a majority of members of the house of representatives who don t want to continue to expand trade what they reflect is the ambivalence the fears people have about the globalization of the world economy and the explosion of information and technology and science and how it s bringing us all closer together and what everybody wants to know is is everyone going to have a chance to participate in this new economy or are some people going to be left behind are we going to have a higher level of citizenship and a higher level of society or are we going to be thrown to the winds of chaos and anarchy by having global marketplace dominate democratic institutions and people there is a lot of anxiety about that out there not only in our country but throughout the world our answer is to help people who are dislocated resume their normal lives as quickly as possible and we have a plan to do more of that to invest more in communities that have been left behind invest more in people who need to upgrade their skills give people tax incentives to invest in areas where the unemployment is too high but don t let america run away from the rest of the world america should be embracing the rest of the world and setting a standard of cooperation and advance of freedom and democracy and prosperity at the same time that s what your congressman believes and i appreciate that thank you all for what has been an unbelievably wonderful day i ll remember this day for the rest of my life i flew all the way down from new york city last night i didn t get in until about 2 00 a m in the morning and i got up this morning wondering if i would be tired but all the faces i have seen and the stories i have imagined have kept me going but you remember what i said politics is nothing more than people organized to pursue their common destiny our political system gives free people the assurance number one that their voice counts number two that they can make changes if they get together and they can prevail and number three there will always be some limits on the government so they can t be abused and within that politics gives us the chance to imagine what kind of life stories we want all of our people to have i hope the people i met on that rope line will remember it for the rest of their lives but i will too and when i go back to washington i ll be thinking what i have to do is to create more good stories if we can do that the american people will take care of the rest thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton9 10 99 bill_clinton thank you good morning you know i was a little sleepy before i came in here and saw you and i m ready to go now i thank you very much let me begin by saying a simple thank you thank you for your friendship thank you for your support thank you for bringing all of the children who are here in this audience today to remind us of what our deliberations are all about thank you juan andrade for your long leadership and your friendship to me and thank you rey gonzalez thank you for bringing the juan andrade scholarship award winners outside for me to have my picture taken with them i enjoyed that that was great people who are worried about america should take a look at those young people they would worry a lot less and feel a lot more hope i want to express my appreciation to everyone at the u s hispanic leadership institute for working since 1982 on your noble mission of empowerment through education and voter participation your work has paid off you see it in greater hispanic participation in elections and in the growing number of latino elected officials like congressman luis guitterez i think he is here today and i thank him for his work i also want to thank the many dedicated hispanic members of our administration including my deputy chief of staff maria echaveste who is here our director of intergovernmental affairs mickey ibarra the eeoc chair aida castro i know she has been or will be on your program along with george munoz aida alvarez henry solanas saul ramirez and secretary bill richardson and a number of other young people in our administration who i ve seen wandering around here at your meeting and some of whom have worked on my trip here let me say that there is another mission that you have followed over the years you have helped to forge unity among the diverse elements of hispanic america you remind us that there are actually differences of ethnicity national origin and even occasionally of opinion among hispanic americans but that you are united by common values of faith and family hard work and a common vision of a better america that is america at its best a diverse nation now the most diverse in our history and growing increasingly so in a global economy in a global society our diversity can be a god send if we make the most of it if we enjoy it if we respect it if we honor it and if we believe that the common humanity that unites us is more important than all the differences among us that thought was uppermost in my mind six and a half years ago when i became president vice president gore and i came into office determined to move away from the divide and conquer politics which had dominated our country for the previous 12 years it had weakened and divided america and it was wrong we wanted to find a way to unify our country to unify our thinking to unify our action and to move our country forward based on values all americans share opportunity for all responsibility from all a community of all our people with that in mind we put in place a new economic plan new crime and welfare policies new education environment and health policies new policies to empower the poor and elevate citizen service i think the results speak for themselves we have the longest peacetime economic expansion in history the highest home ownership in history the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the lowest crime rates in 26 years the smallest federal government in 37 years the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years along the way we managed to pass the family and medical leave law which has given millions and millions of americans the right to take some time off when a baby is born or a parent is sick without losing their jobs ninety percent of our children are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in our history our air and water are cleaner our food is safer we have opened the doors of college with the hope scholarship and other increases in financial aid we have opened the doors of health care to 5 million children a 100 000 young americans have served in americorps just last week we learned that median household income rose 3 5 percent last year but for hispanics it rose at an even faster rate of 4 8 percent in one year even though this community has serious challenges including i might say uppermost a high school drop out rate that is too high we now have the lowest hispanic unemployment rate in history the lowest hispanic poverty rate in a generation and a million new hispanic home owners since 1994 in 1993 we doubled the earned income tax credit for lower income working people it now lifts over a million hispanics out of poverty we raised the minimum wage that directly benefits 1 6 million hispanic workers and i think it s time we raised the minimum wage again we increased the number of small business administration loans to hispanic entrepreneurs by 250 percent we thank aida alvarez for her leadership there and as the vice president recently announced the sba has planned to expand lending to the hispanic community even more we revolutionized welfare in a way that allowed the rolls to be cut nearly in half millions of people to move from dependence to the dignity of work what with more child care more transportation aid guaranteed food and medicine to children and we have succeeded in reversing the unfair cuts in the welfare reform law restoring benefits to over 600 000 legal immigrants under the vice president s leadership we ve reduced the naturalization backlog at ins streamlining the process to make it easier for immigrants who play by the rules to become full partners in america we have more to do and i ask you to help us with that i d also like to ask your help with one other thing in the 1997 bipartisan balanced budget bill we created the 24 billion children s health insurance program it was the largest expansion of children s health coverage since the enactment of medicaid it required all the states to file plans to use this money to enroll children without health insurance in the program this year we finally got all the states enrolled but the alarming thing is that we estimate there are at least at least four million children who could be covered by the money that is there waiting for them to provide health insurance who have not signed up yet so i ask you when you go back home make sure that in your community there is a systematic effort underway to get health care to every hispanic child who doesn t have it who is eligible for this program like you i believe in the concept of empowerment so i will mention this one last issue i asked the vice president to lead our efforts to create over 100 enterprise zones and empowerment communities across our country to generate billions of dollars in new private sector investment and public investment in these low income areas you can see them operating from chicago to philadelphia to cleveland to detroit to south texas to the mississippi delta to appalachia and you can see them working i have asked for an increase in the number of empowerment zones and community development banks and we re fighting for them now in the budget i want to talk to you about what we re going to do next i thank you for your support i am pleased by the progress we have made but in america we must always be determined to change to improve to move forward and we must honestly face the fact that there are still a lot of challenges out there that have not been met when i came up on this stage i ll just give you one example when i came up on this stage one of the people back here said mr president there are some people in our community with disabilities who are out there be sure and say hello to them on the way out one of the important things i m trying to get passed in this congress is a bill sponsored by senator kennedy and senator jeffords which would allow people with disabilities to move into the workplace and still keep their medicaid insurance because they can t get health insurance in the work place that s the sort of thing we need to be doing i ask you to take just a few minutes and focus on the outstanding challenges places where we haven t made enough progress and places where we haven t received enough cooperation from this congress let me begin with judicial nominations i am proud that we have succeeded in appointing more hispanics to the federal bench than any administration in history i am proud that on the whole the judges i ve appointed are the most diverse group in our history nearly half are women or minorities more than half my current judicial nominees are women or minorities and they are good judges my appointees have garnered the highest ratings from the american bar association of any president in 40 years now i would also say that unlike previous administrations there has been article after article after article saying that i have avoided putting ideological extremists on the court unlike what happened in the previous decade or so so these people are well qualified they re diverse you would think the united states senate would be falling all over themselves to confirm them now let s look at the facts earlier this week i said it was a disgrace that the senate defeated on a straight party line vote my nomination of ronnie white a highly talented african american jurist from the state of missouri that was the first african american to serve on the missouri state supreme court who was endorsed by one of his state s republican senators supported by republican senators on the judiciary committee but when he came to the floor for political reasons back in missouri 100 percent of the republicans in the majority voted to deny his confirmation and distorted his record in capital punishment appeals cases it was wrong that s the kind of thing that s going on up there that ought to stop but unfortunately it s not an isolated event listen to this richard paez the first mexican american ever to serve as a judge in the federal district court in los angeles i nominated more than three and a half years ago for a seat on the 9th circuit court of appeals for more than three and a half years he has been waiting for the senate to confirm his nomination is it because he s not qualified no the american bar association said not that he was qualified but that he was well qualified he received the highest rating from the aba he has broad bipartisan support back in california and in the legal community yet he still has not been given a senate floor vote why well they don t want to vote him down because they hope that you will vote with them in the next election but they don t want to vote for him so this man has been hanging there for three and a half years now i don t know about you but if i took three and a half years to make a decision you wouldn t think i was a very good president and most of you couldn t hold your jobs if you took three and a half years to do your assigned tasks can you imagine that how many time has somebody been on you because you took three and a half hours another fine candidate for the 9th circuit a renowned appellate lawyer marsha berzon has been waiting for more than 18 months to receive a floor vote that is they put these people out of committee and they just never bring them up they just disappear somewhere in the dark recesses of the calendar of the senate now i think the treatment of richard paez and marsha berzon is shameless we have also been working to get three other exceptional hispanic nominees confirmed judge julio fuentes for the 3rd circuit civil lawyer enrique moreno for the 5th circuit and judge ronald guzman for the northern district of illinois here i am pleased to announce that judge guzman finally received his judiciary committee hearing last week for a vacancy here but the senate s treatment of judge white and its failure to vote on the outstanding hispanic nominees that are pending creates a real doubt about their ability and their willingness to perform their constitutional duties to advise and consent so i urge you to help me get a senate vote on judge paez judge fuentes judge guzman marsha berzon enrique moreno they should be confirmed they should be confirmed but they ought to be voted on one way or the other now let me say in spite of the difficulties we have had with this congress they re capable of putting partisanship aside and putting the country first we did it on the third try with the welfare bill in 96 we did it with the balanced budget act in 97 we did it last year when they voted right before the election for my program to put 100 000 teachers in the schools and just last week at the end of this session that just concluded finally after two years of work a substantial bipartisan majority in the house of representatives passed a strong enforceable patients bill of rights now that bill is a long way from becoming law but a lot of people never thought we could get this far it gives you the right if you re in an hmo to see a specialist if your doctors says you should to go to the nearest emergency room if you re in an accident to keep your doctor through a course of treatment whether for chemotherapy or a pregnancy and to hold your health care plan accountable if you re injured so we re capable of doing this i have asked the congress to do more i have asked them to keep our prosperity going by paying down our debt and getting america out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835 we can do that i have asked them to keep working until the prosperity of this moment reaches every community and every person willing to work for it i have asked them double the number of empowerment zones and enterprise communities and i have asked them to adopt my new markets initiative which would simply say we want the same incentives for people with money to invest in poor communities in america we give them to invest in poor communities around the world because people in america deserve the chance to be a part of america s prosperity i ve asked them to work with me to meet the challenge of the aging of america by saving social security and modernizing medicare and adding a prescription drug benefit i have asked them now that we have the lowest crime rate in 26 years to ask them to join me in making america the safest big nation on earth by closing this gun show loophole in our background check law and doing more to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals i have asked them to help me give all of our children all of our children a world class education demanding more from our schools but also investing more our agenda is clear build or modernize 6 000 schools there are too many kids in the schools and too many schools are run down or too many kids going to school in trailers put 100 000 teachers out there and focus on the early grades to give our children smaller classes have more after school and summer school programs like chicago does so that you can say okay we re going to have high standards we re going to end social promotion but we will not label children a failure when the systems fail them we want them to have access to the help they need close the digital divide hook up every classroom and every library in this country to the internet at a rate even the poorest schools can afford that s what we re doing i am proud that we won almost 500 million in the 1999 budget for the hispanic education action plan to make sure latino children get the tutoring the after school the mentoring program they need to help them meet higher academic standards finish not drop out of high school and go on to college it will take time for these efforts to have an impact but you can help at the local level hold up these young scholarship winners as an example to the young people in your communities we cannot make america what it ought to be in the 21st century unless we dramatically reduce the 30 percent drop out rate among hispanic american children as many of your leaders have told me not withstanding our best intentions in this administration we have a lot more to do to make sure that the states and the school districts who accept federal dollars actually spend those dollars in a way that reaches under served hispanic students and we are working on that as well let me finally make this one point i have always wanted an administration that looks like america you ve heard me say that a dozen times i bet more and more america will look like you more and more there will be more people listening and more people performing like ricky martin and jennifer lopez there will be more books there will be more movies there will be a bigger part of our culture what i ask you to do as you rise in dominance and influence not only in our political life but in our cultural life is never to forget your roots and never forget the pain of discrimination or being ignored and make sure that your are always a force for good for building one america if you look around this old world today the biggest problem i have faced as your president in my responsibilities around the world is dealing with the racial and the ethnic and the religious and the tribal conflicts where people occupy the same land and cannot get along where they continue to believe what is different about them is more important than their common humanity where they fear people who are different from them and get to the point where they look down on them and in some places god forbid they think it s even okay to kill them and if you look all over the world today we celebrate the modern world modern music modern culture the internet the decoding of the human gene all these things that are going on a lot of your young people probably want to go to work for these internet companies where there are dozens and dozens of young people in their 20s now worth 50 million that s chump change to some of them it s all great all this modern world but don t forget the biggest problem is the oldest problem of the human heart the fear and hatred of people who are different so i ask you to remember this you are growing in numbers you are growing in influence you will grow in ways that are good and will make america richer more alive more textured more exciting and it s all going to be positive but don t forget what you ve been through and do everything you can to stop it from happening within america and beyond our borders we are still for all of our modern advances too much in the grip of the oldest fears of the human heart and your community can make all the difference for 21st century america thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 11 04 bill_clinton whoa thank you very much thank you for the wonderful welcome i must say president stewart if i had known that you had been at that concert that my little dance band played at st joseph s that night when i was a very green 18 year old barely out of arkansas i might have been too embarrassed to show up tonight but i thank you for what you said about it i did write about it extensively that evening in my book because it was a searing memory i had of going into my first new york high rise apartment walking in manhattan for the first time going into tad s steakhouse and buying a big steak for a dollar and a half i m honored to be here and i thank you for inviting me i thank the sacerdote family for endowing these lectures i know i follow a distinguished group of people to this podium i also want you to know that i was prepared tonight by as the president said the junior senator from new york who is obsessed with upstate new york you can now even though as you might know i ve been otherwise occupied for the last few weeks trying to stay among the living i could tonight pass the test on every economic project every education project every high technology project every homeland security project every law enforcement project in which she s been involved in these counties up here and i want you to know that she s proud to represent you and i think she s doing a wonderful job so i thank you for that i ve always wanted to come here that some of your alums are friends of mine including the great sol lenowitz who negotiated the panama canal treaty and which played a role in the 1980 election for president which is the last one i can remember that was like this one where so many people came to the polls because they said they were doing the will of god and most of them thought god was against the panama canal treaty the legendary civil rights leader bob moses elihu root ezra pound and my friends the governor and first lady of iowa tom and christie vilsack i love the legacy that you have given to america i d also like to thank the students here who worked so hard in the last election to guaranty that students would be able to vote where they go to college i must say i was shocked by a lot of the efforts that were made to discourage some people from voting in the last election there was a flyer handed out in an african american neighborhood in milwaukee that told people if anybody in their family had ever been convicted of anything they couldn t vote if they d had a traffic violation they couldn t vote and if they violated the law they could go to jail and their children could be taken away from them i ve never been afraid of people voting but i thought that was amazing but you know the principle that univ college and university students should be able to vote either in the place of their residence or in the town where they attend school was established by the supreme court more than 30 years ago and i was disappointed to see it under assault in this election and gratified that students like those of you here were willing to fight to make sure that your voices were heard and your votes were counted and i thank you for that the president told me after we d finished speaking i was going to do some questions and answers and i found normally in these events people would rather hear me answer your questions than answer my own which is what i do in my speeches so i m going to pare down my remarks just a little tonight so i have more time for questions i d like to start by just making a few observations about this election in terms of the larger context of the world in which the students here are moving into regardless of your party affiliation you ought to be glad that so many people voted there was a huge increase in turnout i believe it s the only time in in the last 40 years except for 1992 when more than half the registered voters voted and well over half voted this time we had an even bigger turnout there were 10 million new voters basically the democrats registered more new voters and voted them but the republicans did a better job of turning out their previously registered voters than the democrats i supported john kerry and john edwards because i liked their ideas on security on managing the troubles in iraq on the economy healthcare education crime control stem cell research and on building a clean energy future the american people made a different decision for most of the time since i ve been old enough to vote the american people have made a different decision than i did i congratulate the president and the vice president on their reelection on what i think was a brilliant campaign it s too early to draw any definitive conclusions but it seems to me that based on what i ve seen about 4 of the voters made their decision in the last 24 hours and most of them decided to vote for the president because even though they were open to changing the direction of the country they were reluctant to change leaders in the middle of the struggle against terror and the management of the problems in iraq to get to that point as i said the republicans were astonishingly successful in pulling out previously registered voters in nevada for example john kerry carried reno which is very unusual i m not sure i ever carried reno and carried nevada twice but he lost the state because 90 of the registered voters in the small towns and rural areas turned out to vote most of them against him there was an astonishingly turnout among evangelical christians who said they were voting on the basis of moral values a great deal needs to be said about this and thought about this and i m not prepared to say everything i think now but i will say this i do not believe either party has a monopoly on morality or truth i do not believe that i do not believe that the democrats can seek to be a truly national party they may win some more national elections but we cannot be nationally competitive unless we feel comfortable talking about our convictions denial is not an acceptable strategy when issues are of obsessive concern to huge numbers of the american people we had a story to tell about abortion it wasn t told we had a position to take on gay marriage you might be surprised to know that when i ran in 1992 i said i thought abortion should remain legal in the first two trimesters but should be made more rare and i was as good as my word we had an aggressive strategy to subsidize adoptions to remove all the financial disincentives for young mothers to stay at home with their parents stay in school and raise their children to help young mothers who had babies to move into second change homes and to support both education and work benefits for people who didn t have much of either the result was there was a nearly 25 decline in the number of abortions in the eight years i was president in the last four years in the last four years the number has increased now you might argue that that doesn t matter the only moral position is are you for or against repealing roe v wade and the only way to promote what the president calls the culture of life is to return to the days when we put poor young women and their doctors in jail and rich people find a way to do what they re going to do anyway but at least we had a story to tell about which was the more pro life position i m proud of the fact that we reduced the number of abortions by 25 without repealing roe v wade and without demonizing anybody but trying to promote what the president calls the culture of life and i think that personally we made a mistake not telling it with regard to the gay marriage issue it was an overwhelming factor in the defeat of john kerry there s no question about it and it was just one of those circumstances that happens in life that the massachusetts supreme court made that decision but he had a position that i don t think most americans knew or wouldn t take seriously which was that for over 200 years marriage has been left to religious doctrine and state law so you would think a religious conservative would favor state s rights and church doctrine but with one decision of one supreme court we all of a sudden had a constitution amendment designed i think more to whip people up inflame them scare them make them feel threatened and make them stop thinking about other issues it worked superbly but probably part of it s our fault for not making it clear that what our position was i signed a bill called the defensive marriage act which simply said that every state got to decide this issue and that no state would be bound by the decision of another and i still believe that i still think i did the right thing eleven states had referendums this time massachusetts is going to have referendum on its own supreme court decision the next time at the earliest available time i don t see why we needed to change 200 years of our policy this ought to be up to churches and states and i don t think that that means that the democrats are the enemies of traditional marriage or the nuclear family even senator kerry said he intended to vote for the massachusetts amendment when it came up on the ballot but none of that was heard and i think partly because we didn t discuss it enough on the other hand this election raised a lot of questions that were not answered which is the more moral position when it comes to going from surplus to deficits and deficits that will dramatically accelerate over the next decade as the baby boom generation requires and now unconscionable pressures will be put on medicare and social security largely because we squandered the surplus when you raise your children sometimes you have to tell them no we were told that somebody s tough and somebody s weak but i think the tough position is to say look i know you guys would like to have a tax cut people like me with lots of money always want more but you can t have it because we ve got have homeland security we ve got to have education we ve got to have healthcare we ve got to save some of this money to pay the debt down get the interest payments down stabilize our long term economy and have some money left when all the baby boomers retire and now i think that was an ethical position the question was never answered it was never answered why is this the first time we ve ever been involved in military conflicts with astronomical defense spending when we ve had not one but two major tax cuts half of which went to the top 1 of the income group so why was i and people in my income group why were we the only americans not asked to make any contribution at all nothing to the rebuilding of the american economy to dealing with our healthcare crisis and to fighting the war on terror most people i know republican and democrat in my income group don t think it s right and resent the fact that no one ever asked us to make a contribution we didn t answer that we didn t answer what are we going to do now if they have affordable healthcare for the uninsured the number of uninsured have gone up by 5 million in the last four years what are we going to do to make america less dependent on foreign oil and do our part to fight global warming what are we going to do to secure the future of social security to improve homeland security these are real challenges this is the kind of stuff a president does all day every day the congress does and millions of americans didn t vote on it at all unless you think i m being too partisan i don t think this is a partisan issue when i was a governor you might be interested in this i was and i tried to write about this in my book i was governor of arkansas for 12 years every single election my vote went up among republicans and independents in the urban areas and the suburbs because they believed in what i was doing to diversify and advance our economy and to lift the education standards and it went down in some rural democratic areas because they thought that no matter what i did i could never benefit them economically and by raising education standards i threatened some of the small school districts i never thought of myself as an ideologue and i certainly never thought of myself as the sort of the neither hillary nor i did the demons that republicans loved to hate until i went to washington and found a very different world than the world most real americans live in so i say this not as a democratic primarily but as an american i can t run for anything the good news is i can say whatever i think the bad news is since i m not president nobody listens anymore but anyway but i want you think about this do you really want in a world where we are pleading pleading the muslims of the world to abandon islamic fundamentalism and the demonization of jews and christians do we want an america which is deeply divided and where people basically vote not based on the issues not based on the evidence but based on who is moral and who isn t let your voting habits depend on what team you re on rather than what the issues of the day are and the proposed solutions are is that really where you want to be new york s a good example a case in point when hillary started running for the senate the conventional wisdom is you ve got to get a big vote in new york city because only some of the suburban areas are democratic the rest are republicans and you re going to get murdered upstate but we d been to upstate new york i said you know they re not that different than the people i grew up with and they have all the same challenges why don t you just forget about their political party and go up there and talk to people about where they are and what their dreams are what their problems are and see whether we can get people together and it s worked pretty well for her and i think it ll work pretty well for our country we have no call to go into the future divided based on who s a good or a bad person or a good or a bad party and once you get to the point when you re making a decision in politics without regard to evidence just based on identity you can get in a lot of trouble in a hurry so i i say that to all of you i think that the current divisions are partly the fault of me of the people in my party for not engaging the christian evangelical community in a serious discussion of what it would take to promote a real culture of life and what the best strategy for reducing abortions is an open discussion of where we are on the issues of gays in america i think we can get a majority of americans to support the employment and non discrimination act which i tried for years to get through the congress without success to recognize the fact that we have a vested interest in encouraging people who make commitments to each other not to be punished for those commitments and in letting and i personally believe that because of the volatility of it that the whole issue of gay marriage should be left as it was in this last election to religious doctrine and state law just like it has been ever since we started out as a country now that s what i believe it may be that people disbelieve us but that s not an inherently less moral position what i said we don t go off and amend the constitution every time the supreme court says we don t agree with a man came through the line with me tonight and reminded me that he worked with me on a bill called the religious freedom restoration act which i signed happily and believed in because i m a radical believer in the first amendment including the rights of all those people and all those churches that believe they were doing god s will by beating every democrat they could find on the ballot and i would die for their right to do that because i think the only reason we re still around here after over 200 years and the most religious country in the world becoming evermore diverse is that we predicted that so here s one case where this republican supreme court was to the right of me because they struck down the religious freedom restoration act and i thought they were wrong but or i was to the right of them if you will but we have to recognize that politics in its domain is fundamentally different from religion in its domain and from science in its domain this is part science and part art politics it s part listening to the people and part leading it is has to be animated like every other human activity by faith and values but we can t expect to operate completely without regard to evidence and without regard to those who have different ways of searching for the truth now having said all that whoever you voted for you ought to be in a pretty good frame of mind tonight for the following reasons i m old enough now and i ve run enough times and i ve governed enough succeeded enough and failed enough to know that there s a limit to how much any election can repeal the underlying tides of history and to know that you can only succeed in the end if you re swimming with the deepest hopes and most profoundly honorable aspirations of humanity i think there will be great opportunities for good things to happen in the next four years if the republicans and democrats in washington will work together after the republicans won a majority when i was president we did an enormous amount together on the economy on empowering poor people on getting investments into poor areas on relieving the debt of the poorest countries in the world and in a whole range of other areas there were also days when we could never reach an agreement they wouldn t ever adopt a senior citizens drug program i wanted because the drug companies didn t like it so they waited and got their subsidy but i think i was right and so we couldn t get that done but we got a lot done i could never get the congress to seriously address the problem of climate change and the need for a clean energy future i once joked to newt gingrich that i considered the major accomplishment of my second term as president when i proposed a 25 tax credit for the production or purchase of clean energy products and he beat it i said newt i have finally found a tax cut you re against and i m joking about that but we got a lot of stuff done so they ll have opportunities to do things but i m optimistic for other reasons because the fundamental underlying realities sooner or later whether or not in these four years are going to compel us to abandon demonizing one another in favor of cooperating we live in an independent world and an evermore diverse country indeed i think part of the reason for the kind of almost religious reaction supporting extremely conservative candidates is the sense that things are spinning out of control and people feel their life options are narrowed and their control even their children s upbringing and what they see on television and how they live is limited and they want to reassert it i want to talk about how we can all reassert it but the first thing i want to hammer home is this no one can change this the world is becoming more interdependent which simply means for good or ill we can t escape each other and the country is becoming not only more interdependent but more diverse which means for good or ill no matter how many elections our side or the other side wins we will become more diverse racially more diverse religiously more diverse culturally no one can stop that the second thing i want to say is that no one can avoid dealing with the major challenges of the moment there are serious security challenges facing this country mostly from non state actors like mr bin laden and the al qaeda our goal ought to be to stop big bad things from happening to take down the terror networks to limit the reach and destroy as much as possible the materials of weapons of mass destruction and to deal with the world in a way that removes a lot of the grievances of poverty ignorance disease and the absence of peace the second thing we have to do is keep working to make america better it s no good going out and asserting that we re the greatest country and that we re good people make their own judgments about whether we re great or good people in this country and in other countries they make their own judgments based on what they see not what based on what we say that s why i think it s important that we not abandon our children i can say this i m the oldest of the baby boomers god i hate it but i am it s hard for me to believe sometimes but you know i ll be 65 years old in 2011 the oldest of the baby boomers and when we retire all of us about eight or nine years after that there ll only be about two people working for every one person in retirement and drawing social security i think we have an ethical responsibility not to do what we re doing now which is to basically bankrupt the retirement and healthcare systems of the seniors so our children will be supporting us instead of our grandchildren i think that s wrong we have an obligation to be smart about homeland security i was really disappointed in the last election that that was one of many issues that were never seriously debated in detail this new department has reorganized a lot of things but we re still only checking 5 of the containers cargo containers at our ports and airports i think that s a mistake it s an open invitation to invade one of them with a bomb a chemical a nuclear a biological device i think it was a mistake that in all the debates and this was something that neither candidate that was fully responsible for because they were answering questions asked of them but i was aghast that there was only one question in the last two debates about energy and the environment when i believe that number one i believe that the differences between the two candidates were honest and heartfelt and therefore they could both speak with a clear conscience and without trying to maneuver and number two i think it is likely to affect our future and our children and grandchildren s future on this planet and i know it will have an immediate impact on the economic prospects for america maybe we can talk about that in a moment but i basically people ask me all the time well if we can t do anything about outsourcing and we can t stop it where are we going to get the jobs in this decade that we got from high technology when you were president and i say well we could get a couple of million if we made a serious decision to go to a clean energy future to have blended fuel vehicles and clean fuel vehicles to retrofit our homes and our office buildings and to build new buildings according to higher standards and to retrofit our factories and our our utility companies anybody who tells you that we can t make a dramatic dent in the the use of greenhouse gases in this country is somebody who has no faith in the american people if you set up the right kind of and the government doesn t have to do it it would help if we had higher standards but if we had the right sort of financial incentives the kind of financial incentives we gave the oil companies at the beginning of the 20th century to build a petroleum based economy you would be amazed at how quickly we could dramatically reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in america do our part to combat global warming and create an unbelievable number of high paying jobs i m going to dedicate my library in a few days down in little rock and there are two buildings one s a basically is the museum building it s kind of the first museum of the 21st century it tells the story of how we moved into a new era of working and living the other contains all the documents the 2 million pictures and all the artifacts that building is covered with solar reflectors made in america the museum is a big glass and steel structure and i wanted it to be light all the time so we got a new kind of glass that s kind of a grainy plate to go over the first glass so when you re inside it always looks daylight but it blocks out 99 9 of the ultraviolet light there are miles of walkway underneath it we have tubing that can carry hot water to heat the place or cool water to cool the place and we re going to reduce the energy consumption by at least 30 all with technology made in america it could be made in upstate new york it could be made in arizona it could be made in oregon it could be made anywhere none of this was discussed now so i think we do need a security policy we need a policy to make a world with more friends and fewer terrorists by dealing with poverty disease and ignorance and the fact that only one in four one in four people in the world don t have any access to clean water i do a lot of that with my foundation but we can t do it only as private citizens we have to have good public policies and we have to keep making america better there will be lots of opportunities i ll say this again in the next four years for us to things in this regard in a bipartisan fashion if we ll just stop screaming at each other and start listening to each other i think that mr arafat s illness will give us a terrific opportunity if the palestinians unite and have a leadership of people who are committed to peace they re all been there a long time they know exactly what was on the table in 2000 when i made a peace proposal and mr arafat turned it down prime minister barak of israel took it a year and a half later arafat said he wanted it and by then he had an israeli government who wouldn t give it to him and an israeli public who didn t trust him peace works better than war in the eight years i was president there were 256 israelis killed by terror in the last four years over 1 000 have been we have to that brings me to the last point i want to make the middle east is the ultimate example of global interdependence the israelis and the palestinians whether they re working together or shooting at each other are no less interdependent in either condition one condition is negative interdependence the other is positive but they certainly cannot escape each other therefore what they need to do is a microcosm of what we all need to do we have got to build a world of sharing we have to share the responsibilities we have to share the benefits and we have to share certain fundamental values that should cross every religious line everybody counts everybody deserves a chance we all do better when we work together and our differences are important worth debating worth fighting for but our common humanity in the end will always matter more now you have decide if you believe that but if you do then on every issue there s a reasonable case to be made for the more conservative position or the more liberal position on every issue you could organize a national political party in america or any other country in the world one slightly right of center the other slightly left of center the only thing that can derail us if we get into a position where we say politics is evidence free don t bother me with the facts and if you re not in my party you ve got nothing to tell me and if you don t agree with me then you deserve whatever you get we got here as americans to this place on this night by a common nation of fighting and cooperating we got here because the framers of this constitution of ours understood that they limited power and protected all of our liberties including our freedom of speech our freedom of association our freedom of the press and our freedom of religion this town i m in is not named for me it is named for george clinton one of the few men in the history of the republic who served as governor longer than i did 21 years in two different stints and also served as thomas jefferson s vice president thomas jefferson gave us the declaration of interdependence but he didn t favor a strong national government with a strong national economy and a strong national legal system alexander hamilton favored a strong national legal system and economy john marshall favored a strong national legal system and economy they were right and he was wrong but he was a very great man and we would be much the poorer if we did not have the declaration of independence if we did not have thomas jefferson s declaration on the walls of jefferson memorial in washington that when he thought of slavery he trembled to think that god was just he knew better than that and he speaks to us down to the present day but because we had a system of separation of powers limitation of powers fostering flourishing debates of conflict and cooperation we wound up with the best of both worlds we got mr hamilton when he was right we got justice marshall when he was right and we got to keep what was right about thomas jefferson we d do well to remember that today this is a great country because more than half the time we ve done the right thing and because more than half the time while doing the right thing we were smart enough to remember that none of us ever on this earth would have the absolute truth thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 11 99a bill_clinton thank you well janice thank you and thanks for giving this group such a build up when you said there were 300 here for tipper and 250 for me this is the first concrete manifestation i have had of the fact that i m the only one in this crowd not running for anything anymore let me first of all say i m delighted to be here i got a good report from hillary on her visit with you and thank you for the good reception you gave her i brought i see ann lewis is here i brought minyon moore my political director with me and the new head of our women s outreach office who used to operate this wonderful organization wlf lauren supina is here so thank you very much for coming as all of you know since al and tipper and hillary and i moved to the white house we have tried very hard to involve women to an unprecedented degree and to show a great sensitivity to interests of particular concern to women and i m sure that you ve had that repeated over and over again but one of the things that i am proudest of is that we have really enabled women to share in the benefits of the work of this administration you know we have now the lowest unemployment in 30 years but we have the lowest women s unemployment in 46 years that s amazing and when you consider how many fewer women were looking for work 46 years ago those numbers are even more meaningful we ve also tripled the number of sba loans to women we ve worked very hard on issues the family and medical leave i don t have the newest numbers but as of last year 15 million people had taken advantage of it and as we look ahead as i have said repeatedly if you compare where we are now with where we were in 1992 we ve gone from a period of economic distress social division political drift and a complete discrediting of government to the strongest economy in our history welfare and crime rates at a 30 year low we learned last week teen pregnancy is at a 30 year low a country beginning to come to grips with its social problems and come together we have a clear direction for the future and no one s out there running against the government anymore we heard for 12 years that government was the problem and things got worse including the deficit and the debt but that s the good news the question that we have to face now is what s at stake ahead of us what is still to be done and i just want to make two points very briefly one is we have the first chance in my lifetime and i m 53 years old the first chance in my lifetime to really deal with the big challenges and opportunities our there facing our country without the paralysis or the threat of an external crisis or an internal crisis and i believe that imposes upon us a very heavy responsibility and we ought to look at our country as a family would its children and its grandchildren we have to deal with these big issues and i think that the women of america can make sure that s what the subject of the election is about and the wlf can make sure that we involve lots of people who ve never been involved before who care deeply about this but if you look at and i ll just mention two or three if you look at the aging of america that will affect more women than men because you have a longer life expectancy and as we talk about saving social security for the 21st century one of the things we ought to be doing is making special provisions for women who could not pay into social security at the same amount men could and who therefore are much more likely to be living in poverty if you look at reforming medicare and extending the life of it and providing affordable prescription drug coverage that affects women disproportionately to men but it s profoundly important if you look at the challenges we face with our children the challenges we face in eradicating poverty and bringing prosperity to the people and places we haven t touched yet of guaranteeing long term economic health for our country by paying down the debt and getting out of debt for the first time literally in 165 years these are things that i believe we ought to be taking to the american people we ve proved you can grow the economy and improve the environment in this period of economic growth we have cleaner air cleaner water safer food we set aside more land for protection than any administration except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt in the history of the country that will continue to be a major concern if you look at our responsibilities around the world there s a big struggle i ve been having here in congress to adequately fund our foreign affairs budget you know one of the things that we do with that money as i m sure hillary talked about today is try to make sure that in developing countries around the world women have a chance to make a living by getting credit and girls have a chance to make a future by going to school and being free of oppressive social practices that s going to be a big issue in the future will we continue to do that will that continue to be part of america s role in the world and of course in the next election one of the things that will clearly be up for grabs is somewhere between two and four seats on the united states supreme court and the question of whether we will revisit a whole raft of issues the most obvious of which is the right to choose but believe me that s not the only one that is hanging in the balance of this election so i hope that you re all pumped up about what you ve done i m particularly pleased when janice was giving the report that you had so many people here today who had not previously been active one of the things that i think is important for the democrats to do is to recognize that there are literally thousands even tens of thousands of people out there who have been directly benefited by the policies of this administration and the direction of the country who have never participated in politics that don t imagine that they have a contribution to make because they have never been asked and they ve never been asked to do anything specific and given an opportunity to participate people now believe in the possibilities of our country and the possibilities of our political system again and so if they don t participate but they could it s our fault not theirs and we have to look at it that way and that s the last thing i would leave you with you know i m fighting now for strengthening the equal pay law i m fighting now for adequate efforts at child care we passed the family and medical leave law 15 million people have taken advantage of it i d like to add 10 million more people to the coverage but you should know for example that today under present federal law of those who are eligible to receive assistance from the federal government to help to provide for quality affordable child care we have funding for only 10 percent only 10 percent and in spite of all that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 46 years but i promise you a lot of those women are going to work every day worried sick about their kids and that is not good for our country because one of the big challenges we have to face that i didn t mention and i want to mention in closing is i m proud that the first bill i signed was the family and medical leave law but we have come nowhere near where we need to be in terms of enabling people to succeed both in the workplace and at home and i think that ought to be one of the major issues that we take into the 2000 elections even as i continue to redouble my efforts to pass the child care initiative we have before the congress to pass the strengthening of equal pay initiative we have before the congress and to do many other things so i m very grateful that i ve had a chance to serve these last seven years i m grateful for what we have done and what we still can do but the decision we should be making as democrats is that we are not going to let our children and our grandchildren down we re going to use the literally it s the only opportunity we ve had in my lifetime to have this level of prosperity in the absence of domestic or foreign crisis to shape the future of our dreams the only chance we have to do that is with the massive involvement and leadership of the women of this country and you will be one of the most important engines of the victories that we have in the year 2000 thank you very much dem wjclinton9 11 99b bill_clinton thank you very much after that introduction i am thinking many things i m thinking i wonder how long it will be before miguel will run for office i m thinking it is much better to have such a friend than an opponent thank you thank you for being my friend in ways that are personal as well as political you may however have caused me quite a problem tonight not over vieques but over saying i have a hispanic soul not very long ago the great african american nobel prize winning author toni morrison said i was the first black president and if i am the first black president and the first president to have a hispanic soul i m afraid they ll never let me go home to ireland it might be worth it loretta sanchez thank you very much for your leadership and standing up here tonight and performing in your usual laid back repressed fashion what a joy it is to have somebody like you in congress who s not ashamed to have a good time being in public life we ought to all enjoy it and be honored you know when i see people trudging around here all the time complaining about how hard public life is and all the burdens i say you know they re not giving these jobs away nobody made you come up here people come to me all the time and say hasn t this been just awful for you i say no it s actually been quite wonderful you know a few turns in the road one way or the other and i could be home doing deeds wills and divorces i am grateful to be here and i like it every day of it and loretta likes it and she s grateful to be here and i appreciate that i want to thank the administration members who are here secretary slater who represented me at home today in arkansas at the funeral of daisy bates a great hero of the civil rights movement administrator alvarez maria echaveste my former secretary of transportation and energy federico pena who did a superb job in both places nice to see you i would also like to thank another former member of my administration who is here tonight who is now working for vice president gore janet murguia her brother was just confirmed as the first hispanic federal judge from kansas so we ve got one of them on the payroll anyway i want to thank all the people at my table and other places who had so much to do with the success of this evening joe and alfie and roger and leo and all the others nelson thank you very much for your leadership thank you joe andrew and the others who are here from the dnc lottie shackelford lydia camarillo thank you for your willingness to go run our convention make sure we all have a good time out there will you and let me say one serious word before i go forward there s one person i really wish were here tonight who died a couple of days ago the great mayor of sacramento california mayor joe serna mickey ibarra would be here but he s out there representing me at that service today so i ask you all to remember isabel serna and the family in your prayers they ve been through a lot he was a magnificent mayor and a great democrat and a great friend of mine he was one of those people who enjoyed public service had a good time doing it and was proud down to the last day his health would no longer permit him to serve and i ask you to remember i also would like to thank two people who aren t here tonight one secretary richardson who is still in the administration and the other whom i wish were here henry cisneros who has served us so ably and is such a great man i thank him now as all of you know we re trying to finish this year s budget and we re trying to do a few other things before the congress goes home and i d like to mention just a few of them because i think they relate particularly to the concerns of the hispanic community i want you to know what s still out there we re fighting to get a reaffirmation of the commitment that congress made last year right before the election that the majority the republican majority has voted to go back on but i am determined that we will reinstate it and that is to put 100 000 teachers out there in the early grades so we can lower class size and give our children a better education we are fighting to give our hardest pressed communities that still have a crime rate 50 000 police officers on the street we are fighting to raise the minimum wage which i think is very very important especially for lower income workers many of whom are hispanic you know we lifted over 1 5 million hispanics out of poverty by doubling the earned income tax credit in 1993 and then by raising the minimum wage and it s time to raise it again and i hope we can prevail and i hope you will help us we re trying to pass hate crimes legislation we re trying to pass legislation that will enable disabled people to go into the work force and not lose their medicaid health insurance we re trying to pass the caribbean basin initiative and the africa trade bill which would open our markets to the caribbean nation and african nation and open their markets more to us and put our caribbean neighbors on a more equal footing with our mexican neighbors in our trading relations all of those things can still be done before the congress goes home and insofar as any of you have influence with anyone i hope you will get out there and help us with our agenda because all these things reflect the deepest values of the democratic party and our commitment to the future i just want to make a couple of other points i don t want to keep you late and most of you have heard me give a lot of speeches i had a very emotional day today i was thinking about many things i m about to leave to go to europe hillary and chelsea just left to go to the middle east to continue the work that i was doing last week in our hope that we can over the next 100 days actually get a framework for a final peace agreement between the israelis and the palestinians then i m going to turkey and to greece two great friends of america in the hope i can help them resolve some of their difficulties over cyprus and other issues before i leave office and then i m going on to bulgaria a great ally of ours to try to keep pushing to make peace in the balkans where we have had to take up arms in bosnia and kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing and slaughter and today i had this incredible experience which would have been wonderful for any president but was especially wonderful for me i hosted in the white house about 30 members of the united states congress republicans and democrats and a couple of hundred other people to give the congressional gold medal the highest award congress can award to the nine students who integrated little rock central high school 42 years ago for those of you who are old enough to remember that or young enough to have studied it you may know also that in addition to the courage of the young children and the power of the supreme court s decisions and the court orders the power of the presidency was necessary for the integration of little rock central high school when president eisenhower sent in the 101st airborne division and later federalized the arkansas national guard to stop the obstruction today i signed a bill naming the old executive office building after president eisenhower because he worked there many years in the military that building until the great depression housed all the offices of the executive branch including all the offices of what was then called the war department except for the treasury building and the office of the president so dwight eisenhower actually worked in that building as long as he worked in the white house as president and his son general john eisenhower who is also a noted historian and john s wife and their daughter were there so i asked them to come so dwight eisenhower s son and granddaughter were actually present as we recognized these nine students and because arkansas is my home i have lived with the reality of these people all my life since i was 11 years old and i said today that these nine students in their simple desire to get a better education became as children our teachers when i lived at home literally 99 percent of all children in my state went to segregated schools and we may have had an opinion one way or the other but everybody more or less accepted it was the way it was but when they did what they did then all of a sudden they came crashing in our lives and everyone had to decide where do you stand what do you believe how will we live thirty years later i hosted them in the governor s mansion for the 30th anniversary of little rock central high i brought them all in and i showed them all the rooms where the then governor planned the obstruction to keep them out of school they got a big kick out of that and 40 years later two years ago i went home to little rock to the steps of little rock central high school which in the 1920s was voted the most beautiful school building in america and it s still a magnificent structure and i held the doors open for them with our governor as they walked freely through the front door something they had not been able to do 40 years ago and then two years later they came to the white house with all their myriad family kin folks and friends for a celebration that truly represented america at its best this has been a great day a great day to be president and a great day to be an american and to end it with you you and all those you represent have been so good to me and to hillary and to the vice president and mrs gore is a great privilege i just want to leave you with a couple of thoughts number one many of you helped me in 1992 because you knew we didn t want to keep on going the way we were going because we had economic problems and social discord and political drift and government with discredit so you knew what you were against and you were willing to try something else but i was just an argument for most of you most of you never met me before i started running for president and you decided to give me a chance so the first thing i want to say to you is it is not an argument anymore together we made a good decision and we ve changed america for the better seven years later when you go home tomorrow and you go back across the country and people ask you why you were there you can say well we gave him a chance and we tried it their way and as has already been said we not only have had the most diverse administration with the most diverse appointments including the judicial appointment more of whom i m trying to get up for a vote by the way in history but we have the longest peacetime expansion in history 19 8 million new jobs the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years the lowest crime rates in 30 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the lowest female unemployment rate in 46 years the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years with the smallest federal government in 37 years it is not an argument anymore it s working it s the right direction for america so the second thing i want to say to you is we ve got to decide now what are we going to do with this because even if i pass everything i m trying to pass if we get a good minimum wage bill and the 100 000 teachers and the 50 000 police and we get the anti environmental riders off the bills and we pass the caribbean basin africa trade initiative we do all the things i mentioned to you there still will be a lot for america to do and of all americans hispanics ought to be able to think about this our country as we would our family i remember one of the nicest nights we ever shared at the white house federico and i was when we previewed that wonderful movie mi familia at the white house in my lifetime which is stretching on and on as the days go by in my lifetime this is the first chance america has had to have on the one hand the prosperity and confidence that we have and on the other to be unburdened by serious wrenching foreign threats to our security or domestic crises in the 1960s we had for a brief period more or less the best economy we d ever had with low unemployment low inflation but we had first the civil rights crisis to deal with and then the war in vietnam now what do you do as a person as a family as a business if things are better than they have ever been but you can look ahead to the future and clearly see challenges and opportunities that will not be met or seized if you don t do certain things you re not doing now what do you do that is the great question before our people i can tell you you know i don t know about you but i ll just use my own life from the time i was a little boy one of the well when i first ran for office let me start with that i asked an old sage in arkansas politics i said i was running really well in this race for governor i said what do you think i ought to really remember he said bill just remember this in politics you re always most vulnerable when you think you re invulnerable how many times can you remember in your own life when you broke your concentration when you got divided when you made a stupid mistake because you thought things were rocking along so well nothing bad could happen how many times has that happened to a family or to a business where you just think things are going to roll on forever it s never that way human nature is not that way human circumstances don t work that way i m telling you this is a precious jewel we have been given a gift we have been given as a country to look ahead and say okay what are the big challenges what are the big opportunities you ought to make your own list and ask yourself in your lifetime has there ever been an opportunity like this for america what are the challenges i ll just give you a few the number of people over 65 is going to double in 30 years there will be two people working for every one person drawing social security medicare is supposed to run out of money in 15 years seventy five percent of our seniors can t afford prescription drugs but need them to stay alive and maintain their quality of life how are we going to deal with the aging of america we have the largest number of children in our schools in history the first time more people than the baby boom and by far more diverse loretta was talking about that republican newsletter from northwest arkansas that s really true northwest arkansas is one of the fastest growing ares of america has been for 20 years and one of the most racially and religiously homogenous areas in the country and all of a sudden boom they have this big infusion of hispanics the catholic church there now has a spanish mass every sunday and has had for the last several years and that s nothing if you re from orange county but if you re from northwest arkansas that s a huge deal we also have a big influx of people in western arkansas from southeast asia but last year our state ranked first or second i m not sure which but i m sure it s one of the two in the percentage growth of hispanic population joe andrew didn t mention this i don t think but in addition to all the mayors we ve celebrated we ve had a truly historic breathtaking election in the state of mississippi where we run the governorship in a state where they didn t think a democrat could be elected for love or money and part of it was the overwhelming african american turnout but there are also more hispanics moving to mississippi all over the south their voices are being heard and we only won the election by about 6 000 votes so everybody can take credit for the victory so we have to think about this what are we going to do for all these children they need a world class education if we do it right the diversity of america will be a blessing in a global society what are we going to do about the fact that this fabulous recovery has left people and places behind unemployment on the pine ridge indian reservation is 73 percent upstate new york outside of the suburbs in new york city if it were a separate state would rank 49th in job growth since i ve been president hawaii burdened by the collapse of the asian economy is the only state with no economic growth the inner cities the mississippi delta appalachia how are we going to bring prosperity to people and places left behind do we have the will to guarantee economic growth for a generation of americans by taking america out of debt i gave a budget to the congress that will get us out of debt over the next 15 years for the first time since 1835 and the progressive party the democrats ought to be for that it sounds like a conservative thing it is but it s the progressive thing to do in a global economy because if the government is not borrowing money you can borrow it for less and our trading partners can get more for less and then they can be better partners with us and they can lift their people out of poverty how are we going to grow the economy and meet our environmental responsibility we ve proved you could do it are we going to keep doing it we ve got the lowest crime rate in 30 years does anybody seriously think america is as safe as it ought to be if you do let me just give you one statistic the accidental death rate of children from gun shots in the united states is nine times the rate of the next 25 biggest industrial economies combined i think we now know we can bring the crime rate down why don t we set a realistic goal i mean realistic in terms of our dreams why don t we say we won t quit until america is the safest big country in the world and if we want that how are we going to do it last night i appeared in the first ever town hall meeting on the internet which was interesting for me since one of the reasons i asked the vice president to join the ticket is because i was so technologically challenged it was quite a thrill for me to do that but there is a digital divide and it can have huge consequences i was in northern california the other night meeting with people who work for e bay do you all ever use e bay buy anything on e bay you want to hear something interesting over 20 000 americans now make a living on e bay not working for e bay trading on e bay many of them former welfare recipients think of what we could do in america to close the economic divide if we could close the digital divide if usage and access to computers and connections to the internet were as dense as telephone ownership and usage think of it now these are the kind of things we ought to be thinking about what are the security threats of the 21st century well i think one of them is we can start running away from each other because we ve all of a sudden gotten afraid of trade we need to keep expanding trade but work harder to put a human face on it to take into account legitimate environmental issues and labor issues but not to run away from the fact that with 4 percent of the world s people and 22 percent of the world s income if we want to continue to grow we ve got to sell something to the other 96 percent and if we want to sell something to them particularly since we re richer we have to be willing to buy things but this is a good thing what else the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction nuclear chemical and biological and the possibility that they can be made in smaller quantities like everything else is smaller we ve got cell phones so small now my big old fingers won t even hit the numbers right the miniaturization of all things technical will apply to weapons as well make no mistake about it this is a serious challenge the growth of terrorism around the world the prospect that the terrorists the drug runners the organized criminals will all start working together and the rampant threat of racial ethnic and religious wars big challenges which brings me to the last one and it s what i ve spent so much time on around the world and what i celebrated today with honoring the little rock nine can we truly make our motto e pluribus unum real as we grow ever more diverse it requires i would argue three things one is we have to respect not just tolerate not just tolerate but respect and celebrate our differences you know i don t have the same attitude as the people that put out that memo loretta talked about i think it s a lot more interesting in america as we grow more diverse i ll never forget the first cinco de mayo celebration i went to in san francisco i thought where has this been all my life you know i mean what have we been doing here you know i used to when i was governor of my home state i used to go to a place called little italy to eat spaghetti in a town called slovak to meet with the farmers that came there in the 1848 revolution and now we re just repeating our history in technicolor times four and i think it s fascinating but let s stop all this tolerance stuff tolerance is not good enough we need respect and celebration of our differences number one number two we need to recognize that as we have from the beginning we have genuine differences of opinion which ought to be forthrightly and publicly argued in that sense and if that s all we re doing partisanship is not necessarily a bad thing when people say partisanship with a little negative edge what they really mean is these people in washington are fighting their partisan battles trying to increase their power without concern for the public interest they think there s some game going on that s not real but we will always have honest differences i know why i m a democrat in the year 1999 and i have friends in the republican party who know why they re republicans and we honestly see the world in different ways we ought to create a safe and constructive way for people to feel free to think and argue but the third thing we have to do is to recognize that the differences we celebrate and the differences we fight over neither one of them are nearly as important as our common humanity and that is what the world keeps forgetting at its peril don t you think it s interesting that at a time when we talk about the internet this and finding a cure for cancer and last year we actually were able to transplant nerves into the spine of laboratory animals that had had their spines severed and for the first time ever they have movement in their lower limbs two years ago we identified the two genes that are the biggest predictors of breast cancer for women within a couple of years when mothers take their babies home from they hospital we ll be able to give them a genetic map which will say here are the things your child has a greater than normal propensity for but if you do the following things you can minimize them a lot of people i know experts in the field actually believe within a very few years babies will be born with a life expectancy of nearly a century within a very few years already today if you live to be 65 your life expectancy is over 82 years isn t it interesting at this time with all this marvelous stuff happening not to mention all the techno joys we can have that the biggest problems we have in the world are rooted in the oldest failing of human society we are afraid of people who are different from us and when you re afraid of somebody who s different from you it s easy to formalize that fear in dislike or hatred and it s a short step to dehumanizing them after which it s a short step to taking violent action against them and to thinking it really doesn t matter i ll never forget being in the airport at kigali rwanda talking to a woman who thought she had been killed because she was cut up in one of the machete rampages in the rwandan genocide and she woke up to find her husband and her six children all slashed to death around her she s the only surviving one knowing that they had been betrayed by her neighbor a person they lived with lived next to her in total peace for years and boom like that they started the fight between the hutus and tutsis and people turned on a dime betrayed their neighbors for life and let people be slaughtered now there are lots of other stories that are heroic on the other side but what happens to people why does that happen why are the catholics and the protestants still fighting in northern ireland when the irish republic has got the fastest growing economy in europe and their common heritage is rich and fascinating and interesting and they could be having arguments in bars or in parliament and making money instead and educating their children what is it that s keeping the israelis and the palestinians from taking these last few steps the syrians from joining in why are there other terrorist and rejectionist groups that are prepared to go out and kill innocent civilians to keep the israelis and the palestinians and the syrians from making their final peace agreement if you look at america you look at the success of people from the indian subcontinent in america from india from pakistan from bangladesh the phenomenal success if you look at the fact that india will be bigger than china in 20 years that they both have big scientific bases of expertise why are they fighting over the line of control in kashmir why can t they work that out why is that such a big problem that they keep spending money preparing to go to war with one another instead of educating their children and alleviating the abject poverty that is holding them down and keeping them from their full potential i mean i could go on and on and on but you get the point why did i have to go into europe and bring the power of the american military to bear in bosnia and kosovo to keep people from slaughtering mostly muslims although others were involved too what is the deal here same reason in a more thank god mundane but still very cruel way people were spitting on and kicking and cursing those nine kids when they tried to go to little rock central high school 42 years ago one of the great human weaknesses is that when people get organized they think that in order for their tribe to matter the other tribe has to matter less in order for their lifestyle to be validated somebody else s has to be invalidated that every difference of opinion turns out to be a difference justifying the dehumanization of your opponent this is a very dangerous thing made more dangerous not less by the collision of societies and the close contact and the openness of borders so we need you for another reason we need you in the democratic party we need you as americans we need you to remind us of what the concept of family means to you what are the obligations of people who are in your family what do we owe to one another if you re like me once you get about 50 your family members there are some you don t even like very much but you are bound together you are bound together i want you to think about that so when you go out across the country you go back home and people say why are you here what are you doing why are you a democrat why are you helping who you re helping in 2000 say well number one i tried him in 92 and it worked we re in a lot better shape than we were then and we re in a lot better shape than we ve been in a long time number two i m doing it because i want to take on the big challenges of the future and i m really determined that we re not going to blow this responsibility to our children and grandchildren and number three because the democrats represent the best hope for creating a family in america and a family in the world that doesn t minimize our differences it celebrates them it doesn t minimize our arguments it respects them but it recognizes that underneath it all is our common humanity and without that nothing else matters much with it there s nothing we can t do thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 12 94 bill_clinton thank you very much mr vice president thank you ladies and gentlemen for that warm welcome hillary and i and the vice president and mrs gore are delighted to be here we thank governor chiles and mrs chiles the lt governor and mrs mackay the members of the florida congressional delegation senator graham senator mack the distinguished members of congress who have come from all over the united states to be here i want to say a special word of thanks to dante fascell the honorary cochair of this summit and a great man i thank the mayors of miami beach and miami all the people who are involved in the metro dade government all the people who have worked so hard on this summit when we first announced the plans to hold the summit of the americas here in miami it seemed that it was a natural choice this city after all has been variously described as the hub the melting pot the gateway the crossroads of the americas but in the end we chose miami because of the commitment of the people who live and work here to make this summit a success led as the vice president said by the governor and the lt governor i won t dwell on all the subtle and not so subtle details of our many conversations about this but let me say that they persuaded me that this was the reverse of that wonderful line in the movie field of dreams where they said to us if you come we will build it and you have and i thank you your efforts have been extraordinary and we are grateful for them i have just been amazed at the energy that has come out of this community and this state over the last several months the kind of energy that s supposed to be generated only by the florida sun you promised that the citizens of miami would do it right and it s clear that you have delivered i think i can say for all of those who have come from around america to be here we knew we would need to be warm in december and now we are in more ways than one and we thank you very very much history has given the people of the americas a dazzling opportunity to build a community of nations committed to the values of liberty and the promise of prosperity now over the next three days the 34 democratically elected leaders of our hemisphere will gather to begin to seize this opportunity i convened this summit of the americas with three clear goals in mind first to open new markets and create a free trade area throughout our hemisphere second to strengthen this remarkable movement to democracy and third to bring together our nations to improve the quality of life for all of our people if we re successful the summit will lead to more jobs opportunity and prosperity for our children and for generations to come we will have launched a new partnership for prosperity today we gather in miami to mark a quiet revolution and to launch a new era for here in the americas as all of us know nation after nation has freed itself from dictatorship and debt and embraced democracy and development when historians look back on our times they will marvel at the speed with which democracy has swept across the entire americas consider this at the time of the last hemispheric summit in 1967 10 countries suffered under authoritarian rule and there were fewer here but today 34 of the hemisphere s leaders have won their post through ballots not bullets this weekend we will welcome leaders like president aristide of haiti we have all seen his commitment to reconciliation and the rule of law and how it now moving his people from fear to freedom and i hope i can take a moment of pride to salute the brave american men and women in uniform and their partners from around the world who helped to restore that democracy and freedom to haiti we are very proud of them here at the summit of the americas the people of the united states will meet a whole new generation of leaders a generation no longer subject to the dictates of military juntas who stifle liberties and loot their nation a generation that has proved in central america that bloody regional conflicts can be peacefully concluded through negotiation and reform and reconciliation a generation which has pledged to support democracy collectively wherever it is imperiled in this hemisphere that s a commitment no other region in the world has made these leaders are here in miami because they have tapped what simon bolivar the liberator of latin america called the most sacred spring the will of the people today just a day before the anniversary of the adoption of the universal declaration of human rights we honor them all of them and we must also honor the brave men and women who dedicated themselves to the cause of freedom and liberty and who today lie all across this hemisphere in unmarked graves and this summit is also a tribute to their astonishing sacrifice and it is their triumph as well only one nation in our hemisphere is not represented here it s the only one where democracy is still denied we support the cuban peoples desire for peaceful democratic change and we hope that the next time we have one of these summits and the people of all the western hemisphere send their leaders here a leader of a democratic cuba will take its place at the table of nations thank you the wave of political freedom that has swept across the americas has also been matched by unprecedented economic reform in these times of very great stress farsighted leaders in nation after nation have adopted sound policies to tame inflation to restore economic growth they ve cut tariffs stabilized currencies opened their economies to foreign investment they have worked together to shrink mountains of debt they ve privatized they ve decentralized argentina has cut its central government by 60 percent in four years bolivia has given back to local communities more responsibility for health for education for agriculture brazil has slashed its inflation rate the socalled lost decade in latin america is a fading memory these reforms are working wonders investment is growing the middle class is again on the rise the western hemisphere now boasts the second fastest growing economies in the world and if current trends continue within just a decade our hemisphere will be the biggest market in the world more than 850 million consumers buying 3 trillion worth of goods and services these are remarkable hopeful times here in the united states we too have developed a comprehensive economic strategy to reap the rewards of this moment we had a lot of work to do just to put our economic house in order we ve made deep cuts in our deficit and federal spending in the size of the federal government for the first time since harry truman was president this year we will have three years of reduction in our deficit in a row we are already taking our federal government down to its smallest size since john kennedy was president we ve have made major steps toward deregulation and banking and trucking and deregulating the states in the areas of welfare health and education and we have just begun to move in this direction our country has produced over five million new jobs in the last 22 months we ve got the lowest unemployment rate in four years and have been voted by the annual panel of international economists as the world s most productive economy for the first time in nine years but the thing that gives me the most hope after all the years nearly two decades in america of american families working longer work weeks for stagnant wages and more fragile benefits is that this year more high wage jobs have come into our economy than in the previous five years combined we hope that we are seeing the beginning of the end of a 20 year trend in stagnant wages and the beginning of the restoration of the american dream by reaching out to the world and into our hearts still we know that millions of americans have not felt this economic recovery millions of americans are still working harder for less and feeling very uncertain even as they read all the good statistics in the newspaper we have a lot of work to do but the truth is that the united states has never been in a stronger economic position to compete and win in the world we re also taking bold steps to open new markets and to make the global economy work for our people for 40 years our markets have been more open than those of many other nations we led the restoration of economic hope and opportunity after the second world war but now that competition is everywhere and productivity is growing and the lessons of management technology and investment and are readily apparent to hardworking people all across the world we cannot allow that to continue we simply must be able to export more of our goods and our services if we are going to create more high wage jobs just a year ago yesterday i signed into law nafta the north american free trade agreement you can clap for that when congress voted for nafta that event committed the united states to continuing leadership and engagement in the post cold war world it marked a new era in world trade relations for america and it gave birth to this summit which could not have occurred if that hadn t happened in the first nine months of this year our exports to mexico jumped 22 percent increased exports to mexico and canada have helped us to create more than 100 000 new jobs in america in this year alone auto exports to mexico are up 500 percent and i might say mexican exports to the united states are also up it s been a good deal for us a good deal for them there has been no giant sucking sound except for american goods going across the border last month in indonesia we agreed with 17 other asian pacific nations including mexico and chile two countries represented here to achieve free trade in the asian pacific region by the year 2020 the tariffs will begin to fall and give us new access to new markets in the fastest growing economies of the world far before then and just yesterday i signed into law the bill implementing the general agreement on tariffs and trade the largest agreement ever for free and fair trade and gatt like nafta before it passed because we had strong bipartisan support in congress that is a pattern that must prevail as we continue to pursue open markets and prosperity in this hemisphere and around the world and i strongly urge all the nations in our hemisphere who have not yet done so to follow what america has done and implement this agreement now it is an important thing for our future growth finally let me emphasize that our economic strategy seeks to prepare our own people to fill the high wage jobs of the future for too many people as i said earlier these times are ones of great uncertainty pressures of the global economy have held down wages and increased job turnover for people who are not in a position to take advantage of the developments now occurring we owe it to those americans to provide the kind of lifetime education and training that will give them a chance to win in this economy as well and we must ensure that basic labor standards are preserved and promoted so that freer trade means better working conditions for all after all in america our people our workers are the most important asset we have and that is true in every other nation as well that s why democracy and free trade go hand in hand more free trade is worthwhile only if its benefits actually change the lives of real people for the better but as i have said over the last two years that does not mean that we can repeal the laws of change repeal the sweeping changes taking place in the global economy if we do nothing to reach out to other countries than to expand trade if we had walked away from nafta if we had walked away from gatt if we don t reach out here and throughout the world the united states will still consider continue to suffer the burdens of trade or we can t walk away but if we reach out as we are with nafta with gatt with the summit of the americas if we act wisely then we can make this new world work for us trade can be a benefit to our people when we have the opportunity to sell american products and services around the world we know we can compete and we know that means new jobs and a rising standard of living the core of the american dream i will say again we must in the united states not only create jobs but raise incomes and we can only do that if we train people for higher wage jobs and if we create those jobs one of the only ways we can create those jobs is to expand trade especially in this hemisphere so that s why every american worker in every part of the united states should be glad we are all here today at the summit of the americas now i hope i ve established why that is my primary goal for this summit we have a real opportunity here to build on the momentum of nafta and gatt that s what this new partnership of prosperity is all about creating a free trade area that stretches from alaska to argentina let no one underestimate the significance of this someday i ll learn to coordinate my speech lines and the applause let me tell you though think about it from alaska to argentina people have talked about free trade in this hemisphere for years it s been talked about and talked about the difference is here in miami we have a chance to act and we re going to take it let me try to describe in graphic terms what this means latin america is already the fastest growing region in the world for american exports of every dollar latin americans spend on exports 44 cents buy goods made in the u s a despite trade barriers that are on average four times higher than ours florida alone sold almost 9 billion worth of goods in the americas in last year alone and by the year 2005 if current trends continue our country will sell more to latin america than to western europe or japan that s why we re here that s an investment worth making creating a free trade area would be good news throughout the americas here in the united states our exports to latin america could literally double by the year 2005 that would create over one million new jobs exports also create good paying jobs on average export related jobs pay 17 percent more than average wages in america they re the kind of jobs that guarantee the families that we are concerned about a fair shot at the american dream and that is why we must succeed here but trade is not the only goal of this meeting there are two others the second goal of our summit must be to preserve and strengthen our community of democracies continued economic prosperity clearly depends upon keeping the democracies alive and stronger and we can only do that if we address the dangers to democracy that face all nations many of the dangers we face consider them international crime narcotics trafficking terrorism environmental degradation these things can only be overcome if we act in harmony so in the days ahead we will discuss ways to seize the assets of money launderers to explore new ways like those developed in chile to prevent corruption from corroding our democracies to move forward on all of these fronts we must also keep our democracies healthy and open our hemisphere has come too far and the cost has been too great to return to the days of repression and dictatorship so at the summit we will discuss how the organization of american states can help to reconcile political disputes and ensure that democratic constitutions actually live and breath here in the united states we know that democracy is hard work we ve been at it over 200 years and we know we still have to defend it every day we have to continually review how well our governments perform and even whether they should be doing some things at all our own efforts to cut the size and cost and improve the performance of government led by the vice president and his reinventing government team demonstrates the immense importance and the great rewards of this undertaking and we too have only just begun the third goal of the summit is to bring our nations together to pursue sustainable development that is far more than a buzzword our democracies and our prosperity will be short lived if we do not figure out how to deal with the things that enable us to grow and come together and maintain our quality of life over the long run improving the basic health and education of our peoples is a key part of that sustainable development strategy consider our common efforts to eradicate polio banished from our hemisphere since 1991 that shows you what cooperation can bring so at this summit we will discuss ways that we can combat poverty combat disease increase health care increase education remove threats from millions and millions of our fellow citizens our summit agenda also calls for important talks aimed at making our environmental and trade policies mutually supportive threats to our environment respect no border and ultimately can undermine our economies we must discuss initiatives that will make progress we re going to talk about things like banning lead from gasoline in every country conserving nature s diversities spreading innovative environmental technologies we will be doing the kinds of things that will permit us to sustain the remarkable trends of the last few years at the summit in support of expanding trade and democracy and sustainable development we will consider more than 20 initiatives all told to plot a course for the future and i am convinced that we will succeed as long as we recognize that the bonds that unite us are stronger than the forces that divide us once the united states and our neighbors were clearly divided by seemingly unbridgeable cultural and economic gulfs but today superhighways satellite dishes and enlightened self interest draw us together as never before our economies are increasingly interwoven and latin american and caribbean contributions to american culture in great novels fine foods spirited music free television networks and many other ways grow every day by the year 2020 the united states of america may well boast a spanish speaking population second only in size to mexico s the connections between north and south in the americas are in short a source of great energy we have to strengthen these bonds we ve got to make them work for the benefit of all of our people on this very day 170 years ago the foot soldiers of bolivar s army won the battle of ayacucho the last battle for liberation between the people of the new world and colonial spain with that triumph peru proclaimed its independence and a new era began in our hemisphere it was an era that bolivar hoped would produce greater unity among the pan american states well his dream was not realized in his lifetime and generation after generation has struggled without success to make it real in our own century president roosevelt s good neighbor policy as vice president gore said sought to unite the hemisphere by urging mutual respect among all and recognizing even then long ago the importance of our interdependence three decades later president kennedy s alliance for progress inspired the peoples of the americas with its vision of social justice and economic growth today we can build on those foundations and do what could not be done in former times we can create a partnership for prosperity where freedom and trade and economic opportunity become the common property of the people of the americas just imagine it a hemisphere where disputes among or within nations are peacefully and honorably resolved where cultures and nations are universally and mutually respected where no person s rights are denied and labor is not abused where ideas and trade flow freely across borders where work is rewarded and families and communities are strong just imagine it my fellow americans this is a magic moment let us seize it thank you very much dem wjclinton9 12 99 bill_clinton thank you very much ladies and gentlemen it s been a long but a wonderful night i am delighted to see you all the most important thing i can say is thank you i thank joe andrew for his increasingly energetic leadership i thank ed rendell for those of you who don t know him you will get to know him philadelphia had lost jobs for 30 years before ed rendell became mayor and now they re gaining jobs rapidly they had lost population they had had a crime rate going up everything do you remember how the vice president used to say in the 92 campaign everything that should be up is down everything that should be down is up that was philadelphia times five now everything that should be up is up thanks to ed rendell and he s going to keep our party up as well i want to thank lorretta bowen and john cooke and john merrigan and carol pensky for this dinner tonight it was wonderful and i want to thank my friend walter shorenstein you have already honored him and you heard the vice president talk about the big achievements in his life i think it is remarkable he reflects first a characteristic i ve seen in so many of you you ve been so phenomenally generous many of you in this room tonight could be making more money in a short run under the other party s policies you know it as well as i do and you came here because you believe that we all ought to go forward to together and that we ought to keep our eye on the long run social justice and the long term strength of america and walter has stood for that all of his life he is also an uncommonly decent person i ll just tell you two things first of all not very long ago i was out in northern california and i had a day to kill and i hadn t seen my little girl in a long time and it s inconvenient for the president to go any place quietly walter had a place south of san francisco he let me go there and spend the day with my daughter that meant more to me than anything he could do for me i ll never forget it as long as i live and i ll tell you something else you heard the vice president say he helped to save the giants i was talking to walter one night and i said you know walter i think the greatest baseball player that ever lived was willie mays next time i go to dinner at walter s house willie mays is there and i might add number 8 on espn s list of the 50 greatest athletes of the 20th century almost high enough so this guy has never lost his sense of personal things which i think matter most to us all when it s all said and done and i thank you for honoring him i hope that all of you feel honored to some extent through him sometimes i think we take and take and take and we don t take enough time to give and to say thank you and i m honored that we could do this for walter and through him for all of you who stick with us through thick and thin i also want to say a word about the vice president and mrs gore i have spent a lot of time studying the history of our country and the institutions that have made it work when i became a candidate for president hillary and i talked about a lot of things i said i ll tell you one thing i m going to do if i win this nomination i m going to appoint somebody to be my running mate that i would feel good if i dropped dead if something god forbid happened to me that i am convinced would be a great president and in the meanwhile i m going to make it a real job you know that when harry truman became president he did not even know about the atomic bomb a lot of people don t know that franklin roosevelt had a lot of great qualities but we had lost a lot of presidents up to then and they were still just picking vice presidents for the most sort of shallow political reasons thank god harry truman turned out to be a great man and a great president and then it got a little better when john kennedy picked lyndon johnson he was ready for the job when dwight eisenhower picked richard nixon he had broader responsibilities and then when jimmy carter picked walter mondale he qualitatively increased the role of the vice president and to his credit president reagan followed his lead in giving more responsibility to then vice president bush but i want every person in this room to know that al gore has had two three four five times as much responsibilities as any person who has ever held this office and he has done a superb job discharging every single one of them you know we ve had a lot of fun together over the years and we kid each other mercilessly when arkansas plays tennessee he usually wins sometimes i do and he always says you know the difference between you and me he said to me is you don t have a vote in congress and i do at least every now and then i do and whenever i vote we win well we re all celebrating this economy but he cast the tie breaking vote in the senate to make it a reality and when we were fighting to pass common sense gun legislation in the senate after colombine and all we wanted to do was to apply the brady background checks to the gun shows and the urban flea markets require child trigger locks on the guns he cast the tie breaking vote in the senate to pass it one day we were sitting around in one of our weekly lunches which i miss now as i confessed in my press conference he said you know we ve got to do something about getting more computers into the schools and not just a computer for their educational programs we ve got to hook them up to the internet and it will revolutionize educational opportunities but if we don t do anything about it only wealthier schools will get it so he came up with this idea that the fcc now that we re revolutionizing telecommunications something he else he was the lead on our administration when we rewrote the telecommunications law for the first time in 60 years or he created 300 000 new high wage jobs in america he said we ve got to give a discount to the poor schools to the hospitals to the libraries so they can afford to hook on the internet and we need to try to get the business community in we ve got this whole private sector group to come help us get the connections done now when we started this in 1994 it was his idea 3 percent of the classrooms and 14 percent of the schools were connected most schools just had one connection in the library or something nineteen ninety four 3 percent of the classrooms 14 percent of the schools today thanks to him over 50 percent of the classrooms in over 80 percent of the schools in america have an internet connection and i could go through what he s done in helping us to reduce the nuclear threat and dealing with a whole wide range of foreign challenges and the environment we set aside 40 million roadless acres in our national forest not very long ago this administration has now protected more land than any administration in the history of the united states except those of franklin and theodore roosevelt thanks to his leadership on the environment so what i want you to know is he has been a good and faithful servant of the people of this country and he knows more than any person who has ever held that job and he s had more experience than anybody who s run in my lifetime that is relevant to this work the other thing i would like to say is his wife has given us hillary and me personally but our administration and this country many gifts i want to thank them for the family conference that they run every year in tennessee that many of you have been a part of what they taught us about family leave and child care health care for children many other issues and i want to thank her for forcing me to recognize the woefully inadequate response that the people of the united states have to the needs of mental health in this country and taking a lead and making us do better thank you i say this because this is a political dinner but most of us are here and we re democrats instead of republicans because we re motivated by these kinds of issues and because we think america should go up or down together and one way or the other if we re going up we ve got to go up together and i honor them and i thank them for that i will be very brief in what i want to say to you there s no point in my reciting what you already know about the progress of the last seven years except i will say that there is something special about the fact that it was done by our party because we believe you can advance the economy and social justice at the same time so it s not just 20 million jobs and the longest peacetime expansion in history in february it will be the longest one in history look underneath that the lowest female unemployment in 40 years the lowest single parent household poverty in 42 years the lowest african american unemployment and poverty ever recorded the lowest hispanic unemployment ever recorded the lowest hispanic poverty in a generation the last three years finally people in the bottom of the income groups with their income rising as fast or faster than those in the top this is a democratic recovery and we re going forward together i want to say this about the next 14 months of my term and the decision the american people will make about the leadership of this country the presidency and in the congress for the next four years over thanksgiving i had my whole extended family with me and then we had a few friends come up to camp david and a lot of kids around and i just love that and this beautiful little six year old girl looked at me and she said now how old are you really six year old girl and i said i m 53 and she said that s a lot and lamentably she s right about that and i want to say this and i want every one of you to think about it in my lifetime in my 53 years our country has never had the blessings and the opportunities and therefore the responsibilities it has at this moment we have never had at the same time a strong economy an improving social climate strong self confidence among the american people with the absence of crisis at home or threat abroad we had an economy that was very strong in the early 60s that came a cropper because of the competing demands of civil rights and poverty at home and the war in vietnam abroad you can go back all through the 20th century and you will not find a time when we ve had prosperity social progress national self confidence the absence of internal crisis or external threat and what i want to say to you is that imposes on our party not bragging rights for the last seven years but an enormous responsibility to keep the american people focused on the future anybody can take a deep breath and summon themselves to great efforts in tough times the great british essayist samuel johnson said nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of one s own destruction every one of us can remember when times were tough and we got right at it but also most people can remember a time in your personal life your family life your business life when things were going so well you just lost your concentration or became indulgent or got distracted this country faces a great choice here the vice president talked about the tax cut that congress passed that i vetoed i was so proud of the american people because times are good and people have been through tough times and a lot of people still have difficulties in their own lives and they could have said hey give us a break here don t tell me about paying off the debt for the first time since 1835 or this other rigamarole just show me the money but they didn t do it they said just what he said that we like what we have and we want to go on we want to leave a stronger america for our children we want to get out of debt we want to deal with the aging of america we want to be able to invest in our children s education what i want to tell you i think that s what is at stake here whether we will assume the responsibility of our success or indulge ourselves and squander it you know you can say whatever you want to about how i say whatever i say about the vice president everything i said was true and i believe it but i m a lot more interested than the whole country in our children and grandchildren even than i am him i m sitting here talking to you about whether we re going to make the most of this prosperity and i ve been here for 53 years and like the kid said that s a lot and we ve never had this kind of chance before are we going to deal with the aging of america or not we re going to double the number of people over 65 in 30 years i hope to be one of them we can take social security out beyond the life of the baby boomers by doing one simple thing just take the interest we re saving on the debt from not spending the social security surplus and put it into social security and we ought to do that we can lengthen the life of medicare we can provide prescription drug benefits to the 75 percent of our seniors who can t afford the medicine that they need we can radically improve our schools we can deal with the challenge of global warming and all the other environmental challenges and do it with new technology and smart investments that will grow this economy faster not weaken it we can extend economic opportunity to the people and places that have been left behind in spite of all the happy talk unemployment tonight is 73 percent on the pine ridge reservation in south dakota i m going home to the arkansas delta tomorrow right across the river from memphis where the vice president spent countless days and he can tell you that except for the native american reservations the poorest parts of america are still in the delta between memphis and new orleans or in appalachia or in any number of our inner cities or upstate new york which would be 49th in job growth if that were a separate state or the rural areas of new england and any number of other places so i think we ought to give people big incentives to invest there the same incentives we give them to invest in poor areas in latin america and asia and africa to try to grow the american economy now in the places that have been left behind no it s not fashionable to talk about because when i talk about trade i make everybody mad and he s doing a pretty good job of it too but let me just say i think i m right about saying that labor standards and the environment ought to be a part of the global economy and you know i m pro trade i don t think you can make a serious case that the world is not better off and globalization is not a bad thing if you do it right you look at the places he mentioned do you really believe that we would have had to go to war in kosovo and use our military power in bosnia to stop slaughter there if the balkans were the richest place in europe instead of the poorest do you believe we would have had 800 000 people slaughtered in 90 days in rwanda in a tribal war if their incomes were 10 times higher than they are and i have to say you mentioned ireland i ve very proud of the role we played in the irish peace process and i m very proud of senator george mitchell but i want to tell you something you can clap for him but make no mistake about it the fact that some american banks were sending their data processing to be done in northern ireland by poor people who didn t have any other jobs the fact that the irish republic had the fastest growing economy in europe and all those young people saw what was going on in the rest of europe and they said this is nuts let s let it go that had a lot to do with that so we have to find a way to put that human face on the global economy and we ve got to decide who we trust to do it and how to get there finally there are lots of other things we could talk about we ve got to be willing to take on some difficult questions in the future you know all that nice talk al said to me about all these tough decisions that i had to make when we first got together after the election he said you know i ve spent a lot more time in washington and i m going to tell you you can t imagine how hard these decisions are going to be and it s just like developing muscles it s going to be agonizing for you at the beginning and you ve just got to grit your teeth and make them and it will be get easier and easier and easier and like so many things he told me it turned out to be right but it was a lot easier because he was there with me helping me he was right when we took on guns he was right when we took on big tobacco he was right when we took on the health care industry on the patients bill of rights and on so many other issues so we have a lot of things to do now i just want to make one last point i m going to keep working for the next 14 months and i think the best thing i can do for all of our candidates from top to bottom is to try to be the best president i can be and i ll do my best to do that and i am profoundly committed to renting back the house and senate because a lot of those people lost their seats a lot of those people lost their seats because they voted for the economic plan and the voted for the brady bill and they voted for the assault weapons ban and they took the tough decisions and unfortunately they had to stand for reelection in 1994 before the american people knew we were right and we owe it to them and besides that i ve got a minor interest in what happens in new york but let me say to all of you if i had this proverbial encounter tonight and somebody said well you can t stay 14 months you ve got to go and the genie showed up and said i could have not three wishes but one it wouldn t be anything i ve said on this list i would wish for an america that is truly one america that can bridge the lines of race and gender and religion and sexual orientation all these things that divide us if you look around the world today that s why we re going to try to pass the hate crimes bill that s why we re going to try to pass the employment and nondiscrimination act because if you look at the world we re living in at the end of the cold war when people are not artificially bound into blocks where they feel threatened by their very existence it was inevitable that we d have an upsurge of nationalism and some of the things that have happened but it is unconscionable that on the verge of a new millennium when there are 20 000 people making a living on e bay trading when we re about to decode the whole mystery of the human genome when some people think we ll find out what s in the black holes in space in a few years it is unconscionable that the biggest problem society faces is the oldest problem of society which is that we re afraid of prone to hate prone to dehumanize and prone to brutalize people who are different from us thank you there is so much hope around the world i announced yesterday the resumption of talks next week between the israelis and the syrians i know they re working hard to make peace between the israelis and the palestinians we even have the greeks and the turks talking about cyprus we ve got all kinds of things going and for all of the hate crimes and terrible things that have happened in america we re not bedeviled like that but it s still there under the surface one of our major newspapers today had two breathtaking pictures side by side on the front page of the young soldier that was beaten to death and the other young soldier that was convicted of killing him he was beaten to death because he was gay and you know i m not running for anything i m just telling you i felt as a human being i looked at that and my heart ached for that young man whose life was extinguished then my heart ached for that young man whose life was ruined because somewhere along the way people taught him you re not born feeling this way people taught him that it was okay to dehumanize that other young person who wore the uniform of his country both of them have committed to die for this country if i send them some place god forbid which might cost them their lives and yet that happened so i say to you not to bring you down but to lift you up the reason i am working as hard as i can to be a good president the reason i m here with you besides to thank you the reason i feel as strongly as i do about the vice president and all of our campaigns for the senate and the house is that we may never have this chance again and we have to make the most of it and we owe it to the american people to get out there and get our message out stand up fight show up for them every day never forget that the people we re really fighting for are the people that served our food here tonight and their children and countless other people who will never have a chance to come to an event like this and i m telling you if you do what you know to do next year and you tell people what the record is and what we stand for then we ll have a great 14 months and we ll have a great celebration in november of 2000 thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 2 00 bill_clinton thank you first of all fred thank you for what you said and i thank you and lisa for being wonderful friends to me and hillary and to al and tipper gore and to our party i thank jess and betty jo for being here tonight i can t help but say betty jo is the niece of former speaker carl albert who passed away in the last couple of days a great democrat and i had a wonderful talk with his wife today and it reminded me of why i have been a democrat all my life and our thoughts and prayers are with your family i thank bernie and audrey rappaport and gary mauro for their work here and i wanted to acknowledge not only the mayor who i think has done a superb job and senator cain thank you for being here and sally thank you for being here and for being our regional department of education person for all the good work you do but i also want to introduce a former very important person on my white house staff regina montoya who is now a candidate for the house who is here i want you all to help her get elected to congress we need to win this seat thank you she s here i think i got tickled i started laughing all over again when ed rendell was up here talking about the rap that the republican chairman laid on him after the new hampshire primary he said we were the candidate of special interests and he mentioned what did he say trial lawyers labor gays and hollywood let me take you back to 1992 in 1991 i was having the time of my life living in arkansas in the 11th year of my governorship i had had a new lease on life i loved my job i could have done it now to kingdom come but i was really worried about my country because that s the kind of stuff that everybody in washington said and there was a republican line and a democratic line there was a liberal line and a republican line and everybody was struggling to be politically correct and to be as confrontational as possible because that is the only way you would get your 15 seconds on the evening news i suppose it was perfectly good for the people who got on the talk shows all the time and the people who could raise funds for their reelection and stay in but the country was in the ditch even when we were nominally in a recovery we couldn t generate any jobs and we had quadrupled the debt in 12 years and we didn t have much to show for it because we were spending less in real terms on things that we needed like education the reason i ran for president is that i had been working on all this stuff for a long time and it became clear to me there were limits to what any governor or any people could do or people in their private lives could do to turn america around until we had a national government that had it right that had the right philosophy that was dynamic and change oriented and was interested in bringing people together and was committed to creating the conditions and giving people the tools to succeed in a very different world so i admit that what the chairman of the republican party said is right but i don t think he got it right that is i m not ashamed of the fact we ve got a lot of trial lawyers here i m not ashamed of the fact that i think if people have been shafted they ought to be able to go to court and pursue their remedy i also want to say this i m also proud of the fact that we ve had a real relationship this has not been a political deal we haven t 100 percent agreed on everything we ve had a relationship it s like being in a family or an organization or anything else it s real here you know i hear all these our friends in the other party talk about how terrible the trial lawyers are all i want to know is if you guys are so destructive why do we have 21 million jobs and the best economy we ve ever had and the same thing about the labor unions labor enrollments went up last year for the first time in many years i think that s a good thing for people to be organized to be able to not only vent their grievances but more importantly build partnerships for the future and if it s so bad why do we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and why do we have the highest productivity that we can ever remember i plead guilty to believing that we should not deprive people of jobs or subject them to violence just because they re gay i m guilty of that i believe that i think anybody that shows up for work and pays their taxes and are willing to do whatever it takes to be a good citizen of this country ought to be treated with the same amount of respect anybody else that s what i believe and i think the evidence is that that s right in terms of hollywood that s sort of the last refuge of the right wing arsenal there i was the first person not a member of the republican party i was the first political leader in 1993 to go to hollywood and ask them to give me a ratings system for television for children and to reduce the amount of inappropriate material our children were exposed to and not everybody agreed with it but again we re in i have a relationship with a lot of people out there and we got a rating system i wish it worked better now because it s kind of practically it s difficult because you ve got to worry if you re a parent you ve got to worry about the video games and the tv and the movies and all that and we re trying to work through that but the point i want to make is my whole idea about politics is that we ought to run it the way we our country the way we would run we would sensibly run a family or a business or any other common enterprise if you were part of a big charitable endeavor here in dallas i just think that if you look at the way the world works and how it s changing all these trends toward globalization all the threats that are out there from people who are trying to take advantage of globalization for their own ends if you look at all the opportunities that are out there through scientific and technological advances it does not make sense for us in this year to revert to the patterns that i have spent seven years trying to break everybody has got we re going to divide up sides now and if you re a liberal you ve got to be over here and if your a conservative you ve got to be over here and here s your line attacking them and here s your line attacking the other and let s don t worry about whether we ever get anything done or not i think this is nuts none of you live like this and none of you have any role at all like this except when you vote we re supposed to be like this i have worked for seven long years with the help of people in my administration people like you to prove that we could have a unifying vision that would bring this country together not in the middle of the road but in a dynamic movement forward and look seven years ago we had a terrible economy and now we ve got the longest economic expansion in history seven years ago we had worsening social problems and now we ve got the lowest welfare and crime rates in 30 years and the lowest poverty rates in 20 years this works and it s not rocket science and if somebody asked me well what is the difference what did you really do that was different as president and you only get a sentence or two i would not say our economic policy although we have a good one i think and it s different or our crime policy although we have a good one and it s different or our welfare policy although we have a good one and it s different or even our education policy which is profoundly different from what was done before i would say i believe that everybody counts everybody deserves a chance and we all do better when we try to help each other and i believe that we don t get anywhere by denying the challenges that are before us so that we can continue the comfortable arguments that we ve been making in the past instead of taking the uncomfortable but exhilarating march into the future that s what this whole deal has been about and that s what i tried to say in the state of the union address anybody that s over 30 years old we ve got a few people who aren t in this room so they will have to learn this but anybody that s over 30 years old can remember at least one time if not more in your life when you made a real bad mistake not because times were tough but because times were so good you didn t think anything could go wrong and so you just didn t want to do what you knew that you ought to do keep planning keep thinking about the future make the tough decisions now better to be diverted better to lay down and rest better to just indulge yourself for the moment anybody who has lived any length of time has made a mistake under those circumstances that is the question that is facing the united states today and the consequences are far greater for the nation than they are for any of us in our personal lives because we have never had this kind of chance before so what i tried to say at the state of the union what i want to say again to you i hope you will hammer home to everyone you can talk about this year is that if there was ever a time when we ought to have an election that was a unifying referendum on our common future it is this one because the economy is in good shape the society is in good shape we ve got a lot of confidence we have relatively few internal crises or external threats there is nothing to prevent us from saying okay what s out there that s a big problem or a big opportunity and let s go deal with it and if we do both we will be able to literally make the future of our dreams for our children that s what i think the democrats ought to be saying this year and that is what we represent we shouldn t be denying that we ought to change if somebody who was running for president said vote for me i ll do just what bill clinton did i d vote against that person because we live in a dynamic time but if somebody says vote for me i d like to go back to the way it was in 1992 and before i would certainly vote against that person so the question is not whether we re going to change it is how so i think if you know the number of people over 65 is going to double you have to meet the challenge of the aging of america putting it off will only make it more expensive and more painful today we can save social security for the baby boom generation extend the life of medicare and add a prescription drug benefit for the 60 percent of the seniors that don t have access to one we can do it today we have the money and we have the reforms to save money and we ought to do it if we know that education is more important than ever before and we ve got more kids from more diverse backgrounds we should act today to make sure all our kids start school ready to learn and graduate ready to succeed head start after school programs school repairs and building and modernizing schools hooking them all up to the internet training the teachers better the whole nine yards there is no excuse for us not doing this test scores are up graduation rates are up college going rates are up but not near where they ought to be but enough so that we know what to do it would be different if we didn t know what to do we know what to do now we don t have an excuse so to squander this moment in education would be a great error in health care i was always one of my friends in the congress came up to me the other day and they said you know they told me the insurance companies said if i voted for your health care plan back in 1994 the number of uninsured people would actually go up and he said they were absolutely right i voted for it and there s more uninsured people today than there was when i voted for it so we had to find a different approach the only social indicator just about that s worse today than it was in 93 when i took office is that there are more americans who work for a living without health insurance so we got this program and i wish you would look at this some of you by the way who work with the agencies in texas we ve got this program that will enroll 5 million kids in the children s health insurance program of lower income working people who can t get health insurance on the job we ve got 2 million enrolled now we ve got money for 3 million more a lot of the ones who aren t enrolled are still in texas for a lot of good reasons i m not criticizing anybody but we just need to go out there and get those kids in there and i d like the congress to say their parents can be enrolled too and i d like the congress to let people between 55 and 65 who don t have insurance it s the fastest growing group of uninsured people people who take early retirement they re not old enough for medicare they don t have insurance i think they ought to be able to buy into medicare and we ought to give them a modest tax credit so it s affordable now this is a big issue we know that more and more parents will work either they will be single parents working or two parent households where both people will be working if we know that and we know right now that for all of our success america does less to support work and family that is to help working parents succeed as child rearers which is the most important job anybody can have if we know we don t do enough we should do more we know more and more families as people live longer are going to be taking care of aging or disabled relatives we should do more so i recommended to the congress to increase our support for the child care tax credit to give families a long term care credit for caring for elderly or disabled loved ones to give parents a tax deduction for college tuition up to 10 000 a year so we can open the doors of four years of college to all americans these are big things why because we know there will be big problems 10 or 20 or 30 years from now if we don t deal with them right now and i could go on and on i don t want to give you the whole state of the union address but the point i m trying to make is the democratic party is now in a position to say we have the resources we ve worked very hard to get rid of this deficit we ve worked very hard to pay the debt down and we ve now got the resources to deal with the aging of america the challenge of the children and their education the challenge of health care the challenge of balancing work and family we can do it and still get this country out of 13 years and still provide extra incentives to places like where i was this morning in the rio grande valley to give people extra incentives to invest in urban neighborhoods rural areas indian reservations where our prosperity hasn t reached and why do we do all that because we believe everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance and we all do better when we help each other that s what i believe nobody believes the democrats anymore are weak on the budget weak on the economy weak on welfare weak on crime but we do believe that if somebody is trying we ought to help them make the most of their lives and we now have seven years of evidence that that s not only a morally defensible thing to do it not only makes us feel better it actually works so i will close with this and i don t want to be maudlin but i can pretty well say what i want to because i m not running for anything first time in over two decades i haven t been on the ballot for anything some of those guys on the other side may write me out just to they may feel deprived that they re being cut out of one more chance to vote against me but i m not on the ballot so i m just telling you this as a citizen once before in my lifetime i thought we had a chance to build the future of our dreams in the last economic expansion that was until this month the longest one in history it ran from 1961 to 1969 i graduated from high school in 1964 and i think it s appropriate that i say this here most of the people who now look back at that period date the onset of american cynicism to the assassination of president kennedy that is dead wrong that is wrong the country was heartbroken but they rallied they united they tried to lift themselves up lyndon johnson did a good job of moving the country forward and we believed when i graduated from high school that we were going to solve the civil rights crisis and the poverty problems of america through the orderly legislative process in congress and working with people we believed we were going to be able to stand against communism without having an unacceptable cost at home or around the world we believed that we could do this four years later i was at my college graduation two days after robert kennedy was killed 90 days after martin luther king was killed 94 days after lyndon johnson said he wouldn t run for reelection the economy was beginning to shut down the country was torn apart over vietnam and we had had riots in the streets of america i have waited as an american over 30 years for my country to get another chance to build the future of our dreams for our children most of us get at least one second chance in life and if we didn t we d be a long way behind where we are our country in our lifetime has this chance in even better circumstances than existed 30 years ago with science and technology changes that are breathtaking i believe that the young women here may very likely give birth to children who will have a life expectancy of 100 years they will come home from the hospital with genetic road maps of their children s lives and if they give birth to young daughters that have one of those two broken genes that are high predictors of breast cancer they ll be able to take gene therapies that will block them from ever developing in the first place i believe that will happen i believe the young people here will soon be driving automobiles that get probably 80 90 miles a gallon and within five years they ll be running on biofuels that will be the equivalent of getting 500 miles to the gallon because they require so little oil to produce i believe we ll find out what s in those black holes in outer space i believe we ll be able to keep people with diabetes adult onset diabetes alive and healthy to a normal life span i believe that we will actually develop computers the size of a tear drop that use dna for computer memories more powerful than any human chip so that you will have tiny little computers with a computing power of all the super computers today i believe all this is going to happen i think we ll also have to deal with highly sophisticated terrorists and organized criminals and drug runners that have access to chemical and biological and other weapons there will always be enemies of civilization out there but we ll do just fine if we understand that it still comes down to whether you believe everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance we re all going to do better if we work together for 30 years i have waited for this moment if i contributed at all to it i am grateful but as a citizen i am implore you don t let america turn away from what works when we ve finally got a chance to redeem the whole promise of our nation thank you dem wjclinton9 2 94 bill_clinton thank you adele hays for this fine program we came here to celebrate today and thank you mr saxton for having us here i was a little uncomfortable about how hard you all laughed at the it occurred to me that this could be one of the great moments in american history for people who hate politicians you ve got the president the vice president half the cabinet and a substantial portion of the congress all in jail at the same time i want to say a special word of thanks too to juseph mundo because i know how hard it was for him to stand up here and give that talk and i thank you sir for doing it we have introduced a lot of people here today and i don t want to lengthen that but there are two people that i think it s very very important to recognize as i get into what our administration s approach to the drug issue will be because it is clear to me and has been for some time from personal experience that we have to have in order to succeed here an enormous effort across this country that goes way beyond the federal government and way beyond law enforcement that involves citizens supporting our common effort and involves some pretty sweeping cultural changes and there are two americans who have done as much to try to fight the drug problem in that way as any people who live in our country i d like to ask them to stand and be recognized the former secretary of what was then the department of health education and welfare the director of the center on addiction and substance abuse at columbia university joe califano thank you joe and one of our country s most distinguished leaders and the chairman of the partnership for a drug free america mr jim burke is also here ladies and gentlemen we came here for a real purpose to announce our antidrug strategy i do believe it is the most comprehensive one ever but we wanted to come here to illustrate that this is an issue which must be dealt with person by person one at a time it s a very human problem and that it requires those of us who are trying to deal with it to take certain steps and those who have already suffered from alcohol or drug abuse to take even stronger steps i believe very much in what we are doing today from two angles one is the first job i ever had the courtesy of the voters was the job of attorney general i started out in a law enforcement job second is that i have had the questionable privilege of living in a family that has dealt with both alcoholism and drug abuse i know treatment works i also know that it is important to be tough as well as caring and what we are trying to do today is to start our government on course that offers the promise of real results to the american people when i asked lee brown to come and be head of the office of drug policy i told him that for the first time ever i would make the director a member of my cabinet that i recognized that it was folly to believe that 100 or 125 or for that matter 1 000 people working in a federal office in washington could change the habits and the policies of the american people that we had to enlist the entire government and i dare say this is probably the first time that we ve ever had seven cabinet members on a stage at the same time all manifesting their commitment to dealing with this issue and there are many others we ll have a total of 10 just in the next two days who will be announcing their part of this battle to implement this strategy we also have here the director of our aids effort the head of the internal revenue service the head of the secret service we have an enormous number of federal officials here who are not on this stage who have a big part of this endeavor i say this to illustrate the fact that we have really tried to be very realistic very hard headed to try to take some time to think about what it is we can do and what it is the rest of america has to do to reinvigorate this nation s fight against the surge of drugs we know we have to build on the works of parents and community leaders who did so much to bring down casual drug use in the 1980s we know we have to add to the staffs of law enforcement authorities who have proved there are things you can do that work we know that where energies have been deployed effectively whether it was cracking down on pushers cracking down on drug networks or building up people like this man who spoke so eloquently today that they can make progress we also know some pretty tough facts we know that hard core drug abuse in america has continued unabated we know that its persistence represents the threat to the stability of our society and the economic future of our country we know that no nation can fight crime and drugs without dealing honestly and forthrightly with the problem of drug addiction as i said in my state of the union address we need an approach to crime and drugs that is both tough and smart we very often have one without the other and we pay the price for that as well the crime bill and this strategy we announced today puts more into law enforcement than we ve ever put before it does more to keep drugs off the street it does more than ever before to help hard core drug users into treatment programs where they belong it is a new national attack on drug addiction the craving for drugs is an enormous factor in a lot of our problems the rise of violence the spread of aids the spiraling costs of health care every time i have one of my town meetings on health care i tell the american people we have to do some things to provide health care to all americans and bring down the cost but we have to be honest no health care proposal can solve all the problems that lead american health care to be more expensive than any other country and one big one health care cannot solve is the fact that we pay more for violence because we ve got our emergency rooms full of people who have been cut up and shot we pay more to deal with aids and both those things are the direct result in large measure of our very high rate of drug abuse you know it and i know it so if we want to deal with this problem we have to face it you also heard mr mundo say in such powerful terms that he lost everything we know that drug abuse is a big factor in the breakdown of families in the increase in joblessness in the increase in homelessness how many people every day when i go out for my run at the white house i see what seems like an everincreasing number of people who are living homeless within three or four blocks of the white house and you know every one of them has a personal life story many of them a story that involves drugs we know if you go to any children s hospital in any sizeable city today and you go to the ward where the little babies are you ll see baby after baby after baby born with an addiction to drugs we know that now many of our streets are too dangerous to walk and our schools even dangerous to attend i met a young man about a year ago from chicago who was a big strapping handsome young fellow who wanted to really make something of his life and he said that he knew he had to get an education to do it but he was scared to walk from home to school to get the ticket out of his neighborhood i ve had that scene replayed many times just in the last year with other people if we want to therefore reduce crime and cut health care costs and reform our welfare system if we want to rebuild our families and our communities all these things require a serious effort to curb the use of drugs part of it is enforcement the crime bill now before the congress is part of that strategy it would put another 100 000 police officers on the street it would provide boot camps for juvenile offenders it would provide dramatic increases in support for drug courts very successful drug courts like the ones in florida new york california and the district where court ordered rehabilitation programs have cleaned people up and freed prison cells for truly violent criminals the miami drug court has treated 4 500 first offenders since 1987 with a rearrest rate of only 11 percent we know these kinds of initiatives will support the efforts of community grass roots efforts like the one sponsored by monsignor east and his parishioners in washington who started an orange hat brigade where community leaders patrol streets in bright orange hats sending a message that drugs and drug trade won t be tolerated there are thousands of groups like this all across america who work with police to shut down crack houses and take the neighborhoods back last friday the vice president and the cabinet outlined our new plan to help residents of public housing rid themselves of crime and drugs we can t do that unless people at the grass roots participate and take the lead but we have to also do our part the most effective things mobilize all the resources of a community and that s what our strategy seeks to support we also seek to support a new more drug free america through prevention we need to reach people before they get started through prevention and early intervention especially among our young people before they enter middle school much less high school or college the latest statistics show an increase in drug use among the young our children need a constant drum beat reminder that drugs are not safe drugs are not good drugs are illegal there will be consequences for using them i know a lot of these programs work i saw them work in the schools where my child attended when she was very very young i saw the impact that a law enforcement officer in a uniform talking to children who had never before had a positive human personal relationship with an authority figure could have in these schools i know we can do it and our proposal provides a substantial increase in funds to support those kinds of activities we also know we have to do more in the workplace drugfree programs that work can be every bit as important and effective as drug free programs at school our strategy supports programs like these and calls on everyone in a position of influence to do their part finally we have to have some more effort at treatment this strategy recognizes that drug addiction is a disease that it can and should be treated and that treatment can work as adele said we re letting hard core drug users know that if you re an addict caught in the cycle of drug abuse we can help you to get the help you need our goal is to get 140 000 more hard core users into treatment in the next year 140 000 more targeting chronic hard core users including adults and juveniles under the supervision of criminal authorities along with pregnant women and children every dollar we spend on treatment will save seven dollars america is losing today it will make up for lost productivity it will safe money we are using now to fight the problem instead of to prevent it this target is a significant start that allows us to expand programs as the effectiveness of service and research findings grow one of the most important parts from your perspective of our health care proposal is that it would include drug treatment as part of health care coverage this is a very important thing we have to recognize that until we have the appropriate level of treatment on demand without delay we will continue to pay for a problem that we can reduce you know treatment works it s time for the congress to recognize it in the form of the budgets we have presented and for america to aggressively embrace it in the way you have at this institution we also recognize we need to try to do something to control the supply strategy calls for what we strongly believe is an improvement of our international drug control program shifting away from a policy that was focused largely on interdiction that is stopping the drugs when they were on the way to the united states to a three pronged approach working with countries in which drugs are grown that have the political will to go after the kingpins in those countries destroying the cartels that grow rich from supplying our people with drugs and continuing our interdiction effort hopefully with better technology and smarter efforts that allow us to interdict even more drugs that is very important we should not stop it but we must supplement those efforts so that we can be more successful dr brown has said yes we want to continue our presence at the border to interdict drugs but we don t want to wait for people at the border anymore he says he s tired of swatting hornets he d rather go after the hornet s nest and that s a pretty good line i might say our friends and neighbors beyond our borders should welcome this we have seen in nation after nation how international drug trafficking is a threat to democratic institutions it fuels human rights abuses and terrorism against the innocent it undermines legitimate broad based economic development it contributes to regional instability many of the countries that deal with this problem will never become what they want to be until they re able to be rid of it we ought to help them for ourselves and for their own people as well this is an important part of our foreign policy toward major source countries and major transit countries we have to make it an important part of our commitment to promoting democracy economic reform and human rights none of that s going to happen in countries dominated by people who dictate events because of the profits of the drug trade finally let me end where i began from my own personal experience in my family as well as my work in law enforcement as an attorney general and a governor i believe still that once it occurs drug addiction has to be overcome one person at a time in the past year as president i ve spoken about drugs on 85 separate occasions and i can keep talking about this until i once again lose my voice but you and i know that we re not going to make a dent in this problem except by having it happen one person at a time if this man had not chosen to take some responsibility for his own life then this fine program would still be just another expenditure of taxpayer money the newly inaugurated mayor of detroit dennis archer offered a challenge to his city when he was sworn into office i d like to quote it for you now because it equals what i think we re facing he said and i quote to the people of detroit stand with me when i tell the dope man to get off our streets to leave our children alone to get out of our way we re taking back our streets and we re taking back our children well mayor archer can t do it alone monsignor east can t do it alone but this administration and the entire weight of state and local government can t do it alone either the people of this country have got to take responsibility for themselves their children and their neighbors if we work with them if we say we know hard core drug users can t do it alone the help they need is treatment the help they need is support then i think we can make a real profound difference i want every american every member of congress every state official everybody who works for a mayor or a city government to join me in putting this strategy to work this is a national strategy not a federal strategy i don t want it to become partisan in any way shape or form this should unite us in america people in the private sector people in government people at the local level people at the national level republicans and democrats people who are inside this institution and people who are beyond its walls we have a common interest in saving our country and all of us have a personal responsibility to pursue this drug strategy we announce today is our attempt to be your partner and pursue our personal responsibility and together together we can do it thank you very much dem wjclinton9 2 95 bill_clinton chancellor kohl members of the german delegation members of the diplomatic corps distinguished guests on occasions like this i normally rise to say how very much i ve enjoyed spending time with a distinguished head of state i enjoyed today but after all it was helmut kohl s third visit to the white house since i have been president he s been here so many times during his 12 years as chancellor that on his last trip here he took me to his favorite restaurant in washington i m happy to announce that after this dinner chancellor kohl will be conducting tours of the white house helmut kohl has become a good and trusted friend of mine as he had been a good and trusted friend of the united states for as long as he s been in public life hillary and i were deeply touched last summer by the famous palatinate hospitality which he and mrs kohl showed to us when he took us to his home town of oggersheim i must say i felt right at home when we turned down the street on which the kohls live and the whole neighborhood turned out to say hello i hope that chancellor kohl feels at home here and i hope someday i ll have the opportunity to take you to my home believe me the whole neighborhood will show up even before helmut kohl became chancellor american leaders were drawn to rhineland pfalz in 1788 a couple of years before helmut became chancellor thomas jefferson traveled along the rhine he loved the paintings he saw in dusseldorf but he was annoyed that the westphalians thought they were the only people who smoked their hams they didn t know virginians did it too when he traveled farther south to the palatinate he said he had entered what he called our second mother country because so many people from that region had settled in america and their customs had become american ones history does not record whether thomas jefferson sampled that famous regional dish saumagen but i have thanks to helmut kohl when hillary and i went home with the kohls i was remembered that real leadership does not begin in theories but in places and lives like those i saw in oggersheim in the homes that we love and the people and the customs that make us who we are we are all proud of the ties that bind us together the german language sums up the richness of those bonds in a single almost untranslatable word heimat here in the united states my attachment to my roots has become somewhat legendary but no world leader has more love for his heimat than helmut kohl a leader who keeps his heimat in his heart will always remember what people want most the certainty that their children will inherit a more peaceful more prosperous more rich world in terms of the human spirit today we worked hard to advance those shared goals goals which have bound our people together for nearly 50 years now and goals which will take us together into the 21st century ladies and gentlemen let us raise a glass to the friendship between the people of the united states and the people of germany and to the chancellor who has done so much to make it better dem wjclinton9 2 98 bill_clinton thank you very much special thanks to those of you who had to wait all night to get in hope you won t be disappointed mr vice president father o donovan to all the groups here who are concerned with social security especially to congressman penny and the concord coalition and john rother and the aarp i thank you all for being here i thank senator bob kerrey who when he cast the decisive vote for our budget in 1993 said that he would do so only if i were also committed to dealing with the long term structural problems of social security to heal the deficit there as well i thank gene sperling and the members of my staff who worked with us on this and thank you mannone butler for embodying what this struggle is all about weren t you proud of her she did a great job i think thank you very much when i first ran for president six and a half years ago now i came to this hall to set out my vision for 21st century america and a strategy for achieving it often in the years since i have come back here to discuss our nation s most demanding challenges and on many occasions but none more relevant than today i have recalled the assertion of my freshman professor in the history of civilizations course carroll quigley that the distinguishing characteristic of western civilization in general and the united states of america in particular is what he called future preference the idea that the future can be better than the present or the past that each of us has a personal moral responsibility to work to make it so to plan for it to work for it to invest for it there is no better example of that principle for the strength of america than the opportunity and the duty all of us as americans have now to save social security for the 21st century so today i return to discuss what we have to do to achieve that and why it is so important you know there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a ufo than that they would draw social security and others may think that it s a long way off as mannone said and the vice president said he thought it was a long way off a couple of days ago i went to new mexico to visit our national labs you may have seen the story and our national labs at los alamos and sandia and lawrence livermore where we do a lot of the research that not only helps us to preserve the security of our smaller and smaller nuclear arsenal but helps us to deal with our environmental questions and a lot of other fascinating challenges of the future but anyway after i finished this i had lunch with a few of my friends including a man that i went to georgetown with and at the end of the lunch he whipped out this photo and gave it to me and we were sitting in a park together about a week after i graduated in 1968 and i looked at that photo and i said my goodness where did all the time go it seems like it was yesterday to me i say that to make this point it may seem a long way away from the time you now where you are until you will need retirement it may seem a long way away before most of your parents need retirement but it isn t and great societies plan over long periods of time so that individual lives can flower and take root and take form and that is what we have to do today social security is a lot more than a line in the budget it reflects some of our deepest values the duties we owe to our parents the duties we owe to each other when we re differently situated in life the duties we owe to our children and our grandchildren indeed it reflects our determination to move forward across the generations and across the income divides in our country as one america social security has been there for america s parents in the 20th century and i am determined that we will have that kind of security for the american people in the 21st century we are entering this new millennium the new century with restored confidence the information age a growing global economy they re changing the way we live and work and the scope and pace of change well it may seem commonplace to those of you who have grown up with it but to people my age it is still truly astonishing and i can tell you it is without historical precedent for a long time our country failed to come to grips with those changes and we paid the price in a stagnant economy and increasing inequality among our working families in higher child poverty in record welfare rolls higher crime rates other deepening social problems before the present era we had only run budget deficits and the deficit i think came to symbolize what was amiss with the way we were dealing with the changes in the world we had only run budget deficits for sound economic reasons either because there were some overwhelming need to invest or because there was a recession that required stimulation of the economy or because there was a national emergency like war the idea that we would just simply have a structural deficit and run one year in and year out was unheard of but that is exactly what has happened throughout your lifetime and it got so bad in the 1980s that between 1981 and 1992 the total debt of the country was quadrupled quadrupled in a 12 year period over and above the previous 200 years that raised interest rates it took more and more tax money away from investments in education for example or the environment to pay interest on the debt it slowed economic growth and it definitely compromised your future five years ago i determined that we had to set a different course to move past the debate that was then paralyzing washington and frankly didn t have much to do with the real world between those who said government was the enemy those who said government was the solution and as long as you can fight about something then you don t have to get down to the nitty gritty of dealing with the real problems when the british prime minister was here last week tony blair we stressed that we both think and many other leaders increasingly around the world are beginning to think that this debate is fruitless and that there has to be a third way that 21st century government information age government must be smaller must be less bureaucratic must be fiscally disciplined and focus on being a catalyst for new ideas and giving you and all other americans the tools they need to make the most of their own lives for five years we have reduced the size of the deficit reduced the size of government dramatically reduced the budget deficit by over 90 percent but continued to invest in your future and in very dramatic ways that s changed the experience of going to college student loans that are guaranteed by the government have been made less expensive and easier to repay there are hundreds of thousands of more pell grant scholarships 300 000 more work study slots americorps has allowed 100 000 young people to earn money for college while serving in their community there are now tax free ira accounts for college education last year we enacted the hope scholarship which is a 1 500 tax credit for the first two years of college and then there s a lifetime learning tax credit for junior and senior years for graduate schools and for adults who have to go back for further training for the first time in history while reducing the deficit by 90 percent we can honestly say if you re willing to work for it whatever your circumstances you can go on to college in the united states and that is a very important achievement now all of these things have worked together to give us the strongest economy in a generation almost 15 million new jobs the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years the lowest inflation rate in 30 years the highest homeownership in history average incomes rising again i ve submitted to congress for 1999 the first balanced budget in 30 years all that is a remarkable achievement but as i said we have to be thinking about the future and all of you know to a greater or lesser degree of specificity every one of you know that the social security system is not sound for the long term so that all of these achievements the economic achievements our increasing social coherence and cohesion our increasing efforts to reduce poverty among our youngest children all of them are threatened by the looming fiscal crisis in social security today i want to talk about what it is and how we propose to deal with it and as the vice president said we should use the economic good times that old saying that you don t wait for a rainy day to fix the roof is good for us today it s very sunny outside and on this sunny day we should deal with social security in very specific terms we ve got a great opportunity because it is projected that we stay with the present budget plan that taking account of the fact that we won t always have the greatest economic times as we ve had now there will be times when the economy will grow faster times when it will grow slower we may recessions but structurally we have eliminated the deficit so that over time we should have a balanced budget and over time most times we should be running a surplus now if we stay with the discipline we have now over the next couple of decades now if that s so it is now estimated that with normal ups and downs in economic growth over the next 10 years after 30 years of deficits that the united states will have a budget surplus in somewhere in the range of a trillion dollars in the aggregate over the next 10 years i have said before we spend a penny of that on new programs or tax cuts we should save social security first i think it should be the driving principle of this year s work in the united states congress do not have a tax cut do not have a spending program that deals with that surplus save social security first that is our obligation to you and frankly to ourselves and let me explain that this fiscal crisis in social security affects every generation we now know that the social security trust fund is fine for another few decades but if it gets in trouble and we don t deal with it then it not only affects the generation of the baby boomers and whether they ll have enough to live on when they retire it raises the question of whether they will have enough to live on by unfairly burdening their children and therefore unfairly burdening their children s ability to raise their grandchildren that would be unconscionable especially since if you move now we can do less and have a bigger impact especially since we now have the budget surplus let me back up just a minute mostly for the benefit of the young people in the audience to talk a little bit about the importance of this effort it s hard for even people in my generation to understand this much less yours but early in this century to be old meant to be poor to be old meant to be poor the vast majority of people over 65 in america early in this century were living in poverty their reward for a lifetime of work for doing right by their children for helping with their grandchildren unless their kids could take care of them was living in poverty if you ever have a chance you ought to read some of the books that have thousands of letters that older people sent to president roosevelt begging him in the words of one typical letter writer to eliminate and i quote the stark terror of penniless helpless old age that s what prompted president roosevelt to launch the social security system in 1935 to create what he called the cornerstone of a civilized society now for more than half a century social security has been a dramatic success if you just look at the first chart over here on the right you will see that in 1959 i don t see as well as i once did the poverty rate among seniors was still 35 percent as recently as 1959 still over a third of seniors lived in poverty by 1979 it had dropped to 15 2 percent by 1996 it had dropped to 10 8 percent to give you an idea of the profound success of the program over the last 30 years as you know there have been increasing number of children being raised in single parent households where the incomes are not so high the child poverty rate in america is almost twice that but no one can begrudge that so the first thing we need to say is social security has succeeded in ending the stark terror of a penniless old age and that is a terrific achievement for the american society now it s also known however that the changes that are underway today will place great stresses on the social security safety net the baby boomers are getting grey when my generation retires and i m the oldest of the baby boomers i was born in 1946 i m 51 and the generation is normally held to run for the 18 years after that that s normally what people mean when they talk about the baby boomers it will dramatically change the ratio of workers to earners aggravated by increasing early retirements and other things offset by gradual increase in the social security retirement age enacted back in 1983 so if you look at that that s the second chart here in 1960 there were 5 1 americans working for every one person drawing social security in 1997 there s still 3 3 people working for every one person drawing social security in 2030 the year after the social security trust fund supposedly will go broke unless we change something at present projected retirement rates that is the presently projected retirement age and same rates there will be two people working for every one person drawing social security now if you look at that plus the present investment patterns of the funds of which are designed to secure 100 percent security and therefore get a somewhat lower return in return for 100 percent security for the investments that s what will cause the problem so if you look at the presently projected retirement and the presently projected returns that will cause the problem it s very important you understand this once you understand this you realize this is not an episode from the x files and you re not more likely to see a ufo if you do certain specific things on the other hand if you don t do anything one of two things will happen either it will go broke and you won t ever get it or if we wait too long to fix it the burden on society of taking care of our generation s social security obligations will lower your income and lower your ability to take care of your children to a degree most of us who are your parents think would be horribly wrong and unfair to you and unfair to the future prospects of the united states so what s the bottom line you can see it today we re actually taking in a lot more money from social security taxes enacted in 1983 than we re spending out because we ve run deficits none of that money has been saved for social security now if you look at this little chart here from 1999 forward we ll be able to save that money or a lot of it anyway we ll be able to save a lot of it that will go into pure surplus in the budget it can be invested but other things will have to be done as well that will not be enough and if nothing is done by 2029 there will be a deficit in the social security trust fund which will either require if you just wait until then a huge tax increase in the payroll tax or just about a 25 percent cut in social security benefits and let me say today social security i want to put that in too because i want you all to start thinking about this social security was conceived as giving a floor for life it is not enough to sustain the standard of living of almost any retiree retiring today so you also will have to make provisions for your own retirement savings and you should start early when you go out and go to work with a 401 k plan or whatever but this is what is going to happen unless we change if we change now we can make a big difference i should also point out that social security also goes to the spouses of people when their widowed social security also goes to the disabled there s a social security disability program cassandra wilkins who s here with us who the vice president recognized ran the social security disability program for me when i was governor it s a very important program but all of these things should be seen in terms of these economic realities now again i say if we act soon less is more if we can develop a consensus as a country to act soon we can take relatively modest steps in any number of directions to run this 2029 number well out into the future in ways that will keep social security s role in providing some retirement security to people without unfairly burdening your generation and your ability to raise your children to do that and i can tell you i have had countless talks with baby boomers of all income groups and i haven t found a single person in my generation who is not absolutely determined to fix this in a way that does not unfairly burden your generation but we have to start now we have to join together and face the facts we have to rise above partisanship just the way we did when we forced the historic balanced budget agreement this is as you can well see this is reducible to stark mathematical terms this need not become a partisan debate oh there ought to be a debate a good debate on what the best way to invest the funds are there ought to be a good debate on what the best trade offs are between the changes that will have to be made but it ought to be done with a view toward making america stronger and again preserving the ties that bind us across the generations i have asked the america association of retired persons the aarp a leading voice for older americans and the concord coalition a leading voice for fiscal discipline to organize a series of four nonpartisan regional forums this year the vice president and i will participate i hope the republican and democratic leadership will also participate i was encouraged that speaker gingrich said the other day that he felt we should save the surplus until we had fixed the social security first the first forum which will set out before the american people the full nature of the problem essentially what i m doing with you today with a few more details will be in kansas city on april 7th then in subsequent ones we will hear from a variety of experts and average citizens across all ages it is very important to me that this debate involve young people very important because you have a huge stake in it and you need to imagine where you will be and what kind of investment patterns you think are fair for you and how you think this is going to play out over the next 20 30 40 years we want people of all ages involved in this this national call also will spread to every corner of the country to every member of congress there are other private groups which have to play a role the pew charitable trust has launched a vital public information campaign americans discuss social security on march 21st i will help kick off the first of many of their town hall meetings and teleconferences now when we go out across the country and share the information and get people s ideas then at the end of the year in december i will convene a historic white house conference on social security and then in a year i will call together the republican and democratic leaders of the house and senate to begin drafting comprehensive bipartisan landmark legislation to save the social security system this national effort will require the best of our people and i think it will get the best of our people it will ask us to plan for the future it will ask us to be open to new ideas not to be hide bound and believe that we can see the future through the prism of the past but it will ask us to hold on to the old values that lifted our senior citizen from the burden of abject poverty to the dignity of a deserved good solid old age keep in mind most of you who are sitting out here can look forward to a life expectancy well into your 80s most of you by the time you get to be my age if you live to be my age your life expectancy will probably be by then 90 or more we re going to have to rethink this whole thing but we have to do it with a view towards preserving the principles and the integrity of our society binding us together across the generations and across the income divides we can do this president roosevelt often called us to the spirit of bold persistent experimentation we will have to do that but he also reminded us that our greatest challenges we can only meet as one nation and we must remember that with our increasing diversity and the way we work and live and our racial and ethnic and other backgrounds religious backgrounds we still have to be when it comes to treating people with dignity and fulfilling our obligations to one another one nation acting today for the future is in some ways the oldest of american traditions it s what thomas jefferson did when he purchased the louisiana territory and sent lewis and clark on their famous expedition it s what abraham lincoln did when at the height of the civil war he and the congress took the time to establish a system of land grant colleges which revolutionized the future of america it s what we americans did when in the depths of the depression when people were only concerned about the moment and 25 percent of the american people were out of work our congress and our president still took the time to establish a social security system that could only take flower and have full impact long after they were gone that is what we do when we do best what professor quigley called future preference what i prefer is a future in which my generation can retire those who are not as fortunate as me can retire in dignity but we can do it in a way that does not burden you and your ability to raise our grandchildren because i believe the best days of this country lie ahead of us if we fulfill our responsibilities today for tomorrow thank you very much dem wjclinton9 3 00a bill_clinton thank you all very much please be seated i am delighted to be here today it s wonderful to see many of you again and some of you for the first time i want to thank congressman kennedy and congressman kildee for the work they have done to build the bridges of cooperation and mutual effort with the tribes of our country i want to thank dick gephardt for being a truly outstanding leader of our party in the house of representatives you know i m not on the ballot this year most days i m okay with it but when i vote it will be along with a lot of other americans whom i believe will make him the next speaker of the house of representatives and it will be a good thing for america when he is because he s an outstanding man i want to thank all the other members who have come here today to be with you to express their support george miller from california a long time champion of tribal causes maxine waters jim maloney and carolyn maloney and i want to thank nancy keenan from montana for running i knew nancy keenan before she ever thought she d be running for congress and way before anybody including my mother thought i d ever be president so i am delighted to see her here as a candidate i can tell you she is i think one of the most outstanding candidates we have anywhere in the united states and she will profoundly enrich the united states congress if she is elected as i firmly expect her to be and she s over there wearing her jeanette rankin for congress button to remind the people of her fellow state her fellow montanans that it s been too long since a woman represented montana to congress i thank bobby whitefeather for the invocation it was very moving some of you have visited me in the oval office have seen that in front of there are basically three windows behind the president s desk and the one directly behind my desk i have a table on which i keep military coins and the one just to the right of that is filled with a drum an indian drum made by a tribe in the southwest when we were debating the nafta treaty and on the face of this drum there is a native american a native canadian and a native mexican and then i have in the drums the eagle feathers i ve received from various tribal leaders around the country and other gifts i now have a beautiful eagle feather headdress i received just a couple of weeks ago and a pouch of tobacco which has great symbolic significance as all of you know i have a number of other things that i ve collected from native peoples in other parts of the world to remind me that these challenges are present everywhere a necklace made for me by a native hawaiian a baobab nut carved for me by an australian aboriginal but i have kept the native american present in the oval office from the beginning of my presidency for over seven years now to remind me of my solemn obligation to respect the nation to nation relationship that i have done everything i could to nurture to build up and to honor in my private office in the white house and every president s got a private office on the second floor of the white house a different room i have things that mean a lot to me personally i have an old old painting of benjamin franklin to remind me of the importance of enterprise and effort and ingenuity in private as well as public life i have a picture of my friend yitzak rabin 10 days before he was killed i have a picture of robert kennedy in appalachia to remind me of the obligations of the president to people who aren t so fortunate and i have one of edward curtiss s magnificent pictures this one of a piece named long fox and i look at it every night to remind me of my continuing obligation to keep working until we get this relationship right and until people who live in all of our native american areas have a chance to live up to the fullest of their god given abilities as well so it s a great honor for me to be here today in 1994 i invited all the tribal leaders to come to the white house to meet me and i learned it was the first time that has been done since james monroe was president in 1822 and i was struck by the great good fortune that some tribes have found and by how wisely some of the tribes were investing the earnings that they were making from gaming enterprises and i was struck that other leaders literally people in their tribes took a collection to make sure they could afford the plane ticket and it reminded me again how very much we still have to do now we have i think a lot of hope in america today but we also have a lot of work to do that s the message i tried to get out at the state of the union address one of the things that i ve always loved about most of the wisest things i ve read coming out of native american tribes in every part of america is there s this understanding of the fleeting nature of life and the intergenerational responsibilities we all have and sometimes about the only time americans ever really get in trouble with our politics in this great democracy is when we re too focused on just this minute sometimes if we happen to be mad as you know when people are really angry and they have to make a decision they re about they re more than 50 percent likely to do something wrong so if you re too obsessed with just this minute and you re really really mad you might make a mistake and if you just look at this little slice of time and you re really really complacent you will also certainly make a mistake because change is constant in human existence and human affairs and the life and times of a nation so that s why i have tried to argue to the congress and to our country that now is the time to meet the big challenges that america still faces and now is the time to meet the big challenges that native americans still face for all the economic prosperity of some tribes on some reservations the unemployment rate is still 70 percent a third of american indians and alaskan natives still live in poverty and without decent health care indians are the victims of twice as many violent crimes more than 80 percent of the people in indian country aren t yet connected to the internet something which can make a big difference which is why i ordered some christmas presents from the people at pine ridge over the internet last christmas to try to emphasize this as an important thing there are many people who have found ways to make a living because of the internet even though they re physically distant from the markets they must serve the dropout rate from high school of native american children is still about one third and we ve got it down we got the graduation rate of the general population now up almost to 90 percent so we have to do something about this that s why i wanted to highlight indian country in my first new markets tour i want to give americans who have made money in this economy the same incentives to invest in the underdeveloped areas in america that we give them to invest in the under developed areas of latin america or africa or asia not to encourage americans to stay away from those places overseas but to look first to the people here at home who need work who need education who need technology who need opportunity and i think it s important i also asked in the state of the union address for the largest budget increase nearly 1 2 billion for new and existing programs to assist tribal nations and many of you mentioned that i think that s important and i think it s important that we do have bipartisan support for this for which i am very grateful to increase economic opportunity health care education law enforcement to more than double last year s funding to replace and repair schools on reservations and to address the growing digital divide to improve roads and bridges public safety and health care increase funding for law enforcement officers and a substantial increase to the indian health services all this is very very important i want to make three points this is going to be a brief speech number one i want you to help me pass the budget it matters and we do have some republican support for it which is good and without it we can t pass it because we re still in the minority number two i want you to help me pass this new markets initiative ever since i ve been president we have worked to try to empower the tribes of this country as nearly as i can tell i ve spent a lot of time since i was a little boy when i used to go to the garland county library in arkansas and i d sit there for hours on end reading history of the native american tribe i tried to figure out what happened and what went right and what went wrong and basically i remember once i read this great biography of chief joseph of the nez perce that was in grade school i still remember and he made that incredible statement from this day i will fight no more forever it was a noble powerful thing i still remember it i was eight or nine years old when i read it but you made that pledge and you got a bad deal you gave up your land and your mineral rights and all this and the government said that they would do certain things through the dia to take care of you and it s not good for people outside your own family and community to act like they re taking care of you and besides that usually people don t keep their word because there s always something else they would rather spend the money on and so i say to you i want this budget to pass and it s important but our real goal ought to be the fundamental empowerment of the native american tribes in this country as envisioned by the constitution required by the supreme court that is what i have worked for since the day i got here and i want you to help me get as much done in the days i have left remaining to get this nation to nation relationship right in a way that will allow you all to be lifted up it is about money but more than money the third thing i want to say is because that s why we re here this is a political event the reason we don t fight in america if you in a way we all all of us citizens promised that we will fight no more forever is that we have other ways of resolving our differences and pursuing our interests and manifesting our power but we have to show up at the ballot box to do it and the truth is that while we will get some very good republican support on this budget and i m grateful for that and while there are some members of the other party in the congress who have represented large numbers of you who have learned about this and i m grateful for them our party has had a consistent determined leadership position that goes from top to bottom throughout the entire united states congress that we support the direction that you advocate that s why you re here today this is unprecedented i am grateful for you being here but this is about far more than financial contributions and money this is about whether people will be organized and energized to go out and vote to recognize that when you lay down your weapons you have to pick up your ballot that this is not about anybody being taken care of this is about the right kind of relationship and it has to be one that focuses on empowerment i have been profoundly honored more than any of you can ever imagine to have had the opportunity to work with you to learn what i have learned to see what i have seen and i hope i have made a difference and i am determined to do everything i can in every day i have left especially with this new markets initiative which does have good bipartisan support but in the end think about this only way we ll ever get this right is if all of you are determined to be heard determined to vote determined to speak determined to educate determined to be heard determined to make real what was supposed to happen so long ago and didn t that s why i think it is so important that you re here today your presence here today and your statement increases dramatically the chances that at last we will get it right when i was down in selma last weekend celebrating the 35th anniversary of the civil rights march i was researching the things that various people had said trying to get ready for it and i noticed something martin luther king said about the end of the whole legacy of slavery he said you know when finally african americans are freed the white people will be free too and as a white southerner i identified with that and it s literally true for me if that hadn t happened in the south jimmy carter and bill clinton never would have been elected president of the united states but america still labors under the burden of the terms that we struck with the native american tribes so long ago and the fact that the deal never worked out in a way that was fair to both sides and honorable and in some ways it was maybe doomed from the beginning to have problems but now we re trying to get it right and we ve made all this progress in the last few years that s the importance of your being here today i want you to feel good about this and i want you to understand that the rest of us are getting a lot out of it this is the part of our historical legacy we want to be proud of and it will never be right until we get it right you just remember every time you come to washington every time you lobby for something every time you try to do something to empower your own people and to help them you re doing something for the rest of us too because this is a country that s supposed to be founded on equal opportunity equal justice mutual respect everybody having a chance the belief that we all do better when we help each other that s what this is all about so i hope you think i have done something for you but believe me i still remember the little boy i was in the library over 40 years ago you ve done a lot more for me and i thank you god bless you dem wjclinton9 3 00b bill_clinton thank you well first of all welcome to the white house welcome to this wonderful east room where thomas jefferson and meriwether lewis planned the lewis and clark expedition to explore parts of america no one had ever seen to try to find an ocean that no one thought could be reached by land in a way we are here on an even grander expedition to try to find a place in the human heart no one has ever seen that many believe we cannot reach in this life and so i thank you all for coming thank you sandy for your passionate and vigorous leadership thank you ben johnson for telling me that you like your job every day i was afraid that i had given you an impossible job you would only hear from people who were disappointed in us and that you would quit on me so i m glad you re happy and i appreciate you thank you maria for your leadership of this effort and i want to thank the members of the administration who are here who have been introduced and dr franklin and judy winston thank you for being here and i thank my good friend congressman amo houghton for being here for proving that this issue is not a partisan issue and for being in selma didn t we have a grand day sunday one of the great days of my life and many of you were there i was thinking when i was in selma sunday and we were walking across the edmund pettus bridge what an important role the faith community of that day had in the civil rights movement and there was an elderly woman there who was 90 years old who was telling me about a rabbi who came to march with them and i think it was rabbi heschel but i m not sure because she didn t remember but i think that s who it must be and the rabbi had a very very long beard and she said you know a lot of us thought god himself had come down to earth to go with us i say that because even today contemporary surveys show that the american people look to the faith community to lead us forward on this great journey some of you have a foot in both worlds so to speak i see my great friend reverend and former congressman floyd flake from new york out there but all of you must have a foot in this world on this issue i also want to comment that if we had had a meeting like this 35 years ago in the white house and it had been a very inclusive meeting there would have been probably probably african americans and hispanics here and european americans maybe some native americans although we were pretty tone deaf about that back then and maybe maybe one asian american and all the faiths represented here would have been christians and jews and maybe native americans today we have a large number of muslims we have buddhists here we have baha i members here and perhaps many other faiths i say that that make this point i think you can make a compelling argument that getting this right in the united states and putting us in a position to play a role of leadership in the world is not just a racial and ethnic issue anymore it is also inevitably a religious issue if you look around the world where i have been so involved take my people the irish there s no ethnic difference all the differences are religious or if you look at our continuing efforts in the middle east is that an ethnic conflict or a religious one in our attempts to resolve the difficulties between greece and turkey and on the island of cyprus is that an ethnic conflict or a religious one when you see the continuing efforts to resolve the future of tibet and the role of the dalai lama is that a religious conflict or an ethnic one i m sure all of you have thought about this more than i have the most dangerous place in the world today i think you could argue is the indian subcontinent and the line of control in kashmir is that an ethnic conflict or a religious one so i think in order to understand this even and make this journey we have to learn not only more about our ethnic and racial differences but our religious differences how are we different how are our world views different how are they in common how do we find a way through it all to reaffirm our common humanity we know that the three great monotheistic religions that grew out of the sturdy but difficult soil of the middle east all say that we re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves that if we turn aside a stranger it s as if we turn aside god that we should not do to others what we would not like to have done to ourselves and we know that in various ways all the faiths in this room however they define man s understanding of the divine at least recognize the fundamental importance on this earth of our common humanity so i hope that we will be able to talk today about what you re going to do but i hope beyond that you will be thinking today about how more and more of this racial and ethnic diversity both within america and beyond our borders has an inevitable religious component and therefore how people of faith speak about it behave about it what their body language is even will have a profound impact on how this whole thing plays out in 21st century america if you heard the state of the union you heard me tell the story about the evening we had in this very room that my wife sponsored to observe the millennium where we had one of the founders of the internet the man who sent the first e mail to his profoundly deaf wife 18 years ago vince cerf talking with eric lander one of our human genome experts and the beginning of their whole discussion was about how we could never have uncovered the mysteries of the human gene without the revolution in computers because it made it mechanically scientifically possible to deal with things that small and that diverse but in the end lander just said almost in passing he said you know we re all genetically 99 9 percent the same and if you get an ethnic group together the differences among individuals within the group will be greater than the differences between one group and another between african americans asian americans and native americans the differences within the groups genetically are greater than the group profile from one group to another and when i said that there was almost a groan in the congress you know because the republicans and democrats having to recognize they were 99 9 percent the same it made them physically uncomfortable you know you could see that they were having real trouble dealing with this and i think it made them understand how others have real trouble dealing with it but i think one of the things i think is most interesting is how the advances of science sooner or later seem to confirm the teaching of ancient faiths the teaching of people who maybe counted with an abacus and wrote in a language now long dead or had no writing at all this is worth remembering so i wanted to make this point to you i mean america would have never had any of its great movements for social justice had it not been for leaders of faith none of them and the same can be said of many other nations as well but as we grow more diverse our opportunity to do good around the world is even greater if we can be good here at home but i would argue to you we will not be able to do it unless we understand that this whole diversity more than ever before is not like bringing the preachers and the priests and the rabbis to help heal the soul of the sinful races now it s caught up in our entire world view and this multiplicity of faiths we now have in america and we need to take this whole effort to a different level and that s why i ask for your help to begin with understanding it s hard to understand this if you ve never lived in a culture different from your own so i ve already talked a little more than i meant to but i wanted you to be thinking about that because i think you know none of you are term limited except by the almighty and so you will be around here doing these kinds of things presumably when i am no longer president but i will predict to you that the work of building one america and dealing with this diversity will more and more and more require a deeper understanding of the diversity of faiths and the understanding of the relationship between human nature and the divine and how it s articulated and played out in life than it ever has before to this day which means your role will be even more important in the new century than it was in the pivotal struggles of our nation s past thank you very much i would like to say two things very briefly because i want to hear more from you first of all i do think this whole issue of economic equity and empowerment is important and i believe there are two elements to that one is are people who are poor being given enough support from their government and from their religious institutions the other that i think is the far more important question and one to which mr flake among others has done so much are we doing enough to empower the poor to support themselves and to take a different path to the future and that is what this whole new markets effort we re making this year is designed to do so i hope you ll be involved in that let me just say about the diallo case i tried to think of something to say which would be true relevant and wouldn t put us all in the position of second guessing the jury that is we didn t or looking into the hearts and minds of those police officers that is we didn t sit there we didn t hear the evidence four african americans did among others so let s posit the jury rendered a verdict and it is the verdict but the larger fact is that we all have the feeling i think that it probably wouldn t have happened as i said if it had been a white young man in a white neighborhood under the same facts and so the real issue here and again we re getting more diverse now more racially diverse and another thing linguistically we re getting much more diverse so you re going to have people in neighborhoods that can t even communicate in tense situations with the people whose job it is to enforce the law keep in mind this also puts more pressure on the police a lot of them believe that it s not the color of their skin it s the color of their uniform that causes them to be distrusted and to feel like aliens so when they get treated that way then they feel more endangered and more threatened and they re more likely to do something so one of the things i didn t say this earlier but one of the things that i hope will come out of the diallo case if you looked at the powerful image his mother has made she s been quite a grand person i think the way she has tried to free herself of what any parent would feel to go to the larger issues i just hope that one of the things we can all do to coming out of this is not only to make sure that the police forces in our diverse communities are themselves properly diverse that s important but that s not all there is to it because you re never going to be having a time when there won t be let s say black police officers who have to arrest hispanics and asian police officers have to arrest white people or you know whatever it is there s never going to be a time when you re going to have total racial homogeneity between the police and the communities they re working so i hope that we can come out of this so that within a period of time a reasonable period of time you could all stand up and say whatever happens i don t believe it would have happened differently if the police and the person involved had themselves been of a different race that s what i want you to be able to say that s the big issue here i wish i could bring that boy back for his mother and his friends to give him the life he should have had but i can t do that and you can t do that and we can t be in a position where we second guess a jury that sat there and i believe honestly made their best judgment and we didn t hear all those facts but we do know the larger truth and that s what i hope will come out of this a real determination and a lot of you can have an impact on this in your communities to bring the police and the community together and role play this this is a matter of training as well as tone it s a matter of disciplined work as well as the heart you know you d never think about sending a police force out unless they ve trained in how to use their guns unless they knew how to put on their bulletproof vests unless they knew how to give someone their miranda warnings unless they knew these things you have to train for this this is not just a matter of having a good heart this is work this is discipline how many times have you had to remind yourself of that in your own work not just enough to have good intentions you ve got to train and work for this i ve talked more about this than i meant to but this is a big deal we ll never get this race issue right unless we get the police community relations issue right and most of these police officers listen they get up every day they put on those uniforms and they ve got their lives on the line and they most of them really do try to do the right thing in a decent way and an honorable way and we shouldn t lose sight of that and we ve got to train for this so that we don t have these diallo type cases again thank you let me be very brief here number one we have this national effort to reduce violence against children especially in the schools and we ve got a lot of things going it s a subject for another moment if you would like to be involved in it if any of you would like to be involved in it if you would give to ben or maria a card or address or something we ll get you involved we ve got a lot of things going on here because there is much more we can do secondly on the perception of the united states around the world first of all i think sometimes people think we can do more than we can which when we don t do it therefore gives us a negative perception and then sometimes we try to do things that if we do it in the wrong way we re seen as being arrogant or high handed and then we are having our own debates in this country which you saw in the debate in the senate over the nuclear test ban treaty for example about what the role of the united states and the world should be so i think that some of this misperception is inevitable but one of the reasons i m about to go to the indian subcontinent is that i want to try to minimize if people are mad at us at least i want them to have an accurate perception if they think we have a certain policy or a certain attitude i want them to have an accurate view of what that policy or attitude is and it s a constant effort but i appreciate that i wonder if i promised this gentleman in the back i d call on him but we have some people here from different religious traditions from east asia or south asia who have not spoken i wonder if any of them would like to be heard before we go go ahead sir first of all i strongly support what was done in south africa and i have tried on various occasions to do that for the japanese who were interned here during the war for the african americans that were subject to the tuskegee experiments and i wish you would work with our people and let s try to give some shape to what your thinking is i do believe that it s i was thrilled that you mentioned that old debate between john adams and thomas jefferson because when people look at john adams they sort of have this preconceived notion of what he was like and what jefferson was like you would think that jefferson was arguing for passion and adams was arguing for reason and it was actually the other way around which is maybe just their own form of denial who knows but anyway it was a great debate and i agree that this is fundamentally a problem of the heart thank you let me say i want to have a chance to greet you all individually so we re going to have to break up i do want to say bishop that i don t believe i ll ever forget that remark that without followers a leader is just a person out on a walk without you and some of our friends of the last couple years i would have been taking a lot of walks so i thank you for that i want to end this on a high note if i might since we re here talking about one america after a four year wait judge richard paez a hispanic judge from california of the mormon faith and marsha berzon were confirmed by the united states senate today they got the highest rating by the american bar association and they added to the diversity of the bench this week judge julio fuentes of new jersey was also confirmed so i think maybe we re by fits and starts moving toward our one america and we will work with you more i look forward to seeing you all individually thank you very much oh wait we ve got to have a benediction and this is my fault tell them to stop the music thank you sir dem wjclinton9 3 95 bill_clinton first of all i want to thank all the people here at patrick henry for making us feel so welcome i thank principal lila ingman for making me feel right at home here and these five young students who have been terrific they took me to lunch today and introduced me to some of their classmates we played where s waldo and had a great lunch and i thank them for that i want to thank senator robb and congressman moran for coming with me and of course our distinguished secretary of education dick riley and ellen haas the under secretary of agriculture for food nutrition and consumer services mayor ticer we re glad to be here in your community thank you and i m glad that dr jim moeller who is here head of the american heart association and a strong supporter of the effort for healthy meals in our public schools throughout the country i thank maxine wood the superintendent of schools and berniece johnson green the vice chair of the school board and the other representatives of this school system who are here i m glad to be here today to participate for the first time in quite a few years in a school lunch program i ate at my school cafeteria for most of my years in grade school and junior high and high school but it s been quite a few years since i ve had a chance to do this except with chelsea on occasion over the years over 25 million young schoolchildren in this country eat school lunches daily and for many of them it s their only nutritious meal in the day this program has been around since the year i was born 1946 when president truman signed it into law as a matter of national security to ensure that our children are properly fed for 50 years this program has had strong bipartisan support in 1969 president nixon said a child ill fed is dulled in curiosity lower in stamina distracted from learning i received a letter from a woman from california who said and i quote i m glad there were free and reduced lunches for children otherwise my kids would have starved she was working full time as a nurse s aide while her children were in school this week s newspapers of course are full of similar stories yesterday i read about a cafeteria worker who said she sees kids every day who are so hungry they practically eat the food from other children s plates school lunches have always been seen by both democrats and republicans as an essential part of student education last year with the leadership of ellen haas we took some further steps to make meals more nutritious to increase their vitamin and mineral content and reduce their fat and sodium content and the congress ratified that in a piece of legislation passed last year unfortunately this year some members of the new congress have decided that cutting this program would be a good way of cutting government spending and financing tax cuts for upper income americans this is penny wise and pound foolish while saving some money now these nutrition programs for schoolchildren and for women and for infants save several dollars in social costs for every dollar we spend on them the american people want a government that works better and costs less not a government that works worse and costs more these republican proposals will cost us dearly in the health of our children the quality of our schools and the safety of our streets i have done everything i could for the last two years to fight for the economic interests of middle class americans to help poor people to work their way into the middle class and to support the values of responsibility family work and community this proposal undermines that we have to give our children more support so they can make the most of their own lives this school lunch proposal of course is not the only thing in the republican rescission proposal that is penny wise and pound foolish that sacrifices enormous future prosperity and health for america for present short term gains the rescissions would deprive 15 000 of the opportunity to serve in americorps 100 000 educationally disadvantaged students would lose their special services drug prevention programs that will now go to 94 percent of our schools would be eliminated drug prevention funds that go for security measures for police officers and for education and prevention efforts would be eliminated and of course 1 2 million summer job opportunities for young people would be eliminated this is hardly what i call putting people first this will advance not the economic interests of the middle class it will not restore the american dream it will not help the poor to work their way into prosperity it will simply achieve some short term gains in order to finance either spending cuts or tax cuts to upper income americans i know we have to reduce the deficit last year with the help of senator robb and congressman moran in 1993 excuse me we cut the deficit by 600 billion i ve given congress 144 billion in further budget cuts i will work with them to find more but not in the area of education or health or nutrition for our children and our future we ought to be here expanding opportunity not restricting it but let me say again to patrick henry to the school to the school leaders and most of all to these fine students you have given me and senator robb and congressman moran and dr moeller a wonderful experience and you have also helped once again to tell the american people that the school lunch program should not be put on the chopping block let s go out there let s defend it let s keep it let s invest more in education and find other ways to cut the deficit thank you very much we re going through them there may well be but they know which ones i don t support and let me just say we re about to move into the debate on the line item veto which gives us a permanent mechanism to get rescissions if you will every year and if they will pass the line item veto i ll work with them we ll cut spending and we ll continue to reduce this deficit but we don t need to reduce our investment in education in child health in medical research and technology and in efforts to keep people off drugs and protect our children and our schools from the drug problem i am more than i have proved that i will cut spending and i will cut some more but look at the agriculture department they want to cut the school lunch program we closed 1 200 agriculture department offices instead that s the kind of decisions we need to make and we ll make the right decisions if we ll work together and i think i speak for all of us here in saying there is a way to restore our country s fiscal health and still support our children and our future that s what we re committed to thank you dem wjclinton9 3 99 bill_clinton president flores colonel ramirez general wilhelm colonel rosner members of the honduran and american militaries to the people of honduras the american delegation and members of congress who came here with me ladies and gentlemen yesterday in nicaragua today in honduras we see that this disaster has taught us that what happens to one in the americas affects us all it reminds us that in good times and bad todos somos americanos mr president i thank you for your kind words about the first lady i spoke with hillary last night and she asked me to give you her best she remembers so well her trip here and she wishes you well mr president as our military leaders know at this honduran air base our armed forces trained together for this sort of disaster just a few months before the storm when the real test came they passed with flying colors this long runway turned into a lifeline connected the countries all over the world over 47 million pounds of supplies came through here helicopters performed daring rescues and delivered food engineers repaired roads medical teams gave treatment and comfort relief workers provided clean water built schools and shelters and restored faith in the future that nearly washed away operation fuerzas apoyo turned into one of the largest humanitarian missions performed by the united states military since the berlin airlift 50 years ago to all who were a part of it i thank you for your courage your confidence your compassion i believe the united states must do more i have asked congress for 956 million to support the reconstruction effort in central america we expect almost a third of that to come to honduras to improve public health to build homes and schools to rebuild roads so farmers can move their produce to market and to prepare for future hurricanes it will also forgive and defer honduran debt and it will be targeted to local communities to make sure the people who need it get the assistance i would also like to announce 56 million to expand our new horizons program which brings civilian guardsmen and reservists to the region for two weeks of training and relief work mr president i know hondurans are determined not just to rebuild but actually to create something better out of this tragedy to build a reconstruction that protects the environment so that people are not exposed to unnecessary risks in the next storm to build a reconstruction that ensures that those who suffered most participate fully and benefit equally to build a reconstruction that consolidates democracy by engaging local government ngos and the private sector i would like to especially thank the members of our armed forces for their hard work to advance these goals for their enthusiasm even when you have to sleep in hootches in tent city for your cooperation between the services and between our u s personnel and our honduran hosts you have shown the people of central america the true colors of our men and women in uniform today i am proud to announce the award of humanitarian service medals to all those members of the u s armed forces who serve and support the relief effort in central america and to announce that i have just presented to colonel rosner a joint meritorious unit award to jtf bravo for its sustained commitment to our mission in this region congratulations on a job well done later today i will see the juan molina bridge in tegucigalpa it was build jointly with u s assistance and honduran efforts i can t think of a better symbol of jtf bravo s efforts or our cooperation building bridges between people and nations in central america with central america itself the bridge between north and south america in this tragedy s aftermath hondurans and americans are giving new meaning to the words written by juan molina in his poem eagles and condors pueblos americanos in este contiente debemos ser hermanos not far from here is comayagua the old capital of honduras built because it was near the center of central america and of the entire new world that city boasts a clock said to be the oldest in the americas made by spanish moors in the 12th century when that clock began ticking about 900 years ago the world was a smaller place in every way now that clock is ticking away the final hours and days of the 20th century headed toward a new millennium but one thing remains as true today as the day the clock was built we humans still have the urge to start a new course for the future and the obligation to make it a better one for our children thanks to your work here a new and better world truly lies within our grasp thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 5 00a bill_clinton i think that young is a relative term i ve decided that young is anybody today younger than i am let me say i want to thank jim and ann for having us in their beautiful beautiful home i love this place i always love to come here and i want to thank mary and frank and little connor who i knew even before he was here and i want to thank all of you for being here for mary a lot of you must feel old you come you do all these things over and over again so i thank you on behalf of senator landrieu and senator daschle and senator lieberman and senator breaux and senator lincoln and senator edwards and congressman jefferson thank you for being there for us i can t help but tell you we did this great event for china today where president ford and president carter came and henry kissinger came and he always sounds like god with a german accent maybe god has a german accent for all i know and jim baker and they all gave great talks and we talked and i looked out there and i realized that there are all these former secretaries of state secretaries of the treasury national security advisors chairmen of the foreign relations committee of the house and senate chairman of the joint chiefs of staff it was the most trade ambassadors the most astonishing group of americans and gerald ford got up and started talking about a vote he cast in 1949 for trade with china that was joined in by john kennedy richard nixon carl albert and albert gore sr and i realized that i was there with people that represented the last 50 years of american history and then i realized there was one person there that represented the whole 20th century mike mansfield who is 97 or 98 now didn t tell the truth about his age when he was 15 and talked his way into the marines in world war i and then he came home and studied asian pacific affairs became a professor at montana became a congressman a senator president kennedy s senate majority leader a post he held for about 14 years i think a long time anyway then president carter appointed him ambassador to japan and when mary said i was young it reminded me of a story shortly after i became president when my mentor senator fullbright was still alive he was 87 and mike mansfield was 91 they had lunch together one day and the next day senator fullbright came to see me he was hitting us all up at the time and he was still in great shape then and mike mansfield looked at him and said now bill how old are you again he said i m 87 and mansfield said oh to be 87 again so this youth you know it s a relative thing i will be very brief first of all i first met mary landrieu when she was a very young state representative and i was a young governor and neither one of us looked our age and she still looks younger than she is and i now look more than my age but i thought she was great when i first met her i always loved her daddy from the time i worked with president carter and his administration when i was attorney general in my home state and i ve known her a long time and i thought when she ran for the senate that if she could be elected she would be uncommonly effective senator breaux worked hard for her congressman jefferson did mayor morial of new orleans did and i certainly did and it all worked out pretty well and she has exceeded even my very high expectations i think sometime in the next day or two the house of representatives is going to pass a house version of this bill that she and others have been working on for a long time to create a permanent conservation fund that could literally change the face of hundreds of american communities and give us a permanent conservation legacy in america the likes of which we have never had before that s quite an achievement for a first term senator now we have to do it but she is also as you heard supporting the administration s initiative to get permanent normal trade relations with china and we had that meeting today and there s no point in me repeating what gerald ford and jimmy carter and all the others said but i will tell you this this is the most important national security vote we will make this year a lot of you here agree with this issue because you understand the economics of it and as i pointed out today most of the people who are against this are against it out of their frustration or their anxiety about globalization generally or their frustration because china keeps doing things they don t like in human rights or they don t like the way the world trade organization operates or some other reason it has nothing to do with whether or not this is or is not in our economic interests or our national security interests but this is an easy vote for a democrat to say no to and that s another reason i m here because mary landrieu says yes because it is a significantly important vote and we will be paying the price for a decade if we fail to adopt this and we could start paying the price within a matter of months it is a profoundly important issue to the world that our children and grandchildren will live in and so i m here for that reason and the third thing i want to say is that mary and a lot of her colleagues have supported our efforts to raise education standards one of the things that bothered me when i ran for president was that people even people who were supporting me they wanted to vote for change they thought i had a lot of energy but a lot of them frankly didn t believe we d make any difference they had been so disappointed for so long and heard so much political hot air that they didn t think we could make a difference they didn t think things could be better and welcome senate robb thank you for being here you ll forgive me for being impertinent if you hadn t given him a contribution i hope you ll give him one too if ever a person deserved to be reelected he does and he s going to be and you might as well help him because he needs your help well anyway the thing that bothered me even in my campaign there were people who thought well i like old clinton s ideas but it really we can t really turn this deficit around or make much of a difference in the economy or reduce the welfare rolls or you know i heard it all and now you know what s happened we ve gone from deficit to surplus when i leave office we will have paid off 355 billion of the national debt and i m very proud of that and we ll have the longest economic expansion in history and the lowest unemployment in over 30 years but also the lowest african american and hispanic unemployment ever recorded the lowest female unemployment in 40 years welfare rolls half the size they were when i took office and eight years of declining crime now what s the point here we don t have an excuse not to do our best anymore because we know that our common challenges are like all other problems they do yield to intelligent effort and the reason education is so important i took this education tour last week and i don t want to bore you with the whole thing but i ll just give you three examples i went to the first charter school in the country which is a public school set up outside the normal rules and regulations to serve a specific population or to pursue a specific education mission and if they do well they can stay in business if they re not they re supposed to have their charter jerked that s the whole idea that they re super accountable now they haven t all worked well we ve had problems with one or two here but you should know that when i ran for president there was one today there are 1 700 mary s voted to help me create more overall they ve been better than average schools and they re vastly over subscribed people want to get into them and i visited this school in st paul minnesota where there are over 100 kids who have had terrible problems in their lives terrible problems in school they were all in school none of them were dropping out there were no violence problems no drug problems no nothing they were showing up every day and learning and they felt like they had a home and they were performing at a high level i went to columbus ohio to a school in a very poor neighborhood where they in columbus they ve got 55 of these 100 000 teachers we got out and we ve been attacked by the republicans we got attacked by their nominee for president they say we re trying to micromanage the school system the people met me everybody from the superintendent on down to thank me for the fact that we were giving them teachers and the money had to go for teachers in the early grades they ve gone from 25 average class size down to 15 and in this one school in a very poor neighborhood in one year they went from 10 percent of the kids reading at or above grade level to 45 percent 10 percent of the kids doing math at or about grade level to 33 percent 10 percent of the kids doing science at or above grade level to 30 percent in one year and they have two of those teachers and then i went to owensboro kentucky four years ago the congress required the states first we required the states to set up school standards then we required the states to identify schools that weren t making it and to come up with a strategy to fix them kentucky got out there early four years ago they identified 170 failing schools within two years 91 percent were off the failure list this school i visited had two thirds of its children eligible for the free or reduced school lunch program and they had one of those teachers we required to lower class size in the early grades listen to this in four years here s what they did two thirds of the kids on free or reduced lunch they went from 12 percent to 57 percent reading at or above grade level they went from 5 percent to 70 percent doing math at or above grade level they went from zero to 64 percent doing science at or above grade level they ranked 18th in the entire state of kentucky in academic achievement ten of the 20 best grade schools in kentucky now have over half the kids eligible for free or reduced lunch race and income are not destiny and we can also turn the schools around and give everybody excellence in education in this country and that s another thing that brought me here tonight now this is the last thing i want to say you want to know how this presidential election is going to come out how these races for the senate and house are going to come out it depends upon what people think the election is about whatever they decide the question is will determine the answer what do you think it s about if you don t remember anything else i say you remember this i think it should be about what are we going to do with this moment of promise i think the answer to the question should be we re going to meet the big challenges and seize the big opportunities how are we going to do it we re going to do it not by doing just what i ve done but by changing in the direction we re moving and not taking a u turn on economic policy on education policy on any of these other policies so what do you think the election is about do you really believe it s about making the most of this moment what does that mean it means taking on the big challenges and opportunities how should we do it we ought to keep changing in the direction that brought us here now if people believe that then al gore will be elected president we ll pick up seats in the senate we ll win the house back and within no time at all the democrats will be rewarded by the american people for the good governance they have brought that is really the issue but to do it we have to keep meeting the challenges every day we can t duck the hard votes like this china vote we ve got to show up be counted and deliver for the american people i hope you will share this with people somebody asks you why you came here tonight tell them you love mary landrieu just like i do you think she s done a great job but you don t want to see america blow the most terrific opportunity we have had in my lifetime to prove we can build the future of our dreams for our children and we ve got to have people like her to do it thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 5 00b bill_clinton well thank you very much aloha and to danny and billy and all of you thank you so much for having me here senator daschle thank you for being here and i d like to acknowledge our great friend a former member of the house of representatives norm manetta thank you for coming norm and being here your friends and your extended family i want to tell you that i m here for two reasons tonight besides the fact that i ve never had a bad day in hawaii and i knew that if i came here tonight danny would do as much as he could to simulate hawaii you know i would have music i d have a lei people would say aloha everybody would be relaxed and by the time i left no matter what i was worried about i d be in a good mood and sure enough that s happened the second reason i m here is in behalf of one of the finest people in the united states senate and one of the most popular people in the entire congress dan akaka is not only a good senator he is a good man and i have yet to meet the first human being who didn t love him who knew him and i want to thank him for being my friend the third reason i m here is because he asked me and i owe him you know there was this senator daschle said all those nice things about my service as president there was a really funny article i was reading hillary this article you know when you think you re about to get good press read it to your spouse and they ll find a way to bring it down so i said look here here s this article it says i have really high job approval ratings and if it weren t for 93 and 94 they d be the highest average ratings since people have been taking polls and hillary said well of course in 93 and 94 you made all the hard decisions that gave you the high job approval ratings in 95 and afterward and if you think about it i said it in a casual way i m serious in 1993 when i presented an economic plan to cut the deficit in half and to get this country moving again and get interest rates down we didn t get a single vote from the other party they all said that it was going to throw the country into recession and if anybody anybody in our party in either house had changed their vote it would have been defeated we would not have enjoyed the economic recovery we have had and i would not have enjoyed the political recovery i enjoyed after 1994 but the most important thing is the american people now have the longest economic expansion in history over 21 million new jobs unemployment rate under 4 percent for the first time since early 1970 and when i leave office we will have paid off paid off 355 billion of the national debt in the last three years now all because he was there we lose one vote and it s history the whole last eight years are a totally different story it was almost the same when we had to pass the crime bill to do more to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals put more police officers on the street you probably saw the report sunday crime down eight years in a row and the leadership of the other party overwhelmingly negative on the brady bill on banning the cop killer bullets on the assault weapons ban on putting 100 000 police on the streets all of those things he was there and in education i just want to say that s a story that is not as well known college going up 10 percent reading and math scores almost up a full grade level but in the areas where people have taken seriously the legislation that i proposed four years ago that every state had to identify every school which was not performing well where the schools were not teaching the children to learn and come up with strategies to turn them around we re seeing breathtaking gains i just got back from kentucky i ll just give you one example i was in this little town in western kentucky where your former colleague wendell ford was born and grew up and he was there to be with me owensboro kentucky two thirds of the children on free and reduced lunches 1996 we passed the democrats did a requirement that states identify schools that are failing and come up with strategies to turn them around or shut them down to stop social promotion which we didn t require but we supported we also have gone from nothing to 50 million for after school and summer school programs to help so we don t brand children failures when the system fails them okay so i show up in this little town in western kentucky where the local grade school has just been named the 18th best grade school in the state because and they were a failing school four years ago now here s what you need to know two thirds of the kids in that school are eligible for free or reduced school lunches two thirds of the 20 best elementary schools in kentucky 10 of them have over half of their kids eligible for free or reduced school lunch race ethnicity income and location are not destiny if we can give all of our children a world class education and the role we played in that would not have been possible if it hadn t been for the supporters i had in our party and the congress including senator akaka so i m proud to be here tonight for him now last and most important elections are always about tomorrow always about the future so if someone asks you why you came here tonight besides bragging on danny akaka as a human being and talking about what a great record he built and how much you appreciate the fact that he helped me i hope you will say something like this this is the first time maybe ever our country has had such a great opportunity because of our economic strength and social progress and our role in creating a more peaceful world that we ve had the opportunity to build the future of our dreams for our children the real question in this election is what are we going to do with all this prosperity what s the answer to that question do you believe that s the question and if you believe that s the question what s your answer i m coming to that but this is very important you know i m not running for anything but i know a little something about elections and normally the candidate who wins is the product of what the voters believe the election is about if you ask the right question it will lead you to the right answer so what s this election about this election is about what are we going to do with all these good things that have happened in the last seven years i think the answer is what we re going to do i know what i think it should be it should be we re going to take advantage of it to build the future of our dreams we re going to take our big opportunities we re going to take our big challenges we re going to bring economic opportunity to people in places left behind we re going to give all our kids a world class education and get rid of child poverty we re going to do more to help people balance work and family we re going to prove that you can meet the challenges of the environment and still grow the economy we re going to deal with the aging of america and save social security and medicare and add a prescription drug benefit we re going to build one america we re going to pass that hate crimes bill and we re going to pass the employment nondiscrimination act and we re going to continue to fight against racial and ethnic and religious and other discrimination until we pull this country together that s what i think we ought to do and we re going to keep the economy going and we re going to keep going until we get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 these are big things big things we ve never been able to do before now if you believe that s what this election is about then the next question is how are you going to do it well you have two choices you can continue to change building on what has brought us to this point or you can abandon it and go back to the political philosophy that governed before we started in 1993 and that s what danny akaka s race is about that s what the race for president is all about do you want an economic strategy that gives us a tax cut we can afford and still gives us enough money to pay down the debt save social security and medicare and invest in the education of our children i do but if you prefer you can have a tax cut and a defense increase and education vouchers that takes us back to deficit spending doesn t give us money to invest in education but makes everybody real happy in the short run because they ll be rolling in doe now we tried it their way we tried it our way you have evidence now you have to choose which way are you going to try going forward the same thing is true with education the same thing is true with health care the same thing is true with the environment and so i say to all of you i m glad you re here i m glad you re helping dan akaka he is as fine a man as i ve ever known in public life and he s always good to me when we play golf together but i m telling you this is a big election i m not running but i can tell you it s just every bit as important as the one we made in 92 and the one we made in 96 because this will determine whether the american people are going to embrace what works or say okay we tried it for eight years and it was nice but i think we ll go back and try something else and the something else was what they tried before but it was so long ago everybody has forgotten that is what this is about this gentleman here said you ought to tell people that the slogan of this election ought to be before you go back think back which is better than anything i ve thought of but the reason i want the vice president to win is because i know what a role he s played in the last eight years and i know he understands the future and he knows how to lead us there the reason i think dan akaka should be reelected is i know how much he loves the ordinary people that he represents and because every single time his country needed him he was there every time not one time did he ever take a dive and walk away when we were trying to build this future and so i ask all of you to think about that i thank you for helping him and i want you to go out between now and november and tell people why you are doing this tell them there may not be another time in our lifetime when we can do this tell them there are places and people that are still left behind including a lot of people in hawaii because of the aging financial crisis who didn t fully participate in this economic recovery and tell them you want a change but you d like to keep moving in the direction that we ve enjoyed for the last several years one good way you can do that is by making sure that he gets as near to 100 percent of the vote as possible come on up here senator akaka dem wjclinton9 5 94 bill_clinton thank you so much thank you thank you senator pell congressman reed governor sundlun and thank you ladies and gentlemen for such a wonderful welcome it s good to be back in rhode island and to see so many of you here governor sundlun thanked me for our quick approval of rhode island s plan to extend health care to pregnant women and to young children i thank him and the people of rhode island for putting this plan together our administration has granted more initiatives for more states than any in history but few as good as the one from rhode island to try to help the health care of your little children and i congratulate you on that i also want to say a special word of thanks to senator pell for his leadership of the senate foreign relations committee and his work with me on some of the most difficult issues of our time in the last year we have succeeded in opening up the united states in trade areas investment areas in ways that were literally not even thought of just a little while ago we also have continued our work to make the world safer when i became president there were four countries in the former soviet union with nuclear weapons now three have agreed to give them up and are giving them up and the nuclear arsenal in russia is no longer pointed at the united states nor are our missiles pointed at them i thank senator pell for his support of that finally i want to thank your congressman for his leadership in the goals 2000 legislation that i signed a few weeks ago which establishes national standards for our public schools and supports grass roots reforms to achieve those standards for the first time in american history and for his courage in leading the united states house of representatives to vote to ban the 19 serious assault weapons that are used for killing people on our streets i want to thank your lieutenant governor your state treasurer your attorney general the state democratic chairman and the mayor of providence lincoln chafee all of them for being here today what the mayor of warwick i m sorry yes the governor says he s john chafee s son i know that and i want to thank john chafee for having a health care bill that covers all americans i m going to work with them and we re going to have a bipartisan health care reform this year if i can possibly get it done ladies and gentlemen i ran for president because i wanted to change the country working with you because i wanted it moved beyond the politics of gridlock in washington all the partisan rhetoric all the arguing over left and right all the politics of delay and distraction and destruction to try to move this country forward again and pull our country together again i thought we could do it with three simple words a commitment to opportunity for all americans and insistence on responsibility from all americans and a belief that we were one community that we are all in this together i thought we could do it be rebuilding the value of work and the strength of our families by pulling together at the national level and at the grass roots and we have made a good beginning last year in a very tough fight the united states congress had the courage to pass our economic program which brought down the deficit kept interest rates down got investments up i m happy to report that in the first four months of this year we ve seen a million new jobs come into this economy three million in all in the first 15 months of this administration eight thousand new jobs in rhode island the first job growth in four years in this state we are well on our way to meeting our goal of eight million jobs in this four year period we also if the congress passes the budget i have presented this year will not only increase funding for education training technology and medical research we will reduce overall domestic spending and defense spending for the first time since 1969 and we will have three years of reduction in the deficit for the first time since harry truman was president no more rhetoric action for the american people our administration is breaking new ground in education we ve reformed the college loan program to lower interest rates and to improve the repayment schedule for our young people we passed the bill to have national standards for schools we passed a bill to set up a network in every state in the country for the young people who graduate from high school who don t go on to four year colleges but do need further education and training and we are going to reform the unemployment system in this country to make it a reemployment system and we re going to change the welfare system to end welfare as we know it we can do these things if we keep working ahead i m proud of the work our administration has done to strengthen the american families that are out there struggling to make ends meet and raise their children with the family and medical leave act with the earned income tax credit increase in this year s tax year which will dramatically enable more and more working people on modest wages to stay out of poverty to stay off welfare by cutting their taxes one in six working families in america will be eligible for a reduction in income taxes this year so they can support their children and be successful workers at the same time that is the kind of thing we ought to be doing in this country finally let me say we are trying to rebuild the bonds of the american community in many ways but with two great initiatives the first one you can see by the signs over here the national service program ladies and gentlemen this fall when school starts 20 000 young americans will be eligible to earn money for furthering their education after high school by working at the grass roots level in their communities in programs to solve the problems of america at the grass roots national service will sweep america the year after next we will have 100 000 young americans earning money on their education solving the problems of america at the grass roots level the other thing we re trying to do which will be done in a few weeks to strengthen our american communities is to pass the most sweeping most effective most comprehensive crime bill in the history of the united states 100 000 more police officers for our streets innovative forms of punishment real funds for prevention to help our young people avoid crime to have something to say yes to as well as something to say no to and finally after that tough battle finally a ban on those assault weapons which are meant to kill people not go hunting with my fellow americans we are changing the landscape in america by moving beyond rhetoric to reality in dealing with the real problems and the real opportunities of the real people in this country but we will never do what we need to do to rebuild community to support family to have a responsible budget and to build a responsible future until we guarantee health care security to all the american people we are spending 40 percent more on health care than any other country in the world we are the only advanced country in the world that does not cover all of its citizens we have 100 000 americans a month losing their health insurance for good we have 58 million americans in any given year who don t have health insurance part of the year we have 81 million americans who live in families where there is a child with diabetes a mother with premature cancer a father with an early heart condition and they can never get health insurance or they pay more than they can afford or they can never change their jobs because of the cursed preexisting conditions which are paralyzing family life for tens of millions of americans three quarters of american people have health insurance policies that have lifetime limits so that if anything should happen to them or their children when they need it most they might lose their coverage small businesses pay 35 to 40 percent more for their health insurance premiums than those of us insured by government or big business my fellow americans no one can justify an administrative system which costs tens of billions of dollars in sheer paperwork more than any other system in the world why because we are the only country in the world that has in spite of the best doctors the best nurses the best health care the best research and the best technology 1 500 separate companies writing thousands and thousands and thousands of policies on little bitty groups and employing hundreds of thousands of people in doctors offices and hospitals and insurance companies to see who is not covered and what is not covered we are spending billions of dollars to figure out how not to provide health care to our people when we ought to be covering all americans if other countries can do it the united states can do it as well our goal is simple by the end of the year i expect to sign a law that guarantees americans every american private health insurance that can never be taken away my wife and i have received about a million letters from people all over the country they re people just like those of you in this audience they may be some of you in this audience most of them aren t organized in any way so they can t make their voices heard in washington but they re out there in every community and every workplace i received a letter from anthony catuto and his wife a young disabled couple whose medicare coverage doesn t pay for the prescription drugs they need they come from rhode island and they just met me on the tarmac they deserve the ability to take care of their children i just met out there on the tarmac a relatively new resident of rhode island anne hood and her wonderful child she was a self employed writer from new york and when she and her husband moved to providence and had a baby her insurance company dropped her coverage without even letting her know let me tell you let me tell you i m going to wait for the plane to go by i just met three people in new york who had written me these letters one of them no health insurance for their child another with a dangerous medical diagnosis not pursuing the diagnosis even though it could be a life threatening illness because they had no health insurance i was in columbus ohio the other day i met a wonderful woman who ran a delicatessen with 20 part time employees and 20 full time employees and she said i am the embodiment of everything that is not right with this system and i have a good insurance person who s done a good job of giving me the most inexpensive insurance they can get i had cancer five years ago i insure my full time employees we pay way too much in our deductibles and our co pays are too high i cannot afford to insure my part time employees i feel guilty that i don t insure my part time employees and i m mad that none of my competitors insure their full time employees i m paying for them as well as for my own we can do better hundreds and hundreds of businesspeople have told me that sort of thing today in new york i was in the 10th largest retail grocery chain in the united states of america and every one of their employees has comprehensive health benefits and they said if we can do it why can t all the other people in our business that s the kind of attitude we need in this country people taking responsibilities for themselves their employees and their future ladies and gentlemen this is not going to be easy six presidents have tried over 60 years to solve the health care crisis in america and we have not done it but this year we can do it with the same kind of courage that finally turned the deficit around with the same kind of courage in the congress that finally took on the interest groups for the assault weapons ban with the same kind of courage that broke a seven year deadlock for family and medical leave a seven year deadlock for the brady bill a five year deadlock on this crime bill let s do it in one year for health care and finally put this issue behind us thank you very much and god bless you all dem wjclinton9 6 96 bill_clinton thank you thank you for being outside all those people in the heat out there thank you very much i want to thank the green valley high school band thank you for playing you did a great job i thank those who were here before thank you mayor jones thank you county commission chair yvonne gates thank you senator titus thank you representative perkins and most of all thank you ladies and gentlemen for being here i want to thank your fine senators harry reid and dick bryan for representing you standing up for you and standing up for america in the united states senate they do a wonderful job and i want to thank governor bob miller you know he has been the best sort of friend to me because he always tells me when he thinks i m wrong and he s been the best sort of governor for you because even though he s my friend he s first and foremost somebody who s always fighting for nevada s interests and every time he hears anything that might be even potentially bad for nevada i know the first call i m going to get is from bob miller he s made a lot of calls in the last three and a half years for you and i thank him for that i also met someone earlier today and i think he s in the crowd today he s supposed to be up here with us state senator bob coffin who s running for congress here i don t know if he s here but i thought i would is he back there thank you ladies and gentlemen i m glad to be back in nevada i like it here i m glad to be back in las vegas which as all of you know was my mother s favorite place on earth i ve had a wonderful day already i went out and visited one of your juvenile justice programs where young people were doing community service and making restitution for mistakes they ve made and i met with some of the young people in the program and some of the adults who were working with them and some of the parents and i want to compliment you for that and i want to ask everybody in this room to support people who are out there working with these young kids trying to get them out of trouble keep them out of trouble give them something to do with their lives we cannot we cannot tolerate the situation which now exists in the united states where the crime rate is going down overall but going up among people under 18 and it s because we don t have enough adults that are out there helping these kids to build good lives for themselves and you ve got some good programs here i want you to support the people that are out there on the front lines in las vegas and nevada working with those kids four years ago when i came here and asked you to support me i had an idea about what i wanted our country to look like as we move into this new century a very different world the world i grew up in was dominated by heavy industry and mass production the world these children will grow up in will be dominated by computers technology and information the world i grew up in had an america that was totally self contained we didn t sell much overseas we didn t buy much from overseas the cold war was the most important thing and the fight we were having with the communists the world these kids will grow up in will be dominated by a global society in which children will actually get on computers and do research in libraries in other countries in which people will be able to move across the world as easily as they used to go across town and in which we will have to fight those who will seek to take advantage of that through drug running organized crime the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction terrorism preying on open societies and free people this is a different world and i had three simple objectives i wanted america in the 21st century more than anything else still to be a place where every child has the opportunity to make the most of his or her own life no matter what racial or ethnic or income background they come from secondly i wanted america to be a community of responsible citizens where we are coming together instead of drifting apart i am tired of seeing people at election time try to find ways to get us to look down our noses at one another and be divided when we are together when we reach across the lines that divide us when we say our diversity is a great and good thing that makes us stronger in the global society of the 21st century that s when america s strong when we re working together not being driven apart and finally i wanted to make sure that when i left office our country would still be the world s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity and i can tell you that on all three fronts we still have a lot of challenges but this country is in better shape than it was four years ago and we re moving in the right direction harry reid and dick bryan will tell you when i presented my economic plan to the congress and i said we ve got to do something about this terrible deficit we ve got to bring it down but we cannot we cannot do it in a way that undermines out commitment to education or to the environment or protecting the health care of the elderly the americans with disabilities the poorest children of this country there were those on the other side who said if clinton s economic plan passes it will be a disaster for america we ll be thrown into recession it will cripple the economy well you ve got three and a half years now to decide when i took office the deficit was 290 billion a year projected to go over 300 billion the next year it s now going to be 130 billion this year less than half of what it was when we came into office we had the slowest job growth rate since the great depression three and a half years later we have 9 7 million new jobs for the american people we are better off than we were four years ago we also passed a crime bill to put more police officers on the street some of them right here in las vegas to prevent crime we began to work with states to reform welfare and move people from welfare to work today there are 1 3 million fewer families on welfare than there were the day i became president of the united states we made efforts to help families struggling to make the most of their own lives the family and medical leave law that says you don t lose your job if you have to take a little time off when there s a baby born or somebody in your family who s sick i was just out at unlv today we ve reformed the college loan program so that people could borrow their money directly from the united states government get it quicker less hassle better repayment terms and that no one would ever have to not go to college because they couldn t afford to borrow the money because now they can pay it back as a percentage of their income so the loans will never bankrupt anybody we passed the national service program americorps to give young people a chance to work in their communities and solve problems and help people and work their way through college that is what we have done and then when the congress changed hands in the last two years and the republicans said we want to balance the budget i said so do i we cut the deficit in half already we ve done half the job and you wouldn t help us we ll help you we won t do you the way you did us we ll help you but i will not balance the budget by cutting education by destroying the environment by undermining our commitment to medicare and medicaid i won t do that because that gets into that second issue i was telling you about we need to come together not come apart in the world of the 21st century education will be the key to opportunity you know it as well as i do we cannot walk away from our commitment to give every american the opportunity to get a good education look at what you re dealing with here in nevada with all your growth you need water here i m going to do everything to make sure you have it we can t walk away from our commitment to preserve the environment for all americans we have obligations here we have to do this together and so i say again to you i want to balance the budget i will keep working to do that we have to do that when you bring the deficit down it gets interest rates down it makes it easier for you to make a home payment to borrow money for a car to borrow money for a new business to create jobs it is critical but we can do it don t let anybody tell you otherwise we can do it and preserve our environment invest in education and protect medicare and medicare for our seniors we can do that and let me say we still have work to do we still have work to do if you renew the contract of bill clinton and al gore there are other things that we have to do to make sure that all the american people can take advantage of these new opportunities because you know as well as i do that not everybody in our country even everybody with a job is having the same chance to get ahead what do we need to do let me just give you three or four things first of all if the congress doesn t pass it now we ll do it first thing next year we need to change the health insurance laws of this country so you don t lose your health insurance when you change jobs or when somebody in your family has been sick secondly we need to change the law so that young people starting out even if they work for small businesses can begin to save for their retirement and they don t lose it if they change jobs they can keep it all through their lives and they can maintain that and most important most important of all we ought to give every american a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition and a tax credit for two years of community college in this country every single american ought to be able to go you know as well as i do the biggest institution of higher education in nevada now is the community college here why because older people have figured out that if they want to be able to get new jobs and raise their incomes they have to have more education i was born at a time when the vast majority of americans did not have a high school education when many places did not even require them to do it now we know that in the world we re living in you need more and i think we ought to make it an article of national faith that every single american citizen should have access to at least two of education after high school and we ll provide it for those families so i say to you my fellow americans i m glad to be back here i appreciate what the governor said about the issues that are specific to nevada what i said about the interim storage was pretty simple the people that wanted to pass the interim bill wanted to pass it so they could make it permanent and i don t believe that that should be done i believe somebody we re going to have to put this nuclear waste somewhere but i want to know it was done based on the best science not the worst politics that s all i want and i don t know what the answer to that is but i want you to think about the future that we ve got here i want you to think about what it s going to take to make sure that all these little kids that are in this house today in this hangar every one of them every one of them and you look at them we ve got kids in this room whose roots come from every continent on this globe just look around here i want to make sure that every one of them has a chance to live out their dreams if they re willing to be responsible law abiding hardworking american citizens that s what i want and that s what you want that s really what this is all about you know politics is not the most important thing in anybody s life when we all get our lives lived we look back and we think about the children we raised the things we loved and cared about the purpose of politics is to make it possible for more and more and more and more people to live together in peace and harmony and to live out their dreams and to find their personal greatness and their families depth and strength and character that s what this is about and that s what this election is about don t you ever forget it and remember this we re all here we re all happy we re all feeling good today it s five months between now and the election that is a very long time so i say to you if you believe what brought you here today and you understand how important this is then i want to ask you to leave here today with a commitment every day between now and november to talk to your friends and your neighbors about what is genuinely at stake america is deciding on the future of the greatest country in human history for a new century you can help make the decision the right one thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton9 6 99 bill_clinton thank you very much senator harkin for your friendship your leadership and for your successful efforts to get this facility named for dale and betty bumpers you know ever since the republicans won a majority in the house and the senate in 1994 it s been impossible to get anything named for a democrat we named more buildings than ever before in the history of the country at a breathtaking rate and i just wanted to come here to make sure this was actually going to happen today and i really thank you tom harkin for your persistence thank you dr varmus dr satcher secretary shalala thank you for your remarks and what you said i want to thank all the leaders of the nih who are here and others involved in all the various endeavors especially sandy thurman who leads our efforts on aids i want to say a special word of appreciation to the families of dale and betty bumpers who are here including two of their three children i want to express the regrets of the first lady and the vice president for not being able to be here today and in particular because of our long friendship and common interest i know that hillary wanted to come forty four years ago edward r murrow described the day dr salk announced his discovery of a polio vaccine water treatment these words the sun was warm the earth coming alive there was hope and promise in the air the occasion called for banners in the breeze and trumpets in the distance indeed that discovery did herald the dawn of a golden age of development of vaccines and prevention of disease in the 50 years since we have benefited from the discovery of vaccines against some 20 infectious diseases tens of millions of lives have been saved tens of millions of children have been spared the agony and crippling pain of polio mumps rubella measles most recently meningitis twenty years ago we eradicated smallpox the disease that took thousands of years struck down men women and children all around the world and destroyed entire civilizations we have eliminated polio from our own hemisphere and as you ve already heard we ll eliminate it from the earth early in the new millennium the triumph of vaccines over infectious disease is one of the great achievements of a remarkable 20th century and at century s end the men and women who labor in labs to unlock the mysteries of human biology and disease especially those here at the national institute of health have made this one of america s great citadels of hope not only for our people but for people throughout the world i think it is important to note though that we are here today because the triumph of immunization over disease is also the triumph not just of scientists but of countless citizens across america public health specialists advocates volunteers leaders in government who work together to support new research and to bring life saving vaccines to all people it is the triumph of the couple we honor today my friends of many many years dale and betty bumpers more than 25 years ago betty bumpers was the first person to open my eyes to the fact that though many vaccines had been discovered approved and marketed too few children in our state then and across america were being immunized as the first lady of our state she visited every community and every school talking to parents and teachers about the necessity of immunizing their children in fact betty became so identified with the immunization cause that people used to joke that every time she walked into a school the kids would start to cry they knew that when she came in somebody was going to have to get a shot her work inspired president carter to launch a nationwide campaign to immunize all children by the time they entered school today i am still amazed by her tirelessness in traveling across the country with rosalynn carter to ensure that every child is immunized by the age of two i d also like to say something that many of you know she is here today just two days after back surgery which is an ultimate testament to her grit and determination she s made sort of a second career betty has out of deflating egos especially her husband s and mine and i told her today she just hit me one more time i got a huge applause in the state of the union address a couple of years ago railing against the hmos and hospitals that kicked people out after drive by surgery and she s exhibit a for drive by surgery i mean here she is she looks great i m going to have to at least modify my position on that issue i guess when betty was working at the grassroots dale was working in government over four terms and 24 years representing our home state in the united states senate he became the resident expert and the greatest champion for immunization in that body through dark times when it looked as if congress and the white house might fail to do their part to make vaccines more widely available his passionate and persuasive arguments would stir consciences and on occasion change votes after the measles epidemic of the late 80s and early 90s dale bumpers rallied his colleagues he took to the senate floor to lament 27 000 cases of measles cases he called totally shameful and avoidable he challenged his colleagues to rise to their responsibility to protect our children our children have been lucky to have his heart and his voice at their service for a long long time hillary and i have been inspired by dale and betty s personal crusade in 1993 i took office committed to renewing america and preparing our country for a new century a key to the strategy we embraced was investing in our people investing in technology and dramatically increasing our efforts in research and development in areas that were pivotal opportunities for the future of americans quality of life we made funding basic science research that could lead to new vaccines one of our top priorities we launched a new initiative to improve immunization services to make existing vaccines safer and more affordable and to boost immunization rates across america and i was profoundly proud when two summers ago hillary and i were able to invite dale and betty to the white house where we announced that finally america had reached its highest immunization rate ever and more than 90 percent of all two year olds in our country have received their most critical doses of recommended vaccines thanks in no small measure to the years and years and years of effort that they have spearheaded therefore it is entirely fitting that today we dedicate this state of the art facility to them two great americans two wonderful human beings today we also lay a new cornerstone in our ongoing efforts against hiv and aids with biotechnology accelerating the development of new vaccines and making existing ones even safer it is a hopeful moment for vaccine research in america including the challenge of finding a vaccine against aids today one out of every 100 people in the world is living with hiv and aids with the recent news that aids has surpassed tuberculosis and malaria to become the leading infectious killer in the world claiming 2 5 million lives in 1998 alone and growing i might add at truly breathtaking rates in africa and india we cannot afford to waste a second in our fight against it over the past six years we have worked hard to conquer this disease we have established the office of national aids policy to lead an effort full time expanded our investment in aids research to a record 1 8 billion accelerated the approval of new drugs two years ago as secretary shalala said i challenged america to come together to develop a vaccine for aids within 10 years our balanced budget will target 200 million toward this goal and until an aids vaccine is tested and approved it will remain the primary mission of the dale and betty bumpers vaccine research center i am confident that this is a place where miracles will happen miracles born of hard work ceaseless effort visionary dreams i look forward to the day when i can come back here to a grand facility with in murrow s words banners blowing in the breeze and trumpets in the distance heralding another great vaccine achievement for mankind the end of aids when that day comes it will be due in large part to the people who will be here at the bumpers center and to the two truly wonderful people for whom the center is named thank you for your work and for letting me be a part of today s ceremony and god bless you dale and betty thank you very much dem wjclinton9 7 93 bill_clinton i would like to resume the discussion because i want to have as much time as possible just to listen and learn today let me say that in my former life i came here several times and met with business leaders on behalf of the interests of my state i m sure that the people who have spoke before me have basically outlined the strategy we are attempting to pursue back home but essentially what we re trying to do is to deal with the major problems of america at home and then try to get ourselves in a better position to do what we can to be a good partner for the private sector in competing in a global economy we are well on the way to passing a record breaking deficit reduction plan that has great credibility in the financial markets and we ve got a big decline in long term interest rates at home which i think is quite good for all the economic softness and it s quite considerable at home we have over 950 000 new jobs in the economy in the last five months that s about as many as the united states produced in the previous three years we ve got a serious attempt going on to bring health care costs under control which as all of you know is one of the major causes of america s lack of competitiveness we re over 14 percent of gdp in health care nobody is over nine except canada and they re barely over nine and we re working on significant changes in our policies with regard to technology defense conversion and trade among other things so that s a basic outline of what i ve been trying to do for the last five months i wanted to come here and just listen to you today because you ve been able to do something that i think is very important which is to operate in japan to create opportunity and i just want to know what you think we should be doing and how we can do more to help you and to create more people like you i didn t hear what mr fallon said but if the ambassador fairly characterizes it and he s pretty good at doing that my attitude about this is that i prefer an open trading system i don t think a wealthy nation can grow wealthier unless there is global economic growth there are all kinds of challenges to that now i think the environmental movement that is sweeping the globe actually gives us a chance to create more jobs not lose them if we do it in an intelligent way but my view is also that the united states should try to get better rules but play by the rules that are in play that s sort of always been my attitude i could never have won an election if i wanted the rules to be different from those that have that obtain at this time you can always try to improve the rules we re trying to have a different campaign finance reform system we re trying to have a different lobby reform system in america but meanwhile we all play by the rules that are there so that s my attitude about that i wish i d heard exactly what you had to say but i think i get criticized in some quarters for saying that but normally when you show up for a game you ve got to play by the operative rules not the ones you wish were in play i was just going to make one other comment about this you made a very perceptive observation when you said the justice department only has ministry only has this issue to negotiate and we ve got nothing to give back because they can t imagine why japanese lawyers would set up offices in new york to do business or anything like that i mean i can understand that most people just assume when they go to another country they ll use lawyers who understand the law and practice in those countries but one of the big problems we ve got in america as i m sure you know is that we don t have enough lawyers who are facilitators and we have too many who are in effect litigators we have too many who slow down the operations of the private sector rather than who speed it up and there may be a little something we can do on the political side by indirection you know by sort of saying that japanese companies doing business in america one of the things that this administration is looking at in the whole productivity mix is how we can reduce the cost of litigation and the cost of decision making and the delays there and there may be some merit in our taking some initiative to bring some japanese lawyers who do business work to the united states to work with american lawyers to work with american businesses to see if we can kind of change the culture a bit and maybe some of the laws in our country that is a little something we could give back and it wouldn t do us any harm to do that anyway dem wjclinton9 7 98a bill_clinton thank you very much and welcome michael i would say with family like this and support like this you have an excellent chance to win i want to thank all of you for coming today in support of michael coles and his wonderful family i want to especially thank the mayor and the governor and all of the state and local officials who are here and my good friends the mayor s predecessor maynard jackson and andrew young for coming i feel a great deal of gratitude to georgia for many things in 1992 when i started running for president zell miller was about the only person besides my mother and my wife who thought i could win and then i didn t win in new hampshire where i had one or two minor obstacles and an opponent who lived five miles from the state line and they said you know if bill clinton doesn t get 40 percent in georgia he ll have to withdraw he s toast he s history and i said now zell i don t want to put any pressure on you so we got 57 percent in the georgia primary in 1992 and there have been a lot of wonderful experiences since and i am very grateful for this state i m grateful for people like maynard and andy who have been friends of mine and my wife for many many years i m grateful for bill campbell s leadership i can honestly say that i know quite a bit about being a governor i was a governor for 12 years one of the great honors of my life was when my colleagues once voted me the most effective governor in the country i m saying that not to brag on myself but to establish my bona fides for what i am about to say in my experience i believe that what zell miller has done as governor of georgia has affected more people more personally positively than the work of any other governor with whom i have worked in the last 20 years i also want to say when i m a very old man if the lord lets me live that long and i m thinking about over the high points of my wonderful career for which i m very grateful in the late of the night one of the things i will always remember is zell miller s voice at the new york convention in 1992 i can give that speech about the house his mama built better than he can but it captured the heart of america and the heart of what we re all about when we were sitting here at lunch i went around the table before i came up and i said can you folks how are we going to win this race what do you want me to say how is this going to work and they all gave me their ideas and i don t know if i can add anything to what s already been said very often since i became president i always get to speak last that s a great honor but very often it s that sort of situation where everything that needs to be said has already been said but not everyone said it i think maybe there is something i can say what do you need to win a race like this to convince voters in what is clearly an american battleground state for the future where atlanta now is home to more foreign companies than any other city in america where you have in this city really everything that you can imagine the future being about in america but where in the state the parties are pretty evenly divided and the philosophies are pretty evenly divided and the races have a way of being agonizingly close as i have found in my joy and disappointment what can i say well you have a good candidate who has demonstrated his character through overcoming adversity he s demonstrated that he understands the american economic system through triumphing in it he has built a great family which is the most important thing for anyone to have in life he has the guts to challenge incumbents who are going to have tons of money which is evident of courage in public life but what i would like to say to you is that we have to convince moderate republicans and independent voters that what happened in america in the last six years and what happened in georgia in zell miller s tenure was not an accident and was directly related not that i am responsible for every good thing that s happened in this country or not that he s responsible for every good thing that s happened in georgia but there is a connection between the ideas that leaders have and the policies that are pursued and the consequences in the lives of people it s not just that zell miller is a good man with a lot of energy and a lot of courage and he was brave in the marine corps and he gives a great speech the hope scholarship was in fact the right thing to do it was the right thing to do and what i can tell you from my experience is i was a southern governor i listened to the republicans bad mouth the democratic party from can to can t from dawn until dark year in and year out forever and a day and by the time i ran for president i had ump de dump people in arkansas who had voted for me repeatedly for governor who never thought they would vote for a democrat for president some of them didn t vote for a democrat even when it was me after voting for me repeatedly because republicans had done a great job of sort of doing reverse plastic surgery on the democrats you know they d say you can t vote for them they can t handle the budget they can t handle this they re weak on foreign policy you know that whole litany they want to take your money and give it to people on welfare don t believe in work i can give that speech better than they can give it too i ve heard it so many times and they still milk that old cow every chance they get and in 1992 i wanted to take the democratic party in a new direction based on its oldest values i believed that we could unite the country and move it forward that we could build that bridge to the 21st century based on opportunity and responsibility and a sense of community and we set about doing things that really were different we had new ideas on the economy we said we believe it s possible to cut the deficit and balance the budget and still have money to invest in education and in science and technology and building the future we believe it s possible to expand american trade and still care about preserving the environment and the standards of our working people we believe it s possible to be tough on crime but to be smart too and to find ways to keep more kids out of trouble in the first place we believe it is possible to move people from welfare to work but not to ask them to hurt their children to empower people to move from welfare to work by saying yes if you re able bodied you have to do it but by the way there s got to be a job there and there ought to be child care and you ought not to have to neglect your role as a parent to do your role as a worker in this society we believed that america could be a force for good in the world and still help the economic interests of our country we believed we could have a smaller government that was more effective that worked on empowering people to make the most of their own lives and we believed that we could build one america across all the lines that divide us because what unites us is more important than what divides us and if we could ever learn to appreciate our differences instead of be afraid of them we would be a very great country indeed now that s what we believe now after six years and again i say i do not believe that i my party or washington d c is responsible for every good thing that s happened in america most of the good things that happen in a free country happen by the billions and billions and billions of decisions that ordinary people make every day on their own but what the president does and the policies that are pursued are not unrelated to what happens in the country they have an impact and i am profoundly grateful that you gave me the chance to do this job and i am very grateful that after six years we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years the lowest inflation rate in 29 years the lowest welfare rolls in 29 years the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years and the highest rate of homeownership in the history of the country i m proud of that and you should be too now that s not a reason to let michael coles and i can t run for reelection and if i could it wouldn t be a reason to reelect me i remember once i was about to run for reelection after i had been in for 10 years and i asked a guy at the state fair once we were having governor s day and this guy came up in overalls and said are you going to run for reelection and i said yes i might will you vote for me if i do he said i will i always have and i said well aren t you sick of me after 10 years he said no but most of my friends are and i said well i said don t they think i ve done a good job he said yes but you drew a check every two weeks didn t you he said that s what we hired you to do so what s that got to do with this race where we are now i ll tell you what it s got to do with it number one it s some indication that if the ideas we had in the past were right that the ideas we re advocating for the future may be right as well and what we are trying to do in education with smaller classes and modernized schools and computers in all the schools and higher standards that these things are important because no one in the world believes we have the best system of public education in the world and everyone knows we have the best system of college education in the world and we will never be what we ought to be for every american child until our elementary and secondary education system is also the best in the world you take health care we re having this big debate over the patient s bill of rights i pleaded with the congress to pass it and i thought for sure they would now the health insurance companies a lot of them are against it but not all of them i might add most people are in managed care plans today i have never been one of those that attacked managed care when i became president health care costs were inflating at three times the rate of inflation it was unsustainable it was going to break every business in the country that tried to provide health insurance for their kids it was going to consume the whole economy we had to do something to slow down the rate of inflation on the other hand any system taken to extremes is subject to abuse i don t care what system it is the genius of the american constitution is the limits it places on all of us in power and whenever we forget that we do so at our peril that is the problem with managed care today people still ought to be able to get an emergency room when they need to go they need to be able to see a specialist when they need to see a specialist they need to be able to appeal these decisions when they need to be able to appeal them and that s what the patient s bill of rights is all about so that s an important issue we have all these exciting ideas about how we can grow the economy while doing a better job at preserving the environment look at these wildfires that your neighbor down in florida has been suffering i m going down to daytona when i leave you to thank the firefighters down there florida had the wettest few months in history in the fall and winter then they had the driest few months they had ever had then june was the hottest month they had ever had hotter than any july or august they had ever had the five hottest years on record since 1400 have all occurred in the 1990s and 1998 is going to be the hottest of all of trends continue now we have two choices we can do what my the leaders of the other party do in washington which is to deny that this climate change is going on deny this is a problem and say we re going to go right on and do everything just like we ve been doing it if it rips the sheet we re going to do it and everybody else is just you know like chicken little or we can face the evidence and say do we have to give up economic growth to change our energy use patterns try to cool the climate try to be more responsible and when you look at the evidence the evidence is plainly no you can grow the economy at least as rapidly as we ve been growing with a different energy strategy and without having the heavy hand of government regulation do it if you just give business and citizens the incentive to do what is plainly there before them to do these are huge decisions what i want to tell you is if you like those statistics i just read off the ideas we ve had in the past are an indication that the ideas we have in the future may be right the third point i want to make is this i do not expect this man if he gets elected to senate to vote with me on every issue i want him to only do so when it is consistent with his conscience and when he believes it s the right thing for the people of georgia but i believe he thinks enough like all of you do and like we do to know that we will be building a future based on progress not partisanship and that s the last point i want to make look at the record of the alternative i am grateful that the republicans worked with me to sign the balanced budget act last year but don t you ever forget that 93 percent of that deficit was reduced it was 93 percent gone on the day i signed the balanced budget act because of a bill that every single one of them voted against in 1993 to get it started don t forget that they said we were going to wreck the economy when we said you know it seems to me that if somebody s got a criminal record or a serious mental health history they ought not just to be able to walk in and buy a handgun even in arkansas where nearly everybody s got a gun why they accused me of the awfulest things you ever heard they said oh the world was going to come to an end and one of the reasons they won the congress in 1994 is because i disagreed with the nra over the brady bill and the assault weapons ban and it wasn t just in the south the took out a congressman in new hampshire too in 1996 i went back to new hampshire where i started and i got a bunch of those hunters together and i said do you remember what they told you in 94 i said well as of today there have been 80 000 felons fugitives and stalkers who couldn t buy handguns because of the brady law i said now if there s a single one of you who lost your hunting rifle because of what i did i want you to vote against me for reelection but if you didn t then they lied to you and you need to get even and in republican new hampshire they got even and i m grateful i say that because we actually view the world in different ways you ve got to understand somehow i talked to zell on the way in here those of you who are in this room we have to be able to reach out to the voters who don t follow politics as closely as you do and say look there are consequences to these ideas this is not just about whether the president can give a good speech or michael coles made a lot of money or even though i admire him enormously it s not even about whether he overcame all that adversity from his terrible accident it s also about whether we re doing the right thing for america s future and you know when times are good like this most people tend to relax and you want to say gosh i just want to go out and sit in the sun i went through the 70s i went through the 80s i lived through all this tumult i m making money the stock market s up leave me alone i don t want to have to think about this i m going to vote for the person that looks nicest on television makes me feel good promises me to keep taxes down and just don t bother me i had a great uncle one time who just died at 91 who had about a 4th grade education he said all i want you to do is keep the brooks clean so i can fish and make sure there s plenty of birds in the air and animals in the woods in hunting season and otherwise just leave me alone there s a lot of people who feel that way but let me tell you any person living in atlanta knows that this is a very dynamic world you see what they re going through in asia now economically you know about all the ethnic and racial and religious tensions all over the world if you ve looked at the demographics and you know what happens when the baby boomers and i m the oldest of the baby boomers when we retire what we re going to do the pressures we re going to put on the social security system and the medicare system we have big long term challenges in this country that we have to face it is easier to take the long term challenges on when you re doing well we have the confidence in this country to do well and georgia ought to have the confidence to vote for somebody like michael coles for the senate we ought to say look we ve got the confidence to do that here s a guy who has done all these other things right in his life and he s a doer you know get out and do things and it will be for progress not partisanship i think i ll take a chance and do it because this is a time when we have the opportunity to deal with these long term challenges and i want you to go out and tell people that i m telling you i ve been in washington six years and i only have two and a half years to go then i can go be a real person again just like the rest of you but what we need is progress over partisanship what we need is people who are willing to take a chance to deal with the long term challenges of the country what we need is people who understand that we cannot lead the world to a better place unless we are becoming a better country at home that we can always do better our founders left us a charge that is a permanent mission it s never finished to form a more perfect union i think that any one of the founding fathers here today could read about this man his family his work his values and say that s the kind of person we had in mind thank you very much dem wjclinton9 7 98b bill_clinton thank you so much well ladies and gentlemen first of all i d like to thank karen terry and randy holmes for their remarks and the introduction and for giving me and all of you and all of america thanks to the media folks who are here one vivid picture of what these last couple of weeks have been all about i want to thank my good friend governor chiles for the work that he has done i thank lt governor mackay and all the other state officials who are here i thank mayor asher and mr rosevear the chair of the county council the mayor asked me to say in front of national television what lawton has already said that daytona beach is open for tourists people all over america are calling the white house on the comment line they want to know what can we do to help the people of florida well one thing you can do is if you haven t taken your vacation yet and you were trying to decide whether to come give these people an economic boost down here they ve got the fires under control and they need some help and support it would be a good thing to do i want to thank the members of congress who are here corrine brown peter deutsch and allen boyd for representing you well and for supporting strongly the emergency appropriations that make it possible for fema and the other agencies to do its work i thank our agriculture secretary dan glickman and our wonderful fema director james lee witt for the work they have done i want to thank all the firefighters who are here i know we have people from palm coast fire department from the national guard from the u s forest service from the division of florida forestry the florida emergency management division and a lot of state and local emergency workers mr myers your emergency management director here and i m glad to see mr barberra from the international association of firefighters here there s so many people i want to thank but i d like to say a special word of thanks too to bill franz for making daytona available as a headquarters for the firefighters and for the effort here i really appreciate that they had to postpone the race this year because there was a more important race just going on and you just heard them talk about it a race that was fought house by house and family by family there are 150 000 fans that normally show up here and even though the race was delayed i hope they ll show up later to show their loyalty and support not only to daytona but to all of you for what you did here i m here because i think it s important that every american knows that this summer notwithstanding the great movies the real american heroes are not up in space fighting asteroids they re in florida fighting fires and i thank you for it you might be interested to know those of you who are firefighters that on the several occasions when i would call and i want to thank our great vice president al gore for coming down here on my behalf because i was in china when much of this occurred and i would call back and get my daily reports and every day people said you would not believe what the firefighters are doing the only real worry we have is none of them will sleep none of them will rest as you know there are almost 100 injuries and no telling how much exhaustion here and i guess i m cutting into your rest time now so i ve now become part of the problem but i think it s important that america know that too every single report i got on the progress of these fires someone said our real concern is the people who are fighting the fires will not sleep they will not rest they are obsessed with saving every home and i thank you for that i d also like to thank the people who came from all corners of our country and from canada and even some came from as far away as russia to help showing that this was a human challenge that touched the hearts of people the world over when i was in china and we were in the midst of tough discussions and arguing over things that are profoundly important over the long run my chinese host asked me how the people of florida were doing with the fires you really reached the hearts of people throughout the world i also want to thank the people with the public works departments across the state for the work they did in cutting fire lines and clearing the fields and i want to thank again no telling how many of you did things that i don t know about but i want to echo something governor chiles said maybe it shouldn t require a disaster like this but you did show our country at its best you showed people at its best you showed people what the meaning of community is and why we all really do depend on each other and as we go back to our daily lives and i hope a much more ordinary routine i hope it s something we never forget that we are all in this together we need each other and we re all at our best when we re giving not only to our families but to our neighbors it s something i will never forget and i hope all of you can help the rest of the people of florida and the united states remember it in good times and rainy times there were children who gave up their 4th of july picnics and trips to disney world i met a couple of them earlier katie and megan hendren to help out and donate food and money hotel managers giving free rooms churches helping people cook food for all the empty pots laundromat owners cleaning soot and ash from uniforms i even heard about the truckload of bananas that were mistakenly donated to volusia country when you put out the word that bandannas were needed for the firefighters well the older i get and the more muscle cramps i get doing my exercises the more i appreciate bananas so the firefighters may need the bananas as well as the bandannas and i thank all the people who made them available our government has tried to be a good partner i just met with several people who have been victimized by this fire and i want to thank the families that took the time to talk to me a lot of them are still hurting some of them don t have their children living with the parents yet they re all spread out all over and a lot of them are still uncertain about what their future living conditions are going to be and a couple of them gave me some very specific suggestions about what we still might do to serve people here better and i thank them for that today i want to say that there are some new things we re going to do and i d like to mention them just briefly first of all i ve directed our agriculture secretary who is here with me dan glickman to declare all of our florida counties eligible for farmers emergency loans if they ve been affected by the drought which is directly connected to this fire second the labor department will pay for hundreds of jobs to expedite the recovery process which is important third fema will develop a long term recovery plan with the state and work with our economic development administration to analyze the economic impact of the fires and see what else we can do to help and finally fema will be giving individual assistance to 29 more counties providing temporary housing crisis counseling repairing homes replacing essential items we re going to do everything we can until the full recovery is completed let me just say one other thing you all probably know this but this fire was made worse because you had first the wettest few months you d ever had followed by the driest few months you d ever had and then june was the hottest month ever recorded even hotter than any july or august ever recorded in florida no one entirely understands what is bringing about this extreme weather but i can tell you this and i ve got it on my mind since i just got back from china and they ve been keeping weather records there for 500 years and more since the 1400s the five hottest years ever recorded all occurred in the 1990s 1997 was the hottest year ever recorded if present temperature trends continue 1998 will be warmer than 1997 was now you ll hear a lot of political debate and the vice president and i believe that the climate is warming and that we ought to take steps to cool it off and that we can do it without hurting economic growth others may disagree the point i want to make today is i m going to go back to washington determined to try to do whatever i can to make sure that you and people like you all over america can be even better prepared because if we are going to have hotter and hotter and drier and drier years and even if we move aggressively to try to combat this climate change we ll have that for a while then when you or other people like you have to face this again we need to learn from what you ve gone through we need your best advice so that s the last thing i want to ask you i want to ask you for one last shred of citizen service when this is all over you need to get together with the groups of people that fought this fire you need to put your heads together you need to ask yourself what specific things could have been done to provide even better preparedness what do you do when you re fighting three fires in three places at once what do you do when you have to make choices about what you re going to do is there any way to avoid making those kind of choices what else can we do because we have to believe based on the evidence of the last decade that if we get hotter and hotter and we have periods of more extreme wet followed by periods of more extreme drought we re going to have more things like this happen you can help america to deal with this and so when you get some sleep when you get some rest when you re absolutely confident this crisis is past if you ve got some ideas get them to the state or get them to our fema people because we want to build on what you ve done this has been heroic but if we can do anything to prevent these things or to be better prepared the next time because of your experience and your knowledge i implore you to share it with us because we have to believe we re facing things like this in the near future finally let me say i found with the help of some of our people who know i m interested in scripture a verse from isaiah that i think captures what you ve all been through and i d like to read it to you in closing isaiah 57 10 you were wearied with the length of your way but you did not say it is hopeless you find new life for your strength and because you did our country is stronger thank you and god bless you dem wjclinton9 8 00a bill_clinton thank you good afternoon welcome to the white house i want to join hillary in welcoming all those who have been acknowledged and all the other family and friends of our honorees today and i want to thank her for many things but especially for the conversations that we had leading up to this day about people who should be selected and the reasons there some of them reflect now that we ve been here eight years and been involved in public life for nearly three decades a lot of personal experiences that we have had and we had a lot of good times talking about who should be here today and why more than 60 years ago president franklin roosevelt said freedom cannot be bestowed it must be achieved from the founding of our nation it has been the duty of each generation to achieve freedom all over again to expand it to deepen its meaning to widen the circle of those who are included as full citizens today we honor 15 men and women who have done exactly that they have helped america to achieve freedom it is my honor on behalf of a proud nation to award each of them the presidential medal of freedom our highest civilian honor in the words of our constitution they have helped us to secure the blessings of liberty by acts of bravery conscience and creativity i am grateful for those who are here and for those who are being honored who are not here today when jim burke was just starting out in business his boss called him into the office and told him to shut the door he had just made a mistake and he was convinced he was about to be fired instead his boss congratulated him saying his mistake meant he was making decisions and taking risks over the years his willingness to make the tough call in times of crisis and to put the public interest above all else has placed a higher premium on candor and corporate citizenship in the business world in an age when many look only to the bottom line he draws his values from a deeper well jim took a risk when he became chairman of the partnership for a drug free america most people think that s a problem you can talk about but not much you can do about there are clearly few challenges tougher and few more vital than teaching our young people about the dangers of drugs helping more to avoid them helping more to overcome addiction once they have become involved like every other challenge in his life he met it head on among other things he s raised billions of dollars in private resources to help do the job he has worked closely with administrations both democratic and republican with the office of national drug control and prevention last year the teen drug use rate fell substantially thanks in no small measure to years and years and years of passionate devotion by jim burke thanks to him our families are healthier our communities are safer our nation is stronger commander read the citation in the fall of 1951 in the mountains of north korea a young marine made himself a promise whatever he faced in battle he would strive to act just as his commander would act his commander s name john chafee captain chafee set the standard for bravery decency and integrity not only in war but later in a long and distinguished career first as governor of rhode island later secretary of the navy then in 1976 by election of the people of rhode island a united states senator where he would serve with distinction until his death nine months ago all of us who love public service and believe in america still miss him very much senator chafee took on the tough issues from health care to child care to most of all the environment even when it meant that he had to take on people in his own party he proved that politics can be an honorable profession he embodied the decent and vital center that puts progress in the public interest above partisanship today we offer this tribute to the man most people called senator but whose riflemen still proudly called captain his wonderful wife ginny and his whole family are here on his behalf we welcome them all commander read the citation in march of 1999 as slobodan milosevic unleashed his army and police on the people of kosovo general wesley clark nato s supreme commander was given the first military mission of its kind directing the forces of a 19 nation alliance to end a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing the stakes were monumental almost a million people had been driven from their homes solely because of their ethnic and religious backgrounds success would save lives strengthen nato advance the cause of freedom democracy and unity in europe failure would leave much of the continent awash in a sea of refugees and end the 20th century on a note of helpless indignation in the face of evil wes clark well understood the perils of the balkans for he had already played a vital role in ending the war in bosnia and beginning the long process of building a stable multiethnic democracy in that country he summoned every ounce of his experience and expertise as a strategist a soldier and a statesman to wage our campaign in kosovo he prevailed miraculously without the loss of a single combat casualty at the apex of a long and distinguished military career that goes back to his outstanding performance as a cadet at west point over 30 years ago he was assigned a challenge many experts thought was mission impossible instead thanks to general clark we now can declare it mission accomplished commander read the citation as a young officer bill crowe seemed to seize every opportunity for a non traditional navy career he took a leave to earn a master s in education he passed up an invitation to join the nuclear submarine program so he could earn a ph d in politics at princeton a few years later when dr crowe found himself named rear admiral crowe he was quite surprised only later did he learn that admiral zumwalt that year had ordered all naval promotion boards to consider and i quote iconoclasts bill crowe has always been an innovative and independent thinker he was the first chairman of the joint chiefs with a mandate to promote greater cooperation among the armed forces along with the power to reshape their respective roles and missions he used that power to build a military more agile and efficient for the global age from that chairmanship to his ambassadorship at the court of st james in our administration bill crowe has been the right leader for changing times even more he has himself helped to change the times to enhance our strength advance the peace and quicken the march of freedom he is an iconoclast but an immensely patriotic one commander read the citation her namesake is marian anderson one of the greatest american singers of all time the power and range of this marian s voice is even greater it brought robert kennedy to mississippi helped to organize the poor people s campaign inspired hillary and thousands of other citizens young and old to join her through the years in the crusade that has become known as the children s defense fund the base from which she has changed the future for millions of america s children by grassroots actions and successful lobbying in congress for health care child care education and so much more marian wright edelman has lived a life of giving in the process she has built a family of distinguished citizen givers she is a tireless advocate a driving force a crusader of conscience like her namesake marian s voice is always strong and true singing that we are all children of god and therefore must protect all our children commander read the citation the first thing you notice about john kenneth galbraith is neither his wit nor his intellect those are the second and third things first you notice his height which like his passion for public service is a legacy of his father the elder galbraith once told him we are obliged because of our enormous size to alter the world to our specifications that is just what professor galbraith has spent a lifetime doing from the lecture halls of harvard to wartime washington to a diplomatic post in india he has altered our world making it better nobler more just it is ironic that john kenneth galbraith actually coined the term conventional wisdom since he spent his entire life challenging it he once said he always suspected president kennedy sent him to india just to be free of his political advice and policy ideas actually president kennedy drew a lot from those ideas as have generations of american leaders and thinkers ever since professor galbraith writes with such eloquence and clarity that his ideas are accessible to all of us helping us not just to understand the economy but also to remember that it is the providence of more than a privileged few commander read the citation monsignor george higgins believes in the dignity of work and he s not shy about fighting for it for more than 60 years now he has organized marched prayed and bled for the social and economic justice of working americans he spoke a fundamental truth when he said work is an important way in which we exercise our humanity in return society offers us not only our daily bread but a sense that we ourselves are honored for the contributions we make today we honor monsignor higgins for his work for defending the right of working americans to organize in factories foundries and fields and to better their own lives through collective action his faith and his courage has strengthened not only our nation s labor unions but our american union commander read the citation you are now about to witness one of the best things about this ceremony for a change i don t have to follow jesse jackson but the truth is america has followed reverend jackson as he marched with dr king walked the picket lines ran for our nation s highest office instilling hope and inspiring millions beginning with his own remarkable family from the streets of watts to the hollows of appalachia as my special envoy to africa and the leader of rainbow push he has walked the walk of freedom when i think of rainbow push i think of two things rainbow means we ve all got a place at the table push is what jesse does when he thinks i m not doing right he has used his legendary prowess at persuading people to do things they are otherwise disinclined to do to free innocents imprisoned around the world including american servicemen from the middle east to the balkans with his wall street project he is forging the next frontier of freedom economic freedom reminding us that when we limit opportunities for some americans we limit possibilities for all americans his work for years has been an inspiration to the new markets initiative that i have undertaken along with the republican and democratic leaders of the house and senate and when it becomes law it will be in no small measure the result of the powerful example that he has set year after year dr king said human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability it comes through the tireless efforts of those willing to be coworkers with god the cause of justice has no greater coworker than jesse jackson it s hard to imagine how we could have come as far as we have without the creative power the keen intellect the loving heart and the relentless passion of jesse louis jackson and god isn t done with him yet commander read the citation as a catholic schoolgirl millie jeffrey dodged the stones of neighborhood bigots and watched the klansmen march through town with a burning cross as a union organizer in mississippi she stood bravely as company men snapped bullwhips at her feet clearly they didn t know whom they were up against she may be small in stature and humble in manner but she is very strong she worked for walter reuther and counseled the kennedys influencing all with her courage and her unflagging commitment to social justice to meet the need for more women in public office she started the national women s political caucus and sparked the effort to nominate geraldine ferraro 16 years ago for countless women around the world she remains an inspiration her impact will be felt for generations and her example never forgotten commander read the citation nearly 20 years ago very few researchers even knew what aids was even fewer had the courage to speak out about it dr mathilde krim was one of the first to grasp its terrible implications but she was not content simply to raise the alarm she marshalled others to establish the american foundation for aids research raising awareness raising millions for research and raising the hopes of countless people bravely confronting this deadly disease despite some promising scientific breakthroughs we know the fight against aids is nowhere near won as she reminds us we must not grow complacent she said recently we re about halfway on a long road thanks to her vision her ability to inspire her enduring compassion for those in need we now travel that road united and determined to prevail commander read the citation his roots lie deep in the south dakota soil in small town farms and the faith of his father a methodist pastor after more than a half century in public life george mcgovern still draws on those teachings and traditions and he s still imparts them to the rest of us by the power of his example the courage of his convictions and his proud legacy of public service long before he became a congressman or senator or a u s ambassador he became a hero his brave exploits in the skies above europe earned him the distinguished flying cross and more important to him the gratitude of the men he brought safely to ground returning home he taught history and then set out to make a little history himself first winning a seat in congress then a few years later creating the food for peace program one of the great achievements of the kennedy era by the time he ran for president in 1972 senator mcgovern was not only a hero in war but a stalwart voice for peace in vietnam hillary and i and several others in this room including the national security advisor mr berger and eli segal who started americorps and our welfare to work partnership were honored to embrace his conviction that we could move our country forward for decades his conviction never wavered nor has his early commitment to bringing food to the hungary today he serves as our ambassador to the u n food and agriculture organization and he has pledged to feed half a billion of the world s ill fed senator mcgovern and senator dole have come together to persuade me along with congressman mcgovern and senator mcgovern s senator tom daschle that the united states should lead the world to get one nutritious meal to every child in every poor country in the world and i just announced a couple of days ago our first 300 million contribution to that goal this initiative could not only feed hungry children but lead to the enrollment of millions of children not now in school especially girls in poor countries so george mcgovern s work continues commander read the citation on the wall of his senate office are two framed magazine covers one says moynihan the conscience of a neo conservative the other says moynihan neo liberal i think he suspects that a great deal of his success in life has come as a result of keeping the rest of us slightly confused but whatever label is assigned to him not a day goes by when daniel patrick moynihan is not brilliantly dynamically uniquely himself he is hell s kitchen and the london school of economics a sailor in uniform and a professor in tweeds a subtle sophisticated wit and a tough blunt critic of social injustice a man of ideas and a man of action by this dazzling collection of qualities pat moynihan has served and survived four successive presidencies the only american ever to have done so most of the people who work for me are glad to have survived one he represented american interests in india he has stood up for our ideals powerfully in the united nations new york sent him to the senate in america s bicentennial year and in the quarter century since he has championed diversity and waged without relent the war on poverty he helped to launch i was interested to learn as hillary said that senator moynihan actually helped to create the medal he is about to receive president kennedy charged him with that task and as the president decreed the standard of achievement was set very high indeed i know that every american will agree that in the four decades since senator moynihan has exceeded the standards set by every conceivable measure commander read the citation cruz reynoso is the son of mexican immigrants who spent summers working with his family in the fields of the san joaquin valley as a child he loved reading so much his elementary school classmates called him el profe the professor later some told him to put aside his dreams of college saying bluntly they will never let you in but with faith in himself and the values of our country cruz reynoso went on to college and to law school but never forgot his roots he worked for the equal employment opportunity commission and led the pioneering california rural legal assistance program in 1976 he was appointed associate justice of the california court of appeals and rose to become the first latino to serve on the state s highest court today he continues to labor in the fields of justice serving as vice chair of the u s civil rights commission opening new doors for latino lawyers and teaching a new generation of students the world of law not long ago the person his classmates once called el profe was voted by his own students professor of the year commander read the citation in the new testament book of romans it is written and how shall they hear without a preacher the lord may have had that passage in mind the day gardner taylor was born or once again years later when a terrible car accident convinced him to abandon law school and enter the ministry his eloquence has inspired generations helping us to see the hard challenges of life in the revealing light of scripture as founder of the progressive national baptist convention reverend taylor helped to galvanize black churches all across america in the struggle for human rights as a pastor in brooklyn he has worked to repair the breach whether racial political or economic he speaks not just from the scriptures but from his soul the gift god gave him he in turn has shared with us for at least 20 years now if anyone made a list of the five or six greatest preachers in america gardner taylor would always be at the top for those of us who heard him preach and those of us whom he has counseled in his private wisdom we know we have been in the presence of not only a man of god but a great american citizen commander read the citation when millions were murdered why was i allowed to live for more than half a century simon wiesenthal has asked himself this question again and again to those who know his story one of miraculous survival and of relentless pursuit of justice the answer is apparent from the unimaginable horrors of the holocaust only a few voices survived to bear witness to hold the guilty accountable to honor the memory of those who were killed only if we heed these brave voices can we build a bullwark of humanity against the hatred and indifference that is still all too prevalent in this world of ours i m struck by another question mr wiesenthal once posed how does one explain to a young person what freedom means when he has been born to freedom answering this question is our common moral responsibility and our enduring challenge mr wiesenthal is 91 years old now and he had a little fall last week and regrettably couldn t be here with us today he s all the way over in europe in vienna but he is listening to us by telephone rabbi marvin hier will receive the award on his behalf we thank him for a lifetime of service and example and reminder and for the astonishing work of the wiesenthal center and after the citation has been read i want you to have a little extra umphf in your applause so he ll be able to hear it all the way over in europe commander read the citation you know today s honorees come from an astonishing array of backgrounds their experiences and their service are remarkably different yet they share in common a devotion to freedom and its expansion to being good citizens to serving their fellow human beings everyone in our country has been enriched by the service of everyone on this stage president johnson said when he first presented this award that no words could add to the distinction of the men and women being honored today rather their names add distinction to this award even more i believe that is true today they have added distinction richness depth and freedom to american life for that the rest of us are proud ennobled and grateful hillary and i again want to thank you all for coming we ask you to join us now in the state dining room for a reception but first i ask you to express your support and gratitude once more for this remarkable group of citizens dem wjclinton9 8 00b bill_clinton thank you thanks for the tie you know i got interested in ties when i realized that the older and grayer i got the more it would be the only sort of fashion statement i could ever make for the rest of my life thank you tom thank you pam thank you brasim and thank you ladies and gentlemen for coming i ll tell you what i would like to do i d like to just talk for a couple of minutes and then just have a conversation if you have any questions you want to ask anything you want to say to me i will be glad to do it we kind of started our dinner that way but i want to begin by thanking you for coming here and for helping hillary and i wanted to just give you a little background on that i am immensely proud of her for making this race and we just got a good poll today from college saying that she was ahead 64 to 43 which i think is quite good and if you understand anything about new york democratic politics if you go into election day and you re two or three points ahead you re going to be just fine so i feel good about that and i m very proud of her because you know we had actually been looking forward to this year and being able to relax a little bit we knew we d have to work hard for the vice president and now for senator lieberman and for our crowd in congress but we also looked forward to the nights at the white house and enjoying our last year there and going to camp david and my wife gave up a lot of that because she understood that it was important to carry on the work that we have been about this last eight years and because half a dozen or more new york house members asked her to do it and she got up and spent her time she s been to every country in new york now and she fell in love with it and figured out that what they needed more was the same thing she had been working on for 30 years i can tell you this for 30 years all she ever did was help everybody else and i m kind of proud of her for sort of venturing out on her own now and trying to do something for herself i wanted to mention just a couple of things because i think it s quite important i think it s important that the people of new york know the voters know that what she did as first lady and what she did before so if you can help us with that i d appreciate it she had basically had an unprecedented level of activity in her present position over the last eight years she s been active in lobbying for specific pieces of legislation from the family and medical leave law to the children s health insurance program to the several bills we passed that dramatically expanded the availability of adoptions gave tax credits to people who would adopt children with disabilities did more for kids in foster care and for kids who are leaving the foster care system which is the product of a lifetime of commitment for her she has been very active in promoting a lot of our education initiatives she had the first ever white house conference on early childhood and brain development which is a very important issue on violence against children we had a big meeting on that that she put on and the last thing that she did as first lady that may have ironically one of the most enduring impacts was to basically run all of our millennial efforts we came up with this slogan for the millennium that we would honor the past and imagine the future and we ve essentially done two things we ve had a series probably 10 now of lectures and dialogues at the white house on big issues that will define the next several years in the new century the last one on exploring the ocean depths and exploring outer space and what s in those black holes and they ve been followed widely all over the world it s been amazing and it was just her idea to put it together we had the famous scientist stephen hawking who as you may know has lived longer with lou gehrig s disease than anybody in history still teaching at cambridge in england came all the way across the ocean and gave us a lecture and talked on this little electronic machine about the whole concept of time and space and how it would change in the new century and then in terms of honoring the past she set up this millennial treasures event to do everything from save the star spangled banner and the constitution and the bill of rights to specific sites in communities all over america we were just up on martha s vineyard there is a 19th century tabernacle there that was used for a hundred years for bible study in the first integrated event racially integrated event starting right after the civil war in america to abraham lincoln s summer home at the old soldiers home in washington and last week when we were up there two weeks ago dick moe the head of the national preservation historic trust historic preservation trust said that hillary s millennium treasures effort was the single largest historic preservation movement in the history of the united states so she s done a good job as first lady she s made a difference in people s lives before she ever got here the whole every year i washington governor and before when i was attorney general she gave up huge portions of her income as a private lawyer to devote time to public service just like she gave away all the money she made on that book which was number one on the new york times best seller list because she always believed in public service but she also served on corporate boards learned a lot about economics helped to bring jobs to poor areas in our state while she was trying to improve education and do all the things she s done and along the way she chaired the committee that rewrote all the education standards in our state she s the best organized person i ever worked with with the best blend of mind and heart and policy knowledge she s perfect for the u s senate and i think she s going to win she ll be great at it but all the people that are trying to beat her will spare no effort or no expense therefore it s critical that you ve done what you ve done if she has the resources she ll do just fine she won t let you down and she ll be great in the senate the only other point i want to make about that generally is i ve done everything i know to do to kind of turn our country around from the very difficult circumstances which existed in 1991 and 1992 when i was running our nation has never had the present combination of economic prosperity social progress the absence of domestic crisis or foreign threat and national self confidence we ve got now and it s very important that this work continue and that means that every senate seat and every house seat is pivotally important it also means from my point of view that this national election is pivotally important a lot of you have been going to these events that i do and i had this little mantra i ll say it again i say i always tell people there are three very important things you need to know about this election it is a bid election there are big differences and our party is the only party that wants you to know what the differences really are what does that tell you about who you ought to vote for but it s actually in fact true if you saw what the undecided voter said after our friends met in philadelphia they said gosh we like those people they look great and they look like they re not being mean and right wing anymore they re being inclusive but what do they stand for anyway that s what they said the undecided voters said i liked what i saw but i didn t hear anything i don t know what they re going to do if they get in and there are a lot of stories which say well i m pretty relaxed about this election after all things are so good in america why be you know sort of a don t worry be happy election and then there was a huge story on the cover of i think it was usa today not very long ago saying that the people didn t know if there was any difference between the two candidates on their economic policy the two candidates for president so i just would say to you in addition to this incredible generosity tonight to hillary and thank you for rescheduling this because i was in the camp david peace talks before when we were supposed to do it every one of you has a big network of friends and co workers and colleagues maybe they re people that share your politics but may not be as energized as you are maybe they re people who don t share your politics at all or don t think about politics much but let me just say i ve lived long enough now to know that people often make mistakes not because they re living under such adversity but because things are going along so well they just stop concentrating and anybody who lives to be beyond the age of 30 can cite at least one time in his or her life when you have made a mistake because things were going so well you just stopped thinking and this is a phenomenal opportunity for us to basically decide what we want the future to look like and then go do it and change is the only constant particularly in today s economy nothing stays the same forever we need to make the most of this the second thing is there really are just huge differences here i mean there are big differences in economic policy in crime policy in health care policy in education policy environmental policy right down the line and in our policy on building one america whether we should have a minimum wage hate crimes legislation employment nondiscrimination legislation whether we should preserve or get rid of a woman s right to choose all these things are at stake here the next president will make two to four appointments to the supreme court u s senators will confirm them or not so there s a lot at stake and the only other thing i want to say is let me just briefly ask you to think about this economic question because their line you can say their line quicker than ours and it sounds so much better they say gosh we re going to have this 2 trillion surplus and it s your money and we re going to give it back to you in a tax cut and we say now wait a minute you want a 2 trillion tax cut but that leaves you nothing to provide prescription drugs for medicare people or deal with long term care or deal with the baby boomers retiring on social security or medicare and if you want to partially privatize social security and protect the benefits of everybody who is on social security that alone costs another trillion dollars and you haven t paid for star wars yet or anything else so in other words how can you give it all away with a tax cut we say we ll only give about a quarter as big a tax cut as they will because we think we have to have money to invest in education health care the environment and science and technology and because we want to keep paying the debt down and get this country out of debt and we re going to have to take care of all these baby boomers when they retire now it takes me longer to say that but let me put it to you in another way i asked the council of economic advisors to tell me what the difference was between the 2 trillion tax cut being conservative and all in other words giving all the other side the benefit of the doubt and the plan that i have embraced that the vice president and senator lieberman are now working on they say that the gore plan will keep interest rates at least at least one percent below the republican plan every year for a decade that is worth 250 billion in home mortgages 30 billion in car payments 15 billion in college loan payments never mind the fact that it means lower business loans which means more business loans more growth more jobs and a better stock market and i haven t even gotten to the main point which is what are we going to do if the surplus doesn t materialize and we give it away in advance by giving it all away in a tax cut i never thought i m up here you may remember that during the primary i was actually attacked and by extension the vice president was for being so insistent on continuing to pay down the debt i was attacked from the left but the best social program is a job and this is a more just country than it was eight years ago because child poverty has dropped income is going up in all quintiles the female unemployment rate is the lowest it s been in 40 years the single parent household poverty rate is the lowest it s been in 46 years the economy does that for you and i m telling you this is really it s wrong for us to get off this path we ve been on of driving this debt down keeping the interest rates as low as we can and letting the technology and the explosion in productivity which was a 5 percent increase in the last quarter over the same period last year keep taking this thing along until we bring everybody along in this economy and i know a lot of you have heard me say this before i want to tell you one more time their position which is let s give everybody a tax cut it s your money because we project it it really does remind me of these publisher s clearinghouse these sweepstake letters you get from ed mcmahon you may have won 10 million you may have and everybody that went out the next day and spent the 10 million should seriously consider supporting the republicans in this election every single one of them but everybody else ought to stick with us and keep this thing going and that s just one difference but i m telling you it is there really is i ve dealt with a republican congress now for five years and i ve found a lot of common ground with speaker hastert we re going to pass this new markets legislation i think this year we passed the africa caribbean basin trade bill with the help of the republican and the democratic leadership where senator lott and senator daschle worked together i work every which way i can but i promise you this is it is a profound philosophical difference they actually believe it s okay to have tax cuts based on a hundred percent of the projected surplus and i can tell you people ask me all the time bob rubin and i were together the other day at his portrait unveiling and we were talking about how we started the economic team and lloyd bentsen was my first treasury secretary and all that and all these guys came up to me one guy says to me he says well mr president what was the principal economic reform you brought to washington what do you think was the principal thing you ve done that led to all this incredible growth and what was the main change and i said arithmetic we brought back arithmetic we stopped spending money we didn t have we stopped projecting in a rosy way we stopped acting like all this stuff falls from trees and the sky and we started working in a disciplined way to make hard choices so i m just telling you hillary needs your help the vice president and senator lieberman need your help america needs your help every one of you has a network we ve got a chance to keep this economy going and spread its benefits but the first and foremost thing we have to decide is are we going to continue the disciplined path of the last eight years taking advantage of the fact that we can do more than we could when i came in because we ve turned it around or are we going to back to the policy which says all tax cuts are good whether you ve got the money or not give it away and worry about the consequences later now we ve tried it both ways you had 12 years of one way now you ve had eight years the other way and you can add up the evidence either way and draw your own conclusion but the only way we can get in trouble is if people don t think about it like that if they don t really think it s a big election if they think this thing is so strong you couldn t mess it up with a stick of dynamite if they don t understand with clarity the choice there clarity is our friend you can be positive and upbeat and you should be you never have to say a bad word about any of our opponents just talk about the differences and let people decide we ve been around here over 200 years now because usually the people get it right if they have enough time and enough information the final thing i want to say is i want to thank tom for what he said about ireland and the middle east it s been the great joy of my life to labor for peace which is the highest example of what harry truman said is the essential work of the presidency which is trying to persuade people to do what they should do without having to be asked in the first place thank you very much dem wjclinton9 8 96 bill_clinton thank you very much i am delighted to be here i want to thank all of you for coming i want to thank the co chairs of this event and hannah bond the director of the saxophone club thank you all very much i want to thank dave koz and his band and b j and the boys and i want to say to my good friend whoopie goldberg she is a national marvel isn t she and here she was tonight actually playing it straight and that just shows you how serious she is about winning this election if you re as serious as she is we re going to be okay in november i also saw magic johnson over there i thank him for being here tonight thank you magic ladies and gentlemen i want to be brief tonight so i can get out and shake hands and say hello to you but i want to say just a couple of things just bear with me for a moment in all your exuberance and let s just be serious with me just for a minute i want to tell you a couple of stories one is that yesterday hillary and chelsea and i had the privilege of welcoming the olympic team to the white house and we re real proud of them and the day before we saw the paralympic team off to atlanta to do their thing and it was an incredible event and of course we had a chance to go down and speak to our olympic team and visit the olympics right before the games began and so i ve been thinking a lot during this whole period and that long night after i stayed up all night after the bomb blew up in the park and we didn t quite know what had happened for a while what is it that makes people love the olympics so much besides the fact that we all love sports and i think that there are two or three things that make us love it even if we don t like sports so much you know we had 77 000 saw the women s soccer final i mean people really got into this now what is it that we like about it well first of all you ve got people from 197 different countries and they re all getting along for a change they re all getting along for a change right before i went to the dining hall the north korean and south korean teams had sat at adjoining tables and had talked i ve been trying to get them to talk for three and a half years with no luck secondly they work the way we think the world ought to work i mean there s a set of rules and people follow them and as long as you re following rules the other people all respect you even if you re different from them and you can t win any medals if you sneak into your opponent s room at night and break his legs or if you stand up at a microphone like this and talk about what a terrible person your opponent is how they re no good and corrupt and dishonest you ve just got to reach down deep inside and do your best and everybody gets a chance but nobody gets a guarantee and most people don t win medals but everybody is better off when it s all over and we all feel good and in america we especially feel good because there were 197 different nations represented there are representatives from 150 of those different countries in los angeles county tonight as we speak so we identify with that and we like it now i ll tell you a second story i was up in salinas today and we were celebrating this remarkable effort they ve made with all their community organizations to reach out to all the children in trouble and break this epidemic of gangs they have there and dramatically lower the murder rate among young people and i went there to celebrate what they ve done and also to point out that we announced today that for the first time in seven long years the crime rate is going down among people under 18 for the first time in seven years but it turns out that there was a gold medal winner from salinas who was a member of our 4x400 relay team a very handsome young man who showed up and got a bigger hand than the president did it was true and he has a twin brother who came within less than a second of making the olympic team himself and it turns out that at one point when these kids were very young they were so poor they were living in a car but the fellow has an olympic gold medal an american dream story now what s all that got to do with this election this election in my opinion is about what this country is going to look like when we start the new century and the new millennium and for those of you young people who are in the saxophone club what it s going to look like when you re my age and you have children and what i want it to look like is a country where everybody wherever they start out in life no matter how poor they are what their race is what their station in life is has a chance to live out their dreams if they re willing to be responsible and work for it i want this to be a country where we relish our diversity where we celebrate our differences and say we re not bound by any race or region or creed we re bound by the constitution the bill of rights and the declaration of independence if you ll sign onto that you re fine by me and we like it and i want this to be a country that stands up for peace and freedom around the world and tells people that it s wrong to have a situation you ve got in bosnia burundi the middle east or ireland or anyplace where people are killed or persecuted because they re different from somebody else from religion or race or ethnicity and if we do that the next century is going to be the greatest era of human possibility that has ever existed there are children in school today that within 10 years will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet that have not been imagined yet and more people will have more chances to live out their dreams than ever before that s what i m working for i was so elated yesterday that i got to participate in a comment about our space scientists discovering this piece of meteorite from mars that took 16 million years to get here and has been hanging around in antarctica for lord knows how many thousands of years but seems to have evidence of a fossilized micro organism incredible thing but whether it s whatever pans out of it what it shows is that there is a magnificent world out there of things we still don t know and the explosion of knowledge and technology if we can make sure everybody has a fair chance and if we can learn to live together amidst all our differences and if we can keep moving the world forward in a more peaceful way it s going to be an incredible time out there now that is what this election is all about and i want you to make just three simple arguments to people in the next 88 days number one take president reagan s test are we better off than we were four years ago well if the test is the first time the deficit has gone down in all four years of a president s term since the 1840s 10 million more jobs 4 4 million more homeowners 10 million people refinance their mortgages a record number of new small businesses a record number of new businesses owned by women and minorities if that s the test record exports we re better off than we were if the test is four years in a row of a declining crime rate 60 000 felons fugitives and stalkers that don t have handguns because of the brady bill then we re better off if the test is 12 million americans who got to take some time off from work when there was a baby born or a sick parent without losing their job we re better off if the test is no nuclear missiles pointed at the american people for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age we re better off so are we better off yes we are second question what is the alternative the answer is you don t have to guess you know what they will do too they ve already done it once i just vetoed it the first time and i don t believe we can become a greater stronger nation by saying we re going to balance the budget and using that as an excuse to wreck our ability to protect the environment for future generations or cutting back on education at a time when we need to be spending more for education we ought to make sure that nobody who needs to go is ever deprived the right to go to college and everybody ought to get two more years of education or running away from our obligations to provide health care to poor children and pregnant women and families with someone in it with a disability or seniors so there s a big difference here in what we think our obligations are i believe the role of government is not to be a bureaucratic pain in the neck we have reduced the size of government we have put it on the side of creating jobs and promoting the economy but i believe this i think we have an obligation to protect the environment to hold people together and to give people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives that is what we have to be doing and that s what i m committed to and the last thing i want to say to you is it s a big bright world out there but it matters what decisions people make don t let anybody tell you this is an election without consequences this is an election of massive consequence in every single policy area you can think of you know we ve got 1 3 million fewer people on welfare than we had four years ago we ve got 1 5 million fewer people on food stamps i m all for looking for new and innovative ways to move people from welfare to work that s why i signed that welfare bill but it was wrong of the congress to deny any access to benefits to legal immigrants who work here and pay taxes and through no fault of their own get in trouble you know you think about it monday when you go to work how many people come here and they work hard and they pay their taxes and through no fault of their own they get in a car wreck or they develop some serious illness and this congress wants to say to people they shouldn t even be entitled to a little help even if they ve been paying their taxes even if they ve been in the military legal immigrants that join the military don t let this election become an excuse to divide us from anybody who is here lawfully obeying the law paying their taxes doing their part we ought to go and grow together we shouldn t be divided on this don t do that if you want to know what we re going to do in the next four years i ll tell you what we re going to do we ve gotten our house in order in the first four years in the second four years we re going to be dedicated to giving every single american the chance to participate in the economy that is emerging to participate in the society that is emerging and to know that we can grow the economy and preserve the environment and to know that we can be fair to our children and our parents and still have enough left for ourselves we in short are going to go forward together we are not going to be divided and that is the central decision facing the american people there is too much out there for all of us if we ll just keep our heads on straight listen to our heart and say we re going to do it together that s the spirit that we celebrated in the olympics and we need to make american life more that way thank you and god bless you all thank you dem wjclinton9 9 96b bill_clinton ladies and gentlemen welcome to the white house it s a great pleasure for hillary and for me to welcome all of you here but especially our distinguished honorees and their families members of congress who are here senator lugar congresswoman collins congressman conyers congressman dellums secretary christopher secretary shalala and secretary cisneros we re here to award the highest honor our nation can bestow on a citizen the presidential medal of freedom president harry truman established these awards as a tribute to those who helped to win the fight for democracy in world war ii president kennedy elevated the medals to honor contributions by citizens to all aspects of american life although we confer these medals today on worthy individuals we recognize even more than individual achievement we honor the american values that unite us as a people opportunity and responsibility a community in which all have a part determination dedication and loyalty faith courage and country we are honoring renewed faith in the freedom that has brought this nation this far and the freedom that will sustain us into the next century william faulkner once said that we must be free not because we claim freedom but because we practice it the 11 men and women we honor today have raised the practice of freedom to new heights i would like to introduce each of them to you now as the archbishop of chicago joseph cardinal bernadin is one of our nation s most beloved men and one of catholicism s great leaders when others have pulled people apart cardinal bernadin has sought common ground in a time of transition in his church his community his nation and the world he has held fast to his mission to bring out the best in humanity and to bring people together throughout his career he has fought tirelessly against social injustice poverty and ignorance without question he is both a remarkable man of god and a man of the people fifteen years ago james brady was at president reagan s side when a would be assassin nearly killed them both with a handgun he had purchased at a gun shop but jim brady is living proof that courage and determination were stronger than the assassin s bullet since that day jim and his wonderful wife sarah who is with us today have waged a moral and political battle to save lives and to keep handguns out of the hands of criminals his life is a testament to bravery and every american family and every american child is safer because of it i don t think it s an exaggeration to say that millard fuller has literally revolutionized the concept of philanthropy twenty years ago he founded habitat for humanity to provide decent homes for disadvantaged people to fund this plan he didn t ask people for their money instead he asked for the sweat of their brows in return he gave them something no tax deduction ever could tangible proof that they had improved someone else s life with a home hillary the vice president tipper and i like so many americans have all swung hammers for habitat for humanity and i was honored to sign a law passed earlier this year to provide the first federal support for land and infrastructure for habitat it s an interesting testament to millard to his wife linda to all the wonderful people at habitat that the three people who testified in favor of the law were millard fuller henry cisneros and newt gingrich they did a good job at bringing america together and we are all the beneficiaries of millard fuller s vision physician scientist and educator david hamburg has devoted his life to understanding human behavior preventing violent conflict and improving the health and well being of our children at stanford he did pioneering work in the biology of mental illness and went to tanzania to rescue four biology students who had been kidnapped there he has worked to avoid all kinds of violent conflict from nuclear war to ethnic strife he has used his presidency of the influential carnegie corporation to support efforts for better parenting strong families and stronger childhoods focusing especially on early childhood and adolescence he is a truly remarkable man and a genuinely effective humanitarian ten years ago i had the honor of recognizing john johnson for his contributions as a native of our native state arkansas john rose from poverty in arkansas and illinois to become one of the world s greatest pioneers in media founding the landmark magazines ebony and jet he gave african americans a voice and a face in his words a new sense of somebody ness of who they were and what they could do at a time when they were virtually invisible in mainstream american culture a humble man despite becoming the most influential african american publisher in history he continues to inspire young african americans to succeed against the odds and to take advantage of their opportunities speaking of opportunity hardly anyone has ever done more personally to give people who didn t have it opportunity than eugene lang in 1981 he made a simple promise to pay the college tuition of every student from his east harlem alma mater who graduated from high school and wanted to go to college since then his i have a dream foundation has opened the doors of college for thousands of young people who seize the opportunity he offered he has helped to make the most of their god given abilities we are all the beneficiaries of eugene lang s innovative vision and it is a great tribute to him that since 1981 other philanthropists many state governments and now i hope our national government have joined him in trying to guarantee the dream of a college education to all people he began it and we are all in his debt jan nowak has dedicated his life to the fight for freedom in world war ii he risked everything to carry vital information to the allies after the nazis defeat he saw his native poland once again in the grip of oppression and he vowed to break it for 25 years he was a dominant voice in radio free europe the great beacon of hope that brought so many people through the dark hours of communism he continued to fight until the day he saw freedom triumph over tyranny in america his commitment to the ideal of democracy continues to inspire us all and i can tell you that his inspiration is still felt in his native poland where the people will never forget what he did and what he stood for paz e respecto peace and respect these are the values that define the life and work of antonia pantoja her efforts to create educational and economic opportunity for all puerto ricans have made her the most respected and beloved figure in the puerto rican community through a aspira the educational program she helped to found 35 years ago she s still there as young puerto ricans to dream and to work to achieve their dreams her dedication to her people and therefore her contribution to our country is unsurpassed when rosa parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on an alabama bus 40 years ago she ignited the single most significant social movement in american history when she sat down on the bus she stood up for the american ideals of equality and justice and demanded that the rest of us do the same when our descendants look back in time to trace the fight for freedom rosa parks will stand among our nation s greatest patriots the legendary figures whose courage sustained us and pushed us forward she is and continues to be a national treasure ginetta sagan s name is synonymous with the fight for human rights around the world in world war ii she paid dearly for her dedication to the cause of freedom for more than a year she was imprisoned and tortured but not broken instead she devoted her life after the war to saving others from the ordeal she had endured to her tireless work with amnesty international and her own aurora foundation she has drawn the world s attention to the plight of prisoners of conscience and of their families amnesty international has created a fund named in her honor designed to help stop torture and especially to stop the persecution of women and their children she represents to all the triumph of the human spirit over tyranny morris udall represents everything a lawmaker should be dedicated to seeking common ground committed to improving the political process and singularly possessed as no one in my adult lifetime has been of the one trait no member of congress should be without an extraordinary sense of humor mo was fond of quoting will rogers who once advised us that in life you ought to get a few laughs and do the best you can well he got a lot of laughs and he did better than most he set a standard few could match by his passionate commitment to preserve our national resources and to leave our children a safer environment his life is an inspiration and more his work is a gift to all americans and we are especially grateful that his son could be with us today now it my great honor and privilege to present to each of you the presidential medal of freedom with great respect for your work your dedication the example you have set for all your fellow americans i ask now the military aid to read the citations ladies and gentlemen we re going in for a reception now but i just i wanted to say one thing rosa parks was delayed in detroit just as many of these people were delayed trying to get here because of the traffic so we will have another time to give her her medal we re sorry she couldn t be here we re delighted everyone else is here please come in for the reception thank you dem wjclinton9 9 98 bill_clinton thank you so much thank you jim pugh for all the work you ve done on this dinner and lunch and for helping buddy through this long campaign and thank you governor rosello for everything you ve said and for your leadership of our democratic governors association i d like to thank the members of congress who are here peter deutsch rob wexler corrine brown and your state party chair mitch ceasar and especially i want to thank buddy and anne mackay for years and years and years of devoted service to the people of florida and for taking on this campaign and seeing it through to what i predict will be a victory that will surprise some but not me and i thank them i came here today to talk to you about what we ve done together in the last six years and what s at stake in this election i think the people of this country have a serious choice to make in november between progress or partisanship between people or politics between unity or division you have been very good to me here in florida to me and to hillary and to the vice president and our administration and i m very grateful to you you have been astonishingly kind and generous to me today and i will never forget it if god lets me live to be an old man i will never forget what buddy mackay said today from this platform when he could have said nothing and so i hope you will just indulge me for a minute while i say that i thank you for that i have been your friend i ve done my best to be your friend but i also let you down and i let my family down and i let this country down but i m trying to make it right and i m determined never to let anything like that happen again and i m determined wait a minute wait a minute i m determined to redeem the trust of people like buddy and anne who were with me in 1991 a lot of the rest of you were too when nobody but my mother and my wife thought i had a chance to be elected when i was over at the hillcrest school buddy and i were over there a few minutes ago and i was shaking hands with all these little kids out there and this kid that reminded me a lot of myself when i was that young he was bigger than the other students and kind of husky he said mr president i want to grow up to be president i want to be a president like you and i said i thought i want to be able to conduct my life and my presidency so that all the parents of the country could feel good if their children were able to say that again i ll never forget that little boy and it s a big guide for me so i ask you for your understanding for your forgiveness on this journey were on i hope this will be a time of reconciliation and healing and i hope that millions of families all over america are in a way growing stronger because of this but i ll tell you one thing that i hope you won t let happen there are a whole lot of people in washington especially or who write about this who would like for this once again would like for something going on in washington to be the subject of an election in november instead of what s going on in the lives of the american people and i want to be open with you i want you to understand these have been the toughest days of my life but they may turn out to be the most valuable for me and my family and i have no one to blame but myself for my self inflicted wounds but that s not what america is about and it doesn t take away from whether we re right or wrong on the issues or what we ve done for the last six years or what this election is about so what i want to say to you is you ve been kind and understanding to me today i hope you ll tell your friends and neighbors that i m grateful and that i m determined to redeem the trust of all the american people but don t be fooled not for a minute not for a day elections are about you and your children and your communities and your future and i was looking at buddy up here today thinking you know how many people in how many places in this country would be well served to have somebody as profoundly decent and committed to doing the right thing as he is in any office in the land this is a big issue for florida what really matters is what decisions would the governor of florida make that would affect you you take this hmo bill of rights we re trying to pass one in washington suppose we don t pass one there is still a huge percentage of people in florida that are in hmos forty three hmos in this country have endorsed our plan why because they re out there treating people right already and they think you ought to be able to go to an emergency room if you re hurt the one nearest to you and be reimbursed not be taken across town they think if you need a specialist you ought to be able to get one they believe if you have medical records they ought to be private they believe if your employer changes hmos in the middle of your pregnancy or your cancer treatment you ought not to have to switch doctors and they believe if these rights are there you ought to have some way to enforce them now that s what this is about now the vote for governor of florida could determine whether people in this state get those protections that s what the election is about we heard buddy talking about education we ve got an education opportunity in this country with the diversity of our kids but we also have an obligation the states have constitutional responsibility for education the vote for governor of florida will determine what kind of education our children get you heard him talking about the gun issue i was i guess the first president ever to get into a public squabble with the nra over the brady bill and then the assault weapons ban i was sort of sad about it actually i had worked with them from time to time when i was governor of arkansas but we were in the business of letting politics and rhetoric get in the way of children s lives this is a better country because we passed the brady bill and the assault weapons ban and you ve got this loophole in florida and this is about politics as opposed to principle no one possibly could believe that if you need a check on the background the criminal or mental health history of somebody who can go into a gun store and buy a gun that you shouldn t have that on any gun purchase it doesn t take that long now these are big issues a quarter of a million people have not been able to buy guns because of their criminal history since the brady bill passed how many people do you think are alive because of that so your decision in the governor s race in florida will have an effect on that and we re all here because we know all this and i guess in a way i m preaching to the choir again but i wanted to say as much as i have been touched by the wonderful reception you ve given me today as much as i hope you ll share what i said to you today with your friends and neighbors never forget you come here as citizens with the responsibilities of citizens and we go forward from this room because we know that our individual lives and our family lives cannot be all they want to be unless our communities our state and our nation is all it can be i go back to washington to work on with only a very few weeks left in this congressional session an enormously important agenda for this country let me just give you three or four examples of what really the election ought to be about because it will chart the future of the country for years ahead on october 1st and i am counting the days we are going to have the first balanced budget and surplus we ve had in 29 years and it s going to be amazing now there are already people who say well it s election year let s give people a tax cut well let me remind you we have 16 million new jobs the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 30 years the lowest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years and the first balanced budget in 29 years and the highest home ownership in history and the lowest inflation rate in 32 years because we didn t squander money we kept at it until we eliminated the deficit that got interest rates down that led to huge investment and an explosion in the markets and the country going forward now if we spend this money because we estimate that we ll have surpluses for years ahead what happens to our other obligations you know pretty soon the baby boomers will start to retire i say pretty soon starting in about 13 years 10 if you take early social security i m the oldest of the baby boomers we re the biggest group of americans the people between 34 and 52 in the history of the country until the kids that started school last year we finally have a bigger groups of kids in school which every florida school district with a bunch of trailers out back of the regular building knows but before that there was us the baby boomers the children of the world war ii generation now when we retire at present rates of work force participation and birth rates and immigration rates there will only be about two people working for every one person drawing social security we ll all be eligible for medicare and i m telling you it is a mistake for us to go out and have an election year gimmick to please people no matter how pleasing it would be with a tax cut until we know we have saved social security for the 21st century in a way that does not require us to maintain our retirement by lowering the standard of living of our children and grandchildren it is important and we ought to be tough about it and by the way it s also good in the global economy for america to be strong and set an example you see with all the gyrations in the stock market last week a lot of you probably said well i hadn t noticed any companies going broke and i haven t noticed any companies making windfall amounts of money it looks like the economy is just growing steady why is the market jumping up and down and then when you read the articles they say well it s because of what s going on in the global economy so i say to you the united states as alan greenspan said the other day cannot be an island of prosperity in a sea of distress thirty percent of our growth has come because of global growth our expanding trade in florida you know that buddy and i we ve done export events here in florida with very impressive businesses here selling all over the world now the united states has an obligation to try to keep global economic growth going to help the countries when they get in trouble if they ll help themselves if they ll help themselves and to create an environment in which growth can occur one of the things we have to do is at least pay our dues to the institutions like the international monetary fund that can put money into these countries that are reforming and it s in our interest you know we ve got a lot of farmers in the midwest and the high plains who are really going to have a hard time this your because in asia where the countries have had difficult economic problems they can t afford to buy our food anymore and it s led to big drops in farm income so i ask you to support number one an economic program that saves social security first and don t fool with this balanced budget until we actually achieve it we ought to look at the black ink just for a day or two before we start giving it away and number two fulfills our responsibilities to the global economy and number three recognizes that over the long run we can t grow this economy and become what we ought to be and be one country with all this diversity you have in florida and throughout the country unless we have a commitment to have a world class education that s available to every single child now we have a national plan that will help florida for the first time to help to build or expand or remodel 5 000 schools to have smaller classes in the early grades to have safer schools to have better reading programs to hook up all of our schools to the internet but in the end i will say again it matters who is governor and if you think about florida s long term history if you look at the record that lawton and buddy have made for the last eight years i hope you ll encourage everybody in this congressional delegation to put partisanship aside and vote for our education agenda but even if it all passes in order to have the maximum impact it matters who the governor is and unless we can prove that america can be one out of all these many cultures to echo what governor rosello said we re not going to have the america we want and we won t be able to do that unless we achieve an education so balance the budget save social security before you spend the surplus meet our obligations to stabilize the international economy because it s the right thing to do morally and it happens to be in our interest give us a world class education pass the patients bill of rights on the national level and at the state level big issue in florida prove that we can grow the economy while improving the environment forty percent of our lakes and rivers are still not safe to swim in we still have places with safe drinking water needs as you have seen in florida climate change and the warming of the planet is real we have to prove we can deal with these things and grow the economy i m so grateful for the chance that we ve had to be involved together in recovering the everglades there are ways to do these things that will promote economic opportunity and still improve the environment there are lots of other issues coming up in washington we re finally going to get a chance to give the senate one more chance to pass campaign finance reform and i hope we do that you know you ve done it in florida every single member of our caucus in the senate supports it they are determined to kill the bill through a filibuster but we finally passed a good campaign finance reform bill through the house i thank the house members here from florida for supporting it we ve got a real chance in the senate and all this ought to be dealt with in the next three weeks and if it s not the voters ought to deal with it in november choices choices choices elections should be about you and your children and your future not what somebody else tells you they ought to be about again let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the support you ve given to all of us let me thank you for your kindness to me today let me thank you most of all for supporting buddy but let me challenge you this is a big fast growing state that is a model of the future of america don t you let a single solitary soul you know get away without voting in november because the future of america is riding on it thank you and god bless you